A first-class ride for Cowboy Kel Bridle Path residents show love for mail carrier

For the past six years, Kelvin Hoang has been delivering mail and smiles to people living in Simi Valleys Bridle Path neighborhood. We love Kelvin. Hes the best. Hes like...

SV Womans Club to meet Detectives Kelly King and Jessica Getchius of the Simi Valley Police Department will discuss the problems faced by victims and perpetrators of domestic violence at the monthly luncheon meeting of...

Womans flight aboard B-25 bomber honors grandfathers WWII bravery As Kerri Braemer-Castro looked down at the mountains and valleys of Camarillo from the cockpit of a World War II B-25 bomber earlier this month, she finally felt connected to...

Shred your documents The Simi Valley Chamber of Commerce will hold a drive-thru document shredding event from 1 to 4 p.m. Fri., Nov. 11 in the parking lot behind the Chamber office, 40...
By clicking Agree, you consent to Slates Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and the use of technologies such as cookies by Slate and our partners to deliver relevant advertising on our iOS app to personalize content and perform site analytics. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information about our use of data, your rights, and how to withdraw consent.

Agree
"These types of weapons are extremely dangerous in criminal hands as they can fire several rounds with a single pull of the trigger," he stated. "If anyone has information on the burglary, we urge them to step forward so we can recover these firearms before someone gets hurt."
Best Canadian Blog

2004, 2005, 2006, 2007

About Kate

Why this blog?

Until this moment I have been forced to listen while media and politicians alike have told me "what Canadians think". In all that time they never once asked.

This is just the voice of an ordinary Canadian yelling back at the radio - "You don't speak for me."

(goes to a private mailserver in Europe) I can't answer or use every tip, but all are appreciated!



Katewerk Art

Support SDA

I am not a registered charity. I cannot issue tax receipts.



Reconnaissance Man

Economics for the Disinterested

...a fast-paced polar

bear attack thriller!



Want lies?

Hire a regular consultant.

Want truth?

Hire an asshole.



Weather Shop

Click to inquire about rates.

Dow Jones

What They Say About SDA

"Smalldeadanimals doesn't speak for the people of Saskatchewan" Former Sask Premier Lorne Calvert

"I got so much traffic after your post my web host asked me to buy a larger traffic allowance." Dr.Ross McKitrick

Holy hell, woman. When you send someone traffic, you send someone TRAFFIC. My hosting provider thought I was being DDoSed. - Sean McCormick

"The New York Times link to me yesterday [...] generated one-fifth of the traffic I normally get from a link from Small Dead Animals." Kathy Shaidle

"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


Tim checks out one of the stone towers at an old Majors Creek quarry. Credit:Dave Moore If this environmental argument isn't enough to deter potential rock towers builders then maybe the law is, for according to my PCS insider "it is an offence under the Nature Conservation Act 2014 to interfere with natural and/or cultural items within reserves". According to Alan Hume, of Burrill Lake, our mountain peaks and reserves aren't the only places where stone towers are multiplying. My coastal correspondent reports that "we have a range of wondrous examples hidden away beyond Dolphin Point (south of Ulladulla), some are magnificent feats of engineering with arches and curves seemingly defying the laws of physics." "They began to appear about a year or so ago, when one of the locals built one in memory of his departed mate," explains Hume, adding "they come and go with the tides and storms, with locals (and visitors) rebuilding them as quickly as they are washed away." Did You Know? One of the first rock towers documented in our region was erected amongst the mullock heaps at an abandoned mine site near Majors Creek back in 2013.

Measuring more than two-metres tall and despite the lack of any obvious binding material such as concrete, when this column visited the site three years ago (The Hard Kept Secret, June 13, 2013, it appeared quite stable. I wonder if it's still standing. LOCAL MYSTERY Cryptic Causeway Is this Canberra's very own Giant's Causeway? ( Credit:Tony McLeod For almost a decade Tony McLeod of Harrison has worked near this curious creation in the public courtyard outside 219 London Circuit (above Rabaul Lane) in Civic.

The structure made from dozens of seemingly randomly-placed hexagonal pavers is bereft of any interpretative signage leaving McLeod to "wonder about its purpose" every day he walks past it. "I've never made any sense of it until last month, when by chance I saw a photo of Northern Ireland's Giants Causeway in a book at the Lifeline Book Fair." Due to its striking similarity to the iconic Irish landmark, McLeod is now seeking confirmation that the sculpture was inspired, or at least modelled on the Giant's Causeway. "The ACT Government don't have any information on it as it pre-dates self-government in 1989," laments McLeod, adding "some long-term Canberrans have told me it also once featured a series of functioning water fountains." Fortunately for McLeod, his search hasn't been completely fruitless. He has uncovered that "the Canberra parkour (a freestyle running discipline that incorporates street furnishings like ramps and railings) community refer to the courtyard as Toast (in reference to a former bar in the vicinity) and base their logo on its geometry."

Can anyone help McLeod solve this courtyard conundrum? Someone must know the sculpture's origins. The Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland. Credit:Tim the Yowie Man The Giants Causeway: According to folklore, this rock formation featuring over 40,000 symmetrical stone columns was created thousands of years ago by the legendary Irish giant, Finn MacCool, to enable him to cross the Irish Sea to fight a giant in nearby Scotland. When Finn reached Scotland he discovered that his opponent was much bigger than he was. In fear, Finn fled back to Ireland, ripping up the causeway of rocks, that only hours earlier he had laid down, as he went. Today, all that remain of the causeway are its ends  the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, and the island of Staffa in Scotland (which has similar rock formations). Geologists estimate that the Giant's Causeway was formed 60 million years ago when a thick layer of molten lava flowed along an ancient valley. As the lava cooled and hardened (from the top and bottom surfaces inward) it contracted, forming an intricate pattern of hexagonal cracks at right angles to the cooling surfaces. Millions of years of erosion has resulted in the rocks splitting along these cracks creating the columns or 'stepping stones'. A collapsed section of ''Sawn Rock'' near Narrabri. Credit:Tim the Yowie Man

Closer to home: You don't have to travel as far as Northern Ireland to experience first-hand this unusual columnar-jointing, the aptly-named Sawn Rocks near Narrabri in north-western New South Wales is also the result of the same slow and consistent cooling of molten rock. Although not as spectacular as the Giant's Causeway, these 40 metre high hexagonal pillars formed following a volcanic eruption 21 million years ago, are regarded as the best examples of columnar jointing in Australia. Each six-sided stone is formed with such geometrical precision that it seems as though some supernatural force must have created them. If there are similar examples closer to Canberra, I'd love to know. FOR THE DIARY Sergeant Parry Memorial Day at Jugiong on November 19. Bushranger shoot-out!

What: Re-enactment of the gun battle between police and bushrangers at the annual Sergeant Parry Memorial Day which commemorates the death of the 32-year-old policeman shot dead by the Ben Hall gang on November 16, 1864. When: Saturday November 19, 4pm-10.30pm. Where: Jugiong Recreation Grounds - a 1.5 hours' drive to the north-west of Canberra via the A25 (Barton Hwy) and M31 (Hume Hwy). Did You Know? On the M31 about five kilometres south of Jugiong is a cairn to Sergeant Parry which is close to the spot where the actual gun battle took place. Tim's Tip: Bushranger buffs don't miss the advanced screening of The Legend of Ben Hall (Two Tone Pictures) at 7.45pm on Wednesday, November 16, at Palace Electric Cinemas in NewActon.

SPOTTED Mystery Marker Mystery structure near Lake George. While recently bush bashing on his trail bike near along the south-west shores of Lake George, Bradley, from Kaleen, stumbled upon this unusual stone structure.

"There was no obvious sign as to what it was," explains Bradley who "really wants to know what it is." Stone base marker ''Lake George North''. Credit:Graeme Barrow While I don't have an immediate answer for Bradley, it isn't the only stone tower near enigmatic Lake George. Along the eastern side of the lake is an important trigonometrical baseline that acts as a reference point from which all surveys in NSW originate. Yes  the whole state! The baseline, completed in1874 is marked by a tall stone pillar at the baseline's northern end and a smaller cairn in the south, the two landmarks being almost 9 kilometres apart in a direct line. WHERE IN THE REGION? Where in the Region THIS week. Credit:Tim the Yowie Man

Cryptic Clue: Classic, well every November at least. Degree of difficulty: Easy-Medium Where in the Region last week. Last week: Congratulations to Elizabeth Chan, of Macgregor, who was first to correctly identify last week's photo as the revamped Smokehouse Restaurant at Poachers Pantry, 431 Nanima Road, Hall. Chan, who just beat a smorgasbord of other foodies, including Judith Phillips, of Deakin, to the prize reports "at this time of year it is glorious there, a lovely drive out and great food at the end, but you need to book as it is very popular." The cryptic clue of related to 'Claude Jeremiah Greengrass', the lovable rogue from the British TV series Heartbeat (1992-2000). Fans of the show will recall that Greengrass, played by English actor and comic Bill Maynard, displayed more than a passing interest in the art of poaching.
Coca-Cola European Partners plc or CCEP CCE reported better-than-expected results in the third quarter of 2016.



Earnings of 74 cents (or 0.66) per share beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 72 cents by 2.8%. Earnings also improved 18.5% year over year on a pro forma comparable basis, excluding the impact of foreign exchange rate. Currency had a negative impact of 4.5% on adjusted earnings.



FindTheCompany | Graphiq

Revenues & Volumes



During the quarter, net sales improved 3.5% year over year to $3,331.9 million (or 2,986 million), on a pro forma comparable basis excluding the impact of foreign exchange rate. The reported figure also surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $3,266 million by 2%.



The companys volume increased 3.5% in the quarter buoyed by the benefits of its brand, package, marketing initiatives and improved weather conditions.



The companys Sparkling drinks (accounting for 84% of total) grew 3% in the third quarter, within which Coca-Cola Trademark improved 2% while Sparkling Flavors and Energy increased 6.5%. Notably, Coca-Cola trademark brands improved on 1% growth in regular Coca-Cola and robust mid-teen growth in Coca-Cola Zero. CCEPs Coca-Cola Zero brand has been re-launched as Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in Great Britain, France, Belgium in the Netherlands and the venture has been very successful.



The company registered 4.5% growth in Stills, with Juice, Isotonics and Other growing 5% and Water improving 4%.



Operating Highlights



The companys cost of sales increased 3% year over year in the quarter, on a pro forma comparable and fx-neutral basis. Meanwhile, cost of sales per unit case was down 0.5%.



Although operating expenses increased 1.5% year over year in the quarter, on a pro forma comparable and fx-neutral basis, operating profit improved 7% given the positive impact of volume growth and timing of expenses.



2016 Guidance Reaffirmed



On a comparable and currency-neutral basis, CCEP expects revenues to remain flat. Operating profit is expected to grow in a modest mid-single-digit range and earnings in a mid-teen range.



Coca-Cola European Partners plc or CCEP was formed on May 28, 2016 through the combination of Coca-Cola Enterprises or CCE, Coca-Cola Iberian Partners or CCIP and CCEG or Coca-Cola Erfrischungsgetranke AG.



Based on revenues, CCEP is the worlds largest independent Coca-Cola bottler. It serves over 300 million consumers across Western Europe, including Andorra, Belgium, continental France, Germany, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.



The company carries a Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell).



Peer Releases



Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, one of the largest independent bottlers of The Coca-Cola Companys KO products, reported adjusted earnings of $2.45 per share in the third quarter of 2016, up 19.5% year over year.



Monster Beverage Corporations MNST third-quarter adjusted earnings of 99 cents per share missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.12 by 11.6%.



PepsiCo, Inc.s PEP third-quarter core earnings per share of $1.40 beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.32 by 6.1%.



You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

COCA-COLA EU PT Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise

COCA-COLA EU PT Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise | COCA-COLA EU PT Quote

Confidential from Zacks



Beyond this Analyst Blog, 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



COCA-COLA EU PT (CCE): Free Stock Analysis Report



COCA COLA CO (KO): Free Stock Analysis Report



PEPSICO INC (PEP): Free Stock Analysis Report



MONSTER BEVERAG (MNST): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research
This new show at CCAS City by Lars Wetselaar has nothing to do with having a bad memory, and everything to do with texture and interpretation: "Wetselaar has crafted this body of work by manipulating patina-laden used lead, by layering and reconfiguring this malleable material, transforming a waste product into a new visual palette. His work is an interpretation of space and place, a direct response to his many dusty road trips across and around Australia. The abstract depictions set on geometric backgrounds, convey a sense of arbitrary connection delivering a sensory visual experience." A Loose Sieve, by Lars Wetselaar, is showing at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra City Framing, 2/39 London Circuit, Civic, until December 10.

"How does one approach representing a world that has been predicated on a false understanding? How does one confront the inconceivable?" Well may we ask, in this US Election post-truth-era week. But thankfully, this intriguing new show opening at the Drill Hall Gallery this week is concerned with far more refined, interesting, life-affirming and just generally more palatable things: "Repurpose takes its impetus from the revelation of Cubist collage and the re-positioning of the found object to act as a signifier sparking a catalytic chain of eventsSpanning three generations, aged between 28 and 100 years young, each of these artists tackles the depiction and understanding of our world through abstract means. Their art features a foreign object, a third party, a ready-made pretext or a pre-existing structure from which a fresh outcome or insight is generated. Repurpose is a celebration of poetic transformation, intuitive response and the creative process of invention." Repurpose opens November 11 at Drill Hall Gallery, Kingsley Street (off Barry Drive), ANU, and runs until December 18.

Country Life at Beaver

If you've already checked out the life-affirming and just plain gorgeous Popular Pet Show over at the National Portrait Gallery, you'll already be familiar with the work of sisters Lucy and Anna Culliton, whose works in painting and ceramics are inspired by their country lives. This new show at Beaver complements the national show - which features 15 artists  perfectly: Lucy lives on a property in the Monaro district of NSW and rescues animals who then become a part of her life. She is an astute observer of the familiar and seemingly insignificant and offers the viewer an incisive but caring and often quirky view of the world around her Anna shares her surroundings with native flora and fauna and has spent a great deal of time regenerating the local landscape after moving to the Kanimbla Valley from Sydney 20 years ago. The animals she depicts in her ceramics do not actually belong to her but "they live close to my heart, and for this exhibition I have invited them into my home and my domestic life." Also showing at Beaver Galleries are works by Barbi Kjar, whose "intimate and ethereal" portraits are inspired by her home in Tasmania, and her frequent travels to Spain: "Her portraits of people have a compelling cultural narrative and, in this exhibition, the place that influences them has been juxtaposed with their portrait." Our Animals, by Lucy Culliton and Anna Culliton, and Lugar/Place, by Barbie Kjar, are showing at Beaver Galleries, 81 Denison Street, Deakin, until November 27.

Iranian Film Festival

There really does seem to be a different film festival on every week these days. But this one looks fascinating  the Iranian Film Festival, shining a contemporary light on a country we really don't see enough of on the big screen. The festival, which screens at the National Film and Sound Archive this weekend, features 13 films by some of the country's most acclaimed and prolific directors. "The new political era continues to heavily influence Iranian cinema, and this year's films are bursting with creativity and new energy as a result," says festival co-director Anne DemyGeroe. The Iranian Film Festival is showing at the National Film and Sound Archive, McCoy Circuit, Acton, November 11 and 12. Tickets $12. For more information, visit nfsa.gov.au.
Beyondblue chairman Jeff Kennett issued a call to arms on Remembrance Day by urging all Australians to join the battle against veteran suicide.

The former Victorian premier spoke to a crowd of 3700 gathered at the Australian War Memorial to remember the more than 102,000 Australians who have given their lives in war and other operations over more than a century.

Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull attended the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Australian War Memorial. Credit:Andrew Meares

"Just this year alone more military veterans have died by their own hand ... than those who died in the 13 years of Australian involvement in the Afghanistan conflict," Mr Kennett said.

"They are bringing the battles here with them. They carry them inside. Too often the battles against depression, post-traumatic stress and anxiety and suicide are fought and lost alone.
Donald Trump's big win might seem a big loss for China.

After spending much of his campaign calling China a cheater that steals American jobs, Trump's election almost certainly means Washington will take a much harder line over trade, the Chinese currency and other contentious economic issues.

Nevertheless, China's policymakers will likely welcome President Trump. For the nationalist upsurge he's inspired will ultimately serve China's, not America's, economic interests.

Of course, Trump will cause some disruption in the short term.
EnergyAustralia has warned of a further round of electricity price rises if its Yallourn power station in Victoria's Latrobe Valley  the country's second-dirtiest power station after Hazelwood  were to close.

Last week, French utility group Engie confirmed it will close the Hazelwood power station at the end of March, with the loss of hundreds of jobs.

Steam billows from the cooling towers at EnergyAustralia's Yallourn coal-fired power station which could be the next power station to close. Credit:Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg

Its closure would leave Yallourn as the next most polluting power station in the country, followed by Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B, which are also in the Latrobe Valley, and also use brown coal as their fuel source.

Hazelwood generates an estimated 1400 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per gigawatt hour of electricity generated, and Yallourn 1300 tonnes. The two Loy Yang plants produce about 1150 tonnes, by way of comparison.
"You don't need to be taught how to look at art. The very best way to appreciate paintings is to just look at them until they speak to you."

Thus spake Kathy Lette, opening the AGNSW summer show The Nude last Friday. The audience, one of the country's more cultivated, rolled its collective eye. Really? murmured the collective mind. We flew her all the way here from puberty to promote ignorance?

I mean, as if, right? As if Australia suffers from over-education. As if everything would be great if we could only dumb down a few (more) notches. As if the art world in particular weren't already mired in the cloud of unknowing. As if the general rejection of discernment as elitist twaddle hadn't already shrunk Australia's intellectual life to the shallowest of puddles. Sheesh. As if.

Consider the body. In Sydney's art world this is shaping up as the Summer of the Body. What with Rabbit's fabulous Vile Bodies and the Powerhouse's Egyptian Mummies (opening next month) as well as The Nude, the body is positively l'objet du jour.
Donald Trump's election will ask hard questions of Australia's alliance with the United States.

Since the end of World War II, the US has played the leading role in the maintenance of the international order. In our own region, the United States has been the midwife of modern Asia. For seven decades, the US forward presence in Asia has underpinned regional stability.

But the fact is that the instincts and opinions of presidents shape their foreign policies. George W. Bush's instinctive decision-making and distaste for detail led to the invasion and shambolic occupation of Iraq. Barack Obama's caution about the use of force, informed by his observations of the Iraq War, led to a more reserved global posture.

Trump seems sympathetic to isolationism. He is unimpressed with America's alliances and trade agreements and attracted to strongmen such as Vladimir Putin. He defines America's national interest far more narrowly than previous American presidents.
Not so long ago, it would be hard to imagine two public figures less alike than Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump. Whether the topic was tolerance or climate change, women or Islam, immigration or popular culture, they came across as polar opposites.

If Trump's natural domain was reality TV, the more raw and combative the better, or the locker room, Turnbull was most comfortable on the ABC's Q&A, flirting intellectually with the audience and wrestling with ideas.

Now, in the wake of the election that has turned everything upside down, it is the qualities that Turnbull and Trump share that encourage some hope that Australia's worst fears about a Trump presidency do not come to pass.

They also explain why, as Turnbull tells it, their very first conversation was so very warm and friendly. "I suppose, as both being businessmen who found our way into politics somewhat later in life, we come to the problems of our own nations, and indeed world problems, with a pragmatic approach," he explained on Thursday.
Though Mr Trump rowed back from some of these hastily conceived and lightly sketched positions as the campaign wore on, he was explicit about tearing up the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, repudiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (of which Australia is a signatory), and introducing tariffs on Mexican and Chinese imports, moves that would likely trigger a global trade war.

He hinted that the United States' allies "owe us tremendously; were taking care of all those people and what I want them to do is pay up", and that perhaps some of those allies (like Japan) should defend themselves against perceived threat by developing nuclear weapons.

That Mr Turnbull felt it necessary to add a personal assurance regarding Mr Trump's bona fides was telling, but not unexpected. Throughout his campaign, Mr Trump's rhetoric ranged from the indiscreet or merely concerning to the alarming, particularly on foreign policy.

After a "warm and constructive" chat with America's president-elect on Thursday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared Donald Trump a "businessman, a deal-maker and he will, I have no doubt, view the world in a very practical and pragmatic way".

Unsurprisingly, there has been considerable analysis (and speculation) since last Wednesday about which of Mr Trump's putative foreign policy initiatives he intends to pursue and which he will let go through to the catcher. That Mr Trump has no track record whatever in public office makes predictions of his future foreign policy behaviour difficult if not impossible.

Given how his promise "to move manufacturing back to the US" struck such a chord with voters, it's probable NAFTA will be dismantled or at least renegotiated more to Mr Trump's liking. His push to stop the TPP being ratified may run into Congressional opposition as the Republicans' commitment to it is long-standing. Much will depend on how far Mr Trump is prepared to push his mandate.

More problematic still is Mr Trump's vow to break down China's "great wall of protectionism" by applying a 45 per cent tax on Chinese imports. While this, too, resonated with voters, China would almost certainly respond by applying similar tariffs on US-made goods. The trade between the two countries in manufactures and US government securities is so enormous, however, that many commentators believe separating "Chimerica" would spell disaster for the global economy.

While an economic showdown between the US and China may be averted by wise counsel, a military confrontation with China may be unavoidable if Mr Trump's vow to strengthen the armed forces (and so restore America's global leadership) is realised. That could have profound consequences for Australia as it seeks to maintain its economic ties with China and its strategic and defence ties with the US.

It's no wonder Mr Turnbull hopes Mr Trump can and will segue from the "poetry" of campaigning to the prose and pragmatism of governing. Otherwise, Australia's defence and foreign policy-planners may face some uncomfortable choices.
... unless it snares you Though hardly a ringing endorsement for freedom of expression I was pleased to read The Canberra Times editorial supporting the inquiry into the Racial Discrimination Act ("Freedom of speech inquiry is welcome", November 9) in light of the exoneration of the QUT students and the case against Bill Leak. Both these cases enjoyed the glare of the public spotlight but it seems there are many more that are reconciled in private. How many good people have paid go-away money under these circumstances? Indeed how many more good people have faced an odious star chamber where some unworthy claimant is cosseted by the system while a faceless bureaucrat wrings an insincere apology from a hapless citizen who has no means to defend themselves? How does a robust democratic society get to this point? Perhaps the answer might be in our universities which are ostensibly institutions of intellectual diversity where free and robust debate should be hallmarks of their culture. Regrettably reality is quite different. Our universities of today are too often places where suffocating political correctness in all its forms thrives and where the default position is censorship of unwelcome views. Wonderful preparation for the leaders of tomorrow!

Is it time to start rating our universities on the extent to which they promote intellectual diversity and freedom of expression? H. Ronald, Jerrabomberra, NSW Bumpy can be beautiful The speed bumps, that G. Evans mentioned (Letters, November 10), could perhaps serve as a metaphor for life. They are there for a reason, to help keep us safe. The road speed bumps may add about 30 seconds to our journey and perhaps give us time to smell the roses. We could leave home a minute earlier and allow time for the speed bumps , and likewise apply this idea to life in general. David Sykes, Holt

Garema Disgrace more apt I recently visited Civic after an absence, and noticed that Garema Place and the surrounding area is no longer as clean, bright and prosperous as I remembered it. I would describe it as run-down and seedy. I found myself wondering whether there might be a town-planning descriptive term, "Socialist Squalid". If so, the local government has achieved it. Not good enough for the National Capital. Mike Heath, Greenway Trams will be ACT's Trump So, Chris Hunter (Letters, November 11) awoke with a sense of disbelief on Thursday to news of Donald Trump's win. I remember feeling the same a few weeks back when the ACT, a constituency as well educated as any in the world, re-elected the tram coalition.

Barr/Rattenbury will no more solve the Gungahlin congestion problem with their tram than Trump will bring back the jobs of the unskilled white workers of the rust belt. They offered fantasy in place of reality and aspirational bunkum in place of logic, just like Trump, and Canberra fell for it. Americans will realise by the next election that Trump hasn't delivered. It will take a little longer here but, once the tram starts operating, people will see quickly enough that they have been sold a pup. We will still have congestion, probably worse than ever, and people will wonder, as they see the tram roll by, empty outside peak hours, what they got for the billion dollars they paid for it. We can't criticise the Americans. Stan Marks, Hawker A light on injustice It was good to see large Australian concert halls, including the Sydney Opera House, filled with people interested in injustice and wrongful conviction last week, wanting to hear the lawyers who fought for justice in the Netflix series Making a Murderer.

I hope David Eastman is heartened this interest, with the series and lawyer tour raising awareness of flaws in the justice system, including in forensics and through tunnel-vision and misconduct by police and prosecutors. Estelle Blackburn, Barton Maximum pressure must be placed on US doubters to preserve planet If the incoming Trump administration goes ahead and implements its anti-science and climate change denialist policies, other countries will have two choices: first, they could roll over and likewise renege on the grounds, that without the US, it is pointless to proceed with the Paris Accord to limit global temperature increases; or, secondly, individual countries could double down on their efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to seek to persuade the Americans to accept the science and do likewise.

The second approach should be the only acceptable option and Australia, if need be, must play a lead role in exerting maximum pressure on the US to do the right thing for the sake of the planet and our children and grandchildren. Dan Buchler, Waramanga Widespread support Commentators say that Donald Trump won the US election because he was supported by white working-class male voters. Others say that most of Trump's supporters were outside the "wealth zones". But exit polls suggest that Trump's support was wider than this, and, indeed, there are not enough white working-class males by themselves to have gotten Trump across the line. According to exit polls, 42 per cent of women, 49 per cent of college-educated white voters and 60 per cent of women without degrees voted for Trump. It is apparent that Trump's appeal was widespread. And yet, 61 per cent of respondents to exit polls said that Trump "was not qualified to be president"!

John Casey, Curtin The screaming class Donald Trump's election was a surprise but probably not a shock. There is a lot of anger and fear in the American Rust Belt. In fact, so much that they were primed to be conned by someone willing to echo their feelings and give them villains to blame. As Michael Moore said: they wanted to throw a Molotov cocktail at the establishment, not realising that in many cases it's the thrower not the target that gets burned. The saddest thing for the rest of the world is that Trump's election has empowered not the working class but the screaming class (those commentators on all sides of the political spectrum who bellow about the innocuous and inconsequential) and the fringe politicians waiting in the wings for their moment to strut their manufactured rage across the stage. Bart Meehan, Calwell

US on the move Donald Trump's victory is due to his trips to America's devastated industrial heartland. So devastated is the industrial heartland that 43 million Americans are dependent on food stamps. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Akron have became ghost towns. Fast-reverse to the 2012 Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama contest for president. Big business gave $1billion each to the Democratic and Republican parties. What I wanted in return was for the winner to run dead on job-offshoring and the minimum wage. The result? Among other things, that apart from Mack trucks, all US vehicles and parts are made (with cheap labour) in foreign lands. In Australia, only 10 per cent of vehicles are made in Australia. The rest are imported. If Trump is as good as his word he will put a tariff on imported goods. Will Turnbull or Shorten put a tariff on imported goods? The only job that both men will protect is their own. America is on the move. Australia is moribund.

Graham Macafee, Latham Pollies be warned The US election results should be a warning to our federal and state politicians. The majority of Australians want to see strong border protection and strict immigration policies where only immigrants who will accept our culture and obey our laws are welcomed. We need stronger law enforcement and punishments in protecting our families from criminal recidivists and drug pushers. Instead of governments kowtowing to unions and minority groups, we want to see them help expand small businesses and manufacturing. We want to see large overseas businesses that sell products here and online pay their fair share of tax.

Bruce Hambour, North Haven, SA Rules-based rubbish During the ABC's 7.30 Report coverage of the US election I heard the US described as in some sense the champion of a "rules-based" international order no less than three times. Leigh Sales, the presenter, Malcolm Turnbull, the PM and Kim Beasley, ex-ambassador all used it. I was and remain astonished that the US, of all countries, can be seen in such a light. What rules were the US championing in Vietnam? In Nicaragua? In Afghanistan? In Iraq? What rule enables them to kidnap people and keep them imprisoned without any shadow of legality for years? What rule empowers them to attempt the assassination of leaders of foreign countries? Whatever phrases come to mind to describe US behaviour abroad, "rules-based" is surely one of the least appropriate. Gordon Soames, Curtin

The 'voiceless' revolt I am tempted to agree with the simplistic notion that ignorance and stupidity led to Trump's victory. But it's much more than that  it is a consequence of division, exclusion, prejudice, stereotyping and bias that renders people who are different from those in positions of power and leadership  a very narrow demographic slice of the population  as inferior. Humans can assess members of in-groups (us) and out-groups (them) in a nano second. We are primed to categorise, label, stereotype. And when people don't feel heard for long enough they revolt. They cause chaos, they gather together and find ways to claim power. The Brexit shock, the rise of Hanson, and now the results of the US election confirm that. As the world becomes scarier and less tolerant, the automatic priming in our brains becomes more acute. Fear informs our judgments of people, and we are more likely to dismiss and devalue them and their needs, interests and aspirations. The US results are in my view the predictable result of a divisive, divided and intolerant society, and is a call to action for us here in Australia.

There has never been a more important time for us to recognise and galvanise to cultivate a cohesive and inclusive society. Deborah May, Ainslie TO THE POINT Clubs are Trumps

Perhaps we do not have to worry too much about President-elect Trump. He has become a politician, and thus will break most of the promises he has made to get elected. James Gralton, Garran I see that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, so the system actually was rigged in favour of Trump. Paul Pollard, O'Connor In 1933, Adolf Hitler's party came to power under a nationalist theme of making Germany great again. Six years later the world was at war. Scary, isn't it?

Steve Hart, Hawker Well, at least Donald Trump won't be in a position to start World War III until after Christmas. Michael Duffy, Curtin Please, please, America  whatever you do, DO NOT assassinate President Donald Trump! Fred Pilcher, Kaleen

I wonder if president-elect Trump will now divest himself of his business interests, or shelter them behind a blind trust. Somehow, I think not. Jennifer Saunders, Canberra City After Wednesday's frightening result, it is imperative the Wall be built now. Am entreating Canadian friends and relatives to have it erected on the 49th parallel. John Freeman, Narrabundah Unrestrained sarcasm
Late last year, a friend told me that we need to make sure we don't look back in the future on human rights as just a passing phase. It was a comment that kept coming back to me over the past 12 months with Brexit, the re-rise of Pauline Hanson, the hardening of Turnbull and now Trump.

There's no mistaking the caustic trend. But equally, we must not be mistaken about what we need to do to address it.

The starting point is recognising and responding to the genuine fear, resentment and feelings of exclusion driving these results.

We absolutely must fight the divisive, harmful racist, xenophobic and sexist rhetoric that is stoking it. And we must stand with and support the minorities who bear its brunt. But we also need to fix the underlying causes.
Gae Pincus, who has died in Sydney contributed more than five decades to social advancement across women's affairs, child care, food safety, consumer law, telecoms and human rights.

Christened Margaret Gae O'Neill, she was born in Melbourne to Arthur and Molly O'Neill (nee Gahan). Molly was a Catholic whose family came from the south coast of NSW and Arthur was with the National Bank. Gae's arrival followed the birth of her brother, also called Arthur. Around 1940 her father joined the Air Force and posted to Darwin at a time when her mother returned to NSW to visit her ailing mother. The two small children, aged three and six, were put in the care of a residential children's home. Decades later, Gae clearly remembered a feeling of abandonment and loneliness and the horror of pumpkin and rice pudding.

Gae Pincus, worked for women's rights.

When Gae was eight, the family moved to Mitchell in regional Queensland. Schooled by the Sisters of Mercy, she regularly topped the class.

While she wanted to be an actor (she auditioned for NIDA) or a barrister, she ended up starting an economics degree at Queensland University, but dropped out to take a job at the Brisbane Public Library. She saved every penny for the 1960s rite of passage  the trip to Europe. Once there, she worked all manner of jobs, the highlight being securing a trade promotion job at Australia House in London. She demonstrated Victa lawn mowers in Battersea Park and, as Miss Ardmona, handed out tinned fruits samples. She returned home in 1964 and her parents, thrilled to see her, took her on a bus trip to Thredbo where Gae promptly secured a job in a ski chalet. Her mother was mortified  this was an inappropriate occupation for her daughter.
Even better, over time, my ability to spell these words improved. I could see the file cards from my bed, so  on the very rare occasions I might tempt home a prospective girlfriend  she'd awake to the sound of me lying next to her, hypnotically spelling the word "bourgeoisie".

Elon Musk says we need to be careful about artificial intelligence: "If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that." Credit:AP

As a would-be historian, I felt the need to use these words almost constantly, yet had no idea how to spell them. The file card display meant I could just look up from my typing and there it would be.

When I was in first year at university, constantly writing essays, I had three words Blu-Tacked to the wall above my desk: "bourgeoisie", "bureaucracy" and "medieval". Each was written on a file card, using a thick Texta, so they could be seen from a distance.

Now, of course, there would be no need for the file cards. Or, for that matter, the girlfriend. The computer and the smart phone would handle everything.

Certainly, with spell check, no one needs to learn how to spell a word like "bourgeoisie". Just throw a few random letters at the screen  a "b", a "u" and a "g". If you are unsure about the "u" and "g", you can simply sit at your desk eating a goat's cheese and quinoa salad, and the computer itself would say, "I'm sensing something to do with the bourgeoisie."

So, no one needs to spell, just as no one needs to remember phone numbers, and no one needs a mental map of the road home. It's all done for you.

The latest attempt to deskill the human race comes courtesy of the "tyre pressure monitoring system" now built into many cars. In Britain, it's been compulsory in all new cars sold since 2014, with the result that people no longer know how to check their own tyre pressure. The only problem: the systems routinely fail, with the result that four in 10 cars in the UK, according to a study out this week, have at least one dangerously underinflated tyre.

At same time, people put such faith in their sat-nav systems that motorists are routinely ending up in rivers and even oceans. They are, it seems, more likely to believe the view on their phone-screen than the view out their windscreen.
I am a Vietnam veteran who served 153 days in Vietnam before being sent home. As a conscript, I had been in the army for 20 months when national service was reduced to 18 months, so my discharge was immediate. Because my service in the Vietnam War zone fell short of 181 days, the government who sent me there deemed I was not eligible to receive the Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal (RVCM). When I march with mates who have the RVCM, I can't help but feel my service is not recognised as equal to theirs, yet we all fought together. I have just received a catalogue from Australia Post and I see that now anyone can buy a full-sized replica of the RVCM, complete with six stamps. There will be nothing stopping a buyer from wearing this medal on the right breast at an Anzac Day march, yet I, who served there, am not entitled to wear it with pride alongside my other medals. I am devastated that this has been allowed to happen. Setting aside my feelings about not receiving the medal, how must those who have the honour of wearing the RVCM feel to know it can be bought by mail order? As I attended a Remembrance service on Friday to honour the sacrifice of all men and women who served Australia, I wondered why our government is still treating some of our veterans with such disregard for their feelings. Is there anyone who can explain this to me or does no one care?

Ashley Blewer Alstonville Hewson: a chance that was missed Hewson  should-be PM  has bright idea John Hewson ("Let's flick to a brighter future", November 11) makes an important case for a technology revolution in renewable energies. As he says, finance is the key, and given a share of the $2 trillion in super investments in "green bonds", the Clean Energy Finance Corporation could be ramped up to cope with seed capital right through to full project financing. Once we have genuine new "jobs and growth" we will see old technologies switch to renewable energy as it would be economic suicide not to. It might only be a couple of decades before we see the whole of Australia powered by renewable energy. Hewson has some wonderful ideas and if Mike Willesee had not asked that GST cake question prior to the 1993 election we may well have had the "feral abacas" (as Keating called him) for PM, and a lot of those ideas long implemented. Steve Johnson Elizabeth Beach

Having seen Kim Beasley interviewed frequently this week on television, I couldn't help think it was such a pity he never made it to the prime ministership. Equally, after reading the piece by John Hewson I consider it unfortunate he never reached the position of prime minister  he is highly educated, articulate and persuasive. They leave the current lot for dead. Paul Hunt Engadine Lessons and warnings for us in Trump's ascendancy President-elect Donald Trump. Credit:AP The greatest tragedy of the US presidential election, of which Waleed Aly appears to be wilfully ignorant about, is that not since the end of the American civil war has the election of a US president been so consciously enamoured with white supremacism as has the election of Donald Trump ("Class war back with a vengeance", November 11). Nothing else can explain why over 80 per cent of America's 50-million strong white evangelical Christians voted for a man who promised to make their whiteness great again.

This has nothing to do with class warfare. It has everything to do with a deep-seated ideological attachment to a supremacy where not even the authoritative teachings and example of Jesus Christ can overcome their blind disdain for all people of colour. Vincent Zankin Rivett (ACT). As the Democrats lick their wounds and hypothesise as to why their blue firewall came tumbling down, required reading should be Joe Bageant's 2007 book, Deer Hunting with Jesus. Bageant didn't foresee Donald Trump slouching towards Washington but he warned Democrats of the dangers of their abandonment of the working class and, in particular the rural working class, with whom Democrats would once have stood on the picket lines in places like West Virginia. The result of ignoring working class voters has been to drive them to the Republican Party, who should be their mortal enemies. An even more telling statistic than the shift in the working class vote is that more than 100 million eligible voters did not bother to cast a vote. I hope there are no non-voters among those in the streets protesting against the result. Cliff Jahnsen Bowral Tony Nicod and others are absolutely correct that much of Trump's support came from dispossessed "rust belt" workers, who have been too long ignored by the media and wealthy establishment (Letters, November 11). However, the potential "saviour" they chose happens to be a well-known member of that establishment: inherited millions, pursued many more by self-admitted "sharp" business practice, boasted of being "smart" for avoiding tax, frequently accused of treating workers and contractors badly. That's even leaving aside the racist and sexist outbursts, which too many of his acolytes seem to find acceptable.

Al Svirskis Mount Druitt As an American who has lived in Australia for eight years and been a dual citizen for three, I had mixed feelings about Paul Keating's comments on the outcome of the US presidential election ("Keating says it's time to cut ties", November 11). I agree that Australia needn't maintain a subservient role to the US in global politics, provided it musters the gumption to stand on its own feet. Australia cannot simply look to China for a new master, like some kind of sad rescue puppy. In response to Keating's conclusion that Australia "is a better society than the United States," all I can say is, don't get smug, Australia. You may not have guns, but you also don't have marriage equality for the LGBT community or full reproductive rights for women. You have universal healthcare, but there is still a shameful 10-year gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, compared to the two-year difference for Native and white Americans. And finally, just because Malcolm Turnbull is less embarrassing than Donald Trump, that does not make him any less of a conservative wing-nut. Australia, you still have work to do. Elizabeth Wright Newtown Some commentators are reacting with surprise that large segments of female voters in the US favoured Donald Trump. I suspect that, for some women, social class and economics very likely outweigh gender politics. Perhaps a lot of people miss this, as class politics has become somewhat unfashionable. A woman who can't even find a good basic paying job is going to be more worried about her economic situation than any glass ceiling holding her more well-to-do sisters back. It looks like some women voted for Trump and what they saw as their own self-interest (very understandably) rather than to try to advance the cause of women everywhere by electing a women who wasn't really holding out the hope of any improvement in conditions for the working class.

Bruce Guthrie Mandurama Again, a highly qualified woman has missed out on a leadership position (UN secretary-general; US president). Perhaps we should take our cue from the United Nations appointment of Wonder Woman as Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women. Yes, no real woman sufficed, it seems. We need a Hollywood-inspired fantasy portraying a sexed-up, scantily dressed, power-accessorised cartoon character for inspiration. Do we have to look like Wonder Woman? The President-elect of the US would approve. Meg Wallace Gosford If Nan Howard's vindictive anti-Hillary letter (November 11) is indicative of a Trumpism tsunami reaching Australia, my god, your god, their god help us, because Our God has Buckley's. Margaret Page Cowra

Nan Howard, since when is grabbing unsuspecting women by the pussy representative of godly values? How can turning one's back on the plight of the Syrian men, women and children displaced by war possibly be representative of godly values? And what about a chronic inability to tell the truth  that too is a godly value? All I can say is thank god I'm an atheist. Karen Beck Potts Point Georgina Downer ("Trump will lead US in the right direction: we should take note", November 11) celebrates Trump's endorsement of "traditional American values  love of country, family and, for many, faith". She doesn't mention lynching black people, but that is more likely to be a result of his election than economic prosperity. Jim Mackenzie Lane Cove Melania Trump and Michelle Obama met at the White House on Thursday. Credit:Getty Images

Thank heavens this could never happen in Australia Australians are justly shocked by Trump's victory  who could ever think that a businessman could make a successful leader? And his party is obsessed with destroying unions and winding back universal health care. He stirred up prejudice and fear by demonising Islam and attacking refugees. Trump insulted and offended Mexicans, blacks and Jews on the basis of their race. Thank heavens this could never happen in Australia. Glenn Meeves Penrith Donald Trump is not the first philanderer to be President of the US. Nor is he the first ignoramus. Nor is he the first liar. Nor is he the first to lack policy experience. Nor is he the first to have been bankrupt. Nor is he the first to slander his opponents. But he is the first to be all of these. God help America. Andrew Macintosh Cromer

If I was the President elect, I would be putting in an order for a Trumpmobile. Clare Raffan Campsie The Simpsons told us years ago that Lisa will succeed president Trump. Greg Thorp Turramurra Donald Trump has the panic stricken look of the school bully who inexplicably finds himself class captain.

Janet Spence Mosman And I guess they compared speech notes ("Michelle Obama meets Melania Trump in private at the White House", smh.com.au, November 11)? Allan Gibson Cherrybrook Postscript Wednesday began without an inkling that a revolution was under way. Regular letter writer George Fishman was glum: "With Hillary Clinton in the White House, Americans will have to wait another four years to 'drain the swamp' of Washington," he wrote.

For others, the mood was lighter. "It looks like Hillary is the next president." Steve Bradbury, of Avalon, guessed. "A pity, as a Trump victory would have given an enormous boost to the voluntary euthanasia movement." But around midday the US election letters stopped. Traffic into the inbox dropped to a trickle. Normally this means it's a sunny Sunday. But on Wednesday I guess it meant our readers were trying to digest the unexpected electoral outcome unfolding in the US. And once they did, they started to consider desperate measures, though none as desperate as Bradbury suggested. "Looks like it might be time to build the bomb shelter," Denis Goodwin, of Dee Why, told us. "And I am taking the cat with me." From that point, the letters began to tumble in, expressing mostly sadness, shock and dismay mixed with support for compulsory voting and constitutional monarchy. Sorry Peter FitzSimons. We published a special online afternoon Letters edition and updated it during the evening. We published another on Thursday.
In 2015 Pope Francis invited the Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein to the Vatican to enlist her support for his encyclical on capitalism, climate change and morality  an unlikely invitation to a self-described secular Jewish feminist. But as Klein explained "the stakes are so high, time is so short and the task is so large that we cannot afford to allow those differences to divide us". "To change everything" says Klein, "we need everyone".

The climate crisis is real. Human culpability is clear and plausible deniability of this, the refuge of climate change sceptics, is not tenable. The Pope has called for urgent action. Even recalcitrant Australian politicians are getting nervous.

But the climate crisis is more than an environmental and political issue. It is also a social and economic justice issue. And that's why this November, Naomi Klein will be awarded the 2016 Sydney Peace Prize.

Klein has been staring down uncomfortable truths and calling us out on them for years. In her latest book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, she calls out the fossil fuel industry and the politicians they control. She identifies our own reckless complicity in all of this as well. But for Klein the climate crisis is an opportunity  and quite possibly our last chance  to build a better world.
A spider was living in the driver's side-view mirror of my car. It moved in there a few months ago and started building little webs across the mirror: I guess it thought it would catch lots of flies and bugs while the car was in motion, and hopefully, one day, a motorcyclist. Not once did I see that spider but I imagined a cute little hoppy thing tucked away behind the mirror, strapped into an approved spider-web seatbelt, in accordance with Regulation 266 of the Road Safety Road Rules 2009. Ziggy Stardust: popular with spiders (from Mars). And the two of us kind of clicked: every night it would build a tiny web of stunning architectural beauty and magnificent geometric precision  and every morning I'd get into the car and destroy the web with my finger, then roll it into a ball and flick it out the window like a booger. It was nice, it was our thing. Just knowing the spider was there was comforting. Whenever I was driving alone, I'd chat with it, keep it up to date on current affairs, the Syrian conflict, the US elections  it never said anything back, but fair enough, I mean, what could anyone say?

On long roadtrips I'd sing it popular spider songs; the Spider-Man theme, Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, the one about the old woman who swallowed a spider (though in hindsight, that was probably insensitive and I regret it). One time I asked if it could weave me a little webby-message like in Charlotte's Web, but it never did. I don't think it understood the literary reference. It's a generational thing. Yesterday I was filling up my car at a petrol station, my mind in a distracted ethanol-fumed state, contemplating a bleak Trumpish future, while silently chanting my PIN so I'd remember at paying time ... when I glanced sideways for a second. There it was. On top of the mirror. No cute, hoppy, itsy-bitsy spider. A massive frickin' Huntsman, the size of a child's hand, after the spider had eaten the rest of the child. The spider stared at me with it's eight arachno-eyes, I stared back with my four myopic-eyes, both of us seeing each other for the first time, thinking "Jeeeeez! It's bigger than I thought! And furrier! Holy f--k!!" Now that we'd seen each other we knew we could never coexist again. The spider made the first move, running towards the open car window  it saw the keys in the ignition, it knew the tank was nearly full, it could head north-west and start a new life for itself in the Grampians. I countered immediately: I grabbed a petrol station squeegee, thoughtfully provided to flick away massive carjacking Huntsmen. With one swoop, I flicked the spider, it flew through the air, landed on the ground, then froze there, staring up at me as if to say, "Is this how it ends Danny? After months of companionship, adventure and laughter? Just go! Drive away and leave me. But pay for your petrol first. And if you've forgotten your PIN, I know it, but I'm not telling."
ALEXANDER NEVSKY (108 minutes) Unrated Made by Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein after his radical editing theories had fallen out of favour, this 1938 spectacle about a 13th century Russian prince may have been a compromise with the Stalinist regime, but it's still the work of a filmmaker determined to create visual drama with every image. Sergei Prokofiev wrote the martial score. Screens as part of the Russian Resurrection film festival. Digitally projected. ACMI, tomorrow, 2.15pm. Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. GRAN TORINO (M) 116 minutes Part of the secret of Clint Eastwood's longevity as director and star has been his willingness to keep reinventing and testing his irascible persona. One especially winning late example is this slow-burn 2008 drama with comic notes, where he plays a racist old coot from the suburbs of Detroit who finds unexpected friendship with the Hmong family next door. Astor, tomorrow, 7pm. Double feature with Sully.

Aline Santana (who plays Caca) and Juliano Cazarre (Iremar) in Neon Bull. FRANTIC (120 minutes) M Roman Polanski's streamlined 1988 thriller is both an exercise in paranoia and a chaste romance anticipating Lost in Translation, with Harrison Ford as a irritable American doctor mixed up in espionage in Paris, and Emmanuelle Seigner as the French party girl who comes to his aid. The bittersweet mood is so carefully sustained you can watch this over and over. Screens as part of a Polanski retrospective. Digitally projected. ACMI, today 6.30pm and tomorrow 3pm. NEON BULL (101 minutes) R The bull is a literal one, painted fluorescent green for a night rodeo by the cattle handlers who are the subject of this poetic slice of Brazilian life. Director Gabriel Mascaro's background is in documentary, but his approach here recalls Apichatpong Weerasethakul in its laidback style, casually frank handling of sex, and sense of myth lurking just beneath the everyday. Cinema Nova.
For years, a glass, steel and stone dining venue sat silent and empty on the water's edge. This spring successful Sorrento restaurateur Barry Iddles took over the lease of 360Q. He has called the downstairs venue Hooked on Fish Cafe Bar. Iddles offers good quality meals at reasonable prices, along with local wines and beer. Consider prawn and crab Banh Xeo  rice and coconut pancake stuffed with wok dry fried seafood with fresh beanshoots, coriander and fish sauce. Upstairs is a lookout tower offering stunning views of the bays and the peninsulas.

360Q, 2 Wharf Street, (03) 5257 4200

Bike Queenscliff

Pack your saddlebags and catch the train to South Geelong where you'll find the trailhead for the 32-kilometre Bellarine rail trail. It passes through Geelong's urban sprawl before heading into grazing country, past vineyards and along the shores of Swan Bay to the old station at Queenscliff. On weekends it is not unusual to race the tourist steam train as it makes its way back to Queenscliff from Drysdale. railtrails.org.au

On the waterfront

Everywhere there's life to behold. Large stingrays glide silently under the million-dollar boats at Queenscliff Marina. Under the bridge to Swan Island, three pelican perch on a small wooden boat. Nearby a bloke with a portable cooler walks up to a fishing boat and buys a bag of Bass Strait scallops from the deckhand. Meanwhile, on the narrow band of sand between the railway line and the shallow waters of Swan Bay, pied oystercatchers walk among the cockles on their lanky red legs.
UPDATED, 7 AM: A couple hours after President-elect Donald Trump tweeted petulantly that protesters marching for a second day were being very unfair to him someone on his team reminded him he won. Either that or they took over his Twitter account again, for one of those presidential Trump social-media course-corrections weve read so much about.

Anyway, this is what was posted to his account:

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

That previous late-night tweet.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

had been written at the same time he had tweeted, presidentially, that he had great chemistry with Obama when the met for the first time, at the White House, hours earlier  and Melania liked Mrs. O a lot:

A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Previous, November 10, 9 PM PT: Just days after staffers reportedly limited Donald Trumps access to the social media platform due to concerns that his tendency to express his most petulant thoughts would impact his electoral chances, the President-elect is back on Twitter tonight. And true to form, hes expressing his most petulant thoughts.

Story continues

This time the objects of Donalds wrath are protestors who, for the second night in a row, have taken to the streets of several American cities to demonstrate against Trumps ultimately successful bid for the Presidency of the United States. In a tweet posted two hours ago, Trump first praised as open and successful an election hed spent months insisting would be rigged, before laying into protestors who, he says, are the pawns of the national news media.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Denver protestor November 10, 2016

Tonights protests arent quite as widespread as last night, but thousands are still gathering in cities such as New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Oakland, Dallas and Denver. In Denver, things kicked off with an estimated 2500 protestors chanting The People United  Will Never Be Divided! while carrying Love Trumps Hate signs. Meanwhile 500 protestors were estimated to have attended the Philadelphia demonstration, and unspecified thousands in NYC.

Trump had his first official meeting with soon-to-be former President Obama today, and has granted his first post-victory interview to 60 Minutes.

Related stories

Bill Maher Invites President-Elect Donald Trump To Appear On HBO's 'Real Time With Bill Maher'

Donald Trump On '60 Minutes': President-Elect Says He'll Keep Elements Of Obamacare

Corey Lewandowski Out At CNN; Late-Night Jokes To Follow
Labor has just as much to lose from the One Nation vote in Queensland as the conservatives, with the outlier party on track to become a major force in the state's politics.

Both Labor and the LNP have begun working to shore up vulnerable seats as the birthplace of One Nation prepares for its election. Between 11 and 13 electorates have been identified as potential gains for the Pauline Hanson-led party in a state still unconvinced by the majors and suffering economic decline.

With both parties matched at 42 seats each on the floor of the unicameral Queensland Parliament, the One Nation vote is shaping up to be instrumental in deciding the outcome of the election, due in early 2018 but widely tipped to be held in September or October next year.

The minority Queensland Labor government has not been able to reverse the above-average unemployment plaguing the state, with jobless figures reaching double digits in regions where the downturn in the mining sector hit hard.
Greens' Nick McKim Credit:Peter Mathew The deal will hinge on the government's move to ban refugees who arrived in Australia by boat from ever returning. That will force Opposition Leader Bill Shorten to retain Labor's opposition to the lifetime visa ban, currently before Parliament, or buckle to support the resettlements and closure of detention facilities by 2019. Mr Turnbull has kept tight-lipped on speculation of a deal with the US, but on Friday Cabinet Minister Christopher Pyne spoke of how such a deal could yet be completed before Donald Trump's inauguration. The government's push for a lifetime ban on resettled boat arrivals ever coming to Australia was taken as another indicator that a third country arrangement was close.

Refugee advocates say the United States would be a welcome final destination for asylum seekers stuck in limbo in Australia's offshore detention system. While they are split on whether a long-awaited solution has been arrived at, defenders of asylum seekers agree the US would be a "suitable" way to get people off Manus and Nauru in exchange for Australia's promise to take people from US protection in Costa Rica. Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre lawyer David Manne said the Costa Rica announcement could indicate a swap deal because the category of asylum seekers there is not one that Australia prioritises for protection. The Hondurans and El Salvadoreans in the Costa Rica camp would be assessed under the little-used "In-country Special Humanitarian visa (subclass 201)" because they have been removed from their own country by the US and are only considered to be "in transit" in Costa Rica, Mr Manne said. "There are rumours swirling that Australia has struck a refugee swap deal," he said.

"The fundamental and urgent imperative is to evacuate people from their suffering on Nauru and Manus to a safe place where they can rebuild their lives in dignity. The US would clearly be a suitable option for vulnerable people who are stuck in limbo." Human rights lawyer Julian Burnside said asylum seekers were generally not concerned with which country they ended up in as long as it was a signatory of the Refugee Convention and allowed them to escape persecution. "Whether it's the US, Canada, Sweden or Australia, their aim is to be able to live without being in fear for their lives," he said. Ian Rintoul, of the Refugee Action Coalition, welcomed the prospect of a US resettlement deal, but doubted that one had been struck. "I think people would be willing to go to the US," he said. "They would have to be settled with permanent visas and rights like anyone else. But I wouldn't hold my breath that this is going to happen."

The position of advocates differs from the hardline stance taken by the Greens. Greens immigration spokesman Nick McKim said the government should resettle those held on Manus and Nauru in Australia. "Who, in good conscience, could send refugees to Donald Trump's America? We've already seen reports of race-based violence since Donald Trump's election," he said. "We know his policies around Muslim people and we have large numbers of Muslim people in the camps on Manus and Nauru. It beggars belief." Senator McKim said Mr Trump could overturn the plan when he took office, leading to more chaos in Australia's immigration regime.
He was escorted under guard to Royal North Shore Hospital for mental health assessment. On Friday a spokesman from NSW Police Media told PS: "We are not providing any further comment" and said due to privacy laws no further information about the 38-year-old man's whereabouts could be released. Peta Credlin and Julia Gillard agree on push for more women in power It's been a hell of a week for women's empowerment, but just a day after Hillary Clinton was turfed onto the political scrap heap by renowned feminist and President-elect Donald Trump, back in Sydney a chorus of applause was greeting girl power. On Thursday over morning tea at the Centennial Hotel in Paddington, Harper's Bazaar Australia unveiled its Women of the Year issue, giving star billing to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott's chief of staff Peta Credlin, who, along with a line-up of other high achievers, was described as one of the great "disruptors" of 2016.

Julia Gillard and Delta Goodrem at the 10th annual Cosmopolitan Women of the Year Awards in Sydney on Thursday. Credit:Cosmo "I'm not driven by big dollars and I don't want a slow or, indeed, an easy life. I want to live a life that matters. I believe in the battle for ideas, because the battle for ideas shapes lives and it shapes countries, hence my love of politics," Credlin, who is now working for James Packer's private company as a senior adviser, writes in next week's edition of Harpers. "I'm comfortable wearing the tag of 'disruptor' so long as I'm honest and true to myself. I would feel I'd let myself down if I didn't speak up on things I care about. We need women like us in politics  women who are prepared to speak up and to shake the tree. Women who can't be bullied or pushed around. If you are just warming a seat then you need to give the seat to someone else, because we need women in public life who are brave and fearless." Peta Credlin arrives at the ACT magistrates court to face DUI charges. Credit:Rohan Thomson And just a few hours after Credlin was being showered in adulation, one of her great foes, former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who accused Abbott and by default Credlin, of misogyny during their opposition years, was gracing a stage across the road in Centennial Park, but this time for Cosmopolitan magazine's Women of the Year Awards.

Gillard, who was a presenting a gong to Delta Goodrem, told the room: "I'm absolutely sure, it'll be so common for a woman to become prime minister here or to be leading in other nations that we don't even bother talking about it anymore so yes, I want to see the next generation of women getting right in there, so please do. Don't be deterred." Now, we can only wonder, would Gillard still feel so supportive if that next female prime minister turned out to be Credlin? Nine gets upfront and personal at celeb-spinning TV love parade The annual beauty parade of television networks flaunting their assets for the coming year has been taking place over the past couple of weeks. Mostly for advertising executives and a few television writers, "upfronts" normally run for an hour or so with a few drinks and nibblies dispensed as network talent is "showcased". Teaser videos of upcoming shows are rolled (usually with the volume way too high) and plenty of fists are punched in the air as network executives puff their chests.

Channel Nine flaunting its assets for the coming year. The objective: to convince clients to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising. On Tuesday Channel Nine turned the upfronts concept on its head, hosting about 500 people at The Star casino complex for what turned out to be a five-hour network love-in, a cross between a Hillsong rally and Donald Trump convention, complete with dancing brides, pyrotechnics, network celebrities and a whiz-bang stage set. The Oscars-like stage featured giant Lazy Susans which spun to reveal the network's "jewels", with the likes of Tracy Grimshaw and Shane Warne under spotlights, although when Tracy's Lazy Susan, shared with Liz Hayes and Peter Overton, came to an abrupt halt mid-spin it was hard to resist giggling. But the giggles were better than the groans that came after Leila McKinnon got all Melania Trump on us and enthused about Nine's digital strategy to capture Australian women with its "revolutionary" formula: recipes, relationship advice, celebrity gossip, fashion and astrology charts.

And then, when the fireworks went off, there was serious concern for Richard Wilkins' trademark mane, though Dickie's magnificent plumage appeared unsinged when PS caught up with him afterwards. Behind all the razzle-dazzle, the upfronts also give an indication of who's in and who's out at the various networks. With Karl Stefanovic conveniently crossing live via satellite from New York, the absence of colleague Tara Brown, still reeling from the 60 Minutes Lebanese debacle, was noted. As Brown's huge image filled one of the giant screens on the stage, one observer noted to PS: "This looks just like the in memoriam section of the Logies." Eek! Seal and Erica Packer hunting for Sydney home as filming for The Voice looms When pop star Seal travels, he usually does so with a sizeable entourage in tow given his ever-growing family brood  which presently stands at nine.

With the pop star set to return to Sydney in early January to commence filming as a judge on Channel Nine's next series of The Voice, PS hears he will also be bringing his girlfriend and former Sydney resident Erica Packer with him, along with the three children (Indigo, 8, Jackson, 6, and Emmanuelle, 4) she shares with ex-husband, embattled billionaire James Packer. Seal and Erica Packer take the children to get Froyo in Brentwood, California. Credit:Ninja/INFphoto.com With seven offspring between them, the hunt has commenced in earnest to find a big enough home to accommodate Los Angeles-based Seal and his girlfriend's families, though it is unclear exactly how long they will be in town. The last time he was in town with Erica the pair managed to bunker down at his girlfriend's former marital home in Vaucluse, the $70 million mega home James Packer built but barely spent a night in as his second marriage unravelled. That home has since been sold, meaning new, temporary digs will need to be secured.

Shooting of The Voice begins in January for a two- to three-week period, followed by a month's break before shooting resumes in February for another couple of weeks. The show then goes into hiatus until mid year, when Seal is required to remain in Sydney for at least two months throughout the live shows. "I think they will be looking forward to basing themselves in Sydney for a few months, which Erica will be looking forward to given that it is her old home town and she has family and many friends here," says an insider on The Voice. Having the three Packer children in Sydney will also be welcome news for family matriarch Ros Packer, who has remained close to both Erica and the children throughout their parent's divorce, as has father James Packer. Given the very public meltdown of James Packer's engagement with pop star Mariah Carey, and the airing of private details involving the bust-up, including Packer's pre-nup proposal, the timing of the family's home coming is said to be welcome news for Ros Packer. Friends say she is understandably weary of the never-ending stream of controversies that have consumed the Packers over recent months, from China to Mariah.

Lizzie Buttrose's high noon at the Joh Bailey salon Was controversial Sydney socialite Lizzie Buttrose auditioning for a bit-part in the upcoming series of Real Housewives of Sydney at Joh Bailey's Double Bay salon on Wednesday night? Buttrose launched into an unseemly catfight with RHOS's Victoria Rees, who had teamed up with Wrinkles Schminkles beauty potions to raise money for the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. With a camera crew documenting proceedings for the Foxtel show, it looks almost certain that Ita Buttrose's headline-grabbing niece will get her mug on the box, which comes after her well-documented run-ins with the local constabulary in recent months, with police attending Lizzie Buttrose's home four times in 18 months. High drama. Trump caricature funnier than the real thing
The link between booth babe policies and harassment policies is generally thought to be that the presence of sexy (and predominantly female) models plugging games and other properties fosters an atmosphere where women are considered little more than decoration, and this filters through to the way certain convention attendees interact with female fans and cosplayers. As a few years ago I began cosplaying (or "crossplaying") almost exclusively as male characters, my experience of this brave new era in safer fandom has been perhaps a little muted, but the mood at PAX and Oz Comic Con this year seemed to have shifted for the better, so I asked some prominent female cosplayers for their experiences. Henchwench, a Sydney-based cosplayer and costume designer, has been attending local cons for years, with the psychic battle scars to show for it. "Sadly, I've had too many negative experiences at conventions to count," she says. "Thankfully, that number has really dropped off this year, so hopefully that means things are on the mend in the Australian convention scene. These days, I feel much safer inside a convention than outside on the streets, and I think that's a good indicator that things are absolutely improving."

The "convention as safe space" is something familiar to Elizabeth DeLoria, a Melbourne cosplayer and games writer, who has also experienced the dangers of commuting while cosplaying. "Last year PAX was held during cup week, and a lot of cosplayers were verbally  and in one case I know of, physically  assaulted by race punters at train stations or in the outside area of the convention building," she says. "Conventions are definitely much more aware of cosplayer safety, however, and I think they've finally realised that cosplay is a big convention drawcard and more will cosplay if it feels safe to. There's a lot less 'maybe you should have cosplayed something less skimpy' from staff and security and a lot more understanding, and that's just happened in the last three years." The consensus is that things are improving across the board, though all the cosplayers I spoke to said that some of the smaller conventions in Australia are lagging far behind their major competitors when it comes to attendee safety (and that includes things such as Supanova inviting actor and GamerGate antagonist Adam Baldwin to attend in 2015). "I think some of the other conventions need to cater very much to a more 'mainstream' audience to be financially viable, and so you get some really undesirable people showing up to 'look at the freaks'," Henchwench offers. "I have never been made to feel uncomfortable by another cosplayer; every single time I have been catcalled or insulted or inappropriately touched has been by someone in plain clothes." For Shivjam, a Melbourne cosplayer who appeared at PAX Aus as Harley Quinn, PAX's staff training in dealing with harassment came immediately in handy. "I was approached to 'attend' Sexpo on behalf of a company if I did an 'audition' at some warehouse," she recalls. "I told the volunteers immediately of the man who did not have a pass and they got straight on the radio to let people know. It's always refreshing to see staff jump straight to a complaint. Word to the wise, never trust a weird man with a live rabbit on his shoulder, I guess."

So, while the no harassment policies and better trained staff have changed the general mood of larger local cons, the jury is still out on booth babes. While the PAX policy seems like a step in the right direction, what it hasn't done is address the fact that there are vastly different dress codes for promotional staff according to gender, something Henchwench remains concerned about. "It's not addressing the actual problem that trade shows like E3 have continued with using booth babes, which is that the vast majority of companies using booth babes have their male employees in baggy pants, sneakers and a polo shirt, and their women (ie: 'booth babe') employees wearing the same company colours and logos but with bared cleavage, six inch heels and a miniskirt," she says. "The problem here isn't that aggressive sexuality is being used to sell product, it's that there is a severe imbalance in gender representation in their sales tactics, which absolutely alienates women." Banning "sexy" booth babes also creates confusion among cosplaying attendees, as most of us will be aware that plenty of female characters of fiction are, in Jessica Rabbit's words, just drawn that way. Take it from DeLoria, who attended PAX last week dressed as Princess Daphne from 1983 video game Dragon's Lair, one of the sexiest characters in gaming history.
Pressure is mounting on the Victorian Government to review the controversial coronial finding into the bizarre garbage chute death of Phoebe Handsjuk in 2010.

The deputy leader of the Victorian National Party, Stephanie Ryan, told Parliament on Thursday that revelations about the shortcomings in the police and coronial investigations into Ms Handsjuk's death had shaken public confidence in the justice system.

"I rarely raise issues in this place unless they have a direct connection to the people I represent or my responsibilities within the shadow cabinet," Ms Ryan said. "I have reflected on this, and in this instance I believe I owe it to Phoebe - a woman of my own age - to put my reservations about the investigation and findings into her death on the record."

Ms Ryan said she believed many Victorians could not accept Coroner Peter White's finding about how Ms Handsjuk died, urging Attorney-General Martin Pakula to examine options for opening her case for review.
They went by the moniker Brothers For Life but during their lengthy court trial two senior members of the notorious Sydney street gang violently turned on each other in extraordinary scenes.

Footage has been released from inside the NSW Supreme Court as one of the gang members attacks the other with a pen as they stood trial for a string of shootings that terrorised Sydney.

The street gang Brothers For Life.

The attack footage, and details of the six-month trial, can be revealed for the first time after senior members of Brothers For Life were found guilty of the shootings that transpired during the group's violent unravelling.

The internal and violent feuding of the now-disbanded BFL group was laid bare in the NSW Supreme Court  drive-by shootings, organised hits and a teenager caught in the crossfire of an internal gang war that plagued the city's south-west.
It rained all day the day that Elvis Presley died

And only a legend can make it do that!

... He gave me my first leather jacket

And taught me how to comb my hair just right in a filling station bathroom

It was Elvis that gave you a rubber on prom night

And told you that you looked real sharp

- Tom Waits, State Theatre, Sydney, May 2, 1979

Tom Waits told the people at the State Theatre that evening 37 years ago a legend never died but just taught you everything he knew. He was performing the American dream for a world where few then dared dream what life could be.

In the American century, the US was the beacon for a better life created by decency, generosity, openness and a willingness to change. Along the way, Americans came to be regarded by many as the nicest people on Earth. Knights errant, admired, envied, clever, yet sometimes reviled, their confidence, generosity, decency and panache seemed to make the world a better place. Where they went, the world followed.

They walked on the moon. They created rock 'n' roll, surfing, the internet, iphones, the Salk vaccine, McDonald's and the Bomb. They saved the world. Twice. They gave many of us in Europe, Asia and Australia our lives.
Police have found a loaded handgun hidden between the buttock cheeks of a man associated with the Rebels bikie gang.

Police searched the man's Mercedes on Felix Street in Brisbane City on Monday and alleged that they found a handgun in the rear of the vehicle.

Officers then went to an apartment linked to the Rebels associate and did a body search, where "a loaded handgun was located secreted between his buttocks", police said.

The man was charged with offences including unlawful possession of a handgun, silencer, Taser, explosives and dangerous drugs.
The university at the centre of a controversial racial discrimination lawsuit admits it would have tried to make sure the students involved knew about the case against them much earlier if it had its time over again.

The Queensland University of Technology has come under fire over its handling of the case, after it was revealed the students were not notified of the complaint against them for more than a year.

QUT has been criticised for its handling of the case. Credit:Glenn Hunt

In his first detailed public comments on the case, which was thrown out by the Federal Court in Brisbane last week, vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake said it was the Australian Human Rights Commission's responsibility to notify the students.

Professor Coaldrake said the university had only facilitated contact with the students to avoid giving up their contact details without consent.
Facebook has vowed to crack down on misinformation and burst the "filter bubble", highlighted by the US election, but can you save people from their own willing gullibility?

When you look at how social media works, it was inevitable that it would turn into one of the world's most powerful propaganda tools. It's often painted as a force for good, letting people bypass the traditional gatekeepers in order to quickly disseminate information, but there's no guarantee that this information is actually true.

How closely is Big Brother watching you?

Google News is attempting to reward news sites which stick to the facts in the post-truth era because, at least in theory, traditional journalists and news outlets are expected to strive for accuracy and independence. There's no such onus on social media users yet people seem just as willing, if not more willing, to believe what they read on the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

The US election has highlighted the power of social media as a propaganda tool, underpinning the insidious concept of "voter suppression"  attempting to dissuade your opponent's supporters from voting. Thankfully it's ineffective in Australia due to our mandatory voting system but it could have a significant impact on a close US election.
Its official. Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States. Now comes the interesting part: dissecting the kind of impact his campaign promises could have on the country.

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly expressed his desire to overhaul trade policy on goods produced overseas. But doing so could hurt US consumers, especially when it comes to the cost of consumer tech. The cost of some products could spike by as much as 45%, if Trump goes forward with his suggestion that the US place a 45% tariff on Chinese goods.

Trump took a very strong negative position on trade, said Professor Gian Luca Clementi of New York Universitys Stern School of Business. The question is if he is going to follow through on these threats, and what these impacts will be on these industry.

In an interview with The New York Times editorial board, Trump said he would consider placing a 45% tax on Chinese goods. Such a move could prove especially damaging for consumer technology companies such as Apple (AAPL), which produces the vast majority of its products in China. Indeed, most technology companies rely on Chinese manufacturing or Chinese parts.

If such a tariff were put into place, it would cost companies more to sell Chinese-made products in the US and cost US consumers more to purchase those products. For Apple that means some goods might cost 45% more.

But not every Apple product would see the same kind of price increase for US consumers, according to Dr. Robert Rogowsky, program chair and professor of international trade and economic diplomacy at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Some products will probably go up by 45%, but most products will not, because some of that profit will be absorbed by the producers, Rogowsky said, adding that assemblers in China could offset some of the increased costs.

That said, such action would have far-reaching global consequences. The consumer technology industry is, after all, a worldwide market. Raising tariffs on China, then, could lead to tax spikes in companies as far away as Europe, through.

Story continues

Everything would rise for consumers and they would consume less. But that filters back through the whole supply chain. So American businesses, Korean businesses, Japanese businesses and German businesses would feel this, Rogowsky explained.

Korean companies like LG and Samsung would likely be insulated from any direct changes to tariffs, as Korea and the US already have a trade agreement in place. They could still face problems because they use Chinese parts. But because China produces nearly all consumer tech products, every tech company would face the same issues.

The fact that the consumer tech industry is so globalized could be its biggest saving grace. As Rogowsky explains it, companies like Apple and Samsung do more business around the world than they do in the US. In fact, most of Apples growth and sales come from overseas, and that will continue regardless of what happens in the US.

Apple and the whole consumer tech market functions in a global marketplace, so if one part  is blocked, they will still sell well elsewhere, Rogowsky said. In the end, US consumers would suffer the most.

The consumer tech industry would likely, however, push back against any plan to re-negotiate existing trade deals or introduce new tariffs.

The way you make money is by broadening the marketplace, so the interest of these companies is to broaden the marketplace as much as possible. But to renegotiate a trade deal could start a trade war that could reduce the size of the market, Clementi explained.

Overall, this idea of re-negotiating trade treaties and introducing tariffs is just a bad, bad idea. There is no subtle way to put it, he added.

As Rogowsky put it, the tech industry would likely lobby against any new tariffs or trade agreements aggressively, as would the likes of Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT), and the transportation industry.

Neither Clementi nor Rogowsky believe Trump will move forward with any new tariffs or trade deals. Thats because negotiating trade deals isnt exactly an easy task. Generally speaking, a trade deal can take up to about three years to flesh out. At that point, Congress then has to approve the agreement .

Its easy to go out and threaten to do something about it, Clementi said. But its very, very difficult to go out and actually do something about it.

Of course, presidential candidates regularly bash China and Japan over trade, Rogowsky said.

Still, he added, The magnitude of what he expects to do, the large tariff increases, which would be almost prohibitive  seems almost remarkably unlikely.

More from Dan:

Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
By 7am on Saturday the temperature sat at the minimum of 14 degrees and the city had received about 2mm of rain, the most was 3.6mm at Melbourne Airport.

A severe thunderstorm warning was cancelled, with the Bureau of Meteorology saying "the immediate threat of severe thunderstorms has passed".

The wild weather that had been forecast for Victoria this weekend. Credit:Angela Wylie

Predicted thunderstorms largely stayed away from the city overnight on Friday and early Saturday morning.

Melburnians are waking to a cool and cloudy start to the weekend.

Severe winds are predicted for Saturday afternoon. Credit:Leigh Henningham

Melbourne will reach a maximum of 24 degrees by about midday when the city will feel muggy and humid.

There is still a 60 per cent chance of more showers in Melbourne, but by the afternoon that will be replaced by severe winds.

Senior forecaster Stephen King said a severe weather warning for damaging winds that was issued for Victoria's south west, the Wimmera and central districts could extend to Melbourne by Saturday afternoon.

"It'll be a full on weekend," Mr King said.
How could he walk free?

It's a question many are asking after John Clifford Torney, 32, emerged from the Mildura police station into daylight on Thursday, after more than a year in custody.

It had taken a jury less than two days to acquit Mr Torney of killing Nikki Francis-Coslovich, the two-year-old daughter of his girlfriend Peta-Ann Francis last year.

Nikki, a chubby blonde toddler, died from blunt-force trauma injuries on August 25 last year.
Tofo Beach in Mozambique. At 5am on Wednesday (local time) her body was found near a busy public toilet by some local fishermen, who alerted police. Eyewitnesses told the newspaper that Elly's body did not show exterior signs of violence. Elly Warren, 20, died while travelling in Africa. Credit:Facebook Her family in Melbourne was told she had been raped and murdered.

However, Mozambique police from the country's Inhambane province maintain she was not raped, had no bruising and showed no sign of violence or a struggle. "It looks like a sudden death," police spokesman Detective Juma Dauto said. "We are in doubt as to what could have happened." Detective Dauto told Fairfax Media that Ms Warren was found in a public change room near the beach at 5am. He said police had no suspects and had been told that Ms Warren was alone. He said witnesses saw her go into the toilet block "20 or 30 minutes" before a group of fishermen found her body.

Australian government information - from the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Australian High Commission in South Africa - suggests that she was found on the beach, raped and murdered. An autopsy was to be held in the Mozambique capital of Maputo, 500 kilometres south of Tofo Beach. Detective Dauto said despite other reports Ms Warren was not found naked. He said she was wearing her bathers. "She didn't have a scratch, didn't have a bruise on her indicating there was violence or rape. I guarantee it. I have total confidence she was not raped. The community here is shocked, this has never happened. Everybody wants to know what happened," he said. He said he was concerned that conflicting reports would give "the town a bad name, like it's not safe".

Ms Warren had been due to return to Australia on Monday. Her mother, Nicole Cafarella, earlier this week, said her daughter was "just one of those girls that wanted to travel the world and see everything she could before she was 30". Ms Warren finished her six-week volunteering stint with Africa Underwater on Tuesday, left the accommodation the company used and booked into a backpackers hostel one kilometre up the beach. A manager at the hostel - Wuyani Pariango backpackers - said she never checked in. But Detective Dauto said her passport and belongings were found there.

Ms Warren's father Paul Warren has said on social media that he will be travelling to Africa "in a few days to bring my baby back home".



In a Facebook post on Thursday night, Mr Warren said Elly's funeral may take some time.



"There is going to be an investigation and autopsy which i have been informed can take up to two weeks," he said.



The budding marine biologist was working with International Marine Volunteers in Africa. IMV described her as an "ocean advocate" in a tribute piece on their website. "Any chance Elly got to don a wetsuit and jump in the cage with the white sharks she was there - enthusiastic and ready- even if the water was cold and visibility bad," IMV marine biologist Alison said. "She was so excited to head to Mozambique and meet the mantas and whale sharks. "The last contact I had from Elly was a messenger post gushing with excitement to tell me about how beautiful Mozambique was and how happy she was to be there."

Stepfather David Cafarella said Ms Warren was a "seasoned traveller" with an "insatiable desire to help the environment and others less fortunate" than herself. "She was off to New Zealand when she got back and then to James Cook University to begin her studies to become a marine biologist, her great passion and what she wanted to do with her life more than anything," he said. Loading The government's Smart Traveller website says Australians travelling to Mozambique should exercise a "high degree of caution".
A soldier swamped in the mud of northern France or Belgium, a sailor adrift in the Pacific, a flier above a valley of Afghanistan  any of them, and hundreds of thousands more  might have dreamed of a day like Friday.

The sun shone from a sky that seemed never to have known a cloud.

The crowd applauds as the parade passes by on Friday Credit:Joe Armao

Flags and the leaves of old gum trees hung limp, no more than the barest of breezes occasionally stirring them. The city of concrete and glass shone beyond the park above St Kilda Road.

Alan Stebbing, nine years a guide at the Shrine, had never seen a Remembrance Day like it.
The brutal murder of a vulnerable 11-year-old girl is deserving of life in jail, the prosecution in the case of Bowe Maddigan has argued.

The 30-year-old strangled Zoe Buttigieg to death on October 25 last year after he crept into her bedroom and sexually assaulted her.

Bowe Maddigan before an earlier court appearance in Wangaratta. Credit:Mark Jesser/Border Mail

The father of two had only met the 11-year-old once before when he was invited over by the girl's mother and her partner for a night of drinking and smoking cannabis.

Director of Public Prosecutions John Champion ran the case himself and argued in Wangaratta Supreme Court on Friday for the highest possible sentence.
A WA politician has accused the City of Fremantle of having "double standards" after it retrospectively granted planning approval to three dongas in a woman's backyard.

Julie Matheson, of the Julie Matheson for Western Australia Party, said she planned to write to the Planning Minister and ask that the approval - granted to a home on Edmunds Street in Beaconsfield in May 2015 - be overturned.

The view of the three dongas from Mardie Street before the owner erected a fence, a requirement of the retrospective approval.

"It's an appalling process that anyone could park three dongas in a backyard and then seek retrospective approval when every other home builder has to go through a huge process of red tape to get anything built," she said.

"The neighbours are really unhappy with the council because the council's got double standards.
Pro-vegan messages painted onto the rear of a Champion Lakes property have been painted over by a volunteer group funded by the local council.

Civic Pride Action Group painted over messages emblazoning the property's back fence and shed, encouraging others to "Stop Eating Animals" and "Be Vegan".

Kelle's back fence before her signs were painted over. Credit:Facebook

Disappointed local resident Kelle had asked the group to not paint over the messages, but the group argued the back fence was public property.

"He asked if the address on his paper was mine and I said yes," she said.
The Agnasi oyster is native to Australia and fetches high export prices. Credit:David Allan-Petale "But now it's all in categories and you either live or die depending on how well you go in the one." The success of oyster farmers in the eastern states exporting to markets in Asia and beyond inspired the pair to create a new venture they hope will navigate a new future for Albany - growing shellfish for both the export and domestic market. Lindsay Michael holds up a fresh catch. Credit:David Allan-Petale "You go in the supermarket and there's not much from Australia on the shelves. It might say part made in Australia but that's just the packaging" Lindsay jokes, reflecting on the changes he's seen come to Australia's fishing industry over his thirty plus year career.

"We're hoping we can get our products to local people as well as send it out. We have plenty to offer down here." Native Agnasi oysters and Akoya pearl oysters, ready to eat... Credit:David Allan-Petale In addition to the always popular mussels, Great Southern Mussels grow Akoya pearl oysters which produce both flesh and pearls, and are pushing to commercially grow native Agnasi oysters. "The flat oysters we get are native to Australia and we pick them up incidentally in the rest of our operations," Rob explains. "They grow all over naturally. But we want a license to grow them commercially. We really think there can be a big market for them. You've got Pacifics which are really popular but they're not allowed to grow over here. And in the east they have trouble with disease with that species so that's an opportunity for us to grow something native."

Great Southern Mussels have applied for a commercial license to grown Agnasi oysters on a commercial scale - and it could be very worth it. Australian native Agnasi oysters can fetch up to double the price of Pacific oysters domestically and there's hope foreign buyers will shell up much more. But for now, Rob and Lindsay are concentrating on growing as may cohorts of mussels and Akoya oysters as they can, enlisting the help of Japanese technicians to insert their nucleuses and help grow the highest quality product possible. "The Akoyas we grow for pearls and also for meat, but that's a very slow process. The water here is perfect for the first flush. Really calm and protected and lots of nutrients so Albany shellfish have very good flavour. We need to build it up so they can be exported overseas and also help us develop a market locally," Rob said. "We've turned down orders because we can't yet guarantee the supply. But it's coming on, slowly and steady."
Shalom House founder Peter Lyndon-James says users only usually come to see treatment when they are desperate. Credit:Emma Young He said media campaigns should include more information on where people could go for help, and advertise treatments like acceptance and commitment therapy that address stigma and get users to address their need to take control of their addiction. But Peter Lyndon-James, who previously dealt methamphetamine and now runs Perth rehabilitation centre Shalom House, said he "completely disagreed" with the claim embarrassment was the biggest obstacle to seeking treatment. Mr Cumming says media advertisements that lean too heavily in favour of shock. "Maybe that's the case for white-collared guys who are afraid of bringing shame onto themselves and their families," he said.

"But in my experience, for the vast majority of people, that has not been the case." A former Shalom House resident, said he had struggled with shame and stigma as he battled a two-year addiction to painkillers. Mr Lyndon-James said thinking they did not need help was likely the biggest factor that would stop addicts from entering into a rehab facility  which was the second biggest problem named by subjects in the studies, as per Mr Cumming's findings. A former Shalom House resident, who preferred to remain unidentified, said he had struggled with shame and stigma as he battled a two-year addiction to painkillers. "The shame, the regret, is huge," he said. Credit:Justin McManus

"I had responsibilities  I was running my own company, I had people working under me, and I thought I would lose my credibility if it came out." He said he kept it a secret for a long time out of fear if people knew he did not have the strength to overcome his addiction, they would assume he did not have the strength to handle his work. Lead researcher Craig Cumming said embarrassment and stigma was cited by most people the main obstacle to seeking help. "The shame, the regret, is huge," he said, worse even than the physical withdrawals, so that whenever he felt embarrassed about his addiction he turned to the medication to restore his confidence. "The medication just took care of everything in one swoop," he said.

Mr Cumming says media advertisements that lean too heavily in favour of shock. But he added that he still struggled with this and kept his drug addiction mostly secret even after receiving treatment, which he pursued when he realised how out of hand his life had gotten. "I'd made some really poor decisions," he said, "And once I stopped and looked at my life and what a mess I'd made of it in a couple of years, I realised I needed some help." Residents outside rehabilitation centre Shalom House in Henley Brook. Credit:Shalom House Mr Lyndon-James said what usually drew addicts to Shalom House was desperation.

"Eventually, you come to the end of yourself and you realise you can't do it anymore, that you need outside help," he said. The state government's WA Meth Strategy will see 60 extra treatment beds open in January 2017 Credit:Louise Kennerly A plan to slow meth use in Western Australia Mr Cumming said his research found meth use in Australia to be higher than in the other countries studied, which he attributed to the cheap rates at which the drug can be manufactured in Australia and purchased from overseas. The state government's WA Meth Strategy 2016 includes plans to disrupt the supply of methamphetamine from other countries.

It also includes plans for roadside drug testing, dedicated police meth teams to target dealers, and an involuntary treatment program for those experiencing a drug-induced psychosis. Earlier this month, the Meth Strategy delivered 60 extra treatment beds in metropolitan Perth and across the South-West, Goldfields, Mid-West, and Pilbara to open in January 2017. Neither stigma nor denial about needing help are directly addressed in the plan, although mental health minister Andrea Mitchell said the government was trying to cover all bases when it came to treatment. "The best outcomes are achieved when the type of treatment matches the specific needs of the individual," Minister Mitchell said in a statement. "For some people, that treatment is residential rehabilitation; for others it is early intervention to avoid the need for residential care or rehabilitation within the community with the help of dedicated support services.
A Western Power worker was electrocuted last month working on a pole that thieves had damaged trying to steal copper wire.

Dan Burton received precautionary hospital treatment after receiving an 11000-volt electric shock from the damaged wire, just one in more than 120 incidents of vandalism or theft to Western Power assets recorded since July.

Dan Burton said he was lucky not to have been more injured.

This represents a 90 per cent increase in recorded incidents compared with the previous six months.

Mr Burton said he was "very lucky" to have only suffered a mild shock.
Cairo: Egypt imposed a security clampdown in its cities on Friday as mass demonstrations called to protest against austerity measures failed to take place.

Riot police and armoured vehicles filled the otherwise empty streets of central Cairo, but most people stayed home.

An Egyptian policeman watches Tahrir Square in Cairo on Friday. Credit:AP

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has urged Egyptians not to protest and warned that there would be no going back on economic reforms, no matter how much pain they might cause.

A little-known group calling itself Movement of the Poor had called for Egyptians to protest on November 11 against deepening austerity measures the government says are required to save the Arab world's most populous nation from financial ruin.
Beijing: Interpol, the international police organisation, has elected a Chinese security official as its president , raising concerns among human rights advocates that the appointment could fortify Beijing's efforts to hunt down political opponents abroad.

The organisation's general assembly elected Meng Hongwei, China's Vice Minister for Public Security for the past 12 years, to the post effective immediately during a meeting in Bali, Indonesia.

China's Vice Minister of Public Security Meng Hongwei speaks at Interpol's general assembly in Bali on Thursday. Credit:Xinhua/AP

"We currently face some of the most serious global public security challenges since World War II," Mr Meng said at the meeting.

Interpol, an intergovernmental organisation that facilitates police cooperation, also appointed a Russian police official, Alexander Prokopchuk, as its vice president for Europe.
Manila: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday he would respect defence treaties with "friends" and "ally" the United States, but still wanted foreign troops to leave his country by the end of his term.

Duterte spared the United States one of his trademark verbal lashings and took a more conciliatory tone than usual, although he hinted at revoking the 2014 Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that gives US troops rotational access to Philippine bases.

"We are friends, with an ally, we have a military pact that would bind us," he told a pre-dawn news conference upon his return from a visit to Malaysia.

"We will maintain our cooperation ... and respect is there, and in all matters between the two countries, especially the treaties we signed with them, so many agreements, we will honour all of these things."
Bali: After a "very stressful few days", Byron Bay woman Sara Connor continues to insist she is innocent of all the charges made against her over the death of a Bali police officer on Kuta beach.

Connor's Australian barrister Peter Strain released a statement on Friday saying that to a "large extent" the indictment presented to the court supported her claim.

Connor and her British DJ boyfriend David Taylor were on Wednesday indicted in the Denpasar District Court on charges of murder, fatal group violence or assault causing death.

The murder charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years' jail.
Mary Barket, head of the Pennsylvania Federation of Republican Women, in her office in Easton, Pennsylvania. Credit:New York Times Where female opponents took to Twitter with #NotOkay, branding Trump a misogynist and worse, his female supporters saw "a good man and a good father," said Mary Barket, head of the Pennsylvania Federation of Republican Women, who knows Biro from church and helped her get involved in the Trump campaign. Biro, who said she was "a quiet, reserved person," had never knocked on doors or worked in politics before. But she spent one day each weekend since August canvassing for Trump. Supporters for Republican Donald Trump celebrate in Phoenix. Credit:AP Where those who voted against Trump saw someone who bankrupted businesses and ducked paying taxes, these women said they saw a man who built a real estate empire and simply followed the law. They saw a man who had raised and promoted a beautiful and successful daughter, Ivanka, and who let a smart and accomplished Washington strategist, Kellyanne Conway, manage his presidential campaign.

In short, they embraced Trump's sales pitch for himself. "I think that women see the big picture - women are smart," Gauta said. "The fact that he said something crude," she said "is not going to change my mind about the good he can do for our country. "Did I like that, no," she went on. "But do I think he can do a better job than Hillary? Absolutely. I think he has got the best interests of this country at heart. He's got a beautiful family; he wants to leave a nice country - the great country he was raised in, for his kids. And I think he said the only way I'm going to get that done is by being president myself." She took her sons, 14 and 16, to a Trump rally, and said she "was even more impressed by him in person than on TV." But as to his sometimes foul mouth: "If my boys ever said anything like that, I'd put them over my knee and spank them.'' In Chicago, Nicole Been, 22, a Roman Catholic who attends DePaul University, is deeply opposed to abortion and the "hookup culture." She complained that other students branded her a racist and a bigot for supporting Trump.

In Philadelphia, Daphne Goggins, 53, an African-American community activist and ardent Republican, always knew she would vote for Trump. She said she believed decades of Democratic efforts had done little for black people. When Trump invited her to a minority outreach meeting, she told him tearfully that "for the first time in my life, I feel like my vote is going to count." (Only 4 per cent of black women, exit polls show, supported Trump, while 26 per cent of Latinas did.) For the women interviewed, as for male Trump backers, the economy was of utmost concern. Gauta and her husband are tired of paying $US1800 a month in health care premiums, with a $US12,000 annual deductible. Lincoln, the retired college administrator, now works at her husband's auto body shop in Old Town, Maine, to help pay the bills. Ostendorf, the graphics producer in Los Angeles, watched her father's million-dollar business implode in the economic crash of 2008. He picked up work doing maintenance for the YMCA. "I've seen America fall down," she said, "and a big part of Trump that appealed to me was his business plan." And they said they are troubled, as well, by an America that seems to have embraced multiculturalism and political correctness without question. They said they did not understand the Black Lives Matter movement, wondered why Democrats seemed so fixated on transgender access to bathrooms and tended to be enraged at the way veterans are treated and violence directed at the police.

They are concerned about immigration and the threat of terrorism. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said Democrats expected "a surge of women" to support Clinton, but that did not happen. While Clinton did better with women in almost every demographic group, Lake said, "Trump won very solidly the white women's vote, and we know that was fed by white, blue-collar women." Biro comes close to fitting that mould; although she considers herself middle class, she did not go to university. And Nazareth, a middle-class community in Northampton County, is the kind of community where Trump did well. Yet sitting in the kitchen of her tidy Cape Cod-style home here, with the Trump-Pence signs still stuck in the front yard and a poster that speaks of peace as a path to enlightenment on the living room wall, Biro expressed the same hopes and fears for the country that many of Clinton's supporters now have. Loading
The first meeting in the Oval Office between US President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump was quite an awkward affair.

The pair, who have had plenty of negative things to say about each other, wore tight smiles in front of the gathered press pack.

They barely looked at each other as they sat, legs apart, in almost identical poses.

Fairfax Media spoke to two body language experts who forensically analysed a series of photographs to point out the non-verbal cues each of the men were giving.
For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Here are the instructions how to enable JavaScript in your web browser
syria family

In the midst of the ongoing war in Damascus, Syria became too dangerous for Rana and her four children, so they fled to the relatively safe suburb of Jamarana. But they only had enough money to rent a cinder block-walled home without mattresses or plumbing.

A recent initiative by the Red Cross in Norway aimed to help Rana and other struggling families in Syria. Rana's family currently receives food and other donations from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, a humanitarian organization that's a part of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Red Cross partnered with Ikea to build a replica of Rana's home at the flagship store in Oslo, so that shoppers could explore it and empathize with her story. People could donate in-store or online.

syrian home

The installation, which was up in October and visited by 40,000 weekly visitors, was part of a larger campaign to support the Red Cross' efforts in Syria. The organization told CNN that the campaign raised $23.8 million.

The project in Ikea, conceived by the advertising agency POL, was called "25 meters of Syria," the size of the home's replica. That translates to 269 square feet, or just a little bigger than the average one-car garage.

syrian home 5

Instead of beds, there were foam mats and just a few blankets. Ikea's iconic tags told stories about Rana and her family for shoppers to read.

According to Ikea, the goal was to raise money for war victims and show the horrors of war in Syria, amongst the other picture-perfect home set-ups in the store.

syrian home 4

Check out a video about the project below:

NOW WATCH: Elon Musk just unveiled something that could revolutionize how you power your home





More From Business Insider


LONDON, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Italian government bond yields rose to their highest level in over a year on Friday ahead of a key ratings review and a planned sale of Italian government bonds via auctions.

The country's benchmark 10-year bond yield rose as much as 9 basis points in early trades to 1.92 percent, before retreating a touch to 1.88 percent by 0815 GMT, still up 5 bps on the day.

Italy is also bracing for a crucial constitution referendum early next month and Friday's move came in tandem with a broad sell off across the euro zone with most government bonds up 5-8 basis points and extending multi-month highs.

Germany's 10-year bond, the region's benchmark, saw its yield rise 5.4 bps to 0.33 percent by 0815 GMT.

(Reporting by Abhinav Ramnarayan, Editing by Marc Jones)
Four more Michigan State football players have been suspended for their roles in the melee in the Michigan Stadium tunnel. That brings to eight the number of suspensions. Among the latest players suspended is Jacoby Windmon.
By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan and India signed a civilian nuclear accord on Friday, opening the door for Tokyo to supply New Delhi with fuel, equipment and technology for nuclear power production, as India looks to atomic energy to sustain its rapid economic growth. (Narendra Modi in Japan, see pictures http://in.reuters.com/news/picture/pm-modi-in-japan?articleId=INRTX2T65I) It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, had concluded such a pact with a country that is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). "Today's signing ... marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a joint news conference with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe. The accord stipulates that the nuclear fuel and equipment provided can only be used for peaceful purposes, and a separate document signed in parallel has a clause allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducts a nuclear test. "As a sole nation to have been nuclear-bombed, we bear the responsibility for leading the international community towards the realisation of a world without nuclear weapons," Abe told the same news conference. "The agreement is a legal framework to ensure that India will act responsibly for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It will also lead us to having India participate practically in the international non-proliferation regime." India says the NPT is discriminatory and that it has concerns about its two nuclear-armed neighbours, China and Pakistan. India is already in advanced negotiations to have U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba Corp, build six nuclear reactors in southern India, part of New Delhi's plan to ramp up nuclear capacity more than 10 times by 2032. Japanese nuclear plant makers such as Toshiba and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd are desperate to expand their business overseas as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster chilled domestic demand for new nuclear plants. The agreement with Japan follows a similar one with the United States in 2008, which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation. That step was seen as the first big move to build India into a regional counterweight to China. On India's infrastructure development, Abe said that construction of a high-speed railway connecting Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which will be based on Japan's "Shinkansen" bullet train technology, was scheduled to start in 2018, with commercial operation slated for 2023. "In Japan, the era of high economic growth began when Shinkansen started its service in 1964. I hope the advent of high-speed railway will trigger fresh economic growth in India as well," Abe said. Modi earlier on Friday praised the "growing convergence" of views between his nation and Japan, saying strong ties would enable them to play a stabilising role in Asia and the world. (Editing by Nick Macfie and Kevin Liffey)
A guide to voter rights in Indiana. What you need to know before you cast a ballot
If all politics is local, that should provide some encouragement to Democrats. The Republican Party will now control every branch of the federal government  and extended its existing statehouse dominance on Election Day  but not U.S. cities.

Two-thirds of America's 100 largest cities are controlled by Democratic Party mayors. (67 Democrats, 28 Republicans and 5 mayors with an Independent Party or no party affiliation).

"Historically, we've seen a shift over the last 30 years to more Democrats in urban areas and Republicans in rural areas. It just reflects the cultural shifts we've seen in our country," said Brooks Rainwater, senior executive at the National League of Cities (NLC).

The shift has big implications in two major policy areas for a Trump administration, and in the federal government's relationship with local jurisdictions: infrastructure and immigration. And these are areas in which tension between cities and the federal government already exist.

The dominant role of Democratic mayors in America's largest cities is a focus of policy planners on the right.



"Cities are heavily Democratic. It seems unlikely that GOP statehouses or Congress will favor many of their leftist ideas on social and economic policy," said Aaron Renn, a senior fellow and urban policy specialist at conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute. "Leftist mayors and urban residents, for their part, need to rethink their unrelenting hostility to those who don't share their agenda."

The first policy pronouncement in President-Elect Trump's victory speech was, "We are going to fix our inner cities."

"Just as it was a mistake for Democrats to demonize and ignore suburban and rural Republican voters, it would be a terrible mistake for Republicans to neglect urban interests. Like it or not, the economic heart of our country is in major metropolitan areas," Renn said.



Renn said the great economic divide is also present in cities, though playing out in different ways, such as debates around gentrification. "Fully integrating black Americans, who still have a major presence in our cities, into middle-class American economic success remains an urgent task I hope Republicans will engage with," he said.



Story continues

But some urban policy experts bristle at the way Trump and the alt-right movement portrayed inner cities during the campaign.

"We are sort of concerned about how [inner cities] were portrayed during the campaign, said Michael Wallace, acting director of federal advocacy at the NLC. "We just push back against the narrative that cities are run down," Wallace said. "Cities don't need 'fixing.' ... Campaign rhetoric used a lot of stereotypical thinking about cities. We want to make sure it doesn't have an undo influence on governing of cities."

More from CNBC Metro 20:

The 20 worst places in America to start a business

The 20 best places in America to start a business

2 ideas, $200,00 and a plan to revive Rust Belt cities

City economies have driven the economic recovery. Ninety percent of U.S. GDP comes from metro regions. The 30 largest metro areas are responsible for half of national GDP.

At The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City(ICIC), the Roxbury, Massachusetts-based economic development nonprofit founded by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, officials were pleased that inner cities became part of the debate over the future of our country, "although the term may not always have been used appropriately," said Kim Zeuli, senior v.p. "The types of infrastructure investment that need to be prioritized depend on the city and inner city, but I think it is safe to say that all inner cities need some infrastructure improvements to support business growth," she said.

In contrast to stereotypes of inner cities that persist, ICIC uses a quantitative definition to identify these areas, and Zeuli noted that for close to two decades already well-known firms have been taking advantage of business opportunities in inner cities.

"There is broad agreement on infrastructure, but when we say 'fixing inner cities,' mayors are best-situated to make decisions about funding coming from the federal government," Wallace said.



The National League of Cities anticipates some fiscal pressure as a result of one party rule in Washington, D.C., but he said the Senate remains closely divided and has the filibuster option. "The writing is on the wall that there will be greater fiscal pressure. We will be making the case about local priority programs. All we can do is make the case for why funding is important," Wallace said.



No issue has created greater tension between local government and the federal government than immigration. If the Trump administration follows through on the immigration rhetoric of its candidate, hostility between cities and the federal government over immigration could escalate.

It has already been tense under the Obama administration, especially in its first years, when local leaders butted heads with the federal government over immigration policies that compelled cities to share information on unauthorized immigrants that came to the notice of the law.

Cities that resisted and implemented policies to block federal requests for information have been referred to as "sanctuary cities," a controversial term that goes back decades to an earlier wave of refugees from Central America who found safe harbor in some urban areas across the country.

Federal policies that require more sharing of information with the federal government any time an unauthorized immigrant entered the criminal justice system started under the Bush administration and were continued by the President Obama, who was at one point called by immigration critics "the deporter-in-chief." Ultimately, the Obama administration scaled back a major program to only require sharing of information once an unauthorized immigrant was sentenced, not any time they entered the criminal justice system.

Michelle Mittelstadt, spokeswoman for the Migration Policy Institute, said the inescapable fact is that the federal government wields by far the largest power in immigration policy. "To the extent that cities and states have the ability to act, it is against the backdrop of a limited role for them."

In recent years, some cities have made decisions to offer drivers licenses and municipal ID cards to unauthorized immigrants.



"One might see more efforts viewed as helping unauthorized immigrants against a rising levels of deportations," Mittelstadt said. But she stressed that Trump has had any number of proposals, and immigration policy makers will have to wait and see what the reality is. "I imagine it will be a very dynamic area both for the federal government and cities and states, and can anticipate there will be more efforts by cities and other local jurisdictions to blunt, to the extent they can, any significant rise in immigration enforcement."

Trump said on the campaign trail he would withhold federal funding from cities who did not comply with federal immigration policy. He also said in a 60 Minutes interview of Sunday night that he would immediately deport two to three million unauthorized immigrants who are criminals, but referred to unauthorized immigrants as "terrific people" more broadly, and said broader immigration policy decisions will take time. The mayors of New York and San Francisco have already voiced their concerns about Trump's immigration plans since his election and said they will remain "sanctuary" cities.

Already there are at least five bills in the Senate and eight in the house trying to target "sanctuary cities" and the noncompliance policies.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced Kate's Law  referring to a San Francisco woman murdered by an unauthorized immigrant  that would bar jurisdictions that resist cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement from getting federal grants. Other legislative efforts make non-cooperation policies illegal in full.

"One would imagine it's an area where Congress and the Trump administration would look in the future," Mittelstadt said.

Wallace at the National League of Cities said "horsetrading" of federal money over social issues would be a real problem. And it has already shown up in the "sanctuary cities" issue.

"We're very opposed to the idea that the federal government could label a city as a sanctuary city and threaten to withhold important social funding that would hurt the most vulnerable people," Wallace said. "It's a very dangerous path."

The half of America that felt forgotten in the "flyover" regions voted to elect Donald Trump. Another half of America may feel disoriented by the seismic change at the level of the federal government.

Cities may be a good place for many Americans to recalibrate their identity.

"A mayor's core role is always to make sure the operations of the government run well, but we elect officials at the local level that reflect our community values, from family leave laws to immigration and innovation policies coming out of cities," NLC's Rainwater said. "I do think while the functioning of the government will always be job No. 1, cities will focus on issues that matter to them."

Mayors may want to promote social policies that reflect their communities and culture, but in many areas that don't relate directly to city services, they have limited policy power. "Constitutionally, mayors are weak players," Renn of the Manhattan Institute said. "Unlike our federal system of dual sovereignty between the federal and state governments, cities are creations of the state and largely controlled by them."

Renn expressed an overarching belief that both cities and suburbs need to be healthy. "We've lost this sense in America that we are a commonwealth, that we rise and fall together as a people. We need to seek to restore it, which requires all sides of our various factions to make significant change."



"You can have disparate interests come together in a city in a way you can't do elsewhere," said NLC's Wallace.







More From CNBC


Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
Georgetown, SC (29440)

Today

Mostly clear this evening then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 57F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mostly clear this evening then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 57F. Winds light and variable.
Welcome to SwanseaOnline - your home for the best news, sports and what's on coverage of the city.

Never miss a Swansea story with our daily newsletter Sign up to comment on our stories here

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter | Swansea City news | Ospreys news | InYourArea
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the WorldView-4 Earth observation satellite for DigitalGlobe launches into space from California's Vandenberg Air Force Station on Nov. 11, 2016.

A super-powerful Earth-observing spacecraft has finally taken to the skies, nearly two months after a wildfire nixed its first launch attempt.

The WorldView-4 satellite lifted off today (Nov. 11) at 1:30 p.m. EST (10:30 a.m. local time; 1830 GMT), riding a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket from Space Launch Complex-3 at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base to a near sun-synchronous, pole-to-pole orbit.

In addition, seven tiny cubesats were onboard in a "ridesharing" initiative. All of the cubesats manifested for the WorldView-4 mission are sponsored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency in charge of the United States' spy satellites, and are unclassified technology-demonstration programs. [Launch Photos: WorldView-4 Satellite Soars Into Space on Atlas V]

The Atlas-V that lofted WorldView-4 today had been scheduled to launch NASA's InSight Mars lander earlier this year, before issues with one of InSight's instruments delayed the Red Planet probe's liftoff until 2018.

Today's liftoff was originally scheduled for Sept. 18, but that attempt was called off due a wildfire raging in a canyon south of the launch pad. While the fire didn't affect the pad, it did damage communications gear and other infrastructure at Vandenberg, leading to the lengthy delay.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the WorldView-4 Earth observation satellite for DigitalGlobe launches into space from California's Vandenberg Air Force Station on Nov. 11, 2016. (Image credit: United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin)

Global capacity

WorldView-4 is a multispectral, high-resolution commercial imaging satellite owned and operated by DigitalGlobe of Westminster, Colorado, and built by the aerospace company Lockheed Martin. Its mission is to provide high-resolution color imagery to commercial, government and international customers.

As the fifth spacecraft in the DigitalGlobe constellation, WorldView-4 joins WorldView-1, -2, -3 and GeoEye-1. The addition of WorldView-4 means the constellation can image a spot on Earth an average of 4.5 times per day, DigitalGlobe representatives have said.

Once in operation, WorldView-4 has a global capacity to image 260,000 square miles (680,000 square kilometers) per day.

DigitalGlobe's WorldView-4 spacecraft undergoes inspection by engineers at Lockheed Martin before being sent to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. (Image credit: Lockheed Martin)

Imaging system

Weighing nearly 2.5 tons (2.3 metric tons), the spacecraft carries a new high-resolution camera provided by Harris Corp.  the SpaceView 110 imaging system. WorldView-4 is designed to capture panchromatic imagery with a resolution of 12.2 inches (31 centimeters) and multispectral imagery of 4 feet (1.24 meters) per pixel.

In a prelaunch news briefing on Sept. 15, Harris Corp.'s Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager for the firm's intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance business, said the surface figure of SpaceView 110's 3.6-foot-wide (1.1 m) primary mirror is manufactured to an accuracy of 1/1,000th of a human hair.

Mitrevski said if the smoothness of the primary mirror is off by even the width of a human hair, "the image captured by the system would be a complete blur."

This means that the sensor is capable of capturing data points that are just over 1 foot (30 cm) apart, Mitrevski said. "What a great capability that is," he said.

From orbit, for example, WorldView-4 images can identify the make of a car.

Lockheed Martin's Carl Marchetto, vice president and general manager of commercial space, emphasized what can be discerned from WorldView-4 pictures.

"It's all about what's changing on the Earth, and how does this picture compare with the pictures that WorldView-3 took?" he said.

DigitalGlobe's WorldView-4 satellite is enclosed in the 13-foot (4 meters) fairing that was placed atop an Atlas V 401 rocket. (Image credit: Lockheed Martin/ULA)

'Visual truth serum'

DigitalGlobe's Taner Kodanaz said that WorldView-4 can be an important tool in monitoring the changing planet "and the challenging situations that all of us face." He underscored the increasing usefulness of high-resolution satellite imagery, from monitoring Ebola outbreaks to pinpointing perpetrators of modern-day slavery.

Kodanaz told Space.com that high-resolution satellite imagery is "sparking new ideas from many individuals," such as detecting what the eye can't see on the ground  for example, never-before-observed ancient cities.

"This launch ensures DigitalGlobe's customers they will have access to the highest-quality and most map-accurate imagery available on the market today," Mark Brender, a board member of the DigitalGlobe Foundation, told Space.com.

"Satellite imagery from WorldView-4 will provide customers visual truth serum of what's happening on the ground anywhere on the planet for the next dozen years or more," Brender said.

Leonard David is author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet," to be published by National Geographic this October. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel six-part series coming in November. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
A nearly-full <a href="http://www.space.com/34391-october-full-hunters-moon.html">supermoon</a> sets behind Orbital ATK's Antares rocket in this photo of the launchpad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The photo was taken before dawn on Saturday (Oct. 15), about 24 hours before the full moon's peak.

On Monday (Nov. 14) at 6:15 a.m. EST, the moon will arrive at its closest point to the Earth in 2016: a distance of 221,524 miles (356,508 kilometers) away. This distance, which is measured from the center of the Earth to the center of the moon, is within 85 miles (137 km) of the moon's closest possible approach to Earth; to be sure, this is an extreme perigee.

Two hours and 37 minutes after perigee (the moon's closest point to Earth), the orb will officially turn full. In recent years, the media has branded full moons that coincide with perigee as "supermoons," and this month's full moon will likely get a lot of extra attention since it will be the closest since Jan. 26, 1948. [Supermoon November 2016: When, Where & How to See It]

The Slooh Community Observatory will offer a live broadcast for November's full moon on Nov. 13 at 8 p.m. EST (0100 GMT on Nov. 14). You can also watch the supermoon live on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh.

So be prepared. It is certain that there will be considerable ballyhoo over this particular full moon. (I wonder if there will be somebody who will dare call this a "Super-duper-moon?")

The full moon won't approach this close again until November 2034, although there were even closer full moons in January 1912 and January 1930.

A comparison of the Moon at perigee (its closest to Earth, at left) and at apogee (its farthest from us). The change in distance makes the full Moon look 14% larger at perigee than at apogee. and nearly 30% brighter. (Image credit: Sky and Telescope, Laurent Laveder)

Is it really so super?

When the moon appears near to the horizon when it is rising (just before 5 p.m. on Nov. 14), the famous "moon illusion" will kick in, which makes our natural satellite appear exceptionally large. However, that illusion happens frequently when the full moon skims the horizon. The supermoon that shines down on us later on Nov. 14 really won't look that different from other full moons.

Yes, we will certainly hear through the mainstream media that on the night of Nov. 14 the moon will appear 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than to when it's at apogee (its farthest point from Earth), but such differences are actually quite subtle. No doubt many will be running outside all through that night, breathlessly trying to get a glimpse of what they will perceive as some sort of astonishing sight. And yet, honestly, if you were not aware of the circumstances regarding the moon's distance I would venture to guess that you wouldn't notice anything unusual at all.

One well-known astronomer takes a very dim view of the term supermoon. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, thinks the term is highly overblown. "There is something called a supermoon," Tyson has noted, adding, "I don't know who first called it a supermoon. I don't know, but if you have a 16-inch pizza, would you call that a super pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza?"

It's not even a full moon

A full moon theoretically lasts just a moment, and that moment is imperceptible to ordinary observation. For a day or so before and after most will speak of seeing the nearly full moon as "full": the shaded strip is so narrow, and changing in apparent width so slowly, that it is hard for the naked eye to tell, at least in a casual glance, whether it's present or on which side it appears. This is important to know, since when folks are looking skyward at the "full" moon on Nov. 14, it really won't be full at all.

Remember?

At the beginning of this column, I pointed out that the moon will turn full at 8:52 a.m. EST on Nov. 14. If you live in the western half of the United States or Canada, you'll be able to see the moon at full phase just before it sets that morning. But elsewhere it turns full after it has set. So when you look at the moon later that night, it will, in the strictest sense, not be a full, but a gibbous moon  99, rather than 100, percent illuminated and waning (reducing in illumination). [Supermoon Secrets: 7 Surprising Big Moon Facts]

Dramatic tides

The near coincidence of this month's full moon with perigee will result in a dramatically large range of high and low ocean tides: an unusually lower-than-normal low tide, followed about 6 hours later by an unusually higher-than-normal high tide. In the latter case, any coastal storm at sea around this time will almost certainly aggravate coastal flooding problems.

Such an extreme tide is known as a perigean spring tide, where the word "spring" is derived from the German springen, "to spring up," and is not a reference to the spring season.

Actually, every month, "spring tides" occur when the moon is full and new. At these times the moon and sun form a line with the Earth, so their tidal effects add together. (The sun exerts a little less than half the tidal force of the moon.) "Neap tides," on the other hand, occur when the moon is at first and last quarter and works at cross-purposes with the sun. At these times tides are weak.

Tidal forces vary as the inverse cube of an object's distance. This month the moon is 14 percent closer at perigee than at apogee, and so it exerts 48 percent more tidal force during the spring tides of Nov. 14 than during the spring tides near apogee two weeks before and after.

Some final thoughts

While this will indeed be the "biggest full moon of 2016," the variation of the moon's distance is not readily apparent to observers viewing the moon directly. However, its movement may be seen in the tides  those folks who are positioned at Burntcoat Head, on the "Noel Shore" along the south side of the Minas Basin, near the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada, for instance, always know when the moon is near when the height of the water begins to rise. The increase in the vertical tidal range of 10 to as much as 20 feet (3 to 6 meters) automatically signals when the moon lies near perigee, whether the moon is actually in view or not.

Conversely, at low tide, water levels can end up being exceptionally low. I guess people living along the shore near the Bay of Fundy might then say: "Long tide, no sea."

Editor's note: If you snap an awesome photo of the moon that you'd like to share with Space.com and our news partners for a potential story or gallery, send images and comments to managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer's Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, N.Y. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
Donald Trump

Now that Donald Trump is the president-elect, the tech world is more closely examining what effect his policies might have.

In particular, some telecoms industry players believe a Trump administration could try to walk back the net neutrality rules that were instituted by the Federal Communications Commission under President Barack Obama.

Those rules, voted for in 2015, mandated that internet service providers and mobile carriers can't provide so-called fast lanes to certain content  sometimes their own. Instead, they were required to treat all data that goes through their "pipes" equally. The idea is that if every internet business has the same level of access to the internet itself, it allows for a more equal playing field and enhanced competition.

As you can imagine, this has made internet-centric companies like Netflix and Alphabet happy, and network gatekeepers like Comcast and AT&T  who are increasingly becoming content companies themselves  upset.

That could all change under President Trump and a Republican-majority Congress.

fcc chairman tom wheeler

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen said that, under Trump, "you may see net neutrality be challenged or weakened going forward."

Though Trump himself has not outlined a plan for how he would approach net neutrality, he has expressed a staunch opposition to government regulation in general. In November 2014, he posted a tweet that referred to Obama's pro-net neutrality stance as an "attack on the internet" that "will target conservative media."

Such sentiment falls in line with those of other Republicans in Washington  Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, once deemed net neutrality "Obamacare for the internet."

(Trump didn't explain why he thought net neutrality would specifically target conservative media, but it's worth noting that, in principle, preventing ISPs from giving a leg up to any online source would seem to ensure that a conservative news outlet could deliver stories without technical handicaps.)

Story continues

The big gray area: zero-rating

Even with the FCC's rules in place, ISPs have found a way around the net neutrality order through a practice called zero-rating. As my colleague Nathan McAlone explains, zero-rating is when a wireless carrier or ISP allows certain services to stream on its network without them counting against a customer's data cap.

T-Mobile's "Binge On" program is a popular example: It lets certain T-Mobile users stream Netflix, YouTube, WatchESPN, and many other similar services over cellular data at no cost.

john legere t-mobile

This is a gray area. The current net neutrality rules do not explicitly ban zero-rating; instead, the FCC has said it would consider each instance on a case-by-case basis. From a consumer standpoint, it also brings immediately apparent benefits. People like popular streaming services, and they love getting things for free. Put the two together, and it's easy to see the appeal.

Internet providers have capitalized on this and rolled out varying zero-rating programs on their networks. Aside from Binge On:

These are typically pitched as special perks for customers.

They've also drawn fierce opposition from net neutrality proponents and consumer advocacy groups, many of whom have called on FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to stop the practice. They argue that zero-rating violates the "spirit" of net neutrality since it gives ISPs the power to decide which services can and cannot receive a technical advantage over everyone else, thus putting them beyond the status of "dumb" pipe providers.

AT&T President and CEO Randall Stephenson

Critics also argue that zero-rating stifles the potential for new services to sprout. The logic is that since making popular services data-free is more likely to attract new customers, those are more likely to be zero-rated by ISPs. When a smaller service comes along, it'll enter a field where incumbent services not only are used more, but also have been given an added boost.

Essentially, they say, it gives the powerful more power. This is seen as especially concerning since internet service in America is a field with relatively little competition as it is.

One possible compromise is to make it so any company can join a zero-rating program at no extra cost beyond a few technical modifications. T-Mobile says this is what it has done with its programs. However, the likes of AT&T and Verizon have taken a more aggressive step and charged content providers for the ability to be zero-rated on their networks.

Complicating this is the fact that more and more internet providers are getting into the content game themselves. Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and AT&T might soon own Time Warner. Though neither firm does so today, the current trend of ISPs zero-rating their own services suggests they might also exempt content from the companies they bought, giving their streams an inherent advantage in separate silos.

net neutrality

That said, Trump did rally against mega-mergers like the AT&T-Time Warner buyout during his campaign, saying in October that it'd result in "too much concentration of power in the hands of too few." This may not affect his administration's stance on net neutrality, zero-rating, and federal regulation, but it could present some pushback to the desires of certain ISPs.

In any case, AT&T defends its zero-rating plans with DirecTV by saying the satellite provider is paying AT&T for the privilege. But given that it owns the company, that's the equivalent of shifting money from its left pocket to its right.

So how might President Trump fit into this?

To see how the Trump administration would approach zero rating, you might want to consider the name Jeffrey Eisenach. He's an economist, consultant, and longtime advocate of deregulating the telecoms industry  in other words, he's adamantly opposed to the current net neutrality rules.

Now, he's heading the team advising Trump on telecoms issues and future staff members at the FCC.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

If Eisenach is dictating the Trump administration's telecoms policy, it's worth looking at a paper he wrote in March 2015 titled "The Economics of Zero Rating." In it, Eisenach defends the concept, writing that "broad-based bans or restrictions on zero-rating plans are likely to be counterproductive and harm consumer welfare."

jeffrey eisenach

His reasons are common of those on that side of the fence. He says:

Zero-rating is a way for wireless firms to separate themselves from competitors, and thus increase competition among wireless operators.

Zero-rating provides an easy expansion of internet access, which in turn benefits society and allows network providers to invest more in advancing their products.

Zero-rating particularly helps "those with lower willingness (or ability) to pay."

Zero-rating benefits content providers by boosting their chances at gaining subscribers.

And so on. Eisenach closes the paper by saying that "concerns about zero-rating are misplaced."

An aside: In the paper, Eisenach says the policy can't be seen as anticompetitive since most zero-rating programs do not require content companies to pay ISPs. However, as noted above, both AT&T and Verizon are currently doing just that. The FCC on Thursday said it had "serious concerns" about the former's policy.

What's also notable is that the paper was sponsored by internet.org, the internet-access initiative headed by Facebook, which has faced a multitude of complaints over perceived violations of net neutrality. Its "Free Basics" app was effectively blocked in India in February for allowing users to access certain Facebook-approved sites for free, but not others.

Donald Trump

Eisenach makes the sponsorship clear toward the beginning of his paper. Still, it's not the only time his work has been sponsored by companies that likely share his positions.

In August, The New York Times reported that he has been a paid consultant for Verizon and the GSM Association, a trade group that says it "represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide." Eisenach himself has said he has consulted for a number of firms in the mobile wireless, broadcast, and related industries.

Does all of this mean that an Eisenach-approved policy would end net neutrality and allow zero-rating to go unchecked? Not necessarily  Wheeler is a former cable lobbyist who was widely seen as a terrible choice for open-internet interests at first, but turned out to be one of the more progressive chairs in recent memory. And there's no guarantee a President Hillary Clinton would have been a champion of net neutrality.

Nevertheless, if past papers and reports are any indication, those who favor stricter regulation of internet providers might be in for a long four years.

NOW WATCH: CLOSE UP THE INTERNET: Donald Trump wants to shut down parts of the web





More From Business Insider


Anything but Easy

NASA

Going to the bathroom in space is anything but an easy procedure. To explain what happens on the International Space Station and the Soyuz spacecraft, Space.com spoke with veteran astronaut Mike Fossum. The three-time space flier has spent time working with both types of toilets, particularly when he spent 165 days in space aboard the space station.

1) How do you go to the bathroom on the ISS?

ESA

To go to the bathroom on the ISS, astronauts go into one of the two toilets (either on the American side or the U.S. side). After closing the door for privacy, there are different procedures depending on if you're urinating or taking a dump.



For "number one," use a hose and turn on the suction to pull away the urine, which is recycled and cleaned for drinking water. For "number two," perch on top of the "solid waste container." Insert a plastic bag into the opening. After finishing your business, seal the bag and push it into the container. This container is changed roughly every 10 days.

2) How often does the toilet break?

Stephanie Pappas

On Fossum's second shuttle flight (STS-124) in 2008, his crew did a last-minute rescue operation for the astronauts aboard the space station. It turned out that a toilet pump failed unexpectedly, leading to a scramble on the ground. Somebody hand-carried a new pump separator from Russia to the Kennedy Space Center, where it arrived the day before launch. [Space Station Toilet Breaks Again]



"The crew was eagerly awaiting our arrival," Fossum joked. As for how often the toilet breaks, he said that it's an "ongoing maintenance thing" but that it's hard to quantify the breakdown frequency. He roughly estimated once a month.



Naturally, the astronauts are highly trained in toilet maintenance using a mock-up before heading to space. The toilet has different indicator lights to show if something is wrong; the most common problems are separator failures (which pull the liquid through the system) or problems with the substance used to treat the urine before drinking.



Fossum said the simulations on Earth are "very high fidelity," of course without the added complication of dealing with the liquids in microgravity. But aspects such as the tight quarters are definitely replicated well, he said.

3) Peeing for science

NASA

When collecting your urine for science  which happens often for astronauts  there certainly is a minor hazard: "Some losses are involved," Fossum said.



The astronauts use specially formulated bags to collect the urine. Men use a "condom-like device" to put the urine inside the bag. (Fossum wasn't sure how women accomplish this task.) Once astronauts finish their business, they seal the bag. The bag contains a bit of chemical, and the astronaut squishes the bag to make sure the chemical marker is distributed.



Next, they use syringes to pull samples out of the bag. These samples are stored in a special facility on the space station called the Minus Eighty Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI).



"That stops the biological action for the duration of the flight," Fossum said. The samples can remain on board for months until they are brought back to Earth, usually aboard a Dragon spacecraft that splashes down near processing facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. [Life in Space: Astronaut Chris Hadfield's Video Guide]

4) Doing your business in a spacecraft

NASA

Though the space station offers relative luxury, being aboard the Soyuz spacecraft is more like roughing it in space. It's the main way that astronauts get to and from the space station. A typical journey today in a Soyuz craft takes a few hours, but alternative orbital trajectories have astronauts living in the spacecraft for about two days.



Fossum said the astronauts use a handheld device located in the orbital module of the Soyuz. To give a little privacy, the other crewmembers move into the descent module while the first crewmember does his or her business.



"It's very rudimentary," Fossum acknowledged. "It just uses airflow to pull the waste in or to collect the waste," he added, "and rather than taking the urine into a tank with pretreatments, the urine goes into a tank that literally has what appears to [be] lots of foam rubber. That absorbs the liquid."



Fossum added that few astronauts use the solid-waste collection system  more of a handheld device  on the Soyuz. That's because the standard practice before flight is to get an enema to reduce the need to do "number two."

5) How popular is the question?

NASA

Fossum has been an astronaut with NASA since 1998, which means countless hours of answering questions from the public. He's fielded questions from kids on school tours, journalists and the public at numerous events. And guess what's the most popular question he receives?



"You get the [bathroom] question almost every time," Fossum said. "It doesn't matter: kids, adults. It's a very human question because you see people floating around, you see things going on, and [for] just about everyone, the question comes in their mind."



Fossum joked that perhaps the question pops up when people see blobs of water floating around the spacecraft and naturally wonder how the astronauts clean up after themselves after urinating. "It's a human life thing; it's something that's a common experience," he added.
The Mars Society is conducting the ambitious two-phase Mars 160 Twin Desert-Arctic Analog missionto study how seven crewmembers could live, work and perform science on a true mission to Mars. Mars 160 crewmember Annalea Beattie is chronicling the mission, which will spend 80 days at the Mars Desert Research Station in southern Utah desert before venturing far north to Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island, Canada in summer 2017. Here's her sixth dispatch from the mission:

We have such great new neighbors here in the desert. This is the place to be for Mars-related research.

This month, there is a Martian-minded colony of international scientists, engineers and researchers working within 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of our Mars 160 mission, based at the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert. [See more Mars 160 photos here, and get daily images by the Mars 160 crew]

As we travel out to science field work in our spacesuits, we pass the camps of the Mars Utah Rover Field Investigation Team (MURFI) from the United Kingdom (UK); a contingent from the German Aerospace Center, known by its German acronym, DLR; and the tents of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

All of these teams are out in the field testing rovers and using instruments that might travel to Mars. It's thrilling to have such amazing work happening near us.

Like a bunch of microbes, together we are all searching for common survival strategies in this ancient Mars-like desert.

In the past few days, under the guidance of our principal investigator, biologist Shannon Rupert, the Mars 160 crew ran a series of science-operation trials both in and out of simulation. On one of the few days out of spacesuits, some of our crew visited the MURFI camp. This gave me the opportunity to chat to Mission Commander Mike Curtis-Rouse about the goals of the rover field trials.

Aerial view of the UK camp taken by the UK Space Agency's unmanned aerial vehicle. (Image credit: UKSA/The Mars Society)

Understanding how to run a mission is the key focus for Curtis-Rouse and his team, both on and off the field.

Mike says the purpose of the UK mission is to run field trials that develop expertise in mission control. This basically gives the Mission Control scientists in the United Kingdom the experience of planning and controlling planetary robotic missions, using rovers to test instruments in the Utah desert as the perfect analogue environment for Mars.

He and his crew are focused on how to work with Mission Control in the UK to deploy a robot platform with a variety of sensors for science and technical characterization, including instrumentation for future missions such as the European-led ExoMars roverwhere possible. [How Europe's ExoMars Missions to Mars Work (Infographic)]

This means a remote centralized mission control in the UK directs scientists and engineers on site to develop UK Field Trial Standard Operating Procedures for analogue field trials. This builds supportive infrastructure for future UK trials and increases the experience for UK researchers for future UK/ESA/international planetary missions.

Mars 160 crewmembers Alex, Jon and Annalea, with Steven, Peter and Mike from the UKs Mars Utah Rover Field Investigation Team (MURFI). (Image credit: The Mars Society)

Mike claims he's a generalist. He has a background in robotics and particle physics, and his experience in planning and execution of military missions within the British Army Reserve ensures that he can get people working together.

In distinct and sometimes difficult and extreme environments, this has its challenges.

Mission operations in space and on satellites are quite different from planetary field science. To run rover trials, it's essential that people adapt to new situations and communicate well on and off the field. For instance, some members of Mike's expert team have never been in the field before. Several of his crewmembers have never been in the desert, and some have never been in a tent or a sleeping bag!

As a Mars analogue, the attraction of this environment for rover trials is that the Utah desert is inherently cold and stable in terms of weather (dust and wind aside). There is no GPS on Mars, and robots will have to navigate the landscape by plotting a course through obstacles.

Mel McHugh, senior Raman spectroscopy specialist from the UK rover trials, happy in one of our Mars 160 Lexan helmets. (Image credit: The Mars Society)

If the weather is changeable and aggressive, as it often is in parts of Europe, it's hard to localize where you are during rover trials. Here in the Utah desert, objects in the landscape remain relatively undisturbed. There is no accelerated erosion that comes with rain and frequent strong winds. This means a boulder that is there in the field one day is usually there the next. These geological features are signposts for the rover and themselves are analogues for GPS.

Mike says rovers are basically dumb and follow a trail of breadcrumbs. They need a series of commands to know where they are coming from and where they are going. And they don't stop for unknown boulders. Today one met Failure Rock and went straight over the top, taking what was left of Failure Rock with it!

The UK rover Q14 is a general-purpose robot designed to simulate a space robot, unlike the Canadian robot, MESR (the Mars Exploration Science Rover), which is an actual robot designed for space. MESR is smart enough to create its own pathway, leaving the Canadian Mission Operations team to identify and characterize rocks that may contain signs of life. [The Search for Life on Mars: A Photo Timeline]

The UK machine is simply a carrier for instruments that will eventually go to Mars and other planets. It has four wheels, some suspension and a tower that allows the team to look around through cameras  but directing exactly where the rover goes still requires careful planning.

One of the advantages for testing out some of the key instruments carried by the robot rover is that, in this desert, there is nothing in the landscape made by humans.

For example, for something like the PanCam  which will be part of the instrument payload on the ExoMars rover, scheduled for launch in 2020  in terms of image acquisition and location, the skyline needs to be totally clear.

The UKs Q14 rover; the PanCam instrument is at the top. (Image credit: UKSA/The Mars Society)

Robotics engineer and PanCam operators Rob Barnes and Steven Kay say that a clear 360-degree view is essential if PanCam is to achieve the high-resolution images needed by geologists at Mission Operations Control. Images are captured and stored on logs, simply as a two-dimensional mosaic, or they can be three-dimensionally mapped, using software like PRO3D.

The purpose of 3D mapping is to measure size and features of the environment. In 3D mapping, we start to see depth, curvatures and textures. The map itself can then be manipulated so that the geologist can get in closer to see context. Maps created here are sent back to geologists at the Mission Control simulation at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in the UK as blind data.

Geologists in MOC examine the maps as they would any form of image for aspects of interests  for instance, characterization of soil and local geological features. They send back a command list, a tactical plan and a list of drive commands as well as annotated relevant images to the field team as the science plan for the day.

The Mission Operations Centre at the Harwell Science and Innovation campus in England. (Image credit: UKSA)

There are plenty of great tools on this UK mission. It's hard not to be captivated by instruments like the Close-up Imager (CLUPI), a close-up camera system that is like an analogue of the eyes or, to be more accurate, the geologist hand lens. CLUPI gives highly detailed, colored close-up images of rocks, soil, drill core samples and so on, at the tens-of-micrometers to centimeter scale.

In a search for morphological biosignatures, CLUPI can photograph forming laminar biofilms on outcrops and create depth of field by performing multiple images taken at different focus lengths (a process known as z-stacking), improving an understanding of the geological context. CLUPI will be also be part of the instrument payload on the 2020 ExoMars rover.

Then there's an instrument called SPLIT, which is my favorite. A tectonic charmer, this percussive geologist's field hammer splits rock aseptically with its shot-based accumulating crack. Whether on the moon, Mars or the Martian satellites Phobos and Deimos, the low-watt mechanical force of SPLIT could cleave a stone in two, even at temperatures of minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 50 degrees Celsius). As the drill tip remains at the surface of the object, SPLIT is great for sedimentary fractures. The planes dislocate with ease. SPLIT is about to be trialed on igneous rocks.

Mars 160 geologist Jon Clarke trying out the new SPLIT instrument with Mike Curtis Rouse (UK Mission Commander). (Image credit: Mars Society)

Or the Raman spectrometer. Operator Peter Edwards from Leicester University explains the functions of the Raman beautifully. When a laser hits a rock, light reflects and scatters. Most of it will be the same wavelength. Some of it, depending on molecules, will shift in wavelength. Electromagnetic radiation from the illuminated spot is collected with a lens and sent through a filter. Some scattered radiation is then removed.

What remains is the Raman-shifted light that gives us a fingerprint of molecules in the sample  for example, the peaks in a spectrum that help us identify quartz.

Life processes can generate complex molecules. On the ExoMars rover mission, the Raman spectrometer will be used to search for biomarkers on the surface of Mars. [Photos: Europe's ExoMars Missions to Mars in Pictures]

Brian Yeomans, senior platform engineer from UK rover trials, ready to leave Earth. (Image credit: The Mars Society)

But for this UK mission here in Utah, the great instruments are not the thing, though some of them will be used in space travel. And as Mike says, the robots are not the thing either.

The key focus is the mission itself. What's real is the people. For most of them  the 60 or so who are in the UK at Mission Control Operations, and for some of those who are here  it's all about how they understand the goals of the mission, how the mission is run and how field trials are conducted.

Annalea Beattie interviewing Mike Curtis-Rouse. (Image credit: The Mars Society)

It's that wonderful argument: While robots are great, they can't do what people do. Mike says that no one has yet been able to program a robot to go over there, look at an object and, on the way, if it sees something interesting, to stop and examine it. He suggests that when we get to Mars, robots still won't be able to do what people do. He claims we will always need to send humans to go where robots go, as only humans have that capacity to be curious.

What is fascinating for me about Mike and his UK team is that their goals and ours are complementary, especially when we talk about science operations and mission support.

Mike said, "The UK Rover Trials focus on the operational methods needed for the effective control of a robot proxy on Mars from Earth and the subsequent development of the mission doctrine needed to do this, in an effective and consistent fashion."

And our focus is performing long-term science and science operations in a strict, simulated environment. We investigate the idea of human exploration of Mars from the perspective of astrobiology and human settlement, in association with our Earth-based scientists and Mission Support. So the science operations component is an integral part of our mission as we develop and modify protocols for communications between Earth-based and Mars-based teams.

We have clear science return goals for Mars 160, and how we run our mission is an enormous part of our learning.

Mars or bust.

Annalea Beattie

Annalea Beattie is an artist and writer based in Melbourne, Australia, and her art practice is based on space science. She is a member of The Mars Society's Mars 160 Twin Desert-Arctic Analog mission, where her art-based research explores how observation is key to the role of all field geologists, including those on a planetary exploration crew. Follow The Mars Society on Twitter at @TheMarsSocietyand on Facebook. Original article on Space.com.
See more

A large, unidentified metal object fell from the sky yesterday (Nov. 10) in the remote mountainous region of Myanmar.

The cylindrical object, which is about 12 feet (3.7 meters) long and 5 feet in diameter, blasted into the village of Lone Khin, near a jade mine. Villagers woke early in the morning to a loud boom and vibrations, when the object fell to the ground. Though no one was injured, the UFO ripped through a jade miner's tent, and afterwards, the smell of burning filled the air, according to The Myanmar Times.

"Initially, we thought it was a battle. The explosion made our houses shake. We saw the smoke from our village," Lone Khin villager Daw Ma Kyi told The Myanmar Times.

Aerial object

At first glance, the object looks like it may have come from an aircraft.

"I think it was an engine because I found a diode and many copper wires at the tail of the body," villager Ko Maung Myo told The Myanmar Times. "It also looks like a jet engine block."

However, government officials say that they haven't identified the object and are sending experts to examine it. One former government official with the Department of Aviation said that the image shown on Facebook of the metal "UFO" looked more like a rocket booster than part of a commercial plane.

Just yesterday China announced the successful launch of a Long March Rocket 11 into space, along with five satellites and an experimental X-ray pulsar navigation spacecraft, Spaceflight Insider reported. The XPNAV-1 (an acronym for Maichong Xing Shiyan Weixing), a 530-pound (240 kilograms) spacecraft fitted with solar arrays and two detectors that use X-ray emissions from pulsars to navigate, is meant to identify the locations of spacecraft in deep space.

Space debris is a regular part of satellite and rocket launches. Though the odds of any individual person getting struck by detritus is low, the odds that it hits one of the 7 billion people on Earth is surprisingly high: After the launch of a school bus-sized satellite in 2011, Mark Matney, a scientist in the Orbital Debris Program Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, previously told Live Science that the odds of anyone being hit by that debris immediately after the launch were approximately one in 3,200.

Space is littered with junk from past exploration. All told, there were at least 500,000 pieces of space junk marble-size or larger that are orbiting our planet in 2010, though most pieces are on the small side. Of that space junk, more than 20,000 pieces are larger than a softball, according to NASA. In 2012, Switzerland proposed building a kind of space janitor to clean up some of that debris.

Original article on Live Science.
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Malaysia's central bank on Friday said the ringgit should not be priced out of sync with fundamentals, and that it has a responsibility to tell banks to take temporary measures to calm the market, as the currency weakened sharply in offshore trade.

The ringgigit dropped 3.5 percent in offshore non-deliverable forwards from the previous close, while the onshore spot rate barely moved in thin domestic markets.

The ringgit's one-month non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) plunged to 4.5280 per dollar, while spot ringgit stood at 4.2670.

"We don't want to be dictated by factors that have nothing to do with the country's fundamentals," central bank governor Muhammad Ibrahim told reporters.

He said the situation now is a result of speculative positioning and that ringgit levels must be supported by underlying transactions on a daily basis.

(Reporting by Joseph Sipalan; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
But what kind of a president will Donald Trump really be? In the past, he has also voiced approval of more liberal abortion laws and he once demanded health insurance for all Americans himself. Over the years, he has held all manner of contradictory opinions on many different political issues, sometimes at the same time.

Those who think they know what Donald Trump will do as president are likely overestimating their own intelligence. Trump will be the most unpredictable president that America has ever had. That holds true of his thin-skinned personality just as it does for his political positions. Anything, really anything, is possible. And that is the most disturbing thing.

The American Hugo Chavez?

It is possible that Trump will turn out to be the US version of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez -- that he will appease and divert Americans while at the same time dramatically eroding the country's institutions and politicizing the judiciary, the CIA and the FBI. And that he, as he indicated he would, will allow for the return of torture. And that he will build the promised wall on the border to Mexico, impede people from Muslim countries from coming to the US, turn up the volume on bigotry and use the presidency to personally enrich himself. It could mean the end of NATO -- but it could also be that his bromance with Putin will cool and turn hostile.

It is equally possible, though, that Trump will turn over the governing of the country to experienced Republican politicians and will preside over proceedings as a kind of CEO. It is possible that he will build his wall as a sop to his supporters but will quickly realize that his announced intention to deport 11 million illegal immigrants makes no economic sense. It is possible that he will service the yearnings for a resurgent white identity primarily with rhetoric, that he will seek to stimulate the economy with billions in investments and that his foreign policy will simply be a continuation of the American withdrawal that began under Obama.

We simply don't know.

The only thing we know -- from his statements, his campaign and his personality -- is that he will be a president unlike any that has come before.

A Danger to Democracy?

That is another reason why Trump's opponents have found it so difficult to find the correct response to him. Should they give him "the chance to lead," as Hillary Clinton suggested in her almost uncannily magnanimous concession speech delivered the day after the election? Or would doing so be akin to normalizing a presidency that is anything but normal and which many see as a danger to American democracy?

It is certain that Trump's approaching Supreme Court appointment will have far-reaching consequences. The post of the late Justice Antonin Scalia has been vacant for months, with the Senate declining to even hold hearings for Barack Obama's compromise candidate Merrick Garland. Leading Republicans like Ted Cruz are demanding that Trump appoint an archconservative candidate to ensure that gun laws remain permissive and that the right to same-sex marriage, established just a-year-and-a-half ago, be overturned. In contrast to Cruz, Trump is not an archconservative, but he is flexible enough to service the extreme right wing of his movement.

But will Trump really launch trade wars with China and Mexico? That seems doubtful because it would be bad for business. There is much to indicate that Trump's economic policy will be a kind of ersatz foreign policy, with a president who sees international diplomacy as being not unlike the negotiations surrounding a construction contract. Beyond that, it remains unclear what the new president's foreign policy will look like. From the very beginning, Trump presented himself as a candidate who had a national focus and he has shown no interest thus far in consensus-based international alliances. He sees NATO primarily as a financial drain and as an alliance from which America's tight-fisted European allies profit. His advisors had to work long and hard to prevent him from flirting with leaving NATO during the campaign.

There is likewise still no convincing explanation for Trump and his team's strange closeness to Moscow. On Thursday, Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, announced that the Russians had maintained contact to Trump's people. Not all, he said, "but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives." Nobody in Washington is willing to predict just how the remote bromance between Trump and Russian President Putin might affect relations between the two countries. Nor is anyone venturing a guess as to what strategy Trump might employ in the fight against Islamic State. As such, Trump's foreign policy ambitions remain a great unknown.

Among the decisive questions facing his tenure will be whether Trump can break the power of multinational corporations, as he promised to do in the campaign. And what his relationship to free trade will be. On the campaign trail, he promised that within 48 hours of entering the White House, he would force Ford to bring its factories back to the US. He also wants to force Apple to cease producing the iPhone in Shenzhen, China and bring production to America. And he wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in addition to blocking ratification of TPP and TTIP, trade agreements with Pacific Rim countries and with Europe, respectively. He has indicated he will use protectionism to warm the hearts of his unsettled followers.

Dazed Washington

Trump knows that a significant measure of his success will be whether he is able to create jobs -- and he is likely to present an investment program for the country's aging infrastructure. Because he is certainly right about one thing: America is a dilapidated country where wealth is private but the potholes belong to everyone. When it comes to the daily needs of Americans, the state has failed.

An infrastructure project would create jobs and stimulate the economy in the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. With such a show of strength, Trump could appease those who have been forced to stand aside helplessly in recent years as jobs have migrated abroad to places like China, Malaysia and Mexico.

But it would also stand in direct contradiction to Republican dogma, which has long been intent on shrinking the state. Indeed, Trump will likely face significant opposition from within his own party should he seek to transgress GOP gospel. And would the Republicans also oppose him if he were to use the office of president to threaten the guarantees inherent in the constitution?

In the days following the election, a dazed Washington sought to convince itself that things won't get that bad. Government institutions, people insisted, would limit what the president would be able to do. But Trump is being presented with an unusually favorable opportunity: Not only does the GOP control both houses of Congress, but once Trump has made his appointment, the Supreme Court will likely be conservative as well. The fact that the Republicans don't have a two-thirds majority in the Senate is the only thing preventing Trump from pushing through constitutional amendments as well. All of that means that Trump will have significant latitude for at least the first two years of his term.

Furthermore, Obama demonstrated just how efficiently a president can circumvent Congress by way of executive orders -- and Trump wouldn't even need the support of his own party to issue them. He could theoretically use the strategy to sidestep all those lawmakers who harbor grave doubts about the constitutionality of mass deportations of foreigners and of banning Muslims from entering the country. Trump can lure his party to his side with appointments and by including them in the decision-making process -- he knows that he will need them.

Birth of a Populist Movement

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan -- a man who spent months waffling back and forth between rejecting Trump and capitulating to him -- is likely to play a key role. It is still unclear what his relationship to the new president will ultimately look like.

The Republicans of the future, believes Trump's friend Jeffrey Lord, could be the party of the white working class, grassroots conservatives, libertarians and populists while following hardline positions on free trade and immigration. That would mark the end of Abraham Lincoln's Grand Old Party, but it would be a political apparatus to Trump's liking. It would mark the end of traditional conservatism and the birth of a new populist movement.

Trump's entire life has been defined by not adapting to his surroundings, but by adapting his surroundings to himself. He is surrounded by advisors who pursue a similar agenda, led by his campaign manager Stephen Bannon, who used to lead the right-wing populist website Breitbart News.

In the White House, Trump could surround himself with a mixture of experienced political professionals and outsiders, who represent a new beginning. Those in the running for cabinet positions include: Senator Jeff Sessions, who is among Trump's closest advisors; New Jersey Governor Chris Christie; and the chairman of the Republican National Committee Reince Priebus. Mike Flynn, former director of the military intelligence service DIA, is under consideration for defense secretary or national security advisor.

Trump is also likely to include businessmen in his cabinet, people similar to himself. Forrest Lucas, head of Lucas Oil, could become secretary of the interior while Steven Mnuchin, an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, has been mentioned as a candidate for treasury secretary. For secretary of state, the archconservative former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is in the running as is Senator Bob Corker. And right-wing journalist Stephen Bannon is actually under consideration for White House chief of staff.

"Trump has always surrounded himself with people who reinforce his worldview," says Tony Schwartz, who ghost wrote Trump's book "The Art of the Deal." And he has also understood the message sent by the voters in this election: People are extremely forgiving of newcomers as long as they aren't part of the establishment.

Hillary Clinton embodied that establishment. That was well known and choosing her as the party's candidate -- capitulating to the Clinton clan -- will go down in history as the Democrats' fatal error.

The Clinton's power within the party led to possible candidates like Senator Elizabeth Warren refraining from running in the first place. It is said in Washington that Vice President Joe Biden elected not to run because it was clear early on that the Hillary Clinton network was too strong. Many believe that Trump wouldn't have had a chance against Biden -- and the socialist Bernie Sanders may have done better as well.

Her lack of a connection with the electorate should have been clear to Clinton when, for example, she made a campaign visit to Flint, Michigan, a state she would go on to lose. The largely poor, largely black city was once a symbol of America's industrial strength and was home to the auto industry. Now, places like Flint stand as symbols of political failure: When the municipal government privatized the water supply in 2014, residents suddenly couldn't even rely on clean water. The city is decaying.

The American Clash of Cultures

Clinton wanted to show solidarity with the people of Flint, but when she visited a black church congregation in the northern part of the city, when her fleet of a dozen dark-colored sedans drove up, it felt more like an invasion. Many people in Flint still feel that they were merely being used as a backdrop for Clinton's campaign and that the visit had very little to do with their own concerns. The pastor of the church speaks of the cross-armed resistance that confronted Clinton. The people, he says, no longer believe that anyone can really do anything for them anymore.

In recent elections, the Democrats managed to win states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, with the Rust Belt emerging as an important source of support for Obama. This time around, though, they went to Trump.

Indeed, Trump didn't just win the election, Clinton lost it. Low voter turnout led to her defeat in some states. But the Democrats must also take a close look at why a large number of Americans who voted for Barack Obama four years ago decided to support Trump this time around.

Trump now finds himself the leader of a deeply divided country that is experiencing a clash of cultures: white America against diversity; urban against rural; modernity against anti-modernity. The America of tomorrow will include a growing number of blacks and Hispanics: Trump's victory was the last major rearguard battle of the whites.

American society will only slowly recover from the shock of this "American tragedy," as the New Yorker has branded it. And it's not yet clear if the country might be facing an even deeper crisis of democracy.

'We Were Wrong'

Donald Trump has made a new political culture acceptable and it is one that will be copied by future candidates, says John Hudak of the Brookings Institution. "They have seen that it pays to say unacceptable things." The challenge facing the political system in the coming years is that of making compromise possible again, he says. The entire world is watching with bated breath to see how a cosmopolitan society will react to having elected the leader of a nationalist, populist movement to its highest position of power.

"We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law," economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote this week. "It turns out that we were wrong." On the day after the election, Krugman tweeted in horror that it wasn't just the "immense damage Trump will surely do. There's also a vast disillusionment that as of now I think of as the end of the romantic vision of America (which I still love)."

Not much is left of the American optimism that always defined this proud nation. Trump has transformed this powerful, divided country to a greater degree than even his most bitter opponents thought possible. He has introduced a level of crudity and callousness that had seemed impossible in the otherwise so polite American society. "Once you inject hyper-anger into civil society, it is almost impossible to undo," wrote Republican pollster Frank Luntz in a Tuesday New York Times op-ed.

In a furious essay written on election night, David Remnick, the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, wrote, "this is surely the way fascism can begin." The future he described in the piece was dark. "We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office . There is no reason to believe this palaver."

Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which keeps close tabs on right-wing extremism, says that until Trump's candidacy, "there had been a democratic consensus to steer clear of white racists. But this stigma doesn't exist anymore. Trump is the fulfillment of many hopes of the radical right."

The campaign may now have come to an end, but the clash of cultures that Trump is leading will occupy America for quite some time to come. The country needs nothing so much as a therapist, but that is not a role that the new president is equipped to play. Seldom has a presidency begun with such a weight on its shoulders as that of Donald Trump.

Shortly before the election, four out of 10 Trump supporters said in a survey that they were not prepared to accept the election results in the event of a defeat. A country whose people are no longer willing to accept the outcome of free and fair elections is a country in decline. A country where women can no longer decide if they want to give birth to a child, where there are no equal rights for homosexuals and whose president has announced his intention to ban the entry of Muslims is no longer open.

Psychologist McAdams believes that Trump will be unable to develop any kind of sensitivity for the concerns of his opponents because he grew up in an artificial world. McAdams' hope is not based on the future president's policies, but on his psyche: "People who have very strong narcissistic agendas like Trump can be very charismatic," he says, "But sooner or later people get tired and lose interest in them."

Sooner. Or later.
Santander (Spain), November 11, 2016 (SPS) - The deputy president and the Minister of Education in the Spanish region of Cantabria affirmed, on Thursday, to the Sahrawi Minister of Cooperation, Bulahi Sid, the maintenance of cooperation with refugee camps and support for a peaceful solution to the Western Sahara conflict, according to a press release from the Saharawi delegation in Cantabria.

During her reception to a Saharawi delegation, led by the Saharawi Minister of Cooperation, Bulahi Sid, the vice president of the Government of Cantabria, Eva Diaz Tezanos, has confirmed for 2017 the economic support to the Saharawi people and the support to a peaceful and diplomatic solution to Western Sahara conflict.

Bulahi Sid informed the regional government of Cantabria about the situation in Western Sahara marked by the continuity of the conflict and "the unwillingness of the Moroccan government to seek a peaceful, political and lasting solution according to different international resolutions."

The minister has detailed the harsh living conditions of the Sahrawi refugee camps, where the majority of the population live in tents without running water and depending almost exclusively on foreign humanitarian aid.

Bulahi Sid said that the situation in the camps has been affected by last year's floods which also have occurred this year 2016.

The minister thanked the people and government of Cantabria for their solidarity with the Saharawi people, saying that the Saharawi cause "is well known both by the Government of Cantabria and other institutions and by civil society."

It worth mentioning here that the Government of Cantabria maintains several lines of cooperation with the Saharawi people, among which it highlights "Vacations in Peace" and the support to the Sanitary Commission of Cantabria that carries out consultations, surgical interventions and trains local sanitary personnel in the camps. SPS

125/090/TRA
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will not risk her reputation and credibility with a refugee policy U-turn in spite of the growing anti-immigration sentiment at home and Donald Trump 's election victory in the U.S., an analyst has told CNBC.

Angela Merkel is widely expected to run for her fourth term as Chancellor in September 2017 despite mounting criticism regarding her open-door refugee policy, which is one of the most generous policies to asylum-seekers in Europe.

Merkel's approval ratings in Germany are at five-year lows heading into the election yet the consensus among analysts is that she would still be victorious, if she decided to run.





Larissa Brunner, analyst for Western Europe at think-tank Oxford Analytica told CNBC in a phone interview, "If Merkel decides to run then yes, definitely, she will win the election.

"There is no real effective opposition from Sigmar Gabriel and his party (the Social Democratic Party) and besides he is not very popular. Though, it is very unlikely that (Merkel's) Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will emerge as the strongest party."

Recent state elections demonstrate a growing level of support for anti-immigration policies and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party are expected to siphon off votes from the CDU and gain an increasing number of seats in next year's poll.

Populist parties throughout Europe celebrated the victory of the U.S. President-elect on Wednesday with far-right groups in France, the Netherlands and Austria buoyed by Trump's surprise win.

In an effort to win over voters who support anti-immigration policies, Merkel's CDU party have been accused of altering their stance in the run-up to the election in 2017.

Brunner is skeptical that Merkel will adopt her party's liberal refugee policy stance too much and argued that it is important to remember the context of an election campaign.

Brunner said, "Merkel's reputation and credibility is so closely linked to refugee policy that it would be extremely hard to U-turn now. Incremental change is as much as can be expected slow shifts to kick the can down the road until the problem goes away."

Story continues

German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, reported at the weekend that the country's Interior Ministry were considering preventing migrants from ever reaching the country by picking them up in the Mediterranean sea and returning them to Africa.

A spokesperson from Germany's Federal Ministry of Interior confirmed by email that on several occasions there had been talks to expand on the model of the agreement between the European Union and Turkey for processing and accommodating migrants and asylum-seekers, however nothing official has been approved.

The spokesperson told CNBC in an email, "There are no concrete plans or precise ideas yet. Therefore we cannot confirm that there are concrete plans on sending back migrants rescued in the Mediterranean Sea.

"Such agreements would have to be developed and negotiated by the European Union," they added.

Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.


The ZETOR brand made its way to the finals for the first time in its history, represented by the innovated model of ZETOR FORTERRA HD 140 that took its place alongside the six other most successful finalists in the Tractor of the Year category.

The international award for the best tractor in the European market is granted by a jury of 25 independent journalists from 23 European countries specialized in agricultural equipment. They evaluate the machine as a whole, emphasizing the technical aspects, design, ergonomics and quality of the machine and, last but not least, evaluate the tractor at work in realistic conditions.

"It was the first time we participated in the Tractor of the Year contest and we immediately got to the finals. It is a great success for ZETOR and all of our employees, which all of us are largely proud of. It confirms that support of investments in development of new modernized machines and presentation of new ranges of models is the correct approach taken by the company. During the contest, we got a unique occasion to present skills of the ZETOR tractor to experts from all over Europe, which we greatly appreciate. The FORTERRA HD tractor received several prestigious awards in the past, however, success in the Tractor of the Year has undoubtedly been the greatest recognition so far," says Margareta Vighova, Corporate Communication Director, ZETOR TRACTORS a.s.

The contest is held every year and FORTERRA HD fought over the first place with six tractors of other brands this year, which was the 20th anniversary of the contest.

Tractors of famous agricultural brands had to pass several selection rounds. The first round was held in spring when each contestant presented its machine before the jury that subsequently chose the finalists for four of the announced categories. FORTERRA HD was nominated in the Tractor of the Year category.

FORTERRA HD is among the top models of the FORTERRA model range. It offers greater power (from 127 to 147 HP), more robust body, axle suspension and multifunctional control panel.

FORTERRA HD uses efficient ZETOR engines with a 16-valve head which are the result of our own development and production; the engines meet STAGE IV / Tier 4F emission standard. The engines have good acceleration and they are easy to start in low temperature. According to independent tests of Mendel University, Brno, Czech Republic, the engines with STAGE IV emission standard offer lower fuel consumption if compared with the engines of the previous generation; the savings are about 15-20% based on performed activity.
SHELTON  After 15 years in a small storefront, Diversified Kitchens has moved into a larger, more visible space in the Huntington Shopping Plaza.

We saw the growth opportunity so we expanded, said owner Douglas Cooper.

Cooper said when he was approached by his landlord several years ago and asked to consider moving into a larger space within the plaza, his instinct was to say no. But after considering the potential benefits of having a larger showroom he agreed to move across the plaza to 43 Huntington Plaza St.

The business now has a showroom three times as large as its former space. We have the latest and greatest features available in the cabinet and countertop business, Cooper said.

And the new showroom, which had its grand opening this week, is proving to be more convenient for staff and customers.

Frank Marini, a designer at Diversified Kitchens, said since the showroom opened several months ago the design staff has had an easier time figuring out what customers want in their own kitchens, despite the number of options available to them.

Diversified Kitchens has more than 25 cabinet displays, 400 countertop samples, 100 decorative hardware samples and 300 door styles, according to its website.

Our other showroom was kind of small, Marini said. Now we have more displays. (Customers) can see more of what we offer. People come in and say, I want that kitchen.

Growth has been substantial since Cooper, a former cabinet maker, started Diversified Kitchens out of his Shelton home 19 years ago. He first worked exclusively with architects, general contractors, builders and developers.

Then referrals led him to offer his services to the general public. The company now has 10 employees.

Doug is a master craftsman, designer and entrepreneur who has built a strong and successful business in Shelton, which will be celebrating its 20th anniversary next year, said Bill Purcell, president of the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce. The chamber offers its congratulations and thanks to Diversified Kitchens for their continued investment in the Shelton community.

The Huntington Plaza showroom is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon and by appointment. To reach Diversified Kitchens call 203-944-0055.

ktorres@hearstmediact.com; 203-330-6227
The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) has revealed that mortgage applications have dropped by 1.2 percent. This follows a five-week period where rates for home loans have trended higher, affecting the attraction for residential property.

Joel Kan, an economist at the MBA, said that there has been good growth in GDP and rising wages over the past few weeks. "This raises the likelihood of the Fed raising rates at its December meeting," he said, "But also indicates stronger domestic economic fundamentals, which pushes rates higher."

In the latest rate changes, levels rose to their highest since June, moving from 3.75 to 3.77 percent for a 30-year fixed home loan of $417,000 or less. Seasonally adjusted levels, to remove bias, saw mortgage applications and refinance applications drop. These loans, which are extremely sensitive to rate changes, dropped by 3 percent. Kan explained that, despite these downturns, home purchase movements in 2016 have improved overall from 2015.

A recent monthly sentiment report by Fannie Mae showed that more consumers believe that the time is right to sell and buy homes. However, fewer people believe that their jobs are safe for the foreseeable future. Also, fewer think that mortgage rates will fall rather than continue their current upwards trend. Fannie Mae chief economist and senior vice president Doug Duncan noted that this doubt over job security may be down to Americans' uncertainty over the future, following the recent election.
STAMFORD -- The Stamford Public Education Foundation honored mentors, including the city's first lady, Monday night at its annual Excellence in Education Awards.

"That additional caring adult in that student's life can make a world of difference," Susan Rigano, the executive director of SPEF, said in an interview prior to the ceremony.

Judy Martin, a Stamford public school reading teacher, president of the Starfish Connection and the wife of Mayor David Martin, was honored this year alongside the Royal Bank of Scotland and Diane Hubbard, a nonprofit management consultant and former mentoring program manager with the Governor's Prevention Partnership.

Rigano said SPEF had selected Martin as its honoree before her husband was elected mayor.

Martin and Hubbard have come to education and mentorship after careers in corporate America, she said.

According to Martin's biography on her nonprofit's website, she spent 20 years involved in strategic planning, human resources and marketing with major corporations before going back to school to teach remedial reading.

She and her husband started the Starfish Connection as a long-term mentorship program for academically talented youngsters from low-income families.

"I am very proud of Judy," Mayor Martin said Monday.

While Martin co-founded the Starfish Connection and serves on its board, he said his wife is the one who runs the program, which has a challenging objective.

Starfish gets a commitment from families and mentors for 10 years, which isn't easy, he said. That takes a student from second grade to graduation. The first group is just now entering high school, he said.

Martin also commended SPEF for recognizing the efforts of Hubbard and RBS, contributions important to having a strong education system.

"In general, education is so important, it's so vital," he said. "A city with the diversity of Stamford's -- it's great we have organizations like RBS and many other organizations that contribute so much of their time and money to the educational process in Stamford... Honoring them is well worth the effort."

Hubbard was the vice president of corporate strategy for Waterbury-based Webster Bank for 27 years before joining the Governor's Prevention Partnership as its mentoring program manager. She's recently established her own nonprofit consultancy, The Hubbard Consulting Group, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Rigano said Hubbard is an expert on mentoring and works all over the country.

RBS is one of SPEF's partners in the region and is expanding its mentorship programs in Stamford, she said. The international financial company is being honored for an after-school program it runs for 30 students from low-income families.

Once a week, the students come to RBS' building, where they are given healthy snacks and a place to do homework and get help academically.

"An experience they will remember for the rest of their lives," Rigano said.
Some experts predict that ecommerce will surpass $2 trillion in sales in the next few years - its the fastest growing and one of the most valuable industries.

When you can shop online, seamlessly checkout, and then conveniently have your favorite pair of jeans, a nice new watch, or even a customized computer shipped directly to your doorstep, you might think the process isnt that complicated.

As a digital marketer, I have helped a lot of brands grow sales through e-commerce. This got me wanting to start my own e-commerce site, so I could truly understand the process and what it takes to launch an online store from scratch.

Below are tips and tricks that I learned during the one year it took my sister and I to launch DermWarehouse, an e-commerce website selling skincare and beauty products. The steps outlined below will not only ensure you take the quickest and most professional route to get your site up and running, it will also set your marketing and SEO up for future success, which will increase your bottom line.

One Year SEO Strategy.

If youve never started an e-commerce store from scratch, its impossible to understand how time consuming and detailed the process is. When looking at any ecommerce site, you never think about the fact that someone had to craft content and individually load each and every product. Not only that, you also have to negotiate with each manufacturer to be able to list their products online, before the actual listing process even begins.

Aside from all the work it takes to actually build the site, from my marketing agency experience, I understood how frustrating it could be to have this functioning site and business model that youve worked so hard on, but not generate organic traffic. So, we kicked off our SEO strategy early, a year prior to site launch, while simultaneously building our website. We needed this time anyway for development, so why not make the most of it and kill two birds with one stone.

Below is a list of all the steps we took to get started and successfully build our e-commerce site:

1. Purchase a domain name.

This is pretty straightforward. You need a domain name that will perfectly identify your brand. Dont overthink the process. Using a site like GoDaddy, you can purchase a domain name for under $10.00.

Related: How to Choose and Purchase a Domain Name

2. Find a web developer.

This is a crucial component in launching your ecommerce site. If you want to launch your site in a relatively short time span and in a professional manner, make sure to do your vetting when it comes to hiring a developer. Get references from other ecommerce websites the developer has built. Get a timeline for how long they anticipate it will take to launch the site. Make sure they have a graphic design background so they can crop images that will align with your site. Be sure to ask if the developer has experience building sites on the ecommerce platform you choose (see step 4).

Too often, entrepreneurs move forward with a developer without doing their due diligence in terms of research. Don't let this happen to you, as it can put a halt to your website before you really even get started. If you want to learn more about how long your e-commerce site should take to launch, feel free to contact a web design specialist.

Related: 5 Tips for Hiring a Great Web Developer

3. Get all the paperwork you need for a legitimate business.

Register your business, get a vendor's License and start looking into legal business issues. You should contact a local attorney to assist in the creation of your business. While it is an upfront cost, it likely will save you significant headache and expense in the future.

According to Alyson Letsky, an attorney at Eastman & Smith Ltd. in Columbus, Ohio, you will first need to strategize and determine the state in which you wish to be domiciled, then check the required filings with that states Secretary of State and department of taxation or revenue.

You will need to register the appropriate articles of incorporation or organization with your states Secretary of State if you are starting a corporation, nonprofit, limited liability company or professional organization. Additionally, if you will be making taxable sales, you will need to obtain a Sellers Permit or Vendors License with the appropriate state agency. Many vendors will require that you have this as well before they agree to work with you.

If you are starting a nonprofit, check with the state Attorney Generals office to learn what charitable licenses and filings are required. Lastly, you will need the appropriate organizational documents. Contact your attorney for more information, but this is not a step to be skipped or overlooked.

Related: 4 Legal Documents You Need to Review Before 2017

4. Select ecommerce and website hosting platform.

To save time and money, select a popular ecommerce platform. I recommend Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce. Most developers are familiar with these, making it easy to integrate plugins, payment processing, etc.

For our skincare ecommerce site, we decided to use WooCommerce because of the its WordPress capabilities. We chose WP Engine for the hosting, which costs $29.99 per month and provides a fast and secure hosting solution.

Related: Overwhelmed by the eCommerce Solutions Available? Here Are the Top 4.

5. Find a theme that matches your ecommerce vision.

To save even more time, you can purchase a theme from ThemeForest to find a layout that resembles the look and feel you desire from an ecommerce perspective. ThemeForest has over 28,000 website templates and themes from $2. They are the #1 marketplace for website templates.

Don't reinvent the wheel. Rather than building your site from scratch, download a template from ThemeForest or a similar site. We learned from experience that the customization process can be a very timely and frustrating one. So, if you can find a theme you like, youll likely save yourself quite a headache.

Related: 5 Ways Store Colors Can Influence Shoppers

6. Take your website live.

As soon as you commit to starting your business, take your site live, even before listing any of your products. Have your developer created a homepage, an About Us page and a contact page. It doesnt have to be beautiful but having a functioning site will be helpful for numerous reasons:

First, it will allow you to establish legitimacy when negotiating deals with vendors. Youll have more than just an idea. Second, when reaching out to reporters and bloggers, they can see that you have a website and are credible. Third, it will give you a place for all of these sources to link back to your site, which is, of course, key for building SEO.

Related: Five Things To Check Before Your New Website Goes Live

7. Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is one of the greatest tools for PR and SEO any business owner or digital marketer can make use of. Its free, it generates amazing exposure (if executed properly) and it can really be a game changer (again, if executed properly).

HARO provides journalists with a robust database of sources for upcoming stories and daily opportunities for sources to secure valuable media coverage. Sign up and use this resource as much as you can to build credibility and establish media relationships for your site.

When it comes to HARO, there are several key components to executing. The first is timeliness. When a reporter submits a query, they can receive hundreds of pitches in response. Each query has a deadline as well, so making sure you respond immediately, in the morning, afternoon and evening is critical for both reasons.

The second key element is finding a true industry expert with ease of access. Fortunately, we had a dermatologist at our disposal at all times for DermWarehouse. This provided us with an advantage over the thousands of pitches that deal with entrepreneurship (which we still responded to also, but had a lower conversion rate).

If you spend the time and send back two pitches per day for a one-year timespan, you will get tremendous exposure on some of the most popular sites on the web. This will not only help increase your brand exposure, it will greatly help your SEO as well.

Related: 5 Tips for Getting Media to 'Swipe Right' on Your Press Release

8. PitchBox.

Developing relationships with media contacts is a very important. This is where Pitchbox comes in. Pitchbox automates the outreach grunt work so you can focus on what you do best -- creating real, person-to-person connections with the people you want to reach. Pitchbox helps scale your outreach efforts. It handles all aspects from the prospecting to the emailing to the tracking and managing the workflow.

After PitchBox sends an initial pitch, if someone doesnt respond, their SaaS software will send a follow-up email based on a timed schedule. You can craft your own emails (both initial and follow-up) so that the message still sounds personal.

Pitchbox starts at $95 for startups and is a great resource to generate high quality relationships. We used this service for vendor outreach and also for media outreach. It saved us an enormous amount of time. If youre also a Moz user, you can integrate Moz within Pitchbox, allowing you to filter your search results based on domain authority.

Related: 7 Tips for Mastering the Fine Art of Following Up

9. Personalized outreach.

Personalized relationships are very important, both for vendors and for the media. If you have successfully implemented an SEO strategy, you definitely understand the value of personalized relationships.

Make sure to pitch the website something of value. It is important to do research on reporters and editors so when you pitch them a story idea the email doesnt get buried in their inbox or deleted unread.

Let's say your ecommerce store sells "Petes Pasta Sauce." Share your expertise through articles teaching readers and cooking aficionados about your most delicious recipes. Send an editor a sample of your pasta sauce to help explain to them why your pesto stands out among the competition.

If youre only selling your own homemade pasta sauce, you wont be dealing with vendor relationships but if youre selling different brands and products you will be working closely with these vendors. Or at least you should be!

Pick up the phone or meet your rep for coffee. The vendors are the people who dictate sales and promotions. They can keep you up to date on the latest trends for their brand to help bolster your sales. They are the people who know the most about the products youre selling, so its very important to establish relationships with them. Let them know that youre a team and you want to work with them to garner success for both of you. They will appreciate it and think of you anytime they have a special deal or promotion, or even a great marketing idea. If youve built a relationship with them, yours is the website that theyll want to share these ideas and offers with.

Related: Why a Phone Call Is Better Than an Email (Usually)

10. Get a payment gateway.

Did you ever wonder how credit card payments were accepted on ecommerce websites? Its through a payment gateway and also a credit card processor. You are likely most familiar with PayPal or Stripe. But if you want to accept credit cards, recurring billing and mobile payment, a gateway like authorize.net or 2Checkout.com provide great options. WooRockets.com provides a great list of the 5 best payment gateways for e-commerce websites.

Getting approved for a payment gateway and credit card processor is not an easy process, so do your research and make sure youre prepared. Before you can apply, youll need to set up a secure checkout process on your website, create a Privacy Policy and Return Policy, figure out your shipping and delivery methods, plus have a working customer service phone number and email address.

All of this information will need to be visible on your website. Make sure to also have a clean credit history, a U.S. drivers license or state ID, a U.S. bank account for the business where funds will be deposited, and a federal tax ID. Youll need a voided check (or a bank letter with your account information) and its also a good idea to include a cover letter with your application explaining your business and why youll be successful.

Setting up your payment gateway and credit card processing can take a while. These processors dont want to take a big risk on a business without experience or that is unlikely to be successful, so you must prove to them that this is not the case with your business. Dont wait until the last minute to start this process.

Related: 5 Features To Look For While Selecting The Right E-payment Model

11. Google Shopping + Facebook Product Catalog.

Weve talked a lot about building your SEO presence during the development process so that, rather than waiting for the website development to be completed and starting your SEO from scratch, you can start to bolster your SEO while your developer is plugging away at your site.

There are some things, however, that you cannot complete until the site is ready to launch and the products are all uploaded. When you are in the final stages of development, make sure to get your Google Shopping Campaign set-up to ensure your product images populate when users search for relevant keywords. If you are unfamiliar with Google Shopping, I give step-by-step instructions on 4 easy steps to set-up a Google Shopping Campaign through Merchant Center.

You can use this same data feed from the merchant center and upload it to Facebooks product catalog.

Related: All-Knowing Google to Roll Out Geographically-Triggered Shopping Alerts

12. Order packaging and figure out shipping/storage options.

Before you can launch your website, youll need to figure out how to store and ship your inventory. You will have to determine storage to make arrangements for with your vendors. Some questions you will need to answer are as follows:

Will you be utilizing drop shipping or will you store all of your inventory in a warehouse? Will you use USPS, UPS, FedE, or some combination of the three to ship and track packages? What will you ship your package in? What size packaging do you need? Are you going to include any promotional materials in your packages? Are there shipping restrictions on any of the products youre offering (e.g, there are some beauty products can only be shipped via ground)?

You need answers to all of these questions before youre ready to ship out any merchandise. As you can see, starting an ecommerce website is quite an involved and detailed process. Following this checklist will ensure you take the proper steps to get your website launched in a timely manner while being proactive with your SEO and marketing.

Related:



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
On Sept. 11, 2001, Bob Lepore, then a New Jersey firefighter, was one of the many first responders who went to help at Ground Zero. "One of the things that I learned is that life is short," he says. "It's not given to everybody."

Even before that day, though, he was inspired by his years in the United States Marine Corps (USMC) to approach his work with a desire to help others.

Related: The One Trick This Navy SEAL Used to Turn Failure Into Success

From 1961 to 1968, Lepore fought in Vietnam as a member of the USMC. After the war, he spent nearly 35 years as a firefighter before becoming a sales executive for Starwood and Hilton hotels in South Carolina.

But it wasnt until recently that Lepore was able to use his military experience in the entrepreneurial world. For the last two and half years, Lepore has been the franchise owner of a Firehouse Subs in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Related: What a Combat Veteran Knows About Transformation Through Adversity



"I think my military experience gave me discipline, neatness, organization and probably a lot of my personality," he says, "which all go hand in hand in running the business."

Lepore says the opportunity to own a Firehouse Subs presented itself when he walked into a location shortly after his retirement from the fire service. "I looked around and everything felt like home," he says.

A common thread for members of the military is an impulse to help others, Lepore says, and being involved with a company that makes that a priority allows him the chance to continue to support his neighbors. An integral part of the ethos of Firehouse Subs is the The Firehouse Subs Public Safety Foundation, which provides support for the purchase of life-saving equipment, educational support for members of the military and disaster prep and relief.

Related: How This Army Veteran Turned His Hobby Into a $20 Million Business



Lepore, who will also host a Toys4Tots gift drive this holiday season through the restaurant, says "giving back to the community is part of me." Lepore, who will also host a Toys4Tots gift drive this holiday season through the restaurant, says "giving back to the community is part of me."

Image Credit: Bob Lepore

Read on for Lepores four tips about how his military experience helps him oversee his business.

1. Timeliness

To be an effective marine and firefighter, you need to be organized.

Now, Lepore's skills are now used in a slightly unexpected way. While running his franchise, he makes sure that the schedules of his college-age employees allow them to fit in all of their schooling.

2. Camaraderie

Lepore says that like in a military unit or a firehouse, one of his number-one priorities is building camaraderie amongst his staff. He looks to extend the same warm welcome to his employees he felt three years ago when he made his first move to become a franchisee. "I feel like I'm part of a family," Lepore says.

3. Tidiness

Cleanliness is paramount in the military, and Lepore explains that Firehouse Subs has very specific guidelines for its uniforms and stores. Keeping your equipment well maintained is no different than keeping your rifle or fire equipment well maintained," he says. "It will save you time and money in the end.

4. Chain of command

A consistent chain of command was something that Lopere says he always valued during the course of his career, and it was something that he wanted to implement when he became a business owner.

All team members are taught a very specific structure from the beginning to avoid any miscommunication or confusion," he says. "I do not overstep my general manager, nor do I allow my shift leaders to break the chain. I make this very clear to all employees so we maintain consistency in our day-to-day operations.

Related:

Taking Command: The Crew Is Only as Good as the Captain

4 Ways This Veteran's Military Background Helps Him Run His Business

Remember the Forgotten Military Veterans of World War II



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
World War II was a sacrifice of extraordinary measures. Almost overnight, the country went from peace to war; from the Great Depression to an industrial powerhouse, providing the tanks, planes and warships that would deliver the peace; and transforming men and women from civilians to the defenders of the nation. The transformation from peace to war and back to peace cost the United States an enormous toll. When peace returned in 1945, the US military stood at just over 12,000,000 soldiers with over 1,000,000 dead and wounded.

The sacrifice of the military veterans of World War II was and remains one of the greatest stories of transformation, innovation, discipline, courage, valor and endurance our country has ever seen. This Veteran's Day, the remaining military veterans of World War II are disappearing from our parades and gatherings. They should not and must not ever fade from our memories, our gratefulness and our respect.

All the veterans.

A group that often fails to be fully recognized for its role and sacrifice as military service members during World War II is women and ethnic minorities. In the era before the war, women and ethnic minorities were usually "second" class citizens, often paid lower wages, who did not share equally in access to all the United States had to offer its citizens. However, when World War II arrived on America's shores, these citizens rose to offer valor, courage and bravery that exceeded what their country had given them.

Related: Veteran Franchisees, We Salute You

African American military veterans.

The Tuskegee Airmen, a group of fighter, bomber, and reconnaissance pilots that fought in the skies of Europe and offered critical defense to the US strategic bomber forces, is one of the most remembered and respected stories of African Americans during World War II. However, the Tuskegee Airmen are just the beginning of the story. The US Army's "Red Ball" Express, a critical logistical unit in Europe, provided General Patton's tanks the food, fuel, and ammunition that helped defeat the ferocious Nazi German attack known as the Battle of The Bulge in December 1944.

But there many other such units, including the 761st Tank Battalion, the Black Panthers, an African American tank battalion in World War II. In the Navy, the African American crew of the USS Mason helped move and defend critical supplies from the United States to England. On the West Coast, African Americans in US Navy logistics units worked under extraordinarily dangerous conditions to load ships of fuel and ammunition to support the "island hopping" campaigns to defeat Japan in the Pacific.

Women military veterans.

While not officially recognized as uniformed members of the armed forces until years after World War II, women played a role in logistics, nursing, administration and flight that made them a vital and central effort of the US military effort. Women flew aircraft from factories and bases in the United States to forward staging areas, provided critical care as nurses and other hospital and medical care staff, and served as a critical backbone of administrative and logistical personnel that provided support to organize and supply the war effort. The US Navys Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), the Coast Guard Womens Reserves (SPARS), the Womens Air (Force) Service Pilots (WASP), and the Women's Army Corps (WAC) put women in uniform where they were essential to the war's success.

Related: Motivating Women Vets to Start Businesses

Asian American military veterans.

The Japanese Nisei, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (motto: "Go For Broke"), was one of the more famous units of World War II. These Japanese American soldiers became one of the most decorated military units in World War II due to their combat performance. Asian Americans also provided critical knowledge of Japanese and other Asian languages for use by intelligence in support of the war effort. The people of the Philippines, then part of an American protectorate, were essential in operating guerilla forces behind Japanese lines, helping rescue downed American aircrews and prisoners of war toward the last stages of World War II.

Native American military veterans.

All military history buffs know about the Navajo code talkers of the US Marine Corps. These Navajo Indians were trained by the US Marines to transmit critical battlefield information as well as direct artillery fire and air strikes, using their native Navajo Indian language. While the Japanese had the ability to intercept and confuse US Marines speaking English, they had no idea what the Navajo language was. The success of the Navajo Code Talkers helped the US Marines provide effective artillery support in its missions to seize critical islands across the Pacific. The US Army in the Pacific also had a program that used Native Americans to speak their own language to ensure rapid, effective, and secure communication.

Related: Health-Food Business Taps Into its Native American Roots

Hispanic American military veterans.

Hispanic Americans did not serve in segregated military units like African Americans or Asian Americans during World War II. They were largely spread across the military forces of the United States, but they still found a way to serve with distinction. The 158th Infantry, the Bushmasters, was a US Army infantry unit that was based in Arizona composed primarily of Hispanic Americans. It fought an intense, heroic, and ultimately successful campaign across the Philippines in April of 1945 against the Japanese.

LGBT military veterans.

Today, all qualified military personnel can serve regardless of their sexual orientation. A great historical oversight of World War II military history is that we know and understand but little of the contribution of America's lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered (LGBT) military veterans. This group either served in silence or was not allowed to enter military service at all due to laws and military regulations at the time. Dr. Alan Turing, a mathematician in England who was gay, was the leader of a non-traditional intelligence team of code breakers that succeed in cracking the Nazi German Enigma code.

On Veteran's Day, we honor, remember and respect the courage and integrity of this small group of Americans that has given and continues to give so much to the defense of our nation. We must remember that the courage, sacrifice, heroics and valor of all Americans veterans each and every Veteran's Day.

Related:

Taking Command: The Crew Is Only as Good as the Captain

4 Ways This Veteran's Military Background Helps Him Run His Business

Remember the Forgotten Military Veterans of World War II



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
STAMFORD  Police on Thursday extradited two men from Pennsylvania who are accused of bilking more than $400,000 from an elderly Stamford man with an elaborate, but dated, con game.

The flim-flam is called the black money scam and began in mid-July, when the 83-year-old Stamford man came upon three Liberian immigrants at a downtown hotel. The third suspect was murdered in Indianapolis in September, according to police.
Don Taylor

Dear Dr. Don,

I have a question regarding Social Security benefits for a person living out of the country. I am 58 and my wife is 47. I am a United States citizen and worked in the States (contributing to Social Security) from 1989 until moving to Canada in August 2014. Currently, I am an associate professor and expect to work until I'm 65 or 66 and then retire in Canada.

Would my wife be eligible for U.S. Social Security benefits upon my death? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

-- John Juncture

Canada skyline | Dan Breckwoldt/Shutterstock.com

Dan Breckwoldt/Shutterstock.com

Dear John,

There's a high degree of cooperation between the U.S. and our neighbors to the north when it comes to Social Security. A totalization agreement between the two countries (plus Quebec) concerning their Social Security programs was put in place in 1984 and amended over the years. There is a separate agreement for Quebec because the Canadian Social Security system includes a special pension plan operated in that province.

Generally, if you have Social Security credits in the U.S. and Canada, you may be eligible for benefits from one or both countries. If you meet all the basic requirements under one country's system, you will get a regular benefit from that country. If you do not meet the basic requirements, the totalization agreement may help you qualify for a benefit.

Calculating benefits

However, when a U.S. benefit becomes payable as a result of counting U.S. and Canadian Social Security credits, an initial benefit is determined based on your U.S. earnings as if your entire career had been completed under the U.S. system. This initial benefit is then reduced to reflect the fact that Canadian credits helped to make the benefit payable. The amount of the reduction will depend on the number of U.S. credits. The more U.S. credits, the smaller the reduction. The fewer U.S. credits, the larger the reduction.

Medicare is a separate issue. Although the agreement between the U.S. and Canada allows the Social Security Administration to count your Canada Pension Plan or Quebec Pension Plan credits to help you qualify for U.S. retirement, disability or survivor benefits, the agreement does not cover Medicare benefits. As a result, the U.S. cannot recognize your credits in Canada or Quebec to determine entitlement to free Medicare hospital insurance.

Story continues

Your wife's ability to get a Social Security spousal benefit in retirement, or a survivor benefit if you were to die before her, is derived from your U.S. Social Security work record. A spousal benefit can be up to half of your full retirement benefit. A survivor benefit also is based on your work record. Both the spousal benefit and the survivor benefit may be reduced by the "Government Pension Offset" that is based on benefits she qualifies for in Canada. Call the Social Security Administration to confirm she'll be able to get these benefits and the effect of any offsets.

CALCULATOR: Estimate your Social Security benefits

Get more news, money-saving tips and expert advice by signing up for a free Bankrate newsletter.

Ask the adviser

To ask a question of Dr. Don, go to the "Ask the Experts" page and select one of these topics: "Personal Loans," "Financing a home," "Saving and Investing," "Senior Living" or "Money." Read more Dr. Don columns for additional personal finance advice.

Bankrate's content, including the guidance of its advice-and-expert columns and this website, is intended only to assist you with financial decisions. The content is broad in scope and does not consider your personal financial situation. Bankrate recommends that you seek the advice of advisers who are fully aware of your individual circumstances before making any final decisions or implementing any financial strategy. Please remember that your use of this website is governed by Bankrate's Terms of Use.





More From Bankrate.com


I still remember the day I arrived in the UK vividly.

My backpack was bulging with my new business wardrobe (brown brogues, a garish pink shirt and the crumpled suit trousers Id worn to 20 interviews) on an oddly sweltering London day. I heaved it from Waterloos Eurostar platform to a mates sofa in somewhere that seemed to be the end of the earth but was actually Norwood.

After a shaky couple of phone interviews with a City advisory firm in my then-broken English, I landed the job (one up from making loos squeaky clean in the executive washroom). Id packed up my life in Belgium (it hadnt taken long, my girlfriend had kicked me out the month before) and was hoping to begin afresh.

It was an inauspicious start. I hadnt factored in how long it would take to get on the train at Clapham Junction, so was late and sweaty, my shirt a darker shade of pink. In my first month, a deal was held up because Id only photocopied half a key document, and I swore in front of the chairman when describing my ambitions  for which I received a raised, bushy eyebrow.

Spin forward a decade and change was afoot again. A switch into private equity had proved lifeless  long, dull days full of endless meetings. On a trip home, I had a revelation, a friend from school had branched into specialist beers and, on describing Londons thirst for well-packaged hipster ales over a few too many samples, I realised I could find a way out.

Ironically coffee, not beer, flowed as I stayed up all night researching the crowded market and tapping up stockists. One major deal subsequently emerged, and Id convinced my brother  who also works in the City  that it made sense to escape our misery and set up together as UK distributors.

Then Britain voted for Brexit. Sterling tanked, and with it my new venture. The numbers only just added up pre-Brexit, and now importing is impossible. Doh!

So here I am, stuck going to five meetings a day at which cost-cutting and putting people out of a job top the agenda. A few days after the vote, my brother voiced his concerns about Brexit, saying he might pack up and return to Belgium with his bilingual kids. The response from one colleague with a particularly hairy chin-mole: Good, more jobs for Brits.

It suddenly doesnt feel like the London I arrived in. Luckily, Ive still got plenty of those samples to drown my sorrows.
M ore than 700,000 job-seekers on the books of recruitment giant Michael Page had their details hacked in one of the biggest security breaches to hit a British firm, the Evening Standard can reveal.

An email to job-seekers from Pages marketing director Eamon Collins warns that an unauthorised third party illegally gained online access to sensitive data just days ago.

Although Page, a FTSE 250 company valued on the stock market at 1.2 billion, insists the hackers had no malicious intent, it admits that the security breach is deeply disappointing and of serious concern.

Coming days after Tesco Bank revealed that 40,000 accounts had been hacked and money stolen, possibly by internet gangsters based in Brazil, this latest incident will heighten concern about web security.

Page says email addresses, passwords, phone numbers and private job applications were all accessed.

Collins said in the email to job-seekers: We will continue to work to understand fully how the breach has occurred and to ensure it does not happen again.

One of the affected Page Group job-seekers told the Standard: My personal details were breached  not good. First Tesco, now this. Whats next? The internet is not secure at all.

The company says it worked non-stop with IT provider Capgemini to fix the issue  711,000 accounts were affected in all, some in the Netherlands and China.

Because of the nature of the data, there is limited risk of fraudulent activity, Page said. We requested that the third party destroys all copies of the data and they have confirmed they have already done so.

No party involved would confirm the identity of the hacker, but it is understood that this is not the first time they have targeted a major group.

Cliff Moyce at tech consultants DataArt said: This type of occurrence  personal, sensitive and confidential information becoming discoverable through clicking on certain commands within websites  is endemic.

Following professional standards for infrastructure management, development, testing, database management, etc will prevent it happening.

Capgemini said in a statement: Our work has established that this was not a malicious attack.

Founded in 1976, Page describes itself as one of the worlds best-known and most respected recruitment consultancies.

It places people in some of the Citys top jobs as well as finding jobs for temporary office staff.
C oncerns that Donald Trumps victory will damage US trade in China did not materialise on Friday, as online retail giant Alibaba revealed American fashion brands have helped it reach record sales during its Singles Day event.

Trump has said he will seek sweeping tariffs on products made in China to promote US manufacturing, which some analysts say could lead to a trade war.

But Alibaba said Apple, Nike and Skechers were among the best-sellers in the opening hours of the 24-hour shopping phenomenon.

About 15 hours into the event, sales had reached $13.4 billion (10.6 billion), surpassing last years total figure.

Singles Day, also known as Double 11 because it is held on November 11, is the worlds biggest online shopping extravaganza, when Chinese shoppers seek bargains. It was started as an anti-Valentines celebration in the Nineties.

Some 12,000 international brands were on sale, including British ones such as Topshop and The Cambridge Satchel Company.

Dom Joseph of advertising tech firm Captify said: The size of the opportunity on offer to UK brands and online retailers can no longer be underestimated or ignored.

Alibaba said: With incomes rising in rural China, online shopping has become an important outlet for disposable income.
A Calais Jungle volunteer has filmed inside the camp to create a new short film about the experiences of migrants coping with exceptionally volatile conditions.

I Am Refugee is set against the poem Refugee Blues, by W. H Auden, as it captures everyday life of migrants struggling to survive in makeshift homes.

The short film was created by 27-year-old Londoner Christian Gordine who filmed the project while working as a volunteer in the migrant camp.

Filmmaker Christian said it was hard to switch off from the emotional process of filming at the camp, where he helped to set up tents, and distribute blankets and sleeping bags.

He told the Standard: The images of Alan Kurdi washed up on the Turkish shoreline was a monumental wakeup call - this for me was the major trigger which truly widened my eyes to the severity of the situation.

Waking up in 'The Jungle' / Christian Gordine

The thought that Alan and his family may very well have been travelling towards a refugee camp that was situated only 116 miles away from my desk in London was unfathomable.

I wanted to do whatever I could to try and help, so I went and volunteered at the the Jungle in Calais and took my camera with me.

I wanted to make a film that showed human experience in The Jungle rather than cold statistics.

I Am Refugee was filmed from inside the camp / Christian Gordine

Christian said he felt the need to be very cautious while filming the camp, where he spent time with the people he filmed, learning about their journeys.

He added: It was an emotional process because I spent a lot of time with the people in the film.

When I would put the camera away, finish volunteering for the day and head back to the hostel I was staying at, it would be so hard to switch off and process the day that I had.

Filming was an 'emotional process', says Christian / Christian Gordine

When you are in a refugee camp for whatever reason, whether thats to volunteer or make a film, you have to check your privilege and really ask yourself what can you can do to help.

French authorites began moving 1,500 children from the Calais 'Jungle' after demolition of the camp began earlier this month, as Slyvie Bermann, France's ambassador to the UK, warned the people who had been living there not to return as they would face a "blind alley".

Demolition work under way at Calais 'Jungle' camp in Calais

The poem by W. H Auden, Refugee Blues, was chosen to narrate the short film as a way of reminding viewers how easy it is to forget our history.

Christian said: I want viewers to feel and understand W. H Audens perspective in the poem and apply it to the here and now.

Filmmaker Christian Gordine says it was 'hard to switch off' after a day's filming / Christian Gordine

We are witnessing an international shift and a growing acceptance of intolerance, racism and fascism and I want my film to embody the words of George Santayana: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

There still exists a startling amount of hostility towards refugees.
Y ou learn something new every day. Such as: New Zealands second-highest volcano, 2,518m Mount Taranaki on the North Island, is an active but quiescent andesitic stratovolcano.

If that sounds like gobbledygook, it seemed a lot more relevant when I heard it  not least because I was tracing a meandering path around Mount Taranakis deep-scarred, lava-streaked flanks, and had just been informed that the volcano isnt likely to stay quiescent for much longer.

The last eruption was around 1850, I was informed by keen amateur geologist John Haylock, one of my two hiking companions. Scientists reckon it erupts about every 90 years, so were overdue another one. Taranaki is one of the most perfect examples of a stratovolcano, though, he added, hastily, seeing my startled expression  as if that made things so much less alarming.

In fairness, I was too absorbed by the spectacular landscapes, wildlife and Maori heritage of my surroundings to be overly concerned. It was a glorious April morning, azure skies unsullied by puffs of smoke or ash, when I joined John and local guide Nick Brown to walk the Pouakai Crossing.

This recently launched 18.4km hike winds across the northerly slopes of Taranaki and has been mooted as an alternative to the countrys best-known hike, the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. Often lauded as the worlds best day-walk, the latter is a 19.4km trek alongside the cones of Tongariro and Ngauruhoe, the body-double for Mount Doom in Peter Jacksons Lord of the Rings. But while the fame of that route draws some 100,000 hikers each year, Mount Taranaki sees only perhaps 3,000  another good reason to try the freshly minted trail.

At the North Egmont Visitor Centre, the hikes starting point, I drank in vistas of Tongariro and Ngauruhoe as surf rolled into the shores of the Tasman Sea to the north. And behind me, serene enough for now at least, loomed the hulking cone of tetchy Taranaki.

The Goblin Forest / Diane Cook and Len Jenshel/Getty Images

The rivalry between Tongariro and Taranaki extends back long before the creation of hiking trails, the Maori believe. John told the legend in breathless bursts as we started our journey with a stiff climb.

Long ago, the Maori say, Taranaki lived with other volcanoes in the centre of the island, John recounted. He and Tongariro both fell in love with Pihanga, a beautiful female mountain, and fought a mighty battle over her. Tongariro triumphed, and Taranaki  his wounds still visible today  fled south, finally settling here alongside his new partner, Pouakai.

Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images

Like so many other New Zealand creation myths, its a story that enhances the mesmerising beauty of the landscape. But its also a cautionary tale. The summit is the head of our mounga (mountain), explained Nick. Its considered tapu (sacred)  so standing, sitting or eating at the very top is considered disrespectful. And although many visitors to the park attempt the summit, not all make it back down. Getting to the top is relatively easy, said Nick. But if the weather closes in its easy to mistake the route down  many have gone astray and died.

The point was reinforced a couple of hundred yards further on when the Ambury Monument hove into view. This stone-built obelisk commemorates Arthur Ambury, who in 1918 made a heroic attempt to save one William Gourlay, who slipped on the ice and fell over the bluff now named for his would-be rescuer. Both died in the fall.

Mark Dwyer/Lavamedia

The Pouakai Crossing, though by no means for couch potatoes, isnt such a hazardous undertaking. The first stretch is testing enough, climbing amid Goblin Forest, a wood of twisted kamahi trees dripping with ferns, mosses and lichens and ringing with the weird trills and whistles of tuis and bellbirds.

Our progress was slow, not so much because of the slope  though the incline was steep  but more due to our frequent stops to discover more about the area. I learned, for example, that the small boxes alongside the path were stoat traps, set to catch these pests introduced by foolish early settlers, which now prey on rare native birds  there are kiwis and whio (blue ducks) here, though youd be fortunate to see them.

I also heard more about the curious rock formations that appeared above us: the lumpy lava flows streaking the slopes; the Dieffenbach Cliffs, organ-pipe rock formations named for the German scientist who first climbed Taranaki in 1839. We passed above the ochre deposits of the Kokowai stream, used by Maori to colour faces, carvings and clothes, and kept an eye out for giant carnivorous Powelliphanta snails marauding the undergrowth  though our ankles survived thankfully un-gnawed.

Mostly, though, we soaked up the views. The grand finale came as the afternoon light waned to a soft golden glow, and we reached the Pouakai tarns. Here, the mighty mounga was reflected and framed in the still waters of a round alpine lake, its muscular base grasping the earth like colossal buttress roots, its haughty summit a challenge to all  fellow lovelorn volcano or intrepid climber.

Solo travel destinations - in pictures 1 /13 Solo travel destinations - in pictures Thailand Thailand Borders of Adventure, Becki Enright Essaouria The Gentleman Traveller Essaouria The Gentleman Traveller Essaouria The Gentleman Traveller Madrid Taylor Hearts Travel Mercado San Anton, Madrid Mercado San Anton, Madrid Taylor Hearts Travel New Zealand Intrepid Escape New Zealand Intrepid Escape New Zealand Intrepid Escape Sunset in New Zealand Intrepid Escape

Back into the Goblin Forest we delved, past horopito (pepper tree, whose leaves indeed taste peppery) and pikopiko (bush asparagus, whose shoots, well, dont  unless sauteed in butter, according to Nick), descending to our pick-up on the Mangorei Road as the last daylight flickered. A short drive brought us to New Plymouth, the Taranaki regions vivacious hub  the kind of typically lively, liveable New Zealand town where every shop, bar and cafe seems more tempting than the last.

I sighed into a streetside seat, cooling my fingers around an icy craft beer, watching as the mounga faded into the nights embrace. One of the worlds most perfect stratovolcanoes, John says. Quite. And the walks not too shabby, either.

The Ambury Monument / Alamy

Details: New Zealand

New Plymouth is served by flights from Auckland with Jetstar (jetstar.com) and Air New Zealand (airnewzealand.com). The latter flies from Heathrow to Auckland via Los Angeles.

Top Guides (topguides.co.nz). Guided Pouakai Crossing hikes from NZ$299pp (175); shuttle between New Plymouth and the trail from NZ$35pp (20).

King & Queen Hotel Suites, New Plymouth (kingandqueen.co.nz). Studios from NZ$180 (105), room only.

visit.taranaki.info

newzealand.com/uk
A man has been stabbed in an unprovoked attack at a supermarket close to Edmonton police station.

Officers rushed to Asda, in Fore Street, around 1pm on Friday to reports of a stabbing.

A 22-year-old man was rushed to hospital with a serious chest injury.

The reception desk at the station was closed an hour after the incident.

A tweet by Edmonton MPS said: Officers are currently dealing with a male suffering with serious injuries having been stabbed in the Edmonton area.

They later added: Due to an ongoing incident. Edmonton Police Station reception office is closed to the public until further notice.
P olice investigating a 14-year-old schoolgirl's claims that she was abducted and raped have ruled out that she was kidnapped.

Thames Valley Police issued a statement ruling out that the girl was abducted while walking to school in the Summertown area of Oxford.

The 14-year-old told police that a man grabbed her at a busy junction and bundled her into a waiting car in September.

The student said another man was in the driving seat and immediately drove away.

Investigation: Thames Valley Police issued a statement ruling out that the girl was abducted while walking to school in the Summertown area of Oxford. / Oxford Mail

She told police that the men then raped her before she managed to escape and raised the alarm by knocking on doors in a nearby housing estate.

A spokesman for Thames Valley Police said: "The evidence gathered indicates that the reported abduction did not take place.

Thames Valley Police continue to investigate an offence of rape against the victim and are following all lines of inquiry to establish what has taken place.

"Specially trained officers and staff from the police, Oxfordshire County Council children's services, health and other agencies continue to work with the victim, at her pace."

The alleged victim's report came days after a 19-year-old woman was sexually assaulted by two men while heading home in Headington.

Police investigated possible links between the two cases but are yet to have found any.

Officers said they had carried out a "thorough review", including sifting through CCTV and dash-cam footage, as well as gathering witness statements.

E-fit images of two men investigators wanted to trace in connection with the report were publicly issued a fortnight after the girl came forward.

No arrests have been made.
A burglar who ran over a police officer, injuring him so badly he may never be able to return to work, has been jailed.

Curtis Naulty and Aaron Rose, both 36, were stopped by police in Village Way, Dulwich, on April 14 after officers linked a Land Rover they were travelling in to a burglary.

An officer, who has not been named, spoke to Naulty, from Norwood Junction, through the drivers window but in a bid to escape, he flung open the door and quickly reversed, Inner London Crown Court heard.

The officer was dragged along by the door before being hurled into a parked car.

He broke his leg in two places and was kept in hospital for nine days.

Crime scene: a police cordon in place in Dulwich / Fiona Simpson

He was forced to wear a leg brace for six months and is still recovering from his injuries, the court was told.

Following the attack, Naulty fled towards North Dulwich station and was arrested on April 23.

Naulty was jailed for seven years at the same court on Monday after being found guilty of causing serious injury by dangerous driving, two counts of burglary and three counts of handling stolen goods.

He was found not guilty of two counts of handling stolen goods, one count of burglary and causing GBH with intent.

Behind bars: Aaron Rose, 36, has been jailed after a police officer was run down in Dulwich Village / Met Police

Aaron Rose, of Canterbury Grove, West Norwood, was also found guilty of two counts of handling stolen goods and two counts of burglary.

He was found not guilty of one count of burglary. Prior to the trial Rose pleaded guilty to four counts of handling stolen goods.

Crime scene: a police cordon in place / @ex_cllr_rch

Rose was sentenced to three-and-a-half years' behind bars.

Detective Constable Claire Spiteri, the investigating officer, said: "These prolific burglars showed no regard for the safety of our police officers or the general public.

"The officer received serious injuries through Naulty's actions and may never be able to resume to full duty. He is still suffering long-term consequences from the events of April 14. He was very lucky not to have been killed.

"We are very pleased with the jury's decision to convict Naulty and Rose and the sentences handed out so they can pay the price for their crimes."
T wo hooded thieves have been caught on camera looting 12,000 of cigarettes, alcohol and cash in a south east London shop raid.

CCTV footage shows one of the men ransacking the till before stealing large bottles of spirits from behind the counter of the Catford food and wine store.

One of the burglars is seen pointing at the alcohol he wants while his accomplice lifts down big bottles from the top shelf and hands them over.

Police in Lewisham are now hunting for the two suspects who made off with the goods - estimated to be worth between 10,000 and 12,000 - following the overnight burglary.

On camera: One of the suspects gestures to the alcohol shelf. / Met Police

The break-in happened at Premier convenience store on Bromley Road between 11.45pm on Tuesday, October 18 and 7am the following day.

Detectives believe the thieves got into the convenience store by forcing open the shutters and door at the rear of the shop. The pair then escaped back the way they had arrived.

Jack Daniels: Thieves made off with a bottle of whiskey in the 12,000 raid / Met Police

The first man, thought to be aged between 30 and 40, is described as white, of large build and with a light brown beard.

Raid: One of the suspects loots bottles of spirits from the top shelf and hands them to his accomplice. / Met Police

The second suspect is Asian, aged between 20 and 30 and with black hair and a black full beard.

Detective Constable Victoria Yusuf, investigating with Lewisham's Major Crime Unit, said police are keen to speak to anyone who has been offered cigarettes or alcohol which they think might have been stolen.

DC Yusuf said: We are keen to speak to the two men identified in the CCTV. Do you recognise them? If so, we would urge you to contact us or Crimestoppers.

Anyone with information should call police on 020 8284 8361 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
A woman has been charged with assisting an offender after an attempted murderer who escaped from Pentonville prison was recaptured.

Kelly Baker, 21, of Ilford, east London, will appear at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court on Friday.

She was arrested on Wednesday night as Matthew Baker, 28, was apprehended after three days on the run.

He escaped from the north London jail alongside James Whitlock, 31, who is still being sought by police. It has been claimed he is also staying with friends.

A 33-year-old man who was also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender has been released on bail.

On the run: James Whitlock is charged with 19 counts of burglary / Met Police

Scotland Yard added that on Thursday officers arrested a second woman, aged 24, at an address in Bow, east London, on suspicion of assisting an offender.

She is currently in custody at an east London police station.

A manhunt was launched for Matthew Baker and Whitlock after their escape was discovered shortly before midday on Monday.

According to reports the cellmates' beds had been stuffed with pillows to make them look as though they were sleeping.

The pair are said to have used diamond-tipped cutting equipment to cut through bars before scaling a perimeter wall to freedom.

Baker was found guilty of attempted murder in October after stabbing a man during a dispute and was due to be sentenced on Friday.

Just days after his conviction he used a phone smuggled into prison to post a sinister message to adversaries on Facebook, according to The Sun.

It said: "Let's get one thing straight to anyone who wants to say anythink behind my back.

Whitlock was on remand having been charged with conspiracy to burgle over 19 alleged ATM thefts.
A London coffee shop has split opinion with a sign warning all Americans must be accompanied by an adult.

The "ironic" message was spotted by passers-by outside a cafe in Clerkenwell, near City University, and sparked a flurry of opinion on whether it was witty or offensive.

It comes from the same controversial serial sign-writer and coffee shop boss who owns Jonestown Coffee, which found itself at the centre of an online storm over another sign last month.

Thousands of people have reacted to a photo of the sign posted online  with many Americans teasing Britain amid claims they have no right to talk after the Brexit vote in June.

Danny Sullivan said it was ironic in a country that voted for Brexit.

Joshua Guerci, from San Francisco, said: England brexited, they dont have a right to judge us.

Devin Ganger, from Washington, said: Thats rich, coming from the land of Brexit.

Erik Spiekermann added his own postscript to the sign on Twitter, writing: and Brexiteers must prove to have more than half a brain.

The chalkboard sign was put up by cafe Goswell Road Coffee, in Goswell Road in the city of London.

It comes after the world was left reeling by billionaire businessman Donald Trumps US election victory on Wednesda.

The cafe is owned by Jonestown Coffee, who were criticised after a sign they wrote which read "please don't feed the crackies".

A spokesman for the company said: "Again, our signs are for the LOLz only. We, as a company, have no political view or standing."

An online row quickly broke out on social media between Americans who found the sign funny and those who were offended.

Oliva Ralston, an American living in London, said people had responded with a serious lack of sense of humor.
P ayouts to victims of the Croydon tram tragedy and their families could run to tens of millions, a personal injury lawyer said today.

The tram derailed at high speed in east Croydon, south London shortly after 6am on Wednesday, killing at least seven people and injuring 51.

Eight of the people taken to hospital have serious or life-changing injuries, including amputated limbs.

Paul McNeil, the head of personal injury at Fieldfisher lawyers, said the total compensation would be very, very substantial, running into tens of millions.

Mr McNeil, who acted for families in the Ladbroke Grove, Potters Bar and Clapham Junction rail disasters, said: I would expect there to be a significant number of claims by the people who were injured, and obviously the families of those who sadly died in the accident.

Emergency crews at the scene of the crash (Steve Parsons/PA ) / Steve Parsons/PA

He called for the inquiry to be made public, saying TfL and the tram operators parent company First Group should move swiftly to accept blame and offer pay-outs.

If the insurance companies are proactive, he added, payouts could begin as soon as the cause of the crash had been determined.

However, if they fight the claims, it could be years before victims see any money.

Depending on the outcome of the ongoing inquiry, the money will be provided by the insurers of either TfL or the tram company, First Group.

British Transport Police today appealed for witnesses and said it planned to publish an interim report about the accident next week.

Footage today emerged of the 42-year-old driver, who lives in Beckenham, being arrested at the scene.

Loading....

He is understood to have told police he blacked out before the tram slewed off the rails at up to four times the 12mph speed limit.

He was questioned on suspicion of manslaughter for around 12 hours at a police station before being released on bail until May.

British Transport Police are also investigating reports that a tram almost came off the tracks a week ago in the same place as Wednesdays fatal crash.
T ributes were today paid to a young father who was named by friends as the fourth victim killed in the Croydon tram disaster.

Mark Smith has been named locally as having died along with five other men and one woman, when the tram derailed at speed in east Croydon, south London at 6.10am on Wednesday.

Mr Smith, who worked for his father's double glazing firm, is believed to have been engaged to marry his fiancee Indre Novikovaite. They have a young son.

Devastated friends and relatives described him as a man who always had a smile on his face and made everyone laugh after news of his death emerged.

His cousin, Tom Smith, said his family had been left in bits after the tragedy as he paid tribute to him in a Facebook post.

Tragedy: The tram overturned near Sandilands stop / PA

"The last couple of days have just felt like a nightmare that I'm gonna wake up from, he wrote.

Not only were you my cousin but literally my best friend. The thought that we are all never gonna see you or hear from you again makes me feel sick.

We are all in bits and I just wish you could walk back into your home with that smile on your face and make everyone laugh.

He added: I would give everything if you could come back and join us.

Extra minute's silence to remember Croydon tram crash victims

He is understood to have parked his car at Lloyd Park and got on the tram and was heading for work.

A neighbour said: "We are all devastated. It is especially sad because he had a little son."

Friends have been sharing a photo of a candle on social media with the caption: RIP Marky. Keep this candle burning for Croydon.

Floral tribute left at the scene / Neil Hall/Reuters

He attended Thomas More Roman Catholic High School in Purley before studying at Coulsdon College.

His neighbour, Louise Baldock, said: "No words can express how utterly heartbroken me and my family are to have heard the news that our dear friend and neighbour was taken from us on Wednesday in the Croydon Tram accident.

"Mark you will always be remembered, loved and never forgotten.

Loading....

"Our thoughts are with your devastated family, your loving fiancee Indre, young son and your family and friends. We will miss you forever."

Another friend, Rich Padley, wrote on Facebook: "Trying to find the right words to say in light of the tragic events that happened on Wednesday morning, Marky was one of the nicest guys I've ever met in the car scene, and always made time for anyone.

"RIP dude, the world's a sadder place without you that's for sure, my heart goes out to your loved ones that you've left behind."

Crystal Palace fans 19-year-old Dane Chinnery, and 57-year-old father-of-three Philip Seary have also been named as victims of the tram disaster  Britains worst in a century.

Victim: Friends have paid tribute to Dane Chinnery, 19, killed in the crash in Croydon

Mother-of-two Dorata Rynkiewicz, 35, for New Addington, is also feared dead. Her relatives say that although her death has yet to be confirmed, two days later they now fear the worst.

Dorota Rynkiewicz, 35, pictured with husband Andrzej, a pro golfer

At least 50 other people were hurt with three requiring surgery to have limbs amputated and one being treated for a collapsed lung.

Workers toiled overnight to begin moving the wreckage of the tram.

Victim: Phil Seary was named as one of the victims killed in the Croydon tram disaster / Facebook

It emerged last night that police are investigating passengers reports that the tram, packed with commuters travelling to east Croydon, almost came off the tracks a week earlier at the same spot.

The driver, a 42-year-old man from Beckenham, has been bailed after being questioned by police on suspicion of manslaughter.

A spokeswoman for TfL said it is not yet known when tram services will resume on the stretch.
W orkers toiled overnight to start lifting the wreckage of the Croydon tram which killed seven people when it derailed on Wednesday.

A giant crane arrived at the crash scene on Thursday evening and rail workers spent the night moving the tram into an upright position and back on the tracks.

Six men and one woman were killed and 51 injured when the two-carriage tram crashed on a sharp bend shortly after 6am on Wednesday.

British Transport Police said the wreckage is still at the crash site in Sandilands as crews wait for a lorry to come and remove the ruined tram which could be later on Friday.

Recovery: Workers and a heavy crane arrive at the scene in Croydon. / PA

A worker with London Undergrounds Emergency Response Unit said on Thursday morning that he had worked through the night at the crash site.

In a message posted on Twitter, Danny Hutchings said: Worked throughout the night at the Croydon tram crash site putting tram back on the track.

So sad, thoughts are with all that were involved.

He said there's still "lots of work to be done".

Police are investigating what happened and probing passengers reports that the tram, packed with commuters travelling to east Croydon, almost came off the tracks a week earlier at the same spot.

Tragedy: The tram overturned near Sandilands stop / PA

The driver, a 42-year-old man from Beckenham, has been bailed after being questioned by police on suspicion of manslaughter.

Loading....

British Transport Police said now the tram is upright it will be taken to an investigation site by road.

A spokeswoman for TfL said it is not yet known when tram services will resume on the stretch, but did not rule out Monday next week.
A mericans are searching for homes in London in huge numbers following Donald Trumps shock election victory, according to one of the UK's biggest property websites.

There has been a spike in the number of people based in the United States looking for houses  with London top of the search list.

As it became clear Mr Trump was emerging as the winner of the Presidential Election on Wednesday, Zoopla had 45.3 per cent more traffic from the United States than the average for the previous month.

And the most popular search term for Americans was London.

Disappointed: A Clinton supporter watches the results being announced (McNamee/Getty Images) / Win McNamee/Getty Images

Lawrence Hall, a spokesman for Zoopla, said: "With the outcome of the election now behind us and as the results bring uncertainty for some, early indications show that Americans may be looking at setting their sights on the British property market.

Traffic to Zoopla on November 9 from those based in America was 45.3 per cent higher than on average for the previous 30 days and 25.5 per cent higher than the average for the past six months.

Mr Hall added that London has topped the list for the past six months, with many hunting for homes in Chelsea, Hampstead and Marylebone.

On the day of the election results, the official website offering immigration services to Canada was struggling to cope as millions of Americans tried to access it.

Hillary Clinton supporters in dismay after her defeat 1 /22 Hillary Clinton supporters in dismay after her defeat Donald Trump wins US election A man sits with his head in his hands as he watches the results roll in Michael Clarke American Democratic Party supporters, one in a Wonder Woman costume, react to the news that Donald Trump has won the state of Florida at the Democrats Abroad election night party at Marylebone Sports Bar and Grill in London Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images An American Democratic Party supporter sleeps in the corner as another reacts to Donald Trump winning a state at the Democrats Abroad election night party at Marylebone Sports Bar and Grill in London Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images Supporters of Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton watch election returns showing Donald Trump winning in Texas at the election night rally in New York Rick Wilking/Reuters Donald Trump wins US election This Hillary supporter, at a party in London, anxiously watches the results Michael Clark Supporters of U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton react at her election night rally in Manhattan, New York Shannon Stapleton/Reuters American Democratic Party supporters react to the news that Donald Trump has won the state of Florida at the Democrats Abroad election night party at Marylebone Sports Bar and Grill in London Getty Images A woman reacts to the voting results at Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's election night event at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City Win McNamee/Getty Images Donald Trump wins US election A woman holds her head in her hands after another state was taken by Trump Michael Clark Donald Trump wins US election Anxious wait: A nervous looking woman looks up at TV screens Michael Clark Donald Trump wins US election There were tense scenes as Trump appeared to stride out in front Michael Clark An American Democratic Party supporter reacts after Donald Trump wins the state of Florida at the Democrats Abroad election night party at Marylebone Sports Bar and Grill Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images Donald Trump wins US election This Hillary supporter watches anxiously as the results come in Michael Clark Donald Trump wins US election Two Hillary supporters wave flags as the count carries on Michael Clark Donald Trump wins US election A woman dressed as Wonder Woman checks her phone as the results come in Michael Clark Donald Trump wins US election Two woman sit in dismay as they watch the TV screens showing US election results Michael Clark People react to the voting results at Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's election night event at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City Elsa/Getty Images

It seemed to buckle under the increased pressure as Mr Trump won key swing states Ohio, Florida and North Carolina.

The search term move to Canada was also one of the most searched terms on Google, along with how to impeach Donald Trump and how did Trump win?.

Trump protest: A Donald Trump pinata is burned by people protesting Los Angeles, California (Mario nzuoni/Reuters) / Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

And the hashtag calexit also began trending on Twitter shortly after the results, as Californians threatened to secede the rest of the US.

In the state, which voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, thousands took to the streets in protest of Mr Trumps victory.
* Prevenar vaccine at lowest price for emergencies

* Pfizer to donate proceeds to refugee support groups

* Move follows similar by rival drugmaker GSK (Adds response from MSF, background on pressure)

By Kate Kelland

LONDON, Nov 11 (Reuters) - U.S. pharmaceuticals group Pfizer is to offer its pneumococcal vaccine at the lowest possible price to non-governmental organisations seeking to protect vulnerable people from illness in humanitarian crises.

In what it called a major expansion of its humanitarian assistance work, the drugmaker said its Prevenar 13 shot, which protects babies and children against pneumonia and other diseases, would be offered in a new multi-dose vial at the lowest prevailing global price, currently $3.10 per dose.

"In addition, given the acute need for aid on the ground, Pfizer will donate all sales proceeds for the first year of this program to humanitarian groups undertaking the difficult work of reaching vulnerable populations in emergency settings," the company said in a statement.

The move follows a similar one by the British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, which said in September it would cut the price of its pneumococcal vaccine, Synflorix, to $3.05 when it is used in humanitarian crises.

The price cuts also come after sustained and intense pressure from the international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which had accused the two drugmakers of charging exorbitant prices for the much-needed vaccines.

Prior to GSK's price-cut pledge, MSF said that in Greece, it had been forced to pay 50 pounds ($65) a dose in local pharmacies in order to vaccinate thousands of refugee children fleeing from conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Responding to Pfizer's announcement on Friday, Jason Cone, executive director of MSF-USA, said in a statement it was a welcome development after "years of negotiation".

"This is definitely a step in the right direction and will help to protect millions of vulnerable children around the world and in MSF projects," he said. "We now hope that Pfizer will extend its efforts to developing countries by offering a lower price to all governments which still can't afford to protect their children against pneumonia."

The World Health Organization said last month it was seeking to establish an emergency vaccine supply system aimed at getting vital shots to vulnerable people in crises such as wars or natural disasters.

(Editing by Greg Mahlich and Jane Merriman)
A girl who was on a life-support machine for three days after being taken to hospital last Christmas with a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis has been selected to play with the National Childrens Orchestra of Great Britain.

Becky Parkin, 12, of Twickenham, has suffered from juvenile idiopathic arthritis since she was four. Her mother Alison said that at its worst the condition left Becky with painful swelling all over her body and unable to walk.

But with treatment at Great Ormond Street Hospital and weekly injections she was able to attend primary school and took up the French horn.

Mrs Parkin said: She was in remission for three years and doing fine. The consultant said she could even grow out of it altogether. Then just as she started secondary school she got ill. It got worse over Christmas and we went to our local hospital, the West Middlesex.

Then on New Years Eve she completely crashed. Her blood pressure was off the scale and she was transferred to Great Ormond Street by ambulance. The staff were brilliant and immediately you could see she was getting better but it was a very difficult time.

Becky spent a month in hospital  and had to use a wheelchair  before she could go home. She has now returned to Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton and is playing with the under-12s National Childrens Orchestra and the London Regional Orchestra.

At the Lord Mayors Show tomorrow Becky and four other GOSH patients will be on the Premier Inn UK float after helping to raise 7.5 million towards a new clinical building at the hospital.

Mrs Parkin, whose other children with husband Peter are Rahul, 18, and Anita, 15, said playing music helped lift Beckys spirits and she was thrilled to meet Sarah Willis, a French horn player with the Berlin Philharmonic, last month.

Becky got a place on the orchestra just before she got ill again but they were fantastic and held it open for her, said Mrs Parkin. She missed a lot of school last year and cant do sport like she used to but she loves music as its a chance for her to be like everybody else".
T im Farron today vowed the Liberal Democrats would seek to block Brexit if the Government does not promise a second referendum on the terms of Britains departure from the EU.

But former Tory MP Zac Goldsmith immediately accused him of a cynical ploy to boost Lib-Dem chances in the Richmond Park by-election.

A small number of London Labour MPs are also threatening to vote against triggering Article 50.

The Labour leadership may seek to tie the Governments hands on its Brexit strategy with a reasoned amendment while not blocking legislation. Just three weeks before the Richmond Park by-election, Mr Farron said his party would vote against Article 50 unless ministers committed to a second referendum.

What started with democracy... must not end up with a deal being imposed on the British people, he told BBC radio. But Mr Goldsmith, standing as an independent in the by-election which he triggered over the Government supporting Heathrow expansion, claimed the Lib-Dems were trying to make it an EU referendum re-run.

It is cynical. Their own candidate has emphatically said she does not want a re-run of the referendum, he added.At least five London Labour MPs are threatening to refuse to back Article 50 after the recent High Court ruling.

Catherine West wrote: I stand with the people of Hornsey & Wood Green, and I will vote against Brexit in Parliament.

Voicing genuine distress among constituents, Dulwich MP Helen Hayes said: I would not be representing them if I voted to trigger Article 50 on the basis of no information from the Government. Ealing Central and Acton MP Rupa Huq said she would struggle to support Article 50 as nearly four fifths of my constituents wanted to remain.

David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, is set to vote against Article 50. However, Vauxhall Labour MP Kate Hoey said: British people voted to Leave. Naturally I will vote to trigger A50. Other London Labour MPs not intending to vote against it include Jon Cruddas, Seema Malhotra and Wes Streeting.

Brexit minister David Jones condemned MPs opposing Article 50, saying: They are attempting to thwart and reverse the decision that was taken on June 23.
D owning Street and Ukip today scoffed at a report that the Government may call up Nigel Farage to act as a go-between to smooth relations.

The Daily Telegraph reported that the Government needed to use the acting Ukip leader as an intermediary because ministers had no direct links of their own to the President-elect.

But sources closes to Theresa May said Mr Farage was an irrelevance after Mr Trump and Theresa May enjoyed a cordial telephone conversation, which ended with an invitation to her to visit Washington and him calling Britain a very, very special place.

A source close to Mr Farage told the BBC he had no intention of working with ministers.

Mr Farage was guest star a rally with the tycoon during the election campaign, and is said to be seeking a role in the Trump administration.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox has extensive contacts with US republicans but has not yet met Mr Trump. London MP Mark Field heads the Tory Partys international body, and knows many of the senior Republicans likely to form the administration.

Government sources confirmed to the paper that Dr Fox would travel to America as soon as possible in a bid to engage with Mr Trumps team.
B ritish Airways cabin crew will vote on possible strike action next week after they rejected a 2 per cent salary increase amid a row over poverty pay levels.

Thousands of the airlines mixed fleet employees will be balloted amid claims crew members are being forced to sleep in their cars between shifts because pay is so low.

Unite, the union representing the crew, also said staff are also having to work two to three jobs on their days off to make ends meet.

Since 2010, all new British Airways cabin crew recruits join what is referred to as mixed fleet which includes a combination of working on both long and short haul flights.

Row: The ballot will go out to members next Wednesday / British Airways

Unite said staff were promised salaries up to 25,000 but instead receive basic pay packets which start at 12,000. It added average salaries which include allowances total just 16,000 a year.

Commenting Unite regional officer Matt Smith said: British Airways, once the worlds favourite airline is fast becoming the worlds least liked, paying poverty wages while its parent company predicts annual earnings of 4.7 billion between this year and 2020.

The promise of salaries being between 21,000 and 25,000 for Mixed Fleet cabin crew is a flight of fancy, with BAs offer of a 2 per cent pay rise doing nothing to address pitiful pay levels which are causing dedicated crew real hardship.

It should be to the company's eternal shame that they, the UKs national carrier, are making billions while their cabin crew responsible for maintaining a safe environment are working while sick and without adequate rest.

BA's bosses, City investors and shareholders need to wake up to the anger brewing before Willie Walsh becomes known as the Philip Green of the skies.

A British Airways spokeswoman said: Our pay proposal for our mixed fleet cabin crew is fair, reasonable and consistent with that already accepted by other British Airways colleagues.

It reflects typical pay awards given by other companies in the UK and will ensure their reward levels remain in line with cabin crew at our airline competitors.

We remain open and flexible to discuss this further with our colleagues and the union.

The ballot will close on Wednesday, December 14.
L ondon came to a halt at 11am today as the capital marked the 98th anniversary of the moment that the guns fell silent on the Western Front.

Armistice Day events were held across the country before and after a two minute silence observed to remember the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 when the slaughter of the First World War finally came to an end.

The commemorations were led by Prince Harry who laid a wreath at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire with representatives from the Army, Navy and RAF.

Harry, who left the Army last summer after a 10-year career as an officer which saw him deployed twice in Afghanistan, took the salute from the hundreds of serving personnel and armed forces veterans taking part in the march-past after the service.

Armistice Day 2016 - In pictures 1 /16 Armistice Day 2016 - In pictures Prince Harry lays a wreath at a Service of Remembrance at the Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Darren Staples/PA Prince Harry attending a service of Remembrance at the Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire Chris Radburn/PA An Eden Girls School student at Trafalgar Square Jeremy Selwyn Trafalgar Square Jeremy Selwyn Bromley College students in Trafalgar Square Jeremy Selwyn Bromley College students in Trafalgar Square Jeremy Selwyn Two minutes' silence is observed at Lloyd's of London Philip Toscano/PA Two minutes' silence is observed in Parliament Square Stefan Rousseau/PA Jake Moores, who was a Commodore in the Royal Navy, looks at some of the 19,420 figurines that have been laid out on College Green as part of the 19240 Shrouds of the Somme art installation in Bristol Matt Cardy/Getty Images The early morning autumn sun illuminates some of the 19,420 figurines that have been laid out on College Green as part of the 19240 Shrouds of the Somme art installation in Bristol Matt Cardy/Getty Images French President Francois Hollande arrives to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris Stephan De Sakutin/EPA Sydney Opera House illuminated with red poppies Sam Moody/EPA

He read Rupert Brookes poem The Soldier, written at the beginning of the war, as part of the service.

Yesterday Harry - whose girlfriend, US actress Meghan Markle, is staying with the Prince at his home in the grounds of Kensington Palace - visited Westminster Abbeys Field of Remembrance to lay small wooden crosses with his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh.

Salute: Prince Harry pays tribute to Britain's fallen troops / Getty

In Trafalgar Square thousands attended a special Silence in the Square event led by The Royal British Legion with music and readings from 10am until 11.15am.

The event was hosted by Good Morning Britain presenter Ben Shephard and featured soprano Laura Wright, actors Charlie Clements and Sophie Thompson and Britains Got Talent stars Vox Fortis.

At the Imperial War Museum The Last Post was performed by a bugler in the atrium at 11am followed by the two minutes of silence ended by a second Reveille bugle call.

The violin recital, Allemande from Bachs Partita for solo violin No2 in D minor, was then played on an instrument crafted from sycamore and pine trees from former Western Front battlefields.

Remembrance Day takes place on Sunday when there will be the traditional service and parade takes at the Cenotaph in Whitehall attended by the Queen and political and military leaders.

There will also be dozens of concerts, church services and local commemorative events at war memorials across London.

The annual silence on Armistice Day was first proposed by King George V on November 7 1919, when he said: All locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.
T he Scottish aristocrat charged with trafficking cocaine worth 4.5 million into Kenya came face to face with the 100kg haul today.

Jack Marrian, 31, was arrested in July after Kenyan police and US Drug Enforcement Agency officials in Mombasa found the class A drugs concealed in a Brazilian sugar consignment destined for Uganda.

The slabs of cocaine were presented as evidence at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) headquarters in Nairobi.

Marrian has insisted he is innocent since his arrest.

As the drugs were removed from their individual cases and shown to the crowd, Marrian rocked back and forwards in distress and put his head in his hands.

Held: Marrian was arrested by police in July / AFP/Getty Images

He covered his mouth with a breathing mask when the cocaine was brought towards him.

Accused: Marrian covered his mouth with a breathing mask when the cocaine was brought towards him / AFP/Getty Images

Marrian, who is of the son of Lady Campbell of Cawdor, was due to go on trial at the Kibera Law Courts in Nairobi last month.

However, after it emerged that the authorities had not had time to confirm that the haul was cocaine, the trial was adjourned.

I dont want to start with a case when we still have holes in exhibits," prosecutor James Warui said to magistrates..

The prosecution says documents found on the ship used to transport the cargo named Marrian director of the firm that was to receive the containers.

However, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, which worked with Spanish police to track and seize the shipment in late July, believes Marrian and his co-accused, Kenyan clearing agent Roy Mwanthi, knew nothing of the concealed drugs.

It says Marrian could be a victim of the rip-on, rip-off smuggling method - where smugglers hide drugs in cargo belonging to other people and retrieve them once they have reached their destination.

Investigation: Kenyan police and US Drug Enforcement Agency officials in Mombasa found the class A drugs concealed in a Brazilian sugar consignment destined for Uganda / AFP/Getty Images

Former DEA officer Anthony Coulson, who was in Nairobi at the time of Mr Marrians arrest, has said: "They have made public the fact that an innocent man has been falsely accused of a crime.

"The Kenyan police and prosecutors are fully aware but are pressing ahead with the charges against him."

Nightmare: Marrian's relatives said he had been thrown into a "nightmarish situationm" (AFP/Getty Images)



After his arrest, Marrians aunt Liza Campbell told the Standard: Jack is a hard-working, loyal employee of a large, respectable sugar company.

"He has been thrown into a nightmarish situation by a perfectly normal consignment getting contaminated by smugglers during international transit."

Marrian, who attended Marlborough College, where the Duchess of Cambridge studied, is managing director of Mshale Commodities, the Kenyan importer the prosecution says would have received the drugs.

He is the son of Lady Campbell of Cawdor, daughter of the late Hugh Campbell, the sixth Earl Cawdor. The family estate is the 14th-century Cawdor castle near Nairn in Scotland.
T he ex-wife of a globe-trotting tycoon is fighting for half their 2 million family home after being told she will be cut out of the majority of his fortune.

International diplomat and businessman Edward Magiera has offered his ex-wife Eve just 10 per cent of their wealth, despite 27 years of marriage and three children together.

Millionaire Mr Magiera also obtained an injunction banning her from entering their house in Chiswick, as the divorce battle turned acrimonious.

Mrs Magiera told the Court of Appeal she has been left with absolutely no capital, while her ex-husband continues to earn significant sums, and de- manded the sale of their London home so she can receive a 1 million payout.

Her claim is challenged by Mr Magiera, 58, who says English courts have no business becoming involved in the Polish pairs financial wrangling.

The couple married in London in 1985  building up an international property portfolio, including a south of France house, a Warsaw flat and the Chiswick home  but separated in 2001.

In 2004 Mr Magiera was granted a High Court injunction to stop her from coming to the London house. It still remains in force.

They finalised the divorce in France in 2013 and the Chiswick property is now occupied by the warring couples children. Mrs Magiera insists it should be sold and the proceeds split down the middle to give her enough to live on.

In parallel proceedings in Poland, her ex-husband is claiming that he is entitled to keep 90 per cent of the marital assets.

Michael Horton, representing Mr Magiera, said an order to sell the Chiswick home and split the proceeds would be incompatible with what he is seeking in Poland.

He accused Mrs Magiera of forum shopping by taking the case to the British courts to try to get a better deal, as there has already been a divorce settlement in France and an ongoing court battle in their native Poland.

However, Timothy Amos, QC, representing Mrs Magiera, said the husband is mounting a relentless legal filibuster to stop her getting a fair share of the family wealth.

He argued Mrs Magiera is joint owner of the Chiswick house and is entitled to sell her half to pay her living costs, pointing out the Polish courts might take 12 years to reach a conclusion.

The wife needs the courts protection but can ill afford this litigation, he said. The husbands present application is a filibuster aimed at stymying the wifes legitimate request to sell their joint London property.

The judges reserved their decision and will give it at a later date.
B oris Johnson has struck up a friendship with Donald Trumps running mate  after calling for an end to the collective whingerama around the election of the billionaire.

Vice president-elect Mike Pence phoned the Foreign Secretary last night and spoke warmly of the Anglo-US special relationship.

Sources say their conversation was strikingly friendly and Mr Pence told the Brexit-backing Tory that he had huge personal admiration for him and had watched your success from afar. It ended with an invitation to meet and have formal discussions.

Mr Johnson tweeted today: Just spoken to US VP-elect @mike_pence. We agreed on importance of the special relationship & need to tackle global challenges together.

Mr Pence replied on Twitter that they discussed Americas longstanding and close relationship with the UK.

During the call he is said to have enthused about a fantastic opportunity for two nations with a shared past and a special relationship.

The phone call arrived during a dinner in Belgrade hosted by the Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vucic. It is believed to be Mr Pences first to a foreign dignitary.

Earlier, Mr Johnson called on Mr Trumps critics to stop being negative about the US election result. Its time we were overwhelmingly optimistic about the possibility here, and if I may respectfully say to my European friends and colleagues, that its time we snapped out of general doom and gloom about this election and the collective whingerama, he said.

He once described Mr Trump as frankly unfit to hold the office of President of the United States.

Downing Street today scoffed at a report that the Government could ask Nigel Farage to act as a go-between with Mr Trump.

Sources closes to Theresa May said the Ukip interim leader was an irrelevance after the President-elect invited the PM to visit Washington.

A source close to Mr Farage told the BBC he had no intention of working with ministers. He was guest at a Trump election rally.
A professional hunter charged over the killing of Cecil the lion has walked free from court after charges brought against him were dropped.

Theo Bronkhorst was accused of helping US dentist Walter Palmer kill Cecil with a bow and arrow outside Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe in July last year.

While no action was taken against Mr Palmer amid a fierce international backlash, Mr Bronkhorst was with failing to prevent an unlawful hunt.

But a Zimbabwean court has now thrown out the charges.

Cecil the lion, pictured in the Hwange National Park, in Hwange, Zimbabwe / AP

Mr Bronkhorsts legal team applied to the High Court to aside the charge, arguing could not have been an offence under the country's wildlife laws if Mr Palmer had a permit to hunt.

His lawyer Lovemore Muvhiringi said: The court granted us that prayer yesterday - that the charges be quashed. So I cannot imagine the state coming back again charging him with the same charge.

Mr Bronkhorst was accused of laying bait to lure Cecil out of the park. Mr Palmer said at the time that no one in his hunting party realized the targeted lion was Cecil

Cecil had been fitted with a collar to track his movements but strayed outside the confines of Hwange National Park and was then shot.

The lion was considered a prize asset at the park and was being monitored as part of an Oxford University study into conservation.
D onald Trump was accused of fanning the flames of unrest in the aftermath of his election triumph as protests erupted across the US.

Rather than speak out to try and calm rising tensions, the new US President-Elect took to Twitter to complain about the demonstrations and brand them very unfair.

On the campaign trail, the billionaire property tycoon became notorious for frequently insulting political rivals and journalists over Twitter.

Mr Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet on social media since his shock victory on Tuesday and there was speculation that his aides had wrestled control of his Twitter account away from him to tame his online presence.

Riots break out after Donald Trump US wins Presidential Election 1 /14 Riots break out after Donald Trump US wins Presidential Election Protesters march on their way to Waterfront Park in Portland Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP Protesters in Minneapolis after Donald Trump's win Adam Bettcher/Reuters Protesters cross the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP Protest: Anti-Trump activists gather in Portland Mark Graves/The Oregonian/OregonLive.com via AP A police officer looks on at protesters Steve Dipaola/Reuters Arrest: Police detain a demonstrator during a protest in Portland Steve Dipaola/Reuters Anti-Trump protest: A man looks at broken glass after a riot swept through the area Steve Dipaola/Reuters A driver's windshield was damaged after she drove in the area with protesters demonstrating against Tuesday's U.S. presidential election results Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP Oakland police officers dawn gas masks as tensions raise as demonstrators block streets before marching in protest against President-elect Donald Trump Peter Da Silva/EPA A demonstrator pleads others to stand back from the police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California following the election Stephen Lam/Reuters A masked demonstrator scuffles with police officers during a demonstration following the election of Donald Trump as President-elect Stephen Lam/Reuters

But he was back on the offensive after going to the White House yesterday with wife, Melania, to meet President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election, he tweeted. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

His remarks came as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets for a second night running to express their anger over Mr Trumps surprise defeat of Democratic favourite Hillary Clinton.

Protesters in Portland aftter Trump's win / Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP

Riot police in Portland, Oregon, clashed with protesters who smashed cars and shop windows and sparked fires. Discontent with the President-elect turned violent and law enforcement officials announced after nightfall that the protests had turned into a riot with demonstrators marching onto major highways.

A police officer looks on at protesters (Steve Dipaola) / Steve Dipaola/Reuters

Due to extensive and criminal and dangerous behaviour, protest is now considered a riot, the Portland Police Department said in a tweet.

Demonstrations continued from East Coast to West, including one outside Mr Trump's home, Trump Tower, in New York, for the second night running and a march involving more than 6,000 people in Oakland, California, that turned ugly.

Thousands marched through Denver, Dallas, Baltimore, Washington DC and Philadelphia, holding signs emblazoned with slogans like Not Our President and Make America Safe For All.

Critics said Mr Trump had no evidence to back his claim that the protests - most of which were peaceful - were being initiated by professional agitators.

Here we go, again, said Republican strategist Ana Navarro. Trump tweeting against protestors and the media. Well, it was nice to see him be presidential for all of, what40 hours?

Anti-Trump protest: A man looks at broken glass after a riot swept through the area (Steve Dipaola) / Steve Dipaola/Reuters

David Axelrod, chief strategist for Obama's presidential campaigns, also took a jab at the former reality TV star.

Not a good look for the POTUS-elect, he said. Instead of reaching out, he reaches for his Twitter account. Again! Winners don't whine. They heal.

The media-bashing tweet appeared to be at odds with the conciliatory tone Mr Trump has adopted since winning the election.

In a second tweet, sent nine minutes earlier, Mr Trump struck a friendlier attitude describing his great chemistry with Mr Obama and adding, Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!

Asked about the protesters, Mr Trump's former campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, defended his ability to unite the country.

I would just commend the protestors to listen to Donald Trump from his victory speech, where he said, 'I will be a president for all Americans, including those who did not support me and who don't support me, she told CNN.

Mr Trump has yet to address the American public since making his victory speech in the early hours of Wednesday morning in which he offered an olive branch to Mrs Clintons supporters and pledged to seek to unify the country after one of the most divisive presidential election campaigns in US history.

Asked yesterday about his priorities once he moves into the White House in January, Mr Trump listed healthcare, immigration and big league jobs. He didnt offer any more details.
D onald Trump must be taught what Europe is and how it works, EU president Jean-Claude Juncker has claimed.

Mr Juncker told students in Luxembourg that the new President-elect's shock win in the US election has put Americas relationship with Europe at risk.

He said during a conference: The election of Trump poses the risk of upsetting intercontinental relations in their foundation and in their structure.

We will need to teach the president-elect what Europe is and how it works.

At risk: President of the EU Commission Jean-Claude Juncker says Donald Trump could jeopardise America's relationship with the EU / AP

Mr Juncker added that he believed it would take Mr Trump two years before he visited Europe.

I think we will waste two years before Mr Trump tours the world he does not know," he said.

The EU president spoke on Thursday of his concerns over the billionaire businessmans views on global trade, climate policy and Western security.


F ar-right activist Tommy Robinson has been pictured holding a gun atop an Israeli tank in a war-torn region of the Middle East.

The former leader of the English Defence League (EDL) posted the photo on Wednesday from the Golan Heights, an area of Syria occupied by Israel since 1967.

He added the caption: All those people telling me to be careful in Israel, I think Ill be okay.

Mr Robinson has been on an eye-opening tour of the Jewish state since landing on Tuesday, posting photos and videos of his exploits to Twitter.

In a clip from the Golan Heights he claims to have heard the dropping of bombs from across the Syrian border.

One picture shows him in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank, the scene of much fighting and bloodshed in recent years, posing next to a sign which forbids Israelis from entering a Palestinian area.

The far-right campaigner appears to be travelling alongside a writer known as Brian of London, who blogs for website Israellycool, having moved to the country in 2009.

In one video filmed in an Israeli settlement built on Palestinian territory, a practice deemed illegal by the United Nations, Mr Robinson says: Im here because I want to understand the difference.

People say there can be no peace because of these settlements. Well Im walking round this settlement now and we found the pub.

He adds: Im having a great time  its very eye-opening.

One of the places we are gonna go which I dont really think is a good idea is a Hamas-controlled refugee camp because I want to see it all.

Hamas is a Palestinian fundamentalist political party which controls the Gaza strip. Israel has often accused it of fostering extremism, which Hamas denies.

Mr Robinson, who left the EDL in 2009, arrived in Israel on Tuesday, tweeting: The eagle has landed.

He later followed it with: Just walked into a pub in Israel. My home from home.

The trip has taken in a meeting with a priest in Bethlehem, a trip through the Jordan Valley and visits to museums.

His travelling partner and tour guide, Brian of London, says in one clip inside a pub: "I'm very proud to have brought Tommy here. He's having a good time."

In 2015 Mr Robinson became involved in the UK branch of Pegida, a German-based organisation opposed to the Islamisation of our countries.

At the launch he said: "I'm not far-right Im just opposed to Islam. I believe its backward and its fascist. The current refugee crisis is nothing to do with refugees."

"Its a Muslim invasion of Europe," he added.
A Muslim woman has been hit with a 30,000 fine for wearing a niqab at a town hall in Italy, it has been reported.

The 40-year-old woman wore the full-body veil at a youth parliament meeting in Pordenone, north-east Italy, last month, Messaggero Veneto reported.

According to the newspaper, she was asked to remove the veil by the towns mayor so she could be identified but the woman, who attended with her son, refused.

The woman, who has lived in Italy for 16 years, was initially sentenced to four months imprisonment and a 600 fine.

This was later converted to a 30,000 fine.

Despite the country not having a ban on burkas, Italian law dictates that people should not keep their faces covered for long periods of time.
P olice lobbed stun grenades and flares at crowds of rioters after anti-Trump protests in the US turned violent.

Video from riots in Portland, Oregon, shows police firing the explosives into the crowd in a bid to scatter demonstrators who gathered on Thursday night.

The footage shows flashes of light and clouds of smoke as police in riot gear clash with the mob in a second night of anti-Trump rallies.

Police said they used flashbangs on the crowd after demonstrators tried to block streets and bridges.

Clash: Police in riot gear came up against protesters as rallies turned violent. / AP

Officers with Portland Police called it an unlawful protest and reported objects were being thrown at them and vandalism on the streets.

Portland Police said: After several orders to disperse, police have used less lethal munitions to effect arrests and move the crowd.

Rally: Police arrested 29 people in Oregon in a second night of protests following Mr Trump's shock election victory. / AP

They said 29 people were arrested during the riot.

Fresh rioting broke out for a second night on Thursday after Mr Trumps shock election victory.

Stun grenade: Footage taken from above shows bright flashes and clouds of smoke. / AP

Activists hit the streets for another wave of protests with hundreds gathering outside the Republicans buildings in New York and Chicago.

On the first night after the billionaire businessmans win, thousands surrounded his penthouse home Trump Tower chanting not my president.

Oregon voted for Hillary Clinton in the US election.
P rince Charles's state visit to the Gulf has left many influential figures, both in the region and at home, feeling better about Britain and its place in the world.

The photographs from the tour  of a smiling Charles sword-dancing in Oman or shopping in a Bahraini souk with the Duchess of Cornwall  tell some of the story, but certainly not all of it.

For if you looked only at the images, the subtle diplomatic, business and cultural benefits could easily be lost. There is a much bigger picture at play here  the trip was a serious, complex undertaking and crucial for Britains interests in the area.

At a time of growing uncertainty, as the world focuses on the fallout of Donald Trumps victory in the US presidential elections, Charles has been in the heart of the Muslim world, strengthening and reinforcing Britains long-standing relationships with Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

His seven-day visit has encompassed 50 engagements, four cities, five flights, numerous helicopter rides and serious talks with the most influential leaders and heads of state.

The visit is seen by Charles, the Queen and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as crucial. From my ringside seat in the press corps, I too believe it can have real power and impact.

Prince Charles and Camilla tour a Souk as part of their visit to the Middle East (Arthur Edwards/Getty Images) / Getty Images

This is exemplified by the fact that this visit could spark a Gulf-wide expansion for British companies  success which would last long after the royals have flown home and the flags and bunting have been binned.

BUT Prince Charles is not some cheap deal maker with slick patter and list of new proposals, promoting Great Britain plc like a super salesman. That is not what he does and he never has.

The Queen, at 90, has indicated she will no longer carry out long-haul trips. Charles, 68 on Monday, represents her and clearly commands respect on the international stage.

He is aware and mindful of the economic needs of a post-Brexit Great Britain, the nation he will one day reign over.

This is the Princes fourth visit to the region in four years, at the request of the British government, promoting the UKs partnership in the region in key areas such as religious tolerance, military cooperation, supporting women in leadership, creating youth opportunities, preserving cultural heritage and wildlife conservation.

In truth it is the positive and unique long-standing relationship between our royal family  and particularly Charles  and the royal families of this region that helps so many direct and indirect opportunities to flower.

During his visit Charles opened a new welfare block at Britains naval facility in Manama, Bahrain and met sailors on board HMS Middleton.

The unit, built on land gifted by the government, is using wastewater treatment technology deployed by award-winning British firm Bluewater Bio, a global specialist in technologies for cost-efficient, environmentally friendly water and wastewater treatment.

Its technology will help to clean the previously polluted water at the bay, helping to conserve the mangrove forest and protect Tubli Bay from further degradation.

The firm now plans to broaden its business across the region, an expansion which will be worth millions of pounds.

Xan Morgan, Middle East director of Bluewater Bio, said: The reality is that the visit from the Prince of Wales will be a powerful catalyst to our Gulf-wide expansion plans.

Richard Haddon, the firms executive chairman, said: We are delighted that our work at Tubli has been a resounding success and one that has exceeded the expectations of the client.

As a British-based company whose operations have been firmly established in the country for nearly 10 years, we are proud to call Bahrain our Middle East hub.

Tubli continues to serve as a compelling showcase of our capabilities and technology, further strengthening our position both regionally and internationally. Tubli has been a true win-win project.

Charles and Camillas trip to Bahrain was the final leg of a tour in which both embraced subjects close to their hearts  and some unusual photocalls.

Their first stop, Oman, produced the headline-grabbing photographs of Prince Charles wielding a 3ft sword in a ceremonial dance held to welcome the couple to the country.

IN Abu Dhabi, Camilla faced up to her fear of falcons at a world-class falconry hospital, refusing to hold one of the birds of prey but eventually allowing a young owl called Baby to hop on to her hand.

Off the coast, the Prince saw first hand the impact of conservation work on the tiny island of Bu Tinah, where he raced along in a dune buggy and took a boat tour to see important marine and coastal ecosystems.

Charles, a long-time champion of the need for environmental and business sustainability, also made a powerful address to business leaders in Dubai in which he warned there was a very real risk of a climate change disaster.

He told them: We are facing what I believe is perhaps the greatest challenge ever faced by our economy and society.

I have been finding the struggle somewhat exhausting and frustrating over the past 25 to 30 years to overcome the deniers and sceptics. If we are honest, we know all too clearly that we cant go on as we are.

Also in Dubai, Camilla visited patients at the new Al Jalila Childrens Speciality Hospital, the UAEs first dedicated childrens hospital, which has partnerships with Alder Hey in Liverpool and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.

Engagements in Bahrain, their final destination, have included a trip to a souk and to the countrys oldest Hindu temple.

Their trip ended today, with Charles paying homage to the fallen at a remembrance service in Manama.

The Prince, dressed in naval uniform, met senior military representatives and UK veterans before taking seat for the service and laying a wreath at the war memorial.

It was a fitting end to a highly successful state visit in which Charles, as heir to the throne, has provided a reassuring sense of stability in a changing world.@theroyaleditor
A US student fabricated a story that she was attacked and her hijab was ripped off, US authorities have said.

The woman, who studies at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, admitted to police that she made up the story following Donald Trumps election victory.

Mr Trump  who has called for an outright ban on Muslims entering the US  swept to victory in the Presidential election on Wednesday.

His threats have sparked fear among many US Muslims.

Donald Trump blames 'professional protesters' as fresh rioting breaks out after US election

The Lafayette case was one of several reports of hate crimes against Muslim women across the US following Mr Trumps electoral win.

In a statement the Lafayette Police Department said the student had admitted that she fabricated the story about her physical attack as well as the removal of her hijab and wallet by two white males.

Donald Trump - In pictures 1 /112 Donald Trump - In pictures President Donald Trump takes the oath of office as his wife Melania Trump holds the bible and his son Barron Trump looks on, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC Getty Images Acceptance speech Republican president-elect Donald Trump gives a thumbs up to the crowd during his acceptance speech at his election night event at the New York Hilton Midtown in the early morning hours of 9 November 2016 in New York Getty Images Little Trump Donald Trump pictured when he was 4 years old Donald J Trump/Instagram The Trump Princess Donald Trump waves to reporters in 1988 with his first wife Ivana as they board their yacht 'The Trump Princess' in New York AP Donald Trump stands next to one of his three Sikorsky helicopters at New York Port Authority's West 30 Street Heliport in 1988 Out on the town Trump and his first wife Ivana arrive at a social engagement in New York in December 1989 AFP/Getty Images Surviving at the top Trump followed up his successful book The Art of the Deal with Surviving At The Top in 1990 Random House Meeting the King of Pop With Michael Jackson in 1990 FilmMagic Taking a break with Miss Universe contestants Donald Trump meets Miss Universe contestants during a break in rehearsals in the Imperial Ballroom at Atlantis, Paradise Island, Bahamas in 1990 Miss Universe Organization via AP Genie of the lamp Donald Trump stands next to a genie lamp in 1990 as the lights of his Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort mark its grand opening in Atlantic City AP Marla's wedding day Donald and Marla Trump at their wedding in 1993 AP Donald Trump with daughter Ivanka at a Harley Davidson Cafe Event, New York City on 9 October 1993 Rex Features New arival Marla and Donald Trump leave St. Mary's Hospital in West Palm Beach, Florida with their newborn baby girl, Tiffany on 14 October 1993 AP Behind the lens Donald Trump takes a picture of Bridget Marks in 1993 after interviewing her for Playboy magazine's 40th anniversary playmate in New York AFP/Getty Images Top Trump New York real estate giant Donald Trump poses in his Trump Tower office on a giant letter "T" on 08 May 1996 AFP/Getty Images New love interest Donald Trump and Melania arrive for VH1's Divas Live concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City on 13 April 1999 Getty Images Toasting in the New Year Donald Trump and Melania toast the new year during Trump's gala bash in 2000 The Sun-Sentinel/AP Wax work A wax replica of Donald Trump stands ready to be put on display at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, New York City in 2000 Madame Tussaud's/Getty Images Rebuild call Donald Trump talks in 2005 to reporters where he presented a proposal that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center be rebuilt in New York Reuters Cracking prformance Amy Poehler, Tracy Morgan, Donald Trump, Seth Myers, Maya Rudolph perform on Saturday Night Live in 2002 Rex Features 'How To Get Rich' Donald Trump poses with a copy of his new book 'How To Get Rich' during a book signing on 24 March 2004 at Barnes and Noble in Lincoln Center in New York Getty Images Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka (left) and girlfriend Melania Knauss (right) attend the "Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century" Costume Institute benefit gala on April 26, 2004 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City Getty Images Fired up figure Donald Trump poses with the new Donald Trump 12-inch talking doll 29 September 2004 at the Toys "R" Us store in New York City Getty Images Olympic flame Donald Trump carries the Olympic flame during Day 15 of the Athens 2004 Olympic Torch Relay on 19 June 19, 2004 in New York Getty Images Donald Trump on The Celebrity Apprentice (2005) Rex Features Anyone for golf? Donald Trump gestures as he arrives at the Old Course in St Andrews where he was meeting with the media to answer questions regarding Trump International Golf Links on 28 April 2005 in St Andrews, Scotland Getty Images Hollywod star Donald Trump, billionaire developer and producer of NBC's "The Apprentice," with his wife, Melania, and their son, Barron, pose for a photo after he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles in 2007 AP In the Highlands U.S. property mogul Donald Trump gestures during a media event on the sand dunes of the Menie estate, the site for Trump's proposed golf resort, near Aberdeen, north east Scotland on 27 May 2010 Reuters Donald Trump plays a round of golf after the opening of the The Trump International Golf Links Course in Scotland in 2012 Getty Images Family time Donald Trump, Barron Trump and Melania Trump attends Trump Invitational Grand Prix Mar-a-Lago Club at The Mar-a-Largo Club on 04 January 2015 in Palm Beach, Florida Getty Images Officially in the running U.S. Republican presidential candidate, real estate mogul and TV personality Donald Trump poses with his family after formally announcing his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination during an event at Trump Tower in New York on 16 June 2015 Reuters Love, life and laughter Donald Trump sits with his wife Melania Trump while appearing at an NBC Town Hall at the Today Show on 21 April 2016 in New York City. Getty Images Thumbs up Donald Trump speaks on the last day of the Republican National Convention on 21 July 2016, in Cleveland, AFP/Getty Images Don't cry for me ... Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds babies at a campaign rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado on 29 July 2016 Reuters Donald Trump eating KFC on his private jet in August 2016 Is this really the Oval Office? Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump views a replica of the Oval Office on a tour of the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan on 30 September 2016 Reuters Women for Trump Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump kisses a "Women for Trump" placard during a rally at the Lakeland Linder Regional Airport in Lakeland, Florida on 12 October 2016 AFP/Getty Images In debate Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speak during the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, America on 09 October 2016 AP Love your country The future is orange: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump hugs a U.S. flag on 24 October 2016 Reuters U.S. President-elect U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks at his election night rally in Manhattan, New York, U.S. on 09 November 2016 Reuters 60 Minutes Donald Trump and wife Melania being interviewed on 13 November 2016 by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes 60 Minutes/CBS At The Whiie House US President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump meet in the Oval Office of the White House on 10 November 2016 EPA Kiss-story Republican president-elect Donald Trump embraces his wife Melania Trump during his election night event at the New York Hilton Midtown in the early morning hours of 09 November 2016 in New York Getty Images Person of the Year U.S. President-elect Donald Trump poses on the cover of Time Magazine after being named its person of the year, in a picture provided by the publication in New York on 7 December 2016 Time Magazine Meeting Kanye U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and musician Kanye West pose for media at Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York on 13 December 2016 Reuters First Press Conference President-elect Donald Trump stands with his son Eric Trump (left) daughter Ivanka and son Donald Trump Jr. (right) on 11 January 2017 Reuters US President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence take part in a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington,Virginia 19 on January 2017 AFP/Getty Images Big shoes to fill: US President-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania arrive to attend an inauguration concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on 19 January 2017 AFP/Getty Images President-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania arrive for a VIP reception and dinner with donors in Washington on 19 January 2017 AP British Prime Minister Theresa May and U.S. President Donald Trump walk along The Colonnade of the West Wing at The White House on January 27, 2017 in Washington, DC Getty Images Pope Francis walks along with US President Donald Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump during a private audience at the Vatican in May 2017 AFP/Getty Images US President Donald Trump inspects border wall prototypes in March 2018 AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Theresa May and U.S. President Donald Trump walk to a joint news conference at Chequers in July 2018 Reuters US President Donald Trump takes the hand of Prime Minister Theresa May as they enter Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire in July 2018 PA A six-meter high cartoon baby blimp of US President Donald Trump is set to fly as a protest against his visit July 2018 AP Activists inflate a giant balloon depicting US President Donald Trump as an orange baby during a demonstration against Trump's visit to the UK in Parliament Square, London July 2018 AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump with The Queen in July 2018 AP German Chancellor Angela Merkel deliberates with US president Donald Trump on the sidelines of the official agenda on the second day of the G7 summit on June 9, 2018 in Charlevoix, Canada Getty Images President Donald Trump meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Sentosa Island in Singapore on 12 June 2018 Evan Vucci/AP U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland in July 2018 Reuters US President Donald Trump meets with rapper Kanye West in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on 18th October 2018 AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian posed for a photograph together at the White House meeting Donald Trump/Twitter A White House staff member reaches for the microphone held by CNN's Jim Acosta as he questions U.S. President Donald Trump during a news conference in November 2018 Reuters President Donald Trump looks over tables of fast food for the the college football playoff champion Clemson Tigers in the State Dining Room of the White House in January 2019 Reuters US President Donald Trump (L) shakes hands with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un following a meeting at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi on February 27, 2019 AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump (left) with Nigel Farage when they met met face-to-face on 2nd March 2019 PA/White House President Donald Trump smiles at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, after signing a proclamation in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House in Washington, Monday, March 25, 2019 AP US President Donald Trump (L) First Lady Melania Trump (C) and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe' Akie Abe (R) watch a sumo battle during the Summer Grand Sumo Tournament in Tokyo on May 26, 2019 AFP/Getty Images President Donald Trump gestures after receiving a prayer at McLean Bible Church on 2nd June 2019 AP US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump make their way to board Air Force One on 2nd June 2019 AFP/Getty Images Donald and Melania Trump arrive at Stansted Airport on 3rd June 2019 AP President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are pictured ahead a meeting in Helsinki on July 16, 2018 AFP/Getty Images Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg watches as Donald Trump enters the United Nations to speak with reporters on September 23, 2019 Reuters Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson shakes hands with U.S. President Donald Trump during a welcoming ceremony at the NATO leaders summit in Watford on December 4, 2019 Reuters President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2020, in Milwauke AP US president Donald Trump delivers a speech at the Congres center during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 21, 2020 AFP via Getty Images US President Donald Trump speaks during the first presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio AFP via Getty Images A car with US President Trump drives past supporters in a motorcade outside of Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland AFP via Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump works in the Presidential Suite while receiving treatment after testing positive for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland via Reuters U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a phone call with Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley October 4, 2020, in his conference room at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Not shown in the photo also in the room on the call is Chief of Staff Mark Meadows Reuters Donald Trump walks out of hospital after receiving treatment for Covid-19 AP Mr Trump boards Marine One to return to the White House after receiving treatment for coronavirus AP Donald Trump stands on the Truman Balcony after returning to the White House from hospital Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump removes his mask upon return to the White House from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 05, 2020 in Washington Getty Images

This incident is no longer under investigation.

According to The Washington Post the female student had told police she had been beaten and robbed by two white men, one wearing a white Trump hat, who then ripped off her hijab.
T here is fear in America this week, and the best place to witness the confusion is in the classroom.

My 13-year-old sons teacher was weeping on Wednesday morning. Like her colleagues, she has no idea how to promote or enforce the schools code of conduct when the President-elect is a bully, a misogynist, and is accused of sexual assault.

Perhaps you can tell most about an election by looking at who is happiest with the outcome. The North Carolina chapter of the Ku Klux Klan is holding a victory parade next month, and has a picture of Donald Trump on the front page of its website. The Kremlin is also pleased. President Putin sees a major strategic opportunity. Mr Trump has spoken about the advantages of improving relations with Moscow, especially over the Syrian crisis.

The Right-wing, conspiracy-spewing blogosphere is ecstatic.

Riots break out after Donald Trump US wins Presidential Election 1 /14 Riots break out after Donald Trump US wins Presidential Election Protesters march on their way to Waterfront Park in Portland Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP Protesters in Minneapolis after Donald Trump's win Adam Bettcher/Reuters Protesters cross the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP Protest: Anti-Trump activists gather in Portland Mark Graves/The Oregonian/OregonLive.com via AP A police officer looks on at protesters Steve Dipaola/Reuters Arrest: Police detain a demonstrator during a protest in Portland Steve Dipaola/Reuters Anti-Trump protest: A man looks at broken glass after a riot swept through the area Steve Dipaola/Reuters A driver's windshield was damaged after she drove in the area with protesters demonstrating against Tuesday's U.S. presidential election results Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP Oakland police officers dawn gas masks as tensions raise as demonstrators block streets before marching in protest against President-elect Donald Trump Peter Da Silva/EPA A demonstrator pleads others to stand back from the police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California following the election Stephen Lam/Reuters A masked demonstrator scuffles with police officers during a demonstration following the election of Donald Trump as President-elect Stephen Lam/Reuters

Poor President Obama. He handled the occasion with the grace and dignity we have come to expect, but the Oval Office encounter with his successor yesterday was a true humiliation. He had to act as if it was just a routine transfer of power. But at the same time, Obama knows that his prized healthcare reforms will be quickly reversed. The Iran nuclear deal is also vulnerable, however much European allies want to keep it intact.

Imagine spending eight years on building a better home and then someone sets it casually on fire.

Portland, Oregon police used flash-bangs some sort of smoke or tear gas to disperse protesters

This has been an exceptionally cruel week, even by this citys tough standards. The President spent years campaigning for his achievements against a Congress that saw him as the enemy. Now the advances are finished. His reforms are toast.

So where will the opposition to Mr Trump come from? Congress is in the hands of Republicans; Democrats are in disarray. The courts will be reluctant to intervene.

So it is left to small groups of activists to challenge the Trump ascendancy. Those I watched outside the White House last night are making a purely token effort. They know they can do little more than wait for the next election season, four long years away.

Robert Moore is the ITV News Washington correspondent.
Changes in 2014 to federal reverse mortgage regulations have shifted this senior safety net away from its traditional role as a loan of last resort to keep the elderly in their homes. Reverse mortgages now serve as a financial planning tool for the waves of middle-class baby boomers facing retirement.

In 2014, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, eased the rules on Home Equity Conversion Mortgages, or HECMs, in two significant ways.

Search for the lowest mortgage rates

The new reverse mortgage rules

Previously, full repayment of reverse mortgages fell due upon the death of the borrower, sometimes forcing a surviving spouse to sell the home or face foreclosure. Now, HUD allows non-borrowing spouses of reverse mortgage borrowers who pass away or enter assisted living to remain in their home, provided they use it as their permanent residence and continue to pay taxes, insurance and association fees.

In a second but related change, HUD allows qualified borrowers to obtain an HECM even if their non-borrowing spouse is younger than age 62, with the caveat that the loan's principal amount will be actuarially based on the age of the younger spouse. Toward that end, HUD released new loan amount tables that apply to non-borrowing spouses of ages 18 to 61.

Prior to the change, both the borrowing and non-borrowing spouse had to be at least 62.

The last major boomer-friendly reverse mortgage tweak came in 2009, when the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, announced its HECM for Purchase Program, which enabled qualified seniors to downsize or relocate by using a reverse mortgage to purchase their new home, thereby saving on closing costs.

How to extract money from your home. copyright Ziven/Shutterstock.com

The impetus behind the change

The 2014 reverse mortgage makeover came about in part as the result of a longstanding legal challenge by AARP, which argued that even non-borrowing spouses should be protected as homeowners from eviction and foreclosure under reverse mortgages. AARP also recognized a trend popular during the housing crisis: HECM applicants would remove their spouse from the home's title before taking a reverse mortgage in order to maximize their loan amount.

Story continues

Such moves not only generated tons of bad press for lenders, who appeared to be throwing widows to the curb, but in many cases saddled them with additional risk.

"Say you've extended amounts of money to a 75-year-old and now you have a 71-year-old continuing to live in the house. That loan may possibly have a longer duration than the lender anticipated," says Peter Bell, president of the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association. "Now, going forward, they can underwrite to the 71-year-old."

Added protection for consumers

Ramsey Alwin, vice president of economic security for the National Council on Aging, applauds the new HECM rules for protecting non-borrowing spouses, lenders and the FHA, which insures the loans. But she points out that those protections may not please all consumers.

Couple sitting with adviser copyright Goodluz/Shutterstock.com

copyright Goodluz/Shutterstock.com

"Given the use of actuarial tables in determining the loan amount, it's going to be a smaller draw as a result," she says. "That may squeeze out some of the individuals who are in crisis mode. But generally speaking, the new policies strengthen the product, protect the consumer and make it well-poised to be an important long-term financial planning tool, most likely for the more moderate- to higher-income population."

Kevin Sandifer, a reverse mortgage attorney based in Columbia, South Carolina, would rather his borrowers had been given a say in the matter.

Limits on borrowing power

"I wonder what would happen if you put an either-or provision in there," he says. "Maybe the borrower could sign a disclaimer that says, 'We've taken care of my wife with a term-life policy; she doesn't want to live here because her family is far away, but we need the higher borrowing amount to be able to pay off our mortgage.' In my opinion, you're forcing all the borrowers to take a lesser amount if they have a non-borrowing spouse."

Overall, he considers the new rules "well-intentioned. I don't think there's a 'gotcha' in there for the consumer." What concerns him is, "it just limits the pool (of applicants)."

"Financial planning is great when everything works for you and you have your own nest egg set aside. But in the real world, things don't always work as planned, whether due to illness, loss of job, downsizing or parents or kids passing away," he says. "If they're upside down in their mortgage, they've gone through their nest egg and their home balance is higher than what they can borrow, then they're precluded from taking advantage of the situation. I think you need to be careful how tight you shrink the market."

More predatory products?

Alwin is concerned, as well, that opportunists may step in to take advantage of those most in need.

"There may be more predatory products created that are then attractive to the cash-poor, house-rich individual," she says. "We need to be vigilant about our consumer protections and consumer awareness for those individuals."

Bell of National Reverse Mortgage admits that while the new rules may "penalize" those with a legitimate reason to exclude their spouse from the HECM equation, he predicts that settling the spousal rights issue stands to open rather than further constrict the reverse mortgage market.

"Over the past couple years, I've seen at least half if not three-quarters of the industry stop writing non-borrowing spouse loans period, because they felt that the 'headline risk' and other liabilities associated with them were not worth doing," he says.

Financial planning tool

He sees the awakening among financially savvy baby boomers to the benefits of taking a reverse mortgage earlier, rather than later, as a more productive approach to a valuable product that has long been unfairly maligned.

"Financial planners suggest that people have peaks and troughs in their cash needs throughout retirement, and as a result, are often forced to liquidate assets at inopportune times because they need cash," he says. "If instead you take a reverse mortgage as a standby line of credit -- a standby cash reserve that enables your other assets to remain intact and continue to grow in value or generate income -- you end up with a greater amount of wealth to fund longevity."





More From Bankrate.com


It was Friday, Jan. 24, 2003, the Nebraska National Guards 1057th Transportation Company was shipping out the next morning. They were heading to Fort Carson, Colorado then on to Iraq. Friday night, they held a final farewell ceremony with family and friends at the Scottsbluff High School.

I was there as media. I dont remember how I got in, but I was the only media there that night.

The 150 members of the 1057th had no idea what was awaiting them in Iraq. At that time, America had just begun Operation Iraqi Freedom. The belief was Iraq had chemical weapons and would use them. That was where our local soldiers were heading.

I remember capturing a photo of National Guardsman Justin Bosak hugging his four-month-old daughter, Madison, and his mom, Connie.

Did he want to leave? Go halfway around the world to a strange land and face possible danger, even death.

No, but he, and the rest of the 1057th, went.

Like all soldiers, they faithfully did their job.

The soldiers life is long, hard, dangerous and lonely. They have each other, but they are separated from their loved ones.

Today, Nov. 11, we honor them. This is a day we set aside to say Thank you, to Bosak and all veterans. This is a very special day, Veterans Day.

In Nebraska alone, there are 143,375 veterans, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. There is over 22 million in America. These are our veterans who are still living.

Back in 2003, our local soldiers packed up everything, put their lives on hold to protect our freedoms.

Too often, we forget that freedom isnt free. It takes men and women standing guard, fighting and dying across the world so we can enjoy the freedoms we have. The freedom to vote, as we did on Tuesday. The freedom to protest, worship, own a gun and the list goes on and on.

In 2003, we saw 150 of our own head into the unknown.

During their deployment, I stayed in contact with a number of the guardsmen. We didnt have Facebook or Twitter back then, but we did have email. I would email Spc. Dustin Bruckner and Spc. Pat Closson, both Gering soldiers, for updates on how things were going.

Turned out, there were no chemical weapons, but our soldiers did get shot at and found themselves in danger. They didnt tell me where they were or what they were doing, but they keep us up to date.

Their emails would come in at strange times, partially due to the time difference and partially because of their limited access to computers. Communicating with family came before a reporter, but they faithful responded keeping us up to date on the homefront.

After the 1057th came home, we sent over to the Nebraska National Guards 267th Ordnance company, the Magnificent Seven. They were a seven man team led by SFC Chad Nelson Grandpa Army. Their job was to fix trucks and equipment that broke down. This often put them in harms way and they were shot at.

I did a series of stories on the families they left behind. That series brought home the sacrifices our soldiers make for us. They put their lives on hold, leave behind wives, fathers, mothers and children. Often, the families know very little about what is happening with their loved ones. Are they in harms way today? Are they safe? Have they been in a fire fight? Are they injured or dead?

So today, as you go about your business, take time to remember the sacrifices made by so many to assure that today you are free.

If you know a veteran, tell them Thank you. If you can, attend the parade or one of the local special activities. Put up a post on Facebook or Twitter or one of the many other social media sites saying, Thank you.

Little four month old Madison would be in junior high or high school now. Hopefully, she nows how grateful we are, I am, for the sacrifice she and her dad made. She spent her first year with her dad in harms way. Justin missed his daughters first steps.

Justin, Madison, Dustin, Pat, Chad and every other veteran and their families - Thank you!
What would it be like if your daughter or younger sister  or you  could reach for the stars with parental support? There would be no limit to your dreams or your achievements  becoming prime minister or an astronaut or an eagle hunter would be inevitable. Despite the hardships and challenges, you would persevere  and then triumph.

The Eagle Huntress is a 90-minute documentary (which recently played the Mill Valley Film Festival) inspired by the real life story of 13-year-old Aisholpan, who lives with her Kazakh family near the Altai Mountains in western Mongolia. Director Otto Bell first spotted her in a BBC news story and he was fascinated as soon as he saw the photographs of her in mountains, taken by Asher Svidensky.

As the Svidensky photos started going viral, Bell realized he had to get to western Mongolia right away, before someone else did. So Bell, cameraman Chris Raymond and Svidensky headed to Mongolia by airliner, twin prop plane and rickety Soviet-era bus. Recording Aisholpans remarkable life was not easy. Director of photography Simon Niblett eventually collaborated with Bell on this documentary; and he has said the experience was not fun exactly, because they had no money and so filmed on a shoestring in formidable weather with the simplest of equipment. The adventurous spirit of Aisholpan was the inspiration which kept them going. The result is a documentary you will want for your permanent collection.

During much of the year Aisholpan lives with her family in a ger (think of a yurt) next to a mountain range. They are herders and hunters. In the harsh winter months they take down the large ger, pack in a few hours, and drive to a base camp with a stone floor and thick walls. During the school year she and her two younger siblings attend a boarding school. Each weekend their father pulls up in an old van or on a motorcycle and takes them home for the weekend.

The heart of the story? Aisholpan wishes to train to become an eagle hunter, just like her father and his father and ten generations before them. Her father is not sure and consults her grandfather. Hunting with a trained bird of prey is a strong tribal tradition dating back some 4,000 years on the Asian steppes, and later spreading east to China and west to Arabia and Persia. With the approval of father and grandfather, Aisholpan begins her arduous training, first with her fathers golden eagle and then with her own.

The closing song by Australian performer Sia will bring tears to your eyes.

And how does Aisholpan acquire her own eagle? Tied by a single rope held in her fathers hand, she climbs down a steep cliff and raids an eagles nest while the mother eagle is out hunting. She must capture her own baby eagle in a blanket, hold onto it and then clamber back up the cliff.

The radiance and inner happiness of this fearless outdoor girl are captivating and you watch the documentary closely to see where these qualities come from. Her mother is quiet and says little before the camera, but her maternal gaze is always on this amazing daughter of hers. When she is asked, this traditional mother  who milks cows and makes meals from scratch  says that her daughter should be able to do whatever she wishes.

As her training progresses under the watchful eye of her father, Aisholpan becomes more confident and she registers to compete in the annual golden eagle festival against men and boys all older than she is. Preparing for the fateful event, she sits happily while her mother braids her long hair and attaches lovely ribbons. Then she applies pink polish to her nails and to her baby sisters nails! And she wears a pearl bracelet.

It takes an entire day to travel from their nomadic home to the town where the competition is being held. Aisholpan and her father ride horses the whole way, with her 15-pound golden eagle resting on her arm. There are four parts to this daunting competition; you are judged on the basis of your riding clothes, your horse, your riding style and your hunting style. The doubters, the skeptics and the nay-sayers are all there. Can she handle the pressure? And even if she wins, will she be able to fulfill the second requirement for becoming an eagle hunter  going into the Altai Mountains in the winter and having her eagle take a fox as its first kill?

When you speak about breaking glass ceilings, you may add a new heroine: Aisholpan from a family of eagle hunters in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia.

Cannot say enough good things about the photography in The Eagle Huntress. The stunning vistas from ground and mountain peaks, frightening challenges of leading a rebellious horse through deep snow in the middle of winter while holding onto a hooded eagle, capturing the costumes and camels and horses crowding into the annual competition, gaining entrance to the homes of the legendary eagle hunting elders as they weigh the pros and cons of allowing a girl to train and compete, catching the glowing face of Aisholpans quiet mother  many thanks to Simon Niblett, Christopher Raymond, and Martina Radwan (intimate scenes with female family members). The closing song by Australian performer Sia will bring tears to your eyes.

Comparison with Whale Rider, director Niki Caros marvelous 2002 film about a Maori girl who wishes to succeed her grandfather as chief, can be made. The difference is that 12-year-old Paikea had to struggle against her grandfathers objections to her becoming a Maori chief. In contrast, Aisholpan had the total acceptance and encouragement of her father and her grandfather when she decided to become an eagle hunter.

When you speak about breaking glass ceilings, and think about courageous girls all over the world  Zlata Filipovic who wrote Zlatas Diary: A Childs Life in Sarajevo, and Malala Yousafzai who won the Nobel Peace Prize  you may add a new heroine: Aisholpan from a family of eagle hunters in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia.
Countries & Areas

Search for country or area A Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan B Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burma Burundi C Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Cote dIvoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia D Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic E Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia F Fiji Finland France G Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana H Haiti Holy See Honduras Hungary I Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy J Jamaica Japan Jordan K Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan L Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg M Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique N Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Norway O Oman P Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Q Qatar R Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda S Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria T Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu U Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan V Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Y Yemen Z Zambia Zimbabwe
When Whitney Gilbert and Shadese (DeeDee) Griffith began dating more than a year ago, neither could have expected that they and their family w
The Greater Statesville Rotary Club recognized five local World War II veterans Thursday, honoring an ever-shrinking population of military personnel from the Greatest Generation.

Organizers said they wanted to find as many World War II veterans in the area as they could, which proved harder than expected.

Our goal today was to put specific emphasis on World War II veterans, and that task was a little more of a chore than I thought it would be, said Curtis Abell, a club member and Air Force veteran himself.

The five area World War II veterans recognized at Thursdays lunch were Tom Allison (Army Air Forces), Clyde Bebber (Navy Armed Guard), Charlton Lindler (Navy), Andy Pendleton (Army Air Forces) and Tab Stikeleater (Army). Allison was unable to attend.

Pendleton, who flew combat missions in North Africa and Italy, said he was humbled by the recognition.

Its hard to put into words, Pendleton, 94, said. I think the community gives us credit for what we did, but its not something that they need to do. Its something that we had to do.

Pendleton added he was grateful to the club and any community members that continue to recognize World War II vets.

It means so much to me to know they still care after such a long time, to recognize what we did, he said.

Friday marks 71 years since the end of the Second World War. In those years, the number of living veterans has steadily declined. Pendleton said at a recent reunion in Texas of military personnel he served with, only eight of the original 5,000 were able to make the trip.

Abell, addressing the audience at the Statesville Country Club, said each of the five veterans seemed humble when agreeing to attend and provide short biographies for the presentation.

Everyone, I got the idea, was modest. Extremely modest, Abell said.

Indeed, Pendleton said he had trouble finding the words to use because he didnt want to sound conceited.

Bebber said he enjoyed his time serving in the Navy but declined to share publicly all he had done beyond saying he served on three ships in both the Pacific and Atlantic.

Linder was a radio operator and served primarily in the Pacific. Allison was a Bombardier on a B-24 plane and Stikeleather served in the Philippines in preparation for an invasion of Japan.

During the program, Mike Tucker, who served in the Navy in the 1960s and later the Navy Reserves until the early 1990s, and who is a member of the Greater Statesville Rotary Club, presented a slideshow of the history of the war and photos from his recent trip to Normandy Beach.

I wanted to say thank you to all of the veterans for the sacrifices you made and I have to say I dont know any veteran that hasnt made any sacrifices, whether that is time away from home or being harmed in the line of duty, Tucker said.

Tucker was inspired to travel to Normandy, France after speaking with a World War II veteran. His experience there, he said, is one reason he personally wanted to recognize veterans from that war on Thursday.

About 2,400 U.S. soldiers died in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, Tucker said, the largest amphibious assault ever.

Statesville Mayor Costi Kutteh issued a proclamation to the club and the veterans recognizing the sacrifices made in World War II.

After the four present veterans from World War II were introduced, the audience gave them a standing ovation.
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore's white-collar crime unit for the first time on Thursday identified Malaysian businessman Low Taek Jho as a key figure in the money laundering investigation linked to scandal-tainted 1MDB fund.

The revelation came from an investigator during the trial of a former wealth manager of Swiss private bank BSI in Singapore's most high-profile money laundering case.

Low is also among the people named in civil lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, which alleged that more than $3.5 billion was allegedly misappropriated from 1MDB.

Singapore authorities have also frozen Low's assets, however the 34-year-old has not been charged with any offense in the investigations into 1MDB.

Founded by Najib, who previously chaired its advisory board, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) is currently the subject of money laundering investigations in at least six countries, including Switzerland, Singapore and the United States.

Najib has denied any wrongdoing and said Malaysia will cooperate with the international investigations.

Oh Yong Yang, an officer with the police Commercial Affairs Department (CAD), told a Singapore court Low had been under investigation since 2015.

"Low Taek Jho is a key person of interest in our investigation, and he is also a person of interest in related investigations in other jurisdictions... It started in 2015," he said.

He made the statement during the trial of Yeo Jiawei, a former wealth manager at Swiss private bank BSI who faces four charges related to his alleged attempt to pervert the course of justice by urging witnesses to lie to police and destroy evidence.

The CAD officer also said Eric Tan Kim Loong and Mohamed Ahmed Badawy Al Husseiny, former chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi's Aabar Investments, are also being investigated in the money laundering probe.

Husseiny was replaced as chief executive of Aabar last year after holding that post since 2010.

Yeo told the court Jho Low was a key client of BSI and also introduced 1MDB to the private bank.

Story continues

Reuters could not reach Jho Low, Eric Tan or Husseiny for a comment.

Ex-BSI banker Yeo is also facing seven separate charges, including money laundering, cheating and forgery, which the prosecution said will be tried next year.

Singapore's central bank ordered the closure of the operations of BSI in May and asked the Attorney General's Chambers to investigate six members of BSI bank's senior management and staff.

Yeo's trial will last until Nov 11.

(Reporting by Fathin Ungku; Editing by Saeed Azhar)
Blog Archive Apr 2010 (22) May 2010 (25) Jun 2010 (8) Jul 2010 (12) Aug 2010 (18) Sep 2010 (19) Oct 2010 (29) Nov 2010 (30) Dec 2010 (18) Jan 2011 (13) Feb 2011 (21) Mar 2011 (23) Apr 2011 (19) May 2011 (31) Jun 2011 (36) Jul 2011 (46) Aug 2011 (26) Sep 2011 (12) Oct 2011 (15) Nov 2011 (17) Dec 2011 (7) Jan 2012 (18) Feb 2012 (4) Mar 2012 (12) Apr 2012 (18) May 2012 (10) Jun 2012 (21) Jul 2012 (8) Aug 2012 (15) Sep 2012 (7) Oct 2012 (17) Nov 2012 (20) Dec 2012 (10) Jan 2013 (58) Feb 2013 (59) Mar 2013 (60) Apr 2013 (98) May 2013 (134) Jun 2013 (204) Jul 2013 (293) Aug 2013 (351) Sep 2013 (363) Oct 2013 (347) Nov 2013 (374) Dec 2013 (440) Jan 2014 (544) Feb 2014 (475) Mar 2014 (525) Apr 2014 (527) May 2014 (470) Jun 2014 (408) Jul 2014 (472) Aug 2014 (522) Sep 2014 (441) Oct 2014 (471) Nov 2014 (496) Dec 2014 (535) Jan 2015 (535) Feb 2015 (520) Mar 2015 (579) Apr 2015 (657) May 2015 (679) Jun 2015 (673) Jul 2015 (728) Aug 2015 (803) Sep 2015 (923) Oct 2015 (921) Nov 2015 (801) Dec 2015 (791) Jan 2016 (782) Feb 2016 (835) Mar 2016 (929) Apr 2016 (864) May 2016 (946) Jun 2016 (1044) Jul 2016 (882) Aug 2016 (1035) Sep 2016 (966) Oct 2016 (918) Nov 2016 (854) Dec 2016 (885) Jan 2017 (879) Feb 2017 (777) Mar 2017 (896) Apr 2017 (872) May 2017 (850) Jun 2017 (851) Jul 2017 (971) Aug 2017 (1040) Sep 2017 (998) Oct 2017 (1144) Nov 2017 (1046) Dec 2017 (838) Jan 2018 (873) Feb 2018 (769) Mar 2018 (885) Apr 2018 (808) May 2018 (827) Jun 2018 (820) Jul 2018 (840) Aug 2018 (854) Sep 2018 (844) Oct 2018 (851) Nov 2018 (870) Dec 2018 (912) Jan 2019 (919) Feb 2019 (827) Mar 2019 (957) Apr 2019 (913) May 2019 (1007) Jun 2019 (934) Jul 2019 (949) Aug 2019 (936) Sep 2019 (910) Oct 2019 (920) Nov 2019 (874) Dec 2019 (908) Jan 2020 (941) Feb 2020 (848) Mar 2020 (898) Apr 2020 (848) May 2020 (822) Jun 2020 (787) Jul 2020 (819) Aug 2020 (858) Sep 2020 (841) Oct 2020 (873) Nov 2020 (811) Dec 2020 (780) Jan 2021 (765) Feb 2021 (716) Mar 2021 (819) Apr 2021 (805) May 2021 (815) Jun 2021 (824) Jul 2021 (830) Aug 2021 (832) Sep 2021 (791) Oct 2021 (754) Nov 2021 (683) Dec 2021 (693) Jan 2022 (694) Feb 2022 (654) Mar 2022 (740) Apr 2022 (745) May 2022 (748) Jun 2022 (701) Jul 2022 (704) Aug 2022 (702) Sep 2022 (699) Oct 2022 (737) Nov 2022 (23)
Donald Trump and President Barack Obama exchanged pleasantries at the White House on Thursday as the two leaders began a transition to the Trump administration following a vitriolic presidential campaign.

After the 90-minute meeting, Obama said he and the president-elect shared a wide-ranging conversation that included discussion of foreign and domestic policy. He said he felt "encouraged" by the "excellent" discussion.



"I have been very encouraged by the  I think  interest in President-elect Trump's wanting to work with my team around many of the issues that this great country faces," Obama said.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said later that the meeting was valuable although many differences remained.



Noting that the meeting lasted longer than scheduled, Trump said the conversation touched on several situations, including some difficulties.

"I have great respect," Trump said of Obama. "I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel. He explained some of the difficulties, some of the high-flying assets, and some of the really great things that have been achieved."

On Wednesday, Obama recognized Trump's electoral victory, and promised he'd work toward a smooth transition of power.



"It is no secret that the president-elect and I have some pretty significant differences," Obama said at the time. "We are now all rooting for his success."



The two men had never met before Thursday.

Trump later met with House Speaker Paul Ryan, after which the president-elect said he would work rapidly on issues including healthcare, taxes and immigration.





More From CNBC


COMMENTARY

CHICAGO  Retirement security already looked like a looming train wreck for most U.S. households before Election Day. Now, the consolidation of Republican control of government threatens to accelerate the crash.

It is too early to predict the agenda Donald Trump will bring to the White House on retirement policy, or where it might fit on his priority list. We live in a rapidly aging nation, but retirement policy never received a serious airing during the hot mess of a campaign that just ended.

It is also impossible to predict how Trump's priorities will match up with those of Republican leaders in Congress, considering their deep divides on many issues during the campaign.

But previous Republican proposals and Trump's campaign pledges point toward a range of possible GOP retirement initiatives between now and the 2018 midterm elections.

The economic frustrations of older, middle-class voters played an important role in Trump's upset win over Hillary Clinton. Exit polling reveals that voters above age 45 favored him, especially among middle-class households.

These are households bearing the brunt of job loss, income inequality, the decline of traditional defined benefit pensions, rising health care costs and shrinking Social Security benefits.

And they have managed to save precious little for retirement: 62 percent of working households headed by people aged 55-64 have less than one year of annual income, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS)  far less than they will need to maintain their standard of living in retirement.

But here is the irony: Republican control of the White House and Congress over the next two years could leave these struggling near-retirement households even worse off. Below is just a partial rundown of the retirement-related issues that will bear careful watching.

Obamacare repeal

This might not seem like a retirement issue at first glance.

But if Trump and Republican lawmakers make good on their promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, millions of older Americans who fall short of Medicare's eligibility age (65) likely will lose their health insurance.

Hate Obamacare if you like, but it has hugely benefited millions of older low- and middle-income households. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that the percentage of uninsured Americans aged 50-64 fell to 9.1 percent this year, compared with 14 percent in 2013. That translates to 3.1 million previously uninsured people who now have health insurance.

Republicans will likely try to repeal the law, or at minimum gut many of its most important provisions, such as Medicaid coverage for low-income people, and premium subsidies for middle-income households.

The uninsured-and-over-50 group will be more likely to forego health care, and they will arrive at Medicare's doorstep with more untreated illnesses.

"If they repeal it and don't replace it with something meaningful, it's going to really hurt this older population," said Christian Weller, professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Spike the fiduciary rule

The U.S. Department of Labor finalized rules this year requiring all financial advisers working with retirement accounts to avoid conflicts and act in the best interest of clients in the products they recommend. This is a huge, positive step in reforming the way retirement savings are managed.

Trump took no position on the so-called fiduciary rule, but he has pledged to cut government regulation aggressively. And one of his advisers promised during the campaign to repeal the rule, even likening it to slavery.

Financial-services lobbyists have been trying to spike the Labor Department rule in the courts and through legislation; President Barack Obama vetoed Republican-sponsored legislation aimed at blocking it in June.

"There is potential for a partial or full pullback," said Rick Jones, senior partner and national retirement practice leader at Aon Hewitt.

Cut Social Security and Medicare

Trump said during the campaign he does not favor cutting Social Security or Medicare benefits. But Republican congressional leadership has long favored raising the Social Security retirement age, reducing cost-of-living adjustments and at least partial privatization of the program by allowing workers to divert part of their payroll tax contribution to a personal savings account.

This year's Republican convention platform stated that Social Security's solvency problems should be addressed without tax increases. That is a de facto call for benefit cuts, because there are only two ways to solve Social Security's financial problems: cut benefits or increase revenue. The platform also contained a vague call for privatization.

On Medicare, House Speaker Paul Ryan has advanced plans repeatedly to shift Medicare toward so-called premium support.

Seniors could choose between private insurance plans and traditional Medicare, and receive a voucher from the federal government to purchase coverage. Studies have shown this approach would shift costs to seniors.

Retirement saving, long-term care

Among the other questions to ponder: How will we reform our retirement saving system to increase coverage and low-cost saving? How will we fix our broken approach to financing long-term care?

All told, the inequalities in our retirement security system could grow worse over the next four years  much worse. That would be not just an ironic outcome of this election  it would be tragic.
For decades, insurance brokers relied on commissions paid by health insurance companies. But for individual health plans, that practice has changed recently: Carriers have either reduced commissions or eliminated them entirely.

So, for the first time in their careers, some area health insurance brokers are asking customers to pay fees.

Kelly Rector, of Denny and Associates Inc. in OFallon, Mo., is among brokers who have implemented a fee structure for health insurance customers.

We cant work for free, she said. I feel really bad for having to do this.

Rector has been an insurance broker for 25 years and this is the first time shes charged her clients fees. And shes not alone.

Almost every colleague Ive talked to is now doing this, said Ryan Hillenbrand, of Chesterfield-based Hillenbrand and Company Insurance Advisors.

The problem is multilayered, he said.

Brokers are no longer receiving commissions from Cigna, the only carrier on HealthCare.gov that offers in-network access to BJC HealthCare doctors and facilities. And Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, the other carrier on HealthCare.gov in the St. Louis area, has cut its commissions to a flat dollar amount for each application, instead of per person, drastically reducing the commission for larger families.

Complicating matters, many of the brokers clients dont stick with the same health plan from year to year. And the networks of providers offered by insurers are drastically different. So it takes an extensive amount of time to counsel each client, Hillenbrand said.

Last year, Hillenbrand said his office spent, on average, four hours with each client.

And for now theyre expected to do that for no or very little commission, he said. At some point in your business, you have to figure out what it is that youre worth.

Timothy S. Jost, a law professor focused on health care at Washington and Lee University, said it was unfortunate that carriers had decided to step away from commissions. He thinks its short-sighted on insurers part.

The people who really, really need insurance are going to get through, Jost said. But, now, the carriers are cutting off their producers or the ones who could help them attract younger, healthier members.

The bottom line is that consumers are going to get less professional help, said Ted Ruzicka of Ruzicka Group Services of Creve Coeur.

Ruzicka said he was not charging fees; instead, hes going to largely step away from the individual health-insurance business.

Itll be a lot less focus, he said. The individual business makes up 10 percent of his income, but he can make that up elsewhere.

A spokesman from Cigna said the reality was that individuals didnt necessarily need to use brokers to buy coverage.

The information and decision support tools consumers need to select a plan on the exchange are available at no cost on HealthCare.gov, company spokesman Joe Mondy told the Post-Dispatch via email.

But there are other resources. Through grants, the federal government supports individuals with certain certifications to assist consumers with HealthCare.gov coverage. However, they do not receive commissions.

The Missouri Department of Insurance, Financial Institutions and Professional Registration said it did not have any authority over the commissions brokers receive from insurance companies. But brokers are allowed to charge fees in the state of Missouri, so long as the consumers agree to them.
A selection of reviews for movies screening on the final weekend of the St. Louis International Film Festival:

The Wedding Party

Screens at 9:30 p.m. Friday at the Tivoli; with director Thane Economou

2016  1:59  Overlong and underfunny, this predictable and thin comedy brings a group of generally awful people together to a wedding reception, where they behave generally awfully. Though a few bits are marginally amusing, there is not a single out-loud laugh to be found. Writer/director Thane Economou spent more effort filming the picture in a single two-hour shot  a gimmick that quickly becomes tiresome  than in creating a story or characters anyone wants to see. This is one party youll wish youd left early. By Daniel Neman

Feral Love

Screens at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Winifred Moore Auditorium in Webster Universitys Webster Hall; with director Markie Hancock, subject Dorian Rence and Best Friends Animal Societys Peter Wolf

Dorian Rence describes herself as a crazy cat lady, but we wouldnt. Rence is a noted musician who has played viola with the New York Philharmonic for 40 years, since she was 21. At home, though, she devoted years to taking care of two (once three) feral cats living in New Yorks railroad tunnels. Feral Love director Markie Hancock picks up her story one freezing winter when Rence becomes determined to capture the cats to save their lives. Touching and unsparing, Feral Love lets us understand both Rence and the cats. The screening will include a performance by Rence. By Gail Pennington

The Slippers

Screens at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at the Tivoli
Angelina Jolie Pitt will continue to have sole custody of her six children with Brad Pitt in a joint agreement reached by the actors, a representative for the actress said Monday.

The voluntary agreement calls for the former couple's six children, who range in ages from 8 to 15, to continue to have "therapeutic visits" with Pitt for the time being. It is unclear what therapeutic visits entailed, and Jolie Pitt's representatives said they could not provide additional details.

A representative for Pitt declined comment.

Monday's statement said the agreement was reached more than a week ago, although Pitt told a court on Friday that he is seeking joint custody.

Jolie Pitt filed for divorce in September, days after Pitt was involved in a disturbance during a private flight with his family. She cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for the breakup, and an attorney said at the time she filed for divorce "for the health of the family."

The statement makes no mention of an investigation by child welfare workers into the plane incident.

The agreement has not been filed in the couple's divorce, and may not be the final custody arrangement governing the actors' children.
On his first day in Abu Ghraib, the perils of war were pounded into James Petersens psyche minute by terrifying minute.

It was April 20, 2004. The Marine from Collinsville found himself in Iraq five years after he had enlisted.

We took over 40 mortars that day, Petersen said. At that point, most of the prisoners at the infamous camp were outside in tents. Twenty-two prisoners died. Body parts were everywhere, he said.

What he saw, felt and heard took its toll.

Petersen got out of the military in 2007 and went back to school at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He earned a bachelors degree, then ended up back in Iraq and Afghanistan as a military contractor between 2008 and 2013.

When he eventually returned to St. Louis, fits of anger and fear dominated his life.

He couldnt enjoy Fair St. Louis because the fireworks caused flashbacks. The sound of the garbage truck slamming the Dumpster in the alley sent a chill down his spine.

Petersen, who is now 37, was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Like many soldiers who have returned from Americas longest-running wars in the Middle East, transition to regular life wasnt easy.

Its really difficult to go from the battlefield to the classroom, Petersen said.

Petersen is now a graduate student at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University. As president of WUVets, a student group for veterans, hes helped organize a Veterans Day event at the schools Anheuser-Busch Hall. From 6 to 7:30 p.m., students will hear from a World War II vet, a Korean War vet and other combat veterans from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., will give the keynote address.

Petersen hopes his fellow students gain an understanding for how difficult it can be for veterans to make the transition to civilian life after experiencing so much violence.

Theyre like two separate worlds, he says, comparing his time at war with life walking the marble halls of academia.

In Abu Ghraib, and in Fallujah, where American soldiers were constant targets, the tension was always high, Petersen said.

You were like a dog in a cage getting poked at with a stick, he said. When you get back home, you still feel that way.

Once home, Petersen said, he drifted. He had fits of bitterness and anger. Noises startled him. He lacked the sense of purpose that drove him while serving as a Marine during war time. It was at his wifes urging that he sought help for his PTSD through the Veterans Administration.

It changed my life, Petersen said.

Over a period of a year, Petersen worked with doctors and nurses to overcome his fears. He talked over and over again about what he saw to help him become more comfortable in everyday situations. In a post-war military culture in which suicides have been high for more than a decade, Petersen became a success story.

Now hes trying to help other veterans as he finishes his education.

Petersen works for St. Patrick Center, tracking down homeless veterans on the street and connecting them with services. He sees himself in the men that he meets, knowing that without the support of family, and the help of the VA, he could be in their spot.

Instead hes working on a masters degree in social work, going to class with students who, for the most part, are much younger than he is and who have had experiences that give them a different outlook on life.

On Friday, he hopes his classmates get a chance to expand their horizons, to see veterans as their peers.

I hope that they look at the panel and see these guys as real people, Petersen said. I hope they have some empathy.
The city of Fergusons agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to reform its police and municipal court is unlikely to be altered by the administration of President-elect Donald Trump.

Thats the opinion of Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, in comments Thursday at a forum on criminal justice reform in downtown St. Louis.

Remember, it will still be career professionals in the civil rights division who are in charge of enforcing the consent decree, he said. Those are lawyers who work for the government and are not subject to replacement by a new president.

The Ferguson City Council unanimously approved in March a proposal with the Justice Department to overhaul the citys police department, an agreement the city had in effect rejected six weeks earlier, provoking a federal lawsuit. The consent decree, approved by U.S. District Judge Catherine D. Perry in April, calls for diversity training for police, outfitting officers and jail workers with body cameras, and other reforms.

Clay said it would be rather difficult to make changes to the agreement, especially if you have the parties agreeing.

Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III, another speaker at the forum, said the city would not try to renegotiate with a Justice Department that would be less motivated than when under President Barack Obamas to press a civil rights case.

I believe wholeheartedly that this is a model that other cities should implement, Knowles said. I think if we tried to renegotiate something, that would tear the community apart again.  Moving forward, well stick with it.

Prefacing a question to Knowles, local civil-rights activist John Chasnoff said he had heard the city of Ferguson was running behind on complying.

Do you really have the capacity to comply, or are you just going to rope-a-dope your way through the rest of Obamas term, he asked.

Knowles reply: The city will fully comply within 18 months.

But a public-interest lawyer whose organization has sued several municipalities in the St. Louis area over their municipal court and jails said he wasnt so sure.

It took people in the street for days and days protesting in Ferguson to bring the eye of the DOJ, said Michael-John Voss, co-founder of the nonprofit law group ArchCity Defenders.

That eye is going to be closed, he said, especially if Trump chooses former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani as U.S. attorney general.

Giuliani pioneered the broken windows approach to policing, with a focus on cracking down on minor infractions. While Giuliani has credited the approach with saving New York, critics have questioned its legality and effectiveness. And Trump has called for more use of stop and frisk tactics to reduce crime.

DOJ is not going to be looking any more, Voss said. Its up to us to do this work.  Its been 48 hours, and that setback cancels and negates the two years that weve been spending here in St. Louis.

St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said Giuliani-style policing would not be coming here.

Stop-and-frisk without probable cause is not something that law enforcement should be engaged in, he said.

The forum, Reforming Criminal Justice, was sponsored by Atlantic magazine with a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
ST. LOUIS  Family and friends of Patrick McVey, an owner of the popular downtown Irish bar Maggie OBriens, are hoping a $15,000 reward will bring answers in a murder case that has few.

McVey, 57, was found slumped over in the drivers seat of his gray Ford Explorer on the side of Interstate 55 near Loughborough Avenue shortly before 6 p.m. Wednesday. Police say he had gunshot wounds and was dead at the scene.

But police believe he was shot hours earlier. They say he had been shot by an unknown suspect or suspects while driving south on the interstate at about 2:30 p.m. Officers said a witness helped them determine the time, but did not give any other details.

Its unclear how the car and his body went unnoticed for more than three hours.

When the news reached general manager Aaron Snively at Maggie OBriens Restaurant & Irish Pub, on Market Street near Union Station, he and his staff decided to close the restaurant early  during a home Blues game, for the first time in decades. He said it was a time to reminisce and pray. Former employees stopped by to pay their condolences.

Family and friends added $5,000 to CrimeStoppers' usual reward for a homicide, and an anonymous donor chipped in more, for a total of $15,000. Authorities asked anyone with information about McVey's death to contact CrimeStoppers at 866-371-8477. Tipsters can remain anonymous and still claim the reward.

An extraordinary person

McVey co-owned the bar with his brother Eddie McVey. Snively said Patrick McVey had worked at the bar for almost 30 years, starting shortly after it opened in 1979 as a bartender while he took classes at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

I think what makes it so difficult is the type of person he was, Snively said Thursday. Longtime customers were calling all afternoon paying their respects, he said. He said McVey was generous, volunteering in as many groups as he could from church to his service employees union.

McVeys body  shot multiple times  was discovered by a Missouri Department of Transportation employee who stopped to check on the vehicle that was parked on the I-55 shoulder south of Loughborough. A MoDOT traffic camera nearby is pointed toward the scene, but a department spokesperson said those cameras dont record and are there only for real-time use.

Police dont have any suspects and havent released any information about a potential motive in the killing.

Were just devastated, said McVeys brother, Hugh McVey. Were just trying to wrap our heads around it. We dont know what happened.

He spoke to a reporter briefly Thursday while detectives were at his home. Funeral arrangements had not yet been made when he spoke to the Post-Dispatch.

Back at Maggie OBriens, which reopened Thursday, Snively said the team was resilient and would get through this.

Sometimes, if youre lucky, you get to have an extraordinary person in your life, he said. Patrick was extraordinary.

The bar has seen tragedy before. A bartender was killed in a botched robbery in 2009 that also saw one of the robbers accidentally shot and killed by one of his accomplices.

The surviving robber, a lookout and a bar employee who helped plot the crime were all sentenced to prison time in 2011.
Paramedics treated more than three dozen more people Thursday after they apparently overdosed on synthetic cannabis.

The additional cases come after at least 43 people were treated for overdoses Monday through Wednesday, authorities say. Most have been homeless people downtown, especially near the New Life Evangelistic Center shelter and the Central Library.

At least 38 people were treated as of 7 p.m. Thursday, according to the St. Louis Fire Department. Most were taken to hospitals for treatment. None of the overdoses has been fatal.

Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson said he was returning to his office about 2 p.m. Thursday when he came across paramedics from his department struggling with one man who had overdosed near City Hall.

The man was acting erratically near Market Street and Tucker Boulevard and threatened to attack one of the paramedics, according to witnesses. Bystanders intervened.

Minutes later law enforcement arrived and ushered the man from the corner. He screamed expletives as he walked away.

Our medics are doing an unbelievable job, Jenkerson said. It takes a lot of restraint for medics to deal with them. My hat is off to the EMTs.

He said his department had dealt with as many overdoses recently as some agencies saw in a year. Those using the drugs have been found on streets and sidewalks, acting strangely or seeming unresponsive.

People were standing and walking around like zombies, said Jenkerson. They didnt know what they were doing or where they were at.

One man was arrested near the New Life shelter Wednesday night as authorities try to crack down on whoever is distributing the synthetic cannabis, often called K2.

He had not yet been charged as of Thursday evening.

Koran Addo of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
WENTZVILLE  A man from Wentzville shoved his fingers down the throat of his 6-week-old son. He wanted to find the babys voice box and stop him from crying.

More abuse followed. The baby was thrown onto a bed. Shaken violently. Picked up by the back of his neck.

All the while the babys mother watched and made no effort to get help.

Thats the harrowing account spelled out in St. Charles County court records documenting the abuse against the infant boy, identified only as J.B. Social media identifies him as Jaxon James Burnette, born on Sept. 27.

The boy was still alive on Friday morning but extremely critical, the prosecutors office said. He was in protective custody and being treated at Cardinal Glennon Childrens Hospital for, among other things, bleeding on the brain and broken bones. Doctors have told police its a likely possibility the boy will die.

The boys father, Robert James Burnette, is held in lieu of $500,000 cash-only bail. Burnette, 19, was charged Tuesday with abuse or neglect of a child, causing serious emotional or physical injury. The crime is a felony, punishable in Missouri by up to 15 years in prison.

The babys mother, Megan L. Hendricks, 20, witnessed the abuse and didnt call for help, police say. She faces the same charge, which was filed Wednesday. Her bail is half of Burnettes: $250,000, cash only.

The abuse happened between Oct. 18 and Nov. 7 at the couples home in the 100 block of St. Charles Street in Wentzville, and involved more than putting fingers into the infants throat, records allege.

According to Wentzville Police Detective Sean Rosner, Burnette violently shook the baby. He slammed the babys face into the bed and held him there. The babys mother and a roommate saw the abuse, police say.

In an interview with police, Burnette allegedly admitted shaking the baby and being too rough with him, Rosner said.

Hendricks told police she saw Burnette abuse the boy three times, including grabbing the baby by the back of the neck and slamming him into the bed to get him to stop crying, Rosner said.

She saw Burnette stick his fingers into the boys throat to find his voice box to get him to stop crying, Rosner said.

Hendricks told police she and Burnette were aware of the dangers of shaking a baby because they had both been required to watch a video before leaving the hospital after the babys birth.

Dr. Linda Shaw told detectives that if the baby survived, there was a strong possibility he would have extreme physical and mental disabilities, Rosner said.

Officials say Burnette has a history of violent tendencies. Burnettes parents told police that he had tried to kill his own brother over the years by beating or stabbing him and trying to smother or drown him, Rosner said. Burnette has been in mental institutions for severe anger issues, court records say.

In a statement to police, Hendricks admitted that she knew her son was in danger. She had been to her parents home nearby several times with the boy but never asked for help. When officers asked why she didnt take action to get the boy into a safe environment, she said she didnt want to have a confrontation with Burnette. She said she was worried her father would harm Burnette, and she would rather stay with Burnette than have that happen.

She admitted she lied at the hospital, telling doctors she didnt know how the baby was injured. Police say she never showed emotion during their interrogation. She referred to her son not by his name but by the kid or the baby.

She feigned crying at one point but stopped when the officer left the interrogation room, police say.

In addition to bleeding of the brain, the baby has suffered possible liver contusions, a broken upper arm, new and old clavicle fractures and multiple rib fractures in various stages of healing, authorities say.

Burnette and Hendricks are scheduled to appear in court next on Tuesday.
EAST ST. LOUIS  The second of two St. Louis neighbors who robbed three banks in the bi-state area in 2015 pleaded guilty to federal charges Thursday.

Brendon Marshall Collier, 39, of St. Louis entered guilty pleas to two bank robbery charges in U.S. District Court, according to the office of U.S. Attorney Donald Boyce.

Collier and his neighbor, Marc Gordon Miller, allegedly robbed two U.S. Bank locations inside Schunck's grocery stores in Edwardsville and Fairview Heights in 2015. The Edwardsville robbery was on Jan. 28, 2015; the Fairview Heights one was on Feb. 10, 2015..

Miller, who let Collier use his vehicle and rode along with Collier to the banks, pleaded guilty in November 2015 to robbing the banks.

In each robbery, Collier approached tellers claiming that he needed to make a withdrawal before handing them a note demanding money with "no alarm" and, in the second robbery, that "no would one get hurt."

The two were arrested after they robbed a third U.S. Bank branch inside of a Schnuck's store in St. Peters. Both men confessed to all three robberies.

Collier told detectives the robberies were motivated by his need to buy heroin and pay for hotel rooms and food.

He faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 on each charge at his sentencing Feb. 24.
TROY, ILL.  Police here have arrested a Texas truck driver and charged him with sexually assaulting an Oklahoma woman he kept trapped in his semi truck.

Daryl Thompson, 59, of Dallas has been charged with criminal sexual assault and unlawful restraint. Both are felonies.

He was arrested Saturday evening after a woman he allegedly restrained and sexually assaulted apparently escaped and begged nearby witnesses to call police.

Thompson, a long-distance semi truck driver, met the woman in Oklahoma City and took her to Troy, police said.

He allegedly physically forced her to participate in sexual acts against her will and prevented her from leaving his truck.

To help the victim in this incident and saving her from what could have happened, was a great feeling for the Troy Police Department, Troy Police Chief Brad Parsons said in a press release. With the support from many local groups, we were able to provide the victim with a place to sleep, food, clothing and a safe way back to her family.

Thompson was being held at the Madison County Jail Thursday night with bail set at $1.5 million.
FENTON  A woman was shot and critically injured early Friday in a robbery on the parking lot of a Denny's restaurant in Fenton.

She was in critical and unstable condition at a hospital.

Police have no details on a suspect.

The robbery was at about 1 a.m. outside Denny's at 1096 South Highway Drive.

St. Louis County Police Sgt. Shawn McGuire said the 66-year-old woman was a customer of the restaurant who was on the parking lot to meet a friend. A man tried to rob her. She was shot in the torso.

The robber grabbed the woman's purse and escaped.

The department's crimes against persons bureau is investigating.
The call from her daughter in Maine came in just before 11 p.m. Tuesday.

Elaine Goldman of Clayton said she was relieved to see Louisas name light up her cellphone  the same phone shed been using all night to text with her female friends as they watched Democrat Hillary Clintons unexpected slide into a presidential election loss against Republican Donald Trump.

Those texts, all among Clinton supporters, started out excitedly with polls projecting an easy win. Pictures of glasses of wine. Jitters about Florida. Jokes about old pantsuits that didnt fit. But as the night wore on the texts got shorter: A horror show. Im in shock.

So Goldman was happy to answer her daughters late call.

I just wanted to feel the love and also comfort her because this was her first election and for it to be so traumatic is rough.

Goldman didnt expect to hear her freshman daughter sobbing in her Colby College dorm room. Like hundreds of thousands of other mothers who had backed Clinton and assured their children that Trump was going to lose, the disappointed cries from children were a double blow.

I kind of joked that if he won, I was moving out of the country, Louisa Goldman said on Wednesday. Now I realize it was not something that was a joke.

Wednesday and Thursday were days of tears, venting and confusion among many women  particularly mothers and daughters  who stood with Clinton. Many of them had been galvanized by Trumps derogatory remarks and actions toward women during his campaign. They loathed the seeming double standard in which a man praised for the art of the deal could insult just about anyone while a woman with decades of political experience was criticized about her harsh tone, her ambition and years of political dealing.

Grief and solidarity

That blow was harder to fathom among white female Clinton supporters who learned in the days after the election that 53 percent of their demographic vote went to Trump and only 43 percent to Clinton, according to FiveThirtyEight.com.

Female Trump voters expressed a variety of reasons for their decision: a loathing of Clintons Washington-insider mentality, an embrace of Trumps anti-abortion or pro-gun rights stances.

Or as Melissa Felsenthal, 53, of Shrewsbury put it: Shes as evil as the devil and definitely not looking out for anyone but herself and her own agenda.

The election left Clinton supporters despondent.

In the morning I thought I could be strong, but I cried when I told [my daughter] Donald Trump had won, said Laura McInnis, of south St. Louis, whose daughter is 4. We promised to be kind that day. To be kind to our friends and strangers.

For some, it was a moment of deep doubt about what women can achieve in America despite Clintons reassurances otherwise.

I still dont think we can honestly tell ourselves that todays young girls should believe they can be president, said Erin Everett of St. Louis, a former supporter of Sarah Palin who became enamored of Clinton in 2008 as she spoke about trying to reach the highest, hardest glass ceiling.

We just watched the most overly qualified, lifelong public servant and the first female candidate for president lose to a man who has never held public office, Everett said.

The intensity of grief and solidarity among these women lingered after election night. Text and email chains remained open. Facebook posts asked how were they to tell their children that a man who bullied and criticized women and gloated about groping them had won.

Emily Cohen-Shikora, a lecturer of psychology at Washington University, said her female students were so upset many asked her to postpone a Wednesday exam. She said students worried about losing the option of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, sometimes called Obamacare, when they soon enter an unstable job market.

They are actually scared about real, high stakes, important things  deportation, watch lists, hate crimes, lack of access to health care.

Womens rights to abortion were on many womens minds. Kelly Banister, a lifelong St. Louisian until moving to Oregon two years ago, said on Wednesday morning that she had started stockpiling Plan B emergency contraception pills.

They were not for me, but for my young loved ones who may someday need it after our Supreme Court reverses Roe V. Wade, as Trump promised hed enact.

Many were confounded by the demographics of outcome in which white women nearly split the vote between Clinton and Trump, while 94 percent of black women voters went for Clinton.

Marva Robinson, former head of the St. Louis Association of Black Psychologists, said Clintons appeal was a no-brainer for black women who believe they are generally identified by other groups by their race, not their gender. The election provided a refreshing alternative to this dynamic, she said.

I just think for me as a woman for me to know Hillary at no point downplayed gender, I appreciated the bold stance that she took especially in light of when your opposing candidate is so vocal about how little value he places on women, she said.

Happier than I thought

And yet, there was a quiet movement among educated suburban and urban white women to buck Clinton.

Karin Kostich of Arnold, said she was a survivor of date rape and a mother from two unplanned pregnancies in which abortion was not morally an option. Kostich said Trumps past did not reflect his future and that Clinton had shown no warmth to her women supporters.

I dont understand the whole crying thing, she said of Clinton supporters who waited for hours to hear a concession speech after her defeat. She did not even have the courtesy to come down and thank you for your support.

Former St. Louisian Helen Launhardt, 54, a lifetime Republican, said she would have voted for Bernie Sanders to shake things up. Without that option, she went with Trump.

I felt very strongly that the establishment needed a wake-up call, she said. Hillarys loss means that the people are tired of politicians that think they can buy their office and manipulate the system.

Rebecca Splain, 37, of Wright City, said she could not abide Clintons abortion rights platform. She also disliked Trump, and she voted for neither candidate, preferring to write someone in.

I didnt believe him when he espoused conservative views, she said, calling him a misogynist with a marriage history not appropriate for office.

And yet, I am happier than I thought I would be that Hillary has lost, she said.

For mother and daughter Elaine and Louisa Goldman, their candidates loss and the white female vote that gave Trump his victory was a wake-up call. They said they need to become more political and more vocal.

I think in our family, we really never talked about politics and never have been the ones to start up a debate, Elaine Goldman said. I made it known that I was not voting for Trump, but beyond that it was all eye rolling.

Clinton supporter Kristen Ingenito, 33, of St. Louis said the situation will ultimately be galvanizing for women.

"I venture to guess there will be a groundswell of women who are emboldened to lean in a little harder, and pull each other up a little more."
JEFFERSON CITY  On a day when other Missouri residents were casting their ballots in an historic election, former state Rep. Tony Dugger was registering to legally wine and dine his old colleagues in the Legislature.

Dugger, a Republican from Hartville, formally registered to become a lobbyist Tuesday after causing a stir when he quit his job as a state lawmaker in August.

Duggers term in office had been set to expire in January, but a law approved last spring as part of a push to scour Jefferson Citys image changed his timetable for stepping down four months before his term ended.

Before Aug. 28, Missouri lawmakers could become lobbyists immediately after leaving office, cashing in on their connections with the Legislature.

The new law imposes a six month waiting period before lawmakers can legally begin to lobby in order to end the perception that a legislator might be casting votes to win the favor of a future employer.

In order to not have to wait, Dugger resigned from office a week before the law took effect.

The concept of a cooling off period for lawmakers wanting to enter the potentially lucrative lobbying field was highlighted by Republican Eric Greitens during his successful run for governor. He has proposed that for every year a lawmaker has served in office, they should have to wait a year to do paid lobbying.

It remains unclear if such a plan has support in the Legislature. Cooling off periods lasting a year or two years were both originally proposed last session, but opponents were able to pare back the waiting period to six months.

Greitens also wants to ban all gifts from lobbyists to lawmakers.

The Missouri Ethics Commission, which regulates lobbying, does not list any clients yet for Duggers new venture.

Dugger could not be immediately reached for comment Friday.
B.C. Wilborn, of Collinsville, has never gone back to Hawaii after World War II. His family persuaded him to attend ceremonies next month.
COLLINSVILLE  Sailor B.C. Wilborn manned an anti-aircraft gun during the attack upon Pearl Harbor and served at sea through World War II. Back home, he had a long career as a postal worker and, at age 95, still owns a racehorse.

Wilborn never went back to Hawaii after the war. He did not join the St. Louis-area Pearl Harbor veterans organization that dropped memorial wreaths into the Mississippi River for many years every Dec. 7.

I had enough of the ocean, I guess, Wilborn said. In the early years, I didnt have the money to see it again. Then I got busy and got away from it.

He finally plans to return for the 75th anniversary commemoration of the Japanese sneak attack on Dec. 7, 1941, that shocked America into entering the war. Credit for his change of heart goes to the persistence of his children.

They want me to do this, he said. A grin shows hes glad to accommodate.

Organizers in Hawaii have planned 11 days of events that are billed as the last big chance to assemble the dwindling band of veterans who were stationed that day at Pearl Harbor. Wilborn was 20 when the attack took place. Organizers say about 50 survivors, including Wilborn, have arranged to attend.

Approximately 60,000 sailors, soldiers, Marines and aviators were stationed on the island of Oahu when the Japanese attacked. Pearl Harbor was the home base of the Pacific Fleet. Nearby was Hickam Field, an Army Air Corps base. Seven battleships were moored along Ford Island in the harbor. Among them was the Maryland, on which Wilborn was a boatswains mate.

The historian for the national park at Pearl Harbor, which includes the memorial over the sunken battleship Arizona, says there is no accurate count of how many veterans of the attack are still living. But of the 335 sailors and marines who survived the destruction of the Arizona, only five are known to be alive. A Japanese bomb exploded the battleships forward ammunition magazines, killing 1,177.

That morning, the Maryland was moored on the dock side of Battleship Row, next to the Oklahoma. The Arizona was two berths behind the Marylands stern. Wilborn said he went to his battle station deep in the powder room for a main gun turret. After commanders confirmed the attack was by air, Wilborn was sent topside to help with a 5-inch anti-aircraft gun. By then, he said, the Oklahoma already had been hit by torpedoes and overturned.

I was in line passing ammunition to the gunners, and a chaplain was helping, Wilborn said. He actually led us in the song, Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition  I remember that well. But so much of what was going on didnt soak in.

All told, the attack killed 2,335 on Oahu, including 68 civilians, and sank or damaged 19 American ships and destroyed 164 American aircraft.

As with many who experience combat, Wilborn remembers slivers of the confusing battle. He said his most powerful memories of the war are from his subsequent service on the light cruiser Columbia. It saw frequent action in the South Pacific, including Guadalcanal, and was struck three times by Japanese kamikaze planes off the Philippines in January 1945. In one attack, while Wilborn was on station above the bridge on a gunnery range-finding platform, his uniform was splashed with burning gasoline from the crash.

I was going to jump into the ocean when a fire-control crew hit me with a hose, he said. I can still hear the voices of guys who died. A simple word can bring it back.

The kamikaze attack killed 13 crew members and wounded 44. Wilborn earned a Purple Heart, one of two he received for service on the Columbia.

Wilma Pidgeon, Wilborns housemate and caretaker, said those memories still occasionally disturbed his sleep. You know that talk about PTSD? It never goes away, she said.

Wanted to see China

Beverly Clyde B.C. Wilborn was born in Tennessee and grew up in Grayville, in southeastern Illinois near the Wabash River. He enlisted in the Navy in 1939 in hopes of seeing China and was assigned to the Maryland. A few months after Pearl Harbor, he was transferred to the Columbia and served on it until wars end. He never saw China.

After returning home, he became Grayvilles postmaster. The Postal Service, then known as the Post Office, later transferred him to Kansas City and St. Louis, where he was a letter carrier in the Bevo neighborhood for 14 years before retiring in 1972.

He attended reunions of the cruiser Columbia but not of the battleship Maryland or the Pearl Harbor attack. He was married twice and had four children. He has eight grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and one great-great grandchild.

Wilborn saw his first horse race as a sailor in Seattle. Shortly before retiring, he bought two horses and ran them at Fairmount Park in Collinsville and other tracks. He still owns Mamonium Moon, a horse at Fairmount. His son, Kevin Wilborn, trains and keeps the horse on a farm near Collinsville.

B.C. Wilborn drives his red Ford F-150 pickup to the track and farm, or to get coffee with his buddies at a McDonalds in Collinsville.

Pidgeon, 80, said Wilborns continued interest in horses is his inspiration. I believe people with a passion for something live longer.

How does it look now?

Wilborn plans to travel to Hawaii with Pidgeon and his two daughters, Edith Stanton of Champaign, Ill., and Sandy Richmond of Arizona, and visit there for nearly a week.

Commemorative events begin Dec. 1 and will include band concerts, ship reunions and solemn tributes. The organizing committee is paying the travel and lodging for each veteran and a companion. Seventy-five veterans of World War II also are attending, a spokesman said.

Wilborn said he wanted to visit Ford Island, but didnt expect anything there to resemble the Battleship Row of 1941. Frankly, he said, he has no idea what to expect or how he will react.
NEW YORK  As I watched the returns at Donald Trumps celebration here Tuesday night, the hardest part was trying to reassure my seventh-grade daughter at home, via phone and text, that she would be OK.

She had expected to be celebrating the election of the first female president, but instead, this man she had been reading and hearing horrible things about had won, and she feared her own world could come apart.

Here is what Im telling her:

My wonderful daughter,

This is a sad day for our country. I want you to know that I did everything I could to prevent this from happening. My efforts and those of many others came up short.

Ive written about the dreadful things Trump said and did during the campaign, and about the still more terrible things he could do if elected. I wont lie: I am deeply worried for the nation.

But I am writing because I want you to keep those fears in perspective. We will be fine. Your daily life wont change. Youll go to school, go to parties with friends, enjoy the same activities and come home to a loving family. Next week, well celebrate your bat mitzvah.

Its important, on one hand, to accept that Trump won, fair and square. As Americans, we respect the office and we salute him. Honoring elections is the bedrock of democracy.

But his election, by itself, doesnt mean America wont be a safe place for immigrants, black people, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians, or a place where women arent treated fairly. There has been a lot of talk about how the political professionals misunderstood the electorate. But thats not entirely true. Hillary Clinton, as of now, is leading in the popular vote. More Americans wanted her to be president than him. Its possible, as exit polls of voters suggest, that the FBI director, by causing the country to spend the final days of the election talking about her email, handed Trump victory. Well never know for sure, and theres nothing we can do about it.

What this means for sure is that Trump has little support to do the things he talked of. The exit polls show people supported him because they were bothered by Clintons emails or because they were worried about the economy and terrorists. CNNs exit polls show that:

Seventy percent of voters, including 29 percent of Trump voters, were bothered by his treatment of women.

Sixty-three percent, including 20 percent of Trump voters, said he doesnt have the temperament to be president.

Sixty-three percent, including 21 percent of his own voters, said hes not honest and trustworthy.

Fifty-seven percent, including 14 percent of his own voters, said they would have a negative view of Trumps victory.

Most Americans dont want a border wall, and only 25 percent of voters want him to deport illegal immigrants. They dont support ending Obamacare or free trade.

So what do we do now?

First, we must try to help Trump succeed. I urge Republicans of conscience to join his administration, to temper his worst instincts. Six years ago, the top Republican in the Senate said his top political goal should be defeating President Obama. I hope Democrats dont act that way. If Trump drops the crazy talk of the campaign, he could easily find compromises on the economy and immigration. Trump reinvented himself for this campaign. Hes capable of remaking himself again into a practical leader.

But if he doesnt, if he governs as recklessly and as divisively as he campaigned, there will be checks on his power. Stock markets will crash and a recession will come if he gets us into trade wars. If he doesnt change his views about foreign policy, hell get no support from allies.

If he uses the federal government to prosecute and jail his critics  well, then we would have a crisis. If he starts rounding up Muslims or inflames the anti-Semitism he stirred up in the campaign, I and many others  including many Republicans  will fight him with everything we have.

People joke about fleeing to another country, but America remains the greatest country on Earth. You are rightly scared that a man who talks about women the way Trump does was elected president. But we all know a woman will be elected president someday. Maybe it will be you.

At your bat mitzvah next week, we will end the service, as always, with a prayer for our country:

Grant our leaders wisdom and forbearance.

May they govern with justice and compassion.

God bless you, my daughter, and God bless America.

All my love,

Dad

Dana Milbank

Copyright The Washington Post
So my question is, if the department is defunded, and low pay continues, what will happen the next time the police are desperately needed and only a handful of them are available?
FINEST KIND CLINIC AND FISHMARKET.... Discussing medicine, culture, and the joys of cooking Pansit.
Carl Adams shouts encouragement to his players during Stratford Towns 4-0 Southern League Cup second round win over Leamington at the DCS Stadium on Tuesday. Photo: Andy Tinkler

CARL Adams stressed the importance of Stratford Town following up their cup victory over Leamington with another strong showing against Cambridge City on Saturday.

Town eased their way into the third round of the Southern League Challenge Cup with a 4-0 victory over Leamington at the DCS Stadium on Tuesday night.

Will Grocott bagged a quick-fire brace, while the returning Mike Taylor and Richard Gregory were also on target as Town bounced back from last weeks 4-0 defeat at Grantham in emphatic fashion.

And while Adams was delighted with the way his team dismantled their local rivals, the Town boss would certainly swap it for three points this Saturday against second-from-bottom Cambridge.

We must not get carried away, declared Adams.

Its great going into Saturdays game and its great beating our local rivals for the first time since Ive been here.

So we must enjoy the moment, but lets realise the league is massively important to us and Saturdays game is a lot bigger than Tuesdays.

I keep trying to tell everyone we need to close the gap between us and these bigger clubs (Leamington).

We are doing that week in, week out, month in, month out and trying to get that bit better.

Our aim this year is to solely improve on 19th, where we finished last year.

Saturdays Evo-Stik Southern League Premier Division showdown with Cambridge sees the welcome return of defensive midfielder Barry Fitzharris.

Fitzharris has now completed his three-match suspension following his red card in the 1-1 draw against Kings Lynn last month.

The Cambridge game arrives a week too soon for right-back Dan Summerfield, who is still recovering from the hamstring strain he picked up against Grantham.

The Welshman looks set for a likely return to action at Basingstoke a week on Saturday.
The OPEC flag and the OPEC logo are seen before a news conference in Vienna, Austria, October 24, 2016. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger

By Alex Lawler

LONDON (Reuters) - OPEC reported an increase in its oil production in October to a record high led by members hoping to be exempt from the producer group's attempt to curb supply, weighing on prices and pointing to a larger global surplus next year.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries pumped 33.64 million barrels per day (bpd) last month, according to figures OPEC collects from secondary sources, up 240,000 bpd from September, OPEC said in a monthly report.

The OPEC figures point to a bigger surplus than those of the International Energy Agency and underline OPEC's challenge in restraining supplies. Oil fell below $45 a barrel after the report was released, having reached a 2016 high near $54 after OPEC's deal was announced in September.

OPEC made little mention of the surprise election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president, beyond noting that currency markets had seen "significant" volatility. It left unchanged its 2017 forecasts for U.S. and world economic growth.

"More data over the coming months will provide further insight to allow a more detailed review of the U.S. economic situation, particularly after the most recent elections," OPEC said in the report.

To speed up a rebalancing of the market, OPEC agreed at a meeting in Algeria on Sept. 28 to cut supply to between 32.50 million bpd and 33.0 million bpd. The group hopes to finalize further details at a meeting on Nov. 30.

The latest figures could complicate OPEC talks on how to share out the cuts. OPEC experts meet to discuss this on Nov. 25 and on Nov. 28 will meet officials from non-OPEC countries, OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo said on Monday.

According to OPEC's report, October's supply boost mostly came from Libya, Nigeria and Iraq - members that have sought to be exempt from cuts due to conflict. Iran, seeking an exemption as output was held back by Western sanctions, also pumped more.

OPEC uses two sets of figures to monitor its output - figures provided by each country, and secondary sources which include industry media. This is a legacy of old disputes over how much countries were really pumping.

Iran told OPEC it produced 3.92 million bpd in October, while the secondary sources put output at 3.69 million bpd. From Iran's point of view, joining the OPEC supply cut deal from the higher figure would be more favorable.

OPEC issued a revised report on Friday to add Iraq's figure. Baghdad, which has questioned the accuracy of the secondary-source numbers, told OPEC its October output was steady at 4.77 million bpd - 210,000 million bpd more than the secondary sources estimate.

That aside, OPEC's report is the latest to show output is hitting new peaks. The October figure is the highest since at least 2008, according to a Reuters review of past OPEC reports.

In the report, OPEC trimmed its forecast of non-OPEC supply this year, although supply growth in 2017 is put at 230,000 bpd, little changed from last month.

With demand for OPEC crude in 2017 expected to average 32.69 million bpd, the report indicates there will now be an average surplus of 950,000 bpd if OPEC keeps output steady. Last month's report pointed to an 800,000 bpd surplus.

The 2017 surplus implied by the IEA in its latest report on Thursday is closer to 500,000 bpd.

(Reporting by Alex Lawler; editing by Jason Neely and David Evans)
CHONGQING, China, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Daqo New Energy Corp. (NYSE: DQ) (the "Company"), a leading manufacturer of high-purity polysilicon for the global solar PV industry, today announced that it will hold its annual general meeting (the "AGM") at Daqo New Energy Corp. Shanghai Office, Room C, 29th Floor, Huadu Building, No. 838, Zhangyang Road, Pudong District, Shanghai 200122, People's Republic of China on December 16, 2016 at 2:00 P.M. (Beijing time).

The proposals to be submitted to shareholders at the AGM include the adoption by the Company of a dual Chinese name "Da Quan Xin Neng Yuan Gong Si (in Chinese characters)", so that the name of the Company will be "Daqo New Energy Corp. Da Quan Xin Neng Yuan Gong Si (in Chinese characters)" and the adoption of the Fourth Amended and Restated Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Company, which reflects the adoption of the dual Chinese name and will replace the existing Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Company in their entirety. The Board of Directors of the Company recommends that the Company's shareholders and holders of the Company's American depositary shares ("ADSs") vote FOR the proposals. The notice of the AGM, which sets forth the proposed resolutions and contains a copy of the Fourth Amended and Restated Memorandum and Articles of Association to be submitted to shareholder approval at the AGM, is available on the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at www.dqsolar.com.

Holders of record of the Company's ordinary shares at the close of business in the Cayman Islands on November 14, 2016 will be entitled to attend and vote at the AGM and any adjournment or postponement thereof in person. ADS holders who wish to exercise their voting rights for the underlying ordinary shares must act through JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., the depositary bank for the Company's ADS program (the "ADS depositary"). ADS holders at the close of business in New York City on November 14, 2016 will be entitled to instruct the ADS depositary to vote the ordinary shares represented by their ADSs at the AGM.

Holders of the Company's ordinary shares or ADSs may obtain a hard copy of the Company's annual report on Form 20-F, free of charge, by emailing the Company's Investor Relations Department at [email protected], or by writing to:

Daqo New Energy Corp. Shanghai OfficeRoom C, 29th Floor, Huadu BuildingNo. 838, Zhangyang RoadPudong District, Shanghai 200122People's Republic of China Attention: Investor Relations Department

About Daqo New Energy Corp.

Founded in 2008, Daqo New Energy Corp. (NYSE: DQ) is a leading manufacturer of high-purity polysilicon for the global solar PV industry. As one of the world's lowest cost producers of high-purity polysilicon and solar wafers, the Company primarily sells its products to solar cell and solar module manufacturers. The Company has built a manufacturing facility that is technically advanced and highly efficient with a nameplate capacity of 12,150 metric tons in Xinjiang, China. The Company also operates a solar wafer manufacturing facility in Chongqing, China.

For further information, please contact:

Daqo New Energy Corp.Kevin He, Investor RelationsPhone: +86-187-1658-5553Email: [email protected]

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/daqo-new-energy-corp-to-hold-annual-general-meeting-on-december-16-2016-300361339.html

SOURCE Daqo New Energy Corp.
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP (GPM) reminds investors of the November 15, 2016 deadline to file a lead plaintiff motion in the class action lawsuit filed on behalf of investors who purchased or otherwise acquired Polaris Industries, Inc. (Polaris or the Company) (NYSE: PII) securities between February 20, 2015 and September 11, 2016, inclusive (the Class Period). Polaris investors have until November 15, 2016 to file a lead plaintiff motion.

Polaris, together with its subsidiaries, designs, engineers, manufactures, and markets off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, motorcycles, and on-road vehicles in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Mexico. On July 23, 2015, Polaris issued a recall for the Companys model-year 2016 Youth RZR off-highway vehicle, citing fire hazards. Three other recalls of the Companys RZR vehicles followedin October 2015, December 2015, and April 2016affecting more than 160,000 RZR vehicles of various model years. Throughout the recall announcements, Polaris disclosed fiscal year 2016 net income guidance of $6.00 per share.

According to the complaint filed in this lawsuit, throughout the Class Period defendants issued false and misleading statements to investors and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Polaris was unable to sufficiently validate the initially identified repair for certain of its recalled RZR vehicles; (2) Polaris would ultimately need to implement a more complex and expensive repair solution; (3) the financial impact of RZR vehicle recalls was therefore greater than Polaris had disclosed to investors; (4) Polaris had overstated its full-year 2016 guidance; and (5) as a result of the foregoing, Polaris public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

If you purchased or otherwise acquired Polaris shares during the Class Period, you may move the Court no later than November 15, 2016 to request appointment as lead plaintiff. To be a member of the class you need not take any action at this time; you may retain counsel of your choice or take no action and remain an absent member of the Class. If you wish to learn more about this action, or if you have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Lesley Portnoy, Esquire, of GPM, 1925 Century Park East, Suite 2100, Los Angeles, California 90067 at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, by email to [email protected], or visit our website at http://www.glancylaw.com. If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number and number of shares purchased.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161111005117/en/

Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP, Los Angeles

Lesley Portnoy, 310-201-9150 or 888-773-9224

[email protected]

www.glancylaw.com

Source: Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- Rubicon Minerals Corporation (TSX: RMX) ("Rubicon" or the "Company") announces that the Company and its direct and indirect subsidiaries (the "Rubicon Companies") obtained an order on November 10th (the "Meetings Order") from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Commercial List) (the "Court) in proceedings (the "CCAA Proceedings") commenced by the Rubicon Companies on October 20, 2016 pursuant to the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (the "CCAA") authorizing the Rubicon Companies to, among other things, (i) file a plan of compromise and arrangement (the "Plan") pursuant to which the Company's previously announced refinancing and restructuring transaction (the "Restructuring Transaction") is to be implemented, and (ii) authorizing the Rubicon Companies to call meetings of their creditors to vote on the Plan.

Meetings of Creditors

Pursuant to the Meetings Order, the Company will hold Meetings to vote on the Plan on December 2, 2016 as follows:

1. CPPIB Credit Investments Inc. ("CPPIB Credit") Meeting - 2:00 p.m. 2. RG Gold AG ("Royal Gold") Meeting - 2:15 p.m. 3. Unsecured Creditors Meeting - 2:30 p.m.

The Meetings will be held at the offices of Goodmans LLP at 333 Bay Street, Suite 3400, Toronto, Ontario.

Details of the Plan will be provided in an information statement to be distributed to affected creditors pursuant to the Meetings Order. Materials in connection with the Meetings, including the information statement and proxy materials, will also be made available on the website of the Court-appointed Monitor for the CCAA Proceedings at www.ey.com/ca/rubicon.

The implementation of the Restructuring Transaction and the Plan is conditional upon, among other things, receiving the requisite creditor approvals under the CCAA and Court approval in the CCAA Proceedings. If the Plan is approved by the requisite majorities of affected creditors, the Company intends to seek Court approval of the Plan on December 8, 2016 and will proceed to close the transaction shortly thereafter.

A copy of the term sheet which outlines the terms of the Restructuring Transaction is available on the Company's profile on SEDAR and on the Company's website at: www.rubiconminerals.com.

Financial Hardship Exemption Application

The Restructuring Transaction involves, among other things: (i) a new equity raise of up to C$45.0 million (the "New Equity Financing") by way of a private placement of subscription receipts (the "Subscription Receipts"); (ii) CPPIB Credit, Royal Gold, and certain securityholders receiving common shares, and (iii) the existing common shares of the Company being consolidated on a ratio of approximately 162.1 pre-consolidation Rubicon common shares to one post-consolidation common share (the "Share Consolidation").

The Company announced the successful closing of the New Equity Financing for C$45.0 million on November 4, 2016. An insider of the Company who currently owns approximately 11.0% of the Company's issued and outstanding common shares subscribed for approximately 9.1% of the subscription receipts.

The Company currently has 394,928,246 issued and outstanding common shares. The Company is expected to have 53,890,125 issued and outstanding common shares assuming completion of the Share Consolidation. The five-day weighted average trading price of the Company's pre-consolidation common shares ending on October 19, 2016, the last full day that the common shares on the TSX before trading in the shares was suspended by the TSX, was C$0.0467 per common share (the "Market Price").

Assuming completion in full of the Restructuring Transaction:

-- The Restructuring Transaction will increase the currently issued and outstanding common shares equivalent to 8,340,607,652 pre-consolidation common shares representing an increase of 2,012%; -- The New Equity Financing represents a pre-consolidation price of C$0.0082 per common share (an 82.4% discount to the Market Price prior to the announcement of the Restructuring Transaction) or C$1.33 per post-consolidation common share. The New Equity Financing includes issuing: -- 30,140,000 post-consolidated Subscription Receipts at a post- consolidated price of C$1.33, equivalent to the issuance of 4,885,664,125 pre-consolidated Subscription Receipts at a pre- consolidated price of C$0.0082 per common share resulting in the issuance of 4,882,664,125 pre-consolidated Common Shares; and -- 3,700,000 post-consolidated Subscription Receipts to an insider of the Company at a post-consolidated price of C$1.33, equivalent to the issuance of 599,766,332 pre-consolidated Subscription Receipts at a pre-consolidated price of C$0.0082 per common share resulting in the issuance of 599,766,332 pre-consolidated Common Shares; -- 14,536,341 post-consolidated Common Shares to CPPIB Credit in partial consideration for the reduction of the amounts outstanding under the Loan Facility, equivalent to the issuance of 2,356,326,444 pre- consolidated Common Shares at a price of C$0.0082 per common share (an 82.4% discount to the Market Price prior to the announcement of the Restructuring Transaction); -- 3,007,519 post-consolidated Common Shares to Royal Gold, equivalent to the issuance of 487,515,816 pre-consolidated Common Shares at a price of C$0.0082 per common share (an 82.4% discount to the Market Price prior to the announcement of the Restructuring Transaction); -- 69,925 post-consolidated Common Shares to holders of restricted share units, equivalent to the issuance of 11,334,934 pre-consolidated Common Shares at a price of C$0.0082 per common share (an 82.4% discount to the Market Price prior to the announcement of the Restructuring Transaction); -- The equity ownership will be as follows: (i) subscribers in the New Equity Financing - 62.79%, (ii) CPPIB Credit - 26.97%, (iii) Royal Gold - 5.58% and (iv) currently existing shareholders and holders of restricted share units of the Company - 4.65%; and -- The Company and CPPIB Credit will enter into an investor agreement, which shall provide CPPIB Credit with a nominee right while CPPIB Credit continues to hold 15% or more of the Company's Common Shares. The Company will also provide customary pre-emptive rights and registration rights to both CPPIB Credit and Royal Gold.

The Restructuring Transaction would ordinarily require approval from the holders of a majority of the currently issued and outstanding common shares of the Company, excluding the votes attached to the common shares held by the insider who participated in the New Equity Financing, under Sections 607(e), 607(g)(i), 607(g)(ii) and 604(a)(i) of the TSX Company Manual, unless an exemption is applicable, because the Restructuring Transaction will result in (i) the issuance of common shares that is greater than 25% of the number of common shares currently issued and outstanding, (ii) the issuance of common shares to an insider of the Company that is greater than 10% of the number of common shares currently issued and outstanding, (iii) the issuance of common shares beyond the 25% permitted discount to the Market Price, and (iv) the creation a new 20% shareholder of the Company.

The Company has applied to the TSX under the provisions of Section 604(e) of the TSX Company Manual for an exemption from the requirement for shareholder approval of the Restructuring Transaction on the basis that the Company is in CCAA proceedings and in financial difficulty (the "Application"). The independent and disinterested member of the Company's board of directors, who is free from any interest in the Restructuring Transaction, considered the reasonableness and fairness of the Restructuring Transaction and recommended to the Company's full board of directors that (i) the Restructuring Transaction be approved; and (ii) that the Company make the Application. The board of directors has approved the Restructuring Transaction. In addition, both the disinterested member of the board of directors and the Company's full board of directors determined that the Company met the applicable TSX financial hardship requirements and that the Restructuring Transaction is reasonable in the circumstances and designed to improve the Company's financial situation. The Company believes that, upon completion of the Restructuring Transaction, it will be in compliance with the TSX continued listing requirements.

TSX Expedited Listing Review Update

The Company has been notified that the TSX has deferred its decision regarding delisting the common shares of the Company with respect to meeting the requirements of continued listing until November 30, 2016. Although the Company believes that it will be in compliance with all TSX continued listing requirements upon conclusion of the delisting review, no assurance can be provided as to the outcome of such review and therefore, continued qualification for listing on TSX. The common shares will remain suspended from trading until further notice.

Third Quarter 2016 Financial Statements

The Company has filed its third quarter Financial Statements and related Management's Discussion and Analysis for the period ended September 30, 2016. The Company confirms that copies of Rubicon's interim financials can be obtained at www.rubiconminerals.com or www.sedar.com.

RUBICON MINERALS CORPORATION

Julian Kemp, Interim President, CEO, and Chair

Cautionary Statement regarding Forward-Looking Statements and other Cautionary Notes

This news release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking statements" and "forward looking information" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "believes", "intends", "may", "will", "should", "plans", "anticipates", "potential", "expects", "estimates", "forecasts", "budget", "likely", "goal" and similar expressions or statements that certain actions, events or results may or may not be achieved or occur in the future. In some cases, forward-looking information may be stated in the present tense, such as in respect of current matters that may be continuing, or that may have a future impact or effect. Forward-looking statements reflect our current expectations and assumptions, and are subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any anticipated future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to statements regarding the implementation of the Restructuring Transaction and its potential impact and outcomes on the Company, the Company's intended actions during the CCAA proceedings and the anticipated timing of the various steps of the CCAA proceedings.

Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made and represent management's best judgment based on facts and assumptions that management considers reasonable. If such opinions and estimates prove to be incorrect, actual and future results may be materially different than expressed in the forward-looking statements. The material assumptions upon which such forward-looking statements are based include, among others, that: the demand for gold and base metal deposits will develop as anticipated; the price of gold will remain at or attain levels that would render the Phoenix Gold Project potentially economic; that any proposed exploration, operating and capital plans will not be disrupted by operational issues, title issues, loss of permits, environmental concerns, power supply, labour disturbances, financing requirements or adverse weather conditions; Rubicon will continue to have the ability to attract and retain skilled staff; and there are no material unanticipated variations in the cost of energy or supplies.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Rubicon to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others: possible variations in mineralization, grade or recovery or throughput rates; uncertainty of mineral resources, inability to realize exploration potential, mineral grades and mineral recovery estimates; actual results of current exploration activities; actual results of reclamation activities; uncertainty of future operations, delays in completion of exploration plans for any reason including insufficient capital, delays in permitting, and labour issues; conclusions of future economic or geological evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; failure of equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents and other risks of the mining industry; delays and other risks related to operations; timing and receipt of regulatory approvals; the ability of Rubicon and other relevant parties to satisfy regulatory requirements; the ability of Rubicon to comply with its obligations under material agreements including financing agreements; the availability of financing for proposed programs and working capital requirements on reasonable terms; the ability of third-party service providers to deliver services on reasonable terms and in a timely manner; risks associated with the ability to retain key executives and key operating personnel; cost of environmental expenditures and potential environmental liabilities; dissatisfaction or disputes with local communities or First Nations or Aboriginal Communities; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; market conditions and general business, economic, competitive, political and social conditions; the implementation and impact of the Restructuring Transaction; our ability to generate sufficient cash flow from operations or obtain adequate financing to fund our capital expenditures and working capital needs and meet our other obligations; the volatility of our stock price, and the ability of our common stock to remain listed and traded on the TSX; our ability to maintain relationships with suppliers, customers, employees, stockholders and other third parties in light of our current liquidity situation and the CCAA proceedings.

Forward-looking statements contained herein are made as of the date of this news release and Rubicon disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Readers are advised to carefully review and consider the risk factors identified in the Management's Discussion and Analysis for period ending December 31, 2015 under the heading "Risk Factors" for a discussion of the factors that could cause Rubicon's actual results, performance and achievements to be materially different from any anticipated future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Readers are further cautioned that the foregoing list of assumptions and risk factors is not exhaustive and it is recommended that prospective investors consult the more complete discussion of Rubicon's business, financial condition and prospects that is included in this news release. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement.

Contacts: Rubicon Minerals Corporation Allan Candelario Vice President of Investor Relations Phone: +1 (416) 766-2804 E-mail: [email protected] www.rubiconminerals.com

Source: Rubicon Minerals Corporation
By Sarah Marsh and Nelson Acosta

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba on Wednesday announced a week of pre-scheduled nationwide military exercises to prepare for "enemy actions," the day after the United States elected Donald Trump, who has threatened to unravel the U.S.-Cuban detente, as president.

The Communist-ruled island did not directly link the exercises, which will include troop movements and explosions from Nov. 16 to Nov. 20, to Trump's victory.

The government has not issued any official reaction to the U.S. election outcome.

Cuba has held what it calls the "Bastion Strategic Exercise" every few years since 1980, often in response to moments of tension with its northern neighbor.

"The aim is to... raise the country's ability for defense and the troops' and people's preparation to confront different enemy actions," according to the announcement in the ruling Communist Party newspaper Granma.

Trump has threatened to reverse outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama's moves to open relations with Cuba and end decades of hostility that began soon after the island's 1959 revolution that overthrew a U.S.-backed dictator.

In the last two years, Obama has restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and eased trade and travel restrictions.

In Havana, many Cubans said their hopes for the detente to continue, bringing their country out of isolation, had been extinguished with Trump's victory.

"Brace for what's coming," said Tomas Gonzalez, a 39-year old engineer on his way to work. "With Trump, I reckon we are headed back to the era of George Bush."

Cafe waitress Adriana Perez, 30, said she saw no end in sight to the U.S. embargo that inflicted so much suffering on the Cuban people. "The embargo continues and our lives go from bad to worse," she said.

Cubans are weary of what some describe as relations with the United States taking two steps forward and one step back. U.S.-Cuban relations deteriorated sharply during the Bush administration, which tightened the U.S. embargo on the island.

"With both the White House and Congress in Republican hands, there is nothing to stop Trump from keeping his pledge to resurrect the Cold War-era policy of hostility, despite opinion polls showing broad public support for engagement," said William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University.

The embargo on Cuba, which only Congress can lift, will unlikely be ended any time soon, political analysts say.

Still, they note that Trump's stance on Cuba had flip-flopped over the years. Newsweek reported earlier this year that a hotel and casino company controlled by Trump had secretly conducted business with Cuba in the 1990s.

"His most recent statements indicate that he may not immediately reverse commercial, economic and political engagement, but may increase conditionality as a cost of expansion," said John Kavulich, head of the New York-based U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council Inc.

In a mid-October interview with CBS in Miami, Trump said he would do anything necessary "to get a strong agreement" with Cuba's government, without providing specifics.

(Additional Reporting by Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Dan Grebler)
Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Bohuslav Sobotka arrives to the meeting of heads of government Central and Eastern European countries and China in Riga, Latvia, November 5, 2016. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

By Jan Lopatka

PRAGUE (Reuters) - Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said on Friday he would replace two of his ministers in a cabinet reshuffle triggered by a poor showing in regional elections last month.

Sobotka's center-left Social Democrats came second, behind their coalition partner, ANO, a protest movement headed by Andrej Babis, a billionaire businessman and now finance minister, who has capitalized on voters' distrust in traditional parties.

"The voters gave the Social Democrats a clear message we need to change," Sobotka told reporters as he announced he planned to replace Health Minister Svatopluk Nemecek with Miloslav Ludvik, head of a large Prague hospital.

Jiri Dienstbier, minister without portfolio in charge of human rights and legislation, will be replaced by Jan Chvojka, a lower house representative, he said. The reshuffle will be put to the president for his consent.

Sobotka faces a party congress in March ahead of general election in October, with rising concerns inside the party about low ratings despite a budget surplus, unemployment at an eight-year low of 5 percent and second-quarter economic growth of 2.6 percent.

Three opinion polls since the regional election showed his pro-European party almost 15 percentage points behind Babis's ANO and Sobotka acknowledged the party leadership faced a "tough fight" for a new mandate at its congress.

Sobotka has said he aims to give the party a more modern feel that would attract liberal urban voters in addition to the party's blue-collar and more conservative base. But that strategy seemed to suffer with the dismissal of Dienstbier, representing the party's younger and progressive wing.

But as he was only able to reshuffle ministries held by his own party his options were limited. ANO and the third coalition partner, the centrist Christian Democrats, have refused to change any of their ministers.

Sobotka has pledged to stand up more visibly to Babis -- whose company is the largest private employer in the country with interests in media, healthcare, chemicals and farming -- and his attacks on coalition partners.

Chvojka, who will replace Dienstbier, could help with that. He co-authored a legal amendment that would ban Babis, as a minister, from owning media and his firms from winning public contracts.

The amendment won wide support in the lower house and is awaiting the final vote after minor changes by the upper house.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
LIMA (Reuters) - (This story corrects culture ministry's Nov 9 comments to say man was accidentally shot dead and not killed by arrow from isolated tribe; corrects headline, paragraph 1 and paragraph 3 to reflect Nov 10 ministry statement.)

An indigenous man was killed and two were wounded last week in the latest clash between sedentary communities and the isolated Mashco Piro tribe as they emerge more frequently from their jungle enclaves, the government said.

The nomadic Mashco Piro turned their bows and arrows on members of the Nahua tribe who had followed their footprints into the wilderness near their town Santa Rosa de Serjali in the region of Ucayali, said Deputy Culture Minister Alfredo Luna.

Some of the Nahua were carrying weapons and a Nahua man was accidentally shot dead in the encounter, the ministry said in a statement on Thursday. Two members of the Nahua community were wounded by arrows.

The Mashco Piro have largely shunned contact with outsiders for at least 100 years as they live off of hunting and foraging in a vast expanse of rainforest in Peru and Brazil.

Believed to be descendants of farmers who fled abuse by white plantation owners during the Amazonian rubber boom in the late 1800s, the Mashco Piro have increasingly ventured outside of their safe havens in recent years.

Illegal logging, drug trafficking and wildcat gold mining may be forcing the Mashco Piro from some lands, while climate change may be disrupting where they traditionally find food and water, Luna said.

Peru broke with its longstanding policy of avoiding contact with isolated tribes last year to communicate with a group of Mashco Piro that had repeatedly appeared at the edge of settled indigenous towns in recent years, killing at least two locals in bow and arrow attacks.

Luna said last week's deadly clash was the first inside a reserve set up for the Nahua, Indians who had lived in isolation up until the 1980s when illegal loggers captured a group of them and spread disease among their members that killed scores.

Peru is home to about a dozen isolated tribes whose members have immune systems with little resistance to common illnesses.

The Mashco Piro may also be drawn to settled areas where they can seize machetes, cooking pots and crops that make their lives in the wilderness easier.

Luna said studies indicate that there may be between 1,000 to 4,000 members of the Mashco Piro in the Amazon.

(Reporting by Mitra Taj and Reuters TV; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Clayton Mitchell

New Zealand First MP

The UK is having to get practical about the challenges to housing caused by unsustainable immigration. This blue government still refuses to admit both that we have a housing crisis, and that one of its major causes - like in Britain - is record net immigration.

Currently, the UK is suffering from its own housing crisis. Politicians including former Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith warn that immigration is "pricing young people out of the housing market". Lord Green of Deddington has said the crisis and its costs will continue to grow unless a 'sustainable' level of migration is achieved.

Does this sound familiar to anyone here in New Zealand?

The UK has at least started doing something towards their crisis, by looking at constructing upwards of 100,000 pre-packed "modular" homes towards its target of providing one million new homes by 2020.

It seems that New Zealand's blue government is still unwilling to face up to the fact that our level of net migration is unsustainable - or they're only willing to tinker with the "backlog" of parent visa migration at most. And if there is no problem, in their minds they don't need to look at solutions.

We still have working families sleeping in their cars, because we have more people who need somewhere to live, than we have places for them. It's basic maths: if we have 97,000 (total population increase) extra people needing houses each year, and we're only adding 10,000 to the housing stock, we're going to have to cram 9.7 people into each new house, or figure out how to up the housing stock figure, or cut the 'extra people' figure.

We, at New Zealand First believe that 10 to 14,000 net immigration is sustainable and practical for meeting any skills shortages we might have - not the current 70,000. If this blue government won't learn from their mistakes here, we should at least expect them to learn from the challenges Britain and other countries are facing.
Today is Armistice Day, which marks the end of the First World War 98 years ago, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Ministry for Culture and Heritage CE Manatu Taonga Paul James says the public are invited to the national commemoration in the Hall of Memories in Pukeahu National War Memorial Park.

This commemoration is held on November 11 every year to signal the end the First World War, a conflict which saw more than 18,000 New Zealanders die and a further 40,000 wounded.

When the guns fell silent, bells were rung and parades were held throughout New Zealand to signal the end of the war to end all wars.

Todays commemoration includes wreath laying by the Governor-General, Her Excellency the Rt Hon Dame Patsy Reddy, Helen Smith, Deputy British High Commissioner and the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps Her Excellency Olove Jacobsen, says Paul.

A group of Australian school students from Ashurst School, Victoria, will be attending and together with the Australian High Commissioner His Excellency Peter Woolcott will lay a wreath and floral tributes at the Australian War Memorial.

More information about New Zealands commemoration of Armistice Day is available at: www.nzhistory.net.nz
The bands about to strike up and Tango will be stepping out for her last dance.

Tango  the oldest of Port of Taurangas seven ship-to-shore gantry cranes  is being stood down, decommissioned. Her name will be erased from the dance cards.

Tango, as she is called, is the ports oldest crane and understood to be one of the oldest Liebherr gantry cranes operating anywhere in the world.

The short answer is the crane has become obsolete, says Port of Taurangas property and infrastructure manager Dan Kneebone. Obsolete in the sense we are receiving bigger ships and with bigger ships you need bigger cranes to service them. The new Liebherr cranes can lift two containers at a time  so twice as much and twice as fast.

While the traditional tango is a bit of hot and sensuous Argentinian exactness, Port of Taurangas Tango is more a spindly wallflower sitting prominently at the front of the container terminal wharf  a gigantic praying mantis about to strike, or a giraffe perhaps.

She is prominent on the harbour citys skyline.

And shes there because shes servicing the coastal feeders, says Dan.

But cranes, like most things, have a design life. For a gantry crane its in terms of the number of lifts. And Tangos is nearing an end. Its like your car, says Dan. There are a lot of moving parts constantly being maintained and replaced. It gets to a stage where its uneconomic to repair them because they are just too old.

Sometimes the old cranes have an afterlife  they find new purpose elsewhere. They can but this one wont, says Dan. It sounds horrible, its going to get scrapped. This lady has a history. Tango was initially commissioned on the Mount Maunganui Wharf 37 years ago in 1979 as a conventional crane. She was reincarnated in 1999  barged across the harbour to Sulphur Point where she became a container crane.

Who knows how many containers she has hoisted ashore or aboard? A lot of container cranes are designed to do about two million lifts. Some of the new cranes are certified higher. But we just dont know with Tango. And apparently there is someone one with a clipboard standing there checking them off? Well, kind of. The new cranes we could tell you exactly how many lifts, but Tango no.

The old Liebherr gantry crane will know her time is nearly done. Two new cranes, which arrived in bits from Liebherrs Killarney factory in Ireland in August, are now being assembled behind her at the container terminal at Sulphur Point.

They are due to be operational later this month. So when the music dies in December, so will Tango. She will be dismantled, she will slowly disappear off Taurangas skyline.

There are still port employees who were around when Tango was commissioned. They will swap stories at a function when she is decommissioned. Or will it be a wake?

Then the flash new-generation, two-at-a-time Liebherrs will step up for the Port of Tauranga.
The $30,000 fine and $25,000 reparations imposed on meat processor Affco after a Te Puke employee was impaled by a hook didnt reflect the serious harm caused to the victim, according to WorkSafe.

The hook was forced through Jason Matahikis skull and came out beneath his eyes.

After a judge alone trial last year, Judge Peter Rollo found Affco guilty of failing to take all practical steps to ensure Mr Matahiki was not harmed at his place of employment.

But WorkSafe has appealed the sentence in the Tauranga High Court, claiming the fine and reparation was manifestly inadequate.

Worksafe says Judge Rollo erred when he fixed a $40,000 starting point when assessing the fine.

It says the starting point should have been $80,000 to $90,000 given the companys culpability, its previous relevant convictions and when looking at other similar serious injury prosecution cases.

Affco claims the process of setting reparation was not an exact science and that Judge Rollo had visited the site and heard all the evidence before imposing an adequate sentence. It called for the appeal to be rejected.

Jason Matahiki underwent rehabilitation and returned to work on light duties four months after the incident. He has ongoing headaches and pain.

The decision in the Tauranga High Court has been reserved.
Initial results of a survey of Lake Rotorua undertaken by the New Zealand Defence Force shows the lake is hydrothermally active.

The bathymetric and magnetic survey being conducted by the Royal New Zealand Navys Littoral Warfare Unit and began on October 17, has so far covered about 40 per cent of the lakes floor.

Once the survey is completed on November 18, the results will provide GNS Science with a high-resolution map of Lake Rotoruas floor and geological features.

Leading the operation is Lieutenant Commander Tim Garvan who says theyve found significant evidence of hydrothermal activity throughout the lake.

This includes pockmarks on the lake floor and hydrothermal vents, with streams of bubbles seen in the water column.

GNS Science Marine geologist Cornel de Ronde explains pockmarks indicate gas is being discharged through the lake floor, while hydrothermal vents show the release of gas and hot water.

Examples of hydrothermal activity seen on the lake floor include smaller hydrothermal eruption craters that are likely expelling hot water, and pockmarks or circular features several metres in diameter and are formed as a result of gas being discharged through the lake floor.

Many of them appear in a linear pattern, suggesting they may be related to underlying faults.

The survey being conducted by the NZDF is valuable because it will provide us with a base map that shows areas of current and past hydrothermal activity, the location of hydrothermal eruption craters and the distribution of volcanic rocks within the lake.

Cornel says the survey will also show areas of acute shoaling, which are potentially hazardous to vessels and sailors.

This work is the first step in a series of surveys that we hope will ultimately determine how much heat is being discharged through the lake floor from an underlying magma source, with the results feeding into our long-term hazards assessment of the area.

Lake Rotorua formed within a large caldera volcano that last erupted 240,000 years ago. It was last surveyed in 2005 by the University of Waikato.

A graphic of one of the vent holes found on the lake floor of Lake Rotorua by a New Zealand Defence Force survey team. The vent hole is 60 metres wide and six metres deep. Image: NZDF
Preciados, Alonso, Laguarda, Pelaez and Santiago in Malaga. :: NITO SALAS

The sailboat Cannonball is manned by five women who dont know when theyre beaten. Having faced up to a battle with cancer, all five came out on top. They are a living example that having a tumour doesnt have to bring your life to a halt.

Keen to show their energy and that theyve left their illness behind them, Patricia Alonso, Marian Santiago, Yolanda Preciados, Susana Laguarda and Carmen Pelaez, aged from 37 to 57, are going to take on the Atlantic, manning a sailboat bound for the island of Martinique in the Caribbean. The vessel docked in Malaga port on Tuesday, arriving from Valencia, before heading for Tenerife, where they are expected to arrive by the 13th.

The five warriors are taking part in the Reto Pelayo Vida (#RetoPelayoVida) and were selected from a pool of 90 women who had had cancer. One of the criteria was to be in good physical shape. Even then, the hopefuls had to take part in a 40-hour navigation challenge between Valencia and the Balearic Islands, explained Yolanda Preciados, Mijas resident. She suffered cancer of the uterus, while the other crew members had breast cancer.

This is a very nice experience, she says. Iam very happy to be part of the crew. What we want to show is that there is life after cancer. Last year Iwas having chemotherapy and now I am about to cross the Atlantic.

The five women will be able to count on the support of two Olympic rowers in the shape of Iago Lopez-Marra and Diego Fructuoso who will accompany them on the voyage.

They hope to depart Tenerife on 16 November, before crossing the Atlantic - a journey expected to take 14 days. The tropical island of Martinique awaits them at the end of the month.
A Customs patrol boat collided with the victims' powerboat, which officials believe was acting as decoy for a nearby drug shipment

The patrol boat and the damaged vessel in Algeciras. :: EFE

A waterborne chase between Spanish authorities and suspected drug runners ended in tragedy last week when four people were killed.

According to official accounts, the incident began when a Customs patrol helicopter spotted two powerboats unloading goods between them 12 miles off the coast between Malaga and Cadiz province near Estepona last Thursday. From the air, officers believed that one of the boats was loaded with hashish and the other was hiding the goods under a tarpaulin.

The pilot immediately alerted the Customs patrol boat based at Malaga, which, reaching the spot at 4.30pm, found another powerboat, different to those that had been spotted earlier.

The 12-metre-long inflatable speedboat with three powerful motors fled the scene when it saw the Customs boat and ignored warnings to stop.

According to the investigation that has now been opened in Algeciras, the escaping powerboat made an abrupt turn to try to avoid the patrol boat. Upon seeing the manoeuvre, the patrol crew immediately switched off their motors and tried to swerve out of the way, but were unable to avoid the collision, said the same sources.

The four crewmen on board the suspect powerboat were thrown to the stern. When the officers went to assist them, they were confirmed dead, seemingly as a direct result of the impact between the boats.

Drums of petrol, waterproof clothing, food and drink were found on the boat but no drugs.

Customs authorities believe that the boat may have been providing fuel back up and acting as a decoy to the other two boats spotted by the helicopter earlier in the afternoon.

Three of the victims were Spanish and one Moroccan. Relatives of the deceased in Algeciras are demanding a full inquiry, with the uncle of one victim saying: They were carrying absolutely nothing. If theyd committed a crime, arrest them and put them in prison, but dont kill them.
Dr Garcia pointed out to students from local schools that Gibraltar is very important to Spanish workers and the economy of the Campo area

The 12,000 Spanish workers in Gibraltar need a fluid border. :: SUR

Dr Joseph Garcia, Gibraltars deputy chief minister, told students this week that a managed and sensible Brexit discussion is in the best interests of both Spain and Gibraltar. Dr Garcia was speaking to pupils from local schools following a presentation by a group who had returned from a visit to the EU institutions in Brussels.

Dr Garcia explained that 12,000 people, most of them Spanish, live in Spain but work in Gibraltar so they count on a fluid border in order to make a living. He pointed out that 25 per cent of the GDP of the surrounding area of Spain is generated by Gibraltar, and that Gibraltar PLC is the second largest employer for Andalucia after the Junta. He also firmly rejected the proposal by former Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Margallo for shared sovereignty between the UK and Spain as the price to pay for Gibraltar remaining in the EU.

Dr Garcia outlined the work that the Gibraltar government has done so far in relation to Brexit, from meetings with British prime minister Theresa May and government ministers to a comprehensive statistical analysis of the impact of leaving the European Union across every area of government and the private sector. He also described the lobbying work that continues to be conducted in public and behind the scenes to best protect Gibraltars position.

The deputy chief minister pointed out that even today different parts of the British family of nations enjoyed a different degree of participation with the EU. With regard to the procedure for departure from the European Union under Article 50, Gibraltar and the UK will remain in the EU and entitled to the rights bestowed by EU membership until the moment of departure in years to come. Even then, Gibraltar would continue to maintain a relationship with the European Union.
The pound may have fallen, but have Spaniards seen any difference visiting or living in the UK?

A shopper crosses Oxford Street, the commercial heart of London. :: REUTERS

Tens of thousands of Spanish people will be visiting London over the December holiday period. According to London &Partners, an official tourism promotion agency, in 2015 there were 1.5 million visitors from Spain, which was the fifth largest source market. In the past decade, the number of Spanish visitors to the UK has risen by 62.5 per cent.

There are no official figures about the Brexit effect, but HotelsCombined, an internet hotel website, has registered 15 per cent more hits in Spain compared with last year. The fall in the pound is also making a visit to the UK cheaper now: a trip on the London Eye cost 32.44 euros in June, but is now 27.69. A seat in row K to see the musical The Lion King was 197.86 euros, but is now 168.94.

To see what Spanish visitors to London think about Brexit, we took a walk between Big Ben and Harrods department store. We didnt have to wait long before we heard Spanish voices below the UKs most famous clock tower. They were from Valladolid: two ladies, Natalia and Belinda Plaza, were visiting their niece, Beatriz Sancho, who has been living with her partner in London for a year.

I think the only difference is the exchange rate between euros and pounds, because Sterling is lower now, but apart from that nothing seems to have changed since we were here a few years ago, says Natalia.

Beatriz echoes the feelings of many young people: I have been working and studying towards a good future since I was 16, and Spain cant offer me that. Here, ever since the first day, they have appreciated my experience, and the languages I speak. We have worked hard and saved as much as we could and now we have opened a shop selling beauty products for men, she says.

What about Brexit? We havent noticed any change. Were not worried, about our work or the economy. What you see on the news and read in the papers isnt reflected by what is happening in the street, says Beatriz.

Natalia believes the changes will be noticed most among the wealthy, companies and banks. We have been here on holiday for two days now, and we still havent bought anything, she says.

No, says Belinda, but then everything is really expensive here, especially public transport.

On the corner of the street there is a Parliament shop, which sells official documents, books, crystal glasses and mugs with pictures of famous buildings. The assistant tells us she doesnt think sales have increased since the EU referendum.

Going up through Whitehall we come to Trafalgar Square, where the National Gallery is situated. Outside, we find a Spanish couple who have come to visit their daughter, who works in London. Maria Cristina Fernandes, a teacher, and her engineer husband Manuel Campos, like the museums and art galleries, and the fact that they are free.

They have only just arrived and they have noticed the weaker pound, but they have always believed London to be a very expensive city. Regarding Brexit, so far they havent noticed any difference and say it is a case of waiting to see what happens. Manuel says that, in any case, the economy here is solid.

Within a few minutes we have arrived at Piccadilly Circus and Regent Street, with Hamleys, the oldest, biggest and best-known toy shop in the world. Maria Medrano is there with her grand-daughter, her husband and her daughter, who lives in London.

I havent noticed anything different. We dont normally go shopping. We sometimes eat out at a pub, and thats the only place that we have seen a difference in the money, she says about Brexit.

Four friends, also fromValladolid, come strolling down Oxford Street. They prefer not to give their names, but say they are happy that the value of the pound has dropped after the EU referendum because their money goes further. Did they plan their visit because of that? No, no, says one. We booked this last year. Do they think the British are crazy to have voted for Brexit?

It would seem harsh for me to say that, and it would probably upset people, but I do think they should have stayed in the EU. However, they voted freely about what they want in the future, and I wish them all the best, really.

Fears for the future

Turning a corner we arrive in luxurious Mayfair, and head for the world-famous Harrods department store, where we spot a Spanish couple looking in one of the windows.

Desire Rojas and Manuel Soriano have been living in Manchester for two and a half years and decided to take a trip to London as a sort of farewell to the UK, because they are thinking of returning to Spain. For them, Brexit is already having a negative effect. When they visit their families in Malaga, they receive fewer euros for their pounds, and they are afraid of what will happen in the next year.

Why are they afraid? We think they might send us home, says Desire. They shouldnt, because we have work contracts, but even so, you never know, says Manuel.

They are also worried about what would happen if after six months or a year back in Spain they cant find work and want to go back to the UK. They have loved their time in Manchester. It has been fantastic. We have jobs, we live in the city centre, and we have been able to travel around, says Desire.

Like London, Manchester voted to remain in the UK. Have this couple experienced any difficulties because they are immigrants? No, not personally, says Manuel, who works in a cafe. I have heard of a few isolated cases, but we havent been treated any differently.

On the contrary, stresses Desire, who works in a fashion shop. If you tell people youre from Spain, and from Malaga, they ask you why on earth you want to be in the UK!
The delicate red field poppy has become an internationally-recognised symbol of remembrance and welfare for war veterans

Poppies have become a symbol for remembrance every November. :: REUTERS

The artificial poppy, which has been used as a symbol of remembrance since 1921, is worn by people throughout the world during the weeks leading to Remembrance Sunday.

The distinctive emblem of the Flanders field poppy is worn on the left lapel, or as near the heart as possible.

The idea of wearing poppies as an emblem of remembrance was promoted by Moina Belle Michael, an American humanitarian who conceived the idea after reading the WW1 poem In Flanders Fields.

Inspired by the Canadian physician John McCraes front-line themed poem, Moina wrote a poem in response called We shall keep the faith, as a tribute to In Flanders Fields,  one of Canadas most celebrated literary works.

McCrae had penned his poem after performing the funeral service of a friend who had died in action at Ypres. During the service, he noted how poppies quickly grew around the graves of the fallen, and he composed the poem the next day.

Moina, born in Good Hope, Georgia in 1869, had visited Europe in 1914, as both sides of her family had origins in Brittany and Flanders. When war broke out in August of that year, she was in Germany.

Moina was a professor at the University of Georgia when the United States entered the war in 1917, though she took a leave of absence and volunteered to assist in the New York-based training headquarters for overseas YMCA workers.

After the war, Moina returned to the University of Georgia, where she taught disabled service men and women. After realising the need to provide financial support for military personnel injured in conflict, she pursued the idea of selling silk poppies as a means of raising funds.

At the age of 49, with a career in teaching for over 30 years already behind her, Moina had the idea to create an emblem of remembrance using the red poppy.

This was a momentous time for her and it was the start of a long journey to create a national emblem of remembrance. Because of her efforts, she became known as The Poppy Lady.

She continued to campaign to have the emblem officially recognised by governments and the general public, dedicating her life to the project until her death in 1944.

Her campaign resulted in the poppy being adopted as a symbol of remembrance by the American Legion Auxiliary in 1921, and the policy was soon adopted by Earl Haigs Legion Appeal Fund, a fund that would later become the Royal British Legion.

In 1941 at the age of 72, Moina published her autobiography, The Miracle Flower, The Story of the Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy, a book she dedicated to John McCrae.

Moina described the way that the idea for a memorial emblem came to her in a moment of revelation in her autobiography.

I read the poem, which I had read many times previously, and the last verse transfixed me. This was a full spiritual experience for me. It seemed as though the silent voices again were vocal, whispering, in sighs of anxiety unto anguish.

The verse that had transfixed her reads  To you from failing hands we throw the Torch, be yours to hold it high, if ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields.

She pledged to keep the faith and always wore a red poppy as a sign of remembrance and the emblem of keeping the faith with all who died.

Moina Belle Michael died in Athens, Georgia, on 10 May 1944. She was 74.

Moinas tireless efforts earned her numerous awards during her lifetime and she would receive several posthumous recognitions honouring her lifes achievement.

In 1944, a Liberty ship constructed in Georgia was launched in her named and in 1948, four years after her death, the US Postal Service issued a commemorative three-cent stamp in her honour.

Because of her campaigning, her complete dedication to the cause and the inspiration her idea gave to others, the red field poppy has become an internationally-recognised symbol of remembrance and welfare for war veterans.
Fresh faces head up the foreign and interior ministries as the new PM urges dialogue with the opposition

A family portrait. Photographers jostle for a better view of the cabinet at the PMs La Moncloa office :: EFE

Newly-appointed as prime minister, Mariano Rajoy lost no time in announcing his new cabinet at the end of last week. On Friday morning his top ministerial team held its first regular weekly meeting at La Moncloa, the prime ministers official residence in Madrid. Earlier they been sworn in at the La Zarzuela royal palace.

As expected, Rajoy opted for continuity and stability without signalling a change of direction.

The few key changes included the removal of two veteran senior ministers: Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo and Jorge Fernandez Diaz were replaced respectively by Alfonso Dastis, an experienced diplomat, as foreign minister and Juan Ignacio Ziodo, a former mayor of Seville, as interior minister. Long-term political ally and PPparty head, Maria Dolores de Cospedal was rewarded with the Ministry of Defence.

Mindful that he doesnt have a majority in parliament, Rajoy instructed his new ministers to pact and talk a lot with the opposition in the coming months.
Javier Fernandez, Juan Espadas, Gabriele Finaldi and Federico Trillo, at the presentation of the Year of Murillo in Room 30 of the National Gallery. :: SALVADOR SALAS

The National Gallery in London was chosen as the venue for the international launch of the Year of Murillo, during which Seville will be commemorating the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of the great European Baroque painters, with an unprecedented series of events and exhibitions between now and 2018.

We want the world to know how a city like Seville impacted upon a painter such as Bartolome Murillo, and at the same time the influence he had on the city, explained the mayor of Seville, Juan Espadas. He invited everyone in Britain to participate in some way in the many celebrations which will be organised in the forthcoming months and which began on Tuesday with the opening of the exhibition Velazquez. Murillo. Sevilla at the Hospital de Los Venerables in Seville.

It consists of 19 works (nine by Velazquez and ten by Murillo), dating from 1645 to 1680, on loan from 12 museums and private collections in Europe and the USA. Through the collection, one can see how each of these artists from Seville were social commentators in their splendid careers, although Murillo never left Seville and Velazquez went to the Court in Madrid. This exhibition will continue until 28 February and has been curated by the director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, who presented the inauguration last Friday.

But thats not all;for nearly two years the charms of Murillo and Seville will be delighting the world of art, with an unprecedented series of major exhibitions and events. The city plans to celebrate in style to mark the fourth centenary of the birth of one of the greatest painters in the history of European art.

For it, Andalucias regional government is planning a major publicity campaign in Spain and abroad for the Year of Murillo (which starts at the end of 2017 and will continue through 2018), as the Andalusian Minister for Tourism, Francisco Javier Fernandez, explained.

The combination of such an attractive project as the Year of Murillo and the three new museums which are to open in Andalucia will be a major tourist attraction for our region. It is an opportunity we cant miss, and we are focusing a large proportion of our promotion on the Spanish market, he said.

He also highlighted the enormous potential of the Year of Murillo in Seville and the new fine art museum about to open in the Aduana building in Malaga, with its very valuable works of Andalusian and Spanish classicism.

They will undoubtedly attract many foreign and Spanish visitors not only to Seville and Malaga, but also to the rest of Andalucia. This is an excellent combination which will benefit all of us. We have to make the most of the great opportunity presented by cultural tourism, and know how to sell it in Andalucia, a region which is so closely linked to art that its cultural, artistic and architectural heritage is not only found in the museums and monuments but is lived and breathed in the cities, as in this case with the Year of Murillo, he explained.

The mayor of Seville, Juan Espadas, expressed his pride in the spectacular programme which has been drawn up by a team of experts for this Year of Murillo. The artist, as Gabriele Finaldi reminded those who attended the presentation, never left Seville, despite numerous opportunities to go to the Court and Madrid.

Espadas said, The Year of Murillo will enable us to showcase the Seville of today, but also the city of old, the city that has always been there, the city that was, and is, powerful, with its way of life, its influences and architecture, its monuments and its art. We are not going to miss this great opportunity to relaunch Seville from a cultural and tourism point of view, but also as a city with an ambitious project behind it.

The event at the National Gallery was also attended by the Spanish ambassador to the UK, Federico Trillo, and the recently-appointed director of the Spanish Tourism Office in London, Javier Pinanes, together with other representatives from the Andalusian Tourism and Culture ministries and Seville city council.
A boyfriend and girlfriend -- sometimes accompanied by friend -- went on a 10-day North Country armed robbery spree, hitting four businesses and an Amish family's home, according to the New York State Police.

The four businesses they hit included two liquor stores, a grocery store and a fried chicken restaurant, police said. Two businesses and the Amish family were hit on the same day, police said.

State police announced Thursday they arrested Justin J. Brunell, 29; his girlfriend, Brandy J. Breithaupt, 39, of Ogdensburg; and their friend, Anthony J. Jock, 36, of Lisbon.

They were accused of robbing McAllister's Liquor Store, the Parkway Country Store and an Amish family after 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 29, according to the St. Lawrence County Sheriff's Office. The three face three counts of first-degree robbery and two counts first-degree attempted robbery.

Brunell and Breithaupt committed the robberies while Jock drove the getaway car, police said. Police released the following details:

McAllister's Liquors and Wines, 213 Rensselaer St., Rensselaer Falls. The sheriff's department responded to a call at 7:10 p.m. The robbers were reported to have a gun with them, deputies said.

Parkway Country Store, Route 37, Red Mills. Police responded to a call at 8:48 p.m. The robbers were reported to have a weapon with them, police said.

Amish home, Line Road, Heuvelton. Police said a man with a pistol and a woman carrying a knife entered the home around 10:30 p.m. The couple entered the homeowner's bedroom and demand them to open their safe, police said.

Brunell and Breithaupt also robbed two other businesses, police said. They were charged with two counts of first-degree robbery and one count of second-degree robbery:

Nick's Liquor Store, 1310 Ford St., Oct. 27: Ogdensburg police said they responded to an armed robbery call around 6 p.m.

Dixie Lee Fried Chicken, 423 State St., Nov. 7: Police said the crime was reported to have taken place before 7 p.m. The suspects were reported to be armed, police said.

Police did not release how much money the robbers made off with.

The three suspects were arrested in a joint investigation between the Ogdensburg Police Department, the St. Lawrence County Sheriff's Office and the New York State Police.

Brunell, Breithaupt and Jock were arraigned in the Town of Fowler Court and are held without bail in the St. Lawrence County Correctional Facility, police said.
MORAVIA, N.Y. - Cayuga County Sheriff's deputies have accused Keith A. Hilliard, a level two sex offender, of having oral sex with a child under the age of 15.

Hilliard, 38, of 4258 Route 38A, Moravia, was charged Wednesday with one count each of second-degree criminal sex act and failing to report a change in status. Both charges are felonies. He was arraigned in the Town of Owasco Court and sent to the Cayuga County Jail in lieu of bail.

Keith Hilliard

Deputies said they began their investigation after they received a report of a man having sexual contact with a child under the age of 15. An investigation found that Hilliard had engaged in oral sexual contact with the child, deputies said.

Deputies also discovered that Hilliard, a level two sex offender, had not reported to the Department of Criminal Justice Services - as required - that he was using a social media site on the internet.

Hilliard was convicted in June 2003 of one count of third-degree rape for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 2002, according to the New York State Sex Offenders' Registry. He was sentenced to a year in county jail.

The Cayuga County Sheriff's Office asks anyone with information related to this investigation to call 315-253-1610 or at www.cayugacounty.us/cayugacrime/Crime-Tips.

Contact Charley Hannagan anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-2161.
TOWN OF FREETOWN, N.Y.--A Cortland County man was charged with assault and unlawful imprisonment after he hit his mother and prevented his parents from leaving their home, sheriff's deputies said.

Cortland County Sheriff's Deputies were called during the early evening on Halloween to a home on East Freetown-Texas Valley Road in Freetown on a report of domestic abuse there.

During their investigation deputies found that an argument between David C. Bamberry, 36, and his mother had turned physical. Bamberry is accused with hitting his mother with his fist, resulting in an injury to her that required immediate medical attention, deputies said. He is also accused of attempting to keep his mother and father from leaving the home where the three live, deputies said.

David C. Bamberry

Bamberry was charged with second-degree assault, a felony and two counts of unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor. He was arraigned Town of Cortlandville Court and was sent to the Cortland County Jail on no bail.

Contact Charley Hannagan anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-2161.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Three federal prosecutors and two FBI agents in Syracuse were honored this week for their work in the case of a North Country couple who kidnapped two Amish sisters and sexually exploited them and others to make child pornography.

The five federal workers were among 376 across the country who U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch recognized for distinguished service. They received the awards in a ceremony Thursday in Washington, D.C.

The Syracuse recipients of the award were assistant U.S. attorneys Steven Clymer, Lisa Fletcher and Tamara Thomson, and FBI agents Fred Bragg and Alix Skelton.

They were honored for their work on the investigation and prosecution of Stephen Howells and Nicole Vaisey. The couple from Hermon, N.Y., kidnapped the Amish sisters from a family vegetable stand in 2014 in St. Lawrence County.

Howells and Vaisey pleaded guilty last year, admitting they drugged and sexually exploited six young girls and produced pornographic videos of the abuse.

Howells was sentenced to 580 years in prison. Vaisey was imprisoned for 300 years.

Richard Hartunian, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, said he was proud of the prosecutors' and agents' "outstanding work in bringing these depraved predators to justice."

Contact John O'Brien anytime | email | Twitter | 315-470-2187
MORAVIA, N.Y. -- Gary Thibodeau, who's appealing his conviction in the 1994 kidnapping of Heidi Allen in Oswego County, has been moved to a less-secure prison closer to home.

Thibodeau was transferred this week from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora to Cayuga Correctional Facility in Moravia, Cayuga County, according to his niece, Barbie Barlow.

Clinton is maximum-security. It's notorious as the prison from which two murderers escaped last year. Cayuga is a medium-security prison.

Barlow said she doesn't know what prompted the transfer. She learned of it Thursday night from Thibodeau's lawyer, Lisa Peebles.

Peebles said prison officials did not tell her or Thibodeau why they transferred him.

Prison officials did not provide Syracuse.com with an immediate explanation for the move.

Thibodeau, 63, had been unable to walk to the showers at Clinton, and had trouble walking to the cafeteria, Barlow said. He suffered two broken ankles in a fall sometime before he was imprisoned in 1995, and has metal plates in his feet.

Thibodeau lost a lung in the 21 years he's been in prison, his family has said.

"This is excellent news," Barlow said of the transfer to Cayuga.

Thibodeau's appealing acting Oswego County Judge Daniel King's decision in March not to overturn his kidnapping conviction. Thibodeau's lawyers and Oswego County prosecutors are expected to argue the appeal early next year before the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court.



Thibodeau's serving a prison sentence of 25 years to life on a conviction of kidnapping Allen from her job at a New Haven convenience store and presumably killing her. His brother, Richard Thibodeau, was acquitted in a separate trial.

Allen's body has not been found.

Contact John O'Brien anytime | email | Twitter | 315-470-2187
21384602-mmmain.jpg

Cor executives Joseph Gerardi, left, and Steven Aiello, center, left the federal building in Syracuse Sept. 22 after being charged with bribery and bid-rigging. The two men hired a former co-chair of the state Moreland Commission for their defense team.

(Michael Greenlar)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Two executives of Cor Development Co. have hired a former co-chair of the Moreland Commission as part of their legal team to defend against federal corruption charges.

Milton L. Williams Jr., a partner in the New York City firm Vladeck, Raskin & Clark, has joined the defense team for Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi, who face federal charges of bribery and bid-rigging.

Williams co-chaired the Moreland Commission, which was convened by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to investigate public corruption in New York State. After Cuomo shut down the commission in 2014, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara started his own investigation that ultimatley led to charges against nine men, including the two Cor executives, a former top Cuomo aide and a lobbyist with close ties to the Cuomo family.

In addition to Williams, Aiello and Gerardi are represented by Albany-based attorney Steve Coffey and Syracuse-based attorney Anthony Copani.

Aiello and Gerardi are due to appear Nov. 23 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The federal prosecutor's office said last month that it is pursuing discussions with at least some of the defendants about "possible dispositions'' of the case. Attorneys for each defendant denied partaking in plea negotiations.

Aiello and Gerardi were among eight men charged Sept. 22 in a criminal complaint lodged by Bharara, who accused them of various crimes in connection with bribery and bid-rigging on state-funded economic development contracts and other state business.

A ninth man, former lobbyist Todd Howe, has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors.

The 80-page complaint filed last month by prosecutors accused Aiello and Gerardi of bribing Joseph Percoco, a former top Cuomo aide, in return for his help influencing state agencies involved in development projects and to secure a $5,000 raise for Aiello's son, who worked for the Cuomo administration.

The two Cor officials also are accused of conspiring with lobbyist Howe and Alain Kaloyeros, the former head of SUNY Polytechnic Institute, to rig the competition for a Syracuse-area developer for nanotech development projects so that Cor would be selected.

An attorney for Aiello and Gerardi has said they are innocent and that the charges are based on false accusations from Howe, who pleaded guilty. Attorneys for the other defendants also have denied the charges.
Blog_2016-10-10-dn-dance11.JPG

Supporters went to Destiny USA in October for a peaceful round dance led by Indigenous singers and drummers, in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux' efforts to protect their water from the Dakota Access Pipeline.

(Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com)

ONONDAGA NATION -- Organizers expect hundreds of people to march from the Onondaga Nation to downtown Syracuse Saturday to stand in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Nation and its fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.

The goal of the Sgennonh Unity March is to bring awareness to the violence that has occurred during the protest to stop the construction of the pipeline.

Thousands of Native Americans from across the country and other supporters have joined the protest against the proposed nearly 1,200-mile pipeline that would transport crude oil from North Dakota to Iowa. Most of the $3.8 billion pipeline has been completed.

The Standing Rock Sioux Nation believes the pipeline will pollute its drinking water and destroy numerous cultural sites.

Hundreds of protesters, who call themselves water protectors, have been blockading the Dakota Access Pipeline's path on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation since earlier this summer. The protest has drawn hundreds of arrests and violence.

Supporters of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation will gather at 12 p.m. Saturday at the Onondaga Nation Arena on Route 11 on the Onondaga Nation and walk up South Salina Street to the Bank of America in Clinton Square. There will be a rally and speakers at both the middle and end of the march, organizers said.

For more information about the march, visit the Sgennonh Unity March event on Facebook.
Pickup Truck.jpg

Four pickup trucks drive by a anti-Trump protest, one with a confederate flag attached to the back, Thursday afternoon on LeMoyne College campus, according to a photo posted on Twitter by The Dolphin.

(The Dolphin Twitter)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Le Moyne College President Linda LeMura said a truck flying the Confederate flag during a post-election protest on campus was deeply upsetting.

LeMura sent a campus-wide email to staff, students and faculty this afternoon.

"What the flag stands for, in both the past and present, is not tolerated on our campus," LeMura said in the email.

Students held a rally outside of Grewen Hall around 3:30 p.m. Thursday to protest the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. During the rally, four pickup trucks drove on campus and deliberately passed by the group of students. One of the trucks was flying a Confederate flag.

Here's LeMura's full letter to the Le Moyne community:

Yesterday was a very emotional day on our campus. For those of you who are not aware, during a student-initiated gathering related to this week's election held in front of Grewen Hall, a number of pickup trucks drove on campus and deliberately passed by the group.



One of the trucks was flying a Confederate flag.



The Confederate flag is a loaded symbol - but since the passage of times often diminishes the impact or true meaning of symbols, I want to provide a brief history. It first appeared during the Civil War as the Confederate battle flag. Shortly after being selected as the vice president, Georgia's Alexander Stephens explained why the perpetuation and expansion of slavery was the central goal of their new nation. "Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea," he told his audience. Its "foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." The origin of the confederate flag is thus irretrievably associate with the history of slavery and the willful subordination of one group of people to another.

For many years this symbol disappeared, only to resurface in the late 1940s as an official symbol of yet another racist group - the Dixiecrats. In 1948, Strom Thurmond from South Carolina ran for President under this party's platform, which included the following: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race." During the civil rights movement, the Confederate battle flag continued to evolve into a symbol used by white supremacy groups representing hate, racism, and violence. From the Ku Klux Klan to segregationists to most recently the Charleston shooter, radical hate groups have adopted this flag as a symbol of their values.



Make no mistake: the presence of the flag was deeply upsetting to me and to many individuals, and is something that is antithetical to our Jesuit heritage. What the flag stands for, in both the past and present, is not tolerated on our campus.



In spite of this disturbing incident, I am proud that our students gathered outside of Grewen Hall comported themselves in a manner consistent with the core values of Le Moyne College. With students on both sides of the political discussion involved in the event, it was a very passionate display - but it remained peaceful. The statements made by Professor Ann Ryan, which have gone viral, perfectly encapsulate the type of civil discourse we strive for at the College.

As a Jesuit college, we have a moral responsibility to speak for the most vulnerable among us. We also have a duty to model the kinds of civil discourse that seem to be lacking in our society today. We want to use what is happening in our country as a teachable moment -- to speak against intolerance and bigotry, while demonstrating that we can do so without demeaning differing political points of view or each other in the process. We must hold steady to our moral precepts while maintaining the sense of cura personalis for which we are so well known. In the words of Pope Francis, "May we make God's merciful love ever more evident in our world through dialogue, mutual acceptance and fraternal cooperation."

The emotions that so many of us are feeling these days are powerful and genuine. We embrace democracy and the rights of individuals to express themselves freely. But as a Jesuit institution, we are also committed to helping further society through the promotion of social justice. We have, and must continue to, foster the ideals espoused by Le Moyne College.

Moving forward, I want to ensure everyone that we are committed to continuing an open, ongoing dialogue that is respectful, inclusive and productive. Our plans are to arrange several events over the weeks ahead to assist with these conversations; we will let you know as these are scheduled.

These have been trying times; we will get through this together, even if this means having sometimes difficult conversations as individuals and as a community.

Sincerely,

Linda LeMura, Ph.D.


Pickup Truck.jpg

Four pickup trucks drive by a anti-Trump protest, one with a confederate flag attached to the back, Thursday afternoon on LeMoyne College campus, according to a photo posted on Twitter by The Dolphin.

(The Dolphin Twitter)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Donald Trump supporters drove pickup trucks, one flying the Confederate flag, on Le Moyne College campus Thursday as students held pro-Trump and anti-Trump rallies.

Le Moyne students held a rally outside of Grewen Hall around 3:30 p.m. to protest the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, according to The Dolphin, the college's student newspaper.

"We want to make sure that [Donald Trump] knows that he can't trample over our rights," said junior Colton Mennig. pic.twitter.com/Gd38WM0cJq  The Dolphin (@thedolphinlmc) November 10, 2016

The students held signs, with messages including "hope will never be silent," "not my president" and "love will prevail." During their march across campus the students chanted, "love trumps hate."

Four pickup trucks drove by the protest, one with the Confederate flag attached to the back, according to a Tweet from The Dolphin.

A student posted an 11-second video on Facebook of the trucks going around a circle on campus with the caption: "Now they are just taking things too far." The video has been viewed more than 35,000 times as of this morning.

Pro-trump protesters with Confederate flag. (Warning the following video contains profane language.)

Now they are just taking things too far  Posted by Phaemy Legitime on Thursday, November 10, 2016

Some argue that the Confederate flag is a symbol of slavery and oppression, while others insist that it is purely a matter of Southern heritage and pride, according to a Washington Post article. It regained popularity by people who opposed in the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the paper reported. The flag is also used by white supremacist groups.

The anti-Trump march continued across campus and past a smaller pro-Trump rally where students held a Trump flag and an American flag.

Kasey Foster held a Trump flag and told The Dolphin, "I don't mind their protest. If they have the right to voice their opinion, we do too."



Pro- and anti-trump protests at Le Moyne College

Students protesting against Trump encounter a small group of students who are pro-Trump. pic.twitter.com/83AXPBk4yl  The Dolphin (@thedolphinlmc) November 10, 2016

The anti-Trump protesters ended their march back at Grewen Hall singing "Amazing Grace," The Dolphin Tweeted.

LeMoyne professor Ann Ryan stopped at the protest to address both sides.

"I want you to remember right now that this isn't a game," Ryan said. "You guys are still a community. Those of you who voted for Trump, congratulations. I respect the democracy. I respect him as my president. For those who did not, we will continue to fight for the values that we believe in. But you guys are not enemies and I want you to remember that."

Le Moyne professor Anne Ryan talks to students
Blog_2016-11-08-EMB-Vote-3.JPG

People vote early on Election Day at this Nottingham polling location.

(Ellen M. Blalock | eblalock@syracuse.com)

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. -- A Liverpool High School teacher who delivered a post-election speech that sparked debate among some parents, students and community members is defending her message.

Miriam Readling, an English teacher, said she adapted a speech from a Huffington Post article and read it to two of her classes Wednesday. The message offended some students and parents who said they felt it was anti-Trump and inappropriate.

The speech talked about supporting the election's outcome and goes on to talk about how bigotry will not be tolerated at the school. It said that all students from all groups will be protected and that moves to deport anyone would be fought.

Readling said she read it to express to her students that regardless of the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election that her classroom was a safe space for all students.

Here's what she had to say about why she read the speech:

By Miriam Readling

The morning following the 2016 Presidential Election brought a sense of relief and triumph to some households in America and in some households a deep sense of fear gripped the inhabitants. Some students were afraid that they would be bullied because of their religious beliefs: their fears were founded. Some students were afraid that they would be bullied because of their skin color: their fears were founded. Some students were afraid that they would be bullied because of their sexual orientation or gender identity: their fears were founded. Some students were afraid that they would be bullied because they or their families supported Hillary Clinton: their fears were founded. Some students were afraid that they would be bullied because they or their families supported Donald Trump: their fears were founded.



When children feel afraid, I feel deeply worried. Maybe it's because I don't have children of my own yet and I have more psychic energy to expend on the ones that are in my classroom, or maybe it's because I need my students to inspire, challenge and sustain me as much as I do them, but the morning after the 2016 Presidential election, I knew that I had to reassure my students that they would be safe in my room, even if I could not protect them from the hallways, or the bus, or the vitriolic words being slung around the internet.



I am a self-identified feminist and I am deeply concerned with promoting social justice in all the forms that it takes. This is not a secret that you can accuse me of: this is a fact. I am biased in my beliefs in the same way that everyone is; we are the products of how we were raised, what we were taught and what we have learned over time is true and right. The morning after the election I decided that it felt true and right to read a speech to my students that assured them that even though the world seemed to be ripping apart at the seams, we would continue to gather in a space where all are welcome and all could learn.



Claiming that promoting tolerance and acceptance is promoting a liberal agenda is deeply problematic. Do you mean to suggest that tolerance and acceptance are solely liberal values? The students that I teach who identify as politically conservative are more articulate, intelligent and compassionate than the majority of the people who left abrasive and uninformed comments on this thread and it is painfully obvious that my students could teach many of those commentators a thing or two about grammar and social grace.



I love my job, I love my students, I love my community and I love my country. I will fight for my students and continue to remind them that in my classroom their voices will be heard and their experiences validated. I will gladly weather the barrage of negative and hateful comments thrown at me because in the last couple of days my students, colleagues and community members have reminded me that standing up for what is right isn't always easy, but it's always worth it and I am so thankful for their support.


Election Protests Oregon

Protesters gather Thursday night in Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, the third night of protests over the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. President-elect Donald Trump fired back on social media after demonstrators in both red and blue states hit the streets for another round of protests.

(Mark Graves/The Oregonian/OregonLive.com via AP)

To the Editor:



For three days now we have endured a pathetic reaction by the anchors, pundits and dozens of guests on the ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC networks to Tuesday's election results.

And then there are the thousands of demonstrators (mostly in the states whose electoral votes went to HRC, by the way) complaining that their voices weren't heard, or the LGBT community and immigrants will somehow be attacked or placed in internment camps. And on today's Post Standard front page I read our governor's macho chest thumping declaration that he will not allow immigrants to be attacked by the federal government in New York State.

One can only imagine what the leftist media and public reaction to all of this inane behavior would be if HRC had won and the "right side" (pun intended) was acting like the country is all but lost.



At least President Obama had the good sense to publicly profess his commitment to a smooth transition and his hope that Trump will be successful in his presidency. It's time for the rest of the left to wipe their noses and dry their tears and commit themselves to the betterment of our country, no matter which political party is governing.



Richard B. Abbott

Fulton
ECDIS - Training the regulators

UK-based ECDIS Ltd is currently half way through a project to train around 1,000 inspectors and Port State Control officers in ECDIS worldwide.

Without doubt, it has already dramatically increased the safety of navigation at sea by providing inspecting officers with all the relevant questions that need to be asked for all the 38 manufacturers, said customer development manager, Joe Sloly. The feedback from inspectors so far is proving that in most cases, officers cannot practically show inspectors the basic safety features designed to reduce the risk of groundings and in some cases are not even able to show that they are familiar with their Primary Means Of Navigation. The inspectors training that they are receiving is proving beneficial for the industry, albeit not for some shipping companies, due to the audits highlighting the fact that some officers lack of understanding in ECDIS, which is embarrassing especially when they hold the required certificates. In our experience, the majority of the time, the lack of understanding comes from not using the ECDIS on a daily basis. However for the minority of time, it comes from deficient Type Specific Training, he said. Sloly claimed that ECDIS Ltd had taken quality assurance one step further as a measurable product for shipping companies by producing a refreshment assessment tool, enabling all officers to remain current on the main navigation safety features of their ECDIS. ECDIS ACAT (Annual Competence Assurance Training) was designed to assist the industry in increasing its ECDIS standards at sea. The cost of one ECDIS ACAT programme is 200 per hull per year. As an example of costing: for a vessel with a crew turnover of 25 officers per year, this would equate to a cost of only 8 per crew member per year for their specific make and model of ECDIS. The five modules, which take in total between 30 and 60 minutes to complete, are: 1) Familiarisation. 2) Navigation tools. 3) Route planning. 4) Route monitoring. 5) Chart updating. ECDIS ACATs is an assurance method of assisting the industry as a whole to increase its key knowledge in an ECDIS make and model and to keep up-to-date with the constantly evolving software from all the manufacturers worldwide. This product also allows the shipmanager or operator to have positive control over their Officers Annual Competency Assurance with regards to ECDIS, which in turn would reduce their training safety matrix for navigating with ECDIS, the company claimed.




ICS backs IMO at COP 22

The recent IMO agreement on a CO2 road map for shipping is a significant decision, giving further impetus to the substantial CO2 reductions that are already being delivered by the global industry, the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) said this week.

At an official UNFCCC Climate Conference (COP 22) side event organised by the IMO, ICS director of policy and external relations, Simon Bennett, said: We are very optimistic that initial CO2 reduction objectives can now be developed by IMO for the sector by 2018. The shipping industry thinks these should reflect the spirit and ambition of the Paris Agreement while being appropriate to the circumstances that apply to international shipping  just as the commitments made by governments to UNFCCC reflect the circumstances of different national economies, he said. ICS also said that the IMO road map (agreed by the IMO MEPC 70 meeting at the end of October) will build on the mandatory CO2 reduction regulations for shipping already adopted by IMO  four years before the Paris Agreement was adopted  which will ensure that ships built after 2025 will be at least 30% more efficient. However, ICS said it believed that the road map will go much further than the Paris Agreement. The final stage to be enacted by 2023 should establish a global mechanism for ensuring that these initial IMO commitments  which the industry wants to see agreed by 2018  will actually be delivered. said Bennett. This IMO mechanism could potentially include a legally binding Market Based Measure, the ICS said. This remains very controversial and is not yet universally supported throughout the shipping industry said Bennett. But if this is what governments eventually decide, the clear preference of the majority of the industry would be for a global levy based on fuel consumption. Key to next steps is the mandatory global CO2 data collection system, which IMO has now adopted. This will enable any initial CO2 commitments agreed in 2018 to be further refined using the very latest data on ships emissions which will become fully available from 2019. But most importantly, the IMO data system will inform the development of a mechanism by IMO for ensuring that agreed CO2 reduction commitments are indeed fully met. This will no doubt include deciding the extent to which technical and operational measures alone might be insufficient to deliver the IMO CO2 reduction commitments that we hope will be initially agreed in 2018, he said. ICS claimed that the international shipping sector reduced its total CO2 emissions by more than 10% between 2007 and 2012, despite an increase in maritime trade  while the rest of the world economy, even taking account of the commitments made in Paris  will probably continue increasing emissions at least until the 2030s. But the shipping industry fully recognises that society expects more, and we therefore think it is vital that IMO member states agree some truly ambitious CO2 reduction commitments by 2018. said Bennett. ICS and its member national shipowners associations expect to come forward with some firm ideas about what these IMO CO2 reduction commitments might entail before the next IMO MEPC meeting in 2017.




Odfjell reported a good third quarter, despite the challenging markets.

An EBITDA of $60 mill and a net result of $16 mill for the third quarter of this year, was compared with $61 mill and $16 mill in 2Q16, respectively.

The downward trend in freight rates seen in 2Q16 continued through the third quarter. However contract nominations and efficient allocation of the fleet softened the impact of the weaker market, the company said.

Odfjells chemical tanker segment delivered an EBITDA of $48 mill and an EBIT of $25 mill - the same as reported for previous quarter.

The company's shareholding in the tank terminal segment also continued to deliver stable result, as an EBITDA of $11.6 mill in 3Q16 was recorded, compared with $12.1 mill in the previous quarter.

The occupancy rate of commercially available capacity was 96%, compared to 97% in 2Q16.

"Our markets continue to be challenging, but we continue to see improvements in our competitiveness, which softens the impact on the Odfjell results. The sale of the Oman terminal at an attractive valuation shows some of the underlying value in our terminal business," said Kristian Mrch, Odfjell CEO.

In a note, Norne Securities said slower 4Q16 for chemical tankers was guided, but only minor changes will be made to its estimates and the positive view will stay.
Somalia - continued vigilance needed

The Operation Commander of the EU Naval Force (Somalia), Maj Gen Rob Magowan, has reiterated the need for continued vigilance at sea after the IMO III type MR, CPO Korea, was attacked by six armed men.

This incident occurred 330 miles off the east coast of Somalia on 22nd October. The attack was confirmed after a thorough investigation into the incident. During the attack, a number of shots were exchanged between the six armed men, who were in a fast-moving skiff, and the armed security team on board CPO Korea. The suspected pirates eventually broke away after the crew successfully implemented self-protection measures by increasing speed, altering course and rigging fire hoses to thwart the attack. CPO Korea was able to continue her transit in the Indian Ocean, with no casualties reported. This is the first reported attack on a merchant vessel off the coast of Somalia in two and a half years. It also comes after 26 hostages from fishing vessel, Naham 3, were released on 22nd October after being held by Somali pirates for four and a half years. Due to 24/7 counter-piracy naval patrols, together with self-protection measures implemented by the shipping industry, piracy attacks have been suppressed in recent years. Speaking about the attack, Maj Gen Magowan said This attack shows that pirates still have the intent to attack ships for ransom and cause misery to seafarers and their families. It is imperative that the international community remains vigilant. The EU Naval Force is working with counter-piracy partners to co-ordinate efforts to ensure pirates do not once again terrorise the waters off the Somali coast. The vessels owner also said in a statement: We, Offen Tankers would like to express our appreciation and thanks to the crew and security team for safeguarding the crew, vessel and the environment by defending this pirate attack in a very professional manner. Despite the decreasing number of attacks in the region, the imminent risk of Somalian piracy still exists and needs to be addressed accordingly by owners and charterers alike.




Welcome, DISH customer! Please note that we cannot save your viewing history due to an arrangement with DISH.

Watchlist and resume progress features have been disabled.

ACCEPT
Thank you for reading!

Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue.
A refresh of Apples flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro, likely will be the highlight of an event scheduled for this Thursday at the companys headquarters in Cupertino, California.

The update to its flagship MacBook line couldnt come at a more critical time.

Apple has been under increasing pressure from Dell, Lenovo and others in this space and needs to up its game considerably lest it be accused of neglecting notebook users and customers, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

Apple will make a play for corporations at the event by focusing on specific business class qualities in the new products.

That would emphasize the value the company has gained from its partnership with IBM, King told TechNewsWorld.

But frankly, he added, Apple needs to make a far better case for the benefits its products offer to corporate customers than it has in the past.

OLED Touch Bar

One of the new features likely to grace the MacBook Pro is an OLED touch bar above the keyboard, which reportedly will be similar to the butterfly keyboard found on the 12-inch MacBook.

The bar would perform a variety of functions  for example, display notifications, identify open apps, and control parts of the operating system.

As cool as the bar sounds, its overall impact on the laptop will be minimal, maintained Jeff Orr, senior practice director for mobile devices at ABI Research.

Maybe theres some productivity efficiencies that can be gained by it, but its not going to fundamentally change the product offering, he told TechNewsWorld.

More USB-C Ports

The new MacBook Pro also is expected to have four USB-C ports.

Apple has been losing market share because it hasnt kept its MacBooks up to date, particularly on the port side, said Bob ODonnell, chief analyst at Technalysis Research.

Thats a big issue with USB-C becoming a standard port, he told TechNewsWorld. Now the MacBook will have all standard ports in a way that we havent seen for quite some time from Apple.

With the addition of the USB-C ports, some ports may be dropped. Could one of the ports targeted for elimination be the headphone jack, already scrapped from the iPhone 7?

I dont think they will, because most people plug in external speakers through the headphone jack, said ODonnell.

However, they could make a philosophical statement by taking it out, he added.

Apples rationale for removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 was to provide a great experience thats wire and cable free, and to save space within the unit, Orr noted.

Those arent motivators for doing that with the MacBook, he said.

Whats more, Mac owners may not be ready for such a change. After the release of the iPhone 7, Orr said he heard Apple customers remark, At least I can still use my audio products on my Mac.

Thunderbolt 3 Forecast

The addition of more USB-C ports on the MacBook also could mean Apple is ready to embrace Thunderbolt 3.

Thunderbolt is a hardware interface developed by Apple and Intel. The first two generations of the technology connected devices to a computer through a Mini DisplayPort, but Thunderbolt 3 uses a standard USB-C port.

Im expecting updated MacBooks with modular features enabled through ThunderBolt 3 over USB-C, said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

This can enable even thinner designs  but with the ability to connect to much higher performance graphics and storage if desired, he told TechNewsWorld.

iMac and 5K display

Some other features Apple watchers expect to see in the new MacBook Pro are a fingerprint scanner, which would facilitate the use of Apple Pay from the laptop; the addition of AMD graphics; and up to 2-terabyte solid state drives.

There are rumors that Apple will offer the laptops in a variety of new colors, such as space gray, silver, gold and rose gold.

A new 13-inch MacBook Air with USB-C ports also might be introduced.

Its been rumored that Apple could announce some new iMacs and a 5K display as well. While not total discounting those possibilities, highly regarded Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities indicated they are highly unlikely.

However, even if those products were announced at Thursdays event, they wouldnt be ready for shipping until next year, he noted.

Maybe Apple is planning another event for that time that would be for all its desktop models: the iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pro.
The model numbers for Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S8 series and Galaxy Note 8 have leaked. According to a reliable source, the SM-G950 and SM-G955 will make up the Galaxy S8 series, while SM-N950 has been reserved for the Galaxy Note 8.

Samsung and wireless carriers who sold the Galaxy Note 7 have been urging Note 7 owners to exchange the defective smartphone, but as we saw in the comments section of a recently published article, many Note 7 users are refusing to give up the device. This has led Samsung and carriers in Europe to release a Galaxy Note 7 software update that limits the smartphone from charging above 60 percent.

"Our absolute priority continues to be customer safety," Conor Pierce, Samsung's mobile and IT vice president for the UK and Ireland, said in a statement.

"This new battery software update is specifically designed to remind all Galaxy Note 7 customers to replace their device at their earliest possible convenience through their local Galaxy Note 7 Replacement Programme."

To further ensure Galaxy Note 7 owners return the recalled phablet, Samsung has announced that it will offer Note 7 owners an upgrade program that will allow them to trade in the defective device for either one of next year's flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone series or Galaxy Note 8 at a discounted price.

While there were rumors that Samsung may cancel its Note series entirely, a reliable source has revealed not only the model number for next year's Galaxy Note 8 but also the two smartphones that will make up the Galaxy S8 series.

Samsung Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8 Plus And Galaxy Note 8 Model Numbers

Evan Blass, who has an impeccable track record of reporting unannounced smartphone news, took to his Twitter page and posted the following message, "Samsung Galaxy S8 models are indeed skipping SM-G94* model numbers, will ship as SM-G950 & SM-G955. Know what else is in the works? SM-N950."

While Blass doesn't mention the Galaxy Note 8 in his post, the SM-N950 is the Galaxy Note 8, as it follows the same naming convention Samsung has used for its Galaxy Note phablets. The Note 7's model number was SM-930, Galaxy Note 5 was SM-920, Galaxy Note 4 was SM-N910 and Galaxy Note 3 was SM-900.

Samsung Galaxy S8 And Galaxy S8 Plus Details

Not much is known about the Galaxy Note 8 at this point, but many details regarding the Samsung Galaxy S8 series has been leaking at a steady rate. Samsung's vice president recently revealed the Galaxy S8 would feature a new "slick design" and is expected to feature enhanced artificial intelligence to better compete with Google Assistant and Siri.

Unlike the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, Samsung is reportedly planning to use dual curved edge displays on both Galaxy S8 models and include an optical fingerprint scanner that will be embedded directly into the display.

As always, we'll keep you updated on any new Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8 information as it become available.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
We value your privacy.

Focus Taiwan (CNA) uses tracking technologies to provide better reading experiences, but it also respects readers' privacy. Click here to find out more about Focus Taiwan's privacy policy. When you close this window, it means you agree with this policy.
Microsoft has rolled out its Windows 10 Preview for Insiders in the Fast Ring. And it comes with a couple of bug fixes, slightly delayed language packs update, and some new cool features.

This is the second build ahead of Microsoft's Windows 10 Creators Update that will commence in the early part of 2017. The build, with number 14965, brings improvements to Sticky Notes, Registry Editor's address bar, Windows Ink Workspace, Hyper-V and allows controlling external monitors from tablet devices.

Windows 10 Preview Build 14965 was built in a different way than its predecessors allowing it to be updated regularly with new features and bug fixes. And while Microsoft has released various updates to date, its Windows 10 Creators Update will be its major one following its Windows 10 anniversary release last August.

What's New With Windows 10 Build 14965?

The new build aims to make using an external monitor easier through a tablet. It enables a virtual touchpad on tablets running Windows 10 so users can now run content directly to a different display without connecting to a mouse.

Previously, connecting a monitor like the Surface Pro requires attaching a mouse to use the second display that will behave similar to a standard desktop monitor. Now, it is possible to use the on-screen track pad to control the cursor on the external monitor.

It seems like Microsoft has some plans for its Sticky Notes application. In the latest Insider update, the Sticky Notes app will now read flight information in German, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian and French aside from English.

The app will also be able to sense any flight information saved to a note and will automatically show latest updates for the said flight. Additionally, it will feature better performance and a snazzier UI/UX.

Smaller updates were introduced to the Registry Editor and Windows Ink Workspace in this build. The former will have a revamped address bar that allows users to use keyboard shortcuts. The latter will now be able to show more recently used apps in the menu plus a new protractor that can be controlled via the mouse's scroll wheel.

Added support for other language packs outside English will be coming shortly as the company needs more time to get them ready for testing.

Fixes To Known Bugs

It is safe to say that with the latest Windows Insider update comes a few bugs or issues to be encountered. The recent Windows 10 Build also made fixes to common PC issues.

 Fixed an issue causing Internet Explorer to crash a few seconds after launching.

 Made graphics improvements consequently making the system respond faster and better when pressing WIN + L while playing a game in full screen mode.

 Updated ALT + F4 Shutdown dialogue to respond better to DPI changes when connected to a separate monitor.

 Fixed an issue where File Explorer crashes when renaming or creating a folder on a shared network.

 Fixed an issue with Cortana crashing when typing "Create an appointment" then clicking the suggested results.

Meanwhile, the latest build also provided some fixes to known mobile issues as well.

Where To Get Windows 10 Build 14965

To be able to download the latest insider build, users have to join the Windows Insider Program and follow the necessary steps to sign up.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Verizon kicked off a sweet BOGO 50 percent off deal on some of the hottest smartphones of the year, including the new Google Pixels, the LG V20 and the Galaxy S7 line.

This buy one, get one at 50 percent off deal allows interested customers to make significant savings when purchasing the Google Pixel, Pixel XL, Samsung Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge and LG V20, getting a second handset at half price.

How It Works

The 50 percent off a second smartphone applies when you purchase one of the premium handsets mentioned above and get it on a device payment plan. When purchasing any of these premium flagships, Verizon will offer a second phone of equal value or cheaper at half off its normal price. Considering the hefty investment these flagship smartphones require, this deal can translate to a massive discount overall.

The deal only covers Verizon's top Android smartphones, however, with no equivalent or similar offer for iPhone fans. Alas, various Black Friday deals are already shaping up to be quite exciting and consumers will likely get plenty of attractive options to choose from.

Verizon doesn't mention when this new Android smartphone BOGO deal will expire, but such promotions usually don't run for very long.

All smartphones included in this promotion are top-of-the-line, widely considered the best Android flagship smartphones currently available on the market.

Prices

Verizon is offering the Samsung Galaxy S7 at $28 per month for 24 months, amounting to $672 in total, the Galaxy S7 edge costs $33 per month for 24 months, adding up to a total of $792, the Google Pixel costs $27.08 per month for 24 months, that is $649.99 in total, the Pixel XL costs $32.08 per month for 24 months, amounting to $769.99, while the LG V20 costs $28 per month for 24 months, or $672 in total.

This means that customers interested in a multi-phone purchase can save more than $300 when purchasing a premium Android smartphone included in this Verizon BOGO deal.

Verizon notes that this is a limited-time offer, so interested customers might want to take advantage of it while it still lasts. For more information or to make your purchase, head over to Verizon's website.

Alternately, you might also want to check out some neat Black Friday 2016 Deals from HTC, including the HTC 10 for $500 and the HTC One M9 for $300. Apple fans, meanwhile, can make some savings by getting a refurbished iPhone straight from Apple, which should guarantee it's in great condition even if it's not brand new.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
On the other hand, Rubiks cube loses EU trademark

A robot has broken the world record by solving a Rubiks cube in 0.637 seconds, at the Electronica Trade Fair in Munich, Germany, according to its makers.

Developed by German tech company Infineon, the machine known as Sub1 Reloaded was helped by one of the worlds most powerful microcomputers.

So, how does it work? At the press of a button, shutters are lifted from the robots sensor cameras, allowing it to study the positions of the coloured squares and calculate the moves needed so all six sides show a single colour. It then transmits commands to the Sub1 Reloaded machine who then uses the six motor-controlled arms, which are holding the central square of each of the cubes six faces and twists, taking just 637 milliseconds to solve the puzzle in 21 moves. The robot is so quick that you can barely see the sides moving as it resolves the colours.

In less than two thirds of a second, the entire process was completed and it was only afterwards the number of moves could be counted by checking software readout.

The hardest part is in processing the sensory information and trying to work out whether it is a situation that requires braking or swerving or ignoring, said Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield. It is a bit like asking Sub1 if it is a Rubiks Cube in front of it or a pile of biscuits that needs to be crumbled for the base of a cheesecake.

The robots time of 0.637 seconds beat the previous world record of 0.887 seconds, set by an earlier prototype of the same machine using a different computer processor.

It says the same powerful computer brain designed to swing over round obstacles is also brilliant at solving spatial puzzles like the Rubiks Cube, a multicolored three-dimensional puzzle. The Rubiks cube was devised by Hungarian architect Erno Rubik more than 30 years ago.

A special speed cube had to be used to reduce friction between the moving parts and keep the time to a minimum.

Infineon said the World Cube Association  the governing body for Rubik puzzle competitions  had approved its use.

A standard three-sided Rubiks Cube can be arranged in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations  but all can be unscrambled in just 20 moves. A variety of algorithms can be used to solve the puzzle, the most well-known of which is the Fridrich Method. But Infineons constructor Albert Beer did not design his prodigy with the fewest moves in mind. Rather, he was intent on achieving the best time  he even allowed the Sub1 Reloaded a few extra moves to reach this goal.

The human record stands at 4.9 seconds to solve but the robot record was set in February at 0.9 seconds by a machine built by Jay Flatland and Paul Rose, beaten days later by Albert Beers Sub1 at 0.887 seconds and then again by his latest effort with the Reloaded unit.

We realise that quickly solving a Rubiks cube is not the most urgent of the worlds problems, the German companys spokesman Gregor Rodehueser told MailOnline.

The robot was developed as a metaphor to show how digital systems are constructed.

We wanted to show that microelectrics are a great and efficient solution to problems faced by technology.

Infineon claimed the test had inferences for driverless cars:

Minimal reaction times play an even greater role in autonomous driving. A high data-processing rate is necessary to ensure realtime capabilities with clock frequencies of 200 MHz. As a result of this ability, a vehicle can safely and reliably apply the brakes when it approaches a barrier.

Asked if the team would be attempting to beat their own record, Mr Rodehueser was shy.

Officially, no, we will be looking for new challenges as a company, and the project was only ever intended as a nice metaphor for technological challenges, he said.

But it is a hobby for our machines constructor, Albert Beer, so I imagine he will be trying again sometime in the future.

Albert Beer, the boffin who built Sub1 robot, designed it to find the fastest way to solve the puzzle even if that involves more moves than the minimum theoretically possible.

Rubiks Cube loses EU trademark battle

Rubiks Cube lost a trademark battle on Thursday after European court of justice (ECJ) said its shape was not sufficient to grant it protection from copyright versions.

British company Seven Towers, which manages Rubiks Cube intellectual property rights, registered its shape as a three-dimensional EU trademark with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) in 1999.

However, the court ruled that the EU trademark representing the shape of the Rubiks Cube was invalid. In May, a judge said the shape did not qualify for trademark protection.

This judgment sets a damaging precedent for companies wishing to innovate and create strong brands and distinctive marks within the EU, said David Kremer, president of Rubiks Brand. The Rubik name is protected and similar toys will not be able to use it.

Simba Toys, the German toymaker had challenged the trademark protection in 2006, claiming the cubes rotating capability should be protected by a patent, not a trademark. Welcoming the decision, Simba Toys that it would give the company legal certainty while selling its own version of the Magic Cube.

The ruling is expected to affect Rubiks licensed manufacturers worldwide, which include Hasbro in the U.S. and John Adams in the UK, as it could face competition from mass-produced, cheaper imitations. The Rubiks cube sells 10m units a year.

Source: Techcrunch
KickassTorrents often abbreviated as KATcr is one of the most reliable BitTorrent sites and is admired by the entire torrent community.

The official Kickass Torrents site was shut down, hence it is time we look at the Kickass Torrents alternatives.

The Kickass site provides torrent files and magnet links to a wide category of movies, tv-series, games, applications, ebooks, music, and videos, to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol.

If we look at its past, KickassTorrents took away the throne of the most visited torrent site from The Pirate Bay before it came to shut down in 2016.

Before we begin, you might like to view the working Kickass torrents proxy and mirror

NOTE: Techworm does not condone using torrents to illegally obtain content. Using the following torrent websites for illegal purposes is done entirely at your own risk. Techworm takes no responsibility for any legal problems you encounter.

Top 10 Kickass Torrents Alternatives

Check out our list of some of the best recommended Kickass Torrents download sites alternatives below. These torrent websites are tested and found to be working fine.

Most of these sites are unblocked and have a good number of seeds and peers to provide good downloading speed.

1. 1337x

Overview

Best Features Simple and clean UI; Dedicated sections for different types of content Types of Content anime, movies, music, TV shows, games, software Availability Banned in Australia, Austria, Ireland, United Kingdom. 1337x Mirror URL Link 1

The first Kickass alternative on the list is 1337x. Similar to KAT, 1337x is a website that provides a directory of torrent files and magnet links used for peer-to-peer file sharing through the BitTorrent protocol.

Users on 1337x share the best torrent files for free download.

1337x has a clean UI, which makes searching content a breeze. Furthermore, to enhance discoverability the content is divided into different categories.

VISIT 1337x

2. The Pirate Bay

Overview

Best Features Magnet links supported; peer-to-peer file sharing Types of Content movies, music, TV shows, games, software Availability Banned in several countries and regions The Pirate Bay Mirror URL Link 1

Another perfect site like KAT is The Pirate Bay. As you might know, The Pirate Bay is one of the best torrent search engines.

The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and even contribute magnet links and torrent files. This website facilitates peer-to-peer file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.

Pirate Bay has a minimal UI, and there is no exploration option. Consequently, you should be precise as to what you want to download.

If you are a Pirate Bay fan but it is not available in your country or your ISP has blocked it, then you should check out the Best Pirate Bay alternatives.

VISIT The Pirate Bay

3. Torlock

Overview

Best Features Torlock only lists verified torrents Types of Content movies, TV shows, anime, software Availability blocked in Australia, India, United Kingdom Torlock Mirror URL Link 1

Next in the list is Torlock. The most impressive feature of Torlock is that it only lists verified torrents.

Content on Torlock is very well organized into different sections like Movie Torrents, TV Torrents, Music Torrents, Game Torrents, Software Torrents, and eBooks Torrents.

Torlock has a simple UI and the website offers a massive collection of Anime series. Lastly, Torlock also displays trending torrents on its homepage.

VISIT Torlock

4. LimeTorrents

Overview

Best Features One-click torrents downloads; LimeTorrents displays the size and the upload time of every torrent. Types of Content movies, games, software, ebooks Availability Banned in Australia, France, United Kingdom. LimeTorrents Mirror URL Link 1

LimeTorrents is a relatively new, but an impressive website for downloading and sharing content.

Content on LimeTorrents is very well organized in different sections like movies, games, music, anime, TV shows, and software just like the kickass torrents. This website offer verified one-click torrents downloads.

In the list of Kickass torrents alternatives, I would definitely rank this one on a pedestal for a lot of stuff.

VISIT LimeTorrents

ALSO READ: Best Torrent Clients for Windows

5. Snowfl

Overview

Best Features Advanced filtering options; Direct download magnet links Types of Content Movies, TV shows, games, applications, music, books, anime, adult content Availability Targeted by individual ISPs. Snowfl Mirror URL Not required

The next KAT alternative that we have here is Snowfl. A simple to use torrent site that allows you to download torrents for free.

We have replaced SeedPeer, formerly known as Meganova, with Snowfl, which is making all the right noises.

Search for a torrent, and the results will be displayed with a single block ad below the search bar. You can either visit the torrent site or download from the magnet link itself.

The magnet link comes in handy as most of the torrent sites are blocked across different regions.

Talking about filters, you can search for audio, movies in SD, HD, and 4K separately, along with applications and software(s).

On top of that, we also can search for verified and NSFW torrents separately using filters.

VISIT Snowfl

6. RARBG

Overview

Best Features Availability of movies in high-def 720p, 1080p, and even 3D. Types of Content movies Availability banned in Ireland RARBG Mirror URL Link 1

Next website to find torrent files and magnet links RARBG. Similar to KickAss Torrents, RARBG, provides torrent files and magnet links to enable peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol.

RARBG has a very simple and intuitive UI. Furthermore, RARBG is very well known for providing verified torrents.

Users can contribute content to RARBG by signing up for the service. Lastly, you can even find exclusive movies on RARBG in 4K HDR quality.

VISIT RARBG

ALSO READ: RARBG Alternatives

7. Nyaa.si

Overview

Best Features No popups and advertisements; Availability of Anime, Audio, Literature, Live Action, Pictures, and Software Types of Content anime related content Availability Available in the entire world. Nyaa Mirror URL Link 1

nyaa.si is an impressive Kickass Torrents alternative for those who are looking for anime content.

The popular anime torrent site has been targeted by law enforcement agencies in the past but somehow new proxies and mirrors have always come up.

NYAA is very popular in japan and users looking for anime content.

VISIT Nyaa.si

8. EZTV

Overview

Best Features No popups and advertisements Types of Content movies, TV shows Availability Blocked in Australia, Ireland, United Kingdom. EZTV Mirror URL Link 1

The next near-perfect kickass replacement would be EZTV. Similar to all other websites, you can easily find and download content.

EZTV has an outdated UI, but it gets the job done. Well, EZTV is perfect for downloading movies and TV shows. Furthermore, the website also displays the latest website news on its homepage.

VISIT EZTV

9. YTS

Overview

Best Features Availability of movies in high-def 720p, 1080p, and even 3D. Types of Content movies Availability banned in Ireland YTS Mirror URL Link 1

Another great alternative of KAT for downloading free movies is YTS. This torrent website is primarily focused on films. Consequently, you cant find other content like software on YTS.

YTS has a very well-developed and pleasing UI. The website helps users to choose between either 720p or 1080p video quality.

Moreover, YTS offers direct one-click download options for all of the movies on the platform.

VISIT YTS

ALSO READ: Yify Torrents Alternatives

10. Torrent9

Overview

Best Feature Simple and well-developed UI Types of Content movies, TV shows, games, music, software Availability Blocked in many countries like Saudi Arabia, India, Portugal, Denmark, United Kingdom, and Morroco. Torrent9 Mirror URL Link 1

The last Kickass torrents alternative on the list is Torrent9. Similar to other websites, Torrent9 also offers verified torrents.

The UI of the website is visually impressive and content is segregated into different sections like movies, TV shows, games, music, software etc.

In addition to that, Torrent 9 also features random movies on its homepage that may impress some users.

Visit Torrent 9

Also Read Best Torrent9 Alternatives

Kickass Proxy Sites

https://kkat.net

https://kat.rip

https://kickass.onl

https://kkickass.com

https://kickasshydra.dev

Users are advised not to use any unknown kAT mirror or Kickass proxy as they may ask for credit card details or even can serve malware or adware.

Please Note: In some territories, such as the UK, US, Canada, and Australia, it is necessary to use a VPN for torrenting. You can check out our list of the Best VPNs for torrenting.

Simply choose a VPN service that suits you. Then you can use torrent websites without any interruptions.

ALSO READ How To Unblock Torrent Sites

Brief History Of Kickass Torrents

The original peer-to-peer file-sharing site Kickass Torrents (KAT) has been down for since 2016, due to legal issues. However, it was recruited by its original staff at a new site katcr.co

Is Torrenting Legal?

One of the most common questions associated with downloading Torrent content Is Torrenting Legal?.

In principle, it is. But if you are downloading and redistributing copyrighted content then its an illegal activity. This comes under the category of pirated content.

That said, if you are sharing now-copyrighted content then Torrenting is completely legal.

You Might Like- Top 10 Torrent Search Engines

Conclusion-

So these were some of the best Kickass movie torrent alternatives. Do share any other alternatives that you know about via the comment section.
The president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, are meeting in Caracas to address the work agenda established by both governments in the framework... | Read More
Sara Geater is to be the new Chair of Pact Council from January 2017, after being nominated for the position in the recent Pact Council elections process.

Geater is the Chief Operating Officer of All3Media, and was previously COO then CEO of Fremantle Media UK. Prior to this Geater held the post of Head of Commercial Affairs at Channel 4 following a four-year stint as Director of Rights & Business Affairs at the BBC where she negotiated the first Terms of Trade between the BBC and Pact.



Geater has also served as Head of Film & TV at Avalon, Head of Production at Miramax Films and Channel 4 Drama Co-Production Executive.



Sara was previously elected chair of Pact Council in 2014 but had to step down following her appointment to All3Media as Pacts then constitution did not allow non-qualifying independent producers, such as All3Media, to sit on Pact Council. In July 2016 a new Pact Memorandum and Articles of Association was adopted allowing all members who are not owned by a UK public service broadcaster to vote in, and stand for, Pact Council elections.



The current Pact Council Chair is Laura Mansfield, CEO of Outline Productions and her tenure will run until the end of the year. Geater will take up the post in January 2017 after being elected unopposed in the Pact election.



Geater said: Its a real honour to be taking on the Pact Chair at such a pivotal and important time for the industry.



Pact continues to play a vital role in driving and promoting the commercial interests of TV, film and digital production companies both in the UK and globally. Im looking forward to building on the great work of Laura Mansfield and the current Pact Council in the New Year.



Departing Chair Laura Mansfield said: Sara is one of our industrys most admired leaders. Her balance of experience and perspective which spans broadcaster, indie and superindie will be invaluable at such an important time. Im delighted to be handing the baton to Sara, and know shell be a great leader for Council and support for John McVay and the team. For myself, its been a real privilege and honour to represent our industry over the past couple of years as Chair, and I wish Sara and the new Council all the very best.

The positions of Northern Ireland Representative and Welsh National Representative were also uncontested. Kieran Doherty (Stellify  SONY) will become Northern Ireland Representative whilst Gillane Seabourne (Midnight Oil) will remain Welsh National Representative.

Both will also take up their posts in January 2017.

The voting window for all other positions including Scotland Representative is now open and will close on 1st December 2016. The results will be announced at the Pact AGM on 7th December.

Pact Council oversees the work of the trade body, signing off budgets and financial plans, as well as agreeing the organisations policies, campaigns, terms of trade and collective agreements. All posts are for a two year term, running from January 2017 to December 2018.



Share this story
A University of Louisiana at Lafayette student faces a criminal mischief charge for allegedly fabricating a story about being attacked near campus Wednesday by two men who yelled ethnic slurs and then stole her wallet and hijab head covering.

Khadija Altamimi, 18, was issued a misdemeanor summons for a violation of the city's criminal mischief law, which carries a penalty of up to $500 and 30 days in jail, according to Lafayette Police records released Friday.

She was not booked on the charge, and no court date had been set.

Altamimi could not be reached for comment on Friday.

News of the attack went viral after the University of Louisiana at Lafayette sent out an e-mail to students Wednesday evening with a description of the suspects that stated one was wearing a white "Trump" hat.

+3 Report: UL-Lafayette student who made up story of being beaten, robbed of wallet and hijab facing charge A University of Louisiana at Lafayette student who told police she was beaten and subjected to ethnic slurs by two men who then robbed her wallet and took her hijab has admitted making up the story, Lafayette Police said Thursday.

Lafayette Police announced Thursday that the student had made up the story, though no explanation was offered why she did.

The student's claim of being attacked was reported online Thursday morning by almost every major news organization in Louisiana and several national news outlets.
Foster Campbell has no chance of winning next months U.S. Senate runoff unless he unifies the fractured state Democratic Party, and he took a step in that direction Thursday by holding his first post-primary phone conversation with Caroline Fayard, the Democrat who finished fourth Tuesday and out of the money.

We will meet to discuss the next steps soon, Campbell said through a spokeswoman Thursday while Fayard confirmed the conversation and planned meeting in a text but added she didnt have anything else to say for now.

Reflecting bruised feelings, neither Democrat called the other Tuesday night after the results showed Campbell advancing to the runoff  against the Republican state treasurer, John Kennedy  and Fayard falling short.

The jungle primary grouped Republicans and Democrats alike in a 24-candidate field, but Campbell and Fayard attacked each other during the campaign in the correct belief that only one would remain standing after Tuesday.

Campbell, a farmer and insurance agency owner in Bossier Parish who regulates utilities as a member of the Public Service Commission, needs a unified Democratic Party because Louisianas electorate leans conservative on social and economic issues and more often than not elects Republicans in state elections. Gov. John Bel Edwards is the only statewide Democrat in Louisiana.

Political pros call Kennedy the clear favorite in the Dec. 10 runoff election because of inherent advantages. About 60 percent of voters in the primary voted for one of the Republican candidates while only about 36 percent voted for a Democrat.

Kennedy led the field with 25 percent of the vote while Campbell got 17 percent.

The state and national Republican parties want to make sure Kennedy does not lose.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is opening 10 offices throughout Louisiana to promote the candidacy of Kennedy and at least two other Republicans competing in Dec. 10 runoffs, said Jason Dore, who is executive director of the Louisiana GOP.

State Rep. Mike Johnson of Shreveport is running against Marshall Jones, a Democrat, to represent northwest Louisiana in the U.S. House of Representatives.

State Sen. Bodi White is running against Sharon Weston to be mayor-president of East Baton Rouge Parish.

Two Republicans are facing off in the runoff to represent Acadiana and the coastal parishes in the U.S. House.

We want to make sure we get our people out to vote, Dore said in an interview.

In an interview Wednesday, Kennedy said he was getting calls from Republican senators offering to assist his campaign. In the 2014 Senate race, Republican volunteers flooded Louisiana during the runoff to help Bill Cassidy defeat the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Mary Landrieu.

Mary-Patricia Wray, Campbells spokeswoman, said offers of support are pouring in to their campaign.

Were building the team, said Stephen Handwerk, the state Democratic Partys executive director before adding, We havent finalized any plans yet.

The winner will replace Sen. David Vitter, who chose not to seek re-election after getting battered during last years governors race. Vitter, who had a 56 percent unfavorable rating in a recent poll, has endorsed Kennedy.

The Campbell campaign Thursday sought to use Vitter to pull down Kennedy, calling Vitter a morally bankrupt U.S. Senator who could barely pass a bill during his time in the Senate.

Meanwhile, both candidates agreed to two debates during the runoff but not the same ones. They both agreed to a Dec. 2 event on Nexstar/WVLA in Baton Rouge. But Kennedy also agreed to a Nov. 29 debate at WDSU-TV in New Orleans while Campbell accepted one on Dec. 1 by Louisiana Public Broadcasting. It wasnt clear Thursday night how they will resolve this.
A 22-year-old Baton Rouge man serving 20 years in prison for a 2014 armed robbery was sentenced Thursday to 40 more years behind bars for a fatal police chase-related crash that occurred about eight hours after the robbery.

State District Judge Beau Higginbotham ordered Brian White's 40-year term for manslaughter to run consecutively with the 20 years he gave him last fall for the armed robbery.

Jury convicts Baton Rouge man on armed robbery, but deadlocks on other charges in fatal crash during chase A 21-year-old Baton Rouge man was convicted early Friday of armed robbery, but the same jury

The Jan. 20, 2014, crash at Fairfields Avenue and North 30th Street took the life of 37-year-old Elvin "Teddy Bear" Dunn Jr., described by his parents -- who wore T-shirts with pictures of their son on them -- as a smiling, spiritual man who was a friend to many and loved by all.

"He would give the shirt off his back," Dunn's mother, Michelle Dunn, said outside the judge's 19th Judicial District courtroom. "Never met a person that didn't like him."

"He always had a smile on his face and would put a smile on your face," added his father, Elvin Dunn Sr.

The elder Dunn called the loss of his son "a hard pill to swallow."

"We never had a chance to say goodbye," his mother said. "We miss him."

Michelle Dunn testified several months ago at White's manslaughter trial that her son, a security guard at the Belle of Baton Rouge, had just left her house after a traditional Monday evening family gathering when he was killed.

"There's always that spot (at the dinner table) that's empty," she said Thursday, explaining that she also misses the daily text messages from her son.

Oddly, White, who was 19 at the time of the armed robbery and fatal crash, told the Dunns in court that he holds no hard feelings toward them.

"I just hope they find it in their hearts to forgive me," he said. "I'm with y'all every night."

Michelle Dunn said outside the courtroom that she doesn't believe White was sincere.

"I don't hold any hatred in my heart for him," she acknowledged. "I pray for him every day."

A Baton Rouge police officer had tried to stop a green 1997 Mercury Grand Marquis for a minor traffic violation when it sped away from the area of North Acadian Thruway and Choctaw Drive with the officer in pursuit. The car ran through two stop signs before smashing into Dunn's car. Dunn was ejected and killed.

Witnesses testify 19-year-old man was trying to avoid police before crashing into another car, killing a Baton Rouge man A Baton Rouge mans DNA was found on the drivers airbag of a car involved in a fatal police

Several men jumped from the other car and fled. White's DNA was found on the driver's deployed airbag.

White was convicted in August 2015 of robbing a man at gunpoint of his cellphone in the Greenwell Springs Road area on Jan. 20, 2014. He was found guilty in June of aggravated flight from an officer, hit-and-run involving serious injury or death, and manslaughter. Those charges stemmed from the fatal crash that took place later that day.

Higginbotham, who said White already has filed a notice of appeal, also ordered him to pay the Dunns' $10,500 in burial expenses.

Prosecutors in late June dismissed an armed robbery charge against Melvin Morgan, 20, the man allegedly driving the green Grand Marquis at the time of the robbery.
In March 1941, the United States was not at war  and didnt want to be. Britain and her Commonwealth allies were fighting for the cause of th
It's hard to know where to begin in trying to game out the coming Donald Trump presidency, but one place to start is close to home.

With a Republican president and Congress, political leaders from red states such as Louisiana are in prime position to influence what comes next. And none are more likely to play a role than U.S. Rep. and Majority Whip Steve Scalise, the Metairie congressman, third-ranking Republican in the House  and, with U.S. Reps. Charles Boustany and John Fleming and U.S. Sen. David Vitter heading to retirement, the only remaining GOP Louisiana lawmaker with any sort of seniority.

Scalise wasn't a major player in the campaign, although he did join a Trump advisory panel on gun rights and the Supreme Court. But unlike House Speaker Paul Ryan, Scalise has never publicly flinched in his support of the incoming president. Trump clearly values loyalty and tends to hold a grudge, so that should work in his favor.

So should Scalise's talent for navigating the sometimes warring factions of the Republican House delegation, a quality that helped him climb the ladder in the first place, as well as a pre-existing relationship with former House colleague and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who preceded him as chair of the conservative Republican Study Group. So it's worth keeping an eye on him.

And it's worth keeping an eye on the whole Louisiana delegation, which will be comprised of at least six Republicans and perhaps only one Democrat (Louisiana's second Senate seat will be filled in the Dec. 10 runoff, but Republican Treasurer John Kennedy is favored to beat Democratic Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell).

With a Democratic administration, they and their fellow Republicans in Congress have gotten used to playing the loyal opposition. Now they'll have the power, and that changes things.

Take health care. Trump promises a quick repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act, and with a friendly Congress, it could happen.

But the situation is a lot more complicated than Trump suggests. Simply revoking the far-reaching law would throw millions of Americans off their health insurance, including more than 300,000 new Medicaid recipients in Louisiana. It would cost private insurance customers popular benefits such as the right to purchase coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions, and a ban on lifetime coverage caps for those with catastrophic ailments. It would also upend the state's already fragile budget, which relies upon the law's large federal Medicaid match.

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly voted to repeal, but have never pushed a detailed replace option. They didn't need to, because they knew that President Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, for that matter, would never let it come to that. The onus is on now on them to produce a viable alternative without creating industrywide chaos in the transition. Let's see what they've got.

Or take infrastructure. In his conciliatory victory speech early Wednesday morning, Trump focused not on his divisive platform proposals such as building a wall along the Mexican border, but on a massive, job-creating investment in infrastructure  an economic stimulus, for lack of a better term. That's something Democrats want too, and indeed, Gov. John Bel Edwards seized on the idea and highlighted the state's vast needs in his congratulatory statement to the president-elect. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pounced on Trump's statement too, and said that, for all their differences, this is one Trump initiative she'd be happy to help him pass.

The challenge, of course, is how to pay for it. All those new fiscally conservative Trump allies in Congress, from here and elsewhere, resisted putting up the money for just such a program under Obama.

Will they change their tune now that their own guy is the one asking? That will be just one of many fascinating story lines to follow as we, and as Louisiana's representatives in Washington, navigate this unfamiliar terrain.
Something unusual happened to the banks' profits this year. For the first time since the global financial crisis, they fell.

You read that correctly  the combined haul of the majors declined 2.5 per cent last financial year - though admittedly, to the still enormous sum of $29.6 billion.

The slide comes a month after the chiefs of the big four banks told a parliamentary hearing that things were getting tougher out there. Does this confirm what the bosses were claiming then?

Well, partly, but it's not that simple.
Woolworths and SPC have struck a three-year supply deal, confirming the supermarket giant will stay with the Shepparton fruit supplier.

The supermarket will be supplied fruit by SPC until 2019, it announced on Friday.

SPC is a major employer in the Goulburn Valley. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones

"SPC Ardmona has now signed a three-year contract to supply an increased volume of deciduous fruit to Woolworths for its private label 'Woolworths' brand, equating to around nine million cans of Australian deciduous fruit," Woolworths said in a statement.

That confirms the two will continue their five-year partnership after a week of speculation Woolworths was not going to honour its $70 million deal signed in 2014.
A landmark plan to allow tens of thousands of workers to transfer their long-service leave entitlements from one employer to the next has been set in motion in Victoria.

Fairfax Media understands the controversial proposal for long-service leave to become "portable" for security guards, social workers and contract cleaners will be taken to the Labor Party's state conference on Saturday.

Sam Ismaili, a cleaner for more than four decades, has never had long-service leave. Credit:Penny Stephens

It follows a year-long parliamentary inquiry into concerns that many low-paid workers are missing out on the important entitlement because their continuous service is broken up by frequent contract changes.

"The sad reality is due to the nature of some workplaces, some workers are not eligible for long-service leave," Industrial Relations Minister Natalie Hutchins said.
As if I need any more convincing that leaving Sydney is the right decision. It's mid-afternoon earlier this week, the temperature is nudging 30 and a blustery northerly is hurling grit into everyone's eyes, making them meaner than ever as they squint into their phones and wait for the bus outside the local shopping centre.

It could be any suburb near the city. Bird droppings smear footpaths already stained with spilt food and drink and spit. Discarded papers and cigarette butts swirl in the gutter. Amid all this, a frail, elderly woman, well dressed with a big floppy hat, edges a shopping trolley loaded with groceries painfully slowly along the path, battling the wind and a body sapped of strength.

It's awful to watch. A couple of high school kids accidentally bump the trolley and snigger. A tradie leaning against a wall gnawing on a kebab catches my eye and looks away. I'm walking two dogs who are straining at the leash, intoxicated with the smells on the ground and in the air. No one is willing to help the woman.

And so for the next 20 minutes she grabs my offered arm and we inch our way to a cab rank two intersections away, wrestling with the trolley, the dogs and dozens of passers-by who couldn't give a toss. At one stage a taxi rolls by. I plead with the driver, who shakes his head and moves on.
Illustration: Cathy Wilcox

Whatever it was, we need to get it out into the open and have a big discussion about why so many women were so willing to reward such bad behaviour and, in the process, set us back in ways that I had hoped were no longer possible.

We are now hurtling back to the baddest of bad old days where women are rated on their appearances, where few hold high office or other leadership roles, where they continue to get paid less and where, most importantly of all, they are not in control their reproductive capability.

These are the facts of the new US administration: Donald Trump, the president-elect, rates women on their "hotness" on a scale of one to 10, did not demur to having his daughter described as a "piece of ass", has said women should be "punished" for having abortions and promised, during the final presidential debate, that the repeal of Roe v Wade "will happen, automatically" once he makes his Supreme Court appointments. Despite having a female campaign manager  and Kellyanne Conway is now the first women to run a successful presidential campaign  he has no women among his consigliores. On election night he pointed to Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Ben Carson and Senator Jeff Sessions as his political soulmates and, one presumes, future cabinet members. Talk about a bunch of deplorables.

Mike Pence, the vice-president-elect, voted three times against Obama's Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act 2007 when he was a Member of Congress, and when Governor of Indiana last year signed a law that forced women to watch sonograms of their fetuses just before an abortion and to conduct a funeral or cremation for them afterwards. He is vehemently anti-gay; he not only opposed marriage equality but in 2013 signed a bill that would imprison same-sex couples of Indiana who applied for a marriage licence.
And it's not like The Left are exactly racking up the triumphs of late. The rise of the xenophobic hard-right National Front leader Marine Le Pan as the possible next president of France, the result of the Brexit vote in the UK, the election of the pro-death squad Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in short, Trump's very much on-trend. And progressive values have largely stalled here too, as our commitment to offshore detention, the continued absence of marriage equality and the sharp increase in greenhouse gas emissions indicate. But here's a thing that's going to feel a bit uncomfortable, though it's said with love: we moderate types really, really, really need to do a better job of bringing people with us. Especially people being left behind by economics. Our national pretence of egalitarianism needs to end: class is a factor, and we need to stop ignoring it. One huge problem the Left has traditionally had is believing that we have the facts on our side and that it's enough. And we do, but it's not  and it's because politics isn't rational. It's tribal.

Voters  including us  make emotional decisions about the politicians that they think share their values, and then decide that their policies are the right ones. That's why you see passionate, violent arguments flaring up over flashpoint issues despite the people involved not having the any idea of what section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act actually says, or any idea what winding back negative gearing on investment properties would achieve for housing prices. If you genuinely believe that inclusion, respect, co-operation, equity and looking out for each other are values that are good for social cohesion and human happiness - and I certainly do, because history and biology scream that message over and over again - then our path is clear: we have to find a way of getting the message to angry people who feel that they have genuine grievances that there's a better solution than scapegoating minorities and burning the place down. That doesn't mean indulgently smiling in the face of egregious homophobia, or failing to call out structural sexism, or pretending that some race-based immigration policies might be worth a shot. But it does mean realising that hammering a climate denier with statistics, or dropping mad Keynes-bombs on a party demanding funding cuts, is a necessary but ultimately tiny part of the broader argument. We can't do anger and division and sanctimony and reality denial nearly as well as the hard right does. They're loads better at it, and have decades of practice.

But you know what the Left has? We have kindness. And we have creativity. And we have humour and joy and a pretty solid history of finding consensus between groups (and bickering a lot among ourselves, to be fair, but robust argument tends to create good policy, savage comedy, and pretty decent hip hop). If our lefty principles are so gosh-darn good  and I reckon they are  then we need to demonstrate their advantages rather than angrily yell about them. Show, not tell. Democracy means government reflects its society, for better and for worse. So it's up to us  all of us  to make this society a kinder, funnier, better one. And we can do that. We have to do that. And on the plus side, it'll be fun. So, friends: lick your wounds, get some rest, and let's get cracking next week. We seem to have some work to do.
Defence Minister Marise Payne confirmed the government would not go ahead with a royal commission in September. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Speaking publicly on the issue for the first time since he stepped down in late 2014, Mr Roberts-Smith  a former military judge  said the matter had been left "on the basis that everybody thinks that something should be done but we don't know what it is". "It doesn't seem to deal with that issue at all," he said. He said there were abusers and mismanagers of abuse cases still serving, including in senior ranks, and that "ultimately a royal commission would be the only way to get rid of that spectre, that shadow of doubt" over officers who had passed through the academy. The most senior serving officer accused of abuse is a Colonel or equivalent  four ranks below the most senior in the Australian Defence Force  officials have previously said.

The clear signal which this lack of urgency sends to perpetrators and victims is that all that perpetrators have to do is sit tight Mr Roberts-Smith warned "both the reality and the perception is there may be many more people" who had been accused of abuse still serving and "that they may be in senior ranks". He stressed however that the taskforce had been highly successful in helping victims including through reparation payments and a program in which victims sat down with senior officers to talk through what happened to them. The taskforce, established by the Gillard government independent of Defence, ran for four years at a cost of $147 million and assessed 2439 complaints of abuse in the Australian Defence Force. Dr Rumble said the inaction on a further probe into ADFA sent a message that "all that perpetrators have to do is sit tight".

He said that as well as alleged abusers still serving, "there must also be ADF officers in positions as role models and drivers of cultural change who acquiesced in rape at ADFA pre-1998, and who have knowledge about rapes which they have not brought forward". "How can a rapist or his mates who acquiesced in the rape of female cadets at ADFA be relied on to respect and protect female members of the ADF?" Mr Roberts-Smith said he found it "rather strange" that after the taskforce recommended a royal commission  which was in its terms of reference to do  then defence minister David Johnston sought a second opinion from Ms Broderick. She instead pushed the crime commission and federal police investigation, which had been floated by the taskforce after Mr Roberts-Smith retired. But the crime commission did not want to be involved in such a joint investigation and, in its final report, the taskforce concluded that it "cannot take this matter any further".

Ms Broderick's advice states that victims consulted did not want a royal commission because they feared for their privacy and did not want to be cross-examined. The report stressed that "underlying this advice is commissioner Broderick's firm belief that if a royal commission is not established, a strong alternative response is required". Asked whether she was disappointed the government had not formed any kind of response, Ms Broderick declined to comment beyond saying: "I stand by my report." Mr Roberts-Smith and Dr Rumble both said that a royal commission could hold private hearings in which victims need not be cross-examined, pointing to the current royal commission into child sex abuse as a model. They insisted it could shed fresh light on systemic problems, encourage other victims to come forward and finally explain who had mismanaged cases and how. And while bringing individuals to justice would not be the primary aim, it could still help achieve this.

Senator Payne said a royal commission and a joint investigation could lead to "retraumatisation of victims and would not necessarily result in the prosecution of alleged offenders". She said the government was rejecting both approaches on the basis of "doing no further harm" to victims. She did not address the question of why the government had ignored Ms Broderick's strong view that doing nothing was not an option. Mr Johnston, the former defence minister under Tony Abbott, said a royal commission would have been "a shotgun approach to impugn the careers  of all people involved over the period". He said the child sex abuse royal commission was "impugning on a large scale a class of perpetrators". In a written response to Fairfax Media questions, the chief executive officer of the crime commission, Chris Dawson, said a joint investigation "may be possible, only if the legislated functions of the ACIC were amended" and the board signed off on it.
Rose McClintock has visited the redwoods of California, celebrated the Cubs' World Series win on the streets of Chicago, skied in Colorado and watched a Michigan gridiron game.

But now the Australian, who has loved two years of living in the United States, wants out. And she is not alone.

For Ms McClintock, a 25-year-old consultant from Sydney who now lives in Chicago, the shock victory of outsider presidential candidate Donald Trump represents a "punch in the gut" for women and an endorsement of bigotry.

"Last night and today, it just feels devastating here," she told Fairfax Media from New York, where she is on a work trip. "It doesn't feel like a place I want to be in a lot of ways."
When the parliamentary human rights committee inquires into section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, it should recall the quote from President-elect Donald Trump about Mexicans.

Announcing his quest for the Republican nomination, he said: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Gillian Triggs and Malcolm Turnbull have clashed over section 18C.

Section 18C says: "It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if: (a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and (b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group."

"Unlawful" does not mean "criminal" but it can give rise to a right to a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission and, if not resolved there, a right to seek damages in the Federal Circuit Court.
Still on the active wear front, Richmond studio Yoga 213, whose claim to fame is being Australia's first dedicated hip-hop yoga space, is clearing out its range of 213 Apparel from last season, at up to 60 per cent off. Each garment is made to wear on and off the mat, in a range of soft and breathable fabrics. Level 1/97 Swan St, Richmond. Saturday Noon-5pm, Sunday Noon-3pm. Now, mark this one in your diaries. The best kind of shopping is shopping for a good cause and Very Special Kids is holding its annual sale of Australian and International designer fashion next week. The charity supports children living with life-threatening illnesses, so your money will go to people who really need it. Brands supporting the sale include Malvern Town Hall, corner Glenferrie Road and High Street, Malvern. Saturday, November 19, 9am-2pm.

Famous for its fluid party dresses and off-the-shoulder tops, Maurie and Eve is having a Melbourne warehouse sale next weekend, featuring stock from its 2016 winter and spring ranges, with everything $100 or less. The brainchild of Kelly Davies-Green, Maya Clemmensen and Scott Davies, the label is named after two of the designers' grandparents. L1 Studios, Studio 2, 1/377 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne (enter via Racing Club Lane). Saturday, November 19, 8am-5pm, Sunday, November 20, 10am-4pm. Here's another one for the dancers and active wear junkies out there. Bloch is clearing out dance shoes and clothing at massive discounts. I am no dancing expert but I know my bargains and $40 for slip-on or lace-up jazz shoes, ballet flats at $20 and all girls' dance wear at $15 sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Happy dance! (Please note: credit card transactions will have a $50 minimum.)

671 Chapel Street, South Yarra. Friday, November 18 to Sunday, November 20, 10am-5pm. Don't forget ... we ran the KitX warehouse sale listing last weekend but, being in the flurry of spring racing, we forgot to give you the address and times! So here they are. Big apologies. 9-11 Claremont Street, South Yarra. Friday 8am-7pm, Saturday 9am-4pm.

Just launched Australia is in the top five countries for sales on The Outnet, so I'm guessing most of you have heard of it. But did you also know that you can change your country  from "international" to US  and get access to a whole different range of stock (shipping charges may vary). These are some of the cool secrets I learnt while having tea with Andres Sosa, executive vice-president of marketing and creative for The Outnet, during his flying visit to Melbourne this week. He also told me about The Outnet's house brand, Iris and Ink, which started as a filler of 35 pieces and has grown to 170 pieces, including its new 2017 autumn/winter collection launched this week. "It's grown in a way that it's in our top 10 [brands]," Sosa said. "It's had no marketing; the customer has just discovered it."

During our chat about The Outnet, Sosa also told me some interesting facts, like The Outnet sources its tweeds from the same place as Chanel, and there's a Prada ready-to-wear drop coming before Christmas (you read it here first). He said the success of The Outnet was also down to its relationships with the brands, killing the myth that it's a dumping ground for old, tired stock from the shop floor. "With excess stock, we ask what we can do with it to add value. We work with the brands on when to upload [new styles]  it really is a partnership," he said. The new Iris and Ink range is available exclusively through The Outnet.

#inthecart: sensible sweats Last weekend, I finally gave up on trying to find my misplaced Lululemon track pants, so it's time to purchase. I've decided to get an early jump on my new year's resolution to buy sustainable and ethical where possible, even when it comes to active wear. If you know of any brands doing ethical and/or sustainable gear, drop me a line. Do you know about a good sale? Email The Sale Whisperer.
Fertility treatment for the two girls cost a combined $32,000. Credit:David Mariuz About one in six couples in Australia are infertile, and the increasing age at which women are attempting to conceive, along with rising rates of obesity, have fuelled a booming fertility industry with two publicly listed companies and strong annual growth. But some fertility specialists are concerned that add-on treatments and tests such as preimplantation genetic screening, NK cell testing and human growth hormone are ramping up the already steep out-of-pocket costs despite little proof of benefit and some evidence of risk. None of the medical experts interviewed in this article were involved in Ms Miller's treatment. A steroid treatment that suppresses the immune system in women with repeated IVF failure and is widely used in Australia and overseas has now been found to be based on the flawed premise that high levels of "natural killer cells" (NK cells) in the uterus jeopardise pregnancy.

The cells actually played an important role in establishing pregnancy and women who took drugs to wipe them out had higher rates of preterm birth, while their babies had higher rates of congenital abnormalities, according to the study published in Human Reproduction. Lead author Sarah Robertson said women who were tested for NK cells often recorded high readings because the results varied widely between individuals, but there was no proof that these cells were problematic and the drug prescribed to reduce them  prednisolone  carried risks. "For women with a rare autoimmune disease this is a good drug to take because it helps with their condition and also helps them achieve pregnancy, but what has happened in the fertility industry is that there's been an extrapolation that therefore this drug will help all women," said Professor Robertson, a reproductive immunology researcher at the University of Adelaide. "The cost may not come until later in the pregnancy. You may get an increased implantation rate but what you really want is a healthy baby." Studies showed the drugs doubled the chances of preterm birth and tripled the risk of cleft palate in their babies, with an anomaly rate of 4.6 per cent.

The $536 million fertility industry has been growing by 4.9 per cent annually since 2011, but the growth of bulk-billing providers since 2014 has threatened the market share of the three dominant players, Virtus, IVF Australia and Genea. With rising out-of-pocket costs at the commercial clinics, the competition posed by bulk-billing operators such as Primary IVF has put pressure on the established players to maintain revenue growth, and prompted claims of over-servicing. Couples generally pay $4000 to $4400 for an IVF cycle at the commercial clinics, while Medicare subsidises around $5300 per cycle, but procedures such as embryo freezing and storing cost extra. Virtus chief executive Sue Channon reassured investors in August that the premium clinics trading under IVF Australia were continuing to perform well, partly because the average age of patients at 37 was driving the take-up of more complicated interventions. These include services such as preimplantation genetic screening, which costs $700 per embryo and grew by 19 per cent in Australia between 2013 and 2014, but is believed by some specialists to be overprescribed.

Other controversial interventions include human growth hormone ($500 per vial), which a large trial concluded had little benefit, intracytoplasmic sperm injection ($4000), which has been described as "unnecessary, ineffective, costly care" and embryoscopes ($475), where embryos are monitored by a camera 24 hours a day but have little evidence behind them. Among 37,281 women who had fertility treatment in 2014, more than a quarter were over the age of 40, by which age the chances of delivering a live baby are less than 10 per cent. Monash IVF medical director Luk Rombauts said add-on procedures did not make any money for IVF companies because there was little mark up. "Often when patients have had many treatments they become more desperate and doctors don't always have the answers," Professor Rombauts said. "I can see why doctors put their thinking hats on and try something that's a bit more experimental, but that should be clearly explained to patients."

Treatments such as prednisolone for NK cells were cheap, but he did not prescribe it. "It's almost like using a nuclear bomb to flatten a city if you see some terrorists hiding there. "Yes, it will take them out, but there's an enormous amount of collateral damage." But IVF Australia specialist Gavin Sacks, who pioneered the NK cell test and the prednisolone therapy that he dubbed "the Bondi Protocol" said while he agreed some patients were being unnecessarily prescribed, the treatment was valuable for many women based on his 20 years of experience and the risks were very low. "It's been difficult to do randomised trials but I would see about 15 per cent of women who have repeated failures have very high level natural killer cells and these people do seem to do better when they have immune therapy," Dr Sachs said.
IVF is producing a new generation of infertile Australian children who will require expensive medical treatment to produce their own offspring, says University of Newcastle laureate professor John Aitken.

He also warned of ongoing health problems with IVF children, suggesting that male children of ageing fathers who used assisted pregnancy procedures were prone to cancer.

University of Newcastle reproductive biologist John Aitken says IVF is producing a new generation of infertile children. Credit:Jonathan Carroll

Dr Aitken said affluence had become the enemy of fertility as Australians increasingly turned to IVF and other assisted pregnancy procedures.

One in six Australian couples use IVF.
It has featured in Sydney's Mardi Gras parade, played a cameo in films starring Jackie Chan and Adrien Brody and stood proudly in the background of Cate Blanchett's photograph when she was awarded an honorary doctorate.

But it was not these star-studded moments that made the University of Sydney's jacaranda tree so special.

Cate Blanchett received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney in 2012. Credit:Alamy

When it collapsed last month, the beloved jacaranda of the Main Quadrangle was publicly mourned by students past and present, having found a place in university folklore since it was planted in 1928.

Originally placed to give students of philosophy "shade to think under", the tree quickly became symbolic for all students, who believed that if they did not begin studying before the tree's first blooms appeared they would fail their exams.
The latest product to be unveiled by tech giant Google is not a new smartphone or wearable device or search feature designed to be used by millions of everyday consumers. Rather, it is a $US6000 whiteboard designed to be used in your office conference room.

The release of Jamboard puts the Silicon Valley behemoth into the niche but increasingly competitive market of interactive whiteboards, the high-tech equivalent of those dry-erase boards that employees use to scrawl out diagrams, lead presentations or brainstorm new ideas.

With Jamboard, Google has entered the smart whiteboard race.

Microsoft and Google have both gotten into the interactive whiteboard market this year, creating new competition for the largest and most entrenched player, Smart Technologies, a Canadian firm recently acquired by Foxconn.

"The last piece of equipment in the office and classroom that hasn't made it into the modern age is the whiteboard," said Smart Technologies chief technology officer Warren Barkley. "We, along with Microsoft and Google, see this as an opportunity to move that static, physically isolated content into the wider world."
More homeless people will get secure accommodation as the Andrews government embarks on a multi-million-dollar "rapid housing blitz" to tackle the number of Victorians sleeping rough or in temporary dwellings.

At a state Labor conference on Saturday, Premier Daniel Andrews will unveil a $24 million plan to purchase 94 houses and lease 79 properties for people in dozens of homeless hot-spots, including Brimbank, Melton, Darebin and Geelong.

Premier Daniel Andrews will unveil a $24 million plan to address homelessness on Saturday.

But tensions on the conference floor are set to ignite over other issues, including branch stacking within the ALP, attempts to give members a greater say on the preselection of Senate candidates, and union anger against the privatisation of public disability services.

Rank-and-file members will make a renewed attempt to tighten Labor Party rules after a recent membership surge found about 1300 "irregularities" in federal seats such as Scullin, Lalor, Gorton, Holt and Calwell  including unusually high numbers of recruits of people from largely Indian backgrounds.
A Caulfield husband and wife stole jewellery from their customers to try to keep their struggling business afloat, a court has heard.

Georgette and Roger Aznavorian ran Caulfield Jewellers  a business that cleaned, repaired and sold clocks, watches and jewellery  in Caulfield North for more than 20 years.

The Aznavorians would tell customers that the delay in getting their watches repaired was due to the time it took to source spare parts. Credit:Steve Colquhoun

Prosecutor Nicholas Batten told the County Court on Friday that Mrs Aznavorian had pawned jewellery and watches that long-standing customers had brought in to her husband to be be fixed or cleaned.

In addition, they pawned non-stolen goods from the shop to secure high-interest loans of up to $32,130 between 2008 and 2010.
A Victoria Police officer is under investigation for a shocking stunt where a baby was repeatedly dangled over a third-storey balcony during a Melbourne Cup party.

A senior constable from the eastern region has been questioned but not stood down, after a shocking photo of the stunt emerged.

It is alleged that the baby, who appeared to be a boy, was held three or four times over the edge of an apartment building in Cremorne in Melbourne's inner east.

A police statement said detectives from the Yarra criminal investigation unit interviewed the senior constable and Professional Standards Command are providing oversight to the investigation.

"As this investigation is ongoing it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time," the statement said.
The complainant said the article failed to note Dino's long stay was partly due to untreatable aggression and to pancreatitis, which had led to his hospitalisation and then euthanasia after an expert assessment. The complainant informed the publication about these matters in a telephone discussion on the day before publication and Dino's pancreatitis was referred to in his adoption profile on its website. The complainant also said the article failed to note Dino was walked twice daily and had 45 minutes in a dog-run every day.

The Council's Standards of Practice require publications to take reasonable steps to: ensure that factual material is accurate and not misleading (General Principle 1) and reasonably fair and balanced (General Principle 3); publish a correction or take other adequate remedial action if published material is significantly inaccurate or misleading (General Principle 2) and give a fair opportunity for subsequent publication of a reply if necessary (General Principle 4); avoid publishing material gathered by deceptive or unfair means, unless in the public interest (General Principle 7) and ensure conflicts of interests are avoided or disclosed and do not influence material (General Principle 8).

The article said a dog at the Home, "Dino" was treated for problems with impulse control and kept in a cage for five months with little exercise until "he was filmed for [a] video. Then he was killed". The article gave descriptions of the stays, medications and fates of six other dogs. The article quoted sources claiming dogs were routinely given high doses of drugs for "anxiety, depression and other problems" despite "questionable testing", and that there were drastic cuts to the time the dogs spent outside of cages. The voiceover in the video said "this is what life is like for hundreds of dogs, they are fed sedatives and antidepressants", and quoted a source saying dogs were "heavily drugged" and "drugged for normal dog behaviour".

The Press Council considered a complaint by the Lost Dogs' Home about an article in The Age on 28 November 2015 headed "It's concrete pens and barking dogs" in print and an online version which included a video and a different heading.

The complainant said the reporting about the six other dogs was also inaccurate and unfair because the information - taken from notes on pens and screen grabs from the Home's computers - was incomplete and these were not official records. The complainant said if the publication had requested information on these dogs, the Home would have provided official medical histories, which included details of the dogs' conditions, the medical treatment provided and attempts to find them homes.

The complainant said the statements in the video that "hundreds of dogs" were "fed sedatives and antidepressants" and "drugged for normal dog behaviour" were wrong. It said no dogs were sedated and only eight of 170 dogs were on medication, following expert assessment related to treating anxiety and antisocial behaviour.

The Home said the audio of its staff member used in the video was recorded without permission and, when combined with other incorrect claims, was unfair to her and not justified in the public interest. It said insufficient time had been given for it to respond to the publication's requests for information and the reporter had declined an invitation to visit the Home. The complainant also said the newspaper initially invited it to submit an opinion piece when it raised concerns, but the newspaper was only prepared to publish its response as a shorter letter to the Editor and this did not adequately present its position, and was published a week after the article.

The publication said the complainant never mentioned Dino's pancreatitis, his hospitalisation or that this had inhibited his adoption. It said the promotional video featuring Dino did not mention these matters and it would not explain keeping the dog for so long or euthanising him. It said Dino's adoption profile was difficult to find; mentioned only "a bout of pancreatitis" which was common and suggested a mild condition; and the complainant had only drawn its attention to the profile after publication of the article. Although the complainant said during the telephone discussion on the day before publication that Dino had tried to get at a rabbit in a hutch, the publication did not consider this unusual enough behaviour to include in the article as it was 'normal dog behaviour'. It said Dino had first been given anti-anxiety medication four months after coming to the Home.

The publication said the reporting about the six other dogs was taken from the Home's computers or whiteboards and constituted the home's own records; it did not imply these were full histories of each dog; and this information illustrated that a range of dogs were given anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. It said the article included a comment by the Home about the use of medication.
VCE students were thrown into a spin when they faced a nonsensical question in an exam this week, prompting demands for more transparency around marking to ensure no student is disadvantaged.

A four-part question asked nearly 2000 students sitting the Music Performance exam on Monday to write chords in the minor key. However, two parts of the question included incorrect chord names.

The way schools are currently funded is contributing to inequality. Credit:Janie Barrett

The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) issued an apology to students immediately after the exam in an email sent to schools offering the subject. The authority said they received queries about the question, and sought to reassure students that they would not be disadvantaged.

"The VCAA apologises for any concerns caused by the use of this terminology. As is always our practice, the VCAA will ensure that no student is disadvantaged and all students are assessed fairly," it read.
Police in South Australia have arrested fugitive Lachlan Mitchell four days after he escaped from a Victorian youth detention prison.

Mitchell was taken into custody at 12.30am on Saturday after a raid on a house in Hackham West, south of Adelaide. An alleged accomplice was also arrested.

Malmsbury Juvenile Justice Centre

The 20-year-old has been on the run since Tuesday, when he fled the Malmsbury Youth Justice Centre and got into a black ute waiting for him with South Australian number plates.

Police are investigating whether the pair were involved in an aggravated robbery at Mount Gambier on Thursday, where a man had his car stolen at gunpoint.
Taipei: Taiwan is shaping up to become the first place in Asia to allow same-sex marriage.

Alongside its vibrant youth culture, gay and lesbian causes have gone from scorn to acceptance in barely a generation, to the point that parliament is now expected to soon legalise same-sex marriage.

Cindy Su, left, and Lana Yu hold their babies in Taipei, Taiwan. Credit:AP

President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan's first female head of state, supports the idea and MPs are working on three same-sex marriage bills, one of which could be passed within months.

About 80 per cent of Taiwanese between ages 20 and 29 support same-sex marriage, said Tseng Yen-jung, spokeswoman for the group Taiwan LGBT Family Rights Advocacy, citing local university studies, according to a report by Associated Press.
Washington: Donald Trump won the presidency campaigning on a promise of a far-reaching immigration crackdown, and early indications are that he intends to execute it.

The immigration section of Mr Trump's presidential transition website reaffirms his plans to "cancel unconstitutional executive orders"  which his advisers have said includes President Barack Obama's 2012 program that has protected from deportation 750,000 young people brought to the US illegally.

Once he takes office in January, Mr Trump can end that program without approval from Congress. He can also end Mr Obama's 2014 executive action, currently blocked by the courts, to extend that deportation reprieve to some four million undocumented immigrants who haven't committed crimes.

The website re-emphasised other Mr Trump proposals for which he may need congressional approval, including plans to build a wall on the US-Mexico border, suspend new visas from certain 'high-risk' countries, end funding for sanctuary cities and change legal immigration policies to better serve US workers.
Washington: Nationwide demonstrations against the election of Donald Trump spilled into a second night on Thursday with thousands of protesters surrounding his buildings in New York and Chicago and clashing with supporters of the president-elect in some areas.

Condemning Trump's litany of crude comments about women and his attacks on immigrants, demonstrators marched along city streets, blocked intersections, burned effigies and, in some places, gathered outside buildings bearing Trump's name.

"Not my president," chanted some of the protesters, while others waved signs with the same message.

In Portland, Oregon, police said that the protests in the city had turned into a "riot". Thousands marched and some smashed store windows, lit firecrackers and started a dumpster fire.
Washington: President-elect Donald Trump is strongly considering naming his campaign chief Steve Bannon to serve as White House chief of staff, CNN reported on Thursday, citing a source with knowledge of the situation. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus along with Bannon is also being considered for the job, The New York Times reported.

Bannon, the executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News, is well liked among Mr Trump's circle of advisers, the Times said. Priebus is said to be viewed favourably by Mr Trump's daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, the Times said.

How Trump may build his cabinet

It comes a day after speculation that Mr Trump may appoint his children to senior roles in his administration.
Ram ProMaster City Wins 2017 Commercial Green Car of the Year, Honda Ridgeline Wins 2017 Green Truck of the Year at San Antonio Auto & Truck Show

SAN ANTONIO - November 11, 2016: The Ram ProMaster City has been named Green Car Journal's 2017 Commercial Green Car of the Year, the second year in a row the versatile compact van has won the award and the first time any model has achieved back-to-back wins in the Green Car Awards program. Additionally, Honda's all-new generation Ridgeline has been honored as the magazine's 2017 Green Truck of the Year. These prestigious awards, which acknowledge environmental leadership in the popular pickup and light commercial vehicle fields, were announced in the heart of 'truck country' at the Green Car Journal press conference held at the San Antonio Auto & Truck Show in Texas.

The Ram ProMaster City compact commercial van and wagon are ideally-sized for city use where maneuverability and versatility are key. The model's strong suit is offering the hauling and commercial-use capabilities desired by tradesmen, small businesses, and fleets combined with 21 city and class-leading 29 highway mpg. It's powered by a 2.4-liter Tigershark four-cylinder engine with efficiency-enhancing Multiair technology and a nine-speed automatic transmission.

Honda's all-new second generation Ridgeline returns to American highways with a design that's more truck-like and refined at the same time. The model's signature unibody construction delivers a smooth car-like ride unsurpassed in the pickup field, providing the functionality needed by most truck buyers with the ability to carry a 1500-pound load, tow up to 5,000 pounds, and transport five occupants in comfort. Its 280 horsepower V-6 provides satisfying acceleration and 26 mpg highway fuel efficiency.

Focusing on the unique combination of hard-working functionality and environmental achievement, the Green Car Awards at the San Antonio Auto & Truck Show recognize vehicles that do the heavy lifting in real life while also keeping an eye on lower emissions, higher efficiency, and overall environmental improvement. Green Car Journal editors weigh the merits of all potential vehicles through its vetting process and narrow down the field to five candidates, which are then considered by the Green Car Awards jury.

Finalists for this year's 2017 Green Truck of the Year included the Chevrolet Colorado, Ford F-250 Super Duty, GMC Canyon, Honda Ridgeline, and Ram 1500. Vying for the 2017 Commercial Green Car of the Year were the Ford F-250 Super Duty, Ford Transit Connect, Mercedes-Benz Metris, Nissan Titan XD, and Ram ProMaster City.
Auto Lab Radio LIVE From NYC - Saturday November 12, 2016 7-9 AM (Eastern)







The Auto Lab Radio Show is Broadcast every Saturday 7 to 9 AM On New York City's WNYM Radio AM 970 and Streamed Worldwide On The Auto Channel

Broadcast Date: November 12, 2016

Car Question or Concern? Call Toll Free 888-692-7234

Auto Lab is a 28 year old interactive automotive-focused New York area radio call-in show hosted by Professor Harold Wolchok. Each week a cadre of experienced hands-on automotive experts are in-studio with advice for the New York area's 12 million people, providing listeners with honest, practical and street-smart car repair and buying advice.

Auto Lab is also about the automotive industry, its history, and its culture, presenting the ideas and advice of leading college faculty, authors, and automotive practitioners in a relaxed, conversational interactive format.

Listeners can hear the past 18 years of archived Auto Lab shows as simulcast on www.theautochannel.com.

Listen - Auto Lab Page (Includes Audio-on-Demand Archives, Auto Programs at Community College Database, Guests Pictures

Broadcast Date: November 12, 2016

Auto Answers - Maintenance, How To's, Safety, Used and New Car Buying, Ombudsmen Suggestions. From These Auto Lab In-Studio Experts

Harold Bendell- Major Auto

Tim Cacace-Master Mechanix

Libby Demarco-Broadway Sunoco

Howard Lepzelter-Retired Bronx Community College's Automotive Technology Department,CUNY

David Goldsmith - Urban Classics Auto Repairs

Joanne Porcelli, Esq

Michael Porcelli - Central Avenue Auto Repairs & I-CAR

Nicholas Prague- MTA and Rockland Community College, SUNY

Auto Lab Correspondents Report Auto Safety News, New Car Reviews, Technology and Latest Auto World Information That May effect You!

Broadcast Date: November 12, 2016

Robert Erskine, Senior European Correspondent, Suffolk England

WANT A NEW CAR?-PRINT IT!

John Russell, Senior Correspondent

ACURA TLX WITH TECH

Robert Sinclair-AAA Northeast

GASOLINE PRICES AND RECENT PIPE LINE DAMAGES
Indian Motorcycle and Zac Brown Band Team up to Surprise Veterans During Atlanta Charity Ride

MEDINA, Minn.In honor and recognition of Veterans Day, Indian Motorcycle, Americas first motorcycle company, paid tribute to our nations veterans with a day of gratitude and a motorcycle ride on the outskirts of Atlanta. In partnership with Zac Brown Band, the Indian Motorcycle Riders Group and charity partner Veterans Charity Ride to Sturgis, the ride kicked-off Wednesday morning beginning at Indian Motorcycle of Marietta and ending at the campus of Camp Southern Ground, Zac Browns non-profit passion initiative, in Fayetteville.







The ride hosted more than 100 riders and veterans from California all the way to Virginia, in addition to Indian Motorcycle Riders Group (IMRG) members from Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia. Veterans and other participants were welcomed by breakfast and a kick-off tribute delivered by Steve Menneto, President of Motorcycles for Polaris Industries, who joined the veterans for the day. The scenic ride lasted two hours and traveled through the outskirts of Atlanta. The full day of events dedicated to saluting all American military veterans culminated in lunch and a surprise acoustic performance by Zac Brown Band at Camp Southern Ground.

All of us at Indian Motorcycle are honored and humbled to continue our steadfast support of Americas military personnel, their families and our veterans, whom we proudly salute today on Veterans Day, said Steve Menneto. I thank the more than 100 veterans and IMRG riders who took part in this epic day of motorcycle comradery. I would also like to thank Zac Brown Band and their team for their support of our troops, and for making this a legendary event.

Along for the ride and days events were four representatives of the ?Veterans Charity Ride to Sturgis, which provides two-wheeled motorcycle therapy for wounded and amputee American military veterans. This past summer marked the second straight year Indian Motorcycle has sponsored this very special charity ride, which departed from Los Angeles en route to the 76th annual Black Hills Rally through some of Americas most scenic landscapes.

Camp Southern Ground is a non-profit organization founded by Zac Brown, with a mission to provide extraordinary experiences for children to recognize and magnify the unique gifts within themselves and others in order to profoundly impact the world. Camp Southern Ground places a special emphasis on those with neuro-developmental disorders, as well as children from military families and those with social or emotional challenges.

Indian Motorcycle partnered with Grammy award-winning and multi-platinum artists Zac Brown Band in May 2015 as ambassadors for the iconic American motorcycle brand. The band, an avid group of motorcycle riders, supports Indian Motorcycle through various events and initiatives across the country.

Indian Motorcycle has a proud military history, providing bikes to the war efforts in both WWI and WWII as well as supporting a host of military programs and events over the course of many decades. Zac Brown Band has a long history of supporting the U.S. military as well. The band members are USO tour veterans who have entertained more than 20,000 troops. In partnership with Indian Motorcycle and the USO, Zac Brown Band met with select troops on some stops of their 50-city North American Stadium Tour, crossing the country in support of their recently released ?JEKYLL + HYDE album, which garnered their third consecutive number one ranking on the Billboard 200.

It was an honor and a privilege to be a part of this day and the band is proud to have played a small role in making this day special for our veterans, said Zac Brown. Camp Southern Ground was proud to host this special event and welcomes our nations veterans today and every day.

ABOUT ZAC BROWN BAND

Three-time GRAMMY winners and multi-platinum artists Zac Brown Band are one of music's most heralded acts. Their latest platinum-certified album 'JEKYLL + HYDE' (Southern Ground Artists/John Varvatos Records/Big Machine Label Group/Republic Records) marks the bands fourth consecutive #1 debut on the Billboard 200 chart. With three platinum-selling albums, 'Uncaged,' 'You Get What You Give,' 'JEKYLL + HYDE' and 5X platinum 'The Foundation,' along with their 2013 project 'The Grohl Sessions Vol. 1,' the band has sold over 25 million singles and eight million albums to date. They have earned a historic series of fifteen #1 hit radio singles and are only the second artist to top both the country and active rock formats. Zac Brown Band broke three Fenway Park records with back-to-back sold-out concerts during their "BLACK OUT THE SUN" 2016 Tour: the most tickets sold for a single concert, the most tickets sold over two nights of concerts by the same artist, and the first band to sell out seven consecutive shows over three years. The band reached another milestone in Camden, NJ, packing 25,227 people into BB&T Pavilion -- the best-attended show in the venue's 22-year history. Zac Brown Band is managed by ROAR, a Beverly Hills-based artist and brand management company. The band is also represented by CAA, public relations firm Shore Fire Media and strategic digital marketing agency Girlilla Marketing. Additional information can be found at http://www.zacbrownband.com/.

ABOUT INDIAN MOTORCYCLE

Indian Motorcycle Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Polaris Industries Inc. , is Americas First Motorcycle Company. Founded in 1901, Indian Motorcycle has won the hearts of motorcyclists around the world and earned distinction as one of Americas most legendary and iconic brands through unrivaled racing dominance, engineering prowess and countless innovations and industry firsts. Today that heritage and passion is reignited under new brand stewardship. To learn more, please visit www.indianmotorcycle.com.
Despite evidence that the violence was instigated by the police ( and undercover military personnel ) in an orchestrated attack, as well as evidence of falsified witness statements and an establishment cover-up, the government decided an inquiry was unnecessary because out of the hundreds injured no one died, and all of the 95 arrested were eventually acquitted.Aside from the authoritarian reasoning which argues premeditated state violence is fine as long as nobody is murdered, this announcement suggests the Conservative government understands how integral its lies about Orgreave are to legitimizing violent worker suppression.In 1981, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher launched a war on unions by announcing the closure of 23 coal pits, starting an on-going industrial dispute which crescendoed at a South Yorkshire coking plant three years later.The National Union of Miners (NUM) mobilized 10,000 pickets at the Orgreave coking plant to stop strike-breaking lorry drivers transporting coke to steel mills.A force of 5,000 police officers descended onto Orgreave to break the pickets, armed with riot equipment, armoured vehicles, attack dogs and military horses. Unprovoked, baton-wielding police charged the miners on horseback and the fleeing picketers were chased through the terraced streets of Orgreave; many were badly beaten and dozens were arrested.To justify this violent attack, South Yorkshire Police manipulated witness statements and gave false evidence in court to prosecute the miners with violent conduct and inciting riots. Although the picketers were eventually acquitted, the lengthy and expensive court cases drained union resources and marked the beginning of the end for the NUM. Any pits that survived closure were privatized in 1994 and a government assault upon unions has continued since.
Property shortage thwarts house hunters looking to return to the West Midlands

A SHORTAGE of properties is thwarting house hunters looking to return to the West Midlands residential market.

RICS said its October residential market survey had shown that across the region, interest from prospective homebuyers increased for the second consecutive month with 21% more surveyors reporting a rise in demand from buyers rather than a fall.

Prices continue to rise, with 55% more respondents seeing growth rather than a fall across the West Midlands  the firmest price momentum of any region across the UK.

All regions saw prices grow in October apart from Inner London where respondents reported a price decline for the eight consecutive month.



The rise in prices has been fuelled by a continued fall in the number of new properties coming on to the market, a trend that has been continuing for well over two years.

Respondents in the West Midlands reported a further slight decline in new instructions over the month and anecdotal evidence suggests that the tight supply conditions continue to be a very dominant feather of the market across the region.



Colin Townsend, of Malvern-based agency John Goodwin, said: There is still a very strong level of sales. This, combined with a sharp drop in the level of new instructions has seen a shortage of stock developing and continuing to put upward pressure on prices.



Simon Rubinsohn, RICS Chief Economist, said the dire shortage of available housing across the region was continuing to push prices upwards, regardless of the uncertainty linked to the ongoing discussions surrounding Brexit.

We are only weeks away from the Autumn Statement, and it will be interesting to see what measures  if any  the Chancellor will put in place to increase housing supply and create a more affordable market, he said.



Looking ahead, 19% more chartered surveyors expect transaction levels to increase over the coming three months rather than fall. This positive sentiment is also echoed in respondents price expectations with 31% more respondents foreseeing a rise over the months to come rather than fall.

Price expectations are now positive across all areas of the UK apart from Central London. At the 12-month horizon, the picture remains broadly unchanged from September with contributors forecasting a rise rather than a fall in prices.



In the lettings market, tenant demand picked up firmly in the three months to October with 43% more chartered surveyors reporting a rise in enquiries, rather than a fall. Demand continues to outpace new supply in a trend that dates back almost two years.

This continued demand versus supply conflict continues to drive rent expectations higher with 46% more respondents expecting rents to increase in the coming three months. This expected rise in rents is also expected on the 12-month and five-year horizon  unless something drastically changes to bring more rental properties onto the market, concludes the body.
Hospital offers safe option to dispose of meds, narcotics Los Robles Health System is working to crush the opioid drug crisis by raising awareness about the dangers of opioid misuse and the importance of safe and proper disposal of unused or expired medications. Crush the Crisis will take place...

Alzheimers Foundation to host free conference The Alzheimers Foundation of America will host a free virtual educational conference from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tues., Nov. 15. The event is part of the foundations 2022 national Educating America Tour. The conference, which is free and open...

Authorities warn about rainbow fentanyl Victims often arent aware theyre taking it

The Ventura County Office of Education and state health officials have issued a warning to schools and families about rainbow fentanyl, a form of the potentially fatal synthetic opioid that comes in bright colors. Rainbow fentanyl can be found in...

Cancer support community to host remembrance event Cancer Support Community Valley/Ventura/Santa Barbara invites family members and friends of those who have died from cancer to attend the second annual Evening of Remembrance from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thurs., Nov. 3 at Cancer Support Communitys Garden of Hope,...
They brought tears and books of poetry, songs and tributes and bottles of wine. Within hours of the announcement that Leonard Cohen had died, mourners in his hometown of Montreal began to gather to pay homage to one of their citys greatest sons.The vigil outside Mr. Cohens home just off Saint Laurent Blvd. began small, and grew as the night went on. Some strummed Mr. Cohens works. Others gathered in a circle and sang his songs.I feel we lost a prophet, said Montrealer Dan Levy, after depositing a candle on the steps of the muted greystone house. Were mourning, but were mourning a great life. Im not somebody who has many heroes but he was my hero.Mr.Cohen knew his city intimately and Montrealers felt they knew the artist the same way. He is a source of inspiration and pride, and he crossed the citys language divide to become an almost universally beloved figure.Sitting cross-legged in the grass in the Parc du Portugal, across the street from Mr. Cohens home, Lydia Yakonowsky described the songwriter as her only idol. She had spent the night crying after learning of his death.I work in a cubicle. Sometimes I listen to his music while I work, and I feel moments of illumination, she said. His poetry is so uplifting.By 11 p.m., about 200 people has massed near Mr. Cohens home. The air, aside from the soft chords of a guitar, was silent. Candles and bouquets of roses began to pile up in a shrine on the houses doorstep. Someone lit two sticks of incense.On a lamppost by the door, a mourner taped a note. In French, it read: Montreal: Leonard Forever. RIP.
The first Schedule 14N! Back in July, Broc ran a poll asking when wed see the first proxy access nominee  only 11% of responders thought it would happen this year. The other 89% were wrong  including the 24% who said never! Heres the intro from this Gibson Dunn blog:

In what appears to be the first use of a companys proxy access bylaw, GAMCO Asset Management filed today a Schedule 13D/A and a Schedule 14N announcing that it has used the proxy access bylaw at National Fuel Gas (NFG) to nominate a director candidate for election at NFGs 2017 Annual Meeting. According to the 13D/A, GAMCO and its affiliates beneficially own in the aggregate approximately 7.81% of NFGs Common Stock and yesterday delivered a letter to NFG nominating Lance A. Bakrow to the Board of Directors.

NFG amended its bylaws in March 2016 to include a proxy access bylaw & its terms are pretty typical:

The Bylaws provide that a shareholder, or a group of up to 20 shareholders, owning 3% or more of the Companys outstanding Common Stock continuously for at least three years may nominate and include in the companys proxy materials directors constituting up to 20% of the board, provided that the shareholders(s) and the nominee(s) satisfy the bylaw requirements. Here is NFGs proxy access bylaw.

In this blog, Davis Polks Ning Chiu also lays out the circumstances

Delaware Says No to Directors Books & Records Request

Every now & again theres a case that isnt likely to have a big practical impact, but is worth noting just because it exists  and the Delaware Chancery Courts recent decision in Bizarri v. Suburban Waste Services is that kind of case. Most corporate lawyers believe that directors have a virtually unlimited right to access books & records. As this blog from Francis Pileggi notes, it turns out that there are some limits after all:

This opinion provides a rare instance in which the court denies a director unfettered access to the books and records of a corporation on whose board he serves, but this case also involves somewhat extreme facts which are not often replicated. The court found during trial that the director and stockholder, who was also a member and manager of an affiliated LLC, engaged in efforts to compete with and inflict reputational harm on the entities. The plaintiffs actions in that regard were driven by his intense hatred of the entities other two owners and principals. Together with the familial relationship of the plaintiff with one of the entities main competitors, it makes the prospect of the plaintiff misusing the books and records both real and troubling.

Theres a strong presumption in Delaware that a director is entitled to unfettered access to books & records  and its up to the company to demonstrate an improper purpose. This is one of the rare cases where the company was able to meet that burden.

CEO Succession: Boards Pass Over Corporate Fredos

This Stanford study concludes that boards are pretty good about identifying which potential CEO candidates should be passed over  like Fredo in The Godfather:

Our data modestly suggests that corporate boards do a reasonable job of identifying CEO talent. Fewer than 30% of the executives passed over among large corporations are recruited by other firms as CEO. Most (over 70%) are not. If an executive who is passed over has valuable skills that make him or her a viable CEO candidate, it is likely that another corporation would identify and hire that individual. Furthermore, candidates who are recruited to new firms after being passed over appear to perform worse (relative to benchmarks) than those who were selected at the original company.

I guess Fredo also is a good example of the potential dangers of a disgruntled senior executive.

 John Jenkins
Gramps

copyright 2007 - murphy



It's hard to believe that thirty years have gone by since the last time I talked to Gramps. I live on his old farm now, carrying on what he started almost one hundred years ago. I still miss him and grandma very much.



Im reminded of them every time I stare out the window at the hay fields, and the large sugar maples that border the property. Its located in Prince Edward County, in eastern Ontario. Gramps had 150 acres that was used for mixed farming - primarily hay and dairy cattle.



He bought the place in 1919 for $150. That was a lot of money back then. He got a special government loan after returning home from France at the end of World War One. The money had to be paid back at one dollar a month, and he never defaulted. He was a hard worker and his dairy cattle produced a steady supply of milk that was easily sold. By the summer of 1931, Gramps was a paid in full member of the local farming community.



In some respects, it must have been tough coming home after the war. Everyone used to say that he had aged far beyond his years because of the fighting. When he was in France, he always worried about his family back in Ontario.



When I was in my twenties, I got a peek into Gramps past. I had just joined the army and he told me about what the service was like when he was in uniform. He never talked about the war, so this was a private moment between us. He spoke about the noise and the dead lying around on the battlefield. He described the musty, dirty smells of the trenches. Did I know that there were rats? They fed on anything - army horses, farm animals and human corpses.



One memory that's always stuck with me was when Gramps described seeing a man cry for the first time. He was embarrassed and ashamed. Gramps felt that he was intruding on another person's privacy, but where could he go? You couldnt leave the trenches. Grown men would just sit by themselves, weeping openly. No one said anything. He finished by saying that the trip back to Canada was a lonely time. Every day he sat on the deck of the ship, staring into space, re-living the memories of what would become the war to end all wars.



"No one learned a lesson from that." was all he said.



He was actually one of three boys that went overseas to fight the Hun. Gramps was the only one that returned. His two brothers  Edward and Terry - died within hours of each other at Vimy Ridge, on the morning of April 9th, 1917. The fighting, the loss of his siblings, and worrying about family took its toll.



Dad said that Gramps never talked to anyone about the days before 1919. Every Remembrance Day however, Gramps would dutifully go to the service at the local cenotaph. He never cried, but always seemed to drift away for a few minutes, staring into the distance - looking in vain for his two lost brothers perhaps.



Gramps died in 1986, but the farm is well cared for by a property agency. The fields are rented out to neighbours to cover the agency fees and taxes.



The 1870s era farmhouse looks much the same as it did when it was built. With the single addition of an indoor toilet in 1961, it stands as a snapshot of a bygone era. I'll always remember it that way.



My first memories of the place were visits in the early 1960s. Unlike our farm, Gramps had no electricity or running water. There was a small pump in the kitchen and a larger one outside, a few feet from the front porch. A large wood stove provided heat. It also provided the hot water for baths, dishes and the laundry.



Whenever I went for a visit, Grandma used to chase Gramps and me out the door. He loved to go bird hunting, but couldnt always find the time for it, so Grandma would say,



Go out and get me a nice pheasant, Grampa, And some rabbits too. Im sick of chicken!



Summer and early fall were my favourite times to go hunting. As a child, I enjoyed the simple pleasure of exploring the farm, oblivious to possession limits or the need to bring something home. Being outdoors was enough, and Gramps helped instill that feeling by being one of my early hunting companions.



Wed spend our Saturdays walking around the hay fields or stalking the hardwood thickets that hid our supper. I think that Gramps secretly liked to play hooky from his farm chores and be a kid again. I carried an old 22 rimfire, single shot Cooey. Gramps had a 12-gauge side by side shotgun.



I was always leading the way, my 22 ready for anything. Gramps was a really good spotter. Whenever he saw a rabbit or a bird that he figured I could hit, hed tap me on the shoulder, point and whisper,



Look over there, Steve. About twenty yards away, under that maple.



My rifle would bark, and if I was lucky, there would be game for the pot. Those were the memories that I treasure the most.



In 1986, I went to visit Gramps while on leave from the army. Ten years earlier, I had joined the Canadian Forces. I was unsure of how the family would take it back then, but I neednt have worried. Both Dad and Gramps were proud that I had chosen to serve, but sad that I would be away from home. Nonetheless, they supported my decision and wrote me often, wherever in the world I went.



When I got to the farmhouse, Grandma met me at the door, gave me a big hug and said to come inside.



I know its been about six months since you last visited us, Steve. I wanted to tell you that Gramps isnt feeling well. Hes lost some weight and has trouble walking. Come on, hes looking forward to seeing you.



I went into the living room and saw Gramps sitting by the window, staring outside at the fields. He wasnt the man I talked to in the spring. He turned and smiled at me, looking very tired and frail. Gramps must have seen the reaction in my face because he said, Come over and sit beside this old man, son. I wont bite. Then he looked at Grandma and said, Why dont you get us some tea, mother?



Gramps waited for Grandma to go into the kitchen before speaking.



Dont look so sad, Steve. No one lives forever. A few years ago, the doctor told me that I had a cancer. Its finally caught up to me. Oh, dont worry. You know that poem about not going gently into the good night? Well, I ran ahead of it as long as I could.



My eyes welled up with tears. I tried, but couldnt say anything. Then Gramps said,



Last night I dreamed about my brothers. I havent done that in years. Ed - he was the oldest - he used to tell me that Id be the traveller in the family. Well, I proved him wrong. Except for going to France in the First War, the farthest Ive never been is Toronto. Ill rub that in his face when I see him.



Gramps was saying goodbye.



When you retire from the service, make sure that you come back here to live. You can settle down and take over this old place. Its in good shape. Ill leave my 12 gauge for you to use. You never did get a shotgun of your own. Take your 22 out of retirement and give it to your kids.



We spent the afternoon chatting about all sorts of things. We reminisced about the farm, me growing up, and later on, when I first joined the military. We laughed about how Grandma always burnt the gingerbread cookies, how the crows used to follow us when we went rabbit hunting and that, even after seventy years, army boots fit no better than when Gramps was in.



Just before supper, Gramps told me to go to my dads place and have something to eat. I could come back later. He gave me a picture of him taken in 1917, standing proudly in his uniform. He also handed over a box with his medals inside. He said to put them away for safekeeping. He said that future generations of our family mustnt forget their relatives or anyone in uniform. He wanted his great-grandkids to see his picture and be able to touch his medals.



A little before 5:00 PM on Nov 10, 1986, I left for dad's house. Gramps passed away less than an hour later.
Well, it happened, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said Thursday night when Rachel Maddow asked her how shes feeling about the unexpected election results. There was a time to be really despondent about it, but the way I see it now is that we pick ourselves up and we fight back.

Warren went on to say that there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that the election of a man who repeatedly referred to her as Pocahontas on Twitter is painful for a lot of people.

This really and truly hurts, she said. And we have to remember how Donald Trump started this whole campaign. He started it with an attack on Mexican Americans and then he took the escalator down. And his entire campaign was fueled on racism and bigotry, attacks on women, attacks on African Americans, attacks on Latinos, attacks on Muslims, attacks on people who were disabled. It was one attack after another. And that means we have to think about what this means for America and where we go forward right now.

As she said in her statement following Tuesday nights news , Warren indicated that as a Democratic senator she would look for places where she could compromise with Trump, but had her doubts. There are things were going to end up losing, because we dont have the White House, we dont have the Senate, we dont have the House of Representatives, she said. But on those core issues about treating every single human being in this country with dignity, on that we stand up and we fight back. We do not back down. We do not compromise, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. For me, thats the starting place on how to understand whats happened to us.

Later, Warren added, You can either lie down, you can whimper, you can pull up in a ball, you can decide to move to Canada, or you can stand your ground and fight back. She urged people who are angry about the election to get involved politically and volunteer for organizations like Planned Parenthood to help those who might be hurt by a Trump administration.

As for the protests that have sprung up across the country in opposition to Trump, Warren said, People are upset and theyre right to be upset. This is our country, and people have a right to have their voices heard. But, she added, we also have an obligation to listen. Not necessarily to Trump, but to those who decided to vote for him despite his bigotry.

After a break, Warren told Maddow that she has spoken to Hillary Clinton since Tuesday night and took a long pause before saying their conversation was good. She added, Look, its hard. Its really hard. She worked hard. She has had 25 years of public service, longer. Shes been out there. She has fought for women. She has fought for children. She has fought for health insurance. She has fought for human rights. That has been the defining feature of her life, and this is hard. This is hard. I respect what she has done and tried to do for this country and for people around the world.

Finally, just as interviewers tried to get Warren to announce her presidential campaign ahead of 2016, Maddow closed her interview by asking, Who are you going to pick as your running mate in 2020?

No, no, no, that is a long way off, Warren said, not exactly ruling out a run. We dont have energy to waste on that. What we have is weve got to line up our fights, where it is that were willing to say, Were with you and well help you and well put wind in your sails, President-Elect Trump, and where it is that we say On bigotry, on prejudice, on turning loose Wall Street, on saddling our kids with too much debt on student loans, on canceling health insurance, where it is we say, No, we will fight you every step of the way.
J.K. Rowling has made no bones about her distaste for the president-elect, Donald J. Trump.

Back in December, the renowned Harry Potter novelist tweeted that Voldemort, the nightmarish villain of the Potterverse, was nowhere near as bad as Trump. Then, in the early hours Wednesday morning, as it became shockingly apparent that the former reality star would be the president-elect of the United States, Rowling delivered a series of hopeful messages to the disappointed and disenfranchised:

The bestselling author was a bit more reticent on Thursday afternoon in New York. Appearing at a press conference for her excellent new film, the Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Rowling acknowledged that things felt bleak at the moment in light of recent events but that she didnt want to say anything more specifically about yesterday right now because today might be a day to concentrate on some good thingsand putting some good things out into the world, hopefully.

Fantastic Beasts, which was directed by David Yates from a Rowling screenplay (her first!), is a Potter prequel that centers on Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a wizard and self-described magizoologist whos been banished from Hogwarts under mysterious circumstance. He arrives in 1926 New York amid precarious circumstances, with wizards living in secret and fearing persecution, and a fanatical faction of No-Majs (or Muggles/humans) out to expose them. Scamander comes equipped with a suitcase full of magical creaturesanimals that are outlawed by the wizarding community for fear of exposing their existence to the masses.

Rowling conceded that though Fantastic Beasts was conceived a few years ago, the social climate of the film, where wizards are oppressed and intimidated by the myopic masses, does bear some striking similarities to the current one, where leaders like Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump in the United States have come to the fore on waves of fear-stoked populism.

If you have read the Potter books, youll know that this period in history was threatened to become very dystopian, so youre looking at the rise of a very dark force, said Rowling. But as I say, I conceived of this story a few years ago, and it was partly informed by what I see as a rise of populism around the world. But I cant say anything specifically about [Trumps election] yesterday because, as I say, Ive been planning this story a long time.

Asked if she plans to bring Fantastic Beasts to the West End or Broadway, Rowling said, There are no plans to put Fantastic Beasts on stage, though she did add that Cursed Child, we do very much hope it will come to Broadway, but I have no dates to tell you yet.

One of the more interesting questions posed to Rowling involved the sexuality of Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts and mentor to Harry Potter. Rowling has acknowledged in that past that Dumbledore is gay and that he will be appearing in the Fantastic Beasts sequel (the first installment is part of a five-movie franchise). Asked if Dumbledore will be portrayed as openly gay in the sequel and whether shell explore his romantic relationship with Grindelwald, Rowling offered a playful smile and, her voice rising a few octaves, replied, Well before adding: Im very comfortable with the question. I cant tell you everything I would like to say, because this is obviously a five-part story and theres lots to unpack in that relationship. I will say that you will see Dumbledore as a younger man, and quite a troubled man, because he wasnt always the sage. He was always very clever, but well see him at what I think is the formative period of his life.Then, the kicker: As far as his sexuality is concerned: Watch this space, I would say.

Fantastic Beasts opens Nov. 18, at a time when many Americansand people around the worldneed a bit of escapist fare. And Rowling, much as she does on Twitter, on Thursday relayed a message to her legions of adoring fans out there: I hear you, and I am here for you.

It is an enormous honor to have anyoneone individualsay to you, Your work has been a place of refuge, or It has been my escape, or It helped me make sense of something, she said, later adding of the film, I think weve done the very best job we can, and I have certainly told a story I really wanted to tell, and I cant think of a better reason to tell a story.
There was a growing feeling of anticipation among Pentagon staffers Thursday over the arrival of President-elect Donald Trumps transition teamwhich so far hasnt showed up. The offices designated for those who will help to shape the future of the Defense Department sat empty. Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the departments current leadership has not been in touch with Trumps transition team.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration-in-waiting is fielding resumes for top national-security positions, but not from the usual tier of seasoned professionals with years of policy and management experience that incoming administrations usually turn to.

Many in those elite cadre had previously disavowed Trump when he was a candidate. Now, the transition team is having more success with its outreach to former members of the military and intelligence world who are more versed in the sharp end of national securityfrom experience on the battlefield.

This warrior class includes people whove maintained their security clearances for work in the defense contracting and conflict-management arena.

Two people who are now working to build Trumps bench say hundreds of people are sending in their resumes, many of them novices to working in the halls of power in Washington.

Three such candidates told The Daily Beast they were in talks with transition officials to take senior positions. All had served in the military and are now working in private industry, and at least one had worked with Trump adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, in the special-ops world.

What unites them is a frustration with the Obama administrations take on Iraq, Afghanistan, ISIS, al Qaeda, and Islamic militant ideology overall, and a hope that President-elect Trump will unleash the military-industrial complex on the terrorist problem on a scale not seen since the years just after the 9/11 attacks.

At the same time, career officials whove spent the past several years working for President Obama are wondering if now is the time to get out. One senior administration official told The Daily Beast that during multiple staff meetings on Wednesday several career staff on the National Security Council expressed their desire to quit, as the reality of a Trump administration sunk in.

Trumps transition process is running behind because campaign staff didnt think they had a chance to win until about a month ago, when internal polling signaled a possible victory. The transition team started reaching out via Trump advisors to Republican national security professionals willing to take a chance on the candidate, and they began a quiet outreach to like-minded individuals who already possess security clearances.

The incoming administration needs those seasoned hands now. Trump laid out ambitious but conflicting plans for the military during the campaign. He said he wanted to add 70,000 troops to the Army, part of an expansionist vision for the armed forces. But he called for the United States to stop nation building, raising questions about why the country needs a larger standing ground force.

Trump also called for more military spending, and yet at the same time, tax cuts, so it is unclear how his administration would pay for his plan. In the halls of the Pentagon, some are wondering whether the militarys top generals will stay in their jobs under a Trump administration given that, as a presidential candidate, Trump said the generals had been reduced to rubble under the Obama administration.

The lack of direction from the Trump team has made it difficult for Pentagon officials to start making plans for possible adjustments to the U.S. defense strategy. Officials are not sure, for example, what effect the election could have on plans to retake the capital of self-proclaimed Islamic States caliphate, Raqqa, which is scheduled to begin next year.

When The Daily Beast asked three defense officials for possible changes ahead, the answer was always the same: a shrug of the shoulders.

Names of potential defense secretaries under a Trump administration are starting to emerge. Among the leading candidates are Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and Stephen Hadley, a former national security advisor to George W. Bush.

In the absence of a transition team, some began trying to read what a Secretary Sessions or Secretary Hadley would mean for the military, although Hadley told NBC News that he is not participating in the transition at this point. Sessions is an Army veteran who served at the tail end of the Vietnam War and has been a long-term Trump adviser. Hadley, meanwhile, helped shape the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, a war that Trump claimed he didnt support but that the record shows he did. That war also defined the careers of nearly all the commanders who would serve under President Trump.

Both candidates were first introduced to the military at two very different periods in history. Sessions served at a time when the draft came to an end and the military became an all-volunteer force. Hadley was part of an administration that pushed that volunteer force into the longest period of war in American history.

Those things have to shape how they would approach the job, one defense official conjectured.

Former Republican staffers who worked for Hadley say if he takes the post, they and others would likely follow, believing his prior experience would spell successespecially with a commander in chief who is likely to delegate rather than micromanage the Pentagon.
For a few hours after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, it seemed as though he was committed to playing the role of a statesman.

But by Thursday night, the old Trump was gnawing himself free to lance an old enemy: the mediaan ominous development for a country whose freedom depends, in large part, on a free press.

From the moment he walked out onto the balcony at the Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan in the early hours on Wednesday, after he won the general election, Trump seemed calmer, less erratic, and less emotional than at any point over his 17-month long campaign for the presidency.

Hed finally made that presidential pivot, in other words, that he failed to make as a candidate.

He gave a subdued speech, and he spoke graciously of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, whom hed been threatening to imprison for the previous year. Then he appeared at the White House and sat with President Obama, whose American citizenship hed questioned for five years, and he spoke graciously of him, too.

But then on Twitter, he fell back into his old habit of undermining the credibility of the press and falsely ascribing it a political agenda. Just had a very open and successful presidential election, he tweeted at 9:19 p.m., Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

The statement is a worrying confirmation that Trump, even with his new hushed voice and presidential handshakes, is the same as hes always been. Surely, much of what he promised hed do as a candidate will not be executable, even with both chambers of Congress in his control and the support of roughly half of the American people. But we shouldnt believe for a moment that he doesnt still want to do precisely what hes said.

The Trump campaign was no act. The last 48 hours, however, have been.

The president-elect has had a fair election and a peaceful transition of power, two necessary features of a first-world democracy like the United States. But make no mistake: There can be no unifying a country when you dismiss its citizens protests as a media conspiracy executed by crisis actors. And there can be no keeping a republic when you refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of a free press.
TIJUANA, Mexico  A Mexican-American truck driver in his late fifties, Jose, wore a star-spangled National Rifle Association t-shirt here at the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing on Tuesday. He was waiting in line to cross into the U.S. and cast his vote for Donald Trump, he said. He pointed at his well-worn shirt, and announced that he was showing his true colors on Tuesday.

Though born in Tijuana, like many here Jose is a dual citizen who went to high school in the U.S. along with his siblings. He said he has worked there, like his mother did before him, since he was 17 years old.

When Jose got his first shitty factory job in the U.S., just out of high school, he said he earned $2.50 an hour. But as the years passed he focused on his education, served for years in the army, was deployed overseas five times, and built up an impeccable work ethic, he said, unlike some people.

I made it in the U.S. legally, he said. They should too.

By they, it was clear, he wasnt talking about the hundreds of other Latinos waiting in line to cross into the U.S. He was talking about the freaking hills full of people he has seen hoping to thwart the existing border wall, as helicopters fly overhead in the border city where he was born.

Precisely on the issue of the proposed southern border wall, he did not mince words. They should build the damn wall or watch the people [American citizens] rise up in arms, he said. Both psychologically and physically the wall works, and I cant wait to see Trump come through on his promise.

Some have compared the mindset of people like Jose and other conservative Latino voters to those who would climb into a treehouse, and pull up the ladder behind themthe ladder of opportunity, in this case.

But as the world comes to grips with the outcome of the election, many are still scratching their heads as it becomes clear that this epic tale of the Latino sleeping giant that would rise up to defeat Trump proved untrue.

Although they may have turned out in record numbers on Election Day, a whopping 29 percent of Latinos cast their ballots for Donald Trump, according to CNN exit polls, devastating the narrative that played out in the media leading up to Tuesday. This is more than the 27 percent of Latinos who voted for Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012.

So, almost one out of every three Hispanic voters decided, despite Trumps rhetoric about Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans, that they want him to lead the United States as it grapples with a future full of decisions about how it will treat migrants, refugees, and the estimated 11 million undocumented people who have lived alongside them in communities across the country.

In speaking with Mexican-American voters lining up at the border to cast their ballots on Tuesday, it became clear to me that Latino voters have been largely misunderstood, and projections were not representative of the rainbow of opinions that Hispanic individuals hold, nor who they consider their vested allies to be.

Many sweeping generalizations tended to ignore the often profound differences among Hispanic communities from different geographic backgrounds, assuming, for instance, that Puerto Ricans or Cuban Americans have exactly the same interests as Mexican-Americans.

Indeed, even if one focuses exclusively on Mexican-Americans, they have remarkably diverse opinions on some of the issues that they are closest toimmigration, border security, binational trade.

Asking African-Americans if they would be against building a wall against the US-Mexico border, 82 percent say yes. But, surprisingly, ask Latinos the same question and that figure falls to 68 percent, NBC exit polls showed. On the issue of whether unauthorized immigrants should be able to apply for legal status in the country, 82 percent of blacks said yes, whereas only 78 percent of Hispanic voters agreed.

Jose is not an outlier. He is just one of several Trump supporters that I spoke to in Mexico on their way to the polls, but one of the few willing to voice his polemical opinions, loudly answering my questions as some of the surrounding border crossers glared.

He explained that he spends months at a time driving across the U.S. in his truck, listening to his favorite talk radio hostsAlex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. He says that he knows they can all be a little bit out there, but that overall they are the only ones in the country who are telling it like it is.

The liberal media is so full of shit. And thats why Trump is going to win this thing, he told The Daily Beast on Election Day. I spend 100 days at a time driving across the U.S., and every time I look at my paycheck I see that they [the government] are stealing more of it$350 to $500 dollars each paycheck, always more, every check, he fumed.

Ignoring my concerned questions about the welfare of migrants and refugees, he said: People who work and pay taxes support Trump, because they know whats at stake.

I have a sister who I havent talked to in years, he said, as we spoke in Spanish on the international pedestrian bridge. Shes on welfare, and has five kids. She lives in Mexico and has a job here, and its total fraud. There are millions of other people just like her. I used to tell her that she needs to grow up. Shes young, isnt disabled, speaks perfect English, and is an American citizen, so why does she do this? Because she can, because its easy, and shes lazy, and the government we have enables her and encourages her to commit fraud.

They are paying her to break the law, he argued. I pay for her lifestyle, and so do you, and every other American taxpayer. And somehow people like me are the assholes? Americans are stupid for allowing this.

Voters like Jose break from the narrative of what has been expected of them, much to the chagrin of non-voting Mexicans, some of whom looked on at him with expressions undulating between amusement and disgust as we spoke.

You may have noted that Jose did not want to share his last name.

I live in Mexico because I cant afford to buy a house in the U.S., he said.

Then we went back to his opinion of immigrants in the U.S.: Where does my money go? It goes to Muslims and Mexicansto people who are here illegally. They give it to people who are on welfare. But I am the only one working for it. It isnt fair.

Comprising 11 percent of the electorate, Latinos were touted as a unified bloc that would overwhelmingly throw their votes at former Secretary of State Hillary Clintontheyd be a force to be reckoned with. But, in speaking with voters like Jose it becomes clear why despite projections, one in three Latino voters came out to support President-elect Donald Trump.

By the time Americans cast their votes again in 2020, one in four people living in the US will be Latino, but it is clear that the idea of them acting as a whole toward a common goal or shared worldview will not be the reality, and their votes will continue to be as diverse as the opinions of the nation at large.

As a demographic they have been discussed in overly simplistic terms. Pundits have not taken into account, on the one hand, a religious, conservative streak among Hispanics, and on the other hand, the idea that many Mexican-Americans and Latinos would call themselves average Americans, rather than identify with the communities that politicians, pundits, and members of the media cast them into. Obviously.

Jose said he is an American first, and also a patriot in the most typical sense, above anything else.

He took offense when I, at first, referred to him as a Latino votersimplistically implying, he thought, that his vote would somehow conform with anyone elses.

Look, lady, Im an American, and vote for my countrys interest, he said with a smile. I dont go around calling people like you a white voter or a woman voter, and I wouldnt assume that you would vote for Clinton because she looks like you, so whys everyone asking the same of people who look like me?

And hes right about at least that much, as evidenced by the votes cast by people like me: white womenwho were expected to overwhelmingly reject the prospect of a lewd, misogynistic, alleged groper-in-chief, but instead voted in President-elect Trump, throwing 53 percent of their support behind him. Latinos, too, surprised on Election Day by failing to meet everyones expectations for how they should react at the polls.

I asked if he, as a veteran who spent years on active duty, sympathized with the deported veteran community in Mexico, dozens of whom have protested at the border in full military uniform over the years.

No way, he said. There are laws that grant full citizenship to people who serve their country, he said, noting the bumpy path to citizenship for people with green cards who enlist  people who despite their service, lose that right if found guilty of an offense. These people lost their chance to be Americans as soon as they committed a crime, so they dress up in the regalia and ask for pity, but most of them are here in Mexico now as a result of their own actionsthey shouldnt have sold drugs, or committed violent assaults, or stolen. People need to be accountable for themselves.

On Tuesday, as polls opened and closed across the U.S., the non-voting people of Mexico hoped that the impact of droves of their fellow bad hombres north and south of the border turning out to vote would guarantee a Trump-less future.

But as evidenced by Joses opinions, not everyone in Mexico was glum after Election Day, as it became apparent that Trump would be the next president. The questions raised by the votes cast by LatinosWhy did they vote for Trump? What were they thinking? Who are they?have pretty simple answers.

Latinos are still, at the end of the day, your average American individual with a head full of opinions, undefined by racial makeup, socio-economic class, level of education, or anyones assumptions of themjust like me, just like you, and just like every other American who will spend the next four years calling The Donald, among a litany of other things, President Trump.
There are 2.5 million miles of oil and gas pipelines in the United States. But thanks to a coalition of Native American and climate activists, about 20 miles of one of themthe the Dakota Access Pipelinewill now be rerouted away from a Sioux Reservation, according to statements from President Obama.

That is clearly a partial victory for the anti-pipeline coalitionbut given the results of the election, it is perhaps a pyrrhic one.

DAPL is a 1,100-mile long, $1.6 billion part of a massive $4.8 billion energy infrastructure project to bring oil from Canada and the Northwest to Chicago. Its being built by Energy Transfer Partners, which has a spotty record of spills elsewhere, but which won all the necessary environmental approvals for this project.

But then Native American groups and climate change activists saw an opportunity. As shown on this incredibly excellent (anti-DAPL-biased) map, the approved route of the pipeline crosses the Missouri just half a mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation (and, activists have noted, across parts of North Dakota that were supposed to have been granted to the Sioux under a 1851 treaty). Because that crossing point depends on an easement from the Army Corps of Engineers, activists saw an opening to protest the pipeline, raise the long-ignored issue of Native American rights, and make the cost of doing business in fossil fuels that much higher.

The result was an escalating series of protests arguing that a leak or rupture in the pipeline could spill into the Missouri, which provides drinking water for some of the Sioux, and that the pipeline crosses ancient burial grounds.

From the outset, the motives of the activists were mixed. In fact, the Sioux themselves are divided on DAPL, many supporting it and many opposing it. Meanwhile, a lot of the organizational and communications muscle has been provided by climate activists, who oppose not just DAPL but any pipelines, anywhere.

At least in theoryreally, a more sophisticated understanding of the strategy is that it increases the marginal cost of fossil fuel infrastructure, thus making renewables a more attractive alternative. At present, oil, gas, and coal comprise 81 percent of American energy consumption. Renewables comprise 5 percent. The main reason is cost, and the enormity of the fossil fuel industry. So if litigation, regulation, protests, bad PR, security, and other assorted costs can drive up the cost of doing business in fossil fuels, then that calculus might gradually begin to shift.

But then something unexpected happened. In the midst of the election, DAPL became a cause celebre for the Bernie Left, a kind of alternative to an election with candidates they didnt like and issues (like climate change) that werent being discussed. More than 1 million slacktivists checked in virtually at the protest site (under a mistaken belief that law enforcement was using Facebook to track protesters), but thousands of more serious activists showed up and put their bodies on the line. Most intriguingly, Native groups that are often at loggerheads came together for the cause.

Violence between police and protesters, and then the acquittal of the Bundy family, intensified the protests. Consider the outrage: white nationalists occupy federal land and get off scot free, whereas Native Americans defending their own land are hit with tear gas. There are plenty of differences between the two cases, but the juxtaposition was hard to ignore. At a time when most Americans were cheering the Cleveland Indians, DAPL was a powerful counterpoint.

The protests also became an alternative to an election in which no one is talking about the gravest existential threat to our world, i.e. global climate disruption, let alone the rights of Native Americans.

Now, in reality, DAPL is hardly the most important crisis point for either Native or climate issues. Other pipelinesfor example, the Spectra Algonquin AIM natural gas pipeline that runs just 50 miles from New York City, and, at one point, beneath an aging nuclear power plantare more dangerous. The proposed Missouri River crossing point already has a natural gas pipeline and high voltage electric lines over it, and the the risk to drinking water was determined by government experts to be minimal. (Compare the risk, the numbers, and the outrage to Flint, Michigan, for example.) And DAPL is nothing compared with the economic woes of reservations, poor access to healthcare and basic services, and continued discrimination, marginalization, and assimilation of Native Americans.

But DAPL became a symbolan opportunity to focus attention on issues that are usually ignored. At least people were paying attention.

And now the protesters have wonsort of.

DAPL will still be built, of course, so the climate contingency hasnt really won. It will still cross the Missouri, toowhile we dont know the new route, probably, if you look at the excellent map again, an alternate crossing point will be found, farther from Sioux Country but still downstream from Bismarck. That will lessen the water pollution concerns, but more importantly, move the crossing far from the reservation and the protesters.

Is that a win? Not necessarily, but its undeniable that the protests have galvanized progressives and united Native Americans. That may prove to be their most lasting contribution.

Especially, to state the obvious, in the Trump administration. Trump has already promised to greenlight the Keystone XL Pipeline, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and opening up public lands across the country to fossil fuel development. Compared with that, DAPL isnt even a deck chair on the Titanic; its a coaster on a side table next to one.

And fossil fuels are only a tiny part of the story. The Trump administration will likely ban even the consideration of climate change in any governmental planning (let alone regulation), as Florida has already done. The Paris Accords will be shredded on day one. So will support for renewable energy. Its easy to get overly apocalyptic about the next four years, but in terms of climate change, the impact will indeed be catastrophic.

In fact, one might argue that the gestural, romantic politics of the pipeline protest, to the extent they diverted energy away from the election, ultimately contributed to a far, far worse situation for both the climate and for Native Americans. In a sense, the DAPL protests were a kind of political fantasy, a distraction. They were full of stereotyping of Wise Native Americansnot among the hard core activists, of course, but certainly among the hundreds of thousands of more who were Standing with Standing Rock by sitting on their sofas. There were New Age prayer vigils for Standing Rock, just like the Evangelical prayer vigils for Trump. There was plenty of heated rhetoric: the protest site is Sacred Stone Camp, the pipeline is the Black Snake. And while Native Americans often took a leading role in the protests, one could also argue that their concerns were often being exploited for other activists agendas.

On the other hand, one could just as easily blame Hillary Clinton for failing to inspire progressives, or even persuade them to trust her. (Clinton was mostly silent about DAPL; Bernie Sanders supported, and even joined, the anti-DAPL protests.) And its not like DAPL siphoned off those crucial votes that could have put her over the top. DAPL protesters are not to blame for Trump.

Yet they now will face a thousand DAPLs, all across the country, and an administration actively hostile to environmental concerns. Ironically, the DAPL reroute may be the last environmental victory for four years. And certainly the last Native American one. (If theres one thing the anti-political-correctness victory means for America, it means years more of Indians, Braves, and Redskins.) Activists have half-won this battle, but they have surely lost the war.

On the other hand, if the DAPL coalition be the beginning of a movement that opposes the drills, pipelines, and devastation that is sure to come in a matter of months, perhaps the protests offer a ray of hope, and a preview of the thousand such protests that now will be required.
For one of his last rallies before Election Day, Donald Trump stood up on a stage in Sterling Hills, Michigan where he was embraced by aging rocker and National Rifle Association (NRA) Board Member Ted Nugent. The obnoxious Motor City Madman was a logical choice for Trump, as not only did the NRA build its power around the very coalition Trump embraced as his ownthe aging, dispossessed white working-class manbut the NRA invested $14 million in Trumps victory. This was more than any pro-Trump SuperPAC spent, and you can be sure they are expecting something in return.

So what can we expect from a President Trump fully supported by the NRA? Lets start with the groups pet project of a long time now (defeated a few times in Congress), passing something called Concealed Carry Reciprocity (CCR).

CCR is legislation that would lower the standards of every states concealed carry law to the lowest common denominator. In other words, you gain your ability to carry a concealed carry license in the newly empowered gun paradise of Missouri, which due to recent legislation doesnt seem to require much beyond breathing to acquire one. But then you move to New York, or Connecticut or California, states with much more stringentdare I say common senselaws requiring background checks and maybe even a stated need to carry said firearm on your person. Not to worry. Under CCR, youre carrying in your new state, even though you never had follow any of its regulations in order to obtain your permit.

The NRA erroneously compares this to drivers licenses. I debated NRA Lobbyist Chris Cox in the pages of The Daily Caller on this issue a few years back. So it is probably useful to include a bit of my response to his incredibly dishonest piece:

Is the NRA now comparing a concealed carry permit to owning and driving a car, where each individual is required to possess a license and register their vehicle? So is Mr. Coxs position that we should create a registry of each person who carries loaded, concealed firearms, so gun regulations will work similarly to the laws governing the owning and driving of automobiles?

To the substance of his point, the police are able to verify the status of ones drivers license through a national database. With concealed carry permits, there is no such licensing databaseand Mr. Cox assures us there are no plans to create one. Some states dont even keep accurate records of whos allowed to carry a concealed weaponmuch less feed them into a national databaseand others destroy these documents.

Any questions?

Also on the NRA wish list, shared with me by Ladd Everett, longtime gun safety activist and director of the organization One Pulse (started by George Takei after the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando), are more restrictive riders on [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives] ATF appropriations bills, such as the frequency with which they can make unannounced visits to suspected dirty firearms dealers or even their ability to revoke their licenses. The NRA for a long time has said it is for stronger enforcement of gun laws on the books, while doing everything in its power, including threatening and hamstringing the ATF via legislation so that it cant enforce the laws on our books. We should expect that effort to get only more intense.

Additionally, Trump has said he would like to eliminate Gun Free School Zones nationally. All this would seem to require is legislation and someone with little enough self-regard to propose such a bill. Well, they control both houses of Congress, and for the latter part of the equation may I introduce you to Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas?

All this will occur even as gun safety measures were overwhelmingly successful on ballots in Nevada, California and Washington state on Tuesday. Only in Maine did a gun-safety measure fail, where it was so close it was subject to a recount. In nearby New Hampshire, the top target of the gun-safety movement, Senator Kelly Ayotte, was one of only two incumbent Republican Senators to lose her seat.

Yet none of this will matter as President Trump takes office on January 20 with the NRA at his side. Only the dedication of champions of gun safety among elected officials like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and the grassroots will truly stop what Trump and his friends with guns have in story for this country.
Watching Trump win by 1% in states where third party candidates took 2%... Fuck you and your protest votes, you special fucking snowflakes.  Chris Roberson (@chris_roberson) November 9, 2016

On behalf of my fellow whites folks, I want to apologize. I wish that we were better than this, but we've clearly got a lot of work to do.  Chris Roberson (@chris_roberson) November 9, 2016

We are a hateful, vile, fearful, bigoted people, and I'm fearful for what the future holds. But I won't stop fighting to make things better.  Chris Roberson (@chris_roberson) November 9, 2016

The next four years are going to be very hard, but we can't stop fighting. We can't let the forces of ignorance and hatred win,  Chris Roberson (@chris_roberson) November 9, 2016

To my friends overseas, please don't judge all Americans too harshly tonight. We did the best we could.  Chris Roberson (@chris_roberson) November 9, 2016

Just keeping saying "It's the DNC's fault for not backing my candidate" as the fascists strip you and your loved ones of all your rights.  Chris Roberson (@chris_roberson) November 9, 2016

My overriding instinct is to apologize. To my LGBTQ friends, to women, to Latinos and Asians and African-Americans... I'm sorry. SO sorry.  Chris Roberson (@chris_roberson) November 9, 2016

I truly believe that all Trump wanted was to pull off the greatest long con in American history, which he did. That MAY be enough for him.  Mark Waid (@MarkWaid) November 9, 2016

Disagree. Pence is vile and a waste of carbon, yes, but I don't have to worry about him launching nukes at 3 a.m. out of spite. https://t.co/e9SbgKPea5 November 9, 2016

It's awesome how Evangelicals embraced a serial-adulterer sexually assaulting racist.  GAIL SIMONE (@GailSimone) November 9, 2016

A lot of people I love and millions like them have been targeted by Trump and his ilk for no goddamn reason. I am with THEM.  GAIL SIMONE (@GailSimone) November 9, 2016

Tell that to trans people trying to go to the bathroom in North Carolina. https://t.co/qLeIzy6ZJL November 9, 2016

I have two slim hopes. First, Trump sees enemies everywhere. Any congress not completely slavish will be that for him. Could gridlock.  GAIL SIMONE (@GailSimone) November 9, 2016

Second, I wonder what happens to his support when he can't follow through on many of his core fantasy promises.  GAIL SIMONE (@GailSimone) November 9, 2016

Have the best day yo can, everyone. Stick up for each other, if you can.



Except Cyclops, screw that guy.  GAIL SIMONE (@GailSimone) November 9, 2016

It's like Brexit.

With all the anti-immigrant sentiment.

And some misogyny thrown in, because why not be even MORE horrible?  Dan Slott (@DanSlott) November 9, 2016

Plus side...



Hey, we'll finally hear Trump's "secret" plan for defeating ISIS.



If you need me, I'll be over here, staring into the abyss.  Dan Slott (@DanSlott) November 9, 2016

Well played, Putin. Well played.  Dan Slott (@DanSlott) November 9, 2016

Media, you didn't do your job.

Now it's on you.

Watch him!

Protect women, POC, LGBTQ, & immigrants.

Keep an eye on Russia.

Follow the money.  Dan Slott (@DanSlott) November 9, 2016



For 4 years we get to fight hate.

For 4 years we don't stop.

For 4 years we get to be God damn heroes. Fine. Then you know what?For 4 years we get to fight hate.For 4 years we don't stop.For 4 years we get to be God damn heroes. https://t.co/5JPK8CDv1V November 9, 2016





No.



We all underestimated the media. @CNN The media, right now, is saying Clinton underestimated Trump.No.We all underestimated the media. November 9, 2016

And congressional Republicans have bullshitted themselves into thinking they won the White House. Trump isn't your ally, you idiots.  Cully Hamner (@CullyHamner) November 9, 2016

Revise of @villagevoice cover sketch.Drew original w him committing "political suicide". This is far more accurate. @ahortonart pic.twitter.com/l8fNEhLZH5  Bill Sienkiewicz (@sinKEVitch) November 9, 2016

My original unused @villagevoice idea. @ahortonart @MNightShyamalan twist :the ones with the gun to the head was US all along? pic.twitter.com/5nn8XJwvpD  Bill Sienkiewicz (@sinKEVitch) November 9, 2016

Perfect closing statement from Trump. Not "I started something about important issues" not "all the good, tough people I met" Just: a waste https://t.co/ihnBYqr6WV  Scott Snyder (@Ssnyder1835) November 8, 2016

My politics. Or, more accurately, my responsibility to speak out against perceived injustice. It's not even a contest. https://t.co/rf65rjMfOh  Mark Waid (@MarkWaid) November 10, 2016

I just had someone tell me that Trump did not stoke violence and encourage hate at his rallies. What do I say to that?  Mark Waid (@MarkWaid) November 10, 2016

Look, I really am trying to reach out across the aisle and understand how Christians could vote for Trump. But no one has answers.  Mark Waid (@MarkWaid) November 10, 2016

Lots of white dems are really obsessed with the dems re-focusing on white people, that's tonight's not so surprising lesson  Nick Spencer (@nickspencer) November 11, 2016

But what conservatives need to be aware of is that to a large number of people--their man represents bigotry, hate, sexism and intolerance.  Erik Larsen (@ErikJLarsen) November 11, 2016

After the impressive victory Donald Trump won in this year's election, various leftist writers/artists predictably came out in mourning over nothing. Here's what I could find, starting with Chris Roberson, whose tweets are chock full of reprehensible rhetoric:Wow, nobody's allowed to make their choice? This is disgusting and uncalled for.Just look at that, he's blaming all white humans for supposedly electing a fascist! But seriously, I think this guy just wants Trump to be one so he can have a scapegoat to bring out of the drawer whenever he feels he has to take out his frustrations on something. People who can't live without something to scapegoat for politics are a truly pitiful bunch.If that's how he feels, then he should pack his bags and leave the country. The USA has no place for people who blur all the differences between a democracy and a totalitarian regime like Iran. On which note, did Roberson ever object to the deal the Obama administration made with Iran? I got a sad feeling the answer's no.In that case, is he willing to come to the defense of this black chef who got blacklisted by "progressives" because he catered food to Trump campaigners? Or this black grandmother who faced backlashing because she supported Trump too? Man, Roberson sure is one genuine ignoramus, and this isn't the first time he's ever been so shallow.He thinks all foreigners have a dim view of the US. But if he paid attention to Egypt, they hoped Trump would win , and Marine Le Pen over in France, who's taking a better path than her disgusting father, preferred Trump over Clinton too Just say it's the DNC's fault for upholding such awful policies, please. Besides, they ran a pretty disastrous campaign if you looked behind the scenes and saw how fractured it really was ; a total disaster. Their incitement activities didn't help matters either.Umm, Chris, have you considered that some of them voted for the GOP this year, because they had a better platform to offer? If you've got to apologize, how about for the poor political approach of the Dems that led to the Orlando massacre a few months ago? Now, let's turn to Mark Waid:What about the con-job the Clintons pulled for many years? Nothing to say about that, I guess? And then, in an argument about Mike Pence, he says:What about Tim Kaine? Nothing reprehensible about his MO? Now, here's Gail Simone:It's stupefying how moonbats like this one ignore the accusations against Bill Clinton for sexual abuse against about a dozen women, including Juanita Broaddrick . Not to mention how Hillary defended a child rapist in 1975 , and used approaches that would've been illegal under laws only later approved by Arkansas. Simone's potentially deliberate obfuscations of specific issues became a wakeup call and made me understand why she was really a bad lot, undeserving of writing any of the mainstream books she worked on in the past. I'm not sure if she even talks about them much anymore, if that matters. It's terrible she turned out to be so shockingly callous, because once, I thought she had a modicum of creativity, and now she's thrown most of that away for the sake of PC lunacy.Is she also with the decent Europeans who've been targeted by Islamofascists for no goddamn reason save for being "infidels" and other petty matters?And you tell that to the ladies who're worried about being sexually harassed/assaulted by men pretending to be women or transvestites so they can enter the ladies' rooms in public. Besides, nobody's saying transgenders can't go to the bathrooms, they just want them to use those whose actual gender they belong to. Her obsessiveness on the issue is only making it worse.Simone sees enemies everywhere too. Sort of reminds me of Fredric Wertham's approach.You certainly do. You also don't have the courage to admit you have Orwellian viewpoints.Wow, she doesn't like the X-Men's main field leader? Bashing a fictional character may not be as bad as bashing a real life person for all the wrong reasons, but it's still very laughable and unintelligible all the same. Now for Dan Slott:Look how he holds up race and sexism cards to obscure his own crude writing that says more about his own personality than the politicians he bashes.No, because how could ISIS be brought down if government/military intel made all their ideas public?Of course they didn't do their job; they were just following orders from the same mentality that people like Slott subscribe to. Interesting that he bashes Putin, since until now, most leftists usually embraced communism for a time. Does this mean he'll be writing stories in the future bashing communism like Stan Lee did in the Silver Age? Alas, probably not.Alas, they won't be.Not exactly. You trusted the mainstream media, no matter how many dishonest reports they kept airing, and never thought to try out anything right-wing, let alone those thinking independently, or you might've gotten an idea what was going wrong with the Democrat campaign. Now, let's see what others we can find here:Umm, a lot of women blacks and Latinos supported Trump in this election, so I think it's the other way around. Clinton failed to win over many, if at all. Even some LGBT groups supported Trump , as did a Muslim woman , so what's the use of explaining anything? the same way about Clinton . Now, here's something pretty awful:Groan. Much as I admire the past artwork of this guy, I can't overlook what Bill's doing here, drawing a caricature of Trump looking like he's going to shoot the big green lady donated by France, and himself. Does he realize how vile that is, and stains his own image? It's devastating when a talented artist sinks this low.I think people like this guy are wasting their time on politics altogether. And when somebody asks Mark Waid what's more important to him, he answered:So he's okay with throwing his career and reputation into the dustbin all for the sake of an otherwise unhappy profession? Sigh. In that case, he should just retire and run for office.You say it's disturbing that Clinton and company tried inciting at his rallies. Waid doesn't think that's a damaging form of behavior?I'm trying to figure out how Waid could vote for Clinton after she slighted the dignity of her hubby's victims, and Kathy Shelton's What, white voters don't matter? Point: Dems have spent several years taking paths that alienated even black voters. Why, back in 2008 , Clinton already screwed up.And what liberals need to be aware of is Bill Clinton's creepy past with several women , ditto Hillary's tolerance for the same There's a lot to learn from subjects like this. The worst part is realizing there's every chance we'll be seeing tons of anti-Trump rhetoric littering up mainstream superhero comics for starters over the next 4 years, and even smaller publishers are probably going to lose their minds over politics. And that's only bound to destroy people's faith in a sadly collapsing medium even more.Update: here's also a few conservative writers/artists setting better paths.

Labels: Europe and Asia, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, politics, terrorism, violence
ROMELess than a month ago, Matteo Renzi was floating on air. Fresh off the pages of Vogue, and still glowing from the limelight for being honored at President Barack Obamas last state dinner, the maverick Italian prime minister seemed to have the world at his feet. This is my last visit and state dinner as president, Obama said as he introduced Renzi. We saved the best for last.

And it couldnt have come at a better time as Renzi prepares to lead his country forward in a crucial Dec. 4 reform referendum that is easily the make-or-break moment of his career. Having Obama throw him a party and endorse his cause was extremely useful back home.

The upcoming referendum to modernize Italys political institutions is something the United States strongly supports because we believe that it will help accelerate Italys path toward a more vibrant, dynamic economy, as well as a more responsive political system, Obama said at a joint press conference with a visibly delighted Renzi gushing enthusiasm. And so I am rooting for success, but I think [Renzi] should hang around for awhile no matter what.

Fast-forward to Nov. 8. All that fairy dust Obama sprinkled now surely feels a little bit like poison ivy. Renzi, like pretty much the rest of the world, was expecting Hillary Clinton to win the presidential race. But he was one of the few world leaders to say it out loud. Im rooting for Hillary, he first said last February, adding that, despite his endorsement, he would work with whoever is inaugurated in January 2017.

Now he may not get that chance.

Since Trumps win, Italys anti-establishment Five-Star movement, led by former showman Beppe Grillo, has been bolstered in its opposition to the upcoming referendum vote. And the energy is clearly tied to the Trump victory, echoing sentiments that have been gaining speed around Europe all week.

This is a general fuck off, Grillo wrote on his popular blog after Trump gave his acceptance speech. It is those who dare, the obstinate, the barbarians who will take the world forward, Grillo wrote. We are the barbarians! The real idiots, populists and demagogues are the journalists and the establishment intellectuals.

Indeed, Trumps hate contagion is spreading across Europe at an extremely unsettling pace. And those who endorsed Trump to ridicule are now having an I told you so moment.

Hungarys Prime Minister Viktor Orban endorsed Trump for his anti-immigrant stance. Had Clinton prevailed, human-rights activists there might have gained a little wiggle room. But she didnt, and Orban feels vindicated for building a border fence to keep out mostly Syrian refugees. We are two days after the big bang and still alive, he said Thursday. What a wonderful world. This also shows that democracy is creative and innovative.

In France, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front party, who also endorsed Trump basked in the afterglow of his victory and enjoyed a bump in her own polls ahead of presidential elections next spring in which she was once considered a long shot because of her xenophobic views. Not any more. Its almost as if Trumps win makes anything unthinkable now possibleeven someone like Le Pen leading France.

Nothing is immutable. What has happened this night is not the end of the world, its the end of a world, she said in Paris after the historic Trump victory. The political and media elites that were heavily chastised this morning can no longer ignore it.

In the Netherlands, far-right Geert Wilders, who is campaigning to ban the Quran to prevail as prime minister in Dutch elections next March, felt reason to gloat about Trumps victory. He reclaimed democracy for the American people, he told The Washington Post. It can indeed be an enormous incentive in Europe and the Netherlands to see that if people start moving in a certain direction, it can be done.

Back in Italy, far-right Northern League party leader Matteo Salvini is also enjoying a bump in popularity after Trumps victory. Salvini, who even traveled to a Trump rally in Philadelphia last fall meet his idol, mocked Renzi for putting his eggs in Clintons basket. His trip to see Obama and his good wishes toward Clinton have ended up today as a farce, he said.

Silvio Berlusconi, whose comparisons to Trump have spawned the unsavory term Trumpusconi tweeted, In America they voted No after Trumps win, making a connection to Italys referendum, which he opposes. One of his party faithful, Renato Brunetta, has even called for Renzi to resign now after unsuccessfully supporting Clinton. From this day forward Matteo Renzi is politically finished, he is a dead man walking, Brunetta said in a statement. No other European country sided with one of the two contenders like Italy did. Now Renzi must reap the consequences and take responsibility for his bad choices.

Renzi originally said he would resign if his referendum fails, and recent polls show that there are more Italians than not still undecided just weeks ahead of the crucial vote, which The Economist and others say would make Italy governable for the first time in its modern history.

Renzi has since stepped back and said he would stay, but its not clear at all if his Democratic party would even be able to keep him, given the bad blood after the Clinton loss. The referendum is not as big as Brexit, but, if it fails and Renzis government falls with it, a very real scenario is that Grillos gang could sweep into power. If they do, they vow to hold an Italexit vote to let Italians decide whether they want to stay part of the European Union.

Lupo Rattazzi is a Harvard Kennedy School-educated Italian entrepreneur who is the president of leisure airline company Neos. He is also a member of Italys most prestigious Fiat-founding Agnelli family. He is actively campaigning for the referendum to pass, but worries the Trump victory signals trouble ahead. It will be damaging because, as you can see as a result, the forces of revulsion are already raising their ugly head, he told The Daily Beast. Having said this, Grillo gloating about Trump tells you something about the level of prevailing confusion and bad faith.

Indeed, its hard to see the logic in Grillos support for someone like Trump, who he has nicknamed Corncob and who he never fully endorsed going into the elections. Apparently its always easy to be on the side thats winning. Corncob has told everyone to piss off: Masons, banking conglomerates, the Chinese, says Grillo. Maybe he will become a moderate. I can already see him saying: Yes, I said so, but we were on the campaign trail Even so, the world has already changed.

Indeed.
For DREAMers, Trumps presidency could be a nightmare.

Almost a million undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children trusted the federal government with their personal informationincluding their home addressesso they could gain temporary protection from deportation.

But under the Donald Trump administration, that could make them targets; in a brutal twist of irony, their faith in American institutions could actually increase their risk of being forcibly removed from the country.

DREAMers are the undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors, havent committed any crimes, and could get temporary work permits and protection from deportation through Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (known as DACA). Under the Obama presidency, DACA was a godsend; it meant DREAMers who built their entire lives in the U.S. could stay without fear. It made it easier for them to get jobs and plan their futures.

They trusted their government. And now, that government is about to change.

On the campaign trail, Trump made two big commitments regarding deportations: First, he consistently said that his top deportation priority would be undocumented immigrants who have committed crimesa priority shared by his predecessor, President Obama. And second, Trump said over and over and over that undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. legally but then stayed longer than their visas allowed would also be deported.

In an address on Aug. 31, 2015, where he first outlined his vision for immigration policy, he emphasized that point.

Removing visa overstays will be a top priority of my administration, he said. If people around the world believe they can just come on a temporary visa and never leavethe Obama-Clinton policythen we have a completely open border. We must send the message that visa-expiration dates will be strongly enforced.

It isnt clear if Trump would direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement to actively track down the 4 million or so undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. legally and then overstayed.

And that has DREAMers and their attorneys deeply worried. Thats because in order to get protected from deportation through DACA, DREAMers had to apply with the Department of Homeland Security. To apply, they had to give the DHS their current home address as well as proof that they had lived in the U.S. (illegally) for at least five years.

For many DACA applicants, that meant giving DHS a document showing their initial, now-expired visas, called an I-94.

On that document, it specifically states when you were supposed to have departed, explained Matthew Kolken, an immigration attorney. That would be proof that you were a visa overstay.

Kolken told The Daily Beast that he advised most of his clients against applying for DACA because he worried an administration hostile to undocumented immigrants could use the information they turned over against them.

It puts a target on your back, he said. There is absolutely no way to predict what Donald Trump or anyone else would do.

In previous years, many immigration attorneys encouraged their clients to take the risk and apply for DACA protection.

But that protection wasnt permanent, and Trump has promised to eliminate it on his first day in the Oval Office.

Its unclear what, if anything, DHS will do with the personal information it has on the 728,000 people enrolled in DACA. Kolken said DACA recipients shouldnt panic, especially since Trump hasnt specifically said he would target DACA participants for deportation.

But who knows what hes going to do? he added.

Bryan Johnson, an immigration attorney who primarily works with children, said the top immigration advisers on Trumps transition teamKansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessionsconcern him. Kobach and Sessions are two of the GOPs most dogged immigration hawks, pushing tirelessly for tighter restrictions on legal immigration and much stricter enforcement of current laws.

Theres a good chance that if Trump follows them and gives them a lot of autonomy, the whole focus on criminals is going to be a facade, Johnson said. Theyre really going after all immigrants.

For the time being, Johnson said he cant offer much comfort to DACA participants.

Theres not much to tell them except for, maybe, move your address, he said. On the safe side, I would tell them to relocate, just until we know whats going on.

Reached for comment on this story, a DHS official said he didnt want to speculate on what President-elect Trump will do with the information he has about DACA recipients.

The uncertainty about the future is all too real for Juan Escalante, whose parents brought him to the U.S. from Venezuela when he was 11. His family came here legally, but their immigration attorney gave them bad advice: to let their visas expire while they were applying for green cards. As a result, Escalante and his family lost their legal status. Escalante hasnt been able to get a green card since then. He is enrolled in the DACA program, and worries that if Trump eliminates it, he could lose his job or even face deportation.

My name could potentially show up on a list, he said. And thats a threat that Im operating with.
Donald Trump killed Tim Fausts dream and made his friends a little bit more scared this week, so he came up with an idea to fight backor at least teach some of his friends how.

Faust is the creator and general manager of Party World Rasslin, an Austin-based pro-wrestling promoter. One of the women in PWR mentioned on Facebook that she felt unsafe and wanted to take a self-defense course.

On Thursday morning, he woke up with an idea: Host a free self-defense course for women at the brewery/arena where they hold the wrestling shows. He hopped on Twitter to ask if anybody could provide some free help teaching the class.

I reckon thats a resource we could provide for our staff and other women in our community, Faust told The Daily Beast.

Immediately he was inundated. Actually, really immediately. People are desperate to help.

It became real about 90 minutes later, he said.

Countless Americans are seeking ways to help out groups whose rights President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, have pledged to strip during their campaignfrom women to immigrants to people in the LGBT community. But Faust felt compelled to act tangibly right away, even if all he had to offer was a warehouse usually used for powerbombs.

On Sunday, the female-owned Lions Krav Maga in Austin will run a two-hour workshop for anyone who wants to learn self-defense. Anybody who comes by can drop money in a donation bucket to the Lilith Fund, if they can swing it. If it goes well, Faust says, theyll do it again. (You can find out more information here.)

The internet is cool and PWR has been lucky to build up a multiverse of sharp, kind people who helped me find a few options, said Faust. Plus, we like to talk about how were a safe space. Listening to and supporting our friends who will suffer under a Trump presidency is just part of living with integrity.

While Faust loves his life as the weirdest pro-wrestling promoter in Austin, he had been planning to go into a more traditional public service career next. Hed been sending out applications for grad school.

I wanted to get a masters of public health or masters of public administration degree so I could go work for a state Medicaid inspector or medical-cost panel or maybe the CCIIO [Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight]the only folks who can drive down medical costs until a centralized federal public option exists, he said.

Looks like that dream might have been thrown into the trash binso Ive gotta find projects to keep me busy, Faust said. Solidarity is the only way through.

Thats where the squared circle came into play. PWR, after all, is not a traditional pro-wrestling organization like the WWE, where the president-elect isno jokea Hall of Famer for a stint he had at Wrestlemania. The group, instead, draws on Fausts roots as a theater major.

The last show was Skeleton Cruise themed, where we traveled 69,000 leagues under the sea to free a ghost ship from the curse of Poseiborg, robot lord of the oceanwhile legendary Nova Scotian longshoreman Dock Master fought Partyweight Champion and HELLSPORT endorsee Dan The Man Ziglar for the title.

As you can tell, Faust is doing his civic duty to keep Austinand now Americaweird. And 1,800 people show up every time.

Its also a free show and a safe space, he said. We want to push peoples buttons and make them react, but we want to do so within explicit boundaries that do not exploit oppressed groups or survivors of real-world violence.

In other words, he said: Slam up, not down.

Oh, and if you recognize Fausts name, its because he sold about $70,000 worth of T-shirts that claimed Ted Cruz Is the Zodiac Killer earlier this election cycle. (Trump later one-upped him, earnestly alluding to a National Enquirer allegation that Cruzs father was part of a plot to kill JFK, and now hes going to be the president.)

Faust gave all of that money to West Fund, a nonprofit that helps pregnant women in El Paso get access to safe abortion facilities.

On Thursday, he got creative with his support for affected communities in a very real way once again. And, with a wave of rights about to be potentially stripped from women in a country where Trump is about to be president, hes imploring everyone else to do the same.

Solidarity begins at home. I care about my friends, I care about my staff, and I want to have their backand the backs of anyone who needs itbecause thats the only way we get through the next four years, he said.

I am lucky to have an organization I find creatively fulfilling, and I must pay forward that joy. I must put my shoulder to the wheel.
During the campaign, Donald Trumps daughter Ivanka played an almost First Lady-like role to her father. Clad in one of her own labels designs, she occupied a key speaking slot at the Republican convention, her hair so smooth and free of flyaways it looked like it had been brushed by angels. She joined him post-debate, congratulating him like a loving stage mom. Shes stylish, poised, and well-spoken. But thanks to her willingness to lend her image to her fathers campaign, shell never have the respect of the demographic of American women her brand needs most again.

Ivanka has relied on her image to build a career out of appearing professionally aspirant. The perfect trajectory for Ivankas brand would be for her to now pivot from New York society girl to well-manicured ideal for American women, a Jackie O-type, gliding into black tie state dinners in a designer gown that gets the internet buzzing with adoring hashtags and women rushing to buy the knock-off version. The demographic from which Ivanka craves acceptancewomen who work, according to her clothing brands taglinejust so happen to be the same sort of women who are unlikely to forgive her.

While Donald Trump won white women overall, he lost white women with a college degree by 6 points, and he lost women overall by 12 points, thanks to landslide preference for Clinton among women of color. Women with college degrees, the women with the most spending power, are not feeling great about Trumpland right now.

There are certainly media outlets that are willing to fling themselves at her in an attempt to garner favor from the president-elect and his family. People magazine, which just last month ran a piece from one of its reporters who was allegedly assaulted by Donald Trump, this week is whistling a different tune, running a slideshow of 22 adorable photos of Ivanka Trump and her family. In the days since Trumps election, the magazine has unveiled a glossy cover starring President-elect Trump, and publications website has run several stories presenting Ivanka as a normal and good role model, instead of a mouthpiece for a campaign that got a man elected president whom several people on that very magazines staff are pretty sure sexually assaulted a colleague.

But American women are not stupid, and the sort of woman who care about who is negatively impacted by Trumps rhetoric and policies will not soon forget Ivankas role in installing him.

Women closely associated with bigotry, no matter how fashionable, do not tend to leave positive legacies among the upscale consumer. You wont see Joseph McCarthys wifes face on a brand of high-end candles, or Asma al-Assads placid face on a fancy line of bedding, or Imelda Marcos brand footwear for the woman on the go. Women who have benefitted from feminism the mostwhite women, college-educated women, urban professional women tend to have enjoyed consonant career success, and thus the most money. Why would they throw it at a person who has delivered stump speeches for a man whose famous quotes include Grab them by the pussy? Ivanka Trump was right to shy away from a pro-Trump ad she shot in the waning weeks of the campaign. The role that will most elevate her profiledaughter of a president whose rhetoric en route to the Oval Office was pure fascismwill also irreparably doom her brand.

Prior to Donald Trumps run for president, it was easier to feel neutral-to-positive about Ivanka. Despite her fathers already-documented history of boorishness, she seemed to have turned out okay. She was a successful businesswoman, a modern gal who seemed more focused on pivoting off her family name to make a name for herself than echoing her fathers dusty old-school ideas.

The 2016 campaign has exposed Ivanka Trumps hypocrisy, and laid bare that being a successful beige lifestyle brand and a surrogate for the most patently offensive presidential candidate in recent history are mutually exclusive. By choosing to campaign on behalf of her father, she made a choice that she cannot rescind. Ivanka cannot sing the praises of maternity leave out one side of her mouth and make it difficult for her own employees to take maternity leave out the other (the same side of her mouth she uses to champion a man who has referred to pregnancy as an inconvenience to employers). She cannot post to her personal website cool ways women can take care of themselves when the man she is actively helping to elect has destroyed the lives of more than one woman. She cant intone vague platitudes about unity and love while stumping for a man who wants to force Muslims to register and is endorsed by the KKK. She cant do all of these things and then run back to her career as a living lifestyle brand.

As the 2016 campaign wore on, a growing movement urged women to boycott Ivanka Trump brand clothing. Sales figures from the next quarter will likely be telling. For what its worth, Nordstrom currently features an array of her wares for sale, but at the moment this is being written, one-third of the items available for purchase online were being offered at discount.

Oh, well, Ivanka. Theres always reality TV.
Chatime Buy 1 FREE 1 Promotion

Chatime Malaysia is offering Buy 1 FREE 1 Promotion, celebrating new opening at Tesco Cheras. This promotion is only valid from today until 15 November 2016, from 3pm onwards daily. Terms and conditions apply. While stock last.



**Terms and conditions apply**

~Complete Online Survey and Get Paid in CASH~

Chatime

To churn out their delicious signature beverages, Chatime uses sophisticated tea and coffee machines that will produce only the highest quality fresh drinks. As for variety, Chatime can be considered second to none as their range of beverages is one of the most delightful ones in the market

Other Ongoing FREE Samples Giveaway
Under the Kennedy administration, an average of $3.9 billion in economic and military aid was sent annually to India. This unique relationship grew out of the Sino-Indian War, a 1962 border dispute between India and China. The U.S. support for India against a potential Chinese invasion fell in line with Kennedy's goals to contain communism.
In 2008 and 2012, were there any such tampering, the result would have been no more than a reduction in Barack Obama's margin of victory.

The egomaniac and the thugs who follow him

Regardless, Donald Trump is president-elect. I never imagined writing or uttering such words. His first target may well be the Republican Party establishment, against whom he is likely to wreak revenge for not supporting him. That, however, would provide no more than a brief respite.

For we know who his real targets are - he made it abundantly clear throughout his campaign. And remember the thugs who hang out with him - the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie.

A criminalization of dissent is coming our way, and if I had to guess Black Lives Matter is a likely candidate to be the first target. There will be many more, ranging across the spectrum of Left activism, from Dreamers to abortion-rights activists to environmentalists to organizers fighting racism and police brutality.

Make no mistake: Those on the Left who blithely declared Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump the same, and maybe the former even a little worse, are likely to find otherwise.

Secretary Clinton is a war-mongering Wall Street-pandering technocrat who, rightly or wrongly, accrues some of the fallout from her husband's presidency, when he proved to be the most effective Republican president we ever had, implementing policies Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush could have only dreamed of doing. Of course she is no choice. But had she won as expected, the room of grassroots activity would have been larger than it will be under a Trump White House.

Given the enormous number of areas where vigorous defensive actions will be necessary, and the heavy police-state repression that is sure to rain down on dissenters, there will be little if any opportunity to go on any offensives.

Consider this statement by Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, who said of the election: "I am not voting for candidates. I am voting for terrain." National Women's Liberation said:

"Under Clinton the terrain will be difficult for us, as well as the targets of her hawkish foreign policy. To get the things women need, we need a lot more than a woman president, we need a strong movement making bold demands, much bolder than anything in Hillary's platform. But making bold demands under a Hillary Clinton administration will be a lot more likely to build into a powerful, effective force than it will if Donald Trump is elected."

Let's not sugar-coat this: The next four years are going to be very dark. Although I wouldn't call the Trump campaign fascist, I do believe we can see it as constituting the seeds for a potential fascist movement. That is more than scary enough - and that retrograde movement will now have the power of the state behind it.

The breakdown of an economic consensus

As awful as Secretary Clinton is, a Trump White House will be something beyond the ordinary neoliberal prescriptions. The first election I ever voted in was Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory, one also unexpected. That had been a dead heat going into the final weekend, in days when polling was nowhere near as obsessive as today.

I still remember the chill of horror that went down my back as I emerged from an event to look up at a television announcer proclaiming a "tidal wave of red" spreading across the map. I had not thought United Statesians would really vote for him, but they did, lulled to sleep by his ability to tell people what they wanted to hear, no matter how at variance with reality.

Looking back across the decades, as immediately disastrous as the Reagan years were, we could not grasp the enormity of what had happened: His election, along with Margaret Thatcher in Britain the year before, inaugurated a whole new era, one that would later be coined 'neoliberalism' as the post-World War II Keynesian consensus definitively was brought to an end and class war sharply intensified.

The world's capitalists brought about this change in response to their no longer reaping the profits they were accustomed to in the 1950s and 1960s. Reagan and Thatcher were the human material embodying a new era and dragging the political sphere into a tighter domination by industrial and financial elites: an era when the traditional balance between industrialists and financiers was upended and financial capital gained the upper hand among elites.

Neoliberalism is now breaking down. Rosa Luxemburg's formula looms large for us today: socialism or barbarism. Or call it a better, more democratic world or barbarism if you prefer. As neoliberalism begins to break down, and working people around the world increasingly chafe at their conditions, they are seeking to punish elites with whatever limited means they have.

This justifiable anger could be channelled into organized activity, in which social movements cohere and join together to effect the structural changes that are necessary and eventually push toward a wholly different system.

Barbarism is no longer theoretical

In the absence of such movements or a coherent Left, the Right fills the vacuum, lashing out at scapegoats and seeking saviors in demagogues, even a demagogue whose real estate career is based on screwing working people like those who voted for him and not paying taxes, again unlike those who vote for him but have so much less.

The Right has the money, control of the corporate mass media, institutional support and vast means of decisively influencing opinion-making. Mr. Trump received more than a year of favorable publicity by the corporate media, but nonetheless his ability to bamboozle so many is a monument to the lack of education and anti-intellectualism that is so prevalent in the United States.

Given his own ignorance and lack of any program beyond enriching himself, coupled with his open racism, appalling misogyny, virulent nationalism, shallowness, lack of maturity, thin skin, inability to empathize with other people, encouragement of violence against opponents, eagerness to give carte blanche to the police, encouragement of nuclear-weapons proliferation and outright denial of global warming, it is no stretch to declare Donald Trump the biggest danger we've ever faced in the White House.

Barbarism has become less theoretical. The time to begin organizing is now, before he takes office and command of the world's most deadly security apparatus. We either demonstrate strong resolve against authoritarian rule, sure to be led by some of the most vicious right-wing operatives around, or a Trump White House is going to unleash repression on a scale not seen in decades.

There is no more room for indulging ultra-left phrase-mongering: We have a clear and present danger. Stand up for whoever is first in line, for eventually they may be coming for you.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His book 'It's Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment', a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.
But solicitors Hogan Lovells - who had just taken over the case from Rosenblatts for reasons that remain mysterious - suddenly and curiously dismissed all my reports and evidence just two weeks before this hearing. They relied instead on conventional nuclear scientist Professor Paddy Regan and dishonest witnesses from the MoD side. As a result, all the appeals were lost.

Back to the High Court for the definitive ruling

Don was one of these cases. Don appealed this decision on the basis that I had been excluded. Joining him was Anna Smith, widow of late Barry Smith, who was stationed at Christmas Island in 1958/59 after the bomb tests. Both died from pancreatic cancer, Don during the course of the appeal.

The appeal process was permitted by Judge Stubbs, and in 2013/14 the upper Appeal Court judge Sir William Charles directed that the whole case be heard again. Ironically, in the same period, Judge Stubbs also died from the rare pancreatic cancer (which had been the cause of death of 4 of the veteran appellants).

Following new representations from the MoD about my expertise and status, Sir William directed that I could not appear as an expert in the new hearing because although an expert, he was persuaded I was biased.

That was because I wrote articles (like this one), and appeared on TV and in videos arguing about the health effects of radiation. I had even chained myself to nuclear power station gates, twice, at Trawsfynydd and at Dungeness, and indulged in similar attempts to draw attention to the facts.

So instead I took the job of Representative in the new hearings, essentially taking on the role normally played by barristers. This was an extremely stressful and challenging experience but also great fun.

Though not a lawyer I had seen the inside of quite a few courts as an expert, in UK and America, even in Korea and so it was not too difficult to become Perry Mason. I bought three white shirts from Marks and Spencer and a nice black suit from Stockmann in Riga. I wore a sober London University tie and no beret: unrecognisable.

On trial: the whole ICRP radiation risk model

Many have followed this story. But this is a very important case for the UK, indeed for the world. For the first time, the truth about the real health effects of internal exposures to radioactive contamination has been presented at the highest level, before a High Court judge in a major nuclear-dependent country.

It was not just a trial of the military and the test veterans. It was a trial of the whole global system of legislation in the area of radiation risk. A trial of the scientific basis of all radiation laws, the Risk Model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) which defines the public health safety cases for projects like nuclear energy at Hinkley Point, the disposal of radioactive waste, the use and development of nuclear weapons and Depleted Uranium.

If - as the courtroom evidence shows - the ICRP model is unsafe, all bets are off: policy changes become inevitable in these areas as release criteria will have to change. If the case is won, the biggest public health scandal in human history will be out in the open and the Uranium economy will end.

To conduct this case, we had to ask for financial support through mailouts to our supporters: none of the charitable foundations like Rowntree, Polden Puckham, Goldsmith et al. would help following ill-informed and scurrilous attacks on me by George Monbiot in the Guardian in 2011.

But we obtained enough funds to run the case, and to fly our expert witnesses in and put them up in London. So those who helped us, at least, should know what happened.

A ten-fold excess of major congenital diseases among test veterans' children

Most of the early case involved tediously writing Statements of Case and obtaining expert reports: since I was not allowed to be an expert, I had to get these from colleagues and friends in the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) that I helped set up in Brussels in 1998.

There were also various Directions and case management hearings in London that I had to fly back from Riga (where I mostly live) to attend. The most important ones were those at the beginning where I managed to persuade the judge to do a number of things which were critical for the success of the new hearing.

The most important was that we could bring in new evidence and new experts - opposed both by the MoD and (interestingly) by Hogan Lovells, who were still representing the majority of the appellants.

Second, we asked the judge to order the MoD to disclose all the information it had about contamination at the Test sites. He did: but in the event, the MoD swore they had nothing. They said that either no measurements had been made, or no measurements still existed, or finally when we found data from other sources, that these were still 'top secret', and if we referred to them, we would be sent to jail under the Official Secrets Act.

Finally Blake made a Direction that the University of Dundee release the questionnaires from the 1999 British Nuclear Test Veteran Association survey to me for analysis, so that we could see what the genetic effects in the children were. We found that there was a ten-fold excess of major congenital diseases, and this became indirect evidence that the veterans had been genetically harmed by the radioactivity at the test sites.

Distinguished scientists set out the key evidence

I contacted colleagues to create expert reports making broadly the same case I would have presented in the 2013 hearing. These were Prof. Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, University of Bremen, Prof Shoji Sawada, University of Nagoya, Prof. Vyvan Howard, University of Ulster, Prof Malcolm Hooper, University of Sunderland and Lt. Commander Dr John Ash (Scott Polar Institute, Cambridge). Richard Bramhall gave evidence about the cover-ups in the CERRIE committee.

Evidence from these experts made the case for the veterans which was broadly the same as it had been in the previous cases, augmented by some new findings. It included:

Unequivocal evidence that the current ICRP risk model is wildly inaccurate for internal exposures and is based on the bogus dishonest epidemiology of the Hiroshima studies. Forensic evidence was presented in court that showed the scientists that carried out that study threw out the original control group who were not in the city when it began to appear in 1973 that there were high levels of cancer in the exposed groups relative to that unexposed original control. That individuals located too far from the Hiroshima bomb to receive any prompt radiation dose whatever still showed the immediate radiation effects like loss of hair due to exposure to the Uranium-containing black rain that followed the detonation.

That there was similar fallout and rainout of Uranium particles from the atomisation of the eight tons of Uranium over Christmas island, and various lesser quantities in Maralinga. This was not measurable with Geiger counters or film badges because Uranium is an alpha emitter.

evidence of other unmeasured exposures from Carbon-14 and Tritium, (radioactive water).

The ten-fold excess congenital malformation rates in the test veteran children, eight-fold in the grandchildren as shown by three independent peer reviewed studies. This affected Don Battersby.

The three-fold excess risk of chromosome aberrations and translocations in the New Zealand test veteran studies, which indicated a very high level of exposure. The evidence for chromosome damage in Uranium miners, Gulf war veterans (DU), French and UK Uranium workers pointed to this element as the cause.

The enormous improbability that four in seven appellants with cancer died from pancreatic cancer which has an incidence of 2% of all cancers in the population (the dice throwing or binomial probability is about 1 in 200,000). They thus shared a common cause for their pancreatic cancer and their only common experience was the nuclear test sites.

For Christmas Island, new evidence was presented that showed that although the lower winds blew offshore to the west when the bombs were exploded at altitude, the upper winds were in the opposite direction and blew the residual Uranium and fission products back over the island.

So what happened at the hearing?

First of all, Group Captain Andrew Ades with whom I was sharing the case had a heart attack a few days before it began and was taken to hospital. I asked my daughter Cecilia to take his place, which she did, brilliantly.

I also was helped by Hugo Charlton the criminal barrister and ex-Chair of the Green Party, solicitor Robbie Manson (at a distance) and Dai Williams who has heroically helped throughout the case acting as clerk and our man in London. Two young women helped out in the hearing, passing the evidence when needed: Hatty Bland, and Lucia Pilekova.

The case began with an ambush: the judge ruled out any evidence in the scientific peer-reviewed literature which had my name as author or co-author. This lost a key new genetic paper which I published with Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, even though this had been put in as evidence several months earlier and no-one had complained. But suddenly:

MR JUSTICE BLAKE: "So that means [Dr Busby's] views, no doubt honestly, passionately held, are not going to enter the difficult arena of this case, either orally by giving witness evidence viva voce, or in writing or otherwise."

Hugo Charlton tried to argue this point:

" ... to go on and say everything that Dr Busby has ever written on the subject, even though it wasn't with a view to proceedings, it was with a view to participating in the scientific debate, to say that all that has to go I respectfully say, my Lord, is positively Orwellian ... and in effect we are going into court with our hands tied behind our back.

MR JUSTICE BLAKE: "Well, I think you are."

However, I persuaded the judge that even if the key genetic paper was ruled out, we could rely on the other papers it was based on: we tore out at lunch, made seven copies of ten papers cited by us in the excluded article, and submitted these.

The collapsing MOD witnesses

One high spot was when I cross-examined the MoD witnesses. None of them had addressed any of our arguments; they all woodenly laid out the conventional ICRP position that the doses were too low.

The most interesting was their witness Professor Geraldine Thomas. She spouted total nonsense, alluding to "non-radioactive Uranium" (there is no such thing) and arguing that the numbers of Fukushima thyroid cancers were what should be expected under the 'standard model'.

Apparently Uranium did not bind to DNA, she said, but Uranium Acetate did - so exhibiting monstrous ignorance of basic chemistry. In the end I felt rather sorry for her; she was embarrassingly ignorant.

The MoD had nowhere to hide. The case we presented was unopposable, and was in fact unopposed. This, despite the judge having previously specifically directed that the MoD rebut all our arguments. Instead the Secretary of State's barrister Adam Heppinstall fell back on the only survival possibility left to him: to dismiss all of our evidence.

And this he tried, saying that because all our experts were colleagues of mine, or members of the ECRR, or had written papers with me, or were my friends, they were to be tarred with the same exclusion brush: "activists". Like Busby, they were biased and should be barred from giving evidence. In other words all the evidence the court had heard over a three week period should be excluded.

But Judge Blake refused.

Interesting and unusual developments

How he deals with this in the decision, we wait to see. But there has been one final and interesting development, that opens the door for another appeal.

Some weeks after the end, the judge asked the MoD dosimetry expert Mr Rick Hallard, to expand on the doses he had said that the crew of the Shackleton survey aircraft had received to the west of the big Christmas Island Grapple Y bomb detonation, the radioactive plume of which was asserted by MoD to have blown safely out to sea.

Hallard actually wrote that most of the readings from the survey aircraft could be discounted because the plane was already contaminated when it took off. What?? Dai Williams tracked down the log of the specific Shackleton. Hallard's new evidence meant that the contamination had already fallen on the aircraft at Christmas Island before its take-off.

I wrote twice to the judge and requested that we might make a comment on this new evidence: a Perry Mason point and spectacular courtroom-stopping case-breaker. The judge did not reply. It is however a point of law (and obvious) that the prosecution should be able to cross examine a defence witness about new evidence. So this is an appeal point, although we may not have to go there. Hopefully we shall soon see.

A lot is at stake here. Win this case, and the scientific fact that the ICRP model understates radiation risk for internal exposures by factor of about 1,000 becomes legal truth. As a result all the nuclear projects that rely on ICRP's understatement of radiation risk - including the MoD projects, the Uranium economy, nuclear weapons - go down.

Under current European and UK law, new and important scientific evidence which emerges must lead to a re-justification of all practices involving exposures to radiation. This basis is currently and explicitly the ICRP model.

I can see why the judge, Sir Nicholas Blake, is taking such a long time. He is in a very difficult position - one that will make him famous whichever way he jumps.

Chris Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia.

See also: chrisbusbyexposed.org, greenaudit.org and llrc.org.
Now that harvest is wrapping up, most farmers are glad that job is finished and happy with their yields. This year good management and Mother Nature converged to give most farmers above average yields. But occasionally this fall, I ran into farmers who were disappointed in their yields, particularly soybean yields. They sing what I call the Soybean Blues!

The song usually goes something like this,

What happened to my soybeans?

They looked so good all year.

But when we got to harvest,

The bushels did not appear!

The saddest case of the Soybean Blues I ever heard was sung by a local farmer several years ago. This is what he told me, put to verse:

My neighbor and I are good farmers.

We plant, spray and harvest together.

Yet his bean yields beat mine,

Almost every time.

And hes NOT an eight-bushel-better farmer!

A variety of conditions could cause either of these songs to be sung, but the most common cause would be the soybean cyst nematode (SCN)  the number one yield robber for soybean growers in Nebraska and across the U.S. Last year SCN caused over $1 billion in losses for soybean growers across the country. The loss for Nebraska soybean farmers is estimated at $45 million.

When we tested the field for the farmer singing the Soybean Blues, we found SCN in his fields. He switched to SCN-resistant varieties in his rotation and was so happy with the results he became my best advocate, encouraging his neighbors to test their fields for SCN.

Now, while those field areas that didnt yield as well as expected are still fresh in your mind  or stick out like a sore thumb on your yield maps  is the time to do something about it. Before the ground freezes, you can collect soil samples from these underperforming acres much as you would collect a surface soil sample for fertilizer recommendations.

If your crop consultant, field scout, or co-op is already collecting soil samples, ask them to take a few more soil cores and then split the sample, half for fertilizer recommendations and half for SCN analysis. You might also want them to collect these samples on corn ground that will be going to soybeans next year. If SCN is detected, you can start managing it by using resistant varieties.

SCN is a microscopic roundworm that attacks the soybean root, competing with the plant for moisture and nutrients, and causes injury sites on the roots which can increase the incidence of soil-borne diseases such as Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS) or Brown Stem Rot (BSR). The only stage of its life when SCN is visible without a microscope is when the females body cavity fills with eggs and they erupt through the root walls, forming the small cysts. You will have to look close because even at this stage of their life cycle, the cysts are smaller than the head of a pin.

Although the cysts can be observed on the roots during the growing season, a soil sample is the only way to determine the level of infestation in your fields. There are two good things about sampling for SCN. First, it can be done any time of the year, and second, the Nebraska Soybean Board will cover the cost of SCN analysis for your samples submitted to the University of Nebraska Plant and Pest Diagnostic Lab.

Since 2005, more than 7,600 soil samples have been processed through this program for SCN and over 30 percent of them came back positive. In many cases, farmers submitting the samples had no idea SCN was present in their fields.

Once SCN is identified in a field, management steps should include rotating soybeans with other crops, which most farmers were already doing, and using SCN-resistant varieties when soybeans are planted.

Research has shown an average six bushel-per-acre yield increase when planting resistant varieties in SCN-infested fields. Unlike other traits, there is no tech fee for SCN-resistance. SCN resistance results from natural breeding programs and is not a GMO.

When you add up the benefits  free SCN analysis, an average six-bushel yield increase by planting resistance in infested fields, and no increased seed cost  why wouldnt you take time to sample for SCN this fall and adjust your soybean management accordingly for 2017?
As representatives of many of the world's main religions join financial leaders in calling for a switch of investment from polluting energy to renewables, a prominent Islamic organisation says it will do just that, in a landmark divestment commitment from a Muslim institution.

The undertaking by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) was announced at a side event at COP-22, the conference of the UN Convention on Climate Change, in the Moroccan city of Marrakech.

The event brought together global faith leaders with financial institutions and foundations to urge sovereign wealth and pension funds with a collective worth put at more than $19 trillion (15 trillion) to make a rapid end of their investments in fossil fuels and to re-invest them in renewable energy, in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement.

"According to Islam's most basic and fundamental teachings, human beings have been uniquely charged with the great responsibility of being guardians of the Earth", Dr. Azhar Azeez, ISNA's president, told the meeting.

"It goes against the mission of ISNA to invest in fossil fuel companies whose operations and products cause such grave harm to humanity and to creation."

Islamic pioneers

The American Muslims' undertaking is described by the event organisers as "the world's first divestment announcement from a Muslim institution." Other groups have already urged similar action without necessarily making a specific commitment: the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, for instance, is published by a UK-based group, IFEES-EcoIslam.

What impact ISNA's action may have (it is an umbrella organisation, reported in 2008 to include 4,000 member groups) is unclear. Within North America it could conceivably help to discourage investment in fracking.

Whether it will spur debate in the oil-rich Gulf and Middle East states, or in the big fossil fuel producers like Russia and the countries of Central Asia, with their large Muslim populations, is also uncertain.

ISNA made its announcement within hours of the end of the US presidential campaign, which dismayed many who saw the winner, Republican candidate Donald Trump, as a thuggish bully-boy. Despite his controversial campaign Trump's entry to the White House was eased for him - perhaps achieved - by the votes of millions of evangelical Christians.

They - and Trump himself, denouncer of global warming as "a total and very expensive hoax" created by the Chinese - seem unlikely to listen to ISNA.

'The Earth is a gift, and it is our responsibility to protect it'

The faith leaders' meeting, organised by GreenFaith and Divest Invest, which works to speed up the transition to a future of clean energy, released a statement whose signatories include the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and over 220 other faith leaders from around the globe.
Making a return to our two favourite summer locations, Mount Maunganui and Nelson in early January 2023, we've got whiff of the first release lineup and me oh my, yes boy
Gary Stephen Preston visibly brightened Tuesday morning as he spotted members of his family in Franklin County Circuit Court.

The 74-year-old smiled warmly, pointed at his adult children in the gallery, then took a seat at the defendants table.

That image of the bearded, slightly stooped father of five stood in stark contrast to the seriousness of his recent criminal convictions: attempted capital murder, two counts of attempted malicious wounding and reckless driving.

Those offenses stem from November 2014, when he led three deputies on a lengthy, roundabout vehicle pursuit.

Although no one was injured, the chase occasionally reached speeds of up to 100 mph and wound across farmland and rural routes, ending when Preston backed his Dodge pickup truck into, and up on top of, the hood of a Franklin County sheriffs deputys cruiser.

Preston, who has been held since his arrest, pleaded guilty in April to the charges, and at Tuesdays sentencing hearing he learned he now must spend several more years behind bars.

Judge James Reynolds gave him a seven-year term, with 38 years in suspended time, and also ordered him to pay $10,726 in damages and restitution. He will get credit for the two years he has already been in custody.

This is an offense of such horrific magnitude that its almost an unredeemable situation, Reynolds told him, adding he felt that Preston had risked not only his own life and the lives of the three deputies but also anybody else you wouldve happened upon that day.

The difficulty in this case is reconciling the two men that the court sees, Reynolds explained, referring to the fact that until recently Preston had no prior criminal convictions.

Through various testimony, defense attorney Will Davis established that Preston had been considered by many a responsible, law-abiding farmer when, in 2005 and 2006, he was struck by vehicles in two separate accidents. He suffered a traumatic brain injury in the latter incident.

Defense witness Sam Williams, who manages Bedford Countys Southern States Cooperative, said he dealt with Preston professionally for 18 years.

Whatever he told me, I could go to the bank on it, Williams testified, but he also acknowledged that after Prestons wrecks, he was struggling at times with his memory.

In February 2014, a third major crash, involving Preston on an ATV, also caused head trauma and seemed to mark a downward spiral. A probation officer told Davis that Preston was involuntarily committed in April of that year, then was convicted of being drunk in public in July, August and October. The following month, deputies came to his home to serve a warrant and he ran from them, sparking the chase.

He made it 72 years before any of this trouble, Davis said.

Also at the hearing, Franklin County Commonwealths Attorney A.J. Dudley played a dashboard camera recording that showed Prestons truck driving wildly in a field, then stopping for the deputies, who had drawn their handguns, then fleeing again. The collision between the truck and the deputys cruiser, on Virginia 829, was also caught on tape.

Dudley acknowledged Prestons age, his difficulties and his family support, but argued those factors couldnt outweigh the seriousness of what happened.

Hes being punished for deliberate acts of violence, Dudley told Reynolds. The Commonwealth is asking you to protect those who protect us.

Preston spoke briefly at the hearing and apologized directly to two of the deputies who were able to come to the hearing.

There is no good answer for what I did, he told them. I wanted to go home. Thats all I know. That aint no answer for this, but Im very sorry.

Hes due back in court Nov. 16 on charges of attempted malicious wounding and strangulation from separate, unrelated incidents.
How Franklin County Voted

State Sen. Tom Garrett has won the Fifth District House seat, besting his opponent Jane Dittmar with 58 percent of the vote.

Garrett collected 206,033 votes to Dittmars 147,385.

In Franklin County, Garrett garnered 19,040 votes to Dittmars 7,448.

The Fifth District House seat is being vacated by Rep. Robert Hurt. The Fifth District is the largest in Virginia and includes Franklin County. The massive rural district extends from the North Carolina border north through Danville and Charlottesville to Fauquier County.

Garrett, the Republican candidate for the vacated seat, is a former prosecutor from Buckingham who grew up in rural Virginia and attended public schools. He attended the University of Richmond on an Army ROTC scholarship.

Throughout his campaign, Garrett touted his experience of job creation coupled with his military background and knowledge of emerging terrorist threats both domestically and abroad.

First and foremost, I want to thank God and my family for their steadfast support, Garrett said while formerly accepting the election results. Similarly, I could not be more appreciative for the outpouring of support by volunteers, donors and GOP units who have given so much during this election. It is truly humbling.

Garrett said his campaign always has been about jobs and the equality of opportunity.

I look forward to working on rolling back the destructive regulatory burdens on our job creators and pursuing creative solutions to replace Obamacare with a more affordable, market-based system, he said. Further, our legislators need to focus on pushing resources and decision making away from Washington and back to our localities. I will also make it a priority to fight to secure our borders and protect our nation from threats at home and abroad.

As Garretts Democratic opponent, Dittmar announced her candidacy on September 17, 2015.

This campaign has been about successfully knitting our country back together and the hope that our president and members of Congress will charge forward in the same direction to address our nations challenges, Dittmar said.

Shortly after the results of the election were final, Dittmar congratulated Garrett and thanked him for their spirited and vigorous contest.

I wished him godspeed and I urge all those who supported me to join me in not just congratulating Tom, but offering him our good will and support in the important work ahead, she said. I promised to him, and requested that he promise me in return, that we now abandon partisan feeling and yield to patriotism in generous service to the Fifth district and to our nation.

The 115th Congress is slated to begin on Jan. 3.
THINKING OUT LOUD WITH SHELDON MacLEOD: Collecting blankets for seniors

It was a small gesture of kindness for the people in the wing of the nursing home where she was volunteering. And from that first year, Nicole Martelle has been able to grow it from a handful of donated blankets, to more than 600. The Bedford woman ...
Donald Bartling literally turned letters into the words of his book.

For Country details his 21 months of service during the Korean War.

Bartling, of rural Herman, shares memories, photos and documents.

The book details the authors experiences as a Korean War veteran and personal commentary that is applicable in todays world, especially regarding North Korea, said publicist Bryan Beach via email.

According to a recent press release, Bartling examines the past and connects it with current events.

Years ago, Bartling and a neighbor sat together at an estate sale.

With their homes separated by just one mile, they came together on an idea.

James Dam, of Hooper, suggested Bartling write about his experiences during the Korean War.

Dam is a veteran too; he joined the Army Reserves in 1957.

I mentioned a long time ago everyone should know what he went through, Dam said.

Bartling began writing based on photos and notes kept by his mother.

I sent (written) orders and rolls of film home and it fell chronologically in place, Bartling said.

Bartling went through three cameras.

He keeps the now faded photos in an album he brought from Japan on the way home.

He spent about six months putting together a draft, a manuscript and finally a book.

But it was not promoted until it was copyrighted, Bartling noted.

His book is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Xlibris Press.

Bartling was a farmer when he entered the military in January 1951.

Typically, the most difficult part of the transition from civilian to military was the loss of personal freedom, Bartling said in the first chapter of his book.

Bartling was in the 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division.

Fremont Tribune news editor Tammy Real-McKeighan wrote about Bartlings service in a June 14, 2014 article.

She wrote about how Bartling was a young sergeant assigned to an anti-tank and mine platoon.

After basic training, traveling through the Northwestern United States was scenic (almost like a vacation), Bartling said in his book.

But that part of the journey was soon behind him.

Our group of approximately 20 men were to board a Canadian-Pacific Airliner, he relays in chapter three.

That was the beginning of many dangerous situations he describes.

What does Bartling sum up from his writings?

You can be a good soldier and a Christian, too, he said.

American morality level has declined in the last decade, he added.

He wants to enlighten readers about better days in the military.

We can get back to that if we try, Bartling said.

Recognize the duties of citizenship and then do it, he added emphatically.

He talked about the changing role of women in the military.

These days, Bartling still lives on a 200-acre farm with his wife, Marilyn.

Bartling was awarded the Bronze Star Medal in November 1952 for meritorious service.

In 2000, Bartling received a Korean War Service Medal and a letter of appreciation from Kim Dae-jung, President of the Republic of Korea.

Bartling stressed that he doesnt consider himself a hero.

Dam is proud of the people that served from the Hooper area and glad that Bartling recorded his experiences, especially for todays students.

Bartling hopes readership grows.

If its benefiting people, the more the better, he said.

Dam shared similar sentiments.

He did a great job, Dam said. Its quite a recollection.

We forget what all these people have done for our country.
Podcast: Who comes out ahead in the Charlie Jones vs. Iowa football reunion?

Iowa Football
Faster loading time (lower bounce rates from)

A faster loading ensures that your site visitors don't leave your site when it starts to load for too long.

Guaranteed dedicated resources

Bandwidth, memory, CPU power, storage of up to 200 GB SSD Storage, NVMe.

Privacy and control (server admin)

You will get total control over digital assets, databases, customer information, and files with no ovhcloud control panel.

Easier scalability

You will able to increase your resources as often as you want easily.

Dedicated IP address

Our VPS services will ensure that you get IPv4 and IPv6 for a reasonable fee.

Other amazing benefits include the following:

- Better capabilities to handle additional websites

- Unaffected by traffic and security of other sites

- Control panel and full root access to your server

- Lower cost than hardware and management of physical servers

A possible reason not to use a VPS hosting provider is that it costs a bit more than shared hosting (but far less costly than physical servers). But the costs arent much higher, and if youve outgrown your shared account, or want the value of the advantages listed above, then its time to upgrade.

Another reason might be a lack of technical knowledge, making VPS servers harder to set up, manage, and secure. But thats why managed VPS hosting is such a good choice.
Shutterstock

Amongst all the election uproar, many people are so upset by the outcome that theyre wondering if they should flee the country. Case in point: Canadas website crashed after Donald Trump was declared the winner of Tuesday's election.

Travel companies were quick to pounce on the trend, offering some awesome deals that both Trump and Hillary supporters alike will love.
NORWALK  Eversource is cautioning local customers to be vigilant and report scammers and deceptive marketers who falsely claim to be representatives or partners of the utility company.

According to Eversource spokesperson Mitch Gross, business and residential customers continue to pick up their phones and open their doors to find individuals on the other side claiming to be representing Eversource.

Whether these scammers are using aggressive marketing tactics to sell discounted power or threatening to turn off electricity unless an immediate payment is made, the company is warning customers to be cautious, Gross said. These individuals are not affiliated with Eversource in any capacity and are most likely either scammers or third-party suppliers choosing to use deceptive marketing tactics.

Eversource rarely makes unsolicited phone calls and would never solicit door-to-door on behalf of a competitive supplier, Gross said. All Eversource employees carry company-issued identification, and any electrical contractors working with the company carry documentation explaining the nature and location of their work.

Customers can call Eversource at 800-286-2000 to verify this information.

Gross said that Eversource customer Theodore Owens reports seeing individuals targeting utility customers in his neighborhood.

Men came to my door, stated they were representing Eversource and told me they could save me money on my bill, said Owens. They quickly flashed a badge and asked to see my bill. I believed they were from Eversource so I showed them my bill. They tricked me and I ended up signing with an alternative company that was charging more than Eversource. These men fooled me and pulled the wool over my eyes.

Owens story is not uncommon.

Were hearing from thousands of our customers who continue to be negatively impacted by these dishonest solicitations, said Penni Conner, senior vice president and chief customer officer at Eversource. We urge any customer who feels they have been targeted by deceptive marketers or are the victim of a scam to contact us immediately. Every concern is logged and passed along to state regulators.

Eversource issued the following reminders to its customers:

Never provide a copy of your utility bill or account information to any unsolicited person on the phone, at the door, or online, particularly if you question their legitimacy.

Customers can verify they are speaking with an Eversource representative by asking for some basic information about their account like the name on the account, the account address, and the exact balance due.

If you dont feel comfortable, close the door or hang up the phone.

Eversource urges anyone who believes they are a target of improper solicitation to contact them directly at 800-286-2000. The company tracks these types of customer concerns and reports them to state regulators.

Howard Schwartz, executive communication director of the Connecticut Better Business Bureau, said their agency has received multiple complaints about misleading or high-pressure tactics.

We urge all consumers, especially the elderly and those whose primary language is other than English, to proceed with extreme caution, Schwartz said. We also encourage customers to verify an energy supplier is registered with the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority  PURA  before contracting for service. The bottom line is that one should avoid doing business at the front door or over the telephone unless you initiate the call.

Though Gross said that electricity customers in Connecticut do have the option of choosing a competitive energy supplier, and most competitive suppliers do follow the rules, customers should do their due diligence and check the validity of any company or offer being made.

Customers considering a switch to a competitive supplier are urged to evaluate factors such as the length and terms of a contract with a supplier, cancellation fees or other related information before providing any financial or account information, Gross said. PURA licenses competitive suppliers within the state and maintains a list of current offers available from suppliers at energizect.com.

Eversource.com provides more information on how to protect personal information and avoid becoming a victim of utility scams. Concerned customers can also report scams and fraudulent activity by calling PURA at 800-382-4586.

In our investigations into conduct by electric suppliers at PURA, we are finding many agents of electric suppliers targeting customers with false and misleading tactics, said Consumer Counsel Elin Swanson Katz. These include calling from phone numbers that misleadingly say Eversource on the caller ID; telling the consumers that they are signing up for a non-existent state- or Eversource-sponsored program; falsely stating that the consumer is not switching from Eversource to a supplier for electricity; or falsely stating that customers are required to choose an electric supplier. None of that is true.

llake@hearstmediact.com
NORWALK  Western Connecticut Health Network (WCHN) has named internationally known physician-scientist, Dr. John A. Martignetti, an expert in human genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, as the network director of the Laboratory for Translational Research at the WCHN Biomedical Research Institute.

Under this collaboration, Martignettis well-established bedside-to-bench cancer research methodology will be extended to patients at Danbury, Norwalk and New Milford hospitals leading to more personalized and successful therapeutic strategies. He will work closely with the oncology physicians and research scientists across WCHN to build on their nationally recognized efforts.
NORWALK  A Norwalk woman, with an infant in tow, was charged with larceny after police said she attempted to exit a Connecticut Avenue department store with nearly $400 in unpaid items.

Police were dispatched to Kohls at 500 Connecticut Ave. Thursday afternoon on a complaint by store loss prevention staff.
WESTPORT  In the midst of a divisive presidential campaign where insults and derogatory remarks were the norm, some Westport teenagers took to social media to air similar thoughts.

A private Staples High School Facebook group of about 200 students, circulating offensive and defamatory memes pertaining to gender, race and religion, was called to the attention of the administration on Nov. 7.

Superintendent of Schools Colleen Palmer said a group of concerned students alerted the administration about the group because it violated the core beliefs of our district.

The Facebook group was immediately taken down and appropriate consequences were given to those involved, she said. Any of the students directly involved and active in the group were assigned community service.

Some of the students felt it was political satire, but it went beyond that, Palmer said. There were some statements in there that targeted gender, certain religious groups, targeted certain ethnic backgrounds. There were various statements where a lot of the content was extracted (from) other sites and posted on the Facebook group.

Palmer refused to say whether any students were suspended and did not answer what grade levels the group included or was limited to, simply repeating, appropriate consequences were given to those involved.

The administration did reach out to the families of any student who was involved to make sure they understood the effect of posting such material online.

In an email to the Staples community, Principal James DAmico explained how he told the student body it is crucial for everyone in the community to feel more empowered to be upstanders in the face of hurtful speech toward others.

DAmico maintained there was no bullying aimed at specific individuals, adding the school will move to engage students by discussing the school districts guiding principles: being socially and emotionally aware, sincere kindness, principled thought and action and a constant state of learning.

Keeping school environments positive has been especially difficult recently in the wake of the election between President-elect Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

According to a report from The Detroit News, students at Royal Oak Middle School in Michigan started chanting Build that wall, a day after Trump was elected  a reference to Trumps pledge to build a wall between the United States and Mexico to stop the flow of illegal immigration.

The Washington Post and other news organizations reported and posted video about an incident in which two students carried a Trump campaign sign through the hallways at York County (Pa.) School as another student, according to police, shouted, white power.

On the campaign trail, Trump stirred up support from white nationalists, prompting others to fear his tenure. He also called for a ban on Muslims entering the country.

The Staples student newspaper, Inklings, ran a story detailing reactions from students ranging from shock and despair to euphoria at Trumps election.

As a woman, I am having trouble coming to terms with the fact that I need to survive four years of Trumps presidency, Zoe Hulina, a junior, told Inklings. He has openly admitted and bragged about sexually assaulting women, called women he doesnt like fat, ugly pigs, and believes that women who have abortions should be punished.

In his email, DAmico said the election had taken a toll, and the principal said counselors would continue to be on hand for students who want to talk about it.

Bill Mecca, an intervention specialist at Trumbull High School, said if he were to encounter a student with such a concern, he would work with the student to make them feel more empowered.

If that were to happen, counselors have to allow a person to express their feelings and to help them verbalize the impact its having on them, said Mecca, a certified school social worker with 17 years of experience in public schools. We would be skilled enough to help them label their feeling and then help lead them to what they would do, in terms of making efforts to move from feeling a certain way to feeling more empowered, so that they would feel secure and comfortable in their present environment.

He added that student leadership groups, of which Staples has many, play a helpful role in fostering a safe climate for students in the sense that they can work to define what their high schools climate is.

@chrismmarquette; cmarquette@bcnnew.com
Nearly 74 years ago in Mississippi several hundred young men, mostly from New England and many only 18, 19 or 20 years old, who until a week ago had been civilians, clamored out of old dirty railroad cars in which they had been riding on a circuitous two day route from Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

They were lined up, greeted by army sergeants and officers, packed into trucks and taken to Camp Shelby. There they were told that they were now members of a new army unit, the 296th Engineer Combat Battalion.

Their commanding officer was Jack Jeffrey, then a captain, but soon promoted to lieutenant colonel. Jeffrey, the only commander the 296th had, was a tall, lean Texas A&M graduate, who with his other officers and a cadre of non-commissioned officers, had the responsibility of turning these teenagers and young males into a cohesive military unit able to perform army engineering duties under combat conditions.

For the next several months, this transformation from a crowd of civilians all with varying backgrounds into a disciplined army unit took place.

The men were marched and drilled. They learned close order drill. They went on forced marches in hot humid Mississippi weather where the temperature frequently went over the 100-degree mark. As the 296th was an engineer combat unit, the men learned to handle explosives, land mines and booby traps. They bivouacked in the snake and insect infested forests around Camp Shelby and put pontoon bridges together. Basic infantry training became part of their routine and they fired rifles, machine guns and went through bayonet drill.

Six months after their arrival, the young men of this new battalion were once again loaded onto trains that carried them to a port of embarkation. With other units they were packed onto an old passenger steamer that had been converted to troop transport duty and sailed out of Boston.

Ten days later on Oct. 18, 1943 they landed in Liverpool, England, where the unit became part of Operation Bolero, the U.S. Armys master plan to build facilities for the massive buildup of troops and supplies arriving in the United Kingdom in preparation for the coming Normandy invasion. Early in 1944 the battalion was released from its construction duties, sent to Gloucester, England where they lived in tents and trained for the upcoming invasion.

The 296th left Gloucester in June, went to Southampton, loaded aboard LSTs and shortly after D-Day landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy. The men cleared minefields, kept supply roads open and worked on the front lines with the 4th Infantry Division in Operation Cobra that ended the slow, grinding bloody war fought in the hedgerows of Normandy. From there the 296th joined the armys race across France to the German border.

On Dec. 16, 1944 Hitlers armies launched its last major offensive through the Ardennes in what is known as the Battle of the Bulge. Panzer forces lead by SS Col. Joachim Peiper pierced American lines and were headed to the Muese River until as Peiper swore they ran into Those Damned Engineers. In his book On To Berlin, Gen. James A. Gavin, commander of the 82d Airborne Division said:

Peipers arrival immediately south of Stavelot, brought him for the first time, up against a force that was to prove as effective as a good combat division. They were the Engineer troops of the U. S. First Army, specifically the 296th, the 291st and 51st Engineers.

When the war against Germany ended on May 6, 1945, the 296th went to Berlin as part of the American occupation force. In the time since its landing in Normandy, the battalion had taken part in five major campaigns, Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes and Central Europe. Twenty one men in the battalion did not survive these campaigns. The battalion was disbanded in October 1945 and most of the men, who had been overseas for more than two years, arrived back home in time for Christmas.

As most of the members came from New England, the battalion held reunions every other year, rotating the reunion locations among Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Some of the members formed close lifelong friendships. Others came occasionally. The last reunion was held six years ago and only a handful were able to attend. Many used canes and walkers. And there was a wheel chair or two.

Today, of the teenagers who formed most of the battalion in 1943, there are only a few still alive and they are in their 90s.

The work the battalion did in its march from Normandy to Berlin was not the type that commands headlines. The battalion kept vital supply lines open. They built and maintained bridges so that tanks, trucks and supplies could move. They cleared mines and when called on performed infantry duty. They know their casualty rate, compared to that of an infantry battalion, was low. Above all they knew there were hundreds of other units like theirs who served their nation well in a time of a national crisis.

The veterans of World War II are now old. In a few years there will only be a handful of the millions who served still alive. Their Veterans Day hope is that the memory of what they did in the cause they served does not die with them.

Forrest C. Palmer, a retired Connecticut newspaper publisher, was one of the teenagers in the 296th.
WILTON  The Wilton Police Department will hold its Stuff-a-Cruiser event in the Wilton Stop and Shop parking lot at 5 River Road on Saturday, Nov. 12.

The event will benefit the Wilton Social Services food pantry, which serves Wilton residents of all ages. Officers and volunteers will be collecting non-perishable food and paper goods from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Over the years, countless thousands the New Yorkers have passed by monuments in their city that were dedicated to two eminent physicians who were related by marriage, but there is little doubt that few of them, until recently at least, had ever realized that the statues were erected in memory of former Southerners. The two men of medicine were Dr. James Marion Sims of Lancasterville, South Carolina, and his son-in-law, Dr. John Allan Wyeth of Guntersville, Alabama. Dr. Wyeth had been a Confederate cavalryman who served under Generals John Hunt Morgan, Joseph Wheeler and Nathan Bedford Forrest, and whose 1899 biography, That Devil Forrest, effectively dealt with the charges that the general had been responsible for the massacre of Union troops, mostly African-Americans, at Fort Pillow in Tennessee and had been a leading member of the Ku-Klux Klan from 1867 to 1869. It is, however, the statue of Dr. Sims, a man who had never served the Confederacy in any capacity, that has become the focus of controversy and cries to have his monument removed.

After graduating from South Carolina College in Columbia, Sims began his medical studies with a physician in Lancaster, South Carolina, as well as taking courses at the Medical College of Charleston. He later graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and then moved to Alabama where he opened a womens clinic in Montgomery in 1845. It was there Dr. Sims began his pioneering work to correct a condition that caused obstructed childbirth, work that, many years later, would become controversial and, because his initial subjects were three female black slaves, has given rise to the current charges of racism. The attacks are based on the argument that, while the women were indeed suffering from the condition Dr. Sims was attempting to correct, they were not willing subjects of the operations. It is further charged that Dr. Sims employed no anesthetic during the procedures, the use of which, in itself, was highly controversial among members of Americas medical profession in the early Nineteenth Century.

In 1853, Dr. Sims moved his medical practice to New York City, and two years later he founded Americas first full-scale hospital for women and was hailed as the father of modern gynecology. In addition, he was also involved with launching Americas first cancer facility, the New York Cancer Hospital, once served as president of the American Medical Association and was the author of a number of major medical papers and books, including, somewhat ironically, the 1879 volume The History of the Discovery of Anaesthesia. During the War Between the States, Sims was practicing medicine in London and Paris, and was appointed surgeon to the Empress Eugenie, wife of French Emperor Napoleon III. Before returning to America in 1871, Dr. Sims was also instrumental in creating an Anglo- American ambulance corps that treated both French and German troops wounded during the Franco-Prussian War.

In recognition of his many contributions to the field of medicine, memorials to Dr. Sims have been erected at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery and at both the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia and his birthplace in Lancaster County, as well the life-size statue of him in Manhattan, the first such monument to a physician in the United States. The latter memorial, which some are now demanding be removed, was created in 1894 by the German sculptor, Ferdinand Freiherr von Miller, who also made the Confederate Memorial at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina. Dr Sims New York statue was first placed in Bryant Park on 42nd Street, the present site of the New York Public Library, and was later moved sixty blocks north to a location in Central Park opposite the New York Academy of Medicine. With the present calls for a total removal of the statue, we are once again faced with yet another example of that which was considered socially and morally correct, even praiseworthy, in a previous century now being viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens used for the current standards of political correctness.

Dr. Sims future son-in-law, John Wyeth, was born in 1845 on a rustic plantation at Missionary Station in Marshall County, Alabama. His father, Louis Weiss Wyeth, an attorney from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who located his small plantation on the Cherokee Trail of Tears, also founded the nearby town of Guntersville, was elected a county judge and later became a member of the Alabama State Legislature. As was the case with most planters in the South, the Wyeths had some slaves, but Louis Wyeth, like other Southerners, including many of the nations founding fathers, was morally opposed to slavery and considered his servants as virtual members of the family. He was also one of the delegates to the state Secession Convention in 1861 who voted against leaving the Union, but volunteered for Confederate military service when war broke out. At age fifteen, Wyeths son John enrolled as a cadet at Alabamas La Grange Military Academy but when war came two years later, the school closed and young Wyeth joined Quirks Scouts, a unit of General Morgans irregular cavalry known as Morgans Raiders. The following year Wyeth enlisted as a private in the 4th Alabama Cavalry, one of the units under the command of General Fighting Joe Wheeler which took part in a number of major engagements in Tennessee and north Georgia, including the Confederate victory at the Battle of Chickamauga. Shortly after that battle, Wyeth was captured and while suffering from pneumonia, transported to the highly overcrowded Camp Morton outside Indianapolis, Indiana, and held there until February of 1865 when he was released in a prisoner exchange and returned to Alabama to convalesce. His harrowing experiences at Camp Morton formed a chapter in his life which would not only involve him in a national controversy three decades later, but would also inspire him to pursue a career in medicine.

After two years of rebuilding both the familys war-ravaged plantation and his own health, Wyeth enrolled in the medical school at Kentuckys University of Louisville, a school that offered two years of lectures and technical training in such courses as anatomy, physiology, and surgery, but no practical work with patients. Armed with a medical degree, Wyeth returned to Alabama and began his practice in Guntersville. After less than two months, the aspiring healer of the sick realized just how inadequate his instruction had been, so he closed his office and decided to seek more advanced training in New York City. Upon arriving in New York in 1872, however, Wyeth found that none of the citys three medical schools offered any type of graduate courses and entered Bellevue Hospitals Medical College where he received his second medical degree, became a resident surgeon at Bellevue and later created New Yorks first pathology laboratory there, as well as writing a number of highly acclaimed papers on innovative surgical procedures. Wyeth was still convinced that the theoretical medical training in America did not adequately prepare its graduates, and in 1878, after learning French and German, he traveled to Europe for more advanced instruction.

It was in Paris that Wyeth met Dr. Sims who had been a friend of his father in Montgomery, and who introduced the younger physician to a number of well-known medical figures throughout Europe. Wyeth also became acquainted with the elder doctors daughter, Florence Nightingale Sims, whom he would wed in New York in 1886. The couple had a daughter and two sons, one of whom would become a highly successful architect in Florida, and the other a well-known soldier-poet during World War One. Following his return to New York in 1880, Wyeth became a leading surgeon at St. Elizabeth and Mount Sinai Hospitals and a year later he finally realized his life-long dream of establishing an institution for graduate studies, the New York Polyclinic Graduate Medical School and Hospital on East 34th Street in Manhattan that bore the inscription over its entrance, For the Sick Without Regard to Race or Class. In the early Twentieth Century, the institution was relocated to a twelve-story building just south of Central Park and while the press reported in 1918 that the medical school would be made part of Columbia Universitys College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbias records show that no such take-over ever actually occurred. The spotlight of world-wide attention was turned on the hospital in 1926 when silent movie idol, Rudolph Valentino, died in the facility, and the institution later merged with New Yorks French Hospital in 1969 to become the French and Polyclinic Medical School and Health Center. After losing a court action against the Associated Hospital Service of New York, the merged facility was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1975 and finally closed in May of the following year.

Like his mentor, Dr. Sims, Wyeth also served as president of the American Medical Association, as well as becoming president of the New York Academy of Medicine, the New York State Medical Association and the New York Pathological Society. In addition to organizations related to the field of medicine, Wyeth was also president of the New York Southern Society and the Alabama Society of New York City. In 1954, Wyeth was inducted into the Alabama Hall of Fame, and like Dr. Sims, he too has a statue at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, this one by Mount Rushmores creator, Gutzon Borglum, who was also the initial sculptor for the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain in Georgia, as well as creating the North Carolina State memorial on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg. Wyeths New York monument was a bronze bust by the equally well-known American sculptor, Herbert Adams, that was unveiled in the lobby of his medical facility in May of 1914, and now resides in the New York Academy of Medicine, just across Fifth Avenue from the statue of his father-in-law.

Aside from Wyeths biography of General Forrest and a number of medical books and journals, he also wrote a history of the La Grange Military Academy and in 1914, his well-received With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon. It was in 1891, however, that Wyeth entered the arena of controversy with his Cold Cheer at Camp Morton article in the Century Monthly Magazine, an expose of the cruel and inhumane treatment meted out to Confederate prisoners of war at the Union prison camp in Indiana where 1,762 of the camps 12,082 inmates had died, a higher death rate than that at any other Northern prison camp, including the infamous camp in Elmira, New York. The articles charges of starvation, exposure to extreme heat and cold, brutal beatings and even murders by the camps guards brought an immediate howl of protest throughout the North, and ultimately an investigation into the charges by a committee of the Grand Army of Republic, the Norths quasi-official veterans group, which included General Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, and William R. Holloway, the former secretary and brother-in-law of the war-time governor of Indiana. Oliver P. Morton, for whom the camp was named. Holloway wrote a lengthy rebuttal to Wyeths charges which Century Magazine immediately published. Wyeth then countered with another article which included numerous supporting statements from both prominent Southern veterans who had been imprisoned at Camp Morton and war-time citizens of Indianapolis, as well as the testimony of a former assistant surgeon in the Union Army, Dr. W.P. Parr, who corroborated many of Wyeths charges.

Wyeth subsequently wrote a sequel to his initial article, but Century Magazine decided not to carry the exchange any further, perhaps, as Wyeth later stated in a letter to Ida Tarbell in 1901 after reading her article in McClures Magazine on the disbanding of the Confederate Army, because of the abuse and threats they received for publishing what they did. His letter to Miss Tarbell also included an account of his return home to Alabama in 1865, only to find that his mother, father, and two sisters had fled to Griffin, Georgia, after their entire plantation had been burned to the ground by Union troops in January of 1864. Wyeth stated that the Union Armys commanding officer in the area, Colonel William J. Palmer of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, had ordered that every building, except for a few housing wounded Northern soldiers, be destroyed, and all Wyeth could see were nothing but tomb-stone like chimneys and charred trunks of trees where many happy homes had once stood. He also related to Tarbell an account that he would later expand on in his 1914 autobiography about how the people in Marshall and the neighboring counties of DeKalb and Blount had been stripped of food and other necessities by the Union Army. He then went on to tell her how his father had traveled as far north as Nashville, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; Cincinnati, Ohio, and elsewhere to give speeches about the plight of the people in his area and ask for donations. He said that the efforts resulted in trainloads of food and other much needed items being sent to aid the suffering, and how his father had superintended the distribution. Wyeth closed by saying to Tarbell that when his father died in 1889, if all of those whom he had helped in this worldcould have attended his burial, they would have had to move the mountains back to let them in the valley.

While Dr. Wyeths bronze bust is safely ensconced within the halls of the Academy of Medicine, Dr. Sims nearby monument still stands exposed to a hostile public eye in the heart of New Yorks Spanish Harlem, and thus remains an open target of political correctness. However, those who now wish to not only remove the monument, but to also dishonor Dr. Sims memory and erase his page from the annals of the nations medical history should take a moment to consider the 1949 epitaph inscribed on the marker at his place of birth: A blessing and a benefactor to women doctor to empress and slave alike.

Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Republished with gracious permission from The Abbeville Review (April 2016).
Albert Abe D. Walton, 82, of Grand Island passed away at his home on Monday, Nov. 7, 2016.

Visitation will be from 4 to 7 p.m. Nov. 14 at All Faiths Funeral Home, with a Celebration of Life service at 7. Pastor George Wheat will officiate.

Funeral services will be at 2 p.m. Nov. 15 at Bellwood United Methodist Church. Pastors Matt Fowler and Jennifer Karsner will officiate. Burial will follow in the Bellwood Cemetery. Military honors will be rendered by the U.S. Marines and LaVern Schmit American Legion Post 327 Honor Guard.

Abe was born on Dec. 1, 1933, on the family farm in Clearfield, S.D., to Ralph and Freda (Wagner) Walton.

He is survived by his wife, Katherine Kay Walton; children, Alex Walton of Waterloo and Beth Watson of Aurora; brother, Richard Walton; sisters, Elinor (Bob) Blomstrom of Gregory, S.D., Kathryn Kay (Ronnie) Foster of Ashland, Ore., and Vernie (Roy) Bechtol of Coulee City, Wash.; brother-in-law, Harry Bettcher of San Jose, Calif.; grandchildren, Sloane, Slate and Emma; along with numerous nieces, nephews and extended family and friends.

Abe was preceded in death by his parents; brother, Dean Walton; and sisters, Joyce Bettcher and Norma Jean Walton.

Abe was raised on the family farm in Tripp County, S.D., where he began his lifelong passion with horses and learned how to raise cattle. He attended the local country grade school and then graduated from Winner High School. Following graduation, Abe went on to enlist in the U.S. Marines, serving from Jan. 19, 1952, to Jan. 18, 1955. He was stationed in Korea. While there, he sponsored two children in a local orphanage. Following his enlistment, he went on to attend University of South Dakota.

On April 18, 1966, he was united in marriage to Kay Harris. The couple made their home in Alda and then Grand Island for the last 50 years. He began his 25-year employment with New Holland in 1967.

For many years, Abe would lease land where he could still raise cattle and his true passion, his horses. Years ago, he raised quarter horses until his love of horse racing led him to raise, train and race thoroughbreds. He shared his love of horses with others by helping them learn how to ride, as well as train, and board horses.

He was a member of the United Methodist Church. Abe cherished the time that was spent with his family and grandchildren. He was a diligent worker who had the softest heart and compassion for everyone he met.

Memorials are suggested to Nebraska Childrens Home Society.

Words of comfort and kindness may be left for the family at www.giallfaiths.com.
Warminster boy makes Phillies nation proud with viral video from Game 1

Carson Wallace, 5, of Warminster, starred as one of the Phillies most savage fans as his celebration and taunt of an Astros fan went viral.
There are few men around now to speak of the horrors and heroism at Iwo Jima.

One of them is Conrad Connie Bauer.

A native of Granite City, in recent years he has settled in at the family farm situated on Zika Road in rural Edwardsville. A few days ago he celebrated his 90th birthday by renewing his drivers license.

Bauer signed up for the U.S. Marines on April 14, 1944. Ten months later, as the Battle of Iwo Jima broke out, Bauer was there helping the Marines in a titanic struggle with the Japanese to capture the island.

It was tough, Bauer says. I didnt talk about this stuff until about 15 years ago. For all those years, I didnt say nothing to nobody about nothing.

Though only a buck-ass private at the time, Bauer and a colleague, Paul Baker, led a stretcher bearer company that wound up rescuing 200 men from death.

Today one soldiers rescue story stands out above the rest: Woodrow Wilson Banks. Banks died seven years ago, but in the decades following the war he thanked Bauer profusely in letters that have become part of Bauers scrapbooks.

One of the scrapbooks also contains a faded clipping of the incident.

Through the stubborn courage and daring of one volunteer stretcher party, 28 wounded Marines, isolated almost three full days and nights, were evacuated from an enemy-dominated pocket during the Fifth Marines Divisions final plunge across Kitano Point, the clipping states. The wounded had been without food, water or medical attention despite repeated efforts to reach them. Suffering all types of wounds, these Marines lay under a constant cover of Jap fire, unable to even sit up.

The original group had 22 soldiers but was whittled down to 16 men during the two-week ordeal.

The men under Bauer and Bakers authority included surveyors, draftsmen, instructors, engineers, and other specialists, according to the papers account.

At one point, a Japanese sniper shot Banks in the hand. The sniper was hitting people, killing people, Bauer recalls now. They had told us when we went up there to be careful when we crossed over. Well four guys went across, and I said When no one else wants to go, Ill go. Well, (Banks) says he wants to go. He was five years older than me.

The hand bled profusely, and Bauer decided to place him on a stretcher and drive him to the field hospital himself. We got to the field hospital and I gave out a bunch of orders that they needed to operate on this guy immediately, Bauer said.

The medics, thankfully, complied, and Banks was hustled into surgery.

When he regained consciousness, the doctor told him how lucky he had been to have survived. Banks recalled the conversation years latter for his friend. Another 20 minutes and youd be dead, Bauer recalled Banks saying.

The doctor quizzed Banks about which soldier had braved enemy fire to bring him to the hospital. Banks laughed and told him. What was his rank, the doctor asked. Buck-ass private like me. He passes out more god-damned orders than any general standing on the front lines. And oh yeah," he added. He babysits 20 of us.

Incidents like that made Bauer a hero in his mens eyes. A captain pushed to promote him to sergeant but Bauer was adamantly against that. Dont make me do nothin, he told the captain. I dont want no rank. I didnt come here for that reason. I came here to get the war over with. Thats why I joined the Marines: to help get it over with.

On Nov. 11, 2009, Bauer was flown out to an Honor Flight ceremony in Washington, D.C., where he met Banks son. His son had been telling him for years that Conrad Bauer had saved his life during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

One of Bauers grandsons, Andy Calloway, says he talked with his grandpa the other day about those acts of bravery. He said You fight for your country, you dont fight for people. Our country was under attack after Pearl Harbor.

There were other stories of heroism that Bauer can still recall vividly. One time when they were burying Japanese soldiers, he noticed a suspicious box next to one of them. The men had placed machine gun belts around their own legs and had been dragging dead Japanese soldiers to a crater hole.

We came across this one, and he had a pistol strapped to him and was all decorated with souvenirs, Bauer said. Everybody wanted to keep going but I said Whoops, slow down. Go back and get your rifles. I said Everybody shoot at that box. It was a box full of explosives, I guess, and we blew it up.

After the war, Bauer returned to Granite City. He took odd jobs for a while. In the early 1960s, he bought some farm property on Zika Lane, in rural Edwardsville though he and his wife didnt move there until 1990, Andy Calloway says.

They raised a family, and from 1960 to 1990 he owned and operated an electrical contracting business, ABC Electric. During that time, he was routinely exposed to asbestos and was later diagnosed with asbestosis. Fluid had to be removed from his lungs.

Bauer recently filed a lawsuit in Madison County through the Simmons Hanly Conroy law firm. The case was settled recently and the firm says it was able to secure a good result.

Not long ago, a nephew took Bauer to the Marine Corps museum. There were 50 or so people attending from around the world. Bauer got his picture taken sitting under a replica of the original iconic Iwo Jima photograph. While they were at the Iwo Jima section of the museum, a guide mentioned that they actually had someone in their midst who was there.

That was kind of cool for him, Andy Calloway says.
The Maryville Board of Trustees approved an agreement with an engineering firm to begin working on the planning of the traffic roundabout on a dangerous section of road.

Trustees unanimously approved an engineering services agreement with Juneau Associates for the Route 162/Keebler Road Roundabout. A roundabout is a type of circular intersection or junction in which road traffic flows almost continuously in one direction around a central island.

The project, estimated to cost approximately $1.5 million, is aimed at improving safety at the dangerous intersection.

In July of 2015 a young woman was killed at the intersection and her family and friends recently made a plea to the village board to make that area safer.

In September, Mayor Larry Gulledge announced that the road project was approved by East-West Gateway Council of Governments Transportation Improvement Program.

Gulledge said that approval paved the way for the project to become a reality.

The project will receive approximately $900,000 in federal funds and $600,000 from the village and Madison County.

Village officials feel the roundabout is necessary for safety because of increased traffic as a result of more development.

The East-West Gateway Council for Governments is a regional quasi-governmental organization made up of county representatives from both Illinois and Missouri.

The organizations Transportation Improvement Program is a financial and implementation schedule for projects receiving federal transportation funding in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Projects identified in the plan are prioritized from, and must be consistent with, the regions 20-year long-range transportation plan.
Gori Julian & Associates, Inc., P.C. today announced that they are working to make sure the less fortunate children in Madison County receive toys this holiday season. The Edwardsville-based law firm is collecting toys for the Toys for Tots campaign, which is administered by the United States Marine Corps, through Dec. 9.

Gori Julian is very excited to be a part of this wonderful campaign that has such a positive impact on our areas families during the holidays. We want all area children to have a safe and happy holiday and hope that residents throughout our community will share in our spirit by donating a toy to our drive, said Randy Gori of Gori Julian & Associates.
Its deer mating season and the bucks and does routinely seen in and around Edwardsville really have other things on their minds than using caution when crossing the road.

For that reason, the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources have issued a warning to motorists to be particularly careful when driving at dusk and dawn.

Last year there were 15,754 vehicle/deer crashes in Illinois. Madison County was ranked as the county with the highest number of deer/vehicle collisions at 440. Cook County was second with 431. More than 50 percent of the collisions occurred in fall.

Glen Carbon Police Sgt. James Jones said drivers should be alert when driving in areas where deer are seen on the side of the road.

Especially at night, drivers should use caution, he said. People should use their bright lights when they can to illuminate the side of the road. Look for the glowing dots of their eyes and slow down.

He cautioned that just because you have seen one deer cross the road, drivers should still to be alert for more.

They travel in groups, so just because you see one cross, doesnt mean there are not going to be more coming, he said.

Jones said if you do hit a deer and there are no injuries to humans, it is best to call the non-emergency number for the police department.

IDOT reported that deer/vehicle crashes increased by 2.5 percent from 2014 to 2015. Injuries resulting from such crashes tallied 628 in 2015 versus 505 in 2014. The number of fatalities doubled, from four in 2014 to eight in 2015.

Jones urged drivers to use caution when they see deer on the side of the road.

Because many people enjoy eating venison, people involved in accidents can claim the deer after it is killed in an accident.

A lot of people dont realize they can claim the deer and have it butchered, Jones said. We have a list of people that like to eat deer meat and if the animals arent torn up that bad they claim them.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Handi Kurniawan (The Jakarta Post) Ann Arbor, Michigan  Fri, November 11, 2016

Indonesia ranks 60th out of 61 countries surveyed for the list of Worlds Most Literate Nations. While we are working toward improving traditional literacy, which in brief is defined as the ability to read, write and do simple arithmetic, the world has been moving toward digital literacy.

The survey caught the attention of US educators as well. America used to be No. 1, but in the past few years Nordic countries have overtaken it, with Finland consistently on top and the US in seventh place. It is interesting to hear comments from fellow educators in the US, who say the rankings shouldnt be exaggerated because the US educational system is different from that of Finland  for example, in terms of size and homogeneity.

In fact there is no centralized educational system in the US as each state implements its own, which means there are 50 different educational systems.

This reminds me of a comment about the Singapore educational system, which is said to be easily managed because of the countrys size. I would imagine that if every province in Indonesia was committed to the improvement of education, the national educational system would collectively get better, but this will not work. The reality is Singapore and South Korea have managed to transform their poor systems into two of the best in the world thanks to their economies.

Why is literacy important? John Miller has an answer. He says, Knowledge has always been associated with influence, power and economic success. And literacy has always been the essential vehicle for the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge and literacy created power in the world. Advantages, both financial and otherwise, were afforded to those who could read and thus acquire, organize and use knowledge.

In the knowledge-based economy, the educated and literate human resources who possess critical thinking and are creative and innovative could help Indonesia reach the same level of respect as other developed and civilized nations in the world.

Indonesia is still struggling to address the challenges in equality, accessibility and quality facing its educational system. So which one do we need to prioritize? Providing accessibility to education, or accelerating digital literacy? I would assume if this question was raised with President Joko Jokowi Widodo, his answer would be to prioritize both.

What is digital literacy? Does WhatsApping, learning from YouTube, or posting in social media constitute digital literacy? With search engines like Google, acquiring information could be much easier. With regards to education, it further emphasizes the importance of understanding over memorization.

Technology has enabled education and enriched the alternatives to the way people learn.

Nobel laureate Herbert Simon said in 1996 that the meaning of knowing had shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.

I would suggest that the most important literacy in the knowledge-based economy is how to find, select and use knowledge productively. The main purpose of education needs to shift from passing the standardized test to developing learners potential, teach them how to learn sustainably and to unleash their fullest strengths.

With digital literacy, more people will be participating in the current knowledge-based economy. Our government, academics and businesses need to work together so we can narrow the gap between the economy and education. To reach the goal three things need to be done.

First, an independent body under the education minister needs to be established to develop and execute a literacy transformation strategy by involving all policymakers, educators, literacy enthusiast across Indonesia. This independent institution should create a shared vision, manage the direction and cultivate all good ideas from the grassroots and unheard voices.

Second, the quality of educators should be continuously improved by providing professional development, better quality control and increasing the standards of certification.

Research shows that students who have more effective teachers will learn much more compared to those who have less effective teachers. Educators should be the facilitators of leveraging new technology and digital literacy to students. In so doing, teachers and students can grow together.

Third, wisdom should be exercised in responding to technology, given the fact that people are merely consumers of new technology.

In the 1920s Thomas Edison predicted movies would forever change the way people learn and that printed books would no longer be needed, but on the contrary, printed books still exist.

There is a fundamental difference between technology now and then, but lets be wise in understanding technology, its impact and its future use.

Digital literacy offers speed, convenience, economical sense and availability in a larger scale, but there is no one size fits all solution with regards to technology.

As Arne Duncan, former US secretary of education said: If the technology revolution only happens for families that already have money and education, then its not really a revolution.

***

The writer, who holds a post-graduate degree from the JapanAmerica Institute of Management Science in Hawaii, is pursuing a Masters in educational studies, new media and new literacy at the University of Michigan, US.

---------------

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. Click here for more information.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Those who enjoy crepes can consider trying a new dish from the pioneer of the light meal in Indonesia, DCrepes, slated to become available in December.

The crepe will have a combination of pandan and red velvet, D'Crepes spokesperson Lintang told The Jakarta Post on Thursday, adding that the new dish would evoke the atmosphere of Christmas with surprise fillings inside. The eatery previously launched new crepe varieties such as red velvet, peanut butter and chocolate chip.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, DCrepes is holding a roadshow to 12 universities in Jakarta, Bogor and Depok, which will end on Friday at Atma Jaya Catholic University. During the campaign, it is offering promotions for customers favorite sweet and savory crepe flavors, such as cookies and cream, SilverQueen, banana choco cheese, choco cheese, beef black pepper, smoked beef and cheese, as well as BBQ chicken.

(Read also: Why breakfast is a must for adolescents)

A DCrepes worker prepares a crepe for a customer.(JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

Ivana, an economics student at Atma Jaya, said she enjoyed the delicious taste and affordable prices from the crepe pioneer. I usually buy cookies and cream for a snack, she said. Hopefully they will hold events like this more often.

[The roadshow] is part of our appreciation for our main target market, especially teenagers and college students who probably never purchase our products, DCrepes marketing manager Sari Gumulya said recently.

Established in 1996, DCrepes opened its first store in a shopping mall in South Jakarta. It currently has 66 outlets in major cities across the country and has created a new trend of "fun and dynamic" food. Aside from the sweet and savory crepes, the brand also offers ice cream. (kes)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

American Newsweek has recalled a commemorative edition with Hillary Clinton gracing the cover. The issue, carrying the heading Madam President, was printed and shipped prematurely to stores and news stalls across the US.

The magazine is preparing a "President Trump" version that is expected to hit stores next week.

Like everybody else, we got it wrong, said Tony Romando, the CEO of Topix Media, the magazine's partner that creates special issues under the brand as quoted by the New York Post.

(Read also: Mr Trump comes to Washington: Triumphant tour for the victor)

From the Editors: 2 special edition covers for 2016 election outcomes were produced by a Newsweek licensee, Topix Media, and not by Newsweek pic.twitter.com/MwC4RytGbC  Newsweek (@Newsweek) November 7, 2016

The company reportedly prepared two versions of a commemorative issue but decided to circulate the Clinton version in the mistaken belief that she would win the election.

The magazine was sent to stores Tuesday, but retailers were told not to sell it before the election, but some did. Romando said only 17 of 125,000 the "Madam President" issue had been sold.

Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the US on Wednesday. Following the announcement, demonstrations against his victory were held in Portland, Oregon, Chicago, New York and other cities. (kes)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin (Associated Press) Los Angeles, United States  Fri, November 11, 2016

Los Angeles supervisors are urging "Star Wars" creator George Lucas to bring his planned Museum of Narrative Art to LA, not San Francisco.

Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said Wednesday that the museum would bring 1,500 construction jobs and another 350 permanent jobs to the city.

Lucas has proposed two possible sites for the institution: LA's Exposition Park, across from the Natural History Museum, and Treasure Island in San Francisco.

(Read also: 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Journey back to the galaxy far, far away)

The concept design of George Lucas's Museum of Narrative Art in San Francisco(lucasmuseum.org/File)

Los Angeles supporters point out that Lucas attended film school at University of Southern California and founded Industrial Light and Magic in Van Nuys before moving it north.

The nonprofit museum  which will focus on movies, art and storytelling  is expected be fully funded by the Lucas family.

Lucas earlier this year abandoned plans to build the museum in Chicago.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Following Semar Gugat, Teater Koma returns with one of its most popular plays, Opera Kecoa (Cockroach Opera). Slated to run until Nov. 20 at Graha Bhakti Budaya at Taman Ismail Marzuki, Central Jakarta, the three-hour play narrates a story revolving around minorities in Jakarta who are searching for justice.

Set in a slum, the play opens in a dreary atmosphere; several performers show up on stage, dancing and singing, while a screen in the background shows footage of Jakarta. Roima then enters, carrying his transvestite beau Julini, who has been shot by an officer. The story then flashes back to a time when Julini was still alive, sleeping on a thin sheet across Roima. Julini tries to wake him up as they must move quickly before the officers come and shoo them away.

Julini and Tuminah (Tuti Hartati) sit side by side.(Teater Koma/File)

Roima and Julini had just returned from their hometown. Upon arriving in the city, Roima is excited to meet their old friends, Tarsih and Tuminah, although Julini does not seem so interested. They later meet Tarsih, the owner of a brothel for poor sex workers that has received an eviction notice from the authorities. Tuminah is considered among the prettiest sex workers and receives mostly government official clientele.

As he tries to find a job with the help of Tuminah, Roima joins a thief group led by Kumis. However, the job results in him seeing less and less of Julini. Meanwhile, Tuminahs brother, Tibal, has been released from prison and he plans to take revenge on Kumis. The situation gets more complicated when Julini becomes jealous of Tuminah, which causes a quarrel with Roima. In the meantime, the slum where the characters live catches fire from an unknown cause. Amid the drama, there is a magician who persuades the characters to buy cockroach repellent.

(Read also: Opera Kecoa The litmus test for fear of expression)

Roima, Tumina and Tibal (Adri Prasetyo) search for justice from the local authority (Budi Ros).(JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

Despite its many criticisms of the government, Opera Kecoa entertainingly combines the reality of living as a low-income person in Jakarta with naughty jokes, which continuously draw laughter from the audiences, especially when Julini shows up with his likable straightforward character.

The play was first performed in 1985 at Graha Bhakti Budaya, as the second part of a trilogy consisting of Bom Waktu, Opera Kecoa and Opera Julini. After 31 years since its first performance, the play still reflects the current situation, said the play's writer and director N. Riantiarno as quoted by Antara news agency.

The play was banned by the authorities in 1990, while its performance in Bandung was hit with a bomb threat that turned out to be a hoax. Following the ban, Opera Kecoa was later performed in Australia in 1992.

Among the cast for this years play are Ratna Riantiarno, Bayu Dharmawan Saleh, Tuti Hartati, Joind Bayuwinanda, Budi Ros, Rangga Riantiarno and Dorias Pribadi. Meanwhile, the music is composed by the late Harry Roesli and rearranged by Fero Aldiansya.

Tickets can be purchased through the theater's official website, with prices starting at Rp 100,000 (US$7). (kes)

(Read also: 'The Red Lantern' raised up 'en pointe')
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Deepti Hajela (Associated Press) New York, United States  Fri, November 11, 2016

Demonstrators in both red and blue states hit the streets for a second day Thursday to express their outrage over Donald Trump's unexpected presidential win.

High-spirited high school students marched through San Francisco's downtown, chanting "not my president" and holding signs urging a Donald Trump eviction. They waved rainbow banners and Mexican flags, as bystanders in the heavily Democratic city high-fived the marchers from the sidelines.

"As a white, queer person, we need unity with people of color, we need to stand up," said Claire Bye, a 15-year-old sophomore at Academy High School. "I'm fighting for my rights as an LGBTQ person. I'm fighting for the rights of brown people, black people, Muslim people."

In New York City, about a hundred protesters gathered at Union Square in Manhattan to protest a Trump presidency. They held signs that read "Divided States of America," "Let the New Generation Speak" and "Not My President."

At a subway station along 14th Street, New Yorkers expressed their thoughts along the walls of a walkway using sticky notes  "Time to Fight Back" and "Keep the Faith! Our work is just beginning!"

On Thursday night, several hundred people marched in Michigan, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Protesters, including parents with children in strollers, gathered near Philadelphia's City Hall. They held signs bearing slogans like "Not Our President," ''Trans Against Trump" and "Make America Safe For All."

Twenty-three-year-old Jeanine Feito held a sign reading "Not 1 More Deportation." The Cuban-American Temple University student said she acknowledges Trump as president-elect.

About 500 people turned out in Louisville, Kentucky, to protest the Trump election.

No arrests or violence were reported.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, condemned what he called a "very, very small group of people" that damaged property or blocked traffic in a Wednesday night demonstration but said he was proud of the thousands more that peacefully protested.

"I actually thought it was a beautiful expression of democracy. I think it was a marvelous thing to see the next generation of this country get engaged and involved," he said at a news conference, adding that at one time in his life he might have joined them.

As expected, the demonstrations prompted some social media blowback from Trump supporters accusing protesters of sour grapes or worse.

Trump supporters said the protesters were not respecting the democratic process.

As of Thursday, Democrat Hillary Clinton was leading Trump in votes nationwide 47.7 percent to 47.5 percent, but Trump secured victory in the Electoral College.

There didn't appear to be any groundswell of counter-demonstrations and many people  including Trump himself in his acceptance speech  have called for unity.

The Los Angeles mayor added his own views at a news conference.

"Don't just reach out to somebody who has a different color skin or different gender or different religion," Garcetti said. "Reach out to somebody of a different political party. Have those conversations and see where we can move forward together.'

___

Associated Press writer Janie Har in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Indonesia  Fri, November 11 2016

The Foreign Ministry has once again reiterated its serious concern over security in and around Malaysias Sabah waters while the government awaits contact from the kidnappers of two Indonesians abducted earlier this month.

Jakarta previously asked for Malaysias help in securing the release of the captains of two Indonesian ships who were abducted in Sabah waters on Nov. 5, with Minister Retno LP Marsudi contacting her Malaysian counterpart Anifah Aman and a peace advisor to the Philippine president.

The ministry said the two hostages, who hail from Buton in Southeast Sulawesi, had worked legally on their Malaysian fishing vessels prior to their abduction.

to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content

e-Post daily digital newspaper

No advertisements, no interruptions

Privileged access to our events and programs

Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Safrin La Batu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

The police have been suggested to use criminal charges only as a last resort in dealing with any reports of religious defamation, including the case currently implicating inactive Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama.

The Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) said Friday that charging somebody under the Blasphemy Law could violate the person's freedom to express his or her thoughts.

"We have to use the perspective of human rights and democracy first and use a criminal charge as the last resort," YLBHI chairman Alvon Kurnia Palma said.

(Read also: Police retract plan to televise case screening of Ahok blasphemy allegation)

Alvon said the problem with the Blasphemy Law was that it was too broad with no clear-cut boundaries, meaning that anything could be considered a violation of its articles.

In particular, he said, the articles of the law could be used to silence people expressing their thoughts.

Ahok is currently being investigated by the police after being reported last month over remarks he made that were considered to be an insult of the Quran and Islam. The remarks appeared in a video that went viral last month.

On Nov. 4, thousands of Muslims staged a rally in front of Presidential Palace in Central Jakarta, demanding that Ahok be jailed. The rally ended violently with two police cars set on fire.

Alvon said the police should, rather than processing the criminal report, facilitate a meeting between the conflicting parties to resolve the issue. (jun)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Hanum Kusuma Dewi (Bareksa) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Publicly listed coal miner PT Bumi Resources Tbk (BUMI) has been known for its forte to make sensational moves.

Although the Bakrie Group-affiliated firm is still waiting for a court decision on its debt restructuring plan, the companys share price has soared threefold over the past 15 trading days.

Speculation has been the key trigger for the significant increase, which spanned from Oct. 19 to Nov. 8. The latest update suggested that BUMI management is proposing debt conversion to share at the price of Rp 926 (7 US cents) apiece, about four times its current market price. But, what do its fundamentals actually say?

The companys financial report showed that BUMI saw US$19 million in losses from January to June this year, as opposed to $564 million in losses booked in the corresponding period last year. Although it managed to cushion further losses in the first half of this year, the companys revenue fell by 41 percent year-on-year (yoy) to $12.7 million from $21.5 million.

Bumi Resources Financial Performance

Source: BUMI financial report, Bareksa(/)

BUMI has managed to reduce losses after restructuring its debts through the sale of 1.6 million shares of copper producer Newmont Nusa Tenggara (NNT) worth $207 million.

The company, whose revenues mainly come from subsidiaries Kaltim Prima Coal (KPC) and Arutmin, has been facing capital deficiency since 2013. This means that it has bigger liabilities than equities. As of June, BUMIs debt stood at $6.5 billion while its capital deficiency at $2.9 billion.

Although the company has not yet published its third quarter financial report, BUMI has announced that it has seen an increase in sales volume. During the first nine months of this year, it posted a coal sales volume of 64.6 million tons, up by 10.7 percent from 58.4 million tons sold in the same period last year.

At the same time, it also recorded a rising volume in coal mined to 62.7 million tons, or up by 4.5 percent yoy from 60 million tons.

However, the average selling price (ASP) of BUMIs coal during the nine-month period fell by 12.25 percent yoy to $40.1 per ton compared to $45.7 per ton.

A rough calculation by multiplying the ASP and sales volume suggests that BUMIs total revenue from January to September was $2.59 billion, slightly down by 2.99 percent from $2.67 billion it posted in the corresponding period last year. BUMI, meanwhile, plans to publish its third quarter financial performance by December. (hwa)

Source: Bareksa.com
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Buni Yani, the uploader of the video footage containing alleged blasphemous remarks made by Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama, is set to report the inactive governor to the police for alleged libel.

Bunis lawyer Aldwin Rahadian said his client wanted to report Ahok as he had accused him of dishonesty during an interview on Tuesday.

The lawyer further said he had read Ahoks accusations in news reports posted on several online news portals. The governor stated as quoted by the news services that Buni did not edit the video, which showed his speech in Thousand Islands regency on Sept. 27, however, he had lied in transcribing the speech.

We are still collecting evidence on his [Ahoks] possible libelous statement. If Ahokreally did say [that Buni had lied], we will report him to Jakarta Police on Monday or Tuesday," Aldwin told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

(Read also: MUI hopes its opinion is used as a reference in Ahoks blasphemy case)

He believed Ahok's statement had tainted Bunis reputation. His client had not transcribed Ahok's speech,but only wrote a caption and his personal opinion in relation to Ahok's speech, the lawyer said, adding that Ahok's accusation is baseless.

He said Buni might report Ahok for allegedly violating articles 310 and 311of the Criminal Code (KUHP) in relation to libel,and Article 27(3) and Article 45(1) of the 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law on defamation via the Internet.

Previously, Buni reported two activists, Guntur Romli and Muannas Al Aidid, to Jakarta Police over alleged defamation. Romli and Muannas had accused Buni for allegedly provoking public unrest by uploading Ahok's speech to YouTube. (ebf)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin (associated Press) San Diego, United States  Fri, November 11, 2016

California authorities were investigating a reported attack on a college campus of a Muslim student wearing a headscarf as a hate crime Thursday.

San Diego State University's police department said two suspects who assaulted the student on campus Wednesday had targeted her because of her faith and made comments about Donald Trump's election.

The woman was not hurt. Authorities said the assault occurred in a parking complex while the woman was wearing a hijab. The suspects stole her car keys, and the vehicle was later reported missing, authorities said.

"We condemn this hateful act and urge all members of our community to join us in condemning such hateful acts," SDSU President Elliot Hirshman said in a statement.

A similar report came from Northern California, where a woman said she was walking in a parking garage at San Jose State University when a fair-skinned man in a hooded sweatshirt came up behind her and pulled at her head scarf, the university said in a statement.

The victim was briefly choked and lost her balance before the suspect ran away, the statement said.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Thursday issued an information bulletin to law enforcement agencies, outlining laws that prohibit hate crimes.

Meanwhile, a Louisiana student acknowledged she fabricated a reported attack by two men, one she said wore a "Trump" hat.

In the Louisiana case, the Lafayette Police Department said in a statement that it is no longer investigating the 18-year-old woman's claims, which were made within hours of Trump's presidential victory.

Police said the student told investigators she was walking near the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's campus Wednesday morning when she was accosted by two white men who drove up in a gray sedan. Police added the student had claimed the men shouted racial obscenities as they knocked her down and stole her wallet and the headscarf.

Charlie Bier, a spokesman for the university, said a federal privacy law prohibits him from saying whether the student could be disciplined.

Lafayette Police spokesman, Officer Karl Ratcliff, did not immediately respond to emails or phone messages from The Associated Press seeking further comment. But he told The Advocate that the woman offered no explanation for lying. He said the woman might now face charges herself related to filing a false police report.

"We don't take this lightly, and it's made national headlines now," he said. "There will be consequences."
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Esther Samboh (The Jakarta Post) Shenzhen, China  Fri, November 11, 2016

Indonesia is a huge market with over 250 million people, but its wide variety of consumer characteristics and its thousands of islands make it "difficult" to operate in, says Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.

Think of markets like Indonesia. Difficult, not politically, but difficult because there are 17,000 islands in Indonesia. How do you get to an Indonesian consumer? Most brands understand 250 million people, but how do you actually get to them? Even if you can get to them on the internet through our platform, what does that consumer want? Alibaba Group president Michael Evans said at a media briefing on the sidelines of the one-day online shopping sale 11.11 Global Shopping Day in Shenzhen, China, on Friday.

Alibaba Group has a presence in Indonesia through Southeast Asia e-commerce giant Lazada, which Alibaba acquired for US$1 billion earlier this year - its biggest overseas deal so far.

Lazada also operates in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.

"That is our play to make sure [we understand] Southeast Asian consumers, with a population of 600 million, 300 million of which are emerging into the middle class," Evans said.

Alibaba Group has a global expansion strategy to recruit 2 billion new consumers worldwide, of which 1.5 billion are expected to come from growth markets such as Southeast Asia, India, Russia and Brazil.

"[We want to be] not just the gateway to China, but also the gateway to Southeast Asia and the gateway to India. The gateway to consumer markets around the world, markets that want to buy great branded products, retail products and small business products," Evans said.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin (Associated Press) Beijing  Fri, November 11, 2016

China's President Xi Jinping is making a strong call for unity among all Chinese people amid political turmoil in Hong Kong and rising independence sentiment in self-governing Taiwan.

Xi spoke Friday on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen, China's first president and the godfather of Chinese nationalism, who continues to command broad respect within China and the Chinese diaspora.

Speaking to an audience at the colossal Great Hall of the People in central Beijing, Xi again called on Taiwan's leaders to endorse the principle that the island and mainland China are parts of a single Chinese nation. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has refused to make such a concession.

Beijing has also registered alarm over anti-China sentiment in Hong Kong among newly elected members of its legislative council.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

In continuing its crackdown on the nationwide practice of charging illegal levies, National Police investigators arrested on Thursday evening a customs and excise official of Tanjung Emas Port in Semarang, Central Java, for allegedly accepting bribes to ease import procedures at the provinces largest port.

The official, identified as JH, was arrested at a Semarang massage parlor by investigators from the National Polices Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim) after he had allegedly asked a businessman, identified as EMKL, to pay up to Rp 50 million (US$3,700) to get the latters imports documents released.

The businessman was asked to transfer the money to a bank account provided by JH, Bareskrims extraordinary economic crimes director Brig. Gen. Agung Setya said on Friday, as quoted by kompas.com.

The police also raided JHs house shortly after his arrest, during which they confiscated several pieces of evidence, including a laptop and Rp 340 million in cash.

Earlier this month, a government-sanctioned task force arrested an executive with state-owned port operator PT Pelindo III for his alleged involvement in the persistent practice of charging illegal levies at local ports.

The anti-illegal levy task force, which works under the leadership of the National Polices general supervision inspector (Irwasum), Comr. Gen. Dwi Priyatno, identified the executive as RS, who served as the firms operation and business development director. RS was arrested in his office at Tanjung Perak Port in Surabaya, East Java.

Tanjung Perak Port Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Takdir Matanette said members of the task force had also raided RSs office, from which they confiscated Rp 600 million in cash and documents. (hwa)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

The Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) has warned Jakartans not to disrupt the election campaign of any candidate because to do so is against the law and such actions can be categorized as a crime.

There should be no more disruptions if the candidates are campaigning according to the law, said Bawaslu chairman Muhammad as reported by tribunnews.com in Jakarta on Friday.

He said any effort to disturb campaigns was a crime, as outlined in the Law on Regional Elections.

Muhammad, however, admitted that his organization had not prepared for the scale of anger presently being directed toward incumbent Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama and his running mate Djarot saiful Hidayat.

We did not expect these kinds of practices to happen. It is really new. After the incident in Rawa Belong, we are coordinating with the Jakarta Police, said Muhammad.

In Rawa Belong, West Jakarta, on Nov. 2, Ahok was forced to leave the area after protestors turned aggressive. One of Ahoks supporters was hospitalized as a result of the incident.

After the incident, the Jakarta Police deployed more officers to Kedoya, West Jakarta, on Thursday, to support Ahoks attempt to campaign and meet with voters. However, Ahok was again forced to cancel the event. (bbn)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Former Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) spokesman Johan Budi has congratulated his former superior, Antasari Azhar, who was released on parole from prison in Tangerang, Banten, on Thursday.

As someone who has worked together with [Antasari], Im happy about his release, Johan told reporters in Jakarta on Friday.

Johan, who now serves as spokesman to the president, was at the KPK headquarters to honor the antigraft bodys invitation to attend its worker unions anniversary celebration, to which former KPK chairman Antasari was also invited. Johan and Antasari were among the early generation of KPK officials in the early 2000s.

As a KPK leader, Antasari has received praise for his achievements in anticorruption efforts in Indonesia. Under his leadership, the KPK prosecuted former Bank Indonesia deputy governor Aulia Pohan, to whom then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was related through marriage. Pohan was convicted in a bribery case related to the Bank Century bailout.

The South Jakarta District Court sentenced Antasari to 18 years in prison in 2010 for masterminding the murder of state-owned pharmaceutical company PT Putra Rajawali Banjaran director Nasrudin Zulkarnaen.

Yudhoyono removed Antasari from his post at the KPK after the latter was convicted of murder. Antasari was released on parole after serving his sentence for seven-and-a-half years. (fac/ebf)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Police have named former president director of state-owned port operator PT Pelindo III Djarwo Surjanto a suspect for his alleged involvement in the practice of charging illegal levies at Tanjung Perak Port in Surabaya, East Java.

Police investigators working under the government-sanctioned anti-illegal levy task force questioned Djarwo at Tanjung Perak Port Police headquarters on Thursday and named him a suspect in the case.

But, he has yet to be arrested, Djarwos lawyer, Sudiman Sidabukke, said on Friday, as quoted by tempo.co.

Sudiman said police investigators had questioned his client in his capacity as a commissioner of PT Terminal Petikemas Surabaya (PKS), a Pelindo III subsidiary in charge of providing container loading and unloading services at Tanjung Perak.

Earlier this month, the same task force, which works under the leadership of the National Polices general supervision inspector (Irwasum), Comr. Gen. Dwi Priyatno, arrested Pelindo III operations and business development director Rahmat Satria for his alleged involvement in the persistent practice of charging illegal levies at Tanjung Perak, the countrys second-largest port.

Tanjung Perak Port Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Takdir Matanette said members of the task force had also searched Rahmats office, confiscating Rp 600 million (US$45,000) and documents.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

National flag carrier Garuda Indonesia president director Arif Wibowo signed an agreement with the UK government, represented by UK Ambassador to Indonesia Moazzam Malik in Jakarta on Thursday, expressing hope that the cooperation boosts passenger growth to 5 percent per year.

Our traffic is 40,000 passengers per year, if we could surpass 50,000 per year, that would be good, Arif said as quoted by Antara news agency.

Arif said the one-year cooperation expanded the business sectors to not only tourism but also education and trade.

First, tourism, so we can make traveling to the UK interesting and vice versa, and second is the attraction of going to school in the UK, he said.

Arif said Garuda had tapped the potential since last year by opening direct flights from Jakarta to London through Heathrow Airport.

We have been operating direct flights to the UK and we consistently see growth. We have received help from Moazzam Malik to get the best slots at Heathrow, he said.

Arif said occupancy rate for Garuda flights to London had increased from 50 percent in the first three months to 70 percent.

Garuda currently provides three direct flights to UK per week on account of the low season. During the high season it provides five flights a week.

Ambassador Moazzam said tourists from the UK to Indonesia reached 300,000 people a year and he hoped the number could surpass those going to Thailand, which reached 1 million people from UK. (evi)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11 2016

The Golkar Party, the countrys oldest and second-largest political party, is again facing internal strife, with party elites sharply divided over whether Golkar should retain its support for Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama.

A group of Golkar elites led by former party chairman Aburizal Bakrie has called on the police to enforce the law against the governor, who has been accused of committing blasphemy and is backed by a majority of the ruling coalition parties.

Since a Nov. 4 rally against the governor, Golkar has yet to make a statement about whether the police should move forward with legal steps against Ahok. Aburizal, who chairs the partys advisory board, complained on Thursday that his party had not taken a law enforcement stance.

to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content

e-Post daily digital newspaper

No advertisements, no interruptions

Privileged access to our events and programs

Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Nani Afrida (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Presidential Advisory Board member Hasyim Muzadi says the government must remain neutral in an alleged blasphemy case involving Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama.

The state represents the people of Indonesian, so its position should be neutral and it must protect its people, Hasyim Muzadi, who is a former chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama Muslim organization said during a silaturahmi (gathering) between Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu and Muslim scholars in Jakarta on Friday.

Besides urging the state to remain neutral, he also asked people to stay focused in their demands.

All actions and demands are vulnerable. It is easy to be manipulated by other parties, he added. Thousands of Muslims staged a rally in front of Presidential Palace on Nov. 4, demanding the government prosecute Ahok for alleged blasphemy.

(Read also: Police question 10 more people on Ahoks blasphemy case)

Meanwhile, Ryamizard said the public should not mix politics and religion.

Religion is the finite truth as it is from Allah, while politics is a perception, assumptions and interests, he said.

He said Muslim scholars and preachers should encourage people to filter information in mainstream and social media. (jun)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Incumbent Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama has said certain parties have asked him to drop out of the gubernatorial race.

Id rather be arrested and jailed than drop out of the race, Ahok said in the Pantai Mutiara area, North Jakarta, on Thursday as reported by kompas.com.

(Read also: Political actors take advantage of situation: Jokowi)

Without naming the parties, Ahok said he had been asked to drop out on security concerns in the capital.

He claimed the parties said demonstrations against him would continue if he stayed in the race.

He added that the situation would affect the stability of President Joko Jokowi Widodos administration.

If the President was forced to step down, the situation would become uncontrollable in Jakarta, he said.

He said the parties had used blasphemy allegations lodged against him as reason to reject him.

Ahok has apologized for a statement he made during a visit to Thousand Islands regency in late September in which his remarks were deemed blasphemous.

So, at the end, they [the parties] are just afraid of me being governor. Why they are so afraid of me? Ahok said.

Earlier, a group of people staged a rally against Ahok, who was campaigning in the Rawa Belong area, West Jakarta.

Thousands of people took part in a demonstration in front of the State Palace in Central Jakarta on Nov. 4, demanding the police press ahead with legal action against Ahok over allegations of blasphemy. (jun)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

The Indonesian government has said it will not be in a hurry to seek membership of the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal following the election of Republican Donald Trump as the countrys president.

The decision was made considering Trumps promise on the campaign trail to scrap the TPP, a multinational trade deal between the US and countries in the Asia-Pacific.

We are still calculating the costs and benefits of the TPP. This kind of agreement requires thorough negotiation and recently the discussion was getting stressful, Trade Minister Enggartiasto Enggar Lukita said on Friday during a media briefing in Jakarta.

He explained that problems persisted because each country had its own ego in expressing its needs through the mega trade deal.

President Joko Jokowi Widodo expressed his intention to join the 12-member trade bloc last year.

The TPP, which covers 40 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), was signed by Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Australia, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore the US and Vietnam.

The trade deal has not been ratified by the US Congress. (win/bbn)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara has expressed his regret over Indonesia losing e-commerce giant Alibaba founder Jack Ma to Malaysia although President Joko Jokowi Widodo had visited Alibaba headquarters and met Ma himself in Hangzhou, China, in September.

We made a lot of fuss about it but eventually we lost and Malaysia got to him first. Theres already a picture of Jack Ma shaking hands with Malaysian Prime Minister [Najib Razak], Rudiantara said Thursday as quoted by tribunnews.com.

Last week, Malaysian paper The Star published a statement by Najib that Ma had agreed to act as an advisor to the Malaysian government for its digital economy aspirations. "We will be in partnership with Jack on the path and route to the future," said Najib as quoted by The Star on Nov. 4.

In September, Rudiantara said he had proposed that Jack Ma serve as an advisor to Indonesias e-commerce steering committee, which consists of 10 ministers led by Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution.

Read also: Alibaba's Jack Ma agrees to become RI e-commerce adviser

The Indonesian government has just released its 14th economic package on the transition period toward ironing out the legal framework related to e-commerce.

Rudiantara said Indonesia did not despair and the steering committee handling the transition period would still communicate with Ma to ask for his advice about what Indonesia should do to push for the success of Indonesian e-commerce. They could receive advice from anyone, in or outside the country. It could be from anybody, including Jack Ma, Rudiantara said. (evi)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

The Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) proposed three strategies to restore peatlands in Indonesia consisting of rewetting the areas through canal blockage and deep well construction, the replanting of peatland-friendly vegetation and the revitalization of livelihoods in areas surrounding peatlands through the development of plasticulture farming systems, fisheries and ecotourism.

The proposal raised during the Conference of Parties (COP) 22 meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, recently, showing the countrys commitment to follow up on last year's Paris agreement, according to a statement made available to The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Sisilia Nurmala Dewi, Peatland Restoration Agency officer on education, information, participation and partnership, joined panelists from the UN's Food and Agriculture Agency, the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) movement and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in discussions early this month in Marrakech about the way forward after the Paris Agreement came into force, the statement said.

In 2015, Indonesia was ranked fourth on the list of top global emitters after immense fires released about 1.62 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. More than 50 percent of the 2015 fires happened in peatland areas. At the Paris COP 21, Indonesia showed a commitment to reduce its global emissions from peatland fires.

Early this year, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo established a non-structural government agency dedicated to restoring peatlands in Indonesia. The Peatland Restoration Agency is aiming to restore 2 million hectares of peatland by 2020. (evi)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Fedina S. Sundaryani and Stefani Ribka (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

With other Southeast Asian countries already having prepared the ground for the digital economy to prosper, the Indonesian government has finally taken the initiative to spur the growth of e-commerce within its own boarders.

Announced on Thursday evening, the 14th economic policy package will tackle eight issues that could determine the success of President Joko Jokowi Widodos goal of turning Indonesia into the biggest digital economy of the region by 2020 with a targeted value of US$130 billion. The eight issues are funding, taxation, consumer protection, human resources, logistics, communication infrastructure, cyber security and the establishment of a project management office.

The government expects the new policy package, dubbed the e-commerce road map, to create 1,000 techno-preneurs with businesses that have a total value of $10 billion by 2020.

Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution said the e-commerce road map, which will be translated into a presidential decree, was essential to boost connectivity and efficiency in the industry.

The government also expects the road map to better protect national interests and give priority to small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups.

We also want to boost creative innovation and invention of new economic activities, especially for youths who enjoy playing around with new things, he said during a press conference to unveil the package on Thursday.

Indonesias e-commerce market is estimated to be worth Rp 18 trillion ($1.4 billion) as of 2015, with 37 million consumers from a total population of 255 million, according to World Economic Outlook data compiled by the Internet Service Providers Association. The association expects the e-commerce market will be worth Rp 25 trillion by 2016, with 49 million consumers.

Meanwhile, Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara presented some details of the road map, which includes grants or subsidies to help start-ups boost their chances of surviving in the tough e-commerce industry.

The government also aims to reduce taxes for locals investing in start-ups and simplify taxation procedures for e-commerce start-ups with a turnover of less than Rp 4.8 billion a year, so that the final income tax will only come to 1 percent.

In terms of logistics, this is interesting, because we have already decided to reposition [state-owned postal company] Pos Indonesia as a logistical platform for Indonesian e-commerce, Rudiantara said.

Since taking office in 2014, Jokowi has issued 13 stimulus packages aimed at eliminating business hurdles.

A recent report from management consulting firm McKinsey & Company suggested that by going digital, Indonesia would be able to unleash its next level of economic growth to the tune of $150 billion in terms of impact by the year 2025 if it were able to address the most pressing issues adequately.

The report suggested that while Indonesia was admirable in terms of the number of internet and smartphone users, it still did not adequately embrace modern technology. Internet penetration in Indonesia has only reached 39 percent of the population, despite smartphone penetration standing at 43 percent.

The report partly places the blame for the low penetration on Indonesias relatively weak information and communication technology infrastructure. Indonesias internet bandwidth, for instance, is still at a relatively low average rate of 6.2 kbps per user, far below Malaysias 27.2 kbps and the Philippines 27.7 kbps.

Bank Central Asia (BCA) economist David Sumual was optimistic about the latest economic policy package, saying Indonesias market was large and investors had already begun to show interest in the business.

David, however, warned the governments digital economy dream could end if the country failed to improve infrastructure and logistics.

It will not reach its maximum potential if our logistics remain the same. It may be alright in the bigger cities, but how will it work in the remote areas? Weak infrastructure remains our biggest task.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Ni Komang Erviani (The Jakarta Post) Nusa Dua, Bali  Fri, November 11 2016

The 85th Interpol General Assembly concluded on Thursday by electing a top Chinese law enforcement official as the new president, as well as approving several agreements to tackle the increased number of transnational organized crimes (TOC).

Public Security Vice Minister Meng Hongwei was elected to replace Frenchwoman Mireille Ballestrazzi as Interpol president.

Ballestrazzi, in her speech during the closing ceremony, emphasized that full support will be given to Hongwei.

to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content

e-Post daily digital newspaper

No advertisements, no interruptions

Privileged access to our events and programs

Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Medan  Fri, November 11 2016

Prosecutors have demanded that the Medan Corruption Court in North Sumatra sentence former North Sumatra governor Gatot Pujo Nugroho to eight years in prison for his alleged role in the misuse of social aid funds.

Prosecutor Viktor also asked the judges, led by Djaniko Girsang, on Thursday to order Gatot to pay Rp 2.8 billion (US$212,800) in restitution to the state or spend another four years behind bars. According to the prosecutors, Gatot conspired with former National Unity and Community Protection Agency (Kesbanglinmas) official Eddy Sofyan, who has been sentenced to five years in prison for his involvement in the same case.

Gatot has been charged with embezzling Rp 4 billion (US$303,836) from the provinces 2012/2013 social aid budget.

to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content

e-Post daily digital newspaper

No advertisements, no interruptions

Privileged access to our events and programs

Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Belu  Fri, November 11 2016

The development of an Islamic vocational senior high school in Manleten subdistrict, East Tasifeto district, Belu regency, East Nusa Tenggara, is being protested by local residents.

The residents argue that the Rp 1.9 billion (US$144,000) development funded by the 2016 state budget is not being conducted properly as it should have involved coordination with the subdistrict and district administrations and a hearing held with local community figures.

We want the development activities stopped within two days, Johanes Aleuk said at a forum held with speakers of the Belu Legislative Council.

to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content

e-Post daily digital newspaper

No advertisements, no interruptions

Privileged access to our events and programs

Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11 2016

The Jakarta Corruption Court sentenced House of Representative member Budi Supriyanto to five years in prison on Thursday after being found guilty of corruption.

The Golkar Party politician was ordered to pay a Rp 300 million (US$22,770) fine or face another two months imprisonment.

Presiding judge Franky Tambuwun said Budi was proven to have received a S$404,000 bribe from PT Windhu Tunggal Utama director Abdul Khoir in connection to an infrastructure project in Maluku and North Maluku.

to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content

e-Post daily digital newspaper

No advertisements, no interruptions

Privileged access to our events and programs

Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Ina Parlina and Margareth S. Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Thursday saw the second time within a week that President Joko Jokowi Widodo made gestures seemingly designed to send the message that he was the highest commander of the countrys armed forces, following the Nov. 4 anti-Ahok rally that the President claimed had been orchestrated by political actors.

Jokowi, unlike his predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is a civilian with no military background. On Thursday he visited the headquarters of the Armys Special Forces (Kopassus) in Cijantung, East Jakarta, a visit he claimed was part of National Heroes Day commemorations.

To balance against the threat of another street protest that many expect to take place on Nov. 25, Jokowi signalled that as the highest commander of the armed forces, he could deploy the elite forces at a moments notice.

Here, there is the Sandhi Yudha [unit], other commandos and the Gultor [unit]. These are the reserve forces that I, as the highest military commander, through the chief of the Indonesian Military [TNI], could deploy for certain needs, Jokowi said.

Sandhi Yudha is a combat intelligence unit that runs clandestine operations and counterinsurgency, and Gultor is an anti-terrorism unit.

As a follow-up to the Nov. 4 rally, which ended in violence, Muslim groups have pledged to stage another rally on Nov. 25 to put pressure on the Jakarta Police to expedite their probe into the alleged blasphemy involving incumbent Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama.

In the days following the rally, Jokowi took steps to tell the public that he was in charge of the situation.

Jokowi started his week by visiting the Armys headquarters, where he told more than 2,000 military personnel from various elite units, such as the Army Strategic Reserve Command (Kostrad), Air Force Special Forces (Paskhas) and the Navys Marine Corps, that he was the highest military commander in the land and ordered them not to tolerate any movement aimed at dividing the nation with provocative [actions].

On Tuesday, Jokowi paid a visit to the National Police headquarters where he also told the police to remain steadfast against pressures from provocative groups and certain interests.

During his visit to the Kopassus headquarters, Jokowi was joined by TNI commander Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo, an apparent move designed to quash speculation that Jokowi would dismiss Gatot for his defense of the rights of Muslim groups to stage a protest against Ahok.

Unconfirmed reports have published quotes allegedly from Gatot, criticizing Jokowi for treating protesters like terrorists.

Jokowi shrugged off the rumors on Wednesday, saying that: This is why I brought along the TNI chief with me here to emphasize that there is no plan to dismiss the TNI chief. The rumors are aimed at increasing tension.

Gatot also denied that he made statements criticizing the President. Gatot stated that he would continue to pledge his loyalty to the President.

Gatot blamed the rumors on a proxy war aimed at attacking the countrys unity.

Two years into his administration, Jokowi is getting more confident in dealing with the military as indicated by his decision to wear a suit and tie during his trip to the Kopassus headquarters.

Last year, Jokowi was seen at least twice wearing military fatigues, including during an occasion when he met with leaders of a Muslim group at the State Palace. The State Palace immediately said that Jokowi did not have time to change and was force
TheJakartaPost

Please Update your browser

Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.

Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Fadli (The Jakarta Post) Batam, Riau Islands  Fri, November 11, 2016

The Western Fleet Quick Response (WFQR) of the Navys Tanjungpinang Naval Base IV has seized 19 containers allegedly carrying illegal goods from Singapore, including Singaporean armed forces uniforms.

The Navy said it was investigating the motive behind the alleged smuggling of military attributes into Indonesia.

Naval base commander Commodore S.Irawan said the container carrying Singaporean military uniforms was not the main target of the WFQR team. During its operation on Wednesday, the team initially aimed to inspect cargo carried by shipping vessel KLM Putri Setia, which had docked in one of illegal ports in Batam.

KLM Putri Setia carried various electronics, such as LED TVs, refrigerators and washing machines. The goods were put in 19 containers, said Irawan on Thursday evening. For further investigation, the WFQR team moved the containers back into the vessel, which was later taken to the Tanjung Pinang Naval Base.

It was during a joint security check with customs and excise officers that the WFQR team found SAF striped-camouflage uniforms and several walkie-talkies in one container.

Were amazed how these Singaporean military uniforms were smuggled into Batam. For what? We are still investigating the matter, said Irawan.

He said the team was questioning the vessels captain, identified only as Acai, to determine where the illegal goods came from.

Singapore has always denied that goods used or new had been illegally exported to Batam. I think this finding has proven the rampant export of garbage from Singapore to our country, said Irawan. (ebf)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

The National Polices Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim) on Friday questioned three men from South Sulawesi, who reported Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama to the police for alleged blasphemy.

Muhammad Faisal Silenang, the South Sulawesi legal bureau head of the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), who arrived in Jakarta from Makassar on Friday morning, said he had prepared himself to be questioned by police investigators.

"We brought a soft and hard copy of the Qurans translation for the questioning. We will give it to police," Faisal said at Bareskrims office in Central Jakarta.

Faisal will be questioned together with Arman, spokesman of the South Sulawesi Muslim United Forum and Habib Muchsin Al-Habsyi, FPIs South Sulawesi branch chairman.

Police have received 11 reports in regard to Ahoks alleged blasphemyboth by organizations and individuals, including those from Jakarta, Sumatra and Sulawesi.

Thus far, police have questioned 43 witnesses in relation to the case sparked by Ahoks speech during his visit to Thousand Islands regency in late September, when he made reference to a Quranic verse.

In part of his speech, Ahok allegedly said, In your inner hearts, ladies and gentlemen you may feel you cannot vote for me, because [you have been] lied to by the use of Surah al-Maidah, verse 51. [] So, if you cannot vote for me because you are afraid of being condemned to hell, you do not need to feel uneasy as you are being fooled. It is alright. (bbn)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

The National Police have retracted their plan to allow television stations to broadcast live the case screening regarding Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnamas alleged blasphemy.

Although it will be restricted from viewers nationwide, the case screening will be transparent and accountable because outsiders from different interest groups will attend and monitor the process, National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Boy Rafli Amar said.

Representatives from various elements  those who filed the reports, experts, Kompolnas [National Police Commission] and some other invitees  will attend [the case screening], Boy told the press on the sidelines of a ceremony at the National Polices Mobile Brigade (Brimob) headquarters in Depok, West Java, on Friday.

But it will not be open for the media to televise it, he emphasized.

Earlier, the police planned to televise proceedings. Boy did not explain the reason for the change.

However, Boys announcement comes days after his institution was widely criticized for its plan to hold an open case screening.

Boy explained that in order to help the police make a careful decision, the case screening, which is slated to take place next Wednesday, would see experts in Islamic teaching, language and criminal law, offer their insights into the case.

Previously, National Police chief. Gen. Tito Karnavian said police investigators would hold a case screening in relation to a blasphemy case, as instructed by President Joko Jokowi Widodo. The Presidents order came following a large-scale demonstration in Jakarta on Nov. 4, in which more than 100,000 people took to the streets, demanding the immediate arrest of Ahok on allegations of blasphemy. (bbn)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

The National Police have confirmed that a case screening for a blasphemy case implicating incumbent Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama will be held on Nov.15.

The case screening is set to take place in the main meeting room of the National Police headquarters at 8 or 9 a.m. on Tuesday, the polices Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim) chief Comr. Gen. Ari Dono Sukmanto said at his office in Central Jakarta on Friday.

He further said a case screening was usually held behind closed doors; however, in line with President Joko Jokowi Widodos orders, the case screening would be open to the public to ensure transparency in the handling of the case.

(Read also: Police gear up for open case screening in Ahok case)

The polices general supervision inspectorate (Irwasum), Internal Affairs Division (Propam) and the law division, as well as the Indonesian Ombudsman and the National Police Commission (Kompolnas), will attend the case screening. All parties that have reported Ahok to the police for alleged blasphemy also will be present. Ahok will also attend the case screening.

Ari said reporters would only be permitted to cover the opening of the case screening. The police will publish the results of their investigation several days after the case screening, he went on.

A case screening is a phase of a criminal investigation in which investigators decide whether evidence collected is solid enough for the police to name someone a suspect in the case. (ebf)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

National Police chief Gen. Tito Karnavian has called on his subordinates nationwide to remain loyal to President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and reject voices from outside telling them the contrary.

As servants of the country, we must maintain our loyalty [to the President], especially when the country is experiencing [unpredictable political] dynamics, Tito said on Friday when addressing members of the police's Mobile Brigade (Brimob) at the units headquarters in Depok, West Java.

Tito took to the stage in a reception to welcome President Joko Jokowi Widodo, who would visit the compound later in the day.



In his remarks, Tito repeatedly emphasized on the non-negotiable loyalty of all members of the police institution to serve the legitimate government under President Jokowi, who also serves as the commander of the National Police.

He specifically cited the crucial role of all Brimob personnel to protect the President, as well as the nation in times of rebellion against the legitimate authority of the state.



"You are the hope when insurgency emerges," he said. "Our highest commander will come and deliver his instruction, which we must obey".



Although Tito did not elaborate the context of his speech, his words seem to reflect the tension and threats against Jokowi's administration following an initially peaceful mass demonstration in front of the State Palace on Nov. 4 that suddenly turned violent.

Jokowi, unlike his predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is a civilian with no military background.

As a follow-up to the Nov. 4 rally, Muslim groups have pledged to stage another rally on Nov. 25 to put pressure on the Jakarta Police to expedite their probe into the alleged blasphemy involving incumbent Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama.

Earlier this week, Jokowi visited the headquarters of the National Police, the Indonesian Military (TNI) and the Army's Special Forces (Kopassus), moves that many see as an effort to send signals that the President is in charge of the situation. (hwa)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

With e-commerce booming in the country, the government is pushing state-owned postal service PT Pos Indonesia to benefit from this growing industry by providing logistical support for online businesses.

Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara said the government had instructed Pos Indonesia to intensify efforts to pursue such opportunities and expand its current business core, which currently relies on mail and package delivery for individuals and corporate customers.

This [business] repositioning strategy will transform Pos Indonesia from a company that focuses on mail delivery to becoming the logistical backbone of Indonesias e-commerce, Rudiantara said on Friday, as quoted by Antara news agency.

With more than 3,000 outlets across the nation, Pos Indonesia, Rudiantara added, could offer reliable services at relatively low prices to help e-commerce companies reduce expenses.

E-commerce players dont need to establish their own logistical unit, as they can share a single logistical platform provided by Pos Indonesia, he said.

With other countries in Southeast Asia having already prepared the groundwork for their digital economies to prosper, the Indonesian government has finally taken initiative to spur the growth of e-commerce within its own borders.

On Thursday, the government announced 14th economic policy package, which planned to tackle eight specific issues that could determine the success of President Joko Jokowi Widodos ambition of turning the country into the biggest digital economy of the region by 2020 with a targeted value of US$130 billion. The eight issues are funding, taxation, consumer protection, human resources, logistics, communication infrastructure, cyber security and the establishment of a project management office.

The role of Pos Indonesia in supporting e-commerce is also addressed in the package. (hwa)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Rod McGuirk (Associated Press) Canberra  Fri, November 11, 2016

The United States and Australia are close to announcing a deal in which the US would resettle hundreds of asylum seekers banished by Australia to Pacific island camps, a newspaper reported on Friday.

The US had agreed to accept up to 1,800 refugees held for up to three years at Australia's expense in camps on the impoverished island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, The Australian newspaper reported.

Such an agreement struck with the Obama administration could be opposed by President-elect Donald Trump, who has called for a moratorium or tight restrictions on Muslim immigration. Most of the asylum seekers are Muslims from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The agreement could empty the camps that have been condemned by human rights groups as a cruel abrogation of Australia's responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention.

Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull declined to comment on negotiations with the United States.

Rebecca Gardner, spokeswoman for the US Embassy in Australia, would not comment on the newspaper report, saying the State Department did not "comment on or discuss diplomatic negotiations."

Senior government minister Christopher Pyne praised the prospect of such an agreement being finalized before the Obama administration ends.

"There certainly is time  two and a half months is plenty of time  and if that's the case, it will be a great achievement for the Turnbull government," Pyne told Nine Network television.

Senior opposition lawmaker Anthony Albanese said "if this occurs, that will be a good thing."

The opposition center-left Labor Party criticized a previous deal struck between Australia and the United States in 2007 to swap refugees, arguing that the prospect of US resettlement would attract more asylum seekers to Australian shores.

Under that deal, up to 200 refugees a year held on Nauru could have been swapped for Cubans and Haitians intercepted at sea while trying to get to the US and held at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But no refugee was ever traded under that deal.

Turnbull announced at Obama's Leaders' Summit on Refugees in September that Australia would participate in the US-led program to resettle Central American refugees from a camp in Costa Rica. Australia would also increase its refugee intake by 5,000 to 18,750 a year.

Turnbull said at the time that the agreement to resettle Central Americans was "not linked to any other resettlement discussions" involving Australia's refugees.

Immigration Department Secretary Chief Michael Pezzullo told a parliamentary committee on Friday that "today we are closer than we were yesterday" to resettling asylum seekers from Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said this week he was looking for countries that will accept all asylum seekers bound for Australia, including those who have had their refugee claims rejected but refuse to go home. Iran won't take back Iranians who won't to go home voluntarily.

Almost 1,300 asylum seekers are on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Hundreds more have come to the Australia for medical treatment and have taken court action to prevent them being send back to the islands.

Few refugees have accepted offers to resettle in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia because most hope that Australia will eventually take them in.

Australia refuses to resettle any refugee who has arrived by boat since the date the tough policy was announced, July 19, 2013.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Grace D. Amianti, Prima Wirayani, Stefani Ribka and Fedina S. Sundaryani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Indonesia will continue to face a challenging economic outlook in 2017 as global uncertainties persist and domestic consumption remains subdued.



Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said Thursday that the government would focus on domestic sources of growth and continue strengthening coordination with other financial authorities.



Her comments came on the back of an unexpected Donald Trump victory in the US presidential election. She acknowledged that, based on his previous statements and debates, his upcoming economic policies would affect international trade quite significantly as the US was still the worlds largest economy.



His views and policies regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP] and global trade, as well as relations with China, will affect the world. In terms of US-China trade, this will affect Indonesia as we are more exposed to Asia, she said in a press conference.



Both the US and China are Indonesias top trading partners and among its largest investors as well. Data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) shows the US was listed as the countrys largest export destination and its fifth-largest import source.



Apparel and clothing accessories were the top products exported to the US, while machinery was what Indonesia imported the most of from the US.



There is also concern about the future path of global financial markets, as Trump previously indicated he might replace US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen. The move, if realized, would likely spell trouble for global markets.



In Indonesias case, a market rout would pose a challenge as the country needs to raise financing from global investors to support its 5.1 percent economic growth target next year.



Bank Indonesia (BI) Governor Agus Martowardojo said in the press conference that global markets had previously predicted the Fed would postpone its plan to raise its policy rate one time in December this year, but Trumps victory and his previous statements on the US economy had reversed the prediction.



The prediction on the Feds plan to raise its rate one time in December was included in our calculation when we cut our seven-day reverse repo rate by 25 basis points in October. The Fed is also predicted to increase its rate twice next year and thrice in 2018, he said.



As the risks loom, the silver lining may be in the governments massive infrastructure projects that are expected to bear fruit next year.



Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution claimed that infrastructure and deregulation would remain key priorities next year, along with other improvements to reduce the dependency of domestic industries on imports.



The infrastructure projects, as they roll out, are expected to have trickle-down effects triggering loan demand and pushing credit growth to between 7 percent and 11 percent in 2017, higher than this years prediction of about 7 percent to 9 percent.



Meanwhile, economists suggest the government strengthen domestic purchasing power and continue its taxation reform, including by improving the taxpayer database, to help increase state revenues.



CIMB Niaga chief economist Adrian Panggabean predicted a 5.1 percent growth next year that could only be achieved if the government continued spending efficiently and provided an economic catalyst that would accelerate private investment and trigger state revenues, such as lowering tax rates.



Improving economic growth through infrastructure projects will help fuel positive sentiments among stock market investors as well, said Danareksa analyst Lucky Bayu Purnomo, who projects the Jakarta Composite Index (JCI) would reach the level of 5,700 sometime next year.



Consumer goods and retail sectors are still favored by investors, followed by banking, property and infrastructure. Stocks in the mining sector are already too expensive and overbought, Lucky said.



The financial market will also get some boosts from BIs dovish monetary policy, Daewoo Securities Indonesia research head Taye Shim said, although it will take time for the real sector to feel the effect.



The JCI, the benchmark of the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX), gained more than 18 percent of its value so far this year, the most among its peers. It peaked at 5,472 on Oct. 4, but has yet to return to its all-time record high of 5,518 booked on March 31 last year. (win)

____________________________



To receive comprehensive and earlier access to The Jakarta Post print edition, please subscribe to our epaper through iOS' iTunes, Android's Google Play, Blackberry World or Microsoft's Windows Store. Subscription includes free daily editions of The Nation, The Star Malaysia, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Asia News.

For print subscription, please contact our call center at (+6221) 5360014 or subscription@thejakartapost.com
There were 16,300 U.S. advisers working in South Vietnam at the time of JFK's death. This reflected the support Kennedy pledged to South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem in their combined efforts to contain communism. This partnership ended abruptly as Diem was assassinated by Vietnamese forces on Nov. 2, 1963, a few weeks before Kennedy's untimely fate. Recordings of private conversations suggest Kennedy felt guilty for Diem's death and felt "we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it."
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Alumni of the Association of Islamic Students (HMI) have filed a report with the National Police's Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim) against former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) over alleged hate speech.

The group of HMI alumni accused Yudhoyono of violating Article 160 of the Criminal Code on provocation and Article 16 of the 2008 law on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination in a speech earlier this month, which is believed to have encouraged the massive demonstration against Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama last Friday.

"[Yudhoyono] seemed to promote peace at the beginning of his speech, but it eventually included a discriminative message against a certain ethnic group," the coordinator of the student group, Mustaghfirien, told the press at Bareskrim headquarters on Thursday.

He cited parts of Yudhoyono's speech, in which the former president allegedly asked all Muslims to stage the rally if demands to prosecute Ahok were not fulfilled.

"Yudhoyono stated that one person [Ahok] should not lock up the expectations of 200 million Indonesians. Such a statement is political," Mustaghfirien added, emphasizing that Yudhoyono's remarks were seen as an attempt to attack Ahok in favor of his son, Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, who is running against the non-active governor in the Jakarta gubernatorial election scheduled for February next year.

Yudhoyono drew nationwide attention when delivering the speech at his private residence in Cikeas, West Java, two days before Fridays mass rally, which was initiated by the Islam Defenders Front (FPI). Many believe Yudhoyono masterminded the anti-Ahok rally. (dmr)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Magelang, Central Java  Fri, November 11, 2016

Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn visited Borobudur temple in Magelang, Central Java, on Thursday, to look at reliefs detailing Buddhas life, from birth to enlightenment.

Her entourage arrived at the temple at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, entering from the west side of the temple, the entrance reserved for state guests.

Security officers from Indonesia and Thailand guarded the princess. The media was not allowed to approach the princess for interview.

Mura Aristina, a staffer at the Borobudur Conservation Agency, said it was the princess third visit to Borobudur. She previously visited in 1986 and 1989, Mura said.

Mura said Princess Sirindhorn was impressed with how the public and the management of Borobudur conserved the temple. She asked why the Kunto Bimo Statue was now off limits.

Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn (left) during her visit to Borobudur temple in Central Java on Nov. 10.(Antara/Anis Efizudin)

She asked and I told her the rule was established to protect the statue and visitors, Mura said as quoted by kompas.com.

She said the princess accepted the explanation and decided to not light a candle to avoid damaging the temple.

The princess spent about two hours at the temple, reading the biography of Buddha on the reliefs. She took pictures and made notes, Mura said.

The princess will return to Borobudur in January 2017, Mura said, to pray for her late father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej. She is expected to visit with Thai religious figures.

Princess Sirindhorn is the third child of King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit. (evi)

Correction: An earlier version of one of the captions in this article contained an error as it stated that Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn posed with members of the Royal Thai security detail. The correct attribution is Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn poses with Thai military cadets. We apologize for the error. Editor
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Philip M. Parker (The Jakarta Post) Singapore  Fri, November 11 2016

A number of my colleagues and executives have been asking me what I think about the Donald Trump victory. Its amazing I say enthusiastically to rather bewildered faces. I am a born optimist and see the glass half full. Let me elaborate.

Full disclosure, before being a supporter of Mitt Romney, I supported Herman Caine. I also preferred Dr. Ben Carson to be the Republican nominee.

I am a lifelong Republican and first voted for Ronald Reagan. I always have supported the non-establishment candidate; especially ones leaning toward the more freedom is always better than less freedom philosophy.

to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content

e-Post daily digital newspaper

No advertisements, no interruptions

Privileged access to our events and programs

Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita has said the victory of Republican Donald Trump, who promoted a protectionist trade policy during his US presidential election campaign, would not have an immediate impact on US-Indonesia trade relations because no country could isolate itself from international trade.

The minister said that although Trump had vowed to, among others things, restrain trade through increased tariffs on imported goods, his background as a businessman would play a huge role in the policymaking process, which might create some positive economic effects.

We believe that our trade relations will increase especially because Trump has a background as a businessman []. He will make decisions from that point of view, he said at the Trade Ministry in Jakarta on Friday.

Enggartiasto further said the government was currently waiting to see names Trump would appoint to fill economic-related posts in his cabinet because this would give hints about the direction of his policies.

According to official data, Indonesia exports to the US amounted to US$16.26 billion in 2015. Data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) shows the US is Indonesias largest export destination and fifth-largest source of imports. Main goods exported to the US are apparel and clothing accessories while products Indonesia imports from the US are mostly machinery. (win/ebf)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, November 11, 2016

Ciamis Regent Iing Syan Arifin and Purwakarta Regent Dedi Mulyadi visited a 6-year-old girl, Oktaviani, who was born with an incomplete skull and malformed face in Banjarsari district in Ciamis, West Java.

The regents aim to help the family get proper medical treatment for Oktaviani at Hasan Sadikin Hospital in Bandung, the capital of West Java.

Oktavianis mother, Tati Nurhayati, 40, said as quoted by kompas.com that her child could only sit in her arms and was not able to see or walk. She has lumps covering her eyes and her skull in the back of her head had not formed, causing cerebral problems.

She was born like this. The doctor said she would not survive a week, but Alhamdulillah [thank God] she has grown big, Tati said Friday.

Because of her malformed face, Oktaviani has to eat through straws.

Tati and her husband, Suryana, have three other children besides Oktaviani. The couple work at a timber factory. She said they had never taken Oktaviani to a doctor, opting for traditional medication instead, which they considered cheaper.

The family lives in a village dozens of kilometers from downtown Ciamis.

Purwakarta Regent Dedi learned of Oktavianis condition and reached out to her family. With Regent Iing, they visited Tatis house.

Oktaviani was sent to Bandung for a check-up. Dedi said they would shoulder all the medical costs for Oktaviani.

Together we would help with her face surgery, and we can find a team of specialists that can handle such a case. We will find them abroad if necessary, he said. Dedi said he hoped the public would also help Oktaviani.

Iing said he received reports about Oktaviani from the village authority. He said he appreciated Dedis help for a Ciamis family. (evi)
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Robin McDowell and Margie Mason (Associated Press) Danville, Calif., United States  Fri, November 11, 2016

Mike Baughman considered himself one of the lucky ones, returning from Vietnam without any major injuries or psychological scars. But after falling ill nearly a half-century later, he found out he did not escape the war after all.

The 64-year-old is among hundreds of veterans who have been diagnosed with a rare bile duct cancer that may be linked to their time in the service and an unexpected source: parasites in raw or poorly cooked river fish.

The worms infect an estimated 25 million people, mostly in Asia, but are less known in America. They can easily be wiped out with a few pills early on. Left untreated, a cancer known as cholangiocarcinoma can develop, often killing patients just a few months after symptoms appear.

The US government acknowledges that liver flukes, endemic in the steamy jungles of Vietnam, are likely killing some former soldiers. Ralph Erickson, who heads post-deployment health services at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said about 700 cholangiocarcinoma patients have passed through the agency's medical system in the past 15 years.

Less than half of those submitted claims for benefits, in part because they were unaware of a potential link to time in service. Of the claims submitted, 3 out of 4 have been rejected, according to data obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act.

The VA requires veterans to show medical conditions are at least "as likely as not" related to their time in service to receive financial help, but doctors note that often isn't easy with bile duct cancer caused by liver flukes.

Mike Baughman holds a 1971 photo of himself in his US Army uniform at his home in Danville, Calif., on Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2016.(AP/ Ben Margot)

The parasites typically go undetected, sometimes living for more than 25 years without making their hosts sick. The body reacts by trying to wall off the organisms. This causes inflammation and scarring and, over time, can lead to cancer. The first symptoms are often jaundice, itchy skin and rapid weight loss. By then, the disease is usually advanced.

If American doctors better understood bile duct cancer and the potential risks to those who served in Vietnam, they could use ultrasounds to check veterans for inflammation, and then surgery might be possible for some of them, said Jeff Bethony, a liver fluke expert at George Washington University.

"Early is key," he said, adding he regularly receives desperate letters from veterans' family members. "The VA should be testing for this."

Once diagnosed, most men don't realize there may be a connection to their service in Vietnam. The few who figure it out often spend their final months fighting for recognition and benefits, leaving them feeling angry and abandoned, as many did when they first came home from the war.

"Hard to believe," Baughman said in his living room, flipping through a photo album from his war days. "I dodged all those bullets, then get killed by a fish."

Baughman had just turned 19 when his draft number came up in late 1970. He was soon deployed to central Vietnam near Hue to do reconnaissance in the mountains. Although he was the youngest in his Army unit, he quickly became one of its most valuable members.

"The Vietnamese like to shoot the first guy in line, and last guy," Baughman said. "And so that's what I trained to do: Be the first guy in."

He would walk point clearing thick jungle with a machete and, thanks partly to growing up hunting in the hills of West Virginia, he proved gifted at noticing the smallest twig or leaf brushed out of place by the enemy. It was his job to spot booby traps and potential ambushes.

Often on long missions, sometimes forced to sleep outside with sheets of monsoon rain pelting down, his unit would run out of rations and go fishing for dinner near the border with Laos.

"We would throw a grenade in the water, and then scoop them off the river floor," Baughman said. "We called it 'fish on a stick.'"

The men would use a helmet and a tiny blue smokeless flame to cook the fish as best they could, but it never really got done.

Years later, when he returned home, those makeshift meals became just another story he would tell about roughing it in Vietnam. He went on to earn a master's degree and became a successful engineer in Silicon Valley working for Atari, Apple and others.

In October 2013, he was about to remarry and decided to get a long-overdue physical. He felt fine, but his blood work indicated there might be a problem with his liver. Further testing revealed he had bile duct cancer.

After researching the condition, Baughman discovered that worms ingested decades ago in that raw "fish on a stick" could be killing him. He turned to the VA for help, and his private physician wrote a letter highlighting the potential connection between the worms and the disease.

He went to a VA doctor as well, who also acknowledged liver flukes were one of the main risk factors for the cancer but concluded there was "no evidence of infection" from Baughman's service time.

He was twice denied benefits in 2015, and is waiting for the results of his latest appeal.

This 1970s photo provided by Mike Baughman shows him, center, with colleagues while serving in the US Army in the Vietnam War. At 64, Baughman is among hundreds of veterans who have been diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare form of bile duct cancer that may be linked to their time in the service and an unexpected source: parasites in raw or poorly cooked river fish. (Courtesy Mike Baughman via AP/-)

Liver flukes are found mainly in parts of Southeast Asia, China and South Korea, where residents and tourists alike risk infection from specific types of freshwater fish such as tilapia and carp.

In one location in Laos, researchers found liver flukes  which can survive pickling and fermentation  in about 60 percent of villagers, and in some parts of Vietnam, up to 40 percent were infected. Experts say it's hard to know how many people in the region may be dying from cholangiocarcinoma caused by the parasites because there are few cancer registries.

In northeastern Thailand, where many villagers have a taste for the sour fish dish pla som, new bile duct cancers affect about 84 in 100,000 people, the world's highest recorded rate. Little research has been conducted outside of Thailand, where mobile clinics routinely perform bile duct ultrasound screenings in hard-hit areas.

Once cancer is detected, surgery is sometimes an option, depending on the tumor's location. Liver transplants typically aren't performed due to organ shortages and poor prognosis.

In the United States, cholangiocarcinoma is extremely rare, with roughly 5,000 people diagnosed each year, including some Asian immigrants who ate infected fish in their native countries. Liver flukes aren't the only risk factor for the disease; others include hepatitis B and C, cirrhosis and bile duct stones.

But some physicians say for Vietnam veterans diagnosed decades after US-backed Saigon fell to communist forces in 1975, the cancer is "as likely as not" tied to their service time. And by VA standards, that should be enough to receive benefits.

Asked if it was likely men were infected on the battlefield, Dr. Banchob Sripa, a leading expert on the disease at Khon Kaen University in Thailand, said "it is the only way to explain it." He said doctors in the US and Australia, which also sent troops to the war, have contacted him for help in determining whether the parasites are to blame for veterans' cancer.

More than 100 appeals for cholangiocarcinoma dating back to the early 1990s are on the VA's website. Though Erickson said there have been no significant case increases among veterans in recent years, data collected following an AP inquiry showed the number of benefit claims has increased sixfold since 2003.

Claims hit a high of 60 last year, with nearly 80 percent denied. Decisions appear to be haphazard. Some are approved automatically. Others, presented with the same evidence, are denied.

For instance, some rejections were based on the fact that parasites were not found in stool samples, but those tests were conducted years after the worms would have died. Other claims were dismissed because the veteran did not report his illness within a year of leaving Vietnam, yet symptoms typically don't appear until decades later.

VA officials say while they're sympathetic, it's up to the men to prove that liver flukes from Vietnam are killing them. They say because the cancer remains rare, it would be unrealistic and onerous to carry out regular screenings.

"This is still a legal process that both the VA and the veteran have to go through, and we will look at each case and all the evidence that is presented to us and make a determination at that point," said Steve Westerfeld, a spokesman for the VA's Veterans Benefits Administration. "Certainly any veteran has an opportunity to appeal."

Many do, sometimes two or three times before either getting approved or giving up.

"It's discouraging to fight for something that you think should probably be available for people who actually went over and served," Mike Brown of Valencia, California, told the AP earlier this year after learning he had bile duct cancer. He died last month at age 68, just days after finding out the VA had approved his claim.

This undated photo provided by his family shows Michael L. Brown during his service in Vietnam. (Courtesy Roxanne Brown via AP/-)

Often, it's the widows who are left fighting.

"It's bad enough," said Anne Petitti, whose husband, Mario, died from the disease in 2010, just a few months after being diagnosed. "They shouldn't be put through the wringer or have to go through all the red tape."

She eventually won her fight with the VA, and set up a Facebook page to help other veterans navigate the system while also cataloging new cases.

How much veterans, or their families, are compensated depends on many factors, including to what degree the illness is affecting their ability to have productive lives. An unmarried veteran can get nearly US$3,000 a month, but some spouses said they get about half that amount. For many, it's not about the money. It's about raising awareness, both among veterans and the VA, and receiving recognition for their service.

"Most vets understand very quickly it's a terminal disease and that they don't have much time," Petitti said.

Baughman talks about his own future with caution, even though he's already beaten the odds: He was supposed to have died last November.

The illness forced him to stop working, and his medical bills have skyrocketed from all the tests, radiation and chemotherapy. He's luckier than some because he has good insurance.

He's not in touch with most of the guys from his old unit, but he worries about them too. Unlike today's troops, those who served in Vietnam were shunned when they came home. It's one more reason having this medical condition recognized by the VA matters so much to him.

"It'd be nice to have me win my little battle," he said. "But ... I want the government to do it for everybody."

____

Associated Press writer Tran Van Minh contributed to this report from Hanoi, Vietnam.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Jim Gomez and Tran Van Minh (Associated Press) Manila  Fri, November 11, 2016

Suspected Abu Sayyaf militants attacked a Vietnamese cargo ship and kidnapped its captain and five crewmen off the southern Philippine island of Basilan early Friday, in the latest in a wave of sea assaults that have alarmed the region's leaders.

About 10 gunmen boarded the MV Royal 16 at dawn off southern Basilan island, where the Abu Sayyaf is active, then fled with their captives in a speedboat, regional military spokesman Maj. Filemon Tan said, citing crewmen from another ship, MV Lorcon Iloilo, who provided help to the Vietnamese ship after the attack.

Tan said ransom-seeking Abu Sayyaf militants are suspected in the raid.

In Vietnam, the Tuoi Tre newspaper said the MV Royal 16 was on its way to Indonesia from Vietnam's northern port city of Hai Phong with 19 crew members and a cargo of cement when it was attacked.

The ship sent an alert at 3:31 a.m. when it was about 18 kilometers (12 miles) southwest of Basilan, the newspaper said, adding that six crew members were kidnapped.

After the attack, the cargo ship anchored safely at Zamboanga port, near Basilan, with the remaining 13 crew members, including one who suffered gunshot wounds in the arm, the newspaper said.

A Vietnam Maritime Administration official confirmed the attack, but gave no details. The Vietnamese agency has asked regional and international anti-piracy agencies for help.

Friday's attack happened a day after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak discussed ways to deal with the spike in piracy incidents.

Najib said at a news conference in Malaysia that Duterte had agreed to allow Malaysian security forces to enter Philippine waters while in "hot pursuit" of kidnappers.

"The 'hot pursuit' is a new development, this has been agreed to by President Duterte and President Jokowi and now with me," Najib said, referring to Indonesian leader Joko "Jokowi" Widodo. "So the three countries will work to make it into a new standard operating procedure."

"I appreciate him [Duterte] because it's a very practical way of us helping each other because we really need to stamp out this kidnap for ransom because it is affecting the welfare, the security of not only the Sabahans but also foreigners who visit us in Sabah," Najib said, referring to the Malaysian state on Borneo island near the southern Philippines.

After flying back to the Philippines, Duterte refused to provide details when asked about his discussion with Najib on the mounting number of attacks at sea.

Duterte has said the attacks embarrass him because the Abu Sayyaf perpetrators are based on the southern Philippine island of Jolo, an impoverished region where the militants hold their hostages for ransom.

During a recent visit to Indonesia, Duterte said he discussed possible security strategies with Widodo.

Despite talks by the three countries on ratcheting up security, Abu Sayyaf gunmen and allied militants  part of a wider Muslim rebellion that has been raging in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation for decades  have continued attacks at sea this year, kidnapping Malaysian and Indonesian crewmen of slow-moving tugboats that are mostly pulling coal barges.

The security talks are complicated because the Philippines and Malaysia have had territorial issues, and questions have arisen about how far Malaysian authorities chasing militants can go as they approach Philippine territory. In initial talks, the countries have considered establishing a more secure sea lane for commercial vessels as well as coordinated law enforcement actions, including sea and air patrols.

Indonesia has restricted coal shipments to the Philippines because of the danger.

Although most of their targets have been tugboats, which are easy to board, the militants attacked an ocean-going South Korean cargo ship for the first time about two weeks ago off southern Tawi Tawi province, near Sulu, abducting its South Korean skipper and a Filipino crewman.

___

Minh reported from Hanoi, Vietnam.

AP video journalist Syawalludin Zain in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, contributed to this report.
Share this article Whatsapp

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin Gianna Francesca Catolico (Inquirer.net/Asia News Network)  Fri, November 11, 2016

Introducing Cassandra de Pecol, the first female backpacker set to visit all 196 countries in the world. She is vying to be the fastest person to travel to all 196 nations in less than 3 years and 3 months and the youngest female to sojourn the whole planet on a low-key budget.

According to her website, de Pecols odyssey began when she left her home in Connecticut, USA, and flew to the Pacific island of Palau. Since, then she took off to the Middle East, Europe and Africa to fill up her passport with hundreds of stamps.

For 16 months, the 27-year-old spent $200,000 (P9.7 million) including for 254 international plane tickets and her daily expenses for two to five days per country. So far, she has stepped foot on 180 nations and is completing 16 more countries within this year.

(Read also: Different cultural insights in Bali's Tenganan village)

To ease her financial woes, she acquires sponsorships from various restaurants and high-end hotels. In return, she has to advertise them on her diverse social media accounts such as her Instagram handle.

Although the jet setter dreamt of traveling ever since she was a child, De Pecol travels for a cause. She is currently an acting ambassador for the International Institute of Peace through Tourism and is collecting water samples from all countries for Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation.

Since school, Ive had this desire to visit every country in the world, intrigued to learn more about every culture, natural habitat and religion, she told Daily Mail. In America, we are lucky to have such a vast melting pot of cultures and people from all over the world who make the country what it is today."

She is currently in New York City prepping up her travel documents so she can journey the remaining 16 countries in approximately six weeks.

If she succeeds in her pilgrimage, she will outshine British filmmaker and explorer Graham Hughes, who traveled to all 196 countries in less than four years without hitching on an aircraft.

This article appeared on the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper website, which is a member of Asia News Network and a media partner of The Jakarta Post
Over forty administrators and principals of yeshivos, Bais Yaakovs and Hebrew day schools from throughout New Jersey gathered at PCS headquarters in Lakewood for a special Agudath Israel of New Jersey workshop. The workshop detailed numerous recent changes to Title 1 and Title 2A federal education funding under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that can greatly benefit nonpublic educational institutions.

Rabbi Abba Cohen, Vice President for Legal Affairs and Washington DC Director and Counsel for Agudath Israel of America, and Michael Coppotelli, Associate Superintendent of Schools in the Archdiocese of New York, detailed the key changes, and how nonpublic schools can receive increased funding for several vital services. Some of the most consequential changes include new qualifying services such as one-on-one tutoring, mentoring and counseling; and safeguards to ensure that nonpublic schools receive the funding theyre entitled to. Rabbi Cohen stressed that he and other Agudath Israel activists have been working in Washington for nearly a decade to secure these changes. He expressed his pleasure at the opportunity to deliver the news directly to our communitys beneficiaries.

Agudath Israel is proud to work tirelessly and deliver on behalf of our communitys children at the federal, state and local level, says Rabbi Avi Schnall, Director of Agudath Israel of New Jersey, Chairman of the event. With Hashems help, we will be able to deliver even more good news in the future.

[TLS]
Now that it's clear than Donald will take up the title of President of the United States and all the responsibilities that go along with it, he might need to patch up relationships with quite a few people from the international political scene.

He has now promised to be a president for all Americans, but there might be a few people with whom he will have to patch their relationship.

During his highly controversial campaign he was not known for minding his tongue when it came to his opinion on various topics, and people in the public sphere. Many of them took to their own platforms today to congratulate the result of a democratic process regardless of their own personal feelings.

people, places, and things The New York Times recently put together a comprehensive list of all thethat Trump has insulted on Twitter.

Though Trump has never directly insulted a British politician, he has had a few choice words to say about Britain.

He has accused the UK of trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem.

The United Kingdom is trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem. Everybody is wise to what is happening, very sad! Be honest.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2015





Though Prime Minister Theresa May has often criticised him for his position on Muslims, she wrote to Mr Trump to congratulate him on his victory, and promised that Britain and America will remain "strong and close partners".

"Britain and the United States have an enduring and special relationship based on the values of freedom, democracy and enterprise, she said in a statement.

According to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Trump's victory was "an unmistakable rejection of a political establishment and an economic system that simply isn't working for most people", but warned the answers he is offering to America's problems are "clearly wrong".

Farage, on the other hand, has always supported the ideas of Trump, and as such hailed his victory in the election.

Today, the establishment is in deep shock. Even more so than after Brexit, he said in a statement, What we are witnessing is the end of a period of big business and big politics controlling our lives.

He further warned the electorate to prepare for further political shocks in the years to come.

Like Farage, Nicola Sturgeon has never hid her opinion on who should be the winner of the US election, as she staunchly supported Hillary Clinton ahead of the vote.

suggested Back in December last year, Trump was excluded from a list of Scottish business ambassadors when hethat Muslims should be stopped from entering the US. His relationship with Scotland was further soured in June when he mistakenly congratulated Scots for taking their country back. All council areas and a total of 62% Scottish people had voted Remain.

Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2016





After the election results rolled in Trumps favour, Sturgeon congratulated on his win.

While this is not the outcome I hoped for, it is the verdict of the American people and we must respect it. I congratulate President-Elect Trump on winning the election, she said.

She insisted, however that in order to truly reach out to every American, Trump will have to make clear  in deeds as well as words  that he will be a President for everyone in modern, multicultural America.

Things arent as positive on mainland Europe. According to Trump, German chancellor Angela Merkel is the person who is ruining Germany.

I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite They picked person who is ruining Germany  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2015





She, instead, opted to offer the president-elect "close co-operation" on the basis of the shared values of "democracy, freedom, respect for the law and for the dignity of human beings, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views".

So who is celebrating the Trump win?

Russian president Vladimir Putin sent Mr Trump a telegram of congratulations, expressing "his hope to work together for removing Russian-American relations from their crisis state". The Russian parliament applauded when they learnt of the election result.

What about Clinton?

As his opponent in the fight for the Oval Office, Mrs. Clinton received a lot of insults from Trump, who would often resort to calling her Crooked Hillary and described her as a nasty woman.

Despite that, it seems that such verbal name-calling will be left in the past. Mrs. Clinton has refused to bring them up, instead congratulating her opponent on his victory.

"We must accept this result and then look to the future," said Mrs Clinton in her concession speech, "Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead."

Although reactions to the news have been mixed, from sheer elation to pure dread, only time will tell what the consequences of a Trump presidency would be.
Tentang Situs Slot Online Resmi MGS88 Nama Situs  MGS88 Minimal Deposit  Rp. 10.000,- (Sepuluh Ribu Rupiah) Proses Deposit   2 Menit Metode Deposit  Bank Transfer,  Pulsa,  E-Wallet Judi Online Terbaik  Slot Online,  Judi Bola,  Casino Online,  Togel Online,  Tembak Ikan Provider Slot Gacor Mudah Maxwin  Pragmatic Play,  PGSoft,  MicroGaming,  Habanero Slot Gacor Gampang Menang  Gates of Olympus,  Sweet Bonanza,  Wild West Gold,  Starlight Princess Win Rate 98%

RTP Live Slot Gacor Tertinggi Hari Ini Terbaru Terlengkap

Selamat datang di halaman RTP live dan informasi soal slot gacor hari ini dari situs MGS88 yang setiap hari selalu update. Berdasarkan RTP Live MGS88, Anda bisa mendapatkan informasi tentang slot online yang saat ini yang sedang Gacor atau onfire dengan persentase yang terbukti akurat, ini bisa menjadi rekomendasi anda sebelum memilih permainan slot online di situs MGS88. Cek RTP Slot sekarang juga bosku

Klik Provider Slot Untuk Mengetahui RTP Slot Secara Real Time

Selamat datang bagi kalian yang sedang mencari situs RTP Live terlengkap dan terkini hari ini. Sangat sesuai jika Anda mengunjungi website MGS88 RTP live untuk informasi tentang permainan slot yang lagi gacor dengan slot RTP yang terupdate. Persentase kemenangan yang kami berikan tentunya diambil dengan data yang sangat valid dan hanya untuk permainan slot yang tersedia di situs MGS88. RTP yang tersedia juga akan selalu diperbarui setiap hari berdasarkan level kemenangan yang diberikan kepada member kami.

Memang sih untuk bermain slot itu tergantung hoki dari setiap pemain, Namun RTP live atau bocoran slot dari yang kami sediakan ini adalah data autentik dari banyaknya pemain yang telah bermain dan mencapai kemenangan tinggi. Sederhananya, kalau banyak pemain yang menang di dalam 1 permainan slot, karena itu permainan slot tersebut akan mempunyai persentase RTP yang sangat tinggi.

Namun kami tegaskan sekali lagi, ini bukan sebuah paksaan kami situs MGS88 untuk anda bermain di game slot yang mana. Ini bisa dijadikan sebagai referensi atau tolok ukur, boleh dicoba kalau anda mempunyai feel yang kuat dalam memainkan permainan game slot. Anda dapat mengakses kapan saja dan di mana saja selama anda siap bermain. Jangan ragu untuk bertanya ya seputar pola putaran terhadap kami, sebab kami juga menyediakannya loh.

Apa itu RTP Live?

RTP Live ialah informasi mengenai persentase tertinggi saat ini dari hasil RTP Live dengan bocoran kemenangan pemain saat ini. RTP Live merupakan singkatan dari Return To Play atau bisa juga diartikan sebagai Return to Player. Karena itu, para pemain slot sekarang jika ingin mengetahui seberapa besar kemenangannya, bisa dengan memainkan permainan yang akan dimainkannya dan bisa untung dengan mudah dan tentunya maksimal.

Apa itu RTP Slot?

RTP Slot juga dikenal sebagai return to player atau pengembalian ke Pemain. RTP slot ialah persentase dari nilai pengembalian semua uang yang dipertaruhkan pemain dari waktu ke waktu. Dengan kata lain, RTP juga dianggap sebagai salah satu fitur slot yang mengembalikan uang pemain saat pemain kalah.

Persentase digunakan untuk menghitung RTP dalam permainan slot. Misalnya, jika slot memiliki RTP 97%, itu berarti untuk setiap 100.000 koin yang hilang di slot, slot dapat mengembalikan 97.000. Jika Anda mengetahui RTP sebuah permainan slot, Anda dapat memutuskan permainan slot mana yang akan dimainkan tanpa kerugian besar.

Apakah Angka Persentase RTP Slot Itu Penting?

Biasanya pemain slot itu tidak memperhatikan RTP dalam permainan yang akan dimainkan, biasanya setelah anda mengisi saldo utama anda akan langsung buru-buru memainkannya. Yang terakhir 90-96% mempengaruhi jumlah kemenangan. Semakin tinggi jumlah RTP yang digunakan, semakin luas peluang untuk mendapatkan keuntungan.

Akan namun itu segala tak secara 100% menjamin kemenangan kau dalam bermain, RTP itu cuma sebagai kalkulasi pengeluaran anda saja selama bermain slot.Dengan adanya RTP, kau dapat mengerjakan pengaturan atas uang yang akan kau pertaruhkan nanti pada ketika bermain.Untuk itu pada ketika kau bermain slot dan telah mengalami banyak kekalahan di satu permainan, direkomendasikan kau pindah ke permainan slot lainnya yang RTP nya lebih tinggi dari permainan yang tadi kau mainkan.

Keuntungan Menggunakan Bocoran RTP Slot Hari Ini

Situs MGS88 Akan dengan senang hati akan beberapa keuntungan yang didapatkan jika anda bermain slot dengan menggunakan RTP Live yang telah disediakan. Berikut Keuntungannya :

Peluang Kemenangan Meningkat Tentu saja, saat bermain slot online, menang adalah hal yang paling penting. Di sinilah RTP berperan sebagai metode atau metode baru yang akan membantu Anda memilih permainan slot persentase tinggi. Mendapat variasi dalam Memainkan Game Slot Pastinya banyak pemain slot online yang hanya memainkan 3-5 permainan slot saja. Namun dengan RTP Live slot akan memberikan banyak game slot lain yang bisa anda coba. Tentunya semua permainan slot memiliki potensi kemenangan yang besar, jadi jangan hanya mengandalkan beberapa permainan saja. Menambah Pengalaman Dalam Bermain Slot Keuntungan terakhir adalah Anda tentu saja menambah pengalaman dan keahlian dalam permainan slot online. Dengan berbagai macam permainan slot yang dimainkan, Anda pasti mengetahui karakteristik dari setiap permainan slot yang Anda mainkan. Akibatnya, Anda pasti bisa dianggap sebagai pemain slot yang andal, yang pasti akan meningkatkan peluang Anda untuk menang besar menggunakan RTP.

Daftar 8 Situs Dengan RTP Slot Live Tertinggi Hari Ini

Ada banyak penyedia mesin slot online di internet. Tetapi tidak semuanya memiliki peluang tinggi atau RTP Live Slot yang sangat tinggi. Tapi jangan khawatir, berikut ini adalah situs slot gacor yang akan memberikan bocoran slot dengan RTP Live Tertinggi:

RTP Live Slot Pragmatic Play (RTP Slot 97.85%) RTP Live Slot PG Soft (RTP Live 96.15%) RTP Live Slot Habanero (RTP Slot 95.89%) RTP Live Slot CQ9 (RTP Live 98.83%) RTP Live Slot Spade Gaming (RTP Live 94.99%) RTP Live Slot Micro Gaming (RTP Slot 95.39%) RTP Slot Live Top Trend Gaming (RTP Live 96.14%) RTP Slot Live JOKER123 (RTP Live 97.45%)

Itulah Daftar 8 Provider Slot Gacor dengan RTP Live teratas diatas tentunya kami analisa terlebih dahulu. Anda bisa membuktikannya langsung dengan mengklik banner atau meprovider game slot yang sudah tersedia di atas. Saran kami yaitu Anda harus memainkan semua penyedia slot di atas untuk mencapai peluang kemenangan terbaik.

Daftar Slot RTP Live Tertinggi Sering Kasih Jackpot

Selain mempertimbangkan RTP Slot Gacor yang ada, sebenarnya ada banyak faktor penting untuk menang dalam permainan judi online. Sebab ada banyak game yang memiliki fitur dan mekanisme unik dan bisa membantu anda meraih Jackpot yang sangat besar.

Berikut ini akan kami ulas daftar 5 game slot paling populer karena sering memberikan jackpot:

RTP Live Gates of Olympus Gates of Olympus adalah game slot teraneh dan terbaik di Indonesia. Karena permainan mesin slot ini paling populer karena kakek Zeus dapat mengizinkan pengganda x500. Selain itu, fitur dan mekanik Gates of Olympus juga sangat menguntungkan untuk memenangkan Grand Jackpot. Secara teoritis, RTP slot langsung Gates of Olympus bernilai 96,50%, yang berarti peluang Anda untuk memenangkan MaxWin cukup tinggi. RTP live Sweet Bonanza Sweet Bonanza adalah permainan slot terpopuler kedua. Game slot bertema buah dan permen yang lezat ini sepertinya akan menarik banyak perhatian karena tergolong slot gacor yang mudah menang. Secara teoritis, slot Sweet Bonanza RTP bernilai 96,48%, yang berarti peluang Anda cukup tinggi untuk memenangkan jackpot. RTP Live Wild West Gold Wild West Gold adalah permainan slot bertema koboi yang juga populer di kalangan penggemar konspirasi. Permainan slot Wild West Gold sendiri kerap menawarkan kejutan jackpot bagi para pemainnya. Selain itu, nilai RTP Live Slot menunjukkan indeks tertinggi hari ini, yang berarti sangat layak dan sangat direkomendasikan. RTP Live Starlight Princess Slot Starlight Princess ini memiliki gaya dan fitur yang mirip dengan Gates of Olympus. Perbedaannya hanya pada desain dan karakter gamenya saja, karena memiliki fitur dan mekanik yang sama tentunya RTP slot teoritis pada game slot ini sama yaitu 96,50%. RTP Live Cash Elevator Mungkin sebagian dari Anda baru mengenal slot Cash Elevator. Namun dari data benchmark yang diungkap, ternyata banyak sekali yang menikmati permainan slot ini. Dengan fitur dan mekanisme unik seperti Lift up and down asli, slot ini juga memiliki slot RTP Live dasar 96,64% yang juga memiliki mekanisme yang sangat menguntungkan untuk memperlancar tingkat kemenangan besar.

Bocoran Jam Main Slot Gacor Hari Ini

Dalam bermain permainan slot online itu tidak bisa dilakukan dengan sembarangan yah. Jadi, Jika anda bermain pada waktu tertentu seperti yang akan kita bahas sesaat lagi, ada kemungkinan anda untuk mendapatkan kemenangan lebih tinggi. Jam RTP Slot Gacor merupakan bocoran jam main slot yang akan memberikan anda kapan waktu yang pas dalam bermain game slot.

Tentu saja seluruh provider slot online memiliki jam tertentu dalam memberikan peluang kepada para pemainnya untuk mendapatkan kemenangan. Disini kami akan memberikan anda Bocoran Jam Slot Gacor yang Paling Akurat Hari ini:

Jam Slot Gacor Pragmatic Play 02:30 WIB - Jam 05:25 WIB Jam Slot Gacor Habanero 14:26 WIB - Jam 17:38 WIB Jam Slot Gacor CQ9 00:45 WIB - Jam 05:53 WIB Jam Slot Gacor PG SOFT 14:25 WIB - Jam 17:35 WIB Jam Slot Gacor Joker123 17:41 WIB - Jam 20:42 WIB Jam Slot Gacor Microgaming 22:30 WIB - Jam 00:35 WIB

MGS88: Situs Judi Slot Online Gacor Pay4D Resmi dan Terpercaya

MGS88 adalah situs game slot online Gacor terbaru yang bermitra dengan Pay4D, Pay4D sendiri merupakan daftar situs game slot online terpercaya dengan berbagai macam permainan judi yang mudah dimenangkan seperti Game Bola, Casino Online, Slot Pay4D, Tembak Ikan dan Pay4D Online Permainan togel seperti Singapura, Hongkong, Sydney dan lain-lain. Tujuan utama kami adalah menjadi situs judi online Pay4D yang menyediakan layanan judi online terbaik di Indonesia.

Kami juga salah satu situs resmi PAY4D di Indonesia yang pasti akan membayarkan semua kemenangan kepada semua member kami, karena kepercayaan dari semua member kami adalah prioritas utama kami sebagai mesin slot 4d Asia terbaik di Asia, khususnya di Indonesia.

Dalam melakukan sistem transaksi sistem simpanan dapat dilakukan dengan mudah melalui mobile banking dan electronic banking berupa bank BCA, BSI, BRI, BNI, Cimb Niaga, Permata dan Mandiri. Selain itu, transaksi e-wallet juga tersedia melalui Dana, Gopay, LinkAja dan Ovo serta dapat digunakan untuk pulsa tanpa dipotong.

Untuk mempermudah dan kenyamanan dalam melakukan registrasi atau melakukan setiap transaksi, MGS88 menyediakan layanan live chat dan Whatsapp terhubung langsung dengan customer service online 24 jam.

Mengenal Istilah Dalam RTP SLOT

Di slot RTP Live Anda akan melihat berbagai fitur yang mungkin tidak Anda pahami masing-masing. Namun jangan khawatir, disini sebagai situs slot gacor MGS88 kami akan memberikan penjelasan lengkap mengenai tentang istilah yang ada di RTP SLOT dibawah ini.
Two new faces and another with a familiar name have won two-year terms in the state House of Representatives in three districts.

Democrat Cara Clemente beat Republican challenger Darrell Stasik for the 14th District seat, taking over the position held by her husband, Paul Clemente (D-Lincoln Park), who was term limited out of office.

Cara Clemente won the seat, earning 20,252 votes to Stasiks 12,178. The district serves Lincoln Park, Melvindale, Riverview and Wyandotte.

In the 17th District, which encompasses parts of Flat Rock, Rockwood, Sumpter Township and Monroe County, Joseph Bellino defeated incumbent Democrat Bill LaVoy by a vote of 20,231 to 17,150.

Democrat Darrin Camilleri, a political newcomer, ran a strong race to defeat Republican challenger Robert Howey for the 23rd District seat. That district serves Brownstown Township, Gibraltar, Grosse Ile Township, Huron Township, Trenton and Woodhaven.

Camilleri won with a vote count of 24,097 to Howeys 23,777.

Camilleri released a statement shortly after the close of the race.

Im incredibly honored that the people of the 23rd District have chosen me to be their state representative, Camilleris statement said. Ive enjoyed meeting with and talking to people around the community, and when I go to Lansing, Ill hit the ground running to tackle the issues that are important to them  good schools, more and better jobs, upgraded infrastructure and more. And although this work will take me to the Capitol, my heart will remain Downriver, and I will always be available to hear from my constituents about how I can best represent them.

Bellino said he thought the road to victory was going to be too challenging to reach, but said he wanted to make his presence known in the political arena.

Although many people told him throughout the course of the campaign that he had a real shot at winning, he was not convinced.

He said he has learned to be cautiously optimistic over the years.

Bellino said he was way behind in the polls just three weeks ago and made plans for a relaxing getaway to spend time with friends the weekend after the election.

All that changed when he won the seat.

People came out of the woodwork for me, Bellino said of his campaign. This was the right year to run. I guess I resonated with people.

Its been only a few days since the election, Bellino said, but people are treating him like a rock star.

A rock star with no band behind me, he said, laughing.

He attributes the Republican movement, his ads and hundreds of signs for helping spread his name.

But, more than anything, he said, a lot of people who simply believed in who he is helped him win the seat.

Of course, he did plenty of legwork himself, he said, knocking on more than 6,000 doors with his wife, Peggy.

Three areas of concern for Bellino  pensions, insurance costs and the way education is treated  will be his target areas.

There is a lot of work to do, he said.

Bellino is the owner of Broadway Market in Monroe, which has been open since 1954.

The businessman said his life has been touched by Christ and he believes all people must treat one another with respect.
A Taliban suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the German Consulate in northern Afghanistan, killing at least six people and wounding more than 100.

The truck exploded at the entrance of the consulate in the city of Mazar-e Sharif, destroying the gate and wall just before midnight on November 10.

A spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry said on November 11 that all of its two dozen staff escaped the attack "safe and uninjured" and were evacuated, while Afghan security forces and NATO special forces had "repulsed the heavily armed attackers."

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was revenge for U.S. air strikes last week that killed 32 civilians near the northern city of Kunduz.

President Ashraf Ghani called the attack a "crime against humanity and all international laws."

A spokesman for the governor of Balkh Province told RFE/RLs Afghan Service that the suicide bomb blast made a large hole in the compound wall and other Taliban fighters tried to enter the compound through the gap.

But he said security forces at the consulate prevented militants from storming inside the compound.

Local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez said the city hospitals received six dead bodies, including two killed by bullets.

He added that at least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries.

Witnesses said many of the injured were Afghans who were sleeping in their homes nearby and were struck by flying glass when their windows were shattered by the massive explosion.

Many nearby houses and shops were destroyed or damaged in the huge blast.

The heavily protected German Consulate is located in a large building close to the famous Blue Mosque in the center of Mazar-e Sharif, where the Indian Consulate was also attacked by militants earlier this year.

The Taliban statement from spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack was in retaliation for November 3 air strikes in the Buz-e-Kandahari area of Kunduz that killed dozens of people, the vast majority of them women and children.

NATO, the United Nations, and the Afghan government are investigating the attack, which prompted angry protests in Kunduz.

In Berlin, officials said a crisis task-force meeting was called at Germany's Foreign Ministry to review events surrounding the attack.

Germany has almost 1,000 soldiers deployed in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh, of which Mazar-e Sharif is the capital, as part of NATO's Resolute Support mission.

In the past several years, attacks have increased in northern Afghanistan, which for years was relatively peaceful.

Taliban militants have overrun dozens of districts in the region and last year seized Kunduz city, the first major city the group captured since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

With additional reporting by Reuters, AP, dpa, and AFP
How you treat a server says more about you than anything else
U.S. President Barack Obama has asked Congress for an additional $11.6 billion to fund the fights against militants in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The request seeks an additional $5.8 billion for Pentagon military operations in Afghanistan and for the campaign against the Islamic State extremist group in Iraq and Syria. An additional $5.8 billion was requested for the State Department and United States Agency for International Development "to counter extremism."

Part of the money would be used to modernize the Afghan military's helicopter fleet and to pay for elevated U.S. troops levels of 8,400 in Afghanistan.

Congress is due to return from election campaigning for a "lame duck" session likely centered on such funding legislation before the newly elected Congress starts in January.

U.S. Representative Mac Thornberry, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he would review the request, but believes it is too low.

"The amount still does not accommodate the increased pace of operations against ISIL and does nothing to begin addressing the readiness crisis," Thornberry said, using an acronym for Islamic State.

Based on reporting by AP and Reuters
So every person who wants to enter will be subject to a search? I see many problems ahead if they tr...(Read More)
All quiet on Patong tourist jet-ski accident negotiations

PHUKET: Two days after a jet-ski ridden by a tourist slammed into rocks at Kalim, north of Patong Beach, the Patong Police, Tourist Police and even the head of the Patong jet-ski operators today (Nov 11) all said they had not received any reports of the incident but were now investigating what happened.

tourismmarineaccidentspolicepatong

By Tanyaluk Sakoot

Friday 11 November 2016, 03:11PM

No authorities were informed of the accident north of Patong, which may cost the tourist hundreds of thousands of baht to pay for damage to the jet-ski. Photo: Supplied

Somprasong Seangchart, the chief lifeguard at Patong Beach, however, was aware of the incident.

There were two jet-skis driven by tourists. They lost control in strong waves and jumped off the jet-skis before the jet-skis hit the rocks, he told The Phuket News.

One jet-ski was turned upside down and water got into the motor. The other jet-ski looked like it had much more damage, and the body of the jet-ski looked broken.

Nucha Petchvimon, President of the Patong Jet Ski Club, said he was unaware of the accident, but added that was not unusual.

I dont know about any jet-ski accident at Kalim. Usually, the tourist and the jet-ski figure it out by themselves with Patong Police, he said.

Yet, Maj Teerasak Boonseng, who was the Patong Police duty officer on Wednesday, today confirmed that he had not received any reports of the accident.

Likewise, Phuket Tourist Police Chief Lt Col Nareuwat Phutwiro also said he knew nothing of the accident.

I am supposed to be informed of any incidents regarding tourists safety. We will certainly follow this up now, he told The Phuket News.

Patong jet-ski boss Nucha pointed out that the tourist who was riding the heavily damaged jet-ski might be facing a bill of up to B500,000.

Honestly, a jet-ski costs B400,000 to B500,000, he said.

We have set our own standard fees to charge for damages to jet-skis, he added.

If the damage is only small, the insurance will cover it, but the insurance covers only up B50,000. If the damage is more than that, the driver must pay for it, Mr Nucha explained.

The driver will also have to pay B3,000 per day for loss of earnings, up to a maximum of B15,000, he said.

Col Nareuwat of the Phuket Tourist Police urged any persons who find themselves having to pay for damages to rented jet-skis in Phuket to notify the Tourist Police.

Usually, such tourists have to pay at least B10,000 before they will be allowed to return to their home countries, he said.

A jet-ski rental company at Bang Tao was ordered to shut down last year by the then-Phuket Governor Nisit Jansomwong after employees demanded a Chinese tourist pay exorbitant repair fees totalling B200,000 following a collision between two of the craft when the tourist rented them out with family members. (See story here).
Floating jetty removed from Phuket beach after dead corals claim

PHUKET: The floating jetty under investigation for damaging corals immediately offshore at Kamala Beach has been removed, the Phuket Marine Office has confirmed

tourismconstructionmarinenatural-resourcesenvironment

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Friday 11 November 2016, 12:15PM

The floating jetty was deemed to have damaged corals immediately offshore at Kamala Beach. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The floating jetty was deemed to have damaged corals immediately offshore at Kamala Beach. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The Phuket Marine Office issued an order on Wednesday (Nov 2) for Kamala Bay Venture Co Ltd to remove the jetty. The order signed by Phuket Marine Office Director Surat Sirisaiyad.

The order gave the company three days to remove the jetty. The jetty was removed last Friday (Nov 4).

In the order issued on Wednesday, Phuket Marine Chief Surat confessed that his office gave permission to install the jetty, but started that after an investigation by local marine conservation officials it was agreed that it was best to have the jetty removed.

The floating jetty damaged more than 600 square metres of corals, which breaches Section 17 of Marine and Coastal Resources Management Act (2015), Chief Surat wrote in the order.

The permit issued to the company also listed conditions, including that if the jetty affects the marine environment, the company must seek a solution and report the incident to the Marine Office and the company must follow other laws and regulations regarding installing jetty, Mr Surat added.

After reviewing the conditions and the conclusion of the investigation by marine conservation officials we decided to revoke the permit issued on August 23 and (now) order the company to remove the floating jetty and the concrete jetty (sic) from the beach within three days of receiving this letter.

The order made no mention of whether or not the Phuket Marine Office would be pursuing Legal action against the company, as threatened Suchart Rattanariangsri, Director of the DMCRs Marine Resource Conservation Division at the Sixth Marine Coastal Resources Administration Office (Phuket).

When investigating the jetty, he was adamant his office will file charges against the hotel  despite the Phuket Marine Office issuing its permit of approval. (See story here.)
Minister confirms plan to close all small schools

BANGKOK: Nearly all schools with fewer than 120 students will be merged into larger schools within five years, Education Minister Dapong Ratanasuwan confirmed on Thursday (Nov 10).

economicspolitics

By Bangkok Post

Friday 11 November 2016, 09:30AM

The handful of students at Ban Tha Kha Yang in Khlung district of Chanthaburi province seem dwarfed by their small but empty classroom in September 2015. Photo: Bangkok Post / file

The exemptions will be a few schools in remote areas.

The education minister was speaking during an inspection of Chumchon Samphrao School in Muang district of Udon Thani province, one of the schools included in the planned mergers.

Gen Dapong said there are 15,537 schools with fewer than 120 students, according to the Office of Basic Education Commission (Obec). These small schools with be merged with selected main schools, which will results in better management and better teaching, he said.

Implementation of the plan had begun this year with 827 schools, each with fewer than 20 students, to be merged with 300 main schools located near to them. Teachers and students at the small schools were being transferred to the bigger schools.

The Education Ministry had a target to complete the mergers within five years, he said.

Chumchon Samphrao School is absorbing a total of 57 students and 11 teachers from two nearby schools, Ban Nayat and Ban Maet.

Gen Dapong said the process will be gradual over the next few years. First, schools with fewer than 40 pupils will be merged with larger schools, then 60, 80 and 120 students. This would result in stronger management and better quality education.

However, not all small schools would be shut down, he said. Some were located in remote communities with no large school nearby.

Udon Thani governor Chayawut Chantarathorn said the province attaches more importance to the development of human resources than building of infrastructure.

This was one of the nine development strategies of the province, he said.

Read original story here.
Semi-trailer slides backward on Patong Hill

PHUKET: A 24-wheeled truck and trailer loaded with construction materials from Bangkok slid sideways while braking after failing to climb Patong Hill this morning (Nov 11), leaving rush-hour commuters stuck on the hill, praying the truck would not slide backwards any further.

patongtourismaccidentsconstructionpolice

By Tanyaluk Sakoot

Friday 11 November 2016, 05:01PM

A cement truck was called in to to tow the semi-trailer up the hill. Photo: Kathu Police

The semi-trailer slid backwards while braking after failing to climb Patong Hill this morning (Nov 11). Photo: Kathu Police

Dozens of motorbikes wait for the truck to be cleared so they can safely pass on Patong Hill. Photo: Kathu Police

The semi-trailer slid backwards while braking after failing to climb Patong Hill this morning (Nov 11). Photo: Kathu Police

The incident happened at about 5am, explained Lt Surapong Pungprom of the Kathu Traffic Police.

The truck was still there when I came on duty at 7am, he told The Phuket News.

There were lots of motorbikes and cars keeping clearing of the truck, and trying to slowly make their way past it, he said.

A cement truck was called in to help tow the semi-trailer up the hill, Lt Surapong explained.

Traffic was finally cleared by 8am.

I checked and the truck was not overweight, Lt Surapong said.

I questioned the driver, and the problem was that he had no experience driving in Phuket and had never driven over this hill before. The truck simply was not powered up to climb the hill on the bend, he added.

Luckily no people were injured and no other vehicles were damaged, Lt Surapong said.
Trump, Obama amiable at the White House

UNITED STATES US President Barack Obama and his successor Donald Trump held a 90-minute transition meeting in the Oval Office Thursday (Nov 10), with the outgoing president vowing his support after an excellent conversation.

politicseconomics

By AFP

Friday 11 November 2016, 09:14AM

US President Barack Obama shakes hands with President-elect Donald Trump following a meeting in the Oval Office yesterday (Nov 10). Photo: AFP

The Democratic US leader told the Republican president-elect his administration would do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.

Mr Obama said his talks with the billionaire political novice, held barely 36 hours after his upset election victory over the Democrat Hillary Clinton, were wide-ranging.

We talked about foreign policy. We talked about domestic policy, Obama said. We talked about some of the organisational issues in setting up the White House.

This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, Mr Trump said.

The meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half. And it could have, as far as Im concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer.

I have great respect, he added, saying: I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel.

The two men ended the historic White House encounter with a handshake and refused to take questions.

The meeting had potential to be an awkward one  the two had traded barbs during the heated campaign for the White House, with Mr Obama describing the celebrity businessman as uniquely unqualified to be president.

Mr Trump, 70, championed the so-called birther movement challenging that Mr Obama was actually born in the United States  a suggestion laden with deep racial overtones  only dropping the position recently.

But in the day after Mr Trumps shock election win, which virtually no poll had predicted, both sides spoke of healing the deep divisions sown in the bruising two-year battle for the presidency.

Ms Clinton, holding back the bitter disappointment of not becoming Americas first female president, urged the country to give Trump a chance.

We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead, she said Wednesday in a concession speech.

Mr Trump headed from the White House to Capitol Hill for a lunch meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan. Vice President-elect Mike Pence was also to attend.

Mr Ryan, who had distanced himself from Mr Trump in the final month of the campaign, has pledged to hit the ground running and work with Mr Trump on conservative legislation.
A roundup of state government and Capitol news items of interest for Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016:

VETERAN PROTECTIONS: Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller announced a series of special consumer protection efforts Thursday designed to assist Iowans who are active duty service members or veterans which included complaint form and website enhancements.

Miller issued a statement Thursday noting that his office was strengthening its year-round consumer protection efforts for Iowans who serve or have served in the military as they can be specially targeted by scammers and businesses that engage in deceptive practices.

Scammers and dishonest businesses may target veterans and service members because of their steady income and benefits. For example, scams targeting veterans include solicitations for deceptive military benefits services, and attempts at collecting personal information. Active duty service members may be solicited by predatory lenders.

Complaint forms now identify service members and veterans: Consumer Protection Division complaint forms now include a check box for consumers to identify themselves as active duty service members or veterans, he said.

REYNOLDS TO VISIT SCHOOLS: Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds announced Thursday that she will visit three schools next week to discuss the importance of computer science education. As co-chair of the Governors STEM Advisory Council and the Future Ready Iowa Alliance, Reynolds said she has led the way in emphasizing the importance of students having opportunities for computer science education and what it means for the workforce of the future. Specifically, she said, computer science education is a key component of reaching the states Future Ready Iowa goal of having 70 percent of our Iowa workforce with education or training by the year 2025.

On Monday, Reynolds will be at the Brookview Elementary School in West Des Moines. On Tuesday, she plans visits to the Kirkwood Regional Center in Coralville and the Central City Community School District.

INMATES DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT: Danny Homan, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 61, issued a statement Thursday regarding an inmates death announcement made by the Iowa Department of Corrections.

Homan said union officials were saddened to hear about the death of Michael Whitworth, an inmate at the Iowa State Penitentiary.

Even more so, he said in a statement, I was surprised to read yesterday afternoons press release from the Iowa Department of Corrections announcing his death nine days after the fact, coincidentally on Election Day. There is a clear attempt for offender Whitworths death at the hands of a fellow inmate to be drowned out by political coverage. It seems as though the DOC hopes that their inability to protect staff, fellow inmates, and the public will go unnoticed. For our collective safety, I hope that Gov. Branstad and members of the media will, in fact, notice.

Fred Scaletta, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections, said the agency declined to comment.

HEATING OIL, NATURAL GAS PRICES DECLINE: With colder weather approaching, officials at the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship who issue a weekly fuel price report noted that heating oil prices in Iowa dropped nine cents this week, recording a price of $1.88. Natural gas prices also fell by 21 cents, to $2.32/MMbtu.

The price of regular unleaded gasoline averaged $2.13 a gallon across Iowa as of Tuesday according to AAA  a drop of three cents from one week ago and 19 cents lower than one year ago. The national average on Tuesday was $2.20, down a penny from last weeks price. Retail diesel fuel prices in Iowa were down two cents from last weeks price with a statewide average of $2.41 per gallon.
SD Secretary of State office says Smith remedied campaign finance mistake

Rep. Jamie Smith's campaign originally did not include the mailing addresses of his donors in violation of campaign finance law.
DES MOINES -- After less than six years at the helm of the Iowa Department of Transportation, its director announced hell step down.

Paul Trombino IIIs departure comes as the department, which employs more than 2,600 people, addresses growth in statewide freight traffic  the number of large trucks on Iowas primary roads has grown by 123 percent over the past three decades  and infrastructure updates.

Trombino, 50, said hes ready for a new chapter.

Everybody knows this job is temporary, and its meant to be that way, Trombino said Thursday. It was a great professional experience in my life and Ive cherished every single day. Weve done some amazing things and the department is in great shape moving forward, and I thought it was a good time for me to take the next step.

He added that he didnt feel good looking for a job while Im in this job. ... So I felt the best way would be for me to resign and then take a few weeks or so to really get a better sense of what opportunities are out there.

Trombino  who makes about $147,000 annually as DOT director  said he doesnt know his next step, but he said, I want to continue to have an impact on transportation and have an impact on improving communities and ultimately improving economic opportunities and development.

Branstad appointed Trombino as DOT director in May 2011, and he was confirmed by the Iowa Senate in June of that year.

Ben Hammes, Gov. Terry Branstads spokesman, said the governors office likely will pursue a nationwide search for Trombinos replacement.

Well try to find the best person for the job, he said. We were very thankful for (Trombinos) leadership in the DOT. He really modernized and brought innovation to the department.

We were told that he was pursuing other opportunities, and we fully respect that.

For some state officials and legislators  and for DOT staff, according to Andrea Henry, communications director  Trombinos announcement was unexpected.

State Sen. Tod Bowman, D-Maquoketa, chairman of the Transportation Committee, was surprised by Trombinos decision. He added that, He was incredibly knowledgeable and he worked in a bipartisan way, so I was very proud to be right there in the weeds with him on some of the issues he worked on.

State Rep. Josh Byrnes, R-Osage, chairman of the Iowa House Transportation committee, described Trombinos resignation as a huge loss.

Director Trombino has put Iowa on the global map with his approach to logistics and transportation. (He) has incorporated technology and used an economic vision to make the Iowa DOT a model for other state DOTs, Byrnes said.
Gabi Matthews 17 is a Spanish and GWSS double major, and a multi-talented artist. They are a poet, cartoonist, illustrator, musician and dancer. Matthews sat down with The S&Bs Candace Mettle to talk about medium, inspiration and representation in her work.

The S&B: What made you interested in art?

Gabi Matthews: Ive been making art since I was a kid. I used to write poetry and song lyrics, especially in seventh grade that was the main thing I did, and since then it has persisted. I always liked to draw. The first career I ever wanted was to be an environmentalist, but the second one was to be a photographer, so I dont know, art has always been a thing that I loved, but now its become more  in some ways political, but  I cant remove it from my life at all. It would be impossible.

The S&B: Do you think now that art has become a part of your life, that it has improved your art or set you back?

GM: In part, I took this last summer to explore my own artistic ability, so I really wanted to focus on creating, and I think that and even the past few months has really helped me as an artist because I was never really that serious about it. I still I dont know how to pursue it as a career. I dont have guidance for that sort of thing, and I think I dont have the privilege to easily do that, but I think especially in recent months, I have really been challenging myself to keep producing things, and that has really helped me a lot and helped me improve as an artist. Im starting to try other mediums and using art to express my voice in various ways. Last school year I did dance ensemble because I wanted to keep trying new things, and I have a lot of anxiety, but I love to dance, so I wanted to use my body in that kind of way. Also I took an art class for the first time, I took the Intro to Studio Art class and that was like my first formal art class ever. I just want to explore everything while I still have access to this art education.

The S&B: You talk about how you dont have the privilege or the resources to become an artist as a career. What does that privilege look like?

GM: What I mean by that is primarily economic resources because its really hard to make art that sustains yourself without doing something else. So if anything, its your side hustle, its just something that you do. You have to find something else to do while you do this art that you love, but also I dont have any guidance in the form of mentors or people I can ask on what to do like how to freelance or how to do art-related work because I dont really have a portfolio. This semester I am getting a book published by SPARC but thats because I tried. I need to use Grinnells resources to have the chance to express myself and poetry is one of my main forms, not because I reached out to someone older or someone more involved and wiser, its because I just found myself in this situation where I have access to Grinnells funds and thought that I should apply myself, because after I leave here I dont know if Ill be able to do these kinds of things.

The S&B: So what would be your main hustle?

GM: My dream would be to do translation work like with documents from Spanish to English because thats the two [languages] Im best at, but also I want to improve my Korean so I can do translations for that  that would be awesome to do with comics. I love making comics, but on the other side, I want to breed rabbits to make yarn from their fur, like I have so many random interests that dont make sense, but the academic one has to do with translation definitely.

The S&B: Why comics?

GM: I like to read web comics a lot because usually you can find them on a lot of different themes and the diversity of characters, especially nowadays, is really cool. Reading queer comics with trans main characters or predominantly black and brown characters is really cool to me and I like to in my art  see myself and people I may know. Reading comics and seeing myself and people I know in them like artists that arent mainstream and dont work for Marvel and DC, stuff that isnt typical spreading awareness about peoples talent is really good to change our media that we consume especially in terms of queer comics and feminist comics.

The S&B: Could you speak more on your project sponsored by SPARC?

GM: Im getting a book published and its mostly poetry there are a few entries that are kind of like diary entry things but its called In Search of Freedom: Mad, Angry and Black and inside I note the distinction between mad and angry  mad having to do more with reclaiming mental health terminology of craziness and being like, whatever if youre going to call me that, I dont care, and because anger is so often contributed to black and brown bodies  especially women, like the kind of like reclaiming and encouraging anger that can be used instead of ignored or described as something bad. A majority of the book talks about my experiences in Grinnell, not in very direct ways. Most of it was written while I was a student. Most of it is written last year so I think what best describes it is the dedication I put in the front it has for black people and their oppressors and disabled people and their oppressors and queer folk and their oppressors, so its for like everyone to read, but it talks about my distinct experience but its useful to everyone. You cant change an oppressive system or oppressive values for yourself because it affects all of us. Theres a picture of me on the front, but just because its an angry black person on the front doesnt mean that like, for example, a conservative white person shouldnt read it. Im not trying to exclude anyone because its a story of Middle-America living. Its just trying to get people to engage with my lived experience because I believe in that whole personal is political to using my story to engage in larger narratives.

The S&B: Has the experience of getting the book published been what you expected?

GM: Oh its been so stressful! Ive never used InDesign before but I had to figure out how to use that. The back cover is just picture of me in my bedroom, which is not really professional, but its what I got. I feel like that shows how me it is, but it wasnt difficult to fill out the forms for SPARCs application. Im just wanting to see how it turns out. Its supposed to come soon in the mailroom, so Im just a little nervous. I dont know Ive never published a print book before, but  Ive published a book online of poetry, and last month I published the Spanish translation of those poems, so its really informal but this will be my first actual book.

The S&B: Which artist do you currently admire?

GM: So this is a musical artist and this semester she really inspired me and because of that she really made me embrace my weirdness art interests that seem really random. They are who I am as an artist. I just dont do one art form and because of that I can express myself in different ways. Its Princess Nokia, shes like my inspiration because she does music of multiple genres and to some that might seem all over the place, but it just that she embraces her creativity and explores. She [also] runs this meeting called Smart Girls Club its in New York and its for women and girls to get together. Its community outreach, and I think that community engagement is really important to me.

The S&B: What art form do you want to try next?

GM: Because I feel like because I have so many interests, I havent mastered anything. It isnt necessary, because I want to try everything. I want to be the best at everything and it really doesnt matter what art you do. In high school I started longboarding and I was like yes longboarding is art like everything is art to me and I like to see that in my everyday life.  So I dont know, singing or something. I usually dont sing in front of people or rap in front of people, but I do it on my own sometimes. I just dont like to share it because Im shy, but that might be the next thing Ill do.
Julia Echikson

echikson@grinnell.edu

This weekend, a fully student run production of the Greek tragedy Trojan Women, will open in the Loft Theater in the Grinnell Arts Center downtown. The production is part of the Grinnell Theatre Departments Open Space program that allows students to propose and put on productions.

Scout Slava-Ross 17 is the leading force behind the production; not only is she directing the play, she also revised translation of Euripides script to make it more powerful and less archaic. Slava-Ross chose to produce this play because it features women with eight of the 11 roles.

[The play] does deal predominantly with the issues of these women and particularly how women are treated in war and post war, she said.

Written by Greek Euripides and first produced in 415 B.C., the play is set after the Trojan War and the sacking of Troy. It revolves around four surviving women Hecuba, Helen of Troy and Cassandra. The women await their fate and deal with their new somber  and dangerous  reality.

Slava-Ross said that the focus on female roles is new at Grinnell.

With Shakespeare and Sir Bernard Shaw, is that most of characters are men and are often very male-centric plays, she said. It has always been frustrating when you get your audition turnout and you have much more women than men auditioning, but more men end up being cast.

As the play is a Greek tragedy, spectators should anticipate a serious and bleak theatrical experience.

People shouldnt expect a light hearted comedy, Slava-Ross said.

Because the play is being held in The Loft  a black box theater, the audience will enjoy an intimate experience.

Its a very simplistic set, Slava-Ross said. Its entirely composed of painted wooden blocks and white fabric.

Ultimately, the play aims to provide a new take on a story that has gained popularity in the 21st century with the Hollywood movie Troy and its mythical wooden horse.

It turns what they [the general public] know about the Trojan War and turns it around and its on their head, says Mithila Iyer 19, who plays Cassandra. We bring an important feminist perspective.
By Carter Howe

howethom@grinnell.edu

Zombie Burger, a popular fast, casual burger restaurant based in Des Moines, is expanding to Iowa City and the Coral Ridge Mall. These will be the first locations in eastern Iowa for the restaurant, which boasts of inventive flavor combos in a post-apocalyptic chic setting, according to their website. The Iowa City location will open on Dec. 8 and the Coral Ridge Mall restaurant will open on Nov. 25. Zombie Burger currently operates three other Iowa stores in Ankeny, downtown Des Moines and Jordan Creek.

Marketing director of Zombie Burgers parent company Orchestrate Hospitality, Adam Bartelt, said he thinks they will be successful in their new locations.

Theres two good opportunities, both in a downtown location as well as in Coral Ridge Mall, Bartelt said. Being familiar with both downtown and suburban locations with Zombie Burgers here in Des Moines we thought it was a nice fit.

Bartelt also said that the significant downtown population and pedestrians in downtown Iowa City, as well as the presence of the University of Iowa, were the main reasons they chose the location in Iowa City.

More than anything, its just a great downtown location with a lot of foot traffic.  Theres density there that you dont always get with cities in the state, and the college community certainly contributes to that

The Iowa City restaurant will be located at 180 East Burlington St., close to Iowa Citys famous Pedestrian Mall. As opposed to the flagship Des Moines Drink Lab location, the new eastern Iowa locations will be Shake Labs, like the other Des Moines area locations. Zombie Burger Shake Labs do not serve alcohol like the Drink Lab and have a slightly smaller menu.

The building were located in, were on the first floor  and all the stories above us [are] housing, and its all been leased by the University as student housing, Bartelt said.

As well as opening the new restaurants, Zombie Burger will also be launching a new burger of the month promotion that will debut at the new Eastern Iowa locations.

We recently launched  burger of the month. Its sort of a play off what we do in the East Village here in Des Moines, which is a burger of the week. With the Shake Labs, we want to give people a consistent experience at all of them, so were starting a burger of the month that will be carried at all of the locations, but were really launching it here as we open our eastern Iowa locations, Bartelt said.

Bartelt said that Zombie Burger has had to change their marketing approach as they have expanded to suburban locations like the Coral Ridge Mall.

For a long time we were focused on downtown locations, which had the benefit of density, a lot of organic traffic and one of the things weve noticed with a lot of our suburban locations its more of a message driven marketing approach.

When asked if Zombie Burger was thinking about expanding to Grinnell, Bartelt said the restaurant is focused right now on opening the new restaurants and does not currently have any other expansion plans, though a Grinnell Zombie Burger is not impossible.

We dont have anything in the books right now but we never say never, Bartelt said.

Ultimately, Bartelt thinks that Zombie Burger will be able to draw people from all throughout the region.

One of the things we noticed with Zombie Burger is that theres definitely a draw from outside the metro area. We see that in Des Moines, we get visitors from all over the state and the region.
MASON CITY | A Warm Hands Warm Hearts Hat & Mitten Drive/Sit n Knit event is taking place at Brick Furniture, 107 N. Federal Ave.

All are welcome and encouraged to donate new, handcrafted, or gently used winter accessories like hats, mittens, scarves and gloves for adults and children. Donations are being accepted at Brick Furniture during normal business hours through Saturday.

All accessories will be given to New Beginnings House of Hope of Mason City, a temporary shelter in a safe and secure environment to meet the needs of the most vulnerable homeless population in North Iowa, with housing options for men, women, and children.

Brick Furniture will provide a comfortable area from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday for knitters and crocheters to gather and work on items they wish to donate. They are asked to bring their own supplies.
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.
FOREST CITY  Being a veteran means sacrifice, Forest City Elementary Principal Brad Jones said.

Jones was the speaker at Mondays Veterans Day program at Forest City High School.

You take an oath at enlistment that you will sacrifice your freedoms for the greater good of the United States, Jones said.

When that service uniform goes on, he said, you become part of just one percent of citizens who currently serve in the military. Just seven percent have served in the military.

You now join ranks of a select few who can call yourself a veteran, Jones said.

Jones own grandfathers both served in the Marines during World War II.

I felt the desire to serve how they did, he said. He then joined the Iowa National Guard on May 20, 2000, while teaching in the Forest City Community School District.

He finished training in Fort Benning, Georgia, in April 2001. Shortly after returning to teach in September 2001, a student walked into his classroom and said planes had flown into the World Trade Center.

I thought that the oath I took in May was about to get real, Jones said.

He waited for a call to deploy, but it didnt come until later.

He graduated from the Wisconsin Officer Candidate School in August 2004 before being told its not a matter of if you deploy, but when.

As an infantry officer, Jones helped train others.

I went from keeping 14-year-olds from fighting to training 18-year-old soldiers to take the fight to the enemy, he said of the transition from principal to officer.

The transition, he said, was an easy one and he was ready for the deployment. But he was then injured twice during training exercises and couldnt deploy.

Jones said the move back from an officer to a husband and father was a lot harder.

For many of us, Veterans Day is not easy, he said.

There are those, like Jones, who feel guilty for not deploying. Others deploy but feel guilty about not being injured. Still others, Jones said, feel guilty over seeing their friends die.

My service wasnt glamorous. But besides my kids, it provides me the greatest amount of pride, he said.

The country isnt perfect, Jones said, but veterans are willing to take an oath to keep it safe.

For the veterans in the audience, thank you for the sacrifices you have made, he said.
SHEFFIELD  An Iowa Falls man convicted of felony serious injury by vehicle after a 2014 accident south of Sheffield has lost his appeal.

The Iowa Court of Appeals this week upheld the Franklin County District Court conviction and sentence of Matthew Schlachter, 39.

Schlachter was sentenced to up to five years in prison in December 2015.

Schlachter claimed his defense counsel was ineffective in allowing him to enter an Alford plea without a factual basis.

In an Alford plea a defendant does not admit guilt but acknowledges prosecutors can likely prove the charge.

Schlachter claimed the record failed to establish a serious injury resulted from the accident on Aug. 27, 2014, on U.S. Highway 65. However, the appeals court ruled such an injury did occur.

Schlachter was driving a pickup owned by ABCM Corp. of Hampton when he failed to maintain control and caused a multi-vehicle accident, according to the Iowa State Patrol.

Urine and blood samples collected from Schlachter tested positive for amphetamines and opiates, the appeals court ruling stated.

Several injuries occurred and one driver had to be flown to a hospital and temporarily placed on a ventilator, the ruling stated.

Schlachter claimed his defense counsel was ineffective in not advocating for a deferred judgment, suspended sentence or probation.

The appeals court ruled that based on Schlachters blood test results, he was operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated and was not eligible for such a sentence.

Schlachter also claimed the district court abused its discretion in sentencing him based on a fixed policy rather than an independent consideration of the appropriate sentencing factors.

The appeals court ruling noted that during the sentencing hearing, Judge Peter Newell said although he appreciated Schlachters employment and family situation, he felt the nature of the offense and the injuries involved called for incarceration.
Its nature that put Norway on the map: snow-capped mountains, glaciers and elongated fjords. The spectacular journey from Oslo to Bergen encapsulates them all, but dont rule out spending a couple of days in the cities at either end.

Book your trip from Oslo to Bergen with Viator

Oslo

Oslo is a city that masquerades as anything but. The hectic buzz, sprawling skyscrapers and hordes of scurrying people that define most metropolises are largely absent from the streets of Norways capital.

Situated at the end of a fjord, and surrounded by islands, forests and hills, Oslo emits a small town vibe (its home to approximately 600,000 people), whilst hosting world-class museums, pristine sculpture parks and pioneering restaurants.

Visit a museum

Grab a 10-minute ferry from the harbour to Bygdy and take your pick from the museums on offer. Norsk Folkemuseum boasts an open-air display of 155 buildings, which gives you an insight into how people in Norway have lived from 1500 to the present day.

Housing the worlds most famous polar ship, The Fram Museum details the history of polar exploration, and the Viking Ship Museum allows you to get up close to two wonderfully preserved wooden Viking ships that date back to the 9th century.

Less Vikings more art? Edvard Munch, Gustav Vigeland and Henrik Ibsen all once called Oslo home and the city pays tribute to each of them: the Munch Museum houses the worlds largest collection of Munchs paintings (including The Scream); Ibsens home has been restored to its original furnishings and is now open to the public; and Vigelands work is on display at the Vigeland Park, the worlds largest sculpture park made by a single artist.

Top tip: Get the Visit Oslo Pass to see the citys main attractions and cut your expenses in half.

Go to the opera or ballet

The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet House may have only opened in 2008, but its fast making a name for itself  and not just for its quirky design. In less than a decade it has attracted internationally renowned opera and ballet performers, as well as given space to home-grown talent  a combination that guarantees variety. If ballet and opera arent your thing, then its still worth checking out the building and taking a stroll on its angled roof.

Take a train ride

Clear some space on your camera; the Bergen Railway, from Oslo to Bergen, is thought to be one of the worlds most scenic train rides. The journey is divided into five stages (three trains, a ferry and a bus) and takes roughly 12 hours to complete in one go, or you can take your time and split it up over several days to really see nature at its rawest. The Norwegian Tourist Board offers the complete journey Norway in a Nutshell for 1320 NOK.

Meandering from the capitals southern tip, the first train sets off at 8am and takes you past lakes, forests, mountains and rustic ski resorts before leaving you at Myrdal to board the historic Flam railway, where the rugged panoramic views somehow become more impressive than before. Next, a tranquil 90-minute fjord cruise will show you just how the sea has carved its way in and around Norways coastline, before you are shuttled along steep hairpin bends on a bus to Voss to see out the final leg of your journey on a train to Bergen.

Bergen

As Norways gateway to the fjords, Bergen has a unique charm that not even its weather can dampen  although it regularly tries. Norways first capital city was once the hub of commerce as Hanseatic merchants saw its trading potential; theyre long gone, but the city has retained its cultural heritage and popularity as one of Europes most visited ship harbours.

Take a stroll

Wander along the historic harbour of Bryggen and experience architecture from the Middle Ages. Rightfully awarded a place on UNESCOs World Heritage List, this strip of wooden houses survived numerous fires before being recently converted into museums, art galleries and shops. Delve into the narrow alleyways and overhanging galleries to get a sense of what the crowded space would have felt like centuries ago, and then explore the Bryggen Museum to learn more about the iconic areas history.

Top tip: Stop for a Skillingsbolle (cinnamon bun) and a coffee at Baker Brun, either to take in the scenery or escape the weather.

Must see view

Surrounded by seven mountains and lapped by the North Sea, Bergen has nature close at hand. See the citys panoramic views by taking a funicular to the top of Mount Flyen and looking down on the wooden houses climbing up the mountain side.

Book your trip from Oslo to Bergen with Norway in a Nutshell or Viator

Header image by Moyan Brenn
The VisionGroup incorporated as the New Vision Printing & Publishing Company Limited(NVPPCL), started business in March 1986. It is a multimedia business housingnewspaper, magazines, internet publishing, television, radio broadcasting,commercial printing, advertising and distribution services. NVPPCL owns thesemedia brands i.e. The New Vision, The Kampala Sun, Bukedde TV, Urban TV,Bukedde newspaper, Orumuri, Etop, Rupiny, X FM, Radio West, TV West, Bukedde FM,Arua One FM, Etop FM and Radio Rupiny.
Patnaik's close aides say that to understand him, one has to understand his empathy

By Pratul Sharma/Photos Sanjay Ahlawat
Go-Jek, one of the largest startups in Indonesia, is leveraging Indian engineering talent and has set up a new engineering facility in Bengaluru.

The facility would have both Indian and Indonesian engineers and would become a training centre for the companys engineering team. There would also be developers, data scientists, designers and product managers who work on product innovation and mining data among other things.

The Jakarta based company wants to scale its operations and extend its offerings to its customers in Indonesia by using Indian engineering talent.

Go-Jek has also been on an acquisition spree in India and had recently made its fourth Indian acquisition in the form of Leftshift, a Pune-based mobile app developing company that specialises in designing and engineering mobile applications for startups such as BookMyShow and Walnut.

Interestingly, Go-Jek, which was founded in 2010 by a Harvard Business School alumni an Indonesian named Nadiem Makarimstarted off as a call centre company. However, today it has come a long way and has now specialised as an App based company with over 25 million downloads.

This startup offers online bike and taxi service in 15 cities in Indonesia. In addition to this, Go-Jek has diversified into providing different services, including food delivery, courier and logistics, grocery delivery, cleaning, massage service, beauty and lifestyle, automotive service and pharmaceutical delivery service.

In August 2016, Go-Jek had raised over $550 million in a new round of funding led by KKR and Warburg Pincus LLC, which was one of the largest for an Indonesian technology startup. The company is also backed by Sequoia Capital India, and DST Global.

Our Bengaluru engineering centre will help us improve the daily lives of more than 250,000 motorcycle and car driver partners, more than 35,000 Go-Food merchants whose businesses we helped grow and more than 3,000 service providers on our other on-demand services in Indonesia. Our Indian acquisitions were a perfect fit as far as our strategy is concerned and they have helped us in scaling up our operations and offering better services to our customers. We will always be on the look out for new acquisitions and if any company fits our strategy we may acquire it in the future, Makarim told THE WEEK

Off late, the company is witnessing increased popularity of its app in Indonesia. The sheer size of Indonesia and the steady increase in the number of smart phone users in the country presents before us a huge potential for growth. We will continue to offer our services in Indonesia and will not venture out in any other market as of now. However, in order to grow and to cater to this large Indonesian population, we need to scale up further which can come only through technology. Indonesian and Indian engineers will collaborate and work together to develop our technology offerings further, remarked Piotr Jakubowski, chief marketing officer, Go-Jek
In the wake of a large number of people queuing up in front of ATMs and banks following the government move to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, the Centre has taken steps to beef up security measures.

The Home Ministry has shot off an advisory to all states and UTs asking them make adequate security arrangements at all the ATMs, post offices and banks to prevent any untoward incidents. The MHA advisory comes in the backdrop of reports from central agencies, indicating that the rush at ATMs, banks and post offices is unlikely to decrease in the coming days and the patience of citizens is running thin in places where banks are either strapped for cash or ATMs are not functioning.

Security sources also pointed out that there is an apprehension of inimical forces and mischief mongers trying to take advantage of the situation and stir up unrest among people.

The demonetisation of Rs 1000 and Rs 500 currency notes has directly hit the plans of terrorist groups who were using fake Indian currency notes (FICN), printed across the border, to carry out their nefarious activities, a security official said, adding that there would be built up frustration among terror groups who may try to stir trouble in the coming days.

Keeping in mind the security concerns, the MHA not only wants adequate deployment of private security guards at all financial institutions, but is also asking states to rope in police forces to keep the law and order in control and deal with the huge crowds at the places where money transactions are taking place.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh had said on Thursday that the ''bold step'' of his government has shocked Pakistan whose motive was to destabilise the Indian economy.

The MHA and National Investigation Agency have several reports with evidence, indicating that the

FICN being circulated in India was printed using ''sophisticated machines and currency papers which can only be owned by a country/state'' .

Notably, India had already made out a strong case to the global inter-government body, Financial Action Task Force, asking it to recognise fake currency notes as an instrument of terror.

An MHA official said FICN was being used to fund terror operations in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of the country for several years and recent seizures of FICNs have shown links to Pakistan from where such notes were smuggled through Nepal and Bangladesh to be circulated in the country.
At least 13 persons were killed and more than a dozen injured in a factory fire in Uttar Pradesh's Sahibabad industrial area, police said on Friday.



Fire gutting the sides of a textile store in UP | ANI

The fire, apparently caused by a short circuit, broke out early Friday morning in a neighbouring Delhi district at a garment factory in Shahid Nagar area near the Jaipal Chowk, the police said.



By the time fire tenders could douse the blaze, a dozen people were dead, a police official told IANS.



A large number of factory workers, mostly from Bareilly, were present inside the facility when the fire broke out. Only three persons managed to jump to safety.



Senior district officials rushed to the spot as relief and rescue work continued, a state home department official informed.



The injured were admitted to nearby medical facilities.



The victims were identified as Aazad, Fazar, Negwan, Hasmat, Mehboob, Naazim, Sameer, Alauddin, Aamir, Salman, Momin, Naseem and Shakir.
Ahead of the annual India-Japan bilateral summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on Japanese Emperor Akihito on Friday.



"A rare audience that symbolizes the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan," external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.



A rare audience that symbolizes the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan pic.twitter.com/ZZf73xxFoy  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

"Speaking of civilizations. PM @narendramodi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of #IndiaJapan and the future of Asia," Swarup said in another tweet.



Modi, who arrived here on Thursday, is scheduled to participate in two bilateral business meets before joining Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for the bilateral summit later.



On Saturday, Modi and Abe will travel on the Shinkansen high-speed rail to Kobe. During Abe's visit to India last year, Japan committed itself to the development of a high-speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad.



This is Modi's second visit to Japan in two years.


MASON CITY  The Iowa Supreme Court Thursday suspended the license of a Mason City attorney for 30 days for charging excessive fees in a probate case.

The court also ordered Kristy Arzberger to pay $4,146 to Matthew Nepstad, the son of John Nepstad, whose estate she represented after he died on July 4, 2011.

The ruling noted the probate case was soon complicated by a lawsuit filed by Lori Thomas, who claimed she and John Nepstad were living together at the time of his death, which according to his will meant she was entitled to his residence. She also claimed she was entitled to ongoing support from the estate.

Because Arzberger was a potential witness for the estate in the Thomas matter, she consulted with a district court judge. The judge told her although a conflict might not be present if her testimony was favorable to the estate, it would be advisable to her other counsel to avoid potential for a mistrial.

Acting on Arzbergers advice, Matthew Nepstad retained another attorney to defend the Thomas claim.

The district court ruled Thomas failed to prove that she and John Nepstad had a common law marriage or that the two of them were living together at the time of his death.

The next day Arzberger submitted an invoice for fees to Matthew Nepstad in connection with the Thomas matter totaling $6,325. The invoice stated those fees were over and above statutory fees for the normal estate work.

However, Arzberger never filed an application in district court for permission to charge the extra fees, according to the supreme court ruling.

Matthew Nepstad filed a complaint against Arzberger with the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board in March 2014.

During a hearing before the Grievance Commission of the Supreme Court of Iowa, Arzberger admitted she made a mistake by not filing an application for the extra fees, but said she had actually prepared and signed an application and thought it had been filed by her paralegal.

The supreme court ruling stated Arzberger must have learned there was no court order approving the fees after Matthew Nepstad repeatedly raised the issue.

The ruling also stated there was a pattern of mistakes and misrepresentation regarding fees in this case.

However, the justices noted Arzberger has a commendable record of volunteer community service and has instituted new office procedure to prevent future errors in probate proceedings.
A Pakistani opposition party lawmaker has submitted a resolution in the Senate to withdraw 1,000 and 5,000 rupee notes from circulation in the country to tackle corruption, citing the example of India where Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered withdrawal of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation.



The resolution submitted by Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) senator Osman Saifullah Khan comes at a time when Pakistan's population is gradually shifting to cash economy due to the government's ill-conceived taxation policies, said Express News.



"The house urges the government to take steps to withdraw from circulation as legal tender the high denomination Rs 5,000 and 1,000 notes so as to reduce illicit money flows, encourage the use of bank accounts and reduce the size of undocumented economy," reads the resolution.



This is the only way that will compel people to use banking channels and launch a crackdown on black money circulating in the economy, said Khan, speaking at a meeting of the senate standing committee on finance on Thursday.



However, committee chairman Saleem Mandviwalla underlined the need for taking the views of all stakeholders.



The Pervez Musharraf-led government had introduced the Rs 5,000 denomination notes despite resistance from the state bank of Pakistan. The notes made it easy for the people to keep cash instead of depositing money in banks.

Referring to India as an example, he added that the world over such notes were being discouraged.



In a dramatic blitz on tax evasion, the Indian prime minister ordered the move. In India, banks and cash machines were ordered to close on Wednesday in preparation for the turnaround, triggering a late night rush by customers to withdraw smaller notes from ATMs.



Senator Khan said that the issue of withdrawal of currency notes should be taken up with the ministry of finance and the central bank.


Four people were killed and over 110 injured when a suicide bomber rammed a truck into the German consulate in the Afghanistan's Mazar-e-Sharif city, officials said on Friday.



The attack took place in front of the consulate at 11 p.m., on Thursday night, Balkh province Police Chief General Sayed Kamal Sadat told Tolo News.



He said the explosives-laden truck was detonated near the entrance to the consulate office which was followed by gunfire.

The injured were all residents, Sadat said.



The death toll is likely to rise as some injured remained in critical condition, health sources said.



The Taliban militant group claimed responsibility for the attack shortly after the blast.



Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in a statement that the attack was retaliation for recent airstrikes in Kunduz from the "invading countries" which caused civilian casualties.



On November 3, a series of air strikes were carried out by NATO-led forces on outskirts of provincial capital Kunduz city, following ground operations conducted by foreign and Afghan security forces there.


The Islamic State is almost finished and its stronghold of Mosul in Iraq will be liberated by the end of the year, an Iraqi ambassador to Spain said.



"The Islamic State is on the verge of extinction and has no future, either in the long or short term," Efe news agency quoted Alaa Al Hashimy as saying on Thursday.



"They may opt to change their name to create confusion," he added during a press conference in Madrid.



The diplomat spoke of what he called feeble resistance shown in Mosul since the Iraqi Army and police forces, along with the Kurdish Peshmergas, launched an offensive on October 17 to retake Iraq's second largest city, which was in the jihadist hands since 2014.



"IS resorts to to terrorizing civilians with savage murders, but they are unable to resist Iraqi forces," Al Hashimy said.

"All they know is how to plant bombs and use human shields," he added.



He said that a large district of Mosul had been liberated on Wednesday without anyone having to abandon their homes.



Al Hashimy said Iraqi forces had killed 1,200 IS terrorists and an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 jihadists remained in the city, but the leadership had already fled and all who remained were foreigners and Arabs, but not Iraqis.



The ambassador said the Western-led coalition's airstrikes had provided crucial support to Iraqi ground forces.



He said the next step would be to liberate Tal Afar, where the families of IS terrorists had fled -- on their way to Syria.




One of president-elect Donald Trump's most divisive promises -- to ban Muslims from entering America -- disappeared briefly from his campaign website before reappearing.

Trump's campaign staff told media that text of the pledge, posted in December following terror attacks in San Bernardino, California, vanished because of a technical glitch.

It reappeared after journalists questioned the disappearance on Thursday.

"The website was temporarily redirecting all specific press release pages to the homepage. It is currently being addressed and will be fixed shortly," the campaign said in a statement.

Trump said in December that Muslim immigrants pose the United States a security threat and called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."

It was one of a number of his statements - including a pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border and criticism of women who accused him of sexual harassment - that prompted the greatest backlash against his campaign, with accusations of xenophobia.

Later, he shifted to say immigration should be suspended from any country "that has been compromised by terrorism."

His stance apparently helped him win presidency with the support of a majority of white, working-class voters.
Donald Trump agreed on the importance of the U.S. military alliance with Australia and the importance of the U.S. military presence to the security of the Asia-Pacific region, Australias prime minister said on Thursday after his first telephone conversation with the U.S. President-elect.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Trump appreciates, honors and admires the 65-year-old bilateral defense pact that requires the security partners to consult if either comes under attack but does not commit them to come to the others defense.

We absolutely agreed on the pivotal importance of our strong alliance, Turnbull told reporters, adding that U.S. and Australian troops had fought side by side in every major conflict for the past 98 years.

We discussed the vital importance of the United States continued strong presence in our region and we agreed that that presence has been an absolutely essential foundation of the peace and stability that has enabled the remarkable growth and prosperity, the remarkable economic growth we have seen over the last 40 years, Turnbull added.

Australia and the United States last month struck a cost-sharing deal to pay for more than $1.5 billion in infrastructure to accommodate up to 2,500 U.S. Marines at a northern Australian training hub at Darwin.

Turnbull would not say whether Trump planned to continue to increase the U.S. military buildup in Australia during warm and very frank discussions.

Turnbull, a self-made businessman worth an estimated $150 million, said their shared business backgrounds were discussed and they plan to meet soon.

(AP)
MASON CITY  The Cerro Gordo County Department of Public Health has presented its first annual Workplace Wellness Diamond Award to North Iowa Area Community College.

The Workplace Wellness Awards Program is a partnership between the Cerro Gordo County Department of Public Health, Blue Zones Project Worksite Committee and the Mason City Chamber of Commerce to recognize and support local employers in their quest to encourage employee health and well-being.

After review and scoring of applications by the Blue Zones Project Worksite Committee, NIACC was recognized for its outstanding efforts surrounding workplace wellness at the Mason City Chamber annual meeting last month.

The following local employers were also recognized their employee wellness initiatives:

Bronze Level  Curries Co.  Assa Abbloy.

Silver Level  Cerro Gordo County, Smithfield Foods, Metalcraft, Opportunity Village, CL Tel, Kingland Systems.

The awards program is funded in part by a grant from the University of Iowas Business Leadership Network and also helps provide educational learning opportunities for workplace safety and well-being.
[PHOTOS IN EXTENDED ARTICLE]

An interview appeared in the Israeli Yated Neeman with HaGaon HaRav Shmuel Kamenetsky Shlita, during which the Torah giant discusses the need for one to be straight and honest. Rav Kamenetsky is the Rosh Yeshiva of Philadelphia and a member of the Moetzas Gedolei Hatorah of Agudas Yisrael in the United States.

Yated reports the Rosh Yeshiva instructed people to vote for Donald Trump in the US election, explaining to Yated for him the realization the other side did not conduct itself as honest as it should have and this led to his decision. The rosh yeshiva added that those who do not conduct themselves honestly, will not enjoy long-term success.

In contrast, regarding the candidate who was supported, apart from the fact persons close to him are sympathetic to Judaism and the Torah world in the United States, their conduct was always honest and straightforward and it is important that this be our position, as we too must only be on this honest straight path.

It is reported the rosh yeshiva instructed anyone who asked his opinion pertaining to the elections to back the republican candidate.

In the photos, we see Rav Kamenetsky during his last visit to Eretz HaKodesh visiting with Maran HaGaon HaRav Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman Shlita.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Russian government officials had contacts with members of Donald Trumps campaign team, a senior Russian diplomat claimed today.

Russias Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, in an interview with the state-run Interfax news agency, said that there were contacts with the Trump team.

Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage, Ryabkov said. Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions. I cannot say that all of them but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives.

We have just begun to consider ways of building dialogue with the future Donald Trump administration and channels we will be using for those purposes, Ryabkov said.

Obama administration officials have blamed Russian hackers, possibly with high-level intelligence links, for infiltrating the email account Hillary of Clintons campaign chief, John Podesta. The emails were then disclosed by Wikileaks in an effort that Clinton supporters claim was intended to damage her White House bid.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post  David Filipov
President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday refused to let a group of journalists travel with him to cover his historic first meeting with President Barack Obama, breaking a long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on the nations leader.

Trump flew from New York to Washington on his private jet without that pool of reporters, photographers and television cameras that have traveled with presidents and presidents-elect.

Trumps flouting of press access was one of his first public decisions since his election Tuesday.

Trumps meeting with Obama on Thursday will be recorded by the pool of White House reporters, photographers and TV cameras who cover the president.

News organizations had for weeks tried to coordinate a pool of journalists who could begin to travel with Trump immediately after Election Day if he won election. But his campaign did not cooperate with those requests and his senior advisers refused Wednesday, the day after the election, to discuss any such press arrangements.

Trump also broke from tradition as a candidate, refusing to allow a pool of campaign reporters, photographers or cameras to fly on his plane as he traveled to events.

Every president in recent memory has traveled with a pool of journalists when they leave the White House grounds. A pool of reporters and photographers were in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.

The pool was just steps away from President Ronald Reagan when he was shot outside a hotel in the District of Columbia, and was stationed outside his hospital room as he recovered. The pool also travels on vacation and foreign trips and at times captures personal, historic moments of the presidency.

News organizations take turns serving in the small group, paying their way and sharing the material collected in the pool with the larger press corps. The pool also covers official events at the White House when space doesnt allow for the full press corps.

(AP)
A Florida man has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for deliberately running down a New York state trooper on an upstate New York highway.

Judge Joseph Cawley imposed the life sentence on Almond Upton on Thursday, calling the crime nothing less than an assassination.

The Melrose, Florida, man was previously convicted of first-degree murder in the 2014 death of 42-year-old Trooper Christopher Skinner.

Prosecutors say the trooper was issuing a ticket along Interstate 81 near Binghamton when Upton drove his pickup truck at 93 mph into the officer.

Attorneys for the 62-year-old Florida man argued he was in a manic state at the time of the crash, making him unable to understand the consequences of his actions.

(AP)
FBI Director James Comey faces a complicated path under a Donald Trump administration. Does he try to serve out the remaining seven years of his term under a president who has publicly questioned the FBIs integrity? Or does he stay on as a safeguard against executive power and a guide for a novice president on complex national security matters?

The term of the FBI director is set at 10 years as an affirmation of the bureaus political independence, and some other chiefs, including Robert Mueller, Comeys predecessor, have served presidents of both parties.

But Comey would be in the delicate position of working with a president who lobbed occasional criticisms from the campaign trail against the nations premier law enforcement agency. Though attention had centered on whether Comey could have co-existed with a Hillary Clinton presidency, given the FBIs investigation into her email practices and his own public statements about the probe, that question applies at least equally to a Trump administration.

As recently as Sunday, Trump complained that Clinton was protected by a rigged system after Comey renewed his decision not to recommend charges for her use of a private email server while secretary of state. Trump repeated his assertion that Clinton was guilty and that the FBI knows it, the bureaus own public statement notwithstanding. Earlier, Trump appeared disrespectful of the Justice Departments independent decision-making power when he said hed ask his attorney general to name a special prosecutor to take another look at Clinton. That stance went hand-in-hand with lock her up chants from some supporters.

Trumps past rhetoric on the terrorism threat, including warnings that radical Islam is coming to our shores, is out of step with Comeys more measured assessments. And his stated desire to have an improved relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin comes even as federal intelligence officials have publicly accused the Russians of meddling through hacking in the American electoral process.

FBI officials did not respond to a message about Comeys plans, but James McJunkin, a former FBI assistant director, said he doubted Comey was fazed by Trumps campaign trail statements. He said Comey knew when he was appointed in 2013 by President Barack Obama that his 10-year term would carry over at least two presidential administrations that might differ sharply.

I cant imagine he would think this is anything more than politics as usual, McJunkin said. I think politicians say whatever they think they can in order to seize the moment, and I think that once Trump settles into office, hell realize the value of the independence that Comey displayed.

In three years as FBI chief Comey has been notable for speaking his mind, breaking with White House talking points on matters of race and policing and speaking more forcefully than others in the administration about his concerns about encryption.

That independent-minded streak predates his FBI career, famously surfacing in 2004 when, as deputy attorney general in the Bush administration, he had a dramatic standoff with White House officials in the hospital room of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft over the authorization of a government surveillance program.

Though the White House has not always endorsed his positions and Obama last week appeared to frown on Comeys public statements on the Clinton email matter, there have been no overt signs of the personal animus thats sometimes marred the relationships between other presidents and FBI directors.

But one clear point of division in a Trump administration would come if Trump followed through on the appointment of a special prosecutor. Such a decision rests entirely with the attorney general and does not require the cooperation of the FBI or its director.

So despite Comeys decision not to seek charges against Clinton over her email practices, a Trump-appointed attorney general could name an outside prosecutor to reopen the matter. Its not clear what his plans are, and Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told ABCs Good Morning America on Wednesday the matter hadnt been discussed.

Director Comey is a subordinate of the attorney general, and this is not his bailiwick, said Robert Bittman, who served as deputy independent counsel under Ken Starr.

Its clear from his public statements that Comey would bristle at such an appointment. He has said the FBIs investigation was thorough and that no reasonable prosecutor would have brought a case.

Such conflicts over major cases, including the 1993 Waco siege and now the Clinton email matter, are not new to us, said Robert Anderson, a retired FBI executive assistant director.

Comey understood when he took the FBI job that it wasnt going to be smooth sailing at every minute, McJunkin said.

(AP)
President-elect Donald Trumps positions on Middle East issues, if carried out, could bring yet more volatility to the worlds most combustible region.

Besides vowing to rip up the international nuclear deal with Iran, Trump says he will ramp up the war on Islamic State militants; he could make the Palestinians more desperate by siding with Israels hard-line right wing. He also seems set to end the Obama administrations cold shoulder toward authoritarians like Egypts Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

Trump has most often been vague and sometimes outright contradictory about plans in the Mideast. And his stances could change. His call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. worried many in the region, but he has since watered down that stance, and many opinion-makers in the Gulf at least call it simply campaign rhetoric.

Overall, Trump has shown a focus on fighting Islamic militants and favoring strongmen who do so. Hes shown less concern with human rights or the complicated minutiae of the Mideasts many factions and interests.

That is a simpler, black-and-white stance in the eyes of some, but it can also bring a backlash.

ISLAMIC STATE, IRAQ AND SYRIA

Trump pledged repeatedly to intensify the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, saying crushing the group is his main priority.

What is less clear is how  and what impact it would have on the conflicts in both countries and the complex alliances that the Obama administration has tried to balance. Trump has given little policy or vision on the wars beyond the vows to defeat IS.

In Syria, the rebels may be the biggest losers.

In contrast to the Obama administrations support for the opposition  equivocal as it may have been  Trump said the rebels may be worse than President Bashar Assad and that defeating the Islamic State group is more important than removing the Syrian leader. That suggests he could drop any backing. Moreover, he says he wants more and better cooperation against IS with Russia, Assads main ally.

Trump says he will step up airstrikes, vowing to bomb the hell out of the militants.

He has criticized the slow pace of the fight and at one point called for up to 30,000 U.S. troops to be deployed in Iraq  six times the current level. He later seemed to back down, saying few troops would be needed.

More intensified bombing, however, risks a backlash if it brings more civilian casualties. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has already come under fire from political rivals over the presence of a few thousand U.S. troops in Iraq.

IS may already be broken in Iraq and cornered in Syria before Trump takes office in January. Over the past year, the Obama administrations campaign of airstrikes, along with training on the ground, has succeeded in helping Iraqi and Kurdish forces take back most territory IS captured in 2014. They are currently assaulting the groups last main Iraqi stronghold, Mosul.

In Syria, if Trump allies with Russia against IS, it could also bring a major shift away from U.S. support of the rebels.

The Obama administrations attempts to work closer with Russia fell apart because of Moscows bombardment of rebels; Trump appears likely to drop any U.S. complaints over the Russian campaign.

Like Obama, Trump views the Syria war mainly through the lens of fighting IS. But the conflicts are intertwined. Turning away from the opposition could anger Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have vowed to oust Assad and back the rebels  and are potential spoilers in any conflict.

Trump will also face the same struggle Obama has: Balancing between Turkey and its bitter rival, the Syrian Kurds, who have been the main U.S.-backed ground force fighting IS. Turkish and Kurdish forces battled earlier this year in northern Syria  a flare-up that was put down by U.S. mediation.

ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS

Trump appears much more sympathetic to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than to the Palestinians. That bodes poorly for the Palestinian dream of gaining independence after 50 years of Israeli occupation, and has led to some warnings that they might grow so desperate as to turn to a full-fledged violent uprising.

While Netanyahu spent the past eight years clashing with Obama over Israeli settlement construction and the deadlock in peace efforts, Trump has expressed great affinity for Netanyahu and called Obama a disaster for the Jewish state.

He has vowed not to impose any solutions on Israel and promised to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a step that would undercut the Palestinian claims to the eastern part of the city. His opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran and promises to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the U.N. also resonate in Jerusalem.

In addition, he has surrounded himself with advisers close to Israels hard-line right wing. Among them are Newt Gingrich; former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton; and conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a close friend of Netanyahus.

Gingrich has called the Palestinians an invented people. Giuliani recently recommended that Trump abandon the U.S. goal of establishing a Palestinian state as part of a peace accord. The Republican platform makes no mention of Palestinian statehood, an idea even Netanyahu has endorsed.

The pro-settler politicians who dominate Netanyahus Cabinet have warmly welcomed Trumps win. Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett called it an opportunity to drop the idea of Palestinian statehood.

Still, the unpredictable Trump also raised some concerns in Israel during the campaign by suggesting he would stay neutral on the conflict and that Israel should repay the billions of dollars of military aid it receives from the U.S.

The Palestinians are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Officials had been hoping that if Clinton had won, Obama would have used his final months in office to deliver a policy statement or promote a U.N. resolution setting the stage for his successor to press ahead with peace efforts. With Trumps victory, the chances seem remote.

Foreign Minister Riad Malki said the Palestinians still dont know the policies of President-elect Trump but hoped he will push to realize the two-state solution.

EGYPT

Trump and Egypts el-Sissi have already shown a bond. Trump said there was good chemistry when they met on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in September. El-Sissi said Trump without a doubt would make a strong leader.

Its clear where the common ground is. El-Sissi has painted himself as a leader in the fight against Islamic militancy, a stance that echoes Trumps priorities.

The result could be closer ties after the chill between el-Sissi and Obama.

As commander of the military, el-Sissi led the 2013 ouster of Egypts first freely elected president, Islamist Mohammed Morsi, amid widespread protests against him and his Muslim Brotherhood. The Obama administration voiced some criticism of the ouster and briefly suspended some aid. It has kept its distance ever since, especially as el-Sissis government has cracked down heavily on its opponents.

Trump is less likely to take Egypt to task over human rights. Instead, he could throw el-Sissi political support as the Egyptian leader battles IS-linked militants in Sinai and Libya.

Egypts pro-government media have often railed against Obama, accusing the U.S. of supporting the Brotherhood and activist groups. They now were cheering Trumps victory.

There will be a big shift in the Egyptian-American relations under this mans era. You will see, said one pro-el-Sissi TV host, Ahmed Moussa.

(AP)
Reports of anti-Trump and even Nazi graffiti have emerged after tens of thousands of demonstrators in cities across the country took to the streets Wednesday night to protest President-elect Donald Trumps unexpected victory.

On Wednesday morning, just hours after Trump was declared the 45th president of the United States, the emblem of the Nazi Party was found spray-painted on the glass window of a building in South Philadelphia. The graffiti also included the words Seig Heil 2016 as well as the word Trump with the T replaced by another swastika, according to the Philadelphia Police Department.

The investigation is ongoing and police did not say whether the vandalism is being investigated as a hate crime.

The incident occurred on the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when Jewish-owned businesses and buildings were attacked and destroyed across Nazi Germany. The Anti-Defamation League, an international Jewish non-governmental organization based in New York City, released a statement Wednesday expressing horror at the hate graffiti.

We are horrified by the appearance of hate graffiti on a storefront in South Philadelphia, said Nancy K. Baron-Baer, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. Swastikas and the Nazi salute send a message of intolerance and hate to the entire community. The fact that today is the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht adds another layer to this already sickening act.

The graffiti appeared just hours before about 700 demonstrators marched through downtown Philadelphia Wednesday night to protest Trumps election win, police said. Graffiti also appeared in other cities where anti-Trump protests were taking place.

In Virginia, hundreds of protesters shut down several streets in Richmond, where several Civil War and Confederate monuments were defaced with graffiti. The words Your Vote Was a Hate Crime were spray-painted on the Jefferson Davis monument and the Matthew Fontaine Maury statue, while the words F Trump, F KKK were found on the Robert E. Lee monument, according to local ABC affiliate WRIC. Donald Trump disavowed David Dukes support of his candidacy earlier this year, and last week, his campaign issued a statement that he denounces hate in any form while also disavowing support by a major Ku Klux Klan newspaper.

In North Carolina, graffiti that read Black Lives Dont Matter and Neither Does Your Votes appeared on Main Street in Durham on Wednesday night. Residents told ABC News that similar vandalism was found in other areas as well.

In Nevada, police said the State Capitol in Lincoln was defaced with graffiti overnight or during the early morning hours. Phrases including Trump = Racism were spray-painted on walls on the north side of the building. Police are reviewing security camera footage in an effort to identify those responsible, according to local ABC affiliate KETV.

And in California, protesters were seen spray-painting buildings and vans with anti-Trump slogans in downtown Los Angeles. Police arrested 13 people in the city after protesters blocked traffic on the 101 freeway late Wednesday, according to local ABC-owned station KABC.

Meanwhile, widespread graffiti appeared on the walls of business and structures in downtown Oakland where about 7,000 people gathered to protest on Wednesday night. As a result of the protests, the Oakland Police Department said it made 30 arrests and issued 11 citations for crimes including assault on an officer, vandalism, unlawful assembly, failure to disperse and possession of a firearm.

(Source: ABC News)
Four local World War II veterans were recently honored by the North Iowa Detachment No. 859 Marine Corps League for their service. Here are their stories.

John Eason, Ankeny, formerly Clear Lake

John Eason recalls April 1, 1945, as if it were yesterday.

As Easter Parade played on that Easter Sunday, Eason, an 18-year-old bugler from Sanborn, was stepping off an amphibious vehicle on to Okinawa, Japan.

He was supposed to be in the third wave, but was among the first to land on the beach. The first and second waves had stopped, waiting on naval bombardment.

Faced with a smokescreen, Eason said the beams his division had only shone a few hundred yards.

We were looking at a good thousand yards of terrain, said Eason, 90. All I could think of, the dang rifle wont shoot that far.

We fanned out like we were supposed to, then came the first wave out of the smokescreen. I have never been so happy in my life to see the amphibs hit the beach.

During the Battle of Okinawa, Easons division took the northern end of the island, later moving south to break the main defensive line. He was a company runner during combat and was responsible for relaying messages.

From that point on, Eason said, he was involved in real heavy combat.

I can still remember at Sugar Loaf Hill, there were so many dead Japs and American boys on the ground, you couldnt touch the ground, he said. You were crawling over bodies.

Taking that 50-foot tall, 300-yard-long mound resulted in the death of 1,656 Marines and another 7,429 being wounded, according to the Marine Corps Association. It was among a triangle of strong points to delay Americans.

The nearly three-month fight  regarded as the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War  resulted in more than 82,000 U.S. casualties.

If I wasnt scared, I should have been, Eason said.

In August, he was loaded on to a ship to invade Japan. Dressed in full combat gear, his outfit landed at the naval base near the south end of the Tokyo Bay.

Here we came ashore loaded with hot ammunition, not knowing what to expect, and I was dumbfounded, he said. The whole town was in their best clothes and the fire trucks were there.

They were not ready for combat, period.

With a million or more casualties estimated if the U.S. invaded Japan, Eason said hes glad the Japanese surrendered.

He returned home on Memorial Day weekend after two years in the Marines. Eason later taught at the high school and collegiate level, teaching geography, history and ecology at North Iowa Area Community College for 18 years.

Although his time in the Marines was short, Eason said hes still part of a strong brotherhood.

When I went into the service, I was told, Once a Marine, always a Marine, he said. I thought that was a bunch of crock, but when I came out, I knew they had told me the truth.

It changed my life.

Larry Cronin, Clear Lake

Larry Cronin, 93, saw fellow Marines and Navy corpsmen raise the American flag on Iwo Jimas Mount Suribachi.

I was standing right there when they raised the flag, Cronin told the Globe Gazette in June. It was wonderful to see it go up.

Cronin, a Des Moines native, had joined the Marine Corps at age 18 for four years. He was initially in infantry but later switched by being a bugler, even appearing in a movie, Salute to the Marines, a World War II film that premiered in 1943.

After boot camp, he was transferred to Hawaii. He says his company was selected for Iwo Jima because it was a good outfit.

When his company landed, he said, he was the first one off the boat. It was a struggle to make it up the beach because, he said, the sand was so powdery and Japanese were mowing us down as fast as they could.

They had that island all these years and had weeds growing around machine guns so we couldnt see them, he said. They were killing us right and left.

Out of his 200-unit company, six men returned.

All my buddies got killed, Cronin said.

More than 110,000 Marines, sailors, Air Force and other military personnel participated in the 36-day battle that killed 6,821 and wounded 19,217. Cronin was shot in the back.

Following Iwo Jima, he trained to go to Japan but the war soon ended. He was still sent to the country to take care of the men.

He returned to Meredith Publishing, working there for 42 years.

Ernie Hudson, Mason City





Ernie Hudson was also sent to Iwo Jima, but as a non-combative.

Hudson, 92, was part of a signal battalion from 1943 to 1946 that would set up telephone operators. He was a truck driver responsible for transporting linemen or helping with wiring.

At Iwo Jima, his battalion waited until the shore was secure and the flag raised, later spending at least a month there.

There was some firing around but no problems, he said.

Hudson, who said he chose the branch because of a movie he watched, said hes glad to have served.

Im proud I was allowed to become a Marine, he said.

He later worked for the Mason City Water Department for 39 years.

Gene Pfertzel, Rockford





After a farming-related deferment, Gene Pfertzel eventually was drafted in December 1943 and settled on the Marine Corps for four years.

I just thought Id like to join the Marines, said Pfertzel, 91.

Pfertzel, a radar operator who also drove, brought fellow Marines like Eason into Okinawa on amphibious vehicles.

After Okinawa, he stayed in Guam another year where he was a truck dispatcher.

After returning home in February 1947, he farmed and hauled pigs for 35 years.
MASON CITY  Retired National Guard Lt. Col. Brent Trout paid tribute to the dedication and service of Americas military men and women Friday.

Trout, city administrator of Mason City, served 29 years in the National Guard that included two tours of duty in Iraq. He was the featured speaker at the Veterans Day observance at the Mason City VFW post.

Speaking of all veterans, he said, Its easy to step up and take notice. Its harder to step up and take action.

Trout told of his experiences serving in Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield and also in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

I came to have a genuine respect for Iraqis, he said. Maybe someone had a better chance at life because I was there.

His voice quivered a little as he told of a young man who was under his command when he was acting battalion commander in Iraq.

He said the man had volunteered to serve and took part in the extremely dangerous mission of transporting fuel to the battlefield. He was killed when his vehicle ran over an improvised explosive device (IED).

The memory of that young man and his service has stayed with him, said Trout.

He said veterans hold a unique place in society.

We are one of the smallest minorities and yet one of the most appreciated, he said.

The program at the VFW was preceded by a ceremony at the Veterans Memorial in Central Park.
MASON CITY  Enlisting in the Marine Corps has given an 18-year-old Rockford man a sense of achievement.

I never felt like I had accomplished much in life, Pfc. Wyatt Paulus said.

The Marines, he said, offered him the biggest challenge but also the strongest brotherhood.

He was a part of that brotherhood as a color guard member during the branchs 241th birthday celebration in Mason City earlier this month. Wearing crisp dress blues, he appeared smooth and confident as he participated in the event hosted by the North Iowa Detachment No. 859 Marine Corps League.

Paulus, who returned to Camp Pendleton this week for Marine Combat Training, was home on leave after completing 13 weeks of boot camp Oct. 28.

While he said local recruiter Sgt. Jeremy Spaunhorst prepared him well physically, nothing could ready him for the mental challenges.

I first thought, What have I gotten myself into?  he said, recalling when his bus pulled up for receiving at the Recruit Depot in San Diego. My second thought was, What comes next?

There were times I thought I couldnt get through it but I thought about receiving my EGA on the hill, Paulus said. Its a sense of pride and accomplishment like no other.

He was referring to earning his Eagle, Globe and Anchor, the official insignia of the Marine Corps. Recruits earn it and the title of Marine in the hills of Camp Pendleton after completing the 54-hour Crucible, the final test of boot camp.

It is a combat training exercise involving limited food and sleep, hauling 45 pounds of gear over nearly 50 miles and relying on others during obstacles and team-building courses.

Now that boot camp is behind him, Paulus will soon train in his military occupational specialty  a technician for light armor vehicles. He will eventually be headed to Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

During service in the Marines, which Paulus hopes to make a lifetime career, he plans to study engineering in college and attend officer training.

I want to be an engineer of sorts, he said. I like to fix things.
Donald Trumps choice of treasury secretary will clearly be of enormous importance. Suggestions that Jamie Dimon, the all-powerful chairman of JP Morgan Chase, is being sounded out shows that the transition team is thinking along the right lines.

Trump will need a figure with the right skills to bolster credibility of his administration. Never mind that JP Morgan is one of the worlds most-fined banks for its role in the financial crisis, having paid out more than 25bn in penalties  a history which made Dimon toxic in the Obama White House in spite of credentials as a Democrat donor.

Wall Street already is exuberant at Trumps campaign commitment to sweep away legislation designed to usher in an era of safety and consumer protection for the financial markets. The Dodd-Frank act was intended to make sure abuses that led to the financial crisis never happen again.

Don't bank on it: Wall Street already is exuberant at Donald Trumps campaign commitment to sweep away legislation designed to usher in an era of safety and consumer protection

It runs to some 2,500 pages and is considered over-elaborate, costly and cumbersome. But presence on the statute books has not prevented American banks from bouncing back quickly from the nadir reached in the aftermath of the crisis.

Much of the hard graft on probing the sham accounts scandal at Wells Fargo was done by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created by Dodd-Frank.

In Chicago, the prosecution and guilty plea entered by Hound of Hounslow Navinder Singh Sarao for spoofing trades, triggering a flash crash on Wall Street, was made possible by Dodd-Frank. Credit rating agencies, which escaped lightly from their role in the creation of sub-prime mortgage securities, have been brought under the same umbrella.

The creation of a new office of banking supervision at the Federal Reserve should make sure it has the tools it needs to deal with failing banks. And the Volcker Rule has ended the dangerous practice of the casino banks risking investor money by behaving as if they were giant hedge funds.

Moreover, even though the US dislikes international rule-making, it is party to the Financial Stability Board, headed by Mark Carney, which aims to make the global financial system safer, strengthen the capital of the banks and bring the guillotine down on too big to fail.

Eviscerating Dodd-Frank, which seeks to make banks and finance safer and protect the consumer, would be dangerous. It should also be looked at with some trepidation by the City. There already have been suggestions that post-Brexit some US banks may move functions back to the US.

Light-touch regulation of the banks would give Wall Street a competitive advantage. Sure, the act may have made it harder for new regional and challenger banks in the US to be established. But making life easier for the Wall Street banks and elites surely cannot be why Main Street and rural America voted Trump-Pence.

Steel nerves

When Anglophile Ratan Tata stepped back into his role as chairman of the Tata Group last month, the 130,000 members of the British Steel pension fund could not have been blamed for breathing a sigh of relief.

Ever since the crisis at Port Talbot emerged earlier this year, the fate of the pension fund has been in the balance.

Now we learn that Tata Steel, in which Tata Group has a stake, is considering closing the UK final salary pension scheme next year. The company already has agreed to make a 60m payment into the scheme in the current period and potentially could avoid making a similar contribution in 2017-18 should the scheme be shut.

Tata Steel is anxious to resolve the issues facing the 15bn pension fund as it is seen as an obstacle to a merger with Germanys ThyssenKrupp. The deficit in the Tata Steel fund has shrunk from 300m at the start of the year to 50m at present as a result of the improved returns on gilts. Nevertheless, closure of the scheme would clearly put at risk the security of payments to those already retired as well as the 11,000 active workers.

A merger of Tata Steel with ThyssenKrupp, without the guarantee provided by the current owners, could lead to the pension plan being transferred to the Pension Protection Fund, where benefits would be cut by 10 per cent and the bill would have to be picked up by a levy on healthy UK funds.

As one of Indias richest companies and an investor in Jaguar Land Rover, Tata Group has a moral and potentially legal responsibility to make sure that the British Steel pensioners are not disadvantaged by any attempt to restructure the pension fund.

Ratan Tata needs to take a personal interest in resolving a problem which could stain his impeccable reputation.

Creating value

As Britains leading free-to-air commercial broadcaster, ITV is being hammered by the switch by advertisers from traditional media to digital.

Worries about the ad environment have driven the shares down by a pound over the last year to 168p.

Investors should not despair. ITV is still the best place for advertisers to reach a mass audience and revenues at its production arm rose by 18 per cent in the past three months to 923m.
Deloitte has been hit with a record fine after a five-week hearing into its work on aircraft parts maker Aero Inventory.

The probe by the Financial Reporting Council looked into the accounts of the collapsed Aim-listed company between 2006 and 2009.

It found that Deloitte failed to perform an adequate audit, which led to misleading information about the profits and turnover being made to investors.

Fined: Deloitte failed to perform an adequate audit of Aero Inventory

The FRC also imposed a fine of 150,000 on Deloitte partner John Clennett.

A Deloitte spokesman said it accepted the findings of the tribunal, and regretted its audit did not meet professional standards.

Deloitte claimed that its audit processes had evolved significantly since those audits had been performed.

Deloitte was ordered to pay the costs of the hearing and make an interim payment of 2.3million.

Gareth Rees, executive counsel to the FRC, said: This fine of 4million is the highest recorded by the FRC for misconduct on a firm and was imposed on Deloitte by the tribunal following a five-week hearing.
It was bonfire night last Saturday, but the fireworks for AIM-listed Redcentric continued into this week.

For the Harrogate-based cloud computing specialist uncovered some fairly serious errors accounting  and the markets reaction was brutal.

There wasnt too much sympathy for chief number cruncher Tim Coleman who was shown the door.

Problems: Redcentric uncovered some fairly serious errors accounting

Analysts, meanwhile, were left guessing the exact financial fall-out, but the company suggested its net assets would likely be reduced by around 10million. Its debts are likely to be substantially higher than initially reported.

The shares were initially down more than 75 per cent on Monday before a mid-week rally recovered some of those losses.

This partly sparked by MXC Capital taking advantage of the reduced prices to increase its stake in Redcentric.

The show of faith buoyed investor sentiment a little, although the share price still halved this week.

It wasnt plain sailing for most of the small caps this week, truth be told.

The AIM All-Share Index lost a point, 0.1 per cent, over the course of the week to stand at 801, underperforming its bigger cousin, the FTSE 100.

The blue chip index actually gained almost 1 per cent, or 53 points, to sit at 6,749 on Friday afternoon as investors got their head around the consequences Donald Trump victory.

Copper miners enjoyed a strong week, but it wasnt just the big boys getting in on the action.

The price of the metal has risen 20 per cent, or around US$1,000, over the past seven days, with Trumps promise to increase infrastructure spending when he assumes power next year, the latest positive for the metal.

Copper was poised to rise and Trump has given it the lift that it needed to get going, said SP Angel mining analyst John Meyer.

Aussie bank Macquarie reiterated that point, claiming that the outlook for the copper market has improved significantly in recent weeks.

Shares in Weatherly International more than doubled this week, while others, such as Metal Tiger and Central Asia Metals, enjoyed double-digit percentage rises, too.

A word as well for one of the larger companies on AIM - Fevertree Drinks.

Investors in the maker of posh tonics for the gin and vodka swilling brigade were treated to another bullish trading update that revealed earnings were ahead of expectations.

This time last year, Fevertree relayed a similar message to investors that it would beat full-year expectations, a feat it repeated again in April.

Its a favourite with a lot of investors and its easy to see why with the stock having gained more than 500 per cent since it listed two years ago today.

Finally, watch out next week for a company called Angus Energy, which could soon become a big noise in the oil sector. It lists on Monday, with 3million in the bank and some ambitious plans.

It has an asset called the Brockham Oil Field that is interesting in that it is quite close to the Horse Hill, Sussex, site of the Gatwick Gusher.

The funds it has raised through the AIM IPO will allow it to drill what they call in the trade a side track well into the same shale that got Horse Hill flowing.

Remember, the Gusher came in at 1,400 barrels, which was, frankly incredible for an onshore well.
Three employees at major banks have been arrested in what could be Britain's biggest-ever insider trading probe, sources have claimed.

The arrests are thought to be linked to the Panama Papers scandal, which saw the identities of thousands of ultra-rich tax avoiders made public in one of the largest leaks in history.

A probe is being carried out by the Financial Conduct Authority with support from the National Crime Agency, Bloomberg reported.

A probe is being carried out by the Financial Conduct Authority with support from the National Crime Agency (file picture)

The authorities are cracking down on the crime, which sees traders place bets on the market using knowledge which has not been made public.

For example, if a banker was working on a secret takeover deal, he could buy shares in the companies involved.

Prices would probably rise when the deal was announced and the stocks could then be sold for a profit.

Earlier this year the FCA secured the convictions of two insider traders following an eight-year investigation involving wire taps, covert surveillance and bugged offices.

One of those convicted, former Deutsche Bank broker Martyn Dodgson, was jailed for a record four-and-a-half years.

Another success came last week when Mark Lyttleton, a former star fund manager at Blackrock, pleaded guilty to illicit trading.

The latest arrests were revealed after a Government update on investigations following the Panama Papers leak of files from law firm Mossack Fonseca.

Officials at the regulator said they had 'identified a number of leads relevant to a major insider trading operation'.

The authorities have also opened 22 civil and criminal probes into suspected tax evaders, and they are looking into nine professionals believed to be helping criminals hide their wealth.

A further 43 wealthy people have been placed under special review in a bid to better understand their actions.

The leak helped uncover the true owners of 26 suspicious offshore businesses.

And 64 firms have been contacted to determine their links with Mossack Fonseca.
Tesco Bank customers are at high risk of letting their accounts be comprised after last weekends attack when thousands of accounts were raided, the official online safety group has warned.

Get Safe Online said Tesco customers should look out for fake emails, phone calls and texts asking them to move money to a new account or confirming their log-in details for security reasons.

It said it is common for fraudsters to exploit breaches like the last one to commit further fraud or ID theft and called on customers to pay extra attention, also when using online banking.

Fraud alert: Tesco customers were warned to look out for fake emails, phone calls and texts

The warning comes as last Saturday it emerged that some 2.5million was stolen from 9,000 Tesco Bank customers, with some people losing up to 1,500.

Cyber experts have said that this was the first mass hacking of accounts at a western bank and the Financial Conduct Authority has described the theft as unprecendented.

Get Safe Online warned said Tesco Bank customers may receive phishing emails or phone calls, texts and social media links from fraudsters, instructing them to take different actions in order to steal their money.

These could include 'moving money to a new account', 'confirming their login details for security reasons' or even handing their cards over to a courier for 'checking'.

If you receive such an approach  which will sooner or later request your confidential login details  you should not comply, but report it to Tesco Bank and Action Fraud, it warned.

'National threat': Britains interior minister Amber Rudd

The safety group also called on Tesco Bank customers to make sure that when they log-in their online account the web page address begins with https, which indicates a secure connection, instead of simply http.

Customers should pay attention that the website looks familiar and there are not any additional fields where they are asked to enter details, nor full passwords or memorable details requested.

The warning comes as Britains interior minister Amber Rudd labelled the theft from Tesco Bank accounts a threat to national security.

The recent example of Tesco Bank is a stark example of what we face, Rudd told to a Financial Conduct Authority conference on financial crime.

Public confidence in our institutions get shaken by these sort of events she added.

Britain's National Cyber Security Centre, launched last month, is helping with the Tesco investigations, giving direct assistance to the bank, and identifying any wider lessons for industry, she said.
ST. ANSGAR  When Keith Roll was fighting on the world stage during World War II, his thoughts were never far from his home in St. Ansgar and his loved ones  and he drew many an illustration to prove it.

Letter upon letter was sent to his late wife, Alice, during his military service. Although he could not tell her where he was stationed, he often drew intricate images upon his envelopes that provided certain clues to his whereabouts. He sketched scenes from the battles he witnessed. Ultimately, this veteran was not only recording history but honing skills that would take him through a lifetime as an artist.

Although Roll, who has lived in Norfolk, Nebraska, since 1950, has lived away from his hometown for many years, he has kept in contact with some of his friends there. Several of his drawings and war envelopes survive and are kept at the St. Ansgar Heritage Association and Museum  and some are even held in the Admiral Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas.

Roll, 98, had no formal art training, although he recalls sketching dexterity for me was when my second-grade teacher in a one-room school two miles south of Manly insisted there was only one correct way to hold a pen. Today, it tugs my heart when I see young and old hold a ballpoint pen like it is a concrete chisel or a hammer handle, Roll wrote in a letter, describing his early days.

His first professional work came from a grocery store owner in St. Ansgar, who hired Roll to paint the lettering for his sale items, painted on his stores exterior windows. Kids walking by would draw their fingers through the lettering and ruin the copy. Roll offered to re-letter the sign and the owner was impressed.

When the boys did it again, Roll suggested to the owner that he could paint the lettering from the inside  requiring him to paint letters backward. The owner was delighted with the result, knowing his advertising was now safe from mischief. He paid Roll in groceries.

Roll recalled that 52 years later he was still being called upon for that exact same talent.

I lettered and painted religious art, all backwards, inside, on glass, for a new Lutheran church in Texas.

By the time the Roll was in high school, Miss Gibson, his English and dramatics teacher, kept him busy doing designs and sketches for programs, plays and other theatrics, plus painting scenery for back drops for plays and programs, he wrote.

After his 1936 graduation and until he entered the Army in March 1941, Roll worked at the Champlin Service Station  still painting signs. When he began his service, he initially served in the 14th Calvary, one of the last horse units in the U.S. Army.

His unit patrolled the border between Mexico and the U.S., since Mexico had not in the wars first year declared its allegiance to the U.S. As a result, Mexico was considered a potential enemy.

Once Mexico became part of the Allied Forces, Roll and his unit became part of the new 776th Amphibious Tank Battalion, which served in the South Pacific. As part of Bravo Company, he was in the first wave in the invasion of the Philippines at Leyte Gulf in 1944. He used his talents to sketch what he saw happening on those beaches. In an article in the Norfolk Daily News in 1991, he said his stop to sketch the scene delayed his own departure, jumping on his units last boat to shore. Army censors, however, took his sketches from him but returned them five years later. His unit was also part of the invasion of Okinawa.

Soon after the invasion of the Philippines and his first action sketch, he started a news sheet called The Spirit of 76. Its original purpose was to inform fellow soldiers about world events, Roll wrote.

But the men preferred sketches and looked forward to what they called cartoons and lies, but none would give up their copy, he added.

Throughout my army life I sketched pictures of wives, sweethearts, etc., for birthdays, anniversaries  we have seen several (in later years) with emotional remembrances. He stayed in touch with children and grandchildren of some of the men.

The curator at the Admiral Nimitz Museum said his sketches represented a unique type of originality unlike any other non-commissioned combat art.

Roll and Alice moved to Norfolk after the war where Roll was employed at the Norfolk Daily News. He worked in the art and advertising department for 30 years. His entry into the business was not friendly at first.

The company was planning its largest issue ever printed; after that business planned to separate the growing printing business from the news side of things. Roll was hired was a graphic artist, but before the separation took place, he was to work in the advertising department.

He was not welcomed with open arms. His colleagues gave him accounts that never advertised, or even disliked the newspaper.

I decided that I had to do it by artwork, (so) I picked one of the largest first, Andrew Van Lines, Roll recalled.

The owner told the young artist/salesman that he wasnt interested in local advertising, since theirs was a national business. That didnt stop Roll.

I drew the world and sketched the newest truck across it, Roll wrote. He was astonished, didnt even ask the price  and they still use the logo today, except the company periodically changes the truck design.

By June I sold more than most and those original salesmen became my good friends, he wrote. He eventually moved into the art department, retiring in 1980.

Even in retirement, work found him. He and Alice traveled with a fifth-wheel travel trailer.

One of my customers, World Enterprises, caught up with us in Mission, Texas, and stayed near until I completed artwork for a booklet.

Requests have come from his hometown, too. His talent was enlisted for artwork when two Mitchell County Catholic churches combined forces to publish a joint directory; his logo was also selected for the St. Ansgar Sesquicentennial.

He has continued to illustrate cards and letters to friends despite a slight tremor in his hand that has come from being a lifetime user of a pen. He lives with his daughter, Regina, and another daughter, Sylvia, is never far away.

Despite the tremor and an occasional sadness that he is only one of three left from his graduating class (Fred Gordon of Delano, Minnesota, and Gerald Halverson of St. Ansgar are the other two), he maintains a sense of humor and wit. Among his artwork is a sketch of Mount Rushmore with his visage nestled between Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt.

And, he still looks to the future.

Among his artwork is a self-portrait that says 100 in 2018.
ROCKWELL  A Thornton Army veteran reminded fellow service members Friday they still have a mission to fulfill.

We need to let kids know how important the gift of freedom is, Jake Miller said during a Veterans Day program at West Fork Middle School in Rockwell.

Otherwise, Miller said, the fight for freedom was in vain.

He likened that fight for freedom to school pride.

What if someone came to your school, put you down and burned your flag? he asked middle schoolers.

Todays war is waged in Washington, D.C., and on social media, Miller said, with words instead of bullets.

He urged students to pledge allegiance, stand for the national anthem and know what their government is doing.

As active duty Army from 2002 to 2006, Miller, a combat engineer, served during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was part of two tours in Baghdad and Mosul.

It was typical stuff during the war, he said. After it settled down, we helped facilitate elections, remodeled Saddams palace, built detention centers and police stations and fixed convoy routes.

With relatives on both sides having served in the military, Miller said 9/11 was an influence in his decision to enlist.

When I joined, soldiers were already deployed, he said. I was nervous at the time, but were the biggest and the best.

Miller also served in the Army Reserves from 2008 to 2010.

His daughter, Raelle Wyborny, 13, was part of the U.S. History class that put on the Veterans Day program Friday.

Its important that our vets receive recognition and are able to share their stories, she said.

TyAnne Schulte, of Ames, formerly Mason City, was one of many vets in attendance at West Forks program.

Having seen the benefits of the Iowa National Guard, Schulte enlisted at age 17, two days after she graduated high school early.

I like the ability to maintain a civilian life but be in uniform, said Schulte, 22, who is a truck driver for the Mason City-based 1133rd Transportation Company.

She is a tattoo artist in her civilian career and has taken art and graphic design classes at North Iowa Area Community College.

Schulte will celebrate five years with the National Guard in January, and plans to continue her service.
Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams

By Mark Hallum

Representatives from the Queens DOT commissioners office announced at Community Board 11s meeting Monday night that the 216th Street pedestrian bridge in Bayside will be dismantled with no plans for a replacement. The decision comes after the concrete foundations underneath the two sides supporting the structure was found to be in decline in 2006.

The rickety structure of twisting, rusted steel and cracked concrete connects the north and south ends of Bayside, cut in half by the LIRRs Port Washington Line.

Transportation Planner from DOT Richard Gippetti said plans for a new, ADA-accessible overpass were shot down by the community board on the basis that the winding ramp for wheelchair-bound users did not fit the aesthetic desired. DOT said the bridges deterioration has reached the level where it must be demolished as a public safety measure which cannot be avoided with repairs.

Gipetti told the crowd assembled in the MS 158 auditorium that because the handicap-accessible bridge was not approved by the community, no bridge at all will be permitted to take its place.

The pedestrian bridge is expected to be closed as early as the end of November, Giapetti said.

The plan right now is to ultimately take down the bridge, Gipetti said. We did work with the Department of Design and Construction on an option and that option was not approved, so there is no plan to replace the pedestrian bridge. Its something we can look to in the future, but right now our interest is in safety.

Susan Seinfeld, district mManager for CB 11, said the ADA-compliant plans were presented by the Department of Design and Construction at a public hearing in 2008, but following an outpouring of opposition from the public they were rejected by the community board.

Residents are urged to cross the railroad tracks at either Bell Boulevard or 221st Street for safety reasons.

Because the bridge will only be rebuilt as an ADA-compliant bridge, the design our engineers had determined had multiple switchbacks, so it was no longer just a single staircase scaling the bridge, Gipetti said, explaining how ADA-compliant ramps requires a certain grade for people in hand-powered wheelchairs to ascend.

Community members reacted with confusion at the knowledge the bridge would be scrapped without being replaced and questioned the DOT officials about where residents, especially children headed for school would be expected to cross.

Gipetti said the city agency is now working with the Long Island Rail Road to determine an exact time frame for removing the steel and concrete structure that does not conflict with commuter schedules.

The 216th Street bridge will be following the pedestrian overpass at the Little Neck station of the LIRRs Port Washington line to the scrap yard. It was taken down in mid-September and is pending replacement.

MTA police have been on high alert for illegal crossings at dangerous points along the tracks, an LIRR spokesman said in October.
Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams

The ugliness of this years presidential election bypassed Queens, where 19 races for congressional and state legislative seats were run with civility and occasional bouts of bipartisan fervor.

Several candidatesincumbents and newcomerswere reluctant to even discuss their opponents to avoid any suggestion of negativity when they visited the TimesLedger offices during the campaign.

On Election Day Queens immigrants jammed the polls to send the impassioned message that they rejected GOP nominee Donald Trumps plan to deport the undocumented and build a wall to keep out Mexicans.

Some Hispanics were voting for the first time in Sunnyside and tried to mark their ballots for Democrat Hillary Clinton in several spots to defeat Trump, a native son of Queens.

Once the presidential primaries passed, Queens was an election backwaterthe candidates did not visit here and there were no campaign rallies. The brutal male vs. female contest over race, gender and character was staged far from the borough.

But Queens voters, like New Yorkers across the state, overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Clinton, who had vowed to offer immigrants legal status and give everyone a shot at the American Dream.

Faced with formidable obstacles in her bid to be the first woman president of the United States, Clinton faced more foes than just Trump: Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is suspected of orchestrating the hacking into the Democratic National Committee computer network; disgraced Anthony Weiner, who had some of her emails on his laptop; and FBI Director James Comey, who reignited her private email debacle just 11 days before the election.

When the dust settled, Trump had won the most divisive presidential race in memory. We hope he does Queens proud when he moves into the White House.

Trumps coattails did not extend to Queens, where former Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, prevailed over Republican state Sen. Jack Martins to claim the seat held by Congressman Steve Israel (D-Mineola), who is retiring. The candidates traded some punches along the way in the spirit of a tough fight to the finish.

In a stunning turn of events, Brian Barnwell, 30, will replace state Assemblywoman Margaret Markey (D-Maspeth), whom he routed in the Democratic primary. Two other open Assembly seats went to DemocratsClyde Vanel in southeast Queens and Stacey Pheffer Amato, daughter of a longtime assemblywoman, in the Rockaways.

After the Trump shocker, it was back to business as usual in Queens.
Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams

By Patrick Donachie

A St. Albans woman was charged by the Manhattan district attorneys office with fatally pushing another woman in front of a subway train at Times Square Monday, according to Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance.

Melanie Liverpool, 30, was charged with murder in the second degree, he said. The criminal complaint filed by the DA said Liverpool was observed by two witnesses pushing a woman in front of an oncoming 1 train at 42nd Street station at Times Square. The woman was found dead under the train by EMS workers and NYPD officers.

The victim was identified as Connie Watton, 49, who lives in Long Island City, according to the NYPD. The incident occurred at about 1:20 p.m., and Liverpool was arrested at the scene.

The New York Post reported that Watton was the housekeeper of Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwartzman. Watton worked for the family for 30 years, and Schwartzmans daughter Zibby said she was conscientious and caring, often looking after the children in the family. Schwartzman said that she considered Watton to be part of the family.

I guess, intellectually, you know things like this happen but to someone so close who is part of the fabric of every single day of your life and for something so senseless and so random, it makes me want to pack my bags and get out of New York, she said to the Post. She was a part of every holiday. She was just a part of every piece of life since I was nine years old.

The Post also reported that police did not suspect that Watton and Liverpool interacted before Liverpool allegedly pushed Watton, and police sources were cited as saying that Liverpool may suffer from schizophrenia or mental illness.

Liverpool was remanded without bail at the request of Assistant District Attorney Michelle Warren, and her next court date was scheduled for yesterday. The Post reported that Matthew Mari, Liverpools defense attorney, said she previously worked as a home aide and has no prior convictions.

NYPD sources said Liverpool had lied about pushing a woman in front of a subway train who allegedly committed suicide on Oct. 19, according to the Post. The 19-year college student allegedly jumped in front of a train at Union Square, and Liverpool was held for a psychiatric examination after she claimed she pushed the student. This previous incident was under investigation in the aftermath of the Watton murder, according to the NYPD.

Liverpool lives on Linden Boulevard in St. Albans, according to the NYPD.
Country

United States of America US Virgin Islands United States Minor Outlying Islands Canada Mexico, United Mexican States Bahamas, Commonwealth of the Cuba, Republic of Dominican Republic Haiti, Republic of Jamaica Afghanistan Albania, People's Socialist Republic of Algeria, People's Democratic Republic of American Samoa Andorra, Principality of Angola, Republic of Anguilla Antarctica (the territory South of 60 deg S) Antigua and Barbuda Argentina, Argentine Republic Armenia Aruba Australia, Commonwealth of Austria, Republic of Azerbaijan, Republic of Bahrain, Kingdom of Bangladesh, People's Republic of Barbados Belarus Belgium, Kingdom of Belize Benin, People's Republic of Bermuda Bhutan, Kingdom of Bolivia, Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana, Republic of Bouvet Island (Bouvetoya) Brazil, Federative Republic of British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Archipelago) British Virgin Islands Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria, People's Republic of Burkina Faso Burundi, Republic of Cambodia, Kingdom of Cameroon, United Republic of Cape Verde, Republic of Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad, Republic of Chile, Republic of China, People's Republic of Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia, Republic of Comoros, Union of the Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, People's Republic of Cook Islands Costa Rica, Republic of Cote D'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, Republic of the Cyprus, Republic of Czech Republic Denmark, Kingdom of Djibouti, Republic of Dominica, Commonwealth of Ecuador, Republic of Egypt, Arab Republic of El Salvador, Republic of Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Faeroe Islands Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Fiji, Republic of the Fiji Islands Finland, Republic of France, French Republic French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon, Gabonese Republic Gambia, Republic of the Georgia Germany Ghana, Republic of Gibraltar Greece, Hellenic Republic Greenland Grenada Guadaloupe Guam Guatemala, Republic of Guinea, Revolutionary People's Rep'c of Guinea-Bissau, Republic of Guyana, Republic of Heard and McDonald Islands Holy See (Vatican City State) Honduras, Republic of Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China Hrvatska (Croatia) Hungary, Hungarian People's Republic Iceland, Republic of India, Republic of Indonesia, Republic of Iran, Islamic Republic of Iraq, Republic of Ireland Israel, State of Italy, Italian Republic Japan Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of Kazakhstan, Republic of Kenya, Republic of Kiribati, Republic of Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Republic of Kuwait, State of Kyrgyz Republic Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon, Lebanese Republic Lesotho, Kingdom of Liberia, Republic of Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Liechtenstein, Principality of Lithuania Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Macao, Special Administrative Region of China Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Madagascar, Republic of Malawi, Republic of Malaysia Maldives, Republic of Mali, Republic of Malta, Republic of Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania, Islamic Republic of Mauritius Mayotte Micronesia, Federated States of Moldova, Republic of Monaco, Principality of Mongolia, Mongolian People's Republic Montserrat Morocco, Kingdom of Mozambique, People's Republic of Myanmar Namibia Nauru, Republic of Nepal, Kingdom of Netherlands Antilles Netherlands, Kingdom of the New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua, Republic of Niger, Republic of the Nigeria, Federal Republic of Niue, Republic of Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway, Kingdom of Oman, Sultanate of Pakistan, Islamic Republic of Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama, Republic of Papua New Guinea Paraguay, Republic of Peru, Republic of Philippines, Republic of the Pitcairn Island Poland, Polish People's Republic Portugal, Portuguese Republic Puerto Rico Qatar, State of Reunion Romania, Socialist Republic of Russian Federation Rwanda, Rwandese Republic Samoa, Independent State of San Marino, Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Senegal, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles, Republic of Sierra Leone, Republic of Singapore, Republic of Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia, Somali Republic South Africa, Republic of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Spain, Spanish State Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of St. Helena St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre and Miquelon St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Suriname, Republic of Svalbard & Jan Mayen Islands Swaziland, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Switzerland, Swiss Confederation Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand, Kingdom of Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of Togo, Togolese Republic Tokelau (Tokelau Islands) Tonga, Kingdom of Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Tunisia, Republic of Turkey, Republic of Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda, Republic of Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe
Select the Times' Boys and Girls Athletes of the Week for Oct. 24-30
CLEAR LAKE  Most Veterans Day speeches focus on what rights and privileges the country has because of the sacrifices of those who have served in the nations armed forces.

Clear Lake graduate Army Spec. Brody Moran shared a different view with students Friday at E.B. Stillman Auditorium at Clear Lake Middle School.

He told them about what they have the liberty to live without: the physical and emotional impact of war.

You talk to other veterans, they still hear the car door slam  they still think theyre getting mortared, said Moran, a 2011 Clear Lake graduate. They see pieces of tinfoil in the road, they think its an IED.

That thats the true liberty you guys have  of not having to experience this.

Moran served as an Army signal analyst for military intelligence in Afghanistan. He also served in Germany.

He said he still deals with nightmares and other psychological effects of serving in Afghanistan.

He views post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, similarly to depression in that its something most people go through.

Its just a matter if it lasts more than two weeks, he said, speaking of depression. If it lasts more than two weeks, it becomes a problem.

Moran says he was told to seek help if PTSD lasted longer than two months.

He was immediately jittery around loud noises and always watchful.

After a week and a half he started having the same nightmare over and over every time he fell asleep.

He drank Red Bull and Monster, two highly caffeinated drinks, to stay awake. Pinched himself if he felt drowsy.

Anything to avoid falling asleep and having that dream.

Anxiety and exhaustion led to a very dark place, he said.

Thankfully, I had good friends that were there for me, and if it wasnt for them I might not be here, he said.

Rural Charles City veterans memorial gets facelift CHARLES CITY  Riverton Cemetery in rural Charles City has a way of drawing people in.

The nightmare still returns, but not as often.

Moran thinks it might never go away. He also believes hes not the only veteran carrying that burden.

Thats whats really important, is you understand what all veterans have done for you, he told the students. Theyve gone to war, theyve fought a war and they probably still are fighting a war for you.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Delanson

An incorrectly installed propane gas line may be to blame for the explosion and subsequent fire that destroyed a Delanson home, Schenectady County fire officials said Friday.

Determining the official cause was made difficult after fire officials deemed the home unsafe to enter late Thursday night. It was demolished overnight.

"They were worried it would collapse," County Fire Coordinator John Nuzback said.

Fire investigators who interviewed the landlord of the two-story rental, located across from the village fire station on Main Street, told Nuzback that the landlord had installed a furnace on the first floor earlier Thursday.

A propane tank behind the building is believed to have exploded.

"We're not 100 percent sure whether every connection was made properly, or if something happened with the furnace itself," he said. "It happened to be a used unit."

No one was hurt in the explosion or ensuing fire, which sent flames shooting through the home's two stories and attic windows.

A mother and daughter who were in the home at the time escaped, officials said. The daughter had apparently smelled gas just before the explosion.

"Whenever you smell anything unusual, my suggestion is to get out of the area and call National Grid," Nuzback said. "Just in case. And always use a qualified [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] guy. Always use a qualified vendor."

Fire officials spent hours battling the fire, which broke out just before 6 p.m. The loud noise, flashing lights and tall plumes of smoke drew gaping villagers to the scene.

"I thought it was a train derailment," said Judy McLaughlan, who lives across the street near railroad tracks that cut through town. "It was so loud, it just sounded like something had blown off the tracks or something. And it shook everything. We've been through a couple earthquakes here, so I just thought it felt like an earthquake and a derailment all at once. It was huge."

Before the overnight demolition, the left side of the building seemed to sag where a portion of the first floor had blown out. Doors, windows, sheetrock, insulation and furniture littered the ground, and shards of glass filled the street.

The building was at least 100 years old and possibly the original village post office, Nuzback said.

Multiple fire companies assisted Delanson at the scene, including Quaker Street, Cobleskill, Esperance and Rotterdam.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

There's a new holiday in the city of Albany.

Starting next year, every June 5 will be Sgt. Henry Johnson Day in remembrance of the World War I hero who took bullets for his country overseas only to fight racism from his fellow countrymen on his return home.

City officials announced the news at a ceremony held Thursday at City Hall to honor Johnson. The first commemoration of the holiday will mark the 100-year anniversary of Johnson's enlistment in the U.S. Army.

"Establishing a day to remember Henry Johnson is an honor deserved by one of Albany's great military heroes," said Mayor Kathy Sheehan. "He not only exhibited great courage while in battle during World War I, he is a man who demonstrated another kind of bravery when he came home from war and spoke against racism in a segregated country, speaking truth to power."

As a young man, Johnson joined millions of other black Americans in the Great Migration from the rural South to the industrial North. He settled in Albany, where he worked in a pharmacy, a coal yard, and as a porter at a train station before enlisting

He joined the 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters, the first black regiment to serve with the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. On May 15, 1918, Henry and another soldier, Needham Roberts, were hit with a hail of bullets from a German raiding party. Needham fell unconscious and the raiding party tried to take him away. Johnson used his rifle as a club after it jammed, and then a knife, to fight off the enemy and protect his comrade.

He was celebrated upon his return to the U.S. until he spoke out against racism and segregation. Johnson was denied a disability allowance and received no American military awards in his lifetime, including the Purple Heart, given to soldiers wounded in combat.

With debilitating injuries, he was unable to find work and eventually died in his early 30s.

In 1996, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer led a campaign of local and elected officials that led to Johnson being awarded the Purple Heart. Last year, President Obama awarded him the Medal of Honor, the highest honor a soldier can receive.
The election is over and the political ads are done. On election night the winners and losers of the races behaved professionally and made nice speeches. President Obama invited the president-elect for a visit to the White House and it appears to be like just any other election.

That is until you look at the people that are protesting and burning flags, which is their right to do because they live in a country where freedom of speech and assembly is their right. I am OK with that. I dont have to like it, but because I believe in our country and the values and principles it was built upon,

I do agree with an individuals right to tell others that Mr. Trump is not who he or she wanted and agree with peaceably assembling to do that. I dont agree with violence or looting. To me, that is just an expression of ignorance. I do not see how destroying property, whether personal or governmental, convinces anyone that your point of view is valid.

What disturbs me more than the protesters and flag burners is what I am seeing on my own social media feeds like Facebook and Twitter. I am seeing people I have known to be very reasonable people go after other friends with a ferocity that would have made the Hatfields and McCoys take notice.

Friendships and family relationships are being torn apart over the politics of this nation. I know its a sore subject. I know its hard seeing how polar opposite the two parties are, and there seems to be no middle ground. There are many today, myself included, who dislike Americas two-party system because it does nothing but divide us.

But folks, lets calm down and take a breath here. Arent we the people supposed to be the important part of this whole deal?

We the people means Democrats and Republics and Green Party and Libertarian and Independents and every other group that is out there. We can all have an opinion and we can all give each other a little break here. Just because we disagree does not mean we have to hate each other.

So lets stop gloating and whining. Just start acting like a considerate human beings. Pretend you actually care about the person you are ripping to shreds and remember thats your neighbor or the person you went to high school with or your cousin.

We all have loved ones that have opposite political views. I have wonderful sisters-in-law on my side and my husbands side of the family whose political views are like day to my night. But guess what: We arent verbally (and certainly not physically) punching each other in the throat. Do you want to know why?

Many years ago these strong women and I agreed to disagree. Yes, it was that easy. We said, I care about our relationship, I think your opinion is wrong, and I respectfully agree to disagree.

Now, we dont antagonize each other, much. We might poke a little political fun once in a while but that is it. We care too much to let politics ruin our relationships.

So just a little advice to North Iowa. Exercise your free speech, but please do it with respect and forethought.

While we are on the topic of free speech, let me remind you that today is Veterans Day. I am hoping that no matter which side of the political ballyhoo you come down on that you remember to support our troops and to thank a veteran today for helping to ensure that you have that right to post provocative messages on social media or to take to the streets in protest.

Please thank the families of those who gave the ultimate sacrifice so you can burn the same stars and stripes that covered their caskets.

Please honor our veterans by remembering that they too are our neighbors and our friends.

Lets focus on this holiday and take a moment away from our fighting.
Were you Seen at the Equinox Inc.'s 'ThanksGathering, A Celebration to Kick Off the Thanksgiving Day Community Dinner,' held at the New York State Museum in Albany on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016?

The Annual Equinox Thanksgiving Day Community Dinner serves 10,000 lonely, homebound, or homeless members of the community. Learn more about Equinox and how to volunteer.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Capital Region

Voters in eight Capital Region school districts have an opportunity this winter to decide whether their schools should spend anywhere from $5.6 million to $196 million on repair, upkeep, expansion and renovation projects.

Bethlehem, North Colonie, Schalmont, Schuylerville and Stillwater are proposing to raise taxes on local property owners in order to help pay for projects. Albany, Brunswick's Brittonkill Central School District and Niskayuna are proposing more modest work that can be paid for with state aid, capital reserves and other methods.

Before they can move forward with the work, districts are required to put the proposals to a public vote. But some voters, good government groups and even school board members are again raising concerns about districts that schedule referendums in the winter, when residents are less likely to turn out due to poor weather, the bustle of holidays or the belief that a single issue is lower-stakes than a ballot full of issues and candidates.

More Information School district referendums Nov. 29, Bethlehem Cost: $32.2 million Taxes: $16 increase per $100,000 of assessed property value, or about $40 increase on property valued at $250,000 Project: Facilities Improvement Capital Project spanning 111 projects across the district, including a much-anticipated renovation of the high school auditorium. Dec. 6, Niskayuna Cost: $5.6 million Taxes: No impact Project: Proposed improvements would address a variety of health and safety work and aging systems at schools across the district, including roof replacements at three schools, new electrical panels, HVAC controls and water heaters at several buildings, and new kitchen fire suppression systems at two schools. Dec. 6, Schuylerville Cost: $24.7 million Taxes: No impact until 2020, when a homeowner with basic STAR exemption and a home valued at $100,000 will see a $34.96 annual increase (enhanced STAR homeowners would see $17.58 annual increase) Project: Renovations and updates at all three district schools, the administration building and bus garage. The project focuses on increasing STEM opportunities, reducing the number of shared classrooms and creating space to help move classes back to the middle school. Dec. 8, Stillwater Cost: $23.1 million Taxes: $36 average annual tax increase for homeowners with homes valued at $200,000 Project: The proposed project has three components: updates and renovations to the auditorium and music wing at the middle school/high school, safety and security updates to the elementary school, and updates and renovations to the bus garage. Dec. 14, Schalmont Cost: $13.9 million Taxes: $2.31 annual increase for Rotterdam homeowners with homes assessed at $100,000. Project: The project consists mainly of HVAC work, fixing pipes, plumbing, heating and duct work, deteriorating masonry, and cracks in the floors, walls, and tiles, insulation, and replacing windows. The scope would also include replacing the roof on the Transportation 100 building and creating a more secure vestibule entrance at the high school. Dec. 15, North Colonie Cost: $196 million Taxes: No impact until 2020, when the tax rate increases 2.5 percent. By 2022, the rate will have increased by 6 percent, or $1.50 for every $1,000 of assessed value. For a homeowner with a median-assessed value home in North Colonie, the total impact would be $255 annually until the bond is retired. Project: The project would add classrooms; enlarge library, art and music space; provide enhanced security; and meet growing demand caused by development in the district. The project calls for adding six classrooms at Boght Hills Elementary School, where growth has especially been felt. Jan. 10, Albany Cost: $6.5 million Taxes: No impact Project: Faced with growing enrollment and urgent space needs for the 2017-18 school year, the school district wants to convert an existing district building into a middle school in order to accommodate a rapidly growing middle school population. The space at 50 N. Lark St. needs renovations and repairs to be equitable with the district's other middle schools. Feb. 28, Brunswick (Brittonkill) Cost: $10 million Taxes: No impact Project: The scope of work includes 36 maintenance and building concerns, including updates to heating and ventilation, replacing old windows, roof work, communication systems, lighting and safety, renovating and updating the MS/HS kitchen, elementary kitchen, renovating and expanding the MS cafeteria space, renovating the HS cafeteria into a multi-purpose learning area, and renovations to science, art and music rooms. See More Collapse

Why, they wonder, aren't these votes scheduled to coincide with the spring school budget vote? Or the November general election?

"Every Capital Region school district already has the ability to put a question before the voters, without costing extra taxpayer money, twice each year, in May and November," said Ken Girardin, spokesman for the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank based in Albany. "School board members instead choose to hold separate referendum votes knowing full well that fewer voters will participate because it requires them to persuade fewer people to support the extra spending being proposed."

District officials acknowledge that voter turnout is typically lower in the winter, but say project timelines often force wintertime votes. With summer the ideal time to start construction, spring the ideal time to snag favorable contract bids and a state approval process that can stretch four to six months, sometimes there's just no way to get around scheduling a referendum in the winter, they say.

In the North Colonie Central School District, where a booming population has strained facilities, officials are racing to capture enhanced state aid that will lower the tax impact of a proposed $196 million expansion project. If the public approves the project Dec. 15, officials say there's a good chance they can sign contracts in time to capture the aid before it expires on June 30, 2018.

"It's not driven by any desire whatsoever to suppress the vote," said Superintendent D. Joseph Corr. "It's strictly driven by time. We were working backwards from the 2018 date."

Districts try to plan major work so that it occurs over the summer or near the end of the school year in spring, in order to minimize disruption to students. For districts that don't want to wait a year before kicking off work, winter votes can ensure a summer groundbreaking.

Of course, critics say districts should plan their work earlier with this time frame in mind.

In Albany, the city school district is asking residents to come out Jan. 10 to vote on $6.5 million in renovations to transform an existing district building into a temporary middle school. Some worry the timing of the vote could sour community relations, which were tested last winter after a controversial high school project that failed on the first try was passed on the second try by a slim margin on a snowy winter day.

District officials have discussed the need for another middle school for the past year, citing space constraints and a rapidly growing elementary and middle school population. But it wasn't until this fall that the board approved a renovation plan.

To school board president Kenny Bruce, this was a sign of poor planning.

Sign up for The Knick  Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter.

"There is a fall election and a spring budget vote," he said. "We have two established days of the year when people are already voting. So it would seem to me that with good and proper planning, you could actually plan your referendums on one of those two days."

To other board members, though, neither day would have been appropriate. Important details regarding equity and enrollment (some residents worried the school would be racially segregated) had to be ironed out before a plan could be finalized. By the time they were, a November vote would have been too soon to fully inform the public about the project, they said. And a May vote would have been too late to get the work done in time for the 2017-18 school year.

Some say the November general election is an inappropriate time to hold a referendum. Albany City School District spokesman Ron Lesko said important school issues risk being drowned out by the noise of general election issues, particularly the recent election, with its "very loud and contentious back-and-forth."

In Bethlehem, where voters will decide Nov. 29 whether to approve $32.2 million worth of building projects including a much-anticipated renovation of the high school auditorium, the general election is also logistically unfeasible, officials say.

"During the general election, there are 38 separate polling locations in the town of Bethlehem and the town of New Scotland (part of which is not in our district)," said district spokeswoman JoEllen Gardner. "Keeping the school vote separate and voting at one location reduces any confusion on the ballot and on the issues being decided."

Some districts, meanwhile, don't think twice about the potential low turnout of a winter referendum. In Schuylerville, Niskayuna and Brunswick (Brittonkill), school officials said referendums were scheduled this winter because every other aspect of the planning process had been completed and a public vote was simply the next step in the process.
[November 10, 2016] UrtheCast Reports Strong Third Quarter 2016 Revenue and EBITDA Growth

Third Quarter non-IFRS revenue of $15.5 million increased by 68% over the prior year (IFRS revenue of $20.7 million in Q3 increased by 37%)

increased by 68% over the prior year (IFRS revenue of in Q3 increased by 37%) Non-IFRS adjusted EBITDA of $4.7 million in the third quarter increased by 211% over the prior year

in the third quarter increased by 211% over the prior year Year-to-date Non-IFRS revenue is $38 millon, compared with $17 million for the same period last year, an increase of 118% (IFRS revenue of $55 million year-to-date, compared to $23 million in 2015)

millon, compared with for the same period last year, an increase of 118% (IFRS revenue of year-to-date, compared to in 2015) Reaffirming our full-year guidance for 2016 of non-IFRS revenue of between $55 and $60 million and non-IFRS adjusted EBITDA of between $4.2 and $6.2 million VANCOUVER, Nov. 10, 2016 /CNW/ - UrtheCast Corp. (TSX:UR) ("UrtheCast" or the "Company") today announces financial results for the three and nine months ended on September 30, 2016. Strong Growth in Revenue and Adjusted EBITDA The Company is pleased to report Q3 non-IFRS revenues of $15.5 million, a 68% increase over Q3 2015 non-IFRS revenue of $9.3 million. IFRS revenue for the quarter was $20.7 million, a 37% increase over the $15.0 million reported in the same period last year. Similarly, the Company's non-IFRS adjusted EBITDA was positive $4.7 million in the quarter compared to a loss of $4.3 million in the same quarter of 2015, amounting to a $9 million improvement for Q3 in year over year adjusted EBITDA. At September 30, 2016, the Company had total cash balances of $21.0 million and working capital of $22.4 million. Revenues in Earth Observation Growing by 129% Quarter over Quarter Revenues in the Company's earth observation (EO) business in the quarter grew by 129% compared with Q2 2016, growing from $3.1 million to $7.1 million (non-IFRS reporting). Growing Opportunities in Engineering Business The Company continues to pursue opportunities for our technology and engineering business. Though not limited to our Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology, it is our SAR IP in particular which is creating a lot of new commercial opportunities, both in Canada and internationally. The Company has now filed 5 patents relating to the OptiSAR technology, some of which have now reached the publication stage. Non-Cash Impairment on ISS Cameras During the quarter, the Company recorded a non-cash asset impairment charge of $7.8 million for the ISS cameras due to a slow revenue ramp, ongoing operational and geopolitical challenges, and our ISS partner informing us of their intention to renegotiate a new agreement with UrtheCast going forward from January 1, 2017. The Company is now in active discussions to monetize our ISS cameras through alternative means, including licensing arrangements. "We are very pleased to see our Earth Observation revenues growing so robustly, from $1.3 million in Q1 to $7.1 million in Q3," explained Wade Larson, CEO and co-founder. "The continuous growth of both our earth observation and engineering services businesses gives us the confidence and financial strength to pursue our goals for UrtheDaily and OptiSAR. The non-cash write-down we've taken on our ISS cameras will not have not a measurable impact on our business because of the proactive steps we took in not only buying Deimos Imaging but, since the acquisition, in consolidating and growing the our sales forces, distribution channels, and global market presence for our Deimos satellites." Business Highlights Earth Observation Update The ramp-up in EO revenues in 2016, from $1.3 million in Q1 to $3.1 million in Q2 and $7.1 million in Q3, allows us to reaffirm our guidance for 2016.

in Q1 to in Q2 and in Q3, allows us to reaffirm our guidance for 2016. In parallel, UrtheCast has been expanding its EO portfolio to include imagery from other satellite imagery providers, including those of the PanGeo Alliance, of which we are a founding member. The capability of UrtheCast to offer an integrated virtual-constellation service, which goes much beyond a simple reseller offer, is allowing us to access new markets and customers with a value proposition which is highly demanded.

The sales ramp for high-resolution imagery data (Deimos-2) is mainly in Europe , Latin America and Asia across a number of market verticals, where our sales network has been working for a longer period. Deimos-2's exceptionally fast turnaround times and our flexibility in adapting to customers' service needs are the key differentiating factors of our product offering.

, and across a number of market verticals, where our sales network has been working for a longer period. Deimos-2's exceptionally fast turnaround times and our flexibility in adapting to customers' service needs are the key differentiating factors of our product offering. Sales of medium-resolution imagery (Deimos-1) are still growing, with legacy customers maintaining or increasing their orders and new customers signing for services in new geographies. This growth can be achieved despite the competition of free data (mainly US Landsat-8 and EU Sentinel-2), thanks to the unique service level of the UrtheCast product, which is also tailored to enable sustainable geo-analytics services. UrtheDaily Update The Company is actively negotiating contracts with multiple partners to bring to market the UrtheDaily constellation, which has been designed to be the world's first Earth Observation system planned, from the ground-up, to truly power machine-learning and artificial intelligence-ready geoanalytics applications on a global scale. Customers' urgency for the UrtheDaily service is being created in part by the impending end-of-life of incumbent satellite systems.

The Company met with several key stakeholders within the supply chain for the procurement of the satellites, further refining the design, cost and timing of delivery and launch. OptiSAR Progress The Company is in full contract negotiations with three prospective OptiSAR customers to convert existing Memoranda of Understanding, representing in total US$490 million of customer commitments for the constellation. If successful, this will allow us to begin building the first series of satelittes.

of customer commitments for the constellation. If successful, this will allow us to begin building the first series of satelittes. The Company is witnessing increasing financial support and user interest from the Government of Canada in OptiSAR, the world's most advanced SAR technology. The company is pursuing this because the Canadian Government is looking at a follow-on mission to the three-satellite RCM program (RADARSAT Constellation Mission).

in OptiSAR, the world's most advanced SAR technology. The company is pursuing this because the Canadian Government is looking at a follow-on mission to the three-satellite RCM program (RADARSAT Constellation Mission). UrtheCast's Request for Proposal ("RFP") to U.S. companies interested in a long-term strategic partnership to serve the United States Government has closed and the Company is reviewing the responses submitted. At this time, the Company is inviting down-selected U.S. bidders for partnership discussions. Reaffirming 2016 Guidance This continued significant year over year growth allows us to reaffirm our full year 2016 guidance to achieve non-IFRS revenue between $55 million and $60 million (representing an IFRS revenue range of $78 million to $83 million) and non-IFRS adjusted EBITDA guidance between $4.2 million and $6.2 million in fiscal 2016. SELECTED FINANCIAL INFORMATION The following table provides selected financial information of the Company, which was derived from, and should be read in conjunction with, the unaudited consolidated financial statements for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2016.











Three Months Ended September 30, Nine Months Ended September 30,



2016

2015

2016

2015 Revenue $ 20,651 $ 15,019 $ 53,776 $ 23,252 Other operating income

61

411

756

4,476



20,712

15,430

54,532

27,728 Operating costs















Direct costs, selling, general and administrative expenses

13,853

12,618

42,895

20,734 Research expenditures

844

5,215

4,073

10,317 Depreciation and amortization

6,321

5,838

19,277

6,003 Asset impairment

7,780

-

7,780

- Share-based payments

769

946

1,892

2,297



29,567

24,617

75,917

39,351 Operating loss

(8,855)

(9,187)

(21,385)

(11,623) Acquisition costs

-

(2,295)

-

(5,325) Net finance costs

(535)

(147)

(1,636)

(276) Loss on derivative financial instruments

(775)

-

(775)

- Foreign exchange (loss) gain

296

(235)

(106)

(66) Loss before income taxes

(9,869)

(11,864)

(23,902)

(17,290) Income tax recovery (expense)

251

(83)

2,907

(83) Net loss

(9,618)

(11,947)

(20,995)

(17,373) Other comprehensive income (loss)

1,425

6,201

(2,031)

6,199 Comprehensive loss $ (8,193) $ (5,746) $ (23,026) $ (11,174) Net loss per share  basic and diluted $ (0.09) $ (0.12) $ (0.20) $ (0.22)



Three Months ended September 30, Nine Months ended September 30,



2016

2015

2016

2015 NON-IFRS REVENUE:















Revenue per income statement $ 20,651 $ 15,019 $ 53,776 $ 23,252 Non-cash revenue

(5,128)

(5,753)

(15,541)

(5,753) NON-IFRS REVENUE

15,523

9,266 $ 38,235 $ 17,499

















ADJUSTED EBITDA:















Net loss $ (9,618) $ (11,947) $ (20,995) $ (17,373) Add back (subtract):















Depreciation and amortization

6,321

5,838

19,277

6,003 Net finance costs

535

147

1,636

276 Income tax recovery

(251)

83

(2,907)

83 EBITDA

(3,013)

(5,879)

(2,989)

(11,011) Non-cash revenue

(5,128)

(5,753)

(15,541)

(5,753) Non-cash operating costs

3,859

3,876

11,736

3,876 Asset impairment

7,780

-

7,780

- Share-based payments expense

769

946

1,892

2,297 Deimos acquisition costs

-

2,295

-

5,325 Loss on derivative financial instruments

775

-

775

- Foreign exchange losses (gains)

(296)

235

106

66 ADJUSTED EBITDA $ 4,746 $ (4,280) $ 3,759 $ (5,200) As previously announced, UrtheCast will host a conference call regarding its 2016 third quarter financial results at 5:00 p.m. ET (2:00 p.m. PT) today, November 10, 2016. The live conference call will be available by calling toll-free at +1 866-696-5910, or by toll call at +1 416-340-2217. The participant pass code is 6974365. An archived version of the conference call will be made available on the Company's investor website (investors.urthecast.com) following the live conference call. ABOUT URTHECAST CORP. UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver-based technology company that serves the rapidly evolving geospatial and geoanalytics markets with a wide range of information-rich products and services. The Company currently operates four Earth Observation sensors in space, including two cameras aboard the International Space Station and two satellites, Deimos-1 and Deimos-2. Imagery and video data captured by these sensors is downlinked to ground stations across the planet and displayed on the UrthePlatform, or distributed directly to partners and customers. UrtheCast is also developing and anticipates launching the world's first fully-integrated constellation of multispectral optical and SAR satellites, called OptiSAR, in addition to its proposed UrtheDaily constellation, which the Company believes will together revolutionize monitoring of our planet with high-quality, medium and high-resolution, and high-coverage and high-revisit imagery in all weather conditions, any time of day. Common shares of UrtheCast trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange as ticker 'UR'. Non-IFRS Financial Measures The Company prepares its financial statements in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS"), as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board. This release includes certain non-IFRS financial measures, such as non-IFRS revenues, EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA. The Company uses these non-IFRS financial measures as supplemental indicators of its operating performance and financial position. These measures do not have any standardized meanings prescribed by IFRS and therefore are unlikely to be comparable to the calculation of similar measures used by other companies, and should not be viewed as alternatives to measures of financial performance calculated in accordance with IFRS or considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. These non-IFRS financial measures should be read in conjunction with the Company's financial statements and accompanying MD&A. Forward Looking Information This release contains certain information which, as presented, constitutes "forward-looking information" or "forward-oriented financial information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information involves statements that relate to future events and often addresses expected future business and financial performance, containing words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect" and "guidance", statements that an action or event "may", "might", "could" or "will" be taken or occur, or other similar expressions and includes, but is not limited to, statements relating to: UrtheCast's expectations with respect its current sensors and proposed OptiSAR and UrtheDailyTM constellations; financial guidance for the 2016 financial year; anticipated cash and financing needs; its plans for and timing of expansion of its product offering and value-added services, including providing additional data sources on the UrthePlatform; its future growth and operations plans, including with respect to the RFP; expectations regarding its sales funnel; significant changes expected in 2017 to the agreement with our Russian partners related to the cameras aboard the Russian segment of the International Space Station ("ISS"); efforts to monetize the cameras aboard the ISS through alternative means; management's expectations regarding recoverable amounts of such assets; and anticipated trends and challenges in its business and the markets in which it operates. Such statements reflect UrtheCast's current views with respect to future events. Such statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by UrtheCast, are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors could cause UrtheCast's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including, among others: any delays or failures in the design, development, construction, launch and operational commissioning of the proposed OptiSAR or UrtheDailyTM constellations; the Company being unable to convert the Memoranda of Understanding in respect of funding of the OptiSAR constellation into binding, definitive agreements; failures aboard the International Space Station ("ISS") or the Deimos-1 or Deimos-2 satellites; failure to obtain, or loss of, regulatory approvals; uncertainties and assumptions in UrtheCast's revenue forecasts; as well as those factors and assumptions discussed in UrtheCast's annual information form dated March 29, 2016, (the "AIF"), which is available under UrtheCast's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Forward-looking information is developed based on assumptions about such risks, uncertainties and other factors set out herein, in the AIF, and as disclosed from time to time on UrtheCast's SEDAR profile. UrtheCast undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by Canadian securities laws. Readers are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. For more information, visit UrtheCast's website at www.urthecast.com. SOURCE UrtheCast Corp.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] Intrusion Inc. Announces Financial Release Date and Conference Call

RICHARDSON, Texas, Nov. 10, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Intrusion Inc. (OTCQB:INTZ), (Intrusion) will announce third quarter 2016 financial results on Monday, November 14, 2016. The press release will be published over the wire services after the market closes. The release will also be available on the companys web site at www.intrusion.com. Intrusion management will review the Companys financial and operational progress for the third quarter 2016 during a conference call later that day at 4:00 P.M., CST.

Interested investors can access the call at 1-877-258-4925 (outside the United States, please dial -973-500-2152) at 4:00 P.M., CST. For those unable to participate in the live conference call, a replay will be accessible beginning November 14, 2016 at approximately 7:00 P.M., CST until November 21, 2016 by calling 1-855-859-2056 (if outside the United States, 1-404-537-3406). At the replay prompt, enter conference identification number 18411485. In addition, a live and archived audio webcast of the conference call will be available at www.intrusion.com.



About Intrusion Inc. Intrusion Inc. is a global provider of entity identification, high speed data mining, cybercrime and advanced persistent threat detection products. Intrusions product families include TraceCop for identity discovery and disclosure, Savant for network data mining and advanced persistent threat detection. Intrusions products help protect critical information assets by quickly detecting, protecting, analyzing and reporting attacks or misuse of classified, private and regulated information for government and enterprise networks. For more information, please visit www.intrusion.com. We develop, market and support a family of entity identification, high speed data mining, cybercrime and advanced persistent threat detection products.

Contact Michael L. Paxton, VP, CFO 972.301.3658, [email protected]

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] Rubicon Project Reports Record Breaking Days for Video Advertising Following U.S. Presidential Election

Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI), which operates one of the largest advertising marketplaces in the world, today announced record breaking video advertising spend in the days surrounding the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The most watched and followed news event of the year saw a massive spike of advertising spend transacted across Rubicon Project's global mobile and desktop advertising exchange, with video being the clear format of choice as people turned to their mobile devices and laptops for real-time updates. Election Day represented the single biggest day in terms of video spend in company history, with momentum continuing to the following day which marked the second largest day on record. The surge in video consumption impacted both desktop and mobile. Highlighting the increasing trend of people moving away from traditional mobile web usage to mobile in-app content consumption, mobile in-app video accounted for 85% of all mobile video spend on Rubicon Project's exchange for those days. Rubicon Project operates one of the three largest mobile advertising exchanges globally. "During important moments in history - be they related to sports, politics, weather or other must watch moments - people are increasingly urning to digital video to stay connected and informed," said Harry Patz, Chief Revenue Officer, Rubicon Project. "On November 8, the world turned its attention online and in many cases to mobile to watch the election results unfold, and tens of thousands advertisers leveraged the power and reach of automated advertising to engage via video this highly sought after audience."



Rubicon Project enjoys a unique position in the video marketplace, powering the industry's most comprehensive mobile video solution, offering buyers and sellers access to every advertising format within the mobile video ecosystem. Ad formats available on Rubicon Project's video offering include highly engaging formats like user-opt-in / rewarded, native, expandable, interstitial, pre/mid/post-roll, outstream and vertical. Rubicon Project announced during its Q3 2016 conference call on November 2, 2016 that the company is well on pace to accelerate to over $100 million of video advertising spend in 2017. In Q3, more than half of Rubicon Project's top customers used Rubicon Project to execute their video advertising business.

Tom Kershaw (News - Alert), Chief Product and Engineering Officer for Rubicon Project, commented, "Rubicon Project has built a premium video offering providing both buyers and sellers access to every video format available. We expect to see more record moments like these in the future as people embrace video - and especially in-app video - to stay connected to the news and information that matters most to them." About Rubicon Project Founded in 2007, Rubicon Project's mission is to keep the Internet free and open and fuel its growth by making it easy and safe to buy and sell advertising. Rubicon Project pioneered advertising automation technology to enable the world's leading brands, content creators and application developers to trade and protect trillions of advertising requests each month and to improve the advertising experiences of people. Rubicon Project is a publicly traded company (NYSE: RUBI) headquartered in Los Angeles, California. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161110006649/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Teva or the Company) (NYSE:TEVA) and certain of its officers. The class action, filed in United States District Court, Southern District of New York, and docketed under 16-cv-08747, is on behalf of a class consisting of all persons or entities who purchased or otherwise acquired Teva securities between February 10, 2014 and November 2, 2016, both dates inclusive (the Class Period), seeking to recover compensable damages caused by defendants violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.



If you are a shareholder who purchased Teva securities during the Class Period, you have until January 5, 2017 to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll free, ext. 9980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and number of shares purchased.

[Click here to join this class action]

Teva develops, manufactures, markets, and distributes generic medicines and a portfolio of specialty medicines worldwide. Teva is the largest generic drug manufacturer in the world and one of the 15 largest pharmaceutical companies worldwide.

The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements, as well as failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Companys business, operations, and prospects. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Teva and several of its pharmaceutical industry peers colluded to fix generic drug prices; (ii) the foregoing conduct constituted a violation of federal antitrust laws; (iii) consequently, Tevas revenues during the Class Period were in part the result of illegal conduct; and (iv) as a result of the foregoing, Tevas public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

On November 3, 2016, media outlets reported that U.S. prosecutors might file criminal charges by the end of 2016 against Teva and several other pharmaceutical companies for unlawfully colluding to fix generic drug prices.

On this news, Tevas ADR price fell $4.13, or 9.53%, to close at $39.20 on November 3, 2016.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Florida, and Los Angeles, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com
[November 10, 2016] Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP Files Securities Class Action Lawsuit Against Diplomat Pharmacy, Inc.

Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP ("GPM") announces that it has filed a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on behalf of a class (the "Class") consisting of persons and entities that purchased or otherwise acquired Diplomat Pharmacy, Inc. ("Diplomat" or the "Company") (NYSE: DPLO) securities between October 9, 2014 and November 2, 2016, inclusive (the "Class Period"). If you are a member of the Class described above, you may move the Court no later than 60 days from the date of this notice, to serve as lead plaintiff. Please contact Lesley Portnoy at 888-773-9224 or 310-201-9150, or at [email protected] to discuss this matter. Throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleadig statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) the Company lacked adequate internal controls over its financial reporting; (2) as a result the Company could not adequately calculate DIR fees; (3) the Company's hepatitis C segment was not performing as previously disclosed to investors; (4) and therefore, the Company had overstated its full-year 2016 guidance; and (5) that, as a result of the foregoing, Defendants' statements about Diplomat's business, operations, and prospects, were false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis.



Diplomat operates one of the largest independent specialty pharmacy networks in the United States. On November 2, 2016, after the market close, the Company reported third quarter 2016 results that fell below investors' expectations. The Company also lowered full year 2016 guidance, with the CEO and Chairman commenting, "we are disappointed with our third quarter results, which were significantly impacted by the softness in the hepatitis C business nationwide, as well as by DIR fees. The methodology and transparency around how PBMs are applying these DIR fees changed materially in 2016, and while we cannot reverse the impact they had on this quarter, we are working with our partners in the specialty pharmacy industry and with legislators to achieve an amicable solution to this problem." On this news, Diplomat stock fell $9.43 per share, or over 42%, to close at $12.95 per share on November 3, 2016.

If you purchased shares of Diplomat during the Class Period you may move the Court no later than 60 days from the date of this notice to ask the Court to appoint you as lead plaintiff. To be a member of the Class you need not take any action at this time; you may retain counsel of your choice or take no action and remain an absent member of the Class. If you wish to learn more about this action, or if you have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Lesley Portnoy, Esquire, of Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP, 1925 Century Park East, Suite 2100, Los Angeles, California 90067, at (310) 201-9150, by e-mail to [email protected], or visit our website at http://www.glancylaw.com. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161110006667/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] A New Multi-partner Platform Powered by Keyrus to Support TheLuxer.com e-Commerce Business in China

LEVALLOIS-PERRET, France, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Keyrus, an international consultancy in Data Intelligence, Digital Transformation and Enterprise Management, is helping TheLuxer.com to improve its customer experience and extend its presence by setting up a multi-marketplace platform to boost its online sales in China. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160707/387171LOGO ) Owned by Italiantouch, TheLuxer.com operates the e-commerce for the brands of the TOD'S Group (TOD'S, Roger Vivier & Hogan) through THELUXER.COM, a global multi-brand e-commerce platform dedicated to luxury shoes, bags, ready-to-wear, accessories and exclusive capsule collections. Already present in China, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Holland, Spain and the United States, TheLuxer.com aims to provide an unprecedented online buying experience to its consumers. In early 2016, Keyrus was selected as a business and technical partner to support TheLuxer.com e-commerce vision and implementation in Greater China. The goal of the project has been to launch a new multi-partner solution, based on the SAP hybris solution, and onboarding several key features providing the ability to: manage several marketplaces from a single point and distribute content to, as well as collect orders from several online channels (JD and Tmall since June 2016 , Xiu and Meici since September 2016 )

, Xiu and Meici since ) automate manual back-office processes, such as photo publishing, product exchanges, order collection, etc.

become autonomous in running its marketplace sales activity in China The first marketplaces connected to the solution were live just two months after the kick-off of the project. Unlike JD, where TheLuxer.com already had a presence, Tmall was a new channel for TheLuxer.com. The implementation involved the configuration, design, and roll-out of TheLuxer.com store on Tmall, and this was done in record time. In Autumn 2016, Keyrus has helped TheLuxer.com extend its online presence further via two new vertical marketplaces, Xiu.com ad Meici.com, dedicated to fashion and luxury products. Next in line is to launch TheLuxer.com on a fifth marketplace, by the end of 2016.



The multichannel platform now operates all marketplaces in a unified and harmonized manner and provides full insight on the entire product catalog and stock availability. "With the new solution deployed, we can now focus on added-value activities and manage our e-Commerce operations without the need of a third-party intermediary," explains Fabienne Pellegrin, Country Manager Greater China for Italiantouch. "We wanted to become more autonomous and have more direct control in order to develop our internal market expertise, in addition to optimizing our costs. Keyrus has worked hand- in-hand with us on the entire marketplace project to help us make it a reality," adds Fabienne Pellegrin.

"This multi-marketplace customer-centric solution, that we implemented for Italiantouch, owner of TheLuxer.com brand, is another example of our ability to develop agile and relevant digital platforms for our clients. TheLuxer.com Project relies on Keyrus RapidStore for hybris, our high-performance solution tailored to provide optimal conditions for the implementation of omni-channel commerce strategies on the Chinese market, and already deployed for several local and international retailers in China. Hosted in the cloud on Aliyun, the Cloud Computing platform of e-Commerce giant Alibaba, the platform deployed for Italiantouch provides the flexibility it requires to scale up tomorrow," explains Thomas Alix, Head of e-commerce and digital at Keyrus China. With Italiantouch as a client, Keyrus China strengthens its foothold in the Luxury sector, on top of its established presence in the fashion, automotive, department store, services and food industries. ABOUT KEYRUS Keyrus, creator of value in the era of Data and Digital An international player in consulting and technologies and a specialist in Data and Digital, Keyrus is dedicated to helping enterprises take advantage of the Data and Digital paradigm to enhance their performance, facilitate and accelerate their transformation, and generate new drivers of growth, competitiveness, and sustainability. Placing innovation at the heart of its strategy, Keyrus is developing a value proposition that is unique in the market and centred around an innovative offering founded upon a combination of three major and convergent areas of expertise:  Data Intelligence Data Science - Big Data Analytics - Business Intelligence - EIM - CPM/EPM  Digital Experience Innovation & Digital Strategy - Digital Marketing & CRM - Digital Commerce - Digital Performance - User Experience  Management & Transformation Consulting Strategy & Innovation - Digital Transformation - Performance Management - Project Support Present in 15 countries on 4 continents, the Keyrus Group has 2,500 employees. Keyrus is quoted in compartment C of the Eurolist of Euronext Paris (Compartment C/Small caps - ISIN Code: FR0004029411 - Reuters: KEYR.PA - Bloomberg: KEY:FP) Further information at: http://www.keyrus.com ABOUT THELUXER.COM TheLuxer.com-the official e-commerce partner of Tod's, Roger Vivier, Hogan -is an online boutique that specializes in limited edition products. TheLuxer.com is a window to the "Made in Italy" mindset, where taste and elegance are the paradigms. TheLuxer.com is the new destination for those seeking the finest details and service tailored to their personal needs. It is geared towards a fashion-savvy crowd-those who are particular about the way the products they purchase are made. The boutique is therefore much more than an online store: It is an inspiring place to have an unprecedented shopping experience. http://www.theluxer.com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] Less Than a Week to go for 'ResellerClub Presents HostingCon India' in Mumbai

MUMBAI, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ResellerClub presents HostingCon India, Asia's largest conference and trade show for cloud, domains and hosting will take place on the 16th and 17th of November, 2016 in Mumbai, the thriving commercial capital of India. India's Internet revolution is well underway as an exploding middle-class, rocketing demand and thriving entrepreneurial spirit come together to create a bright digital future. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130522/614177 )

The event follows hot on the heels of ICANN 57, the global meeting of the top stakeholders of the Internet in India with several of the key figures from the event scheduled to attend ResellerClub presents HostingCon and further grow their business in what is the fastest growing large economy in the world. ResellerClub presents HostingCon provides every stakeholder in web presence, IT services and other online industries the opportunity to gain an edge in this rapidly growing market. Over 4000 people have already registered to attend ResellerClub presents HostingCon and have positioned themselves to ride the wave of the digital economy. Varun Motasha, Director, ResellerClub presents HostingCon said, "Every year we aim to grow even bigger and this year we've outdone ourselves. With over 4000 professionals from the web infrastructure business already registered and networking with leadership from the biggest brands in the industry, this year's vent is shaping up to be our best ever. Simply put, if you're not going to be there, you're missing out to your nearest competitors."



Exclusive Networking With access to the largest web infrastructure brands and the who's who of the digital industry, ResellerClub presents HostingCon offers visitors a unique opportunity to rub shoulders, network and learn from the best in the business.

Every year, thousands of industry leaders converge at ResellerClub presents HostingCon to share their ideas, trade secrets and recipes for success in the Domains & Hosting sphere. With the perfect mix of audience demographics ranging from web designers to developers, ResellerClub presents HostingCon India 2016 promises to be the perfect networking opportunity for you to help your business grow. Sign up now and book your spot at ResellerClub presents HostingCon on November 16 & 17 in Mumbai. What's more, you can grab a whopping 30% discount on a suite of exclusive benefits with a VIP pass using the coupon code: DEAL30. Register for free at: http://india.hostingcon.com About ResellerClub presents HostingCon: ResellerClub presents HostingCon is the Premier Industry Conference and Trade Show for the Cloud and Service Provider Ecosystem. The conference brings together attendees to network, learn and grow. Types of companies attending include hosting and cloud providers, MSPs, resellers, telcos, data centers, hardware and software vendors and others representing the Internet infrastructure industry. For details about the event, visit: http://india.hostingcon.com. About ResellerClub: ResellerClub was founded with the objective of offering domain names and hosting products to Web Designers, Developers and Web Hosts. Today, ResellerClub has evolved into a one-stop-shop marketplace for all products and services that a Web professional can use to enable small businesses to build a meaningful web presence. ResellerClub offers Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Servers, VPS, Email, Backup, Security and more with multi-brand options in many of these categories to empower choice. ResellerClub also offers a comprehensive solution to register and manage 700+ gTLDs, ccTLDs and new domains. Through the platform customized for Web Professionals, ResellerClub envisions provisioning the widest variety of Web Presence products, PaaS and SaaS based tools. Current Partners: Over 200,000

Domains Served: Over 5 Million

Server Locations: US, United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong, Turkey

Team Strength: 300+ Media Contact:

Varun Motasha

[email protected]

+91-9820554955

Director

ResellerClub presents HostingCon

ResellerClub





[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] TPCAST Reveals World's First Tether-less VR Upgrade Kit for HTC VIVE(TM) Devices at Alibaba's Tmall 11/11 Global Shopping Festival

SHENZHEN, China, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- HTC Corporation ("HTC"), a pioneer in innovative, smart mobile and virtual reality (VR) technology, today is proud to support the unveiling of a breakthrough tether-less VR upgrade kit (preview edition) for VIVE VR system developed and produced by TPCAST, a Vive X Accelerator invested company. This kit will enable for the first time, users of high-end PC VR systems to have a fully untethered experience without compromising quality on all current Vive VR devices. As the current global leader in high-end VR, HTC has continually delivered the most immersive and complete VR experiences on the market. It was the first to enable room-scale VR and 6-DoF controllers to the world, and today, TPCAST's upgrade kits will enable Vive to be the first devices to offer a seamless tether-less high-end PC VR experience. The tether-less upgrade kit will be available for pre-order at 1,499 RMB in limited quantity on www.vive.com/cn starting at 11pm Beijing time on November 11. Order fulfillment will be prioritized to existing customers who can provide a valid Vive serial number. Initial delivery is expected to begin in Q1 2017. At the Tmall 11/11 Media Center, Alibaba and HTC jointly demonstrated Alibaba's new Buy+ mobile VR channel on the latest HTC-powered VR-ready smartphones to more than 600 journalists gathered from all over the globe. This is the first application to date that allows the completion of actual retail transactions fully in VR, showing China's gaining leadership in the VR space. HTC Vive and Alibaba have previously announced strategic partnerships relating to Cloud services and VR, as well as Video services cooperation with its Youku subsidiary. Today's joint VR demonstration is a furthe strengthening of cooperation across another business section connecting the two firms.



"We are glad to cooperate with Alibaba to enable the first mass-demonstration of a complete VR shopping experience and are honored that they have chosen Viveport M as the preferred download partner for the Buy+ mobile application," said Alvin W. Graylin, China Regional President of Vive, HTC. "We are also very proud that a Vive X team, TPCAST, has developed such an impactful product in such a short time. It will allow Vive customers worldwide to gain untethered mobility in VR from their existing devices, while satisfying the biggest feature request of potential PC VR customers." Zhuoran Zhuang, Head of VR programs at Alibaba, said, "It's been a pleasure working with the VR market leader, HTC Vive on multiple VR related projects. We are continuously exploring on the next generation of shopping experiences via innovative technology, and looking forward to deeper collaboration with our partners to deliver even more immersive commerce experiences!"

HTC Vive has prepared a number of seasonal promotion deals for VR fans at this year's Tmall 11/11 global shopping festival. This includes Vive plus VR-ready PC sets, complimentary accessories and VR content, interest-free installment, and an upgraded Vive referral program! For more information, please visit: Tmall.com and Vive.com/cn. About the Vive Virtual Reality System Vive is a first-of-its-kind virtual reality system developed in partnership by HTC and Valve. Designed from the ground up for room-scale VR, Vive allows true-to-life interactions and experiences thanks to an adjustable headset displaying stunning graphics, two wireless controllers with HD haptic feedback and 360 degree absolute motion tracking. For a convenient and safe experience, Vive incorporates essential functionality from your phone and features a front facing camera that blends physical elements into the virtual world. Working in concert, this system immerses you visually, physically and emotionally in the virtual world. For more information on Vive, please visit www.vive.com. About HTC HTC Corporation aims to bring brilliance to life. As a global innovator in smart mobile and virtual reality devices and technology, HTC has produced award-winning products and industry firsts since its inception in 1997, including the critically acclaimed HTC One and HTC Desire lines of smartphones, and is now leading the VR industry with the Vive line of products. The pursuit of brilliance is at the heart of everything we do, inspiring best-in-class design and game-changing mobile and virtual reality experiences for consumers around the world. HTC is listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE: 2498). www.htc.com. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tpcast-reveals-worlds-first-tether-less-vr-upgrade-kit-for-htc-vivetm-devices-at-alibabas-tmall-1111-global-shopping-festival-300361300.html SOURCE HTC Vive

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] Innovators in Science and Technology Celebrated at Arizona Technology Council's 2016 Governor's Celebration of Innovation

At a prestigious gala attended by the top technology companies in Arizona to honor the state's science and technology innovators, the Arizona Technology Council in conjunction with the Arizona Commerce Authority, today announced the winners of the 2016 Governor's Celebration of Innovation (GCOI) Awards presented by Avnet, Inc. "Congratulations to all the nominees and winners who contribute so much to growing our knowledge-based economy," said Steven G. Zylstra, president and CEO, Arizona Technology Council. "It is incredibly rewarding to see so many winners from the software sector this year, as Arizona has become a prominent destination for developers. The growing breadth and depth of Arizona's technology industry continues to be a tremendous boon to the state." The winners in their respective categories are: Company Award Winners: Innovator of the Year - Start-Up Company: Life365, Peoria, Arizona

Life 365 was recognized for its cloud-based platform, RAIN, that uses "Lite" Solutions & "Nudges" to Achieve Maximum Engagement Across a Larger Population of Users. Innovator of the Year - Small Company: SimpleView, Tucson, Arizona

SimpleView was recognized for creating the first web-based sales and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system built specifically for destination marketing organizations. Innovator of the Year - Large Company: Avnet, Inc., Phoenix, Arizona

Avnet Inc. was recognized for the Avnet Cloud Marketplace, designed to be a one-stop shop with everything customers need to succeed in the cloud. Innovator of the Year - Academia: Arizona State University Biodesign Institute, Tempe, Arizona

Arizona State University Biodesign Institute is the current world-leader in X-ray Free Election Laser (XFEL) technology. Current technology in XFEL hardware is more than a mile in length and cost more than $1 billion. ASU's center used revolutionary techniques to design and build the world's first compact high energy XFEL. It will shrink the large XFELto three feet and reduce the cost to less than $20 million.



Chairman's Award: Selected at the discretion of the Arizona Technology Council's leadership, the Chairman's Award was presented to Jeremy Babendure, Ph.D., executive director of the Arizona SciTech Festival and Arizona Technology Council Foundation. Dr. Babendure was recognized by the Council as its Chairman's Award winner because of his dedication to STEM education. Babendure enables students and families all across the state of Arizona to experience science and technology in ways that are entertaining. The SciTech Festival includes more than 800 collaborators, 1200 events in 53 Arizona cities and draws more than 400,000 participants. "Arizona's technology ecosystem is experiencing impressive growth, and continues to receive recognition on a national scale," said Sandra Watson, president and CEO, Arizona Commerce Authority. "We congratulate this highly-skilled collection of technology leaders for helping Arizona stimulate this growth by advancing new innovations that are improving lives and creating high-wage jobs."

Previously announced winners that were also honored at the event include: The Individual/Company Award winners: OneNeck IT Services People's Choice Lifetime Achievement Award: Rick Smith, president and CEO, TASER, Scottsdale

Rick Smith, president and CEO, TASER, Scottsdale William F. McWhortor Community Service Leader of the Year: Tomas Gorny, CEO, Nextiva, Scottsdale

Tomas Gorny, CEO, Nextiva, Scottsdale Ed Denison Business Leader of the Year: Brian Mueller, president and CEO, Grand Canyon University, Phoenix

Brian Mueller, president and CEO, Grand Canyon University, Phoenix Pioneering Award: Intel (News - Alert), Chandler

Intel (News - Alert), Chandler Judge's Award: WebPT, Phoenix Previously announced "Future Innovators" and "Teacher of the Year" award winners can be found at: https://www.aztechcouncil.org/the-arizona-technology-council-announces-select-winners-and-finalists-for-the-2016-governors-celebration-of-innovation/ Previously announced Tech Champions Legislators can be found at: https://www.aztechcouncil.org/arizona-technology-council-names-2016-tech-ten-legislators/ Winners and finalists were evaluated and chosen by a selection committee of experts independent of the Council. Susan Engle, Avnet, Inc.

James Goulka, Arizona Tech Investors

Doug Hockstad, Tech Launch Arizona

William Loux, Arizona Technology Enterprises

Eric Miller (News - Alert), Phoenix Analysis Design Technologies

Mary O'Reilly, PhD, CEM Science Foundation Arizona

Bob Rasmussen, Honeywell Aerospace About the Arizona Technology Council The Arizona Technology Council is Arizona's premier trade association for science and technology companies. Recognized as having a diverse professional business community, Council members work towards furthering the advancement of technology in Arizona through leadership, education, legislation and social action. The Arizona Technology Council offers numerous events, educational forums and business conferences that bring together leaders, managers, employees and visionaries to make an impact on the technology industry. These interactions contribute to the Council's culture of growing member businesses and transforming technology in Arizona. To become a member or to learn more about the Arizona Technology Council, please visit www.aztechcouncil.org. About the Arizona Commerce Authority The Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) is the state's leading economic development organization with a streamlined mission to grow and strengthen Arizona's economy. The ACA uses a three-pronged approach to advance the overall economy: recruit, grow, create - recruit out-of-state companies to expand their operations in Arizona; work with existing companies to grow their business in Arizona and beyond; and partner with entrepreneurs and companies large and small to create new jobs and businesses in targeted industries. Visit azcommerce.com for more. About Avnet, Inc. From components to cloud and design to disposal, Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT) accelerates the success of customers who build, sell and use technology globally by providing them with a comprehensive portfolio of innovative products, services and solutions. Avnet is a Fortune 500 company with global headquarters in Phoenix, AZ. For more information, visit www.avnet.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161110006727/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 11, 2016]

The New ecbc Sparrow II: Perfecting Your Travel

MURRIETA, Calif., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ecbc, an uncompromising brand of premium luggage for the successful modern business traveler, announced the arrival of its Limited Edition Sparrow II Wheeled Garment Bag.







The Sparrow II will be available for pre-order beginning November 15 at www.ec-bc.com with a price tag of $399.

The original Sparrow debuted in 2013 featuring the unique ecbc FastPass laptop storage system. It allows you to unzip the Sparrow's specialized electronics compartment, lay it flat on the security conveyer and breeze through TSA without unpacking your laptop, tablet or cords.

Ever committed to creating unique travel solutions, ecbc has upped the ante with the Sparrow II. The TSA-friendly carry-on was designed with the short duration (2-5 day) business traveler in mind, toting both technology and attire across the miles.

ecbc President, Jean-Luc Annet, said, "Electronics are ubiquitous to the 21st century traveler. We've gone beyond 'keeping up with technology'. We're anticipating future travel needs and designing technology-supportive solutions like integrated electronics storage, portable power banks, lockable zippers and RFID electronic theft blocking pockets."

This enhanced Sparrow successor has a larger electronic storage capacity to hold up to a 16" laptop and a widened 12" tablet pocket. It is secured by a new lockable YKK zipper system and all packed in a sharp, clean 22"x14"x 9" profile to meet tighter airline regulations.

Travelers carting the Sparrow II will note the upgraded trolley system and whisper quiet, replaceable rubber tires.

Plug in and recharge! ecbc users can recharge their phone or portable electronics on-the-fly, smiling as they saunter past unneeded electrical outlets. Included with the Sparrow II is the new portable rechargeable 6000mAh Portable Power Bank. Dual USB charging ports allow users to charge two portable devices simultaneously.

The Sparrow II has been engineered to ease frequent travel while protecting your business and breezing through TSA lines in control and organized, no device left behind. Protecting your possessions is its top priority as you jet around the country with your critical electronic entourage in tow. Enjoy your journey. The Sparrow II will handle the rest.

To learn more about ecbc and the new Sparrow II, go to www.ec-bc.com

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438071

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-new-ecbc-sparrow-ii--perfecting-your-travel-300361006.html

SOURCE ecbc
[November 11, 2016] CSRA to Highlight Next-Generation High Performance Computing Services at SC16

FALLS CHURCH, Va., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CSRA Inc. (NYSE:CSRA) will showcase a wide range of next-generation high performance computing (HPC) capabilities and solutions at SC16 in Salt Lake City, Utah from Nov. 14-17. CSRA will demonstrate how it helps government customers leverage high performance technologies at the company's exhibit booth 1831. As an HPC powerhouse, CSRA leverages cloud services and data analytics to improve the HPC lifecycle and reduce operational costs for the government. CSRA recently announced several key programs in which it is providing end-to-end HPC solutions and services to various defense, health and civil agencies. During SC16, CSRA experts will discuss the company's next-generation HPC capabilities and partners, the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), and Health Research and Bioinformatics HPC. CSRA's speaker schedule and events are as follows:







Tuesday, November 15 Realizing Science-as-a-Service in the Hybrid Cloud Time: 2:00  2:30 pm Speaker: Rion Dooley, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, University of Texas at Austin Location: CSRA Booth 1831

Wednesday, November 16 CSRA SC16 Job Fair Time: 10:00 am  3:00 pm Location: Room 251-ABDE

CSRA is looking for the brightest minds to join its team of innovators. The company is hiring candidates with applications development, IT services/customer support, business analyst, engineering and cybersecurity skill sets. Applicants can visit the fair to apply or find current openings on the company's careers website. Hybrid Cloud in High-Performance Computing Time: 11:00  11:30 am Speaker: Al Settell, CSRA Digital Platforms HPC Lead Location: Exhibitor Forum, Room 155-E About CSRA Inc.

Every day CSRA (NYSE: CSRA) makes a difference in how the government serves our country and our citizens. We deliver a broad range of innovative, cloud-enabled, next-generation IT solutions and professional services to help our customers modernize their legacy systems, protect their applications, infrastructure, and assets and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of mission-critical functions for our warfighters and our citizens. Our 18,000 employees understand that success is a matter of perseverance, courage, adaptability and experience. CSRA is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia. To learn more about CSRA, visit www.csra.com. Forward-looking Statements

All statements in this press release and in all future press releases that do not directly and exclusively relate to historical facts constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements represent CSRA's intentions, plans, expectations and beliefs, including statements about network and asset protection and improving mission-critical functions. The forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside the control of CSRA. These factors could cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements. For a written description of these factors, see the sections titled "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in CSRA's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and any updating information in subsequent SEC filings. CSRA disclaims any intention or obligation to update these forward-looking statements whether as a result of subsequent event or otherwise, except as required by law. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151207/293934LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/csra-to-highlight-next-generation-high-performance-computing-services-at-sc16-300361149.html SOURCE CSRA Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 11, 2016] IoT Company Stringify Named as CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree

Los Gatos, CA, Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Stringify, a thoughtful automation service for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced that it has been named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree for its Android offering. Products chosen as CES Innovation Honorees reflect innovative design and engineering in some of the most cutting-edge tech products and services coming to market. Stringify allows people to connect all their physical products and digital services together in one place so they can take better care of themselves, their families and their homes while also getting more done. By tying things together in what Stringify calls Flows, users can create unique experiences that matter to them personally, opening up endless possibilities. Building powerful automation has never been more convenient. Stringify strives to make smart devices even smarter, and currently works with over 500 products and services including Nest, Philips Hue, Ring, Amazon Alexa, Honeywell, Insteon, LIFX, Netgear, Dropbox, Facebook, Google Drive and Slack, just to name a few (for more partners, visit www.stringify.com). The cloud-based platform gives its customers anytime/anywhere access through its mobile apps, with no hardware required.





Its a great honor to be one of the few companies selected for this award especially in a category as competitive as software and mobile apps, said Mike Yurochko, CEO of Stringify. Our goal with Stringify, across both the current iOS offering and the upcoming Android service, is to make the world of IoT and connected living more attainable, customizable and enjoyable for everyone. This award is exciting validation that we are delivering an appealing service.

The CES Innovation Awards are sponsored by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)TM, the producer of CES 2017. Products entered in this prestigious program are judged by a preeminent panel of independent industrial designers, independent engineers and members of the trade media to honor outstanding design and engineering in cutting-edge consumer electronics products across 28 product categories. Entries are evaluated on their engineering, aesthetic and design qualities, intended use/function and user value, unique/novel features present and how the design and innovation of the product directly compares to other products in the marketplace. Stringify for Android will be displayed at CES 2017, which runs January 5-8, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES 2017 Innovation Honoree products are also featured on CES.tech/Innovation. The company will also be demonstrating the platform at CES Unveiled in Las Vegas on January 3. Stringify is available now in the iTunes store with Android support coming soon. For up-to-date information on newly supported products and tips on living a connected life check out the Stringify blog https://www.stringify.com/blog/ and follow the company on Twitter @StringifyIt. About Stringify: Stringify, an automation platform for the Internet of Things (IoT), transforms the way you connect your life by bringing your physical and digital Things together to help create more meaningful experiences. Founded in 2014, Stringify makes the services you use and rely on every day better and more valuable. The company is based in Los Gatos, CA and has funding from ARTIS Ventures, Oryx Ventures, OurCrowd and other private investors. Susie Hayne, Lyman Agency Phone: 408-314-2226 [email protected] www.stringify.com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 11, 2016] China Eastern Airlines and Kaligo Travel Solutions Launch TravelEdge Loyalty Hotel Platform

SINGAPORE, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Kaligo Travel Solutions, the leading innovator in travel rewards technology, in partnership with China Eastern Airlines, one of the world's 10 largest airlines by passenger volume, today announced the launch of a new loyalty hotel platform for 32 million Eastern Miles members worldwide. Powered by Kaligo's TravelEdge accrual & redemption technology, the new platform enables Eastern Miles members to earn and redeem Eastern Miles points instantly at 465,000 properties globally. It's the first such fully integrated hotel loyalty product available to consumers in the vast US$ 620B Chinese travel market. "We are seeing a clearloyalty trend in China, where large rewards programs are quickly gaining momentum. The TravelEdge accrual & redemption platform is a perfect fit for modern Chinese travellers who are becoming increasingly rewards conscious," said Kyle Armstrong, CEO of Kaligo. "Based on a recent market study of loyalty programs, it's estimated that hotel redemptions already represent over 500B miles burned globally on an annual basis, and we're excited to see this proposition starting to take off in China." Zhilin Wei, General Manager, China Eastern Airlines E--Commerce Co.,Ltd., said "We continuously strive to strengthen the value of the Eastern Miles program for our members by offering new travel redemption options which are proven to increase customer engagement. Our members will now be able to instantly earn and redeem their points for hotel bookings all over the world with a simple and easy-to-use e-commerce experience. We're only just getting started. Our objective is to continue to accelerate the 20% YOY growth in our membership and, as an innovative partner, Kaligo enables us to achieve this with the TravelEdge platform." The new China Eastern hotel platform allows members to choose from over 465,000 hotels and reorts worldwide using a quick and easy-to-use desktop or mobile websitewith end-to-end servicing in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English. Members can use money or points to book hotels with instant confirmation.



The most celebrated loyalty programs around the world turn to Kaligo's TravelEdge technology to accelerate revenue growth and delight customers. Across hotels, cars, cruises and activities, the TravelEdge accrual & redemption suite can be quickly integrated into a brand's web or mobile presence. Using the latest e-commerce design principles and a localized experience across 22 languages, the platform consistently achieves market-leading conversion rates for its partners. With no up-front integration costs and deployment timeframes averaging 4-8 weeks, TravelEdge has set the standard when it comes to risk-free commercials and speed-to-market. For more information about Kaligo Travel Solutions and the TravelEdge suite, please visit www.kaligosolutions.com .

About Kaligo Travel Solutions: Kaligo Travel Solutions is operated by Kaligo Pte Ltd, the global leader for innovative travel and loyalty technology. Established in Singapore in 2014 with offices across APAC, Europe and the Americas, Kaligo Travel Solutions enables 50+ of the world's leading loyalty programs to drive engagement through rewarding travel experiences. With core product lines and expertise in e-commerce, small business, financial services, white label accrual & redemption platforms and cutting-edge API solutions, Kaligo enables the world's leading loyalty programs to drive spend,engagement and retention. For more information, please visit www.kaligosolutions.com or contact media relations at [email protected]. About China Eastern Airlines Corporation Limited China Eastern Airlines Corporation Limited has its headquarter located in Shanghai. As one of the three major airlines in mainland China, it flies a fleet of more than 500 long-haul and short-haul aircraft with an average age of less than seven years, China Eastern serves nearly 80 million travelers annually and ranks among the world's top 5 airlines in terms of passenger transportation volume. As an official member of SkyTeam, China Eastern has extended its flight network from Shanghai to 1064 cities in 178 countries via close cooperation with SkyTeam member airlines. Members of Eastern Miles can participate the mileage accumulate and redeem program, enjoy member benefits and use any one of the 564 VIP lounges across the world within all 20 SkyTeam member airlines. China Eastern has been striving to become a superexcellent aviation service integrator to win "staff devotion, customers' loyalty, shareholders' satisfaction and public trust". As the end of 2013, China Eastern has been rewarded the "Golden TingAward" by China Capital Market Annual Conference 2013, been recognized as one of the 50 most valuable Chinese brands by WPP and been ranked among the top ten of FORTUNE China CSR Ranking 2013In the past three years, China Eastern gains more than 10 billionprofits, which ranks among the top state-owned enterprises with respect to ROA and therefore been rewarded the "Golden Phoenix Award" by China Capital Market Annual Conference 2011. With the concept of "World-class hospitality with Eastern charm", China Eastern will create splendid travel experiences for global customers with an "accurate, delicate and precise" service quality. Website: www.ceair.com; Customer service line: +8695530 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438205 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/china-eastern-airlines-and-kaligo-travel-solutions-launch-traveledge-loyalty-hotel-platform-300361391.html SOURCE Kaligo Travel Solutions

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 11, 2016] Cabot Corporation Board Declares Dividend

On Friday, November 11, 2016, the Board of Directors of Cabot Corporation (NYSE:CBT) declared a quarterly dividend of $0.30 per share on all outstanding shares of the Corporation's common stock. The dividend is payable on December 9, 2016, to stockholders of record at the close of business on November 25, 2016. About Cabot Corporation

Cabot Corporation (NYSE: CBT) is a global specialty chemicals and performance materials company, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The company is a leading provider of rubber and secialty carbons, activated carbon, inkjet colorants, cesium formate drilling fluids, fumed silica, and aerogel. For more information on Cabot, please visit the company's website at: http://www.cabotcorp.com.



Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Statements in the press release regarding Cabot's business that are not historical facts are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward looking statements, see "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161111005612/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
IRVINE, Calif., Nov. 10, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Orange County Business Council commends today's momentous agreement to end 15 years of dispute and litigation over the SR 241 Toll Road Extension. The decision between Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency (TCA), California Attorney General Kamala Harris, the Save San Onofre Coalition, the California Park and Recreation Commission and the Native American Heritage Commission presents an opportunity for TCA to consider a number of transportation project ideas including completion of the State Route 241Interstate 5 connection while protecting sensitive lands and cultural resources within the San Mateo Creek watershed, including San Onofre State Beach and the Richard and Donna O'Neill Conservancy.

"Congratulations to all for their hard work and dedication. To move forward after decades of litigation on real traffic relief solutions for South Orange County while protecting its environmental treasures including Trestles, San Onofre State Park, sacred sites, endangered species habitat and open space is truly momentous," said Lucy Dunn, president and CEO, OCBC. "OCBC strives to enhance the economic vitality of Orange County and this partnership is a move in the right direction; building a strong economy, enhancing mobility for people and goods, and providing real environmental protections are mutually beneficial to a thriving Orange County. OCBC will remain actively engaged to realize these goals as the settlement is implemented."

CLICK HERE to learn more about the landmark agreement.

About OCBC:

Orange County Business Council is the leading voice of business in Orange County, California. OCBC represents and promotes the business community, working with government and academia, to enhance Orange County's economic development and prosperity in order to preserve a high quality of life. OCBC serves member and investor businesses with nearly 250,000 employees and 2,000,000 worldwide. In providing a proactive forum for business and supporting organizations, OCBC helps assure the financial growth of America's sixth largest county. For more information, visit www.ocbc.org.
[November 11, 2016] Cognovi Labs: Twitter Analytics Startup Predicts Trump Upset in Real-Time

DAYTON, Ohio, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Cognovi Labs, an Ohio-based analytics startup that monitors real-time social media sentiment and trends via Twitter, accurately pegged Donald J. Trump and his fellow Republicans as victors in Tuesday night's election, hours before the results for the Presidency and control of the Senate were finalized. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438278LOGO This comes just a few months after a similarly unexpected Brexit voting result. In both cases, the emotion and volume data that Cognovi Labs collected and analyzed from the social media platform enabled the technology to predict outcomes that traditional polls missed. On the morning of the election, Cognovi Labs posted findings going into the day, showing a head-to-head sentiment split of Clinton 50.3% and Trump 49.7%. This turned out to be remarkably prescient as, at the time of this release, the head-to-head popular vote breakout stood at Clinton 50.1% and Trump 49.9%. At 1 pm on Tuesday, November 8th 2016, Dr. Sheth, lead inventor of the technology, predicted the votes in Florida going to Trump, saying "Going against the flo (dangerous) at 1pm, #FloridaVote not looking + for #Hillary, Vol, Emotion favoring #Trump, sentiment #Hillary." This was also noted in his liveblog where he said, "Clinton better have lots of early and absentee votes for her. Today's analysis of social media when limited to professed votes from Florida until 1pm is not looking in her favor. Volume for Trump is high, positive emotion (joy) for Trump is higher, positive sentiment for Clinton is higher but has to be seen in view of lower volume. This will need close monitoring. The challenge in forecasting may come down to estimates for early voting #Election2016."



Throughout the day and as Florida closed, Cognovi Labs identified Trump with the advantage going into counting. At 9:22, pm Dr. Sheth began a series of tweets noting the difficult path for Clinton, posted a map of projected Trump states and finished by characterizing the surprising outcome of the election as "Brexit 2.0." Cognovi Labs also accurately forecasted the GOP hold on to power in the Senate. A tweet from @CognoviLabs at 8:30 pm on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 said, "In our Senate analysis we see the Republicans holding on to the majority."

About Cognovi Labs Cognovi Labs is an Ikove Venture Partners Startup Nursery portfolio company and is currently led by CEO James Mainord. Twitris, the technology behind Cognovi Labs, was developed at Wright State University by LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar Dr. Amit Sheth, professor at Wright State University and Director of Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge Enable Computing (Kno.e.sis). James Mainord

Cognovi Labs CEO

[email protected]

937.239.2250

@cognovilabs This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cognovi-labs-twitter-analytics-startup-predicts-trump-upset-in-real-time-300361446.html SOURCE Cognovi Labs

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 11, 2016] Winners of 2016 Video Marketing Awards Announced at Viewtopia

Vidyard, the video platform for business, today announced the winners of the 2016 Video Marketing Awards (VMAs), recognizing innovative marketing and sales leaders at Viewtopia, the company's annual video marketing summit. The VMAs recognize organizations that are using video content and analytics in exceptional ways to expand their audience, generate demand and empower their sales teams to close more business. "Video has become the medium of choice for modern marketers to engage, entertain and educate their audiences," said Vidyard CEO and co-founder Michael Litt. "They are creating incredible high-quality content, measuring its performance and using detailed analytics to turn viewers into customers and revenue for their organizations. And the results are coming whether the organizations are large or small, whether the videos highly produced or done on a budget. These winners prove the power of video to connect with audiences and improve the bottom line." Below are the winners and finalists in each VMA category: Video Marketing Campaign of the Year

Winner: Lenovo (News - Alert) with agency partner Traction

Finalists: Philips, Elemica Lenovo's marketing efforts had primarily consisted of tactics at the bottom of the funnel. With the launch of the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 12 Ultrabook, an all-in-one laptop and tablet, the company hoped to broaden its exposure to a larger audience than they had currently been marketing to and to re-engage dormant customers. They also wanted to educate users while making them feel entertained. The campaign played out in the form of five videos, including "Know your Chad" and "See Jane Run at Top Speed," and a series of tongue-in-cheek illustrated "Survival Guides" for IT viewers to enjoy and commiserate over. Results: Lenovo saw an immediate lift in video completion rates from 70% to 96% - a clear signal that the campaign was working. Engagement soared with a 400% lift over previous benchmarks. The videos were the most shared and the most viewed assets Lenovo commercial marketing had ever produced. Lenovo surpassed its target of 17,000 new leads by 50% with over 25,000 and blew away its goal of 34,000 reactivated leads by engaging over 91,000 contacts. They increased the number of marketing qualified leads by 250% and improved lead quality by 200%. Best Personalized Video Campaign

Winner: Reltio

Finalists: Veracode, Influitive Reltio wanted a new way to build awareness and drive interest it its flagship product with a top-of-funnel awareness campaign. The company launched a personalized video campaign targeting 10,000 leads to build awareness and identify their most engaged prospects. Results: Nearly 30% of all individuals who opened the email clicked through to watch the video. That marked a 10X increase in click-through rates compared to their average marketing campaign. Reltio is now launching a second personalized video campaign as part of its account-based marketing effort. Best Use of Video for Sales Prospecting or ABM

Winner: MongoDB

Finalists: Act-On, P2 Energy Solutions MongoDB wanted to use more customer testimonials to show the impact that MongoDB could have on their organizations. With a small marketing team and small budget, MongoDB picked a few customers to do high-quality testimonials. The end goal was to provide powerful assets for the sales team to better engage key prospects and move them through the buying journey faster. Results: The sales team was ecstatic, and the videos become one of their top three calls to action in outbound outreach efforts to new prospects. The videos also served as tools for new sales reps to learn how customrs use MongoDB.



Best Online Video Presence for a B2B Brand

Winner: SolarWinds

Finalists: Applied Predictive Technologies, Prophix Video is a key component of the SolarWinds marketing strategy, helping the company create a unique, relatable voice that stands out for IT professionals. The video team is a big contributor to brand, social, product and demand gen creative campaign strategy and leverages a multi-channel distribution strategy to reach its audiences across the web. Its videos have been featured on Huffington Post (News - Alert), Buzzfeed, Reddit and other media sites. SolarWinds' customers are IT professionals, and the company uses a snarky, geeky tone to connect with its audience. Top examples include "Happy IT Professionals Day" "Free Tool Brack-IT-ology", "Meet the Head Geeks," and their newly released parodies of hit show Stranger Things called "Stranger IT."

Results: The SolarWinds content has helped the business reach a wide array of new audiences and boost engagement with its current customers and prospects. Its YouTube channel features nearly 1,000 videos, and the top 15 each have more than 50,000 views. SolarWinds continues to invest in video as a primary content medium for marketing and communications, brand and social media to build and engage its B2B buyer's audience. Breakout Video Marketer of the Year

Winner: Jonas Construction Software

Finalists: RL Solutions, ExamSoft Jonas Construction Software started out a year ago with no video content but a goal to provide prospective clients with a more personalized and dynamic digital experience to guide them to content that addressed their existing needs. In its "Why Jonas" video, the company created a video that explained to customers how Jonas could help them. The used pop-out features in the video to direct viewers to product pages. Viewers who made it to the end of the video got a final call-to-action pointing them to a product tour. The company has invested in a series of product and testimonial videos and is tracking audience engagement to help identify, qualify and convert more leads. Results: Jonas Construction Software quickly noticed improvement in the quality of its leads, and prospective clients are more engaged with its content. Now roughly 50% of all Jonas' leads from its website come directly from video content. 20% of closed business comes from deals that originated with a video view. Conversion rates on email marketing programs with video content are 200% that of traditional email campaigns. Sales velocity also has increased, the amount of time needed to convert a lead to an opportunity has been cut in half, and the time need to close new business is down by 30%. Small Business, Big Bang (News - Alert)

Winner: Terminus

Finalists: Social123, Xenex Terminus employed a video marketing strategy to raise awareness for account-based marketing (ABM), which was just a buzz word for the B2B marketing industry a year ago. Terminus launched its #FlipMyFunnel campaign with personalized videos aimed at B2B marketing and sales thought leaders the company wanted to attend its first conference of the same name. They wanted 200 people to attend the first event in Atlanta. CMO Sangram Vajre created an individual video for each recipient with an opening "Hi (first name). Sangram here!". Based on the early success of video content, Terminus now leverages custom and personalized video for outbound prospecting, ABM, event awareness, customer testimonials and product demonstrations. Results: Besides getting 300 people to attend that first #FlipMyFunnel, Terminus credits video as a huge part of its ABM strategy and success. The company has produced eight customer testimonial videos this year with four more in production. They integrated Vidyard with Uberflip to track engagement and attribution of its video content. The unique video stream of content has proven to be an important asset for the sales team, especially to move deals through the pipeline more quickly. Sales development reps also have started producing their own personalized videos to use in outreach to help them cut through the clutter and increase connect rates. Video Marketing Impact Award

Winner: Tradeshift

Finalists: Rapid7, BenefitMall After working primarily with large corporations, Tradeshift recently started expanding into the mid-market categories and needed help generating demand. Enterprise Marketing head Travis Bickham recognized that Tradeshift's traditional demand gen model didn't scale to smaller companies, and he needed a new way to stand out in the competitive mid-market. Already using Vidyard, Bickham could see from the platform's analytics that customers watched a lot of video before ever talking to sales teams. He saw that using video as the basis for all demand gen efforts would help Tradeshift accelerate leads and accounts down the funnel by providing engaging content and lead scoring at every stage. With Vidyard's integration with Marketo, Bickham could track metrics on leads, conversions and opportunity revenue that his team helped drive through video content. Bickham later used Vidyard's personalization technology to send out holiday videos with each prospect's name featured in the video they received. Results: 100% of active opportunities that convert to deals are exposed to video before and after sales qualification. In outbound emails promoting customer success stories, video has double the click-through rate compared to PDFs when both versions were tested. Leads who view videos reach qualified status 4X faster than those who don't. Tradeshift's personalized holiday video campaign resulted in a 230% increase in click-through rates, an 88% increase in eBook downloads and a surge in qualified pipeline development. More than 10% of marketing-sourced qualified leads in the first half of 2016 came from that personalized video campaign, resulting in a cost-per-opportunity that was lower than the average cost-per-lead of other campaigns, an unheard-of set of results in the world of demand generation. Video Marketing Trailblazer

Winner: Bisk Education

Finalists: Cisco, Marketo Bisk Education partners with universities to help finance, develop and support online degree programs and with businesses to offer training and education programs. The company recently began investing in video marketing and created Bisk Studios to handle all video strategy, production, marketing and distribution. Bisk Studios contributes to several campaigns at a time, supporting multiple brands and the overall Bisk brand. Usually their videos are a piece of a larger marketing campaign or content strategy but sometimes they comprise the entire campaign. Bisk Studios also drives internal communications programs, brand awareness, training, and other video-based programs across the organization. Investing in Bisk Studios has transformed the way the company markets its own business and partners with other organizations. Going beyond traditional marketing and social videos, their production of a full documentary with Notre Dame shows what can happen when an organization gets serious about video. Results: Bisk's video series with Florida State University, "Study Snacks" drove the most Facebook shares of any of its social efforts to date with more than 2,000 views. Their "Spartans Will" project with Michigan State University influenced many students to commit to a specific degree program. On a broader level, Bisk employees are now engaged in using video initiatives across the entire company. Employee events are now covered by the video crew, and one internal company culture video had a 85% click-through rate and over 70% engagement - even after the video was already shown in a group meeting. About Vidyard Vidyard (Twitter (News - Alert): @Vidyard) is the video intelligence platform that helps businesses drive more revenue through the use of online video. Going beyond video hosting and management, Vidyard helps businesses drive greater engagement in their video content, track the viewing activities of each individual viewer, and turn those views into action. Global leaders such as Honeywell (News - Alert), McKesson, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD Ameritrade, Citibank, MongoDB and Sharp rely on Vidyard to power their video content strategies and turn viewer into customers. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161111005676/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 11, 2016] Pivot Technology Solutions Wins Two Top Partner Awards at Cisco Partner Summit 2016 in San Francisco

Portfolio Companies ACS, ProSys and Sigma Solutions Deliver Exceptional Results for Americas South Region TORONTO, Nov. 11, 2016 /CNW/ - Pivot Technology Solutions, a leading provider of data center solutions and services and a Cisco Gold partner, today announced that it has won two prestigious awards at the 2016 Cisco Partner Summit in San Francisco, CA. Pivot was recognized as the Cisco Software Partner of the Year, Americas South and was awarded Cisco Capital Partner of the Year, Americas South. Cisco Partner Summit awards recognize exemplary channel partners who demonstrate best-in-class business practices and serve as a model to the industry. Criteria for recognition include innovative practices, application successes, unique programs, problem solving and sales approaches. The Cisco Partner Summit South Area encompasses the 11 state Cisco South Region. Pivot was recognized based on the delivery of Cisco solutions through its portfolio companies: ACS, ProSys and Sigma Solutions. John Flores, Vice President of Mareting, for Pivot stated, "These awards highlight our commitment to delivering Cisco solutions for our customers as well as our high level of implementation expertise. I am very proud of our relationship with Cisco, and their recognition of our innovative practices, leadership and outcome-focused programs as a Cisco Gold business partner. We are thrilled to be recognized for our customer successes as both the Cisco Software and Cisco Capital Partner of the Year for Americas South."



Pivot was chosen for the Capital Partner of the Year due to increased sales and services as well as offering new financing options. Additionally, Pivot won Software Partner of the Year due to a healthy increase in software sales as well as the addition of dedicated resources to drive SmartAccounts with customers while investing in the Software Advisor and Lifecycle practices. Cisco Partner Summit Theatre awards reflect the top-performing partners within specific technology markets. All award recipients are selected by a group of Cisco Global Partner Organization and regional and theatre executives. Cisco Partner Summit is attended by more than 2,100 global attendees from Cisco's eco-system of partners representing more than 1,000 companies worldwide from more than 75 countries.

About Pivot Technology Solutions



Pivot, through its portfolio companies, designs, sells, integrates and supports IT solutionsincluding hardware, maintenance and supportengaging clients in all aspects of their IT Lifecycle Management. Pivot provides technology services, ranging from the initial needs assessment and design, through procurement and implementation, to on-going support. Learn more about Pivot Technology Solutions at www.pivotts.com.  2016 Pivot Technology Solutions. All trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. SOURCE Pivot Technology Solutions, Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 11, 2016] The Consumer Technology Association Inducts 17 Visionaries into the 2016 CT Hall of Fame

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA)TM inducted 17 industry leaders into its annual Consumer Technology Hall of Fame at an awards dinner held Wednesday night at the Rainbow Room, atop 30 Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. CTA created the Hall of Fame in 2000 to honor industry visionaries. This year's honorees were Sidney Cooper, founder of Silo; Dr. Jaap Haartsen, the "Father of Bluetooth"; David B. Lorsch, founder and CEO of DBL Distributing; Chuck Pagano, ESPN (News - Alert) chief technical officer and HDTV pioneer; Steve Smith, former editor-in-chief of TWICE; Joel S. Spira, founder of Lutron Electronics; Nat Tiffen, founder of the Tiffen Company; and Hiroshi Yamauchi, former president of Nintendo. In addition to these individuals, two teams were inducted into the 2016 class. The first team developed the first handheld GPS system. Under the leadership of Magellan (News - Alert) Founder Ed Tuck, Norman Hunt and Don Rea developed and released the Magellan GPS NAV 1000 in 1989. The second group to be honored were the six individuals who comprised the HDTV Grand Alliance - Dr. Peter Bingham, president of Phillips Labs; Dr. Jim Carnes, CEO of Sarnoff Labs; Dr. Curt Crawford, president of AT&T (News - Alert) Microelectronics; Dr. Jae Lim, professor at MIT; Jerry Pearlman, CEO of Zenith Electronics; and Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of General Instrument - were honored for their work in developing and implementing a unified digital TV broadcasting system. Gary Shapiro (News - Alert), president and CEO of CTA, praised the inductees for their contributions to the growth of the consumer technology industry and their innovations which helped better our world. He said, "Tonight we celebrate our rich heritage by honoring the legends in our industry. Those inventors, entrepreneurs, retailers and business executives who were willing to take risks to bring new products and services to market and had the imagination to create new technologies." Dr. Jaap Haartsen, the "Father of Bluetooth", stressed that the creation of Bluetooth was possible because of the contributions of many individuals. "I accept this award as a tribute to all the people who joined me on this exciting journey of setting a new standard for personal wireless connectivity, and I'm happy to accept this award on behalf of the Bluetooth community." Accepting the award for his late father Sidney Cooper, Richard Cooper reflected on the man who founded the Silo Discount Center retail chain. "He was a pioneer, but he never saw himself as one. He simply knew that the world was changing faster than anyone could fathom, and he knew that if he stayed in one place too long, everyone would pass him by." David Lorsch thaned his wife and family for helping him build DBL Distributing into a powerhouse. "We were an American success story. We started from 1,500 square feet in Tempe, Arizona and we grew all the way to our final headquarters of 144,000."



Accepting the award on behalf of her father, Joel Spira, creator of the first solid state dimmer, Lutron Co-Chairman and Co-CEO Susan Hakkarainen reflected on her father's endless desire to learn. "Our father was insatiably curious; his interests had almost no boundaries. He was always looking for new ideas, and was fascinated by fine craftsmanship." Chuck Pagano, who was responsible for leading ESPN into the high-definition era, thanked ESPN for their willingness to accept new technology. "My fantastic team of smart engineers, I want to thank them. Our vocation in life was to serve the fans. ESPN's journey is now solidified, and HD is in their DNA."

Nat Tiffen grew a business he and his brothers started into a Hollywood cornerstone. Steve Tiffen, CEO of the Tiffen Company, accepted the award for his father. He said, "My dad lived by a single principle. Find out what the customer wants and give it to them." Nintendo's success is due partly to the risks taken by Hiroshi Yamauchi. In addition to his persistence, hard work and vision, he was humble, according to his granddaughter, Maki Arakawa, who accepted his award. She said, "Even with success, my grandfather continued the same lifestyle." The Magellan team was represented by Ed Tuck's daughter Jean Tuck McGregor and Norm Hunt's children Laura Hunt Ross and her brother Jay Hunt, a soldier who said, "Wherever I was in the world, it was always the tinkerers who got me home." Dr. Curt Crawford and Dr. Jae Lim represented the HDTV Grand Alliance team that despite differences among the group, pushed to develop the HDTV technology that consumers enjoy today. "We argued a lot and we talked a lot. But we worked it out and made it happen," said Lim. Journalist Steve Smith's dream was to work for a major newspaper or magazine right out of college, but instead found his love for technology journalism and became one of the most legendary tech journalists of our generation. He said, "In life, if you're a little lucky, dreams can become a reality." With the 2016 class, the CT Hall of Fame grows to 234 inventors, engineers, retailers, journalists and entrepreneurs who conceived, developed, promoted and wrote about the innovative technologies, products and services that connect and improve the lives of global consumers. Watch highlights from the evening: https://www.cta.tech/Events/Awards/CT-Hall-of-Fame.aspx The inductees were selected by a group of media and industry professionals, who judged the nominations submitted by manufacturers, retailers and industry journalists. To learn more about the CT Hall of Fame program and for information on the 2017 nomination process, visit CTA.tech. Find complete profiles of the honorees in the November issue of It Is Innovation (i3) magazine. About Consumer Technology Association: Consumer Technology Association (CTA)TM, is the trade association representing the $287 billion U.S. consumer technology industry. More than 2,200 companies - 80 percent are small businesses and startups; others are among the world's best known brands - enjoy the benefits of CTA membership including policy advocacy, market research, technical education, industry promotion, standards development and the fostering of business and strategic relationships. The Consumer Technology Association also owns and produces CES (News - Alert) - the world's gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. Profits from CES are reinvested into CTA's industry services. UPCOMING EVENTS CES Unveiled Las Vegas

January 3, Las Vegas, NV

January 3, Las Vegas, NV CES 2017 - Register

January 5-8, Las Vegas, NV

January 5-8, Las Vegas, NV CES Asia 2017

June 7-9, Shanghai, China View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161111005768/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
Galvanize Honors Veterans And Extends Discounts On Tech Training

Galvanize, the learning community for technology with nine campuses across the country, announced today that it will provide veterans of the US armed forces a 20% discount on its web development and data science workshops and immersive programs.

Galvanize will also donate 10% of all proceeds from their 20% off veterans promotion to partner veterans support organizations such as Operation Code, Patriot Boot Camp and Vets in Tech.

"Galvanize is very proud to stand with and support our veterans," said Jim Deters, cofounder and CEO of Galvanize. "As a nation, we have to make sure that it's easy and affordable for those who've served our country to learn the skills that can help them get and keep a valuable, high-wage job. At Galvanize, that's a core commitment to our veterans and our community."

The veterans discounts and matching contributions will kick off on Veterans Day, November 11th, and run through the end of November, 2016.

In addition, Galvanize will celebrate and honor veterans by participating in local events in the communities where Galvanize campuses are located. Some of the events in which Galvanize will participate are:

Denver: Denver Veterans Day Festival on Saturday, November 12th from 12-3pm in Denver's Civic Center. Galvanize will set up a booth at the veteran's festival as well as host a veterans only information session at the Galvanize Golden Triangle campus on Thursday, November 17.

Seattle: Galvanize will host Veterans Day Intro to CSS - a language for describing the presentation of Web pges, including colors, layout, and fonts - and Explorations in Data Science for Veterans as well as a Veterans Job Fair on November 17.







Phoenix: Galvanize will participate in several special Learn To Code events for veterans throughout November and December.

San Francisco: Galvanize will host a special Intro to HTML for vets program on November 14.

Austin: Galvanize Austin will host a Central Texas Veterans Day Happy Hour on November 11.

The Galvanize commitment to veterans isn't simply about celebrating Veteran's Day. Veterans can currently utilize their GI BIll benefits to learn coding and data skills at the Galvanize Golden Triangle campus in Denver. Over the past year, Galvanize has hosted workshops and events in Austin and San Francisco to raise awareness about veterans joining the technology community and workforce.

To date, Galvanize has helped many veterans learn the tech skills they need to find, win and keep technology career. Allen Fordam, an Army Veteran and student in the Galvanize Web Design Immersive program in Denver is one example. "At first I was very confident that I'd be able to find a job immediately. I graduated at the top of my class, I was a veteran, I had a long list of qualifications. Over the course of a year I applied to about 100 jobs and didn't get any of them. Several times I was the runner up and they called me and said, 'You're a great fit but the applicant we hired had technical skills.' They were able to code websites and manipulate data and other things that are necessary for the way business is done nowadays," Fordham said.

"Our approach to supporting veterans is not a one-and-done or once a year thing," Deters said. "Helping our veterans make a successful transition to a great career is essential and it's something we take very seriously and stay focused on every day."

Galvanize is unique in the technology education marketplace in that it works with major hiring partners to design and teach the most up-to-date, industry-aligned career skills in high-quality immersive programs that lead directly to jobs for nine in ten graduates, on average. Galvanize, is also committed to the highest possible standards for public disclosure and consumer protection -- The Galvanize Standard.

For more information, interviews or additional questions, please contact: [email protected] or cell: 973-615-1292.

About Galvanize

Galvanize is a dynamic tech learning community that that offers education, workspace and networking for students, startups and large companies. Galvanize teaches web development, data science and data engineering to students, offers support and space to member companies and hosts more than 200 networking events across nine urban campuses throughout the nation. Galvanize campuses bring together entrepreneurs, students, investors, mentors, and great people and companies to develop the skills, mindset and networks necessary to thrive in a technology driven world. To learn more about Galvanize, visit http://galvanize.com or like us on Facebook (News - Alert): https://www.facebook.com/GalvanizeHQ or follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @Galvanize.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161111005806/en/
Two candidates seeking NLCS Board District 2 seat

In this year's general election, two candidates are seeking election to the district two seat on the NLCS board: Adam Parsley and Michael Patton.
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION OR RELEASE, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, JAPAN OR AUSTRALIA OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN WHICH THE DISTRIBUTION OR RELEASE WOULD BE UNLAWFUL. OTHER RESTRICTIONS ARE APPLICABLE. PLEASE SEE THE IMPORTANT INFORMATION AT THE END OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT

Bermuda, 11 November 2016 - Reference is made to the announcement by Avance Gas Holding Ltd ("Avance Gas" or the "Company") dated 11 November 2016 regarding the successful completion of the subsequent offering (the "Subsequent Offering") of 2,500,000 new shares in the Company (the "Offer Shares") at a subscription price of NOK 17.00 per Offer Share (the "Offer Price").

The following primary insiders have on 10 November 2016 subscribed for, and been allocated, Offer Shares in the Subsequent Offering at the Offer Price:

Niels G. Stolt-Nielsen, Chairman of the Board of Directors, has been allocated 41,500 Offer Shares in the Subsequent Offering. Niels G. Stolt-Nielsen will hold 91,500 shares in the Company, representing approximately 0.14% of the shares and votes in the Company, following completion of the Subsequent Offering.



Peder Carl Gram Simonsen, Chief Financial Officer, has been allocated 1,000 Offer Shares in the Subsequent Offering. Peder Carl Gram Simonsen will hold 2,300 shares in the Company, representing approximately 0.004% of the shares and votes in the Company, following completion of the Subsequent Offering.

For further queries, please contact:

Christian Andersen, President

Tel: +47 22 00 48 05 / Email: c.andersen@avancegas.com

Peder C. G. Simonsen, CFO

Tel: +47 22 00 48 15 / Email: p.simonsen@avancegas.com

About Avance Gas

Avance Gas operates in the global market for transportation of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). The Company is one of the world's leading owners and operators of very large gas carriers (VLGCs), operating a fleet of fourteen modern VLGC ships.

Important information

This communication may not be published, distributed or transmitted in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan. These materials do not constitute an offer of securities for sale or a solicitation of an offer to purchase securities of the Company in the United States, Norway or any other jurisdiction. 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 "U.S. Securities Act"). The securities of the Company have not been, and will not be, registered under the U.S. Securities Act. Any sale in the United States of the securities mentioned in this communication will be made solely to "qualified institutional buyers" as defined in Rule 144A under the U.S. Securities Act and to "major U.S. institutional investors" under SEC Rule 15a-6 to the United States Exchange Act of 1934. No public offering of the securities will be made in the United States.

Investors should not subscribe for any securities referred to in these materials except on the basis of information contained in the prospectus. In any EEA Member State that has implemented the Prospectus Directive, other than Norway, this communication is only addressed to and is only directed at qualified investors in that Member State within the meaning of the Prospectus Directive, i.e., only to investors who can receive the offer without an approved prospectus in such EEA Member State. The expression "Prospectus Directive" means Directive 2003/71/EC (and amendments thereto, including Directive 2010/73/EU, to the extent implemented in any relevant Member State) and includes any relevant implementing measure in the relevant Member State.

In the United Kingdom, this communication is only addressed to and is only directed at Qualified Investors who (i) are investment professionals falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (as amended) (the "Order") or (ii) are persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order (high net worth companies, unincorporated associations, etc.) (all such persons together being referred to as "Relevant Persons"). These materials are directed only at Relevant Persons and must not be acted on or relied on by persons who are not Relevant Persons. Any investment or investment activity to which this announcement relates is available only to Relevant Persons and will be engaged in only with Relevant Persons. Persons distributing this communication must satisfy themselves that it is lawful to do so.

Matters discussed in this announcement may constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and may be identified by words such as "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "intends", "may", "should", "will" and similar expressions. The forward-looking statements in this release are based upon various assumptions, many of which are based, in turn, upon further assumptions. Although the Company believes that these assumptions were reasonable when made, these assumptions are inherently subject to significant known and unknown risks, uncertainties, contingencies and other important factors which are difficult or impossible to predict and are beyond its control. Such risks, uncertainties, contingencies and other important factors could cause actual events to differ materially from the expectations expressed or implied in this release by such forward-looking statements. The information, opinions and forward-looking statements contained in this announcement speak only as at its date, and are subject to change without notice.

This announcement is made by and, and is the responsibility of, the Company. ABN AMRO, Danske Bank, DNB Markets, Nordea Markets, Credit Agricole CIB, SEB and Swedbank (the "Managers") are acting exclusively for the Company and no one else and will not be responsible to anyone other than the Company for providing the protections afforded to their respective clients, or for advice in relation to the contents of this announcement or any of the matters referred to herein.

Neither the Managers nor any of their respective affiliates makes any representation as to the accuracy or completeness of this announcement and none of them accepts any responsibility for the contents of this announcement or any matters referred to herein.

This announcement is for information purposes only and is not to be relied upon in substitution for the exercise of independent judgment. It is not intended as investment advice and under no circumstances is it to be used or considered as an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or a recommendation to buy or sell any securities of the Company. Neither the Managers nor any of their respective affiliates accepts any liability arising from the use of this announcement.

Each of the Company, the Managers and their respective affiliates expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to update, review or revise any statement contained in this announcement whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise.

The distribution of this announcement and other information may be restricted by law in certain jurisdictions. Persons into whose possession this announcement or such other information should come are required to inform themselves about and to observe any such restrictions.

This information is subject to disclosure requirements pursuant to Section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.
Finnish English

Lahti, Finland, 2016-11-11 09:30 CET (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Raute and York Timbers to strengthen cooperation towards a strategic partnership



Raute Corporation, a leading technology and service company in the plywood industry, and York Timbers (Pty), the largest manufacturer of plywood products in Southern Africa, have signed a Cooperative Agreement in order to strengthen the level of cooperation towards a strategic partnership.

The parties mutual goal is to enhance the profitability of York Timbers via its plywood division with the aim of becoming an international player in the plywood business. The Cooperative Agreement will be executed in various forms such as production process and capacity development, service delivery, competence development, and sharing of technology upgrades on Raute and other equipment.

"York Timbers and Raute have already cooperated for years. The agreement is a major step forward in strengthening our cooperation in the future", says Mr. Pieter van Zyl, Chief Executive Officer, York Timbers.

"Raute will be the main technology, service and development partner to York Timbers. This agreement allows us to commit to York Timbers and to develop our operations in Africa in the future", says Mr. Antti Laulainen, Group Vice President of Raute Corporation.

Raute is a technology and service company that operates worldwide. Rautes customers are companies operating in the wood products industry that manufacture veneer, plywood and LVL (Laminated Veneer Lumber). The technology offering covers machinery and equipment for the customers entire production process. As a supplier of mill-scale projects, Raute is a global market leader both in the plywood and LVL industries. Additionally, Rautes full-service concept includes technology services ranging from spare parts deliveries to regular maintenance and equipment modernizations. Rautes head office is located in the Nastola area of Lahti, Finland. Its other production plants are in Kajaani, Finland, the Vancouver area of Canada and in the Shanghai area of China. Rautes net sales in 2015 were EUR 127.3 million. The Groups headcount at the end of 2015 was 646. More information about the company can be found at www.raute.com.

York Timbers is an integrated forestry company, operating through its wholly-owned subsidiaries, York Timbers Proprietary Limited, that owns plantations and processing plants, and Agentimber Proprietary Limited, that runs a wholesale distribution network. York has the largest market share of the South African timber and plywood market. This share in the market is a result of Yorks sustainable biological assets, integrated operations of primary and value-added processes. York's revenue was R 1 771 million (approximately EUR 120 million) and total asset value was R 4 561 million (approximately EUR 310 million) in 2016. The company's headcount is 5 238 (includes employees and contractors). York Timbers is listed on the JSE in the Forestry and Paper Index sector under the share code YRK. This year, York is celebrating100 years since incorporation and 70 years of being listed on the JSE  milestones few companies have achieved. More information about the company can be found at www.york.co.za.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

Mr. Antti Laulainen, Group Vice President, Technology services and Sales management, Raute Corporation (antti.laulainen@raute.com, tel. +358 (0)3 829 11)
London, United Kingdom, November 11th, 2016 - Seadrill Partners LLC is scheduled to release its third quarter 2016 results on Tuesday November 22nd, 2016.



In connection with the earnings release, a conference call/webcast will be held as described below.



A conference call will be held at 1:15 p.m. EST / 6:15 p.m. GMT on Tuesday November 22nd, 2016.



To listen to the management presentation of the results, the following options are available:



A. Webcast

In order to register to listen to the conference call, please click this link.



B. Conference call

Participants can register for the conference call and receive their dial-in details by clicking this link.

Those without internet access or unable to pre-register may join the call on November 22nd by dialling:

US dial in: +1 866 807 9684

International dial in: +1 412 317 5415The participants will be required to request the Seadrill Partners Conference call.There will be a Q&A session subsequent to the presentation. Information on how to ask management questions will be given at the beginning of the Q&A session.In order to view the presentation while listening to the conference, please download the presentation material from http://www.seadrillpartners.com/ If you are unable to participate in the conference call, there is an opportunity to listen to a replay on http://www.seadrillpartners.com/ (Investor Relations)Participant list information required: Full name & company
Just as Australias music scene is thriving, so too are its queer party-starters, who regularly kick-start some of the countrys best events week in, week out.

One such outfit are the expert party champions at Heaps Gay, who are are teaming up with avant-garde drag crew Yummy for a massive bash as part of Melbourne Music Week on November 16 at the MMW Hub venue, the State Library of Victoria, packing a huge lineup of acts like Donny Benet, HABITS, Broadway Sounds, Brooke Powers and heaps more.

Ahead of next weeks show, we caught up with the organisers at Heaps Gay to chat about the strength of Australias queer artistic community, the government, and throwing the biggest gay night of the year.

Pelvis-pumpin lady killa Donny Benet will be heading a huge lineup of local talent

Heaps Gay, Heaps Yummy

Tell us a little about Heaps Gay and Yummy  what each group is about, and how you came to collaborate?

Heaps Gay started as a small charity gig in a dodgy old pub in Sydneys Inner West three years ago. Its all about creating all-inclusive spaces, blurring gender & sexuality lines and incorporating music, art and dance. We run events in Sydney and Melbourne and are about to embark on a travelling gap year which means were visiting 12 country pubs in 12 months to spread the Heaps Gay love!

At Heaps Gay, we are constantly seeking collabs that allow us to explore the diversity of queer culture and celebrate the incredible creativity of the community in new ways. When we set our sights on Melbourne Music Week, we knew we had to make the event exceptional and the only way to do that was to find a collaborator who loved to explore the boundaries as much as we do.

Then we found Yummy  a drag cabaret collective who collide high fashion, avant-garde drag, and kooky pop with dance, circus and music. As soon as we saw them we knew it was a perfect match! I mean, who wouldnt want to see avant-garde drag circus in the State Library reading room?! The Queens hall was MADE FOR THIS!

What made you look to Melbourne Music Week for this event?

One of the biggest challenges is finding an accessible way to do so, one that isnt limited to the fringes. Big festival events such as MMW are so important in this respect. Were no strangers to great Aussie festivals and have had the Heaps Gay festival featured on the Vivid Sydney music lineup for the past two years, while Yummy have featured on Midsummer and Melbourne Fringe.

We love that MMW is all about showcasing diversity  we are also so bloody proud that this will be the first ever LGBTQ+/inclusive event to be included in the MMW hub program.

How did you go about selecting this roster of artists  what makes them fit the bill?

Heaps Gay & Yummy events shares the same philosophy: 1) celebrate the community, 2) make it accessible and all-inclusive, and 3) push the boundaries. The bill for this Heaps Gay x Yummy event was put together with this in mind.

Firstly, we wanted to bring together as many elements of the Melbourne community as possible, so there are DJs/performers from Gaytimes, Unicorns, Poof Doof, Thursgay, and Honcho Disco. Second, we wanted to make sure our lineup celebrates all kinds of diversity not just LGBTIQA+. One of our headliners, Donny Benet, is a smooth-talking, pelvis-pumpin lady killa and we wouldnt have him any other way!

Who are some of the acts on the lineup pushing boundaries, artistically or otherwise?

Habits are seriously the ones to watch  incredible. Think sad goth party jams. Channeling the likes of Bjork and FKA Twigs with both their amazing vocals and by turns fluid and aggressive dance moves.

The incredible HABITS are seriously the ones to watch

What are some of the defining characteristics of the queer communities in Melbourne and Australia, especially where artists are concerned?

We have a healthy thriving scene here that reacts to the conservative government, but reflects our famously easy-going nature. From the singlet and thongs crowd to the glitter punks to the art bears to everything in between, theres a space and a place for everyone. We still dont have same-sex marriage laws legislated for Australia, and there are a many other discriminatory practices we have to deal with on a daily basis.

That said, things are better off here than in many parts of the world, so the way we come together is simultaneously political and accepted. Australians are famously relaxed, that rings true for the queer scene as well  though our identities are probably more creative, more visual, and more punk that our straight contemporaries. The drag scene in Melbourne is explosively good, and would give any other city a run for its money.

Have lockout laws in Sydney impacted its gay nightlife, and how does Melbourne fare?

Definitely, the Sydney lockout laws have negatively effected all kinds of night life.

Weve seen the closure of a huge number of live music and club venues which could not continue to operate under the imposed restrictions. Making ends meet in Sydney as a DJ or musician is much harder. Sydneys iconic Oxford Street is a shadow of its former self and the previously queer safe zone of the inner west has seen a spate of violent attacks on LGBTIQ+ persons at the hands of people who are being funneled into the area looking for a late night venue. As an event producer, its getting harder and harder to create spaces to celebrate Sydney music, arts and culture.

Thankfully, we have legends like the folks at Keep Sydney Open who continue to fight to save Sydney from further losses! As for Melbourne, the much fantasised alternative for many Sydney Siders, we have 24hr booze laws, City of Melbourne activating unique spaces, passionate promoters and a thriving cultural city.

What are some of the other MMW events youre keen to check out?

The MMW lineup is stellar ad we would happily go to everything on offer, but here are a couple that we are looking forward to:

Morning Ritual: Kira Puru and Morning Ritual: Nai Palm  both women have more soul than my platform Dr Martens and I couldnt imagine a more beautiful morning in the state Library forecourt.

Her Sound, Her Story: Film Screening  This sounds like an incredible chance to hear the experiences of some of Australias most inspiring female musicians, from every lesbians teen crush, Missy Higgins, to 2016 powerhouse Sampha the Great.

Women in electronic music: GL + BUOY + CORIN + Linying  we think the recent push to recognize women in electronic music is fantastic and this lineup is seriously strong! Its particularly exciting to see Singaporean artist Linying included on the lineup!

Valve Sounds: Elliphant +Yeo ++  Valve sounds have put together one of the biggest line-ups of any event on the program and we think this event is going to be packed to the brim with vibe!

Closing Party: HVOB + Seekae ++  what better way to end the week then dancing the night way with Melbournes favourite party crew!

What can we expect from the show?

An all immersive experience in one of the most iconic buildings in the state. Fast paced, colourful, energetic! I cant believe they are letting Heaps Gay and Yummy run riot for one night only! Haha, crazy Thanks MMW!
With several artists being forced to speak out in recent times in response to sexual assaults at their gigs, its clear that Australia still has a problem with sexual assault, both inside the music scene and more broadly.

One group trying to tackle this issue is the team behind Chatterbox, an event that hopes to not only throw one damn good day party, but also provide a lighthearted but vital platform to open up the conversation around sexual assault in Australia and its music scene.

In an effort to open up the discussion, theyve gathered up a range of likeminded local talent to pile into the Gasometer Hotel tomorrow, including Harvey Sutherland (DJ), Prequel, DJ JNETT & Rambl, Brooke Powers, DANNY HOTEP, Jennifer Loveless, Huw Orleans and Kasun  with all proceeds going directly to the Womens Liberation Halfway House Domestic Violence Service.

Keen to join in on the discussion, weve spoken with organisers Helen Slattery and Alex Gleeson about why they felt compelled to put this show on, the underlying threat of bro culture in Australia and its music scene, and the change they hope to see come from more and more people speaking up.

Courtney Barnett and a bunch of other Aussie musos spoke out recently against sexual assault at gigs

What prompted you to start this sort of event?

Alex: For me, it was an opportunity to put on an event to bring light to an important issue. A culmination of events, on a personal basis and otherwise, really made me take note of bro and rape culture. Australian music is definitely one of the most progressive fields when it comes to stamping out such mentalities, but our community is not immune to it and its effects, and its something we need to be talking about more often.

Helen: I started speaking out on my personal social media about issues surrounding the stigma attracted to sexual assault, and soon I realised how sickeningly common it is. I received an overwhelming amount of messages from beautiful women and men whom shared their stories with me and have never fully felt safe to speak out as there is still a lot of doubt and judgement in society of sexual assault victims.

Although there are many support lines in place, its still something really tough to speak out about. Not only this but a few of my male friends came out openly and spoke to me about how they have sexually assaulted women and they have never really known what to do after this point, or have never realised the depth of their actions and how much it effected the victims. There are no excuses for such horrific actions, but there is still no platform for help for them to speak because unless men speak out about this also there will never be a change in society.

It is very easy to dehumanise someone for these actions, but there still needs to be support in place to reform them. I was talking about this to one of my dearest friends Alex, and we decided that more needs to be done, and he pitched the idea of throwing a party to attempt to remove some of the stigma and get people talking more.

Some clubs have introduced Safety Officers to help patrol dancefloors and ensure that everyone can feel safe in a crowded room. Do you think its time for wider implantation of this sort of thing?

Alex: I think clubs are taking more notice of safety and conscious of ensuring a safer and more enjoyable time out. The concept of safety officers was not developed with me in mind (straight, white cis-male) but that doesnt mean I cant acknowledge the positive impact it has on the clubbing community.

Cool Room does it best I think, their safety coordinators arent there to be overlords, or iron fisted, they just seem to be their for a chat, to help maintain a universal level of comfort. Im not sure whether this sort of role can be implemented within other areas or fields. I think rather, the mentality and openness for discussion needs a wider implantation.

Helen: Its up to the promoters, artists and the venue managers if they feel the space is not safe, then definitely do what it takes. I have been working as a door girl for years now at a range of different venues. And one of the main issues I find with sexual assault in the club is victims not feeling comfortable to speak out.

At the end of the day if someone gropes you in a club it is no different to being groped on public transport. Its still someone touching you forcefully without consent.

Should the music industry be looking outward to try and solve the greater systemic issue of male privilege, and be working in partnership with the Victorian State Governments latest school program addressing the issue?

Helen: Yes absolutely, it really sucks that its such an awkward conversation to have but if there is a manner to do it that removes this stigma and also allows men to be aware of their privilege than thats definitely worth doing.

Are there educational components to the event? How do you plan on engaging the audience on a serious topic like this, while also keeping the party rolling?

Alex: I think the event is there to operate not in an educational sense so much, more so operating as an attempt to remove this so called taboo that surrounds these topics of conversation. I think revolving an event around the very idea of this discussion, is enough open the door to further education.

When people see the likes of Harvey Sutherland, Prequel, JNett & Rambl, Danny, Brooke, Jen, and the Good Manners crew getting behind this idea, I think it sends a pretty strong message. Enoughs enough, we want to see a change. To me, its a party for discussion. A party that acknowledges we can do better as a community, and a party that demands that we do better as a community.

Helen: There is so much stigma attached to rape and bro culture that I dont want to put too much pressure on having the conversation yet, I want people to organically speak about their experiences and educate each other in a calm and open way. But when the conversation gets tough, get up and dance it all off. Because its one of the most natural things anyone can do.

Whats the most effective way to break down the hyper-masculinity that leads to bro/rape culture, and how can the music industry assist this?

Helen: I guess it all comes down to education and open conversations. As far as Im aware Australias Bro culture originates with the basis that our country was invaded by convicts, who came in raping and murdering the Aboriginal people. Its brutal, but its our ancestry and we cant change that  but we can work on future generations to make a change.

Whats the most effective platform to hold the conversation about sexual assault, and specifically at live music shows?

Alex: I think for those looking to see change in these fields, it is important to make conversation surrounding the topic, the norm. It needs to be as frequent as possible, in all genres and in all environments. When enough people start voicing their disgust and disappointment, thats when things begin to change. Thats when people start questioning their actions, their motivations. So I definitely think that it will take us all banding together, promoters and artists alike, to see this change.

It would mean the world to me, to see the more mainstream clubs of King Street, or Chapel Street, or Hawthorn, openly stating their desires for a creep free space, in the way that Cool Room, Daydreams, Boney, and so many others do. Its not just about tapping into the nightlife that myself and Helen involve ourselves in. Its about tapping into all nightlife, coming together to stamp out this stain on our musical community

Helen: Any platform given is a great way to open the conversation, just knowing artists whom you idolise support sexual assault victims sharing it on socials or getting on the microphone and shouting out. It means more to survivors than the artists may know.
Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey to Host Post-Election Town Hall on Race, Place & Diversity Nov. 10

"Our goal is to deliver information and experiences that will challenge, impact, inspire and influence one's outlook on race, place and diversity," said KCFAA Chief Artistic Officer and Symposium coordinator Tyrone Aiken. Audience members are encouraged to ask questions and/or make brief statements in this town hall format.Participants are encouraged to use #KCFAASymposium and #KCFAATownHall to submit questions via Facebook and Twitter."

Given that Kansas City is pretty much donating another 7 MILLION to keep this unsustainable district afloat . . . Here's a look at a much needed community service where people can voice their opinion in public rather than annoying their friends and relatives on social media.There was a horrible graphic that was included in this presser but Lucy Pinder and Sophie Howard hugging it out is much more pleasing because I'm an idiot.Check the info . . .Gem Theater1615 E 18th St, Kansas City, MO 64108FREE7:30 - 9:00 p.m.Developing . . .
EC From DC: Practicing the Act of Civility

The latest newsletter from Kansas City's Congressman calls for more than calm but responsibility and respect. Checkit:The American people have spoken. The country has elected Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. Election Day is now over and the job before us is to keep America moving forward. The only way to do that is to work together with humility and respect for one another despite our differences.Ive talked many times about civility. Now is the time to practice that very act of decency and respectful conduct. We have a greater responsibility and that is to our country and to democracy. I have no doubt that there will be differences, but what matters now is how we work through those differences to do whats best for America.When my colleagues and I return to Washington next week, we will focus on the tasks remaining this year and roll up our sleeves to get started on the work before us for the 115th Congress. I will continue working on the projects I have started this year: making sure the pensions for thousands of retirees are secure, honoring the sacrifices and services of our veterans from World War I through today, creating an atmosphere of economic growth for small businesses and rural communities, making sure companies are conducting fair hiring practices, and the list goes on and on. But it is a list that I take very seriouslya list too important to neglect.Warmly,Emanuel Cleaver, IIMember of Congress###############
"Why don't you focus on good stuff happening in Kansas City?" Or "Why do you hate Kansas City?" Or "Why didn't you mention this accomplishment by WHOEVER?"

NOBODY CARES ABOUT KANSAS CITY GOOD NEWS AND TKC IS A CRITICAL BLOG COMMUNITY DEDICATED TO DISCUSSING CONTROVERSIAL HOT TOPICS AND OTHER RANDOM COOL STUFF THAT WILL PROBABLY END BADLY!!!

Great Stabbing Weather This Weekend

Best Bathrooms For Hobo Bathing

Coming Home To Another Mistake

Kansas City Dead Hooker Landing Strip Almost Done

Golden Ghetto Directions To KCMO City Union Mission

Spy Cam Crumbling Infrastructure Footage

Future Cowtown Disappearance Site

Every once in awhile these questions come through e-mail . . .Short answer . . .People who actually put the news together know this debate quite well . . . Reporters work really hard on a loving crafted profile or feature and it falls flat. Or worse, the subject adds a correction or doesn't feel satisfied.And given that most of mainstream media is just filler to sell bonor pills, feminine hygiene products, booze or fast food . . . None of that works on this blog.That's not to say that we don't appreciate good news . . . It just doesn't belong here.To be fair, we've started running some promo stuff that I really like and that's just to keep my sanity because "working" among so many angry white people can be really fun but sometimes a grind.You won 500 years ago and the future doesn't look so bad. The Chinese running everything is at least 50 years in the future and by then the worsening climate will have destroyed most of what's left to fight over . . .But I digress . . .To start Friday morning here's a collection ofthat might or might not be worth checking . . . . After the jump and becauseis more important than all of it. Another post in a few.More in a bit . . .
"Mike Shanin interviews Kansas City, Missouri City Councilwoman Heather Hall about KCI, infrastructure and streetcar expansion. Then Theresa Garza, Steve Glorioso, Patrick Tuohey and Steve Mirakian provide analysis of this week's local and national election results."

This evening a former local Latina power broker who keeps lingering among the Kansas City political scene talks to a bunch of white dudes on thisof cowtown discourse still in shock over the election results.The highlight here is Northland Council Lady Heather Hall sharing insight on upcoming development projects under consideration . . . Everything else is just run-of-the-mill punditry without any good (or bad) jokes.Check the description . . .You decide . . .
A crushing defeat for a talented, educated and brilliant young man offers inspiration but also a hint that elected office might not be in his immediate future.Here's the kissoff thank you message from former Missouri SecState Kander. Checkit:Please know that Im going to be fine. My wife is gorgeous and brilliant and my son True is my best little buddy in the world. We are not the people who will be hurt by these election results. So please dont spend any time being sad for me. If youre going to be sad for someone, make it the single mom who has cancer and is scared to death about being unable to keep her insurance to continue treatments without Obamacare. Worry about the undocumented student who has only ever known this country and is worried about what happens to her now. Worry about the minimum wage worker trying to stretch $30 into a full grocery trip. Let your heart go out to the college student saddled with enormous debt and unable to get help from a parent whose own graduate degree has forced him into bankruptcy.Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. Yes, Donald Trump is going to be President and the Republicans control the House and the Senate, but I need that to double your resolve, not cause you to give up on our politics.Be proud of the campaign we ran. In a red state that Donald Trump won by 19%, we came within 3% of turning the Senate seat blue. And we didnt do it by hugging the middle and pretending to be moderate Republicans.I wouldnt change a single day on this campaign. Im proud that we took on some of the biggest names in Republican politics and darn near shocked the world. We fought for smart environmental policies, for unions, for LGBT equality, for commonsense gun safety, and a host of other important causes. Im proud that we didnt back down and that we demonstrated that the most important thing Democrats can do is make their argument.If you were a part of this campaign in even the smallest way, you might feel like stepping away from it all to lick your wounds. Maybe you think youre done with volunteering or donating or even believing in anything changing.And this is the time to maintain that engagement. A new generation is stepping forward in America. Dont let anyone tell you that this generation is selfish. This is a generation that cares more about ideas than ideology and measures patriotism not by a politicians eagerness to go to war but by their willingness to do whats right no matter the political cost. And this generation knows better than to let any politician  even a President  tell them that a changing country is a declining country.I dont know what Im going to do next or even whether Ill ever place my name on a ballot again, but I know Im not leaving this cause behind. To truly care about this country is to demonstrate that you care about her politics the same when youre winning as when youre losing.America needs you now more than ever. So dont quit! This generation is patriotic, creative, selfless, and  most importantly  numerous. My campaign might no longer be the vehicle for your activism, but that doesnt mean youre excused from standing up and making your voice heard . . .#############You decide . . .
All over town, I find folks in mourning for Hillary's loss. To gain perspective, here's how to change the channel in your head. Come to the final night of this town's best film festival, Kansas International Film Festival. At Ranchmart South, 95th & Mission.

Our pal Tracy offers a bit of counter programing for those looking for election aftermath coverage . . . Check this promo by a dedicated JoCo community volunteer helping out the arts in her part of town . . .Tracy seyz:More in a bit . . .
The government cabinet of Cyprus, set in motion a tender process to sell 100% of shares of "Cyta Hellas", subsidiary of the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (Cyta)

The government cabinet of Cyprus, set in motion a tender process to sell 100% of shares of "Cyta Hellas", subsidiary of the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (Cyta), to the highest bidder.

This process will be carried out separately and independently from any other process for the privatization of other assets of the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority. Additionally, for the procedure to be followed, it is likely that Cypriot authorities will recruit new consultants from privatization since the original plans for the privatization of Cyta did not include a separate sale of the subsidiary in Greece.

According to the newspaper "Kathimerini" Cyprus, although the company's financial results for 2015 recorded an increase in revenue, gross profit and EBITDA, the year failed to become profitable. Total income amounted to 107.8 million euros, an increase of 19.16% compared to the previous year.

Accordingly, gross profit recorded an increase of 45.33% to 42.8 million euros, while operating profit (EBITDA) was positive to 14.6 million euros. However, the Greek subsidiary recorded a loss before tax of around 2.97 million. Compared with 2014, losses recorded a fall of 80.4%. On the positive aspects of last year, broadband customer base grew to 325,000 active customers.

The subsidiary Cyta Hellas SA was founded in 2007 and its share capital on 31.12.2015 was 145.9 million euros. Since August 2014 it began to provide mobile telephony services in Greece as a virtual provider. It employs 766 staff, of whom 686 are full-time. According to the company's management, the aim in 2015 was to reduce staff by 10% and payroll by 5%, an aim which was not achieved, since costs despite the reduction in the number of employees remained at the same level as in 2014 (16.1 million euros in 2015 compared to 16.5 million in 2014).

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Source: ANA-MPA
English Danish

Bagsvrd, Denmark, 11 November 2016 - Novo Nordisk today announced that the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP), under the European Medicines Agency (EMA), adopted a positive opinion for the use of Fiasp (fast-acting insulin aspart), recommending marketing authorisation for the treatment of adults with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

The CHMP recommends Fiasp, the intended brand name for fast-acting insulin aspart, to be indicated for use as the bolus component of basal-bolus therapy in combination with basal insulin and for continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion via an insulin pump. Novo Nordisk has developed Fiasp as mealtime insulin with an earlier and greater glucose-lowering effect than NovoRapid (insulin aspart).

"We believe Fiasp provides an important evolution in mealtime insulin, which can address the unmet medical need for people requiring further improved blood glucose control around meals or flexibility of dosing," says Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, executive vice president and chief science officer of Novo Nordisk.

Novo Nordisk expects to receive final marketing authorisation from the European Commission in the first quarter of 2017.

About Fiasp

Fiasp (fast-acting insulin aspart) is a mealtime insulin for improved control of postprandial glucose (PPG) excursions and has been developed for the treatment of people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, as well as for pump treatment. Fiasp is insulin aspart (NovoRapid) in a new formulation, in which two new excipients have been added to ensure early and fast absorption thereby providing earlier insulin action. The review of Fiasp was based on the onset programme, a phase 3 clinical programme comprising of four trials encompassing more than 2,100 people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Further information

Media: Katrine Sperling +45 3079 6718 krsp@novonordisk.com Ken Inchausti (US) +1 609 786 8316 kiau@novonordisk.com



Investors: Peter Hugreffe Ankersen +45 3075 9085 phak@novonordisk.com Melanie Raouzeos +45 3075 3479 mrz@novonordisk.com Hanna Ogren +45 3079 8519 haoe@novonordisk.com Anders Mikkelsen +45 3079 4461 armk@novonordisk.com Kasper Veje (US) +1 609 235 8567 kpvj@novonordisk.com

Company announcement No 78 / 2016
The coalition government accepted the main oppositions candidates for chairman and his deputy

The Presidents of Greek Parliament convened on Thursday and finally reached agreement on the new members of the National Council for Radio and Television (ESR). A consensus was reached after the government agreed to the main oppositions proposed candidates for the posts of the councils chairman and deputy chairman.

Following the vote, the final composition of the Council ratified by the parliament presidents is as follows:

Chairman: Athanasios Koutromanos

Deputy Chairman: Rodolfos Moronis

Members: Popi Diamantakou, Vassilis Karapostolis, Nikos Kiaos, Giorgos Plios, Lilian Mitrou, Dimitra Papadopoulou and Giorgos Saridakis.

This proposal received 20 votes, with support from government partners SYRIZA and Independent Greeks, the main opposition patty New Democracy, the Democratic Alliance and the River. The Communist Party of Greece, Golden Dawn and Union of Centrists abstained from the vote.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades stated on Thursday that Fridays meeting with Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci is considered one of the most critical meetings.

Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades stated late on Thursday that Fridays meeting with Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci is considered one of the most critical meetings given everything that has taken place before.

Both leaders are set to conclude week-long talks in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, focused on the key territorial issue, on Friday.

Anastasiades made the statement after going to a restaurant in Montreux, near Mont Pelerin, for dinner with Akinci along with their negotiating teams.

The President chose not to give too much away if the Mont Pelerin talks were successful thus far, but he did say: I must confess that there was further progress on pending issues.

A crucial topic discussed during this weeks talks was the property issue, with Anastasiades saying that further progress was noted, however, he added, it was completely linked, as we had said repeatedly, with the territory issue.

CREATIVE EFFORTS

Commenting on Thursdays territorial talks, the President outlined: There is a creative effort on the part of both sides, there is a good climate, but these by themselves are not enough to provide the outcome. Everything will depend on the dialogue that will follow tomorrow [Friday].

When questioned by a journalist as to what he specifically meant, with regards to his reference on everything, Anastasiades replied, by everything I mean as far as the conclusion here is concerned, with regards to the territory issue, in the sense of the agreement on the criteria or not.

NOT THE FINAL MEETING

The President emphasised that Fridays meeting is not final as, for some 42 years we have been negotiating the Cyprus Problem. The effort now is to create those indispensable conditions that will allow us to proceed to the next step.

When questioned by a journalist as to whether a territorial map will be on the table during Fridays talks, Anastasiades replied: The first prerequisite is the agreement on the criteria; second is, based on the criteria, to have maps submitted, which will reflect the agreement on the criteria.

NOT THE END OF THE PROCESS

The President stated that if it is considered that there is progress then consequently we can proceed further. If it will not be possible to conclude what we seek, it will not be the end of the process; we will continue the dialogue in our homeland.

After the dinner with Akinci, speaking to Turkish Cypriot journalists, Anastasiades remarked that we are negotiating in a very good climate with a commitment to meet each others concerns, but this is not enough.

It depends on what we will see tomorrow [Friday], which is the most critical day; to see if we are within reach in order to finalise or to continue our deliberations furthermore in Cyprus.

In a tweet posted by Akinci's after his dinner with Anastasiades, the Turkish Cypriot leader wrote: "Our aim is to solve the 50-year Cyprus Problem and to give new life, a new future to future generations of both communities."

BACKGROUND

Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded and illegally occupied its northern third.

Anastasiades and Akinci have been engaged in UN-led negotiations since May 2015, with a view to reunite the island under a federal roof.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
The talks between Nicos Anastasiades and Mustafa Akinci in Switzerland, far from the pressures of Cyprus, allow us to hope that a solution may be near

The talks between Nicos Anastasiades and Mustafa Akinci in Switzerland, far from the pressures of Cyprus, allow us to hope that a solution may be near, ekathimerini.com notes and adds:

"The road will be long but the fact that the thorny issue of territory is being discussed is encouraging.

It is worth noting, also, that after a century of intensive involvement in the Cyprus issue, Greece is all but absent. Turkey does not allow the Turkish Cypriots any breathing space and may still torpedo the process at any moment. As regards the Greek side, developments are in Cypriot hands. Until now, Greeces most positive contribution was the strong support it gave to Cypruss EU accession in 2004.

For the most part, however, outside intervention on Cyprus was disastrous  to a greater or lesser extent  for the people of Cyprus but also for Greece and Turkey. The balance of power and tensions between Greece and Turkey, the influence of Britain, the United States and Russia, turned Cyprus into a dispute which brought questionable gains and huge damage upon its people.

From 1915, when Greek statesman Eleftherios Venizelos and the British government first discussed the colonial powers giving Cyprus to Greece in exchange for Greece entering World War I on the side of the Entente, the Cypriots were repeatedly at the center of events they could not control.

Often, however, the actions of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots caused tension between Greece and Turkey, fueling the nationalism that put pressure on governments and determined events. The anti-Greek pogrom in Istanbul in 1955 and the later expulsion of the citys age-old Greek community was one consequence of this dynamic. In 1974, the Greek dictatorships criminal effort to cover itself in glory by engineering a coup aimed at uniting Cyprus with Greece set off the Turkish invasion.

Each decade had its own tensions, clashes and negotiations  before and after the agreement establishing the Republic of Cyprus. The constitution provoked new tensions and clashes, and the guarantor powers  Greece, Turkey and Britain  did anything but help. Britain, in fact, had brought Turkey into the issue earlier, ensuring that Cyprus would be a continual cause of tension. With all these factors at play, and with Turkey's hard line, it was impossible to reach a just and viable solution to the problem.

As the years passed and the islands communities lived apart, the possibility of their agreeing to reunite grew slimmer. And yet EU accession and the personal relationship between Anastiasiades and Akinci gave new life to the effort.

Greece observes, with minimal participation. Perhaps this is because of the damage that the Greek economic crisis dealt to Cyprus. Perhaps Cypruss quick recovery gave the Cypriots confidence that they can manage on their own. In any case, the answer that Cypruss Communist Party AKEL fired off at its sister party in Greece, when the latter tried to intervene in the negotiations, said it all: The future of Cyprus is an issue for Cypriots and it is they who will decide what it is.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
The International Migration Organisation (IOM) reported that 5,328 third country nationals had left Greece and returned voluntarily to their countries of origin

In figures announced on Wednesday, the International Migration Organisation (IOM) reported that 5,328 third country nationals had left Greece and returned voluntarily to their countries of origin between the start of 2016 and November 7.

Of these, 1,193 persons returned to Afghanistan, 1,040 to Morocco, 934 to Iraq, 577 to Iran and 472 to Pakistan.

The repatriations were held within the context of the "Government assisted repatriation programme including reintegration measures" carried out by IOM Greece in cooperation with the Interior Ministry. The programme is 75 percent financed by European funds and 25 percent by national funds.

Source: ANA-MPA

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
There is something about medieval castles that really intrigues many people

There is something about medieval castles that really intrigues many people. It could be growing up with all those Disney films of fairy tales and princesses, or the many Hollywood movies of heroic deeds by kings and knights that attract us to them. The irony is that these fairy tale castles were actually inspired by real castles. Here is a list of some of the most beautiful castles in the world.

Neuschwanstein Castle-Germany



This is a German castle built in the 19th century by Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Chateau de Chambord-France



The Chateau de Chambord is undoubtedly on a class of its own as far as architectural awesomeness and superiority is concerned.

Castle Hohenschwangau-Germamy



It was built by King Maximilian II of Bavaria and was the childhood home of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Castle Howard-England



It is located north of Yorkshire, England and has been the familys residence for about 300 years.

Catherine Palace-Russia



Found near the City of Saint Petersburg in Russia. Its construction was commissioned by Catherine of Russia as a summer home in the year 1717.

Tafaria Castle-Kenya



This is probably one of the youngest castles in the lot. It was built by an ambitious businessman in Kenya and was completed in 2012

Kronborg Castle-Denmark



The Kronsborg is a 16th century castle that is located in Denmark. It was built by King Erick VII and is even mentioned by Shakespeare though with a different name in Hamlet.

Chateau de Versailles-France



Arguably one of the most decorated castles, the Chateau de Versailles is a marvelous work of art built in France. The castle occupies a whooping 17acres of land. Its existence dates back to the 17th century and was ainly built for royalty.

Edinburgh Castle



This is one of the most historic castles. It is built on a huge volcanic rock in the city of Edinburgh.

Schloss Moritzburg-Germany



The Schloss Moritzburg is located 13 kilometers near Saxony. The castle was built as a hunting lodge for the kings and high members of society between the year 1542 and 1546.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Main Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: ToucanWings License: CC-BY-SA Other Photos Source: protothema.gr
Shuaa Capital saw total revenues grow to Dh48.7 million ($13.2 million) in the third quarter of the year, a 42 per cent increase on Q3 2015 when total revenues were Dh34.3 million ($9.33 million).



Net loss was Dh35.3 million ($9.6 million) for the quarter as compared to net loss of Dh28.6 million ($7.78 million) in the corresponding quarter of 2015; non-lending business lines (Investment Banking, Asset Management and Capital Markets) recorded a consolidated net profit of Dh3.3 million ($898,216). The groups lending business recorded provisions of Dh46.3 million ($12.6 million) (Q3 2015: Dh18.1 million/$4.98 million).



Net fees and commissions were up 52 per cent to Dh13.9 million ($3.7 million) (Q3 2015: Dh9.2 million/$2.5 million). Total Interest Income was lower at Dh35.1 million ($9.5 million) (Q3 2015: Dh42.1 million/$11.4 million), while ongoing control over General and Administrative expenses maintained Q3 2015 levels at Dh32 million ($8.7 million), and in spite of a series of new appointments across the firm. Group total expenses were Dh87.3 million ($23.7 million) (Q3 2015: Dh61.5 million/$16.7 million) mainly due to a rise in SME lending related provisions.



While total revenues for the nine month period ended 30 September 2016 edged up slightly to Dh138.7 million ($37.7 million) (2015: Dh138.1 million/$37.5 million), net loss for the nine months period was Dh113.6 million ($30.9 million) (2015: Dh28.6 million/$7.7 million).



Abdul Rahman Hareb Rashed Al Hareb, chairman of Shuaa Capital commented, As volatility across regional markets persists, we remain focused on our strategy of re-aligning and strengthening our business lines through product diversification and the appointment of revenue-driving staff. And while we are beginning to see positive results of this strategy on our core revenue lines, there continues to be stress on our lending division.



Al Hareb added, I would also like to emphasise our strong business model in the Saudi market. The first of three hospitality projects has recently been completed and handed over for operations, thus marking a significant milestone since the firms foray into the kingdom. Saudi Arabia remains a vital market for us, and we will continue to pursue strategic growth opportunities there alongside our partners." - TradeArabia News Service


Islamic State forces (Isis) have used chemical weapons against Iraqi government forces at least three times between September and October, creating a serious threat to civilians and combatants in and around the embattled city of Mosul.



The attacks hit the town of Qayyarah, 60 kilometers south of Mosul, in September and October after Iraqi government forces retook the town on August 25, 2016. The attacks caused painful burns to at least seven people consistent with exposure to low levels of a chemical warfare agent known as vesicants, or blister agents, a chemical weapons expert told Human Rights Watch.



"Isis attacks using toxic chemicals show a brutal disregard for human life and the laws of war, said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.



The agent used is suspected to be Sulfur mustard, a common type of blister agent, after reports of garlic odor and the burning of the eyes, followed by the subsequent reddening of the skin and the delayed appearance of blisters.



A more definitive identification of chemicals used in these attacks would require the analyses of soil and water samples collected by specialized teams near the attack sites and of tissue samples collected from the victims, the Human Rights Watch reported.



Isis had previously used blister agents, including in an attack on areas held by armed opposition groups in Syria in August 2015, according to a United Nations-appointed investigative committee.



"Isis has sought to paint itself as protector of Sunni Arabs in Iraq, yet it is willing to use chemical weapons on them in their own homes, Fakih said.
TORONTO, Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GeneNews Limited (TSX:GEN) (GeneNews or the Company) today reported operational and financial results for the three-month period ended September 30, 2016.



Corporate Update

The third quarter of 2016 was a period of significant progress for GeneNews:

Signed first early cancer diagnostic partnership with a large healthcare group, NueHealth, LLC (NueHealth)

Accelerated fundraising activities to support growth of the Companys business

Began the process of reducing the Companys outstanding trade and other payables

Adopted a new flat-fee business model, reducing GeneNews reliance on collections from third party payers

A central part of that early success has been GeneNews population health model whereby the portfolio of early cancer diagnostic tests offered through its Virginia-based clinical reference lab, Innovative Diagnostics Laboratory (IDL), provide important risk stratification at the beginning of the cancer diagnostic process, so that those patients who are at highest risk are prioritized for advanced diagnostic procedures.

As healthcare providers actively seek ways to improve the cancer risk screening rates, our quick and convenient blood-based testing programs are uniquely positioned to help bridge that compliance gap, explained James R Howard-Tripp, GeneNews Chairman & CEO. Driven by the shift to value-based healthcare delivery, we are seeing that message begin to really resonate with the medical community. By leveraging our menu of advanced cancer tests, doctors now have the capability to implement cancer risk stratification programs for their patients that lead to improved patient compliance, reduced industry costs, better use of healthcare resources and, ultimately, improved patient outcomes.

GeneNews partnership with NueHealth, announced in September 2016, is the first agreement from the Companys collaboration with JTS Health Partners (JTS). NueHealth delivers value-based healthcare solutions and operates a growing nationwide system of integrated physician networks (IPNs). Under the agreement, NueHealth doctors will immediately be able to take advantage of three different GeneNews screening tests  ColonSentry, earlyCDTLung and Prostate Health Index  which provide early risk stratification of colorectal cancer, lung cancer and prostate cancer, respectively. All three screenings utilize a quick and convenient blood test where the sample will be drawn at one of NueHealth's many provider-owned care centers, and then sent to IDL in Richmond, VA for analysis.

I am pleased to report that we have begun the process of introducing the diagnostics to the NueHealth physicians. With NueHealth, we have identified multiple starting points, which include physicians within the IPNs as well as self-funded employers. Two early-adopter sites in Pennsylvania have been selected for training and process validation, and we expect initial on-boarding to be completed in the coming weeks, said Mr. Howard-Tripp. At the same time, we are preparing to expand the program to the identified additional groups."

Mr. Howard-Tripp added, "GeneNews and JTS are in discussions with multiple, large healthcare systems with respect to adoption of GeneNews' blood-based, early cancer screening diagnostics into their hospitals, integrated physician networks and employee bases. The use of convenient, blood-based tests to improve patient compliance, as well as allow for risk stratification of patients to improve health outcomes and optimal utilization of resources, is a solution to one of the pressing healthcare problems of today - how to encourage the patient to comply with early screening."

Under GeneNews new business model, diagnostics services are provided by IDL via a flat-fee model, with responsibility for the management of patient billing resting with the client organization within its value-based healthcare solution model.

Q3-2016 Financial Results

Effective July 1, 2015, GeneNews changed its functional and presentation currency to U.S. dollars given the increasing prevalence of U.S. dollar denominated activities of the Company over time. These third quarter 2016 financial results are presented in U.S. dollars and prior year comparable information is restated to reflect the change in presentation currency. Results are reported in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards.

For the three-month period ended September 30, 2016, GeneNews reported a consolidated net loss of $2.8 million, or $0.04 loss per common share, as compared with a consolidated net loss of $2.2 million, or $0.04 loss per common share, for the three-month period ended September 30, 2015. For the nine-month period ended September 30, 2016, GeneNews reported a consolidated net loss of $7.0 million, or $0.11 loss per common share, as compared with a consolidated net loss of $4.5 million or $0.11 loss per common share, for the nine-month period ended September 30, 2015.

The Company had approximately $0.1 million in cash and cash equivalents as of September 30, 2016.

While our turnaround is not yet reflected in our financial results, with a strong partner in JTS helping to drive business development activities, and a key new customer in NueHealth kickstarting our new population health model, we feel very strongly about our prospects for achieving profitable growth.

The Company's financial statements and management's discussion and analysis are available on www.sedar.com.

About GeneNews

GeneNews is committed to becoming a leader in advanced diagnostics and personalized medicine, serving as a strong commercialization outlet for early detection of cancer and other chronic diseases. Our mission is to identify, assess and make commercially available a comprehensive menu of diagnostics that provide physicians and patients with personalized clinical intelligence and actionable information to improve health out-comes through the early diagnosis of disease. Our Richmond, Virginia-based Innovative Diagnostics Laboratory clinical reference lab specializes in traditional and advanced clinical evidence-based blood testing that helps find, understand, and address cancer risk in patient populations. Currently, IDL offers risk assessment blood tests for the three most prevalent cancer types - colon, lung and prostate. GeneNews' common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol 'GEN'. More information on GeneNews can be found at www.GeneNews.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements identified by words such as expects, will and similar expressions, which reflect the Company's current expectations regarding future events, including the launch of ColonSentry test across the United States and the assembling of a robust menu of other advanced cancer tests to be offered by IDL. The forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including market reaction to the launch of the ColonSentry test into new regions, that could cause the Companys actual events to differ materially from those projected herein. Investors should consult the Company's ongoing quarterly filings and annual reports for additional information on risks and uncertainties relating to these forward-looking statements. The reader is cautioned not to rely on these forward-looking statements. The Company disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
The difference between presenting and training is often not clear. Buzzwords such as learning objectives, learner-centric and active learning can create confusion, and developing training often means spending hours creating elaborate PowerPoint slide decks. This process is time-consuming, and the slide decks mean very little to a learner who has not participated in the training.

So how do you inspire busy subject matter experts to move from simply presenting to training? How do you simultaneously change the mindset across all levels of the organization that training is more than presenting?

A newly formed training department in global safety at Novo Nordisk recently faced this challenge. Their two-and-a-half-year journey began with introducing the importance of learning objectives and how to write them and ended with trainers and managers knocking on the door of the training department for advice and inspiration. This journey incorporated training into the organizations competency catalogue and firmly secured its inclusion on the agenda as a future activity.

Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with more than 90 years of innovation and leadership in diabetes care. Headquartered in Denmark, it employs approximately 41,600 people in 75 countries and markets its products in more than 180 countries. Global Safety is responsible for patient safety and has over 400 employees. Training at Novo Nordisk is decentralized, so it is common to find different levels of maturity in training departments across the organization. Sharing best practices is common across training departments, and the voluntary training network hosted by trainers is a source of inspiration.

A new learning management system branded the training department.

The launch of a new LMS created an administration process owned by the training department. In preparation, the department wrote over 150 course descriptions with active learning objectives. All classroom and virtual trainings were finally anchored in one place, and the organization began to understand the role of the training department. Slowly, the seeds of respect began to grow.

Training principles matter.

Three key training principles are the backbone of our work in the training department:

Training is based on the needs of the business: Its clear why a training program exists.

All training has clear learning objectives: Its clear to the learners what they will be able to do after the training program.

Training is learner-centric: Training is engaging and interactive.

These principles are communicated at every opportunity.

A train-the-trainer course paved the way.

Management gave the green light to launch an internal train-the-trainer course. The training department designed, developed and launched an optional interactive, two-day course for global safety trainers. To date, the organization has delivered the course seven times to over 70 trainers in three countries. They returned to the office with fresh ideas and the motivation to make one small change. Positive feedback is always encouraging, and it spread like a domino effect to all levels of the organization. Optional quarterly post-course training laboratory meetings enabled trainers to share best practices and try out and discuss new tools in a safe environment with their colleagues. Requests for advice on moving from presenting to training at the individual and team level are flowing in to the training department.

Training strategy is an anchor for the future.

Two years later, the strategy that the training department worked on under the table became a request from management. This strategy has firmly secured many training tasks (both needed and nice-to-have) on the agenda and given training a clear direction for the future.

There is never an ideal order of activities to develop and brand a training department. Sometimes, tasks are decided on, and the department must fit them into a logical order. Other times, the department gets to choose the direction and create the logic. It is always a balance between push and pull, requiring constant adjustments to meet the individuals and the organization where they are.

Here is some advice for new training departments:
Considered as the 5th in Lonely Planets Best in Travel in 2017 list, Nepal has totally changed the hyped vacation and given it a whole new diverse Himalayan experience instead.

How to get there

Nepal is the perfect destination for budget travelers. There is no need to subtract such a big fraction from your money to experience its tranquility. One of the cheapest ways of getting there is via Asian hubs. The only direct west European flights are from London to Kathmandu.

Nepal after the quake

Rich in immaculate mountain views, Nepal is paradise for trekkers and nature-lovers who prefer to go back to their roots. Though it was hit by a series of earthquakes last 2015, Nepal has slowly risen from its deep ashes. The tourism industry, for one, has helped the Nepali get back up on their feet and bounce back.

Places to visit

First of all, Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, will always be on a tourists itinerary. In the mazelike alleys surrounded by the Himalayan mountains, Durbar Square sits at the heart of the city. Here, the recent movie Doctor Strange was filmed, showcasing the city's fine architecture.

Another staple for Nepali culture and heritage is Patan. Also known as Manigal, it is famous for its traditional arts and crafts. Wood and stone carvings are also prominent here.

Trekking in Nepal

As for the trekkers, its going to be tough. Nepal has a series of treks and annually, around 200,000 trekkers attempt to climb one of these. In Thamel, there are a number of trekking agencies that will offer you a wide variety of treks.

To name the top 3 from Bookmundi, the first one is the Everest Base Camp. It is around 12-13 days. It is sort of expensive but it will give you the once in a lifetime opportunity to come face-to-face with the worlds highest peak  Mount Everest.

At 5,600 meters, there is also a point wherein you will witness pristine peaks such as Lhotse and Nuptse, where the trail is also great. .

Second is the Annapurna Circuit, which spans for 13-14 days and in this interval, youll get to trek the entire Annapurna Region. Here, you will be able to cross the worlds widest pass, the Thorong La Pass at a cheap price.

Lastly, the Annapurna Base Camp will grant you to come face-to-face with the worlds most dangerous mountain to climb. Spanning 9-10 days, its an cheap, authentic and a real trekking experience.

See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018
Sydney, Australia, Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Heron Resources Limited (Heron or Company) advises that Ardea has lodged a prospectus (Prospectus) with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission on 9 November 2016 for a proposed initial public offer of up to 30 million fully paid shares at an issue price of $0.20 each including a priority offer to Existing Heron Shareholders to raise up to $6 million before cost (Public Offer) and an offer of 12,445,028 options to Heron, the lead manager and the corporate adviser.

The prospectus also includes an offer made by Heron for the sale of up to 5.4 million shares under a Sale Facility (as that term is defined in the Prospectus). Details of the Sale Facility were set out in the Companys ASX announcement on 29 September 2016.

All Existing Heron Shareholders (being Heron shareholders with a registered address in Australia or New Zealand) as at 9 November 2016 will be sent a copy of the Prospectus together with a personalised blue priority application form after the exposure period.

A copy of the prospectus is available at www.ardearesources.com.au and on SEDAR www.SEDAR.com . Anyone considering investing should read the prospectus in its entirety before deciding whether to do so. Applications can only be made via the application form which is in or accompanies the Prospectus.

Please contact Ardeas company secretary on +61 8 6500 9200 to request a copy of the prospectus.

About Heron Resources Limited:

Heron is engaged in the exploration and development of base and precious metal deposits in Australia. Herons projects include the high-grade Woodlawn Zinc-Copper Project located 250km southwest of Sydney, New South Wales, and the Kalgoorlie Nickel Project located north of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. In addition the Company holds a number of other high quality exploration properties located in the Lachlan Fold Belt, New South Wales.





CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Australian and Canadian securities laws, which are based on expectations, estimates and projections as of the date of this news release. This forward-looking information includes, or may be based upon, without limitation, estimates, forecasts and statements as to managements expectations with respect to, among other things, the timing and ability to complete the Ardea spin-off, the timing and amount of funding required to execute the Companys exploration, development and business plans, capital and exploration expenditures, the effect on the Company of any changes to existing legislation or policy, government regulation of mining operations, the length of time required to obtain permits, certifications and approvals, the success of exploration, development and mining activities, the geology of the Companys properties, environmental risks, the availability of labour, the focus of the Company in the future, demand and market outlook for precious metals and the prices thereof, progress in development of mineral properties, the Companys ability to raise funding privately or on a public market in the future, the Companys future growth, results of operations, performance, and business prospects and opportunities. Wherever possible, words such as anticipate, believe, expect, intend, may and similar expressions have been used to identify such forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the information is given, and on information available to management at such time. Forward-looking information involves significant risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from the results discussed or implied in the forward-looking information. These factors, including, but not limited to, the ability to complete the Ardea spin-off on the basis of the proposed terms and timing or at all, the ability to complete the Woodlawn Zinc-Copper Project Feasibility Study on time or at all, and whether the feasibility study is positive and otherwise consistent with the business plans of the Company, fluctuations in currency markets, fluctuations in commodity prices, the ability of the Company to access sufficient capital on favourable terms or at all, changes in national and local government legislation, taxation, controls, regulations, political or economic developments in Canada, Australia or other countries in which the Company does business or may carry on business in the future, operational or technical difficulties in connection with exploration or development activities, employee relations, the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development, obtaining necessary licenses and permits, diminishing quantities and grades of mineral reserves, contests over title to properties, especially title to undeveloped properties, the inherent risks involved in the exploration and development of mineral properties, the uncertainties involved in interpreting drill results and other geological data, environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected formations, pressures, cave-ins and flooding, limitations of insurance coverage and the possibility of project cost overruns or unanticipated costs and expenses, and should be considered carefully. Many of these uncertainties and contingencies can affect the Companys actual results and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made by, or on behalf of, the Company. Prospective investors should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking information.

Although the forward-looking information contained in this news release is based upon what management believes, or believed at the time, to be reasonable assumptions, the Company cannot assure prospective purchasers that actual results will be consistent with such forward-looking information, as there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended, and neither the Company nor any other person assumes responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of any such forward-looking information. The Company does not undertake, and assumes no obligation, to update or revise any such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information contained herein to reflect new events or circumstances, except as may be required by law.

No stock exchange, regulation services provider, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained in this news release.
A new year brings out bucket lists or resolutions from people to start the year in a positive vibe. 2016 is about to end and a great way to welcome the next year is by traveling. According to Price of Travel research, cost of hotels and air tickets usually decrease towards the second week of January.

There are several selections for the best option according to the weather and prices. This article shows three of the many choices for cheapest places to visit in January 2017.

Thailand

It is a worthy choice to go north of Thailand, specifically, in Chiang Mai. One need not spend so much on attractions because admission to most spots are very cheap. One can enjoy a meditation retreat at the Wat Umong Center and give a meek amount of donation. Tourists can also visit one temple to the other as there are plenty of these in Chiang Mai. Take pictures of the cherry blossoms at Doi Khun Chang Kien, Doi Inthanon and Doi Khun Mae Ya in Pai. Explore the Chiang Mai University Art Museum.

Chiang Mai follows a laid-back life and there are alternatives for budget food. According to Price of Travel website, budget food ranges from $0.85- $4.55. Your budget can go a long way in this beautiful province up north.

Philippines

Another desirable selection is Baguio City in Benguet, Philippines. Benguet is located at the northern part of the country. January is a quiet month as the Christmas and the New Year holidays are starting to wear off. The items that were not bought during the Christmas season will be sold at a discounted price.Thrift shops or locally known as "Ukay-ukay" are still offering low prices at this time.

Hotels could be expensive but there are many transient houses, dormitels, bed & breakfast, which offer cheap rates ranging from $10 - $30. There are many activities to do which will not hurt your budget such as going to Burnham Park, Baguio Cathedral, Mines View Park, Wright Park & The Mansion, Stobosa Art Mural. Souvenirs are affordable at the Baguio Public Market, Ukay-Ukay Shops and Night Market.

Vietnam

One place that travellers need to add to their list is the "Town in the Cloud" in Vietnam known as Sapa. Because of its geographical location, the activities are concentrated on enjoying the landscape view, getting acquainted with different tribes and trekking along the trails. These activities can be done in a group and tours can be arranged by local tour operators. Homestays with locals could also be arranged as part of a package.

See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018
New Zealand boasts of the best skydiving drop offs in the world because of the amazing aerial views of its mountains, rivers, beaches, oceans, and grasslands. Here is a list of places where you can get to experience the jump of your lifetime.

1. Wanaka, New Zealand

Skydive Wanaka will let you have a tandem skydive experience where you'll get to "strap yourslelf to a beautiful sttanger." This trip, which has nothing but positive reviews, will let you see see the beautiful scenery of Lake Wanaka under you 12,000 feet from the ground. Don't forget to smile--they have cameras to take a photo of what could probably be the most thrilling ride of your life!

2. Nelson, New Zealand

Skydive Abel Tasman offers several packages for tandem skydiving according to the height of the plunge, with the highest ranging to 16, 500 feet and the lowest to 9,000 feet. The dive offers you a breathtaking aerial view of snow-capped mountains, lush green plains and golden beaches. They also take HD photos and videos for those who want to document your epic moment.

3. Taupo, New Zealand

If you want to see an aerial view of Lake Taupo, Skydive Taupo will give you the best deal in acquiring that skydiving experience. They offer services like picking you up in a limousine and arrive at their pink plane where you will be having your drop off. Lake Taupo will never disappoint as it gives a scenic picture along with the Tongariro National Park. Skydive Taupo also documents your experience through video.

4. Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand

The highest tandem skydive in New Zealand is offered by Skydive Franz Josef which ranges up to 19,000 feet. With a jump that high and an extended free fall, you will get to enjoy the breathtaking view of the snow-capped peaks of Mount Cook longer.

5. Queenstown, New Zealand

NZONE Skydive Queenstown will take you to air just below the Wakatipu Basin that is encircled by mountains in Central Otago. The dive will give you a scenic view of the mountains while your tandem skydiver records the experience through video.

See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018
The Forbidden City located at the heart of Beijing is one of the most important palaces in the world. It housed 24 emperors of the Qing and Ming dynasty. The imperial regime ended 90 years ago upon the dissolution of "boy emperor" Puyi and thus welcomed the start of the Palace Musuem. Planning to visit? Here are some of the things that you need to know

Why is it called the Forbidden City?

The Forbidden City is translated as "Zi jin Cheng" in Chinese which is interpreted as the Purple Forbidden City. The Purple Palace is believed to be the house of God and Chinese tradition replicated this concept to house the most revered and powerful man at that time, the emperor.

Another reason why it is called the Forbidden City is because the locals and peasants were not allowed to enter the palace. If you went in unannounced, the punishment was immediate execution.

The Palace Museum offers a lot of historical artifacts that are preserved for the public:

1. Hall of Martial Valor

Enter the Gate of Prosperous Harmony to reach the Hall of Martial Valor. This hall housed the painting and calligraphy section. Here you can see ancient paintings from Jin, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties.

2. Hall of Literary Glory

Enter the Gate of unified to Harmony to reach the Hall of Literary Glory. This hall housed ceramics section of the palace. It has 429 pieces of ancient potteries which covers 1.770 square meters.

3. Hall for Ancestry Worship

The Hall for Ancestry Worship is located at the east side of the Inner Court of the Palace. It housed the clock and watch gallery which comprises two hundred different kinds of timepieces like mechanical clocks and sun dials.

4. Treasure Gallery

Treasure Gallery consists of Hall of Spiritual Cultivation, Hall of Joyful Longevity, and Belvedere of Well-Nourished Harmony. These halls housed important and beautiful jewelries of the Qing and Ming dynasty. They include jade, gold, silver, pearls, tea utensils, imperial robes, phoenix crown, and many others.

5. Other Galleries

Other galleries that you must also check out are Stone Drum Gallery, Gold and Silver Gallery, Jade Gallery, Bronze Gallery, and Opera Gallery.

Have you visited the Forbidden City? Share some travel tips below!

See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018
Tuscany is famous for its intricate cuisine, beautiful hills and Instagram-worthy castles. It's no wonder why holidays in Tuscany are definitely on top of every travelers' bucket list.

But why travel to Tuscany? According to CNNTraveler, this place features medieval hill-tip villages just like the Montalcino and Pienza that seems to take you back in time. Here are some insider'stipss on traveling to Tuscany:

Prepare to Get Lost

When driving to Tuscany, you have to prepare for the inevitability of getting lost unless you have a "SatNav". But avoid choosing the quickest option on your GPS whenever you're in Tuscany since it will send you on white roads which are often only accessible by goats and not cars.

SatNav tends to overlook restricted traffic areas or ZTLs in medieval tops. So, if you want to avoid traffic fines in Italy, you should never rely only on your GPS and watch out for signs.

Travel Wisely

Italians tend to flock to the beaches in the summer while tourist dominates the main cities. So, if you have to travel, try to avoid the main routes and busy roads during the weekend.

Even though Tuscany is a year-round travel destination, prices tend to peak during July to August and can be very hot and crowded. Instead, you can visit during springtime and autumn, which is also great for exploring the countryside.

Visit the Hot Springs of Bagno Vignoni

It's always worth going to the natural hot springs of the Bagno Vignoni which is located on a hill in Val d'Orcia Natural Park. The best part of this is that it's free!

These natural hot springs have sulphuric scents tends to cling to your suit and is quite hard to remove. So, unless you still want to smell like hot sulfur whenever you swim, then just wear an old swimsuit or a cheap one.

Have you been to Tuscany? Share your trip ideas in the comments below!

See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018
NEW YORK, Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hunt Mortgage Group, a leader in financing commercial real estate throughout the United States, announced today it provided two loans totaling $61.5 million through its top Seattle-area correspondent, GP Realty Finance, Inc.



The partnership between Hunt Mortgage Group and our firm has now provided the first Fannie Mae loan for a micro housing community, said Dan Piantanida, Senior Vice President of GP Realty Finance, Inc. Our firm has been involved with the micro housing industry since its beginning and were pleased to help open the door to this competitive lending source.

The properties include:

Arete . Located in Kirkland, Washington, Arete is a brand-new, LEED Platinum Plus, mid-rise style apartment community comprised of 290-units housed in five, five-story buildings. Hunt Mortgage Group provided a Fannie Mae loan in the amount of $37.5 million to refinance this property. The loan term is 15-years with amortization based on a 30-year schedule with three years of interest only payments. Yield maintenance will apply during the first 10 years.



Arete was developed in 2015-2016 and leased up soon after each building opened. The property has 62 conventional apartments and 228 micro housing units marketed by the property as ecoflats. Kirkland is an excellent submarket for micro apartments, with many major employers and a dearth of affordable housing.



The city of Kirkland is situated in northwest King County, about 14 miles northeast of downtown Seattle and within the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan service area.





. Located in Kirkland, Washington, Arete is a brand-new, LEED Platinum Plus, mid-rise style apartment community comprised of 290-units housed in five, five-story buildings. Hunt Mortgage Group provided a Fannie Mae loan in the amount of $37.5 million to refinance this property. The loan term is 15-years with amortization based on a 30-year schedule with three years of interest only payments. Yield maintenance will apply during the first 10 years. Arete was developed in 2015-2016 and leased up soon after each building opened. The property has 62 conventional apartments and 228 micro housing units marketed by the property as ecoflats. Kirkland is an excellent submarket for micro apartments, with many major employers and a dearth of affordable housing. The city of Kirkland is situated in northwest King County, about 14 miles northeast of downtown Seattle and within the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan service area. Green Leaf at Lakewood. Hunt Mortgage Group provided a $24 million Fannie Mae loan to facilitate the acquisition of Green Leaf at Lakewood, a garden-style multifamily property comprised of 19, two- and three-story buildings and a total of 231 units. Located in Lakewood, Washington, Green Leaf at Lakewood was built in 1990 and the property is situated on 16.84 acres.



Project amenities include: clubhouse, fitness center, playground, swimming pool, sport court and spa/sauna. The loan term is 15-years with amortization based on a 30-year schedule with the initial seven years as interest-only. Yield maintenance will apply during the first 14.5 years.



The property consists of one-, two- and three-bedroom units. Greenleaf at Lakewood is located within five miles of Joint Base Lewis-McChord military base, but the military only account for approximately 35% of the tenancy of the property. Lakewood is located in Pierce County within the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan service area.

These repeat clients are experienced local investors; one an award-winning builder and the other a top value-add developer, noted Peter Clasquin, Managing Director at Hunt Mortgage Group. Green Leaf will undergo an interior and exterior renovation, which we expect to recapitalize with a supplemental loan within the next few years. Arete is an unsubsidized, affordable, high-quality living experience that is walking distance to many employers and neighborhood services. If every city built projects like Arete there would be no affordable housing crisis in this country.

About Hunt Mortgage Group

Hunt Mortgage Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hunt Companies, Inc., is a leader in financing commercial real estate throughout the United States. The Company finances all types of commercial real estate: multifamily properties (including small balance), affordable housing, office, retail, manufactured housing, healthcare/senior living, industrial, and self-storage facilities. It offers Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD/FHA in addition to its own Proprietary loan products. Since inception, the Company has structured more than $21 billion of loans and today maintains a servicing portfolio of more than $12 billion. Headquartered in New York City, Hunt Mortgage Group has 189 professionals in 21 locations throughout the United States. To learn more, visit www.huntmortgagegroup.com.


Search News Archive : Fast Travel News Promotion Via Search, Social Media + Email Follow Us On : JOIN RANCH RIDER AT YOUR HORSE LIVE FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN! Industry: Events

(TRAVPR.COM) UK - November 11th, 2016 - Riding holiday specialist, Ranch Rider will be exhibiting at the Your Horse Live Show on the 12th and 13th of November at Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire.



Visit the stand (no. 12 & 13) for your chance to a win a 2017 ranch stay for two at the Colorado Cattle Company worth 3,500. Terms & Conditions apply (prize exc. return flights).



With over 350 stands under one roof those attending the show be spoilt for choice as this year there will be more brands to browse in the shopping area.



Each day is packed full of unmissable performances, demos, talks, celebrity riders and signings and of course, the fantastic Monty Roberts Living Legend evening show taking place on Saturday 12th November only.



-ends-



Ranch Rider (01509 618811; info@ranchrider.com) ATOL PROTECTED No 4660 ABTA 96395/V9150. ### Please contact the person or company listed above for information regarding the content of this press release. TravPR.com are not the issuers of this press release and are not responsible for the accuracy of the content. Share Release :



CONTACT INFORMATION Name: Sam Ward Company: Ranch Rider Phone: 02081801614 Email: mseven7studio@gmail.com Web: PRESS RELEASE TAGS
In the United States, only a third of the avocados we eat are grown domestically. Of the two-thirds remaining, nine out of 10 come from Mexico. The other 10 percent come from Chile, Peru and the Dominican Republic, according to The New York Times.

But the math in the United Kingdom is different, which is why avocados are back in the news in a bad way. Major supermarkets in the United Kingdom source avocados from Chile's Petorca region, the country's largest avocado-producing province. To meet demand, Petorcan plantations are installing illegal pipes and diverting water from rivers to irrigate their crops. That diverted water is leaving villages in the region in drought conditions.

According to The Guardian, 17,000 tons of avocados from Petorca were imported to the U.K. in 2016, and it's estimated even more were imported in 2017. That's a lot of avocado toast and guacamole.

A thirsty crop

It took over 400 gallons of water to produce these three avocados. (Photo: Robin Shreeves)

It takes a lot of water to produce avocados. On average, 2,000 liters of water (about 528 gallons) are needed to produce a kilo of avocados (about 2.2 pounds). (In Petorca, the amount needed is even more because it's a very dry region.)

I wanted to see how those average numbers played out concretely, so I weighed the three Mexican avocados that I bought earlier this morning to make guacamole. You can see that the three weigh a little less than 2 pounds, so it took over 130 gallons of water to produce each of those avocados.

Whenever I talk about food waste, I talk about the resources wasted that went into that food, but that can sometimes be abstract  but not in this case. It's smack-me-in-the-face astonishing. If I waste just one of those avocados, I'll be wasting over 130 gallons of water. Put in another context, the average American shower uses 2.1 gallons of water per minute. Throwing away one avocado would be like letting the shower run for more than an hour with no one in it.

I'm looking at each one of these avocados in a completely different light right now.

It's time to make choices

In Mexico, pine forests are being cleared to make way for avocado plantations. (Photo: Protasov AN/Shuttertock)

The matter at hand here isn't simply the water wasted; it's all of the water used.

The impact of this water being used  water that's been diverted from villagers  are serious and far-reaching.

Villagers are using contaminated, trucked-in water, and they're getting sick. Each person is given 50 liters of this contaminated water per day, which isn't enough.

The situation is causing irreversible damage to local ecosystems.

Small farmers can't grow food or raise animals so they're leaving the region.

Water advocates are receiving death threats and other forms of intimidation. Some protestors have lost their jobs.

For those who live in the U.K., they have some choices to make, and that choice may be to not buy the fruit at all. But here in the U.S., we have choices to make, too  choices like knowing where our food comes from and what the growing conditions are like.

This year, the bad news about avocados is coming from those exported to the U.K., but two years ago, The Guardian reported problems with Mexican avocados, too. The country where the majority of avocados sold in U.S. grocery stores come from is facing major deforestation. Farmers can make high profits growing avocados, so they're thinning out pine forests to plant avocado trees.

For those of us who don't live where avocados can be grown, it may be time to make some choices about our ever-increasing avocado consumption.
HOUSTON, Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- This Veterans Day, Service Corporation International (NYSE:SCI), North Americas largest provider of funeral and cemetery services, and its brand, Dignity Memorial, continue their ongoing commitment to honor those serving our country through the Dignity Memorial Homeless Veterans Burial Program.

Since 2000, Dignity Memorial, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, along with local government agencies, have combined resources to honor and provide care for more than 2,500 forgotten veterans across the United States. The Dignity Memorial Homeless Veterans Burial Program serves eligible homeless and indigent veterans, providing a full burial ceremony with military honors in a VA Cemetery or a Dignity Memorial network cemetery in 32 states across the country. On March 30, 2016, the company participated in the nations largest full military honors service for 42 unclaimed veterans in Phoenix, AZ.

The program is one of many initiatives of the Dignity Memorial network that honor and support our nations veterans and active military. Other programs include the Veterans Planning Guide, the Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall, educational veterans seminars and discounts for members of veterans service organizations.

The companys commitment to serving veterans is so strong, the Dignity Memorial network became the Founding Community Partner of the We Honor Veterans program, a collaboration of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Our Dignity Memorial providers serve more veterans than any other funeral service provider in the country, said Michael R. Webb, President and Chief Operating Officer at SCI. It is our great privilege to celebrate and honor members of the military through our veterans programs and is a small way to thank them and their families for their service and sacrifice for our country.

For more information about the Dignity Memorial Homeless Veterans Burial Program, visit

www.dignitymemorial.com.

About Service Corporation International

Service Corporation International (NYSE:SCI), headquartered in Houston, Texas, is North Americas leading provider of death care products and services. As of September 30, 2016, SCI operates 1,531 funeral service locations and 471 cemeteries (including 262 combination locations), which are geographically diversified across 45 states, eight Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Through its businesses, SCI markets the Dignity Memorial brand which offers assurance of quality, value, caring service and exceptional customer satisfaction. In January 2016, SCI was presented with the J.D. Power Presidents Award in recognition of an ongoing dedication to service excellence including quality improvement, customer satisfaction and the development of enduring client relationships. For more information about Service Corporation International, please visit www.sci-corp.com. For more information about Dignity Memorial, please visit www.dignitymemorial.com. As used herein, SCI or the Company refers to Service Corporation International and all of its affiliated companies.
Los Gatos, CA, Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Stringify, a thoughtful automation service for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced that it has been named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree for its Android offering. Products chosen as CES Innovation Honorees reflect innovative design and engineering in some of the most cutting-edge tech products and services coming to market.

Stringify allows people to connect all their physical products and digital services together in one place so they can take better care of themselves, their families and their homes while also getting more done. By tying things together in what Stringify calls Flows, users can create unique experiences that matter to them personally, opening up endless possibilities. Building powerful automation has never been more convenient. Stringify strives to make smart devices even smarter, and currently works with over 500 products and services including Nest, Philips Hue, Ring, Amazon Alexa, Honeywell, Insteon, LIFX, Netgear, Dropbox, Facebook, Google Drive and Slack, just to name a few (for more partners, visit www.stringify.com). The cloud-based platform gives its customers anytime/anywhere access through its mobile apps, with no hardware required.

Its a great honor to be one of the few companies selected for this award especially in a category as competitive as software and mobile apps, said Mike Yurochko, CEO of Stringify. Our goal with Stringify, across both the current iOS offering and the upcoming Android service, is to make the world of IoT and connected living more attainable, customizable and enjoyable for everyone. This award is exciting validation that we are delivering an appealing service.



The CES Innovation Awards are sponsored by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)TM, the producer of CES 2017. Products entered in this prestigious program are judged by a preeminent panel of independent industrial designers, independent engineers and members of the trade media to honor outstanding design and engineering in cutting-edge consumer electronics products across 28 product categories.

Entries are evaluated on their engineering, aesthetic and design qualities, intended use/function and user value, unique/novel features present and how the design and innovation of the product directly compares to other products in the marketplace.

Stringify for Android will be displayed at CES 2017, which runs January 5-8, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES 2017 Innovation Honoree products are also featured on CES.tech/Innovation. The company will also be demonstrating the platform at CES Unveiled in Las Vegas on January 3.

Stringify is available now in the iTunes store with Android support coming soon. For up-to-date information on newly supported products and tips on living a connected life check out the Stringify blog https://www.stringify.com/blog/ and follow the company on Twitter @StringifyIt.

About Stringify:

Stringify, an automation platform for the Internet of Things (IoT), transforms the way you connect your life by bringing your physical and digital Things together to help create more meaningful experiences. Founded in 2014, Stringify makes the services you use and rely on every day better and more valuable. The company is based in Los Gatos, CA and has funding from ARTIS Ventures, Oryx Ventures, OurCrowd and other private investors.
Aarti Kapur

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 11

Post Office branch, Sector 29, at 10.30 am, no currency available.

Post Office branch, Sector 15 market, at 3.04 pm, no currency available.

Post Office branch, Sector 18 market, at 3.30 pm, no currency available.

Post Office branch, Sector 30 market, at 4.10 pm, no currency available.

This was the status of city post offices on the second day of the disbursal of new currency notes and exchange of old denomination notes when this correspondent visited the post offices on Friday.

During a visit to the Sector 29 branch, the staff was heard making an announcement and requesting customers who wanted to exchange notes not to stand in a queue as they had not received any cash from the head office. They categorically stated that only deposits would be made at the moment and those who wanted to exchange their currency could try their luck at the Sector 30 post office.

At the Sector 15 branch, the staff said they had received Rs 3 lakh in cash from the headquarters which they disbursed to the customers from 11 am to 3 pm. A requisition was made for Rs 10 lakh by the branch on the basis of the demand of the customers.

At the Sector 18 branch, Rs 4 lakh in cash was received in the morning, but went out of stock after just an hour due to heavy rush. The staff made the request for more currency in the afternoon.

During a visit to the Sector 30 branch, doors were closed for the general public as the branch did not have any cash left with them. The staff standing outside the branch asked the customers to visit them on Saturday for deposits or exchange of currency notes.

Punjab Circle Chief Postmaster General (CPG) PK Swain said the headquarters received the supply of cash late from the banks due to which disbursal was delayed at the branches of the post office. He said that keeping in mind the senior citizens, additional counters were set up at a few branches today. In fact, at some of the post offices, police personnel were deployed after the staff made a complaint of youngsters misbehaving with the senior citizens. The PU and the PGI were also informed, if need be, that a special counter could be set up for professors and doctors on Saturday in the respective institutes.

Detailed report on requirement of funds

The Punjab Circle Chief Postmaster General (CPG), PK Swain, said he had asked all the heads to prepare a detailed estimate as to how much currency was required on Sunday at their respective branches. He said on Friday, the post office had received Rs 2 crore for disbursal at all branches.

Post office yet to receive cash

It has become difficult to get currency notes to deposit the fees of children as the post office is yet to receive cash and banks have long queues.  Urmila, senior citizen

A long process

Its a daylong process, first deposit the money in the post office and then go to the bank to get the currency exchanged.  Pooja, housewife

Notes go out of stock

I came to the Sector 15 market to get the currency notes as they went out of stock at the Sector 14 post office.  Kangana Singh, Student

Long queues at post offices, banks

I came to the market to withdraw from the ATM as the PU post office and the bank ATM there have long queues since morning.  Deeksha, hosteller at PU
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 11

The Chandigarh traffic police have started suspending driving licences of motorists who are caught using mobile phones while driving, red-light jumping, overspeeding and overloading in commercial vehicles, including auto-rickshaws, for a period of three months.

The new rule was introduced on Thursday by the traffic police and on the very first day, the licence of a motorist was suspended for talking on a mobile phone.

Steps were taken on the directions of the Supreme Court regarding the seizure and suspension of driving licences of violators for the offences. The police said the driving licence would be suspended in the first instance in case of being challaned for the offences.

On being challaned for these offences, the traffic police will seize the driving licence of the motorist and send it to the authority that has issued the licence, which will then hand it over to the motorist after three months.

The offence of drunken driving is at present not included in the offences. However, sources said in future, this offence too will invite suspension of the driving licence.

In case of driving licences issued by the other states, the police official said the driving licence of the suspended individual will be sent to the issuing authorities concerned in that particular state.

The Delhi and Haryana Police have already implemented the new rule.
S Nihal Singh

MANY in the US and around the world will have some difficulty in getting used to President Donald Trump. Yet his stunning victory over the favourite Hillary Clinton proved the polls wrong yet again.

There will be treatises written in the American fashion on what went wrong, but the pollsters, despite all the technology at their command, did not gauge the anger that had built over the new disposed  in particular the less educated whites in an age of globalisation  and the texture of their country is changing with a mixed heterogeneous population. This is perhaps the last presidential election in the US with the kind of weightage white voters have.

Mr Trumps instinct tapped into this anger among people with many other grievances against the establishment elite for stark income inequalities, for taking away jobs that went to other countries, for seemingly looking down on the relatively poor, evils they blamed on the traditionally rich. Here was an outsider, often reviled by the Republican administration, who spoke his mind, ostentatiously placed Americas interests first. His misdemeanours in relation to women, embarrassing as they were, were overlooked by supporters for the bigger goal of knocking the teeth of the establishment.

Mrs Clinton, in a way, contributed to her own defeat by revelations of her close links with Wall Street charging vast speaking fees, thanks to revelations and hacking of her Democratic Party emails, allegedly by Russians, and the perennial saga of using a private server for her emails while in office. The strange conduct of the investigative agency in reopening the case some 10 days before polling to close the case again had dented her high poll ratings, which never recovered. In the end, the pollsters verdict was that the contest had tightened, but she would win. She could never shake off her trust deficit, often revealed in her secretive ways, perhaps because of her long struggle in securing high political positions in a mans world.

However, as the result of the presidential election shows, this was a vote for change. For many, Mrs Clinton was something of an Obama term three, despite her variations on the theme. And Mr Obama, who has by and large proved to be a remarkable President during his two terms, has himself become an establishment figure, despite his having broken the glass ceiling by being the first black President of the US.

What next? Mr Trump has made many extravagant promises he will be hard put to keep. Will he build a wall on the Mexican border and ask Mexicans to pay for it? He has called Mexicans rapists. Will he scrutinise Muslim immigrants with a tooth comb? He has already limited his animosity to their country of origin and his animosity towards the trans-Pacific trade deal is likely to stay.

It will be an embarrassing moment for President Obama to go for the forthcoming summit meeting of NATO because his successor has already hinted at its insignificance while asking European members to pay more of their share. He has also questioned why the US should continue to protect allies such as South Korea and Japan from attack by others and would rather let them have their own nuclear bombs.

Everyone knows that campaign rhetoric cannot often be translated into policies when one is in power. Mr Trump has not thought through his ideas and the American system is mature enough with its expert committees and platoons of advisers to keep a novice president on the straight and narrow. Judging by his victory speech after Mrs Clinton conceded, he can be sober on contemplating his new responsibilities.

It cannot, however, be denied that the drastic change in the Washington architecture will have repercussions around the world. On the brighter side, there can be prospects of better relations with Russia, now at a 30-year low. Mr Trump has often praised Russias President Vladimir Putin for being a strong leader and has expressed the view that he is a man he can do business with. The stinging Western sanctions imposed under Washingtons leadership for Moscows annexation of Crimea and role in eastern Ukraine gives the US some room for manoeuvre. Many European nations would rather have friendlier relations with Moscow and it does not benefit Washington to be in perpetual enmity with Russia.

It is difficult to see Mr Trump retreating on the Pacific trade deal because he built his whole populist argument on globalisation taking away American jobs and his constant theme has been America First. But in his victory speech, he suggested he had a major infrastructure rebuilding programme, somewhat similar to Mrs Clintons, to put his supportive blue collar workers left unemployed by the modern age to work. He also has a programme for army veterans.

Judging by his oration at the American Hindu outfit, he seems to have good vibes with Hindus, a term in which he includes others, including Muslims. And he obligingly plagiarised Mr Narendra Modis election chant to suggest, Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar. At the same time, he has railed against China and India for stealing American jobs. While the President and Mr Modi congratulated Mr Trump on his victory and spoke to him by telephone, Beijing is initially adopting a cautious policy.

Is the Trump phenomenon, with its own impulses, part of a wider trend? Europe is undergoing something of a populist onslaught, with the rise of the far right and far left eating into the votes and popularity of well-established parties. In Poland and Hungary, for instance, there is a wave of conservative ultra-nationalism. And Britains impending exit from the EU has cast a shadow on the entire European venture.

The truth is that in a fast-changing world at a time of relative recession and inequalities America has an advantage over Europeans, despite the rise of nativist ideas. It is a nation of original thinkers and innovators. Its economy, military strength and reach are built on innovation and an inventive mind.
ATLANTA, Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Atlanta-based design firm COOPER CARRY today announced the expansion of one of its design studios, The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY with the opening of a new restaurant, hospitality interiors and club design studio in its New York City office. Hospitality design veteran Ray Chung will lead the new studio in COOPER CARRYs office, located in Downtown Manhattan.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/83bd2cef-490c-4dd0-bf62-b6e4cb41eb2d.

The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRYs expansion into the Northeast market further equips our firm with unmatched expertise and capabilities, said Kevin Cantley, COOPER CARRYs President and CEO. We expect 2017 to be a great year of growth for our hospitality portfolio across the country, but especially in the Northeast market.

The expansion of the practice will better position The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY to design projects in the Northeast, including restaurants, clubhouses, hotel interiors and other hospitality-related venues. The studio has previously designed Northeast-based projects, including the Del Friscos Grille in Rockefeller Center and several Legal Sea Foods restaurants including the recently opened Legal Crossing in Boston, Massachusetts.

COOPER CARRYs New York office, which opened in 1998, is known for designing office, retail, hotel and mixed-use projects, including The Lodge at Woodloch, an award-winning destination spa in Hawley, Pennsylvania; Lighthouse Point, the landmark mixed-use community on Staten Island; and a new Hilton hotel proposed for the banks of the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Our New York office has seen great demand for hospitality projects, and our decision to open the new studio, helmed by Ray, will better prepare our team to design iconic projects across the Northeast, said Bill Johnson, Associate Principal of The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY. We are confident that Rays extensive hospitality background and familiarity with New York City will allow him to strategically grow the hospitality-focused practice.

At New York City-based Tihany Design and before that, Rockwell Group, Chung led the design of restaurants, bars, theaters, spas, hotels, luxury cruise ships and casinos. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Yale University, and his Master in Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

COOPER CARRY and The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY are both recognized globally for their unique connective architecture approach, and Im thrilled to join the highly regarded team of designers, said Chung. The firm has an especially great reputation for transforming complex projects into memorable places that connect ideas, people and spaces  a particularly appealing approach in a crowded real estate market like New York.

COOPER CARRYs move to expand its restaurant design and hospitality interiors practice through The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY comes after the two design firms joined forces earlier this year. The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY is currently working on twenty projects across the U.S. and the Caribbean.

For more information about COOPER CARRY, visit coopercarry.com.

ABOUT COOPER CARRY

COOPER CARRY provides architecture, planning, landscape architecture, interior design, environmental graphic design and sustainability consulting services. Founded in 1960, the firm specializes in the design of corporate, education, government, hospitality, mixed-use, office, residential, retail, science + technology, and transit projects. The firm has designed projects in 45 states and globally in the Caribbean, Middle East, Asia, Africa and Central America. Engaging a fundamental design philosophy centered on the concept that environments should connect people to people and people to place, the firm promotes the philosophy of connective architecture. Designers understand the local market and the specific cultural and physical contexts in which the building will serve those who interact with it while conceiving memorable spaces, inside and out. Listening to the client and gaining a deep understanding of the market and site prior to commencing design, COOPER CARRY balances passionate creativity with client service.

For more information visit coopercarry.com.

ABOUT The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY

The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY works closely with clients to create extraordinary spaces that connect food and people to place. The firm offers complete design service consultation, conceptual development, architecture, interior design, lighting design and furniture purchasing. Since its founding in 1988, the studio has built a reputation for producing some of the most forward-thinking restaurant designs in the world. The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY has designed over 500 full service restaurants ranging from casual neighborhood eateries to upscale nationally branded establishments to unique chef-driven restaurants. It also specializes in the design of country clubs, bars and lounges. The Johnson Studio at COOPER CARRY is based in Atlanta, but orchestrates projects nationally and beyond.

For more information, visit johnsonstudio.com.
Vandana Shukla

The scene that led to charges of sedition in the contentious play Daupadi, in fact made the audience laugh; when staged, on September 21, by the students of Department of English and other Foreign Languages, Central University of Haryana (CUH), Mahendragarh. The U-tube grabs of the play showcase Draupadi as an amateur production; incapable of inciting sedition.

Adapted from Mahasweta Devi's short story, a custodial rape survivor Draupadi Mejhen's tale of courage; written around tribal resistance against the exploitation of the landlords, the Naxal movement and its suppression by the armed forces. It created havoc among some sections due to an insertion of an epilogue to the play that contextualised facts with fiction. Recordings of the selected three parts of the play on the web trigger more guffaws because of the goof-ups and the irritatingly crackling sound of the mikes. It must have taken a lot of hard work and imagination on the part of the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), to accuse the play of being anti-national. Their demand to arrest the students and faculty, responsible for staging this play, is a part of a larger design  to suppress voices of reason; howsoever faint or insignificant.

Abiding by the law

To understand the unusual response to an ordinary academic exercise; it's pertinent to know the academic-administrative background of the central university. CUH, is one of the 15 new central universities, established during the previous UPA regime. While the older universities were fortunate to have the luxury of evolving liberal thought in the democratic space available to them for long; the new universities have become a laboratory for neo-liberal education policies. Adopting the policy of contractual, temporary employment of teachers and staff; results in the latter being under the constant threat of termination. The absence of unions forces the faculty and staff to work under submission  be it ideological or contractual. Universities should create space for learning, discussions and debates where new ideas and ideologies are formed and popular narratives are challenged and reshaped. All this requires liberal practices.

The fact-finding committee from Delhi University, probing the alleged case of sedition, found that in CUH, every event (academic and non-academic), requires sanction from multiple authorities. The two teachers from the Department of English, Manoj Kumar and Snehsata, organised, rehearsed and performed the controversial play under the supervision and guidance of the Head of the Department. The staging of the event, to pay a tribute to the late Mahasweta Devi, was finalised by the Head of Department in consultation with the Vice Chancellor.

Neither Mahasweta Devi, nor the story Draupadi, has been banned by the university. The teachers, who planned the programme, to help understand the text of Mahasweta Devi's play, prescribed in the syllabus, are selected through a proper process to teach and help shape student's intellectual faculties. The script too was shown and received approval, from the HoD. The executive committee's decision finding the two teachers Snehasata and Manoj, guilty of adding an "unwanted epilogue" smacks of ideological regimentation of the faculty and the students. They were issued a warning to refrain from such acts in future, suffocating academic freedom and the dignity of the faculty.

The controlling authority

Rather than standing for the liberal rights of its faculty, after local protestors filed a police complaint on September 22, the university issued show-cause letters to Manoj Kumar and Snehsata. Both have been grilled and coerced for hours to submit an apology. Later, a mahadharna was organised by about 400 ABVP/RSS functionaries, and the university authorities buckled under pressure. Members of the DU inquiry committee found a history of show-cause notices being served for slightest of aberrations, like not attending a meeting. The students are being treated as juveniles and the faculty is being the liberty to set the examination paper. Both grading and setting the examination paper is done by external evaluators. Students as well as faculty members are scared of voicing their opinion. Yet, a few dare to demand the right to know. The video of the play was recorded by the camera arranged by the CUH administration, how did it land in the hands of RSS and ABVP activists? Says a student who does not want to be named: The CUH administration is clearly working in collaboration with RSS, they control the university, who else allows shakhas to be conducted inside the campus by nearby villagers?

CUH has the excuse of being a new university; Mahendragarh isn't a cosmopolitan city, like Mumbai. In 2010, when the Vice Chancellor of Mumbai University, Rajan M Welukar, agreed to remove Rohinton Mistry's, nominated for Booker Award novel, Such A Long Journey, from the university's reading list, he institutionalised a culture of self-censorship for Indian universities. The novel caricatures the Shiv Sena leader in the fictional account of contemporary Bombay. In 2012, in the Academic Council meeting of Delhi University, only nine of the 120 members present dissented against the decision of the Council to remove late A K Ramanujan's brilliant essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples and Three Thoughts on Translations, from the syllabus of BA History (honours) course, because it attracted the ire of Hindutva activists. The essay talks about 300 different versions of the Ramayana, unpalatable to the narrow view of the right wing. Intellectuals observe a tacit silence, witnessing erosion of liberal values. It strengthens the fundamentalists.

In 2013, the Department of Mass Communication, Kurukshetra University, organised a film festival, to screen world cinema, followed by deliberations by internationally acclaimed directors. Udayan Prasad's much-talked-about film, Brothers in Trouble, based on a South Asian illegal migrant's heart-breaking tale of survival in Britain was screened. A furore was created based on one scene, which the adult students could not digest for showing demands of adulthood of the migrants packed in a ghetto, despite being handled aesthetically and with utmost sensitivity. The good effort of the department came to a naught. The Head of the Department, had to fight to save his job. Other universities shied away from hosting such events that would expose students to a wider worldview.

That the play is about rape; a woman's body used as battleground to win ideological wars; is ignored to tom-tom the honour of soldiers.

Is a woman's honour a non-issue, especially in a land where girls often lose the fight before even taking birth? The voice of reason gets drowned under the din of growing jingoism. It is reminiscent of Sudhir Mishra's film, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, also based on the Naxal movement of the 1970s. That too depicts the custodial rape of a woman, who witnesses the death of all socio-political ideologies and the survival of the opportunist.

vandanashukla10@gmail.com
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, November 11

The Crime Branch of Delhi Police has arrested two accused - Javed and Mosam - who were wanted in a kidnapping case in Bhuj in Gujarat. They had called the victim, a businessman, to Delhi to buy a car at a very low price.

The victim, Valji Bhai of Bhuj reached Delhi after receiving calls on his mobile number from the accused saying that they would arrange a car for him at a very low price. The accused were unknown to him, police said.

According to the police, on finding it a lucrative offer, the victim reached Delhi Railway Station on December 21 last year where he met one person, who took him to Palwal on the pretext of showing him the car. On reaching Palwal, he noticed that six persons were already present there on two bikes and on sensing danger, he refused to go further.

He was forcefully taken to a secluded place. After that, they started beating him and demanded a ransom of Rs. 5 lakh from his son by making calls to him. The accused also took away Rs.20,000 and mobile phone, which he was carrying. The next day they had run away leaving the victim there after getting information of police action.

The accused were arrested today from Sarai Kale Khan Inter State Bus Terminus where they came from Rajasthan and waiting for their accomplices.

During interrogation, Mosam and Javed disclosed they kidnapped gullible persons for ransom.

Cases of this type have become common in the Mewat area. The modus operandi is that the criminals give advertisements in newspapers in far-flung areas of Maharashtra and Gujarat for sale of vehicles especially cars and scrap materials etc. at throwaway prices.
It has been a week since two professors were named among 10 persons in an FIR for the murder of a tribal person, Shamnath Baghel, in the insurgency-hit Sukma district of Chhattisgarh. As the matter comes under greater media and court scrutiny, the case seems to be becoming untenable. Under questioning from the Supreme Court, the state government has submitted it wont arrest Delhi University Professor Nandini Sundar and JNU Professor Archana Prasad. It had no choice in the light of revelations that make the charges very, very suspect. Baghels wife was alleged to have quoted the assailants as saying that they were killing him because he had complained against the professors. Subsequent media reports have quoted villagers and Baghels wife as saying that neither was a complaint lodged against the professors nor did the Maoist attackers make any such statement.

A sinister policing approach is at work. And, bad judgements and bad motives are in play. One police IG under whose jurisdiction the murder happened is facing an inquiry for his suspected role in the burning of 160 homes in a tribal village in 2011  and Professor Sundar is a co-petitioner against him. These are familiar tactics of intimidation and coercion. In an insurgency such as the Maoist movement, which is entirely homegrown, it is vital that we understand the socio-economic environment that feeds the unrest. Just killing those who take to the gun will not do, as is evident from the very duration for which the insurgency has lasted.

In arriving at a wise understanding, academics and activists have a role that no official agencies can possibly perform. By intimidating these very people the government loses its own eyes and ears. Engaging with them can serve the dual purpose of comprehending the nuances of the situation as well as keeping a close eye on their work (if at all the government wants to). It is easier to introduce a conflict between the tribal societies and civilisation; it is very difficult to tame the tribals. Civil society members are needed to mediate and mitigate.
Mukesh Tandon

Tribune News Service

Panipat, November 11

Former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda today demanded that Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar should take a bold decision to claim Haryanas right and the Congress was with him for the states future. He also announced Pani ke adhikar ke liye sangharsh (fight for the right to water) here.

The former CM was interacting with mediapersons after attending a programme organised by the District Bar Association (DBA). He welcomed the Supreme Court verdict on Presidential reference on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal in favour of Haryana.

He said the Panipat DBA had passed a unanimous resolution today for dismissal of the Punjab Government immediately and imposing the Presidents rule in the neighbouring state. I appealed to all DBAs in the state to pass such resolutions and send it to the President of India, he said. Hooda said, Panipat is a historical place and I had started the Lalkar Rally here only. I have again started a fight from here to get the states right, a share in canal water.

A meeting of Congress workers would be held at Chandigarh on November 14 to decide the future course of action against Punjabs move against the state, he maintained.

I was an MP in 2004 when I, along with all MPs from the state, had met the then President of India and submitted a representation about the actual situation of the SYL canal. The then President Dr Abdul Kalam had sent a reference to the Supreme Court, on which the verdict was given in favour of Haryana yesterday, he said.

He said the Punjab Government had passed two resolutions this year and had also started to cover the portion of the SYL canal falling in its territory, but now both resolutions stand null and void automatically.

Follow raj dharma, Cong asks Modi

Chandigarh: Congress MLA from Kaithal Randeep Surjewala on Friday asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to break his silence on the SYL canal issue and follow 'raj dharma' by prevailing upon the SAD-BJP government in Punjab to complete the canal to give justice to the Haryana people."The ball is in Modi's court. The Prime Minister must uphold constitutional and legal principles and get the Supreme Court decision on the SYL canal implemented in letter and spirit as there is the NDA government at the Centre, the SAD-BJP alliance government in Punjab and the BJP government in Haryana," Surjewala told reporters here. Saying that narrow political consideration could not override the national interests, he said. TNS
Pradeep Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 11

The Supreme Court decision on the SYL canal has divided the BJP and the Congress in Haryana and Punjab with respective state units taking diametrically opposite stands on the issue.

In fact, different stands of these parties in two neighbouring states portend ill for them in the run-up to the Assembly elections in Punjab where stakes are high for both the Congress and the BJP, the junior partner in the SAD-BJP alliance.

While the Haryana Congress wanted Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal to uphold the Constitution and implement the SC judgment in letter and spirit, its Punjab counterpart is up in arms against the apex court decision with PCC chief and Amritsar MP Capt Amarinder Singh and all Congress MLAs resigning from their posts against the decision.

The situation in the ruling BJP is no different with the Punjab BJP throwing in its lot with the alliance partner SAD on the issue while the BJP in Haryana had termed it a victory for the state residents.

AICC Communications in charge and Kaithal MLA Randeep Surjewala sees no contradiction in the Congress stand on the issue claiming that in a democratic setup individuals were free to take a particular stand keeping in view the interests of their respective state.

Haryana Finance Minister Capt Abhimanyu, who is also co-in charge of the BJPs Punjab Affairs, also parried question on the SYL canal issue saying that he would keep visiting Punjab to prepare party for elections. I will not speak about SYL canal, but discuss only election-related issues in Punjab, he quipped.

Meanwhile, the INLD and the Congress will hold their meetings in Chandigarh on November 14 to chalk out future course of action on the SYL canal issue.
Tribune News Service

Shimla, November 11

Amid the fear of the demonetisation casting its shadow on trade, Governor Acharya Devvrat today inaugurated the four-day International Lavi Fair at Rampur in Shimla district today.

The Governor said the state was known for its rich culture, customs and traditions and it was evident from the fact that the people celebrated the religious and traditional festivities with great enthusiasm and fervour. He said the fair had its own historical importance and was famous not only for trading activities, but also for its age-old traditions.

He said the fair was important in terms of trade between India and Tibet for centuries and was a unique example of the glorious, social, cultural and economic ties. He hoped that all folk artists of the district and other areas of the state would enthrall the audience with their performances and leave an impression on the younger generation about the importance of socio-cultural and ethical values preserved by the hill people.

Devvrat stressed the need for retaining the beauty of Devbhoomi by keeping the surroundings clean and underlined the need for aggressive cleanliness campaigns. Global warming is posing a serious challenge to the environment and effective steps must be taken to prevent any ecological degradation, he said.

Every section of society should be treated equally without any discrimination, he said. The Governor urged the people to come forward and eradicate social evils as every section was playing an important and equal role in the development of society.

Devvrat said women should be given respect and offered equal opportunities. There should be no discrimination. The declining sex ratio is a cause of concern and all sections of society must come forward to eradicate female foeticide, he remarked. He also expressed concern over drug abuse, adding that the youth should engage themselves in acquiring knowledge, social work and mainstream activities.

Devvrat urged the people to adopt zero-budget farming. He said the number of diseases had increased due to excessive use of chemical farming. Farmers should be encouraged to rear domestic cow instead of hybrid one imported from abroad as the cows found in hilly areas are significant in many ways, he said. The Governor also inaugurated the Kinnauri market and an exhibition.
Dinesh Manhotra

Tribune News Service

Jammu, November 11

Union Minister of State (MoS) for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir today reached Jammu for an unscheduled visit and interacted with some officers and selective BJP leaders to get feedback on the rehabilitation of refugees residing in the Jammu region.

Although the BJP termed the ministers visit purely as personal, Ahirs sojourn to Jammu assumes importance keeping in view the proposed two-day trip of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat who is reaching Jammu on November 13.

The RSS chief during this years Vijaydashmi address had touched on many issues related to J&K. Highlighting the plight of West Pakistan refugees and Kashmiri Pandits, he had supported grant of citizenship to refugees from West Pakistan.

Highly placed sources said the minister convened a closed-door meeting with some selective leaders of the BJPs state unit before holding a general introductory interaction with other office-bearers. During the meeting, the Union Minister sought feedback about implementation of various packages announced by the Central government, from time to time, for refugees living in Jammu, the sources said, adding that the minister also sought details of PMs special package for the rehabilitation of displaced Kashmiri Pandits.

During the meeting, local BJP leaders informed him that the state government had failed to formulate any policy to sanction relief for families who lost their cattle in Pakistani shelling, the sources said, added that they sought Centres intervention to force the state government to come up with a plan on it.

Interestingly, no BJP minister met the Union Minister despite the fact that party leadership was informed about his visit and all ministers were aware of it.
Ishfaq Tantry

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, November 11

Making one of his most eloquent and straightforward talks so far, former Hurriyat Conference chairman Abdul Gani Bhat today said the separatist leadership of Kashmir lacked the strategy for a political movement.

Stating that blind men are riding lame horses in Kashmir, Bhat said the current situation demanded that capable people should come forward and deliver.

The senior separatist leader, who is also an executive member of the moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference headed by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was speaking during a function here organised by him to release his new book and memoir Beyond Me, chronicling his early days and the political events up to 1987.

None of the three separatist leaders, Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik, who are at the forefront of the current unrest were present at the book release as Bhat had not invited them.

In an oblique reference to the current happenings in Kashmir, which is under lockdown for over four months, Bhat urged his fellow Kashmiri men to seek the light of wisdom, understand the dynamics of the situation and accordingly strategise.

If you dont have a strategy, where will you end? Where do you go? he asked, adding that the political movements require a defined strategy and identified goals.

The statement from Bhat comes even as the joint resistance camp had last week called a meeting of the civil society groups and other stakeholders to suggest ways for carrying forward the unrest which today completed 126 days.

Somebody told us lets jump into the river not knowing the fact that whether we can swim or not. Where do we go from here? That is why it requires a strategy, Bhat said while commenting upon the current phase of shutdown in an oblique manner.

In Kashmiri we call it langin gurin, aunn sawar (blind men riding lame horses), he said. There are all sorts of leaders around but no people around them. Everybody says I am a leader. This will have to end and the people will have to choose the most honest and the most sagacious persons as their leaders, Bhat said in an indirect reference to the current separatist leadership which is spearheading the Kashmir unrest. He was quick to add that he would never contest elections or seek power for himself.

But I want capable people to come forward and deliver, Bhat said. The current situation demands that you shall have to belong to all and then all will belong to you, he said suggesting that the leadership should take all people along.

Delineating the history of the Partition, Bhat said in 1947 a line was drawn across British India and then broken, which he termed as the first phase of darkness in the subcontinent.

The Kashmir dispute is the basis of this darkness. And this dispute is not about land or wealth of the region but a dispute about the wounded spirit of its people, Bhat said, adding that India entered Kashmir with the roar of guns amidst the noise of democracy.

The former Hurriyat chairman suggested that all political parties and leaders of J&K (both mainstream and separatist) should break the walls and sit together and adopt a joint draft resolution urging both India and Pakistan to resume the stalled dialogue process.
Actress Priyanka Chopras first Punjabi production, Sarvann, is set to release in December.

The 34-year-old star, who is currently busy in the west with the second season of American TV series Quantico, shared the news via Twitter. It is her second foray in regional cinema under her Purple Pebble Pictures banner.

Drum roll So proud to announce @PurplePebblePics debut Punjabi film Sarvann Coming this December! Watch this space for more! #Sarvann, Priyanka wrote.

PTI
Nikhil Bhardwaj

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, November 11

Accusing government of not extending any help, a martyrs wife returned the Sena Medal of his martyred husband at the Deputy Commissioners office today. As the DC was not available, she returned the medal to the ADC.

Surinder Kaur, Martyr Subedar Teja Singhs wife, his daughter Paramvir Kaur along with the president of the Universal Human Rights Organisation, Satnam Singh Dhaliwal, came to return the medal at the DC office so that they could further return it to the President of India Pranab Mukherjee.

Surinder Kaur, a resident of Mehma Singh Wal village, said her husband had attained martyrdom during during Operation Pawan in 1989 in Sri Lanka. She got this medal on January 26, 1990, from the President of India.

She said, after the operation, the government announced to give 10-acre land, along with a licence of a petrol pump or gas agency and a government job for one family member. She said she had been getting regular pension, but other assurances given by the government are yet to take practical shape.

She said if the government could give Rs 50 lakh each to the families of martyrs of 1962, 1965, and 1971 wars, then why was the government delaying facilities to the family members of other martyrs who attained martyrdom in Operation Pawan in Sri Lanka.

She said she urged the state and the Central governments to fulfill all assurances so that families of the martyrs dont face any financial problem in their lives.

Not the first time

Notably, a day before Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Ludhiana, 60-year-old Surinder Kaur also returned her husbands Sena Medal claiming that the government had not provided any help to them even after 30 years of her husbands sacrifice during a special operation in Sri Lanka.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Saturday, November 12, MYnd Analytics, Inc. (OCTCQB:MYAN) CEO George Carpenter will present at the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum  Silicon Valley (#DEFxSV) hosted at Stanford University. Carpenter will highlight recent results of a military trial demonstrating the effectiveness of PEER technology in helping physicians prescribe medications that improve outcomes for service members suffering from depression, PTSD, and suicidal ideation.



The Defense Entrepreneurs Forum brings together disrupters from the military, defense, and technology sectors to discuss ways to foster a culture of innovation within the national security bureaucracy. DEFxSV is the first forum held in the Silicon Valley and will feature a series of TED-style talks by individuals from diverse military branches, industries and backgrounds committed to bridging the gap between the government and the private sector.

About MYnd Analytics, Inc.

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 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.

Safe Harbor Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995

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 as 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.
New Delhi, November 11

Long queues were witnessed at banks and ATMs, which opened after two days, as people rushed to get new banknotes in lieu of their old defunct bills.

Many ATMs ran out of cash in couple of hours as there were heavy rush to withdraw lower denomination currency. Most of the machines were equipped to tender Rs 100 notes, while some were still not working.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Banks are saying that they are trying to recalibrate their machine for higher denomination notes, it will take some days before they start tendering new high security Rs 500 and 2,000 notes, which is expected to ease pressure.

However, to ensure customer convenience, banks have been asked to provide all cash withdrawal transactions at their ATMs free of cost till December 30.

Banks across country are witnessing heavy rush on the second day as people gathered to get new banknotes in exchange of old bills.

After the government scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, banks were shut on Wednesday, and ATMs were supposed to be out of service for re calibration on Wednesday and Thursday.

In the financial capital of the country, shutters of ATMs of State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda, Yes Bank, Dena Bank were down in many parts. ATMs of many banks reported running dry.

From today onwards, customers are allowed to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day from ATMs till November 18. The withdrawal limit will be raised to Rs 4,000 per day per card from November 19, 2016.

In the two days when the ATMs were out of service, the banks said they will re-configure their ATMs to dispense Rs 100 and Rs 50 notes. PTI
New Delhi, November 9

Having junked 86 per cent of total currency in circulation with the demonitisation decision, the government on Wednesday sought to assuage anxious public saying banks and post offices would start giving out high denomination replacement notes from on Thursday even as it expanded the list of exempt public utilities.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

To deal with the chaos at toll plazas arising out of the government's junking Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, the government has suspended fee collection on all booths at National Highways till the midnight of November 11.

"We have issued instructions to suspend collection of fees on all toll plazas on National Highways till November 11 midnight," Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said here.

The government also ordered banks to remain open full day on Saturday and Sunday to deal with the rush of people wanting to deposit the defunct currency bills. Besides, many banks would work extra hours tomorrow and the day after.

Why demonetisation scheme?

 Withdrawal of high denomination currency notes introduced to contain rising incidence of fake notes and black money.

 High denomination notes have been misused by terrorists and for hoarding black money.

 The fake notes promote anti-national and illegal activities.

 The OHD (Old high Denomination) notes Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 have been withdrawn

 Cannot be used for transacting business and are of no value in future if stored.

 OHD notes can be exchanged at banks and 19 offices of RBI

Besides, it expanded the list of areas where the withdrawn notes will be accepted till November 11 midnight.

They include payments for metro rail tickets, highway and road toll, purchase of medicines on doctor prescription from government and private pharmacies, LPG gas cylinders, railway catering and ASI monuments entry tickets.

A 72-hour relaxation for use of such notes was given yesterday for government hospitals, railway ticketing, public transport, airline ticketing counters at airports, milk booths, crematoria/burial grounds and petrol pumps.

Where should I go to exchange old notes?

 Any bank can be approached with valid ID proof for exchange up to Rs 4,000.

 Any one of the following is a valid proof of identity: Aadhaar card, Driving licence, Voter ID card, Passport, NREGA card and PAN card

 Your home bank or any of its branches has to be approached for exchange above Rs 4,000.

 The withdrawal through ATM has been limited to Rs 2,000 per day currently.

 Cash can be exchanged against cheque subject to ceiling of Rs 10,000 in a day and an overall limit of Rs 20,000 per week till November 24, 2016.

Banks and ATMs were shut today to remove old Rs 500/1,000 notes and stock them with lower denomination and new hard-to-fake Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 currency notes. Banks will open tomorrow as RBI has sent truckloads of new notes throughout the country, while some ATMs will begin dispensing cash.

Through RBI's currency chest, adequate currency is (being) provided in all banks and post offices. But it would require 2-3 weeks for full adequate replacement. It would begin tomorrow morning," Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told reporters here.

Withdrawal limits - Rs 2,000 a day from ATM per card and Rs 10,000 through bank account on a day and Rs 20,000 in a week, will continue for some time, he said. "As and when more currency comes into banking system, there will be a rethink on those limitations."

Transaction in cash

 Rs 4,000 per person will be available in the form of liquid credit, the rest is credited to the bank account.

 The entire transaction cannot be in liquid form as the scheme does not allow for it

 If that designated amount is insufficient, electronic mode of payment could be used.

For NRIs/foreign tourists

 If you are an NRI and hold an NRO account, OHD (Old high Denomination) bank notes can be deposited in your account.

 If you are out of India and hold these OHD notes, a representative can be sent to the bank for exchange with an authorised letter and a valid identity proof.

 Foreign tourists can exchange these notes at airport exchange counters equivalent to Rs 5,000 within 72 hours after notification along with the proof of purchase.

Officials said while honest tax payers as well as housewives and farmers with genuine savings have nothing to worry if they deposit old currencies in their bank accounts and take out replacement ones, tax authorities would keep a close watch on high-value deposits made from illicit sources, black money or crime money.

Housewives, farmers and those whose annual income is within the tax exemption limit may not be hounded by tax authorities for depositing up to Rs 2.5 lakh of the now-defunct higher denomination currency notes in bank accounts.

Deposits above Rs 2.5 lakh to face tax, penalty on mismatch

Further dangling the stick, the government tonight warned that cash deposits above Rs 2.5 lakh threshold under the 50-day window could attract tax plus a 200 per cent penalty in case of income mismatch.

"We would be getting reports of all cash deposited during the period of November 10 to December 30, 2016, above a threshold of Rs 2.5 lakh in every account.

"The (tax) department would do matching of this with income returns filed by the depositors. And suitable action may follow," Revenue Secretary Hashmukh Adhia said tonight.

Any mismatch with income declared by the account holder will be treated as a case of tax evasion.

"This would be treated as a case of tax evasion and the tax amount plus a penalty of 200 per cent of the tax payable would be levied as per the Section 270(A) of the Income Tax Act," he said.  PTI
Simran Sodhi

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, November 11

After almost six years of intense negotiations, India and Japan today signed a landmark civil nuclear cooperation deal which will allow Japan to sell nuclear technology, fuel and equipment to India. The deal was signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Japan.

When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited India in December last, a broad framework agreement was reached between the two countries but several technical issues remained. Today, the deal was finally inked, marking Indias emergence in the region as a counterweight to China. The only caution remains a clause in the agreement allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducted a nuclear test.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

There had been major resistance within Japan to the deal primarily on two counts. One, Japan is the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack and the public was wary of exporting any such technology. Two, the fact that India has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was a stumbling block. The deal bestows on India the unique honour of being the first non-NPT nation to have a nuclear deal with Japan.

The deal will give a boost to the 2008 India-US nuclear pact under which US-based Westinghouse Electric, which is owned by Japans Toshiba Corp, is in talks for building six nuclear plants in India.

Japan confirmed its support to India for its entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group. I wish to thank Prime Minister Abe for the support extended for Indias membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Modi said.
Kolkata, November 11

As demonetisation of high-value notes hit small businessmen across the city, sex workers of Sonagachi, South Asias largest red-light area, here are seeing brisk business as they are accepting high-denomination notes.

Our girls have been asked to accept Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. But they are telling customers that they will not accept those after this week. Therefore, there is a huge rush of customers.

Although sex workers in top categories are facing no problem but those who take only Rs 300 to Rs 400 are facing great difficulty, said Bharati, the mentor of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a sex workers organisation which claims to have over one lakh registered sex workers under it across Bengal.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Sex workers who charge below Rs 500 are facing tough time as they have hardly got any customers in the last two days.

Prospective customers first enquire whether the sex workers will accept Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. If we say no, we will lose the customer. We have to accept the notes and Durbar and Usha bank had assured us that our money would not go waste, said Rekha, a sex worker.

In the last two days, sex workers in and around Sonagachi have deposited more than Rs 55 lakh in Usha Multipurpose Cooperative Bank, which was formed and is run by former sex workers since 2001 for women in the same trade.

Due to the huge rush of customers in Sonagachi, the sex workers in the last two days have deposited more than Rs 50 lakh in their bank accounts in Usha Bank. Generally sex workers prefer to keep money in their homes but after demonetisation, there is a rush among them to deposit the money in the bank, Shantanu, a senior official of Usha Bank said.

In normal circumstances, Usha Bank carries out a business of around Rs 5 lakh per day. PTI
Mumbai, November 11

As millions queued up outside banks and at ATMs, which opened after two days on Friday, the RBI said enough cash is available for exchanging the scrapped Rs 500/1,000 notes and asked people to be patient.

There is enough cash available with banks and all arrangements have been made to reach the currency notes all over the country. Bank branches have already started exchanging notes since November 10, the RBI said in a statement.

It said that consequent to the withdrawal of Legal Tender Character of existing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bank notes, it has made arrangements to distribute the notes in new Rs 2,000 and other denominations across the country.

The central bank conceded however that it might take a while for banks to recalibrate ATMs and once that is done, members of public will be able to withdraw from ATMs up to a maximum of Rs 2,000 per card per day up to November 18.

After that, they will be able to withdraw up to Rs 4,000 per card a day.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Several ATMs have started functioning from Friday morning as the banks could complete recalibration of these machines to allow withdrawals up to Rs 2,000 to begin with.

There were huge queues outside the banks for the second consecutive day on Friday after the government scrapped Rs 500/1000 notes to combat black money.

Meanwhile, SBI chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya said her bank had collected Rs 53,000 crore (from November 10 till around 2 pm on November 11) after the demonetisation of higher value currency.

The SBI has also exchanged about Rs 1,500 crore worth of currency. PTI
Islamabad, November 11

Pakistan on Friday briefed Head of Missions of P5 countries on the alleged Indian aggression on the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, saying the use of heavy weaponry by the Indian Army threatened peace and stability and might lead to a strategic miscalculation.

Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry provided details to the ambassadors of China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, about unprovoked firing and ceasefire violations by the Indian occupation Forces in the past two months, the Foreign Office (FO) said.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Chaudhry expressed grave concern over the increased frequency and duration of indiscriminate firing from the Indian side, deliberate targeting of villages and civilian populated areas, resulting in the death of 26 civilians and injuring 107 others, said the FO.

The Foreign Secretary also alleged that the Indian side was resorting to such heavy weaponry use after a gap of 13 years.

Pakistan has been compelled to respond but with maximum restraint. The Armed Forces of Pakistan gave a befitting response, the FO quoted Chaudhry as saying.

He expressed apprehension that Indian action, which constituted a threat for the maintenance of peace and security, might lead to a strategic miscalculation.

He said India was also not cooperating with the United Nations Military Observers Group.

The Heads of Missions assured that they would convey Pakistans concern to their respective capitals, the FO statement said. PTI
Washington, November 11

Indian-American Kamala Harris, who scripted history by winning a Senate seat, has said she would open a battlefront against President-elect Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies, saying "we must reject racism and xenophobia in our politics".

"I recognise that Tuesday's election has made millions of people in this country feel powerless and afraid of what is to come," Harris, 52, said in an email sent to her supporters launching a signature campaign against Trump's policies on immigrants.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Harris, the first Indian-American elected to the Senate from California, described Trump's immigration policies like mass deportations and wall along the US-Mexico border as "absolutely unrealistic" at a news conference in California.

A two-term Attorney General of California, she would be sworn in as US Senator on January 3.

"Our diverse movement and the responsibility the people have granted me in this office come into play. We have the power to give a voice to the voiceless in Washington as we advance an agenda rooted in justice and equality, she said.

"It is no secret that there exists two divergent directions for our country to take on immigration reform and the treatment of our immigrant communities, both documented and undocumented.

"One side believes it is okay to demagogue immigrants, has proposed unrealistic plans to build a wall, and is promising to break up families by deporting millions of people. The other side believes in respect, justice, dignity and equality as part of an approach to bring millions of people out of the shadows," she said.

Harris said she want every immigrant family in this country as well as the new Trump administration to know exactly where she stands on immigration reform.

"We must reject racism and xenophobia in our politics as we work to protect our immigrants through real reforms. Right now is a time to bring people together. To unite our country around the common values and ideals that actually makes us great. Demagoguing or outright attacking communities of colour is not a real plan, it is a recipe for disaster.

"What we must do is rededicate ourselves to the fight for who we are and build a coalition that is ready to join that fight because we are stronger when we are inclusive," Harris, whom President Barack Obama had described as fearless, said.

Harris has already talked with her future Democratic colleagues about "banding together" to protect immigrants from what she described as the draconian immigration proposals of the President-elect, Los Angeles Times reported.

"I intend to fight for a state that has the largest number of immigrants, both documented and undocumented. We must bring them justice and dignity and fairness through comprehensive immigration reform. I intend to fight for 'Black Lives Matter' and to ensure truth, transparency and trust in our criminal justice system and to fight for a woman's access to healthcare and reproductive rights," she added. PTI
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, November 11

India and China are readying for a joint military exercise and have decided on a trajectory to increase military interactions and ensure stability along the disputed boundary between the two nations.

A two-week joint military exercise begins on November 16 to understand and practice methods to tackle the transnational terror. The exercise is being conducted under the Pune-based Southern Army Command.

This will be the sixth edition of the hand-in-hand exercise, first since December when Beijing passed a law authorising its military to venture overseas on counter-terror operations and even sent off 5,000 troops to tackle the Islamic State in Syria.

Both countries separately face transnational terror in their respective regions  India in Kashmir and China in Xinjiang (lying north of J&K in India). Both nations also have collective threat of their own youth joining the IS. The scope of the exercise will include evolution of joint drills for conduct of counter-terror operations and include a live drill to neutralise a terrorist.

Besides, a high-level India-China Defence and Security Consultation has been conducted in New Delhi earlier this week. Indian Defence Secretary G Mohan Kumar led the India delegations in talks with Sun Jianguo, deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of Chinas Central Military Commission and the Indian.

The Chinese side expressed its commitment to join hands with the Indian Army to maintain the exchanges on border defence, improve the mechanism of communication and strengthen border management and control so as to safeguard peace and stability in their border areas, he added. The two are working to introduce better measures to boost communication and coordination between border guarding forces.
Tokyo, November 11

Shedding its reservations, Japan on Friday made an exception to sign a landmark civil nuclear deal with India, opening the door for export of its atomic technology and reactors, after adding features like safety and security keeping in mind its sensitivities on the issue.

The nuclear deal, described as historic by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was part of the 10 agreements signed between the two countries in various areas after he held talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe on the second day of his three-day visit.

The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries and Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar said the nuclear deal was similar to the agreements signed with the US and other countries with added features on safety and security in keeping with Japans sensitivities.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

At the joint media interaction with Modi, Abe said he was delighted over the signing of the agreement on peaceful use of nuclear energy.

This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in Non-Proliferation regime even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT, he said.

It (the agreement) is in line with Japans ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons, said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II.

He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests.

Todays signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership, Modi said.

Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of climate change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan, he said and thanked Abe, Japanese government and Parliament for their support to this agreement.

The deal would allow Japan to export nuclear technology to India, making it the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo. It would also cement the bilateral economic and security ties as the two countries warm up to counter an assertive China.

There was political resistance in Japan--the only country to suffer atomic bombings during World War II-- against a nuclear deal with India, particularly after the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

Abe pushed for universalisation of the NPT, entry into force of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and start of negotiations at the earliest on Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT).

Later, a joint statement said, The two Prime Ministers welcomed the signing of the Agreement between the Government of Japan and the Government of the Republic of India for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy which reflects a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership in the cause of clean energy, economic development and a peaceful and secure world.

In his remarks, Prime Minister Modi said as democracies, the two countries support openness, transparency and the rule of law.

We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism, he said.

The two sides also called upon all countries to work towards eliminating terror safe havens, disrupting their networks and stopping cross-border movement of terrorists, in an apparent reference to Pakistan.

The two Prime Ministers condemned terrorism in strongest terms in all its forms and manifestations in the spirit of zero tolerance, the joint statement said.

The two leaders noted with great concern the growing menace of terrorism and violent extremism and its universal reach.

They called upon all countries to implement the UNSC Resolution 1267 and other relevant resolutions designating terrorist entities, it said, referring to Indias bid to get Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar designated as global a terrorist under this resolution.

China--a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council--had blocked Indias move to put a ban on Azhar under the Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the Council.

Regarding bilateral economic and trade ties, Modi said deeper economic engagement, growth of trade, manufacturing and investment ties, focus on clean energy, partnership to secure the citizens, and cooperation on infrastructure and skill development are among key priorities in the Indo-Japan relationship.

India and its economy are pursuing many transformations. Our aim is to become a major centre for manufacturing, investments and for the 21st century knowledge industries.

And, in this journey, we see Japan as a natural partner. We believe there is vast scope to combine our relative advantages, whether of capital, technology or human resources, to work for mutual benefit, he said in his joint interaction.

The Prime Minister said the strategic partnership between the two countries also brought peace, stability and balance to the region. It is alive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges in Asia-Pacific, he said.

The successful Malabar naval exercise had underscored the convergence in the two sides strategic interests in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific, Modi said.

On his part, Abe mentioned the high-speed train corridor between Mumbai and Ahmedabad that is being built with the help of Japan, saying the project symbolised a new dimension in the special relations.

Prime Minister Abe said the designing of the project would begin by the end of this year, construction would begin in 2018 and the high speed train would be in service from 2023.

He said Modi, who would travel by one such train to Kobe city from here on Saturday, would see for himself that it is the safest technology in the world.

The Japanese private sector also would be setting up an institute of manufacturing in India to train about 30,000 people in 10 years, particularly in rural areas, Abe said.

Abe said Japan would set up a tourism bureau in New Delhi to encourage people-to-people contacts. He said he wanted to work with Modi in liberalising the visa rules.

India-Japan relations have the greatest potential in the world. Strong India is in the best interest of Japan and strong Japan is in the best interest of India, Abe said.

Noting that he had met Modi for the third time in one year, Abe praised him, saying he had a global vision and was a decisive leader.

Later briefing reporters, Jaishankar said there was meeting of minds between the two sides on a large number of issues and a major focus area was to further ramp up economic cooperation.

He said Japanese investment in India had gone up and priority would be given to infrastructure projects, including the dedicated freight corridor and Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor.

Jaishankar said the full architecture to take forward the eco-cooperation was one of the major highlights of the talks.

Asked about the proposed purchase of 12 US-2 aircraft from Japan, the Foreign Secretary said the issue came up for some discussion and that India was still evaluating the requirement of the aircraft.

On flagship high-speed rail project, he said some important decisions were taken about it, adding that it was agreed that the general consultant would start work in December while construction work would start by end of 2018 and the network would be made operational by 2023. PTI
Mukesh Ranjan

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, November 11

In a bid to maximise political gain out of the Centres decision to demonetise old Rs500 and Rs1,000 currency notes, BJP president Amit Shah, flanked by party treasurer Piyush Goyal, at a press conference today attacked the Congress, BSP, SP and AAP saying the decision had rattled only those having black money and fake currencies and in the process were getting exposed.

He said the decision had made some political parties poor. I would like to ask the Congress, SP, BSP and AAP as to why they are so pained. I understand that dealers of black money, fake currency, hawala and drug are rattled, but what I cannot fathom is why Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati and Arvind Kejriwal are joining the list of such people, Shah asked.

On linking the move with the upcoming assembly elections in several states, particularly in crucial UP, the BJP president shot back saying: In India elections take place almost every year. So, it has nothing to do with the impending polls.

He, however, contended that politically the BJP would benefit not because of the decision, but by the reactions of opposition parties. Shah waited for three days after the decision was announced to hear the reactions from other parties and expectedly he targeted SP, BSP and Congress for they being the rivals in UP and AAP for it being one of the main challengers in Punjab. He incidentally skipped any mention of TMC chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who was the first leader to take on the government, in his opening remarks.

He said: I want to ask Mulayam, Mayawati and Kejriwal as to why they are pained? If politics become cleaner with a measure and black money is taken out of electoral politics, then why should it pain political parties? Challenging political parties to face the polls with the issue, he said: People will decide. He said: These political parties always questioned the Narendra Modi government as to what it was doing against black money and now it has given such a hard blow to black money and they are rattled.

Rejecting the charge of opposition parties that BJP leaders and those close to the party were informed in advance, Shah said only constitutional authorities and those related to the administrative measures were aware of the move.
BELGRADE, Mont., Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Xtant Medical Holdings, Inc. (NYSE MKT:XTNT), a leader in the development, manufacturing and marketing of orthopedic products for domestic and international markets, reminds rights holders that the subscription period for its previously announced rights offering expires at 5:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday, November 14, 2016. The rights offering is for up to 15,000,000 units, each consisting of one share of common stock and one warrant to purchase one share of common stock. The subscription price is $0.75 per unit, and there will be no further adjustments to the subscription price.



If exercising subscription rights through a broker, dealer, bank or other nominee, rights holders should promptly contact their nominee and submit subscription documents and payment for the units subscribed for in accordance with the instructions and within the time period provided by such nominee. The broker, dealer, bank or other nominee may establish a deadline before November 14, 2016 by which instructions to exercise subscription rights, along with the required subscription payment, must be received.

All holders of rights that wish to participate in the rights offering must deliver by mail, hand or overnight courier, a properly completed and signed subscription rights statement, together with payment of the subscription price for both basic subscription rights and any over subscription privilege election, to the Subscription Agent, to be received before 5:00 PM Eastern Time on November 14, 2016. The Subscription Agent is:

Corporate Stock Transfer, Inc.

3200 Cherry Creek Drive South, Suite 430

Denver, Colorado 80209

Under the proposed rights offering, the Company has distributed two non-transferable subscription rights for each share of common stock held, or underlying convertible notes held, on the record date. Each subscription right entitles the holder to purchase one unit at the subscription price of $0.75 per unit. Each unit consists of one share of common stock and one warrant, with each warrant exercisable to purchase one share of common stock at an exercise price of $0.90 for five years from the date of issuance. After the one-year anniversary of issuance, the Company may redeem the warrants for $0.01 per warrant if the volume weighted average price of the Companys common stock is greater than $2.25 for each of 10 consecutive trading days.

Holders who exercise their subscription rights in full will be entitled, if available, to subscribe for additional units that are not purchased by other shareholders or convertible note holders, on a pro rata basis and subject to ownership limitations.

Xtant Medical has engaged Maxim Group LLC as dealer-manager in the offering. The offering may only be made by means of a prospectus. Questions about the rights offering or requests for copies of the prospectus may be directed to:

Maxim Group LLC

405 Lexington Avenue

New York, NY 10174

Attention: Syndicate Department

Email: syndicate@maximgrp.com

Telephone: (212) 895-3745.

The Company's registration statement on Form S-1 was declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on October 31, 2016. The prospectus relating to and describing the terms of the rights offering has been filed with the SEC as a part of the registration statement and is available on the SEC's web site at http://www.sec.gov.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor will there be any sale of these securities in any state or other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

About Xtant Medical Holdings

Xtant Medical Holdings, Inc. (NYSE MKT:XTNT) develops, manufactures and markets class-leading regenerative medicine products and medical devices for domestic and international markets. Xtant products serve the specialized needs of orthopedic and neurological surgeons, including orthobiologics for the promotion of bone healing, implants and instrumentation for the treatment of spinal disease, tissue grafts for the treatment of orthopedic disorders, and biologics to promote healing following cranial, and foot and ankle surgeries. With core competencies in both biologic and non-biologic surgical technologies, Xtant can leverage its resources to successfully compete in global neurological and orthopedic surgery markets. For further information, please visit www.xtantmedical.com.

Important Cautions Regarding Forward-looking Statements

This press release contains certain disclosures that may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements include statements that are predictive in nature, that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, or that include words such as "continue," "efforts," "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "projects," "forecasts," "strategy," "will," "goal," "target," "prospects," "potential," "optimistic," "confident," "likely," "probable" or similar expressions or the negative thereof.

Statements of historical fact also may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. We caution that 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: our ability to integrate the acquisition of X-spine Systems, Inc. and any other business combinations or acquisitions successfully; our ability to remain listed on the NYSE MKT; our ability to obtain financing on reasonable terms; our ability to increase revenue; our ability to comply with the covenants in our credit facility; our ability to maintain sufficient liquidity to fund our operations; the ability of our sales force to achieve expected results; our ability to remain competitive; government regulations; our ability to innovate and develop new products; our ability to obtain donor cadavers for our products; our ability to engage and retain qualified technical personnel and members of our management team; the availability of our facilities; government and third-party coverage and reimbursement for our products; our ability to obtain regulatory approvals; our ability to successfully integrate recent and future business combinations or acquisitions; our ability to use our net operating loss carry-forwards to offset future taxable income; our ability to deduct all or a portion of the interest payments on the notes for U.S. federal income tax purposes; our ability to service our debt; product liability claims and other litigation to which we may be subjected; product recalls and defects; timing and results of clinical studies; our ability to obtain and protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights; infringement and ownership of intellectual property; our ability to remain accredited with the American Association of Tissue Banks; influence by our management; our ability to pay dividends; our ability to issue preferred stock; and other factors.

Additional risk factors are listed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q under the heading "Risk Factors." You should carefully consider the trends, risks and uncertainties described in this document, the Form 10-K and other reports filed with or furnished to the SEC before making any investment decision with respect to our securities. If any of these trends, risks or uncertainties actually occurs or continues, our business, financial condition or operating results could be materially adversely affected, the trading prices of our securities could decline, and you could lose all or part of your investment. The Company undertakes no obligation 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, except as required by law. All forward-looking statements attributable to us or persons acting on our behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement.
Thalassery/Mumbai, November 11

A 48-year-old man, who came to deposit Rs 5 lakh worth scrapped high denomination notes in a bank here, died after he fell down from the second floor of the building on Friday, police said.

Unni, a Kerala State Electricity Board employee, was filling the necessary forms to deposit the amount in the State Bank of Travancores branch, located on the first floor, when the mishap occurred, they said quoting preliminary information.

He had unsuccessfully tried to deposit the notes on Thursday and came to the bank again on Friday morning.

There was heavy rush of customers to deposit the demonetised Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes also on Friday.

Meanwhile, in Mumbai, a 73-year-old man, who was standing in a queue to exchange his old currency notes here, collapsed and died in suburban Mulund on Friday afternoon, police said.

Vishwanath Vartak, a senior citizen, was standing in a queue outside a branch of the State Bank of India in Navghar area of Mulund (East) to exchange his notes when he suddenly fell down at around 1.30 pm, they said. As he fell, some people, who were also in the queue, rushed him to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead before admission, police said, adding that the body had been sent for post-mortem.

Police also visited the spot where the elderly man collapsed.

According to initial reports, Vartak died of a heart attack, police said. PTI
Rajmeet Singh

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 10

Within hours of the Supreme Court announcing its verdict on the controversial SYL issue, 42 Congress MLAs resigned from the Punjab Assembly today while state party chief Capt Amarinder Singh quit his Lok Sabha seat.

Congress MLAs, led by Leader of the Opposition Charanjit Singh Channi, will submit their resignations to the Vidhan Sabha Speaker tomorrow and so will Independent MLA from Mukerian Rajesh Babbi.

However, Lok Sabha MPs Ravneet Singh Bittu and Chaudhary Santokh Singh and Rajya Sabha members Ambika Soni, Shamsher Singh Dullo and Partap Singh Bajwa have not quit.

I have resigned as MP (from Amritsar) as I am the PPCC chief. It is not necessary for other party MPs to follow suit. My resignation is a protest against the deprivation of the people of Punjab of the much-needed Sutlej waters. The apex courts decision is a bad day in the history of Punjab, he told mediapersons here. He challenged AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal to spell out his stand in light of the ruling.

The Congress will now go to the masses to expose the SAD-BJP government for failure to contest the states case effectively, he said, recalling that it was following an agreement between the late Haryana Chief Minister Devi Lal and Parkash Singh Badal in 1978 that the stone for the SYL canal was laid.

Alleging that the Akalis have let down the people on the critical issue, he claimed while his government tried to protect Punjabs interests through the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act 2004, the Akalis have exposed the people to unprecedented hardship owing to their failure to safeguard their interests in the court.

He cited evidence while accusing Badal of selling Punjabs interests. He was instrumental in acquiring land for the SYL canal in Punjab through a notification on February 20, 1978, and taking money from Haryana, weakening Punjabs stand on the dispute, he said.
Tribune News Service

Kapoori (patiala), November 11

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) today started a dharna in the districts Kapoori village against the Supreme Court verdict invalidating the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act. The party will start a relay fast tomorrow.

Sanjay Singh, incharge, political affairs, Punjab; Jarnail Singh, joint in-charge; Gurpreet Singh Waraich, Punjab convener; and other leaders, including HS Phoolka, Sukhpal Khaira and Kanwar Sandhu, reached the protest site.

Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had laid the foundation stone of the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal at Kapoori village on April 8, 1982.

The AAP leadership targeted both the SAD-BJP combine and the Congress for their hypocrisy. Sanjay Singh said Punjab Congress chief Capt Amarinder Singh was the biggest traitor of Punjab and his resignation from Lok Sabha was eyewash.

Capt Amarinder had welcomed a proposal for the SYL canal decades ago. He even accompanied Indira Gandhi when she laid the foundation stone. Now, he is raising a hue and cry about saving Punjab waters. If he is serious about Punjab, why didnt he raise his voice then? he added.

Jarnail Singh hit out at Capt Amarinder for resigning as MP. He should have fought for Punjab waters in Parliament as the final decision will be taken there, he said.

Gurpreet Waraich said, If AAP comes to power, it will fight a do-and-die battle for Punjab waters.

Jaitley meets Governor in Chandigarh

Chandigarh: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley paid an unannounced visit to the residence of Punjab Governor VP Badnore here on Friday. A Principal Secretary of the Punjab Government, requesting anonymity, said: There is speculation that Jaitley was sent by the Centre to sort out the SYL logjam between the neighbouring states. A senior BJP leader, however, said: He is here to attend a ceremony preceding the marriage of the grandson of Justice Kuldip Singh (retd). tns

Work out mutually acceptable pact: CPM

New Delhi: The CPM on Friday asked the Centre to work out a mutually acceptable and beneficial agreement with Punjab and Haryana on the SYL canal. The party politburo said, The Centre must step in immediately to avoid escalation of tension. PTI

Independent MLA Babbi quits too

Hoshiarpur: Backing PPCC chief Capt Amarinder Singhs stand on the SYL issue, Independent MLA from Mukerian Rajneesh Kumar Babbi on Friday handed over his resignation to the Vidhan Sabha Speaker. He said the SC verdict showed that the SAD-BJP government had failed to protect the rights of the people of Punjab. Babbi is the son of former Finance Minister Dr Kewal Krishan. OC

Panel to finalise Cong candidates by mid-Dec

Jaipur: The chairman of the Congress screening committee, Ashok Gehlot, said on Friday that the party candidates for the Punjab Assembly poll would most probably be finalised by the middle of next month. Winnability will be the main criterion while shortlisting the candidates, Gehlot said. OC
Chandigarh, November 11

Stepping up pressure on the SYL canal issue ahead of the Assembly elections, all 42 Congress MLAs today submitted their resignation letters to the Speaker. A Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting was held thereafter where it was decided to launch a drive against the Badal government for its failure to protect Punjabs rights.

Exhibiting unity, the MLAs, led by PPCC president Capt Amarinder Singh and CLP leader Charanjit Singh Channi, decided to burn the CMs effigies in all 117 Assembly constituencies tomorrow.

Edit: Control hotheads

Ambika Soni, Partap Singh Bajwa and Shamsher Singh Dullo, all MPs, were at the meeting too. A state-level rally will be held on November 13 at Abohars Gunjal village located in the area most affected by the SYL decision, Sunil Jakhar, PPCC vice-president, said. Capt Amarinder, attacking the Centre, said despite the CM and the Punjab BJP claims that not a drop of water would be allowed to flow into the SYL, Badals daughter-in-law Harsimrat Kaur and other MPs have not resigned, exposing doublespeak.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

He said the party would go to the people, imploring them to ensure a clear win for the Congress in the elections so it was able to pass the legislation to give them justice.  TNS

Akalis to move motion in LS against SC verdict

Chandigarh: The Shiromani Akali Dal will move an adjournment motion in the Lok Sabha next week for a debate on whether the judiciary is above the Constitution or not. SADs Prem Singh Chandumajra said the Supreme Courts ruling invalidating the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act 2004 was unconstitutional, adding that it could not take away the states rights over riverwaters. Meanwhile, Punjab has constituted a three-member legal team to formulate opinion on the possible options, including scrapping all water-sharing pacts. TNS
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 11

Suspended AAP MP Dr Dharamvira Gandhi said here today that he was ready to resign as a member of the Lok Sabha on the riverwaters issue. But before taking this step, I will ask all other MPs from Punjab to do the same, he said.

He added that if the MPs did not agree to quit, he would request them to stall the functioning of Parliament till justice was done to the state.

Punjab has suffered a lot over the past several decades. It is the duty of the elected representatives from the state to save it from more suffering, he said.

Dr Gandhi said Punjab did not have a drop of surplus water, so it was the need of the hour to revisit all old agreements on the riverwaters.

Meanwhile, the Dr Gandhi-led Punjab Front and the CPI (Marxist-Leninist Liberation) staged a protest here today against the SYL canal. Leaders of the Democratic Swaraj Party, Akhand Akali Dal and the Bahujan Sangharsh Dal were among those who took part.

Manjit Singh and Harbans Singh, president and general secretary of the Democratic Swaraj Party, respectively, Sukhdev Singh Bhaur of the Akhand Akali Dal, Resham Singh of the Bahujan Sangharsh Dal and Sukhdarshan Natt of the CPI (ML Liberation) also addressed the gathering.
Ruchika M Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 11

A day after the Supreme Court verdict, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today drafted a Bill aimed at setting set aside all water-sharing pacts and sought an audience with the President. The party is trying to get an appointment before the special session of the Vidhan Sabha on November 16.

Meanwhile, the SAD has decided not to launch a stir right away. A meeting chaired by SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal in Ludhiana late in the evening decided not to take the SYL issue to the people as of now.

In his letter to the President, Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal wrote: The issue of Punjabs legitimate and constitutional right over its riverwaters is a question of life and death for each and every Punjabi today and for all times to come. It is neither a political nor a mere issue but one that is deeply human, even though in purely legal terms, the people of Punjab demand nothing that is not constitutionally theirs.

The letter goes on to say though the Punjab Government respected the honorable court, it respected the Constitution even more, which clearly forbids the Government of India from arrogating to itself the right to adjudicate on distribution of riverwaters among states. Grave injustice has been done to Punjab by the Government of India 

The Akali MPs have been asked to raise the issue in Parliament during the winter session. Party spokesperson PS Chandumajra said the SAD would move an adjournment motion in the Lok Sabha to initiate a debate on whether the judiciary was above the Constitution. He said the move to return farmers their land acquired for the SYL canal would be initiated soon.

Even as the Deputy CM accused the Congress of running away by resigning at this time of crisis, a senior Akali leader said being in majority, the government did not need the Opposition to either pass a Bill or a resolution during the November 16 House session.

With the Congress and AAP raising the pitch and fearing a law and order situation, the government has requested for additional security. At least 10 companies of central forces were requisitioned till November 12. We have now asked the Centre to extend their stay till November 19, said an officer.
Saurabh Malik

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 11

The Punjab and Haryana High Court today extended by a week the deadline for a probe into the allegedly illegal detention of 46 persons in connection with the Sarbat Khalsa.

As a habeas corpus petition filed by an advocate for the release of the alleged detainees came up for resumed hearing today, Punjab Additional Advocate General Mehardeep Singh told the Bench of Justice Jitendra Chauhan that the investigating officers concerned were present, but the process to gather information for establishing the identity of the alleged detainees was in progress. Justice Chauhan posted the matter for November 18 for further hearing.

Justice Chauhan had yesterday fixed a 24-hour deadline for the state to make a statement before the court after holding the inquiry. The developments took place on the petition filed by Simranjit Singh against Punjab and other respondents.

His counsel told the court that the petitioner had received a communication on the illegal detention from Baljit Singh Daduwal, an organiser of the Sarbat Khalsa.

In his petition, Simranjit Singh alleged that the Punjab Police, at the instance of Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, conducted illegal raids on the houses of the organisers and supporters of the congregation.

He alleged that the detainees were arrested from their houses on November 6, but the police did not inform them about the grounds of arrest. So, it violated the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court in the case of DD Basu versus West Bengal.

Simranjit Singh added that the detainees were not even allowed to call their counsel and family. The proceedings against them were conducted in a clandestine manner to settle a political score, he said.

He added that the respondent authorities were not ready to accept the bail bonds furnished by the detainees or produce them before the magistrate concerned.
Sarbjit Dhaliwal

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 11

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) will move an adjournment motion in the Lok Sabha next week to initiate a debate on whether the judiciary is above the Constitution or not.

We will urge the House to decide once and for all whether the judiciary is above the Constitution and that the legislature is subordinate to it, SAD spokesman Prem Singh Chandumajra said here today.

Speaking to mediapersons, he said the Supreme Courts judgment invalidating the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004, was unconstitutional, adding that the court could not take away the states rights over its riverwaters.

The way the Congress government in Punjab was arm-twisted to sign the water-sharing agreement with Haryana in 1981 by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was not only illegal but also a travesty of justice, the Akali MP said.

By moving the motion, the SAD MPs will urge the Lok Sabha to decide whether the judiciary can undo an Act enacted by the legislature on a subject within its purview, said Chandumajra.

He said a delegation of Akali leaders led by Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal would submit a memorandum to the President  probably next week  to take note of the constitutional crisis.

The exercise to return to the farmers concerned the land acquired for the SYL canal will start soon, he said. He asked the Congress MLAs not to skip the emergency session of the Assembly scheduled for November 16 to pass a new Bill on the riverwaters.

The Congress MLAs will gain nothing by quitting the Assembly. They are running away from their responsibility to protect Punjabs interests, said Chandumajra. He added that the new Act would be a bold step to safeguard the states major interests, including its rights over riverwaters.

Why didnt Capt quit in 1982, asks SAD

Chandigarh: The SAD on Friday asked PPCC chief Capt Amarinder Singh why he did not resign as an MP when the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi laid the foundation stone of the SYL canal in 1982. SAD spokesman Dr Daljit Singh Cheema accused the Congress of adopting double standards. At the time of the start of the excavation work, Amarinder stood with Indira Gandhi like a rock. Had he resigned at that time, the situation would not have reached this stage, Cheema added. He alleged that senior Congress leaders such as Amarinder and the then Chief Minister Darbara Singh had betrayed the people of the state for vested interests. TNS

No Punjab water to other states: Sukhbir

Ludhiana: Deputy CM Sukhbir Singh Badal reiterated on Friday that there was no question of giving water of Punjab to any state. Water is our life and we will not let our life be taken away, no matter what, he said. He said this during a function organised to launch the Ujjwala Scheme on Friday. On being asked if reports of stoppage of bus service between Punjab and Haryana were true, he said no such step had been taken by the Punjab government. There is no such thing. Is there any enmity? We all are brothers, he said. TNS
R Sedhuraman

Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, November 10

In a blow to Punjab, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that Punjab was bound to share the Ravi-Beas waters with Haryana and other states and comply with its two judgments for completion of the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal.

A five-member Constitution Bench, headed by Justice Anil R Dave, made the clarification while invalidating the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act 2004 by which the state had terminated its pacts with Haryana, Himachal, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi for sharing the waters of the two rivers.

Edit: Water Act terminated

The apex court ruled that the 2004 Act was in violation of the constitutional provisions, the Inter-State Water Disputes Act 1956 and the Punjab Reorganisation Act 1966 and as such did not discharge the state from its obligations under the agreement of December 31, 1981, and other pacts pertaining to sharing of Ravi-Beas waters and under the two SC judgments in 2002 and 2004 on the construction of the SYL canal.

Sent to the apex court by the then Manmohan Singh government through President APJ Abdul Kalam after the Punjab Assembly passed the law on July 12, 2004, the reference contained four questions that required SCs answers.

The President had sought the apex courts opinion on whether the Act was in consonance with constitutional provisions, the reorganisation Act, the inter-state pacts on Ravi-Beas waters and the two SC judgments. All the questions referred to this court are answered in the negative, the SC said. The others on the Bench were Justices PC Ghose, SK Singh, AK Goel and Amitava Roy.

The Punjab Act cannot be considered to be legal and valid and the State of Punjab cannot absolve itself from its duties/liabilities arising from the December 31, 1981, agreement. The state was not justified in enacting the law citing the need to protect the interests of its residents, the Bench said.

It, however, rejected Haryanas oral plea for extending the status quo order passed on March 17, 2016, directing Punjab not to notify the SYL Canal Land (Transfer of Proprietary

Rights) Bill 2016 meant for returning about 4,000 acres of land acquired for construction of part of the SYL canal falling within the state.

Haryana was free to take appropriate steps, including approaching the SC, the Bench told the states senior counsel Shyam Divan. In its opinion on the Presidential reference, the Bench, however, held that the proposed law was in clear violation of the 1981 agreement.

The SC had passed the status quo order on Haryanas application filed to be heard as part of the Presidential reference. Since the reference stood answered, no further order could be passed on the plea for extending the status quo for a few days as pleaded by Haryana, the Bench explained.

1981 pact entitlement

Punjab 4.22 million acre ft (MAF)

Haryana 3.50 MAF

Rajasthan 8.60 MAF

Delhi 0.20 MAF

J&K 0.65 MAF
Ruchika M Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 10

In light of the adverse ruling of the Supreme Court on the Ravi-Beas waters issue, the SAD-BJP government today decided to convene a special one-day session of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha on November 16.

Punjab da paani nahin jayega, nahin jayega, nahin jayega! thundered Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal after an emergency meeting of the Cabinet.

With a maha rally planned at Moga on December 8 to mobilise people on the issue, the Council of Ministers said as true custodians of the rights of Punjab, we will fight it out rather than run away like the Congress.

Sources said the government was legally examining if a new Bill can be brought to scrap all water-sharing agreements, including the already flowing share of 6 MAF (including Sutlej) to Haryana, 10.5 MAF to Rajasthan, 0.20 MAF to Delhi and 0.69 MAF to J&K.

The Punjab Termination of Agreements Act 2004 had protected the already flowing river water share to all these states, under section 5.

Advocate General Ashok Aggarwal has been asked to give an opinion on the feasibility of the proposed legislation by Tuesday, when theCabinet meets again a day before the special session.

The strong posturing by the Akalis was matched by the BJP ministers. Since the BJP is in power in Haryana, Industry Minister MM Mittal said the party had given a free hand to the state units to defend the rights of the state they represented.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn., Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Founded in 2014, Big Kahuna Wings Bar & Grill is known for its award-winning, dry-rub wings, made fresh-to-order and its tasty BKW Seasonings and dipping sauces is a family-owned restaurant concept. Big Kahuna Wings joins the Restaurant Finance and Development Conference November 14-16 in Las Vegas, Nevada to announce their brand to restaurant investors. The conference gives us the ability to showcase Big Kahuna Wings to those restaurant investors who are looking to diversify their portfolios with new and innovative brands like BKW where we have changed the way people view wings, offers Matt Beeler, founder of the Big Kahuna Wings.



Franchise Innovation Group (formerly 1st Choice Franchise Concepts), a recognized leader in facilitating entrepreneurs in building their empires; and realizing their dreams developed the Big Kahuna Wings franchise system. Together the two companies created a seven volume operations manual complete with on the job training and education for employees, Franchise Agreements, and a robust franchisee training and support program.

Everything is in place and we are ready to develop and open new locations with incentives for early adopters of the Big Kahuna Wings brand, states Roger Flynn, VP of Franchise Development for Franchise Innovation Group. As a client of the Franchise Innovation Group, Big Kahuna Wings franchisees have access to site selection experts, architects, marketing professionals and commercial interior designers who are contracted to assist new franchisees in building, opening and supporting Big Kahuna Wings locations in exclusive territories. When we build franchise systems, we are actually creating a business in a box with experts in place as your support team, explains John Batcheller, President and CEO of Franchise Innovation Group.

To learn more about Franchise Innovation Group or Big Kahuna Wings franchising please visit BeTheBigKahuna.com, FranchiseInnovationGroup.com or call Roger Flynn at 865-320-0083.
Rajmeet Singh

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 11

The Congress in Punjab on Friday demanded setting up of another tribunal to assess the amount of water the state currently has access to and announced that it would hold state-wide agitations beginning from Abohar from Sunday to protest against the government's "failure in protecting people's interests" on the SYL issue.

This was decided at a meeting of Congress MLAs with state chief Capt Amarinder Singh before tendering their resignations over the SYL issue at the Punjab Vidhan Sabha on Friday.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The 42 MLAs, including leader of Opposition Charanjit Singh Channi, Sunil Jakhar, Sukhjinder Randhawa and Balbir Singh Sidhu, went to the Assembly and submitted their resignations to Assembly Secretary Shashi Lakhanpal Mishra as Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal was not present.

Senior Congress leaders Amarinder Singh, Partap Singh Bajwa and Ambika Soni accompanied the MLAs.

Launching a fresh attack on Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, Amarinder alleged that Badal had "failed to protect the interests" of people and announced that his party would take out a rally on the issue on Sunday.

He said, "I am not in Parliament and our MLAs are not in Vidhan Sabha. We will go to the people. We are going to burn the effigies of the government for not protecting Punjab's rights."

Hitting out at Badal, the state Congress chief asked, "Why is Badal not protecting Punjab's interests? Is it because he has made a lot of money and doesn't care what happens in his area?"

He said Harsimrat Kaur Badal should also resign on moral grounds as the BJP government at the Centre had failed to act in the interests of Punjab. He alleged that the Akalis had double standards.

In a blow to Punjab, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that Punjab was bound to share the Ravi-Beas waters with Haryana and other states and comply with its two judgments for completion of the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal.

The case involves sharing of the Ravi-Beas river waters primarily between Punjab and Haryana, besides Rajasthan, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh.

Haryana Roadways suspends bus service to Punjab

Meanwhile, fearing tension, Haryana Roadways has suspended bus services to Punjab. The bus service to Punjab has been suspended on preventive grounds, said the Kurukshetra DC.

Chain hunger strike by AAP

The AAP has decided to start a chain hunger strike over the SYL issue at Kapoori from Saturday.

Addressing a gathering at Kapoori village, AAP leader Jarnail Singh accused Badal of being hand-in-glove with the Haryana government over the issue.

He alleged that former CM Amarinder Singh was the biggest traitor, and termed his resignation as mere eyewash.

Other AAP leaders present were Sanjay Singh, Gurpreet Singh Ghuggi, HS Phoolka, Kanwar Sandhu and Sukhpal Khaira.

Nagra stops train

After submitting his resignation along with other Congress legislators in the Vidhan Sabha, Fatehgarh Sahib Congress MLA Kuljit Singh Nagra on Friday stopped the Jansewa Express (Amritsar-Saharsa) train on Sirhind railway track against the SYL verdict.

The train was halted for half an hour by more than 100 protesters causing inconvenience to commuters. The Sub-Divisional Magistrate, Punjab Police, GRP and RPF personnel tried to remove the protesters but in vain. Finally, on the intervention of SSP Harcharan Singh Bhullar, the MLA and other protesters were removed from the track, allowing the train to move on its onward journey.
As his real estate partner Donald Trump won US presidential election earlier this week, the Lodha Group which is building the posh Trump Tower in the heart of central Mumbai, is confident of working together with the president-elect.

Congratulating Trump on his surprise victory in the just concluded US national hustings, Abhishek Lodha, managing director of Lodha Group, said, the Trump Organisation is our valued partner and we look forward to continue working together to create the Trump Tower Mumbai as planned. He also congratulated him. Announced early August 2014, the 75-storey, 800-feet Trump Tower, sprawling on a 17.5-acre plot, is coming up at The Park in Worli, which features a gleaming golden edifice and curtain-wall golden facade.

It has been my desire for many years to be involved in a great project in Mumbai, and it is my honour to bring the Trump lifestyles to the citizens of this truly global metropolis with the launch of Trump Tower Mumbai. We are thrilled to be working with the Lodha Group, a truly fantastic team of professionals, Trump, chairman and president of The Trump Organization had said on August 12, 2014.

That time the now-president-elect had told PTI that the realty prices in Mumbai were abysmally low yet he was very bullish on the country and was keen to pump in more money into the luxury residential and hospitality spaces.

The Mumbai luxury realty market is the cheapest in the world. For ages Mumbai has been the hottest reality market in the country as well as one the costliest across the world.

I will invest a substantial amount in the Trump Tower Mumbai, in my individual capacity, Trump had told PTI without quantifying the amount to be invested.

He already has a partnership in Pune and had said his next destination could be Delhi for a high-end luxury residential property.

The Lodhas pact with the Trump Organisation for The Park, is through a licensing agreement which also involves design. Under the licensing agreement with Trumps, the Lodhas would pay Trump a fee running into several crores of rupees for the license to use its brand name for the project.

Earlier, the Trump Organisation had tied up with Pune-based Panchashil Realty for a similar property in 2012 but smaller in size. This 22-storey residential twin-tower project would have 44 luxury single-floor condominiums.

The Trump Tower Mumbai has around 300 super luxury units in the 3,4 and 5-bedroom configuration, priced in the range of Rs 9 crore to Rs 18 crore. The Park was initially scheduled to be commissioned by 2018.

In 2010, Trump had entered into a similar pact with the city-based Rohan Lifescape for a 65-storey building near Nariman Point, which was later terminated. The project had to be scrapped due to delays in project approvals after stricter coastal zone regulation norms came into effect.

The multi-billion-dollar Trump Organisation owns and manages marquee hotels, resorts, casinos and luxe apartments in New York, Washington DC, Miami, Toronto, Vancouver, Dubai, Rio de Janerio and Panama, among others.  PTI
It is interesting to know what educated Hindu ladies have to say about certain aspects of Hindu Social Reform. An elderly lady lecturing at the Arya Samaj Anniversary at Saharanpur the other day, is reported to have advocated certain liberties for women which the men themselves seem reluctant to allow. An account furnished by a correspondent whose letter we publish elsewhere says that the lady, who was evidently inspired by the purer social customs of ancient Hindus, said that for the health of the women it was good they should go out for a walk in the open. She denounced the custom of veiling by women from the health point of view and said that it was not proper that men should not take their female relatives in attending public meetings, as the presence of women tended to chasten special conduct.
Tribune News Service

Dehradun, November 11

The ATMs of nationalised and private banks remained shut today, causing inconvenience to local residents of the city. Long queues were witnessed outside banks on the second consecutive day as people in large numbers visited to replace old currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 with new ones. While a few ATM kiosks were opened in the city, many did not have new notes and the people queueing up could only deposit old notes.

The dysfunctional ATMs became a cause of inconvenience rather than a facility in the city. Residents were forced to visit banks to withdraw cash so that they could meet their daily needs.

Sources said banks did not have new currency notes, which was the main reason behind the closure of ATMs in the city.

The government should increase daily withdrawal limit from Rs 2,000 to minimum Rs 5,000, said TS Chauhan, a resident.

I have been standing in the queue since morning to withdraw cash from my bank but it is taking too much time, said Usha Bisht, another local resident.

Meanwhile, Vivek Chandra Jaiswal, Chief Manager (General Banking) of State Bank of India (SBI), said cash trays of ATMs were filled frequently to avoid inconvenience to residents of the city.
Tribune News Service

Dehradun, November 11

Rashmi Shreshtha, senior scientist of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), today said genuine participation of local people in planning hydropower projects, sharing of project benefits, and grievance redressal mechanisms can be the keys to expediting hydropower development in Uttarakhand.

She addressed a workshop titled hydropower irrigation nexus in upper Ganga headwaters organised jointly by University of Arizona, USA, Peoples Science Institute, Dehradun, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi, and ICIMOD. Shreshtha asserted that people were suspicious of hydropower projects and that was the reason even hydropower developers were also a frustrated lot.

University of Arizona Professor Dr Chris Scott presented an overview of the research project. He said social and environmental impacts from hydropower projects were often overlooked. They have disproportionately greater impact on the marginalised populations, which is largely overlooked, he said.

Peoples Science Institutes Director Dr Debashish Sen presented field data to show that the impact of the projects in the Bhilangana basin was greater on the slopes where tunnels or channels had been constructed to divert water from the river to the power house. These effects include loss of irrigated land, decrease in agricultural productivity, drying of springs and increased hardships for women who gather resources for daily sustenance for their families and cattle, Sen pointed out.

Uttarkhand Renewable Energy Development Agencys chief project officer AK Tyagi spoke about UREDAs electrification of remote rural areas using mini and micro hydropower projects. He emphasised the need for specific guidelines for environmental and social impact assessment of small hydropower projects.

Former Uttarakhand Chief Secretary SK Das called for aggressive social mobilisation so that developers, government and the community can work together for hydropower development.

Manoj Kesharwani from Uttarakhand Jal Vidhyut Nigam Limited said the new state policy in 2015 for hydropower development in the state had increased the Local Area Development Fund from one per cent of the approved project cost to three per cent.

Dr Piyoosh Rautela from Disaster Mitigation and Management Centre, Dr Prakash Nautiyal from HNB Garhwal University and Dr Malavika Chauhan of Himmothan Society participated in the workshop.
Mosul, November 11

Elite Iraqi troops battled the Islamic State group in the streets of Mosul today as US-backed forces in Syria pressed an advance on jihadist bastion Raqa after a sandstorm eased.

The high winds in the desert which separates the Syrian Kurdish-Arab militia alliance from the jihadists stronghold in the Euphrates Valley had slowed their advance yesterday as visibility levels plummeted.

Iraqi forces too had regrouped after meeting stronger than expected resistance from IS fighters on the east bank of the Tigris River which runs through Mosul after thrusting into the built-up area last week.

The jihadists had been expected to pull back to the west bank, a stronghold of Sunni Arab insurgency even before IS swept through the minority communitys heartland north and west of Baghdad in mid-2014.

Commanders of Iraqs elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) said that troops were advancing on two eastern neighbourhoods of the city.

The battle to retake Mosul is now in its fourth week, and while troops have entered the built-up area, there are weeks, if not months, of fighting still to go. Our forces have begun the attack on Arbajiyah. The clashes are ongoing, Staff Lieutenant Colonel Muntadhar Salem said, referring to an area in the east of the city.  AFP
Mazar-i-sharif/Berlin, Nov 11

Taliban militants stormed the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, ramming its outer wall with a truck bomb before battling security forces in a late-night attack that killed at least six persons and injured more than 120, officials said.

The explosion, triggered by a suicide bomber, caused extensive damage to the building and shattered windows as far as 5 km away, a NATO spokesman said.

No consular staff were among the victims, but Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germany would review its lead role in the international mission in northern Afghanistan, where violence has escalated sharply during 2016.

The Taliban said the bombing, which tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars, was a revenge attack for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead. Heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there, the Islamist militant movements spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone. The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate, local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat said.

The NATO spokesman said at least one vehicle packed with explosives was rammed into the high outer wall surrounding the consulate, but authorities were investigating if a second car had been involved. The extent of damage to the city is huge, said Abdul Razaq Qaderi, deputy police chief of Balkh province.  Agencies
Washington/New York, November 10

Demonstrators took to the streets across the country for a second day on Thursday to protest Donald Trump's presidential election victory, voicing fears that the real estate mogul's political triumph would deal a blow to civil rights.

On the East Coast, protests took place in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, while on the West Coast demonstrators rallied in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon.

The protests were for the most part peaceful and orderly, though there were scattered acts of civil disobedience.

Dozens in Minneapolis marched onto Interstate 94, blocking traffic in both directions for at least an hour, as police stood by. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles freeway before police there cleared them off.

Baltimore police reported some 600 people marched through the downtown Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street. Two people were arrested, police said.

In Denver, a crowd estimated by local media to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through downtown in one of the largest of Thursday's events. Hundreds paraded through Dallas.

Thursday's gatherings were generally smaller in scale and less intense than Wednesday's, while teenagers and young adults again dominated the racially mixed crowds.

Police erected special security barricades around two Trump marquee properties that have become focal points of the protests - the president-elect's newly opened Pennsylvania Avenue hotel in Washington and the high-rise Trump Tower where he lives in Manhattan.

In the nation's capital, about 100 protesters marched from the White House, where Trump had his first transition meeting with President Barack Obama on Thursday, to the Trump International Hotel blocks away.

At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many of them chanting "No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!" and carrying signs with such slogans as "Impeach Trump" and "Not my president."

"I can't support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It's heart-breaking," said Joe Daniels, 25, of suburban Alexandria, Virginia.

'GIVE TRUMP A CHANCE'

Off to the side stood two Trump supporters carrying signs that read: "All We are Saying is Give Trump a Chance" - an apparent play on lyrics from the John Lennon song "Give Peace a Chance".

Trump's critics have expressed concern that his often-inflammatory campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, women and others - combined with support he has drawn from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists - could spark a wave of intolerance against various minorities.

Anti-Trump rallies were held in more than a dozen major U.S.

cities on Wednesday, with thousands turning out at the biggest gatherings - in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles and Oakland, California. In Oakland, unruly protesters smashed windows, set fires and clashed with riot police.

A Trump campaign representative did not respond to requests for comment on the protests. Taking a far more conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech early Wednesday than he had at many of his campaign events, Trump vowed to be a president for all Americans.

Earlier this month, his campaign rejected a Klan newspaper endorsement, saying Trump "denounces hate in any form." Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a high-profile Trump supporter, called the demonstrators "a bunch of spoiled cry-babies," in an interview with Fox News.

Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer urged the protesters to give Trump a chance once he is sworn into office in January.

"I hope that people get it out of their systems ... but then they give this man that was just elected very historically and his new vice president an opportunity to govern," Spicer said in an interview on MSNBC.

In San Francisco, more than 1,000 high school students walked out of classes Thursday morning and marched through the city's financial district carrying rainbow flags representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, Mexican flags and signs decrying Trump.

Civil rights groups and police reported an uptick in attacks on members of minority groups, in some cases carried out by people claiming to support Trump. There were also reports of Trump opponents lashing out violently against people carrying signs indicating support for Trump.

More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend.

Reuters
Washington, November 11

A Trump administration will execute a 10-point plan to restore the integrity of the US immigration system, including building a wall along the border with Mexico, suspension of visas from certain countries and reforming the legal immigration system, the president-elects transition team said today.

The new administration under Donald Trump will focus on radical ideologies, nuclear weapons and cyber-attacks as three areas of threat in the national defence and security domain, the transition team said.

The team listed out what it called the 10-point plan for immigration reform though not much details of such a policy framework were immediately available. It broadly indicates the policies articulated by Trump during his election campaigning, but the list gives a maturity in the policy formation and not simply rhetoric. As per the Trump transition, the list includes building a wall on the southern border, end catch-and-release, zero tolerance for criminal aliens, block funding for sanctuary cities, and cancel unconstitutional executive orders and enforce all immigration laws.

It also includes suspending the issuance of visas to any place where adequate screening cannot occur. This policy appears to have evolved from Trumps election time statements related to banning entry of Muslims from entering the country.

The policy, among other things, also calls to ensure that other countries take their people back when the US deports them.

This year, India has taken back at least three charter planes full of people who came to the US illegally or were asked to be deported.

Among other policies include completing the biometric entry-exit visa tracking system and turning off the jobs and benefits magnet.

The Trump Transition has also talked about reforming the legal immigration system, which among other things includes the much sought-after H-1B visas.

Reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers, it said, without giving any further details.

While there is no mention of H-1B visas, a position paper issued by the Trump Campaign during the primaries was critical of this system and had called for increasing the minimum wage of H-1B visas to $100,000. This was described as a deal killer by immigration experts and Indian companies.

Trumps transition team in its brief position paper also listed radical ideologies, nuclear weapons and cyber-attacks as three areas of threat in the national defence and security domain.  PTI

Trump shifts tone in overnight tweets

US President-elect Donald Trump on Friday praised demonstrators for being passionate about their country, just hours after he accused them of being professional protesters incited by the media.

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud! Trump tweeted early on Friday.

On Thursday night, the president-elect had posted: Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

Big decisions coming soon: Trump

US President-elect Donald Trump said he would use the Veterans Day holiday to focus on the imposing task of forming a new administration, saying he will soon be making very important decisions about who will help him govern

Trump has about 70 days to put together a 15-member cabinet, and the names of several of his close advisors have been mentioned as options to fill key posts

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is heading the transition team, and he is believed to be in the running for attorney general, along with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani

Calexit? Californians push for breakaway

After Brexit, could there be a Calexit? For liberal Californians incensed by Donald Trumps election to the presidency, secession from the US is the only way forward. The idea is appealing for many who are disenchanted with the shock outcome of the vote. The hashtag #Calexit also began trending on social media with many Twitter users pairing it with #notmypresident. I cannot identify with bigotry, sexism, xenophobia, one Twitter user wrote. Im no longer American, I am Californian.

Kamala Harris vows to defy President-elect

Indian-American Kamala Harris, who scripted history by winning a Senate seat, has said she would open a battlefront against President-elect Donald Trumps anti-immigration policies, saying, We must reject racism and xenophobia in our politics.

I recognise that Tuesdays election has made millions of people in this country feel powerless and afraid of what is to come, Harris, 52, said in an email sent to her supporters launching a signature campaign against Trumps policies on immigrants. She described his policies like mass deportations and wall along the US-Mexico border as absolutely unrealistic

"We must reject racism and xenophobia in our politics as we work to protect our immigrants through real reforms. Right now is a time to bring people together. To unite our country around the common values and ideals that actually make us great. Attacking communities of colour is not a real plan, it is a recipe for disaster"  Kamala Harris
New York, November 11

Donald Trump blasted the media in his most aggressive tweet yet since he was elected the US President, alleging that the people protesting his victory were "incited by the media", "Just had a very open and successful presidential election," he tweeted late Thursday.

"Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in major cities across the US since Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night, with the slogan "Not my President", Politico reported.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Earlier Thursday, Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway called on Clinton and President Barack Obama to speak out against some protesters' calls for violence.

"Not cool. @POTUS or Hillary should address," she tweeted, linking to a story headlined "People Have to Die': Anti-Trump Protester Calls For Violence on CNN." In a subsequent interview with Fox News , Conway said demonstrators should "take their cues" from Obama and former President Bill Clinton, who she said had a "warm conversation" with Trump on Thursday.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

As for Trump, she said, "I know he's fully capable of being the president of all Americans and he's promised to do that." She added: "But I would say to these protesters -- who are burning his image, and who have all nasty signs, 'not my president' -- can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had been elected, which I imagine they were all expecting, and the Trump protesters were saying 'not my president' about President Obama? That's all you would hear." Conway also said people should have some "self-reflection" and realise that even if Trump is willing to work with people who don't agree with him, he will "be a tough leader".

"He got elected on certain issues and you can expect him to tackle that very quickly in his administration," Conway said.

On social media, some liberals have used the hashtag #NotMyPresident to express their rejection of Trump's victory, Politico said.

Since Tuesday, thousands of demonstrators, including immigration rights and environmental activists, have protested in cities like Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in front of the Trump International Hotel.

Although the demonstrations have mostly been peaceful, some protesters burned flags and effigies of Trump, and at least 124 people were arrested, charged with vandalism and assault on officers.

IANS
LOS ANGELES and CARY, N.C., Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kay Properties and Investments has successfully completed 100% of the $8,500,000 - 506c equity raise for the Shannon Oaks DST property located in Cary, N.C.



A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/1dea71c9-16b8-4a38-8d06-1b066f205b2d

Shannon Oaks is a 56,571 sq. ft. two-story class A office building well located in Cary, N.C.

The Shannon Oaks DST was structured as an All-Cash/Debt-Free DST in an effort to potentially protect investors from lender foreclosure, refinancing risk, 1031 debt replacement risk and other potential risks found in leveraged properties.

The property was exclusively available to clients of Kay Properties and Investments, LLC seeking to complete a 1031 exchange as well as make a direct cash investment.

Dwight Kay, the founder and CEO of Kay Properties and Investments commented, We believe Cary to be an ideal market to invest in due to its location just minutes from downtown Raleigh, the Research Triangle Park (RTP) and RDU International Airport.

Mr. Kay continued, With the overall vacancy rate for office product in Cary, N.C. at a low 6.4% as of 4th quarter 2015, we are extremely comfortable with owning an all-cash/debt-free DST property in this dynamic market for the long term.

Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All real estate and DST properties contain various risks, including but not limited to, potential loss of principal invested, that cash flows/appreciation/returns are not guaranteed and could be lower than anticipated and adverse tax consequences.

Along with multiple large and small 1031 exchange and direct cash investors purchasing an interest in the Shannon Oaks DST, we are also proud to announce that multiple Kay Properties team members also personally invested in the property.

To view this press release as an infographic please visit: http://www.kpi1031.com/dst-1031-exchange-press-release-infographic/

ABOUT KAY PROPERTIES AND INVESTMENTS, LLC

Kay Properties and Investments, LLC was founded by Dwight Kay to offer solutions to 1031 Exchange clients throughout the country.

Headquartered Specialists in Los Angeles, CA with offices in New York, N.Y. and Washington, D.C.

Specialists in the Delaware Statutory Trust (DST) 1031 Exchange Marketplace.

Offering DST Advisory Services to 1031 Exchange Clients and working with many major DST sponsor companies throughout the country.

Offering client exclusive DST properties solely available to Kay Properties clients.

Over $127,000,000 of DST properties purchased by our clients in 2015.

Licensed in all 50 states, Washington D.C. and the Virgin Islands.

Always Available to Help Our Clients - Weekends, Holidays and Whenever You Need Us.

Better Business Bureau A+ Accredited Business.

This material does not constitute an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Such offers can be made only by the confidential Private Placement Memorandum (the "Memorandum"). Please be aware that this material cannot and does not replace the Memorandum and is qualified in its entirety by the Memorandum.

This material is not intended as tax or legal advice so please do speak with your attorney and CPA prior to considering an investment.

This material contains information that has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. However, Kay Properties and Investments, LLC, Colorado Financial Services Corporation and their representatives do not guarantee the accuracy and validity of the information herein. Investors should perform their own investigations before considering any investment.

There are material risks associated with investing in real estate, Delaware Statutory Trust (DST) and 1031 Exchange properties. These include, but are not limited to, tenant vacancies; declining market values; potential loss of entire investment principal; that past performance is not a guarantee of future results; that potential cash flow, potential returns, and potential appreciation are not guaranteed in any way; adverse tax consequences and that real estate is typically an illiquid investment.

Please read carefully the Memorandum and/or investment prospectus in its entirety before making an investment decision. Please pay careful attention to the "Risk" section of the PPM/Prospectus. This material is not intended as tax or legal advice so please do speak with your attorney and CPA prior to considering an investment.

IRC Section 1031, IRC Section 1033, and IRC Section 721 are complex tax codes; therefore, you should consult your tax and legal professional for details regarding your situation.

Securities offered through registered representatives of Colorado Financial Service Corporation, Member FINRA / SIPC. Kay Properties and Investments, LLC and Colorado Financial Service Corporation are separate entities. OSJ Address: 304 Inverness Way S, Ste 355, Centennial, Colorado.

Kay Properties & Investments, LLC, is registered to sell securities in all 50 states.

DST 1031 properties are only available to accredited investors (generally described as having a net worth of over $1 million dollars excusive of primary residence) and accredited entities only (generally described as an entity owned entirely by accredited individuals and/or an entity with gross assets of greater than $5 million dollars). If you are unsure if you are an accredited investor and/or an accredited entity please verify with your CPA and Attorney prior to considering an investment. You may be required to verify your status as an accredited investor.
LISLE, Ill., Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Eckrich, the makers of naturally hardwood smoked sausage and savory deli meats, teamed up with Marcs grocery store and Operation Homefront, a national nonprofit whose mission is to build strong, stable, and secure military families, to honor a Fairview Park, Ohio military family on Friday.



A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/98dff2f1-3722-436a-b2a5-5a8519a49713

To honor the Glenns for their service, Eckrich presented the family with a gift of $5,000 in free groceries at Marcs in Parma, Ohio. As part of the event, crowds of shoppers were treated to samples of delicious Eckrich deli meats and an appearance by Cleveland Country radio station 99.5.

Jim Glenn served for more than five years as a combat engineer in the US Marine Corps. He was deployed to Iraq and later awarded numerous medals, ribbons, and certificates for his service. His wife, Lyndsay, is his caregiver and a member of Operation Homefronts Hearts of Valor program. The program is a network of more than 3,000 caregivers of wounded service members which provides annual retreats, support groups, and online communities. The family has two children.

This is a great example of how when you give back and serve your country, good things can happen when you least expect it, said Jim Glenn. We need more organizations out there like Eckrich, and we are extremely appreciative and grateful for this gift.

The surprise is part of an ongoing campaign by Eckrich to honor, thank, and support military families through its partnership with Operation Homefront. Eckrich, in its fifth year of partnership with Operation Homefront, has donated more than $2.5 million to the organization since 2012.

Eckrich is proud to continue its support of military families across the country, said Jennifer Zmrhal, Smithfield Foods senior director of marketing. We appreciate Marcs partnership in presenting the Glenn family with $5,000 in free groceries.

For more information about Eckrich, please visit www.eckrich.com or follow Eckrich on Facebook and Twitter.

Eckrich is a brand of Smithfield Foods.

About Eckrich

Founded by Peter Eckrich in 1894, Eckrich has a rich heritage starting from a small meat market in Fort Wayne, Ind. Through it all, Eckrich meats have been recognized for their great taste and supreme quality, craftsmanship, care and pride. For more information, visit www.eckrich.com.

About Smithfield Foods

Smithfield Foods is a $14 billion global food company and the world's largest pork processor and hog producer. In the United States, the company is also the leader in numerous packaged meats categories with popular brands including Smithfield, Eckrich, Nathan's Famous, Farmland, Armour, John Morrell, Cook's, Kretschmar, Gwaltney, Curly's, Margherita, Carando, Healthy Ones, Krakus, Morliny, and Berlinki. Smithfield Foods is committed to providing good food in a responsible way and maintains robust animal care, community involvement, employee safety, environmental and food safety and quality programs. For more information, visit www.smithfieldfoods.com.

About Operation Homefront

A national nonprofit, Operation Homefront builds strong, stable, and secure military families so that they can thrive in the communities they have worked so hard to protect. With more than 3,200 volunteers nationwide, Operation Homefront has provided assistance to tens of thousands of military families since its inception shortly after 9/11. Recognized for superior performance by leading independent charity oversight groups, 92 percent of Operation Homefronts expenditures go directly to programs that provide support to our military families. For more information, go to www.OperationHomefront.net.
Son of former president to speak at OK Ethics

Steve Ford, the son of former president Gerald Ford, will speak during the next Oklahoma Business Ethics Consortium (OK Ethics) luncheon on Wednesday.

Ford will discuss how he successfully negotiated the bumpy road from the White House to a 20-year career as an actor in Hollywood. His one-of-a-kind presentation inspires people to be open to change and transformation.

The meeting will be at 1 p.m. at at the DoubleTree by Hilton Tulsa Downtown, 616 W. Seventh St. Cost is $30 for OK Ethics members and $45 for nonmembers. To reserve a seat, visit okethics.org by Monday.

Peoria Avenue Wal-Mart holds grand reopening

The newly remodeled Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market at 4404 S. Peoria Ave. is holding a grand reopening celebration this weekend.

The project features a bright, open look in the store, an enhanced fresh produce experience and an updated pharmacy.

We are looking forward to re-introducing our store to the community with expanded offerings and a fresh look. Our everyday low prices will remain the same, but were adding greater convenience and a new and improved local grocery shopping experience, said store manager Blake Litton.

A brief ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held at 7:30 a.m. Friday prior to family activities and free food samples, and several grants will be awarded to local nonprofit organizations.

Customers can enjoy a grand reopening event 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and noon-4 p.m. Sunday with sampling and family friendly activities.

Wal-Mart is also holding similar reopening celebrations this weekend at its store in Henryetta.

Rupe Helmer Group hires director of acquisitions

Rupe Helmer Group has hired Mike Cropper as its director of acquisitions and development.

Cropper is a graduate of the University of Tulsa and has 15 years of experience in real estate related fields, exemplifies the ideal skill set for his new position.

The Rupe Helmer Group has been a leader in construction, development, brokerage and property management in Oklahoma since 2002.

Hideaway 66th among pizza U.S. companies

Hideaway Pizza was ranked No. 66 in Pizza Today magazines 2016 ranking of the nations most successful pizza companies, up six spots from its No. 70 ranking in 2015.

With a reported $43 million in gross sales among 16 outlets, the Tulsa-based company was the smallest company in the top 70. Pizza Hut, with $13.7 billion in sales and 16,063 outlets, was ranked No. 1 ahead of Dominos, which had $9.6 billion in sales and 13,000 outlets.

According to co-owners Darren Lister and Brett Murphy, who purchased the company in 2006, all Hideaway Pizza restaurants are company owned and there are no plans to begin franchising. The company employs about 1,000.

Others on the list were Mazzios at 29th with $124 million in sales and 143 outlets and Glenpool-based Simple Simons with $53,856,000 in sales and 176 outlets.

Sawyer Manufacturing acquires certifications

Sawyer Manufacturings facility is officially certified by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the National Board Inspection Code with R Stamp and U Stamp certifications, company officials announced recently.

These certifications declare that Sawyer, primarily a manufacturer of pipeline equipment, is capable of meeting ASME and NBIC standards for the fabrication, repair and alteration of boilers, pressure vessels and other pressure retaining items.

The certifications are regarded as a symbol of acceptance and compliance with laws and regulations in nearly all states and Canadian provinces and are recognized as an international standard of conformance. The U stamp certifies Sawyers capabilities with new construction and fabrication, while the R refers to repairs and alterations.

We have actually been capable of meeting these code requirements for quite some time, but we have now made it official. Doing so was important to us because these certifications are the leading standard for pressure equipment and components, shop supervisor John Morelock said.

Wal-Mart awards $25,000 to City Year

The Wal-Mart Foundation provided $25,000 to City Year Tulsa through the foundations State Giving Program in order to support math interventions and tutoring.

City Year is an education-focused nonprofit that unites young AmeriCorps members from diverse backgrounds for a year of full-time service to keep students in school and on track to graduate. City Year Tulsa reaches more than 4,000 students at Eugene Field Elementary, Kendall-Whittier Elementary, Sequoyah Elementary, Clinton Middle, Will Rogers College Middle, McLain Junior High and McLain and Webster high schools.

The grant will support teacher-directed math instruction during class time and provide one-on-one and small-group tutoring for students who need extra help. Using research-based intervention strategies, AmeriCorps members deliver more than 15 hours of tutoring focused on building foundations of math skills and supporting grade-level curriculum.

The Wal-Mart Foundations State Giving Program supports organizations that create opportunities so people can live better, awarding grants that have a long-lasting, positive impact on communities across the U.S. To be considered for support, visit walmartfoundation.org/ stategiving.
LONDON - November 11, 2016 - Transocean Partners LLC (NYSE: RIGP) (the "Company") announced today that it convened and adjourned, without a vote, the Company's previously scheduled special meeting of common unitholders to vote on the proposed merger with a subsidiary of Transocean Ltd. ("Transocean"). The special meeting will reconvene on Wednesday, November 16, 2016, at 3:00 p.m. local time at the Company's offices at 40 George Street, 4th Floor, London, England W1U 7DW, United Kingdom. The record date for common unitholders entitled to vote at the special meeting remains September 22, 2016.



The special meeting was adjourned to allow for the solicitation of additional votes in favor of the proposal to approve the proposed merger and the Agreement and Plan of Merger dated July 31, 2016, among the Company, Transocean and certain subsidiaries of Transocean, as contained in the definitive proxy statement filed by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") on October 6, 2016. Thus far, holders of common units not owned by Transocean Partners Holdings Limited have shown support for the transaction, with approximately 75% of the common units for which proxies were submitted having been in favor of the merger.

During the period of the adjournment, the Company will continue to solicit proxies from its common unitholders. Common unitholders who have not already submitted a proxy are encouraged to do so.



The affirmative vote of approximately 50.1% of the outstanding common units not owned by Transocean Partners Holdings Limited is required to approve the merger. At the time of the adjournment, a preliminary count indicated approximately 46.8% of the outstanding common units not owned by Transocean Partners Holdings Limited intended to vote in favor of the merger. The holders of approximately 7.4 million common units (which represents approximately 37.6% of the outstanding common units not owned by Transocean Partners Holding Limited) have not submitted a proxy to have their common units voted at the special meeting. The results of voting at the special meeting, once reconvened on November 16, 2016, could differ from this preliminary count.



Any common unitholder who has previously submitted a proxy may revoke and submit a new proxy by 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on November 15, 2016, or vote in person at any time before the polls close at the special meeting on November 16, 2016. Common unitholders who do not wish to revoke their proxy do not need to take any further action. All common units represented by properly submitted proxies that are received in time for the special meeting, as adjourned, and that are not revoked, will be voted at the special meeting in the manner specified by the holder.



Leading independent proxy advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., Glass Lewis & Co. LLC and Egan-Jones Ratings Co. recommend common unitholders of the Company vote in favor of the approval of the Merger Agreement and the merger.



The Board of Directors of the Company and the independent conflicts committee of the Company have each unanimously recommended that common unitholders vote "FOR" the proposal to approve the Merger Agreement and the merger.



Today's adjournment provides common unitholders, who have not yet participated in the critical process, the extended opportunity to vote, which we encourage them to do. Unlike proxy votes on routine annual meeting matters, a non-vote is effectively a "No" vote for the merger. Please act today!



Unitholders who need assistance in voting their common units, or who have questions, are encouraged to contact the Company's proxy solicitor, Innisfree M&A Incorporated, at (888) 750-5834 from U.S. and Canada or (412) 232-3651 from other countries.



About Transocean Partners



Transocean Partners was formed as a growth-oriented limited liability company by Transocean Ltd. to own, operate and acquire modern, technologically advanced offshore drilling rigs. Transocean Partners' assets consist of 51 percent interests in subsidiary companies that own and operate three ultra-deepwater drilling rigs.



For more information about Transocean Partners, please visit: www.transoceanpartners.com.



Forward-Looking Statements



This communication includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The statements regarding the proposed transaction, including its effects, benefits and costs savings, opinions, forecasts, projections, expected timetable for completion, expected distribution and any other statements regarding the Company's and Transocean's future expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, financial conditions, assumptions or future events or performance that are not statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. We can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to have been correct. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions including, among other things, satisfaction of the closing conditions to the merger, the risk that the contemplated merger does not occur, negative effects from the pendency of the merger, the ability to realize expected cost savings and benefits, failure to obtain the required vote of the Company's unitholders, the timing to consummate the proposed transaction, the adequacy of and access to sources of liquidity, the Company's and Transocean's inability to obtain drilling contracts for rigs that do not have contracts, the Company's and Transocean's inability to renew drilling contracts at comparable dayrates, operational performance, the impact of regulatory changes, the cancellation of drilling contracts currently included in each company's reported contract backlog, and other risk factors that are discussed in the Company's and Transocean's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-Ks, as well as its other filings with the SEC available at the SEC's Internet site (www.sec.gov). Actual results may differ materially from those expected, estimated or projected. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any of them in light of new information, future events or otherwise.



Additional Information



This communication does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any securities or a solicitation of any vote or approval. INVESTORS ARE URGED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS, THE REGISTRATION STATEMENT, AND OTHER DOCUMENTS THAT MAY BE FILED WITH THE SEC REGARDING THE TRANSACTION CAREFULLY AND IN THEIR ENTIRETY BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. These documents contain important information about the proposed transaction that should be read carefully before any decision is made with respect to the proposed transaction. Investors may obtain free copies of these documents and other documents filed with the SEC by the Company and Transocean through the website maintained by the SEC at www.sec.gov. Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by the Company are available free of charge on the Company's internet website at: www.transoceanpartners.com. Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by Transocean are available free of charge on Transocean's internet website at: www.deepwater.com. You may also read and copy any reports, statements and other information filed by Transocean and Transocean Partners with the SEC at the SEC public reference room at 100 F Street N.E., Room 1580, Washington, D.C. 20549. Please call the SEC at (800) 732-0330 or visit the SEC's website for further information on its public reference room.



Participants in Solicitation



The Company, Transocean, their respective directors and certain of their respective executive officers may be considered, under SEC rules, participants in the solicitation of proxies in connection with the proposed transaction. Information about the directors and executive officers of the Company is set forth in its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015, which was filed with the SEC on February 25, 2016, and its proxy statement for its 2016 annual meeting of unitholders, which was filed with the SEC on March 17, 2016. Information about the directors and executive officers of Transocean are set forth in its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015, which was filed with the SEC on February 25, 2016, and its proxy statement for its 2016 annual general meeting of shareholders, which was filed with the SEC on March 18, 2016. These documents can be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above. Additional information regarding the participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct and indirect interests in the transaction, by security holdings or otherwise, is contained in the proxy statement/prospectus and other relevant materials that may be filed with the SEC.



Analyst Contacts:

Bradley Alexander

+1 713-232-7515



Diane Vento

+1 713-232-8015



Media Contact:

Pam Easton

+1 713-232-7647




Residents in Valsayn South are said to be marooned in their homes. Councillor for the area S
On Mondays Four Corners, Linton Besser reports from the frontline of Australias child protection crisis.

He reveals that rather than protecting and nurturing neglected children, some private operators are treating them as badly as the families they escaped.

I walked in there and I just thought wow. I didnt even know kids lived like this. I just couldnt believe this was happening in Australia.  Child Protection Worker

These are Australias most vulnerable kids, betrayed and neglected, not only by their parents but by the system designed to protect them.

Theyre told, youre in resi because nobody wants you, we cant find a home for you, we cant find a foster family for you. I couldnt imagine being told, youre so bad that we cant place you anywhere, this is where you have to live now.  Child Protection Worker

Theyre known as resi kids after the group homes they live in, run by private operators and charities. Some were taken into care as babies, others after years of abuse. Theyre often difficult to manage but desperately in need of help.

In this searing Four Corners investigation, we reveal that rather than protecting and nurturing these children, some private operators are treating them as badly as the families they escaped.

What I cant wrap my head around is why children are removed because theyre neglected only to end up being a teenager in a resi house still neglected.  Child Protection Worker

Its prompted some in the child protection system to brand their treatment a national failure and call for the entire resi care system to be shut down.

Everybody who might watch Four Corners has to understand that they are our children. We have a responsibility to them.  Former Childrens Commissioner

This investigation, nearly three months in the making, continues online in a special digital feature with further revelations of systemic failings, which will be published on ABC News Digital (abc.net.au/news) at 8.30pm AEDT on Monday November 14.

Monday November 14 at 8.30pm on ABC.
You have to admire the ambitions of Mars, a global event series from producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.

Their docudrama series hopes to reignite our yearning for space travel and educate us about the challenges and dreams to colonise Mars. If we are to continue as a species, it argues, then we must leave the planet in order to save it.

Combining actors with scientist interviews is equally ambitious in this 6 episode miniseries, requiring the viewer to shift from genre to genre along the way.

For its drama component the year is 2033, and a crew is leaving Earth for a 7 month journey to Mars in a first step towards colonisation. But like all good space movies (especially those by Ron Howard) something goes terribly wrong. Astronauts in peril is the stuff of Apollo 13, Gravity and The Martian, with Howard on familiar turf.

But to reach Mars by 2033, we first had to lay down the foundations in 2016 which is where the Documentary element steps in. There are bite-size interviews with scientists and experts from SpaceX, which is launching the first returnable rocket they hope to land and re-use.

The real present + fictionalised future is a bit of a challenge for the viewer, and it never quite bridged the divide for me. American Mission Commander Ben Sawyer (played by Ben Cotton) is earnest in his description of this first human Mars mission aboard the fictional Daedalus. With limited screentime to dramatise the projects overall pitch, I never really connected emotionally to its characters, at least on the same level as movie characters.

By contrast the science grabs, including by luminaries such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, was so brief as to feel like vox pops. Sometimes it was tricky to work out whether what was on screen was fact or faction.

But the overall premise, that we can and must, reach the red planet is a fascinating argument, with failure, risk and innovation at its very red centre. Whether America can step up its space race under its new president-elect is a question unaddressed.

This global event -which includes a theme co-written by Nick Cave- might have been more effective as either one of its two genres, to avoid being a bit of a space oddity.

Mars airs 7:30pm Sunday on National Geographic.
Swedish thriller Midnight Sun will be available on SBS On Demand from Thursday 1 December, ahead of its broadcast on SBS in early 2017.

Directed by Marlind & Stein, (The Bridge) it stars French actress Leila Bekhti (The Prophet, All That Glitters), Swedish actor Gustaf Hammarsten (Bruno, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), and follows the investigation of the brutal murder of a French citizen in Kiruna, a small Swedish town in the Arctic Circle where the sun never sets. What ensues is the discovery of a ten-year-old secret conspiracy that no one could ever imagine.

Head of SBS On Demand, David Gwynne, said: The international interest and response to this new thriller has been exceptional and were pleased to be able to add this to our growing library of premium content on SBS On Demand  available exclusively and for free.

Australians have really embraced Scandinavian dramas, a genre SBS has been home to for almost 20 years. Most recently, weve had great success bringing premium Scandi-noir titles to Australians first on SBS On Demand, including Trapped and Modus.

Episodes One and Two are available online from Thursday 1 December, Three and Four from Tuesday 6 December, and the final four episodes available from Tuesday 13 December.

The series broadcasts on SBS in early 2017.
Screen Producers Australia have announced finalists for two Business categories in their annual awards which will be presented during the Screen Forever conference next week.

Production Business of the Year Finalists for 2016:

CJZ

December Media

FremantleMedia Australia

Matchbox Pictures

Werner Film Productions

The Production Business of the Year is awarded to a production business that has produced an outstanding project or body of work, which has contributed to the advancement of the screen industry. The 2015 recipient was production company Matchbox Pictures, recognising their consistently original and entertaining productions for audiences, both locally and internationally.

Breakthrough Business of the Year Finalists for 2016:

Epic Films

In Films

Media Stockade

Mint Pictures

Tamasin Simpkin

The Breakthrough Business of the Year is awarded to a production business that has demonstrated a significant breakthrough in the screen industry in the past 12 months. The 2015 recipient was Brindle Films, a full-service media company based in Alice Springs.

The 2016 Screen Producers Australia Lifetime Achievement Award will also be presented to post production visionary Roger Savage.
SACRAMENTO, Calif., Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aerojet Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:AJRD), successfully supported the launch of WorldView-4, DigitalGlobes newest high-accuracy, high-resolution imaging satellite. The mission was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket today. Aerojet Rocketdyne propulsion on the Atlas V included the RL10C-1 upper-stage engine, six helium pressurization tanks and a dozen Centaur upper-stage Reaction Control System thrusters (RCS). For the WorldView-4 satellite, Aerojet Rocketdyne provides 12 MR-106L 5-lbf hydrazine rocket engines which provide all of the maneuvering and attitude control propulsion for the mission.

High-resolution commercial satellite imagery plays a critical role in modern society, from helping to keep nations safe, to supporting disaster response efforts, to powering a wide range of location-enabled applications and services. We are proud to support the launch of WorldView-4 and its sophisticated technology, which millions of commercial users throughout the world will rely upon for years to come, said Eileen Drake, president and CEO of Aerojet Rocketdyne.

Aerojet Rocketdyne's role in the launch began after separation of the first stage, when a single RL10C-1 upper-stage engine ignited to place the payload into orbit, helped by the Centaur thrusters and pressurization tanks. The RL10C-1 delivers 22,890 pounds of thrust to power the Atlas V upper stage, using cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants during its operation.

The RL10C-1 was developed from the RL10 family of upper-stage engines, which have accumulated one of the most impressive track records of accomplishments in the history of space propulsion. More than 470 RL10 engines have supported launches over the last 50 years, helping to place military, government and commercial satellites into orbit, and powering scientific space-probe missions to every planet in our solar system.

The 12 MR-106 series 6-9 lbf Centaur upper-stage hydrazine thrusters provide roll, pitch and yaw control, as well as settling burns. Aerojet Rocketdyne has flown more than 3,000 MR-106 series 6-9 lbf thrusters with 100 percent mission success. ARDE, a subsidiary of Aerojet Rocketdyne based in New Jersey, provided the pressure vessels on the first and second stages of the launch vehicle.

WorldView-4 was built by Lockheed Martin and is owned and operated by DigitalGlobe. The satellite will orbit Earth every 90 minutes, traveling 17,000 miles per hour and capturing as much as 680,000 square kilometers of the Earths surface daily  the equivalent of the land area of Texas. The 12 MR-106L engines on the WorldView-4 satellite are located at the corners of the satellite to provide three-axis control, as well as maneuvering of the satellite. Each rocket engine is approximately the size of an average persons hand and weighs less than 1.5 pounds.

Aerojet Rocketdyne is an innovative company delivering solutions that create value for its customers in the aerospace and defense markets. The company is a world-recognized aerospace and defense leader that provides propulsion and energetics to the space, missile defense and strategic systems, tactical systems and armaments areas, in support of domestic and international markets. Additional information about Aerojet Rocketdyne can be obtained by visiting our websites at www.Rocket.com and www.AerojetRocketdyne.com.
One Ukrainian soldier was killed and one was wounded in the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) zone in eastern Ukraine over the last day, Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Spokesperson for ATO issues Colonel Andriy Lysenko stated.

One Ukrainian serviceman was killed and one serviceman was wounded as a result of combat actions over the past day, Lysenko said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Friday, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. iy
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko had a phone conversation with EU Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy & Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn, according to a report posted on the presidents website on Thursday, November 10.

The parties discussed a series of topical issues of the Ukraine-EU agenda, particularly the introduction of a visa-free regime for Ukrainian citizens. The EU Commissioner once again noted that Ukraine had fulfilled all the criteria and the EU must fulfill its commitments in the coming weeks, reads the report.

The interlocutors also noted the importance of preserving transatlantic unity and willingness to closely cooperate with the U.S. Administration to help Ukraine counter Russian aggression.

The EU Commissioner assured of unwavering and consistent EUs support of Ukraine in restoring its sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as comprehensive facilitation of reforms.

During the conversation, special attention was paid to the completion of the Association Agreement ratification between Ukraine and the EU, as well as to the problem of strengthening Europes energy security.

The Head of State stressed that the decision of the European Commission to expand access of Gazprom to the Opal pipeline did not comply with the spirit of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU and the Energy Community Treaty, reads the report.

In addition, President Poroshenko and EU Commissioner Johannes Hahn agreed to step up efforts to ensure fruitful Ukraine-EU Summit on November 24, 2016 in Brussels.

iy
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko held a telephone conversation with President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko. The parties agreed to intensify the political dialogue at all levels.

This is reported by the press service of the Ukrainian Head of State.

"The presidents of Ukraine and Belarus also discussed cooperation within the UN and other international organizations," the statement reads.

Poroshenko and Lukashenko hailed the positive results of activity of the Belarusian-Ukrainian Intergovernmental Commission on Trade and Economic Cooperation, which held a regular meeting in Minsk on November 10.

The Presidents noted the positive dynamics of bilateral trade, in particular, the growth of trade turnover between Ukraine and Belarus.

ol
Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Andriy Parubiy noted the importance to accelerate granting of visa-free regime to Ukraine and to complete the ratification of the EU-Ukraine Association.

He said this during a meeting with Head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine Hugues Mingarelli and representatives of the European Commission.

Parubiy thanked for a decision made by the European Union to extend sanctions against the Russian Federation as "the Ukrainian army and the sanctions of the European civilized world are the only factors that deter aggression."

He also stressed that the decision on visa-free regime was extremely important, especially on the eve of the anniversary of Maidan protests.

In turn, Mingarelli said that MEPs "are ready to support this decision." "I am confident that the summit on November 23 will give an appropriate impetus," he stressed.

ish
The European Union Foreign Affairs Council on its meeting on November 14 plans to discuss the future of the Eastern Partnership and the current situation in Ukraine.

These and other issues have been put on the agenda of the upcoming meeting, own Ukrinform correspondent reports.

The Council will discuss current multilateral and bilateral relations with the six Eastern Partnership countries - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine, reads a report on the EU Council website.

Also, EU foreign ministers will have an exchange of views on the future of the Partnership and determine possible deliverables to be achieved in 2017, notably with a view to the next Eastern Partnership Summit.

In particular, the discussion may focus on the current situation in Ukraine

iy
Foreign ministers of the EU member states will discuss the impact of the internal process of visa liberalization on the EU's relations with Ukraine and Georgia.

This issue will be raised at the Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Brussels on Monday, November 14, an Ukrinform correspondent reported.

"The foreign ministers may discuss the issue regarding the impact of the legislative visa liberalization process [in the context of its delay in the EU] on relations with Ukraine and Georgia," the official representative of the governing institutions of the EU said.

ish
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Poland to Ukraine Jan Peklo believes that Ukraines visa-free regime with the EU will be introduced in the near future.

He stated this today during a public debate organized by the World Policy Institute and dedicated to the Ukrainian-Polish relations, an Ukrinform correspondent reported.

"Ukraine is now integrating into the European Union, and the Association Agreement has been signed. And probably, I'm quite sure that very soon the European Commission will declare that Ukraine will be granted a visa-free regime. And we will be able to observe a visa-free regime with Ukraine," the ambassador said.

ish
French President Francois Hollande said on Friday he hoped U.S. President-elect Donald Trump would clarify his position on issues including conflicts in Syria and Ukraine and Iran's nuclear deal during a telephone conversation later in the day.

This has been reported by Reuters.

"French President Francois Hollande on Friday expressed hope that during the telephone conversation US President-elect Donald Trump would clarify his position on a number of issues, including the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, as well as Iran's nuclear deal," reads a statement.

"My duty is to make sure we have the best possible relations with the United States, but a relation that is based on frankness and clarity," Hollande said.

ish
Many Thanks to our Advertisers

When choosing between competing products and services, please consider our advertisers, who help support Brand New.
As fighting intensifies in the more densely-populated urban areas of Mosul, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is preparing for possible large-scale movements and is ready to provide further shelter and protection assistance to displaced Iraqis, inside and outside camps.

Some 47,730 Iraqis have been displaced since the beginning of the offensive in Mosul on 17 October 2016, according to inter-agency data as of 11 November. Numbers have approximately doubled in the last week and are expected to continue to rise as the fighting continues. Several significant population movements from Mosul were recorded in the last week, especially around Gogjali and the citys eastern neighbourhoods.

UNHCR and humanitarian partners are providing life-saving protection and assistance to newly-displaced families, making sure they have adequate shelter, and basic household items including mattresses, stoves, kitchen sets, hygiene sets and jerrycans. Overall, more than 3,500 packages of emergency relief items have been distributed by UNHCR and its partners since the start of the offensive.

UNHCR is also increasing its protection monitoring and psychosocial and legal assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs) through mobile teams to ensure timely interventions when concerns are identified. People with specific needs or vulnerabilities are being identified quickly to ensure they receive specialized support. Reports of a disproportionate number of female-headed households have raised concerns about family separation. More than 50 unaccompanied or separated children have been identified for appropriate assistance; and 443 vulnerable families have been referred for cash assistance.

In terms of shelter, UNHCR already has six camps open, with a capacity to host 54,408 people. UNHCR is planning for a total of 11 camps, should land be made available, with a capacity for 120,000 people, and it is also actively engaged in identifying further land for emergency sites. This is part of a broader response with the government of Iraq and other humanitarian partners who are also reinforcing camp capacity and preparing for other shelter options to support a total of 700,000 internally displaced Iraqis if needed.

On 5 November, UNHCR opened a new site at Hasansham, hosting more than 10,000 people. All of the newly arrived IDPs have received emergency relief items. A final section of the camp, with 240 tents, is due to open this week. New arrivals in the last few days from eastern Mosul are currently being sheltered at the nearby Khazer M1 camp of the Iraqi Government, where UNHCR is providing emergency relief items. Another UNHCR camp, Zelikan, is currently hosting 2,270 individuals, or 456 families.

UNHCR already has 30,000 tents in country, with more procured, while land is currently available to pitch 20,000 tents.

In Iraq, as temperatures have begun to sharply drop at night, UNHCR and its partners have also began distributing essential winter items to 1.2 million recently-displaced Iraqis including for families who have fled the Mosul offensive.

UNHCR is stressing that residents of Mosul seeking sanctuary must not be prevented from fleeing and that they should have access to safe areas including the emergency camps. Likewise, civilians must not be forced to return to unsafe areas. UNHCR is also appealing for more international funding to assist those likely to be displaced in coming months. UNHCRs Mosul Emergency Response Appeal -- of USD 196.2 million -- is now 57 per cent funded. Underfunding will severely limit the agency's capacity to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable families during winter  particularly for heating.

For more information on this topic, please contact:
Mahmoud Ahmed and his family arrive by truck at Khazer M1 camp in northern Iraq.  UNHCR/Caroline Gluck

HASANSHAM, Iraq  Father of six, Mahmoud Ahmad, 35, had a huge smile on his face as he clambered out of the crowded truck packed with other families, holding his two month-old baby daughter, Farah, in his hands.

After more than two years of living under militant control, he and his family had finally escaped their home in the eastern district of Intisar, in Mosul, and arrived at Khazer M1 camp for displaced Iraqis, near Hasansham village, about 30 kilometres away.

Its very good; we are safe now. Im very happy, he said. Now, one of the first things Im going to do is to shave, he added laughing, referring to some of the tight restrictions that militant groups had placed on civilians in areas under their control.

Men were told to grow beards, stop smoking and wear shorter trousers; women were ordered to fully cover themselves and feared to go out in public.

Families had lived with fear and terror for more than two years.

Families had lived with fear and terror for more than two years. Now, they were happy to be free to decide how they wanted to live their lives and even dress.

Mahmoud, speaking still with a smile that lit up his entire face, used to make a living as an electrician and sold satellite dishes in the local market. But when the satellite dishes were banned by militants seven months ago, he found himself out of work, relying on savings and selling his wifes jewellery to support their family.

My smile helped me overcome many difficulties in Mosul, he confided, when asked if he was always so happy. It helped me forget that life was harsh.

He was among 2,040 people arriving at Khazer camp that day, all telling of their relief at being free from the rule of militant groups. In the past week, the number of people displaced from inside and around Mosul city has more than doubled, bringing the total number of displaced Iraqis to 47,000 since the start of military operations began on October 17.

A young boy blows bubbles at a camp for internally displaced Iraqis near the village of Hasansham, 30 kilometres from Mosul.  UNHCR/Caroline Gluck

"My smile helped me overcome many difficulties in Mosul," says father-of-six Mahmoud Ahmad, 35, as he and his family enjoy the freedom that greeted them on arriving at a camp for displaced Iraqis.  UNHCR/Caroline Gluck

A family of internally displaced Iraqis are reunited at Khazer camp in the village of Hasansham, after fleeing Mosul.  UNHCR/Caroline Gluck

"Even though we are very tired and hungry, we feel safe. We are free," says Khairo Murat Mirza, 55. The father of nine slept outside on his first night after arriving at a full-to-capacity camp for internally displaced people near Hasansham, 30 kilometres from Mosul.  UNHCR/Caroline Gluck

A truck carrying internally displaced Iraqis arrives at Khazer camp, in the village of Hasansham, 30 kilometres from Mosul.  UNHCR/Caroline Gluck

The numbers are likely to continue to sharply rise, as the fighting moves into the more densely-populated urban areas of Mosul. In response, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is stepping up its assistance.

UNHCR is building 11 camps to host displaced Iraqis, with five currently receiving new arrivals. The agencys newly-built Hasansham U camp became full-to-capacity in the space of just four days.

The camp now houses 1,855 families  more than 10,000 people. A final section of the camp, with 240 tents, is due to be finished this week. 135 families who arrived on Monday spent their first night at the camps reception centre while waiting for tents, where they were provided with mattresses and blankets.

Some of the new families temporarily moved in with others, joining neighbours, friends or family. Sadika Abdullah Aziz, a mother of two from Samah neighbourhood in Mosul, is hosting six families in her tent which is now packed with about 20 people  mostly young children.

We arrived yesterday morning. We feel safe and comfortable here and slept well last night, she said. We no longer have explosions and bombings all around us. Our house was totally destroyed and we were staying with neighbours until we could leave."

When we were here, I saw many other families had no tents, so we welcomed them to stay. It is crowded, but soon they will get tents and more help, she added.

"We feel safe. We are free. We feel liberated and we hope for a better future.

Khairo Murat Mirza, a father of nine, slept outside on this first night; while the women in his family slept in a packed container building in the reception centre. Even so, he was not complaining.

Before, things were confusing and frightening. We didnt feel at all safe. Now, even though we need help, we are very tired and hungry and have no tent, we feel safe. We are free. We feel liberated and we hope for a better future.

Trucks and buses packed with new arrivals from eastern Mosul are now being directed to an extension site where thousands more families can be housed at the government-run Khazer M1 camp a few minutes away, where UNHCR is providing emergency relief items, including mattresses and blankets.

In the camp, Mahmoud Ahmad and his family were settling into their new tent. Mahmoud was still smiling broadly. I hadnt slept for five days. Last night was the first night I got proper sleep, he said. The children are laughing and playing again outside. They are so happy. They couldnt play outside in Intisar  we were too afraid for them.

Being here now is like a release  from a dark prison into the light, he said with a beaming smile.

Donate now
A high school student was suspended for buying an extra chicken nugget for lunch at school.

Carson Koller, a senior at Farragut High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, was suspended for allegedly stealing a chicken nugget from the school cafeteria, reports the Knoxville News Sentinel. He reportedly took six pieces of chicken nuggets instead of the usual five.

Koller said the lunch amounts are portioned, but because he was hungry he took a chicken nugget from another portion, and put it in his, WATE reported. Upon leaving the lunch line, he was taken to the principal, and was suspended.

The principal, Ryan Siebe, said he will be suspended for a day for "theft of property." Nervous, Koller didn't mention that he actually paid extra for the chicken nugget.

"It's honestly kind of funny. It was partially on me, kind of mostly on me. At the same time it was like, 'Really, you couldn't have just given me a warning?'" said Koller.

His mother, Carrie Koller Waller, was outraged at the suspension.

"How is it theft if he paid for it? Waller wrote in a Facebook post. "It's food. FOOD!!! Not weapons. Not drugs. Not alcohol. Not cheating on a test."

In a letter sent to school administrators and also posted on Facebook, Waller explained how it happened. "I know it wasn't your intent to overcharge Carson and I know it was not my son's intent to steal an extra nugget from you," she wrote. "He was hungry. He took six total nuggets. He entered his number, and the cashier rang him up,"

Waller explained that Koller paid for his meal, but when the cashier realized that he had more food than what she calculated, he was charged again. According to a screenshot Waller posted on Facebook, Koller was charged three times for a total of $8: one extra lunch charge of $2.75, one entree lunch charge of $2.50, and another charge worth $2.75.

Waller called Siebe to discuss the matter. After reviewing the case, Siebe then revoked Koller's suspension. Details about Siebe's investigation of the case were not disclosed by the school.

Waller, in response to Siebe's revoking of the suspension, posted on Facebook how she was pleased at what the principal did to correct the situation. She also said that Koller only missed "part of his class."
Autism greatly affects one's ability to interact with others, as well as one's ability to learn. To help students with autism prepare for the challenges of college, a school in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, offers a one-of-a-kind training that actually works.

Hill Top Preparatory School in Rosemont offers the all-year boarding program where college-bound students get the social training they need for college life, reports Philly. There, students with autism learn to live away from family during Mondays to Fridays, only going home on weekends.

"It was tough at first, living in a new environment with different people," Joseph Brennan, a 19-year-old student at Hill Top. "But we learned to adapt and make the best of it."

Hill Top Prep, a nonprofit institution founded in 1971, believes that with a strong collaboration between the school and a student's family, any student with autism can be prepared for success in college, work, and in their lives. Ninety percent of its graduates are able to enter college.

Thomas Needham, current Headmaster at Hill Top Prep, said in a message that students with autism don't necessarily have problems with basic language-related skills such as reading and spelling. They do, however, have another set of difficulties.

"One of the things they struggle with is being successful socially," Needham said.

To help them cope with and learn how to adjust to people, students enrolled in Hill Top Prep's boarding program live together in the school's property, and are given tasks such as washing their own dishes and fixing their own beds. They are also being trained to handle stress, respect others, and observe their boundaries.

"They're working on how do you live in a positive way with others," Needham said

Hill Top Prep also aims to teach students soft skills needed for jobs, such as starting and maintaining conversations with others over simple things like coffee, to asking others about how they are doing.

Going to college might be difficult for students with autism, but with the help of Hill Top Preparatory School's unique program, it just might become easier and more manageable.
Entering college is only one step in pursuing one's dream. The road is not always straight. There are instances when college students have to go through a rocky road. There are so many things that await college enrollees and financial issue is just one of them.

In the case of first-generation college students or those who are first in their family to attend a four-year college, the pressure is twice. They need not worry, though, as there are people who could help them survive the demands of college life.

Stony Brook University's Senior Associate Admissions Adviser Michelle Curtis-Bailey teamed up with Yolanda Norman, CEO/founder of FirstGenCollege Consulting in Texas to discuss how the first-generation college students could thrive and survive college, as per US News.

On managing finance

Norman explained that students can acquire knowledge about managing finance through developing relationships with a financial aid adviser. She encouraged students to fill out the FAFSA each year for them to find grants and scholarships.

Making the most out of time

Students can also earn money through on-campus job which will allow them to have flexible time to work and excel in their academics. Bailey added that looking for jobs during summer near the campus can help earn some more. However, managing time and setting priorities should be done.

Surviving the freshman year

Based on federal data, first-generation college students are more likely to find it hard to graduate in a span of six years. Experts believe that these students may suffer from the feelings of inadequacy and other psychological and social issues such as importer syndrome.

For those students who feel unprepared to get to college, Norman advised them to ask for help whenever they cannot comprehend the concept given to them. Students should overcome their fear of asking for help.

Looking for support group

When they feel like they are out of place, visiting the counseling office can be a convenient place for them to share their struggles with the transition. They can also approach their family as their support group.

Curtis-Bailey said that students should always lean in to their family. By being honest about their feelings and having an open communication with their family, they can create a great support group that could help them thrive as college students.
Last year, a student team from MIT took home the trophy for the winning Hyperloop Design. But this year, it is all about application. The real test begins on SpaceX's Hyperloop One. And college and university teams from around the world are getting ready to take this particular trophy home.

This year, there are thirty student teams participating in SpaceX's Hyperloop challenge. They all answered to Elon Musk's challenge to create a transportation system that would take an individual from point A to point B at top speed. Will these students break the speed of sound or even outrun the speed of a bullet?

It all depends on the design. According to Inverse, the pod itself must not only be effective and efficient but also affordable. And if the design can stand the test of a one mile long track through a tube with concrete and aluminum layers, then it may just win the competition. For now, these student teams are heading to SpaceX's Hawthorne, California site for the initial testing of their pod designs.

After figuring out if their pod fits the rails, can start up and work properly without glitches, then they can move on to the January 27-29, 2017 competition. If they find any faults in their design, they only have about two months to fix it.

Originally, SpaceX planned to have these teams' pods tested back in June 2016 but because of several issues concerning the completion of the Hyperloop track, they pushed the testing at a later date.

Elon Musk's vision to create such transportation system seemed absurd for some at first. But the reality of traveling from Dubai to Abu Dhabi in 12 minutes, or Finland to Sweden in 30 minutes is becoming a reality. Musk hopes to see such technology happen by 2038.

Teams are already experimenting with levitation, magnetism and more. Which student team do you think is going to win this competition?
iOS 10 jailbreak: Pangu could potentially receive the exploits from other hackers

Previously, Italian hacker Luca Todesco has demoed his jailbreak tool running on iOS 10 device.

However, unless the utility is released, there is no legitimate tool to be confirmed even when Todesco has published his video of the purpoted jailbreak running on iOS 10.2. It could even be a fake.

According to a familiar source, Todesco has been assisting Pangu with the exploits since iOS 9. Pangu also used the kernel bug from Loki Hardt to develop iOS 9.1 jailbreaking tool, TechGlued reported.

That being said, both hackers and probably many others, who have demoed the iOS 10 jailbreak, could be passing on the results to the Chinese hacker to develop a reliable tool - downloadable for public.

iOS 10 Jailbreak: Pangu has not yet given up

There are many false reports on Pangu's status in releasing the jailbreaking tool for Apple's latest operating system. The community cannot be more patient when waiting to break the restriction in iOS 10, especially after the other hackers have successfully launched their own software.

However, once again, these jailbreaks are not legitimate because it is not made available for public. Thus, the biggest hope relies on Pangu iOS 10 jailbreak.

iOS 10 jailbreak Pangu: Release date is imminent

As Apple are adding more security layers to iOS 10 firmware, it can be argued that it would take more time to jailbreak the latest OS version.

The previous report suggests that Pangu is waiting for TV App release in December because by then, the iOS firmware will be renewed by Apple and in a stable stage.

Pangu could be building better jailbreaking system based on what the other hackers have developed. According to Redmondpie, the security vulnerability demoed in MOSEC 2016 should be able to prove that Pangu does work on an iOS 10 jailbreak.

Check out speculation on iOS 10 jailbreak Pangu below!
President-elect Donald Trump has already caused an increase in hostile acts against minorities in campuses. This comes after he has been vocal about his plans on immigration and the like.

The New York Times reported that fliers depicting men in camouflage with guns and an American flag were posted in men's restrooms inside the campus of Texas State University. "Now that our man Trump is elected," the poster read. "Time to organize tar and feather vigilante squads and go arrest and torture those deviant university leaders spouting off that diversity garbage."

The fliers were part of several instances this week that suggest how Donald Trump's victory at the U.S. 2016 election has sparked backlash among the minority groups on campuses. Universities have been trying to pacify fears about the nation's future by organizing meetings and counseling sessions.

"A lot of Muslim students are scared," Abdalla Husain, 21, a linguistics major at the University of Tennessee, said. "They're scared that Trump has empowered people who have hate and would be hostile to them."

A Muslim woman at San Jose State University in California reported to the police that she was grabbed by her hijab and choked. Investigations are being made on the accusations.

At Hillary Clinton's alma mater, Wellesley College in Massachusetts, two male students from Babson College drove through campus with a large Trump flag. They then parked outside a meeting house for black students and spat at a black female.

They were ejected by campus police. However, they even bragged about their endeavor on social media.

According to Quartz, the Southern Poverty Law Center has released survey data from the "Teaching Tolerance" project which showed details about the toxic effects that Donald Trump's campaign has had on teachers and students. Immigrant students, especially Muslims and Latinos, are growing more and more concerned about what might happen to them or to their families after the election.

A majority of respondents reported an increase in "uncivil political discourse or anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attitudes." Teachers have also reported reluctance in having a discussion about the election in their classrooms for fear of the issue's escalation.
Any student who wants to build a great career can choose to start a business or company while in college. Many businesses, such as Facebook and Snapchat, started in college - and if their founders were able to succeed, many who will try just might succeed as well.

Starting a business in college, however, isn't a walk in the park, says TechCrunch. There are some things that need to be considered, and it takes more than just a dream or an ambition to make it work.

For those who desire to start their own business or company in college, here are three things to think about and consider.

1. It will take a lot of focus and work

Founding your own company in college needs more than just a dream or an idea. It takes work and focus, and will eat up tons of your time and effort.

2. You'll need to carefully choose who your partners will be

Choosing the right co-founder for your company is very important. They will share ideas and work on things that you otherwise cannot do on your own. Choose wisely, as you'll be working with them most of the time.

Your choice of a co-founder is "more important than your product, market and investors," AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant told TC.

Choosing the right mentor will greatly help as well. Find someone who has the experience, one whom you greatly respect and will allow to teach you things that he has already learned.

3. You need take advantage of the available resources today

College gives a vast amount of resources available for the young entrepreneur's disposal. Professors, student organizations, and peers can all give help and wisdom for your plans, while other benefits such can be received from other sources such as school libraries, scholarships, funds, and grants.

Don't worry about failures, though. Failure isn't a reason for you to not try at all. Success just might be yours if you try.

"If you focus on the risks, they'll multiply in your mind and eventually paralyze you. You want to focus on the task, instead, on doing what needs to be done," said Barry Eisler, a startup executive in Silicon Valley.
As Veterans Day approaches, the Michigan Supreme Court announced Thursday that $750,000 has been awarded to 23 courts around the state to fund the operation of veterans treatment court programs.

Instead of costly incarceration, these problem-solving courts closely supervise offenders who are required to enroll in treatment programs and be drug tested regularly. Extensive follow-up analysis shows that participants in these courts are far less likely to re-offend and much more likely to find a job and improve their quality of life. In particular, volunteer mentors play an important role by offering their time and energy in helping participants find employment linkages.

Many of our service men and women continue to fight difficult battles long after they leave the military, said Justice Joan Larsen, who is the MSC liaison to problem-solving courts. In the past, courts were not equipped to deal with their unique challenges. By connecting veterans with the help they need, these courts are saving lives, saving money, strengthening families, and building stronger communities.

Some important facts about Michigan veterans treatment courts:

 Unemployment among veterans treatment court graduates has been cut by more than half.

 Michigan is a national leader with 25 veterans treatment courts.

Learn more about these courts in the most recent MSC Problem-Solving Court Annual Report, 

.

for a list of veterans treatment courts that received grants. The process of awarding the grants is highly competitive and funding is limited.

for more information about the grant programs.

In addition to funding, the Supreme Court provides operational support and valuable resources, including a manual for judges interested in starting veterans treatment court programs.

Performance of problem-solving courts is tracked as part of a broader performance measures initiative to monitor court performance statewide. Data collected is used to identify and share best practices and to target areas that need improvement. More information is available

.

promote sobriety, recovery, and stability through a coordinated response that involves collaboration with a variety of traditional partners found in drug courts and mental health courts, as well as the Department of Veterans Affairs, volunteer veteran mentors, and organizations that support veterans and veterans families.
November 11 2016

The City of Edinburgh Council is pressing ahead with measures to increase schools capacity across the city with plans for a new gym hall to free up dining capacity at St Margarets RC primary, South Queensferry.Following hot on the heels of additional classroom space at Liberton Primary the school hall will be faced in fibre cement cladding and standing seam zinc above a brick basecourseIn their design statement Scott Brownrigg commented: By adopting a simple, singular form which in its materiality makes reference to the existing context, the proposal maintains a clear relationship with the site and its surroundings whilst still retaining an individual character.The extension ought to be complete by August 2017.
UTSA signs agreement with Japan to collaborate on astronomy

An artist's rendering of the Thirty Meter Telescope. Courtesy of The TMT International Observatory.

(Nov. 11, 2016) -- Today The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) signed an agreement to collaborate in all aspects of astronomy, including the planned Thirty Meter Telescope.

This agreement will help strengthen relations between the U.S. and Japan, by encouraging the exchange and collaboration of scientific and technological knowledge. Its with a partnership like this that UTSA makes significant progress in reaching our internal goal of becoming a Tier One research university, said UTSA President Ricardo Romo.

In addition to President Romo, the signing was attended by NAOJ Director Masahiko Hayashi, Congressman Joaquin Castro, Consul-General of Japan in Houston Tetsuro Amano and Hiroshi Karoji, professor of astronomy at Princeton University.

Chris Packham, associate professor of astronomy at UTSA, is leading a team of American and Japanese scientists in building instruments for the telescope, which is planned to be one of the largest ever built.

Ive been collaborating with my fellow astronomers in Japan for 20 years, he said. Its one of the leading nations in astronomy and the new telescope is an historic project. Im thrilled to be a part of it.

The telescopes proposed massive mirror, which is designed to be 30 meters wide, will enable it to see much farther than current ground-based telescopes, the largest of which possess mirrors roughly 10 meters across. The mirror is designed to allow astronomers to view the furthest reaches of space to address questions concerning the origin of the universe, peer into the centers of black holes in distant galaxies and examine the atmospheres of exoplanets.

The project, which is a collaboration between the United States, Japan, Canada, China and India, is expected to be completed in the next 10 years.

Another aspect of the partnership will be an exchange of scientists and graduate students between Tokyo and San Antonio to further internationalize UTSAs diverse campus. Packham is already hosting scientists from the NAOJ to participate in top-tier research efforts at UTSA.

Today represents a huge step forwards in a multi-year project, which we expect to help put UTSA astronomy on a strongly rising profile, Packham said. Astronomy is a highly internationalized enterprise, its always moving to see so much support and collaboration among nations to answer such profound astronomical questions.

Congressman Castro is the co-chair of the U.S.-Japan Caucus, which aims to facilitate bilateral collaboration on issues of common interest between the two nations, including technological development.

I congratulate everyone here in San Antonio and Japan who made this achievement possible, Castro said. And I applaud the work UTSA has continued to do on a national scale.

-------------------------------

Learn more about the UTSA Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Learn more about the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Connect online at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
Aside from last February, Iran has once again violated one of the terms of its nuclear deal signed with six world powers by exceeding a limit on its heavy water stockpile, according to a report from United Nations monitors on Wednesday -- the same day the rogue nation demanded the U.S. stick to the deal, no matter what.

The confidential report by the U.N.'s atomic watchdog, seen by The Associated Press, came out shortly after Iran issued its warning to the U.S. following the election of Donald Trump. The president-elect earlier described the Iran agreement as "the worst deal ever negotiated."

The deal specifies a heavy water limit of 143.3 tons. The International Atomic Energy Agency report found that Iran's stockpile exceeded that amount by 0.10 metric tons. It marked the second time Iran stepped over the limit, according to investigators.

Heavy water is a potential proliferation concern because it is used in reactors that produce substantial amounts of plutonium, a potential path to nuclear weapons. The report noted that Tehran had announced plans to export 5.5 tons to an unspecified country, bringing it back under the limit -- but did not specify which nation would receive that shipment.

The State Dept. acknowledged that under Trump, the U.S. could move to scrap the deal. However, it could easily rankle European nations who signed on and already started doing business with the Islamic Republic, USA Today notes.

In addition, analysts warn the move could deal a blow to Shiite militias fighting the Islamic State in Iraq. Iran continues to support the Shiite fighters.

Meanwhile, the chief of staff of Iran's armed forces criticized Trump for the president-elect's harsh words about confronting Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

In September, Trump said Iranian ships trying to provoke the U.S. "will be shot out of the water." In January, Iran took 10 American sailors prisoner after their ship veered off course into Iranian waters; they were released a day later.
The Braves have announced a one-year deal with free agent righty R.A. Dickey. The contract comes with a $8MM guarantee, per Jon Heyman of Fan Rag (via Twitter). That includes a $500K buyout of a 2018 option, which the team can exercise for $8MM.

Atlanta has long been said to be seeking multiple starters this winter, with the team interested in top-quality arms but also seeking to limit the length of any guarantees. This contract seems to accomplish what Atlanta hoped to do with at least one slot, plugging in a sturdy veteran without committing to a long-term deal.

MLBTR's Tim Dierkes predicted both the match and the guarantee in his ranking of the top fifty free agents. The 42-year-old is a native of Nashville and starred at the University of Tennessee, so the move will allow him to live closer to home.

Phil Niekro pitched with the Braves for 21 seasons, and his brother Joe spent two years there, 1973 and 1974. Hoyt Wilhelm also spent parts of three seasons with the Braves, in 1969, 1970 and 1971.

Dickey spent the last four seasons with the Blue Jays and contemplated retirement this year when he was not included on Toronto's postseason roster. But after he became a free agent, he decided to sign a one-year deal with an option for another to pitch for a team that is about 250 miles from his home in Nashville.

Dickey pitched three years with the Mets and won the 2012 National League Cy Young Award in his final season there.

In December of that year, the Mets traded him, along with catchers Josh Thole and Mike Nickeas, in a blockbuster deal to the Blue Jays for Travis d'Arnaud, Wuilmer Becerra, John Buck and a top pitching prospect named Noah Syndergaard.

Dickey broke in with the Texas Rangers in 2001 and has compiled a 110-108 record with a 4.01 earned run average with five teams. The Mets signed him to a minor league free-agent deal in 2010, and after six weeks at Class AAA Buffalo, he was inserted into the Mets' starting rotation and enjoyed the most success of his career.
The Indo-Japanese nuclear deal has been six years in the making. After prolonged negotiations, Japanese Prime Minister Shizo Abe and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi will sign a civil nuclear cooperation during Modi's visit to Tokyo on Friday, November 11.

The deal will mark Japan's first nuclear cooperation agreement with a country that is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). The NPT is an international treaty meant to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and arms technologies, while promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy. India refuses to sign it, saying it is discriminatory because it defines nuclear-weapons states as those that tested nuclear devices before 1967.

The nuclear deal between Asia's second and third largest economies has been described by the two countries as "a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership for the cause of a peaceful and secure world."

Supporters of the impending deal say it is a win-win situation for both Tokyo and New Delhi. India will be able to feed its energy-hungry economy with emission-free energy, whereas Japan opens up new business opportunities for its nuclear sector.

Japan's cutting-edge nuclear technology is considered crucial for India's massive economic growth. Japan has a monopoly in the manufacturing of reactor safety components and power plant domes - key parts that India needs to enable its nuclear cooperation programs with the US and other countries.

The deal would allow Japan's struggling nuclear industry access to the growing Indian market, which is estimated to be worth $150 billion. This would be a great opportunity for Japanese nuclear companies that have suffered greatly since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident.

India's similar civil nuclear deals with South Korea and the US "have boosted bilateral relations," Smruti Pattanaik, a research fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, told DW.

But concerns remain about India's potential misuse of the technology for developing more nuclear weapons. The Japanese people have long been apprehensive about the deal with India due to its nuclear weapons program.

"The Japanese government has softened its stance for the sake of economic benefits," Akira Kawasaki of Tokyo-based Peace Boat organization, told DW. "The deal grants the same rights de-facto to India as other nuclear powers that have signed the NPT."

The shift in Japan's nuclear cooperation policy with India started in 2008, when the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) granted a waiver to New Delhi to push through a civil nuclear agreement with Washington. NSG - a 48-nation grouping that includes the US, Russia, Britain, France and Japan - controls the export of nuclear technology and materials to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.


Santas will take over Downtown Las Vegas for the 12th annual, iconic Las Vegas Great Santa Run benefitting Opportunity Village on Saturday, December 3.

This year, Human Nature will join Opportunity Villages OVIPs as the Grand Marshals of 2016. The Strips famed Chippendales will serve as the Grand Marshals for the one-mile Kris Kringle Jingle Walk.

The morning will kick off with music by a DJ Mikey P, a Zumba class, and more at 8 a.m. at the Third Street stage at the Fremont Street Experience. The 5K run begins at 10 a.m. with the Kris Kringle Jingle Walk at 10:30 a.m. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., all proceeds from the Slotzilla zipline and zoomline rides will benefit Opportunity Village.

After the race, runners can enjoy the new Blitzens Bar Crawl. Downtown bars will offer drink specials for those with an official red Blitzens Bar Crawl cup, which can be purchased online or at select bars the day of the event. Have a jolly good time visiting participating bars, including Inspire Las Vegas, Itsy Bitsy Ramen and Whisky, Park on Fremont, Velveteen Rabbit, Triple George Grill and the Vegas Pub Crawler.

The Great Santa Run raises funds and awareness for Opportunity Villages myriad programs, which provide unparalleled opportunities, enrichment and support to more than 3,000 individuals with intellectual and related disabilities throughout the Las Vegas Valley. Pioneers of the World Santa Alliance, the Las Vegas Great Santa Run is the reigning champion of an annual friendly competition for most Santas gathered for a fun run with Liverpool, Tasmania, Australia, Japan, Belgium, Texas and San Francisco, with plans to maintain the trophy for another year in 2016.


Star of ABCs hit show, Bachelor in Paradise, Daniel Maguire traded in an island paradise for a Strip-side party at Chateau Nightclub & Rooftop at Paris Las Vegas, where he was spotted late last night (Pictured: Daniel Maguire arrives at Chateau Nightclub).

Maguire arrived at the nightclub close to midnight, dressed in a black-and-white button-up complemented by black jeans. The hunky 31-year-old bachelor, also a Canadian model and personal trainer, partied the night away in a lavish VIP booth on the Chateau rooftop.

Maguire was first introduced to audiences across the country as a suitor for JoJo Fletcher on the latest season of The Bachelorette, returning to the TV screen for another shot at love on Bachelor in Paradise.


Entrance

Hotel des Arts Saigon's acclaim by 2016 World Luxury Hotel Awards is an acknowledgement of our efforts to provide sophisticated business travelers with a signature luxury experience that our passionate team is proud to deliver, said Carl Gagnon, the hotels general manager.

World Luxury Hotel Awards are presented to luxury hotels in over 50 different categories from around the world at the annual ceremony and these prestigious awards are seen as the pinnacle of recognition for luxury hotels worldwide.

Award winners set the benchmark for luxury hotels on the global front in achieving recognition for exceptional facilities and unsurpassed service. Nominees are carefully evaluated by a select global panel of expert consultants situated amongst 144 countries. Guests, visitors, clients, travel agents and industry experts then cast their votes online.

Officially opened in October 2015 and situated in the heart of vibrant Saigon, Hotel de Arts Saigon evokes a time when a voyage to the Far East was a luxurious privilege for the most sophisticated members of society.

All 168 guest rooms and suites, four dynamic restaurants and bars are elegantly designed with traditional Indochine elements elevated in timeless French style with various eclectic touches.

At every turn, guests are immersed in the romance and elegance of a bygone era, while maintaining comforts, technology and amenities that are exquisitely modern for business purpose. The hotel staff is key to creating an authentic, refined experience, with a bespoke approach that integrates the most extraordinary aspects of East meets West hospitality.
Photo : nasa.gov

The US space agency had already pushed back the launch by a day to Tuesday.

If technicians are able to finish their repairs as planned, Discovery and its six American astronauts will now launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center at 3:52 pm (1952 GMT) Wednesday, NASA test director Jeff Spaulding said.

The flight to the orbiting International Space Station is the fourth and final shuttle flight of the year, and the last scheduled for Discovery, the oldest in the three-shuttle fleet that is being retired in 2011.
A man stands outside the processing center for migrants and refugees in northern Paris, on Nov 10, 2016, the day of its inauguration. (Photo: AFP/Philippe Lopez)

The centre in a disused railway yard near Gare du Nord station will take in 50-80 people a day - the estimated number of migrants who arrive in Paris daily, most of whom end up sleeping rough.

They can spend up to 10 days at the site where they will receive medical care and advice on seeking asylum before being transferred to various refugee hostels.

Three Eritreans with backpacks and woolly caps were among the first to arrive at the site, where they were greeted by a "Welcome" sign in French, Arabic, Pashto, Dari and other languages.

"It's nice here," said Thierno Diallo, a 31-year-old Guinean after he entered the new shelter, adding that he had previously been sleeping on the street.

According to the Paris town hall, 60 men were housed in the camp by Thursday evening.

The plan is to process those in the centre quickly and move them on elsewhere to free up places for new arrivals.

The centre is made up of a giant inflatable white-and-yellow reception hall and a 10,000-square-metre (110,000 square feet) hangar with dormitories, bathrooms, a canteen and a games area. Around 500 people have volunteered to assist the 120 staff.

"The idea is to create a place where every newly arrived migrant can be welcomed and offered dignified, humane shelter," said Bruno Morel, head of the Emmaus Solidarite housing charity in charge of the centre.

A separate facility for families and women will open in early 2017 in the southeastern suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine. Unaccompanied minors will be sent to existing children's shelters around the city.

100,00 ASYLUM REQUESTS

The opening of the men's centre comes a week after police cleared a camp in northeast Paris where 3,800 people - mostly Afghans, Sudanese and Eritreans - had been living in tents and mattresses under an elevated metro line.

Last month, authorities also demolished the notorious "Jungle" shantytown in the northern port of Calais - the main launchpad for attempts to smuggle across the Channel to Britain.

France's Socialist government is anxious to show it has a handle on migration in the run-up to presidential and parliamentary elections next year.

Over the past year, the authorities have repeatedly cleared makeshift migrant settlements in northern Paris only for them to sprout up again.

To try to resolve the issue, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced in May she would create a refugee shelter operating to international standards.

Europe is grappling with its biggest migrant crisis since the aftermath of World War II.

More than 1.5 million people have crossed the Mediterranean since 2014 to escape wars, persecution or poverty in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

France has welcomed only a fraction of the newcomers.

In 2015, it received 73,500 new asylum requests, up 24 per cent from the year before, according to interior ministry figures.

Authorities have forecast 100,000 new requests this year.
US President-elect Donald Trump speaks to the press with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) following a meeting at the Capitol in Washington, DC, on Nov 10, 2016. (Photo: AFP/Nicholas Kamm)

Continuing a Washington victory tour of sorts after his presidential election shocked the world, Trump and Vice president-elect Mike Pence sat down with House Speaker Paul Ryan and then with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to discuss the Republican priorities in Congress.

Ryan and Trump had a testy relationship during the campaign, with the House speaker last month saying he would not defend the nominee after Trump's lewd comments about women were made public.

Now that Trump is the president-elect, Ryan appeared friendly and gracious as they met, first over lunch and then in his Capitol office.

"We had a very detailed meeting," Trump told reporters at a brief photo spray. "As you know, healthcare - we're going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on healthcare," he said.

Trump made repealing Obamacare, and building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, pillars of his presidential campaign.

Trump said he and the Republican majority in Congress were going to accomplish "absolutely spectacular things for the American people," adding he was eager to get started.

Afterwards, following an hour-long meeting with McConnell on the other side of the Capitol, Trump stood at the Senate majority leader's side and stressed that "we have a lot to do."

"We're going to look very strongly at immigration," he said. "We're going to look very strongly at healthcare, and we're looking at jobs - big league jobs."

Trump did not elaborate.

McConnell said they discussed the transition operations and said "he's anxious to get going early, and so are we."

Ryan for his part complimented Trump on his astounding come-from-behind victory against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

"We're going to turn that victory into progress for the American people, and we are now talking about how we are going to hit the ground running to get this country turned around and make America great again," Ryan said.

Congress returns to work next week, after an extended break for the US elections.
404!: NOT FOUND

The page is not found!



Try our home page: https://vir.com.vn/ - Vietnam Investment Review - VIR
The IP construction started three months after the project was licensed. Construction of the 600-hectare IP will be divided into two phases with the first phase, which covers 300 hectares, located in the provinces Kim Bang district.

The IP is located near National Highway 38. From here it is easy to access National Highway 1 to go to Hanoi and the Hanoi  Haiphong Expressway to go to Haiphong Port. It takes 40 minutes to transport goods from the IP to Noi Bai International Airport and 75 minutes to transport goods from the IP to Haiphong Port, thus exporting goods by both air and road is convenient.

The area has an advantage in human resources with 500,000 local workers in Ha Nam and approximately four million workers from neighbouring provinces. In order to attract human resources, Viglacera will build accommodations for workers and specialists close to the IP.

In the framework of the IPs ground-breaking ceremony, Chairman of the Ha Nam Peoples Committee granted investment certificates to three South Korean firms. Viglacera had completed the site clearance and handed over sites for these firms to build factories, which are expected to come into official operation in 2017.

Established in 1974, Viglacera has developed from a traditional brick and ceramics manufacturer to a state-owned conglomerate with a focus on building material production and development of infrastructure, IPs and residential and business properties.

The firm has a total of 40 subsidiaries and affiliated companies nationwide. As of now, Viglacera has developed 10 IPs across the country. These IPs have attracted over 200 foreign companies coming from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, some of which are Samsung, Canon, Orion and Sumitomo.

With its slogan Investors Success is Our Success, Viglacera develops IPs with convenient location, transport infrastructure as well as good quality facilities and security in order to ensure investors activities are carried out under the best conditions. Viglacera has received international awards such as, Best Vietnamese IP Developer and Vietnams Most Active Developer awarded by BCI Asia for its achievements in industrial and residential property development.


remaining of

Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading.
U.S. officials are urging the American public to start a dialogue to determine the right balance between privacy and security. Speaking at an annual summit this week in Washington, intelligence and security officials said that absolute privacy is not in the public interest as authorities try to fight cybercrime and terrorism. Zlatica Hoke reports. VOA Khmer's Soeung Sophat narrates.
Cambodian-Americans have expressed hopes that President-elect Donald Trump can address their economic and social concerns and strengthen US foreign policy towards Phnom Penh.



Prime Minister Hun Sen has voiced his approval at Trumps victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, along with a number of other authoritarian world leaders, prompting analysts to worry that a Trump presidency could reshape foreign policy to downplay human rights concerns.



Nem Chhoeung, president of the Khmer Town Association in Atlanta, GA, said he was concerned, especially for minority groups like ours.



We are concerned about more deportation of immigrants, because he seems to be tough on that, he said.





The real estate billionaire stunned many in the US by comprehensively defeating his opponent in an election that also saw the Republicans win control of the Senate and Congress.



Another concern is that Trumps party controls the White House, House of Representatives, and the Senate, therefore if Trump has good intentions, then we are happy, if not, then we are concerned, Chhoeung added.



The Cambodian community in Atlanta has struggled with high unemployment and low access to education and healthcare.



Navann Cheth, a community activist from Long Beach, CA, hoped that Trump could do more to help the Cambodian-American community in the United States, because he is a Republican so he can help Cambodia.



Trump won at least 290 electoral college votes, according to the latest counts, with only 270 needed to secure the presidency.



Kompha Seth, secretary of the National Cambodian American Organization, from Chicago, IL, voted for Trump, believing his lack of experience of Washington could actually be a benefit.



At least we hope that he is a new person with no experience in the government because people are tired of the current US government, he said. They are tired of seeing the same faces and that Washington does not represent the real voices of the people. The election results simply reflected that.



A longtime Republican, San Oeun, of Richmond, VA, switched to the Clinton camp this time round.



Im not disappointed with the election results because I know that they will lead the country in the same direction, Oeun said.
Amnesty International is calling on Nigerian authorities to provide accommodation for as many as 30,000 people who have been left homeless after their waterfront communities were destroyed despite a court injunction.

Amnesty said Friday that the people made homeless in Lagos State were driven out this week and their homes deliberately set alight, in direct contravention of a court order.

A fire started in the Otodo Gbame community Wednesday, and eyewitnesses said police who were present did not try to stop the fire. The witnesses said police chased them away when they attempted to put out the blaze.

It was unclear how the fire started.

Reports said that after the fire was extinguished, police and a demolition team returned with a bulldozer, at which time residents were forced out of their homes.

The community had been granted an injunction Monday ordering the Lagos State government not to demolish the community.

The governor of Lagos State announced October 9 that the waterfront communities surrounding Lagos State creeks and waterways would be demolished because of public health and safety concerns.

Governor Akinwunmi Ambode said the shantytowns were providing safe havens for suspected kidnappers and must be destroyed for the safety of local children.

Amnesty said despite the High Court injunction, more than 40 communities surrounding Lagos Lagoon face eviction.

In recent years, poor waterfront communities in Lagos have begun to be replaced by luxury apartments and commercial districts.
Tens of thousands of people from New York to California filled the streets of large U.S. cities for a third day Thursday to demonstrate their dismay at Donald Trump's election to be the United States' 45th president.

Demonstrations occurred from Portland, Oregon, to Chicago, to New York and parts in between and each typically drew a few hundred people, less than the thousands that gathered in various protests that surged after it became clear Trump had won Tuesday's election.



Late Thursday night, Trump went on Twitter to take on the protesters. Trump tweets: "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!"

In Portland Thursday night thousands of people marched throughout the city, according to police, as protests turned violent, with people smashing store windows and lighting off firecrackers. Police declared the protests a riot, said there were people with baseball bats in the crowd and told people via loudspeaker to move on.



Oregon Department of Transportation officials closed portions of Interstate 5 and Interstate 84 in the area intermittently as a precaution.



In Denver, protesters managed to shut down Interstate 25 near downtown Denver briefly Thursday night.



Denver police tweeted around 10 p.m. that demonstrators made their way onto the freeway and traffic was halted in the northbound and southbound lanes. Police say the interstate was reopened about half an hour later as the crowd moved back downtown.



Earlier protests in Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs on Wednesday and Thursday went off peacefully.

Protesters briefly shut down interstate highways in Minneapolis as well.

In Philadelphia, protesters near City Hall held signs bearing slogans like "Not Our President," "Trans Against Trump" and "Make America Safe For All."

About 500 people turned out at a protest in Louisville, Kentucky, and in Baltimore, hundreds of people marched to the stadium where the Ravens were playing a football game.

In San Francisco earlier Thursday, many of the marchers were African-American and Hispanic students.

The demonstrators said the tone of Trump's campaign comments about immigration frightened them, and they accused him of racism and xenophobia.

IN PHOTOS: Anti-Trump Protests Rage On Across US

A large group of marchers made themselves heard outside the Trump Tower in New York City. They included pop superstar Lady Gaga, who stood on a truck waving a sign popularized by supporters of Trump's vanquished opponent, Hillary Clinton: "Love Trumps Hate."

One New Yorker said he is afraid that Trump's avowed desire for "law and order" in American cities will result in police targeting more blacks for unfair and unwarranted searches and harassment.

Watch video report from VOA's Zlatica Hoke:

Hundreds of students stormed out of their classrooms Thursday in San Francisco and marched to the city's famous Fisherman's Wharf.

"In our hearts, we are supporting the students," city schools superintendent Myong Leigh said. "This is technically not a school-sponsored activity. This is students taking their feelings and emotions and channeling them in a way that feels right to them."

WATCH: New Yorkers React to Trump Presidency

Some marchers in Los Angeles burned a large paper bust of Trump, and prepared new attempts to blockade the city's crowded auto freeways. Others in Oakland, near San Francisco, threw gasoline bombs and fireworks at police and blocked highways with garbage fires. At least 30 people were arrested.

Some of Trump's harshest comments during the campaign were aimed at Mexican immigrants, many of whom he singled out as criminals and rapists. In campaign speeches, he has threatened mass deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. without legal residence or work permits.

Trump also has directed tough words at Muslim-Americans, both immigrants and longtime U.S. residents.

Many protesters believe Trump will fill vacancies on the nation's highest court by appointing political conservatives. A Trump presidency, they warn, could overturn laws protecting women's right to abortion and equal treatment for homosexuals, including in marriage.

Trump has promised to be a president for all Americans, but he has not mentioned the protests or discussed his policy positions in detail since becoming president-elect.

Watch: President's reaction to protests against election results

Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer told a television interviewer that this is the time for anti-Trump protesters to "get it out of their systems" and exercise their right to free speech, as long as "they give this man that was just elected very historically and his new vice-president an opportunity to govern."

In conceding the election to her Republican opponents on Wednesday, defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said, "Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead."
The Russian military says its officers have found evidence of chemical weapons use by Syrian militants.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Friday that ministry experts have found unexploded ordnance and fragments of munitions containing chlorine and white phosphorus on Aleppo's southwestern outskirts. Konashenkov said the discovery proves the militants have used chemical weapons against civilians and Syrian army soldiers.

The U.S. and its allies have pushed for sanctions on the Syrian government for using chemical weapons. Russia has questioned international investigators' conclusions linking chemical weapons use to the Syrian government and pointed at evidence of their use by the militants.

The U.N. Security Council has voted to extend the mandate of inspectors working to determine those responsible for chemical weapons attacks in Syria.
As Americas European allies try to figure out their future relationships with Washington under President-elect Donald Trump, analysts say NATO and Russia are involved in an increasingly tense battle for influence in the Balkan states. Montenegro  formerly part of Serbia until declaring independence in 2006  is about to join the NATO alliance.



There is increasing anxiety, however, over the U.S. commitment to the core principle of collective defense.



Montenegro hosted NATO exercises earlier this month as part of preparations to join the alliance in 2017. Becoming part of NATO would mark a decisive change in course for the small Balkan country, according to James Ker-Lindsay of the London School of Economics.



"At one point Montenegro was a Russian bastion, if you like, in the western Balkans; but, thats completely changed now," said Ker-Lindsay. "Under the government of [Prime Minister Milo] Djukanovic, we saw that, in fact, Russian influence has lessened considerably. So for example, Montenegro signed up to the sanctions that were imposed against Russia following the events in Crimea."

War games



Just a few hundred kilometers away, Serbia has been hosting war games with Russia and Belarus. Moscow has made little secret of its anger at Montenegros decision to join NATO.

Trump has demanded that NATO allies spend more on defense  threatening that otherwise the U.S. may not come to their aid. Thats triggered deep anxiety, says Ker-Lindsay.

"Really, everything is up in the air. And unless Europe can come up with some sort of stronger response to anchor the region in, then of course I think the feeling will be that Moscow will capitalize on this," said Ker-Lindsay.

Tensions have increased following claims of an assassination plot by pro-Russian militants against Montenegros prime minister, Milo Djukanovic. Theres no suggestion that the Russian state was involved.





Security focus



The security jitters are compounded as the EU deals with internal tensions  first among them, losing one of its major military powers, as Britain leaves the bloc. Europe should soften the blow, says Leslie Vinjamuri of London policy group Chatham House.



"A wise policy would be for Europeans to work very hard collectively, to really strengthen and hold onto that relationship between Europe and the UK," said Vinjamuri.



Vinjamuri says she believes Trumps approach to NATO could change rapidly if faced with a security crisis.



"I think we could see a very different strategy pursued by Donald Trump," Vinjamuri said. "And this isnt uncharacteristic of past presidents. Remember that George [W.] Bush entered office with a very different set of policies, or at least policies that he suggested he would pursue than those that he did pursue. And that was entirely a response to the 9/11 attacks."



Analysts say Trumps picks for top government posts  especially secretary of state  will reveal more about his foreign policy intentions.
Californians made it abundantly clear Tuesday night that they didn't want to see Republican Donald Trump in the White House, overwhelmingly voting for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Now, disappointed with Trump's victory, they are seeking another way out.



A group of secessionists is taking advantage of post-election discontent to push for 'Calexit', the new name for the prospect of California seceding from the U.S. It is modeled after "Brexit," Britain's historic decision to leave the European Union.



Discussion of the idea exploded Wednesday on Twitter, where tweets with the hashtag #calexit rolled in at hundreds per minute all day. Many  often paired with the hashtag #notmypresident, in reference to Trump's election  backed the movement.



I cannot identify with bigotry, sexism, xenophobia," one Twitter user wrote. "I'm no longer American, I am Californian."



Silicon Valley venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, who is Iranian-American, said he was willing to bankroll a secessionist campaign. He said the new nation would be called New California.



California is the country's most populous state, making up 11.6 percent of the U.S. population, according to mid-year figures from the U.S. Census. If it were a separate nation, it would be the 35th biggest country on Earth, according to U.N. data. It has the sixth largest economy in the world, according to 2015 global GDP figures.



But while the U.S. Constitution specifies how a state can gain admission to the United States, there is no stipulation for the reverse.
China is calling for national unity for all areas it considers Chinese territory.

Speaking at the 150th anniversary of the birth of China's first president Sun Yat-sen, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Friday China will not tolerate any attempts by territories to separate from China.

The president's remarks come as China has suspended communication with self-governing Taiwan until it recognizes the "one China" policy and after China barred two elected officials in Hong Kong from taking office after they expressed anti-China sentiment.

"All activities attempting to split the country will definitely be strongly opposed by all Chinese people. We will resolutely not allow anyone, any organization, any party to split any bit of territory from China, in any way at any time," Xi said at the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing.

Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan's first female president of the China-skeptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), took office in May following a landslide electoral victory over the more China-friendly Kuomintang party (KMT). She called on Beijing to face up to the reality of her government's existence and the island's democracy and said the two sides should sit down and talk.

China insists that Taiwan is part of China.

The Chinese government has criticized Hong Kong independence advocates as separatists and belittled them as a fringe minority. When Chinas number-three ranking leader Zhang Dejiang visited the territory in May, he warned that Hong Kong would undoubtedly rot if it gave up its one country, two systems formula of autonomy, enshrined in the Basic Law.
Two days after his stunning victory, Donald Trump made his first visit to the Capitol as president-elect to meet with Republican leaders and discuss his ambitious legislative to-do list for the early months of his administration.

After meeting Thursday with President Barack Obama, Trump worked with House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican.

"We are now talking about how we are going to hit the ground running, to make sure that we can get this country turned around and make America great again," Ryan said, with Trump seated at his side.

"We're going to lower taxes, we're going to fix health care and make it more affordable and better," Trump said moments later.

WATCH: Trump Honored to Meet with Congressional Leaders

On the other side of the Capitol, Trump conferred with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the other man he will rely on to shepherd his agenda through Congress.

"A lot of really great priorities," Trump said afterward. "We're looking very strongly at immigration; we're going to look at the borders. Very importantly, we're looking very strongly at health care and we're looking at jobs. Big league jobs."

"It was a first-class meeting," McConnell told reporters.

Democratic hopes dashed

Before the election, the majority leader often refused to discuss Trump  or even mention his name.

"I don't particularly want to sit here today and critique the presidential campaigns," McConnell said weeks ago in response to persistent questions from reporters about Trump's often-incendiary comments on the campaign trail.

By contrast, Democratic lawmakers had been unabashedly exuberant about their presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, and optimistic about advancing their policy goals right up to the final hours of election night.

"Tackle climate change and safeguard our planet!" roared New York Senator Chuck Schumer at a victory party for his successful reelection bid. "Pass comprehensive immigration reform, and get a functioning Supreme Court  a Supreme Court that will protect women's rights, voting rights."

But that vision hinged on a key assumption that proved false  that Clinton would beat Trump.

'A lot of change'

Now, it is Republicans who are laying plans for the coming year.

"We would like to see the country go in a different direction," McConnell said at a news conference Wednesday.

WATCH: McConnell Discusses Transition Issues with Trump

With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the White House, McConnell expects action on taxes, repealing Obamacare, and filling a Supreme Court vacancy.

"The American people have spoken, and President Trump will send us a nominee, I assume, early next year," the majority leader said.

"This Congress controlled by Republicans  they are going to act," said political analyst Darrell West of the Washington-based Brookings Institution. "They have an agenda of things they want to do. They have the votes to push them through. So, people are going to see a lot of change."

Much of that change will target President Barack Obama's legacy. Senate Democrats will be able to use procedural tactics to block some, but not all, Republican agenda items. And on some matters, like Trump's pledge to build a massive wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, divisions among Republicans could be exposed.
President-elect Donald Trump met Friday with many of his top advisers in his Manhattan apartment at Trump Tower on the task of forming a new administration. He said on Twitter "Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!"

U.S. media reported Friday that U.S. vice president-elect Mike Pence will be given control of Trump's transition team, rather than New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has been running the transition. Trump is reported to have told advisers that he wanted to use Pence's Washington experience to aid a swift transition in January.

Trump has about 70 days to decide on a 15-member cabinet, as well as other top staff for his administration. Several of his close advisers have been mentioned as options to fill key posts. Here are some of the names being talked about.

Rudy Giuliani

iuliani is the former mayor of New York and known for his efforts to unite the city after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that toppled the World Trade Center. He has been an informal adviser to the Trump campaign and frequent spokesman for the campaign with various media outlets. He was the first person to be mentioned by Trump in his election acceptance speech. "He's unbelievable," Trump said. "He's traveled with us and he went through meetings, and Rudy never changes." Giuliani, an attorney, is often mentioned as a possible attorney general.

Newt Gingrich

The former speaker of the House was the architect of the 1994 "Contract with America" that earned Republicans control of the House after decades of democratic dominance. Gingrich was an early Trump supporter and was reportedly on Trump's short list for vice president. Since leaving the House, Gingrich has been an influential Republican strategist and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2011. He has been mentioned as a possible candidate for secretary of state or White House chief of staff.

Chris Christie

The New Jersey Governor quickly gave his support to Trump after his bid for the Republican nomination ended. He had been serving as head of the Trump transition team until Pence took over Friday, and was reportedly on Trump's short list for vice president. Christie, a former U.S. attorney, has been mentioned as a possible attorney general or commerce secretary. He has been entangled in a years-old scandal over the closure of a major bridge linking New Jersey and New York, allegedly to punish a local mayor. Two of Christie's former aides were convicted in the case earlier this month.

Reince Priebus

The current chair of the Republican National Committee was a steady supporter of Trump when many in the Republican party establishment wanted to distance themselves from the billionaire. Priebus provided Trump with an important link to the party's resources and field operations to get out the vote. Trump ceded the podium for a minute during his election acceptance speech to Priebus to thank him for his support. Priebus is rumored to be in contention for the role of White House chief of staff.

Steve Bannon

Bannon served as Trump's campaign chief after heading the conservative website Breitbart News. Bannon is not afraid to use strong political tactics and was behind some of the more controversial moves of the Trump campaign, including bringing women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct to a presidential debate. He is cited as a potential White House chief of staff.

Kellyanne Conway

Conway served as Trump's campaign manager and tweeted that she might accept a senior White House role. She founded a polling company in 1995 and has consulted on polling for Republican politicians and major corporations. Conway also served as a senior adviser to Gingrich's presidential bid in 2011.

Jeff Sessions

The Alabama senator was one of the first politicians to endorse Trump when many other leading Republicans were against his candidacy. Trump hailed him in his election acceptance speech as the first "major politician" to support him. "Let me tell you, he is highly respected in Washington because he is as smart as you get." Sessions has been in the senate since 1997 and sits on the Armed Services Committee and Budget Committee among others. He has served in the Army Reserve and is mentioned as a possible candidate for secretary of defense.

Steven Mnuchin

The campaign finance manager for Trump's election, Mnuchin's name is being mentioned as a possible candidate for treasury secretary. Mnuchin is a veteran of Goldman Sachs and a CEO of a private investment firm.
Environmentalists are reeling when they envisage what impact on climate change President-elect Donald Trump might have.

"A gut punch to the planet" is how environmental group Friends of the Earth described his upset victory.

But despite candidate Trumps promises to reopen coal mines, pull out of the Paris climate treaty and roll back environmental regulations, there's only so much the president-elect can do once he begins governing next year.

Energy markets are shifting away from fossil fuels, according to economists, and the market for renewable energy is growing steadily. So, ironically, for all of Trumps vows to create new American jobs, if he keeps his promises on environmental issues, he could wind up shipping even more U.S. jobs to China.

Managing the unavoidable

"The election of Donald Trump could be devastating to our climate and our future," said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune. Trump is the only world leader "to reject the scientific consensus that climate change is real and mankind is the cause," he added.

Earths average temperature has already risen about 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times. Global warming of 2 degrees Celsius is the point at which at which humankind can "avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable" impacts of climate change, says University of California-Berkeley public policy professor Dan Kammen.

At the current rate of warming, temperatures will hit the 2-degrees-warmer benchmark before 2050.

At a time when aggressive emissions cuts are needed, Trump's proposals point in the opposite direction.

Cheaper than gas?

In recent years, there has been "an alignment of the climate movement and the marketplace that is unprecedented," Brune noted.

The United States has become the world's largest producer of natural gas. As the price of natural gas has fallen, it has helped push coal out of the power generation market.

"Coal is not coming back," Brune said.

That's not just his opinion. The president of the largest electric utility in West Virginia, the nation's number-two coal producer, agrees.

You just cant go with new coal [plants] at this point in time, Appalachian Power President Charles Patton told the states Energy Summit last October, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail. It is just not economically feasible to do so.

But as far as natural gas prices have fallen, the costs of renewable energy have plummeted even further. Wind power is 60 percent cheaper than it was just seven years ago. Large-scale solar is 80 percent cheaper. In many cases, wind and solar power are now cheaper than natural gas.

Last year, the United States added more power-generating capacity from wind than from any other source. Natural gas was second, followed by solar. The largest share of wind power came from Texas, where members of Congress are vocal opponents of climate-change legislation.

"Texas is a leader in renewable energy even though it hasn't necessarily been a leader in supporting climate action ... because it's good for the economy," said World Resources Institute President Andrew Steer.

Power companies around the world are responding to dropping prices for renewables. Dubai recently announced it is building a large-scale solar plant that will produce electricity for less than a new natural gas-fired plant would - in a country that produces natural gas, Kammen notes.

Complete folly

The growth opportunities for American companies and American jobs are in renewables, Kammen says, and if Trump makes rebuilding the coal industry his top priority, that would "fly in the face of economic opportunity."

"It would be complete folly to do anything but accelerate these plans to expand the renewable energy industry, he adds.

Energy demand in the industrialized world is only expected to grow 18 percent by 2040, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. For the developing world, that figure is 71 percent.

These countries want renewables, Kammen says. And they want American-made renewables.

Kammen is a U.S. State Department science envoy for the Middle East and Africa. He says he has met with more than 20 national delegations at the latest round of climate talks in Morocco. "These are all countries that have clean-energy targets of 50 percent or more by 2030. And they all want to buy U.S.-made technology."

"If these solar, wind and efficiency (products) are not available from the U.S., they will go elsewhere," he adds.

Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean companies dominate the solar-panel industry. A Chinese company took over the top of the wind-turbine market last year, pushing out a U.S. company.

No slackening

The next big opportunity is in energy storage, Kammen says. The U.S. government has made major investments in storage technology research.

"If we shut down our interest here," he says, "we are going to choose to give those jobs to China."

While Trump once said on Twitter that China invented the concept of global warming to undermine US manufacturing, "China is taking quite serious action on climate change right now," says the World Resources Institute's Andrew Steer. With pollution choking Chinese cities, Beijing "believes it is very much in its own interest to do so. We see no reason or evidence to expect any slackening of that," even with Trump's threats to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

Furthermore, he adds, "It's certainly true that China would benefit competitively if the United States falls behind."
Many Facebook users have been discovering a new problem with their accounts  a banner on the top of their homepage, telling people they are dead.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was one of the victims of the bug that emerged this week on the social networking site. Some wits have titled the phenomenon #FacebookRapture, referring to a biblical story about people being removed from Earth in mass numbers.

While the notion is jarring, the message sounds benign. The banner, which appears above the person's original page, reads, "We hope that people who love _____ will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate their life."

A Facebook spokesperson told the Buzzfeed News site that the problem was due to a bug that has since been fixed.

Facebook has recently been plagued with criticism that partisan stories posted on the site helped to influence the U.S. presidential election.

The outcry was so strong that on Thursday Zuckerberg spoke out to defend his company, saying at a conference in San Francisco that the idea is "pretty crazy."

"There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news," he said.
Former Afghan Intelligence Chief Accuses Pakistan of Militarily Supporting Taliban

Afghanistans former spy chief has accused Pakistan of helping the Afghan Taliban militarily, as well as providing them with safe havens..



In an exclusive interview with VOA in Kabul, Rahmatullah Nabil, the former head of the National Directorate of Security, said Pakistan helped create a strike force called the Red Force or Red Brigade in late 2014, and that it started operating in early 2015 when international forces had mostly left and surveillance had been reduced.



Initially, Nabil added, almost 3,000 people were recruited to fight in southern Afghanistan. They were divided into cells of 25 fighters assigned to one handler from Pakistans intelligence agency, the ISI.



Each fighter was armed with an AK-47 and each cell received portable rocket launchers or machine guns like an RPG-7, a PKM, an 85-millimeter gun, and a Dushka machine gun.



He said there were signs that these cells were involved in conflict in Farah, Helmand, Ghazni, and Uruzgan, some of the provinces that have seen heavy fighting between members of the Afghan security forces and Taliban.





Explosive charges

Nabil also accused Pakistan of reopening and distributing weapons from at least four depots that he said were last used to dispense firearms to Mujahedeen fighters during the conflict with the former Soviet Union.



He said the depots were close to the Pakistani cities of Quetta, Miramshah, Peshawar, and Spin Tal.



Pakistan strongly denies allegations it supports the Afghan Taliban.

Lt. Gen. Ehsanul Haq, the former head of Pakistans intelligence agency, called the allegations absolutely ridiculous.



If Afghanistan was worried about militants coming from this side, he said, the best solution was to harden, regulate, and stabilize the border between the two countries, but that the Afghan government balked at any such suggestion.

Nabil, a longtime critic of Pakistan, was forced to resign after he publicly criticized his boss, President Ashraf Ghani, for engaging with Pakistan and trying to secure Pakistans help in restarting peace talks with the Afghan Taliban after an initial round failed.



Flow of militants

He now runs the charity Help for Afghan Heroes, which works for families of Afghan national security personnel killed or wounded in battle.

The former spy chief also criticized Pakistans military operation, called Zarb-e-Azb, saying it deliberately helped push some militants across the border into Afghanistan.



The operation, he said, was intentionally launched at a time when Afghan forces were busy with the second round of presidential elections and could not control militants crossing to their side of the border.



Nabil accused Pakistan of relocating several Afghan Taliban, particularly members of the Haqqani network, to other areas of Pakistan before launching its military operation, along with opening several mountain passes to allow some of them  along with members of other international militant groups like Jundullah, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM)  to cross over to Afghanistan.



Pakistani officials have said they shared their plans with both the government in Kabul and NATO forces in Afghanistan well ahead of time, but that both failed to take the necessary actions against possible infiltration of militants during the operation.



Competing interests

Commenting on reports of Irans support for the Taliban, the former spy chief said the country is using the Taliban as a tactical tool because it is afraid of Islamic State gaining ground. Most of the Iranian support, he explained, was in western Afghanistan bordering Iran, in the form of money or small arms.



He also said Russias interest in Afghanistan had increased since 2014 when violence reached northern Afghanistan near areas Russia considered its backyard.



Intelligence cooperation between China and Afghanistan, according to Nabil, had increased significantly during the last few years.



Afghanistan, he added, handed several members of ETIM to China that had been trained in Karachi, Pakistans largest city.



That was when, according to Nabil, Chinas interest in Afghanistans peace process increased and it became part of the efforts to help facilitate peace talks between the Afghan Taliban and Afghan government.
A former child soldier has received one of Australias highest civic awards, the 2017 New South Wales Australian of the Year.

Deng Adut has been recognized for helping to combat discrimination and assisting juvenile offenders. The 33-year-old former refugee is a successful criminal lawyer who helps Sudanese migrants.

And he is now a contender for a prestigious national award.

As a young child he was made to fight for Sudans Peoples Liberation Army. He endured torture, witnessed atrocities and was shot in the back.

He told VOA his ordeal began when he was kidnapped from his mother at the age of 6

The reality started hitting you, he said, because there were thousands of other kids that were just, you know, sleeping on the ground, on the floor, waiting for the orders to be given so that they can march to Ethiopia, and we traveled towards Ethiopia. We had suffered a lot of thirst. We did not have water for days. We also were ambushed by another tribal group called Murle at the time.

Adut was eventually rescued and smuggled to Kenya with the help of the United Nations. He arrived as a refugee in Australia in 1988.

He taught himself to read English as a teenager and lived in his car while studying law at a university in Sydney. He plans to become a barrister, his ambition fueled by an insatiable desire to learn.

I am hungry, he said. I have been deprived for a long, long time. Even my belly, which used to be the biggest belly in town when I was a kid has shrunk to the point that I do not even eat lunch, I do not even eat breakfast, I only eat dinner. So what the idea of learning to me is that hunger in me is not about food anymore.

The award in New South Wales puts the former child soldier in the running for the title of Australian of the Year, the nations most coveted civic honor, which will be announced January 25.
Hassan Ayariga, the twice disqualified presidential candidate of Ghana's opposition All People's Congress, is calling on the chairperson of the country's electoral commission to step down with immediate effect, before next month's general elections.

If chairperson Charlotte Osei does not resign, Ayariga said Ghana's presidential, legislative and local elections on December 7 will no longer be seen as transparent and credible.

Civil society groups in Ghana and other members of the electoral commission dismissed Ayariga's demands and defended Osei as someone who has implemented electoral laws without favoring any side.

The APC leader noted that Osei, who has held her position for less than a year, has faced legal challenges more than 15 times, with every one of her decisions being overturned in court.

The electoral commission announced the placement this week of seven candidates deemed qualified to contest the presidential election. Ayariga was not among them, having been disqualified for a second time for failing to meet the commission's requirements for registering his candidacy.

The opposition figure had filed a legal challenge against the electoral commission's original disqualification, and the court agreed, ordering the electoral body to reconsider his nominating papers. However, the commission then decided to disqualify Ayariga for a second time.

"This EC [electoral commission] boss has actually destroyed the credibility of the commission and the commissioners," Ayariga told VOA. "Now if we are going into an election with such a person what do you expect? Do you think we are going to have a peaceful election? Do you think other political parties would accept the results in good faith when [Osei] has demonstrated in several places and on several occasions that she is not credible and she cannot be trusted?"

Naming Charlotte Osei to head the government's electoral commission "is the worst mistake the president of the republic has done so far, and she must resign immediately," Ayariga said.

Ayariga predicted that any further rulings by Osei would be challenged in court and overturned.

"It tells you that this person has a problem," he added. "...Clearly it tells you that this person is not credible enough to make one single decision right. ... If you have [held] a position for less than a year and you have been to court more than 15 times and in all those times you have lost all those cases, what is the credibility?"

Civil society groups and officials of the electoral commission who defended Osei said the legal battles over some of her decisions "form part of the learning curve" in Ghana's relatively relatively young democracy. Constitutional rule was reintroduced in the West African nation in 1992.

"it's not about a learning process because Ghana is 22 and more years in democracy and 22 years cannot be a learning process now," Ayariga told VOA. "We've gone beyond the learning process. We have had five consecutive elections with a different EC boss; all was peaceful, and there were no problems."

The APC presidential candidate's critics say he has too great a personal animosity toward the electoral commission chairperson as a result of his recent disqualifications.

The critics also contend that Ayariga and his APC party failed to exercise due diligence in preparing his application to enter the presidential race, and thus are to blame themselves for his disqualification.

Ayariga disagreed, saying his nomination documents were accurately and appropriately filed. "I don't have any personal grudge against the electoral commissioner," he added. "...But if you don't do things right, I am a person who would not take it lightly when you go astray."
The government of Hungary will not resubmit a law to ban the European Union's migrant resettlement quotas after parliament narrowly rejected the plan this week, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told state radio Friday.

We tried to put this into the constitution, but could not achieve this, as the opposition sided with Brussels, Orban said in an interview on Kossuth radio.

Orban had said the amendment was needed to honor an October referendum, in which more than 3 million Hungarians, an overwhelming majority of those who voted, rejected EU quotas stipulating how many migrants member states must accept.

The far-right opposition Jobbik party sealed the bills rejection by boycotting the vote Tuesday. It said it would throw its support behind the ban if Orban scrapped a separate government bond scheme that allows foreigners to buy residency rights.

But giving way to Jobbiks demand would have been politically difficult for Orban after the parliamentary defeat.

As a result, Orban added, his government would have to fight the European Unions migrant quotas in Brussels, using Hungarys existing constitution.

On a related matter, Orban said Hungarian immigrants who work in Britain will not see a worsening in their situation after Britain leaves the European Union.

Orban, who met British Prime Minister Theresa May in London earlier this week, said he and May had agreed on the issue, which is critical for around 95,000 Hungarians working in the United Kingdom. Unofficial estimates put this figure much higher.

We had agreed that the situation of Hungarians already working in the UK today cannot worsen in the future, as long as the situation of Brits working in Hungary wont deteriorate either, Orban told Kossuth radio. The debate will be about whether those, who would want to move to the UK in the future, will be able to go there or not.

Since Hungary joined the EU in 2004, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians have moved to work in richer Western Europe, mostly in Germany, Britain and Scandinavian states.

Britons voted to leave the EU June 23. The British governments plans to begin a two-year divorce process by the end of March were thrown into disarray last week, when a court ruled that parliament must be consulted on the decision.

Prime Minister May has said she is confident of overturning that ruling.
U.N. human rights monitors in Iraq are uncovering growing evidence of multiple atrocities against civilians by Islamic State militants as the battle for Mosul advances. Abuses include widespread killings and torture, sexual exploitation of women and girls, and the recruitment of children as fighters and suicide bombers.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein says the extent of civilian suffering in Mosul and other areas in Iraq occupied by Islamic State, also known as ISIL, is numbing and intolerable. He is calling for immediate action to make sure victims and survivors are protected and their needs are met.

The high commissioners spokeswoman, Ravina Shamdasani, says the U.N. has come across images of children being forced to carry out executions.

"ISIL also posted a video on Wednesday showing four children, believed to be between 10 and 14 years old, shooting to death four people for spying for the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] and the Peshmerga. The video shows the victims falling into a river nearby," said Shamdasani.

Shamdasani says the children include one from Uzbekistan, one from Russia and two from Iraq. The U.N. reports mass killings appear to be commonplace. For instance, it says IS militants reportedly shot and killed 40 civilians in Mosul after accusing them of "treason and collaboration" with the Iraqi Security Forces.

More details are emerging of a mass grave containing the bodies of at least 100 people in an agricultural college building in Hamam al-Alil that was discovered on Monday. Shamdasani says the corpses are in various states of decomposition, indicating the site has been used as a killing ground for some time.

She says a number of incidents point to the use of chemical weapons by IS.

"One is the setting alight of this factory, the al-Mishrag Sulphur Gas Factory and Field, in the Shura sub-district of Mosul. Now, the factory was set on fire and it was shelled by ISIL. And we already have reports of people who have died as a result of the fumes that came out of this factory," said Shamdasani.

Shamdasani says there is evidence Islamic State is stockpiling large quantities of ammonia and sulfur in Mosul close to civilian areas. She says this is raising concern that IS intends to use chemical weapons against civilians as part of its strategy to hang on to Mosul.

In the meantime, aid agencies have been scaling up their operations in anticipation of a large upsurge of people fleeing Mosul. This hasnt happened as of yet, with the U.N. reporting an exodus of only around 48,000 of Mosuls population of more than one million.

But, the World Health Organization representative in Iraq, Altaf Musani, referred to the situation in the region as dynamic and said aid agencies had to be flexible and prepared for any eventuality.

Speaking on a telephone from his office in Baghdad, Musani said aid agencies have not yet been able to enter Mosul and were concentrating on providing shelter, food, health care and other necessities to those people who have managed to leave the city.

There are credible reports that IS militants are preventing civilians from leaving Mosul to use them as human shields against the entry of Iraqi forces into the city.

Musani said his agency was working to bring trauma and referral care as closely as possible to the city because we anticipate that as the conflict intensifies, the casualties will be overwhelming.

He said it was important to make sure that there was sufficient capacity to stabilize patients and send them to referral hospitals in nearby cities.

He said there was no accurate count of the number of dead and wounded, but an indication of the seriousness of the situation could be seen in the number of hospital patients. For example, he said the main hospital in Erbil, in Iraq's Kurdish region, had received 300 casualties in one seven-day period alone.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, Musani said. We know that there are many more casualties that are either stranded in Mosul or in the outskirts of the city. He said the injuries are very severe with civilians caught in the crossfire suffering from gunshot wounds, mine and mortar injuries.

We have reports of young women and children as small as two years old with bullet wounds in their chest, with a young girl suffering from leg injuries due to explosives", he said.

The U.N. refugee agency has opened six camps, which can host 54,408 people with plans to open five more camps with a capacity to accommodate a total of 120,000 people.

Besides providing life-saving support, UNHCR spokesman William Spindler said his agency also was increasing protection, psychosocial and legal aid to internally displaced people. He told VOA that among those who have fled Mosul there appeared to be a disproportionate number of female-headed households.

He said, we do not know the details of why this is happening  whether men are being held back or whether they have just been moving through different routes. In any case, this is something that is worrying and we are following it up closely.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Antarctica Friday, ahead of an international climate-change conference in Marrakesh next week.

After an early-morning departure from Christchurch, New Zealand, Kerry flew to McMurdo Station, the base of U.S. operations in Antarctica. Kerry is traveling from McMurdo to a small U.S. research station near the South Pole, where he will speak with experts there before returning to McMurdo for the night.

Kerry's aides say the trip is an opportunity for him to learn about Antarctic climate change.

Kerry has made no public statements while in Antarctica, but on Thursday in Christchurch he congratulated U.S. President-elect Donald Trump for winning what Kerry called a "momentous election" earlier this week.

Kerry returns to New Zealand on Saturday to meet with Prime Minister John Key.



From there, he travels to the middle east for talks and then on to Marrakesh, Morocco, where he is slated to deliver a major speech.
Lawyers for President-elect Donald Trump have agreed to begin settlement talks in a class-action lawsuit alleging fraud against the former Trump University.

Trump's lawyers went to court Thursday in San Diego, California, in an attempt to push back the November 28 court date for the lawsuit until after Trump is sworn into office. They contend the presidential transition period is too intense for their client to begin the trial. The lawsuit, alleging that Trump U failed to deliver investment tips, was filed in 2010.

"This has been a gut-wrenching campaign, as everybody knows. And the nation is just beginning the long healing process. And I think the last thing we need right now is to have a trial about events that occurred six years ago or seven years ago," said Daniel Petrocelli, Trumps lead attorney.

Earlier in the day, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had told lawyers he was not inclined to delay the trial, but would announce his decision next week. He encouraged both sides to consider making a deal.

He said both parties could work on a possible settlement with U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller in San Diego. They agreed.

Investment strategies

Trump University students paid as much as $35,000 to obtain what they were told would be Trump's real estate investment strategies. Complainants say they were falsely told that Trump would personally select the programs instructors. Documents from the now-defunct business show that its sales people were told to deliberately mislead potential customers, manipulate their emotions and ignore their concerns.

Trump's lawyers argue that customer surveys show the vast majority of students were satisfied with the course. However, the timing of the hearing threatens to refocus attention on one of the most embarrassing moments of Trump's campaign just as he prepares to take the reins of the U.S. government.

Trump outraged the public, including leading figures in his own party, when six months ago he questioned whether Curiel would rule fairly in his case because of the judge's "Mexican heritage." Trump repeatedly had pledged to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of the United States, once describing many of Mexicans who have entered the United States illegally as "criminals" and "rapists."

Curiel is an American who was born and raised in the Midwestern state of Indiana.

At the time, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan questioned Trump's comments about Curiel. "I regret those comments he made," Ryan said. "Claiming a person can't do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of racism."
A week ago, Abu Yousef arrived at this camp during a dust storm, with his wife and four small children in tow. Relaxed and now without the scruffy beard he grew while living under Islamic State rule, he settled into the relative safety of a camp that has gone from empty to overflowing in just two weeks. A former resident of a town near Mosul  a region which IS fighters held for nearly two years - he told VOA his story, translated here from Arabic:



I was a police officer when Mosul fell to Islamic State militants. When they captured my town, Bashiqa, they made us - police and other government workers - go to Mosul to meet with IS officials and promise to be good Muslims.



I was surprised, I had been a Muslim for all 30 years of my life. But they said, You worked for the Iraqi government which is against Islam. They cursed at us and demanded we give them our weapons.





They told us to say There is no God but the one God and Mohammad is his Prophet as we often do as Muslims. We didnt know why we needed to say it at that moment.



But then the militants hugged us and said, You just became a Muslim.



How did I just become Muslim?



Arrested



Two months later IS militants came to my house. They said, Are you Abu Yousef? I said, Yes. They handcuffed me and forced me into a car. After about a 30-minute drive they put me in a cage about a square meter large and left me there for the night. In the morning they took me to a room and sat me in a chair. Sitting opposite to me was a bearded man wearing all white. They called him Sheik Abu Deema - The Father of Blood.



Why are you an infidel? the sheik asked me.



Im not, Ive been a Muslim my whole life, and lately I even renewed my faith with you all, I said, and then lied to them. I was with government police before because I needed a salary. Its the only reason.



No, you are an infidel, said Sheik Abu Deema, We will cut off your head.



For the next seven days I was kept in the cage, blindfolded. They took me outside for whippings and beatings and fed me only once a day, a bowl of soup and bread.







Dont lose this bullet



At the end of the week, a soldier put a bullet in my pocket, and said, Dont lose this bullet. Tomorrow, we will kill you with it.



The next day someone else approached my cage and demanded the bullet back. No, take this bullet instead, he said. Tomorrow we will kill you with it. This went on for three days, every day a new bullet. On the fourth day they said This, yes this, is the day we will kill you. I believed them.



They brought me back to Sheik Abu Deema and forced me on my knees. They blindfolded me and I heard the sheik bark, Kill him. I felt the gun on my head and heard them pull the trigger. But there was no bullet.





The sheik gave the order again. Kill him, he said. The barrel touched my head, and the soldier pulled the trigger. Again there was no bullet. He did this three times.



Then they removed my blindfold, helped me up and said, Sorry, you are not an infidel. You are our brother.



They gave me 10,000 Iraqi dinars (about $9) and I left. But the psychological punishment stayed with me.
Based on a true story, Loving offers an intimate portrait of Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a black woman, who in 1957 defied the miscegenation laws of Virginia to marry. The events that followed changed America.

When Mildred Jeter was about five months pregnant, Richard Loving asked her to marry him. His decision was met with resistance from his family and skepticism from hers. In 1950s Virginia, it was unheard of that a white man would marry a black woman; but, Richard loved Mildred and couldnt live without her.

They married in the nations capital. However, their interracial union was illegal under the Racial Integrity Act of Virginia, where they lived. They were arrested, accused of a crime and found guilty.

The couple had to leave Virginia or face prison. In 1958, they moved to Washington, D.C., away from friends and family, where they raised three children. But, Mildred was homesick and longed to return to her native Virginia.

ACLU steps in

Five years later, in 1963, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, she wrote to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, asking for help overturning the Racial Integrity Act. She was contacted by the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose pro bono lawyers encouraged the couple to fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. Loving vs. Virginia became a landmark case that overturned miscegenation laws around the country. Their story  captured in intimate family pictures taken in their home by renowned LIFE magazine photographer Grey Villet in 1966  moved America, but in the decades that followed, was forgotten.

With Loving, Jeff Nichols has brought it back into the nations consciousness.

The filmmaker relied on historical footage and Nancy Buirskis 2011 in-depth documentary, The Loving Story, about the couple.

This feature films power lies in the way Nichols portrays a nuanced, deep love between two people whose only desire is to live a life together. Using intimate close-ups, Nichols locks his frame on the couples faces. He told VOA that through the close-ups he wanted to convey their entrapped life.

They are in a prison even though they are moving around and they are walking around. So I wanted movement, but I wanted the camera to be locked on them. It was a very specific type of shooting. Probably one of the most precise films Ive ever directed.

During the red carpet event at the recently inaugurated African-American museum in Washington, Nichols spoke to VOA about the Oscar buzz his film has generated.

Part of American history

Its flattering and humbling, he said, but whats important here is the story were trying to tell, Richards and Mildreds story. I didnt know it in 2012 when I first heard about it, and thats shameful! This is a fundamental part of our American history.

Actress Ruth Negga pours her heart into the character of Mildred. Her soulful performance has earned her acclaim. She told VOA what really inspired her to play the reluctant activist was her admiration for her characters immense courage.

How do we find out who we are really? Usually, its when we are in peril. When we are forced to find out who we are. And I think that when our true colors show, then we discover our grit and our integrity.

Asked if a film such as Loving could speak to wide audiences in Americas current climate of political polarization, Joel Edgerton, who plays Richard Loving, said yes.

You know, he said, we keep running into the same problems that will always be there, so its always good to have new stories and sometimes gentle stories that allow us to take a walk  an empathetic walk  in someone elses shoes to help us start to examine where there was judgment in our own minds. I think it is a very special film that will resonate.
Housewife Tripta Bareja is among millions of Indians who stood in snaking lines outside banks on Thursday as they scrambled to swap high value currency notes, which have been scrapped in a sudden move aimed at rooting out graft.

The resident of Gurgaon near New Delhi arrived at her neighborhood bank at 8.30 am -- an hour and a half before it opened after shutting for a day to stock currency.

Like countless others, Bareja is short of money to stock up on essentials like food. We have no small denomination notes at home. When we withdrew money from banks, it was always in 1000 ($15) and 500 rupee ($7.50) notes, she says.

Many experts have hailed the move to scrap these notes as the countrys biggest and boldest step to stamp out corruption and flush out tax evaders, who are estimated to have stashed away billions of dollars in cash. But skeptics warn the impact will be short-lived in a country where corruption has deep tentacles.

Economic disruptions

Only time will tell who is proven right, but for the moment, withdrawal of high currency notes has caused disruptions in an economy where 80 percent of all transactions are made in cash.

With a mind boggling 23 billion notes to be exchanged, the transition to the new currency will not be easy. Officials say it will take three to four weeks to inject new high-value notes into the banking system.

As lines grew longer outside banks, the government sent out a reassuring message. We are trying to ensure at the earliest that the requisite currency is available with people. We do believe there is no need to rush in the initial days because people have a lot of time, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said.

In a country where there is deep resentment about corruption that allegedly involves officials, politicians and businesses, many ordinary men and women waiting in lines said they were prepared to endure hardship for a few days if it mean cleaning out the system.

Storeowner Ramesh Chhabra said he has hardly transacted any business since the high value notes were scrapped because he does not have change to return to customers. But shrugging, he pointed out that it is for a good cause. We have to face this problem for a few days. I dont mind the inconvenience, he said.

Business has dipped at restaurants and stores and may not pick up anytime soon. It has also caused consternation in the midst of a busy wedding season when many transactions are made in cash, whether it is to jewelers or caterers.

Managing the exchange

But perhaps the worst impacted are millions of poor and illiterate people  laborers, small vendors and housemaids, who are at a loss about how to manage the exchange.

Days ago, housemaid Tetri Nuniya was paid her monthly salary in 1,000 rupee notes that are now no longer legal tender. I dont know how to change them, she said, adding that she worries about how to buy her monthly rations until her employers give her small denomination notes.

Officials say the scrapping of high value currency is part of a larger crackdown on corruption, which Prime Minister Modi vowed to root out when he came to power.

The unexpected move, announced in an unscheduled address to the nation on Tuesday night, comes half way through his term as he faces questions over slow anti-graft progress.

Saying that a decisive step was needed, Modi said India, which was ranked 100 on global corruption rankings, has only moved up to 76 despite steps his government had taken.

The government also says it is not just taking aim at graft, but also terrorism. Officials say large amounts of counterfeit currency notes are brought into the country by terrorists, and scrapping the existing high value currency will disrupt their works. The new notes, the government says will have stronger security features, making them harder to counterfeit.

Skeptics

But skeptics question how much the latest measure will actually dent corruption.

Dev Kar, the chief economist at the research and advocacy organization Global Financial Integrity, called it a cosmetic solution to a massive and growing problem. The group estimates India lost more than $ 500 billion in the decade between 2004 and 2013 to illicit outflows from the country.

The effect will be temporary, it will inconvenience the people who are operating in the underground economy. This inconvenience will last until they are not able to come up with an alternate way of financing, he said, pointing out that future kickbacks could easily be paid in foreign currency.

Saying that governance will have to improve in a credible, sustainable way before India can hope to win the battle against what is called black money, Kar said he has seen no concrete steps on that front or strict legal action that is needed to deter corruption: Jail times, severe penalties, draconian laws that are enforced in a transparent, timely manner, regardless of who they are.

Some political observers also suspect the timing of the move could be intended to deprive political rivals of Modis Bharatiya Janta Party of piles of untaxed cash, commonly used by political parties across the spectrum to finance expensive election campaigns.
Voters in Moldova are casting their ballots in a runoff election for president November 13 that could see Russia-leaning candidate Igor Dodon upset his pro-Europe rival Maia Sandu. While Dodon has said he wants to shift Moldova's alliance toward Russia, political analysts say the election is more about bringing a new face to the country after corruption scandals marred Moldova's European path. VOA's Daniel Schearf reports from Moscow.
Nationwide protests proved to be the first test for President-elect Donald Trump, as he took to twitter Friday morning to reverse an earlier tweet criticizing the negative postelection reaction in some cities as "very unfair."

"Love the fact that small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud," Trump wrote, nine hours after posting a less accommodating tweet: "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!"

The difference between the two tweets reflected the varying tones struck by Trump throughout his campaign, ranging from the politically incorrect statements that struck a chord with many voters to the more disciplined approach taken in the final days of the campaign, when candidate Trump followed a teleprompter for his speeches and stayed on message during rallies.

"You are seeing a president-elect who is beginning to understand that his words matter," said John Hudak, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy research group. The second tweet, Hudak added, appeared to acknowledge the First Amendment rights of the protesters.

Trump's tweets came in response to a third night of demonstrations in major cities across the United States, with some protesters burning American flags and effigies of Trump. Police in Portland, Oregon, described the protests there as a riot after demonstrators threw projectiles and broke store windows.

Trump secured the nomination by winning 290 Electoral College votes, 62 more than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who won the nationwide popular vote. After a campaign season and an election shaped by the concerns of the white working class, the protests revealed a reversal in political grievances.

"Now the white middle class is not taking seriously the plurality of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton and the majority of Americans who didn't vote for Donald Trump," Hudak said.

Divided electorate

Many of the president-elect's supporters took to social media to point out that Republicans did not protest in the streets when President Barack Obama was elected eight years ago.

Robin Allweiss, a Tampa, Florida-based lawyer who volunteered with the Trump campaign, said she wasn't upset by the protests because she didn't see them as legitimate political expression.

"If I felt these people were articulate with their reasoning and giving legitimate reasons and they weren't burning flags and they were peaceful and they were strong in their beliefs, then I would be bothered," Allweiss told VOA. She characterized the protesters as paid agitators, an accusation repeated across social media by the president-elect's supporters.

"They are doing this to cause dissension, anger and to scare. I think it's an intimidation factor," Allweiss said.

But Hudak said the accusations of paid, bused-in protesters was a common reaction among the political right.

"These are frustrated people  more people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Donald Trump. There are a lot of very unhappy people in this country," he said.

In the days following Trump's surprising win, both Clinton and Obama called for a peaceful transfer of power in keeping with America's political traditions. A respect for the wishes of the electorate and the process of transferring power between outgoing and incoming administrations could be complicated by the divisive dialogue of this election season.

"There's a lot that Donald Trump has said that has divided this nation and has divided a lot of the people you see protesting, but giving him a chance and seeing what he will be like as president and seeing what his policy proposals actually will be is important," Hudak said. "And if you don't like what ends up being part of the Trump administration, then protest against that."

Looking ahead

Trump flouted one key tradition Thursday by not allowing the traveling press pool to document his movements during the now-traditional visit of a president-elect with the sitting president.

The move could signal an antagonistic relationship between a President Trump and the news media, in keeping with the problematic relationship established during the campaign.

"The blaming of the protests on the media certainly signals the way he's going to treat the media in using them as a scapegoat for anything negative that happens in his administration," Hudak said. "But I think it's an important moment for Mr. Trump to take a step back and realize the media is not driving these protesters to the streets. Mr. Trump's own words are driving protesters to the streets."

Despite the protests, Trump's supporters greeted the win with surprise, elation and a hopeful sense of what his administration could accomplish starting in January.

"He is really going to turn the world upside down  he's going to get along with people. He's been an excellent businessman," Allweiss said. "Here is somebody who is actually going to do something. He owes nothing to no one  not a lobbyist, not a special-interest group."
A Turkish district governor wounded in a bomb attack on his office in the largely Kurdish southeast has died, the state-run Anadolu Agency and other media said Friday.

Suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants carried out Thursdays attack in the Derik district of Mardin province with an improvised explosive device, wounding three people, according to the Mardin governors office.

The blast happened in the town of Derik, situated between Diyarbakir and the Syrian border.

Derik district governor Muhammed Fatih Safiturk was one of those people hurt in the attack, suffering second-degree burns. He died at a hospital in the city of Gaziantep Friday morning, having been flown there by helicopter for treatment, the Dogan news agency said.

Safiturk had been given the additional responsibility in July of running the local municipality as part of a series of moves to replace elected officials from the Democratic Regions Party (DBP), a sister party of the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party (HDP).

Ankara accuses the HDP, parliaments third biggest party, of links to the PKK, which is fighting for autonomy in the largely Kurdish southeast. The HDP denies any direct links and says it is working for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

There was no claim of responsibility for Thursdays attack, but the PKK often carries out bomb and rocket attacks in the southeast, where violence has raged since a two-year-old PKK ceasefire collapsed in July last year.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict since the PKK took up arms in 1984. It is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
President-elect Donald Trump has put his vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, in charge of his transition team, replacing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Advisers to Trump said he wanted to use Pence's Washington experience to aid a swift transition in January. In a statement Friday, Trump said Pence would "build on the initial work" done by Christie. The New Jersey governor will remain as a vice chair of the transition effort.

Christie has been entangled in a scandal from 2013 over the closure of a major bridge linking New Jersey and New York, allegedly to punish a local mayor. The scandal came to the foreground again this month when two of Christie's former aides were convicted in the case. Christie has denied any knowledge of the bridge closure.

The announcement of the change came shortly after Trump met Friday with many of his top advisers in his Manhattan apartment at Trump Tower to discuss formation of his administration.

He said on Twitter Friday, "Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!"

In addition to Pence, Trump said that three of his five children, Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka, along with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would help with the transition effort, serving on an executive committee.

Trump has about 70 days to decide on a 15-member Cabinet as well as other top staff for his administration. Several of his close advisers have been mentioned as options to fill key posts. Here are some of the names being talked about.

Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani is the former mayor of New York, known for his efforts to unite the city after the September 11, 2001, attacks that toppled the World Trade Center. He has been an informal adviser to the Trump campaign and frequent spokesman for the campaign with various media outlets. He was the first person to be mentioned by Trump in his election acceptance speech. "He's unbelievable," Trump said. "He's traveled with us and he went through meetings, and Rudy never changes." Giuliani, an attorney, is often mentioned as a possible attorney general.

Newt Gingrich

The former speaker of the House was the architect of the 1994 "Contract with America" that earned Republicans control of the House after decades of Democratic dominance. Gingrich was an early Trump supporter and was reportedly on Trump's short list for vice president. Since leaving the House, Gingrich has been an influential Republican strategist and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2011. He has been mentioned as a possible candidate for secretary of state or White House chief of staff.

Chris Christie

The New Jersey governor quickly gave his support to Trump after his own bid for the Republican nomination ended. He had been serving as head of the Trump transition team until Pence took over Friday, and was reportedly on Trump's short list for vice president. Christie, a former U.S. attorney, has been mentioned as a possible attorney general or commerce secretary.

Reince Priebus

The current chair of the Republican National Committee was a steady supporter of Trump when many in the Republican Party establishment wanted to distance themselves from the billionaire. Priebus provided Trump with an important link to the party's resources and field operations to get out the vote. Trump ceded the podium for a minute during his election acceptance speech to Priebus to thank him for his support. Priebus is rumored to be in contention for the role of White House chief of staff.

Steve Bannon

Bannon served as Trump's campaign chief after heading the conservative website Breitbart News. Bannon is not afraid to use strong political tactics and was behind some of the more controversial moves of the Trump campaign, including bringing women who had made sexual misconduct allegations against former President Bill Clinton, the husband of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, to a presidential debate. He is cited as a potential White House chief of staff.

Kellyanne Conway

Conway served as Trump's campaign manager and tweeted that she might accept a senior White House role. She founded a polling company in 1995 and has consulted on polling for Republican politicians and major corporations. Conway also served as a senior adviser to Gingrich's presidential bid in 2011.

Jeff Sessions

The Alabama senator was one of the first politicians to endorse Trump when many other leading Republicans were against his candidacy. Trump hailed him in his election acceptance speech as the first "major politician" to support him. "Let me tell you, he is highly respected in Washington because he is as smart as you get," Trump said. Sessions has been in the Senate since 1997 and sits on the Armed Services Committee and Budget Committee, among others. He has served in the Army Reserve and is mentioned as a possible candidate for secretary of defense.

Steven Mnuchin

The campaign finance manager for Trump's election, Mnuchin's name is being mentioned as a possible candidate for Treasury secretary. Mnuchin is a veteran of Goldman Sachs and a CEO of a private investment firm.
Russias former Soviet neighbors have congratulated Donald Trump for his surprise election victory in the United States and emphasized the importance of continued U.S. support in the region. As VOAs Daniel Schearf reports from Moscow, Russian analysts argue Trumps de-emphasis on NATO may be making some nervous but could also bring some balance to the region.
Nearly 20 South Sudanese were killed and at least 10 others wounded Wednesday and Thursday in renewed fighting in Yei River state's Kaya, in Yambio, and in the former Upper Nile state. Government and armed opposition forces accuse each other of starting the attacks.

Residents of Yambio said they woke up to the sound of gunshots Thursday morning, causing panic across one area.

Gbudue State Information Minister Joseph Natale Sabun said anti-government forces attacked civilians, forcing government forces to intervene.

Around 6 o'clock in the morning, rebels came and attacked a small area called Hai Kuba, a residential area in the heart of town," Sabun said. "Following that small attack, people started running from place to place. The areas which have been affected more seriously are Hai Kuba and Hai Ipiro."

Attackers repulsed

Sabun said police and government soldiers repulsed the attackers and police now control the town. He confirmed that some civilians were killed during the attack.

There are about three to four injured and some dead," Sabun said. "And a place called Nakpere is also affected; maybe two to three people were killed there. Now our police forces are looking around collecting the dead.

Sabun urged Yambio residents to stay calm, assuring them that government security forces have been patrolling the town to prevent further attacks.

In a separate incident in Yei River State's border town of Kaya on Wednesday, 13 people were killed, including government forces, according to state officials.

Calm in Kaya

Yei River State Information Minister Stephen Lado said the government forces acted in self-defense.

[At] 6:30, there was an armed group that came and attacked Kaya," Lado said. "Where they started shooting in the morning, army and police in Kaya had to react in self-defense and they chased away the attackers. Three police were killed, three injured, and then 10 of these unknown men were gunned down."

Lado said Thursday that calm had returned to Kaya and other parts of the state, and that government forces were in full control of Yei River. He called on armed groups allied to the SPLA-In Opposition (SPLA-IO) to adhere to the peace agreement and to assemble in cantonment sites in the state.

The government of Yei River state has put a priority for a peaceful dialogue. This is an attack that is coming to the government side, Lado said.

Fighting confirmed

Dickson Gatluak, the SPLA-IO's military spokesperson, confirmed fighting occurred in Yambio and Kaya between government forces and armed groups allied to the SPLA-IO and its leader Riek Machar. He accused government forces of attacking SPLA-IO positions in parts of the former Upper Nile state and Unity state.

They attacked our defensive positions around Kaya and our gallant forces managed to switch [shoot] them. ... Also the same incident occurred in Yambio. There are some clashes around Yambio and our forces also managed [to fend off the attackers], Gatlauk said.

Gatluak declared that the 2015 peace agreement signed by President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Machar has completely collapsed.

SPLA spokesperson Brigadier-General Lul Ruai Koang would neither deny nor confirm reports of fighting in the three areas, saying he had not received any new information from South Sudan Army field commanders.
In October, Donald Trump laid out his agenda for his first 100 days as president of the United States.

Responding to criticisms that his platform lacked specifics and solid plans, Trump laid out a list of proposals for what he wanted to accomplish once reaching the Oval Office.

Proposals were divided into three categories: measures to "clean up the corruption and special interest collusion" in Washington, actions to protect American workers, and restoration of security and the constitutional rule of law.

Additionally, Trump proposed 10 legislative measures he intended to work with Congress on, including repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature health care plan that expanded medical insurance to millions of Americans. Trump and other critics have said the plan of costs too much and provides inferior care. The controversial health care measure, known as Obamacare, was signed into law in 2010.

'Drain the swamp'

In the first category of his efforts to "drain the swamp" of Washington, Trump listed six initiatives, including tightening regulations on lobbyists.

The first of these six, imposing term limits on all members of Congress, would actually have to be initiated and approved by the Senate, because it would require a constitutional amendment. Constitutional amendments are proposed by Congress, not the president. Although Republicans hold a majority in both houses, it is still not clear how much support some of Trump's proposals will receive from Congress. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already said he opposes term limits.

Another proposal on Trump's list is a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the size of the federal workforce through attrition. This is most likely supported by Republican lawmakers, whose spending plans for years have called for reducing the number of non-national-security employees.

Of the seven proposals Trump made regarding the protection of American workers, three of them are related to the environment and U.S. energy policy, including approving construction of the controversial Keystone pipeline, canceling payments to U.N. climate change programs, and lifting restrictions on the production of shale oil, natural gas and clean coal.

Other proposals include rejecting the Trans-Pacific Partnership and renegotiating a number of other trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Trump listed five actions to restore "security and the constitutional rule of law," one of which is filling the Supreme Court seat held by the late Justice Antonin Scalia  an action Obama tried to take, only to be blocked by the Senate.

Cancel 'unconstitutional' orders

Other actions deal largely with immigration issues. The first proposal is to cancel all executive actions, memoranda and orders issued by Obama that Trump has labeled "unconstitutional." Of these, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is one that could end, affecting protection for more than 1 million immigrants who were brought to the country as children.

Trump also stated his intention to remove undocumented immigrants with criminal records from the country, as well as suspend immigration from "terror-prone" countries from which he contends immigrants cannot safely be vetted.

Another is his proposal to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, which he reaffirmed the Mexican government would ultimately pay for. Mexico's president told Trump in a meeting earlier this year that Mexico would not finance a wall.

The full transcript of Trump's speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that outlined his plan for his first 100 days in office can be seen here.
A Donald Trump administration could radically reshape the Justice Department, particularly civil rights efforts that became one of its most pressing and high-profile priorities over the past eight years.

The department, under the Obama administration and the country's first two black attorneys general, has investigated about two dozen police agencies for civil rights violations and reached court-enforceable consent decrees with many of them. It refused to defend a federal law that banned the recognition of gay marriage. It sued North Carolina over a bathroom bill that it said discriminated against transgender people. And it implemented new racial profiling limits on federal law-enforcement agencies.

But Trump's election has stirred concern from civil rights advocates that some of that work could be undone, set aside or at least minimized under a Trump administration.

The Civil Rights Division was just building a head of steam over the last two, three years, and it raises really serious concerns about whether we now lose traction on these issues, Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said of a section that former Attorney General Eric Holder called the crown jewel of the department.

'Law and order'

One overt change could come in the department's approach toward policing and relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve, an issue that's moved to the public forefront in the last two years.



Trump's talk of a law and order approach to crime fighting and his praise for stop-and-frisk police tactics are out of step with a Justice Department that has advocated community policing and decried strategies it considers unconstitutional or discriminatory.

He talked about things like the war on police, that we need more stop and frisk, that the Black Lives Matter movement has placed police officers at risk in ways that are really concerning, said Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department civil rights official who oversaw the investigation into discriminatory practices by the Ferguson, Missouri, police force.

The last law-and-order president was Richard Nixon, Smith said.

The rhetoric resembles that of Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who's expected to be considered for the position of attorney general.

Change in overall approach

Under the Obama administration the Justice Department has opened wide-ranging investigations of 23 police departments, including those in Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson. It's enforcing 19 agreements, including 14 court-enforceable consent decrees.



While those agreements are unlikely to be reversed, new attorneys could be lax in enforcing them or in requiring meaningful change when additional police departments come under scrutiny, Smith said. And different leadership may see less value in some of the community meetings and round-table discussions promoted by Justice Department officials as a way to seek reconciliation between police and minorities.

Also subject to change is the department's overall approach to the thousands of drug prosecutions it brings each year, embodied in a 2013 policy initiative that discouraged prosecutors from seeking harsh prison sentences for nonviolent offenders.



A new administration might also seek changes on the national security front, including how terrorism cases are prosecuted and broader surveillance powers  particularly of Muslims.

Role of career attorneys

Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged the prospect for change Thursday, saying in a speech that some policies and priorities may shift over the span of time or the turn of the electoral wheel.

Career attorneys throughout the Justice Department, including at the Civil Rights Division, are intended as a stabilizing and apolitical force across different administrations, but there hasn't always been a clear line. A 2008 inspector general report identified instances in the Bush administration when the Civil Rights Division considered political and ideological affiliations in hiring career attorneys or assigning cases.

But it's the department's political appointees, who routinely change with presidential administrations, that set the tone and the direction, and determine the vigor of civil rights enforcement, Romero said.

At the Civil Rights Division, that includes its leader, Vanita Gupta, a former ACLU attorney who earlier in her career led an effort to overturn wrongful convictions of drug defendants in Texas.



Under her watch, the federal government has routinely become involved in state and local matters that officials believe brush up against constitutional protections.

That includes a directive to schools that they permit students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity, and a policy document discouraging municipal courts from jailing citizens for nonpayment of fines and fees. In an Idaho case, the department also argued that local police can't arrest the homeless for sleeping in public, and worked in Tennessee to get juvenile suspects access to attorneys.

New leadership

New department leadership could well take different stances on issues like those, or steer clear of federal intervention altogether. And while federal civil rights statutes will surely remain on the books for enforcement, advocates are concerned that their causes won't have the same commitment they've had under President Barack Obama.

We intend to fight, we intend to ensure that we do not go backwards, Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told reporters Thursday. We believe that we have the Constitution and the laws of our nation on our side.
Turkey on Friday detained the board chairman of the opposition daily Cumhuriyet, following the arrests of nine staff members last week, the newspaper reported.

Police stopped Akin Atalay at Istanbul's airport on his arrival from Germany, said Cumhuriyet, which has been a strong critic of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Atalay was held for a while at the airport and later was ushered into a police vehicle, which took him to the Istanbul Security Directorate. Cumhuriyet said he is being held in connection with an investigation into "terrorist activities."

Nine of the paper's senior staff members, including editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu, remained in custody Friday pending trial after raids that added to growing international alarm about media freedom in Turkey.

The exiled former editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, who stands accused of revealing state secrets, fled to Germany earlier this year while appealing against a nearly six-year jail term.

Turkey has closed more than 130 media outlets since a failed coup attempt against Erdogan in July, raising concerns among its Western allies about deteriorating press freedoms in the country.

Warnings against crackdown

Earlier this week, the European Union's Executive Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker warned Turkey that its crackdown on political opponents and the media contradict EU values and give the impression that it no longer wants to join the bloc.

Juncker called on Erdogan to immediately say whether Turkey really wants to be  yes or no  a member of the European Union.

Juncker's comments followed a week that brought the arrests of 10 lawmakers from Turkey's pro-Kurdish party, in addition to the Cumhuriyet journalists, on suspicion of links to terror groups.

Access to social media websites and apps also have been restricted, a move seen as a bid by the government to prevent protests from being organized.

Turkey has suspended more than 110,000 people, ranging from soldiers and judges to teachers and journalists, and has made some 35,000 arrests since the failed military coup in July, which Ankara blames on the U.S.-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.

Erdogan's critics have accused the government of using the coup as an excuse to stifle all forms of dissent.
Ukrainian authorities are laying the groundwork for President Petro Poroshenko to visit Washington early next year, hoping to shore up U.S. support against Russia and allay concerns about what a Donald Trump presidency means for Kiev.

Ukraine has relied on Western support and economic aid since street protests in 2014 which toppled a Kremlin-backed president and were followed by a war with pro-Russian separatists and Russia's annexation of the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine.

Some of Trump's campaign comments, from appearing to recognize Crimea as part of Russia to contemplating an end to U.S. sanctions on Russia, stoked fears in Kiev that Trump will mend ties with Moscow at Ukraine's expense.

Kiev is already wary of losing the European Unions backing over the bloc's own sanctions, imposed on Russia over its seizure of Crimea and support for the separatists fighting government forces in eastern Ukraine.

EU diplomats say the bloc is likely to approve a six-month extension of the sanctions at a summit in December but that it may find it harder to renew them again after Trump is inaugurated in January.

Ukrainian officials say that whatever Trump said on the stump, they believe he wont change U.S. policy on Russia and Ukraine.

"We are confident that the new U.S. administration will continue to work closely with the leadership of Ukraine, providing the assistance that is necessary to counter Russian aggression and carry out internal reforms," Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said in a statement to Reuters, echoing similar remarks by Poroshenko.

Trump's victory was cheered in the Russian parliament on Wednesday and raised hopes in Moscow that an easing of the sanctions would give succor to Russia's ailing economy.

The same day, Ukrainian dollar-denominated bonds tumbled in a sign of investors' concern about the potential impact of Trump's victory. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Trump's foreign policy approach was "phenomenally close" to President Vladimir Putin's.

But Kiev believes that bipartisan support for Ukraine in the United States is strong and that the Republican Party, which will control the U.S. Congress, has the backing of a large Ukrainian diaspora lobbying for a continued firm U.S. line on Moscow, a senior Ukrainian official told Reuters.

"The policy of the United States will be consistent," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the situations sensitivity.

"It's not only about Trump," he added. "He's not a tsar, he's not an emperor."

Seeking reassurance

Despite these comments, Kiev has been seeking assurances of continued U.S. support.

"Mission in NYC done: more than 50 mtgs (meetings), 30 calls in 3 days to support UA (Ukrainian) resolution on human rights in Crimea and Donald Trump Pres-elect," Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin tweeted on Thursday.

He was referring to a resolution submitted to the United Nations condemning what Kiev says is discrimination in Crimea and calling on Russia to halt alleged rights violations there.

Deputy Parliament Speaker Iryna Gerashchenko, who is part of a working group in talks on ending the war in eastern Ukraine that has killed nearly 10,000 people, said neither Republicans nor Democrats had shown a desire to soften sanctions.

"It is also clear for me that a change of administration in the White House will not change the U.S. position," she told Reuters in an interview.

While Ukraine's main objective is ensuring that sanctions on Russian remain, Kiev also hopes that Washington will agree to supply it with lethal weapons, the senior Ukrainian official said.

Such aid is supported by two contenders to become Trump's secretary of state: former

House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich and U.S. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee. Ginrich met Poroshenko on a visit to Ukraine in September.

"We're preparing the visit of the president of Ukraine to the United States," the senior official said. He did not say how far preparations had progressed.

New front

Trump's campaign remarks infuriated many Ukrainians, and his election triumph was greeted by Ukraine's deputy prime minister as another "front" on which Kiev had to fight. Officials in Kiev fear his victory will embolden Russia.

Trump has praised Putin as a strong leader. The president-elects former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, helped propel pro-Kremlin Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovich to power before he was part of the president-elect's campaign team.

Home Minister Arsen Avakov took to Facebook in July to denounce statements by Trump on Russia's annexation of Crimea, calling them a dangerous indulgence of the "dictator" Putin.

Oleh Lyashko, head of the opposition Radical party, initially said a Trump presidency would be "disastrous" for Ukraine, though he later qualified that by saying he hoped Trump's overtures to Putin were just "campaign rhetoric.

Nadiya Savchenko, a servicewoman who became a symbol of resistance to Russia after being captured in eastern Ukraine and later freed, wrote an open letter to Trump urging him not to abandon Ukraine, or risk starting a new world war.

Trump "gives preference to Russia and in fact does not recognize Ukraine as a sovereign country," Kiev resident Volodymyr Nazarenko said.

In comments underlining the depth of concern among the population about Trump's election triumph, Nazarenko said: "He will talk to Putin and Ukraine doesn't mean anything to him. This is the most terrifying thing."
The election of Donald Trump has left many U.N. diplomats nervous because of the candidate's isolationist talk on the campaign trail and his loud disregard for the United Nations.

After eight years with an extremely engaged multilateralist Obama administration, many diplomats fear the U.S. will return to the darker days of George W. Bush, who pursued his foreign policy outside the United Nations.

We very much hope we can continue to count on the deep cooperation and the leadership of the United States within the United Nations system, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Thursday.

The United States also is the single largest financial donor to the U.N., contributing about $8 billion annually, and some worry it could significantly scale back its payments at a time when the organization is juggling responses to multiple humanitarian crises.

In March, at a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Trump spoke of the utter weakness and incompetence of the United Nations, suggesting he had no love for the organization.

The United Nations is not a friend of democracy, it's not a friend to freedom, it's not a friend even to the United States of America where, as you know, it has its home," the then-candidate said.

Art of the deal

The international community also is on edge waiting to see if Trump follows through on threats to renegotiate or cancel several major international agreements, including on Iran's nuclear program (Trump: "disastrous")  and the Paris Climate accord, which only went into force last Friday.

Trump has said the concept of global warming "was created by and for the Chinese" to hurt U.S. manufacturing. Diplomats say if he withdraws from the deal, it will send a negative message to other nations and hurt efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.

U.N. Security Council members also have been considering for several months whether to try to push through a resolution before the end of the Obama administration setting out the parameters for a future peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, or one declaring Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands illegal.

At the same AIPAC event in March, Trump said a parameters resolution would be a catastrophe and a disaster for Israel, adding, When I'm president, believe me, I will veto any attempt by the U.N. to impose its will on the Jewish state. It will be vetoed 100 percent.

On the campaign trail, Trump was hit with strong criticism from the U.N. human rights chief, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, for his stance on torture and harsh rhetoric.

If Donald Trump is elected, on the basis of what he has said already and unless that changes, I think it's without any doubt that he would be dangerous from an international point of view, the high commissioner said last month.

Uncertainty

Diplomats here privately say they share those concerns.

Officially, I will say that my government looks forward to working with any U.S. government in power, one diplomat said this week. But privately, we are very concerned.

That diplomat's sentiment has been echoed by many others in the U.N. corridors since Wednesday morning.

Iraq's ambassador welcomed the election result, but said of Trump's stance toward his country, From what he has said, there is really not yet a clear policy.

Others say they are not even sure who is in charge of foreign policy in the Trump transition.

Asked if U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon plans to meet with Trump, his spokesman said there currently are no plans, but he would be open to it.

We also have to wait and see who our interlocutors will be  who the foreign policy people will be around the president-elect.

Ban wraps up two terms as U.N. chief at the end of this year, just three weeks before Trump will be inaugurated.
As he presided over his final Veterans Day ceremony as commander-in-chief, U.S. President Barack Obama thanked the countrys former service members for preserving Americas democratic electoral process, a reference to Donald Trumps stunning presidential victory after a contentious campaign.

Veterans Day often follows a hard fought political campaign, an exercise in the free speech and self-government that you fought for. It often lays bare disagreements across our nation, Obama said.

WATCH: Obama at National Cemetery



Obamas remarks came Friday morning at Arlington National Cemetery, just south of the capital city of Washington, as the U.S. honors its nearly 22 million veterans.

The president participated in a full honor wreath-laying ceremony at the cemeterys Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a monument dedicated to unidentified military service members who sacrificed their lives.

During the somber event, Obama faced the wreath as he stood at attention, with his right hand placed on his heart, as Taps, a traditional military bugle call, was played.

The president hosted a White House breakfast earlier Friday morning for veterans and their families.

Bill Mohr, a 108-year-old World War II veteran, was among those who attended the annual breakfast. Mohr, who lives in the northeastern city of Hatboro, Pennsylvania, was an army sergeant with the 45th Infantry Division. His daughter said Mohr participated in Operation Dragoon in France and was among those who marched into Germany to liberate the Dachau concentration camp.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said he is spending Veterans Day focusing on the formation of a new administration. In a tweet posted Friday morning, Trump said "very important" decisions about who will help him govern will soon be announced.



Origin of holiday



Service members are honored annually on Veterans Day, November 11, the anniversary of the end of World War I. It was originally proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson as Armistice Day in 1919 and became a U.S. federal holiday in 1938. President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill in 1954 that changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day so that all veterans could be honored.

Of the 21.7 million veterans in the U.S., 4.3 million receive some form of disability compensation from the federal government, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Nearly 530,000 veterans are classified as 100 percent disabled. Nearly 300,000 veterans receive pensions from the federal government.

There are about 40,000 veterans who are spending this Veterans Day without a home to live in, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. The group estimates another 1.4 million veterans are at risk of being homeless.

The Department of Veterans Affairs encourages people to donate to regional Veterans Administration hospitals or volunteer by registering on its Voluntary Service page.

The U.S. Department of Labor helps match employers with qualified veterans. Details are available at https://www.dol.gov/vets/.
It is home to beautiful mountains, breathtaking historical buildings and priceless artwork, but its also the subject of strongly worded U.S. State Department warnings.

For Americans, Iran may not be the first place that comes to mind when planning a vacation, even decades after the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover following the countrys Islamic Revolution. Death to America! can still be heard at hard-line mosques and protests, and Iranians with Western ties can face arbitrary arrest.

However, one luxury tour company in the U.S. is promoting a new trip to the country for those willing to take the risk, describing it as the first opportunity to see an Iran opening up to the West after last years nuclear deal.

Stepping into another world

We feel that Iran is one of the most exciting places that someone can travel to at this point in time, given the current climate in the country and what sort of changes have been taking place recently, said Stefanie Schmudde, product manager of Americas and Middle East for the Downers Grove, Illinois-based tour company Abercrombie & Kent.

On paper, theres a lot to interest travelers. The United Nations culture agency lists 21 World Heritage sites in Iran. They include the ruins of Persepolis and Pasargadae, the mosques and palace at Meidan Emam of Isfahan, and other sites included on the Illinois companys 12-day tour from $5,600.

Iran has long drawn Shiite pilgrims to its holy sites, but local skiers and snowboarders also boast of its slopes, and the capital, Tehran, enjoys a growing modern art scene. Iran says around 5 million tourists visit each year, most coming from Iraq and other neighboring countries.

Europeans have been coming to Iran, but Americans represent far less than 1 percent of all tourists. Many are doubtless staying away because they associate Iran with Middle East conflicts and anti-American rhetoric. But the Iranian government, which is deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions, has also made it difficult for Americans to secure tourism visas.

Schmudde, who recently returned from a trip to Iran, compares the current opening to what is taking place in Cuba, which unlike Iran has restored full diplomatic relations with the U.S.

Theres so few places that dont have a strong American influence, and Iran is one of those places, she said. You do get the sense youre stepping into another world, and that makes it completely fascinating to a traveler.

State Department not a fan

The State Department has a very different perspective.

Iranian authorities continue to unjustly detain and imprison U.S. citizens, particularly Iranian-Americans, including students, journalists, business travelers and academics, on charges including espionage and posing a threat to national security, its August travel warning reads. U.S. citizens traveling to Iran should very carefully weigh the risks of travel and consider postponing.

While American diplomatic posts overseas tend to see security as a glass half-empty, or even shattered on the floor, their concern in this case is reasonable. Iran and the U.S. havent had formal diplomatic relations since 1979, and a new round of arrests by hard-line factions within Irans security services is targeting those with Western ties in the wake of the nuclear accord.

Schmudde acknowledged those concerns and said any journalists, people associated with the U.S. government and military personnel asking about the trip would be warned in advance. Alcohol is illegal, and women are required by law to cover their hair.

Gays and lesbians can face the death penalty in Iran. However, that didnt stop Utah state Sen. Jim Dabakis and his husband from traveling to Iran this summer at the invitation of the countrys tourism industry. His visit set off a firestorm in Iran among hard-liners, who constantly warn of Western infiltration.

Visas hard to come by

In the time since, one hopeful U.S. tourist and a tour company in Iran have told The Associated Press that it has become even more difficult for Americans to get a visa. However, the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, which handles issuing visas for Iran, says nothing has changed.

Iranian officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Abercrombie & Kent has planned its first Iran trip in early May, leaving just ahead of the countrys presidential election. They say that interchange between American tourists and the Iranian people will help bridge the gap between the two nations.

I would not hesitate to send anybody, Schmudde said. Its a very exciting destination thats really and truly on the cusp of change.
President-elect Donald Trump did not pull any punches when it came to criticizing Chinas trade practices on the campaign trail, and he pledged to direct his treasury secretary to label Beijing a "currency manipulator" on his first day in office in January.

But much less is known about how he might seek to address worsening human rights conditions in the worlds second-largest economy.

That has dissidents, rights activists and regional political analysts wondering whether traditional American support for rights could soften at a time when they say the Chinese public needs an advocate more than ever.

As a candidate, Trump sidestepped criticizing other countries over human rights, and his campaign rhetoric included disparaging comments about Muslims and immigrants.

In July, after Turkish officials jailed tens of thousands of people following a failed coup attempt, Trump was asked whether he would press authorities there to uphold the rights of citizens.

"I think right now when it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot of problems, and I think its very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we dont know what we are doing and we cant see straight in our own country," he said.

At the time, demonstrators had gathered in several U.S. cities to protest police shootings of black men. Trump said the United States should focus on addressing its own problems instead of speaking about rights issues abroad.

"When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don't think we're a very good messenger," he told The New York Times.

Activists worry

For Chinese rights activists, the signs from the incoming U.S. president are troubling.

"It seems that these attitudes probably [could] spill over to a generally hostile attitude toward human rights in other countries as well," says Maya Wang, a China researcher in Hong Kong with the international advocacy group Human Rights Watch. "It is worrying, given that the U.S. government has been largely a consistent supporter of pressing human rights in China and we fear we might lose an important ally."

Since Chinese leader Xi Jinping began his rise to power in 2012, he has worked to expand his authority and tighten control over society and all forms of expression. In addition to recently passing a restrictive law over foreign nongovernment organizations, which goes into effect in January, he has jailed dissidents and activists and cracked down on rights lawyers.

Pragmatic approach

Hu Jia, a prominent activist, knows well the lengths to which Chinese authorities will go to suppress opposing views. He was sentenced to jail for more than three years in 2008 and released before Xi came to power.

Like many others who speak out, Hu Jia continues to face scrutiny by security officers who are posted outside his home. He is not allowed to travel overseas, and his wife and daughter live in Hong Kong.

Hu Jia told VOA that, for many in China, Trump is an unknown quantity.

"His remarks about foreign policy, religion and rights on the campaign trail and all the other comments hes made dont instill us with confidence," Hu Jia said.

Some Chinese dissidents at home and overseas think the checks and balances of the U.S. political system will help ensure that the new president is more pragmatic about human rights issues.

Ge Yongxi, a rights lawyer in southern Guangzhou province, said he believes that the "reasonable Trump presented to American voters late in his campaign and in his victory speech shows hes making that shift back.

"Although there are many people who are saying there is a lot of uncertainty about Trumps policies, I dont believe that there will be a paradoxical shift away from fundamental American values," Ge says.

Grand bargain

But as Chinas economic power and influence grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to find ways to pressure, influence or even persuade the country. Activists say they will be watching closely to see who Trump appoints to key positions and whether the next administration continues to openly press China on individual cases.

Initial clues about how a Trump administration might approach China and the rights issue appear in an opinion piece published in the South China Morning Post on Thursday. It was written by James Woolsey, a former Central Intelligence Agency director whos the senior adviser to the president-elect on national security, defense and intelligence.

In the piece, Woolsey argues that while the U.S. has an unwavering commitment to advancing freedom, it also needs to recognize and perhaps accept some ideological differences with China.

As we improve our understanding of the complexities of the Chinese social and political system, it becomes increasingly apparent that challenging the current system is a risky endeavor, Woolsey wrote. We may not like it but we dont necessarily have to do something about it.

Woolsey writes that such a grand bargain may not be a spoken agreement, but a tacit understanding in which the U.S. accepts Chinas political and social structure and commits not to disrupt it in any way in exchange for Chinas commitment not to challenge the status quo in Asia.
We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on!

Go to form
Be careful what you wish for, Amy Farrah Fowler. You longed for Sheldon Cooper to be an enthusiastic, attentive boyfriend, a partner who would want to marry you and make a family of little Shamy offspring.

It seems Sheldon and Amys recent cohabitation project has reached a nice boiling temperature. Yes, Dr. Sheldon Cooper is finally ready to get his baby daddy on. But while Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler is all about the cohabitation and the coitus, Shamy Jr. isnt on her to-do list just yet. Of course, that was before Sheldon busted out his sexiest moves 

In an episode thats more about setting up story lines that could pay off delightfully than moving current plots along  yep, Bernies still preggers and Penny and Leonard are still living together in Sheldon and Leonards apartment, which is pretty much the extent of those characters scenes in the installment  Amys lab experiment has left Sheldon with a raging case of baby fever, while Raj may have finally met the woman hell make a family with someday.

First up, Shamys latest project, which begins with Amy mixing her skin sample with Sheldons to synthesize a neural network. Once he gets past the perceived pain of Amy taking a skin sample  on a scale of one to ten, she tells him the pain level will be a two, or what he equates with eating a whole Altoid  the resulting primitive network and its off-the-charts response to various stimuli has Sheldon acting like a proud papa.

He even tries to compare the co-mingled cells to Bernadettes bun in the oven, countering her point that the fetus has a fully functioning immune system with We didnt need to have sex with Howard for ours, so we win.

As the Shamy cells react to stimuli in increasingly impressive ways, Sheldon wants to lock Amys lab door, pull down our underpants a little, and make a baby. Amy, not so much. She isnt ready to get pregnant just yet  though Sheldon rather creepily assures her that she can in the next 36 hours, as hes been tracking her cycles. When that sweet talk doesnt work, he resorts to flashing his butt after accidentally dropping a pen on the floor and bending over to pick it up. Still resisting his seductive ways, Amy arrives home that day to find a line of rose petals leading up to the apartment door. Inside, Sheldons got his hair slicked back, smooth jazz filling the room, and an untied bow tie slung around his neck. Add in a pair of too-short plaid dress pants, and the effect is what Amy will later describe to Penny and Leonard as Rat Pack Pee-wee Herman.

Sheldon has one more move up his sleeve: a seductive flamenco dance, which he springs on Amy and performs rather gracefully. Nevertheless, it sends her running from the apartment, apparently unmoved by his sexy dance and undeterred in her decision about baby-makin. Apparently.

An episode-ending shot finds Amy out in the hallway, all hot and bothered, fanning her face and muttering to herself, That was a close one. Never thought wed see a Shamy pregnancy before a Shamy wedding  what would Bible-totin Mama Cooper say?  but Sheldon just might make it so.

And then theres Raj, finally at the center of an episode, and its one that doesnt involve him breaking up with someone or being the dumpee. Instead, he meets the buildings cleaning woman, Isabella, and they click immediately. He asks her out to dinner after offering to help her clean toilets in the building just to spend time with her. The single mom tells him she doesnt have time to date because she has two jobs, so he surprises her with a microwaved dinner he has set up in the telescope room, complete with table setting and two office chairs.

Theres clearly chemistry between them, and Isabella is about to tell Raj she has some free time over the weekend when Howard walks into the room. Raj had told his friends hed met someone named Isabella  who was a fellow scientist. When Howard meets her and assumes shes an astronomer, she realizes Raj lied about her job because hes embarrassed by her work.

Sitcom cliche would demand this budding relationship come to a quick end, but Raj chases an angry Isabella down the hall, admits he did have a problem with her job, and then apologizes for it. He tells her shes going to be embarrassed about plenty of things he does, like letting his dog eat out of his mouth. (Not because Cinnamon likes it, but because he does.)

Isabella, eschewing some sitcom cliches of her own, doesnt allow herself to feel embarrassed about her blue-collar work. She agrees to give Raj a second chance, making a joke in the process that shows her sense of humor and that she noted an earlier assumption he made about where shes from. (He assumed Mexico; shes actually from Cuba.) In ten seasons of TBBT, Isabella already might be the best of Rajs potential mates.

THEOR-EMS:
Picking up where we left off two weeks ago, now A.T. (After Trump), theyve got Majid Nassar, but he wont talk. The look on President Kirkmans face is one of confusion, and then of frustration, because he can tell hes going to have to tap into Bauer mode and get information for himself. Wheres a BIC lighter and a plastic spoon and a glass of Newmans Own Lemonade and some embalming fluid, he most certainly thinks to himself.

The president has a meeting with the governors. En route, he sees his security guard, Mike, and a completely random conversation takes place. We learn Mike will not be accompanying Jack to the event, and instead is going bowling with his brother. So get ready for one of two things: Mike is about to die or Mike is a mole for the terrorists.

Sorry to keep it so real, but thats whats up.

We go to the meeting, which is a fancy dinner for all the governors. In the corner, we see the White House press corps, something that could not exist come 2017.

Jack is giving a hell of a speech, even making people laugh  something we havent seen a lot of so far. Go Jaaaack, go Jaaaack, I thought, as I continued to hide under my blanket, still barely capable of getting out of bed because America just vomited on the floor and half the country decided the floor splatter was a Pollock.

And then, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Yep, someones shooting at the White House.

The shooting was coming from the outside, so no one inside got hit, but the shooter is still on the loose on White House grounds. This isnt good  there was some worry that gathering yet another collection of American leaders in the same room could prove disastrous, but their security team claimed to be ready. Apparently, not ready enough. (As I typed that last sentence, I said, Apparently, not ready enough in movie trailer voice. So you know.)

During the hunt for the shooter, guess who we see  Mike. He never even made it to bowling. Hes already back to help find this shooter. And wouldnt you know it, he spots the dude. And wouldnt you know it, he shoots and kills the dude. And wouldnt you know it, he also gets shot while shooting and killing the dude.

If you hear that someones going bowling, theyre getting shot five minutes later. Thats TV writing 101.

On the Malik Yoba and Maggie front, theyre in a pickle. Right before the shots rang off, Aaron and Emily ran into MacLeish at the party. And wanted to know if he would be interested in the VP position, his answer being yes. This is stressful for Yoba because the FBI is involved in the vetting process  but only Yoba and Maggie know that MacLeish is definitely dirty. Since, you know, he found a way to hide in the secret bomb shelter in the Capitol when everyone else died.

Oh, theres something else I forgot  apologies, I was a little distracted thinking about how Kirkman had never been elected or held a military position and is now president, much like Trump, except for the fact that Kirkman doesnt want a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.

But I digress. Heres what I forgot to mention: The shooter at the White House pledged his allegiance to Nassar. Now that we know about MacLeish, its pretty clear that Nassar isnt behind the Capitol bombing. But until the MacLeish intel is known, everything thats Nassar-related is going to seem connected to the original attack.

Eventually, Jack goes back to a big room with all the governors to have a meeting about appointees.

Photo: ABC

That lady in the middle? TROUBLE. We already saw her earlier, giving the president sass, and shes back at it in the meeting. Something to note: This show paints governors like MONSTERS. And maybe they are, but outside of the terrorists, the shows second-biggest bad guys are the leaders of each state. And in this room  in the White House, JACKS HOME  this lady begins to essentially put Jack on trial with the quiet support of her fellow governors. She says he needs to answer all of their questions and then theyll consider doing what he wants.

Its mad rude. With that said, maybe the governors will do this to President Trump  he, also an unproven leader. Maybe theyll make him pass a spelling bee. Thatd be fun. The only problem is that if he misspelled a word, hed say the way he spelled it was right, and then hed ban the spelling of non-English words and have bees killed at an even more alarming rate.

I dont know if its clear, but my hearts not really in this episode. But were going to get to the end, I promise.

Back to the governors meeting. You dont need much context, so just know that Jack says, Its over, and Im not talking about the presidency, Im talking about the country as we know it.

Just know that.

Anyway, Jack has agreed to the governors interrogation against the advice of Emily and Aaron. Equally smart and/or dumb, Kal Penn gets flirty with someone in the press corps, which is very West Wing C.J. and Danny. I cant wait for everyone to find out about it and/or for her to be a terrorist.

This show loves a good parallel scene thing, so we get another big one this week: Jack is about to sit down and get interrogated by the governors while Maggie and Yoba are about to sit down and interrogate Nassar.

Heres how it goes for Jack. A few of the governors gang up on him and it all ends with him basically saying, Well, maybe Im not fit to be the president. And then he walks out.

This episode is spiraling, but Im not sure if its in a good or bad way. The FBI gets Nassar to essentially admit that he and his group are taking the blame for someone elses bombing. It doesnt tie the Capitol attack straight to MacLeish, but its a step in the right direction. As for the governors, Jack goes back in the room and makes a speech. It turns out enough of the governors will get behind him  as long as he halts all immigration into the country until the dust settles.

This is basically what the scene is like:

And then its time for another story line. A bunch of refugees needed to land in Florida, but the governor was being terrible. (Again, governors on this show are monsters.) White FLOTUS figured out a way to get them clearance in Missouri, but Jack had to do a deal to get them sent elsewhere. WFLOTUS is furious, saying these people were promised a better life in America.

Jacks response: THEYRE GOING TO CANADA.

You can hear it in his voice. He knows its better there.

This episode ends with all types of cliffhangers, as Designated Survivor always does. Kal Penn is about to go on his first date with the journalist, but she wants to ask him about something she heard from a source first: THAT PRESIDENT KIRKMAN IS NOT LEOS DAD. Kals expression shows that he does not know about this development. And then right before it all ends, Maggie and Yoba get a call  its about Nassar.

Hes dead. Hes so dead. Dead in his cell. Dead, dead, dead.

This will be a much more enjoyable show to watch next week. But come next year (and seasons to come), itll take on an entirely new meaning. President Kirkman will act less as a metaphor for the current president, and more as a much-needed escape from reality. See you next Wednesday.
So Far is exactly what we needed. Its impossible to watch Queen Sugar and not see the parallels to Americas current political climate, and yet, this episode offers us a hopeful, valuable message. Watching the Bordelons commit to their familys legacy is, in its own way, an opportunity to take a breath, collect ourselves, and consider our way forward.

Violet is turning over a new leaf, no pun intended, thanks to her talk with Nova about doing more for herself. After Charley insinuates she keeps Micah in private school so he wont end up like Vi, a member of the working-class poor, she doesnt wallow in hurt feelings. Instead, she goes to the High Yellow Diner and demands a job as manager, with benefits and year-end bonuses. She uses Charleys hopes for Micah as motivation to realize her own dreams. Hollywood congratulates her on the promotion and she gives him a cup of coffee, her version of a peace offering.

Meanwhile, Ralph Angel is frustrated hes not allowed to sign Blues permission slip for a school trip because Violet is still his legal guardian. He confronts his aunt, telling her hes done his time in jail and has been with Blue every moment since he got out, but having to ask her permission for his son to do anything tears him apart. When do I get out? When am I done? he asks. Ralph Angels time in jail haunts every corner of his life, and when Violet sees how much it hurts him, she finally signs over guardianship. She tells her nephew that she is always there for him and there is no shame in asking for help.

Queen Sugar showrunner Ava DuVernay has a special place in her heart for uncovering the corruption of the prison industrial complex in America. Her film Middle of Nowhere addresses the issue, and so does the documentary The 13th, which is currently streaming on Netflix. More than six million Americans were unable to vote in this years presidential election because of felony disenfranchisement. How long does a person have to pay for his or her crimes, even after serving time? Every day, Ralph Angel gets a reminder that hes still considered a criminal. Millions of real people face that same reminder.

Micahs new private school finds out the reason why he was expelled from his last school, and it may prevent him from enrolling. Vi argues for St. Josephine High School, which his crush Keke attends. Theyve been hanging out, so Micah is getting a lesson in Southern black-girl magic and the expectations of courting in the South. Keke is direct: When Micah tries to be cool and say, I guess Ill see you around, she shoots back, Why guess when you can know? Later, when he clearly wants to kiss her, she says, Life is short and I gotta go home. In other words, make your intentions plain and show your commitment. Its something even Hollywood knows. Hes filed for divorce from LeeAnne because he wants to show Violet that shes worth his full commitment.

Micahs love life may be blooming while Violets is healing, but Novas is falling apart. She is set to speak with Melissa Harris-Perry about her investigations of police corruption and migrant workers, but Chantal sees it as an opportunity to instead promote the Black Lives Matter movement. She tries to offer talking points, but Nova doesnt want her help. Chantal thinks Nova is being self-serving, but even more, she cant accept the fact that Nova still has feelings for a white cop. Chantal tells Nova she cant claim to be for the people while in bed with the enemy and ends their relationship.

This is not the first time Novas work and love life have left her torn. And honestly, its so refreshing to see a show acknowledge and push the issues that arise in interracial relationships. As shows become increasingly diverse, we see more interracial relationships on TV and too often, the complications get ignored in praise of color-blind casting. Its not just cultural differences people have to deal with; its how people perceive them and those perceptions can affect professional relationships. Scandal acknowledged the racial tension in Olivia and Fitzs relationship in season two, when Olivia asked Fitz if she was the Sally Hemings to his Thomas Jefferson, and the audience gasp went round the world. Its important people see that interracial relationships are not kumbaya events, meant to heal the world of racism and strife. Nova tells Chantal she loves people for who they are. That kind of love can lead to external issues, and Im glad to see Queen Sugar acknowledge as much.

While Charley tries to get a handle on Micahs school situation, shes also working to find a mill to grind up the sugarcane harvest. She meets with Jacob Boudreaux, who owns Boudreaux Mill with his brother. He offers her a 40-60 deal in the farms favor, but its still a very steep percentage. During negotiations, Charley shows her hand and says she and her siblings are trying to get the Bordelon farm to prove its viable so they can sell it at the best profit. Jacob turns up the charm and gives Charley a tour of the mill, where she learns more about sugar production after it leaves the farm. Although its clear Jacob is trying to schmooze Charley for the sake of business, theres also a little moment where he suggests he wants to learn more about her personal life. Is he hitting on her? Maybe so, because a little later, he stands very close while making an offer hes sure she wont refuse.

Charley takes the offer back to the family, including Prosper, the farm manager, but interestingly enough Remy is not included in this meeting. Jacob has offered to buy the Bordelon farm for $4 million, which is six times what Landry offered. The catch? The Boudreauxs married into the Landry family, so they tend to work together to gobble up farmland and make life hard for any farmer who isnt related to them. Charley is suspicious of the offer and researches old maps. The Boudreauxs and Landrys own all the land around their farm. She discovers that Bordelon land used to belong to the Landrys. She wonders what happened and why theyre so intent on getting it back. Violet and Prosper reluctantly reveal a harrowing yet familiar part of Bordelon family history.

The Landrys owned Bordelons during slavery and let them sharecrop the land after abolition. When the Landrys fell on hard times during the Great Depression, the Bordelons bought some of the Landry land. However, when the Landrys became flush again, they claimed the sale never happened and tried to get the land back. The Landrys lynched some of the Bordelon men, including Ernests older brother. The bank finally found the title, attesting to the Bordelons rightful and legal ownership, but the Landrys and the Boudreauxs did everything they could to make farm life hell for the Bordelons.

Charley, Nova, and Ralph Angel are distraught. At first, they were excited about such a significant offer for the land, but now they know the truth, they refuse to accept it. The three gather to look out over the farm, the land that was paid for with the blood of their ancestors. No more running. We aint going nowhere, they vow. Its a powerful moment, and it mirrors the way many people feel now that a man endorsed by the KKK is the president-elect. If the Bordelons can fight back, we all can. We aint going nowhere.

The history of the Bordelon farm is filled with ugliness and hate that cannot be denied, just like the history of the United States. When you commit to being an American, you take on its complicated history as well as its victories and benefits. If youre asking, How did we let this election happen? you have to be ready to learn how the past feeds the present. That is the way forward. Queen Sugar reminds us of this: Armed with knowledge about their family history, Charley, Nova, and Ralph Angel vow to create a new legacy for the Bordelon name. Not only to overcome the past, but to honor their ancestors. Its a lesson for us all to remember.
Photo: Getty Images

If theres one thing were loving on TV right now, its true crime, and USA will make its own play at the genre with Unsolved. According to Variety, the scripted series will follow the murder investigations of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., and the pilot will be directed by Anthony Hemingway, who brings his experience working on the current gold standard of true-crime programming, American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, along with him. Unsolved will be based on the book Murder Rap: The Untold Story of Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations, by Greg Kading, a former LAPD detective who led multiple investigations into both murders, and who will be onboard with the series as an executive producer. Between this and the next season of American Crime Story, which will focus on the murder of Gianni Versace, the 1990s may be the new 1980s on TV.
Isabelle Huppert in Elle. Photo: SBS Productions

Heres the first sign that Paul Verhoeven isnt your average filmmaker: Not only does he have two Golden Raspberry Awards (for Showgirls), but hes also one of the few people whos ever shown up to accept their trophies in person. This idiosyncrasy is a useful tool for parsing the rest of the directors work, which ranges from serious fare (usually Dutch) like the World War II movies Soldier of Orange and Black Book to bravura schlock (usually American) like Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Starship Troopers. Across that strange filmography, you always get the sense that Verhoeven knows exactly what hes doing, even as he ventures into extreme camp or Cronenbergian body horror. This isnt a director whos ever lost his way; he just happens to be going to some very strange places.

His new film, Elle, might be the apex of this approach. Based on the French novel Oh by Philippe Djian, and written for the screen by David Birke, Elle opens with a startling scene: Michele Leblanc, played by the French actress Isabelle Huppert, is raped in her own home by a masked assailant. Despite the horror of that opening event, Micheles arc is much different than one might expect; successful, acerbic, and sexually empowered, she refuses to be victimized by the attack, even as the harassment is prolonged and heightened.

What unfolds is a rare kind of erotic thriller  if the movie can possibly be called that  in which the eroticism is often un-erotic and the thrills are constantly sidelined for R-rated screwball comedy. Theres a holy young neighbor who labors over her lifesize nativity scene, an elderly woman sleeping with a young stud, a cruelly treacherous love affair, gratuitous male and female nudity, and an insane, terrible-looking video game that never reveals whether its satirical or not. Michele gleefully sticks her stockinged foot in a mans crotch during a dinner party, makes one of her employees show her his penis, and constantly insults her fatuous mother and dimwitted son, whose baby emerges from his girlfriend a different race than he is. Oh, and her father is a nationally famous mass-murderer. And then, still  the rape.

And thats the point. Throughout Elle, Verhoeven and Huppert steer headlong into the skid, fashioning a film that seeks to dissemble rape into its manifold contradictory parts: power, sex, gender, violence, ownership, sin. What results is startlingly strange, and I suspect it will leave both art-house patrons and Academy members dumbfounded. In that way, Elle seems most to be a true Verhoeven original, determined to subvert the idea of what should happen after a woman is raped onscreen. As Michele throws herself into a shocking relationship that stems from her assault  and Elle is one of the rare modern movies that can truly be described as shocking  Verhoeven (and Huppert, too) seem like theyre trying to see just how far they can take things.

At its core, Elle flips and unfolds conventional narratives of victimization, refusing to make it a reductive event. This kind of dynamic has been attempted by male filmmakers in the past, most notably in the femsploitation thrillers of the 70s and 80s and Quentin Tarantinos modern update, Kill Bill. But unlike those films, where our heroine is first destroyed, then seeks revenge, Elle treats the rape as matter-of-factly as it can be, fitting it into a long history of misdeeds done to Michele by the men in her life, whether its her fathers murders, her husbands abandonment, or her sons inadequacy. After shes raped, she is not reborn as a better, stronger version of herself  Michele remains Michele.

Is this the right way to treat rape and sexual violence in film? Is there a right way to treat rape and sexual violence in film? These are not questions that Elle seems terribly interested in answering; the movie is so determinedly itself that it doesnt spend much time wading into ethical and moral waters, other than to splash that water in your face. When Leblancs friends urge her to report the rape to the police, she declines, citing the debacle of her fathers crimes, and the way she handles her rapist once she discover his identity is  idiosyncratic. (It involves lasagna.)

Here, Verhoevens influence is most prominent. Where other directors would try to make a larger statement about rape, or to tell a story with cultural or societal heft, Verhoeven has far more interest in how weird people are. It isnt the rape thats so appalling (though the rape is appalling); its people that are appalling, and irrational, and oversexed, and goofy. You might love Elle, or you might hate it, but theres one thing thats for certain, aside from Hupperts virtuosity: There arent many movies out there that go even half as far as this.
In a story that would play as well on Valentines Day as Veterans Day, KWTXs half-hour news special From The Ashes Of Vietnam, which airs at 6:30 p.m. Friday on Channel 10, follows how the stations 2015 Vietnam veterans documentary led to one couples reconciliation after 40 years.

That documentary, the Emmy Award-winning We Cant Forget: Vietnam, featured Marine Corps veteran Bart Smith, a West resident, who recounted his combat experience in Vietnam and his return to the United States in emotional footage.

Smiths experience led him some time later to look up his first wife and childhood sweetheart Lynn Smith Dwyer, aided by Army vet and veterans advocate Bill Mahon, some four decades after their marriage dissolved. That call led to others and, as viewers of From The Ashes Of Vietnam will see, a decision by the two to get back together.

The two plan to remarry  Smith wants Mahon to do the ceremony in the KWTX studio where the veterans interviews for We Cant Forget were conducted  although no date has been set.

It was one of those things we never expected to come out of this, said KWTX Operations Manager Adam Tabaja. We were really fortunate to see this happen.

The reconciliation completes a circle that started a half-century ago in Port Huron, Mich., where the two met as teenagers and fell in love. They put their relationship on hold when Smith enlisted in the Marines and was shipped with the Third Marine Division to duty in South Vietnam. Viet Cong attacks on and near the city of Hue in early 1968 left him with back and head injuries, but on his return to the States, he and Lynn were married.

He buried himself in work as an electrician, but an increasing amount of time spend away from his wife and a difficulty in communicating strained the relationship and she left the marriage after five years. The two went their separate ways. Bart remarried and had three children with his second wife before they divorced. Lynn remarried, but that marriage, too, ended in divorce.

Bart said he had never forgotten Lynn and their relationship and after We Cant Forget decided to see if he could reconnect. Mahon found she was now living in Philadelphia, Pa., where she presently works as she works as a project administrator of John Bean Technologies, Co. Armed with her number, Bart called and left a message on her voice mail. It turned out she hadnt forgotten him, either.

It was quite a surprise to hear him explain what had happened to him over the last 40 years, she recalled in a recent phone interview. It was quite enlightening to hear the injuries he had suffered and the problems he has had since then, but expresssed so matter-of-factly.

Looking back on that time 44 years ago, Bart saw his overwork as his way to prove to her and her well-to-do family that he could provide for her. Over conversations this year, she perceived a different reason: his way of coping with his war experience and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Back then, nobody knew what PTSD was. We were both 20, 22 years old. We were very young and neither one of us understood what was going on, she said.

Their love rekindled, the two have decided to remarry and Lynn intends tomove to West.

Bart Smith hasnt seen the final product of From The Ashes Of Vietnam, but noted just the promotional spots have made him emotional. He says he agreed to go public with his story in hopes of helping other veterans and their loved ones. I just did it for everybody else, to help them.

Program producer and editor Don Smith said accompanying the love story at the heart of From The Ashes Of Vietnam is a recognition how allowing a veteran to talk out his or her war experience can help heal emotional and psychological wounds.
Turning 95 on Saturday, Charles Alford can vividly recall the exact moment he and his friends decided to join the military in 1942, a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

I was a single kid when I joined the Army. I was 21 and I lived with my dad in Chicago because he had split with my mother, Alford said. I break it down a lot and for 21 years, I was a dumb kid. I didnt know anything, didnt learn anything. I worked a couple of places, and when Hawaii was bombed, pretty soon everyone wanted to join the military.

He and six other World War II veterans sat in the small library at Harmony Science Academy on Thursday morning, swapping stories as they waited to serve as the grand marshals of a Veterans Day parade down the campus hallways and to be guest speakers in classrooms.

Noey Meza, Harmony Science Academys campus outreach coordinator, organized the event with his son, after his son said he wanted to teach his peers about local WWII veterans for the holiday because Mezas uncle served in WWII.

The focus today for Harmony was just putting a face to our veterans and celebrating their service and making sure our kids know these stories are real people, said Erin Wolfe, the Harmony Science Academy spokeswoman for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Theyre a real face and a real story from somebody personally, and I think that builds our American spirit and community efforts here.

For Miguel Valverde, a Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter chaplain who helped find the WWII vets for the event, the parade was about setting an example and focusing on observing Veterans Day on Friday instead of the protests that have popped up across the nation since voters elected Donald Trump as president three days ago.

This gives them the opportunity to say, Let me step back and see what I do not know,  Valverde said. Well, heres WWII veterans that endured many pains and suffering their families had to go through throughout the years, or Vietnam veterans who came home that were spit on or got treated like garbage and yet, today any veteran I see, I always welcome them home. Some students dont realize that happened in our history, or were not teaching it.

As his daughter sat nearby wearing a scarf decorated with the American flag, Alford explained he served for a year and a half under General George S. Patton in Europe. Another vet walks by and asks if the pin on his uniform is a Silver Star, the third-highest a military combat decoration that can be awarded to someone in the U.S. Armed Forces. Alford nods, then goes back to his story.

Join the military

I had three drinking buddies, and wed go around looking for girls, Alford said. And I told the guys one day, You know what we need to do? We need to quit our jobs and as soon as we run out of money, join the military. They said that sounds good. Everybody wants to do that. So we tried it.

Initially, Alford wanted to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force. But bad vision kept him out, he said, joking his first flight wouldnt have ended well anyway.

The veterans lined up in the halls of the school, behind a Boy Scouts color guard, and Alfords daughter Sharon Sexton stood behind his wheelchair, ready to escort him.

Alford didnt start talking about the gravity of the war until much later in life, Sexton said. She, like the children he speaks with, sometimes has a hard time wrapping her mind around what her father has done for the country, she said. Alford served as an artillery man on the front lines of battle, including the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, he said. That battle played a critical role in defeating German counterattacks and freeing a country from the Nazi regime.

Thats what I spent the war doing, shooting people, Alford said. Thats what wars for. Did you know that?

Thats about as close as he gets to opening up about what he saw on the battlefield. As Sexton pushed her father down a hall lined with students on either side, she was overwhelmed. He would reach out to shake their hands or offer up high-fives, and they would clap or salute. She cried, she said.

I dont know if you know this story, but a lot of them didnt have the clothing (needed). He grew up in Chicago and said thats the coldest hes ever been, marching into Bastogne, and Patton in his chrome helmet, Sexton said. He told me Patton would always be out in front of the men and hed be waving the troops as they walked by.

She remembers hearing about how her father traveled overseas, with his ship zig-zagging every seven minutes to avoid being targeted by German submarines. Men were seasick, packed into an old cruise liner stripped of everything, and Alford would go up top for fresh air, she said. Those stories are what shaped her father, turned his life around and gave him a direction, she said.

The other touching thing I remember is when they came upon concentration camps and he said the men were  Ive seen pictures, Sexton said, choking up and unable to go further. They didnt know that. They thought they were just fighting a war. They had no idea. Have you ever seen Band of Brothers? They just kind of went, What is this? and the Germans dropped everything and ran. They were just in such horrible conditions, and I think thats when he realized thats what it was all about, the atrocities of the war.

After the parade, Sexton watched her father from the other side of the library. She smiled as Harmony Science Academy teachers and fellow veterans sang happy birthday and Alford blew out candles in the shape of a nine and a five on a cake. Once they finished, he hollered, Well, arent we going to have a piece?, and waited to be served.

When you go back to Normandy and France, they do sort of what they do here. The kids just line the streets, and they know what it was like to be occupied and theyre teaching that to children so it doesnt happen again, Sexton said. I dont know if the students can truly grasp the magnitude of what they did, coming up on the beaches when everybody around them is dying and they just keep going.

Hes always shut that part out for us. . . . You get him in a group of men, other veterans, I always say thats his first family, and were his second family. He stands up straighter and he lights up. Hes always kind of said, Why would I tell you these things? You dont understand. These men, they understand, and thats important.
The election of the highest number of women into the U.S. Senate is a harbinger of change to come in public policy affecting all of us. They will govern alongside one of the largest numbers of women elected to public office and they will work with an increasing number of female top military leaders in our armed forces.

And with this growing influence of women, we have an opportunity to make significant progress in addressing the mental-health problems of our female veterans. This Veterans Day, as we thank, recognize and honor our veterans, we must address the hard realities that many female veterans struggle with.

Of particular concern is the alarming rate of female veteran suicide. According to a recent study by the Department of Veterans Affairs, since 2001, the age-adjusted rate of suicide among male veterans has increased 30.5 percent. In comparison, the age-adjusted rate of suicide among female veterans has increased 85.2 percent. And among veteran women ages 18 to 29, the risk of suicide is 12 times the rate of nonveteran women.

Its clear that gender-specific interventions are needed to support our female veterans. Our new female leadership in this country must respond to the challenges facing female service members and veterans.

One approach is to enact new laws. A bill introduced this year by U.S. Rep. Julia Brownley of California, called the Female Veterans Suicide Prevention bill, would require the VA to identify mental-health and suicide-prevention programs that are most effective for female veterans and disseminate the guidance to providers within the VA. This is a good step. In addition, better access to trauma-focused care is needed because womens trauma groups at the VA are woefully understaffed and underfunded.

We also need to better understand how women experience military service. Often, the mental-health and substance-abuse problems female veterans suffer stem from the trauma of military sexual assault, in addition to the trauma of warfare. In 2014, about 20,300 military service members (approximately 10,600 men and 9,600 women) were sexually assaulted, a rate unchanged from 2010. And womens experiences are different. Sixty-two percent of women who reported a sexual assault faced retaliation from superiors and commanders. A third of victims are discharged after reporting, on average within seven months of making a report. In 2015, of cases (for men and women) where the military could take action, only 20 percent were prosecuted and just 9 percent of offenders were convicted of a sex offense.

Women who serve in the military are strong, courageous, trailblazing women. Yet many dont identify as veterans because they did not serve in combat roles and/or were socialized to defer to their husbands or commanders service as more important than their own. As a result, many dont enroll for well-deserved benefits from the Veterans Health Administration.

Our military can lead the way in how our society supports its families. The military is a mirror of our larger society but also a model for us to follow in pursuit of our best self. One place to start is to ensure gender-specific and gender/ethnic-specific screening for mental-health and substance-use problems, as well as gender-focused employment training and education support during veterans transition to civilian life. We also must support our service members by recognizing their unique roles as parents and by giving them necessary time for bonding and nurturing with newborns and young children.

As the military and the VA continue to broaden their gender-specific policies in how they support women, they offer all of us a vision for a future in which all people are truly treated equally. With the growing diversity represented in our elected and military leaders, we are prepared to reach our potential more than ever in our history.

Elisa Borah is an associate research professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin. She conducts research to improve programs and services for the military, veterans and their families.
No need for tears and hand-wringing, U.S. friends. What happened on Tuesday was not a collapse of your democracy  just a powerful blow to American Exceptionalism and the misplaced arrogance of the U.S. elite.

Donald Trump won by using a mix that has been effective in Eastern Europe since the turn of the century: a combination of strong nationalism and an anti-corruption agenda.

At a hotel in an Orlando, Florida, suburb at 7 p.m. Tuesday, a dozen Osceola County Republicans gathered around a TV tuned to Fox News. They were early comers to an event billed as a victory party  the Osceola Republican Party was going to celebrate some modest down-ballot wins  but these people were more interested in the presidential race.

They looked cocky and overconfident about Trumps performance. Hes going to run the table, a gray-haired gentleman in an Air Force cap said as the first results came in. They toasted one another with beer. To the wall, said an olive-skinned woman who explained that she was herself an immigrant from Romania.

They didnt really feel this confidence. As the numbers changed on the screen, faces grew tense and the body language betrayed anxiety. Mobile phones came out of pockets as the Trump fans perused the various online election maps and discussed their candidates paths to victory, still unlikely at that point.

Three hours later, a woman in a cowboy hat climbed up on a chair and screamed: Theyve just called Florida for Donald Trump! And she brandished a rubber mask of Hillary Clinton as a witch as if it was the Democratic nominees severed head. A huge cheer went up. It did turn out to be a real victory party, after all.

Many will say Trumps victory was fueled by racism and xenophobia. But its more complicated than that.

The pro-Trump Orlando crowd wasnt an all-white, all-male audience. The day before, when Orlando government relations consultant Bertica Cabrera Morris, a Trump surrogate, told me the Republicans hadnt really botched Hispanic outreach and would deliver plenty of votes to their candidate, it was all I could do not to show disbelief. Yet she was right: Spanish was heard in that hotel ballroom. Women, too, were well-represented. Clearly, enough Latinos and enough women didnt believe Trumps words about them had been particularly offensive.

This is just anecdotal evidence, of course, and so is the fact that, in my travels around the United States this year, I met far more people who were enthusiastic about Trump than about Clinton. But then, do we have anything but anecdotal evidence to go on anymore?

Clearly, most pollsters and pundits were so wrong that everything they said all year should have been disregarded. I am sorry I didnt have the courage to do so, unlike some people I met  for example, Las Vegas lawyer Robert Barnes, who has, since the primaries, consistently predicted a Trump victory and who has now made hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself and the clients he advised to place bets on Trump with European bookmakers.

The signs he and other gamblers saw  many of them rather unscientific  turned out to be more valid than the arrogant opinions and authoritative-looking calculations of pollsters, academics, political operatives and veteran commentators.

I should have listened to Barnes, and to dozens of ordinary Americans who explained to me why they preferred Trump to Clinton. Only a small number of them indicated they were xenophobic. Most were unhappy about their economic situation, particularly rising Obamacare premiums and the precariousness of their incomes  and every one of them considered Clinton corrupt. As one Trump supporter in Orlando put it Tuesday night, Id rather have the Mafia run the U.S. government than Hillary Clinton: They are less crooked.

That should have told me something important  or, rather, confirmed something Id known from another part of the world.

Trump probably won because, by the end of his campaign, he wasnt just a nationalist populist, like the kind that has recently achieved increasing success in Europe, without, however, winning commanding heights. He was also an anti-corruption crusader. He was smart to pick up on the opportunity given to him by WikiLeaks, which tweeted on Tuesday night: The American people dont like corruption.

Anti-corruption parties saw major electoral success in Central and Eastern Europe, joining or leading governing coalitions in a number of countries  Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Bulgaria  in the 2000s. Far from all of them, however, survived their second, not to mention their third election. The most successful of them  Polands Law and Justice  runs the country today because it has artfully combined an anti-corruption agenda with nationalist populism.

This combination has tempted many post-Soviet politicians, too. Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili honed it after his countrys 2003 Rose Revolution, and then, when he was swept out of power after significantly changing his country, he brought it with him to Ukraine. This week, he resigned as governor of Ukraines Odessa region to build a strong party and fight for an early parliamentary election.

He announced his resignation in a Trump-like self-pitying, vindictive speech. He blamed corruption in President Petro Poroshenkos administration and cabinet for his failure to reform customs and public services in the region. He said the president personally supported corrupt criminal clans in Odessa and he vowed to begin a new stage of the struggle.

I am the soldier who forges ahead while he can and then as long as he must, Saakashvili said. As long as he must until a total victory, until Ukraine is purged of this filth, of this corrupt dirt.

Its highly ironic if indeed it was Russia that provided Trump with his WikiLeaks ammunition. There, an anti-corruption, nationalist populist, Alexei Navalny, is probably the strongest figure in the beleaguered opposition to the Vladimir Putin regime. Putin, who is not a nativist and whose close circle is notoriously corrupt, is the sworn enemy of nationalist anti-corruption movements in Russias immediate vicinity, and he is their No. 1 target. The Law and Justice coalition in Poland is strongly anti-Putin, too.

Meanwhile, its time to give up the hubris. The United States is a country like many others in most important respects. Everything that can happen elsewhere can happen here. Trump has just proven that.

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti.
Post-election blues

For all of you who voted for Trump this week, welcome to Nazi Germany version 2.0. For his KKK supporters and his American Nazi Party supporters: Congratulations. You can stop hiding in the woods. You can come right out and be as racist in public as our new president.

To all the women in our country whose mothers and grandmothers fought so hard and so long for our rights, welcome to 1950. As Trump said in his campaign, he thinks the government has the right to tell us what to do with our bodies  and if you dont do what he likes, you can go to prison. Trump cannot change our country back into a bunch of old white men running everything but he is going to try.

I feel most sorry for the people he promised would get back their jobs  jobs that moved to Taiwan 30 years ago. Wonder if his promises will get back the houses and cars that were repossessed. Is he going to pay for this out of his own pocket?

I know exactly who voted for him  elderly people afraid of change, people who want immigrants out of our country, racists and women-haters. In other words, people like him. I cant wait to see someone heckle him during a speech because our current president sure has to deal with it all the time. Is he going to have them forcibly removed? It is called freedom of speech and he is going to have to suck it up and wear his big-boy panties, if he has any.

Janet Smith, Waco

n n n

First, Im sick of Trump voters being described as uneducated white males. I am a white male who is far from uneducated. I have a BA in public administration and my lady friend attended the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor when it was an all-girls school.

I am retired from the U.S. Navy where I was a nuclear technician in the Submarine Service (a very tough course of study, academically). I enrolled in the University of Puget Sound in 1972 at age 40 and completed my studies in two years. I also enrolled in their MBA program, finally realizing that I was trying to empty the ocean with a teacup and dropping out with only 3 credits left till I graduated. I was 46 and realized an MBA would not offer any benefit.

I voted for Trump. I still remember Whitewater, the cattle futures, all the women Hillary trashed, Monica Lewinsky, Travelgate and all of Hillarys transgressions. I remember Bill Clinton, who was unable to keep his fly zipped up. Added to her email issues is the fact all of her top advisers were Muslims, as were Obamas top people. When I considered all that, there was no way I could vote for HRC. I am seriously considering dropping my subscription to the Trib because of anti-Trump articles like the one by Garrison Keillor, which is pure Trump-bashing. And Trump is right about the mainstream media being all in for HRC with the exception of Fox News and Fox Business, which I watch almost 24/7/365.

I also have my doubts about Obamas citizenship.

Joseph Bays, West
WAHOO  As of Oct. 30, Steve Malina is chief deputy with the Saunders County Sheriffs Department.

Malina was previously a captain with the department, but was appointed to the administrative position after former Chief Deputy Bob Thorson stepped down, said Saunders County Sheriff Kevin Stukenholtz.

Thorson will remain with the department as deputy, training supervisor and be in charge of scheduling. He chose to step down, wanting less responsibility, Stukenholtz said.

Not too much is going to change. He (Thorson) did a wonderful job for us, said Chief Deputy Steve Malina.

Malina is from Prague and is a graduate of Prague High School.

He joined the military in 1995 with the Nebraska Air National Guard and is currently a master sergeant with their security forces, normally known as military police.

Malina served with the Schuyler Police Department to begin his career, and also served with the Bulter County Sheriffs Department, before coming home to Saunders County in 2003.

He is already involved in several pretty large projects, Stukenholtz said.

He will still do day-to-day investigations and activities. But the biggest thing is that in the absence of the sheriff, Malina will be the acting sheriff, Stukenholtz said.

Malina said hes been focused on implementing updated technological aspects to law enforcement in his recent responsibilities.

In addition to the newly purchased record management system for the department, Malina said hes working on updating the radio system to a state-wide network and bringing dispatch to the next generation 911 system.

Malina did the research and got recommendations for the new records management system. He is doing the same with the radio system that is not currently compatible with other departments, Stukenholtz said.

Malina said that with the help of the newer technologies, he will hope to improve communication between deputies.

This will include a web-based email system that can let other deputies know what has been going on while they were off duty.

Nobody wants to be blind-sided by anything, Malina said.

He said hes been consistently pushing to get laptops in the patrol cars and technology at their fingertips.

Using the internet and connecting to various systems will help deputies do their job, Malina said.

For example, a recent arrest made at Bomgaars in Wahoo would not have been possible if not for the technology.

Malina said that if he had not had his laptop with him, he would not have been able to look up and see that the individual had a warrant.

He was not in the system, but it was updated online, Malina said.

Malina said he hopes to move the ball forward and bring more technology to the sheriffs department.

Im confident he will do an excellent job, Stukenholtz said.
But more than increased supply is needed if we are going to help people at the more affordable end have a reasonable home to live in. The Greater Sydney Commission (GSC) has floated the concept that new housing developments, particularly in suburbs needing more affordable housing, should provide 10 per cent of the housing as being affordable.

In boom times, like now, we should be closer to 40,000 new homes a year but last financial year only 30,000 new homes were built. So step one must be to add 10,000 homes a year to current production.

The first reaction has been to boost supply. The Department of Planning says that Sydney needs an average of 37,000 new homes every year for the next 20 years.

With Sydney's housing now among the most expensive in the world, governments are under pressure to do something to help those at the affordable end.

The GSC approach takes a stick to the development industry. Credit:Reuters

In essence the developer should donate the housing to a Community Housing Provider who will let it out to people below certain income thresholds. This is another tax on development that will only pass on the cost of the 10 per cent affordable housing to the other 90 per cent. So the majority of new housing will go up by 10 per cent to subsidise the affordable housing.

The GSC approach takes a stick to the development industry by requiring the affordable housing to be donated by the developer. There is a much better way to provide massive numbers of affordable homes across Sydney by using a carrot approach rather than using a stick.

The better way is to use the government's Affordable Rental Housing State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP) that encourages developers to provide at least 20 per cent affordable housing by giving a floor space uplift. Unfortunately the current formula in the SEPP does not allocate a big enough uplift to make projects viable so very few affordable homes have been built. What is needed is a tweaking of the formula in the SEPP to give a 20 per cent floor space uplift for the provision of 20 per cent of the units as affordable.

The SEPP goes on to explain that the affordable housing should provide rental accommodation at 20 per cent below market rates for 10 years, The Urban Taskforce estimates that with an incentive approach up to 4000 new affordable homes a year could be delivered leading to 40,000 over 10 years. With this large number of affordable homes a new asset class that institutional investors, like superannuation funds, could invest in would establish an ongoing funding stream for decades ahead. Surely this carrot approach to the development industry will provide far more affordable homes into the future that the stick of forcing developers of homes to subsidise the affordable housing.
As we sit in the foggy aftermath of one of history's most extraordinary elections one thing is clear enough  Australia just received an enormous shot of financial adrenalin. We are accidental collateral winners from the Republican victory in the US. Call it the Trump gift and it's worth billions.

Trump's policy centrepiece to spend $1 trillion to rebuild America's infrastructure signals a massive increase in demand for commodities like iron ore and coal, which Australia produces. And since declaring he was set to "fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals", the prices of these commodities have taken off like a rocket.

The price of Iron ore  our biggest export  has soared to almost US$75 a tonne which is almost double where it was at the start of the year. In the past few days since the days it has gained more than 8 per cent.

According to Australian government's budget papers, the effect in 2017/18 of a change in the iron ore price alone is huge, with every $US10 a tonne change impacting tax receipts by $3.9 billion and nominal GDP by $13.4 billion.
Sorry, but I find the ascent of Donald Trump more fascinating than frightening. If it's all going to be so terrible, how exactly is he going to make it happen?

If you take literally all the things he's said he'll do, it will be a disaster. But anyone who believes all the things politicians say in the heat of election campaigns isn't too bright.

It wouldn't surprise me if many of the people whose votes got him elected don't know half of what he promised, don't much care what he promised and certainly don't expect him to deliver.

They voted for him because, in their anger with the business and political establishment, they wanted to give the system a kick up the bum. The less he sounded like a proper politician, the more they thought him the man for that job.
The federal government has set 40 "strict" environmental conditions on the first stage of the Badgerys Creek Airport even before flight paths have been settled, prompting the move to be dubbed as "ridiculous" by one of the project's critics.

The conditions covering biodiversity, noise and heritage are "as comprehensive a set" as any placed on an airport in Australia, the federal Environment and Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, said.

The measures include "minimising the impact of noise" on nearby residents, the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area and other sensitive areas.

However, Blue Mountains City Council mayor Mark Greenhill said it was "ridiculous" that the government had assigned only vague conditions and not waited for flight paths to be set over the internationally renowned region.
A lawsuit brought by young people against the Obama administration may force President-elect Donald Trump to decide how far he'll go to downplay the threat of global warming.

Youths from across the US won a chance on Thursday to pursue claims that the Obama administration didn't do enough to protect the environment from climate change when an Oregon federal judge rejected the government's request to dismiss their lawsuit.

An environmental activists holds a banner during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump at the Climate Conference, known as COP22, in Marrakech, Morocco, on Wednesday. Credit:AP

Environmentalists said the ruling is especially poignant because Trump, a real estate developer and former reality television star, has called climate change a hoax.

"We have a President-elect who is an obvious climate denier and both political branches controlled by a party rampant with climate denialism," said Julia Olson, an attorney for the plaintiffs.
Estimados amigos,

Les doy cordialmente la bienvenida a este Blog informativo con articulos, analisis y comentarios de publicaciones especializadas y especialmente seleccionadas, principalmente sobre temas economicos, financieros y politicos de actualidad, que esperamos y deseamos, sean de su maximo interes, utilidad y conveniencia.

Pensamos que solo comprendiendo cabalmente el presente, es que podemos proyectarnos acertadamente hacia el futuro.

Las convicciones son mas peligrosos enemigos de la verdad que las mentiras.

There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.

You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.

No soy alguien que sabe, sino alguien que busca.

Only Gold is money. Everything else is debt.

Las grandes almas tienen voluntades; las debiles tan solo deseos.

Quien no lo ha dado todo no ha dado nada.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.
A man has been charged with child stealing and other crimes after allegedly taking a car with a baby inside in Melbourne's north.

Gurkan Yildirim, 24, of Coburg, is alleged to have stolen a silver 2014 Mercedes from outside the Australian International Academy in Ross Street, Coburg North, on Tuesday.

Eloca Arafe on the bonnet of the car as the thief sped off.

Police prosecutor Detective Senior Constable Virginia Creece told the court the mother of the baby had parked outside the school to pick up her young children when the theft occurred.

The mother left the car's motor running and the windows down, and had been talking to a friend next to the car when Mr Yildirim allegedly crawled in through a window and drove off, the court heard.
In November 2000, as the Florida recount gripped the nation, a newly elected Democratic senator from New York took a break from an upstate victory tour to address the possibility that Al Gore could wind up winning the popular vote but losing the presidential election.

She was unequivocal. "I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people," Hillary Clinton said, "and to me that means it's time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president."

Sixteen years later, the Electoral College is still standing, and Clinton has followed Gore as the second Democratic presidential candidate in modern history to be defeated by a Republican who earned fewer votes, in his case by George W. Bush.

In her concession speech Wednesday, Clinton did not mention the popular vote, an omission that seemed to signal her desire to encourage a smooth and civil transition of power after a divisive election. But her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, highlighted her higher vote total than Donald Trump's in introducing her.
Russia's Vladimir Putin and Germany's Angela Merkel have reacted very differently to Donald Trump's surprise election victory. Credit:Getty Images Neither has there been a president who is so willfully ignorant on the issues. Through a hellish 16 months of campaigning, Trump got away with revealing very little of what he really thinks about foreign policy. We know he likes Putin; thinks the Iran nuclear deal is "terrible", doesn't like ISIS; is not sure about NATO; thinks the Chinese are thieves; wants to wall off all of Mexico; and he wants to make America great again. It was as though he wouldn't, or couldn't, elaborate on his slogans and his policy bullet points. But because of the way the world turns and time passes, already we can discern the contours of crises that surely will test him and the mettle of the men and women around him. President Barack Obama meets President-elect Donald Trump at the White House. Credit:AP In addressing the "what happens next" question about President-elect Trump, it might be best to keep this simple. Think of it as a 4x4 report  four sets of four facts on the policy challenges for the incoming president and commander-in-chief.

Four wars to keep him busy 1. The campaign against IS in Iraq

2. The campaign against IS in Syria

3. The war against the Taliban in Afghanistan  now in its 15th year

4. The air campaign against IS in Libya Four imminent crises to test him 1. A trade war with ? After all Trump said on the hustings, he can't just do nothing about China, which he variously accused of "killing us", "stealing" or "raping our country". His beef is that China manipulates its currency to hurt US exporters and that it steals American technology. An option is to take a case against Beijing to the World Trade Organisation, but that's one of those global institutions that irritate Trump. His preferred course of action is to whack China with tariffs of as much as 45 per cent, for which China would be sure to retaliate, engulfing the world in an horrendous trade war. An army of experts is saying: "Donald, don't do it." The respected Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that a trade war with China, which would increase the cost of Chinese products in the US and make it more difficult for US exports, would cause another recession, in which as many as 4 million American jobs would be eliminated.

2. Let Putin have his way in Europe? Another issue on which Trump has talked himself into a corner. Trump is so desperate to be "liked" by the Russian leader that Putin is sure to put him to the test at the first opportunity  like in the coming months, when US and European economic sanctions on Moscow, for its messing in Ukraine, have to be renewed or abandoned. Alternately, Putin might test Trump's indifference to NATO, and Washington's obligation under the treaty to protect other members, by sending troops into NATO member and former Soviet republic, Estonia  as he did in Ukraine. Another option for Putin would be to seek a deal in which Washington would get off his case in Europe, in return for Russia taking full responsibility for the war on ISIS in Syria  the ISIS element of which Trump embraced while campaigning. Trump will reveal some of his thinking by proceeding with, or blocking an Obama plan for 4500 troops and hundreds of military machines to be deployed to Eastern Europe by February 2017.

Flames rise from a car bomb in a government-controlled area of Aleppo, Syria. Credit:AP 3. "Dismantle" the Iran nuclear deal? Again, an issue on which Trump's over-the-top rhetoric obliges Trump to do something. It's not a formal treaty, so he could walk away from it. But his co-signatories  Russia, Germany, France, Britain and the European Union  probably would not walk with him. Trump might re-impose US economic sanctions on Tehran, but this week's $US4.8 billion gas deal between France and Iran is indicative of the kind of business that others would prefer with Iran.

4. Make Mexico pay for the border wall? Priced as high as $US25 billion, it's an enormous undertaking and the Mexican attitude is best expressed by former president Vincente Fox  "I'm not going to pay for that f---ing wall". Trump's various proposals for how he would make Mexico pay for America's wall would cause an economic and diplomatic crisis. They include commandeering the combined $US25 billion a year that Mexicans in the US send as small remittances to their families; onerous fees for a range of visas; banning Mexican businessmen and government officials from entering the US; putting tariffs on Mexican goods; and cutting foreign aid to Mexico. Chinese President Xi Jinping. Credit:AP Four US election takeaways for Russia, China and any other pushy, oppressive regime

1. We got lucky: They don't have to deal with Clinton, an experienced candidate with a record of standing up to bullies; instead they have Trump, who will be quite at home with the Russian oligarch class and in the case of China, as observed by Foreign Policy magazine's Asia editor James Palmer, "he's exactly the kind of businessman who is most easily taken in by China  credulous, focused on the externalities of wealth, and massively susceptible to flattery". 2. Authoritarianism beats democracy: All of Trump's instincts are authoritarian  the Chinese must love his approval for their brutal suppression of the peaceful Tiananmen protests in 1989. And any electoral system that throws up a winner like Trump surely is a joke; much better to stick with a system that imposes leaders; and if the US has any complaints, tell it to clean up its own house. 3. Human rights be damned: The world just got smaller, uglier and meaner; lonelier too for innocents who are denied their rights. Trump's disregard for human, civil and women's rights in the US; and his cosiness with white supremacists; all mean that he's unlikely to be fussed by human rights violations, as much by US allies as by its enemies. 4. Keep cracking down on the media: Even if Trump fails in his declared intention to strangle the First Amendment and to change libel laws to make it more difficult for the media to report on his business misconduct and his mistreatment of women, they'll love that he wants to; and they'll take his attacks on the media as a green light to press ahead with press suppression. President-elect Donald Trump celebrates his victory. Credit:Chip Somodevilla

Four examples of Trump contradicting Trump But it all depends on what day of the week it is. Trump's intentions are opaque, because his capacity to mangle language makes it difficult to understand what he's saying; and he often contradicts himself. So we are left with: 1. The usefulness of NATO: One day it's "obsolete", but the next it might be useful to fight terrorism; if American allies don't pay for Washington's contribution to their defence, he'll withdraw; but later, this is just a bargaining position  he didn't really mean what he said. At another time, he claims he doesn't mind if Japan and South Korea go nuclear  and later denies that he even said so. 2. Fighting terrorism: He wanted to commandeer Iraq's oil to cover the cost of its military effort and losses since the 2003 US-led invasion; he was going to "bomb the shit" out of IS; he would waterboard terrorist suspects; and he'd happily kill their relatives to make them talk. All these are war crimes and he insisted that the generals would do as he told them  but later he said he'd not order the military to act outside the law. He always had a "secret" plan to destroy IS, and then he didn't  he'd be asking the generals, who he claimed knew less about IS than he did, to devise a plan to take out the terror group. Will the likely recapture of the Iraqi city of Mosul, now under assault by Iraqi forces with help from US and Turkish forces, be the point at which he seizes Iraq's oil reserves and production facilities? 3. Homeland security: First he wanted a total ban on all Muslims entering the US and to have special police patrols in the communities in which Muslim Americans live; then the whole Muslim thing was dropped  instead, he was calling for "extreme vetting" for people from certain part of the world.

4. Undocumented aliens: First he just talked about the wall on the Mexican border  and then he had the idea that Mexico would be made to pay for it; then that the US would pay for it, and he'd find other ways to extract the funds from Mexico [see above]; at first all of the estimated 12 million "illegals" in the country would be deported  "in a very humane way"; but then it was going to be just "gang members and drug peddlers", and he'd make a decision on what to do about the millions remaining "at a later date". With 65 million people displaced worldwide, Georgetown University research professor Elizabeth Ferris writes: "The ugly anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US has fed into a toxic global narrative that refugees and migrants are to be kept out  why should Pakistan and Kenya continue to host millions of refugees if much wealthier countries are closing their doors to refugees and political candidates blame foreigners for all manner of problems?" Just by winning the election, Trump has added to global instability and uncertainty. Foreign policy is an area in which presidential power is least constrained by the legislative and judicial branches of government and the mere suggestion that Trump's transactional view of relationships might supplant traditional alliances that were deemed to be of mutual benefit is cause for alarm  do Vietnam, Myanmar and the Philippines seek greater stability by going deeper with Beijing? Do Taiwan, South Korea and Japan continue to have faith in the US nuclear umbrella, or do they embark on their own nuclear programs? And won't China just love that? Describing the combined effect of Trump's election at a time of GOP control of the house and senate as a body-blow to all that flows from the traditional post-Cold War order of pro-Western alliances, Brookings Institution expert Ted Piccone makes this point: "How ironic that, as the world gets smaller and the demand for cross-border solutions grows, the most powerful country in the world has decided to build walls and run for the hills ... Say goodbye to Pax Americana. Say hello to Chinese and Russian imperialism, spheres of influence, renewal of radical fundamentalism, higher risks of climate catastrophe; and a return to the worst instincts of human and state behaviour." Aware that Trump will take the side of the other guy, of Bernie Sanders when he was challenging Clinton, of Putin when he was belting Obama, Putin adopted the same strategy in congratulating Trump on winning the election  all the relationship problems between Washington and Moscow were Obama's fault.

"We understand and are aware that it will be a difficult path in the light of the degradation in which, unfortunately, the relationship between Russia and the US are at the moment  it is not our fault that Russia-US relations are as you see them," Putin said. Russian President Vladimir Putin may test Trump. Credit:AP And Germany's Angela Merkel seemingly made co-operation with the incoming Trump administration conditional on decency and compassion  "[We] are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views  I offer the next president of the US close co-operation on the basis of these values." Loading Far from reassuring, but nonetheless an accurate assessment of the lie of the land in terms of foreign policy as we approach the Trump era, is this from conservative security analyst Max Boot: "Is this the dark night of fascism descending on America? Maybe. Is this the triumph of white supremacists? Could be. Is this the end of NATO and the triumph of Vladimir Putin? Quite possibly 
Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo haven't been able to agree on much of anything since the mayor took office. That disagreement over anything and everything dissolved for a moment today though, as Mayor de Blasio joined Andrew Cuomo in telling New Yorkers that maybe a Trump presidency won't be so bad and we've got plenty of infrastructure spending to look forward to.

"Yesterday I was clear about the area that we are prepared to work with President Trump for the good of the people of New York City" de Blasio said at a press conference this afternoon, before conjuring a version of Donald Trump only a milquetoast liberal could build.

"If President-elect Trump follows through on a vision of creating new jobs and rebuilding our infrastructure and follows through on a vision of ending trade deals that are bad for American workers and follows through on a vision that closes the carried interest loophole and a tax policy that will put resources back into the federal government to invest in our cities and our nation, we'll work with him and do everything to help him achieve those goals."

The mayor followed it up by noting that "there are areas of real concern if President Trump were to follow through on his platform, that there would be conflicts with the values of the vast majority of New Yorkers: for immigrants, any threat to deport people here in our city, any effort to undermine reproductive rights for women in New York and America, any effort to derail Obamacare and take away health insurance from so many people who've struggled to get it. These are all examples of where we will fight to protect the interests of New York City, and certainly as well in affordable housing, where it's crucial the federal government remain committed to the people of the city."

De Blasio chose to treat Trump as an unknown, suggesting that his campaign rhetoric might not match his actions, and that there's a reason for hope there. "With any new leader, everyone has to watch and see what we're gonna get. On a historical level, sometimes we get exactly what we expect and sometimes we get something very different. It's a lot easier to talk about some of the things he offered in his platform, but a lot of them will generate serious, serious opposition and become harder to achieve."

The mayor said he hopes Trump will "remember the people of New York City in the decisions that he makes," and also suggested that "there would be a hypocrisy in turning against the place he came from." And if there's one thing we know about Trump, it's that he would never do anything hypocritical.

"I do not fear at all the normalization of Donald Trump," the mayor said, while also emphasizing that the real X factor is who Donald Trump will be when he takes office. "We'd like him to succeed," de Blasio told the press, "I do believe President Obama is right that you're supposed to have a patriotic impulse to want to see the president succeed."

Does de Blasio really mean any of this, or did he just say it in the hopes that President Trump wont nuke the city in a fit of pique?

That success, in the eyes of Cuomo and de Blasio, seems to be in a Trump the men created in their own minds who'll support Robert Moses-esque big builds in urban areas. The actual evidence we have on hand at the moment however, doesn't seem to suggest that's going to be the case.
Your Ultimate Investing Toolkit

Sign up for MarketBeat All Access to gain access to MarketBeat's full suite of research tools:

Portfolio Monitoring

Top Stock Lists

Premium Reports

Stock Screeners

Live News Feed

Premium Support

Free for your first month.
Fariha Nizam, a 19-year-old college student from Bellerose, Queens, was taking the Q43 bus en route to her Manhattan internship on Thursday morning when she says a white, middle-aged couple approached her, yelling that she must take off her hijab.

"The woman was doing most of the talking and she was basically telling me that I wasn't allowed to wear it," Nizam told us on Friday, three days after Donald Trump, a candidate who has stoked Islamophobia and called for a ban on Muslims, was elected President. "She was telling me to take that disgusting piece of cloth off of my head, telling me it's not allowed anymore."

Nizam, whose parents immigrated from Bangladesh in the 1990s, has lived in Bellerose her whole life, and has commuted on the Q43 bus since high school. "I've been taking it forever: for high school, for college, for work," she said. "I've always been taking that bus and nothing has ever happened to me before."

According to Nizam, there were about ten other commuters on the bus, many of whom spoke up, telling the couple to stop. This, she said, prompted the woman to approach her and touch her head. She continued:

Other people were telling them to stop and leave me alone, and they kind of got in a fight. She was screaming, "No she has to fucking take it off." The more she was fighting with them the angrier she got and because of that I assume she came towards me and started grabbing at my head and tried it pull it off. And I completely started bawling and I started freaking out. And I finally was able to breath properly and I got up and got off of the bus and walked back home and let my internship know I couldn't make it.

Nizam recounted the incident on Facebook, in a post that has been "liked" over two thousand times since. Though she still plans to contact the police, yesterday, she said, she was "too distraught."

"I wish I didn't respond so weakly, but I hope, God forbid, if this happens again I won't break down the way I did," Nizam added.

Nizam's account is "not unusual," said Etzion Neuer, policy director for the Anti-Defamation League. "While the specifics are unique, broadly speaking there are a lot of pieces here that are commonly shared by victims of incidents of hate. Often, people don't respond in the way they would have liked to."

"Someone will say, 'Why didn't you say this or do that?' And it's simply not fair. Because the moment is so shocking and emotionally wrenching, that their rational faculties don't take over and they don't know how to respond."

Still, Neuer urged victims to go to the police as soon as they are able. In his experience, he said, the NYPD's Hate Crimes Taskforce is "extraordinary."

But Debjani Roy, deputy director at the anti-harassment nonprofit Hollaback!, said Friday that many women don't feel comfortable contacting the police. Taking this into account, she said, there's plenty that New Yorkers can do if they witness a hate incident unfolding. "What we have always pushed for as an organization, and is more important now than ever, is bystander intervention," she said. "We have a role to play as community members to support and help provide some sense of safety for people who are directly targeted."

Hollaback! has developed what they refer to has the "Four D's Of Bystander Intervention": directly intervene, distract, delegate, and delay.

If stepping between victim and harasser "isn't the safest thing to do," Roy said, distraction is a good alternative. "That could be pretending you are lost and asking for directions, or sitting next to the person and pretending you know them," she said. "Then the person who is doing the harassing is disrupted." Delegating might involve getting up and speaking to the bus driver. The fourth response, "delay," might involve stepping up to the victim and talking to him or her after the incident.

In Nizam's case, she said, fellow bus riders could have done more. "As much as I appreciate that people were asking [the couple] to stop, I wish there was more of an active effort. There wasn't someone literally getting between me and this woman," she said. "I didn't see anyone telling the bus driver he needed to stop, or calling the police."

The MTA didn't respond to a request for comment.



An excerpt from Nizan's Facebook post on the assault (via).

Dr. Debbie Almontaser is board president of the Muslim Community Network, a social justice nonprofit organizing Muslim New Yorkers that was founded in 2003, in response to "urgent needs" following 9/11.

She said on Friday that the precautionary measures she's urging Muslim New Yorkers to take this week are the same ones she's been pushing for the last six months, as the presidential election drew to a close, and, particularly, since an Imam and his assistant were fatally shot in the head in Queens in August.

"Right now my advice to Muslim Americans is to be vigilant, to be careful where they are going," she said. "Consider what time of day they go out, what neighborhoods they are in, and really try to travel with other people. Try to not be out late... really try not to be on [your] phones, which could be a distraction."

"I've been telling people, 'If you need someone to walk with you I will,'" Nizam said. "But it's just scary because I myself am susceptible... I am going from being super angry, to distraught and in agony."

On Facebook, she reiterated her resolve to support others. "As terrified as I fucking am in the hijab I have loved, cherished, and proudly worn for the past 5 years, I am here for ANYONE who needs consolation," she said.

The NYC Human Rights Commission enforces the NYC Human Rights law, which protects individuals against discriminatory harassment. However a spokesperson clarified on Friday that protections typically apply to repeated instances of alleged abusesay, walking by the same deli each morning and enduring repeated harassment from a regular customer.

"If anyone believes they have been the victim of discrimination, including repeated verbal harassment, we urge them to call the 311 and ask for Human Rights," said spokesman Seth Hoy. "If anyone is in immediate danger of violence, they should call 911."

Hollaback! has more detailed advice on how to respond to harassment, either as a victim or a witness, here. Here's one Paris-based illustrator's guide for bystanders, and another reminder that intervention and action is essential.
The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation provides a range of financial products and services in the United States and internationally. The company operates through Securities Services, Market and Wealth Services, Investment and Wealth Management, and Other segments. The Securities Services segment offers custody, trust and depositary, accounting, exchange-traded funds, middle-office solutions, transfer agency, services for private equity and real estate funds, foreign exchange, securities lending, liquidity/lending services, prime brokerage, and data analytics. This segment also provides trustee, paying agency, fiduciary, escrow and other financial, issuer, and support services for brokers and investors. The Market and Wealth Services segment offers clearing and custody, investment, wealth and retirement solutions, technology and enterprise data management, trading, and prime brokerage services; and clearance and collateral management services. This segment also provides integrated cash management solutions, including payments, foreign exchange, liquidity management, receivables processing and payables management, and trade finance and processing services. The Investment and Wealth Management segment offers investment management strategies and distribution of investment products, investment management, custody, wealth and estate planning, private banking, investment, and information management services. The Other segment engages in the provision of leasing, corporate treasury, derivative and other trading, corporate and bank-owned life insurance, renewable energy investment, and business exit services. It serves central banks and sovereigns, financial institutions, asset managers, insurance companies, corporations, local authorities and high net-worth individuals, and family offices. The company was founded in 1784 and is headquartered in New York, New York.
Suncor Energy Inc. operates as an integrated energy company. The company primarily focuses on developing petroleum resource basins in Canada's Athabasca oil sands; explores, acquires, develops, produces, transports, refines, and markets crude oil in Canada and internationally; markets petroleum and petrochemical products under the Petro-Canada name primarily in Canada. It operates through Oil Sands; Exploration and Production; Refining and Marketing; and Corporate and Eliminations segments. The Oil Sands segment recovers bitumen from mining and in situ operations, and upgrades it into refinery feedstock and diesel fuel, or blends the bitumen with diluent for direct sale to market. The Exploration and Production segment is involved in offshore operations off the east coast of Canada and in the North Sea; and operating onshore assets in Libya and Syria. The Refining and Marketing segment refines crude oil and intermediate feedstock into various petroleum and petrochemical products; and markets refined petroleum products to retail, commercial, and industrial customers through its other retail sellers. The Corporate and Eliminations segment operates four wind farms in Ontario and Western Canada. The company also markets and trades in crude oil, natural gas, byproducts, refined products, and power. The company was formerly known as Suncor Inc. and changed its name to Suncor Energy Inc. in April 1997. Suncor Energy Inc. was founded in 1917 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.
VMware, Inc. provides software solutions in the areas of modern applications, cloud management and infrastructure, networking, security, and digital workspaces in the United States and internationally. It offers VMware multi-cloud solutions, including VMware vSphere, a data center infrastructure that provides the fundamental compute layer; vSAN and VxRail, which offers holistic data storage and protection options to applications running on vSphere; and vRealize Cloud Management solutions that manages hybrid and multi-cloud environments running in virtual machines and containers, as well as VMware Cloud Foundation, a cloud platform that combines its vSphere, vSAN, and NSX with vRealize Cloud Management into an integrated stack and delivers enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for private and public clouds. The company also provides networking solutions, such as VMware NSX, NSX Distributed and Gateway Firewalls, NSX Network Detection and Response Engine, NSX Advanced Load Balancer, Tanzu Service Mesh, and VMware SASE; security solutions consisting of VMware Carbon Black Endpoint, Workload, and Container; and digital workspace solutions comprising Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management, Access, Intelligent Hub, and Horizon. In addition, it offers application modernization solutions, such as Tanzu Application and Operations Platform, Tanzu Application Service Platform, Tanzu Observability, Tanzu Community Edition, and Tanzu Labs; and cloud management solutions, including vRealize Cloud Management, vCloud Suite, and CloudHealth by VMware Suite. The company sells its products through distributors, resellers, system vendors, and systems integrators. VMware, Inc. has a strategic alliance with Amazon Web Services to build and deliver an integrated hybrid solution. The company was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
Univar Solutions Inc. distributes commodity and specialty chemical products, and provides related services worldwide. It offers epoxy resins, polyurethanes, titanium dioxide, fumed silica, esters, plasticizers, silicones, and specialty amines; ingredients for cleaners, detergents, and disinfectant products; and base stocks, performance-enhancing additives for lubricants and metalworking fluids. The company also distributes specialty and basic chemicals, and ingredients used in skin and hair care products; and commodity and specialty products for meat processing, baked goods, dairy, grain mill products, processed foods, carbonated soft drinks, fruit drinks, and alcoholic beverage markets, as well as provides excipients, solvents, reactants, active pharmaceutical ingredients, and intermediates to pharmaceutical ingredient producers. In addition, it offers chemical products for use at various stages of production, from sap stain prevention to pulp and paper manufacturing; and chemistries and products used to sanitize, balance, and supplement municipal and industrial water. Further, the company provides chemicals to midstream pipeline and downstream refinery operators, as well as chemicals and services to upstream oil and gas sector for offshore production, oil extraction, and waste management activities. Additionally, it offers transportation and warehousing services, chemicals and hazardous materials handling, waste management services, inventory management, and blending, mixing, and repackaging services. Univar Solutions Inc. distributes its products through warehouse and direct-to-consumer delivery channels. The company was formerly known as Univar Inc. and changed its name to Univar Solutions Inc. in September 2019. Univar Solutions Inc. was founded in 1924 and is headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois.
Are you relatively new to this bustling metropolis? Don't be shy about it, everyone was new to New York once upon a time, except, of course, those battle-hardened residents who've lived here their whole lives and Know It All. One of these lifers works among us at Gothamistpublisher Jake Dobkin grew up in Park Slope and still resides there. He is now fielding questionsask him anything by sending an email here, but be advised that Dobkin is "not sure you guys will be able to handle my realness." We can keep you anonymous if you prefer; just let us know what neighborhood you live in.

This question comes from a fellow New Yorker wondering what can be done if she witnesses Trump-emboldened hatred.

Gothamist,

When we see bigoted incidents like these situations, what do we do? What can we do?

Jenna

A native New Yorker responds:

Dear Jenna,

Thank you for your letterit helped me shake off some of my despair and remember that feeling sorry for myself and my country isn't going to do anyone any good; we've got to begin to shift our focus to action. As we discussed in a letter earlier in the week, four groups are in immediate danger from the incoming regime: women, immigrants, Muslims, and members of the LGBTQ community. Even before Trump takes the oath of office, they are going to experience (and already are experiencing) harassment from emboldened misogynists, xenophobes, and homophobes. It is our job, as good, kind, and decent New Yorkers, to make sure that every instance of this harassment is met with a harsh rebuke. This is also good practice for next year, when we will need to bring this same strength and ferocity to opposing reactionary policies from the new administration.

This is easy to say, but hard to do, because it requires going against the New York trait of minding your own business and avoiding danger. But if you see someone yelling obscenities at a woman in a headscarf, or telling a group of Hispanic kids to go back to Mexico, or rubbing up against a woman on a subway, you have an obligation to act. This does not mean you need to jump up and hurl yourself at the perpetratorquite the contrary, as this will only escalate the conflict.

No, the trick is to use your street smarts and figure out what is the least aggressive, but most effective means of diffusing the conflict. If it's just a name-calling idiot, moving between them and the victim is a good technique. If you don't feel comfortable doing that, you can use your voicea loud shout in your most New York accent of "Hey! Knock that off!" or "Stop it!" can help. If you're too scared to speak, then you need find reinforcements: a fellow citizen, the police, etc.



(Gretchen Robinette / Gothamist)

Remember the bystander effect: the larger the group, the less any one person feels the need to act. So if you need help you should look right into the friendliest person's eyes and say "please, can you help me here?" After one person volunteers, this will unfreeze the crowd and many people will jump to your aid.

We need to take this spirit of action into all realms of our lives. If you see racist graffiti in your community, take a walk to the hardware store, buy some paint, and buff it. If you're a teacher, and you see a student using Trump's win as an excuse to bully a classmate, you have a legal and moral obligation to put a stop to that shit right there. If you are a cop on the beat you need to be aware of how vulnerable everyone is feeling right now, and use your position to show them they are supported and respectedsimply standing beside them on the train can mean a lot.

In short: this is New York, and we need to show the world that we are the most tolerant city in the world, and the last place you want to victimize someone because of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or nationality.

We are lucky to have the full and united support of our elected city and state representatives standing strong against the forces of intolerance and bigotry. As Mayor De Blasio said last night: "If President-elect Trump were to follow through on his platform, there would be obvious disagreements and obvious conflict with my values and with the values of the vast majority of New Yorkers and the needs of New Yorkers. That certainly includes in the area of immigrationany threat to deport people here in our city, any efforts to undermine reproductive rights for the women of New York and for the women of America, any effort to derail Obamacare and take away health insurance from so many people who have struggled to get it and so many more New Yorkers who would have been eligible if Obamacare continued... We cannot, in any way, underestimate that challenge."

So remember: the road ahead will be long, but you don't need to think about that. You only need to think about today: what is one step you can take today to make this city, state, and country a better place? Did you smile and say hello to a neighbor? Did you give money to one of the charities or political action groups who will be taking the fight to Washington in 2017? Did you just do your best to get through this awful fucking week and be kind to your friends and family? If you did any of that, then well done: take the weekend to relax and recuperate. Go to a movie, take a walk through the park to enjoy the beautiful fall foliage. The fight will still be here when you get back, and we need you to keep your spirit strong!

Jake

N.B.: I'd like to take a moment here to thank everyone who has written in this week, expressing their support for the work the journalists at Gothamist have been doing during this difficult time, and extend my own thanks to them as wellit's an honor to work amongst people so committed to positive values.

Ask a Native New Yorker anything via email. Anonymity is assured.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Nov. 10, 2016 | 07:56 PM | MURRAY, KY

Davies opened his remarks by referencing Dr. Ralph Woods, the fourth president of Murray State University. Woods presided during a time of rapid transformation and challenges for the University in the 1940s through the early 1970s.





Davies spoke of the past year, which included significant fiscal challenges such as a reduction in state funding, pension cost increases and several other examples that impacted the University.





While this was a difficult and strenuous time we, as a community, stood together and worked to overcome this challenge, said Davies. It was during this critical time that we did not waver from our goals, our values, and we did not lower our aspirations.





Through these challenges, the University moved forward and Davies shared several examples of success involving Murray State faculty, staff and students, such as a $3.8 million National Science Foundation grant to support the research efforts of Drs. David White and Susan Hendricks.



Student success stories were many, including Morgan Owens, a senior psychology major who was awarded the Psychology Undergraduate Research Award for the best psychology research project of the year. Owens has been researching the correlation between Alzheimers and bilingualism. Davies also shared that for the 26th consecutive year, the University has been ranked by U.S.News and World Report as one of the top universities in the South.





Davies provided updates on the Universitys 2015-22 Strategic Plan, which included a commitment to higher admission standards for incoming freshmen and transfer students.





This falls freshmen class has increased by slightly over two percent from the previous falls class, and there has been a corresponding increase in freshmen ACT scores with an average of nearly 24. The Universitys Honors College participation has grown significantly with 176 new students, the largest freshmen class in the Universitys recent history.





Davies also spoke of the Universitys new scholarship model that awards scholarships as a percentage of tuition. Davies said, Our scholarship model is more aggressive and progressive and is essential to our ability to attract high-achieving and capable students. And, because of the percentage-of-tuition approach, this is ensuring an affordable and predictable model for our students. No other university that we know has such a model.





Davies spoke of the adoption of a performance-funding model for Murray State as future state appropriations, in part or in whole, will be allocated based on outcomes and performance levels that are achieved.





One can look at performance funding in many ways, as a threat or as an opportunity. Our goal has always been student success, and our Strategic Plan is based on this core value, said Davies.





An initial performance-funding model uses criteria such as the number of students completing STEM-H programs. Davies mentioned that last year, Murray State granted 1,036 STEM-H degrees, an increase of 25.6 percent over the previous year.





Murray States return on the state of Kentuckys investment in the University is strong. Davies referenced a recent study conducted by Dr. Gil Mathis, a Murray State professor emeritus, and graduate student Savannah Allen that determined the economic impact the University has on the immediate area, service region and the state. The study found that the University provides an impact of $209.8 million with Calloway County investing $8.3 million, a net return of over $200 million. For the state of Kentucky, the study determined that the University receives an investment of $132.2 million and returns $495.1 million in economic benefit, a net return of over $360 million.





Davies emphasized the importance of achieving a degree as an accomplishment not bound by receiving a diploma or getting a job; rather, it should be to embark on a lifelong journey based on the seeking of new opportunities, new horizons, a passion of discovery in which the person will be richly rewarded in many and diverse ways.





Davies spoke of a critical and important initiative in the concept of the Marketplace of Ideas. In a tense time of mistrust shared by many people with varying beliefs and thoughts, Davies stated that we must begin now to create a lasting culture that is inviting, that is inclusive of others. We must work diligently to create an environment that encourages asking difficult and pertinent questions, but also allows for discussions to occur in a civil manner.





In his closing remarks, Davies again spoke of Dr. Woods as an inspiration in ensuring Murray State remains a well-known and respected University that makes a difference, one student at a time.





Davies stated, We must, we will, keep our aspirations high, as Dr. Woods said, Aims determine our direction, and aspiration determines how far we may go in that direction. Be assured that lofty aims and high aspirations will be our most significant fortune.





About Murray State University: Murray State University provides an Opportunity Afforded for nearly 11,000 students through a high-quality education with experiential learning, academic and personal growth and the ability to secure a lifetime of success. Since 1922, the true value of higher education has been found at Murray State University, where our commitment is to afford endless opportunities for developing leaders in the community, the country and the world. The Universitys main campus is located in Murray, KY and includes five regional campuses.



For more information on Murray State University, please visit www.murraystate.edu.





Murray State University President Bob Davies delivered the annual State of the University Address on November 10 at Wrather Auditorium, providing updates on the past year while sharing successes, hopes and ambitions in the Universitys commitment to being the best student-centered institution in America.
Ballot proposal asks Kentucky voters whether there's a right to an abortion
Advertisement

By West Kentucky Star Staff

Nov. 10, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Nov. 10, 2016 | 05:05 PM | PADUCAH, KY

Nine people face various charges, after deputies searched a home Wednesday in the Farley area.



The McCracken County Sheriff's Department says detectives with the drug division had received complaints over the past several months alleging illegal drug activity at a home on Hovekamp Road. Detectives went to the home, where they located David Martin, Darrell Franklin and Sky Campbell. Detectives reportedly seized methamphetamine from both Martin and Franklin, and found marijuana on Campbell.



Detectives were in the process of obtaining a search warrant when Paul Floyd began to pull into the driveway, but left after seeing deputies. Floyd was stopped and arrested for possession of meth. Crystal Cursey and Morgan Henderson also arrived, and told deputies they lived at the home.



Upon execution of the search warrant several others were found on the property. Johnna Wilkey, who was found inside, was arrested on an outstanding warrant. Detectives located Tony Waldridge and Misty Flint in a camper on the property. The couple was arrested after meth was found in their camper.



While deputies continued their search, Jimmie Overturf arrived and was arrested on an outstanding warrant. Detectives said they found marijuana, meth, scales, pipes, syringes and other assorted drug paraphernalia during the search. While searching the detached garage on the property, detectives reportedly located and seized an active meth lab, more meth, precursors and several items of drug paraphernalia.



Detectives said David Martin told them he had been cooking methamphetamine at the home for about a year, and that several other people had been purchasing Sudafed for Martin to use in the methamphetamine cooks.



Both David Martin and Darrell Franklin were out on bond at the time of their arrests for prior drug arrest earlier in year.





The suspects face the following charges:



41-year-old David Martin Jr.; manufacturing methamphetamine, possession of meth, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of marijuana and failure to notify dot of an address change



18-year-old Morgan Henderson; unlawful distribution of a meth precursor, possession of meth, possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia



29-year-old Darrell Franklin; unlawful distribution of a meth precursor and possession of methamphetamine



39-year-old Crystal Cursey; possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia



46-year-old Paul Floyd; possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia



46-year-old Tony Waldridge; possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia



Johnna K. Wilkey; bench warrant / contempt of court



42-year-old Jimmie Overturf; bench warrant / contempt of court



18-year-old Sky Campbell; possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia
By WestKyStar & Paducah City Staff Nov. 10, 2016 | 08:23 PM | PADUCAH, KY

How tall can grass be on my lawn? Grass should not exceed ten inches in height. However, we have to look at locations on a case-by-case basis since some ornamental grasses can be exempted from the height requirement. This height requirement also applies to vacant lots; however, some parcels of undeveloped property such as a large field may be exempt.





How will I be notified if my grass needs to be mowed and how long do I have to get it mowed? The violation notice is placed on the property that needs attention. These notifications are not mailed. You have five business days from the time of notice to take care of the problem. Its the responsibility of property owners to check their pieces of property to make sure they are maintained. We understand that some people own property in the City but do not live here. For landlords who may not live here, we suggest hiring a property manager to take care of your parcels.





What happens if the violation is not abated? If the violation is not taken care of in five business days, then a citation is issued. The citation is mailed to the listed property owner. Then, the City hires a contractor to abate the violation (mow the lawn). Once it gets to this level, the property owner will need to pay a fine and the Citys cost to hire a contractor to abate the violation. If the fine and abatement cost are not paid in 30 days, then a lien is filed on the property.





What happens if someone dumps debris such as an old couch, scrap metal, or tires on my property? The responsibility still falls on the property owner. The property owner is responsible for the removal of those items regardless of the fact that someone else tossed the discarded items onto their property.





Who is responsible for a tree hanging over on my property? Typically, trees and tree limbs are more of a neighbor issue than a code enforcement issue. You are responsible for the portion of the tree that hangs over on your property regardless of the location of the base of the tree. Heres a common question. If my neighbors tree falls onto my house, who is responsible? The simple answer is that you are responsible for the portion of the tree that is now on your property. However, we have seen neighbors offering to help out neighbors in these cases. The best advice we can give is to speak with your neighbor about the issue. Otherwise, you should consult an attorney, as this is a private matter. However, if there is a tree or vegetation that is blocking clear vision at a corner or intersection, contact the Engineering-Public Works Department at 270-444-8511.





Who is responsible for the maintenance of a vacant house or property? The currently listed property owner is responsible for a vacant house or property. We often see problems pop up with vacant structures in which the property owner may have moved or is elderly and is no longer living there. This can be frustrating for neighbors who want the property maintained. Plus, this situation is difficult for the code enforcement officers since they are working to find either the property owner or a responsible family member to take care of the property.





What should I do if there is a vacant house in my neighborhood in disrepair? Is there a process either to bring it up to code or to demolish it? Our goals are to give property owners due notification and a chance to take care of their property. We want property owners to be responsible and responsive. Here is the process. After receiving a complaint, the code enforcement officer posts a property maintenance violation on the structure and photographs the visible exterior violations. A follow-up inspection will occur in 30 days. Then, if there is no response or activity, the process moves forward either to a condemnation notice or a correction notice. The notice would be mailed to the listed property owner. A condemnation notice also means that the structure would be placed on the unsafe structure list so that emergency responders are aware that the structure may not be safe to enter. Plus, the structure is placed on a demolition schedule with priority given to the structures in the worst condition. After receiving a condemnation or a correction notice, the property owner needs to contact Code Enforcement. If no contact is made, then the City will issue a Failure to Comply letter. Code enforcement officers will continue to inspect the structure if it has received a correction notice. Fines start piling up at the third and sequential inspections. Liens and any abatement costs are placed after the 5th inspection.





How do I ask a question or file a complaint? If you have a question or would like to file a complaint about a property maintenance issue, contact Code Enforcement at 270-444-8522. A code enforcement officer will check on the complaint typically within three business days or sooner.

For more information about code enforcement in the City of Paducah, visit www.paducahky.gov or call the Fire Prevention Division at 270-444-8522.



Do you have an idea for Ask Paducah?

Contact Public Information Officer Pam Spencer at pspencer@paducahky.gov or 270-444-8669.

(Edition 10  November 9, 2016)



The Fire Prevention Division of the Paducah Fire Department has the responsibility for the Fire Marshals office, Building and Construction, and Code Enforcement. For this edition of Ask Paducah, Deputy Chief of Fire Prevention Greg Cherry provides answers to questions frequently posed to the Citys code enforcement officers regarding property maintenance and vacant properties.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Nov. 11, 2016 | 09:05 AM | FULTON COUNTY, KY

A Tennessee man has been indicted on a murder charge in Fulton County.

Fifty-nine-year-old William Terry Jamison of Tiptonville, TN, was indicted by a Fulton County Grand Jury Thursday for the murder of 49-year-old Mark Williams of Hickman.



Jamison was arrested after an Oct. 1 incident during which police say he shot and killed Williams in a field off KY 94 in Hickman.

Jamison was arraigned by Fulton County Circuit Judge Tim Langford after the formal reading of the murder indictment. Jamison pleaded not guilty and remains out of jail on a $500,000 cash bond.

Jamison's pretrial hearing is set for Jan. 12, with a trial to begin in April.
Advertisement

By The Associated Press

Nov. 10, 2016 | FRANKFORT, KY

By The Associated Press Nov. 10, 2016 | 04:43 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

Longtime state Rep. Jeff Hoover has been selected by his Republican colleagues to become Kentucky's first GOP House speaker in nearly a century when lawmakers convene in January.



The newly elected House majority GOP caucus met behind closed doors at the Capitol on Thursday to unanimously select Hoover for the top leadership post.



It comes two days after Republicans won control of the House. Republicans will hold a commanding 64-36 majority.



Hoover is from Jamestown and has served 20 years in the House and spent 16 of them as minority leader.



He calls his selection as the next House speaker the "highest honor" of his life.



Hoover says he looks forward to working with Republican Gov. Matt Bevin and the GOP-led Senate to make decisions to "move Kentucky in a new and better direction."



He said, "We have an incredible opportunity to maximize the great potential that exists in the Commonwealth, from job creation, to strong education priorities, to open and transparent government that is accountable to its citizens."
By The Associated Press Nov. 11, 2016 | 05:01 AM | LOUISVILLE, KY

Farmers who are just starting out can get information about federal programs, planning, financing and other topics at the Kentucky-Tennessee Beginning Farmer Summit being held in Louisville.

The Kentucky Department of Agriculture says the daylong event on Friday is being held at the Fair and Exposition Center and includes sessions on U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that are available to new farmers, succession planning and agriculture financing.

Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles will give the keynote address. A representative from the Tennessee Department of Agriculture will also attend.
This week has felt like it lasted for a century, but here we are at the weekend. And though the world as we know it has ended, subway track work has not. Here are this week's changes:

1 trains will not run between 14 St and South Ferry in either direction, starting at 11:30 p.m. on Friday and ending at 5 a.m. on Monday.

All 2 trains will run local between Chambers St and 34 St-Penn Station from 11:30 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday.

3 trains will operate to/from New Lots Av, with that change in effect from 11:45 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday. All 3 trains will run local between Chambers St and 34 St-Penn Station, with that change in effect from 11:30 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday.

All 4 trains will run local from 125 St to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall from 11:45 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday. Also during that time, trains will be suspended between New Lots Av/Utica Av and Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall.

5 trains will not run at all between Eastchester-Dyre Av and E 180 St between 11:45 p.m. Friday and 5 a.m. Monday. Trains will not run in either direction between Bowling Green and Grand Central-42 St from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday and from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Sunday.

Main St-bound 7 trains are running express from 74 St-Broadway to Mets-Willets Point, starting at 11:45 p.m. Friday and ending at 5 a.m. Monday. All trains are suspended between Queensboro Plaza and Hunters Point Av from 12:15 a.m. Sunday to 1230 a.m. Monday, and Queensboro Plaza-bound trains will run express from 74 St-Broadway to Queensboro Plaza during that time.

A trains will not run between 168 St and Inwood-207 St in either direction, with that change in effect from 11:45 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday. All trains will run local between 168 St and 145 St from 12:01 a.m. Saturday to 5 a.m. Monday.

C trains will not run between 145 St and 168 St from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

All F trains are suspended from Coney Island-Stillwell Av to Church Av from 11:45 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday. Also during that period, Jamaica-bound trains will skip 14 St and 23 St.

Manhattan-bound Q trains will run express from Kings Hwy to Prospect Park, with that change in effect from 5:45 a.m. Saturday to 7 p.m. Sunday. Trains will operate to/from Astoria-Ditmars Blvd from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday.

The Franklin Av S shuttle will run every 24 minutes from 12:01 a.m. Saturday to 5 a.m. Monday.
Rita Redmond was a true lady who felt that every pupil had something to gift to the world
I felt I had been fighting off some illness for the last few days but woke up in the middle of the night this morning with a sore throat and...
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 10/11/2016 (2182 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

More rural hotel beverage rooms will go under unless the province reduces liquor taxes, says the filmmaker of a new documentary.

Closing Time: The Vanishing Prairie Beverage Room, is based on stories that ran in the Winnipeg Free Press in 2014 and 2015.

A lot of these places are going to fail, said Karen Tusa of Lucky 9 Productions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egNmXcIhJ0s

I met all these wonderful people who have poured their lives into these establishments trying to make a go of it, and its been heartache and struggle and working 14-hour days.

The problem is the bars are taxed at the same rate as beverage rooms in larger centres but dont have the same population base to draw from, Tusa said. The documentary compares rural bars to successful ones such as Selkirks Boot Tavern and Winnipegs Pembina Hotel.

Tusa said the Rural Hotel Owners of Manitoba were optimistic after arranging a meeting with former Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries CEO John Stinson to discuss solutions. But the new Tory government removed Stinson before the scheduled meeting and appointed Peter Hak as its acting CEO.

Angelo Mondragon of the Notre Dame Hotel, who heads the rural hotel association, said his group made a proposal to lower taxes to small rural vendors by $1.9 million on a sliding scale based on market size. It would benefit the smaller hotels the most, with no change for bigger hotels. The province turned it down.

Most rural hotels say they have enough sales to sustain their businesses if the government didnt take such a big bite.

By law, hotel vendors can keep 17 per cent of revenue from beer sales, whereas 30 per cent is the norm in retail sales. They also retain just 18 to 22 per cent of VLT revenues, compared with legions 25 per cent and First Nations 90 per cent.

Mondragon staged a one-day protest at the Manitoba legislature last year, erecting a giant throne-like chair out of 168 empty beer cases. About 20 cut-out headstones with HOTEL written on each formed a footpath.

WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Angelo Mondragon, president of the Rural Hotel Owners of Manitoba, assembles a throne of beer cases in front of the Manitoba Legislative Building in October 2015 to protest the province's role in the decline of rural hotels.

George Orallo, Ryan Wuckert and Natalie Batkis also worked on Closing Time, which will be available on MTS Stories From Home. There will be a special showing in The Forks Market at the Common craft beer and wine kiosk, Nov. 21, at 7:30 p.m.

Featured hotels include the Highway 6 Motel in Oak Point, the Notre Dame Hotel, the Mossy River Inn in Winnipegosis, the Sprague Motor Inn, Sandy Lake Hotel and the Brunkild Bar.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 10/11/2016 (2182 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The paper mill in The Pas has a new owner and a new lease on life.

Late Thursday afternoon, Tolko announced the sale of the mill to Canadian Kraft Paper Industries Ltd., a company affiliated with American Industrial Acquisition Corp.

The sale comes 2 1/2 months after Tolko dropped a bombshell on the northern community of about 5,500, announcing it would shut down the mill in December.

KRISTIN ANNABLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES

As part of the agreement, the more than 300 current employees at the mill will keep their jobs.

Tolko officials said they will work with Canadian Kraft Paper Industries Limited to support a successful transition.

This is great news. It is fantastic news, said Jim Scott, The Pas ecstatic mayor.

Facing the closure of the towns largest employer, it was all hands on deck to try to find a buyer and save the plant.

Over the past few weeks concessions have been negotiated, allowing the sale to AIAC to be completed. They include unionized workers agreeing to a 10 per cent pay cut for five years, a three-year moratorium on pension solvency payments and an annual $450,000 municipal tax holiday for the next three years.

There has been a great group of local guys who really worked hard on this. I couldnt be happier for all of them, Scott said. The residents coughing up taxes for three years that is a huge sacrifice. Workers taking a 10 per cent pay cut. It was a huge effort on behalf of everyone in the region.

Premier Brian Pallister called the deal great news for the community and a testament to teamwork.

The people of the community, the workers in the plant, the leadership in the town itself  and of course our staff here worked very, very hard, as did others, he said.

The province didnt offer subsidies to make the deal happen, although the Pallister cabinet passed an order granting the purchaser a pension payment holiday if the unions agreed to it.

This sends a powerful message that theres opportunity in the North, and it doesnt depend on handouts from the government. It depends on the capabilities that we have with our people. It depends on the assets that we have in this province, the premier said.

Vernon, B.C.,-based Tolko planned to close the kraft paper mill Dec. 2, claiming after years of efforts the company was unable to improve the operations competitive position.

News of the mills closure came on the heels of Omnitrax Canada announcing it was cutting rail freight service from The Pas to Churchill to one train per week from two.

Also in late August, Aseneskak Casino in nearby Opaskwayak Cree Nation (OCN) announced its intention to move within the next two years, putting 147 local jobs at risk. In late October, the IGA grocery store in OCN announced it was shutting down, throwing 47 people out of work.

There is not much known about AIAC other than it has been part of many similar deals such as this across North America.

Brad Thorlakson, president and CEO of Tolko Industries Ltd., thanked employees and retirees at the Manitoba operation for their dedication and patience and support of the sale.

We also want to acknowledge the critical role that the Swampy Cree Tribal Council played in enabling this sale; and recognize the Manitoba government, the Town of The Pas and local unions for their co-operation and work towards making this sale happen, he said in a prepared statement.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

 with files from Larry Kusch
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 10/11/2016 (2182 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Premier Brian Pallister says this months throne speech will contain a modest list of priorities for the coming year as the Progressive Conservative government continues to rein in spending.

Pallister suggested Thursday the speech will be short and focus on a few key areas.

I think the difference youll see in our throne speech as opposed to the ones from the previous administration is they had dozens of priorities, he said. And you cant, of course, have dozens of priorities and get things done.

WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister

The premier refused to offer any hints on the governments legislative agenda as it heads into a new session Nov. 21, beginning with the throne speech.

Weve been very clear about the principal areas or focal points of our initiatives  and that is again fixing the finances, repairing the services and rebuilding the economy, Pallister said.

MLAs concluded their first session under the new PC government on Thursday, with the passage of Bill 7, the controversial labour legislation that requires secret ballot votes be held in all union organizing drives. The law it replaced required no such vote. Instead, once 65 per cent of employees signed union cards, certification took place.

The PCs, elected on April 19, unveiled a largely stand-pat budget at the end of May with a projected deficit of $911 million. The deficit under the last year of the NDP, according to recently audited statements, was $846 million  not the $1-billion-plus number the Tories had earlier claimed.

Apart from Bill 7, the PC legislative agenda was fairly light. A bill was passed to make it easier for information to be shared among authorities about children in care.

Another new law will require post-secondary institutions to adopt policies that raise awareness about sexual violence and address complaint procedures and response protocols.

The PCs also passed bills to end operating subsidies for political parties and to create a standard 28-day election period for fixed-date general elections.

What we may have lacked in quantity I think we made up for in quality, Pallister quipped after being questioned about his modest legislative record.

The Pallister administrations main focus has been reducing the rate of growth in government spending. Projects approved by the former government have been put on hold, pending review.

Some 112 civil service managers will be removed from the payroll over the next year. Departments have been warned they cannot overspend their budgets.

The new government and the official Opposition stumbled at times as they became acclimatized to their new roles after nearly 17 years of NDP rule.

The PCs had difficulty backing claims they had discovered $122 million in budgetary savings.

A pair of NDP MLAs got in hot water for singling out female PC MLAs for heckling during a recorded vote.

Cabinet minister Rochelle Squires got egg on her face when she wrongly accused NDP MLA Rob Altemeyer of saying, Take your pants off as she was speaking in the house.

MLAs will now have a 10-day break before the new session begins.

Interim NDP Leader Flor Marcelino said after six months of a Conservative majority, Manitobans still dont have a clue what Pallister plans to do.

All the public has seen are platitudes and regressive policies, she said.

Marcelino said she wants to know the governments plans for increasing daycare spaces, affordable housing and jobs for the north. During the session, she urged Pallister to boost the provinces minimum wage.

Pallister has interfered in the faculty strike at the University of Manitoba by imposing a one-year wage freeze, she said. Students are now compromised. Why? Because this government interfered.

Meanwhile, Marcelino said the government has undermined workers rights through passage of Bill 7. Its so disappointing, so disheartening.

I dont know what our province will look like in six months, she added.

Keewatinook MLA Judy Klassen, who recently became interim leader of the provincial Liberals, said neither the Conservatives nor the NDP appears to understand their new responsibilities.

Theres a still a struggle in the PCs, theyre not fitting into their new roles, Klassen said.

She said her hope is that the Liberals will be the calm voice of reason in the legislature.

The rookie MLA said she is disappointed at how few Opposition questions receive direct answers in question period.

Im getting tired of the antics by both sides. They need to start focusing on what they hear from their constituents, Klassen said.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.canick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 10/11/2016 (2182 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An RCMP guard, contracted by the RCMP, has been accused of inappropriately touching female prisoners in Norway House.

In two separate incidents in the last two months, the guard touched two women through the cell doors at the Norway House detachment, police allege.

Mounties say they got the complaint Wednesday and arrested the 21-year-old Norway House man today for sexual assault at around 5 p.m.

The RCMP say a jail guard in Norway House inappropriately touched female inmates.

Charges are pending.

The RCMP say the guards building access has been revoked.

This is still very early in the investigation but we are asking anyone who may have been a victim to contact the Norway House RCMP said Superintendent Will Tewnion, North District Commander for the Manitoba RCMP. We acted immediately upon learning of the accusations and have arrested a suspect but it is important that our officers hear from anyone who may have information on this matter.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 11/11/2016 (2181 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A cultural specialist and prominent voice in Winnipegs Ukrainian community has died.

Orysia Tracz passed away in Winnipeg Thursday after a sudden stroke.

The writer, translator, consultant and lecturer was born after the Second World War in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria in 1945. She was raised in New Jersey and met her husband Myroslaw at Soyuzivka, a Ukrainian resort in upstate New York. They married in 1967 and in 1968 moved to Winnipeg. They embraced the city that embraced Ukrainian culture.

KEN GIGLIOTTI / FREE PRESS FILES Last month the Ukrainian Canadian Congress presented Orysia Tracz with a Shevchenko Award for arts and culture.

A broadcaster once called Tracz a walking, talking Ukrainian encyclopedia.

In 2011, Tracz gathered personal stories and reflections for a commemorative book for the Rusalka Ukrainian Dance Ensembles 50th anniversary. She escorted travel groups on 18-day tours of discovery, focused on Ukraines art and culture.

Earlier this year, Tracz received an honourable mention in the Thin Air Winnipeg International Writers Festival awards for her book First Star I See Tonight, described as the first in-depth English-language book on Ukrainian Christmas traditions.

In October, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress presented her with a Shevchenko Award for arts and culture.

A prayer service for Tracz will be held Monday at Holy Eucharist Parish at 6 p.m. It was her wish that all participants wear Vyshyvanky (Ukrainian embroidered shirts). Any donations, in lieu of flowers, are requested to be made to the Canadian Ukrainian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 10/11/2016 (2182 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MILD November weather could be devastating for the north when winter arrives.

Many northern communities have been unable to start building ice roads  the lifelines that allow delivery of supplies, interim Liberal Leader Judy Klassen said.

We had such a short season last year. It was quite depressing, said Klassen, the MLA for Kewatinook.

SUPPLIED Northern communities havent been able to start building ice roads this year.

Last years road from St. Theresa Point to Bloodvein could be used only three weeks, and only by light vehicles; semi-trailers were half-full at best, she said.

The ice wasnt thick enough to take full loads, she said. Its pretty scary.

The farthest north ice roads are needed is Tadoule Lake, which links to Lynn Lake, she said. I have friends in Tadoule Lake. I see the ice forming there, but its not safe.

To compound the problem, theres little or no snow, which has to be packed to build trails between and atop frozen lakes, she said.

Direly needed equipment cant get in, Klassen said.

Northern First Nations rely on the ice roads for deliveries of food, gas and other essentials. Winter is the only time of year when vehicles and construction equipment and materials can get to the communities.

A shorter season means a community might get two new houses instead of 10 and a water or sewer truck might not get repaired, Klassen said.

First Nations can declare states of emergency and have Ottawa pay to fly in essentials, but not goods that southerners take for granted.

Beyond the availability of consumer goods, residents lose time during which theyre paid to build and maintain the ice roads. That affects the economies of Thompson, Lynn Lake and Leaf Rapids, where northerners shop as long as they can get to highways via the temporary roads.

Lynn Lake and Leaf Rapids rely heavily on that traffic, Klassen said.

Theyre so strapped as it is, theyre ghost towns.

Klassen said she was no fan of the East Side Road Authority, which the PC government is dismantling, but she vowed to push the provincial government to continue building road connections to the north.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
In Mexico, Nov. 1 and 2 are celebrated as Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. For Mexicans, the Day of the Dead commemorates ancestors who have died. The day is spent making offerings to the dead.

As part of the celebrations, students made sugar skulls, which were then placed on altars for the spirits of the dead. WSHS Spanish Honor Society students Hannah Brown, Anna Velikanova and Mason Henke presented about the importance of the holiday and helped students decorate sugar skulls in Mrs. Toni McDevitts third grade classroom and Mrs. Stacy Rasmussens fourth grade classroom at Jefferson Elementary STEM School.
The Great War ended right on schedule.

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, up and down the Western Front, the guns fell silent.

After more than four years of stalemated trench warfare, the Allied Powers  France, Great Britain and the United States  forced the German Empire to the the peace table three days earlier, and a date to end the fighting was set.

But the bloodshed would go on for 72 hours, right up to the last moment.

Thousands of American heavy guns fired the parting, shot at the Germans at exactly at 11 oclock this morning, read an account of the armistice published in the Winona Republican-Herald.

President Woodrow Wilson made the formal announcement:

The armistice was signed this morning. Everything for which America fought has been accomplished. It will now be our fortunate duty to assist by example, by sober friendly council and by material aid in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world.

Nearly 325,000 American servicemen were killed, wounded or missing.

They would not be forgotten. One year later, Wilson proclaimed Nov. 11, 1919 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day, saying, To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the countrys service and with gratitude for the victory.

Two years later on Armistice Day, remains of an American soldier returned from France and known but to God were ceremoniously interred in a tomb in Arlington National Cemetery overlooking the Potomac.

In 1938 an Act of Congress established Nov. 11 as Armistice Day, a national holiday to recall and honor those who fought in the War to End War.

Fifteen months later Adolf Hitler launched the Wehrmacht across Germanys border with Poland, triggering the conflict that would become known as World War II, a conflict that would eventually claim more than 1 million American casualties.

Between 1950 and 1953, another 130,000 Americans would be killed or wounded as war enveloped the Korean peninsula.

On Nov. 11, 1953, the nation would mark its final Armistice Day.

In June 1954, at the urging of American veterans organizations, the 83rd Congress amended the 1938 act, officially designating Nov. 11 as Veterans Day to honor all those who served in uniform.

In Winona the first Veterans Day observance included the firing of a rifle salute at 11 a.m. at Third and Center streets and the American Legions traditional sauerkraut and wiener lunch.

Students at Winona Senior High were addressed by Capt. Doyle M. Coffee, professor of naval science at the University of Minnesota.

Coffee told the students that the holiday was originally intended to honor WWI veterans, but that ... subsequent events have proved that this armistice was no more than a brief rest before the next assault ... One World War and several police actions later, in 1954, it seems evident that our heritage of freedom is too valuable to be left unguarded or taken for granted.

There is no better way to show our appreciation for the services of these brave men than to defend, in our turn, the great principles for which they fought.

In 1955, the first American military personnel were sent to Vietnam. Over the next 20 years American forces would sustain more than 200,000 casualties in a war that would bitterly divide the country.

In 1993, with memories of the first Gulf War fresh in the public mind, the Military Affairs Committee of the Winona Area Chamber of Commerce and local veterans groups organized a day-long vigil at Lake Park in honor of those who had served. The vigil would become a Veterans Day tradition, with veterans standing an hour-long watch through the day and night, gathering to share stories and memories sheltered a heated bunker beneath the Lake Park bandshell.

Ninety-eight years after the guns fell silent and all was quiet on the western front, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we still pause to remember.

There is no better way to show our appreciation for the services of these brave men than to defend, in our turn, the great principles for which they fought. Capt. Doyle M. Coffee, professor of naval science at

University of Minnesota
Each year on Veterans Day, I think about the military men and women I had the honor to meet when I took part in several overseas USO tours before I became a U.S. senator.

Those tours not only gave me the chance to help entertain our troops stationed in places like Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, but they also allowed me to sit down with many of them and understand the sacrifices that they make to defend our nation, and, more importantly, the toll it can take on them and their families.

As senator, when Ive visited Walter Reed Medical Center near Washington, D.C., Ive met brave service men and women who have made unimaginable physical and psychological sacrifices to ensure our freedoms. These are the troops whose battles did not end when they came home. Whats most striking is that when I meet them, they often tell me that despite their own suffering, they think more about their fellow service members, especially those who didnt make it home.

What do our veterans in Minnesota and across the country ask in return for their service? Usually, they want nothing more than the benefits they were told would be there for them when they leave military service.

I recently met with Veterans Secretary Robert McDonald and urged him to continue to make the changes necessary to address the VAs recent benefits backlog that had forced far too many returning veterans to wait far too long to receive the medical care they need to treat both the visible and invisible scars of war. I told him Im going to continue my fight to ensure that veterans not only get timely and quality care at our VA medical facilities, but also receive the education, training and housing benefits they were promised to help ease their transition back into civilian life. When I talk to Minnesota veterans and meet with the leaders of our states veterans groups, they tell me that ensuring access to these important benefits must continue to be a top priority.

During the current Congress, I, along with Minnesota Congressman Tim Walz, have pushed our Quicker Veterans Benefits Delivery Act, to get benefits into the hands of veterans with service-related disabilities as quickly as possible. A key feature of the bill is to allow veterans to receive a disability diagnosis from doctors outside the VA system so that they can access their disability benefits more quickly.

This year, Ive also pressed to ensure that Minnesota National Guard and Reserve members who were called to active duty can access their hard-earned veterans benefits. Unfortunately, some Minnesota Guard and Reserve members who were deployed to the hostile Sinai Peninsula in Egypt had their GI Bill applications rejected after returning home. Ive worked with Sen. Amy Klobuchar to fix this problem by pushing to ensure that Guard and Reserve men and women who were called to active duty  including the Minnesotans deployed to the Sinai  are no longer denied these important benefits.

Im also working to help thousands of service members who in the late 1970s were unwittingly exposed to high levels of radiation when they helped clean up nuclear testing sites in the Marshall Islands without proper protection. Today, these atomic veterans suffer from high rates of cancer, heart disease, and respiratory issues and are not being adequately compensated for their medical costs.

To correct this injustice, I, along with Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, have pushed a bipartisan bill to extend key medical benefits to these veterans so they can get the care they should have gotten long ago.

Ill continue to listen to Minnesota veterans and fight on their behalf in the U.S. Senate to ensure they have access to the VA benefits they were promised in return for their sacrifice and service. Perhaps President Reagan said it best on Veterans Day in 1985, when he spoke of those who laid down their lives for our country. Most of them were boys when they died, he said, and they gave up two lives  the one they were living and the one they would have lived.

Today, for us to honor our veterans second life, we must do more than thank them for their service. We must ensure that we keep our promises to get them the medical care they need, and deliver the education, training and housing benefits theyve earned in a timely manner. Keeping our promises will not only help ease a veterans transition back into civilian life, but it will reflect the true meaning of Veterans Day.
A meeting to discuss the possible removal of Sauk County governments highest ranking administrator has been postponed.

The Sauk County Boards Executive and Legislative was tentatively scheduled to meet in closed session Thursday to discuss the employment of Administrative Coordinator Renae Fry, and to decide whether to place her on administrative leave.

Sauk County Corp. Counsel Todd Liebman said in an email that the meeting was canceled. He declined to say why, or answer questions about the situation involving the countys administrative coordinator.

No, I cannot comment on any other matter, Liebman said in an email.

County officials have not said publicly what is behind the attempt to oust Fry, who has been on the job for only 8 months. Sauk County Board Chair Marty Krueger of Reedsburg and Sauk County Personnel Department Director Michelle Posewitz did not respond to inquiries.

Sources familiar with the matter who requested anonymity said Fry was offered a severance agreement in lieu of being placed on administrative leave.

The Baraboo News Republic has requested documents related to the matter under the states open records law.

The special meeting to discuss Frys pending employment in closed session initially was scheduled to take place Nov. 3. The Executive and Legislative Committee convened on that day, but decided to postpone the discussion for one week after Fry raised legal concerns about the meeting notice.

In an email Monday to supervisors and county department heads, Krueger, the boards chair, said Fry had taken voluntary personal leave.

Renae offered to go on personal leave as part of her request to postpone last Thursdays special E&L meeting one week, Krueger wrote in the email. It was her offer, not my request.

Krueger said the attorney for the countys insurance provider did not agree with Fry that the notice for the Nov. 3 meeting was illegal, but concurred that her offer was a good faith effort to explore possible ways to move forward.

In another email, Krueger said a request for a special county board meeting to discuss the matter with legal counsel will be made during the boards monthly meeting Tuesday night.
Rare birds are descending on Baraboos zoo.

On Sunday, the Ochsner Park Zoo will unveil its snowy owl exhibit, the only one of its kind at a public zoo in Wisconsin. Parks Director Mike Hardy said its one of only about two dozen such exhibits in the entire country.

Hardy said giving visitors a chance to see these birds up close is an educational opportunity. The zoo already exhibits great horned owls and barred owls, and now visitors can examine differences between the three species. Adding diversity to our zoo only helps us to better educate on the diversity of species in our world, he said.

The owls, named Aurora and Boris, were donated by Linda and Jerry Bethke, formerly of Soaring Eagles Wildlife Rehabilitation. The pair couldnt be released into the wild, so the owls will live in a spacious exhibit in the center of the zoo.

Kandie Beckwith, president of Friends of the Baraboo Zoo, said the gift shows how well zookeeper Tori Spinoso and her staff are respected. The animals are taken care of very, very well, Beckwith said.

The zoo will unveil the exhibit to the public at 1 p.m. Sunday. Park staff will talk about the renovation of the exhibit and how the owls were procured. Visitors will have an opportunity to see the owls in their new home and ask zookeepers questions.

The snowy owls add an opportunity to compare between other owl species, noting comparisons as well as differences, Hardy said. Also, being an animal linked to the Arctic, seeing how changes in the environment can affect this bird helps us relay our message of conservation of the environment.

Operated by the city of Baraboo, the Ochsner Park Zoo features 19 animal species. The park occupies 26 acres on Baraboos west side. Its open daily year-round, and admission is free.

Beckwith said the owls will help draw visitors. I think its going to be another reason for people to visit Baraboo and stop in at the zoo, she said.
Building on their success with the Beaver Dam Piggly Wiggly grocery store, Daryl and Brenda Schoenfeld are pursuing an opportunity as new owners of Juneau Piggly Wiggly.

The Schoenfelds will assume ownership of the store at midnight Saturday after an inventory is completed.

Brenda and I have been in business for eight and a half years and we have a lot of great support from the community, Daryl said. Juneau is a great community too.

The Juneau store was previously owned by Jonathan Jensen, but has been run as a corporate store for more than a month during a transition period. The Schoenfelds said they had to give the opportunity to acquire the Juneau grocery store some careful thought.

They admit it will be challenging to run two businesses. But there also will be opportunities for efficiency in staffing and products.

There will be no changes in staff at the Juneau store, which is run by store manager JoAnne Link. There are 45 employees in Juneau and about another 130 employed in Beaver Dam.

The Schoenfelds commitment to the store and community is evidenced by their plans to make some investments. They plan to install new energy-efficient lighting and new motors for refrigerator cases, as well as other small changes.

The Schoenfelds, who purchased the Beaver Dam Piggly Wiggly in 2008, have some experience with remodeling and upgrades as they completed an expansion in 2014.

Eventually there will be a grand re-opening in Juneau.

Were looking forward to serving customers in two locations, Brenda said. We appreciate all of our customers.

Store hours in Juneau and Beaver Dam are 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week. The store websites can be found at shopthepig.com.
JUNEAU  A 27-year-old Madison man was sentenced to a month in jail for participating in two 2013 break-ins in a Randolph home.

Dywone C. Clay entered a no contest plea to a felony charge of party to a crime of burglary. Dodge County Circuit Court Judge Joseph Sciascia found Clay guilty Thursday.

Misdemeanor charges of criminal damage to property and theft were dismissed but were read into the court record. A three-year prison sentence was withheld, and he was ordered not to have contact with his co-actors. He also must pay court costs.

According to the criminal complaint, Clay denied involvement in the burglaries and was unwilling to talk to the police after one of his co-actors identified him. During the break ins, cash and a camera were taken from a home. A second break-in was attempted two weeks later.

Two Beaver Dam men, Cody Anderson and Dylan Turner, have also been sentenced for the burglaries.
Looking for a way to volunteer and help others? Become a volunteer tutor for the Columbus Literacy Council.

There has been an increase in people seeking out help from the Columbus Literacy Council to improve their English skills, and more volunteers are needed to meet the demand.

If you are interested or would like more information please contact Columbus Public Library director, Cindy Fesmeyer or call the library at 920-623-5910.
As he concluded his 18th ceremony honoring Veterans Day at Mauston High School, Principal Jim Dillin had a simply message for those in attendance: Let us never forget.

Dillin said its important to pause and reflect on all who served and defended the country, not just on Veterans Day, but every day.

Mauston High School honored those who served during a somber and graceful dedication on Friday at a packed MHS gym. This years Veterans Day ceremony focused on values. Several students presented the values of each military branch: Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Marines and the Air Force.

Local veterans began Fridays dedication by presenting the colors and student Hannah Rattunde sang the National Anthem.

Today we talk about values: values that are instilled in us by the veterans who surround us today, Dillin said, as he addressed the audience at a podium.

Sitting behind Dillin was Ian Donaldson, an MHS senior, dressed in his full Army National Guard uniform. Donaldson recently completed basic training and he spoke to the crowd for a few minutes, reciting the military values. About 50 feet to Donaldsons left, his arm resting on a walker, sat 90-year-old John Bakalik, a heavily decorated World War II veteran. As a member of the Navy, Bakalik fought in the Pacific theater. Bakalik joined the war effort in 1942 and returned home, building a long, prosperous life in Wisconsin. His brother wasnt so fortunate. A member of the military police, he was killed in Belgium, fighting in the European theater.

As the MHS chorus sang Blades of Grass and Pure White Stones, Bakalik wiped a tear from his face. The WWII veteran will turn 91 in December.

Maustons Veterans Day ceremony honored both active and retired military veterans, along with those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. This years guest speaker was Technical Sgt. Jacqueline Franck, a 2002 MHS graduate. Franck enlisted in the Army National Guard during her junior year of high school and served in active duty at Fort McCoy. She completed eight years in the Army National Guard before transferring to the Air National Guard.

Franck has received many honors during her years of service. Franck talked about the importance of professionalism in the military and how it helped shape her life. The MHS grad said its important for all students to develop professional habits as they prepare to enter the workforce.

You have to work toward being a professional and uphold that standard day in and day out, Franck said. For some this can be a challenging task, but I believe one grows into being a professional with time and experience. Professionalism is something that is sworn into you the day you enter the military. No matter what you do, be a professional. Give your best at everything that you do. People will notice it and appreciate it.

On this Veterans Day, take the time to say thank you to a veteran. Honor those who serve. Remember the thousands who are serving overseas as we speak, along with the many who gave their lives serving our nation.

The MHS Jazz Band performed America the Beautiful and the show choir sang Homeward Bound. Dillin showed a YouTube clip on a large, projected screen with the song Will You Remember, playing in the background. The song told the story of a World War II veteran who fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Maustons heartfelt dedication ended with a bagpiped rendition of Amazing Grace, followed by rifle shots from area veterans, the playing of Taps and the retirement of the colors. As the color guard marched across the gym floor, Bakalik stood and proudly saluted the flag he helped protect more than 70 years ago.
The Murphy AMVETS Post 2180 had a lot to celebrate Nov. 8th at their 14th annual Charter Night Dinner.

Murphy AMVETS Post 2180 was awarded the 2016 Post of the Year Award from the AMVETS Department of Wisconsin. In the last eight years, the Post has received the award 7 times. Kenneth Hornburg received the Edward L. Janczak award which is given to the AMVET who does the most for all Veterans in their community.

Most all of it has to do with the support of the American veteran, Hornburg, who also serves on the American Legion and VFW, said. Here in the state of Wisconsin and here in the local village of Necedah and village activities from time to time.

For this year, Murphy Post 2180 members have made a total of 1,641 visits to places such as schools and memorial services, totaling 5,549 hours of service to their community. Last year, members made a total of 1,600 visits totaling 5,800 hours.

Hornburg was in the service for 35 years, both on active duty in Europe and Asia and for a certain time frame as a reserve officer in the United States. Hornburg said Veterans Day is about all veterans who have served our county whether they were in active duty, combat or at a base at home it is a hole in their lives they could have spent doing something else. Instead they made the choice to sacrifice that time for the freedom of others.

It means down the road the person that gives some time to the service of his country needs to be thanked, Hornburg said of Veterans Day. Because he has given his life over and above what everybody else does.

VFW, American Legion and Veterans Assistance Foundation in Tomah were also in attendance at the event. According to an article published in the Oct. 31 edition of the Tomah Monitor-Herald, the VA Medical Center is in the process of terminating their lease with the VAF due to some incidents at the facility. If the VAF cannot find another location and loses its grant funding, the local veterans will have to find housing outside of the Tomah area.

Andrew Lamourex served one tour in Afghanistan and is now a resident at the facility. He said the VAF provides housing for veterans and assist them with the transition back into the civilian environment.

A lot of people have a bad association with homeless vets, he said. A lot of these guys are people who fell through the cracks and struggle with authority figures and have a hard time holding and maintaining a job.

Charles Roth, was a Korean Era Veteran in the US Army and was stationed in Fort Lenardwood, in Missouri, Fort Bliss in Texas and Chicago Gary Defense. He then served on the reserved and national guard for 25 years. He said when he thinks of the word veteran he thinks of freedom.

Veterans are the defenders of our freedom, Roth said. Every veteran has given up part of his life or a big portion of his life for the United States governments.
Snow-covered roads in Juneau County could take longer to get plowed this winter after the county board turned down a recommendation to fill a vacant highway maintenance worker position.

Due to a resignation and retirement, two highway positions became open. During its meeting on Tuesday, the board voted to fill only one of the openings. The first position passed with 16 yes votes and 4 no votes with 1 absent. Voting for the second position ended in a tie, but due to board rules, no votes carry final approval.

Board member Jerry Niles questioned why the highway department was hiring at this time. Niles said the department does some snow plowing for townships and the county could save money by eliminating this service.

Thats one place we could start saving money, Niles said. When we have to find work for these individuals for the rest of the year, I just wonder about that. Are these people absolutely necessary?

Board chairman Alan Peterson said there are about 18 culverts that should be replaced throughout the county.

Currently, the county pays half of the work, while townships pay the other half. Peterson said it could be beneficial to determine if a private contractor would charge a more reasonable rate to replace culverts.

Tuesdays decision came after the board passed the 2017 county budget. Niles said the top four county departments really need to examine ways to save money.

Its easier to keep employees than to add new ones, Niles said. We always talk about looking for ways to save money, but we dont do anything about it.

Board member Tim Cottingham, who is on the finance and computer committee, said committee members plan to meet with department heads in December to find proactive ways to trim costs.

Im not against hiring somebody, but we really need to look at why were doing it before we put someone else in place, Niles said.

Peterson said the county cant be too hasty in making decisions to cut costs. He said the county must work with its departments to find suitable ways to save money, but it could take substantial time.

Board member Michael Kelley said county workers arent going around trying to find work; theres always enough work to keep them busy throughout the year.

We have our supervisor going out whenever he can to fill in the vacancies, trying to keep up with the work so its not like were sitting around wondering what were going to do, Kelley said. I think these positions are necessary.

Oleson honored by USDA

Julie Oleson, from the Juneau County Housing Authority, received an award of excellence from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development.

Peterson presented the award to Oleson during Tuesdays meeting. The recognition was given to Oleson for her work in preserving and providing families with affordable housing opportunities. The award also honors recipients who help build communities and improve the quality of life for residents in rural Wisconsin.

Oleson thanked board members for the honor and said shes proud to work for the housing authority.

Burns recognized for service

After more than 20 years serving Juneau County, Robert Burns retired on Nov. 1.

On Tuesday, the board recognized Burns for his dedicated years of service. Burns served as a patrolman and with the county highway department. Burns was not present to accept the honor, but highway commissioner Dennis Weiss accepted a plaque on his behalf.

Pay raise for county employees

County employees will see a small one percent pay raise in 2017.

The board passed a resolution to increase the staffs salary by $110,000, which includes benefits. The raise will be included in the 2017 budget. The raise does not include union employees in the sheriffs department or elected officials.

Also on Tuesday, the board approved a part-time food transportation position for the countys Aging and Disability Resource Center (ADRC). It also voted to eliminate a part-time court security officer position in the sheriffs department. Sheriff Brent Oleson said the position will be replaced by a limited-term employee (LTE) to provide security on an as needed basis. By cutting the part-time position, the county will save almost $14,000 annually.
State Senate Republicans, still giddy from a surprisingly strong Election Day showing that expanded their majority, met at the state Capitol Thursday to re-elect Sen. Scott Fitzgerald as their leader.

Fitzgerald was a staunch supporter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who on Tuesday became the first Republican to carry Wisconsin in a presidential election since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Trumps presence on the ballot, particularly his strength in rural areas, helped the GOP grow its already-large majorities in the state Legislature.

Fitzgerald on Thursday urged his federal GOP counterparts, who will have complete control on Capitol Hill when Trump takes office in January, not to do anything rash affecting the more than 10 million people with health coverage through exchanges created under President Barack Obamas health care law.

Repealing Obamas signature law is a top priority for congressional Republicans and Trump early next year.

The leadership vote for Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, was unanimous. He has been Majority Leader almost nonstop since 2011, except for a few months in 2012 when recall elections briefly gave Democrats a Senate majority.

Roger Roth, R-Appleton, was unanimously voted Senate president, the chambers procedural chief. He succeeds outgoing President Mary Lazich, R-New Berlin, who did not seek re-election.

Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, was elected Senate president pro tempore. That post previously was held by Rick Gudex, R-Fond du Lac, who died in October.

Other Senate Republicans unanimously returned to leadership posts were Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa, as assistant majority leader, Sheila Harsdorf, R-River Falls, as majority caucus chairperson, and Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, as vice chairperson.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Fitzgerald said he would reappoint all six Senate Republicans to the 16-member budget-crafting Joint Finance Committee. They are Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, the committees co-chairperson, Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, its co-vice-chairperson, Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, and Vukmir, Marklein and Harsdorf.

All Senate Republican incumbents who sought re-election Tuesday won it. The caucus also welcomed three new members to their ranks: Patrick Testin of Stevens Point; Dan Feyen of Fond du Lac; and Dave Craig of Big Bend. Feyen and Craig, now a state representative, succeeded two Republican senators: Gudex and Lazich, in Senate districts 18 and 28, respectively. Lazich did not seek re-election.

Testin defeated Sen. Julie Lassa, D-Stevens Point, in Tuesdays election in the 24th Senate District. His win expanded the GOP majority in the 33-person Senate to at least 20 seats.

Republicans continue to hope a 21st seat could be added to the mix: Senate District 32, now represented by Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse. Unofficial results had Shilling clinging to a 58-vote lead in that race, in which she was challenged by former Republican Sen. Dan Kapanke, also of La Crosse.

A recount is likely in that contest.

Fitzgerald supported Trump throughout the campaign even as some Wisconsin Republicans, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, criticized the GOP standard-bearer.

From the leadership position, I just did what I thought we needed to do, Fitzgerald said. It was just practical from a political perspective.

Hes a populist candidate thats very difficult to explain, and people still cant explain it.

Depending on what Trump and federal lawmakers do with the health care law, it could create a huge issue to address in 2017 for state lawmakers in Wisconsin and in 49 other state capitols.

Fitzgerald said he expects federal lawmakers to adopt an overall shift back toward the states, and for the states to manage the exchanges. The health care law created the exchanges as a marketplace to shop for health care coverage and a mechanism to give income-based subsidies to people to pay for coverage.

Fitzgerald acknowledged he doesnt yet know what that could mean for Wisconsin, which unlike some other states, opted to use the federal exchange instead of creating its own.

More than 207,000 Wisconsinites currently are covered on the federal exchange. They could be without coverage if federal lawmakers and Trump simply repeal the law but go no further.

Fitzgerald said Thursday that to do anything rash would be a mistake, I think.

It is going to be difficult to just make some wholesale change without taking into consideration the people that have already become a part of that system, he said.
Amid nationwide demonstrations against the election of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, several Democratic state lawmakers spoke to a solemn crowd of roughly 200 during a peaceful Rally for Unity Thursday evening at the steps of the State Capitol.

The grassroots gathering was not associated with any organization and had no official program. One of its planners, Kylie Gursky, said it was held because we believe we must work together to build communities that ensure safety and dignity for everyone and challenge bigotry and intolerance.

In response to the election of Donald Trump, many people are uncertain and fear for themselves and their families, she said. We gather to say that we will love and protect our neighbors, to say that we will resist racism, sexism, and Islamophobia.

Among the speakers were state Rep. Jenny Eck, Sen. Christine Kaufmann, and Rep.-elect Kim Abbott, all Helena Democrats. Though some of the speakers and other attendees expressed their disapproval of the president-elect, Eck said she didnt consider the event to be an anti-Trump rally.

It was about what do we stand for, what do we believe in and what can we do about that, she said, adding that Trump has said some very scary things.

We need to be ready in case we do need to defend the people who could be impacted by what hes talking about, Eck said. Theres a lot of people scared, and rightfully so.
A ceremony in honor of Veterans Day is slated for 3 p.m. today at Memorial Park. It's the 98th such event.

Hosted by the Lewis and Clark County Veterans Memorial Foundation, the ceremony will honor those who have served. All current and retired military personnel are encouraged to attend along with Gold Star Families and all interested residents.

The keynote speaker will be Richard A. Fox, chairman of the Helena Area Military Affairs Committee. Fox is a decorated U.S. Air Force veteran who served in Vietnam. He is a professor of archaeology.

The solemn ceremony will recognize those who have served and those who have died while serving in the military.

If the weather is not conducive to an outdoors event, it will be relocated to to the American Legion Post No. 2 at 3095 Villard Ave.

A reception after the event will take place at the same American Legion Post, which is on the corner of Villard and Custer.

Prior to the Memorial Park service, East Helena will host its annual Veterans Day parade. It'll kick off at 11 a.m. Veterans are encouraged to participate by marching or riding in the parade. The parade, organized by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 10010 will start in front of the Post on Main Street and continue to JFK Park.
Skechers U.S.A., Inc. designs, develops, markets, and distributes footwear for men, women, and children; and performance footwear for men and women worldwide. The company operates through three segments: Domestic Wholesale, International Wholesale, and Direct-to-Consumer. It offers casual, casual athletic, sport athletic, trail, sandals, boots, and retro fashion footwear for men and women under the Skechers USA, Skechers Sport, Skechers Active, Modern Comfort, Skechers Street, Mark Nason, and BOBS brands; sneakers, casuals, boots, and sandals for boys and girls under the Skechers Mega-Craft, S-Lights, SKECH-AIR, Foamies, Twinkle Toes, Z-Strap, Skechers Stretch Fit, and Skechers Street brands; and technical footwear under the Skechers GOrun, Skechers GOwalk, Skechers GOtrain, Skechers GOtrail, and Skechers GO Golf brands. The company also provides men's and women's slip-resistant and safety-toe casuals, boots, hikers, and athletic shoes; and lifestyle apparel for men, women, and kids. As of December 31, 2021, it operated 4,306 company and third party owned Skechers stores. The company sells its products through department and specialty stores, athletic and independent retailers, boutiques, and online retailers; and through its e-commerce sites, concept stores, and factory and warehouse outlet stores. It also licenses its Skechers brand. Skechers U.S.A., Inc. was incorporated in 1992 and is headquartered in Manhattan Beach, California.
The following companies are subsidiares of Novartis: 1 A Pharma GmbH, Abadia Retuerta S.A, Admune Therapeutics, Advanced Accelerator Applications, Advanced Accelerator Applications, Advanced Accelerator Applications International SA, Advanced Accelerator Applications S.A., Advanced Accelerator Applications S.r.l., Advanced Accelerator Applications USA Inc., Aeropharm GmbH, Alcon, Alcon  Couvreur NV, Amblyotech, Amblyotech Inc., Arctos Medical, Arctos Medical AG, Australia Pty Ltd, Beijing Novartis Pharma Co. Ltd., BioMedical Research Co. Ltd., CELLforCURE, Cadent Therapeutics, Cadent Therapeutics Cambridge, Cellerys, Cellerys AG, CellforCure, Chiron Corporation, Ciba-Geigy Japan Limited, Co. Ltd, CoStim Pharmaceuticals, CoStim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Coalesce Product Development Limited, Corthera, Development Co. Ltd., EBEWE Pharma Ges.m.b.H Nfg. KG, Encore Vision, Endocyte, Endocyte Inc., Eon Labs Inc., Farmanova Saglik Hizmetleri Ltd, Fougera Pharmaceuticals, Fougera Pharmaceuticals Inc, Gyroscope Therapeutics, HEXAL AG, Hexal, IDB Holland BV, Iberica S.L.U., Ilaclari Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S, JSC Sandoz, Japat AG, Kedalion Therapeutics Inc., Lek Pharmaceuticals d.d., Lek S.A., Manufacturing Pte Ltd , Navigate BioPharma Services Inc, Neutec Pharma Limited, Novartis (Hellas) S.A.C.I., Novartis (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Novartis (Taiwan) Co. Ltd, Novartis (Thailand) Limited, Novartis Argentina S.A., Novartis Australia Pty Ltd, Novartis Austria GmbH, Novartis Biociencias S.A., Novartis Biosciences Peru S.A., Novartis Bioventures AG, Novartis Business Services GmbH, Novartis Capital Corporation, Novartis Chile S.A., Novartis Corporation, Novartis Corporation Sdn. Bhd., Novartis Deutschland GmbH, Novartis Ecuador S.A., Novartis Farma S.p.A., Novartis Farma  Produtos Farmaceuticos S.A., Novartis Farmaceutica S.A, Novartis Farmaceutica S.A. de C.V., Novartis Finance Corporation, Novartis Finance S.A., Novartis Finance Services Ltd, Novartis Finland Oy Espoo, Novartis Gene Therapies, Novartis Gene Therapies EU Limited, Novartis Gene Therapies Inc., Novartis Grimsby Limited, Novartis Groupe France S.A., Novartis Healthcare A/S, Novartis Healthcare Philippines Inc., Novartis Healthcare Private Limited, Novartis Holding AG, Novartis Hungary Healthcare Limited Liability Company, Novartis India Limited, Novartis Inflammasome Research, Novartis Integrated Services Limited, Novartis International AG, Novartis International Pharmaceutical Investment AG, Novartis Investment Ltd, Novartis Investments S.a r.l., Novartis Ireland Limited, Novartis Israel Ltd, Novartis Korea Ltd., Novartis Middle East FZE, Novartis Netherlands B.V., Novartis Neva LLC, Novartis New Zealand Ltd, Novartis Norge AS, Novartis Ophthalmics AG, Novartis Optogenetics Research Inc., Novartis Overseas Investments AG, Novartis Pharma (Logistics) Inc., Novartis Pharma (Pakistan) Limited, Novartis Pharma AG, Novartis Pharma B.V. , Novartis Pharma GmbH, Novartis Pharma GmbH, Novartis Pharma K.K., Novartis Pharma LLC, Novartis Pharma Maroc SA, Novartis Pharma NV, Novartis Pharma Produktions GmbH, Novartis Pharma S.A.E., Novartis Pharma S.A.S., Novartis Pharma Schweiz AG, Novartis Pharma Schweizerhalle AG, Novartis Pharma Services AG, Novartis Pharma Services Romania S.R.L., Novartis Pharma Stein AG, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc., Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Limited, Novartis Pharmaceuticals UK Limited, Novartis Poland Sp. z o.o., Novartis Portugal S.G.P.S. Lda., Novartis Ringaskiddy Limited, Novartis Saglik Gida ve Tarim Urunleri Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S, Novartis Saudi Ltd., Novartis Securities Investment Ltd, Novartis Services Inc., Novartis Slovakia s.r.o., Novartis South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Novartis Sverige AB, Novartis UK Limited, Novartis US Foundation, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Inc, Novartis Vietnam Company Limited, Novartis de Colombia S.A., Novartis de Venezuela S.A., Novartis s.r.o., Oriel Therapeutics Inc., PT. Novartis Indonesia, Protez Pharmaceuticals, Pte Ltd, Research Inc, Salutas Pharma GmbH, Sandoz A/S, Sandoz AG, Sandoz B.V., Sandoz Canada Inc., Sandoz Egypt Pharma S.A.E., Sandoz Farmaceutica S.A., Sandoz Farmaceutica Lda., Sandoz GmbH, Sandoz Hungary Limited Liability Company, Sandoz Ilac Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., Sandoz Inc, Sandoz Industrial Products S.A, Sandoz International GmbH, Sandoz K.K., Sandoz Limited, Sandoz Manufacturing Inc., Sandoz NV, Sandoz Pharma K.K, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals AG, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals d.d., Sandoz Philippines Corporation, Sandoz Polska Sp. z o.o. , Sandoz Private Limited, Sandoz Pty Ltd, Sandoz S.A. de C.V, Sandoz S.A.S., Sandoz S.R.L., Sandoz S.p.A., Sandoz South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Sandoz Ukraine LLC, Sandoz d.o.o. farmaceutska industrija, Sandoz do Brasil Industria Farmaceutica Ltda, Sandoz s.r.o., Selexys Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Shanghai Novartis Trading Ltd., Societe par actions SANDOZ, Spinifex Pharmaceuticals, The Medicines Company, The Medicines Company, Triangle International Reinsurance Limited, Trinity River Insurance Co Ltd, Vedere Bio, Vedere Bio ll, Xiidra, Ziarco, and Ziarco Group Limited.

Read More
Oxford Industries, Inc., an apparel company, designs, sources, markets, and distributes products of lifestyle and other brands worldwide. The company offers men's and women's sportswear and related products under the Tommy Bahama brand; women's and girl's dresses and sportswear, scarves, bags, jewelry, and belts, as well as footwear and children's apparel and swimwear under the Lilly Pulitzer brand; and men's shirts, pants, shorts, outerwear, ties, swimwear, footwear, and accessories, as well as women and youth products under the Southern Tide brand. It also designs, sources, markets, and distributes premium childrenswear, including bonnets, hats, apparel, swimwear, and accessories through thebeaufortbonnetcompany.com and wholesale specialty retailers; men's apparel, which include pants, shorts, and tops through duckhead.com and wholesale specialty retailers. In addition, the company licenses Tommy Bahama brand for various products, such as indoor and outdoor furniture, beach chairs, bedding and bath linens, fabrics, leather goods and gifts, headwear, hosiery, sleepwear, shampoo, toiletries, fragrances, cigar accessories, distilled spirits, and other products; Lilly Pulitzer for stationery and gift products, home furnishing products, and eyewear; and Southern Tide trademark for bed and bath product. Oxford Industries, Inc. offers products through its retail stores, department stores, specialty stores, multi-branded e-commerce retailers, off-price retailers, and other retailers, as well as e-commerce sites. As of January 29, 2022, it operated 186 brand-specific full-price retail stores; 21 Tommy Bahama food and beverage locations; and 35 Tommy Bahama outlet stores. Oxford Industries, Inc. was founded in 1942 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
KeyCorp operates as the holding company for KeyBank National Association that provides various retail and commercial banking products and services in the United States. It operates in two segments, Consumer Bank and Commercial Bank. The company offers various deposits, investment products and services; and personal finance and financial wellness, student loan refinancing, mortgage and home equity, lending, credit card, treasury, business advisory, wealth management, asset management, investment, cash management, portfolio management, and trust and related services to individuals and small and medium-sized businesses. It also provides a suite of banking and capital market products, such as syndicated finance, debt and equity capital market products, commercial payments, equipment finance, commercial mortgage banking, derivatives, foreign exchange, financial advisory, and public finance, as well as commercial mortgage loans comprising consumer, energy, healthcare, industrial, public sector, real estate, and technology loans for middle market clients. In addition, the company offers community development financing, securities underwriting, brokerage, and investment banking services. As of December 31, 2021, it operated through a network of approximately 999 branches and 1,317 ATMs in 15 states, as well as additional offices, online and mobile banking capabilities, and a telephone banking call center. KeyCorp was founded in 1849 and is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio.
Everest Re Group, Ltd., through its subsidiaries, provides reinsurance and insurance products in the United States, Bermuda, and internationally. The company operates through Reinsurance Operations and Insurance Operations segments. The Reinsurance Operations segment writes property and casualty reinsurance; and specialty lines of business through reinsurance brokers, as well as directly with ceding companies in the United States, Bermuda, Ireland, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The Insurance Operations segment writes property and casualty insurance directly, as well as through brokers, surplus lines brokers, and general agents in Bermuda, Canada, Europe, South America, Canada, Chile, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The company also provides treaty and facultative reinsurance products; admitted and non-admitted insurance products; and property and casualty reinsurance and insurance coverages, including marine, aviation, surety, errors and omissions liability, directors' and officers' liability, medical malpractice, mortgage reinsurance, other specialty lines, accident and health, and workers' compensation products. In addition, it offers commercial property and casualty insurance products through wholesale and retail brokers, surplus lines brokers, and program administrators. Everest Re Group, Ltd. was founded in 1973 and is headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda.
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.
Dudik captures a veteran's new life in photos

The photographer Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Art History Eliot Dudik spent a weekend in South Carolina photographing Medal of Honor winner Kyle Carpenter for a Veterans Day story in Vanity Fair. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Kyle on campus Kyle Carpenter lies under the oaks of the University of South Carolinas Horseshoe. A Medal of Honor winner, he is enrolled as a student studying international relations. Eliot Dudik, courtesy of The War Horse

Signs of healing Kyle Carpenter compares his scars today to those captured in photographs shortly after his injuries occurred when he jumped on a grenade to shield a fellow soldier in Afghanistan in 2010. Eliot Dudik, courtesy of The War Horse

A family moment Kyle and his father, Jim Carpenter, kid around in their backyard in Gilbert, South Carolina, last May. Eliot Dudik, courtesy of The War Horse

Receiving our highest honor President Barack Obama applauds Kyle Carpenter for his heroism after awarding him the Medal of Honor at the White House on June 19, 2014. Photo - of - Hide Caption

Eliot Dudik might have been photographing something relatively ordinary  a popular student at the University of South Carolina interacting with his friends  were it not for the obvious and inescapable tapestry of scars on Kyle Carpenters face and body.

Dudik, visiting assistant professor of art and art history  and the creator of William & Marys photography program  was part of a team of professionals hired by Vanity Fair to chronicle not a life shattered by war but one reclaimed through unimaginable brilliance by doctors and pain, suffering and courage by their patient.

This was a very different type of assignment for me, Dudik said. Im used to longer investigations, ones that take one, two or even five years. This was the first one of these freelance, quick-paced [jobs]  but the most important one that Ive done.

In November 2010, Carpenter was a Marine corporal atop a lookout post in Marjah, Afghanistan, when a grenade tossed by a Taliban fighter landed beside him and a fellow Marine. Carpenter, then just 21 years old, threw himself onto the grenade to shield his buddy.

As author Thomas Brennan described in his story appearing in the Nov. 11 Vanity Fair, Shrapnel left entry and exit wounds in his skull, severed major arteries, splintered his right arm [in 34 places], collapsed one of his lungs, and left him unconscious and hemorrhaging underneath a plume of grey smoke.

Virtually no one thought hed survive; in fact, he died twice on the helicopter ride from Marjah to the first of several trauma hospitals he visited before finally arriving at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

There, a team of orthopedic, vascular, reconstructive and trauma surgeons huddled to map out a treatment strategy. Brennan wrote that because Carpenters face absorbed the brunt of the blast, it would take months of surgery to remove embedded dirt and debris.

Bit by excruciating bit, with progress measured in months, not days, they pieced Carpenter back together. Somehow, they saved his arm, and he has near-full range of motion. They rebuilt his face, although he lost the use of one eye.

On June 19, 2014, Carpenter was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama, the nations highest military honor.

Corporal William Kyle Carpenter should not be alive today, the President said during an emotional ceremony. But we are here because this man, this United States Marine, faced down that terrible explosive power, that unforgiving force, with his own body  willingly and deliberately  to protect a fellow Marine.

The question the story sought to answer  and Dudik was assigned to capture photographically  was what was Carpenters life like now.

Hes just an amazing individual, Dudik said. Despite the difficulties hes had over the last five years and the scars he lives with every day, hes just bubbling with enthusiasm and excitement. Thats the first thing that struck me.

We met him at a restaurant to start with, but then walked around campus. He seems to know everybody; everybody seems to know him. He would stop and shake peoples hands, pet their dogs, talk to them. Hes just an incredible guy.

Equally impressive, Dudik said, were Carpenters parents, Robin and Jim. Part of the weekend was spent in their home, sharing meals and emotions.

Theyre both incredibly sweet people, Dudik said. Theyre still dealing with the shock of the day that they got word of this, and their lives have changed a lot since this has happened, being in the public eye a lot. But they are incredibly generous people.

Standing behind the stove as she cooked for her guests, Robin Carpenter opened up about her feelings about the days following her sons injuries, the fear of loss, the determination to help see him through, the abject helplessness of seeing him in a coma and, the bit of solace gained by knowing that his heart rate increased every time he heard her voice in his ear.

They both were really open about the experience and their feelings, Dudik said, Some of that will come through.

Dudik also photographed then-Pfc. Jared Lilly, who applied tourniquets to each of Carpenters arms, pulled him off the roof on which he lay dying and got him into the arms of a Navy corpsman who was waiting to treat those wounded in the attack.

Dudik estimated that he took 700 photos that weekend in South Carolina.

I made a lot of photos of him as he moved through space and some photos of him interacting with other people, he said.

When he stands in front of the camera, he stands very proud and straight. I think thats the Marine in him, and his understanding of what hes been through and what it means to the country. I think thatll come through in the photographs. Hes a proud American.
ARGENTA  During the 13 years Richard and Patricia Mosier worked together, she called him Mr. Mosier because he was the principal and her boss at Argenta-Oreana High School.

When they got home during their 65 years of their marriage, however, Pat called him Dick and she was in charge.

We decided early on that neither one of us were mind-readers, so communication and patience had to be important, and so was a sense of humor, he said. You make things work when you're married a long time.

The Argenta couple, both natives of Lincoln, will celebrate their upcoming 66th wedding anniversary and his 90th birthday with an open house from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday at the Whitmore/Oreana Community Center.

He was born Nov. 14, 1926, and the Mosiers were married on Nov. 23, 1950, when he was 24 and she was 21.

Dick, who still lives in their Argenta home while Pat moved to Decatur's McKinley Court earlier this year, also agreed to share what he thinks might be the key to his long life in anticipation of the party.

He said he has maintained a healthy weight throughout his life, getting plenty of walking in as a teacher and principal, and quit smoking in the 1960s when tobacco's connection to lung cancer became clear.

Mosier did undergo surgery and radiation treatments 40 years ago for prostate cancer but has remained cancer-free since.

After serving in the Navy for 18 months at the tail end of World War II, Mosier taught business classes at Rochelle and Arthur high schools, staying at the latter for 15 years. He earned a master's degree in education administration from Eastern Illinois University during this time.

He accepted the position of high school principal at Argenta-Oreana for the 1968-69 school year and taught business at Richland Community College for another dozen years after retiring from the school district in 1984.

Pat, who had been three years behind him at Lincoln High School, worked as her husband's secretary while he was a principal. "Everybody liked her," Dick said.

They look forward to seeing some of their former students at the open house, although the oldest ones would be in their early 80s and might be tough for the Mosiers to recognize at first. More than two dozen years teaching in Arthur and serving as principal in Argenta, he said, also adds up to a lot of students.

The Mosiers say they considered the 300-plus students at Argenta-Oreana to be their children at work and devoted themselves to their three daughters whenever they were away.

We told our children we would always love them, but I felt strongly that they should not lie to us, no matter what, he said.

They are the parents of Nancy Mosier of Sacramento, Calif., the late Barbara Fegan, and Judy Mosier of Chicago. They also have four grandchildren.

Dick Mosier said Nancy and Barbara graduated from Argenta-Oreana, but Judy went to St. Teresa to avoid even the appearance of playing favorites while he was principal.

We sure had a lot of kids, Pat Mosier recalls. We've had our ups and downs but more ups than downs.




China News on Women





Sorry, the page you requested was not found. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Womenofchina.cn, try visiting the Womenofchina Home page
Stephen Pytko, 25, left, and his brother Nathan, 22, co-owners of Pytko Construction Company in North Smithfield, are thrilled at Donald Trump's win in Tuesday's election. Nathan said he was both shocked and thrilled when he awoke Wednesday morning to the news and his brother Stephen stated he was shaking so much he couldn't sleep all night.
Japan-India nuclear cooperation agreement signed

11 November 2016

Share

The prime ministers of India and Japan have welcomed the signature today of a nuclear cooperation agreement between the two countries. Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe said the agreement reflects a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership for clean energy, economic development and a peaceful and secure world.

Modi and Abe meet in Japan (Image: Kantei)

The agreement between the two countries was signed during a visit by the Indian prime minister to Japan and has taken six years of negotiations. Its signature follows the signing of a memorandum on cooperation by the two leaders in December 2015. It will open the door for India to import Japanese nuclear technology. India has been largely excluded from international trade in nuclear plant and materials for over three decades because of its position outside the comprehensive safeguards regime of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Modi said signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marked a "historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership", adding that their cooperation would help "combat the challenge of climate change".

In a joint statement, the two prime ministers also reaffirmed their commitment to work together for India to become a full member of the international Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), as well as of the Wassenaar Arrangement and the Australia Group, with the aim of strengthening international non-proliferation efforts.

In a separate statement, Modi thanked Abe for his support for India's membership of the NSG. Membership of the NSG, which seeks to prevent nuclear proliferation by controlling the export of materials, equipment and technology that could potentially be used to manufacture nuclear weapons, has up to now been limited to NPT signatories. Following the approval of an India-specific safeguards agreement by the International Atomic Energy Agency, an exception under NSG rules and bilateral nuclear cooperation deals, India formally applied to become a member of the NSG in May.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
UAE 'strong' on nuclear security, says IAEA

11 November 2016

Share

The United Arab Emirates has undertaken "strong and sustainable" nuclear security activities, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team of experts has concluded. The Vienna-based agency carried out a two-week International Physical Protection Advisory Service (IPPAS) mission at the UAE government's request.

"The UAE's hosting of this IPPAS mission as it embarks on a nuclear power program is a welcome demonstration of its commitment to nuclear security," Juan Carlos Lentijo, IAEA deputy director-general and head of the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security, said in an IAEA statement yesterday. "In hosting this mission, the UAE demonstrated leadership, and we hope that other states, particularly those embarking on nuclear power production, also will request such missions," he added.

The IPPAS team reviewed the UAE's legislative and regulatory framework for nuclear security, looked at the physical protection of nuclear material and nuclear facilities, and the security of radioactive material, associated facilities and associated activities.

Also discussed was the UAE implementation of the 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, which entered into force last May and provides a strengthened framework for protecting nuclear material and nuclear facilities. The UAE ratified the Amendment in 2009.

"The team concluded that the UAE has undertaken strong and sustainable nuclear security activities [and] identified a number of good practices in the national nuclear security regime and at the visited facilities, while also making recommendations and suggestions for continuous improvement," the IAEA said.

The team, led by Patrick Adams, a senior security advisor of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, also included eight experts from seven states and the IAEA. The team met in Abu Dhabi with officials from the Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation, the Critical Infrastructure and Coastal Protection Authority and the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation.

The UAE was the 47th country to host an IPPAS mission.

Four Korean-designed APR-1400 pressurized water reactors are under construction at Barakah, in Abu Dhabi, which are expected to start up in 2017.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
US DOE sells depleted uranium for laser enrichment

11 November 2016

Share

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has agreed to sell around 300,000 tonnes of depleted uranium hexafluoride to GE Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) for re-enrichment at a proposed plant to be built near DOE's Paducah site in Kentucky. The agreement paves the way for commercialisation of Silex laser enrichment technology.

GLE was selected by the DOE in 2013 to enter contract negotiations on the construction of a laser enrichment plant former at the former gaseous enrichment site at Paducah, Kentucky to re-enrich its inventory of high-assay depleted uranium tails. The tails, left over from previous enrichment operations, contain a lower proportion of uranium-235 than in naturally occurring uranium but can potentially be re-enriched for use in nuclear fuel.

GLE would finance, construct, own and operate the Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility, which would be a commercial enrichment plant licensed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Re-enrichment of the 300,000 tonnes of tails would take place over 40 years, producing around 100,000 tonnes of "natural-grade" uranium which would be sold into the world uranium market. The balance of the material - low assay tails - would be returned to the DOE for disposition.



Sometimes described as third-generation technology, laser enrichment processes promise improved efficiency and lower costs than the centrifuge enrichment plants in operation today. Silex stands for Separation of Isotopes by Laser Excitation.

Australian company Silex Systems Ltd, which developed the technology, said the production rate of the Paducah facility and the subsequent sale of uranium into the market is likely to be regulated by the US government at around 2000 tU per year, equivalent to a mine producing around 5 million pounds U3O8 per year.

Silex said that subject to "timely completion" of the technology commercialisation program, prevailing market conditions and regulatory approvals, construction of the Paducah plant could take place in the "early 2020s". Silex and GLE are also investigating the possibility of using a US government loan guarantee facility to support the financing of the project, the company said.

US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said the agreement furthered the DOE's environmental clean-up mission while reducing clean-up costs, creating local jobs and supporting an "economical" enrichment enterprise. "The sale contributes to two key Energy Department mission areas  to fulfil the federal government's responsibility to manage the safe storage and disposal of nuclear materials and to enable nuclear power, America's largest source of zero-carbon energy and an important enabler for reduced greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

Pivotal step



GLE is a joint business venture of GE (51%), Hitachi (25%) and Cameco (24%). Earlier this year GE Hitachi announced its desire to reduce its equity interest in GLE and in April signed a termsheet with Silex giving the Australian company an exclusive option to acquire GE Hitachi's entire 76% interest in GLE.

Silex said the restructuring of GLE continues to progress. Discussions under way with several potential strategic investors, some of whom are currently engaged in due diligence activities, the company said.

"The finalisation of the agreement with the DOE is a pivotal step in the path to commercialisation for our unique third generation Silex laser enrichment technology. We wish to thank federal, state and local partners, including the DOE, the state of Kentucky and the city of Paducah for supporting this opportunity," Michael Goldsworthy, Silex CEO, said.

GLE president and CEO Bob Crate said the completion of the agreement was an important step for the company. "Securing the right to acquire depleted uranium hexafluoride from the Department of Energy is a key factor in GLE's plans to potentially license, construct and operate the Paducah laser enrichment facility," he said.

In 2012, the US NRC granted GLE a combined construction and operating licence for a laser enrichment plant of up to 6 million separative work units at Wilmington, North Carolina. GLE has successfully demonstrated the concept in a test loop at Global Nuclear Fuel's Wilmington fuel fabrication facility but has not yet decided whether to proceed with a full-scale commercial plant there.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
Australia is home to a wide range of mammals, including both native and introduced species. Some of these species are thriving well and comfortably share their habitat with other species and groups of animals. Almost 270 species of the land-dwelling mammals are native to Australia. Most of these Australian mammals are marsupial placental mammals. Australia has some of the Critically Endangered species of mammal some of which are near extinction. These endangered mammals are looked at below.

Australias Most Endangered Mammals

Christmas Island Pipistrelle

The Christmas Island Pipistrelle, scientifically called Pipistrellus murrayi, is a bat species representing an endemic taxon on Australia's Christmas Island. It is a small insectivorous bat which weighs between 3 to 4.5 grams with a forearm length of between 30 and 33 millimeters. Both the male and the female are similar in appearance with a dark brown fur covering their bodies. The female Christmas Island Pipistrelle forms colonies of up to 50 individuals, while the males roost alone in solitude. The bat roosts at the back of dead trees and in hollow trees. The number of Christmas Island Pipistrelle has reduced significantly with fears being held that the species may be extinct by now. Its decline is associated with threats such as predation, diseases introduced by species such as black rats, and disturbance of their habitats.

Bare-Rumped Sheathtail Bat

The Bare-Rumped Sheathtail Bat, scientifically called Saccolaimus saccolaimus nudicluniatus, is a Critically Endangered bat species, and ranked as a high priority by the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection in Australia. It is a large sheath-tailed bat which lacks fur on the lower part of its back. The dense dorsal fur is colored brown or black with white patches. It has a throat pouch as opposed to the wing pouch common in most bats. The throat pouch is more developed in the male than in the female. Bare-Rumped Sheathtail Bat occurs in tropical eucalyptus and rainforest. It is common in open woodland and lives in tree hollows, with most roosts located in Eucalyptus plantyphylla trees. The bat lives in colonies of 3 to 40 bats. It is a fast flier and forages mainly at night. Bare-Rumped Sheathtail Bat is insectivorous. The threats to its survival include habitat loss and competition for hollows with native birds.

Carpentarian Rock Rat

The Carpentarian Rock Rat, scientifically known as Zyzomys palatalis, is a rodent species in the Muridae Family. It is native only to Australia. The Carpentarian Rock Rat is a compact conilurine rodent with a grey-brown fur above and pale fur below. It stores fat at the base of its carrot-shaped tail. An adult species weighs an average of 120 grams. It is found in only five locations around the Wollogoran Station while its habitat includes rugged sandstone gorges. The main threats to Carpentarian Rock Rat include fires and hot late dry seasons. Its conservation is under the Territory Wildlife Park management.

Christmas Island Flying Fox

The Christmas Island flying fox, scientifically named Pteropus melanotus natalis, is a bat species in the Family Pteropopidae. It inhabits the Christmas Island in Australia, Nicobar and Andaman Islands in India, and Sumatra Island in Indonesia. It is often spotted flying and foraging in the mid afternoon. It feeds on fruits and flowers of coconut palms. The threat to Christmas Island Flying Fox includes loss of roosting habitat and inadequate food.

Other Endangered Mammals of Australia

Other endangered mammals in Australia include Gilberts Potoroo, the Kangaroo Island Dunnart, Leadbeater's Possum, the Lord Howe Long-Eared Bat, the Macdonnell Range Rock Rat, the Mountain Pygmy Possum, and the Queensland Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat. The major threats to these species include habitat loss and human activities such as poaching and agriculture
Syria is one of the Western Asia countries bordering other Asian Countries including Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea. The country is characterized by fertile plains, deserts, and mountains. Syria gained independent on October 25, 1945, becoming a founding member of the United Nations. Most of the Syrian population live in the Euphrates River Valley between the coastal mountains and the desert. The country has a population of approximately 17 million people with over 4 million people living outside the country as refugees. The remaining population is spread across the major cities of Syria. The countrys capital and the largest city is Damascus. The biggest cities include;

The Three Biggest Syrian Cities

Aleppo

Aleppo is the capital city of Aleppo Governorate, Syrians most populous governorate. The city has an official population of 2,132,100 people making it Syrias largest city. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world having been inhabited since the 6th millennium BC. The long history of Aleppo is attributed to its strategic trading location between the modern Iraq and the Mediterranean Sea. Aleppos decline began with the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1869 which diverted trade to the sea. Aleppo is characterized by medieval architecture and rich cultural heritage which has been preserved from the Ottoman rule. The Battle of Aleppo which began in 2012 and the Syrian Civil War have caused massive destruction to the city. Aleppo is a major center of Arabic traditional and classical music including Tarab. The Aleppine cuisine consists of wide range of dishes including kebab and dolma.

Damascus

Damascus is the capital city of Syria and the largest city in the country after Aleppo with a population of 1,414,913. It is nicknamed the City of Jasmine, and it is located in the South-western Syria embedded on the eastern foothill of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range. Damascus has been occupied since the second half of the seventh millennium but it gained its prominence when Aram-Damascus was founded by Ezron when he overthrew citys tribal governor. Damascus has been an important trade center since its founding. The city is also a tourist center with abundant cultural wealth. The historical sites in the city date back to different periods of history. It is also the main education center in Syria with the oldest and largest university.

Homs

Homs was previously known as Emesa. It is located in the Western Syria in the north of Damascus, and it is the capital of Homs Governorate. Homs was a major industrial center before the Syrian Civil War and it had a population of approximately 652,609 people in 2004. Historically the city was the capital of Emasany dynasty and a center of worship for the sun god El-Gabal. Homs declined during the Ottoman rule but regained its economic importance with the revival of the cotton industry. The city was the stronghold of the opposition during the Syrian Civil War. Much of the city has been destroyed in the war with several of its residents dead.

Effects Of Civil War On Cities

The civil war in Syria has had a devastating impact on its cities. Some of the once prominent cities like Homs and the old city of Aleppo now lie in ruins. The once prominent structures and historic sites now lie in ruins. The economy of these cities has also been affected since no meaningful trade can be carried out. Some of the cities are now ghost cities with most of the residents either killed in the war or moved to other countries for safety. According to the Syrian government, it will cost over one trillion dollars to restore the major cities.
There are many lists of wonders in the world, but none is as awe-inspiring as the Seven Wonders of the World. These ancient sites have been standing for centuries and attract travelers from all over the globe. Whether you're a history buff or just looking for an amazing vacation spot, these destinations should be at the top of your list!

So, start planning your next trip and add these destinations to your bucket list.

The New Seven Wonders of The World

The New Seven Wonders of The World

In 2007, a Swiss corporation announced the New Seven Wonders of the World. The new wonders were chosen based on public voting. They are: Chichen Itza in Mexico, the Colosseum in Italy, the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu in Peru, Petra in Jordan, the Taj Mahal in India, and Christ the Redeemer in Brazil. Heres some information on all these marvelous feats of human ingenuity.

Chichen Itza - Mexico

Chichen Itza - Mexico

Chichen Itza is located in Mexico and was built by the Mayan people. The Mayan people were a very advanced civilization, and their architecture is unbelievable. The Chichen Itza temple stands 79 feet above the main plaza and was built in such a way that it aligns with the sun during the spring and autumn equinoxes. During these equinoxes, the sun shines directly on the pyramid and casts a shadow in the shape of a snake. It is truly an amazing sight to see.

The Mayans were very advanced for their time. They practiced agriculture, astronomy, and mathematics. They also built cities and lived in houses that had running water. The Mayan civilization was very successful until it eventually disappeared from the earth around the 11th century. The reasons for this are unknown, but it has been speculated that the Mayans may have perished due to wars or were wiped out by the disturbances in their trade routes.

More AboutChichen Itza, Major Tourist Attraction

Colosseum  Italy

Colosseum  Italy

The Colosseum in Italy was built in 70 and 80 AD and was the largest amphitheater in the world. This magnificent structure is made of concrete and stone and is considered one of the greatest achievements of Roman architecture.

Every year, millions of tourists visit the Colosseum to see its grandeur for themselves. It measures 620 by 513 feet, which is larger than an American football field! It is also estimated that over 50,000 people could be seated in the Colosseum at one time.

The Colosseum was used for gladiator fights and public spectacles such as mock sea battles, animal hunts, executions, and re-enactments of famous battles and dramas. On average, it is estimated that 550,000 people were killed in the Colosseum, and so many animals died that some species even became extinct.

Great Wall of China  China

Great Wall of China  China

The Great Wall of China is the largest man-made structure in the world stretching over 5,000 miles long. Construction on the wall commenced in the 7th century BC and continued for 2 millennia.

The Great Wall was first conceived during the reign of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang Di, although it was actually built in many parts by different emperors. In the Qin Dynasty, the emperor ordered thousands of soldiers to build a wall that would stretch across China. After the fall of the Qin Dynasty, the Northern Wei Dynasty restored and expanded the remaining wall to guard against assaults from other tribes. From there, many kingdoms and dynasties throughout the millennia helped repair and finish this magnificent structure.

There are many stories about why the wall was built. Some say that it was built to prevent attacks by fierce nomadic tribes from the north. Others think that it was built to keep out armies of invaders. However, academics have stated that it worked more as political propaganda.

Today, the Great Wall is a popular tourist attraction in China and thousands of people flock to it each year.

Interesting FactCan The Great Wall Of China Be Seen From Space?

Machu Picchu  Peru

Machu Picchu  Peru

Machu Picchu is an ancient Incan city that is located in present-day Peru. The city was built in the 15th century and is situated on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba River valley. Machu Picchu is one of the most well-known and popular tourist destinations in Peru, as well as being one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The city was built around 1450, but it was abandoned just a century later at the time of the Spanish conquest. The Incas never revealed their location to the Spanish conquerors, so Machu Picchu was undiscovered for almost 400 years. When Machu Picchu was rediscovered in 1911, it became one of the most famous archaeological sites in South America. The site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and receives approximately half a million visitors each year.

Petra  Jordan

Petra  Jordan

As one of the oldest cities in the world, Petra is an archaeological wonder in Jordan. It is believed to have been the site where Moses struck a rock and water flowed forth. Later on, in 300 BC, it was established by the Nabataean Arabs. During this time, Petra thrived, and it became an essential trade hub, particularly for spices. The buildings in Petra are carved from sandstone, and the city contains many rock-cut temples, tombs, and other structures. The structures are designed to let the light shine into the interiors of the buildings.

The city eventually fell, however, as trade routes changed and two major earthquakes, (363 and 551, respectively) caused more complexity, Petra was eventually abandoned.

The city was hidden for centuries by the surrounding cliffs and was only rediscovered in 1812 by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Petra is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Read MorePetra Archaeological Wonder

Taj Mahal  India

Taj Mahal  India

The Taj Mahal is one of the most beautiful and well-known buildings in the world. It was built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to the couples 14th child. It is said to have taken 20,000 men and 22 years to complete.

The Taj Mahal is located in Agra, India, and is an example of Mughal architecture, which combines Indian, Persian, and Islamic influences. This glorious structure is made of marble and has a main tomb chamber with a sarcophagus. It also includes a gigantic garden with a reflecting pool.

The Taj Mahal is considered a symbol of love and peace and it is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Christ the Redeemer  Brazil

Christ the Redeemer  Brazil

Christ the Redeemer is a world-famous statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The statue is of Jesus Christ and is located on top of Corcovado Mountain.

Created by Heitor da Silva Costa, Paul Landowski, and Carlos Oswald, the statue was built in 1931 and stands at 98 feet (not including the base) and has an arm span of 92 feet.

Christ the Redeemer is a popular tourist destination and receives millions of visitors each year. It is truly a beautiful sight to behold and is definitely worth a visit.

In Summary

The ancient wonders of the world never cease to amaze. Each one is a unique and awe-inspiring destination that attracts travelers from all over the globe. If you're looking for an amazing vacation spot, or just want to learn more about history, these destinations should be at the top of your list! Have you been to any of these ancient wonders? Do you have any tips or tricks to share? Leave a comment below!
The Industrial Revolution was a period of history in the West that marked the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one. It was a period that ushered in the mass production of goods and the rapid urbanization of the population. The Industrial Revolution began in England in the latter half of the 18th century, and lasted until about the mid-19th century. This revolution also came to the U.S., though at a later time, beginning in the early 19th century and lasting until the latter half of the century. The Industrial Revolution marked the birth of the modern economy that we are accustomed to today.

Origins Of The Industrial Revolution

Thomas Newcomen steam engine (1702 model), built by Edward Nairne around 1770, purchased by the Teylers Museum in 1839. Image credit: Jane023 via Wikimedia Commons

The main impetus for the Industrial Revolution was the invention of steam power, or more specifically, the steam engine. Development of this game-changing invention began in the early 1700s, when an English inventor named Thomas Newcomen designed a prototype of the first modern steam engine. In the 1760s, Newcomens work was followed up by Scottish engineer James Watt, who added a separate water condenser to one of Newcomens models, which made it more efficient.

Used postage stamp printed in Britain celebrating Pioneers of the Industrial Revolution showing James Watt and Steam Engineering.

Later on, Watt collaborated with Matthew Boulton, who would become one of the premier industrialists of the Industrial Revolution. Together, they invented a steam engine with a rotary motion, which was the key innovation that allowed steam power to be used by British industry on a massive scale. Among the industries to begin using steam engines was the coal mining industry. The steam engine allowed coal miners to go deeper to extract the valuable resource, which would go on to fuel much of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, it was coal that was used to fuel the steam engines, as well as the factories that mass produced goods, and the steamships and railroads that transported those goods.

Improvements and innovations in transportation methods and infrastructure also helped spark the Industrial Revolution. For instance, improvements to Britains road network and the building of canals in the country allowed for much easier movement of goods. In addition, the advent of steam power allowed for the development of two key innovations in transportation: the locomotive and the steamship. By 1830, locomotives were transporting freight and passengers between the English industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. At the same time, steamships were used to transport goods along Britains rivers and canals, and across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Second Industrial Revolution

Boott cotton mills in Lowell, USA. The machine room is identical to the working conditions in the late 19th century. Editorial credit: travelview / Shutterstock.com

The Second Industrial Revolution is the term used to refer to the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S., which took place primarily in the 19th century. Some historians mark the beginning of the American Industrial Revolution with the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1793. The mill was built by English immigrant Samuel Slater, who subsequently built several other cotton mills throughout New England. His contributions led historians to call him the father of the American Industrial Revolution. Slaters cotton mills and the cotton manufacturing industry in general got a boost from American inventor Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin.

Innovations Of The Industrial Revolution

The period of the Industrial Revolution saw the advent of numerous innovations. Besides the aforementioned steamships and railroads, the Industrial Revolution was also the period in which electricity was developed. This development began in the early 19th century in Britain, with experiments involving electric currents and magnetism. These experiments led to the creation of the electric motor and electrical generator. By the late 19th century, these new inventions led to the introduction of electric railways and tramways. The late 19th century also saw the invention of the incandescent lamp, which would become the primary source of artificial light in urban areas over the next 50 years.

A woman using one of the earliest telephone models in 1927.

The Industrial Revolution also revolutionized communications with two key inventions: the telephone and the telegraph. The latter was developed in the early and mid-19th century in both the U.S. and Britain. By the mid-19th century, telegraph cables had been installed across the English Channel and Atlantic Ocean. Among other things, telegraphy allowed for the rapid movement of information, such as the transmission of national and international news. The telephone was developed in the late 19th century. The first telephone call was made on March 10, 1876, by inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was credited with the invention of the device. Telephones did not, however, become common household items until the mid-20th century.

Another important innovation of the Industrial Revolution was the internal combustion engine, whose development began in Europe in the mid-19th century. By the late 19th century, this engine was small and efficient enough to power an invention that would change the face of the world forever: the automobile. In the 1890s, a nascent automobile industry was present in Europe and the U.S., which served mostly wealthy customers. This all changed less than 20 years later, however, when industrialist Henry Ford perfected assembly-line methods to mass-produce automobiles.

Impact Of The Industrial Revolution

Pollution is one of the negative impacts of Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution led to the creation of the modern world we know today. Among other things, it ushered in a new era of modern capitalism, including the mass production and consumption of goods and services. Indeed, more efficient modes of production led to reduced prices for goods, which meant that a higher number of consumers could afford these goods. Industrialization also led to new employment opportunities as factories and other mass productions facilities opened. People who once lived off the land started streaming into urban centers at a rapid pace, in order to fill jobs at these facilities.

This rapid urbanization also led to new problems, however, including overcrowding, lack of proper sanitation, and lack of clean drinking water. Industrialization also led to environmental degradation, which would eventually result in a new global problem that we still struggle to tackle today: climate change. In addition, although mass production and increased economic output significantly improved the lives of the middle and upper classes, working class people struggled mightily. Many workers worked in horrible, unsafe conditions. They also worked long hours with very little in the way of monetary compensation. Thus, modern-day issues like climate change and workers rights have their origins in the Industrial Revolution.
11. Second Persian Gulf War

The Second Persian Gulf War (Iraq War), took place between 2003 and 2011. The US President in office at the time was George W. Bush, who served two terms from January 2001 until January 2009. He alleged that Iraq not only held weapons of mass destruction but also posed an imminent threat to the US and its allies. Based on these allegations, US-led forces with allied troops invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. This move overthrew the Baathist government and captured Saddam Hussein. Under current President Barack Obama, who has served two terms beginning in January of 2009, troops were withdrawn from Iraq. The exit strategy was announced in February of 2009 and US forces began training the Iraqi Security Forces to take over. US troops officially withdrew on December 18, 2011.

10. Persian Gulf War

The Persian Gulf War, also known as the First Iraq War, occurred from August 2, 1990, to February 28, 1991. This war was in response to Iraqs invasion of Kuwait and was US-led with the backing of 34 other countries, the largest military alliance since World War II. Ex-President George H. W. Bush made the call to send troops to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the attacks. After Iraq had refused to remove troops from Kuwait, the allied troops began bombing on January 17. On February 24, the ground invasion was underway. This move had lasted 100 hours before Iraq withdrew from Kuwait and a ceasefire was called.

9. Vietnam War

The Vietnam War holds the record as the longest war fought by the US. As such, it has had more Presidents in power than any other war. The war began between Communist-backed North Vietnam and anti-Communist South Vietnam. At this time, Dwight Eisenhower was President and on November 1, 1955, he sent the Military Assistance Advisory Group to help train South Vietnamese troops.

The US became further involved in May of 1961 when ex-President John F. Kennedy sent 400 military advisors to train the troops in South Vietnam. He would eventually send over 16,000 military advisors. In November of 1963, after Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency.

Johnson did not increase US involvement until after he won the election of 1964. During his first year in office, ex-President Johnson sent 3,500 Marines to South Vietnam. Military operations lasted longer than expected.

Richard Nixon won the next election and took office in 1969. While running for office, Nixon sent his South Vietnam government liaison to convince them not to sign the peace treaty that Johnson was offering. This move was illegal. During his presidency, Nixon initiated the Vietnamization program, a move to transfer military power to South Vietnam. After negotiating a peace treaty, US troops withdrew in March of 1973. South Vietnam later lost the efforts to North Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

8. Korean War

After World War II, the Soviet Union freed North Korea from Japanese control and US forces were pushed into South Korea. By 1948, the two regions were made distinct countries with distinct governments, resulting from the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US. Neither Korean government recognized the other as legitimate. The war (June 25, 1950, to July 27, 1953) was instigated when Communist-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in an attempt to join the two countries. Harry S. Truman was the US President at the time. UN troops deployed to the war; 88% of those forces were from the US.

7. World War II

World War II (WWII) occurred between 1939 and 1945. It involved over 30 countries and more than 100 million individuals, making it the biggest war in world history. The war began under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and ended under Harry S. Truman. On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in the US, ex-President Roosevelt responded by declaring war on Japan the next day. On December 11, Germany and the Axis powers declared war on the US. This marked the beginning of US involvement in WWII. The country sent over 16 million troops before fighting ended. The end of WWII marked the beginning of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union.

6. World War I

World War I began in July of 1914 and ended in November of 1918. It is remembered as one of the deadliest wars in history. The war began when a Yugoslav nationalist killed the Archduke of Austria. Conflict arose, and countries began taking sides and forming alliances. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia a month later. At this time, Woodrow Wilson was President of the US and joined forces with the Allies. The Allies consisted of Japan, US, Russian Empire, France, and the UK. By the end of the war, more than 9 million military personnel and 7 million civilians died.

5. Spanish American War

The Spanish-American War took place in 1898 under the presidency of William McKinley. This conflict was spurred by Cuban efforts to gain independence from Spain. The US became involved after one of its ships was destroyed in the Havana Harbor. Congress pushed the President into action; historians report that McKinley wanted to avoid fighting. The war ended with the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which gave US temporary control over Cuba and ownership of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

4. US Civil War

Ex-President Abraham Lincoln held office during the US Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865. The war began when 7 of the 34 US states seceded from the union by forming the Confederate States of America over the issue of slavery in western states. These southern states attacked Fort Sumter, initiating the war. Before the war ended, 11 states had joined the Confederacy. The war ended with the fall of the Confederate States and the abolishment of slavery.

3. Mexican American War

The Mexican-American War (1846 to 1848) took place under the presidency of James K. Polk. This conflict was initiated when Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836 and was incorporated into the US in 1845. Ownership of some of the territory was disputed, and ex-President Polk made an offer to purchase the land. Mexico declined, and the US deployed troops to the area. By the end of the war, the US had gained control over present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico.

2. War of 1812

During the War of 1812, ex-President James Madison fought against British naval powers. The war was caused by British attempts at controlling US trade and the US desire to expand its territory. This war brought on a significant loss for the US, including a great fire in the capital of Washington DC. Fighting ended with the Treaty of Ghent, in which the British promised not to move Canadas border and promised to abandon its efforts to create an independent state in the northwest for indigenous peoples.

1. American Revolution

The American Revolution was fought between 1775 and 1783 under the presidency of George Washington, the nations first President. The conflict broke out after increasing disagreement between the original colonies and the British-represented colonial government. France joined the fighting in 1778 on the side of the colonists. This involvement instigated British surrender in 1781. However, violence continued until 1783. In September of 1783, Britain formally acknowledged the independence of the US.
Sex robot (illustration)

By: Feng Qian

The owner of a cafe in Switzerland, has announced that his company will offer free sex with a robot with the purchase of a coffee.

Bradley Charvet, who also owns Facegirl, which is an escort service, said that he will charge $62 for a cup of coffee, but consumers will be able to have sex with a robot of their choice for free.

Charvet originally planned to employ prostitutes at the cafe, but legal issues arose. Charvet is in talks with a U.S. manufacturer to purchase several sex robots for about $3,000 a piece.

A government official has commented about the idea of offering sex at the cafe, saying that paid sexual services are prohibited in public establishments.

Charvet thinks he can skirt legal issues by offering sex with non humans. Consumers will be able to choose the robot of their choice on an iPad.

They will then be given rooms along with their coffee, and will be pleasured as they consume the beverages.
A young man wanted to make a point about racism in the United States, but his plan backfired when he was exposed for a liar by police. 20-year-old Khalil Cavil of Texas was working at the Saltgrass Steak House in Odessa when he claimed he was discriminated against because of his Muslim name. Cavil took
DECATUR  Although the United Way of Decatur and Mid-Illinois is one-third of the way toward reaching a $1.6 million goal, that's not the number that got the emphasis Thursday at a campaign report event.

Rather, it was the estimated 21,217 lives that $530,441 would impact in the hands of the United Way's 21 partner agencies in Macon County.

You don't have to be a giant corporation to make a difference in this community, said Brian Byers, vice president of development for Neuhoff Media and chairman of the United Way board.

Thursday evening's event preceded a special performance of Edgar Allan Poe's Nevermore at Millikin University's Pipe Dreams Studio Theatre.

Joel Kimling, a senior theater major from Cincinnati and artistic director of the student-run company, said the collaboration was a great way to learn about partnering while exposing Pipe Dreams to a new audience.

The guest speaker was Shauna Ejeh, the new executive director of Baby TALK.

Ejeh said her agency is dedicated to supporting the parent-child relationship from day one.

Representatives visit the family of every baby born at Decatur Memorial Hospital and HSHS St. Mary's Hospital and continue with home visits to 200 low-income families. Other programs include Early Head Start, Fathers Leading Families and Family Literacy.

It really does begin in the beginning, Ejeh said. The more we can do early on, the more likely we are to have productive, contributing citizens later.

Byers and Debbie Bogle, the United Way's executive director, gave a list of campaign totals so far, stressing that for every $100 given, an average of four people can be helped.

They were Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Illinois, $984; Caterpillar Inc., $281,143; Catholic Charities, $743; Comcast, $1,026; Decatur Foundry, $2,484; Hickory Point Bank & Trust, $60,000; Erickson, Davis, Murphy & Johnson, $1,230; Gerber State Bank, $1,700; Good Shops, $5,700; Herald & Review, $10,968; McGuire, Yuhas, Huffman & Buckley, $3,328; Norfolk Southern Foundation, $31,290; and Richland Community College, $6,887.

Preliminary totals included $23,326 from Decatur Memorial Hospital and $17,933 from Soy Capital Bank.

Bogle singled out the $360 given by Illini Supply Inc. for special comment.

This is a very small office, but their gift is huge," she said. The bulk of our campaign is made up of people who give $1 or $2 per paycheck.
The New Jersey administration of Governor Chris Christie took control of Atlantic City on Wednesday, approving a five-year takeover plan to prevent the city from declaring bankruptcy.

The citys elected officials, led by Republican Mayor Donald Guardian, had submitted their own plan to meet an end-of-October deadline, but the states Local Finance Board rejected it in voting for the state takeover.

The state board, established under the states dubiously named Municipal Stabilization and Recovery Act, will have the power to overrule the City Council, break union contracts, sell off assets, and hire and fire municipal workers.

The state has taken over some impoverished cities previously, most recently Camden in 2002. The Atlantic City action, however, goes further than any in the past. It was not immediately clear how the board, under its director Timothy Cunningham, would exercise its power. Cunningham said that unions should consider their contracts still in place, but that could obviously change on very short notice.

The Atlantic City crisis reflects the desperate economic conditions facing a growing number of small US cities, but it has been magnified by the role of gambling casinos in the local economy. As reported by The Week, 5 of the citys 12 casinos have closed since 2014, as casino gambling has faced greater online competition as well as the legalization of gambling in Pennsylvania and other nearby states. Casino income in New Jersey dropped from $5.2 billion in 2006 to about half that amount in 2015. The Atlantic City tax base has collapsed from $21 billion to $6 billion. The city, with a small population, nevertheless faces a relatively huge budget deficit of $100 million, and has accumulated debt of $500 million.

The role of the Republican governor looms large in this latest assault on the working class. Top Christie aides were just found guilty of orchestrating traffic chaos at the George Washington Bridge in revenge against local mayors who refused to endorse the governors reelection bid in 2014. At the trial, they virtually named the governor, who is at the same time the head of President-elect Donald Trumps transition team, as an unindicted co-conspirator in Bridgegate. Following Trumps election, speculation has grown that Christie will be named to head the Justice Department or to some other top post in Washington.

A local political activist in Atlantic City told the Associated Press that the state takeover illustrated what this country could turn out to be under Chris Christie and President-elect Donald Trump, taking away our rights and sovereignty. ... What will government look like with the state of New Jersey overpowering the residents? We are headed for some bad times, and your city could be next.

The attack on Atlantic City is bipartisan, however. As another activist was quoted as saying, The takeover of Atlantic City is about denying the people a voice in their own future, and the likely handover of a precious assetthe citys water systemto private corporations close to Gov. Christie, Senate President Steve Sweeney and political power broker George Norcross. Sweeney and Norcross are among the states top Democrats.

Trumps casino connection to Atlantic City is well known, although he sold his struggling casinos some years ago, including Trump Plaza and Trump Taj Majal. Taj Mahal was the latest to close, after Labor Day this year. About 1,000 cooks, housekeepers and other workers at the casino had gone on strike on July 1. The UNITE HERE union kept these workers isolated, agreeing to a deal with Tropicana Atlantic City while the Taj Mahal workers were on strike. The union also allowed Democratic politicians, including presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, to come to the Taj Mahal picket lines and offer empty statements of support.

City employees have already granted concessions, including agreeing to defer paychecks last April, and then going to a monthly instead of twice-monthly pay schedule.

Atlantic City, with a population of 39,000, is one of the poorest cities in New Jersey in one of the most socially polarized states in the US. New Jersey is home to many upper middle class residents, but the states largest cities, including Newark, Camden, Paterson and Trenton (the state capital), are synonymous with urban poverty. The official poverty rate in Atlantic City is 34.3 percent.
Canadas Liberal government responded rapidly to the election of the fascistic billionaire Donald Trump as US president, proclaiming only hours after the votes had been tabulated that it is eager to cooperate with Trump and his incoming, far-right administration.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau quickly sent Trump his congratulations and in a subsequent phone call invited him to visit Canada at his earliest convenience. Speaking of his Wednesday evening conversation with Trump, Trudeau stated yesterday, It was a brief call, but it was a strong beginning to what is going to be a constructive relationship.

In what the press is describing as a goodwill gesture, Canadas ambassador to the US, David MacNaughton, announced Wednesday that the Trudeau government is prepared to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if Trump so requests. Throughout his campaign to win the Republican nomination and then the presidency, Trump denounced NAFTA, vowing to scuttle it, if major changes were not made to it in favour of corporate America.

Said MacNaughton, If they want to have a discussion about improving NAFTA then we are ready to come to the table to try to put before the new administration anything that will benefit both Canada and the United States and obviously Mexico also.

The rapid moves to curry favour with Trump could not conceal the fact that the outcome of Tuesdays election has been greeted with shock and trepidation by virtually the entire Canadian elite. Canada relies on the United States for around three quarters of its exports and has been Washingtons closest military-strategic partner on the global stage for the past seven decades. There are deep fears that Trump will pursue a more protectionist economic policy by abandoning NAFTA and the prospective Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), while shifting away from the traditional military alliances, such as NATO, through which the Canadian bourgeoisie has asserted its own predatory interests.

The Trudeau government made no secret of its support for a Clinton presidency. Liberal officials were reportedly in regular contact with Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and other leading Democrats so as to offer advice on the campaign and discuss the agenda of a Clinton-led administration. But Trumps victory forced an abrupt shift, with Trudeau and his government quickly pivoting to offer their support to what will be the most right-wing administration in US history. According to the Globe and Mail, Trudeau issued instructions Wednesday for Liberal MPs not to publicly criticize the president-elect so as to underscore his governments commitment to developing a close partnership with Trump and his administration.

MacNaughton revealed that talks involving Canadian diplomats and leading Trump campaign figures, including Senator Jeff Sessions, were held last month to examine areas for cooperation. Referring to NAFTA, he even raised the prospect of returning to the 1989 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, NAFTAs predecessor, if Trump chooses to abandon the trilateral pact.

Increased US tariffs and a thickening of the border due to increased security measuresanother Trump campaign promisewould roil the Canadian economy and badly disrupt the cross-border production chains upon which the auto and other manufacturing industries depend. A recent study by the Canadian government trade promotion agency, Export Development Canada, said almost 1 million jobs would be lost if NAFTA were to be abrogated.

Seeking to make the best out of a bad situation, and in response to the rise of economic nationalism around the globe, Canadas government has apparently decided to act preemptively on NAFTA. Its aim is to accommodate Trump, while also voicing corporate Canadas own demands for changes to the 22-year-old tri-lateral trade pact. MacNaughton signaled that in any renegotiation of NAFTA, Canada would be seeking free trade in softwood lumber, a perpetual irritant in Canada-US relations.

The Liberal government is also concerned about Trumps stance on climate change. Over the past year, Trudeau and Obama concluded agreements on clean energy with the goal of exploiting public concern over climate change to boost corporate profits through the development and use of renewable and clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels. Trump opposes such initiatives and this has raised doubts about the viability of Trudeaus plans to implement a carbon tax.

Trumps foreign and defence policies will have a major impact on Canada, whose military is closely integrated with the US armed forces. Trumps America First policy and his sharp criticism of NATO allies for purportedly not pulling their weight in defence spending has caused consternation, because the Liberals recognize that there is no public support for the type of increases Washington is demanding. To meet NATOs target of military spending equal to 2 percent of GDP, Canada would have to double its defence budget to more than $40 billion per year.

MacNaughton responded to questions on whether Trump would be pressuring Canada to hike military spending by emphasizing the Liberal governments willingness to mount aggressive military operations. Some people, when they want to talk about defence, send their accountants out and we tend to send our soldiers out. I think, continued MacNaughton, we have stepped up to the plate in terms of defence and NATO.

Indeed, under the one year-old Trudeau government, Canadian imperialism has continued to expand its already significant role in Washingtons principal military-strategic offensives. The Trudeau government has expanded Canadas role in the Mideast war, by tripling the number of Special Forces deployed to Iraq; pledged 450 troops to lead an anti-Russian NATO brigade in Latvia as part of NATOs encirclement of Russia; and increased Canadas involvement in the Asia-Pacific region as part of the US-led drive to isolate and confront China.

The demand that Canada provide even more support for the US in its drive to assert global hegemony unites the US political and military-security establishments. President Obama, in his speech to Parliament earlier this year, urged the Liberal government to move rapidly towards enacting NATOs 2 percent defence-spending target.

To lay the political groundwork for military spending hikes, greater Canadian involvement in wars of aggression, and Canadas participation in the US anti-ballistic missile shield program, the Liberals are currently conducting a defence policy review.

Nevertheless, substantial sections of the ruling elite have welcomed Obamas and now Trumps criticisms, seeing them as a means of pressing the government to massively hike military spending and rapidly proceed with the modernization of Canadas armed forces, that is, rearmament. In response to a question about Trumps demand US allies shoulder more of NATOs costs, David Perry, an analyst at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, told the Globe and Mail, Weve benefited since the Second World War from a whole number of co-operative arrangements with the United States on defence where the U.S. carries a disproportionate share financially.

More troubling from the standpoint of the Canadian ruling class has been Trumps ambivalence towards NATO, which is seen as critical for asserting Canadian imperialisms interests in Europe and countering Russia, including in the Arctic. The Globe and Mail, which fully endorsed the Democrats right-wing, anti-Russian hysteria during the election campaign, has repeatedly accused Trump of having ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Trudeau governments readiness to collaborate closely with the incoming Trump administration is a devastating exposure of its progressive posturing. In something of a contrast to the more confrontational tone being struck by some European politicians in the wake of Trumps victory, Canadas Liberals are going out of their way to pander to Trump.

Having made the deepening of the Canada-US alliance a key plank of their government, the Liberals are determined not to let the arch-reactionary, demagogue Trump get in the way. In this they are faithfully implementing the agenda of the Canadian bourgeoisie as a whole, which calculates that Canadian imperialism can only advance its rapacious global interests through a close partnership with US imperialism, the most aggressive and destabilizing force on the planet.

Although the vast majority of the Canadian bourgeoisie favoured Clinton, a small but important minority have welcomed Trumps victory, because of his advocacy of massive tax cuts for big business and the rich, privatization, and deregulation. Thus the Financial Post s Kevin Libin penned a column titled Cheer up, Canada, President Donald Trump just might be good for you.

Trumps victory has been welcomed by a large section of the opposition Conservative Party, which is currently in the midst of a leadership race to find a replacement for ex-Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Kellie Leitch, a right-winger who made her name in the previous government for her anti-immigrant positions, including calls for a snitch-line to denounce barbaric practices, is promoting herself as the Canadian Trump. Leitch is advocating all new immigrants be screened for their commitment to Canadian values.

Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose, who has sought to strike a more moderate tone, also embraced the Republican victory, noting that it paves the way for the revival of the Keystone XL oil pipeline project. Ambrose urged Trudeau, who also supports the project, to make its realization a priority now that it has the support of the incoming president, in addition to the Republican-dominated Congress.
Amid the Socialist Party (PS) governments destruction of the refugee camp in Calais, the neo-fascist National Front (FN) has stepped up its propaganda against refugees in towns and cities across France, where refugees have been transferred to wait in greeting structures.

On October 17, the FN in the Haute-Pyrenees region published on its Facebook page an aggressive denunciation of the presence of clandestine migrants at Lourdes. It gave the addresses where the refugees were located, in a barely veiled attempt to provoke physical attacks against them. This was made clear in comments posted after the announcement, such as Shoot the sons of b*tches.

In Beziers, the majority of whose municipal council describes itself as FN-linked since the 2014 municipal elections, the authorities approved by a large majority on October 19 the holding of a referendum on the presence of new refugees in the city.

Earlier in October, Beziers Mayor Robert Menard had launched an anti-refugee campaign based on doctored photographs showing a mass of refugees in Macedonia getting on a train, whose wagons were marked as having Beziers as their destination.

On July 5, the administrative tribunal in Montpellier had already annulled the decision of the municipal council to create a biterroise guard, that is, a local far-right militia. Menard had launched his campaign with an online poster aimed at recruiting volunteers, citing the state of emergency in France. In 2015, he had already ordered files to be drawn up on all Muslim schoolchildren in the citys education system.

In September, the administrative tribunal in Grenoble cancelled a decision of the municipal council of Allex to hold a referendum on whether to install a few refugees in a nearby deserted castle.

The authors of these initiatives enjoy the more or less open support of the political establishment.

In September, the conservative president of the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region, Laurent Wauquiez, called on mayors to refuse to house migrants coming from Calais. The region was supposed to greet 1,784 refugees, according to the national governments resettlement plan.

While the media grant anti-immigrant demonstrations organized by the FN significant and immediate coverage, they are silent about the strong and instinctive sympathy for the migrants from broad masses of youth and of the working population.

They nevertheless felt obliged to report certain demonstrations supporting refugees in recent days, though these were closely monitored and penetrated by political forces determined to prevent the demonstrations from turning into a movement against the PS governments reactionary policies.

There was a demonstration in Marseille on November 4 against anti-immigrant rallies organized by the FN mayor of the 13th and 14th districts of the city, Stephane Ravier. The FN rally drew only 150 participants, while 350 people joined the counterdemonstration, according to police figures.

The same day, the FN was forced to cancel an anti-refugee demonstration in the city of Saint-Martin dHeres near Grenoble, due to a counterdemonstration of several hundred people.

On October 23, 2,000 people participated in a rally on Mont Menzenc in Auvergne to protest Wauquiezs opposition to allowing refugees into the region.

In Paris, solidarity demonstrations with migrants took place amid the recent dismantling of the refugee camp on Stalingrad Square. On October 31, a planned mass raid by police against the refugees had to be abandoned due to resistance from the refugees and local residents.

Anti-migrant demonstrations are directly encouraged by the openly anti-refugee policy of the PS government. Its assault on the refugee camp in Calais was not only a fundamental attack on democratic rights, including refugees rights to asylum, but the realization of one of the principal demands of the neo-fascists.

Besides giving police, over 50 percent of whom vote FN, an even greater role in French politics, this places in the centre of the French presidential election campaign hostility to refugees and migrantscovering up essential questions such as the war drive, unemployment, poverty, social inequality, and attacks on democratic rights such as the state of emergency. This constitutes significant assistance to the neo-fascist party and reinforces it for the presidential campaign.

The campaigns against refugees and the organization or incitement of violence against them are a preparation for attacks on the entire working class.

Pseudo-left organizations such as the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), the trade unions and their various initiatives such as SOS-Racism (which is closely tied to the PS and the NPA), Ensemble (closely tied to the Stalinist French Communist Party), while claiming to oppose the FN, are ferociously opposed to a mobilization of the working class against the PS in defence of refugees.

Besides their fundamentally nationalist perspective, for decades they all have supported the PS and a policy based on the affluent petty bourgeoisie, based on various forms of identity politics (gender issues, ethnic minorities, separatism), and are viscerally opposed to a political mobilization of the working class against the bourgeoisie.

Their occasional clashes with the FN notwithstanding, they do not present an alternative to the French financial aristocracys plans to establish a dictatorship, in which the neo-fascists would serve as the political spearhead. On the contrary, they serve to block the emergence of class-based opposition to this policy.

The protests organized by SOS-Racism, the PCF, and Ensemble in Beziers, on the day the municipal council voted its anti-refugee referendum, is a clear example of this.

Its main perspective was to support municipal officials (including of the PS) who called for the intervention of the national state, the police prefects and the courts. Trying to give credibility to such actions, Ensemble advanced the call for the unity of all democratic forces. This is another version of the calls for a Republican front advanced by the PS, the conservatives, and other bourgeois parties of government.

This means essentially calling upon the PS, the main architect of anti-refugee policies, and on forces like conservative presidential candidate Alain Juppe, who advances a program of vast attacks on the working class, based on calls for supporting anyone but the FN.

There is undoubtedly vast opposition among youth and the population to attacks against refugees, however. The political establishment, including the FN, fears a mobilization of the working class against these attacksas was made clear by the comments of an FN official, Daniel Lamy, in Marseilles 13th district, which has 19 percent unemployment. On October 25, as refugees arrived in the district, he said, It would be dangerous however to organize a demonstration [against the refugees] here. Did you see the urban estates next to them?
DECATUR  Danny Jones, a firefighter for the Jamestown, Pa., Volunteer Fire Department, was on duty a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, when he received a call for first responders to help with an operation at the Flight 93 crash site.

We were called to do body part recovery and plane recovery, said Jones, 52, a retired paramedic who has been serving as a firefighter since he was 16 years old. They called it 'Operation Clean Sweep,' the final cleanup operation.

Jones, who lived about 160 miles away from the crash site near Shankstown, Pa., was given a bucket to collect scraps from the plane and flags to mark any tissue from people, which would be collected by medical personnel.

United Airlines Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked during the worst terrorist attack in history on U.S. soil. Everyone aboard was killed, including 33 passengers and seven crew members, as brave passengers charged the cockpit, forcing the hijackers to crash the Boeing 757 into a field, instead of their intended target in Washington, D.C.

There were pieces of scrap metal all over the place, Jones said during a phone interview. It was obviously a very devastating crash. One of those things you wish you never saw but you did. I was very honored to be there and help out.

One of the pieces made its way to Decatur, where it is now on display in a colorful memorial in the foyer of the Macon County Courts Facility, 253 E. Wood St., on the wall behind the security area. The piece is set back in its own case, so it appears to be within the body of a bald eagle, which gazes in the direction of an ascending aircraft above a field bordered by a forest.

The U.S. flag provides the backdrop, over the famous quote from Todd Beamer, the apparent leader of the passenger rebellion: Are you guys ready? Let's Roll.

Chief state's attorney investigator Nathen Binkley, who attended the unveiling event Thursday morning, was in the Army National Guard the day of the terrorist attack. He said the expression Let's Roll was used regularly in the military after that.

On the day Jones volunteered to help at the crash site, the major pieces of the plane had already been cleared away. What was left were the smaller fragments, which Jones and others discovered by crawling around in a field, a reclaimed strip mine, and a forest, which had been scorched by the plane crash.

With the permission of authorities, Jones took home several small fragments, which he has treasured.

In October 2015, John Axe, a Decatur man, stopped at the Jamestown fire station, where firefighters invited him to park his rig, loaded with a steel I-beam from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Axe was returning the beam to Decatur to build a 9/11 memorial. It was obtained through the efforts of the George A. Mueller Beer Co.

When I heard the beam was over there, I thought one of those pieces should go with that, Jones said.

Jones offered Axe the best piece he had, a 2-by-6-inch slice of aluminum with two rivets in it. After Axe returned to Decatur, with much fanfare concerning the three-quarter-ton beam, he wondered what he should do with the tiny remnant of history.

He contacted Macon County sheriff's Lt. Jon Butts to find a prominent, safe place to share it with as many people as possible. Butts thought of the courthouse, and then conferred with Presiding Judge A.G. Webber and the Decatur Public Building Commission. Dynagraphics Inc., was commissioned to fabricate the memorial.

Standing at a podium, Butts said the memorial was dedicated to the 40 heroes who perished on Sept. 11, after boarding a flight from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco. The four hijackers, affiliated with Al Qaeda, were also killed.

Passengers decided they would not allow terrorists to fly their plane into any national landmark that represented our country's freedom, our country's honor and our American way of life, Butts said.

When Axe first handed the plane fragment to him a few months ago, he was deeply moved.

It literally sent chills through my hand and body once I was informed of what it was, Butts said. This might only be a small piece of Flight 93, but it means something larger to all of us: bravery and an unwavering attitude of what our country stands for, freedom.

Webber compared the passengers who fought the hijackers to sailors and soldiers who defended Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, when the Japanese military executed its surprise attack nearly 75 years ago.

They were draftees in the first war of the 21st century, Webber said. They fought back, and they won. If you go to Washington and see the Capitol Dome you'll see that they won.
In German commentaries on the foreign policy consequences of the American presidential election, a central theme has emerged: With the election of Donald Trump, the United States has departed from the community of Western politics and values, and Germany must therefore build itself up militarily, unite Europe under its leadership, and take on the international responsibility for the defence of Western values.

This is a thread which runs through every political camp. While some in the conservative media want to maintain close relations with the US under Trump, they combine this with the demand for military buildup and a common European defence policy.

Thomas Schmid, publisher of the Welt newspaper, considered it reckless to now bid farewell to the US, saying that Europe and America belonged together. At the same time, he added, Europe should and must become something like a great power if it wants to assert itself in the world and on the side of the perhaps foundering United States.

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Berthold Kohler lamented Americas turn away from the world, and drew the following conclusion: The divided Europeans will have to come together on the important questions and fortify themselves to look after their interests. In the same paper, Holger Steltzner added: The member states [of the European Union] will have to substantially increase their spending for domestic and foreign security. Both Kohler and Steltzner are editors of the FAZ.

The arms industry has already recognized an opportunity. On Wednesday, the shares of arms manufacturer Rheinmetall registered at times an increase of 6 percent.

The loudest voices calling for an assertive German and European foreign policy have not, however, come from conservative but rather the liberal papers. They are exploiting anxiety over a Trump presidency to campaign for the return of German militarism.

Deputy Editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Bernd Ulrich, compared Trump to the monarchical gamblers and fascist leaders, which have led Europe repeatedly into misfortune. He described Trump as a macho crazy and the US as an aimless world power in decline. He concluded from this: It is now time to leave behind Americanism, naive Atlanticism, gullible dependence on America and assumed US avant-gardism.

Ulrich goes on: With the election of Trump, with the political freak out of the greatest and most powerful democracy in the world, there remains only one great power that can embody democracy and reason. That power is Europe. And the most powerful person in the world, who is neither an authoritarian nor crazy, is from this week forward Angela Merkel.

One does not know whether to laugh or become angry over such an hysterical article. Ulrich declares Merkel, of all people, who, because of her brutal austerity policy and her reactionary refugee deal with Turkey, is detested in large parts of Europe as the embodiment of democracy and reason. Ulrich calls the European Union, hated by a large section of the population as a tool of the European great powers, banks and companies, the best functioning democratic world power.

Ulrich is a typical representative of that academically educated middle-class layer, which has gone from pacifism to warmongering and from social criticism to defending the status quo. This conscientious objector began his journalistic career with the anarcho-pacifist magazine Graswurzelrevolution [Grassroots Revolution]. In his early years, he headed the office of the Green Partys parliamentary fraction. He then wrote for the taz, the Frankfurter Rundschau and other newspapers before landing at Die Zeit .

The Suddeutsche Zeitung makes arguments similar to those of Die Zeit. Its editor-in-chief Kurt Kister writes: Those states in Europe that were previously among Americas closest allies must now reposition themselves.  The relationship between Europe and the US will not only be more competitive, but also more confrontational. For this reason, the EUbe it in a smaller circle of core statesmust develop a strategy. This would begin with trade policy, continue with defence and would not stop with the intelligence services.

In the same paper, Stefan Braun remembers the speech by German President Joachim Gauck, who three years ago called for an end to military restraint and greater international responsibility. This will finally become reality, writes Braun. If Europe, the Europe of democrats, of human rights, liberality, wants to defend its values, it must defend them itself.

The values meant by this are revealed in the admission that the US had previously defended these values. It apparently means 25 years of almost uninterrupted wars, in which the US and its allies have destroyed large parts of the Middle East, killed hundreds of thousands and turned millions into refugees. This is what the proponents of international responsibility propose to take up. This is not about values, it is about imperialist interestsfor strategic influence, raw materials and markets. Every imperialist war of aggression, even the most brutal, has been waged in the name of lofty values.

Above all, the German economy is extremely nervous about the election of Trump. Should he make real on his announcement to protect the US from imports, Germany is threatened with the loss of its most important export market. In 2015, the US replaced France as Germanys largest trading partner after six decades. This year, German industry has exported goods valued at 114 billion to the US, 73 percent more than in 2010 and almost twice as much as was imported from the US. In addition to this, the US accounts for one sixth of all German direct investments.

Should these markets collapse under Trump, the German economy will need a substitute. That is one of the main reasons for the return of German militarism and an aggressive foreign policy.

This course is receiving support not only from the governing parties, but also from the Greens and the left opposition parties. Left Party politician Stefan Liebich revealed this on the evening of the election with his extremely enthusiastic reaction to the prospect of a more aggressive German foreign policy.

Liebich declared that Germany and Europe must in the future pursue a stronger foreign policy, independently and more confidently. The times when one oriented towards the US are over. Now it is time to strengthen foreign and security policy, he said. In the future, we will say no louder and more clearly to what Washington wants. This is the end of soft pedalling.

These politics have nothing to do with the defence of values. Less than 75 years after the worst crimes in human history were committed, the ruling class of Germany least of all has the right to lecture others about values.
Within a day of the election of Donald Trump, leading Democrats have moved with extraordinary speed to declare their support for the president-elect.

President Barack Obama invited Trump to the White House for a friendly 90-minute meeting on Thursday. He declared afterwards that his number-one priority in the coming two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures our president-elect is successful. He added, speaking to Trump, I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-Elect, that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeedbecause if you succeed, then the country succeeds.

Obamas declaration stands in stark contrast to his own statements just a few days ago. Then he asserted that Trump appears to only care about himself and doesnt know basic facts that youd need to know to be president. He added that Trump spent 70 years on this earth showing no regard for working people.

That was before the Democratic debacle on Election Day. Now he declares his highest priority to be ensuring that Trump is successful.

Obamas comments followed the statement by Hillary Clinton on Wednesday that she hoped [Trump] will be a successful president for all Americans. Senator Bernie Sanders, the supposed socialist, issued his own groveling statement, declaring, To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.

With such declarations, the Democrats are in effect abandoning any pretense of acting as an opposition party to a President Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress.

The proclamations of support from top Democrats are made in relation to an individual whose election clearly marks a watershed in American politics. What is coming to power is a government of the extreme right, with fascistic characteristics. There are reports that Trump wants to appoint as his chief of staff Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart News, an ultra-right and fascistic media outlet. His top advisors and likely cabinet appointees include reactionary figures such as former New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

In their rush to lend the transition of power an aura of normalcy, the Democrats and the media have maintained a studious silence about certain quite striking elements of the election.

No one is noting that a principal factor in the election of Trump was a significant decline in voter turnout. For all of the media talk of a surge of white working class voters behind Trump, the Republican candidate actually received one million fewer votes than Mitt Romney received in losing the 2012 election to Obama. Clinton won 6 million fewer votes than Obama won in his reelection, when the outgoing president obtained significantly fewer votes than he had received in 2008. Also virtually ignored is the extraordinary fact that Trump failed even to win the popular vote. Clinton had a higher percentage of the national vote, but she lost in the Electoral College, which involves a complex and antidemocratic apportionment based on victories in individual states. Trump will take office having failed to secure a plurality, let alone a majority, of the overall vote.

In the entire 240-year history of the United States, there have been only five elections in which the incoming president did not win the popular vote. When this happened in 1876, the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, became president, though he had fewer votes than the Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden. The political conflict over the outcome was so intense that the Republicans were able to hold the White House only after agreeing to the effective end of post-Civil War Reconstruction, through the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.

After a split vote in 1888, when Grover Cleveland lost to Benjamin Harrison, the winner of the Electoral Vote was also the winner of the popular vote for the next 112 years. In the 21st century, this anomaly has now happened twicein 2000 and again in 2016. In the former case, the selection of George W. Bush as president required the intervention of the Supreme Court to halt the recount of ballots in Florida.

Had Trump found himself in the position of Clinton, he would have taken his time before conceding. His concession speech, when and if it came, would have stressed that he had won the popular vote and that Crooked Hillary could not claim a mandate.

The media message would have stressed the need for Clinton to be conciliatory and acknowledge that the majority of the voters had chosen Trump. One can easily imagine CNN announcing the breaking news that Clinton had withdrawn the nomination of Obamas choice for the Supreme Court and invited the Republicans to name the replacement for the deceased Antonin Scalia.

But the Democrats have done just the opposite.

What is behind this universal about-face? President Obama said perhaps more than he intended when he declared Wednesday that we have to remember that were actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmagethat is, a test competition involving players from the same school.

The United States does not really have an oppositional political system. The divisions between the Democrats and Republicans, and between Clinton and Trump, are of an entirely tactical character. They all defend the same basic intereststhose of the corporate and financial aristocracy that controls the political system.

Within this framework, the Democrats are always the more accommodating and conciliatory party, since their rhetorical references to defending the interests of working peopleincluding by the likes of Bernie Sandersare thoroughly vacuous and insincere. In relation to Trump and the dangers he poses, there is an element of complete complacency, which arises from the fact that the danger is not to the Democrats or the privileged social forces for which they speak, but to the working class.

The chief concern of the Democrats is to contain popular anger. Their moves to circle the wagons around Trump are above all a response to the danger they see of the emergence of popular opposition that threatens not only the incoming government, but the capitalist system itself.

Even as Obama, Clinton, Sanders and company prostrate themselves and pledge their loyalty to Trump, thousands of youth and workers are demonstrating around the country against the president-elect. These protests are only a pale and politically disparate foretaste of mass struggles of the working class that are to come.

What is critical is that the lessons of the 2016 election be drawn and all attempts to keep opposition to war and austerity chained to the political corpse of the Democratic Party be rejected. The task is not to take back the Democratic Party or push it to the leftthe inevitable result of that false perspective has already been demonstrated in the reactionary outcome of the Sanders campaignbut to break with both parties of big business and all forms of capitalist politics and build an independent socialist and internationalist movement of the working class.
On November 7, the administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte officially announced that Manila would continue the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) military basing deal with Washington, as well as most joint military exercises, but would discontinue naval and amphibious assault drills. The decision represents a reversal of previous statements made by Duterte that he would end the basing deal as part of his separation from the United States.

The announcement was followed on Wednesday by Dutertes enthusiastic hailing of the election of the Republican Donald Trump as the next US president. Leading members of Dutertes cabinet declared that Trump marked a sharp departure from the pivot policies of the Obama administration, and they foresaw a restoration and strengthening of ties with Washington after the rocky first four months of the Duterte government.

Duterte, who assumed the presidency at the end of June, represents the interests of sections of the capitalist class in the Philippines who are alarmed at the threat to trade and economic ties with Beijing posed by the war drive launched by the Obama administration in the Pacific to military encircle and isolate China. Each new provocation staged by Washington in the South China Sea in alliance with the previous administration of Benigno Aquino, who served as a leading US proxy in the region, saw diminished investment from China and curtailed access to Chinese markets.

To Washingtons dismay, both The Hague ruling against Chinas territorial claims in the South China Sea, and the Philippine Supreme Courts final decision declaring the EDCA deal constitutional, were handed down in July, after Duterte took office. The US was thus not given the opportunity to immediately implement either of these decisions under the Aquino administration in the aggressive manner it intended.

In a volatile, at times almost unhinged fashion, Duterte sought to rebuild Manilas ties with Beijing by publicly declaring his opposition to the interests of Washington. In late October, he announced that the Philippines was separating from the United States and he was ending joint military exercises and the EDCA agreement for the basing of US forces in the Philippines. During his travels to Beijing he deliberately sidestepped The Hague ruling, reaching an agreement with Beijing for the Coast Guard to permit Filipino fishermen to return to the disputed Scarborough shoal without resolving or even mentioning the territorial dispute.

Washington is prepared to tolerate a great deal of Dutertes rhetoriche can call the American president a son of a bitch without upsetting US geostrategic interestsbut the EDCA basing deal is a red line whose transgression the US ruling elite will not tolerate. While Duterte declared in off-the-cuff remarks during his speeches that he was ending the US military presence in the country, at no point were formal measures presented to act on these statements.

On November 7, Duterte convened his cabinet. His top military advisors, led by Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, presented their recommendations for continued US-Philippine military ties. The top military leaders in the Philippines have received extensive training in Washington and their core political allegiance is to the Pentagon. Lorenzana called for the continuation of the EDCA basing deal, which will allow for the unlimited basing of US forces throughout the country, and of the annual Balikatan military exercises, the largest joint military exercises between the two countries.

Lorenzana proposed to expand Balikatan to include extensive anti-narcotics training, thus directly incorporating US forces in Dutertes murderous anti-drug crusade. At the same time, Lorenzana proposed to end CARAT, the joint naval exercises in the South China Sea, and Phiblex, the Marine Amphibious Assault drills, also in the South China Sea. The cancelled drills were those which openly targeted China.

Duterte accepted all Lorenzanas proposals. Lorenzana will formally present these decisions to his counterpart, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, at the US panel of Mutual Defense Board-Security Engagement Board, which will be held later this month.

The decisions reached by the Duterte government over the basing and joint exercises with Washington clearly confirm the analysis of the World Socialist Web Site over the character of Dutertes oppositional posture to Washington. He is proposing to curtail the measures most likely to inflame tensions with China, while continuing and developing the most crucial components of military ties with Washington. Duterte is engaged in a balancing act between ties with Washington and economic relations with Beijing that has become so untenable that it produces an alteration in policy on an almost weekly basis.

In a move to improve ties with Duterte, Washington has replaced its ambassador to Manila, Philip Goldberg, whom Duterte despised and had publicly cursed on a number of occasions, with Sung Kim, a US diplomat born in Korea, who previously served as US special representative for North Korea policy.

Duterte sees in the election of Trump an opportunity for the restoration and strengthening of ties with Washington. The isolationist and economic nationalist measures are being interpreted in Manila as the curtailing of the pivot while its economic wing, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump openly opposes, has been proclaimed dead.

Speaking in Kuala Lumpur, where he was meeting with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, Duterte congratulated Trump, and stated: I no longer want to fight [with the United States] because Trump is already here. Im just four months [in office] and there has been a lot of controversy around my person, including my quarrel with America. I dont want enemies. Trump already won. Why dont we just shut up?

Dutertes spokesperson, Martin Andanar, was more direct, claiming that Trumps election meant diminished military tensions between Manila and Beijing. He stated: The world cannot afford a Third World War or we are all finished. Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay said: The election of Trump signals an opportunity for change that can result in a stronger Philippine-US relationship.

Never one for subtlety, Duterte immediately appointed Jose E.B. Antonio to serve as his special envoy to Washington. Antonio is Trumps key business partner in the Philippines. The head of Century Properties Group, he was responsible for the construction of Trump Tower in the business district of Makati.

There are concerns, however, within the Philippine market that Trumps economic nationalism will spell crisis for the countrys vital Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector, which includes a massive network of call centers. Seventy percent of BPO revenue in the Philippines comes from the United States, and the BPO sector in 2015 generated $22 billion in revenue and 1.2 million jobs.
A US-backed offensive to seize control of Raqqa, the Syrian stronghold of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), has become enmeshed in bitter conflicts between Washingtons main allies on the ground.

The opening of the drive south toward the city was first announced last Sunday by President Barack Obamas counter-ISIS envoy, Brett McGurk, who proclaimed that the initial phase of the operation to liberate Raqqa, dubbed Euphrates Wrath, had begun.

What has followed, however, has been a series of recriminations between Turkey, Washingtons main NATO ally in the region, and the Syrian Kurdish forces of the Popular Protection Units (YPG) militia, which constitutes the principal proxy force in the drive against Raqqa. The YPG has been armed and funded by the Pentagon and accompanied into battle by US special forces units.

The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan initiated its own intervention into Syria, Euphrates Shield, beginning last August. Ostensibly launched in support of US-led operations against ISIS, the main thrust of the Turkish offensive has been directed at consolidating its own buffer zone along the Syrian-Turkish border and preventing Kurdish forces from joining together the territory they control in the same area.

With the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), dominated by the Kurdish YPG, pushing further south toward Raqqa and seizing control of villages on the way, the Erdogan government has grown increasingly agitated, fearing that a successful offensive will strengthen the Kurdish enclave on Turkeys border.

Ankara considers the YPG a branch of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) in Turkey, regarding both as terrorist groups.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was dispatched to Turkey on Monday for talks with his counterpart, General Hulusi Akar, on the offensive against Raqqa.

In his discussions with the Turkish general staff, General Dunford attempted to assuage Ankaras hostility to the role being played by the Kurdish militia and made promises that the YPG-led SDF would not take Raqqa. According to the Pentagons web site, Dunford told Ankara that the Kurdish militia was moving south to isolate the enemy thats in the vicinity of Raqqa and in Raqqa, in an operation that would take months.

We always knew the SDF wasnt the solution for holding and governing Raqqa. What we are working on right now is to find the right mix of forces for the operation, the top US commander said. He claimed that the Pentagon would rely upon the moderate Syrian opposition, the vetted Syrian forces and the Free Syrian Army forces. Moderate, vetted and Free Syrian Army forces all refer to the same fiction of a viable secular, US-backed opposition capable of mounting a major military operation. Such forces simply do not exist. US officials have acknowledged that the main forces that have benefited from the vast amounts of money and weapons poured into Syria by Washington and its regional allies have been the Al Qaeda-linked militias such as ISIS and the Al Nusra Front.

In addition to the issue of the Kurdish advance on Raqqa, Turkish officials pressed Dunford on the continued YPG occupation of Manbij, a city in northern Syria west of the Euphrates River. Washington had previously told the Turkish government that the YPG, which seized Manbij from ISIS last June, would withdraw from the town, which Ankara sees as linking up Syrian Kurdish cantons in the east and west of northern Syria.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu charged on Tuesday that some 200 YPG fighters are still in Manbij, warning that unless Washington saw to their withdrawal, Turkey would take necessary actions.

Speaking before a parliamentary committee, Cavusoglu also touched upon Dunfords promises regarding Raqqa. The YPG will only serve in seizing, as operations in the city will be conducted by special forces along with local forces. This is the agreement we have reached with the US, but we are still walking on thin ice as to whether they keep their promise or not, as we have experienced with Manbij.

The Associated Press quoted a Pentagon official as saying that Dunford had not guaranteed that the Syrian Kurdish fighters would not go into Raqqa, only that the US would work with Turkey on organizing the final offensive against the city.

For its part, the YPG and SDF leadership have insisted that they will continue their offensive into Raqqa itself and have categorically rejected any Turkish role in the offensive.

Further complicating the situation, the minority of Syrian Arab fighters affiliated with the SDF have pulled out of the offensive, claiming that they have been double-crossed by the Kurdish militia and its American advisors.

According to a statement quoted by the web site Middle East Eye, the Syrian Arab brigade charged that the US was attempting to sideline its participation, while relying exclusively on Kurdish forces. It claimed this violated an agreement that the YPG would only provide logistical support for the operation and that the Syrian Arab fighters would be in charge of the administrative and security management of the city afterwards.

The charges appeared to echo concerns expressed by Ankara that a Kurdish invasion of Raqqa could lead to a form of ethnic cleansing of what has long been an overwhelmingly Arab city.

There is also the possibility that an attempt to seize the city with the Kurdish militia could provoke a response from the government of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, again raising the threat of a wider war.

Meanwhile, the Erdogan government appears to be hopeful that it can achieve a more favorable agreement with an incoming Donald Trump administration regarding Syria and the Kurds. While Erdogan had earlier condemned candidate Trumps call for a ban on all Muslims entering the US, he delivered one of the earliest and most effusive messages of congratulation to the new president-elect.

An indication that the desire for rapprochement may be mutual came in the form an article published this week by The Hill, by Trumps senior national security advisor, retired General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Flynn criticized the Obama administration for keeping Erdogans government at arms lengthan unwise policy that threatens our long-standing alliance.

Flynn went on to strongly suggest that the US should agree to Ankaras demand for the extradition of exiled Islamic leader Fethullah Gulen, who resides under US government protection in Pennsylvania. The Erdogan government has blamed Gulen for the abortive July 15 military coup against his government and has carried out a massive purge of his suspected followers.

It is time we take a fresh look at the importance of Turkey and place our priorities in proper perspective, Flynn writes. It is unconscionable to militate against Turkey, our NATO ally, as Washington is hoodwinked by this masked source of terror and instability nestled comfortably in our own backyard in Pennsylvania... We should not provide him safe haven. In this crisis, it is imperative that we remember who our real friends are.
In the wake of Donald Trumps electoral victory Tuesday night, Senator Bernie Sanderss office proclaimed his willingness to work with Trump once he takes office.

Stating that Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media, Sanders went on to say:

To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.

In an interview yesterday on CNN, Sanders repeated this point, stating that he intends to work with President Trump on those issues where he will in fact work for the middle class and working families in this country. He later said, If he is serious about creating jobs in America and not in China, I will work with him, and I hope very much that he will work with progressives to create a tax system that asks billionaires and multinational corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.

One might imagine the response of Senator Sanders to Attila the Hun sweeping into Europe with his mounted hordes: I will work with you to the extent that you help the people, but I will oppose you when you rape and pillage!

The notion that Trump is going to do anything to improve the lives of working people is a fantasy. He is a right-wing billionaire committed to cutting taxes for the rich, eliminating corporate regulations, slashing social programs and other reactionary policies. Wall Streets verdict on a future Trump administration was provided on Thursday, with markets soaring to record levels.

This is the outcome of Sanders political revolution against the billionaire classan offer to cooperate with the fascistic Trump. Eighteen months after Sanders announced his candidacy, his statement on Trump punctuates a critical experience for the working class.

The self-proclaimed socialist won 13 million votes and 23 states in the Democratic Party primaries. Though he secured just under half the delegates, Sanders conceded the nomination to Clinton in Philadelphia and falsely claimed that the convention had ratified the most progressive party platform in history.

In reality, his capitulation came without a political price taghe won no concessions from Clinton, who ignored the issue of social equality during her general election campaign, ran the most right-wing election campaign and ensured Trumps ability to present himself as an opponent of the status quo.

In the weeks and months that followed the convention, Sanders traveled across the country chastising his former supporters for voting for third-party candidates and insisting that they support Clinton, whom he had previously condemned as the candidate of Wall Street.

Sanders current volte-face in relation to Trump has been just as quick as his previous pivot in relation to Clinton. Only a few short days ago, Sanders was insisting that a vote for Clinton was necessary because Donald Trump would be a disaster for the future of this country. Not 24 hours had passed since polls closed before Sanders had offered to help Trump impose his disastrous policies on the American and international working class.

Sanders pledge is not the product of a political mistake or miscalculation. Rather, it reveals the pro-capitalist, anti-working class character of his campaign and his entire political career.

In Sanders two-paragraph pledge, the Senator uncritically notes that Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class, which is tired of seeing decent paying jobs go to China, among other things. Sanders diplomatic language reveals the parallels between his proposals and those of Trump.

Both Trump and Sanders are nationalists who rail against China and other countries for stealing our jobs. Both pit American workers against immigrants and blame the latter for bringing down wages. Both speak in a vaguely oppositional manner about living standards, but both have nothing to say in opposition to the capitalist system or the American war machine. On this basis, Sanders holds out hope that Trump might be serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families.

To the extent Sanders is prepared to oppose Trump, it is on the very narrow basis of racial and environmental politics: If Trump pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.

But by pledging his support for Trump on economic issues, Sanders is paving the way for capitulation on the most basic questions of democratic rights related to issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. The very fact of Trumps election is proof that the defense of these democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, which will turn on a dime on these issues if political expediency so dictates.

Sanders groveling capitulation to Trump shows the sham character of American democracy. From start to finish, the presidential election was an eighteen-month-long compendium of lies and diversions aimed at deceiving the working class and channeling social opposition behind one of several pro-corporate candidates.

A cabal of media and finance giants wasted billions of dollars to manipulate public opinion with lies and false promises. TV audiences were subjected to an endless cycle of meaningless election coverage by networks staffed by affluent pundits who know nothing about social reality in the United States. Any political viewpoints outside of the Democratic and Republican campaigns were blacked out entirely. It is entirely fitting that Donald Trump emerged from the ashes of this degrading spectacle.

In the aftermath of the election of Trump, Sanders and the Democratic Party will once again make appeals to workers and youth to follow them into the Democratic Party and oppose the new administration through the loyal minority. Sections of the Democratic Party establishment, led by figures like Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and backed by political idiots like Michael Moore, will proclaim that the Democratic Party is being transformed and pushed to the left.

Lies, lies, and more lies. The degrading debacle of the last 18 months has proven that the American political system is set up to muzzle the working class and tie it to the parties of its capitalist exploiters.
Seven people were killed and more than 50 injured Wednesday morning after a crowded tram derailed in Croydon, south London. The tram, operated by Tramlink, overturned at 6:13 a.m. near the Sandilands stop.

Eight people remain in a severe or life threatening condition in two local hospitals. More than 100 emergency workers attended the scene and worked for six hours to free injured commuters.

The Croydon disaster is the worst rail incident in the UK since 10 people died in the Great Heck crash between two trains in Yorkshire in 2001.

The busy two-car tram, travelling from New Addington to Wimbledon, was mainly filled with commuters. In torrential rain conditions, the tram flipped on its side on a sharp, left-hand curve after coming out of the last of three tunnels and down a steep slope towards the bend. Survivors said that upon derailing, the tram slid for between eight and 10 seconds before coming to a halt.

Passengers reported that the tram sped up when coming down the slope instead of slowing to within the 12 mph limit required on that section of the track. One of the passengers, Martin Bamford, said, When we were coming through the tunnel we were going at some speed and the tram was speeding up more and more. We were coming out of the tunnel and we hit the bend way too fast and the tram flipped.

Tramlink is run by giant transnational FirstGroup, which operates the service under a concession with Transport for London. Tramlink is the only tram system operating in the capital and carries 27 million passengers a year.

Following the rescue operation, a 42-year-old driver was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter by British Transport Police and taken into custody. Late Wednesday evening he was freed on conditional police bail. On Thursday, British Transport Police said he was released until May while investigations continue. Asst. Chief Constable Robin Smith said it was investigating whether the driver fell asleep, alongside a number of factors.

Many questions remained unanswered about the disaster, including why the driver was immediately arrested while investigations as to its cause were still underway. One passenger, Martin Bamford, told the media that after the crash he asked the driver if he was OK. Bamford said the driver replied, Yeah. Bamford recalled, I said to him, What happened? He said he thinks he blacked out.

Given these comments, there are obviously issues around the health of the driver that need to be established. This is particularly significant following the fatalities that occurred in Glasgow in December 2014, when a bin lorry collided with pedestrians in the city centre. Six people were killed and 15 injured. The driver of the local authority-owned vehicle, Harry Clarke, said he had passed out at the wheel, was unconscious and had no memory of the crash. Following an investigation, which did not involve Clarke giving a police statement, Clarke was not prosecuted.

Surviving passengers said the tram was travelling at anywhere between 40 mph and 70 mph when the train emerged from the tunnel. The Bombardier CR4000 tram weighs around 36 tonnes, is 100 feet long, 10 feet high and 8 feet wide. But the Office of Rail and Road confirmed that UK trams are not fitted with any safety protection systems that apply the brakes automatically if they are going too fast.

The Financial Times noted, Tram systems typically use far less sophisticated signalling than heavy rail systems and tend to lack the mechanisms that limit speed in dangerous locations such as sharp curves. The Croydon tram emerged from the tunnel and travelled into such a sharp curve.

Tramlink opened in 2000 and uses a combination of on-street and segregated running for the 17 miles of track. The track used by the tram where the derailment took place is old heavy railway line. From known facts, the state of the track has not yet been established. Transport for London is responsible for tram frequency, overall performance, maintenance and improvement work.

In February 2012, a tram carrying 100 passengers also derailed on the same section of line at Croydon, about half a mile away. No one was hurt. It was established that the main cause of the incident was that a track circuit failed to respond to an approaching tram and locked the points to prevent movement. A Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) investigation found the track circuit was not correctly adjusted and the railhead may have been contaminated with silt. The RAIB also found that system integration was inadequate.

The fatalities in Croydon are the first on any UK light rail system since tram systems were revived in several UK cities in the 1990s. These include Nottingham, Sheffield, Manchester and Edinburgh. The last death of a passenger in a tram was in 1959, after a tram caught fire in Shettleston Road, Glasgow, following a collision with a lorry. Two women passengers and the driver died.

However, a number of accidents, including derailments have occurred at regular intervals with more than 100 in the year to March alone. The vast majority of the accidents, 102, involved collisions with road vehicles.

Cost cutting cannot be ruled out as a factor in the disaster. London Tramlink drivers have faced ongoing attacks on their pay and conditions at the hands of FirstGroup. Last year FirstGroup slashed drivers pension benefits, resulting in them having to pay up to 120 per month more out of their salaries into their pension fund.

Earlier this year drivers voted to strike, by a 100 percent majority on an 82 percent turnout, to demand pay parity with train drivers. A two-day strike was set for June in response to a company pay offer of 2.6 percent. Finn Brennan, the London Underground union organiser of the drivers trade union Aslef, said at the time, The current pay offer of 2.6 percent doesnt make up for the cuts FirstGroup has made to pensions and means staff will continue to earn much less than they deserve. Brennan added, Last year they saw their pension benefits drastically cut as FirstGroup milked its staff to increase its profits.

Just days before the strike, Aslef called off the proposed action, claiming FirstGroup had made a much improved offer.

FirstGroup originated in the deregulation of bus services in the UK in 1986, and operates transport services in Ireland, Canada and the United States. In June, it reported global revenues of 5.2 billion and a pre-tax profit rise of 7 percent to 114 million. In 2014, FirstGroup chief executive Tim OToole had his salary doubled to 2,000,000 per annum.
Europe

Walkout by Finnish shipyard employees

Workers employed by the Russian-owned Arctech ship building company in Helsinki walked out in a wildcat action last Thursday and Friday. Their union is currently in negotiation with Arctech over a variety of issues, including wages.

The walkout was triggered when Arctech insisted that the discussions should deal solely with the government-initiated competiveness pact. Under this pact, working hours would be extended by a further 24 hours a year.

Walkout by women in Paris over equal pay

Female staff from offices in Paris walked out on Monday at 4:34 p.m., with many joining a spontaneous rally at the Place de la Republique. They walked out at 4:34 as this represents the time at which on average women will be working for nothing for the rest of the year, compared to the average wage earned by men.

Among those participating were staff from the Musee dOrsay, newspaper offices including Le Monde and those from Paris city hall. According to Eurostat figures for 2014, the average figure for mens wages was more than 15 percent greater than for women in France. A similar walkout by women in Iceland took place in October over wage inequality.

Greek union announces nationwide strike

The GSEE union, which represents around 2 million Greek private sector workers, has announced it will hold a 24-hour strike on Thursday, December 8. It is to protest the ongoing austerity measures and job cuts being imposed by the Syriza-led government.

Pensioners in the central Greek city of Larissa held a protest Wednesday against cuts in pensions. They held a rally outside the Social Security Foundation office where they burnt copies of papers outlining cuts to their pensions.

British car builders support strike over pension attack

Around 4,000 staff employed by car manufacturer BMW at several sites, including Cowley and Swindon, have voted by a 96 percent majority in a consultative ballot in favour of strike action.

BMW, which made nearly 6 billion in profits last year and paid out nearly 2 billion in dividends, wants to scrap workers final salary pension scheme.

In a press release, the Unite union said it would hold a full statutory industrial action ballot unless BMW rescinds its decision.

Teaching assistants in northern England hold 48-hour strike over pay cut

Over 1,800 teaching assistants employed by County Durham in northern England began a 48-hour strike on Tuesday. They took the action in response to the Labour-controlled councils decision to only pay the teaching assistants during term time. This would mean a cut in pay of around 23 percent. The strike led to the closure or curtailment of classes at around 100 schools.

The council decided on the cuts in May but they were revised in September to include a two-year compensation package. The council presented this as a final offer. Teaching assistants represented by Unison and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) voted by big majorities to reject the offer. However, Unite and GMB members accepted it.

The striking teaching assistants held a lobby of the Durham Council on Wednesday.

Teachers in Northern Ireland announce series of strikes

Northern Irelands National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) has announced a series of one-day strikes. The first will take place later this month followed by others in January and February next year. Teachers are taking the action in protest against a zero percent pay rise for last year followed by a 1 percent rise for 2016/17. It will affect around 130 schools in Belfast and Newtonabbey.

Late on Tuesday the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) called off its series of strikes and refusal to cover supervisory duties. They had been taking the action in pursuit of increased pay and improved working conditions.

Schools that had been closed because of the lack of supervision by teachers reopened on Wednesday. ASTI announced the decision to call off the strike after receiving an invitation to talks with the Education Ministry, arbitrated by the Teachers Conciliation Council. The action had led to the closure of around two thirds of Irelands secondary schools, affecting a quarter of a million pupils.

Strike by confectionary workers in Northern England

Employees at the Tangerine factory in York, which makes boiled sweets, held a 24-hour strike on Monday. They are members of the GMB union. A further three one-day strikes are planned throughout the month. The workers overwhelmingly rejected the latest offer from the company of a 1.25 percent pay offer backdated to April, along with an additional 15 minute tea break.

UK equality commission staff strike

Staff working for the government body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, held a one-day strike Wednesday. They are protesting government plans to carry through 25 percent cuts that would lead to the closure of offices in Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh. Unite and Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) members took part in the strike.

Further strike by technology workers in Northern England

Around 300 staff working for the technology giant Fujitsu in Manchester began a 48-hour strike Monday, following a previous strike. Further strikes are planned. The members of the Unite union are in dispute over pay, pensions and job security as well as pay discrimination. The union says women staff are paid on average 16 percent less than their male colleagues. The union accuses the company of cutting pay rates over the years in spite of very healthy profit figures.

Bus drivers in southwestern England to hold further strike

Around 70 drivers working for First Bus in the Weymouth and Bridport area of south-west England are due to hold a 24-hour strike Wednesday, November 16, as part of their ongoing five-month-long pay dispute. The drivers have rejected the latest offer from the company. Among the outstanding issues are back pay, overtime rates and the moving back of the payday start date anniversary from August to October.

One-day strike planned by bus drivers in north of England

Around 750 bus drivers employed by Arriva in West Yorkshire are due to hold a 24-hour strike on Monday in a dispute over working conditions. They are members of the Unite union. The company plans to try and draft in nonunion drivers from its nearby depots.

Hunger strike by Ukrainian miners

Around 50 Ukrainian coal miners at mine number 10 in Novovolynska began a hunger strike on Monday over three months wages arrears. Around 300 miners at the pit protested over the same issue by blocking nearby border-crossing points at the end of October.

Middle East

Strike of Israeli bus drivers averted

An all-out strike by bus drivers working for the nation-wide intercity and urban bus company Egged, due to have begun Monday of this week, has been called off. Egged is the largest bus company in Israel, employing 6,000 drivers.

Egged drivers held a one-day strike on November 2 and rallied outside the Finance Ministry to demand financial support for payment of their wages. The Ministry of Finance had been holding back on giving financial support in an attempt to push through employment changes by which the drivers would be classed as contractors rather than employees.

The trade union federation Histadrut reached a deal with the Finance Ministry that only guarantees drivers wages for the next few months.

Strike by Oman water employees

Around 400 staff working for the government-owned Haya Water Company in Oman held a two-day strike beginning last Saturday. They were protesting mistreatment by the company and were demanding the removal of the CEO.

Among the issues were the intrusion of womens privacy, the fact that they were only being granted 10 days sick leave per year rather than the statutory 14 days and problems with an electronic fingerprint system used to monitor work attendance. According to the staff, the system was under-reporting their attendance and they were losing some of their annual vacation allowance.

They returned to work following intervention by the General Federation of Oman trade union.

Africa

Namibian security workers demonstrate

Namibian security guards are threatening to go on strike at the end of the month if their demands are not met. The dispute has gone to arbitration after three months of deadlock. The guards took their string of demands onto the streets of the capital, Windhoek, and 11 other towns on Thursday, November 4.

Three security unions involvedthe Namibia Transport and Allied Workers Union (NATUA), Namibia Security Guards and Watchmen's Union (NSGWU) and the Namibia Independent Security Union (NISU)are demanding payment of outstanding wages and a wage increase.

Workers want a pay increase to N12.5 ($.92) an hour from N7 and N6.75 ($.50) for new recruits. Other claims are over training, a pension scheme and legislation implemented related to their work.

TUC Zimbabwe says conditions better under Smith regime

Workers at the Zimbabwe textile company, David Whiteheads, demonstrated against administration managers. The company has been under administration since 2013 and employees at the mill, owed $20 million in unpaid wages, are concerned about the fate of the mill and jobs.

Textile workers accuse the administrators of not looking after their interests and allowing the mill to fall into disrepair. Since 2013, administrators have been promising to turn the company around, but neglect of the buildings and machinery, through rain damage, is rendering the mills useless.

Workers complain the company owes them $20 million, while assets of the company are being sold off. Recent woven fabrics going out of the mill are also not being accounted for, according to workers. A spokesman for the workers is demanding the mill be given over to them in compensation for lost wages.

A spokesman for the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions commented in regards to the general condition of Zimbabwes industry, saying Zimbabwe is a museum of factories and claiming they were better under the Smith regime, i.e., colonialism.

South African street cleaners strike

South African workers in Lenyenye and Nkowankowa Township who keep the street clear of litter have gone on strike. The strike is being organised by the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) to demand recognition.

SATAWU claims it has achieved a sufficient level of membership among the workers to give it the right to negotiate. A certificate allowing strike action was given to the union after the services of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration had been exhausted.

SATAWU say it is looking for support from the South African Municipal Workers Union and the other Congress of South African Trade Unions affiliates in extending its subscription-paying base.

Kenyan doctors defy return to work order

Kenyan doctors in Nyeri have been issued with a Labour Court order to return to work. The doctors organised in the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU) have been on strike for two weeks. They were ordered back to work Friday, November 3, but refused to comply.

The doctors had recently returned to work on September 20, after striking over the same issues. Promises that their grievances would be resolved have not been fulfilled and so they resumed their strike.

The public hospitals have been brought to a standstill with doctors complaining of overwork and understaffing, living and working in life threatening conditions, and the hospital authoritys refusal to allow doctors time to undertake postgraduate studies.

Nigerian food agency threatens strike

Nigerian workers at the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration (NAFDA) completed a two-week warning strike November 2. A demonstration was held by the Medical Health Workers Union at the agency in Abuja the following day.

The union is demanding a review of their salaries and demanding a substantive director general for the agency and a review of recruitment. At the conclusion of the warning strike, the union gave the agency extra days to respond before calling an indefinite strike.

Kenyan nurses return to strike

Nurses at hospitals in Tharaka Nithi County resumed industrial action after their grievances were ignored. Ninety workers have been removed from the county payroll.

Other outstanding issues include lack of promotion and salary increases, remittance of statutory dues, and conditions at work.

Nurses have been in continuous dispute with state and federal authorities and have resorted to strike action on over 10 occasions since nursing was devolved to the counties in 2010. The Kenyan National Union of Nurses has said its members will not return to work until all their grievances are addressed.
DECATUR  John Haskins likes to find different ways to express his creativity.

Usually, John said it's through writing, but a project he has been taking part in is a new experience for him and other members of a Decatur 4-H club. They have put the finishing touches on painting a mural on the front of the former Newsstand building, 801 N. Water St., next to the Northeast Community Fund in Decatur.

After seeing the painting come together, John is among those who see why murals are becoming an increasingly popular form of expression, particularly on the sides of older buildings in Decatur.

It's outside of my artistic comfort zone, said John, 16. It's something we could potentially do more of in the future.

The mural came together in recent weeks with the help of 16 children ranging in age from 9 to 17 years old. Their ideas were incorporated into planning for the project, which John said was based on a Bible verse intended to inspire helping others in need.

He said the verse relates to the what you do for the least of these, you do for me passage from Matthew.

The project is a bigger endeavor than the group would typically take on, said Sonya Jefson, one of the parents helping with the work along with two of her children, Benny, 13, and Sammi, 16.

To get it all organized takes three times longer than you think it would, Jefson said.

Following the advice of Jerry Johnson from the Decatur Area Arts Council who has painted other murals in downtown Decatur, Jefson said the group needed to make sure they had enough high quality paint to make it all work. She said Sherwin Williams was helpful in making that happen.

Funding for the project came from a Farm Credit Illinois community improvement grant, which are usually targeted to 4-H Clubs and FFA chapters to be used toward smaller rural towns. Sara Foley, a Farm Credit sales and service specialist, said the project stood out because of its ability to brighten up an area of the city.

Applications for 2017 grants are due Feb. 27 and are open to groups in 60 Illinois counties.

A grid design pattern was followed with the parents and children working together to make sure colors were added as intended.

A project this size doesn't happen instantly, said Jodi Haskins, who was working on it with her children Elijah, 14, Isabelle, 11, and Annabelle, 9, along with Connie Brewster and her daughter, Grace, 16. A lot comes into play. It's not just something we did one afternoon.

The painting of the mural is in addition to flowers that were planted last spring. It all brightens the area outside the Northeast Community Fund building, which Executive Director Jerry Pelz appreciates as he has been supportive of the project and enjoys seeing other murals being completed in other nearby parts of town.

It's going to bring more color and something nice for people from the overpass to look at, Pelz said. It helps to identify the mission and our ministry. It gives a fresh, clean look.

Pelz said the group ran with the project and has dependably followed through with its plans.
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - Authorities say an Orlando area youth pastor is accused of kidnapping and raping a young girl.

Records show 35-year-old Samuel Pierre was arrested Tuesday and remains in the Orange County Jail. He's charged with sexual battery on a child under 12.

The girl's mother told Orange County Sheriff's investigators that Pierre picked up her daughter in August to attend a youth group at Tabernacle of Prayer and Miracles International Church. She says the girl started "acting different" after that night.

The Orlando Sentinel (http://bit.ly/2emhbfq ) reports the mom confronted the girl who told her Samuel took her to his house. At some point she says he took her into a bedroom and raped her. Afterward, he told her not to tell anyone.

Records don't indicate whether he's hired a lawyer.

___

Information from: Orlando Sentinel, http://www.orlandosentinel.com/

(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (The News Service of Florida) - The Florida House of Representatives is poised to enact the most significant lobbying reforms in more than a decade when lawmakers return to Tallahassee for an organization session on Nov. 22.

The reforms, which have been crafted by incoming House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O'Lakes, will be in the form of new House rules, which will govern the 120-member chamber's activities for the next two years, including the 2017 and 2018 legislative sessions.

Among other provisions, the rules would:

--- Prohibit lobbyists from texting members while they are in committees or in floor sessions.

--- Require lobbyists to file electronic disclosures on what specific issues they are lobbying for or against.

--- Require separate bills to be filed on budget projects.

--- Ban House members from flying on planes provided by lobbyists or their clients.

--- Require House members to disclose any new jobs they take from public entities that receive tax dollars.

--- Prohibit House members, while in office, from lobbying local governments, with an exception for situations where their jobs require them to go before local officials and register as lobbyists.

--- Ban members from entering business deals with lobbyists or their clients.

--- Extend to the lobbying corps the House's sexual-harassment code for members and employees.

--- Require lobbyists who represent public entities or tax-supported entities to disclose their lobbying contracts.

--- Ban former House members from lobbying the chamber for six years after they leave office, up from the current ban of two years. The six-year ban would require passage of a constitutional amendment.

The rule changes, which must be approved by the House, are the most-extensive effort to regulate lobbying in the Legislature since 2005, when lawmakers approved legislation requiring lobbyists to disclose their fees and banned lobbyists or their clients from buying gifts or meals for lawmakers.

The move to redefine the relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists has been anticipated with Corcoran's rise to the House speakership, foreshadowed by a spring 2015 floor speech when Corcoran called out the "the Gucci-loafing, shoe-wearing special interests, powers that be" in the health-care industry.

But in a later speech, where he accepted his designation as the next House speaker, Corcoran, a lawyer who has also been a chief of staff in the speaker's office, made it clear he was not targeting "special interests" in his bid to change the rules impacting lobbyists and members.

"The enemy has always been and will always be us," he told his members.

It was a message he repeated Thursday when he released the new House rules.

"It is time that government embodies the very highest of standards and serve citizens and not self," Corcoran, whose brother is a prominent lobbyist, said in a statement. "The Florida House, in adopting these rules, will take a transformational leap into a new era of accountability, professionalism, transparency and fairness.

"There is something (in) here impacting every player within the political process: members, lobbyists and the public."

Rep. Jose Oliva, a Miami Lakes Republican who will be the new House Rules and Policy Committee chairman, said with the new rules, the House "is leading by example."

"If we are going to hold agencies and programs accountable, we must ensure that our own House is held to even higher standards," he said.

David Mica, a lobbyist for the Florida Petroleum Council and head of the Florida Association of Professional Lobbyists, said Corcoran's effort is in line with his association's philosophy of establishing ethical standards for the industry.

Mica said he has been in discussions with Corcoran's aides, and they have expressed a willingness to possibly make adjustments as the rules are implemented in the coming months.

"In looking at them, while there are probably some provisions in there that are not going to make all of the profession happy, there are not draconian measures in there that I think are going to be burdensome to a point of no return," Mica said.

Mica said the rules have been put together with a "conscientious" effort to respect the constitutional right to petition, or lobby, the government.

"There has clearly been a sensitivity to some of the kinds of issues that have been raised there," Mica said. "What I believe they clearly want is a higher level of transparency and there will be some cultural changes that will have some folks doing things differently."

The rules do not apply to the Florida Senate, which has its own set of rules.

But Corcoran said: "The Florida House will set the standard for others to emulate."
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Florida's Democratic Party Chair has announced on her Facebook page that she will not be seeking another term as state chair.

In her message poster Friday around noon, Alison Richard said that when her term as the state Democratic Party Chair comes to an end in January, it will come to an end for good.

She said that though there were many reasons that she would not be looking for a re-election, "most of the reasons are closest to home."

However, Richard encouraged her supporters and Democratic Party members to keep up the fight even as the party deals with shock following Hillary Clinton's shocking defeat to President-Elect Donald Trump.

READ HER FULL STATEMENT BELOW:

My personal note to close friends and local party leaders this morning:

My term as state party chair comes to an end in January. I have made the decision not to seek another term as state chair.

There are many reasons why I am not seeking re-election, but most of the reasons are closest to home. My oldest son, Jonathan, leaves for college in six months and I want to maximize my time with him before he goes. My oldest son by marriage, Todd had a debilitating brain bleed in March that lead to extremely risky thalamic cavernous malformation brain surgery in May leaving him in a state of recovery that he is managing well but I want to be more helpful to him. My oldest daughter by marriage just had her second baby making me a grandma of 2, both under the age of 4 whom I have had precious little time with since their births. My 13 year old daughter is distraught by the election and needs my attention as she finds herself in these crucial years, and my disabled son needs me to help him transition to whatever is next for him after high school. My husband is 74 and I am too aware, since the death of my mom June a year ago, that time is fleeting and precious. We've had little to no time as a family and I've had none for myself.

While I am woefully disappointed by the outcome of our national elections, I take great comfort in the fact that we are on the right side of all of the issues that matter in this country and to humanity, and for that I am very proud. I would rather go down fighting for our values: bettering the conditions of others, standing up for people of color, those who are poor and disenfranchised, people of ALL or even no religious beliefs, for LGBTQ family members, for disabled people, for protecting our vulnerable and aged citizens, people striving to get into or stay in the middle class, people seeking the opportunity to work hard and those struggling to provide for their families, standing up for our fragile environment and investing in public schools, than being on the side of a carnival barker who was endorsed by the KKK and has divided our nation. The arc to justice is long and we will not give up. However, I am going to continue our fight in a different way. I am taking a step back from politics to reflect on how I can be most impactful with my time, treasure and energies as well as determine the efforts I will invest myself.

I encourage you to join me in finding a cause aligned with your passion b/c our individual efforts on behalf of others have never been in greater need once the Trump administration begins. We will personally have to stand in the gap as the cuts to health and human services, environmental protections, education, criminal justice reforms occur and families, elders and children are battered by new policy decisions.

Thank you for allowing me the privilege of working alongside you for the last 4 years as you chair. And thank you, all of you who have worked so hard for others.

allison tant richard
Today is Veterans Day, a federal holiday that commemorates and honors every veteran who has served and is serving in America's armed forces.

It has its roots in Armistice Day, the day when world leaders signed the documents to end World War I  at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

Veterans past and present, going back to the Revolutionary War, all the way to current warriors, are honored and memorialized with speeches, prayers, pride and tears during present-day ceremonies.

It hasn't always been that way.

Ask a Vietnam War veteran how he or she was welcomed home in the early 1970s, and you'll likely get a hard stare as those painful memories are dredged up. Last year was the 50th anniversary of the official start of the conflict in Vietnam, based on when U.S. troops were assigned to specific areas of southeast Asia.

Few are left of the "greatest generation," those who served during World War II. Veterans of more recent wars, conflicts and peacetime service are gradually aging and finding themselves in need of help that can be provided through various veterans' organizations and the Veterans Administration.

There are those who believe "veteran" is reserved for people who served in war time, and those who served on hostile ground. We prefer to use the designation to honor all who have served overseas and stateside, in wartime and in peace. Anyone who has chosen to wear the uniform and bear arms to serve, protect and defend the United States is worth celebrating, thanking and remembering.

Today, we ask you to consider attending a Veterans Day ceremony, observing a moment of silence at 11 a.m., shaking a hand of someone in uniform, or just paying silent tribute to those who have served and continue to serve.

We celebrated America and her freedoms earlier this week when we cast votes during our free and open elections. Those freedoms are supported not just by the beliefs of our citizens and our strong government, but by the people who stand up for our country and beliefs through their military service.

On behalf of a grateful nation, we offer our heartfelt thanks to all those who have served and are serving in America's armed forces and to their families who selflessly support their efforts.
TALLAHASSEE, FL (WTXL) -- With Donald Trump winning the presidential election, several groups have expressed concern about the next four years, including Muslims.

A Facebook video shows a Floridian Trump supporter with decals on his truck saying "Kill All the Muslims" and "All Muslims Are Child Molesters."

While Trump hasn't called for the death of Muslims, his comments about them have concerned many.

The Islamic Center of Tallahassee posted the following statement on Facebook:

"This election has left our nation with very divisive wounds; as Muslims and as Americans, we must unite around one cause, which is to heal the divide and give our new leader a chance to lead."

"Nothing is going to happen to hurt the Muslims," said Amro Abdalla, the imam of the center. "We have to think about it this way: be optimistic always."

Abdalla said whatever happens is by the will of Allah, the Islamic concept of God. He says sometimes things that surprise us turn out well.

"The birth of Jesus wasn't expected to happen, especially if there's no father," he said, "A beautiful result happened."

While many Muslims didn't want Trump to become president, Abdalla said having Trump in the White House actually encourages Muslims to draw closer to their faith.

"The moment you feel it is tight, you go directly to your creator, and you ask him for help," he said, "and this is what I'm encouraging everyone who feels scared."

With protests nationwide, the imam said that response is not the Muslim way.

"I am encouraging every Muslim to accept the fact and not to go for violence," Abdalla said. "This is not the correct way, because it's not going to be beneficial."

Abdalla said it's time to accept the election results and work towards peace.

**The Islamic Center of Tallahassee will host an interfaith breakfast on November 19, as part of its efforts to promote peace and unity.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday that will allow medical marijuana to become available to hundreds of thousands of patients across the state.

However, major details need to be worked out in the coming months about how the industry will work.

The expansion will be a lucrative boost for businesses already growing, processing and distributing cannabis in Florida.

Kim Rivers is the CEO of Trulieve, the state's first legal medical marijuana dispensary.

Rivers, hoped the regulatory details of the amendment can be worked out quickly.

"Everyone's focus right now is making sure that there is implementation, to ensure that those conditions that were in the amendment are given full access to medical cannabis in the state of Florida," she said.

Florida is home to an estimated 500,000 patients who would be eligible for the treatment, making it the second-largest market in the country.
VALDOSTA, Ga. (WTXL) - Police have arrested man they said was involved in an armed robbery in Valdosta.

The Valdosta Police Department said that Tyler Morrison was arrested on Friday around 12 p.m. after they spotted him at an apartment complex in the 1700 block of South Patterson Street.

VPD said that detectives are questioning Morrison about the armed robbery at "Unique Kollections" on Nov.6.

According to police, at approximately 4:40 a.m., authorities were called to the armed robbery at the business. The victim described an African-American male who had walked into the business with a gun demanding money.

The store employee told police that the man had pointed a gun at her and snatched an undisclosed amount of money from her.

Officers searched the area for the offender and after accessing the video surveillance, an officer was able to identify Morrison as the suspect.

After questioning, Morrison will be taken to Lowndes County Jail to face armed robbery charges.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - More than 200 people in Tallahassee gathered at the state capitol building Wednesday to protest the results of the election after Donald Trump was pronounced President-Elect.

Capital city residents weren't the only ones in an uproar as protests took place all across the nation.

Earlier today, at least 120 protesters were arrested across the country.

The Students for a Democratic Society staged the protest, with less than 24 hours notice given to community members and students in attendance.

They carried signs, and chanted "the people united, will never be defeated."

Local family therapist, Jane Marks, said this year's election has been the most divisive election she's witnessed, with so many people acting on strong feelings about both candidates.

"Right now it's pretty acute because it just happened, but within weeks, weeks from now, three or four weeks from now this will become a memory as opposed to a heartache or something hard felt," Marks said.

If anyone is feeling intense feelings following the results of the election, Marks suggests to take a break from social media in order to get back to a normal routine both mentally and physically.
You have permission to edit this article.

Edit Close
Sue Montgomery shops for a backing for a quilt she made for her son at Craft Warehouse in Yakima, Wash. on Feb. 11, 2015. Many quilters are upset that Craft Warehouse is closing and some have gone so far as to lobby the corporate office. (KAITLYN BERNAUER/Yakima Herald-Republic)
You are the owner of this article.
GRANGER, Wash.  A shortage of police officers in Granger led to the school district losing its student resource officer before the start of t
Submit An Obituary

Funeral homes often submit obituaries as a service to the families they are assisting. However, we will be happy to accept obituaries from family members pending proper verification of the death.

Go to form
If you are sending a Letter To the Editor, please be sure to follow these rules:

Letters have a firm 200-word limit and will be edited for grammar, clarity and accuracy.

The person who signs the letter must be the author. Anonymous letters will not be considered. Letters must address the editor, not a third party.

We will not print form letters, libelous letters, business promotions or personal disputes, poetry, open letters, letters espousing religious views without reference to a current issue, or letters considered in poor taste.

Letters reflect the opinion of the writer. The Yakima Herald-Republic cannot verify the accuracy of all statements made in letters.

Writers are limited to one published letter per calendar month.
The first rain fell hard on the red tin roofs. It drips from the roofs to the steep, narrow road winding between the caravans, pouring out into the nearby valley. Children return from school to their home in the temporary site of Migron . The locals refer to the place as the maabara (transit camp) because of the density, with the caravans nearly touching each other, and because of the impermanence.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



Four years have passed since the community of Migron was evacuated from its original location on the top of the mountain. Government Resolution 4569 from April 2016 determined that a new permanent community would be established in the lower parts of the mountain slope, at a site known as Givat Hayekev.

Yaakov Berg near the Migron winery, last week. A Jew seeking to evacuate other Jews? (Photo: Amit Shabi)

Four years have passed, and there is not a single sign of the beginning of permanent construction on the ground. The only permanent building rising above the caravans is the Psagot Winery. Round stone arches, glass-fronted display cabinets filled with dark bottles, carved wooden tables, a visitors center, a banquet hall, grass and a strong smell emanating from wooden barrels of fine sparkling wine.

The winery was there first. It was established in 2008 on an area covering 1.5 acres by Yaakov Berg. He had purchased the rights to the land from the Mateh Binyamin Trade, Planning and Development Company, which leased from the Civil Administration some 15 acres designated for tourism and industry for more than NIS 3 million. The winery and the visitors center are stuck like a thorn in ones side in the middle of the area where the Israeli government decided to build the permanent community of Migron. A tourism area in the heart of a residential neighborhood creates an impossible chance for coexistence with noisy weddings into the night and babies trying to sleep.

Before Migron was relocated to Givat Hayekev, the government promised to fund the construction of another winery at an alternative site, and to turn the winery into a public building within the future permanent community of Migron. So what if it promised?

The government also promised to work to change the purpose of the land from tourism to housing. So what if it promised? In order to establish the temporary site for the evictees of Migron, a special military order was issued to temporarily alter the lands designation from tourism to housing. The temporary order was valid for two years. It could have been extended by law by two more years, but it was not, and the four years have already passed. A plan to permanently change the zoning has yet to be submitted. This means that the temporary site of Migron, which was established by the Israeli government in order to evacuate the residents of the illegal outpost of Migron, is no longer legal.

Last week, in an unprecedented move, winery owner Yaakov Berg and the Mateh Binyamin Development Company filed a lawsuit against the Prime Ministers Office, demanding that the government keep its promise and relocate the winery at a cost of NIS 25 million, or alternatively, evacuate the residents of Migron from the area owned by the company. Thats right, a Jew seeking to evacuate Jews.

Outrageous government conduct

We hesitated a lot before taking this step, Berg admits. Its not easy filling a lawsuit against the government, and its definitely not easy asking to restore the land to its prior condition  in other words, to evacuate the residents of Migron again. We are trying to contribute to the state, not to take things from it. We did not demand compensation for the damage, just an implementation of a commitment enforced by documents and in countless meetings.

The Israeli governments conduct is outrageous. I never imagined that this is the way the state is being run. Before the Migron agreement, then-Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser came here, to the winery, put his hand on my shoulder and asked me to withdraw my objection to the establishment of the new Migron in Givat Hayekev. I understood that it was very important for the residents to move here of all places, in order to feel that they are not leaving the mountain.

Hauser did not just put his hand on Bergs shoulder. He also made sure that the winerys relocation would be mentioned in the governments decision to establish the temporary and permanent site of Migron, although it did not include any explicit commitment, but an instruction to look into the possibility of relocating it to an alternative site.

Later, in June 2012, at the conclusion of a meeting at the Prime Ministers Office in the presence of many senior officials, the cabinet secretary pledged that the government will fund the construction of an alternative building and the transfer of the visitors center and the winery to the new building according to the assessment of a government actuary and subject to legal approval. The decision was also adopted by the Civil Administrations planning authorities, and Berg withdrew his objection to Migron residents relocation to Givat Hayekev.

Within two months, as quick as lightning, they constructed the temporary site for Migrons residents. As soon as the High Court ruling for the evacuation was implemented, no one cared about it anymore, says Berg. There are more urgent matters to deal with. Thats the Israeli governments evident message.

Elisheva Razvag. 'The absurdity of another evacuation is unreal' (Photo: Amit Shabi)

It would be inaccurate to say that the government did not do anything. After a long process, a government assessor estimated that the total cost of the construction of a new building and the relocation of the winerys internal components would be NIS 25 million.

This sum was not determined by me, Berg stresses. It was determined by a government assessor. But nothing happened. Three years ago, we demanded another meeting with the cabinet secretary, who was already Avichai Mandelblit. It took him time to study the issue. Mandelblit, a jurist who measures every word that comes out of his mouth, stood up in the last meeting and said to us: Im sorry. I apologize on behalf of myself and on behalf of the Israeli government. What was done to you was wrong. This thing has been going on for three years. Im saying this to you on behalf of myself and on behalf of the prime minister. All you did was provide the ground. You helped us when we needed it.

Mandelblit explained in the meeting that he had solved the legal issue, and that all that was left was to bring the money, which he would finalize with the director-general of the Prime Ministers Office. What legal issue did Mandelblit rush to solve?

It turns out that in June 2014, the Legal Department at the Prime Ministers Office issued a long letter to Mandelblit, which stated that the agreements signed by Hauser were unauthorized. Mandelblit, as cabinet secretary, claimed he had managed to solve the legal problem. But after Mandelblits apology, we never heard anything else from him, Berg says. We remained in touch with representatives of the Prime Ministers Office, with Avi Cohen, who was tightly connected to the offices previous director-general, Harel Locker.

With no other choice, Berg and the trade company turned to the legal channel. A long letter of warning before instituting legal proceedings, backed with evidence, was sent by Harel Arnon to the director-general of the Prime Ministers Office. The letter of response, signed by the offices legal advisor, Shlomit Barnea-Farrago, claimed that the government did not authorize anyone to make a commitment on its behalf.

Its crazy, Berg smiles, managing to keep the composure of a businessman. We worked vis-a-vis the most senior officials. Was I supposed to ask Bibi (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) himself to attend all the meetings? To sign the protocols? I cant wait to see the governments statement of defense to our claim. No problem, well put Hauser and Mandelblit on the witness stand. If Hauser and Mandelblit acted without any authority as cabinet secretaries, then the current attorney general, Mr. Mandelblit, should file a lawsuit against Hauser and against himself for exceeding the limits of their authority.

I cant understand whats going on here. Migrons residents were moved from their original location because of a nonexistent Arab land claim. The District Court has yet to find a single Arab capable of proving that the land at the top of the mountain is his. The High Court ruled in favor of Migrons evacuation not because of any proof that the land belongs to Palestinians, but simply because of the lack of planning feasibility. Now Migrons residents have again settled illegally, this time on land which belongs to the trade company and to me. So because Im a Jew, it makes it okay? If the Israeli government is unable to meet its commitment, it should restore the situation to its prior condition, take the people sitting here and move them somewhere else.

Despite his resolution, Berg the settler very much hopes that the demand made by Berg the businessman will not be implemented. He doesnt want another Migron evacuation on his conscience. That is probably also the last thing the conflicted government needs right now. If Netanyahu is currently suffering from a light to mild headache caused by the attempt to reach an agreement on the evacuation of the illegal outpost of Amona, he is now in for a serious migraine concerning Migron. What are his chances of reaching an agreement with Amonas residents, if the Migron agreement has not been honored?

I would definitely suggest that Amonas residents be very careful when it comes to agreements with the government, Berg says. We have everything in documents, yet four years later nothing has happened. They should be very careful and know that the Israeli government is reluctant to honor agreements. High Court rulings are implemented on the set date. Government decisions can be postponed or not be implemented at all. That just goes to show who is the real sovereign in the State of Israel today.

We no longer believe anyone

Elisheva Razvag, a dancer and dance teacher and mother of four, has been living in Migron for six and a half years. Her family arrived at the mountain even before the threat of evacuation, and today they live in a caravan in the temporary site.

I feel deceived, she says. When we were evacuated last time, there was a sort of comfort, that they would build us a new and regulated community. Today were at a much lower place. Physically, we are sitting at the foot of the mountain in a transit camp on a very small area, and legally, the temporary site we live in, which was established by the Israeli government, is no longer legal today. There have been so many unfulfilled promises that we no longer believe anyone. How long can we live in such impermanence and uncertainty regarding the future? There are families with eight children here, people who want to settle. We are earth people. We want to feel the earth, not to live in the density of a transit camp.

Out of the 50 families evacuated from Migron, 10 have left the temporary site. Most of them are veteran families who were the pioneering force in Migrons establishment. They were replaced by 10 younger families. I understand those who decided to leave, Razvag says. The reality we have found ourselves in is very complicated. The families that remain understand that in these tough times there is no choice but to follow ideals.

What do you have to say about the lawsuit filed by your neighbor from upstairs?

I heard about the lawsuit. They sent an email to the residents and updated us. I understand the winery owner. There is something good about this lawsuit. Anything that makes noise and makes it clear to the government that it cant keep throwing us around is welcomed, as far as Im concerned. On the personal level, the moment I heard about the lawsuit, the first thing I wanted to do was to go back to our original place, which we miss. There are voices in the community which think that is what needs to be done, after four years in which the permanent construction has yet to begin.

You may be evacuated again following the lawsuit.

This possibility hasnt even crossed my mind, because the absurdity of something like that happening is unreal. Another evacuation of Migron is a wild exaggeration. It wont happen easily. Even the most moderate residents of the community, those who spoke about the need to reach agreements with the government and prevent a forced evacuation, have already lost their innocence and are beginning to think differently. We will establish a permanent community on this mountain, and I believe that we will return to the top of the mountain, to Migrons original location, in the future.

Some may claim that the entire government decision is irrational. You established a community illegally and you forced the government to fund the infrastructure for a permanent community.

The original Migron was established by the state. There is no individual who can establish a community on his own. Migron already had zoning regulations which had to be finalized. For the Bedouins in the Negev, the government not only builds infrastructure for new communities, it also gives them very generous compensation packages. We didnt force anything on the government. A decision was made, and government decisions much be honored, period.

The Prime Ministers Office offered the following response: The Legal Department received the lawsuit and will respond to the court. Former Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser refused to be interviewed or comment on the claims.
Israel-US relations have already experienced many dramatic transitions of power in Washington, including a sharp transition from one party to another, the election of new presidents whose style was different from that of their predecessors, and even sudden, surprising changes in the administration.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



When I first visited Washington, President John F. Kennedy was in the White House. A month later he was murdered, and President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed office. About a decade later, the political pendulum swung again, when President Richard Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal and was replaced by Gerald Ford. He was followed by the Democratic Jimmy Carter, who was replaced by the Republican Ronald Reagan, and so on and so forth.

Trump and Netanyahu. We must work both with the US and independently to advance our security, diplomatic and economic position (Photos: EPA, AFP)

One thing has remained consistent throughout the years, despite the political upheavals: Israel-US relations have been reinforced and tightened. Israel has a lot of practical experience in adjusting to the transition of power in the United States.

In general, the need for caution around election campaigns requires us to apply the guiding principle that if we cannot control things and dont have to choose  there is no need to gamble either. In other words, we must maintain the security margins when shaping a policy and take both options into account regardless of their probability.

The moment Donald Trump defeated his rivals in the primary elections, the possibility that he would win the presidential election should have been taken into account. In Israel, this possibility was not repressed at all, as many in the government were prepared and even hoped for it.

So what will happen now is a familiar practice: We will begin a networking process with the new administration, as well as with the incoming Congress, in order to synchronize our security and diplomatic interests with the American policy taking shape. The prime minister and the President-elect will likely meet in the near future. After all, the Israeli prime ministers main mission is to reach a good relationship and work relations with any American president. Not to mention the fact that Trump seems to sympathize with Israel. Israeli government officials are acquainted with many of the people who are slated to assume positions in the new Trump administration.

The expected change in US policy will likely have extensive systemic implications in the global and regional arena. Under Trump, changes will likely take place in the American direction and level of involvement. That change will probably allow  or even require  a wider maneuvering area for political or military action on Israels part. In any event, the Israeli interest is to get help from our American ally and be coordinated with it.

Israel also needs to tighten its cooperation with the US and improve it in crucial areas in a way which was not exhausted under the Obama administration. For example, in preventing Irans nuclearization and in the battle against radical Islam. We will have to be on the same wavelength with the US in terms of diplomatic agreements as well, in order to ensure that we have its support.

Alongside improving the relationship with the US, Israel must also make sure to reinforce its independent strengths. The recent developments in America and in the international arena require us to look inside and also deal with the apparent trends of erosion in the Israeli educational and governmental systems.

In order to be able to successfully pass the upcoming tests that are still ahead of us, Israel must understand that a lot of what it has to do starts at home. In an era in which the US adopts an isolationist line and takes a step backwards, Israel must work to strengthen its abilities on the diplomatic, military and economic levels.

Outwardly, it will be able to fine-tune its international conduct and maneuver vis-a-vis key states in order to advance its interests. Israel has many international maneuvering areas which do not contradict the US policy, and we must take advantage of that in order to work both with the US and independently to advance our security, diplomatic and economic position.
Donald Trump, the US president-elect who got on stage to deliver his victory speech , was not the Donald Trump we got to know in the election campaign. One could clearly see from the serious look on his face, and even from his body language, that he could feel the full weight of responsibility hanging on his shoulders.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



It is, undoubtedly, an encouraging sign that the uninhibited and provocateur and chatterbox from the campaign realizes that there was a difference between what can be done to gain the votes of the people in the United States and their actual management on a day-to-day basis; and not just managing them, but bringing about a dramatic change for the better in their situation.

Donald Trumps victory speech. Everyones president (Photo: AFP)

White America wanted a change at all costs, possibly as a reaction to the election of black, liberal President Barack Obama and what it symbolizes, and thus did not vote for Hillary Clinton. Trump promised a revolution, without elaborating, and that was enough for them to forgive him for everything and vote for him against any political-governmental logic.

Trump must have realized that in order to gain votes one must intimidate, offend and convey hate. This is a language which most voters in the US, and in Israel too, understand very well and respond to like a terrified child running into the arms of the adult who promises to defend him or her. But in order to govern, and to lead people to the better future that they expect, they must be presented with a positive agenda that creates hope. Trumps victory speech, therefore, focused on a vision, on a promise for a better future.

Trump's victory speech

X

Unlike the campaign speeches, the president-elects first speech was completely free of intimidations, insults, lies and blood libels. Like a responsible leader of a large nation, he stressed his desire to reunite the people and be everyones president, including those who voted for Clinton. He reiterated his promise that he would be everyones president with the clear intention of alleviating the fears of blacks, Hispanics, the LGBT community, Muslims and even Jews, who were put on defensive alert by his election.

Trumps victory speech also cleared some of the uncertainty that still surrounds the plans he intends to implement during his presidency and his future policy. Assuming, of course, that he does have plans and he does have a future policy, and that is not all certain. It is quite likely that Trump and his advisors are just beginning to shape them, with the help of the serious people who have gathered around him: Rudy Giuliani, for example, Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Governor Chris Christie and others. In addition, in the initial stages, Trump will rely on the staff of the last Republican president, George W. Bush, in shaping his government and policy.

In his first speech as the elected president, he provided a taste of the directions in which he plans to navigate the American ship. As always, he did it with very few explicit words and mostly with hints which he will be able to shirk later on. For example, he stressed time and again that he is the head of a movement, not a party or a political body  a hint towards his future relations with Congress. In other words, with Washington, the hated political establishment. There may be a Republican majority in both Houses of Congress, but Trump doesnt even trust his own party, so he is reminding Congress that it must cooperate with him, or he will stir up the movement, the nonparliamentary independent power base which accepts his authority.

In the economic field, Trump made it clear that he plans to multiply the growth rates through massive reconstruction and development of national infrastructures: roads, bridges (half of which are unusable across the US as a result of neglect and lack of investment), electricity, water, etc. Investing in infrastructures requires a lot of manpower and resources and is definitely, according to many economists, an engine for growth and increasing employment. The question is from where will Trump bring the huge budgets required for such a major project across the US.

The president-elect implied indirectly that he does not plan to dissolve the welfare services system and the transfer payments, as he had threatened to do in the campaign, but he does plan to give it a new emphasis and direction which will compensate those who voted for him, members of the middle class and lower-middle class, which is mostly comprised of white people but also of Hispanics and blacks who join the armed forces (there is no compulsory military service in the US, and the soldiers are in fact salaried employees of the state for all intents and purposes).

He promised to expand the social welfare system spread out under this neglected sector. He will make sure to rehabilitate army veterans who served their country in the wars and demonstrated a patriotic spirit, and should therefore be rewarded. This means that from now on, the leading criteria for receiving welfare aid in the US is not belonging to weak social-economic populations, but a persons contribution and sacrifice to the nation so that American will become great again.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Less pressure from the US (Photo: Amos Ben Gershom, GPO)

As for foreign relations, it was clear from Trumps speech that he is aware of the fact that most world leaders see him as an unexpected and unstable person and are afraid of any reckless and irresponsible conduct on his part. He calmed them down by saying that as president, he would honor and continue understandings and agreements  not necessarily contracts  that the US is committed to today.

He did clarify, however, that his administrations future foreign relations would be based on interests and on deals that would serve those same interests, rather than on ideological motives (like in the Obama era). What he apparently meant was that during his era there would be more give-and-take deals, which would provide the US and its citizens with the best they deserve, and that he would focus much less on the ambition to impose democracy and human rights in the world.

Trump went on to stress traditional family values. He did it in a sophisticated way. Not explicitly, but in the extensive part of his speech in which he mentioned each member of his family by his or her name and thanked them, starting with his deceased parents through his children to his siblings. In this demonstration of cohesion, commitment and dedication to tradition, trump brought the conservative and ultra-conservative Republican establishment closer, as well as the white people in the rural areas and the Christian-evangelical establishment. He won thanks to them and he knows he will need them later on too.

Israel, Iran and the Palestinians

Trump will likely try to reach a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, somewhat at the expense of the NATO alliance. The US will no longer press to expand it towards other countries in Eastern Europe, and will even delay the deployment of an anti-missile defense system on Russias border.

The full price of the future change in the American policy will be paid by Ukraine and the rebels in Syria. Trump and the Russians will agree to fight the Islamic State together, but Trump will let the Russians help Bashar Assad win. This means that the radical Shiite axis led by Iran, with Russian aid and defense, will tighten its grip and its strategic abilities in the Middle East in general and in what is called the Shiite spectrum in particular. This is very bad for the State of Israel and it is also bad for the Arab Gulf states (which supported Clinton).

Netanyahu and Trump in New York in September (Photo: Kobi Gideon, GPO)

As for Iran, its quite unlikely that Trump will cancel the nuclear agreement it signed with the Obama administration. So what if he promised to do so during the campaign? An American president cannot cancel an agreement which was ratified by Congress by mere words. It is possible, on the other hand, that Trump will accept Israels requests to tighten the intelligence supervision on Iran and to respond to any violation on its part with serious sanctions. Trump will also generously accept Israels arming requests so that the IDF would be able to respond with all its might in case Iran makes a breakthrough towards a nuclear bomb.

As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the two-state-for-two-people formula will likely enter a deep freeze for a long time. Trump will probably not try to impose any solution on the two sides or even peace negotiations, not to mention a solution based mainly on Israeli concessions. The combination between the current Israeli government and the Trump administration in Washington will likely lead to a deep freeze in the talks with the Palestinians, as opposed to  or perhaps because of  the tireless efforts made by former American presidents on the issue. We should remember, however, that a stalemate in the peace process may lead to a violent outbreak in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, a major bloody outbreak which we should prepare of.

On this historical day, in which a very unexpected and nonconventional person was elected as the 45th president of the United States, we should expand our gaze. Even those who see Israels interest as their top priority should know that the really important thing is what kind of president will Trump be for America and for the Americans. A good president who will strengthen and advance our protective world power is also a president who will strengthens and advance us  and the other way around.
Make no mistake. The hurricane of Donald Trumps election as president of the United States will wash through the entire world, destroying mountains and smashing rocks. Erroneous diplomatic concepts which have guided the diplomatic-social-economic discourse in the past century  and have almost led to the free worlds collapse  will disappear. A worldwide conscious revolution has begun.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



I cannot avoid mentioning the fact that last Shabbat we read the weekly Torah portion of Noah, which focuses on the great flood that hit the world and was followed by the development of a more proper world.

Trump's success lies in his ability to translate to Obama and people like him what the scared American citizens really want to maintain (Photo: Reuters)

Running amok, the free world adopted the political correctness doctrine, which banned any warnings against countries captured by radical Islam and forbade people to speak out against millions of Muslim immigrants who flooded Europe, and say that instead of integrating into the free world that welcomed them with open arms, they were planning to destroy it from the inside. This world was about to collapse into itself.

As if temporarily blind, the leaders of the most important countries in Western Europe recited poetic phrases about their multiculturalism policy, based on which they took in millions of Muslim immigrants. Immigrants who were not beaten and not persecuted  and if they were persecuted, it was in Muslim countries whose values they brought along into Europe and refused to bid farewell to. Negative types of people who should have been banned entry under any social standard.

And so, entire cities and quarters in Europe were shut off to the local government which took them in. Barack Obama, the leader of the free world, outdid himself by consistently refusing to refer to global terror as Muslim terror against the free world. The inexperienced Obama with his naive vision traveled around the world, scattering the basic security, economic and social assets of the worlds greatest power in the wind, and leaving behind blood, fire and pillars of smoke.

The Middle East is on fire, Europe is collapsing on its borders, clear US economic interests of have been sacrificed for the sake of political correctness  neglecting the heavy industry states in the US  and Obama arrogantly went from one election rally to another in the past few weeks, filled with self-satisfaction, completely blind as the finest political correctness supporters. He pleaded with the voters: Choose Hillary, in order to maintain my achievements in the past eight years.

And then came Trump. His success lies in his ability to translate to Obama and people like him what the scared American citizens really want to maintain, as they alarmingly watched the political correctness establishment  the old politics  taking most of their assets away. The air that the great America breathes.

What they needed was an eccentric New Yorker with no political experience, who was not educated in the suitable elitist institutions, to make a change in the diplomatic, social and economic thinking patterns, something that has not been seen since the days of Machiavelli. No more political correctness prism, but simply and sophisticatedly telling the truth, at eye level. And sometimes a lot below the eyes. As long as they understand.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it Lets talk dugri in his United Nations speech . So on the following day, people in the US and in the rest of the free world which was crushed under the boots of political correctness woke up with a big smile.

As far as Israel is concerned, Trump is a reality which is close to a dream. Because, lets talk dugri, the Palestinians dont want peace with us. Despite the radical concessions we made, we were still hit by missiles, suicide bombers and knives. But the leaders of the Western world, loyal to their political correctness doctrine, kept calling us occupiers, racists and peace refuser. No more. A new concept has arrived in the world we are inventing as we speak. Introducing the reality correctness.

From now on, everything will be examined undisguised. Without any imaginary covers. Black or white. There are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys want and are working for the worlds prosperity. The bad guys want to make it dark  and the bad guys come from Muslim countries, brainwashed by an educational system which teaches them that sacrificing their lives as jihadists is sacred.

Up until now, European leaders would justify these crazies. No more. The world will soon adapt to the new reality correctness lexicon. Just like the economic gloomy prophecies predicted by the supporters of the old world evaporated within several hours. Commentators spoke about months of economic recession which would hit the world if Trump were to be elected. The markets stabilized themselves faster than expected.

Heres another test linked to our region: It seems that in light of the new reality correctness that has just been born, the French initiative to convene a peace conference  in other words, a conference aimed at embarrassing and pressuring Israel  will be postponed and then fade away.

And we have yet to talk about the expected dream team in the new presidents executing cabinet. The designated secretary of state, Newt Gingrich, understands better than the rightists among us who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in the region. The designated attorney general. Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and the father of the broken window theory, who turned it from a crime city into the capital of the world, acts according to the reality correctness principles.

In his arrogance, Obama (remember how he put his feet on the table while talking to Netanyahu on the phone?) refined political correctness. He was handled with kid gloves and relied on those on the left who kept him out of public criticism, and even gave him a delusional Nobel Prize, to protect him and his legacy. But that too will eventually fade away.
In a cordial beginning to their transfer of power, President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump met at the White House Thursday. Obama called the 90-minute meeting "excellent," and his successor said he looked forward to receiving the outgoing president's "counsel."

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



Afterward, Obama said to Trump, "We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, the country succeeds."

Photo: AP

Trump and Obama in the Oval Office ()

X

The two men, who have been harshly critical of each other for years, were meeting for the first time, Trump said. The Republican said he looked forward "to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel."

Obama blasted Trump throughout the campaign as unfit to serve as a commander in chief. Trump spent years challenging the legitimacy of Obama's presidency, falsely suggesting Obama may have been born outside the United States.

But at least publicly, the two men appeared to put aside their animosity. As the meeting concluded and journalists scrambled out of the Oval Office, Obama smiled at his successor and explained the unfolding scene.

Photo: AFP

If Trump makes good on his campaign promises, he'll wipe away much of what Obama has done during his eight years in office. The Republican president-elect, who will govern with Congress fully under GOP control, has vowed to repeal Obama's signature health care law and dismantle the landmark nuclear accord with Iran.

First lady Michelle Obama also met privately in the White House residence with Trump's wife, Melania, while Vice President Joe Biden prepared to see Vice President-elect Mike Pence later Thursday.

Trump traveled to Washington from New York on his private jet, breaking with protocol by not bringing journalists in his motorcade or on his plane to document his historic visit to the White House. Trump was harshly critical of the media during his campaign and for a time, banned news organizations whose coverage he disliked from his events.

Also on Trump's schedule were meetings with House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to discuss the GOP legislative agenda. Ryan, who holds the most powerful post in Congress, was a sometime critic of Trump, was slow to endorse him and did not campaign with the nominee. Pence intended to join both meetings.
A woman in her 50s lost control of her car on Thursday and crashed it into a carpet store in the Kiryon shopping center in Kiryat Bialik.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



X

The driver suffered slight injuries. Nobody else was injured in the store.

(Photo: United Hatzalah)

Earlier in the day, a 25-year-old pedestrian was injured by a car on Haifa's Ibn Gvirol Street. She was taken to the hospital, and the 58-year-old driver from Kiryat Motzkin was detained by the police.

That evening, a 70-year-old woman who was crossing Hanassi Boulevard in Haifa at a location without a pedestrian crossing was moderately injured when she was struck by a car. That 20-year-old driver was also detained.
ISTANBUL- A Turkish district governor wounded in a bomb attack on his office in the largely Kurdish southeast has died in hospital, the state-run Anadolu Agency and other media said on Friday.

Suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants carried out Thursday's attack in the Derik district of Mardin province with an improvised explosive device, wounding three people, according to the Mardin governor's office.

Derik district governor Muhammed Fatih Safiturk was one of three people hurt in the attack, suffering second-degree burns. He died at a hospital in the city of Gaziantep on Friday morning, having been flown there by helicopter for treatment, the Dogan news agency said.

Safiturk had been given the additional responsibility in July of running the local municipality as part of a series of moves to replace elected officials from the Democratic Regions' Party (DBP), a sister party of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).
ANKARA -- Turkey's state-run news agency says an official has died of wounds sustained in an attack by Kurdish militants on a government building in southeastern Turkey.

The Anadolu Agency said Fatih Safiturk, the district governor of the town of Derik, died in a hospital Friday.

Safiturk and two others were wounded Thursday when assailants attacked his office, near the border with Syria, with an improvised explosive device. Authorities blamed the attack on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which has waged a three-decade-long insurgency against the Turkish state and is considered a terror organization by Turkey and its Western allies.

Kurdish militants, however, haven't immediately claimed responsibility.
Dozens of rabbis have published a petition in which they attack Minister of Education Naftali Bennett over his office's intention to encourage religious women to enlist in the IDF. According to the rabbis, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel forbids it, and the country should only be encouraging female high school students to do national service.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



There has been a significant increase in the amount of graduates of state religious education schools who have ignored the historic ruling and enlisted in the IDF in recent years. As a result, rabbis and religious educators have started resisting the trend.

Some believe the war on religious women in the IDF is lost and they must offer assistance to religious women during their army service, even if they chose the wrong path in their eyes. However, others take an even stronger line and say that the issue of women in the army isnt forbidden by Jewish law.

In time, organizations such as Aluma were founded, whose goals are to guide women through the draft process, advise them about different options and available tracks and care for them and their religious needs during their service. In recent years, there has also been an increase in military preparatory academies for religious men and women to help their integration into the IDF.

Because of the sensitivity of the issue and the disputes between rabbis, there are also more conservative rabbis and schools who oppose any such activity related to women enlisting in the IDF.

Organizations such as Aluma, which try to get to a larger crowd, explain that they are not encouraging enlistment, but only that they wish to help those who have chosen to enlist.

Naftali Bennett (Photo: Ohad Zweigenberg)

Now for the first time, the Ministry of Education is choosing to fund these organizations, much to the chagrin of Orthodox rabbis.

The Religious Education Administration recently published a draft of informal information offered to religious students about the possibilities of service in the IDF. Ministry officials made sure to point out that the information and guidance offered is not meant to encourage women to draft, but rabbis are not convinced.

Prominent Religious-Zionist rabbi Yaakov Ariel, one of the signatories on the petition

In the petition, rabbis wrote, "Currently, there are attempts to enter the religious education system and influence women to draft into the IDF instead of doing national service. We call on Minister of Education Naftali Bennett to maintain the values and principles of religious education based on the decisions of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel."

Under the heading "national service to begin with," the petition said, "The position of religious Zionist rabbis on the issue of girls in the IDF has always been consistent with the position of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, that religious girls avoid military service. This has always been the position of the Religious Education Administration, throughout its autonomous existence regarding decisions and educational values as required by the Education Act."
HANOI -- State media and a maritime official say pirates have attacked a Vietnamese cargo ship and kidnapped six of its crew members off the Philippines' Basilan island.

The Tuoi Tre newspaper reported that the ship, named "Royal 16," was on its way from Vietnam's northern port city of Hai Phong to Indonesia with 19 crew members and a cargo of cement when it was attacked early Friday.

It said six crew members were kidnapped. After the attack, the ship anchored safely at Zamboanga port in the southern Philippines with the remaining 13 crew members, including one who suffered gunshot wounds in the arm.

A Vietnam Maritime Administration official confirmed the attack, but gave no details.

The agency has asked regional and international anti-piracy agencies for help.
In the days following the election of Donald Trump, the Arab press is reflecting how the Arab world sees both the election and the President-elect.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



The "familiar bad option," Hillary Clinton, was viewed as one who would continue the disappointing policies of Obama, while the "unfamiliar bad option," Donald Trump, was seen as someone who said racist things about Muslims.

Caricature from Hamas newspaper Al-Risalah

Al-Quds Al-Arabi front page: Trump's victory has brought about a political and economic earthquake in Washington, and shocked the world

The headline of London-based publication Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, which is close to Qatar, read, "President Trump. The shock and fear."

Similarly, the headline of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, also based in London, read, "The victory of Donald Trump brought a political and economic earthquake to Washington and shock to the world."

Caicature in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed

Ashraq Al-Awsat, which is Saudi-owned and published in London, wrote, "Trump against the Presidential test," while noting that the King of Saudi Arabia called the President-elect and congratulated him on his victory.

Syrian newspaper Al-Watan, which is connected to the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, wrote, "Moscow and Cairo are among the prominent well-wishers. The Saudi opposition is worried and their candidate is frustrated. Trump is the master of the White House."

Caricature of Trump in Al-Watan

Another Syrian newspaper said, "Damascus will cooperate if Trump's policy is consistent with our ambitions."

"Trump's WorldA resort for the crazy"

"America begins the Trump era," read the headline of Egyptian government-owned Al-Ahram, which also quoted Trump as saying, "I'm looking for partnerships and not conflict around the world." The paper further went on to say that Trump led a real war against state institutions and the American media and against every poll, made history.

The Republican Elephant on top of the world

Frontpage of Egyptian Al-Ahram Quotes Trump: 'I seek partnerships around the world, not conflict'

Lebanese newspaper adopted a more skeptical line, with Al-Akhbar, affiliated with Hezbollah, wrote, "Trump's worlda resort for the crazy," as its headline. Similarly, As-Safir wrote, "The Trump earthquakethe world of hawks and fear returns."

Jordanian media covered the election like many other news outlets across the world, reacting with shock and surprise at the election of Trump. Jordanian newspaper "Al-Ghad," wrote, "World shock: Trump is President." The newspaper went on to quote local politicians who adopted a more pessimistic narrative by saying that they believed the election of Trump would negatively impact relations between Jordan and the United States.

Caricature from Al-Rad: Lady Liberty immigrating to Canada

Frontpage of Al-Ghad: World shocked: Trump President

"Do not be afraid of Trump"

"Don't be afraid of Trump," wrote Abed al-Rahman al-Rashad in an article in Ashraq Al-Awsat. Al-Rashad, the former editor-in-chief of the newspaper and former director of Saudi Al-Arabiya, added, "When Obama was elected eight years ago, the victory was accompanied by a flood of jubilant articles. I wrote then not to go overboard with optimism. Not a day since the election of Trump has gone by without pessimism. I also say there is no need to exaggerate the pessimism."

Caricature in Al-Quds Al-Arabi: Trumps unexpected win has kicked America in the behind!

Al-Rashad also wrote that there is a need to look at the United States, which according to him is a country of institutions, and not just at Trump. "There are changes expected in the Trump era versus the Obama era, but there will not be a foreign policy revolution."

Al-Rashad also mentioned Trump's position with regard to Muslims and claimed, "His position against Muslims with regard to terrorism and extremism should not be seen in any way as racism. That is our position on Muslims as well." He went on to clarify that "most of our problems and issues are the result of our own decisions. As such, most of the solutions are in our hands."

Al-Rashad concluded by saying that without a doubt, Trump's four years in the White House will be much more crucial than the eight years of Obama.
LONDON -- Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami says that President-elect Donald Trump should apologize to the Iranian people for calling them terrorists during his campaign.

The senior religious scholar, in a Friday sermon broadcast live on state radio, said Trump should "respectfully apologize to the nation."

Khatami warned Trump about confronting Iran, saying he should know better than to play with "the tail of the lion."

The cleric said that Tehran had successfully foiled and frustrated several of Trump's White House predecessors.

He said Iran's stance on the US election is to avoid intervention or involvement in another country's internal affairs.

He said, "We respect the people of other countries and we respect their elections."
The Prime Ministers Office signed an agreement to contribute up to one-third of the finds required to support the Birthright Israel Excel program on Thursday.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



The Excel program was launched in specifically geared towards participants interested in businesses and technology. It is an exclusive fellowship that starts with an all-expense paid 10-week internship program in Israel and continues with year-round workshops led by the community and its members. Government funding will enable the program to diversify and develop further, as well as reach a greater number of students from the Jewish communities around the US and the world.

Excel connects high-performing college students and recent graduates with leading businesspeople in Israel. The program offers opportunities to work in a wide range of fields including finance, venture capital, consulting, cybersecurity, high-tech and bio-tech, or to join a venture creation boot camp for 10 weeks. More than 230 young adults have participated to date.

Birthright Excel participants at their ceremony (Photo: Avishai Finkelstein)

We are pleased that the Israeli government has recognized the strength and potential of our Excel program, said Birthright Israel CEO Gidi Mark. This added support will allow the program to connect even more Jewish young adults with their Israeli peers and leading entrepreneurs in Israel in order to create life-long career, business and networking opportunities for them.

Companies that have participated in the Excel program include Check Point Software, Ernst & Young Israel and Magma Ventures Partners.

In addition to the business track, Birthright Excel launched the Ventures track this year, a similar fellowship focusing solely on entrepreneurs. Participants of the Ventures program work in an accelerator environment starting from initial creation to an early stage proof of concept and are mentored by leading figures of the Israeli startup community. Out of the six pilot teams, five are still working on launching their companies.

Graduates of the Birthright Excel Ventures program (Photo: Adam Lazovski)

Last summer, as part of the organizations efforts to engage with the flourishing technology and startup scene in Israel, Birthright Israel opened the State of Mind Innovation Center in Tel Aviv. In partnership with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the exhibit celebrates Israeli entrepreneurship throughout history and has hosted hundreds of Birthright Israel participants to date.

Since 2000, Birthright Israel has provided free trips to more than 500,000 Jewish young adults aged 18-26 with the goal of strengthening Jewish identity, facilitating cultural understanding and fostering solidarity with Israel and its people. Israel Birthright Excel is supported by The Steinhardt Family Foundation, The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and The Paul E. Singer Foundation.
The Foreign Ministry is preparing for Trump's accession to the White House by attempting to assess future US policy and how it will affect the international arena, particularly the Middle East.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



A confidential report by the ministry's research department, which is responsible for formulating the ministry's intelligence assessment, states that "Trump doesn't see the Middle East as a 'wise investment,' and it is likely that he will strive to reduce US involvement in the region."

Trump visiting Obama in the White House (Photo: MCT)

The report provides initial insights following the Trump victory. The document's central message is that Trump's statements indicate his desire to focus on internal challenges, while simultaneously strengthening the international position of the United States. However, the report indicates that, in practice, Trump's statements point to isolationist characteristics.

The report puts special emphasis on Trump's statements of support for Israel during the campaign. However, this issue is also marked by contradictory statements. On one hand, he declared that Israel has to pay for the military assistance it receives from the United States, but on the other hand, he views military aid to Israel as "a great investment."

In a policy statement published by Trump advisors on Israel-related matters, the aid agreement is viewed positively because the agreement does not prevent the government or congress from extending the aid beyond the amount specified.

Arab cartoon after Trump's win

According to the report, the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is a top priority for the Trump government. The report further contends that his statements on the issue are not necessarily indicative of systemic policy. Trump has expressed support for moving the American embassy to Jerusalem and supports the right of Israel to build settlements. Other statements indicate that Trump will be an honest broker on the issue and that he believes all parties need to form a "deal" between them.

In terms of the Iran nuclear deal, the report notes that Trump has also made contradictory statements about his commitments. On one hand, he has strongly criticized the deal, but on the other hand, has avoided saying he will cancel the agreement and has promised to enforce strict monitoring of conditions.

In regards to the war on Syria, Foreign Ministry officials wrote that Trump declared completely different policies and has said there is a need to examine the provision of providing aid to rebels in Syria, and implicitly expressed support for Assad remaining in power. Furthermore, it is reported that he supports Russian activities in the country.

Trump's vision could lead to a change in relations with US allies around the world. Trump would like to "exact a price" for US protection for Asian and Gulf allies, does not shrink away from a reassessment of placing US troops in Japan and South Korea and calls for a review of US NATO membership, against the backdrop of the perception that the US pays for crises that it is not a part of.

However, the report concludes that Trump's limited familiarity with foreign arenas gives added importance to the team that he brings to the White House. The State Department is expected to have strong influence in setting policy agenda on these issues.
A memorial ceremony was held on Thursday in Ramallah for Arafat, which was attended by MK Ayman Odeh (Joint List), who delivered a speech. In response, Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beytenu) attacked the MK on his Facebook page.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



Lieberman wrote, "He's not willing to attend Peres's funeral in Jerusalem, but he'll make a speech in Arafat's memory. We'll continue to act until he will no longer be a member of Knesset in Jerusalem, but at most a member of the Palestinian Council in Ramallah."

Avigdor Lieberman (Photo: Yair Sagi)

Ayman Odeh (Photo: Elad Gershgoren)

The Joint List confirmed that Odeh intends to take part in next week's memorial service for assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

A month and a half ago, after members of the Joint List boycotted statesman Shimon Peres's funeral, Lieberman proposed that all members of the coalition should in turn boycott Arab MKs when they speak in the Knesset. However, with the opening of the parliament's summer session, no such boycott took place.
LONDON - Turkey's state-run news agency says the prime minister has congratulated U.S. President-elect Donald Trump over the phone.

Anadolu Agency said Binali Yildirim called Trump on Friday and sent his wishes to the American people.

Yildirim reportedly said they were looking forward to strengthening cooperation between the two countries, while Trump said he attached great importance to Turkey and that furthering dialogue was a priority.
Residents of Pisgat Ze'ev, an eastern neighborhood of Jerusalem, emulated a muezzin call early the Thursday morning before last in front of the Beit Hakerem residence of Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to protest ongoing disturbances from Muslim calls to prayer emanating from the Shuafat, Beit Hanina and A-ram neighborhoods.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



"There is a 'noise regulation' law in Israel restricting the amount, duration, source and timing of noise (in the public sphere) and the muezzin calls are an infringement on that legislation," said right-wing activist and member of the Jerusalem City Council Aryeh King, to Tazpit Press Service (TPS).

"Over the last year, the muezzins have ramped up the volume to insane levels, not only for (prayer calls) but also of weddings and other celebrations," he stated.

Police shutting down the protest (Photo: Yechiel Gurfein/TPS)

King said that in 2015, the Jerusalem City Council budgeted half a million shekels to enforce those regulations and to find technological solutions to resolve the issue. However, in October 2015, Mayor Barkat decided to reallocate this money for other pressing matters.

"I tried to convince him not cut the budget, and he promised to redistribute the funds on that issue during 2016. But a year has gone by and nothing has been done, which is why we decided to protest," said King.

The activists came at 6am to perform the muezzin call and claimed that they actually showed consideration to Barkat and the neighbors by not doing so at the actual time that they are routinely woken up.

"This morning we had to shatter the tranquility of Beit Hakerem in Jerusalem as part of our struggle with the muezzin noise (with) loudspeakers to emulate the sounds mosques disturbing thousands of families in the various neighborhoods of Jerusalem," said Yossi Davidoff, one of the organizers.

Police removed the protesters after a few minutes.

King said that the Arab community suffers from this issue no less than their Jewish neighbors.

"I brought Arab residents to testify at the Knesset, and they have said the same thing: 'You live 500 meters away from the loudspeakers, but we live only 5 meters away,'" he recounted.

"There are three parties who have jurisdictions to deal with this issue on their ownZe'ev Elkin's Ministry of Environmental Protection, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan," King said.

Gilad Erdan recently gave a countrywide order for the police to enforce the noise regulation law and on Wednesday, Nir Barkat charged Amnon Merhav, Jerusalem Municipality General Director, with the task of formulating a plan with the collaboration of the police to effectively regulate and supervise compliance with said law.

"Anybody who has not been woken by the muezzin in the morning or in the evening will never understand how annoying it is," he stated. "This will not be our last protest in front of the Mayor's house."

Andrew Friedman contributed to this article.

Article reprinted with permission from TPS
President-elect Donald Trump's positions on Middle East issues, if carried out, could bring yet more volatility to the world's most combustible region.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



Besides vowing to rip up the international nuclear deal with Iran, Trump says he will ramp up the war on ISIS militants; he could make the Palestinians more desperate by siding with Israel's hard-line right wing. He also seems set to end the Obama administration's cold shoulder toward authoritarians like Egypt's Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

Trump has most often been vague and sometimes outright contradictory about plans in the Mideast. And his stances could change. His call for a ban on Muslims entering the US worried many in the region, but he has since watered down that stance, and many opinion-makers in the Gulf at least call it simply campaign rhetoric.

Shi'ite forces near Mosul (Photo: AFP)

That is a simpler, black-and-white stance in the eyes of some, but it can also bring a backlash.

Israel and the Palestinians

Trump appears much more sympathetic to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than to the Palestinians. That bodes poorly for the Palestinian dream of gaining independence and has led to some warnings that they might grow so desperate as to turn to a full-fledged violent uprising.

While Netanyahu spent the past eight years clashing with Obama over Israeli settlement construction and the deadlock in peace efforts, Trump has expressed great affinity for Netanyahu and called Obama a "disaster" for the Jewish state.

He has vowed not to impose any solutions on Israel and promised to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, a step that would undercut the Palestinian claims to the eastern part of the city. His opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran and promises to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the UN also resonate in Jerusalem.

In addition, he has surrounded himself with advisers close to Israel's hard-line right wing. Among them are Newt Gingrich; former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; the former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton; and conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a close friend of Netanyahu's.

Gingrich has called the Palestinians an "invented" people. Giuliani recently recommended that Trump abandon the US goal of establishing a Palestinian state as part of a peace accord. The Republican platform makes no mention of Palestinian statehood, an idea even Netanyahu has endorsed.

The pro-settler politicians who dominate Netanyahu's cabinet have warmly welcomed Trump's win. Education Minister Naftali Bennett called it an opportunity to drop the idea of Palestinian statehood.

Still, the unpredictable Trump also raised some concerns in Israel during the campaign by suggesting he would stay "neutral" on the conflict and that Israel should repay the billions of dollars of military aid it receives from the US

The Palestinians are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Officials had been hoping that if Clinton had won, Obama would have used his final months in office to deliver a policy statement or promote a UN resolution setting the stage for his successor to press ahead with peace efforts. With Trump's victory, the chances seem remote.

Foreign Minister Riad Malki said the Palestinians "still don't know the policies of President-elect Trump" but hoped "he will push to realize the two-state solution."

ISIS, Iraq and Syria

Trump pledged repeatedly to intensify the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, saying crushing the group is his main priority.

What is less clear is howand what impact it would have on the conflicts in both countries and the complex alliances that the Obama administration has tried to balance. Trump has given little policy or vision on the wars beyond the vows to defeat ISIS.

In Syria, the rebels may be the biggest losers.

In contrast to the Obama administration's support for the oppositionequivocal as it may have beenTrump said the rebels may be "worse" than President Bashar Assad and that defeating ISIS is more important than removing the Syrian leader. That suggests he could drop any backing. Moreover, he says he wants more and better cooperation against ISIS with Russia, Assad's main ally.

Trump says he will step up airstrikes, vowing to "bomb the hell" out of the militants.

He has criticized the slow pace of the fight and at one point called for up to 30,000 US troops to be deployed in Iraqsix times the current level. He later seemed to back down, saying "few troops" would be needed.

Donald Trump with House Speaker Paul Ryan (Photo: AFP)

More intensified bombing, however, risks a backlash if it brings more civilian casualties. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has already come under fire from political rivals over the presence of a few thousand US troops in Iraq.

ISIS may already be broken in Iraq and cornered in Syria before Trump takes office in January. Over the past year, the Obama administration's campaign of airstrikes, along with training on the ground, has succeeded in helping Iraqi and Kurdish forces take back most territory ISIS captured in 2014. They are currently assaulting the group's last main Iraqi stronghold, Mosul.

In Syria, if Trump allies with Russia against ISIS, it could also bring a major shift away from US support of the rebels.

The Obama administration's attempts to work closer with Russia fell apart because of Moscow's bombardment of rebels; Trump appears likely to drop any US complaints over the Russian campaign.

Like Obama, Trump views the Syria war mainly through the lens of fighting ISIS. But the conflicts are intertwined. Turning away from the opposition could anger Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have vowed to oust Assad and back the rebelsand are potential spoilers in any conflict.

Trump will also face the same struggle Obama has: Balancing between Turkey and its bitter rival, the Syrian Kurds, who have been the main US-backed ground force fighting IS. Turkish and Kurdish forces battled earlier this year in northern Syriaa flare-up that was put down by US mediation.

Egypt

Trump and Egypt's al-Sissi have already shown a bond. Trump said there was "good chemistry" when they met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September. Al-Sissi said Trump "without a doubt" would make a strong leader.

It's clear where the common ground is. Al-Sissi has painted himself as a leader in the fight against Islamic militancy, a stance that echoes Trump's priorities.

Egyptian President al-Sissi (Photo: AP)

The result could be closer ties after the chill between al-Sissi and Obama.

As commander of the military, al-Sissi led the 2013 ouster of Egypt's first freely elected president, Islamist Mohammed Morsi, amid widespread protests against him and his Muslim Brotherhood. The Obama administration voiced some criticism of the ouster and briefly suspended some aid. It has kept its distance ever since, especially as al-Sissi's government has cracked down heavily on its opponents.

Trump is less likely to take Egypt to task over human rights. Instead, he could throw al-Sissi political support as the Egyptian leader battles ISIS-linked militants in Sinai and Libya.

Egypt's pro-government media have often railed against Obama, accusing the US of supporting the Brotherhood and activist groups. They now were cheering Trump's victory.

"There will be a big shift in the Egyptian-American relations under this man's era. You will see," said one pro-al-Sissi TV host, Ahmed Moussa.
When you put a property up for sale with tenants in it, there are some potential risks that simply arent there when youre selling a vacant home.

If your tenants dont co-operate with the real estate agent, or dont make any attempts to clean before inspections, it can seriously hamper the sale process and ultimately, impact your profit.

But there are steps you can take to make the process as smooth and painless as possible, for everyone involved.

In this situation, its important to remember that respect is a two-way street.

Keep the lines of communication with your tenants open, stick to legislative laws and maybe even offer your tenants something in return for their co-operation, and youll likely find they come to the party reasonably happily.

Lets look at the best practice for selling a property with a tenant in place:

Speak to the tenants personally

If practical, arrange to meet with the tenants and your sales agent together, so you can set the course of the sale process. You might also consider offering the property to the tenants first.

Remember to check your state or territorys laws for the notice period before inspections. In most cases, tenants must be given 24 hours notice, and breaking that agreement could get them offside quickly.

Offer incentives for the tenants co-operation

While you might be paying the mortgage, the property is your tenants home.

Having to clean the house for every inspection can wear thin quickly, and its important that the house looks as tidy as possible when prospective buyers walk through.

Here are some incentives you could offer your tenants:

A discount in rent during the sales process

A free weeks rent when the house is sold

A small fee for every open house they have to prepare for

A letter of recommendation for their next rental if required

While you can ask tenants to step out during inspections, theyre under no legal obligation to do so. And, they might be less inclined to oblige by this request, the longer the sale takes. Sweetening the deal might be just the incentive they need to stay scarce while buyers walk through.

Dont leave it all to the tenants

Hire a cleaner and a maintenance person to tidy up the property prior to taking advertisement photos.

Its one less clean for the tenant and a great way to thank them for their cooperation, and best of all, youll be assured of the best photos for your sale.

For a small-tax deductible investment, this one is a no-brainer.

Also, ask your agent to open curtains, blinds and windows before inspections, so the property presents in as airy, fresh and open as possible  its a simple but effective step that is often overlooked.

Offer to break the lease early

If your tenants are uncooperative, it might be best to offer them an early out from the lease.

Yes, youll be missing out on the rental income, but you might be able to sell for a higher dollar amount with the property untenanted, because it will appeal to owner-occupiers as well as investors.

In addition, you could stage the home yourself, which is an effective tool for increasing your final sales price.

Obviously, asking your tenants to leave is entirely dependent on your financial position. Any lost income dips directly into your overall profits, so weigh the decision up carefully; this is a drastic move and is really only the last resort if all other options are exhausted.

To avoid reaching this point, be respectful of your tenant. Be sure to stay in close contact with your property manager to keep the lines of communication clear.

Dont forget, they are facing the uncertainty of potentially having to find a new home, so anything you can do to reassure them is going to benefit your overall relationship and encourage them to cooperate during the sales process.

..........................................................
According to Harvey, many downsizers are time poor and feel overwhelmed by the amount of information thats available to them during the property hunt.

Generally speaking the older generation are reluctant to leave the family home so a buyers agent can help smooth the process, he said. Buying a home can be a daunting task for anyone, let alone someone who hasnt been involved in the property market for 20 or more yearsparticularly in a highly competitive market such as Sydney and Melbournes.

The last thing retirees want to do is make poor investment decisions and overpay for a property since their advanced age makes recouping losses difficult. A good buyers agent can help search, evaluate and negotiate a more suitable home, relieving the buyer of unwanted stress and time pressures, Harvey said.

Buyers agents can assist inexperienced buyers by analysing data, negotiating on their behalf, and ensuring that they make informed decisions rather than emotional ones.

As Australias population continues to age, many councils are actively encouraging investment in residential aged care. REBAA supports greater government concessions which encourage downsizers to free up the housing market and move to lower maintenance, medium density housing. Incentives include stamp duty concessions for downsizers and subsidies for buyers agents fees.

When downsizers move out of their home it encourages the next generation of families to move in and renovate, prompting a positive ripple effect in the neighbourhood. While there has been much debate stirred up recently by demographer Bernard Salts smashed avo analysis, we believe the focus should shift toward the real and more serious status of government incentives.

Related stories:

New Rules Adjust How Much Retirees Can Hold In Assets (Including Properties)

Will You Be Living Well In Retirement...Or Just Living?
Armenian Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan today, in Yerevan, met with ambassadors from EU countries with diplomatic representation in Armenia, and with Ambassador Pitor Swiatlski, who heads the EU delegation to Armenia.

During the meeting, Karapetyan stressed the importance of sincere and open dialog and cooperation in all directions with the European Union, adding that he saw a vital need for the exchange of experience and an injection of European culture in Armenian regarding business management, the fight against corruption, the defense of human rights, and in the judicial reform process.

Karapetyan said the main problem facing the executive branch is to create a just and level playing field for business and to spur investment projects.

The Armenian prime minister said that without a comprehensive campaign against corruption and tax evaders, it would be impossible for Armenia to develop.

Karapetyan said that to achieve such aims his government would be presenting new specific legislative initiatives and that the composition of the anti-corruption council would be changed.
Latest News

San Luis, Arizona - AWCs Office of Financial Aid and the Arizona Commission for Postsecondary Education (ACPE) are teaming up for their Annual College Goal FAFSA. College bound students are encouraged to attend College Goal FAFSA on Friday, November 18 from 3pm-6pm at the AWC San Luis Center.

All new and continuing students planning to attend ANY college during the 2017-2018 school year will receive FREE help to complete the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). There will be computers with internet connection to access the FAFSA online and volunteers will be available to offer information in both English and Spanish.

College Goal FAFSA is happening earlier this academic year due 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 FAFSA process. Students were able to start applying for FAFSA on October 1, 2016 with tax information from two years prior (2015 tax info).

The purpose of College Goal FAFSA is to assist students, especially minority and first generation college applicants, in completing the FAFSA, which is their first step toward accessing postsecondary education. State-wide there will be many volunteer financial aid professionals and high school counselors that will lend a hand to those completing FAFSA forms and seeking information on the financial aid process.

In years past, ACPE has been successful in attracting first-generation applicants and those from low-income homes to College Goal FAFSA. These are the families who can most benefit from this program.

The mission of ACPE is to expand access and increase success in postsecondary education for Arizona. For more information about College Goal FAFSA, please visit http://collegegoal.az.gov
Latest News

Washington, DC - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announces the successful conclusion of the first year of the Arkansas Declaration of Learning program, a first-in-the-nation, public-private partnership that works collaboratively with school librarians and educators in the fields of art, English language arts, and social studies to develop innovative curriculum that brings history and art to life and shares the importance of civic engagement with students in grades 7-12.

Through this program, teachers have the opportunity to work with historic art and objects from national and state partners to develop innovative lessons for their classrooms and school libraries that inspire student learning. Arkansas is the first state in the country to participate in this national program; all states are eligible to participate, and others are already in the pipeline.

On November 14, 2016, teachers and school librarians who participated in the program will be honored for their work at two special events in Little Rock, Arkansas. A public event will be held at 10 a.m. at the Central Arkansas Library Systems Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at 401 President Clinton Avenue. A public and press event will be held at 1 p.m. at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center at 1200 President Clinton Avenue.

The events will celebrate the success of the 26 participants, highlight their work, feature presentations by some of the programs exemplary educators, and provide additional information on the Arkansas Declaration of Learning program. The 1 p.m. event will include remarks from Dr. Mark Gotcher, Deputy Commissioner of the Arkansas Department of Education.

In 2015, a group of 26 Arkansas teachers and school librarians were selected to create dynamic lesson plans and teaching tools using historical objects, works of art, and primary sources from the collections of the founding partners: the U.S. Department of State Diplomatic Reception Rooms, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, in collaboration with the Arkansas Department of Education. The William J. Clinton Presidential Center joined the partnership in 2016.

Objects and art selected for the program were used to illustrate national and state-based stories that vibrantly demonstrate the many ways our nation valued civic engagement during its formative years, as well as the importance of this continued focus today. A special focus of this program is to engage students in active learning that teaches the importance of stewardship and civic engagement in the life of their community at the national, state, and local level.

The program is led by the U.S. Department of States Diplomatic Reception Rooms and is part of a national Inter-Agency Educational Initiative that began when representatives from 13 national partnering organizations signed the Declaration of Learning in 2013.

This document pledged that the U.S. Department of State, the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, and 11 other national organizations would work with state and local partners to co-create learning tools for educators and students in middle and secondary education using historical art and objects from their respective collections and best practices in education.

The Diplomatic Reception Rooms are the site for many of our nations diplomatic meetings and events including summits, treaty negotiations, official State luncheons, and important Presidential speeches.

Located on the top two floors of the U.S. Department of State, these 42 rooms are modeled after 18th century rooms and spaces in our countrys history. The rooms house a historic museum-quality collection of more than 5,000 fine and decorative art objects that tell the story of our countrys founding and formative years (1730-1840).

The rooms and their historic collections were created and are sustained through generous gifts from American donors, corporations, and foundations.
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.
Italian police arrested 15 alleged organized crime figures accused of smuggling drugs from South America and laundering the profits, according to a statement released Thursday.

The joint effort of Italian state and financial police and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials in the US and Colombia targeted a ring accused of sending drugs, mostly cocaine, from Colombia to Spain and then into Italy.

An initial operation between May and October of 2013 uncovered a connection between the group in Italy and drug traffickers in Guatemala known for moving cocaine out of Colombia. During this first sting, officials seized 20 kilos of cocaine and arrested four couriers.

The latest operation began with an investigation aided by DEA officials in the US regarding the alleged use of import/export companies as covers by Colombian cartels to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

Italian police used bank records and wiretaps to trace the route of drugs from Venezuela to Colombia and then on to Rome.

The alleged leaders of the drug ring are Venanzo Tamburini, Ermanno Di Rocco and Antonio Antonini, local media has reported.

Police say Tamburini was in charge of making deals with Latin American drug suppliers, while di Rocco and Antonini handled distribution in Italy.

Some of the drug money accrued was sent back to Colombia via couriers and the rest was laundered through transfers to foreign banks, according to police.

The investigation resulted in the seizure of more than three tonnes of cocaine, 42 kilograms of heroin and 96 kilograms of methamphetamine.

Authorities also seized  245,000 (US$ 266,802) in drugs proceeds in Italy, according to local media.

Ninety-six others associated with the drug trafficking ring were arrested outside of Italy and US$ 11 million dollars in laundered funds have been seized, police said.

occrp.org
Hackers conducted coordinated attacks on five of Russias top 10 financial institutions on Tuesday, the Central Bank told state media.

Sberbank, along with four other institutions, experienced distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Tuesday and through the night into Wednesday before they subsided. The hackers failed to get their hands on bank funds during the attacks. Russian authorities have yet to identify any of the perpetrators.

Russian financial institutions Alfa Bank, Moscow Bank, Rosbank and the Moscow Exchange faced similar attacks on Tuesday, according to Russian state news agency TASS.

Typical DDoS attacks involve hackers overloading target servers with fake Internet traffic until they collapse, shutting down genuine business activity.

The attacks on the financial institutions have been traced to machines in 30 countries including the US, India, Taiwan and Israel, with each attack lasting from one to 12 hours, Russian news outlet RBC reported.

The attacks were largely unsuccessful in disrupting usual financial services and customers information was not compromised, bank officials told state media.

Sberbank plans to work with the security teams of the other banks involved and law enforcement to determine who organized the attacks, according to chairman Stanislav Kuznetsov. The last major series of DDoS attacks on banks was in October 2015, when eight Russian banks were targeted.

"These kind of attacks happen, for us this is attack 68," Kuznetsov told Russian state media. He declined to speculate on a motive for the attacks.

occrp.org
District of Columbia: Thousands of protesters angry over Donald Trump`s election win took to the streets for a second straight night, with at least one demonstration degenerating into a riot against the tycoon turned president-elect.

Accusing Trump of racism, sexism and xenophobia, protesters from New York to Los Angeles blocked traffic and chanted slogans like "Not my president" and "We reject the president-elect."

The worst violence was in the northwestern city of Portland, where protesters hurled projectiles at officers, vandalized businesses, smashed car windows and attacked drivers.

Police said they were treating the protests as a "riot" due to what they said was "extensive criminal and dangerous behavior."

In his first comments on the unrest, Trump blamed the media.

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" tweeted Trump.

Hours later he seemed to change tack, writing "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!"

The violence stood in contrast to an apparently harmonious meeting between Trump and President Barack Obama designed to heal divisions after the most acrimonious election campaign in recent memory.

Obama and Trump put past animosity aside during the 90-minute White House meeting designed to quell fears about the health of the world`s pre-eminent democracy, and vowed to carry out a smooth transfer of power.

After a nasty campaign that culminated in the election of a 70-year-old billionaire and former reality TV star who has never held public office and who gained power on a populist platform, the message was: this is business as usual in a democracy.

The outgoing Democratic president and his successor huddled one-on-one in the Oval Office, for what Obama characterized as an "excellent conversation" and then put on a remarkably civil joint public appearance.

"It is important for all of us, regardless of party and regardless of political preferences, to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face," Obama said.

Trump appeared more subdued than usual, and was unusually cautious and deferential in his remarks.

"Mr President, it was a great honor being with you," Trump said, calling Obama a "very good man."The meeting, which came less than 36 hours after Trump`s shock election victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, had the potential to be awkward.

After all, Trump championed the so-called "birther movement" challenging that Obama was actually born in the United States -- a suggestion laden with deep racial overtones -- only dropping the position recently.

And if the president-elect fulfils his campaign promises, he will unravel almost all of Obama`s signature achievements.

Trump -- who previously called Obama the "most ignorant president in our history" -- said he looked forward to receiving the president`s counsel.

Obama -- who has cast Trump as a whiner and "uniquely unqualified" to be commander-in-chief -- vowed his support.

He told Trump his administration would "do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds."

The two men ended the improbable and historic White House encounter with a handshake and refused to take questions, appearing to find common cause in their opinion of the press.

"Here`s a good rule. Don`t answer questions when they just start yelling," Obama told Trump.While their husbands were getting acquainted, First Lady Michelle Obama met soon-to-be successor Melania Trump while Vice President Joe Biden held West Wing talks with Trump`s running mate Mike Pence.

In the evening, Trump tweeted: "A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!"

White House officials said Obama and Trump discussed a range of issues including global hotspots and the president`s meetings next week with leaders from Germany, Greece and across the Asia-Pacific.

On that trip, Obama is likely to be inundated with panicked questions about America`s role in world affairs.

The White House hopes that by rolling out the red carpet for Trump, they can bind him to some of the conventions of the office. Trump then traveled to Capitol Hill to meet Republican leaders who had been at best cool to him winning their party`s nomination.

The president-elect proclaimed health care, border security and jobs as his top three priorities in the White House.

"We had a very detailed meeting," Trump told reporters. "As you know, health care -- we`re going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on health care," he said.

Trump made repealing Obamacare, and building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, pillars of his presidential campaign.

During a bitter campaign that tugged at America`s democratic fabric, the tycoon also pledged to deport illegal immigrants, ban Muslims from the country and tear up free-trade deals.

Trump said he and the Republican majority in Congress were going to accomplish "absolutely spectacular things for the American people," adding he was eager to get started.

Team Trump unveiled a transition website -- www.greatagain.gov -- that highlights the colossal human resources challenge facing the incoming administration under the headline "Help wanted: 4,000 presidential appointees."
Beijing: Vowing not to allow anyone to rip out any part of Chinese territory, President Xi Jinping on Friday called for unity between China and Taiwan under the leadership of the ruling Communist Party, amid political turmoil in Hong Kong and growing pro-independence sentiment in Taiwan.

"I call on all Chinese who revere Sun Yat-sen, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese, to unite, no matter what their political affiliations are," Xi told a gathering of top officials and military officers at the Great Hall of the People.

Chinese should unite in pursuit for a rejuvenated China Sun dreamt about, Xi said while commemorating the 150th birth anniversary of Sun, one of China's influential leaders in overthrowing monarchy before the advent of Mao Zedong.

But at the same Xi, who is the General Secretary of the CPC and head of the military besides being President, said to love the country, the Chinese people should uphold the leadership of the CPC, the socialist system in China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics developed under the CPC's leadership.

"Sun Yat-sen unequivocally opposed any remarks or actions that attempted to split the country or the nation," Xi was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Quoting Sun, Xi said that united, the people of the entire country benefit; disunited, people suffer.

"All activities that intend to divide the country will certainly be firmly opposed by all Chinese people. We will never allow anyone, any organisation, any party to split off any tract of territory from China anytime, or in any way," Xi said.

"The best way we commemorate Sun is to learn and carry forward his invaluable spirit, to unite all that can be united and mobilise all that can be mobilised to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of," Xi said.

It is rare for the CPC leaders to pay tribute to non-Communist leaders.

Born in 1866, Sun was the founder leader of the Kuomintang Party, which remained a prominent political party in Taiwan after the island parted from China following the rise of the Communist Party of China headed by Mao.

Sun, who founded the Republic of China after the Qing Dynasty was toppled in the 1911 revolution, is also revered in Taiwan, which the mainland considers a breakaway province.

Xi's appeal for unity was significant as Taiwan's new President Tsai Ing-Wen was elected this year defeating Ma Ying-Jeou who promoted normalisation of ties between the two sides in the election early this.

In his speech, Xi said CPC members are the firmest supporters, most loyal collaborators and most faithful successors of Sun's revolutionary undertakings.

"Today, we are closer, more confident and more able to achieve national rejuvenation than ever before," Xi said.

"With lots of challenges and difficulties ahead, there is still a long way to go until we have truly modernised the country, revitalised the nation and realised the common prosperity of all Chinese," Xi added.
New Delhi: Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Friday joined the panic-stricken common public, which had lined up for hours outside the bank ATMs to exchange old currency notes, days after the Centre's demonetisation move.

According to reports, Gandhi stood in the queue at the SBI ATM centre at the Parliament Street here.

This was a rare visit by the Congress vice president, who is normally protected by a large posse of security men.

Talking to reporters, he said, ''The common man is facing problem due to the Centre's demonetisation move. I have also come here to exchange the old currency.''

I want to stand in queue to exchange Rs 4000, Rahul said..

I am standing in support of people. If citizens face problem, so can I, the Congress vice president said.

Taking a swipe at PM Narendra Modi and the government, he said, "The government should be for these people, not a select 10 or 15 people who are not here and suffering".

Gandhi also sportingly posed for selfies with customers who were stunned to find a VIP in their midst.

When quizzed repeatedly why he was there, Gandhi replied, "You will not understand that. You or your millionaire bosses or the media or the government will never understand what these people are suffering."
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat government today said the Centre had given its approval for conducting the 2017 NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) for medical admissions in Gujarati in the state, along with English.

"Due to numerous representations of parents, the state government had urged the Union Health Ministry to conduct NEET in Gujarati," Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel said.

"Union Health Minister J P Nadda in a letter to Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has informed that Health Ministry will conduct NEET 2017 in Gujarati language in our state," he said.

The Supreme Court has made NEET mandatory for medical admissions.

Parents of students, who want to appear for NEET next year, were pressing the government to conduct the exam in Gujarati for the benefit of Gujarati-medium students. They had also staged protests in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar on the issue.
Paris: Fluctuat nec mergitur: tossed but not sunk. A year after the Paris attacks, the survivors of the carnage and those who lost loved ones are doing their best to live up to the city`s Latin motto and not be dragged under by anger and fear.

There are the wounded -- over 400 of them, nursing sometimes horrific injuries.

And there are the walking wounded: those who escaped the carnage but are nursing deep psychological scars and the 1,000 or so who lost a relative, including more than 50 children growing up without one of their parents.

Each has their own way of trying to heal."We are the ones left behind, stalked by the same shadow, united by the idea that we must not be killed a second time," said Antoine Leiris, the young father who penned a poignant, widely-shared Facebook message three days after the death of his wife in the massacre, vowing not to give way to hatred.

"I was a sort of totem to which people rallied, a symbol of someone who was trying to pick themselves up. But I`m just a normal person... There are days when I`m afraid, days when I want to flee, days when I want to smash everything to pieces, like everyone else," Leiris told AFP in a telephone interview.

In a France 5 TV documentary to air on Sunday, the 35-year-old explores how others bereaved or injured by terrorism -- in Paris or elsewhere -- have tried to rebuild their lives.

Among those he meets are a woman left raising two children alone, an amputee who shows him the bullet that tore his leg and a Holocaust survivor who taught him it is okay not to forgive.

"At first I shielded myself and my son from the world, because the world had hurt us. But we did not want to remain in isolation. This was my way of re-engaging with the world," he says.Maureen Roussel, a survivor of the carnage at the Bataclan concert hall, gave up her job as a teaching assistant after the attacks.

"I said to myself that if I couldn`t protect myself in the face of danger I couldn`t bear to be responsible for children," Roussel said.

A year on, she is still traumatised, constantly imagining more apocalyptic scenes.

"I feel like James Bond, as if everything might explode behind me," she says.

The association Life for Paris, which she founded to help survivors and victims` relatives, acted as a sort of lifeline.

"Before I used to look after little kids. Now I`m helping lots of big kids."Lea Malwe, a 28-year-old physiotherapist, was hit on two fronts on November 13, 2015.

Her boyfriend -- a "handsome, funny, kind" sound engineer she had met in a bar a few weeks earlier -- was shot dead in the Bataclan.

Minutes beforehand, the gunmen mowed down 14 people at the Petit Cambodge restaurant and Carillon bar restaurant and bar on the corner of her street.

The willowy Malwe, who used to boast to foreigners about how safe her city was, has been living "like a robot" ever since.

"What changed for me is that before I expected to become a mum, grow old, become a grandmother and so on, and now, none of that is certain. I know now you can die of something other than old age," she says.

Her one source of solace is "seeing people love each other"."If, like me, you have the chance of a second life, life is almost more beautiful," said Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe, a senior civil servant who was left bleeding on the pavement after being shot on a cafe terrace.

Triomphe, 58, was having a drink at La Bonne Biere when a bullet ripped into his thigh, damaging his intestine and sciatic nerve.

Another hit him in the arm and fragments also lodged in his ankle and foot.

He recalls the "angel" of a doctor who used bar towels to apply a tourniquet and, later, the help of another physician friend, who helped save him from a pulmonary embolism as he was being shunted from hospital to hospital.

After weeks on his back staring at a hospital ceiling he was eventually "turned upright" and strapped into a wheelchair -- the turning point in a remarkable recovery.

"I learned to walk again, and I mean really to put one foot in front of the other," said Triomphe, who now gets by without crutches.

Hiking in the mountains -- his great passion -- is out of the question for the moment, but other horizons beckon.

Next year, Triomphe moves to Marseille to take up a top role as state commissioner for civic engagement.

One of the questions that gnaws at him is "why France has produced more jihadists than any European country.

"That`s a fundamental question," he said.
Lucknow: With the aim of ensuring medical facilities to poor, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Friday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to allow Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 invalid notes at private hospitals and medicine shops till November 30.

This will ensure medical facilities to poor, who are facing a lot of problems after ban of high denomination notes, he said in separate letters to Modi and Jaitley.

"As Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 were banned in haste, those undergoing treatment at hospitals and nursing homes are facing a lot of problems. I, therefore, request you to intervene and allow private hospitals, nursing homes and medicine shops to accept these notes till at least November 30," Yadav said.

"Due to the ban, those going to avail medical facilities in hospital are a harried lot. It is proving fatal for them. Allowing (Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes) currency will help people get medical treatment," he said.

As foreign tourists were facing difficulties due to demonetisation of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, Yadav had yesterday directed the state Chief Secretary to ensure opening of extra counters for them to exchange currencies.

"The Chief Secretary should coordinate with banks and ensure opening of extra counters for foreign tourists in Agra and Varanasi. This will help them in exchanging their notes easily," Yadav in his directive.

As the Centre's move caught people by surprise, especially with wedding season round the corner, SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav demanded a roll back of demonetisation decision for a few days in view of the wedding season.

He suggested that people be given a week's time by the government.

BSP chief Mayawati has also said poor people and farmers have been badly hit by high denomination rupee ban decision, which reminded people of the dark days of Emergency imposed by then Congress government.
New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah on Friday hit out at Congress, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and Aam Aadmi Party for criticising Modi governments demonetisation move.

In an apparent dig at the Opposition parties for criticising Centre's bold step to curb the black money and corruption, Shah said, Poor will not suffer, but some political parties have become poor.

The way some rival parties are rattled, it seems BJP will benefit, Shah said when asked, what would be the political implications following the demonetisation decision.

As people are facing difficulties in withdrawing money at thousands of Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) across the country, the BJP president said, the government is concerned about their worries and appealed to people to cooperate.

ATMs machines operate according to the weight of the notes and as the weight of the new currency notes is different from the existing ones, it is causing some problems. Rs 100 currency notes are being deposited in ATMs, but as there is a huge rush, the machines are running out of cash very quickly, Shah said.

Shah's reaction comes after serpentine queues were witnessed at various banks' and ATMs across the country as people made a beeline for withdrawals of the permitted amounts.

Crores of people were disappointed as thousands of ATMs did not dispense cash.

The BJP leader urged the people to extend their co-operation, saying that the government also feels their pain.

"The Narendra Narendra Modi government has embarked on a campaign to end corruption. I appeal to people to join in and give it speed," Shah said.

Shah also said there will be no inquiry on people depositing up to Rs 2.5 lakh in demonetized currency in banks.Rs 2.5 lakh in demonetized currency in banks.

"The middle class, the poor and small traders will face no problems," he said, adding that there is no need to rush as the currency notes will be accepted till December end.

Janata Dal (United) and Biju Janata Dal have supported government's unique way to fight against black money.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced that the government had decided to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes to tackle the menace of black money.

Addressing the nation, PM Modi on Tuesday said, To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the five hundred rupee and thousand rupee currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight, that is 8th November 2016.

The five hundred and thousand rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements will become just worthless pieces of paper. The rights and the interests of honest, hard-working people will be fully protected. Let me assure you that notes of one hundred, fifty, twenty, ten, five, two and one rupee and all coins will remain legal tender and will not be affected.

This step will strengthen the hands of the common man in the fight against corruption, black money and fake currency. To minimise the difficulties of citizens in the coming days, several steps are being taken.
Patna: People in large numbers thronged banks to exchange old currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination and withdraw money from ATMs, that went dry at several places, across Bihar on the second day of transaction.

In Patna, many stood in long serpentine queues in front of different nationalised and private banks to exchange old currency notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 besides depositing and withdrawing money.

Since morning till in the evening long queues were witnessed at almost every bank branch as panic-stricken citizens went to banks on the second day of their reopening after the Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced to demonetise Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes to fight menace of black money, corruption and fake currency.

Long queues were witnessed at ATMs too which opened today after the gap of two days. ATMs were closed for two days-Wednesday and Thursday- for their re-calibration to dispense money.

Many ATMs ran out of cash in couple of hours as there were heavy rush to withdraw money but a large number of ATMs, especially on Boring road or Boring canal road of the capital, were not working till 11 am since morning.

People were a harried lot as they were finding it difficult to meet their daily needs for paucity of money.

"After completing my morning walk, I went to the ATM of ICICI Bank around 7 am on Boring road roundabout but it was closed. One of the guards told me the ATM was to be replenished with cash in the night but the process could not be completed in the night and hence it was not dispensing money," said Ajay Kumar, a resident of Anandpuri area in the capital.

"Things have gone from bad to worse as I am completely run out of money and it is becoming difficult to meet my daily needs," Kumar added.

Vivek Kumar Singh, a resident of Rajiv Nagar, said, "I woke up early in the morning in order to avoid rush at ATMs thinking that ATMs would have been replenished in the night. But to my surprise, no ATM was opened in my vicinity."

Bank employees are facing tough time dealing with customers.

"We (employees) could not get time to have our lunch during the day as the branch was flooded with people," S K Shrivastava, Manager, Bank of India, S K Nagar branch told PTI.

The situation was more or less the same at all branches of banks be it nationalised or private banks. SBI, Bank of India, Allahabad Bank, Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank, UCO bank, ICICI, HDFC etc.

There are 6,700 bank branches in Bihar. Out of this 4,300 are in public and private sector while rest are regional rural and cooperative banks.

The state has around 6,600 ATMs and over 4 crore ATM-cum debit cards.

There were reports of shortage of cash in some branches due to huge rush of customers which was solved.

"Yes, we are getting reports of problems like shortage of cash from various branches and work of money exchange is hampered for an hour or so but soon the cash is provided to the banks concerned and work resumed. It is a continuous process. This is happening because of people rushing to the branches in huge numbers," said Praveen Kumar, Assistant General Manager, RBI Patna, who has been made nodal officer for Patna.

Similar scenes of people queueing up at various banks' branches and ATMs have been reported from various districts.
New Delhi: The Shiv Sena has also come out openly against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's de-monetisation scheme to curb black money.

Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray said that the move to scrap old Rs 100/500 notes had badly affected the common people.

This initiative taken by the government is not in public interest because only normal people are suffering from this hasty decision, said Thackeray.

Everybody is saying that it is a surgical strike, but what if angry and frustrated people start a surgical strike against the government, he added.

The Sena leader said that instead of inconvincing the common man, the government should have taken strong steps to bring back black money stashed away in tax havens like Switzerland.

Government should have done surgical strikes on the black money deposited in all the Swiss accounts, he said.

Long queues were witnessed at banks and ATMs, which opened after two days, as people rushed to get new banknotes in lieu of their old defunct bills.

Many ATMs ran out of cash in a couple of hours as there was a heavy rush to withdraw lower denomination currency. Most of the machines were equipped to tender Rs 100 notes, while some were still not working.

Banks are saying that they are trying to recalibrate their machine for higher denomination notes, it will take some days before they start tendering new high-security Rs 500 and 2000 notes which is expected to ease the pressure.
New Delhi: With anger brewing among the common public and ATMs across the country running out of cash days after the Centre's demonetisation decision, the Reserve Bank Of India (RBI) on Friday stepped in to caution people not to panic and have some patience.

Separately, the Finance Ministry also said that there is no need to panic and depositing junked Rs 500, 1,000 notes of upto Rs 2.50 lakh in bank accounts will not be reported to the Income Tax department.

A Finance Ministry note also cautioned people against depositing the money of unknown people in their own accounts or falling prey to cheats, thugs and rumour mongers.

Besides, the Ministry said, farm income continues to remain tax free and can be easily deposited in bank.

Small businessmen, housewives, artisans, workers can also deposit cash in their accounts without any apprehensions, it added.

"Deposits up to Rs 2.50 lakh will not be reported to the Income Tax department. There will be no harassment or investigation. All honest citizen need not worry. Farmers' income is tax free and can be easily deposited in bank," the Ministry said in newspaper ads.

The RBI today reiterated that enough cash is available with banks and urged public to exercise patience and exchange notes at convenience.

Enough Cash is Available, RBI reassures; urges Public to exercise Patience and Exchange Notes at Conveniencehttps://t.co/gbCaSorPtb  ReserveBankOfIndia (@RBI) November 11, 2016

In its biggest crackdown ever on black money, the government on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and asked people holding such notes to deposit in bank accounts.

Since yesterday people have been thronging banks amid concerns among people over exchanging and depositing the scrapped high denomination currency.

People can deposit old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in their accounts till December 30, 2016, without any limit. Restrictions have been imposed on withdrawal limit and people can withdraw up to Rs 10,000 per day or Rs 20,000 per week. This limit will be reviewed after few days.

Besides, old notes up to Rs 4,000 can be exchanged at any bank or post office till November 24, 2016, by showing photo ID proof.

ATMs can be used to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day per card till November 18 and Rs 4,000 from November 19 onwards. This limit too will be reviewed subsequently.

The ministry also advised people to make payments using cheques, demand drafts, debit or credit cards and electronic fund transfers and there is no restriction on such transactions.

With PTI Inputs
Panaji: Even as Congress maintained silence on the possibility of an alliance for the Goa Assembly polls claiming that they are yet to get any written proposals, like-minded parties in the state have said that submission of proposal in politics is something new on the block.

"Submission of a written proposals in an era where coalition politics, at least against the BJP has come to stay, is something new to me," Vijai Sardesai, an independent legislator and mentor of Goa Forward Party told PTI today.

All India Congress Committee General Secretary Digvijay Singh who is currently camping in Goa to shortlist the candidates for upcoming elections had said that the party (Congress) has not received any formal proposal for alliance from any like minded parties.

"All the same, we in the Opposition are being closely watched by the people of Goa and they would never forgive us if we undermine prevailing public sentiment with popular surveys indicating 80 per cent Goans wanting BJP government out from Goa," Sardesai said today.

"If any of us intentionally work to sabotage the unity of Opposition forces then we would invite curse of Goans and their future generations," he commented.

Goa Forward and NCP have already showed their intention to align with the Congress to contest the upcoming Goa Legislative Assembly election.

"Till date we have not learnt lessons what happens after we stand divided. We are going to destroy ourselves if we contest against each other," NCP Goa President Jose Philip said reacting to the delay by Congress to decide on an alliance.

"What is the reason that Congress is acting adamant on the issue of alliance ? Whether they want us to destroy ourselves or want to give a chance to BJP to win. Nobody knows," he said.

Congress' strength in Goa was reduced to single digit in the State Legislative Assembly after the 2012 elections which saw BJP forming the government.
Tokyo: Shedding its reservations, Japan on Friday made an exception to sign a landmark civil nuclear deal with India, opening the door for export of its atomic technology and reactors, after adding features like safety and security keeping in mind its sensitivities on the issue.

The nuclear deal, described as historic by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was part of the ten agreements signed between the two countries in various areas after he held talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe on the second day of his three-day visit.

The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries and Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar said the nuclear deal was similar to the agreements signed with the US and other countries with added features on safety and security in keeping with Japan's sensitivities.

At the joint media interaction with Modi, Abe said he was delighted over the signing of the agreement on peaceful use of nuclear energy.

"This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in Non-Proliferation regime even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT," he said.

Also Read: LIVE: India becomes 1st non-NPT country to sign nuclear deal with Japan

"It (the agreement) is in line with Japan's ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons," said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II.

He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said.

"Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of Climate Change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan," he said and thanked Abe, Japanese government and Parliament for their support to this agreement.

The deal would allow Japan to export nuclear technology to India, making it the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo. It would also cement the bilateral economic and security ties as the two countries warm up to counter an assertive China.

There was political resistance in Japan - the only country to suffer atomic bombings during World War II - against a nuclear deal with India, particularly after the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

Abe pushed for universalisation of the NPT, entry into force of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and start of negotiations at the earliest on Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT).

Later, a joint statement said, "The two Prime Ministers welcomed the signing of the Agreement between the Government of Japan and the Government of the Republic of India for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy which reflects a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership in the cause of clean energy, economic development and a peaceful and secure world."

In his remarks, Prime Minister Modi said as democracies, the two countries "support openness, transparency and the rule of law".

"We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he said.

The two sides also called upon all countries to work towards eliminating terror safe havens, disrupting their networks and stopping cross-border movement of terrorists, in an apparent reference to Pakistan.

"The two Prime Ministers condemned terrorism in strongest terms in all its forms and manifestations in the spirit of 'zero tolerance'," the joint statement said.

The two leaders noted with great concern the growing menace of terrorism and violent extremism and its universal reach.

"They called upon all countries to implement the UNSC Resolution 1267 and other relevant resolutions designating terrorist entities," it said, referring to India's bid to get Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar designated as global a terrorist under this resolution.

China - a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council - had blocked India's move to put a ban on Azhar under the Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the Council.

Regarding bilateral economic and trade ties, Modi said deeper economic engagement, growth of trade, manufacturing and investment ties, focus on clean energy, partnership to secure the citizens, and cooperation on infrastructure and skill development are among key priorities in the Indo-Japan relationship.

"India and its economy are pursuing many transformations. Our aim is to become a major centre for manufacturing, investments and for the 21st century knowledge industries.

"And, in this journey, we see Japan as a natural partner. We believe there is vast scope to combine our relative advantages, whether of capital, technology or human resources, to work for mutual benefit," he said in his joint interaction.

The Prime Minister said that the strategic partnership between the two countries also brings peace, stability and balance to the region. It is alive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges in Asia-Pacific, he said.

The successful Malabar naval exercise has underscored the convergence in the two sides' strategic interests in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific, Modi said.

On his part, Abe mentioned the high speed train corridor between Mumbai and Ahmedabad that is being built with the help of Japan, saying the project symbolizes a new dimension in the special relations.

Prime Minister Abe said the designing of the project will begin by the end of this year, construction will begin in 2018 and the high speed train will be in service from 2023.

He said Modi, who will travel by one such train to Kobe city tomorrow from here, will see for himself that it is the safest technology in the world.

The Japanese private sector also would be setting up an institute of manufacturing in India to train about 30,000 people in 10 years, particularly in rural areas, Abe said.

Abe said Japan will set up a tourism bureau in New Delhi to encourage people-to-people contacts. He said he wants to work with Modi in liberalizing the visa rules.

"India-Japan relations have the greatest potential in the world. Strong India is in the best interest of Japan and strong Japan is in the best interest of India," Abe said.

Noting that he had met Modi for the third time in one year, Abe praised him, saying he had a "global vision" and was a "decisive leader".

Later briefing reporters, Jaishankar said there was "meeting of minds" between the two sides on a large number of issues and a major focus area was to further ramp up economic cooperation.

He said Japanese investment in India has gone up and priority would be given to infrastructure projects including the dedicated freight corridor and Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor.

Jaishankar said the "full architecture" to take forward the eco cooperation was one of the major highlight of the talks.

Asked about the proposed purchase of 12 US-2 aircraft from Japan, the Foreign Secretary said the issue came up for some discussion and that India was still evaluating the requirement of the aircraft.

On flagship high speed rail project, he said some important decisions were taken about it, adding it was agreed that the general consultant will start work in December while construction work will start by end of 2018 and the network will be made operational by 2023.
Cuttack: Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Friday launched a signature campaign against alleged "injustice" meted out to the state by the Centre over Mahanadi and Polavaram projects by Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh respectively.

Patnaik became the first signatory to the memorandum, which will be submitted to President Pranab Mukherjee. It is proposed to contain at least one signature from all the 87 lakh families of the state, BJD sources said.

Addressing a gathering here, the Chief Minister said the projects on the upstream of Mahanadi in Chhattisgarh would severely affect the flow of water to Odisha during non-monsoon days and spell doom for the riverside areas.

"Starting from potable water, the entire livelihood of people of Odisha would be severely jeopardised," he said asserting that he would step up this fight for the interest of state till the last breath of his life.

Soon after Patnaik put his signature on the memorandum, five accomplished farmers drawn from across the state followed suit. Eminent citizens of the city from different walks of life also put their signatures on it following which ministers and other BJD leaders sitting on the dais signed the memorandum.

Patnaik had earlier lamented that Prime Minister Narendra Modi remained silent over Mahanadi water dispute. He had also asserted that his government would move court for protection of the state's interest.

"I had sought the Prime Minister's intervention in the Mahanadi water issue. However, it is a matter of regret that the Prime Minister does not respond to us in this sensitive matter," he had said on Monday addressing the ruling BJD MPs, MLAs and senior leaders.

Stating that the state government has been time and again reminding the Centre about the "adverse impact" of the project by Chhattisgarh on Odisha, Patnaik added that the Centre was not pursuing the issue with sincerity and has been ignoring our demands.
Tokyo: India and Japan on Friday signed the landmark civil nuclear agreement following the annual bilateral summit headed by Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe here.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on a three-day visit to Japan, on Friday met top Japanese business leaders and urged them to invest in India.

Here are the latest updates of his visit: 

Groundbreaking ceremony of bullet train in 2017

Also Read: Nuke deal with Japan contains features of pact with US

The nuclear deal will come into effect once Japan's Parliament ratifies it: Jaishankar

The signing of civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement is something that has taken us some time to negotiate for very understandable reasons. Indo-Japan nuclear pact has striking similarities with agreements India signed with the US and others: Jaishankar

Last two years witnessed a sharp increase in Japanese economic activities in India: Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar

PM Narendra Modi thanks his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe for the support extended for Indias membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The successful Malabar exercise has underscored the strategic convergence in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific, says Modi. He adds: "We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism."

Our strategic partnership is not only for the good and security of our own societies. It also brings peace, stability and balance to region: PM Modi

The deal would allow Japan to export nuclear technology to India, making it the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo. It would also cement the bilateral economic and security ties as the two countries warm up to counter an assertive China. Notably, there was political resistance in Japan - the only country to suffer atomic bombings during World War II - against a nuclear deal with India, particularly after the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

India, Japan sign landmark civil Nuclear Deal.

Delegation level talks between India and Japan begins at Kantei.

Tokyo: Delegation level talks between India and Japan begins at Kantei, the Prime Minister's Office. pic.twitter.com/0rk6HpzryA  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

PM Narendra Modi welcomed by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Kantei.

PM Narendra Modi meets Japan Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida.

Foreign Minister of Japan, Mr. Fumio Kishida met the Prime Minister in Tokyo. pic.twitter.com/6XrjzHSUzd  PMO India (@PMOIndia) November 11, 2016

PM Narendra Modi meets Former Japan Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.

Mr. Yoshiro Mori, the former PM of Japan had a meeting with the Prime Minister. pic.twitter.com/QvfEMTovcI  PMO India (@PMOIndia) November 11, 2016

Combo of your hardware & our software is fantastic; Let's march forward & explore bigger potentials and brighter prospects: PM Modi.

In 2 years, India is up by 32 places in global competitiveness index of world economic forum: PM.

FDI equity inflows have gone up by 52% in last 2 yrs; We have done substantial improvement on ease of doing business: PM Modi.

FDI equity inflows have gone up by 52% in last 2 yrs; We have done substantial improvement on ease of doing business: PM Modi pic.twitter.com/Bk25MClIz0  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Japan has important role as India needs scale, speed and skill; Involvement in our mega projects signifies scale & speed: PM.

Want to make India the most open economy in the world: PM.

Lower labour costs, large domestic market and macro-economic stability combine to make India a very attractive investment destination: PM.

'Made in India' and 'Made by Japan' combination has started working wonderfully: PM.

Japan has emerged as the 4th largest source of FDI and that too in various fields: PM Modi

In 2015, the Indian economy grew faster than other major economies: PM.

In 2015, the Indian economy grew faster than other major economies: PM.

India and Japan will have to continue to play an imp role in Asias emergence: PM.

Asia has emerged as the new centre of global growth. This is because of its competitive manufacturing, and expanding markets: PM.

PM Modi speaking at CII-KEIDANREN business luncheon in Tokyo.

PM concludes by inviting Japanese technology & experience to India - a land of prospects and assured market & human resources.

India's prowess in software is complemented by Japan's strength in hardware. Want to assure you that we'll provide a level playing field: PM.

India's prowess in software is complemented by Japan's strength in hardware. Want to assure you that we'll provide a level playing field: PM pic.twitter.com/47KuwPVjfE  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

PM Modi stresses on 'Make in India', Innovation and technology transfer. This is meant to leverage the vast manpower India possesses, says PM.

India has conducive biz environment which Japan can take advantage of. Have taken steps to implement your suggestions: PM at IJBLF meeting.

PM Modi addresses IJBLF meeting; mentions his long standing ties with Japan since he was CM Gujarat.

Tokyo: PM Narendra Modi addresses IJBLF meeting; mentions his longstanding ties with Japan since he was CM Gujarat. pic.twitter.com/Un2T2J7a5G  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

PM Modi and the CEOs of the India-Japan Business Leaders Forum take a group picture.

Tokyo: PM Narendra Modi and the CEOs of the India-Japan Business Leaders Forum take a group picture. pic.twitter.com/QTZ0dHQC2K  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

PM Modi interacts with members of the India-Japan Business Leaders Forum in Tokyo.

he nuclear deal - which is subject to ratification by the Japanese Parliament -- will allow Japan to supply nuclear reactors, fuel and technology. The two nations reached a broad agreement last December, said foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup.

PM Modi met Japanese Emperor Akihito Friday morning, ahead of his meeting with counterpart Shinzo Abe. The two Prime Ministers will hold wide-ranging talks.

Prime Minister Modi, who reached Tokyo after a brief stopover in Thai capital Bangkok to pay respects to revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died last month, tweeted, "Looking forward to fruitful deliberations that will boost economic and cultural ties between India and Japan".

India is in advanced negotiations with US-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba, to build six nuclear reactors in the south - a part of New Delhi's plan to ramp up nuclear capacity ten-fold by 2032.

The nuclear deal comes after long negotiations to find a way around Tokyo's reservations about such an agreement with a nation that hasn't signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has sought assurances from New Delhi that it would not conduct nuclear tests any more.

The main accord is likely to be accompanied by a separate document stipulating that Tokyo will suspend nuclear cooperation if India conducts a nuclear test, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper reported. Initially, Japan wanted it to be part of the agreement, but India resisted, it said.

India has declared a moratorium on nuclear testing since its last explosions in 1998. The nation -- which has concerns about nuclear-armed China as well as its long-time rival Pakistan -- has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, contending that it is discriminatory.

The nuclear deal is seen as a step that will draw the two nations closer in the backdrop of concerns about a reduced US engagement in the South-east Asia following US President-elect Donald Trump's "America First" campaign promise.

India and Japan have also been trying to close a deal on the supply of amphibious rescue aircraft US-2 to the Indian navy, which would be one of Japan's first sales of military equipment since Prime Minister Abe lifted a 50-year ban on arms exports.

With Agency inputs
Noida: Amid chaos over poor cash flow in the wake of demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, rumours were rife on Friday that the price of salt has gone up to Rs 400 in Uttar Pradesh.

The panic-stricken shopkeepers shut their shops following the spread of the rumour.

This is to be noted that it is just a rumour.

In a bid to allay the fears of the people of the state, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav said there was no shortage of salt. He further urged people not to pay attention to rumours.

Also, an alert has been issued in this regard.

The government's sudden decision to withdraw Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes and shortage of lesser-denomination notes has caused a lot of inconvenience to the people across the country.
New Delhi: In an unprecedented action, the Supreme Court on Friday issued notice of contempt to its former judge Markandey Katju for using "intemperate" language and "scandalising" judiciary as he appeared before a bench and had heated exchanges with it.

A bench comprising justices Ranjan Gogoi, P C Pant and U U Lalit said Katju's statement in a recent blog constituted a serious assault on judges and not on the judgement and therefore the notice of contempt to him.

Katju protested against the decision saying the judges were threatening him and it was not proper for them to behave in such manner with a former judge of the apex court.

"I am not scared of it. Don't give me threat," the former judge remarked as Justice Gogoi pronounced the order in a surcharged atmosphere.

Justice Gogoi warned him saying "don't provoke us any more" to which Katju said "you are provoking me by this type of threat. You requested me to come here and assist you."

At this point, Justice Gogoi asked, "is there somebody to escort Justice Katju (out)". Katju replied, "What is this behaviour. On your request I came here. Is this the way I am to be treated."

However, the Bench continued with the dictation of the order saying that prima facie the statement (of Katju) constituted a serious assault on judges and not on judgement. Therefore a notice of contempt."

The issue of contempt was raised after the bench had dismissed the review petitions filed by Kerala government and mother of Soumya challenging the acquittal of the convict of the murder charge.

Justice Katju was summoned as he in his blog had claimed that there was error in the judgement acquitting the accused for the murder and he was asked to assist the bench during the hearing of the review petition.

Addressing Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Katju said a Supreme Court judge should not behave like this and it was like a threat to him.

"Don't try to be funny with me. I came on your request. Don't treat me like this," he said after Justice Ranjan Gogoi pronounced the order as to why a contempt proceeding be not initiated against him for scandalising the judiciary. The Supreme Court issued notice after taking the view of

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi who was shown a copy of the blog which he described as "scandalous".

Taking note of this, the Bench said "we are issuing notice of contempt". Taken aback Rohatgi said his view was restricted only to the underlined portion of what he was shown as he had not read the entire blog.

"I am changing my position and I am reading the entire page. The underlined portion is intemperate and nothing beyond," he said.

When the Bench pointed to the other part of the Katju's blog which was not underlined by it, Rohatgi said the second one is also intemperate. Justice Katju repeatedly said he has appeared before the Bench and it should not have threatened as he was also a senior to the judges on the bench.

However, before taking up the contempt issue, Justice Katju along with the Attorney General assisted the Bench and tried to show how the judges have gravely erred in acquitting the convict of the murder charge.

Katju said that the judges have not applied "common sense" in arriving at a decision that the victim was pushed to death as she jumped out of a slow-running train in a semi- conscious state after the convict had inflicted head injuries on her.

The court had last month asked Justice Katju to appear and debate his Facebook post criticising the judgement by which the accused had escaped gallows in the Soumya rape case in which he was acquitted of murder charge.

The court had asked Justice Katju to appear in person before it to point out the "fundamental flaws" as claimed by him in the sensational Soumya rape case.

Subsequently Katju tweeted that he would be appearing before the court for the hearing on the review plea in the case.

Experts had said it was for the first time that the Supreme Court has asked its former judge to appear in person before it in connection with any matter.

In his Facebook post, Justice Katju had criticised the apex court saying it had grievously erred by "not holding" the convict, Govindachamy, "guilty of murder" in the case.

While issuing notice to Justice Katju, the bench had also quoted his Facebook post criticising the Soumya case verdict, which said "It is regrettable that the Court has not read section 300 carefully. The judgement needs to be reviewed in an

open court hearing".

In another post on the same issue, Justice Katju had written "I submit that the Supreme Court has erred in law in not holding the accused guilty of murder, and its judgement needs to be reviewed to this extent".

Justice Katju, through his Facebook post on September 15, had criticised the verdict commuting to life the death sentence awarded to Govindachamy for raping 23-year-old Soumya on February 1, 2011, after pushing her out of a train in Kerala.

Following the apex court order, the state as well as Soumya's mother had filed review petitions.
London: Theresa May's first visit to India as British Prime Minister earlier this week sent a clear signal to the world of the close ties the two countries share, the acting high commissioner of India to the UK has said.

Dinesh Patnaik, who was involved in preparations for the high-profile tour, also dismissed any reports that the visit was overshadowed by visa and immigration issues.

"The biggest outcome of the visit is the signal it sends to the world of the close relationship between India and the UK. We had agreed on a biennial visit, which is that every two years, the Prime Ministers on both sides would meet."

"The fact that Prime Minister Theresa May has gone within one year of Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi's visit to the UK speaks volumes about the importance she attaches to India," he told PTI.

"This was the first major bilateral visit by her outside the European Union (EU). The message is that the UK considers India of primary importance... There is no question that the visit has moved the relationship forward and was overall a very successful one," he said.

Asked if the UK's toughening stance on visas overshadowed the visit, he said: "I really want to make it clear that nowhere was the visa issue a big thing for both our countries. After Brexit and the strong feeling around immigration control, it was assumed that it was topmost on the agenda.'''

"The main agenda was trade and technology. India is not wanting to push Indians into the UK. Our government's position is that we want access for our people everywhere in the world. We are a big nation with a lot to offer the world and we want Indians to be able to access anywhere in the world be it as tourists, short-term workers, professionals, businessmen, technical entrepreneurs, or as students."

"So our message doesn't put in place rules and regulations which restrict access of Indians. But we don't want to push."

The envoy, who as India's deputy high commissioner to Britain stepped in when Navtej Sarna recently left to take charge as the Indian ambassador in the US, said the visit reflected good chemistry between Prime Minister Modi and her British counterpart.

"Both Prime Ministers got on very well. Prime Minister Modi had a good relationship with former Prime Minister David Cameron and it was to be seen if the same chemistry and dynamics worked this time. And, it seems it has worked very well.

"The one-hour bilateral one to one meeting between the two PMs continued for almost two hours. Though we won't know what was discussed but the fact is they spoke cordially and the chemistry and body language between them showed that there is a great relationship between the two PMs," he said.

In reference to the impact Brexit could have on India-UK ties, Patnaik described it as a "work in progress".

"In my view Brexit or no Brexit, the relationship between India and the UK is on an upward path. Brexit brings with it both challenges and opportunities.

The opportunities lie in the fact that India and the UK bilaterally have a very strong relationship. And how Brexit will impact that is a work in progress, which has already started," he said.
New Delhi: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has asked varsities to implement NCC as an elective subject.

In a letter to all varsities, the UGC said that the issue was discussed in a conference last year after which the decision was taken to implement NCC as an elective subject.

"The Ministry of Human Resource Development, as part of discussion in the JSR&D Conference held on 30th July, 2015 has decided to implement NCC as an elective subject to be taken up by all universities," a letter by UGC secretary Jaspal S Sandhu said.

He asked central varsities to implement the NCC as an elective subject.
Srinagar: Authorities on Friday imposed curfew in parts of Srinagar to prevent a protest march called by the separatists, officials said.

"Curfew has been imposed in seven areas to maintain law and order," the police said.

Separatists have called for the march to the Jamia Mosque in the city's Nowhatta area.

Congregational Friday prayers have not been allowed inside the mosque.

Separatist leaders Mirwaiz Umer Farooq has been kept under house arrest while Muhammad Yasin Malik was arrested and shifted to the Srinagar central jail on Thursday.

Syed Ali Geelani continues to remain under house arrest.

Meanwhile, the ongoing unrest has entered the fifth month after it started here on July 9.

Ninety-five people have been killed and over 12,000 injured during the ongoing violence in the valley.


Kannur: A Kerala State Electricity Board employee who came to remit money to his State Bank of Travancore account here on Friday fell down from the third floor of a building and died, said the city police.

The man was identified as 48-year-old Unni, a resident of Pinarayi, said a Thalassery police official probing the incident to IANS.

The police are, however, unable to say whether it was an accident or a suicide.

"From his bag a sum of Rs 5.5 lakh was recovered," said the officer who did not wish to be identified. The police have taken possession of the bag.

The SBT office is located on the second floor of the building.

Hundreds of people who had arrived at the bank were busy writing in their application form to be submitted along with their currency on the third floor of the building, which was unoccupied.

The police have not ruled out an accidental fall of Unni while moving around in the building.
New Delhi: The CISF will conduct a security and fire audit of all jails in Madhya Pradesh in the wake of eight SIMI operatives pulling off a daring jailbreak in Bhopal recently.

The paramilitary force has constituted a board of officials to conduct the survey of the main jails and sub- jails from security and fire hazards point of view and the team will begin its work from the Bhopal central jail where the audacious incident took place.

The Central Industrial Security Force has a special consultancy wing within its establishment that conducts audit of critical installations and establishments, in government and public domain, by way of suggesting them the required access-control, deployment of watch towers and sentry posts, usage of gadgets and positioning of security personnel and surveillance gadgets to enhance protection.

When contacted, CISF Director General O P Singh said the force has received a request in this regard from the state government.

"We will be submitting a report to the government in due course of time," he told PTI.

The force does this job on a government approved fee and has provided consultancy to a total of 134 organisations till now.

Some of the important clients of CISF security consultancy services are TISCO Limited, Bangalore Metro, the National Security Guard headquarters here, Allahabad High Court, Tirumala Tirupati and Devsthanam in Tirupati, British High Commission in the national capital and assemblies of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

The eight SIMI under-trials had escaped from the high- security Central Jail on the intervening night of October 30- 31 after killing a guard, before they were gunned down in an alleged encounter by police on the outskirts of city on October 31 morning.
Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's bold move of demonetising Rs 500, 1000 notes, aimed at curbing corruption and black money, is yielding positive results.

A Maharashtra government official was on Thursday arrested for allegedly demanding Rs 2500 bribe. Not only this the agricultural officer with the Mohol Panchayat Samiti insisted on being paid only in the Rs 100 denomination.

He was arrested by anti-corruption bureau officials.

The officer, Balasaheb Bhikaji Babar, was approached by the complainant Dattatray Bedge for clearing his Krishi Seva Kendra proposal, police said.

The officer insisted the complainant bring 25 notes of Rs 100 as the government has demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, a police official told PTI.

A case has been filed under sections 7, 13 (1) and 13 (2) of the anti-corruption Act at the Mohol police station in Solapur district, police said.

Addressing the nation, Prime Minsiter Narendra Modi on Tuesday said, To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the five hundred rupee and thousand rupee currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight, that is 8th November 2016.

The five hundred and thousand rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements will become just worthless pieces of paper. The rights and the interests of honest, hard-working people will be fully protected. Let me assure you that notes of one hundred, fifty, twenty, ten, five, two and one rupee and all coins will remain legal tender and will not be affected.

This step will strengthen the hands of the common man in the fight against corruption, black money and fake currency. To minimise the difficulties of citizens in the coming days, several steps are being taken.
Mumbai: The ensuing elections to municipal councils and nagar panchayats across Maharashtra will be a major test for the two-year-old Devendra Fadnavis government, in the backdrop of caste polarisation triggered by campaigns of different communities, including influential Marathas in pursuance of their various demands.

Political observers here are of the view that all parties may feel the heat of the Maratha campaign, pressing for reservations in jobs and education, and the counter movements by Dalits, OBCs and Muslims in the state.

Even though these campaigns have so far refrained from targeting each other, undercurrents of caste tensions have been palpable, they point out.

Some of them feel that the BJP-led government has not taken these morchas seriously and made efforts to defuse the caste tensions slowly building up.

There is a distinct possibility that voters around the state, especially in rural areas, will take the civic polls as a referendum on the performance of the Fadnavis regime, they said.

Law and order issue, spurt in crime against women and farmers' distress and suicides are also to figure prominently in the elections, they said.

The government is yet to declare Minimum Support Price for soyabean, cotton, paddy, sugarcane and has not taken a decision on starting procurement centres, they observed.

While ruling partners BJP and Shiv Sena have struck a deal to contest the polls together, the Congress and NCP, who control majority of municipal bodies, have left the decision of alliance to their local leadership.

NCP has 1,300 seats while Congress 1,293. BJP has 437, Sena 454 and MNS 61. There are over 400 independents as well.

Dismissing suggestion that the Maratha campaign could hit the BJP, party spokesman Madhav Bhandari said Congress and NCP are to be blamed for the caste polarisation.

"Maratha leadership of both these parties have ruled the state throughout. They did nothing for uplift of the community. It is only after Devendra Fadnavis became CM, the community feels it is backward," he said.

"If large morchas are taken out by the dominant community, naturally the non-Marathas will get insecure and the marches organised by them are a result of this insecurity," Bhandari said.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court will on Friday hear an appeal filed by the December 16 Nirbhaya gang rape convicts, who have moved to top court challenging their death sentence.

The death sentence of four of the convicts- Akshay, Vinay Sharma, Pawan and Mukesh was upheld by the Delhi High Court.

They had challenged their death sentence awarded by the Delhi High Court in the Supreme Court.

In the last hearing on November 7, the top court` amicus curiae in the case, Raju Ramachandran, has asked the apex court to set aside the death penalty awarded to the accused.

In his written submissions, the senior advocate listed six fundamental errors committed by the trial court while awarding death sentences, including not taking the mitigating circumstances of the accused persons into consideration and not hearing them in person on their punishment.

Amicus curiae refers to someone who is not a party to the case but volunteers to offer information on a point of law or some other aspect of the case to assist the court in deciding a matter before it.

The top court had on April 4 begun final hearing of the convicts` appeal almost two years after staying their execution.

Two of the four death-row convicts had written to Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justice Deepak Misra, stating that they do not approve of the defence counsel appointed by the court to argue their case before the top court as they had given statements against them to the media in the past.

The trial court had in September 2013 awarded death sentences to the convicts.

Six months later, the Delhi High Court upheld their conviction and sentence.

All the convicts moved the apex court in 2014, which stayed their execution.

Six people, including a juvenile, had brutally assaulted the woman in a moving bus in South Delhi.

Later, the accused threw out the victim and her male friend at an isolated spot.

She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29, 2012, triggering nation-wide protests that resulted in giving more teeth to laws related to rape and other forms of sexual harassment.
Bhubaneswar: A youth was arrested by Odisha police when he was trying to deposit fake currency notes at a bank at Khurda town, near here, amid the rush of customers depositing money following the demonetisation of high-value currency notes.

Sumit Kumar Tudu, a resident of Kendrapara district, was trying to deposit Rs 2.5 lakh at the SBI branch at Khurda town, around 25 km from here.

"We found fake currency notes of Rs 47,000 face value in the bundle," SBI in-charge, Khurda, Deba Prasad Kanhar said, adding that the bank authorities have informed the police about the incident.

Forty-two of the fake currency notes being deposited by Tudu had a face value of Rs 1,000 each and 10 notes had a face value of Rs 500 each, police said.

The youth claimed to be the son of a bank officer and reportedly told the police that the money belonged to his father and that he was told to deposit the amount in his father's account.

Police have registered a case under sections 489A, B, C and other sections of the IPC. The youth was being interrogated, Harihar Pani, Khurda SDPO said.
SAS Nagar: Terming the resignation of Amarinder Singh as an MP over SYL issue a "drama to mislead the people", Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Friday said if the Punjab Congress president were "sincere and honest" he would have announced not to contest Assembly polls.

Protesting against the Supreme Court's verdict on the SYL canal issue, Amarinder had tendered his resignation as a Lok Sabha member yesterday. Today all Congress MLAs in Punjab resigned over the issue.

The Chief Minister accused the Punjab Congress leadership of "playing to the gallery" over the issue and said Amarinder and his colleagues were "trying to become martyrs" by tendering resignations just before Assembly polls.

"Amarinder being dubious by nature had enacted this drama just to mislead the people to better his electoral prospects. Had Amarinder been sincere and honest he'd have announced not to contest the forthcoming assembly polls," Badal said.

He dared the Punjab Congress chief to ask his fellow Congress MPs from state to step down on this issue if he was "really aghast" with Supreme Court verdict on the issue.

"Rather he was pitching for President's Rule in the state for paving a way for completion of SYL canal in the absence of any democratically-elected people's government," Badal said.

He was interacting with media on the sidelines of a summit on 'Sustainable Development Goals and Universal Health Coverage- States perspective' organised by the Health and Family Welfare Department Punjab in collaboration with PGIMER and WHO, India, here.

He said the SAD-BJP alliance would oppose the "anti- Punjab" decision as "we have absolute and legitimate right over the river waters as per universally accepted Riparian Principle".

He said common man would not allow Congress to succeed in its "nefarious designs" to betray the people and state.

"Congress is known for hatching conspiracies against the interests of Punjab and its people on the inter-state issues including sharing of rivers waters from day one," Badal said.

He said the Congress party was solely responsible for aggravating the "impending crisis".

Badal reiterated that not even a single drop of water would be spared for any state neither anyone would be allowed to lay even a single brick for the construction of this canal.

Recalling the Congress's "conspiracy" to divest the state of its legitimate share in river waters, Badal held the then prime minister Indira Gandhi responsible for Punjab's "crisis" as "she forced" the then Congress Chief Minister of Punjab Darbara Singh into signing an agreement to "give away" Punjab's waters to Haryana.

"She also forced him to withdraw the Supreme Court Case filed by him to protect Punjab river water interests," the Chief Minister alleged.

Badal also held Amarinder responsible for inviting Indira Gandhi to start the digging of the canal at Kapuri in his own constituency Patiala by offering her a silver spade to start the digging.

He said the then Congress rejoiced the occasion, while the SAD had launched a long peaceful democratic morcha for Punjab's interests as a result of which no river waters went out of Punjab since.

"Water is the lifeline of every citizen of Punjab, especially farmers, industry and trade so as a custodian of state's interest I am duty-bound to ensure that nobody snatches it," he added.

Earlier addressing the summit, the Chief Minister reiterated the firm commitment of SAD-BJP alliance government to impart accessible, affordable and quality health services to the people.

Laying stress on living a quality life, Badal advised the people to have simple food and exercise daily.

He also advised people to regularly get their health check up done so as to ensure diagnosis of any disease at early stage.

"This would help in leading a healthy and long life by every one of you," he added.
New Delhi: A woman was allegedly raped by a man on the pretext of marriage in outer Delhi's Mangolpuri area.

The accused, identified as Virendra, works as a security personnel at Sanjay Gandhi hospital.

The woman in a complaint alleged that the accused befriended her during the course of her visits to the hospital for treatment.

Virendra got intimate with the woman after promising that he would marry her. The woman later found out that he was already married, police said quoting the complaint.

A case under Section 376 (rape) of IPC was registered against him. He was arrested on November 8, police said.
A powerful Taliban truck bomb struck the German consulate in Afghanistan`s northern Mazar-i-Sharif city late Thursday, killing at least two people and wounding more than 100 in a major militant assault in the war-torn country.

The Taliban called it a "revenge attack" for US air strikes in the volatile province of Kunduz earlier this month that left up to 32 civilians dead.

The huge explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

The German foreign ministry said the attack had ended and that all German staff from the consulate were unharmed.

"The consulate building has been heavily damaged. It is not yet clear how many Afghan civilians and security personnel died or were injured in the attack," the ministry said in a statement.

"Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families."

A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting.

"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."

Afghan special forces cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel. Helicopters were heard flying over the diplomatic mission early Friday as ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area, according to an AFP reporter near the scene.

At least two dead bodies and more than 100 wounded people -- including at least 10 children -- had so far been brought to two city hospitals, said local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez. Some of the wounded were in a critical condition, he added.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents routinely exaggerate battlefield claims.

Posting a Google Earth image of the consulate on Twitter, Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims` relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

The country`s worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up air strikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign -- even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America`s longest war with no end in sight.
New York: Donald Trumps shock victory in the US elections has triggered a flood of calls on Twitter and other social media outlets for the President-elect to be assassinated and authorities will investigate all threats deemed to be credible, The New York Post has learned.

The development comes as demonstrators continued to take to the streets for a second day across the US against Trump`s victory in the country`s presidential election.

In Portland, Oregon, an estimated 4,000 protesters chanted "We reject the president-elect!", with some throwing objects at police, prompting several arrests.

According to The Post, a simple search on Twitter can reveal dozens and dozens of calls to gun down Trump. Some posts called for both Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence to be assassinated, and there`s even an #AssassinateTrump hashtag.

"Trump chose the literal worst case scenario as VP so nobody would try to impeach or assassinate him," one user posted on Twitter.

Last Saturday, Trump was rushed off a stage on in Reno, Nevada, where Secret Service agents took action after an "unidentified individual shouted `gun`" in front of the stage. Authorities took the man, Austyn Crites, into custody, but did not find a gun, the Secret Service said in a statement, according to the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Trump, after blasting the media and protesters in aggressive tweets after people took to the streets to protest against the election results, Trump on Friday said he loves the "passion" of his countrymen for their country, media reported.

"Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country," Trump tweeted, the New York Post reported.

"We will all come together and be proud!"

The gracious gesture - playing down the widespread protests or what police labelled as "riots" - was a change from Thursday night when Trump flashed annoyance at his detractors.

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Trump tweeted.

Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in major cities across the US since Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night, with the slogan "Not my President".

Since Thursday, thousands of demonstrators, including immigration rights and environmental activists, have protested in cities like Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in front of the Trump International Hotel.

On Wednesday in Wellsville, New York a passer-by spotted a swastika and the phrase "Make America White Again" on a softball dugout. Graffiti, with Nazi imagery and the word "Trump", was also discovered on a storefront in Philadelphia.

Police said they would look into the incident, though they haven`t received any reports.

The New York City Police Department confirmed on Thursday that at least 65 persons were detained on different charges, including disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.
District of Columbia: One of President-elect Donald Trump`s most divisive promises -- to ban Muslims from entering America -- disappeared from his campaign website before reappearing on Thursday.

Trump`s campaign staff told US media that text of the pledge, posted in December following terror attacks in San Bernardino, California, vanished because of a technical glitch.

It reappeared after journalists questioned the disappearance.

"The website was temporarily redirecting all specific press release pages to the homepage. It is currently being addressed and will be fixed shortly," the campaign said in a statement.

Trump said in December that Muslim immigrants pose the United States a security threat and called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country`s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."

It was one of a number of his statements -- including a pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border and criticism of women who accused him of sexual harassment -- that prompted the greatest backlash against his campaign, with accusations of xenophobia.

Later, he shifted to say immigration should be suspended from any country "that has been compromised by terrorism."

His stance apparently helped win him the presidency with the support of a majority of white, working-class voters.
Mosul: Elite Iraqi troops battled the Islamic State group in the streets of Mosul on Friday as US-backed forces in Syria pressed an advance on jihadist bastion Raqa after a sandstorm eased.

The high winds in the desert which separates the Syrian Kurdish-Arab militia alliance from the jihadists` stronghold in the Euphrates Valley had slowed their advance on Thursday as visibility levels plummeted.

Iraqi forces too had regrouped after meeting stronger than expected resistance from IS fighters on the east bank of the Tigris River which runs through Mosul after thrusting into the built-up area last week.

The jihadists had been expected to pull back to the west bank, a stronghold of Sunni Arab insurgency even before IS swept through the minority community`s heartland north and west of Baghdad in mid-2014.

Commanders of Iraq`s elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) said that troops were advancing on two eastern neighbourhoods of the city.

The battle to retake Mosul is now in its fourth week, and while troops have entered the built-up area, there are weeks, if not months, of fighting still to go.

"Our forces have begun the attack on Arbajiyah.

The clashes are ongoing," Staff Lieutenant Colonel Muntadhar Salem said, referring to an area in the east of the city.

The latest fighting came "after a few days of quiet," he said.

Another CTS officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ali Hussein Fadhel, said that the first row of buildings in Arbajiyah had been seized.

"We are within firing range of Karkukli but the full attack has not yet started," he said, referring to another eastern neighbourhood.

In a makeshift command post in a two-storey house, a CTS soldier used an iPad to control a reconnaissance drone on the lookout for jihadist suicide bombers.

Iraqi forces launched the operation to retake Mosul on October 17, with federal and Kurdish regional forces closing in on the city from three sides.

Pro-government Shiite paramilitaries later began an advance on the town of Tal Afar, which commands the city`s western approaches, with the goal of cutting the jihadists off from territory they control in neighbouring Syria.

The advance up the Tigris Valley from the south has been slowest. The troops on that front had the farthest to cover, with a string of jihadist-held towns in their path.

On Thursday, the battle neared the remains of ancient Nimrud, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of Mosul, raising fears for the famed heritage site already ravaged by jihadist bombs and sledgehammers.

In Syria, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said their advance on Raqa was back on track after a sandstorm which swept through the area on Thursday eased.

"We seized control of two new villages yesterday but we didn`t advance as far as planned because of the sandstorm," SDF commander Merkhas Kamishlo told AFP.

Fighting has focused on the IS-held village of Al-Heisha, around 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Raqa.

An AFP correspondent reported heavy air strikes on Friday morning by the US-led coalition supporting the SDF forces.

"Al-Heisha is totally besieged and overnight the US-led coalition hit four Daesh positions inside the village, and destroyed a vehicle being prepared for use as a bomb," Kamishlo said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

The SDF launched its offensive last weekend and has been pushing south from areas near the Turkish border towards Raqa.

Kamishlo said SDF forces advancing south from the towns of Ain Issa and Suluk were close to converging at a position some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from Raqa.

"The situation is good, the operation continues," SDF spokeswoman Jihan Sheikh Ahmed told AFP.

Dozens of families have been seen fleeing towards SDF lines in recent days.

Many have been arriving in trucks and cars, loaded down with belongings and in some cases with livestock including cows and sheep.

Raqa had a population of some 240,000 before the eruption of Syria`s civil war in 2011 but more than 80,000 people have since fled there from other parts of the country.

Mosul is much bigger, home to more than a million people, and over 45,000 people have fled since the offensive began.

Aid workers have expressed fears of a major humanitarian crisis as fighting intensifies inside the city, where IS is expected to use civilians as human shields.
Brussels: The EU extended border controls Friday in the passport-free Schengen area for three months, missing an end-of-year deadline to scrap emergency checks brought in during the migrant crisis.

Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and non-EU Norway are all allowed to continue the checks which they first introduced in 2015 as a wave of refugees and migrants streamed across Europe.

"Our ultimate objective is to get back to Schengen as soon as possible," said Slovak Interior Minister Robert Kalinak, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

"Although we are not there yet, the situation is improving. The prolongation will therefore be for three months only, and there will be more intensive reporting obligations compared to the previous period."

Brussels had said it wanted to restore full functioning with no border controls across the Schengen area -- which includes 22 EU countries as well as Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein -- by the end of 2016.
Dhaka: Four people have been arrested in connection with attacks on Hindu temples and members of the community in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, the police on Friday said as villagers at the heart of the attacks formed neighbourhood watch teams to keep vigil.

Police arrested the four last night for their alleged involvement in the attacks in the Hindu-dominated Nasirnagar upazila of Brahmanbaria, the Daily Star reported citing the officer in-charge of the local police station.

With that, the total number people arrested for the attacks last week by a group of religious zealots have reached 78. At least 100 homes and five temples were vandalised and torched by the mob after a Facebook post deemed offensive to Islam.

Kasipara is one of the six Hindu-dominated areas in Nasirnagar union that came under the attack.

Neighbourhood watch teams have been formed in each of the Hindu-dominated areas of the union including Banikpara, Akhrapara, Thakurpara, Hashpatalpara and Dattapara after the attacks on the nights of November 3 and 5, the report said.

"I came to my village [on Tuesday afternoon] and learnt that someone from my family would be with the vigilance team at night," Dhonu Das, a third-year student of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University in Gazipur, told the daily. "My younger brother was supposed to join, but I decided to do the job as he has a class in the morning."

Das is one of the five youths who were in the vigil team gurading the Kasipara village on Tuesday night.

According to the report, a team of eight people comprising members from Hindu and Muslim communities were guarding Namasudrapara village Wednesday night.

Majority of the residents in the Hindu localities are poor fishermen, farmers and small traders, and they depend on their daily earnings to feed their families.

And, thus, guarding the village at night is an added responsibility for them.

"We guard the village throughout the night. But we have to work during the day as we have no alternative means of earning a livelihood," said Jamal Hossain, a trader in Nasirnagar.

But Nasirnagar Police Station's Officer-in-Charge Abu Jafar welcomed the move to guard the villages at nights by the residents. "This is certainly helpful for us to maintain law and order following the incidents of attacks," he told the daily.

Many Hindu families have deserted their houses following the attacks and have taken refuge in neighbouring areas. Tension have escalated in the neighbourhood.
Paris: French President Francois Hollande said Friday he would "clarify positions" with US president-elect Donald Trump during "frank" telephone discussions later in the day.

"I will have to clarify and seek clarification on positions. We must speak frankly to each other," Hollande told France 2 television on the sidelines of France`s Armistice commemorations.

On Wednesday, the Socialist president had said the Republican billionaire`s election win "opens a period of uncertainty" and offered only brief congratulations.

"Donald Trump has been elected, my duty is to ensure that we have the best relations but on the basis of frankness and clarity," Hollande, who declared a few months ago Trump`s excesses "make you want to retch", said Friday.

The French leader cited the fight against terrorism, the battle against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq and the conflict in eastern Ukraine among the subjects he wished to discuss.

He underscored the "long friendship" between France and the US and the solidarity shown by Americans during a series of jihadist attacks on French soil over the past two years.

"Each time the American people were by our side," he said, adding: "Our two peoples are very closely connected."

Trump has raised hackles in France after saying the November 2015 Paris attacks that left 130 people dead might have been avoided if the country had looser gun laws.

He has also referred to "vicious" no-go zones in Paris and said French people arriving in the United States could face security vetting because of fears about extremists.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke by telephone with Trump on Thursday, her spokesman Georg Streiter said on Friday.

Merkel had congratulated him and said she looked forward to meeting him, at the latest, when Germany hosts a G20 summit in July in the northern port city of Hamburg.

Merkel had offered Trump "close cooperation" and "stressed that Germany and the United States of America are closely tied through common values," Streiter said.

On Wednesday, Merkel had issued a first statement on Trump`s election, in which she pointedly said cooperation must be based on shared democratic values and respect for human dignity and reminded him of the global responsibility he carries.
Islamabad: Pakistan on Friday briefed Head of Missions of P5 countries on the alleged Indian aggression on the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, saying the use of "heavy weaponry" by the Indian Army threatens peace and stability and may lead to a "strategic miscalculation".

Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry provided details to the ambassadors of China, France, Russian, UK and USA, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, about unprovoked firing and ceasefire violations by the "Indian occupation Forces" in the past two months, the Foreign Office (FO) said.

Chaudhry expressed grave concern over the increased frequency and duration of indiscriminate firing from the Indian side, deliberate targeting of villages and civilian populated areas, resulting in the death of 26 civilians and injuring 107 others, said FO.

The Foreign Secretary also alleged that the Indian side was resorting to such heavy weaponry use after a gap of 13 years.

"Pakistan has been compelled to respond but with maximum restraint. The Armed Forces of Pakistan gave a befitting response," FO quoted Chaudhry as saying.

He expressed apprehension that Indian actions, which constituted a threat for the maintenance of peace and security, may lead to a "strategic miscalculation".

He said India was also not cooperating with the United Nations Military Observers Group (UNMOGIP).

The Heads of Missions assured that they would convey Pakistan's concern to their respective capitals, the FO statement said.
Barack Obama and Donald Trump on Thursday put past animosity aside during a 90-minute White House meeting designed to quell fears about the health of the world`s pre-eminent democracy.

As protests against the Republican property mogul`s shock election rumbled across US cities and world capitals contended with a suddenly uncertain world order, Obama and Trump vowed to carry out a smooth transition of power.

After a nasty campaign that culminated in the election of a 70-year-old billionaire who has never held public office and who gained power on a far-right platform, the message was: this is business as usual in a democracy.

The outgoing Democratic president and his successor huddled one-on-one in the Oval Office, for what Obama characterized as an "excellent conversation" and then put on a remarkably civil joint public appearance.

"It is important for all of us, regardless of party and regardless of political preferences, to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face," Obama said.

Trump appeared more subdued than usual, and was unusually cautious and deferential in his remarks.

"Mr President, it was a great honor being with you," Trump said, calling Obama a "very good man."The meeting, which came less than 36 hours after Trump`s shock election victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, had the potential to be awkward.

After all, Trump championed the so-called "birther movement" challenging that Obama was actually born in the United States -- a suggestion laden with deep racial overtones -- only dropping the position recently.

And if the president-elect fulfills his campaign promises, he will unravel almost all of Obama`s signature achievements.

Trump -- who previously called Obama the "most ignorant president in our history" -- said he looked forward to receiving the president`s counsel.

Obama -- who previously said Trump was a whiner and "uniquely unqualified" to be commander-in-chief -- vowed his support.

He told Trump that his administration would "do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds."

The two men ended the improbable and historic White House encounter with a handshake and refused to take questions, appearing to find common cause in their opinion of the press.

"Here`s a good rule. Don`t answer questions when they just start yelling," Obama told Trump.While their husbands were getting acquainted, First Lady Michelle Obama also had a sit-down at the White House with her soon-to-be successor, Melania Trump.

Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, met in his West Wing office with Trump`s running mate, Mike Pence, the new vice-president-elect.

White House officials said that Obama and Trump discussed a range of issues including global hotspots and the president`s meetings next week abroad with leaders from Germany, Greece and across the Asia-Pacific.

On that trip, Obama is likely to be inundated with panicked questions about America`s role in world affairs.

The White House hopes that by rolling out the red carpet for Trump, they can bind him to some of the conventions of the office.

Trump then traveled to Capitol Hill to meet Republican leaders who had been at best cool to him winning their party`s nomination.

The president-elect proclaimed that health care, border security and jobs will be his top three priorities when he moves to the White House next January.

He held talks with House Speaker Paul Ryan and then with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"We had a very detailed meeting," Trump told reporters. "As you know, health care -- we`re going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on health care," he said.

Trump made repealing Obamacare, and building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, pillars of his presidential campaign.

Trump said he and the Republican majority in Congress were going to accomplish "absolutely spectacular things for the American people," adding he was eager to get started.

Afterwards, following an hour-long meeting with McConnell on the other side of the Capitol, Trump stood at the Senate majority leader`s side and stressed that "we have a lot to do."

"We`re going to look very strongly at immigration," he said.

"We`re going to look very strongly at health care, and we`re looking at jobs -- big league jobs."

Trump did not elaborate.

Team Trump unveiled a transition website -- www.greatagain.gov -- that highlights the colossal human resources challenge facing the incoming administration under the headline "Help wanted: 4,000 presidential appointees."

During a bitter campaign that tugged at America`s democratic fabric, the tycoon pledged to deport illegal immigrants, ban Muslims from the country and tear up free-trade deals.

Those campaign messages were embraced by a large section of America, grown increasingly disgruntled by the scope of social and economic change under Obama.

But they were passionately rejected by Clinton supporters.

Protesters turned out for a second day in cities across America from New York to Los Angeles to express continued opposition to the incoming leader they accuse of racism, sexism and xenophobia. Thousands had rallied on Wednesday.
Geneva: The International Organisation for Migration have evacuated 127 Somalis fleeing the conflict in Yemen, including women and children, the IOM said on Friday.

The Somalis arrived in Berbera, Somaliland, from Sanaa, Yemen on a boat organised by IOM with financial support from Saudi Arabia`s King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre (KSrelief), IOM stated.

The successful operation was the first under $10 million KSrelief-funded project and paves the way for a further 2,500 Somali nationals stranded in Yemen to be evacuated over the next seven months, IOM said.

The Somalis will be evacuated by air to Mogadishu and by sea to Berbera under the project implemented by IOM and by the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).

Over 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen since a Saudi-led Arab coalition in March 2015 began bombing Shia Houthi rebels who overthrew president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and allied with parts of the Yemeni army have engaged in fighting with forces across the country that are nominally loyal to the exiled president.

International efforts to find a political solution to the war are at an impasse.
Balkh Province: The death toll from a powerful Taliban truck bombing at the German consulate in Afghanistan`s Mazar-i-Sharif city rose to at least six Friday, with more than 100 others wounded in a major militant assault.

The Taliban said the bombing late Thursday, which tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars, was a "revenge attack" for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead.

The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

All German staff from the consulate were unharmed, according to the foreign ministry in Berlin.

But seven Afghan civilians were killed, including two motorcyclists who were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop, said deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri.

A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added.

Local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez said the city hospitals received six dead bodies, including two killed by bullets.

At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries, he added.

"The consulate building has been heavily damaged," the German foreign ministry said in a statement. "Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families."

A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting.

"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."

Afghan special forces have cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area after the explosion.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents routinely exaggerate battlefield claims.

Posting a Google Earth image of the consulate on Twitter, Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.

US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims` relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

The country`s worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up air strikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign -- even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America`s longest war with no end in sight.
Istanbul: Turkey detained on Friday the head of the board of opposition daily Cumhuriyet, said the newspaper, which has been the target of an intensifying crackdown since July`s failed coup.

Akin Atalay was taken into custody at Istanbul`s airport after arriving from Germany, said Cumhuriyet, which also saw nine of its staff arrested last week.

The paper has in recent years taken a strong line against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan`s ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Atalay was targeted by a warrant that was part of a probe into "terrorist activities", and was ushered into a police vehicle that was waiting for him on the tarmac.

Some 35,000 people have been arrested and tens of thousands more have lost their jobs -- including military officers, judges, teachers, civil servants and journalists -- in a sweeping crackdown in the wake of the failed July bid to oust Erdogan.

The news comes as nine MPs from the opposition pro-Kurdish People`s Democratic Party (HDP), including its co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, were detained last week pending a trial on terror charges expected to begin Friday.

Nine of the paper`s staff, including its current editor-in-chief, were remanded in custody last weekend pending trial after raids that have added to growing international alarm about media freedoms in Turkey.

The paper`s exiled former editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, fled to Germany earlier this year while appealing against a near six-year jail term for revealing state secrets.

Among the nine to be held ahead of trial were Cumhuriyet`s editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu, celebrated cartoonist Musa Kart and influential anti-Erdogan columnist Kadri Gursel.

However, columnists Hikmet Cetinkaya and Aydin Engin were released on bail on health grounds and because of their age.

Two other suspects from the newspaper`s accounting department were released without charge.

The suspects are charged with links to the Kurdish militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the movement of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, blamed for the failed coup bid.

Gulen denies the accusations.

Dundar was sentenced by a Turkish court in May to five years and 10 months in prison for a story about a shipment of arms intercepted at the Syrian border, which had prompted a furious Erdogan to warn Dundar he would "pay a heavy price".

Amid mounting fears for Turkish press freedom, on Tuesday the Turkey representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and two other campaigners went on trial charged with making terror propaganda for Kurdish militants.
Veterans Can Look to Agriculture

On November 11, 1918, the First World War ended and that date is marked by countries across the globe as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day in Europe and the Commonwealth, or Veterans Day in the US.

In the US, the USDA maintains a nationwide database of resources to support veterans who are interested in farming, whether as a first-time endeavor or the continuation of a pre-service career. In honor of Veterans Day, here are some organizations dedicated to helping veterans see whether farming is the right career for them after their time in uniform.

Inaugural AgFunder Innovation Awards Now Open for Nominations!

The election may be over, but its time to cast a few more votes. To ensure the innovators driving the industry forward get the recognition and encouragement they deserve, we are launching the AgFunder Innovation Awards. These are peer-selected awards based on nominations from our network. For the 2016 AgFunder Innovation Awards, there are five categories, looking for the most disruptive startups in various areas and the most beneficial accelerator program. To ensure you have your say and to submit nominations in each of these categories, please fill out this short form. It takes less than 2 minutes to complete!

Cali, Nevada, Maine and Mass Legalize Recreational Cannabis Use

On Tuesday, California, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts legalized recreational marijuana, while voters in Arkansas, North Dakota, Florida, and Montana passed medical marijuana legislation. Arizona voters were the only ones to down-vote a pro-marijuana state proposal. While the industry and supporters celebrate, however, some have started asking about the viability of recreational or medical marijuana laws in a Trump administration. The substance remains illegal at the federal level despite instructions from the Obama Administration to the Department of Justice urging them to only pursue and enforce the federal drug statutes against marijuana offenses in states with medical marijuana laws.

US Organic Farmland Hits New Record

Mercaris, the startup facilitating the trade of organic commodities, has released a report detailing an 11% increase in the number of organic acres in the US over the past two years. There are now 4.1 million acres of organic farmland, and the top five organic producing states are California, Montana, Wisconsin, New York, and North Dakota. The US has also seen an increase in the number of certified organic farms to the tune of over 6%, or 1k more farms between 2014 and 2016. For all the details on the report, head over to Civil Eats. Mercaris founder Kellee James featured on a podcast about consumer trends and the role of women a few months ago. Check it out here.

Trimble Consolidates Precision Ag Software Products

Amid the current shift toward precision agriculture practices, farmers are also running into hurdles with technology integration. When farmers mix precision ag hardware and software with third-party vendors, the results can lead to lost time due to data re-entry, USB data transfer or multiple support entities. To try and combat these barriers, Trimble announced this week that it is consolidating three of its agriculture software productsConnected Farm, Farm Works Software and Agri-Data solutionsinto one farm data management platform. Now called Trimble Ag Software, this tool aims to offer customers a complete desktop, web-based and mobile-enabled agricultural software solution that simplifies farm data management for farmers, crop advisors, ag retailers and food processors.

Bay Area Tech Companies Donate their Savvy to Help #HackHunger

The SF-Marin Food Bank is tapping the local tech scene to raise money and to help address food insecurity in the region, where one in four folks go hungry. The #HackHunger Challenge tasks participating tech gurus and startups to raise $500k to help end hunger in San Francisco and Marin between November 7-18. Companies or teams of tech-savvy folks can use a variety of fundraising tips to rack up points for every dollar donated and every pound of food collected. The top three teams will have their name plastered on a truck as the top hunger hackers.

General Mills & Organic Valley Expand Organic Dairy Businesses

Perhaps as a result of all the new organic farmland reported above, General Mills and Organic Valley are increasing their organic dairy production in the United States. General Mills has entered into a new sourcing partnership with Organic Valley, which is the largest organic cooperative on the planet. The partnership will help roughly 20 dairy farms add around 3k acres to their production over the next three years. With 90 popular food brands in its portfolio like Yoplait, Pillsbury, and Cheerios, this could account for some big organic shifts on store shelves. Currently, General Mills holds itself out as the third largest maker of natural and organic foods with nine popular brands: Cascadian Farm, Muir Glen, LARABAR, Liberte, Mountain High, Food Should Taste Good, Immaculate Baking, Annies and EPIC Provisions.

USDA Reports Continued Decline in Midsize US Farms

According to a new USDA report, mid-sized family farms, which include those with gross cash farm income between $350k to $1 million, have declined five percent between 1992 and 2012. In 2014, midsized ag operations accounted for roughly 21 percent of total US agriculture production and six percent of total US farms. This is contrasted with the significant jump in farms that have very low sales, and farms with over $1 million in sales during the same period. The report notes that most mid-sized farm operators draw their primary income from the farming business, leaving them highly susceptible to fluctuations in the market as well as policy shifts.

Sonoma County in California Passes Measure to Ban GMO Crops

On election day, Sonoma County voters approved an ordinance that bans the cultivation of genetically-engineered crops within its borders by a 12 percent margin. This marks the sixth county in California to pass a similar measure, with Santa Cruz, Humboldt, Marin, Trinity, and Mendocino also on board. With Humboldt, Trinity, Mendocino, and Marin sharing boarders, there is now a 13,734-square-mile region in the major agricultural state where growing GMO crops is illegal. It hasnt been smooth sailing for all GMO bans, however, with courts invalidating other measures in Hawaii and elsewhere on the basis that they do not comply with state law.

GrubHub CEO Tells Trump Supporters to Resign

In an email to the companys 1,000 plus employees, GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney said: If you do not agree with this statement, then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here. The statement reads:

Further, I absolutely reject the nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics of Donald Trump and will work to shield our community from this movement as best as I can. As we all try to understand what this vote means to us, I want to affirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and everyone else here at GrubHub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States.

The CEO has also said that had any of his employees said some of the things that Trump has said during the last 18 months of election season; they will be met with a swift termination. According to the CEO, some 20 percent of his employees expressed their gratitude for his email.

Other News Thats Fit to Chew:

Trump has already selected someone to lead his EPA transition, Myron Ebell, which many folks believe will lead to dramatic shifts in US climate policy, on Scientific American .

Indias government is backing technologies that can help address food waste in the country, on Business Standard

The FDA is taking a new look at how nut butter should be quantified on serving size labels, but Nutella has an important point to make, on Boston Globe

Theres a new agtech accelerator program in India, on Entrepreneur India

Have news or tips? Email Media@AgFunderNews.com
Mexican Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu said Mexico is willing to "modernize" the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and the US

Canada and Mexico agreed Thursday to US President-elect Donald Trump's demand to have a fresh look at their tripartite 22-year-old free trade pact, fearing they could be shut out of the US market.

But the two US allies diverged on the level of changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) each was willing to accept, with Mexico taking a harder line.

The 1994 trade pact became a source of friction with America's neighbors during the campaign when Trump called NAFTA the worst trade deal the United States has ever signed.

The Republican president-elect's protectionist notions to repatriate American jobs lost to free trade sent shockwaves through Canada and Mexico's economies, which both rely heavily on exports to the United States.

"I think it's important that we be open to talking about trade deals," Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau -- a fierce defender of free trade -- said Thursday.

"If the Americans want to talk about NAFTA, I'm more than happy to talk about it," he said.

Mexico's Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu, meanwhile, said her government was willing to seek to "modernize" NAFTA with Trump's incoming administration and Canada, but not ready to start from scratch.

"We are willing to talk about this with the new government and with Canada as well," Ruiz Massieu told CNN.

"We think it is an opportunity to think if we should modernize it -- not renegotiate it, but to modernize it," she insisted.

Ruiz Massieu said NAFTA would be discussed with Trump's transition team in the coming months.

Trump has also agreed to meet with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, possibly before the New York billionaire's inauguration in January.

Trudeau has meanwhile pledged to work closely with the new US leader.

- 530 million consumers -

NAFTA created a continental market with 530 million consumers in Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Two-way trade in goods between Mexico and the United States totalled about US$1.5 billion daily in 2015, while bilateral trade crossing the US-Canadian border amounted to $1.8 billion daily.

Story continues

The United States, however, is a net loser in both cases, posting $15 billion and $58 billion trade deficits with Canada and Mexico, respectively, last year.

Ruiz Massieu said Mexico "believes in free trade" and the governments "have the challenge to make sure that the opportunities created by NAFTA are more inclusive and that more people in the three countries feel the benefit of this integration agreement."

Trudeau said also that it was important to periodically reassess trade deals to ensure that they continue to be of benefit to the middle class.

Some analysts predict a drop in trade if Trump follows through with protectionist measures, and even possibly a recession in Canada, whose exports to the United States account for 20 percent of its GDP.

Others insist the United States would never seek to curb trade with Canada and Mexico since their economies are so heavily intertwined.

Whether or not NAFTA actually helped generate thousands of jobs and reduce income disparities across North America, or caused huge job losses in the United States as companies moved production to lower cost Mexico -- as Trump has suggested -- is up for debate.

In 2015, the US Congressional Research Service summarized several studies this way: "In reality, NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters."

"The net overall effect of NAFTA on the US economy," it concluded, "appears to have been relatively modest, primarily because trade with Canada and Mexico accounts for a small percentage of US GDP."

The report acknowledged there were corporate and employee costs associated with the transition to more open trade.

It also noted that NAFTA has served as a template for all subsequent free trade agreements negotiated by the United States.
 I come from a small town called Stara Zagra, located in Central Bulgaria, where I spent all of my childhood. I first started taking photos as a teenager, when I took astronomy and astrophotography lessons. This is how I acquired the basic skills and techniques; my approach was therefore a very scientific one but it established my fascination with cameras. At the age of 15 or 16, I started taking black and white photos, and didnt experiment with colour until 2012. My first shots mainly consisted of landscapes and still life which were high-contrasted and surreal.

This lasted until I was 21 years old, when I decided to put an end to my studies as a civil engineer, despite pressure from my parents to continue, in order to fully dedicate myself to my passion of documentary photography. After two years as an assistant photographer in an advertising studio in Bulgaria, I decided to emigrate to France in September 2001, at 23 years old, to try to make a better life for myself. It took a lengthy eight years before I could actually start living from my passion again.
The North Carolina Ku Klux Klan offers you "racial greetings" and invites you to celebrate the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States with a good old fashioned parade, dressed in sheets.

Via Snopes:

A spokeswoman for the group, who provided us with the name Amanda, said the parade would be "unannounced." She did not give us any further information, such as the event's time or specific location, other than to say it will take place in North Carolina.

The KKK representative was responding to our inquiry as to whether the group had held a Trump victory rally on 9 November 2016 on a freeway overpass in the city of Mebane. She confirmed they had not, but she alerted us to the upcoming parade.





We reached out to the press office for Trump's campaign for comment and have not heard back.
[A lot of Americans are considering a move north/EPA/HERB SWANSON]

Chand Nirankari and Ted Bogin were only half-serious when they launched Trumpfugees.Us a website devoted to helping Americans find life away from Trump.

It was a very quick project, we just wanted to get something up (and) we figured if Trump didnt win wed turn it into an expat resource site, Nirankari told Yahoo Canada Finance over the phone from New York the morning after the election. But clearly theres a need for it now.

The website offers digestible breakdowns on different options for so-called Trumpfugees like Argentina, New Zealand, and, of course, Canada. But Nirankari says she spoke to Bogin after this weeks election and the pair decided to flesh it out over the coming weeks.

While the concept of Trumpfugees started as an absurd joke, theres proving to be some legitimacy. Last week the US-based branch of job site Monster saw a 58 per cent spike, with 30,000 searches by Americans involving the keyword Canada. And as the election results rolled in on Tuesday evening, Canadas immigration website crashed, overwhelmed by a rush of traffic seeking information on the move.

Economically speaking, an influx of immigrants from the U.S. could be positive for Canada, provided its highly skilled immigrants, explains Andreas Schotter, assistant professor of international business and global strategy at Western Universitys Ivey Business School.

Canada requires strong contributors of the age group between 25 and 55, says Schotter. Let them be here, welcome them we already lost this opportunity once after 9/11.

In his opinion, Canada should have streamlined its immigration rules surrounding the September 11 attacks and made it easier for firms to bring in talent from elsewhere when countries like the U.S., were tightening their immigration laws. The key, he says, is being selective.

(Highly skilled immigrants) will be net positive contributors to the economy and improve the competitiveness of a lot of Canadian firms and create new jobs by being entrepreneurial, says Schotter. Plus, highly skilled workers are higher income earners meaning they spend more money on higher level goods and services boosting the need for jobs in that sphere.

Story continues

And immigrants are more likely to start a business. According to StatsCan, 19.6 per cent of immigrants are unincorporated self-employed persons compared to 16.1 per cent of their Canadian-born peers.

Naturally, there are some downsides to an influx of immigrants from the south, admits Schotter.

It will have consequences in places like the GTA and the Golden Horseshoe because thats most likely the area that will be crowded by immigrants, same for Vancouver we dont necessarily need more people in these areas, he says. But you have lots of space in between that we need to fill.

Mind you, Schotter isnt convinced there will even be a mass exodus. As anyone whos looked into it (or crashed a website while trying to look into it) can attest, it can be a lengthy process.

Brian Portas, an immigration lawyer with Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, deals predominantly with people immigrating to Canada for work.

A lot of Canadian immigration is geared towards people who have job offers already and Im guessing some of those people dont have those in place yet, he says. Therefore, the immediate issue to moving to Canada will be to get a work permit.

But in order to hire a skilled worker from south of the border, a Canadian employer needs to advertise the position for a minimum period of time to Canadians. After theyve illustrated that its difficult to find the right talent here, they need to complete a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to demonstrate that there will be a neutral or positive effect on the Canadian market.

If the assessment gives the go ahead, theres still the permanent resident process, which even under the express entry system  a point system which takes into account your work experience, skillset, etc  can take a year in legwork and processing time.

Its not as easy as just submit (your) application and wait, adds Portas.

But theres a silver lining for anyone who does navigate the paper work and make the formal move to Canada.

Canada is already great, says Schotter. So we dont have to make it great again.
Inside a model of a Syrian home that Ikea created to raise awareness. From Vimeo.

Ikea showrooms are typically a picture-perfect representation of the type of home many people strive for  one thats clean, modern and inviting. But the popular Swedish retailer turned that concept on its head to raise awareness around the horrors experienced by those stranded behind the battle lines of Syrias ongoing civil war.

With 25 M2 of Syria, Ikea housed a replica of the Damascus cinder block home shared by Rana and her family of nine. Inside the display, Ikea used their iconic price tags to share the story of Syrians living in war zones and how visitors could help.

The installation was part of a fundraising effort for the Red Cross and was created by ad agency POL.

Having visited Rana and learned how she and her family survive outside Damascus, we wanted to rebuild her home as truthfully as we could, POL art director Snorre Martinsen told AdFreak. Placing a Syrian home next to all the Scandinavian homes was obviously a brave move from the warehouse, but it made it clearer than any TV commercial how crucial it is to donate and help.

Ikeas 25 M2 of Syria ran from Oct. 17-31, and the campaign has reportedly raised 22 million Euros for the cause.
It's the question that looms large over every British winter  will you be struck down by flu this year or not?

But now scientists have come up with a way of predicting whether or not you will contract the dreaded lurgy, coughs and sneezes  and it might all depend on which year you were born, according to a new study.

Researchers found that the flu virus a person first encountered when they were young leaves more than just a memory of being ill.

They found that if someone is exposed to a certain strain in childhood, that first exposure could result in long-term protection against that particualr flu virus.

MORE: Trump hits back at professional protesters

MORE: McDonalds cooks up a Nutella burger

This might even reduce the risk of a future flu by up to 75% in a given year, said the study, as it gives the bodys immune system a permanent imprint and subsequently, robust protection against similar or weaker strains of flu.

Its not the age, its the birth year that matters, said researcher Michael Worobey, head Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, and one of the senior authors of the study, to The Guardian.

As far as the data tell us, there is something kind of magical about the first time you have an influenza A response. It does seem to lock you into this imprinted immunity that you can benefit from.

Influenza A has been divided by scientists into 2 categories  type 1 and type 2 plus  and depending which strain of flu is most prevalent in one particular year, doctors might be able to predict who will suffer and who will escape.

Worobeys team came to its conclusion after examining flu data from 1918 to the present day.

It found that until 1968, the viruses in circulation belonged to the type 1 branch.

So people born before then are less likely to suffer from infections if the type 1 flu is the most prevalent.

Story continues

Between 1968 and 1979, type 2 flu dominated  meaning those first exposed to this strain are better protected when that bug is doing the rounds.

After 1979 it gets a little more complicated.

Since then, strains belonging to both branches have been in circulation simultaneously  and depending which one is the strongest, could determine whether you get the flu or not.

Researchers say the study could help doctors deciding which patients are in most need of a flu jab in a particular year.

The study, printed in the journal Science, also found that most people got flu before the age of five.

In Britain, the NHS spends around 100 million each year on the flu jab.

Iframe
FRIDAY, Nov. 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Smokers have an elevated risk of dangerous aneurysms in the body's largest artery, but quitting can cut those odds, a new study confirms.

Experts have long known that smoking raises the risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm -- a weak spot in the wall of the aorta, where it passes through the abdomen. The aorta is the body's main artery, and if an aneurysm there ruptures, it can cause massive internal bleeding.

Researchers said the new study, because of its large size, gives a clearer picture of the risks.

The investigators found that middle-aged smokers had a roughly one in nine chance of developing an abdominal aortic aneurysm in their lifetime.

But if they quit during the study period, that risk declined by 29 percent, versus people who kept smoking. And longer-term quitters -- people who'd stopped smoking before the study -- had an even lower risk, the findings showed.

"Quitting can substantially reduce the risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm," said lead researcher Dr. Weihong Tang, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. "It's never too late to quit."

Dr. Elizabeth Ross, a cardiologist and spokesperson for the American Heart Association, agreed.

"Some people think that if they've been smoking for decades, it's too late to benefit from quitting," Ross said.

But, she stressed, it's clear that when smokers kick the habit, their odds of cardiovascular disease -- not only aortic aneurysm -- go down.

To Ross, the "most important" finding of the study related to women: It found that among women who kept smoking, the lifetime risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm was over 8 percent.

"That's important because abdominal aortic aneurysm is often seen as a disease that affects men," Ross said. "But smoking puts both men and women at increased risk."

However, it's true, she noted, that the condition is more common among men.

That point is emphasized in guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), an expert medical panel that advises the federal government.

The guidelines say that men aged 65 to 75 who have ever smoked should be offered a one-time screening test for abdominal aortic aneurysm. Screening can also be "considered" for men who've never smoked.

For women, the picture is different. The USPSTF says there is not enough evidence to offer screening advice to women who've ever smoked. For women who have never smoked, the guidelines advise against any screening.

But regardless of those guidelines, Ross said, older women who smoke can still ask their doctor about screening.

Cost will be a potential obstacle, she acknowledged. Medicare pays for one-time screening of male smokers only, since it's recommended for them.

On the other hand, Ross said, screening is done by ultrasound, which is fairly inexpensive -- around $100, according to the USPSTF.

People can't rely on symptoms to alert them, Ross pointed out. "An abdominal aortic aneurysm usually doesn't cause symptoms until it ruptures," she said.

At that point, the symptoms include severe pain in the abdomen or back, dizziness, rapid heart rate, and loss of consciousness. A ruptured aneurysm requires emergency surgery; only about one in five people survive, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

When an aneurysm is caught before it bursts, it may be surgically repaired or -- if it's small -- monitored with periodic ultrasounds.

The new findings are based on nearly 16,000 U.S. adults aged 45 and older who were followed for more than two decades.

During that time, 665 people developed an abdominal aortic aneurysm; 75 were caught through ultrasound screening that was begun toward the end of the study period, in 2011, according to the report.

Overall, Tang's team found, the lifetime risk of developing an aneurysm was 2 percent for people who'd never smoked.

The odds were much higher for smokers: Men had an almost 13 percent chance, while the risk was just over 8 percent for women, the study showed.

Quitting clearly helped: Former smokers who'd quit before the study had about a 6 percent lifetime risk of aortic aneurysm. And those who quit in the decade after the study's start did curb their odds, compared with people who kept smoking.

According to Tang, the findings hammer home the importance of kicking the smoking habit.

As for screening, she said, this study won't change any guidelines.

"Whether women can benefit from screening is beyond the scope of this study," Tang said.

She agreed, however, that female smokers and their doctors may want to consider the findings when they make any decisions on screening.

The results were published online Nov. 10 in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

More information

The U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has more on aortic aneurysm.
Donald Trump's shock election victory has enraged Muslim militant groups around the world, and may fan the flames of global terrorism.

The Republican's aggressive anti-Muslim rhetoric, which has included proposing an outright ban on Muslims entering the U.S. and a wish for all Muslims to register in a national database, has provided ample fodder for Islamist extremists. On Wednesday, several groups declared Trump's win was proof of a U.S. war on Islam, counterterrorism research group SITE Intelligence flagged in a post on its website.

Jihadists used social media to warn that having Trump in the White House would unite the mujahideen, SITE director Rita Katz tweeted, with supporters of Al Qaeda (AQ) and the Islamic State (IS) saying the billionaire's election exposed America's hatred of Muslims and would contribute to America's downfall.

Southeast Asia may be at particular risk from Trump's inflammatory comments.

Indonesia and Malaysia are not only home to the world's largest Muslim-majority populationseach also has local militant networks that sympathize with IS' agenda, so a Trump administration could intensify the efforts of those groups.

"They [terror organizations] are good at taking events from one side of the world and using that to incite passion on the other side, which may play out in Indonesia and Malaysia." explained Greg Barton, chair in global Islamic politics at Australia's Deakin University. "There's a real danger we'll see right-wing bigots in the U.S. seize the chance to do nasty things, which will be picked up by jihadi propaganda as evidence that the West is at war with the Muslim world."



In his congratulatory message to the tycoon, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said he hoped Washington would continue to work with Jakarta to "build peace and prosperity for the world." But in June, the country's Vice President Jusuf Kalla told Reuters that his government was "not happy with Trump's opinions" and warned that religious discrimination in the U.S. could prompt retaliatory policies from other countries.

Story continues

"Trump's continued anti-Muslim rhetoric will definitely feed into the already deep-seated distrust of the West by the Muslim conservatives in the region. Depending on his policies in the Middle-East, it will drive even more radicalization and terrorism activities," Asrul Hadi Abdullah Sani, a Malaysia-focused analyst at BowerGroupAsia, warned.

But some believed the expectation of violence as a result of Trump's victory alone was unrealistic.

Terrorist groups operate on a range of ideologies, which include not just anti-Western beliefs but also anti-democracy and anti-government views, Jacinta Carroll, head of the counterterrorism policy center at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said. "These positions are already held as part of the central tenets of these groups and are unlikely to be affected by statements made by President-Elect Trump."





Still, networks were likely to continue to use selected statements from the billionaire as a means to provide inspiration and justification for their cause, just as they selectively quoted from religious leaders, she continued.



Many were careful to note that Trump's anti-Muslim talk on the campaign trail may not necessarily turn into action once he enters office.



"Now that the election season is over, I expect Trump to return to the center...Despite his previous comments, Trump and his team knows that he needs to show that he is a president for all Americans and not a certain segment. Now that he is president, it is no longer about slogans but geopolitical realities," BowerGroupAsia's Sani explained.

Indeed, many have pointed out that because global forecasting on Trump's chances of victory were wrong, the world must be cautious in predicting his policies going forward.

Reports already emerged late on Wednesday that references to a ban on Muslims were removed from the president-elect's website, a move that could suggest a toned-down outlook.

That would lend credence to the views of many political pundits, who have long warned that Trump's controversial views were merely a public-relations stunt and that he would pursue more moderate policies once taking office.

"It is highly unlikely that Trump will continue to make the kind of statements he had previously made on Muslims, now that he is approaching office and responsibility to govern for all Americans," said Carroll.

But it may be too late for a moderate stance on Islam from America's new president, because Trump effectively "let the genie out of the bottle" during his campaign, suggested Barton.

Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.







More From CNBC


BLUFFDALE, Utah, Nov. 11, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Listen Technologies, a leading provider of assistive listening products for more than 17 years, has announced that the second generation of its award-winning ListenWiFi pro audio solution will be available in North America and Europe, shipping at the end of the year. ListenWiFi lets users in noisy video environments easily stream TV audio and local venue audio to their personal smartphones and devices.



The newly updated ListenWiFi is highly scalable and can accommodate up to 10 access points (AP) supporting up to 100 simultaneous users per AP. ListenWiFi is ideal for student centers, fitness centers, employee lounges, corporate and medical waiting rooms, airports and other venues that feature multiple screens or media walls.

The newest version of ListenWiFi remains easy for venues to install and use, affording an enhanced experience for patrons. There are no monthly fees or hidden contracts for streaming audio and automatic software updates.

Additional ListenWiFi enhancements include:

More coverage : Achieve greater coverage by utilizing up to 10 access points.

: Achieve greater coverage by utilizing up to 10 access points. More channels : Venues are able to setup up to 24 stereo or 48 mono channels, depending on the application.

: Venues are able to setup up to 24 stereo or 48 mono channels, depending on the application. International support: Venues can program channels in their native languages and allow patrons to select the languages of their choice to navigate menus.

In venues and facilities that offer ListenWiFi, patrons can download the free app on their mobile device, connect to the ListenWiFi network and tune into the channel displayed on the television. ListenWiFi enables users to manage audio channels and the app contents via the cloud and to hear audio clearly in crowded, noisy multi-screen environments.

ListenWiFi is the most robust WiFi solution available and makes it easy and affordable for venues in any market  from hospitality and education to government and business  that feature video walls or multiple screens to enhance the audio experience for their patrons, students and employees, said Russ Gentner, CEO, Listen Technologies.

About Listen Technologies

Listen Technologies develops products that create exceptional user listening experiences in a variety of groups or gatherings. The company thrives on innovation, leading to the delivery of exceptional wireless communication systems. These solutions are used for assistive listening and language interpretation in houses of worship, tour groups, fitness centers, stadiums and a long list of other cool applications. For more information on Listen Technologies' newest innovations, including ListenWiFi and ListenIR, visit www.listentech.com.
Lancet Study:

These findings firmly counter those of a Cochrane review of direct-acting antiviral treatment trials that could neither confirm nor reject if direct-acting antivirals had an effect on long-term HCV-related morbidity and mortality. They also provide the best evidence to date to support guidance documents that recommend direct-acting antiviral treatment for all patients with chronic HCV infection.





Latest Update Feb 12, 2019A systematic review published by the Cochrane Collaboration suggested achieving SVR (cure) for patients using hepatitis C direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) doesn't correlate with any long term benefits. View each rebuttal and all ongoing media coverage.
Congratulations on your victory @realDonaldTrump. As our President, Columba and I will pray for you in the days and months to come.
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
A crowd of hundreds of UW-Madison students and others who gathered Thursday night at the top of Bascom Hill swelled to around 2,500 by the time it reached the steps of the state Capitol.
A Middleton man is at the forefront of a fight to establish a memorial in Arlington National Cemetery for Vietnam War helicopter pilots and crew members.

The veterans have designed a memorial that would cover 5 square feet, but last year the Army refused them, saying space for the graves of war dead was a higher priority.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Bob Hesselbein said he hopes Congress will overrule the Army and honor the key role played by helicopter personnel in deploying ground troops, providing air cover and evacuating the wounded.

Arlington memorials like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier draw many thousands of visitors and imbue the fields of buried dead with important meaning, Hesselbein said.

Thats what separates Arlington from other cemeteries, said Hesselbein, who flew a Cobra gunship in 1972, the year the Army sent him to Vietnam. He later joined the Air Force and became a fighter pilot.

A memorial would help reduce the isolation experienced by reticent Vietnam veterans and family members, said Julie Kink, who was a Middleton 8-year-old in 1969 when her parents received a telegram telling them her older brother David Kink had been hurt in a helicopter crash in Vietnam.

David Kink died 12 days after an explosion brought his helicopter down, but it took many years of gingerly reaching out to veterans of the war  many of whom just wanted to forget  for Julie Kink to feel she understood his service and how he died.

Kink said she was so young that she hardly knew her brother, a skinny 1967 Middleton High School graduate.

In the two decades since she began learning more, she has built a new family, including people like Hesselbein with whom she has worked on the memorial.

Vietnam was a topic you just didnt talk about, she said. That kept me apart for many years from all these guys that have since become my new big brothers.

The most important thing to me is that its become more OK to talk about it, she said. There was such a disconnect between us Gold Star families and the guys who came back and just put their service on the shelf.

The memorial can be a needed focal point that will help people talk and connect.

Anything that can lift that shadow really needs to be done, and it needs to be done now, she said.

Military rejects memorial

Last year, the Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery deadlocked 3-3 on the memorial. Those in favor said it would be fitting because of the heroism of the crews in saving the lives of military personnel who were injured or pinned down by the enemy in Vietnam. Opponents said Arlingtons primary mission was interment, and it should not become a monument park.

Then-Secretary of the Army John McHue said in a letter to the committee that instead of a memorial, the cemetery would place a memorial plaque at the base of a living tree and create a virtual tour focused on the grave sites of pilots.

A spokesman for Army Secretary Eric Fanning referred questions to Arlington National Cemetery, which didnt respond on Wednesday. A tree has been planted but the pilots association didnt want the plaque because it could be seen as closing the matter.

Instead, the association is pushing for H.R. 4298, the Vietnam Helicopter Crewmember Memorial Act. More than 60 co-sponsors have signed on, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, is co-author of a Senate version, S. 3447.

Hesselbein said the aging of the Vietnam generation has added urgency to the efforts because the pressure on decision-makers will wane as their numbers wane.

The average age of the approximately 8,900 pilots association members is 72, he said.

Weve got to get this done while we are still alive, Hesselbein said. When the people who fought in a war have all died, the chances of honoring them goes away with them.

Doing things that were crazy

Hesselbein grew up in Ohio and was deployed to Vietnam in 1972 as a pilot on an AH-1G Cobra gunship, a helicopter equipped with rockets and machine guns.

The speedy Cobras operated with two pilots and no other crew. They worked in concert with slower, lightly armed scout helicopters that spotted targets, and UH-1 Iroquois helicopters called Hueys that dropped troops into jungle battlegrounds and extracted the wounded.

I saw guys do things that were crazy to save somebody, Hesselbein said.

About 12,000 helicopters were operated by the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force in the Vietnam theater of operations.

Of those, 5,086 were destroyed by enemy fire or mishaps related to combat operations, maintenance and weather, said Hesselbein, a past president of the pilots group.

An estimated 2,002 pilots, 2,704 crew members and 532 U.S. military passengers died on UH-1 missions, or roughly 9 percent of the wars 58,307 recorded fatalities, he said.

After he left the Air Force in 1986, Hesselbein moved to Wisconsin to take a job as a pilot for Northwest Airlines. He is married to Dianne Hesselbein, a Democratic member of the state Assembly.

Bob Hesselbein and his daughter Katie, 15, began tidying up David Kinks grave in the Sunset Memory Cemetery on Mineral Point Road about 12 years ago.

Extra meaning on Veterans Day

Kink was 19 years old when he graduated from flight school and joined C Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division in Phuoc Vinh on June 23, 1969, his sister said.

By the time he crashed, July 21, 1969, he had logged about 66 hours of combat pilot time, mostly in Hueys. He was co-pilot that day in a light observation helicopter flying at a low altitude searching for signs that the ground had been disturbed by the enemy.

Overhead, a Cobra gunship fired at a target and detonated an unexploded U.S. bomb hidden on the ground, Julie Kink said. The blast slammed into the scout helicopter, killing the pilot and another crew member.

David Kink crawled away from the burning wreck with burns and broken bones. He was evacuated to a Japanese hospital where he died less than two weeks later.

Julie Kink, through her involvement with veterans groups, met James Mike Sprayberry, who is the recipient of a Medal of Honor for his actions in Vietnam in an air cavalry unit, not a pilot or crew member, but a soldier who was dropped into the battlefield with other troops to fight on the ground. They were married in 2012.

David Kink was born on Nov. 11, 1949. His little sister said she thinks about that whenever she sees crowds gathered for Veterans Day.

She said: I think Davids looking down saying, Look at all the people who came for my birthday.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. So wrote H.L. Mencken a century ago.

In our form of democracy, though, the people often dont get what they want. But with the election of Donald Trump, that is about to change.

Among the central elements of the U.S. Constitution are checks and balances, achieved through separation of powers. The idea, James Madison wrote, is that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

By design, Congress is a restraint on the president. The president has tools to contain Congress. The Supreme Court, whose members are chosen by the other two branches, has the last word on what they do.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, explained Madison, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The scheme is the source of chronic frustration born of stalemate. Presidents fail to keep their promises because Congress rebels. Congress cant enact its agenda because it lacks the votes to override vetoes. And even if they can agree on what to do, their plans may die in the Supreme Court.

The beauty of a parliamentary system is efficiency. If you elect a party that promises to take some action, you can bet the action will be taken. The prospect of getting what you vote for concentrates the mind on what you really want.

Our system encourages voters to be less careful, because winning candidates often fall short of their proclaimed intentions. Barack Obamas 2009 stimulus package had to be smaller than liberal economists urged so it could pass. He got health care reform, only to see the Supreme Court invalidate significant portions. In 2008, his supporters voted for hope and change, but the ensuing change was glacial and dispiriting.

Things will be different for President Trump. His party controls both houses of Congress, and he will get to restore the Supreme Courts Republican-appointed majority. The constitutional checks will be largely irrelevant. Trump and his party will be free to do what they campaigned on. Voters who didnt take their plans literally may be surprised when they come to pass.

A trade war is imminent because Trump has vowed to scrap the Trans-Pacific Partnership, signed by Obama, while threatening to levy a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods and abandon NAFTA. Obamacare will be history. The nuclear deal with Iran is a dead letter.

Construction will start on a border wall with Mexico, and the government will step up efforts to deport undocumented immigrants. Tax cuts to boost economic growth will become law.

His supporters may cheer each achievement. But they may not be so pleased when they go to WalMart or Home Depot and find that Trumps tariffs have raised the price of everything from clothing to power tools.

He tweeted that instead of Obamacare, we will have MUCH less expensive and MUCH better health care. Some of his supporters may miss the Affordable Care Act when they lose their coverage. What will they think when they have to pay more for something they like less?

How will Trumps followers feel when Iran resumes the nuclear weapons program that Obamas deal halted  or if the United States and Israel launch a war against Iran in response?

What will they say when Mexico refuses to pay for that wall? Or when it turns out that, as an editorial in The Wall Street Journal noted, deporting all the undocumented foreigners would demand the departure, on average, of 84 buses and 47 chartered flights every day for two years  which isnt going to happen?

Trump can promise 4 percent annual GDP growth year in and year out, but he has no clue how to produce it. Trump supporters dismayed by the huge increase in the federal debt since 2008 should brace for an even bigger one under him.

If Trumps plans lead to failure or disaster, he and the Republican Party will own the results. And the voters who put their faith in him will have no one to blame but themselves.

They may come to understand the wisdom of Oscar Wilde. There are only two tragedies in life, he wrote. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
You are not imagining things, Paula. My sound meter is on overdrive these days. My worst recent experience was at the otherwise delightful new Ambar in Arlington, where -- not for the first time in a restaurant -- I asked a server if the music could be turned down because none of us at my table could hear each other. The decibel reading was 88 -- as loud as a SNOWBLOWER.

Restaurants, you really need to address the noise pollution issue. I'm tempted to take the suggestion of several readers and deduct stars for places that show no concern for their customers' ears. (Complaints are coming from all demographics, by the way, not just seniors.)

Good morning, everyone. Tell me what else is on your mind today, food-wise.
I feel like the word "normalize" is being flung at lots of reporters these days.

Here's the reality: Donald Trump won one of the two major party nominations. During the general election campaign (and in the primary) we fact-checked his statements, pointed out when he was saying things that were outside of the norms of political conversation and dug into is background to see what we could find that explain who he is.

We did all of that because that's our job.

I think we will continue to cover him in that vein. When and if Trump does things that are outside the bounds of political behavior, we will cover it.

BUT, simply because you disagree with Trump or even hate him doesn't invalidate his victory. He won. Period.

Our job is to figure out why, what it says about America and what it means for our future.
Fatou Bensouda, Chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) told Wednesday the UN Security Council that her institution will make civil war-ravaged Libya its top priority next year.

In an address before the Security Council, the UN top prosecutor said that widespread violence, lawlessness, impunity in the country and the tragic consequences of the conflict borne by civilians cannot leave her institution unmoved.

The referral by definition carries great responsibility to seek justice for the countless civilians who have been victims of the widespread crimes in Libya since 15 February 2011, she said.

Libya descended in lawlessness since the fall of Col. Muammar Gaddafi killed in a NATO-backed revolution in 2011. Uncontrolled factions have caused mayhem. UN-backed Government of National Accord tasked to reunify the country has failed to impose its rule.

The Gambian lawyer acknowledged that permanent instability in the oil-rich country has made investigations hard to carry out. She pointed out that her office is poised to issue other arrest warrants against additional suspects.

Timely execution of these new arrest warrants will be crucial, will require coordinated efforts by States, and may also require support from the Council, she said, adding that she has decided to allocate additional resources from within her Offices overall budget to the Libya situation.

Without this Councils support, this allocation will necessarily come at the expense of investigations of other crimes in other situations, she said.
This liberation operation marks the beginning of the end of the so-called Daesh Caliphate in Iraq stated Jan Kubis of the ongoing offensive assault of the Iraqi forces, backed by militia groups and the US-led coalition, to takeover Mosul.

The battle for the city began more than three weeks ago and the UN envoy for the country pointed out that after the eventual victory over the extremist group, reconciliation at both community and national level is the way to make military victories against ISIL sustainable, to make Iraq truly peaceful and united.

Kubis who was briefing the UN Security Council on the situation in Iraq pointed out that some of the armed groups fighting on the sidelines of the Iraqi forces have been engaged in revenge acts against ISIS militants. He urged the Iraqi government to continue its efforts to prevent such incidents from occurring and to investigate and punish any such incidents should they occur.

Iraqi forces have progressed faster than Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi had projected since the operation began but the number of civilian casualties could increase because the extremist group is forcing locals to relocate inside the city of Mosul with the intention of using them as human shields, Kubis stated. The extremist group is trying to intimidate locals from cooperating with its enemies by public displaying crucified bodies of those accused of being spies.

Around 35,000 people have been displaced by the operation to liberate Mosul and their numbers are expected to increase although relief and aid organizations are already struggling to provide the necessities to those sheltered in camps.
Sweden to reach NATO's defense spending goal of 2% of GDP by 2026

Lebanon raises electricity price for first time since 1990s

Lavrov and Cavusoglu discuss situation over 'grain deal'

Turkey not satisfied with Sweden's promises

Azerbaijan claims to have 'exposed' Azerbaijanis who acted 'under control of Iranian secret service'

Taliban sets up female Interior Ministry unit in Afghanistan to disperse protests

U.S. concerned about Iran's 'threats' against Saudi Arabia

Lebanon is facing a power vacuum, left without a president

Gas exports from Iran to Armenia to double

In first 9 months about $1.7 billion is transferred to Armenia

Baerbock and Scholz disagree on China

Delegations of Ukraine, Turkey and UN temporarily suspend movement of ships in framework of Black Sea grain deal

Qatar Energy Minister calls EU proposal to limit gas prices hypocritical

Jamshidi: Any capturing of further territories is occupation

Putin: Kiev must give real guarantees of strict compliance with the Istanbul agreements

Putin and Erdogan discuss results of meeting of Russian, Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders in Sochi

Blinken goes to Germany to meet with G-7 colleagues

Iranist: Cooperation between Yerevan and Tehran will prevent further Turkish activism

U.S. military conducts field weapons inspections in Ukraine

Defense Ministers of Russia and Turkey once again discuss suspension of 'grain deal'

Armenian President and ICRC representatives discuss Armenian captives held in Azerbaijan

Aliyev's aide visits Nakhchivan

Berlin urges Serbia to choose between EU and Russia

Armenian Deputy Prime Minister and USAID representatives discuss bilateral cooperation

Erdogan: Turkey continues to make necessary initiatives on grain deal

Macron promises Ukraine to survive winter and strengthen air defense

The Collins British Dictionary chooses main word of 2022

Medvedev: Western countries are pushing the world into a global war

Deputy Minister: 50,5 bln AMD will be allocated to North-South transport corridor construction in 2023

Georgia begins preparations for multinational exercise Agile Spirit 2023

Armenia and Iran discuss bilateral energy cooperation

Paruyr Hovhannisyan receives Erin Elizabeth McKee

Dollar, euro drop in Armenia

Erdogan plans talks with Putin and Zelenskyy in coming days

Head of Armenian State Revenue Committee: In 2022, the state budget will lack about AMD 84.8 billion

Russia's richest billionaires will become $83.4 billion richer in 2022

Expert: expansion of relations between Tehran, Yerevan may prevent corridor creation

Governor of Armenias Gegharkunik briefs EU mission on condition of settlements affected by Azerbaijan shelling (PHOTOS)

Russia and Iran to sign deal on free trade zone with EEU

Armenia National Assembly opposition factions representatives meet with visiting European Parliament members

Hearings on South Caucasus to be held in US Senate

Central Bank chief: High activity in Armenia economy is maintained in third quarter of 2022

OPEC Secretary General: Europe and U.S. are heading for economic recession

Pashinyan briefs Raisi about talks in Sochi and their results

Ardshinbank and Mastercard offer to pay with Apple Pay and get cashback

Nine people arrested in India after mass deaths in bridge collapse

CSTO meeting on Armenia-Azerbaijan border situation to be held on November 23 in Yerevan

Zas: CSTO working towards proposals regarding situation on Armenia-Azerbaijan border

Ameriabank: At the Vanguard of Armenia's Banking Sector

Clinton sues Trump to recover $1 million from him

Lukashenko: Armenia turned down proposed settlement plan

Raisi: Iran-Armenia trade can be increased to $3bn

Zas discusses Baku-Yerevan conflict in Minsk

Raisi: Foreigners interference will deepen problems of Caucasus

State Security Service conducts operation in Azerbaijani Ministry of Culture

Iran expands sanctions on U.S.

Cavusoglu discusses relations with Azerbaijan with his Iranian counterpart

European gas price falls to $1,246 per 1,000 cubic meters in October

Legislature vice-speaker thanks visiting European Parliament lawmakers for supporting Armenia

Armenia revenue committee chief: No initiative to ban import of Turkish goods

Economy minister: Authorities plan to increase number of tourists in Armenia to 2.5mn annually by 2026

Armenia official: Our border checkpoints are ready to receive Azerbaijanis

Flight restrictions extended at 11 airports in south and center of Russia until November 9

Sergey Kopirkin: Unblocking of communications must be based on respect for countries sovereignty

Storm Nalgae in the Philippines leaves 110 people killed

Lukashenko on Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict: Why did they engage EU? Why are they engaging CSTO there?

Ambassador: Russia justifies itself as Armenias ally

Kopirkin: September battles between Armenia, Azerbaijan were stopped by Russia militarys efforts

Gold price remains stable

Death toll in Seoul stampede rises to 156

Armenian PM and Iranian President hold talks in Tehran

Kopirkin: Karabakh status issue should be left to next generations

14 people injured in Chicago Halloween night shooting

Armenias Pashinyan arrives in Iran

Armenia economy minister: Government predicts 7% economic growth in 2023

Turkish and Ukraine defense ministers discuss situation with grain deal

Copper prices are rising

Russia envoy to Armenia: Many common paradigms being broken in South Caucasus

Israel holds fifth parliamentary elections since 2019

Lavrov: Over past decades we managed to lay solid foundations for strategic partnership, alliance with Armenia

Oil goes up in price

Primakov Readings international forum kicks off in Yerevan

One person killed in Toronto shooting

Armenias Pashinyan heads for Iran

Newspaper: Armenia premier sends intelligence to Artsakh on day of rally

Putin on choosing Turkey as Russia natural gas supply junction: Erdogan is man of his word

Russia, Turkey FMs discuss South Caucasus

Kremlin: Armenia, Azerbaijan confirmed their interest in Russia mediation

Armenia PM concludes visit to Russias Sochi

Putin: Europe will not be able to exclude Russia from Yerevan-Baku relations normalization process

Putin on extending mandate of Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh: It will depend on other matters

Putin: No Armenia-Azerbaijan peace treaty yet

IMF forecasts $1 trillion unforeseen profit for oil exporter

Lavrov and Cavusoglu discuss recent developments in Caucasus

Seoul and Warsaw sign key agreements on nuclear energy development in Poland

Statement by leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan on results of meeting in Sochi

Saudi Arabia and UAE defend OPEC decision

Putin: Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan agree on joint statement

U.S. wants EU to impose export restrictions against China

Thunberg calls UN conference place for lies and fraud
YEREVAN.  Zhoghovurd newspaper has made an improbable discovery. It turns out that Turkey provided humanitarian assistance to the Republic of Armenia (RA), in 2015; this is indicated in official documents, reported Zhoghovurd.

According to data released by the RA National Statistical Service [(NSS)], the humanitarian aid received by the RA in 2015 made up of about 5,000 tons, overall, which totaled about $50 million.

We found out that the humanitarian aid which Armenia received from Turkey contained caoutchouc [i.e. natural rubber that has not been vulcanized], plastic, rubber, and other similar items.

However, the most bizarre and problematic is that the [Armenian] national state agencies, represented by the government and the NSS, provide contradicting information [in this regard].

In response to Zhoghovurds question, the RA Government strongly denied the fact of getting aid from Turkey. There has been no aid by Turkey as well as reciprocal aid.

The reality remains unknown in the created contradiction, wrote Zhoghovurd.
STEPANAKERT.  The adversary violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between the Karabakh and Azerbaijani opposing forces around 85 times, from late Thursday night to early Friday morning.

During this time the Azerbaijani armed forces fired more than 1,100 shots toward the Armenian position-holders, and by way of various caliber weapons, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh) Defense Army informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.

In addition, the adversary fired four shells from a rocket-propelled grenade and one shell from a mortar, in a northerly (Verin Chaylu village) direction of the line of contact.

But the NKR Defense Army vanguard units took actions in response to quell this aggressive activity by the Azerbaijani armed forces, and continued confidently carrying out their military service.
YEREVAN.  The Government of Armenia can be called a Komsomol (i.e. a youth organization controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in a bad sense; there is a form, but there is no content.

Capital city Yerevan former Mayor, opposition Armenian National Congress member, economist Vahagn Khachatryan, stated the aforesaid at a press conference on Friday. He noted this when asked about the new Armenian state program for making social payments to members of the military.

Let no one attempt to make a speculation with it that he wants to help the soldiery; [there is] no such thing, said Khachatryan. And people want to be sure that this money will reach its goal. [But] the current vague explanations give no answer.

The economist stated that no one even explains whether such a payment shall be voluntary; and if not, then it is a tax; yet no one calls it a tax.

[This] recalls the voluntary-compulsory means of the Soviet years, added the opposition member. Everyone wants to help, but they discredit this concept with such initiatives.
YEREVAN.  The military exercises that began in Azerbaijan are a cause for concern to Armenia.

Ambassador Ara Papyan, Modus Vivendi Center Director and political scientist, stated the aforesaid at a press conference on Friday. He noted that this concern stems from the fact that the adversary is unpredictable in its conduct.

This is one of the threats, added Papyan. We [i.e. the Armenian side] need to assess the military exercises [of Azerbaijan] within the general policy of Azerbaijan: they are attempting to solve the problem [i.e. the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) conflict] by force.

At the same time, however, the analyst stressed that no matter how militant Azerbaijan is, it needs to grasp the fact that it will not succeed in case of a direct confrontation.

Although the parties will have casualties [in such confrontation], Azerbaijan will not be able to have successes, [and] which they understand and realize in Azerbaijan.
STEPANAKERT.  The Azerbaijani armed forces continue taking provocative actions at some parts of the line of contact between the Karabakh and Azerbaijani opposing forces, on Thursday night and since Friday morning.

In particular, the adversary is shellingwith mortarsthe Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh) Defense Army positions located in a northeasterly (Talish and Yaremja villages) direction of the frontlines, starting from Friday at 12:15pm, the Defense Army informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Especially the Artsakh military outposts located in the direction of Yaremja village are subjected to intense shelling.

But the NKR Defense Army vanguard units are taking actions in response to quell this aggressive activity by the adversary.

The Artsakh Ministry of Defense stated that the full accountability for this rise in border tension falls on the Azerbaijani side.
YEREVAN.  The office of the Personal Representative to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Chairperson-in-Office (OSCE CiO) is kept regularly informed about the situation in the Karabakh conflict zone.

Press secretary of the Ministry of Defense (MOD) of Armenia, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, told the above-said to Armenian News- NEWS.am. He noted this commenting on the recent increase in ceasefire violations along the line of contact between the Karabakh and Azerbaijani opposing forces.

Press service of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh) Defense Army on Thursday informed that the adversary was shelling with mortars.

In accordance with the working procedure, we [i.e. the Armenia MOD] keep in constant contact with the office of [Ambassador] Andrzej Kasprzyk, the Personal Representative to the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, noted Hovhannisyan. The information is reported virtually every day.
YEREVAN.  Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan on Friday met with the ambassadors of European Union (EU) member states accredited in Armenia. The ambassadors delegation was led by Ambassador Piotr Switalski, Head of the EU Delegation to Armenia.

The PM underscored the frank and open discourse and cooperation with the EU, the Press Office of the Government of Armenia informed Armenian News-NEWS.am. Karapetyan added that he considers the exchange of experience and contribution of European culture in Armenia to be indispensable.

The Premier noted that the main task of the Government of Armenia is to create a maximum fair, liberal and level playing field for businesses, and to promote investment projects in the country.

Karen Karapetyan informed that foundations will be established soon that will co-fund businesses, and steps will be take toward motivating becoming law-abiding taxpayers in Armenia.

The PM stressed that he sees no way to develop the country without fighting against shadow economy and corruption.

In the near future we will create a center for strategic initiatives and reforms, added Karapetyan.

Ambassador Switalski, for his part, said they are impressed by the ambitions and agenda of reforms by the Prime Minister and Government of Armenia.

The European diplomat added that the EU, as a friend of Armenia, stands ready to assist the country.

Reflecting on combating corruption in Armenia, Switalski noted that he is impressed by the respective measures which the countrys government envisions, and expressed willingness to work closely in this regard.

The EU ambassador also underscored collaboration and reforms in several other domains.

At the talk, the interlocutors discussed a number of other matters of mutual interest.
STEPANAKERT.  The Azerbaijani Armed Forces fired 37 mortar at Karabakh positions in the north-eastern (village of Yarymdzha) and northern (village of Talysh) directions of the line of contact on Friday afternoon from 12:15 to 15:30.

As the Karabakh Defense Army reported, 13 shots were made from 60 mm mortars, 24 shots from 82 mm mortars.

In addition to mortars, Azerbaijani armed forces used small arms of various calibres in the eastern direction (Akna), including large-caliber guns Black Arrow (8 shots) and Istiglal (25 shots).

The Karabakh Defense Army units reiterated in case of necessity to provide reliable protection of the state border. At the moment the situation is relatively calm.
YEREVAN. - The Chief of State Health Agency of Armenias Health Ministry, Saro Tsaturyan, was dismissed upon his own application Friday, the press-service of the Health Ministry informed Armenian News  NEWS.am.

As reported earlier, on the basis of obtained evidence, Chief of State Health Agency Saro Tsaturyan, head of Yerevan City Center, Arsen Sedrakyan, and former head of Medical Examination and Information Center, Samvel Kharazyan, were charged with Article 308 (2) of the Armenian Criminal Code (abusing of position, which negligently caused grave consequences ). Precautionary measure of release on signature bond is enforced regarding them.

Later, in the framework of the criminal case considered in the proceedings of the Department of Especially Important Cases of the Investigative Committee of Armenia, the investigator decided to temporarily suspend the activity of Tsaturyan and Sedrakyan.
YEREVAN. - President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan on Friday received the delegation led by Co-Chair of the Inter-parliamentary Committee on Cooperation between the Armenian National Assembly and Russian Federal Assembly, Nikolay Ryzhkov. The latter has arrived in Armenia to attend the subsequent session of the Inter-parliamentary Committee.

The President welcomed the guests, stressing that the Yerevan session like the previous sessions of the Inter-parliamentary Committee  was held in a constructive atmosphere; issues of mutual interest aimed at further strengthening of the Armenian-Russian cooperation, were discussed.

The interlocutors expressed satisfaction with the fact that thanks to the years-long activity of the Inter-parliamentary Committee, the ties between Armenia and Russia have become stable and dynamic in nature. The President also highly appreciated the multilateral format of the Armenian-Russian cooperation.

At the meeting, the sides underscored the importance of consistent deepening of the Armenian-Russian strategic cooperation in all directions.

Nikolay Ryzhkov, for his part, thanked President Sargsyan for the traditional reception of his delegation after the session, as well as for productive discussions. He briefed the President on the agreements reached during the session and future programs. Stressing that Russia has special relations with strategic ally Armenia, the Co-Chair assured that the deputies of both countries have and will do their best in the committee format to contribute to the continuous strengthening and deepening of bilateral interstate ties.
The scheduled meeting between the Pope and the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia was held at the Papal office in the Vatican on Friday morning.

After sharing greetings, Catholicos Aram I expressed his great appreciation for the Popes two pronouncements on the Armenian Genocide of 1915 as the first genocide of the 20th century, which he had made in 2015 at the Vatican and in 2016 in Yerevan. His Holiness Pope Francis reiterated his conviction on this matter, Catholicosate said in a statement.

Speaking of the conflicts in the Middle East and the current problems of the churches, Aram I said that the churches had endured difficulties at the cost of martyrdom for centuries, and, yet presently, they remain committed to their vocation. He then thanked Pope Francis and the Vatican for defending the rights of Christians in the Middle East and for supporting efforts towards Christian-Muslim cooperation and conviviality. Pope Francis welcoming the Catholicos reminder, stressed, in his turn, the vital importance of the Christian presence in the Middle East and assured of the continuing solidarity of the Vatican to this effect. In this context, the two Pontiffs emphasized the need to continue, with renewed pace, interreligious dialogue and collaboration in general, and Christian-Muslim in particular, to face together concerns and challenges of modern societies.

His Holiness Aram I speaking about the importance of the unity of the church, pointed out that establishing a common date for Easter would be a visible expression of Christian unity. The Holy Father reminded Aram I that during the last few decades the Catholic Church has given special attention to this matter and welcomes any efforts aimed at fixing a common date, which could be acceptable by all the churches.

Aram I shared with Pope Francis the good news that eventually Lebanon had a new president in the person of Gen. Michel Aoun. The Pope warmly greeted the election of a president, considering it an important step towards deepening the Christian-Muslim cohabitation in Lebanon.

Referring to the historical relations between the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia and the Vatican, which dates back to the time of the Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia, His Holiness Aram I reaffirmed his commitment to continue bilateral relation and collaboration with the Vatican. At the end of their meeting, both Pontiffs reemphasized the decisive importance of taking the church to the people through the kind of initiatives, which make the church a living and relevant reality in the life of the people.
The session in the format of NATO Partnerships and Cooperative Security Committee + Armenia was held at NATO Headquarters on Friday. The session was chaired by James Appathurai, the NATO Secretary General's Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Armenian delegation was headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Ashot Hovakimyan and First Deputy Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan.

During the session, the Armenia-NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) Assessment Report for 2015-2016 was discussed.

In his speech, Deputy Minister Hovakimyan touched upon the Armenia-NATO political dialogue and partnership cooperation in various fields. He also reaffirmed Armenias commitment to continue participating in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan during 2017.

For his part, Deputy Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan presented the political and economic reforms in Armenia, preparatory process prior to the parliamentary elections in 2017, as well as the efforts exerted towards creating relevant conditions for advancing the peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict.

He also touched on the main results of reviewing the defense strategy this year, attaching importance to the further development of joint programs and formats in the area of military cooperation, defense education and reforms.

The initiatives aimed at enhancing integrity in the armed forces, fighting corruption and strengthening human rights, as well as expanding civil and public control over the armed forces were mentioned as priorities of defense policy in the coming years.

The Armed Forces will carry out reforms in the defense area and review the legislation in the framework of the logic of considering the factor fostering development of economy, education and science in Armenia.

Upon the request of the participants of the session, the Armenian side also presented the situation on the line of contact between the armed forces of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan, consequences of the aggression launched by Azerbaijan along the contact line with Artsakh in April and the steps taken to overcome them.

In their speeches, the representatives of NATO member states delegations highly appreciated Armenia's cooperation with the Alliance in all fields, expressing their support to the efforts exerted by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs towards the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Ashot Hovakimyan and Davit Tonoyan also responded to numerous questions of the delegates of the NATO member states.

After the session, the Armenian delegation was received by Deputy Secretary General of NATO Rose Gottemoeller. During the meeting the sides discussed issues related to the further development of Armenia-NATO political dialogue and regional issues. Specifically, the Armenian side drew the NATO officials attention to the escalation of tension along the contact line with Artsakh prior to the large-scale military exercises held by Azerbaijan.

Afterwards, Ashot Hovakimyan and Davit Tonoyan met with NATO Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security, Alejandro Alvargonzalez. During the meeting the sides discussed steps towards the dialogue held within the framework of Armenia-NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan.
STEPANAKERT. - On the night of November 10-11 and during the day the Azerbaijani armed forces shelled the frontline positions of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh) Defense Army near the villages of Talish and Yarimja from 60 and 82 mm mortars. Such massive use of mortars occurring for the first time after a large-scale aggression against Nagorno-Karabakh in April, has become the continuation of recent escalation of tension on the Line of Contact by Azerbaijan.

It is of serious concern that the aggravation of the situation takes place against the background of Azerbaijan's preparation for the large-scale military exercises near the NKR borders, employing a large number of military equipment and manpower.

Such actions are a flagrant violation of agreements reached at summits in Vienna and St. Petersburg on inadmissibility of escalation of tension on the Line of Contact and indicate Azerbaijans intention to impede the measures aimed at creating conditions for the resumption of the negotiation process.

Moreover, Azerbaijan not only rejects creating incidents investigation mechanisms and expanding the office of the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, but also seeks to undermine the only international monitoring mechanism to maintain the ceasefire regime by firing an area where the OSCE mission carried out a planned monitoring the day before.

In this situation, we call on the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, the OSCE Chairperson in Office and the international community as a whole to condemn in the strongest terms the destructive policy of the Azerbaijani authorities, and to take effective measures to prevent a further escalation of tension.

For its part, the NKR will suppress any actions of Azerbaijan, threatening the security of the Republic, the peace and stability in the region.
Password Reset

Please enter the email address for your account. A verification code will be sent to you. Once you have received the verification code, you will be able to choose a new password for your account.




IAFC Releases Guide to Address Gap in Firefighters' Physicals

"Firefighters need health care that is tailored to the inherent risks of their dangerous jobs," said Chief John Sinclair, IAFC's president and chairman of the board. "The guide provides doctors and firefighters clear information about the clinical care needed to address these risks."

The International Association of Fire Chiefs released "A Healthcare Provider's Guide to Firefighter Physicals" this week in a bid to assist health agencies and boost the health and wellness of firefighters. The guide serves as an important new tool for firefighters to manage their own health, according to IAFC.

The research-supported, experience-driven guide was spearheaded by IAFC's Safety Heath and Survival Section and features a systems approach to the physical examination of firefighters, addressing cardiovascular health and fitness, cancer, musculoskeletal injuries, behavioral health, lung disease, sleep disorders, and infectious diseases.

IAFC reports recent studies and surveys indicate there's a gap in firefighters' health care:

According to the National Fire Protection Association, sudden cardiac deaths account for 51 percent of on-duty firefighter deaths.

Research by Denise Smith, Ph.D., of Skidmore College found that for every line-of-duty death, there are an estimated 17 non-fatal cardiac events on duty among firefighters.

An IAFC survey found that only 45 percent of volunteer firefighter respondents and up to 80 percent of career firefighter respondents receive annual firefighter physicals.

"Firefighters need health care that is tailored to the inherent risks of their dangerous jobs," said Chief John Sinclair, IAFC's president and chairman of the board. "The guide provides doctors and firefighters clear information about the clinical care needed to address these risks. The IAFC encourages all firefighters to be strong advocates for their own health and wellness by making sure their doctor examines them for the many health risks they face."

"As a former firefighter and department physician with the Boston Fire Department and now as the primary care provider for many Boston-area firefighters, I have developed a unique perspective and understanding of the many immediate and long-term serious health risks associated with firefighting," said Dr. Michael Hamrock of St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, who was a primary contributor in the development of the guide. "These guidelines will be extremely beneficial to primary-care clinicians and have a profound impact on improving the health and saving the lives of many firefighters. Primary-care providers will now be better equipped to more effectively screen and intervene early on the specific occupationally related illnesses that are disabling and killing too many of our firefighters."
In-Depth

Microsoft Explains Windows Server 2016 Patching

Windows Server 2016 patching likely won't differ too much from the monthly cumulative update model laid out by Microsoft for other Windows products, but there are some nuances.

In late October, Microsoft explained in a "Patching with Windows Server 2016" blog post that the server is getting basically two types of cumulative updates each month. These two updates arrive on different days within a given month.

Windows Server 2016 Cumulative Updates

For Windows Server 2016 installations, a security update arrives first, followed by a quality update a couple of weeks later. Here's the breakdown:

Cumulative updates with new security fixes arrive on the second Tuesday of each month ("patch Tuesday")

Cumulative updates with new quality fixes arrive on the fourth Tuesday of each month

That's a somewhat simplified explanation because the security update arriving on patch Tuesday also includes past security and quality fixes. Microsoft's announcement explained that point as follows:

"Being cumulative this update [the security one] will include all the previously released security and quality fixes."

Likewise, the quality update arriving on the fourth Tuesday "will include all the previously released security and quality fixes."

This Windows Server 2016 update approach, which staggers the releases of the security update and the quality update, is slightly different from Microsoft's update model that kicked off on Oct. 11 for all supported older Windows clients and servers, such as Windows 7 and Windows Server 2012. Those older Windows products get the security and quality updates on the same day, namely patch Tuesday.

Because the two cumulative updates arrive on the same day for older Windows products, many organizations have discovered to their dismay that the security update arrives superseded. That's because the quality update contains the security patches in the security update, so patch management systems read the security update as being unnecessary (superseded). Microsoft's solution for organizations is to delay the supersedence of those updates by modifying rules in a patch management system. However, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 users are out of luck because that product doesn't have the ability to customize the supersedence rules, Microsoft recently explained. Other System Center Configuration Manager products do have that customization ability, though.

In contrast, the Windows Server 2016 staggered update release approach seems like an improvement as it more easily permits organizations to opt for using the security update up front, if that's the approach they want to take. Using the security-only update is one approach to take if organizations have encountered compatibility issues after a Windows update.

"Customers can choose a security only update instead of a cumulative update," a Microsoft spokesperson clarified, via e-mail, in response to a question about the Windows Server 2016 patch process.

Other Monthly Updates

Microsoft's announcement last month didn't mention it, but preview updates also arrive each month for Windows Server 2016. Under the update model that kicked off on Oct. 11 for older Windows releases, Microsoft indicated that preview updates arrive on the third Tuesday of each month. Presumably, that's the case for Windows Server 2016, too. In response to a question, the Microsoft spokesperson simply stated that "preview updates apply to Server as well."

Also, Windows Server 2016 will get .NET Framework monthly rollups. They are cumulative updates and arrive on patch Tuesdays. There's a rollup that contains security and quality improvements, and a rollup that's "security only," but both arrive on the same day (patch Tuesday), according to this .NET blog explanation. A preview of a quality rollup arrives on the third Tuesday of each month.

Automatic Updates On by Default

Microsoft has turned on the Automatic Updates service in Windows Server 2016 by default. It will automatically download cumulative updates each month, but IT pros will have the ability to choose when to install them if using Windows Server Update Services, which has policy options for configuring the behavior of installations, as described in this TechNet article.

The control of Automatic Updates is important because Windows Server 2016 updates first arrive as "optional" updates, but they later become "recommended" updates after two weeks. Microsoft conceives of this time lag as a testing period for IT pros.

"This predicable behavior gives time to test updates such as in your lab, before being notified across the broader set," Microsoft's announcement explained.

Another way to manage the Windows Updates behavior in Windows Server 2016 is to use Microsoft's Server Configuration tool (Sconfig.cmd), as described in this tutorial. I asked the spokesperson if this tool could be used to turn off Windows Updates for Windows Server 2016, and whether the server could eventually end up on an unsupported branch as a consequence. While that's a scenario that organizations face with Windows 10 on the current branch for business (CBB) update model, it's not the case for the Desktop and Server Core installations of Windows Server 2016, which follow the long-term servicing branch (LTSB) approach. Here's how the Microsoft spokesperson explained the matter:

Windows Server 2016 Server with Desktop Experience and Server Core are using the LTSB model, not Windows as a service CBB model. With the CBB Windows as a service model, which Nano Server is using, you must move forward to a new build as older builds are no longer supported.

Nano Server is Microsoft's newest minimal-footprint deployment option that's available for Windows Server 2016. Microsoft doesn't enable Automatic Updates on Nano Server. There's no Group Policy support for it either. Instead, Microsoft offers PowerShell securityCmdlets or Desired State Configuration for management.

Tracking Updates

Microsoft has explained that it moved to the cumulative update model for Windows systems because it has seen fewer problems when computing environments are fully patched. Of course, IT pros typically have rolled back specific Windows patches when the patch was associated with a problem. Now, with the new cumulative update model, Microsoft has given IT pros a month to get those problems fixed or risk staying unpatched.

In the recent past, Microsoft has been less descriptive in its various Knowledge Base articles about the patches. Possibly, that approach will be changing. At least Microsoft is working to centralize its patch information.

For instance, this month, Microsoft announced a preview of a new "Security Updates Guide." It permits searches for software updates within a specific time period. One catch is that Microsoft will fill up this database with published security bulletins until January 2017. It'll only add "update information" after that date.

Microsoft also has added Windows Server 2016 information to an Update History page that already describes Windows 10 updates. This updated portal is supposed to kick off next month, but Windows Server 2016 details are already listed there this month. Other Windows products will get described at the Update History page, too.

"This new, unified Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 update history page will be available beginning with the December Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 Cumulative Update (CU), and then other Windows 10 updates and down-level platforms will follow over the coming months," Microsoft explained in this announcement.
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Malaysia's central bank has denied any freeze in foreign exchange trading of the ringgit, state news agency Bernama reported on Friday.

Bank Negara Malaysia will issue a statement to this effect at 1400 local time (0600 GMT), Bernama said, citing a central bank spokesperson.

The ringgit plunged to its weakest in more than 12 years in offshore markets on Friday as investors dumped government bonds, while the spot rate barely moved as the central bank kept a tight grip on the onshore market.

(Reporting by A. Ananthalakshmi; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
It ranked 10th in the FDI confidence index.

The latest A.T. Kearney Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Confidence Index revealed that Singapore has been one of the 10 most attractive nation in the world for foreign investments. The study showed Singapore rising five spots to reach 10th in this year's index.

"Investors from the Asia Pacific region and the IT industry are those that are most interested in investing in Singapore," the study explained.

The report cited that the city-state is very friendly to foreign investments, as its FDI stock levels is equivalent to a little more than threefolds of the state gross domestic product.

To recall, foreign businesses receive equal treatment with local firms under the Singapore law. However, some sectors remain completely or partially closed to investors, some of which are the telecommunications, broadcasting, legal services and domestic news media.

The study noted that FDI inflows to Singapore rose year after year between 2011 and 2014, when they hit $67.5billion.

Other Asia Pacific countries which managed to snag spots in the top 10 are China at second place, Japan at sixth place, Australia at seventh, and India at ninth place.







More From Singapore Business Review


This move will allow developers to easily integrate these official financial datasets into their platforms

Singapores central bank, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), has released 12 Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the public, with more expected to be published in the future.

In a nutshell, the APIs will allow developers to build applications that can automate the integration of official financial datasets into their platforms.

Some examples of these include applications that can compute currency exchange rates to help companies file tax returns, applications that can automatically pull up credit card statistics of the whole population, or software that can display the number of listed companies.

This news comes as the Singapore government continues to ramp up its drive to boost support and awareness for the local fintech sphere. Just hours ago, MAS granted full CMS license to p2p lending platform MoolahSense, a first for the country. Next week, the government will also hold its inaugural fintech festival.

Check out the full list of APIs here.



Image Credit: MAS

The post Singapores central bank (MAS) releases 12 APIs including credit card stats and currency exchange rates appeared first on e27.
Here's full text of PM Lee's letter to Donald Trump.

Prime Minister Lee has written congratulatory letter to US President-elect Donald Trump.

The full text is as follows:



Dear President-elect Trump,

Please accept my warmest congratulations on your election as the 45th President of the United States of America.

The American people have elected you at a time when the United States is facing many challenges. I offer my best wishes as you lead your country forward and build a better future for the American people.

Singapore and the United States share strategic interests and an excellent, longstanding partnership. We have long supported Americas presence in the region, which has underwritten regional peace and stability for decades, and enabled the Asia-Pacific to grow and prosper.

Our two countries enjoy substantive and multifaceted cooperation across the economic, defence and security fields, underpinned by a Strategic Framework Agreement and an Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement. We are collaborating to tackle emerging threats in cyberspace and to counter terrorism and violent extremism.

On the economic front, the United States-Singapore Free Trade Agreement has doubled trade between our countries to reach US$64 billion over the last decade. The United States has consistently maintained a trade surplus, which now stands at almost US$20 billion. Investments by Singapore companies in the United States, combined with Americas exports to Singapore, have created some 240,000 jobs for American workers. Your extensive business experience sets you in a unique position to tap into Asias growth.

I look forward to working with you and your Administration to further enhance our bilateral partnership and strengthen the United States engagement in the Asia-Pacific for years to come.

I wish you every success in your new appointment and hope to welcome you to Singapore at your earliest convenience.

LEE HSIEN LOONG





More From Singapore Business Review


Some point out the moral decline began when a liberal Supreme Court demanded prayer and Christianity be barred from our schools, which was quickly followed with attempts by liberals to remove Christianity from all public places. When a law forbids something, most people believe the new law is put in place to protect people from harm, but nobody could possibly prove prayer is harmful to anyone. In fact, there is proof of just the opposite.

Some attribute Donald Trump winning the election to him touching on issues which most American citizens believe are most important - that America is in a financial and moral decline. But Trump's success still doesn't answer when, how, and what caused the decline?

A quick look at the Courts decision to remove prayer from our schools and all public places was based on the lie that our Founders wanted a separation of church and state. The liberal Supreme Court Justices used misinformation to justify their intentions. The phrase separation of church and state was used in a letter in which Thomas Jefferson responded regarding whether one denomination of Christianity should prevail over others in America. The intended meaning was intentionally misconstrued and used as the basis for banning school prayers. The following quote by Jefferson clearly indicates his strong opinion about a nations need for God - proving his opinion never would have been to exclude prayer from our childrens schools.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?

That our forefathers embraced Christianity in the public place is easily proved as evidenced throughout our history. Consider that Scripture verses were engraved on many of our public buildings, even those in Washington D.C. Consider that most states mention our creator" and/or God" in the preamble to their state constitutions. Our early schools used the Bible for reading assignments and our early school textbooks were filled with biblical references. Most certainly, God was very much a part of Americas beginning and throughout our history. This Supreme Court decision lacked a credible basis, it lacked historical precedence, and it was unpopular with the general public.

No one can seriously deny our Founders were men of faith. Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, nearly half (24) held Seminary or Bible School degrees. Their decisions reflected the Bible they honored. Even those who were not overt Christians nevertheless understood the importance of Christianity. They wisely knew faith in God benefited both the people and country in a way nothing else could. Morality is the backbone of a prosperous country.

Why did America begin abandoning all that made her great? Who can deny our nation is in trouble when we are 20 trillion dollars in debt, our economy is faltering, jobs are increasingly difficult to find, Obamacare has become unaffordable with healthcare costs at an all-time high, close to half of all Americans are on some type of welfare program, and racial tensions and violence have been steadily increasing rather than decreasing.

People who take to the streets to discredit and malign our brave police force are being financed by globalist like billionaire George Soros, and others, who fund groups and organizations to oppose the values of our Forefathers. Can anyone seriously deny that America has changed and is dangerously close to suffering the fate of other once great nations that lost their direction as a nation. It is true: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is dangerous when our elected officials believe they are above the law or that they can initiate their own laws. Yet, there is evidence that has been happening.

It is wise to discuss the causes of the downward trend in America to get a better understanding of what and how to correct problems. There are many who believe the catalyst for problems began with the liberal Supreme Courts decision to legalize abortion. That law was considered the final atrocity that revealed we no longer could call America a Christian nation if we legalized killing the unborn. The Supreme Court claimed this law was passed to usher in safe and legal ways for women whose health or well-being was endangered due to an unwanted pregnancy. The plaintiff in Roe vs. Wade lied when she claimed she had been raped. The second intent of the Court was that abortions were to be legal, safe, and rare. That had no teeth for possible convictions, and thus Sixty (60) million babies have been aborted in America in the last 40 years, proving abortion in our country is anything but rare.

Those who find this number of aborted babies appalling would likely be horrified by liberal, self-admitted atheist Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who stated:

"The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. Sanger also described Blacks, immigrants and indigents as: "...human weeds ... reckless breeders ...spawning... human beings who never should have been born.

Those comments are hateful, and yet it is liberals who accuse Conservatives of being insensitive because they oppose the killing of innocent lives. Most recently, we discovered that Planned Parenthood also has been selling aborted baby parts for profit. However, this revelation was quickly dropped by the media, a few hands were slapped for allowing the information to go public, and Sanger's Planned Parenthood continues to exterminate the unwanted with our tax money. Few among us have voiced our objections to a government that allows what can only be described by honest people as legalized massive murder of the most innocent and vulnerable among us.

The fact is we all must accept a share in the blame for the moral decline of America, because we have not been vocal or persistent in our objections to the liberal changes that have occurred on a rather regular basis. We rarely investigate all the candidates, and instead just vote based on their background, political party, and/or opinion on issues. We pay little or no attention to those we elect once they are in office. Most of us do not make it a priority to learn how our representatives voted on important issues that impact our lives. Also unfortunate is that only a small percent of American citizens even know the names of their elected officials, let alone keep track of how they vote. Even fewer hold them accountable to keep their campaign promises.

Can we save America from the fate of other once great countries who failed and fell? Yes! If enough of us take the time to be educated on facts, bills, and laws so we can discover which are detrimental and then share information with those in our sphere of influence. We must begin to talk with friends and relatives about political matters and share viewpoints, as well as call, email, or text elected officials to express our opinions.

To make America great again, we must join conservative organizations and strategize about simple ways to help make positive differences. It is important to talk to our church leaders about informing fellow Christians of important information that impacts Christian families. Christians want to support Godly, but they often dont know how or where to seek information. What better place to provide information on moral subjects than in our churches with like-minded people?

For any who doubt our nation was founded by those who knew the importance of Christianity in our lives and understood this to be the mainstay of our countrys future, I urge you to visit the website below that provides the proof. As you read each amazing quote, consider how far America has wandered from what these astute early American leaders believed important for America. It is why we must stay devoted to restoring our conservative values, attend the church of our choice regularly, and begin building and restoring the values which allowed America to become a great country, with freedoms and rights many others only dream of having.

Lets do everything possible to keep America from that last 10th step that defines the end of a free nation. We must prevent America from experiencing the horrendous fate of what happened to other once great countries who forgot the basics and lost everything. Even if we are not successful in stopping the decline and inevitable deterioration of America, at least those of us who tried to save our country will have the sweet peace of knowing we did all we could to prevent it. So, let us all commit do whatever possible in the months ahead to engage others in conversations about these issues while the opportunity remains and before criticism might no longer be considered a right.

The following quote from Ronald Regan, stated on October 27, 1964, is a warning to the American people of how fragile this nation is and what we must do to insure that future generations do not live tyranny:

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United State where men were free."

John Adams once wrote of the new republic: Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Are we still a moral and religious people? Sadly, I think we all know the answer to that question  even before the poll results were know on Tuesday, November 9th, 2016.
If youve ever used or heard of the trendy hashtag #Girlboss, you have Sophia Amoruso to thank. Amoruso is the founder and executive chairwoman of Nasty Gal, a clothing company that started on eBay back in 2006 and grew into a $100 million dollar business. But now, the company is reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy.

Amoruso already stepped down as Nasty Gals CEO last year. And thats apparently when things started to go downhill for the company. There were two rounds of employee layoffs, a strategic reorganization and an unsuccessful search for a buyer.

Now, Amoruso is actually taking an even bigger step back from Nasty Gal, reportedly stepping down as executive chairwoman while she promotes a new book and a Netflix series based on her #Girlboss book.

Leadership plays an extremely important role in the success of any business. So the possibility exists that the Nasty Gal brands troubles may be directly linked to its founders departure. Entrepreneurs often expect to be able to be able to pull themselves out of day to day operations of their business. But they must first make certain that the business is ready.

Can a Failed Business Lead to a Damaged Personal Brand?

Founders must also remember that damage to the brand they create can lead to a damaged personal brand and affect future projects too. How will a book and Netflix series based on the Nasty Gal brand fare if the business upon which it is based does not survive?
Today marks the end of HubSpots annual Inbound Conference. What started out as a nice little gathering of roughly 200 folks in 2008 has morphed into a conference of 19,000 attendees this year.

While there were a slew of announcements that came out over the four days of the event, it was a statement Hubspot (NYSE:HUBS) CTO and cofounder Dharmesh Shahs made during his keynote speech that caught (and kept) my attention  that he felt chatbots are the most important technology to come out in decades.

I was able to grab some time with Shah to hear more about why bots have such potential to such a game-changing technology and to hear about HubSpots own Growthbot efforts.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: Whats the biggest thing since you started HubSpot with Brian Halligan ten years ago that has surprised you the most about marketing, and how people have gravitated around some of the things that youve put out there?

Dharmesh Shah: The biggest surprise for lack of a better term is how global the underlying fundamental philosophy of Inbound Marketing is. When we started talking about it here in the United States a decade ago that gave us confidence was that people were nodding their heads some would say the same thing is not gonna work out that well this is an observation that company was very young and what we found though is that as we go to Europe, Asia, Latin America with that same kind of core message all over the world. We have that same nodding of heads; people were like yup this that makes sense. Im not exactly sure what to do about it but that makes sense to me.

I think its a fundamental human thing. So I dont think its a particularly big leap, I think were surprised by how quickly people just agree with the philosophy. They may disagree with some tactics underlying it or to what mix should be in inbound vs outbound. The we may have debates around it, but thats been a big gratifying surprise; this is not just you, not just Boston and not just United States, its a global movement.

Small Business Trends: Your keynote is really interesting. You said something that really caught my attention. You said that you think chatbots is a technology that may be the most important technology over the last few decades. So first of all I just want to make sure I heard that right.

Dharmesh Shah: You did. Chatbots are the manifestation, but the underlying trend thats the biggest thing weve seen in two decades is conversational interfaces. Thats what a chatbot essentially is. Its allowing you to get around the software using either text or voice. And the reason I think thats such a big deal is that, with all due respect to the iPhone and other things that have happened obviously the last couple of decades, when iPhone came out we already had the web. We had some apps that knew that cameras on phones had sensors. Yes it was touch and swipe instead of click. But those are only slightly different interaction metaphors.

But now with the conversational UI a couple of things are happening. One is people can express the things they want in direct terms. They dont have to translate it from the words that are in their head. They just have to say the words that are in their head and thats enough.

And for decades when you were building software you felt like its an intuitive interface, an intuitive website. Well its not completely intuitive ever because whatever the human is trying to do they still had to translate into a metaphor with what that particular interface provides. Thats the number one reason.

Number two reason, from a product of management perspective, is figuring out what to build. What is it my users want to be able to do with an application or a website  whatever it is. With the conversational UI every night I go through the logs for our growthbot and my users tell me what they want to do. We get a thousand plus messages a day. Some of them the bot already handles. Some of them are marriage proposals and profanity on the Internet. But then some of them are reasonable things to want to do with growthbot. I dont have to guess. What do people wish they could do, they tell me. And then I go back and over the weeks and months and years I will build those things. Weve never had that opportunity to blank canvas what the people dream of.

For example if you go to a web application, users say to themselves I wish they had this little button or this filter for something. Users can think that, but then youd have to take an active action just to get that idea somewhere else; just to say can you please build this. Here, using the application is providing the idea to builders. This is what I want. Thats the big thing.

Small Business Trends: You said businesses have been focused on building websites for over a decade. But you think going forward they are going to be focused on building bots to work with websites. How soon do you see that happening?

Dharmesh Shah: I think it will be pretty soon. I think its already started having their startups working on it. Right now theres a company called Drift  friends of ours here in Boston that are in that general area. And I think whats happening here is that the software community is now figuring out theres a bunch of things that are happening simultaneously. One is natural language recognition has gotten much better than it was a year ago. And people are much more used to messaging now; ordering an Uber ride, ordering Dominos pizza or something like that. Its not that foreign to them. So now its possible to build these things.

The reason I think that bots should supplement websites comes back to humans are  and it is in a positive way  fundamentally lazy. They come on a website, lets say they have a question in their head; Somebody comes to the HubSpot website and says oh can I buy this month-to-month as a requirement in our contract  thats the question you have. You are not sure if that is on the pricing page or is out on the terms of service, so where do I go to get that question answered?

In the early days whats going to happen is the bots are going to be playing more triage; maybe they can answer 5 percent the questions with some reasonable degree of accuracy. Over time that percentage will go up and up and up because we will have this growing knowledge base; the bot will know more and more things. It will learn essentially over time. And this is not that far off.

Once the bot gets used enough, in the same way Googles search engine gives you auto-suggest the bots will give you auto-suggest. Not just based on things you are typing. But based on what youve done on the website. You went to the pricing page and you typed these two characters so youre probably asking this question.

Small Business Trends: What role do things like the Amazon Echo and other voice assistants play in the growth of chatbots?

Dharmesh Shah: I think its going to be big. Because what Amazon Alexa, Siri, Google Home and all these things essentially teach us, which weve sort of forgotten, is how to be human and just be able to say things. Were so used to as having to do something with technology. Out comes my phone and I start clicking and doing something. With Echo, and people that have had it for a while, its completely natural now that youre sitting at the dining room table trying to settle a debate or some fact thing, or play some piece of music, or whatever  and you just say it.

And you get used to that. It feels a little weird the first few days. But then it becomes natural. So these devices will help people not feel strange or awkward about saying things to technology or say things to computers. It becomes much more natural.

See Also: Chatbots Will Soon Discuss Your Banking Info With You

Now the shift that I think will happen Amazon Echo is great. We have three of them in the house. We love it.

Small Business Trends: I know your son loves it.

Dharmesh Shah: My son, my wife loves it as it turns out. But what I think is going to happen, in my mind the optimal interaction a year or two from now, were going to have voice as input because we talk much faster than we type. So the most efficient form of input to a device is the voice. But the most efficient output from a device is not voice, its visual. We read faster than we can listen to spoken speech. And especially if you have a visualization.

If Im talking to you about the numbers  just reciting numbers you digest that much more easily in charts and graphs. So I think the answers to these things like Siri where you talk into it, will be the answer comes to you on a screen of some sort.

Small Business Trends: Whats the future of digital marketing. Is it what we just talked about or is it something we havent even conjured up?

Dharmesh Shah: This has happened in other industries. Any activity in marketing that is fundamentally rote, repetitive, those things are going to start moving more and more to software. Its just the way to do it because we shouldnt be spending precious human time on something that computers can do better. That doesnt make sense. Were going to see that shift happen. Just in my mind inevitable. Thats going to be the next five years.

The way we think about the marketers role five years out is to say the number one role the marketer has is understanding the customer. Who are you selling to? How do they think? Actually having face to face meetings. I think it will take a long time for machines to replicate some of those kinds of functions.

The second thing  When you were building software products and websites the marketers helped write the copy for the website and then it was a web designer that said hey Im going to help you make that look nice. In five years whats going to happen is marketers are going to have much more direct involvement in creating the experience of a company.

So what youll see is similar to what we have with web designers; youll have bot design or interaction design. And the nice thing is the most important thing is understanding the customer. So youll be able to sit down and say heres how I would like to craft this set of answers to these common questions that our business gets all the time, and heres the tone were trying to emulate. So in the same way we have style guides, were going to have interaction guidelines; we have a light amusing tone or do we have a very stiff and  just the facts and nothing but tone. Thats going to vary from company to company.

Small Business Trends: Will there be empathy automation? Or are we going to allow the human to still use their empathy along with all the other tools that you just talked about so that its not man versus machine, but man with machine to do the work.

Dharmesh Shah: I think this move to machines and software will actually help us be more empathetic. So I had this glib answer once when someone asked me around this man vs. machine question; My answer is Ive met humans that are not all that empathetic. Travel on the airlines and especially when flights are delayed and theres a lack of empathy for the situation. And the reason for that lack of empathy  and Im an optimist and believe in humans overall  is the lack of empathy occurs when people are stressed out.

I think their intentions are good but you have two thousand people showing up in line because you need to reschedule their flight, that stresses the ability of even the best people to express empathy.

So if we can take those things out, that could hopefully help us maybe empathize at scale. That would be a good thing to think about. Thats where the software helps. We have to automate some things in order to make that possible, otherwise it wont work.

This is part of the One-on-One Interview series with thought leaders. The transcript has been edited for publication. If it's an audio or video interview, click on the embedded player above, or subscribe via iTunes or via Stitcher.
STEM

Ten80, U.S. Army Wrap up Student Racing STEM Challenge

The final event for this year's Ten80 Student Racing Challenge was held yesterday in Miami with more than 1,300 attendees.

Sponsored by the United States Army and the U.S. Army National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) racing team, Ten80 aims to engage students in STEM topics by competing in a series of exercises designed to test critical skills and based on the training required of soldiers and the racing team. Students are invited to learn about STEM through panel discussions, competitions and workshops on topics such as robotics, racing, coding, leadership, marketing and intellectual property.

"Much like U.S. Army soldiers, STEM students are problem-solvers with a heightened interest in innovation," said Terri Stripling, chief executive officer and president of Ten80 Education, in a prepared statement. "The Army is committed to education initiatives and advanced technology, making the partnership with Ten80 a natural fit for both organizations."
By Abdul Matin and Sabine Siebold MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan/BERLIN (Reuters) - Taliban militants stormed the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, ramming its outer wall with a truck bomb before battling security forces in an overnight attack that killed at least four people, officials said. The explosion caused extensive damage to the building, a NATO spokesman said, but Germany indicated on Friday this would not deter it from continuing its work as part of the international mission in Afghanistan. Triggered by a suicide bomber, the blast shattered windows as far as 5 km (3 miles) away, NATO said. A local doctor said it and the subsequent firefight also wounded 120 people. Twenty consular staff survived the attack with no injuries, German officials said. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said soldiers had had to battle hard to repel the heavily armed attackers. "It was only possible to ... beat them back after fighting that occurred at the compound and in the building," he said, adding that Berlin would review its lead role in northern Afghanistan. His spokesman Martin Schaefer later said he did not expect a big policy shift. "I cannot imagine that the events of last night will lead to a fundamental change in Germany's thinking or that of the global community on the need for continued assistance for Afghanistan," Schaefer told reporters. The attack also highlights one of the tougher policy challenges facing U.S. President-elect Donald Trump when he takes office in January. U.S. combat operations against the Taliban largely ended in 2014, but thousands of its soldiers remain in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission. The Taliban said the attack was in retaliation for NATO air strikes against a village near the northern city of Kunduz last week in which more than 30 people, many of them children, were killed. Heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent "with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there", the Islamist militant movement's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone. Taliban forces came close to over-running Kunduz last month, a year after briefly capturing it in their biggest success in Afghanistan's 15-year-long war. INTO THE EARLY HOURS The NATO spokesman said at least one vehicle packed with explosives was rammed into the high outer wall surrounding the consulate, but authorities were investigating if a second car had been involved. "The extent of damage to the city is huge," said Abdul Razaq Qaderi, deputy police chief of Balkh province. "This kind of an attack, bringing a truck full of explosives and blowing it up in the city, had never happened before. Noor Mohammad Faiz, the head doctor in Mazar-i-Sharif hospital, said four bodies and 120 wounded, most hurt by flying glass, had been brought to the hospital. Qaderi said German troops later shot and killed two men on motorcycles who did not comply with orders to stop, with a third man seriously injured. German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said that incident was being investigated. It was not clear if the men were attackers or civilians. Germany, which heads Resolute Support in northern Afghanistan, has about 800 soldiers at a base on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, with another 1,000 troops coming from 20 partner countries. The explosion occurred about an hour before midnight local time, a spokesman for the German military joint forces command in Potsdam said. "It was a prepared attack for which we made all arrangements," the Taliban's Mujahid said, adding that dozens of German soldiers and intelligence personnel were killed in the attack. The Taliban often exaggerate casualties caused by its operations. Sayed Kamal Sadat, police chief of Balkh province, said the fighting was over by the early hours of the morning after Afghan special forces, German security personnel and NATO's quick reaction protection force intervened. At least one suspect was arrested from the area of explosion, officials said. The heavily protected consulate is in a large building close to the Blue Mosque in the centre of Mazar-i-Sharif, where the Indian consulate was also attacked by militant gunmen earlier this year. (Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in BERLIN, James Mackenzie, Mirwais Harooni and Hamid Shalizi in KABUL, and Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR; Writing by Andrea Shalal; Editing by John Stonestreet)
ANKARA (Reuters) - The leader of Turkey's nationalist opposition indicated on Thursday that his party might support constitutional changes that could give President Tayyip Erdogan more power. Last month, Turkey's ruling AK Party said it would soon submit a bill to parliament to expand the powers of the presidency, paving the way for a referendum which the nationalist opposition said it would not oppose. Erdogan has long wanted an executive presidency, a Turkish version of the system in the United States or France, saying the country needs strong leadership. His opponents fear the change would mean growing authoritarianism. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim met with the chairman of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Devlet Bahceli, on Thursday to discuss changing the constitution. "We view the prime minister's thoughts on the constitution, which he shared with me today, as positive and appropriate," Bahceli wrote on Twitter following his meeting with Yildirim. "While there is no political agreement yet, I hope the coming period can solve the de facto situation forced on the country," Bahceli added. Any constitutional change requires the support of at least 367 deputies in the 550-seat assembly to pass directly, and of 330 deputies to go to a referendum. The AKP has 317 seats, and the MHP 40. Yildirim said the government would seek a referendum on the executive presidency however much support it won in parliament, describing it as "the greatest reform to open the locks and undo the knots in the system". The two biggest opposition parties, the secularist CHP and the pro-Kurdish HDP, both oppose an executive presidency and some opinion polls have shown that a majority of Turks also do not want the change. But Erdogan has seen his effective power and popularity rise by riding a wave of patriotism since an abortive military coup on July 15 that failed to oust him. The MHP wants to see debate on reinstating the death penalty, which Erdogan has continuously said he would approve if it passed parliament, revived as part of the AKP's constitutional change package. The nationalist party also looks to reel in voters by potentially being the party to end the "de facto state" in which Erdogan wields executive powers despite holding a constitutionally symbolic presidency. "We have no desire other than being the leader of the solution, not part of the problem; to light the way for peace and order, not be the architect of chaos," Bahceli said. (Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mark Heinrich)
The Railbird Report: "Tom Dwan Is Not Kidnapped and Not Part of the Triads"

November 11 2016 Frank Op de Woerd

For quite some time, Tom "durrrr" Dwan was the biggest name in poker. At the top of his popularity, he earned a spot on Team Full Tilt. And it wasn't just some lousy "Red Pro" contract getting $20 an hour and 100 percent rake back, but a spot on the main team, presumably accompanied by a fat paycheck.

Howard Lederer hailed him as "the first pure internet player to come up and really establish dominance playing the biggest games."

In an introduction, Chris Ferguson dubbed him the best player out there and Patrik Antonius followed up in agreement.

"Tom Dwan has been the real deal since he stepped into the big games," Antonius said.

That was November 2009, and in 2010, Dwan was still on top of the poker world, partaking in one of the biggest WSOP bets at the World Series of Poker that year.

The high stakes world held their breath as Dwan made it to the heads-up portion in a $1,500-event. Established pros like Lederer, Ferguson, Matusow and countless others walked around nervously, uneasy about the prospect of losing a ton of money if Dwan would grab the precious first-place prize and bracelet. He eventually finished second to Simon Watt and some of the most prominent players simultaneously sighed in relief.

In 2011, Dwan was still living the good life, flying private jets around the world talking about big winning days (seven-figures) and huge losing days (minus $3.8 million):

Then, Black Friday happened and Full Tilt Poker crumbled. The truth started to surface; Full Tilt Poker wasn't going to return and Team Full Tilt was no more. As PokerStars stepped in and bought Full Tilt Poker's assets and debts, the site was back up a year later and one of their first big marketing stunts was to establish "The Professionals," a team of pros that would represent the site.

Gus Hansen was brought on board first, followed by Viktor Blom and Tom Dwan. Upon his introduction, he was hailed in as "one of the most feared and respected players in the world today" by the marketing department of the relaunched site.

A little over a year later, Tom Dwan and Full Tilt Poker parted ways. While a Full Tilt Poker spokesman still called him "one of the most respected names in poker", he was by no means that at that point in time. Dwan would later say he had a big issue with Full Tilt Poker and those not so warm feelings were mutual. While it never came out what the issue exactly was about, Amaya personnel didn't hide their surprise when he later showed up to the EPT Grand Final to play cash games. "How does he dare to show up here?" one employee was overheard saying, declining to address what had happened when asked.

Tom Dwan didn't show up to a photo shoot before heads-up matches between "The Professionals" and Team PokerStars in London in 2013.

Dwan still had an unfinished "Durrrr Challenge" with Dan "Jungleman12" Cates. The latter wasn't happy about things not moving ahead. Dwan, in the meantime, wasn't showing his face in public all that much after that.

Some poker fans started to get worried, especially since he was seen in Macau more and more. The digital railbirds started threads on message boards, hinting at the former top pro being in trouble with the American government, the Chinese Triads and more.

Those rumours were only fueled when Tom Dwan's name popped up when Paul Phua was arrested. He was one of the people besides Phil Ivey and Andrew Robl who put up bond money for the accused.

While Phua was acquitted of all charges and it turned out the link to the 14K Triad was anything but substantial, many railbirds kept linking Dwan to the Triads. Memes putting the former Team Full Tilt pro in moist dungeons hit the internet. Dwan was still tight to the Asian high rollers, as confirmed by Winfred Yu back in May 2015:

Tom Dwan's Twitter account died down, and Dwan's last comment on Two Plus Two with any substance was in a thread about him playing a huge game in Macau back in 2014. Every now and then, news did resurface of his whereabouts. People spoke of a $20 million losing session, which was in a way confirmed by Doug Polk who spoke on his live stream of Tom Dwan losing a pot worth $30 million.

While Tom Dwan still remains silent himself, some news came out this week, again by Winfred Yu, president of the Poker King Club. As action was underway in the Triton High Roller Series, Yu gave Asian poker website somuchpoker.com spoke out about Dwan:

"Tom has access to the big games because he is a very likable guy and he gives a lot of action. VIPs love his action. Ive read many stories about Tom being kidnapped or is part of the Triad, and people staking him, thats totally not true."

So, it appears Tom Dwan is doing fine. He does still look a bit bleak, though.

Last Week's Biggest Pots Online

Dwan might be doing fine, but he hasn't been seen online in years. Over on Full Tilt Poker (+$2,165,475), he was last seen in November of 2013 according to HighStakesDB.com. Over on Stars, his screenname "Holdem_NL" hasn't been spotted online in even longer and he doesn't have a profile anymore.

It's a different group of players roaming online these days. Here's this month's biggest three pots so far:

1) "WRUUUUM" Wins a $75,624-Pot (756 big blinds) versus "Ravenswood13"

($50/$100 NLHM HU)

click for replay

"WRUUUUM" raised the button to $340 only for "Ravenswood13" to three-bet to $1,060. WRUUUUM called to create a $2,200 pot and see a flop.

The flop came and Ravenswood13 check-called a bet of $1,438.33. With now $5,076.66 in the middle, the hit the turn and Ravenswood13 check-called $5,034.16.

The on the river paired the board and Ravenswood13 bet out $5,889.96 into the $15,144.98 pot. WRUUUUM shoved all in and Ravenswood13 called all in for $30,239,90.

WRUUUUM showed , winning the pot as Ravenswood13 mucked his .

2) Patrik "Fake Love888" Antonius Wins a $66,170-Pot (132 big blinds) versus Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky

($250/$500 NLHM HU - part of mix)

click for replay

Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky was first to act and raised to $1,000 from his button. Patrik "Fake Love888" Antonius, seated in the big blind, three-bet to $3,000 and Sulsky called to create a 6,000 pot.

The flop came and Antonius bet $3,000. Sulsky called. Both checked the on the turn and the completed the board. Antonius checked again and, with $12,000 in the middle, Sulsky pushed for $27,085. Antonius called with for rivered trips; Sulsky showed for the missed flush draw.

3) Alexandros "mexican222" Kolonias Wins a $63,156-Pot (316 big blinds) versus "prot0"

($250/$500 NLHM 6-max - part of mix)

click for replay

Action folded to Greek high roller Alexandros "mexican222" Kolonias and he raised to $400 from the button. In the small blind, "prot0" three-bet to $2,000 and the big blind folded. Kolonias called in position to see a flop in a $4,200 pot.

The flop came and "pro0" bet $2,307,25. Kolonias raised to $6,712 and "prot0" called to build the pot to $17,624.

The on the turn saw "prot0" check. Kolonias bet $5,814.27 and a call followed.

With the on the river and $29,252.54 in the middle, "prot0" pushed for effectively $16,951. Kolonias called all in with for flopped trips and rivered quads. "prot0" showed and left the pot to his neighbor.

Online High-Stakes Action This Month

2016 hasn't been kind so far to Viktor "Isildur1" Blom, but the last couple of weeks, he has recouped in an impressive manner. He topped the daily leaderboard many times, and so far this month, he's the biggest winner as well, with over $150,000:

(user)name hands profit/loss last week profit/loss 2016 profit/loss all time Winning Players 1 Viktor "Isildur1" Blom 3038 +$150,488 -$505,088 +$1,495,873 2 Alexandros "mexican222" Kolonias 704 +$73,407 -$41,692 +$133,001 3 terror777727 92 +$58,087 +$54,013 +$74,097 4 Dan "w00ki3z." Cates 1,507 +$42,131 -$12,064 +$1,252,090 5 Scarface.VLT 851 +$37,441 +$22,174 -$18,407 6 Grazvis1 485 +$36,773 +$212,883 +$217,941 7 VeGeTTo89 1214 +$32,603 +$231,307 +$287,919 8 Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky 2,095 +$30,917 +$787,621 +$4,824,823 9 Mariosy 770 +$25,806 +$21,689 +$21,689 10 Trocola7 66 +$16,678 +$35,699 +$34,928 Losing Players 1 bodamos 663 -$165,688 -$828,483 -$2,155,605 2 Patrik "Fake Love888" Antonius 2,111 -$153,044 +$290,634 -$1,293,502 3 Bill "GASTRADER" Perkins 99 -$82,622 -$56,693 -$283,705 4 Henrik "hhecklen" Hecklen 3,569 -$63,161 -$57,653 +$17,831 5 ltt1981 1,824 -$60,439 +$257,596 +$257,596 6 Dani "supernova9" Stern 626 -$51,710 -$108,483 -$542,943 7 Andrey "Kroko-dill" Zaichenko 510 -$38,635 -$105,498 -$316,925 8 Alex "Kanu7" Millar 116 -$38,425 -$635,521 +$2,625,070 9 ZarubaNT 103 -$32,110 -$72,033 -$72,033 10 Mark "AceSpades11" Radoja 576 -$23,534 +$66,008 +$85,172

The 2016 Leaderboard

Andres "Educa-p0ker" Artinano didn't play any hands of poker again, while Mikael "ChaoRen160" Thuritz won some to overtake the second spot on the podium of biggest winners in 2016. Top spot still goes to Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky, though he lost a bit in the first 10 days of November.

Blom leads the top three biggest losers, but dropped to the third spot after some winning weeks. While he was down over a million at one point, he's now down "only" $600,000 for the year. "bodamos" and Alex "Kanu7" Millar both lost this month and now make up the top two spots.

(user)name hands 2016 profit/loss 2016 profit/loss per hand 2016 profit/loss all time / most played game 2016 Winning players 1 Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky 78,920 +$787,621 +$9.97 +$4,824,823  8-game 2 Mikael "ChaoRen160" Thuritz 48,068 +$586,022 +$12.19 +$1,446,570  8-Game 3 Andres "Educa-p0ker" Artinano 29,380 +$561,403 +$19.10 +$982,391 - NLHM Losing players 1 "bodamos" 10,646 -$828,483 -$77.82 -$2,155,605  8-Game 2 Alex "Kanu7" Millar 28,694 -$635,521 -$22.14 +$2,625,070  NLHM 3 Viktor "Isildur1" Blom 178,222 -$599,003 -$3.36 +$1,401,957  8-game

The above top three biggest winners and losers in online poker for 2016 and the top 10 biggest winners and losers online for the last week only consist of PokerStars accounts that haven't opted out with HighStakesDB.com. *Photos by Neil Stoddart
PORTLAND, Ore.  Another night of nationwide protests against Donald Trumps election came to a head in Portland, where thousands marched and some smashed store windows, lit firecrackers and sparked a dumpster blaze. Police termed the protest a riot and used less lethal munitions to help clear the streets.

Some 4,000 protesters surged into the downtown area late Thursday night with chants like we reject the president-elect!

Officers began physically pushing back against the crowd that at times threw objects at them as midnight approached, arresting several people and using flash-bang devices and types of smoke or tear gas to force people to disperse.

After several orders to leave, police said officers used less lethal munitions, such as pepper spray and rubber projectiles. Live video footage showed officers firing what appeared to be the non-lethal items. It wasnt immediately clear if anyone was hit.

Protest number continued to dwindle through the night and as the early morning hours wore on, police announced to remaining clusters of protesters to immediately disperse or be subject to arrest and the use of riot-control agents. Police said they made 26 arrests.

Around the country from New York to Chicago to California, in red states as well as blue, hundreds of demonstrators marched through streets, many for the third straight night though in somewhat smaller numbers.

Trump himself fired back late Thursday, tweeting: Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

In Denver, protesters managed to shut down Interstate 25 near downtown Denver briefly Thursday night. Police said demonstrators made their way onto the freeway and traffic was halted in the northbound and southbound lanes for about a half-hour. Protesters also briefly shut down interstate highways in Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

In San Franciscos downtown, high-spirited high school students marched through, chanting not my president and holding signs urging a Donald Trump eviction. They waved rainbow banners and Mexican flags, as bystanders in the heavily Democratic city high-fived the marchers from the sidelines.

As a white, queer person, we need unity with people of color, we need to stand up, said Claire Bye, a 15-year-old sophomore at Academy High School. Im fighting for my rights as an LGBTQ person. Im fighting for the rights of brown people, black people, Muslim people.

In New York City, a large group of demonstrators once again gathered outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue Thursday night. They chanted angry slogans and waved banners bearing anti-Trump messages.

You got everything straight up and down the line, demonstrator David Thomas said. You got climate change, you got the Iran deal. You got gay rights, you got mass deportations. Just everything, straight up and down the line, the guy is wrong on every issue.

In Philadelphia, protesters near City Hall held signs bearing slogans like Not Our President, Trans Against Trump and Make America Safe For All.

About 500 people turned out at a protest in Louisville, Kentucky and in Baltimore, hundreds of people marched to the stadium where the Ravens were playing a football game.

Hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside Trump Tower in Chicago and a growing group was getting into some shoving matches with police in Oakland, California.

Mostly peaceful protests also surged again in Los Angles. City News Service reported that dozens of protesters were arrested around midnight when they refused to budge from an area.

As expected, the demonstrations prompted some social media blowback from Trump supporters accusing protesters of sour grapes or worse, though there were no significant counter-protests.

Trump supporters said the protesters were not respecting the democratic process.

As of Thursday, Democrat Hillary Clinton was leading Trump in votes nationwide 47.7 percent to 47.5 percent, but Trump secured victory in the Electoral College.

___

Jablon reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Deepti Hajela in New York, Janie Har in San Francisco and Lisa Baumann in Seattle contributed to this report.
A Muslim student at San Diego State University was robbed and may have had her car stolen Wednesday by two men who made comments about President-elect Donald Trump and Muslims, according to police and university officials, who called the attack a hate crime.

In a separate incident Wednesday, a female student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette claimed to have been beaten, robbed and had her hijab ripped off by two men, one of them wearing a white Trump hat, police and university officials said.

But on Thursday, Lafayette police said that during their investigation, the woman admitted fabricating that story.

The SDSU student was walking to her car about 2:30 p.m. when two men accosted her in the stairwell of a campus parking building and made comments about President-elect Donald Trump and the Muslim community, campus police said in a statement. The men grabbed the womans purse and backpack, and removed her car keys before fleeing, police said.

The woman, who was not injured, left the area to report the attack, police said. When authorities arrived on the scene, they said, her car was missing.

Police described the suspects as a white male between 20 and 25 years old and a Hispanic male about the same age. Investigators are treating the incident as a hate crime, robbery and vehicle theft.

The SDSU Muslim Student Association said the victim was a Muslim student wearing a hijab and full Islamic garb. The group is planning a demonstration next week to protest Trumps victory, saying his campaign has encouraged discrimination against blacks and Muslims.

We are calling on all students, faculty, staff, and community members to come and show solidarity with our sister that was attacked and also stand against anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and all other forms of discrimination that have become increasingly normalized during the campaign and now election of Donald Trump, the group said on Facebook. It is time we make it clear that the hate and racism of Donald Trump will not find a home in San Diego.

University President Elliot Hirshman said in a statement that the victim appeared to have been targeted because of her Muslim faith.

We condemn this hateful act and urge all members of our community to join us in condemning such hateful acts, Hirshman said. Hate crimes are destructive to the spirit of our campus and we urge all members of our community to stand together in rejecting hate.

Hours earlier, Hirshman sent out a statement calling on members of the university to ensure fair and equitable treatment of all members of our community in the wake of the election, the independent student newspaper reported.

Trumps vows over the past year to ban, deport or use extreme vetting against Muslims entering the country has struck fear in many U.S. Muslims, who have faced a surge in hate crimes since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Those proposals, along with the president-elects repeated condemnations of Muslims on the campaign trail, have led some critics to accuse him of bringing anti-Islamic sentiment into the mainstream.

The incident in San Diego came less than two weeks after a Saudi Arabian student at the University of Wisconsin-Stout was assaulted and killed near campus. Allegations spread online that the attack on 24-year-old Hussain Saeed Alnahdi may have been a hate crime, but police have yet to identify a motive or name a suspect in the case.

colleges-attacks-1stld-writethru
The Latest on anti-Donald Trump protests around the country (all times PST):

11:30 p.m.

Police in Portland Oregon have detained several people as an anti-Trump protest-turned violent with demonstrators breaking windows of businesses and starting a dumpster fire downtown. Police termed it a riot.

Police termed Thursdays nights protest a riot and told people who had not returned to the designated square where the protest took place that they would be under arrest.

About 4,000 protesters were in the streets with chants like we reject the president-elect.

Meanwhile in Colorado, anti-Trump protesters managed to shut down Interstate 25 near downtown Denver briefly Thursday night

A crowd of several hundred had been marching through downtown Denver earlier in the evening waving anti-Trump signs before taking to the freeway.

___

10:35 p.m.

Protesters managed to shut down Interstate 25 near downtown Denver briefly Thursday night during a demonstrations against Trumps election

Denver police tweeted around 10 p.m. that demonstrators made their way onto the freeway and traffic was halted in the northbound and southbound lanes. Police say the interstate was reopened about half an hour later as the crowd moved back downtown.

It wasnt immediately clear how many protesters walked onto the highway. A crowd of several hundred had been marching through downtown Denver earlier in the evening waving anti-Trump signs. Officers in cruisers and on bicycles were monitoring the situation.

Earlier protests in Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs on Wednesday and Thursday went off peacefully.

___

9 p.m.

Police in Portland, Oregon say that because of criminal and dangerous behavior, a protest against President-elect Donald Trump is now considered a riot.

Police said in series of Twitter posts Thursday night they were dealing with increasing vandalism and aggressive behavior from protesters.

Heated arguments were breaking out at the scene and one video showed an altercation after a woman threw laundry detergent at protesters.

Police said multiple people with bats were reported in the crowd and urged people not wanting to be associated with protesters to leave the area.

The Portland protest was among many that occurred across the country.

___

7:30 p.m.

Demonstrators gathered for a second day outside Chicagos Trump Tower to protest the election of Donald Trump as the nations 45th president.

One day after thousands marched around the citys business district blocking traffic and gathering at the 98-story hotel and condominium, about 50 people demonstrated at the building Thursday.

One protester, 24-year-old Jessica Orman, says the demonstrators arent happy with the president-elect and were trying to let everyone know that.

The demonstrators were met with cheers from several people shopping and dining in the area, while at least one person driving by shouted they should shut up and accept democracy.

Thousands have been gathering in cities across the nation to voice opposition to Trumps election. Trump was on Twitter on Thursday, calling the demonstrators professional protesters, incited by the media.___

___

7:30 p.m.

Protesters are blocking Interstate 94 in Minneapolis after demonstrators marched from an anti-Donald Trump rally at the University of Minnesota.

Traffic was blocked in both directions on the heavily traveled highway Thursday night.

It was the second night of protests in the Twin Cities over Trumps election as president. Similar protests popped up in cities across the nation both Wednesday and Thursday nights.

The Star Tribune reports demonstrators entered I-94 after marching down Franklin Avenue. The protesters blocked both lanes and chanted Shut it down.

Officers from the Minnesota State Patrol and the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments rushed to the area with lights flashing. A line of protesters faced officers on the freeway.

Anti-Trump protesters also staged a demonstration in St. Paul on Wednesday night.

___

7 p.m.

President-elect Donald Trump is back on Twitter, taking on the protesters who have gathered in cities across the nation since his election.

Trump tweets: Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

Thousands have been gathering in cities from New York to Dallas to San Francisco to voice opposition to Trumps election.

Trumps complaint Thursday about the media echoes the rhetoric of his campaign, when he railed against the press as disgusting and dishonest.

___
WAXAHACHIE, Texas  A volunteer firefighter accused of sexually assaulting a new recruit in a rite of initiation at a Texas firehouse has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault.

Prosecutors say Keith Edward Wisakowsky (wih-sah-KOW-skee) entered the plea Thursday in the Dallas suburb of Waxahachie and received a suspended one-year jail sentence. Felony aggravated sexual assault charges were dropped against Wisakowsky and five other volunteer firefighters, and witness tampering charges were dropped against the chief and assistant chief of the Emergency Services District 6 Volunteer Fire Department, ending the case.

Ellis County District Attorney Patrick Wilson says the victim agreed to the plea deal.

The attack happened in April 2015.
Jeffrey Veregge comes from a long line of Native American artists.

The lineage goes back to his great-grandmother, who painted covers for Liberty magazine in the 1930s. She also was a friend of Diego Rivera during her time in San Francisco. And it extends beyond Veregge to his son, who is completing a degree in animation.

He will carry on the legacy, he says proudly.

Throughout his career, Veregge has been a strong advocate for Native American artists.

Unlike many artists, Veregge has a style is not traditional in any sense. His work has a huge pop culture flair.

And this pairs well with his job as a comic book artist.

The member of the Port Gamble SKlallam Tribe works for Valiant Comics, IDW Publishing, Dark Horse Comics and Marvel.

Yes, Marvel.

I have 70 covers working for those four comics, he says. Each time I see my work in a comic book, I cant believe it. Doing work for Marvel is a dream come true. It still blows my mind that so many artists Ive looked up to are now my peers.

Veregge will be one of the guests at the inaugural Indigenous Comic Con, which will be held at the National Hispanic Cultural Center on Nov. 18-20.

Veregge grew up on the Port Gamble SKlallam Reservation in Washington. The reservation is known as Little Boston.

Although he lives there, his mind was under the thought-altering tutelage of George Lucas, Walt Disney, Ray Harryhausen and Stan Lee.

Im a huge comic book fan, he says. I had an opportunity to work on a lot of titles. Im a Star Trek fan, and I got to work on that title. This is also coming for a boy who used to wear Vulcan ears in eighth grade. It didnt go over well with the girls. When I get to work on the titles that mean so much to me, the 8-year-old boy inside me still jumps for joy.

Recently, Veregge had the opportunity to work on X-Men, in which he got to draw Forge.

The mutant known only as Forge is a member of the Cheyenne tribe who was trained in mysticism by his tribes shaman, Naze. He is a mutant and sorcerer, inventor and warrior. Forge later rebelled against his Cheyenne heritage and became a U.S. soldier to serve in the peacekeeping force in east Asia.

Forge is probably one of the best representations of a Native American, he says. It was amazing for me to work on this title. And I also got to draw Wolverine, which had me geeking out.

Though his work is pop culture-heavy, Veregge incorporates Native symbols.

I try to be very vocal about my heritage, he says. Im proud of where I come from. I want to show other Natives what Ive learned and that we can accomplish anything we set our mind to. Theres a lot of hard work that goes into it.

Indigenous Comic Con

WHEN: 6 p.m. Nov. 18; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Nov. 19; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Nov. 20

WHERE: National Hispanic Cultural Center, 1701 Fourth SW

HOW MUCH: $15-$300 at indigenouscomiccon.com or at the door
Belva Ann Lockwood is not spinning in her grave. I went there and checked.

Some other women went there, too, weaving between the headstones of Congressional Cemetery in the nations capital, finding the tombstone of the feminist pioneer tucked between a pair of tall Italian cypress trees.

They left their I Voted stickers for Lockwood, who became the first woman to appear as an official candidate on a presidential ballot back in 1884, when she wasnt even allowed to vote in the election.

And on Wednesday, after the country had once again refused to elect a woman to the White House, someone left a handwritten apology: Im so sorry. We tried, but we couldnt do it. And then someone else added Yet to the end of the note.

The Yet matters. And so does Lockwood, who was one of the United States first female lawyers and whose law school wouldnt give her a degree  even after she aced all the classes  until President Ulysses S. Grant intervened on her behalf. Her campaign for the presidency predated Hillary Clintons by 132 years, but the outcome was exactly the same. The response has to be the same, too.

The fight by American women for equal representation in government, equal pay, equal human rights has never been easy and probably will never be over. At least not in our lifetimes.

The soaring hopes of so many women this week werent so much about a single person  an accomplished but flawed former first lady, senator and secretary of state  as they were for a milestone breakthrough. Finally, a woman as president, the crashing of the ultimate glass ceiling.

So when Clinton lost to the misogynistic Donald Trump, it left millions on women reeling, feeling like the reset button was just pushed on 200 years of progress.

In Lockwoods days, the sexism was so blatant it was almost funny. When she applied to law school at Columbian College (now George Washington University) in 1869, her rejection letter said such admission would not be expedient, as it would be likely to distract the attention of the young men.

She fought until another law school her in. Then she fought to get her degree. Then she fought to be allowed to practice in a court.

Born a woman, with all of a womans feelings and intuitions, I had all of the ambitions of a man, forgetting the gulf between the rights and privileges of the sexes, she wrote in Lippincotts Monthly Magazine in a February 1888 article about her struggles.

So many women still face resistance in pursuing their ambitions in modern-day America.

Capt. Kristen Griest became one of the first two women to graduate from the Armys notoriously demanding Ranger School last year, 233 years after Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a man to fight for the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War.

In 2004, Susan Hockfield became the first female president of MIT, 131 years after the Ellen Swallow Richards became the schools first female graduate.

It took 91 years for the U.S. House of Representatives to elect a female speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., after the first woman, Jeanette Rankin, R-Mont., was elected in 1916.

All of these women have battled, been knocked down and got back up.

Belva Ann Lockwood died in 1917, three years before the 19th Amendment gave American women the right to vote. She had to push relentlessly for every bit of progress she achieved in making it in a mans world.

Not long after the presidential campaign in 1884, she wrote about her struggles to be taken seriously in the legal profession.

In the autumn of 1877 some of the newspaper men of Washington, who had begun to be interested in the long and unequal contest that I had waged, asked me what I intended to do next, she remembered.

Get up a fight all along the line, she told them.

Get up a fight. Its what American women have always done. And its what we will keep doing.

woman-prez-analysis
SHOW LOW, Ariz.  Funeral services are scheduled Monday for a Show Low police officer who was killed in the line of duty earlier this week.

Officer Darrin Reed was fatally shot after responding to a disturbance at a restaurant Wednesday in the town of about 10,000 people in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.

Authorities say the gunman was later killed during a barricade situation at a rental cabin in the nearby community of Pinetop-Lakeside.

The 50-year-old Reed had been with Show Low police since 2006 and was scheduled to retire in February.

Hes survived by a wife and two children.

Police officials say Reeds funeral is scheduled for 1 p.m. Monday at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Stake Center in Show Low.

They say the funeral is open to the public.
For all but a few days of the year  mainly around the start of a semester  college bookstores are focused much more on building school brands than on selling textbooks. They might as well be called college hoodie stores.

American University, in a shift reflecting that retail reality, this fall joined a modest but growing number of schools that have removed textbooks from their campus stores.

Any student at the private university in Washington who wants to buy a textbook may of course still do so, through an online site AU promotes that offers price discounts and rapid delivery of hard copies to the campus. But the store itself has not a single copy on hand of the many textbooks that are required reading at AU. The only books in stock, as of Monday afternoon, were a few mass-market volumes, including To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Most students dont seem to mind. They and their peers at colleges elsewhere long ago became savvy online shoppers, hunting for used copies, cheap rentals or even free excerpts of the texts they need  all in the quest to save precious dollars for other school expenses.

But Yazmin Padilla, 19, a sophomore from Arizona, confessed that she was a bit nostalgic for the now-vanished sight of stacks of textbooks.

You knew they were expensive, but they were there, Padilla said. I liked looking at them.

Padilla, an international studies major, figures she spent about $300 on books this semester. She found some through the AU website and others elsewhere. She usually compares prices through sites such as Slugbooks.com. She likes hard copies but doesnt mind e-books once in awhile, such as the text she uses for Spanish language class. Her goal is simple: Find the best deal  as efficiently as possible.

That is what AU wants too.

Were trying to be as efficient as we can with every square foot we have, said Charles Smith, AUs director of auxiliary services. A staircase inside the bookstore that once led to a lower floor where the textbooks were kept has now been sealed off. The space is being remodeled to accommodate student events and a university dining club.

Smith said he heard few complaints after the university announced the switch during the summer. Two students voiced concerns about not being able to see and handle textbooks they might buy, Smith said. But for the most part the changeover was uneventful.

Better Cheaper Online, reads a sign posted outside the store. Weve taken the books out of the store, but not out of your hands. The sign says that students who buy online can get 10 percent off the price of new or used textbooks, and discounts of up to 80 percent on rentals.

Its been good for the students, Smith said. Very good for the students.

Lindsay Petelinkar, 19, a sophomore in international studies from Pennsylvania, said she is a bargain hunter and doesnt mind waiting a day or two for the university to deliver her texts. Its totally worth the wait for the cheaper book, she said.

A decade ago, Smith said, college bookstores were often considered major revenue generators for schools. Now, he said, AU views its store mainly as a resource for students and as an opportunity to build the school brand for alumni, parents and other visitors who might crave an AU sweatshirt or a plush stuffed Eagle (the school mascot).

Market research for the National Association of College Stores, a trade group, shows that students these days get their course materials through an average of about two sources, and that 40 percent of students rent at least one required text. Students spent an average of about $600 on required course materials for the 2015-2016 academic year.

Most of the nations estimated 4,500 campus stores still stock and sell hard copies of textbooks. We dont have exact numbers on how many schools have gone virtual-only for textbooks, but the majority still carry textbooks and offer both in-store and on-line purchase options, said Jenny Febbo, an association spokeswoman.

George Washington and Georgetown universities, also in the District of Columbia, said they still stock textbooks.

GW spokeswoman Maralee Csellar said the school has a cost-match program to reward students who show proof that another bookseller has a lower price on the same book sold at GWs store. In that case, she said, a student will get the difference back in the form of a gift card.

Georgetowns Barnes & Noble College outlet said it also advertises a variety of ways to stay competitive on price, through price matching, book rentals, used-book sales and buyback programs.

But its important to remember that the college bookstore isnt just about selling books, said Patrick Maloney, president of Barnes & Noble College. The bookstore is a key part of a students success both inside and outside the classroom. Maloney said the store functions as a social hub on campus  a place where new students can get their books and where alumni and fans visit . . . when they come back to campus.

college-bookstore
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

A University of New Mexico freshman said a fellow student wearing a Donald Trump shirt attempted to remove the hijab from her head and implied she was a terrorist while she was in Zimmerman Library on Election Day.

The woman, who is Muslim, said she reported the incident to the UNMs Office of Equal Opportunity, an agency that investigates discrimination. She provided a copy to the Journal.

She said she doesnt want the man, who is in one of her classes, to be punished, but wants him to realize he was wrong.

The Muslim community is just as patriotic as the next Trump supporter, or even more so because we believe in the American beliefs of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the woman told the Journal on Thursday. Were just as American as you are.

Dianne Anderson, the university spokeswoman, said UNM cant confirm or deny the case or provide information about specific OEO cases due to federal privacy laws. She did say the office received several reports about hate and bias incidents over the past two days, and will be investigating and responding to those reports.

The woman said she was sitting with some friends in Zimmerman Library on Tuesday when a man wearing a Trump shirt came up behind her, grabbed her head and tried to remove her black hijab. She struggled, then asked: Whats your problem? Whats that for?

He mentioned Trump and ended the conversation by saying, I am going to sit down before you (throw) a grenade at me, according to the report.

Among his policies, Trump has proposed at least temporarily banning Muslims from entering the United States.

I am not trying to expose anyone or get revenge, she said. I want to show people this is real.

Tensions related to the presidential election have been growing since Wednesday, when a vandal or vandals tagged UNMs campus with graffiti connecting Trump to Nazis.

Anderson said UNM has established a team to respond to incidents of hate and bias to ensure our campus can heal and to prevent future incidents.

The woman has not reported the incident to police and did not identify the classmate to UNM.

Authorities at San Diego State University said Thursday that they were investigating a reported attack on a Muslim student wearing a hijab on campus as a hate crime.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
When viewing an artwork, a viewer brings much of his or her own experiences and emotions in reacting to a piece.

But think of the richness and depth that can be added when you can learn what the artist herself was thinking or feeling or experiencing in creating the work:

That Dara Mark was mourning the death of her husband and working out her grief in her Elegy watercolor series.

That Shaun Gilmore was once a dancer and incorporates the ideas of movement through space in creating her work.

Or that Kelly Eckel studied Zen Buddhism many years ago, contributing to her appreciation for empty space.

All these things and more were revealed through the most recent gallery talk for the current Alcoves exhibition  a series that concentrates on current work by contemporary New Mexico artists  at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Museum director Mary Kershaw told the Journal that she has found the talks often evolve into conversations among artists that teach her new things about art trends and techniques, as well as the actual pieces hanging on the walls.

On a recent rainy Friday night, insights abounded from a five-artist exhibit that was curated by Katherine Ware, the museums curator of photography, who had stepped in for the usual Alcoves curator, Merry Scully. And that substitution might have explained the almost ethereal lightness of the entire space, where many of the artworks included a lot of white, with some black and grays, and only occasional subtle additional hues.

You may notice the restricted palette in all the work in the show, Ware said, also noting the preponderance of paper or plastic that looks like paper. She said that may reflect her own love for black and white photography.

Albuquerque resident Eckel actually does incorporate photography into her Morphogenic series, taking images of specimens from nature, cutting them into pieces and shifting those pieces over and over again until something satisfying emerges. One of the collages includes images of her grandmothers skin, which evoked thoughts of layers of sediment and the history that lies buried there. We have all our history in our genes, she said.

Her goal is not to tear things apart, but to bring disparate things together. I wanted to move toward something instead of against something, she said, in explaining that her works address the environment, but in a positive way.

I like seeds and organic shapes, she said, adding, I like black and white because you focus on the actual image itself.

Marks works have a flow of transparent layers, created by allowing watercolors to pool and meander across the surface of synthetic paper. Her Elegies series, she said, was done in the wake of her husbands death. One onlooker observed that it was as if she incorporated her tears into her artwork.

I was grieving and these paintings were a way for me to keep going on with my life, the Lamy resident said. Noting that they started with only black and white, then slowly took on some washes of pale browns and blues, Mark said, I really couldnt face color when I was so deranged.

My work is very intuitive, she added. I have very little idea of what its going to look like. Its really about letting the process happen.

Galisteo mixed-media artist Gilmore had both sculptures and paintings on display. The overall theme of my work, she said, is a sense of discovery. Its about looking at and observing the world.

Whenever she is traveling, she said, she makes brief notations of horizons that interest her. She then takes those markings home, copies the line onto paper, then adds additional lines along the shape, which then may curve and swirl upon itself, with other shapes and elements, and even colors interpreting the horizon into an abstraction. Its almost a geological kind of process, she said.

She also had sculptures of small linked pieces inspired by the weather, including a snow curtain, and wire wrapped in papier-mache for her Branching Out series. Of her work with papier-mache, she added, Ive gone back to my 3rd grade roots and having so much fun with it! It has a tactile, sensory quality I love.

Other artists included in the current Alcove Series are Mira Burack, who lives in the Ortiz Mountains, and Signe Stuart of Santa Fe.

Stuarts work in the show involves strips of translucent paper laid over and under each other, showing both connections and voids. Shes subtracted more than shes added, Ware said, of the works.

Buracks Bed series starts with photographs of mussed bedclothes or a pile of laundry, built into a collage reminiscent of a rounded blossom or even a mandala. I find it enchanting that something so completely ordinary, shes looking at it aesthetically  and making something extraordinary, Ware said.
Creating a public bank in Santa Fe  an outside-the-box idea that has been kicking around since Mayor Javier Gonzales first raised it during his election campaign in 2014  is coming back for a new round of public discussion.

City Councilor Renee Villarreal is calling for the formation of a task force to determine whether the city should move forward with the establishment of a public bank. Two other councilors, Carmichael Dominguez and Joe Maestas, have signed on to co-sponsor Villarreals proposal, and a nonprofit group called WeArePeopleHere! continues to push the public banking idea with support from the likes of state Sen. Peter With and school board member Linda Trujillo, recently elected to the state House of Representatives.

But some outside city government and with experience in the banking industry remain skeptical.

To me, its one of those circumstances that sounds conceptually interesting. People say, Why cant we do this?  Bryan Chip Chippeaux, chairman of the locally owned Century Bank, said in an interview this week. But I think people underestimate the requirements of what becoming a public bank would entail. Plus, its one of those deals where you have to ask, Is that the biggest issue Santa Fe has in front of it right now? 

James Lodes, a retired loan officer, said he doesnt want to see the city rush into anything. Its gone from the concept stage to OK, how do we do this?  he said. No one has stopped to say, Do we really want to do this? 

Elaine Sullivan, president of the board of directors for WeArePeopleHere!, said thats whats happening now.

Thats precisely what this resolution is about, said Sullivan. Its to give it serious thought before we go into this, she said.

Resolution specifics

The resolution calls for the formation of a task force to define the process, resources, information and timelines for preparing an application for a New Mexico bank charter and report back to the City Council in six months. It comes after the city spent $50,000 to contract with a consulting and project management firm that determined that starting up such a bank in Santa Fe was feasible.

The study, conducted by El Paso-based Building Solutions, LLC and the New Mexico State Universitys Arrowhead Center, stated that the city could realize a fiscal and economic impact of $24 million in a public banks first year of implementation.

Lodes suggested that the feasibility study might have been a way for the city to justify its pursuit of creating a public bank. Lodes said the consulting firm really wasnt instructed to conduct an objective cost/benefit analysis.

The feasibility study pointed out things the city could have done to save millions, like paying off loans early and managing the way they drew bond proceeds. Those are the millions in savings the study attributes to a public bank, he said. Well, thats not the bank saving them money, its the finance department using the cash more wisely.

Mayor Gonzales talked about the possibility of creating a public bank while laying out his economic platform prior to his election in March 2014. Three months after taking office, he hosted a forum on the issue and, three months after that, the city staged a day-long symposium on the concept.

Were not going to rush into anything, Gonzales said then, but we are going to move forward in learning and understanding how to develop a bank in Santa Fe, and being honest about whether we can truly pull it off or not. That remains to be seen.

More than two years later, it still does.

Youd have to raise capital and infrastructure, and then be subject to regular examinations. I just dont see that happening, said Chippeaux.

Its a slow process just to get through the application process for a bank charter.

Lodes said a public bank could be a good thing, but Santa Fe is too small a community to carry the freight all on its own. Doing it on a statewide level or regional level might make sense, because it spreads out that initial startup cost and whats estimated to be $1 million in operating costs. Youre starting a bank with no capital, you need to have loan loss reserves, so I dont know how they could do that alone short of a huge gift.

Initially, at least, the city would be the banks only customer, unless there was a collaboration with other entities.

Public banks in ND, Europe

Public banking is not a new concept. The nations only public bank, the Bank of North Dakota, is nearly 100 years old and, as of the second quarter of 2016, had built assets totaling more than $7.3 billion. The state has used some of its profits to fund expansion of child care services, financing for rural mortgages and consolidating student debt.

Most recently, North Dakota has tapped the bank for $10 million to help cover unexpected costs for law enforcements response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Public banks are more common in Europe, where there are more than 400 savings banks, as they are called there.

Gonzales has said that a public bank in Santa Fe could help build the citys social infrastructure by financing such things as broadband expansion, early childhood education programs and health care services.

Theres growing interest in public banks across America, Sullivan said. She provided a list of entities in a dozen states that are considering the idea.

The benefits are numerous, she said.

Forty to 45 percent of city funds go to Wells Fargo Bank. After that, we dont know how it gets used, she said. A public bank would keep the money here and the interest on loans would go back into the bank. Interest paid and earned would stay within the local economy, she said.

If we keep the money local, were using it for our purposes and well be able to see whats happening to it, she said. Its not a silver bullet, but it would be one piece to the solution to our economic challenges.

Councilor Villarreal was reluctant to say much about the resolution shes proposing.

Were still working on language so the resolution is consistent and were still exploring the mechanics, she said.

But considering the feasibility study indicated a public bank would work in Santa Fe and public banking has worked elsewhere, she believes its worth taking a closer look.

One of the things were looking at are other sources that can fund community projects, instead of always relying on bonds, she said.

The current draft of the resolution charges the task force with determining what would be the most appropriate kind of bank charter, looking into potential sources and methods of capitalization, and recommending two or more governance models to the City Council. It would also be tasked with identifying a source for the $7,500 bank charter application fee and completing a five-year business plan, a requirement for the bank charter application.

The task force would comprise nine members appointed by the mayor and approved by the council. Its make up would include one city councilor who is a member of the council Finance Committee; the citys finance director or a representative from that department; someone with legal expertise in the banking industry; another person with federal and state regulatory experience in the industry; three people with local financial and/or banking experience with a local community development financial institution, such as a community bank or credit union; and two residents at large who have expressed a commitment to the goal of establishing a public bank.

That would seem to suggest the city is looking mostly for people who have already made up their mind about supporting a public bank.

Thats one of the sections we need to look at, Villarreal said, adding that the resolution was still being tweaked before it begins the committee process.

One part of the resolution unlikely to change is a section that calls for the task force to hold at least two public meetings to report on its progress and take public comment before coming back the City Council with recommendations within the six-month time frame.
On a recent sunny day, standing next to Santa Fes historic Loretto Chapel, Maggie Andersson described to a reporter the projected views of the chapel from various vantage points if her family is successful in constructing a long-planned, multi-story residential/retail building next to it.

Andersson was in her early 20s and Bill Clinton in the first year of his presidency in 1994 when her father Jim Kirkpatrick, who bought the chapel in 1971 and opened the Inn at Loretto next door in 1975, first applied to build on the lot at Old Santa Fe Trail and Water Street. Kirkpatrick, now in his early 80s, sold the hotel in 1995.

Through various design iterations, hearings, a legal fight and amid opposition from some Santa Feans about a new buildings impact on the Loretto Chapel and downtown, the family is still seeking construction approval  now for a 25,536-square-foot building with underground parking that they say fits with the surroundings.

Since their latest plan for a four-story design, with the top story set back wedding cake style, was voted down 3-1 by the Historic Districts Review Board (known as the H-Board) in September, theyve appealed to the City Council.

We were really optimistic going into that meeting (of the H-Board)  but I wasnt surprised, said Andersson.

We have presented so many different renderings over the years, said Andersson, who works for the family business Teme, LTD. And they have never approved anything.

I feel we have to go the City Council route just so that everybody understands the rules  and then we can tweak the building and make it the best possible building.

The appeal has not yet been placed on a council agenda. The H-Boards September vote, following a public hearing, came despite a staff recommendation for approval of exemption from a height ordinance that would have allowed the 49-foot-high building to go forward.

Court ruling

The Kirkpatrick family believes that, based on a 1998 court ruling that resulted from litigation over one of the familys earlier proposals for the site, an exemption is not required for the height of the latest design, but say they asked for one anyway at the request of city staff.

Thats not the citys position. A February email from assistant city attorney Zachary Shandler to Andersson says a 1996 ordinance applies and sets a height maximum at the building site of 21 feet, 11 inches.

The Kirkpatricks recent appeal letter says that maximum ignores the fact that the adjacent properties to the north and south have long been developed with buildings over 40 feet higher than the purported height limit.

The fact is that the proposed building is more than 15 feet lower than the La Fonda and the Loretto Inn, and is 9 feet lower than the rooftop of the Loretto Chapel, the letter said. The chapel was completed in 1878 and includes the Miraculous Staircase that legend says was built by a mysterious carpenter who showed up after prayers to St. Joseph. The back of La Fonda is across Water Street from the site.

The issue goes beyond any impacts on the chapel, said John Pen La Farge, president of the Old Santa Fe Association.

He and other individual members of the association oppose the new building, although the association board has not taken a position on the proposal.

Increasing the height of downtown Santa Fe as a whole is a problem, he said.  If we want Santa Fe to remain the town that draws people from as far away as Japan and is unique, then it has to abide by the rules and one of those criteria is height.

La Farge said he was also concerned about the streetscape and whether or not it (the new building) will overwhelm the chapel next to it.

Randall Bell, vice-president of the Old Santa Fe Association, said, What I see the applicant saying is, essentially, We dont like the ordinance. We dont want to be bound by it. 

Each granted gift (exception) that doesnt apply or doesnt conform to city regulations sets a precedent for other people to do the same thing, said La Farge. The city tends to not enforce its own ordinances  the city council tends to feel sorry for people.

Back to court?

Kirkpatrick bought the property from the Sisters of Loretto in 1970 subject to a condition that he could build to 65 feet high, his appeal letter states.

In an effort to facilitate the purchase and at the request of the Sisters of Loretto, in January of 1971, the city council adopted Resolution 1971-3 establishing the height limit for a building on the Property at 65 feet, the letter says. Kirkpatrick bought the property relying on that resolution, the letter adds.

So when plans for a 43-foot-high building were turned down by the city, the Kirkpatricks went to court in 1996. The appeal letter says that the judge in that case had documented a city stipulation that the 65-foot height allowed by the city in 1971 remained in effect and sent the matter back to the Historic Districts Review Board for further review.

They denied our first building on rules that didnt exist, Andersson said. The citys attitude, she said, is a large part of why we sold the hotel (Inn at Loretto).

In 2004, the H-Board appointed a study group to work with the family on a new plan, says Andersson. We just kind of sat back and said, What do you think?  said Andersson. But a proposal debated in 2006, larger than the current plan, also bogged down.

Fast forward to 2015. With time past and a new board in place, the Kirkpatrick family thought Lets just give it a shot with a new application, said Andersson. Legal issues surfaced. The lawyers start talking and the whole system shuts down, she said. Nobody quite gets the rules  and we just got caught in the quagmire of design.

The family maintains the 1998 court ruling continues to allow a height of up to 65 feet. But the city says the ruling was specific to the 1996 proposal and there is no vested right to build up to 65 feet, according to the February email from assistant city attorney Shandler.

At the September H-Board meeting, the boards staff recommended approval of a height waiver, even though some criteria had not been met.

Asked recently about the boards denial of the waiver, city planner supervisor David Rasch said the board asked architect Eric Enfield of Architectural Alliance, Inc., representing the Kirkpatrick family, for a design for a three-story building, and Enfield returned with a four-story design.

A three-story design did not look good, said Andersson. It makes it blockier as a three-story, she said.

He (Enfield) didnt bring back what they (the board) wanted to see, said Rasch. Some board members felt the proposed building crowded the chapel a little too much.

Because the board asked for a three-story design that would still have required a height variance, we really feel they were disingenuous, said Andersson.

The cost of the process has been burdensome emotionally as well as financially, Kirkpatrick said in a recent email for this story.

He thinks the system needs an overhaul. It is my recommendation that the historic districts overlay zoning be returned to the oversight of the planning commission and that the height ordinance be repealed for being an undue burden on the economic vitality of our Capital Business District, he said in the email.

Asked if District Court litigation was again an option if the City Council upholds the denial, Andersson said, Well have to see  but we are certainly prepared to.
Largely as a result of efforts to reform campaign finance laws, the past few election cycles make clear that political parties are losing clout and perhaps even their relevance at the state level. Even candidates themselves are more and more relegated to secondary importance and control of their campaigns.

Politics is evolving, and driving the change are well-funded dark money groups and Super PACs that are flexing their muscles and pushing aside the traditional way of running campaigns.

Nationally, several court rulings  most significantly the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which was the correct ruling for the case  have played a role in allowing unions, corporations and the coffers of the rich and influential on both ends of the political spectrum to be tapped to push certain agendas and give their favored candidates a better chance of being elected.

Campaign limits do not apply to independent expenditure groups. They can accept contributions of any size, but cannot coordinate directly with candidates. Some claim Super PACS do have to report who their donors are, but do not have to report specifically which candidates they are favoring or opposing by spending money on advertising, mailers or robocalls.

In New Mexico, state lawmakers in 2009 approved limits on campaign contributions. They currently are set at a $5,400 cap per election, primary and general for individual campaign contributions to statewide candidates  such as governor, attorney general and secretary of state  and at a $2,500 per election cap on individual donations to legislative candidates. Theres also a limit on donations to and from traditional political committees.

But what was intended as a way of limiting the impact of special interest money, increasing transparency and leveling the playing field apparently had the opposite effect as independent groups jumped into the breach, handing out cash left and right. (Pun intended.)

Most of the money donated to the two biggest Super PACs that worked New Mexico this election cycle came from out-of-state donors.

Advance New Mexico Now, a pro-Republican group run by Gov. Susana Martinezs political adviser, Jay McCleskey, targeted Democratic candidates in more than a dozen legislative races, spending roughly $1.1 million and taking in about $500,000, according to the latest campaign report filed with the Secretary of States Office.

The groups highest profile victory was its role in knocking out long-time state Senate Democratic boss Michael Sanchez.

About half of Advance New Mexico Nows money came from the national Republican State Leadership Committee. Other donations came from wealthy donors with ties to the oil and gas industry, including $150,000 from Paul Foster, an El Paso businessman who founded an oil refining company. Anne Marion, a Texan who co-founded the Georgia OKeeffe Museum in Santa Fe, donated $100,000.

Patriot Majority New Mexico, a pro-Democratic group, took in more than $1 million in a recent four-week period, most from two national labor unions  AFSCME, which represents some public workers, and the NEA, which represents teachers  and spent virtually all of it. Most was spent on mailers, radio commercials and contributions to other political action committees.

The group was instrumental in putting Democrats back in control in the House, with the unspoken goal of making sure New Mexico remains a state without right to work and with a public school system that will battle anything that resembles education reform. Its about the employees  not the kids.

Nationally, as of Oct. 19, the Washington Post reported that, of the $996.2 million donated to support Democratic candidates in the 2016 election, 20 percent was raised by super PACs and other independent groups. Of the $727.3 million donated at that point to support Republican candidates, 57 percent was raised by super PACs and other independent groups.

As Super PACS keep shoving the political parties toward their respective corners, candidates naturally will become more beholden to them.

Raising the question: Were we better off when we at least knew where the influence was coming from and had a better idea of how money was being used to target, i.e. control, the outcomes? Werent candidates better off when they could actually control the tone of their own campaigns?

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.
CANBERRA, Australia  The United States and Australia are close to announcing a deal in which the U.S. would resettle hundreds of asylum seekers banished by Australia to Pacific island camps, a newspaper reported on Friday.

The U.S. had agreed to accept up to 1,800 refugees held for up to three years at Australias expense in camps on the impoverished island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, The Australian newspaper reported.

Such an agreement struck with the Obama administration could be opposed by President-elect Donald Trump, who has called for a moratorium or tight restrictions on Muslim immigration. Most of the asylum seekers are Muslims from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The agreement could empty the camps that have been condemned by human rights groups as a cruel abrogation of Australias responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention.

Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull declined to comment on negotiations with the United States.

Rebecca Gardner, spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Australia, would not comment on the newspaper report, saying the State Department did not comment on or discuss diplomatic negotiations.

Senior government minister Christopher Pyne praised the prospect of such an agreement being finalized before the Obama administration ends.

There certainly is time  two and a half months is plenty of time  and if thats the case, it will be a great achievement for the Turnbull government, Pyne told Nine Network television.

Senior opposition lawmaker Anthony Albanese said if this occurs, that will be a good thing.

The opposition center-left Labor Party criticized a previous deal struck between Australia and the United States in 2007 to swap refugees, arguing that the prospect of U.S. resettlement would attract more asylum seekers to Australian shores.

Under that deal, up to 200 refugees a year held on Nauru could have been swapped for Cubans and Haitians intercepted at sea while trying to get to the U.S. and held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But no refugee was ever traded under that deal.

Turnbull announced at Obamas Leaders Summit on Refugees in September that Australia would participate in the U.S.-led program to resettle Central American refugees from a camp in Costa Rica. Australia would also increase its refugee intake by 5,000 to 18,750 a year.

Turnbull said at the time that the agreement to resettle Central Americans was not linked to any other resettlement discussions involving Australias refugees.

Immigration Department Secretary Chief Michael Pezzullo told a parliamentary committee on Friday that today we are closer than we were yesterday to resettling asylum seekers from Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said this week he was looking for countries that will accept all asylum seekers bound for Australia, including those who have had their refugee claims rejected but refuse to go home. Iran wont take back Iranians who wont to go home voluntarily.

Almost 1,300 asylum seekers are on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Hundreds more have come to the Australia for medical treatment and have taken court action to prevent them being send back to the islands.

Few refugees have accepted offers to resettle in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia because most hope that Australia will eventually take them in.

Australia refuses to resettle any refugee who has arrived by boat since the date the tough policy was announced, July 19, 2013.
Anthony Castillo was on a bad path.

The Army mechanic became a gunner when he was deployed to Iraq in 2005. He came home with PTSD and self-medicated with heroin. And, to fuel that habit, he turned to property crime.

I turned from a hero into the villain, he said. And, eventually, he got caught.

Castillo said his saving grace was the 2nd Judicial District Courts Veterans Court program, which helps veterans through their non-violent criminal cases, connecting them with a support network, community service opportunities and treatment as an alternative to incarceration.

The program seeks defendants whose criminal behavior stems from their experiences in the military. It works to assist each defendant in an individualized way in order to relieve the root of the problem.

In the eyes of the community, theyre not your typical criminals, Ginger Varcoe, program coordinator, said. Their issues are stemming specifically from whats happened to them while they served.

Castillo said he pleaded guilty to multiple burglary counts and faced an 11 year sentence. But, instead, he used the resources offered through Veterans Court to find PTSD and substance abuse treatment programs at a local VA hospital. He started volunteering with Assistance Dogs of the West. He went to school, became a barber and graduated from the program.

I was on a bad path, he said. And Im telling you, there was destruction in front of me.

Castillo is one of many success stories.

Since the programs launch in 2011, 42 of 75 participants have graduated. The recidivism rate for graduates is just 7 percent, according to court officials. A handful of graduates joined several current participants at a luncheon at the courthouse Wednesday.

Judge Stan Whitaker, who presides over the program, called the low recidivism rate incredible.

He said the program works to identify the needs of each individual, and to set them up with the tools and treatment they need to avoid re-offending.

Its a way to sort of honor the vets who come through the system, he said.
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

Bernalillo County Commissioner-elect Steven Michael Quezada has filed a defamation lawsuit against a mysterious political committee that he says falsely accused him of beating women and affiliating with a West Side gang.

The lawsuit follows a vicious campaign in which anonymous opponents posted signs and distributed mailers accusing Quezada of domestic violence and other misconduct  allegations that the suit and Quezada and his attorney say are flatly false.

Im not going to let them to do this to me, Quezada said Thursday. Its bigger than a campaign for me. Its my reputation.

The suit names as defendants the Committee for the Truth District 2, an organization that isnt registered with the secretary of state, and John Davis, its treasurer, though theres a question about whether Davis is a real person or just a fake name, according to documents filed with the lawsuit.

Quezadas complaint says he was the victim  not the perpetrator  of domestic violence in 1999. To back that up, his suit includes a photo showing his face caked with blood as hes stabilized on a stretcher. Quezada said a police report at the time listed him as the victim and that police arrested the two women who had attacked him.

His four-page lawsuit says the committee knew its mailer was false but made the allegations against Quezada anyway to disparage his character and reputation in the community and to influence the election.

One of the falsehoods, Quezada said, is the mailers suggestion that he is or was a member of a gang. He said he did the opposite as a counselor at the nonprofit group Youth Development Inc., where I spent my life pulling kids out of gangs.

Lawsuits like Quezadas are rare.

Martin Esquivel, a First Amendment lawyer, said a candidate for elected office and similar public figures face a high burden to win a defamation claim.

Its extremely uncommon for a lawsuit to be filed, because theres a certain amount of hyperbole that goes along with elections and campaigns  Its easy to say youre defamed, but its another thing to prove it in court, Esquivel said.

To succeed, a plaintiff must show actual injury to reputation. That could mean, for example, proving that not only did a plaintiffs business income decline after the publication of defamatory material, but that it was directly a result of the defamation, he said.

Quezada, a comedian, writer and actor famous for a role in Breaking Bad, narrowly won a three-person race in June to claim the Democratic nomination in District 2, which covers the South Valley and Southwest Mesa. The flier was distributed before that election.

Quezada went on to win 62 percent of the vote in this weeks general election, though he again faced anonymous allegations about his past. He has freely acknowledged being arrested three times on drunken-driving charges, most recently in 2002, but he also says, Im not that guy anymore and credits his family for changing his life.
It has been so warm this year, even up in the Midwest and the Plains states, that you couldnt blame birds for delaying their travels south for the winter.

But Kent Swanson, manager of the citys Open Space Visitor Center, said there should be plenty of cranes around for the Return of the Sandhill Cranes celebration Saturday at the center.

Weve got some sorghum and millet fields out here that were mowing, Swanson said in a phone interview Thursday. Im looking at about 15 cranes right now, and it will probably be double that number by the time we finish mowing and knocking down the seed heads. The cranes go wherever the food is.

He said that on Saturday, at any one time, there should be 20 to 30 cranes, maybe more, foraging in the 21 acres of agricultural fields at the center.

The cranes will be here until March. They spend their evenings at the Rio Grande, a half mile east of the center, because the river provides protection from predators.

Noel Chilton, event coordinator at the visitor center, said flute music, film screenings and the venerable Chinese practice of tai chi are among the activities planned for the celebration.

The lineup includes several presentations, starting with Craneology 101 at 10 a.m. Montessori Middle School students will take part in a native flute musical performance at noon, the Montessori Middle School Honors Choir performs at 12:30 p.m., and members of the New Mexico Storytellers spin tales at 1 and 2 p.m.

We like to incorporate young voices in all our projects, Chilton said. I dont know that the Montessori school performances will be specifically related to cranes, but one of the performances is native flute and that relates to our property because we have a (Puebloan, 1300-1500 A.D.) archaeological site here. But the three New Mexico storytellers will tell stories that are all about cranes specifically or about the transition into winter solstice.

The Albuquerque Origami Society will be on hand to teach people how to make paper cranes, and there will be artist talks and a tour of the visitor center art gallery.

At 1 p.m., theres a special screening of Su Rynards The Messenger, a documentary about our connection to and effect on birds, along with a New Mexico Audubon Society program about protecting bird habitat.

The day starts at 9 a.m. with Tai Chi With the Cranes, outdoors, facing the fields where the cranes are.

Those who wish to do so can end up the day by driving about a mile from the visitor center to Los Poblanos Fields Open Space for a guided crane fly-out walk.

Two of our staff members will guide people on a walk around as the cranes leave Los Poblanos for the day and fly to the river, Chilton said. Its kind of dramatic. So, tai chi to welcome the cranes in the morning and the fly-out at night to say goodbye.

Return of the Cranes

What: A daylong celebration welcoming sandhill cranes back to their winter habitat along the Rio Grande.

When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday

Where: Open Space Visitor Center, 6500 Coors Blvd. NW

Admission: Free

More info: 505-897-8831
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

While compiling a lengthy list of Sandoval County veterans  from the Civil War through Vietnam  retired Army colonel and amateur historian David Cde Baca made an intriguing find: Two Navajo women who served as scouts with the Armys 20th Infantry Regiment in the summer of 1886 could be the first women to have officially been enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Because it wasnt until this year that all jobs in all branches of the military became open to women, even combat roles, Cde Bacas discovery has piqued at least one historians interest.

What hes turned up is not unusual  except for the fact that they were actually enlisted, said Paul Hutton, distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico. That I find amazing.

There were certainly women who were used by the military as intermediaries throughout the Indian Wars, said Hutton, a prolific author whose recent book The Apache Wars delves into that conflict in great detail.

But I found the fact that he actually found enlistment records to be pretty amazing.

The Apache Wars were a series of armed conflicts between the Army and various Apache nations fought in the Southwest from 1849 to 1886.

Even though the Apaches and Navajos are linguistic cousins, by the time of the American occupation of New Mexico they were bitter enemies who often battled over hunting country, Hutton said.

The U.S. campaign against the Navajos during the Civil War had actually freed the Apaches from that northern threat, he said. Navajos, as well as the Pueblo, were happy to act as scouts against their traditional Apache enemies and saw hard service until the final surrender of Geronimo in 1886.

Sandoval County veterans

Two years ago, Cde Baca got involved in the Sandoval County Historical Societys efforts to honor its World War I veterans as the centennial of that war approached.

There was a presentation being made at the Gutierrez/Minge House having to do with World War I, Cde Baca said. As part of that, they were going to have a remembrance ceremony  for the veterans buried in the cemetery next door. There were 16 in the cemetery, so I took it upon myself to find out who the others were. When I was done, I had 44.

The historic Gutierrez/Minge House, also known as Casa San Ysidro, is now a museum in Cde Bacas hometown of Corrales.

After making presentations on the World War I veterans, people began asking when the historical society would do the same for veterans of other wars, Cde Baca said. He then began collecting names and photos of all Sandoval County veterans.

Those efforts have culminated in an expansive 34-panel display inside the Sandoval County administrative offices in Bernalillo, where the names of more than 5,800 veterans  and photos or images of more than 1,600  grace the foyers walls.

The display, dedicated on Memorial Day this year, will be there permanently, Cde Baca said, and it will grow as new veterans are discovered. Other panels, such as one dedicated to female veterans, are planned.

We knew we had to capture these stories before it was too late, Cde Baca said. In another five to 10 years, it would be impossible because we wouldnt know who (of the veterans descendants) might still have their photos and stories.

Early GI Janes?

While checking about 4,500 military records from the Indian Wars, Cde Baca came across the names of two Navajo women  Mexicana Chiquito (whose given name was Nal-Kai) and Muchacha  who were enlisted as Army Scouts by the 20th Regiment, U.S. Infantry, at Fort Wingate. The records indicated that Mexicana Chiquito, 24, served from May 24, 1886, to Oct. 11, 1886. Muchacha, 21, served from May 26, 1886, to Oct. 11, 1886.

Cde Baca pointed out that language barriers among Native Americans, Hispanics and Army officers often resulted in the military assigning aliases to some recruits, which appears to be the case with the two women.

Seeking additional verification of his findings, Cde Baca enlisted the help of U.S. Sen. Tom Udalls office, which requested the womens military records through the National Archives. The records verified the womens enlistment dates and other information, including that Mexicana Chiquito had applied for and received an Army pension.

I couldnt find a (pension) record for Muchacha, which suggests she died before Congress authorized the pensions in 1917, Cde Baca said.

UNMs Hutton said it was common for the Army to hire indigenous people for various tasks during the Indian Wars, ranging from translators and trackers to sharpshooters and warriors who fought in battle.

The Army enlisted Navajo scouts throughout the war against the Apaches, Hutton said. Most served out of Fort Wingate, but they also enlisted from other tribes and pueblos.

Although such enlistees were called scouts, they did a variety jobs for the Army, he said.

And there are documented cases of women being hired informally by the Army  but not enlisted  he said.

Its one thing to use them informally, which went on all the time. But to actually enlist them.  All I can say is its the first time Ive seen it, Hutton said.

It really is fascinating, and hes turned up something of great interest that warrants further inquiry, Hutton said.

Theres probably a story behind that  how useful these women were and what their particular skills were, Hutton said.

For the time being, Cde Baca is content knowing that his research may have discovered what he calls Americas first GI Janes.

CLARIFICATION: The caption of the photo depicting the two Navajo women has been modified since the original posting.
A parade of restored military vehicles, ceremonies at the New Mexico Veterans Memorial and recognition of a former UNM soldier who died in Afghanistan are among activities slated for Veterans Day today.

 The parade in Albuquerque starts at 9 a.m. at USS Bullhead Memorial Park at the southern end of San Pedro SE. It winds through the Raymond G. Murphy Veterans Affairs Medical Center complex and onto Ridgecrest Drive. It then turns east on Gibson Boulevard and north on Louisiana Boulevard, concluding at the veterans memorial, 1100 Louisiana SE.

 Events at the Veterans Memorial begin at 10 a.m., with music by the Dukes of Albuquerque American Legion Band. The ceremony begins at 11 a.m. Guest speakers include retired New Mexico Air National Guard Brig. Gen. Judy Griego, Denise Rohan, candidate for national commander of the American Legion, and Mayor Richard Berry.

 The University of New Mexico will honor veterans and active-duty military with a formal flag ceremony at 9 a.m. today at the Alumni Memorial Chapel on campus. The name of Washington National Guard Staff Sgt. Matthew Q. McClintock, 30, of Albuquerque, will be added to the memorial wall. McClintock, a former UNM student, died Jan. 5, 2016, in Afghanistan. He was awarded a Silver Star, the militarys third-highest award for combat.

 Rio Rancho will have its Veterans Day event at 11 a.m. today at Veterans Monument Park, located off Southern Boulevard on Pinetree Road and adjacent to Esther Bone Memorial Library.

 The village of Tijeras will host a wreath-laying ceremony at 10 a.m. today at the Tijeras Vietnam Veterans Memorial, located just west of the village library on Old Route 66 (State Highway 333.)

 Santa Fes Veterans Day parade starts at 10:30 a.m. at Fire Station No. 1 just north of Fort Marcy Park, goes through the Plaza and ends at the Santa Fe Veterans Memorial at the intersection of Montezuma Street and Cerrillos Road. Ceremonies begin there at the conclusion of the parade, with music by the Santa Fe Concert Band. After the ceremonies, the public is invited to attend free luncheons hosted by VFW Post 2951, located at 307 Montezuma St., and American Legion Post 1, located at 1601 Berry Ave.

 The Vietnam Veterans Memorial State Park, located 4 miles north of Angel Fire off U.S. Highway 64, will host a Veterans Day ceremony at 11 a.m. today. The keynote speaker will be Col. George Brick, an educator at New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell. The Cimarron High School Band will perform, and the NMMI JROTC Color Guard will present the colors.
MIAMIDonald Trumps election as the next president of the United States has cast a shadow over the Obama administration policy of warming relations with Cuba.

While Cuban leader Raul Castro issued a short congratulatory message on Trumps victory, the official Granma newspaper on Wednesday also announced five days of upcoming military preparedness exercises, a signal that the island is getting ready for a hostile U.S. administration.

Those exercises began during the Reagan administration in 1980 but had not been held for the last three years. A reporter on a Havana TV news program noted that Cuba has had similar experiences and maintains its will to resist the big neighbor to the North.

President Barack Obamas legacy on Cuba could well be affected by whatever happens after Trump moves into the White House.

Obama announced dramatic changes in U.S. policy toward Havana starting in December 2014. Saying he wanted to end the last vestige of the Cold War, he decided to re-establish diplomatic relations, broken more than 50 years ago, and eased economic sanctions on the island.

U.S. residents can now travel to Cuba more easily, commercial flights have been restored and many companies are looking over the Cuban market, although the islands government has been unwilling to give them more access so far. One month before Tuesdays election, the president also lifted restrictions for travelers on the importation of Cuban cigars and rum for personal use and published a presidential directive that sketched out a path for fully normalizing relations.

But the directive could remain just a piece of paper if Trump honors some of the promises on Cuba policy that he made during the campaign.

As the Republican candidate, Trump started out saying he supported relations with Cuba but added that he would have negotiated a better deal with Havana. Later, to win the votes of Cuban-American Republicans in South Florida, he promised to reverse the Obama opening.

We will cancel Obamas one-sided Cuban deal, made by executive order, if we do not get the deal that we want and the deal that people living in Cuba and here deserve, including protecting religious and political freedom, he declared in Miami just a week before the election.

Obama changed policy on Cuba through executive powers that were allowed by the trade embargo on the island, and can be reversed by the new president. The Obama administration tried to make them irreversible with written guidelines sent to federal agencies.

A senior administration official told reporters in October that a new president could issue a new directive on Cuba to reverse Obamas directive, although that would take a significant amount of time. The Obama guidelines remain in place in the meantime, the official added.

Frank Mora, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Latin America from 2009 to 2013 who now teaches at Florida International University, said the next president has several options for changing the Obama policies on Cuba.

On the day of his inauguration, Mora said, Trump can simply write, although I doubt that would be one of his priorities, something that says that everything in the presidential directive related to U.S. policy on Cuba is invalid.

The document would not have to be long, but must be explicit, Mora said.

Trump also could totally freeze the process, and would not need a (new) directive or even something in writing. It could be an oral instruction to the secretary of State, Mora said. If he wants to, he can break (diplomatic) relations with Cuba.

Even if Trump does not go to that extreme, Cuba watchers agree that he probably will make some gesture to fulfill his campaign promises and acknowledge the support of Cuban Americans whose votes might have helped him to win Florida.

He has a political debt with the Cuban community, and perhaps feels that he has to pay it in some way, maybe not reversing everything  but signaling that hes returning to the status quo before the Obama changes, Mora said.

Mauricio Claver-Carone, director of the pro-embargo U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC in Washington, agreed.

As for President-elect Trump, his Cuban-American supporters will surely hold him to his commitment to reverse Obamas executive orders, he said. Moreover, his election and the huge win of the Cuban-American Congressional delegation give Trump the clear mandate to do so.

Sen. Marco Rubio and Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Curbelo  all Cuban Americans from South Florida who oppose Obamas policies on Cuba  were re-lected Tuesday. And Republicans retained control of both chambers of Congress.

Lawmakers have submitted bills to ease or strengthen U.S. sanctions on Cuba in recent years, but neither side has prevailed.

Supporters of the sanctions say the election of Trump and a Republican Congress has put an end to any possibility of lifting the embargo in the next two years.

There was minimal chance that a new Congress would ease or remove (embargo) sanctions, Claver-Carone said, and those slim chances are now down to zero.

John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, which monitors business with Cuba, agreed that in the effort to ease or lift the embargo: The legislative pathway is deceased. It passed at 3 a.m. (when Trump was declared president-elect).

Kavulich added that the Obama administration must now focus on making as many regulatory changes as it can and finish strong, even though theres no hope that the Cuban government will reciprocate by agreeing to a broader economic or any political opening.

Nevertheless, Engage Cuba, a group of companies and organizations that has lobbied against the embargo and promoted an expansion of U.S. travel and exports to Cuba, said it will continue with efforts to solidify ties with the island.

Growing commercial and cultural ties that have been forged between our two nations have irreversibly altered our bilateral relations with Cuba, the groups president, James Williams, said in a statement. We remain hopeful that Mr. Trump, who has previously supported engagement with Cuba as a businessman and a politician, will continue to normalize relations that will benefit both the American and Cuban people.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Rick Herrero, who has long worked for organizations that favor improving relations with Havana, such as the Cuba Study Group and Cuba Now, said hell wait to see which side of Trump prevails  the pragmatic side that according to Newsweek and Bloomberg reports explored business opportunities on the island a few years ago, or the political side that would seek to retain Cuban-American support.

Either way, Herrero said, the chances of Congress making any changes in Cuba policy are minimal.

The forces in Congress that want to isolate the Cuban people  have gained strength, and it will be very difficult to open ourselves to Cuba through congressional action in the short run, he said.



2016 Miami Herald

Visit Miami Herald at www.miamiherald.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

_____
DALLAS  More than 400 people in Dallas-Fort Worth area are protesting president-elect Donald Trump for a third night in a row.

In Dallas, around 400 people gathered at a downtown public park Friday night. Protesters chanted we reject the president-elect and carried signs that said Not My President as they marched through streets in the downtown area.

In downtown Fort Worth, more than 70 people gathered at the Tarrant County courthouse.

No arrests were reported Friday evening.

On Thursday, three people were arrested by Dallas police. Houston police arrested five anti-Trump demonstrators during a downtown protest Thursday.

Texas troopers in Austin on Thursday detained two demonstrators on the grounds of the Capitol.
WASHINGTON  The Latest on the U.S. presidential transition (all times EST):

4:05 p.m.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence recalled his late fathers modesty over his Korean War service during a Veterans Day speech in Indiana that included only brief mentions of Donald Trumps coming accession to the presidency.

Pence didnt speak about Fridays announcement that he is becoming leader of Trumps transition team during his remarks at the Indiana National Guards Camp Atterbury. Reporters were kept at a distance.

The Indiana governor told about 200 people that he and others who didnt serve in the military should be especially grateful to those such as his father and his son, who became a Marine Corps officer last year.

__

2:30 p.m.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence will lead President-elect Donald Trumps transition team, replacing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Trump picked his transition chairman and other leaders on Friday. Its his biggest staffing announcement since he won the election this week.

Christie will now serve as vice chairman. Hes joined on the executive committee by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.

A statement says more than a dozen other people will also advise Trump on transition matters. They include some of Trumps children, Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus and former Breitbart news executive Steve Bannon.

___

2 p.m.

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is being discussed for a role in President-elect Donald Trumps transition planning.

Thats according to a person with knowledge of the process.

Its unclear exactly what Thiels role would be. Trump tapped New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to begin the transition planning during the campaign.

Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, was an early supporter of Trump. He spoke at the Republican National Convention, becoming the first openly gay speaker at the event in 16 years. Earlier this year, Thiel was revealed as the primary funder of Hulk Hogans successful lawsuit against Gawker for publishing a sex tape that had been secretly recorded.

The person with knowledge of the transition planning insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the process. A spokesman for Thiel declined to comment.

-By Julie Pace

___

10 a.m.

The departing Senate minority leader says Donald Trumps election has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry and he now must lead a time of healing.

In a statement Friday, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid said white nationalists, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Islamic State extremist group are celebrating Trumps election while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear.

He says that does not feel like America.

Reid said the fear felt by blacks, Hispanics, gay Americans and others is rational because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them.

Reid said Trumps victory doesnt absolve him of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans.

He said Trump may not possess the capacity to relieve those fears but must begin trying to do that immediately.

___

9:30 a.m.

President-elect Donald Trump is promising a busy day assembling his government  but isnt sharing any details.

The celebrity businessman was holed up in Trump Tower Friday morning meeting with senior staff members. He tweeted that he had a busy day planned in New York.

He added that he will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!

But Trumps staff has not offered any guidance as to what on the president-elects schedule in the coming days.

On Thursday, he broke with tradition and did not bring the traveling transition press pool  a group of reporters who follow the presidents movements  on his trip to Washington to meet with President Barack Obama and congressional leaders.

____

7:30 a.m.

A Hillary Clinton supporter who was heartbroken over Tuesdays election says she decided to go on a hike in the woods  and ran into the former presidential candidate herself.

Margot Gerster said in a Facebook post that she was heading home following her hike Thursday in Clintons hometown of Chappaqua, New York, when she saw Clinton and former President Bill Clinton walking their dogs.

Gerster said she hugged the former Democratic nominee and told her that one of her proudest moments as a mother was taking her daughter with her to vote for Clinton. She posted a picture with Clinton that she says was snapped by the former president.

___

7:10 a.m.

President-elect Donald Trump seems to be having a change of heart about those protesting the election results.

Trump had denounced the protesters in a tweet late Thursday. He wrote that professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

But early Friday, he tweeted: Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!

Thousands have been gathering in cities across the United States to protest Trumps victory in Tuesdays election.

___

3:05 a.m.

The budding new alliance between Donald Trump and congressional Republicans hides a tougher reality: Even with unified GOP control of Washington, the president-elects priorities may have trouble getting through Congress.

And in some cases Republicans themselves might be the barrier.

Among the issues are Trumps promises to build a border wall and restricting immigration from terror-stricken nations. Dont count on Senate Democrats to go along, and they will effectively wield veto power in many cases.

And theres repealing the nations health care law, which will take painstaking and potentially lengthy negotiations to come up with a solution.

Still, all that and more seemed like a problem for another day as Trump paid a triumphant visit Thursday to Capitol Hill after a cordial White House meeting with President Barack Obama.
TEMPE, Ariz.  Residents of Tempe are calling for the city to take action against homeless people that have taken up residence in a city park.

A number of homeless encampments have cropped up in the Tempe portion of Papago Park since this summer, raising the concerns of nearby residents who say they are afraid to use the park now, The Arizona Republic reported (http://bit.ly/2eZx33w ).

Weve seen more aggressive behavior from some of these homeless people. There are big men who feel uncomfortable walking there, said Darlene Justus, a north Tempe resident who worked with others to lobby the City Council earlier this year to designate the park as a protected area.

In October a group of eight Tempe residents, including Justus, addressed the City Council about the homeless camps. Many said they were concerned about safety and trash in the park.

Lloyd Thomas, an attorney, told the council it will need to balance addressing the problem with the rights of the people living in the park.

We cant just kick people out. On the other hand, we have to make sure its safe for all of us to use, not just those who have chosen to squat there, as it were, Thomas said. Theyre still valuable human beings, and hopefully they can find a way to get back to their whole lives. I just want you to consider all options.

Tempe Parks Manager Craig Hayton said his department has worked to address the encampments by periodically clearing trash from abandoned camps after police ask people to move out, but it doesnt take long for the urban campers to return.

Hayton said his department has collected about 34 tons of trash from the camps since June and that cleanup is ongoing.

Most of (the cleanup work) is laborious. You cant get any vehicles in there. You have to pull everything out, Hayton said.

Hayton said park workers do not enter camps until Tempe police have first made contact with people living there, giving them warning of the cleanup and encouraging them to move on. Hayton said police have not cited people for setting up camps.

The homeless encampments came under fire this summer after a blaze in June burned several trees in an adjacent riparian area.

___

Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com
FORT COLLINS, Colo.  A Fort Collins couple has been found guilty of abusing their 7-year-old daughter, who weighed just 37 pounds and was unable to speak when she was taken from their home in 2013.

The Coloradoan reports (http://noconow.co/2eoADrI ) that a jury on Thursday found Doug and Leah Dyer guilty of felony child abuse mess than 24 hours after deliberations began. They face mandatory sentences of 10 to 32 years in prison.

The Dyers were found guilty of knowingly ignoring their daughters seizure condition for years. Defense attorneys argued that the childs doctors failed to ensure her parents understood how to treat and deal with the medical condition.

The child was placed into foster care after Leah Dyers mother reported her concerns to the Colorado Department of Human Services.

___

Information from: Fort Collins Coloradoan, http://www.coloradoan.com
LONDON  The latest on world reaction to the U.S. presidential election (all times local):

4:10 p.m.

The former head of the British spy agency, MI6, says Donald Trump must keep a cool head during the stressful times ahead to reduce the threat of a nuclear war.

Former Secret Intelligence Service chief John Sawers told the BBC he fears a nuclear clash between the United States and either China or Russia.

According to Sawers, Were getting back into a world which is quite dangerous, and I think that is the biggest threat.

He said the most devastating scenario would be if relations with Beijing or Moscow turn confrontational or if the Trump administration overreacts.

Sawers observed: I dont think Donald Trump quite yet knows what the pressures will be on him when he becomes president.

He added: Weve seen that when he feels slighted, when he feels criticized, he reacts quite fiercely.

___

This item has been corrected to show the surname of the former M16 chief who commented on Trump is Sawers, not Sawyers.

___

2:45 p.m.

After Robert De Niro quipped that he might have to move to Italy now that Donald Trump is president-elect, a group in the actors ancestral region of Molise has come up with a proposal to make him at home.

The emigration association said Friday that it wants to make De Niro president of the small central Italy region, if only for a day.

The association noted that De Niro is tied to his Molise origins and even speaks a good Italian-Molise dialect, even if he doesnt like to flaunt it.

De Niro made an anti-Trump video before the election. He said on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! talk show Wednesday that he also holds Italian citizenship and added, I may have to move there.

De Niros great-grandparents emigrated from Molise in 1890.

___

12:00 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on winning the U.S. election and offer her countrys cooperation.

Merkels spokesman says the German leader spoke to Trump by telephone late Thursday.

Spokesman Georg Streiter told reporters in Berlin that Merkel stressed the common values of Germany and the United States.

Immediately following Trumps election victory, Merkel had offered the new U.S. administration a close partnership on the basis of democracy, freedom, respect for the law and the dignity of human beings regardless of their origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation and political opinion.

Her comments were widely seen in Germany as a rebuke to Trumps rhetoric during the election campaign.

___

11:25 a.m.

A powerful Iraqi cleric whose followers once fought U.S. troops says Donald Trumps election victory is a sign of American decline.

Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite who brought thousands of anti-government protesters into the streets of Baghdad earlier this year, urged Americans in a Friday statement to resist Trumps intolerant views.

He says: We advise the American people not to be affected by the radicalism of their president, and they should not allow him to impose his influence.

Al-Sadrs militia, known as the Peace Brigades, is among the largest of several government-sanctioned Shiite armed groups battling Islamic State forces. He says his group considers America as the founder of terrorism, by its acts and behavior.

He added: Peace be upon the American people, those who like moderation and who want peace and peaceful coexistence between religions and ethnicities.

___

10:30 a.m.

Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami says that President-elect Donald Trump should apologize to the Iranian people for calling them terrorists during his campaign.

The senior religious scholar, in a Friday sermon broadcast live on state radio, said Trump should respectfully apologize to the nation.

Khatami warned Trump about confronting Iran, saying he should know better than to play with the tail of the lion.

The cleric said that Tehran had successfully foiled and frustrated several of Trumps White House predecessors.

He said Irans stance on the U.S. election is to avoid intervention or involvement in another countrys internal affairs.

He said, We respect the people of other countries and we respect their elections.

___

6:30 a.m.

Japans defense minister says her country already pays enough for U.S. troops based there, a response to repeated demands by President-elect Donald Trump that countries hosting American forces should pay more.

Trumps remarks during the election campaign have raised concern in Japan about a possibility his administration may seek Japans increased spending for American forces.

Defense Minister Tomomi Inada stressed that the presence of U.S. troops in Japan serves as a key deterrence in the Asia-Pacific region and they should stay.

Japan pays about 200 billion yen ($1.9 billion) a year  or about 70 percent  in so-called host-nation support for 50,000 U.S. troops.

Inada said Friday: I believe its enough. We pay what we are supposed to cover.

___

This story has been corrected to show that Defense Minister Tomomi Inada is female.
SANTA FE, N.M.  New Mexicos newly elected secretary of state will be greeted by a stack of political campaign finance filings flagged for possible violations, a shrinking budget and lingering mistrust.

Secretary-elect Maggie Toulouse Oliver may take office ahead of schedule  as soon as Dec. 9  under regulations allowing for the early replacement of the agencys interim leader.

In a postelection interview, the long-time Bernalillo County Clerk said she may call on the state auditor to help review campaign spending disclosures.

The office has 40 days after an election to randomly select 10 percent of filings and begin a review for compliance with state reporting statutes  a process that will likely stretch into the new year.

Toulouse Oliver also said shell advocate for legislation to depoliticize the agency by creating an independent ethics commission and implementing public financing in future elections for secretary of state.

Spending in the race nearly topped $1 million this year, with Toulouse Oliver outspending Republican challenger Nora Espinoza 2-1.

Voters wanted the most qualified, competent person in the Secretary of States Office, and I think our message of transparency and reform also resonated, Toulouse Oliver said. The people of New Mexico are tired of waking up to corruption scandals with elected officials of New Mexico. They reacted to our commitment.

Democrats and Republicans are drawing up new proposals for an independent ethics body that would take responsibility for judging campaign finance and other transgressions away from the Secretary of States Office and legislative committees. Similar legislative proposals have repeatedly failed.

New Mexico is one of eight states without an independent ethics commission. The state relies essentially on two agencies overseen by elected officials  the attorney general and secretary of state  to vet campaign finance reports and pursue violations and indications of corruption.

A spokesman for the attorney generals office said there are eight recent political ethics complaints under review and declined to provide further information.

Toulouse Oliver will fill the last two years of former Secretary of State Dianna Durans term. Duran resigned in 2015 and was convicted on embezzlement and money laundering charges. She acknowledged violating laws she was supposed to uphold by using campaign funds to fuel a gambling spree.

University of New Mexico political science professor Lonna Atkeson said the agency has seen competent management this year under appointed Secretary of State Brad Winter  despite a tumultuous legacy.

The office has been plagued by scandals and downright crime in the case of Duran, she said.

Before Duran, one-term former Secretary of State Mary Herrera was accused of politicizing the office by asking employees to work on her re-election campaign. An investigation into allegations against the Democrat was later dropped.

Herreras predecessor, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, was indicted after leaving office in 2006 in connection with the misuse of federal voter education money. Charges were dropped based on lengthy trial delays, while two outside associates were convicted.

It will fall to Toulouse Oliver to replace an online campaign finance information system that has been widely criticized for obscuring sources and destinations of political spending. The Legislature approved the upgrade but hasnt provided funding.

Elections Director Kari Fresquez said more than 35 campaign finance warnings left from Durans tenure have been resolved through clarifications or by collecting fines and setting up payment plans.

Dozens of cases remain open, and the staff is trying to resolve this years barrage of election-season complaints before Toulouse Oliver arrives.

The office has moved to a strict schedule of warnings and fines of $50 a day for candidates and political committees that miss disclosure deadlines.
Paul K. Visarraga traces the origins of his business to 1992, when he fell through a ceiling after the roof he was standing on gave way.

Visarraga was repairing a broken water pipe on his home, and the consequences of the fall were severe: a traumatic brain injury and the end of his military career as an active duty member of the Army National Guard.

I didnt know what I was going to do, said Visarraga, who spent eight months recovering from his injury at the VA hospital in El Paso.

Fast-forward to today: Visarraga is the owner and sole employee of A2Z Promo Zone, a promotional products business he runs out of his home in Santa Fe. He and his company are the recipients of a five-year, $18 million federal contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs to supply more than 10,000 American flags a month (through subcontractors) for military funerals across the country.

He said he takes great pride in working with an organization that supports veterans.

Its an honor, he said. Theres something about it that just feels right.

Visarraga attributes his success to resources aimed at the veteran community. After he completed his recovery in Texas, he went through the Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment Program, which connects disabled veterans with services to help them live and work independently. That, in turn, led him to begin taking classes in small business administration. When a friend of his with a T-shirt printing company suggested he begin an embroidery business, Visarraga reached back out to the VA, which connected him with the funds to purchase an embroidery machine in 2000.

With the help of mentors at New Mexicos Procurement Technical Assistance Program, Visarraga quickly found himself the recipient of several federal contracts. At least 3 percent of all federal contracts government-wide must be awarded to small businesses owned and controlled by service-disabled vets, and Visarraga found that several agencies were eager to work with him.

Suddenly, I had this great business and four employees, he said.

Visarraga had to lay off his employees and file for bankruptcy in 2009 in the midst of the recession, but he used his one remaining embroidery machine to start a new business, which he sold in 2010. He was still doing some work with promotional products in 2012 when he got a call from a subcontractor looking to partner with a disabled veteran to bid on the VAs interment flag contract.

After we won, we got a lot of push back from some of the bigger companies that didnt think a small operation could do it, he said. But weve shown thats not the case.

Though the flag contract ends next year, Visarraga said hes not concerned about the future of his business. For one thing, he believes his track record with the VA will allow him to continue working with the agency in some form. His promotional products business is also doing well, thanks in part to several contracts with the state.

Then there are the lessons hes learned as a result of his 16 years as a small business owner, which he believes will continue to allow him to work independently for the foreseeable future. Visarraga said he hopes other disabled veterans will hear his story and use the same resources that have allowed him to support himself since his injury.

Theres a lot of opportunity out there, especially for veterans, he said. I started out with nothing in my pocket. But I never gave up.
Federal Department of Finance

Bern, 11.11.2016 - The withholding tax agreement between Switzerland and Austria will be terminated on 1 January 2017. The agreement between Switzerland and the EU on the automatic exchange of information in tax matters will enter into force on that date. On 11 November 2016, Switzerland and Austria signed a corresponding agreement in Bern to ensure a smooth transition between the two models.

The withholding tax agreement between Switzerland and Austria entered into force on 1 January 2013. It allowed the regularisation of assets held in Switzerland by Austrian taxpayers and the taxation of income generated by these assets based on the Federal Council's financial integrity strategy. In accordance with this agreement, Austrian taxpayers had the option of either paying withholding tax levied directly on their accounts and anonymously transmitted to the Austrian authorities or opting for voluntary disclosure. However, this model loses its reason to exist at all with the introduction of the automatic exchange of information between Switzerland and the EU as of 1 January 2017, which concerns the 28 member states and Gibraltar.

The termination agreement governs in particular the arrangements for transferring the last tax amounts and the forwarding of the last voluntary disclosures to the Austrian tax authorities. The provisions of the withholding tax agreement will continue to apply for all facts and legal rights that materialised during its period of validity. Furthermore, the MoU between the two countries on market access issues will remain in force.

Switzerland also concluded a withholding tax agreement with the United Kingdom which has to be terminated when switching to the automatic exchange of information standard with the EU.

Address for enquiries

Beat Werder, Head of Communications

State Secretariat for International Financial Matters SIF

Tel. +41 58 469 79 47, beat.werder@sif.admin.ch

Publisher

Federal Department of Finance

https://www.efd.admin.ch/efd/en/home.html




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.
Tech and government investment specialist Veritas Capital has made another deal in the wake of its weighty $10.65bn Fund VIII close from earlier this month with the buyout of analytics provider Verisk's energy business.
ES PASSIERT IN DIESEM MOMENT: Das Animals-Asia-Team befindet sich in der vietnamesischen Provinz Gia Lai, um vier Baren zu retten, die uber ein Jahrzehnt in Gefangenschaft lebten.

Verfolgen Sie live die Rettung anhand unserer #PleikuBearRescue-Timeline.



Die Rettung ist das Ergebnis funfjahrelanger Bemuhungen und Verhandlungen. Die vier Baren stammen von drei unterschiedlichen Gallefarmen.

Fur heute (Freitag, den 11. November) ist die Befreiung und gesundheitliche Bewertung der Tiere geplant.

Am Samstag, den 12. November, wird sich das Team auf den Weg in das 1.200 km entfernte Animals-Asia-Rettungszentrum begeben. Es liegt in der Provinz Vinh Phuc, etwa eine Stunde von der vietnamesischen Hauptstadt Hanoi entfernt.

Die Ankunft des Rettungsteams wird am darauffolgenden Montag, den 14. November, erwartet.

Animals Asia wurde 2011 von der lokalen Forstschutzbehorde uber die Notlage der vier Baren informiert. Daraufhin versprach die Organisation, die Tiere aufzunehmen, sobald deren Freilassung erwirkt ist. Nach jahrelangem Druck auf die Farmer scheint dieser Moment endlich gekommen.

Tuan Bendixsen, Direktor, Animals Asia Vietnam:

Die Rettung von Gallefarmbaren ist immer riskant  und keine gleicht der anderen. Jedes der Tiere hat unbeschreiblich gelitten und jedes davon reagiert individuell auf die erlebte Grausamkeit. Auch die Bedingungen auf den Farmen weichen voneinander ab. Die Forstschutzbehorden versuchen uns vorab so viele Informationen wie moglich zu geben, dennoch wissen wir nie wirklich, was uns erwartet, wenn wir dort ankommen.

Jill Robinson MBE, Grunderin und CEO, Animals Asia:

Das Rettungsteam ist uberaus erfahren und wird mit jeder Situation, die es auf den Farmen vorfindet umgehen konnen. Eine sofortige professionelle, tiermedizinische Versorgung ist durch unser Veterinar-Team gewahrleistet, wahrend die Barenpfleger eine geeignete Strategie entwickeln, um die Tiere aus den Kafigen  entworfen, um niemals geoffnet zu werden  zu befreien.

Barengalle zu extrahieren ist seit 2007 in Vietnam verboten  offiziell halten sich die Farmen daran. Doch zur Uberprufung dessen sind nur geringe Ressourcen verfugbar. Zudem ist es schwer, die Galleentnahme unmittelbar nachzuweisen. Aus diesem Grund geht die grausame Praxis weiter, wenn auch in weitaus geringerem Mae.

Die Barengalle wird in der traditionellen Medizin verwandt. Die Tiere, denen sie abgezapft wird, vegetieren in kleinen Kafigen und leiden unter den Schmerzen, die mit der regelmaigen Extraktion einhergehen.

Schatzungen zufolge werden heute noch rund 1.200 Mond- und Sonnenbaren zum Zweck der Galleentnahme in Vietnam gehalten. In China geht man von Zehntausenden Tieren aus. Dort ist die brutale Industrie nach wie vor legal.

Bis heute hat Animals Asia rund 600 Baren in Vietnam und China gerettet. Die meisten davon von der Barengalleindustrie. In ihren Rettungszentren in China und Vietnam beheimatet die Organisation nahezu 400 Baren.

Mehr zum Thema:

Rennen gegen die Zeit, um vier Baren aus Gallefarmen zu befreien

Die Baren, die du nicht rettest, verfolgen dich

Vietnam: Dorf fur Dorf dem Ende der Barengallefarmen naher
The Government is to provide an additional 3.9m in aid for countries in Central and West Africa.

Around 9.1 million people are currently in need of urgent humanitarian assistance in the Central African Republic, Chad and Niger.
A Syrian woman says she gave birth aboard a boat loaded with 128 other migrants as they made their way from Turkey to Cyprus, police said.

The woman told authorities the birth took place a day into the two-day trip that began in Mersin, Turkey, and ended when rescue crews towed the boat to Cyprus' north-western coast, police spokesman Andreas Angelides said.
The UKs microfinance industry is thin and weak as a result of poor and short-term policies and because both the voluntary sector and government have largely ignored it, the chief executive of Big Society Capital said yesterday.

Speaking at the Charity Finance Group's Alternative Finance Conference 2016, Cliff Prior said a waning microfinance industry could spell absolute disaster in political terms and be appalling in social economic terms.

Referring particularly to community development finance institutions (CDFIs), Prior said the industry has been subsidised by the government and EU for a very long time, but that those subsidies were now coming to a close.

The government subsidies are just running out now and the European subsidies will run out in two years time, he said.

Microfinance involves the provision of small loans for people who might not have access to traditional finance models  often for business development or community regeneration projects.

Globally, microfinance is a big ticket item for social investment, Prior said.

But he said it was tenable that somebody in Durham, in the Welsh valleys, in Cornwall, cannot create a business for lack of basic business start-up capital.

To my mind, thats appalling in social economic terms, he said. We are starting with such a weak starting point, that even with the best will in the world, it will be some time before we get there.

Voluntary sector partly to blame

But Prior said the voluntary sector was also to blame for struggling industry.

There are a number of things the government can do and a number of things that we can do. Its not just the government that has ignored this. The voluntary sector hasnt really included it and its because somebody else is doing it.

But if you think of the effort that is made on the social sector community regeneration and so on - if there are no jobs, we are wasting our time. Weve got to generate job creation and business creation and so on before you even stand a chance. So for me its a really important area.

Microfinance initiatives have particularly suffered as a result of short-term policies in the UK, in comparison to longer-term strategic visions adopted in the US and France, Prior said.

The American system is a combination of guarantees for the loans, and subsidies for the organisations that deliver it. It has been bipartisan and very long term  about 20 or 25 years. In the UK, its a three year programme here, a three year programme there. There is no certainty. These organisations in the UK are on a knife edge the whole time.

Prior said it was key for microfinance schemes to be watched carefully but that this has not happened in the UK.

Number one is just to keep an eye on it and my sense is that the government has not kept an eye on it, he said.

After the referendum and the change of government, there were some very immediate announcements about EU agricultural subsidies being carried on and research subsidies being carried on. Where was the mention of microfinance? They had forgotten it even existed. So number one is getting it on the agenda.
This daily digest focuses on Yuan rates, major Chinese economic data, market sentiment, new developments in Chinas foreign exchange policies, changes in financial market regulations, as well as market news typically available only in Chinese-language sources.

- The NDRC will ban real estate developers from funding for commercial real estate projects through corporate bonds.

- The non-performing loans ratio of Chinese commercial banks increased +0.01% to 1.76% in the third quarter.

- Chinas first state-owned enterprise that defaulted on bonds was ruled by a regional court to make payments.

To receive reports from this analyst, sign up for Renee Mu distribution list.

Yuan Rates

- The PBOC weakened the Yuan slightly against the U.S. Dollar on Thursday, down -53pips to 6.7885. This guided level is 493 pips away from the record low that the offshore Yuan reached earlier, which is the record high for the USD/CNH. Looking forward, traders will want to continue to keep an eye on the Central Banks guidance as we discussed yesterday.

USD/CNH 15-minutes

Prepared by Renee Mu.

Market News

Hexun News: Chinese leading online media of financial news.

- The total assets of Chinese commercial banks have increased +15.7% to 222.9 trillion Yuan as of the end of the third quarter from a year ago. The non-performing loans (NPL) rose +56.6 billion Yuan to 1.4939 trillion Yuan from the last quarter; the NPL-to-total loans ratio increased slightly, up +0.01% to 1.76%. Banks profits grew slowly in the third quarter: The net profits expanded +2.83% to 1.3290 trillion Yuan; however, the profit-to-asset ratio dropped -0.13% to 1.08%.

- The PBOC Chief Economist Ma Jun said that the current funding cost for the Yuan is higher than those of the U.S. Dollar, Euro and Yen; this is likely to be the case for many years, and therefore, financing in foreign currencies often has a cost advantage. Mr. Ma made such comments when he talked about Chinas One Belt, One Road Initiative. He also emphasized Hong Kongs role as a primary finance center for mainland investors to finance from overseas.

Caixin New: Chinese leading media of financial news

- The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) will ban real estate developers from funding for commercial real estate projects through issuing corporate bonds. For affordable housing and refugee housing projects, developers have to follow strict rules if they want to finance through bonds. Chinese policymakers have launched numerous measures over the past two months in the effort to cool the red-hot property market. In PBOCs 3Q Monetary Policy Implementation report, the regulator has prioritized curbing asset price bubbles over the following periods.

Sina News: Chinas most important online media source, similar to CNN in the US. They also own a Chinese version of Twitter, called Weibo, with around 200 million active usersmonthly.

- Baoding Tianwei Group, the first state-owned enterprise (SOE) that defaulted on bonds, was ruled by a regional court to pay over 50 million Yuan to one of its creditor, Bosera Funds. Chinese bond defaults by SOEs have been on the rise since the second quarter, amid drops in global demand, domestic production cuts as well as a shift tone from the Chinese government, which told it will no longer bail out all the troubled firms. How to solve those defaults is new not only to investors but also to regulators. Debt-for-equity swap has been introduced as a major solution but it took a couple of months before the State Council finalized and released details of the program. In addition, swapping debt to equities is currently only applied to bank loans, as creditors other than banks are less willing to use this method.

China Finance Information: a finance online media administrated by Xinhua Agency.

- The Chief Executive of Hong Kong Leung Chun-ying said on Thursday that the upcoming Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect will strengthen Hong Kongs role as a global financial center and as a major hub for the offshore Yuan. On the same day, 7 funds received approvals from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange for participating in the stock link.

To receive reports from this analyst, sign up for Renee Mu distribution list.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (November 11, 2016) - A study being presented at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting found most colleges don't have integrated systems in place to support food-allergic students.

"Our study found that while many colleges offer support for students with food allergy in the dining hall, the same support doesn't carry over to organized sports, dormitories or social events" says food allergy researcher Ruchi Gupta, MD, ACAAI member and lead author on the study. "That leaves students feeling vulnerable and scrambling to inform all the various departments of their needs."

The study found that while these students don't want to be defined by their allergies, they value feeling safe. They are willing to work with school officials to create more education around what administrators and other students need to know about food allergies. Peers of food allergic students believe the stress caused by food allergies could be significantly reduced by creating and engaging a community of support through peer training, awareness and increased epinephrine access.

Also at the ACAAI meeting, allergist David Stukus, MD, and ACAAI Fellow, will be presenting on how allergists can help safely transition a student with food allergies to college. "Teenagers with food allergy are the age group at highest risk for life-threatening food allergy reactions. This is mostly due to not having their epinephrine with them at all times, but they also face social pressures that cause them to not speak up when dining with peers."

Dr. Stukus points out that transitioning to independence requires practice, awareness, and understanding of the factors that impact your health. He says it should start early, around 12 or 13 years old, and allergists are in a unique position to help their patients successfully navigate self-management of their food allergies and other allergic conditions.

"Effective self-management of food allergies requires an understanding of the signs and symptoms of an allergic reaction," says Dr. Stukus. "College students with food allergies must know how and when to use epinephrine auto-injectors, how to read labels and what to communicate to food handlers. They must also have epinephrine available at all times in case of accidental ingestion leading to a severe allergic reaction."

"Parents tell us they need to educate everyone, literally everyone - professors, other students, the librarian and the person putting food on your kid's plate." said Dr. Gupta, "Giving a student support from peers, staff and the college itself is critical in providing a safe and positive environment."

###

Abstract Title: Leaving the nest: Improving food allergy management on college campuses

Author: Ruchi Gupta, MD, ACAAI member

For more information about food allergies and to locate an allergist in your area, visit AllergyandAsthmaRelief.org. The ACAAI Annual Meeting is November 10-14, 2016 at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco, CA. For more news and research from the ACAAI Scientific Meeting, go to our newsroom - and follow the conversation on Twitter #ACAAI16.

About ACAAI

The ACAAI is a professional medical organization of more than 6,000 allergists-immunologists and allied health professionals, headquartered in Arlington Heights, Ill. The College fosters a culture of collaboration and congeniality in which its members work together and with others toward the common goals of patient care, education, advocacy and research. ACAAI allergists are board-certified physicians trained to diagnose allergies and asthma, administer immunotherapy, and provide patients with the best treatment outcomes. For more information and to find relief, visit AllergyandAsthmaRelief.org. Join us on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (November 11, 2016)  Parents may be confused with how and when to introduce peanut-containing foods to their infants. Presentations at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting will offer guidance, based on soon to be released guidelines, on how to approach this topic without going nuts.

The first step is determining if your child is at high-risk for peanut allergy, says Amal Assaad, MD, chair of the ACAAI Food Allergy Committee and a co-author of the guidelines. Before introducing peanut-containing foods to a high-risk infant, the infant should be seen by their primary health care provider who will determine if referral to an allergist for testing and/or in-office introduction is needed.

According to the guidelines, an infant at high risk of developing peanut allergy is one with severe eczema and/or egg allergy. The guidelines recommend introduction of peanut-containing foods as early as 4-6 months for high-risk infants, after determining that it is safe to do so.

If your child is determined to be at risk, and then is tested and found to have peanut sensitization, meaning they have a positive allergy test to peanut, from that positive test alone we dont yet know if theyre truly allergic, says allergist Matthew Greenhawt, MD, MBA, MSc, ACAAI Fellow, incoming ACAAI Food Allergy Committee chair, and a co-author of the guidelines. Peanut allergy is only diagnosed if there is both a positive test and a history of developing symptoms after eating peanut-containing foods.

A positive test alone is a poor indicator of allergy, and studies have shown infants who are peanut-sensitized arent necessarily allergic. Infants sensitized to peanuts showed the most benefit from early introduction of peanut-containing foods in the Learning Early About Peanut allergy (LEAP) study, says Dr. Greenhawt. Some allergists caring for a child who has a large positive skin test may decide not to do an in-office challenge. Instead, they might advise that the child avoid peanuts completely due to the strong chance of a pre-existing peanut allergy. Other allergists may proceed with a peanut challenge after explaining the risks to the parents.

Children with mild to moderate eczema who have already started solid foods do not need an evaluation, and can have peanut-containing foods introduced at home by their parents at around 6 months of age. Children with no eczema or egg allergy can be introduced to peanut-containing foods at home as well, according to the familys preference.

The new guidelines offer several methods to introduce age-appropriate peanut-containing foods to infants who have already eaten solid foods. It is extremely important that parents understand the choking hazard posed by whole peanuts and to not give whole peanuts to infants. Peanut-containing foods should not be the first solid food your infant tries, and an introduction should be made only when your child is healthy. Do not do the first feeding if he or she has a cold, vomiting, diarrhea or other illness.

The soon to be released updated guidelines on preventing peanut allergy are sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says Dr. Greenhawt. The guidelines are an important step toward changing how people view food allergy prevention, particularly for peanut allergy. They also offer a way for parents to introduce peanut-containing foods to reduce the risk of developing peanut allergy.

The guideline authors, an expert panel of food allergy researchers, physicians, nurses and lay organization representatives from many fields, reviewed existing evidence and made comprehensive recommendations.

The authors recognized early introduction of peanut-containing foods may seem to depart from recommendations for exclusive breastfeeding through six months. One recent study showed introduction of peanuts did not affect the length or frequency of breastfeeding, and did not negatively influence growth or nutrition.

This is a very exciting development for those of us who have been treating an increasing number of kids with peanut allergies in the past 25 years, says Dr. Assaad. To be able to offer parents a way of reducing the risk of their children developing peanut allergies is remarkable and of real importance.

ACAAI has created the video Peanuts and your baby: How to introduce the two as an introduction to the topic.

###

For more information about allergies and to locate an allergist in your area, visit AllergyandAsthmaRelief.org. The ACAAI Annual Meeting is November 10-14, 2016 at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco, CA. For more news and research from the ACAAI Scientific Meeting, go to our newsroom - and follow the conversation on Twitter #ACAAI16.

About ACAAI

The ACAAI is a professional medical organization of more than 6,000 allergists-immunologists and allied health professionals, headquartered in Arlington Heights, Ill. The College fosters a culture of collaboration and congeniality in which its members work together and with others toward the common goals of patient care, education, advocacy and research. ACAAI allergists are board-certified physicians trained to diagnose allergies and asthma, administer immunotherapy, and provide patients with the best treatment outcomes. For more information and to find relief, visit AllergyandAsthmaRelief.org. Join us on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.
CANCER RESEARCH UK-funded scientists have discovered that a 'sponge on a string' pill test can identify which people with a condition called Barrett's oesophagus have a low risk of developing oesophageal cancer - sparing them uncomfortable endoscopies. Researchers from the University of Cambridge gave 468 people who had Barrett's oesophagus a 'sponge on a string' (cytosponge) test (watch a video of the test)*. Barrett's oesophagus is a condition that can lead to oesophageal cancer in a small number of people.

They found that the cytosponge test together with additional laboratory tests identified that 35 per cent (162) of people with Barrett's in the study were at a low risk of developing oesophageal cancer.

The results show that patients with Barrett's could be given a cytosponge test by their local GP and monitored, to detect which patients were at low risk of developing cancer, rather than having regular endoscopies at hospital.

This could help save patients' time, as well as reducing the anxiety and discomfort of having endoscopy tests. Endoscopies are expensive and involve putting a camera down the throat to collect a sample of the cells lining the oesophagus for analysis under a microscope.

The cytosponge is a small pill with a string attached that the patient swallows, which expands into a small sponge when it reaches the stomach. This is slowly pulled back up the throat using the string, collecting cells from the oesophagus for analysis.

The researchers tested these cells for two specific genetic markers and changes in the cells that can be used to estimate an individual's risk of developing oesophageal cancer. These results, alongside other information including age and obesity, were used in a mathematical model to classify patients' risk levels.

Barrett's oesophagus is caused by acid reflux. This can occur when acid travels back up the food pipe from the stomach causing symptoms such as heartburn. Cells in the oesophagus can then become damaged over time, leading to Barrett's oesophagus People with the condition are also monitored for early signs of cancer, which can sometimes be triggered by cell damage.

Lead researcher Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald, based at the MRC Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge, said: "Most people who have Barrett's oesophagus will not go on to develop oesophageal cancer, but at the moment there is no way of identifying who will and who won't. Our study is the first step in using the cytosponge to answer this question.

"We're assessing the cytosponge test in larger trials next year to understand more about how it can help diagnose oesophageal cancer sooner. Compared with endoscopies performed in hospital, the cytosponge causes minimal discomfort and is a quick, simple test that can be done by your GP."

Jessica Kirby, Cancer Research UK's senior health information manager, said: "It would be good news for patients if the cytosponge test could be used to replace uncomfortable endoscopies for some people.

"Twelve per cent of people with oesophageal cancer survive for at least 10 years, and part of the reason for the lower survival could be that the disease is often diagnosed at a late stage. Research like this helps us to understand more about the disease and could help doctors better predict who is at risk of oesophageal cancer."

The study is published in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology**.

###
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- An Indiana University physicist and neuroscientist who studies how physical movement can be used to detect autism in children and adults has received support from the National Science Foundation. The $750,000 NSF grant to IU scientist Jorge V. Jose and collaborators will be used to apply analytical methods pioneered at IU and Rutgers University toward diagnosing, and possibly treating, a wider range of learning disabilities.

The study, titled "Learning to Move and Moving to Learn," will measure the fine-grained movement of the body, face and eyes in middle- and high-school-age children to reveal measureable signs of learning disability. These methods could represent a powerful new tool for educators and physicians who often depend upon highly subjective methods -- such as conversations with parents and classroom observation -- to identify children who require assistance in learning.

The grant is part of NSF's Collaborative Networks for Learning program, which supports the establishment of research partnerships that advance knowledge on learning to address national challenges such as improving educational outcomes and strengthening workforce development.

Collaborators on the project are grant leader Leanne Chukoskie and co-leader Joseph Snider of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego, who are experts in neuroscience and computer science. Other project partners include Elizabeth Torres at Rutgers University, Emo Todorov at the University of Washington and Terrence Sejnowski at the Salk Institute.

"By pooling our expertise to study movement signatures in children who experience learning difficulties in school, this study will develop new quantitative methods to detect learning disorders like ADHD, autism spectrum disorder and dystonia," said Jose, Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Physics.

Previous research by Jose, Torres and John Nurnberger at the IU School of Medicine found the first evidence that the analysis of bodily movement could reveal physically measureable signs, or "biomarkers," of autism spectrum disorder. The UC San Diego team members are experts in applying movement tracking to detect many other types of learning disorders, including autism. The study will also benefit from sophisticated movement detection technology at UC San Diego, which is capable of precisely tracking both physical movement and facial expression with extreme precision.

"The research team at UC San Diego is excited to partner with Dr. Jose in understanding how fine-scale differences in movement map onto differences in learning ability in children," Chukoskie said. "His expertise in novel mathematical analyses for characterizing movement will be central to this project. We expect that our collaboration will produce a novel and productive perspective for understanding learning disorders, including how we evaluate and treat them."

Jose's background as a physicist and neuroscientist will enable his lab to provide this mathematical modeling, based in large part upon his previous work on movement and autism.

"We're providing some highly advanced, extremely powerful quantitative methods to separate the physiologically significant 'signal' from the 'noise' in terms of the body's movement," Jose said.

He added that physical movements, like the ability to point quickly and accurately, can act as an indicator for learning disorders since physical movement is a learned behavior -- the same as learning to speak or read. In typically developing children, infants transition from uncontrolled movement to relatively sophisticated tasks such as tidying up a room or tying shoes by about age 4 or 5.

But children with learning disabilities can struggle to acquire these and other more basic skills -- such as moving their finger through space in a straight line.

"The difference between typically developing children and the children with autism spectrum disorder is that the latter group of children never completely transition to fully controlling their movements," Jose said. "In our previous tests in autistic children, they never learn to control their movement with the same precision."

The data to be analyzed at IU under the new NSF-funded study will be collected at UC San Diego from middle- and high-school-age students with learning disabilities, as determined by a widely accepted educational assessment survey. These students will be asked to undertake a series of tasks while their body, face and eye movements are tracked using extremely sensitive sensor technology. For example, they may be asked to point to specific shapes on a screen filled with rapidly moving geometric forms. As the number and variety of forms increase, the challenge grows increasingly difficult.

The most extreme form of this test is "Where's Waldo," Jose said, noting that even typically developed adults struggle to identify a specific form -- such as Waldo -- when surrounding distractions are exceedingly complicated.

Fortunately, other studies have shown that the motor cortex -- the part of the brain responsible for the movement -- is also one of the most trainable parts of the brain, Jose said. So, in addition to tracking how movement reveals learning disabilities, the new project will also explore how this part of the brain, and general mental plasticity, can be used to improve cognitive functioning in children.

"Our joint work will set the stage to use this mental plasticity as a lever to improve cognitive functioning," Jose said. "Ultimately, our aim is that this work can be used to improve the chances that children who require early intervention due to learning disorders are more likely to get the assistance they need very early in their educational careers."

###

Jose is also a member of the Stark Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology at the IU School of Medicine.
Kazan University has demonstrated really impressive results in its hydrocarbon research recently. We talked about one of such breakthroughs in our article not long ago. Interestingly, a paper on this new research was also published in Energy and Fuels.

Senior Research Associate of the In-Situ Combustion Lab Andrey Galukhin explains, "In-situ combustion is one of the most promising hydrocarbon recovery methods of today and, probably, tomorrow. It can help not only extract oil from deeper horizons but also improve the quality of recovered material. That's a new level. However, there are some issues to be resolved. For example, we at our lab now work on the stability of the combustion front -- this parameter is the key to all the unique opportunities provided by this technology. We have learned to stabilize the front with catalysts".

The catalysts can not only stabilize the front but also accelerate its movement along a reservoir. The current result is 10-fold increase. However, this is not what makes the research unique. KFU employees are the first in the world to try revealing the catalysts' work mechanisms.

"It's basically impossible to observe a catalyst inside a reservoir. The total mass of catalysts used in a reaction is too miniscule. Maybe that's the reason for us being the pioneers in this area. We have had to unite different methods to achieve something. We collaborate with the Institute of Physics, something unheard of previously. Such an opportunity only appeared because of SAU EcoOil", adds Dr. Galukhin.

It's early to speak about a revolution in oil recovery, however. The idea is to create a model that can later be tested with specific catalysts. But some companies have already shown interest. A few days ago Baker Hughes and KFU held negotiations considering in-situ combustion catalysts.

###
NSU researchers receive more than $1.8 million in grants from US Army to examine causes of Gulf War illness

FORT LAUDERDALE-DAVIE, Fla. - As the nation honors our veterans on November 11, we must pause to remember the long-lasting health effects soldiers experience not only from bullets or bombs, but from exposure to unexplained pesticides, radiation or other toxins during their time in the service.

At least a quarter of the 700,000 soldiers who fought in the 1991 Gulf War suffer from a debilitating disease called Gulf War illness (GWI).

GWI is a medical condition that affects both men and women and is associated with symptoms including fatigue, chronic headaches, memory problems, muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal issues, neurological problems, respiratory symptoms, hormonal imbalance and immune dysfunction.

Researchers at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) are conducting multiple studies to learn more about and ultimately help veterans facing GWI. Two NSU research teams recently received grants from the U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity totaling $1,830,389 to fund three studies.

Improving Diagnostics and Treatments for GWI Females by Accounting for the Effects of PTSD1 - $655,822 (Travis Craddock, Ph.D., principal investigator)

Disentangling the Effects of PTSD from GWI for Improved Diagnostics and Treatments2 - $592,825 (Travis Craddock, Ph.D., principal investigator)

Persistently Elevated Somatic Mutation as a Biomarker of Clinically Relevant Exposures in Gulf War Illness3 - $581,742 (Stephen Grant, Ph.D., principal investigator)

The first two, three-year studies1&2 are aimed at identifying subgroups of GWI based on the presence or absence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from time on the battlefield in both men and women. Dr. Craddock and his research team will perform a systems biology analysis to isolate biobehavioral profiles that identify the effects of PTSD in GWI to improve diagnostic criteria and to assess potential treatment avenues for GWI in the context of probable PTSD diagnosis.

GWI is at least in part caused by illness-specific inflammatory activity. The extent and nature of the resulting inflammation may be altered in people who also experience PTSD, leading to a shift in treatment targets/strategies for each subtype. Specifically, Dr. Craddock's team aims to understand the role of systemic inflammatory mechanisms in GWI in the presence and absence of probable PTSD diagnosis as this is critical to define subtypes of GWI, and for the development of subtype-specific treatments.

Travis Craddock, Ph.D., assistant professor in the NSU College of Psychology's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and associate director of the NSU Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine's Clinical Systems Biology Group, is the principal investigator for the first two studies. His research team includes Nancy Klimas, M.D., director, NSU Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine; Gordon Broderick, Ph.D., director, NSU Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine's Clinical Systems Biology Group; and Stephen Messer, Ph.D., associate professor, NSU College of Psychology's Department of Clinical Psychology.

The final three-year study3 is based on the idea that long-term effects of exposures from service in the Gulf Wars are due to damage affecting the regenerative stem cells of the body. Dr. Grant and his research team will examine the cumulative effects of many types of exposures that can damage DNA in cells (genotoxicity) using blood samples from patients with GWI to help determine possible causes of the disease using a patent-pending biodosimetric technique.

Rather than identify a single agent as cause for GWI, the study proposes that it is due to the cumulative effect of all exposures. Results of the study could be used to develop new treatments and screen patients to predict who is at greatest risk of developing symptomatic GWI.

###

Stephen Grant, Ph.D., associate professor in Nova Southeastern University (NSU) College of Osteopathic Medicine's Master of Public Health Program, is the principal investigator for the latter study. His research team includes Nancy Klimas, M.D., director, NSU Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine; Mary Ann Fletcher, Ph.D., NSU's Schemel Professor for Neuro-Immune Medicine; and Jean Latimer, Ph.D., director of the new NSU AutoNation Institute for Breast and Solid Tumor Cancer Research.

The U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity, 820 Chandler Street, Fort Detrick MD 21702- 5014 is the awarding and administering acquisition office. These works were supported by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs through the Gulf War Illness Research Program under Award Nos. W81XWH-16-1-0632, W81XWH-16-1-0552 and W81XWH-16-1-0678. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Department of Defense.

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 http://www.nova.edu for more information about NSU and realizingpotential.nova.edu for more information on the largest fundraising campaign in NSU history.
From stationary to flying qubits at speeds never reached before...This feat, achieved by a team from Polytechnique Montreal and France's CNRS, brings us a little closer to the era when information is transmitted via quantum principles.

A paper titled "High-Fidelity and Ultrafast Initialization of a Hole-Spin Bound to a Te Isoelectronic Centre in ZnSe" was recently published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters. The creation of a qubit in zinc selenide, a well-known semi-conductor material, made it possible to produce an interface between quantum physics that governs the behaviour of matter on a nanometre scale and the transfer of information at the speed of light, thereby paving the way to producing quantum communications networks.

Classical physics vs. quantum physics

In today's computers, classical physics rules. Billions of electrons work together to make up an information bit: 0, electrons are absent and 1, electrons are present. In quantum physics, single electrons are instead preferred since they express an amazing attribute: the electron can take the value of 0, 1 or any superposition of these two states. This is the qubit, the quantum equivalent of the classical bit. Qubits provide stunning possibilities for researchers.

An electron revolves around itself, somewhat like a spinning top. That's the spin. By applying a magnetic field, this spin points up, down, or simultaneously points both up and down to form a qubit. Better still, instead of using an electron, we can use the absence of an electron; this is what physicists call a "hole." Like its electron cousin, the hole has a spin from which a qubit can be formed. Qubits are intrinsically fragile quantum creature, they therefore need a special environment.

Zinc selenide, tellurium impurities: a world first

Zinc selenide, or ZnSe, is a crystal in which atoms are precisely organized. It is also a semi-conductor into which it is easy to intentionally introduce tellurium impurities, a close relative of selenium in the periodic table, on which holes are trapped, rather like air bubbles in a glass.

This environment protects the hole's spin - our qubit - and helps maintaining its quantum information accurately for longer periods; it's the coherence time, the time that physicists the world over are trying to extend by all possible means. The choice of zinc selenide is purposeful, since it may provide the quietest environment of all semiconductor materials.

Polytechnique Montreal and CNRS of France, a team effort

Philippe St-Jean, a doctoral student on Professor Sebastien Francoeur's team, uses photons generated by a laser to initialize the hole and record quantum information on it. To read it, he excites the hole again with a laser and then collects the emitted photons. The result is a quantum transfer of information between the stationary qubit, encoded in the spin of the hole held captive in the crystal, and the flying qubit - the photon, which of course travels at the speed of light.

This new technique shows that it is possible to create a qubit faster than with all the methods that have been used until now. Indeed, a mere hundred or so picoseconds, or less than a billionth of a second, are sufficient to go from a flying qubit to a static qubit, and vice-versa.

Although this accomplishment bodes well, there remains a lot of work to do before a quantum network can be used to conduct unconditionally secure banking transactions or build a quantum computer able to perform the most complex calculations. That is the daunting task which Sebastien Francoeur's research team will continue to tackle.

###

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) funded the research of Mr. Francoeur and his team.

Article: St-Jean, P., Ethier-Majcher, G., Andre, R., & Francoeur, S. (2016). High-fidelity and ultrafast initialization of a hole spin bound to a Te isoelectronic center in ZnSe. Physical Review Letters, 117(16). doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.167401

PDF version of the article is available upon request.
Penn State University astronomers have discovered that the mysterious "cosmic whistles" known as fast radio bursts can pack a serious punch, in some cases releasing a billion times more energy in gamma-rays than they do in radio waves and rivaling the stellar cataclysms known as supernovae in their explosive power. The discovery, the first-ever finding of non-radio emission from any fast radio burst, drastically raises the stakes for models of fast radio bursts and is expected to further energize efforts by astronomers to chase down and identify long-lived counterparts to fast radio bursts using X-ray, optical, and radio telescopes.

Fast radio bursts, which astronomers refer to as FRBs, were first discovered in 2007, and in the years since radio astronomers have detected a few dozen of these events. Although they last mere milliseconds at any single frequency, their great distances from Earth -- and large quantities of intervening plasma -- delay their arrival at lower frequencies, spreading the signal out over a second or more and yielding a distinctive downward-swooping "whistle" across the typical radio receiver band.

"This discovery revolutionizes our picture of FRBs, some of which apparently manifest as both a whistle and a bang," said coauthor Derek Fox, a Penn State professor of astronomy and astrophysics. The radio whistle can be detected by ground-based radio telescopes, while the gamma-ray bang can be picked up by high-energy satellites like NASA's Swift mission. "Rate and distance estimates for FRBs suggest that, whatever they are, they are a relatively common phenomenon, occurring somewhere in the universe more than 2,000 times a day."

Efforts to identify FRB counterparts began soon after their discovery but have all come up empty until now. In a paper published November 11 in Astrophysical Journal Letters the Penn State team, led by physics graduate student James DeLaunay, reports bright gamma-ray emission from the fast radio burst FRB 131104, named after the date it occurred, November 4, 2013. "I started this search for FRB counterparts without expecting to find anything," said DeLaunay. "This burst was the first that even had useful data to analyze. When I saw that it showed a possible gamma-ray counterpart, I couldn't believe my luck!"

Discovery of the gamma-ray "bang" from FRB 131104, the first non-radio counterpart to any FRB, was made possible by NASA's Earth-orbiting Swift satellite, which was observing the exact part of the sky where FRB 131104 occurred as the burst was detected by the Parkes Observatory radio telescope in Parkes, Australia. "Swift is always watching the sky for bursts of X-rays and gamma-rays," said Neil Gehrels, the mission's Principal Investigator and chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "What a delight it was to catch this flash from one of the mysterious fast radio bursts."

"Although theorists had anticipated that FRBs might be accompanied by gamma rays, the gamma-ray emission we see from FRB 131104 is surprisingly long-lasting and bright," Fox said. The duration of the gamma-ray emission, at two to six minutes, is many times the millisecond duration of the radio emission. And the gamma-ray emission from FRB 131104 outshines its radio emissions by more than a billion times, dramatically raising estimates of the burst's energy requirements and suggesting severe consequences for the burst's surroundings and host galaxy.

Two common models for gamma-ray emission from FRBs exist: one invoking magnetic flare events from magnetars -- highly magnetized neutron stars that are the dense remnants of collapsed stars -- and another invoking the catastrophic merger of two neutron stars, colliding to form a black hole. According to coauthor Kohta Murase, a Penn State professor and theorist, "The energy release we see is challenging for the magnetar model unless the burst is relatively nearby. The long timescale of the gamma-ray emission, while unexpected in both models, might be possible in a merger event if we observe the merger from the side, in an off-axis scenario."

"In fact, the energy and timescale of the gamma-ray emission is a better match to some types of supernovae, or to some of the supermassive black hole accretion events that Swift has seen," Fox said. "The problem is that no existing models predict that we would see an FRB in these cases."

The bright gamma-ray emission from FRB 131104 suggests that the burst, and others like it, might be accompanied by long-lived X-ray, optical, or radio emissions. Such counterparts are dependably seen in the wake of comparably energetic cosmic explosions, including both stellar-scale cataclysms -- supernovae, magnetar flares, and gamma-ray bursts -- and episodic or continuous accretion activity of the supermassive black holes that commonly lurk in the centers of galaxies.

In fact, Swift X-ray and optical observations were carried out two days after FRB 131104, thanks to prompt analysis by radio astronomers (who were not aware of the gamma-ray counterpart) and a nimble response from the Swift mission operations team, headquartered at Penn State. In spite of this relatively well-coordinated response, no long-lived X-ray, ultraviolet, or optical counterpart was seen.

The authors hope to participate in future campaigns aimed at discovering more FRB counterparts, and in this way, finally revealing the sources responsible for these ubiquitous and mysterious events. "Ideally, these campaigns would begin soon after the burst and would continue for several weeks afterward to make sure nothing gets missed. Maybe we'll get even luckier next time," DeLaunay said.

###

The research effort received financial support from Penn State's Office of the Senior Vice President for Research, Penn State's Eberly College of Science, and the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. Members of the research team also received support from the U.S. National Science Foundation and NASA.

CONTACT

Derek Fox

dbf11@psu.edu

1-814-863-4989

Neil Gehrels:

neil.gehrels@nasa.gov

1-301-526-9288

Barbara Kennedy (PIO)

science@psu.edu

1-814-863-4682

ARCHIVE

This information will be archived at http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2016-news/Fox11-2016
Penn State and Lockheed Martin have signed a Master Research contract, establishing an agreement that includes research collaboration, an enhanced recruiting relationship and increased engagement in Penn State programs.

The research agreement is the most recent chapter in a solid history of Penn State-Lockheed Martin initiatives. It follows Penn State's Open Innovation Model, which allows for academia to propose solutions to challenges articulated by industry without needing to renegotiate contracts.

"Penn State and Lockheed Martin have enjoyed a long and productive partnership, with the signing of this new master agreement sending a clear signal that our relationship is stronger than ever," said Neil Sharkey, vice president for research, Penn State. "I am thrilled that Lockheed Martin and Penn State will be breaking new ground together well into the future, and look forward to expanding our partnership to mutual benefit. Advancing university-industry partnerships such as this one with Lockheed exemplifies Penn State's renewed emphasis on economic development and job creation, and adds to our growing reputation as the go-to industry-friendly university."

Over the past five years, Lockheed Martin has supported dozens of Penn State research programs totaling $6.2 million. This past spring, Lockheed Martin also tasked students in Introduction to Design Engineering to leverage additive manufacturing -- 3D printing -- to solve new problems or redesign existing solutions for its unique areas of expertise. Some of the areas of design or redesign involved heat exchangers, shock absorbers, wire connectors and USB hub mounting brackets.

"Industry-academic partnerships drive innovation, and together with Penn State, we have uncovered solutions to help solve some of our industry's most interesting challenges," said Lockheed Martin Vice President for Technology Strategy and Innovation, Robie I. Samanta Roy. "Lockheed Martin is focused on creating generation-after-next technologies, and this new research agreement ensures that we can collaborate with Penn State faculty and students who lead in research that will shape our future and benefit our customers."

The research agreement includes a framework that will guide future research projects focused in areas including computer science, cybersecurity, supply chain and aerospace engineering. Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin Company, supported past aerospace research focused on materials science, air vehicle dynamics, additive manufacturing, gear design and testing, and autonomous flight.

Students will benefit from the long-term strategic commitment through access to talent recruitment opportunities, and Lockheed Martin employees also can benefit from Penn State's online master's programs for electrical engineering and engineering leadership and management.

"As our technological demands increase, so do our needs for world-class talent," said Lockheed Martin Vice President of Engineering & Technology Dan Heller. "This agreement is an ideal opportunity for Penn State students to work alongside Lockheed Martin engineers and scientists on the challenges we face today and those we anticipate will emerge in the future."

###
In a study published online by JAMA, Mark L. Metersky, M.D., of the UConn School of Medicine, Farmington, and colleagues analyzed trends in Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System ventilator-associated pneumonia rates from 2005 through 2013.

Whether previously reported decreases in the rates of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) were attributable to better care or stricter application of subjective surveillance criteria is unclear. The Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System (MPSMS) has independently measured VAP rates since 2005, using a stable definition of VAP. This analysis included MPSMS VAP rates during calendar years 2005 through 2013 among Medicare patients 65 years and older with principal diagnoses of heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia (including a primary diagnosis of sepsis or respiratory failure and a secondary diagnosis of pneumonia), and selected major surgical procedures. The cohort was divided into 4 periods (2005-2006, 2007 and 2009, 2010-2011, and 2012-2013).

The VAP rate was studied among 1,856 patients. The researchers found that the MPSMS VAP rates were stable over time, with an observed rate of 10.8 percent during 2005-2006, 9.7 percent during 2012-2013, and an adjusted average annual change of 0.

"From 2005 through 2013, MPSMS VAP rates remained stable and substantial, affecting approximately 10 percent of ventilated patients. Persistently high VAP rates bolster concerns that most interventions purported to reduce VAP are supported by limited evidence," the authors write.

###

(doi:10.1001/jama.2016.16226; the study is available pre-embargo at the For the Media website)

Editor's Note: This work was supported by a contract from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, United States Department of Health and Human Services, Rockville, Md. Qualidigm was the contractor. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, etc.

To place an electronic embedded link to this study in your story This link will be live at the embargo time: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/10.1001/jama.2016.16226
November 11, 2016 - For patients with degenerative spinal disease, surgery is more effective in reducing pain that interferes with sexual activity, compared to nonsurgical treatment, reports a study in the November 15 issue of Spine, published by Wolters Kluwer.

"Sex life is a relevant consideration for the majority of patients with degenerative spondylolisthesis and spinal stenosis," write Dr. Shane Burch of University of California-San Francisco and colleagues. "Operative treatment leads to improved sex life-related pain," in addition to reducing pain and disability from degenerative spinal conditions.

Lower Rate of Sex Life-Related Pain after Spinal Surgery

The researchers analyzed data from the Spine Outcomes Research Trial (SPORT)--one of the largest clinical trials of surgery for spinal disorders. Patients meeting strict criteria for spinal stenosis or degenerative spondylolisthesis were randomly assigned to surgery or nonsurgical treatment.

Patients with spinal stenosis or degenerative spondylolisthesis have narrowing of or pressure on the spinal canal, causing back pain, leg pain, and other symptoms. In the SPORT study, patients who did not improve with initial nonsurgical treatment were offered the opportunity to "cross over" to surgical treatment.

In response to questionnaires, about 30 percent of patients indicated that sexual function was not relevant to them. These patients were older (average 70 versus 63 years), more likely to be female and unmarried, and more likely to have coexisting joint problems.

Of 825 patients who said that sexual function was relevant, 531 underwent some kind of surgery (spinal decompression or spinal fusion) 294 received nonsurgical treatment. Before treatment, 55 percent of patients said they had at least some pain affecting their sex life.

Three months after back surgery, less than 20 percent of patients still had sex life-related pain. In contrast, about 40 percent of patients treated without surgery still had pain with sexual activity. The improvement persisted through four years' follow-up, and was significant for patients undergoing spinal decompression versus fusion.

The SPORT study was designed to clarify the benefits of surgical compared to nonsurgical treatment in patients with carefully defined spinal disorders. Previous results in patients with spinal stenosis/degenerative spondylolisthesis suggested that surgery provides greater improvement in pain and functioning.

Chronic back pain has known negative consequences for sexual function, contributing to decreased quality of life. Previous research has suggested that sexual function is improved after surgery for back pain. The new study is the first to include a large number of patients undergoing back surgery, and the first to include a comparison group of patients treated without surgery.

"The impetus behind our study was to initiate the process of understanding how back surgery affects patients' lives," says Dr. Burch. "An important aspect for many patients includes sex life. We have very limited data to discuss this topic, and we need to do a better job for our patients to inform them of what to expect after surgery."

Future studies will provide more complete information on how back surgery can improve sexual function and activity. Meanwhile, Dr. Burch and colleagues suggest that surgeons and other professionals caring for patients with back pain should be aware of and discuss the impact on sexual functioning. They conclude: "Sex-life function is relevant to patients with spinal pathology and should be addressed."

###

Click here to read "Sex Life and Impact of Operative Intervention on Sex Life-related Pain in Degenerative Spinal Conditions: An Analysis of the SPORT Study."

Article: "Sex Life and Impact of Operative Intervention on Sex Life-related Pain in Degenerative Spinal Conditions: An Analysis of the SPORT Study" (doi: 10.1097/BRS.0000000000001851)

About Spine

Recognized internationally as the leading journal in its field, Spine (http://www.spinejournal.com) is an international, peer-reviewed, bi-weekly periodical that considers for publication original articles in the field of spine. It is the leading subspecialty journal for the treatment of spinal disorders. Only original papers are considered for publication with the understanding that they are contributed solely to Spine. According to the latest ISI Science Citation Impact Factor, Spine is the most frequently cited spinal deformity journal among general orthopaedic journals and subspecialty titles.

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer is a global leader in professional information services. Professionals in the areas of legal, business, tax, accounting, finance, audit, risk, compliance and healthcare rely on Wolters Kluwer's market leading information-enabled tools and software solutions to manage their business efficiently, deliver results to their clients, and succeed in an ever more dynamic world.

Wolters Kluwer reported 2015 annual revenues of 4.2 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, and employs over 19,000 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands. Wolters Kluwer shares are listed on Euronext Amsterdam (WKL) and are included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices. Wolters Kluwer has a sponsored Level 1 American Depositary Receipt program. The ADRs are traded on the over-the-counter market in the U.S. (WTKWY).

Wolters Kluwer Health is a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry. For more information about our products and organization, visit http://www.wolterskluwer.com, follow @WKHealth or @Wolters_Kluwer on Twitter, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, or follow WoltersKluwerComms on YouTube.
(Editors note: Ivory Harlow farms with her husband, Kip, in southern Ohio and provides farming advice columns every Friday on farmanddairy.com. Both Ivory and Kip served in the United States Air Force before moving to Ohio to start their small goat and hay operation. We asked Ivory about her time in the service and the programs available to military veterans interested in farming.)

Q. Where did you grow up?

A. I was born in Elk River, Minnesota. My mom had a horse hobby farm where she ran an agritourism operation. She held childrens parties and events and used it for a photography venue. I helped out with that up until I graduated high school.

Q. When did you join the military?

I had to sit on my hands until I was 18 to be eligible to enlist. I wanted to go overseas and see the world. I wanted to go into the Air Force and I had dreams of going to Italy and all over.

I enlisted in the military just weeks after graduating high school. They ended up sending me to Texas, where I was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio. I spent my entire enlistment there.

Q. How long did you serve?

I spent four years in the Air Force, from 2000-2004. In 2001, I met my husband, Kip Harlow, who was also serving in the Air Force at the time. I was a logistics material manager  working with medical equipment  and he was a biomedical engineer. We were in the same department.

Kip grew up raising hogs and eventually cattle in Llano, Texas. Even when he was on the Air Force base, (Kip) would take time to go home and work cattle on the ranch. That was his master plan (to someday run his own farm). Kip served eight years  a combination of active duty and International Guard.

Q. How did you end up in Ohio?

When both of our enlistments were up, we knew we wanted to get back to those rural roots. The base was like a subdivision, it was like torture for us.

My husband continued working as biomedical engineer and working with Veteran Affairs. Our only options (for relocation) were Providence, Rhode Island, or Chillicothe, Ohio.

Chillicothe looked much more promising (for farmland) than Providence. Weve been in Ohio for about five years now.

Q. What do you farm?

Dickie Bird Farm officially became an entity in 2012. We raise Boer goats for exhibition and breeding stock, and meat. We normally sell through United Producers but we are looking into direct meat sales.

We also have a forage operation and sell small square bales of hay. We spend our summers baling a lot of hay and winters with goat babies running around.

Q. Did you use any farmer-veteran programs to get started?

We didnt use any special funding to get started, but we became members of the Farmer Veteran Coalition and became certified in the Homegrown by Heroes program in 2012. It has helped with marketing.

Q. What farmer veteran groups and conferences have you been a part of?

The Farmer Veteran Coalition has helped us be successful and the Homegrown by Heroes provides marketing opportunities. Its a growing group and is even a good group for those just with rural lifestyle interests.

In the spring, I attended a womens Farmer Veteran Coalition conference in New York. It was a two-day conference focused on sustainable production methods and marketing. I thought, how many (women farmer veterans) could their be, but there was a lot.

At the end of November, the Farmer Veteran Coalition will be holding the Farmer Veteran Stakeholders Conference in Michigan. The conference is Nov. 30-Dec. 2 and features educational tracks, farm visits, speakers and networking.

We are going to start getting an Ohio chapter of the Farmer Veterans Coalition together this spring. Right now, we are meeting with other chapters to get ideas. If people are interested in being a part of that they can email me at farmer@dickiebirdfarmer.com.

We are not sure what it will look like yet. Some states use it just for networking, others for marketing. It can be whatever the group wants it to be.

Q. Why are farmer veteran programs so important to you?

One of the real values is getting back into that military family. Farming is kind of a lonely profession. By attending these conferences and being a part of these groups, you are surrounded by people with a shared background.

There is a feeling you get when you have been in the military and you see fellow military men and women again. Even if I dont know them, when I get on base again, I feel like I should. There is something about having that shared experience. You feel like you know everybody, when you dont.

Ivory Harlow provides a list of resources for military veterans interested in farming as a career in her column here.
ResApp Health Limitedhas announced it has received institutional review board approval at the Massachusetts General Hospital for its SMARTCOUGH-C study.The SMARTCOUGH-C study will evaluate the success of the ResAppDx software in using cough sounds to diagnose childhood pneumonia and respiratory conditionsIf successful, the technology could be delivered via smartphone, improving patient management and increasing access to healthcare at a reduced cost.The details of the trial will be made available on the US National Institutes of Health clinical trials database.ResApp Health Limited reported a net loss of $3.2 million at 30 June 2016.
New Delhi : Pakistan will not be able to replicate the new notes that are being planned by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), according to intelligence agencies.

They said that the security features in the new denominations of Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes will make it impossible for them to copy.

Citing a top government official, the Times of India reported that the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), Indias external intelligence agency, the Intelligence Bureau and the DRI have examined the features for the past six months.

However, he reportedly did not reveal the security features on the new notes.

Pakistan reportedly had a dedicated mint in Peshawar where only fake Indian currency notes were being printed.

The fake notes are then supplied to various terror groups like the Dawood gang and LeT by Pakistans intelligence agency.

According to Indian intelligence agencies, the Pakistani mint has achieved a zero-error counterfeit capability in printing fake Indian notes.

According to an estimate, Pakistan reportedly pushes about Rs 70 crore worth of fake currency notes into the Indian economy in order to fund terror.

TOI quoting MoS for home Kiren Rijiju reported that the governments move would lead to closure of fake currency press in Pakistan.

Source : Zee News
Nigeria : A Christian pastor and eight others were killed in two separate attacks in Maiduguri, Nigeria on Oct. 29. The attacks were carried out by female suicide bombers who are believed to be members of Boko Haram.

The pastor belonged to the Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN), according to World Watch Monitor. France 24 reported that the first blast occured when two suicide bombers tried to enter a camp that holds more than 16,000 refugees. The military however, clarified that there is only one attacker.

A suspected female suicide bomber ran into a group of men and women at the entrance while they were coming out of the camp, killing five men and injuring 11 women, said military spokesman Col. Mustapha Anka.

The second explosion occured about a kilometer away from the first site about half an hour later. A tricycle taxi driven by the bomber and carrying two passengers reportedly exploded outside a gas station. The taxi followed a fuel tanker with the sole aim of gaining entry to cause maximum damage and casualty.

Nine bodies, including the suicide bombers, were recovered in the explosions. Twenty-four wounded people have been brought to nearby hospitals, according to Sani Datta, a spokesperson for the National Emergency Management Agency.

The blasts on Saturday is the second attack in two weeks. On Oct. 12, an bomb explosion killed eight refugees in a taxi-van outside Maiduguri.

Christians who are experiencing difficulties in refugee camps in Maiduguri cannot go back home due to the constant attacks carried out by Boko Haram.

Aid workers who visited the camps described their experience this way: Life has become hell for the more than 3,000 people living here Already people are resorting to eating leaves. Children are dying of hunger. If nothing is done for these people, this will lead to a huge tragedy. People cannot go home because Boko Haram is constantly regrouping and continuing attacks.

The terrorist group is still in talks with the Nigerian government regarding the release of the remaining Chibok schoolgirls. Rumors have circulated that the negotiations are postponed due to the attacks blamed on Boko Haram but a government official has assured that the talks are still ongoing.

Source : Christian Times
November 10, 2016 - The ACLU of Northern California is outraged to learn that Esra Altun, a young Muslim woman, was assaulted and choked at San Jose State University yesterday. The rash of similar attacks and campus graffiti targeting Muslim students, and referencing Donald Trump, is especially troubling in light of Mr. Trumps frequent use of both anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric while on the campaign trail.

Muslim Americans are an integral part of our communities in California, with the same rights as all of us: the rights to practice religion freely and openly, to live and work without fear, and to participate fully and equally in public life.We condemn this rhetoric and this behavior, which further add to the violence that Muslim communities face due to racism and bias. We call on President-elect Trump to do the same. We call on all Californians and Americans to reject all forms of anti-Muslim bigotry, and to challenge speech and actions that harm others based solely on their religion or heritage.
Guerilla Incursions From The Boondocks by Philippines Cultural Studies Center

Commentary on President Duterte's "separation" from US domination and the media representation

of the crisis in the Philippines.

GUERILLA INCURSIONS FROM THE BOONDOCKS:

President Dutertes Logomachia and Subaltern Counter-Hegemony in the Philippines







by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Emeritus Professor of Ethnic Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut; Professorial Lecturer, Polytechnic University of the Philippines







A howling wilderness was what General Jacob Smith ordered his troops to make of Samar, Philippines. He was taking revenge for the ambush of fifty-four soldiers by Filipino revolutionaries in September 1901. After the invaders killed most of the islands inhabitants, three bells from the Balangiga Church were looted as war trophies; two are still displayed at Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming. Very few Americans know this. Nor would they have any clue about the 1913 massacre of thousands of Muslim women, men and children resisting General Pershings systematic destruction of their homes in Mindanao where President Rodrigo Duterte today resides.



Addressing this dire amnesia afflicting the public, both in the Philippines and abroad, newly-elected president Duterte began the task of evoking/invoking the accursed past. He assumed the role of oral tribune, with prophetic expletives. Like the Filipino guerillas of Generals Lukban and Malvar who retreated to the mountains (called boondocks by American pursuers from the Tagalog word bundok, mountain), Duterte seems to be coming down with the task of reclaiming the collective dignity of the heathens eulogized by Rudyard Kipling, at the start of the war in February 1899, as the white mens burden. The first U.S. civil governor William Howard Taft patronizingly adopted this burden of saving the Filipino little brown brother as a benighted colonial ward, not a citizen.





White Mens Burden



The Filipino-American War of 1899-1913 occupies only a paragraph, at most, in most US texbooks, a blip in the rise of the United States as an Asian Pacific Leviathan. Hobbes figure is more applicable to international rivalries than to predatory neoliberal capitalism today, or to the urban jungle of MetroManila. At least 1.4 million Filipinos (verified by historian Luzviminda Francisco) died as a result of the scorched-earth policy of President McKinley. His armed missionaries were notorious for Vietnam-style hamletting. They also practised the water-cure, also known as water-boarding, a form of torture now legitimized in a genocidal war of terror (Iraq, Afghanistan) that recalls the ruthless suppression of Native American tribes and dehumanization of African slaves in the westward march of the civilizing Krag to the Pacific, to the Chinese market. Today the struggle at Standing Rock and Black-Lives-Matter are timely reminders. Stuart Creighton Millers 1982 book, Benevolent Assimilation, together with asides by Gabriel Kolko and Howard Zinn, recounted the vicissitudes of that bloody passage through Philippine boondocks and countryside.



Not everyone acquiesced to Washingtons brutal annexation of the island-colony. Mark Twain exposed the hypocrisy of Washingtons Benevolent Assimilation with searing diatribes, as though inventing the conscience of his generation. William James, William Dean Howells, W.E.B. DuBois and other public intellectuals denounced what turned out to be the first Vietnam (Bernard Falls rubric).



It was a learning experience for the conquerors. In Policing Americas Empire, Alfred McCoy discovered that Americas tutelage of the Filipino elite (involving oligarchic politicians of the Commonwealth period up to Marcos and Aquino) functioned as a laboratory for crafting methods of surveillance, ideological manipulation, propaganda, and other modes of covert and overt pacification. Censorship, mass arrests of suspected dissidents, torture and assassination of bandits protesting landlord abuses and bureaucratic corruption in the first three decades of colonial rule led to large-scale killing of peasants and workers in numerous Colorum and Sakdalista uprisings.



Re-Visiting the Cold War of Terror



This pattern of racialized class oppression via electoral politics and discipiinary pedagogy culminated in the Cold War apparatus devised by CIA agent Edward Lansdale and the technocrats of Magsasay to suppress the Huk rebellion in the two decades after formal granting of independence in 1946.



The Cold War Leviathan continued to operate in the savage extrajudicial killings during the Marcos dictatorship. The Marcos family were rescued by President Reagan from the wrath of millions in the February 1982 People Power revolt. After Marcos death, the Marcos family and the despots cadaver were allowed by then President Ramos to return.



Given the re-installment of the feudal-comprador ellite due partly to the failure of the national-democratic forces to educate, organize and mobilize the masses, the Marcos family recovered institutional power. The current reactionary Supreme Court Justices and Dutertes link to the Marcoses are a symptom of fierce internecine conflict within the oligarchic bloc. It fosters sectarian partisanship and opportunist fantasies. The controversy over Marcos burial today cannot be fully assayed without factoring in, in this conjunctural crisis, the role of patronage-clientelism syndrome in the body politic and the U.S.-oriented State ideological-military apparatus of a decadent oligarchic elite.



Mournless Melancholia



U.S. Cold War Realpolitik defined Corazon Aquinos total war against nationalists, progressive peasants, professionals, Igorots, Lumadsall touted by Washington/Pentagon as the price for enjoying individualist prerogatives, esp. the right to gamble in the capitalist casino. This constitutes the rationale for U.S.-subsidized counterinsurgency schemes to shore up the decadent, if not moribund, status quoa society plagued by profound and seemingly durable disparity of wealth and powernow impolitely challenged by Duterte.



Not a single mass-media article on Dutertes intent to forge an independent foreign policy and solve corruption linked to narcopolitics, provides even an iota of historical background on the US record of colonial subjugation of Filipino bodies and souls. This is not strange, given the long history of Filipino miseducation documented by Renato Constantino. Perhaps the neglect if not dismissal of the Filipino collective experience is due to the indiscriminate celebration of Americas success in making the natives speak English, imitate the American Way of Life shown in Hollywood movies, and indulge in mimicked consumerism.



What is scandalous is the complicity of the U.S. intelligentsia (with few exceptions) in regurgitating the civilizing effect of colonial exploitation. Every time the Filipino essence is described as violent, foolish, shrewd or cunning, the evidence displays the actions of a landlord-politician, bureaucrat, savvy merchant, U.S.-educated professional, or rich entrepreneur. Unequal groups dissolve into these representative types: Quezon, Roxas, Magsaysay, Fidel Ramos, etc. What seems ironic if not parodic is that after a century of massive research and formulaic analysis of the colonys underdevelopment, we arrive at Stanley Karnows verdict (amplified in In Our Image) that, really, the Filipinos and their character-syndromes are to blame for their poverty and backwardness, for not being smart beneficiaries of American good works. Fck you, Duterte might uncouthly respond.



Hobbes or Machiavelli?



An avalanche of media commentaries, disingenously purporting to be objective news reports, followed Dutertes campaign to eradicate the endemic drug addiction rampant in the country. No need to cite statistics about the criminality of narcopolitics infecting the whole country, from poor slum-dweller to Senators and moguls; lets get down to the basics. But the media, without any judicious assaying of hearsay, concluded that Dutertes policyhis public pronouncement that bodies will float in Manila Bay, etc.caused the killing of innocent civilians. His method of attack impressed the academics as Hobbesian, not Machiavellian. The journalistic imperative to sensationalize and distort by selective framing (following, of course, corporate norms and biases) governs the style and content of quotidian media operations.



Is Duterte guilty of the alleged EJK (extrajudicial killings)? No doubt, druglords and their police accomplices took advantage of the policy to silence their minions. This is the fabled collateral damage bewailed by the bishops and moralists. But Obama, UN and local pundits associated with the defeated parties seized on the cases of innocent victims (two or three are more than enough, demonstrated by the photo of a woman allegedly cradling the body of her husband, blown up in Time (October 10) and in The Atlantic, September issue, and social media) to teach Duterte a lesson on human rights, due process, and genteel diplomatic protocols. This irked the thin-skinned town mayor whose lack of etiquette, civility, and petty-bourgeois decorum became the target of unctuous sermons.



Stigma for All Seasons: Anti-Americanism



What finally gave the casuistic game away, in my view, is the piece in the November issue of The Atlantic by Jon Emont entitled Dutertes Anti-Americanism. What does anti-Americanism meanto be against McDonald burgers, Beyonce, I-phones, Saturday Night Live, Lady Gaga, Bloomingdale fashions, Wall Street, or Washington-Pentagon imperial browbeating of inferior nations/peoples-of-color? The article points to tell-tale symptoms: Duterte is suspending joint military exercises, separating from U.S. govt foreign policy by renewing friendly cooperation with China in the smoldering South China Sea, andveering toward Russia for economic tiesin short, promoting what will counter the debilitating, predatory U.S. legacy.



Above all, Duterte is guilty of diverging from public opinion, meaning the Filipino love for Americans. He rejects US security guarantees, ignores the $3 billion remittances of Filipinos (presumably, relatives of middle and upper classes), the $13 million given by the U.S. for relief of Yolanda typhoon victims in 2013. Three negative testimonies against Dutertes anti-American bluster are used: 1) Asia Foundation official Steven Roods comment that since most Filipinos dont care about foreign policy, elites have considerable latitude, that is, they can do whatever pleases them. 2) Richard Javad Heydarian, affiliated with De La Salle University, is quotedthis professor is now a celebrity of the anti-Duterte cultthat Duterte can get away with it; and, finally, Gen Fidel Ramos who contends that the military top brass like US troopsWest-Point-trained Ramos has expanded on his tirade against Duterte with the usual cliches of unruly client-state leaders who turn against their masters, and seems ready to lead a farcical version of the 1968 People Power revolt, one of the symptoms of fierce internecine strife within the corrupt oligarchic bloc.



Like other anti-Duterte squibs, the article finally comes up with the psychological diagnosis of Dutertes fixation on the case of the Davao 2002 bombing when a supposed involvement of US officials who spirited a CIA-affiliated American bomber confirmed the Davao mayors fondness for stereotypes of superior meddling America. The judgment seems anticllimatic. What calls attention will not be strange anymore: there is not a whisper of the tortuous history of US imperial exercise of power on the subalterns.



This polemic-cum-factoids culminates in a faux-folksy, rebarbative quip: Washington can tolerate a thin-skinned ally who bites the hand that feeds him through crass invective. The Washington Post (Nov 2) quickly intoned its approval by harping on Ramos defection as a sign of the local elites displeasure. With Washington halting the sale of rifles to the Philippine police because of Dutertes human-rights abuses, the Post warns that $ 9 million military aid and $32 million funds for law-enforcement will be dropped by Congress if Duterte doesnt stop his anti-US rhetoric. Trick or treat? Duterte should learn that actions have consequences, pontificated this sacred office of journalistic rectitude after the Halloween mayhem.



On this recycled issue of anti-Americanism, the best riposte is by Michael Parenti, from his incisive book Inventing Reality: The media dismiss conflicts that arise between the United States and popular forces in other countries as manifestations of the latters anti-Americanism.When thousands marched in the Philippines against the abominated US-supported Marcos regime, the New York Times reported, Anti-Marcos and anti-American slogans and banners were in abundance, with the most common being Down with the US-Marcos Dictatorship! A week later, the Times again described Filipino protests against US support of the Marcos dictatorship as anti-Americanism. The Atlantic, the New York Times,and the Washington Post share an ideological-political genealogy with the Cold War paranoia currentlygripping the U.S. ruling-class Establishment.



Predictably, the New York Times (Nov. 3 issue) confirmed the consensus that the US is not worried so much about the authoritarian or murderous ways of imposing law and order (Walden Bellos labels; InterAksyon, Oct 29) as they are discombobulated by Dutertes rapproachment with China. The calculus of U.S. regional hegemony was changed when Filipino fishermen returned to fish around the Scarborough Shoal. Dutertes bombastic one-man show, his foul mouth, his authoritarian pragmatism, did not lead to total dependency on China nor diplomatic isolation. This pivot to China panicked Washington, belying the Time expert Carl Thayer who pontificated that Duterte cant really stand up to China unless the US is backing him (Sept 15, 2016). A blowback occurred in the boondocks; the thin-skinned Punisher and scourge of druglords triggered a howling wilderness that exploded the century-long stranglehold of global finance capitalism on the islands. No need to waste time on more psychoanalysis of Dutertes motivation.



What the next US president would surely do to restore its ascendancy in that region is undermine Dutertes popular base, fund a strategy of destabilization via divide-and-rule (as in Chile, Yugoslavia, Ukraine), and incite its volatile pro-American constituency to beat pots and kettles in the streets of MetroManila.

This complex geopolitical situation entangling the United States and its former colony/neocolony, cries for deeper historical contextualization and empathy for the victims lacking in the Western media demonization of Duterte and his supporters, over 70% of a hundred million Filipinos in the Philippines and in the diaspora. For further elaboration, see my recent books US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave) and Between Empire and Insurgency (University of the Philippines Press).



_____



E. San Juan, Jr, an emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies and Comparative Literature, was a fellow of W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, Fulbright lecturer of American Studies at Leuven University, Belgium, is currently professorial lecturer, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Manils.
Leonard Cohen sent a touching final letter to his dying muse Marianne Ihlen, the subject of his song So Long Marianne.

Ihlen, who was also the inspiration behind Bird on the Wire, died in Norway on July 29 at the age of 81.

Cohen met Ihlen  then Jensen  in Hydra, Greece in the 1960s. They became lovers, staying together for a decade.

Her close friend Jan Christian Mollestad told Canadas CBC radio he had contacted Cohen, 81, to tell him Ihlen was dying of leukaemia and had only a few days to live.

He recalled: It took only two hours and in came this beautiful letter from Leonard to Marianne.

We brought this letter in to her the next day and she was fully conscious and she was so happy that he had already written something for her.

Mollestad, a documentary filmmaker, read the letter to Ihlen before she died.

He recalled: It said, Well Marianne, its come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon.

"Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

And you know that Ive always loved you for your beauty and for your wisdom, but I dont need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey.

Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.

Mollestad told host Rosemary Barton that when he read the line stretch out your hand, Ihlen had stretched out her hand.

It was a very nice gesture from both of them, he said.

Only two days after, she lost consciousness and slipped into death. And when she died, I wrote a letter back to him saying in her final moments I hummed A Bird on the Wire because that was the song she felt closest to. And then I kissed her on the head and left the room, and said So long, Marianne.

Reflecting on Cohen and Ihlens relationship over the years, Mollestad recalled: What Marianne said, was Leonard was the one who loved her for herself, who opened her up and let her feel that she was worth loving, not only because she was beautiful outside, but he really was interested in her.

This story was originally published on Monday, August 08, 2016

READ MORE: Tributes pour in for 'cherished artist' Leonard Cohen
Patrick OBrien, aged 76, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to 48 sample counts of indecent assault and three counts of sexual assault of the boys.

The offending took place between 1974 and 2013 at numerous locations throughout the state including Kildare, Westmeath, on a boat in Loughrea in Co Galway and at St Patricks Cathedral in Dublin where he worked as a volunteer.

In 1989, he received a one-year suspended sentence for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy in 1982.

OBrien, of Knocklyon Rd, Templeogue, Dublin, was sent forward for trial from Dublin District Court in 2015 where Judge Cormac Dunne ruled the media could identify the accused following an application by RTE.

All of the victims wish to preserve their anonymity. Four victims were present in court for the sentence hearing.

A number of victim impact reports were prepared but not all the men wanted their statement to be read out.

It took over 30 minutes to read out the charges at the original sentence hearing that took place last month over two days to allow for all 14 statements of complaint to be read into the record.

Judge Melanie Greally said the ages of the victims ranged from seven to 16 years old.

She noted one victim was abused on a single occasion with the longest duration of abuse being seven years. The mildest form of abuse was kissing with the most extreme being forceful anal penetration.

She noted that no location could be considered safe by the children and the presence of nearby adults or parents did not afford the victims any protection from OBriens predatory actions.

Judge Greally said every one of the victims had suffered consequences as a result of the abuse in specific and individual ways.

In sentencing OBrien, she said she was taking into account aggravating factors including the gravity of the sexual misconduct, the length of time involved, the ages of the victims, the nature of his grooming techniques, and the breach of trust involved.

She said in mitigation, she was taking into account the guilty plea, OBriens co-operation with the investigation, his health issues, and expression of remorse.

Judge Greally imposed consecutive sentences totalling 13 years which she backdated to July.

Speaking outside court, Detective Superintendent Declan Daly said he would like to commend the bravery and resilience of all the victims who had gone through a harrowing and difficult case.

I hope their bravery will send a message to all other victims who may come forward in historical cases and report their complaints to An Garda Siochana, he said.

Following sentencing, the Church of Ireland yesterday issued a statement: St Patricks Cathedral, Dublin, and the wider Church of Ireland community have been deeply dismayed at the nature and extent of the offences which have been brought to light in the case involving Patrick OBrien, who was sentenced today. The Church commends the courage of Patrick OBriens victims in coming forward.
The ballot is due to go out to its 10,300 members on Friday, November 18, with a return date of December 5.

GRA sources confirmed that there would be no recommendation from the Central Executive Committee and that its for members to decide.

Sources said an information document will be supplied to members with the ballot  and that it will be posted on the GRA website.

The decision comes a full week after the Labour Court recommendation was made.

The failure of the CEC to recommend the deal will come as a disappointment, though not a surprise, to the Government and Garda management.

It makes for a nervous month, with GRA sources unsure if members will back the deal or reject it  reigniting the strikes.

There are well-publicised divisions within the CEC to the deal and the deferral of strike action  and to the leadership of the body.

General secretary Pat Ennis survived a motion of no-confidence, by 25 votes to 16, at a heated CEC meeting on Wednesday.

The association had narrowly decided, by 20 votes to 17, at the 11th hour on Thursday, November 3, to defer the first strike date, due to start at 7am on Friday.

Decisions on deferring the following three strike dates were made in another tense meeting of the CEC last Monday.

There has been no independent analysis of the pay implications of the deal to date.

An initial analysis based on early GRA estimates suggested the recommendation would benefit gardai by roughly 2,800-3,100 a year.

For new recruits the increase would be greater  their salary increasing from around 23,000 to 29,500, benefiting more than 500 recent graduates.

The Labour Court deal could cost the State in the region of 39m to 42m, with the caveat that the gains to the countrys 2,080 sergeants and inspectors is not as clear.

These increases do not factor in the 1,000 per annum increase given to all public servants under the Lansdowne Road Agreement.

It this payment is included, it could bring the overall cost to the State to between 43m and 50m.

The Government has roughly estimated the deal to cost in excess of 50m, depending on variables.

Yesterdays meeting followed the vote of no-confidence on Wednesday, which was taken by members angry at a decision last Thursday by five members of the officer board to massively increase emergency cover for last Fridays strike.

That increase was agreed with Garda management without consulting the CEC.

Meanwhile, the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors is holding an information seminar for its members on November 21 on its ballot.

The AGSI National Executive agreed last Wednesday to recommend the deal to its 2,080 members.

The ballot is being sent out on November 23, with a result due in early December.
Do you get a sinking feeling when you struggle mid conversation to remember that place, whatsitsname, where you ate on your holidays, the one you wanted to recommend to a friend?

Or feel a jolt of anxiety when you then take the next step in your imagination  the fear you might not remember even more stuff, as you age?

As we adjust to not being as sharp as in our younger years, we tend to compensate by finding other ways to remember like making lists, or taking home a card for that restaurant you wanted to recommend.

However, increasingly, research is pointing to the benefits of exercising regularly as we age, to help brain function and memory.

And although we may be busy challenging our brains on our mobile devices or doing the daily newspaper crossword, if we are sitting, we could well be lessening some of that positive impact.

Current research is usually based around cognitive decline, dementia or Alzheimers, and although results are from a small number of studies and a direct link cant be made yet around prevention of memory loss and exercise, one thing is sure: being physical activity can only do your brain good.

One such study which featured last month in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society suggests for instance, that pumping up your muscles might also pump up your brain function. The research carried out in the University of Sydney, Australia, featuring people aged 55 to 86.

As we age past 50, muscle declines more rapidly and regular weight-bearing exercises can help manage that wastage and in the process contribute to our general physical wellbeing.

However, the 100 participants in this study, who all had mild memory and cognitive impairment showed a significant improvement in their mental functioning after they did supervised weight training at a high intensity, twice a week, for six months.

The researchers suggested that the positive impact on the participants lasted for at least a year after the weight sessions ended.

The benefits that regular physical activity offers to our overall wellbeing, as we age, are of course well documented.

In his book Sod 60! The Guide to Living Well British health service expert, Muir Gray says in 2015 the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges were so bowled over by the weight of evidence of the benefit of 30 minutes of sweaty, puffy exercise five times a week, that they published a report about it called Exercise  The Miracle Cure.

In the report they suggested exercising at the recommended level, reduces the risk of developing dementia by up to 30%. They also said regular exercise reduces your risk of breast cancer by up to 25%; bowel cancer by 45%; having a stroke by 30% and the risk of heart disease by over 40%.

Considering how common these conditions are, in people aged over 65 and above, the staggering benefits of exercise become clear, says Muir. And its not unreasonable to think that getting active will make you biologically younger. The evidence suggests that is exactly what happens, he says.

And of course if our body is healthier, our brain follows suit. The scientists and researchers at Trinity College Dublin who have set up the website Hello Brain to encourage us to lead a brain-healthy lifestyle, say that being physically active is like drinking a tonic for your brain.

When you start exercising, blood rushes around your body, including your brain. Never one to miss an opportunity, your brain takes advantage of this added oxygen and nutrients and refreshes itself, building new neurons and connections. This builds your brain reserves, backup funds for a rainy day, such as when damage occurs.

The World Health Organisation says to reduce cognitive decline, older adults should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity throughout the week, or do at least 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity weekly or an equivalent combination of moderate and vigorous-intensity activity.

Aerobic activity should be performed in bouts of at least 10 minutes and for extra health benefits, we should increase our moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity to 300 minutes per week.

In keeping with the earlier research, saying the benefits of resistance training to memory, the WHO also recommends we do muscle-strengthening activities, involving major muscle groups, on two or more days a week.

The Hello Brain website say exercising three times per week was linked with 38% reduced risk of developing dementia over six years, in a study of over 65s.

Another investigation found physical activity in older adults with known cognitive impairment reduced the risk of dementia by 28%.

If a little pill could do this, it would fly off the shelves, they say.

Check out Hello Brain at www.hellobrain.eu/en/
Rubicon Minerals Corporation (TSX:RMX) ("Rubicon" or the "Company") announces that the Company and its direct and indirect subsidiaries (the "Rubicon Companies") obtained an order on November 10th (the "Meetings Order") from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Commercial List) (the "Court) in proceedings (the "CCAA Proceedings") commenced by the Rubicon Companies on October 20, 2016 pursuant to the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (the "CCAA") authorizing the Rubicon Companies to, among other things, (i) file a plan of compromise and arrangement (the "Plan") pursuant to which the Company's previously announced refinancing and restructuring transaction (the "Restructuring Transaction") is to be implemented, and (ii) authorizing the Rubicon Companies to call meetings of their creditors to vote on the Plan.

Meetings of Creditors

Pursuant to the Meetings Order, the Company will hold Meetings to vote on the Plan on December 2, 2016 as follows:

CPPIB Credit Investments Inc. ("CPPIB Credit") Meeting - 2:00 p.m. RG Gold AG ("Royal Gold") Meeting - 2:15 p.m. Unsecured Creditors Meeting - 2:30 p.m.

The Meetings will be held at the offices of Goodmans LLP at 333 Bay Street, Suite 3400, Toronto, Ontario.

Details of the Plan will be provided in an information statement to be distributed to affected creditors pursuant to the Meetings Order. Materials in connection with the Meetings, including the information statement and proxy materials, will also be made available on the website of the Court-appointed Monitor for the CCAA Proceedings at www.ey.com/ca/rubicon.

The implementation of the Restructuring Transaction and the Plan is conditional upon, among other things, receiving the requisite creditor approvals under the CCAA and Court approval in the CCAA Proceedings. If the Plan is approved by the requisite majorities of affected creditors, the Company intends to seek Court approval of the Plan on December 8, 2016 and will proceed to close the transaction shortly thereafter.

A copy of the term sheet which outlines the terms of the Restructuring Transaction is available on the Company's profile on SEDAR and on the Company's website at: www.rubiconminerals.com.

Financial Hardship Exemption Application

The Restructuring Transaction involves, among other things: (i) a new equity raise of up to C$45.0 million (the "New Equity Financing") by way of a private placement of subscription receipts (the "Subscription Receipts"); (ii) CPPIB Credit, Royal Gold, and certain securityholders receiving common shares, and (iii) the existing common shares of the Company being consolidated on a ratio of approximately 162.1 pre-consolidation Rubicon common shares to one post-consolidation common share (the "Share Consolidation").

The Company announced the successful closing of the New Equity Financing for C$45.0 million on November 4, 2016. An insider of the Company who currently owns approximately 11.0% of the Company's issued and outstanding common shares subscribed for approximately 9.1% of the subscription receipts.

The Company currently has 394,928,246 issued and outstanding common shares. The Company is expected to have 53,890,125 issued and outstanding common shares assuming completion of the Share Consolidation. The five-day weighted average trading price of the Company's pre-consolidation common shares ending on October 19, 2016, the last full day that the common shares on the TSX before trading in the shares was suspended by the TSX, was C$0.0467 per common share (the "Market Price").

Assuming completion in full of the Restructuring Transaction:

The Restructuring Transaction will increase the currently issued and outstanding common shares equivalent to 8,340,607,652 pre-consolidation common shares representing an increase of 2,012%;

The New Equity Financing represents a pre-consolidation price of C$0.0082 per common share (an 82.4% discount to the Market Price prior to the announcement of the Restructuring Transaction) or C$1.33 per post-consolidation common share. The New Equity Financing includes issuing: 30,140,000 post-consolidated Subscription Receipts at a post-consolidated price of C$1.33, equivalent to the issuance of 4,885,664,125 pre-consolidated Subscription Receipts at a pre-consolidated price of C$0.0082 per common share resulting in the issuance of 4,882,664,125 pre-consolidated Common Shares; and 3,700,000 post-consolidated Subscription Receipts to an insider of the Company at a post-consolidated price of C$1.33, equivalent to the issuance of 599,766,332 pre-consolidated Subscription Receipts at a pre-consolidated price of C$0.0082 per common share resulting in the issuance of 599,766,332 pre-consolidated Common Shares;

14,536,341 post-consolidated Common Shares to CPPIB Credit in partial consideration for the reduction of the amounts outstanding under the Loan Facility, equivalent to the issuance of 2,356,326,444 pre-consolidated Common Shares at a price of C$0.0082 per common share (an 82.4% discount to the Market Price prior to the announcement of the Restructuring Transaction);

3,007,519 post-consolidated Common Shares to Royal Gold, equivalent to the issuance of 487,515,816 pre-consolidated Common Shares at a price of C$0.0082 per common share (an 82.4% discount to the Market Price prior to the announcement of the Restructuring Transaction);

69,925 post-consolidated Common Shares to holders of restricted share units, equivalent to the issuance of 11,334,934 pre-consolidated Common Shares at a price of C$0.0082 per common share (an 82.4% discount to the Market Price prior to the announcement of the Restructuring Transaction);

The equity ownership will be as follows: (i) subscribers in the New Equity Financing - 62.79%, (ii) CPPIB Credit - 26.97%, (iii) Royal Gold - 5.58% and (iv) currently existing shareholders and holders of restricted share units of the Company - 4.65%; and

The Company and CPPIB Credit will enter into an investor agreement, which shall provide CPPIB Credit with a nominee right while CPPIB Credit continues to hold 15% or more of the Company's Common Shares. The Company will also provide customary pre-emptive rights and registration rights to both CPPIB Credit and Royal Gold.

The Restructuring Transaction would ordinarily require approval from the holders of a majority of the currently issued and outstanding common shares of the Company, excluding the votes attached to the common shares held by the insider who participated in the New Equity Financing, under Sections 607(e), 607(g)(i), 607(g)(ii) and 604(a)(i) of the TSX Company Manual, unless an exemption is applicable, because the Restructuring Transaction will result in (i) the issuance of common shares that is greater than 25% of the number of common shares currently issued and outstanding, (ii) the issuance of common shares to an insider of the Company that is greater than 10% of the number of common shares currently issued and outstanding, (iii) the issuance of common shares beyond the 25% permitted discount to the Market Price, and (iv) the creation a new 20% shareholder of the Company.

The Company has applied to the TSX under the provisions of Section 604(e) of the TSX Company Manual for an exemption from the requirement for shareholder approval of the Restructuring Transaction on the basis that the Company is in CCAA proceedings and in financial difficulty (the "Application"). The independent and disinterested member of the Company's board of directors, who is free from any interest in the Restructuring Transaction, considered the reasonableness and fairness of the Restructuring Transaction and recommended to the Company's full board of directors that (i) the Restructuring Transaction be approved; and (ii) that the Company make the Application. The board of directors has approved the Restructuring Transaction. In addition, both the disinterested member of the board of directors and the Company's full board of directors determined that the Company met the applicable TSX financial hardship requirements and that the Restructuring Transaction is reasonable in the circumstances and designed to improve the Company's financial situation. The Company believes that, upon completion of the Restructuring Transaction, it will be in compliance with the TSX continued listing requirements.

TSX Expedited Listing Review Update

The Company has been notified that the TSX has deferred its decision regarding delisting the common shares of the Company with respect to meeting the requirements of continued listing until November 30, 2016. Although the Company believes that it will be in compliance with all TSX continued listing requirements upon conclusion of the delisting review, no assurance can be provided as to the outcome of such review and therefore, continued qualification for listing on TSX. The common shares will remain suspended from trading until further notice.

Third Quarter 2016 Financial Statements

The Company has filed its third quarter Financial Statements and related Management's Discussion and Analysis for the period ended September 30, 2016. The Company confirms that copies of Rubicon's interim financials can be obtained at www.rubiconminerals.com or www.sedar.com.

Source: Rubicon Minerals
Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCwire) - Prophecy Development Corp. (Prophecy or the Company) (TSX:PCY, OTC:PRPCD, Frankfurt:1P2N) is pleased to report that Bolivias Minister of Mining and Metallurgy, Cesar Navarro, met with Prophecy and representatives from other international mining companies operating in Bolivia on November 9, to coordinate and prepare for the Minister's upcoming participation at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention to be held in Toronto, Canada from March 5-8, 2017.

Minister Navarro stated: Both, public and private mining sectors will try to attract foreign investment disclosing and sharing their experience with investors from several parts of the world.

The other participants of the meeting were: the Presidents of Sinchi Wayra S.A. (Glencore Plc) and Manquiri S.A. (Coeur Mining Inc.), plus representatives from Empresa Minera San Cristobal (Sumitomo Corp.), Pan American Silver Corp., Empresa Minera Paititi (Orvana Minerals Corp.) and Organismo Latinoamericano de Mineria (OLAMI).

This gathering follows Prophecy's meeting with Minister Navarro in La Paz on October 9, which was facilitated by the Embassy of Canada in Bolivia. During that meeting, Minister Navarro stated that the aim of the recent mining regulation is to support the investors and ensure the inclusion of cooperative labour in their projects".

Highlights and photos of both meetings can be accessed at: http://www.mineria.gob.bo/ and www.prophecydev.com.

The Company also announces that John Lee, of Suite 1301, 12 Harcourt Road, Central, Hong Kong, Executive Chairman of the Company, acquired 11,200 shares of Prophecy (the Acquisition) through trading in the secondary market (i.e. the Toronto Stock Exchange) today.

Prior to the Acquisition, Mr. Lee beneficially owned 1,087,853 shares, representing approximately 22.85% of the issued and outstanding shares of the Company.

As a result of the Acquisition, Mr. Lee now beneficially owns and exercises control over an aggregate of 1,099,053 shares representing an interest of approximately 23.09% of the Companys currently issued and outstanding shares, and 34.80% of the Companys shares on a fully diluted basis assuming exercise of all of the Companys outstanding share purchase warrants.

The securities were acquired by Mr. Lee for investment purposes only, and not for purposes of exercising control or direction over the Company.

Generally, Mr. Lee intends to evaluate his investment in the Company and to increase or decrease his shareholdings as circumstances require, depending on market conditions and other factors, through market transactions, private agreements or otherwise.

The information contained in this news release has been provided by Mr. Lee and the Company is not responsible for its accuracy.

A copy of the early warning report pursuant to National Instrument 62-103 required to be filed with the applicable securities commissions in connection with the acquisition of the shares described in this news release will be available for viewing under the Companys profile at www.sedar.com. A copy of the early warning report can also be obtained from the contact number for Investor Relations below.

About Prophecy

Prophecy Development Corp. is a Canadian public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that is engaged in developing mining and energy projects in Mongolia, Bolivia and Canada. Further information on Prophecy can be found at www.prophecydev.com.
Treasury Metals Inc. (TSX: TML) is pleased to announce initial results from the first phase of the ongoing infill drilling program at its 100% owned Goliath Gold Project located in Northwestern Ontario.

Treasury's current drilling program is primarily focused on the conversion of underground "Inferred" resources to the "Indicated" category that reside in and adjacent to the known Main Zone and C Zone gold-bearing shoots. During this multi-phase drill program, Treasury expects to test over 20 targets at vertical depths ranging from 360 m to 690 m from surface over a strike length of 950 m along the main gold deposit. Successful results of this program would enhance the underground resources in the mine plan for upcoming Pre-Feasibility level design studies.

Highlights from the initial Phase I drill program include Hole TL16-410 that intersected a well mineralized section of the central Main Zone shoot containing significant concentrations of visible gold and returning 11.55 g/t Au over a sample length of 6.0 metres (m) as tabulated below. This hole is located 40 m east of the new hole TL16-406 that returned 5.74 g/t Au over a sample length of 4.9 m.

Other highlights include drill hole TL16-405 that contained visible gold and returned 7.99 g/t Au and 4.48 g/t Ag over a sample length of 7.25 m (from 580.75 to 588.0 m), including 14.61 g/t Au and 6.21 g/t Ag over 3.79 m (580.75 to 584.54 m), in the B1 zone in an area of the deposit not previously tested providing new resource expansion opportunities in that portion of the deposit. Hole TL16-403B returned 5.06 g/t Au and 4.05 g/t Ag over a sample length of 2.0 m in association with visible gold. Due to deflection this hole did not test its intended target but did test an area where resource blocks were not previously defined resulting in the expansion of gold resource blocks in that particular area of the deposit as well.

Treasury has extended the drilling program from the initially planned 5,000 metres to target and convert additional deep underground "Inferred" resources. Further results will be released as the drilling program continues and new assays become available.

Technical information in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Paul Dunbar, P. Geo, who is the qualified person under the definitions established by National Instrument 43-101.

Drill Hole Intersections

Drill Hole Section From (m) To (m) *Intercept (m) Au (g/t) Ag (g/t) Comments Tl16410 527925E 544.0 550.0 6.0 11.55 P including 546.0 550.0 4.0 16.94 P Visible Gold including 547.0 550.0 3.0 21.84 P TL16405 527750E 549.0 551.0 2.0 3.39 1.75 580.8 588.0 7.3 7.99 4.48 B1 Zone including 580.8 584.5 3.8 14.61 6.21 TL16406 527875E 555.1 560.0 4.9 5.74** P Including 555.1 558.0 2.9 8.93** P Visible Gold TL16404D 527825E 610.0 612.0 2.0 5.62 35.10 HW Zone TL16403B 527775E 528.0 530.0 2.0 3.56 3.65 Including 529.0 530.0 1.0 6.94 5.90 541.0 544.0 3.0 3.55 4.83 Including 542.0 544.0 2.0 5.06 4.05 Visible Gold

The company has not used a Gold Equivalent (AuEq) for the contained silver for this release but would expect the recovery of silver to increase the overall contained AuEq by a small amount in future studies. Holes are generally drilled 350-360Azimuth with inclinations ranging -55 to -80. All assays are rounded to two decimal places. *Intervals do not necessarily indicate true widths. ** Metallic Screen Fire Assay Results P = Assays Still Pending Full Table of Assays will be provided on the company's website.

The Company has implemented a quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) program to ensure sampling and analysis of all exploration work is conducted in accordance with the CIM Exploration Best Practices Guidelines. The drill core is sawn in half with one-half of the core sample dispatched to Actlabs facility located in Dryden, Ontario. The other half of the core is retained for future assay verification, and/or metallurgical testing. Other QA/QC procedures include the insertion of blanks and Canadian Reference Standards for every tenth sample in the sample stream. A quarter core duplicate is assayed every 20th sample. The laboratory has its own QA/QC protocols running standards and blanks with duplicate samples in each batch stream. Additional checks are routinely run on anomalous values including gravimetric analysis and pulp metallic screen fire assays. Gold analysis is conducted by lead collection, fire assay with atomic absorption and/or gravimetric finish on a 50 gram sample. Check assays are conducted at a secondary ISO certified laboratory (in this case Accurassay located in Thunder Bay, Ontario).

To learn more about Treasury Metals, please visit the Company's website at www.treasurymetals.com.

Source: Treasury Metals
LifeStyle

The best LifeStyle shows are right here, from Australia and around the world. Catch up with the experts on home design and interiors, food and cooking, the property market, and get fresh ideas with the savviest of renovators. Whether you need inspiration for cooking up a storm, to refresh a tired room, or tips to sell your property, Foxtel LifeStyle will always something new for you to watch. Enjoy your favourite experts like Andrew Winter and Neale Whitaker, or Deb Hutton and Jamie Oliver live or On Demand.

Get Foxtel
Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2016 > BRICS-BIMSTEC Outreach may pave the way for Regional Integration, (...)

by Ashok B. Sharma

This article was written before the BRICS-BIMSTEC Outreach programme but is still relevant.

Leaders of the group of emerging economies, BRICS, are meeting in Goa and India being the host country has rightly planned an Outreach programme with the leaders of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral and Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). The initiative of inviting regional leaders for the Outreach programme began with South Africa at the 5th BRICS Summit, followed by Brazil by inviting Latin American leaders in the next Summit and subsequently Russia invited leaders of the SCO and Eurasian Union at the Ufa Summit. The practice has given an unique opportunity to the leaders of BRICSthat consti-tute Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and represent four continentsto interact with regional leaders of the host country.

India took over the BRICS presidency from February 16 this year and Prime Minister Narendrabhai Damodardas Modi has rightly planned the Outreach meeting with the BIMSTEC leaders from five South Asian countries and two South-East Asian neighbours. Prime Minister Modi had planned the integration of South Asian countries by inviting the leaders of the SAARC nations at his oath-taking ceremony in 2014. He announced priority to South Asia in his Neigh-bourhood First policy. However, later the initiative did not fructify much with Pakistan posing as a roadblock.

Signs of cracking in South Asian integration were evident in the 18th SAARC Summit in Kathmandu where three slated agreements, namely, on motor vehicle cooperation, railway connectivity and cooperation in electricity trade could not be signed at the venue. However, the agreement on electricity cooperation was signed with the intervention of the host, the then Nepalese Prime Minister, Sushil Koirala, at the Retreat of the leaders at Dhulikhel. Subsequently, under the sub-regional cooperation mandated by the SAARC Charter, an agreement on motor vehicle cooperation was signed amongst Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (BBIN).

The 19th SAARC Summit slated in Islamabad had to be deferred owing to the reported ceasefire violation along India-Pakistan border, terrorist attacks on the Indian air base at Pathankot and the Army base at Uri. New Delhi had to avenge these attacks by conducting surgical strikes on terrorist bases in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. India, Bangladesh, Afghani-stan, Bhutan pulled out of the SAARC Summit followed by Sri Lanka. Afghanistan and Bangla-desh have also accused Pakistan time and again for export of terror.

Integration of South Asia has, thus, become a dream for some sceptics. They believe that SAARCs march towards a common customs union and an economic union would continue to remain a distant possibility for times to come. The SAARC Free Trade Area (SAFTA), already in operation, has not met with much success as the official intra-regional trade remains around $ 22 billion a year, though trade through unofficial channels continues unabated. If the figure of unofficial trade is added up to the official, the total may be around $ 60 billion. This shows the potentiality of the region.

South Asia is the third largest economy in terms of GDP on the basis of purchasing power parity after the US and China. It hosts 21 per cent of the worlds population on three per cent of the global land mass. Though the trade relations between both have improved in recent years with the Pakistan Commerce Ministry moving from positive to negative list for imports to facilitate the entry of more Indian goods, still much needs to be done. Over a decade back India had accorded the most favoured nation (MFN) status to Pakistan in matters of trade, but the latter has yet to reciprocate. Islamabad was thinking of giving non-discriminatory market access (NDMA) to Indian goods and at the same time is yet to allow Indian goods to pass through its territory to reach Afghanistan.

The big question is: for how long will the South Asian integration be held hostage? Is there a way out? Yes. India, which is a major country in the region, shares borders with all countries with the exception of Afghanistan, which shares its borders with Pakistan. Hence, New Delhi should play a more proactive role in deeper integration of South Asia and work out the plans with all the countries that share the same borders. Regarding integration with Afgha-nistan, India should explore the possibility of using the Chabahar port in Iran to reach goods and services to Afghanistan by the rail and land route. Rightly this possibility is being explored. Regarding, Maldives, India and Sri Lanka a sub-regional cooperation can be worked out under the SAARC Charter similar to that of BBIN.

However, BIMSTECthat consists of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and two ASEAN countries, Myanmar and Thailandcan supple-ment SAARCs regional integration and act as an effective bridge between South Asia and South-East Asia.

BIMSTEC is much younger to SAARC which is around 30 years old. It has some definite positive achievements to its credit. It brings together 1.5 billion people amounting to 21 per cent of the world population and a combined GDP of $ 2.5 trillion. But unfortunately, BIMSTEC so far has had only three Summit-level meetings since its formation in June 1997 in Bangkok. Only recently it had got its Secretariat which is rightly situated in Bangladesh. The present leadership in Dhaka under Sheikh Hasina is very proactive in fostering regional integration not only in SAARC but also in BIMSTEC. The last BIMSTEC Summit was in Nay Pyi Taw in Myanmar last year and the next is scheduled to be hosted in Nepal.

A new democratic government in place in Myanmar may prove beneficial for regional cooperation. The architect of democracy in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, is slated to come for the BRICS-BIMSTEC Outreach Summit. Further, as Sheikh Hasina is determined to ensure regional cooperation, the Myanmar-Bangladesh-India gas pipeline can become a reality. New Delhi also needs to do a bit for Dhaka in matters of sharing waters of river Teesta. Bangla-desh, Bhutan and other BIMSTEC countries have assured to act on counter-terro-rism in the region. India, by striking electricity generation and sharing agreements with Nepal and Bhutan other than initiating sub-regional agreement of Mekong-Ganga Cooperation that includes Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, has set an outstanding example.

Unlike SAARC, BIMSTEC has no written charter of its own and is, therefore, more flexible in nature. It has identified 14 priority areas where a member-country takes the lead. India is the lead country for transport and communi-cation, tourism, environment and disaster management, counter-terrorism and trans-national crime, Bangladesh for trade and investment and has circulated a concept paper on climate change. Bhutan is the lead country for cultural cooperation, Myanmar for energy and agriculture cooperation, and Nepal has taken up the issue of cooperation in poverty alleviation. Sri Lanka is the lead country for technology cooperation and Thailand is for cooperation in fishery, public health and people-to-people contacts.

The BIMSTEC Transport Infrastructure and Logistics Study (BTILS) has identified as many as 100 projects that would promote connectivity within the region. These projects are to be funded by the Asian Development Bank. Apart from these, there are the Kaladan Multi-Modal Project that would connect India to ASEAN countries and the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, both of which are expected to be completed. There is also the ESCAP dream project of an Asian Highway.

Among BRICS countries, particularly Russia, India and China (RIC) can play an effective role in Asian connectivity; India has floated the concept of North-South Corridor to increase trade connectivity between major cities such as Mumbai, Moscow, Tehran, Baku, Bandar Abbas, Astrakhan, Bandar Anzali. China has its own plans for connectivity under the One Belt One Road concept and Maritime Silk Route. Though India and China have differences over the boundary dispute and issue of terrorism, Beijing is cooperative in matters of regional and economic development. It has floated the idea of a BRICS free trade agreement. Also among the BRICS countries, India, Brazil, South Africa (IBSA) can connect South Asia with Africa and Latin America. Thus the BRICS-BIMSTEC Outreach programme can be an excellent oppor-tunity for regional integration in South Asia in particular.

The author is a senior columnist writing on strategic and policy issues in several Indian and international newspapers and magazines. He can be contacted at e-mail: ashokbsharma[at]gmail.com
Were excited to announce that metalbulletin.com is now part of fastmarkets.com.

A new look and an improved experience means you can still stay ahead of this fast-moving metals 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.
Jurickson Profar could be one of the Rangers biggest trade chips this offseason in their search for starting pitching, writes MLB.coms T.R. Sullivan, although GM Jon Daniels spoke highly of Profar and said he expects him to be with the team next year. As we sit here today, I expect him to be a part of the club in a winning role, said Daniels of the 23-year-old Profar, who missed both 2014 and 2015 due to shoulder injuries but returned to play 90 games for Texas in 2016. The former No. 1 overall prospect batted just .239/.321/.338 in 307 plate appearances while playing first base, second base, shortstop, third base and left field. Daniels did acknowledge that hes aware of Profars desire to play shortstop on an everyday basis, though theres no avenue for him to do that with Elvis Andrus coming off a career year. However, as Daniels noted, the increase in roster versatility around the league has allowed utility players to effectively become regulars  a role that Profar could hold next year. Profar is under control through the 2019 season.

More from the division
His net worth is over $18.3 billion, he is the wealthiest man in Africa and his investment cut across different industries in the continent of Africa and other parts of the world. In the near, Arsenal fans shouldnt be surprised if Dangote becomes the majority shareholder in your club as he hasnt hidden his love for the club.

He is arguably one of Nigerias most priced export to the world. He has mentored many and at the same time young Nigerian entrepreneurs want to be like him. But there is a caveat, Dangote did not get to where he is today by mere bravado. He started in 1978 and currently operates in sub-Saharan Africa. It took a lot of sacrifice and hard work. So, do you want to be like Dangote? If yes, here are 5 things you must know.

Stay focused and believe

There are uncountable things that distract young entrepreneurs. If you are not disciplined and focused you will definitely derail or go off tangent. In a country like Nigeria where the business environment is a bit unfriendly, being focused is not negotiable. Electricity will be interrupted, and government bureaucracy will frustrate you, dont lose hope. Keep believing. Things will work out like it worked out for Dangote!

Take Baby steps

Dangote Group of Companies wasnt built in a day. It was a gradual and painstaking process that require years of sacrifice and denial. So, to be a Dangote, you must take baby steps no matter how minute it may be. Spend wisely, and celebrate success moderately. And before you know it, your business name will be on the pages of newspapers.

Know when expansion

Depending on how dogged you are and manage your finances, you should know when your business has outgrown its baby steps. When your business is ready, make the expansion gradual. The mantra think global and local should be your strategy.

Dont be afraid to take risk or fail

The fear of failure has prevented some entrepreneurs from taking risks. Risk is very good as far as it is not foolhardy. Shelve your fear as a budding business man. It is good to be cautious but dont be overly cautious that you refuse to important business decisions because you are afraid of its outcome. For Dangote, his textile business crashed in the 1990s. He had no choice than to let go 6400 workers and shut down his business.

Dont focus on a single market or product

Dangote was a trading. After expanding trading business, he didnt stop there. He diversified into other businesses like banking, cement, and oil and gas. In fact he Dangote recently acquired Twister BV, a gas processing plant in the Netherlands.

Damilola Faustino

Freelance Content Developer
Actor Agya Koo has rubbished rumours on social media over his alleged dealings in illicit drugs, saying it is politically motivated.

The story went viral on social media after news broke out that the actor has been arrested in the United Kingdom, where he was trading drugs.

In an interview with Roman Father on Atinka FM's mid-morning show dubbed Adwuma oo, Agya Koo debunked the allegations and said those who peddled the falsehood did so because he has thrown his weight behind the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

According to him, he has not travelled abroad for quite some time now and the pictures used in tarnishing his image were taken about eight months ago.

Agya Koo further lamented the politics of dispute going in the country where Ghanaians abuse and belittle people, particularly celebrities who support politicians.

He cited the just-ended US elections, stating that many celebrities openly declared their support for Hilary Clinton but had no attack or whatsoever from the opposition.
Sorry, we can't find the content you're looking for at this URL.
Harare (AFP) - A Zimbabwean high court has dropped charges against the professional hunter, Theo Bronkhorst, who led the expedition that killed prized lion Cecil last year, his lawyer said Friday.

"The high court has said the charges were flawed and, therefore, should be set aside," lawyer Perpetua Dube told AFP.

She said the judge had ruled Thursday that the charges "did not constitute an offence.

"It's a great relief for Mr Bronkhorst," said Dube.

The high court ruling followed an application by Bronkhorst's lawyer for a review of a previous decision by a magistrate's court to have him tried over the 2015 hunt which led to the death of the iconic lion renowned for its distinctive black mane.

The hunt provoked worldwide outrage after it emerged that Cecil not only was a popular attraction for visitors to famed Hwange National Park, but that he wore a collar as part of an Oxford University research project.

Bronkhorst, 53, had been charged with "failing to prevent an illegal hunt" when American trophy hunter, dentist Walter Palmer, paid $55,000 to shoot the lion with a bow and arrow in July last year.

Zimbabwe decided not to charge Palmer after it emerged he had legal papers allowing him to hunt.

Bronkhorst denied any wrongdoing, saying he had the required permits to kill an elderly lion that was outside the national park boundaries. Cecil, who was 13 years old, was killed outside the reserve, which is not fenced.
Malian military coup leader Amadou Sanogo was arrested in November 2013 after handing over power to a transitional regime in a deal brokered by the Economic Community of West African States. By Issouf Sanogo (AFP/File)

11.11.2016 LISTEN

Bamako (AFP) - An army officer who led Mali's 2012 coup against then president Amadou Toumani Toure will stand trial on November 30 for murder and collusion over the massacre of soldiers who opposed the takeover.

The coup headed by Amadou Sanogo toppled what had been heralded as one of west Africa's most stable democracies and precipitated the fall of northern Mali to Al-Qaeda-linked groups until a French-led military operation forced them out.

The court said it would hear "the case of Amadou Sanogo and several others accused of kidnapping, murder and collusion."

The trial would take place in Sikasso, southern Mali, AFP learnt late Friday.

After Sanogo and his military junta seized power in the largely desert nation in March 2012, several dozen paratroopers known as the "Red Berets" who had supported the ousted president were seized.

The regiment had mounted an unsuccessful counter-coup a month after Sanogo toppled Toure.

By December 2012, almost 30 of the missing soldiers' bodies were found in ditches near Kati, a garrison town outside the capital Bamako, where Sanogo had set up his headquarters.

Sanogo was arrested in November 2013 after handing over power to a transitional regime in a deal brokered by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

If convicted, he could face the death penalty in line with Malian law.

Sanogo was referred for trial in December last year over the "Red Berets" affair, along with former defence minister Yamoussa Camara and former army chief Dahirou Dembele.

The head of an association for victims' families told AFP they were glad to see Sanogo finally come to trial.

"We want to know what happened. We want to know how our fathers were taken away, how they ended up in a mass grave," said Amadou Kante.

During their brief rule, Sanogo and his allies were also accused of violence against politicians, journalists and prominent members of civil society.
A group of UN human rights experts* has condemned a violent clampdown on a peaceful protest in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, while urging the authorities to investigate claims of excessive use of force and arbitrary arrest  both against demonstrators and journalists  and to hold all perpetrators accountable.

The demonstrators were protesting against alleged government corruption when police used teargas and batons to disperse them. A number of people are reported to have been injured or detained during the incident on 3 November.

Interference with the right to freedom of peaceful assembly is inexcusable at any time, but it is especially repugnant when demonstrators are calling for government accountability, the experts said. Protesters may sometimes raise uncomfortable truths, but holding people in power to account is a central function of peaceful assemblies in a democracy.

The experts also expressed alarm at the timing of the crackdown, less than a year before Kenyans elect a new president in August 2017. They said creating an environment where opinions could be expressed peacefully was key to avoiding a repeat of the wave of violence which followed the disputed presidential poll in 2007.

Beating protesters does not make their grudges go away. Rather, it intensifies them, because it sends the message that the government does not care, they stressed. This approach does not foster a culture of dialogue; it fosters a culture of violence, which is exactly the opposite of what Kenya needs right now.

The UN independent experts also expressed grave concern over reports that police had attacked journalists covering the protest, in some cases damaging their equipment.

International law protects the right of everyone  including journalists and human rights defenders to observe, monitor and report on such events, the experts said. It also imposes a duty on States to protect the rights of monitors to do their jobs, even if the gatherings turn violent. Attacking journalists who perform this important public duty is simply unfathomable.

The UN Special Rapporteurs called on the Kenyan authorities to respect the demonstrators fundamental rights at future protests, and noted that they would be watching developments closely.

(*) The experts: Mr Maina Kiai, Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, Mr. David Kaye, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and Mr. Michel Forst, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders.
UNCTAD and the European Union are discussing a wide-reaching technical assistance and training programme for national experts in Angola's Ministry of Trade, worth 5.5 million ($6.1 million).

As part of its strategy of cooperation with Angola, the EU provides support to enhance the Angolan trade capacity through measures such as technical assistance to the ministry of trade, national experts, trade finance and logistics, small business development, and trade facilitation.

One component of this EU support covers "Train for Trade", for which a larger programme with UNCTAD was signed already two years ago.

In this context, UNCTAD is preparing an implementing project. The overall goal of the four-year programme is to boost Angola's capacity to design and implement national policies on trade, investment, and services in order that the country of 22 million people can unlock new trade opportunities outside its dominant oil sector.

"Trade is a core ingredient of growth and jobs, and falling oil prices mean oil-rich countries such as Angola need support to diversify away from oil," UNCTAD's Deputy Secretary-General, Joakim Reiter, said, soon after meeting with Nils Behrndt, Chef de Cabinet of Neven Mimica, European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development.

"We're delighted to support Angola and are in close contact with the European Commission as regards their support to the forthcoming project, which ultimately will help many in Angola to trade their way out of poverty," he added.

Set to launch in early 2017, the four-year programme, called the EU-UNCTAD Joint Programme for Angola, will train national experts on trade policy and negotiations, trade finance and logistics, small business development, trade facilitation and the scoping of non-oil trade opportunities.

"The EU is actively supporting Angola to tap the significant potential of trade for the sustainable development of the country. On training of the key personnel as one key element of this support we're keen to cooperate with UNCTAD and await the detailed project proposal swiftly," said Nils Behrndt, Chef de Cabinet of Neven Mimica, European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognises that international trade is an important mechanism through which many of the specific goals and targets that have been agreed can be achieved.

The programme will leverage both the growing role of multilateral trade agreements, regional trading blocs, and the private sector too.

According to World Bank data, Angola's oil exports accounted on average for 97% of Angolan exports over the past ten years. But falling oil prices have had an impact. In 2014, Angola's oil exports brought in $60.2 billion in revenues to the country. In 2015, however, Angola received $33.4 billion, a 44.5% decline.
By Elizabeth Kankam-Boadu

Kumasi, November 10, GNA - The Ashanti Region Early Election Warning and Response Group (REEWARG), has urged Body builders (Machomen) in the country to use their strong clout and brawn to help build as well as protect the peace in the country before, during and after the upcoming December 7. General elections.

The REEWARG, together with the Ashanti Regional Peace Council (RPC), said it had identified the role of body-builders in peace-building (those who refused to be hired to commit mayhem), so essential because of the admiration they attracted from the youth in the communities.

'This could be used positively when you act as peace ambassadors and be part of the on-going national peace discourse, to help maintain a peaceful atmosphere in the election period and after'.

The advice came when the REEWARG/RPC sub-committee on youth and religious groups, met with the Kumasi-based Macho Men for Peace and Justice Group at the Sunset Hotel in Kumasi, as part of REEWARG's bid to engage selected youth groups in the Region to prevent the occurrence of electoral violence in the Region.

The sub-committee chaired by Professor Imoro Braimah, with Ms. Harriet Takyi, Reverend Father George Gyasi, Mr. George Agbee and Reverend Emmanuel Amoah Badu as members, the commitee members took turns to advise the group to resist the temptation of being used as politicians to foment trouble whiles also staying out of anything violent.

The youth body builders were also admonished to endeavour to erase the negative connotations and perceptions about body-builders and live out their avowed aims and objectives-'peace' and 'Justice'.

During the peace interactive session held on the theme 'Non-violent means of peace building-a corporate responsibility", the 'machomen' had the opportunity to watch documentary videos on electoral violent conflicts in Sierra Leone and La Cote D'Ivoire.

Mr. Gilbert Ntiamoah Polos, President of the Peace and justice body builders, thanked the REEWAARG for the engagement and said his group, non-partisan, formed in 2012, was not part of the other ones residing in the ghettoes, who were hired to perpetrate violent atrocities during election periods. GNA
10.11.2016 LISTEN

By Albert Futukpor, GNA

Tamaligu (N/R), Nov. 10, GNA - The Ghana Commercial Agriculture Project (GCAP) has started yielding results as beneficiaries have begun harvesting about 1.733 metric tonnes of paddy rice valued at GH2.2 million from the Nasia-Nabogo Inland Valley (NNIV).

This quantity of rice, which is being harvested from a 385 hectare field in the NNIV, formed the first phase of the project, which was planted in July 2016, by six beneficiary companies including Libga Farms, Banse Farms, M-galant Farms, Emtrade Farms, Ask/Dramani Farms and Satco Farms.

The rice will be processed by AVNASH Limited, a local rice processing plant located at Nyankpala, near Tamale.

Mr Henry Kerali, World Bank Country Director, who visited one of the project sites ahead of the harvesting at Tamaligu, described it as 'the start of a dream come true' by boosting local production and increasing incomes for rural households.

GCAP, which is implemented by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) with funding from the World Bank and United States Agency for International Development, seeks to amongst others ensure increased agricultural production to improve incomes of farmers.

Mr Kerali said the World Bank would continue to support initiatives to increase agricultural production in the country to accelerate progress for all.

Engineer Joseph Boamah, Chief Director of MoFA, said government was committed to increasing local rice production adding that the country has currently achieved a 60 per cent increase on local rice production up from 30 per cent in 2008.

Engineer Boamah said government would establish an agricultural mechanization centre at the NNIV to address amongst others machinery needs of rice farmers to improve productivity.

Dr Sumani Alhassan, Director of Libga Farms, thanked all stakeholders for their support which ensured the success of the project.

Meanwhile, GCAP will roll out the second phase of the project next year where a total of 3,000 hectares of rice will be cultivated.

GNA
By Julius K. Satsi, GNA

Accra, Nov. 10, GNA - Madam Mary Akutei, the President of the Ada Songor Salt Women Association (ASSWA), has called on the Government to consult the communities for any development project in and around the Songor Lagoon.

Madam Akutei said: 'If the government is planning to bypass the communities around the Songor Lagoon to do something fishy it will not succeed,' adding that it was prudent to consult the community members on any development agenda.

She said the Government's inability to help them make the most out of their mineral resource was having a negative impact on the community.

Madam Akutei was speaking at a forum organised by the ASSWA on Wednesday at Sege in the Greater Accra Region on the theme: 'Songor for All.'

She said salt winning was the only means of livelihood for the people during the dry season as they were unable to farm at this time but 'it is rather unfortunate that today the Songor Lagoon is no longer playing that role due to government policies.'

'We have the right to protect our natural resources. Government is attempting to siphon the resource to the detriment of the community members,' she said.

She reminded the Government of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) Law 287 which shows that community members must benefit from the Songor Lagoon but not foreigners.

'President Mahama, kindly look through the books and implement the laws,' Madam Akutei said.

Mr Albert Apetorgbor, an opinion leader and an advocate of the Songor project, told the Ghana News Agency, under the GNA Tracks Election 2016, that since the Songor Lagoon was discovered by the Cubans as a rich natural resource for the country there had been various attempts to sideline the indigenes.

He said the Government should fund the development of the Lagoon after which concessions should be given to the indigenes and any multinational.

The GNA Tracks Election 2016 Project is being sponsored by Ghana Oil Company Limited (GOIL), the nation's foremost indigenous oil marketing company.

GOIL - Good Energy comes with a Smile.

GNA
By Stephen Asante, GNA

Kumasi, Nov 10, GNA - The European Union (EU) has signaled its readiness to send a team of election observers to assess the conduct of next month's presidential and parliamentary polls.

Mr. Sotirios Bazikamwe, a Governance Advisor of the Union, said more than 200 observers would be deployed on voting day - fan out across polling centres, nationwide.

Addressing a meeting of the Kumasi metropolitan inter-party dialogue committee (IPAC), he said an advance team to monitor the election campaign of the various political parties ahead of the election, was already in.

The meeting, organized by the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) and sponsored by the EU, was attended by representatives of the parties.

The goal was to promote healthy political discourse, remove needless suspicion and tension.

Mr. Bazikamwe indicated that the EU had over the years' forged closer relationship with Ghana, and as partners in development, it was interested in the growth of the nation's democracy.

He applauded the country for upholding democratic values and he expressed confidence that it would continue to work hard to safeguard the peace and ensure the successful conduct of the polls.

He underlined the EU's commitment to support developing nations to build a more stable society to underpin socio-economic growth.

Mr. Yakubu Alhassan, Ashanti Regional Director of the NCCE, said it would continue to deepen the conversation with all key actors - political parties and youth groups to protect the peace, before, during and after the December 07 election.

He asked the parties to step back from aggressive political rhetoric and to make sure that the election campaign was substantive on message.

They should tell voters how they were going to address felt needs of the people, whose mandate they were seeking to govern.

GNA
The flagbearer of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Akufo-Addo, has asked President John Mahama to call his Ministers for Local Government and Sports, Collins Dauda and Nii Lantey Vaderpuye to order, over some comments he considers an attacks on members of the NPP.

According to Akufo-Addo, the President has told the world that, Ghana is very peaceful, yet in his cabinet, around the cabinet table at which he is presiding, are people who are to be instigated for violence  purveyors of violence, sitting around his cabinet table.

He doesn't care. He doesn't have the strength of character to reprimand them, and tell them to stop what they are doing. He is simply looking on unconcerned. Does this mean he endorses this kind of conduct?

Akufo-Addo made the comment while campaigning at Hwidiem in the Asutifi South Constituency of the Brong Ahafo Region, on Thursday.

Akufo-Addo made the comment on the back of what he calls consistent attacks against NPP members in Asutifi South, allegedly being perpetrated by Collins Dauda, who also is the Member of Parliament for the area, as well as a recent assault on NPP members in the Odododiodioo Constituency, allegedly led by Nii Lante Vanderpuye.

Nana Akufo-Addo noted that, this kind of leadership, being displayed by President Mahama, is not the kind needed to move Ghana forward and return the country on the path of progress and prosperity.

No one should see himself or herself above the law. We don't want any trouble in Ghana. Those who think that violence, through the use of guns and machetes is the only path to which they can succeed, should have a good rethink, because it will not succeed, he added.

The NPP Presidential Candidate further rebuked Collins Daudu for the attacks in the Asutifi South constituency.

You [Collins Dauda] are contesting a woman, and you're having to employ guns, harmful weapons and the use of macho men in order to win? It is a shame and a disgrace. What kind of a man are you then? You are employing all of these shameful tactics, not against a fellow man, but, against a woman. This is a disgrace. When such things happen, it means you have already lost, he said.

Nana Akufo-Addo further urged the constituents to vote massively for the NPP in the upcoming polls on December 7.

Until the ballots are cast and counted, we should not be complacent. If you want change, you have to go and vote for the change, he charged.



By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @AlloteyGodwin
Renowned Naturopathic Physician, Dr Ofei Agyemang, has said in order to avoid conflicts and for societies to thrive in harmony there is the need to de-radicalize people who erroneously hold that some religions are superior to others.

The harmony we seek to achieve in society will only come when we understand that we are one people with regard to our spirituality, and that we can access God through Oneness, since the creator is the God of all religions, he says.

Harmony, Oneness, Life after Death and other principles are what to expect to be discussed on 4th December at the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) Hall in Accra when renowned speakers join Dr. Ofei Agyemang to throw more light on the topic.

Briefing the press on the essence of the lecture, Dr Ofei bemoaned the spate of bombings, assassinations, murders, kidnappings, rape and various atrocities committed against innocent people throughout the world in the pursuit of power, wealth and religion.

We are dedicating this lecture to these victims, with the view to appealing to what we have in common with the perpetrators of such acts, our Divine Nature, to help the perpetrators refrain from such acts. It is erroneous for people to believe that committing suicide makes one worthy in the sight of God. We are not condemning such people, but we believe that with illumination, we shall all come to terms with the Oneness of our being he said.

Dr Ofei Agyemang observed that illumination can only be achieved through education, explaining that if we see each other as one people, one's religion, race, caste, sex and colour will be of no relevance.

He called on the general public to attend the lecture, since he believes it will promote the resolution of almost all conflicts within all relationships, domestic, social and international, going forward. It will help us understand the origin of humanity's oneness, concluding that until we understand such Oneness, it will be difficult to avoid conflicts in society since most of us are controlled by our physical, mental and emotional bodies instead of our spiritual nature.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com
Farmers can expect to have improved all year round yield of yam in the coming farming harvest seasons.

That is an assurance by the Director of Crop Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Dr Stella Ama-Ennin.

She spoke at the launch of an initiative on pre-basic seed yam production.

It is known as the Yam Improvement for Income and Food Security Aeroponics Screen House and System.

Aeroponics is the process of growing plants in mid-air in a moist environment without the use of soil.

The Technology improves food varieties devoid of diseases.

The solar-powered technology will complement efforts by the CRI to distribute improved varieties along the yam value chain.

It involves generating yam seeds from vines of crops like potatoes.

Dr Aba-Ennin is optimistic the technology will improve the livelihood of farmers and Agricultural GDP of the country.

In Ghana Yam is important traditionally, its a food security crop and also an export crop. She says, this method will cut down the cycle of the seed.

Project leader, Dr Norbert Maroya, urged seed producing companies to get involved to make seeds available to farmers.
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has condemned what he says is President John Mahamas lack of concern as his appointees perpetrate various crimes.

The President is going all over the world talking about Ghana, talking about peace and talking about democracy. And in his cabinet, around the cabinet table at which he is presiding, are people who instigate violence  purveyors of violence, sitting around his cabinet table. He doesnt care. He doesnt have the strength of character to reprimand them and tell them to stop what they are doing. He is simply looking on unconcerned. Does this mean he endorses this kind of conduct?

The 2016 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, said these during his 2016 electioneering campaign in Hwidiem, in the Asutifi South constituency of the Brong Ahafo Region, on Thursday, November 10.

Nana Akufo-Addo made these comments on the back of consistent attacks against NPP members in Asutifi South allegedly being perpetrated by Hon. Collins Dauda, MP for the constituency and Minister for Local Government.

Also, some NPP members in Odododiodioo constituency were assaulted by persons believed to be from the camp of MP for the constituency and Minister for Youth and Sports, Nii Lante Vanderpuye.

Nana Akufo-Addo noted that President Mahama leadership style is not the type that will move Ghana forward and return the country to the path of progress and prosperity.

No one should see himself or herself above the law. We dont want any trouble in Ghana. Those who think that violence, through the use of guns and machetes, is the only path to which they can succeed should have a good rethink because it will not succeed, he added.

With residents of Hwidiem and surrounding towns living in fear as a result of atrocities and acts of intimidation being meted out to them by Hon. Collins Dauda, the NPP flagbearer condemned these acts, explaining that they have no place in a democracy.

Nana Akufo-Addo wondered what kind of man would resort to the use of violence against a woman in a contest.

You (Collins Dauda) are contesting a woman, and youre having to employ guns, harmful weapons and the use of macho men in order to win? It is a shame and a disgrace. What kind of a man are you then? You are employing all of these shameful tactics, not against a fellow man, but, against a woman. This is a disgrace. When such things happen, it means you have already lost, he said.

Nana Akufo-Addo was confident that, regardless of these shameful tactics being employed by Hon. Collins Dauda, residents of Hwidiem and Asutifi South will vote out the NDC, in both presidential and parliamentary elections.

The NPP flagbearer noted that the people of Asutifi South will not allow themselves to be cowed by violence, nor will they allow violent people to superintend over them. No one can be kept away from voting. Everybody is going to have the chance to cast their vote in this election.

Nana Akufo-Addo urged the electorate not to be complacent, in the belief that the NPP has already won the election.

We dont want that. Until the ballots are cast and counted, we should not be complacent. If you want change, you have to go and vote for the change, he concluded.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | GN
CEOs of the major telecom networks and tower companies in Ghana stormed the Kaneshie Market in Accra Thursday to commemorate five years of the Chamber of Telecommunications.

The CEOs include MTN Ghana boss, Ebenezer Asante, Tigo Ghana boss, Roshi Motman and Vodafone Ghana CEO, Yolanda Cuba, together with CEO of the Chamber, Kwaku Sakyi-Addo.

Airtel boss Lucy Quist was represented by a senior executive and the industry regulator, National Communication Authority was represented by Director of Consumer and Public Affairs, Nana Defie Badu.

The telco executives used the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Chamber to tell subscribers about mobile money, the importance of telecom towers and SIM registration.

The Chamber was launched five years ago by then Vice-President John Mahama, and it had Airtel, Expresso, MTN, Tigo & Vodafone as members; but tower companies ATC, Eaton & Helios have since 2015 joined the chamber.

Its establishment was in recognition that industry players were in a stronger position to make inputs to shape policy and the regulatory environment if they worked together.

The Chamber has, over the last five years, enabled key stakeholders, such as the government, industry regulators and lawmakers to engage telcos and tower companies together instead of as individual entities.

CEO of the Chamber, Kwaku Sakyi-Addo told the subscribers the market storm was all about the subscribers who have over the years patronised telecom services and provided important feedback to help telcos improve their services.

He said the theme for the fifth year commemoration was Empowering People, SIMpacting Lives," and it will spend the period earmarked for the celebration to emphasise how mobile telecoms has impacted the economy and empowered millions to realise their dreams since 1992 till date.

There are few industries that have such an intravenous effect on everyone whilst impacting the national economy, Sakyi-Addo said.

The Telco bosses spent quality time in direct engagements with the traders and buyers inside the market, listening to them and taking feedback on their respective services.

They spoke to them about the need to register their SIM cards, as required by law, or risk losing their numbers.

The CEOs also gave the subscribers helpful information about how to secure their mobile wallets, while encouraging more of them to sign up for mobile money and to be more accepting of towers in their communities because that is what carries their network service.

Kwaku Sakyi-Addo stressed the end for Ghanaians to register for mobile money and use it, saying five years from now, if we all register for mobile money, well be trading in this market mostly with mobile money and very little or no cash.

Meanwhile, during the five years, the Chamber has been here, the industry has seen substantial investment and growth.

SIM penetration has grown by nearly 70% to 134% compared with the national population.

Voice connection has grown by 15 million from 21 million in 2011 to over 36 million at the last count early this year, while mobile data connections, which stood at 8 million in 2011, is now more than 18 million.

Meanwhile, mobile money subscriptions have grown three-fold over ten periods, with its value of transactions growing exponentially from a few hundreds of millions of Ghana cedis to GHc35bn in 2015.

The telecommunications industry has created over 6,000 direct jobs and 1.6 million indirect jobs and paid nearly GHC5 billion in taxes as at 2015 year end.
11.11.2016 LISTEN

Our honored Professor Hollman, while he was still in Wittenberg, conferred the degree of Doctor of Philosophy on a Negro [Anton Wilhelm Amo] who proved his great talent both in his writings and in his lectures, and who later came to Berlin as counselor to the King. I have two of his treatises before me, of which one especially contains much unexpected and well-digested reading in the best physiological works of that time (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the Father of Physical Anthropology; see the latters Observations on the Bodily Conformation and Mental Capacity of the Negroes, Philosophical Magazine 3 (1799): 141-146; see also Andrej Krause Anton Wilhelm Amos Ontology, Philosophia Africana, Vol. 12, Issue 2, Fall 2009, p. 141-157).

Firstly, let us make it clear that it was through Kwame Nkrumahs influence and efforts in the 1960s that compelled the Germans to begin to recognize Anton Wilhelm Amo, the Gold Coasts/Ghanas pre-eminent philosopher and polymath, and his intellectual achievements. Put simply, we owe the revived memory of Amo due to Nkrumahs personal interventions, influence, efforts and vision. Of course both were Nzemas, two of Ghanas and Africas foremost philosophers. Nkrumah, just like William E. Abraham, wanted the man and his achievements celebrated.

Secondly, Kwame Anthony Appiah delivered this years Reith Lectures, part of it in Europe and one in particular in Accra, Ghana. Ex-President John Kufour and poet Atukwei Okai, one of Ghanas and Africas greatest poets, attended the presentation.

The title for Appiahs presentation is Mistaken Identities: Creed, Country, Color, Culture, a talk centered on Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759), his person, academic training, professorship, academic writings, importance in and to Enlightenment thinking, and the like.

Last but certainly not the least, a Ghanaweb commentator, Tekonline.org, drew our attention to this years Reith Lectures featuring Appiah (what we present here in a two-part series is an excerpt from the lecture series, four parts). In this learned and informed presentation, Appiah mentions a racist satirical play directed at Amo (but he did not mention racist satirical poems about Amo. The German jurist and professor at University of Halle Johann Ernst Philippi authored those poems; Amo also spoke English though Appiah also failed to mention this).

Finally, Amo was elected to the prestigious Dutch Academy of Flushing and other learned societies and his works covered all the important questions of the 18th century from epistemology, psychology of knowledge, political philosophy, ethics and ontology, philosophy of language, and hermeneutics to logic. In sum, he contributed significantly to the findings of German and European Enlightenment. As well, Gottfried Achenwall of Elbing, Amos friend and originator of statistics in Germany and one of the inventors of statistics, put together an album containing personal memorials of eminent men of science and learning including his [Amos] (May 5, 1740).

Interestingly enough, a full-size statue has been dedicated to him at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, in 1965. This university was one of the centers of German Enlightenment. Some of his works have also been translated from Latin into French, German, and English. Amo acted as devils advocate at the defense of numerous dissertationsMoses Abraham Wolff completed his studies at the University of Halle. His two known professors were Frederick Hoffman and Amo.

Amo later became a lecturer in medicine soon after obtaining a Masters Degree in Medicine. He also studied law, psychology (pneumatology), history, aesthetics, metaphysics, astronomy, physiology, science, theology, mathematics, hermeneutics, etc. Amo was also an educator (Readers should also read about Juan Latino (1518-1596), perhaps the first African scholar, poet, and professor to teach in a major European university). The University of Halle-Wittenberg has since 1994 been awarding the Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Prize for excellent academic achievements of students and postgraduates in honor of the black philosopher.

Amo and his works have since been at the center of international research and discourse on philosophy, race and racism, slavery historiography and history of slavery, philosophy of mind and logic, Enlightenment thinking and history, philosophy of education, etc. The irony however is that, in some academic circles in the West, he is largely seen as a Western philosopher, educator, theorist, and thinker than an African philosopher and thinker per se. The other important fact is that African, Asian, and Western academics, writers, historians, philosophers, and scholars have all written about him and his works.

How interesting!

FINAL NOTES TO OUR READERS

Those interested in the topic can read more about Anton Wilhelm Amo in African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources, an influential academic text edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Abu Abarry, Jacob E. Mabes Anton Wilhelm Amo: The Intercultural Background of His Philosophy, Barry Hallens A Short History of African Philosophy, Peter Kings One Hundred Philosophers: A Guide to the Worlds Greatest Thinkers, and Paulin J. Hountondjis African Philosophy: Myth and Reality and The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa.

In the text edited by Asante and Abarry readers should look for William Abrahams essay, The Life and Times of Anton Wilhelm Amo, The first Black African Philosopher in Europe. See also Abrahams essay Anton Wilhelm Amo in Kwasi Wiredus A Companion to African Philosophy, the Chapter 12 of Kwesi Wiredus Amos Critique of Descartes Philosophy of Mind in the afore-mentioned volume, Lewis R. Gordons Black European Thinkers and Trajectories of Emancipation (Conference Presentation and Debates, International Conference, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2009), Lewis R. Gordons Introduction to Africana Philosophy, and German/English publication of Amos texts by the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (Title: Anton Wilhelm Amo Antonius Gvilielmus Amo Afer of Axim in Ghana: Translation of his Works).

See also Kwame Nkrumahs Consciencism: The Philosophy and Ideology of Decolonization, Uzodinma Nwalas Anton Wilhelm Amos Treatise on the Art of Philosophizing Soberly and Accurately (With Commentaries), Kwame Anthony Appiah/Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s edited volume Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Robert L. Arringtons A Companion to the Philosophers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s Figures in Black and The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, Gates/Emmanuel Akyeampongs edited volume (Vol. 6) Dictionary of African Biography, Heiner Klemme/Manfred Kuehns The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, etc. (For a more comprehensive bibliography on Anton Wilhelm Amo, readers should consult Hakim Ali/Caroline Bresseys edited volume Belonging in EuropeThe African and the Work).

Finally, David Henrij Galandat, a Swiss physician who met Amo in person in Axim, covered the him, the latter, in his memoirs.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: MISTAKEN IDENTIDIES: CREED, COUNTRY, COLOR, CULTURE

In 1707, a boy about five years old boarded a ship at Axim on the African Gold Coast, a long mornings drive west from Accra, where we meet today.

The ship belonged to the Dutch West India Company, and after many grueling weeks, it arrived in Amsterdam. But that wasnt the end of the boys long journey. For he then had to travel another 500 or so kilometers to Wolfenbuttel, a German town midway between Amsterdam and Berlin.

It was the home of Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, who was a major patron of the European Enlightenment.

The Dukes library boasted one of the most magnificent book collections in the world, and his librarian was the great philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibnitz, an inventor of the calculus and among the most powerful minds of his century.

This was a glittering, dazzling center of Enlightenment rationalism: what was this boy from Ghana doing there?

Well apparently, he had been given to the Duke as a present. We dont know what the boys status was exactly: Had he been enslaved? Was he sent by missionaries for a Christian education?

What we do know is that Duke Anton Ulrich took a special interest in him, arranging for his education, and conferring on him, at his baptism, both his own Christian name and that of his sons: so the young man came to be known as Anton Wilhelm Rudolph.

For the Duke, the gift of an African child was an opportunity to conduct an Enlightenment experiment, exploring what would happen to an African immersed in modern European scholarship.

The young man from Axim received the familys patronage for three decades.

They were presumably aware of a similar experiment, which began a few years earlier, when Tsar Peter the Great of Russia took an African slave as his godson, naming him Hannibal. Hannibal became a successful Russian general, and was the great grandfather of Pushkin, the founder of modern Russian literature. They didnt know that was going to happen.

But Anton Wilhelm wasnt content to be an object of inquiry; he had inquiries of his own to conduct. Were not sure when Anton Wilhelm started using his Nzema name, Amo: at his confirmation, the church records call him Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Mohre; Mohr, or Moor, being one of the ways Germans then referred to Africans.

Later, though, he called himself Anton Wilhelm Amo Afer, using the word for African in Latin, the language of European scholarship. So he wanted to be known, then, as Amo the African.

Nowadays, we might call Amo a person of color, and we know that Enlightenment Europeans could be rather unenlightened when it came to color.

Immanuel Kant, the most influential European philosopher of the eighteenth century, once declared that the fact that someone was completely black from head to foot provided distinct proof that what he said was stupid. And, though it would be nice to report that such hierarchies of hue are merely of antiquarian interest, they have, of course, proved curiously persistent.

Consider the bestselling book on politics by a German author in the past decade, written by a then board member of the Deutsche Bundesbank no less, which suggests that Germany is being made less intelligentverdummt, is the expressive German wordby genetically inferior Muslim immigrants.

In the United States, where I live, the color line is an unhealed wound. In the past year, while the Black Lives Matter movement has sought to draw attention to black victims of state violence, white nativists have found a Presidential candidate to rally behind.

And so questions arise: Why have the divisions of color proved so resistant to evidence and argument? Why did the Enlightenment spirit of rational inquiry fail to consign these hierarchies to the ash heap of history, alongside so many other discarded notions? What has gone wrong in the longstanding global conversation about color?

Lets retrace our steps. The experiment with our young African, three centuries ago, looks like a success.

Amo, the Dukes godson, educated with the children of the local aristocracy, clearly flourished at the local university, because he went on to study law at the University of Halle, then (as now) one of Germanys leading centers of teaching and research.

There, he wrote a thesis about the legal status of the Moor arguing that the European slave trade violated the principles of Roman law.

He soon added knowledge of medicine and astronomy to his training, and a few years later, moved to the University of Wittenberg, in Saxony, WHERE HE BECAME THE FIRST BLACK AFRICAN TO EARN A DOCTORAL DEGREE IN PHILOSOPHY.

When the ruler of Saxony came to visit, Amo was chosen to lead the students procession in his honor. His Wittenberg thesis, published in 1734, makes important criticisms of Descartes views of sensation.

And Amo, who knew Dutch, German, French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, went on to teach at two eminent institutions of higher learning, in Halle and in Jena.

And in 1738 he published an academic text, which won eminent admirers. The great physicist and philosopher Gotthelf Loescher, who examined his thesis at the University of Wittenberg, spoke of the Gold Coast as THE MOTHER...OF THE MOST AUSPICIOUS MINDS, and added (see SPECIAL NOTES FOR OUR READERS at the end of this article):

AMONG THESE AUSPICIOUS MINDS, YOUR GENIUS STANDS OUT ESPECIALLY, MOST NOBLE AND DISTINGUISHED SIR, SEEING THAT YOU HAVE EXCELLENTLY PROVED THE FELICITY AND SUPERIORITY OF GENIUS, SOLIDITY AND REFINEMENT IN LEARNING AND TEACHING, IN COUNTLESS EXAMPLES

ANTON WILHELM AMO GOES BACK HOME

As Anton Wilhelm Amo Afer knew, even benevolence has its limits. Reaching middle age, he decided that it was time to go home, and, in 1747, he made his way back to the Gold Coast, to the Nzema villages of his birth. It was a bold move.

Someone whod been raised in the heartland of the European Enlightenment and had built a scholarly career in some of the most prestigious seats of European learning, was now turning his back on the grand experiment he embodied and resolving to make a life in a land hed last glimpsed as a small child.

We can only guess why. There is some suggestion that increasing color prejudice in this period in Germanythe early stirrings of Europes racial fixationmay have caused him discomfort: a satirical play was performed in Halle in 1747 in which Astrine, a young German woman, refuses the amorous advances of an African philosophy teacher from Jena named Amo. My soul, Astrine insists, certainly cannot ever love a Moor. This work demonstrates that Amo was a famous figure in Halle.

But the rejection of the Moor is Astrines, not the authors; and some will conjecture that what drove him off was not racial prejudice but a broken heart.

We know a little more of what happened to him. A Dutch ships doctor met him in the mid-seventeen fifties at Axim.

His father and a sister were still alive and lived four days journey inland, the doctor reported. He also reported that Amo, whom he described as a great sage, had acquired the reputation of a soothsayer.

Both European sage and African soothsayer: Amo claimed the inheritance of the Enlightenment and an Nzema legacy.

Sometime later, he moved from Axim and went to live in Fort St. Sebastian, near the town of Shama, where he is buried. Today, we are bound to wonder: What did the soothsayer say he had learned from his long sojourn in the north?

And how did he explain his decision to leave behind everything he had built there? Its impossible not to wonder whether his was a flight from color consciousness, a retreat to a place where he would not be defined by his complexion. A place where Amo the African could just be plain Amo again.

Indeed, his odyssey asks us to imagine what he seems to have yearned for: a world free of racial fixations. It asks if we could ever create a world where color is merely a fact, not a fate. It asks us to contemplate another bold experimentone in which we gave up our racial fixations and abandoned a mistaken way of thinking that took off at just about the moment when Anton Wilhelm Amo was a well-known German philosopher at the height of his intellectual powers

SPECIAL NOTE FOR OUR READERS

A passage from an address made by Gotthelf Loescher, the professor who chaired Amos successful defense of this second dissertation in April 1734 gives some idea of the high regard in which he was held:

We proclaim Africa and its region of Guinea, separated by a very great distance from us, and formerly the Gold Coast, so called by Europeans on account of its abundant and copious yield of gold, but known by us as your fatherland, in which you first saw the light of day, the mother not only of many good things and treasures of nature but also of the most auspicious minds:

We proclaim her quite deservedly! Among these auspicious minds, your genius stands out particularly, most noble and distinguished Sir, seeing that you have excellently demonstrated felicity and superiority of genius, solidity and refinement of learning and teaching, in countless examples before now, and even in this university, with great honor in all worthy things, and now also in your present dissertation.

We shall return with Part 2.

REFERENCES

Amo, Anton Wilhelm (1703?-1753). Retrieved from http://www.blackpast.org/gah/amo-anton-wilhelm-1703-1753

For transcript presentation, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9/episodes/player

See also http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/reith3_colour.pdf

Anton Wilhelm Amo (1903-1950s)-Visions Between Slavery and Enlightenment, Between Europe and Africa. Retrieved from http://www.bayreuth-academy.uni-bayreuth.de/resources/Workshop-Amo_vorlaeufiges-Programm.pdf

Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Amo/Antonius Gvilielmus Amo, Afer of Axim (1703-c. 1759). Retrieved from http://authorscalendar.info/amo.htm
The New Patriotic Party's vice presidential candidate, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has debunked claim by the Vice-President, Amissah-Arthur that restoring allowances for teacher and nursing trainees will collapse the economy.

According to Dr. Bawumia, what is destroying the Ghanaian economy is the incompetence, mismanagement and corruption of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government.

Dr. Bawumia also took a swipe at the President John Mahama and his Vice-President over the government's confusing position on nursing trainee allowances.

Speaking at the Nalerigu Nurses Training College, Dr. Bawumia expressed shock at the constant contradictions of government officials on the allowances, saying in government, we will expose the incompetence of this NDC administration. There is nowhere where they have demonstrated as much incompetence as in the area of the Teacher and Nursing Training Allowances. They have demonstrated monumental incompetence.

Today, you do not really know what the policy of the NDC is as far as the issue of Training Allowances is concerned. First, they said they have cancelled the allowances, and as the election was getting close, they said they are going to restore the allowances. And there is now a clear conflict between the President and Vice-President over their policy on Nursing Training Allowances, he pointed out.

Responding to the claim made by the Vice-President on the same campus barely a week ago, Dr. Bawumia noted that the comment by the current Amissah-Arthur suggests that handlers of the economy still do not understand how the economy works.

So when the Vice-President came here and said that the allowances will destroy this economy, it simply means they do not understand the economy. What is destroying the economy is mismanagement, incompetence and corruption; that is what is destroying this economy, he said.

Dr. Bawumia is on the second part of his tour of the Northern Region. He has so far on this tour visited the Yunyoo, Bunkpurugu, Nalerigu-Gambaga and Yagaba-Kubore constituencies.



By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @AlloteyGodwin
Following pockets of election-related attacks in parts of the country, the National Elections Taskforce Committee has promised to get tough on violence ahead of the December polls.

Coordinator of the Taskforce, Chief Superintendent Benjamin Agordzor, said the relevant security agencies have been involved in the strategy to deal with criminal violence that is related to the general elections.

Irrespective of who is involved, the law must take its course. We are not looking at the person involved or from any political perspective or background, he said.

His comments on Newsnight on Joy FM on Thursday come on the back of a gun violence between the supporters of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Supporters of the two major parties clashed shortly after a mammoth rally had been organised by the NPP on Tuesday.

Both parties have provided conflicting accounts of what triggered the chaos but three people believed to be supporters of the NPP were arrested and remanded by the James Town Police which triggered another bout of chaos.

Greater Accra Regional Minister, Nii Laryea Afotey Agbo, who also heads the regional Security Command, told Joy News two supporters of the NDC were shot at close range from the back and are receiving treatment in the hospital.

According to him, the bullets had to be extracted from the bodies of the victims in a very painful operation.

Also, recently, the private bodyguard of the Independent Parliamentary Candidate for Sunyani East, Mr George Kumi is reported to have disrupted a debate organised by National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE) for Parliamentary Candidates contesting for the seat.

According to the report, shortly before the commencement of the debate, a violent clash ensued among supporters of the Independent Candidate and that of the NPP Candidate.

Speaking on the two incidents on Newsnight, Chief Superintendent Benjamin Agordzor said the Taskforce is on high alert to deal with such violence.

We are observing that very seriously. We have been speaking to the Regional Commander of Accra and other district commanders involved in this and we are satisfied with the action they have taken so far, he said.

He urged state institutions to involve the police in any elections-related activity.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | GN
11.11.2016 LISTEN

Preparations towards the 2nd Ghana CFO Awards have reached its top gear, as Instinct Wave gets set to celebrate and honour Mona Quartey, the Deputy Finance Minister and other top finance experts on the 18th November 2016 at the plush Movenpick Ambassador Hotel.

The Awards ceremony will recognize financial executives / teams whose outstanding leadership practices have raised the standards of accountability within the profession, showcased brilliancy in managing their organisations' wealth and supported the nation's economic growth .

It is opened to all CFOs and Finance Executives across all industry sectors contributing to their companies' financial growth as well as corporate organizations promoting financial leadership..

Speaking in press statement, Akin Naphtal, Instinct Wave CEO emphasised on the need to celebrate CFOs and leading finance experts .'Today's CFOs play diverse and challenging roles in corporate organisations. They preserve the assets of the organizations by minimizing risk and getting the books right, and run a tight finance operation that is efficient and effective. CFOs are strategists, helping to shape overall strategy and direction, and catalysts, instilling a financial approach and mind set throughout the organizations to help other parts of the business perform better. These varied roles make a CFO's job more complex than ever. Therefore It's very important that we celebrate and honour our finance experts He said.

The 2016 CFO Awards will also provide a platform for top CFOs, Head of Finance, high-level executives, analysts, academics, and pundits to gather and take part in conversations that shape the policy decisions of tomorrow in a more relaxed environment

The Awards which is powered by Instinct Wave is also the company behind the highly recognized Ghana Information Technology &Telecom Awards (GITTA), West African Telecom Summit & Expo, and Ghana Construction Awards.
Many Americans have and continue to express serious concerns about their president-elect, business executive Donald J. Trump, Sr. While some of these concerns may be legitimate, not all are real or based on facts. A good number of them are based on the President-elects campaign-fever/mood utterances, which contextually and in my understanding, reflect a man who was once a reality TV star that later on happened to become a candidate for president of the United States, and who clearly understood the anger and frustration of his fellow Americans, and indeed related to those angers and frustrations in ways that elevated his acceptance to the average American voter. That is why he won a landslide victory against Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton who most people viewed as the most qualified and competent candidate for president in U.S.s history.

Do we agree with President-elect Trump on everything, especially on some of his utterances? Absolutely no! Even the First Lady in waiting, Mrs. Melanie Trump, disagreed with her husband on some of his utterances during the campaign, and has made this public. President-elect Trump himself has admitted some of his faults and repeatedly stated that even his elegant daughter, Ivanka and his wife have scorned him about these things.

This sort of admission references a sense of humility and selfawareness. And for this, President-elect Trump deserves lots of credit. After all, not many people have such self-awareness and humility. Mainly when they have become leaders. At least, in Africa, we see how uncommon for those in power to admit their faults and wrongs, even as their actions and bad leaderships drag their people in excruciating poverty and sometimes death.

Do we believe that Mr. Trump would make a good president? Presumptively, we can say yes, but it also depends on the yardstick to be used for such measurement. Considering the fact that numerous Americans are unsure as to what type of presidency Mr. Trump will champion, there is a reason for concern and, expression of such concerns by those Americans is fair game because they are the governed and Mr. Donald J. Trump, Sr. will be their leader for the next four or eight years. This leads to my disagreement with President Ellen Johnson-Sirleafs unfortunate interference in recent U.S.s electoral politics.

It is clear that a lot of people, including me, would have loved to see the United States elect its first woman president. Even my two young daughters, ages 9 and 11, are inspired by Secretary Clintons determination to run for president and the grace and poise with which she went about it. Secretary Clintons inspiration also prompted my 11 years old daughter to run for senior class/school president at her elementary school this year, going on to win and defeating two boys in the contest. Secretary Clintons has left an incredible on girls all over the world and this will remain an indelible imprint. As a father of two girls and a strong supporter of womens right, Secretary Clinton is my champion. Like my mother, she has a special place in my heart forever for breaking an unusual ceiling in the most powerful democracy alive.

It is also an established fact that President Sirleaf is a good friend to Secretary Clinton, and as a good friend, she would have loved to see her win, simple as that.

The truth is, the fact that Secretary Clinton did not win the U.S. presidential election should demand a reason for concern from the Liberian leader for many reasons. However, it does not permit, as per diplomatically courtesy, the Liberian leader to grossly interfere in American politics verbally as she has displayed during her recent BBCs interview, especially so when all other world leaders, including her counterparts throughout Africa, are only sending congratulatory messages to Mr. Trump. The president of Egypt, a powerhouse nation in Africa, called President-elect Trump and wished him well and luck. Kenya the same. Even leaders in Muslim-dominated nations in the Middle East did likewise. Liberia did the opposite.

I respect and like President Sirleaf and after some reflections, I resolved not to criticize her nor her administration. As president of Liberia and Africas first woman president, she deserves some praise and admiration. But I am compelled to register a disagreement on the prevailing issue at hand because the Liberian leader is not an ordinary Liberian citizen. She is the president of Liberia, a struggling and poor nation of 4.5 million people. Whatever she says and does carries a significant weight and besides, it will not only be newsworthy; it would also be taken seriously by policy makers in the United States and around the world.

As such, the new administration or the president-elect of the U.S. would see it as an affront or a premature attack against him by a foreign leader when he has not even taken office. This could then make the incoming U.S. administration to perceive Liberia and the Liberian government as unfriendly to it. Who suffers when this happens? The poor Liberian people, including those on Deferred Removal Status in the U.S.; it would not be President Sirleaf nor any member of her family or inner circle. This is the broader point here.

This point is important because a similar thing happened in late 2007 when President Sirleaf verbally disparaged the competence of then Senator Barack Hussein Obama during his primary contest against then Senator Hillary Clinton for the U.S. presidency. That did not sit well with many of Obamas top supporters and others in the administration after the election was over. What made this a non-issue for Liberia throughout the Obamas presidency is the fact that President Obama is a decent, kind and God-fearing man. Moreover, Senator Clinton became an integral part of the Obamas administration as Secretary of State. In the case of a Trumps presidency, such opportunity may not exist that would give Liberia a free pass this time around due to the Liberian leadership premature attacks against the leader of an incoming U.S. administration where there is no apparent reason to do so.

Like almost all presidents around the world, the president of Liberia has a team of legal and foreign policys advisors. These people inform and guide the president on legal and foreign policy issues. It is expected that they would have informed the president on a simple legal concept: Standing. From all that we know, the Liberian leaders verbal interference in the results of the U.S.s election lacks standing. All it does is that, at least, it makes members of the incoming Trumps administration to perceive Liberia as unfriendly to it. At least, this is what I am hearing from higher-up friends I know who are associated with the campaign and the transition team of the president-elect.

This is why in diplomacy people dont take side more openly. The best the Liberian leader would have done was to call her friend, Secretary Clinton, and share her lost and grief. Even if it meant crying, that wouldnt be a bad idea. But to demonstrate condemnation of an incoming U.S.s president is not only an unconstructive engagement; it is equally a bad diplomatic move for a small, poor and inconsequential nation like Liberia where unemployment stands at roughly 85% or more.

One may argue that American leaders or the U.S. intervenes in the affairs of other nations. True. But the U.S. is a superpower nation that is realistically self-sufficient. Liberia is not. Also, the U.S. does not beg Liberia to feed its people, treat its people, provide simple things like materials for education and vehicles for use by government service agencies etc.

In addition, strategic intervention to stabilize and reconstruct failed, failing, fragile, and even re-orient hostile countries like Liberia may not be avoidable for the U.S. and also for its serious E.U. partners. All of these and many more reasons such as adherence to the fundamentals of transparency, accountability, the rule of law, the provision of basic needs and social services for its citizens and the fact that there are continuous investments in science, technology, engineering and math, agricultural-food production and infrastructure make the U.S. to have a moral high ground in many of the things it does as a guardian nation. Liberia, again, is not there yet because we cannot even feed ourselves; our roads are still in the days of dark ages, our entire nation has no ambulance service, and our airport resembles an aircraft mechanic garage for farmers in Alaska. This is precisely why criticizing an incoming U.S. president, no matter who he or she is, is just not a good idea at all.

If Liberia was that close to self-sufficiency, we would not have thousands of Liberians around the world still in refugee camps, hundreds more on Asylum status in Europe and Canada, and more on Deferred Deportation or Temporary Protective Status (TPS) in the U.S. which has been annually renewed by President Obama and beforehand by President Bush. How does President Sirleaf expect a President Trump to reconsider renewing the status of the vulnerable Liberians in the U.S. if the first thing her administration does is to question the integrity of the incoming U.S president and his incoming administration? As legal minds would put it: What is the standing here? As lawyers would question: Does President Sirleaf have any standing to do so?

I know Donald Trump and some of his immediate family, I have met him on few occasions. I am also closed to some of the prominent people in his orbit and many of them, people like Chris Christie, Kelly Anne Conway and Mayor Rudy Giuliani are expected to play key roles in his administration. These people are human beings and people of conscious. A lot of them shared the same faith (Catholic faith) with me. In fact, one of them, the former mayor of New York City, is like a mentor to me. I have met, sat and ate with him several times. Like me, he once studied for the Catholic priesthood before going on to becoming a successful and brilliant lawyer, an assistant U.S. Attorney General and later Mayor. He is also a world-renowned leader in his own right. So too are many other people around President-elect Trump.

This means Mr. Trump as president is not going to lead/run his administration single-handily. Besides, the U.S. government is one of check-and-balance between the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary. So for people to think that the world will fall apart under a President Trump is mind-blowing and unreasonable, at best. Trump cannot change the overall traditional policies and culture of the United States unilaterally. It is not like what African tyrants and dictators do because they govern in lands where the rule of law is either abused, violated or nonexistence.

What I do know for a fact is that a President Trump will not tolerate corrupt and inept leaders, be it from Africa, Asia or Latin America. He will also not tolerate leaders who are not patriotic to their nations and people or, not constructive and competitive in terms of developing their people and countries. Mind you, Trump is a competitive developer and show man who has a serious test for class and elegance.

He is not going to sit or welcome leaders who have no passion to transform their countries into first class environments. His mantra, whether one likes it or not, is to Make America Great Again by creating more jobs, investing in infrastructure and making sure every nation and leader takes responsibility. He does not share the view that some countries and leaders will always want the U.S. to take care of them, especially when their leaders and officials pocket resources for personal gains.

This is the Trump I know and this is the Donald J. Trump, Sr. that will lead the greatest nation on earth for the next four or eight years. Yes, we can disagree with his campaign utterances for legitimate reasons, but not everything he said and promises to do is wrong or bad. Equally, Mr. Trump is a nice man who needed to win an election in a nation where certain people feel disfranchise and aspire to certain views. To win such people over, one has to speak their language to achieve the ultimate results. So this idea that Trump dislikes immigrants, Muslims and all the nine yard is going to be proven wrong. Transitioning from a businessman to a typical politician was new for Mr. Trump. But technically, what the other politicians who competed with Mr. Trump said about immigration, foreign policy, domestic policy etc. is no different in substance from what Mr. Trump said. The difference is tone and approach.

That said, I disagree with my friend and my president, Madam Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in her verbal expression of serious concern about Mr. Trumps victory and possible tenure as president. My disagreement is rooted on the simple premise that Madam Sirleaf is not an ordinary person or Liberian citizen; she is a sitting president of an independent nation that is relying heavily on foreign support, mainly from the U.S.from healthcare to even our staple food. This is why the parameters for the Liberian leaders verbal intervention in recent U.S. politics is unfortunate, even though we are certain that she may have done so with the purest of intent.

I would conclude by urging President Sirleaf and her administration to reach out to the Trumps transition team and explain the exact meaning of her messaging on the BBC so that Liberia can start on a good note with the incoming U.S. administration. If not, and based on what I am hearing from inner circles, the odds would not be good either way. After all, Mr. Trump is a counterpuncher. No joke about it.

About the Author:

Jones Nhinson Williams is a Liberian citizen and Secretary General of the Israel-Africa Friendship Organization.
British Council Ghana announces its second of 4 quarterly Mini TEDxSocialEntrepriseTalk dubbed Investors or Father Christmas?  Social entrepreneurs interaction with investors. This is a TEDxAccra led social enterprise event in partnership with SE Ghana supported by the British Council. This event takes place on Thursday, 17th November, 2016 at the British Council, Accra from 5pm to 8pm.

The discussions during the event will focus on, why investors are not interested in financing social enterprises, how social enterprises can access financing from mainstream capital markets and accountability demands of investors. The event will also connect investment ready businesses that need funding for their businesses to investors. Interested Social enterprises will be offered an opportunity to 'PITCH' to REAL INVESTORS from 11am to 4pm on the day. Applicant is open via: https://goo.gl/forms/gx0FnMncGo7p2cNO2 . Limited slots available. There will be opportunity for social enterprises to exhibit their products and services to interested guests who will visit the British Council. Interested businesses can apply via https://goo.gl/forms/Oa0jrvaN1BbSPnSo1 for free limited exhibition slots.

Attendance and participation is free. Visit https://egotickets.com/events/social-thursday to register or follow us @ghBritish @SocEntGlobal @TEDxAccra on twitter or the hashtag #SocialThursday and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BritishCouncilGhana/

About

The British Council Ghana is the United Kingdoms international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. As a registered charity, the British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide.

TEDxAccra, brings people together to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world, and to inspire ideas and action for a better future for us all. Founded in April 2014, TEDxAccra is a 100% Community-Created and Not for Profit Organisation.
The Commissioner for Peace and Security held a meeting with Senior Military Leadership of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) fighting the Boko Haram terrorist group to discuss the security situation in the MNJTF Area of Responsibility and other issues relating to enhancing the efficiency of MNJTF Operations. The delegation was composed of the Force Commander for MNJTF, Deputy Force Commander, the Chief of Staff and Head AU Liaison Office in Chad.

The Commissioner commended MNJTF efforts aimed at eliminating the terrorist group and bringing back the situation in the region to normalcy. The Commissioner also noted the increasing number of Boko Haram terrorists surrendering to MNJTF forces, with particular reference to the reporting of 325 fighters with their families to the MNJTF on 8 November 2016 in Chad. It was observed that the situation calls for specialised organisations to handle the group in order to prevent them from re-joining the terrorist group. It was further noted that the humanitarian situation in the MNJTF Area of Responsibility is worsening and this calls for immediate intervention.

The Commissioner for Peace and Security reiterated the need for the International community to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to alleviate the suffering of the populace in the MNJTF Area of Responsibility, as well as the Commissions continued support to MNJTF in fighting Boko Haram.
As he continues his quest for improved provision of services by government to citizens, Minister for the Public Service and Administration, Adv. Ngoako Ramatlhodi will again meet residents of Kabokweni in Mbombela, Mpumalanga on Monday 14, November 2016 to give feedback on the issues raised during the visit to the community last year, as part of his Batho Pele- putting people first programme.

The visit seeks to respond to service delivery challenges experienced by citizens through capacitating government institutions with the requisite skills and information to improve the level of service delivery quality.

During the engagement, the community raised issues including lack of water, roads and poor services at government service points such as the local clinic and police station. Youth also highlighted the lack of socio- economic opportunities for young people to further their education after completion of basic education.

The Imbizo will also provide the Minister with an opportunity to update the public on programmes that are being implemented to improve their lives through the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF). MTSF is governments first five year implementation plan of the National Development Plan (NDP) covering the period 2014 to 2019.

Minister Ramatlhodis programme is a strategic vehicle that enables the department to interact with citizens in its quest to improve service provision in support of the priorities of government.

Members of the media are invited to the event as follows:

Date: Monday, 14 November 2016

Time: 10h00

Venue: Moyeni Ward 36 Sport Ground, Zwelitsha, Ntsikazi Zone

RSVPs: Wisane Mavasa on 0828061351/ [email protected]
LAGOS, Nigeria, 10 November 2016,-/African Media Agency (AMA)/- Every Breath Counts declared November: Pneumonia Month. Nigeria has the second highest pneumonia mortality in the world and primarily affects children under five. Pneumonia kills more children than any other infectious disease - almost 1 million children every year.

In light of World Pneumonia Day (November 12), Every Breath Counts decided that the disease needs more attention then just one day. Using social and traditional media, Pneumonia Month is dedicated to raising awareness to pneumonia's prevalence and burden in the country.

Building from Her Excellency Aisha Muhammadu Buhari's, Wife of the President of Nigeria, participation and endorsement, the Every Breath Counts campaign features nationally recognized influencers: Hadiza Aliyu, Rahama Sadau and Ali Nuhu.

They have each raised their voices to speak up against pneumonia in various PSAs. Ali Nuhu (@alinuhu) will lead a twitter chat to discuss his role in the campaign on November 11th at 11AM (Nigeria). Pneumonia Month jumpstarts the campaign that is expected to run through January 2017.
Staff and guests of the Accra City Hotel (formerly Novotel) were last Tuesday night reportedly held captive by a lone policeman who seized the facility.

Threatening to shoot anybody who dared to call his bluff, he was able to seize the hotel for over three hours, different police personnel failing to disarm him when they were deployed to the scene.

Information available to DAILY GUIDE has it that Cpl Wadzah who is stationed at the Jamestown Police Station, turned up for duty at the hotel on night shift.

As if possessed, he was said to have seized the facility late Tuesday night, preventing both entry and exit, causing maximum fear and panic among the staff and guests.

Some airline crew were said to have suffered delay in moving out to the airport as a result of the hold-up which ended towards the early hours of Wednesday.

A patrol team was ordered to go and disarm Cpl Wadzah but upon reaching the place, he reportedly warned the officers that they risked being shot.

Failing to achieve its objective, the team left the scene for a Special Weapons and Tactical (SWAT) squad to be replaced by a Counter-Terrorism Unit squad.

The mission was not a cut-and-dry affair: a frontal engagement was not advisable and so the very dangerous cop held sway for more hours as the commander and his men thought out a means of overpowering and disarming him.

Eventually, one of the men went up the ceiling and descended upon the cop who reportedly fired his weapon but the firearm did not respond due to a malfunction.

As soon as he descended upon him, members of the squad rushed to overpower and disarm the cop.

The police are tight-lipped about the incident but DAILY GUIDE has learnt that the cop, who appeared to be suffering from a mental challenge, was sent to a psychiatric hospital at Pantang for examination, the outcome of which is not available to this paper at the time of filing this report.

Some colleagues of the cop at the Jamestown barracks have confided to DAILY GUIDE that his demeanor at home bespeaks of someone harbouring a mental challenge.

In July this year, a certain L/Cpl William Amuzu of the Tema Regional Police Command's Rapid Response Unit reportedly killed his mother-in-law, two children and committed suicide, using his service rifle.

It was a news story which shocked Ghanaians when it landed on the public domain with the pictures of the gory scene worsening the situation.

Following the development, the police administration demanded of its commanders to be observant about the mental health of personnel and acting swiftly when abnormalities are observed.

It is however, not clear if that directive has been carried out.

By A.R. Gomda
The National Diabetes Association has dragged the Ministry of Health (MoH) to the president over the latter's refusal to deal with it in the organisation of this year's World Diabetes Day scheduled for November 14, 2016.

The association claims that the ministry is rather dealing with a Coalition of NGOs In Health and Novo Nordisk, a Danish organisation, in breach of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) dating back to June 2012, under which government would support it in the fight against diabetes, including the subject under review.

In a petition sent through its lawyers, Gynaye Chambers, the association pointed out that the Health Ministry has had a Memorandum of Understanding with the association since September 2012, through the then sector Minister Mr Alban S.K. Bagbin to support it in the fight against diabetes, a deal which has been contravened.

The association went on to point out that the minister of health has since December 2015 appointed a certain Kofi Edusei from Regenerative Health to work hand-in-hand with them in the organisation of the World Diabetes Day.

According to the association, by the action of the Health Ministry in dealing with the Coalition you seek to undermine Mrs Elizabeth Denyoh, the West African Chairperson of the International Diabetes Federation.

Information gathered by DAILY GUIDE indicates that the organisation of the World Diabetes Day falls mainly on Elizabeth Denyoh, who apart from being the President of the National Diabetes Association, is also the sole Ghanaian representative of the International Diabetes Federation.

The association has threatened to take legal action against the ministry and expose what it considers the petty politicking being orchestrated by the Health Ministry through a press conference.

The management of diabetes in the country, according to a source within the association, has witnessed challenges of funding from the Health Ministry.

The clearance of a consignment of insulin from the airport is said to have suffered a setback because of non-availability of funds for the customs procedure.

There are about three million diabetics in the country and the rate of amputations due to diabetes-related cases is nowhere abating.

In a related development, Dr Ahmed Reja, Chairperson of the International Diabetes Federation, Africa Region, who doubles as the President of the Ethiopian Diabetes Association, has fired a correspondence to the health minister dated November 10, 2016, appealing for support to enable the National Diabetes Association hold the forthcoming World Diabetes Day.

This is, therefore, to humbly request your good office to assist the Diabetes Association of Ghana to celebrate world diabetes day and render better services to Ghanaians living with diabetes.

The Ministry of Health Public Relations Officer, Tony Goodman, has however, denied that the National Diabetes Association is being sidelined by the Health Ministry.

He explained that the ministry is supporting the National Diabetes Association to organise the day in Big Ada and the Coalition of NGOs in Kumasi.

By A.R. Gomda
(From left) Dr. Doris Dartey, EFG Vice Chairperson; Amadu Sulley, EC Commissioner; Ms. Ajoa Yeboah-Afari, EFG Chairperson and Mrs. Charlotte Osei.

The chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), Charlotte Osei, has allayed fears that the commission is not prepared adequately to organize a successful election on December 7, 2016.

According to the EC boss, the electoral body has put in place the necessary measures that would not only ensure a credible election, but also a violence-free poll.

Addressing journalists at a meeting hosted by the Editors Forum Ghana (EFG) on the theme, Election 2016: Innovations, Flashpoints and Challenges, the EC Chairperson said 94 out of the 97 things required for the election had already been deployed to the regions awaiting movements on the election day.

Ms Charlotte Osei said the only outstanding items are the printing of parliamentary ballot papers which would be completed by the end of this week, and the printing of the notices of poll for the presidential election, which would commence soon following the balloting for positions by the presidential aspirants on Wednesday.

As soon as the notices of poll are out, the presidential ballot will be printed. Results collation forms printing will also start soon with political parties' involvement since this is the first time it is going to be printed in Ghana.

We do not believe that when it comes to the process that there is any cause for concern or worry that we are not ready for December 7, she said.

Electronic Transmission

The EC Chair, however, noted that the challenge of the electoral body in conducting this year's election is the electronic results transmission process which is yet to be finalized and its usage demonstrated to political parties to ensure that they understand it.

She said the main mode of results transmission is the manual one that is captured in the law, adding that the electronic transfer is just a pilot system to enable the EC compare the manual results to make sure they are the same.

Transparency

Charlotte Osei further indicated that the commission had adopted innovations that would bring transparency to the process from start to finish.

She said all the 28,992 polling stations would have two biometric verification devices  one primary and one spare  to ensure there is no break in the process when voting starts.

We don't anticipate any problems with the device but if there is a case of false rejection then the officer in-charge will use the manual verification which will be witnessed and signed by all the party agents present, she indicated.

Unstamped Ballot

After voting, Mrs. Osei said counting would be made in the open, indicating that an unstamped ballot paper would be considered as foreign material and would not be counted.

She said another innovation would be the projection of results on the screen at the collation centres after which they would be published on the EC's website according to constituencies.

Then those results will now be sent to the national collation centre which replaces the former strong room. At this place for the first time, we will have some media access, observers and party agents to confirm the results from the collation centres with what has been sent.

It is only when the scanned 28,992 polling station results are cross-checked, finalized by stakeholders and everyone is satisfied that the EC will announce the final results for the presidential while the returning officers make the announcement for the parliamentary votes at the constituency collation centres.

This makes it very difficult for anyone to play mischief or amend the results, so it is really impossible for the EC Chairperson to change any results, she explained.

Recount Option

She, however, said the commission would opt for a recount in consultation with the various political parties if the results are too close to call.

In managing election, international best practices suggest that if the results are too close you take your time and make sure it is right. All we were saying is that it is better to be sure than to be sorry, she added.

Proxy/Special Voting

Charlotte Osei, addressing the issue of special and proxy voting  which some political activists have alleged will be used by the commission to rig the elections  said there are only 534 proxy votes and not 270,000 as has been suggested.

She said the EC has also reduced the number of special voters from 120,000 in 2012 to 29,773, even with the inclusion of the media.

This year, the number is about half of that excluding the electoral staff, and we have added the media this year; so media and security personnel come to about 29,773 and how we are going to use this to rig the elections still defies our imagination, she stated.

She said the processes for early voting, which will be conducted on December 1, 2016 in every constituency, will follow the same process as the general election, because in our view they are part of the general election.

Flash Points

The EC Chairperson raised concerns about the 5,000 flashpoints identified by the police, especially with the recent 23 incidences of violence that characterized the limited voter registration and votes transfer.

She said the EC was working with the police to ensure that there is enhanced security at the hotspots identified, but urged politicians and the media to work towards managing very sensitive issues.

What keeps me awake at night are the intemperate language and rumour mongering in the media that has the likelihood of the outbreak of violence based on any of the issues I have already addressed, Mrs. Osei said.

She said it's important the media report factually and crosscheck their facts before going on air or publishing stories that have the tendency of causing violence.

One outbreak of violence in one polling station can lead to a bigger issue we may not be able to handle.

It is in our collective interest as a nation to respect the law and the processes and not to shield wrongdoing but to report it, she stressed.

Ayariga Saga

Asked if she ever made an assertion that the presidential candidate of the All Congress Party (ACP), Hassan Ayariga, would not win the election, the EC boss said, What we are saying is that the candidates had gone to court and we are awaiting the outcome of the Supreme Court. At that time the Supreme Court had not even told us to extend the nomination period to correct it so there is no way we could have made a comment about Mr. Ayariga winning or not contesting.

We want an electoral process that is peaceful, respects the right of all Ghanaians who are eligible to vote.

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri


Bishop Daniel Obinim, founder of the International God's Way Church, has been dragged before the Accra Domestic Violence and Gender-Based Court for flogging two supposed 'fornicating' teenagers during a live church service.

The controversial pastor is reported to have on August 17, this year at Ashaley Botwe in Accra, unlawfully and physically abused one Elliasu Obinim, 16 and Gyesiwaah Obinim, 14  his (Obinim's) adopted children  in front of the congregation.

Two others in the dock with 'Angel' Obinim are Pastors Kingsley Baah and Solomon Abraham.

The two have been slapped with abetting their senior pastor to abuse the two teenagers.

Hearing

Before the court, presided over by Abena Oppong Adjin-Doku, Bishop Obinim, who was in court with his lawyers, denied the offence.

The judge subsequently admitted the three to bail in the sum of GH10,000 each with one surety to be justified.

Proceedings were adjourned until November 24, 2016.

This was after Raphael Opoku Adusei, lawyer for the three, had asked the court to grant his clients bail.

He said the accused persons are popular men of God who have places of abode.

Mr Opoku Adusei stated that the charges preferred against the accused persons were a misdemeanor  an offence the court could grant them bail.

Prosecuting, DSP Abraham Annor said

the victims live with Bishop Obinim in his residence in Accra and that on the day of the incident, the Accra branch of the church had a service where he (Obinim) claimed that he had a revelation from God and that the two were engaged in pre-marital sex, resulting in Gyesiwaah becoming pregnant.

The police officer stated that Bishop Obinim further indicated that he was directed by the Holy Spirit to chastise them in front of the congregation and so subjected the two to serious beatings with his black leather belt in the full glare of the congregation.

Abetment

The prosecution stated that 'Angel' Obinim was assisted by Kingsley and Solomon.

He argued that Kingsley held the female victim and prevented her from running away while the Bishop continued beating her, adding that the girl in the process could not bear the pain and therefore, sought refuge with the wife of Obinim, Mrs. Florence Obinm, but he ordered the wife to stay aside, which she did.

DSP Annor contended that Solomon then brought back Gyesiwaah for his master to continue beating her.

He said Obinim, assisted by his two accomplices, continued to physically abuse the two church members till they were satisfied before releasing them.

The Narration

At the time of the incident and the subsequent brouhaha it generated, Joseph Osei Oppong Brenya, described as a media aide to Bishop Obinim, narrated the sequence of events from the church's point of view as follows.

The Founder and General Overseer of International Gods Way Church (IGWC), Bishop Dr. Daniel Obinim, had punished one of his adopted children for impregnating a young girl and terminating the pregnancy.

Bishop Obinim exhibited his frustration as a father after it was revealed to him during prophecy time in church that one of his adopted children has impregnated a girl known as Gyesiwaah.

The man of God could not take the news but called the two to the pulpit and disciplined them for that wrongful act. Both mothers of the accused persons were present during the church service which was broadcast live on OBTV.

The gentleman, known as Elliasu, is said to have aided the termination of the pregnancy, an act which infuriated Bishop Obinim, hence his action. The Young girl nearly lost her life in the process of terminating the pregnancy.

Elliasu lost his father at a tender age and has been under the care of Bishop Obinim among many others who are catered for by the popular man of God. All expenses, including education, are all taken care of by Bishop Obinim. Elliasu and Gyesiwaah, including their families are housed and catered for by Bishop Obinim. Bishop Obinim acted as a father and disciplined the two live in church to serve as deterrent to others.

Bishop Obinims action was driven by the disappointment and melancholy a father will go through after detecting that his lovely and cherished son has impregnated the lady and terminated it.

By Jeffrey De-Graft Johnson

[email protected]


Alfred Agbesi Woyome

There were fireworks at the Supreme Court yesterday when the infamous Alfred Agbesi Woyome case came up for hearing.

This came about as there were strong indications that the Attorney General was giving up on recouping the GH51.2 judgement debt fraudulently paid to Woyome, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) financier, as judgement debt.

The Attorney General (AG), Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong, represented by her deputy, Dominic Aryine, challenged former Attorney General Martin Amidu's locus in going after the money given to the NDC financier, saying that he (Amidu) was violating the Constitution by coming to court to retrieve the money.

She said it was only the AG's office that is mandated by law to do so.

Martin Amidu clashed with Dominic Aryine, over who has the right to examine the NDC businessman on why he had not refunded the controversial GH51.2 judgement debt paid to him by the NDC government.

When the case was due for hearing, Aryine stated that Amidu aka Citizen Vigilante, does not have the locus to mount the instant action.

He said although the former Attorney General (Amidu) was the plaintiff in whose favour the judgement was delivered as a public interest case, Amidu could not enforce the judgement of the court.

He explained that the said money was public fund and that the action by Amidu was also in public interest, but the former AG, coming under Article 2 of the 1992 Constitution, cannot enforce payment of the money.

In his view, the case had resulted in a consequential order directed at the AG, adding that per the Constitution, it is only the AG that must take steps to comply with the orders of the court.

The Deputy AG explained that under Article 88 of the Constitution and the State Proceedings Act, it is only the AG that is mandated by law to take action to protect public properties.

Mr Dominic Aryine said both the Constitution and the State Proceedings Act do not support the type of application Amidu had brought before the court.

Scandalous Depositions

Aryine posited that Amidu does not have a personal interest in the judgement and that even if the case had been brought for the sake of personal interest, the evidence in support does not meet the standards set.

He said the court ought to expunge paragraphs 8 to 21 of Mr Amidu's affidavit in support of the motion because it is scandalous, frivolous, and unsubstantiated allegation full of hear-say evidence.

Mr Amidu had indicated in the affidavit that the Attorney General (Marietta Brew Appiah-Opong), withdrew her application to examine Woyome before the Supreme Court because President Mahama personally gave an order.

He said the AG backtracked in order to protect some National Democratic Congress officials, who benefited from the GH51.2 million fraudulent payout.

Amidu Returns Fire

Matters however, got worse when Aryine referred to Amidu as a lawyer with several years' standing at the Bar.

Amidu, who represented himself as the plaintiff-'lawyer' (removing his spectacles) snapped, I am not a lawyerI have stopped practising (as a lawyer)

However, it took the intervention of the sole judge Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah, to tidy the ruffled feathers of Citizen Vigilante.

Mr Amidu said whether he had an interest or not could be looked at by reading Article 2 of the Constitution in its entirety.

According to him, the order of the Supreme Court was directed at Woyome to refund the money and not to the AG.

'Solvent' Woyome

The former AG insisted that Woyome could pay the money but had just refused to do so.

He indicated that he was the proper person to be permitted to examine Woyome insisting, He has the means; he is just refusing to pay.

He wondered why the AG was preventing him from examining Woyome in public.

Ken Anku, lawyer for the NDC financier, opposed the application on the grounds deposed in the affidavit.

He stated that Article 2, based on which Amidu had mounted the action, does not give him the power to do so, stressing that he does not have the locus standing.

Woyome's lawyer said, among other things, that the plaintiff could not position himself in any enforcement proceedings on judgement debt in the name of the state.

He was emphatic that there was no space for the motion.

Ruling on the matter is on November 15, 2016.

By Jeffrey De-Graft Johnson

[email protected]
President John Dramani Mahama, his wife Lordina Mahama, Asiedu Nketiah, Kofi Adams, just to mention but a few of the NDC members, have lately run out of sensible electioneering campaign messages. The ferociously blowing wind for change sweeping away everything in its path seems to have completely destroyed all the NDC messages which were of course, complete lies. They are now without any sensible message for Ghanaians but their usual bullshitting propaganda.

President Mahama about three days ago said that when he visited Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, his Yen ntie obiaa buddy, at the Otumfuos Manhyia Palace in Kumasi, Otumfuo advised him to tell Ghanaians about his achievements to get them to vote to re-elect him for a further 4-year term in office as the President of Ghana.

What are his supposed infrastructural or socio-economic achievements that he has been advised to tell Ghanaians about to convince us to vote for him? Did he not know about the existence of such achievements until he was told by Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II?

Frankly, he has nothing credible to tell us or else, he wouldnt wait for his friend to ask him to do so according to his own words as published in the newspapers. On the other hand, is he not wise enough to know that it is by telling Ghanaians his economic achievements that people can be persuaded to vote for him?

He can only convincingly tell Ghanaians about his attainment of distinction in orchestrating, perpetrating and perpetuating corruption, lawlessness, nepotism, cronyism and the practice of selective justice in Ghana. For this, I do agree with him but are they credible enough to convince discerning Ghanaians to give him another chance of a 4-year term in office to mismanage Ghana?

He has said, if he is given a second 4-year term, he will introduce and implement policies; put in place structures to curtail or curb corruption in Ghana. On this note, I agree perfectly well with Kwame A-Plus, that Ghanaian artist who says to him, Moay3 late. Check the underlying video link for his message for President Mahama as put into a song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbwRSYwnnZQ

Mrs Lordina Mahama once said, her husband, H.E. John Dramani Mahama would do exactly what Mrs Hillary Clinton had planned to do for the Americans. She said this in the belief that Mrs Clinton who everyone thought to be the favourite was surely going to win the American presidential election hands down. However, when the unexpected happened to the dismay of many a citizen of the Western world, with Mrs Clinton losing the election to Mr Donald Trump, a completely unknown person in the political arena, Mrs Mahama has subsequently quickly changed her mouth. She now says her husband is doing exactly what President-elect Donald Trump has promised Americans building infrastructures, construction of roads, hospitals, schools and creation of jobs for the people.

Folks, note how Mrs Lordina Mahama is a shameless opportunist by her two conflicting statements; what she said during the American election and what she is now saying after the election. See her as a person with two mouths and any person with two mouths is a liar according to an Akan saying.

President Mahama knows best and does best when it comes to practicing corruption of all sorts.

Asiedu Nketiah said, Nana Akufo Addo is patapaa (somebody who disregards laws and uses force to obtain whatever he wants) same as American presidential-candidate Donald Trump. Now that Donald Trump has won the American 8 November 2016 presidential election to the shocking of almost the entire world, what is Asiedu Nketiah going to say? Will he change his words and mouth same as Lordina Mahama has done? Can he now say that Donald Trump is a sociopath? No, he cant.

Kofi Adams, Koku Anyidoho, and Asiedu Nketiah continually mock Nana Akufo Addo for being too old to be a President. Not only is Hillary Clinton his age group but also, Donald Trump. Donald Trump who is seventy has won the American election. Is age still a barrier to these nutters for one becoming the President of a country?

All their U-turns and desperate attempts to persuade Ghanaians to vote for them are like one clinging on to a straw when drowning. You may think the straw can save you from drowning but it cant in a million times.

They are even worsening their case and should we vote for them on their U-turn messages, all of which are of course lies, then we are the biggest fools ever to live on the planet earth.

Help the wind to sweep away the rot from Ghana by carrying away President Mahama and his NDC government into the ocean of political wilderness.

President Mahama is going, going, going. He is be gone, swept away from the presidency on 7 December 2016. Amen!

Rockson Adofo
Whenever a man has a God- sent mission to accomplish, its quite imperative not only to trace the the real roots of such mission but also to scrutinize what is happening at the commencement of such mission.

Ghanaians who have strong love for our dear nation and a deep sense of patriotism should be sincere and honest enough to see the clear manifestation of strong signals and unstoppable backings moving the God- sent deliverer of our country. Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo Addo, the father of patience ( abutrehene), has offered himself to be considered as the next president of this country. His massive endorsements by both chiefs and celebrities is not just luck but also a clear indication that he has a divine mission to accomplish to our dear nation.

We the people of this country must not forget to appreciate the fact that Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo Addo(Abutrehene) is a true Democrat. Ghanaians must wake up from their slumber after they have been misled by this incompetent NDC government for the past 8 years. The NDC have failed us woefully and are unable to save us from our numerous economic hardships. The NDC under president Mahama given 1000years can't save we the people of Ghana from graduate unemployment, high utility tariffs, inadequate school feeding for our students, poor healthcare delivery, persistent strikes by various workers unions , gargantuan corruption at all levels, unprecedented judgement debts like; Woyome, Ameri, GYEEDA, SADA, the bus branding saga among others.

Nana Addo has really done what Napoleon could not do for this nation when he was a minister and a Member of Parliament for the Abuakua South as well. For example, through his good vision he was able to bring mobitel now Tigo. Also, it was through his effort that the pressmen and women now discharge their duties without any fear or favour.

As an MP(2001-2002) for Abuakwa South, he was able to extend the rural electrification projects to communities like; Kwasi Komfo, Kwasi Krakye, Akwadum, Ntebea, Bomponso and many others. Under his MPship, many six classroom blocks were built including that of Abesim, Yeboah,Apapam Presby Primary, Kyebi Anglican Primary, to mention but a few. Not only in these areas but he also constructed, rehabilitated and renovated many health centres, roads, and some water projects and markets including that of Kyebi.

This was the man lost Presidential primaries to his main contender J. A Kuffour yet rallied behind him to serve this nation. This is also a man who accepted the Supreme Court verdict as soon as it was given without any hesitation, back in 2013. No wonder he is notably called"Abutrehene". This is a man who believes that God in his own wisdom bless people to become blessing onto others and that is why he wants to give back to Ghanaians their fair share of the national cake which the current NDC government is creating, looting and sharing.

He is the type of politician who is courageous, kind, trustworthy, competent, incorruptible, ready to serve and to be served and above all, listen to the plights of all sort of people no matter your political, racial, religious or ethnic background. Nana Addo has never been found wanting in the area of corruption. He has not given bribes and has not taken bribes. Even as a cabinet minister, he refused to be bribed with Ford expeditions. He has always maintained transparency in his dealings and this is one of the reasons that made him a respected person in Ghana and internationally. Nana Akuffo Addo is a man who has come out boldly to say he is not corrupt. We are yet to find a single NDC member who will challenge him on any platform on that with evidence. This is the man we Ghanaians need to come and fight this gargantuan and unprecedented corruption which is at its peak in this country.

Ghanaians must not be deceived by the NDC who cheap and crude propaganda that Nana Addo is arrogant, violent and old, hence cannot lead this nation. Ghanaians must not listen to the NDC who have collapsed the economy of Ghana with lies and propaganda. They must believe and listen to Nana Addo. After all, wisdom and good leadership styles is what is needed and not the age of a person. President Mahama is very young yet very incompetent and corrupt. Besides, President Mahmud Buhari of Nigeria, Alhassan Quattara of Ivory Coast, Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the just elected president of U.S, Donald Trump and many others in the world over are all above 70 years.

Ghanaians are already fed up with corrupt create, loot and share of the nations money by the president Mahama led NDC government. Ghanaians are fed up with the clueless, uncaring, indecisive and incompetent leadership of the president Mahama. Ghanaians need a change and a competent and incorruptible change for that matter. Ghanaians need Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as president come the 7th of January, 2017, In sha Allah.

With this, I'm appealing to all Ghanaians passionately to vote and vote massively for Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo Addo.

Change Is Coming. NanaB3ba.

Long Live Nana Addo!

Long live NPP!!!!

Long Live Ghana.

Tonduogu Musah Abass

[email protected]
Richard Benyon paid a three-day visit to Mozambique in September with an agenda centred on boosting trade relations between the UK and Mozambique. The visit was to create space for UK businesses to strengthen their knowledge of the growing commercial opportunities in the Southern Africa country.

During the visit, Mr Benyon met the Mozambican Prime Minister Agostinho do Rosarion and discussed bilateral links and potential for future better interactions, with the UK lending its expertise in a number of sectors.

The meetings with representatives of the import and export sectors, local oil and gas operators and regulators focused on existing and new business opportunities for the growing number of UK companies operating in Mozambiques market.

There was also a moment for exchange of views on Mozambiques business environment during a meeting with representatives of the companies members of the British Businesses Network in country. He also made field visits to some of UK investment projects in Mozambique, with particular focus on Aggreko, in Maputo province, which uses natural gas to generate electricity.

The main objective of these engagements was to build the basis for greater commercial links between the UK and Mozambique, especially in booming sectors of the economy such as natural resources, supply chain, and energy.
The Presidency is concerned about continuing public statements by the former Public Protector Adv Thuli Madonsela on matters relating to President Jacob Zuma and the report entitled State of Capture.

Adv Madonsela has discharged her duties as the Public Protector and has no further role to play in the process regarding the said Report. Her unwarranted public attacks on the President, as happened in Stellenbosch on Thursday, are unbecoming and are not helpful. It would be prudent therefore, for the former Public Protector to step back and allow legal and constitutional processes to unfold unhindered.

The Presidency remains concerned as well by the leaking by Adv Madonsela to television channel ENCA, of her discussion with the President to the ENCA television channel. This conduct has serious implications with regards to ethics, confidentiality and the protection of information gathered during investigations by the Office of the Public Protector. It is also not clear why Adv Madonsela decided to leak only the audio recordings of the discussion with the President despite the fact that she had interviewed several witnesses.

The President urges all parties to act as guided by the Constitution and respect the processes that are unfolding in respect of the Report.
On behalf of President Obama and the American people, I am pleased to congratulate the people of Angola on the 41st anniversary of your nations independence on November 11.

The United States deeply appreciates its strong and productive partnership with Angola. Your country has been a valued voice for peace in the region, and we applaud the leadership you have shown in helping to resolve conflicts, particularly in the Great Lakes area.

In the year ahead, we look forward to continued collaboration to promote sustainable prosperity, good governance, and democratic institutions.

On this special day, I send my best wishes to all Angolans for a healthy, happy, and safe future.
Migration will be the main issue on the agenda of Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni, during his visit to Niger, Mali and Senegal. Italy intends to follow up on the Migration compact and on its commitment for Africa, which will also be expressed when sitting on the UN Security Council in 2017.

The main challenge is to reduce migration flows across the central Mediterranean. The key to the solution is to support the Countries of origin and transit in re-establishing stability and security, by assuring better living conditions to local populations. Niger, Mali and Senegal are considered to be strategic in this sense. Minister Gentilonis mission aims to offer support to these Countries in order to gradually remove the causes of underdevelopment, helping local Governments to combat illegal migrations, terrorism and illegal trafficking. With this perspective in mind, Italy intends to raise funds at EU and national level, also through a coordinated action with the EU Member States that are more directly concerned and with the European Commission.
The National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) has given government a two-week ultimatum to come clear on the payment of the Nursing Trainees allowances or face their wrath.

Speaking at a Press Conference held at the Wisconsin International University College, Mr. Kwasi Frimpong, the Press and Information Secretary of NUGS said the government of Ghana through the Minister of Health Mr. Alex Segbefia said somewhere in June this year that the government will be restoring the scrapped allowance. President Mahama in a subsequent radio interview and on several campaign platforms has stated that the government is indeed restoring the allowance.

However, The Vice President of Ghana speaking recently at the Nalerigu Nursing and Midwifery College in the Northern region said Restoring the allowances of nursing trainees will threaten the future of Ghana's economy. This leaves the Ghanaian student in a confused state as to who is telling the students of Ghana the truth. It is very evident that since the announcement of restoring the allowance, not even a pesewa has been paid to a single student. This therefore comes to confirm the statement of the vice president that government is just playing games with the minds of the students and is not committed to the payment.

On the issue of postings, Mr. Frimpong asked the government to post all nurses who have completed various courses on Nurses and midwifery but are languishing in the house.

Mr. Frimpong also called on the government to restore with immediate effect the scrapped teacher trainees allowance and also pay newly trained teachers who have been posted to work but are not paid their salaries in these hard times.

According to NUGS, the unpaid graduate students bursaries and thesis grant is also a source of worry and are calling on the government to pay as soon as possible.

Again NUGS has asked the government to pay the feeding grant of the three northern regions for the second and third terms of the 2015/2016 academic year and to also increase the grant from the meagre GHC3.30p per day to an appreciable amount.

To the opposition parties, NUGS has called on all the opposition parties to outline how they intend to finance their promises on education to Ghanaians and they students of Ghana. To the New Patriotic Party and the other political parties that have promised to pay the Nurses and the teacher trainees allowances, they are calling on them to come clear on how they intend to finance these payments.
From 8 until 10 November 2016, Hon. Wolfgang Tiefensee, Minister of Economy, Science and Digital Society of the State of Thuringia, was in Namibia for the Invest in Namibia Conference, accompanied by a large business delegation.

His programme included the participation in a panel discussion during the conference as well as a reception hosted by H.E. President Hage Geingob for all participants, separate meetings with H.E. President Hage Geingob and other cabinet members, the launch of the maxx-solar academy, a signing ceremony for the renewal of the cooperation agreement between the Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences in Jena and the Namibia University of Science and Technology, the inauguration of a model building of the PolyCare Research Technology company and a visit to Okahandja accompanied by the Minister for Urban and Rural Development, Hon. Sophia Shaningwa, where he was received by His Worship the Mayor. H.E. Vice-President Nicky Iyambo and the Prime Minister, Hon. Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, welcomed Hon. Tiefensee upon his arrival while Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Hon. Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, bid him farewell at the airport.
The German Embassy is pleased to announce a contribution of Euro 11 Million (TSH 26,4 Billion) to assist Tanzania in coping with the continued arrival of refugees in its western regions. The additional funds will help support ongoing operations of the World Food Programme, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and a number of non-governmental organisations helping with the refugee situation in Tanzania.

The Government of the Federal Republic of Germany has decided to make these funds available from the Emergency Relief Fund of the Federal Foreign Office as a sign of its solidarity with the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania. The German government would also like to underline its commitment to burden-sharing at a time when Germany itself is host to an ever increasing number of refugees due to the crisis in the Middle East.

Members of the press are kindly invited for a joint press conference as are representatives of the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania, the World Food Programme and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This will be held on Monday, 14 November 2016 at 9.30 am at Umoja House, corner of Hamburg Avenue and Mirambo Street.

For further information, please contact the press-officer of the German Embassy, John Merikion, at +255-(0)22 211 7409-15.
11.11.2016 LISTEN

A few days ago, Mahamas Chief of Staff, Julius Debra REPEATED Candidate Mahamas spiel at a rally in the North, that Mahama is one of them, and so they should vote for him. Nobody has raised any issue with this tribalistic statement. Not even the AKANS who have been sidelined by President Mahama and his NDC govt. have rebuked this rallying cry. Interestingly, about a year ago Honourable Osafo Marfo was criticized from ALL corners, (Akans, Ewes, Northerners, etc.) for allegedly saying the obvious: that the Akans have been marginalized by the Mills/Mahama administrations. The question to ask is NA WHO CAUSE AM If the tables were turned with the Northerners and/or Ewes in the Majority, would we ever have an Akan or a Ga elected president of Ghana?

Isnt it absurd that DESPITE HIS SERVICE TO THE AREA, Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom got less than 1000 votes in the last election, from his own KEEA constituency of over 10,000 voters.? No single individual continues to do more for the region; and yet support from his Fanti constituency is lukewarm.

Nowadays, almost All scholarships go to Northerners and Ewes. The high unemployment in the country IS disproportionately much higher among the Akan and Ga youths; AFTER LOADING ALL INSTITUTIONS (Police, Customs, Hospitals, etc.) WITH NORTHERN AND VOLTARIAN JOB SEEKERS, MAHAMAS GOVT. PLACED AN EMBARGO ON HIRING; DELIBERATELY LOCKING OUT AKANS AND GAS OUT OF THE JOB MARKET. Mahama and his NDC are bragging in their campaign that, thanks to Prez. Mahama, 26,000 teachers and 16,000 nurses NOW HAVE JOBS. If these figures are EVEN correct, I can bet my bottom cedi that 88% of them are Northerners and Ewes The remaining 12% are kids of party faithfuls and girlfriends. And just a few weeks ago, Mr. Jujius Debrah, Mahamas Chief of Staff was reminding NORTHERNERS THAT Mahama was one of them so they should vote him back into power.

Mr.Allotey Jacobs and Chief Biney echo on radio stations Mahamas lies that his NDC govt. is creating ENABLING conditions for future jobs. They are suggesting Akans and Gas should therefore wait another four years for those jobs, and vote Mahama back into power. It is bad enough having your sons/daughters, brothers/sisters raped, but to actually aid and assist the rapists time after time (as we listen to and see our Akan NDC trumpeters) is both sacrilegious and criminal. In fact, Nursing and Teaching students should NOT fall for Mahamas lies of restoring their allowances; graduate Teachers and Nurses, and other unemployed graduates should NOT waste their energies going to picket at the Flag Staff House. THEY SHOULD RATHER WALK DOOR TO DOOR IN THEIR VARIOUS VILLAGES TO CAMPAING FOR THE OUSTER OF THIS MAHAMAS NDC GOVT.

It is time WE Akans and Gas wake up to the fact that our fortunes are in our own hands!! Jerry John Rawlings and John Mahama have shown us that we cant depend on other tribes for our socio-economic growth. Couldnt the NDC Akans TRADE the Fanti vote for an Akan presidential candidate? After all President Mahama has shown us what he thinks of, and treats Akans, especially Fantis.

WE MUST RE-EVALUATE OUR MESSAIAH!! IT IS NOT JOHN MAHAMA!! HE HAS PROVEN THAT IN HIS 6 YEARS AS PRESIDENT. WE MUST REMEMBER THAT GHANAS MESSAIAHS IN HER 59 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE HAVE BEEN AKANS.

Recently, Awulae Annor Adjaye, Paramount Chief of the Western Nzema Traditional Area, resurrected their call for a 10% share of the oil revenues coming out of their region, to offset negative impact of the new oil industry in the western region.

( http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/business/Chiefs-to-demonstrate-over-chopped-oil-cash-474212 ).

This new call should NOT have even been necessary, as candidate John Mahama UNDERSTOOD THE RATIONALE AND PROMISED to honor the original request during his campaign in the area. In the last 8 years, that 10% has gone somewhere else (probably into off shore accounts of some party gurus and Alhajis), besides the Western Region. Once again some westerners, fed crumbs by the NDC govt. think theyve had it sooo good that they are the loud ones leading the discussion AGAINST the 10% revenue retention for their own communities livelihood and development. IT IS SOO SAD INDEED.

Fellow Ghanaians, previous governments since 1957, Nkrumahs, Ankrahs, Busias, Akufos Acheampongs, Rawlings, Kufuors and Mills ALL CREATED INFRASTRUCTURE - schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, clinics, Akosombo and Bui dams, thermal power plants, airports and harbours, virgin highways from Elubo to Aflao, from the coast to the North, Fly-overs/interechanges (over 8), VIRGIN urban and rural roads and streets, Ghana Airways and Black Star Lines, Ghana Telecom and GBC, The Ministries, Estate communities, our military, our stadia, courts, parliament, state hotels, etc., etc. etc.

In fact, 99.9% of ALLL our infrastructure to date was created before John Mahamas govt. and AT A DEBT STOCK OF UNDER US$ 19.0 Bil. John Mahama wants us to believe that IN ONLY THE PAST 6 YEARS, HIS ADMINISTRATION HAVE USED OVER US$ 35 Bil (US$ 29.0 Bil. Borrowed + US$ 3.0 Bil, oil revenue + US$ 5.0 Bil. additional taxes) to create the remaining 0.1% of our infrastructure, To quote our judge, create, loot and share indeed. And Mahama wants us to vote him and his cronies back again!!.

AKANS, REMEMBER: It is bad enough having your sons/daughters, brothers/sisters deceived, cheated, or raped, but to actually participate, aid and assist the rapists time after time (as we peel away mounds of leaves off our own staple foods, or listen to and see our Akan NDC trumpeters) is both sacrilegious and criminal.

First, we Fantis MUST STOP SELLING TO EACH OTHER OUR KENKEY, FOMFOM, and EPITSI LOADED WITH LEAVES. Then we can graduate to supporting our own for national Executive positions such as the Presidency.

The saddest part of this deliberate marginalization of Akans, especially the Fantis, means very few Fantis or Akans will even have a chance to read this on web media. It is up to Educated Fantis/Akans to enlighten our kith and kin about this evil being perpetuated on us by Rawlings/Mahamas NDC with tricks and cheap giveaways for our votes; so that they can continue to lord over and marginalize us, loot our resources for a FEW Northerners and Ewes.
For the second consecutive time, Stanbic Bank Ghana, has been adjudged the PR Organisation of the Year (Financial Sector) at the 5th Institute of Public Relations (IPR) Excellence Awards held in Accra.

The award was presented to Stanbic in recognition of the communication strategy devised to introduce and position its SlydePay app as an all-in-one money app that simplifies transactions and payments.

SlydePay targets were constantly engaged through five strategic communication pillars  digital engagement, experiential activations, visibility on various campuses, and merchants' engagement, as well as continuous engagement of the internal audience.

At the end of the campaign, the app received countless positive news reports and client testimonials, positioning it as an innovative and secure mode of payment.

Within the first 12 months of its launch, the app received an impressive number of installations, far exceeding the initial target.

Mawuko Afadzinu, Head of Marketing and Communications at Stanbic Bank Ghana, said the award was testament to the bank's commitment to effectively make progress in the lives of its customers.

At Stanbic Bank, we constantly endeavor to engage our clients and the society through effective communication drivers that bring progress to their businesses and personal lives, he said.

SlydePay as a unique and innovative product offers us yet another opportunity to well inform Ghanaians of easier electronic channels to make payments and transact on the go.

We are happy for this award and thank our customers for making this happen.

Mr. Afadzinu said the SlydePay App takes the cashless revolution further by providing carefully thought through solutions for both web-based and mobile transactions.

Since its introduction, SlydePay has won a lot of awards, including the Product Innovation of the Year 2015 at the recently held Ghana Banking awards.

For the past 10 years, Stanbic Bank has earned a reputation as a customer-oriented, business friendly and socially relevant bank, and has received a number of communication-related awards in recent times.

Alhassan Andani, the bank's Chief Executive was adjudged CIMG Marketing Man of the Year 2014 while Mawuko Afadzinu, Head, Marketing and Communications also won the CIMG Marketing Practitioner of the Year 2013.

A business desk report
Telecommunication operators in the country spent a total of GH4.92 billion in tax contributions, public funding and network improvement over the last five years.

Out of the amount, the telcos, comprising MTN, Vodafone, Airtel, Tigo, paid GH1.42 billion in taxes in 2015 as compared to GH1.05 in 2014.

A total of GH3.82 billion was used in capital expenditure while other remittances amounted to GH595 million.

Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, who disclosed this in an interview with journalists at the launch of 5th Anniversary celebration of the Chamber at Kaneshie Market, Accra, said the telcos have contributed a lot to the growth of the economy of Ghana.

He said the telcos have created over 6,200 direct jobs and about 1.6 million indirect jobs over the last five years.

Mr. Sakyi-Addo said the formation of the Chamber has helped the telcos to fight for a common cause in the areas of taxes, regulations and legislations, among others.

He said the telecos engage in discussions at the Chamber and find solutions to their problems.

Mr. Sakyi-Addo said currently the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications was working closely with the National Telecommunication Authority and community leaders to develop a formula for charging for mobile infrastructure in various communities.

The formula, when agreed upon, would make fees charged for mounting mast and other infrastructure more predictable and transparent, he added.

By Cephas Larbi

[email protected]


Chartered Accountant and former Defence Minister, Albert Kan-Dapaah, has urged Ghanaians to stop relying on Parliament, the Judiciary and the Auditor-General to fight corruption in the public sector.

Mr. Kan Dapaah made the appeal on Wednesday in Accra while delivering a speech at a special corruption symposium organized by the Forum for Media Accountability and Democratic Governance (FOMADEG), a civil society organization which adheres to the principle of non-partisanship and independence.

Speaking under the theme: 'Redefining our Ethos as a Nation,' the chartered accountant said Parliament, Judiciary and Auditor-General's Office, the three constitutionally established institutions tasked with responsibility of fighting corruption, have remained ineffective over the years with respect to executing their oversight responsibility to check corruption.

The institutions that have been put in place to hold the government to account have not been effective, he said.

According to Mr. Kan Dapaah, the ability of Members of Parliament (MPs), judges and the Auditor-General to effectively fight corruption was questionable.

He urged citizens to protect state properties and funds, as well as crackdown on corruption.

We need to be very vigilante in protecting public funds in the hands of the politicians, he said.

He said if citizens do not protect their resources entrusted to politicians, they would continue to be stolen.

According to him, the country needs functional accountability mechanisms and institutions to ensure that government can be held accountable.

He wondered how an Auditor-General, who is supposed to audit the President, can do his or her work creditably when it's the same president that appointed him or her.

The second key accountability institution that the constitution put in place to safeguard our assets as a nation is Parliament.

With the majority of MPs from the President's party, it would be difficult to have them hold the President to account because doing so might jeopardize their chances of being appointed as ministers of state and receiving other benefits from the first gentleman of the land, he said.

Weak Sanction Regime

According to him, The ease with which monies can be stolen and secondly the knowledge among public servants that no sanctions will be applied even if they were caught were responsible for the unending corruption canker in the country.

Monies can easily be stolen in the public sector primarily because of the ineffectiveness of our accountability institutions and mechanisms, coupled with our fear to apply sanctions against those who will steal, he added.

Government, having been entrusted with the management of public resources, must be answerable for the use of the resources to the citizenry after all they provide the resources, he said.

Values Declining

Mr. Kan Danpaah pointed out that the absence of a clearly defined national value was militating against the country's ability to tackle corruption.

Former Commissioner of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Justice Emile Short, could not fathom why Parliament takes so long in passing anti-corruption legislations but less time to approve huge loans.

He urged the citizenry to question the political will of parliamentarians in fighting corruption when it comes to the passage of anti-corruption laws.

According to him, moral and ethical values in the Ghanaian society have declined, adding that corruption had permeated every aspect of national life.

Meanwhile, Daniel Addo-Danquah, Director in-charge of Operations, FORMADEG, has stressed the need to redefine the ethos of Ghana.

By Melvin Tarlue
11.11.2016 LISTEN

Doctor is basically a title for teachers or scholars. It was derived from the Latin word doceo (I teach). Ironically, it has been observed that the use of Doctors title is confusing in todays world. For example, if someone is addressed as doctor, one can hardly predict what their profession or qualification is, this is so because in a general sense, there are three (3) majorly recognized bearer of the Doctors title in Nigeria. We have the Medical Doctors, Academic doctors (PhD) and honorary Doctors. Although, there are other bearers of Doctors title, but in Nigeria, these are the mostly recognized and used in public space.

Among laymen, the only people mostly recognized as doctors are medical practitioners. As a matter of fact, some laymen do not know there are other kind of doctors, apart from the medical doctors. Recently, I heard of a story in which a man is called doctor in his area. One day, a child suddenly fell sick early in the morning, but rather than rush the child to hospital, the mother ran to the apartment of the doctor hoping for a quick intervention, only for the man to inform her that he is not a medical doctor, but an academic doctor (PhD). The woman was said to be disappointed, as she could not understand what an academic doctor is all about. Later on, she was reported to have said, if you cant treat an ordinary child, you shouldnt be answering doctor. To her, a doctor is simply a medical practitioner.

In political circle however, especially among Nigerian governors, most of those addressed as doctors are merely honorary doctorate degree holders. I am of the view that, the title of doctor should be limited to those who rightly deserve to bear the title, while other bearer should seize to use it henceforth.

But real question is, who is a doctor?

As earlier noted, the word "doctor" originally (circa 1300) meant "religious teacher," "adviser," "scholar," or just "teacher." In retrospect , it was discovered that Doctor is an academic title that originates from the Latin word of the same spelling and meaning. The word is originally a noun of the Latin verb docere to teach'. It has been used as an honored academic title for over a century in Europe, where it dates back to the rise of the first Universities, the earliest of which was the University of Bologna. This use spread to the "Americas", through its former European "Colonies", and is now prevalent in most of the world.

The roots of Doctorate can be traced to the "Early church" when the term "doctor" referred to the "Apostles", "Church fathers" and other "Christianity" authorities who taught and interpreted the "Bible". The right to grant a licentia docendi was originally reserved to the "Catholic church" which required the applicant to pass a test, take an Oath of allegiance" and pay a fee. The right to use the title remained a bone of contention between the church authorities and the slowly emancipating universities, but was granted by the "Pope" to the University of Paris" in 1179 where it became a universal license to teach (licentia ubiquie docendi).

It is important to point out that, the earlier contention between the church authorities and universities over who should use the title was put to rest when Pope granted University of Paris the right in 1179 and ever since, it is known exclusively as a title conferred by the Universities.

The Ph.D was originally "Academic degree" granted by "University" to learned individuals, who had achieved the approval of their peers and who had demonstrated a long and productive career in the field of philosophy (in the broad sense of the term, meaning the pursuit of knowledge). The appellation of "Doctor" (from Latin: teacher) was usually awarded only when the individual was in middle age. It indicated a life dedicated to learning, knowledge, and the spread of knowledge.

The Ph.D entered widespread use in the 19th century at "Humboldt University of Berlin" in Berlin as a degree to be granted to someone who had undertaken original research in the sciences or humanities. From there it spread to the United States, arriving at "Yale University in 1861, and then to the "United Kingdom" in 1921. This displaced the existing Doctor of Philosophy degree in some universities; for instance, the D.Phil. (higher doctorate in the faculty of philosophy) at the "University of St Andrews" was discontinued and replaced with the Ph.D. (research doctorate). However, some UK universities such as "Oxford University" and "Sussex University"(and, until recently, "University of York" retain the D.Phil. appellation for their research degrees, as, until recently, did the "University of Waikato" in "New Zealand".

Historically, lawyers in most European countries were addressed with the title of doctor, and countries outside Europe have generally followed the practice of the European country which had policy influence through modernization or colonialization. The first university degrees, starting with the law school of the University of Bologna (or glossators) in the 11th century, were law degrees and doctorates. Degrees in other fields were not granted until the 13th century, but the doctorate continued to be the only degree offered at many of the old universities up until the 20th century. As a result, in many of the southern European countries, including Portugal, Spain and Italy, lawyers have traditionally been addressed as doctor,(as well as Macau in China).

Additionally, the doctors title was not known to be a title for medical practitioner, until in 1703, when the "University of Glasgow"'s first medical graduate, Samuel Benion, was issued with the "Academic degree" of Doctor of Medicine. That marked the beginning of medical practitioners using the Doctors title.

In recent time however, laymen had associated the doctors title only to medical practitioners. Apart from laymen, some doctors even feel it is unworthy for none medical practitioners to use the title. Reports of medical doctors feeling dismayed that there are so many academics these days who insist upon being addressed as "doctor," when that title properly belongs to physicians abound. These medical practitioners do not know that from Roman times through the middle Ages until well into the 18th century, the honorific doctor applied only to eminent scholars - e.g., the Four Doctors of the Western Church in the 5th and 6th centuries (Saints Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, and Gregory).

History has it that, jealous of the respect shown to scholars by the title doctor, medical schools in the 18th century (particularly Edinburgh in Scotland) began the practice of addressing their graduates as "doctor." The schools argued that since their graduates generally earned bachelor's degrees before admission to medical studies, they were entitled to the honorific in the same manner as university scholars. In one of lifes great ironies, many uninformed laymen now perceive the medical degree to be more prestigious than the PhD, declaring that people who have earned the latter are not real doctors.

"Doctor" signifies that an individual has not only gained enough competencies to practice in a teaching field, but has developed enough expertise to instruct others. Incidentally, most UK surgeons drop their title of "Dr" and revert to "Mr" after joining the Royal College of Surgeons. I've read through an online medium of at least one surgeon who reacted quite angrily at being addressed as a mere "Dr", which in such circles, due to a collision between traditional titles and modern medical training, could be unkindly translated as "trainee".

Additionally, the confusion in the use of Doctors title is not only in Nigeria, it existed all over the world. In France for example, only medical practitioners can use the Doctors title. The mention of Doctor for none medical PhD holders is forbidden, especially in hospitals even when the type of doctorate is precisely stated. More shocking is the fact that, in some health departments or hospitals in France, PhD holders are not authorized to sign/co-author any article, even if they did all the work and wrote the manuscript; they are mostly retained as ghost writers, whose intellectual work goes to others. But in Poland, doctor is a common degree of education. It is not reserved for medicine.

By convention in most countries, recipients of honorary doctorates do not use the title "Dr" in general correspondence, although in formal correspondence from the university issuing the honorary degree it is normal to address the recipient by the title. However, this social convention, especially in Nigeria, is not always scrupulously observed; notable people often defy social convention and use the honorary prefix.

Furthermore, It has also been argued that, using the title "Dr." based on an honorary doctorate is unethical, but this is prevalent in Nigeria. But let me state that Doctors title isn't an honorary title; it's an earned title; an academic degree after much efforts and rigor. It is a title for scholars or teachers, who have acquired enough competence to pass down knowledge.

However, others have equally argued that, whatever one thinks of the merits of an Honorary doctorate, it is not something "claimed" but rather something "awarded" for good reasons or bad.

Finally, let me emphasize that, neither MD's nor PhD's are the original "Doctors", but Doctor of Divinity (DD's). But since Pope granted the right of usage to the University, the right of usage has been transferred to educators, particularly the holders of PhD, which is the highest academic qualification for teachers. For this reason, I believe only PhD holders should use the Drs title to put an end to the confusion once and for all.

Abdulrazaq O Hamzat is the President of Foundation For Peace Professionals. He resides in Abuja, Nigeria and can be reached on [email protected] .
Even before Ghanaians go to the polls on December 7, the referee for the 2016 presidential elections Charlotte Osei had written off the presidential candidate of the All People's Congress, Hassan Ayariga.

Speaking at a lecture in the UK last week, Chairperson of the Electoral Commissioner said, "there will be one winner and certainly several losers including Hassan Ayariga, I am sure".

But speaking to journalists in Accra, Charlotte Osei denied making the comment.

On the day of the denial, she also announced that the APC Presidential candidate has been disqualified from the December 7 general elections.

This was because his nomination papers fell short of the requirements stated in the law governing the election, the C.I 94. It was the second time the commission rejected the APC flagbearer's nomination forms.

Hassan Ayariga

After the first rejection, he went to court and prevailed over the EC which was directed to allow him to correct the errors on the forms that formed the basis for his disqualification.

The Supreme court judgment later also stressed the disqualified candidates should be given a second chance. In spite of this second chance, Hassan Ayariga and seven others could not make the list.

Peeved at the decision, Hassan Ayariga has accused the chairperson of the EC of having a personal agenda against him. He said on Joy FM's Super Morning Show he has suffered a 'personal knock-out not a technical knock-out.

According to him, ever since he tried to correct the errors on his forms, Mrs Charlotte Osei has worked to frustrate him.

When he and others were given a second chance, Mr Ayariga alleges the APC went to the EC's offices at 8am Monday morning. In a testament to her rude behaviour, they only managed to see Charlotte Osei at 7pm, he claimed.

Although the EC pointed out 95 more errors which she said included inconsistent signatures, Charlotte Osei also got angry when the APC pointed out 10 of the EC's own inconsistent signatures.

Hassan Ayariga said Charlotte Osei raised her voice at them and questioned Ayariga's place to cast doubt over the EC's signatures.

The behaviour of the EC, he said, raises questions about the capability of women to handle sensitive positions like the EC chair.

Hassan Ayariga said the EC boss is too emotional to be fit for the job.

Story by Ghana|myjoyonline.com|[email protected]
11.11.2016 LISTEN

In the past few months, it seems weve made great leaps in the race to curb global warming. In early October, 191 countries signed the worlds first agreement to curb greenhouse gas pollution from aviation. On October 15, nearly 200 nations agreed to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, another greenhouse gas. And on November 4, last years historic Paris climate agreement will enter into force.

But for every advance we make, new evidence emerges that the world is heating up faster than we could have imagined. Even if the measures pledged in Paris last year are implemented, the world is on track to an average temperature rise of about 3C over the next 50 years.

Thats enough to render many of the worlds poorest countries uninhabitable  including much of Africa.

Its clear what countries have to do this week in Morocco at COP22, the latest global climate talks.

They have to turn the Paris pledges into immediate action. They need to revise those pledges upwards, to have a chance of limiting global warming to less than 2C, the Paris goal. And they must focus their action on the worlds most vulnerable countries.

When it comes to climate change, many African countries are doubly vulnerable. They are often the first to feel the effects of global warming, despite having contributed little to climate change. And they lack the finance, technology and capacity they need to adapt to those effects. They need more resources, skills, systems and institutions.

With the limited means that it has, Africa has shown that it can be a world leader in renewable energy. The Africa Progress Panel Chaired by Kofi Annan, of which I am a member, spelled this out clearly in its 2015 report, Power People Planet: Seizing Africas Energy and Climate Opportunities .

Africa could lead the world in every kind of climate action. But it needs sustained assistance. Developed country governments and international finance institutions have a duty to help Africa.

Supporting Africa is also a crucial investment in the future of the planet. Africa may have contributed little so far to climate change, but the continents population is set to carry on rising for many decades, which will mean more greenhouse gas emissions unless Africa gets the help it needs.

We know what we need to do. The Paris Agreement spells it out. We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation). We need to cope with the effects of global warming (adaptation). And the countries that are suffering harm from climate change, or loss and damage, need compensation.

Those are the ingredients. But in Africa the recipe is different from elsewhere in the world. African countries need more support for adaptation than they are getting  and more compensation for loss and damage.

The Paris Agreement also outlines the kind of support countries need: finance, technology and capacity building. Once again the combination in Africa is different. The need for finance is large and urgent, as is the need for capacity building.

How can countries make sure at COP22 that the worlds most vulnerable regions get the assistance they need? It is imperative that every country in the world shows that it complies with the letter and spirit of the Paris Agreement, by acting to keep all of its climate pledges.

Crucially, universal compliance with the Paris pledges means coming up with the money that is vital to enable every country to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. In Paris, countries agreed to jointly come up with $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020. At COP22, they must finalise the roadmap towards raising that sum.

Countries who will receive part of that $100 billion need to know when and how much they will get, so that they can plan their adaptation measures and their transition towards a low-carbon economy. They also need to know how much they will get from two other climate funds, the Adaptation Fund and the Least Developed Country Fund.

At the COP22 meeting, its likely delegates will celebrate the entry into force of the Paris Agreement. And so they should. But the best way they could honour that historic agreement is not just to keep it but to reinforce it. A key aspect of the agreement was its commitment to regularly revising its targets. A mechanism has been put in place to do that  the Facilitative Dialogue. Countries need to lend it serious support.

If we needed another spur to action at COP22, it arrived in September. The World Meteorological Organization announced that global average CO2 levels had just surpassed 400 parts per million  for the first time in 3 million years.

Three million years ago, when CO2 levels were last as high as they are now, global temperatures were as much as 3C higher than now. Ice sheets were dramatically smaller. Sea levels were up to 3 metres higher.

Thats the scenario we face. We know what we have to do to avoid it and to contribute to keep for our children a world inhabitable.

Michel Camdessus, a former head of the International Monetary Fund, is a member of the Africa Progress Panel (APP), which consists of ten distinguished individuals from the private and public sector who advocate for equitable and sustainable development for Africa.

Kofi Annan, chairs the panel and is closely involved in its day-to-day work. The other panel members are Peter Eigen, Bob Geldof, Graca Machel, Strive Masiyiwa, Linah Mohohlo, Olusegun Obasanjo, Robert Rubin and Tidjane Thiam.
Even before Ghanaians go to the polls on December 7, the referee for the 2016 presidential elections Charlotte Osei had written off the presidential candidate of the All Peoples Congress, Hassan Ayariga.

Speaking at a lecture in the UK last week, Chairperson of the Electoral Commissioner said, there will be one winner and certainly several losers including Hassan Ayariga, I am sure.

But speaking to journalists in Accra, Charlotte Osei denied making the comment.

On the day of the denial, she also announced that the APC Presidential candidate has been disqualified from the December 7 general elections.

This was because his nomination papers fell short of the requirements stated in the law governing the election, the C.I 94. It was the second time the commission rejected the APC flagbearers nomination forms.

After the first rejection, he went to court and prevailed over the EC which was directed to allow him to correct the errors on the forms that formed the basis for his disqualification.

The Supreme court judgment later also stressed the disqualified candidates should be given a second chance. In spite of this second chance, Hassan Ayariga and seven others could not make the list.

Charlotte Osei, EC Chairperson

Peeved at the decision, Hassan Ayariga has accused the chairperson of the EC of having a personal agenda against him. He said on Joy FMs Super Morning Show he has suffered a personal knock-out not a technical knock-out.

According to him, ever since he tried to correct the errors on his forms, Mrs Charlotte Osei has worked to frustrate him.

When he and others were given a second chance, Mr Ayariga alleges the APC went to the ECs offices at 8am Monday morning. In a testament to her rude behaviour, they only managed to see Charlotte Osei at 7pm, he claimed.

Although the EC pointed out 95 more errors which she said included inconsistent signatures, Charlotte Osei also got angry when the APC pointed out 10 of the ECs own inconsistent signatures.

Hassan Ayariga said Charlotte Osei raised her voice at them and questioned Ayarigas place to cast doubt over the ECs signatures.

The behaviour of the EC, he said, raises questions about the capability of women to handle sensitive positions like the EC chair.

Hassan Ayariga said the EC boss is too emotional to be fit for the job.

Myjoyonline
11.11.2016 LISTEN

In every sphere of life, Africans are great innovators and entrepreneurs. You only have to step into an African market to see and hear that ingenuity.

But every entrepreneur needs investment, and thats where things often get tough in Africa. Investment is hard to come by, whether you're a small trader trying to open a bank account or a company trying to get a loan so it can grow.

African countries need investment, too. Right now, in particular, they need investment so they can adapt to the effects of climate change and play their part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change adds urgency to the investment needs that were already there  for infrastructure, agriculture, health and education.

The historic Paris Agreement that was reached at the COP21 climate talks last year provides for such investment. Developed countries have committed to providing $100 billion a year between 2020 and 2025, and to set a new, higher goal for the period thereafter.

At this years global climate talks, COP22 in Marrakesh, Morocco, in November, its crucial that developed countries finalise the roadmap towards meeting that annual $100 billion goal. Above all, that means the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases: the United States (15% in 2014), the European Union (9.6%), Russia (5%) and Japan (3.6%).

Theres a catch when it comes to the $100 billion. The definition of developed countries goes back to 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed. So it doesn't include China  now by far the worlds largest emitter (29.6%). China, Brazil and other emerging economies should be making their own significant contributions to climate finance, and stepping up to meet other global climate obligations.

The $100 billion is called climate finance, but its really climate investment. Partner countries need to make sure that they invest in Africa to protect the progress that they have already helped to build. China, a major investor in many African countries, bears a particular responsibility to safeguard its investments.

On a global scale, climate finance for Africa is an investment in the future. Africa may contribute little to total emissions now, but almost all of the worlds population gains over the next 50 years will happen in Africa. Africa and its climate finance partners need to make sure that growth is low-carbon growth.

Africa, for its part, is far from being a passive recipient of rich countries money. Africa has the potential to become a global climate leader . The Africa Progress Panel , of which I am a member, demonstrated this powerfully in its recent report Power, People, Planet: Seizing Africas Energy and Climate Opportunities .

African countries know that their 21st century growth needs to be driven by renewable energy, and they are making astonishing leaps. Delegates at COP22 need look no farther than Ouarzazate, where Morocco is building the worlds largest concentrated solar power station . Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa have also built huge solar and wind power stations.

The continent needs low-carbon energy not just to climate-proof African growth, but to expand access to modern energy: two-thirds of Africans do not have electricity . It takes a long time to design, finance and build big power stations, and to extend grid access to remote areas. Thats why many Africans are turning to off-grid solutions, especially solar. Off-grid household or mini-grid systems are expected to supply 70% of the 315 million people who will gain access to electricity in rural Africa by 2040.

That scenario will still leave at least 300 million people without electricity in 2040, however. And only 3% of international climate finance is being channelled towards such decentralised renewables.

That gap illustrates starkly the triple challenge delegates must address at COP22. We need to increase our ambition, to act urgently, and to think long-term.

When it comes to ambition, one of the achievements of the Paris Agreement is the joint commitment to revise our global climate goals regularly. COP22 needs to maintain and increase that pressure. For one thing, there is widespread doubt over whether the $100 billion in climate finance will even be enough. Some experts have put the figure at $400 billion.

We need to act urgently because with every month that goes by, there is new scientific evidence that global warmings effects are more severe and more immediate than we had anticipated. Developing countries need to receive climate finance now so they can start adapting immediately for climate effects that will be upon us very soon. That means finalising a new workplan at COP22 to compensate countries for loss and damage from climate change.

We need to think long-term because this is not just about us, or even our children: this is an investment in every generation to come. They will look back and judge us not on the promises we make  or the excuses we make  but on the action we take now.

Strive Masiyiwa is founder and chairman of Econet Wireless and a member of the Africa Progress Panel Chaired by Kofi Annan.
On 10 November 2016, the UK and Uganda co-hosted the fourth high-level meeting of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC) Partners Group on South Sudan. Participants including the Foreign Ministers of Nigeria and Somalia and JMEC Chair, former Botswanan President Festus G. Mogae, discussed the current situation in South Sudan and measures for ending the current escalation of violence.

The following Statement was agreed by all participants in the meeting:

"We discussed the current situation in South Sudan and measures that could be taken to end the continuing escalation of violence and ensure that efforts to build peace in South Sudan through the Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (ARCSS) are made more effective.

The violent clashes which began in July 2016 represent a serious breakdown in the fragile peace agreed under the ARCSS. The situation in Juba remains fragile as tensions rise and violence increases across the rest of South Sudan. This fighting violates the peace agreement and is having a devastating impact on the lives of millions of South Sudanese people. We call for an immediate cessation of hostilities and encourage all armed groups to join the peace process as the only way forward for resolving political differences. There is no military solution to South Sudans problems.

We commend the efforts of the JMEC under the leadership of former President Festus G. Mogae on its work to try to keep the peace agreement alive under these challenging circumstances. We recognise the important roles that IGAD Plus partners have played in supporting the JMEC and urge leaders in the region to remain actively engaged. We specifically recognise the role that Kenya has played so far, and express our hope that Kenya will continue to play a key role in supporting the peace process. We further note the commitments made by the Transitional Government of National Unity (TGNU) to keep the ARCSS alive.

The only way forward in South Sudan is through a genuine and inclusive political process that sees all interests engaged in shaping the future of this young country. Inclusivity is not about individuals. Inclusivity means inviting all parties to join the process peacefully and ensuring genuine representation of the national character in government. All parties must demonstrate their commitment to peace by taking meaningful steps to end violence and ceasefire violations. We strongly call on all parties to lay down their weapons and engage in peaceful and inclusive political dialogue  not just in Juba, but across the whole of South Sudan.

We strongly condemn all instances of hate speech, ethnically targeted killings and incitement to violence. These are in violation of the peace agreement and put the future of the country at great risk. We commend the efforts of community and religious leaders to ease tension and work to unify the country.

We remain gravely concerned about the fragile security environment and the desperate economic and humanitarian situation in South Sudan. We particularly recognise the role played by neighbouring countries in hosting large numbers of refugees from the current crisis. Continued violations of the ceasefire and the hindrance of humanitarian assistance are exacerbating the suffering of civilians and cannot be tolerated. All parties must take urgent steps to ensure that humanitarian actors are granted free, safe and unhindered access to people in need, in compliance with international obligations, and allow the people of South Sudan to return safely to their homes and livelihoods.

We note the acceptance letter sent by the TGNU to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on deployment of the Regional Protection Force (RPF), and welcome the progress that has been made. The TGNU must also take urgent steps to facilitate the deployment of the RPF and allow UNMISS to fulfil its mandate without restrictions or bureaucratic impediments. A failure to do this cannot and will not be tolerated by the regional and international community. The TGNU has a responsibility to deliver on the commitments it has made to all its people and to the international community. The institutions (Strategic Defence and Security Review Board (SDSR), Joint Military Ceasefire Commission (JMCC) and Joint Operations Centre (JOC)), established under the ARCSS, should be revived and strengthened according to the ARCSS, to achieve sustainable security arrangements.

The JMEC Partners Group will continue to press for peace in South Sudan. The TGNU should endeavour to do whatever is within its means to implement the ARCSS. The region and international community will meet to consider appropriate action if no positive developments are seen on these urgent issues and on progress towards peace in South Sudan. We will review progress at the next meeting of the JMEC Partners Group in February 2017."
The European Investment Bank, the worlds largest global lender for climate related investment, today confirmed its commitment to support climate action and increase the impact of climate related investment in Europe and Africa.

The European Investment Bank welcomes the ratification of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement less than a year after COP 21, a key step to ensuring that the first-ever legally binding global agreement on climate can enter into force. The EIB recognises the importance of long-term finance to tackle a changing climate and the increasing role of climate finance to drive economic growth.

....The Paris Agreement has strengthened efforts to unlock more sustainable finance and catalyse greater investment where market innovation, national leadership and international finance all play a crucial role. said Jonathan Taylor, European Investment Bank Vice President responsible for climate action.

Vice President Taylor confirmed that since COP 21 was convened in Paris the EIB has strengthened the impact of climate related investment worldwide. This has including backing for long-term investment in new sustainable transport, renewable energy and energy efficiency schemes, as well as supporting investment to adapt crucial infrastructure to a changing climate both across Europe and around the world, in Africa, Asia, Latin America and in Europes eastern neighbours.

He outlined how EIB the impact of support for climate investment in Europe has been strengthened under the Investment Plan for Europe and how future new lending in countries most impacts by the refugee crisis would also have a strong focus on supporting climate related investment.

Climate action is a key priority for the European Unions long-term lending institution, the European Investment Bank. In the last five years the EIB has provided more than EUR 90 billion for climate related investment around the world. In 2015 EIB climate finance reached a record high of EUR 20.7 billion and represented 27% of overall financing.

Transformational projects such as the Noor solar power plant at Ouarzazate and Lake Turkana wind farm in northern Kenya demonstrate how private investment across Africa can be unlocked to strengthen sustainable energy generation. Enabling future climate related investment of this scale and increasing the climate impact of all projects is crucial for successful implementation of the Paris agreement. added Jonathan Taylor.

Climate related investment approved by the EIB since Paris ranges from zero-energy buildings in Finland, a billion euros for sustainable transport in Paris, construction of mobile breakwaters to protect islands in the Venice lagoon, and one of the worlds largest offshore windfarms, the 84 turbine Beatrice project that will provide sustainable power to an estimated 450,000 homes.

Since the landmark agreement the EIB has also confirmed key climate related investment outside Europe, including expansion of the Cairo Metro and the first metro in the Indian city of Lucknow as well as improving supply of sustainable energy in the small island state of the Maldives.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the long-term lending institution of the European Union owned by its Member States. It makes long-term finance available for sound investment in order to contribute towards EU policy goals.
This week at the 22nd Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP22) dubbed the action and implementation COPthe Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI) is forging ahead with its ambitious, African-led initiative to deliver 300GW of renewable energy generation capacity by 2030.

AREI is a transformative effort to accelerate, scale-up and harness the continents huge potential in renewable energy sources.

Launched by African Heads of State and Government last year, AREI was among the most substantive and ambitious outcomes of COP21 in Paris.

The framework and action plan of the initiative set out a plan to enhance access to energy to improve human well-being, power agriculture and food production, industries and services, and strengthen social and community services.

In the year since the Paris talks, the Initiative has secured financial support for the establishment phase, and launched an interim Independent Delivery Unit (IDU) under the leadership of Youba Sokona. Dr. Sokona who led the establishment of the African Climate Policy Center (ACPC), comes to the Initiative with decades of experience in the fields of energy, development and climate change.

To achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs), Africa must adopt smart, modern, people centered, scalable, locally appropriate renewable energy solutions that help the poor and ensure gender equality. As most of Africas energy systems are not yet built, the continent has a unique opportunity to leapfrog to the clean energy systems for the future by taking a visionary, programmatic planning approach. AREI is here to support countries in this effort, Sokona said.

Among its key objectives, AREI is set to bring 10GW of energy projects online by 2020, as an initial step towards the transformational change needed to ensure universal access to energy by 2030.

Significant reductions in renewable energy costs in recent years and months have made AREIs action plan not only the most sensible option from an environmental and social perspective, but also the most affordable paths forward to power the African continent. Parallel to AREI, similar initiatives are being considered around the globe.

Its been encouraging to see mounting support from so many countries and organizations who want to be associated and work with AREI. And I am particularly excited that our efforts have helped to catalyze other similar renewable energy endeavors, including initiatives from the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Small Island Developing States (SIDS). While working towards a global partnership across these and other initiatives, its now all about implementation and getting energy on the ground to the communities that need it, he added.

African and international leaders will gather for a high-level event on November 16th from 9.30 am to 10.30 at the Africa Pavilion to discuss the way forward for this initiative. Dr Sokona will present and discuss AREI at a special session on Africas energy future during the COP22 Energy Day today 11 November, 12:20pm in Side Event Atlantic Room in the Blue Zone.
The Electoral Commission has just awarded contracts for the electronic transmission of collated results to four local mobile telephony companies.

The four are Vodafone, MTN, TiGo and Airtel, with the country divided into four zones to support multi-lots.

Their task is to set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) infrastructure to link the 275 constituency collation centers to the national collation center in Accra, where the collated presidential results from all 29,000 polling stations will be tallied and the winner declared.

The e-transmission of results from the constituency, and not from the polling station, is a recommendation from the Electoral Reforms Committee.

The EC's head office, regional and district offices have their own internal communications network (WAN), consisting of VSAT nodes, which is provided by STL.

However, the tender document for this e-transmission contract made it absolutely clear that the VPN service provider should operate "independent from EC WAN".

According to sources at the Commission the Daily Statesman spoke to, STL was categorical that it wanted nothing to do with results transmission. STL's core mandate is to supply the Biometric Verification Devices used for voter verification on Election Day.

There have been concerns over the integrity of the results transmission infrastructure the EC was seeking to use.

The earlier decision to have results electronically transmitted from polling stations was vigorously resisted by the New Patriotic Party and the Let My Vote Count Alliance.

The decision to limit the transmission from the constituency collation centre and to use the established telecommunications companies in the country should provide some comfort to Ghanaians.

The system is such that the Returning Officer at the national collation center should be able to retrieve a two megabytes file in less than a second.

All 276 CPES are expected to be installed and operational by the end of November for training of technicians to take place. The VPN is scheduled to be commissioned three days before December 7 after internal stress tests have been done by end of November.

Each of the four Telcos is in charge of a zone, as primary provider with another telco serving as back up.

There are 275 constituencies in the country. The 57 constituencies in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions are clustered into one zone.

The 76 in Ashanti and Brong Ahafo Regions are in one zone. Volta and Eastern Regions are in another zone with their 59 constituency collation centers. Greater Accra, Western and Central Regions are supposed to be in the last zone, representing 83 constituency collation centers.
Marrakech, 11 November 2016  As countries focus in turning climate commitments to actions, WHO is calling for health to be the central priority during COP22.

Almost one quarter of the global burden of disease, and approximately 12.6 million deaths each year, are attributable to avoidable environmental risk factors, such as air, water and soil pollution, chemical exposures and ultraviolet radiation. Global environmental and social changes, including climate change, exacerbate many of these risks.

Despite growing evidence of the effect of environmental risk factors on health, political action and investments remain largely insufficient: only about 3% of health resources are invested in prevention, with approximately 97% are spent on treatment, increasing healthcare costs.

Health gains represent major social and economic benefits of environmental protection, and therefore should be put forward as key motivating forces for public support and political action.

The Government of Morocco, holding the Presidency of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 22nd Conference of the Parties (COP22),

the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Environment Programme will host a ministerial meeting on Health, Environment and Climate Change. The meeting will bring together health and environment ministers to promote healthier environments for healthier people.

The expected outcomes include a Marrakesh declaration on health, environment and climate change and identification of ways and means for a potential future coalition and a proposal for ensuring health is considered a priority for financing.

There will be a press briefing later today in this direction to be addressed by:
Today in this country, if you should select ten people who have held top positions in this country and should God give them a second chance to relive their lives, I do not have any doubt in my mind that Jerry John Rawlings, the founder, the creator and the Godfather of the corrupt, criminal, greedy, incompetent, evil, satanic, tribalistic NDC administration will stand up and be counted. Today, Jerry John Rawlings cuts a morose figure, a man with so much regret and sorrow in his heavy heart and which weighs down on his broad shoulders. The man who used to deliver boom speeches which sent both mice and crocodiles alike scuttling for cover now speaks in parables and proverbs in measured tones. From the way he currently carries himself and seizes every opportunity offered him to share his thoughts, I have the belief that he constantly prays to God for forgiveness for his past behaviour and misdeeds against the nation, acts which could be put down to youthful exuberance, naivety, over zealousness, misunderstanding of the socio-political environment arch tribalisitc mindset fostered on him by selfish individuals who belong to his Ewe tribe, criminality or plain treachery of people who surrounded him.

At a point in in time, he needed those people to survive and those people also needed him to survive. So they formed an unholy rainbow coalition of miscreants and hirelings who raped the virginity of the country. The NDC which he created out of the PNDC turned out to be a Frankenstein monster which turned out to swallow him. It was Jerry John Rawlings who offered massive opportunities for the people from the Savanna Region to assume commanding heights of the nation's affairs. Without John Jerry Rawlings, John Dramani Mahama would have been an unknown commodity in the nation's affairs. Today, the greedy and criminal manner John Dramani Mahama has used his position of trust to allow members of his family and other corrupt people from the Savanna Regions to capture the commanding heights of the political, and socioeconomic spirit and letter of this country to loot and share the national resources among themselves can be traced to the massive opportunity Jerry John Rawlings offered the people from the Savanna Region. SADA and GYEEDA were completely constituted by corrupt and greedy person from the Savanna Region put in place by the NDC who set about raping the entire organisations.

At the end, the criminals were let loose and some given ambassadorial appointments to escape from the full glare of their unfortunate tribesmen and tribeswomen they had shortchanged. Today, in the public service, over 80% of all Chief Directors are from the Savanna Region. There is no single Board of Directors of a state institution where either the Chairperson or the Chief Executive Officer is not from the Savanna Region. Search through the Council of University of Ghana, Legon and not less than three of the members are from the Savanna Region, some with doubtful credentials to be of any use to the premier university of the country while you might find it difficult to find one single Ga person on the Council. Yet, today some uncouth youths from the Savannah Region dare to insult Jerry John Rawlings brandying him as a tribalist who put only his Ewe tribesmen and tribeswomen into positions of trust. Today, a former palm wine tapper who has risen to the highest position of trust within the NDC can claim openly that the mad dog within the NDC (referring to the Godfather) has been chained and at his age, the Godfather is too old to be an asset on the political campaign train of the NDC.

When Jerry John Rawlings came to power, over 99% of the people he surrounded himself with were not known to him, neither did he know their background and they formed a mass of failures and disgruntled persons with axe to grind against the rich and successful in society. Most of them were either recommended to him or thrusted on him because at the time when he burst on the political scene his close associates were limited. Jerry John Rawlings placed them in positions of trust and power and they did not waste time to illegally acquire wealth and started living filthy glutinous lifestyle from the stolen resources of the nation. Some of them used their positions as their national service (indeed many of them had never signed pay voucher before when they were offered minstrel appointments) and flew out on a weekly basis on the resources of the nation to acquire higher qualifications in Ivy League universities outside. Some extended the largesse to their children and family members. The GETFund was raided outside the law establishing it to give scholarships to family members and cronies to study oil and gas in Aberdeen University in Scotland. Most of the scholarship went to people of the Savanna Region. Is it any surprise when university in Scotland offered an honorary doctorate degree to the occupant of the State House? While the corrupt, incompetent, greedy, criminal evil, satanic John Dramani Mahama NDC administration was illegally enriching the elite from the Savanna Region, the regime was at the same time impoverishing the poor and downtrodden from that region.

After reflections, Jerry John Rawlings call his despicable creatures greedy bustards, old evil dwarfs, babies with sharp teeth, liars, leeches, criminals and even tells the whole world that over 60% of all the appointees of John Dramani Mahama are criminals and thieves. A Daniel has at last come to judgment. It is not only Jerry john Rawlings who has awaken from his deep slumber. Today the Supreme Court has realised the great harm it did to this country by handing over the State House to the incompetent and corrupt John Dramani Mahama on silver platter, perhaps because at that time the political climate dictated it. Today like practicing Catholics going for confession before their Metropolitan Archbishop, the Supreme Court by recent decisions is telling the corrupt, incompetent, petulant, arrogant Poison Ivies who portray themselves as Electoral Commissioners that the Electoral Commission (EC) cannot be a law to itself and claim a Robinson Crusoe status and that the EC operates under the 1992 Republican Constitution with the Supreme Court having the ultimate power to give judicial directions to the EC.

The fear of Lord is the beginning of wisdom. However, this fear of the Lord has not permeated the very thick skulls of the corrupt, incompetent, greedy, criminal evil, satanic John Dramani Mahama NDC administration including the EC which is clearly unashamedly in bed with the corrupt, incompetent, greedy, criminal evil, satanic John Dramani Mahama NDC administration otherwise the hallucination which afflicted Don Quixote of old would not be repeated now.

E-mail: [email protected]

By Kwame Gyasi
Policy experts and statisticians specialized in sustainable development, environment and tourism gathered to agree on the way forward in developing a statistical framework for sustainable tourism. The meeting was held at UNWTO headquarters in Madrid last 20-21 October.

The first meeting of the Working Group of Experts on Measuring Sustainable Tourism (MST) agreed that developing a statistical framework for sustainable tourism is a priority to support integrated policy responses at national and destination level, and urged UNWTO to lead this effort.

The Group agreed that the core rationale for developing a statistical framework is to support the measurement of sustainable tourism in its various dimensions (economic, environmental and social) and at the relevant spatial levels (global, national, sub-national) by providing a common language and organizing structure for exploiting the richness of data already available and for identifying additional data that may be needed.

A statistical framework for sustainable tourism is the natural evolution of and complement to the standing statistical standards on tourism statistics: the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) and the International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics (IRTS). The starting foundation involves bridging the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable tourism through two UN standards: the TSA and the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA).

A standards-based statistical framework can support the credibility, comparability and outreach of data and various measurement and monitoring programmes pertaining to sustainable tourism, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators.

The Sustainable Development Goals and the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development 2017 constitute a unique opportunity to advance sustainable, inclusive and responsible tourism; developing a statistical framework to measure sustainable tourism is essential in fostering a common understanding for tracking our progress, said UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifai. Tourism stakeholders at large will benefit from having a statistical framework for sustainable tourism much like we all benefit from the TSA which provides the framework for tourisms economic contribution.

More than 50 representatives from stakeholders like National Tourism Administrations, National Statistical Offices and Ministries of Environment from 13 countries, as well as subnational administrations, the private sector, academia, civil society, tourism observatories (including UNWTO-INSTO members) and multilateral organizations participated in the two day working session.

The meeting came at an important point in UNWTOs initiative Towards a Statistical Framework for Measuring Sustainable Tourism (MST) which is being developed since 2015 with the support of the UN Statistical Division and the engagement of Austria, Fiji, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands and Cardiff University (Wales).

In addition to exchanging views and experiences, the Working Group of Experts considered the 8 discussion papers prepared for the meeting and the ongoing work of the 5 pilot studies in order to assess the feasibility and relevance of advancing towards a statistical framework to better inform and to advocate for sustainable tourism as well as to guide policy makers.

The Working Group emphasized that beyond being a technical exercise, developing and subsequently implementing a statistical framework for sustainable tourism is very much a strategic endeavor requiring stakeholder engagement, inter-institutional coordination and political leadership. These key issues need to be addressed in recognition of the multifaceted natures of tourism, environment and sustainable development.
The Ambassadors of Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland payed a visit to the UN Regional Service Centre Entebbe (RSCE) last week, to inspect the facilities and learn more about the services the centre provides.

The RSCE is a shared service centre for United Nations field missions in Central and East Africa. The centre was established in 2010, and currently serve a total of approximately 16,000 personnel in 9 missions, together comprising almost 60 per cent of UN peacekeeping. The RESCE has about 420 staff.

RSCE services all peacekeeping (PK) and special political missions(SPM) in Africa - about 12. The services they provide are administrative, including salaries, benefits, travel support, ICT, training and logistics. RSCE is under the Department of Field Support of the UN Secretariat.

As one of the main pillars of the Global Field Support Strategy --a five-year (2010-2015) change management initiative of the UN Department of Field Support  the centre is committed to supporting United Nations peace operations in a changing and challenging global reality.

The visit started with a brief about the RSCE held by the chief of the RSCE, Ms. Safia Boly, and some of her staff members, followed by a tour of the premises. Amongst the providers of equipment to the RSCE-base is the Norwegian Bergen-based company W. Giertsen Hallsystems AS - who has been one of the leading suppliers of relocatable canvas halls for use in industrial, sport, peacekeeping and emergency relief operations for several decades.

The group also met briefly with the head of the MONUSCO base at Entebbe. The MONUSCO base handles rotation of uniformed personnel, their health needs, logistics etc. The base has several warehouses with supplies, in addition to a security coordination center.
"....Mr. Mahama must now answer the simple questions...directly...Is Ghana receiving now, and is Ghana going to receive tomorrow, Fair-Share Oil?...The FTOS-Gh/PSA signatories, all those selfless people...are Ghanaian heroes and selfless supporters of Ghana...like Abou Ben Adhem...Respectfully, we want to think it is great to be part of crowds like Okyeame, GLU and Yahoo Groups...if only to know what people think about public policy...But there are Groupthink effects...Sadly,....some are more into Montie-Mouth-Talk-Talk and ChenChenMa Hand-Me-Down Ford SUVs, crappy heap of stories that will never pay for a single mile of road, build a single health clinic, or stop the billion-dollar loses in oil revenues...Surely, Ghana can afford a first-ever "Ghana Oil Contract Forum" in Ghana's own Ghana National Theater sponsored by the People... for the People, far and away from that spongy Accra International Conference Center... Press on FTOS-Gh Campaign/Petition..., " (Prof. Lungu and Andy C.Y. Kwawukume, 10 Nov. 16).

Continuing......

We've always wondered: Why should GIGS, FTOS-Gh organizers, and the Signatories to the Campaign give the government the benefit of doubt when the Government never provides complete and timely information and data about what the Government wants us to know is the "truth" with respect to Ghana's oil revenues?

The NDC government line and lie, we have been told repeatedly, is that the Concession or the variant now dubbed Ghana Hybrid System, is adopted by countries emerging into petroleum exploration.

But, has the NDC named a single country in Africa that has adopted a concession system for its sovereign oil within the last 2 decades?

Respectfully, we want to think it is great to be part of those types of crowds, Okyeame, GLU and Yahoo Groups, etc., if only to know what people think about issues that have important public policy implications.

But there are Groupthink effects, we can see!

Sadly, some, including government officials, are a lot more interested in using their Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and group accounts to talk about their selfies and themselves, in all their grandeur.

They seem more in Montie-Mouth-Talk-Talk and ChenChenMa Hand-Me-Down Ford SUVs, just crappy heap of stories that will never pay for a single mile of road, build a single health clinic, or stop the billion-dollar loses in oil revenues.

Then there are those more enthralled by Pastor Obinim whips and deliverance by God, as they "Fa ma Nyame" (Leave all things to God), dazed, and worshipping in perpetual, heavenly stupor, foaming at the mouth at the mention of Woyome.

They want to "OccupyGhana", but yet, they operate under benign negligence of the $6bn-plus lost the last 5 years alone to foreign oil companies, among them KOSMOS of the United States and Brexit-UK's Tullow. Might it be the idea of so many zeroes attached to the lost $6 billion that is numbing their reflexes and stupefying their minds?

Sad news is, today, together, they all help create, support, and incentivize even bigger rat holes (ermm...corruption tunnels) and systems. Those are predatory systems that have now been morphed into MOHS by Mahama. Those are manna for his government officials and the foreign oil interests: no explanation necessary.

So, let us remind them that The People pay taxes for the Government to answer questions, directly, publicly, timely.

They ought to have already internalized the idea that we are not simply going to go away!

Because we are not simply going to go away, why can't our challengers (the Buahs, Dagadus, the Amins, the Hammonds, and all the like-minded), why have they not bothered to task the Government and themselves to use the same people Ghana has employed in the sundry communications bureaus to answer those important questions, in free, open forum?

Recall that at great expense and profit, Buah-Dagadu-Hammond, just had an international Summit on Ghana's oil last April. Attended by "Big Men" from all corners of the world, the Summit was proudly spear-headed by Dr Kwabena Donkor, the Censor, as we have noted previously.

Did they tell Ghanaians who funded that event, and why?

Did they tell Ghanaians where all the profits went?

Did they report to Ghana the impact on the average Ghanaian given amount spent?

How much of the millions of dollars generated ever remained in Ghana to pump up Ghana's economy?

Relatedly, have they bothered to communicate to DFID/UK that records exit that affirm there has been, and there still is, vociferous opposition to the oil contracts? Have they bothered to report to British tax payers that those factors are inherently "Risk Factors" to the UK-funded GOGIG "Revenue Management" program?

But we forget!

The "Big Men" from KOSMOS and Tullow, and the rest of the oil companies, are in fact using $29 million to take $6 billion from Ghanaians.

GOGIG Revenue Management, that DFID/UK Trojan Horse contract on Ghana!

And the leaders of Ghana are either conniving, they do not care, or, they simply do not have a clue.

We believe it is all that, and some more!

Why, for instance, do they prefer to meet in secluded/hidden places (in Ada, for example), when it is a lot cheaper and more efficient to have the meetings in Accra where they have all their big offices?

So, in closing, how about a serious, Ghana-centered/Ghana-Proud "Ghana Oil Contract Forum" to settle the matter?

How about settling the matter once and for all?

More than a decade and half into the 21st Century, how about settling the matter once and for all. How about settling the matter so even the elementary school child sitting under a tree in school in Mahama's Gonja/Bole hometown and environs, can understand that YES, indeed (1) Ghana has received, (2) Ghana is receiving, and (3) Ghana will continue to receive a Fair-Share of its own oil revenues in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana? It is not rocket science, or is it? Surely, Ghana can afford a first-ever "Ghana Oil Contract Forum" in Ghana's own Ghana National Theater sponsored by the People, of the People, for the People, far and away from that spongy Accra International Conference Center. Do that, if only for symbolism.

But, maybe we should not hold our breath on that one on account of Mr. Mahama!

After all, the attitude that it is actually the "man in the street" who must use their own resources to do the work the government is already funded to do still rules in Ghana, from Accra to Bole, even while Mr. Mahama and the other "Big Men" take their large incomes and multiple benefits, month-after-month, year-after-year, all tax-free.

All those "Big Men"!

Kwame Nkrumah, right from the Polo Grounds to Independence Square, from Akosombo Dam to Addis Ababa, from Kulungugu to the United Nations in New York City, affirmed neo-colonial bondage and fought mightily to control and overthrow those plundering thieves, vampires, and rapists of Ghanaian resources.

And Kwame Nkrumah won in no small measure.

But now, by his own actions in the 21st Century, President Mahama is confirming the neo-colonial bondage and predatory racket plot that is his own racket, his new plundering scheme of a baby, MOHS.

Don't be fooled!

There is absolutely nothing healthy about the Ghana Hybrid System and Mahama' MOHS.

There is no Better Ghana underneath MOHS. MOHS gives Ghanaians a whole lot less than Ghana is actually entitled to receive as sovereign owner of all the oil resources.

MOHS is a contract on Ghana!

That is their agenda!

Press on GIGS!

Press on FTOS-Gh/PSA Campaign!

NOTES/SOURCES:

1. PSA Countdown Clock for Ghana. Fair-Trade Oil Share , ( http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?msg=Countdown%20to%20Production%20Sharing%20Agreement%20%28PSA%29%20for%20Ghana&p0=4&swk=1&year=2015&month=11&day=30&hour=0&min=0&sec=0 ).

2. Need more information? Visit http://ghanahero.com/FTOS_GH_Campaign.html .

SUBJ: Mahama Oil Hybrid System (MOHS) is confirmation of neo-colonial bondage (Part 2), by Prof. Lungu and Andy C.Y. Kwawukume.

Support Fair-Trade Oil Share Ghana (FTOS-Gh) Campaign/Petition:

https://www.change.org/p/ghana-fair-trade-oil-share-psa-campaign-ftos-gh-psa/

Brought to you courtesy www.GhanaHero.com10th November, 2016.

(Powered by: www.GhanaHero.Com).
Marrakech, 11 November, 2016  With the Paris Climate Agreement having just come into force, leaders from a wide range of sectors are coming together on Energy Day at the UN Climate Change Conference in Marrakech (COP22, to 18 November) to demonstrate action on global efforts to decarbonise our energy system.

Energy Day is being jointly organized by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), in cooperation with the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN) and the Moroccan Agency for Energy Efficiency (AMEE), as part of a series of thematic days  hosted by the Climate Champions  and held under the auspices of the COP22 Presidency.

The Paris Agreement set urgent climate action firmly in the context of sustainable development, with conversations today focusing on how we achieve the Sustainable Development Goal Number 7 (to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all), and secure universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy that can connect the current 1.1 billion people in the world who have little or no access to electricity, and the 2.9 billion people that still rely on smoky, dangerous solid fuels for cooking and heating.

Discussions and commitments made throughout the day will include:

Announcements from the RE100 and EP100 initiatives

Pre-launch commitments to One for All  a global campaign to be launched in early 2017 that seeks to mobilize new forms of capital and new investors to end energy poverty before 2030.

Developments in the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Lighthouses Initiative, launched in Paris last year aimed at supporting islands in the transformation of their energy systems.

Developments related to the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI)

The remarkable renewable energy transformation of Morocco, this year's COP hosts.

Closing the energy gap offers us one of the greatest economic opportunities of our lifetime, said Rachel Kyte, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All. In 2016, the world needs an energy system that allows universal access, supports new jobs and meets our aspirations of a just, fair future for all. To achieve this, promises made must be promises kept.

The climate objectives agreed in Paris require nothing less than the radical decarbonisation of the global economy, said Adnan Z. Amin, IRENA Director-General. Transitioning rapidly to a future fuelled by renewable energy, combined with improving energy efficiency, is the single most effective way to stave off catastrophic climate change while providing citizens with a better quality of life. But the pace and scale of change needs to dramatically increase if we are to fulfil the promise of the Paris Agreement. Governments need to create the necessary policy and finance frameworks to catalyse a groundswell of initiatives, as the private sector develops its own decarbonisation strategies. This is well within our reach.

New announcements made on Energy Day include:

New commitments from Dalmia Cement and Helvetia were announced during the press conference, which saw them publicly commit to use 100% renewable power across their operations and join RE100; a global, collaborative initiative with more than 80 of the worlds most influential companies who are working to massively increase demand for  and delivery of  renewable energy.

Announcements also came from Philips Lighting and Swiss Re who have committed to double their energy productivity and join EP100, a global campaign that works with companies to maximize the economic benefits of every unit of energy they consume.

The RE100 and EP100 initiatives are designed to work together to provide the least-cost decarbonisation pathway for business, and today three companies  Dalmia Cement, Philips Lighting and Swiss Re  become the first companies to be part of both campaigns led by The Climate Group, in partnership with CDP and the Global Alliance for Energy Productivity.

Together, RE100 companies are collectively creating over 100TWh of demand for renewable electricity  more than enough to power Morocco three times over. Members speaking today include Alejandro Agag, CEO, Formula E, Kevin Rabinovitch, Global Sustainability Director for Mars, and Bill Weihl, Director of Sustainability, at Facebook. Mr. Rabinovitch announced a new wind power purchasing agreement to power Mars' Mexican operations.

A new private-sector led initiative, the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA), was also announced - REBA builds connections between corporate electricity demand and renewable energy supply.

Since COP21, the SIDS Lighthouses Initiative grew rapidly to include 39 States and 19 development partners and developed an innovative island renewable energy support programme. 19 renewable energy projects in the Caribbean were registered on the Sustainable Energy Marketplace, representing an investment volume of $1 billion. Two island States, Antigua and Barbuda and Cabo Verde, were selected to receive funding from the IRENA/ ADFD Project Facility and other co-financiers for a total of $45 million. In addition the UAE have recently announced $50 million for renewable energy projects in the Caribbean States.

Alejandro Agag, CEO, Formula E commented: "Electric vehicles reach their full potential when coupled with renewable energy charging - which is why all the fully-electric Formula E cars are powered by a revolutionary zero-emission glycerine. The future is electric!

About Global Climate Action

France and Morocco's global climate champions have set out their detailed agenda to boost cooperative action between governments, cities, business, investors and citizens to cut emissions rapidly and help vulnerable nations adapt to climate impacts and build their own clean energy, sustainable futures.

Message from the COP22 climate champions

A year after COP 21, the great dynamic of climate action is now growing strong. As we all gather to Marrakech time has come to start to take stock of what has been achieved during the last year. To be consistent with the long-term goals, all actors will have to work together, not only to achieve the national targets of the NDCs, but also to go further and bridge the gap of emissions.

This sense of urgency should guide us all into accelerating immediate efforts and delivering ambitious action. We must identify what concrete policy options and what tools we will have to mobilize in the short term. The science is clear: the path towards achieving the long-term goals should bring us to peaking GHG emissions by 2020. This is a challenge, and we are not there yet.

On the current trends, we will be in 2030 between 11 to 14 GT above Paris-compatible pathways. The purpose of these days is to strengthen all efforts and take them to the next level to stay on track for the objectives: stay well below 2C and if possible 1,5C, increase adaptation and resilience capacities and reorient financial flows. It is our responsibility, as champions, to make the link between the real world and the COP process. Political leaders from all around the world should hear and be inspired by the solutions at our reach.
About 65,000 voters are expected to cast their ballot in this year's special voting on December 1, 2016.

This will be six days before the general elections which comes off on December 7.

The special voting on that day will start at 7am and end at 5pm at designated polling stations across the country.

The areas will be announced by the EC later.

EC officials, media personnel, members of the security services, among others, who would be playing one role or the other on December 7, are expected to cast their votes.

The early voting process is in accordance with the Public Elections Regulations, 2016 (C.I. 94) [R. 23].

NPP man sues EC over declaration of special voting results

A member of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Kwame Amoako-Tuffuor and two others had earlier dragged the EC to court, seeking an order to compel the Commission to announce results of the special voting on the day of casting.

The trio which included Benjamin Arthur and Adreba Abrefa Damoa argued in their writ that section 23 of C.I. 94, of the law which regulates the conduct of the 2016 general elections, is inconsistent with Article 49 of the 1992 constitution.

Judgement set for Nov. 14

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has set November 14, 2016 to give its judgment on the case.



By: Sixtus Dong Ullo /Citifmonline.com /Ghana

Follow @ sixtus_gh
11.11.2016 LISTEN



By Naabenyin Joojo Amissah.

Since peace, tolerance, unity and tranquility are prerequisites to nation building, the acting President of the Assin Atendensu Traditional Area in the Central Region, Nana Oseadeayo Kwantwi Barima, has urged Ghanaians to be mindful of their utterances.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with The Chronicle, Nana observed that post-election violence posed a threat to the continent of Africa, and, therefore, pleaded with Ghanaians to take a cue from what is happening in other African countries.

'No Ghanaian is willing to be a refugee. We don't have any other country apart from Ghana, and this is why we must make it a topmost priority to protect and maintain the peace we have today, he stressed.

Nana advised that it was high time the Ghanaian electorate took bold decisions to cast their votes based on issues and policies that would affect their lives.

This, he argued, would send strong signals to politicians to do the right things when voted into power.

He bemoaned the situation whereby some voters sell their birth rights to politicians by taking money from them (politicians) in exchange for their votes.

He again appealed to the leadership of all the political parties to preach good messages to their follows any time they mount their political platforms, so that their supporters would see their counterparts from the other side as competitors, and not enemies.

Nana Kwantwi finally appealed to the Electoral Commission to be vigilant and conduct its duties without fear or favour, so that it could conduct free, fair and credible elections.

The eyes of the world have now been set on Ghana, as the country prepares to go to the polls on December 7 to elect a President and 270 parliamentarians.

Since 1992, when Ghanaians opted for multi-party democracy, Ghana has conducted six successful and peaceful elections that have brought four presidents into office.

This enviable track record is what has made the country a beacon of democracy in the sub-Saharan region of Africa.






11.11.2016 LISTEN



By Joyce Danso.

Bishop Daniel Obinim, Founder of God's Way International Church, on Thursday, appeared before an Accra Circuit Court for allegedly assaulting two adopted children in the presence of his congregation.

Two other pastors, Kingsley Baah and Solomon Abraham, who were him in the dock, have also been charged with abetment of crime. They have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The court, presided over by Mrs. Abena Adjin-Doku, admitted them to bail in the sum of GH10,000, with one surety each. They are to reappear on November 24.

Mr. Ralph Opoku Edusei, who represented Bishop Obinim and other the two accused persons, prayed the court to admit them to bail, as the charges preferred against them were bailable.

According to the counsel, the offences were also misdemeanours, adding that he was certain that no other offences had been committed by the accused persons.

He submitted that his clients were well known reverend ministers, who have fixed places of abode, and would not abscond.

Prosecuting, Deputy Superintendent A. A. Annor narrated that the complainant, Irene Aborchie Nyahe, is a legal practitioner residing at Community 17 Lashibi.

Baah and Abraham are in charge of the Accra branch of the church.

The female victim, aged 14 years, and male victim, aged 16 years, are adopted children of Obinim, and they lived with him in his residence in Accra.

DSP Annor said on August 17, this year, at about 17:00 hours, the Accra branch of the church held a church service, where Obinim claimed he had a revelation from God that the two victims were engaged in pre-marital sex and that the 14 year old girl was pregnant.

The prosecution said Obinim revealed that the victim was in the process of aborting the pregnancy, as such, the Holy Spirit had directed him to chastise them in the presence of the congregation.

In the full glare of the church, Obinim removed his black waist belt and assaulted them.

In the process, DSP Annor said, his two pastors, Baah and Abraham, prevented the female victim from running away, and Obinim continued to beat her.

The prosecution said the victim could not bear the pain, hence sought refuge with Mrs. Florence Obinim, but her husband asked her to stay away.

According to DSP Annor, Abraham brought the victim back to Obinim, who beat the victim.

Obinim beat the two victims to his satisfaction, before freeing them. The matter was reported to the police for investigations.

Source: GNA




11.11.2016 LISTEN



By Pascal KafuAbotsi

([email protected]).

Former Commissioner of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Mr Emile Short has cautioned voters against the use of physical looks of candidates as the basis for the choices they make at the polls in December.

Candidates with proven records of honesty, integrity and hard work, he said, should be the people's preference for positions, as opposed to reflections on tallness or handsomeness, for example, which had mostly been the case in Ghanaian politics.

Speaking at a symposium organised by the Forum for Media Accountability and Democratic Governance in Accra on Wednesday, Mr Short, who stressed the need for this years elections to be taken seriously, also spoke about the need for politicians not to conceive the idea of enriching themselves, prior to occupying public office.

Leaning on the adage, a good name is better than riches, the legal luminary would want to see a new breed of politicians whose main concern would be the sort of legacy they wish to leave behind upon retirement.

Mr Albert Kan-Dapaah, former Member of Parliament (MP) for Afigya-Sekyere West, who was touched by the theme for the programme, Redefining our Ethos as a Society, blamed the ease with which monies are stolen and also the knowledge among public servants that nothing would be done to them when they are caught, as the root cause of corruption among state officials.

The knowledge among public servants that no sanctions will be applied even if they were caught [means] monies can easily be stolen in the public sector, primarily because of the ineffectiveness of our accountability institutions and mechanisms, coupled with our fear to apply sanctions against those who steal, he stated, while recommending sanctions as the only way to minimise corruption in the country.

Touching on accountability, he deepened the understanding that government was the poorest institution to have ever existed, saying they don't make any money, they depend on us the citizens for all the monies they use to provide the public goods and services, the reason they ought to be accountable to the people.

Why do we have a government? he asked, responding that: The primary duty of government is to provide public goods and services to citizens with public funds provided by citizens. To do this, they need money, monies that they themselves don't have.

For him, the Auditor General, Parliament of Ghana and Judiciary, being the institutions put in place to hold government accountable have not been very effective and it was even worse to know that accountability mechanisms put in place to check the financial management system also did not work.

Their failure to put government on its toes, he said, stemmed from their modes of appointment. What these institutions need to do their accountability task is independence, yet all their heads are appointed by the government. he stated.

Mr Kan Dapaah, however, would be comfortable with a thief as President of Ghana so long as there were workable structures in the country, which would not allow him to steal public funds.

Today, Donald Trump has been elected the President of USA, whatever he does, he will not be accused of stealing public funds, not because of his ethical values, or the American national values, but is it because the system in place will not allow him to steal, he mentioned.
11.11.2016 LISTEN

Charlotte Osei, New EC Boss

By Maxwell Ofori

[email protected]

The chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Madam Charlotte Osei has told Editors forum in Accra yesterday that her outfit had no option but to charge media practitioners who are applying for accreditation to cover the December 7 election, because the Commission lacks funds to print the accreditation free of charge.

Journalists have been asked by the EC to pay GHC10 and GHC20 respectively for the printing of the accreditation cards, but most of the media practitioners are not happy with this, because the Commission had been given adequate funding for the election and must, therefore, provide the cards free of charge.

The European Union has for instance given the EC 4million pounds whilst the government of Ghana had also paid GHC693 million out of the GHC1.2 billion requested to enable the electoral body to organize the elections.

But Mrs Osei explained that not all the 4 million Pounds Sterling came to the EC and that, the money was distributed among four state institutions and they (EC) only got One Million Pounds Sterling.

She mentioned other recipients as the National Media Commission (NMC) and the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE).

So we don't have 4 million pounds. If you say we've received GHC693 million from the government, You would recall that the final budget that was approved between the EC, the Special Budget Committee and the Ministry of Finance was GHC1.2 billion, so clearly you now see the reason we need you to pay for your accreditation cards?She asked rhetorically, laughing all through, adding that  so please as good partners pay the GHC10 to ensure that you can move around the polling stations and do your work freely and ensure the difference between you (Media) and the voter on the election day.

The programme 'briefing by the EC Chairperson' on the theme: 'Election 2016: Innovations, flashpoints and other challenges,' was to give the media the opportunity to discuss any issues bothering them and to seek clarification concerning the general election scheduled for December 7.

The Chairperson of the EC told the journalists that the Commission would follow laws and make sure the processes leading to the election were transparent.

She made this assertion when responding to a question that the EC was too 'legalistic and unyielding'.

According to Mrs. Osei, it would be safer for her outfit to be legalistic in an election like this. Are we being legalistic? Yes, should we be legalistic? Yes. In a high contest like we have, I think the safest place for the Electoral Commission is to follow the law to the best of our understanding and ability. Anytime you exercise discretion, which cannot be supported by the law, you risk being taken on by another side, whose rights are also affected.

It's very easy sometimes for us to also seek the right of those who are directly affected by the application of the law, forgetting that if you do the opposite, somebody else can take you on, so the safest place for the EC is to be legalistic. I don't know of any Electoral Commission worth its sort that has not been called unyielding by politicians. I think that's what you should do. You should be unyielding when it comes to the application of the law. Everybody feels safer and everybody's rights are respected.

She said that the EC had made provisions for solar and rechargeable lamps, which could last for twelve (12) hours in case of power outage during the counting of the ballot papers on the day of the election.

She noted that, every polling station on Election Day will require about 97 different items such as Biometric Verification Machine (BVD), Stamps and others, out of which 94 are ready, as of now and being sent to the regions, awaiting movements on election day.

The Chairperson also indicated that the list for the proxy voting and the special voting would be made available to the public on Monday. She added that there would be two (2) hourly briefing with the media on Election Day, so that the media is constantly updated and informed about any challenges we are experiencing with the process and any issue we seek the support of the media to address.

She continued that the total number of proxy voters for this year's election would be five hundred and thirty-four (534), not the two-hundred and seventy thousand (270,000) being bandied around that the EC would use to rig the election.

We've also been told that we are going to use special voting process as a vehicle to rig the elections. In 2012, there were about a hundred and twenty-thousand (120,000) who took part in special voting. This year, the numbers are about half of that. Excluding the electoral staff, we added the media this year so the media and security personnel count to about 29,773.

In her welcome address, Ms AjoaYeboah-Afari, Chairperson of the Editor's Forum (EFG) said the aim of the meeting, which was the third of its kind since 2012, was to provide the EC and the media an opportunity for a dialogue, ahead of the elections, to enhance understanding of the issues and promote better reportage.
11.11.2016 LISTEN



The much talked about general elections in the United States of America, which saw Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump contesting on the tickets of the Democrats and Republicans respectively has come and gone, with the latter clinching victory.

And barely 24 hours after the election, has the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) ascribing reasons why it believes Trump's victory has prepared the way for the elephant party to win the upcoming election.

Interestingly, officials of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), who prior to the US elections made claims that a win for Hillary Clinton will be a win for President John Dramani Mahama, have all of a sudden made a sharp u-turn, 'singing' that Trump's victory is a sign of triumph for their party.

Speaking in an interview with The Chronicle on Wednesday, Nana Akomea -Communications Director of the NPP said the fact that Donald Trump defied all odds to win the elections is an indication that the American people wanted change, and this is what would happen here in Ghana.

The win of the Republican Party and its candidate in the American elections hold important lessons for Ghana, he noted, adding The first major lesson is that the American people have voted for change.

This shows us that no incumbent government is entitled to an automatic retention in power. That retention in office is dependent on how best a government has fulfilled the expectations of the people.

The second main lesson is that it is so easy for an incumbent government to lose touch with the real concerns of the electorate. The Republican candidate, Mr. Trump, made many comments that many found disagreeable and regrettable.

At some points, he did not enjoy the support of key members of his party, including ex-presidents, the Senate Majority Leader, etc., who all spoke out against him.

But obviously, he also gave voice to issues that really mattered to the majority of the American people, including poverty, deprivation, jobs, security, etc.

It is very clear that President Mahama and the NDC government have lost touch with the real needs and concerns of Ghanaians, he said.

Much as The Chronicle agrees with Nana Akomea that his argument is on point, this should not quench the fire that the party, especially the supporters, have stoked to ensure victory in the December polls.

The party must rally every Tom, Dick and Harry and move to all nook and cranny of the country, if possible, house-to-house and ensure that its messages have gone down well with the people to ensure total victory, come December 7.

Trump's victory has brought to the attention of the world that everything is possible in an election, another reason why the rank and file of the opposition party must not rest until the election has been won convincingly.

The rank and file of the party should not also allow the numerous media hikes and prophesies making rounds in the country that, Nana Akufo-Addo will win the December 7 election to go into their heads.

Nana Akufo Addo, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia and the rest of the top hierarchy of the NPP, down to the grass roots, should hold the bull by the horn and work very hard until the flagbearer of the party has been crowned with victory.




WHAT: The Africa Day High Level Event in the margins of the the 22nd Conference of the Parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 12th Session of the Meeting of the Parties (CMP12) to the Kyoto Protocol (KP).

THEME: Moving from Commitment to Action with Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) and the African Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI)

WHEN: 16 November 2016, at 10:00am

WHERE: Marrakech, Morocco (African Pavilion)

WHO: The COP22 Africa Day high level event is jointly organized by the African Union Commission (AUC); African Development Bank (AfDB); United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA); and NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency (NPCA); in collaboration with support of the host country; the Kingdom of Morocco.

OBJECTIVE:

The main objective of the Africa Day high level event is to provide a platform and opportunity to critically examine the implementation of the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) submitted by African countries as part of the Paris Agreement, as well as the African Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), and the implications for Africas development.

Specifically the high level event seek to achieve the following objectives:

 Emphasize Africas priorities for the means of implementation of the INDCs in the context of the Paris Agreement;

 Review the implications and prospects for the implementation of the NDCs for Africa, including associated challenges and opportunities;

 Discuss the alignment of the NDCs with national development strategies that are inclusive and aligned to climate-resilient and low carbon transition;

 Have an open conversation on the rollout of the African Renewable Energy Initiative.

The expected outcomes of the Africa Day high level event includes:

 Good understanding of Africas readiness regarding the implementation the NDCs and AREI;

 Opportunities and challenges for the implementation of NDCs and AREI in Africa;

 Better understanding of the implications and prospects of NDCs and AREI on Africas development.

Participants:

The Africa Day high level event is expected to bring together African leaders, global leaders and African stakeholders participating at COP 22, development partners and the donor community, African Group of Negotiators on climate change, Scientists, Experts, Civil Society Organizations, Private Sector entities, women, youth and the media.

BACKGROUND:

The COP21 Paris agreement in 2015 acknowledges the need for further negotiation and refinement. Consequently, COP 22 is significant as the place where the Paris framework will be further refined, and gaps in the existing agreement filled in order to ensure a safe future climate. Already, the SABSTA meetings in Bonn have started to discuss the provisions of the Paris agreement that require further elaboration. This on-going negotiation is particularly important for Africa, given that the continent continues to bear the brunt of climate change while contributing the least to the phenomenon.

It is thus in Africas interest to ensure that the Paris framework is consolidated into a binding and enforceable agreement which addresses the issues that concern the continent. In the lead up to Paris, these issues included the need to ensure balanced focus on adaptation and mitigation, limiting global warming to below 1.50C, ensuring adequate means of implementation, as well as maintaining the CBDR principle. The Paris framework does not conclusively address most of the continents concerns, and it is recognized that COP 22 represents an opportunity to advance the development of the Paris framework.
The Chief of Staff, Julius Debrah, is appealing to Zongo Chiefs in Koforidua, Eastern Region, to renew the mandate of President John Mahama in the December 7 polls.

His reasons are that it would be unfair to make President Mahama a one-term president when all other Presidents before him under the Fourth Republic, were allowed two terms in office.

Mr. Debrah also buttressed his argument by citing what he called the numerous developmental projects undertaken by the President's in his first term in office.

During courtesy call on Chiefs at Koforidua Zongo today [Friday], the Chief of Staff said, From the north to the south, almost all the presidents who have governed this country have been given eight years to serve. President Kufuor and President Rawlings were all given 8 years if possible; let's give the president 8 years so that at the end of his tenure, we can conclude whether he did well or not.

Chiefs give assurances

On his part, the Fulani chief, Nuhutah Saliki-Fulani, assured that his people will vote to retain President Mahama based on his achievements and not religious leanings.

God does not make kings based on their religion. He elects leaders irrespective of their religious beliefs. Take Senegal for instance. The country is dominated by Muslims and Christians just make up two percent yet they still voted for a Christian president.

So it does not matter where you belong. All I am saying is that Mahama has done a lot for this country and we have to vote for him again irrespective of his religious beliefs.



By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana
The Lagos State authorities must take immediate steps to provide alternative accommodation for as many as 30,000 people who were made homeless, in direct contravention of a court order, when their homes were deliberately set alight in the Otodo Gbame community in Lekki, Lagos, Amnesty International said today.

Although it is unclear who started the first fire on the morning of Wednesday 9 November, eyewitnesses have told the organization that police present did not attempt to stop the fire. Instead, they say they were chased away by police officers when they attempted to put it out. After the fire stopped in the afternoon, the police and a demolition team returned overnight with a bulldozer. Eyewitnesses say that the police then started the fire again, forcibly evicting thousands from their homes. At no point were firefighters seen.

Thousands of residents of Otodo Gbame watched in horror as their homes and possessions were destroyed literally overnight, and their futures plunged into uncertainty. What makes this especially shocking is that on Monday this community was granted an injunction preventing the Lagos State Government from proceeding with the planned demolition of the informal settlements along the States waterfronts  the authorities involved in this destruction are in flagrant violation of the law, said Amnesty International Nigerias Researcher Morayo Adebayo.

We are therefore urging the Lagos State authorities to immediately establish a commission of inquiry to investigate the shocking incident at Otodo Gbame, and provide adequate housing and compensation to all those who have lost their homes.

Amnesty International spoke to eight residents who described what they saw over in recent days.

Eyewitnesses reported that the chain of events began on Monday 7 November with a scuffle between youths in Otodo Gbame and youths in a neighbouring community. The scuffle escalated on Wednesday morning and resulted in a fire. A statement by police said they had intervened at that point to restore calm.

A 22-year-old woman said that on Wednesday morning, she saw youths setting fire to the homes, and that the police had prevented them from intervening or collecting their belongings:

We [tried] to pack our things but the police [stopped] us, when we tried to pack; they [threatened to] shoot us [..] we all left empty-handed.

By the afternoon of 9 November, approximately a third of the community was already destroyed by the fire. A witness told Amnesty International that the fire stopped around 1.30pm, although there was still smoke in the community.

Later that night, at around 11.30pm, the police returned with a bulldozer and began demolishing the remaining houses. Eyewitnesses told Amnesty International that they also set houses on fire as part of this forced eviction, which continued into late in the afternoon on 10 November. One witness told Amnesty International that after the bulldozer demolished their houses, the police set the rubble on fire. Other eyewitnesses also said that the police were setting fire to houses that were still standing.

A 39-year-old Otodo Gbame resident described to Amnesty International the chaos that ensued when the destruction unexpectedly resumed overnight on Wednesday:

Police were firing guns [into the air], everybody was running helter-skelter so they had to run for dear life [] They did not allow anybody to rescue his property, everything was burnt. I was only able to rescue [a] few [items]. Most of the property that was burnt is my wifes property, clothes and childrens clothes. I have [a] TV and other things; they were burnt down.

The same man also reported that he saw people falling into the water in the panic, including young children who were apparently unable to swim. Other residents also told Amnesty International that several people drowned, although the organization could not verify this.

A 28-year-old man said:

In the middle of the night, I was sleeping when somebody came to wake me up, [saying] that there was a bulldozer in the community. I had to come out and walk to a place where I can be safe and [watch] it. The bulldozer was working [clearing houses]. They [the demolition team] began to set fire to the houses they had cleared already.

Amnesty International confirmed with the Public Relations Officer of Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA) that the agency was part of the demolition team sent to Otodo Gbame.

A police statement made on 10 November also confirmed that the State Ministry of Physical Planning and Urban Development would move in to demolish the remaining shanties and clear the rubble caused by the inferno.

Residents told Amnesty International that this morning (11 November), policemen returned to demolish the few remaining structures. With police back at the site, there are growing fears that the neighbouring community called Chisco Ikate will also be destroyed. A resident from this community told Amnesty International a demolition team arrived this morning with a bulldozer.

In October the Lagos State authorities announced plans to demolish all irregular structures in waterfront communities across the state, which could leave hundreds of thousands of people homeless and destitute. They alleged the settlements are a security threat, linking them to a rise in kidnappings in the area. However, the authorities failed to provide any details on the process and how people would be rehoused.

On 31 October the Lagos State House Assembly passed a resolution calling on Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to halt the demolition plans, and on 7 November Lagos State High Court granted an interim injunction preventing the Lagos State Government from proceeding with the demolition of the informal settlements along the States waterfronts, including Otodo Gbame.

Amnesty International is calling for an immediate end to destruction of any houses in the Otodo Gbame and neighbouring waterfront areas, and a moratorium on mass evictions within Lagos State until there are regulations in place to ensure that such evictions comply with safeguards that are required under international law for any eviction to proceed.

These standards prohibit evicting people at night and the deliberate destruction of property including through arson. The deliberate burning of peoples houses and structures during the demolition exercise by the police may constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for which suspected perpetrators must be brought to justice as a matter of urgency.

The wave of mass forced evictions across Lagos waterfront communities is shattering lives. We are calling for the State authorities to respect their obligations under international law by stopping these demolitions, and providing alternative housing for all those already made homeless, said Morayo Adebayo.

Background

More than two million people have been forcibly evicted from their homes in different parts of Nigeria since 2000. These evictions are carried out without adequate prior consultation, adequate notice and compensation or alternative accommodation. Most were already marginalized and many had lived for years without access to clean water, sanitation, adequate health care or education.

Nigeria is a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and other international and regional human rights treaties, which require it to realize the right to adequate housing, and to prevent and refrain from carrying out forced evictions.
By Kester Kenn Klomegah Moscow Bureau Chief

Moscow (Russia), Nov. 11, GNA - For more than two decades, Russia has been trying to regain its Soviet-era economic influence in Africa, but such efforts have regularly hit stumbling blocks. Policy experts and Russian authorities attribute this to inadequate knowledge of investment and economic possibilities on the continent.

'As before, we cannot deny that Russian business structures have insufficient knowledge of Africa, its requirements, and other parameters,' said Irina Abramova, newly-appointed director of the Institute for African Studies under the Russian Academy of Sciences. 'On the other hand, Africans are poorly informed about the possibilities of Russian partnership.'

Keir Giles, an associate fellow (on the Russia and Eurasia Program) at Chatham House, London, wrote in an emailed query that lack of knowledge about investment opportunities was not the only factor holding back economic engagement. 'The problem remains that there are whole sectors of the economy where Russia is simply irrelevant - to take the most obvious example, consumer goods - and so their engagement will always be dwarfed by China,' he wrote.

'The only exceptions are the traditional strengths of Russia (and the Soviet Union before it) - infrastructure, raw materials and energy. In effect, the lack of engagement is partly a consequence of the failure to develop and diversify since the end of the Soviet Union that is a fundamental challenge to the Russian economy,' the research associate further stated.

Scaled-down African presence:

Giles added that the 'economic collapse at the end of the Soviet Union affected Moscow's engagement with Africa along with other regions. While Russia was finding its new place in the world, diplomatic representations abroad were cut back harshly and resources focused on those countries seen as essential.'

As a result, Russian expertise and engagement with Africa entered a hiatus, at exactly the same time as China started rapidly to increase investment and presence. Moscow's recent efforts seek to redress this and catch up.

Interestingly, Russia has more than 40 full-fledged diplomatic representations in Africa, and has fixed special trade missions to help facilitate trade and investment in a number of African countries. Despite this, economic engagement has faced difficulties over the years.

'One must admit that the practical span of Russian companies' business operations in Africa falls far below our export capabilities on the one hand, and the huge natural resources of the huge continent on the other', Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said in a speech at a session of the Urals-Africa Economic Forum in Yekaterinburg in 2013.

Lack of media coverage:

For the past years, only a few of Russia's initiatives aimed at reviving economic cooperation have been made public.

'The Russian media writes very little about Africa - what is going on there, what are the social and political dynamics in different parts of the continent,' said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs. 'The media and NGOs should make big efforts to increase the level of mutual knowledge, which can stimulate interest for each other and lead to increased economic interaction as well'. Lukyanov is also a member of the State Council on Foreign and Defence Policy.

'To a certain extent,' Lukyanov said, 'the intensification of non-political contacts may contribute to increased interest. But in Russia's case, the main drivers of any cooperation are more traditional rather than the political interests of the state and the economic interests of big companies. Soft power has never been a strong side of Russian policy in the post-Soviet era.'

For the lack of vital economic information, the Russian Foreign Ministry, Department of Press and Information could also be blamed for its failure to grant media accreditation to, at least, a few African journalists to work in Russia. Most often, African political leaders and corporate business directors have to depend on western media reports about developments in Russia.

Prioritizing Africa:

'Until recently, Africa was poorly represented in macro-economic forecasting and research, especially in terms of Russian-African relations,' wrote Professor Aleksei Vasiliev and Evgeny Korendiasov, both from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of African Studies (IAS).

Vasiliev is a former presidential envoy to African countries, and Korendiasov a former Russian ambassador to the Republic of Mali and Burkina Faso. They authored an article published in June 2013 that said Russia has officially declared promoting relations with Africa a priority goal.

However, assurances made by Russian officials in their statements that Africa is 'in the mainstream of Russia's foreign policy' have not been substantiated by systematic practical activities, and the development of relations between Russia and Africa has so far been nothing to boast about.

Moscow's long term goals include developing investment cooperation with African countries, widening the presence of Russian companies in African markets through increased deliveries of industrial and food products, and enhancing Russian participation in driving the economic development of Africa.

At the same time, Russia needs to look at simplifying access to its market for African countries.

GNA
By Gideon Ahenkorah, GNA

Accra, Nov.11, GNA - Nana Oye Lithur, the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, has expressed confidence in the Ghana News Agency (GNA) committed to pursuing its mandate as the central news collection and dissemination hub of the state.

She said the relevance of the Agency in fostering national integration and unity could not be overemphasised as it continued to be the only state-owned wire service disseminating accurate, reliable and credible information to the public.

The Minister was interacting with the staff of the GNA in Accra when she paid a working visit to the Agency.

Nana Oye Lithur said the Agency was established with the objective of creating formidable corps of journalists who would promote peace and security in Ghana and Africa as a whole through the dissemination of information that reflected patriotism.

She said the Agency had the mandate to present Africa in a positive light to the world.

The Minister commended the staff for leading the way in ensuring national cohesion and urged them to continuously conform to their professional ethics.

"I know that if you have GNA your story can be circulated to the entire nation," she said.

Nana Oye Lithur said the Ministry would continue to contribute towards efforts by the Government in tackling the challenges confronting the GNA to ensure that it attained a competitive status.

'Just like our Ministry, GNA certainly has some challenges which must be addressed to fuel its growth," she said.

He said the Ministry would continue to engage the expertise and services of the Agency to achieve its aims and objectives adding; 'when we organise any event we make sure we invite GNA because we believe it is capable of providing the needed publicity we desire".

Nana Oye Lithur urged the staff to work harder during the December 7 polls to ensure a conflict-free general election.

GNA
Bawku (UE), Nov. 11, GNA - The Most Reverend Alfred Agyenta, Bishop of the Navrongo-Bolgatanga Catholic Diocese, has called on the government and stakeholders in education to focus more on technical education.

He noted that technical education, when given the needed attention would be the only avenue to train the teeming youth to provide qualified skilled personnel who would create jobs for themselves and not wait on government for white-colour jobs.

The Bishop said this in a speech read for him by the Very Revered Father Robert Laar, Parish Priest of the Saint Anthony of Padua Parish in Bawku, at the launch of the 50th anniversary of the Bawku Technical Institute in Bawku in the Upper East Region.

It was under the theme 'The Role of Technical Education in an Era of Increasing Graduate Unemployment in Ghana'.

Bishop Agyenta said technical education was established to provide skilled trained human capital to generate resources for the development of the country, but this aim had been diverted to different areas.

He said most technical institutions such as the polytechnics and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology had diverted from their main courses.

This, he said, was the major cause for the lack of technical experts in the country and the increasing unemployment.

He said technical and vocational education was an important catalyst for economic transformation, as it prepared middle level professionals and equipped them with the requisite competence for positions in various sectors of the socio-economic life.

Bishop Agyenta said the youth had to be educated to accept technical training and acquire skills that would enable them to gain employment instead of depending on government.

Dr Robert Baba Kugnaab-Lem, Upper East Deputy Regional Minister, gave the assurance of government's commitment to focusing its attention on technical and vocational education in the country in recognition of their role in the development of the country.

Dr Kugnaab-Lem noted that government, over the years, had implemented a number of interventions in technical and vocational education.

He called on parents to change their current negative attitude towards vocational and technical education as it would help their wards to gain employable skills to enable them to compete in the job market.

Mr Paul Kowono Atogebania, Principal of the Institute, said it was founded in 1967 by the Catholic missionaries with 18 students to train in motor vehicle mechanics and was later absorbed by government in 1973 with additional ten technical and vocational based courses.

He said the institute ran two examinational bodies which included the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Professional Technical Examination (NAPTEX).

He called on the government to assist the school to fence its compound, as its land was being encroached upon by settlers in the area.

GNA
By Laudia Sawer, GNA

Old-Ningo (GAR), Nov 10, GNA - Lekela Power, initiators of the first wind farm project in Ghana, has assured residents of Ningo in the Greater Accra Region that the project would not affect farming activities in and around the town.

Lekela, the renewable energy company, therefore appealed to land owners to cooperate with them for a smooth take-off of the wind power farm in the area.

The company's wind farm when in operation is expected to add 150 megawatts of power to the national grid.

Mr Joseph Addai, Project Manager of Lekela Power, gave the assurance on Thursday when the company signed contracts with contractors to renovate three basic schools in the Ningo Traditional Area as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility.

Mr Addai said even though 15,000 acres of land were being acquired for the farm, the wind turbines would be installed on only one per cent of the land.

The other portion of the land, he noted, could be used for farming activities without disturbing the smooth operation of the turbines.

He further stated that an artificial dam would also be created alongside the farm to serve as a reliable source of water for the various farms all year round.

According to him, link roads to the farm would also be constructed to aid easy transport of farm produce to the market.

The construction of the wind farm, he said, was still at the preliminary stage which involved land acquisition.

Mr Addai indicated that currently it was collaborating with the Ningo-Traditional Council and the Ningo-Prampram District Assembly (NIPDA) to survey the land and help owners to fully register them and subsequently lease it to Lekela for the construction of the wind farm to start.

On the renovation of the schools, he said, education was a priority to his outfit hence their decision to invest about 70,000 US Dollars into the renovation of Old Ningo, Ayetepa and Dawa DA Basic Schools over eight weeks.

He gave the assurance that the company was prepared to provide some of the needed social amenities to the community and therefore called on them to cooperate with their workers residing in the area.

Mrs Matilda Quartey, Ningo-Prampram District Education Director, in a speech read on her behalf, thanked the company for the renovation even though they were yet to fully commence their project.

Mrs Quartey promised to ensure the maintenance of the renovated buildings.

Mr Daniel K. Ahotor, Head teacher of the Old-Ningo DA Basic A School, told the Ghana News Agency that the school which was built over 50 years ago, was yet to see any major renovation.

Mr Ahotor added that the school needed additional rooms for the kindergarten department since their current structure was inadequate.

'Lack of fencing is also a big challenge to the school as residents use the compound as they wished,' he said.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

By Yussif Ibrahim, GNA

Kumasi, Nov 11, GNA - The government has been asked to actively involve people in mining operation communities in the formulation of policies to regulate the industry.

Mrs. Hannah Owusu-Koranteng, Associate Executive Director, Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining (WACAM), said this was the way forward to protect their economic, social and environmental rights.

The situation, where financial benefit, was placed ahead of any other consideration, should not continue.

She was addressing the fifth conference of WACAM's community groups held in Kumasi under the theme 'Community-based advocacy: the key to the protection of citizens' rights'.

Mrs. Owusu-Koranteng said it was important to empower the people to get the multinational mining companies to do the right things.

Public policy discourse needed to provide adequate space for the majority poor whose interest, 'we are made to believe, these national policies are meant to serve', she added.

She underlined the need to properly educate the communities on their rights, and said that was important to prevent any infractions.

She noted that Ghana could not achieve sustainable development in favour of the poor when public policy excluded and made them passive recipients of dole outs from the political elite.

'An empowered group of people through rights education would be able to protect their rights against multinational companies and that is why WACAM has spent over two decades in the empowerment of mining communities.'

Mr. John Alexander Ackon, the Ashanti Regional Minister, said the importance of the mining industry to Ghana's economy could not be downplayed - providing employment and contributing immensely to revenue mobilization.

He therefore asked that all stakeholders worked together to sustain the industry.

He was, however, emphatic that the health and safety of the people and the environment must never be compromised.

he Regional Minister applauded WACAM for the vital role it was playing to promote responsible mining.

Dr. Yaw Baah, Secretary General of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), decried the extensive damage of the environment through mining and pledged total support for the campaign by WACAM to improve the quality of life of people in the mining companies.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

By Morkporkpor Anku, GNA

Accra, Nov.11, GNA - Ms Abla Dzifa Gomashie, the Deputy Minister of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts, has advocated that children in the Ketu South District be included in the 2016 Spelling Bee Competition.

Spelling Bee was born purely out of the desire to encourage children to cultivate the reading habit and build their vocabularies.

The Spelling Bee Team organised the competition for the children in the district where five spellers were selected.

The competition is a literacy programme organised for children between the ages of eight and 13 years to help them use the English Language effectively.

The first edition of the competition was held in 2008 with only 30 participants from six schools.

Ms Gomashie told the Ghana News Agency that she had provided a library facility for children in the Ketu South District as part of her commitment to improving their reading habits.

She said it was in furtherance of this project that she decided to invite the Spelling Bee Team to the district.

She said the five selected spellers, as part of their prize package, would be brought to Accra for a week's sponsored excursion.

Places they would visit include the Late President John Evans Atta Mills Asomdwe Park, the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park and the Values for Life Library at Adenta.

She encouraged parents to invest in their children's education since they are the future leaders.

Miss Afua Ansah, the reigning champion of the National Spelling Bee, participated in the Scripps National Spelling Bee USA and made it to the finals.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

By Florence Afriyie Mensah, GNA

Kumasi, Nov 11, GNA - Political party leaders have been asked to demonstrate genuine commitment to protecting the peace of the nation by stepping back from anything divisive.

Mr. Charles Owusu, National Chairman of the 'Voters Forum', a civil-society organization (CSO), said they should be measured and avoid exciting ethnic passions.

That, he warned, was not healthy to the unity of the society and not the right thing to do.

Making the call through the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Kumasi, he said it was important for everybody to be responsible in their conduct - mindful of their actions and inactions.

Mr. Owusu said the expectation was that the political parties and their supporters would make their election campaign substantive on message - what policies and programmes they had lined up to grow the economy, create jobs and make things better.

He called for civility, tolerance and respect for each other to calm the political atmosphere and prevent trouble.

He also appealed to the security agencies to act boldly and decisively to deal with those who breached the law, adding that, they needed to send powerful message to everybody that they were not going to have their way.

Mr. Owusu said his organization held the firm belief that 'the people must be allowed to choose their preferred leaders without any fear or intimidation'.

He rallied the people to give strong backing to the Electoral Commission (EC) for the successful conduct of next month's polls.

GNA
By Florence Afriyie Mensah/Josephine Nyarkoh, GNA

Kumasi, Nov 11, GNA - Vegetables sellers in the Kumasi metropolis are making good sales as consumer demand keeps rising.

Madam Comfort Antwi, leader of the vegetable sellers association at the Abinkyi market, confirmed to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that they were doing good business.

They could now sell an average of 400 fertilizer bags each of carrots, cabbage, green pepper, cucumber, spring onion and lettuce a day.

She indicated that this was about four times the sales they were making in the past years.

This came to light during a market survey conducted by the nation's wire service in the metropolis.

Madam Antwi, however, pointed out that the prices had been fluctuating, depending on the period of the year.

She said cabbage, for example, which now goes for GH 150.00 per fertilizer bag could hit as high as GH 400.00 per fertilizer bag during the lean season.

Eating of vegetables, in the past was not popular with many in the Ashanti region but things have radically changed as many households are increasingly developing the taste for these.

There is now widespread recognition of the health value of vegetables and Madam Mercy Frimpomaa, another seller, said she was confident that their business would only grow.

She spoke of the need for the government to give support to the farmers to engage in all-year-round production to meet the demand hike.

It was also important to improve the roads leading to the farm gates to make it easier to transport the crops to the marketing centres.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

By Kwabia Owusu-Mensah GNA

Kumasi, Nov 11, GNA - The Member of Parliament (MP) for Subin, Mr. Isaac Osei, has made available tools and equipment costing about GH 120,000.00 to support the growth of small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) in the constituency.

These included spraying and compressor machines, stitching and industrial sewing machines, deep freezers, curling and tonging machines, tricycle, desk top and laptop computers.

A total of 38 enterprises benefitted and he said it was in response to requests made to him by operators of those enterprises.

Handing over the items at a ceremony, the MP also presented a cheque for GH 52,000.00 to pay for the education of 72 students in the area.

Mr. Osei said he was eager to see local businesses flourished to create jobs for the people and to get more young people to live their academic dreams.

He rallied supporters of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to work hard and with passion to bring the party back to power.

They should reach out to every voter, knock their doors, to get them out to vote in next month's presidential and parliamentary polls.

He gave the assurance that the nation's economy would be restored to the path of real growth under the party's government led by Nana Addo-Dankwah Akufo-Addo to end the widespread suffering.

Mr. Francis Boamah, the constituency chairman, urged a united front to assure the party of resounding election victory.

Nana Serwaah Asiribour on behalf of the beneficiaries, thanked the MP for his tremendous assistance.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

By A.B. Kafui Kanyi, GNA

Ho, Nov. 11, GNA - Mr Affail Monney, President of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), has advised journalists to suppress their partisan interests ahead of the December polls.

He described the 2016 general election as 'hyper sensitive' and asked media practitioners not to allow their voting pattern to define the quality of their work in the supreme interest of the country.

Mr Monney gave the advice at a Vodafone Media Round Table on Election Coverage in Ho and cautioned the media against inciting violence.

He urged journalists to observe the highest degree of circumspection in their reportage to pass the test of quality electoral journalism.

Mr Monney recounted some excesses in the media and asked practitioners to ensure that their stories are factual, accurate, objective and credible.

He said the media was obliged to hold the nation intact before, during and after the elections and underscored the need for them to tilt stories toward conflict prevention.

Mr Ebenezer Amankwah, the Vodafone Corporate Relations Manager, said the private sector had crucial roles to play in ensuring event-free polls and stated the commitment of Vodafone to peaceful polls in December.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

Jomoro (W/R), Nov 11 GNA - Vice President Kwesi Amissah-Arthur has cautioned Ghanaians against voting for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) because they have not shown the ability to provide good leadership for the country.

He said President John Mahama still remained the safest pair of hands in terms of good leadership qualities to ensure the forward march of the country.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur gave the caution when he addressed hundreds of National Democratic Congress (NDC) supporters at Tikobo No.1 in the Jomoro District of the Western Region.

The event marked the third day of the Vice President's four-day campaign tour of the Western Region.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur is being accompanied on the campaign tour by Mr Paul Evans Aidoo, Western Regional Minister, Mr Armah Kofi Buah, Minister of Petroleum, Ms Barbara Serwah Asamoah, Deputy Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr Samuel Ofosu Ampofo, National Vice Chairman of the NDC, and Mr Yaw Boateng Gyan, former National Organizer of the NDC among others.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur also stated that the upcoming December 7 elections was about the future of the youth of the country.

He, therefore, urged the youth to take keen interest in the December polls by going out in their numbers to vote massively for President Mahama whose government has provided many employment opportunities for the youth.

He said the NPP performance in government in terms of providing jobs for the youth was nothing to write home about, adding that the NPP cannot come back to claim that they would provide jobs for the youth.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur also noted that the NDC as a government would continue to hold Ghana in peace and tranquility.

He assured that the President Mahama led administration would ensure that the December polls take place in an atmosphere of harmony devoid of any violence.

He emphasized the government's commitment to provide more infrastructural development in terms schools, roads, and health facilities to the people in the second term of President Mahama's administration.

Mr Samuel Ofosu Ampofo on his part stated that nothing could change the victory of the NDC in the December 7 elections.

He accused the NPP of trying to bring fear and intimidation to the electorate in order to sway them from voting for the NDC.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur and his team also addressed similar NDC rallies in Ellembelle and Axim.

He also introduced Mr Eric Yankey, Mr Armah Kofi-Buah and Mr Charles Tanikyi Kessie as the NDC Parliamentary candidates for Jomoro, Ellembelle and Evalue Ajomoro Gwira constituencies respectively to the people.

GNA
Akim Asanteman (E/R), Nov. 11, GNA - Mr Tei Brentum, Best Farmer for this year in the Birim Central, has appealed for public-private partnership investment in agriculture to create job opportunities in the rural areas.

He said government partnership with private investors would make the agriculture sector vibrant with the supply of machinery for farming on a large scale to give the youth jobs and prevent the rural-urban drift.

Mr Brentum, who hails from Samankwa, near Akroso in the Eastern Region, made the call in an interview with the Ghana News Agency.

Mr Brentum, who owns 152 acres of food crops and poultry, urged his colleague farmers to adhere to guidelines and directives by the agricultural officers to achieve higher yields.

Dr Felicia Ansah-Amprofi, Birim Central Municipal Director of Agriculture, said government had demonstrated its resolve to scale up investment in agriculture through the Ghana Agriculture Sector Investment Programme.

She said business opportunities were available for investors in the various sectors of the agriculture value chain including fish feeding, production of tilapia, catfish and shrimps.

Dr Ansah-Amprofi said there was the need to upscale the use of technology in farming activities.

GNA
By Albert Futukpor, GNA

Tamale, Nov.11, GNA - The Global Shea Alliance (GSA), in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has launched a 13 million dollar Shea Sustainability Initiative to promote and sustain initiatives for Shea in seven West African countries.

The initiative will focus on women's empowerment such as constructing warehouses for women shea collectors, business development services, parkland management and conservation pilot projects as part of efforts expand shea markets worldwide and improve sustainable production.

USAID will provide 6.5 million dollars and GSA will provide a matching fund of at least 6.5 million dollars to implement the initiative in the seven West African countries namely; Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cote D'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Mali.

At the launch of the initiative in Tamale, Madam Mary Hobbs, the Director of USAID West Africa Regional Economic Growth Office, said: 'Investing in and supporting the growth of the shea industry is one means of helping to improve incomes for women and their families across the Sahel, hence the Shea Sustainability Initiative'.

She said GSA would liaise with 25 private sector partners and up to 250 women's shea co-operatives to implement promotional and sustainability activities in the beneficiary countries focusing on women's empowerment and protection of shea trees.

Mr Moumouni Konate, the President of GSA, expressed optimism that the initiative would help to improve incomes as well as health and safety of shea collectors.

Mr Kenneth Wujangi, a Deputy Chief of Staff in-charge of Operations at the Office of the President, who represented the Government, described the shea industry as robust saying government had been supportive of the industry to add value to the produce for improved incomes.

He said the Shea Sustainability Initiative was in line with government's efforts to develop the shea industry adding that government would, in the next few years, build 10 warehouses for the shea industry in Ghana.

GNA
Peaks known to few

Mountains make up a large part of the American identity. The Rocky Mountains mark the western boundary of the Great Plains, while the Appalachian Mountains define a portion of almost every eastern state. The area between these majestic ranges is often considered flat, boring farmland, with little geographical interest. And as such, few people are aware of the dazzling Interior Highlands that lie in-between. (Credit: Zack Frank)

A landscape carved by water

Interior Highlands is the name collectively given to the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which extend from eastern Oklahoma through northern Arkansas to southern Missouri. Despite the name, the nearly 4 million-sq-mile region is actually a dissected plateau  an entire region that rose up as a flat plain and whose mountainous features were carved by erosion and waterways. The resulting terrain is made up of hills that roll on for hundreds of miles. (Credit: Zack Frank)

Canyons and plateaus

To understand how the Interior Highlands were formed, travel to the high plateaus, where waterways are constantly sculpting the land. The waters of Cedar Falls (pictured), located in Arkansas Petit Jean State Park , helped dig the 95ft canyon that it flows into: you can clearly see the layers of rock and soil that have been stripped away. Similar features can be seen along the length of the Buffalo National River in northern Arkansas. (Credit: Zack Frank)

A hidden gem

The Ouachita Mountains straddle the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma, making up the southernmost section of the Interior Highlands. The most stunning portion of this range is the Talimena Scenic Drive , which extends 54 miles over an impressive series of peaks, providing expansive views of both states. Talimena is also possibly the biggest missed opportunity in national park history: legislation establishing the area as a national park was passed by Congress in the 1920s, only to be pocket vetoed by President Calvin Coolidge. (Credit: Zack Frank)

Geological wonders

A road trip along the Talimena Scenic Drive is extremely rewarding, but its even better to leave your vehicle and hike to less travelled areas. The highlands have incredible geological diversity, and you can stumble across fascinating sites like these massive turtle shell-shaped sandstone rocks, which can be found throughout Arkansas. The process that carved these polygonal structures is poorly understood, but the leading theories all involve water and weathering. (Credit: Zack Frank)

An unprotected wonderland

The Ozark and Ouachita Mountains are a wonderland of rock formations, with large arches, pillars, cliffs and outcroppings popping up along the many trails. A lack of publicity also keeps little traversed and in excellent quality, similar to the way they would have been before settlers arrived.

But despite spanning three states, the mountains are virtually unrepresented in the National Park Service. Hot Springs is the regions only national park  and at just 5,550 acres its not only the smallest of the countrys 59 parks, but means that only 0.0002% of the Interior Highlands is protected in this way. (Credit: Zack Frank)

Shortsighted plans

In addition to having minimal government protection, vast swaths of the Interior Highlands are privately owned and could be easily bought out by any business interest that wants to log or develop it. But immediate profits may not compare to the potential revenue from a national park, which gives local communities a return of 10 dollars for every one dollar spent. (Credit: Zack Frank)

Hope for the future

Despite its current, unprotected state, the Interior Highlands still holds its incredible natural beauty and has the opportunity to be preserved before human hands can alter it. If some of the best sections were set aside for conservation, the mountains and rivers that make up this region could be publicized, and an area in deep need of a national park could finally be recognized. (Credit: Zack Frank)
Lower court judges in Ghana are threatening to embark on a strike on November 21, 2016 if government fails to increase their salaries by 10 percent.

We therefore respectfully wish to notify your good office that members of the lower bench have taken a decision to withdraw our services from 21st November 2016 if the issue of the 10 percent is not addressed and the money paid to us, a letter addressed to the Chief Justice and seen by citifmonline.com stated.

In the letter the lower court judges lamented that several efforts in having the issue resolved including writing a letter to the Ministry of Finance have proved futile.

They added that they have no other choice but to withdraw their services on the said date.

Respectfully, honourable Lady Chief Justice, we humbly wish to inform you that the letter addressed to the Minister of Finance has not received any attention. We humbly bring this to your attention because the undue delay has created anxiety and frustration among members of the lower bench. This is particularly so implementation of the conditions of service of the lower bench has been characterized with frequent interruptions and disruptions since 2013, the judges lamented.

Respectfully, we have also observed that this disruption and interference with our conditions of service has occurred as a result of the erroneous manner in which the concerns of other institutions have been addressed even though these matters are not related to judges and magistrates of the lower bench.

Background

In June 2016 , lower court judges issued a stern warning to government to immediately abandon a planned move to revise their conditions of service.

The judges, who work in the magistrate and circuit courts across the country, said they were being short-changed in the proposal presented for a review of their salaries.

One of the judges, His Honor Aboagye Tandor had earlier said they will advise themselves if nothing is done about their concerns.

Certain reforms have been done with regards to our salaries without any views or recourse to us. No inputs were made to us and we saw that there were some discrepancies so our members were of the view that the purported letter that was brought should be withdrawn.We were surprised that as members of the lower bench we would have conditions reviewed even before we are notified. You cannot review that recourse, it should be withdrawn



By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @AlloteyGodwin
Ottawa (AFP) - Canada is planning to send 600 troops on a UN peacekeeping mission to Africa for three years, a spokesperson for the defense minister told AFP Friday.

However, the plan still requires cabinet approval, said Jordan Owens, the spokeswoman for Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan.

In a Remembrance Day statement, Sajjan hinted at an imminent start to the mission, saying: "The government is about to ask up to 600 Canadian Armed Forces members to deploy in aid of UN peace-support operations."

The minister recently returned from visiting trouble spots in Africa, most recently Mali, as he mulls where to send soldiers.

He has also traveled to Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In an interview with the Toronto Star newspaper, Sajjan said Canadian troops could be spread among several African countries, where they would help train local troops and support host nations' de-radicalization efforts.

The aim is to have an "enduring" impact, he told the Star.

"These missions, all of them, have the level of risk where peacekeepers have been hurt, they have been killed. And we've been looking at the risk factor in a very serious way," Sajjan said.

In August, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged the troops Can$450 million (US$332 million) for UN peace operations around the world.
Juba (AFP) - The UN's special adviser on preventing genocide, Adama Dieng, said Friday he feared an escalation of ethnic violence in South Sudan which unless stopped, could trigger genocide.

'I have seen that there is extreme polarisation among some tribal groups, which has increased in certain places" since July's fierce fighting in Juba between President Salva Kiir's largely Dinka soldiers and his arch-foe Riek Machar's mostly Nuer rebels, Dieng said at a press conference.

"Inflammatory stereotyping and name-calling have been accompanied by targeted killings and rape of members of particular groups, by violent attacks against individuals or communities on the basis of their perceived political affiliation," the UN adviser said at the close of a week-long visit.

Dieng said that "what began as political conflict has transformed into what could become an outright ethnic war".

"There is a strong risk of violence escalating along ethnic lines with potential for genocide,' he added.

"With the stalling of the implementation of the peace agreement, the current humanitarian crisis, stagnating economic and proliferation of arms, all the ingredients are there for escalation of violence."

South Sudan, the world's newest country, gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but plunged into civil war in December 2013, leaving tens of thousands dead and displacing more than 2.5 million people.

A peace deal between Kiir and Machar in August last year had raised hopes of peace, until clashes erupted once again in July in the capital.

Dieng said that in Yei, in the southwest, he had "heard reports of violence that included targeted killings, assault, miming, mutilation and rape by armed men, some in uniform and others not.

"There are cases of barbarous use of machetes which reminds (us) of Rwanda," he added, referring to the 1994 genocide there.

"Genocide is a process, it doesn't happen overnight. And because it is a process and one that takes time ... it can be prevented," he added.

"I urge the people of South Sudan to reconcile."
The presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the 2016 elections, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has urged Ghanaians to pray fervently for him because he needs their prayers to win the December 7 presidential election.

According to him, he is doing what is required of him physically to win the election; however, his victory will be greatly dependent on God's intervention. Therefore, Ghanaians should pray for him ahead of the elections.

Speaking at a meeting with the elders and representatives of the Omanhene of Kenyasi Number Two, Odeneho Bediako Nsiah Ababio, in the Asutifi North constituency of the Brong Ahafo Region as part of his campaign activities ahead of the elections, Mr Akufo-Addo said: Pray for me to win the elections. All you need to do is to pray for me to win the elections in order to implement your demands for a university. It is only when I win to become the president that I can implement your demands.

He added: Help the parliamentary candidates to also win and represent the constituency and the party in parliament. Vote massively for them so that we (NPP) will have majority in parliament so that your demands will be easily provided.

The Krontihene of Kenyasi Number Two, who represented the Omanhene at the meeting, assured Mr Akufo-Addo of their prayers, saying: We are happy that he has visited us to listen to us. It is God who chooses leaders.

He pleaded with the NPP presidential candidate to fast track the payment of mineral royalties to the chiefs of the area.

Nana, we plead with you to ensure that the royalties are paid on time. As we speak, for the past three years, the royalties have not been paid. The excuse is that the money is in the Consolidated Fund, but that is a huge challenge for us, he said.

-Classfmonline
A Ghanaian professor based in the United States has launched a campaign to reduce the number of rejected ballots in Ghana's election beginning with the 2016 edition.

Dubbed the "rejected ballot challenge" Prof Stephen Kwaku Asare is hoping that through a comprehensive education programe the 2016 election will record less than one per cent of rejected ballots.

The Prof popular for his landmark cases won in Ghana's Highest Court has decided to engage in what he calls a public service aimed at reducing the margin of spoilt and rejected ballots in the elections.

If the rejected ballot syndrome were a candidate in the election, it would have been the third force in Ghana's election having recorded the highest number of votes right from the 1992 elections to 2012.

In 1992, the total rejected ballots was 3.6% of the total votes cast. In 1996 the total number of rejected votes was halved to 1.5% of the total votes cast.

In the 2000 first and second round elections, a total of 1.8% and 1.58% rejected ballots were recorded.

In the 2008 elections the total number of rejected ballots recorded was 1.02% in the second round, lower than the 2.4% recorded in the first round.

In the 2012 elections, as in other elections, a total of 2.3% of votes were rejected, a figure that was higher than all the votes garnered by the minority parties.

With the 2016 elections rocked by law suits and controversies very little has been done about voter education with the possibility of recording a very high rejected ballot in the upcoming election becoming extremely high.

Prof Asare, popularly called Kweku Azar on his facebook page, launched a campaign to reduce rejected ballots.

"A ballot is rejected if it is cast by a verified voter but cannot be, and is therefore not, counted. The presiding officer decides whether a ballot should be rejected and pursuant to CI 94(39) can do so on the following grounds:

(a) the ballot does not bear the official mark of the Commission; or

(b) the ballot is not thumb printed by the voter to clearly identify the candidate for whom the vote was cast; or

(c) the ballot is not thumb printed at all; or

(d) the ballot has on it a writing or mark by which the voter could easily be identified," he said.

He outlined an eight point mechanism to educate Ghanaian voters and to reduce the percentage of rejected ballots to less than one per cent.

"The Ballot Challenge I am launching is to reduce the percentage of rejected ballots to under 1% in 2016.

It is easy to play the challenge by adopting a voter and explaining to same how to cast a valid vote:

1. Show them the proforma Ballot (see below);

2. Tell them to inspect the Ballot that is given them to ensure that it bears the official mark of the Commission and is not otherwise marked. They should ask for a new Ballot if what they are given lacks the Commission's mark or is otherwise marked.

3. Show them the official mark of the Commission.

4. Show them how to thumbprint the Ballot (in the box next to the candidate's symbol; sideways not downwards; the thumprint or mark must not straddle the box of two candidates);

5. Tell them not to write their name on the ballot;

6. Tell them to mark or thumbprint only 1 candidate;

7. Tell them if they accidentally mark their ballot they should not cast it but insist on getting a new one. The law allows for Spoilt Ballots.

8. Demonstrate how folding the ballot can lead to "over-voting" and show them the correct way to fold the ballot.

Help reduce Rejected Ballots to less than 1% in 2016. Adopt a Voter and play the Rejected Ballot Challenge today and everyday till December 7.

Story by Ghana|Myjoyonline.com|Nathan Gadugah
Former workers of Intercontinental Bank (IBG) who dragged Access bank to the National Labor Commission (NLC) over their refusal to pay them their redundancy package have won the case against the bank.

Sixty seven former workers of Intercontinental bank hurled Access bank to the NLC in 2012 after the bank refused to pay them a redundancy package following its acquisition of intercontinental bank.

But the NLC yesterday Thursday 10th November, 2016 directed the management of Access Bank to pay the redundancy package to the ex-staff in accordance with Section 65 of the Labour Act, Act 651.

The bank which was served with the ruling today has to pay the redundancy package within 14 after the ruling.

The bank is expected to cough up over 15 million cedis to cover the redundancy payment.

Genesis of case

Some aggrieved workers of IBG in March, 2012 begun agitating against new owners of IBG  Access bank after they were asked to sign an absorption letter on March 12, which contained the introduction of new conditions including the writing of a credit policy guide test.

The workers who refused to sign the letter by the deadline date were disabled from the banks system.

The move led to the workers threatening to demonstrate against their new owners, Access Bank who subsequently also refused to pay the workers their severance package.

This led to some of the workers in the same year dragging Access Bank to the National Labour Commission while others resorted to the courts to compel the bank to pay them the severance package.

A statement sent to Citi Business News from Access Bank at the time in reaction to the reports said 395 out of the total 448 employees of IBG had accepted their absorption into Access Bank Ghana and were fully absorbed into the combined entity.

Although all IBG employees have been offered job opportunities with no diminution in their terms and conditions of service, we are aware that a few have not accepted the offer and have petitioned the National Labour Commission demanding severance pay, the statement read in part.

Access Bank has maintained a fair, objective and transparent process during the business combination, in line with international best practice.

As such, the Bank remains committed to working with the Labour Commission and all other relevant bodies to uphold the laws of the land and address any residual issues arising from the merger, it added.

Industry players say the latest development may hit Access bank Ghana hard due to its ongoing Initial Public Offer (IPO) launch.



By: Vivian Kai Lokko/citibusinessnews.com/Ghana
Washington (AFP) - The International Monetary Fund on Friday approved a three-year, $12 billion loan for Egypt to help the country recover from its deep economic crisis.

The IMF board said it will release $2.75 billion to Egypt immediately, while further disbursements will depend on the country's economic performance and implementation of reforms.
A group calling itself the International Standards Journalist Association (ISJA) has sued the Electoral Commission of Ghana over media accreditation fees.

The EC had announced its intention of charging accreditation fees from journalists who would cover the elections.

Though the Commission is yet to determine the fee a statement signed by its Head of Communications, Eric Dzakpasu said accreditation tags will be given to only those who have formally applied for it and for a fee to be determined by the Commission.

But the group, in their statement of claim said the Commissions demand for payment of money as a condition for the issuing of accreditation tag constitutes unconstitutional discrimination against each journalist on the basis of his status as a Ghanaian journalist.

The group wondered why the EC had decided to charge accreditation fees when non- Ghanaian journalists approved by the Commission to cover the election have not been asked by Commission to cover the 2016 election have not been asked to pay money to as a condition of for the issuing of accreditation tags.

The group further argued that every citizen who votes is entitled to supervise the Electoral Commission in order to ensure transparency, credibility, legitimacy, legality and correctness of election processes and outcomes.

That right cannot be exercised by every citizen because of illiteracy, old age, sickness, the inconvenience of the greatest majority and the sheer volume of numbers as compared to the limited spaces available at the Commission, it added.

The group had earlier threatened to sue the EC over media accreditation fees.

The President of the group, Dr. Nana Oppong who issued the threat on behalf of the group had argued that the EC has been given huge sums of money from both government and donor partners to conduct the elections hence extorting money from journalists for accreditation is not necessary.

It will be recalled that in September 2015, some journalists in the Ashanti and Western Regions, were asked by the EC to pay an amount of GHc 8 b efore getting accreditation to cover the exercise.



By: Marian Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @EfeAnsah
Juba (AFP) - The UN's special advisor on preventing genocide, Adama Dieng, said he feared escalating ethnic violence in South Sudan, as the EU offered emergency aid for the swelling number of refugees on Friday.

Speaking in Yumbe in neighbouring Uganda, the EU 's humanitarian aid commissioner offered 78 million euros ($85.2 million) to help the refugees, with 30 million earmarked for Uganda.

"I am truly alarmed by what I saw today," said Christos Stylianides. "I think that the crisis is largely underestimated. The needs are huge and they continue to grow."

Uganda, one of the world's poorest countries, currently hosts 530,000 South Sudanese refugees, 330,000 of whom fled fighting in the world's newest country this year alone.

The UN's Dieng meanwhile warned of "extreme polarisation among some tribal groups, which has increased in certain places" since July's fierce fighting in Juba between President Salva Kiir's largely Dinka soldiers, and his arch-foe Riek Machar's mostly Nuer rebels.

"Inflammatory stereotyping and name-calling have been accompanied by targeted killings and rape of members of particular groups, by violent attacks against individuals or communities on the basis of their perceived political affiliation," the UN advisor said at the close of a week-long visit.

Dieng said that "what began as political conflict has transformed into what could become an outright ethnic war".

"There is a strong risk of violence escalating along ethnic lines with potential for genocide," he added.

"With the stalling of the implementation of the peace agreement, the current humanitarian crisis, stagnating economic and proliferation of arms, all the ingredients are there for escalation of violence."

South Sudan, the world's newest country, gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but plunged into civil war in December 2013, leaving tens of thousands dead and displacing more than 2.5 million people.

A peace deal between Kiir and Machar in August last year had raised hopes of peace, until clashes erupted once again in July in the capital.

Dieng said that in Yei, in the southwest, he had "heard reports of violence that included targeted killings, assault... mutilation and rape by armed men, some in uniform and others not.

"There are cases of barbarous use of machetes which reminds (us) of Rwanda," he added, referring to the 1994 genocide there.

Uganda military personnel are seen atop military and police trucks as they drive towards Juba in South Sudan at Nimule border point

"Genocide is a process, it doesn't happen overnight. And because it is a process and one that takes time... it can be prevented," he added.

"I urge the people of South Sudan to reconcile."

Stylianides urged donors to step up aid while thanking Uganda for its help to the rapidly increasing numbers of people seeking shelter from conflict.

Touring Bidibidi refugee settlement which, since its establishment in August, has swollen to become the third biggest refugee camp in the world, Stylianides said: 'I promise to continue assistance as long as it takes. You are not alone.'

Bidibidi is home to more than 215,000 refugees who each receive a plot of land to cultivate and materials to build a basic shelter. An average of about 2,400 new refuges arrive each day.
11.11.2016 LISTEN

EPHESIANS 1:12-14; 2 CORINTHIANS 1:21-22; HEBREWS 10:14-17

To the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory. In Him, you also after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvationhaving also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise (Ephesians 1:12-14).

Now He who establishes us with you in Christ and anointed us in God, who also sealed us and gave us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge (2 Cor. 1:21-22).

For by one offering He has perfected for all time all those who are sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also testifies for us; for after saying, this is the covenant that I will make with them after those days says the Lord, I will put My laws upon their heart, and on their mind I will write them. He then says, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more (Hebrews 10:14-17).

INTRODUCTION

A missionary from England died in India in the early part of the twentieth century. Immediately after his death his former neighbors started carrying away his possessions. The English Consular was notified, and since there was no lock on the door of the missionarys house, he pasted a piece of paper across it and affixed the seal of England on it. The looters did not dare break the seal because the worlds most powerful nation stood behind it.

When you turn away from your sins and receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior, there are series of events that take place simultaneously in your life of which you may not be even aware. First, when you are saved God justifies you. Second, the Holy Spirit baptizes you into the body of Christ. Third, the Holy Spirit takes up His residence in your heart immediately (we call it the indwelling of the Holy Spirit).

I. THE SEAL OF THE HOLY SPIRIT: EPHESIANS 1:12-14

After describing the spiritual blessings that God gives to His people in Christ, Paul adds another paragraph to emphasize that the blessings belong equally to Jewish and Gentile believers. The Apostle Paul moves from the pronoun we (himself and fellow Jewish believers) to you also (believing Gentile readers) to our inheritance (in which both groups equally share). Paul emphasizes that Christ is the One who reconciles both Jews and Gentiles, and that through union with Christ the people of God are one.

The fourth event that takes place simultaneously at the time of salvation is the seal of the Holy Spirit. Young people, the word seal here is not a reference to the animal that bounces a ball on its nose. Women, I am not talking about something that you do with your fruit jar. Men, I am not talking about the fluid you put in the anti-freeze tank of a car when there is a leakage. The Greek word conveys the idea of impress or confirm. The word seal is used three times in the NT in connection with believers. It is also mentioned in the life of Jesus. The Gospel of John states, On Him (Jesus) the Father, even God has set His seal (John 6:27). Here we see that the heavenly Father sealed the Son, Jesus Christ. At the moment of conversion, you and I are sealed with the Holy Spirit for the day of redemption (Eph. 4:30).

When you put your faith and trust in Jesus you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Eph. 1:13). The seal of the Holy Spirit of promise has two important values. First, the seal of the Holy Spirit means that you are the possession of God. Seal has to do with property and belongings. With the seal of the Holy Spirit at the time of your salvation, God is saying to you, you belong to Me; you are My possession; you are My property. That is what God said to Israel when God chose her. God said, Israel is My possession; Israel is My inheritance. A seal connotes the idea of ownership. In the OT, Jeremiah bought a piece of property (land), paid for it in the presence of witnesses, and sealed the purchase according to the Law and custom (Jer. 32:10). Jeremiah was now the owner. The allusion to the seal as the proof of purchase would have been especially significant to the Ephesians. The city of Ephesus was a seaport, and the shipmasters of the neighboring ports carried on an extensive trade in timber. The method of purchase was this: the merchant after selecting his timber, stamped it with his own signetan acknowledged sign of ownership. In due time the merchant would send a trusted agent with the signet. He would locate all the timbers that bore the corresponding impress and claim them. The Holy Spirit seals you and me who have trusted Jesus as our Lord and Savior; that is, we are separated and set apart for God, and we are distinguished and marked as belonging to God. You and I are Gods property forever! To put a seal on something means it is yours. I have stamped all my books and the stamp reads, From the library of Kennedy A. Adarkwa. Therefore, if I loan a book to you with my stamp in it, it is an indication that the book is mine, not yours.

In the Western part of the United States, ranchers put a brand on their cattle. Each rancher has his brand, his seal on the animal, indicating that it belongs to that ranch owner. When we are born of the Holy Spirit the Spirit comes into our hearts. The Spirits presence is Gods seal which says That one belongs to Me. I own that one and he/she is special to Me. Here is the difference: when ranchers seal their animals, when merchants seal their timber it is always external, but when God seals you with His Spirit it is internal. He alone sees the seal that He has placed on you. God seals you and I to make us like His Son Jesus Christ.

A second aspect of a seal has to do with security . A seal in the sense of security is illustrated in the OT when the King sealed Daniel into the lions den so that he could not get out. In the ancient times when a king sealed a document with his signet ring, nobody could reverse what he had written. Pilate did the same when he ordered the soldiers to secure the tomb of Jesus (Matt. 27:65-66). Seal in Matthew 27:65-66 is the same Greek word used in the passages that speak of the sealing of the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit seals you and I, we are secure in Christ. Have you ever thought about the fact that the Holy Spirit has sealed you? Yes, He has sealed you and I as believers. You and I are secure in Christ. Nothing can touch us (Rom. 8:38-39). A seal also indicates a finished transaction . Seals are used sometimes in important corporate documents. The seal means that the deal is done. Salvation is like a legal document. God has drawn out the term by which He would save fallen humanity. God signs it. When you say yes to Jesus you sign the document. Then God puts His Holy Spirit in your heart. The terms of the agreement are cemented. Heaven is a guarantee promise. It is just as much ours today by promise as it will be ours by experience in the future. It means we are just as much in heaven as if we had been there ten thousand years. How long will this seal last? Ephesians 4:30, tells us that we are sealed for the day of redemption. When God seals a person by the Holy Spirit, He says, this one is eternally Mine.

II. THE PLEDGE OF THE SPIRIT: 2 COR. 1:21-22; EPH. 1:14

As you open your heart to Jesus Christ, God gives you the Holy Spirit not only as a seal , but also as a pledge . In some translations the word is earnest or deposit. In the day of Paul businessmen considered a pledge to do three things: it was a down payment that sealed a bargain, it represented an obligation to buy, and it was a sample of what was to come. Supposed you were to buy a car. The pledge would first be a down payment sealing the transaction. It also represents an obligation to buy the car. And it would be a sample of what was to comethe remaining amount of the selling price. The Holy Spirit likewise seals Gods purchase of us. And His presence shows Gods sense of obligation to redeem us completely. The presence of the Holy Spirit living in fellowship with us provides us with a foretaste, a sample of our coming life and inheritance in Gods presence.

In Numbers 13, when the spies of Israel set out to scout the land of Canaan, they reached it at the time of the first ripe grapes. They came to the valley of Eshcol and from there cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes (Num. 13:23). This they brought back with them for the people of Israel to see. The cluster of grapes was the pledge of their inheritance. It was a small foretaste of what lay before them in the Promised Land. This was Gods pledge that as they moved forward in faith, they would receive in full what they now had in part. The NT refers to the pledge of the Spirit three times: 1. He [God] also sealed us and gave us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge (2 Cor. 1:22). Here the Spirits presence in our lives is Gods pledge that he would fulfill His promise. 2. Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge (2 Cor. 5:5). The context here suggests that the Spirit in our lives is Gods pledge that we shall receive spiritual bodies at Christs second coming. 3. [The Holy Spirit] is given as a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of Gods own possession, to the praise of His glory (Eph. 1:14). The Holy Spirit is Gods seal that we belong to Him and His pledge guaranteeing that He will do what He has promised. The Holy Spirit is like a down payment, a deposit, and a validating signature on the contract. The presence of the Holy Spirit in us demonstrates the genuineness of our faith, proves that we are Gods children, and secures eternal life for us. His power works in us to transform us now, and what we experience now is the taste of the complete change we will experience in eternity.

A man heard a knock on his door one day. He opened his door, and a man said, Sir, Im here to tell you that you have received an unbelievable inheritance, a huge sum of money. It will be a while before you receive it all. I have been instructed to present you with a check. He gave the man a check for fifty million dollars! As the man left he said, I want you to know theres far more than this.

Every blessing you and I receive, every sweet touch of God in our lives, every evidence of the moment of the Holy Spirit in our lives as believers right now is just a drop in the bucket compared to what God has waiting for us in the future. It is all part of what it means to be born of the Holy Spirit.

III. THE WITNESS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT: HEBREWS 10:14-17

Not only is the Holy Spirit our seal and pledge as Christians, but He is also our witness within, assuring us of the reality of our salvation. Jesus spoke to His disciples and gave them assurance when He was with them. In the same way the Holy Spirit witnesses in and to the hearts of all true believers. There are several passages that bring out this truth. First, the Scripture teaches us that the Holy Spirit is a witness to the finality and sufficiency of Jesus death on the cross for us (atonement). In Hebrews 10:14-17 the Scripture contrasts the Levitical sacrifices with the sacrifice of Christ, which was offered one for all and once for all. Animal sacrifice can never relieve your conscience from the burden of sin. Those who offer alms (saraha) can never relieve their conscience from the burden of sin because those things cannot atone for their sins. But on the other hand, by one offering He [Jesus Christ] has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us (Heb. 10:14, 15). It is a witness linked to Jeremiah 31, I will forgive their iniquity and their sins I will remember no more (v. 34). The witness of the Spirit relieves us of our fears in these days of uncertainties. Second, the Scripture also teaches that by faith in Jesus Christ, we have become the children of God. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16).

When you were saved, you were baptized into the body of Christ, and also adopted into the family of God. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father! Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God (Gal. 4:6-7). Because the Holy Spirit declares us sons and daughters of God, we can cry out from our hearts, Abba, Father. This is the Magna Charta of a believers freedom from the power of sin to the privileges and wealth of Christ. Finally, the Scripture teaches us that the Holy Spirit witnesses to the truth of every promise God has given to us in His Word (the Bible). The Spirit who inspires the written Word (the Bible) of God also works in our hearts to assure us that its promises are true, and that they are for us. We know that Christ is our Savior and Lord and we know that we are the children of God, because the Bible tells us this and the Spirit assures us it is true. But when He the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth (John 16:13). Thy Word is truth (John 17:17). And the witness is this that God has given us eternal life; and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son does not have the life. These things I have written to you in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life (1 John 5:11-13).

Therefore, if you do not have the witness of the Holy Spirit in your heart, it is an indication that you are not a child of God. But it is not too late. You can become a child of God today. As believers the Spirit of God witnesses to our human spirit that we are the children of God. And as children of God, we are to witness to others of the love of God demonstrated to us in Christ Jesus. I believe the primary purpose of God in sending the Holy Spirit is to empower us to be His witnesses in a lost and dying world (Luke 24:45-49; Acts 1:8). All the other benefits of the Holy Spirit are secondary. I serve God because I realize that the privileges I enjoy from the Holy Spirit far exceed the responsibilities He has given me in this world. What about you? Give your life to Christ and become His follower so you can bring others to Him.
President Mahama at the inauguration of the Gold Coast Refinery Limited at Airport

President John Mahama has declared government's intention to add value to Ghana's mineral resources to ensure the country derives maximum benefits. In this regard, President Mahama has revealed the vision of his administration to turn the country into a jewellery production center for Africa.

Speaking at the inauguration of a $110 million gold refinery, the Gold Coast Refinery Limited at Airport, Accra, Mahama commended owners of the company adding that it has come at an opportune time.

Our next step after commissioning of this refinery is also to make Ghana into a jewellery production center for Africa. Working with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, we intend to establish a jewellery production village at Tepa in the Ashanti region of Ghana.

President Mahama charged owners of the refinery to assist government in achieving its vision of adding value to the country's gold.

It is my hope that this group can work with us to achieve that vision that I have just espoused. I look forward to other such centers being established in other parts of the country to make Ghana truly worth our former name of Gold Coast.

The Gold Coast Refinery [GC Refinery] Ghana Limited has the capacity to refine raw dust and scrap gold and other precious metals up to 180 metric tons per annum, in a single shift production.The refinery is the first of its kind to be established in Ghana and West Africa. It is also the second largest in Africa. The company is expected to provide 300 direct and 1,200 indirect jobs.

President Mahama also charged managers, workers and owners to work towards the sustainability of the facility and also to ensure the country benefits. He added that government has created the enabling environment for businesses to thrive as recognized by the World Bank doing business report. GC refinery has Banking and Financial Services {BAFIS}, Euroget Group of investors and local shareholders as its owners.

-Starrfmonline
Marrakesh (Morocco) (AFP) - The world expects the United States to uphold commitments under the landmark Paris climate treaty despite Donald Trump's vow to pull out, the incoming head of its UN implementing body told AFP Friday.

"The Paris Agreement is here," Moroccan foreign minister Salaheddine Mezouar, who took over stewardship of the 196-nation UN climate forum from France earlier this week, said in an interview.

"It's entry into force means that governments must face up to their responsibilities."

"It would be, I think, extremely difficult to retreat -- there's no turning back," he added.

At UN headquarters in New York, meanwhile, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed confidence that US president-elect Trump will come to understand the "seriousness and urgency" of the deal.

The news that an avowed climate change denier had captured the US White House stunned participants arriving Wednesday at the 12-day talks in Marrakesh, which run from November 7 to 18.

"There are two types of reaction: worry and determination to forge ahead," said Segolene Royal, France's foreign minister.

Delegates from several countries have taken a "wait-and-see" attitude after the victory by the New York real estate developer, who has said that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

"We need to assess the situation when the new government comes into office," in January 2017, said Chen Zhihua, a delegate from China's National Development and Reform Commission. "There are too many uncertainties ahead."

'Wait and see'

American students protest outside the UN climate talks during the COP22 international climate conference in Marrakesh in reaction to Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election, on November 9, 2016

Shigeru Ushio, a negotiator from Japan's foreign ministry, also said his country would "wait and see" whether Trump's climate policies will differ from his campaign rhetoric.

But if the United States reneges on a committment to give poor countries 2.5 billion dollars (2.3 billion euros) to help them cope with climate impacts, he added, "that would cause difficulties."

Under the Paris pact, rich countries have pledged at least 100 billion dollars a year starting in 2020.

In annex to the treaty, nations have also submitted voluntary pledges to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that cause dangerous global warming.

The agreement commits nations to collectively capping Earth's average temperature increase at under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

With 1.0C (1.8F) of warming to date, the world has already seen an uptick in deadly storms, droughts, heatwaves and flooding.

Mezouar has not yet reached out to Trump or his team, he told AFP.

"As the president of COP22" -- the acronym for the 22nd meeting of the Conference of the Parties -- "I am waiting with impatience to encounter the new American administration," he told AFP.

"I have absolutely no doubt ... that the United States will pursue its commitments alongside the rest of the international community."

More ambitious pledges

A report Thursday by three research groups, however, said the US was likely to miss its emissions reduction targets without new climate policies -- which Trump has promised he would not put in place.

Experts and diplomats here insist that the global market-based transition from a fossil fuels to clean energy is too far advanced to peel back.

But Trump's ascension has shaken hard-won political unity at the UN forum.

This uncertainty makes Mezouar's role even more crucial, said Liz Gallagher, an analyst at London-based thinktank E3G.

"The Moroccans need to be more proactive in driving the process, using all the diplomatic tools at their disposal, to make sure we get a clear outcome," she told AFP.

On Friday, ministers from a dozen nations and negotiating blocs -- including France, Germany, Mexico, Bangladesh, the European Union, and the group of Least Developed Countries -- issued a joint statement affirming their resolve.

"Our commitment to be climate leaders remains steadfast, as is our commitment to work with the whole international community, including the United States," they said.

National carbon-cutting plans submitted under the Paris Agreement go into effect in 2020.

Some ministers arriving next week for a high-level session will announce more ambitious pledges, which still fall far short of what is needed to stave off devastating climate impacts.
Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - Accra Brewery Limited (ABL), the nation's premier brewery, emerged winner in the 'Beverage Industry of the Year' category at the Association of Ghana Industries 5th Ghana Industry Awards ceremony.

Accra Brewery Limited (ABL) was honoured for their outstanding achievements and their immense contribution to the development of Ghana's economy.

This year's event has seven award categories and 21 sector awards and the sector awards included: Beverage, Automobile Sector Awards, Agribusiness, Electricals and Electronics, Oil and Gas, and Pharmaceuticals, among others.

The event was held at the State House, was under the theme: 'Growing Local Industry for Export Development and Job Creation'.

It was also used to honour companies that had performed excellently in various sectors of the company.

Accra Brewery Limited (ABL) has in recent years seen a complete revamp of its production processes with the completion of a USD 100million expansion project.

ABL has over the years also introduced innovative beverages and shown commitment to the best practices in its manufacturing processes by placing emphasis on conserving water as well as reducing energy use and waste reduction.

The company has embarked on numerous community support initiatives across the country including campaigns in schools against under-age drinking and in hospitals on the negative effect of alcohol during pregnancy.

Its retailers have also benefited from responsible alcohol retailing programmes and business appreciation skills training.

Additionally, ABL has steadily increased the use of locally grown raw materials over the past ten years and today approximately 50 per cent of its agricultural input is sourced locally.

Madam Adjoba Kyiamah, Director of Corporate and Legal Affairs at ABL, expressed delight that ABL's efforts have been recognised.

'This year marks the 85th anniversary of ABL as a business. We are proud, as the current crop of employees at ABL, to be building on the legacy of our predecessors. It is our ambition that we will carry the mantle placed upon us so successfully that future generations will also come to benefit from ABL. For the AGI to give us this recognition is an icing on the cake 'she intimated.

Mr James Asare-Adjei, the President of AGI, said the high unemployment rate in the country will reduce if industries experience sustainable growth.

He said such growth was particularly crucial in the private sector as it was the vehicle through which the country could achieve development.

'An estimated 90 per cent of our economically active population is employed by the private sector and it is for this reason that the sector deserves government support to expand,' Mr Asare-Adjei said.

ABL has previously won awards for Best Company in Sustainable Manufacturing Practices and Best Company Employer at the Ghana Industry Awards.

GNA
By Robert Tachie Menson, GNA

Dormaa-Ahenkro (B/A), Nov 11, GNA - The Dormaa West District Electoral Officer, Mr. Oscar Ampem Darko, has expressed optimism about the successful conduct of next month's polls in the area.

This comes amid concerns that there could be problems with the efficient running of the election in the district because the Electoral Commission (EC) has been struggling with office space.

Mr. Ampem Darko told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that this was not going to affect its performance in anyway, adding that, everything would be smooth.

He said arrangements had been made to re-locate its major activities from Nkrankwanta, the district capital to the Dormaa-Ahenkro in the Dormaa municipality.

He called for the people to remain calm, adding that, there was no basis for anybody to become anxious.

They were ready to deliver credible polls in all the 44 polling centres in the area.

The team of four permanent staff and 240 field officers was focused on the task and would pass the test, he added.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - Ex-President John Agyekum Kufuor and four other prominent Ghanaians have been honoured with Membership into the University of Ghana Alumni Association.

At the 28th Alumni Lecture on Thursday, Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr, former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana (UG), Emerita Professor Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, former Director of the Language Centre, UG, Professor John Owusu Gyapong, the former Pro-Vice Chancellor and Current Vice Chancellor of the University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ho, and Mr Kofi Esson, former Chief of Staff at Tullow Oil Ghana Limited, were honoured to become members of the Alumni.

Paa Kwesi Yankey, the Chairman of the University of Ghana Alumni Association, said the honorary membership was conferred on prominent members of the society who did not attend the University of Ghana but had in divers ways served or helped the university to be 'a go to university'.

He said the individuals had contributed immensely to the development of the university and, therefore, the need to make them honorary members of the Association.

Speaking on the topic: 'Who is 'them'? Governance in the Educational Sphere,' at the Great Hall of the university, Dr (Mrs) Myma Belo-Osagie, the Senior Managing Partner with Udo Udoma and Belo-Osagie, a leading Nigerian Corporate Law Firm, said the importance of education could not be overemphasised and all must come together to build a solid educational sector for Ghana.

She said: 'The onus lies on employers to expect or demand excellence in the fundamentals of the education given to our children - these fundamentals being, in particular, numeracy and literacy."

Dr Belo-Osagie said there was the need for the culture of excellence to be implanted in the current generation so they could thrive in any adventure.

She said in order to excel the children should have access to comprehensive grammar books and well written literature and be taught how to communicate current technological and scientific concepts accurately and clearly.

"The writing of plays, movie scripts, television scripts, poetry and digital media content in Akan should be encouraged as should research on the language, proverbs and sayings," she said.

Dr Belo-Osagie said she was interested in the 'education that imparts knowledge but is also purposeful in that it seeks to achieve, or support the achievement of, a particular goal or objective."

She suggested that in order to better the lives of Ghanaians through economic development, the knowledge coming from, or generated by, the educational institutions must be education that did not only respond to the social, political and economic context of the country but also took cognisance of what the future of the country ought to look like.

Dr Bello-Osagie said there was the need for the right kind of education at both the individual and national level in order to achieve the ultimate goal to consistently improve the quality of the lives of the citizens.

"If we accept that empirical research has shown that education is indeed one of the most important determinant of economic growth and that the greatest economic growth is achieved by countries which produce students with strong skills and deep knowledge, then education is not only important for each individual child, it is also essential for our country as a whole," she said.

GNA

By Kwamina Tandoh/Julius K. Satsi, GNA
By Joseph Amoah Acheampong, GNA

Kumasi, Nov 11, GNA - The governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) parliamentary candidate for Tafo-Pankrono, Ms. Memuna Kabore-Saddique, has set up a foundation to support the education of academically brilliant students from poor homes.

She told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that more than 50 students were already benefiting.

The assistance package include the supply of school uniforms, bags, foot wear and computers.

Ms. Kabore-Saddique also spoke of the donation of desk top computers to four senior high schools (SHS) in the constituency - Osei Kyeretwie, Azariya Islamic, Uthamaniyah Islamic and Faith Assemblies of God.

She said it was her contribution to efforts at helping to promote education, to aid the youth to live their dreams.

She expressed discomfort with the high dropout rate and said she was determined to go to every length to reverse the trend.

Ms. Kabore-Saddique has been campaigning on education development and job creation.

GNA
By Joyce Danso, GNA

Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - Six members of the Shai Traditional Council (STC) have been hauled before an Accra High Court over contempt application.

The members are said to have refused to confirm Odeopor Martey Kodjoe Awah IV, the Paramount Chief of the Shai Traditional Council, to the National House of Chiefs.

They are: Nene Nornor Sordji V, Acting President of STC; Nene Agyeman Kukubor V, a member of the Council's Standing Committee; and Nene Aku Djagbletey V, a member of the Council.

Others are: Nene Paddy Narh Wayo I, a member of the Standing Committee; Mankralo Okpor Tesa IV, a member; and Jessey Okpoti, Registrar of the Council.

The contemnors had also refused to sign the necessary documents to enable Odeopor Awah IV to be gazetted.

The contempt application was to be moved today, however, when the matter was called, it was adjourned to December 1, 2016, because the trial judge was indisposed.

In a contempt suit the Paramount Chief stated that in March, following a ruling on an order of Mandamus, compelled the STC to process an application for the Odeopor Awah IV's name be placed in the Register of the Chief at the National House of Chiefs.

According to Odeopor Awah IV, also known in private life as, Solomon Akwetey contended that although the STC had been served with the Court order, they had failed to comply with the order.

He said the STC was given 10 days period to comply with the order but failed to execute it.

Meanwhile the contemnors had filed their affidavit in opposition.

GNA
Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (AfCHPR) is to climax activities marking a decade of human rights protection on November 21- 22, 2016, at Arusha, the United Republic of Tanzania.

The African Court was established by the African Union to complement the protective mandate of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights with a view to enhancing the enjoyment of human rights on the continent.

Activities earmarked to climax the commemoration include statements from the African Union Commission; High Representative of the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania; Coalition for an Effective African Court; Network of African NHRIs (NANHRI); and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

The rest are the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR); African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child; and the African Commission on Human and Peoples` Rights (ACHPR).

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Justice Sylvain Ore, President of the African Court, explained that since becoming operational in 2006, the Court had charted a viable path for the protection of human and peoples' rights on the continent.

'Within a decade of its operationalization, the African Court has already brought about renewed hope and optimism within the African human rights system, and positioned itself as a veritable instrument in the quest for regional integration, peace, unity, good governance, respect for human rights and development,' he said.

Justice Ore said the jurisprudence of the African Court within this period reinforced the widely held view that respect for human rights provided a foundation upon which rested the political structures of human and peoples' freedoms.

He explained that the achievement of human freedoms, in turn, generated the will as well as the capacity for economic and social progress, leading to the attainment of sustainable peace.

'There is therefore reason to be optimistic about the African Court's role in the new African dispensation,' Justice Ore told the GNA.

Giving the historical genesis, Justice Ben Kioko, Vice-President of the African Court, also told the GNA that the African Court was established pursuant to the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples` Rights.

He said it was adopted by member-xtates of the then Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on June 9, 1998, (hereinafter, the Protocol).

Justice Kioko said the Protocol came into force on January 25, 2004, after it was ratified by more than 15 countries. However, the African Court became operational only in November 2006 when it officially started working in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and later moved to its current seat in Arusha, Tanzania.

The African Court Vice-President explained that although the Protocol was adopted in June 1998 by the then OAU, 17 years later, only 30 of the 54 African Union member-states had ratified it.

'The even fewer number of declarations made in accordance with Article 34 (6) of the Protocol: Of these 30, only eight have made the declaration required under Article 34 (6) of the Protocol, which allows direct access to the Court for individuals and non-governmental organizations (NGOs),' Justice Kioko stated.

As part of activities, a commemorative symposium would be held to educate the citizens on the successes, weaknesses, and challenges, and brainstorm on ways to ensure the Court plays a meaningful role on the protection of human rights in particular, and good governance as a whole.

The overall objective of the Symposium is to assess the work of the Court in the last 10 years with a view to making recommendations that will enhance the effectiveness of the Court for the future.

The Symposium platform will be used to highlight the importance of the African Court in the African Union architecture, reflect on the implementation of the decisions of the African Court, and assess challenges, successes and prospects of the African Court.

It will also examine the jurisprudence of the Court, create avenue for sharing experiences from other regional and sub-regional human rights institutions concerning their judicial function during the early years of existence and garner opinions on how to enhance the legitimacy, access and effectiveness of the protective mandate of the Court.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

By Benjamin Mensah, GNA

Tuba (GAR), Nov. 11, GNA - The Government is to improve irrigation systems across the country to support all-year round agriculture, Mr Bright Demordzi, the Vice Chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Agriculture, has said.

He said as part of the improvement scheme, the irrigation systems are being equipped with solar systems to make electricity available to support agro-industrial and domestic activities.

Consequently, the Agricultural Committee Vice Chair appealed to the people to vote massively for the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), and retain President John Dramani Mahama, and parliamentary candidates on the NDC ticket for the project to be sustained.

Mr Demordzi, who is the Member of Parliament for Bortianor Ngleshie Amanfro, was addressing the electorate at separate rallies at Tuba, farming and fishing community in the constituency.

The campaign was supported by a group of outgoing Members of Parliament from the NDC who have come together to promote the re-election of President John Dramani Mahama, as well as candidates in constituencies facing challenges for a resounding victory.

Known as 2016 NDC MP Exit Group, the 49-member group is composed of current NDC Members of Parliament who could not make it at the Party's primaries and NDC MPs who would not be contesting at the parliamentary polls on December 7.

Hajia Mary Salifu Boforo, First Deputy Majority Chief Whip is the leader of the group, and Mr Emmanuel Nii Ashie Moore, MP for Adentan, the originator.

Tuba in the Ga South Municipal Assembly of the Greater Accra Region is predominantly, a Muslim community, with settlers from across the country.

The provision of irrigation facilities to support agriculture has been the challenge to the people, as a canal system provided needs to be worked on as a result of siltation and break down.

Mr Demordzi, popularly called 'International Fisherman', by colleague legislators entreated the people to give him a second term in parliament to push through for canal project to be worked on.

He said a similar project at Ashaiman, has been equipped with solar systems, and it was the intention of the NDC Government to de-silt the canal system system at Weija though the instrumentality of the Parliamentary Select Committee of Agriculture.

Mr Ashie Moore, who is also the outgoing MP for Adenta, urged the electorate to retain Mr Demordzi for a second term since as he put it 'the first term is a learning period, and an additional four more years would provide President Mahama and Mr Demordzi the chance to complete uncompleted projects and programmes.

He said the voting for the presidential candidate for one party and the parliamentary candidate of another party, -'skirt and blouse'- voting was not welcome in the NDC.

'In the NDC, we wear kaba and slit, beautiful dressing to the admiration of all,' Mr Ashie Moore said, entreating the electorate to give the nod for a second term to President Mahama, and the NDC parliamentary candidates.

Mr Emmanuel Akolbire Opam Brown, the outgoing MP for Bolgatanga Central, said the position of Mr Demordzi as Vice Chair of Select Committee of Agriculture shows 'he is very relevant to the House.

'We believe strongly you should support President Mahama and Mr Demordzi top get a second term."

Mr Donald Daari Soditey, outgoing MP for Sawla Kalba Constituency, and former Vice Chair of the Agriculture Select Committee, said he knew Mr Demordzi as effective legislator.

He advised the electorate not to be deceived by any defection from the NDC, explaining that defectors are seen as traitors from the parties and are often untrustworthy.

Wing Commander (rtd) Francis Kabenlah Anaman, outgoing MP for Jomoro, said the intention of the NDC is transform the constituency into what he called 'one in town.'

Mr Demordzi donated quantities of bags seeds of different vegetables, received by Mr Samuel Evans Lartey, Scheme Manager of the Weija Irrigation Scheme, to be distributed to the farmers.

Later at the Tuba mosque, the delegation also distributed various items to the womenfolk.

GNA
Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - Mrs Ifey Ikeonu, the Acting Chairperson of the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority (ERERA), has lauded Ghana's efforts at implementing the 2013 ECOWAS Directive on the Organisation of the Regional Electricity Market.

She gave the commendation in Accra at a meeting with representatives of the power sector in Ghana, specifically from the Ministry of Power, GRIDCo and the Energy Commission, to discuss the status of implementation of the ECOWAS Directive on the Organisation of the Regional Electricity Market.

The first phase of the regional power market will be launched later this year.

While stating Ghana's critical role in the first phase of the regional power market, Mrs Ikeonu pledged ERERA's assistance to Ghana in areas the country may be having difficulties during the implementation of the Directive.

The Directive provides for the gradual establishment of the ECOWAS regional power market through the harmonisation of national electricity markets. It also provides for a regional market design and market phases, open access to the regional transmission network and access by eligible customers.

Other key issues of the Directive include the harmonisation of contractual arrangements relating to cross-border electricity exchanges for the import and export of electricity as well as the capacity building of national regulatory authorities.

Mrs Ikeonu, who briefed the meeting on other details of the Directive, spoke on the tasks assigned to ERERA and the West African Power Pool (WAPP) towards the development of the regional electricity market.

She informed the meeting of the progress made towards the take-off of the market and this includes the approval of instruments such as the Regional Electricity Market Rules and WAPP Operations Manual that would guide market participants as well as a tariff methodology which would determine the cost of trans-border wheeling of electricity.

Mrs Ikeonu said ERERA was now finalising work on the dispute resolution rules and contract templates which were two other critical instruments being re prerequisites for the launch of the market.

Mr Solomon Asoalla, the Chief Director of the Ministry of Power, said Ghana took issues of regional integration seriously and informed members of the ERERA delegation of the major steps so far taken towards implementing the Directive.

These include the power sector reforms which have led to the unbundling of the sector and the existence of seven generating companies, one transmission company, three distribution companies and 31 bulk customers.

Major steps have also been taken towards the establishment of a wholesale electricity market.

The ERERA delegation was also briefed on major steps taken towards the establishment of the wholesale electricity market including the development of grid code, market rules to guide the conduct of market participants as well as procedures for the issuance of licences for the export and import of power.

Discussions were also held on the steps taken so far by Ghana towards integrating renewable energy into the electricity generation mix as well as Ghana's energy efficiency programme.

The ERERA team commended the efforts so far made and noted that in line with ERERA's capacity building initiative in the region, Ghana's experience in these areas could be shared with other member states for the mutual benefit of ECOWAS.

GNA
11.11.2016 LISTEN

By George-Ramsey Benamba, GNA

Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - President John Dramani Mahama on Friday said government was putting in place measures that would make Ghana a jewellery hub in Africa.

He said: "We have all that it takes - the raw gold and other minerals - and now that a refinery has been established, it would facilitate the setting up of a jewellery village in Tepa in the Ahafo-Ano District of the Ashanti Region."

President Mahama said this when he inaugurated a 110 million-dollar Gold Coast Refinery established by Banking and Financial Services, Euroget Group of Investors from Egypt and local shareholders.

The Refinery, which was registered under the laws of Ghana with the business operations in refining gold and other precious minerals, is located within the vicinity of the Kotoka International Airport and has the capacity to refine raw (dore) dust and scrap gold.

It also has the capacity of 180 metric tonnes per annum in a single shift production, first of its kind in West Africa and second largest in Africa.

President Mahama said the establishment of Gold Coast Refinery was in line with government's policy on value addition to Ghana's raw materials and export diversification programme.

He said government's approval of the Mineral Mining Act in 2014 would also provide adequate impetus for more investors in the area and appealed to potential investors to take advantage of the fertile investment environment in the country.

"Ghana is practising rule of law, good legal framework in addition to transparency, which will attract and encourage more businesses to invest in the country,' he said.

President Mahama said the mining sector was already contributing about 14 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product of the national economy and with value addition in the coming years the figures could be doubled for the benefit of all.

He said exports in the sector had risen from 40 per cent in 2012 to 45 per cent in 2015, a situation that could double and create numerous jobs for the teeming youth of the country and beyond.

The President said the establishment of the refinery would also deepen the relations between Ghana and Egypt which started many decades ago.

Dr Said Deraz, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Euroget Group of Investors, said for commercial operations, the refinery would offer transportation and logistics services for precious metals, assaying, melting and testing.

He said they would also refine to the highest quality grade (five nines), process for export and exporting of gold, storage, safe keeping, custodian services, jewelry manufacturing and showroom phase three.

Dr Deraz said the refinery, which is expected to commence full operation in December, would produce 600 kilogrammes per shift of eight hours and provide 300 direct and 1,200 indirect jobs.

He commended the Government for creating an enabling environment for doing business.

Mr Nii Osah Mills, the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, said it was gratifying that the Euroget Group of Companies and their partners had invested in gold refinery after so many years exporting raw gold.

He said the establishment of the gold refinery would create jobs and provide adequate revenue to government and urged the investors to respect their financial obligations during their operations.

GNA
Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - The Ghana Prisons Service on Thursday commended the management and board of Ghana Oil Company Limited (GOIL), the nation's foremost indigenous oil marketing company, for being one of the most outstanding homegrown management companies in the country.

Mr Emmanuel Yao Adzator, Acting Director General of the Ghana Prisons Service, who made the commendation, noted that: 'In the era when most local companies are bedeviled with management challenges, GOIL continued to perform tremendously well in the midst of global and domestic hiccups'.

Mr Adzator said this during a brief presentation of glass and wood engraved commemorative placard to Mr Patrick Kwame Akpe Akorli, GOIL Managing Director, for being adjudged the CIMG Marketing Man of the Year, whilst GOIL was declared the CIMG Petroleum Company of the Year.

The commemorative placard has the National Coat of Arms and the Ghana Prisons Service Logo embedded at the bottom.

Mr Adzator, who was accompanied by senior management members of the Prisons Service, said the service considered GOIL as hero, and urged the Board and Management to continue with their prudent management systems.

Mr Akorli acknowledged the overwhelming support from corporate Ghana and individuals since the double award and attributed it to team work from GOIL Board and Management members.

Other GOIL management members included Mr Stephen Yaw Gyabeng, Solicitor/Secretary; Mr Anthony Twumasi, IT & Planning Manager; Mr Joseph Kofi Nyarko, Health, Safety & Environ Manager; and Mr Erasmus Ofori Sarkwa, Finance Manager.

GOIL was incorporated as a private limited liability company on June 14, 1960, as AGIP Ghana Company Limited with the objective of marketing petroleum products and related products particularly fuels, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), lubricants, bitumen, and specialty products in Ghana. The shareholders were AGIP SPA of Italy and SNAM S.P.A.

On December 16, 1968, SNAM S.P.A. transferred its 10 per cent shareholding, representing 95,000 shares, to Hydrocarbons International Holdings of Zurich, Switzerland.

The Government in 1974 acquired the shares of AGIP SPA and Hydrocarbons International Holdings in AGIP Ghana Company Limited and by a special resolution in 1976 changed the name of the company to Ghana Oil Company Limited.

By a shareholders resolution passed on August 1t, 2007, the company adopted new regulations and was converted into a public company.

Between the year 2010 and 2012, the company underwent a transformation process aimed at changing its logo, station outlook, and most importantly the corporate culture which was dubbed 'Good Energy comes with a Smile'.

Though the company's main business is marketing and distribution of petroleum products in Ghana, one of the tenets of the New GOIL is to move beyond the current frontiers to marketing and distribution of energy products in general.

GNA
By Kodjo Adams, GNA

Accra, Nov. 11, GNA - The kingmakers of the three gates of Nii Klu Din We, Nii Adjei Okon and Nii Okang Duamro and Principal elder of Nii Nmai have confirmed Jonathan Adjetey Adjei as the Mankralo of Teshie with the stool name Nii Okang Duamro Nmashie III.

This was contained in a letter signed by the head of the family of the three gates to the Registrar of the Greater Accra Regional House of Chiefs in Dodowa dated October 10, 2016 and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra.

The kingmakers who signed the letter include Ex W.O 1 Henry Nii Sowah Otinkra, head of the family of the Nii Klu Din We; Nii Adjetey Otinkorang I, Principal Elder of Nii Adjei Okon; Nii Adjei Tinkum, Principal Elder of Nii Okang Duamro; and Charles Nii Klu Adjei, Principal Elder of Nii Nmai.

Nii Adjetey Otinkorang I, who is also the Dzasetse of Nuumo Nmashie Family of Krobo Teshie, on Thursday performed the cleansing rites on Nii Okang Duamro III to affirm him as the Mankralo of Teshie, and this was witnessed by the elders and youth of the community.

Nii Okang Duamro III, who spoke to the Ghana News Agency on his vision for the community, promised to unite the people of Teshie under one umbrella since peace and unity was critical in utilizing the potential of human resource and infrastructural development.

'This can only be achieved with effective mobilization of all groups within the area through a well-coordinated administration to meet the plans and desires of the people,' he said.

He said some areas within Teshie lacked development because of the feuds, making it difficult for government or any organisations to pay compensation for any developmental projects being undertaken in the area.

He called on all to come on board to develop the area devoid of violence saying he would use his position to ensure that there is peace and understanding among the community and appeal to the youth to eschew any activities that would endanger the lives of people ahead of the December polls.

Nii Otinkorang I said in 2012 the kingmakers of Teshie installed Nii Nmashie III and he was duly introduced to the Teshie Traditional Council.

He said Tsitsi-tse Nii Okang Duamro Nmashie IV, known in private life as Benjamin Nii Nmai Sam Sowah, was later outdoored as the new Mankralo of Teshie, which he explained does not qualify to be a Mankralo of Teshie, and this resulted in confusion in the area.

Nii Otinkorang I said as a result of the mayhem, an Accra Circuit Court Presided by Francis Obiri on Wednesday April 30 restrained the Kingmakers of Teshie to stop the outdooring of Mr Benjamin Nmai Sam-Sowah to avoid violence in the area.

This follows an ex-parte motion for an order to stop the outdooring of the new Mankralo filed by the Police with a supporting letter from the Greater Accra Regional House of Chiefs.

He said Chief Inspector K. Adu told the court that the elders of Teshie has not nominated or selected Mr Benjamin Nmai Sam-Sowah as the Mankralo of the area.

Nii Otinkorang I said the case before the Regional House of Chief at Dodowa and a facts finding committee was set up for arbitration.

He said the Committee established that the position of Mankralo rotates among the three gates and that Nii Klu Din We, one of the three gates has eight houses of the Krobo Quarter namely Nii Okoh Gate, Nii Okang Gate, Nii Nmai Gate, Nii Ashia Gate and Nii Botwe Gate.

The Committee established that the stool is a patrilineal inheritance.

Nana Odupon Okomfo Abeka Sikafo II, National President of Greater Accra Traditional Priests and Priestesses Council, has pledged their support for the confirmation of the Mankralo, adding that "in their traditional setting if a Dzasetse performs the necessary rites on a Mankralo, then it means the right thing has been done".

He said the Council will work with the Mankralo to succeed, and hope to put in place youthful policies that will help develop the area.

GNA
From the moment he declared he wanted to be President of the United States of America, Donald Trump must have known that he was about to start a reality show that would change the course of history.

A businessman Trump who had nothing to do with politics previously, won a very experienced Secretary Hillary Clinton, to become the next President of America.

The day Donald Trump became President Elect, he became the prime target of so many attacks, within and even outside the United states of America, and there are fears that some will stop at nothing till they have seen to it that this controversial businessman does not lead the US.

A brief history of threats

Barely 4-days ago, Donald Trump was surrounded by security agents and hustled off a Reno, Nev., stage, while people in the crowd before him called out, "He's got a gun."

The then Republican nominee who now is President elect, disappeared behind the backdrop of the Nevada rally while law enforcement agents swarmed the area directly before the podium.

READ ALSO: Trump, Obama finally meet at White House (photos)

A man was led from the rally by a phalanx of armed agents, however, the US Secret Service said in a statement there was no weapon involved in the incident, that after a search of the person who was earlier suspected to be an attacker.

It is reported that Trump retook the stage a short while later and finished his address. He later boarded his plane en route to his final campaign stop in Colorado.

Shortly after the incident, the Trump campaign released the following statement: "I would like to thank the United States Secret Service and the law enforcement resources in Reno and the state of Nevada for their fast and professional response. I also want to thank the many thousands of people present for their unwavering and unbelievable support. Nothing will stop us  we will make America great again!"

The incident was reminiscent of a glitch experienced earlier in Trump's campaign. In a hangar outside Dayton, Ohio, in March, U.S. Secret Service agents rushed the stage and surrounded Trump in a protective ring after what the campaign described as an attempt "to breach the secure buffer." As with the other disruption, Trump continued his speech after a short break.

Along the campaign, Eric Trumps wife opened a letter containing a white powder substance at their Trump Parc East apartment.

According to CBS News, the exact content of the letter has not been revealed at this point, however, it is known that it was a direct threat to the Trump family.

READ ALSO: Obasanjo writes to Trump, as ISIS makes dangerous statement

Both the FBI and Secret Service were called to the home after the letter was opened, on-site testing was done and the powder at this time is believed to not be harmful. Regardless, one can only imagine how scared the family was when the powder fell out of the envelope.

The powder threat came on the same day the Trump familys information was released by Anonymous, hence, many are of the opinion that coincidence are becoming really suspicious.

Loss of Democratic culture

The landmark victory of Donald Trump in the just concluded polls, has prompted waves of protests across California college campuses as irate mobs disowned the audacious billionaire by chanting hes not my president.

There are clear indications that while Donald Trump might have been elected president of the US, there are so many who do not believe in his capabilities to serve the American people. Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States on Wednesday, November 9, expressing shock and anger over Donald Trumps election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency. There was a gathering of several thousands in Washington, just in front of the White House for a candlelight vigil on a damp, chilly evening, criticizing what they called Trumps racism, sexism and xenophobia, and carrying signs reading We have a voice! and Education for all!

For some the campaign was marred by racism and misogyny, with a lot of terrible tactics that saw Trump swaying the electoral college. Those who are of the opinion have sworn to ensure that a Trump-led presidency would not "hinder the progress of the country".

"Not my president" is the chant that now rents the air, a course which many are giving their all to. Other chants like "Love Trumps Hate" and "Trump grabbed America by the pu**y" have become known slogans Boston, Philadelphia and some other cities.

These are not the best times in the history of America's democracy, many are deeply pained, claiming that history has been inverted and the true democratic culture is lost. As many take to the streets, blocking roads and burning flags, one cannot but fear that the situation will degenerate into a total break down of law and order.

The push for Hillary Clinton

While it is still a mystery that Donald Trump beat Secretary Clinton in the race to the white house, there are still many pushing to see that the tables turn before Trump is sworn-in as president of the United states.

The die-hard Democrats who are still hoping that they wont have to endure a Trump presidency, are looking at one last ploy - which is a miraculous upset in the decisions of the Electoral College.

It is recalled that though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 200,000, and Trump won the minimum of 270 electoral votes necessary to be elected president. Still, the American constitution leaves room for a change of heart for electors of the Electoral College who are scheduled to meet when on Monday, December 19 in their respective state capitals.

Hence, there is technically nothing stopping any of the electors from voting their conscience and refusing to support the candidate to whom they were bound, or from abstaining from voting altogether. This process is called the "faithless elector."

The idea of electors reversing their vote is rarely discussed  and was most recently bandied about after the incredibly close 2000 election in which George Bush narrowly beat Al Gore. And electors going faithless is exceedingly rare.

According to analysis by The New York Times, well over 99 percent of electors throughout American history have voted as pledged.

The last faithless elector was witnessed back in 2004, when a lone anonymous voter in Minnesota declined to vote for Democrat John Kerry and instead voted for Kerrys running mate, John Edwards.

READ ALSO: Just in: In wake of Trumps win, naira stays strong against dollar

The r vote was purely ceremonial, as Bush already had 286 electoral votes, more than enough to ensure his reelection.

According to The New York Post, faithless electors are technically barred in only 29 states from ignoring the will of the voters, though the penalties are light. And a faithless elector has never swung an election.

But given the high dissatisfaction with Trump among Republicans, a few faithless GOP electors could well go rogue next month.

For Clinton, it would be a very great task, as she would need more than 20 GOP electors to go rogue and vote instead for her

Even then, the new, Republican-controlled Congress meets Jan. 6 to approve the electoral college vote, and would certainly vote to void any roguery, handing the victory firmly back to Trump.

When all attempts fail

If all legal attempts to stop Trump from occupying the White House fails, then there are fears that the peoples anger will degenerate to grave hate, one that could lead some into attempting murder.

Already there are threats and calls for the head of Donald Trump, and though the President Elect is indeed well secured, still one cannot doubt the potential of desperate persons who will rather die trying.

All signs show that many are really bitter about the just concluded elections in America, they will go all the way to get Trump out of the White House, if he is not stopped.

More and more petitions are being signed by the day and so many have been googling how an American President can be impeached.

Both home and away, there is no doubt that Donald Trump has many enemies who will not flinch at the news of his demise. It is a very critical time for American security operatives, if there was anytime the US feared for the assassination of a president or president elect, that time is now.

Donald Trump on his part is trying to make certain amends to make up for the many things he said wrongly during the course of his campaign.

The media team of US president-elect reportedly removed the statement on his website to deport Nigerians from the country if he becomes president. This comes even as his team also deleted the statement on his website to ban Muslims from entering the US.

It was gathered that the page now redirects to another page encouraging voters to donate to his campaign, New Telegraph reports. Trump and his allies had consistently defended the ban, insisting the measure was about Americans safety and not about discriminating against religion.

The protests are still ongoing, the social media feeling the heat with buzz upon buzz regarding the Trump issue. Amid rumours of a war that many fear is looming, amid immigration crisis, religious upheavals, political tussles and economic challenges around the world; one can only hope that the American people find a more civil way to settle their scores.

Source: Legit.ng
The fact that Donald Trump an American businessman, reality television personality, and politician is President-elect of the United States does not sit well with many people.

Trump is as well chairman and president of The Trump Organization, the principal holding company for his real estate ventures and other business interests.

However what will people do or what are they doing to register their displeasure? It seems like he will be impeached. How did we arrive at this conclusion? Here are some clear signs:

1. The protests

Anti-Trump protests are spreading

One sign that is clear as day is shown in the series of protest marches going on all over the country. The demonstrators marching in cities across the United States to protest against Donald Trumps surprise win, are blasting his campaign because he spoke against immigrants, Muslims and other groups.

The protesters are all saying one clear thing: We do not want Donald Trump as president of the United States. Many of them are chanting: "Not my president!."

The signs they carry speak their mind, they do not want Donald Trump in power and their numbers with is going into hundreds of thousands cannot be easily dismissed.

2. The tweets

#ImpeachTrump is gaining momentum

If the social media platform Twitter was the entire electorate of the United States, then Hillary Clinton would have won by a landslide.

And following Donald Trump's win many people in Twitter wasn't him impeached. the hashtags are coming qucik and fast and here are some of them: #impeachTrump, #DumpTrump, and #notmypresident to mention a few of them.

READ ALSO: 11 facts on Trumps presidential armored car that will blow your mind (photos)

3. The Google searches

The Google searches are also a clear sign that the American people are not happy with who the President-elect currently is, and they are not even keen on waiting for inauguration in January 2017, before impeaching him.

According to this Twitter user:

According to Google Trends data, the top five states frantically looking up impeachment were Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado.

READ ALSO: First photo of Michelle Obama and Melania Trumps historic meeting

4. The petitions

One of the petitions against Donald Trump

Many are taking the legal route to try and impeach Donald Trump as at least seven petitions have been raised against him with one of the petitions to contest his presidency amassing more than 13,322 signatures in a matter of hours.

Also thousands of people are calling for him to be impeached over claims of sexual abuse, fraud and racketeering, pictured are protesters in Chicago

In addition to this, a number of professors have thrown their weight behind the movement, saying there is a 'strong case' to impeach Trump and stop him from taking the top job.

It remains to be seen if all these efforts will prove successful or if on January 20, 2017, Donald Trump will assume office as 45th president of the United States of America.

Source: Legit.ng
- The Benue state government has declared every Friday as public holiday in the state

- The state government said the declaration is to enable civil servants harvest their farm produce on such days

- The state also said the declaration will be effective from November 11 to the end of January 2017

Benue state governor Samuel Ortom

The Benue state government has declared Fridays as wrok free days starting from November 11.

The state government said declaring such work free days will enable civil servants begin harvest on their different farms.

The state said its worker should use the last working day of the week for farming in the face of dwindling economy which made it difficult for the administration to pay salaries

This decision was made after the governor Samuel Ortom presided over a state executive meeting in the state.

READ ALSO: Lagos lawyer sues federal government over public holidays

A statement by the special adviser to the governor on media and ICT Tahav Agerzua said the state executive already approved that Fridays become work free days.

This, Agerzua said it take effect from November 11 to the end of January 2017, to enable civil servants harvest the farm produce.

He also said, the council, however, exempted some workers in education sector, maintaining that the school calendar should be allowed to run normally.

Meanwhile, a Lagos based lawyer had earlier sued the Nigerian over 'unlawful' declaration of public holidays in Nigeria.

The lawyer Malcom Omirhobo asked the Federal High Court in Lagos to decalre the rescheduling of public holidays in Nigeria as illegal.

Omirhobo also joined the Attorney General of the Federation and the minister of interior as defendants in the suits filed before the court.

Source: Legit.ng
Never thought of visiting Iceland? Well, you might be soon. In our Breakout Role series, we take a look at places that have seen huge increases in tourism in the last few years, and try to figure out whats causing all the hype.

Icelands tourism is rooted in immersion. It isnt sufficient to just observe the glaciers, mountains, volcanoes and other natural wonders that draw so many people to the Nordic nation; these sights have to be experienced holistically.

When I go to a lot of [other countries], I feel like whatever youre seeing is kind of like youre an audience member, says Xiaochen Tian, one of the co-founders of Guide To Iceland, an Icelandic travel company. Its like youre on the opposite sidein a theater and watching. But in Iceland you kind of feel like youre in the middle of it all.

Engaging landscapes have been drawing a few travelers to the island nation for decades, but not nearly in numbers as large as in recent years. Since 2010 alone, Icelands annual visitors have almost tripled, rising from 489,000 to 1.3 million in 2015, the first time the country saw more than 1 million tourists in a year.

Photo: Serge, CC-BY

The story of Icelands booming tourism industry is in many ways tied directly to the 2008 Financial Crisis, which was felt especially strongly in the Nordic country. However, as the economy recovered, the lack of reliability in other industriescombined with a major devaluation of the Icelandic krona against the U.S. dollar that made travel from America relatively inexpensiveleft the door open for tourism to flourish, and help out a struggling nation in the process.

I think people are mostly happy [with the increase in tourism]. I mean tourism pretty much saved Iceland after the [2008] financial collapse, says Nanna Gunnarsdottir, Guide to Icelands key writer.

Simultaneously, Iceland was beginning to earn global recognition in other ways, with the country appearing as the filming location for a number of blockbuster films and heavily-watched TV series, such as Interstellar, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Game of Thrones. This publicity, combined with the popularity of Icelandic bands such as Bjork, Sigur Ros and Of Monsters and Men helped put the country on the map as an emerging tourism hub.

Photo: Ophelia photos, CC-BY

As a nation with a population of only about 330,000 people, Iceland cant deal with hoards of tourists the same way other countries would. For example, there are more Americans who visit Iceland in a year than there are residents in the entire country, a fact which can present some interesting problems.

According to Gunnarsdottir, the public outrage in regards to tourism is not usually directed at the tourists but at Iceland itself, as the nations infrastructure has yet to catch up to its increasing number of foreign visitors.

Tian calls tourism a hot topic in Iceland, but says the local response has been positive, especially in Reykjavik, the capital, where its easy to witness the effects of new visitors.

Most Icelanders in Reykjavik think it really makes the city more dynamictheres more city life, nightlife, restaurants and all of the services that come with tourism, she says.

Photo: Dan Ngyuen, CC-BY

Hot springs are an absolute requirement when visiting Iceland, regardless of the time of the year. Aside from the incredibly popular Blue Lagoon for the unacquainted really does have an incredibly pure sky blue colorthere are also more obscure sites, such as Viti and Landmannalaugar:, which are both more off the beaten path and more natural in their aesthetic.

In terms of sightseeing in Iceland, the easiest way to see the most is by way of the Golden Circle, a 300 km road that allows travellers to depart from Reykjavik and see the Gullfoss Waterfall, the geysers at Haukadalur, mountains and crater lakes in a single day.

The cost of seeing these beautiful sights is mostly paid in preparation. In order to experience the kind of firsthand beauty she described, Tian advises visitors to do their research before heading to Iceland, and to keep in mind it wont be a typical vacation.

People who buy a package trip to Iceland and dont really read up on it before are really shocked that we dont have any five star luxurious hotels with including multiple restaurants and swimming pools and helicopter pads, she says. Thats not the tourism youre going to get when youre in Iceland.

Flight Rates: $627  $1,327

Travel Concerns: According to the U.S. State Department, there are no specific threats to Iceland in particular.

Currency Exchange: 1 USD = 115 Icelandic Krona

More Info: Inspired By Iceland is Icelands primary tourism website, with information about events, activities and destinations within each of the countrys regions.

Top Photo: Kris Williams, CC-BY

Dillon Thompson University of Georgia student and freelance writer with a love for travel and an addiction to coffee and hip-hop music.
If youve ever traveled the world, you know two struggles firsthand: the first is trying to fit all the souvenirs and goodies you found in your suitcase when you head home. The second struggle is when you return home and realize Amazon cant ship you that item you saw at a street market in Thailand, nor can you find a certain type of candy at your local supermarket.

And if you havent done much traveling, its probably because of how expensive it is to do so. Between flights, a hotel, rental cars and everyday needs, spending adds up when you embark on an adventure, which is why many of us decide to stay home.

Enter Grabr: the peer-to-peer delivery app looking to help shoppers anywhere buy anything, while also making traveling more affordable.

Theres got to be an app for that already right?

Thats what Grabr co-founders Daria Rebenok and Artem Fedyaev assumed to be true when they found themselves living in San Francisco craving the fresh gazpacho and Spanish wine they loved to dine with while living abroad in Barcelona. They figured that since they were living in the tech capital of the United States, there had to be an app that would deliver items internationally.

Wrong.

Since the Internet couldnt help her get what she was looking for, Rebenok decided she was willing to pay someone to bring it to her. Living in San Francisco means there are dozens of flights coming into the city from Barcelona on a daily basis, so Rebenok figured she could ask someone traveling to bring it to her.

She figured there would be an app that could connect her with someone traveling from Barcelona to San Francisco that she could pay to bring the food over in his or her suitcase.

Wrong, again.

We thought, this is a good idea and we were shocked that it didnt exist already, says Rebenok. We mentioned the idea to an investor and they thought it was a valuable idea.

What initially started as a side project (as most start-ups are) the idea for Grabr eventually turned into a company that Rebenok now leads as its CEO. And for the first grab they posted when their app was live? Gazpacho and Spanish wine.

We got the wine pretty quickly, but the gazpacho took a few months. But we got it! exclaims Rebenok.

Grabr released its beta in January 2016 and currently has an estimated 70,000 users, with about 30% Travelers and 70% Shoppers. The imbalance between the two is intentional, as the app is still new and wants to focus on creating a demand to inspire people to sign up as Travelers and travel to make money.

At its core, the company intends to help people around the world get items they otherwise cannot get. Here, in the U.S. market, we have so many options and websites that can get us whatever we want. But as Rebenok points out, other countries dont have that kind of access.

For example, Amazon doesnt ship to Brazil and Argentina, so many consumers end up spending a lot of money on customs to have a traditional shipper send things like baby formula, beauty products, clothes or gadgets. It can take a really long time to be received, especially if held up in customs. Thats why some companies dont even bother shipping to certain countriesand when youre the person in said country trying to order something, its incredibly frustrating.

That kind of frustration wouldnt be acceptable for American consumers who expect Amazon-like customer service from every company. But even Amazon cant get us everything we want, so Grabr can appeal to people who are used to seamless shipping.

If we want something unique like fresh macaroons directly from Paris, we cant use Amazon Prime to get that, says Rebenok. Grabr is a simple and easy way for people to get items they otherwise cant get.

First things first: no, you cant use this app to smuggle drugs or other illegal substances. The app has a semi-automatic system that will flag certain keywords and remove any postings that violates the law.

Its not uncommon for people to be wary of a new app. Not all people are accepting of tech apps and some are particularly skeptical about the legality of having a stranger deliver something in exchange for money. With Grabr, the setup sounds suspicious, but the truth is the app is pretty similar to ones we use on a daily basis, just with a different outcome.

As a Shopper you set up an account on Grabr and simply make a post for the item youre looking for. If you want something specific, like a particular item from a store you know about, you can include all those details, including a link to the store and an address of where its located. You list the amount youre willing to pay for the item (hopefully the actual cost of the item) and a reward amount that youre willing to pay someone to bring it to you. This is essentially what a delivery fee is in Postmates or a tip to a Lyft driver. Its basically a way cheaper amount someone would pay in shipping, duties and taxes if they were to place the order online.

As a Traveler you sign up to do exactly that: travel, pick up the items requested by a Shopper, and earn rewards for doing so. In the same fashion you might sign up to deliver food through Postmates, as a Traveler, you sign up to deliver items you collect while youre traveling around the world.

In app, youre able to see the items being requested from Shoppers. You can filter the requests by location and accept what youre willing to grab, or you have the option to place a bid if youre willing to pick up an item, but want a greater reward. Think of it as eBay meets Postmates, in the sense that youre bidding out other Travelers to get paid to deliver an item. If youre ambitious enough, you can plan to travel to one place, pack your suitcase with all the items youve elected to pick up and get paid a fair amount for making the transaction when you cross the border.

When you elect to pick up a reward, the Shopper will agree to the amount, but you wont receive any money until they receive the item. That means you have to pay for the item out of pocket. The Shoppers money is essentially held in escrow until you hold up your end of the deal and hand off their item.

Once the grab is complete, youll get the money for the product, plus the reward. Its illegal to take an item to another country and re-sell it, but since the Traveler paid for the item with their money, and the exchange of money happens in Grabrs app, theres no reselling occurring. Thus, the rules technically arent being broken. Its a loophole, but it works (for now.)

Customs do come into play and though Grabr has plans to help make this easier for Travelers, right now, you (as a Traveler) have to make sure you know how much youre allowed to bring over to any given country. This can be a bit time consuming if youre not immediately aware of how customs works because every countrys customs varies on the amount of goods being brought. In the U.S. its around $500 depending on where youre coming from. If a Traveler goes over the limit, theyll have to pay a custom tax, which they either eat or see if the Shopper is willing to pay. Though this hasnt been an issue yet, Grabr says they will protect the Traveler.

The benefits are endless for both the Traveler and the Shopper. As the Shopper, youre able to pay less for something that you either cant get in your home country, or would have to pay a lot (in some countries, an exuberant amount) of customs and taxes, making it somewhat impossible to afford.

As a Traveler, you, well, get to travel and earn money. Sure, you might have to go out of your way to deliver items and travel with some extra load, but if youre making enough to pay for your flight or a night in a hotel, it ends up being worthwhile. Moreover, Travelers who have successfully completed grabs say the in-person deliveries are what they enjoy most about the experience.

I delivered a birthday set for Disneys Frozen products to a little girl in Peru who couldnt get anything like that there, says Jamie, a Traveler for Grabr. Her father wanted to throw her a Frozen themed birthday party but he couldnt find the birthday set in Peru and anything he did find was incredibly expensive. I delivered the doll to her and she started crying because she couldnt believe she was holding an Elsa doll.

Jamie says its the person-to-person aspect that makes Grabr different than any other courier service, explaining that most Travelers are people who are going on a trip, delivering something to someone else out of the kindness of their heart. Plus, Jamie was able to pay for a plane ticket and two night stays in a hotel in Peru.

You might have to spend a lot of time on Grabr figuring out custom fees and planning out deliveries, notes Jamie. But when you walk away from it with $1,200, you walk away feeling pretty good.

The truth is, it does! I tested out whether or not I could ask the app for random gifts from different countries and have them delivered to my door in Seattle. I decided to focus on iconic gifts from around the world, asking for the following grabs:

1. Japanese parasol

2. Traditional Indian elephant figurine carved from sandalwood

3. Everything bagel with an old-fashioned New York City coffee cup

4. French baguette

5. Set of Matryoshka dolls from Russia

For the purpose of the demo, the Grabr team was able to receive some of the grabs on my behalf. In example, a Traveler coming into San Francisco from Japan, India and New York City were able to drop off the items I requested to their office. The only items that didnt make the cut were the bagel and baguette, which Grabr admits delivering fresh items like that is something thats still hard to work around.

I met up with Christina Leigh Morgan, senior manager of brand activation at Grabr, in Seattle to receive the items. Christina hadnt spent much time in Seattle, so I suggested brunch at a local diner and gave her suggestions on places to visit during her stay. Right away, I could see how I would have benefited if the roles were reversed, so the appeal of Grabr is high for those Travelers who love meeting locals and getting their take on what to do in a city.

As for the set of Matryoshka dolls, I was able to chat with a Grabr Traveler in Russia to secure their delivery. Ill admit I was skeptical of this at first, especially because it took a few days for me to hear back from anyone after placing my grabs. I received a notification from Ksenia in Moscow saying she could pick up the set for me.

When Ksenia went to find the dolls, she communicated with me through the app. She sent me photos of the dolls that were in my price range and let me pick out the color I liked. I thought it was cool that she was in the store while we were talking, and it was fun that I got to pick the exact one I wanted. When I received the dolls, I saw the whole interaction come full circle. Now, the dolls make a nice accent in my living room and when people ask about it, I have a unique story to tell.

Grabr is different from other start-ups in that its taking on two huge industries at once: shipping and travel. Its helping consumers get the goods they cant get anywhere else, but its also helping those who want to travel do so.

You might not be able to live off completing grabs in the app, but for most of us, the idea of covering an expensive plane ticket or accommodations is worth it. Now that we know it exists, why not use it the next time you travel to save yourself a little money or to get a special gift for an upcoming birthday.

And for those consumers who are tired of frustrating experiences with customs and companies who refuse to ship to them, Grabr just might be the perfect solution.
A new addition to Marriott International's portfolio, the brand just announced the upcoming opening of the Apollo Hotel Amsterdam, A Tribute Portfolio Hotel. The brand's new property is scheduled to join Marriott International's portfolio in April 2017, following a major renovation of its guestrooms, restaurant and public areas. The

[]
Impressive results on the industrial market in Q3 2016. Supply volume is approaching 11 million square metres. High growth rate of demand  an increase of 76% compared to the same period last year. Marked reaction of developers  they are building a lot and preparing their first projects in

[]
For Husqvarna, the EICMA 2016 is all about re-entering the street bike space. The Vitplien 401 and Svartpilen 401 would be playing a crucial role in the KTM-owned Swedish brands future global operations. So, its hardly surprising that the company is wasting no time in suggesting possible variant extensions and customizing options.

In addition to the Vitpilen 401, Svartpilen 401 and Vitplien Aero concept, Husqvarna is also exhibiting an accessorized version of the Vitpilen 401 at the ongoing expo in Milan. Considering that Vitpilen and Svartpilen are Swedish for white arrow and black arrow respectively, the accessorized dual-tone version could be described as a black-and-white arrow.

In addition to the black-white color combination, the Vitplien 401 custom also features white pillion seat cover, cafe racer style rear view mirrors and a fluorescent green filter for the headlight. The rear tyre hugger has been done away with to render a raw appeal. Other aspects remain true to the regular Vitpilen.

Husqvarnas latest product is essentially the KTM Duke 390 in an entirely different attire. The racy single-cylinder liquid-cooled engine, trellis frame, and WP suspension system are common to both motorcycles.

The production-spec Husqvarna Vitpilen 401s 375 cc motor is paired to a 6-speed gearbox and Bosch ECM. The final power and torque figures are still under wraps. We expect the powertrain to have a slightly different state of tune compared to the Duke.

Considering that India is the sole production base for KTMs family of compact displacement motorcycles, the closely related Vitpilen and Svartpilen are also most likely to be made in the same Bajaj-owned facility at Chakan, near Pune. Global sales are expected to commence in the first half of 2017.

Its only a matter of time before we see more engine variants for the new Huskies corresponding to those of the Dukes.
Ford Figo BS6 comes in both petrol and diesel formats across four variants: Ambiente, Trend, Titanium and Titanium Blu.

The updated Ford Figo BS6 has been launched at a starting price of Rs 5.39 lakh, with the top-end variant hitting Rs 7.85 lakh ex-showroom. Compared to the last iteration of the BS4 model, there are no significant improvements, but a few cut-downs on the list of features. For instance, the BS6 model misses out on SYNC3 infotainment system and makes-do with a 7.0-inch capacitive touchscreen (available only on the top trim).

The new Ford Figo BS6 is available in both petrol and diesel formats. The 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol engine is good for 95bhp and 119Nm while the figures rise to 99bhp and 215Nm of torque in the 1.5-litre four-cylinder diesel mill. There is no automatic variant and both engines come mated to a 5-speed manual.

FORD FIGO  1.2l Ti-VCT PETROL BS6 Prices BS4 Prices Diff Ambiente INR 539,000 INR 523,000 INR -16,000 Trend (New Variant) INR 599,000 NA NA Titanium INR 635,000 INR 599,900 INR 35,100 Titanium Blu INR 695,000 INR 664,900 INR 30100 FORD FIGO  1.5l TDCi DIESEL Trend (New Variant) INR 686,000 NA NA Titanium INR 725,000 INR 689,900 INR 35,100 Titanium Blu INR 785,000 INR 754,900 INR 30,100

The hatchback is available in four variants: Ambiente, Trend, Titanium and Titanium Blu. Here are the features and equipment coming under each variant:

Ambiente (comes in petrol format only)

175/65 R14 tyres on steel wheels

Rear fog lamps

Adjustable front headrests

12V power outlet

FordPass smartphone connectivity

Welcome lamps

Tilt steering

Distance-to-empty reading

Door-ajar warning

Front power windows (with one-touch up/down for driver)

Day/night IRVM

Auto door lock (at 15km/h)

Electric boot release

Gear-shift indicator

Dual airbags

Seat-belt reminder

Rear parking sensors

ABS+EBD

High-speed alert

Trend (in addition/replacement to the features on Ambiente)

Silver grille with chrome surround

Blacked-out B-pillar

Passenger vanity mirror

Rear parcel tray

Driver-seat height adjustment

Rear power windows

Four-speaker Bluetooth stereo

Device dock (instead of the touchscreen)

Boot lamp

Steering-mounted audio controls

Powered ORVMs (in body colour) with turn signals

Remote keyless entry

Perimeter/intrusion alarm

Titanium (in addition/replacement to the features on Trend)

195/55 R15 tyres on 6-spoke alloy wheels

Chrome fog lamp bezel

Adjustable rear headrests

Push-button start

Titanium Blu (get all the above features, plus blue accents against Absolute Black theme)

15-inch four-spoke (multi-strand) gloss-black alloy wheels

Blu exteriors and interiors

Front fog lamps

Rear wiper/washer/defogger

Gloss-black roof

7.0-inch touchscreen (capacitive) with navigation

Electrochromic IRVM

Automatic climate control

Power-fold ORVMs

Automatic headlamps

Rain-sensing wipers

Leather-wrapped steering wheel

Rear parking camera

Six airbags

The BS6 Ford Figo comes in five colours: Ruby Red, Moondust Silver, Smoke Grey, White Gold and Oxford White. Out of this, the top-end Titanium Blu is available only in Oxford White, Moondust Silver and Smoke Grey shades, with chrome-delete and some extra strokes of blue.
Just last month, Mahindra announced the appointment of Dr Pawan Goenka, who was the Executive Director of the Mahindra Group, as the new Managing Director. Today, the $17.8 billion Mahindra Group announced major rejig in top management under the leadership of Dr Goenka.

It is to be noted that the post of Managing Director was previously held by none other than Mr Anand Mahindra. As for Mr Mahindra, he now holds the post of Executive Chairman in the Group. Dr Pawan Goenka will continue to report to Mr Anand Mahindra and to the Board of the Company.

Mahindras statement released today read 

The company formed a new sector, the Agriculture Sector. This is in addition to its two existing sectors, namely  Automotive and Farm Equipment Sectors.

The company has also announced the appointment of Mr. Rajan Wadhera as the incoming President of the Automotive Sector. Mr. Wadhera will take over from Pravin Shah, the current President & Chief Executive (Automotive) M&M Ltd, as he retires on March 31, 2017.

Subsequent to the restructuring announcement, the respective business heads have also been re-designated.

Accordingly, Rajesh Jejurikar will now be the President of the Farm Equipment Sector and Ashok Sharma, the President, of the Agriculture Sector. All three sector Presidents in their respective capacities will report to Dr. Pawan Goenka. All changes will be effective April 1, 2017.

Mahindra Trucks and Buses and the Construction Equipment businesses will now be an integral part of the Automotive Sector and will report to Mr. Rajan Wadhera.

In the official statement released by Mahindra, the company reveals that this rejig in senior management is in line with the practice followed by companies in the Mahindra Group. The practice in Mahindra Group of Companies is that the post of Managing Director or CEO is different than that of Chairman.

It is to be noted here that Mr Anand Mahindra was also the Chairman of Mahindra Group before November. He held two posts  Managing Director and Chairman. From November, he holds only one post, and that is of Executive Chairman.

Mr. Mahindra emphasized that as the Executive Chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra he will continue to oversee, and be responsible for shaping, the growth strategies of the Company and its portfolio of investments.

Announcing the appointment, Mr. Mahindra said Pawan has played a major role in M&Ms meteoric growth in the post liberalization era. His elevation as MD is a fitting recognition not only of his vast experience and domain knowledge in the mobility space and his many past achievements, but also of the eminent role that he currently plays in the Company.

I am humbled by my appointment as the Managing Director of Mahindra & Mahindra said Dr. Goenka. When I joined the Group 23 years ago, I could never have imagined that one day I would be entrusted with this responsibility by the Board of the Company. I am sure that with the guidance of the Executive Chairman and the Board, and the support of my colleagues, this Company will continue on the growth path that we have witnessed over the last decade and a half.

About Dr Pawan Goenka

Dr. Goenka joined Mahindra & Mahindra as General Manager R&D in 1993, after working for General Motors Corp. in Detroit, USA for 14 years, and was instrumental in growing the R&D capability of Mahindra and also the launch of the Scorpio SUV. He became President of the Automotive Sector in 2005, of AFS (Automotive and Farm Equipment Sectors) in 2010 and was appointed Executive Director on the Board of Mahindra & Mahindra in 2013. Dr. Goenka has been actively involved with many professional bodies such as CII, SIAM, SAE, ARAI and has been widely acclaimed for his technical work and business leadership. Currently he also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIT Madras.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, along with seven other major institutions, have found that even mild postoperative pulmonary complications (PPCs) are significantly associated with increased death within the first week after surgery.

The study, which appeared online in the journal JAMA Surgery, examined 1,202 patients who underwent abdominal, orthopedic, neurological and other procedures under general anesthesia for at least two hours.

"We found that patients with one or more PPCs, even mild, had significantly increased intensive care unit admission, ICU/hospital length of stay and early postoperative mortality," said Ana Fernandez-Bustamante, MD, PhD, associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She and Marcos Francisco Vidal Melo, MD, PhD, associate professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University, are the lead authors of the article.

Current estimates suggest that there are over a million PPCs each year in the U.S. resulting in 46,200 deaths and 4.8 million hospitalizations days. Most of these PPCs are considered mild (i.e. needing prolonged supplemental oxygen), difficult to measure and often ignored in clinical studies.

Fernandez-Bustamante and her colleagues, including Karsten Bartels, MD, assistant professor of anesthesiology at CU Anschutz, set out to understand these PPCs better and how to address them.

They studied patients classified as "physical status 3" by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, meaning they suffered severe systemic disease. The patients underwent prolonged, non-cardiac or thoracic surgery with general anesthesia and mechanical ventilation.

advertisement

A third of them developed one or more PPCs after surgery. These patients were often older with hypertension, cancer or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Severe complications were rare. The most common complication was simply requiring oxygen for longer than 24 hours after the operation. That was followed by atelectasis (or portions of the lungs being partially collapsed).

But even these relatively mild complications were associated with significantly increased hospital stay, admission to the ICU or mortality within the first week after surgery.

And this was observed at seven large American academic hospitals.

"This tells us that care could be improved," Fernandez-Bustamante said. "If we could understand better and prevent mild PPCs we could improve the recovery of thousands of patients."

Doctors know that giving patients too many fluids or too big breaths during anesthesia can cause pulmonary problems afterwards.

Fernandez-Bustamante said that paying more attention to preventing atelectasis, for example, before, during and after surgery, could reduce some of them, improve oxygenation and prevent the need of oxygen therapy and hospital stay.

She noted that physicians must also optimize fluids and pain control, and minimize blood loss during operations to prevent PPCs. Doing all of this, she said, could improve patient outcomes and result in shorter hospital stays.

"Surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, respiratory therapists, and others, must collaborate better to make this successful. And of course patients need to know they play a critical role in their own recovery. We must work with them closely before, during and after surgery," Fernandez-Bustamante said. "If we want patients to have less pulmonary complications, we need a truly comprehensive approach to this problem."
A strangely shaped depression on Mars could be a new place to look for signs of life on the Red Planet, according to a University of Texas at Austin-led study. The depression was probably formed by a volcano beneath a glacier and could have been a warm, chemical-rich environment well suited for microbial life.

The findings were published this month in Icarus, the International Journal of Solar System Studies.

"We were drawn to this site because it looked like it could host some of the key ingredients for habitability -- water, heat and nutrients," said lead author Joseph Levy, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, a research unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

The depression is inside a crater perched on the rim of the Hellas basin on Mars and surrounded by ancient glacial deposits. It first caught Levy's attention in 2009, when he noticed crack-like features on pictures of depressions taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that looked similar to "ice cauldrons" on Earth, formations found in Iceland and Greenland made by volcanos erupting under an ice sheet. Another depression in the Galaxias Fossae region of Mars had a similar appearance.

"These landforms caught our eye because they're weird looking. They're concentrically fractured so they look like a bulls-eye. That can be a very diagnostic pattern you see in Earth materials," said Levy, who was a postdoctoral researcher at Portland State University when he first saw the photos of the depressions.

But it wasn't until this year that he and his research team were able to more thoroughly analyze the depressions using stereoscopic images to investigate whether the depressions were made by underground volcanic activity that melted away surface ice or by an impact from an asteroid. Study collaborator Timothy Goudge, a postdoctoral fellow at the institute, used pairs of high-resolution images to create digital elevation models of the depressions that enabled in-depth analysis of their shape and structure in 3-D. Researchers from Brown University and Mount Holyoke College also participated in the study.

advertisement

"The big contribution of the study was that we were able to measure not just their shape and appearance, but also how much material was lost to form the depressions. That 3-D view lets us test this idea of volcanic or impact," Levy said.

The analysis revealed that both depressions shared an unusual funnel shape, with a broad perimeter that gradually narrowed with depth.

"That surprised us and led to a lot of thinking about whether it meant there was melting concentrated in the center that removed ice and allowed stuff to pour in from the sides. Or if you had an impact crater, did you start with a much smaller crater in the past, and by sublimating away ice, you've expanded the apparent size of the crater," Levy said.

After testing formation scenarios for the two depressions, researchers found that they probably formed in different ways. The debris spread around the Galaxias Fossae depression suggests that it was the result of an impact -- but the known volcanic history of the area still doesn't rule out volcanic origins, Levy said. In contrast, the Hellas depression has many signs of volcanic origins. It lacks the surrounding debris of an impact and has a fracture pattern associated with concentrated removal of ice by melting or sublimation.

The interaction of lava and ice to form a depression would be an exciting find, Levy said, because it could create an environment with liquid water and chemical nutrients, both ingredients required for life on Earth. He said that the Hellas depression and, to a lesser extent, the Galaxias Fossae depression, should be kept in mind when looking for habitats on Mars.

Gro Pedersen, a volcanologist at the University of Iceland who was not involved with the study, agrees that the depressions are promising sites for future research.

"These features do really resemble ice cauldrons known from Earth, and just from that perspective they should be of great interest," Pedersen said. "Both because their existence may provide information on the properties of subsurface material -- the potential existence of ice -- and because of the potential for revealing ice-volcano interactions."
A program that brings live fish into classrooms to teach the fundamentals of biology not only helps students learn, but improves their attitudes about science, a new study finds.

The study of nearly 20,000 K-12 students, who raised zebrafish from embryos over the course of a week, found that kids at all grade levels showed significant learning gains. They also responded more positively to statements such as "I know what it's like to be a scientist." The results, to be published by the journal PLOS Biology, suggest that an immersive experience with a living creature can be a particularly successful strategy to engage young people in science, technology, engineering and math.

Co-author Steven A. Farber is a biologist who is a principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a Johns Hopkins University adjunct associate professor in the Department of Biology and in the School of Education. He founded BioEYES in 2002 with co-author Jamie R. Shuda, director of life science education at the University of Pennsylvania and an adjunct associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. Intended to reach low-income schools with students who are primarily from underrepresented minorities, BioEYES is now a partnership between the Carnegie Institution and Johns Hopkins that has worked with 100,000 students in Baltimore, Philadelphia and other cities.

During the course, students collect zebrafish embryos and watch them develop from single cells to swimming larvae complete with beating hearts and distinct pigmentation. Elementary students learn about human and fish anatomy, habitats, cells, and DNA. Middle school students identify observable traits of zebrafish offspring, and, in high school, students learn how scientists determine the genetic makeup of parents by studying their offspring. By the end of the week, all students are analyzing data and discussing results like real scientists.

"The kids can't wait for a chance to look at their fish -- they're natural scientists," Farber said. "They're so focused on the experiments, it doesn't feel like school."

The authors analyzed the performance of 19,463 students who participated in BioEYES from 2010 to 2015. Before and after the program, students were asked knowledge-based questions and questions to assess their attitude about science.

advertisement

After experiencing BioEYES, elementary school students improved their knowledge of scientific concepts covered in the program 48 percent, while middle school scores and high school scores rose 27 percent.

The results suggest students are particularly able to grasp concepts -- even complex ones -- when they're delivered through an authentic, hands-on experience, the authors say. Farber also says the chance to work with live animals -- fish that swim, mate and grow right before their eyes -- focuses children's attention in a way a book lesson can't.

After the program, students were more positive about who scientists are, the importance of science and the popularity of science. The attitudes of elementary students changed the most, with improvement in six of 11 statements.

The statement that generated the most positive change for all of the students was, "I know what it's like to be a scientist."

"We're showing that BioEYES allows children to imagine themselves as scientists and that's really important for us," Farber says. "We're changing attitudes and developing a more STEM literate citizenry."

BioEYES operates in 104 schools in the United States and 25 in Australia. In Baltimore, the program runs in 45 schools (36 of them Baltimore City public schools), reaching more than 4,000 students a year. The program is taught by classroom teachers who train alongside educators from the Carnegie Institution and universities, as well as by "model teachers" who train with BioEYES staff for three years before running the program on their own.

At Baltimore's Thomas Jefferson Elementary Middle, third-grade students who were given male and female zebrafish one day this fall were amazed, just 24 hours later, to see embryos form, and thrilled to observe the growing life forms under a microscope.

"You see a whole different side of them when they're learning something that's real," said Kelley Taylor, their teacher. "I have some bright students in here, and they are definitely making the connection that scientists are changing people's lives."
As atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) levels rise, very few coral reef ecosystems will be spared the impacts of ocean acidification or sea surface temperature rise, according to a new analysis. The damage will cause the most immediate and serious threats where human dependence on reefs is highest.

A new analysis in the journal Plos One, led by Duke University and the Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, suggests that by 2050, Western Mexico, Micronesia, Indonesia, parts of Australia and Southeast Asia will bear the brunt of rising temperatures. Reef damage will result in lost fish habitats and shoreline protection, jeopardizing the lives and economic prosperity of people who depend on reefs for tourism and food.

"Some scientists have held out hope that there would be reef areas that could escape the harm of climate change, but we find that most reefs will be affected by either warmer seas or more acidic oceans," said Linwood Pendleton, the study's lead author, a senior scholar at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and an International Chair of Excellence at the European Institute of Marine Studies. "2016 has been one of the worst years in memory for coral bleaching. This fact is demonstrated by this year's bleaching event that affected nearly all of the Great Barrier Reef."

The study builds on previous analyses to identify exactly how people and coral reefs are affected by a high-CO 2 future and suggests pathways to help deal with changes. The authors mapped human dependence at the country level, scoring for two indicators: shoreline protection and coral reef fisheries. Simultaneously, the authors mapped the largely unavoidable impacts of increased sea surface temperature and ocean acidification.

Using data from the maps, the study predicts that the countries of Oceania will be among the first to face the greatest environmental stresses from climate change and ocean acidification, followed by the Coral Triangle countries of Southeast Asia and other parts of Australia -- all areas with high dependence on coral reefs.

Countries most likely to experience severe ocean acidification are generally different from those that will experience the earliest onset of coral bleaching. Acidification is projected to be worse for Baja California (Mexico), Japan, China, and southern Australia because they are at the upper and lower latitudinal bounds of coral reef distribution and thus generally in cooler waters that naturally carry more CO 2 .

"The response of non-governmental organizations, nonprofits, and labor and trade organizations will be critical in mounting a response to the threats posed by warming and acidification because these organizations represent the people that will be most severely impacted by the failure of coral reef fisheries," said Chris Langdon, a professor in the Department of Marine Biology and Fisheries at the University of Miami. "These groups must speak up for the individuals they represent so that their local, regional and national government agencies see that action is needed."

The authors say policy action to combat the threats of ocean acidification and surface temperature rise must be informed by data and science, but the research community is still doing a poor job of collecting this information where these threats are most substantial for people. Many of the countries most dependent upon coral reefs are also the countries for which we have the least robust data on ocean acidification, especially the South China Sea, an area of high human dependence and equally high political tensions.

"Because sea temperature and ocean acidification is largely beyond the control of the communities that depend on coral reefs, it is critical that we constantly monitor conditions there," said Adrien Comte, a Ph.D. candidate at the Universite de Bretagne Occidentale. "Better environmental management can help delay the impacts on corals, and stepwise actions to improve monitoring and plan for adaptation should be funded."
By age 75, approximately half of all Americans will develop cloudy vision caused by cataracts, according to the National Eye Institute. The most common complication from cataract surgery is high eye pressure, which can cause swelling and other issues that can lead to vision loss or even blindness. Now, researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine recommend a new test to check eye pressure to prevent possible vision loss.

"The current standard of care following cataract surgery is to refill the eye with a saline solution and tap on the eye with a Q-tip to observe if it is too firm, too soft or just right," said John Jarstad, M.D., associate professor of ophthalmology at the MU School of Medicine and lead researcher of the study. "This Goldilocks-style guesstimate often is inaccurate, and patients might actually have higher eye fluid pressure than the surgeon believes. Here at MU Health Care, we use a device known as a tonometer to accurately gauge eye pressure."

An electronic eye pressure monitoring device known as a tonometer often is used in a clinical setting to determine eye pressure, but the device rarely is used in a surgical setting. The researchers studied 170 patients who had eye pressure adjusted after cataract surgery with a tonometer and found that patients were 2.5 to 4 times less likely to develop cystoid macular edema -- cyst-like pockets of fluid in the macula of the eye.

According to Jarstad, normal eye pressure should be between 16 and 21 mmHg, or millimeters of mercury. In most cases, a high eye pressure will resolve itself in a matter of days without issue, but in cases in which the pressure is significantly high, a person can experience symptoms of nausea and pain above the eyebrow. In these cases, it's important that the pressure be adjusted to prevent permanent damage to the eye.

A tonometer costs eye surgeons approximately $4,000, though its use can save patients up to $150 in medications and eye drops used to treat retinal swelling or edema. A lower cost pressure ring also can be used as an effective alternative tool to gauge eye pressure, Jarstad said. Potential complications from using a pressure monitoring device include eye infections, though Jarstad has not observed an infection in five years of using a pressure monitor.

"Seeing patients who had gone blind because of high eye pressure convinced me that there needed to be a better, more accurate gauge," Jarstad said. "I recommend eye surgeons adopt this practice for the good of their patients. There is no additional cost to patients, and if it saves just one patient from going blind, it would be well worth every doctor using it in his or her surgical practice."
In 2009, applied physicist Peter Sturrock was visiting the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, when the deputy director of the observatory told him he should read a controversial article about radioactive decay. Although the subject was outside Sturrock's field, it inspired a thought so intriguing that the next day he phoned the author of the study, Purdue University physicist Ephraim Fischbach, to suggest a collaboration.

Fischbach replied, "We were about to phone you."

More than seven years later, that collaboration could result in an inexpensive tabletop device to detect elusive neutrinos more efficiently and inexpensively than is currently possible, and could simplify scientists' ability to study the inner workings of the sun. The work was published in the Nov. 7 issue of Solar Physics.

"If we're correct, it means that neutrinos are far easier to detect than people have thought," said Sturrock, professor emeritus of applied physics. "Everyone thought that it would be necessary to have huge experiments, with thousands of tons of water or other material, that may involve huge consortia and huge expense, and you might get a few thousand counts a year. But we may get similar or even better data from an experiment involving only micrograms of radioactive material."

Why, how we study neutrinos

For twenty years, Sturrock and his colleague Jeff Scargle, astrophysicist and data scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, have studied neutrinos, subatomic particles with no electric charge and nearly zero mass, which can be used to learn about the inside of the sun.

advertisement

Nuclear reactions in the sun's core produce neutrinos. A unique feature of neutrinos is that they rarely interact with other particles and so can escape the sun easily, bringing us information about the deep solar interior. Studying neutrinos is thought to be the best way to obtain direct information about the center of the sun, which is otherwise largely a mystery. Neutrinos can also give us information about supernovas, the creation of the universe and much more.

On Earth, an area the size of a fingernail has 65 billion neutrinos pass through it each second. But only one or two in an entire lifetime will actually stop in our bodies. Studying neutrinos involves massive equipment and expenses to trap enough of the elusive particles for investigation.

At present, the gold standard for neutrino detection is Japan's Super-Kamiokande, a magnificent $100 million observatory. In use since 1996, Super-Kamiokande lies 1,000 meters below ground. It consists of a tank filled with 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water, surrounded by about 13,000 photo-multiplier tubes. If a neutrino enters the water and interacts with electrons or nuclei there, it results in a charged particle that moves faster than the speed of light in water. This leads to an optical shock wave, a cone of light called Cherenkov radiation. This light is projected onto the wall of the tank and recorded by the photomultiplier tubes.

Past challenges in detection

The 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Masatoshi Koshiba of Super-Kamiokande and Raymond Davis Jr. of Homestake Neutrino Observatory for the development of neutrino detectors and "for the detection of cosmic neutrinos." One perplexing detail of this work was that, with their ground-breaking detection methods, they were detecting one-third to one-half as many neutrinos as expected, an issue known as the "solar neutrino problem." This shortfall was first thought to be due to experimental problems. But, once it was confirmed by Super-Kamiokande, the deficit was accepted as real.

advertisement

The year prior to the Nobel, however, scientists announced a solution to the solar neutrino problem. It turned out that neutrinos oscillate among three forms (electron, muon and tau) and detectors were primarily sensitive to only electron neutrinos. For the discovery of these oscillations, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Takaaki Kajita of Super-Kamiokande and Arthur B. MacDonald of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.

Even with these Nobel Prize-worthy developments in research and equipment at their disposal, scientists can still detect only a few thousand neutrino events each year.

A new option for research

The research that Sturrock learned about in Tucson concerned fluctuations in the rate of decay of radioactive elements. The fluctuations were highly controversial at the time because it had been thought that the decay rate of any radioactive element was constant. Sturrock decided to study these experimental results using analytical techniques that he and Scargle had developed to study neutrinos.

In examining the radioactive decay fluctuations, the team found evidence that those fluctuations matched patterns they had found in Super-Kamiokande neutrino data, each indicating a one-month oscillation attributable to solar rotation. The likely conclusion is that neutrinos from the sun are directly affecting beta-decays. This connection has been theorized by other researchers dating back 25 years, but the Sturrock-Fischbach-Scargle analysis adds the strongest evidence yet. If this relationship holds, a revolution in neutrino research could be underway.

"It means there's another way to study neutrinos that is much simpler and much less expensive than current methods," Sturrock said. "Some data, some information, you won't get from beta-decays, but only from experiments like Super-Kamiokande. However, the study of beta-decay variability indicates there is another way to detect neutrinos, one that gives you a different view of neutrinos and of the sun."

Sturrock said this could mark the beginning of a new field in neutrino research and solar physics. He and Fischbach see the possibility of bench-top detectors that would cost thousands rather than millions of dollars.

The next steps for now will be to gather more and better data and to work toward a theory that can explain how all these physical processes are connected.
A woman spraying weeds on a farm in the Bay of Plenty is now in hospital after falling down a steep bank.

The Tauranga-based Trustpower TECT Rescue Helicopter was dispatched to a farm near Mamaku yesterday to fly the 68-year-old woman to Rotorua Hospital.

Base manager and pilot Liam Brettkelly says the 68-year-old woman received lower leg injuries as a result of the fall.

She was treated at the scene by St John ambulance medics before being flown to Rotorua hospital for treatment.

The helicopter was used because of difficult access to the patient.
The following companies are subsidiares of D.R. Horton: 10700 Pecan Park Austin Inc., 11241 Slater Avenue NE LLC, 2 C Development Company LLC, 8800 Roswell Road Bldg. B LLC, 91st Avenue & Happy Valley L.L.C., ANN & 215 LLC, Austin Data Inc., BP456 Inc., C. Richard Dobson Builders Inc., CH Funding LLC, CH Investments of Texas Inc., CHI Construction Company, CHM Partners L.P., CHTEX of Texas Inc., CV Mountain View 25 Inv LLC, Cane Island LLC, Continental Homes Inc., Continental Homes of Texas L.P., Continental Residential Inc., Continental Traditions LLC, Crown Operating Company Inc., Cypress Road L.P., D.R. Horton - CHAustin LLC, D.R. Horton - Colorado LLC, D.R. Horton - Crown LLC, D.R. Horton - Emerald Ltd., D.R. Horton - Georgia LLC, D.R. Horton - Hawaii LLC, D.R. Horton - Highland LLC, D.R. Horton - Indiana LLC, D.R. Horton - Iowa LLC, D.R. Horton - MV LLC, D.R. Horton - Nebraska LLC, D.R. Horton - Permian LLC, D.R. Horton - Regent LLC, D.R. Horton - Terramor LLC, D.R. Horton - Texas Ltd., D.R. Horton - WPH LLC, D.R. Horton - Wyoming LLC, D.R. Horton BAY Inc., D.R. Horton CA2 Inc., D.R. Horton CA3 Inc., D.R. Horton CA4 LLC, D.R. Horton Commercial Inc., D.R. Horton Cruces Construction Inc., D.R. Horton Inc. - Birmingham, D.R. Horton Inc. - Chicago, D.R. Horton Inc. - Denver, D.R. Horton Inc. - Dietz-Crane, D.R. Horton Inc. - Greensboro, D.R. Horton Inc. - Gulf Coast, D.R. Horton Inc. - Huntsville, D.R. Horton Inc. - Jacksonville, D.R. Horton Inc. - Louisville, D.R. Horton Inc. - Midwest, D.R. Horton Inc. - Minnesota, D.R. Horton Inc. - NNV, D.R. Horton Inc. - New Jersey, D.R. Horton Inc. - Portland, D.R. Horton Inc. - Torrey, D.R. Horton Inc. Foundation, D.R. Horton Insurance Agency Inc., D.R. Horton LA North Inc., D.R. Horton Life Insurance Agency Inc., D.R. Horton Los Angeles Holding Company Inc., D.R. Horton Management Company Ltd., D.R. Horton Materials Inc., D.R. Horton Realty LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Atlantic County LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Central Florida LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Delaware LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Georgia Inc., D.R. Horton Realty of Melbourne LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Northwest Florida LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Southeast Florida LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Southwest Florida LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Tampa LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Virginia LLC, D.R. Horton Seabridge Marina Inc., D.R. Horton Serenity Construction LLC, D.R. Horton Urban Renewal LLC, D.R. Horton VEN Inc., D.R. Horton  Corpus Christi LLC, DBC54 LLC, DHI Commercial - Lakeview LLC, DHI Commercial - Signal Butte LLC, DHI Commercial - Tamarron LLC, DHI Commercial Inc., DHI Communities Construction LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Arizona LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Colorado LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Florida LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Iowa LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Nevada LLC, DHI Communities Construction of North Carolina LLC, DHI Communities Construction of South Carolina LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Texas LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Utah LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Virginia LLC, DHI Communities II LLC, DHI Communities Inc., DHI Engineering LLC, DHI Insurance Inc., DHI Mortgage Company, DHI Mortgage Company GP Inc., DHI Mortgage Company LP Inc., DHI Mortgage Company Ltd., DHI Ranch Ltd., DHI Realty of Alabama LLC, DHI Realty of Mississippi LLC, DHI Title GP Inc., DHI Title LP Inc., DHI Title of Alabama Inc., DHI Title of Arizona Inc., DHI Title of Florida Inc., DHI Title of Minnesota Inc., DHI Title of Nevada Inc., DHI Title of Texas Ltd., DHI Title of Washington Inc., DHI Verandah South Shores Communities LLC, DHIC - Bridges LLC, DHIC - Brittmore LLC, DHIC - Carolina Forest LLC, DHIC - Desert Peak LLC, DHIC - Durbin Creek LLC, DHIC - Freestone LLC, DHIC - Hammock Landing LLC, DHIC - Heritage LLC, DHIC - Horizon Uptown LLC, DHIC - Jacobs Reserve LLC, DHIC - Lakeview LLC, DHIC - Lipoma LLC, DHIC - Minton Cove LLC, DHIC - Mountain Vista LLC, DHIC - Naco LLC, DHIC - Northshore LLC, DHIC - Prairie Village LLC, DHIC - South Creek LLC, DHIC - Tamarron LLC, DHIC - Valley Vista LLC, DHIC - Varina Gateway LLC, DHIC - Waterleigh II LLC, DHIC - Waterleigh III LLC, DHIC - Waterleigh LLC, DHIC - Westridge LLC, DHIC LLC, DHIC  Glendale LLC, DHIC  Grove West LLC, DHIC  South Park LLC, DHIC  Westinghouse LLC, DHIR - Aspen Vista LLC, DHIR - Avian Pointe LLC, DHIR - Emerald Lakes LLC, DHIR - Fosters Ridge LLC, DHIR - Gulf Stream LLC, DHIR - Parkview at Lynn Haven LLC, DHIR - Poplar Terrace LLC, DHIR - Properties I LLC, DHIR - Rock Ridge LLC, DHIR - Sunset Village LLC, DHIR - Village at Hickory Street LLC, DRH - ARK LLC, DRH - ASG LLC, DRH - HWY 114 LLC, DRH Cambridge Homes LLC, DRH Capital Trust I, DRH Capital Trust II, DRH Capital Trust III, DRH Colorado Realty Inc., DRH Construction Inc., DRH Energy Inc., DRH FS Mortgage Reinsurance Ltd., DRH Land Opportunities I Inc., DRH Land Opportunities II Inc., DRH Mountain View LLC, DRH Oil & Gas Inc., DRH Opportunities I Inc., DRH Properties Inc., DRH Realty Company Inc., DRH Realty of Iowa LLC, DRH Regrem L LLC, DRH Regrem LI LLC, DRH Regrem LII LLC, DRH Regrem LIII LLC, DRH Regrem LIV LLC, DRH Regrem LV LLC, DRH Regrem VII LP, DRH Regrem XII LP, DRH Regrem XIV Inc., DRH Regrem XIX Inc., DRH Regrem XLIX LLC, DRH Regrem XLV LLC, DRH Regrem XLVI LLC, DRH Regrem XLVII LLC, DRH Regrem XLVIII LLC, DRH Regrem XV Inc., DRH Regrem XVI Inc., DRH Regrem XVII Inc., DRH Regrem XVIII Inc., DRH Regrem XX Inc., DRH Regrem XXI Inc., DRH Regrem XXII Inc., DRH Regrem XXIII Inc., DRH Regrem XXIV Inc., DRH Regrem XXV Inc., DRH Southwest Construction Inc., DRH Tucson Construction Inc., DRHI Inc., Deer Valley Office Park LLC, Desert Ridge Phase I Partners, Emerald Creek No. 4 L.P., Emerald Realty of Alabama LLC, Emerald Realty of Central Florida LLC, Emerald Realty of North Florida LLC, Emerald Realty of Northwest Florida LLC, Emerald Realty of Southeast Florida LLC, Emerald Realty of Southwest Florida LLC, Encore II Inc., Encore Venture Partners II (California) L.P., Encore Venture Partners II (Texas) L.P., Encore Venture Partners L.P., Express Realty of Central Florida LLC, Express Realty of North Florida LLC, Express Realty of Northwest Florida LLC, Express Realty of Southeast Florida LLC, Express Realty of Southwest Florida LLC, Forestar Group, Forestar Group Inc., Founders Oil & Gas II LLC, Founders Oil & Gas III LLC, Founders Oil & Gas IV LLC, Founders Oil & Gas LLC, Founders Oil & Gas Operating LLC, GP-Encore Inc., Georgetown Data Inc., Germann & McQueen L.L.C., Grand Title Agency LLC, Grande Realty Incorporated, Grande Realty of Pennsylvania LLC, Greywes LLC, HPH Homebuilders 2000 L.P., Hadian LLC, KDB Homes Inc., Kaomalo LLC, Lexington Homes - DRH LLC, MRLF LLC, Martin Road Lake Forest LLC, McQueen & Willis LLC, Meadows I Ltd., Meadows II Ltd., Meadows IX Inc., Meadows VIII Ltd., Meadows X Inc., Melody Homes Inc., Pacific Ridge - DRH LLC, Rielly Carlsbad LLC, Rielly Homes Madison LLC, SFTEN LLC, SGS Communities at Grand Quay L.L.C, SHA Construction LLC, SHLR of California Inc., SHLR of Nevada Inc., SHLR of Washington Inc., SRHI LLC, SSHI LLC, Schuler Homes of Arizona LLC, Schuler Homes of California Inc., Schuler Homes of Oregon Inc., Schuler Homes of Washington Inc., Summerlin Pkwy & Cimarron LLC, Surprise Village North LLC, The Club at Cobblestone LLC, The Club at Hidden River LLC, Tierra Financial Advisors LLC, Travis County Title Company, Treasure Assets LLC, Venture Management of South Carolina LLC, Vertical Construction Corporation, WPH-Camino Ruiz LLC, WPH-Copper Canyon II LLC, WPH-Copper Canyon LLC, Walker Drive LLC, Western Pacific Brea Development LLC, Western Pacific Housing - Mountaingate L.P., Western Pacific Housing - SDG LLC, Western Pacific Housing - Westlake II L.P., Western Pacific Housing Inc., Western Pacific Housing Management Inc., Western Pacific Housing-Antigua LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Broadway LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Canyon Park LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Carrillo LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Communications Hill LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Copper Canyon LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Creekside LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Lomas Verdes LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Lyons Canyon Partners LLC, Western Pacific Housing-McGonigle Canyon LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Norco Estates LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Pacific Park II LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Park Avenue East LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Park Avenue West LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Playa Vista LLC, Western Pacific Housing-River Ridge LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Terra Bay Duets LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Torrey Meadows LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Torrey Village Center LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Windemere LLC, and Wilson Parker Homes.

Read More
National Grid plc transmits and distributes electricity and gas. The company operates through UK Electricity Transmission, UK Electricity Distribution, UK Electricity System Operator, New England, and New York segments. The UK Electricity Transmission segment provides electricity transmission and construction work services in England and Wales. The UK Electricity Distribution segment offers electricity distribution services in Midlands, and South West of England and South Wales. The UK Electricity System Operator segment provides balancing services for supply and demand of electricity on Great Britain's electricity transmission system; and acts as an agent on behalf of transmission operators. The New England segment offers electricity and gas distribution, and electricity transmission services in New England. The New York segment provides electricity and gas distribution, and electricity transmission services in New York. It also engages in the provision of transmission services through electricity interconnectors and LNG importation at the Isle of Grain; sale of renewables projects; and leasing and sale of commercial property, as well as insurance activities in the United Kingdom. The company was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.
No one could say Alex Perez doesn't have a big heart. He was just 11 years old when he came across a puppy at a yard sale - and insisted on taking him home. Just a couple of years after that, while driving with his mom, the boy spotted an injured pit bull running up the middle of the street. "I was pulling off the side of the road when I hear Alex's car door open," his mother, Valinda Cortez of Canton, North Carolina, tells The Dodo. "Before I could stop him, he was out in the middle of the road with this dog." "He picked up this bloody baby and brought him to the car," she says. "We got him all healed up and now he lives a wonderful spoiled life."

Valinda Cortez

But earlier this week, at 16, Perez became part of a very different kind of rescue - the kind that pushes hearts to the breaking point. "He's helped before in animal shelters and homeless shelters but this time was different," Valinda says. Having the day off school, Alex joined his mom, who volunteers with animal rescue groups, at a warehouse where dozens of animals saved from a hoarding situation in Canton had been taken. Rescue groups - Brother Wolf Animal Rescue, Sarge's Animal Rescue Foundation and Duke's Animal Haven, as well as the Haywood County Animal Shelter - had coordinated the rescue from a secluded property. The dogs, many of them Chihuahuas and dachshunds, had spent their lives in cages. In all, they found around 140 animals living in every kind of misery.

Dodo Shows Odd Couples Dog Is So Gentle And Patient With Her Foster Kittens

Valinda Cortez

"Most of them had only had little or no human contact," Valinda explains. "They were so scared. They would tremble and cower if we tried to pet them."

Valinda Cortez

But at the temporary warehouse where the animals were housed, Alex was drawn to one dog in particular - a trembling bundle of terror named Trouble. "Alex walked around looking for a bit and talking to the dogs," Valinda recalls. "Then he came to Trouble's crate. He decided that Trouble was The One."

Valinda Cortez

As the little dog clambered into his rescuer's arms, his whole body seemed to beg, never let me go. And Alex, despite being surrounded by countless animals in need, held on tight. "He held him, played with him and, probably for the first time in this dog's life, he felt loved," Valinda says. "He fell asleep while Alex was holding him."

Valinda Cortez

Valinda's heart swelled with pride as she watched her boy's compassion blossom, as it had time and time again, for this love-starved dog. "My wonderful 16-year-old son has a giant soft spot in his heart for the animals that are 'less desirable,'" she says.

Valinda Cortez

But Alex would eventually have to let Trouble go. Along with the rest of the animals, they had to remain at the holding facility, where many of them would get much-needed medical attention.

Valinda Cortez

"He didn't want to leave Trouble," Valinda notes. "But we are at capacity with all our animals from pit bulls to Chihuahuas."

Valinda Cortez
No matter your political party, many people are worried - and have been worried - about what the future holds for animals and the environment. While the shift in power might change some priorities, people are hopeful that we can all put aside our differences to keep our planet healthy for future generations.

Shutterstock

"Having an executive and legislative branch both controlled by Republicans may make environmental and animal welfare work more difficult, but it was also Richard Nixon who signed into law the Endangered Species Act and George H. W. Bush who signed into law the Wild Bird Conservation Act," Adam M. Roberts, CEO of Born Free USA, told The Dodo. "Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been the lead champion on bipartisan legislation to stop the trade in bear parts and in this most recent Congress Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has sponsored legislation to stop the trade in primates as pets." The president of the United States has direct oversight over most federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (including the U.S. Forest Service), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of the Interior (which includes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service) and the U.S. Department of Commerce (including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). "These federal agencies have sweeping powers over animals not only in the United States but also all over the world," Stephen Wells, executive director at the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), told The Dodo. "That power includes the authority to enforce - or not to enforce - the Animal Welfare Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and many other laws that protect animals and our environment."

Dodo Shows Soulmates Dog Goes Everywhere In His Dad's Kangaroo Pouch

Shutterstock

Some people are concerned about what president elect Donald Trump will do. In September, he modified his previous statement that he would eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to say that that he'll "refocus the EPA on its core mission of ensuring clean air, and clean, safe drinking water for all Americans." Fair goals. But scientists and activists alike know that the planet needs a lot more than that, especially since, according to the U.S. government, 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the year 2000. This causes rising sea levels, which can wreak havoc on coastlines, while rising temperatures disrupt ecosystems and threaten the very existence of species. Other advocates are concerned about factory farming's effect on the environment (it is one of the largest contributors to climate change, more than all transportation emissions in the world combined) and its impacts on animal welfare. Still others are worried about the welfare of dogs in puppy mills and cats in kitten factories.

"As with any president, it is essential that animal advocates pay close attention to the president's appointees to lead these federal agencies," Wells said. To lead the EPA, Trump is considering Myron Ebell, known skeptic of climate change, who is currently running the EPA working group on Trump's transition team. And for the secretary of the interior, he's considering an oil man, Forrest Lucas of Lucas Oil. "No matter one's political affiliation, animal and environmental advocates will need to watch these appointments and resulting federal policies closely," Wells said. Here are some organizations that are fighting now - and will continue to fight - for animals and the planet. "Given the threats we face, and specifically threats to the rule of law and the preservation of the environmental laws themselves, nonprofit advocacy groups are needed now more than ever," Brett Hartl, endangered species policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Dodo. The Animal Legal Defense Fund The ALDF fights to protect the lives of animals through the legal system, filing high-impact lawsuits to protect animals from harm, supporting tough animal protection legislation and fighting legislation harmful to animals. "The Animal Legal Defense Fund will continue fighting to expand protections for animals, and we will also fight hard to ensure that existing protections are not weakened or repealed," Wells said. Donate here. Born Free USA Born Free USA works to end the suffering of wild animals in captivity, protect wildlife and endangered species and support global conservation. Some of Born Free USA's current causes involve conservation of endangered species and supporting an end of captive tiger breeding for tourist attractions and selfies. According to Born Free USA, we need to be asking some key questions about upcoming cabinet appointments. "Will the secretary of the interior support wildlife conservation or a free market approach to commercializing elephant ivory and rhino horn and lion trophies?" Roberts said. "Will the secretary of agriculture support a regulatory end to the breeding of captive tigers for photo opportunities or consider this a regulatory burden on small businesses?" Donate here.

Shutterstock

The Center for Biological Diversity Through science, law and media, the Center for Biological Diversity works to "secure a future for all species, great and small." This mission means protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive. "Donald Trump has said he'd eliminate 70 percent of EPA regulations," Hartl said. "Every endangered species is protected by a separate regulation ... 70 percent of all listed species would be delisted." Donate here.

Defenders of Wildlife Defenders of Wildlife works to help native species in the U.S. by promoting policies that protect animals and fighting in the courtroom against policies that threaten to take away protections. According to the organization: 90 percent of American voters support the Endangered Species Act. Seventy-four percent say that the federal government should be doing a substantial amount to combat climate change. And 72 percent say that national public lands, like forests and monuments, help their state economies. "Wildlife is depending on us - and we will not let them down," Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of Defenders of Wildlife, said. Donate here.

Many kinds of wolves are threatened or endangered - and they need protection. | Shutterstock

The Humane League To reduce animal suffering, The Humane League is focused on recruiting and training grassroots activists in U.S. and Mexico who can educate the public on animal protection, effective activism and reducing meat consumption- which is good for animals, people and the environment. The Humane League recently secured commitments from a major food corporation to better conditions for their chickens, and is still fighting the good fight to help more factory farmed animals go cage-free. Donate here.

This browser does not support the video tag. GIPHY

The Humane Society of the United States One great thing that happened on election day this week? Massachusetts voters stood up for farm animal rights after activists, veterinarians and farmers came together. One of the organizations that fought for this was the HSUS. That's because the HSUS supports a vast array of initiatives to fight for animals in puppy mills, dog-fighting, factory farming, canned hunts and the wildlife trade. Donate here. Oceanic Preservation Society Through collaborating with artists and activists, OPS tries to raise awareness for endangered species and the environment, especially oceans and ocean life. Recent projects include Racing Extinction, a documentary about the the stress and strain human activity is inflicting on animals across the world. Donate here.

Shutterstock
So, you want to move to another country? Even if the idea has only just now crossed your mind (or within the past 48 hours or so), in all seriousness, living abroad can be a wonderful, eye-opening and mind-broadening experience. If you have pets, there's just one problem: How do you bring them?

Shutterstock

The Dodo did some research and asked Pet Relocation and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) for tips for people who are serious about taking some time away from the U.S. While requirements vary by destination (and required pet quarantines do still exist in some places, so aim for destinations where you won't have to be separated), there are some things that you most certainly will have to do. Getting the right travel crate, and getting your pet to love it If you're planning on flying far, far away, you'll need a safe and comfortable travel crate for your pet. Measure for the correct size - see this list as a guide for a dog; for a cat, a good rule is to add 4 inches to your cat's height and length to determine a carrier size.

Dodo Shows Adoption Day Hairless German Shepherd Puppies Find The Perfect Families

If you already have a sense of where you're headed, check with the airlines about whether to get a hard or soft-sided crate. Start crate training (for more on this, see here for a dog or here for a cat). Ultimately, the goal is to give your pet good associations with the crate so that he feels comfortable spending some time there. So, keep the treats coming. HSUS recommends crate training for at least a month beforehand, if possible. Getting the right documents So now that you've got the gear, and your pet is finally warming up to the idea of becoming an expat, it's time to research the destination country's requirements. Check out this resource from Pet Relocation, which keeps country requirements updated weekly. Then, visit the vet for a few key documents and discuss any health-related questions you have with your vet. 1. The rabies vaccine. Even if your pet has had a rabies vaccine in the past, you'll need to make sure it's in the right timeframe before you depart. For instance, if you're thinking of moving to Canada, the rabies vaccination must be more than 30 days old but not more than 1 year old, if you got your pet a one-year vaccination, and not more than 3 years old if he got a 3-year vaccination. 2. International health certificate. To get your furry family member ready to be an expat, you'll need to get him a special health certificate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). An international health certificate for your pet must be filled out by an accredited veterinarian, and then endorsed by one of the USDA's veterinary services area offices. But that's just to get your pet out of the U.S. "Your destination may have other specific health requirements for entry of animals," the USDA explains. "These requirements are established by the importing country, not the United States." 3. Printed health records. It's a good idea, even with the health certificate, to bring a printed copy of your pet's health records, should any questions or concerns come up. And some places require it, on top of the international health certificate - even Canada. 4. Microchipping and ID tags. While not all countries will require microchipping, some places, like Canada, recommend it. Microchipping, even if you aren't traveling, is something you should do anyway. ID tags are also a good idea, in case the unthinkable happens and your pet gets lost, especially during flights. The HSUS says to get a collar that can't get caught in crate doors and make sure it has your name and an address and telephone number where you can be reached. The HSUS also recommends bringing a current photo of your pet along with you, especially if he has to travel in the cargo hold.

Now you're itching to get out of here and bring your pet with you, but first a few final and important steps: 1. Check breed bans. Whether or not we like it, some breeds are banned from entering certain regions. For example, Montreal has threatened thousands of pit bulls with a ban that has now been suspended indefinitely. It's always good to check whether your dream expat destination has any of these laws in place.

Shutterstock

2. Check airline requirements. You may have satisfied your new country's requirements for your pet to live abroad - but you still need to get there. And airlines vary on what they require before you and your pet take off. It varies a lot, airline to airline, whether you will be able to travel with your pet in the cabin on international flights, which the HSUS recommends.

The HSUS recommends that you ask the airline: Whether they allow a small cat or dog in the cabin with you,

Whether they require any special health or immunization requirements,

Whether the airline requires a hard-sided carrier or if a more comfortable soft-sided carrier will do If you must put your pet in the cargo hold, make sure your airline doesn't have a track record of pets getting injured. Most U.S. airlines are required to report all animal incidents that occur in the cargo hold, HSUS says: "Consumers should study the performance record of any airline before choosing to fly your pet in a cargo hold." Check this list to see a breakdown of requirements by airline. And double check before your trip to make sure these requirements haven't changed. Pet Relocation specifically recommends KLM, Lufthansa, Qantas and United for flying with pets. Also, budget for a pet ticket - this fee also varies.

Shutterstock

3. Keep your pet safe during the flight. To make sure your pet will get through the flight safely, you should consider a few factors. *If you have a bulldog, pug or Persian cat - an animal with a scrunched face - air travel can be particularly dangerous because their nasal passages are narrow and thinner air could cause oxygen deprivation, according to the HSUS, so you should consider alternatives. If you MUST fly, never put them in the cargo hold. (Canada is luckily just across a border, so you could potentially drive there.)*

Shutterstock

The HSUS recommends the following to keep your pet safe during the flight: Avoid traveling during extreme temperatures. If you're traveling in the summer or winter, choose times of day when the weather is more tepid.

Avoid busy travel times, like the holidays and the summer.

Use direct flights to avoid pets getting misplaced or lost on connections.

Travel on the same flight as your pet.

Stop feeding your pet four to six hours before taking off. Given them small amounts of water inside the crate, so if it spills they won't be uncomfortable.

Clip your pet's nails so they don't get caught on anything.

Don't use tranquilizers unless your veterinarian prescribed them.

When you board the plane, notify the captain and a crew member, and say whether the pet is in the cabin or in the cargo hold. "If the captain knows that pets are on board, they may take special precautions," HSUS says.

Label the crate with your name, address, telephone number, final destination and where you can be reached once you get there.

As soon as you arrive and in a safe place, open the carrier and examine your pet to make sure he's OK. If anything seems wrong, visit the vet. So, there are a lot of steps involved in moving to another country with your pet, but nothing insurmountable. If you start planning now, you should be good to go by January.
Brynneth Paltrow the pit bull promised the voters of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, that if she were elected mayor she'd promote peace, love, understanding, the importance of spaying and neutering, an end to breed discrimination and remaining peaceful with the town's cats. The town liked this positive and progressive platform. On Tuesday, Brynn got elected, beating out a tough field that included several dogs and cats, a chicken and a plastic Godzilla figurine. Brynn triumphed over her closest competitor - an Australian shepherd named Bourbon - by more than 1,000 votes, 3367 to 2336. (The chicken, Bossy, earned just 216 votes; the Godzilla figurine appears not to have gotten any.) "Once they announced her the mayor, she ran around and jumped on me, gave me a lick and went about celebrating," Brynn's mom, Jordan Bamforth, tells The Dodo.

Dodo Shows Soulmates Growling Little Kitten Becomes Her Mom's Best Friend

Brynn

Rabbit Hash has had previous dog mayors. Three of them before Brynn, in fact, starting in 1988 with the inauguration of Goofy Borneman - a pup "of unknown parentage," according to his official bio, who served several years before dying in office at the age of 16.

via Rabbit Hash Historical Society

The position, as you may have guessed, is largely ceremonial. The elections serve as fundraisers for the Rabbit Hash Historical Society. Participants pay $1 per ballot, and are encouraged to vote early and often. But sometimes a mayor's ambition (or that of his or her person) grows. Rabbit Hash's current mayor, a border collie named Lucy Lou - the town's first female mayor, who has served for eight years - mounted a campaign to take her talents to Washington, as president of the United States. Alas, as you know, she lost. Lucy Lou was quiet about Tuesday's national elections, but this statement was issued on Facebook, about the Rabbit Hash results: "Through the course of a tense evening of voting she sniffed the butts of all the candidates and has given her approval to the Mayor elect, Brynn."

Rabbit Hash's outgoing mayor Lucy Lou | JEANNE SHERIDAN

Brynn herself may not be looking toward the presidency (yet). But Bamforth's is hoping that her dog's election will bring a bit of cheer and hope to people who are unhappy about upcoming White House residents. "I certainly hope that is takes someone's day and turns it around," she says.

Brynn

Plus, she'd like Brynn's ascendancy to help bring attention to Rabbit Hash as the "center of the universe," as Bamforth puts it - and, while she's at it, make the world a friendlier place for pit bulls. "To constantly have your dog judged because of how she looks, it gets old," says Bamforth. "But, hey, now she is mayor, so there's that."
Donald Trumps U.S. presidential election victory came as a positive surprise for pipeline proponents.

Energy Transfer Partners LPs controversial Dakota Access Pipeline is likely to be the immediate beneficiary. TransCanada Corp.s Keystone XL project, rejected by the Obama administration a year ago, could be resurrected. A Republican-controlled government would likely expedite project approvals and permitting by regulators.

Trump has said he would reduce the federal governments role in energy and environmental policy, while encouraging more infrastructure projects including pipelines to better connect production with markets and consumers. Shares of Energy Transfer and TransCanada rallied on Wednesday.

Obama killed the deal. Hillary wasnt warm to it at all, Bart Melek, the head of commodity strategy at TD Securities in Toronto, said of Keystone XL. This is something thats accretive.

A year after President Barack Obamas refusal to approve the $8 billion Keystone XL project to connect the Canadian oilsands with refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, the $3.8 billion Dakota Access line to ship crude from the Bakken shale hasnt fared very well either. The project is facing escalating opposition from environmental groups and has been stalled by the administrations pending review.

Trump has said hed approve Keystone XL  for a share of the profits. TransCanada said it remains fully committed to building the line and is looking at ways to engage a Trump administration on the projects benefits, including a $3 billion boost to the U.S. economy, a total 42,000 jobs and tens of millions of dollars in property taxes, according to an emailed statement. The Calgary-based pipeline giants shares rose 3 per cent in Toronto on Wednesday, the most since Jan. 22.

As for Dakota Access, if it hasnt received the go-ahead by the time Trump is sworn in, the new administration would be expected to grant it, said Christine Tezak, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners LLC in Washington.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is unlikely to keep holding up the last leg of the project, said Ethan Bellamy, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., in a note. Energy Transfer shares surged 11 per cent, the most since Feb. 16.

We remain focused on completing construction of this important energy infrastructure project with the expectation it will be in service in the first quarter of 2017, Vicki Granado, a spokeswoman for Energy Transfer, said in an emailed statement.

The Army Corps hasnt made any changes to its review process and wont speculate on the effect of the election, Kamil Sztalkoper, a spokesperson, said in a statement.

A revival of Keystone XL may help ease the pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus government to approve controversial pipeline projects to link the landlocked oilsands to the coast, such as TransCanadas proposed $13 billion Energy East line that has faced mounting opposition in Quebec. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said it wouldnt comment on the politics of another country, but noted the U.S. is the industrys largest customer.

Our challenge is getting that energy to the world and the only way we can do that is through more energy infrastructure, such as pipelines, which will enable us to deliver oil and natural gas to more customers at home and abroad, Tim McMillan, the associations president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Broadly speaking, a Trump administration will encourage oil and gas infrastructure, said Erika Coombs, an analyst at BTU Analytics LLC. The projects will continue to encounter obstacles and delays on the state and local levels, she said, but itll be harder for opposition to get on the national stage.

Its a step in the direction of more infrastructure getting built, Coombs said. The opposition doesnt still have the same support from the government at the executive level.

Read more about:

SHARE:
You might not be able to solve Rubiks Cube, but now you can make one.

The multicoloured puzzle thats kept small and big hands busy since the 1970s lost the final round in a fight to hold on to a European Union trademark protection.

EU trademark law seeks to prevent a company getting a monopoly on technical solutions or functional characteristics of a product, the EU Court of Justice ruled in Luxembourg on Thursday.

The legal battle in Europe has seen almost as many twists and turns as the iconic cube. A lower European court two years ago backed the puzzles makers by deciding that the shapes distinctive surface with black lines and the grid structure on each surface justified the right to a trademark valid across the 28-nation EU.

An adviser to the higher court in a non-binding opinion in May disagreed, saying EU judges should back the argument by German toy maker Simba Toys GmbH that the protection isnt justified because the cubes shape performs a purely technical function.

Seven Towns, a U.K. company that manages the intellectual property rights for Rubiks cube, didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ruling isnt a surprise, said Geert Glas, a lawyer at Allen & Overy LLP in Brussels, who specializes in intellectual property cases.

The EU court has become very wary of trademarks which it fears could become competitive obstacles for others, he said.

The EUs IP office, which will now have to weigh adopting a new decision will be bound by the latest ruling. Im afraid its game over for the owners of the Rubiks Cube, he said.

Hungarian inventor Erno Rubik in 1974 created a solid cube with coloured stickers that twisted and turned without falling apart. It was an object that was not supposed to be possible, says the official Rubiks website. Rubik himself took one month to work out the solution. There are 42 quintillion possibilities, but only one correct solution so that all sides are aligned in an evenly coloured manner, according to the website.

The essential characteristics of the cubic shape in issue must be assessed in the light of the technical function of the product, the EU court said in Thursdays ruling.

Read more about:

SHARE:
OTTAWAOttawas construction of a light rail line hit another hurdle Thursday when a small section of temporary concrete collapsed in a tunnel, sparking fears that three workers had been trapped underground.

The workers were spraying shotcrete  temporary concrete used to reinforce steel supports in tunnelling  when a portion of the material fell down on their equipment.

The workers took shelter as emergency crews converged on a busy intersection above, preparing to mount a rescue. But it was quickly determined that the workers were safe and the tunnel itself was intact.

It was not a tunnel collapse at all. It was one small portion of rebar and the sprayed concrete that fell, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said.

Fire crews were able to walk into the tunnel and escort the three men to safety, he said. On Twitter, the city said, This was not a rescue operation.

One was taken to hospital with minor injuries and the other two were evaluated at the scene by paramedics, Watson told reporters.

They expect to be able to go home any moment now, said the mayor, who spoke to the two workers.

We were very fortunate that no one was seriously injured.

Minister of Labour inspectors had been called in to investigate the incident. No work will take place in this portion of the tunnel until the ministry gives the all-clear sign, Watson said.

The incident happened at the intersection of Laurier and Waller streets, just a few blocks from Ottawa City Hall and the Rideau Canal and close to the University of Ottawas campus. Rescue vehicles and curious university students packed the area just after 5 p.m. on Thursday.

The intersection was the site of another collapse related to LRT tunnelling in 2014, when a section of the surface of Waller Street actually collapsed.

Its also a few blocks away from the sinkhole that opened up in Rideau Street and Sussex Drive in June, also at the site of light rail tunnelling efforts though the exact cause of this incident has yet to be determined, Watson said.

Ottawa has been working on a tight schedule to open up the Confederation Line, the citys first east-west light rail line, by 2018. The city planned demonstrations of the new transit system in time for 2017, in time for the thousands of tourists expected to visit Ottawa for Canadas 150th anniversary.

Read more about:

SHARE:
VANCOUVERHundreds of people turned up in downtown Vancouver on Thursday to protest the results of the United States presidential election.

Crowds voiced their opposition to president-elect Donald Trump as they chanted Love trumps hate and Down with Trump.

The Republican ended a divisive election campaign on Tuesday by pulling off a widely unexpected upset, defeating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the race to the White House.

The Vancouver protest was staged in front of Trump Tower, where another demonstration was held earlier this year because of its controversial namesake.

One man, who gave his name only as Brandon, arrived wearing a red T-shirt with the words Trump is my president.

He said he showed up to represent the silent majority who supported the controversial billionaire.

Read more about:

SHARE:
OTTAWACanadian troops headed to Africa will operate in dangerous territory where peacekeepers have been killed, says Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan.

In an exclusive interview with the Star from Vancouver Sajjan said Canada has committed to a three-year deployment that will be reassessed each year to ensure it has an enduring impact.

It will be spread among a number of unspecified African countries, have a major focus on training and increasing capacity of the host nation as well as other countries troops, and build on existing social, economic and deradicalization programs on the ground.

These missions, all of them, have the level of risk where peacekeepers have been hurt, they have been killed. And weve been looking at the risk factor in a very serious way, said Sajjan.

Asked about his approach to deploying Canadian forces to conduct counter-insurgency operations  something the previous Conservative government was keen to avoid in Africa when it turned down requests to deploy soldiers to Congo and Mali  Sajjan said some of it is going to be the reduction of radicalization in certain areas, in other parts it will be developing the capacity of the host nation.

Just back from Mali, which hosts the deadliest United Nations mission in the world right now, Sajjan says its clear there are risks there. He said the same risks exist in the other African missions under consideration by the Liberal government.

But, he added, there are also risks to Canada of doing nothing to counter insurgent groups that are terrorizing populations and radicalizing new recruits, and suggested he and the Liberal government have made this clear to Canadians from day one.

This is not the peacekeeping of the past  we need to look at what the challenges are of today and develop the peace operations for todays challenges.

After having travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia in late summer, and Senegal and Mali in the past week  Sajjan said he believes the UN mandate for and rules of engagement with hostile forces are robust enough to address the risks, particularly in Mali. The UN mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, has seen 106 casualties since it was established in 2013, including 69 from malicious acts.

One thing I did learn, the mandate for the mission is robust so there no concern that our troops would be limited in any way, said Sajjan. I had a very direct conversation with the political leadership of the UN and the force commander about that, and the safety of our troops is always paramount.

The defence minister, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran of the Afghanistan combat mission, suggested the risk to soldiers lives, however, does not justify inaction.

It cant just be one factor that we look at. Thats one; thats an important factor that needs to be addressed. We have looked at that and the question always comes: how do you mitigate some of these challenges, he said.

But at the end of the day just because you see a problem ahead of you, you cant just ignore it, you have to look at, can we look at addressing it.

He insisted Canada can play a huge role where we can reduce conflict and get into areas where we can start preventing conflict by addressing certain root causes at an early stage.

Sajjan said there are ways to mitigate risk, just as he says the Liberal government did when it overhauled Canadas combat mission to Iraq, and making sure that we put the right type of troops, the right equipment with the right mandate for that mission.

The Liberals pulled out Canadas CF-18 fighter jets and refocused Canadas military contribution to the fight against Daesh on training Iraqi and Kurdish peshmerga forces to fight the Islamist rebel forces.

Sajjan stressed that a big part of the federal analysis underway  as he, two other federal ministers, and military and civilian fact-finders have travelled to Africa  is examining how Canadas contribution of some 600 soldiers and up to 150 police can have a maximum impact, whether its through military training, building on economic development programs and opportunities like on the agriculture side in Mali, or combating sexual violence, including by UN peacekeeping troops.

What we do provide will be enduring. We committed for three years, but the thinking is to have the impact, we always need to assess, said Sajjan.

Asked how Canada avoids sending troops to be injured or killed in a mission where there is no end in sight, Sajjan stressed Canadas intention is to effect measurable change.

I wouldnt want to put troops in any place where there is no end, he said, suggesting the plan is to provide innovative solutions, to help UN or African Union troops be better able to do their jobs, so we dont have to look at a very long, protracted deployment that will not have an impact.

Sajjan said Canada is looking at spreading its various contributions  military, police and civilian  among a number of UN missions, not African Union-led missions, in Africa. But it will support African Union efforts at the same time.

Right now, he said, much of the public attention is on exactly where soldiers will be sent.

But he said Canadians should expect a broader mission that could see troops sent to one end of Africa while other elements of Canadas contribution will be sent to a different part. He said there are troop and police training centres across Africa, and a small number of troops or even RCMP can have significant impact in other areas, to make a training centre far more effective.

We will be assisting in capacity-building in many of the training centres and that will be . . . regardless of where we go.

Much has been made of the fact Canada has French-speaking troops and no colonial baggage, an asset from the perspective of many francophone African nations and the UN. Sajjan said it doesnt mean soldiers from Quebec or New Brunswick would be the only ones to deploy, rather he said that across the armed forces, the leadership in officer ranks are bilingual, as are many in the non-commissioned ranks.

Sajjan said the government has narrowed the ultimate destinations for its Canadian mission, but did not tip his hand on his preference.

He said there is nothing to be read into the countries hes travelled to, nor the fact that he recently went to Mali, saying he couldnt fit it into the earlier trip to central and East Africa. Although he has not travelled to the Central African Republic, Darfur, or South Sudan, Sajjan said he has addressed the same questions around those missions at meetings in Ethiopia late summer.

He said the decision on where to dispatch Canadas peace support mission is expected to be finalized by the federal cabinet before end of year.

I think when Canadians see the level of work thats gone into this its not just the location thats going to be the main news, its how were going to be deployed.

Sajjans comments flesh out the layered approach that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians should expect to its upcoming Africa peace support operation.

Several ministers and government departments are working up options to make good on the Liberal election pledge to re-engage with the United Nations.

International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau also travelled to Senegal (where many UN offices operating in West Africa are located) and Mali in August. And Global Affairs Minister Stephane Dion travelled this week to Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

Dion, in a statement issued Thursday from Nairobi where he announced $21.5 million for development and security projects, said: Kenya is an important partner for Canada in regional peace and security in Africa, but there is room for further growth.

Dion said the money will help provide youth with enhanced skills for employment and improve security and stability by countering terrorism, combating radicalization and violent extremism, and ensuring safety and security of borders within the region.

Read more about:

SHARE:
OTTAWALiz Quinn struggles to hold back tears as she recites the oath taken by all military search-and-rescue technicians, which ends: That others may live. For her, the oath is more than just words. It is a reminder of her late son, Sgt. Mark Salesse.

He devoted his life and he continually trained to make sure that his skills were up to par so that any given incident or accident that he was able to go in and save someone, Quinn says, her voice barely above a whisper.

I know that when he made the pledge, that it was serious. Every SAR tech that says that pledge means every word of that. Thats his soul.

Salesse was killed in an avalanche while on a training exercise in Banff National Park on Feb. 5, 2015. The 44-year-old New Brunswick native was the 13th military search-and-rescue technician, or SAR tech, to be killed on duty since 1947 and the third in the last decade.

Today, on Remembrance Day, people across the country will pause to reflect on the Canadians who fought and died on the battlefields of Europe and Korea or served on missions in places like in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Quinn hopes they will also take a moment to think about the militarys SAR techs, those chosen few like her son who put their lives on the line every day at home.

I would like Canadians to remember the Canadian Armed Forces search and rescue in their prayers and in their thoughts on Remembrance Day alongside the soldier that wears the camouflage or has served in Afghanistan, Quinn says. They are Canadian soldiers. They put their lives at risk every day.

The Canadian Forces has 150 SAR techs across the country whose sole job is to go into often-risky environments to rescue Canadians in distress. That includes parachuting or rappelling into remote areas such as mountains, the high Arctic or one of Canadas three oceans to respond to plane crashes and sinking ships.

The federal government ordered the military to start conducting search-and-rescue operations in 1947. Chief Warrant Officer Greg Smit, the militarys top SAR tech, suggests that makes it Canadas longest domestic military mission.

And my SAR techs, you could argue, are deployed for 10 or 15 years straight, he says. Because they dont typically get long periods of rest. And this is a challenge.

Smit says his men and women see tragedy often when responding to plane crashes and other emergencies. But what sustains them are the successes. He recalls sitting in the back of a helicopter a few years ago, after saving four people from their sinking sailboat.

We were just exhausted and they were as well, Smit says. But the skipper knew that hed nearly lost his life and he just looked over at me and looked me in the eyes and sort of mouthed those words: Thank you. And that just carries you over the tough times, even when you lose brothers.

Smit says his men and women arent risk junkies and they dont seek attention. Theyre a tight-knit group who enjoy difficult challenges and have dedicated themselves to helping others. And they understand that peace and security come at a cost, both at home and abroad.

The government receives about 10,000 distress calls a year, Smit says. The majority are handled by the provinces or territories, with police and volunteers tasked with responding. That leaves about 750 for the military.

Inevitably what happens is we tend to be the rescuers of last resort, Smit says. When no one else can do it. When the weather is at its most extreme. When the terrain is difficult. Thats quite often when the Canadian Forces gets involved.

Such was the case on Oct. 27, 2011 when a distress call came in from the remote community of Igoolik in Nunavut where two Inuit hunters had become stranded in stormy conditions off the coast of Baffin Island.

What followed was a harrowing rescue that would claim the life of 35-year-old Sgt. Janick Gilbert after he and two other SAR techs were forced to parachute into the icy Arctic waters to save the two hunters.

The Quebec City native, who was awarded the Star of Courage posthumously, left behind a wife and two young children. Melisa Lesquir says the fifth anniversary of her husbands death this year was particularly difficult on the family, with lots of emotions in the air. Like Quinn, she hopes Canadians will think about the SAR techs on Remembrance Day.

Its a small group and they are very dedicated, she says. They dont get as much attention as those who serve abroad on missions. But they are here on Canadian soil saving the lives of our people.

Read more about:

SHARE:
MONTREAL  A man charged in a series of alleged break-ins and sexual assaults at a Quebec university student residence has been released on bail.

Thierno-Ourny Barry, 19, is facing 12 charges, including four of breaking and entering with commission of a criminal act  sexual assault.

He also faces two counts of attempted break-in and six counts of breaking and entering with the intention of committing an offence.

Barry was granted bail today and is expected to return to court Dec. 7.

He and another student were arrested in connection with the Oct. 15 alleged crimes at Universite Laval, in Quebec City.

The other man has been previously released on a promise to appear at a later date.

The university has said the two accused have been expelled from the school.

SHARE:
A man in his 30s is in serious condition after he was stabbed repeatedly with a machete near Moss Park Friday, paramedics said.

Police were called to the scene inside the Maxwell Meighen Centre, a homeless shelter at Queen St. E and Sherbourne St., at around 11:28 a.m. for reports of a man wielding a machete.

Officers used a Taser to subdue the male suspect and arrest him, said the Toronto Police Service. The man was also taken to a hospital as a precaution, and is in good condition.

The victim received numerous stab wounds to his arms and torso, according to Toronto Paramedic Services. He was rushed to hospital, and his injuries are not life-threatening.

Meanwhile, the suspect will be charged with various offences for the incident, and is expected to appear in court on Saturday morning, said police.

SHARE:
Cyborgs are people, too.

Thats part of what Neil Harbisson wants the world to realize. The 34-year-old lives with an antenna fixed to the back of his skull, and it sometimes restricts where hes allowed to go. Certain shops, churches, casinos and the like have blocked his entry, and once he was nearly prevented from getting a new passport photo. But the trade-off, he said, is more than worthwhile.

Thirteen years after the artificial protuberance was drilled to his cranium, Harbisson is one of the worlds pre-eminent cyborgs, a futurist thinker who travels from city to city to defend his choice to enmesh his body with technology and promote a future where anyone is free to follow his lead. The device serves as an extra sense by translating light frequencies picked up by a sensor into tones that vibrate inside his head from the base of the antenna. In this way he can perceive colour as sound, an ability that he uses to paint in shades he associates with notes from music and political speeches. Harbisson and his collaborator Moon Ribas, a dancer with an earthquake-sensing chip in her arm, will be at Massey Hall Saturday as part of Generator, the second annual science-based variety show created by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.

We give talks non-stop to normalize this, so that people understand that its not bad to merge with technology and also that we are all free to decide, Harbisson told the Star. You can become the species that you want to be, that you feel you are.

Harbisson is among an emerging host of thinkersresearchers, artists, futurists, aestheticistswho believe were entering the era of the cyborg, a term used to describe the incorporation of computer technology with the human body. As Harbisson explained, human beings have always been in a state of evolutionary flux, from microbes through to homo sapiens. The addition of computers into our biology, he argues, is the next step along the evolutionary spectrum, an inevitable stage in the progress of our species that some call transhumanism.

The origins of these ideas can be traced back several decades. Since the 1980s, Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, has tinkered with augmented reality eye-glasses that led to him being dubbed a cyborg. And in 1998, British researcher Kevin Warwick was hailed as the first person to be implanted with a silicon chip that would turn on lights when he entered a room.

Today, alongside artists like Ribas and Harbisson, there is the biohacker or Grinder subculture, where people modify their bodies with computer technology and espouse a philosophy that demands such procedures to be safe, affordable and available through open source research. Examples of such human augmentation procedures include the installation of magnet-activated LED lights under the skin, as well as implantable devices that can read medical data like ones heart rate and transmit it to the Internet.

There are lots of people thinking about this, said Nikolas Badminton, a futurist in Vancouver who has a chip in his left hand that acts as a key card to his office door. And while it remains a fringe practice, Badminton predicts that human augmentation will become more affordable and join the mainstream culture in the years to come  much like the widespread adoption of mobile phones and tattoos. But in the short term the main obstacle is the risk of discrimination, he said  the weird out factor.

When I got my chip, I got a lot of abuse online, people claiming that I was the anti-Christ, Badminton said. If you do take the step forward to become a cyborg, youre an outcast from the beginning.

Mann, the U of T professor, claimed in 2012 that he was approached by an erratic man who tried to pull off his EyeTap glasses device in a Paris McDonalds. He is now one of the proponents of a Human Augmentation Code to protect the rights and responsibilities of people who choose to equip their bodies with computer technology. This includes the proclamation that people should have the right to create their own digital identities through the use of cameras and instruments that collect information, as well as the right to know when and how theyre being recorded.

Toronto filmmaker Rob Spence has experienced these issues first-hand. Spence lost his eye after it was badly damaged in a shotgun accident when he was 9, and since 2009 he has occasionally worn a specially-made fake eye thats equipped with a miniature camera. He said while many people are intrigued by the novelty of the camera-eye, others are frequently put off and concerned about being recorded.

My right to have a video camera eye overlaps other peoples right to have privacy. Theres no easy way around that, Spence said.

But much like growing comfort with perpetual Internet connectivitynot to mention the ubiquity of camera-enabled smartphonesSpence expects that social norms will change to accommodate devices that people incorporate into their bodies. Harbisson agreed, believing that most people living today are already psychological cyborgs because of their proximity to, and reliance upon, the information matrix of the web.

Steven Mizrach, a professor at Florida International University, said in an email that he believes human beings have been conjoining with technology for thousands of years, whether it is through the advent of clothing, the use of tools and weapons or the widespread adoption of automobiles and computers. The big question, for him, is whether anything will be lost as these connections become more intimate and physical, melding the organic and the artificial in a way that gives us control over how we look, what abilities we have, and maybe even how we think.

What aspects of humanity might we be giving up? he asked. What makes us human?

The answer might get complicated sooner than you think.

For tickets and more information on Generator, see http://www.generatorevent.com .

SHARE:
We just clicked.

Its been almost three-quarters of a century, but Peggy Campbell, 93, still remembers the instant attraction she felt when she met her future husband.

It was in 1942, in Brighton, U.K., at the height of The Second World War.

Peggy was 19, an office worker from Sussex, and had been set-up on a blind date.

My girlfriend had a date with a Canadian soldier and she asked him to bring a friend along, she recalls.

That soldiers friend was Bill Campbell, from Renfrew, Ont., overseas with the Governor Generals Foot Guards.

I got down to Brighton and wasnt going out anywhere, but a chum  we were roommates  asked me to go, recalls Bill, 94.

The quartet met at an ice-rink near the Brighton pier.

Bill and Peggy hit it off.

He was just the image Id pictured, says Peggy.

Four years later, they were married and Peggy was sailing across the Atlantic, to her new home in Renfrew.

Peggy Campbell is one of more than 44,000 young women who came to Canada between 1942 and 1948 after they married Canadian servicemen. Granted free passage by the Canadian government, the war brides brought with them more than 20,000 children.

Like the vast majority of war brides, Peggy arrived on these shores in 1946.

Seventy years later, she and Bill sit in a common area of the Sunnybrook Hospital Veterans Centre residence, remembering the early years of their life together.

The couple kept in touch after their initial meeting, and saw each other whenever they could, but the war kept them apart for long stretches.

Bill was preparing military vehicles to be deployed in Europe.

Peggy joined the Womens Royal Naval Service and was sent to the town of Winchester, where her job was to order parts for navy planes.

As the war came to a close, in 1945, Bill was sent to Germany with the Allies occupation force.

He and Peggy wrote each other plenty of letters.

There was no phoning or anything in those days, Peggy.

Finally, when Bill returned to England in 1946, they married.

Bill headed home to Renfrew to set up house. Peggy waited for her immigration papers to come through and set sail from the port in Southampton in late August.

My parents came down to see me off, which was a very sad day, Peggy says. My family felt pretty awful.

They told her to make sure she always had enough money to come home.

But I have no regrets in that department, says Peggy. Its hung on for 70 years.

She set sail on the RMS Queen Mary, and, five days later, landed in Halifax, where hundreds of war brides left the ship and boarded trains to be delivered to new husbands and new families all across the country.

The change of pace from Sussex to small-town Ontario came as a shock, says Peggy.

You come from a town where the next town is very close and then you come to Renfrew, which is sort of isolated, to me, she says.

(And) I missed England. But then, you get used to it, you know? And you get on with your life . . . . I guess we all leave our nests.

The couple had two daughters. Bill got a job at a foundry and Peggy stayed home with the girls. The family lived what Bill calls an open air Canadian life, going on frequent camping trips to Killbear and Killarney provincial parks, and down in the U.S.

Earlier this year, they moved into the veterans care residence at Sunnybrook. Always devoted watchers of the Remembrance Day ceremonies at the Cenotaph in Ottawa, Peggy and Bill will wake up on Nov. 11 to thousands of Canadian flags planted in the lawn of the residence, part of Sunnybrooks annual Operation Raise a Flag campaign to honour veterans.

Its been an adjustment, living at Sunnybrook, but the Campbells are glad to be together.

We hold hands often, says Peggy.

Their family lives near the residence, and they regularly get to see their great-grandson Billy, born last year.

Its been wonderful, says Peggy of her life with Bill. Weve enjoyed it and weve done everything together.

In the years after The Second World War, several war-bride associations sprung up around the country. One of the largest, Canadian War Brides, says about 93 per cent of war brides were British.

That proportion of U.K. arrivals, and the high number of war brides from The Second World War, in general, can overshadow the stories of women from different countries, who came to Canada after different wars  even in the minds of the women and their families.

Its not really war brides, because theyre not from Britain, says Japanese-born Michiko Small, who came to Canada with her mother, Shizue Clark, and Canadian stepfather after the Korean War.

Shizue, who died in 2013 at the age of 91, had a thoroughly different immigration experience from that of Peggy Campbell and other British war brides  one marked by racial tensions and the lingering stigma of coming from an enemy country.

Shizue was not yet 30 years old when she met Canadian soldier John Clark in 1951, but already she had survived many lifetimes worth of disaster and loss.

Her first husband, Second World War Japanese naval officer Minoru Hirahara, was killed in action in 1944 when his submarine was sunk near the Phillipines.

Left to care for their baby daughter, Michiko, Shizue moved from the port town of Kure to live with her family in Hiroshima.

She thought it would be safer, says Michiko from her home in Ottawa.

Kure was the naval base for submarines, but Hirsohima was just supplies and old people.

On Aug. 6, 1945, Shizue heard the blast from the first atomic bomb, dropped by the U.S. air force on the city she thought would be safe from attack.

Shizue fled Hiroshima, on foot, with her baby, her father and grandmother, through the mountains, back to Kure.

Six years later, she met Clark, an Ottawa-native, while he was on leave in Kure during the Korean War.

The couple married in a civil ceremony on Oct. 19, 1953.

In the summer of 1955, Shizue, John and Michiko sailed to Seattle, crossed the border into British Columbia and took a train headed east, settling in Ottawa on July 2.

Michiko, 11 when she arrived in Canada, recalls the hardships of being a Japanese immigrant in 1950s Ontario, let alone part of a mixed-race family.

It was very, very difficult, because it was after (WWII) and Canadians were not very kind . . . . As soon as they found out we were Japanese, they became a little cold, she says. They just didnt understand the people of other origins, I guess.

Johns parents never accepted Shizue either.

He was their only son and he married a Japanese woman with a child, Michiko says.

But John and Shizue, who adopted the name Suzie, settled into their Canadian lives.

He was a career soldier, while she was a homemaker and did some work cleaning peoples houses. They had a son, James.

They even knew and socialized with a few other Japanese war brides who had come to Canada after the Korean war.

Shizue took adult English classes at a local high school and eventually began working as a seamstress at various large clothing companies in Ottawa.

John died in 1994. But Michiko, described by her daughter as a quiet person, led an active life into her old age, even taking up line-dancing.

Later on, the older she got, she started to get used to Canadian customs, started to be vocal. Not timid, Michiko said.

Shizue never, to her daughters knowledge, talked about being a war bride.

In those days I dont think we ever talked about (war brides), she says. Now everybodys talking about it 70 years (on), you know.

SHARE:
In a gym on Barton Ave., a fitness group cools down under the direction of their instructor who isnt actually there.

Alejandro Jose Vivar cant be. For his own safety, he leads the stretches via cellphone from an undisclosed location.

The former federal inmate and founder of Prison Pump  a penitentiary-style workout he created on the inside  is laying low three months after someone pumped five bullets into him during a morning workout class held across the street in Christie Pits Park on July 30.

The shooter is still wanted by police.

I just want to show you guys that with our bodies, nothing is impossible, Vivar, 35, tells the group of 50 people sweating in St. Raymond Catholic Schools gym. His face, projected on a giant screen, beams down at his supporters. I love you guys. Thank you for supporting this.

Together, they are taking the Prison Pump mantra to heart and turning a negative into a positive.

Vivar went to jail a gang leader but came out a certified fitness instructor with a mission to be a community ambassador for good health.

His life of crime started early  at age 13 he says he was a petty drug dealer before he fell in with the L.A. Boys, a crew of local Latino hustlers who were part of the once-notorious street gangs in the Christie Pits neighbourhood.

I was in deep and it caught up to me, he said. It was a lifestyle that was ingrained in me from a very young age.

Vivar was charged but acquitted in the execution-style 2002 murder of Christie Boys gang member Gary Malo, and in 2007, he was rounded up as part of the Project Cheddar drug bust.

He would be sentenced to 10 years and four months in federal prison, where he made a commitment to turn his life around through fitness. Vivar had been out on parole only a few months when he was shot in broad daylight this past summer.

It was obviously a targeted attack on him for whatever reason, said Det. Darren Worth, who is investigating the case. It wasnt just a random, fluky thing . . . And its certainly not something you would expect at 9 a.m.

Vivar remembers hearing the gun and watching and feeling the bullets enter his body, as if in slow motion. This is it, he thought, before his son, his partner in the class, pulled him away and he went into survival mode, controlling his breathing until the ambulance arrived.

Vivar says he doesnt know his shooter, but that he doesnt hold a grudge.

Ill never wish prison on anyone, he said. I hope that this guy can reflect on that . . . I dont want him to go to jail, never.

After the shooting, Vivars parole was briefly suspended for security reasons. Once he got out of hospital, he was transferred to the Toronto South Detention Centre, but would eventually return to hospital after his wounds became infected. His parole was later reinstated and he was moved out of Toronto for his own safety.

Vivar is still physically recovering from the incident: he cant do a pull-up but he is back to 10-kilometre runs.

Fitness saved my life, he often says. And while he thinks he now suffers some symptoms of mild PTSD, and is hyper-vigilant of his surroundings, Vivar says he does not live in fear. In fact, he feels more passionate and motivated than ever.

His dream is to open a non-profit gym in 2017 that works with former inmates and at-risk youth to show them the opportunities there are in fitness.

This cause is stronger than fear, said Vivar. I cant stop. Thats not who I am. Thats not why I suffered through all of this.

The return of Prison Pump raised $1,000 for FEAT for Children of Incarcerated Parents, an organization that supports Torontos estimated 20,000 youth who have folks on the inside.

We are so proud of him and his perseverance and resilience, said Jessica Reid, FEATs founder. He really wants to help break the prison cycle.

Vivars associates and trainers  many of whom are also former inmates  plan to help him keep the Prison Pump classes going through winter. The free classes will take place every Saturday morning.

Vivar, meanwhile, must remain in hiding as a condition of his parole.

I dont want this to die with what happened to me, Vivar said. We didnt come this far, I didnt come this far, for it to just die.

Prison Pump is still alive and so am I.

SHARE:
When an Italian team claimed to have deciphered actual words on charred papyrus scrolls excavated from the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii, it was hailed as a breakthrough. Now a preeminent expert is blowing holes in that claim

1. In 79 A.D., the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii and other Roman towns in Italys Campania region. A pyroclastic flow of superhot gas, ash and lava buried the seaside resort of Herculaneum, eventually wiping it from human memory until its discovery by well-diggers in the 1730s.

2. Excavations in the 1750s unearthed a spectacular villa likely built by Julius Caesars father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. In a room, diggers found what looked like lumps of charcoal. They recovered 1,000 charred papyrus scrolls from the only library to survive antiquity. And there begins the tortuous history of trying to read them, says David Sider, author of The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum.

3. History has not been gentle with ancient Greek and Latin texts. Sophocles, for example, wrote more than 100 plays, yet only seven survive. And the scrolls havent made adding to the classics canon easy. Temperatures of 320 Celsius carbonized their outer layers while sucking out the moisture inside, twisting and searing the papyrus together like a log. Theyre friable, says Sider, a classics professor at New York University. They just crumble.

4. The most successful attempt was in 1756 by a priest named Antonio Piaggio. He removed the burnt outer layers and attached the less damaged parts to a kind of rack he invented that slowly unrolled the scroll. His method was used until the early 1900s on the best-preserved scrolls that could withstand the stress.

5. About 55 scrolls and fragments have been opened enough to provide published materials. Most are the Greek writings of Philodemus of Gadara, a minor philosopher and poet.

His patron was Piso, and its believed the scrolls were part of Philodemuss personal library. He was a dedicated follower of Epicurus, an important Athenian philosopher who died in 270 B.C. and who made peacefulness and pleasure the main goal of his doctrine.

6. In 2009, University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales used computed tomography, or CT scan, to create a three-dimensional image of the interior of a Herculaneum scroll housed at the Institut de France in Paris. Seales then used software he and his team created to virtually unroll the scroll. It didnt work; the ink on the papyrus didnt create enough of a contrast to be read. Still, it was the first time the scrolls internal labyrinth could be seen.

7. When a more sensitive scanning process, called X-ray phase-contrast tomography, became available, Seales arranged for the French institutes scroll to be used by an Italian-led team. To his surprise, the team conducted the experiment without him. Results were announced in early 2015, to much publicity, in the journal Nature Communications  four words and 24 Greek letters were seen.

This summer, however, the team gave Seales its data, including more recent scans. He was not able to virtually unroll it  a process he recently used to successfully read the 1,500 year-old En-Gedi scroll in Israel. Seales believes the Italian-led teams published results are faulty. We unwrapped fairly large sections of the data and were never able to see anything that looked like the writing they said they saw.

8. Seales believes the team likely saw papyrus fibres twisted into the shape of letters. But he remains optimistic. Hes convinced a scanning process hes designed could read the scrolls within a year if museums give him samples to work with. Such a breakthrough would likely trigger the resumption of excavations. Scholars believe the villas main library  assumed to hold well over 60,000 scrolls  remains buried underground.

SHARE:
Parents who pushed for better road safety near their schools and in their communities prompted new legislation that will allow municipalities to install photo radar and lower speed limits, Premier Kathleen Wynne said Thursday.

At a news conference at Northlea public school in Torontos Leaside neighbourhood  in her riding  Wynne said families there were among those across the province saying we need to see something happen. You know, the streets are filled with cars that are driving too fast and were worried about our kids.

And in some cases like this, in this part of the province, in this neighbourhood, there actually was a child who was killed. And so it made it a very, very important issue here, she added, referring to Georgia Walsh who died after being hit by a minivan two years ago.

The new moves mean people will know that if they are driving through a school zone they need to slow down. And that will be up to the city to decide where those will go, she said.

But it will only be in school zones and community safety zones, where quite frankly there are a lot of kids because thats what this is about.

Cities will also be able to lower speed limits in those zones from the typical 50 or 40 kilometres an hour, she added.

Drivers who are caught will face fines, but not demerit points, said Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca, adding that it will be up to communities to install cameras or reduce speed limits, or do both.

Wynne thanked Toronto Mayor John Tory and city councillor Jon Burnside for their work on road safety. Tory had asked the province back in February to allow photo radar in the city.

When asked about revenue from the fines, Tory said I hope we don't take in one cent and I'm also quite prepared to say if we take in any money from fines that are issued as a result of the use of this technology in school zones that we will put all of it towards the $68 million we're spending at present on a road safety plan to make sure we cut pedestrian deaths down to zero.

Conservative MPP Michael Harris said his party has always supported initiatives that help make our schools and communities and high-risk zones safer. We look forward to reviewing the legislation carefully, to make sure it achieves its intended purpose and doesnt become a cash grab like the former photo radar in the province.

He also wondered if the radar and lower speed limits would be in effect after hours and on weekends.

Harris, who represents Kitchener-Conestoga, knows first-hand about road safety concerns  just the other day, his young son was getting off the bus and seconds later a guy was speeding down our street.

He noted, however, that he believes photo radar wont stop drivers like that, only police officers can deal with that.

Meanwhile, Toronto District School Board Trustee Ken Lister is asking that the revenue raised be given to school boards to repair fields and playgrounds. His motion goes before a board committee next week and asks that a letter be sent to Wynne and Education Minister Mitzie Hunter.

Read more about:

SHARE:
BAGHDADIraqi troops fired automatic weapons at positions held by Daesh in and around the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, but did not advance as they regroup and clear neighbourhoods once occupied by the jihadis.

In Mosul proper, where troops have a foothold in a sliver of territory in the citys east, the special forces control the Zahra neighbourhood, once named after former dictator Saddam Hussein, military officials said.

They have taken at least half of the Aden neighbourhood and clashes were still ongoing there, while the regular armys ninth division is stationed in east Mosuls Intisar neighbourhood, they added, speaking on condition of anonymity because they werent authorized to brief reporters. Skirmishes also continued in the citys southern outskirts.

Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the U.S.-led forces operating the key air campaign against Daesh, said that advancing troops and aircraft have destroyed some 70 tunnels the jihadis had been using to launch surprise attacks from inside densely populated areas.

Theyve set up elaborate defences, and we have to assume theyll do anything among the civilian population because they dont care about anyone, he said, noting that airstrikes had hit hundreds of Daesh positions in the three-week old Mosul campaign.

Iraqi troops are converging from several fronts on Mosul, the countrys second largest city and the last major Daesh holdout in Iraq. Kurdish peshmerga forces are holding a line outside the city in the north, while Iraqi army and militarized police units approach from the south, and government-sanctioned Shiite militias are guarding the western approaches.

The offensive has slowed in recent days as the special forces, the troops who have advanced the farthest, push into more densely populated areas of the citys east, where they cannot rely as much on airstrikes and shelling because of the risk posed to civilians who have been told to stay in their homes.

Over 34,000 people have been displaced in the fighting and are settling in camps and host communities in nearby provinces. Troops are trying to screen the crowds for potential Daesh fighters attempting to sneak out among the civilians, and some have admitted to meting out what they consider swift justice, by executing them.

On Thursday, Amnesty International issued its latest report on the abuses of security forces, urging the government to investigate and stop cases of arbitrary detention, forced disappearances and ill-treatment of prisoners. The London-based rights organization said it visited villages near the Shura and Qayara areas outside Mosul, where it says up to six people were extrajudicially executed in late October over suspected ties to Daesh.

Men in Federal Police uniform have carried out multiple unlawful killings, apprehending and then deliberately killing in cold blood residents in villages south of Mosul, said Amnestys Lynn Maalouf. In some cases the residents were tortured before they were shot dead execution-style.

The battle front in that area has moved further north toward Mosul. Forces there are at the town of Hamam al-Alil, said Brig. Firas Bashar, the spokesman for Nineveh operations command.

To the northeast, about 13 kilometres (8 miles) from the city, peshmerga continued to take territory in the town of Bashiqa, believed to be largely deserted except for dozens of Daesh fighters. Theyve have had the town surrounded for weeks, and have assaulted it with mortar and artillery fire.

At an area church in territory freshly freed from the militants grip, priests rang bells for the first time in two years on Wednesday as the peshmerga worked to secure the town.

We are so happy at the liberation, said the Rev. Elkhoury Alfaran Elkhoury at the Mart Shoomy Church in Bahzani, a village near Bashiqa.

They want to give a message to the world, and that message is damage, their message is destruction, their message is death, he said, highlighting damage to the church made by the jihadis while they occupied the area.

In New York, the U.N. said the progress meant that the days were numbered for the self-styled caliphate declared by Daesh from Mosul in 2014.

This liberation operation marks the beginning of the end of the so-called Daesh caliphate in Iraq, the U.N. envoy for the country told the Security Council on Wednesday.

Jan Kubis said that the U.N.s humanitarian agencies were preparing to shelter even more of the tens of thousands of displaced people as winter approaches. He also warned that reconciliation and restoration of confidence in the government was necessary if the victories against Daesh are to be lasting.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, bombings killed at least ten people and wounded 38 others, according to police and medical officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.

The capital has seen near-daily bombings since the Mosul operation began, but no large-scale attacks. Daesh frequently targets Iraqs security forces and Shiite majority as part of its campaign to destabilize the country.

Read more about:

SHARE:
DETROITA judge on Thursday ordered delivery of bottled water to lead-tainted homes in Flint, Michigan, unless residents opt out or officials verify that a water filter has been properly installed.

Water is distributed for free at many sites in Flint. Residents who cant get to a distribution site can call a community group for help, but U.S. District Judge David Lawson said its still not enough.

The fact that such items are available does not mean that they are reliably accessible or effective in furnishing safe drinking water to every household, he said. Bottled water is heavy, and not all of Flints residents are capable of transporting the cases of water effectively.

Flint residents are urged to use bottled water or filtered tap water while the citys water system heals from lead contamination. Corrosive water from the Flint River wasnt treated properly for 18 months.

Its unclear how many people in the city of roughly 100,000 will get home delivery. Lawson said the state of Michigan and Flint must provide each home with four cases of bottled water per week per resident, if they qualify.

Delivery isnt required if officials confirm that a filter has been installed and is working properly. Residents also can decline water.

State attorneys were reviewing Lawsons order, said Anna Heaton, spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Snyder.

What the judge said is very reasonable, said Dimple Chaudhary, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sought the injunction along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. Its a complex situation, and the government response has not been robust enough.

SHARE:
Thousands of demonstrators continued to march in cities across the country on Thursday, unwilling to accept Tuesdays upset election of Donald Trump.

Condemning the president-elects litany of crude comments about women and his attacks on immigrants, demonstrators marched along city streets, blocked intersections, burned effigies and, in some places, gathered outside buildings bearing Trumps name.

Not my president, chanted some of the protesters, while others waved signs with the same message.

Their concerns included policies, such as Trumps proposed plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as rhetoric that many described as xenophobic.

At a student rally Thursday at the University of California at Berkeley, several hundred students watched as faculty members took turns speaking.

People make choices, and choices make history. We can be bystanders, or we can be upstanders, said Rucker Johnson, an associate professor of public policy.

As the president-elect met with congressional leaders on Thursday afternoon, more than 100 protesters staged a sit-in outside the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Police nationwide made dozens of arrests  most of them in New York  late Wednesday through Thursday, according to police officials. Although most of the demonstrations were peaceful, police in Oakland, Calif., said that a rally there turned violent when some in the massive crowd threw rocks and fireworks at police officers, injuring three of them. People in Trumps circle said they were monitoring the unrest and had expected such activity after the election.

On Thursday, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the protesters were a bunch of spoiled crybabies.

In Oakland, police said the crowd of demonstrators eventually grew to about 7,000 and began to splinter into smaller groups, some of which vandalized buildings.

Authorities reported 16 cases of vandalism, including graffiti and looting, with numerous trash fires in the streets. (About 40 fires were extinguished by police and fire officials.) Police said they arrested 30 people and issued an additional 11 citations for vandalism, unlawful assembly and assault on an officer.

MoveOn.org, a liberal group, had called on people to gather in cities nationwide. Ben Wikler, MoveOns Washington director, said that people had registered to organize events in 275 cities and communities across the country, noting that many were candlelight vigils and group discussions rather than the sprawling marches seen in New York and Chicago.

A lot of people reacted to the election results with a kind of plodding feeling, like they wanted to curl up under their desks or hide under their sheets, Wikler said Thursday.

Read more about:

SHARE:
WASHINGTONPresident-elect Donald Trump on Thursday refused to let a group of journalists travel with him to cover his historic first meeting with President Barack Obama, breaking a long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on the nations leader.

Trump flew from New York to Washington on his private jet without that pool of reporters, photographers and television cameras that have travelled with presidents and presidents-elect.

Trumps flouting of press access was one of his first public decisions since his election Tuesday.

Trumps meeting with Obama on Thursday will be recorded by the pool of White House reporters, photographers and TV cameras who cover the president.

News organizations had for weeks tried to co-ordinate a pool of journalists who could begin to travel with Trump immediately after election day if he won election. But his campaign did not co-operate with those requests and his senior advisers refused Wednesday, the day after the election, to discuss any such press arrangements.

Trump also broke from tradition as a candidate, refusing to allow a pool of campaign reporters, photographers or cameras to fly on his plane as he travelled to events.

Every president in recent memory has travelled with a pool of journalists when they leave the White House grounds. A pool of reporters and photographers were in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.

The pool was just steps away from President Ronald Reagan when he was shot outside a hotel in the District of Columbia, and was stationed outside his hospital room as he recovered. The pool also travels on vacation and foreign trips and at times captures personal, historic moments of the presidency.

News organizations take turns serving in the small group, paying their way and sharing the material collected in the pool with the larger press corps. The pool also covers official events at the White House when space doesnt allow for the full press corps.

The Associated Press is among those reaching out to Trump advisers about press access.

SHARE:
PARISThe flashbacks come to Denys Plaud unbidden, making it hard to work: Gunshots threatening to pierce his cramped refuge in the Bataclan theatre. The excruciating silence between rounds of fire. And when it was all over, stepping over the dead and dying to reach freedom.

One year on, survivors of Frances deadliest extremist attacks are trying to look to the future, but they will never forget.

More than 1,700 people have been officially recognized as victims of the horror that unfolded on Nov. 13, 2015, at the Bataclan, Paris cafes and the national stadium. In addition to the 130 who died, nine remain hospitalized and others are paralyzed or otherwise irreparably damaged. According to the governments victims minister, more than 600 are still receiving psychological treatment.

A year was the minimum period of time for me to recover, and to mourn the dead, Plaud said. Like a veteran, I will always have to live with this horrible (memory). You cannot make them fade. You can learn to live with them.

Plaud, a 48-year-old math and physics tutor, wrote a book to process his anguish. Cafe owner Gregory Reibenberg, whose wife died in his arms, also wrote a book, to help their 9-year-old daughter heal, and to find sense in the senseless. Another survivor turned his flashbacks into a graphic novel, depicting the attackers as skeletons and sprinkled with poignant humour.

As France prepares to mark one year since the attacks with commemorations Sunday, Plaud still seems surprised that he escaped alive that night.

Itching to dance as he watched a concert by California rock band Eagles of Death Metal, he left the crowded dance floor for the balcony, for more room to move around.

I just heard what sounded like firecrackers, and the first seconds I thought that someone is spoiling the show  or maybe that it was part of the show. But when I heard some shots, some screaming from people being shot, I told myself theres something wrong, he told the Associated Press this week. I ran.

He and about 15 others hid in a small room and called police, who told them to keep quiet until emergency crews came.

It took nearly three hours.

We were listening to some shooting and screaming, and when we thought it was over it was just the time the terrorists would reload their weapons and shoot again, he said. At one point, bullets hit a wall he was squeezed against, and he felt it shake.

When the silence and strain became too much for someone in the cramped room, he recounted, the others would softly say shhh  to show we were together, we were a unit, there was no one left alone.

When finally the emergency crew came to rescue us, we passed from that dark, tiny room to full light with a bloody battlefield. And policemen every five metres telling me dont look at them, mister, they are dead, you cannot do anything, he said. But there were so many corpses I had to look where I put my feet.

Today, the memories sometimes pierce his concentration when he is teaching, and he has to stop.

Survivors guilt is a problem for some. And many are still recovering from injuries.

Daniel Psenny was working from his apartment across from the Bataclan when he heard gunshots and saw panicked people escaping via the emergency exit and windows. He went down to help, pulled an injured American man into his building, reached to close the door  and was shot in the arm by an automatic rifle.

Psenny, a journalist for Le Monde, continues to undergo physical therapy after the shot burned his nerve endings. Ive lost part of the sensations and mobility in some fingers, he said. Its a bit better than one year ago because I am on my feet and alive. But its quite tiring and heavy-going.

We are not like we were before. There is a before and an after November 13th, in the way of being, looking, seeing, even if, in my case, I continue going to a performance, to a movie, take flights and get on with my life.

Survivors also face frustrations  the protracted investigation, the French bureaucracy required to be recognized as victims  allowing for government compensation and medical support. And what they see as injustices, like not being invited to the Bataclans reopening concert with Sting on Saturday night. Families of those who died were given the priority instead.

Reibenberg has chosen to look to the future after what happened that night, when 19 people were killed in his cafe, La Belle Equipe. His wife Djamilas last words were take care of Tess, their daughter. His guardian angel, cafe manager and longtime friend Hodda Saadi, also died, along with her sister Halima, celebrating her 36th birthday.

What these (attackers) were targeting, we were representing it fully  diversity, mixing, sharing, said Reibenberg. A French Jew, his wife was Muslim and his staff had roots reaching to Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Mexico, the Alps. . .

Reibenberg spoke from his apartment near the attack sites in the 11th arrondissement  and near a new tea shop hes opening soon, expanding his business because he refuses to give in to fear.

His message for the attackers is clear: Its not because you shoot us and take away our cherished ones that we will suddenly become stupid and hateful people who will stop loving others.

SHARE:
Ben Infuso, a U.S. Army veteran who was a sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division, felt it was his duty to attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at Old City Hall on Friday morning.

Infuso, born in Toronto, joined the U.S. military shortly after a loved one had died in the early 1960s. In February of 1965, he left the service, and, a few months later, his unit was moved to Vietnam to fight in the war. Eight men in his unit died and more returned home scarred, both physically and mentally.

I felt like I was deserting them, because I was older and there were a lot of young kids there, he said. I need to remember them. Its a very important day for me.

Infuso was among the dozens of veterans and thousands of others who gathered at the Old City Hall cenotaph Friday to commemorate the sacrifice and service of the military.

Toronto mayor John Tory spoke at the ceremony, reminding the crowd of the enormous sacrifices made by those who served in The First World War, The Second World War, the Korean War, in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other conflicts and peacekeeping missions around the world.

Walter Stevens offers a salute at the grave of his great-grandfather Andrew Belcher who served in the Boer War and the First World War, ahead of a Remembrance Day Ceremony at Prospect Cemetery in Toronto on Friday.















Our veterans today are both young and old. We are here today to remember and honour them all, Tory said.

Contrary to the accepted wisdom that time heals all wounds, many of those who served long ago or recently were left with physical and emotional scars that most of us could hardly imagine.

The ceremony included a moment of silence, wreath-laying and a reading of the poem In Flanders Fields. Seventeen-year-old Gabrielle Bissainthe joined 95-year-old navy veteran Janet Watt to read the famous poem.

Bissainthe said she feels its her duty to remember those who served. She hopes to join the navy next year.

I want to remember those who served, like my father, signed up to give back to his country, she said. Im amazed by all the veterans. Today was really memorable.

Read more about:

SHARE:
KABULGermanys consulate in northern Afghanistan was attacked when a suicide car bomber rammed the compound, killing six people and wounding more than 120, Afghan police and the German foreign minister said Friday.

Four of the dead  two civilians and two unidentified bodies  were brought to the Balkh hospital, said Dr. Noor Mohammad Faiz. He said 128 people were wounded in the attack.

Germanys Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said six people had been confirmed dead. He added in a statement that all German and Afghan employees of the consulate remained unharmed.

The car exploded at the gate of the consulate in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, destroying the gate and wall around 11:10 p.m. Thursday, said Abdul Raziq Qaderi, head of security for Balkh province.

The blast destroyed the Mazar Hotel, where the consulate is based, and surrounding buildings. Residents said that casualties were contained because it of the late hour, though an ensuing gun battle raged for around five hours.

Steinmeier said fighting took place on the premises and inside the consulate.

The attack was carried out by heavily armed terrorists, he said, adding: The attackers were fought off by the consulates security personnel, Afghan security forces, and German, Georgian, Belgian and Latvian special forces stationed in the city as part of the Resolute Support mission.

President Ashraf Ghani called the attack a crime against humanity and all international laws.

The United Nations assistance mission in Afghanistan also condemned the attack. In a statement it said the injured include 19 women and 38 children.

Most of the injured suffered minor wounds from broken glass while those with serious injuries remain hospitalized, it said. More than 100 homes and shops were damaged, it said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility.

Germany has 983 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh province, as part of the NATO mission. Mazar-i-Sharif is the provincial capital and one of the richest and most important cities in Afghanistan.

The Talibans insurgency has spread from their southern heartland across the country in the past two years, following the withdrawal of most international combat troops. Attacks across the north have been increasing.

The Taliban statement from spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack was retaliation for recent airstrikes in the northern city of Kunduz, capital of the province of the same name.

A U.S. airstrike early this month killed dozens of people and is under investigation.

Read more about:

SHARE:
For a look at how sharply policy in Washington will change under the administration of Donald Trump, look no further than the environment.

Trump has called human-caused climate change a hoax. He has vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency in almost every form.

And in an early salvo against one of President Barack Obamas signature issues, Trump has named Myron Ebel of the business-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute to head his EPA transition team. Ebell has asserted that whatever warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution is modest and could be beneficial. A 2007 Vanity Fair profile of Ebell called him an oil industry mouthpiece.

Global warming may indeed be the sharpest example of how policy in Washington will change under a Trump administration. Obama has said his efforts to establish the United States as the global leader in climate policy are his proudest legacy.

But if Trump makes good on his campaign promises, experts in climate change policy warn, that legacy would unravel quickly. The world, then, may have no way to avoid the most devastating consequences of global warming, including rising sea levels, extreme droughts and food shortages, and more powerful floods and storms.

Trump has already vowed to cancel last years Paris climate agreement, which commits more than 190 countries to reduce their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution, and to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, Obamas domestic climate change regulations.

If Trump steps back from that, it makes it much less likely that the world will ever meet that target, and essentially ensures we will head into the danger zone, said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which produces global reports on the state of climate science.

Trump cannot legally block other countries from fulfilling their Paris agreement commitments, nor can he quickly or unilaterally erase Obamas climate rules.

But he can, as president, choose not to carry out the Paris plan in the United States. And he could so substantially slow or weaken the enforcement of Obamas rules that they would have little effect on reducing emissions in the United States, at least during Trumps term.

That could doom the Paris agreements goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions enough to stave off an atmospheric warming of at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the point at which, many scientists say, the planet will be locked into an irreversible future of extreme and dangerous warming.

Without the full participation of the United States, the worlds second-largest greenhouse gas polluter, after China, that goal is probably unattainable, even if every other country follows through on its pledges.

And, the experts say, without the participation of the United States, other governments are less likely to carry out their pledged emissions cuts.

That target is already extremely difficult to achieve, but it could be done with very hard, very diligent work by every single country, Oppenheimer said.

The election of Trump is likely to cast a pall over Marrakech, Morocco, where global negotiators have gathered for a 12-day conference to hash out the next steps for the Paris accord: how to verify commitments are being met, and how to pay for enforcement by poor countries that cannot afford the technology or energy disruptions.

Travelling in New Zealand, Secretary of State John Kerry was asked if he still planned to attend the conference, given the results of the election.

Im absolutely going to Marrakech, perhaps even more important, he said. And I look forward to being there very, very much.

Pessimism appears to be warranted. Oppenheimer and other climate policy experts said all major emitters needed to take action in the near term to stave off the 3.6-degree increase.

Scientific reports released over the last two years have concluded that the measurable warming of the planet because of human activities has already begun. This year is on track to be the hottest on record, blasting past the previous records set in 2015 and 2014.

An analysis by Climate Interactive, a scientific think tank that provides data used by many governments, concluded that the policies by the United States would account for about 20 per cent of the expected greenhouse gas reductions under the Paris plan from 2016 to 2030. But absent the expected policy actions in the United States under the Trump administration, scientists at Climate Interactive said, the math of emissions reductions will be much more difficult to maintain.

Pessimists will find abundant support for despair this morning, John Sterman, a professor of system dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a Climate Interactive analysis on Wednesday morning.

With Mr. Trump in the Oval Office and Republican majorities in both houses, Sterman wrote, there is little hope that the Clean Power Plan will survive in the Supreme Court or for federal action to meet the U.S. commitment under the Paris accord. Worse, other key emitter nations  especially India  now have little reason to follow through on their Paris pledges: If the U.S. wont, why should developing nations cut their emissions?

The Clean Power Plan is the ambitious centrepiece of Obamas climate change legacy and the key to his commitment under the Paris accord. At its heart is a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to curb planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants. If enacted, the rules could transform the U.S. electricity sector, close hundreds of coal-fired plants and usher in the construction of vast new wind and solar farms. The plan is projected to cut U.S. power plant emissions 32 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.

But the program is currently under litigation by 28 states and more than 100 companies, and it is expected to go before the Supreme Court as early as next year.

Trump and other Republicans have attacked the Clean Power Plan as a war on coal. As president, Trump would not have the legal authority to unilaterally undo the regulations, which were put forth by the EPA under a provision of the 1970 Clean Air Act.

However, Trump could target the rules by appointing an industry-friendly justice to the Supreme Court and then refusing to defend the plan when it goes before the court.

He could also direct the EPA to reissue the plan to be extremely friendly to industry. Such a move would also be subject to lawsuits by environmental advocates, which would further drag out the process. And in concert with congressional Republicans, he could decimate the EPAs budget, crippling its rule-making capacity.

They may still have to have a regulation, but they dont have to do it the way the Obama administration did it, said Jeff Holmstead, a former EPA official in the George W. Bush administration. And in the meantime, those suits often go on for years and years.

In China, the worlds largest greenhouse gas polluter, climate change officials said they intended to continue with plans to cut carbon emissions regardless of Trumps plans. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has vowed under the Paris agreement that Chinese emissions will drop after 2030, and that China will put in place a national system next year to force companies to pay a fee for their carbon pollution.

Chinas attitude toward low-carbon development, as President Xi Jinping has said when he met with Secretary of State Kerry earlier, is that tackling climate change is not something anybody asks us to do, Chai Qimin, a Chinese negotiator, said in an emailed response from the Marrakech talks. Its what we want to do.

But in India, the worlds third-largest greenhouse gas polluter, the election of Trump has raised doubts about a willingness to move forward. Under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, pledged that rich countries would mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poor countries make the transition to cleaner forms of energy. Indian officials have made clear that their steps to cut emissions will depend on financial aid from rich countries, but Trump has also vowed to cut all global warming payments.

Read more about:

SHARE:
WASHINGTON  Departing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid lashed out at Donald Trump on Friday as a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fuelled his campaign with bigotry and hate.

The Nevada Democrat said in a statement that If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.

Reid said white nationalists, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Islamic State extremist group are celebrating Trumps election, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear. That does not feel like America, Reid said.

Absent from the statement was any note of conciliation or a congratulatory olive branch.

The 76-year-old Reid is retiring at the end of this year after five terms, so unlike other congressional Democrats he has no imperative to try to make nice with Trump. That position allows him to give voice to bolder sentiments than other Democratic leaders who may need to try to work with Trump.

Reids replacement, New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, has had little to say about Trump so far, but he did congratulate him in a phone call and a brief statement. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi also offered congratulations and the prospect of working together on an infrastructure and jobs bill.

For Democratic leaders who have spent months campaigning for Democrat Hillary Clinton and against Trump, his election now presents a challenge on several levels, including whether or how to try to reach out to him. Reid doesnt have to deal with such considerations and instead on Friday aimed harsh parting shots at Trump, whom hed spent months denouncing on the Senate floor.

Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans, Reid said. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

Trumps election could also jeopardize a $100 billion plan launched by his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton seven years ago to help poor countries to cope with climate change, delegates at U.N. talks said Friday.

Trump vowed during his campaign to withdraw U.S. tax dollars from U.N. global warming programs designed to help vulnerable countries shift to cleaner energy and adapt to rising seas and other impacts of climate change.

The immediate worry for delegates at U.N. climate talks in Morocco was what Trump's election means for the Obama administration's pledge of $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, a key U.N. climate fund. Only $500 million of that pledge has been disbursed so far.

"That could be worrisome, as that money was never approved through the U.S. Congress and we now have a president who is unwilling to put that type of money out there," said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the chief negotiator for Congo and chairman of a group of least developed countries.

The Green Climate Fund pledges are part of a wider effort by rich countries to mobilize $100 billion annually for poor countries, announced by Clinton in 2009 when she was U.S. secretary of state. The plan calls for scaling up financing to that level by 2020. So far rich countries say they're about two-thirds there, though many developing countries challenge that assessment.

Climate activists are calling on rich countries to raise their contributions, fearing that withdrawing U.S. funds could have a domino effect.

"The U.S. is supposed to be the leader in raising this $100 billion," said Lidy Nacpil of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice. "So if the U.S. is not going to give, why will the other countries give?"

Trump told an oil industry conference in North Dakota in May that he would "cancel" last year's landmark Paris Agreement on climate change "and stop all payments of the United States tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs."

Many negotiators in Morocco hoped Trump didn't really mean what he said.

"There will be a distinction between campaign policies and real policies," said Chinese negotiator Gu Zihua. "We should still wait and see what kind of measures the U.S. will take on climate change."

Meanwhile, president-elect Donald Trump is promising a busy day assembling his government  but isnt sharing any details.

The celebrity businessman was holed up in Trump Tower Friday morning meeting with senior staff members. He tweeted that he had a busy day planned in New York.

He added that he will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!

But Trumps staff has not offered any guidance as to what on the president-elects schedule in the coming days.

On Thursday, he broke with tradition and did not bring the travelling transition press pool  a group of reporters who follow the presidents movements  on his trip to Washington to meet with President Barack Obama and congressional leaders.

The budding new alliance between Trump and congressional Republicans hides a tougher reality: Even with unified GOP control of Washington, the president-elects priorities may have trouble getting through Congress.

And in some cases Republicans themselves might be the barrier.

Among the issues are Trumps promises to build a border wall and restricting immigration from terror-stricken nations. Dont count on Senate Democrats to go along, and they will effectively wield veto power in many cases.

And theres repealing the nations health care law, which will take painstaking and potentially lengthy negotiations to come up with a solution.

Read more about:

SHARE:
NEW YORKThe election is over, so what about all those frayed relationships among loved ones?

Mothers and sons, sisters and brothers, friends unfriended  its been tough for some on opposing sides who must now figure out the way forward. They wonder what their ties will feel like a month from now. A year. What about the holidays?

Leigh Anne OConnor in Manhattan already has her answer, and her heart broke.

My dad just called and said he is not coming for Thanksgiving, she said Thursday. I cried last night when we hung up.

He supported president-elect Donald Trump, along with one of her sisters and other relatives. She did not.

He got into a discussion on Facebook with a friend who will be at Thanksgiving and he also read something my oldest daughter wrote against our family members who supported Trump, OConnor explained. My mom was always liberal. She died 12 years ago. Things would be different if she was still alive.

In Los Angeles, Tonya McKenzie said she expects her big brother to show up for turkey despite their political differences. She has always looked up to him but anticipates a new level of awkwardness after he went on a few social media rampages disparaging Hillary Clinton.

Until then, McKenzie said they had been able to thoughtfully agree and disagree on specific issues and traits they liked about each presidential candidate, with the siblings often crossing party lines together.

McKenzie wound up voting for Clinton. Though she likely knows the answer, Im scared to ask him who he voted for, said McKenzie, who would rather dwell on more positive times.

For Clinton supporter Taz Loomans, who lives in Portland, Ore., her ache comes over her relationship with her older sister. Like McKenzie, she hasnt asked whether her loved one  both are 40-somethings  cast a vote for Trump. Loomans doesnt want to seal that in words.

Were a Muslim family. She hadnt been with Trump the whole time. She was really appalled at his candidacy and his racism. But at the end she said she hated Hillary more and was really suspicious of Hillary, Loomans said.

Their bond is battered but not broken, she said, and shes not sure how her feelings will settle. Theyve spoken since the election.

I love my sister. Im not going to disown her or stop speaking to her, but Ive always looked up to her and her opinions. If she disagreed with me, it always made me think, Oh maybe she has a point,  Loomans said. But this kind of takes that away. Shes not on a pedestal anymore.

The election cycle has clearly left some families battered, along with Amanda Rose in Louisville, Ky.

Shes a professional matchmaker.

I had one man that refused to continue to date a lady that voted for Trump. I have heard of countless conflicts with dates because of the election. Its been so bad Ive decided not to set up any more dates till next week, Rose said Thursday.

Its a husband-wife thing for Bill Seavey in Cambria, Calif. Shes from Canada and a Trump voter. He was for Clinton.

There were some hurt feelings that we wouldnt accept each others viewpoints, he said. Were civil people, love each other and we agreed to disagree. But Im glad the election is over!

Read more about:

SHARE:
Before anyone writes off the United States or throws their hands up in despair, its important to note that voter turnout was low at about 50 per cent, with total votes split almost down the middle. That means about a quarter of the voting-age population made Donald Trump the 45th president, many while holding their noses.

There are racists and women haters (more likely women fearers) in the U.S. There is systemic racism, sexism and homophobia. But those evils dont define our American cousins. There is a fundamental tenet in crisis communication  that a frightened or angry person will not hear you until that person believes he or she has been heard and understood.

There are a lot of frightened or angry people in the U.S. who dont believe they are heard or understood. Millions didnt vote, resulting in a lower voter turnout than for the significantly less dramatic 2012 election because they felt their vote  their voice  wouldnt matter. Many voted to throw a brick through the window so someone would pay attention.

That same feeling is what gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguably now more important than ever. Its why LGTB lives matter now more than ever, why girls and women matter now more than ever, why immigrants matter now more than ever. Many more people now fear they wont be heard.

Another relevant principle of communication is that its human nature to group people by archetype. Consequently, to many, Hillary Clinton seems the archetypal career politician. Despite a lifetime of public service and status as arguably the most qualified candidate to ever seek the presidency, she is seen by many to carry all the baggage of every career politician: insincere, scripted, self-serving, dishonest and worse. There is plenty of recent reputational research that shows people have never held politicians in lower regard.

In contrast, Trump is seen by many as the archetypal iconoclast. Iconoclasts get away with a lot, when the people are in the mood for an iconoclast.

Many of us failed to hear  though there were voices calling it out  that political leadership has lost its credibility with much of the U.S. population. By focusing on Trumps iconoclastic baggage  his bombastic, unscripted, rude and even abhorrent behaviour, Clinton inadvertently validated his bone fides. They wanted an iconoclast. By focusing on her own vast political experience, she supported her opponents narrative.

The voting public also did its part, with most voters isolating themselves in their own media bubbles that reinforced what they already believe. That is also well established communication science. Cognitive bias. We are more likely to believe sources that confirm our existing beliefs, and to have disproportionate confidence in their veracity.

Consequently, Clintons supporters could not believe that rational people could actually believe what they were reading in alt-right media. But it is human nature that Trumps supporters would believe that which confirms their beliefs that Clinton is a career politician with all the vagaries that come with that.

In retrospect, its easy to see this election as a slow-motion train wreck. The track was broken and the engine was chugging along oblivious to the danger.

Of course, none of that matters now. Trump is the president-elect. The people who wanted his kind of disruption have it, and the people who wanted a continuation of the progress of the Obama administration were largely unaware of the frustrations they werent listening to, wrapped up in their own cognitive bias.

This is not the end of the United States. Its not the end of decency or social justice. Rather than giving in to despair, it will be much more useful for Clintons supporters to be involved, to live their values, help those who need help, learn from this and try to understand everyone.

They dont have to agree with them, or be happy with the outcome. But we ignore, dismiss, minimize or ascribe one-dimensional motives to those who feel disenfranchised at our own peril. Everyone needs to feel heard, or they will start throwing bricks.

Geoffrey Rowan is a Toronto-based media and crisis communication consultant.

SHARE:
How impressive were those protests across the U.S. on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after Trump won? And he hasnt even deported anyone yet. Imagine what will happen when he does.

I say this not just as someone moved by any political activity that looks beyond casting a vote. Impressive because they have already answered a question that hung in the air once the result was known: What kind of opposition or resistance makes sense for the Trump years ahead?

That question floated up instantly, like a Macys balloon, because Trumps forces now control all the levers of formal political power: presidency, congress and courts. His cabinet  Giuliani, Christie, Newt  will be even more of a clown car than the Republican primaries. Theyll have the means to roll back every advance in minority rights, abortion rights, gender rights, health care, climate change  with nothing in the formal political processes to hinder them.

The only answer I can think of is a popular resistance movement coming from the ground up, mobilizing huge, diverse numbers in the streets and ready to engage  this is crucial  non-violently, in civil disobedience if necessary. It may find supporters in the formal system, like Sanders or Warren, but theyre shackled in what they can do in those roles for two years at least.

Why nonviolent? Because its idiotic to imagine taking on U.S. state power in the forms of police and military  not to mention overarmed right-wing militias and survivalist groups, who are significant forces there. But the difference is: militias consider themselves a permanently besieged minority.

A mass movement of the  I dont even know what to call it: left, progressives, people of good will  has to assume it implicitly represents or can win over the large majority of its fellow citizens. That was assumed by every great mass movement in U.S. history: civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, union drives in the 1930s, even the abolitionists of the 19th century. And they eventually did.

In fact, there is majority support for most advances the Trumpians want to destroy. So the appeal to the broader society will be based on a moral challenge, as it was on issues like slavery, womens suffrage and civil rights.

Does this mean denying the legitimacy of the democratic voting process? Less its legitimacy than its limits. Clinton won a majority of votes, though not the presidency. The majority doesnt deserve to have its views trampled on because of a peculiar electoral system. For that matter, minorities dont deserve to be trampled on by misogynists or racists, no matter how the vote went.

I mentioned this to a despairing American friend who called the day after. Yes, he said bleakly, but I dont see the experience or vision needed to organize a campaign of mass resistance. Hes right, civil rights didnt just spring from Martin Luther Kings head; it developed over many decades. The antiwar movement of the 1960s drew on the 1930s.

But todays protesters have also been gathering insight, through Occupy and Black Lives Matter  or from the Chicago Teachers Union, which allied with parents and others to literally fight City Hall on school closures and privatization. Even when we lose, we win, said Madeleine Parent, Canadas pioneer labour feminist, because we learn something.

What have they learned? Take the role of social media, which one of them says will be crucial in building a mass anti-Trump movement. Theyve learned you dont achieve much by signing online petitions but you can find like-minded others and fix a meeting with them, to talk or march, quickly and flexibly.

Political alliances matter too. King played off Southern racist governors against a liberal president, JFK. That obviously wont apply with Trump; hes the racist. But there are elected officials to ally with, like mayors in cities such as New York.

At its best what could emerge is a revitalization of U.S. politics in a sense beyond mere elections. Everyone in the U.S. likes to talk about making a revolution  from Reagan to late night infomercials  but this one might prepare for the political revolution that Bernie Sanders promoted: getting money out of official politics and democracy back in.

You have to start somewhere. As anarchist labour leader Joe Hill said before his impending death by firing squad: Dont mourn, organize. Theres really nothing else to do at this point anyway.

Rick Salutins column appears every Friday.

Read more about:

SHARE:
Donald Trump says hell tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement if he cant renegotiate a better deal. That has spooked Canadians.

We should relax. We should take a deep breath. Depending on how its done, getting rid of NAFTA could work for us.

Even without NAFTA, goods could continue to flow tariff-free back and forth across the Canada-U. S. border. Thats because the original Canada-U.S. Free Agreement of 1989, which eliminated most of these tariffs, has never been repealed.

It was superseded by NAFTA in 1994. But it continues to exist. And should NAFTA be axed, it will automatically come into play again.

Thats the view of trade experts, such as Osgoode Halls Gus Van Harten. It is also the view of the government of Canada, as expressed through its ambassador to Washington, David MacNaughton.

So what are the differences between the FTA and NAFTA? One is that the earlier deal doesnt include Mexico  which means that, so far at least, it is not on the U.S. president-elects hit list.

The second is that, unlike NAFTA, the original Canada-U. S. pact doesnt allow foreign corporations to challenge Canadian laws.

This so-called investor-state dispute settlement mechanism has turned out to be the most controversial part of the three-nation trade and investment pact. American corporations have used it to override Canadian environmental and regulatory laws that they said interfered with profitability.

A 2015 study found that of the completed NAFTA disputes involving Canada, roughly half were decided in favour of the corporations.

Others never made it to the dispute-resolution stage because Canadian governments caved in.

By contrast, no Canadian corporate attempt to challenge U.S. laws under NAFTA has ever succeeded.

In short, a U.S. decision to pull out of NAFTA could benefit this country. Technically, Canada and Mexico could continue on with the pact. But it was designed around the giant U.S. market and makes little sense without it.

The Canadian government has boldly announced it is willing to renegotiate NAFTA if thats what Trump wants. MacNaughton told reporters this week that Ottawa would particularly like to address Americas persistent bias against importing Canadian softwood lumber.

Good luck on that one. The original FTA was supposed to clean up the softwood lumber mess. It didnt. Neither did NAFTA. Americas politically connected lumber producers have successfully scuppered free trade in this commodity. They are not likely to give up.

More to the point, a renegotiated NAFTA is likely to go badly for Canada. Trump has campaigned and won on a promise to deliver trade deals that better protect American workers. If he pays any attention at all to Canada (and with luck he wont) he will want visible gains from this country in any renegotiated deal.

Trade is not supposed to be a zero-sum game but in some instances  particularly when one of the players wants to demonstrate dominance  it is.

What can we do?

First, take Trump seriously. He promised to renegotiate or scrap NAFTA. We should assume he means it. He is not likely to give the back of his hand to the working people of Americas rust belt who assured his victory.

And he can do so unilaterally  even if free-traders in the new, Republican-dominated Congress object.

As the New York Times reported earlier this year, U.S. presidents may have to win Congressional approval to pass new trade deals. But thanks to a series of laws passed over the 20th century, they need no such approval to scrap or override existing trade deals.

If Trump wants to slap a punitive tariff on imported goods, he can legally do so.

If he wants the U.S. out of NAFTA, he need only give six months notice.

There is no guarantee that the president-elect wont turn his rage against Canada. He may decide to scrap the original FTA as well as NAFTA. If so, Canada will have little choice but to resurrect some version of John A. Macdonalds national policy of tariff-protected industrialization.

But if Trump kills just NAFTA, that wont be so bad. It hasnt been a good deal for us either.

Thomas Walkoms column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Read more about:

SHARE:
Donald Trump talks tough. He complains that the United States is very weak and vows to Make America Great Again. He wants to go back to a lost time, decades ago, when we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody.

It sounds like a prescription for American assertiveness, even aggression. But its just as likely that the United States under Trump will end up being a less engaged presence around the world. His rise may be a sign of American weakness, not strength.

Its not clear what exactly Trumps foreign policy  to the extent he has one  amounts to. Its made even more complicated by the fact that he promises to be deliberately unpredictable. Keeping your enemies guessing is part of his art-of-the-deal negotiating strategy. The problem is it keeps your friends guessing as well.

What is clear is that the people who voted for Trump want him to focus on fixing domestic problems. They care about nation-building at home, not in messy foreign hotspots. They want a stronger economy, more jobs, and investment in their own communities  not in Syria or Afghanistan.

So its no surprise that Trump has called into question international arrangements that depend on the U.S. backstopping allies in both Europe and Asia, and picking up much of the cost.

In Europe, hes said NATO is obsolete and extremely expensive and questioned whether the U.S. would come to its allies defence unless he was satisfied they had paid their full share of the bill. No wonder NATO members close to Russia  like the Baltic states  are trembling at the prospect of being cut loose.

Thats made worse by Trumps notoriously chummy attitude toward Russias Vladimir Putin. It turned out this week that Russian officials had been in touch with Trumps team during the election campaign, despite denials all along. If President Trump does go wobbly on Washingtons commitment to NATO and cozies up to Moscow, that will embolden Putin to expand Russias influence to the west and south.

In Asia, too, Trump questions expensive U.S. military commitments to Japan and South Korea. He even suggested they get their own nuclear weapons to defend themselves. All of sudden China looks more reasonable, and it would be no surprise if Tokyo and Seoul move closer to Beijing. The Philippines has already headed in that direction.

That would end the United States so-called pivot towards Asia and open the door to China expanding its influence in its own neighborhood. Suddenly, a Trump-led America would watch as both Russia and China get more assertive at its expense.

Trump also promises to rip up trade deals like NAFTA and impose 45-per-cent tariffs on imports from China. If he actually did such a thing, China would undoubtedly retaliate, leading to a dangerous trade war. Given how enmeshed the U.S. and Chinese economies are by now, American business will no doubt put enormous pressure on him not to carry through. But just the possibility makes business very nervous, with good reason.

Then there are Trumps even more provocative remarks on world affairs  including most alarmingly his casual talk about possibly using nuclear weapons. He has also said he would move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a shift that would enrage Arab countries. And of course he promises to bomb Daesh (aka the Islamic State) and take the oil  whatever that means.

Its a combination of bombast, threats and ignorance, and its impossible to know exactly what it all adds up to. Trump almost certainly doesnt know himself, given how little attention hes paid to world affairs.

But on the face of it, it could well mean the U.S. will be so focused on rebuilding its own economy and undermining its commitments to allies that its rivals around the world will quickly enlarge their spheres of influence. Seventy years of Pax Americana  an international order anchored by the United States  will be called into question.

Tough-talking Trump may end up leaving the United States with a diminished role in the world.

Correction- Nov. 14, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Ukraine is a member of NATO. It is not.

Read more about:

SHARE:
Re: Citizens, not secrets, killed LRT, Letters Oct. 29

Re: Was the memo that killed the LRT deliberately misleading to city council? Opinion Oct. 26

Citizens, not secrets, killed LRT, Letters Oct. 29

The Scarborough Subway vs. LRT debate is about mobility equity for transit riders, not the seamless or major modal shift advantages subway advocates proclaim as paramount.

To invest all of our resources in a one-stop subway while denying transit riders the access to rapid transit they could have with a 24-stop LRT network, is unjust.

Take a look at who is on the TTC bus in Scarboroughs outer neighbourhoods, university and college campuses. Do they deserve to wait another 30 years for rapid transit? Definitely not.

Brenda Thompson, Scarborough Transit Action

This really stinks. The dishonesty, the manipulation of and lack of respect for council, the ongoing saga of concocted numbers, all the way down the line to the shoddy treatment of transit riders in Scarborough.

Whether it is cost and speed of construction, ridership, development potential or access and walkability, an LRT system of rapid transit in Scarborough trumps the single-stop subway extension. But thanks to the gerrymandering by our political leaders, we get stiffed with crowded buses and the RT.

Its pretty clear that Andy Byford gets his marching orders from the mayor. What is not clear is whether there will be any investigation of this fraud and holding the players to account.

Moya Beall, Scarborough

Was the memo that killed the LRT deliberately misleading to city council? Opinion Oct. 26

Finally an informative article by someone who is Toronto transportation knowledgeable and has no axe to grind. R. Michael Warren expressed the facts clearly and concisely for Toronto residents to take note. Halleluya. About time that someone took on our gullible politicians who vote only on what suits them and not for the good of Toronto.

Chavazelleth (Lil) Ben-Arie, Toronto

SHARE:
Re: Allan Hawcos new Frontier, Nov. 5

Allan Hawcos new Frontier, Nov. 5

Exciting news! I hope Hawco has read Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society 1670-1870, by Sylvia Van Kirk, associate professor of Canadian history and womens studies at U of T.

It is an engrossing history of the importance of country wives as the Indian women were called. The book is illustrated with many photographs and appropriate maps. Without these women and their expertise there would be no fur trade.

Their knowledge of the land, customs and wildlife was highly regarded by the fur traders and essential to the success of their trading. Their marriages resulted in many warm and enduring family unions, which marriages only foundered with the arrival of white women in the 1820s and 1830s.

The fur traders of the Northwest and Hudsons Bay Companies were not all conflict and so much blood and drama. The women were highly regarded and cherished.

Charles Ross, writing to his relatives of his wife Isabella Mainville, whose mother had been an Ojibwa: I have as yet said nothing about my wife, whence you will probably infer that I am rather ashamed of her  in this, however, you would be wrong. She is not indeed exactly fitted to shine at the head of a noblemans table, but she suits the sphere she has to move in better than any such toy . . . as to beauty (she is) quite as comely as her husband.

Jennifer McKinney, Toronto

SHARE:
European regulators have given PTC Therapeutics (PTCT) a five-year regulatory reprieve on its Duchenne muscular dystrophy drug Translarna, sending the company's stock price soaring by more than 80% in premarket trading Friday morning.

The conditional approval of Translarna in Europe should be renewed, conditioned on PTC Therapeutics conducting another randomized, placebo-controlled study, according to the recommendation released Friday by a committee of drug reviewers from the European Medicines Agency.

The proposed study of Translarna in Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients will take five years to conduct, but in what is great news for PTC Therapeutics, the company will be allowed to sell the drug during that period.

For that reason, PTC Therapeutics shares nearly doubled in price to $11.80 in Friday premarket trading.

Translarna is designed to treat Duchenne caused by a so-called "nonsense" mutation. The drug targets a different set of Duchenne patients than those treated by Sarepta Therapeutics' (SRPT) newly approved Exondys.

PTC Therapeutics secured conditional approval in Europe based on a phase III study which failed to demonstrate a conclusive benefit for Duchenne patients. Most recently, the company had warned investors that European regulators were leaning towards not renewing Translarna's conditional approval, so Friday's decision came as a surprise.

"Although the data available to date continue to indicate that Translarna slows the progression of the disease and there are no major safety concerns, the Committee considered that further comprehensive data are still needed to fully confirm that the benefit-risk balance of the medicine is positive," European regulators said Friday.

The willingness of European regulators to be flexible with Translarna should also bode well for Sarepta as it moves forward with plans to seek marketing clearance there.

Adam Feuerstein writes regularly for TheStreet. In keeping with company editorial policy, he doesn't own or short individual stocks, although he owns stock in TheStreet. He also doesn't invest in hedge funds or other private investment partnerships. Feuerstein appreciates your feedback; click here to send him an email.
Editors' pick: Originally published Nov. 11.

So, you're an avowed #NeverTrump-er and you can't want to follow celebrities like Lena Dunham, Cher, and Amy Schumer and bid the U.S. "good-bye" and say "bonjour" to our friendly neighbor to the north, Canada.

That's fine. The U.S. is a free country, and pulling up stakes and crossing borders is well within your rights. But just don't slap a maple leaf flag on your rear bumper and steer toward Moose Jaw or Banff without a good moving plan in place. Just a few missteps will have you back in the land of the stars and stripes before you can say "hoser, eh?"

To get you heading north of the border, TheStreet spoke with several experts on moving to, and living in, Canada. Here's their advice:

Know what you're getting into - "Ask yourself why you want to move and be honest," says Donna Duncan, a small business owner who holds dual-citizenship in both the U.S. and Canada. "Canada is in many ways similar to the United States, and Canadians are just frustrated with their political system and economy. The big difference is culture and opportunity." Duncan says Canadians have more of a sense of community and less tolerance for self-serving individualism than U.S. citizens do. "They value humanitarianism, moderation and conformity," she says. "While friendly and kind, some outsiders might consider Canadians boring." Duncan also notes that because Canada is a much smaller population and economy, and because their immigration policies are more open, and job opportunities are fewer. "If you want to move, ask yourself why," she adds. "You won't necessarily escape your problems by moving to Canada. You might just be swapping one set for another."

What is the Canadian real estate market like? - It really depends on what kind of housing situation you're looking for, says Michelle Farber Ross, managing partner and broker at Toronto-based MMD Realty. "If you're looking for new construction, for example, expect to pop down a 10% deposit, and 50% through the course of the build," says Ross. "And, you'll be expected to show you have the full 100% to close." Ross adds that Canadian banks have "tightened up" lending for home loan borrowers. "Banks used to lend 90% ten years ago, but the highest amount that is obtainable now is 70%, and they look closely at your income and your ability to pay," she says. Right now, the Canadian real estate market is competitive and the prices are well above the historical means and averages, Ross notes. "Vancouver and Toronto are both over-priced, due to the Chinese and Eastern European money coming in, because they wanted out of China and Eastern Europe. The average per square feet for a house in Vancouver is around $800 -$1000 , and that's in a high-tax environment and less-desirable climate than oceanfront property in Florida and California, which go for $600 per square foot."

What's the tax situation? - If you like paying taxes, Canada is the place for you. According to Dale A. Walters, a certified financial planner, and author of the book, Taxation of Americans in Canada: Are You At Risk?, as a rule of thumb, a U.S. citizen moving to Canada will pay between 33% to 50% more in income tax. "In addition, there are high sales taxes and those sales taxes apply to services, not just goods," Walters says. "Also, in some cases, the person leaving the U.S. may be subject to an exit tax." Walters strongly advises Americans considering a move to Canada to discuss the financial implications with a trusted money manager and/or accountant."

Do I need to beat the rush? - You bet. According to Roxana Baiceanu, communications specialist with Canada-based Point2Homes, traffic data collected on the website shows that in the last 48 hours (in the two days after the election) the number of visits from the U.S. landing on Canadian listing pages jumped by 700%. "The most targeted cities were Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Windsor, and Cape Breton," Baiceanu says.

Here's what Point2Homes found in its 48-hour data, from Tuesday, November 8, to Thursday, November 10:

- Searches targeting homes for sale in Ontario went up by 900%, and rental listings saw a bigger surge of 1,120%.

- Toronto and Ottawa listing pages saw visits jump by 515% and 275%, respectively.

- Montreal homes for sale recorded a 430% increase in searches.

- Searches for Vancouver homes for sale went up by 335%.

- Visits landed on Cape Breton listing pages rose by 600%.

What's the job market like? - The answer depends on your current line of work, says Ian Wright, a Canadian citizen, and founder of MoverDB.com, an international moving comparison site. "For people who work in natural resource industries the job market is not great due to low global prices for most products such oil," he says. "The technology industry is doing quite well in Canada, but Americans moving to Canada should be prepared for substantially lower wages than comparable jobs in the U.S."

How can you make the move easier? - If you really do just want to drop everything and go - and you have enough money stashed away to get the task completed, look for turn-key furnishing services like Furnishr to set you up in an empty home and make it "move in ready." Furnishr, which has locations in many Canadian cities, says its service is a "natural" for U.S. citizens who are in a rush to get to Canada. "They can leave their furniture behind and just pack their personal belongs," the firm states in an email to TheStreet. "Choose one of our room designs and tell us when and where they are moving, and we'll deliver and assemble all brand new furniture in your new home."

In the end, perhaps the most critical question an American whose bags are already packed is this: "Will I be welcome in Canada?"

"Yes, I think on the whole Canada is very welcoming to immigrants from all countries, including the United States," Wright says. "However, if you do make the move be prepared to have to explain American politics and voting patterns on a pretty regular basis."

"Canadians, on the whole, are pretty baffled that Donald Trump could get elected President," Wright adds.
The following companies are subsidiares of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.: 2235158 Alberta Limited, A.J. Amer Agency, AHC Digital LLC, AIX Limited, AJG Coal LLC, AJG Financial Services LLC, AJG Meadows LLC, AJG North America ULC, AJG RCF LLC, AJGRMS of Louisiana LLC, ARM RE Ltda., AVIATION INSURANCE SERVICES, AVRECO, Ace IRM Insurance Broking Group, Acumus Holdings Limited, Acumus Interco Limited, Acumus Ltd, Adams & Associates International, Adaptive Marketing LLC, Adco General Corporation, Advanced Benefit Advisors, Aequus Trade Credit, Affinity Marketing Group, Ahrold Fay Rosenberg, Aires Consulting Group, Alesco Risk Management Services Limited, Alize Limited, Allied Claims Administration Inc., Alternative Market Specialists, Altman & Cronin Benefit Consultants, American Freedom Carriers Inc., American Security Services Corp., American Wholesalers Underwriting Ltd, Andrew-Anthony Insurance Agency, Anthony Hodges Consulting Limited, Antrobus Investments Limited, AquaSurance, Argentis, Argentis Financial Group Limited, Argentis Financial Management Limited, Argus Benefits, Armstrong/Robitaille/Riegle, Artex (SAC) Limited, Artex Cedar Hill, Artex Corporate Services (Malta) Limited, Artex Corporate Services Limited, Artex Holdings (Gibraltar) Limited, Artex Holdings (Malta) Limited, Artex Insurance (Guernsey) PCC Limited, Artex Insurance (Tennessee) PCCIC Inc., Artex Insurance Brokers (Malta) PCC Limited, Artex Insurance ICC Limited, Artex Intermediaries Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Bermuda) Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Cayman) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Gibraltar) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Guernsey) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (International) Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Malta) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (UK) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions Inc., Arthur J Gallagher (Norway) Holdings AS, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (AUS) Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (Bermuda) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (Illinois), Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Insurance Brokers of California Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher (Aus) Pty Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (Bermuda) Holding Partnership, Arthur J. Gallagher (Life Solutions) Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (U.S.) LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher (UK) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Asesoria S.A.C., Arthur J. Gallagher Australasia Holdings Pty Ltd., Arthur J. Gallagher Brokerage & Risk Management Services LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Broking (NZ) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Financial Services Professionals Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Group Quebec ULC, Arthur J. Gallagher Holdings (UK) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Insurance Brokers Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Latin America LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Management (Bermuda) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Real Estate Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services (Hawaii) Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services of Utah Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher School Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Service Company LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Services (UK) Ltd, Ashmore & Associates Insurance Agency, Atlantic Risk Management Corp., Atrex Insurance (Cayman) SPC Limited, Avantek Pty Ltd, Axe Insurance PCC Limited, BIS Insurance Services, Baker - Tillys employment benefits solutions, Ballard Benefit Works, Bankers Financial Benefits, Barmore Insurance Agency, Behnke & Co. Inc., Bellisle Pty Ltd, Belmont Associates Consultants, Belmont Insurance Holdings Limited, Belmont International, Belmont International Limited, Benefit Development Group, Benefit Management Group, BenefitLink Resource Group, Benefits Planning & Insurance Agency, Benefits Unlimited, Bennett & Shade Co., Bergvall Marine, Bergvall Marine A.S., Besselman & Little Agency, Big Savings Insurance Agency Inc., Blenheim Park Ltd, Blenheim Park Services Limited, Blue Holdings Pty Ltd, Blue Horizon Insurance Services, Blue Water Benefits, BluePeak Advisors, Blueleaf Consulting Pty Ltd., Bluewater Incorporated Cell Insurance Company, Bollinger Inc., Bollinger Insurance Services Inc., Bowen Miclette Britt & Merry of Arkansas Inc., Brendis & Brendis, Brim AB, Broker Benefit Services, Brokerage Professionals, Brown Hobbs & McMurray Insurance, Bultman/Bell Associates Inc., Burkwald & Associates, Burns-Fazzi Brock & Associates, Bushong Insurance Associates, C&B Consulting Group, CGM Gallagher Insruance Brokers (Trinidad & Tobago) Limited, CJM Solutions Inc., CMA Solutions LLC, Cairnstone Financial, California Insurance Center, Capital Bauer Insurance Agency, Capitol Benefits Group, Capsicum CRLA LLP, Capsicum Re Brasil Participacoes Ltda, Capsicum Re Latin America Corretora De Resseguros Ltda, Capsicum Reinsurance Brokers Bermuda Limited, Capsicum Reinsurance Brokers Miami Inc., Carefree Marketing Inc., Carpenter Cammack & Associates, Cashan & Co., Castle Insurance Associates, Centennial Insurance Agency, Charity First Insurance Services Inc., Charles Allen Agency, Charter Lakes Insurance Agency, Chris Schroeder Insurance, Christie-Phoenix, Cintran Claims Canada Limited, Classic Insurance Services, Cleaveland Insurance Group, Cohen & Lord Insurance Brokers, Cohn Financial Group, Coleman Group Holdings Limited, Coleman Holdings Limited, College and University Scholastic Excess Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Commercial Insurance Brokers, Complete Benefit Alliance, Complete Financial Balance, Complete Financial Balance Pty Ltd, Consolidated Casualty Specialties LLC, Construction Risk Solutions, Contego Underwriting Limited, Contego Underwriting Ltd, Continental Excess & Surplus, Convergence Risk Services Ltd, Copper Mountain Assurance Inc., Cornwall & Stevens Co., Corporate Benefit Advisors, Corporate Life Consultants, Countrywide Accident Assistance Limited, Coverdell & Company Inc., Coverdell Canada Corporation, Cowles and Connell, Craig M. Ferguson & Co., Crist Elliott Machette Insurance Services, Crombie Lockwood (NZ) Limited, Davis-Poston & Associates, Denman Consulting Services, Detlefs Johnson & Partners, DiBrina Group, Dickinson & Associates, Discount Development Services L.L.C., Discovery Benefit Solutions, Dodson-Bateman & Co., Donald P. Pipino Co. Ltd., E. S. Susanin Inc., EHE Holdings LLC, EHS Holdings Limited, Elantis Premium Funding (NZ) Limited, Elantis Premium Funding Limited, Elite Benefits Insurance Marketing Services, Employee Benefits Analysis Corp., Employee Benefits of The Carolinas, Encore Insurance & Bonding, Everett James, Evolution Risk Services Limited, Evolution Technology Services Limited, Evolution Underwriting Group, Evolution Underwriting Group Limited, Evolution Underwriting Limited, Excel Insurance Services, FYI Direct Canada Corporation, FYI Direct LLC, Farallone Pacific Insurance Services, Fenchurch Faris Limited, Fidelity Benefits & Insurance Services, Financial Profiles Inc., Finergy Solutions Pty Ltd, First Agency, First Iowa Insurance Agency, First Premium Inc., First Premium Insurance Group, Fish & Schulkamp, Fishermans Insurance Services, Foley Healthcare Limited, Fortress Financial Solutions Pty Ltd, Fortress Insurance LLC, Foundation Strategies, Fox Lawson & Associates, Franklin-Case Agency LLC, Fraser MacAndrew Ryan Limited, Friary Intermediate Limited, Fuller & O'Brien, G.S. Chapman & Associates Insurance Brokers, G.S. Levine Insurance Services, GBS (Australia) Holdings Pty Ltd, GBS Administrators Inc., GBS Insurance and Financial Services Inc., GBS Retirement Services Inc., GBS Specialty Markets LLC, GGB Finance 1 Limited, GGB Finance 2 Limited, GGB Finance 3 Limited, GGB Finance 4 Limited, GPL Assurance, GPL Assurance Inc., Gabor Insurance Services, Gale Smith & Co. Inc., Gallagher (Bermuda) Insurance Solutions Ltd., Gallagher - Grace/Mayer Insurance Agency, Gallagher Bassett Aires Inc., Gallagher Bassett Canada Inc., Gallagher Bassett Insurance Services Ltd., Gallagher Bassett International Ltd., Gallagher Bassett NZ Pty Ltd., Gallagher Bassett Services Inc. , Gallagher Bassett Services Pty Ltd., Gallagher Bassett Services Workers Compensation Victoria Pty Ltd., Gallagher Benefit Services (Canada) Group Inc., Gallagher Benefit Services (Holdings) Limited, Gallagher Benefit Services Inc., Gallagher Benefit Services Management Company Limited, Gallagher Benefit Services Pty Ltd, Gallagher Benefits Consulting Limited, Gallagher Bomford Couch Wilson, Gallagher Burgess, Gallagher Canada Acquisition Corporation, Gallagher Caribbean Group Limited, Gallagher Clean Energy LLC, Gallagher Communications Limited, Gallagher Community Clinic RPG LLC, Gallagher Consulting Ltda, Gallagher Corporate Services LLC, Gallagher Coyle, Gallagher CyberRisk, Gallagher Energy Risk Services Inc., Gallagher Fiduciary Advisors LLC, Gallagher Holdings (UK) Limited, Gallagher Holdings Bermuda Company Limited, Gallagher Holdings Four (UK) Limited, Gallagher Holdings Three (UK) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (Barbados) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Kitts & Nevis) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Lucia) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Vincent) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers Jamaica Limited, Gallagher International Cash Management s.r.l., Gallagher International Holdings (US) Inc., Gallagher Investment Advisors LLC, Gallagher Inwest Group, Gallagher Koster, Gallagher Lambert Group, Gallagher Madison Risk & Insurance Services, Gallagher Mauritius Holdings, Gallagher Mississippi Brokerage LLC, Gallagher RE Colombia Ltda Corredores de Reaseguros SA, Gallagher Risk & Reward Limited, Gallagher Risk Group LLC, Gallagher Risk Placements Pty Ltd, Gallagher SKS, Gallagher Service Center LLP, Gallagher-Tarantino, Galtney Group, Game Day Insurance Inc., Gardner & White Corp., Gardner Marine Agency, Garza Long Group, Gatehouse Consulting Limited, Gault Armstrong Kemble Pty Ltd, Gault Armstrong SARL, Giles Group, Giles Holdings Limited, Giles Insurance Brokers, Gillis Ellis & Baker Inc., Goodman Insurance Agency, Grandy Pratt Co., Greenseed Alternative Mangaers Platform Ltd, Grossman & Associates, Group Benefits of Arkansas, Group Insurance Associates, Gruppo Marcucci, HLG Holdings Limited, HMG-PCMS Limited, HPF Investments LLC, HR Owen Insurance Services Limited, Hagan Newkirk Financial Services, Hagedorn & Company, Hardman & Howell Benefits, Harlequin Insurance PCC Limited, Hartstein Associates Inc., Healthcare Professionals Purchasing Group LLC, Healthcare Risk Solutions, Heath Lambert Group Ltd., Heath Lambert Limited, Heath Lambert Overseas Limited, Heiser Insurance Agency, Henderson Phillips Fine Arts Insurance, Herbruck Alder & Co., Heritage Insurance Brokers (CI) Limited, Hesse & Partner AG, Hesse Consulting, Hexagon ICC Limited, Hexagon Insurance PCC Limited, Hill Chesson & Woody, Hogan Insurance Services, Home & Travel Limited, Honour Point Limited, Horseshoe Corporate Services Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services (Cayman) Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services USA Inc., Horseshoe ILS Services UK Ltd, Horseshoe Insurance Advisors US LLC, Horseshoe Insurance Advisory Ltd., Horseshoe Insurance Services Holdings Ltd, Horseshoe Insurance Services Holdings US Inc., Horseshoe Management (Gibraltar) Limited, Horseshoe Management (Ireland) Ltd, Horseshoe Management Ltd., Horseshoe PCC Limited, Horseshoe Re Limited, Horseshoe Services (Cayman) Ltd, Horseshoe Services (Pty) Ltd, Horton Insurance Agency, Housing Authorities Services Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Human Resource Management Systems, I-Protect Underwriting Pty Ltd, IBIS Advisors, IBS Reinsurance Singapore Pte Ltd, ILS Fund Services Ltd., ISG International, ITI Solutions, Igloo Insurance PCC Limited, Independent Benefit Services, Independent Fiduciary Services, Ink Underwriting Agencies Limited, InsSync Group Pty Ltd, Inspire Underwriting Limited, Instrat Insurance Brokers, Instrat Insurance Brokers Pty Ltd, Instrat Integration Holdco Pty Ltd, Insurance Acquisitions Holdings Limited, Insurance Associates Inc., Insurance Dialogue Limited, Insurance Dialogue Ltd., Insurance Plans Agency, Insurance Plus Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Insurance Point, Insurance Risk Managers of Missouri Inc., Insure My Villa Limited, Insure Pty Ltd, Integrated Healthcare Strategies, InterNational Insurance Group, InterPacific Underwriting Agencies, Intermountain Financial Benefits, Interstate Insurance Underwriters, JPGAC LLC, James F. Reda & Associates, James R. Weir Insurance Agency, Jenkins and Associates, Joe E. Martin Inc., John P. Woods Co. Inc., Jones Brown, Jones Brown Group Inc., Jones Brown Insurance Solutions Inc., Joseph Distel, Joseph James & Associates Insurance Agency, Just Landlords Insurance Services Ltd, KDC Associates, KRW Insurance Agency, Kahl Insurance Services, Kaler Carney Liffler & Co. Inc., Kane Group - Insurance Management Operations, Kelly Financial, Kent Kent & Tingle and RBS, Keyser Benefits Corp., Kingspark Enterprises Pty Ltd, L&R Benefits, LSG Insurance Partners, Learn About Money Limited, Lewis & Associates Insurance Brokers, Leystone Insurance & Financial, Life Plans Unlimited, Lincoln Financial Management, Longfellow Financial, Lucas Fettes Limited, Lucas Fettes and Partners Limited, Lutgert Insurance, MA Underwriting Pty Ltd, MDM Insurance Associates, MG Advanced Coal Technologies-1 LLC, MGA Insurance Services, MRS Holdings Ltd., Madison Scott & Associates, Managed Healthcare Solutions, Mannequin Insurance PCC Limited, Marchetti Robertson & Brickell Insurance, Marine Insurance Service, Martin Gordon & Jones Inc., McDowall Associates Human Resource Consultants, McIntyre Risk Management, McLean Insurance Agency, McNeary, McPherson Benefits Group, McRory & Co., Mecacem Insurance SPC Ltd, MedInsights Inc., Melton Insurance Associates, Memberworks Canada LLC, Merit Insurance, Metcom Excess, Metzler Bros. Insurance, Meyers-Reynolds & Associates, Mid America Group, Midwest Surety Services, Mike Henry Insurance Brokers, Mike Henry Insurance Brokers Limited, Mike Henry Insurance Funding Limited, Miller Buettner & Parrott, Miller-Harrison Insurance Services, Milne Alexander Pty Ltd, Minvielle & Chastanet Insurance Brokers, Monument Insurance (NZ) Limited, Monument Llc, Monument Premium Funding Limited, Mortgage Insurance Agency, Murphy Consultants, Mutual Insurance Services, NationAir Aviation Insurance, National Administration Co., National Ethics Association, National Transportation Adjusters, Nelson/Monarch Insurance Services, Nicoud Insurance Services, NiiS/Apex Group Holdings, Nonprofit Insurance Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Noraxis Capital Corp, Nordic Forsakring & Riskhantering AB, North Alabama Insurance, Nourse Insurance Brokers, O'Gorman & Young, OAMPS (UK) Limited, OAMPS Gault Armstrong Pty Ltd, OAMPS Limited, OAMPS Special Risks Ltd, Offshore Market Placements Limited, Optimum Talent, Orb Financial Services, Orb Financial Services Limited, Osprey Insurance Brokers Limited, Oval Group, Oval Healthcare Limited, Oval Insurance Broking Limited, Oval Limited, Oval Management Services Limited, Oxygen Insurance Managers, P2 Group, PEN Insurance Management Advisors Ltd, PT IBS Insurance Broking Service, Pacific Insurance Agency, Palmer Atlantic Insurance, Palmer Atlantic Insurance Ltd, Palmer Atlantic Risk Services Ltd., Park Row Associates, Parkstar Enterprises Pty Ltd, Parmia Pty Ltd, PartnerSource, Pastel Holding (NZ) Company, Pastel Holdings Pty Limited, Pastel Purchaser (NZ) Limited, Pastel Purchaser Pty Limited, Pavey Group Holdings (UK) Limited, Pavey Group Holdings Limited, Pavey Group Limited, Pearson Dunn Insurance Inc., Pen Underwriting Canada Limited, Pen Underwriting Group Pty. Ltd., Pen Underwriting Limited, Pen Underwriting Pty Ltd, Persing Dyckman & Toynbee Inc., Personal Advice Services Pty Ltd, Petty Burton Associates, Pointer Insurance Agency, Portmore Insurance Brokers (Wilshire) Limited, Portmore Insurance Brokers Limited, Potter-Holden & Co., Powell Insurance Agency, Premier Insurance Services Inc., Premier Risk Services, Premium Finance Corporation, Preston-Patterson, ProSource Financial, Professional Agents Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Professional Claims Managers, Proinova AB, Proinova Agency AB, Pronto California Agency LLC, Pronto California General Agency LLC, Pronto Florida Claims LLC, Pronto Florida General Agency LLC, Pronto Franchise LLC, Pronto General Agency Ltd, Pronto General Agency Management LLC, Pronto Holdco Inc., Pronto Holding California LLC, Pronto Holding Florida LLC, Pronto Insurance Agency of Laredo Inc., Pronto Premium Finance LLC, Property & Commercial Ltd., Property Insurance Initatives Limited, Property and Commercial Limited, Protected Insurance Company, Protection Plan Association Inc., Protek Group Limited, Providium Consulting Group, Ptarmigan Underwriting Agency Limited, Ptarmigan Underwriting UK Limited, Purple Bridge Claims Management Limited, Purple Bridge Finance Limited, Purple Bridge Group Limited, Purple Bridge Investments Limited, Purple Bridge Online Services Limited, Purple Bridge Publishing Limited, Quantum Underwriting Solutions Limited, Quillco 226 Limited, Quillco 227 Limited, R. L. Youngdahl & Associates, R.G. Speno Inc., R.W. Scobie, RA Rossborough (Guernsey) Ltd., RA Rossborough (Insurance Brokers) Ltd, REGENCY Group inc., RGA Referencing Limited, RGA Underwriting Limited, RIL Administrators (Guernsey) Ltd., RJ Dutton Inc., RSM Insurance Services Limited, Reassurance Holdings Inc., Rebholz Insurance Agency, Reid Manson Ltd., Reimbursement Services, Rentguard Limited, Reward Management Limited, Reynolds & Rodar Insurance Group, Riley & Associates, Rio 587 Limited, Rio 588 Limited, Risk & Reward Group, Risk Management Partners Limited, Risk Placement Services Inc., Risk Planners, Risk Services (NW) Limited, Risk Services (NW) Ltd., Risk Solutions Group Limited, Robert A. Schneider Agency, Robert Keith & Associates, Roberts & Roberts Insurance Service, Robinson-Adams Insurance, Rossborough Healthcare International Ltd, Rossborough Insurance (IOM) Ltd., Rossborough Insurance Services Ltd. (Jersey), S. A. Freerks & Associates, SEG Insurance Ltd, SGB-NIA Insurance Brokers, SHILLING Ltd, SKANCO International, SMERI AB, SRS Underwriting Pty Ltd, Secure Enterprises Pty Ltd, Securitas Re, Sellers Group, Sentinel Indemnity LLC, Septagon Insurance PCC Limited, Shuford Insurance Agency, Sigma II Insurance Agency, Sinclair Billard and Weld Limited, Sobieski & Bradley, Solid Benefit Guidance, Spanjers Insurance Agency, Spataro Insurance Agency, Specialised Broking Associates, Specialty Risk, Stackhouse Poland, Stackhouse Poland Bidco Limited, Stackhouse Poland Group Limited, Stackhouse Poland Holdings Limited, Stackhouse Poland Midco Limited, Stackouse Poland Limited, Stanton Group, Stark Johnson & Stinson Inc., Steel Agency, Strata Solicitors Ltd, Strategic Health Plans Corp., Strathearn Insurance Brokers, Strathearn Insurance Brokers (Qld) Trading Trust, Strathern Insurance Group Pty Ltd, Strathern Integration Holdco Pty Ltd, Strathern Unit Trust, Strong Financial Resources, Summit Insurance Group, Sunday and Associates, Sunderland Insurance Services, Super Advice Corporate Services Pty Ltd, Taylor Benefits, Texas Insurance Agency, Texas Insurance Managers, The BeneTex Group, The Buchholz Planning, The Chapman Group, The Commonwealth Consulting Group, The Daniels Group Inc., The EHE Group LLC, The EHE Insurance Agency LLC, The Eagle Insurance Agency LLC, The Eriksen Group, The Forker Company, The Gleason Agency, The Great Lakes Agency, The HR Group, The Hawk Agency, The Human Capital Group, The Lance Group, The Levitt/Kristan Co., The MW Bagnall Company, The Old Greenwich Consulting Group, The Parks Johnson Agency, The Plus Companies Inc., The Presidio Group, The Producers Choice, The Rains Group, The Splinter Group, The Titan Group, The Treiber Group, The Woodsmall Companies Inc., Title & Covenant Brokers Ltd., Title Investments Limited, Tom Sherwin Insurance Agency, Total Reward Group, Total Rewards Group (Holdings) Limited, Towle Agency, Transwestern, Tri-State General Insurance Agency, Triad Insurance Agency, Triad USA, Tribeca Strategic Advisors, Trinder & Norwood, Trip Mate, Trissel Graham & Toole, Tropp & Co., Tudor Risk Services, Tyloma Holdings Limited, Uni-Care Inc., Unison Inc., Universico Group, Unoccupied Direct Limited, V2V Holdings LLC, VEBA Service Group, Vasek Insurance Services Limited, Velo ACU LLC, Velo Holdings Inc., Verbag AG., Vertrue LLC, Victory Insurance Agency, Vincent L. Braband Insurance, Vital Benefits, Voluntary Benefits Solutions, W. E. Kingsley Co. Inc., WM. W. George & Associates, Walker Taylor Agency, Welling Associates, Wesfarmers Insurance - Insurance Brokerage Operations, Western Benefit Solutions, White & Company Insurance, Whitehaven Insurance Group, William Gallagher Associates Insurance Brokers, William H. Connolly & Co., Williams Insurance Agency Inc., Williams-Manny Insurance Group, Winn & Company Insurance Brokers, Wischmeyer Benefit Partners, Woodbrook Underwriting Agencies, Woods & Grooms, WorkCare Northwest, Worksite Communications, Y. S. Liedman & Associates, YOA Capsicum Reinsurance Broker Limited, Zenor Limited, Zuber Insurance Agency, and e3 Financial.

Read More
Apollo Global Management, Inc. is a private equity firm specializing in investments in credit, private equity and real estate markets. The firm's private equity investments include traditional buyouts, recapitalization, distressed buyouts and debt investments in real estate, corporate partner buyouts, distressed asset, corporate carve-outs, middle market, growth capital, turnaround, bridge, corporate restructuring, special situation, acquisition, and industry consolidation transactions. The firm provides its services to endowment and sovereign wealth funds, as well as other institutional and individual investors. It manages client focused portfolios. The firm launches and manages hedge funds for its clients. It also manages real estate funds and private equity funds for its clients. The firm invests in the fixed income and alternative investment markets across the globe. Its fixed income investments include income-oriented senior loans, bonds, collateralized loan obligations, structured credit, opportunistic credit, non-performing loans, distressed debt, mezzanine debt, and value oriented fixed income securities. The firm seeks to invest in chemicals, commodities, consumer and retail, oil and gas, metals, mining, agriculture, commodities, distribution and transportation, financial and business services, manufacturing and industrial, media distribution, cable, entertainment and leisure, telecom, technology, natural resources, energy, packaging and materials, and satellite and wireless industries. It seeks to invest in companies based in across Africa, North America with a focus on United States, and Europe. The firm also makes investments outside North America, primarily in Western Europe and Asia. It employs a combination of contrarian, value, and distressed strategies to make its investments. The firm seeks to make investments in the range of $10 million and $1500 million. The firm seeks to invest in companies with Enterprise value between $750 million to $2500 million. The firm conducts an in-house research to create its investment portfolio. It seeks to acquire minority and majority positions in its portfolio companies. Apollo Global Management, Inc. was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in New York, New York with additional offices in North America, Asia , India and Europe.
If theres one thing President-elect Donald Trump, Congress and a lot of Democrats can agree on, its the need for more spending on bridges, roads and other infrastructure. And corporate America and lawmakers are salivating at the prospect of a windfall.

Infrastructure is the happiest word in American politics, said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

At least for now. A presidential transition website this week said Trump will invest about $550 billion in new projects. But he hasnt spelled out his priorities. Nor is it clear how much of that total would be new federal spending and how much would come from the private sector. And Congress might have its own ideas.

Two of Trumps advisers, Wilbur Ross, a private-equity investor, and Peter Navarro, a University of California at Irvine business professor, released an analysis Oct. 27 suggesting that the federal government could provide tax credits  a form of subsidy  to investors in infrastructure and recapture lost revenue through taxes on higher wages and contractor profits. The credits would cover $137 billion, or 82 percent, of the equity investment needed for $1 trillion of infrastructure, according to the analysis.

If Trump relies too heavily on the private sector, though, his initiative could fall far short of the new investment that businesses and economists say is desperately needed. According to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the average age of U.S. infrastructure  including water and sewer facilities, streets and highways, and electric power plants  is two to three decades and has increased steadily since the late 1960s.

For the time being, however, infrastructure spending has become a rallying cry. In his acceptance speech Wednesday morning, Trump again pledged to make such spending a top priority.

We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals, Trump said. Were going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.

Marcia Hale, president of Building Americas Future, a group representing a variety of city and state officials and former officials, called on Trump to make an infrastructure plan part of his first 100 days in office.

The president-elect is a builder at heart. A developer, Hale said. Every president who goes through that door is hit with stuff that he is not familiar with. This is the one thing he knows. This is a passion for him, and hes very comfortable in this space.

Plans to boost government infrastructure spending have been on the table for years. In his fiscal year 2016 budget proposal, for example, President Obama asked Congress to support a $478 billon, six-year public-works plan for roads, railroads and ports. He tried to bundle that with business tax reform. Funding for the infrastructure plan would have been offset with the windfall from a temporary tax adjustment that would have encouraged corporations to bring back profits parked overseas.

But Republicans in Congress, who said they were concerned about the federal deficit, blocked Obamas proposals. Those lawmakers could prove an obstacle for Trump, too. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) favors linking infrastructure plans to comprehensive tax reform.

Meanwhile, leading economists have made the case for more infrastructure spending.

Economists and politicians of all persuasions recognize that this can create quality jobs and provide economic stimulus without posing the risks of easy-money policies in the short run, Lawrence Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and as an economic adviser to Obama, wrote in September. They also see that such investment can expand the economys capacity in the medium term and mitigate the huge maintenance burden we would otherwise pass on to the next generation.

By increasing the economys productivity, infrastructure spending also boosts tax revenue.

But Harvard economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw cautions against possible waste. The term infrastructure is broad, encompassing everything from useful public capital to bridges to nowhere, he said. Bridges to nowhere can create jobs in the short run, but they are still not worth spending taxpayer dollars on.

Traditional infrastructure companies stand to benefit. Shares of heavy-equipment-maker Caterpillar climbed more than 10 percent this week. Chicago Bridge & Iron shares rose 5.3 percent. Fluor, a construction firm, was up 9.7 percent.

Energy infrastructure would be another winner. Trump has said he will support oil and gas pipelines, including the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which Obama rejected.

Thats welcome news for the members of North Americas Building Trades Unions, half of whom spend at least part of the year working on energy projects, including pipelines, wind turbines and petrochemical plants.

Since the election, the chief executives overseeing three stalled energy projects have called NABTU President Sean McGarvey to say that they hoped to proceed and that the union would be supportive.

Clintons program was pretty detailed. President-elect Trumps is not, McGarvey said. But he talked about one bigger and huger than hers. We take him at his word that hes going to pursue it. Well be supportive in any way we can.
INVESTING

Buffett blames CEO for Wells Fargo scandal

Warren Buffett said Friday that former Wells Fargo chief executive John Stumpf bears blame for a system that encouraged staff to set up bogus accounts and then made matters worse by not fixing the problem.

Stumpf is a very decent man who made a hell of a mistake, the billionaire told CNN in an interview. And he didnt correct it. Thats the thing.

Buffetts public remarks were his most extensive on the bank since it agreed in September to pay $185 million to settle allegations that employees set up credit-card and deposit accounts without customers permission. Staff members said they were encouraged by cross-selling targets to open as many accounts as possible.

It was a dumb incentive system, said Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway is the largest investor in Wells Fargo.

Stumpf stepped down in October and was replaced by Tim Sloan, who was promoted from chief operating officer.

 Bloomberg News

ONLINE RETAIL

Singles Day boosts Chinese e-commerce

In a bright spot for Chinas cooling economy, online shoppers spent billions of dollars Friday on Singles Day, a quirky holiday that is now the worlds busiest day for e-commerce.

The countrys biggest e-commerce brand, Alibaba Group, said sales by the thousands of retailers on its platforms passed $13.4 billion in the first 15 hours of the event  more than four times the $3 billion that the comScore research firm says Americans spent last year on Cyber Monday.

Rivals including JD.com, VIP.com and Suning offered deep discounts on clothing, travel packages, smartphones and other goods.

Singles Day was begun by Chinese college students in the 1990s as a version of Valentines Day for singles. The Nov. 11 date was picked to be 11.11  four singles. Originally, young people would treat each other to dinner or give gifts to woo that special someone to end their single status.

 Associated Press

Also in Business

 From news services
The extraterrestrial heptapods at the center of the new sci-fi thriller Arrival arent the only strange, poorly understood creatures in the film. The other aliens, it turns out, are linguists, represented by Amy Adamss Dr. Louise Banks, an academic field researcher who is recruited by U.S. military intelligence to help communicate with a race of seven-legged E.T.s that have descended on Earth, with intentions unclear, from another world.

A lot of people dont know what linguists do, or even that we exist, apart from some idea that we just translate lots of languages, says Jessica Coon, an associate professor of linguistics who consulted on the film and provided a loose model for Louise. Coon unsuccessfully lobbied the filmmakers to change a line describing Louise, arguing that it misrepresents what linguists do: Youre at the top of everyones list, Forest Whitakers Army colonel says to Louise, when it comes to translations.

[Read Ann Hornadays three-star review of Arrival.]

Coon also tried  and failed  to get screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Lights Out) to change Louises backstory. The character is said to have security clearance from an earlier mission, translating Farsi. I said, No, no, no. The military is going to already have Farsi translators,  Coon says with a laugh. [Louise] needs to be working on a minority language that nobody is a translator for, like Burushaki. (That language is spoken by the Burusho people of northern Pakistan.)



Amy Adams, with Jeremy Renner (left), plays a linguist trying to teach herself an alien language in the brainy sci-fi thriller Arrival. (Jan Thijs/Paramount Pictures)

Linguists, Coons explains, arent so much glorified translators as they are theoreticians, more interested in the why of humankinds natural affinity for language acquisition, when other species arent hard-wired for it. According to Coon, real linguists just arent all that interested in the Sanskrit word for war. (As the film notes, intriguingly, it literally translates as a desire for more cows.)

In preparation for the shoot, a design team visited Coons office at McGill University in Montreal, where the film was shot, poring over her bookshelf and even inspecting the kind of bag she carries in the field. In one scene, set at the military encampment at the foot of the hovering alien spacecraft, youll see some of Coons handiwork in the background. Imagine a military officer has helicoptered you here, Coons recalls the set designers telling her. Youre getting ready to start working with aliens. You have a team of 50 military cryptographers at your service. Youre in charge. Whats written on the whiteboard?

Her answer?

Lots and lots of questions: Is there air coming out of the aliens mouths, or is it going in? What are their articulators? (Meaning: Do the aliens have tongues and teeth, or perhaps something more like blowhole-like orifices with flapping diaphragms?) In Ted Chiangs 1998 short story, on which the film is based, the sound the aliens make is described as vaguely resembling a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur. In Heisserers screenplay, its described as a mixture of whispers and clicks and low whale song. In the finished film, what we hear is a little of all that, plus some bestial vocalizations, courtesy of Coons McGill colleague Morgan Sonderegger and the films sound department, who collaborated on the aliens spoken language, known in the film as Heptapod A.

As it happens, Heptapod A isnt just unrecognizable, but irreproducible by human vocal chords, leading to what Coon calls a temporary dead end in the films narrative. Enter Heptapod B, a written language that the aliens squirt from one of their limbs, like squid ink. Chiangs story called the calligraphic text an evocation of fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice. When writing his screenplay, Heisserer included his own prototype of these logograms, crafted from a digitally altered version of J.R.R. Tolkiens Elvish language but rendered in a closed circle. Production designer Patrice Vermette took that circular theme home to his artist wife, who created beautiful drawings. These ended up in the film, along with several of Coons pen-and-ink notations on them.

The fact that Heptapod B text is non-linear  there is no beginning, middle or end  figures prominently in the plot, as well as in the movies key twist. So does something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a linguistic theory positing that the language we use influences the way we see the world.

Now, before your eyes glaze over while reading those words, relax. The most famous example used to explain Sapir-Whorf comes from anthropologist Franz Boass research: Because the Inuit language has so many different words for snow, as Boas reported, Eskimos may see snow differently from the rest of the world. They may even think about snow differently.

Although Sapir-Whorf is applied in Arrival with a healthy dose of poetic license  as it is in Chiangs story  Heisserer says he struggled mightily to excise some of the writers other, even wonkier references: Fermats Principle of Least Time, for instance, along with something called Snells Law and Bayess Theorem (as applied to global population). If he hadnt, Heisserer jokes, Arrival would have arrived in theaters as little more than a series of TED talks that we tuned into a film.

As it happens, the movie is not just a brainy meditation on how communication affects cognition, but also a deeply poignant, heartfelt rumination on memory, connection and love. As the author of the book Aspects of Split Ergativity, Coon jokes that anything that raises the profile of her field, while making linguists not just more down to earth but also heroes, is a very, very good thing.

Arrival (PG-13, 116 minutes). At area theaters.


Boat noodle soup at the Thai Cuisine. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)

The broth strikes fear into those who prefer the mountain-stream clarity of consomme. The liquid in my bowl of boat noodle soup at the Thai Cuisine practically roils, dark and opaque, as if it were extracted from the devils black heart. You half expect to see an animal skull float to the surface.

The broths fearsome appearance is, of course, part of its appeal, the thrill of staring a wild beast in the eye. Your first sip confirms what your brain already suspected: The soup is a feral creature that snorts fire from its nostrils. It will drag you to places you simultaneously fear and desire. Youll revel in the adventure and, years from now, tell your grandkids about the time you slurped down a soup prepared, in part, with animal blood.

Okay, Im exaggerating for dramatic effect, but the boat noodle soup at Thai Cuisine does include the blood of either a pig or cow, depending on which bowl you order. The ingredient is essential to the proper preparation of the dish, sometimes called floating market noodle soup, a nod to the Bangkok waterways where vendors hawk all kinds of food, homemade or straight from the field. The ingredient also provides a small glimpse into this Rockville storefront, which channels the flavors of Thailand without pausing to consider more fragile palates.

Whats interesting about Thai Cuisine  aside from its intoxicating boat soup  is that its Rockville location offers a headier menu than its sister restaurant in Olney, which debuted in 2004, seven years earlier than this spot on Hungerford Drive. The later operation was custom-made for Rockville, where the owners felt more comfortable introducing the fragrant, fiery street fare of Thailand to locals. I should point out that this nervy outpost also predates Little Serow, Soi 38, Baan Thai and other acknowledged pioneers of authentic Thai cooking in the District.

[The exquisite Baan Thai hides in plain sight on 14th Street]



Business partners Natee Pansiri, left, and Pongwasu Saengsophaphan, right, opened the Thai Cuisine with chef Sukhum Pongpol. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)

The siblings behind Thai Cuisine hail from Isaan, the region in northeastern Thailand that has inspired so many chefs, including Johnny Monis at Little Serow. But Pongwasu Saengsophaphan and Arisara Sangsopapun do not restrict their menu to the food of their homeland, in part because Arisaras husband, Sukhum Pongpol, is head chef. His heart and palate are tied to Lopburi province in central Thailand, his native land.

[The 10 best places to eat cheap food in the Washington area]

Wherever the family draws inspiration, their best dishes are often found in the specialties section of the menu. The Crying Tiger doesnt look like much on the plate, little more than a timber pile of marinated strips of rib-eye. On their own, the meat sticks are modest pleasures, their slight chew providing ample time to ruminate over the flavors of the sweet, savory marinade. But when scooped up with a piping-hot clump of sticky rice and dunked into the accompanying nam jim jaew sauce, an impenetrable concoction of pure pungency, the steak assumes a new identity. What was once a sketch has become a fully composed work of art.



Crying Tiger, marinated rib-eye strips. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)

Unlike the beef strips, the grilled pork skewers are an amusement all to themselves, their milky, soy-splashed marinade an enhancement that deserves its own patent. But like the rib-eye, the easygoing pork skewers hum a different tune, high and fevered, when dipped into their ramekin of hot, sour sauce. Crumbled bits of ground pork bob in the tom yum noodle soup, one of countless delights buried in this unassuming vegetable broth thats force-fed lime juice, dried squid, fish sauce, crushed peanuts, pickled jalapenos, chili powder and other ingredients that stimulate the brainpan faster than recreational drugs.

The kitchen liberally doses some dishes with dry-roasted rice powder, called khao khua, a touch of texture and toastiness common to Isaan cooking. The ingredient adds an unearthly crunch to the larb gai salad, which first assaults your nose with its slap of fish sauce before rattling your bicuspids with rice powder. The same powdered stuff, supplemented with minute amounts of galangal and lemon grass, is sprinkled on a dish dubbed dusty pork, which will jolt you with its seismic crackle, a tabletop alarm to wake your senses.

Crunch is also the primary sensation of the spicy moo krob, a pork belly stir-fry that undergoes three forms of heat treatment. The belly is first boiled, then slow-roasted in a low oven before being tucked into the refrigerator. When ordered, the precooked meat is tossed into a deep fryer until all fat has rendered, resulting in a protein thats sort of the Thai equivalent of chicharrones. I must confess, I grew weary of the juiceless morsels midway through my moo krob.



Kanom jeeb, dumplings filled with crab, chicken and shrimp. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)

A number of the appetizers betray their debt to Chinese cooking, notably the kanom jeeb, these beautifully pleated dumplings of crab, chicken and shrimp that would not look out of place on a dim sum menu. The dumplings dizzying mix of meats, both sweet and nutty, becomes even more bewitching with a little black sauce dabbed behind each fold of wonton. The homely hoi jaw, by contrast, wont be auditioning for the cover of Bon Appetit any time soon, but this tofu-wrapped cake of crab and cuttlefish inspires deeper contemplation than sheer beauty alone: What is it about the fishy, deep-fried snack that proves so alluring?

If anything at Thai Cuisine comes as a shock, its learning that the kitchen does not pound its own curry pastes. After one slurp of the fragrant, slyly spicy green curry, I would have placed sizable bets that commercial pastes had no place in Pongpols kitchen. But Saengsophaphan tells me that the chef adds fresh galangal, shallots, lemon grass, garlic and dried chilies to a canned paste. The result is a green curry that, while based in convenience, is bold enough for prime time.



Spicy green curry. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)

Moo krob, a pork belly stir-fry. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)

Speaking of which, Saengsophaphan indicates the family is searching for a third location, one that will follow the lead of the Rockville spot, not the original eatery in Olney. One can only hope they scout properties in the District, where there is always room for another genuine Thai restaurant.
Moderator Megyn Kelly waits for the start of the Republican presidential primary debate in Des Moines, Iowa, in October. (Chris Carlson/AP)

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly has denied that her upcoming memoir suggests Donald Trump was tipped about specific contents of a question she planned to ask him during the first Republican primary debate last year.

Kellys response, in a tweet posted late Thursday, sought to clarify a passage noted by the New York Times in an advance review of the book, Settle for More. The review said Kelly wrote that Fox News executives told Trump that Kellys first question would be very pointed and directed at Trump.

Kellys tweet appeared aimed at countering the idea that Trump was given specifics about the question  which was about Trumps history of making demeaning comments about women. The moment produced one of the most famous exchanges of the presidential campaign and plunged Kelly into a long-running, if one-sided, feud with the man who was elected president Tuesday.

Kelly tweeted: For the record, my book Settle for More does not suggest Trump had any debate Qs in advance, nor do I believe that he did.

But if the question  or its general tone  was leaked in advance of the debate, it would suggest Trump had time to prepare his response, giving him an advantage over his Republican rivals. It would also parallel the disclosure that Donna Brazile, then a CNN commentator and the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, leaked debate topics to Hillary Clintons campaign before Democratic debates.

Megyn Kelly interviews Donald Trump in May, 2016. (Eric Liebowitz/Fox)

Kellys book will be published next week, but the New York Times obtained an advance copy and described the sequence of events in a review.

Kelly also describes her tempestuous relationship with Trump and with ousted Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, according to the Times account.

Kelly apparently drew Trumps wrath a week before the first primary debate in August 2015. A segment on her show, The Kelly File, had upset Trump enough that he refused to do a scheduled interview with her unless she phoned him personally.

She writes that he told her, I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you, and I still may.

The day before the debate, Kelly writes, Trump was upset again and called Fox executives to complain about her. He said hed heard that her first question as co-moderator was a very pointed question directed at him.

In fact, Kellys first question at the Fox-sponsored debate was about Trumps references to women as fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.

Kelly does not speculate in her book how Trump knew that her question would be directed to him, the Times said. But she writes, Folks were starting to worry about Trump  his level of agitation did not match the circumstances. Yes, it was his first debate. But this was bizarre behavior, especially for a man who wanted the nuclear codes.

Trump appeared to be rattled by Kellys question, a reaction that suggests he did not see it coming. His many months of criticism of Kelly thereafter further suggests he viewed the question as a betrayal.

The anecdote raises its own questions about who within Fox News was aware of Kellys debate planning and could have tipped Trump.

Kelly doesnt make a specific allegation, but she does note that Ailes often responded to Trumps complaints about Kelly by calling Kelly and asking, Was I being fair to Trump? Was I being too hard on him? She writes: He felt the bar for skeptical Trump coverage should be higher.

Following the first debate, Trump went public with his criticism of Kelly, calling her overrated and a bimbo on Twitter. He went on CNN and described her as having blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her whatever. He boycotted a Fox-sponsored debate before the Iowa caucuses in January because Kelly was scheduled to be one of the moderators.

Ailes was forced out of Fox in July amid widespread allegations of sexual harassment, including by Kelly herself. He became an informal adviser to Trumps campaign.

Kellys debate anecdote raises some questions about Kelly herself, such as why she never reported anything about this incident to her viewers during the campaign and waited until after Trump was elected to reveal it in a book. It also adds an additional element to Kellys contentious interview with Brazile last month in which Kelly repeatedly asked Brazile whether she had leaked debate questions to Clintons aides.

Fox Newss representatives did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

Kelly also recounts in the book a bizarre episode surrounding the first primary debate, according to the Times. On the day of the event, a driver assigned to her kept offering her coffee, which she refused. She finally relented and drank the cup he handed her. Within 15 minutes, she became seriously ill and feared she wouldnt be able to appear at the debate. She did, but kept a trash can under her desk just in case she had to vomit.

Kelly doesnt say so directly, but she suggests she may have been poisoned, the Times said.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Donna Brazile as the chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Before you can learn a body of music, you need to find a way in. For other listeners my age, the portal into Leonard Cohens songbook materialized in 1993 on the lips of Kurt Cobain. Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld, Cobain groused during Pennyroyal Tea, one of Nirvanas gnarlier mood swings. So I can sigh eternally.

Hell of an introduction. To escape Cobains world and drift into Cohens was to abandon a miasma of teenage despair for the mystical introspection of adulthood  a strange kind of sanctuary where Cohens consummate elegance seemed to drain all of the self-pity out of feeling blue. Cobain was howling into the void. Cohen had engaged it in polite conversation.

That conversation started in 1967 when Cohen released his debut album at the age of 33, and it ended Monday when Cohen died at the age of 82. He spent much of his life singing about divinity, desire and death, and when David Remnick recently asked the songwriter about what might be in store for us after the big sunset, Cohen replied, I dont ask for information that I probably wouldnt be able to process even if it were granted to me.

Cohens roundabout spiritual journey has been well documented. He tried Kabbalah, Scientology, LSD, red wine and five years in a Zen monastery on a California mountaintop. His nagging depression frequently bent his spiritual quest in difficult directions, just as his humor, vitality, lust and grace bent his ballads in astonishing ones. Yet, along the way, his music became synonymous with gloom, which always felt like one of pop musics pandemic misconceptions. Cohens quest was a serious one, but seriousness and misery are not the same thing.

And for a sad man, he liked jokes. For one, he liked to say that he only learned six chords  a self-effacing explanation of his musics modest melodic range. Of course, he compensated for it with the color of his words. As one of the greatest lyricists to ever grace our little vale of tears, Cohen offered testimony (I have tried, in my way, to be free), prophecy (Get ready for the future: It is murder), and one of the most tender couplets ever set to melody (And you know that she will trust you/For youve touched her perfect body with your mind).

Despite all of the heavy, metaphysical searching evoked on his lyric sheet, Cohen judged the quality of his work by its everyday usefulness. In 1995, he told the New York Times that songs must be measured by their utility. Any jaunty little tune that can get you from one point to another as you drive, or get you through the dishes, or that can illuminate or dignify your courting, I always appreciate.

Such a humble way to explain such a beautiful, colossal idea  that our spiritual work and our daily work are really one and the same. Whats more, getting through those dishes might be stranger than we allow ourselves to acknowledge. That idea came to the fore with Cohens extraordinary 1988 album Im Your Man, a collection of woozy songs that drift through the absurdity of existence over a patina of cheap-sounding synthesizers.

Witty and wise, Cohen seems to have figured out his entire endeavor by the time he reaches the albums grand finale, Tower of Song, in which he describes the world of song-craft as a factory, a prison, an asylum, a purgatory and a heaven. By the time he reaches the songs penultimate verse, hes a prophet again: Youll be hearing from me baby, long after Im gone/Ill be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.

And, God, listen to how he sings those lines. Listen to the spit, the tongue, the teeth. Listen to how he made that immaculate baritone sound sexier than life and deeper than death. Cobains sigh was surely a crush. The forever kind.
Dear Heloise: As a schoolteacher, I cant tell you how many pencils I purchased and gave out to use, never to see them again. Toward the end of my last year, I refused to purchase yet another pack, so I told the borrower to leave a shoe under the table where the box of pencils was. They got the shoe back when the pencil was returned.

Renee P. in California

Renee P. in California: Certainly an ingenious way to get the pencil returned! While on the subject, Ill ask my readers to help out. Readers, Renee is like many teachers who end up buying supplies with their own money. If you know a teacher, ask if you could buy some simple supplies for him or her. Or call the school nearest you and ask what it might need. Pick up supplies when they are on sale, and pass them on to a teacher.

Dear Heloise: If you do not or cannot get a newspaper daily, I wonder how many people are aware that you can search the weekly circulars of big-box stores online. Many stores upload their weekly circulars, which you can view page by page, exactly as if you had gotten the hard copy delivered to your home. I thought it is a hint worth sharing, as I already have with many of my friends.

Eileen D., via email

Dear Heloise: I found a new use for wreath holders. I needed to find a way to store my purse that wasnt on the bedroom doorknob, bed or top of the dresser. I had a wreath holder not in use and hung it from my bedroom door, then hung my purse on it. Perfect! Its out of the way, but still handy to grab when going out!

Berta C. in San Antonio

Dear Heloise: I bring my own bags to the grocery store to do my part to help the environment. But sometimes, I forget to bring them into the store!

Some shopping centers, but not all, post signs in parking lots reminding customers to take in those reusable bags.

I tied a piece of ribbon onto my steering wheel. Now, every time I see it, I think of my bags, even if Im not headed off to the grocery store. Ive not forgotten my bags since!

Tracy S., Austin

Tracy S.: Oh my, how many times have I done the same and at the counter fussed at myself for forgetting them.

Dear Heloise: When I travel, I take lots of dollar bills. Its so important to reward great service with cash tips ($5 bills come in handy for this purpose, too!).

I also can feed the change machine for quarters for laundry, snack and drink machines.

Perry Y. in Pennsylvania

Heloises column appears six days a week at washingtonpost.com/advice. Send a hint to Heloise , P.O. Box 795000, San Antonio, Tex. 78279-5000, or email it to Heloise@Heloise.com.
Rob Nelb, left, and Foster Curry walk out to bubbles at Church of the Pilgrims in Washington. ( Alex Kotran of Alex Kotran Photography )

Striking up a conversation with a cute complete stranger is never easy. It can be daunting and, potentially, awkward.

But sometimes, a chance encounter and some courage can lead to much more, as was the case for Rob Nelb and Foster Curry.

It all goes back to Oct. 1, 2011. Rob had decided to swing by the cafe at the National Portrait Gallerys Kogod Courtyard for a quick cup of coffee after a long morning of volunteering at his church. He noticed an attractive man toiling away on his laptop at a nearby table.

He thought to himself, half-jokingly: Could this serendipitous meeting be my instant karma for volunteering this morning?

Foster had planned for a productive afternoon at the museum, full of work and job applications. But after noticing Rob, that plan was quickly sidelined.

Foster Curry, left, and Rob Nelb, right, at the cafe at the National Portrait Gallerys Kogod Courtyard. The two met there by chance on Oct. 1, 2011. ( Alex Kotran of Alex Kotran Photography )

They exchanged friendly glances and smiles for some time before Rob finally decided to approach Foster. Nervous, instead of using a line, he asked Foster to watch his computer as he stepped away to use the restroom.

Fortunately, that was enough to spark a friendly dialogue, and they wound up chatting on and off for almost three hours.

I think we both ran out of work to do but didnt want to leave, Foster said.

[Are you getting married in the Washington region? Tell us why we should feature your nuptials here]

Eventually, the two parted ways, exchanging first names and nothing else.

As soon as Foster left the museum, Rob regretted not asking him for his information and immediately began searching all corners of the Internet to connect further.

At the cafe, he tried searching for him on Facebook, then Google, with little luck. He considered coming back to the museum the following Saturday, hoping that somehow their paths would cross again.

Foster Curry, left, and Rob Nelb, right, share their first dance at LHommage Bistro Francais restaurant in Mount Vernon Triangle. ( Alex Kotran of Alex Kotran Photography )

Luckily, he didnt have to wait that long. Foster also had realized there had been an opportunity missed and returned minutes later with his name and number scribbled on a scrap of paper from the museums gift shop.

I didnt even make it past the lobby, said Foster, 28, a government relations coordinator at the American Society of Hematology. Right away, I thought, This doesnt happen very often, and I cant leave without trying to see him again. 

Foster handed the paper to Rob and asked him to call him. I put the ball in his court and then walked away, he said.

Rob didnt hesitate, texting Foster that night. Two weeks later they met for coffee and pumpkin pie at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe.

The conversation flowed easily, a stark difference from past online dates. Sometimes when you know so much about a person before a first date, it can be hard to know what to talk about on the date, said Rob, 31, a senior analyst at the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission. It can feel like going into a job interview with their resume in hand.

By the end of October, they were carving pumpkins and hosting dinner parties together, Rob said, and became an official couple around Christmas. After two years of dating, Rob moved into Fosters townhouse in Shaw.

If we had tried to meet on online dating sites, I am 99 percent sure that I would not meet half of Robs original checklist, Foster said with a laugh.

But sometimes, Rob added, the person that meets all the criteria you think you want really isnt the right person for you . . . Love isnt something you can find on a checklist . . . You know it when you see it, and I fell in love with Foster at first sight.

[She saw her first love on the 11 oclock news. Four months later, they were engaged.]

Over Memorial Day weekend in 2015, Rob proposed to Foster during a sunset walk along the boardwalk in Rehoboth Beach, Del. With the help of close friends, Rob surprised Foster with a rose-studded display on the beach, featuring a flower for every month they had dated. On bended knee, Rob recited an original sonnet and presented two Claddagh rings, a nod to Fosters Irish heritage.

And hidden in the pewter ring box was another surprise  the original note Foster had passed Rob during their first encounter in the Kogod Courtyard. Under Fosters fading phone number, Rob had written a new message: Will you marry me?

I was shocked, Foster said. I had no idea he had saved it this entire time.

Fireworks went off as soon as Foster said yes, a surprise arranged by their friends. The timing was perfect, Rob said.

Rob and Foster exchanged vows Oct. 1, exactly five years from the day they met, at Church of the Pilgrims in Washington, where Rob is an elder. After the ceremony, friends and family headed to LHommage Bistro Francais restaurant in Mount Vernon Triangle, where they continued the celebration with champagne, escargot and other French treats.

Their first dance was a mash-up of several chart toppers, including Dear Future Husband by Meghan Trainor, Firework by Katy Perry and, fittingly, Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen.

I think making the first step is what holds a lot of people back, and I hope our story encourages others to take the chance when opportunity presents itself, Foster said. I tell my friends, Go ahead, give them your number . . . Whats the worst that can happen? 

More from On Love:

A fender bender brings a couple back together after 33 years

She was told 50 first dates was the key to relationship success. He was No. 98.

Wedding trends: Enough with the white dresses

Are you getting married in the Washington region? Tell us why we should feature your nuptials here at wapo.st/weddings.
Christ Congregationalist in Silver Spring on Friday morning, where a Black Lives Matter banner had been vandalized on election night. Someone also had put up a small heart-shaped response saying Love Beats Hate. (Bill Turque/The Washington Post)

The Black Lives Matter banner in front of Christ Congregational Church in Silver Spring has been a magnet for vandals. Three times since early 2015, it has been spray-painted, slashed or thrown into Colesville Road.

But for the Rev. Matt Braddock, there was a chilling resonance to the latest instance of vandalism, which appears to have happened overnight Tuesday, at the end of a presidential campaign that laid bare this countrys deep and angry racial divisions.

Braddock found the word Black torn away from the banner Wednesday morning. He offers no evidence that the defacement was directly linked to the election of Republican Donald Trump, who made multiple statements that were seen as racially insensitive during the campaign, has a vocal white-supremacist following and was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

But the pastor says he found the timing deeply disquieting.

I cannot fully express how upset I was to see that this happened on election night, Braddock wrote on the church website Thursday. I experience it as a symbolic validation of the bullying bluster we heard coming from the campaign of the President Elect. Its as if the election results gave permission for some of his supporters to begin acting badly.

On Friday, Braddock joined about 100 parishioners, elected officials and clergy to denounce the incident. The speakers said that all lives matter but that the Black Lives Matter movement is important because it represents a new kind of civil rights movement pushing back against police violence and a prison population disproportionately filled with African Americans.

When we say black lives matter, we are focusing on the continuation of racism in lots of ways, said Rep.-elect Jamie B. Raskin (D), the former Maryland state senator who was elected Tuesday to represent the 8th Congressional District.

Montgomery County Council member George L. Leventhal (D-At Large), who joined Council member Tom Hucker (D-Eastern County) and Board of Education member Jill Ortman-Fouse, a church member, at the microphone, said it was a moment to affirm the countys identity as a place of peace and tolerance.

I know a lot of us are not feeling very safe this week, Leventhal said. I know a lot of us are trying to understand what happened on Tuesday, and how we can be heard and send that message that in Montgomery County we are going to be a beacon of diversity and inclusion.

James L. Stowe, director of the countys Office of Human Rights, called on the crowd to take action and promote unity. Whomever cut off the word Black is still part of this community, Stowe said. At the end of the day, weve got to be one in Montgomery County.

Neighbors had already restored the missing word to the banner with a patch. Someone added a small heart-shaped sign that said, Love Beats Hate.

We will not tolerate hate in our community, said the Rev. Jeffrey O. Thames, a Silver Spring activist. We will not let it go unanswered.

Christ Congregational is at least the second church in the D.C. region that has endured serial assaults on a Black Lives Matter sign. River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bethesda had theirs damaged or stolen three times between July 29 and August 18, 2015.
A lawsuit over whether to move a restaurant to this location on Washington Street in Old Town Alexandria and add a bed-and-breakfast has riled residents and cost the city almost $1 million so far. (Patricia Sullivan/TWP)

In Old Town Alexandria, the site of so much Colonial and Civil War history, the battle of La Bergerie has raged for two expensive years.

Hostilities began shortly after the owners of the elegant French restaurant sought to move their business five blocks west to busy Washington Street, where they also hope to operate a small bed-and-breakfast.

Twenty-three neighbors, alarmed at the potential noise, smell and traffic, fought against rezoning the 1820s brick rowhouse. After losing at the planning commission and the Alexandria City Council, they sued, accusing officials of allowing the rezoning as a favor to former mayor and state senator Patsy Ticer, the mother of one of the restaurant owners.

A judge upheld the citys decision last week. The plaintiffs must decide this month whether to appeal.

So far, the battle has cost taxpayers $972,952 in outside legal fees, twice as much as the city budgeted for such purposes for each of the past two years. Among other things, the plaintiffs lawyers, from the prestigious Williams and Connelly law firm, deposed all seven city council members at length. City attorney James Banks said the lawsuit has become Alexandrias most expensive in at least eight years, and would be costing even more if the citys own private counsel, McGuire Woods, was not billing at a discount.

The high legal bills have riled up other residents, who say this type of civic intransigence wreaks havoc with the city budget and harms Alexandrias reputation as friendly to small business. Another case in point: the $300,000 the city spent to defend its waterfront plan from legal challenges brought by residents a few years ago.

Anyone in Old Town trying to move toward the future is being held up by a handful of people with resources who can use this heavy stick of litigation to stop it, said Judy Guse-Noritake, an architect who has served on civic boards over the years. I see this as a microcosm of whats happening at the federal level  people believe theyre not getting a fair shake, even though we have a democratic government and, God knows, hearing after hearing.

[In friendly Del Ray, a decidedly unneighborly dispute]

Jody Manor, owner of Bittersweet Catering, called lawsuits like the one involving La Bergerie a slap in the face to small businesses trying to expand and thrive.

For a small handful of people to cost the city that kind of money at a time when the city manager is asking all departments for a 10 percent budget cut  we could have used that $1 million for schools or any of our other needs, Manor said.

Old Town is both the source of the citys all-important tourism dollars and home to many of its most engaged citizens and persistent city-government critics. Not surprisingly, they see the dispute differently.

A lot of Old Town residents feel this council, and the one prior to this council, want to do nothing but push more development, said Yvonne Callahan, president of the Old Town Civic Association. They constantly feel beleaguered and pushed and feel their objections are met with indifference. And, its true, this part of town does seem to have more than its share of people who dont like to take no for answer.

Laurent and Margaret Ticer Janowsky have owned La Bergerie, at 218 N. Lee St., for the past 15 years. The planning commission approved their application to move the business to the corner of Washington and Princess streets in October, 2014. At that meeting, commissioners also honored Patsy Ticer  Margarets mother  for her lifelong community work.

When the city council voted 11 days later to uphold the rezoning, the former mayor sat in the front row, opponents of the rezoning noted in their lawsuit. During the break, she lunched with council members nearby, in a room that is open to the public.

The city imposed a number of conditions on La Bergerie, such as limiting the hours that outdoor music is permitted and requiring increased trash pickup and more off-site parking. But that didnt satisfy Shirley Rettig, 89, who has lived on Princess Street since 1959 and is the first named plaintiff in the case.

How would you like a restaurant open until 11 p.m. every night 30 feet from your back yard? she asked. The parking situation, the noise ... its just not the right place for a restaurant.

Opponents of the lawsuit are further riled by unconfirmed reports that Williams and Connelly is representing the plaintiffs pro bono, perhaps because of personal ties some lawyers at the firm have to the neighborhood.

Neither Rettig nor C. Bryan Wilson, a partner at Williams and Connelly, would confirm the rumors, which have spread rapidly on social media.

Rettig said the cost of the lawsuit to the city did not bother her, and should not be a concern for others.

Isnt that too damn bad? she said. Im a taxpayer, too.
School officials are investigating an incident involving a white Maryland student who posted a photo of herself in blackface, with a caption that used a racial epithet. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

School district officials in suburban Maryland are investigating an incident involving a white student who posted a photo of herself in blackface on social media, with a caption that used a racial epithet.

The principal of Atholton High School, in Columbia, Md., said in an email home to families Thursday that administrators became aware of the photo as school dismissed Thursday afternoon.

The letter, signed by Principal JoAnn Hutchens, described the image as a racially offensive and hurtful post to social media and said school officials were in contact with the students parents and would take appropriate action.

I am committed to ensuring a safe and inclusive environment for all students at Atholton High School, she wrote. I encourage all students to Think Before You Post. 

Howard County school officials said Friday that students who saw the image brought it to the attention of the principal and that soon afterward the teenagers parents also contacted Hutchens.

They said the image appeared to have been posted to an app such as Snapchat, and then shared again on other platforms.

The caption on the blackface photo said: im finally a n-----.

Howard school spokesman John White said the student, an 11th-grader whom district officials did not identify, was very apologetic about what she had done.

White said the district is working with the family as it investigates and would follow its student code of conduct in applying consequences. Under the conduct code, disciplinary action may be taken for off-campus incidents that could have an adverse effect on schools, with possible consequences, including detention and suspension.

Last school year, a video went viral in Howard County showing a white teenager disparaging the Black Lives Matter movement with inflammatory racist pronouncements. In the video, the student  who attended Mount Hebron High School, in Ellicott City  said that who the [expletive] cares about some black man who dies? The student went on to say that black lives do not matter because they are an inferior race, okay?

[Maryland students dismissal of Black Lives movement prompts backlash]

District officials said Friday the most recent incident reinforces the need for a community meeting  already planned for Monday night  to discuss the responsible use of technology and social media and supporting an inclusive community. The meeting is for both students and parents, and it is being done with police and the county library system.

Too many young people and adults post things without thinking about what happens next, White said. We want to make sure parents know about the latest technology and that students know there could be ramifications for a bad decision.
THE DISTRICT

Man found guilty in sex assaults, holdups

A Maryland man faces a maximum sentence of life in prison after his conviction Thursday in several sexual assaults and robberies of five women at knife point near two Northeast Washington Metro stations in the summer of 2015.

After a four-week trial in D.C. Superior Court, a jury found Demetrius Banks, 32, of the Riverdale area, guilty of 23 felony counts of attacking and robbing women as they walked home from the Fort Totten and Brookland Metro stations between July 28 and Aug. 28, 2015.

Banks, who remains in the D.C. jail, is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 27 by Judge Jose M. Lopez. Prosecutors said Banks stalked his victims while waiting near the Metro stations late at night as the women walked out of the stations.

Young teenager shot, wounded in Northeast

A young teenager was shot and wounded Thursday afternoon in front of the D.C. Department of Employment Services building on Minnesota Avenue in Northeast Washington, according to D.C. police.

The youth was treated at a hospital, and police said the injury did not appear life-threatening. Police would not divulge the victims age.

Police said witnesses reported hearing up to five shots shortly after 1 p.m. near the offices main entrance in the 4000 block of Minnesota Avenue NE between Benning Road and the Minnesota Avenue Metro station.

Dustin Sternbeck, a spokesman for D.C. police, said officers detained three people who tried to run, and recovered a weapon.

Sternbeck said witnesses and the people of interest were being interviewed late Thursday afternoon. No arrests had been made. The police spokesman said detectives have retrieved video from surveillance cameras and were in the process of reviewing it.

The building is typically busy and is used by people seeking help finding jobs, filling out paperwork for unemployment benefits or taking training classes. It could not be determined whether the wounded youth was using any of the services or just happened to be outside.

MARYLAND

Woman killed in fire in July is identified

A woman who died in a Bowie house fire in July has been identified as Arlena Mae Michelle Burney, 63.

Burney suffered burns and smoke inhalation in the fire, which broke out in a single-family home about 7 p.m. July 31 in the 2000 block of Lofting Court, according to the Prince Georges County fire department.

The cause of the fire remains unknown, but it started in a section of the house that was not equipped with sprinklers, the department said. Burneys body was found in the garage.

It took months for authorities to identify Burney, and they were recently able to do so after matching her remains to dental records, the department said.

 Lynh Bui

VIRGINIA

Seven arrested in gang-related killing

Six men and women, as well as a juvenile, have been arrested and charged in connection with a killing in October in Prince William County involving the criminal gang MS-13, authorities said.

The seven were arrested and charged Thursday by Prince William County police and agents from the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They were involved, police said, in the Oct. 29 fatal shooting of Edwin Ivan Chicas, 22.

Police said Chicas was shot after a disagreement in the 7500 block of Quail Run Lane in the Manassas area. The seven are members of MS-13, police said.

Police charged Marlon E. Argueta-Flores, 23, and Gerson A. Sorto-Ramirez, 18, with murder in Chicass death. The others were charged as co-conspirators or accessories, according to the police. Police are looking for two additional suspects.

 Dana Hedgpeth
Advocates protested a warning from the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration that said commercial drivers licenses could be suspended for immigrants with protected status. (Alfredo Duarte/For El Tiempo Latino)

Dozens of immigrants who hold commercial drivers licenses in Maryland will be able to keep those licenses as long as they have work permits and temporary protected status in this country, the state Motor Vehicle Administration said in a letter this week.

In July, the agency triggered panic when it sent letters to more than 250 immigrants saying federal regulations required the state to cancel their commercial licenses  which authorize them to drive trucks, buses or tractor-trailers  unless the immigrants could prove U.S. citizenship or permanent residency.

After an outcry from elected officials and immigrant rights groups, the state agency delayed the action and has now clarified the federal rules.

We have determined that you can retain your CDL and that no additional information is needed, the agencys letter said. You may continue to renew your commercial drivers license as long as you reside in Maryland and provide a work permit, unexpired passport or qualifying visa.

State Sen. Victor R. Ramirez (D-Prince Georges) applauded the MVAs reversal and said Friday that he was pleased the affected individuals can continue to drive and provide for their families.

Many of the drivers had spent thousands of dollars on commercial drivers license training and exams, purchased their own transport vehicles or started their own delivery or transport businesses.

Most are from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and other countries that the secretary of homeland security has designated for the temporary protected status. That program allows people to stay in the United States because of an ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster or another extraordinary condition, such as violence, in their countries of origin.

The immigrants have to renew their status regularly to keep their employment permits, while also undergoing criminal background checks.

Thank God. Now I dont have to worry about moving or finding a new job, said Abraham Ventura, a Prince Georges County trucker and father of three. Originally from El Salvador, he has had protected status since 2001.

Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez (D-Montgomery), who has advocated on behalf of the affected drivers, said the state agency should apologize for its mistake and for threatening the livelihoods of immigrants unnecessarily.

It is not clear whether President-elect Donald Trump (R), who campaigned on a promise of shutting down illegal immigration, will appoint a homeland security secretary who would significantly change which countries of origin qualify for the protected-status program. The program for citizens of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras next comes up for review in 2018. Yemen, Sudan and Somalia are on the list for 2017.
Protesters gathered in front of the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington, on Nov. 10, carrying signs and chanting outside the building before marching to the White House. (Video: WUSA9 / Photo: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Protesters gathered in front of the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington, on Nov. 10, carrying signs and chanting outside the building before marching to the White House. (Video: WUSA9 / Photo: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

About 200 protesters gathered peacefully, if loudly, Thursday night in front of the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington, chanting Love Trumps Hate, We Resent the President-Elect and Not our President.

Marching down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, the protesters held signs such as Build a Wall Around Trump, No Human Being is Illegal, and Stand Up to Hate. Then they began a walk of about four blocks toward the White House.

Shannon Martinez, 40, of the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest D.C., was perhaps the only Trump supporter in the crowd. She was also walking  and handing out mini Snickers bars from a big bag with a smile on her face.

Im here to keep the people happy, a little sweeter, Martinez said. Like I say, who can be angry with chocolate in their mouth?

For many, the chilly evening was a fascinating spectacle. Some snapped photographs. Well-dressed foreign tourists strolled, laughing and marveling at the scene. And a United Nations assortment of tongues was easily heard. The protesters had their say, without destruction, and the others were interested, if nothing else.
David Gregory, a prominent journalist and political commentator on CNN, told authorities that a D.C. police officer made offending comments to his Pakistani-born driver during a traffic stop Friday morning in Northwest Washington.

I will take everything away from you, Gregory said he heard the officer say. The veteran reporter said his driver told him later that the officer also said, I will take your head off.

Gregory published the comments on his Twitter feed and said he later received calls from the mayors office and a top police official. They were eager to follow up and learn more, Gregory said. They were very concerned and wanted to express their regrets to the driver.

The office of Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) responded in a statement saying, The incident described on social media does not illustrate who we are as a city or how we carry ourselves when serving residents and members of the public. The police and Bowsers aides have already made contact to understand what transpired and will review the matter, the statement added. Police said they have spoken to the driver.

The incident occurred about 8 a.m. after Gregory had finished CNNs morning show, New Day, and was returning home. He said he was in the back of a sedan talking to his wife on the phone when his driver, who works for a company used by CNN on contract, passed a line of buses on New York Avenue near the I-395 interchange.

Gregory said the driver thought the buses were parked, but they were waiting for a light. Gregory said the D.C. officer driving a small SUV pulled over his driver for crossing the double-yellow line but did not issue a citation.

The driver, through Gregory, declined to be interviewed by The Washington Post.

Gregory said he didnt know whether the alleged comments were directed at his drivers ethnicity or were made out of anger for the traffic violation. At the same time, the veteran reporter and former host of NBCs Meet the Press, said he could not remain silent.

[CNN journalist David Gregory tweets about encounter with D.C. officer]

I have the greatest respect for the police officers in our city and the job they do day in and day out, Gregory said. But we are in a highly charged atmosphere. Im somebody who is immersed in covering and analyzing our political discourse in our country. Citizens have an obligation to look after each other. That is the reason I wanted to raise this.

Gregory called the comments striking and disturbing. To use that kind of language was beyond the pale.

The reported comments come days after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency and concerns among immigrant groups and others offended by Trump threatening mass deportation of people illegally in the country and banning of Muslims from entering, and whether his rhetoric targeting ethnic groups has given supporters license to lash out at minorities. Gregory said the driver has lived in the United States for many years, and Gregory said he believes the driver is a citizen.

District officials said they are working to identify the officer and determine if he was wearing a body camera that could have recorded the interaction.

Gregory said the officer did not get out of his vehicle but appeared angry and yelled at his driver, whom he described as shaken by the incident. Gregory tweeted, and stated in an interview, that the driver broke traffic laws and deserved to be cited for a traffic infraction.

Perry Stein contributed to this report
A Sept. 28, 2013, store surveillance video from inside a Tennessee gun store, shows Baldeo Taneja and Raminder Kaur shopping for guns. They bought two handguns from the shop that day, including a revolver the couple used to kill Taneja's ex-wife on Oct. 12, 2013. (Montgomery County States Attorneys Office)

A Sept. 28, 2013, store surveillance video from inside a Tennessee gun store, shows Baldeo Taneja and Raminder Kaur shopping for guns. They bought two handguns from the shop that day, including a revolver the couple used to kill Taneja's ex-wife on Oct. 12, 2013. (Montgomery County States Attorneys Office)

Raminder Kaur, a 66-year-old grandmother accused of gunning down her husbands ex-wife with a snub-nose revolver, was convicted of first-degree murder in Montgomery County late Thursday by a jury that rejected her attorneys claim that it was her husband, acting alone, who fired the shots.

The verdict comes more than three years after the death of Preeta Gabba, 49, as she walked along a quiet street in Germantown, Md., to catch a bus to work on a Saturday morning.

In a 2014 trial, Kaur and her husband, a PhD-level biostatistician named Baldeo Taneja, 65. were tried together. Both were convicted of first-degree murder. The two, natives of India, had been in an Amway operation together, and were living in Tennessee. They were upset about alimony that Taneja still had to pay to his ex-wife.

After their convictions, both Kaur and Taneja moved to get new trials. Tanejas effort is pending. But Kaur, based on a judges ruling that she had ineffective lawyering in 2014, was granted the new trial.

In the most recent case, Taneja was not at the defense table with Kaur. She did not testify, but her attorneys put forth a defense that Taneja committed the murder.

Baldeo Taneja and Raminder Kaur were tried together in 2014 in the slaying of his ex-wife. Both were convicted of first-degree murder, but a judge ordered a new trial for Kaur. (Tennessee law enforcement photos)

She showed little emotion Thursday evening as the jury announced its verdict: guilty on the murder charge, as well as guilty on conspiracy and handgun counts.

Kaur puts blame on husband

Preeta Gabbas son: She was the only family I had.

Her second trial had begun early last week. Kaur will remain behind bars and will be sentenced at a later date.

This was a coldblooded act, said Montgomery County States Attorney John McCarthy, noting the plotting and planning on the part of Kaur and Teneja. Not only did they drive up here to execute the victim, theyd come up earlier to run surveillance on her movements. I am grateful that a jury has seen the truth of this matter  yet again.

The murder goes back to October 2013.

That month, according to authorities, Kaur and Taneja got into their car in Nashville, drove to Maryland and checked into a Red Roof Inn. When they awoke, authorities say, they drove to the ex-wifes neighborhood, where Kaur got out of the car to shoot her before the couple left, then made a quick appearance at an Amway conference and headed back to Tennessee.

Preeta Gabba (Montgomery County States Attorneys Office)

Police soon caught up to them, finding in their car the alleged murder weapon, a second handgun, more than $3,000 in cash, hair dye, a wig and the packaging for a second wig, according to prosecutors. They contend that the couple used their stop at the Amway conference to create a cover story.

Earlier Thursday, the jury panel had sent a note to the judge saying they were having trouble reaching an agreement. But they kept going, eventually reaching a verdict.

In an interview after the verdict, one juror said the panel respected each other during the full day of deliberations. All the jurors looked to achieve consensus, he said.

They kept reviewing the evidence, and how Maryland law defined participation in a murder, according to the juror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations.

She didnt have to have pulled the trigger, the juror said. But this murder wasnt a surprise to her. She was an active participant.

Still, in the end, most of the jurors also felt she was the shooter, the juror said.

Why Raminder Kaur was given a new trial.

Immediately after Kaurs first trial, top officials at the Maryland Public Defenders Office stepped forward and asserted that one of their attorneys had provided poor representation to Kaur and contended that Kaur had wanted to testify, but that her attorney would not let her. The office asked for the new trial for Kaur.

Montgomery Circuit Court Judge Michael Mason agreed, ruling that part of the defense failings in the first trial resulted from the heavy workload carried by public defenders.
A view of the August 2014 rescue of 24 roller-coaster riders who were stuck on the Jokers Jinx at Six Flags American in Upper Marlboro, Md., for five hours. (Courtesy of Prince George's County Fire Chief Marc Bashoor)

When Sergio Benitezs cousin and fiancee were reluctant about hopping on the twisting green-and-purple roller coaster that climbed more than 70 feet into the sky, he nudged them with playful peer pressure.

Its only going to take 30 seconds to a minute, Benitez remembered telling them two years ago on a hot August day at Six Flags America in Upper Marlboro, Md. Its quick. Its fast.

Wary, the two got on the Jokers Jinx with Benitez and a few other relatives and friends. But shortly after they shot through a loop at 60 mph in under three seconds, the ride began losing momentum and stalled, stopping dead about seven stories in the air.

Benitezs fiancee at the time, now his wife, turned to him and asked, Baby, is this part of the ride?

It wasnt.

A judge awarded some of the 24 riders $10,000 in a lawsuit over the 2014 incident, which involved additional litigation. (Courtesy of Prince George's County Fire Chief Marc Bashoor)

What promised to be a few minutes of adrenaline rush turned into a five-hour ordeal for Benitez and about two dozen others who eventually had to be rescued from the top of the ride by firefighters.

Two years later, a Prince Georges County judge ordered Six Flags America to pay $10,000 to each of Benitezs family members stuck that day, totaling $60,000 in damages.

The lawsuit is part of a set of legal actions against Six Flags since the dramatic 2014 rescue made national and international headlines.

Two riders had already settled out of court before the most recent judgment, and one of Benitezs brothers  who said he suffered nerve damage from the incident  is expected to pursue his case in circuit court, where he has asked for damages in excess of $75,000, said Barry Helfand, the attorney who represented Benitezs family.

[Firefighters rescue 24 on roller coaster at Six Flags]

They were dehydrated, frightened and nauseated, Helfand said. One of my clients testified that he had to urinate up there so he urinated in his pants.

Six Flags declined to comment for this article. Helfand said it remains unclear why the ride stalled.

Benitez wound up at Six Flags America on Aug. 10, 2014, for a family outing with relatives visiting from Paraguay. Benitez, who was raised in Rockville, grew up riding roller coasters at places such as Disney World, Kings Dominion and Hersheypark, and never imagined anything unusual happening during his visit to the amusement park in a Washington, D.C., suburb.

But shortly after he launched out of the start of Jokers Jinx, the cart carrying him lost momentum, went down a slope and began rocking side-to-side until it came to a complete stop about 75 to 85 feet in the air, leaving the seats tilted sideways in mid-twist.

Benitez said he was sure they would be on their way back down soon. But a few minutes turned into 30 minutes, which turned into two hours, which turned into five.

Benitezs then-fiancee started crying. His mother, who was on the ground holding the riders purses, wallets and cellphones, was terrified. And everyone began to get sunburned, dehydrated and cramped as they sat restrained in the cars under the midday sun.

Helfand and Benitez said worried riders were made even more frightened when the park failed to communicate what was going wrong after the ride first stopped.

I was scared and anxious and just not knowing what the hell was going to happen, Benitez said.

After about 2 hours of intermittent communication with riders through a bullhorn, the park staff called the fire department for assistance, Helfand said.

[Six Flags incident was scary. But roller coasters have a good track record]

Firefighters in a retractable bucket eventually made it up to the stranded riders, strapping each one into a harness before releasing the safety bar on the rides seats. The riders then walked, one-by-one, along a greasy, narrow running board before hopping into the bucket that brought them back to earth, Helfand and Benitez said.

Benitez said his family and friends suffered from injuries including back pain, cramps, dehydration and numbness from sitting tilted in the slanted carts and being restrained for hours. Benitezs brother went to the emergency room the next day when he woke up and couldnt move his neck, the family said.

The family sued, Benitez said, hoping the amusement park will adopt better practices in the event that other riders find themselves in a similar situation.

How does a multimillion-dollar corporation like Six Flags not have an emergency backup plan, let alone someone trained to be down there somewhere talking to us for five hours just to entertain us, or ask us random stupid questions to get that fear out of our heads? Benitez said.

Hopefully we were an example for them to cover these gaps next time they have an emergency.
A man accused of raping a woman last month after dragging her into a ditch following a car crash near Fredericksburg, Va., was arrested Thursday in North Carolina, authorities said.

On Oct. 31, a woman was driving on Route 3 about 3 a.m. when her car was struck by another vehicle. Police said the driver of the other vehicle dragged the woman into a ditch and sexually assaulted her over a two-hour period.

[Woman in Va. is dragged into ditch and sexually assaulted after car crash]

During authorities investigation, they identified 26-year-old Roberto Carlos Flores Sibrian, of no fixed address, as a suspect, the Stafford County Sheriffs Office said in a statement.

Flores Sibrian, who had been living near Fredericksburg, was arrested Thursday at a construction site in Sanford, N.C., the statement said.

He was charged with rape and aggravated sexual battery, police said, and is being held in North Carolina on $100,000 bond and an immigration detainer.

The incident occurred near Sherwood Forest Farm Road, about five miles southeast of Fredericksburg and 60 miles from the District.
A 24-year-old Montgomery County man was charged with a hate crime after allegedly assaulting a gay man outside a bar after he had poured water on the victims head earlier while they were inside, police officials said Thursday.

The victims husband also was injured in the melee, police said. Both men were taken to a hospital for treatment of cuts, scrapes and bruises.

Jose Luis Ledesma-Chavez, of Olney, was charged with a hate crime, police said. A second man who was with him, identified as Hamdan Ibrahim Bibi Vincent, 24, of Beltsville, was charged with simple assault.

Neither man charged could be reached for comment about the allegations, and court records do not indicate whether they have retained attorneys.

Early on the morning of Oct. 22, police were called to the Greene Turtle in Olney for the report of an assault in progress, charging documents state. Detectives eventually spoke with witnesses, reviewed interior and exterior surveillance video and, according to documents filed with the charges, concluded:

Jose Luis Ledesma-Chavez (Montgomery County Police)

A group of four people, including the gay couple  had been at the bar. A second group, including Ledesma-Chavez and Vincent, were sitting at a table across the room. At closing time, the second group began to walk out. Ledesma-Chavez peeled off, walked up behind one of the gay men, poured water on his head and said enjoy that followed by a gay slur, according to the police. He then left the bar.

The couple, along with an acquaintance, chased after him.

A fight ensued, which spilled outside to the front of the restaurant, police asserted in court records.

Ledesma-Chavez tackled one of the gay men and repeatedly struck him about the head and face, causing cuts, scrapes and a black eye, police wrote.

The victims husband then tried to hit Ledesma-Chavez, prompting Vincent to go after the victims husband, police said in the charging documents. Vincent then proceeded to kick/stomp [this victim] while he was still on the ground, police wrote.

Security staff from the bar helped separate the parties.

Ledesma-Chavez and Vincent were able to leave the area in vehicles. Just before they did, police alleged that Vincent placed something over the license plate of one of the vehicles in an effort to elude identification.

Hamdan Ibrahim Bibi Vincent (Montgomery County Police)

In addition to interviewing witnesses and reviewing surveillance tapes, police linked the two suspects to the bar based on credit card receipts, according to court records.
Two more people were arrested Thursday in the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old Manassas man in October, police said.

On Oct. 29 at about 9:50 p.m., officers found Edward I. Chicas suffering from gunshot wounds after a gang-related fight in the 7500 block of Quail Run Lane in Manassas, Prince William County Police said in a statement. Chicas, Prince Williams 19th homicide victim this year, died after being transported to a hospital, and vehicles and homes in the area were also hit by gunfire, the statement said.

[Seven arrested and charged in gang-related slaying in Prince William County]

Police said they identified several suspects in the shooting, including accessories after the fact and co-conspirators, as members of the gang Mara Salvatrucha, known as MS-13, and arrested seven people on Wednesday, including a 17-year-old.

On Thursday, police said, Kevin Vigil Cruz, 22, of Manassas Park and Carlos Antoni Cisneros-Espinal, 21, of Manassas were arrested in Ohio and charged with accessory after the fact.
Police received reports from witnesses who spotted missing University of Maryland student Kaitlyn George in Baltimore following her departure from campus on Nov. 10. Authorities said they have "no reason to suspect foul play in this case. (WUSA9)

Police received reports from witnesses who spotted missing University of Maryland student Kaitlyn George in Baltimore following her departure from campus on Nov. 10. Authorities said they have "no reason to suspect foul play in this case. (WUSA9)

Police said new video surveillance footage shows some of the movements of a 21-year-old University of Maryland college student who went missing last week and they said they do not suspect foul play in the case.

Kaitlyn George was reported missing around 6:30 p.m. Thursday. She was supposed to meet a friend around 5 p.m. at the Eppley Recreation center to go on a hiking trip. When she didnt show up, her friend reported her missing to campus police.

Security footage, according to police, showed George leaving a hall at the university just before 5 p.m. Thursday with a camping-style backpack and a pink bag. She was later seen in a cab and reportedly dropped off in front of a marina in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, according to a police review of security camera footage.

University of Maryland police and Baltimore City Police said they also reviewed security footage from the Federal Hill area that showed her getting into a waiting SUV on her own accord and by herself after she left the cab.

Authorities said a witness reported seeing her around 8:40 a.m. Friday on a Charm City Circulator bus in Baltimore.

Kaitlyn George (University of Maryland)

In a statement, police said, We have no reason to suspect foul play in this case.

The case remains under investigation and officials said they will continue to work on this case until we have located Kaitlyn and have verified that she is okay.

Police described George as 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighing about 121 pounds. She has hazel eyes and blonde hair.

Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to call police at 301-405-3555.
A 19-year-old from Fairfax will spend 30 years in prison for helping murder a fellow member of the street gang MS-13.

On Nov. 28, 2015, Boris Elias Rosa Castro and at least two other gang members stabbed 22-year-old Eduardo David Chandias Almendarez to death in Alexandrias Four Mile Run Park.

They did so, Castro admitted when he pleaded guilty earlier this year, to keep Almendarez from testifying against a fellow gang member who was involved in a nonfatal shooting.

Castro was sentenced Thursday in Alexandria Circuit Court to life in prison, with all but 30 years suspended pending good behavior.

Almendarez was set upon in a surprise attack during which he was stabbed at least 96 times, Commonwealths Attorney Bryan Porter said in a statement.

His body was found about a week after the killing.

Over the past few years, the D.C. region has faced a surge in violence from the El Salvador-based MS-13. Authorities believe the gang is attempting to rebuild its presence in the region after aggressive law enforcement crackdowns in the early 2000s.

Now, local officials are again focusing on the gang.

The rule of law must win over a criminal street gangs dedication to the rule of violence, Porter said in his statement.
Two juveniles were arrested this week in the stabbing of two men in Loudoun County on Nov. 4, police said.

Guillermo Piedra-Espinoza, 22, of no fixed address and a 19-year-old man were stabbed Nov. 4 about 6 p.m. near the Ashburn Meadows apartment complex in Ashburn, the Loudoun County sheriffs office said in a statement.

Piedra-Espinoza was found dead in the woods near the apartment complex, and the 19-year-old was treated for serious wounds that were not life-threatening, the statement said.

[One man slain, second wounded in Loudoun stabbings]

On Tuesday, police in New York arrested a 17-year-old from Ashburn in the stabbing, according to the statement. He is awaiting extradition to Loudoun on a detention order for aggravated malicious wounding, and further charges may be filed, according to police.

On Wednesday, a 16-year-old from Herndon was arrested in the stabbing and is being held in Fairfax County on an unrelated charge, police said.

The names of the suspects were not released.

Last week, County Sheriff Mike Chapman said the stabbing may have gang implications.

Police asked anyone with information about the stabbing to contact them at 703-777-0475.
MARYLAND

Jamie Raskin resigns his state Senate seat

Montgomery County Democrat Jamie B. Raskin has resigned his seat in the Maryland Senate after winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives.

The countys Democratic Central Committee will meet Dec. 13 to decide on a recommendation to Gov. Larry Hogan (R) about who should serve the remainder of Raskins term. A forum with potential candidates is set for 6:45 p.m. Thursday at the Silver Spring Civic Center. Del. David Moon (D-Montgomery), Del. William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery), community activist Debbie Spielberg and Howard University business professor Darian Unger have expressed interest to the committee.

 Josh Hicks

Man found slain in Prince Georges

A man was found fatally shot Friday evening in the Brandywine area of Prince Georges County, police said.

Police said he was found about 6 p.m. in the 13600 block of Tower Road. He was not identified immediately.

 Martin Weil

VIRGINIA

Two more arrested in Pr. William shooting

Two more people have been arrested in the October death of a Manassas man, police said.

On Oct. 29 at about 9:50 p.m., officers found Edward I. Chicas, 22, shot after a fight in the 7500 block of Quail Run Lane in Manassas, Prince William County Police said.

Police said they identified several suspects as members of the MS-13 street gang and arrested seven people Wednesday.

On Thursday, police said, Kevin Vigil Cruz, 22, of Manassas Park and Carlos Antoni Cisneros-Espinal, 21, of Manassas were arrested in Ohio and charged with as accessories after the fact.

 Justin Wm. Moyer

Juveniles arrested in Loudoun stabbings

Two juveniles have been arrested in the stabbings of two men in Loudoun County, police said.

Guillermo Piedra-Espinoza, 22, of no fixed address and a 19-year-old man were stabbed at about at about 6 p.m. on Nov. 4 near the Ashburn Meadows apartment complex, the Loudoun County sheriffs office said. Piedra-Espinoza was found dead in woods near the apartments, and the other victim was treated for serious wounds, the sheriffs statement said.

On Tuesday, police in New York arrested a 17-year-old from Ashburn in the stabbing, according to authorities. Police said a 16-year-old from Herndon also was arrested in the stabbings and is being held in Fairfax County on an unrelated charge.

 Justin Wm. Moyer

19-year-old sentenced to 30 years in killing

A 19-year-old from Fairfax will spend 30 years in prison for helping murder a fellow member of the street gang MS-13.

Police say that on Nov. 28, 2015, Boris Elias Rosa Castro and at least two other gang members stabbed 22-year-old Eduardo David Chandias Almendarez to death in Alexandrias Four Mile Run Park.

They did so, Castro said when he pleaded guilty earlier this year, to keep Almendarez from testifying against a fellow gang member who was involved in a nonfatal shooting. Castro was sentenced Thursday in Alexandria Circuit Court.

 Rachel Weiner

The District

Same two sought in Capitol Hill attacks

The same two people apparently carried out a robbery and an attempted robbery Friday evening in the Capitol Hill area, D.C. police said.

A phone was taken in the 700 block of First Street NE after the victim was hit on the head and in the face, police said. A few minutes later, in the 600 block of First Street, a victim was hit and ordered to give up items, but the assailants fled when someone yelled, police said.

 Martin Weil
Margo Thorning, a 73-year-old resident of Falls Church, Va., began taking drum lessons three years ago and now plays regularly in two jazz ensembles. In this video, Thorning plays with the house band at the 49 West Club in Annapolis, Md. (Video: Margo Thorning)

Margo Thorning, a 73-year-old resident of Falls Church, Va., began taking drum lessons three years ago and now plays regularly in two jazz ensembles. In this video, Thorning plays with the house band at the 49 West Club in Annapolis, Md. (Video: Margo Thorning)

When Margo Thorning was a high school student in the late 1950s, she liked to play bongo drums while listening to jazz records, but it never occurred to her to take a drum lesson. She attended college, raised two sons, and worked as a senior economic policy adviser for a Washington think tank. All the while, the urge to beat out a rhythm persisted. So three years ago, at age 70, she started taking lessons.

Im pretty athletic, and I felt like I had a chance to be competent, said Thorning, a Falls Church resident who plays tennis and rides horses. But drums were a challenge, physically and mentally. Each hand and each foot is doing something, with a different hand and a different foot at one time.

Mastering a new musical instrument has a reputation as a young persons game. Like learning a foreign language, it is commonly seen as something that must be embedded during the formative years, otherwise the learner will be hopelessly behind, if not simply hopeless.

But increasingly, adults are embracing musicianship late in life. Some finally have time after their wage-earning and child-raising years have ended. Some are spurred on by studies showing the health benefits of playing music. Many describe it as scratching an itch theyve had all their lives. And while some are happy to get to the point of playing Happy Birthday for their grandchildren, others achieve a level of competence that allows them to join ensembles and even earn money playing.

Its a growing trend, said Alicia Andrews, assistant director and adult division manager at the Lucy Moses School at Kaufman Music Center in New York City. In the last few years, more adults are really making music and arts a priority in their lives. Bucket list is such a trendy term, but thats what they say  Playing an instrument has been on my bucket list. 

Beverly Zweiben, left, a student at the Levine School, and instructor Lois Narvey work on the piano. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University who wrote a book about learning guitar at age 40, said the idea that older people cant learn new instruments is false. There are very few really firm critical periods, he said. In general, most things adults can learn, but it takes more time, and they have to do it more incrementally. Maybe they wont play like Jimi Hendrix, but they will be able to play well enough to satisfy themselves.

[Does creativity have an expiration date?]

Research shows that music stimulates the brain and enhances memory in older people. In one study, adults aged 60 to 85 without previous musical experience showed improved verbal fluency and processing speed after a few months of weekly piano lessons.

Jennifer Bugos, assistant professor of music education at the University of South Florida who conducted the study, said older people can easily pick up theoretical concepts such as intervals, arpeggios and scales. But as we age, coordination becomes much more challenging between the hands, she said.

Beverly Zweiben found that to be the case when she started learning piano 10 years ago.

I had always wanted to play the piano and never had the opportunity to do it. And then suddenly one day, when I was over 50, I saw a notice by a piano teacher at my place of work offering to teach piano to anyone in any circumstance, said Zweiben, a retired government worker who lives in the District.

Her initial teacher had a piano with little stars on the keys because everybody else she taught was a child.

Margo Thorning poses for a portrait next to her drum kit during a practice with her fellow musicians at her townhouse in Falls Church, Va. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)

I was absolutely dreadful. I had no hand, eye or brain coordination. But about a year into it, something clicked. Theres nothing more gratifying than doing something with your hands and out comes something that vaguely sounds like music.

At Levine Music, a regional music school, many of the 800 adult students are retirees, and over a third come in never having played an instrument. For them, starting after age 50 can be a blessing and a burden.

Theres definitely an enormous amount of memory involved in learning an instrument, and young peoples memory is much better than older adults memory; and certainly eyesight and hearing play into it, said Lois Narvey, head of performance at Levine.

Older people also tend to set higher bars for themselves, she said. Kids have no expectations about how well theyre supposed to be doing something brand new. . . . The older people get the more anxiety there is coming, I suppose, from their expectations of themselves. These are, in general, very accomplished people in their lives, so its very humbling to be doing something brand new, and theyre very surprised at how much time it takes.

At the same time, they have a certain edge. Adult learners know themselves and their learning styles better, and they tend to be more motivated, said Jessica Grahn, a music neuroscientist at Western University in Ontario. In fact, she said, their brain limitations may even help them.

Our brains are less plastic when were older, and thats probably a good thing  rewiring the brain is an intense process, she said. While children pick up new skills more easily, they also have more trouble with seeing the big picture and controlling their impulses. And adults have an easier time understanding concepts, such as what a scale is and what a chord is, and how they relate to each other. So your response might be slower, but that life experience is incredibly useful.

But so much life experience can make beginners painfully aware of botched rhythms and sour notes. They have been listening to music all their lives, so they know what its supposed to sound like, Grahn said. Its demoralizing when you start to play, you see a huge contrast between what you are able to produce and you know other people are able to produce.

Given enough time and dedication, older learners can generally catch up with younger ones, even if they have to use more brain power to do so, Grahn said, noting that in scans of older people playing the same piece of music as younger people, We tend to see greater brain activity, which means theyre using more of their brains to process the same thing.

A lifetime of learning foreign languages does not seem to help, she said. But a math background might, perhaps because the rhythmic relationships and time signatures require an understanding of numbers.

Even when the understanding is there, an older body can have a harder time with the flexibility and stamina required of instrumentalists.

Most people have some level of muscular tension, and somebody whos achieved a certain age and hasnt done anything like play a musical instrument, the hands become kind of clawlike, Narvey said. Its one thing to say, Relax  they try, but theyre not aware of what patterns their body has developed over so many years.

Older musicians need to watch how they hold their body, Marcus said: Whereas younger people can get away with bad posture, older ones are more vulnerable to carpal tunnel syndrome.

But playing can also be a good workout. Not only does Thorning have to carry her drums around, but drumming is really an isometric exercise  in a seven- to eight-minute piece, Im playing the whole thing; the sax or guitar get to take a break. So its a good weight-loss strategy. It keeps you physically fit, and mentally its very disciplined. At the end of two hours, my brain is tired.

She now plays in two different jazz groups and describes connecting with her fellow musicians in a way that could only come with age. With a drummer, you have to add comp  little sounds based on what the other people are doing. Im told Im good at comping. Maybe a 10- or 12-year-old might not be as attuned . . . maybe being older helps you become more sensitive to the other musicians, and listen to what the other musicians are doing and complement what theyre doing. You add a little flair, a little splash and dash to the music.

Many who play with ensembles or take a class say it makes them feel part of a community.

They love to get together each week and share the music and get together afterward and talk, said Glenn Sewell, director of adult music education at Levine. Thats just as important as playing.

For adults, the instruments in and of themselves often also hold emotional appeal.

Susan Shand, 57, walked into an estate sale in Northwest Washington last spring and became enamored with an East German harpsichord that had been lovingly cared for by its previous owner. She had never played a musical instrument, although she had considered taking up piano. Instead, she bought the harpsichord (along with the previous owners sheet music and maintenance logs) and began studying with Narvey.

I like its sound. I like its Jane Austen style. I like its delicacy, she said. For Shand, an executive producer for Voice of America who is also working on a book and a masters degree and is a caretaker for her mother, playing for an hour a day has had an unexpected effect. Im completely focused and concentrated. And when Im finished practicing, Im so rested, I feel like Ive meditated for an hour.

Her playing, she added, sounds to me like Im a child, but its okay.

Playing like a child doesnt bother Zweiben either  she is learning Slow Dance by Bartok from a book he wrote for his 6-year-old son.

Its very satisfying. Once Im learning a piece and into it, it stays in my brain and I find myself wanting to get back to it. And she must be getting better. My cats have stopped yowling, which I take as a good sign.
"The Cruelest Wound" by Charles E. Kelly from the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. (Charles E. Kelly/Veterans History Project)

Some of the artists scribbled their work on envelopes. Others illustrated letters they sent home from overseas. Still others made serious portraits of combat, its horrors, and the men and women who served during wartime.

Army Sgt. Robert K. Bindig drew cartoons he mailed to his wife. Naval officer Tracy A. Sugarman made exquisite pictures in pencil of average sailors. And Charles E. Kelly sketched a Marine gone mad in battle.

Now, the Library of Congresss Veterans History Project has launched an online posting to coincide with Veterans Day called Art of War, which offers material from 19 collections of art from World War II, as well as the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

[The raw art of war]

The collection highlights the art of servicemen and women whose only canvas was the paper they might have in their pockets.

It captures the mundane and dreary aspects of war, as well as the dignity of its participants, and the drama of its battles.

Soldier David R. Dressers illustrated diary depicts the drudgery of cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors, and washing out of his helmet.

Army aviator Doane Hage drew detailed pictures of his B-17 bomber getting shot down, and his life in a Nazi prison camp.

Army Staff Sgt. Joseph George Farris painted scenes of combat in France and later went on to be a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine.

They worked with pencil, ink and watercolors, in the field or barracks or aboard ship, often spending spare time or slow time on their art. Sometimes they portrayed themselves immersed in their work.

For a lot of them, [art] was a coping mechanism, Megan Harris, reference specialist with the Veterans History Project, said Thursday.

Just as in civilian life, folks are driven to create art through . . . a need to put it down on paper, she said. As a means of catharsis for what theyre seeing and dealing with, as a permanent record.

Numerous servicemen decorated the envelopes containing letters they wrote home to their families.

Bindig, who later became a commercial artist and cartoonist, wrote regular letters to his wife, Dorris, in Buffalo, covering the envelopes with comic illustrations in colored pencil.

They often portrayed his dismay at failing to get mail from home, but also included lighthearted self-portraits.

That levity was needed for themselves, but then also for the people they were sending the letters to, Harris said.

They wrote letters home to reassure, to bring solace to their families, she said. A funny drawing lightens the mood a little bit. It reassures the home that theyre okay, theyre fine, theyre surviving, that theyre swell.

As light as they are, and as theyre portraying themselves, theres no getting around what they were doing and seeing and feeling, she said.

Some of the collections include letters. Those of Sugarman to his wife, June, in Peekskill, N.Y., are especially poignant.

You have to pinch yourself mentally several times a day to realize that you are actually going overseas, he wrote her from a ship in February 1944. That you are actually in some danger from attack; that all the guys you are eating, sleeping, playing poker with are actually going to war.

Sugarman would go on to draw portraits in graphite and ink of anonymous rumpled sailors rolling dice, peeling potatoes, and playing poker.

He later did illustrations of the civil rights movement and other aspects of U.S. history. He died in 2013.

Charles E. Kelly was a Navy pharmacists mate assigned to a unit that was among the first to land on the beach at the Pacifics bloody Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945.

His stark drawings depict the terrors of battle.

The smell of death was heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of the disinfectant we had boiled our clothes in the day before, he wrote later. That stretch of beach the following morning, the bodies were packed so tightly you could hardly see a place where they were not touching.

He drew fallen Marines half-buried in the black sand, and one naked, his clothes having been blown off in an explosion.

His most unsettling image, though, was a black-and-white sketch of a frantic, wild-eyed Marine who had gone crazy in the battle.

He titled the image The Cruelest Wound.

It is a terrible tragedy to lose a limb, he wrote in a memoir. How much greater the sacrifice of ones mind. . . . The human mind is a frail commodity, unable for prolonged periods to withstand the force of fire and steel.

To those we owe so much, he wrote, we attempt to mask their madness with a diagnosis of combat fatigue. 

Mimi Korach Lesser was a civilian commercial artist who sketched hundreds of portraits of soldiers recuperating in hospitals in Europe. She often signed them to her subject, who could then have the portrait sent home to his parents.

I was so intrigued by these surroundings that I even took my sketchbook into the latrine, she wrote later. It went everywhere with me.
Clarence Ditlow speaks to reporters in 1994 about a government settlement with General Motors over the auto companys pickup trucks. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Clarence M. Ditlow III, a consumer advocate who helped force automakers to install lifesaving features such as air bags and to remove millions of defective vehicles from the road during a four-decade campaign for auto safety, died Nov. 10 at a hospital in Washington. He was 72.

The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Marilyn Herman. Since 1976, Mr. Ditlow had served as executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a Washington-based nonprofit organization founded by Ralph Nader and the Consumers Union advocacy group.

The son of a Chevrolet service manager, Mr. Ditlow pursued dual training in engineering and the law, joined Naders group of activists as a young lawyer and became what the New York Times once called the splinter that the car industry could not remove from its thumb.

Under Mr. Ditlows leadership  on a shoestring budget and through methods both celebrated and criticized  the Center for Auto Safety battled lawmakers as well as car manufacturers, winning changes in regulatory and business practices that were credited with saving thousands of lives.

He was one of the chief watchdogs of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the auto industry, said Nader, whose 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed helped incite outrage over what Nader described as the auto industrys willingness to trade safety for profit. Nader described Mr. Ditlow as a full-time citizen for motorist safety.

Among the centers most significant early victories was the recall in 1972 of 6.7 million Chevrolets with defective engine mounts, a flaw that could cause the accelerator to jam and the brakes to malfunction. In 1978, the group helped force the recall of 14.5 million Firestone 500 tires after the blowout-prone model was linked to dozens of deaths and injuries.

The same year, again with pressure from the Center for Auto Safety, Ford recalled 1.5 million Pintos and Mercury Bobcats at risk of fuel tank fires. A similar problem surfaced years later in Chrysler Jeeps; 2.5 million of them were recalled in 2013.

He makes em; we recall em, Mr. Ditlow had told the Times in 1991, referring to then-Chrysler Chairman Lee A. Iacocca. We have a standing offer to stop our opposition when they stop making bad cars.

Few if any major automakers escaped the centers scrutiny. In a 2014 settlement with the Justice Department, Toyota admitted to having deceived the public about the risk of sudden acceleration in certain vehicles. The company was fined $1.2 billion  reportedly the largest criminal penalty ever imposed on an automaker by the United States.

The next year, General Motors agreed to pay a $900 million fine in a settlement with the Justice Department after the exposure of an ignition-switch defect, also uncovered with help from Mr. Ditlows group, that was reportedly linked to 174 deaths.

Mr. Ditlow cited the requirement of dual frontal air bags, effective for all cars since the 1998 model year, as the biggest single advance in automotive safety. The devices have saved more than 42,000 lives, according to an estimate from NHTSA.

But even air bags sometimes presented problems: In 2015, in part through the efforts of Mr. Ditlows group, Takata air bags in nearly 34 million vehicles were recalled after the products were sometimes shown to discharge shrapnel when they deployed. The Washington Post reported that it was expected to be the biggest recall of any consumer product in U.S. history.

In pursuing their cause, Mr. Ditlow and his colleagues assembled a database of thousands of consumer complaints, then mined it to discern patterns. They also tracked lawsuits against automakers, looking for settlements that raised red flags.

At times, the group drew criticism for what some federal regulators considered crying wolf, undermining government oversight efforts with its own watchdog activities and working too closely with product liability lawyers, whom Mr. Ditlow considered useful partners in his cause.

The Center for Auto Safety figured prominently in a high-profile, highly fraught controversy in the 1990s over the recall of GM pickup trucks with side saddle fuel tanks. The center described the vehicles as rolling firebombs, prone to catching fire in the event of side collision. GM claimed that critics had engaged in a campaign to sensationalize and prejudice the record.

Feeding the controversy was a report in which the TV newsmagazine Dateline NBC rigged a fiery explosion involving one of the vehicles. The shows anchors later apologized for the breach of journalistic ethics and announced a settlement with GM.

Amid the investigation of the trucks, a former GM lawyer sued Mr. Ditlow for libel and slander, accusing the consumer advocate of falsely claiming that the lawyer had ordered the shredding of company documents related to the trucks. The case ended in a settlement, with the Center for Auto Safetys insurer paying a reported $500,000.

A judge assessed Mr. Ditlow and his lawyer $54,000 in fines and damages after they brazenly ignored the courts order by releasing a sealed deposition to other lawyers engaged in a lawsuit against GM.

In 1994, the federal government and GM reached a settlement in which the government ended a recall investigation and GM agreed to contribute more than $51 million to auto safety initiatives. Mr. Ditlow did not relinquish his campaign; nearly a decade later, he railed against the design as the worst auto crash fire defect in the history of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Clarence Mintzer Ditlow III was born Jan. 26, 1944, in Louisville, Ga., and grew up in Camp Hill, Pa. He was inspired to work as a consumer advocate during chemical engineering studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., where he graduated in 1965. As a student he visited a steel plant, he told the Times, where workers had little protection against industrial accidents.

He received a law degree from Georgetown University in 1970 and a masters degree in environmental law from Harvard University the following year. He worked with Naders Public Interest Research Group before becoming executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, which was established in 1970.

Mr. Ditlow testified before federal officials and otherwise lobbied on matters including car warranties, fuel-economy standards and lemon laws to help buyers of flawed vehicles. The Center for Auto Safety was credited with helping enact such laws in 50 states.

With Nader and others, he helped write editions of Lemon Book, a guide for unlucky car owners seeking recourse. His other publications included Little Secrets of the Auto Industry: Hidden Warranties Cost Billions of Dollars (1994), written with Ray Gold.

Besides his wife, of Washington, survivors include a sister.

Mr. Ditlow drove a variety of Chevrolets over the years, including the Geo Prizm, the Nova and, most recently, a hybrid Monte Carlo. (He also rode the Washington subway after he was struck by a car while riding his bicycle.)

He said he was hopeful that advances in technology would improve auto safety by automatically alerting drivers to potential dangers.

We have a number of accidents each year because of driver inattention, he told the Times in 1997. You can tell from the movement of the steering wheel whether someones getting drowsy, and you can build in an audible alert that says, Wake up! Heck, I just had Dr. Ruth tell me to buckle my seat belts in my New York cab yesterday.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Mr. Ditlow succeeded Ralph Nader as executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. Nader was a co-founder of the organization, not an executive director.
President-elect Donald Trump speaks to the press following a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at the Capitol on Thursday. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

During the brief period since his election, President-elect Donald Trump has begun to revise his health-care agenda in ways that conform more closely to the heart of Republican thinking in recent decades.

On the presidential transition website, at greatagain.gov, antiabortion statements and policy positions have appeared that were not part of the campaigns health-care platform. Other proposals have been deleted.

Erasing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with a set of policies long favored by conservatives remain at the core of the agenda. But in his first interview as president-elect, Trump significantly softened his language for the ACAs fate, telling the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Either Obamacare will be amended or repealed and replaced.

He mentioned just two parts of the law to keep, both favored by House Republicans despite their eagerness to axe the law. Trump reiterated his support for a rule forbidding insurers to refuse coverage to people with preexisting medical problems. And he said young adults should be able to stay on their parents insurance policies until 26  an aspect he did not discuss during the campaign.

[Trumps health-care positions as a candidate]

On the transition website, the first two lines in a set of bullet points say that the Trump administration will protect health-care workers from being required to perform services that violate their religious or moral beliefs and that it will protect innocent human life from conception to natural death. Neither had figured among the campaigns health-care positions.

Donald Trump has campaigned to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act once he gets into office. Now that he's won the presidency with a majority Republican House and Senate, that feat still might not prove to be too easy. Wonkblog's Max Ehrenfreund explains. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

Conversely, the website omits what had been the Republican nominees call for Congress to allow Americans to import prescription drugs from countries where they are sold at lower prices. This idea has long been favored by Democratic lawmakers but repeatedly blocked by Republicans.

The idea of drugs crossing U.S. borders could be construed as conflicting with the president-elects support of trade barriers, said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. But Cannon acknowledged that, overall, Trumps health-care machinations have been a black box for me.

According to insiders to the transition, the shifts in the agenda primarily reflect the views of people chosen to help handle his ascension to the Oval Office, not a deliberate strategy by Trump to align with the GOP majorities in the House and Senate.

[Is Paul Ryan already eyeing Medicare cuts?]

Many of the ideas, including the conscience clause for health-care workers, mirror the positions of the Heritage Foundation. Edwin Feulner, the conservative think tanks former president, has a prominent role in the transition for domestic policy. So does Kenneth Blackwell, a former Cincinnati mayor and Ohio secretary of state who is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and serves on boards of other conservative organizations.

The tweaked health-care agenda is certainly moving in the direction of traditional Republican thinking, said Gail Wilensky, a veteran health-policy expert who ran the Medicare and Medicaid programs under President George H.W. Bush and has not conferred with the Trump post-election team. Not with a fulsome leap, but hes definitely moved in that direction.

During the campaign, for instance, the candidates platform did not address the future of Medicare, the vast federal insurance program for older or disabled Americans. The program has been strained financially for years, and the trust fund that pays for Medicare patients hospital care is forecast to become insolvent in a dozen years. Before his election, Trump said repeatedly that he would not cut or change the program. Im leaving it the way it is, he said in May.

1 of 22 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  What President-elect Donald Trump is doing on his trip to Washington View Photos Trump arrives at the White House for a meeting with Obama and on Capitol Hill to meet with Republican congressional leaders. Caption Trump arrives at the White House for a meeting with Obama and on Capitol Hill to meet with Republican congressional leaders. Nov. 10, 2016 President Obama talks with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

In contrast, the transition website says the Trump administration will modernize Medicare so that it will be ready for the challenges with the coming retirement of the Baby Boom generation  and beyond.

By adding Medicare modernization to the list, Trump is now employing the vocabulary of Republicans, notably House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Wilensky said. Ryan has long advocated converting Medicare from an entitlement program and giving its beneficiaries a certain amount of money to help buy private health plans.

For his part, Trump is borrowing language that Ryan . . . has used about modernizing Medicare, but not with any specificity, Wilensky said. She also noted that the president-elects time frame was slightly skewed, since the first baby boomers began to retire five years ago.

The president-elects agenda removes a separate campaign idea that the House speaker and other conservatives favor: changing tax law so that individuals can deduct the cost of health insurance. Critics say such a switch would weaken employer health benefits that have been the mainstay of coverage since the 1940s.

[Trump took five positions on abortion in three days]

Over the years, including early in his candidacy, Trumps position on abortion has fluctuated. But in July, he chose Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a fervent abortion opponent, as his running mate. Two months later, Trump dispatched a letter to pro-life leaders in which he pledged to nominate Supreme Court justices who oppose abortion rights, remove funding from Planned Parenthood and permanently institute the Hyde Amendment, a controversial provision that limits federal funding of abortion.

In Tuesdays election, exit polls suggest about 80 percent of white, evangelical voters supported the Republican ticket.
Hillary Clinton

Donald Trump said he would put her in jail, accusing her of mishandling classified emails as secretary of state.

How would Trump be able to do that? To start, he would have to appoint his attorney general and then order the attorney general to select a special prosecutor to look into the matter. The special prosecutor would have to agree with Trump that Clinton violated federal law pertaining to the handling of classified information. Even then, Clinton would still be allowed a trial, at which the prosecutor would have to contend with the fact that the FBI investigation of Clinton found insufficient evidence to bring a case against her. FBI Director James B. Comey said in July that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a criminal case against Clinton.

Time frame: Trump could get the process started as soon as he comes into office if he appoints an attorney general willing enough to go after Clinton.

Obamacare

Donald Trump has campaigned to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Now that he's won the presidency with a majority Republican House and Senate, that feat still might not be too easy. Wonkblogs Max Ehrenfreund explains. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

Trump has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a set of new health-care programs.

Trump benefits from the fact that House and Senate Republican leaders share his goal. Congress probably can readily rescind parts of the ACA that involve federal spending, through a method called budget reconciliation  a strategy that produced a bill early this year that President Obama vetoed but Trump would sign. This method requires 50 Senate votes  one fewer than the GOP majority in the next Senate  and could be used to eliminate federal subsidies for ACA health plans, the requirement that most Americans have insurance, and other important elements. Because it would require 60 Senate votes to avoid a filibuster, Trump might have more trouble winning passage of some of his health-care proposals. They include converting Medicaid from an entitlement program to state block grants, allowing insurance companies to sell policies across state lines and letting individuals take tax deductions for their insurance costs, as businesses already do.

Time frame: Quickly for portions of the ACA to be abolished through reconciliation  as soon as the House and Senate scheduled votes. Unclear for the rest.

Waterboarding

Harsh interrogation tactics such as waterboarding, Trump said, should be used again.

Trump would have to appoint a team of lawyers to come up with a law that could win court approval. Trump would probably have to restart the program under a massive amount of public and congressional scrutiny. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has said repeatedly that the agency would not waterboard again, saying Trump would need his own damn bucket. Waterboarding had been a key part of the U.S. militarys Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program and was used on trainees in controlled environments. In the early 2000s the CIA hired two clinical psychologists to create an interrogation program that incorporated aspects of SERE.

Time frame: Unknown. Trump would need to appoint a CIA director willing to direct his personnel to waterboard, as well as a defense secretary willing to do the same.

Trump mused about accepting immigrants to the United States using a "merit system" during a campaign rally in Pensacola, Fla. (The Washington Post)

The wall

Trumps earliest campaign promise was perhaps his boldest  to build a beautiful wall along the Mexico border to keep out illegal immigrants and to force Mexico to pay for it.

To do this, Trump will have to work with two governments  Mexicos and his own. His first step would be to persuade Congress to appropriate the money, which experts say could run into the tens of billions of dollars with Mexico refusing to pay. Trump has said he would force Mexico to pay by withholding about $24 billion in remittances to the country from illegal immigrants. But those are many of the same migrants hes vowing to deport, and remittances also come from legal immigrants. To build the structure, Trump would also have to overcome major obstacles, including environmental and engineering problems; fights with people who dont want to give up private land; and the huge geological challenges of the border.

Time frame: Trump says hell start immediately, but given the myriad obstacles, this could take forever.

Deportation

In addition to the wall, Trump vowed to deport all illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, to remove many other undocumented migrants and to kill executive actions that protect some from deportation.

To do this, Trump has vowed to triple the number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, which experts say would require congressional approval and be very costly. He would also have to appoint an aggressive secretary for homeland security who would focus on measures to make it easier for ICE to deport the estimated 820,000 illegal immigrants whove committed crimes. Trump can end Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which has given temporary protection from deportation to hundreds of thousands of people who arrived in the United States as children.

Time frame: Targeting and deporting about half of the nations estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants would take years.

Syrian refugees

Trump has promised an extreme and total ban on Muslim refugees entering the United States from Syria. More recently, he changed that vow, instead calling for an entry exam to determine if hate is in their hearts.

This would be an unprecedented step. The Trump administrations first action would be a directive to the Department of Homeland Security to somehow design a test that certifies whether a refugee or asylum seeker from a majority-Muslim country is a threat. The agency would have to identify which citizens from which countries would be subject to such an exam, and he would have to persuade Congress to go along with it.

Time frame: This could take two years of drafting, analysis and hearings before final approval.

Iran nuclear deal

Another Trump pledge has been to renegotiate the deal aimed at curbing Irans nuclear weapons ambitions by imposing limits on some nuclear programs in return for lifting sanctions.

To pull it off, he would have to get all the parties that agreed on the deal, including the U.N. Security Council and Iran, back to the table to renegotiate some of the key tenets. If Iran deemed that to be a violation of the agreement, Tehran would be able to walk away from it altogether. Trump has said in the past that he has issues with some of the deals sunset provisions, specifically those that pertain to Irans enrichment of uranium. Under the deal it will be 15 years before Iran is allowed to make uranium that is weapons grade.

Time frame: However long it could take to get the U.N. Security Council and Iran, as well as Germany, back to a place where they would all want to renegotiate a hard-won deal.

Military

A signature Trump promise is to rebuild the military and cooperate with Russia in Syria.

To rebuild the military, Trump would have to persuadee congressional Republicans to roll back the defense budget sequester that affected force size and readiness levels. The sequester went into effect in 2013 but was a part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, this would cost $450 billion through 2026. Trump would have to find a way to offset these costs and has proposed cutting the federal workforce to help do so. Trump has also pledged to cooperate more with Russia in Syria. This effort could be modeled by creating  much like the U.S. forces have done in Iraq  a joint intelligence cell in a neighboring country where the two countries could coordinate.

Time frame: Rebuilding the military could take years. But Trump could direct the Pentagon to start talking to Russia immediately if generals and intelligence briefings dont change his mind.

Federal workforce

Shrinking the size of the federal government through attrition and a hiring freeze is another Trump vow. Military, public safety and health employees would be exempt.

This doesnt require congressional action. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan imposed hiring freezes by issuing executive orders. Reagan issued such an order on his first day in office and made it retroactive to Election Day. These days, agencies have installed hiring freezes to avoid layoffs. Unlike in previous calls for a freeze, Trumps goal isnt to save money; its to clean up what he calls corruption and special interests in Washington.

Time frame: As Carter and Reagan showed, this can start in a snap. Meaningful results, however, will take years.

Oil and gas

Trump has promised to expand drilling for oil and gas and lift regulations on companies that dig for coal.

This responsibility would fall to the Interior Department. Trumps interior secretary would have to instruct staffers to draft a new policy on energy excavation on federal land to replace the muscular regulations that restrict the practice. That would take a year of drafts and public hearings before approval. It would be complicated by a sour energy market. Even with regulations, the industry managed to excavate so much of the resources that they flooded the market. With too much supply, global prices fell, the industry suffered losses and jobs are still being cut.

How long: About 150 days, allowing for many court challenges from environmentalists.

Climate change

The Paris climate agreement reached late last year will be canceled, Trump has said.

Trump doesnt have to do much to achieve this. He could simply shrug at the nations obligations under the accord. By failing to live up to the commitments promised by Obama under the agreement, Trump could throw the process into turmoil. If the United States doesnt honor its vow to lower greenhouse-gas emissions, why should China, Brazil or India, which is racing to supply its vast and growing population with electric energy using coal? Experts say such a move would leave U.S. international credibility in shreds, but Trump has called global warming a hoax and has given little indication that his mind has changed.

Time frame: Ignoring an agreement takes no time at all. It might be a year or two before the international accord unravels.

Trade deals

Heres what Trump said in June: I am going to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He also vowed to immediately renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Trump can withdraw from the TPP literally by doing nothing. The agreement doesnt take effect until it is ratified by all of its 12 signatories, and under federal law, Congress cant ratify the deal until the president submits it. Renegotiating NAFTA is more complicated. Trump can propose changes to his counterparts in Mexico and Canada, but they are under no obligation to negotiate. Any NAFTA signatory can withdraw with six months written notice. But he could make trade a lot harder. Presidents have wide powers to impose tariffs or other trade restrictions without Congresss approval.

Time frame: Immediately. Leaders in Congress say TPP is dead unless Trump revives it.

Amy Goldstein, Mike DeBonis, Jerry Markon, Lisa Rein and Eric Yoder contributed to this report.
AFGHANISTAN

4 killed in blast at German Consulate

Germanys consulate in northern Afghanistan was attacked when a suicide car bomber rammed the compound, killing four people and wounding more than 100, police and a doctor said Friday.

Four dead, two civilians and two unidentified bodies, were brought to the Balkh hospital and around 115 people were wounded, said Dr. Noor Mohammad Faiz.

The car exploded at the gate of the consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif city, destroying the gate and wall around 11.10 p.m. Thursday, said Abdul Raziq Qaderi, head of security for Balkh province.

The Taliban issued a statement saying they had sent suicide attackers to the consulate. The statement from spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack was retaliation for recent airstrikes in the northern city of Kunduz, capital of the province of the same name.

A U.S. airstrike earlier this month killed dozens of people, including women and children, and is under investigation.

Mazar-i-Sharif is the capital of Balkh province and one of the most important cities in the country.

The German Foreign Ministry said there was an armed attack on the consulate but didnt specify the nature of the attack or mention any casualties. Germany has 983 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh.

Associated Press

SOUTH AFRICA

Motion to oust Zuma defeated in Parliament

South Africas Parliament on Thursday defeated an opposition motion to remove President Jacob Zuma over a slew of scandals, including possible government corruption linked to the president and his associates.

The motion by South Africas biggest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, was rejected 214 to 126 after an often-raucous debate.

The ruling African National Congress party, which has a majority in Parliament, had said it would not support the opposition motion against Zuma, virtually ensuring its defeat. Although some ANC members had urged Zuma to resign, it was unlikely that ruling-party lawmakers would defy the party leadership.

Last week, the state watchdog agency recommended that a judicial commission investigate the relationship that Zuma and some state officials had with the Guptas, a business family of Indian immigrants accused of meddling in the government for financial benefit. A report by the watchdog found possible ethical violations because the Guptas were allegedly involved in the removal and appointment of cabinet ministers and directors of state-owned firms.

Parliament also had rejected a motion to remove Zuma in April. That vote followed an apology by the president after the Constitutional Court ruled that he had failed to uphold the constitution amid a scandal over millions of dollars in state spending on his private home.

 Associated Press

AUSTRALIA

Government ratifies Paris climate targets

Australia on Thursday ratified its greenhouse gas emission targets agreed upon last year at the U.N. climate meeting in Paris.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told Parliament that Australia had become the 140th country to ratify the agreement, signed by 196 nations in New York in April, after the December meeting in Paris. The pact commits countries to work toward limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and set five-yearly targets for cutting emissions.

Ratification confirms Australias target to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

 Associated Press

U.N. renews arms embargo on Somalia, Eritrea: The U.N. Security Council has renewed an arms embargo on Somalia and Eritrea, citing a continuing threat from al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab militants. The 15-member council approved the renewal of sanctions, with 10 nations voting in favor and five abstaining. China, a veto-holding council member, abstained. It said the sanctions were not conducive to strengthening cooperation among the countries in the region.

1 wounded in blast outside French Embassy in Athens: A hand grenade attack outside the French Embassy in Athens lightly wounded a police officer, police said, days before President Obama is due to visit the Greek capital. Authorities said the officer, who had been on guard outside the embassy, was wounded when two people on a motorbike threw a hand grenade outside the building, located opposite Parliament on a major avenue.

Belgium freezes assets of 15 suspected of terror ties: Belgium has frozen the assets of 15 people allegedly linked to terrorism, including a Belgian man identified as being a possible organizer of the deadly attacks on Paris and Brussels in the past year that together killed 162 people. The decision also imposes a ban on directly or indirectly providing funds or economic resources

to them. We are going to systematically extend this list in the months and years to come, Justice Minister Koen Geens told lawmakers.

 From news services
Henrico County Sheriff Mike Wade (R), left, answers a question as state Sen. A. Donald McEachin (D) listens in their final debate in Richmond on Oct. 20. (Alexa Welch Edlund/Richmond Times-Dispatch via Associated Press)

Ross Lawrence, a D.C.-based communications strategist, works at the American Enterprise Institute.

The stunning presidential outcome revealed an America more deeply divided and hostile to government-as-usual than many inside the Beltway could have ever imagined. Although there is a way forward from the turmoil, the answer most likely wont come from Washington.

Instead, look south of the Potomac. Amid the tumultuous national primaries, you could be forgiven for missing one of Virginias most important political developments in 2016. In January, a three-judge panel in Richmond issued a ruling that altered the states political terrain significantly. The decision redrew Virginias 3rd and 4th Congressional Districts, acting on a judgment that legislators in 2012 diluted African American influence by crowding these voters into a single majority-minority district.

The move came as a number of other states, including North Carolina, Wisconsin and Florida, faced their own legal challenges to allegations of gerrymandering.

Virginias Republican congressional delegation challenged the timing of the decision and lost. With the 2016 election behind us, both parties must consider the long-term health of our democracy and point to this new map as an opportunity.

First, because redistricting breeds competitive elections, its undeniably good for voters. Experiences from Democratic inner cities and Republican rural towns show that one-party dominance can be a marvelous recipe for corruption and complacency. Research from the University of Oxfords Petra Schleiter and Alisa Voznaya bolsters the point: In a study of 70 democracies, they find that meaningful party competition is crucial for limiting the scope of governmental corruption.

Second, one of Virginias two major parties is in dire need of a reset. The 2013 gubernatorial election saw Republicans get shut out of the three major statewide offices for the first time in nearly 25 years. With Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton carrying the commonwealth this week, no Republican has won a statewide race in the Old Dominion since 2009.

There is a glimmer of hope. Subtle yet powerful changes in how and where the parties compete for control of Congress could produce an enduring new landscape all their own.

Evidence that such a geographic realignment could spark a political one is already emerging. Consider what happened this cycle in Virginias 7th District, where popular Henrico County Sheriff Mike Wade was planning to challenge Rep. Dave Brat in a Republican primary. Instead, Wade ran for an open seat in the newly configured 4th District, transforming what was destined to be yet another intra-party squabble into a far more intriguing general election contest.

The two districts look little alike. The 7th is the very definition of a Republican stronghold, last electing a Democrat to Congress in 1968. The new 4th District, on the other hand, is 41 percent black and was carried by President Obama with 61 percent of the vote in 2012.

Wades record, emphasizing issues Republicans rarely touch in a congressional race, such as criminal-justice reform, was a good fit for this diverse district. For most of election night, he looked strong, trading leads with his Democratic opponent, state Sen. A. Donald McEachin, until the last 20 percent of precincts began reporting. McEachin prevailed, confirming the steep hill that Republicans had to climb.

A single congressional campaign, no matter how well fought, is rarely enough to turn the tide on decades of history. Good political habits must be formed from trial and error, and a lack of competition at the House level has stymied each partys ability to communicate beyond its demographic niche.

No matter the result, Wades campaign is a model for what Republicans and Democrats must do across the country: Embrace new, supposedly hostile districts. Study them carefully. Learn from these voters while competing hard for their support.

Elections will be lost, as meaningful realignments dont happen overnight. But if the parties can come together on anything, let it be competitive redistricting to help save the two-party system from itself. Given the factious legacy of the 2016 race, this path forward is more urgently needed than ever before.
Its common to describe ruthless or devious politicians as Machiavellian. But rarely in the United States have we seen an embodiment of the traits Machiavelli admired quite like Donald Trump, the president-elect.

Go down the list of Trumps controversial characteristics and you will find many of the qualities the cynical Machiavelli thought were essential for a tough leader. Trump can be a liar, which the Florentine philosopher believed was sometimes a necessary part of leadership. He can be a bully, like some of the Italian potentates Machiavelli lauded. He has boasted of a voracious sexual appetite, like Machiavelli himself.

To say that Trump displays attributes that Machiavelli deemed necessary in the fractious, perpetually warring states of the 16th century is not to recommend him as a modern leader. Nobody would want a neo-feudal dictator to lead a 21st-century democracy, you might think. But the American public voted Tuesday for Trump, perhaps in part because it shares Machiavellis concept of strength, or as he liked to call it, virtue.

I came to my interest in Machiavelli in a somewhat unusual way: I wrote the libretto for an opera about him, composed by Mohammed Fairouz, which will premiere in March at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam.

One thing I discovered in the process was that Machiavelli mocked the version of political correctness of his day. He thought most advice manuals for princes were nonsense, in calling for saintly goodness rather than strength. For Machiavelli, leadership was about the decisive exercise of power, not about morality. The princes task was to create a strong state, not necessarily a good one.

Speaking from the Oval Office, Nov. 10, President Obama said he was "very encouraged" following a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump. Trump said the meeting lasted longer than expected and easily could have gone longer. (The Washington Post)

Everyone knows how laudable it is for a prince to keep his word and live with integrity instead of by trickery. But the experience of our own time shows us that the princes who have accomplished great things are those who cared little for keeping faith with the people, and who used cleverness to befuddle the minds of men, he wrote in The Prince.

The leaders responsibility was to see the world as it truly was, not as a morality play: A man who wishes to always do good will surely be ruined among so many who are not good. Thus it is necessary for a prince wishing to retain power to learn how not to be good, employing this art or not according to need.

Trumps hunger for public affirmation might have worried Machiavelli. Leaders inevitably want to be both feared and loved, but Machiavelli famously warned that if they have to choose, it is far safer to be feared.

Machiavellis model of a virtuous leader was Cesare Borgia, who in most historical accounts comes across as a bloodthirsty and rapacious military commander. But Machiavelli thought those qualities allowed Borgia to govern decisively. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel, yet his cruelty brought an end to the disorders in the Romagna, uniting it in peace and loyalty, he explained.

Machiavelli had a chip on his shoulder, politically. He had served as a senior adviser to the republican government that briefly ruled Florence after the Medici dynasty was toppled in 1494. This experiment briefly empowered the fanatical monk, Savonarola. When the Medici regained power in 1512, a cash-strapped Machiavelli tried desperately to gain their confidence. He actually wrote The Prince to curry favor with the Medici, but they spurned it. His masterpiece wasnt published until 1532, five years after his death.

Machiavellis free-wheeling sex life contributed to what was, bizarrely, his greatest renown later in life. He became celebrated as the author of sex farces, including one called The Mandrake, about a randy old mans misadventures with a Florentine herbal version of Viagra.

In an excellent 2011 biography, Miles J. Unger writes that Machiavellis personal insecurities help explain his deep cynicism: Disappointed in his hopes, burning with unfulfilled ambition, he wrote a pugnacious work that makes a fetish of strength and oozes contempt for anything that smacks of weakness or vacillation.

We live in a world in which Machiavellian personalities  ruthless leaders with a cynical view of human nature  seem increasingly dominant. Atop the world stage these days are autocratic tough guys, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Trump may be tempted to take his place beside them on the rostrum. But when he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, he will represent a democracy whose Constitution and Bill of Rights remain the hope of the world.

Read more from David Ignatiuss archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Democracy is one of the most cherished features of our nation. But we have many misconceptions about what it is, how much of it we have, how it works and what place it occupies in history. Perhaps more than at any time in recent American history, democracy is now a subject of debate, as populist movements abroad and at home prompt questions about the rule of the many. The United States has just finished one of the most divisive campaigns in recent history, and there is no sign yet that consensus is on the way. While we ponder this election, there are certain facts about democracies at large that are worth considering.

Myth No. 1

Voters are selfish.

In 2012, Mitt Romneys infamous claim that 47 percent of Americans would vote for President Obama because they were dependent on government may have cost him the election. But the misapprehension Romney subscribed to is still conventional wisdom: Most people vote their pocketbooks. Rich taxpayers, the supposition goes, vote for low-tax Republicans, and poor tax consumers vote for high-tax Democrats. People vote to promote their narrow, selfish interests  or so the myth goes.

But political scientists who have studied voter behavior have found little evidence for this claim. The young and the old are about equally in favor of Social Security. Men and women are about equally supportive of abortion rights. The rich and the poor have roughly the same attitudes toward taxes and redistribution. Self-interest is a weak predictor of voter behavior.

Voters are not selfish. Instead, they tend to vote for what they believe is in the national interest.

Myth No. 2

Democracy relies upon the consent of the governed.

The Declaration of Independence pins the governments power to the consent of the governed , and the Library of Congress considers the phrase key to the formation of the United States. Indeed, the idea that ours is a government of the people is a key aspect of our national self-conception.

But we no more tacitly consent to our government than a person kidnapped and placed on a ship consents to the captains rule by refusing to jump overboard. Democracy gives the masses the power to change government, but that doesnt mean we consent to it. Philosopher David Hume made this point 25 years before the American Revolution, arguing that nearly all governments originated out of conquest.

Consider a consensual transaction. You order a pizza from Papa Johns. The pizza comes only if you do something that signals you want it. If you tell Papa Johns you dont want pizza, it doesnt send one. Further, when you give the company your money, it has to hold up its end and give you pizza.

Your relationship to government isnt like that, even in a democracy. Regardless of what you do  whether or how you vote, or if you dissent  the same laws are imposed upon you. For government, your no means yes. Further, courts have ruled (e.g., in Warren v. District of Columbia ) that the government has no specific duty to protect you, even if you pay your taxes. Imagine if Papa Johns took your money but never sent you pizza; you wouldnt say you consented to that deal.

Myth No. 3

Political participation helps bring us together.

The democratic ideal is that people with different perspectives and ideas will come together, talk, work out their differences and reach a compromise. From presidential debates to citizen comments at city council meetings, many of our attempts at political engagement center on efforts to hear one another out and join together in the project of democracy. But does it really work that way?

Many political scientists have checked. The results are generally disappointing. As political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarizes, political deliberation tends to increase conflict rather than reduce it. Deliberators either avoid talking about heated issues or, if they do talk about them, tend to become angry, try to manipulate one another or even come to blows. Legal scholar Cass Sunstein finds that deliberation pushes people to more extreme versions of their ideology; after talking to people with whom they disagree, they become more rigid in their views. Political scientist Diana Mutz finds that when people do try to understand the other side, it causes them to lose enthusiasm and stop participating in political activity.

Myth No. 4

America is a democratic country.

So common is the know-it-all refrain that America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy that The Washington Post tackled that very issue last year , ruling that the two arent mutually exclusive. And they arent: The United States is a republic with democratic features.

But were not all that democratic.

Whats supposedly distinctive about democracy is that elected leaders try to give the majority what they want. Or, perhaps more precisely, politicians try to implement the policy preferences of the median voter, i.e., the voter who falls right in the middle of the ideological distribution, regardless of income or other characteristics.

However, recent work puts this picture in doubt. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page asked: When voters at the 90th, 50th and 10th percentiles of income disagree about policy (keep in mind that they usually agree), with whom do presidents side? The answer: Presidents are much more likely to do what the wealthiest Americans want than what ordinary or poor Americans want. Surprisingly, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and President Obama tended to side with the rich even more than George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did. Presidents respond more to what high-income voters want than what the ideological majority wants. Just why this pattern holds is still being researched.

One possible upside: High-income voters tend to be better informed, so perhaps siding with richer voters gets us better government.

Myth No. 5

Democracy is inevitable.

In 1989, as the Cold War wound down, political scientist Francis Fukuyama claimed that liberal democratic capitalism was the end of history  the end point of mankinds ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Likewise, authors in the Harvard Business Review argued that widespread democracy is simply an inevitable consequence of the march of time. Listening to these theorists, you might conclude that the entire world is poised to adopt market economies and democratic government.

But dont get too excited.

Each year, Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization, and the Economist magazine independently produce indices measuring how many countries are democratic and how democratic they are. While the world generally became more democratic after the Cold War, in recent years, its grown more authoritarian. Some formerly democratic countries are becoming non-democratic, and some democratic countries are becoming less democratic.

Freedom House says that 2015 was the 10th consecutive year of decline in global freedom, meaning that political freedom and freedom of the press both regressed.

Anti-democratic attitudes also seem to be on the rise. Some recent polls have found that fewer than half of millennials in Canada, the United States and Australia believe that democracy is the best form of government or that it is essential for justice.

outlook@washpost.com

Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.
EGYPTIAN STRONGMAN Abdel Fatah al-Sissi claimed he was the first foreign leader to call President-elect Donald Trump with congratulations. He had good reason: In meetings with the two presidential contenders in New York in September, Mr. Sissi was chided by Hillary Clinton about his abominable human rights record, while Mr. Trump issued him a free pass, calling him a fantastic guy. Egypt hopes the presidency of Donald Trump will inject new life in Egyptian-American relations, said a jaunty statement from Mr. Sissis office Wednesday.

If Mr. Trump follows the course he set in the presidential campaign, there will be many more such statements  and a rush to repression in countries around the world. At least since President Wilson carried his Fourteen Points to the 1919 Versailles conference, the United States has been the worlds foremost promoter of human rights and democracy. Mr. Trump appears ready to walk away from that role.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump brushed off reports of brutality and repression by the likes of Russias Vladimir Putin, Syrias Bashar al-Assad and Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Not surprisingly, all three regimes welcomed his electoral college victory. In an interview with the New York Times in July, Mr. Trump raised his brushoffs to something like a doctrine. Asked about Mr. Erdogans arrest of tens of thousands of domestic opponents, he said, I think its very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we dont know what we are doing and we cant see straight in our own country.

Its true the U.S. human rights record is far from perfect, and presidential preaching  from Wilson to Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush  often has been bluntly rejected. But American pressure also has played a role in pushing dozens of countries toward freedom, rescuing countless political prisoners and restraining abuses by autocrats like Mr. Sissi. Even powerful adversaries, such as Mr. Putin and Chinas Xi Jinping, have been discomfited by U.S. human rights criticism and sanctions  including those under the Magnitsky Act, which mandated travel bans and asset freezes for Russian officials linked to such crimes as the killing in prison of a dissident lawyer.

President Obama has been a relatively lukewarm supporter of this policy. He withheld some military equipment from Egypt after Mr. Sissis 2013 military coup, but later released it and waived human rights restrictions on other aid. Yet many regimes, from Congo to Bahrain to Thailand, still feared U.S. censure. The moratorium on pressure signaled by Mr. Trump could quickly have a tangible impact: Congo President Joseph Kabila, for example, may now shrug off U.S. pressure to step down when his term ends in December. Rodrigo Duterte may feel freer to step up his murderous campaign against alleged drug traffickers in the Philippines.

Mr. Sissi, who freed one American citizen held in his crammed jails under pressure from Washington, was pressed by Ms. Clinton to release Aya Hijazi, a U.S. citizen and nongovernmental-organization activist from Falls Church who has been unjustly held without trial since May 2014. Mr. Trump, who claims to put America first, said nothing about her plight. No wonder Mr. Sissi was so quick to call.
Debbie Dingell, a Democrat, represents Michigans 12th Congressional District in the House.

I was the crazy one. I predicted that Hillary Clinton was in trouble in Michigan during the Democratic primary. I observed that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination for president. And at Rotary clubs, local chambers of commerce, union halls and mosques, I noted that we could see a Trump presidency. Thats Debbie, its hyperbole, she is nuts.

Its now our reality , and as Americans we need to understand why. My district reflects much of this countrys diversity. Ann Arbor is a university- and start-up town. Ypsilanti is urban, and its issues mirror those of larger cities such as Detroit and Chicago. Dearborn is headquarters to Ford Motor Co. and has the largest Muslim population in the country. The Downrivers  a collection of communities south of Detroit  mean auto plants and manufacturing with strong union membership.

Much of the district is Democratic and those voters strongly supported Bernie Sanders in the primary. That result didnt surprise me, but it did infuriate me that Clinton and her team didnt show up until the weekend before the primary, when it suddenly became clear they had a problem. I took Bill Clinton grocery shopping that Saturday  too little, way too late. They never stopped on a campus; never went to a union hall; never talked to the Arab American community. Sanders was in my district 10 times during the primary. How would any sane person not predict how this one would go? It was fixable for the general election.

Hillary Clinton spoke to supporters, Nov. 9, offering a message of thanks, apology and hope. Here are the key moments from that fervent address. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

[What Clinton didnt understand]

From the beginning, I knew the Downrivers would support Trump both in the Republican primary and in the general. I witness the emotions and passions of their residents every day, and I believe they are what elected Trump president.

The ordinary working man or woman in this country isnt asking for a lot. They want to make a decent living. They want to be able to provide for their family, buy a home in a safe neighborhood, put food on the table, go the doctor when they need to, afford their medicines and educate their children. What many dont understand is how these things are in danger of becoming unattainable for too many Americans.

In my first week as a member of Congress, I flew to Michigan with President Obama to visit an auto plant and see the results of his policies that saved the auto industry and thousands of jobs in Michigan. At the time, I thanked the president profusely for his leadership because I know what would have happened to my state and the country had he not implemented his strong economic plan.

But I also said to him: Mr. President, with all due respect, many of these workers dont translate what you have done to them. They dont feel better off. Their real wages have not risen in decades, and in fact for many it has dropped. They have less purchasing power; their health insurance costs more; they dont trust their pensions to be there; and because we are a cyclical industry, they are frightened that something bad could happen at any time. Add to that, trade deals that they view as shipping jobs overseas and threatening the ones they have here. Top it off with fear about national security and potential threats at workplaces or movie theaters and you have workers who are scared, worried and concerned in their hearts and souls.

[The two sins that defined this election]

The president did save my states industry. But what many keep missing is that working men and women dont see this in their lives. They feel the system is rigged against them. And those workers are white, black, Hispanic, Muslim  all races, creeds and colors. Economic and national security fears overcame all other factors when they walked into the voting booth.

1 of 57 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Hillary Clintons campaign comes to an end View Photos Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Caption Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Nov. 9, 2016 Hillary Clinton speaks in New York while her husband, former president Bill Clinton, applauds. Melina Mara/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

These first days post-election are emotional. My Muslim constituents are terrified; I literally had a shaking 8-year-old sobbing in my arms that she would be killed in school. Black young people on college campuses are stunned and anxious about what their future holds. Women  and as one myself who has multiple stories of inappropriate sexual harassment in the workplace  ponder how to make certain we dont go backwards.

One of the biggest challenges we face as a country, not just as a party, is how to make our diversity a strength, not a weakness. We have to come together as Americans first and foremost. After this campaign, that is no easy feat.
THERE IS plenty of time, in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, to give President Obamas nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland, a hearing and put his nomination to a vote. That vote should be favorable: Mr. Garland, 63, is able, moderate, respected and seasoned, an appellate jurist who has previously been confirmed, with significant Republican support, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Of course, this will not happen, because it does not suit Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and his fellow Republicans. Mr. Garlands nomination should have been considered and voted on in March when Mr. Obama sent his name to the Senate as a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia. That did not happen because, with the long-term ideological tilt of the court at stake, Mr. McConnell argued that the voters choice for president in November should get the pick.

This was a gamble on a GOP victory in the fall; and there is no denying that, in political terms, it has paid off. Contrary to predictions that voters would punish GOP obstructionism, they appear to have rewarded it. President-elect Donald Trump will choose Scalias successor next year, a GOP Senate undoubtedly will confirm him  and the court will, in all likelihood, shift rightward rather than left in the coming years. Someday Mr. McConnells example may be invoked against his side  those who practice situational ethics must be prepared to have situational ethics practiced against them  but theres no arguing with his success.

Except to say, perhaps quaintly, that we dont regard political success as the only relevant measurement here. In addition to the personal injustice to Mr. Garland, the majority leaders ploy wrought harm to basic norms of democratic accountability. Those should have dictated respect for the majority will, as expressed in the incumbency of Mr. Obama  not anticipatory deference to whatever might happen in November. Any other rule is inherently unstable, as became evident in the waning days of Campaign 2016; when it appeared that Hillary Clinton, not Mr. Trump, might be the winner, Republican politicians started moving the goal posts, suggesting that they might not approve any replacement for Scalia, or even fill subsequent vacancies, until the GOP had regained control of the White House.

In support of his position, Mr. McConnell accurately cited similar musings by then-Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) during 1992, which was then-President George H.W. Bushs final year in office. To that, we can only reply that this purported Biden Rule never should have been treated as a precedent, and would not have been if Republicans had maintained this year the objections to it that they voiced in 1992. Two wrongs dont make a right, not even in politics.
As a Donald Trump victory became clear Tuesday night, the ghost of Herbert Hoover paid a visit to Trumps election night party in New York.

In the Fox News coverage playing on screens in the ballroom, Megyn Kelly turned to Karl Rove. It didnt happen under Reagan or the Bushes. When was the last time a Republican president had a Republican Congress?

1928, Rove answered.

Incredible, Kelly said.

Yes, quite: Republicans actually had unified control for four years under George W. Bush, and for two years under Dwight Eisenhower, as Rove amended when I followed up with him.

Expecting a celebration, The Washington Posts Dana Milbank wrote a letter to his daughter to help her cope with Hillary Clintons electoral loss. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

But the 1928 comparison is instructive. Its the last time a Republican president enjoyed anything like the majority Trump will have, particularly in the House.

And how did that work out for them?

Hoover took over in a time of general prosperity but stagnant wages and vast income inequality. Populists in Congress proposed dramatic increases in tariffs to help the struggling agricultural sector, the equivalent of todays beleaguered blue-collar workers.

The proposal divided Republicans in Congress and Hoover before they produced the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, setting off retaliation, freezing international trade, contributing to the Great Depression and accelerating a ruinous cycle of nationalism around the world.

Hoovers ghost should haunt the GOP right now. A populist, protectionist president has come to power at a time of long-depressed wages and vast inequality. He threatens to implement tariffs of 45 percent against China and 35 percent against Mexico, and hes about to collide with free-traders and pro-business interests in his own party.

If they jettison Trumps agenda and proceed with business as usual, they risk inflaming Trumps already-furious followers. If they do what Trump has promised, there will be chaos as they pursue what amounts to a mission impossible: enacting a huge tax cut, making enormous spending increases on infrastructure and the military and cutting the debt in half  all without touching Social Security and Medicare.

And theyll be without a mutual foil to unite them. President Obama will be out of office, Hillary Clinton defeated, Harry Reid retired. With unified control, Republicans now own every issue  health care, the economy, national security  and Democrats, who narrowly won the popular vote and are supported by exit polls showing tepid support for many of Trumps policy priorities, have little incentive to cooperate.

Some early signs show Trump wont hesitate to disappoint supporters, including his statement Friday that, after talking with Obama, he no longer favors repealing all of Obamacare.

Drain the swamp? Trump has packed his transition team with a whos who of the K Street lobbying trade, according to Politico. Among those in charge of staffing the new administration are people who have lobbied for or represented Altria, Visa, Anthem, Coca-Cola, General Electric, HSBC, Pfizer, PhRMA, United Airlines, Southern Company, Dow Chemical, Rosemont Copper Company, Boeing, Duke Energy and Nucor.

My colleague Catherine Ho reports that Trumps win is likely to be a boon to the lobbying business, as businesses try to counteract the uncertainty with more lobbyists.

The Trump-proposed ban on Muslims entering the country? As The Posts Jose A. DelReal reported, the Trump campaign removed that policys web page Thursday, then restored it after the reporters inquiries.

That wall on the Mexican border? Going to take a while, Trump lieutenant Rudy Giuliani said Thursday, suggesting he can do it by executive order by just reprogramming money within the immigration service.

Reprogramming money away from . . . deportation? Truly building the wall would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and require approval from Congress.

The lock her up crowd may also be disappointed. Chris Christie said politics are over now.

On that same question, however, Giuliani said prosecuting Clinton would be a presidential decision  an extraordinary departure from the American tradition of removing the president from prosecutorial decisions, particularly since President Nixon tried to block the Justice Departments Watergate probe in 1973.

The Trump transition sounded another Nixonian note when Trump surrogate Omarosa Manigault told a conservative website that Trump is keeping an enemies list.

The conflicting signals suggest Trump himself hasnt settled on his course. His gracious victory speech was about reaching out to the opposition, but Breitbart News, whose once and future leader ran the campaign, has been whipping up racial fears (Shock Video Shows White Man Viciously Beaten in Chicago After Election).

On Thursday night, the president-elect tweeted that professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair! Friday morning he reconsidered: Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!

Trumps internal tension is understandable. He can leave supporters disillusioned, or he can keep his promises  and send us all back to 1928.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbanks archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Larry Ancona points out the rows of homes where there used to be an American Motors plant. (David Weigel/The Washington Post)

The day after the election, Bob Oldani parked himself at the Common Grounds coffee shop and talked to whoever came by. At 71, he had just cast his first Republican vote for president. Dont tell my wife, he joked, as he told anyone within earshot why hed backed Donald Trump.

We need a change in everything, and I hope he can do it, said Oldani, whod retired after years as a machinist. This guys a billionaire, so Im thinking he can say, Hey, lets just get the job done. I dont need your money. 

The rebuttals started flying. What about the leaked tax forms that showed Trumps writing off nearly a billion dollars?

More power to him. He aint in jail, right?

What about the Access Hollywood tape?

As far as these rumors with the girls, and all of that  if you do your job, who cares?

A few miles away, outside a Culvers near Kenoshas sprawling and anonymous business park, Joe Schmaling and Oscar Corona were taking a break from their landscaping business. Schmaling, 32, said that work had been steady  maybe because Obamas on the way out  and that Trump, in the words of his campaign, would drain the swamp of Washington.

If we put up with Obama, we can put up with four years of this guy, said Schmaling. Im excited to see him blow the place up. He stands on his own, so he can throw the middle finger up.

Corona, 30, was born in Mexico but lives in the United States with a green card. Theyd just been joking about whether Trump would kick him out of the country, fully confident that he wouldnt.

Hes not rash, Schmaling said.

In interviews on Wednesday, again and again, voters in Kenosha said that they had gotten behind Donald Trump. Often, they had not cast a vote for a Republican presidential nominee before. More often, they said that the past eight years had gone well for them  although, tellingly, the city had been better in the times they dimly remembered.

Trump, the first Republican to win the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin since the 1980s, did so by narrow margins. Michigan has not been called but with all the results in Trump has 2,279,210 votes to Clintons 2,267,373, according to Associated Press figures. Rural voters broke decisively his way. Trumps last-minute campaign swing through Eau Claire, a western Wisconsin city that shares a largely rural media market with parts of Minnesota, confounded Democrats who saw him losing in polls. It made more sense when massive Trump margins in rural Wisconsin gave him the state.

Kenosha, south of Milwaukee and north of the Chicago suburbs where Hillary Clinton was raised, was telling of the threat that sneaked up on Democrats. The industrial economy had been replaced by tourism, but the county was growing. No one would have picked it for a travelogue of trade-racked America.

And it had voted for Democrats. It voted for Barack Obama, twice. It voted against George W. Bush, twice, and for Bill Clinton, twice. It helped Michael Dukakis carry the state in 1988 and, four years earlier, gave Walter Mondale a five-percentage-point victory over Ronald Reagan. No Democrat had lost since 1972.

Hillary Clinton lost it; in retrospect, the trend was obvious. In her 2008 loss to Barack Obama, Clinton lost Kenosha County by just three points, as she lost by 18 points statewide. In the 2016 Democratic primaries, Clinton lost the county to Sen. Bernie Sanders by 15 points  despite a closer result across the state. She carried heavily black Milwaukee County, and Sanders carried everything else.

White working-class people are deserting the Democratic Party in droves, Sanders said in an interview Thursday.

The 2016 election was Wisconsins first since the Supreme Courts ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which undid part of the Voting Rights Act; the first since Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed voter ID legislation; the first since Walker pushed through right-to-work legislation. Each domino, Democrats warned, was falling on their party by design. An estimated 300,000 people lacked voter IDs on Election Day, and private-sector unions had shrunk and consolidated since 2015.

We had to go to our membership and ask specifically, Are you able to donate ten cents per hour?  said Randy Bryce, a local organizer and one-time Democratic candidate for state Senate, describing how a series of laws had weakened the labor movement. With the economy now, thats impossible to do. So any money we had [at] the start of the process was all wed have for the rest of our existence.

Yet on Wednesday, sitting around a table in their downtown Kenosha headquarters, local leaders of the Democratic Party said the voter-ID issue had not stuck. Approaching the election, it seemed that they were mobilizing the partys loyal voters.

It was just that Make America Great Again turned out to be genius, said Karen Kempinen, 67, a retired teacher. That resonated. They didnt need to think any further than those words.

In 2012, 21 percent of Wisconsin voters told exit pollsters that they or a family member belonged to a union. They broke for Barack Obama by 33 percentage points.

This year, just as many voters said they were in union households  and Clinton won them by just 10 points. The numbers and the swoon were similar in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Early on, Clintons campaign had waved off the idea of a backlash. After her victory in Ohios primary, campaign pollster Joel Benenson, an Obama veteran, wrote confidently that white working-class voters had paid attention to her real trade record. Democrats in states hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs are looking for more than anger and accusations, and stopping abuse by foreign countries, he wrote. Theyre looking for real plans and a broad economic agenda.

But to the bafflement of Democrats here, the late Clinton push into the state  a series of ads that began in late October  did not mirror the economic messaging of the local labor unions. One played back Trumps worst remarks about women; another, his mocking of a reporter with a physical disability; the last, a warning from a nuclear technician who worried that a reckless President Trump would start a war.

In 2012, when Democrats fought for Wisconsin all cycle, there had been clear economic messaging. One Obama ad dramatized Mitt Romneys plan to give millionaires another tax break with a photo of him walking past Donald Trumps plane.

Romney lost Kenosha despite tapping Paul D. Ryan, who represented the district in Congress, as his running mate. But in midterm years, and in the historic 2012 recall that took place before the general election, Kenosha voted for Walker, the governor.

Walkers popularity had slipped since then, but his style had stuck with people. After work on Wednesday, a retiree named Larry Ancona, 61, bitterly pointed out the rows of homes that stood where there used to be an American Motors plant powering the citys economy.

I know people that get $800 a month in food stamps, lied to get that, lied to get the medical benefits. And here we are  were paying for it, he said.

Angelo Tenuta, 51, politely argued with his friend. Ancona, sporting a knockoff Make America Great Again hat with a stitched Trump signature, kept calling the Obama presidency a disaster. That seemed to go too far.

He got a war in Iraq without a price tag, Tenuta said. I voted for Bush twice, but Obama inherited a mess from that guy.

But Tenuta was more optimistic about Trump. For one, he had broken the old, bad Republican Party  He was on his own from day one. For another, he seemed ready to break legislative stalemates where Obama never could.

Its pathetic, he said. You got to go to Congress to get anything done. Its hindering sales. Its hindering business.

In Wisconsin, with a Republican majority that need not worry about a filibuster, this thinking was self-evident. Washington stumbled and failed and offered nothing; Trump offered brisk if unspecified change. It still made little sense to Democrats.

I was going to be one of the electors this year for Hillary, Bryce said. I thought it was a done deal. I could not imagine anyone voting for the man, based on the things that were coming out of his mouth.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Trump had carried Michigan. That state has not been called for Trump, but with all the results in, he leads Clinton.

John Wagner contributed to this report.
Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump went to court Thursday to ask that a civil fraud suit against Trump scheduled to begin in less than three weeks be delayed, a reminder of the unusual complications facing Trump as he shifts from businessman to commander in chief.

Trumps attorneys said he will be too busy with the presidential transition to participate in the Nov. 28 trial involving his defunct real estate seminar program, Trump University. They asked that the trial be postponed until February or March, after he has taken office.

They made their request before Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the jurist Trump harshly criticized during the campaign as biased because of his Mexican heritage.

Curiel expressed concern about the wisdom of a delay given that Trump will assume the presidency Jan. 20. Curiel said he will probably issue a ruling by Monday.

The hearing came just two days after Trumps victory, reflecting the continuing legal challenges facing an incoming president whose businesses are the subject of multiple pending civil suits.

"My job was to sell, sell sell," says former Trump University instructor James Harris, who explains the inner workings of the company, detailing high pressure sales tactics and the battle for profit. (Dalton Bennett/The Washington Post)

Were in uncharted territory, Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli told Curiel, noting that never before has a U.S. president or president-elect come to court under similar circumstances.

Later, Petrocelli told reporters that holding a trial during Trumps presidency would be better than during the intensive transition period. He called the case a very difficult circumstance for a sitting president  more so, I would say, for a president-elect, because hes turning, right now as we speak, to a mountain of challenges in front of him, to get himself up to speed.

The California Trump University case is one of two class-action fraud suits filed by former customers of the real estate seminar program. The former customers say they were misled by advertisements promising that Trump had hand-picked instructors for the program and that they would learn Trumps personal tricks for real estate success.

[Donald Trump said university was all about education. Actually, its goal was: Sell, sell, sell!]

Trump has said in depositions that he did not choose the instructors, many of whose names and faces he could not recall.

1 of 75 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Protests swell across U.S. in wake of Trump victory View Photos Vigils and protests flared up across the country as opponents of President-elect Donald Trump expressed dismay with the election results, underscoring the difficult task he faces in uniting a fractured country. Caption Vigils and protests flare up among opponents of the president-elect. Nov. 20. 2016 People participate in an anti-hate rally at a Brooklyn park named in memory of Beastie Boys band member Adam Yauch after it was defaced with swastikas. Spencer Platt/Getty Images Wait 1 second to continue.

Trump has said most customers were satisfied with the experience, citing positive customer surveys submitted by seminar attendees. His attorneys have predicted that he will prevail in court.

Trump University became an issue in the campaign when Trumps rivals in the Republican primary and later Democrat Hillary Clinton cited it in attacking Trump as a scam artist.

Trump vehemently defended the business during campaign rallies. His attack on Curiel became a symbol of his tendency to lash out at people, and it drew sharp criticism, including from House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who termed the allegation the textbook definition of a racist comment.

Trump also said during the campaign that he looked forward to the trial.

They ought to look into Judge Curiel, because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace, Trump had told supporters at a rally in San Diego in May. Okay? But we will come back in November. Wouldnt that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case?

[Trumps personal, racially tinged attacks on federal judge alarm legal experts]

From the bench Thursday, Curiel appeared unruffled by the unusual nature of the hearing, patiently engaging with both sides and referring to Trump respectfully as the president-elect.

Curiel proposed potentially having Trump testify by video to make the trial easier on him, but also urged that he settle with former students suing over the real estate seminars.

Though Trump has boasted that he never settles lawsuits, Petrocelli, an attorney for Trump, expressed interest: I can tell you right now: I am all ears, your honor, he said.

Petrocelli told reporters later that a trial risked further inflaming post-election tensions in the country.

This has been a gut-wrenching campaign, as everybody knows, and the nation is just beginning the long healing process, he said. And I think the last thing we need right now is to have a trial about events that occurred six years ago or seven years ago, in which Mr. Trump  President-elect Trump  is a personal defendant in matters completely unrelated to the momentous obligations that he now needs to deal with.

Also Thursday, Curiel rejected a request by Trumps attorneys to prohibit the jury from hearing about Trumps campaign-trail comments, including his attacks on the judge. Curiel called the request vague but said he might bar specific testimony at trial.

Trumps attorneys argued that his campaign speeches, tweets and other public statements were irrelevant and highly prejudicial. They also asked Curiel to exclude discussion of other negative topics that came out during the campaign  including allegations about his personal conduct, and information about how Trump ran his personal charity, the Trump Foundation.

A president is not shielded from civil litigation for actions taken before he took office or unrelated to his presidential duties, a precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit filed against then-

President Bill Clinton. Clinton was required to sit for a deposition in the matter but he settled with Jones before the case reached trial.

But the court also said a trial judge, in scheduling, may show some deference to a presidents demanding schedule and the burdens of the office, said Duquesne University President Ken Gormley, who wrote a book on the Clinton case.

Gormley said there were few historical parallels for Trumps legal entanglements because no president has been so immersed in the world of business before his election.

You just have to start from the proposition that hes like any other citizen for this purpose, Gormley said. People have claims against him, and those preexist him being in office. There seems to be no question they can proceed.

Among other suits, Trump faces litigation in connection to celebrity chef Jose Andres, who halted plans to open a restaurant at Trumps new hotel in Washington over the Republicans claim that many Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists.

Trump University also faces a separate action in New York filed by state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. A court of appeals in New York ruled in March that the case could proceed, but Trumps attorneys have appealed the ruling.

Trump has said he will win in court and then restart the program, which has not been in operation since 2010.
A photograph made available on Thursday by Interpol shows Chinas Meng Hongwei speaking in Bali, Indonesia. Meng was elected president of Interpol. (Interpol/EPA)

A top Chinese police official was elected president of Interpol on Thursday, setting off alarm bells among rights advocates over abuses and a lack of transparency within Chinas legal system, as well as the potential misuse of the police organization to attack Beijings political opponents.

Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei is the first Chinese to hold the post.

The Lyon, France-based International Criminal Police Organization has 190 member nations and has the power to issue red notices. It is the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use today. Interpol circulates those notices to member countries listing people who are wanted for extradition.

While Interpols charter officially bars it from undertaking any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character, critics say some governments, primarily Russia and Iran, have abused the system to harass and detain opponents. Interpol says it has a special vetting process to prevent that from happening.

Interpols president is a largely symbolic but still influential figure who heads its executive committee. Jurgen Stock is the organizations secretary general.

Meng, who takes over from Mireille Ballestrazzi of France for a four-year term, will assume his new duties immediately.

His election comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping is seeking to give new momentum to his four-year-old campaign against corruption, including a push to seek the return of former officials and other suspects who had fled abroad. China filed a list of 100 of its most-wanted suspects with Interpol in April 2014, about one-third of whom have since been repatriated to face justice at home.

Chinas police and judicial systems have been routinely criticized for abuses, including confessions under torture, arbitrary travel bans and the disappearance and detention without charges of political dissidents and their family members. That has prompted reluctance among many Western nations to sign extradition treaties with China or return suspects wanted for nonviolent crimes.

China also stands accused of abducting independent book sellers who published tomes on sensitive political topics from Hong Kong and Thailand.

Given those circumstances, Mengs election is an alarming prospect, said Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch.

While we think its important to fight corruption, the campaign has been politicized and undermines judicial independence, Wang said. Mengs election will probably embolden and encourage abuses in the system, she said.

Interpol member countries nominate officials for the post of president. Presidents are elected in a vote by members on a one-country, one-vote basis.
People walk past a mural on a restaurant wall depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and then U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump kissing in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May. (Petras Malukas/AFP/Getty Images)

For all the misgivings about Donald Trumps penchant for saying things Vladimir Putin wants to hear, there is one possible positive outcome of the bromance between the president-elect and the Russian leader.

It could make the world a safer place. At least for the next few months.

Call it a game of Russian reset.

Like just about everyone else, Moscow was preparing for Hillary Clinton to win, which in the short term meant trying to delegitimize her victory by claiming the vote was rigged  the Kremlin had even lined up a postelection news conference with its top human rights official to pan U.S. democracy as a sham.

With Clinton, an intractable foe, in the Oval Office, Moscow would have had no reason to ease up on its brinkmanship in the Baltics, the bloody, road-to-nowhere standoff in Ukraine, and the vicious bombing campaign to wipe out resistance to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, all coated in Cold War-style rhetoric and nuclear saber-rattling.

Instead? Trump is headed to the White House. He never once expressed interest in containing or contesting Russian influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and offered to at least discuss Kremlin wish-list items such as lifting sanctions or recognizing the annexation of Crimea. And Putin, some analysts say, has no reason to dissuade the Republican of his willingness to deal before he takes office; in the short run, the Russian leader could decide to substitute his trademark unpredictability with diplomacy.

With a reset White House, Russia can seek its goals through diplomacy, rather than secret operations like landing troops in Syria overnight, said Vladimir Frolov, a Moscow-based foreign policy analyst. The important thing for Russia is to not be in the news for some massacre.

[Aleppo residents in rebel-held areas wary of Russian-Syrian humanitarian pause]

Frolov and other analysts are quick to clarify that any softening of Russian aggression will only last as long as Moscow believes something can be gained from dealing with Trump.

My guess is that they will want to test the extent to which Trump will follow through on his rhetoric that places like Ukraine and the Baltics are not in the zone of U.S. vital interests by offering a sphere of influence deal where they [Russians] can happily dominate their neighborhood in exchange for an end to confrontational rhetoric and efforts to destabilize Western European countries [plus cooperation in Syria], Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior research scientist for CNA, a nonprofit research organization in Arlington, Va., wrote in an email.

Since the election, Russian officials have expressed guarded optimism that they will be able to deal with Trump. Dmitry Peskov, Putins spokesman, gushed that It is phenomenal how close they are to one another when it comes to their conceptual approach to foreign policy, while at the same time warning that establishing mutual trust could take years, according to Reuters.

We shouldnt expect love or gifts from Trump, tweeted Alexei Pushkov, a member of Russias upper house of parliament. Hes a patriot and a businessman. But hes not an ideologue, hes a realist. And a realist understands the language of deals.

In Mexico, China, Russia and Israel we ask people what they think of the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

But each area where Putin would try to deal with Trump comes with a set of built-in snags.

In Syria, the Obama administration has supported more moderate forces allied against Assad, and wants the Syrian leader to step aside in favor of a negotiated settlement. Putin, who committed himself to supporting Assads regime, faces a choice between going for the all-out victory over rebel forces that Assad wants and some of his generals say is possible, or waiting for Trump. The Republican might be more amenable to accepting Russias view that Assad should stay at least until ISIS and al-Qaeda are defeated in Syria, said Simon Saradzhyan, the founding director of the Russia Matters Project at Harvard Kennedy Schools Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

But for such a deal to work, Russia would have to be able to control Assad and persuade him to accept something less than an all-out victory.

In Europe, Trump has raised expectations that he would reassess the U.S. commitment to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. In July, he said he would be looking into the possibility of recognizing Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, as Russian territory.

[Russia celebrates Crimea annexation while Ukraine looks to West for support]

Russia became alarmed about Ukraines direction after anti-government protesters forced the ouster of its president in 2014 following his refusal to sign a pro-E.U. trade deal. Moscow had also viewed Ukraines interest in joining NATO as unacceptable. Russia has backed a subsequent rebellion in eastern Ukraine, prompting the U.S. and European governments to broaden sanctions on Moscow initially imposed because of Crimea.

Trumps criticism of NATO indicates he may be far less enthusiastic about further expansion of the alliance into the former Soviet neighborhood, which Russia views as a grave threat to its security, Saradzhyan said.

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at the Belfer Center, said a solution for Ukraine that Putin might pursue, and Trump might accept, could involve a new effort to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine in return for lifting most of the sanctions. But the deal would likely depend on a Ukrainian commitment to remain a neutral and nonaligned state, a condition Kiev has not indicated it would accept.

Russian analysts worry further about the hard-line stance toward Russia reflected in the names reportedly in the mix for Trumps foreign policy team  a report by Politico included former House speaker Newt Gingrich; John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

These names make me sick, said Sergei Markov, an outspoken pro-Kremlin political analyst.

And then there is Trump himself. Nothing he said in the election campaign amounted to a promise. All of his campaign talk about willingness to deal with Russia could be just that  talk.

As much as the Obama administration accused Russia of meddling in the election in favor or Trump, it is plausible that the Kremlin was not hoping for a Trump win.

It is hard to know how a President Trump would react the first time a U.S. carrier gets buzzed in the Baltics or the first time his Congress pushes back over Ukraine.

Unpredictability is Russias most effective foreign policy tool, Frolov said. But its also Trumps.

Read more

Yes We Did: Russias establishment basks in Trumps victory

Inside Trumps financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin

Donald Trumps confusion and contradictions about Russia

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
Marine Le Pen of the French far-right National Front congratulated President-elect Donald Trump on his victory before a winner was even announced. (Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Brexit, Donald Trump and, just maybe, Marine Le Pen.

The tidal wave of populist outrage coursing through the West has found an unsurprising cheerleader in Frances Le Pen, the increasingly popular leader of the countrys far-right National Front. In the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, Le Pen thinks she could write the next chapter in a global revolt against the status quo.

Frances presidential elections are less than six months away. Once confined to the political fringe  a poster girl for Europes radical right  Le Pen is clearly preparing for a boost from Trumps tail wind. She may get it. In regional elections in December, a month after the terrorist attacks across Paris, she won nearly 30 percent of voters in the first round. And that was before Brexit, the July attack in Nice, the drama over the Calais migrant camp and, now, the U.S. election  all of which have played to her advantage.

As in Britain and the United States, a fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric has swept through France, still reeling from terrorist violence. It is largely directed at the historic wave of migration that has brought more than 1 million people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe in the past two years. Thousands of them ended up in camps on the northern coast of France, and when two newcomers took part in the Islamic State-orchestrated attacks on Paris last November, the migrants came to represent a national-security threat  and an entire religion  portrayed as a threat to the French way of life.

[Foiled Paris attack near Notre Dame deemed intelligence success by France]

1 of 26 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  How the world is reacting to results of the U.S. election View Photos People around the globe watched as Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States. Caption People around the globe watched as Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States. Nov. 12, 2016 Activists take part in an anti-Donald Trump demonstration at the Angel de la Independencia monument in Mexico City. Edgard Garrido/Reuters Wait 1 second to continue.

Since the Paris attacks, a palpable Islamophobia has emerged in France. Over the summer, there was the uproar over the burkini swimsuit, and now, after the closure of the Calais migrant camp, there is widespread anxiety over the other camps that have emerged across the country  including three within Paris. Prominent French intellectuals have normalized the idea of a Muslim invasion, and even Francois Hollande, the Socialist president, has said that France has a problem with Islam. As it was in the Brexit campaign and the U.S. election, the theme of a national identity under siege is the centerpiece of Frances search for its next president.



And no one screams louder about national identity than Le Pen, who has promised to make France great again in the same nostalgic appeal that Trump successfully pitched to U.S. voters. We, too, are keen on winning back our freedom, she said in September. We want a France that is the master of its own laws and currency and the guardian of its borders.

Le Pen was probably the first foreign politician to herald Trumps victory, tweeting her congratulations before a winner had been officially announced. Then, hours later, she took to the stage at her partys headquarters outside Paris, presenting herself as the torch bearer of a long-brewing international mission to disrupt the established order.

She warned political leaders  inside and outside France  to watch their backs. The political and media elites that were heavily chastised this morning can no longer ignore it, she proclaimed Wednesday, smiling for the cameras.

The French referendum in 2005, the Greek one in 2015, the recent electoral successes of patriots in different European countries, the massive vote by the British in favor of Brexit and now Donald Trump  all are democratic choices that bury the old order and steppingstones to building tomorrows world, she said.

[Europes anti-immigrant leaders are taking Trumps show on the road]

But could she win? Most analysts still say there is little chance that the National Front could emerge on top in Frances 2017 elections  despite the staggering unpopularity of Hollande.

For one, Le Pen and her populist platform will not be the only option for voters on the right, who could also support Alain Juppe, the grandfatherly mayor of Bordeaux, or Nicolas Sarkozy, the bling bling former French president with the supermodel wife and a penchant for Islamophobia that has come to rival Le Pens.

For another, despite Le Pens best efforts to improve its image, the National Front  which shares much of the nationalism, protectionism and pro-Russian sensibilities of the Trump campaign  has an unfortunate history of anti-Semitism that many voters have a hard time overlooking, even after their leaders recent attempts to de-demonize the party.

I believe that shes played this well, said Francis Kalifat, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, the countrys largest Jewish advocacy organization. But in reality, nothing has changed. It remains a xenophobic party and a party that we share no values with.

In a country highly sensitive to the memory of its collaboration in the Holocaust, even the allegation of anti-Semitism can torpedo a political future, said Nonna Mayer, a political scientist at the Sciences Po school in Paris. It remains a major taboo in our history.

For many, the National Front is a synonym for that taboo. Le Pens father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 88-year-old founder of the party from whom Marine is estranged, once referred to the Nazi concentration camps as a detail of history, a remark that led a French court to declare him guilty of questioning a crime against humanity and to fine him nearly $35,000.

So high is the instinctive French distaste for the National Front that, on the one occasion when the party made it to the final round of the presidential elections, in 2002, both the right and the left rallied around Jacques Chirac, a centrist conservative, who then trounced Jean-Marie Le Pen in a landslide victory. The view in Paris is that much the same would happen if Marine Le Pen ran against Alain Juppe, favored to win Frances conservative primary this month.

[Trumps victory places U.S. at the front of a global right-wing surge]

But depending on the results of the primary, Le Pen could be facing off against Sarkozy instead, which experts say would present a scenario where a National Front victory might be possible, largely because Sarkozys hard line on migrants and Muslims has alienated the moderate voters he would need to fight off Le Pen.

He has used a very similar rhetoric to Le Pen herself, said Cecile Alduy, the author of a 2015 study of Le Pens reliance on language, referring to the former presidents recent turn toward Islamophobia to steal voters away from the National Front.

That, added Gerard Grunberg, a political scientist at Sciences Po, probably would hurt rather than help Sarkozy at the ballot box. Many voters on the left and right wont support him against Le Pen, Grunberg said.

Before the presidential elections next year, France will remain in a state of anxiety over the possibility of future terrorist attacks and the migrant crisis, which has caused its political establishment to be ridiculed for responses too little and too late.

Until the next president is chosen, one voice in particular is likely to be louder than its challengers, decrying the sitting government, political elites and the European Union itself to an audience of angry and world-weary voters.

For the moment, there is very little chance that Marine Le Pen would win, Mayer said. But we should never say never, as Brexit and Trump show.

Read more

27 years after the Berlin Wall fell, Europe wakes up to a U.S. president-elect promising one of his own

Trump promised Brexit times five. He delivered.

How far right will Nicolas Sarkozy go to become Frances president again?

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
Chinas nationalist press could barely contain its glee this week. Under President Donald Trump, argued the tabloid Global Times, the United States will embrace isolationism, stop projecting its strategic might and shrink its global influence.

Meanwhile, the United States Asian allies, the paper gloated, fear being cast aside. A cartoon showed the Chinese leaders archrival, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, sweating profusely as a slot machine came up with a Trump jackpot.

But the glee could be short-lived, and the Chinese governments impressions of Trump  as a pragmatist who will make business deals with China but play down geopolitics; as an isolationist who will pull back from the Asia-Pacific region; as a realist who wont bug them about human rights  could end up being seriously misguided.

They are expecting that they are going to be able to work with this guy, said Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing. But the big risk here is that the Chinese have come to one conclusion, and the reality may be very different.

[China is the big winner as candidates disavow hard-fought Pacific trade deal]

It is far too soon to know what is in Trumps mind, or whom he will appoint to his foreign policy and national security team. But early signs are that he may take a significantly more hawkish line toward China than Beijing expects.

Case in point: an article by two prominent Trump advisers, Alexander Gray and Peter Navarro in Foreign Policy that set out the president-elects Peace Through Strength Vision for the Asia-Pacific, borrowing Ronald Reagans Cold War mantra.

As expected, the essay advocates withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious 12-nation trade deal championed by President Obama as a key element of his rebalance, or pivot, to Asia. China was not part of TPP negotiations, and the demise of the TPP would be a clear strategic win for Beijing, experts say.

But the rest of the essay makes for very uncomfortable reading for China, promising that Trump will massively rebuild the U.S. Navy to reassure allies that the United States remains committed to its traditional role as guarantor of the liberal order in Asia.

Although Japan and South Korea will be respectfully asked to do more to support the U.S. military presence, there is no question of Trumps commitment to Americas Asian alliances as bedrocks of stability in the region, Gray and Navarro wrote.

Trump would back Taiwan with a comprehensive arms deal, they argued, and end the mistreatment of other Asian friends and allies, drawing Thailands military government back into the U.S. embrace and away from China, for example.

Trump has already spoken by telephone with Japans Abe, telling him he looked forward to strengthening the special relationship between the two countries, according to Japans Foreign Ministry.

In Mexico, China, Russia and Israel we ask people what they think of the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

He also chatted with South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who told him of the importance of their alliance and the need to maintain strong sanctions and pressure on North Korea.

Trump said he agreed with her 100 percent, according to a statement from her office in Seoul. We are with you all the way, and we will not waver, he was quoted as saying.

The contrast with the consensus in Beijing is marked.

Jin Canrong, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said he did not expect Trump to cut off funding for U.S. military bases in Japan or South Korea. But he said he thinks that the new U.S. leader would be less interested in a pivot to Asia.

The American pressure on Chinas strategic plans will be smaller, he said, adding that China would not have to modernize its military so anxiously.

Su Hao, director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, said Trump was likely to go ahead with the deployment of the THAAD missile-defense system in South Korea but otherwise take a less-confrontational stance toward China. He is not very likely to have a high-profile military confrontation with China on the South China Sea issue, he said.

At Gavekal Dragonomics, China policy analyst Yanmei Xie said Beijings optimism about a Trump presidency was based on a number of factors.

First, they think Trump is a businessman who will be transactional, and China knows how to do transactions, she said. They also know how to massage the ego of a dictatorial strongman.

According to this optimistic analysis, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping might get along, just as Trump appears to have found a kindred spirit in Russian President Vladimir Putin, she said. Meanwhile, there is a belief that the next U.S. president doesnt really mean all the criticism he leveled at China during the campaign.

None of that is a very solid basis for having an optimistic view, Xie argued. Indeed, Trumps foreign-policy advisers do not look like fans of Chinas or people who see the country as a partner and a friend, she added.

At the other extreme, several experts warned, if Navarro and Gray are wrong and Trump takes a more isolationist approach, that might not be such unalloyed good news for Chinas Communist Party, either.

Many clear-minded scholars think that an American retraction, the trend towards isolationism, may not be a good thing for China, Zhao Hai, a research fellow at Tsinghua Universitys National Security Institute, argued on a Carnegie-Tsinghua podcast.

They know the United States has been a big pillar of the current international system, and China has benefited from the current international system, he said.

A sudden and dramatic U.S. withdrawal, Zhao and Xie argued, could leave a power vacuum, breeding instability in Asian affairs  not something that Chinas stability-obsessed Communist Party leaders would welcome, especially as they grapple with a slowing economy and a transition in senior leadership next year.

The idea, for example, of Japans building its own defense capabilities, or even of Tokyos and Seouls seeking nuclear weapons, would be anathema to Beijing.

Finally, there is one other implication of a Trump presidency that might be welcomed in the corridors of power but not necessarily on the streets.

Mr. Trump is a successful businessman, and hes likely to favor profits and short-term tangible interests over principles, said human rights activist Hu Jia. I fear that he would put price tags on values that are priceless. And if thats the case, human rights issues are most likely to be affected.

Luna Lin, Congcong Zhang and Jin Xin contributed to this report.

Read more:

Asia doesnt think Trump is serious about ripping up trade agreements

After Trumps victory, the world is left to wonder: What happened to America?

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news


Iraqi soldiers talk during a lull in the fighting against Islamic State militants on Nov. 11, 2016, as security forces were pushing through parts of Mosul. The United Nations reported the militants have executed dozens of people in the city for alleged treason. (Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)

Since pushing into Mosul a week ago, Iraqi commanders say their forces have been shaken by some of the most complex fighting they have ever encountered in battles against the Islamic State.

It is a bitter fight: street to street, house to house, with the presence of civilians slowing the advancing forces. Car bombs  the militants main weapon  speed out of garages and straight into advancing military convoys.

If there were no civilians, wed just burn it all, said Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridhi, a counterterrorism commander. He was forced to temporarily pause operations in his sector Monday because too many families were clogging the street. I couldnt bomb with artillery or tanks, or heavy weapons. I said, We cant do anything. 

Mosul is the most populous city held by the militants, with an estimated 1 million people still living there. Iraqi forces have been closing in from the north and south but have broken into the city only on the eastern front, beginning a slow grind through densely populated neighborhoods.

[Civilian casualties are starting to rise as Iraqi forces push into Mosul]

Its a long, hard slog to the Tigris River that carves through the center of Mosul  and then a whole new battle awaits on the other side. Commanders expressed confidence that they eventually will prevail, but they are less optimistic that they will meet Prime Minister Haider al-Abadis pledge to have the city under control by the end of the year.

Militants wait to move between fighting positions until people fill the streets, using their presence as protection from airstrikes.

They always keep them with them, Aridhi said. Other officers said the militants occasionally let a flood of people flee as a method of forcing a pause in the fight.



People carrying a white flag and belongings flee fighting as Iraqi soldiers engage Islamic State militants in Mosul on Nov. 11, 2016. (Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)

At their base on the outskirts of the city, Iraqi counterterrorism troops call in airstrikes where they can, radioing to report militant positions and suicide bombers. Two French advisers sit nearby watching surveillance feeds of the citys streets.

The voice of a field commander crackled through the radio. These civilians are making me tired, he said. They are coming from everywhere. We dont know if they are fighters or civilians. They are carrying bags  we dont know whats inside.

Col. Arkan Fadhil calls in airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition, but they are less forthcoming than in previous battles because of the presence of families, and are used only to defend Iraqi forces rather than backing them when they attack.

[These images show how Islamic State forces have dug in for a fight in Mosul]

Just a few Islamic State militants hidden in populated areas can cause tremendous chaos. Seven would-be suicide bombers were arrested as counterterrorism troops cleared the last corners of the Zahra neighborhood of Mosul on Thursday, nearly a week after they had entered it.

It was one of six neighborhoods that the elite units stormed Nov. 4, on a day that was initially trumpeted as a success before it became clear that their early gains were not sustainable. After pushing forward with relatively little resistance, the forces were ambushed and cut off. A CNN team was trapped with them and surrounded for more than 24 hours after their convoy was attacked.



Iraqi soldiers move in formation through an alley on the outskirts of Mosul on Nov. 4, 2016. (Marko Drobnjakovic/AP)

They fired rockets from over there, Ghalib al-Lahaibi said from the roof of his home in Mosuls Samah neighborhood, pointing deeper inside the city. From there, the sound of heavy gunfire and explosions still rang out five days later, as the counterterrorism troops fought to expand their foothold.

Lahaibis family hid inside as groups of Islamic State militants passed by carrying rocketpropelled grenades. Stray bullets gouged holes in his living-room walls.

The house shook as a pickup truck full of explosives rammed into a convoy of Iraqi security forces nearby, scattering debris and body parts onto the street. Iraqi forces have little time to react, let alone call in airstrikes.





Youve got less than 10 meters to engage, so you shoot and cross your fingers, said Fadhil, the colonel.

The Iraqi military does not release casualty numbers, but the losses in the Nov. 4 battle appear to have been particularly heavy.

Ive lost count, Jorge Calzadilla, a volunteer with a Slovak medical organization, said about the number of military wounded. One night his group received nine dead soldiers at once. It was just a truckload of mangled bodies, he said.

The plan that day, according to Fadhil, was to rock their defensive line at multiple points.



A boy reacts as Iraqi soldiers help him walk from the front line during a battle with the Islamic State in eastern Mosul on Nov. 4, 2016. (Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)

Low-ranking officers in the field made some mistakes, he said, such as pushing forward without waiting for other units or without properly clearing and securing areas, later getting ambushed and becoming surrounded and trapped. Since the pitched battles of Nov. 4, the counterterrorism troops have adjusted their pace.

Aridhi said they have had to slow down as they wait for other fronts to advance on the city. Whether they can fight inside when they reach it also remains to be seen. In the battle for the city of Ramadi, the elite counterterrorism troops ended up leading the entire fight after police and army forces struggled to move forward in their sectors.

Restrictions in the use of airstrikes also slow their advance.

But on Tuesday morning, more than half a dozen rockets roared overhead into the Mosul neighborhood of Tahrir.

Officers identified them as TOS-1 short-range missiles, which unleash a blast of pressure over an area of several hundred square meters, devastating anything in their wake. The officers said they had been informed that there were no civilians in the target area.

We only use these missiles in empty areas, Aridhi said. We dont use them in places with families in it. They sometimes are used when Iraqi forces are under heavy direct fire, he said, because it is faster than sending coordinates to the coalition.

As the battle drags on, thousands of civilians trapped inside Mosul are risking their lives to escape, making their way across the battlefield in small groups carrying white flags.

They describe the defenses that the Islamic State has built in its neighborhoods  tunnels, concrete barriers, car bombs.

They are in the apartments, said one 64-year-old woman as she reached the security forces. They arent allowing anyone to leave. They have car bombs there.

In the apartments and where else? asked an Iraqi counterterrorism officer as the woman was handed water and food.

All of Mosul, she replied.

Mustafa Salim contributed to this report.

Read more:

Iraqi Christians doubt they will return to Mosul

Islamic State is kidnapping thousands of people to use as human shields

Sunnis fleeing Islamic State rule in Mosul brace for revenge

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
A fighter allied with the U.N.-backed Libyan unity government aims his weapon as he takes up position inside a ruined house at the front line of fighting with Islamic State militants in Sirte on Wednesday. (Ismail Zetouny/Reuters)

The Pentagon has tracked scores of Islamic State militants escaping fierce fighting in Libyas coastal city of Sirte and has begun laying the groundwork for expanded air attacks to follow and kill them, part of a final push by the Obama administration to blunt multiplying militant threats across the broader Middle East.

Intelligence from surveillance aircraft flying over Sirte and areas south of the city allowed the U.S. militarys Africa Command to track up to several hundred militants who U.S. officials now fear could be preparing to mount a counterattack on allied Libyan forces.

The presidents counterterrorism advisers are eager for Africa Command to pursue militants who have fled the coastal city but say military planners have more homework to do collecting and analyzing U.S. intelligence on their new encampments to ensure that U.S. strikes wont inadvertently kill civilians.

These guys are fleeing the fighting. There arent too many of them, said one U.S. senior official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operations. Why wouldnt you want to pick them off?

The Libya expansion comes amid a series of military escalations the White House has directed in recent months, from targeting leaders of al-Qaedas affiliate in Syria to launching major campaigns against Islamic State strongholds in Syria and Iraq. The Pentagon has also expanded operations in Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan in a bid to beat back resurgent militant threats.





Though President Obama has seized on the decimation of al-Qaedas core leadership as one of his central national security achievements, militant activity has evolved and spread to new theaters in recent years, representing a potentially more treacherous threat to the West.

That danger will be among the major issues facing President-elect Donald Trump when he takes office next year, forcing incoming officials to weigh the threat to Americans security against the costs of intensified action overseas.

[Amid a world of problems, Trumps policy prescriptions remain opaque]

While the White House had hoped to quickly wrap up the U.S. air campaign in Libya, the Islamic State has mounted a tougher-than-expected defense in Sirte and beyond. U.S. officials said the operation had been repeatedly extended in part because of self-imposed restrictions on the strikes to mitigate the risk of civilian casualties.

The flight of experienced militants could pull the United States deeper into the conflict, potentially worsening the instability that has plagued Libya since its 2011 revolution and undermining a U.S.-backed project to build a broadly recognized unity government.

[Why its taking so long to finish off the Islamic State in Libya]

The campaign in Libya has laid bare the challenge the United States faces in defeating even small bands of extremist fighters across the greater Middle East, who can seek shelter in remote areas or melt back into the population. Obama has been reluctant to commit significant U.S. ground forces to the fight, a stance Trump, given his campaign statements, seems likely to continue.

The extended air campaign over Sirte is emblematic of the challenge. Since August, the U.S. military has carried out more than 360 airstrikes in support of pro-government forces from the nearby city of Misurata. Small teams of elite U.S. commandos have helped local fighters push deeper into the coastal enclave, where officials say less than 100 extremists remain.

Administration officials estimate that the Islamic State controlled the whole city at the start of the campaign. Now, they say, it holds one square block. But still, the militants have continued to hold out.

Officials said that Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the head of Africa Command, has been eager to ensure that fleeing militants arent allowed to regroup or attack local forces, who have sustained heavy losses in the fighting and already taken fire from the rear. A militant resurgence would also threaten to tarnish what has been Africa Commands first sustained bombing campaign since its activation in 2008.

[Obama directs Pentagon to target al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria]

At the request of the government of national accord, the United States military has conducted airstrikes to help severely constrict ISILs ability to operate in Sirte and its environs, said White House National Security Council spokesman Carl Woog, using the administrations acronym for the Islamic State. We will continue to cooperate closely with the Libyan government as it works to prevent ISIL from finding safe haven anywhere in Libya.

The militants who have escaped Sirte are not believed to be Islamic State leaders but rather rank-and-file fighters.

Military planners at Africa Command in recent days have been pouring over surveillance footage and other intelligence to try to ensure any expanded strikes wont put noncombatants at risk, officials said.

The Pentagon is concerned that any reports of civilian casualties could prompt U.S. partners in the region to pull back their support for the air campaign. NATO ally Italy has allowed the U.S. military to fly armed drones out of Naval Air Station Sigonella but could suspend the operations there if the U.S. campaign in Libya sparks a public backlash against the Italian government, U.S. officials say.

U.S. drones also conduct unarmed surveillance flights over Libya from neighboring Tunisia, which has likewise been nervous about a domestic backlash over its cooperation with the U.S. military.

Africa Command says its Sirte operation has killed no civilians to date.

The air campaigns potential expansion beyond the besieged city would build on a series of earlier strikes against militants in Libya, including one almost a year ago on a senior deputy of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Those strikes were conducted under a different set of authorities, approved directly by the White House rather than delegated to Africa Command.

While the Pentagon pushed for months for authorization to attack the Islamic State before the Sirte operation began, the White House was cautious from the start about launching a sustained operation in another Muslim nation until a unity government and local forces were in place. For some officials, Libya has been an especially hard sell, given the countrys political dysfunction and the lack of deep U.S.-Libyan ties.

[A reminder of the permanent wars: Dozens of U.S. airstrikes in six countries]

American officials have been keen to demonstrate their deference to the unity government, which has thrown its support behind U.S. air operations. While the unity government, headed by Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj, has secured Western backing, it has not yet won approval from rival Libyan factions, making it vulnerable to a political backlash over the United States intervention.

Even if the United States can hunt down escaped militants outside Sirte, its unlikely to signal an end to the Islamic States most powerful affiliate.

Mattia Toaldo, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the militants, as they have elsewhere, are likely to adopt terrorist tactics as they lose control of territory. Most worrying, Toaldo said, is the fact that none of Libyas various security forces  including militiamen and remnants of the pre-revolution army  are positioned to contain militant cells.

There will be smaller streams going everywhere, going underground, and then re-emerging, he said.

Read more:

In Libya, the Islamic States black banner rises by the Mediterranean

Inside the brutal but bizarrely bureaucratic world of the Islamic State

A Libyan arms dealer chased by Gaddafis legacy
Children look at the rubble of damaged buildings in a rebel-held area of Aleppo on Sunday. (Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters)

The last of stockpiled rations were distributed Thursday in east Aleppo, and widespread starvation is expected to set in as winter arrives if no progress is made in negotiations to deliver food and medical aid, the United Nations said.

It is terrible as we speak; it could get much worse, U.N. relief envoy Jan Egeland said in Geneva. I do not think anybody wants a quarter of a million people to be starving. . . . I cannot see anyone wishing to see so many civilians bleed to death . . . because of indiscriminate war.

Russia said it would continue, at last through Friday, what has been a pause of several weeks in its air attacks. But it said that it and the Syrian government  which occupies western Aleppo and surrounds the entire city  would not fail to respond to ongoing shelling and other ground attacks by rebel forces in the east.

Egeland said that tremendous ground fighting between the two sides has stopped repeated plans to deliver aid to civilians and evacuate the wounded.

[How Russias lone aircraft carrier will change the fight in Syria]

He pleaded with Russia and the United States to continue trying to negotiate some form of cease-fire. It is only when these two . . . have been leading that we have made progress, when we have not been completely stalled, Egeland said.

Planned humanitarian convoys have yet to deliver aid, he said, because of the danger and the inability to obtain simultaneous security guarantees from all sides. A new U.N. proposal was delivered to the United States, Russia and other actors early this week.

Syria is the worst war, the worst humanitarian crisis, the worst displacement crisis, the worst refugee crisis in a generation Egeland said. While there has been no contact with the incoming Trump administration, he said, we expect U.S. help and engagement to be continued, uninterrupted, in the coming months.

But U.S.-Russia engagement, despite months of negotiations over a cease-fire in Aleppo and beyond, has made no progress in ending sieges across western Syria, largely by surrounding government forces, or in moving toward a transition government that both have said is their long-term goal.

In Moscow, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Russia would continue to work with the new administration on Syria, but that it would be exaggeration and wishful thinking to say that we are on the threshold of some radical change for the better. In an interview with the Russian news agency Interfax, Ryabkov suggested that repeated delays in initiating a political process in Syria were largely Washingtons fault.

Read more:
On Veterans Day, Constitution Daily looks at 10 Presidents who had first-hand experience serving in the military before they were elected to office and became commanders in chief.

GeorgeBushWWII

George H.W. Bush during World War II

Of the 43 men who have served as President (remember, Grover Cleveland served twice) so far, 31 had some type of military experience, either in active service, in the reserves or in a militia. In fact, 12 Presidents held the title of General during their careers.

And among these leaders, three men, George Washington, Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower, held the rank of General of the Army, the highest military rank obtainable in their times.

Here is a quick look at these leaders, and a few others with interesting military connections.

1. George Washington was still in the army at the time of this death. George Washington served with distinction in the French and Indian War, and led the Continental Army. But he came out of retirement after he left the White House, in case the United States went to war with France in 1798. He held the rank of senior officer of the Army when he died in 1799.

2. James Monroe, Revolutionary War hero. Monroe was a young officer in Washingtons army when it crossed the Delaware River and attacked Trenton in late 1776. Monroe was seriously wounded leading an assault on an artillery position but survived. His active military service ended a few years later when he decided to study the law under Thomas Jefferson.

3. Andrew Jackson, a fighting President. Jackson served as a messenger during the Revolutionary War at the age of 13 and was captured by the British. He later led regular army and militia forces in three wars, including a victory over the British at New Orleans in 1815 that made him a national hero.

4. William Henry Harrison, mostly known as a war hero. Harrison only served 30 days as President when he died in 1841, but he was the second biggest hero of the War of 1812, next to Jackson. Harrison was the protege of General Anthony Wayne and his victory over the British at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 was his biggest in the war, not the more famous campaign at Tippecanoe.

Story continues

5. Abraham Lincoln spent three months in the military. Lincoln volunteered to fight in the Black Hawk War of 1832, and he was elected as captain of his militia unit. Lincoln didnt see active fighting, but he was tasked to bury the war dead, an experience that deeply influenced the future President.

6. Ulysses Grant, the first President from West Point. That doesnt sound unique but only three Presidents were educated at military academies: Grant, Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter. Future President Grant served under another future President, Zachary Taylor, during the Mexican-American War, and Grant modeled his leadership skills on his experience with Taylor.

7. William McKinley, the last President to serve in the Civil War. Seven future Presidents served in the military, in some capacity, during the Civil War. McKinley was the last President who was a Civil War veteran. He fought bravely during his time in the Army and had his horse shot out from under him in one skirmish.

8. Harry Truman fought in World War I. Harry Truman was the only President to serve on the battlefield during World War I; Dwight Eisenhower served stateside during the war. Truman commanded an artillery unit in France and saw battle, including offering support for George Pattons tank brigade.

9. Bush and Kennedy, World War II heroes. Both future Presidents were involved in well-known incidents. John Kennedys patrol boat was cut in half by a Japanese ship in the Solomon Islands; George H.W. Bush was shot down in the Pacific, survived and flew a total of 58 combat missions. A total of eight Presidents served in some capacity during World War II.

10. John Adams, unsung hero. Adams didnt serve in the military during the Revolutionary War, but he played a major role in organizing and equipping the war effort by acting as a de facto Secretary of War. Adams also pushed for Washington to be named as commander of the army. And he fought alongside sailors who captured a British ship near Spain, with his son John Quincy Adams also on board.

Historical Stories on Constitution Daily

10 fascinating facts about Election Day

Semper Fi! Happy 241st birthday to the Marine Corps

Pollsters Trump mistake takes its place in history

It was 156 years ago today: Abraham Lincoln is elected President
From Cosmopolitan

Based on Trump's proposed policies and campaign rhetoric, millions of Americans are worried about the loss of their civil liberties, the loss of protections to our overheating planet, access to affordable health care, and so much more. No one can be absolutely sure of what a Trump presidency will mean for America and its disenfranchised groups. What is certain is how much is at stake. Here are just a few of those things.

Abortion May Become Illegal

As a congressman representing Indiana, future Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly sought to defund Planned Parenthood. As Indiana's governor, Pence signed one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country earlier this year. The law banned abortions sought over genetic disorders, banned fetal tissue donation, and required fetal remains be either cremated or buried, among other restrictions. Though it was later blocked by a federal judge, Pence has made it clear that he will continue to oppose abortion in office. Im pro-life and I dont apologize for it, Pence said during a town hall in July, promising that his administration will see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs." Trump's Supreme Court pick will be anti-abortion, and according to the Los Angeles Times, There almost certainly will be a majority to overrule Roe vs. Wade and allow states to prohibit abortions. Backed by a majority Republican Congress, Trump has committed to move to defund Planned Parenthood, "make the Hyde Amendment - a rule that forbids any taxpayer funds to be used to cover abortion, even for Medicaid patients - a permanent rule rather than something that must be renewed every year, and sign a federal ban on abortion at 22 weeks gestation into law," Robin Marty explained in Cosmopolitan.com.



LGBTQ Rights May Be Set Backward

Pence is anti-gay rights. He has advocated for conversion therapy, has said that same-sex couples are a sign of societal collapse," and supported the militarys Dont Ask Dont Tell policy. As governor, he also signed a religious freedom bill that critics feared would allow businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people by citing religious beliefs as a legal defense (the language of the bill was amended after outcry). Trump opposes same-sex marriage and has said he would consider appointing judges who would overturn marriage equality. The Human Rights Campaign's Jay Brown told the Daily Beast: Everybody is a little stunned right now. We know there are several threats coming at us, and we spent many months warning voters about the anti-LGBTQ platform of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Now were confronted by that.

Story continues

The White House's Support for Victims of Sexual Assault Could Disappear

Trump has boasted about sexually assaulting women and even faces sexual assault allegations from over a dozen women. Many of the men in his inner circle, like Corey Lewandowski and Newt Gingrich, have dismissed the concerns over sexual assault, argued that Trump's comments are normal, or called reporters covering the story "fascinated with sex," respectively. The Obama administration has prioritized sexual violence on college campuses through the It's On Us initiative and the U.S. Department of Education has over 200 college investigations open. Inside Higher Ed writes, "His lack of a plan has worried many victims advocates, and comments made during the campaign by some of Trumps surrogates suggesting that, if elected, Trump would scale back Title IX, or even eliminate the Department of Education or the Office of Civil Rights, has caused more concern."

Immigrants Will Be at Risk

Immigrants and refugees will become one of the most vulnerable populations in a Trump presidency. Trump focused his platform around immigration, promising to build a wall at the border of Mexico (and have Mexico pay for it), proposed a ban on Muslims from entering the United States (which, as of Thursday, had disappeared from his campaign site), and said he will not offer millions of undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship and will deport them. He has promised to withdraw funding for cities that become sanctuaries for refugees, saying, "Cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities will not receive taxpayer dollars, and we will work with Congress to pass legislation to protect those jurisdictions that do assist federal authorities," and is extremely suspicious of Syrian refugees. His anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies have translated into a rise in hate crimes against people of color and a rise in Islamophobia, and are guaranteed to infringe upon the human rights and safety of millions in this country.

The Justice System Could Skew Conservative

There is currently one vacancy on the Supreme Court, and given that two judges are over 75, Trump may be able to nominate more judges during his presidency. Trump's list of potential judicial nominees skews male, white, and conservative, endangering a history of progressive victories like marriage equality, affirmative action, and LGBT rights. Trump, who has also attacked a federal judge over his Mexican heritage, will have the power to appoint federal judges. Since most cases never make it to the Supreme Court, federal judges end up making the majority of decisions on cases involving civil rights of Americans. Because the Republicans hold the Senate, Trump would likely get more support than Barack Obama, who was blocked by Republicans from filling the open Supreme Court seat.

Support for Clean Energy May Disappear

Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. According to Vox, all the fragile but important progress the world has made on global warming over the past eight years is now in danger of being blown up" under Trump. Vox explains that Trump wants to do away with Obamas Clean Power Plan, which reduces carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., wants to stop federal funding of clean energy, and wants to gut the Environmental Protection Agency. What's worse, if he also fails to acknowledge the Paris Agreement (an international treaty targeting global warming), he "will likely ensure that the global mean temperature rises higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius," the Atlantic reports, which "would have devastating effects on a planetary scale, pushing weather patterns far outside what human civilization has previously experienced and ensuring mass extinctions."

Racial Equality and Civil Rights Will Be Threatened

Trump is a proponent of stop-and-frisk, a form of racial profiling that was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge. He advocates waterboarding and believe torture works against terrorist suspects, even though torture is a violation of several international laws. Using racially coded language, Trump has also incited violence at his rallies, urged his supporters to monitor voters at the polls on Election Day, and has garnered the support of the KKK - one KKK group even held a victory parade for Trump in North Carolina. People across America are already starting to experience more incidences of racism by Trump supporters.

Millions May Lose Access to Affordable Health Care

Trump has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would leave 24 million Americans without insurance. The ACA also protects women from discriminatory practices by insurance companies that charge women more for health care, and ensures their access to no co-pay birth control. Given the likelihood that birth control is about to become expensive and abortion may be an impossibility, some feminists are encouraging women to get an IUD, a medical device that can prevent pregnancy for several years, before January. With Republican control of Congress, and their firm disavowal of the plan, Trump could end up gutting Obamas health-care act.

America's Relationships With Other Countries May Deteriorate

Security experts are terrified about what Trump, who is unpredictable and retaliatory, will do with access to the nuclear codes and the most powerful military in the world. In Politico, Ian Bremmer wrote that when it comes to foreign policy, "With Trump, the biggest risk comes from the way hed handle a crisis that no one saw coming, whether from China, Putin, North Korea, a cyberattack, terrorists, or something else. As a candidate, he thrives on surprise. Restraint and strategic patience dont figure among his strengths, and Trump might well respond to a bolt-from-the-blue crisis with a shot of bravado, a threat of escalation and tactics designed to keep antagonists, and maybe U.S. allies, off guard." The Daily Beast summarizes Trump's views on NATO as "at best a pay-to-play arrangement, at worst, a total waste of time," noting that Trump has called America's post-World War II military treaty with Canada and several European nations "obsolete" and "unfair, economically." If Russia invades any neighboring NATO countries, it's possible that Trump may refuse to honor the treaty and not intervene. This action could dismantle the 70-year international treaty.

Net Neutrality Could End

Obama supported a free and open internet. A President Trump will likely not. In 2014, he tweeted against net neutrality, saying, "Obamas attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media." Trump will likely have the support of a Republican-majority Congress in his opposition to net neutrality. Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen expects that net neutrality will be "challenged or weakened" under a Trump administration.

Freedom of Press Will Be Threatened

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump has called journalists like NBC's Katy Tur and CBS News's Sopan Deb liars, has threatened to sue the New York Times for printing allegations of sexual assault against him, and has repeatedly insulted media outlets that report pieces he doesn't like. Reporters covering the Trump campaign have faced death threats, rape threats, and harassment from Trump supporters, both at rallies and online. Furthermore, Trump frequently left out press and even banned several news outlets from attending press conferences and campaign events. Trump has also said that the First Amendment offers too much protection" and that our press is allowed to say whatever they want. Many journalists fear what will happen to the freedom of the press under a Trump presidency.

Follow Prachi on Twitter.

You Might Also Like
From Cosmopolitan

In the wake of this historic, unprecedented election, there are so many people looking for guidance on how, as women, we make sense of it all. Below are 12 must-read feminist responses to the 2016 presidential election. Let them enrage you, fuel you and inspire you to keep fighting:

Gloria Steinem

"I think this country is in a time of danger because most of us are escaping control by some of us. Just as we would never tell a woman, man or child to stay in a violent household, we will never go back to the old hierarchy. Despite ongoing threats, at home and in other countries, including a very racialized and gendered terrorism, we have many leaders who inspire democracy, who model it, and who know we are linked, not ranked.

Luckily, real change, like a tree, grows from the bottom up, not the top down. We have Hillary, Barack and Michelle to guide us. We will not mourn, we will organize. Maybe we are about to be free." -Gloria Steinem for The Guardian

Lindy West

"We have been weathering this hurricane wall of doubt and violence for so long, and now, more crystalline than ever, we have an enemy and a mandate. We have the smirking apotheosis of our oppression sliming, paw-first, toward our genitals. We have the popular vote. We have proof, in exit polls, that white women will pawn their humanity for the safety of white supremacy. We have abortion pills to stockpile and neighbors to protect and children to teach. We have the right woman to find. We have local elections in a year.

The fact that we lost doesnt make us wrong; the fact that they dont believe in us doesnt make us disappear." -Lindy West for the New York Times

Photo credit: Katie Buckleitner

Brittney Cooper

"Last night, white women and men together put their boots on the neck of such visions aiming instead to take the country back(ward), to a time where white male dominance was clearly the order of the day. Yesterday, white voters formed a coalition across the lines of gender to assure that white mens place and white peoples power will remain untouched. The hallmark of unchecked white supremacy and patriarchy is the limitless opportunities available to mediocre white men. No one, not even Trump supporters, would argue that he is anything other than mediocre in morals, accomplishments, and political vision. But Hillary Clintons prodigious history of achievements both in and out of public office was no match for the astounding depths of Trumps mediocrity. Up against this countrys best, most accomplished women, even the worst of men can still win. Last night, patriarchy had the last word in this battle with an eager pantsuit nation." -Brittney Cooper for Cosmopolitan.com



Story continues

Jill Filipovic

"This election is such a deeply felt insult to women across the United States. The message is just so obvious: You can be the best by a long shot, but sorry, sweetie, that aint enough. Every woman who has ever been passed over for a promotion in favor of a lower-achieving male colleague, who has been condescended to by a teacher or a male classmate, who has been told her voice sounds too girly or she just doesnt seem like a scientist or she lost the student body election because Dave just seemed like a more chill guy knows this feeling: that you are not enough, just because of who you are. Its crazy-making, especially in a country that promises equality and that anything is possible. That ethos makes lots of women blame themselves, concluding maybe were just not as good, not as smart, not as hardworking as we think we are.

At least now we have a stark example of just how good a woman can be and still lose to a man who is deeply and fundamentally bad." -Jill Filipovic for Cosmopolitan.com

Ann Friedman

"Heres a secret: Hillary was always a beginning and never an endpoint. She is not our last chance at a woman president, and she was never our only path to meaningful change or feminist progress. President Hillary - even with a Democratic Senate - wouldnt have been able to put a hard stop on the entrenched racism that leads to state violence against black people, or the male entitlement that leads to the abuse and assault of women. Things are going to be, uh, different without her in the White House (sorry, understatement of the decade), but our fundamental task is unchanged. The call to action is the same, but so much louder." -Ann Friedman for The Cut

Photo credit: Katie Buckleitner

Clover Hope

"Overwhelmingly, white people voted to preserve whiteness. Fifty-eight percent of white Americans, according to CNNs exit polls, voted to make Trump the leader of the country. President Trump. Many of them, motivated by fear and ignorance, walked into a voting booth and put physical effort toward electing a racist, sexist tyrant whos been proven to hate everyone but himself. Sixty-three percent of white men voted Trump. The toughest pill is that fifty-three percent of white women followed them. Institutionally-educated and middle class white people voted to retain their power. The truth is that this is how its always been. The fear is that we continue to live with the knowledge that all along, it was you." -Clover Hope for Jezebel



Kelly Faircloth

"But as I looked around at the little girls I see popping up on my Facebook and toddling around my neighborhood - as I think of my own future children - I wanted this for them. I want a lot of things for them, of course: longer protected parental leave and paid at that; federally subsidized daycare; public schools that are well-funded and actually integrated; access to health care. But in the meantime, I wanted the symbolic victory of the election of Americas first female president with the added dimension that it could be seen as a renunciation of the way the country talked about Hillary Clinton and indeed all women for so many years. Theres so much work to do, but surely we could start by bagging this. Instead, America opted for Donald J. Trump." -Kelly Faircloth for Jezebel

Anne Helen Petersen

"I started to ask myself: Who would I be if I didnt live in a world that hated women?

What might we be? Perhaps women wouldnt go to college fearing the statistical inevitability of sexual abuse. Perhaps we might be women liberated from the persistence of unequal pay for equal work. And perhaps we might gradually cease to calculate our value based on our ability to regiment our bodies into a highly circumscribed understanding of beauty. Those of us who are nonwhite, queer, fat, disabled, trans, or immigrant might not just be told that were equal citizens, but perhaps even experience life as such. Perhaps, if we didnt live in a world that hated women, we might not live in fear that a male superior will sexually harass us and force us to make a decision between our integrity or our careers.

We might, in other words, experience something like freedom. And from there, the ability to navigate the world in a posture that is not defined by hesitancy and fear.

But for all of that, America has decided, we must wait." -Anne Helen Petersen for BuzzFeed

Photo credit: Katie Buckleitner

Michelle Goldberg

"Had Clinton won, she would have done more than shatter the glass ceiling. For 25 years, she has been a synecdoche for unseemly female ambition. (In 1996, a 4,000-word Weekly Standard essay titled 'The Feminization of America' ended with these words: 'To put it more simply, Hillary is welcoming men to their new role as the second sex.') Clinton ran for president on an explicitly feminist platform and promised a half-female Cabinet. Her victory would have been a sign that the gender hierarchy that has always been fundamental to our society - that has always been fundamental to most societies - was starting to crumble. It would have meant that men no longer rule. We have to come to terms with the fact that a majority of men would rather burn this country to the ground than let that happen." -Michelle Goldberg for Slate

Jessica Valenti

"I know that Ill find the right words to relay the gravity of the election to my daughter without scaring her. I have confidence in that. Her father and I will tell her that sometimes people make bad decisions, and that the wrong people are chosen to lead. Well remind her of lessons shes learned in school about times in her countrys history when weve done the wrong thing  horrible things. Well remind her of how good people organized and fought, loved each other and believed things could change.

Well tell her that we will have to be the good people who fight now. And soon, when weve had a chance to grieve and gather ourselves, well remind our daughter that part of the reason this man was elected is because of how powerful we actually are. That our power scared him and others who are not ready to change and grow.

And that we owe it to ourselves and our country not to let fear stop us now. Not ever." -Jessica Valenti for The Guardian

Roxane Gay

"Where do we go from here? That is the question many of us will be trying to answer for the next while. For now, we need to breathe, stand tall and adjust to this new reality as best we can. We need - through writing, through protest, through voting in 2018 and 2020 - to be the checks and balances our government lacks so that we can protect the most defenseless among us, so that we can preserve the more perfect union America has long held as the ideal. We have to fight hard, though I do not yet know what that fight looks like." -Roxane Gay for the New York Times

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

"A week before Election Day, I saw an Instagram picture of a friends daughter who happened to share a birthday, that day, October 26, with Hillary Clinton. The Instagram caption read, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME AND HILLARY. I clicked 'like,' and I thought of the girls who had been radicalized by this election - literal seven year olds who will grow up knowing what to ask for, who will know what theyre worth in a way that Hillarys generation and even mine have had to guess at, who will not wait for election returns to find out if theyve become an acceptable part of society. They wont stand by and write think pieces about unfairness. They wont eat half the shit weve had to. But they will never know the sunshine of a Hillary Clinton presidency, where the fight is good and it all makes sense."-Taffy Brodesser-Akner for GQ

Follow Madison on Twitter.

You Might Also Like
From Cosmopolitan

Photo credit: Getty/Twitter

If you're feeling despondent about the election of Donald Trump and overwhelmed by the task of protecting women and minorities that lies ahead, know that you can start doing good here and now, in ways both large and small. As Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement on Wednesday, "There are almost no words to capture the threat that this election result poses to our democracy, to our economic security, to access to reproductive health care, and most especially to the safety and dignity of people of color" - but while we may not have words for this threat, we can fight it with action. By no means an exhaustive list, here are twelve ways that you can help before and after Trump takes office.

If you have one minute, and some cash...

Find a nonprofit that works on an issue you care about and set up a recurring donation. Just like with an IUD, you can "set it and forget it" when it comes to your nonprofit giving. Planned Parenthood provides lifesaving reproductive care to the nation's most vulnerable women, and the 100-year-old organization has pledged to keep its doors open in the face of a Trump presidency - support its mission here. The American Civil Liberties Union protects voting rights, reproductive rights, and more - donate here. The Council on American-Islamic Relations advocates for the rights of American Muslims, the Anti-Defamation League combats anti-semitism, the Trevor Project supports LGBTQ youth, and the International Rescue Committee helps refugees uprooted by violence and war. Pick an organization (or a few!) that fights for your priorities, then chip in a little each month automatically.

If you have two minutes...

Post about what's important to you. No, a tweet won't change the world. But talking about your priorities and your involvement on your social platforms starts conversations and encourages others to take action, too. Did you make a donation? Share that on Facebook, and invite others to do the same. Is a protest happening near you? Tweet about it - communities are built and movements driven forward both in person and online. And feel free to tweet the details of your menstrual cycle at our soon-to-be vice president Mike Pence, who has inspired many women to do the same with his apparent concern for what goes on inside our bodies. And by "concern" I mean his efforts to decimate our bodily autonomy, for example signing a bill to ban abortions in the case of fetal anomalies and forcing women to view their fetal ultrasounds hours before their abortion procedures.



Story continues

@periodsforpence I have cramps! Is it menstrual or the large number of politicians in my uterus? @GovPenceIN Please advise #periodsforpence - AnastasiaBeaverhousn (@NotAmused8) April 26, 2016

If you have five minutes...

Contact your representatives in Congress about restoring voting rights. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, allowing nine states to change their voting laws without federal approval. This means that this presidential election was the first without a fully functional Voting Rights Act since the act was passed in 1965, and Republican officials and legislators were able to do things like shorten voting hours and close polling places to suppress voter turnout in black communities. Find out who represents you in Congress, then email or call them to pressure them to restore the Voting Rights Act.

If you have fifteen minutes...

Talk with a friend or family member. Thanksgiving is coming up, and that could mean facing family members or friends who see things differently than you. Bring those things up. Explain why abortion access, fighting police brutality, or reforming the criminal justice system matters to you personally.

If you have an hour...

Stop by a rally. Getting offline and to a local event does wonders to remind you that you're not alone in your concern, fear, passion, or whatever you're feeling right now. Check out the "Events" tab on the lefthand side of your Facebook home page to see what people are up to in your area, as well as the Facebook pages of organizations such as Black Lives Matter and the National Organization for Women. Put your time and your body on the line. You can also search Eventbrite and MoveOn for event listings.

Vote in local elections. Actually, vote no matter how much time you do or don't have. Federal and state elections are far from the only ones that matter: Sheriffs, mayors, school board members, and other officials elected at the local level all affect the lives of the people in your community, and you have the power to hold these officials accountable.



If you have an afternoon...

Volunteer at your local LGBTQ center. Search for a center near you that assists LGBTQ youth, seniors, and families, then contact it to ask how you can help. LGBTQ youth especially are at high risk for homelessness, harassment, and suicide, and after-school programs around the country are in need of compassionate people to show up for them.



If you have a day...

Support people who travel to your area for abortion care with rides, child care, or a place to stay. If you live in an area where abortion care is relatively easy to access, people from other areas may be coming to yours for their procedures. Nonprofits such as ACCESS organize volunteers to provide transportation, child care, and overnight housing to women who have to travel to get an abortion.

If you have a couple of hours a week..

Volunteer to teach English or citizenship classes to people applying for American citizenship. Search for organizations in your area that offer immigrants classes to help them get citizenship, for example the Chinese Progressive Association in New York City and the Central American Resource Center in Washington, D.C.

If you have multiple days...

Volunteer to mentor refugee individuals and families. Through the International Rescue Committee, you can sign up to provide refugees mentorship, job-seeking assistance, and more. Locate the IRC office nearest you here.

Become a clinic escort. Clinic escorts guide patients in and out of abortion clinics, protecting them from protesters and making sure they get the care they need. Becoming one requires an orientation period, but if you've got the time it makes a world of difference to women who need support. Contact your local Planned Parenthood to learn more.

Volunteer for a sexual assault hotline. The anti-sexual-violence organization RAINN has partner crisis centers all over the country, and many are in need of trained volunteers to answer calls to their hotlines. Locate a center here and find out what it needs.

Follow Hayley on Twitter.



You Might Also Like
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood actor Warren Beatty returns to cinema screens after a 15-year absence in the romantic drama "Rules Don't Apply", playing billionaire Howard Hughes. The Oscar winner, known for movies such as "Bonnie and Clyde", "Bulworth" and "Dick Tracy", also wrote and directed the film about a young actress, played by Lily Collins and her driver, portrayed by Alden Ehrenreich. The movie, which had its world premiere at the American Film Institute festival in Los Angeles on Thursday, is Beatty's first film appearance since 2001's "Town & Country". "I always take a long time to finally begin a movie," the 79-year-old said at the premiere. "I've had this in the back of my mind for a long time and ... so to be able to finally go ahead and do it is very satisfying, and I got lucky with a terrific cast." Beatty walked the red carpet with his wife, actress Annette Bening, who also stars in the movie alongside Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin and Matthew Broderick. "I think that the sexual puritanism of America and the rise of feminism in the late '50s and the early '60s which occurs in this movie is meaningful," Beatty said. The AFI Fest runs until Nov. 17 and will feature premieres of such other films as "The Comedian," starring Robert De Niro, and Disney's "Moana". (Reporting By Reuters Television, editing by Larry King)
Yahoo Celebrity

With the final season of "Dead to Me" dropping on Netflix on Nov. 17, Applegate said, "This is the first time anyones going to see me the way I am. I put on 40 pounds; I cant walk without a cane. I want people to know that I am very aware of all of that."
Cosmo Scharf

Peter Thiel's support and backing of Donald Trump hadn't been sitting well with Cosmo Scharf for awhile.

The 21-year-old had a unique tie to the venture capitalist: Scharf was a Thiel Fellow, one of the 20 or so kids a year given $100,000 to drop out of school and chase their entrepreneurial dreams.

Scharf, who received the money for his work in the virtual reality community in LA, was concerned about Thiel's backing of Trump from the beginning. He'd been uneasy about it, but realized when he was in the shower the morning after Trump won that he just couldn't be a part of the program because Thiel had helped him win.

"I knew for months about his general support. It always didnt really sit well with me for awhile," Scharf told Business Insider. "The breaking point for me was realizing that he did have some part, small or large, in helping get him elected and the fact that it happened changed my perspective on it."

On Thursday, Scharf made the choice to drop out of the Fellowship program and published a Medium post announcing his decision. The money he has received thus far in the program he says he will be donating to a charity that will help climate change, a global issue that Trump has repeatedly denied. He also won't accept any money that's left in the fellowship's $100,000 grant to him.

"The consequences of this election is much larger than whats going on in America and it seems like it would make sense to put the money towards something that would save our planet," Scharf said.

Turning it down

It wasn't an easy decision as a young adult to turn down $100,000 but Scharf wrote in his post that he "cannot justify being associated with someone who helped a psychopathic, sexist, racist, bigoted, xenophobic, poisonous demagogue rise to power."

Any of those words, he told Business Insider, would be enough for him to not want to associate with a person, but Thiel did more than just associate with Trump. Thiel, a Facebook board member and venture capitalist, appeared onstage at the Republican National Convention and also pledged to donate $1.25 million to the then-Republican nominee.

Story continues

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., July 21 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

"Fundamentally when you put your money towards getting him elected, you tacitly condone and accept Trumps words and his actions," Scharf said.

While Scharf never received outside pressure from friends or family to turn down the Thiel-tainted money, he says his mom and friends accepted his decision to turn the money down. When he called the Thiel Fellowship on Thursday, they were nice and didn't pressure him to reconsider or argue any pro-Trump viewpoints, Scharf said. The Thiel Foundation didn't respond to a request for comment on Scharf's departure.

Scharf says the election now motivates him more than ever to work on what virtual reality means in a larger context of the world. He believes the technology, which can fully immerse someone into a new situation, is something that can help shift people's perspectives and change how they think for the better  and it's now needed more than ever to bring that diverse perspective, he argues.

"Theres obviosuly a lot of factors for why Trump has won, and important reason is sort of ignorance based on lack of access to diverse thought and diverse opinions. Based on where people live, they dont see people that arent like them every day. They absorb what is said in TV and on Facebook," Scharf said.

NOW WATCH: Peter Thiel on why he supports Trump: Insider politicians are just 'rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic'





More From Business Insider


An overwhelming number of Americans are deficient in vitamin D all year long. In fact, one study published in Nutrition Research put that number at 41.6 percent.

But, in the winter, our levels of the "sunshine vitamin" tend to drop even further, with scientists at the University of California--Davis stating that current recommended intake levels for vitamin D need to be increased by as much as 500 percent during the winter months in order to support healthy vitamin D levels.

That's because the majority of our vitamin D is produced in the body in response to the absorption of UVB rays from sun. In the wintertime, the days are shorter than ever and, according to a review published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, north of Atlanta, the sun's rays become so indirect that our bodies cannot absorb as many UVB rays as they can in the summer months. What's more, people with darker complexions as well as the elderly are less efficient at converting UVB rays into vitamin D, explains Dr. Shanna Levine, clinical instructor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Unfortunately, too-low levels of vitamin D are linked not only seasonal affective disorder (a more intense version of the "winter blues"), but also muscle and bone loss, as well as an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes (irrespective of weight) and cancer.

[See: Seasonal Affective Disorder: 8 Ways to Feel Better.]

So if you haven't had your vitamin D levels checked, now's the time, Levine says. Your doctor can perform a simple blood test to determine your levels and if you need to bolster them in the months ahead.

Here are four simple, expert-approved ways to make sure you're getting enough vitamin D, even during the cold, dark days of winter:

1. Eat the Right Foods

Just because the majority of our vitamin D comes from sun exposure, that doesn't mean food can't help support healthy levels. Some foods, including pork, mushrooms and fatty fish, are naturally rich in vitamin D, Levine says. (A single serving of canned tuna contains about one-third of your recommended daily intake.) Plus, many foods -- including dairy and eggs -- are fortified with the essential nutrient. One 2016 study from the Cork Centre Center for Vitamin D and Nutrition Research found that eating just seven vitamin D--enriched eggs per week can protect against low vitamin D levels in the wintertime.

Story continues

[See: 10 Ways to Avoid Winter Joint Pain.]

2. Get Outside

Don't use the cold as a reason to hole up indoors all winter long. While at northern latitudes the ability to absorb UVB rays for the production of vitamin D is reduced, it's not completely eliminated, says Dr. John Stracks, clinical assistant professor of family and community medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Schedule some outdoor time -- like taking a walk during your lunch break, playing in the snow with your kids or going on a ski trip -- whenever possible and, ideally, on slightly warmer days. Some exposed skin is required for your body to absorb the sun's rays. Also, if you've been eager to visit the Caribbean or any other sunny destinations, the winter is the time to do it, Stracks says, noting that it can help give your D levels a needed boost.

3. Get a Vitamin D Lamp

Can't get much natural light in your life? Try artificial light. Many light therapy boxes have been shown to have a protective effect against seasonal affective disorder. However, most do not actually increase vitamin D levels, Stracks explains. Currently, the only Food and Drug Administration-approved lamp on the market to raise vitamin D levels is the Sperti. It costs $425, but that's cheaper than a cross-continental vacation and can be used every day.

[See: 8 Food Combinations to Embrace (and 3 to Avoid).]

4. Take a Supplement

When all else fails, vitamin D supplementation can help, Stracks says. It's important to talk to your doctor before taking any supplements, as excessive intake should also be avoided. Your physician will be able to recommend a dose that will be most effective given your current levels -- and make sure you get them where they need to be.

K. Aleisha Fetters, MS, CSCS, is a freelance Health + Wellness reporter at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter, connect with her on LinkedIn, find her on Facebook or the Web, or email her at kafetters@gmail.com.
Foreigners always watch U.S. elections, but rarely with the edge-of-the-seat suspense evident as the votes were tallied Tuesday. With Donald Trumps dramatic victory, theyre as much in the dark as we are. Pick your foreign policy: Whats he going to do?

French President Francois Hollande immediately asserted, somewhat courteously, that Trumps election opens a period of uncertainty. Earlier this year, Hollande did not hold back: His excesses make you want to retch.

Related: Factbox: Foreign Leaders' Criticism, Praise of U.S. Republican Candidate Trump

Angela Merkel is just as guarded. Pointedly mentioning respect for the law and human dignity, the German chancellor declared, I offer the next president of the United States close cooperation on the basis of these values.

Vladimir Putin is so far among a handful of welcoming world leaders in evidence. Russia is ready and wants to restore our relations with the U.S., Putin said within hours of Trumps triumph. He added, We understand the way to that will be difficult, taking into account the current state of degradation of relations.

Wariness, expectation, a lot in between: The world is still on the edge of its seat. Here are five foreign policy challenges Trump will face right away.

 Relations with Russia. Trumps willingness to work with Moscow when shared interests make this possible is among his strongestand clearestpoints. But what will this look like?

While Putin and Trump had not spoken as of Thursday, contact short of a summit is a near-term likelihood.

Related: With an Eye on Russia, the US Reinforces Its Defense of Northern Europe

Apart from this, the next two policy issues offer partial answers.

 Syria. Secretary of State Kerry tried and failed numerous times to develop a collaborative arrangement with Moscow to find a solution to the Syria crisis and credit to him for the effort. But he hadnt mended WashingtonMoscow ties sufficiently to get this done.

Story continues

If Trump does cut a deal, what now seems hopelessly out of reach may become possible. If the Trump administration calls for military cooperation, will the Pentagon cooperate any more than it did in Kerrys case?

 TransAtlantic ties. Given how unsettled the leading European allies are, the task of reassuring them is a priority. In particular, Trump will have to clarify the U.S. commitment to NATOs mission, as well as the budget burden.

In Trumps favor: Eased relations between the U.S. and Russia could play well in Europe, given how many European Union membersthe French and Italians in particular, as well as the German business community and the left side of Merkels coalition governmenthave had enough of Washingtons costly sanctions regime. Trumps liability: Depending on his foreign policy appointments, he may or may not prove up to the complexities of transAtlantic diplomacy.

Related: Trump Victory Likely to Empower Iran's Hardliners, Worry Investors

 Iran. Trump the dealmaker has vigorously denounced the Obama administrations agreement governing Irans nuclear program from Day 1 as the worst deal Ive ever seen in my life. Now that hes in a position to scuttle it, will he do so?

He has to tread carefully because tearing up the pact will have huge implications for Middle East stability based on Irans reaction. Also, repudiating the pact, which was negotiated with Tehran as a team effort involving three E.U. allies, would prove monumentally alienating to the Europeans. Trumps biggest problem here: Except Israel, the rest of the world wants this deal to stick.

 The TTP and China. The TransPacific Partnership, the shiniest ornament in Obamas grand pivot to Asia, may well have died Tuesday night. Trump has plenty of political allies among Democrats opposed to the deal, so no problem there.

But the Obama administration viewed the TTP as primarily a strategic device in its response to Chinas emergence as a Pacific power. This means Trump will have to script a serious China policy quickly, and hes nowhere near developing one at the moment.

Related: China State Media Warns Trump Against Isolationism

We know his thinking is less militaristic than Clintons, and Beijing has occasionally signaled its attenuated appreciation on this point just as Moscow has. Trump, by comparison, is unmolded clay, even if hes mistaken about numerous aspects of the relationship. He complains about Chinas manipulation of exchange rates, for instance, but that hasnt been at issue for years; even the IMF would concur.

You have to hope Trump will learn on the jobthat is, come around to sensible, non-scapegoating positions with some nuance to them once he starts talking directly to the Chinese leadership.

Uncertainty is rarely welcome in the foreign policy sphere, and Trump starts off by giving the world plenty. His performance abroad could turn out to be balls-up, as the English say, but there is a decent chance that his foreign policies will give Americans and others less to worry about than meets the eyes of many at the moment.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
The 52-week investment strategy is one of the relatively new entries in the investing rule book. Borrowing from the basics of Momentum investing, this technique bets on the catchphrase buy high and sell higher.A wide group of investors today favor winning stocks with prospects of scaling higher. These investors have mastered the art of finding stocks that have strong upside potential and are still undervalued.

Though betting on 52-week high stocks without a clear investment blueprint is outright dangerous, even naive, clubbing it with the correct parameters is all what you need to turn the tide in favor.

Here at Zacks we help you avoid the pitfalls and book a ride on the 52-week high stocks that offer handsome returns.

A Peek in to 52-Week High Stocks

Stocks near 52-week highs often instill the presumptive adjustment and anchoring bias in the minds of investors. This principle works on the belief that investors use the 52-week high price as a reference point and value stocks against this anchor.

Many a times such stocks are prevented from scaling higher despite robust potential, due to the psychological bias of investors who fear that the stocks are overvalued and a price crash is impending.

A few of the stocks remain undervalued due to prolonged under reaction on part of investors, despite bullish growth drivers. Meanwhile, news pertaining to robust sales, surging profit levels, bullish earnings prospects and strategic acquisitions can drive the stock higher.

However, when a string of positive developments start dominating the market, investors find their under-reaction unwarranted and the renewed interest might drive stocks beyond the 52-week high bar. Wall Streets fast paced trading makes it imperative for investors to step in before the market gets a whiff of it.

Also, recent academic research reveals that if a stocks current price is near its 52-week high, there are high chances that it will outperform peers in the subsequent period. According to researchers George and Hwang, holding 52-week high stocks for six months has resulted in an average monthly gain of 0.45% between 1963 and 2001. Encouragingly, this is twice the gain that can be garnered from similar momentum-based strategies.

Story continues

Setting the Right Filters

Our diligent screening technique has been deployed to find 52-week high stocks that hold tremendous potential compared to their respective industries. The added parameters are strong earnings growth expectations, sturdy value metrics and positive price momentum.

These stocks are relatively undervalued compared to their peers, in terms of earnings as well as sales, which make us believe that they will continue their rally for quite some time.

Current Price/52 Week High >= .80

This simply is the ratio between the current price and the highest price at which the stock has traded in the past 52 weeks. A value greater than 0.8 implies that the stock is trading within 20% of its 52-week high range and is likely to touch the 52-week high mark soon.

% Change Price  4 Weeks > 0

It ensures that the stock price has moved north over the past four weeks.

% Change Price  12 Weeks > 0

This metric guarantees a continued upward price momentum for the stock over the past three months as well.

Price/Sales <= XIndMed

The lower, the better.

P/E using F(1) Estimate <= XIndMed

This metric measures the amount an investor puts into a company to obtain one dollar of earnings. It narrows down the list of stocks to those that are undervalued compared to their peers.

One-Year EPS Growth F(1)/F(0) >= XIndMed

This helps choose stocks that have higher growth rates than the industry median. This is a meaningful indicator as decent earnings growth adds to investor optimism.

Zacks Rank = 1

No screening is complete without our proven Zacks Rank, which has proved its worth since inception. It is a fundamental truth that stocks with a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy) have always managed to brave adversities and beat the market. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Current Price >= 5

This parameter will help screen stocks which are trading at $5 or higher.

Volume  20 days (shares) >= 100000

Inclusion of this metric ensures that there is a substantial volume of shares that can be traded easily.

Here are seven of the 18 stocks that made it through the screen:

Founded in 1983 and headquartered in Chicago, IL, Navigant Consulting Inc. NCI is a provider of specialized consulting services. It serves industries undergoing regulatory and structural changes, including construction, energy, financial services and healthcare. The company managed to surpass estimates in all of the trailing four quarters, clocking an average positive surprise of 29.3%.

Incorporated in 1959, Houston, TX-based McDermott International Inc. MDR is an engineering and construction company, solely focused on the offshore oil and gas business. The company has a whopping average earnings surprise of 474.0%, beating estimates in all of the trailing four quarters.

Idaho-based Micron Technology, Inc. MU is a provider of advanced semiconductor solutions. Through its worldwide operations, the company manufactures and markets Dynamic Random Access Memory, NAND flash memory, CMOS image sensors, other semiconductor components and memory modules used in leading-edge computing, consumer, networking and mobile products. With an earnings beat in all the four quarters, the company has an average positive surprise of 31.5%.

Winnebago Industries, Inc.WGO is a leading manufacturer of recreational vehicles in the U.S. The company distributes its products through independent dealers throughout the U.S. and Canada. The company beat estimates twice in the trailing four quarters, the average positive surprise being 1.2%.

Amkor Technology, Inc. AMKR: Amkor is the world's largest independent provider of semiconductor packaging and test services. Also, the company is one of the leading developers of advanced semiconductor packaging and test technology.The companybeat earnings estimates in three out of the trailing four quarters at an average of 62.5%.

Cambrex CorporationCBM manufactures and markets a broad line of specialty chemicals and commodity chemical intermediates and also manufactures chemicals to customer specifications.With three beats in the trailing four quarters, the companys average earnings beat stands at 19.8%.

Coherent Inc.COHR designs, manufactures, and supplies electro-optical systems and medical instruments utilizing laser, precision optic and microelectronic technologies. The company beat estimates in all of the trailing four quarters, at an average of 10.0%.

You can get the rest of the stocks on this list by signing up now for your 2-week free trial to the Research Wizard and start using this screen in your own trading. Further, you can also create your own strategies and test them first before taking the investment plunge.

The Research Wizard is a great place to begin. It's easy to use. Everything is in plain language. And it's very intuitive. Start your trial to the Research Wizard today. And the next time you read an economic report, open up the Research Wizard, plug your finds in, and see what gems come out.

Click here to sign up for a free trial to the Research Wizard today.

Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

Disclosure: Performance information for Zacks portfolios and strategies are available at: https://www.zacks.com/performance.

Zacks Restaurant Recommendations: In addition to dining at these special places, you can feast on their stock shares. A Zacks Special Report spotlights 5 recent IPOs to watch plus 2 stocks that offer immediate promise in a booming sector. Download it free 



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



WINNEBAGO (WGO): Free Stock Analysis Report



AMKOR TECH INC (AMKR): Free Stock Analysis Report



CAMBREX CORP (CBM): Free Stock Analysis Report



MCDERMOTT INTL (MDR): Free Stock Analysis Report



MICRON TECH (MU): Free Stock Analysis Report



COHERENT INC (COHR): Free Stock Analysis Report



NAVIGANT CONSLT (NCI): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research
Election day continues to rattle executives.

The people have spoken and Donald Trump is now the president-elect of the United States. After a panic on election eve, the U.S. stock market stabilized and then rallied, reaching an all-time high. Will President Trump bring more rallies to Wall Street? Here's what some CEOs of America's biggest companies say.

Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo (ticker: PEP)

"I had to answer a lot of questions, from my daughters, from my employees, they were all in mourning," the CEO of PepsiCo told CNBC anchor and New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Conference Thursday. "Our employees are all crying, and the question that they are asking, especially those that are not white: 'Are we safe?' Women are asking, 'Are we safe?' LGBT people are asking, 'Are we safe?' I never thought I'd have had to answer those questions."

Nooyi: 'Let life go on.'

Nooyi says she is supportive of Trump and that her employees and her daughters should relax. "The first thing that we all have to do is to assure everyone living in the United States that you are safe. Nothing has changed as a result of this election," Nooyi says. "The process of democracy has happened. We just have to let life go on."

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com (AMZN)

Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, tweeted a short but also supportive statement for the president-elect: "Congratulations to @realDonaldTrump. I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country."

Bezos has a chilly history with Trump.

As Recode notes, the president-elect and Bezos have butted heads. In May, Trump criticized Bezos and the Post's critical reporting of his campaign, saying, "He's using the Washington Post, which is peanuts, he's using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust." Last month, Bezos said of Trump, "To try and chill the media and threaten retribution and retaliation, which is what he's done in a number of cases, it just isn't appropriate."

Story continues

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (FB)

The Facebook CEO wrote a post on his company's platform that focused on his daughter, Max. "Holding Max, I thought about all the work ahead of us to create the world we want for our children. This work is bigger than any presidency and progress does not move in a straight line. The most important opportunities of Max's generation -- like curing all disease, improving education, connecting everyone and promoting equal opportunity -- will take long-term focus and finding new ways for all of us to work together, sometimes over decades."

Terry Lundgren, Macy's (M)

Macy's famously decided in 2015 to remove Trump-branded clothing from its stores after Trump referred to immigrants from Mexico and other countries as "killers and rapists." Lundgren doubled down on that decision after the election. "We made our decision about a year and a half ago, and stand by our decision," he told TheStreet. "As I have said, we wouldn't carry product from a political candidate -- and now a politician -- whether they be Republican or Democrat. If Hillary Clinton had a line of women's suits or handbags I wouldn't carry those either. I just think we don't want to be a politically associated company."

Tim Cook, Apple (AAPL)

The CEO of Apple emailed his U.S. employees asking for them to come together. "While there is discussion today about uncertainties ahead, you can be confident that Apple's North Star hasn't changed," Cook wrote. "Our products connect people everywhere, and they provide the tools for our customers to do great things to improve their lives and the world at large. Our company is open to all, and we celebrate the diversity of our team here in the United States and around the world -- regardless of what they look like, where they come from, how they worship or who they love."

Howard Schultz, Starbucks Corp. (SBUX)

The Starbucks CEO wrote in an email to employees that he was "stunned" with the election results. "Today, I trust you, and I trust all that is good in our country. Let's take care of each other and the people in our lives. I believe we will each find the best version of ourselves to help our country move on in the direction we all deserve. Together is where our collective power lies, as partners, and as Americans."

Jeff Immelt, General Electric Co. (GE)

Immelt made it clear that while GE would work with Trump and Congress, the company's values and Trump's campaign messages aren't all the same. "We support people of all races, genders and sexual orientations," he wrote to employees in a message that Reuters saw. "We believe in the importance of globalization and investment."

Michael Neidorff, Centene (CNC)

Centene's CEO says that the Affordable Care Act, which Trump has said he would repeal, requires an adjustment. Neidorff told CNBC, "You could do it either way. You could start over, or you could look at what you have now and say, 'What are the fundamental issues?' And there are structural issues: number of tiers, who's covered, what's happening, and you can repair it."

David Oliver is Associate Editor, Social Media at U.S. News & World Report. Follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, or send him an email at doliver@usnews.com.
An eight-year-old Mumbai actor who plays a significant part in the film Lion starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman will likely miss the U.S. premiere of his own movie.

In the film, Sunny Pawar portrays the younger version of main character Saroo Bierley, a lost Kolkata boy who survives extreme circumstances (Patel plays the elder version of the character). Its not a totally fictional movie; Bierley, a businessman, wrote the unflinching book about his personal history that the film was based on, A Long Way Home, which tells the story of the Australian couple who adopted him and his reunion with his birth mother.

The U.S. consulate in Mumbai denied the visa Pawar needed to travel to America for the films premiere twice without offering an explanation, according to the films distributor, the Weinstein Company.

Sunnys father Dilap Pawar explained the process in a statement to TIME.

We have been back and forth to the embassy many times and have not yet been able to get our Visas, Dilap told TIME in an email.

The family and the Weinstein Company say they began the process of arranging for young Pawar to travel to the U.S. to promote the film at least one month ago. After the first interview process last week at the U.S. Consulate, which included Pawars father, the family was disappointed to learn Sunny was denied entry, but not deterred. (The Weinstein Company said they also offered the embassy a letter outlining the specifics of his temporary visit, proposing that his father and a guardian who speaks both Hindi and English would accompany Pawar.)

By the second interview Thursday morning, Pawar was still excited about the prospect of making the trip to participate in the promotional efforts for the movie, which opens Nov. 25. But now it doesnt look like that will be possible. On Thursday, the visa officer requested an additional itinerary, adding we are trying are best to get you to the United States as soon as possible. Congratulations Sunny! on the success of your film. But the office will be closed to honor Veterans Day Friday, and Sunny will likely miss his chance to attend.

Story continues

It doesnt look like we will make it in time for the Los Angeles premiere, Pawar added in his statement. Me and Sunny are very disappointed. I know it will bring him such joy to see the movie and see his friends from the cast. We hope we can make it there soon  we will do whatever we can.

Weinstein has worked with attorney David Boies on this effort. Lion is a true story of love, inclusiveness, and human commitment unbounded by race, religion, or ethnicity, Boies said in a statement. The governments preventing the 8-year-old star of that movie from visiting this country shows how much we need to be reminded that those are our nations core values.

Nicole Quenqua, head of publicity at the Weinstein company, said: His performance is heart-shattering, and we want him to be a part of this. Hes never even seen his little face on the humongous movie screen or seen the reaction to his work. Weve been promoting the film without him and it feels very incomplete.

Quenqua added that Pawar currently lives in a modest home and that the distributors producers created an annual fund for him. Theyve also helped him to start learning English since filming began.

This just puts a spotlight on how unfair and difficult the world has become because hes just an 8-year-old boy, Quenqua told TIME.

The U.S. consulate in Mumbai did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
When Morris Dennis returned to Nashville, Tennessee, from his time in the Navy during World War II, his seabag contained a slightly burned German flag, a 40 mm shell, a newspaper with the headline Germany Quits, his uniform, a pair of work pants, and a pair of wooden shoes.

In a profile in The Tennessean, Dennis, 90, recounted that soon after landing at Normandy on D-Day in 1944, he encountered a young French girl who waved him over and spoke to him in perfect English.

My grandparents are starving, and Im trying to take care of them, the little girl said, according to Dennis. The Germans have taken all of our food and everything we had. Do you have any food you can give me to take to them?

He returned to his transport ship and explained the situation to his commander. The other members of his detachment contributed, and Dennis had a pile of rations and assorted food to take back to the little girl.

Initially, she refused. She said she wouldnt take the food unless Dennis took something in return, telling him thats how she was raised.

So she took off her shoes  made by her grandfather, a wood carver  and offered them to Dennis. He could always make more, she reasoned; Hes good at it, she explained.

The Navy shipped Dennis to Memphis when the Japanese surrendered and the war ended. Hed been given $196.95 in discharge pay and $11.90 for travel, but opted to hitchhike home to Nashville. Eventually, he started Dennis Paper Company and remained a Nashvillian for life. And the little girls shoes he carried with him through his deployment and in various cars from Memphis to Nashville have never left him.




1. What is accreditation?

Accreditation is a process conducted by an outside authority to ensure that a school and degree program meet certain standards of quality and rigor. Online, blended and on-campus degree programs can all be accredited. While it's voluntary, accreditation has many benefits and, in many ways, validates a program to employers and other colleges or universities.

2. Who accredits online degree programs?

Legitimate online degree programs are accredited by agencies recognized by either the Department of Education or the nonprofit Council for Higher Education Accreditation, known as CHEA.



[Discover how to tell if an online program is accredited.]

3. What are the different kinds of accreditation for online programs?

Online learners should ensure that a program has both institutional and programmatic accreditation, says Judith Eaton, president of CHEA. Institutional accreditation applies to the entire university, while programmatic or "specialized" accreditation focuses on particular degrees, departments or schools -- including those offered as online programs .

Not every program at a university has programmatic accreditation, however -- it depends on the school and industry standards for the discipline.

4. Why does an online program's accreditation matter?

Many online students plan to change or advance their careers, but most employers -- especially those unfamiliar with online learning -- will verify that a job candidate's online degree comes from an accredited program, experts say. In addition, transferring credits to and from degree programs is common among online learners, experts say, and credits earned in accredited programs are more likely to be accepted by other schools.

Online students "want credits that are acknowledged and respected and usable once they've completed their coursework," Eaton says.

Institutional accreditation also ensures that students can receive federal financial aid, says Barbara Gellman-Danley, president of the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits colleges and universities in their entirety. Federal aid is generally available for online students as grants, loans and work-study.



Story continues

[Learn what to know about financial aid in online programs.]

5. How do programs get accredited?

Accreditation often involves a self-review, requiring institutions to provide evidence that they satisfy set standards, and a site visit, generally by a team including faculty and administrators from similar institutions and practitioners in the field chosen by the accreditor to check those claims, experts say.

For site visits, peer evaluators might receive access to online courses and meet with students virtually, says Karen Pedersen, chief knowledge officer for the Online Learning Consortium, a group dedicated to advancing the quality of online learning.

Accreditors monitor programs and institutions continuously to ensure they continue to meet standards, according to the Department of Education. Programs are re-accredited every several years, depending on the accrediting body.

6. Do accreditors judge online and on-ground degree programs the same way?

Yes, experts say -- expectations about quality aren't lower just because a program is online. However, there are steps an accreditor takes to ensure that these programs meet the specific needs of online learners, says Jennifer Mathes, director of strategic partnerships for OLC. They might look at how student services function and how students and faculty interact.

7. What's the difference between national and regional accreditation?

When it comes to an institution's overall accreditation, prospective students might come across either regional accreditation agencies such as the Higher Learning Commission and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education or national accrediting bodies, such as the Distance Education Accrediting Commission.

While both regional and national accreditation are reliable signs of a program's quality, Eaton says, more employers typically look for regional accreditation. Experts say it's also easier to transfer credits to and from a regionally accredited institution.

The regional accreditation process is typically more rigorous than national accreditation, says Gellman-Danley. Historically, reputable schools have been regionally accredited, though that doesn't mean there aren't strong nationally accredited schools, she says. For-profit online programs, experts say, are more likely to have national rather than regional accreditation -- though some, including the University of Phoenix and Capella University, are regionally accredited.



[Explore important facts about online, for-profit education.]

8. How can I tell if an online program is accredited?

That information is often listed on an online program's website -- a good place to start researching, Pedersen says. Then, prospective students can verify a school or program's accreditation with CHEA or the Department of Education, but experts say they shouldn't hesitate to ask school officials for clarification.

9. What are some immediate signs that an online program might not be accredited?

If a website contains information about an online degree program that seems too good to be true -- for example, that students can earn a degree with little to no study -- definitely look into its accreditation, says Pedersen from OLC. The same goes if a program seems abnormally expensive.

"Don't just read it on a website and enroll," says CHEA's Eaton. "Check out the claims."

And experts say: Beware of so-called "accreditation mills," or groups that accredit schools under minimum standards on the internet. Confirm the accreditor is recognized by CHEA or the Department of Education.

10. I'm applying to a program at a reputable university. Is it safe to assume it's accredited?

For the most part, yes -- a program at a respected school will likely have both institutional and specialized accreditation. But it's always smart to double check, experts say.

"Even good schools can sometimes do things, or have things happen, that may jeopardize their accreditation," Mathes says. It's not very common, she says, but it's important to ensure the program is in good standing.

Jordan Friedman is an online education editor at U.S. News. You can follow him on Twitter or email him at jfriedman@usnews.com.


Rules Don't Apply, which opened the 30th AFI Fest tonight at the TCL Chinese Theatre and received voluminous applause, marks a major comeback for the legendary filmmaker Warren Beatty. No, not only as a writer/director/producer (his last such credits came 18 years ago on Bulworth), nor as an actor (his last on-screen work was in Town & Country 15 years ago), but as an Oscar force to be reckoned with.

Beatty, you might remember, has garnered 14 noms across categories recognizing work in all of the top categories and won best director for Reds and the Irving G. Thalberg Award. Now, for this old-fashioned-in-the-best-sense film - which is not, contrary to widespread rumor, a Howard Hughes biopic, but rather a love story that takes place in Hughes' orbit, which happens to be the same orbit occupied by Beatty and his many Golden Age contemporaries in the Academy - he may well have more accolades coming his way. (I've spoken with a number of old-timers who attended an earlier screening of the film and they ate it right up.)

Read more: 'Awards Chatter' Podcast's 100th Episode Special  Warren Beatty ('Rules Don't Apply')

His new film, which has been in the works for decades, centers around two fictional youngsters under the employ of Beatty's Hughes in 1958 Hollywood: Marla Mabrey, a contract starlet played by beautiful Lily Collins, and Frank Forbes, a lowly driver played by handsome Alden Ehrenreich (who starred in another 2016 film about Hollywood's Golden Age, the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar!). The famously eccentric, controlling and womanizing Hughes - you remember him from 2004's The Aviator - forbids romantic relations between people who work for him, but they happen anyway, as Mabrey waits for an assignment, Forbes shepherds her around, sparks fly between them and Hughes takes a special interest in both.

The casting of the leads couldn't be better - Collins, convincingly sweet and innocent, with her doe eyes and thick eyebrows, reminds me of a young Natalie Wood, while Ehrenreich, unassumingly charming and dashing, evokes memories of, well, a young Beatty. In part for those reasons, and in part because of the film's subject matter - which Beatty describes as "America's sexual puritanism" - Rules Don't Apply reminds me a lot of 1961's Splendor in the Grass, which starred Wood and Beatty, in his first big screen appearance. That film won the best original screenplay Oscar and garnered Wood an Oscar nomination for best actress. It did even better at the Golden Globes, where Beatty won best male newcomer and the film was nominated for best picture, best actor and best actress on the drama side.

Story continues

Read more: Warren Beatty's Howard Hughes Movie 'Rules Don't Apply' to Open AFI Fest

This one has been submitted on the musical/comedy side at the Globes, where the same noms all are achievable. (All three principal performers are being pushed in the lead categories; Beatty and Ehrenreich might well land noms alongisde each other.) At the Oscars, the climb for recognition is steeper. In the picture category, there could be as few as five nominees; in the best actress category, Collins is competing in an unusually strong year; and best actor won't be any easier for Ehrenreich. As for Beatty? Others apparently disagree, but I feel that his Hughes, while very solid, largely is in the background (and literally in the shadows) as the youngsters drive the story, which, to me, justifies pushing him in the supporting category, where he could win - it might also be called "the gold watch category" since so many revered vets have won it - as opposed to the lead category, where even a nom isn't a sure-thing. Alas, it doesn't look like those categorizations will be shifting anytime soon.

Whatever happens in the above-the-line categories, look out for Rules Don't Apply to show up in several below-the-line categories, where period pieces often register strongly. It is represented by revered veterans in almost every area - cinematography by Caleb Deschanel (five Oscar noms), production design by Jeanine Oppewall (four Oscar noms), costume design by Albert Wolsky (seven noms, two wins) and the list goes on. Plus, Eddie Arkin and Lorraine Feather's wistful original song that recurs throughout the film - titled "The Rules Don't Apply," even though the film's title lacks the "the" - might also land a nom, since the music branch loves nothing more than a memorable tune that's actually incorporated into the plot, as this one is.

A film editing nom probably is a stretch, since the main gripe I've heard about the film is that it goes on a bit too long - but after more than a decade away from the business, can you really begrudge Beatty a few more minutes? Many of us cherish every one.

Read more: 'Rules Don't Apply': Film Review | AFI Fest
Warren Beatty was once one of Hollywoods most popular stars  and arguably still is, though he hasnt made a movie in more than 15 years. At the height of his fame, however, Beatty leveraged his position as an industry darling to take on truly daring projects, most notably Reds, a defiantly noncommercial epic about American journalist John Reed and his fellow Communists  for which he won a best director Oscar.

Now, in what is either the best of timing or the worst of timing, Beatty finally unveils one of his longest-gestating passion projects, the seed of which dates back at least four decades, in which he finally gets to play Howard Hughes (as if what the country needs now is the story of an eccentric, possibly demented billionaire with delusions of grandeur, premiering at the AFI Festival just two days after Donald Trumps election). Or maybe Rules Dont Apply is exactly what America needs: a nostalgia trip that takes an intimidating, mysterious power figure and turns him into an insecure old teddy bear.

And yet, for once in Beattys career, the film isnt about him (take that, Carly Simon), curbing his vanity in what amounts to a frequently unflattering portrait of the reclusive Hughes at a moment thats set just around the time Beatty himself arrived in Hollywood. Like the Wizard of Oz, Hughes hides behind a curtain for much of the film, not showing his face until nearly 25 minutes into the picture, though the character cant help but commandeer our attention from that point on, especially amid the vanilla pudding that serves as the rest of the plot.

As imagined by Beatty, Hughes isnt so much a character as an all-powerful force  a supporting player whose giant invisible hand can be felt throughout Tinseltown. The film takes place mostly in Hollywood, from 1958 onward, kicking off with the arrival of ingenue Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), a chaste Baptist girl who has been brought out on contract with Hughes RKO Pictures, accompanied by her duly suspicious mother (Annette Bening). (Hughes had actually sold off RKO by 1955, a discrepancy the movie shrugs off with its opening quotation, Never check an interesting fact, attributed to Hughes himself.)

Story continues

Marla and her mother are afforded a swanky Hollywood Hills house and a steady supply of caviar, though its not at all clear how the actress was selected for such treatment. Marla herself maintains that she cant sing, though soon enough shes bringing men to their knees with (an oft-reprised) vintage-sounding original number, The Rules Dont Apply.

Also among Marlas perks: a personal chauffeur. And included in Hughes small platoon of drivers is the freshly scrubbed Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), who develops an instant interest in Marla  despite being engaged to his wet-noodle 7th-grade sweetheart (Taissa Farmiga).

While both Frank and Marla work for Hughes, neither has met him, lending a certain mystique to what he might be like. In the absence of a face-to-face session with their employer, all they have to go on are his many rules, paramount among them being that no hanky-panky is allowed between contract actors and their drivers. And so, as Frank and Marla eye each other lustfully  the heat obvious to Franks manager (Matthew Broderick) and to Marlas mom  we cant help but sense the enormous off-screen obstacle that lies between them. While this strategy builds anticipation for the moment the shadowy Hughes finally reveals himself, the would-be couple comes across as small, bland, and ordinary by comparison with their boss.

Once Hughes does appear, he proves far more interesting than the paint-by-numbers boy-meets-girl plot  already stale when Woody Allen tried it earlier this year with Cafe Society, and far more charming (and, weirdly, true to the time period) in La La Land. Were quick to forget the couples woes, especially after an icky scene in which Frank gets a little too excited listening to Marla sing The Rules Dont Apply.

Franks response is too risque for films of the era. Overall, though, Beatty tries hard to re-create the look and feel of late-50s Hollywood as it existed both on-screen and off, aided by DP Caleb Deschanel and terrific costume and set contributions. And yet, it actually comes off too conservative for its own time, with stiff performances from Collins and Ehrenreich, who looks the part of a post-James Dean brooder but lacks the naturalism of the Method style that Dean and his mid-50s peers ushered in. As a result, Rules feels considerably tamer than Beattys own acting debut, Splendor in the Grass, which occurred just as Hollywood was undergoing both a creative and sexual revolution not yet in evidence here.

Meanwhile, Beattys Hughes is a wily and impossible-to-pin-down loon, a slave to his own obsessive-compulsive disorder, giggling impishly to himself and talking in an excited, reedy voice that sounds an awful lot like Beattys friend Jack Nicholson. But what exactly are the impulses behind Hughes strange behavior? Whether out of paranoia or perversion, he secretly records his first meeting with Marla, and though he seems jealous of the possibility that his staff might be seducing his brood of young starlets, theres nothing (on-screen, at least) to indicate that he has designs on them himself.

At one point, he confides in Frank, If you dont drive em, you cant keep your eye on em. But if surveillance is so important, why do the girls go for weeks and months without the slightest sign of attention from Hughes? Is his so-called studio just an elaborate front for a personal harem? Hes rumored to have 26 young actresses under contract at the time, and not all are as innocent as Marla, whom Hughes dismisses as a Baptist nun.

But once the naive young teetotaler gets drunk in his presence, her carnal side appears; its Marla who makes the first advance. In light of his playboy past, one cant help but ask whether Beatty now prefers not to be regarded as the seductive stud he once was.

A collage of doctored photos from Hughes Hollywood heyday, featuring Beatty at his most beautiful photoshopped next to the bombshells of the era, suggests a more interesting chapter from Hughes life  one that was still swinging 15 years later, in 1973, when Beatty discovered that the billionaire was allegedly keeping a stable of women at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the actor was living at the time.

Though Rules Dont Apply shows a Hughes whos clearly unhinged, Martin Scorseses The Aviator takes a more substantive plunge into the billionaires neuroses. In Rules Dont Apply, Hughes is merely the device that keeps the young couple apart, which he succeeds in doing for a clumsily edited five-year stretch in which Marla disappears and Frank is stuck doing menial tasks, like buying up the last remaining supply of Baskin-Robbins banana-nut ice cream while an unrecognizable Candice Bergen screens calls.

As Hughes behavior gets weirder, his business partners begin to question his fitness to manage his interests (with cameos by Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin), and try to wrest control of TWA away from him. The script assumes that audiences know a fair amount about Hughes personal history going in (his obsession with the Spruce Goose, for instance, and the fact that he barely managed to get it off the ground), which tells you a bit about the demographic Beatty is targeting.

Beatty, 79, is more than a quarter century older than Hughes was in 1958, and though its a pleasure to see him acting again, this version of the character feels more pathetic than magnetic. Its as if Beatty already found an outlet to embody the charming, hot-blooded millionaire when he brought those qualities to his portrayal of Benjamin Siegel in Bugsy. And now that Beatty has settled down (with his Bugsy co-star, Bening, as it happens), he may no longer be interested in playing the seductive side of Hughes that reportedly attracted him to the character in the first place. Can it be that the great Warren Beatty has finally been tamed?

Related stories

Warren Beatty Joins Best Actor Race With Colorful 'Rules Don't Apply' Performance

Lily Collins Reveals the Best Advice She Received From Warren Beatty on 'Rules Don't Apply'

Warren Beatty's Biggest Films, Ranked
apple airpods

Apple's fancy new wireless earphones, the $159 AirPods, are sure to be a popular Christmas gift this year.

That is, if Apple can get them on sale in time.

The earbuds, launched alongside the iPhone 7 in September, were supposed to go on sale in "late October," but were delayed late last month.

That's set off a lot of speculation and rumors about why they were delayed and when they will actually go on sale  Apple hasn't offered a timeline yet.

Here's the latest data point, from Barclays analysts, citing Asian supply chain sources.

"We did hear that the AirPods should finally start production in December but units are fairly small at 10-15M to start," Barclays researcher Blayne Curtis and team wrote in a note distributed to clients on Friday.

Earlier, a Taiwanese trade paper reported that a supplier expected to begin "shipping AirPods in January 2017."

On the other hand, a single retail employee at Conrad in Germany made international news when he told Apfelpage.de that Apple was planning to ship AirPods to stores on November 17 ahead of a launch next week.

When Apple delayed the device, it released this statement:

The early response to AirPods has been incredible. We don't believe in shipping a product before it's ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers."

Simply put, without official communication or a release date from Apple it's hard to tell if the AirPods will go on sale before Christmas.

If they do, there's a good chance there won't be many to go around, although orders of 10-15 million of the wireless earbuds, as Barclays believes, is a healthy number.

We've reached out to Apple and will update this post when we hear more.

NOW WATCH: This Lego-style home can be built in a few weeks with just a screwdriver





More From Business Insider


Alan Ruck almost lost it all.

The 60-year-old Ferris Buellers Day Off star shares the alarming story of an out-of-nowhere health crisis that blindsided him  and nearly left him brain-damaged  on Saturdays Oprah: Where Are They Now?

In an exclusive clip from the episode, Ruck recounts a December 2001 episode when he collapsed in his apartment after feeling like I had the worst flu of my life  this headache that wouldnt quit.

The next thing I know, Im hearing 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Happy New Year! And I was Nyack Hospital in Nyack New York with tubes coming out of everything, and I was sick as a dog.

Ruck was diagnosed with Streptococcal Type G infection, which causes bacteria in the blood stream. Doctors were concerned the actor might not fully recover from the disease, which had made its way to his brain and caused stroke-like symptoms.

The first two days they told my ex-wife that Hes going to die. And then they were like, No, hes hanging in there, but hes not going to have all his marbles. 

Ruck, who was costarring with Charlie Sheen in the sitcom Spin City at the time, thankfully bounced back  not only physically, but also professionally.

I came around. just lucky, he says with a signature Cameron Frye-style grin and a shrug.

Oprah: Where Are They Now? airs Saturdays (10 p.m. ET) on OWN.




LOS CABOS, Mexico  Just as seemingly everyone else is piling into content, Mexicos Alex Garcia of AG Studios is pulling back. Citing the uncertainty of todays film biz where SVOD platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon are more actively creating or acquiring content, and collapsing traditional windows in the process, Garcia said: The only way for AG Studios to work was to produce films endlessly; I have decided to stop producing and focus on providing production services instead. To that end, he has spun off AG Studios movie arm Itaca Films into an independent unit for Itaca CEO Santiago Garcia to manage as he sees fit.

Producing movies is like betting the double 00 in a roulette, so the odds to win are 37 to one; Im not sure I want to take the risk, he said, adding: Its easier for me to stop, watch and see where its all going. He likens the surplus of content today to the dot.com bubble of the late 90s, which famously imploded.

He is giving carte blanche to Itacas Garcia to continue producing films while he remains a silent partner. [Santiago] Garcia has been actively producing films in Cuba and Mexico, the latter run by Andres Tagliavini. The other Itaca outposts in Colombia and Brazil will focus on providing production services. Last summer, Itaca Colombia, led by Rodrigo Guerrero, unveiled the film and TV production services collective Prose in partnership with Five7 Media and RCN TV in a bid to streamline and facilitate production services in locations worldwide. Other companies from Spain and Australia also boarded the initiative. We hope to expand Prose worldwide, said Garcia.

Other operations will continue in place such as Latam Distribution, run by Mineko Mori, who will continue to handle the distribution in Latin America of AG Studios catalog while exploring production opportunities as long as the productions dont need my investment, said Garcia. AG Studios fantasy-horror cable network Morbido TV, managed by Eduardo Caso, just launched last week. In L.A., Garcia still owns BN Films and equity-backed fund AG Capital, run by former CAA film finance agent Laura Walker. The industry is shifting but there are other changes that are making it even harder, he said, hinting of the recent outcome in the presidential elections. Alex has invested $400 million in content over eight years, Walker said at the time of AG Capitals launch in May last year. Meanwhile, AG Studios participation in the Lucha Libre reality series has paid off, now on its third season on Robert Rodriguezs El Rey network. The holding companys music arm ZZ Inc. is also doing well as the music business has again become profitable from the growth of a multiplicity of revenue sources.

Story continues

Many film production companies have diversified into TV production.

AG Studios closed its studio in New Orleans, however, when Louisianas incentives dried up, with Demian Bichirs directorial debut Un cuento de circo & a love song and Juan Curis comedy Hypnotized (aka Mind Puppets) among the last to be made there.

I dont mind that much about making a profit or not, what I do mind is getting my investment back, said the former banker.

Related stories

Los Cabos: Lucero Garzon Boards 'The Desert Bride' (EXCLUSIVE)

Carlos Carrera, Leonardo Zimbron Pitch 1930s Period TV Series, 'Mics and Celluloid' at Cabos

IM Global in Talks With Canana, Ciro Guerra for Latin American TV Production (EXCLUSIVE)
On the eve of Alibabas (BABA) biggest shopping day of the year, one of the Chinese e-commerce giants co-founders expressed the need for China and the US to work together.

America and China cannot ignore each other. These are the two largest economies in the world, Alibaba co-founder and vice chairman Joe Tsai told Yahoo Finance. If the two countries dont work together, everybody else in the world will suffer.

The comments came in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, who resisted the notion of trade with China throughout his upstart presidential campaign. In his platform, Trump says he will instruct his Treasury Secretary to label china a currency manipulator. The Wall Street Journal reports that the promise, if kept, could be the first step to a trade war.

For his part, Trump has said we already have a trade war with China, and he has repeatedly said the country is taking Americas jobs. Tsai, on the other hand, asserts that China could actually provide jobs for American workers, pointing out that China has an $11 trillion economy thats growing at 6.5%.

New wealth is being created in China, and what that translates into is a lot of consumption and demand, said Tsai, who seemed to brush off concerns that Chinas economy is slowing down.

China may look to the US and other countries for goods to satisfy that growing demand, he said.

We are looking at a lot of Chinese demand and also Chinese capital, Tsai said. From the American perspective, thats a lot of job opportunities because Chinese consumers will want to buy from America. Chinese investors will want to invest in America, therefore creating jobs.

In an acknowledgement of the anti-trade administration that was just elected in the US, Tsai added, We hope the politicians on both sides will see those constructive aspects and work toward the future.

For now, Tsais Alibaba will continue working to make itself a global platform. He notes that Singles Day  a day of major discounts every November 11 in honor of a fake holiday for single people  is already a global event with brands from all over the world. In the future, he said, hed like to get 2 billion consumers around the world shopping on Alibaba.

He also has one other hope for the future: We look forward to a relationship between America and China that is prosperous, that is constructive. With an anti-trade president in the White House, that may be an uphill battle.
heidi lamar

Heidi Lamar's decision to become a Canadian citizen was far more romantic than trying to flee a Donald Trump presidency  something many Americans seem rather eager to do.

"My Canadian husband came in for a massage and left with a wife instead," Lamar, the owner of Spa Lamar in Scottsdale, Arizona, told Business Insider.

That was 2010. By 2012, the two were married and Lamar was filing for permanent residence to spend more time with her husband, who owned a business in Toronto. Today, they split their time between the two countries.

And even though full citizenship is still a few years away, Lamar says there are clear pros and cons to living on the other side of the border.

Pros

Politics

To many Canadians, America's 18 months of mainstream election coverage seems downright bizarre. People just don't take that kind of interest in politics, Lamar says.

The Canadian candidates also take a more lighthearted approach. She points to one campaign ad that ran while current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was running for office. Seated around a table, a group of seasoned politicians looked at a mock-up of Trudeau's resume and concluded that, despite his great hair, he was "just not ready."

"In the traditional Canadian niceness, that was as mean as his opposing campaign got," Lamar said.

Friendly culture

Lamar says Canadians hate to hear they're all so "nice," but she insists they really are a wholesome bunch.

"It's a friendlier place," she said. "I don't think Americans are unfriendly, but I think they just tend to be more focused on working and not as focused on the other parts of life."

Work-life balance

According to Lamar, Canadians seem to place a greater value on spending time with family and friends. She was surprised to find out most companies observe a monthly paid holiday. There are no national holidays in August, for instance, so a number of Canadian provinces observe Civic Holiday on the first Monday of the month.

Story continues

"There's definitely a different mentality about work-life balance in Canada, which I really enjoy," Lamar said.

Wages

According to 2013 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data on minimum wages, Canada's average take-home wage, adjusted for purchasing power, is the ninth-best in the world. The US came in 11th, $0.92 behind Canada.

Lamar says that's one reason people generally leave smaller tips in Canada than they do in the US. Instead of leaving 20% for a server, people might leave 15% because wages are higher and more consistent across jobs, Lamar says.

Cons

Cost of living

Wages may be higher, but Lamar says the costs of most goods are, too.

Canada's tax and tariff laws, combined with its shipping costs and lack of economies of scale, create a retail environment in which many Canadians may prefer to travel across the border to buy clothes and furniture at lower prices.

Consumer choice

The drawbacks also extend to the selection of goods offered in Canada. Lamar says Canadians are horrified that Canada's Netflix library is only half the size of America's, which inevitably leads to the desired title getting pirated.

A lot of Americans might also be disappointed to learn there are no Target stores in Canada. The beloved mega-retailer had to close the last of its 133 stores in 2015 because of failures on multiple fronts, perhaps the largest being high prices.

Environmental impact

Canada is one of the world's leading oil producers. As such, it ranks as the eighth-largest producer of greenhouse gases, despite Canadians making up only 0.5% of the total global population.

Weaning the country from its dependence on coal has been one of Canada's top priorities in recent years, according to Canadian officials.

Lamar says these factors make it hard to decide where she'd rather spend her time, even in a Trump America. Instead, she reverts to playing the role of the romantic.

"This is going to sound sappy, but honestly wherever my husband is, I am enjoying more," she said.

NOW WATCH: How to move to Canada and become a Canadian citizen





More From Business Insider


This Friday, millions of Americans will take time out to honor our military on the traditional time of 11:11 a.m. on November 11. But there was a time when Congress tried to move the holiday, only to face several years of strong public resistance.

You may recall from history or civics class that the holiday was first called Armistice Day. It was established after World War I to remember the war to end all wars, and it was pegged to the time that a cease-fire, or armistice, that occurred in Europe on November 11, 1918. (World War I officially ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919 in France.)

A year later, President Woodrow Wilson said the armistice anniversary deserved recognition.

To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the countrys service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations, he said.

Armistice Day officially received its name through a congressional resolution that was passed on June 4, 1926. By that time, 27 states had made Armistice Day a legal holiday.

Then, in 1938, Armistice Day officially became a national holiday by law, when an act was passed on May 13, 1938, made November 11 in each year a legal holiday: a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as Armistice Day.

After World War II, the act was amended to honor veterans of World War II and Korea, and the name of the holiday was changed to Veterans Day in 1954. President Dwight D. Eisenhower marked the occasion with a special proclamation.

However, controversy came to the universally recognized holiday in 1968, when Congress tried to change when Veterans Day was celebrated as a national holiday, by moving the holiday to a Monday at the end of October.

Story continues

The Uniform Monday Holiday Act was signed on June 28, 1968, and it changed the traditional days for Washingtons Birthday, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Columbus Day, to ensure that the holidays fell on a Monday, giving federal employees a three-day weekend.

The bill moved Veterans Day, at least on a federal level, to the last Monday in October, with the first observance of the new date in 1971. Veterans groups moved quickly to oppose the date switch, and two states refused to switch their dates in 1971. By 1974, there was confusion over the two dates and most states took a pass on commemorating the holiday in October.

In a typical editorial of the era, the Weirton, West Virginia Daily Times explained why the holiday switch wasnt working. Congress has no choice now but to enact legislation restoring Nov 11 as Veterans Day. The majority of the states have spoken and the Congress should heed their preference. Theres too much confusion over the two dates, says an editorial from October 28, 1974. All veterans organizations retain the original date.

A few months after that editorial ran, 46 of the 50 states decided to ignore the federal celebration in October, by either switching back to November 11 or refusing to change the holiday. By the middle of 1975, Congress had seen enough, and it amended the Uniform Monday Holiday Act to move Veterans Day back to November 11. President Gerald Ford signed the act on September 20, 1975, which called for the move to happen in 1978.

That November, the Carroll Daily Times Herald in Iowa said it was about time Congress did the right thing. [Veterans] deserve to be honored on their special day, not as an adjunct to a weekend holiday as Washington tried to force on us, the newspaper commented.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

Historical Stories on Constitution Daily

10 fascinating facts about Election Day

Semper Fi! Happy 241st birthday to the Marine Corps

Pollsters Trump mistake takes its place in history

It was 156 years ago today: Abraham Lincoln is elected President
LAGOS (Reuters) - Amnesty International called on Nigeria to shelve plans to demolish more illegal settlements in the megacity Lagos as several hundreds of thousands of people could be made homeless, it said on Friday. Some 30,000 residents of a waterside slum in the commercial capital, a city of 23 million, lost their traditional homes this week after state-ordered demolition and fighting between rival communities, residents said. The London-based rights group said officials needed to provide alternative accommodation for residents and investigate why police and a Lagos agency had destroyed their housing despite a court ban until there had been a hearing. "The authorities involved in this destruction are in flagrant violation of the law," it said in a statement. It called on Lagos state to stop any mass evictions after announcing plans last month to remove all illegal waterside communities until rules were in place to follow international law. Police have denied claims by Lagos-based Justice and Empowerment Initiatives (JEI) that it had destroyed any buildings this week. It also denied it had a role in the reported drowning of four people which the rights group said had run into water after officers had opened fire. Lagos officials could not be reached for comment. The violence highlights the challenges of a rapidly rising population unable to provide enough jobs and housing for its 180 million people. Many end up trying to migrate to Europe by boat from lawless Libya. Rights groups such as JEI say Lagos carries out demolitions to remove poor from attractive buildings sites -- Lekki island, the site of this week's demolitions, is a prime site for real estate developers, who have been building luxury apartments and skyscrapers. Officials have tried to attract more investment into Africa's largest economy struggling with recession due to slump in oil prices. The overcrowding in Lagos looks likely to continue. By 2050, Nigeria's population is set to more than double to 400 million, making it the world's third most populous nation after China and India, according to U.N. estimates. (Reporting by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
Conservative media darling Ann Coulter has taken a page from Donald Trumps playbook and added fat shaming to her brand of anti-social-activist rhetoric.

Without fat girls, there would be no protests, she tweeted Thursday, along with a photo she apparently thought exemplified her position.

Without fat girls, there would be no protests. pic.twitter.com/Qmd7XE0CJC  Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 10, 2016

A few minutes later, she added a few more images and continued on her theme by noting, I guess marching around waving signs is some exercise, but they also need Atkins.

I guess marching around waving signs is some exercise, but they also need Atkins. pic.twitter.com/ZmQ62nh44n  Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 10, 2016

While the pair of tweets together received more than 10,000 likes, they also prompted angry responses, such as, My jaw is dropped. HOW ARE YOU THAT EVIL/MEAN/RUDE? May you never have a daughter or even be around children, and because judging women by their appearance is SUCH a Republicans are really more tolerant than Dems thing to do. Others stooped to meet Coulters level, criticizing points of her appearance including her protruding Adams apple and her skinny ass skeleton.

Coulter still wouldnt let her theme rest after another 10 hours had passed, when she tweeted the following in response to a tweet with an article about anti-Trump protests spreading, which contained video snippet of a woman holding a sign that read, Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter:

Note that its another fat girl. https://t.co/D9hDwnrfjs  Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 11, 2016

That also drew some pushback, with one woman noting, Wow Ann, ur a misogynist just like our new president! and another suggesting, Be a gracious winner. Youre giving up any possible moral high ground you may have had! Author Nancy Jo Sales noted, Pathetic Ann Coulter fat-shaming anti-Trump protesters, while another appalled commenter noted, Youre sick. Calling them out due to their physical look? Really???

Story continues

Still, far more commenters felt emboldened to jump on the hate bandwagon  just as many have reportedly done across the nation ever since the stunning victory of Trump, who was known throughout his campaign for his derogatory statements about women, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled people, and other minority groups, apparently giving regular folks the green light when it comes to chastising and bullying.

This week brought several reported cases of pro-Trump related bullying of students, the first in Minnesota, where f*ck n*ggers was the graffiti of choice scrawled on a school door. In Michigan, a group of middle school students chanted build that wall while fellow Latino students cried, and in Pennsylvania a group of students parched with Trump signs while calling out, white power. Finally, some proud Trump supporters were apparently harassing black students at Hillarys alma mater Wellesley College. Anti-Defamation League CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt confirmed for Yahoos Katie Couric on Friday that hate speech has been intensifying across the nation. Its typically been people energized by the outcome and then using vandalism or other types of harassment to go after minorities, he said, noting that black, Mexican, Muslim, gay, and Jewish individuals have been targeted.

Its all left the disempowered reeling, including LGBTQ people, fearful of Mike Pences long-documented stance on gay conversion therapy, with calls to LGBTQ and specifically transgender suicide hotlines reportedly doubling since the election. Facebook friends of just this writer alone have reported the following: being given the Heil, Hitler sign by someone roving her Colorado neighborhood in a pickup truck (and another seeing the same in Brooklyn); having another friend threaten suicide because she could not live under Trump.

Fat shaming (something Coulter has been prone to do for some time now) fits right into this mix  a terrifying one for anyone valuing freedom of identity and expression. As the Anti-Defamation said in its post-election day statement: Democracy is more than simply what occurs at the ballot box or during a particular election. Democracy encompasses the full collection of our laws, our norms and institutions that enshrine and protect our freedoms. That work begins today to reinvigorate the idealism of e Pluribus Unum and to ensure that America remains a land of economic opportunity and personal freedom for all people regardless of their gender, race, class, faith, ethnicity, sexual orientation or political preference.

Lets keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.




November 11 is Veterans Day, but it hasnt always been. Our current conception of the day was the work of a few dedicated individuals, many of whom are not known by the general public. So lets dive into how the holiday came about.

Though the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I, was signed on June 28, 1919, the Allied nations and Germany actually reached an armistice  or a temporary stop to fighting  on Nov. 11, 1918. (The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, by the way.)

It was President Woodrow Wilson who proclaimed the date Armistice Day in 1919. Congress passed a resolution on June 4, 1926 declaring it a national day of thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations. An Act approved in 1938 made Armistice Day a legal holiday.

By 1945, a Birmingham, Alabama, WWII veteran Raymond Weeks was dedicated to the idea that all veterans of the U.S. armed services should have a day to honor them, not just those who had fought in WWII. Weeks held the first celebration called Veterans Day on Nov. 11 in Birmingham with the goal of making the day more inclusive to members of the armed services.

Eight or so years after Weeks held his first Veterans Day, Kansas Representative Edward Rees proposed a bill to change the holiday, which was approved on June 1, 1954. Weeks, who was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Ronald Reagan in 1982, continued to organize local Veterans Day celebrations in Birmingham until his death in 1985. Rees was honored with the first National Veterans Award in Birmingham in 1954 for his support of the legislation.

In 1968, the Uniform Holiday Bill was passed. The goal of the bill was to encourage three-day weekends on four national holidays that would fall on Mondays (Washingtons birthday, Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Columbus Day) to encourage travel and recreation. The first moved Veterans Day occurred in 1971, though many states ignored the decision and continued to hold the holidays on their original date.

Story continues

Resistance to the change continued for four years, before President Gerald R. Ford returned Veterans Day to its original date, a change that took place in 1978.

Veterans Day as pertaining to the two World Wars is not strictly an American observance: Britain, France, Australia and Canada also celebrate their countrys veterans of those wars on or near Nov. 11. In Canada, its referred to as Remembrance Day, while Britains holiday is the second Sunday of November, called Remembrance Sunday. Much of Europe also observes two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11.

There are roughly 22 million veterans in the U.S. general population. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that roughly 13 percent of the U.S. homeless population consists of veterans, with younger vets from recent wars making up 10 percent of that population and 31 percent of all veteran suicides.

Many services exist to help returning veterans and their families: Fisher House Foundation serves 10,000 families per year and is integrated with many credit card reward programs; Hire Heroes is an organization dedicated exclusively to helping returning veterans find jobs; and Operation Homefront offers vets and their families everything from food assistance to housing. Theyve all received high marks from charity-review organizations and are worth your time.




"Ground Control" will be the theme of Art Basel Miami Beach's 2016 Public program, organizers revealed this week, with installations by 20 artists to go on display in the city's Collins Park during Art Basel Miami Beach next month.

Curator Nicholas Baume chose the focus for this year's event, taking inspiration from David Bowie, who died earlier this year. "Ground Control" will examine ways in which artists "invent and imagine new kinds of space: physical, social and psychic." Viewers will see the familiar surroundings of Collins Park reframed as a site for "transformational experiences" with art.



Several of the featured works will use repurposed everyday objects, such as Eric Baudart's "Atmosphere," which consists of a clear tank filled with peanut oil in which a fan slowly rotates. David Adamo contributes a series of small bronze sculptures of items such as flip flops, citrus fruits and a sandwich from Miami Beach food stand La Sandwicherie.

For Wagner Malta Tavares' "Malpertuis," a 19th-century-style outdoor lamp will be installed in the park landscape and will glow as darkness falls, while Alicja Kwade's "Reise ohne Ankunft (Mercier)" will feature a bicycle bent into a perfect circle.



A pair of large bronze handcuffs will shackle a tree for Yoan Capote's "Naturaleza Urbana," a commentary on urbanization, while four nearly life-sized aluminum-cast camel sculptures will stand on their own reflections in Jean-Marie Appriou's "Mirage."



Sol LeWitt and Claudia Comte contribute works featuring geometric forms, while the human form will also be represented in a number of works, including Tony Matelli's "Jesus" and Magdalena Abakanowicz's "10 Standing Figures."



Meanwhile, at Miami Beach's contemporary art museum, recently rebranded The Bass, five brightly painted boulders stacked in the form of a cairn will make up Ugo Rondinone's towering "Miami Mountain."



The exhibitions at Collin Park will be on display during Art Basel Miami Beach, which runs December 1-4; a selection of works will remain in place through March 15 as part of the program "The Bass Projects."

www.artbasel.com/miami-beach
AstraZeneca PLC AZN reported third-quarter 2016 core earnings of $1.32 per American Depositary Share, comfortably beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 48 cents. Core earnings rose 12% year over year at constant currency rates (CER).

Core earnings increased on the back of cost savings and a non-recurring tax benefit of 36 cents per share resulting from agreements on transfer pricing arrangements between various tax authorities.

However, sales were softer in the quarter

Total revenue declined 4% at CER to $5.70 billion in the third quarter. Revenues also fell short of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $5.95 billion.

Among the key growth platforms (representing 60% of total revenues), while Diabetes, Emerging Markets and New Oncology performed well in the quarter, Respiratory and Japan sales declined and Brilinta/Brilique saw sequentially softer sales growth.

All growth rates mentioned below are on a year-over-year basis and at CER.

Quarter in Detail

Product sales declined 14% in the quarter to $5.03 billion while externalisation revenues were $674 million.

U.S. product sales declined 35% to $1.54 billion primarily due to the loss of exclusivity of Crestor in May 2016 and the ongoing impact of Nexium generic medicines. European markets witnessed a 1% decline in sales to $1.27 billion, reflecting the ongoing price erosion. Revenues from Emerging Markets were, however, up 3% to $1.4 billion in the reported quarter supported by strong growth in China (up 10% to $643 million).

As far as AstraZenecas core products are concerned, both Nexium and Crestor sales declined in the reported quarter.

Nexium recorded sales of $516 million (down 21%), with the U.S. contributing $125 million (down 50%) and Europe accounting for $63 million (down 2%). Moreover, Crestor sales declined 44% to $688 million, with the U.S. accounting for $124 million (down 82%) and Europe contributing $219 million (flat). U.S. sales declined sharply in the third quarter as multiple generic versions of the drug entered the market in July.

Story continues

Products that recorded growth in the quarter include Farxiga/Forxiga (up 64% to $220 million), Daliresp/Daxas (up 27% to $42 million), Pulmicort (up 4% to $224 million), Faslodex (up 11% to $207 million), Lynparza (up 111% to $58 million), Duaklir (up 88% to $14 million) and Seloken/Toprol-XL (up 12% to $185 million). The newly launched medicine Tagrisso recorded sales of $133million, up 45% sequentially driven by new patient starts and treatment duration.

Brilinta/Brilique sales were $208 million in the reported quarter, up 25%. However, sales declined almost 3% sequentially due to U.S. wholesaler stocking in the year-ago quarter during the launch of the 60mg dose. However, Europe and China, among emerging markets, continued to do well.

Other Details

AstraZenecas core gross margin was down 0.5 percentage points to 84.1%. Core selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses decreased 12% to $1.89 billion due to the companys productivity initiatives.



During the quarter, core research and development (R&D) expenses were flat at $1.33 billion.

2016 Outlook

AstraZeneca has reiterated its outlook for 2016. The company continues to expect both total revenue and core earnings to decline in the low-to-mid single-digit percentage range in 2016. The guidance takes into account dilution from the Acerta Pharma and ZS Pharma acquisitions that were announced in 2015. Based on average exchange rates in the first nine months of the year, currency movements are expected to minimally impact the top line in 2016.

While adjusted R&D costs are expected to be above the 2015 levels, SG&A will be materially lower than last year.

Our Take

AstraZenecas third-quarter 2016 results were mixed, with the company beating the bottom-line estimates while missing the same for sales. The company has been quite active on the acquisition and partnering front, and expects to continue to pursuing strategically profitable deals.

ASTRAZENECA PLC Price and EPS Surprise

ASTRAZENECA PLC Price and EPS Surprise | ASTRAZENECA PLC Quote

A number of regulatory decisions, submissions and key data readouts are expected in 2017.

However, we remain concerned about the declining sales of Nexium and Crestor due to generic competition.

AstraZeneca has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the health care sector include Anika Therapeutics Inc. ANIK, Cambrex Corporation CBM and Merck & Co., Inc. MRK. While Anika and Cambrex sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Merck carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Anikas earnings estimates have increased 5% for 2016 and 3% for 2017 over the last 30 days. The company posted a positive earnings surprise in each of the four trailing quarters, with an average beat of 33.1%. Its share price has increased 19% year to date.

Cambrexs earnings estimates have increased almost 4% for 2016 and 5% for 2017 over the last 30 days. The company has posted a positive earnings surprise in three of the four trailing quarters, with an average beat of 19.78%. Its share price has increased 8% year to date.

Mercks share price has increased 23% year to date. Its performance has been pretty impressive, with earnings beating expectations consistently. The average earnings beat over the last four quarters is 4.30%. It reported strong third-quarter results, encouraging 7 out of 11 estimates to move north over the last 30 days for both 2016 and 2017.

Zacks' Top Investment Ideas for Long-Term Profit

How you like would to see our best recommendations to help you find todays most promising long-term stocks? Starting now, you can look inside our portfolios featuring stocks under $10, income stocks, value investments and more. These picks, which have double and triple-digit profit potential, are rarely available to the public. But you can see them now. Click here >>



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



ASTRAZENECA PLC (AZN): Free Stock Analysis Report



MERCK & CO INC (MRK): Free Stock Analysis Report



ANIKA THERAPEUT (ANIK): Free Stock Analysis Report



CAMBREX CORP (CBM): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
Arguing that the Senates Republican leaders have stolen a Supreme Court nomination, to deliver it to the new Trump administration, Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley is signaling a late campaign by his colleagues to get a vote on President Obamas choice of Judge Merrick B. Garland for the courts vacant seat.

In two appearances on cable TV Thursday night and Friday morning, the Oregon lawmaker said that he and those on his side of the Senate aisle will do everything we possibly can to block what he called the theft of the opportunity to pick the replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

President Obamas nomination of Judge Garland was made on March 16, and thus has been waiting for any sign of Senate action for nearly eight months. Senate GOP leaders have said the Scalia replacement must be made by the president elected on November 8.

The new administration, taking office in January, has no right to fill that seat, Markley said on MSNBC Thursday night. He repeated the charge of a stolen opportunity on Friday morning on CNN, suggesting that he and his colleagues will be attempting through publicity to inform the American people of what he called the lack of legitimacy if the vacancy is handed over to the administration of President-Elect Donald Trump.

Here is how he put it on CNN on Friday: What the majority in the Senate has done is to basically steal that from one presidency and try to deliver it to another, which is going to greatly and profoundly affect the legitimacy of the Supreme CourtThe theft is under way.

He added that some of his Senate colleagues are privately deeply ashamed.

Although the senators spoke in terms of what Senate Democrats would do, it was not clear whether he was speaking for the leadership of the minority party in the chamber, or only for a more limited group of objecting members.

The senator was asked specifically during his MSNBC appearance whether Senate Democrats would try to block any nominee that was sent to the Senate by the new administration over the next four years, and he did not reply directly. What he did say, though, was that Democrats would be attempting to persuade the Senate majority leader, Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell, to give Judge Garland a legitimate shot at a vote in the Senate during the post-election session of Congress, before a new Congress opens on January 3.

Story continues

The Senate is currently in a recess, but it must hold a so-called lame duck session because the current funding to run the government expires on December 9. In the meantime, the Senate is holding sessions every few days, with no business actually being done. That is designed, at least in part, to prevent President Obama from making any recess appointments while the Senate is out of town.

Under the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent, a president may make a recess appointment  including one to the Supreme Court  but only if the Senate is in a recess that lasts at least ten days. If the Senate reassembles more frequently than that, but does no business other than formally opening and closing a session, that still interrupts the opportunity for a recess appointment to any federal post.

Once the Senate has recessed this years session for the final time, in late December, the Garland nomination  if not acted upon  would be returned to the White House.

But whether that would create an opportunity for President Obama to name Garland to a recess appointment before inauguration day on January 20 depends upon how late in December the Senate is formally sitting, determining how long a recess will be until the new Congress meets on January 3.

Republicans retained control of the Senate in Tuesdays elections, so GOP leaders will be able to schedule only short recesses between that day and the inauguration.

That makes it appear that the only chance for a vote on Judge Garland would be in the lame-duck session, but GOP leaders have said repeatedly that they would not schedule such a vote. The effort by Senator Merkley and his colleagues thus appears to be an attempt to build public pressure on the GOP leadership.

Legendary journalist Lyle Denniston is Constitution Dailys Supreme Court correspondent. Denniston has written for us as a contributor since June 2011 and he has covered the Supreme Court since 1958. His work also appears on lyldenlawnews.com.
Stranger things have happened.

In a court motion on Friday, 79-year-old comedian Bill Cosby asserted that he intends to resume his career once litigation surrounding numerous sexual assault allegations against him draws to a close.

Cosby is being sued for defamation by several alleged victims in federal court in Massachusetts. As part of the litigation, the plaintiffs are seeking Cosbys business records, including deals arranged with Creative Artists Agency.

Cosbys attorney, Angela Agrusa, filed a motion on Thursday objecting to the disclosure, saying it would jeopardize Cosbys ability to negotiate future contracts.

When Mr. Cosby is cleared from all liability and charges, and the impact of Plaintiffs defamatory conduct has subsided, he expects to resume his career, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, Agrusa wrote. But disclosure of this type of financial and business information is irreversible. Even after his name is cleared, if released to the public, this information would improperly restrain his employment and tie his hands for renegotiation.

Cosby is also facing criminal charges stemming from a 2004 incident in Pennsylvania. His attorneys in that case have said that he is legally blind. More than 50 women have come forward with sexual assault accusations against the entertainer.

Related stories

What if Bill Cosby's Career Could Rebound After His Sexual Assault Trials

Rose McGowan Says a Studio Executive Raped Her

Bill Cosby Sexual Assault Trial Date Set
Blac Chynas birthing suite cost an insane amount of money, but hey, this is what celebs do

When it comes to celebrities giving birth, the world typically waits with bated breath for the deets to roll in, and we have to say that the staggering cost of Blac Chynas birthing suite is nothing short of gag-worthy. According to US Weekly, Blac Chyna gave birth to her and Robs baby girl Dream Renee Kardashian in a hospital suite so fancy that we could comfortably live there in IRL.

To give you an idea of what Chynas insanely expensive birthing abode was like, its the same luxurious, LA Cedars-Sinai suite in which Kim Kardashian West delivered her son Saint, so obviously baby Dream received a queens welcome into the world.

And why wouldnt she because ZOMG look at this cute face:

Confirmed: Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna's baby girl is an absolute Dream! https://t.co/0lxS4mS2Txpic.twitter.com/6m2ULwB12i  Kardashians on E! (@KUWTK) November 10, 2016

The hospitals website lists the cost of Chynas maternity suite between $4,800 to $5,826 PER NIGHT. Sure, thats like, four times the monthly rent of Pennys apartment on The Big Bang Theory, but whatevs. Plus the suites include two to three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a lounging area. Other amenities include hardwood floors and 24-7 access to doulas.

While thats pretty mind-boggling, giving birth is no easy feat, so we totally dont blame Blac Chyna for doing it in style.

The post Blac Chynas birthing suite cost an insane amount of money, but hey, this is what celebs do appeared first on HelloGiggles.
In perhaps the most poignant video to emerge from the viral Mannequin Challenge, Black Lives Matter activists came together to recreate shocking scenes that continue to leave the African-American community shaken.

Read: Off-Duty Cop Kills Black Lives Matter Supporter Who Broke Into His Home: Police

The one-minute clip opens with an actor depicting Philando Castile in the passenger seat of his girlfriend's car, turned away from the gun a white police officer pointed at him. The audio from Castile's girlfriend's Facebook Live video recorded right after the fatal shooting plays in the background.

The video goes on to depict the deaths of other African Americans, including Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling and Trayvon Martin, with the corresponding audio from officers' bodycam.

Then, as a Malcolm X speech plays, Black Lives Matter protesters  with their fists raised  become the subject of the video.

"As an African-American woman, it's a scary place to live," said viral sensation Simone Shepherd, who directed the video. "This could be my story. Trayvon could be my brother, or son, or nephew. I see that when I look at all of these boys, or even Sandra Bland, who could be me."

Story continues

She told InsideEdition.com that following a popular Mannequin Challenge video she put together earlier this week, she was inspired to reach out to her friends, who are producing a film depicting the relationship between African Americans and police, and put together a similar video with a hard-hitting message.

Read: Vandals Cut Out 'Black' From Church's 'Black Lives Matter' Sign, Twice

"The African-American community has been depicted negatively," said Todd Anthony, a producer in upcoming film Black in Blue. "We're trying to take a stand, create understanding, and bridge the gap between African-American communities and police officers."

Amid rising tensions between what some call opposing forces, Anthony, who is black, said he was conflicted, saying: "I have police officers in my family, who are black. Do I have to choose a side?"

The uncertain answer to his question led him and other outspoken members of the African American community to conceptualize Black in Blue, the story of a black police officer attempting to mend relations between his two identities.

Although the Mannequin Challenge video they released as a teaser to the film depicted scenes of alleged police brutality against African Americans, "this is not a film that bashes officers. We're trying to take a stand, and create understanding," Anthony told InsisdeEdition.com.

Read: Girl Bullied for Her Dark Skin Now a Successful Fashion Model: 'My Goal Is to Spread Love'

While the one-minute clip was released immediately following Election Day, the creators insist the message has nothing to do with the results of the vote.

"No matter who was elected, this video was still going to be important," Shepherd said. "It's still an issue that needs to be addressed, no matter who's in office."

For producer Kevalena Everett, "There was a need for people to come together and the need to do something to get people to come together and support each other."

Watch: Girl, 9, Tearfully Appeals for Peace Following Fatal Police Shooting: 'I Can't Stand How We're Treated'

Related Articles:
Blogger and Maybelline ambassador Sazan Hendrix shares her secret beauty tips

When it comes to the overlapping worlds of beauty tutorials, lifestyle blogging, and fashion, the Maybelline ambassador Sazan Hendrix is a true renaissance woman. Through some crazy amazing multitasking talents that most people cant conceptualize, Sazan manages to wear multiple hats like  blogger, model, brand ambassador, and creative director all while keeping a sense of humor. Her journey in the world of beauty vlogging started back in 2011 while she was studying Radio and Television at The University of North Texas. She decided to launch her Youtube channel primarily dedicated to makeup and lifestyle videos, which now has over 226,000 subscribers. Five years later and hundreds of thousands of followers later, Sazan is now

Five years later and hundreds of thousands of followers later, Sazan is now an official Maybelline ambassador. She has traveled internationally for her work, her content is captivating and original, and shes just the sweetest thing. Get it, girl!

We were lucky enough to catch up with the girl boss! She gave us a glimpse into her life, where she talks about working with Maybelline, her personal trajectory, and, of course, her favorite beauty products.

bh4a3001

HelloGiggles: Have you been a fan of Maybelline and what inspired you to be an ambassador?

Sazan Hendrix: Always  its a brand I grew up with! I was inspired to become an ambassador because I love the brand, they have great products, and theyve always had killer style. Plus, it seemed fun!

HG: Youre an active traveler and I read you recently spoke at a conference in Dubai. What is your go-to travel beauty tip?

SH: Rose water! When youre on a plane for over 10 hours, your face is gonna dry out (at least mine does). Wearing minimal makeup and spritzing rose water on your skin during [a] flight makes all the difference.

bh4a3137

HG: Whats your favorite product for your skin when youre stressed out or emotionally drained?

SZ: Sunday Riley Clay Cleanser  it refreshes my skin and makes me feel new!

Story continues

HG: I loved your Wednesday Addams Halloween makeup tutorial. Have you always been a costume person and has that influenced your relationship with beauty?

SZ: Thanks! I have  its always been fun for me to put my creativity to good use. Any time theres an occasion, I get to play dress-up with both my style and my makeup, so Halloween is a great excuse to go nuts.

HG: At what age did you start playing with make-up?

SZ: Lets see, probably 5 or 6? I wasnt allowed to wear it to school, of course  my mom would kill me, haha!

bh4a2896

HG: What inspired you to make a five minute tutorial about gym-makeup?

SZ: Thats real life! I love working out and I love wearing makeup, but sometimes the two things dont mix. I wanted to create a look that was just enough for those girls hitting the gym.

HG: What is the latest product youre obsessed with?

SZ: Clarins Gentle Foaming Cleanser  Omg. Its a one-step process that takes off ALL your makeup, and I mean all of it. Its amazing and my skin has never felt cleaner.

bh4a2890

You can keep up on all of Sazans latest adventures and beauty tips through her website or her Youtube channel, and of course, stay up to date with her appearances at Maybelline events.

The post Blogger and Maybelline ambassador Sazan Hendrix shares her secret beauty tips appeared first on HelloGiggles.
The 16-year-old girl missing after her little sister and mother were fatally shot in Texas has also been found dead, authorities said, and the teen's 21-year-old boyfriend remains a suspect in all three murders.

The body of Kirsten Fritch was discovered at about 12:40 p.m. Thursday not far from where officers arrested her boyfriend, Jesse Dobbs, two days earlier, the Baytown Police Department said.

Authorities found Dobbs in Shenanigans Bar in Texas City at about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, hours after Fritchs mother, Cynthia Morris, 37, and her sister, 13-year-old Breanna Pavilicek, were found murdered, police said.

Officers conducting a wellness check at their Baytown home discovered the mother and young girl had each been shot at least once, authorities said.

Read: Teen Missing After 21-Year-Old Boyfriend Allegedly Kills Her Mom, Younger Sister

Morris car had been missing from the scene. It was later found across the street from the bar where Dobbs was taken into custody, police said.

"Baytown Detectives attempted to interview Mr. Dobbs about the murder; however, he refused to offer any details about the deaths of Cynthia and Breanna, or the whereabouts of Kirsten, Baytown police said in a statement.

After searching for nearly two days, police discovered Fritchs body in a wooded area north of the bar.

A motive for the murders has yet to be determined as Mr. Dobbs continues to refuse to cooperate with detectives, police said.

Read: Husband of Missing Jogger Passes Polygraph: 'No Involvement With the Disappearance of His Wife,' Cops Say

Dobbs and Fritch began dating after they met online, Fritchs grandmother, Barbara DeRamus, told KHOU.

He moved into the familys home not long after, but the teens mother wanted him out and did not approve of the relationship, DeRamus said.

He just seemed like a lowlife, she told the television station. I thought, what was Kirsten doing with this idiot?

Story continues

Dobbs has not been charged in connection to the murders, but authorities said he is a suspect. He remains in the Galveston County Jail on a resisting arrest charge, authorities said.

Watch: 10-Year-Old Girl Found Dead, Uncle Charged with Murder After Amber Alert Issued

Related Articles:
By PTI: Thiruvananthapuram, Nov 11 (PTI) The mother of Soumya, who was brutally raped and killed after being pushed out of a moving train in 2011, today said she was aghast with Supreme Courts rejection of her review petition against acquittal of the convict of murder charge.

Sumathi said her daughter had been killed cruelly "inch by inch" and justice had been denied to her family.

advertisement

"Even though I have not got justice, Govindachamy should never leave the prison. I had expected to get justice from the Supreme Court," Sumathi, who broke down on hearing the verdict, told reporters at her home in Shornoor in Palakkad district.

The apex court today dismissed the two review petitions filed by Kerala government and Sumathi challenging its earlier verdict commuting the death sentence of the accused Govindachamy after dropping the murder charge.

Apparently, referring to former Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju, who appeared in the court today in the case, she said, "Even a retired judge came to argue for my daughter ...But even then I did not get justice. I do not have any complaints against anyone as everyone has worked hard to help me."

Justice Katju was summoned by the apex court as he in his blog had claimed that there was error in the judgement acquitting the accused of the murder charge. He was asked to assist the bench during the hearing of the review petition.

Sumathi said the Kerala High Court had upheld the trial court order awarding death sentence to Govindachamy.

"But I do not know how my daughters case ended up like this in the Supreme Court," she said.

The distraught mother said her only prayer was there should never be another Soumya.

My child was killed so cruelly inch by inch... Govindachamy should never be released," she said.

Meanwhile, reacting to the apex court verdict, Leader of Opposition in state Assembly Ramesh Chennithala hit out at the LDF government alleging that Govindachamy managed to escape the gallows due to the governments "inefficiency".

"The states conscience will not pardon the CPI(M)-led LDF government," he said in a statement here.

"Todays decision was not unexpected. The prosecutions lapses had been pointed out by the apex court earlier itself," he said. PTI UD JRK VS SRY

--- ENDS ---
By Alonso Soto

BRASILIA (Reuters) - The World Trade Organization has ruled that some Brazilian industrial stimulus programs hurt foreign competitors, a government official said on Friday, a major blow to a country struggling to shore up its industry amid a crippling recession.

The preliminary ruling, which has not been made public yet, backs the challenge by Japan and the European Union against industrial policies they say have hurt their producers, said the official who was briefed on the matter and asked for anonymity to speak freely.

Brazil's foreign ministry said the government will analyze the initial WTO panel report before the organization makes a final decision, but did not reveal its content, stating the document was confidential.

The programs implemented in 2011 gave tax breaks and other benefits to companies that manufactured cars and communication technology goods in the country.

A ruling against Brazil will add pressure on the country to scale back industry subsidies at a time when it is struggling with its worst recession in memory.

A widening budget deficit has already forced Brazil to roll back some of those subsidies since 2015, but the government remains under pressure from business groups to keep some stimulus to avoid further job cuts in the industry sector.

"It is expected that this negative ruling will force Brazil to review important aspects of its industrial policies, with emphasis to the local content requirements and tax exemptions to domestically made products," said Renata Amaral, a trade expert with Brasilia-based consultancy Barral M Jorge.

Earlier on Friday, Brazil moved to launch a WTO case to challenge U.S. tariffs on some Brazilian steel imports.

Brazil is also facing a probe into its sugar exports to China and weighing whether to drop its actions at the WTO against Thailand's support for its sugar sector.

(Reporting by Alonso Soto; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli and Matthew Lewis)
London (AFP) - Donald Trump's improbable election has buoyed eurosceptics in Britain, who hope London's "special relationship" with the world's top economy will result in lucrative post-Brexit trade.

US President Barack Obama warned that Britain would be at the "back of the queue" for trade deals if it left the bloc but Trump was pro-Brexit and will likely look more favourably on its trans-Atlantic partner, say Brexiteers.

The president-elect's attitude to Britain leaving the bloc was "more positive than the hostile approach" of Obama, noted prominent Conservative lawmaker and ardent eurosceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Trump, whose mother was born in Britain, hailed the vote to leave the European Union as "a fantastic thing" and pledged that Britain would "certainly not be at the back of the queue" under his presidency.

Fellow Conservative Bernard Jenkin told the City AM financial newspaper: "President Trump might not be to our taste but we must calculate our national interest.

"He will not put logs on the track in front of Brexit in the same way (Hillary) Clinton might have," said the influential eurosceptic.

- Britain in 'best' position -

Seeking to capitalise on a Trump presidency, Prime Minister Theresa May wasted no time in emphasising strong trans-Atlantic ties as she bids to forge new trade links outside the EU.

In her congratulatory message to Trump on Wednesday, she carefully avoided sensitive subjects -- unlike German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande -- to highlight the strong "trade, security and defence" ties between London and Washington.

And writing in the Spectator magazine, political commentator Douglas Murray said that in terms of trade, Britain was "in the best possible position" with Trump in the White House.

"Everything Trump has ever said suggests that he is exceptionally well-disposed towards the country where his mother was born. In recent times such an attitude could not be taken for granted," he wrote.

Story continues

That could bode well for the so-called "special relationship" between Britain and the United States.

However, many analysts also warn that Trump's more positive attitude to Britain is outweighed by his diatribes against free trade and isolationist tendencies.

"Trump has been consistent in his opposition to free trade. His political sympathies for Brexit are therefore unlikely to lead him to prioritise a trade agreement with the UK once the country leaves the EU," said Florian Otto, head of Europe research at global risk analysts Verisk Maplecroft.

- May 10th on call list -

And there are early signs that Trump may not prioritise the US's traditional "special relationship."

The president-elect spoke to nine other leaders, including from Ireland, Egypt and Australia, before telephoning May, much to the annoyance of British media.

Tom Raines, from the Chatham House international affairs think-tank, said that with his radical policies, Trump could end up hobbling the Brexit negotiations.

"I do not regard Trump as a useful ally for Britain as it leaves the EU. If she had been elected, Hillary Clinton would likely have been a strong advocate for a Brexit settlement," he told AFP.

"If Trump's foreign policy follows his campaign rhetoric, clashes are inevitable," he said.

"The best the UK can hope for is that EU leaders, worried about the direction of the US, feel now is not the time to distance themselves further from the United Kingdom," he added.

Tim Oliver, an expert on Europe-North America relations at the London School of Economics university, said Trump's election posed a dilemma for Britain's overall strategic outlook.

Though Britain's vote to leave the EU contained a desire to play an enhanced global role, that largely depends upon cooperation with the United States.

"In president Trump, the UK now finds itself stuck between a Trump rock and a Brexit hard place."
BELGRADE (Reuters) - British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, setting aside his previous hostility toward Donald Trump, said on Thursday the U.S. Republican's presidential election victory offered economic opportunities and there was no need for Europeans to be despondent about it. "I may respectfully say to my European friends and colleagues that it's time we snapped out of general doom and gloom about this election," Johnson said after meeting Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic. "He is after all a deal maker. He wants to do a free trade deal with the UK," Johnson told reporters. Trump's upset victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton has delighted far-right politicians in France, the Netherlands and Austria but worried some mainstream politicians who fear it may be part of a populist, anti-establishment trend. "I believe that this is a great opportunity for us in the UK to build on that relationship with America that is of fundamental economic importance for us but also of great importance for stability and prosperity in the world," Johnson said. Johnson was one of the leading proponents of the successful Brexit campaign to get Britain out of the European Union. Trump aligned himself with the Brexit movement during his campaign. On Wednesday, Johnson, the former London mayor, congratulated Trump on his victory and tweeted that he looked forward to continuing the partnership between the two nations. Johnson said last year that he feared going to New York because of "the real risk of meeting Donald Trump" after the New York businessman said parts of London were now so radicalized that police officers feared to go there. Later on Thursday, Johnson said on his Twitter account he had spoken to U.S. Vice President-elect Mike Pence. "We agreed on importance of the special relationship & need to tackle global challenges together," he tweeted. (Additional reporting by Eric Walsh in Washington; Reporting by Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Peter Cooney)
New York (AFP) - Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Friday the US would move forward after a bruising presidential campaign and that he would be happy to advise President-elect Donald Trump if asked.

"I would do that with any president," Buffett, a strong supporter of Trump rival Hillary Clinton, told CNN. "If any president asked me for help in any way, that's part of being a citizen."

Buffett said he was "100 percent" confident in the US, believing the country would ultimately move beyond the vitriolic campaign.

Buffett picked Clinton over Trump because he thought she had better "temperament and judgment," calling the risks of weapons of mass destruction "by far the most important thing."

"It's important that he does" have a good temperament, he said. "And nobody know for sure what does happen if you get a call in the middle of the night."

Buffett, the head of the massive Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate and the world's third wealthiest person, said he was not bothered that Trump's business record includes "some major failures" -- a reference to his multiple casino and hotel bankruptcies.

"Harry Truman went broke in a Haberdashery store near Kansas City or in Kansas City," he said. "He wasn't much of a businessman. He turned out to be a terrific president."

Buffett expressed skepticism that Trump will push forward with some controversial campaign proposals.

Talk of imposing a 35 percent tariff on imports from Mexico or China is "a very bad idea, but I'm not going to say it will cause a recession," Buffett said.

"Any time you start playing with retaliatory type trade things, it's very likely you're going to have the other side play too."

Buffett called Trump's pledge of four percent annual growth a pipe dream, saying "there may be a given year where that happens, but the math is just too extraordinary."

A better objective was to do a better job of distributing the two percent growth that is possible, said Buffett.
RALEIGHTrump has often boasted that in his first day of office as president, he will start building a big, beautiful, powerful wall on the border with Mexico and start sending millions of undocumented immigrants back south. That will be a problem for the construction industry, which relies heavily on undocumented laborers.

On the day after the election, I visited a construction site in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, where a cluster of big tech and science companies have opened offices, making it one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country. About 70 percent of the states construction workforce is made up of immigrant laborersthe remaining 30 percent are mostly their American supervisors. Researchers at the University of North Carolina say that a large number of these workers are here illegally, something general contractors get away with by subcontracting with other companies to hire laborers, therefore making someone else liable for the workers who dont have valid papers.

Recommended: The Trump Voters Quest for Respect

I spoke to about a dozen workers who are building the roof on a new 1-million-square-foot retail, restaurant, and office building in the area. Most of them were from Mexico and Central America, and most came to the United States illegally. To my surprise, none seemed afraid of Trump moving into the White House or what his victory says about how Americans view them. Psshh, says one Mexican worker, whose identity is being withheld because of his immigration status. We always knew Americans didnt want us here, he said in Spanish, loading equipment into a van after an 11-hour shift building ceiling frames. They use us, but thats okay because we use them too for the money.

Have you looked around? Who do you think is building everything here?

His colleagues, wearing hard hats and safety vests, nodded their heads. They seemed to agree with the idea that it doesnt make much of a difference if the next president is a Democrat or Republican. [All presidents] break their promises, they all want to deport us, said another worker, who declined to give his name. He was likely referring to the record number of deportations during President Obamas administration. Their reactions are a sharp contrast to those of other undocumented groups, such as the generation of younger immigrants who grew up in the United States and view themselves as Americans. Those who received temporary deportation relief through Obamas DACA program are particularly frightened about the likely scenario that Trump will revoke the protection and deport them. The construction workers I spoked to seemed more resigned, more cynicalyet also defiantabout their own situation. What about the wall, I asked them, do you really think Trump will build a wall?

Story continues

He can build a wall, but well just build a tunnel, said Magdaleno Santos, a Salvadorian man who arrived in the the United States illegally more than two decades ago, but adjusted his immigration status in the late 1990s. If we leave, the entire country will fall apart. Have you looked around? Who do you think is building everything here? Its the Latinos. American workers just want to walk around with a clipboard, sipping from their water bottles. They dont want to do what we do.

Recommended: The U.S. Media Is Completely Unprepared to Cover a Trump Presidency

Earlier in the day, I had walked over to the makeshift offices where the contractors and subcontractors had set up shop. I chatted with Neal Fisher, the subcontractor overseeing electrical work on the retail complex. Is it true that he cant find Americans to do this work? Thats part of it. But if Bobby comes looking for a job, hes going to want $24 an hour, and these guys will do the same work for $12. The company he works for subcontracted with another company to hire the laborers, so he didnt know the legal status of the Latino workers. When he started working in the construction industry 38 year ago, he only worked with one or two foreign laborers, he says, now all of them are immigrants. He seemed torn by the dichotomy he faced: his companys need to stay competitive, and his clear disdain for the immigrant workforce. Honestly, if you cant speak English, you shouldnt be allowed in this country, said Fisher, who voted for Trump. (A spokesman for the development company in charge of the construction project declined to comment for this story).

Immigrant laborers in North Carolina hold no illusions about how their employers view them with contempt, while also understanding how necessary they are to a companys bottom line. At a workers center near the construction site, I spoke with undocumented immigrants from Mexico as they waited for pickup trucks to come by and drive them to jobs in landscaping, home remodeling, or house painting. They too were not alarmed by Trumps victory and his threats to deport them. If he deports me, I will just leave with my children, said one man, who declined to give his name because of his immigration status. But [Trump] cant get rid of all of us; there are too many of us. This country will starve without us, he says, pointing out that immigrants harvest most crops grown in the United States.

Another man, who has crossed the border illegally several times, laughs at the idea that a border wall will solve anything. Trump can build the tallest wall that he can, and we will find a way to fly over it, just like birds.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Traders are looking for Union Pacific to continue its recent uptrend.



OptionMonster's market scanner shows that 11,800 December 97.50 calls were purchased for $1.97 to $3.10 yesterday. This represents new positioning, as volume was more than 5 times the open interest in the strike..



Long calls lock in the price where investors can buy stock, allowing them to profit from a rally with limited capital at risk. Their cheap cost can also generate significant leverage on a percentage basis if shares move in the right direction. (See our Education section)



UNP rose 3.77 percent to $97.49 yesterday and is up 6 percent in the last week. The railroad operator reported bearish results on Oct. 20 and is expected to release its next quarterly numbers in pre-market hours on Jan. 19.



Overall option volume in the name was twice its daily average yesterday. Calls outnumbered puts by a bullish 3-to-1 ratio.





More From optionMONSTER


The levy per ticket is likely to be up to Rs 8500 on flights in major routes to fund the regional air connectivity scheme.

By Anindya Banerjee: Domestic air fares are set to go up after the government announced new taxes to fund the ambitious regional connectivity scheme, which seeks to take the airlines sector to India's smaller cities.

The levy per flight is likely to be up to Rs 8500 on flights in major routes to fund the regional air connectivity scheme, Civil Aviation Secretary RN Choubey said today.

advertisement

For flights up to 1000 km, the levy will be Rs 7500. For flights between 1000-1500 km, it will be Rs 8000 while for flights beyond 1500 km, the levy will be Rs 8500.

Speaking to India Today Aviation Secretary RN Choubey said, "By paying Rs 50 extra for say Delhi to Patna you can fly Patna to Purnia at Rs. 2500. That's our aim."

UDAN



The regional connectivity scheme will be applicable on route length between 200 to 800 km. About 22 airports are to be connected under the regional connectivity scheme in the first phase.

The operations under the scheme are intended to provide air connectivity to unserved and remote routes with airfare being capped at Rs 2,500 for an hour's journey of around 500 km.

The scheme christened as UDAN -- "Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik", will be in operation for a period of 10 years.



--- ENDS ---
By Pamela Barbaglia

LONDON, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Buyout firms have approached Santander Asset Management and Intesa Sanpaolo over a possible takeover of the Allfunds Bank mutual fund platform, sources told Reuters.

U.S. buyout fund Bain Capital and Europe's Advent are planning to make a joint bid for the business, which could be worth up to 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion), the sources said.

Cinven, Permira, BC Partners and Hellman & Friedman have also discussed Allfunds with its Spanish and Italian owners, prompting a strategic review of the platform.

Santander Asset Management and Intesa, which own 50 percent each of the Madrid-based firm, have decided to sell their shares and are seeking advice from large investment banks to begin an auction before the end of the year, the sources said.

Mid-sized asset managers appeal to private equity investors as they generate stable returns and offer scope for growth over a three to five year period.

Santander Asset Management, Intesa Sanpaolo, Cinven, Advent, BC Partners and Hellman & Friedman all declined to comment, while Bain Capital and Permira were not immediately available.

Banco Santander has a 50 percent stake in Santander Asset Management, while U.S. buyout firms Warburg Pincus and General Atlantic control the remainder.

Santander Asset Management is selecting an adviser, while Intesa is working with U.S. bank Morgan Stanley, they said.

Established in 2000 to provide access to so-called open architecture investment funds market, Allfunds has more than 200 billion euros of assets under management.

It offers more than 47,000 funds and has an extensive network of more than 503 clients including commercial and private banks, fund managers and insurers.

The sources said it generates earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) of about 125 million euros and could be valued at close to 16 times this.

TAKEOVER APPETITE

Earlier this year analysts pointed to the acquisition by London-based asset manager Henderson Group of U.S. rival Janus Capital as a catalyst for further consolidation as companies need to gain global scale, streamline operations and diversify their portfolios.

Story continues

UniCredit wants to find a new owner for its fund management arm Pioneer by the end of the year and has recently received binding bids valuing the unit at more than 3 billion euros.

Meanwhile, Bain and Advent have often teamed up over the years to secure joint control of several European financial services and payment firms such as Worldpay and Nets , which were both recently listed on European stock markets, as well as Italy's Istituto Centrale delle Banche Popolari (ICBPI).

($1 = 0.9195 euros) (Additional reporting by Jesus Aguado in Madrid; Editing by Rachel Armstrong and Alexander Smith)
Washington (AFP) - Donald Trump assumes the mantle of the US presidency under an unprecedented cloud of litigation that could weigh on his ability to govern after this week's shock election.

Just as the newly minted president-elect visited the White House and Capitol Hill on Thursday, two thousand miles away his lawyers were in a California courtroom battling over evidence and jury instructions in a fraud trial over the defunct Trump University, which stands accused of defrauding students.

On the campaign trail, Trump disparaged the judge in the same case, Gonzalo Curiel, as a "Mexican" and a "hater," and Trump's attorneys want such remarks excluded as evidence.

Trial begins in 18 days, meaning Trump could be sworn in as a witness in the case well before he is sworn in as president.

- Scores of cases -

In New York, the billionaire developer, a famous legal pugilist with a lifetime's worth of business enemies and sparring partners, is facing a case brought by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, also over Trump University, as well as a libel case from a political consultant and lawsuit from a protester claiming he was assaulted outside Trump Tower.

Then there is his pending IRS tax audit. And a case in Chicago accusing his campaign of spam text messages. And a breach of contract case a Trump company brought in Washington -- Trump was accompanied by a Secret Service agent to a recent deposition in that case, according to court papers.

That is just a sample of the private legal matters the sitting president will have on his plate.

"This is going to be one of the many unprecedented things about a Trump presidency," Louis Seidman, a scholar of constitutional law at Georgetown University, told AFP.

According to USA Today, over the past three decades Trump and his business entities have been involved at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts, ranging from high-stakes business clashes to personal defamation lawsuits.

Story continues

In just the year following the announcement of his candidacy in June of 2015, at least 70 cases were filed, split evenly between those Trump brought and those filed against him, according to the newspaper.

The Trump Organization and an attorney for Trump in California did not respond to requests for comment.

- No absolute immunity -

Despite their power, US presidents can and have been dragged into the courts. The Supreme Court held in 1982 that former president Richard Nixon was immune from liability for damages based on his official acts.

Fifteen years later, however, the court found that Bill Clinton could face civil litigation for acts occurring before his presidency in a sexual harassment suit brought by Paula Jones. Clinton went on to survive impeachment in 1999 over accusations that he had lied and obstructed justice during the Jones case.

"The law stands with what the court decided in that case," Clinton's attorney at the time, Bob Bennett, told AFP. "And they said the president does not have absolute immunity in civil suits."

Seidman said courts were often expected to adjust their schedules to suit the many pressures and demands on serving presidents. The Supreme Court has also never decided whether a president may face criminal prosecution, he added.

Trump's legal entanglements will almost certainly be a factor in his ability to govern, said Seidman.

"Disentangling him from that business is going to be close to impossible," said Seidman. "There are going to be constant legal distractions."

Trump's ability to govern under such circumstances will depend on the resources he can bring to bear, said Seidman, adding that Trump's courtroom battles as president are in many cases likely to be driven by political rather than legal forces.

"On the one hand, he is coming into office with all the levers of power," he said, noting that Republican party will soon control the executive branch and both houses of Congress.

"On the other hand, he is also coming into office as the least popular president in American history, with less than a majority of the popular vote and half of the country despising him."

"The real risk is that he might react to those sorts of problems by trying to exercise still more power," said Seidman. "A lot of this is going to depend on how good of a politician he is."
Six people were killed and at least 120 wounded after a car bomb detonated at the gate of the German consulate compound in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, on Thursday, November 10.

Consulate security staff, along with Afghan and NATO security forces, engaged in a firefight with militants, according to German officials. No German consulate employees or security forces were killed.

Media reports said that Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the attack, calling it revenge for US air strikes last week that were blamed for killing 32 civilians in the northern city of Kunduz. Credit: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty via Storyful
Cavaliers Mannequin Challenge

The Cleveland Cavaliers visited the White House on Thursday to celebrate the Warriors blowing a 3-1 lead in the Finals with President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.

Their visit included several memorable moments: Obama praising JR Smith for wearing a shirt, Iman Shumpert watching White House staffers move a podium with the bemusement of a child at a magic show, and a fun "mannequin challenge."

The mannequin challenge is the fun new teen video game in which everyone freezes in place (just like a mannequin!) as the camera pans across the frame. There were groans after the challenge was done by the Dallas Cowboys' front office aboard a private jet, but Michelle Obama and the Cavs appear to have done it right.

Behold:

Kevin Love posing with the $1 bill in front of a portrait of George Washington is an interesting choice, filmically speaking, and LeBron James and Michelle Obama posing for a selfie is even better.

What's more, James posted to his Instagram a second and slightly different mannequin challenge, in which the first lady is admiring his ring. This one, according to Uninterrupted (James' content platform), is called the "Official LeBron James version."

Here it is:





More From Business Insider


Chad Michael Murray has written a romance novel because 2016 cant be stopped

In the most surprising news weve heard since, well, Wednesday, its been revealed that Chad Michael Murray has written a romance novel.

Confirming the news with US Weekly, a representative for the star confirmed that Murray had written the book with Heather Graham. According to Just Jared, however, this Heather Graham isnt the actress Heather Graham. Could you imagine if that had happened!?

The news comes after it was revealed that Murray was expecting his second child with his wife Sarah Roemer.

So, what is Chad Michael Murrarys book actually about?

Well, the novel, which is titled American Drifter, is a romance novel about American soldier who is backpacking across Rio de Janeiro.

Watching @nbcagt last night like Whoa... A photo posted by Chad Murray (@chadmurray15) on Sep 14, 2016 at 8:21am PDT

American Drifters romance was inspired by a dream I had, Murray told Us Weekly. The dream had played out so vividly, as if I was a fly on the wall watching this tale go down.

That sounds INCREDIBLE. We love it when we hear about peoples creativity coming from dreams. Continuing, he added:

Also, at that time, I had been searching for a story that would resonate with the youth of the world in a way that would make us feel the light and excitement for adventure.

The novel, which isnt set for release until November 2017, is said to become a combination of those two journeys merging together with Rio de Janeiro setting the stage for an adventure thriller romance.

Throwback to those homeless days... #otherpeopleschildrenmovie A photo posted by Chad Murray (@chadmurray15) on May 9, 2016 at 9:05am PDT

Murray had previously teased the novel back in 2014, where he also spoke about his literary inspirations.

Speaking to Metro, it seems that the star sure would have one heck of a varied Good Reads account.

I really like poetry  I really like Edgar Allan Poe. Growing up, I loved The Catcher In The Rye, which is a bit of a cliche to say but f*** yeah, thats a great book, he revealed to Metro. Brave New World made an impact on me. I wouldnt consider myself an avid reader  I want to be but I havent incorporated it into my lifestyle. Writing is a beautiful craft and so many people do it so well that Im just incredibly grateful to get published, he finished.

Story continues

Now, you might remember that Chad Michael Murrarys character in One Tree Hill, Lucas Scott, was also a novelist.

Titled An Unkindness of Ravens the fictional book was also adapted into a TV series in One Tree Hill. Perhaps Murrays actual novel will get the same treatment?

Regardless the next 12 months seem like theyre going to be HUGE for Murrary. Not only is her set to star in CMTs Million Dollar Quartet this month, but the 35-year-old actor (and now author) will also welcome his second child and his romance novel next year.

The post Chad Michael Murray has written a romance novel because 2016 cant be stopped appeared first on HelloGiggles.
By Brijesh Pandey: BJP president Amit Shah today called the government's decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes a "masterstroke of Prime Minister Narendra Modi" to check black money and assured that the problems being faced by common Indians are temporary.

"It is the political parties that are afraid of the Modi masterstroke. The common people are not facing any problems," Shah claimed at a press conference in New Delhi even as all TV channels were showing live images of long and angry queues at ATMs and banks all over India.

advertisement

ALSO READ | Crackdown on black money: Is Govt's bold decision a real game-changer?



Admitting that people had to wait in queues outside ATMs to get fresh cash in view of the demonetisation, he urged people to extend their cooperation. "The step which has been taken will greatly benefit the economy," he said.

"The middle class, the poor and small traders will face no problems," he said, adding that there is no need to rush as the currency notes will be accepted till December end.

"WHY IS OPPOSITION UPSET?"

Shah targeted the opposition for their protest over the demonetisation scheme. "I fail to understand why Mulayam, Mayawati, Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi are upset with this move?" he asked.

ALSO READ | Suicide, shock death, out of cash: How Modi's surgical strike on black money has hit some people hard



"I can understand that the hawala opertors, mafia, the Naxalites, terrorist group and black marketers are facing problems. But the kind of reactions we are getting from the opposition is surprising. Till November 7, they were questioning us over our action against black money. Now they are questioning this decision," he said, asking the parties to clear their stands.

Shah said the move to demonetise high value currency notes would greatly benefit the economy and urged the people to join the campaign against corruption.

"The Narendra Modi government has embarked on a campaign to end corruption. I appeal to people to join in and give it speed," Shah said.

--- ENDS ---
Chelsea Clinton is eyeing Congress and were definitely cool with that

Those Clintons dont quit, and were so, so thankful. The New York Post reports today that Chelsea Clinton is being groomed for a congressional run. Her mother Hillary may have lost the Presidential race, but her tenacity, courage, and dedication to bettering our country has won our hearts and our minds. And now her legacy continues, with her daughter picking up the reigns.

The seat Chelsea may be eyeing is New Yorks 17th Congressional District in Westchester County, currently occupied Democrat Nita Lowey, who was just reelected for her 14th term. Lowey might be retiring after her current term, and Chelsea will run for the seat then.

The Posts source says Clinton will move next door to her parents in Chappaqua to begin prepping.

While it is true the Clintons need some time to regroup after Hillarys crushing loss, they will not give up, the source says.

Chelsea would be the next extension of the Clinton brand. In the past few years, she has taken a very visible role in the Clinton Foundation and on the campaign trail. While politics isnt the life Hillary wanted for Chelsea, she chose to go on the campaign trail for her mother and has turned out to be very poised, articulate and comfortable with the visibility.

#TRUTH

Chelsea rocked it on the campaign trail.

And shes considered running for a while now. New Rochelle Talk reported five years ago that she was planning to run upon Loweys expected retirement in 2012. But, the 79-year-old is still going strong, so Chelseas waiting patiently. And so are we.

The post Chelsea Clinton is eyeing Congress and were definitely cool with that appeared first on HelloGiggles.
A 22-year-old Chicago man was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly beating and stomping a 21-month-old baby to death, PEOPLE confirms.

A police statement obtained by PEOPLE identifies the alleged killer as Uriel Vega, who has been charged with one count of first-degree murder for the death of Raiylana Vasquez.

Police have yet to comment on a possible motive.

Vega  who is the childs mothers boyfriend, but not Raiylanas father  was minding the child at the time of her death, according to police.

Police officers were called to the home Vega shares with the girls mother just before 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, finding Raiylana unresponsive with obvious signs of trauma, the statement alleges.

 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.

The investigation revealed that the victim died from blunt force trauma caused by Vega, reads the statement. A prosecution source tells PEOPLE that, in addition to beating the child, Vega allegedly stomped on the babys stomach.

Raiylana was rushed to Holy Cross Hospital and pronounced dead within one hour of arrival, according to the statement.

An autopsy performed Wednesday found the child had died of multiple injuries due to child abuse and her death was ruled a homicide, according to police.

Alissandra Calderon, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, tells PEOPLE that agency is investigating Vega for previous allegations of abuse and neglect, and that the childs mother was indicted on neglect charges 10 months ago. She would not provide the mothers name or discuss the allegations that led to the indictment.

Vega is being held without bond and does not have legal representation at this time, according to police.

A GoFundMe page has been established to help pay for Raiylanas funeral.




Fifteen years after his death, Cuban jazz pioneer Chico O'Farill will be laid to rest in Cuba. The burial of the trumpeter, composer and arranger's ashes is set to take place in Havana's Colon Cemetery in mid-December. A memorial concert is to be held at the city's Basilica de San Francisco, an 18th Century church known for its exceptional acoustics.

O'Farrill's signature "Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite," first recorded by Machito in a session featuring Charlie Parker, will be among the music performed by players led by Chico's son, Arturo O'Farrill, who has orchestrated his late father's eternal return to the island. Arturo will also perform his own "Afro Latin Jazz Suite," which is dedicated to his Chico.

"The only thing that I ever saw make my father cry was his yearning for his homeland," New York-based Arturo O'Farrill said in an interview. "My father died very unhappily. I think that he was not able to return. I feel that he would want us to do this."

Chico left Havana for New York in 1948 to continue his classical music studies at Julliard; he soon was hired as an arranger for Benny Goodman. He went on to write Dizzy Gillespie's celebrated "Manteca Suite" and many other pieces, becoming known as a pioneer of Cubop, which he interpreted as a sophisticated fusion of Latin and avant-garde jazz idioms.

The elder O'Farrill moved with his family to Mexico in the 1950s, before moving back to New York in the mid-sixties. He visited Cuba for the last time in 1958. Although he left Cuba as en emigre, not an exile, politics intervened.

"Late in his life he was invited to go back to Cuba," Arturo O'Farrill recalls. "But he received communication from the Cuban American community that if he did, he would be boycotted. And It scared him."

Chico never returned to Cuba. He died in New York in 2001; he would have been 95 years old this year.

Story continues

"Toward the end of his life he said 'I'm ready to go back,'" O'Farrill recalls. "But he was old, he was weak, he was infirm and he wouldn't have survived the trip,"

O'Farrill, 56, a Grammy-winning composer, pianist and bandleader, has been traveling to Cuba for the past 18 years. He has undertaken a series of collaborative performance and recording projects there, including 2015's Cuba: The Conversation Continues, which was recorded in Havana just after Presidents Obama and Raul Castro announced the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba.

"I've been going back and forth when it was comfortable and when it was uncomfortable," O'Farrill comments. "When it was easy and when it was not easy."

He had first scheduled the trip to take his father's ashes to Cuba for September, but it was canceled because of the delicate health of his mother, Lupe Valero O'Farrill.

"Now we are confident that we will be able to take her to Cuba for a really extraordinary trip," he says.

It is a groundbreaking event, representing the unfulfilled wishes of many Cuban artists who left Cuba and never returned. Among those was Celia Cruz, who remained in exile until her death in 2003. Her song called "Por Si Acaso No Regreso" ("In Case I Don't Go Back") addressed the pain of never returning to Cuba.

"I feel in a way it is a very symbolic gesture," O'Farrill says of his father's burial in Havana, adding that Cuban and American agencies have worked together to make the trip and the tribute possible. "It represents Cuba welcoming back an ex-patriot son who changed the way of music. And it's a gesture on the part of American people that shows that the things that count in life are cultural, they are not political or ideological."

O'Farrill and his family will be received by the American ambassador in Havana, and will also join Cuban officials to talk about creating jazz and Afro-Cuban music studies programs at Havana's university-level music school.

The pianist stresses that the trip has taken on more importance since the election of Donald Trump, which, he says, "will undoubtedly reverse the progress that President Obama and President Castro have made." O'Farrill is calling for a grassroots mobilization against Trump.

"[Chico's return to Cuba] is a compelling example of someone being welcome to their homeland even as ashes, based on their contribution to the world," O'Farrill says. "It's important to state unequivocally that music, art and life will overturn the tenets of hatred."

Dictators come and go, but what really unites us are the things that we share." he adds.
"Quantity has a quality all its own" is a phrase that's been popular in U.S. military circles for decades, and is most often attributed to Stalin. It's also variously attributed to Lenin, Mao and even former Sen. Sam Nunn. Regardless of its origin, the American defense establishment's response to that approach helped form the basis of U.S. military tactics and strategy during the Cold War. The Soviet Union may have had more tanks, ships, missiles, etc., but America's were going to be better. This response also extended to aircraft and the people who flew them  where the enemy's greater numbers in planes would be offset, it was hoped, not just with superior equipment but with better-trained operators of that equipment.

Like the old Soviet Union, current-day China is another potential U.S. adversary that has traditionally subscribed to a quantity-over-quality military philosophy, and is attempting to address this deficiency in its air force. The People's Liberation Air Force, or PLAAF, has recently embarked on a major revamping of its fighter pilot training in the hope of bringing its pilots' capabilities up to par with those of western "near peer" adversaries. Combine this development with the recent high-profile (air show, not operational) debut of Chinas latest-generation fighter  the J20, designed to approach the capabilities of the West's best offerings  and the aggressive patrolling of the South China Sea, and the balance of power in the Pacific is worth renewed attention.

Related: The Pentagon Is Planning a New Super Rival to the Troubled F-35

According to RAND Corporation's Lyle J. Morris and Eric Heginbotham, co-authors of a recent report on the Chinese air forces plans for its fighter units, the new training will focus on "actual combat conditions ... manifested in training scenarios meant to mimic or simulate real-world battle conditions."

The United States has done this type of training for decades. The Navy's Fighter Weapons School, better known as Top Gun, was created in 1968 to teach pilots the art of "dogfighting," or traditional air-to-air combat, which was feared to be dying. The Air Force does similar training for its fighter pilots at its own Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and four times a year hosts a massive, mock air-combat exercise called Red Flag, also conducted at Nellis.

Story continues

But maybe most noteworthy, and worrying, for the U.S. defense community, is that the PLAAF's training revamp includes an emphasis on "free air combat" and "unscripted scenarios"  another aspect of air combat that has always kept U.S. air forces not just competitive but dominant in engagements. The good news is, creating fighter pilots who can operate autonomously (that is, without much help from ground control, unlike standard procedure for the old Soviet and current Chinese command structure) at a high level of air-to-air combat competency isn't easy, and certainly can't be done overnight.

Related: China Will Own New Years Eve in Times Square

Morris and Heginbotham note that RAND's research saw "shortfalls in pilot performance, including insufficient flight-lead skills and autonomy, lax discipline during daily training, poor tactics, and a lack of coordination with other PLAAF branches." These are characteristics and capabilities that U.S. air forces have always excelled at  aspects of air war that are part institutional culture, part societal.

In an age of increasing technologicalization, and with drone strikes in particular such a high-profile feature of current American military operations, it's easy to overlook the human element when it comes to thinking about modern military might. But until the world's fighter pilots are entirely replaced with remote pilots, or even artificial intelligence, the capabilities of the people physically sitting in the cockpit still matter. In the end, "The Right Stuff"  Tom Wolfe's famous phrase for the flying, fighting and personality qualities found in America's best military pilots  knows no international boundaries.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f282854%2fobamabidenelexresult

President-elect Donald J. Trump will enter office on Jan. 20, 2017 with an agenda that includes dismantling President Barack Obama's environmental actions, particularly when it comes to global warming. Environmentalists are gearing up for a fierce fight against him, and it's easy to see why.

Trump is set to become the world's only leader who does not believe human-caused global warming exists.

In just his first 100 days, he is seeking to green light the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project Obama rejected in 2015, as well as redirect climate aid the U.S. gives to other nations. In doing so, Trump may hand over the mantle of global leadership on combatting climate change to a country he aims to compete more fiercely with: China.

SEE ALSO: Donald Trump will be the only climate-denying world leader

Trump has also pledged to "lift the restrictions" on producing what he says is $50 trillion dollars worth of energy reserves, including shale oil and natural gas as well as, in his campaign's words, "clean coal," which doesn't exist on a commercial scale.

Environmental activist Bethany Hindmarsh, 26, cries during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump at the UN Climate Summit in Morocco on Nov. 9, 2016.

Image: Mosa'ab Elshamy/AP

And that's just what he has planned for the first 100 days. He will have unified control of Congress for longer than that, enabling his administration to undertake even more radical anti-environmental measures should they choose to.

Fragile progress

Obama took more steps to mitigate the effects of climate change than any president in history, having rolled out regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, mandated large increases in the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks, and forced regulators to factor in the climate change consequences of federal projects, including some energy projects.

While you might think that Obama's climate moves, which he sees as a cornerstone of his legacy, are durable, Trump may quickly expose their fragility.

The vast majority of Obama's climate agenda has been accomplished using his power as the chief executive, either through executive orders or federal regulations. Such steps can be more easily overturned than bills passed by Congress and signed into law.

Story continues

Environmental advocates are gearing up for a long and costly fight with a Trump White House over what he will roll back, and the measures he plans to take using his executive authority  such as the authorization of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which Obama rejected in 2015 in part on climate change-related grounds.

"Trump must choose whether he will be a president remembered for putting America and the world back on a path to climate disaster, or for listening to the American public, investing in the fastest-growing sector in the U.S. economy  clean energy  and keeping us on a path of climate progress," said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune in a statement.

Blood Falls and the Taylor Glacier near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016.

Image: Mark Ralston/AP

"He should choose wisely," he said. "Otherwise, we can guarantee President Trump the hardest fight of his life every step of the way."

Keystone Pipeline

The Keystone XL Pipeline became a flashpoint for climate activists because it would transport oil 1,200 miles from Canada's oil sands region in Alberta through the Central U.S., to the Gulf Coast. There, the oil would be refined and exported to the global oil market.

Trump and other project supporters contend it would create thousands of jobs, although these claims were debunked by multiple studies, including the State Department's own review that showed few permanent jobs would result.

Rows of pipe ready to become part of the Keystone Pipeline are stacked in a field near Cushing, Okla. in Feb. 2012.

Image: Sue Ogrocki/AP

In rejecting the pipeline, Obama cited the climate impacts of accessing and burning more oil, which at the time was a groundbreaking  and precedent setting, move.

The company seeking to build the pipeline, TransCanada, made it clear this week that it is preparing to apply for approval again under Trump.

The pipeline requires State Department review since it crosses an international border. However, in 2015, Congress passed a bill giving Keystone the go-ahead, but Obama vetoed it. Were a Republican Congress to pass a similar bill, Trump could sign it and fast-track the pipeline instead of going through a new round of State Department reviews.

Studies published in the past two years have shown that if the world is to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or lower compared to preindustrial levels, oil from Canada's oil sands region in Alberta would have to remain in the ground rather than being burned.

Climate advocates at the environmental group Friends of the Earth told Mashable that if Trump were to approve the pipeline now it would be a setback for the "Keep It in the Ground movement," which has gained steam since then and aims to prevent new fossil fuel extraction projects, period.

Soon there will be nothing, other than activist pressure and possibly the courts, standing between Trump and Keystone's approval.

"If he is successful this would be an important symbol of rolling back President Obamas legacy on climate change," said Kate Colwell, a spokeswoman for the environmental group, in an email.

Clean Power Plan

The Clean Power Plan is a set of EPA regulations that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. The regulations are currently facing court challenges, and have not yet fully entered into force.

The plan seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Image: PA Wire/PA Images

Power plants account for roughly one-third of all domestic greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and the vast majority of the electricity sector's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Dismantling the Clean Power Plan, as the Trump campaign vowed to do, would be a complex undertaking. Some states that have already moved forward with implementing the regulations would resist such a move, since it could be costly to scrap the regulations.

However, coal-producing states and those that rely most heavily on coal-fired power plants, such as Ohio, may welcome a regulatory retreat. If the plan is gutted, the U.S. would no longer be on track to meet its commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement.

Climate Finance

A big part of U.S. leadership on climate change is the country's commitment to helping vulnerable nations around the world adapt to climate change impacts, such as heat waves and rising sea levels, and develop technologies to expand their access to energy in a cleaner way.

So-called "climate finance" has been a flashpoint of international climate talks for many years, with developed nations now committed to spending at least $100 billion per year by 2020 in such funding.

Trump has declared that he would cancel U.S. funding, which amounts to about $3 billion annually, for U.N. climate programs and redirect it to domestic infrastructure development.

"Money for developing countries to tackle a climate crisis not of their making  that money is probably gone now," Colwell said.

China as the world's climate leader?

An electric car is being charged at a photovoltaic power carport in Shanghai, China, 17 August 2016.

Image: Zhong yang /imaginechina

While it will take time  possibly the entire Trump presidency  to roll back many Obama's climate achievements, make no mistake: It will become much harder for the world to meet its climate goals with Trump in the White House.

This fact could have ramifications lasting decades or more as the planet responds to increased greenhouse gases in the air.

However, there is reason to be optimistic: global energy trends are moving in favor of renewables over coal and other fossil fuels. The worldwide push toward solving global warming that occurred during Obama's presidency has gained enough momentum that it is not going to stop even if the U.S. turns into a rogue state on this issue.

"A shift to a low carbon economy, says Mark Watts, the executive director of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, is too well-embedded in large parts of the world, particularly China, for it to be overturned.

China, in fact, reiterated on Friday that with or without the U.S., it is firmly committed to continuing to reduce its emissions.

"Our policies and action will not be impacted by any action by the U.S. government," Chen Zhihua, of China's National Development and Reform Commission, said at the latest round of UN climate talks in Morocco on Monday.

The question for Trump, then, may be who he wants to lead the world on this issue: the U.S., or China?
BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Friday sentenced to death the former police chief of the northern region of Inner Mongolia after convicting him for murder, bribery, and possession of fire arms and explosives, state media reported. A court in Taiyuan City in the northern province of Shanxi ruled that Zhao Liping, 65, was guilty of killing a person surnamed Li in March last year, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. He also took over two million yuan ($290,000) in bribes and illegally stored 91 detonators in his office while working as the police chief of Inner Mongolia from 2008 to 2010, Xinhua said. Zhao first became police chief of the region in 2005 and had worked as a police officer for almost three decades. "The nature of Zhao Liping's murder was sinful, the plot especially vile, the means especially cruel, the danger to society grave," the court said. Zhao also refused to plead guilty and should be severely punished, it added. He was detained on suspicion of the murder of a woman last year and was formally charged in February 2016. State media has previously said the victim was his mistress, whom he stabbed and shot and then burned the body after she threatened to expose his corrupt behavior. President Xi Jinping has emphasized the need for officials to be paragons of virtue and to uphold public morality in his drive to restore discipline to the ruling Communist Party. Since he became party chief in 2012, Xi has waged war on corruption within the party, warning that a failure to root out graft could jeopardize the party's survival. Inner Mongolia is a strategically important area bordering Russia and Mongolia, covers a tenth of the China's landmass and has the largest coal reserves in the country. (Reporting by the Beijing newsroom; Editing by Michael Perry)
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's two largest coal producers Shenhua Energy Co and ChinaCoal agreed more long-term contracts at a discount price to current spot market rates, the Securities Times reported on Friday.

Shenhua and ChinaCoal inked agreements with China Datang Corp , Huaneng Group and China Guodian [CNGUO.UL] at 535 yuan ($78.60) per tonne, the Securities Times reported citing unnamed sources.

The contract price would be a reference point that could fluctuate depending on physical settlement prices at the end of each month, according to the newspaper. Buyers and sellers will equally share risks of price moves, the newspaper said.

Shenhua and ChinaCoal signed similar deals with Huadian Group and State Power Investment Corp [CPWRI.UL] on Tuesday.

ChinaCoal and Shenhua were unavailable for comments.

(Reporting by Meng Meng and Josephine Mason; Editing by Tom Hogue)
* Chinese consumers more vulnerable as debt rises

* China's household debt doubles in less than decade

* Rush to buy property adds to debt worries

* Social welfare costs high, cuts disposable income

By Engen Tham

SHANGHAI, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Single-mother Li Ying helps explain why household debt in China may be a bigger risk to the giant economy than previously thought.

Faced with expensive medical bills to treat breast cancer, the 38-year-old nurse from Heilongjiang in northern China is struggling to repay her mortgage and relies on financial support from her wider family to pay for her healthcare.

To cut household costs, she waits until the local food market is about to close before buying because that is when remaining fresh produce is sold at a discount.

"People say that when it's about to close is the time that produce is cheapest," said Li. "So now I go at that time."

Li's experience show's the vulnerability of Chinese consumers, who are taking on record amounts of debt even as income growth slows, adding to the challenge for policymakers of preventing the economy from slowing too quickly.

China's household debt as a proportion of GDP has more than doubled to 40.7 percent in less than 10 years. While developed nations have higher rates of household debt, Chinese families are much more leveraged because income is lower and so proportionately the costs of social welfare from pensions to healthcare are much higher.

At the end of 2014, the out-of-pocket health spend in China as a percentage of total expenditure was 32 percent, compared to 9.7 percent in Britain and 11 percent in the United States, World Health Organization data shows.

"Household debt leverage is very alarming, even though the aggregate amount is controllable," said Wan Zhe, chief economist at China National Gold Group Corporation, visiting researcher at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China.

"The first issue is that household debt has risen too quickly, the second is that it has risen too quickly as a proportion" of GDP and disposable income, said Wan.

Story continues

Underlining these concerns, authorities are trying to calm a property rally. In the latest move, regulators told banks to limit the issuance of home loans, the Shanghai Securities Journal reported on Thursday.

The balance of retail mortgages at the end of the third quarter hit 16.8 trillion yuan ($2.5 trillion), more than a third higher than a year earlier, China central bank data shows.

More broadly, consumer debt financed by Chinese banks has grown sharply, from 3.8 trillion yuan at the end of 2007 to 17.4 trillion yuan at the end of last year, a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent, Fitch Ratings said in a report.

But the growth in income has been much more modest, rising 6.3 percent in January to September compared with the year-earlier period, the weakest pace since 2013 when the National Bureau of Statistics first started issuing the data.

"The rapid growth in outstanding (consumer) loan balances has been accompanied by an increase in NPLs (non-performing loans) across all segments of consumer debt," the Fitch report said.

China's central bank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

MUM WON'T FORECLOSE

Like a typical borrower, half of Li's 2,800 yuan in monthly earnings cover her mortgage payments, with 200,000 yuan outstanding.

That proportion rises to 70 percent though in first-tier cities, where prices have been rising the fastest, said Yan Yuejin, director of E-House China R&D Institute.

But the cost of treatment for breast cancer has dramatically changed Li's financial position. Since February last year, she has spent around 132,000 yuan on the treatment and has to continue with medication for three years at 6,000 yuan a month just for drugs. Most of the medical bills are paid by her family.

"Things have changed, I didn't used to think money was that important," said Li. "Before, if there was 1 yuan on the ground I wouldn't pick it up, now even if there is 1 fen I will pick it up," she added. There are 100 fen in one yuan.

Public health insurance reaches nearly all of China's 1.4 billion people, but its coverage is basic, leaving patients liable for about half of total healthcare spending. That proportion rises further for serious or chronic diseases such as cancer.

Some economists argue that China's gross savings rate of 49 percent of GDP at the end of 2014 suggests little risk to the economy from the buildup in household debt.

But Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Guanghua School of Management Peking University, said there are hidden problems. Down payments for new homes, which are relatively high in China, are often borrowed from family members.

"We can't simply assume there isn't any debt there, or that it's family debt and mom is never going to foreclose on you so it's OK," said Pettis.

Highly indebted households also cut their spending more in a downturn, which can make a slowdown worse, economists say.

HOME SWEET HOME

Beijing wants consumption to help drive future economic growth as it turns away from its traditional manufacturing base.

Retail spending growth is easing however. It declined to 10.4 percent for January to October this year from over 13 percent in 2013, government data shows. Per capita consumption growth has also fallen to its weakest pace since the data was first published in 2013.

The IMF expects China's GDP growth to slow next year to 6.2 percent, its slowest pace since 1990.

To be sure, other commentators argue household debt has room to expand without representing a risk to the economy. They say the main debt worry in China is the rise in corporate debt, not household borrowing.

Wang Shengbang, an official from China's banking regulator said in June that household debt "leverage is pretty low," whether compared to international standards or other fundamental markets. ($1=6.76 yuan)

(Additional reporting by Sue-lin Wong, Yawen Chen and Elias Glenn in BEIJING, and Clare Jim in HONG KONG; Editing by Neil Fullick) )
By Sue-Lin Wong BEIJING (Reuters) - China will never allow any part of its territory to break off, President Xi Jinping said on Friday, within a week of reining in Hong Kong independence moves and ignoring Taiwan's urging to heed democratic aspirations in the Asian financial hub. Xi made the comments at an event in Beijing's Great Hall of the People to mark 150 years since the birth of Sun Yat-Sen, China's latest bid to exploit the legacy of a man many view as the founder of the modern nation. "We will never allow any person, any group, any political party, at any time, in any way, to split from China any part of its territory," said Xi, who is also general secretary of the ruling Communist Party. "To uphold our national sovereignty and territorial integrity, to never let our country split again and to never let history repeat itself - these are our solemn promises to our people and to our history." China's parliament on Monday passed a ruling effectively barring two elected Hong Kong pro-independence politicians from taking office, Beijing's most direct intervention in the territory's affairs since the 1997 handover. Recalling Sun Yat-Sen's belief in a united nation, Xi urged people in China and Taiwan, as well as ethnic Chinese around the world, to oppose independence for Taiwan. "Any Taiwanese political party, organization or individual  regardless of what they have advocated for in the past  as long as they recognize the "1992 consensus," as long as they recognize the mainland and Taiwan are one China, we are willing to associate with them," Xi added. The "1992 consensus", agreed with Taiwan's previous China-friendly Nationalist government, acknowledges Taiwan and China are part of a single China, but allows both sides to interpret who is the ruler. Beijing has halted official communication with self-ruled Taiwan because the government of President Tsai Ing-wen, the leader of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), refuses to acknowledge this "one China" principle. In the Chinese capital this month, Xi met Hung Hsiu-chu, the chief of Taiwan's opposition Nationalists, who has said the party holds out the possibility of a peace pact with China. (This story has been refiled to correct translation of quote in third paragraph) (Reporting by Sue-Lin Wong; Additional reporting by J.R. Wu in Taipei; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
Clarence M. Ditlow, III, one of the most influential and effective consumer activists of the past five decades, died Thursday in Washington, D.C., of colon cancer. He was 72.

Ditlow was the longtime executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a watchdog group founded in 1970 by Ralph Nader and Consumers Union, now the policy and mobilization arm of Consumer Reports. He leaves behind an astonishing legacy of work on safety defects that led to the eventual recall of tens of millions of vehicles.

He was at the center of every major automotive safety controversy dating back to the exploding gas tanks of the Ford Pinto during the disco era, and as recently as this summer remained a strong voice for how to regulate autonomous technology in vehicles.

He was the nightmare of the misbehaving auto industry and the dream of safety-conscious motorists, Nader said of Ditlow in an interview with the New York Times in October. He was also honest, ethical, and self-effacing.

Mentored early in his career by Nader, Ditlow was never afraid to challenge the status quo and often refused to back down until he got results. He could be equally hard on automakers and regulators charged with governing the industry.

"He was one of the great consumer advocates in America, said Joan Claybrook, a former Consumers Union board member and president emeritus of Public Citizen. "I cant think of a single example of a time he thought there was a problem that he didnt prove he was right and force action on it.

Clarence Ditlow had a hand in exposing nearly every major case of automotive malfeasance since Richard Nixon inhabited the White House.

Heres a partial list: exploding Ford Pintos, failing Firestone 500 tires, GMs fire-prone C-K pickups, Ford Explorers that rolled over after their Firestone tires lost their treads, Toyotas unintended acceleration, GMs faulty ignition switch, and Takatas exploding airbags.

And thanks mainly to Ditlow, so-called lemon laws have been adopted throughout the country that enable consumers of cars and other goods to be compensated when products fail to meet basic standards of quality and performance.

Story continues

Americans are driving in cars that are safer thanks to Clarence, and his voice as an advocate for safety wont easily be replaced, said Mark Rosekind, director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Clarence was relentless in his pursuits, and whether he was taking the fight to the auto industry, or prodding NHTSA when he felt we werent moving fast enough, no one could ever doubt his heartfelt motivation.

Ditlow began working with Nader and Claybrook in 1971 soon after Nader established a network of consumer groups, including the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (or PIRG).

He was an engineer by training with a law degree from Georgetown University, and had recently finished a masters degree in environmental law at Harvard when he became one of the first people hired to carry on the movement Nader started with the book, Unsafe at Any Speed.

In it, Nader called out General Motors for marketing a two-door coupe, the Chevrolet Corvair, that was prone to roll over. Nader went on to show how many common features of automotive design at the time were linked to predictable, preventable traffic deaths.



Consumers Union and Nader joined forces to establish the Center for Auto Safetywith a mission to protect the public from potentially fatal design flaws.

Claybrook needed someone with technical expertise to work with her at PIRG, and says thats why Ditlow first appealed to her. But early on, he was shy and quiet and quite unlike many of the other noisy activists that became known as Naders Raiders.

Still, Claybrook was convinced he could help the cause, and remembers persuading Nader to hire him, in part, because Ditlow had been a competitive wrestler. Anyone whos been a wrestler has been a bulldog, she told Nader.

"Boy, was I right, she told Consumer Reports.

Ditlow soon proved to be the perfect complement to Claybrooks louder and more public-facing personabacking up sometimes difficult-to-believe allegations with meticulously compiled technical documentation.

"When you look at his 40 years of contributions, he has a legacy that will be hard for anyone to match, said Jackie Gillan, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety in Washington, D.C.

Ditlow began directing the Center in 1974 and in 1978 replaced Nader on Consumer Unions board of directors, where he served until 2011.

He will be sorely missed by the entire consumer community, said Laura MacCleery, current vice president of consumer policy and mobilization for Consumer Reports.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Ditlow developed a reputation for being a tireless investigator of public documents and hidden clues. He read everything and if something sounded strange to him, he dug deeper and asked more questions.

He used his engineers brain to discover safety defects that were often hiding in plain sight in automaker reports to NHTSA, or buried in consumer complaints to the agencys hotline. He went over crash reports in federal databases. He used his legal skills to mine lawsuits for admissions from company executives about what they knew was happening behind the scenes.



As a particular defect came into focus, Ditlow and the Center built case files thousands of pages long. Theyre available to the public to this day on the Centers website, and the list reads like a whos who of automotive controversies: Ford transmissions that could slip from park to reverse in the 1970s; GM brakes that could lock up in the 80s; fuel-tank fires in pickup trucks in the 90s; SUV rollovers in the 2000s; and sudden-unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles in 2010.



Ditlows ability to dig and connect the dots, and explain what was going on in a clear, simple way made him a potent foe of the auto industry.

Initially, many tips came from the thousands of letters sent to Nader from consumers claiming their cars were defective. Eventually, the Center got its own members writing in. He also had a network of engineers, lawyers, and professors who spotted automaker wrongdoing and alerted him.



"He could tell when people were cheating, Claybrook said.



He may not have been as comfortable in front of Congress or a television camera as in the warren-like offices of the Center, but Ditlow did more than his share of public and media appearances. He made sure reporters understood the documents and learned how to deliver the publishable quote.

He had a great ability to communicate, said Jack Gillis, author of the Car Book, an annual guide to fuel economy and safety information published by the Center for Auto Safety.



"It was because he was a brilliant person, Gillis said. "Taking complex ideas and putting them into simple terms is very difficult. He could take very tough technical issues, or policy, or regulations, and boil them down into two or three sentences."

The media crush that surrounds congressional hearings such as those on the Ford-Firestone rollovers, the GM ignition-switch deaths, or exploding Takata airbags can be intense. But Jack Gillis says those were the times Ditlow was the happiest, because his work was making a difference.

"It was what he lived for, Gillis said. "Theres no question he has been the leader on auto safety in the consumer movement, he added. "There are relatively few people who have improved the public health of Americans more than Clarence Ditlow."

Such work didnt endear him to automakers or regulatory agencies. He complained when documents were missing from the public record, and pushed regulators with petitions for more rulemaking and by calling for defect investigations. He filed a continuous stream of lawsuits to make sure government records on auto defects became public information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Those same officials conceded that even though he was one of the most difficult people they had to deal with, Ditlow helped them do their jobs. He pointed out things that the agency had missed.

One reason Ditlow was effective is that he focused on defects that exposed larger problems, said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research and Strategies, a public-interest legal research firm in Rehoboth, Mass. Ditlows biggest wins were cases that involved unsafe vehicles that complied with U.S. safety laws even though their occupants were getting killed, Kane said.

"Clarence had a penchant for these large issues that pushed the envelope, particularly those that showed the weakness of the regulatory agencies, Kane said.

Ditlow used those examples to show how NHTSAs regulations were out of date, then testified on Capitol Hill to make sure lawmakers knew. He also tirelessly fought with NHTSA to make automaker data available to the public.

One of his campaigns was about the technical service bulletins car companies send to dealers. Those alerts can often flag safety defects that have yet to be identified with a formal recall. The companies are required by law to send copies to NHTSA but not the wider public. After years of Ditlow, prodding, the reports are now searchable on the agencys website.

"We shouldnt have these kinds of government secrets, Kane said. "Clarence knew that. These were small, behind-the-scenes maneuvers, but the outcome has been a significant benefit for the public.



Whomever succeeds Ditlow at the Center for Auto Safety will have a strong blueprint to follow, Gillis said.



"I dont know what Im going to do without him, Gillis said. "My only hope is theres another Clarence Ditlow out there, someone dedicated to whats right and willing to follow the leads wherever they might go.







More from Consumer Reports:

Top pick tires for 2016

Best used cars for $25,000 and less

7 best mattresses for couples



Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright  2006-2016 Consumers Union of U.S.
The MS Dhoni actor will be in the Capital for literary fest, Sahitya Aaj Tak that will be a confluence eminent writers, thinkers and literary figures.

By India Today Web Desk: Veteran actor Anupam Kher, who runs his own acting school, will perform his popular monologue, Kuchhh Bhi Ho Sakta Hai,at Sahitya Aaj Tak literature festival to be held in the Capital this weekend.

Kher, who has attended several literary festivals as an author feels this would be the first time he would perform as an actor at a literature festival.

advertisement

Also Read: Glad my children aren't my shadows, says Javed Akhtar ahead of Sahitya Aaj Tak

"This is the first time I think that a literature festival has a performance. It's an autobiography on stage. Around 13 years back, someone had asked me to write my autobiography. So I had recorded seven to eight hours of my life. When I heard them, I thought to myself that I should perform," Kher was quoted as telling IANS.

Also Read: Here's who inspired Anupam Kher's commendable weight-loss

Titled Kuchh Bhi Ho Sakta Hai--a phrase the MS Dhoni actor is a firm believer of--is a one hour, 15 minutes long play.

The first edition of Sahitya Aaj Tak's will be held on November 12-13 at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi and will host eminent public figures like Javed Akhtar, Ashutosh Rana, Prasoon Joshi, Ashok Vajpeyi, Piyush Mishra, Anurag Kashyap and Devdutt Pattanaik.





--- ENDS ---
CHICAGO, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Chicago Mercantile Exchange live cattle futures rose for a fourth day in a row on Friday, aided by expected cash prices later in the afternoon, said traders.

* They said periodic profit-taking ahead of the weekend capped market advances.

* A small number of cattle and hog processing plants will be closed for Friday's U.S. Veterans Day holiday.

* At 09:37 a.m. CST (1537 GMT) December was up 0.600 cent per pound to 105.100 cents, and February was up 0.250 cent to 105.750 cents.

* Packer bids for slaughter-ready, or cash, cattle in the U.S. Plains were $101 to $102 per cwt versus up to $108 asking prices, said feedlot sources. Last week, U.S. Plains cattle moved at $102 to $105.

* Investors are anticipating a $104 to $105 per cwt cash trade based on still healthy packer profits, Wednesday's $103 to $104.25 per cwt Fed Cattle Exchange sales and potential pre-winter holiday beef demand rebound.

* Friday is the last of five days in which funds in CME's livestock markets that track the Standard & Poor's Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (S&PGSCI) periodically sell, or "roll," December long positions mainly into February.

FEEDER CATTLE - November, which will expire on Nov. 17, was up 0.475 cent per pound to 125.675 cents. Most actively-traded January was up 0.575 cent to 120.900 cents.

* CME feeder cattle futures drew strength from live cattle market advances.

LEAN HOGS - December was up 0.725 cent per pound to 48.100 cents, and February was 0.500 cent higher at 55.075 cents.

* Follow-through buying and Thursday's firmer cash and wholesale pork values boosted CME lean hogs, said traders.

* Investors were encouraged by the cash and wholesale price upswing in the face of abundant seasonal supplies.

* "You may have had some strong retail ham buying going into the winter holidays, an analyst said.

* He added that decent U.S. pork exports, and consumers grilling due to unseasonably warm weather in parts of the country, contributed to surprisingly good wholesale pork values.

Story continues

* From Monday to Thursday, packers processed 1.771 million hogs, 76,000 more than a year ago during the same period, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.

* Analysts and Midwest hog merchants forecast Saturday's slaughter at roughly 270,000 head, down from USDA's estimated 314,000-head kill last week.

(Reporting by Theopolis Waters in Chicago)
While most people will never know the overwhelming feeling of seeing color for the first time, this high school student conveys the emotion well.

Read: Colorblind Brothers Burst Into Tears as They See Color for the First Time: 'It's So Bright'

Stevie Kaczor, a colorblind student at Alexandria High School in Minnesota, was brought to tears after seeing the natural hues that she had never seen before.

"It's so pink," she could be heard screaming in a video shot by classmate, Sean Rice, as a green balloon was tossed in the air. "This is green? Is this what trees look like? They're all so pretty."

Her classmates watched in awe as she reveled in the colors around the classroom, then ventured outside to gaze at plants.

The 17-year-old told InsideEdition.com she was diagnosed as colorblind when she was 12.

"All the colors blended in together," Kaczor told InsideEdition.com.

She had heard about EnChroma glasses that help with colorblindness, and planned to purchase a pair of her own after graduation, when she could get a job and pay for them herself.

But her art teacher had something else in mind.

"She's in AP studio art class," her teacher Nathan Knick said. "Not being able to see color puts a damper on it."

Without Kaczor knowing, Knick took up a collection with her classmates for money to purchase the glasses for her.

Read: Gender Reveal Party Goes Hilariously Wrong as Box Contains Medley of Rainbow Balloons

The class wound up with $100, and a charitable program at the school donated the rest.

Kaczor was given the glasses during class and taken outside, where the results were astounding.

"I live in a community where everyone is caring," Kaczor said. "It made me feel really special and I wanted to help everyone else too."

Watch: 2-Year-Old Girl Sees and Hears Her Mom for the First Time After Miracle Surgery

Related Articles:
CNN announced this afternoon, a few hours after Corey Lewandowski was seen arriving at Trump Tower, that the president-elects former campaign chief no longer serves as the cable news networks paid Trump surrogate.

CNN said Lewandowski resigned, effective immediately, because, see above.

Lewandowski paid a visit to Trump Tower this morning as the new administration is taking shape. Team Trump already has announced Chris Christies demotion from chief of the transition efforts, giving that title instead to Veep-elect Mike Pence.

Lewandowski was the Trump campaigns original manager but got fired in June, after he grabbed a female reporter as she tried to buttonhole the former Apprentice star during a campaign rally. CNN hired him days later as a commentator, though he was bound by a nondisclosure agreement and received severance payments from the Trump campaign.

At the time it was presumed CNN never would put Lewandowski in a roundtable of talking heads with CNN contributors S.E. Cupp or Mary Katherine Hamm,. Thats because they were among the female journalists/TV commentators who had signed a petition demanding Trump sack Lewandowski after the reporter-grabbing incident then called her delusional when she went public with her account, adding I never touched you. As a matter of fact I have never even met you. Except video emerged showing otherwise during the March campaign event.

Back then, CNN had reported its future commentator subsequently was arrested and charged in Jupiter, FL, with simple battery, after turning himself in on the misdemeanor charge. In April, the Palm Beach County Florida State Attorney announced the state would not charge him with a crime.

Among Lewandowskis accomplishments, FNC also reported he threatened Megyn Kelly back in January, when his boss was unhappy that she was going to co-moderate Fox News next GOP debate, as she had the first.

On the day Lewandowski was escorted from Trump Tower and relieved of his campaign duties, CNN reminisced about the trail of bizarre moments for which it would remember him, including his having threatened to revoke credentials from reporters who didnt follow his orders.

Story continues

Late-night comics had a field day when CNN turned around and hired him. Stephen Colbert, for instance, tweeted, Corey, does this mean you wont be taking that position at the National Organization for Women?

Lewandowskis slam-bang finish at CNN went like this:

Related stories

Alec Baldwin: NBC Execs "Kill" Any 'SNL' Attempt "To Tell People Who To Vote For"

President-Elect Donald Trump's 1st TV Interview Surges '60 Minutes' Ratings, Seahawks Win Scores For 'Sunday Night Football'

Donald Trump's Steve Bannon Appointment Dominates Early Morning News Cycle
As President Obama prepares to leave office, his mission to stabilize and reconstruct Afghanistan is failing. Violence has surged as troops have been drawn down. This years spring offensive brought Taliban attacks in major cities. The outgoing head of the International Red Cross said that Afghanistan now faces the worst humanitarian crisis since the beginning of the fifteen-year-long war. The U.S. is quietly preparing for a prolonged military presence.

This unfortunate situation exists despite the roughly $115 billion the United States has appropriated since 2002 for Afghanistans relief and reconstruction  or perhaps because of it. Thats the conclusion of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a government watchdog tasked with providing independent oversight of how those funds were managed. In its recently released lessons learned report, SIGAR argues that the U.S. elevated short-term security goals over fighting corruption while simultaneously injecting massive amounts of aid into the Afghan economy with few controls. This caused a dramatic spike in corruption that undermined the legitimacy of both the Afghan government and the U.S. effort. SIGAR goes on to recommend that the U.S. government make anticorruption a top priority in its work abroad, and includes specific suggestions of how it can do so. But its not clear that this is the right lesson to take away from Afghanistan, much less that this lesson should be applied globally.

Corruption has topped the news about Afghanistan for the last fifteen years. Even as aid poured in, shrink-wrapped pallets of U.S. dollars and gold bars were leaving the country by air. In 2010, Kabul Bank collapsed after nearly one billion dollars disappeared through a pyramid scheme and dubious investments such as the $160 million spent on luxury villas in Dubai for the banks shareholders. So theres little dispute that Afghanistan is, as David Cameron put it, fantastically corrupt. Whats less well understood is why the corruption is so pervasive  and what should be done about it.

Story continues

One way to understand corruption is as the result of criminal acts committed by individuals. This invites a straightforward response: more laws, stiffer penalties, and better enforcement. While these approaches might help, the SIGAR report correctly recognizes that in Afghanistan and similar countries, the problem is not a few bad apples but an entire system of behavior. In a 2011 USAID survey, 60 percent of Afghans reported being asked to pay a bribe in the past year.

A deeper analysis of corruption looks to impoverished and dysfunctional government institutions that are unable to manage money or personnel, pay salaries, or deliver services. In response, international donors seek to modernize government procedures, train personnel, build infrastructure, and purchase equipment. As in so many other countries, however, the problem of corruption in Afghanistan goes even deeper. The government holds onto power not despite the corruption but because of it, making the problem political rather than technical. The government hands out jobs, contracts, and other benefits to its key supporters, who in turn pass them on to their friends, family members, dependents, and political allies. Government jobs are valued beyond their meager salaries as opportunities to divert assets, collect bribes, or sell decision-making authority.

This is why Afghanistans former president, Hamid Karzai, told the New York Times that he used C.I.A. money to cover rent, hospital bills, and scholarships for government officials and members of the presidential guard  and described this as nothing unusual. In this setting, technocratic reforms alone are unlikely to work because, as the SIGAR report notes, they require the cooperation and political will of Afghan elites whose power relied on the very structures [the] anticorruption efforts sought to dismantle.

American support didnt introduce corruption to Afghanistan, but there seems to be a consensus that it made things worse. SIGAR faults the U.S. for injecting more money into the Afghan government than it could handle. When such governments receive a windfall, patronage networks expand, norms that once constrained behavior disappear, the scale of bribery increases, and everyone scrambles more vigorously than ever for access to government offices that have suddenly become even more valuable.

The tough question is what the United States should do when, in the words of Karzais National Security Advisor, corruption is the system of governance. The answer to this question depends critically on beliefs about what is possible that are rarely articulated, much less supported or defended.

SIGARs answer, in short, is that the United States should try harder  not just in Afghanistan, but everywhere. Its report recommends that the U.S. make anticorruption a top national security priority and pursue it consistently. It faults the U.S. for turning a blind eye to complaints and for mistakenly believing that fighting corruption more forcefully would require making compromises on other goals. And it recommends that, in analogous situations, the United States should press for anticorruption reforms consistently at the highest levels.

SIGAR is spot on when it identifies the political heart of systemic corruption. But attacking the basis of a governments power is a tricky business. Such an approach only makes sense if theres a better alternative. The United States goal in Afghanistan has been to build a liberal democracy that holds power by winning the peoples support through the effective provision of public goods and services. Implicit in this project, and therefore in SIGARs understanding of corruption, is the idea that this type of government is available at any time to anyone  that it has no prerequisites and only requires people to change their behavior.

But there is simply no evidence that this kind of government is an option for all countries at all times. Governments as poor as Afghanistans cant hold power this way. For one thing, they lack the revenue to provide public goods and services to most people. As one of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan is an extreme case. In 2016, the governments domestic revenues amounted to less than $60 per person per year (compared to an estimated $20,000 per person for the United States).

Where governments cant rely on support that comes from providing public services, they must rely on other means of holding onto power, such as distributing private goodies to supporters. They may be unable to govern parts of their territories at all. When they cant pay regular and adequate salaries, they tacitly allow civil servants to collect their own. Under the legal systems that they have copied from (or had imposed on them by) much richer countries, this is usually a criminal act. But a 2012 United Nations survey found that 68 percent of Afghans thought it was appropriate for government officials to ask for small bribes to top up their salaries.

If there is such tension between the laws and the governments behavior, maybe the laws should change. No one is a champion of patronage, but if poor governments must rely on it to govern, perhaps we should ask what the best possible patronage system would look like. A better patronage system would be legal and transparent, would not create very large concentrations of wealth or systematically exclude particular groups, and would deliver some critical services. Similarly, when a government cant pay adequate salaries, perhaps some public service providers should be allowed to collect fees legally, like lawyers and notaries. If the government is unable to provide a service at all, perhaps the service should be handed over entirely to the private sector. The divide between public and private is a matter of policy. Whats needed are workable rules, limits, and transparency.

The options of the worlds poorest governments for holding power are limited. Instead of attempting to enforce current anticorruption standards more vigorously and more widely, perhaps the U.S. effort should focus on helping Afghanistan and other poor countries have the very best government that they can, given their constraints. Further changes can come as the governments options widen. In the meantime, having an impossible standard is the same as having no standard at all.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of the School of Advanced Military Studies, the U.S. Army, or the United States government.

Photo credit: WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images
Creditors of South Korea's STX Offshore and Shipbuilding on Friday narrowly approved a debt restructuring plan, avoiding the imminent liquidation of what was once the country's fourth largest shipbuilder.

The agreement came a week after the bankruptcy court handling the case said it had received bids from four foreign shipbuilders for the troubled shipyard and its profitable French unit, which makes cruise ships.

Before voting on the restructuring plan, creditors heard a statement from a court-appointed accountant who concluded that STX would be able to raise a total of 1.0 trillion won ($860 million) by 2026 through business activities, the sale of non-essential assets and fresh loans.

"The rehabilitation plan is deemed feasible," the statement said.

The vote was extremely close, with creditors holding 66.9 percent of STX's non-collateralised debt approving the plan -- just above the required two-thirds ceiling.

If the plan had been rejected, the company would have been liquidated.

STX sought a court-led restructuring in May after struggling for years with mounting losses caused by mismanagement and a slump in global demand.

Creditor banks have stumped up billions of dollars to keep the company afloat, but its total debts still stand at around 7.0 trillion won.

Four foreign companies have submitted bids to buy STX. The court has declined to identify them, but South Korean media reports named three as Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri, Dutch group Damen and French state-controlled naval shipbuilder DCNS.

The court said last month that buyers could bid to purchase STX Offshore and the French unit separately or as a package.

In 2008, STX bought a 66.6 percent stake in a huge naval shipyard in the western French port of Saint-Nazaire, later named STX France and currently the company's only profitable unit.

The French state holds a 33.3 percent share in STX France and is extremely concerned about the future of the shipyard, which is a big local employer with a healthy order book for large cruise liners.
Gunmen abducted at least five crewmen of a Vietnamese cargo vessel in southern Philippine waters on Friday, authorities said, an area where Islamic militants are on a kidnapping-for-ransom spree.

The attack brings to at least eight the number of people abducted from vessels in the region over the past week, including an elderly German sailor, raising fears authorities are unable to control the worsening piracy problem.

The MV Royal 16 was sailing less than 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Basilan island, a stronghold of Abu Sayyaf militants, when it was attacked on Friday morning.

Two crew members, one of whom was wounded, escaped and were rescued by a local cargo ship in the area, authorities added.

"Sea and naval assets (were) already deployed to search and rescue the said kidnap victims," said regional military spokesman Filemon Tan.

The nationalities of the five crewmen and the identity of the kidnappers were still unknown.

In recent months, the Abu Sayyaf has been accused of kidnapping dozens of Indonesian and Malaysian sailors in waters off the southern Philippines.

On the weekend an Abu Sayyaf commander claimed responsibility for abducting a 70-year-old German sailor and murdering his wife.

In what maritime experts described as a landmark incident, the captain of a South Korean cargo ship and a Filipino crewman were abducted off their vessel, the first such attack on large merchant vessel.

Abu Sayyaf militants this year beheaded two Canadian hostages after demands for millions of dollars were not met. Most of the Indonesian and Malaysian sailors were released after ransoms were reportedly paid.

However two more Indonesian sailors were abducted on November 5.

The Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of militants formed in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, and has earned millions of dollars from kidnappings-for-ransom.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has launched a military offensive to "destroy" the Abu Sayyaf.

Story continues

But the militants have defied more than a decade of US-backed similar offensives, surviving in their mountainous and jungle-clad southern island strongholds where they have support from local Muslim communities.

The Abu Sayyaf is not the only threat with those near-lawless islands home to other armed gangs and people whose families have been involved in piracy for generations, according to security analysts.

The Philippines has agreed to allow Malaysian and Indonesian maritime forces to pursue kidnappers into its waters to contain the threat, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Thursday.
On Friday, the Income Tax department reached the house and offices of producers Shobhu Yarlagadda and Prasad Devineni, who bankrolled the blockbuster Baahubali: The Beginning.

By Ashish Pandey: Panic grips in Tollywood as sleuth of Income Tax knocked the doors of producers Shobu Yarlagadda and Prasad Devineni, who bankrolled the blockbuster film Baahubali.

On Friday, the Income Tax department officials raided the office and the residence of Shobu Yarlagadda and Prasad Devineni.



ALSO READ: Vedalam remake- Pawan Kalyan's next to have music by Thaman



ALSO READ: Shruti Haasan receives death threat, lodges police complaint in Chennai

advertisement

Speaking to India Today, Telugu producer and director Tammareddy Bharadwaja condemned the move and said that the Income Tax officials were victimisng the producer and that not a single producer from the industry had involved in illegal practices. He also said that the producers maintained proper documentation.



Directed by SS Rajamouli, Baahubali: The Beginning, which starred Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty and Tamannaah was highly successful and grossed over Rs 600 crore worldwide.

Meanwhile, the team is currently wrapping up the shoot of the much-anticipated sequel Baahubali: The Conclusion. The makers of the film recently unveiled the first look posters, which has piqued the curiosity quotient.

Baahubali: The Conclusion is slated to hit the screens on April 28, 2017.

--- ENDS ---
By Tom Perry and Laila Bassam BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies hope to benefit from Donald Trumps election win, believing it has saved them from the risks of an interventionist Clinton administration. Trump's win may have already shifted the course of the Russian-backed military campaign in Aleppo. A senior pro-Assad official told Reuters that plans to capture the rebel-held east by January were shaped around an assumption Clinton would win. The confidence in Damascus will have been justified if some of Trumps comments on Syria crystallize into policy, though there are questions over how far he will follow through on suggestions such as cooperating with Russia - President Bashar al-Assad's most powerful military ally - against Islamic State. One complicating factor could be Trump's tough stance on Iran, Assad's other main military backer. Trump has threatened to rip up the nuclear deal with Iran and heaped criticism on the sanctions relief it brought. Long-standing Republican aversion to Assad may also block any big policy shift, analysts say. Yet Trump has struck a different tone to current U.S. policy on some aspects of the multi-sided Syrian conflict, where the United States with allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia has backed some of the insurgents who have been fighting to topple Assad for more than five years. Trump has questioned the wisdom of backing rebels, played down the U.S. goal of getting Assad to leave power, and noted that while he didn't like him, "Assad is killing ISIS" with Iran and Russia. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State. "This is very comforting for us and our allies in Syria," said the senior official in the military alliance fighting in support of Assad, who is backed by the Russian air force, Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Lebanon's Hezbollah, and other militias. "The wave is currently with us, serving our interests, and we must benefit from it as fully as possible," said the official, who declined to be identified by nationality or affiliation so he could give a frank assessment. The war has shattered Syria into a patchwork of areas controlled by Assad's state, rebels battling to topple him, a powerful Kurdish militia, and the Islamic State group. It has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and created the world's worst refugee crisis. While Washington has provided significant support to the opposition, it has never matched the backing given to Assad by Russia and Iran. The rebels have seen U.S. policy as a betrayal of their revolt, with Washington focusing mostly on the fight against IS in the last two years. TRUMP "A NEW FACTOR" FOR DAMASCUS The ground war between Assad and the rebellion has this year focused largely on Aleppo, in the north west of Syria. The government is trying to recapture the rebel-held east of the city, the opposition's most important urban stronghold. Expectations of a Hillary Clinton win have been shaping military planning in the Aleppo campaign for some time, and the aim had been to conclude the campaign before the new U.S. president took office, the senior official said. While that is still the plan, the official said Trump's victory was a "new factor". Russian President Vladimir Putin would "certainly have a different approach towards the entire Syrian crisis based on what will happen with Trump". The Syrian newspaper al-Watan said most Syrians had felt "joy" at the result, and that many had spent the night up following the U.S. election. Trump had no designs in Syria, or the region, it declared. While some in the opposition expressed concern about Trump's statements and views on Putin, others still hold out hope for a U.S. policy that serves their cause. A senior rebel leader noted Trump's views on Iran were "positive" for the Syrian opposition. "Today, the role of the United States remains active and essential in Syria, regardless of whether he tries to distance himself from it, he won't be able to," said the rebel, who declined to be identified so he could talk freely. A build-up of Russian forces has fueled speculation of an imminent escalation in the campaign for eastern Aleppo, where hundreds of people were reported killed in air strikes before Russia declared a pause on Oct. 18. Rebels say they are well-entrenched in eastern Aleppo, a besieged area the United Nations says is home to 270,000 people. The rebels say it will be impossible for government forces to take the area. Russian firepower has in recent weeks focused on rebel-held areas to the west of the city, from where insurgents recently launched their own offensive on government-held parts of Aleppo. Rebel shelling has killed dozens of people in western Aleppo. Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster but the city had "basically" fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favor of rebels without knowing who they were. The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed program, and jihadists such as the group formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. Rather than focusing on fighting Assad, Islamic State, has prioritized the expansion and defense of its self-declared "caliphate" in eastern and central Syria. REPUBLICAN AVERSION TO ASSAD, PUTIN, IRAN Damascus had hoped that it could win back international legitimacy as part of the international fight against Islamic State, but the United States has rejected that idea, viewing Assad as part of the problem. The U.S.-led fight against Islamic State in Syria is fraught with complications. The United States has built its strategy around a powerful Kurdish militia that has carved out a self-governing areas across much of northern Syria. But its alliance with that militia, the YPG, has angered Turkey, a U.S. ally worried that Kurdish influence in northern Syria will fuel separatism among its own Kurdish minority. The YPG has in turn fought FSA rebels backed by Turkey, which is itself waging a major operation in northern Syria. One senior adviser who Trump will inherit is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine General Joseph Dunford. Dunford told Congress in September he thought it would not be a good idea for the military to share intelligence with Russia on Syria, something Moscow has long sought. Republican stalwarts who might join Trump's cabinet or become advisers are unlikely to want close relations with Putin. Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, forecast that Trump would start out by sounding out Russia on options for a political transition or agreement to end the war. Failing that, he may decide to leave western Syria as a Russian zone of influence, with the United States and its allies fighting Islamic State in the east. "I think it is going to be fluid. Remember a lot of the Republican foreign policy folks in Washington will probably go into this government, and they have very strong feelings about Iran and about the Assad regime, so I don't see a situation where the United States suddenly cozies up to Assad," he said. (Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy in Washington; Writing by Tom Perry; editing by Janet McBride)
Protests across the U.S. continued for a second day Thursday as thousands of people took to the streets in opposition to President-elect Donald Trump, voicing concern that his administration could do damage to hard-won progress on civil liberties.

The President-elect took to Twitter late Thursday to address the demonstrations in his first public comments on the unrest, tweeting: Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

However, some hours later the President-elect returned to Twitter with a more conciliatory message, praising the passion for our great country demonstrated by the small groups of protestors and concluding: We will all come together and be proud!

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

In Portland, Ore., police classified an anti-Trump protest there as a riot in an announcement on the departments verified Twitter account. Police said the move was prompted by extensive criminal and dangerous behavior.

Dozens were arrested, the Associated Press reports, as demonstrators broke windows of businesses and started a fire in a trash can. About 4,000 people had amassed in the city, according to AP, chanting slogans including, we reject the President-elect.

Story continues

Security was tight at two of the real estate moguls signature high-rise properties in Washington, D.C., and New York City, which became rallying points Wednesday night, in the wake of his surprise defeat of Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Protesters approached the site chanting slogans such as Love trumps hate, a phrase used by Clinton throughout her campaign.

About 100 mostly young protesters gathered at the White House, where Trump had just concluded his first meeting with outgoing President Barack Obama, and marched to the foot of his newly erected Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, Reuters reports. In New York City, where 15 protesters were arrested Wednesday night, CNN reported that about 5,000 protesters were joined by Lady Gaga at Trump Tower.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama supported the right of demonstrators to peacefully express themselves.

On Wednesday, tens of thousands took to the streets in more than a dozen major cities to rally against the President-elect, many chanting Not my President and denouncing what they say is racist and misogynistic rhetoric used by his campaign. Protests swelled in Seattle; Pittsburgh; Austin; Dallas; Philadelphia; Portland; Providence, R.I.; Atlanta; St. Paul, Minn., as well as several other cities around the nation and in other countries.

Trumps critics worry that remarks he has made about Muslims, women and minority groups could provoke intolerance. Many members of the Black Lives Matter movement, a non-violent activist group seeking greater equality in policing, viewed Trumps election as a major setback. His campaign has drawn support from the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups, though he has publicly denied any links to them. His campaign turned down an endorsement from a KKK newspaper earlier this month, stating that Trump denounces hate in any form.

In his acceptance speech on Wednesday, Trump vowed to be a President for all Americans, striking a more conciliatory tone than he had in the past. His surprising ascension to power exposed sensitive divisions among Americas diverse communities and a gulf between the media and the public.

This generation deserves better than Donald Trump, Lily Morton, a 17-year-old student at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C., told Reuters. The queer people, colored people, women, girls, everyone that is going to be affected by this, we need to protest to help them.

Wednesdays demonstrations were largely peaceful, though violence was reported in Oakland, Calif., where some demonstrators reportedly smashed store windows, started fires and clashed with police in riot gear. NBC said that Molotov cocktails were thrown at some 40 fires started. Three police officers were injured and 30 people arrested.

In Los Angeles, hundreds marched to U.S. Route 101 in an attempt to block the freeway.

Trump stunned Americans at home and abroad on Tuesday when he beat opponent Clinton following what has been considered the most polarized and fraught U.S. election in living memory. Clinton was widely expected to clinch the victory and become the first female President in U.S. history.

Throughout the campaign period, Trump came under fierce criticism for his hardline stance on immigration and remarks he has made about both women and minorities.
Welcome to The Hollywood Reporter's weekly DC TV Watch, a rundown of all things DC Comics on TV. Every Friday, we round up the major twists, epic fights, new mysteries and anything else that goes down on The CW's Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl and Fox's Gotham and what it all means. (Note: The Flash did not air a new episode this week.)

Supergirl

Alex comes out: The mystery of who is going to come out on a DC Comics show has finally been solved: Alex (Chyler Leigh) on Supergirl. Kara's sister realized through her growing friendship with Maggie (Floriana Lima) that she was gay, and she looked hopeful and excited about her new self-discovery while discussing it with her crush at the end of this week's episode. "Alex has put her hopes and dream on Maggie, which may or may not sit well with Maggie," says executive producer Andrew Kreisberg. "But watching them navigate Alex's coming out, their own ongoing romantic relationship will make up the emotional crux of the next few episodes."

Read more: DC TV Watch: 'Arrow' Finally Deals With "Olicity," 'Legends of Tomorrow' Creates New Duo

Gotham

Good cop breaks bad: The one person at the GCPD who has always been ethically sound, moral and all-around good has officially joined the dark side. Capt. Barnes (Michael Chiklis) finally succumbed to his blood poisoning in this week's episode, and with his rage amplified, he decided that everyone in Gotham was guilty and needed to be killed. It's interesting to note that when Barnes was first introduced on the Fox series, he was the pinnacle of law and order, and was supposed to be the mirror for Jim Gordon's (Ben McKenzie) darkness that was starting to come out. Now that Barnes has gone bad, does that mean Jim is going to tip the scales back to good? Gordon did hear Barnes' latest victim whisper his name, so he now has an idea that his boss might be connected to the gruesome killings he's investigating. Will Gordon be the one to take down Barnes?

Story continues

Read more: DC TV Watch: 'Gotham's' Gay Twist, Is 'Supergirl' Next?

Arrow

Prometheus unmasked? While speculation surrounding new villain Prometheus has been swirling ever since producers revealed he had a connection to something Oliver (Stephen Amell) did in season one, Arrow may have revealed who is behind the mask in this week's episode. After Thea (Will Holland) discovered that Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) had never stopped drinking, she decided to drag him to an AA meeting, but a quick cut scene at the end of the episode showed that he had one of Prometheus' throwing stars at home and a gash on his arm where Artemis (Madison McLaughlin) had cut Prometheus during a fight. Is there more than just alcoholism going on beneath Lance's surface? Is he finally getting revenge on Oliver for ruining his daughters' lives? Or, more likely, is this just a red herring meant to distract viewers from the real identity of Prometheus?

Read more: DC TV Watch: A 'Supergirl' Exit, 'Legends of Tomorrow' Battle and New Crossover Details

Legends of Tomorrow

Where's Rip? The former leader of the Legends team hasn't been name-dropped in quite some time after his disappearance, but Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill) is not gone for good. "That's going to be something that is always going on in the background, and in some cases the foreground, in the various episodes," says executive producer Marc Guggenheim of the search for Rip. "We don't want to change the mission statement from fixing aberrations to going to save Rip, because the bat's been taken out of their hand because they don't know how to find him. Even if they were to say priority number one was finding Rip, I don't know how they'd go about it given the nature of his disappearance." And "you will find out before the Legends do" about what happened to Rip.

What did you think of all the shocking twists, reveals and mysteries on the DC Comics shows this week? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Gotham airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on Fox; Supergirl airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on The CW; The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW; Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW; and Legends of Tomorrow airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
(Recasts lead, headline; adds details, background)

MANDAN, N.D., Nov 11 (Reuters) - A decision on whether the Dakota Access Pipeline will be allowed to be completed near sacred tribal lands in North Dakota will come in the next few days, possibly by Monday, a U.S. government spokeswoman said on Friday.

The statement by spokeswoman Amy Gaskill of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came as police again confronted protesters at a construction site on the controversial pipeline, which has drawn steady opposition from Native American and environmental activists since the summer.

Smoke was seen emanating from a large excavation vehicle near a site off Route 6 in rural North Dakota, and protesters had also climbed into other equipment, according to a Reuters witness. Two workers were seen leaving the scene.

The Dakota Access Pipeline, set to run from North Dakota to Illinois, was delayed in September so federal authorities could re-review permits. The line was planned to run under a federally owned water source near sacred tribal lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

The Obama administration intervened in September to temporarily halt construction under that source, Lake Oahe, so the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could review permitting.

The 1,172-mile (1,885 km) pipeline has been the source of heated protests from the Standing Rock Sioux and climate activists. The Obama administration had requested a voluntary halt to construction within 20 miles of the lake on each side.

Energy Transfer Partners, which owns the line, continued to build to the edge of the federal land where the lake is located.

The company said earlier this week said it was "mobilizing" drilling equipment to prepare to tunnel under the lake. That has angered protesters, who planned more protests in coming days. ETP was not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting By Stephanie Keith in Mandan, North Dakota; additional reporting by Liz Hampton in Houston; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Cynthia Osterman)
Def Leppard will document its 2016 North American summer tour with And There Will Be A Next Time -- Live From Detroit, a concert film recorded during the group's stop at the suburban DTE Energy Music Theatre. The set comes out Feb. 10, and you can check out an exclusive preview of the opening number "Let's Go" below.

Filming a show was a no-brainer, according to guitarist Phil Collen. "We were playing so amazing, and we were getting all these dates selling out, places we've played over the years many times but all of a sudden it was just, like, a frenzy almost, just an excitement," Collen tells Billboard. "We thought, 'What a great thing to do to capture that.' We obviously had Viva, Hysteria! (in 2013, but we haven't really had a live album/DVD really since (2003's) In The Round, In Your Face. It just felt like a good thing to do and a good time to do it."

The location was no random selection, either. "I think Detroit was one of the first ones that sold out, and it's always just an amazing audience in Detroit Rock City," Collen notes. "We've played that [venue] a zillion times and it's always killer. That was kind of a no-brainer, really. When that one sold out pretty early on it was like, 'Yeah, let's record it there.'"

There Will Be A Next Time features the group's entire 17-song set, including its medley of Hysteria and the late David Bowie's "Heroes" and a pair of songs from 2015's Def Leppard album. The set also comes with official music videos for "Let's Go," "Dangerous" and "Man Enough," as well as a lyric video for "Let's Go." On Nov. 15 the group will launch a PledgeMusic pre-order site to give fans early access to select tracks and exclusive merchandise.

Meanwhile, Def Leppard is gearing up for a busy 2017, with touring slated to start in April and cover much of the year. Next year also marks the 30th anniversary of the 12-times platinum Hysteria album, which Collen predicts will be commemorated in some fashion. "We do, like, seven songs off it anyway, but it'd be nice to throw the odd other one in, just another song, just give it a bit of celebration," he says. He also anticipates the group will be working on material for a new studio album to follow-up Def Leppard.

"We'll be getting some new music together during the tour, and after as well," says Collen, who will also be releasing a live album with his other band, Delta Deep, and is producing the next album for Def Lep tour partners Tesla. "I'm constantly writing. I think everyone in the band does. This last album, Def Leppard, we went in to record a single and then all of a sudden everyone has these amazing ideas. There were no rules and no business agenda or record company. It was the purest album we've ever done. I'm sure we're going to approach the next one the same way."

He adds that, "I think we've got a little bit of an Indian summer with the career here. There's a lot of theories on why it's happening; I think one of them is lots of bands are disappearing, and we have integrity. We never split up. We carry on. We try to improve, raise the bar, try to get better as players and stuff. And I think people notice. There's a warmth, and it just feels way more appreciative, the fact that at this level and at this age and everything that this stuff can happen. I feel that. It means a lot."
From Harper's BAZAAR

Pippa Middleton is set to marry her hedge-fund manager boyfriend James Matthews in 2017, and speculation around her wedding dress is already building.

While leading British designers Jenny Packham and Alexander McQueen are reportedly in the running to design Pippa's dress, the latest rumors suggest that Giles Deacon has got the all-important job.

The Central Saint Martins graduate and former London Fashion Week favorite was photographed leaving the bride-to-be's home in the capital this week. He was seen carrying a large black dress bag when he left the house, before Pippa and her mother Carole shortly followed.

Deacon, who has dressed Scarlett Johansson, Gwen Stefani and Cate Blanchett, is known for his statement-making gowns. He showed his first couture collection in Paris this July, which featured striking satin designs inspired by Faberge eggs.

Few details have been released about Pippa's upcoming nuptials since her engagement was announced in June, but the couple made it clear they won't be marrying until next year.

Matthews is thought to have proposed on a long weekend away to the Cotswolds after they re-kindled their romance in 2015. Shortly after the announcement, a statement released by Kensington Palace said the Duchess of Cambridge was "absolutely delighted." Sadly, due to British tradition, it's unlikely we'll get to see Kate return the favor as Pippa's bridesmaid.

"British tradition dictates that bridesmaids should always be unmarried and should be younger than the bride; indeed, many aristocratic British brides have children as their bridesmaids," writer Tom Sykes recently explained to The Daily Beast.

Still, there's no doubt who the spotlight will be on when Pippa says her vows.

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Related%20Story" customtitles="27%20%20Wedding%20Dress%20Ideas%20For%20Pippa%20Middleton" customimages="" content="gallery.7597"]

You Might Also Like
By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - The number of deaths from measles has fallen by 79 percent worldwide since 2000, thanks mainly to mass vaccination campaigns, but nearly 400 children still die from the disease every day, global health experts said on Thursday. In a report on global efforts to "make measles history", the United Nations children's fund, the World Health Organization and other bodies said fight was being hampered not by a lack of tools or knowledge, but a lack of political will to get every child immunised against the highly infectious disease. "Without this commitment, children will continue to die from a disease that is easy and cheap to prevent," said Robin Nandy, UNICEF's head of immunisation. Mass measles vaccination campaigns and a global increase in routine vaccine coverage saved an estimated 20.3 million young lives between 2000 and 2015, the report said. But coverage is patchy, and in some countries the majority of children are not vaccinated. In 2015, around 20 million babies missed their measles shots and an estimated 134,000 children died from the disease. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan account for half of the unvaccinated babies and 75 percent of the measles deaths. Measles is a highly contagious virus that spreads through direct contact and through the air. It is one of the biggest killers of children worldwide, but can be prevented with two doses of a widely available and inexpensive vaccine. According to the report, published by UNICEF, the WHO, the GAVI vaccines alliance and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, outbreaks of measles in various countries  caused by gaps in immunisation  are still a major problem. Seth Berkley, GAVI's chief executive, urged governments to recognise the threat of "one of the world's most deadly vaccine-preventable childhood killers" and act to contain it. "We need strong commitments from countries and partners to boost routine immunization coverage and to strengthen surveillance systems," he said. In 2015, large outbreaks were reported in Egypt, Ethiopia, Germany, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, the report said. The epidemics in Germany and Mongolia affected older people, highlighting the need to vaccinate young adults who missed out on measles jabs. Measles also tends to flare up during conflicts or humanitarian emergencies when vaccination schedules are disrupted. Last year, outbreaks were reported in Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan. (Editing by Richard Balmforth)
Bani Judge will not only manage to offend aam aadmi contestants, but also celebrities, after taking some controversial decisions.

By India Today Web Desk: All is not going well for Captain Bani. While she will take the oath to fulfill the responsibilities of a captain to the best of her ability, her decisions will not go down well with the housemates.

Here's what will happen in tonight's episode.

Girls get to choose their favourite dance partners

Bigg Boss 10 contestants will welcome composer Ankit Tiwari and the cast of Tum Bin 2--Neha Sharma, Aditiya Seal and Aashim Gulati. The Tum Bin 2 team will play an interesting game with the housemates wherein they will ask Lopamudra, Mona and Lokesh to choose a partner among the guys and shake a leg with them. Lopa will pick Gaurav, Mona will select Manu and Lokesh will choose Aditiya.

advertisement

Also read: BB10 Day 23: Is Bani Judge falling for Gaurav Chopra?



Bani J's captaincy style to be questioned

Bani will be seen taking the oath that states that she will fulfill all the responsibilities of a captain with utmost sincerity. She will also be seen delegating responsibilities to people. However, she will end up annoying aam aadmi contestants because of her decision to allot beds to Rahul, Gaurav, Karan and Rohan--all celebs. Manveer and Navin will get annoyed. Manveer will blame Bani for giving preference to her own people and not allotting beds to them.

Also read: BB10 contestant Gaurav Chopra nominates Bani J; both have an argument over it

Manu, Manveer to complain against Lokesh

Lokesh will step on the wet floor while Manu is mopping the floor. When Manu will ask her to step aside, Lokesh will say that she did not notice the wet floor, in a not so pleasant tone. Manu and Mona will complain about Lokesh to captain Bani. Lokesh will also manage to irritate Manveer by dipping her feet inside the pool while the latter is cleaning it. She will not mend her ways, despite Manveer telling her not to do it. Manveer will also complain to Bani about Lokesh's behaviour.

Captain Bani rewards Manu

Bigg Boss will ask captain Bani to reward one contestant and punish two. While the contestant winning the 'inam' will get to have a lavish lunch with Bani, the contestants getting the 'dand' will have to wash dirty dishes.

Bani will punish Lopa and Manveer and give the inam to Manu. Celebs will criticise Bani's decision by saying that Bani should have given the inaam to one of them and not Manu.

Bigg Boss airs Mon-Fri at 10:30pm and Sat-Sun at 9pm on Colors TV.



--- ENDS ---
Photo credit: SCREENSHOT: The Hollywood Reporter

From Seventeen

Zendaya and Tom Holland, stars of the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming movie, did a photo shoot with The Hollywood Reporter and it's every type of adorable. For starters, Zendaya looked totally glam in a bejeweled gown and sleek old-Hollywood curls. More important, she and her co-worker - Tomdaya, as I've dubbed this duo - have insane chemistry. "She's one of the most professional and hardworking people I've ever met in my life," Tom gushed of Z. Here are more of the best nuggets from their joint interview.

Zendaya had to audition for her role (but was cast instantly).

Tryouts don't get much better than Z's, said Tom. "We were at the screen test for Spider-Man and we did the first scene together, and I think the producers cast her, like, then," he recalled. "Before she even left the room they knew she was going to play her character." Um, if that's not a testament to Zendaya's talent, what is?!

Zendaya and Tom's first meeting was super awkward - for Tom.

"My first meeting with Zendaya was very embarrassing, actually, for me," Tom said. "It was just one of those moments where it just wasn't my smoothest moment." Not quite sure what Tom is getting at, but lucky for him, the details are just as vague for Zendaya. She claims to have no memory of the alleged awkward encounter.

Z insists her role is not "romantic," whatever that means.

There's an ongoing rumor that Z's character's name, Michelle, is actually a code name to keep the fact that she's playing Mary Jane Watson, a.k.a. Peter Parker's longtime love interest in the comic books, under wraps. If the rumors prove true, Z would be the first black actress to portray the iconic character.

Z neither confirmed nor denied the rumor, but she did clarify one detail: "My character is not romantic," Zendaya replied when asked if she would romance Peter on-screen. "My character is, like, very dry. Awkward. Intellectual. And because she's so smart, she just feels like she doesn't need to talk to people."

Story continues

Still, I can't help feeling that Z might be trying to throw fans off the scent. Since Spider-Man is going to be a franchise, the platonic status of Z's character could change in a future installment. Are you playing the long game, Z?!

Rumors about the film make Zendaya laugh.

During shooting, curious reporters were constantly trying to suss out the film's character details. "Whenever we were on set, one of us gets some random character name [on the call sheet] [Bloggers were] like, 'Oh, they must be so and so,'" Z said of the media speculation. "And we just crack up about it, because it's like, 'Whatever you want to think. You'll find out.' It's funny to watch the guessing game."

Z would love to see a black Mary Jane, even if she doesn't play her.

"People are going to react over anything," Z said when asked about the outrage from a faction of fans who freaked at the idea of Z portraying MJ because the character is traditionally white. "But of course there's going to be outrage over that because for some reason some people just aren't ready."

While the rest of us wait to see whether she is indeed playing that role, Z says she supports the idea wholeheartedly. "I'm like, 'I don't know what America you live in, but from what I see when I walk outside my streets of New York right now, I see lots of diversity and I see the real world and it's beautiful," she declared. "That's what should be reflected and that's what is reflected, so you're just going to have to get over it."

Check out your new fave movie duo in action below!

You Might Also Like
In her first election, 19-year-old Melissa Kelley voted for Hillary Clinton. Theres a million reasons why, she said. Donald Trump is just so anti-everything I believe in. Kelleys causes? A womans right to choose an abortion, Black Lives Matter, refugees, and the environment.

But dont take the American University sophomores comments as a sign the entire youth vote backed the former secretary of state and senator. A national exit poll suggests more young adults in 2016 than in 2012 supported a third-party candidate, did not vote for a presidential candidate, or specifically chose not to answer this poll question, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).

More From The Education Writers Association

Education Writers Association

Though voters ages 18-to-29 skewed liberal, more than a third did not: Fifty-five percent of young voters chose Clinton, down from the 60 percent that backed Obama in 2012, while 37 percent chose President-Elect Donald Trump.

CIRCLE researchers held a press call Wednesday to unpack some early data on the youth vote, which accounted for 19 percent of the ballots cast nationwidethe same percentage as in 2012. Young voters were a substantial voting bloc and they influenced the outcome, although a majority of them ended up on the losing side of the presidential race, said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, the CIRCLE director, from her office at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

Recommended: The U.S. Media Is Completely Unprepared to Cover a Trump Presidency

Among CIRCLEs key findings:

In Michigan, a state considered essential to Clintons blue wall of electoral support, the youth vote was the only age group to favor Clinton over Trumpwho ultimately won the state.

Trump and Clinton split the youth vote in Iowa, with each receiving 45 percent. Clinton was favored by the youngest voters (ages 18-24) while voters aged 25-29 strongly supported Trump.

In Nevada, where Clinton won by 26,000 votes, 18 to 29-year-olds favored her 52 to Trumps 35 percent, adding 35,000 votes to Clintons column.

Story continues

When reporting on these data, its important to remember that the youth vote encompasses a diverse group of voters, and generalizations about them should be avoided. An 18-year-old and a 29-year-old might have supported the same candidate but their reasons for doing so can beand often arevery different.

Young voters supported Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates more than any other age group did, Kawashima-Ginsberg said. However, they are a heterogeneous generation, and their choices differed greatly depending on their own race, their state, and other factors.

Thats no solace to Clintons young supporters. Im just really still in shock, Kelley said, and nervous for the future. While she admittedly reads left-leaning news sites and surrounds herself with friends who are also Democrats, she said she didnt realize that people in other parts of the country felt so differently.

Recommended: Its My Fault That Hillary Lost

One common trait of younger voters, according to CIRCLE researchers, is they tend to put greater stock in the causes they care about rather than the appeal of a particular candidates personality.

That was certainly the case for Cassandra Behler in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Behler, 19, works between 50 and 60 hours per week at two jobs and takes classes in literature and anthropology at Washtenaw Community Collegewhen she can afford it. While crafting lattes and washing dishes Tuesday afternoon at a local coffeehouse where shes a barista, Behler said she would be voting for Clinton, after having first supported Bernie Sanders. Trumps policy stances made him an impossible choice, she said.

This is about who do we want to be the face of our country.

I dont think the personalities of either candidate is appealing, Behler said. But (Clinton) is the most progressive candidate. Even when Trump says I want to make to make America great again he really means he wants to rewind time.

Behler added that she had tried to convince some of her friends not to follow through on plans to support a third-party candidate: Thats just a waste of a vote. Some of them didnt intend to vote at all, which disappointed her. National exit-polling data showed that 8 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds backed neither candidate on Tuesday.

This is about who do we want to be the face of our country, Behler said. I dont want that face to be Donald Trumps.

Recommended: The Lessons of Henry Kissinger

Her frustration was echoed by 18-year-old Ethan Aliste, a freshman at Santa Monica College, a community college near Los Angeles. Aliste researched the statewide ballot measures in addition to the candidates and considered himself fairly well prepared for his first trip to the polls. But he says some of his friends were more apathetic about the political stakes or claimed registering to vote was too difficult.

He tried cajoling them to register and vote by discussing the debates with them, he said. And frankly, they dont like either of the candidates either, so for them its a matter of Oh, Im not gonna vote, doesnt matter if I voted anyway, its not gonna count, Aliste said Tuesday in an interview at a polling place in the Palms neighborhood of L.A.

Other 18-year-olds spoke of a large concentration of friends who voted. Rami Mamita, an Eagle Scout who turned 18 yesterday, said in an interview that of the roughly 20 friends of his who were old enough to vote, 13 took part in the elections. Mamita, a senior at Santa Monica High School in California who wants to become a doctor, said taking AP Government helped him stay abreast of the news. Definitely a majority of what he knows about the election is because of this class; the teacher assigned weekly viewings of Meet the Press followed by a quiz and class discussion.

In his studies, he found some stark differences between this years presidential campaign and past ones. There was a video of a debate between Romney and Obama; I looked at itit was much more civilized, Mamita said. They spoke in a much more formal manner. And I compared it to now, its just amazing. Green issues like the environment and public transit matter to Rami, but his interests are global, too: He has two dozen family members in Syria. Some of them died from grenades, gunshots; so we just look at that issue really seriously and see which president would be able to contribute to these conflicts, resolve them, rather than create even more tension, he said.

Having arrived from Cuba at age 12, Jessica Valdes became a U.S. citizen a few years ago. Now a junior at the University of Florida, Valdes voted early last Friday in Gainesville, Florida, for Clintonthe presidential candidate with the best proposals for immigration and education policies that would affect her personally, Valdes said.(A poll about a week before the election showed Trumps support among Cuban-Americans in Florida at 52 percent.)

The issue of most importance to Valdes was immigration reform and a plan that would provide a path toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants. She has many friends who also entered the country as children and are now recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)a program that allows some undocumented individuals who entered the U.S. as children to stay in the country without the risk of deportation.

There are certain groups of people whose lives are really at risk, Valdes said. Clinton wants to give (immigrants) the opportunity to achieve the American dream.

Of the two candidates, Clinton was the most informed and willing to work with minority people in the United States, she said. She also valued the former secretary of states plans for making college more affordable.

Valdes, whos majoring in political science, stayed up-to-date on major races through social media, CNN and The New York Times. She was doing research on local races with her phone up until the time she voted.

This article appears courtesy of the Education Writers Association.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
A man diving off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, may have stumbled upon a nuclear weapon that the United States lost decades ago.

Now, the Royal Canadian Navy is scoping out the strange object to see if it is indeed a Mark IV bomb that was jettisoned by an American pilot in 1950 just before his plane crashed.

The man, Sean Smyrichinsky, was using an underwater scooter to hunt for sea cucumbers near Pitt Island, when he came upon a weird bagel-shaped object. After straying from his boat, he came upon a bizarre object that looked a bit like a half-cut bagel the size of a king-sized bed, he told CBC. [Flying Saucers to Mind Control: 7 Declassified Military & CIA Secrets]

"I came out from the dive and I came up and I started telling my crew, 'My god, I found a UFO. I found the strangest thing I'd ever seen!' Smyrichinsky told CBC. "It resembled, like, a bagel cut in half, and then around the bagel these bowls molded into it."

Long lost nuke

When he came to shore, he started asking around. He soon came upon the strange tale of the Convair 36-B, a bomber that took off from Elison Air Base in Alaska in 1950 and was flying near British Columbia when its engines caught fire. The plane was testing how well it could carry a Mark IV "Fat Man," an 11,000 pound (4,900 kilogram) atomic bomb similar to those dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to news.com.au.

The official story was that crew parachuted to safety and the plane itself sank in the Pacific Ocean.

However, a few years later, people stumbled across the plane wreck in the remote B.C. mountains, three hours inland from where it was supposed to have crashed, according to " Lost Nuke: The Last Flight of Bomber 075," by Dirk Septer (Heritage House Publishing 2016).

"After years of silence, the United States finally admitted to losing its very first nuclear bomb; the incident was its first Broken Arrow, the code name for accidents involving nuclear weapons," Septer wrote in "Lost Nuke."

Story continues

One mystery remained, though: Did the bomb detonate in the ocean or blow up over the mountains?

Not so deadly

After Smyrichinsky heard the story, he Googled the bomb and found an image that looked strikingly like the object he found.

Though finding a nuclear weapon sitting neglected in the ocean is scary, even if the strange object is the actual lost bomb, it likely contains no radioactive material. The original Mark IV bomb was a dummy capsule, Major Steve Neta of the Canadian Armed Forces, told CBC.

Finding a weapon under the waves is surprisingly common. The ocean is littered with nearly 5 million tonnes of chemical weapons lost between 1919 and 1980, according to Hakai Magazine.

Original article on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations
By Martyn Herman LONDON (Reuters) - Novak Djokovic intends to come out fighting at next week's ATP World Tour Finals and prove that rumors of his decline have been grossly exaggerated. It seems a long time ago now that the all-conquering Serb was being tipped for a calendar-year grand slam, having won the Australian and French Open titles. Andy Murray was his victim in both those finals but last week the Scot evicted Djokovic from the ATP's world number one spot that he had jealously guarded for more than two years. Since his long-awaited first Roland Garros title in June, Djokovic has suffered some crushing blows; losing to Sam Querrey in the third round at Wimbledon, exiting the Rio Olympics in the first round and then being trumped by Stan Wawrinka in the U.S. Open final. He has not won a title since July and a first career loss to Marin Cilic in last week's Paris Masters opened the door for a hungry Murray to steam through to the summit for the first time. Niggling injuries have not helped Djokovic while rumors have abounded of emotional burnout. The 29-year-old admitted on Friday that his early-season exploits had taken a toll, but said he was determined to end the year on a high and claim a fifth consecutive Tour Finals title. "I'm here in London to crown this year with the best possible result," Djokovic told reporters on Friday. "I didn't get to recover fast after the French Open to compete on the highest level. I had to dig deep and take some time to reflect because it was an incredible achievement. Djokovic "It took a bit of time to get back on track but all in all it was a very good year." Djokovic, who has spent a total of 223 weeks as world number one during his career, can finish the year number one for the fifth time in the past six seasons if he wins in London. He starts 405 points behind Murray who arrives on the back of a 19-match winning streak. "I've had an amazing last four years at the O2 Arena. I'm hoping I can carry on with those great results," said the 12-times grand slam champion. "I still feel I have a lot of gas in the tank, a lot of years ahead of me. My mind is very positive to this sport." Djokovic's hopes of climbing back above home favorite Murray have been helped by him being placed in the easier group. He starts on Sunday against debutant Dominic Thiem and also plays French first-timer Gael Monfils and Milos Raonic. Murray must contend with U.S. Open champion Stan Wawrinka, Kei Nishikori and Monday's opponent Marin Cilic, but whatever happens Djokovic knows their battle for supremacy will continue in 2017. "Looking at his qualities and commitment to the sport there is a good chance he can play at this level for a long time," Djokovic said. (Editing by Pritha Sarkar)
There is one exceptionally annoying narrative that has started to come down, about how rural voters were making themselves heard with Trump. The last couple of emails I wrote to you talked about why there is some validity to the claim that middle America is ignored by coastal elites. And to put it in personal perspective, I am a man of color and child of immigrants who was born on one coast, got college degrees, and traveled to work in one of the bougiest parts of the world on the other coast. It is ridiculous for me to tell a poor kid living in a trailer who has no real path to college in todays America that hes benefiting from white privilege.

But the flip side is, considering their candidate lost the popular vote, considering in 2012 more votes were cast for Democratic congressmen, and yet despite that the party that has lost raw vote totals controls the totality of two branches of governmentwell, its ridiculous for anyone to say they havent been heard. Republicans have disproportionately controlled the government since 2000. The deck is stacked in their favor. And rural Americans have chosen Tea Party candidates and now Donald Trump as their standard bearer.

Everything I said before remains true: Theres a gap that needs to be bridged. I hope Donald Trump can do it. But it should be noted that bridge needs to flow in both directions. Its not just about listening to the concerns of blue-collar whites; its about listening to the concerns of coastal people of color who are now wondering whether middle America will let us stay in this country.
President-elect Donald Trump is back to his Twitter complaints.

In a tweet posted Thursday night, Trump slammed the protests against his forthcoming presidency in cities across the country. Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair! he wrote.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Its a return to form for Trump, who often expressed frustration with the media and political rivals on his Twitter account. His tweets since becoming president-elect on Tuesday, however, had remained tame. In fact, Trump just ten minutes before tweeted about a good meeting with President Obama in Washington, D.C.

Trumps Twitter had often been a source of controversy in his campaign. While other presidential candidates largely had carefully curated Twitter accounts, Trump frequently let his unfiltered opinions run in his tweets. In a profile last week, the New York Times reported that Trumps aides even took control of his Twitter account in the final days of his campaign.

Anti-Trump protests did indeed break out across the country on Wednesday, in large cities including New York, Chicago, Boston, Berkeley, Portland, Austin, and Los Angeles. In L.A., a march grew to thousands and 29 people were arrested for blocking the 101 freeway through downtown.

Related stories

Mark Zuckerberg: 'Pretty Crazy Idea' That Facebook Fake News Helped Donald Trump Win

Creepy Details of Roger Ailes, Donald Trump Dealings Emerge in Megyn Kelly's Book

Mother and Daughter Hikers Bump Into Hillary Clinton in the Woods
The only thing that makes nightmares tolerable is that you never do experience the consequences. You might be falling from a great height, but you wake up  or miraculously change scenery  before you can hit the ground, or even wonder about survival.

For most of the world, Donald Trumps election feels like a nightmare that lacks that one saving grace. For the last few days we have all been in free fall, with the ground fast approaching, except that we also know we are wide awake.

Difficult as it is, however, its time to start thinking about what exactly awaits the world after it slams into its new political reality. This is not an easy task. While Trump is a man of strong words, he is not one of consistent views. Over the course of the last 12 months, he has flip-flopped on just about every issue, from the welfare state, to civil rights, to nuclear proliferation and the use of American military power.

As a result, it is doubly difficult to understand the threat posed by Trump: It is difficult to know whether his radical rhetoric will translate into the most fundamental shake-up of American domestic and foreign policy in the better part of a century, or whether the bluster of his ugly campaign will give way to a more moderate persona once he is in office. And even if his extreme persona should prove authentic, as it well might, it is far from clear which variety of extremism will characterize it.

So, we may not be able to make a firm prediction about the rude awakening that awaits us  but we need to start listing the possibilities.

Trump May Undermine Americas Liberal Democracy

First and foremost, we must not underestimate the possibility that Donald Trump may prove a serious threat to liberal democracy in the United States.

In the campaign, he has attacked every norm of democratic politics: He has threatened to jail his opponent and to disregard the result of the election if he loses. He has attacked the independence of the judiciary and promised to muzzle the free press. This may be the verbal expulsions of a man to whom the art of saying extreme things without thinking them through comes very lightly, but it is just as likely to be a reflection of the depth of his authoritarian impulses. And even if his victory at the polls has not been nearly as resounding as the immense power it has given him suggests, it did make one thing clear: A shockingly large number of Americans were not put off by this authoritarian rhetoric. They may be willing to go along if he decides to walk the walk as well.

Story continues

The hundreds of political scientists (myself included) who signed a letter warning of the danger Trump may pose to liberal democracy did not overcome their professional reluctance to engage in partisan politics on a whim; they were motivated by the similarities they saw between Trump and to the many undertakers of democracy in other historical periods and geographic areas. As James Loxton, of the University of Sydney, put the question we now need to ask: Is Trump the American Berlusconi or the American Mussolini? We must hope that he turns out to be the former while preparing for the possibility that he may try to turn himself into the latter.

He May Kill the Dream of a Multiethnic Democracy

It is rarely noted that democracy took hold in many European countries at the precise moment when decades of war and ethnic cleansing had turned them extremely homogeneous. This is probably no coincidence. In the modern era, democracy has always gone hand-in-hand with nationalism. And the popular perception of who truly belongs to these nations has, in turn, been deeply restrictive. In most times and places, you did not truly belong to the volk unless you descended from the same ethnic stock as the majority of your co-citizens.

This is one way in which the United States really was at one point, if not quite unique, then certainly special. For despite its long and deep history of radical racial injustice, it was tempting to think that America had in some ways become a genuinely multiethnic democracy. Even as many whites jealously guarded their privileges, for example, most had come to accept that blacks or Latinos were fellow Americans.

Trumps election calls that optimism into doubt. Its not only that Trumps willingness to bully and slander members of just about every minority group was a core part of his electoral appeal. Its also that his extreme rhetoric against minorities gave the longstanding racial divide in the American electorate a more bitter slant: While a clear majority of white men and women supported a candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, a thumping majority of Muslims, Latinos and African-Americans sought salvation by supporting his opponent.

Politics in the United States keeps getting more tribal. As Lee Drutman, my colleague at the New America Foundation, has argued, the main political cleavage dividing Democrats from Republicans was once economic; now it is racial. The implications of this transformation are radical. You can have deep economic disagreements while recognizing each other as compatriots. But once politics turns this tribal, supporters of competing parties may increasingly refuse to think of each other as true fellow citizens.

After this election, multiethnic democracy looks a lot less stable in the United States than it once did. And that is a blow to its prospects in many other parts of the world, as well.

The Illiberal International Will Be on the March

During the election campaign, global opinion polls showed an overwhelming preference for Hillary Clinton in most parts of the world. But these polls missed a crucial detail: among the illiberal populists who are now on the rise in such diverse countries as France, Sweden, Hungary and Russia, Trump has always enjoyed strong support.

Nigel Farage, who helped bring about Brexit as the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, campaigned with Trump. Other illiberal populists were among the first  and the most enthusiastic  to celebrate his victory. Marine Le Pen, of Frances National Front party, congratulated Americans on choosing their president of their own accord instead of rubber-stamping the one chosen for them by the establishment. Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right leader who recently out-Trumped Trump by calling for on an outright ban on the Quran, rejoiced in the fact that politics will never be the same. What America can do, we can do as well.

There is a reason for their joy. While the far-right leaders who have enjoyed a meteoric rise in recent years are virtually always deeply nationalist, they now see themselves as part of a common enterprise: to divorce liberalism from democracy. In a liberal democracy, the rights of minorities are protected and independent institutions like the judiciary rein in the power of the government. In the illiberal democracies which the vanguard of the illiberal international has established in countries like Turkey or Poland, by contrast, minorities are scapegoated for political gain and independent power centers are systematically undermined.

Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary and probably the most ideologically sophisticated illiberal populist of them all, has put the aspirations of his comrades most clearly: We are living in the days where what we call liberal non-democracy  in which we lived for the past 20 years  ends, and we can return to real democracy. Orban is right: The era in which the stability of liberal democracy can be taken for granted definitively ended on Tuesday night.

Trump May Embolden Dictators Around The World

During the election campaign, much was made of Donald Trumps praise of Vladimir Putin. Some journalists even speculated that Trump or some of his close advisors might have a personal financial interest in an alliance with Putin. But that misses a much scarier point: Trump praises Putin because he genuinely likes the guy  and much of what he stands for.

Like Trump, Putin believes that nations should pursue their own self-interest ruthlessly. Like Trump, Putin believes in a world in which great powers have spheres of influence they can dominate at will. And like Trump, Putin does not believe that there is such a thing as a loyal opposition.

America has always been willing to make alliances of convenience with ideologically abhorrent regimes when that seemed geopolitically necessary. But it has always preferred to forge its firmest alliances with liberal democracies. One simply cant be sure that Trump will follow that tradition.

This is likely to embolden the dictators of the world, not only in Russia but also beyond. They now know that they wont come under criticism if they blatantly violate human rights, or quash the opposition, at home. And they also have good reason to suspect that America will look on leniently if they blackmail or invade their neighbors, so long as they are willing to return the favor to America in its own geopolitical neighborhood.

If Trumps election does result in a radical reorientation in American foreign policy, two consequences are likely to ensure. First, authoritarian powers like Russia are likely to expand the influence they wield in the world dramatically. And second, their expansion will cause radical instability, even in areas, like Central Europe, that had finally seemed to enter a new era of stability.

Americas Allies May Start Looking Elsewhere

Even in the best case, American foreign policy will remain unpredictable for the coming years. For countries whose security has always depended on the reliability of their American allies, this is deeply scary. For now, they will be extremely vulnerable to the caprices of President Trump.

That insecurity cannot be a good feeling. And so, if decision-makers in capitals from Berlin to Tokyo have any ounce of strategic vision, they must now be hard at work in figuring out how to become less dependent on the United States.

But their options are sparse. They could invest much more heavily in their own defense, and doubtless many of them will. But for countries like Germany or Japan, it would be incredibly costly to modernize their armed forces sufficiently to be able to do without the protecting hand of a friendly hegemon. They could strengthen alliances with countries that still do share their values. But those are few and far between, and they are unlikely to be stronger than themselves militarily. Finally, they could seek the reassurance of nuclear weapons. But this is likely to engender significant domestic opposition and may prove counterproductive if it scares their neighbors into an arms race.

And so, the most realistic alternative among all the possibilities available to Americas longtime allies may be to move away from a values-based system of international alliances. In a world in which there is no reliably liberal democratic hegemon left, smaller nations will be very tempted to scurry for protection wherever it might be on offer. And if that comes to pass, then the Western liberal order may disintegrate more quickly than we might have imagined a few short years ago.
Donald Trump protests San Francisco

Donald Trump is not happy about the protests against him that have popped up nationwide since he was elected president.

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Trump said on Twitter on Thursday night.

Trump's assertion that the demonstrators were professionals "incited by the media" was seen as a dismissal of the protesters' concerns.

In a follow-up tweet Friday morning, however, Trump seemed to have a change of heart, writing that he loved the "passion for our great country" that the "small groups of protesters" had.

"We will all come together and be proud!" Trump wrote.

Thousands of people have flooded streets and freeways in major cities  including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Detroit  to express their distaste about Trump's election.

The protests have continued since Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in a historic upset early Wednesday morning.

Many of those demonstrators say they are afraid of what the Trump administration will do after he ran a campaign they saw as leaning heavily on racist, xenophobic, and sexist bombast. The protesters have also said they are troubled by white-supremacist groups emboldened by Trump's victory.

Trump was endorsed by both the Ku Klux Klan and former KKK leader David Duke. Though the real-estate mogul has disavowed those endorsements, both the KKK and Duke have reiterated their adulation. Duke, who was running for a US Senate seat in Louisiana, said at a debate earlier this month that he would be Trump's "most loyal advocate" if he were to win the seat.

And after Trump won the White House, Duke said "our people played a huge role" in electing him. Duke lost his Senate race.

The president-elect visited the White House on Thursday for his first meeting with President Barack Obama. The closely watched powwow came after a bitter election  one in which Trump and Obama threw rhetorical jabs at each other on the campaign trail.

Story continues

Trump, in another tweet, had only positive things to say about the meeting, including that he and Obama had "great chemistry."

NOW WATCH: 'He's the founder of ISIS': Watch Trump and Obama trade insults throughout the years





More From Business Insider


mike pence chris christie

Vice President-elect Mike Pence is replacing Gov. Chris Christie as head of the team transitioning President-elect Donald Trump to the White House, Trump announced Friday.

The move comes one week after two former associates of the New Jersey governor were convicted on conspiracy charges in the so-called Bridgegate scandal.

The associates, Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, had been charged with conspiracy and wire fraud in plotting to shut down lanes on the George Washington Bridge in 2013 as an act of political retribution.

Sources told The New York Times, which first reported the shuffle, that Pence would take over the transition team to capitalize on his Washington connections.

In a statement, Trump announced that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Dr. Ben Carson, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Sen. Jeff Sessions, and Christie would serve as vice chairs on the team. And several notable names, including tech mogul Peter Thiel, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, and several of Trump's children were listed on the transition team's executive committee.

"Together this outstanding group of advisers, led by Vice President-elect Mike Pence, will build on the initial work done under the leadership of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to help prepare a transformative government ready to lead from Day One," Trump said in the statement.

"The mission of our team will be clear: put together the most highly qualified group of successful leaders who will be able to implement our change agenda in Washington," he added. "Together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding this nation  specifically jobs, security, and opportunity. This team is going to get to work immediately to Make America Great Again."

The transition team will help Trump make Cabinet appointments, about which rumors are already flying.

Story continues

Christie, who was briefly considered to appear on the ticket as Trump's running mate, began leading the transition team in May. Christie, who hasn't been charged with a crime related to the Bridgegate scandal, released a statement after last week's verdict, saying "no believable evidence" in the trial showed he played a role in the scandal.

NOW WATCH: Animated map shows how drastically split different demographics are this election





More From Business Insider


By India Today Web Desk: Bigg Boss 10 contestant and troublemaker of the house, Om Swami is making headlines again. And no, it is not because of his antics in the house. This time the self-styled godman is in the news thanks to fresh trouble with the law.

A Delhi court has ordered Swami to appear before the court on November 21, according to a report in Hindustan Times. A non-bailable warrant will be issued against Swami if he fails to appear before the court on said date.

advertisement

Also read:BB10 Day 24: Om Swami returns to the house; Mona Lisa fights with Swami



According to recent reports, Swami had to appear before the court on Tuesday (November 8), but he failed to do so. Therefore, the court has slapped a Rs 20,000 fine against him for showing disrespect to the court. After his failure to appear before the court, Swami's lawyer was asked directly, "Bigg Boss is more important or court?"

Om Swami aka Vinodanand Jha was accused of stealing 11 bicycles, expensive spare parts, and sale deed of a house from his brother, Pramod Jha's bicycle shop, in 2008.

The channel's (Colors) team has given a statement saying that they were not aware of the legal proceedings against the Bigg Boss 10 contestant, and as soon as they are contacted by the police, they will consult their legal team and act accordingly.

According to a report in dailymail.co.uk, Swami has also been slapped with charges under the Arms act, and TADA.

Well, looks like Swamiji will not remain inside the Bigg boss house for a long time.



--- ENDS ---
When lawyers filed a class action lawsuit in 2010 against Trump University, they could hardly have expected that six years later theyd be coming up against the president-elect in the courtroom.

But thats exactly what stands to happen during the trial, which is scheduled to start on Nov. 28, as Trump and his lawyers will defend against allegations that Trump University defrauded students by presenting itself as an accredited institution and pressuring people to spend up to $35,000 for classes taught by people advertised as hand picked by Trump.

The Trump University lawsuit isnt the only legal headache hanging over the president-elect. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (who also brought a case against Trump University in 2013), is investigating Trumps foundation, after it was found in October to have violated state law by soliciting donations without the proper charity certification. Additionally, the FBI is conducting a preliminary inquiry into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manaforts foreign business ties, NBC reports, a potential conflict that had already caused Trump to distance himself from Manafort. And Trump has sued two D.C. restaurateurs for pulling out of deals to operate in his new hotel.

It is unusual for a president-elect to be entering the Oval Office with these types of live legal issues involving the business entities that he had been running, says Caleb Burns, a partner at Wiley Rein LLP focused on election law and government ethics.

Trump will now have to juggle these trials and investigations while also getting his administration in place by Jan. 20, when he becomes leader of the free world. It is perhaps ironic that the husband of his general election opponent paved the way for the potential legal problems that may follow him into the Oval Office; in a 1997 case involving then-President Bill Clinton and Paula Jones, who was suing him for sexual harassment, the Supreme Court ruled that a sitting president isnt immune from litigation over actions done before taking office.

Story continues

But Burns cautions that theres a crucial difference between the case Clinton dealt with and the ones confronting Trump: Clinton was sued personally, whereas Trumps cases concern disputes with businesses that he is or was involved with. Those matters will continue to progress and make their way through the legal process, but those matters arent aimed at Donald Trump personally, Burns says. Therefore they in all likelihood will not have much of an effect on his presidency. It also means that in cases like these in which Trump is a witness, not the defendant, judges might be more reluctant to compel the president to testify. My instinct would be that a judge would take great pains to avoid that situation, Burns says.

The most immediate issue for Trump is the Trump University trial beginning this month. With Trumps new status as president-elect, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel has advised both sides to consider a settlement rather than trial, given all else thats involved. Trumps attorney Daniel Petrocelli indicated Trump might be willing to settle, despite Trumps past reticence. I could settle these cases for peanuts but Im not a settler, Trump told TIME of the case last November. Petrocelli has also said hell file a formal request to delay the trial until after Trumps inauguration.

Read More: What The Legal Battle Over Trump University Reveals About Its Founder

If the parties do not agree to a settlement, however, Trump will have to testify, though Judge Curiel will allow him to do so via video rather than appearing in court. And Curiel denied a request Thursday to ban campaign statements from the trial. This could include any speeches, tweets, sexual misconduct allegations, tax history, corporate bankruptcies or details about his charitable foundation. It could also include inflammatory statements Trump made about Curiel; in May, Trump called Curiel a hater and very hostile and said Curiels Mexican heritage creates a conflict of interest given Trumps hardline immigration stance.

Trumps lawyer argued this campaign information carries an immediate and irreparable danger of extreme and irremediable prejudice to defendants, confusion of issues and waste of time. But Curiel wrote on Thursday that he wouldnt issue a blanket ruling because Trumps attorneys did not specify which statements they wanted banned.

Voters knew they were choosing a businessman to be their president, and a litigious one, at that. A USA Today analysis found that Trump and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. Trump prides himself on deal-making and standing tough to opponents, at least in posture. But as Trump cedes control of his foundation and businesses to members of his family, which hes signaled that hell do, Burns says these cases will largely become their problem. President-elect Trump, after all, will soon have much bigger things to worry about.
From Esquire

You went to bed. You woke up. Donald Trump is still president-elect. When will the shock wear off?

Trump's stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election has left a whole lot of people wondering what's next. But in fact, Trump has been unusually specific about his plans for at least the immediate future. Here are nine things president-elect Trump has promised to do on his first day in the Oval Office.

1. Repeal Obamacare.

Both Trump and Vice president-elect Mike Pence have said consistently that repealing the Affordable Care Act will be one of Trump's first acts in office. "Obamacare is a disaster. You know it. We all know it," Trump said during the second presidential debate. "We have to repeal it and replace it with something absolutely much less expensive."

Although erasing Obamacare with the stroke of his pen on day one isn't possible, Trump could work with the Republican-led Congress to begin the legislative maneuvers necessary to end Obama's signature domestic policy.

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed that the Senate will move quickly to repeal Obamacare. Though Trump would need 60 votes in the Senate to definitively repeal the act, NPR reports that even without that support, he can make a number of smaller legislative changes with impunity, which would effectively end Obamacare in its current form.

2. Reverse every one of Obama's executive orders.

The First Day Project, as one Republican called it, will see Trump spend several hours of his first day signing papers to repeal as many of Obama's executive orders as possible.

"We want to identify maybe 25 executive orders that Trump could sign literally the first day in office," campaign adviser Stephen Moore told The New Yorker, describing a strategy apparently inspired by Reagan's swift deregulation of energy prices during his first week in office.

Orders on the table include the Paris Agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, the Syrian refugee program, and background checks on gun purchases.

Story continues

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Related%20Story" customtitles="You%20Either%20Want%20'The%20Wall'%20or%20Know%20It%20Won't%20Happen" customimages="" content="article.44782"]

3. Begin the process of deporting illegal immigrants.

If you're trying to get your head around how the scheduling of this packed first day will work, put this first: "Within one hour" of taking office, Trump will begin the process of removing illegal aliens from the United States, focusing on undocumented immigrants' criminal records. "We will begin moving them out, day one. My first hour in office, those people are gone," he said in September, promising to prioritize this "before the wall, before anything."

Trump has vowed to bolster this effort by suspending visa access for countries that refuse to take back their "dangerous illegal immigrants."

4. Begin building The Wall.

Construction of that "beautiful" southern border wall, which Trump insists Mexico is going to pay for, will begin on day one, according to the president-elect. On his first day, Trump has promised to issue a written warning to Mexico demanding that they pay, according to The Washington Post. If they refuse, he will enact a federal provision to confiscate money that undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. send back to Mexico.

Also on day one, Trump plans to meet with Homeland Security officials to begin work on securing the southern border.

5. Fix the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"It's a day one project," Mike Pence told a group of two dozen military veterans over the summer. "We are committed to fixing the VA, not privatizing." Pence went on to promise that Trump would expand mental health care for veterans, which is one of 10 points in his Veterans Affairs Reform plan.

6. Give top generals a 30-day window to stop ISIS.

On his first day in office, Trump will give the military's generals 30 days to come up with a plan to defeat ISIS. Trump has said he knows more about ISIS than the generals, so this will be an interesting meeting.

7. End the war on coal.

"On day one of a Trump-Pence administration, the war on coal comes to an end," Pence said last week. "Trump digs coal." This has been a repeated promise throughout the campaign, with Trump and Pence identifying the so-called war on coal and on miners as a major failing of the Obama administration, claiming that the Democrats' focus on curbing emissions via regulations has stifled the industry. It's unclear what executive moves he'll deploy to fulfill this promise.

8. Abolish gun-free zones at schools.

"I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools, and on military bases," Trump said at a rally back in January, suggesting that more mass shootings could be prevented if there were fewer restrictions on citizens arming themselves. "My first day, it gets signed, OK? My first day. There's no more gun-free zones."

9. Impose high tariffs on companies moving jobs out of the U.S.

On day one, Trump will call the heads of U.S.-based companies, including Pfizer, Ford and Nabisco, to warn them that they will face a 35 percent tariff on their products for moving jobs out of the country.

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Related%20Story" customtitles="I%20Am%20Sure%20of%20Nothing%20Now" customimages="" content="article.50521"]

You Might Also Like
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f282818%2fmichaelblackwell

Remember sweet, sweet July, when Donald Trump promised the Republican National Convention that he would do everything in his power to "protect LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a foreign ideology?"

Well, he hasn't even taken the oath of office and he's already broken that promise.

This morning, Donald Trump announced that former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell would be heading his domestic transition team. Blackwell, who once compared LGBTQ people to animals, is a Senior Fellow at the Family Research Council, a hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

SEE ALSO: Bernie Sanders is prepared to be Trump's 'worst nightmare'

Compared to his hate speech against Muslims, Mexican immigrants and women, Trump's rhetoric against LGBTQ Americans was relatively tame during his campaign for the presidency.

His policy-related promises, of course, told a different story  Trump pledged to support the First Amendment Defense Act, which would allow businesses and healthcare organizations to legally discriminate against LGBTQ folks. He supports HB2, North Carolina's infamous law that prevents trans people from using the bathroom of their choice. And he appointed Mike Pence to be his vice president, the governor best known for his plan to defund AIDS research and support conversion therapy, a dangerous practice since denounced by the American Medical Association. Not to mention Pence's support of Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which also would have allowed legal discrimination against LGBT folks before public outcry necessitated its revision.

So it shouldn't come as any surprise that the candidate who once waved a rainbow pride flag upside down appointed Blackwell, a man who has reportedly blamed mass shootings on "the crumbling moral foundations of our country" and "the attack on natural marriage and the family."

Story continues

Presidential candidate Donald Trump holds up inverted Pride flag at Colorado rally which reads "LGBTs for Trump." https://t.co/NpmXayixqM pic.twitter.com/PYulopstIM  SDGLN.com (@sdgln) October 31, 2016

When he was campaigning against same-sex marriage in Ohio in 2004, Blackwell compared LGBTQ people to farm animals.

"I don't know how many of you have a farming background but I can tell you right now that notion even defies barnyard logic ... the barnyard knows better," he said.

In the past seventy-two hours, LGBTQ community leaders have sounded the alarm about Blackwell and addressed additional pressing concerns about a Donald Trump presidency. While same-sex marriage is the law of the land, Trump's list of possible Supreme Court nominees include those who do not support a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. He could further reverse Obama's decision and yet again ban transgender and LGBTQ people from serving in the military.

While Trump has yet, of course, to enact any anti-queer legislation, Americans have already started to feel the brunt of his electoral college win. On Wednesday evening, Rochester, New York, resident Greg Ventura came home to find that the gay pride flags on his porch had been burned. Ventura had come out as gay earlier this year and believes that the incident was hate-related. Another home close to his had a rainbow flag burned Friday evening as well.

All this, and it's not even day one.

BONUS: Hillary Clinton: Please never stop believing that fighting for whats right is worth it
With 89% of the S&P 500 members having already reported their results, the Q3 reporting cycle is soon to wrap up. Though earnings and revenue growth for the reported index members is still low, an improvement over other recent periods is palpable. In fact, it is being said that the earnings recession has come to an end in Q3.

This is corroborated by the Q3 performance of the index members. Of the 445 S&P 500 companies that have reported as of Nov 9, 72.8% topped earnings expectations while 55.3% surpassed revenue estimates. Total earnings for these index members were up 4% from the year-ago quarter on a 2.7% improvement in revenues.

This is on track to be the first quarter to see positive earnings growth after five quarters of back-to-back declines.

Several sectors are witnessing earnings and revenue growth this quarter and Medical is one of them. Our Q3 scorecard shows that 88.7% of the companies in the Medical sector have reported results so far, with earnings growing 6.4% on 7.4% higher revenues. The blended beat, which represents the percentage of companies that have beaten both earnings and revenue estimates, stands at 42.6%.

The earnings picture for both the pharma and the biotech sectors is a mixed bag of beats and misses. Pharma giants such as Johnson & Johnson JNJ, Merck & Co., Inc., and Bristol-Myers Squibb Company surpassed both earnings and revenue expectations, and raised their outlook for the year. Meanwhile, Allergan plc and Pfizer Inc. PFE lagged on both the fronts and trimmed their 2016 earnings guidance.

Meanwhile, in the biotech sector, Celgene Corporation CELG and Amgen Inc. AMGN topped earnings and revenue estimates, and raised their expectations for 2016, whereas sector behemoth Gilead Sciences Inc. GILD missed on earnings and barely surpassed revenue estimates, keeping its outlook unchanged for the year.

Several mid- and small-sized pharma and biotech companies are yet to report Q3 results. Lets take a sneak peek at two such companies, both of which are scheduled to report Q3 results on Nov 14.

Story continues

Headquartered in Durham, NC, Argos Therapeutics Inc. ARGS is an immuno-oncology company focused on the development and commercialization of immunotherapies using the Arcelis technology platform. The most advanced candidate in the companys pipeline, AGS-003, is being evaluated for the treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma and non-small cell lung cancer.

ARGOS THERAPEUT Price and EPS Surprise

ARGOS THERAPEUT Price and EPS Surprise | ARGOS THERAPEUT Quote

Argos track record has been far from encouraging with the company missing estimates in three of the trailing four quarters, bringing the average negative surprise to 5.66%. This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock has an Earnings ESP of 0.00% for the third quarter, making it difficult to predict a positive surprise.

You can uncover the best stocks to buy or sell before theyre reported with our Earnings ESP Filter.

Asterias Biotherapeutics, Inc. AST is developing proprietary cell therapy programs based on its immunotherapy and pluripotent stem cell platform technologies. Currently, the company is focused on the advancement of its three pipeline candidates  AST-OPC1, AST-VAC1 and AST-VAC2  across neurology and oncology.

ASTERIAS BIOTHR Price and EPS Surprise

ASTERIAS BIOTHR Price and EPS Surprise | ASTERIAS BIOTHR Quote

This Fremont, CA-based biotechnology company has a dismal track record. The company has missed expectations in three of the trailing four quarters with an average negative surprise of 30.64%. This Zacks Rank #3 stock has an ESP of 0.00%, once again making a surprise prediction difficult this quarter. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Confidential from Zacks

This week, Zacks researchers have named 7 other stocks that look to break out even sooner than today's Bull of the Day. You can see these time-sensitive tickers free, and access additional trades that are not available to the public. Simply click here>>



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



PFIZER INC (PFE): Free Stock Analysis Report



JOHNSON & JOHNS (JNJ): Free Stock Analysis Report



GILEAD SCIENCES (GILD): Free Stock Analysis Report



CELGENE CORP (CELG): Free Stock Analysis Report



AMGEN INC (AMGN): Free Stock Analysis Report



ARGOS THERAPEUT (ARGS): Free Stock Analysis Report



ASTERIAS BIOTHR (AST): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research
Nov 11 (Reuters) - Duke Energy Corp has agreed to pay $27 million to settle a lawsuit over the power producer's abrupt firing of its newly installed chief executive in 2012.

Duke had agreed to install Progress Energy head William Johnson as chief executive of the combined company as part of the terms to buy Progress.

But within hours of the deal closing in July 2012, the new Duke board met and fired Johnson, reinstating former Duke CEO James Rogers.

Johnson left with a pre-negotiated $44 million severance package.

Shareholders soon sued Duke, arguing the decision to fire the CEO was reached in May 2012 and concealed from the public, investors and regulators.

A Delaware judge in August denied Duke's bid to end the case, finding the plaintiffs plausibly argued that the defendants might have concealed information about their actions from the public and regulators.

The settlement will be "funded by certain insurers" and does not include admission of any liability or wrongdoing by Duke, according to a court document filed Nov. 9.

(Reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)
By PTI: From K J M Varma

Beijing, Nov 11 (PTI) Chinese police have arrested 101 suspects, including 25 Taiwanese from Cambodia, for their alleged role in transnational-telecom crimes involving USD 2.94 million, officials said today.

Of the suspects, 76 were from the mainland and 25 from Taiwan and they have been linked to 135 cases currently under investigation, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said.

advertisement

The suspects were arrested in the crackdown since mid-June this year.

The fraudsters had targeted victims living in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and police across the province first began to receive complaints about telecom and Internet fraud in April this year, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The subsequent investigations led to outfits based in Cambodia, where the suspects were allegedly swindling victims out of their money by pretending to be government or law enforcement officials.

Chinese police captured 39 suspects, 14 from the mainland and 25 from Taiwan, in Cambodia, and seized the apparatus they had been using.

Following the arrests and raids in Cambodia, and under the coordination of the MPS, police departments from seven provinces in China carried out multiple raids and arrested 62 suspects and dismantled three transnational fraud outfits.

Around 590,000 telecom fraud cases were reported in 2015, involving the loss of 22.2 billion yuan.

Taiwan has been protesting over the arrest of its national in the ongoing crackdown by China over the international telecom frauds.

Officials from China, which claims Taiwan as part of the mainland, defend the action saying that the Taiwanese were involved in committing crimes against Chinese nationals. PTI KJVSUA AKJ SUA

--- ENDS ---
DUBLIN (Reuters) - European Central Bank rate setter Philip Lane shrugged off a selloff in euro zone government bonds since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, playing down the significance of "day-by-day" market moves for ECB policy.

Bond yields have surged since Trump's victory, a potential problem for the ECB, which is trying to lower borrowing costs in the euro zone to stimulate lending with an ultra-easy monetary policy.

But Lane said market prices would be just one of several factors the ECB's policy makers review when they meet on Dec. 8 to decide on the future shape and duration of their 80 billion euros ($87.17 billion) monthly bond-buying programme.

"This day-by-day movement is not going to directly matter to us, but we're just going to assess what goes on and in early December we'll be looking at the market data and the updated forecasts," Lane, who is head of the Irish central bank, told reporters. "Monetary policy is not made on a day-by-day basis."

The ECB has been trying to revive euro zone growth and inflation via aggressive bond purchases, sub-zero rates and cheap loans to banks.

In theory, rising bond yields and market-based inflation expectations are good news for the ECB. They mean price growth may finally accelerate and alleviate concern about a scarcity of eligible bonds to buy in some countries.

But borrowing costs for more indebted euro zone countries, such as Italy, are rising faster than for safe-haven Germany. That suggests investors also fear a rise of anti-establishment sentiment before a key Italian referendum on Dec. 4 [GVD/EUR].

Lane said the ECB was in "monitoring mode" and it was too early to draw any conclusion on Trump's presidency.

"It's way too early to tell, we in the bank and across the euro system are in a monitoring mode, reviewing what's happening," he said.

"At this point, there's no hard information about what will be the nature of the regime. There's no real basis for any firm analysis."

Story continues

Lane also said that the Irish Central Bank would announce any changes resulting from its first review of strict new deposit rules on mortgage lending introduced last year on November 23, following a meeting of its board.

($1 = 0.9178 euros)

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Writing by Francesco Canepa and William Schomberg; Editing by Larry King)
Edward Snowden has said he is not worried about the prospect of Vladimir Putin striking a deal with Donald Trump that could lead to his extradition and trial in the United States.

Speaking on a webchat hosted by the Dutch private search engine StartPage on Nov. 10, the whistleblower and former NSA contractor said it would be crazy to dismiss the idea of the Russian President and Trump making a deal over his future, but he [doesnt] worry about it.

Snowden has been stranded in Moscow since he revealed classified information about the National Security Agencys widespread surveillance three years ago. He was charged in the U.S. with violations of the Espionage Act, but various campaigns and civil liberty organizations have been putting pressure on President Obama to pardon him.

While I cant predict what the future looks like, I dont know whats going to happen tomorrow, I can be comfortable with the way Ive lived today, he said. And no matter what happens, if theres a drone strike or I slip and fall down the stairs, thats something that wont change. As long as we do our best to live in accordance with our values, we dont have to worry about what happens tomorrow.

Trump, who has vowed to repair U.S. relations with Russia, has previously threatened Snowden with execution. 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?, he said, during an appearance on Fox and Friends in 2013.
By Ahmed Aboulenein CAIRO (Reuters) - An Egyptian rights group that treats torture victims was prevented on Thursday from accessing its funds and told that its account had been blocked, its lawyer told Reuters. Taher Abu al-Nasr, who represents the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture, said an employee was not allowed to cash a cheque for the center and was told by a bank manager that the central bank had ordered its account suspended until it registers as a non-governmental organisation with the social solidarity ministry. Nadeem says it is registered as a clinic with the health ministry and does not need to register as an NGO. "We couldn't cash a cheque today. We don't know exactly what happened; whether our assets are frozen or our account is shut down or what. We will try to obtain the written order on Sunday when banks reopen," Abu al-Nasr said. Egyptian authorities deny allegations by human rights groups and activists that security forces round up people and torture them in secret detention centres. Amnesty International condemned the move against Nadeem, saying the NGO provides hundreds of torture victims with vital services including counselling and legal assistance. "This is yet more evidence of the Egyptian authorities' chilling contempt of perceived critics. By freezing Nadeem's financial assets the authorities are preventing the Center from carrying out their crucial work to provide care to survivors of horrific violence," said Philip Luther, Research and Advocacy Director at Amnesty for the Middle East and North Africa. The government had already ordered the closure of the center in February without providing an official reason. Health ministry sources at the time said it committed unspecified violations. The center challenged the order in court and still operates. Egyptian rights activists say they are facing the worst assault in their history amid a wider campaign to erase freedoms won in a 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule as president. In October, an Egyptian court approved a freeze on the assets of five prominent human rights activists and three NGOs accused of receiving foreign funds to sow chaos. The groups accuse President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's government of widespread abuses, allegations it denies. As military chief, Sisi toppled Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in 2013 after mass protests against his rule. Security forces killed hundreds of Mursi supporters in the streets and arrested thousands. Secular activists were later rounded up. (Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
Mosul (Iraq) (AFP) - Elite Iraqi troops battled the Islamic State group in the streets of Mosul Friday, as the UN reported jihadists had executed dozens of people inside the city for alleged "treason".

With IS also on the defensive in neighbouring Syria, US-backed forces pressed an advance on jihadist bastion Raqa after a sandstorm eased.

High winds in the desert separating the Syrian Kurdish-Arab militia alliance from the jihadists' Euphrates Valley stronghold had slowed their advance Thursday as visibility plummeted.

Iraqi forces had also regrouped after meeting stronger than expected resistance from IS on the east bank of the Tigris River running through Mosul after thrusting into the built-up area last week.

Commanders of Iraq's elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) said troops were advancing on two eastern neighbourhoods of the city.

In a house near the front line, Staff Lieutenant Colonel Muntadhar Salem clutched a radio in one hand and a tablet computer in the other with a map showing recaptured buildings.

As the troops waited for orders to push forward, incoming mortar rounds shook curtains on the windows.

Later Friday, the fighting eased off, although CTS forces still occasionally fired mortar rounds towards IS positions in eastern Mosul's Arbajiyah area.

IS fighters reportedly shot dead more than 60 people this week and hung some of the bodies from poles inside Mosul after claiming they had collaborated with Iraqi troops, the UN human rights office said Friday.

- 'Treason, collaboration' -

"On Tuesday, ISIL (IS) reportedly shot and killed 40 civilians in Mosul city after accusing them of 'treason and collaboration'", it said.

On Wednesday, IS slaughtered another 20 people at the Ghabat Military Base in northern Mosul after accusing them of "leaking information", it added.

The battle for Mosul is now in its fourth week, and while troops have entered the built-up area, there are weeks, if not months, of fighting ahead.

Story continues

"Our forces have begun the attack on Arbajiyah. The clashes are ongoing," Salem said.

Another CTS officer, Staff Lieutenant Colonel Ali Hussein Fadhel, said the first row of buildings in Arbajiyah had been seized.

"We are within firing range of Karkukli but the full attack has not yet started," he said of another eastern district.

Iraq began the operation to retake Mosul on October 17, with federal and Kurdish regional forces closing in on the city from three sides.

Pro-government Shiite paramilitaries later began advancing on the town of Tal Afar, which commands the city's western approaches, with the goal of cutting the jihadists off from territory they control in Syria.

The advance up the Tigris Valley from the south has been slowest. Troops on that front had the farthest to cover and a string of jihadist-held towns in their path.

On Thursday, the battle neared the remains of ancient Nimrud, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of Mosul, raising fears for the famed heritage site already ravaged by jihadist explosives and sledgehammers.

- SDF gains -

The International Organization of Migration said Friday more than 47,000 people have been displaced since the Mosul operation began.

In Syria, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said their advance on Raqa was back on track after a sandstorm swept through the area on Thursday.

"We seized control of two new villages yesterday but we didn't advance as far as planned because of the sandstorm," SDF commander Merkhas Kamishlo said.

Fighting had focused on IS-held Al-Heisha, some 40 kilometres north of Raqa, and the SDF reported late Friday its forces took control of that village and three others on the Suluk front.

Early Friday, an AFP correspondent reported heavy air strikes by the US-led coalition supporting the advance.

"Al-Heisha is totally besieged and overnight the US-led coalition hit four Daesh positions inside the village, and destroyed a vehicle being prepared for use as a bomb," Kamishlo said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

The SDF offensive, launched last weekend, has been pushing south from areas near the Turkish border.

The alliance said late Friday its forces advancing south from the towns of Ain Issa and Suluk had now converged.

The military in Russia, which has sided with the Damascus regime, said Friday it had evidence rebels in Aleppo city used chemical weapons, a charge the opposition denied.

The global chemical arms watchdog, meanwhile, condemned both Syria and IS for using toxic weapons and called for stepped up inspections.

A joint panel of the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found regime forces carried out three chlorine gas attacks in 2014 and 2015, while IS used mustard gas in Syria in 2015.
By PTI: From K J M Varma

Beijing, Nov 10 (PTI) A top Chinese security official was today elected to head the Interpol, in a move that could come as a likely boost to Chinas anti-graft crackdown at home.

Vice Minister for Public Security Meng Hongwei was elected President of the International Criminal Police Organisation, making him the first Chinese to take the prestigious post.

advertisement

Meng took over from his predecessor Mireille Ballestrazzi of France at the closing ceremony of Interpols 85th General Assembly in Bali, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The Interpol President heads its Executive Committee and is elected by the General Assembly for a period of four years.

In his speech, Meng promised to work together with all member-states of Interpol to build the international group into a stronger platform for global police cooperation.

He said he will promote more effective global police cooperation, better support the capacity-building efforts of police in all member countries, improve the coordination among regional and global police forces with a view to building a safer world and a more efficient Interpol that is beneficial for all member-states.

The election gives China another seat at an international organisation tasked with fighting transnational crimes, and is believed to aid its domestic crackdown on corruption, helping it in tracking down fugitives or suspects staying abroad.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has launched a sweeping campaign on corruption after he took over in 2012. More than a million officials have been punished under the crackdown.

Mengs new charge will include chairing meetings of the committee which ensures the implementation of decisions made at the General Assembly.

Founded in 1914 and now headquartered in Lyon, France, Interpol is the second-largest international organisation after the United Nations with 190 members.

By establishing a global police communications system, the agency has played an important role in deepening international police cooperation to combat transnational criminal offences.

China became a member state of Interpol in September 1984.

The 86th General Assembly of Interpol is scheduled to be held in China in 2017, according to the report. PTI KJV ABH AKJ ABH

--- ENDS ---
Johannesburg (AFP) - The head of South Africa's state-owned power company Eskom announced his resignation on Friday in a corruption scandal that has embroiled President Jacob Zuma.

Brian Molefe became the first person to step down after a report released last week raised allegations of corrupt links between Zuma, ministers, top officials and the Guptas, a wealthy business family.

"I have, in the interest of good corporate governance, decided to leave my employ at Eskom," said Molefe in a statement, adding he would depart at the end of the year.

Molefe broke down in tears last week at a press conference where he denied any wrongdoing over accusations in the report, which was drawn up the Public Protector, the country's top watchdog.

The report included allegations that Zuma ensured the Gupta family won huge preferential contracts with state companies such as Eskom.

Cellphone records obtained by investigators showed that Molefe was at or around the Guptas' home in Johannesburg 19 times between August and November 2015, and made scores of phone calls to Ajay Gupta.

The timing of Molefe's contact with the Guptas raised eyebrows as it coincided with a Gupta-owned firm negotiating the purchase of a mine that supplies Eskom with coal.

"This act is not an admission of wrongdoing on my part," Molefe said in his resignation statement.

He said he hoped to prove his innocence and that his name would eventually be cleared.

- Zuma under pressure? -

Economist Peter Montalto, from Nomura International, said Molefe had "no credibility left" after being named in the watchdog's report.

"The rot in Eskom goes much deeper, the whole board needs to be replaced and there are many others there also implicated," Montalto said.

Molefe was appointed Eskom CEO in August 2015, following the suspension of his predecessor Tshediso Matona.

The firm has had a series of leadership changes in the past five years, while the country suffered months of regular blackouts last year.

Story continues

The main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomed Molefe's resignation, adding it would lay charges against him over alleged corruption.

"He has resigned after we began the process of getting him to come clean under oath in parliament," the party said.

Growing numbers of anti-apartheid veterans, ANC activists, trade unions, civil groups and business leaders have called for President Zuma to resign in recent months.

On Thursday, he easily survived a no-confidence vote in parliament as ruling ANC lawmakers ignored calls for him to be ousted from office.

South Africa's highest court this year found him guilty of violating the constitution after he refused to repay taxpayers' money used to refurbish his private rural house.

He is also fighting a court order that could reinstate almost 800 corruption charges against him over a multi-billion dollar arms deal in the 1990s.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union agreed on Friday to extend temporary border controls inside the bloc's free-travel zone for another three months to help cope with the migration crisis. Last month, the European Commission, which proposes legislation, recommended that Austria, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and non-EU Norway be allowed to continue carrying out border checks beyond Nov. 15, when the checks were due to end. All of the countries are members of the Schengen zone where passport checks are not required. The internal controls were re-imposed to halt the flow of undocumented migrants through Europe after landing in Greece or Italy. The European Council, made up of the heads of the member states of the 28-country EU and the head of the Commission, approved the recommendation. "The Council has today adopted the Commission's proposal to prolong proportionate controls at certain internal Schengen borders in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Norway," the Commission said in a statement. (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
European Union trade ministers said Friday they must not be "naive" in the face of alleged China price dumping, as they tried to agree tougher measures to fight unfairly low prices.

China is the EU's second-largest trade partner but the two blocs have had a series of disputes over cheap Chinese exports that Europeans say are unfairly flooding their market.

"Europe cannot be naive and must protect its interests especially when it comes to dumping," said Peter Ziga, trade minister from Slovakia, which holds the EU's six-month rotating presidency.

However, differences remained at a meeting of the 28 ministers in Brussels, with free-trade purists such as Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands fearing a lurch towards protectionism and angering China.

"There is still not the necessary majority, but we are sure that we can have a decision," said French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl.

"It is indispensable," he added.

The most controversial idea -- on the table since 2013 -- is to soften the "lesser duty rule" by which tariffs are imposed systematically at the lowest possible level.

Changing this rule would allow the EU to impose higher tariffs than now.

Steelmakers are especially keen for the changes after being battered by a collapse in prices due to China-led oversupply and a wave of cheap imports.

China makes more than half the world's steel and is accused of massive dumping as its own market slows sharply.

About 15,000 steelworkers protested in Brussels on Wednesday demanding the EU pass the tougher rules.

But some countries are worried that tougher rules will make imports too expensive for industry.

"The Swedes are really against it. Volvo needs 10,000 parts to build an auto," an EU diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

These extra defences are seen as key with China in December widely expected to receive the official World Trade Organization designation of Market Economy Status (MES).

Story continues

This new standing means that China's trade partners will no longer be allowed to use alternative methods to measure potential price dumping, handing much more power to Beijing in trade fights.

To counter this, the European Commission's proposal introduces several criteria to assess trade partners, such as state policies and influence, the widespread presence of state-owned companies and the independence of the financial sector.

Beijing on Thursday said the EU's tougher proposals were wrong, leaving China as a "surrogate country" in the eyes of the WTO.

"These new measures have no basis in World Trade Organization rules," said China's commerce ministry spokesman Shen Danyang, adding that the EU was illegally stripping China of its WTO rights.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union state aid regulators have ordered Irish budget airline Ryanair (RYA.I) and TUI's (TUIT.L) German carrier TUIfly to repay millions of euros in illegal aid given by an Austrian airport.

Certain airport services and marketing agreements between the operator of Klagenfurt airport in southern Austria and Ryanair, TUIfly and HLX - which was merged with Hapagfly in 2007 to create TUIfly - gave the carriers an undue advantage, the European Commision said on Friday.

"As no profit-driven airport manager would have concluded such loss-making agreements, they amount to state aid to the airlines. Moreover, the agreements simply reduce the operating costs of the airlines, without contributing to common transport objectives," it said, without providing details on the contracts.

The Commission said it estimated the illegal aid to Ryanair at around 2 million euros ($2.2 million), to TUIfly at 1.1 million and to HLX at 9.6 million. The companies will have to repay the money to Austria.

Ryanair said it would fight the EU ruling.

"We note the Klagenfurt decision, where we stopped flying in 2013. We disagree with the findings and have instructed our lawyers to appeal," a Ryanair spokesman said.

TUI's German arm said it would examine the EUs reasoning once it had received it and would then decide on the next steps. A spokesman noted the Commission's ruling referred to transactions that were nearly 10 years in the past and that airline HLX no longer existed.

The Commission also found that aid granted to the airport by its public owners between 2000 and 2011 was in line with EU state aid rules.'

($1 = 0.9195 euros)

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Additional reporting by Victoria Bryan and Maria Sheahan in Frankfurt and Kirsti Knolle in Vienna; Editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Mark Potter)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union state aid regulators have ordered Irish budget airline Ryanair <RYA.I> and TUI's <TUIT.L> German carrier TUIfly to repay millions of euros in illegal aid given by an Austrian airport.

Certain airport services and marketing agreements between the operator of Klagenfurt airport in southern Austria and Ryanair, TUIfly and HLX - which was merged with Hapagfly in 2007 to create TUIfly - gave the carriers an undue advantage, the European Commision said on Friday.

"As no profit-driven airport manager would have concluded such loss-making agreements, they amount to state aid to the airlines. Moreover, the agreements simply reduce the operating costs of the airlines, without contributing to common transport objectives," it said, without providing details on the contracts.

The Commission said it estimated the illegal aid to Ryanair at around 2 million euros ($2.2 million), to TUIfly at 1.1 million and to HLX at 9.6 million. The companies will have to repay the money to Austria.

Ryanair said it would fight the EU ruling.

"We note the Klagenfurt decision, where we stopped flying in 2013. We disagree with the findings and have instructed our lawyers to appeal," a Ryanair spokesman said.

TUI's German arm said it would examine the EUs reasoning once it had received it and would then decide on the next steps. A spokesman noted the Commission's ruling referred to transactions that were nearly 10 years in the past and that airline HLX no longer existed.

The Commission also found that aid granted to the airport by its public owners between 2000 and 2011 was in line with EU state aid rules.'

($1 = 0.9195 euros)

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Additional reporting by Victoria Bryan and Maria Sheahan in Frankfurt and Kirsti Knolle in Vienna; Editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Mark Potter)
By Douglas Busvine

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A top European Union official sounded the alarm on Friday that efforts to revive talks on a trade deal with India could be derailed by the imminent expiry of several bilateral investment protection deals with its member states.

The warning came from Jyrki Katainen, vice-president of the European Commission and a former prime minister of Finland, after he met senior ministers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government in New Delhi.

It signified the neglect into which EU-India relations have fallen after a summit in March, held after a four-year gap, failed to set out a roadmap for talks on a proposed Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA).

Katainen said the looming expiry of an investment protection agreement between India and the Netherlands could increase the cost to European business of investing in India and nip the wider trade discussion in the bud.

"European businesses have said they are extremely worried about the potential legal gap," Katainen said. "It's a huge risk."

In total, 23 EU members have investment pacts with India and most will end next spring. If they are not extended, so-called sunset clauses mean that the terms of the old deals would remain in force for another 10 to 15 years.

That in turn would preclude talks on an EU-wide investment protection treaty that would be a precursor to the broad-based trade pact.

EU trade with India totaled 78 billion euros ($84 billion) in 2015, but imports from and exports to Asia's third-largest economy have shrunk over the last five years.

Modi, who led his nationalist party to a landslide victory in the 2014 general election, has shown greater interest in dealing bilaterally with partners like the United States, Russia and Japan than with the EU, which is viewed by many in New Delhi as a complicated partner.

But, in a climate of growing protectionist sentiment, he has shown little enthusiasm for trade deals and has not taken up Washington's overtures on to hammer out a U.S.-India investment treaty.

Story continues

A senior commerce ministry official declined to comment.

($1=0.9200 euros)

(Additional reporting by Manoj Kumar; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
Eva Longoria had to work to pay for her Quinceanera, and we respect that work ethic immensely

Desperate Housewives alum, Eva Longoria had to work to pay for her Quinceanera and that hard work has continued to drive her throughout her career in Hollywood, which makes us even bigger fans of her.

The 41-year-old actress revealed in Redbooks newest issue that she got her drive and hard work from her mother and it has continued to guide her in her life choices, beginning at the young age of 15.

I wanted to have a Quinceanera when I was 15 and my family didnt have the money, so I got a job at Wendys and paid for it myself, Longoria told Redbook in their December issue, which she is also the cover star for.

I couldnt wait to get to work and make my own money. There was never any resentment, because I saw how hard my mother worked and all she did for my sister [with special needs], and I wanted to do whatever I could to help. We all did, she continued.

That strength from her mother, and her success at getting the perfect dress for her big event when she was younger, is part of the reason she has been able to make it through all the ups and downs that have been thrown her way throughout her acting career.

I remember losing auditions or being let go from a job and Id say, That must mean theres something amazing ahead for me!' Longoria recalled about her early audition days.

My friends would laugh and look at me like I was crazy. I have never, ever had a personal pity party, she added.

Story continues

Calling all girl bosses, Longoria should be added to your list of role models ASAP! We love how hard work and a continual positive attitude has been one of the biggest things in the Telenovela actresss life. She is so inspiring!

Check out more from Longoria when the Redbook December issue hits stands on November 15.

The post Eva Longoria had to work to pay for her Quinceanera, and we respect that work ethic immensely appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Kanye West and Drake are up to something.

While the star hip-hop duo have both released collaborative projects individually (West with 2011's Watch The Throne alongside Jay Z and Drake teaming with Future for 2015's What a Time to Be Alive) and have been featured on tracks together (see Drake's "Pop Style" and "Forever," as well as Big Sean's "Blessings," to name a few), the rap titans have long been hinting at a potential full-length joint project.

As the 6 and beyond eagerly await an avalanche of epic anthems courtesy of the dynamic duo, here's everything we know so far about the LP.

The Introduction

West first hinted at the possibility of a joint album during an appearance at the Toronto rapper's OVO Fest in August where he asked the crowd, "I got one question for you Is y'all ready for this album? I'm not talking about Pablo. I wasn't talking about Views. I wanna ask y'all right now, y'all ready for this album?" Drake further clarified: "What my brother was asking before was, are you ready if we make an album? That's what he was asking."

Later that month, a series of cryptic billboards started popping up around Los Angeles featuring the logos for Drake's OVO Sound and Kanye's G.O.O.D. Music imprints with a variety of seemingly random phrases, i.e. "Calabasas is the new Abu Dhabi" (more on this later).

The Release

'Ye further elaborated on the project during an interview with Vogue during the debut of his Yeezy Season 4 clothing line, noting, "We're just working on music, working on a bunch of music together, just having fun going into the studio. We're working on an album, so there's some exciting things coming up soon." While the interview was conducted in September, "soon" could now be imminent.

The Content

Perhaps that Los Angeles billboard referring to Calabasas was more than just a random phrase. Not only do the rappers reside in the ritzy Los Angeles enclave, they reportedly live down the street from one another, leading one to assume that's where the bulk of the recording is happening. In addition, Drizzy recently posted a black-and-white Instagram of him and West adorned with the caption "There goes the neighborhood.," with West's manager Scooter Braun commenting, "It begins."

Story continues

There goes the neighborhood

A photo posted by champagnepapi (@champagnepapi) on Nov 7, 2016 at 3:05am PST

The cryptic caption could also be interpreted as a nod to Calabasas, or even the actual name of the album, as some observers suspect. On top of those two hints, Yeezy also rolled out Calabasas-branded merch tied to the launch the Yeezy Season 4 clothing line, including track pants with the neighborhood's name stitched onto the leg. With Drake saluting his native T-Dot with Views, he may very well be playing tourism ambassador alongside 'Ye on the forthcoming album.

The project would also serve as a treasure trove of thoughts about the gossip and drama that's been swirling around the two MCs for the past few months. Will Kanye West allude to his wife Kim Kardashian's robbery in Paris? Will Drake address his on-again, off-again fling with Rihanna? Making things even more interesting: Drake has reportedly been getting chummy with West's enemy-turned-friend-turned-enemy-again Taylor Swift, as Swift recently attended Drake's birthday bash.

Is that velvet? --

A photo posted by champagnepapi (@champagnepapi) on Nov 4, 2016 at 1:34am PDT
- By Geoff Gannon





Someone who reads my blog emailed me this question:

"What is the best way to grow a circle of competence in a given field? Is it reading a bunch of annual reports? Is it trade magazines? Is there an online resource that provides detailed education on different industries?"

The best way is picking specific stocks to study. A lot of people do too much what I'd call "passive" learning They hope to be like a sponge reading Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio)'s letters, "The Intelligent Investor," a new book on some economic issue, a book on behavioral finance, etc. And they do this without a pen, paper, and calculator in hand. They don't ask questions. They don't make the subject their own. They are too detached and objective about it. The right way to increase your circle of competence is not about what you choose to study. It's about how you choose to engage with that material.





Here's what I'd suggest to investors who wants to grow their circles of competence. First, think of the stock in your portfolio you know best. The business you are most comfortable with. I don't own Omnicom (OMC). But I have in the past. Let's use that as an example. Omnicom has some obvious public peers: Interpublic (IPG), Publicis (PUB.PA), WPP (WPP.L) and Dentsu (TSE:4324). That's five companies right there. There are plenty of other companies we could talk about. We could talk about Havas (HAV.PA) and BrainJuicer (BJU.L) and so on. But five is enough.

Now, make yourself a schedule. Time yourself. Most people spend too much time with too divided an attention. They don't focus enough on the subject they want to study. You probably don't know how long it takes you to read an annual report. A lot of people have no idea how quickly they read. Do you think you read at 150 words a minute, 300 words a minute, or 450 words a minute? Some people have no idea. There's no reason not to know this. It's easy to figure out what a normal pace is. How many pages there are in an annual report may determine how long it takes you to read the report. But we can use a sample of these five stocks and the median result of how long it takes you can be a pretty good guide to how long it will normally take you.

Story continues

Set yourself a schedule. For the next five days: read the annual reports of Omnicom (Monday), Interpublic (Tuesday), Publicis (Wednesday), WPP (Thursday) and then Dentsu (Friday). You have no idea how long it will take you to get through each annual report. So, this time you're going to need to set aside a lot of time. You might need something absurd like a block of three hours each day this first time. But you're only going to need this once. After we have the timed results of these five annual reports, you'll be able to measure how long it normally takes you to get through an annual report.

Set a timer. I have an Amazon (AMZN) Echo where I work. But you can use a phone. Or, you can use a computer. My one caution about using a computer is that I'm going to have you print out the annual report. I don't want you reading the annual report on the computer. That only encourages distraction.

The tools you are going to need are the 10-K or annual report itself, a calculator (for your hand, not on your phone or computer) and a pen (to write notes). I have a pad of blank paper with me (it's just printer paper clipped to a clip board) at all times. Other people just write all over the 10-K itself. I think this is how Buffett does it. I will write questions on the 10-K or circle things. When I want to do longer calculations I use a blank sheet of paper to write down the values with which I am working.

The most important thing is the questions you ask. This is directing your attention. The "experience" of reading an annual report is not objective. It's subjective. As you work your way through an annual report and I work my way through an annual report we are going to have different experiences. We are going to notice different details. We are going to ask different questions. It's important to ask questions to which you don't know the answer. It's even OK to ask questions you can't answer and aren't sure how to get the answer just yet.

I have Asperger's. Compared to other people unusual details are going to pop out to me. The average person is going to tend to see the "forest" more and the individual "trees" less. If you give average people columns of numbers or paragraphs of text, what jumps out to them is more like "what's the overall theme here, what's the purpose of this stuff" whereas what jumps out to me are the individual errors in arithmetic, spelling, etc. Unusual details.

There are advantages and disadvantages to integrative versus disintegrative (analytic) thinking. Different people will fall in different places on this spectrum. Some people are very detail oriented. Others are very gist oriented. Even if you are gist oriented, you're going to want to zero in on the specific details that tell you more than what the company is trying to communicate. Usually, you aren't going to be good at picking out specific details and drawing analogies between companies until you read the reports of several different companies that are related in some way. Write down all the questions you have as you have them. And work your way through all five of the ad agency groups I mentioned. Time yourself.

Now that you know how much time it takes you on average - let's say it took you between 60 minutes and 120 minutes to work your way through each annual report and the median time was 80 minutes. In the future, I'd definitely set a timer for 120 minutes when picking up an annual report. And I'd seriously consider setting the timer for more like the median (in this hypothetical, 80 minutes) time. This is to ensure you stay focused. Most people aren't able to stay focused for long periods of time. It's unrealistic for the average person to spend more than maybe three to four hours of their day actually focused. And they are rarely going to be able to sustain focus for longer than 90 minutes. Work periods of more like 45 minutes to one hour are more reasonable. If you can find a way to break your study time down into one-hour chunks, I'd definitely do that.

Know ahead of time the exact task you are going to tackle and then set a timer for the time you are going to work. If you finish before the timer - fine, you're done. If you don't finish before the timer - you're still done, at least for today. Be realistic in setting the timer. The idea is not to rush. I'm not trying to get you to read an annual report and take notes, ask questions, etc. as quickly as possible. What I'm trying to get you to do is to be 100% focused on the work you're doing while you're doing it. This is critical. That's why you are working from a printout. Otherwise, you will have tabs open in your browser, you might even check email, take a call, etc.

There is no substitute for focused attention. That means focus in terms of not doing anything else while you are working on studying some investment. But, it also means focus in terms of what you are studying. I don't want you "thinking about the market" willy nilly. Or about advertising. Or about anything as broad as that. On Monday, you are going to think only about Omnicom. On Tuesday, you are going to think only about Publicis. And so on. You are also going to be alone with the primary source and your own thinking. I don't want you reading anything I wrote about Omnicom, or something written about ad agencies over at Value Investor's Club, or anything as mentally undemanding as that.

You are doing focused work here. Mental heavy lifting. It's a lot more pleasant to read other people's ideas and then either nod or shake your head on the inside. This doesn't lead to any insights. It doesn't help you come up with your own way of seeing stocks, companies, situations, etc. You have to be focused. And you have to be alone with your own thoughts to do this. I can't stress this enough. This is the sort of thing that I'm sure Buffet does and that I'm sure almost everyone I talk to via email does not do. There are plenty of people who spend as much time as Buffett thinking about investing. But, they don't spend as much quality time. The quality of the time you spend is the focus you bring to bear on some specific question.

OK. This isn't supposed to be a discussion of focused work; it's supposed to be a discussion of circle of competence. How do you expand it? First, you verbalize things. You actually write your questions right there in the margins. You make the material your own. The 10-K itself isn't important. The way you see and frame and understand the 10-K is what matters. Every 10-K you read changes you.

Once you detect a possible opportunity - you can work in a web of familiarity. For that first week, I gave you a rather rigid schedule. It's organized in terms of genre. The genre here is industry and its big, giant, public ad companies. You are going to read about Omnicom, Publicis, WPP, Interpublic and Dentsu. This isn't necessarily the best way to increase your circle of competence. But it's a fine way to start. It's an easy category to identify. When I was writing a newsletter, my co-writer and I did this a lot. We looked at Grainger (GWW) and MSC Industrial (MSM) back to back. We looked at U.S. regional banks like Frost (CFR), Prosperity (PB), Bank of Hawaii (BOH), BOK Financial (BOKF) and Commerce (CBSH). A lot of times one bank would lead us to another.

For example, I liked Frost. Frost is the biggest bank in Texas. Quan liked Prosperity. Prosperity is the second-biggest bank in Texas. Frost and BOK Financial are two of the biggest energy lenders around (one is in Texas, the other is in Oklahoma). Frost and Bank of Hawaii are similar in terms of having very high deposits per branch. That's a figure I care a lot about.

We also looked at Wells Fargo (WFC). In some ways, Wells Fargo is like a nationwide regional bank. It looks a little like Frost and Bank of Hawaii in some ways but not in other ways. And there were enough differences that we never picked Wells for the newsletter. But we had an established process for looking at these banks. And we got better at that process as we went. The two huge advantages we had though were that we talked about these banks and we wrote about these banks. I can't overstate how important verbalizing your thinking process is.

If you can find someone to talk your investment ideas through with, do it. Buffett had his Charlie Munger (Trades, Portfolio). Get one. Maybe there's a blogger you really like. Email him. Ask him what he thinks of some idea of yours. It's not real important what he says. Don't act like he's an expert and you're a newbie and you are seeking guidance from him. Act like he's a peer and you are pitching an idea. It doesn't much matter if he emails you back, likes your idea, etc. The key here is to hear yourself talk the idea aloud. Everybody needs a sounding board. You need someone to bounce ideas off. Who that person is doesn't matter. What matters is hearing yourself talk aloud.

If you aren't writing a blog, you should be. If the whole blog idea doesn't appeal to you, start an old school journal, but get out a piece of paper and write down why you are buying the stock. Give your reasons.

Maybe you aren't ready for any of that yet. Maybe you just want to focus on "studying" to increase your circle of competence. That's fine, but don't let it be passive study. And don't let it be unfocused. Most people are too passive and too scatterbrained in their study of value investing. Pick a group of stocks. I mentioned multinational ad agency holding companies. I mentioned regional banks. I mentioned MRO distributors. Fastenal (FAST) is another one. So, if you want to study MROs - there are three to get you started: MSC Industrial, Grainger and Fastenal. You don't have to decide if any of them are worth buying.

But you can certainly read the latest 10-K of each of these three companies and then you can write a blog post or a journal report explaining which you think has the best: 1) business model, 2) growth prospects, 3) customer base, 4) capital allocation, 5) management and 6) stock price. If you had to buy one of these three stocks, which would it be? If you had to short one of these three stocks, which would it be?

Here are some clusters of stocks to study.

Watch stocks: Movado (MOV), Fossil (FOSL), and Swatch (UHRN.SW).

Bank stocks: Frost, Prosperity, BOK Financial, Bank of Hawaii, Commerce Bancshares, UMB Financial (UMBF) and Wells Fargo.

MRO distributors: Fastenal, Grainger and MSC Industrial.

Advertising giants: Omnicom, Publicis, WPP, Interpublic and Dentsu.

Pick any of these groups. Work through one annual report a day for three to seven days of study. Talk to another investor. You can do this in person, on the phone, via Skype or via email. Talk to me if you want. I promise I'll read your email - no matter how long - and I'll send you some kind of answer in return. Then, once you're done studying a group of these stocks and done using another human as a sounding board, put your own reasoning down on paper. If you're shy, put it in a pen and paper journal that no one else ever needs to see. If you're more gregarious, put it in a blog post. Turn the comments off or learn not to read them. You don't need to hear people's superficial, knee-jerk reactions to what you write. It'll dispirit you. How other people judge your ideas isn't important. That's not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to get comfortable hearing yourself think.

Of course, there's nothing magical about 10-Ks. Some investor presentations are pretty good. If you want to make more work for yourself, I'd suggest reading both the latest annual report and the latest investor presentation (not a result presentations - but like an Investor Day or an investment banking conference or something similar). Don't read the earnings transcripts. I do read earnings transcripts. We used these heavily in the newsletter I wrote. But, what we'd do is work from a huge stockpile of like 5-10 years of past transcripts and take a long-term view. This is very time intensive. There's no point reading the latest earnings call transcript or listening to an earnings call. Just work from 10-Ks (or annual reports) and investor presentations. Study stocks in groups.

My four rules for expanding your circle of competence are:

Study a series of related stocks. Give each stock your absolute undivided attention - focus like you've never focused before (it's fine if you can only do this for like 45 minutes at a time). Put your thoughts into writing. Bounce those ideas off another person.







Once you get through these four steps, you'll have a ton of questions; you'll be so energized by the discussion that you'll be ready to go right back to Step 1 with a new group of related stocks. You'll be talking about some aspect of banks and the other guy will tell you about how that's similar to something he saw with this insurer. Once you get a discussion going, you'll find a lot of new threads to follow. Just stay focused and stay engaged. And try to do a little every day.

If you can devote even 30 minutes of total focus a day to this task - you can grow your circle of competence. That's over 180 hours of intense study in one year. It's much better than looking at stocks and markets randomly in unfocused dribs and drabs as headlines come in. Expanding your circle of competence doesn't take much time. It does take dedication. Make it a focused, daily habit.

Disclosure: Long Frost.

Start a free seven-day trial of Premium Membership to GuruFocus.

This article first appeared on GuruFocus.






By Ashok Singhal: The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) strongly denounced the statement made by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar that India should revise its "no first use" nuclear weapon policy.

The CPI (M) said it has serious implications both for India's security concerns and for the country's standing in international relations.

The statement added that the remarks represent a complete reversal of the long standing position of India as a country that champions a nuclear weapon free world and consistently stood by its commitment for peaceful use of nuclear energy.

advertisement

The defence minister's statement, it said, clearly indicates that this government is negating India's established stand on use of nuclear weapons in war. It jeopardizes India's security concerns by undermining the declared good neighbourly relations approach. Further, it undermines India's efforts for membership of international bodies like the UN Security Council and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Also read: Manohar Parrikar makes bizarre nuclear statement, his ministry says personal opinion



LACK OF GOVERNANCE

The defence minister's contention that these are his personal opinion is completely untenable. As a member of the cabinet collective in a parliamentary democratic system, under oath to the Indian Constitution, such opinions that are contrary to India's long established policy direction is a reflection of the complete lack of "governance" of this government. The party said that if the defence minister wishes to air his personal opinions, then he may do so after resigning from the Cabinet.

The CPI(M) demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, now on a visit to Japan, to conclude amongst others a nuclear agreement, must immediately clarify this government's commitment to India's long standing position of universal nuclear disarmament and the non-use of nuclear weapons in war.



PUNJAB WATER SHARING



In view of the Supreme Court verdict annulling the "Punjab Termination of Agreements Act 2004", the party called upon the central government to immediately intervene with both the governments of Punjab and Haryana and work out a mutually acceptable and beneficial agreement on the sharing of waters.

Also read: Want to make India most open economy, says PM Narendra Modi in Japan

The BJP heads the central government and Haryana, and is a partner of the ruling coalition in Punjab. Given this situation, it must urgently intervene to ensure that tensions do not escalate. It is imperative that an agreement be evolved at the earliest.

The party appealed to the people of Punjab, Haryana and other concerned states not to fall victim to rousing provocative passions and to maintain peace and harmony.

--- ENDS ---
Mark Zuckerberg

Half the nation is blaming Facebook for Donald Trump's election.

And Facebook feels that's very unfair!

The argument is that Facebook now plays a huge role in the distribution of information. Its 2 billion active users may read traditional news sources like The New York Times and Business Insider. But they aren't typically visiting those websites directly. Instead, they're scrolling through Facebook's news feed and reading articles that friends share.

The problem is that Facebook users aren't always good at distinguishing legitimate news sources from satire, propaganda, or just plain false information. And if bad information goes viral, it can negatively influence the public's opinion.

The spreading of false information during the election cycle was so bad that President Barack Obama called Facebook a "dust cloud of nonsense."

"People if they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again, as long as it's on Facebook and people can see it, as long as its on social media, people start believing it," he said.

But Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to get that.

"Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook  it's a very small amount of the content  influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," Zuckerberg said on Thursday night.

That seems a bit tone deaf.

If Facebook wants to be a platform where billions of people regularly find and share news, then it needs to accept some of the responsibility that comes with that power. That means coming up with some guidelines to help spread information responsibly.

A messy business

It's not hard to see why Facebook is reluctant to do this. The internet was built on the legal foundation that online companies are not liable for third-party content displayed on their sites.

Acting as an information gatekeeper and making editorial decisions is a difficult and messy business. Facebook learned this earlier this year when a person who worked on the project told Gizmodo that contractors Facebook employed suppressed politically conservative articles from the trending news section.

Story continues

Facebook's response to the controversy was to fire the contractors and let its algorithm decide which stories appear in the trending news box. Clearly, more work needs to be done.

But there's good news: Facebook doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Google has already spent two decades battling the distribution of bad content online. Facebook can adopt this by:

Assessing the quality of the content being shared (and the authority of the people who are sharing it) Burying content that doesn't meet quality standards

Google has built an algorithm that prioritizes the quality and relevance of an article. Anyone can write anything online, but not just any piece of content will show up in the first few pages of a Google search result.

It's not perfect  just ask former Sen. Rick Santorum, who was the victim of the most famous Google bomb, in which a webpage characterizing him in vulgar terms rose to the top of search results.

But Google takes its responsibility to surface the right information seriously  in part because its business depends on it  and by and large, people trust that the top results on Google will be legitimate.

The vetting game

Google also examines the source of the article carefully. It has an application process for publishers that want to be part of its Google News program. Then it has a team carefully review each applicant and reject a site if it doesn't meet quality standards.

Sites are evaluated on a number of things, including their "authority" on a subject matter, their "journalistic standards," their ability to show "accountability" for content through proper attribution and author bio pages, and more. If a site is rejected, it can reapply a few months later.

Facebook's Instant Articles, by contrast, don't seem to require much vetting at all. Instant Articles launched in closed beta, with a few Facebook-approved partners. But now it appears open to almost any site that has the required tech specifications. The only requirement listed on the Instant Articles FAQ page for publishers is that the content does not run afoul of Facebook's community standards, which bans things like sexually explicit content and violent threats.

Now that Facebook is such an important part of the news cycle, its vetting process needs to mature. It should evaluate the person who is sharing a piece of content on Facebook, weigh the quality of the link being shared, and then determine how far a friend's status message should really spread.

Coming up with this sort of process isn't censorship. It's just being responsible.

This is an editorial. The opinions and conclusions expressed above are those of the author.

NOW WATCH: This is how you're compromising your identity on Facebook





More From Business Insider


Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook announced on Friday it is going to remove an option that allowed advertisers to exclude certain ethnic groups from their targeting.

The social network has offered the ability to exclude "Ethnic Affinity" groups for a couple of years, but the feature was thrust into public attention last month, thanks to an article from ProPublica.

The article explained housing or employment ads that exclude people based on race, gender, or other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law  but the author managed to purchase an ad aimed at house hunters that excluded anyone with an affinity for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people that was approved within "15 minutes." This month, a lawsuit seeking class action status alleged Facebook was violating federal fair housing laws and civil rights laws for allowing the option.

On Friday, Facebook's VP of US public policy and chief privacy officer Erin Egan published a blog post outlining that "discriminatory advertising has no place on Facebook."

Facebook is making a number of changes to address the issue. It is disabling the ethnic affinity targeting option for ads it identifies as offering housing, employment, or credit products and building tools. The company is also building tools that can automatically identify when an advertiser in one of these sectors has attempted to exclude an ethnic group from its targeting.

In addition, Facebook says it wants to provide more clarification and education to prevent marketers from running discriminatory ad campaigns.

Egan said Facebook met with New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois and the Congressional Black Caucus, and U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez of California and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss how the site can do better to target discrimination.

Facebook also spoke with the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Fair Housing Alliance, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Brookings Institution, and Upturn.

Story continues

Egan concluded: "We are making these changes to deter discrimination and strengthen our ability to enforce our policies. We look forward to finding additional ways to combat discrimination, while increasing opportunity, and to continuing our dialogue with policymakers and civil rights leaders about these important issues. "

Facebook's ethnic affinity targeting option has been compared to racial profiling by detractors, but the company has argued that its advertising policy prohibits using its targeting features to discriminate against a group of people.

The feature does have legitimate uses: Universal Studios, for example, used it to show different versions of the "Straight Outta Compton" trailer to black and white audiences.

NOW WATCH: Scientists have discovered why American honey bees are turning into zombies





More From Business Insider


Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg called the election results on Thursday a hopeful sign for women despite the loss by Hillary Clinton, who she supported.

Although President-elect Donald Trump's victory has worried a number of Silicon Valley executives, many leaders including CEO Jeff Bezos, CEO Marc Benioff, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have struck a more neutral tone in their responses. Sandbergs message, written on Facebook, was no different, calling attention to a peaceful transition of power, and Thursdays meeting between President Obama and Trump.

This has been a truly divisive election and Americans on all sides are speaking out for the chance everyone should have to improve their lives, Sandberg wrote on Facebook. We need to do better to ensure that every child gets a great education, every adult has the opportunity to support their families, and that we embrace each other to get there. America is a melting pot where women, men, and people of all races, backgrounds, religions and political views build the future together.

Get Data Sheet, Fortune's technology newsletter.

Sandberg, publicly backed Clinton in the election, and at one point, she was rumored to be considered for a cabinet position in a possible Clinton administration. But in October, she said she was uninterested in becoming Treasury or Commerce Secretary if Clinton was to be elected president.

Sandberg, the author of the well-known manifesto on womens leadership, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, also used Thursdays note to call attention to this historic election for women.

For the first time in our countrys history, a woman was the nominee of a major party, and over 59 million Americans voted to put Hillary Clinton in the highest office in the land. Even though we fell short, that should make us all proud. There are now more women in the U.S. Senate than ever before. Nevada elected our country's first-ever Latina senator, Catherine Cortez Masto. Illinois' Tammy Duckworth will be the first Thai-born senator and California's Kamala Harris will be the second-ever black woman in the Senate. There is still so much to do, and we need the full talents of our population to tackle the challenges our country faces. We must encourage more women to run for office across every party at every level of government until our representation matches our share of the population. History is on our side - and we will get there. We have real challenges to face as a country. The only answer I've ever known to facing any challenge is to work harder. Today we pledge as Americans to keep working for a better future for everyone. Today we recommit ourselves to leaning in, Sandberg wrote.

Story continues

See original article on Fortune.com

More from Fortune.com
By Dustin Volz

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc said on Friday it would no longer allow certain advertisers to exclude racial or ethnic groups when placing ads on its service, following criticism that the practice was discriminatory.

The move comes amid growing scrutiny of how the world's largest online social media network's policies and algorithms shape what content appears in a user's news feed.

The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election this week has prompted questions over how much voters were swayed by inaccurate or misleading news items shared on Facebook, mostly in favor of Trump.

Facebook will disable use of the advertising tool, called 'ethnic affinities,' for ads that offer housing, employment and the extension of credit; areas where certain groups have historically faced discrimination, Facebook said in a blog post.

"There are many non-discriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these types of ads," Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, wrote. (http://bit.ly/2eZ8Eey)

Facebook collects vast amounts of data on its users, including photographs, allowing it to demographically categorize them in ways that allow advertisers to precisely target content to those they want to reach.

The company said it will now use tools that automatically detect and disable ads offering housing, employment or credit that rely on ethnic affinity marketing, Egan said. It will also update its policies to more explicitly require advertisers to not engage in discriminatory advertising.

The changes come two weeks after ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news organization, published an article showing how Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude groups on the basis of ethnic affinities, a practice it said may violate federal housing and civil rights laws passed in the 1960s.

A group of Facebook users filed a lawsuit against the company after the ProPublica report, claiming such ad targeting violated the Fair Housing Act and Civil Rights Act.

Story continues

Facebook has attracted criticism in recent months for how it polices several forms of content for its 1.8 billion users, including extremist propaganda, nudity and misleading or inaccurate political articles, which have become known as 'fake news.'

The company has been accused by some reporters, political observers and some in Silicon Valley of helping Trump win Tuesday's election by doing little to limit the spread of such items, many from dubious websites, on its service.

On Thursday, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rejected those claims.

I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, (which is) a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, is a pretty crazy idea," he said at a technology conference in California.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz in Washington and Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke; Editing by Sai Sachin Ravikumar and Bill Rigby)
By Alicia Powell NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", the "Harry Potter" wizarding spinoff movie, had its world premiere on Thursday night, and the cast said they hoped the film would provide both escapist comfort and a message of acceptance in the real world. The film, the first of five, takes place 70 years before events in the first Harry Potter books and features a cast of new characters with magical powers. Set in 1926, it centers on Newt Scamander, a "magizoologist" who arrives in New York with a case full of strange creatures that quickly escape. Just like the Harry Potter books and movies that were rich in themes of good and evil, death and family, author J.K. Rowling infuses the "Fantastic Beasts" story with darker topics of xenophobia and intolerance. "There are a few really beautiful and pertinent messages in the film ... There is this fear of the other, this fear of what we don't understand, a need to blame and segregate. And how hate can grow into something that is just overpowering because of that," actress Alison Sudol, who plays the mind-reading Queenie Goldstein, told reporters on the red carpet in New York. Ezra Miller, whose character Credence Barebone is shy and unloved, said the movie has "the comfort and the escapist wonder that she (Rowling) brings" as well as issues "to take back to our world to get to work on." Rowling, who wrote the screenplay for the film, said the story was "partly informed by what I saw as a rise of populism around the world." "If you have read the (Harry) Potter books you know this period threatened to become very dystopian. You were looking at the rise of a very dark force," the British author told a news conference ahead of Thursday's premiere. "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" opens worldwide on Nov. 18. (Reporting by Reuters Television; Writing by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)
Fantastic Beasts star Ezra Miller makes a beautiful Harry Potter statement following this election

Its been a rough week following the election, to say the least. Positivity is what we need right now to get through the craziness. Thats why Fantastic Beasts star Ezra Miller turned to Harry Potter to cope with election results.

During a live Facebook chat with BuzzFeed, Miller explained how hes dealing with Donald Trumps victory.

Me and my friends watched [Harry Potter and] the Deathly Hallows last night . . . Because some of my friends genuinely needed that, Miller said. The fear that a lot of people are feeling right now is so palpable and so real.

Miller then described exactly why J.K. Rowlings series brings an incredible amount of comfort during times of fear.

He beautifully stated,

The world of J.K. Rowling is this beautiful mythology that comforts us, and if we knew it as children, it brings us to a very basic place of feeling like were not alone in the world. [She] reminds us of the tools that we have in times of darkness, like the one we are barreling into right now: our love, our support of each other, friendship, community.

Heres the live chat in full:

BuzzFeed Presents Fantastic Beasts A conversation with the the cast of Fantastic Beasts! Posted by BuzzFeed Entertainment on Thursday, November 10, 2016

Rowling posted her own thoughts about the election results on Twitter.

We stand together, she wrote. We stick up for the vulnerable. We challenge bigots. We dont let hate speech become normalised. We hold the line.

We stand together. We stick up for the vulnerable. We challenge bigots. We don't let hate speech become normalised. We hold the line. https://t.co/ro9AkRSc9Q  J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 9, 2016

Miller beautifully echoed her words by saying, I think were going to need the Order of the Phoenix.

The Order of the Phoenix being a secret society founded by Albus Dumbledore to oppose Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters.

Stay strong, friends. As hard as it is to remember this right now, positivity always prevails.

The post Fantastic Beasts star Ezra Miller makes a beautiful Harry Potter statement following this election appeared first on HelloGiggles.
This feminist fashion line is donating 100% of proceeds to Planned Parenthood

If youre looking for a way to channel your outrage over Tuesdays election result (and get your holiday shopping done) look no further than The Outrage. The feminist fashion line is donating 100% of proceeds from its Pantsuit Nation collection to Planned Parenthood from its Pantsuit Nation collection, and we promise youre going to love everything they offer.

The company announced this week that it will make the donation in Hillary Clintons name, writing on Instagram, We are devastated but we have work to do. From sweatshirts and tees to baby onesies and tote bags, theres something for all of your HRC-loving friends in this collection.

We are devastated but we have work to do. Start here: 100% profit donated to Planned Parenthood in HRC's name www.the-outrage.com A photo posted by the-outrage (@theoutrageonline) on Nov 9, 2016 at 8:27am PST

In an interview with Marie Claire, co-founder Rebecca Correa Funk said,

To have such a qualified, intelligent and inspiring woman come so close and lose like this is absolutely devastating. But its also a signal that we have a lot of work to do. Hillary has championed womens rights for decades, and donating to Planned Parenthood is the best way we can think of to carry her work forward.

She says The Outrage has already raised more than $15,000 for Planned Parenthood from the Pantsuit Nation collection. (The company will also donate 50% of profits from some of its other lines, including Not My President, to Planned Parenthood.)

50% profits donated to Planned Parenthood in honor of HRC A photo posted by the-outrage (@theoutrageonline) on Nov 9, 2016 at 6:43pm PST

While President-elect Donald Trumps stance on funding for Planned Parenthood remains unclear  hes said he thinks the healthcare provider is important because it provides cancer screenings, but doesnt support it because some clinics provide abortion services  others in the G.O.P. have made it abundantly clear that their goal is to de-fund Planned Parenthood quickly and permanently.

Story continues

Meanwhile, President Obama has been working tirelessly this week to permanently protect funding for Planned Parenthood before he leaves office in January. Heres hoping her makes it happen.

Ready to shop? Keep scrolling for a few of our favorite Pantsuit Nation items from The Outrage!

Proud Member of Pantsuit Nation T-shirt

Get it here for $32.

Proud Member of Pantsuit Nation Onesie

Get it here for $26.

Proud Member of Pantsuit Nation Sweatshirt

Get it here for $46.

Proud Member of Pantsuit Nation Tote Bag

Get it here for $28.

We hope this brings you a little light in the dark.

The post This feminist fashion line is donating 100% of proceeds to Planned Parenthood appeared first on HelloGiggles.
As straightforward as its title, The Monster strands a bickering mother and daughter on a little-trafficked rural road where they discover that they  and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass by  are prey to a ferocious beast of unknown origin. Like writer-director Bryan Bertinos prior The Strangers, this is an admirably lean-and-mean execution of an elemental horror story. Though ultimately its narrowness of purpose proves a limitation as well as a strength, the strong performances and visceral action make for a satisfying genre exercise. A24 is opening the feature (which is already available on DirectTV) on 18 U.S. screens Nov. 11, simultaneous with its on-demand launch.

Bertino effectively creates a tense mood well before the actual scary stuff starts, since the principal characters are already living a more banal kind of domestic horror-show. Divorced Kathy (Zoe Kazan) is raising daughter Lizzy (Ella Ballentine) alone, at least in theory. In practice, however, Lizzy is raising herself, forced into a maturity beyond her 10 or so years to compensate for moms substance-abuse problems  which may have improved somewhat from the extreme abuses glimpsed in bleak flashbacks, but remain considerable. At the start, Lizzy greets the morning by making herself breakfast, clearing away the living-room debris from Kathys previous-night bender, and repeatedly trying to wake her zonked-out mother. Theyre inevitably late getting started on the long drive to dads, where Lizzy will be dropped off for a stay, and where she clearly would rather be living in the long-term.

Its a testy road trip complicated by rainy weather and construction that forces them to take a detour onto a lonely side road. They suffer a blown tire, and while the car is spinning out of control, they hit a wolf that crossing the little-traveled lane. Shaken but basically unhurt, the two wait for the tow truck theyve called to arrive. By the time it does (with Aaron Douglas as unlucky proprietor Jesse), Lizzy has noted some disquieting things in the area  like the inexplicable disappearance of that wolfs corpse in a moment when the mother and daughter arent looking, not to mention a giant fang lying nearby on the ground.

Suffice it to say that there is something much worse than an ordinary lupine lurking in these woods, imperiling not only our protagonists but whoever shows up to help them. It takes nearly an hour before the leads become fully cognizant that theyre under attack, but its time well spent building character dynamics and an atmosphere of dread. Once all hell breaks loose, the action is brutally unrelenting, its long prelude coaxing us toward acceptance of some climactic elements (like the little girls credulity-stretching resourcefulness under extreme pressure) that might otherwise have seemed silly.

Theres no explanation whatsoever for just what the monster is or where it came from. Is it supernatural? An alien? Some kind of prehistoric aberration? A fairly old-school, man-scaled reptilian beastie when finally confronted head-on, its certainly unpleasant enough. But as in The Strangers, this menace is most frightening when still a mystery. The fact that it remains a complete enigma to the end will probably strike some as a narrative cheat, and indeed theres a certain lack of lingering resonance to a monster movie in which the monster is, well, just a monster, absent the slightest context, purpose, or backstory. But like Bertinos sleeper-hit debut (in the interim, he made 2014s Mockingbird, a more gimmicky horror picture that few saw or liked), this feature makes a rigorous virtue of its conceptual simplicity.

Given much more dimensionalized characters to work with than the genre norm, Kazan and Ballentine are very good, each willing to dig into how interpersonal strife has made this duo not just victims, but irritable, unforgiving, and often cruel toward one another. Naturally, their essential bond emerges in crisis, but thats handled without too much sentimentality.

Shot in Canada (and largely at night), The Monster is sharply assembled in all departments, wringing the maximum suspense and variety out of what might have easily become a claustrophobically monotonous handful of outdoor and car-interior locations. In addition to Julie Kirkwoods atmospheric widescreen lensing and Maria Gonzales muscular editing, the principal aesthetic contribution comes from the judiciously applied score from tomandandy (aka Tom Hadju and Andy Milburn).

Related stories

Off Broadway Review: 'Love, Love, Love' With Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan

Paul Dano to Make Directorial Debut With Indie Drama 'Wildlife'

Berlin: David Thewlis Starring in Heist Comedy 'Croak'
Before they became transfixed by their electronic devices, there was a time when little boys loved trains, whether playing with models or imagining themselves in a real-life version of Thomas and Friends. Of course very few childhood enthusiasms can translate perfectly intact to adulthood, which is pretty much the predicament faced by the real-life protagonist of Off the Rails. Adam Irvings documentary profiles the already somewhat notorious case of a grown man with Aspergers Syndrome who for decades has been unable to stop himself from repeatedly, competently yet illegally, assuming control of New York City subway trains  no matter how many times hes been jailed for it. Though the film eventually grows as repetitious as its subjects habit, this odd tale has an undeniable bizarro human-interest fascination. Having traveled extensively on the fest circuit the past six months, the picture is wading into Oscar-qualifying limited-theatrical runs.

Im really good with trains, but I cant seem to figure out people is how Darius McCollum describes himself after having already spent half his adult life in prison. A nerdy African-American Big Apple native bullied from an early age, he was at one juncture attacked with scissors by another youth. That turning point induced a great distrust of his peers, triggering a subsequent behavioral loop of running away, being committed and put on heavy psychotropic pharmaceuticals, and so forth. Frequently fleeing to the relative safety of the subway system in the late 70s, this curious kid ingratiated himself with the workers there, some of whom went so far as to unofficially train him in various capacities. He made news in 1981, at age 15, when he got caught joyriding (or rather joy-driving) the E Train; a conductor pal who wanted to sneak off to see his girlfriend had asked McCollum to take over.

That first time proved as addicting as heroin. Darius crimes have all been victimless  whether operating a train, driving a bus, collecting tolls, maintaining tracks, or assuming any of the other roles for which he has stealthily acquired appropriate uniforms and even keys. And he has never caused an accident. Nor has he deviated from the standard routes and procedures, of which he has an encyclopedic knowledge. Nonetheless, his criminal record and mental issues have rendered impossible the one thing that would seemingly solve his obsessive problem: getting an actual job with the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

As a felon, he has found any employment increasingly hard to come by, which has led to sporadic homelessness. The consequences of his continuing transit antics were exacerbated by a shyster lawyer who exploited McCollum for publicity while often needlessly leaving him abandoned in jail. Hes serving a sentence on Rikers Island when finally assigned a much-improved new representative, Sally Butler. But by then (amid his 29th incarceration at age 45 in 2010), his legal options are sorely limited, and in the jarringly violent milieu of prison, the therapy he desperately needs isnt available.

Its a complicated, messy history marked by endless recidivism and the subjects inability to resist his compulsions when released back into freedom. (Nor is his plight aided by his fondness for the media-driven celebrity each new arrest brings.) First-time documentary director Irving uses a variety of tactics to diversify this doomed-to-repeat-itself narrative, including brief reenactments, a wide range of interviewees, a running thread of recited letters between Darius and his long-suffering mother, plus clever use of graphics and animation. Its an attention-getting tale with a colorful star. Still, after an hour or so, interest begins to flag, as we realize this public transit bandit who imagines himself a public-service Good Samaritan may never exit his revolving-door predicament.

Nonetheless, theres enough drama as well as novelty here to make Off the Rails worthwhile. One interesting theme is the ways in which the law can trap people who have clinical mental conditions; at one point Darius best hope appears to be joining his elderly ma in North Carolina, yet his probation conditions wont allow that. There are also occasional curve balls like the protagonists unlikely marriage to an Ecuadoran emigre, who suspects him of being unfaithful  only to discover shes been thrown over for his subway addiction.

A notable plus in the well-assembled package is Duncan Thum and Steve Gernes quirky electronic score, which finds the right skewed tone to suggest the subjects mixture of childlike simplicity and high level of unconventional intelligence.

Related stories

'Off the Rails' Director Adam Irving on Strange True-Life Story That Could Win Julia Roberts Her Next Oscar
I have seen nothing like this in my life. I do not mean the cancellation of 500- and 1000-Rupee notes; I mean that the website of Reserve Bank of India crashed. Instead, there was a message: "Error 521 Ray ID: 2ff1c1321ce83192 o 2016-11-09 13:54:13."

Photo: @ASHOKVDESAI

That is hardly worth a complaint, for the Prime Minister himself had given a pretty clear explanation. And he gave us in detail the arrangements the government had made for exchanging banned notes for unbanned ones. All one had to do was to choose one of the exchange counters - in crematoria, milk booths, rail ticket booths and so on - and queue up with one's sacks of notes. True, it was an unwarranted waste of time; but while one stood for hours, one only had to share the Prime Minister's view that one was participating in a Mahayajna - I guess it means a great religious ceremony. He called it this celebration of integrity, this festival of credibility. And just in case one wondered why the Prime Minister of a secular country had organized these thousands of yajnas, the answer should be clear - that his government has brought a new moral dimension to the running of this country.

advertisement

This is not its first step of this kind. Earlier this year, the finance minister had asked black-moneyed people to confess, pay 45 per cent of the money they admitted to have evaded taxes on, and earn the government's forgiveness. And he had appointed a commission to detect evaded taxes. While the Prime Minister has been bent on physically cleaning Bharat, the finance minister has been engaged in cleaning it financially. And he thinks he has succeeded; in July he said that there had been a sizeable dip in money parked abroad. I wish he would give some evidence, not so much because his word cannot be trusted, but because statistics of money parked abroad are extremely scarce and unreliable. In fact, those who who park it abroad are secretive for good reasons, and they park it in tax havens that have a good reputation for respecting their preference for secretiveness.

While the effectiveness of the finance minister's efforts to curb black money is uncertain, the impact of the Prime Minister's ban on two notes is pretty clear. The Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes constitute over four-fifths of currency notes in circulation in terms of value. So those who use them will be seriously inconvenienced. That is precisely what the government intended: it believes that tax evaders use these notes, and will be seriously inconvenienced. So will be the small fellows who use the notes for small transactions; the vegetable sellers and pavement traders will have a tough time. They too should think that they are participating in a yajna.

They are the people who will suffer; but the government did not cancel the notes to make common people miserable. What will be the benefit? Presumably the government reckons that apart from the common people, those who make black money transactions in stacks of notes will also suffer; that is indeed the object of the move. The bad businessmen can hire small people, give them wads of notes and ask them to stand in queues and get them exchanged; but the government presumably thinks that they have such huge stocks of notes that they will not be able to get most of their black money converted. Is it right? No one knows, and the government has not issued any data to show that it is.

advertisement

This is a general problem with the policy measures of this government - that it does not publicly demonstrate their rationality. Does it have such evidence? My guess is that if it had, it would see the advantage of publicizing the evidence; the evidence up to this point is that it proceeds without sufficient evidence.

Good intentions pursued with a poor rationale: is it a good combination? Some obviously think so; but a better combination can be conceived of, namely good intentions pursued with a good rationale. I myself believe that this is essential in public policy: the government is so big, its actions affect so many citizens, and they are so powerless against it, that it is essential to make policy robust and failure-proof. It is not enough to ask whether a policy would do some good; it is far more important to be careful that it does not do harm. The harm done by the cancellation of the notes - the inconvenience to the public - is obvious; of its benefit, there is no reliable estimate. That is not the way to make policy.

advertisement

Those who make policy today evidently do not think so; we just have to accept and endure the new approach to policy, that as long as some evildoers are inconvenienced to an uncertain extent, collateral damage to innocents is quite all right. Apart from the morality of such a view, one should also consider the likely impact on India's reputation. We may recall the Vodafone case: its purchase of Essar's telephone business was made abroad and hence not taxable in India, but the finance minister changed the law after the event to make it taxable. His government obviously benefited financially from his action, but he gave it an international reputation for arbitrariness. Currency notes have been for general, unrestricted use ever since their invention; by demonetizing them, the government has given the message that it can do so again. Henceforth, it would be unwise for people to hold on to currency notes - not just for black-moneywallahs, but for ordinary people. And if notes are risky, how about the government's other paper, such as bonds? How about its word? Can it be trusted? I would have thought twice before I gave the people an occasion to ask the question.

advertisement

Anyway, the government has acted and erred; what next? First of all, it has to change its conviction that if some innocents are hurt when the guilty are assaulted, that is all right. All citizens matter, and not hurting the innocent is more important than taking down the guilty. And second, it must not only allow dissent, but it must encourage and welcome contention, and use criticism it courts to make robust policies.

The author is a former chief economic advisor to the Government of India



--- ENDS ---
San Francisco-based filmmaker and artist Jay Rosenblatt works with archival footage, original images, voiceovers, and ominous classical pieces by the likes of Arvo Part to create new stories that explore dark, ironic themes ranging from the personal habits of dictators, as in 1998s Human Remains, to the heartrendingly confessional meditation on grief, 2005s Phantom Limb. Honored this year with the Camerimage award for achievement in documentary, the former psychologist returns to Bydgoszcz, Poland to screen a new film, When You Awake, and to speak about his work.

What qualities do you find in film (and found film)  as opposed to digital filmmaking  that lend themselves to your method of assembling new stories and themes?

It is a very different process to work with images that already exist than with something you shoot. For me it has led to a more poetic/metaphoric way of working. When I am looking for a specific image then it is more similar to shooting, but many times it can be more transformative to re-contextualize an existing image.

And do you follow your instincts when going through the hundreds of reels youve collected  many discarded from public schools?

For me, it requires some access and trust in my unconscious. Found footage also has this collective unconscious aspect to it, so there is a familiarity for the audience.

Youve said that you didnt think of yourself as a documentarian at first, but as new genres of the form gain traction at festivals and with distributors, youre now more comfortable with the label?

Yes as a documentarian but also essayist, collage artist, experimental filmmaker, provocateur, entertainer and, not to sound presumptuous, at times a healer.

Are you more comfortable to be working without a producer so that you can experiment on a film until youre completely satisfied with it?

Yes and no. I need the total freedom but I yearn for someone to help handle all the non-creative aspects of filmmaking, of which there are many. I think the right producer would be a godsend. Ever since my early films I do not consider a film finished until I am totally satisfied and feel I have done all I can do. I dont want to later regret not waiting. I also never believed in having a pre-determined length to a film and I think many films suffer from this.

Story continues

In all that time making adjustments, what insights have you gained about editing? It seems almost a mystical process to many filmmakers.

Absolutely, it is mystical, organic, intuitive and requires extreme perseverance to experiment and adjust. When the cut feels right you just know it.

Your endings are sometimes quite surprising, as in The Phantom Limb, inspired by the death of your younger brother, which considers how life might still go on in some way for those we mourn, using a passage from Victor Hugos Le Revenant.

It was in someones book that I was reading about grief and I just thought it was such a beautiful story. It seemed like a great way to end the film. To end a film about death with birth and like multiple births.

Your new project, The Kodachrome Elegies, is a follow-on of your film from 22 years ago, which examined sort of sociopathic behavior and a boys battle with his feminine side, right?

Yes, I am finishing a brand new short and working on a proposal for a longer project that revisits the unbelievable and bizarre experiences I had in making my 1994 film, The Smell of Burning Ants.

What can you reveal at this point about what happened?

Its about the nature of trauma, of memory, a lot of layers  a revisiting of this film that had all these synchronistic occurrences in the making and in the aftermath.

As a filmmaker, what perspective do you gain from your role programming the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival?

I know it from both sides  how filmmakers feel and how difficult it can be to curate and all the variables that go into programming. Rejections are still hard  to receive and to notify someone else. I am particularly sensitive to this and it is especially hard when I know the filmmaker and respect their work.

Related stories

Production Designer Dennis Gassner on James Bond, 'Blade Runner,' Coen Bros.

'Taxi Driver,' 'Raging Bull' Cinematographer: 'Great Cinema Need Not Be Beautiful'

Alan Parker to Head Main Competition Jury at Camerimage, 'La La Land' Will Open the Festival
HTC smartphones are known for their solid, unibody aluminum cases. And in Consumer Reports' tests, they generally earn solid scores for display quality, camera performance and battery life. They also excel in the sound department.

The new HTC Bolt smartphone, a Sprint exclusive available today for $600 directly from the carrier and its retail partners, seems likely to follow that tradition.

That's particularly true when it comes to sound quality. The phone supports 24-bit, hi-res audio and packs an amplified stereo speaker that sounds good enoughand loud enoughto let you enjoy music without headphones.

While these features are currently available on two other HTC phones in our ratings, the One A9 and the HTC 10, the Bolt adds a new twist: It includes a set of earbuds that use a sonar-based technology to scan and map out the shape of your ear canal in order to optimize music for those ears.



The Bolt is rated water-resistant to 1 meter for 30 minutes and supports both wireless and rapid charging. Other features include a 16-megapixel camera with optical image stabilization, 32 gigabytes of onboard memory thats expandable to 2 terabytes via an optional microSD card, and a relatively capacious 3,200 mAh battery.



We'll be testing the phone in our labs in the coming weeks, but here are our first impressions.

Key HTC Bolt Features

Speedy network access. Sprint named this smartphone after Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who is regarded as the fastest human ever timed, because it supports the fastest portion of Sprints LTE Plus data network.

It takes advantage of a technology called carrier aggregation, which combines multiple frequency bands of LTE spectrum to create a single, fatter data pipe. Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are all at various stages of rolling out this technology. The result: download speeds of more than 100 megabits per second (mbps).

Usually, two frequency bands are used. But the new HTC phone is one of a handful on the market that can take advantage of three LTE bands, and phones using this version of carrier aggregation have clocked data download speeds approaching 300 Mbps.

Story continues

The goal is less to break data-speed records than to minimize congestion when lots of phones in a small area want to jump on their data networks at the same time. The technology is currently only available to in parts of Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Columbus. Users of the HTC Bolt in other regions will experience the slower dual-band aggregation.

But 100 Mbps is still plenty fast. The FCC defines a broadband connection as 25 Mbpsand thats for an entire home with computers and Netflix streaming to large-screen HDTVs. So 100 Mbps delivered to a single phone with a relatively tiny screen is pretty amazing.

I've been using the HTC Bolt on the Sprints network in the New York area, without three-band carrier aggregation. And the connection speeds were more than fast enough in my informal trials. Apps and websites often seemed to download information almost instantly.

Sonar-powered earbuds. The Bolt, like the iPhone 7, did something many consumers might not like: It ditched the 3.5mm headphone jack and instead comes with a set of earbuds that plug into its data/charging port (USB Type-C).

This puts the headphones in direct competition with the charging adapter, whose services cant always be ignored, and adds the extra hassle and expense of retrofitting conventional headphones you probably already own with a port adapter.

Unlike the iPhone, the conventional headphone adapter isn't included in the box. But the Bolt does have an advantage over the iPhone 7 in that it supports both wireless and quick charging, so you can continue listening to you favorite tunes using the headphones while the Bolt replenishes its battery cells resting on a wireless charging pad (not included).

More interesting is that these earbuds scan your ear canal with what HTC says is a "sonar-based" technology and also samples ambient noise to adjust audio output to "suit your personal hearing capabilities." This feature, which HTC calls BoomSound Adaptive Audio, can compensate for hearing loss, according to an HTC spokesperson.

The feature automatically flips on whenever you plug the BoomSound earbuds into the Bolts port. If its your first time using the headphones, the app pops up on screen and prompts you to perform a quick, 2-second scan. From then on, it functions in the background, though you can toggle it on or off at any time, as well as rescan your ears or create new sound profiles by tapping the app in the Android notification bar.

Our engineers will assess Adaptive Audios sound quality and hearing-customization prowess over the next few weeks. In the meantime, I found songs like Saint Motels "My Type" sounded quite good with the feature turned on, but suspiciously flat and tinnyworse than the cheap headphones I use with my LG G3 smartphonewhen turned off.

Sharp, tough display. The Bolts QHD display provides about 534 pixels per inch of resolution, which is more detail than an unaided human eye will probably notice. Still, its good to know that when youre streaming an HD-quality video off of Netflix, every pixel of that movie will find a home on your phones screen.

The screen is protected by Cornings Gorilla Glass 5, which the company says should protect the screen significantly from cracking when dropped from shoulder height "onto hard, rough surfaces up to 80% of the time."

Seemingly impressive battery life. The Bolts 3,200mAh battery is just a about right for a phone supporting a fast Snapdragon 810 processor and jumbo 5.5-inch quadHD display.

I used the phone sporadically for about 24 hours after fully charging it, and yet the phones gauge indicated the battery still had 67 percent capacity. I found that quite impressive, though Ill leave it to the expertise of CR testers to pronounce the final verdict on this phones battery life.

I didnt have the opportunity to test the Bolts rapid-charging abilities, though my experience with such phones is that you can expect several hours of battery life if you can connect a phone showing a near-dead battery for 15 to 30 minutes.

Its dunk-resistant. HTC says the Bolt meets the IP57 standard for dust and water ingress. The "7," according to the standard, means no water should be able to enter the phone if it's submerged in a meter of water for 30 minutes.

That useful quality is becoming standard with many top-shelf smartphone lines. Some models, like the iPhone 7 and late-model Samsung Galaxy smartphones, are rated to survive deeper dives (about 5 feet) for the same amount of time.

The important thing in smartphone water resistance is that you'll still have a functioning phone if you accidentally drop it into the sink or bathtub.

Its a bit bulky. While some phablet-screened phones, including Samsungs Galaxy S7 edge and ill-fated Note7, manage to present 5.5-inch displays with palm-friendly comfort, the Bolt tilts a tad over to the chunky side, measuring a little more than 6 inches by 3 inches by 0.3 inches.

The Edge, whose display curves away from the viewer to form the phones tapered edge, is just 0.02 inches less thick and less wide than the Bolt, yet that seems more than enough to noticeably affect comfort.

We'll have more on the HTC Bolt when we finish testing in our labs in the coming weeks.







More from Consumer Reports:

Top pick tires for 2016

Best used cars for $25,000 and less

7 best mattresses for couples





Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright  2006-2016 Consumers Union of U.S.
Katie Holmes makes another striking transformation into Jaqueline Kennedy for The Kennedys sequel, The Kennedys: After Camelot, and this time she's joined by Matthew Perry.

The new miniseries picks up where the last one left off after the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the late '60s. Perry plays Senator Ted Kennedy with the help of a prosthetic nose, who is fighting the Chappaquiddick scandal in the series. The highly publicized incident took place on July 18, 1969 when a vehicle that Ted was driving veered into a body of water. Campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, reportedly drown in the accident, while Ted swam to safety.

PICS: Katie Holmes Glows as Jackie Kennedy in Her Wedding Dress in 'The Kennedys: After Camelot'

This is just one of the many family sagas that get examined in the series, after the original stirred up controversy for its unflinching look at the lives of one of America's most prominent political families.

The four-hour series also delves into Jackie Kennedy's second marriage to billionaire, Aristotle Onassis and the tragic love story between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.

Holmes last played Jackie O. in 2011, and ET was with her at The Kennedys premiere.

"As exciting as it was, it was daunting because she was loved by so many," Holmes explained to ET at the time. "So you walk into a situation trying your best, but everybody has their idea of who she was and so you're never going to please everyone."

WATCH: Katie Holmes Giddily Channels Jackie O. On Set of 'The Kennedys: After Camelot'

Despite the five-year hiatus, Holmes comfortably slips back into the role, baring a striking resemblance to the former first lady in photos from the set that were released in June.

In the pics, Holmes is in full character for a wedding scene, reenacting Jackie O.'s 1968 nuptials with Onassis.

WATCH: Katie Holmes and Suri Cruise Play Dress Up

TheImageDirect.com

Story continues

Clad in a recreation of Kennedy's iconic long-sleeve lacy white Valentino wedding dress, Holmes stunned next to actor Alexander Siddig, who plays the late Greek shipping mogul.

Kennedy married Onassis five years after her first husband, the late John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. The two were married for six years before he died in March 1975 of respiratory failure at the age of 69.

The Kennedys: After Camelot debuts in 2017 on Reelz.

Related Articles
As the credits rolled on their new World War II era drama Allied, and the audience at the Regency Village Theatre in L.A.'s Westwood burst into rapturous applause, co-stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard and director Robert Zemeckis couldn't hide their excitement as they waited in the wings for the post-screening Q&A.

The threesome were all smiles Wednesday as they sat down to discuss the film about a Canadian Intelligence officer who, during the second World War, encounters a French Resistance fighter in Morocco and falls in love, only to have the relationship tested once they attempt to build a life together during the height of the war.

"I've never had princess dreams when I was a kid, but I really wanted to be an actress, because I was a big fan of Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo and all the glamour of this era," Cotillard said of her excitement to take on this role. "To be part of such a beautiful, strong, deep and yet glamorous movie, that's my princess dream."

Indeed, Allied is an homage to the movies of a bygone era, complete with Lawrence of Arabia-esque sweeping vistas and stormy exterior scenes all shot inside a soundstage. "We have wonderful digital tools so we can create set extensions and sand dunes and all that stuff digitally now," said Zemeckis. The audience laughed as the director admitted, "Anytime I can stay indoors, I do," crediting his experience in making digital films for the past few years for giving him tools to make a movie that looks real but is digital. Some of the throwback scenes, where Pitt and Cotillard appear to be in a moving vehicle when in reality the car is stationary and the background is added later, "was a really fun experience for us and it lends itself to this story particularly well," Pitt revealed.

Read more: How the Brangelina Split Will Impact Pitt's Upcoming Movie With Marion Cotillard

In his first red carpet appearance since the announcement of his divorce from Angelina Jolie, and one day after the father of six was cleared in a child abuse investigation, the 52-year-old appeared to be in good spirits. He made his first public appearance the night prior to co-host a screening of Moonlight with Julia Roberts, but Allied was his first red carpet event.

Story continues

Pitt's French co-star gently mocked his Parisian accent and lack of dance skills and Cotillard in turn took a ribbing about her gun wielding. The actress admitted this was an area where she was lacking. "I had training before we started shooting, and the first shooting scene was a disaster," she laughed. The director told her to take 30 minutes and practice some more, but also told Cotillard, "I can see that you hate guns - I need you to love guns." Pitt quipped, "It's very American."

While the talk's moderator pointed out that Pitt has made a fair share of WWII films, the actor insisted he doesn't have a World War fetish. "I have a fetish for story," he said. "It just so happens to land in World War II." All three were struck by Steven Knight's script about love, war and betrayal, which was loosely based on a true story. "It came off the page," Zemeckis raved, revealing that the script is a largely fictionalized version of real-life circumstances that were, admittedly, far less epic.

Joked Pitt: "It would have made a much shorter movie."

Read more: How Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard Got the Bespoke Treatment in 'Allied'
I keep being told that food is cheap right now. From grocery companies reporting earnings to news stories about food deflation, prices are reportedly at their lowest levels in decades. That sounds great, but are you actually seeing much lower prices in the aisles of your local store? Im not.

I know I live in New York City, where everything is usually a bit more expensive, but shouldnt some of this historic reduction in prices be getting passed on to all consumers? If eggs prices are really crashing, I feel like I should see it reflected on my receipt.

Its hard to compare your grocery shopping year to year unless you are super organized. Im not, but Im lucky enough to have my groceries delivered by Fresh Direct, so I do have my orders from the last few years. I decided to compare an order from a year ago with the same order today.

Heres what I found. The biggest decrease was in meat prices. Ground beef dropped $3.00 a pound in the last year to $6.99 a pound. Dairy: Heavy whipping cream is down 30 cents, but my yogurt was up 30 cents. I read in the Wall Street Journal that farmers are actually throwing milk out in their fields, because it costs too much to truck it to market. Yet, my half gallon was still $3.99, about the same as it was a year ago. There was a lot of variability in produce prices. My lettuce was 50 cents cheaper. My cauliflower and strawberries were both cheaper by $1, but lemons and onions didnt budge. None of the consumer packaged goods (CPGs) we buysalsa, cereal or mac-n-cheesehad fallen either.

I talked to Jason Ackerman, CEO and co-founder of Fresh Direct, and he confirmed the trends. CPGs have not fallen. The makers of those goods are reluctant to pass savings along to consumers. So even though oil and grain prices are lower, the price of your Cheerios probably isnt. Fresh Direct and other grocers have more leverage negotiating with farmers and providers of goods that have a shorter shelf life. If you have a bumper crop of lettuce, you cant exactly hold onto it for a few months because it will perish. You need to sell it now, and that can sometimes mean youre having to accept a lower price.

Ackerman also said I basically have my own tastes to blame for not seeing a sharper decline in my grocery bill. While meat, eggs and dairy may be down on average, they arent across the board because theres actually a shortage in some cases of humanely raised, cage-free or organic products, and thats sending prices higher in some cases. I see this at play with my organic hot dogs, which were up $2 since last year or in the organic milk that cost the same as it did 12 months ago. As consumers shift toward these products, growers and farmers havent always kept up with demand, leading to an imbalance and possibly higher prices in those categories. Basically, there are cheap prices for grade A white eggs, but not for my cage-free brown eggs.

How are you faring in this era of food deflation? Have you seen your bill go up or down? How so? Wed love to hear about it. Reach out to us on @yahoofinance on Twitter.
Global stock market moves right after Donald Trumps unexpected win made one thing clear that market watchers want the present state of affairs to sustain and not a complete revamp. The theory was true for the U.S. market as well which is why markets started crashing initially on cues of Trumps victory but finally steadied probably on his reassuring rhetoric on America First (read: ETFs to Watch if Trump Makes it to White House).

In fact, several global markets too edged higher on November 9, defying the odds of a crash. All-World ETF iShares MSCI ACWI ACWI was up over 0.3% on November 9. But investors should note that Trumps uncertain rather arguable stand on trade, immigration and global policies may be detrimental to many foreign ETFs.

Long List of Losers

Nay to NAFTA

Trump has indicated in its campaign that he wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement  or totally remove it. The agreement had tied up the U.S., Canada and Mexico for more than two decades. The deal permitted manufacturers and farmers to do seamless business. Now, this agreement may be threatened as Trump intends to bring jobs offshored to countries like Mexico back to America.

This particular issue does not go well with country ETFs like iShares MSCI Mexico Capped EWW and iShares MSCI Canada ETF EWC.

Mexico Wall

Trumps win has by now become synonymous with Mexicos loss. Mexico is a Trump-unfriendly investment due to his plans of building a wall along the border as part of his immigration strategy and making an unwilling Mexico pay for it (read: 10 ETFs to Watch Today and After The Election).

Apart from the wall issue, restriction on outsourcing makes Mexico ETF more vulnerable. Several auto companies have manufacturing hub in that country. Speculation is rife that Trump may impose huge tariffs on imports from that country. Mexico peso slumped over 12% to a record low on cues of Trumps victory. Mexico ETF iShares MSCI Mexico Capped EWW was down over 8.5% on November 9.

Story continues

Other Asian Outsourcing Hubs

China and Taiwan are among the other outsourcing hubs that may fall prey to Trumps outsourcing policies. Higher tariffs on imports or likely loss of manufacturing jobs may put pressure on China ETFs like iShares China Large-Cap FXI (down 2.4% on November 9) or Taiwan ETFs like iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF EWT (down over 3.4% on November 9) (see all Asia-Pacific (Emerging) ETFs here).

Trans-Pacific Partnership to be Terminated?

The Obama administration has been negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership or pan-Pacific trade agreement among 12 nations of Pacific Rim. Countries like Japan and Australia are part of this. But Trump finds this deal not in the best interest of America.

So, TPP members are likely to suffer if the agreement is not passed (of which there is a high chance). So member ETFs like iShares MSCI Australia EWA (down 0.7% on November 9), iShares MSCI New Zealand Capped ENZL (down 3.3%) and iShares MSCI Singapore ETF (EWS) may get hurt. In fact, most of Americas Asian friends like iShares MSCI South Korea Capped EWY (down over 4.5%) may be hassled in the coming days (read: Why Korea ETF Investors Will Pay for Samsung's Mistake).

Europe in Danger?

Trump views that several American cronies are benefiting from partnerships like trans-Atlantic efforts, be it on the security front or trade. In fact, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is likely to be in trouble in Trump presidency. Whether the U.S. can be loyal to the defense of countries that are unable to invest sufficiently in their militaries is a big question now. Trump, in fact, proposed an easier attitude toward Russia and advised being more hostile against terrorism. Europe ETF Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF VGK will thus be under watch in the coming days (see all Europe ETFs here).

Beneficiary

Among all these uncertainties, Russia is likely to win on Trumps victory as he indicated his approval for Putin. Notably, the relationship between the U.S. and Russia was stressed when the latter annexed Crimea from Ukraine in early 2014. But now the ice may start melting. So, Russia ETFs like VanEck Vectors Russia ETF RSX and VanEck Vectors Russia Small-Cap ETF RSXJ may be poised for gains if oil price remains stable  a key factor to notice before investing in this energy-rich economy (read: 3 Country ETFs Soaring on Hopes of Oil Output Curb).

Want key ETF info delivered straight to your inbox?

Zacks free Fund Newsletter will brief you on top news and analysis, as well as top-performing ETFs, each week. Get it 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



ISHRS-MSCI ACWI (ACWI): ETF Research Reports



ISHARS-TAIWAN (EWT): ETF Research Reports



ISHARS-AUSTRAL (EWA): ETF Research Reports



VANECK-RUS SC (RSXJ): ETF Research Reports



ISHARS-MEXICO (EWW): ETF Research Reports



VANECK-RUSSIA (RSX): ETF Research Reports



ISHARS-CANADA (EWC): ETF Research Reports



VANGD-FTSE EUR (VGK): ETF Research Reports



ISHARS-S KOREA (EWY): ETF Research Reports



ISHARS-MSCI NZ (ENZL): ETF Research Reports



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research



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
SINGAPORE, Nov 11 (Reuters) - A Singapore court on Friday jailed a former banker who handled Swiss bank BSI's relationship with state investor 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) for 18 weeks for forgery and failure to disclose suspicious transactions.

Yak Yew Chee, who worked as a senior vice president at BSI Singapore, was also a private banker for Malaysian businessman Low Taek Jho, who was described by Singapore authorities as a key figure in the money laundering investigation linked to 1MDB.

Founded by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who chaired its advisory board, 1MDB is currently the subject of money laundering investigations in at least six countries, including Switzerland, Singapore and the United States.

Najib has denied any wrongdoing and said Malaysia will cooperate with the international investigations.

Yak pleaded guilty to four of seven charges at Singapore's state court. He was also fined S$24,000 ($17,000).

Two charges related to forging reference letters vouching for the Low family and two to turning a blind eye to hefty sums - allegedly proceeds from criminal conduct - coursing through BSI bank in Singapore.

Yak is now expected to assist the ongoing 1MDB money laundering investigation.

Singapore earlier this year shut down BSI and Falcon Private Bank in its biggest crackdown on alleged money laundering connected to 1MDB.

In May, Singapore's central bank referred Yak among six members of BSI Bank's senior management and staff to the public prosecutor to evaluate if they had committed criminal offences in the wake of its money laundering investigation.

Yak earned S$27 million during about four years of work for BSI, including hefty bonuses, court documents showed. ($1 = S$1.4) (Reporting by Fathin Ungku; Editing by Nick Macfie)
A former regional police chief in China was condemned to death on Friday for murder and multiple other offences, a court said, with reports describing his victim as a lover more than three decades his junior.

The woman reportedly survived the first two rounds Zhao Liping fired and fled, before he chased her down in a car and shot her in the head.

Zhao, 64, was found guilty of murder, bribery and possession of firearms and explosives, a court in Taiyuan, the capital of the northern province of Shanxi, said in a statement on its website.

He was sentenced to death because of the "facts, nature, circumstances and degree of damage to society" of his crimes, it added. He will have an opportunity to appeal the sentence.

Zhao headed the police in Inner Mongolia for seven years until he retired in 2012, and was also a deputy head of the regional People's Political Consultative Conference, a Communist-controlled debating chamber.

He was detained last year in Chifeng on suspicion of killing a 28-year-old woman with whom he "had an intimate relationship" because she wanted to expose his wrongdoings, Chinese media said earlier.

Many fallen Chinese officials have been found to have mistresses, and corruption investigations have often been triggered by allegations from spurned or angry women.
Sao Paulo (AFP) - Esteban Gutierrez confirmed on Friday he is to leave the American Haas team at the end of this season.

The Mexican announced on Facebook he was not staying with the team, hoping to clarify his position for his fans before Haas made an expected statement to confirm their recruitment of Kevin Magnussen, currently with Renault.

Renault have signed Nico Hulkenberg, of Force India, for next year and confirmed that Jolyon Palmer will be staying for a second season.

"I want to share with you that I will no longer be with Haas F1 Team for the next season," said Gutierrez via Facebook.

"I want to thank all the team and staff, especially Gene Haas, for this opportunity to work with them. I wish them all the best.

"There are two races left, which I intend to enjoy to the fullest, and as always, Ill give my best. Special thanks to all my fans and supporters -- you will always have a place in my heart.

"I hope to shortly share my plans for the future."

Gutierrez made no comments about his likely next team, but paddock sources on Friday speculated that he could switch to the Manor team.
All across the national capital there was long queues outside bank branches, with people saying they sudden ban had left them shocked.

People started lining up at banks starting 7am, waiting to get their hands on the new notes. Photo: ANI

By Ilma Hasan: Chaos and confusion marked the first day of banks opening after the government banned 1000 and 500 rupee notes on Tuesday.

While people are lauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi's move to fight corruption, most faced many inconveniences on Wednesday and Thursday following the announcement.



CHAOS AND CONFUSION



Banks were closed on Wednesday to get the new currency, and it was rush time on Thursday morning. People started lining up at banks starting 7am, waiting to get their hands on the new notes.

advertisement

All across the national capital there was long queues outside bank branches, with people saying they sudden ban had left them shocked.

"I had withdrawn Rs 10,000 on Monday morning, this move rendered all of it practically useless. I had no cash for two days", said a customer at ICICI bank in Connaught Place.

The bank witnessed long lines, with people waiting for an average of three-four hours before being able to gain entry. Representatives however, came out to help customers, explaining the procedure, offering forms and even water to those waiting for hours.

The operations however, weren't as smooth in other branches.

Also read: Suicide, shock death, out of cash: How Modi's surgical strike on black money has hit some people hard

Also read: You can now pay your electricity, water bills using old Rs 500, Rs 1,000 notes



CITIZENS ANGRY WITH BAN



Yes Bank in Janpath ran out of cash an hour after it came. People were left waiting for hours until they got a fresh stock later in the afternoon. In Central Delhi's Punjab National Bank, customers had several altercations with the security and employees, "They have offered no help, they aren't even letting us in. No one is cooperating with us, maybe this move by the government wasn't good for us after all", said Kabir, a Delhi resident.

At the Gol Dak Khana Postoffice in Delhi, people lined up at 7am, but operations started much later in the morning. A senior citizen said, "They were supposed to make a separate line for us, but I've been asked to join the rest. It's been three hours, it's not good for my health."

While locals who couldn't receive cash on Thursday despite standing in lines could go again, tourists visiting India have faced a major setback.

They came on vacation with the Rs 500 and 1000 denomination which is now unusable. A tourist from China said, "I don't have an international credit card, and all I have is 15,000 rupees. I don't even have money to eat, all I do is sit in my hotel room."

advertisement

Also read: Ola, M-Pesa cashing on Modi's currency ban, clock huge growth in 48 hours

Also read: Going to exchange your old notes? Keep these 10 points in mind



--- ENDS ---
FT MYERS, FL / ACCESSWIRE / November 11, 2016 / Ray Higdon, a resident of Fort Myers, Florida, whose company was listed on the Inc. 5000 this year, has just released an update to his company's popular training on personal branding, called the 3 Minute Expert. In this training, the company states that they will share how business owners can utilize the Internet to position themselves and companies as the go-to experts in their profession.

To date, more than 8,000 copies of this training have been sold worldwide, and the latest update incorporates new facets of social media and branding. The company is offering a free three video series, which can be found on their official website.

Ray Higdon says, "The video series gives you many secrets that will help you to position yourself as an authority figure in any niche."

The 3 Minute Expert helps marketers to create content to attract their target audience. Higdon says that the video series comes from years of strategies that he has personally put into practice in building his business empire. He states that the addition of social media and branding information is critical in helping businesses to better market their products and services and to reach the right people with their messages.

Higdon states that his training will help marketers to create simple content that will work around the clock to bring in customers or clients. He says that after the training, marketers will have a good idea of what it takes to create an online presence that reaches higher levels of success than they have ever known, and levels that position them as authorities within their niche. He states that establishing oneself as an authority is the first and foremost rule of marketing, and the one that can make the most difference when it comes to online success.

Those interested in learning more or connecting with other marketers who have worked with Higdon and his company can view Facebook page reviews. More information can also be found on the company's official website.

Story continues





Contact Ray Higdon:

Ray Higdon

support@RayHigdon.com

RayHigdon.com PO Box 07028 Ft. Myers, FL 33919

SOURCE: Ray Higdon
From ELLE

Election week-or, should we say, the entire 2016 presidential campaign-has been a rollercoaster for all involved.

We were curious about how young women voting for the first time felt about the election-from the lead-up to the aftermath. Reuters reports that 15 per cent of 2016 voters were first-timers, up from 9 per cent in 2012's election. We asked four women about their first experience with this crucial political process: Upasna Barath, from Tennessee; Amelia Lamp, from Nevada; Kinsey Hirae, from Massachusetts; and Morgan Jerkins, from New York.

How did you feel in the weeks leading up to the election?

Kinsey: I was apprehensive. I'd had an idea of who I was going to vote for for some time, but when it came to actually filling out my ballot I almost couldn't believe that I was in the midst of voting for our next president.

Upasna: I was feeling very optimistic. I thought the election would go in favor of my candidate, so I wasn't too stressed or anxious.

Morgan: I was feeling pretty optimistic. I just knew that Hillary had it in the bag despite the email controversy. Perhaps, in retrospect, I overestimated how appalled the nation would be about Trump's indiscretions.

Amelia: I also felt apprehensive. I come from a very rural, very conservative town, and the general feeling there was very pro-Trump. I've also been taking a class that is analyzing presidential elections, and we've been keeping an eye on the polls. They have been so close for so long, it seemed like it was going to be close no matter what.

I overestimated how appalled the nation would be about Trump's indiscretions.

What were the issues that mattered to you during this election?

Kinsey: LGBTQ rights and equality, the mental health crisis, housing policies, campus sexual assault, protecting animals and wildlife, criminal justice reform, women's rights and opportunity, paid family/medical leave, and racial justice.

Upasna: I've always prioritized domestic policy, so the issues that mattered to me the most included gun control, LGBTQ rights, criminal justice reform, climate change, reformed drug policy, gender equality, and welfare reform.

Story continues

Morgan: Racial justice, women's rights, and prison reform.

Amelia: Definitely LGBTQ+ issues, women's issues (specifically reproductive rights), immigration reform, race justice issues, and environmental issues. I was also concerned about foreign problems, like international environmental treaties and other international agreements like NAFTA.

Apart from voting, did you participate in any political activity, such as volunteering or attending political events?

Kinsey: I attended Bernie's rally when he visited Rhode Island, but other than that I just kept tabs on the news.

Upasna: Before the primaries, I canvassed and phone banked for Bernie Sanders and I also attended his rally in Illinois. I canvassed for the Senate General Election as well, for Tom Cullerton. When I felt like I wasn't doing enough, I wrote essays and spoke up in Political Science class. I also run a diversity club on my campus, and we put on a panel where conservatives and liberals discussed their primary and secondary factors of diversity and how it contributed to their choice of candidate.

Amelia: I volunteered with the local Democratic party in my county. I participated in phone banks, and ran the Twitter account for the Elko County Democratic Central Committee. I spoke very openly and often about my voting preferences with the people around me, who were often not informed about the state of the world or our country. I felt a kind of obligation to bring them into the civic sphere, even if it was just to disagree with me.

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Related%20Stories" customtitles="Thousands%20Protest%20Trump%20Across%20America%7CRepublican%20Women%20on%20Why%20They're%20Excited%20for%20Trump%7CThe%207%20Best%20Lines%20From%20Clinton's%20Concession%20Speech" customimages="||" content="gallery.29094|article.40667|article.40596"]

Was gender an important factor for you in deciding who to vote for?

Kinsey: Not really. The only factor that gender played in my decision was who I thought was better for gender equality. It wasn't necessarily the candidate's gender that mattered to me, but how they would handle social issues that involve gender.

Upasna: I always valued the fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman in that I respect her immensely for standing up for her rights. But I think that voting for her on the basis that she is a woman would invalidate all of her other accomplishments. Still, it was nice to know that a presidential candidate could potentially understand where you're coming from when you feel strongly about sexual assault and issues of gender inequality.

Morgan: When I heard about their stances on abortion, I couldn't help but see how their gender may have influenced their choices, especially when it came to Trump. During the last presidential debate, it was clear that he doesn't know about how women's bodies function, period, and it was a very stereotypically male (read: sexist) move.

Amelia: I feel like this is a difficult question to answer. Did the fact that Hillary would have been the first woman president, effectively shattering the one of the highest glass ceilings, impact the way that I voted? Did it ever cross my mind that if Hillary won, there would be even more young people who would not have seen a white man in the Oval Office? The answer to both of those questions is yes. For me, the concept of a woman proving once and for all that gender does not determine how qualified a candidate is was extremely important. So to a certain extent, yes, gender did impact my voting choices. But it was not at all the only reason I voted for her.

Who did you vote for, and why?

Kinsey: I voted for Hillary-not only is she a woman and would represent all women across our nation, but she is highly educated and well-spoken. Although she has an immense amount of baggage, which would have followed her into the White House, she is educated on political issues and is pretty damn good at what she does. She stands up for our rights as people and as women, and she doesn't participate in 'locker-room talk' that denigrates people of color or people of different genders.

I think that she had the country's best interests at heart, and was the only person qualified for the job.

Morgan: I voted for Hillary. Although I'm critical of how the Clinton administration was responsible for massive incarceration rates, especially amongst African-Americans, Clinton was the more qualified candidate, and she wasn't inciting white nationalists.

Amelia: I have been a Hillary fan since she ran the first time. Like Kinsey said, she's extremely well qualified for the office for a plethora of reasons, spanning experience, drive, ideology. I agree that she wasn't perfect, and there were definitely problematic things that Hillary has done in the past, but I think that she had the country's best interests at heart, and was the only person qualified for the job.

Did you feel excited about voting and about your chosen candidate?

Kinsey: Considering the issues that surrounded each candidate, I cannot say that I was super excited about who I voted for. Yes, I support Hillary, but that doesn't mean I agree with everything she has done during her time in a political office.

Upasna: I am very optimistic, so I felt that if I continued to be passionate and excited throughout the whole election season, the result would be awesome. I love Hillary Clinton as a person and I am fascinated with her biography, but I feel like it's not unusual to be nervous when you throw your support behind someone since you're not sure exactly what to expect.

Morgan: I felt very excited about voting. I thought I was a part of making history and it just felt right.

Amelia: I was so proud to be able to exercise my civic right. I was also so excited to be voting for the first major female candidate.

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Related%20Stories" customtitles="Nearly%20Half%20of%20Eligible%20Voters%20Didn't%20Vote%7CThe%20Election%202016%20Winners%20You%20Can%20Feel%20Good%20about%7CClinton%20Delivers%20Her%20Concession%20Speech" customimages="||" content="article.40676|article.40643|article.40639"]

Did you follow media coverage of the election results? What did you think about it?

Kinsey: I followed the media coverage all night, up until the very end. It was my first time voting, so I wanted to take it all in. I was on the edge of my seat most of the time, but towards the end I realized how the results were going to turn out. I was impressed by the amount of unbiased coverage and I was very interested to see what experts had to say about the poll numbers.

Upasna: I think the media played such a huge role in this election. However, I look at the media in two different ways. As a political science student, I see bias in the media from both sides of the political spectrum. As a regular person, I see it as exciting, amusing, shocking...but for all the wrong reasons.

Morgan: It was perhaps the most overwhelming night of my life. I was watching with a group of people and one of them could not stop crying. As the night progressed, the ambience became bleaker and quieter. I was almost in a catatonic state.

Amelia: I followed the media coverage almost religiously. Not only because I was involved in generating content for a party, but because I have taken plenty of classes that have stressed the massive impact that biased media can have on the outcome of a political event. From Brexit to the recent Landtag elections in Germany, the media controls the issues that are covered, how they are covered, and who sees what when.

I was disappointed with the American media, actually. I didn't see it as unbiased whatsoever. The amount of free media that Trump got outstripped what the rest of the candidates received. They did all of his advertising for him. I wish that they would have talked about Trump less, given him a smaller platform to speak.

How did you feel when the result was announced?

Kinsey: I think my heart dropped out of my body. There was a moment where a wave of shock hit me, and then a feeling of extreme sadnessand then shock again.

Upasna: It felt surreal. It felt like my dreams had been crushed.

Morgan: I was angry at America because I realized that [a bigger proportion of] black women voted for Hillary than white women. I just felt like I was living in a country where the majority would probably like to see me dead or subjugated in the worst ways. My back was all twisted in knots.

Amelia: Honestly, I cried. I cried so hard for so long. I felt sick to my stomach, like I couldn't breathe, couldn't think. I felt like my country had turned its back on me as a person, and that we just jumped into the abyss.

Will you be participating in any further political activity now that the election is over?

Kinsey: I think I will check in here and there, especially since there is still so much progress to be made after the election. I want to see who is elected into the Supreme Court; I want to see how the decisions from the ballot questions are carried out.

Upasna: I'd like to run for Congress one day. That's where the real action happens.

I am grieving now, allowing myself to feel the pain of this loss.

Morgan: I'm going to try, but right now, I can't even think about it. My heart is too broken.

Amelia: Absolutely. There is so much to be done in the next two years. I am grieving now, allowing myself to feel the pain of this loss. But I am going to harness my anger, sadness, disappointment, horror, and pain, and put it towards getting Congress back in the midterm elections. And work in my state to ensure that people continue to have their rights respected.

How has this election made you feel about the electoral process and politics more generally?

Kinsey: I was never big on politics and sometimes I would say I consider myself apolitical, but during this voting period, I felt that it was my duty to understand politics to a certain extent in order to decide who I thought would best lead our country. Frankly, I think it is important for all of us to educate ourselves about it. There is a lot of corruptionbut then again, where isn't there corruption? It hurts my head and my heart at times, but it's reality.

Morgan: I never had much faith in politics to begin with. I tend to be very pessimistic and I'm even more so now because of the outcome. I'm still in a state of disbelief, especially since I am a black woman and I don't know if I will ever be able to fully forgive America for what it has done this past Tuesday.

Amelia: Politics is our government; our government is politics. In order to make our nation better, we have to be willing to participate and engage with the system. There is so much work we have to do to make our nation the best that it can be. Partisan politics are tearing at the very threads of our constitution, and the Supreme Court is barely keeping it together. But I refuse to give up on my government. I am going to turn my passion into change, and I will not stop fighting until I can turn to my future children and say that their world is going to be more equal, more loving, and more open than mine.

This roundtable has been edited for clarity and concision.

You Might Also Like
marine le pen

"Defying the odds, vocal populists have won the two major popular votes in the western world this year. The success of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump raises an obvious question: could it happen elsewhere in Europe?"

That's the question put forth by Berenberg's chief economist Holger Schmieding and senior UK economist Kallum Pickering in a note to clients in the aftermath of the US presidential elections, which ended in a surprise Trump victory.

And they're not the only ones. HSBC's chief European economist, Simon Wells, expressed a similar idea in a note to clients on Wednesday, writing "there is a risk that the Trump victory could boost the popularity of anti-immigration and populist parties across Europe."

Of course, the situations in the US and in Europe are not identical. But, there are some similarities in the sentiments of the electorates.

"After all, the parallel to the anti-Washington rage in the US is a rejection of the European Union; the parallel to Trumps anti-NAFTA rhetoric is the threat to reverse the process of European integration that, jointly with NATO, has been the cornerstone of peace and prosperity in Europe since the 1950s," wrote the Berenberg duo.

Taking it a step further, they argued that France is the next crucial vote to watch.

Marine Le Pen

Though an Italian referendum on changes to the country's constitution is right around the corner, the "risk would probably be containable" if Prime Minister Matteo Renzi loses the referendum come December, according to Schmieding and Pickering. (Although, back in August, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told Business Insider the referendum could be the "cataclysmic event" similar to Brexit that could trigger the collapse of the eurozone.)

Story continues

So, given that France is one of the two pillars of the eurozone along with Germany, there's an argument that what happens in that nation's upcoming presidential election, potentially featuring a showdown between a center-right former president and a far-right-wing leader, could have greater implications for the continent than what happens in Italy.

"Could Front National leader Marine Le Pen win the presidential election on 7 May 2017, possibly even trying to take France out of the EU or euro afterwards? If so, it could spell the end of Europe as we know it," wrote Schmieding and Pickering.

Interestingly, they also drew a parallel between how (some) voters saw Hillary Clinton and Trump versus how voters might see France's former president Nicolas Sarkozy and Le Pen (emphasis ours):

"The decisive second round in France will most likely pit Le Pen against the winner of the center-right primaries on 20 and 27 November 2016, either former prime minister Alain Juppe or  slightly more likely in our view  ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy. A Le Pen-Sarkozy duel could invoke parallels with the US vote. Almost like Hillary Clinton, Sarkozy is seen as a divisive old-timer with significant baggage."

For what it's worth, Marine Le Pen was one of the first major European politicians to congratulate Trump after he won.

Still, as things stand now, the Berenberg team writes that they are "fairly confident" that Le Pen won't win come May, given that she is significantly behind both Sarkozy and Juppe in opinion polls. However, they also wonder to what degree polls might misjudge the mood, and added that they need "to monitor the political risks very closely."

populism in europe

It's worth zooming out of France and taking a broader look at what's happening in Europe. Although the continent has always had a plethora of voices  Western Europe versus Eastern Europe, nationalism versus socialism, etc.  the conversation appears to have shifted more to a debate over "open Europe" versus "closed Europe," as the team at Eurasia Group noted back in January 2016.

"Open Europe" refers to the post-Berlin Wall Europe that German Chancellor Angela Merkel pushes for: It's open to the world, and the borders between (most) European states are open to one another. By comparison, "closed Europe" collectively shuts itself off from the outside world, and each country within the continent closes itself up from the others.

And populist movements have been growing in Europe as the continent has grappled with ongoing large-scale economic and political challenges in recent years, including the European debt crisis, the migrant crisis, terrorism, the Turkey-EU refugee deal, and Greece.

Notably, back in October, Buzzfeed News reported data from YouGov, which polled over an 12,000 people across 12 European countries from late August to early September in Europe to "measure the extent of what it termed 'authoritarian populist' opinions." The research found that nearly half of adults held anti-immigrant and nationalist views.

"These results show that the old days of left-versus-right have been replaced by a much more complicated, nuanced mix of political groupings, with profound implications for politics across Europe," Joe Twyman, YouGovs head of political and social research for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, told Buzzfeed News. "Any political party or movement that can successfully appeal to those of an authoritarian populist leaning could benefit hugely when it comes to elections."

NOW WATCH: Scientists have discovered why American honey bees are turning into zombies





More From Business Insider


Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota

Three days after Donald Trump won a stunning victory over Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of the United States, the Democratic Party, like much of the country, is still in shock over the upset.

One major party figure was likely not surprised, however, based on statements made over a year ago.

In July 2015, Rep. Keith Ellison, a congressman from Minnesota and the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, appeared on ABC's "This Week" and warned about ignoring Trump's momentum.

Ellison is now considered a top contender for chair of the Democratic National Committee after receiving endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as other major party figures.

During a roundtable discussion on "This Week," host George Stephanopoulos asked his panelists  ABC news political analyst Matthew Dowd, New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, Republican strategist Ana Navarro, and Ellison  to explain Trump's appeal.

After each panelist spoke, Stephanopoulos turned to Ellison, who had remained silent and smiling throughout the discussion. Here's what he said:

"Well, all I want to say is that anybody -- well, from the Democratic side of the fence, who thinks -- who's terrified of the possibility of President Trump better vote, better get active, better get involved, because this man has some momentum, and we better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket."

The panelists broke out into laughter and Stephanopoulos told Ellison, "I know you don't believe that." Ellison continued:

"You know, George, we had Jesse Ventura in Minnesota win the governorship. Nobody thought he was going to win. I'm telling you, stranger things have happened."

Ellison's sentiment proved prescient.

Here's the video:

NOW WATCH: Here's the ad that Ivanka Trump reportedly doesn't want America to see





More From Business Insider


Kiev (AFP) - Georgia's pro-Western former president Mikheil Saakashvili on Friday announced plans to create a new opposition movement in Ukraine that aims to topple the current leadership and force early elections.

Saakashvili was a passionate supporter of Ukraine's 2014 pro-EU revolution that ousted the Russian-backed president and set the former Soviet republic on its westward course.

He was rewarded by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for his efforts by being named as governor of the important Black Sea port and resort region of Odessa in May 2015.

But the 48-year-old fluent Ukrainian speaker resigned on Monday in frustration after the president and members of his inner circle allegedly hindered him from fighting corruption.

The mercurial Saakashvili -- a furious foe of Russia -- said "we will create a wide political force, a new platform of new forces whose goal is to remove the current political elite."

"Our goal is to force early parliamentary elections as soon as possible," he told reporters in Kiev.

Ukraine is due to hold its next legislative polls in 2019.

The current parliament is led by the parties of the president and his prime minister. Other chamber members include populists and nationalists who might swing to Saakashvili's side.

The prospect of new political turmoil comes seven months after graft allegations forced Poroshenko to overhaul his government as Ukraine continued to fight a pro-Russian separatist war in its east that has claimed nearly 10,000 lives.

That 30-month battle still simmers and the prospects for peace in the European Union's back yard seem distant.

Ukraine's Western allies have long worried about the level of bribe-taking and insider dealing that penetrates the country almost three years since a popular uprising appeared to herald fresh change for one of Europe's poorest states.

Saakashvili made himself into a US darling in Georgia by cleaning up the corrupt police force and setting the Caucasus country on a far more economically transparent road.

Story continues

But Georgia's devastating defeat to Russia in a brief 2008 war saw Saakashvili's star power dwindle to the point that he was beaten in a 2012 election and was targeted in a series of investigations he viewed as politically-driven.

He left his country and came to Ukraine with a promise to clean up graft-riddled Odessa as he did with ex-Soviet Georgia.

Saakashvili said Monday he was serious about his new plan to oust Poroshenko -- a rich chocolate conglomerate owner -- and set Ukraine on a fresh course.

"I do not intend to negotiate with anyone," Saakashvili said in Russian.

"I will only negotiate with the people of Ukraine."
By Markus Wacket BERLIN (Reuters) - The German government has bowed to pressure to water down its CO2 reduction targets for industry in the final version of its climate action plan, a document seen by Reuters showed. Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is determined to hammer out the final details this week so that Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks can present the plan at global climate talks in Morocco next week. The government is now calling for German industry to cut its CO2 emissions by 20 rather than 30 percent by 2030 compared with 2014, according to the document which was seen on Friday. The plan sets out how Europe's biggest economy expects to move away from fossil fuels and cut CO2 emissions by 95 percent by 2050 to implement pledges made as part of a global climate treaty agreed in Paris in September 2015. A leader of the Greens, Anton Hofreiter, said the watered-down goals as showed how Germany, which once considered itself a leader in climate protection, has gone off course. "The climate protection plan remains just a skeleton," he said. "There still aren't any clear goals or measures. This government is afraid to tackle issues like more CO2-free vehicles on the road or closing down coal-burning plants." In the new plan, the emissions-cutting target for power stations was reduced, although only slightly. Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) who share power with Merkel's conservatives, blocked a deal late on Tuesday on the initial plan, aimed at cutting German CO2 emissions by 55 percent by 2030. His unexpected veto came after trade union IG BCE, with the support of the BDI industry group, raised concerns about plans for Germany to end its use of brown coal amid calls for it to set out a timetable for ending coal-fired power production. Gabriel said it was important to achieve ambitious climate and energy policies that also take into account modernization, economic growth and job security. The document also dropped a previous government call to set a minimum price for carbon permits auctioned by countries under the EUs Emissions Trading System (ETS). The ETS charges power plants and factories for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, but to stop industries moving their operations to countries with looser environmental regulations, many firms have been handed free permits. The German document suggested 10 percent of the most efficient plants in sectors that could be vulnerable to so-called carbon leakage should continue to get free allowances. EU lawmakers are currently working on reforms of the market that will reduce the share of free carbon permits handed out after 2020 as part of an effort to fix the oversupply in the system and boost prices. (Additional reporting by Susanna Twidale; Writing by Michael Nienaber and Erik Kirschbaum,; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Alexander Smith)
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany's financial watchdog warned against a loosening of post-financial crisis bank regulations on Friday.

Felix Hufeld, president of Germany's top financial regulator Bafin, made the call at an industry conference days after the election of Donald Trump, who has said he would scrap some financial rules to help U.S. businesses if he became president.

The financial and banking lobby in the U.S. and Europe has also been pushing for less post-crisis regulation, which the industry says is hampering its ability to lend to companies and stimulate growth in economies still suffering after the effects.

"Barely 10 years after the start of the financial crisis I once more hear the bugle calls of deregulation," Hufeld said, without explicitly referring to Trump in his speech.

"And I have the impression that these sounds are becoming louder," Hufeld added. "That is not without risk."

President-elect Trump said throughout his campaign he would oppose financial regulations and in May said he would repeal the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, which was passed in the wake of the financial crisis and empowered federal regulatory agencies to restrict banks' ability to make risky investments.

Hufeld also warned that a loosening or scrapping of existing laws would lead to a new financial crisis.

"The industry, just as politics and regulators, are in need of predictability and continuity - not regulatory volatility," the Bafin head said.

(Reporting by Andreas Kroener; Writing by Tina Bellon; Editing by Alexander Smith)
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany urged other developed countries on Friday to support a plan it is finalising to bolster the economies of Africa, create jobs and slow the flow of migrants from the continent to Europe. Chancellor Angela Merkel and her officials, anxious to stop growing numbers of migrants risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea, are pushing for increased public and private investment in Africa. Development Minister Gerd Mueller said Germany would in coming weeks release details of what he called a new "Marshall Plan with Africa" - drawing a direct parallel with the huge U.S. investment programme that kick-started the ravaged German economy after World War Two. "We have to invest in these countries and give people perspectives for the future," he told a news conference. "If the youth of Africa can't find work or a future in their own countries, it won't be hundreds of thousands, but millions that make their way to Europe." The International Organization for Migration last week said nearly 160,000 people had crossed the Mediterranean from Africa to Italy this year, while 4,220 had died trying. Mueller noted that in addition to the migrants already looking to come to Europe, there were about 20 million displaced people in Africa. He said these issues needed to be recognised by the international community, and Africa should have representation on the U.N. Security Council. Mueller said his plan was aimed at developing joint solutions with African countries, with a big focus on programmes for youth, education and training and on strengthening economies and the rule of law. Merkel raised similar issues during a visit to Africa last month, and during a meeting of the G20 industrialised countries in China. Mueller said a significant share of his ministry's proposed budget increase of over 1 billion euros for 2017 would be earmarked for projects in Africa. Germany this week pledged a 61-million-euro ($67 million) hike in funding for U.N. relief operations in Africa. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal; editing by Erik Kirschbaum and John Stonestreet)
From ELLE

Gigi Hadid was one of the many to vote for Hillary Clinton Tuesday, she said in an interview with the Associated Press yesterday. "I felt a lot of pride being able to do it and obviously felt confident honestly in the candidate that I voted for." Then Donald Trump won, "and this morning I think [I] woke up after seeing the entire election last night on TV, um, I think we all kind of woke up like kind of, an 'is this real moment?'"

But Hadid took heart in Clinton's remarks-and she appealed to others to do the same and to not feel defeated:

I was very inspired by Hillary speaking this morning, and I think that it's important that we all kind of understand that this is our reality, and it's something that we all have to accept. I think that like she said, you know at this point Donald has won, and he's going to be the president and you know, honestly, as a country, we have to give him a chance because that's what our country voted for and that's what we accept as citizens in this country. But I think that we have go into it with positivity, and we can't lose heart or hope or have a feeling that we still can't make a difference and that we still can't even you know, help Trump make great decisions. And I think that's what Hillary this morning was really kind of trying to inspire the whole country to do and I know that she has offered to help him so you know, I think that he should and hopefully will try to find guidance. The entire nation and even his-the people that weren't supporting him during the election, I think that hopefully he can learn from. And yeah, we need to move forward.

Part of that is working on voter turnout: "It's nice to hear that most young people voted for her," Hadid said when asked about the now viral map of the youth vote, "but a huge problem I think in our country is that under 40 percent went out and voted yesterday." [Editor's note: 53.1 percent of eligible people reportedly voted and an estimated 50 percent of voters ages 18-29 did.]

Story continues

This is how the future voted. This is what people 18-25 said in casting their votes. We must keep this flame alight and nurture this vision. pic.twitter.com/ivuXrar869 - Eliza Byard (@EByard) November 9, 2016

"So you know, I think we hopefully can get it up in our next election and make sure everyone's voices are heard so that it's less-I think it's easier to accept the outcome when you know that it's truly what people want so hopefully this will turn out as good as possible."

You Might Also Like
The leaked set of Deepika's photos are look-test shots for Iranian living legend, Majid Majidi's first English feature film. This film would be her second international release after XXX: Return Of Zander Cage.

By Mail Today: Leaked pictures trending online all through Thursday hinted at what could be the most glorious high in Deepika Padukone's career.

The low-resolution snapshots are look test shots Deepika gave for Iranian living legend Majid Majidi's next feature film, on location at Mumbai's Dhobi Ghat.

The film, rumoured to be titled Kashmir Afloat, is to be shot across Mumbai, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and Kashmir. This is Majidi's first English feature film, a project the filmmaker has wanted to start for nearly a decade now.

advertisement

The photographs that cropped up on Twitter show Deepika donning an entirely de-glam look, dressed as a washerwoman. The get-up is diametrically opposite to the sexy action avatar she gets to play out in her Hollywood debut, xXx: Return Of Zander Cage - where she is cast alongside international action superstar Vin Diesel.

Majidi's film will be her second international release after the Diesel starrer and should be an ideal platform to showcase her acting chops, given the Iranian maestro's penchant at making aesthetically rich and intricate sagas of human relationships that demand high calibre histrionics from his artists.



ALSO READ | Another dig at Deepika? Sonam won't hide her Hollywood debut

ALSO READ | Deepika on cold war with Priyanka: I was in school when she won Miss World!

While Majidi's film is scheduled to start in the yearend, Deepika will also be dividing her time between preparing for the promotions of xXx, which opens worldwide on January 20, 2017, and shoot for Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmavati - her next Bollywood biggie lined up for a December-2017 release.

Bhansali's film co-stars Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor. Early reports coming in suggest Shahid's stepbrother Ishaan Khattar is also a cast member of Majidi's upcoming film.

Iranian doyen Majidi is known for cinematic classics such as Baran, Children Of Heaven, The Colour Of Paradise and The Song Of Sparrows.

Among numerous international honour he has received is a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination for Children Of Heaven in 1999.

This is the second time Majidi is collaborating with Indian talent. India's Oscar-winning composer AR Rahman had scored music for his controversial 2015 film Muhammad: The Message Of God, which was the first of his trilogy on the Prophet's life.

Soon after the film released, a Mumbai-based Sunni Muslim group named Raza Academy issued a fatwa against Majidi and Rahman claiming Islam does not allow any visual depiction of the Prophet.

The fatwa also stated Majidi had used non-Muslim actors in the film. The fatwa, of course, has not deterred Majidi from shooting his new film in India.

--- ENDS ---
By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 40 international business and technology organizations representing hundreds of companies on Friday expressed deep concerns to the Chinese government about a new cyber security law they said would likely increase the separation between China and the rest of the world economy.

Beijing on Monday adopted a cyber security law it called necessary to counter growing threats of hacking and terrorism.

The measure, to take effect in June 2017, was swiftly condemned by overseas critics, including business and human rights groups. They said it threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors deemed "critical", and includes contentious requirements for security reviews and for data to be stored on servers in China.

Chinese officials have said it would not interfere with foreign business interests.

In their letter, the groups warned that Beijing's efforts to control more of China's Internet and technology would "effectively erect trade barriers along national boundaries" while failing to achieve its security objectives.

The cyber security law would also burden industry and undermine "the foundation of Chinas relations with its commercial partners, the groups wrote in a letter addressed to the Chinese Communist Party Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs.

The letters signatories include the Information Technology Industry Council, the Internet Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Australian Industry Group and BusinessEurope, among others.

The law's adoption comes amid a broad crackdown by President Xi Jinping on civil society, including rights lawyers and the media, which critics say is meant to quash dissent.

U.S. Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, told Reuters he was extremely troubled by the new law.

The measure could further infringe upon the privacy of its people and potentially have a widespread impact on the international business community, said Gardner, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific and International Cybersecurity.

Gardner said he voiced concern with Chinese officials about the law during a recent visit to the country and would press the Obama administration to address Beijings broader actions in cyberspace, which threaten U.S. economic and national security."

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by David Gregorio)
By John Tilak and Nicole Mordant

TORONTO/VANCOUVER (Reuters) - South Africa's Gold Fields Ltd and Silver Standard Resources Inc have made three joint, unsolicited bids for Canada's Kirkland Lake Gold and recently sweetened their offer to about C$1.4 billion ($1 billion), three sources familiar with the process said.

The latest bid has also been rebuffed, said the sources, who requested anonymity as the issue is confidential. The names of the bidders have not been previously disclosed.

Kirkland Lake has declined to discuss the offers, the sources said. A spokeswoman for Kirkland Lake said she could not immediately comment.

The latest offer for Kirkland Lake represented a premium of more than 50 percent of its value on Thursday. Its shares, which were trading at C$7.42 just ahead of the news, jumped as much as 8 percent to hit C$8.17 before being halted on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

If Gold Fields and Silver Standard succeed in their bid, it would scupper Kirkland Lake's planned acquisition of miner Newmarket Gold for about C$1 billion in stock.

Newmarket could not immediately be reached for comment. Gold Fields and Silver Standard both said they did not comment on market speculation.

In an Oct. 28 shareholders circular filing to discuss that merger, Kirkland Lake said it received two bids without naming the bidders.

Shareholders have a Nov. 23 deadline to vote on Kirkland Lake's bid to buy Newmarket.

Kirkland Lake is a midsized producer operating four gold mines and two mills in a bullion-rich belt of northeastern Ontario.

With its high-grade production and reserves located in a safe, mining-friendly jurisdiction, Kirkland Lake's appeal is bolstered by a scarcity of growth opportunities in the gold sector. It also has more than C$200 million of cash and equivalents on hand.

Gold Fields and Vancouver-based Silver Standard's second bid for Kirkland, submitted in late October, valued the company at roughly C$1.3 billion, two of the sources said. Kirkland's market capitalization as of Thursday was about C$922 million.

Story continues

Kirkland Lake said in the Oct. 28 circular that both the bids, comprised of cash and stock, were not financially superior to the proposed combination with Newmarket.

The sources said it is possible new bidders may enter the fray, noting companies such as Yamana Gold Inc and Hecla Mining Co have assets in the area where Kirkland Lake operates.

Investor advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis have recommended to shareholders of Kirkland Lake and Newmarket that they vote for the deal.

"There's not a lot of synergy between the two companies, but I think there's a bigger picture that maybe some people are missing," said Joe Foster, fund manager at Van Eck, the biggest shareholder of Kirkland Lake and second-biggest at Newmarket.

"What they're doing is creating a niche company: a high-grade underground miner, and that takes a certain skill set."

Luxor, Newmarket's third-biggest shareholder, said it also supports the deal with Kirkland.

Kirkland Lake ran a strategic review in 2014 that did not result in partnerships or acquisitions.

(Additional reporting by Susan Taylor and Matt Scuffham in Toronto and Ed Stoddard in Johannesburg; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli and Matthew Lewis)
As per Reuters, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. GS is likely to consider moving part of its base from London to Frankfurt. This move is being made in order to secure its presence in the European Union (EU) market post Brexit, along with retaining its passporting rights.



Frankfurt is one of the main commercial hubs in the European continent and also Goldmans largest European operation outside London. The bank is examining this move as a gateway to qualify for supervision by the European Central Bank (ECB) before Brexit, by placing part of its assets and operations under the observation of the EUs chief banking regulator.



Reuters cited three sources with knowledge of the matter. One source stated that moving under the supervision of ECB is one of the options that the bank is considering. Another source mentioned that Goldman has had talks with ECB officials in Frankfurt regarding this move. According to the third source, the company will be able to offer its services to clients across the Euro zone and the wider EU, post-Brexit, once it comes under the ECB's jurisdiction.



Notably, all the sources stated that the bank has not taken any final decision on the matter since it will be navigating to an unchartered legal territory resulting from a formal split between the UK and the EU.



Per a spokesman of the bank, there were "numerous uncertainties" about the outcome of Brexit negotiations. "We continue to work through all possible implications of the Brexit vote," he said. However, an ECB spokesman declined to comment on the matter.



At present, Goldman relies on the EUs passporting rights to sell its products. This allows the bank to conduct business with other members of the European Economic Area (EEA), without the need to get further authorization to sell in each member state, while operating under the supervision of U.K. authorities. However, post Brexit, the banks U.K. operations will likely lose this luxury of cross-border services, resulting in a lot of red tape involving lengthy authorization process and huge costs.



Further, the bank needs to increase its Euro zone assets to $33 billion (or 30 billion euro) to qualify for ECB supervision. The company noted that according to its 2015 filings, it had assets of 551 million euro in Germany. Notably, the banks overall assets are higher, including other entities in Germany and the rest of the Euro zone.



Though Goldman enjoys a comprehensive banking license in Germany, some of the services are offered through London  the banks headquarter for operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Also, Goldmans assets in Germany are less compared with nearly $850 billion of assets in London.



Even if the company comes under ECB supervision, its operations in London would still be under the control of U.K. authorities. However, on a broader scale, Goldmans shift of operations to Frankfurt may result in London losing its status as the financial guard for the bank.



Our Viewpoint



Global uncertainties have been a drag on the banks so far this year, with the U.K. voting to exit the EU in late Jun 2016, adding numerous fears in the financial markets.



Goldmans decision largely highlights the move deployed by many banks, opting to shift their base from London.



UBS Group AG UBS, Morgan Stanley MS and JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM are some major banks that have been contemplating to shift their operations/workforce to continue providing services to the EU countries if Brexit makes it impossible to run such services from London.



Currently, Goldman carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 (Strong Buy) Rank stocks here.



Zacks' Top Investment Ideas for Long-Term Profit



How would you like to see our best recommendations to help you find todays most promising long-term stocks? Starting now, you can look inside our portfolios featuring stocks under $10, income stocks, value investments and more. These picks, which have double and triple-digit profit potential, are rarely available to the public. But you can see them now. Click here >>



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



JPMORGAN CHASE (JPM): Free Stock Analysis Report



UBS GROUP AG (UBS): Free Stock Analysis Report



MORGAN STANLEY (MS): Free Stock Analysis Report



GOLDMAN SACHS (GS): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research
Parents Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin have had to watch their little girl grow up through anothers eyes.

Thats because the only picture they have to show how their daughter, Lisa, might look today  five years after the 10-month-old disappeared from her familys home in north Kansas City, Missouri  was generated by computer.

The age-progressed image of Lisa released earlier this year by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children looks so much like Jeremy and me at the same time, its amazing, Deborah tells PEOPLE about her daughter, who would turn 6 on Nov. 11.

Watching your child grow up through technology is never something a parent should ever have to go through, Deborah says in this weeks issue, on newsstands Saturday. But if thats all weve got right now, well take that over nothing. We want to see her in person, and we want to take pictures of her ourselves.

That optimism assumes a best-case outcome to which the hopeful parents cling: That Lisa was abducted in October 2011 and lives now in the caring embrace of another. Eventually, perhaps, she will be found and returned to the parents and brothers who miss her.

But that remains a scenario for which there is little known evidence.

 Subscribe now to PEOPLE or pick up the latest issue, on newsstands Saturday, for updates on the Lisa Irwin investigation.

Investigators were unable to verify a break-in at the familys modest one-story home the night Lisa vanished  when Jeremy returned from work after 3 a.m. on Oct. 4, 2011, to find his wife and sons asleep, the front door open, lights left on and a front window screen pushed in.

Missing cell phones led to the discovery that one phone was used to call someone tied to a person of interest; witnesses also reported a man carrying an infant in the neighborhood in those early morning hours. But none of those leads have yielded answers.

Lisas parents also know that, as the people closest to her, questions arose about their own possible involvement, which they deny. Police have never named them as suspects.

Story continues

Im sure there are people that think that, Deborah tells PEOPLE, but we know the truth, and thats what matters.

Adds Jeremy: I would imagine that a lot of those people will never be heard from ever again once Lisa comes home.

 For more on this case, watch What Happened to Baby Lisa? on our new true crime show, People Magazine Investigates, Nov. 14 (10 p.m. ET) on Investigation Discovery.

Asked whether authorities are investigating a missing person or homicide, Kansas City police Maj. Steve Young tells PEOPLE: We are open to wherever the evidence takes us, and right now its still just an open case. But we are as hopeful as anybody that one day well find this little girl.

As people might imagine, the volume of tips has dropped off, which is normal with a span of time, Young says. But that being said, its a case we still take very seriously.

More than 200 tips have been logged by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children since Lisa vanished, says Maureen Heads, program manager with NCMECs missing childrens division.

Deborah says media coverage surrounding last months fifth anniversary of the disappearance generated about 10 new tips to the familys official website, FindLisaIrwin.com.

That gives me hope that people are still paying attention. Theyre watching. Theyre still trying to help, she says. That means a lot to us.

Lisas disappearance falls into the sliver of cases  just 3 percent last year  characterized by NCMEC as a critical missing child, separate from cases such as endangered runaways or suspected parental abductions.

The five-year wait for answers obviously is not helpful for the families, Heads says. We want children to be recovered as quickly as possible.

But with the examples of other disappearances where abducted children were recovered, she adds, We are very much firm believers in never giving up, and we always hold out hope and work cases until there is a resolution.

Says Deborah: I feel confident with the age-progressions that will be recognized. We want to keep everybody out there looking for her.

But there is also the hard fact that Lisa vanished as an infant. When we do get her back, shes not going to know me, Deborah tells PEOPLE. Shes not going to know Jeremy. Shes not going to know her brothers. But as long as shes safe, thats okay.

We cant make up for the time that was taken from us  that was taken from her, Deborah says. But we can spend the rest of her life getting to know her and making her life better for her in any way we can.

People Magazine Investigates airs Mondays (10 p.m. ET) on Investigation Discovery.




Heres what happens now that Donald Trump is president-elect

The post-election dust has begun to settle and the reality of a Donald Trump presidency is setting in. If youre wondering what happens now that Trump is president-elect, were here to clear things up. Though he has a plan for his first 100 days in office, hes got a lot of work to do before he takes over the reins of the nation.

The responsibilities of a president-elect are manifold, from meeting with the current administration to sitting in on security and policy briefings, but there are some ~unique~ steps on Trumps path to the White House.

Today, he met with President Obama.

The two held an excellent 90-minute meeting this morning, according to President Obama, discussing foreign and domestic policy, the organizational process of setting up an administration, how to facilitate a successful transfer of power, and other critical issues. Michelle Obama also gave Melania Trump a tour of the White House and its living quarters, a traditional turnover from one First Spouse to the next.

Ive been very encouraged byPresident-elect Trumps wanting to work with my team around many of the issues that this great country faces, said Obama. I believe that it is important for all of us, regardless of party and regardless of political preferences, to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face.

He will also, going forward, sit in on all of Obamas top secret national security briefings.

At these meetings, hell learn about the countrys most closely protected secrets, including ongoing information-collection projects  such as the National Security Administrations phone-tapping scheme  and classified espionage operations.

Some in the national security community have expressed concern about Trumps access to these secrets, including Republican officials who opposed hiss candidacy. In an August letter, 50 G.O.P national security and foreign policy officials said Trump was unqualified to be president, and feared the impact that his erratic behavior could have on U.S. relations with close allies.

Story continues

Trump will also have to choose his cabinet and fill out his administration.

Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Holds Wisconsin Campaign Rally

With no prior political or military experience, Trumps cabinet is expected to be the most eclectic in recent memory. It may include business leaders, such as the former CEO of Nucor Corp, a steel company, Dan DiMicco, politicians such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and Trumps own son, Donald Trump Jr. Politico has a detailed list of predictions here.

Unlike other soon-to-be presidents, Trump will have to appear in court before Inauguration Day.

Later this month, Trump is expected take the stand as a witness in a federal civil court trial alleging fraudulent practices by his Trump University. Jury selection is set to begin Nov. 28th in San Diego, and while Trump does not have to be present for the duration of the case, he will have to be in the courtroom to testify. He also has several of his own lawsuits pending and may have to appear in court for those cases.

The sexual assault case against Trump that was expected to be heard in December will not go forward as it has been withdrawn by Jane Doe.

And then hell be inaugurated as president.

Barack Obama Sworn In As U.S. President For A Second Term

The date it set for Friday, January 20, 2017. See you there.

The post Heres what happens now that Donald Trump is president-elect appeared first on HelloGiggles.
LONDON, Nov 11 (Reuters) - A "hard" Brexit in which Britain loses its free access to the European Union market now looks like the most likely outcome of the country's plan to leave the bloc, ratings agency Standard & Poor's said on Friday.

Britain will suffer the brunt of the economic impact of Brexit and the effects on the world economy will be more limited, S&P said in its latest update on Britain's economy.

S&P cut Britain's top-notch AAA credit rating by two places to AA shortly after the June 23 vote to leave the EU, arguing that the country's capacity for effective and stable policymaking had diminished.

On Friday, it said that it appeared that Britain's government had not yet accepted that the EU was unlikely to yield on the indivisibility of its four freedoms - the free movement of people, capital, goods, and services.

"Even if Westminster were to acknowledge the EU position, it is hard to fathom how a rather hard Brexit can be avoided unless both sides become much more flexible than they appear today," said S&P chief sovereign credit officer Moritz Kraemer.

(Reporting by Andy Bruce; Editing by William Schomberg)
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of PayTM payment start-up, left last Sunday for a temporary stay in Mumbai, worried about the impact of hazardous clouds of dust, smoke and fumes that hang over Delhi during the winter months.

By Reuters: As New Delhi grappled with its worst smog in 17 years, the head of India's largest mobile payment firm got on a plane and left, one of thousands of professionals escaping pollution that could cost the capital and the broader economy dear.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of PayTM payment start-up, left last Sunday for a temporary stay in Mumbai, worried about the impact of hazardous clouds of dust, smoke and fumes that hang over Delhi during the winter months.

advertisement

"It became very visibly clear that it is going to be tough in Delhi, especially with young kids," Sharma said in Mumbai. "We were worried that it could create long-term (health) problems."

His company, which has considered moving from its base outside Delhi, has installed air purifiers, brought in plants and masks and offered extra health assistance.

READ | For non-smokers, Delhi's toxic air equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes, will lead to cancer in a month

Telecoms operator Idea Cellular and others have allowed more employees to work at home, and hired buses so that car traffic is reduced - all at their own expense.

A few companies are thriving from the heavy smog hanging over the city earlier this month - providers of face masks and air purifiers have seen sales soar.

But others, like the car manufacturers, are in the firing line of local and national politicians who want to reduce the deadly haze, while estate agents and tour operators have complained of a slowdown in business.

Delhi, home to around 17 million people, is among the fastest growing states in India. Its $84 billion economy has been expanding at more than 8 percent for the past two years, faster than a 7.4 percent national average.

Its air quality, meanwhile, has deteriorated, even by the standards of a country with some of the world's most polluted cities. Conditions had improved by Friday, but the problem is perennial and has been particularly acute this winter.

Companies have yet to tot up the cost of a week of coughing, spluttering and watering eyes, but local industry lobby group Assocham estimates "several billions of dollars" of new investments are under threat.

A study by the World Bank shows Asia's third-largest economy lost 8.5 percent of its GDP in 2013 due to air pollution.

"WORST ON EARTH"

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), a global real estate services firm serving large corporates, said some clients were reconsidering Delhi as a base, as costs of working there rise.

"This is increasing their operational costs as they are being made to spend more to provide a healthy workplace to their employees," said Santosh Kumar, a senior executive at the firm.

advertisement

Delhi's image is deteriorating more widely, a headache for tour promoters and a government touting "Brand India".

Some local tour operators say they are already receiving requests from overseas partners to redraw the itinerary of foreign tourists to avoid even an overnight stay in Delhi. Business travellers say they are cancelling trips.

READ | Delhi government launches app to register garbage and pollution complaints

"The ongoing tourism season, which is yet to pick up, could see a maximum hit," Assocham said.

Expatriates are also thinking twice about living in the Indian capital. JLL's Kumar said more smog could see foreigners packing their bags, a blow to real estate as well as employment.

Lisa Akerman, a Swedish national who lives in an affluent Delhi neighbourhood, said authorities needed to do much more than they were.

Akerman moved to the city two years ago with her family and has taken measures to ensure clean air in her apartment for her two small daughters. Still, the choking smog left her worried about their health.

advertisement

Earlier this week, she decided to take them out of the city for a while.

"The pollution level is too much for the children," she said by 'phone from Goa, where she is camping with her kids. "While I love Delhi, its air quality will be a major consideration in deciding whether we want to extend our stay here."



NOT EVERYONE LOSES

The local government has taken steps to reduce traffic amid widespread public anger at pollution that has caused choking, wheezing and breathlessness.

Licences are being withdrawn for diesel-powered vehicles older than 15 years, and authorities are considering resuming an "odd-even" scheme, under which cars can only travel in the city on alternate days depending on their registration number.

Those steps, and the risk that India's courts will impose stricter rules on emissions, are a potential blow to foreign and domestic carmakers, some of whom have asked for greater clarity.

But not everyone is complaining about the smog.

Japan's Daikin has seen sales of air purifiers increase by up to three times since the Hindu Diwali festival, and its stock that had been expected to last until March is exhausted.

To meet growing orders, the Osaka-based air-conditioner maker increased shipments from its Thai factory by 50 percent.

advertisement

Nirvana India, which distributes the Vogmask face mask in South Asia, reported soaring sales.

It sold 300 to 400 pieces a week around this time last year, but since Diwali at the end of October, it has sold 5,000-8,000 a week and is seeking emergency stocks from Singapore, China and Korea.

"Earlier, only expats, patients and government departments would buy these masks," said chief executive Jaidhar Gupta. "Now everyone is buying."

--- ENDS ---
LONDON (Reuters) - A "hard" Brexit in which Britain loses its free access to the European Union market now looks like the most likely outcome of the country's plan to leave the bloc, ratings agency Standard & Poor's said on Friday.

Britain will suffer the brunt of the economic impact of Brexit and the effects on the world economy will be more limited, S&P said in its latest update on Britain's economy.

S&P cut Britain's top-notch AAA credit rating by two places to AA shortly after the June 23 vote to leave the EU, arguing that the country's capacity for effective and stable policymaking had diminished.

On Friday, it said that it appeared that Britain's government had not yet accepted that the EU was unlikely to yield on the indivisibility of its four freedoms - the free movement of people, capital, goods, and services.

"Even if Westminster were to acknowledge the EU position, it is hard to fathom how a rather hard Brexit can be avoided unless both sides become much more flexible than they appear today," said S&P chief sovereign credit officer Moritz Kraemer.

(Reporting by Andy Bruce; Editing by William Schomberg)
GettyImages 617653588

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid ripped into President-elect Donald Trump on Friday, calling the New York businessman a "sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate."

"The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America," Reid said in a statement.

In his first comments on the election of Trump, who shocked much of the US and world with his election night victory, the outgoing Nevada senator said "watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America."

"I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics," he said.

Reid pointed to the fear some minorities have expressed at the election of Trump.

"I've felt their tears, and I've felt their fear," he said.

The five-term senator said he felt that "their fear is entirely rational" and implored the news media to not produce "fluff pieces."

"Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women, and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African-Americans," Reid said.

"Their fear is legitimate, and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces," he added.

Reid said that the "responsibility for healing" falls "at the feet of Donald Trump," who he noted lost the popular vote.

"Winning the Electoral College does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans," Reid said. "Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try."

"If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do, and he must begin immediately," Reid concluded.

Story continues

Protests erupted across the country on Thursday night. People took to the streets in several major cities to demonstrate against the president-elect.

In some cities, demonstrations descended into chaos. In Portland, Oregon, an anti-Trump demonstration was declared a riot by the police because of "extensive criminal and dangerous behavior." In Salt Lake City, protesters threatened reporters, according to reports from the scene.

Trump initially called the protests "unfair," but quickly changed his tone.

"Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country," Trump wrote on Twitter early Friday morning.

The president-elect added, "We will all come together and be proud!"

The Republican businessman will be inaugurated as the 45th president in January.

NOW WATCH: Its surreal to watch this 2011 video of Obama and Seth Meyers taunting Trump about a presidential run





More From Business Insider


I have personally been on the ballot in Nevada for 26 elections and I have never seen anything like the reaction to the election completed last Tuesday. The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America.

White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trumps victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear  especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America.

I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics. Hispanic Americans who fear their families will be torn apart, African Americans being heckled on the street, Muslim Americans afraid to wear a headscarf, gay and lesbian couples having slurs hurled at them and feeling afraid to walk down the street holding hands. American children waking up in the middle of the night crying, terrified that Trump will take their parents away. Young girls unable to understand why a man who brags about sexually assaulting women has been elected president.

I have a large family. I have one daughter and twelve granddaughters. The texts, emails and phone calls I have received from them have been filled with fear  fear for themselves, fear for their Hispanic and African American friends, for their Muslim and Jewish friends, for their LBGT friends, for their Asian friends. Ive felt their tears and Ive felt their fear.

We as a nation must find a way to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows. Their fear is entirely rational, because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them. Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African Americans. Their fear is legitimate and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces.

If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. (Photo: Susan Walsh/AP)

Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid released a scathing statement on Friday tearing into President-elect Donald Trump.

If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate, Reid said.

Reids statement further declared that white nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trumps victory in Tuesdays election, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear.

The Nevada senator and former boxer is well known for his willingness to lob political grenades into the national discussion. In late October, the Democrat claimed that the FBI had explosive information about close ties and coordination between Trump and the Kremlin. After his comments, CNN reported that the FBI had opened an investigation into ties between Trump aides and the Russians.

Reid, in his final weeks in office, clearly has no interest smoothing a transition to the upcoming Trump administration.

In his Friday statement, Reid accused Trump of demonizing wide swaths of the American public.

I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics, he said.

If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, Reid concluded, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.

Yahoo News reached out to Trumps spokeswoman for comment.

View Reids full statement below:

I have personally been on the ballot in Nevada for 26 elections and I have never seen anything like the reaction to the election completed last Tuesday. The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America.

White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trumps victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear  especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America.

Story continues

I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics. Hispanic Americans who fear their families will be torn apart, African Americans being heckled on the street, Muslim Americans afraid to wear a headscarf, gay and lesbian couples having slurs hurled at them and feeling afraid to walk down the street holding hands. American children waking up in the middle of the night crying, terrified that Trump will take their parents away. Young girls unable to understand why a man who brags about sexually assaulting women has been elected president.

I have a large family. I have one daughter and twelve granddaughters. The texts, emails and phone calls I have received from them have been filled with fear  fear for themselves, fear for their Hispanic and African American friends, for their Muslim and Jewish friends, for their LBGT friends, for their Asian friends. Ive felt their tears and Ive felt their fear.

We as a nation must find a way to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows. Their fear is entirely rational, because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them. Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African Americans. Their fear is legitimate and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces.

If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.
For the Hillary Clinton supporters who have been wondering how she is doing since delivering her painful concession speech on Wednesday morning, one mom in New York has an uplifting answer.

Margot Gerster took to Facebook on Thursday to say that she was feeling heartbroken over the election results and decided to take her daughters on her favorite hike in Chappaqua. While hiking in the the Democratic nominee's hometown, she bumped into none other than Hillary and Bill Clinton, who were taking their dogs for a walk on the same trail.

"I got to hug her and talk to her and tell her that one of my most proudest moments as a mother was taking [my daughter] with me to vote for her," Gerster writes. "She hugged me and thanked me and we exchanged some sweet pleasantries and then I let them continue their walk."

Along with the caption is a photo of Gerster and her daughter with a casual-looking Clinton, who is seen smiling ear to ear.

During her concession speech, Clinton said the loss to president-elect Donald Trump would be painful for a long time, but she encouraged her supporters to never stop fighting. To the little girls watching, she said, "Never doubt you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams."

Gerster's feelings of heartbreak echo many throughout the divided nation, as protests raged Wednesday night across U.S. cities and scores of public figures have come out to express their struggle with the results. Jennifer Lawrence penned an editorial encouraging everyone who isn't a white male to let "this be the fire you didn't have before." Chelsea Handler broke down in tears on her Netflix show Chelsea before telling all women to "not give up."

At the end of her post, Gerster wrote: "Now, I'm not one for signs but I think ill definitely take this one. So proud."

The photo has been up for three hours and already has 45,000 likes.

The moment was first shared by NBC News producer Michael Cappetta on Twitter, who made a note that Bill Clinton was the one who snapped the pic.

See the full post below.
Photo credit: Getty

From Seventeen

It's happening: Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. If, like many younger Americans, you opposed Trump's hateful campaign messages, the election results likely set off some intense emotions for you, whether sadness, fear or outrage.

Yesterday I tweeted a request: I wanted to hear exactly how you've been feeling since the news came down - and how you've been coping. In an outpouring of emails, you told me that you feel your voices aren't being heard. That you feel you're living in a country that doesn't respect you. That you want to do something. I want to hug you all.

In the midst of all that, however, some of you told me how you are moving forward. As Hillary Clinton said yesterday in her concession speech, "Let us not lose heart, for there are more seasons to come, and there is more work to do."

It's super important to take care of yourself right now. And when you feel strong enough to stand back up, there is so much you can do. You have more power than you might realize, even if you're not eligible to vote, even if you don't have money to donate. You can give your compassion, your time, your ideas.

Today is a new day. Let's make it better together.

1. Take care of yourself.

Photo credit: Getty

"You're completely entitled to feel anxiety, fear and grief right now," said licensed clinical social worker Barbara Massina in an interview with Seventeen.com. Don't try to push those emotions aside. "You have to allow yourself to feel them to move through them. That's how you start to heal."

Some simple self-care tips can make a big difference in helping you get through this tough time, she says. Some of Barbara's favorite suggestions:

Breathe slowly and deeply. Four counts in, six counts out. Repeat.

Try exercising, or just taking walks outside, to calm your thoughts.

Soak in a long, hot bubble bath.

If you're religious or spiritual, seek solace in your faith.

Try journaling or expressing your feelings through poetry or music.

Vent your anger by screaming into a pillow or ripping up a piece of paper.

Story continues

And don't overlook the basics: "I'm definitely making sure I eat today," Mikayla Metzler, 20, told Seventeen.com the day after the election. "I'm taking time to just breathe."

And know that it's totally normal to have trouble coping alone! If you're struggling or feeling despondent, talk to a trusted friend or adult. Or, you can call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255), the Trans Lifeline (1-877-565-8860), or chat or text (1-202-304-1200) a counselor at Trevor Project. If you're thinking about running away from home, the National Runaway Safeline can connect you with resources including emergency shelter.

2. Lean on friends for support.

Photo credit: Getty

True friends are there for you in good times and bad. Now is a great time to reach out.

"I'm grieving together with another woman of color," said Mikayla, who is among very few Hillary supporters and people of color in her Florida town. "To other girls: Don't isolate yourselves. Come together, cry together, and be strong in one another."

3. Volunteer on campus.

Photo credit: Getty

School can be an incredible place to make a difference. Carolyn Twersky, 19, told Seventeen.com that the numerous sexual assault accusations against Trump made her more driven to assist survivors in her community.

"I want to support people who need help and make sure they feel safe enough to report incidents when they occur," she said. "Right now, since I am a college student, my efforts will focus mainly on my college campus. I plan to get involved with an support group called Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators, or SHAPE. I also would love to start an initiative myself, maybe to support women in Greek organizations who have experienced sexual assault."

Use this election to reflect on the issues that matter most to you, then look for local ways to make an impact.

4. Be an amazing ally.

Photo credit: Getty

If you're worried that life is about to get a lot worse for women, people of color, Muslims and immigrants, you're not alone. It's easy to feel powerless, but you can help.

Supporting nonprofit groups that help marginalized communities is a great way to be an ally. You could volunteer your time, or you could just help spread their message. For instance, Kyley Schultz, 19, is working with the Council on American-Islamic Relations to book a speaker on her campus. "A speaker will reach a much more diverse and wide audience beyond myself," she explained.

Here are some other organizations you might want to check out:

Hannah Orenstein is a writer at Seventeen.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

You Might Also Like
Photo: Getty Images

From ELLE

By the end of last month, Donald Trump was still displaying a characteristically shaky understanding of the Affordable Care Act-otherwise known as Obamacare-which provides health coverage for millions of Americans who aren't able to get insurance through their job or are self-employed or unemployed. Trump told a FOX News reporter that, as an employer, "I don't much use Obamacare, I must be honest with you, because it is so bad for the people and they can't afford it." Except most employers, Trump included, can't use Obamacare as their insurance, because the whole point is...never mind. Notwithstanding his ignorance, the President-elect has vowed to overturn the national healthcare reform law.

So, as a woman, what does that mean for you? First, it's important to keep in mind that Republican lawmakers hold 51 seats in the Senate; nine less than they would need to outright repeal the Affordable Care Act, assuming no Democrats are into the idea. But, through a partial repeal and the elimination of funding, Trump can sure still screw it up. Some of the provisions below describe consequences for women who get their coverage exclusively through Obamacare, but some (time off to nurse, for example), apply to all women. Here's what we-and our reproductive rights-stand to lose.

For all women:

The prohibition of insurance companies to discriminate by gender, or deny coverage because of a preexisting condition like breast cancer. (Previously, insurance coverage could even be denied if an individual had received treatment for domestic abuse or sexual violence.)

HPV testing for women over 30 with normal cytology results

STI counseling for sexually-active women

Depression screenings

Mammograms every one to two years for women over the age of 40

Cervical cancer screenings for sexually active women

Annual well-woman visits

For mothers, and mothers-to-be:

Mandated break times for nursing mothers

Full coverage of breast pumps

Folic acid supplements for women who may become pregnant

Various health screenings before and during pregnancy, including screening for gestational diabetes and for STDs like gonorrhea and syphilis, Hepatitis B screening at first prenatal visit, and urinary tract and other infection screenings.

Story continues

For their children (some of whom are girls and women):

Preventative services for children, including hearing and vision screens for newborns, autism and developmental assessments for toddlers, and vaccines and behavioral counseling for older kids

The ability to stay on a family plan until the age of 26

The prohibition of insurance companies to deny children coverage due to a preexisting condition, such as Aspergers or lupus

For women who prefer not to be a mother (at least for now):

The coverage of IUDs

Reiumbursement of out-of-pocket expense for all forms of prescription birth control

You Might Also Like
A California mom performed an act of bravery that's being hailed across America as she shielded her little boy from a vicious attack by two dogs on the front porch of her home.

Read: 2 Bald Eagles Fighting Over Territory Get Stuck in Storm Drain, Cause Rush-Hour Traffic Jam

In horrific video taken from her Anaheim home, Samantha Bishop can be seen sacrificing herself to save her son Grayson as the two are attacked by a pair of dogs.

The child was rushed to the hospital. He required cosmetic surgery on his face and also suffered cuts on his legs.

Grayson's father, Spenser, who was at work at the time, says he can't bring himself to watch the surveillance video of his wife and son being attacked because it is just too upsetting.

Read: Video Shows School Bus Driver Being Attacked as Kids Scream and Cry: 'Mommy!'

"She screamed at the top of her lungs, she was trying to protect her little boy, I think she did a damn good job," he told Inside Edition. "As soon as I got to the doorstep and there was blood everywhere, I lost it. A firefighter had to pull me away and he cried too. He was very upset."

He added: "The thought of losing your family is horrible. It is really terrible."

Samantha has cuts, bites and bruises all around her body as a result of the attack.

Family attorney Richard Patterson told Inside Edition: "The mother has difficulties caring for the child because of her wounds, so we are getting in home health care. It is going to be a long, long healing process."

The dogs were taken into custody, one has been put down and officials say their owner could face criminal charges depending on the result of an investigation.

Watch: Halloween Redux: Little Girl Gets to Trick-or-Treat a Day Late After Being Mauled by Dog

Related Articles:
FRANKFURT, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Buyout group HgCapital hat put Qundis, a maker of metering devices for heat and water consumption, up for sale in a deal potentially worth more than 400 million euros ($435 mln), people close to the matter said.

The investor has asked investment bank Rothschild to find a buyer for the German company, which is expecting to post earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of 30 million euros this year, they added.

HgCapital and Rothschild declined to comment.

HgCapital is hoping to attract offers worth up to 14 times Qundis' core earnings from potential bidders such as Honeywell and other private equity firms.

Honeywell bought German metering technology company Elster in 2015 at a valuation of about 13 times that group's expected core earnings.

The Qundis auction is expected to start in early 2017.

The metering services sector will be closely watched in Germany next year with Ista and Techem - which both specialise in meter reading and billing services - expected to be put up for sale by their private equity owners.

Qundis was created in 2009 through a merger of Qvedis, a former Siemens unit, and Kundo SystemTechnik. HgCapital bought Qundis in 2012 from peer investor Capcellence. ($1 = 0.9189 euros) (Reporting by Arno Schuetze; Editing by Tina Bellon)
Fifty years ago she embarked on a political life that seemed to embody liberal progress. Rightwing rage brought her down  and with it an entire era

.

When Hillary Clinton relinquished her political dream at the Wyndham Hotel on Wednesday, her voice barely quavered. She exuded grace and resilience. The woman has a true gift for giving losing speeches.

Some of her supporters, who began demonstrating on the streets to protest Donald Trumps victory, yearned to hear something else, however. They would have preferred at least a dash of the defiant tone that Hillary Rodham struck in her famous Wellesley commencement address. In that speech, she talked proudly about how the women in her class were too young to know what was not possible. They were going to reshape the ruling order, a pledge that remained unfulfilled.

In some ways, her defeat was pre-ordained, despite all the polls that showed the White House well within her grasp. She has been under sustained attack from the right since her husband was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978. No one has been more reviled for a longer period of time in American politics. Although she did not run a flawless campaign, the baggage from all the attacks proved too heavy and caused the historically low trust and likeability numbers that proved insurmountable. It made the task of re-energizing the Obama coalition too daunting and depressed Democratic turnout in key battleground states.

Early on, her band of critics seized on her overt feminism and her clinging to her maiden name and legal career. In order to calm them over the next 40 years, there were several name changes (from Rodham to Rodham Clinton to plain Clinton), style transformations (from frumpy dresses to the color-coded pantsuits and new hairstyles, of course) and political sea changes from first lady (of both Arkansas and the United States), to US senator to secretary of state to two-time presidential candidate.

Her distinguished service in those posts only inflamed her haters and the constant shape-shifting earned suspicions from the Democrats who should have supported her that she was inauthentic. Her excellent performances in all the debates in 2016 were overshadowed by Trumps calling her a nasty woman. Her fierce determination to seek the presidency a second time, eight years after being defeated by Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries, was seen as evidence that she was relentlessly ambitious. Her perseverance and resilience were mistaken for power madness.

Story continues

For all of this time, the shadow of phony scandals followed her, beginning with a losing real estate venture called Whitewater and ending with her private email server. FBI director James Comeys 99th-hour intrusion into the election, coming right as Clinton was catching a wave of momentum, seemed to seal her fate. All of these strands combined to create a literal no-win situation and her final quest may have been doomed from the start.

Its beyond obvious to point out that almost all of the criticism and rage focused on her was laced with sexism and involved gender-based double standards. When she stayed in the background, went into listening mode and eagerly worked with older, male Republicans during her eight-year Senate tenure, Clinton got a respite. As secretary of state, she was Obamas subservient helpmate, so the hate quieted then, too. Her position as one of the most admired women in the world was restored. But every time she sought the big prize for herself, in 2008 and 2016, the hatred and caricatures came roaring back.

Millions of dollars fortified the anti-Hillary movement. Just months after she stepped over the White House threshold as first lady, a conservative magazine funded by the multi-millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife portrayed her as a witch, in black regalia and a pointy hat. Conservative groups like Judicial Watch came after her with lawsuits. She and her husband had dared and succeeded in breaking the conservative, Republican hegemony the right had established during the Reagan-Bush years. Their fury consumed Washington DC through the failed attempt to impeach Bill Clinton.

Some of the enemies who delighted in attacking her over the decades worked directly for Trumps election, including Roger Stone (who dates back to the Nixon campaign), David Bossie (of Whitewater vintage) and Stephen Bannon who came from the newer rightwing media bastion, Breitbart News. He was Trumps campaign chairman and is said to be a favorite for White House chief of staff. A campaign low was when Trump brought the women who alleged mistreatment by Bill Clinton and tormenting from Hillary, his supposed enabler, to the second debate.

Hillary Clinton, even more than her husband, incited the anger of what she rightly labeled a vast, rightwing conspiracy. And no one understood its structure and sharp contours better than her. To arm herself, she did what she always did, she studied. She turned to trusted advisers for help, like Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who wrote a respected book about the conservative movement and to David Brock, a turncoat whose journalism had once been funded by Scaife. They, too, were vilified, for trying to fight fire with fire and building a liberal armada to fight back on Clintons behalf. But she was always outgunned.

In letters to friends, Clinton expressed occasional despair over the attacks and wearying ethics investigations, all of which have melted away without any charges. She told one of her lawyers, Robert Barnett: I am just so tired of all this. But she always battled on.

The feminist writer Susan Faludi, author of the famous book Backlash, also recognized the daunting nature of the fight. Shortly before the election, she wrote in the New York Times: The left needs to acknowledge what the right has long known: that its a fiction to think we can move on beyond the brawl of the 1990s without settling it, adding, and settling it requires helping Mrs Clinton triumph once and for all against the calumnies that were created to define her as the feminine face of evil.

In this election, her name was coupled with Lucifers and Trump supporters, some dressed in orange or striped prison jumpsuits, demanded she be jailed (some even shouted that she be killed). Now that they helped bring about her political death, they will surely move on to other targets. The endless investigations of Clinton will probably, at last, end. (Trump has not said a word since the election about putting her on trial).

It is hard to be the first woman in any position of power, but Clinton was more than ready to grab the ultimate prize. On Tuesday night, in the glass encased Javits Center, her fanbase had everything set for victory, even confetti shaped as glass shards. The highest, hardest glass ceiling was about to fall.

The confetti never fell  and at the age of 69, Hillary Clinton finally faced the cold reality that she couldnt see as a Wellesley student in 1969: it was not possible.
UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav believes that poor people undergo treatment at private hospitals and nursing homes, when they fall ill.

By India Today Web Desk: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav sought exemption for private hospitals from the demonetisation move of the Modi government. Writing a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the UP CM urged the former to extend the deadline for accepting invalid currency notes till November 30.

The government kept private hospitals and nursing homes out of the list of services/places, which were allowed to accept Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes even after they were declared invalid with effect from November 9.

advertisement

READ: From Rahul to Akhilesh, Modi gets brickbats, bouquets over decision to ban Rs 500, Rs 1,000 notes



SEPARATE LETTERS TO PM, FM

Akhilesh wrote separate letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. Allowing private hospitals and nursing homes to accept demonetised currency notes will ensure medical facilities to poor, who are facing a lot of problems, Akhilesh said.

"As Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 were banned in haste, those undergoing treatment at hospitals and nursing homes are facing a lot of problems. I, therefore, request you to intervene and allow private hospitals, nursing homes and medicine shops to accept these notes till at least November 30," Akhilesh said.

WATCH:





READ: Operation Black Money: Here is the inside story of Modi's bold move

"Due to the ban, those going to avail medical facilities in hospital are a harried lot. It is proving fatal for them. Allowing (Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes) currency will help people get medical treatment," he said.

FOREIGN TOURISTS IN UP

As foreign tourists were facing difficulties due to demonetisation of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, the CM had yesterday directed the state Chief Secretary to ensure opening of extra counters for them to exchange currencies.

READ: After demonetisation 1,000 per cent rise in rail ticket bookings; airport counter sales also soar



"The Chief Secretary should coordinate with banks and ensure opening of extra counters for foreign tourists in Agra and Varanasi. This will help them in exchanging their notes easily," Akhilesh said in his directive.

MULAYAM, MAYA ON SAME PAGE

As the Centre's move caught people by surprise, especially with wedding season round the corner, SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav demanded a roll back of demonetisation decision for a few days in view of the wedding season.

He suggested that people be given a week's time by the government.

READ: Demonetisation effect: Hawala operations come to a grinding halt



BSP chief Mayawati has also said poor people and farmers have been badly hit by high denomination rupee ban decision, which reminded people of the dark days of Emergency imposed by then Congress government.

advertisement

WATCH:





--- ENDS ---
Hillary Clinton has returned home to Chappaqua, New York, after delivering a concession speech following Donald Trumps election as President.

The former secretary of state was spotted on a hike in Westchester County, and took a few minutes to chat with a supporter who encountered her on a trail.

Ive been feeling so heartbroken since yesterdays election and decided what better way to relax than take my girls hiking, Margot Gerster wrote in a Facebook post. So I decided to take them to one of favorite places in Chappaqua. We were the only ones there and it was so beautiful and relaxing. As we were leaving, I heard a bit of rustling coming towards me and as I stepped into the clearing there she was, Hillary Clinton and Bill with their dogs doing exactly the same thing as I was.

Gerster continued, I got to hug her and talk to her and tell her that one of my proudest moments as a mother was taking Phoebe with me to vote for her. She hugged me and thanked me and we exchanged some sweet pleasantries and then I let them continue their walk. Now, Im not one for signs but I think Ill definitely take this one. So proud.

In the accompanying photo, Clinton  who won the popular vote in the 2016 election but ultimately fell to Trump in the electoral college  posed with Gerster while holding her dogs leash. Gerster wrote in the comments of her post that former President Bill Clinton had snapped the picture.

Many commenters called the photo uplifting, with one woman writing, Thank you for sharing your sentiments with her on behalf of all of us who were proud to vote for her.

Added another commenter, This means so much to me to see her smile, to see her enjoying time away from the noise.

On Wednesday, Clinton said during her speech in New York City, This loss hurts  but please never stop believing that fighting for whats right is worth it. Let us have faith in each other. Let us not grow weary. Let us not lose heart. For there are more seasons to come and more work to do.

Story continues

RELATED VIDEO: Hillary Clinton Urges Her Voters to Support Trump During Concession Speech

She continued, I am incredibly honored and grateful to have had this chance. I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it too. This is not the outcome we wanted. And Im sorry we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.

The 69-year-old emphasized, however, that Americans must accept Trump as their President, saying, I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.




By Peter Eisler BETHLEHEM, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - The unraveling of the coalition that was supposed to carry Hillary Clinton to the White House had a lot to do with voters like Jim McAndrew in counties like Northampton, Pennsylvania. McAndrew, 69, a retired steel worker, voted Democrat in every presidential election for half a century. This year he stayed home. And Northampton County, a heavily white, heavily Democratic, largely working class area that backed President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, went for Donald Trump, a Republican. McAndrew, who voted for Obama in the two previous races, was intrigued by Trump, but decided eventually that all he does is insult everybody ... women, black people, white people, rich, poor. Hes an idiot. He considered Clinton, but was concerned by the scandal over her handling of classified material on a private email server as secretary of state. I hated both of them, so I just said, the hell with it, McAndrew said. His wife, also a life-long Democrat, went to the polls without him - and voted Republican. First time ever," he said. Trumps ability to flip reliably Democratic counties like Northampton helped drive his victory in the presidential election this week. It was critical to his win in Pennsylvania and other Rust Belt states, a bulwark in the Democrats electoral strategy for winning the White House, and it helped fuel his victories in critical swing states, such as Florida and North Carolina. Its not that Trumps economic populism and "America First" messages generated widespread enthusiasm; he won some of those counties with far fewer votes than Mitt Romney captured as the Republican nominee in 2012. Nationwide, Trumps 59.7 million votes are about 1.2 million behind the 60.9 million Romney got when he lost four years ago, based on initial projections. But Clintons troubles holding on to Democratic voters were far more stark. Some crossed party lines for Trump or backed an independent. Many just stayed home. Clinton won the popular vote with 59.9 million votes, 6 million fewer than the 65.9 million Obama won in 2012. And her weakness in traditionally Democratic areas helped cost her the electoral college that chooses the winner of the election. Clinton came across as a status quo candidate unlikely to shake up the Washington establishment, says Mike Sly, 74, a retiree and independent voter in Pinellas County, Florida, who backed Obama in 2012 and voted for Trump this year. Clintons message failed to convince him that she would address his concerns about the state of the economy and rising health insurance premiums under Obamas Affordable Care Act. The race came down to basically what change do I think is going to happen, and how I think it is going to happen, Sly says. I felt that Hillary really carried too much baggage to be trusted. NEW COALITIONS Clintons loss in Florida, a key battleground state, stemmed partly from her inability to hold voters like Sly in white, middle- and working-class areas that previously went Democrat. In vote-rich Pinellas, a beach community popular with retirees in the Tampa Bay region, Trump won 48 percent of the vote, besting Clintons 47 percent. In 2012, Obama won 52 percent. Nationally, initial projections show low voter turnout of just over 55 percent, the worst since the contested election of 2000, when Republican George W. Bush defeated then-Democratic Vice President Al Gore. In Obamas first victory, turnout was more than 62 percent. Clinton beat Trump among black and Hispanic voters, but her effort to forge a winning coalition by leveraging that strength in diverse, urban areas was upended by Trumps strength among whites. Meanwhile, Trump still managed to hold roughly the same level of minority support that Romney got in 2012. The pattern held true not only in rural areas, but also in many suburbs, particularly in the Rust Belt and the South, that tipped towards Obama in the previous two presidential races. It was pretty much a base election, but one group was better at turning out their voters than the other, says Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida political science professor. In Gates County, North Carolina, Trumps vows to crack down on illegal immigration and police Muslim communities for radicalism resonated, says Eric J. Earhart, 49, pastor of the evangelical Upper Room Assembly church. There has been a definite shift over the past eight years away from us being a Judeo-Christian nation, Earhart adds, and many congregants worry about that. The rural county of 12,000 people went for Obama in 2012 with 52 percent of the vote, but it flipped into Trumps column in this years race, giving him 53 percent. Thomas Hill, 38, chairman of the Gates County Republican Party, says voters also were attracted to Trumps blunt speaking and his pledge to bring back manufacturing jobs that went overseas. Trumps economic message, which included a promise to kill free trade agreements that are unpopular among many working-class voters in industrial areas, also succeeded in Macomb County, Michigan, a predominantly white area north of Detroit. The number of voters casting ballots in the county jumped by more than 14,000 over 2012, and Trump captured 53 percent of the vote to Clintons 42 percent. Four years ago, Obama won the county with just under 52 percent of the vote. Youve got a lot of blue collar workers here (and) ... a lot of union guys, and they went Republican, says David Phair, 59, a construction worker and Trump voter who didnt cast a ballot in 2012. Theyre tired of politicians. Phair also liked Trumps promise to end illegal immigration. Im looking forward to how hes going to handle illegal aliens. DEFYING EXPECTATIONS In Pennsylvania, Northampton County and neighboring Lehigh County, once reliant on steel companies, have bounced back from the industrys decline. In Bethlehem, which straddles the two counties, new development has mushroomed around the old steel mill, including a Sands casino resort with 2,400 employees. E-commerce companies, white collar firms and big corporations, such as Olympus, the Japanese imaging giant, have also moved to the region. Lehigh and Northampton counties have a larger share of households than the state as a whole that earn more than $75,000, about 36 percent. All that suggests ripe country for Clinton. But the counties also are whiter and older than the country as a whole. And Trump dominated voting among older whites. Around the table where McAndrew has a weekly poker game in the basement of the United Steel Workers office in Bethlehem, the retired men of the citys steel mills have different opinions on why Clinton failed to match Obamas success in the region. But they agree that she didnt offer a compelling message. Among the five at the table, all lifelong Democrats, only three cast votes for Clinton. She was going to continue everything the way it is and a lot of people think there are things that need to be changed, says Ken Rayden, 80, who voted for Clinton, but mainly out of party loyalty. She didnt show the people anything new. (Additional reporting by Letitia Stein in Florida, Howard Schneider in Washington, DC, Gary Robertson in North Carolina, and Tim Branfalt in Michigan. Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)
The Hilltop Hoods' exploration of a traumatic -- but ultimately life-affirming -- experience was the catalyst for a world-first collaboration with Google Play Music.

The popular Australian hip-hop trio on Friday (Nov. 11) shared an immersive music video for "Through The Dark," a personal song penned by founding member MC Pressure (real name Dan Smith) on the journey he faced after his son Liam's cancer diagnosis.

The Hoods joined forces with Google to shed light on Pressure's tale and help find a way out of the darkness for others facing similar challenges.

"We received literally thousands of emails and interactions from people telling us their story of similar things. And how much the song meant to them and how it connected," Pressure tells Billboard. "'Through The Dark' has "become a theme as part of their therapy of getting through their journey, and because of that we wanted to do more than just a single. We wanted it to be bigger. And this gave us that window of opportunity to create an amazing immersive experience for all of those people and to have a type of legacy to give back to other kids suffering a chronic illness."

The interactive film has been created for use on Android smartphones and traces a father and son's travels through two 3D-animated worlds, a dark place representing fear, the light meaning hope.

The tech giant's execs approached the band with the seed of an idea. "It felt like a fit," explains Google Play's product marketing manager Sophie Hirst. "If you look at the users on Google Play Music, we knew that our users really love Hilltop Hoods, they really consume a lot of music on our platform. Plus, I've always been a big fan of the band."

The song, a fan-favorite at the Hoods' live shows, appeared on the group's 2014 album Walking Under Stars and on the rebooted Drinking From The Sun, Walking Under Stars Restrung from February 2016, both of which reached No. 1 on the ARIA Albums Chart (the Hilltop Hoods have landed five albums at the top of the national albums chart).

Story continues

Though Google declined to divulge its cost, both parties workshopped the video project for "many, many months," Hirst explains. "We were breaking new ground together and that felt exciting for Google and the band. This is a genuine partnership."

For every fan who listens to Hilltop Hoods' latest album on Google Play Music via the link at the clip's conclusion, Google and the hip-hoppers have pledged to donate $1 to youth cancer organization CanTeen. The money raised will boost a new project Side of Stage, which will enable young people affected by cancer special access to live music shows across the country.

The video is now live and can be viewed at throughthedark.withgoogle.com through high-spec Android mobile devices and desktops.

Hirst hopes the Hilltop Hoods partnership will be the starting point for many other music campaigns. "It was really important for us to support Australian artists. The other thing is we just really love seeing how technology can push art forward. We love building things, we love playing around with technology and seeing how that can be used to innovate creative art, and in particular music. It's something Google has done for a while and will continue to do."

Pressure has been living in the light for some years now. His son is healthy, Liam's leukemia is a problem of the past. "He's like any other 12-year-old. He has a crush on a girl at school, he downloads as much rap music as I do. But he's been living cancer-free for over two years, so that's great. It's a really beautiful end."

The Hilltop Hoods are nominated in three categories for the Nov. 23 ARIA Awards.
PARIS (Reuters) - French President Francois Hollande and U.S President-elect Donald Trump had a phone conversation on Friday in which they agreed to clarify positions on key issues such as the Middle East and Ukraine, said a source in Hollande's camp. The source told Reuters that the phone conversation lasted between seven and eight minutes and took place in "good conditions". "They agreed to work together on a number of key issues in order to clarify positions - the 'war on terror', Ukraine, Syria, Iran's nuclear deal and the Paris climate change agreement," said the source. (Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau; Writing by Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Donald Trump's controversial campaign - one that eventually landed the Republican in the White House with a shocking win on Nov. 8 over Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton - contained not-so-veiled threats against many minority groups, including Muslims and Latinos. And while Trump never came out against the LGBT community, some aren't taking their chances.

Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of notable Hollywood nonprofit Women in Film, who had previously served in a similar position with local LGBT org Outfest, revealed in a Facebook post that her partner of 16 years, music industry professional Linda Kennedy, had asked to marry her in the wake of this week's election results. In the post, which has received nearly 500 likes, Schaffer recounted their conversation about picking a date, adding, "16 years, 2 kids, 3 dogs, so much love (and some fear). #modernmarriage #queermarriage #afraidofhim."

One of her friends, an actress-writer-producer named Dalila Ali Rajah, revealed she and her partner shared the same emotions. "We are talking about moving up our legal hitch date too," Rajah wrote in support. And they're not alone. The New York Times today covered the "alarms" currently going off in LGBT communities across the country.

Reached by phone on Thursday afternoon, Schaffer explained that she and Kennedy have been together nearly 17 years and, while they had been discussing marriage, the plan was expedited due to the election results. "Obviously there have been a lot of ups and downs in LGBT rights over the years, and we didn't get married at a couple of other times when our friends did," said Schaffer, who admits that marriage has never been high on her priority list due to fundamental views on the separation of church and state. "We were holding out but the fear set in around 9 p.m. on Tuesday night."

Schaffer continued: "We live in California, so we know that we are really protected with our domestic partnership, but there's a chance that it won't be protected outside the state. If it does change, it won't change for years, so I know that it is fear-based and irrational, but we want to do it now before Obama is out of office."

Story continues

Read more: A "Heartbroken" New York Mom Bumps Into Hillary Clinton While Hiking

Trump has yet to outline what his first orders of business will be. However, he made it clear throughout the election that the Supreme Court's vacant seat is a priority and many expect him to select a social conservative, giving way to a conservative majority on the bench. That in itself has LGBT activists nervous. And while some may see Schaffer's decision could be seen as a rush to judgment over an administration that is still 70 days away from assuming office, the Human Rights Campaign also didn't waste any time in releasing a statement about Trump and Pence and the uncertainty that lies ahead.

"Over the last 18 months, Donald Trump and Mike Pence have intentionally sowed fear and division for cynical political purposes. They now face a decision about whether they will also govern that way. We hope, for the sake of our nation and our diverse community - which includes women, people of color, those with disabilities, immigrants, and people of all faiths and traditions - they will choose a different path," the HRC said in a statement on Nov. 9. "For our part, HRC will continue our fight for equality and justice for all with greater urgency and determination than ever before. We must. Lives literally depend on it.

The statement continues: "The defeats we have suffered tonight demonstrate that our future victories will require us to dig deeper and work harder to continue bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice and equality. We must fight to protect our progress, and to limit the damage that Donald Trump has promised. To every LGBTQ person across this nation feeling stunned and disheartened, and questioning if they have a place in our country today, I say this: You do. Don't ever let anybody tell you otherwise. Be bold, be strong, and continue to stand up for the principles that have always made America great."

During his tenure as governor of Indiana, Pence stood in opposition of gay marriage, signing into law a bill that made it legal for business owners to cite religious freedom when refusing service to LGBT customers. He also supported "conversion therapy" over funding for HIV prevention.

As for Schaffer's wedding, which will likely happen in the coming weeks at a local city hall, Schaffer contends that with Trump in office, it's best to focus on their two children and what's important: "We're doing this for our children. And focusing, as a family, on love and kindness."
A recent influx of Saudi Arabian visitors in L.A. had nothing to do with real estate or retail and everything to do with film.

Nov. 3 marked the launch of the first-ever Saudi Film Days, a two-day event hosted by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture. The showcase featured screenings of short films from rising Saudi filmmakers (both a VIP showing at the Paramount Theatre and a public screening at the Ace Hotel) paired with a gala dinner on the Paramount Pictures lot attended by industry insiders like John Singleton, Mark Duplass and Armie Hammer.

"Our job is to help these young ones to excel in their talents, and what they do is their own choice, basically," said the evening's host, Tareq Al Ghamdi, director of the Center, which is backed by national petrochemical company Saudi Aramco. He added it was the Center's mission "to contribute to the country's efforts to transform to a knowledge-based society, inspiring the youth of the country to have a passion for knowledge, creativity and cross-cultural engagement. Filmmaking is at the heart of [these things]."

Read more: Margaret Cho Reveals She Is Residing in a Sober-Living House

And mounting the event on the famous studio lot, he added, would help with the recognition and promotion of filmmaking back home: "We want to say this is something big and growing. Saudi Arabian filmmakers had the opportunity to showcase their work at Paramount Pictures, which is big."

It's an opportunity that Duplass, for one, appreciated.

"I'm going to get to see the one feature-length submission through the Academy, but what about weird short films by emerging filmmakers I never get to see anywhere?" asked the multihyphenate. "Just to see a voice of someone making the kind of movies they can make in that country right now - that doesn't really have a distribution method for them - what are they making?" [There are no commercial cinemas in Saudi Arabia.]

Story continues

Courtesy of Amanda Kari McHugh

Singleton, meanwhile, was on a talent hunt. "I'm a student of world cinema," he said before the screenings. "Plus, I'm looking for directors for my television shows. The new directors I have on Snowfall came from Morocco, so you never know where you're going to find the next great filmmaker."

Hammer came out because "unfortunate clerical errors" recently had him grounded in Dubai while en route to shooting a film in India. "I had some of the best meals and the time of my life," so when he got an invite to the Saudi event, he was all over it. "I've never seen a Saudi short film. Tonight, I got to see a series of amazing short films, two of which I truly loved," he said. "And you had me at free meal! Saffron rice pudding? I'm in!"

The screenings were followed by an appropriately Middle-Eastern-themed dinner - lots of dates, hummus and said pudding - under a white tent put up next to the theater.

Courtesy of Amanda Kari McHugh

The five shorts unveiled ranged from "an intimate character piece, to a frenetic family drama, to a documentary about a lost art form," said the evening's moderator, Dave Karger, who conducted a lively Q&A with the five (all male) directors.

When asked about his film, Meshal Aljaser, the young filmmaker of "Is Sumyati Going to Hell?" - a tragicomical look at a long-suffering Asian servant working for a Saudi family told from the family's 7-year-old daughter's POV - exclaimed, "I care about removing racism. I don't care about Hollywood or Paramount. All I care about is Sumyati."

Courtesy of Amanda Kari McHugh

Courtesy of Amanda Kari McHugh

Courtesy of Amanda Kari McHugh

A version of this story first appeared in the Nov. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Read more: FX and John Singleton Partner for 1980s Crack Drama
The Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Theatre Owners have come out victorious in a lawsuit that insisted that tobacco imagery in films rated G, PG or PG-13 causes 200,000 children every year to become cigarette smokers and 64,000 people to die as a result. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed an attempt led by a California father of two to hold major film studios and theater owners legally responsible.

The legal action from Timothy Forsyth on behalf of himself and others similarly situated claimed that the industry's film-ratings practices amounted to negligence, misrepresentation, breach of fiduciary duty,advertising, unfair competition and nuisance.

In response, Hollywood raised a First Amendment defense, arguing that ratings merely reflect opinions about what's suitable for children and compelling them to give R ratings to anything found socially unacceptable could apply to films depicting activity like alcohol use, gambling, contact sports, high-speed driving and so forth.

In an order striking the complaint under California's anti-SLAPP statute, Seeborg first takes up the question of whether the claims arise from acts in furtherance of free speech in connection with a public issue. The judge tackles Forsyth's argument that the rating system represents "pure commercial speech" and that the only speech at issue are the "certification trademarks" of G, PG, PG-13 and R issued by the Classification and Ratings Board ("CARA").

"The flaw in Forsyth's reasoning, however, is that while some certification trademarks undoubtedly are merely representations of the characteristics of products and therefore arguably only commercial speech outside the purview of anti-SLAPP and entitled to only limited First Amendment protections, CARA's marks serve a different purpose and arise in a different context," Seeborg writes. "Indeed, the certification statements filed with the [Patent & Trademark Office] when each of the marks was registered plainly explain that CARA is merely 'certifying' that 'in its opinion' the particular film warrants a particular level of parental caution. Furthermore, the underlying 'product' - films - are not mere commercial products, but are expressive works implicating anti-SLAPP concerns and plainly entitled to full First Amendment protection."

Story continues

Having concluded this, Seeborg then examines whether Forsyth has any likelihood of prevailing on his claims.

"Forsyth insists that a rating less stringent than R is a representation that 'the film is suitable for children under seventeen unaccompanied by a parent or guardian,' " continues the judge. "The ratings plainly make no such representations. Rather, the PG and PG-13 ratings caution parents that material in such movies may be inappropriate for children. More fundamentally, the ratings reflect the consensus opinion of CARA board members. As such, neither intentional nor negligent misrepresentation claims are tenable as pleaded."

The judge then writes that the plaintiff has also failed to allege facts, if proved, that would establish the defendants had legal duties to him, created a public nuisance or how any of the activity would be "specially injurious" to him.

The ruling comes after a hearing that was held Oct. 28. Then, the judge also expressed discomfort with making a determination that could invite future lawsuits over film content.

Afterward, the plaintiff's lawyers attempted to calm the judge's slippery-slope worries by writing, "The only movie content that has ever been scientifically proven to kill kids by the hundreds of thousands is tobacco imagery. If additional scientific research and evidence does ever become sufficient to prove that exposing children to imagery in movies of bullying or violence or under-age drinking causes kids to engage in increased bullying, violence or under-age drinking then defendants should also be held liable if they rate such content with the PG and PG-13 ratings (under defendants existing rating system). But concern about possible future cases should not prevent doing the right thing in this case when we know what we know now."

The argument wasn't enough, although it's not specifically addressed by today's opinion.

The defendants were represented by attorneys led by Kelly Klaus at Munger Tolles.

Here's the full order.
By Naomi Tajitsu and Maki Shiraki

TOKYO/MARYSVILLE (Reuters) - Japan's top automakers are shuffling their U.S. product portfolios and resorting to larger imports of popular models there as they scramble to meet booming demand for gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks in the world's No. 2 auto market.

Honda Motor Co , Japan's third-largest automaker, said it will begin producing from early next year the Acura MDX SUV at its plant in East Liberty, Ohio, adding to production at its Alabama plant, which also makes its Pilot SUV, Ridgeline pick-up truck and Odyssey minivan.

Honda, Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co are all trying to maximize production efficiency at their North American plants to squeeze out more SUVs, but Toyota and Nissan have been importing a large number of SUV models to make up for the production shortfall, and Honda may do the same.

"It takes time for manufacturing to catch up to these shifts because automakers are committing to changing their portfolio. It's not something you can do quickly," said Rebecca Lindland, senior analyst for automotive research company Kelley Blue Book.

Imports allow car makers to sell more cars in a region without raising local production capacity, but they also can increase foreign exchange risks.

Historically low U.S. gasoline prices and cost-conscious consumers seeking multi-tasking vehicles have boosted sales of SUVs, particularly smaller crossover models, and trucks, denting demand for traditionally sought-after passenger cars.

Currently, 59 percent of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. market are light trucks, versus 41 percent passenger cars, compared with 55 percent and 45 percent, respectively, a year ago, according to Autodata figures.

In contrast, the balance of U.S. vehicle sales at each of Japan's top three automakers is roughly even, suggesting that while they are producing more vehicles, the model mix of their sales is lagging market trends.

Honda is responding by expanding production capacity for its CR-V SUV model in the United States. Another option is importing the CR-V, along with the popular Civic, from Japan, a company spokeswoman said.

Story continues

"While maintaining our current overall capacity (in North America), we'd like to also consider our production options in Japan ... to produce more light trucks to respond to strong demand," American Honda Motor Co CEO Toshiaki Mikoshiba said.

The Japanese are not alone in trying to adapt to the demand shifts. South Korea's Hyundai Motor Co has been producing its Santa Fe Sport model at its Alabama plant since June to increase supply of the SUV while sales of its mainstay sedans such as the Sonata stagnate.

SALES FORECASTS CUT

Both Honda and Toyota recently cited a less competitive product mix as a reason for trimming their respective annual North American vehicle sales forecasts.

Toyota will increase production capacity of its Tacoma pick-up truck at its plant in Mexico by more than 60,000 to an annual 160,000 by 2018 while it is also looking to its upcoming C-HR crossover model to lift sales in the segment.

In the meantime, total Japanese exports of Toyota's popular RAV4 model to the United States rose 20 percent in January-September from a year ago, even as the model's production at its plant in Canada has increased by 3 percent over the same period.

Nissan has ramped up exports of its Rogue crossover from Japan to North America by 27 percent to 56,000 units in the April-September period from a year ago, while it also exports a large number of Rogues from South Korea.

Japan's No. 2 automaker in August moved production of its Armada SUV from its plant in Mississippi to Japan to make room to make more Titan pick-up trucks and Murano SUVs. In April-September it sent 8,000 Armadas to North America.

Toyota, Nissan and Honda all anticipate that the rampant growth in the U.S. market may slow going forward, and Lindland at Kelley Blue Book said that flexible production capabilities, rather than more capacity, was key to keeping pace with demand.

"I wouldn't recommend adding new plants because the market is plateauing," she said. "There's a fine line between having enough inventory and over building."

(Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu and Maki Shiraki; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
The new romantic drama Loving, based on the real-life couple whose 1967 Supreme Court trial Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage, is a quintessential tale of American social justice. Yet neither of films leads, Joel Edgerton and Ruth  who deliver two of the most highly acclaimed performances of the year  is a U.S. citizen.

I kept thinking he cast me cause hes just lazy, the Australian-born Edgerton joked to Yahoo Movies (watch above) about director and Arkansas native Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter), whom the actor had just worked with on the spring release Midnight Special.

Related: 13 Oscar Contenders That Emerged Out of Venice, Telluride, and Toronto

Edgerton (Warrior, Black Mass) plays Richard Loving, a soft-spoken carpenter who wants nothing more than to live The Simple Life with his sweet-natured bride, Mildred Jeter (Negga). But, when they return to rural Virginia after getting married in Washington, D.C., the newlyweds are arrested by local police for violating miscegenation laws.

He saw something in the shape of my head, and the nature of me, Edgerton said of Nichols. And in Ruth I think he found the right energetic sort of divinity that Mildred [had] as this rural, kind of princess-like person that she was.

The Ethiopian-born, Irish-raised Negga (Warcraft, Preacher), who was the first actress to audition for the role, sees Loving as a story thats relatable well beyond U.S. borders. This is a couple who speaks for many people across the world, not just Americans, she said. As a humanity, theres a collective acknowledgement of our similarities, and I think thats what this film encourages.
The airline that covers 11 destinations in India, is going to accept the banned notes till 11.59pm tonight.

By India Today Web Desk: Are you still stuck with 500 and 1000 notes, and don't know what to do with them? Well, you could always head out to the bank, and excange the notes for shiny new ones (including the very attractive 2000 note).

But let's admit it, there are so many people lining up outside banks that it's a bit too time consuming. But then, what else can we do to get rid of all the banned notes that we're stuck with?

advertisement

AirAsia has the perfect solution: you can book flight tickets with tem till 11.59pm tonight, with those banned 500 and 1000 notes!

Yes, this airline is accepting the cancelled denominations till the time 11 November lasts. According to their announcement, you can head out to their counters at airports across India, and book yourself a trip with those notes you can no longer use.

Also read: #Demonetisation: Here's what travellers can do post Rs 500 and 1000 notes being scrapped



There are a few conditions though. These flight tickets will be non-refundable, and the other facilities that you could opt for during a booking (pre-booked meals, extra baggage, and seat selection) will not be available. But it's a good deal anyways.

AirAsia India currently flies to 11 destinations, with its two hubs in Bengaluru and New Delhi, covering Chandigarh, Jaipur, Guwahati, Imphal, Pune, Goa, Vizag, Kochi and Hyderabad. So you can really take your pick.

So take that planner out, chalk out a trip to an Indian destination, and head out to the AirAsia booking counters with your 500 and 1000 notes before the clock strikes 12 tonight.





--- ENDS ---
Thousands of police officers gathered on Long Island on Thursday, November 10, for the funeral of a New York Police Department officer killed in the line of duty.

NYPD Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo was shot and killed in the Bronx on November 4 when responding to reports of a home invasion, according to PIX11. Mayor Bill Mayor de Blasio paid tribute to Tuozzolo at the service in Massapequa, New York.

This aerial video shows the huge funeral parade for Sgt. Tuozzolo. Credit: Twitter/NYPD Special Ops via Storyful
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary's government will not resubmit a law to ban the resettlement of migrants after parliament narrowly rejected the plan this week, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told state radio on Friday. Orban had said the amendment was needed to honor an October referendum, in which more than three million Hungarians, an overwhelming majority of those who voted, rejected EU quotas stipulating how many migrants member states must accept. The far-right opposition Jobbik party sealed the bill's rejection by boycotting the vote on Tuesday. It said it would throw its support behind the ban if Orban scrapped a separate government bond scheme that allows foreigners to buy residency rights. But giving way to Jobbik's demand would have been politically difficult for Orban after the parliamentary defeat. "We tried to put this (referendum decision) into the constitution but could not achieve this as the opposition sided with Brussels," Orban said in an interview on radio. As a result, Orban added, his government would have to fight the European Union's migrant quotas in Brussels instead, using Hungary's existing constitution. Orban said he could rely on his own Fidesz party and its partner the Christian Democrats in his fight now that Jobbik had turned from a radical party into "a bunch of softies" who represented the interests of Brussels instead of Hungary's. "The battleground is in Brussels, at home we have done what we could, our conscience is clean," he said. Jobbik is Fidesz's strongest political opponent. The latest poll by research center Tarki showed its support at 10 percent in October, down from 14 percent in July. Fidesz widened its support to 32 percent from 30, with the opposition Socialists on 9 percent support. The next election is due in 2018. (Reporting by Krisztina Than; Editing by Toby Chopra)
The husband of a woman who vanished while jogging in Northern California has passed a polygraph test, authorities said.

Keith Papini, the test results show, "has no involvement with the disappearance of his wife," said Shasta County Sheriffs Lt. Anthony Bertain.

Read: Teen Missing After 21-Year-Old Boyfriend Allegedly Kills Her Mom, Younger Sister

Investigators also confirmed his whereabouts at the time Sherri Papini is believed to have disappeared, Bertain said, according to the Record Searchlight.

The 34-year-old mother of two hasnt been seen since 2 p.m. Wednesday, when she went for a run near her Mountain Gate home.

Keith Papini came home to an empty house that day, he told detectives. Usually, his wife and their two kids, ages 4 and 2, were there to greet him, he said.

He called the childrens day care center, and was told the kids had not been picked up.

After searching the house, he told investigators he used the Find My iPhone app to locate his wifes cell phone about one mile from their home. The womans ear buds were also found, along with strands of her hair, authorities said.

Thats when he called 911, he said.

Read: Murder of Jogger, 27, in Massachusetts Shares Eerie Similarities with New York Killing

The husband is convinced his wife was abducted.

She is my wife, and I know everything about her, Keith says. I know that my wife would never leave me and never in a million years leave our kids, he told People.

Detectives said they have thus far found no evidence of an abduction. A GoFundMe account has been opened to help fund search efforts.

Watch: Husband of Missing Jogger Mom Breaks Silence to Offer $50,000 Reward

Related Articles:
By Dave McKinney CHICAGO (Reuters) - Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner reported personal income of more than $188.1 million in 2015, and 90 percent of the former private equity investor's earnings came from capital gains, according to income tax returns he released on Friday. Rauner, a Republican, and his wife, Diana, paid federal taxes of $51.6 million and $6.9 million in state taxes in 2015. Of the total income, $169.5 million was from capital gains, though no details were released on the source of those profits. "I believe as the good book says to whom much has been given from whom much is expected in return," Rauner said at a news conference when asked about his tax returns. Rauner, who has led a fight against Democrats controlling Illinois' legislature in the country's longest-running state fiscal impasse, and his wife contributed $21.7 million individually to various Illinois political campaigns this year to weaken Democratic control of the state legislature and dislodge the state's long-running budget stalemate, campaign records show. Illinois has not had a full operating budget for 17 months. Republicans netted four seats in the Illinois House and two seats in the state Senate in Tuesdays elections, but Democrats retained control of both legislative chambers and defeated Rauner's choice for comptroller. A separate filing from Rauner's family's foundation showed $53.6 million in assets at the end of 2015 and $11.6 million in charitable giving for the year. In 2014, Rauner and his wife reported $58.3 million in earnings. Because the Rauners' assets are in a blind trust, an aide said the couple is "screened from all financial decisions" and cannot explain the increase in their income. A spokesman for Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan declined comment on the governors earnings, but a top Madigan ally said Rauner's wealth puts him out of touch with the electorate. I dont know how he can claim to ever understand the problems of regular, ordinary Illinoisans, said Democratic Representative Lou Lang. Madigan and Democratic Senate President John Cullerton, Chicago attorneys who maintain property-tax appeal practices, do not release their tax returns. (Reporting by Dave McKinney; Editing by Leslie Adler)
LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / November 10, 2016 / Lundin Law PC, a shareholder rights firm, announces the filing of a class action lawsuit against InfuSystem Holdings, Inc. ("InfuSystem" or the "Company") (NYSE MKT: INFU) concerning possible violations of federal securities laws between May 12, 2015 and November 7, 2016 inclusive (the "Class Period"). Investors who purchased or otherwise acquired shares during the Class Period should contact the firm prior to the January 9, 2017 lead plaintiff motion deadline.

To participate in this class action lawsuit, click here. You can also call Brian Lundin, Esquire, of Lundin Law PC, at 888-713-1033, or e-mail him at brian@lundinlawpc.com.

No class has been certified in the above action. Until a class is certified, you are not considered represented by an attorney. You may also choose to do nothing and be an absent class member.

According to the Complaint, InfuSystem made false and misleading statements and/or failed to disclose: that InfuSystem lacked effective internal control over financial reporting; that the Company's financial statements from back to the beginning of 2015 overstated the estimated accounts receivable collections, which then overstated revenues and pre-tax income by a corresponding amount; that financial statements dating back to the beginning of 2015 could no longer be relied upon; and that as a result of the above, the Company's financial statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

Lundin Law PC was founded by Brian Lundin, a securities litigator based in Los Angeles dedicated to upholding shareholders' rights.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules.

Contact:

Lundin Law PC

Brian Lundin, Esq.

Telephone: 888-713-1033

Facsimile: 888-713-1125

brian@lundinlawpc.com

http://lundinlawpc.com/

SOURCE: Lundin Law PC
MGM Resorts International MGM is a global hospitality company based in Las Vegas, Nevada 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 MGMs 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 MGM Resorts could be a solid choice for investors.



Current Quarter Estimates for MGM



In the past 30 days, 4 estimates have gone higher for MGM Resorts while none have gone lower in the same time period. The trend has been pretty favorable too, with estimates increasing from 10 cents a share 30 days ago, to 15 cents per share today, a move of 50.0%.



Current Year Estimates for MGM



Meanwhile, MGM Resorts current year figures are also looking quite promising, with 5 estimates moving higher in the past month, compared to none lower. The consensus estimate trend has also seen a boost for this time frame, increasing from 63 cents per share 30 days ago to 98 cents per share today, an increase of 55.6%.

MGM RESORTS INT Price and Consensus

MGM RESORTS INT Price and Consensus | MGM RESORTS INT Quote

Bottom Line



The stock has also started to move higher lately, adding 7.6% 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 #1 (Strong Buy) stock to profit in the near future. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.



Zacks' Top Investment Ideas for Long-Term Profit



How would you like to see our best recommendations to help you find todays most promising long-term stocks? Starting now, you can look inside our portfolios featuring stocks under $10, income stocks, value investments and more. These picks, which have double and triple-digit profit potential, are rarely available to the public. But you can see them now. Click here >>



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



MGM RESORTS INT (MGM): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
By Sethuraman N R and Rajendra Jadhav

BENGALURU/MUMBAI (Reuters) - Gold premiums in India jumped to their highest in 21 months, as demand surged after the government abolished two high-value currency notes, while bargain hunting propped up demand and premiums in leading consumer China.

Indian government on Tuesday abolished 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes to crack down on rampant corruption and counterfeit currency. The surprise move started disrupting cash-based gold smuggling.

After the government announcement, some people with unaccounted wealth paid as much as 50,000 rupees for 10 grams gold, compared to official price of around 30,000 rupees, traders said.

For most of 2016, gold traded at a discount in India as smugglers undercut official importers.

Dealers in the world's No.2 consumer of the metal were charging a premium of up to $6 an ounce this week over official domestic prices that include a 10 percent import tax, the highest since mid-February 2015. Last week, they were offering a discount of $3 an ounce.

The ban on high-value notes has disrupted smuggling network. Demand is shifting to banks and refiners, said Daman Prakash Rathod, a director at MNC Bullion, a wholesaler in Chennai.

In the long run, India's physical demand could take a hit as unaccounted money gets parked into mostly gold and real estate, said Hareesh V, research head, Geofin Comtrade Ltd.

Meanwhile, China saw good demand as prices fell, pushing premiums up to $5 from $4 last week against the international benchmark.

Gold prices were on track to end this week lower for the first time in four weeks. Spot gold is set to end the week down over 3 percent.

"People were expecting gold to go up after the U.S. election results but it did not last long ... More and more would rather wait on the sidelines until a notable trend can be observed," said Samson Li, an analyst with Thomson Reuters-owned metals consultancy GFMS.

Gold surged by nearly 5 percent on Wednesday after Republican nominee Donald Trump triumphed over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential election, a surprise for markets, prompting investors to seek refuge in perceived safe-haven assets like gold. Prices later tumbled as U.S. markets reacted positively to the Trump win.

Story continues

"Whenever there was a dip, people (in China) were buying," said Ronald Leung, chief dealer at Lee Cheong Gold Dealers in Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong, sellers were offering a premium of 50 to 70 cents an ounce, while in Singapore premiums were unchanged at 80 cents.

Demand in Japanese markets continued to remain tepid with premiums flat to a discount of 10 cents.

(Reporting By Nallur Sethuraman in Bengaluru and Rajendra Jadhav in Mumbai; Editing by Vyas Mohan)
FRANKFURT, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Innogy will stick to plans to expand its renewable business in the United States, adding there was no reason to fear a change in support to the sector after Donald Trump won the presidential election earlier this week.

"Our plans are unchanged. We are being selective in our approach and want to expand the business," Bernhard Guenther told journalists on Friday after the release of nine-month results.

Innogy is planning to enter the U.S. onshore wind market, with a focus on the northeastern part of the country, which it says has a risk profile that is very similar to Europe.

European renewable stocks fell sharply on Wednesday, after Trump won the U.S. presidential election, hit by concerns that his plans to promote coal and other fossil fuels would come at the expense of renewable energy investment.

(Reporting by Christoph Steitz; Editing by Maria Sheahan)
This man's suggestion to Prime Minister Narendra Modi is about how to make use of black money. Find out what it is.

By India Today Web Desk: Amid income tax department conducting multiple raids in various cities, many shopkeepers in the lanes of Delhi's Chandni Chowk have shut their shops.

The raid operation was launched because of reports claiming that conversion of demonetised currency notes is taking place in an illegal manner. Keeping in mind this, and the fact that some businessman have so much black money, that they would rather destroy it than get caught with it, a man gave a suggestion to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

advertisement

Also read: Livetweeting ATM nightmares: People share hunt for cash on social media



A user who goes by the handle @indiantweeter shared a WhatsApp message on Twitter which has gone viral with 184 retweets and 115 likes.

The message talks about how rich people will not mind destroying the huge amount of black money they have. The suggestion is regarding creation of a bank account.

Photo: Twitter/@indiantweeter

According to the message, a bank account should be created under the name of the Indian Army and people should be able to deposit any amount they want without an enquiry being probed against them. This will apparently have two advantages, first being that the money can be used for the nation's welfare and second that the notes will not be destroyed.

Also read: Prime Minister's popularity drops as Modi loses over 3 lakh followers on Twitter



Many Twitter users liked the suggestion and are sharing the message so that it reaches PM Modi.

--- ENDS ---
IRVINE, CA / ACCESSWIRE / November 11, 2016 / Khang & Khang LLP (the "Firm") announces a class action lawsuit against Tenet Healthcare Corporation ("Tenet" or the "Company") (THC). Investors, who purchased or otherwise acquired shares between February 28, 2012 and October 3, 2016 inclusive (the "Class Period"), are encouraged to contact the Firm prior to the December 6, 2016 lead plaintiff motion deadline.

If you purchased shares of Tenet during the Class Period, please contact Joon M. Khang, Esquire, of Khang & Khang, 18101 Von Karman Avenue, 3rd Floor, Irvine, CA 92612, by telephone: (949) 419-3834, or via e-mail at joon@khanglaw.com.

There has been no class certification in this case. Until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. You may choose to take no action and remain a passive class member.

The Complaint alleges that Tenet made false and misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: the Company illegally paid kickbacks to induce the referral of patients to Tenet's hospitals for labor and delivery; that Tenet defrauded the Georgia Medicaid program through this scheme; and that as a result of the above, statements about Tenet's business, operations and prospects were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times. On August 1, 2016, Tenet announced that it reached an agreement in principle with federal and state authorities that the Company would pay nearly $514 million to settle allegations that four Tenet hospitals in Georgia and South Carolina paid kickbacks for obstetric referrals. Under the settlement, two Tenet subsidiaries would plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate federal kickback laws. On October 3, 2016, Tenet issued a press release and filed a Current Report on Form 8-K with the SEC, announcing the Company finalized the agreement in principle announced on August 1, 2016. When this information was disclosed, shares of Tenet dropped in value, causing investors harm.

If you wish to learn more about this lawsuit at no charge, or if you have questions concerning this notice or your rights, please contact Joon M. Khang, a prominent litigator for almost two decades, by telephone: (949) 419-3834, or via e-mail at joon@khanglaw.com.

This press release may constitute Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions.

Contacts

Joon M. Khang, Esq.

Telephone: 949-419-3834

Facsimile: 949-225-4474

joon@khanglaw.com

SOURCE: Khang & Khang LLP
By Natalia Zinets KIEV (Reuters) - Citing past praise by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump for his reforms, former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili launched a new political party in Ukraine on Friday to fight corruption, just days after resigning bitterly as a regional governor. Saakashvili, who is widely credited with cracking down on graft when he led Georgia from 2004 till 2013, quit as governor of the coastal Odessa region last Monday, accusing his erstwhile patron, President Petro Poroshenko, of blocking his reforms there. His political allies said his repeated criticism of authorities in Kiev had made him a target of political infighting. At a news conference in Kiev, Saakashvili played an old video of a meeting with Trump in which the New York real estate tycoon praised the Georgian as a model reformer. Saakashvili, who assumed Ukrainian citizenship to be eligible for the post in Odessa, went on to say he would look to bring about a snap election as soon as possible and by peaceful means. "Our goal is to change the current so-called political elite," he said. "The main goal is to bring in people who are ready to work for the country, not for their clan, pocket or oligarchic group." Saakashvili, a bitter opponent of Russia, was among several foreign politicians and technocrats to be given key posts by the pro-Western leadership in Kiev after the Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovich fled in the face of mass street protests. They were brought in as part of a drive to eliminate entrenched corruption and improve transparency in a country riven by cronyism, economic mismanagement and a separatist war in eastern Ukraine. Since then, many have resigned or been dismissed, amid growing disillusion with the pace of reforms. Saakashvili took more swipes at Poroshenko, one of Ukraine's wealthiest businessmen, on Friday. "He had a chance to use me for implementing real reforms in this country, but it turned out that the real reforms and his wealth are opposite things," he said. Saakashvili said his new party would not have ties to big business and would not accept politicians or officials who had been in public life for a long time. "We will win only when we get rid of the so-called Ukrainian political elite, in reality - the dregs of society, those who are identical to the Russian ruling class," he said. "As long as we have authorities that want to neglect national interests, that are trading away national interests at every corner, we can not protect ourselves from enemies," he said. (Writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
(BAGHDAD)  Iraqi troops inched ahead in their battle to retake the northern city of Mosul from ISIS on Friday, as the U.N. revealed fresh evidence that the extremists have used chemical weapons.

Exchanging small arms and mortar fire with ISIS positions, the special forces entered Mosuls Qadisiya neighborhood, advancing slowly to avoid killing civilians and trying to avoid being surprised by suicide car bombers, said Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil.

Regular army troops control 90 percent of the Intisar neighborhood, said one officer, but progress had slowed because the streets are too narrow for our tanks. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.

Iraqi troops are converging from several fronts on Mosul, the second-largest city and the last major ISIS holdout in Iraq. Kurdish peshmerga forces are holding a line north of the city, while Iraqi army and militarized police units approach from the south, and government-sanctioned Shiite militias guard western approaches.

The offensive has slowed recently as the special forces  the troops that have advanced the farthest  push into more densely populated areas of eastern Mosul, where they cannot rely as much on airstrikes and shelling because of the risk to civilians who have been told to stay in their homes.

To the northeast of Mosul, in the formerly ISIS-held town of Bashiqa, the Kurdish commander responsible for military operations said his forces are still working to secure the northern Iraqi town but that booby traps were holding up the advance.

Gen. Hamid Effendi told The Associated Press that he estimates more than a thousand unexploded bombs could remain buried. Over 100 ISIS fighters have been killed in combat, he added, but injured fighters likely remain in defensive tunnels built by the militants.

To the south, some 20 kilometers from Mosul, Iraqi forces paused their advance to prepare for a push to take Mosul airport on the citys southern edge. Advancing from Qayara air base over the past month, Iraqs army and federal police have cleared tens of villages along the Tigris river valley and in Nineveh desert.

Story continues

Now, Iraqi forces say they are preparing for an assault on the southern edge of the city itself, which is likely to yield stiff ISIS resistance comparable to what Iraqi forces faced in Mosuls east earlier this month.

Federal Police Brig. Gen. Shaker Alwan al-Kafaj said that when his men retook the town of Hamam al-Alil, some 20 kilometers south of Mosul, they uncovered what Iraqi officials say is a mass grave.

The most powerful resistance for us was here, he said of the fight for the last town to Mosuls south.

Meanwhile, the U.N. human rights office cited new details on Thursday as proof that ISIS is using chemical weapons, which many fear the extremist group has and is saving for an even more brutal endgame should they be cornered or about to lose the city, still home to more than a million people.

Amid concerns about ISIS use of human shields in the city, rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said four people died from inhaling fumes after ISIS shelled and set fires to the al-Mishrag Sulfur Gas Factory in Mosul on Oct. 23.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Shamdasani said reports indicated ISIS has stockpiled large quantities of ammonia and sulfur that have been placed in the same areas as civilians. We can only speculate how they intend to use this, she said, We are simply raising the alarm that this is happening, that this is being stockpiled.

Shamdasani said the rights office did not know how IS intended to use the chemicals, but pointed to the requirement under international humanitarian law to protect civilians located near them.

U.N. officials say about 48,000 people have now fled Mosul since the government campaign began on Oct. 17.
By Stephen Kalin and Saif Hameed KOKJALI/BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi special forces said they pushed deeper into Mosul on Friday despite heavy resistance from Islamic State militants using civilians as cover, and were holding half a dozen city neighborhoods seized in the last 10 days. The elite Counter Terrorism Service troops broke through Islamic State defense lines to enter the city early last week and have since been embroiled in a brutal, close-quarter combat with waves of suicide bombers and snipers. The special forces are the spearhead of a wider coalition of 100,000 fighters seeking to crush a few thousand Islamic State jihadists who have ruled Mosul, the biggest city of their cross-border "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria, for the last two years. The campaign, nearly four weeks old, is the most complex military operation in Iraq in the 13 years of turmoil since the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Security forces and army infantry divisions, backed by a U.S.-led air force, are preparing to move on southern and northern districts of Mosul in coming days, to step up pressure on the militants. Kurdish peshmerga and Shi'ite paramilitary forces are holding territory to the northeast and to the west. On the eastern front, special forces pushed into the Qadisiya al-Thaniya district, on the northern edge of the small pocket of neighborhoods they control so far, Sabah al-Numani, spokesman for the Counter Terrorism Service, told Reuters. "We have encountered heavy resistance from the enemy," he said, with what he called "obstructive patrols" of militant forces trying to hold up the advance. "We are facing the most difficult form of urban warfare, fighting with the presence of civilians, but our forces are trained for this sort of combat." Military officers have told Reuters that the fighting is some of the most lethal they have seen, with small groups of militants using a vast network of tunnels and narrow streets to launch an apparently endless sequence of attacks against troops. A Reuters correspondent in Kokjali, on the eastern edge of the city, saw U.S. Apache helicopters overhead. Explosions, either from air strikes or suicide car bombs which the jihadists have deployed in the hundreds since the campaign started on Oct. 17, could be heard against a backdrop of artillery fire. As smoke rose above the city, hundreds of civilians were on the streets of Kokjali, some of them local residents but others fleeing the fighting in Mosul itself. The International Organization for Migration says nearly 48,000 people have been displaced by the fighting, still a relatively low figure compared to a United Nations warning before the campaign of a possible exodus of up to 800,000. Numani said the army had told civilians to stay indoors for their safety, adding that the counter terrorism unit aimed to hand over neighborhoods which it had secured to other forces. In other cities retaken from Islamic State, local police forces have moved in after the special forces have cleared territory. KILLINGS AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS Islamic State's two-year reign of fear in northern and western Iraq threatened the country with disintegration, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi says it has cost Iraq $35 billion in economic damage. On Friday, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani praised the forces battling Islamic State, including thousands of Shi'ite fighters in the Popular Mobilisation paramilitary forces, for their sacrifices. Without "the blood of these dear ones and their continuous steadfastness, only God would know what fate would await Iraq and others", said Seyyid Ahmed al-Safi, who delivered the Friday sermon in the holy city of Kerbala on behalf of the aged and reclusive Shi'ite religious leader. Inside Mosul, a city which is still home to up to 1.5 million people, residents said this week that the militants had killed at least 20 people and displayed their bodies - five of them crucified - as a warning against acting as informants for Iraqi forces. The U.N. human rights office said a total of 40 people were reportedly shot on Tuesday for "treason and collaboration" with Iraqi security forces, and a 27-year-old man was shot for using a mobile phone. Spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani also said the jihadists were reportedly stockpiling ammonia and sulfur in civilian areas, possibly for use as chemical weapons. A source in the city contacted by Reuters said the militants were allowing some relatives of Islamic State supporters to evacuate and head west to Syria. Routes out of Mosul to Islamic State's Syrian stronghold of Raqqa appear still to be open, despite efforts by the mainly Shi'ite Hashid Shaabi forces to cut them off. The source said he had seen five families leaving Mosul. One departing person said they had permission from Islamic State and "no one will stop us on the road from Mosul to Raqqa". In the eastern district of Karama, where fighting continued, one resident said militants were riding around on motorbikes. "We can bear the bombardment and the clashes to get rid of Daesh (Islamic State). We want to be liberated and despite all this fear we are staying in our houses," he said. In nearby Qadisiya al-Thania, stormed by special forces on Friday, a woman said the clashes were so fierce she was too scared to go into the kitchen to cook, so she fed her family dates. "The sound of clashes grew more distant, and then fighters reached us and raised the Iraqi flag and told us they had pushed out Daesh and liberated us," she said by phone. "We never thought we'd be free of Daesh. We can still hear clashes and we hope they don't come back again". (Additional reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Giles Elgood)
Fashion is taking out the seams. (Photo: Getty)

It seems that after a decade of embracing skinny jeans, jeggings, bodycon dresses, and all manner of stretchy and slim-fit clothing, were collectively outgrowing skinny fashion and headed in a more voluminous sartorial direction.

The signs have been all around us. The Wall Street Journal predicted the phasing-out of skinny jeans back in October 2014, when it ran a piece about the rising popularity of roomier denim styles, such as the classic Levis 501s and other boyfriend fits. Vintage pairs were spotted on influencers during Paris Fashion Week that year, and the publication reported that mainstream denim tastemakers like Citizens of Humanity and Urban Outfitters Urban Renewal website were encouraging wider proportions by peddling new and vintage loose-fit offerings.

Tastemaker and art director Sofia Sanchez de Betak wears loose-fitting jeans during Paris Fashion Week. (Photo: Getty)

The seams are being taken out when it comes to mens fashion, too. In October, J. Crew announced it would be widening its neckties by a quarter inch, suggesting a shift back in the direction of more traditional and less tapered menswear.

Now, The Wall Street Journal is revisiting its earlier observation, this time pointing to many of the 2017 fall and resort collections by major labels like Celine, Monse, and Stella McCartney, which are dominated by roomy trousers, the lavishly loose tops and  voluminous dresses. Even Roopal Patel, senior vice president and fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, confirmed to the publication, Theres been a shift in proportion. The woman who lives in pants has been looking for something exciting, because for a long time its been the same. With [wider styles], theres a reason to buy pants. Its new and its fresh.

Monse paired cropped, baggy cargo pants paired with a form-fitting top and feminine heels at New York Fashion Week 2016. (Photo: Getty)

Womens Wear Daily pointed out volume as a trend for resort collections back in 2015. Whether structured or fluid, [2016] resort looks featured ample proportions and an elegant flair, the publication said, pointing to billowing pieces by Chanel, Rocha, and Balenciaga. Stylecaster pointed to the flowing styles that were seen all over the runways at the Spring 2016 New York Fashion Week, including puffy shirts, loose linen pants, and pajamas-inspired daywear.

Story continues

While this sizable change in the industry may be good news to risk-takers and the naturally fashion-forward, it could also be troublesome to the everywoman. Now that weve been wearing skinny fashion for so long, and slim cuts hold court in our closets, how do we just start dressing differently? The Wall Street Journal admits that adopting larger proportions can be challenging for many women. Certain principles need to be obeyed in order to prevent looking lost in your clothes.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a good cut is paramount: The key to wearing volume successfully is understanding how it relates to the body. The publication notes that when wearing billowing garments, care should be taken to accentuate key areas of the female form. Even if your pants pool around your ankles in a swirl of fabric, they should delineate your waist, the publication says. When pairing a voluminous top with a voluminous bottom, its crucial to draw attention to either a bit of skin  a collarbone, say  or a slimmer part of the body, whether thats the ankles, arms or waist, to avoid looking lost in your clothes.

Designer Rosie Assoulin, a die-hard fan of volume in fashion, wears a look from her one of her latest lines, which debuted at New York Fashion Week 2016. (Photo: Getty)

Designer Fernando Garcia of Monse told The Wall Street Journal, It all depends on how you style it. You have to have balance. He offered a few ways to streamline ample garments, including wearing baggy cargo pants with a tighter top and feminine heels or cinching the waist of an ultra loose-fitting dress with a wide belt that draws the eye in. See the wisdom in a belt, the publication suggested.

Still afraid of looking frumpy? Advocates of roomier fashion insist that you can look and feel just as sexy in broader proportions and clothes that have volume. Designer Rosie Assoulin, interviewed by The Wall Street Journal says its all about the idea of sensual as opposed to sexy. She told the publication, Theres something very sensual about the way fabric moves when you move. The sort of thing that is conventionally sexy, something very tight for example, is not what I consider sexy.

Wearing wider proportions can simply be freeing, too, those interviewed by The Wall Street Journal suggest. Comfort and liberation are inherently sexy. And speaking of liberation, the shift toward roomier styles may also be a sign that the fashion industry is finally embracing women of all sizes and shapes. During recent trunk shows, designer Assoulin noted that a significant number of customers responded enthusiastically to her widely proportioned green-and-white plaid dress, which has a structured corselet waist, according to The Wall Street Journal. Normally youre with the fit model and you know how it looks on her, Ms. Assoulin said, but seeing this on different body types was great because its flattering on everyone.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.
ROME  The Neapolitan Quartet novels by pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, which have attracted legions of fervent fans around the globe, will be the subject of a high-profile documentary titled Ferrante Fever. Prominent arthouse sales company The Match Factory has boarded the pic to handle international sales.

The documentary is being directed by Italian multi-hyphenate Giacomo Durzi, who has been shooting in Naples, Turin, Florence and New York. Durzi interviewed American authors Jonathan Franzen and Elizabeth Strout, among others, about their enthusiasm for Ferrante and her books about an intense female friendship set against social changes in Italy from the 1950s to the present.

He also interviewed Ann Goldstein, the New Yorker editor who is Ferrantes translator in English.

Ferrante Fever is being described as an attempt to stimulate reflections on the particular reasons for Ferrantes success, without being seduced by the provocation of making a gossipy documentary about her unknown identity, Durzi said in a statement.

Durzi has several documentaries under his belt, including SB, I knew him well, a portrait of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi through the words of those who really knew him.

A screenwriter and a creative consultant for several Italian TV networks, Durzi is working on the Ferrante Fever screenplay with Laura Buffoni, an Italian film critic and festival programmer.

The screenplay uses re-enactments of scenes from Ferrantes novels in the real locations where they are set, archival materials and photographs, and animation inserts to reconstruct Ferrantes narrative universe, according to the production notes.

What Ferrante Fever will not be is an investigation into the real identity of Elena Ferrante, a subject which made headlines recently when investigative journalist Claudio Gatti deduced that the writer was Italian translator Anita Raja. His potential unmasking of Raja prompted outrage among many of Ferrantes fans, who lamented that he had violated her right to privacy and anonymity. Raja has not commented.

Story continues

We decided with Ferrantes publisher not to delve into the issue of who Elena Ferrante is, said Ferrante Fever producer Alessandra Acciai.

It was very important for me to be in harmony with them, said Acciai. It means being on the same page with Elena Ferrante.

The docu will, however, look into Ferrantes choice to remain anonymous which has sparked an unprecedented cultural debate, Durzi said. Ferrantes Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O, which also owns the Europa Editions imprint that publishes her books in the U.S., has read various drafts of the docus screenplay.

Acciai is co-producing the pic via her Rome-based Malia Film shingle in collaboration with Rai Cinema and Milan-based film marketing company Qmi. Qmi will be releasing the docu theatrically in Italy.

Italian writers and cultural figures who will be interviewed include Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano and Neapolitan film director Mario Martone, whose film Lamore molesto (Nasty Love) was based on Ferrantes book Troubling Love.

Italian film and TV company Wildside earlier this year announced plans for an eight-episode TV series based on the Neapolitan Quartet novels. Still at script stage, it is being co-produced with Domenico Procaccis Fandango.

There is a real passion for Ferrantes four Neapolitan novels; its a type of affection for literary works that weve not seen for a long time, said Giovanni Cova, chief of Qmi, which will release the 75-minute doc theatrically in Italy next year via a three-day event release starting April 17.

Its an adult audience, but its a type of phenomenon thats similar to what you see with teen literature, Cova said.

Related stories

The Match Factory Rolls Out First Sales on Amat Escalante's 'The Untamed' (EXCLUSIVE)

Venice: The Match Factory Sells 'Through the Wall' to Italy's Cinema SRL (EXCLUSIVE)

Locarno: The Match Factory Rolls Out First 'Paula' Sales (EXCLUSIVE)
Witches and wizards arent the only ones who can pull tricks  the filmmakers behind Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have a surprise in store for fans toward the end of the film.

(Warning: light spoilers below.)

Its the 1920s in the first spin-off movie from J.K Rowlings sprawling Harry Potter universe, and the wizarding world is in chaos following the rise of dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald. And fans will be surprised to see a familiar face in the role of the worlds most dangerous wizard  before Voldemort, of course.

Revealed near the end of the movie, Johnny Depp makes a small cameo as Grindelwald, a character who promises to take on a bigger role in the new franchises four planned sequels.

Why did we cast him? Because hes iconic. Hes an iconic actor and we needed an iconic actor to play this part, veteran Potter producer David Heyman told PEOPLE at the Fantastic Beasts premiere Thursday night at New York Citys Lincoln Center. Johnnys created two or three iconic people, people who are unforgettable. He makes choices, and that was really, really important.

Heyman also added that they wanted somebody who could, in the one hand, seduce, but, on the other hand, be really scary. Johnny can do that. He was an absolute pleasure to work with.

When asked if he was worried that the film might be impacted by Depps recent legal woes following his acrimonious divorce from Amber Heard, who had accused the actor of domestic abuse, Heyman said: Heres the thing: Misogyny, abuse, maltreatment of people is unacceptable  but none of us know what happened in that room. So I think it would be unfair for me to be judge and jury, or for any of us to be judge and jury.

Potter creator and Fantastic Beasts screenwriter Rowling also spoke to PEOPLE about Depps appearance in the saga.

Hes obviously a cameo in this film but going forward will obviously be more important, Rowling said. Watching Johnny create a character is really quite remarkable, its fascinating. Its great as a writer to work with people like that.

Story continues

David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter movies and has now helmed Fantastic Beasts, marveled at the fact that they were able to keep Depps cameo a secret for so long, revealing the actors scene in the film was shot this past January.

Its unbelievable that people only just found out, Yates said. We cast him because hes a real artist. Hes a great actor. Were asking him to fill a big pair of shoes  Grindelwald is a huge character.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them  also starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Ezra Miller and Colin Farrell  hits theaters Nov. 18.

Entertainment Weeklys collectors edition The Ultimate Guide to the World of Harry Potter & Fantastic Beasts is out now




A 48-year old man, who came to deposit over Rs 5 lakh worth scrapped high denomination notes in a bank in Thalassery in Kerala, died after he fell down from the second floor of a building.

By Revathi Rajeevan, Mayuresh Ganapatye: The huge rush for cash across the country turned tragic on Friday as three people died in separate incidents in Kerala and Maharashtra. The Congress blamed the Modi government for the deaths. IN PICS

The scramble by millions of panicked consumers to exchange or deposit invalid currency continued amid chaos and confusion for the second straight day. At many places, customers complained of poor cash flow in spite of RBI's assurance that the banks had enough currency to exchange.

advertisement

Also Read: Demonetisation: Akhilesh Yadav bats for private hospitals



KERALA VICTIM CAME TO DEPOSIT Rs 5 LAKH

A 48-year old man, who came to deposit over Rs 5 lakh worth scrapped high denomination notes in a bank in Thalassery in Kerala, died after he fell down from the second floor of a building.

Unni, a Kerala State Electricity Board employee, was filling the necessary forms to deposit the amount in the State Bank of Travancore's branch, located in the first floor, when the mishap occurred, they said quoting preliminary information.

He had unsuccessfully tried to deposit the notes yesterday and came to the bank again this morning.



Also Read: Demonetisation: How Kerala's 'parallel banking system' got affected

According to the police, Unnikrishnan had withdrawn Rs 4 lakhs from his account in the same branch on Tuesday, only hours before the demonetization announcement came. He deposited the same on Thursday.

He returned to the bank on Friday to deposit another 5.5 lakh rupees, which he had reportedly borrowed from another co-operative bank.

"He was depressed for the last two days. We are told he withdrew this money, which includes loan and his savings, to purchase land. Those, who were waiting with him had noticed him. He was shivering and feeling uncomfortable," police sub-inspector Talassery said.

The second death was reported from Alappuzha district of Kerala, where a 73-year-old man collapsed at the SBT bank while waiting for transaction.

The deceased, Karthikeyan, was waited in queue since 8:30 am till around noon, when he collapsed, his relative said. The two were waiting to get their 500 and 1000 rupee notes exchanged.

ELDERLY MAN DIES IN MUMBAI

Vishwanath Vartak, 73, who was standing in the queue before an SBI branch for exchanging currency, collapsed and died on the spot at Navghar in Mulund in eastern suburbs of Mumbai, police said.

Vartak had been standing for hours in the queue to exchange Rs.1000 and Rs.500 denomination notes. Though he was rushed to hospital by some people who saw him collapse, he was declared dead before admission, police said.

Maharashtra Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant blamed government for Varatak's death.

advertisement

"When the government was not prepared for currency exchange, then why did they implement this decision all of a sudden? People are in panic mode for past two days. Vartak had gone to deposit his hard earned money to bank, where he died while standing in queue. The government should take responsibility of this."

"People have skipped their work to stand in queue outside banks. People in rural India are also facing heat of this decision. Due to non-availability of enough cash, farmers produce is lying at market places waiting to be sold," Sawant said.

LONG QUEUES EVERYWHERE

Running out of money for the last two days, men and women across the country had thronged the ATMs since early morning while in many places, to their disappointment, they found the machines not working.

Police was also called in to help banks control the angry depositors whose patience wore thin after standing in long queues.

There were no signs of immediate relief even as several cash-strapped people were told to go back after bank servers at several branches reportedly collapsed while several ATMs went dry in a few hours. People who were able to exchange the old currency could get hold of the new notes only after waiting for several hours.

advertisement

CONGRESS LEADERS ALSO QUEUE UP

As banks across the country struggled to contain serpentine queues since early morning, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi took people by surprise when he visited SBI's Parliament Street branch in Delhi to exchange banned notes with new ones, in a show of solidarity with increasingly impatient people.



Also Read: After demonetisation 1,000 per cent rise in rail ticket bookings; airport counter sales also soar

"People are facing hardships. That's why I have come to join them. I am here to exchange my Rs 4,000 with new notes," Rahul Gandhi said.

"Neither you (reporters), nor your crorepati owners nor Prime Minister will understand the problems faced by people," the Congress vice-president said.

The Congress leader, who reached the SBI's Parliament Street branch at around 4.25 PM, waited for his turn in queue to exchange his old notes.

Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam was seen standing outside an ATM kiosk.

While Rahul Gandhi queued up in New Delhi, Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam was seen standing outside an ATM kiosk. While waiting for his turn, Nirupam distributed water bottles and pouches to people, who stood along.

advertisement

"After banning notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000, the Prime Minister assured people that there would be enough currency of lower denominations like Rs 100. But, people are not getting what was promised to them hampering their lives," Nirupam said.



Also Read: Demonetisation will help in bringing down prices, says SBI Chairman





--- ENDS ---
Japan executed a death-row prisoner for the murders of two women on Friday, the justice ministry said, a further snub to calls from international rights groups to end capital punishment.

The execution by hanging was the 17th since conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to power in late 2012.

Justice Minister Katsutoshi Kaneda, who authorised the latest execution, said he approved it after carefully considering the violent nature of the crimes.

"These are extremely brutal cases that caused unspeakable sorrow to the families of the victims," Kaneda told a news briefing.

"I decided to order the execution after careful deliberations."

Executed Kenichi Tajiri, 45, was convicted of killing a 49-year-old woman in 2004 and a 65-year-old woman in 2011 in robbery-homicides.

In the 2004 case, Tajiri battered the victim's head and face with a wrench to kill her to steal cash, while in the latter case he stabbed his victim to death and took her money.

Japan and the United States are the only major developed countries that still carry out capital punishment.

The death penalty has overwhelming public support in Japan, despite repeated protests from European governments and human rights groups.

Opponents say Japan's system is cruel because inmates can wait for their executions for many years in solitary confinement and are only told of their impending death a few hours ahead of time.
By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan and India signed a civilian nuclear accord on Friday, opening the door for Tokyo to supply New Delhi with fuel, equipment and technology for nuclear power production, as India looks to atomic energy to sustain its rapid economic growth.

(Narendra Modi in Japan, see pictures http://in.reuters.com/news/picture/pm-modi-in-japan?articleId=INRTX2T65I)

It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, had concluded such a pact with a country that is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).

"Today's signing ... marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a joint news conference with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The accord stipulates that the nuclear fuel and equipment provided can only be used for peaceful purposes, and a separate document signed in parallel has a clause allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducts a nuclear test.

"As a sole nation to have been nuclear-bombed, we bear the responsibility for leading the international community towards the realisation of a world without nuclear weapons," Abe told the same news conference.

"The agreement is a legal framework to ensure that India will act responsibly for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It will also lead us to having India participate practically in the international non-proliferation regime."

India says the NPT is discriminatory and that it has concerns about its two nuclear-armed neighbours, China and Pakistan.

India is already in advanced negotiations to have U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba Corp, build six nuclear reactors in southern India, part of New Delhi's plan to ramp up nuclear capacity more than 10 times by 2032.

Japanese nuclear plant makers such as Toshiba and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd are desperate to expand their business overseas as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster chilled domestic demand for new nuclear plants.

Story continues

The agreement with Japan follows a similar one with the United States in 2008, which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation.

That step was seen as the first big move to build India into a regional counterweight to China.

On India's infrastructure development, Abe said that construction of a high-speed railway connecting Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which will be based on Japan's "Shinkansen" bullet train technology, was scheduled to start in 2018, with commercial operation slated for 2023.

"In Japan, the era of high economic growth began when Shinkansen started its service in 1964. I hope the advent of high-speed railway will trigger fresh economic growth in India as well," Abe said.

Modi earlier on Friday praised the "growing convergence" of views between his nation and Japan, saying strong ties would enable them to play a stabilising role in Asia and the world.

(Editing by Nick Macfie and Kevin Liffey)
By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan and India signed a civilian nuclear accord on Friday, opening the door for Tokyo to supply New Delhi with fuel, equipment and technology for nuclear power production, as India looks to atomic energy to sustain its rapid economic growth. It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, had concluded such a pact with a country that is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). "Today's signing ... marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a joint news conference with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe. The accord stipulates that the nuclear fuel and equipment provided can only be used for peaceful purposes, and a separate document signed in parallel has a clause allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducts a nuclear test. "As a sole nation to have been nuclear-bombed, we bear the responsibility for leading the international community towards the realization of a world without nuclear weapons," Abe told the same news conference. "The agreement is a legal framework to ensure that India will act responsibly for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It will also lead us to having India participate practically in the international non-proliferation regime." India says the NPT is discriminatory and that it has concerns about its two nuclear-armed neighbors, China and Pakistan. India is already in advanced negotiations to have U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba Corp, build six nuclear reactors in southern India, part of New Delhi's plan to ramp up nuclear capacity more than 10 times by 2032. Japanese nuclear plant makers such as Toshiba and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd are desperate to expand their business overseas as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster chilled domestic demand for new nuclear plants. The agreement with Japan follows a similar one with the United States in 2008, which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation. That step was seen as the first big move to build India into a regional counterweight to China. On India's infrastructure development, Abe said that construction of a high-speed railway connecting Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which will be based on Japan's "Shinkansen" bullet train technology, was scheduled to start in 2018, with commercial operation slated for 2023. "In Japan, the era of high economic growth began when Shinkansen started its service in 1964. I hope the advent of high-speed railway will trigger fresh economic growth in India as well," Abe said. Modi earlier on Friday praised the "growing convergence" of views between his nation and Japan, saying strong ties would enable them to play a stabilizing role in Asia and the world. (Editing by Nick Macfie and Kevin Liffey)
* Nuclear accord intended only for peaceful purposes

* Japan can terminate pact if nuclear weapon test is conducted

* Indian high-speed railway to start commercial run in 2023 (Adds Abe and Modi quotes, schedule for Indian high-speed railway construction)

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Elaine Lies

TOKYO, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Japan and India signed a civilian nuclear accord on Friday, opening the door for Tokyo to supply New Delhi with fuel, equipment and technology for nuclear power production, as India looks to atomic energy to sustain its rapid economic growth.

It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, had concluded such a pact with a country that is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).

"Today's signing ... marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a joint news conference with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The accord stipulates that the nuclear fuel and equipment provided can only be used for peaceful purposes, and a separate document signed in parallel has a clause allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducts a nuclear test.

"As a sole nation to have been nuclear-bombed, we bear the responsibility for leading the international community towards the realisation of a world without nuclear weapons," Abe told the same news conference.

"The agreement is a legal framework to ensure that India will act responsibly for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It will also lead us to having India participate practically in the international non-proliferation regime."

India says the NPT is discriminatory and that it has concerns about its two nuclear-armed neighbours, China and Pakistan.

India is already in advanced negotiations to have U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba Corp, build six nuclear reactors in southern India, part of New Delhi's plan to ramp up nuclear capacity more than 10 times by 2032.

Story continues

Japanese nuclear plant makers such as Toshiba and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd are desperate to expand their business overseas as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster chilled domestic demand for new nuclear plants.

The agreement with Japan follows a similar one with the United States in 2008, which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation.

That step was seen as the first big move to build India into a regional counterweight to China.

On India's infrastructure development, Abe said that construction of a high-speed railway connecting Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which will be based on Japan's "Shinkansen" bullet train technology, was scheduled to start in 2018, with commercial operation slated for 2023.

"In Japan, the era of high economic growth began when Shinkansen started its service in 1964. I hope the advent of high-speed railway will trigger fresh economic growth in India as well," Abe said.

Modi earlier on Friday praised the "growing convergence" of views between his nation and Japan, saying strong ties would enable them to play a stabilising role in Asia and the world.

(Editing by Nick Macfie and Kevin Liffey)
Jason Cassidy, formerly the head of marketing at Open Road Films, has been named President of Marketing at Focus Features and will oversee all aspects of marketing for its film slate. He will report to Focus Features Chairman Peter Kujawski and work closely with Focus President Robert Walak, and Chief Operating Officer Abhijay Prakash.

Cassidy left Open Road during a shake-up in the marketing department there in March when Jonathan Helfgot came in to replace him. Cassidy was one of the executives who led the charge on marketing the critically acclaimed Spotlight which went onto win Best Picture last year.

Since Universal Pictures re-positioned Focus this past February, the studio has been building like-minded, socially-charged films including Loving, Nocturnal Animals, Kubo and the Two Strings, and A Monster Calls.

London-based exec VP of marketing Jamie Schwartz will report to Cassidy who has over 20 years experience in marketing prestige films. Prior to joining Open Road, he ran marketing at Mirmax Films where he worked on the campaign for such films as No Country for Old Men.

Related stories

Stephen Dillane Joins Working Title's Churchill WWII Epic 'Darkest Hour' As Production Begins In UK

Charlize Theron Spy Thriller 'The Coldest City' Moves Up To July - Update

'Nocturnal Animals,' 'Loving' & 'Kubo' Highlight Focus Features Panel -- The Contenders
With Oscar nominations for his work on Martin Scorsese's operatic Raging Bull and the Harrison Ford thriller The Fugitive, cinematographer Michael Chapman, 80, will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 24th International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, Camerimage, which runs Nov. 12 to 19 in Bydgoszcz, Poland. Chapman describes Camerimage as "summer camp" for cinematographers, an annual gathering where the elite and novice meet and share stories. The legend shared a few stories of his own with THR, recalling some of the most iconic films that he's shot.

How did your work as an actor and as a director on such films as All the Right Moves contribute to your work as a cinematographer?

I did tiny parts here and there. There's an enormous amount of bravery involved in acting. You just have to lay it out there and do it; and once it's done, you can't take it back. Actors share that with cinematographers. It led me to have a little more sympathy for actors than perhaps I once had when I stared out. As I directed, it made me understand how basic cinematography was and is to visual storytelling. When you are shooting, it's a form of directing, and when you are directing, it's a form of shooting. They are intertwined. They are both trying to tell a story.

How did your signature shot of the slow-motion boxer alone in the ring that opens Raging Bull come about?

It was Marty's idea. We were trying to show that this was Jake La Motta's art form, and it was being treated as an art. This was the way in which he stepped out of ordinary life and became an artist. In the background of the shot there are flashes of cameras going off every once in a while. That's actually me with an old flash camera that I would shoot off from time to time. There are ways in which the film is a verismo opera - stories about people who were not kings and queens but ordinary peasants and people in small towns. And the fights are the big arias. They were very elaborate, and the rest of the movie's shots and setups were very simple.

Story continues

Read more: 'The Comedian' Director Reveals What It's Like to Work With Robert De Niro

How about the train crash in The Fugitive?

The train crash was shot in a gully in the mountains of North Carolina. We just bought a train, and we crashed it. So we could only do it once. That's why it looks so convincing. We shot it on a small set of railroad tracks. We set up a lot of cameras, and we let the train go. It was hard work. We had to walk up and down about 130 steps every time you had to go to the john or get something to eat.

You also served as the camera operator on Jaws, working with Steven Spielberg and the director of photography, Bill Butler.

Operating a camera is the greatest job in the movies. It's heavenly. I had a marvelous time on that film, and I've had a house on Martha's Vineyard ever since. Steven was very young and, like Marty, had a great sense of how to tell a story with the camera. On the water, it's almost all handheld because in those days we didn't have the tools [for stabilization on boats]. It was a real mechanical shark, and it broke down so often that they were running out of time. And so they made this a virtue by not showing it. Not seeing the shark and building suspense is what makes the movie. But they couldn't show the shark because the damn thing wouldn't work!

Warner Bros./Photofest

What's your view of the state of cinematography today?

I think today the very best storytelling - imagery - are things people shoot on their cellphones: hurricanes and earthquakes and the horrors of war. The most compelling imagery is not professional cinematography, it's what ordinary people shoot reacting to what's going on around them. That is the stuff that's telling us the most graphically about what is happening in the world.

***

6 OTHER HONOREES

Michael Apted

Lifetime Achievement Award for Directing

Jay Rosenblatt

Award for Outstanding Achievements in Documentary Filmmaking

Dennis Gassner

Award for Production Designer With Unique Visual Sensitivity

Robert Lantos

Award for Producer With Unique Visual Sensitivity

Jessica Lange

Krzysztof Kieslowski Award recognizing excellence and passion in film and photography

Paul Sarossy and Atom Egoyan

Cinematographer-Director Duo Award

This story first appeared in the Nov. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
PHILADELPHIAOn November 8, 1938, Nazi paramilitary soldiers and German civilians looted and vandalized thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Jews were murdered. Up to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps.

On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The next day, a man discovered that someone had painted swastikas on an abandoned storefront in South Philly, placing the symbols next to Trumps name and the words Sieg Heil, a salute used by Nazis during World War II. Maybe it was an anti-Trump protester. Maybe it was an anti-Semite. Either way, it underscored the ways in which Trumps election has evoked the persistent Jewish nightmare: That America will become like Germany in 1938. Jews, who have a keen eye for the repetition of history, might be forgiven for worrying about the fragility of American democracy.

This is the scale of fear, grief, and anger about Trump in some Jewish communities across America. In Philadelphia, at least three synagogues held prayer services on Wednesday; congregations in a number of other cities, including Durham, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., held similar events. No matter who we voted for and how we are feeling this morning, we all know that we and our country are in desperate need of healing, read the Facebook invite for an event at the Germantown Jewish Centre in north Philly. We will sit together, sing together, pray together, and have a chance to share what is on our hearts with the support of the community.

A woman was crying when I walked into the cavernous sanctuary of GJC on Wednesday night. Roughly 100 people were gathered in a circle of chairs toward the front of the room; the cream ceiling and warmly brown furniture gave the space a living-room feel. In the center of the gathering, a single candle sat burning on a small round table. The space was still except for the occasional baby squeal or patter of toddler feet at the side of the room; people had brought their children because, as someone on Facebook observed, they need to heal, too.

Recommended: The U.S. Media Is Completely Unprepared to Cover a Trump Presidency

As a Jewish person, Im not as afraid of Trump because his own daughter is Orthodox, one woman said, referring to Ivanka Trump. This has exposed something weve been ignoring for too long, said another, speaking about the racist and sexist comments exchanged during the campaign. There was a discussion of the stages of grief and talk of making aliyah, or emigrating to Israelnot as a plausible possibility, but as a back-of-mind option in case things get really bad. And yes, people brought up Nazi Germany.

Unlike Muslims, Mexicans, African Americans, the disabled, and women, Jews have not been directly insulted by Donald Trump during this election. Anti-Semites have arguably been empowered by his campaign: Jewish journalists have been consistently threatened and harassed on Twitter since the election got underway, often by people who self-identify as Trump supporters. But the fear seems to be less that Trump will specifically persecute Jews than the sense that America under Trump will become an increasingly hostile space for Jews and other minority groups. Trump doesnt have to be an anti-Semite to bear responsibility for anti-Semitism.

While exit polls suggest that roughly 25 percent of American Jews voted for Trumpfewer than voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, but more than voted for John McCain in 2008the group as a whole is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic. Adam Zeff, the rabbi at GJC, said in an interview that the synagogues neighborhood, Mt. Airy, is so left-wing that its almost self-parody. Most Jews live in cities or stay concentrated in little enclaves, as Zeff called themhe pointed out that on the map of the election results, there are tiny blue spots even deep in Trump country. Thats where Jews live, he said, along with other minority groups.

Recommended: What Does Donald Trump's Election Say About America?

It wasnt Jews Trump promised to ban some 13 months ago. It was Muslims.

This clustering creates a dual challenge for Jewish communities. People at GJC spoke about Trumps election like they might about a death in the familywith a sense of real and personal loss, and a staggering alienation from their fellow Americans. It is kind of shattering to people to feel like, wow, theres such a difference, said Zeff. To think that racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and misogyny could be given a pass by so many people makes Jews feel like anti-Semitism could also be given a pass.

And yet the congregants also spoke about the need for understanding. The people for whom this is a happy daywe have to think about them, too, Zeff said during the prayer service. Mt. Airy is about a half hour drive from Bucks County, a swing area in Pennsylvania where nearly half of voters went for Trump this year. But even within such a short distance, its difficult to imagine how the liberal Jews of Philadelphia and the Trump supporters one county up would start to know one another or be in community.

The other challenge for Jews who are scared is putting that fear into context. Other groups are hurting just as much as Jews are right now, and in some cases, their fears are more tangible. It wasnt Jews Trump promised to ban from entering the country some 13 months agoit was Muslims. It wasnt Jewish neighborhoods Trump described in apocalyptic terms in the presidential debatesit was black neighborhoods. At times, Jews have struggled or declined to find solidarity with both of those groups, often over the issue of Israel.

Recommended: The Lessons of Henry Kissinger

When disaster strikes, the Jewish impulse is to look inward, to say, What tshuva, or repentance, do I need to do? Zeff said. If his community looked inward and asked what kind of allies they have been to African Americans, Latinos, and other groups in Philadelphia, Zeff said, I know what [those groups] answer is, which is: not very good ones.

For Jews, as for other groups who feel threatened by Trump, this new era has begun with a struggle of contradictions: to understand Trump supporters while maintaining their value commitments; to experience their particular and unique pain while finding solidarity with others. When Zeff sent out a note to his synagogue about the election, I got a response back from a congregant that said, This is very nice, rabbi, but youre asking us to do two contradictory things: Youre asking us to reach out, and youre asking us to stand up, Zeff told me. He wrote back, Yes, and isnt that the lot of the Jew?

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Jinger and Jeremy Vuolo may be on their honeymoon, but that isnt stopping the newlyweds from saying hello to fans!

The Vuolos, who tied the knot on Saturday, shared their first video message as a married couple from their honeymoon on Friday.

Standing side-by-side in front of a tree-lined road, the duo were all smiles as they gave an update on their new life together.

Hey everyone, we just wanted to say hello. We are enjoying our honeymoon here, Jinger, 22, begins the short video message.

We wanted to say thank you for all of your support and all of your prayers, Jeremy, 28, continues. We appreciate them and theyre much needed as we begin this new journey in life together.

On Nov. 5, the couple said I do at their ceremony at the Cathedral of the Ozarks at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, PEOPLE exclusively reported.

Jingers sister Jessa (Duggar) Seewald served as the maid of honor while Vuolos brother, Charles, was the best man. The wedding included nearly 1,000 guests, comprised of family and friends, and Vuolos father, Chuck, officiated.

The couple previously told PEOPLE that they were heading to Australia and New Zealand following their nuptials. We plan to get away for a couple of days alone together and then will be leaving the country for an amazing trip to New Zealand and Australia, the couple said. We are so excited and so thankful for this amazing trip to start our marriage together. Most of all, we are just excited that we will be together  married!

After tying the knot, the couple took to their website to share the news with fans: YES! We are married! We are so thankful to God, our parents and our wonderful families and friends for celebrating this day with us and for helping us arrive at this moment in time. We love that we now are beginning our lives together as one, before God.

Watch Jingers nuptials in a special episode, Counting On: Jingers Wedding, on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 8 p.m. ET on TLC.




The US presidential election of 2016 will be remembered for its widely unexpected and astonishing outcome, the incendiary nature of its campaign and the perfect storm of anger that it unleashed. Some called it "the election of our discontent". The idea of America was called into question. In the words of British pollster Lord Ashcroft, who tied his country's vote on Brexit as analogous to the emergence of the Trump phenomenon in the US: "Brexit and Trump are the opening chapters in a story whose denouement we have yet to see." 'Trumpism', a growing global phenomenon (witness the rise of the right in many parts of Europe), will not go away even after the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency.

The United States is today a country marked by deep fissures and divisiveness. Eight years ago, in 2008, the election of America's first black president was expected to signal the beginning of an era of post-racism. Barack Obama spoke of the moment when the rise of the oceans would "begin to slow" and "our planet began to heal". Today, the 'Black Lives Matter' movement signifies the embattled state of race relations in the country. Blood and treasure continue to be expended in military engagements abroad. The emergence of the Alt-Right, as the rightist voices in the country are termed, provides much food for thought. Protectionism, isolationism, xenophobia, misogyny, antipathy to Islam are all preserves of these unabashed voices whose core views support authoritarianism, and who draw inspiration from such historical events as the Battle of Thermopylae where a beleaguered Sparta (a symbol of white civilisation and values) rallied to fight Xerxes and the Persians (symbols of the assault on values that made America 'great').

advertisement

The Trump supporters have, as The Economist recently noted, a 'Roman garrison' view of foreign policy and geopolitics. The building of a 'bloody, blameful' Mexican wall is just one aspect of this. The Obama legacy in foreign policy will be remembered for ending the war in Iraq (but unleashing the incubus of ISIS), the Iran nuclear deal, the relaxation of relations with Cuba, the execution of Osama bin Laden, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change-all aimed at improving America's standing in the world. Its failures will be the unravelling of the Middle East (Russian President Vladimir Putin's classic query, voiced in his 2015 speech to the UN General Assembly, "What have you done?", comes to mind), the collapse of governance and state structures in the region, the cavalier approach to regime change ("We came, we saw, he died," was then secretary of state Clinton's laconic reference to Gaddafi's horrific death). The coordinates of the 'pivot' or rebalancing to Asia were never fully elucidated, as also America's vision for the world. The conviction of American exceptionalism continued to be closely held by the establishment, but it was a value increasingly questioned in the world outside. Clarity and intelligence of approach in relations with China were in short supply. Cold war politics were reincarnated in ties with Russia.

The Obama cohort, responding to criticism that the outgoing president did not understand the nature of war (his mention of the "red line" on use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime and his failure to act when this line was crossed is cited in this context), says he preferred to use the scalpel rather than the hammer and that he believed in the theory of the Long Game rather than the Long War. But the country saw Obama as a wartime president (more American men and women died in Afghanistan under him than under George W. Bush) who did not grow into the role, because he had a distaste for war and no desire to speak clearly and purposefully about it. The contrasting examples of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt are cited. Trump frequently denounced the Obama presidency's alleged neglect of the state of American defence preparedness and capability during the campaign.

President Obama made 11 trips to Asia during his two terms. His identity as a Pacific president (his youth was in Hawaii and Indonesia) enabled the forging of a warm, new 21st century relationship with Southeast Asia. His last trip in September for the G-20 meet in Hangzhou, China, and the East Asia summit in Laos, had mixed results and much of the media focus was on the tarmac incident in China and the insulting remarks of the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. Post-2008, an assertive China, wary of strategic surprises involving the US and its partners in the region, has emerged as an opposing pole to American interests in the Indo-Asia-Pacific. One of the linchpins of American geoeconomic strategy in the region, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has little or no chance of being approved by the United States Congress before the end of the Obama presidency. Trump has been emphatic in his opposition to it.

advertisement

India was not an issue in the campaign apart from on immigration (many overlook the fact that the largest ingress of immigrants into the US today is from India and China. From 2009 onwards, the numbers from Mexico have drastically decreased, with more Mexicans leaving the US than coming in). The India relationship was not a vexed issue with either candidate. Trump did not display any in-depth awareness of foreign policy issues during the campaign. But in his acceptance speech after his election victory he did indicate willingness to develop mutually beneficial relations with all countries willing to have good ties with the United States.

advertisement

This has not been a foreign policy election. It has been a contest about the state of America, a lament for American greatness in the 20th century, exposing the bitter anger and distrust of hillbilly white folks impoverished by the end of American mining and manufacturing, whose rural communities and ghost towns are insignia of a vanished world, against the urban, college-educated and globalist elites. It has revealed atavistic hatreds predicated on racial prejudice, and fear of foreigners, and it has laid bare the hollowing out of America the beautiful. President Obama has reason to fear for the preservation of his legacy. The elements of rationality and reason, the necessary drivers of democratic politics, are absent; instead they have been sacrificed at the altar of populism, both right and left. One fervently hopes that the vision of that shining city on the hill, the idea of America, will not be dimmed. The world has an enormous stake in the health and well-being of the United States and its democracy.

Nirupama Rao, a former foreign secretary, was also Indian ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2013



--- ENDS ---

advertisement
If this doesn't get you feeling all warm and fuzzy today, nothing will.

John Legend is making us swoon with his new "Love Me Now" music video, showing what appear to be real-life couples from all over the world -- Northern Iraq, Florida, Dominican Republic and North Dakota -- kissing, cuddling, hand-holding, and simply going about their lives. Of course the scene-stealers are Legend's own wife, Chrissy Teigen, and the couple's adorable daughter, Luna.

Watch below (and maybe have some tissues at the ready).

WATCH: John Legend and Chrissy Teigen Share Gorgeous Unfiltered Sunset Pics with Baby Luna

The video comes just one day after Legend called for "more love" in an Instagram message reacting to Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election.

"Embracing my family has made today full of love and light despite the bad news," he wrote. "But it's also important that we show love and empathy to people who may not look like us or live like us. Those who are marginalized and rejected, feared and left behind."

To support the release of "Love Me Now," Legend asked fans to share photos of themselves with their loved ones using the hashtag #LoveMeNow.

"Love is universal," he continued. "We all need it. We all can give it. And it will ultimately win over hate. I have to believe that."

WATCH: John Legend, Chelsea Handler and Aaron Sorkin's Powerful Reactions to Donald Trump's Presidency

Related Articles
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, setting aside his previous hostility toward Donald Trump, said on Thursday the U.S. Republican's presidential election victory offered economic opportunities and there was no need for Europeans to be despondent about it. "I may respectfully say to my European friends and colleagues that it's time we snapped out of general doom and gloom about this election," Johnson said after meeting Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic. "He is after all a deal maker. He wants to do a free trade deal with the UK," Johnson told reporters. Trump's upset victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton has delighted far-right politicians in France, the Netherlands and Austria but worried some mainstream politicians who fear it may be part of a populist, anti-establishment trend. "I believe that this is a great opportunity for us in the UK to build on that relationship with America that is of fundamental economic importance for us but also of great importance for stability and prosperity in the world," Johnson said. Johnson was one of the leading proponents of the successful Brexit campaign to get Britain out of the European Union. Trump aligned himself with the Brexit movement during his campaign. On Wednesday, Johnson, the former London mayor, congratulated Trump on his victory and tweeted that he looked forward to continuing the partnership between the two nations. Johnson said last year that he feared going to New York because of "the real risk of meeting Donald Trump" after the New York businessman said parts of London were now so radicalised that police officers feared to go there. Later on Thursday, Johnson said on his Twitter account he had spoken to U.S. Vice President-elect Mike Pence. "We agreed on importance of the special relationship & need to tackle global challenges together," he tweeted. (Additional reporting by Eric Walsh in Washington; Reporting by Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Peter Cooney)
Jon Stewart stepped down from The Daily Show in August 2015. Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2016.

Why cant I stop feeling like the two are related?

Allow me to preface this argument with some transparency: Im a registered Democrat, and I voted for Hillary Clinton. If those two attributes incense you before we even get going, just skip directly to the comments and have at it.

VIDEOSWatch Hillary Clintons Concession Speech: Our Nation Is More Deeply Divided Than We Thought

If youre still here, you might be marveling at the insane idea that a comedy series could muster the kind of groundswell that could change a national elections outcome. Screw it, these are crazy times: Had Stewart still been host of The Daily Show, Clinton wouldve had a much better shot at grabbing the requisite 270 Electoral College votes to become commander in chief.

Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 28,000 votes. Is it that far afield to think that Daily Show viewers there, along with the friends they mightve shared Daily Show videos with, couldve turned the state for the Democratic candidate?

VIDEOSDonald Trump Makes First Speech as President-Elect, Thanks Hillary Clinton for Her Service  Watch Video

For starters, Stewarts Daily Show had a spark and vigor that is just plain missing under Trevor Noahs command. With Stewart behind the desk, The Daily Show spoke truth  often peppered with f-bombs  to power in a way that resonated. Stewart exuded an Everyman frustration with government and politics that educated as it mocked. Noah has continued on his predecessors path, but the new hosts unruffled charm at times lends him a distance Stewart never showed.

That might be why, to the former hosts repeated chagrin, Stewarts Daily Show served as a news source for at least part of its nightly audience. In a 2014 Pew Research Center report, 12 percent of Americans online said they got their news from the Comedy Central show. Those numbers arent knock-you-down amazing, but theyre up there with USA Today and The Huffington Post: aka not smart to ignore. And the people who watched Stewarts half hour each night  as well as channel-mate Stephen Colberts The Colbert Report  skewed young (in their mid-30s) as opposed to those who regularly viewed nightly network and cable news broadcasts.

Story continues

RELATEDThe Daily Show: Why the Series Should End When Jon Stewart Leaves

Now think about how voter turnout at the polls Tuesday was incredibly low; the United States Elections Project projections show that 43.2 percent of Americans eligible to vote this year chose not to. I very strongly believe that Stewart, whose audience averaged 1.7 million viewers in 2011-2012, mightve swayed some of the on-the-fencers to get out and make their voices heard, if only to have complaining rights in the years to come.

This isnt to say that Stewarts spiritual heirs  most notably Last Week Tonights John Oliver and Full Frontals Samantha Bee  didnt put impassioned, pointed, funny-as-hell, make-you-think effort into derailing Donald Trumps candidacy. But being politically educated and aware is a practice akin to brushing your teeth or taking your vitamins: Doing it every once in a while doesnt cut it.

Ideally, that practice involves getting your news from various sources, weighing what you see against what you know to be true, asking questions and seeking answers. But if you werent doing that, at least The Daily Show (and The Colbert Report) offered some point of contact with the political realm. It may not have been perfect, or told the whole story, but it was something  four nights a week.

VIDEOSThe Daily Shows Hasan Minhaj and Michelle Wolf Just Delivered TVs Best Post-Election Takedowns

Maybe this is all an exercise in escapism. Maybe Im just trying to make sense of how the country I love could choose such an unqualified man to lead it. Maybe Im despondent over how many people have felt emboldened this week alone to spew hate at those they perceive as different from themselves  and how our president-elect has yet to condemn those actions.

So I end with an appeal to the man who coined the name Fkface Von Clownstick: Jon, please return to regular political commentary. Now, more than ever, America could use a Moment of Zen.

Related stories

Ratings: Trump Boosts 60 Minutes; Secrets and Lies, Quantico Tick Up

Donald Trump on 60 Minutes: The 10 Most Surprising Revelations

Dave Chappelle Wishes Donald Trump Luck in Saturday Night Live Monologue: 'I'm Going to Give Him a Chance'
(This version of the Nov. 10 story, corrects the name to Natural Resources Defense Council in paragraph 3) By David Bailey (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday ordered state and city officials to deliver bottled water directly to qualified residents in Flint, Michigan, where a water contamination crisis has made unfiltered tap water unsafe to drink since April 2014. Officials must deliver four cases of bottled water a week immediately unless they can prove a water filter is installed and properly maintained at a home or if residents opt out of a filter or deliveries, U.S. District Judge David Lawson said. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by residents and advocacy groups Concerned Pastors for Social Action, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. "Here the plaintiffs seek a stop-gap measure that provides ready access to safe drinking water," Lawson said. "It is in the best interest of everyone to move people out of harms way before addressing the source of the harm." Flint, a predominantly black city of 100,000, was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager when it switched its water source in April 2014 to the Flint River from Lake Huron in a money-saving move. The more corrosive river water caused lead to leach from city pipes and into the drinking water. The city switched back in October 2015 after tests found high levels of lead in blood samples taken from children, but the water has not returned fully to normal. Flint has been replacing lead pipes running to homes, and state officials have said the water is safe to drink if properly filtered. The crisis drew international attention and numerous lawsuits and led to calls by some critics for Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to resign over the state's response. The groups' lawsuit, filed in January, seeks replacement of lead service pipes. They later asked Lawson to order home water deliveries or faucet filter installations because transportation issues made it hard for some residents to get to water distribution centers. The city and state argued that bottled water was widely available at government-run distribution points and ordering door-to-door deliveries could be financially crippling. Lawson called the city and state efforts commendable, but said the plaintiffs offered credible anecdotal evidence the distribution network was in flux and not completely effective. "The court correctly recognized that the government created this crisis, and it's the government's responsibility to ensure that all people in Flint have access to safe drinking water," NRDC attorney Dimple Chaudhary said. (Reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis; Editing by Leslie Adler)
By Dan Levine and Karen Freifeld SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The U.S. judge overseeing a lawsuit against President-elect Donald Trump and his Trump University told both sides they would be wise to settle the case "given all else that's involved." Lawyers for the president-elect are squaring off against students who claim they were they were lured by false promises to pay up to $35,000 to learn Trump's real estate investing "secrets" from his "hand-picked" instructors. Earlier on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel tentatively rejected a bid by Trump to keep a wide range of statements from the presidential campaign out of the fraud trial. Trump owned 92 percent of Trump University and had control over all major decisions, the students' court papers say. The president-elect denies the allegations and has argued that he relied on others to manage the business. Trial is scheduled to begin Nov. 28, and Curiel told lawyers he was not inclined to delay the six-year-old case further. Trump lawyer Daniel Petrocelli said he would ask to put the trial on hold until early next year, in light of the many tasks the magnate has before his inauguration. Curiel said he would allow both sides to file briefs on whether to delay the case. He also indicated they should consider making a deal. "It would be wise for the plaintiffs, for the defendants, to look closely at trying to resolve this case given all else thats involved, Curiel said. Petrocelli told reporters after the hearing that Trump might have to be a "little more flexible" about settling the case now that he is president-elect, although the lawyer wasn't sure his client would was willing. Curiel said that he would allow Trump to testify via video given his presidential obligations. In the tentative ruling Curiel, based in San Diego, said Trump's lawyers can renew objections to specific campaign statements and evidence during trial. Trump's attorneys had argued that jurors should not hear about statements Trump made during the campaign, including about Curiel himself. Trump attacked the judge as biased against him. He claimed Curiel, who was born in Indiana but is of Mexican descent, could not be impartial because of Trump's pledge to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump's lawyers argued that Curiel should bar from the trial accusations about Trump's personal conduct including alleged sexual misconduct, his taxes and corporate bankruptcies, along with speeches and tweets. They argued the information is irrelevant to the jury and prejudicial to the case. In court papers, lawyers for the students claimed that Trump's statements would help jurors as they weigh the Republican's credibility. "Defendants have not identified specific evidence that they wish to exclude," Curiel wrote on Thursday. "Accordingly, the court declines to issue a blanket ruling at this time." The judge also barred Trump lawyers from telling jurors that the university had a 98 percent approval rate on student evaluations. That rating is irrelevant as to whether Trump University misrepresented itself, Curiel wrote. Curiel is presiding over two cases against Trump and the university. A separate lawsuit by New York's attorney general is pending. (Reporting by Dan Levine in San Diego and Karen Freifeld in New York; Editing by Peter Henderson and Cynthia Osterman)
PARIS (Reuters) - Former prime minister Alain Juppe remains front-runner to win the centre-right's nomination for France's 2017 presidential election in spite of losing some ground, a poll said on Friday. The Odoxa poll for France Info radio station said Juppe was seen winning 36 percent of votes in the first round of primaries on Nov. 20, although this was seven percentage points down on a month ago. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was in second place with 26 percent, a score that was unchanged from a month ago, while the score for Francois Fillon, another former prime minister, increased by nine percentage points to 20 percent. The top two from this first round of voting go through to a second round, unless one of the candidates gets more than 50 percent in the first. In the second round, the Odoxa poll sees Juppe winning with 58 percent versus an expected 42 percent for Sarkozy - although Juppe's second-round score was again down seven percentage points from last month. The winner of the primaries has a good chance of prevailing in the presidential election due in April and May 2017, given Socialist President Francois Hollande's unpopularity and divisions among left-wing candidates. Polls suggest far-right leader Marine Le Pen will make the second round run-off, and Donald Trump's shock victory in the U.S. presidential election has led prominent French politicians to warn she could win unless her mainstream rivals get their act together. (Reporting by Yann Le Guernigou; Writing by Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
Los Angeles long has been a plastic surgery punchline with its glut of perfectly upturned noses, cantilevered cheekbones and lips like breakfast links. But the latest trend in "work" is alarmingly unfunny.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, more and more young women - some not even old enough to traipse into Tower Bar - are misspending their youth and savings on soft tissue fillers like Juvederm and paralytics like Botox.

In the past six years, the number of noninvasive procedures among the 20- to 29-year-old set has surged nearly 40 percent to almost 170,000 treatments in 2015. So why are these millennials suddenly acting like they're, well, middle-aged?

"It used to be that you didn't start getting Botox until you turned 35," says Westside dermatologist Jessica Wu, who's known for a "much less is more" approach to cosmetic tweaks. She believes the proliferation of medi-spas that offer everything from brow shaping to Botox is to blame: "For a lot of younger women who are used to getting their nails done and their lashes tinted, it is almost like the natural extension."

Read more: Celebrity Trainer, Plastic Surgeon Weigh in on 2016's Butt Moment

There's also the preoccupation with perfection thanks to Generation Y's tendency to bare all. "It's social media, pop culture and the Kardashians - or the Jenners," says Beverly Hills celebrity plastic surgeon Gabriel Chiu, who has famous young patients striving to replicate the magical digital effects of Instagram filters on their faces and bodies. That could mean erasing nasolabial folds around the mouth or strengthening a jawline or inflating lips with filler. But there are limits: "When they bring in certain pictures, I have to tell them that I can't do that because it's Photoshop," says Chiu.

The bizarre results of the pursuit of so-called perfection aren't lost on casting directors, who see actresses in their 20s with cosmetically tweaked faces that appear off. "It completely takes away from their innocence," says veteran TV casting director Carrie Audino, who has cast young women in Mad Men and The Magicians. "They think they have an edge because it's supposed to make them look younger, but it just looks strange." Or, even worse, older.

Story continues

Earlier this year, social media commenters called out filler-friendly millennial icon Kylie Jenner, 19, for looking 40, even 50, on the cover of Adweek. Audino - who never would publicly out an actress with too much filler or Botox during an audition - prefers to follow up offline with advice: "If I think it's extreme, I often will mention it to her agent or manager and say, 'Whatever she's doing to her face, she needs to stop.' " Wu adds that young actresses have sought her help in reversing the effects after watching their faces not move on video. "They see that they have become so overfilled that they lose natural contours and their eyes recede."

Read more: Beverly Hills Plastic Surgeon on How Selfies Have Affected the Beauty Biz (Q&A)

One big reason for the premature plumping and paralyzing is that millennials believe these procedures are preventative. Within the past decade, the beauty industry started marketing peptide creams and retinols to 20-somethings. For instance, beauty brand Origins uses #QuarterLifeCrisis to sell its anti-aging renewal serum. #FightTechNeck - the purported early wrinkling of the neck caused by looking down at smartphones and keyboards - is scientific anti-aging skin-care line StriVectin's callout for its neck creams. Yet early and repeated Botox in young muscles that are not hyperactive theoretically can cause problems later on. "If someone is treated with high doses of Botox frequently so the muscle is always frozen and never allowed to regain any function, it's possible that the muscle could atrophy," says Wu, who adds that the atrophy would be reversible once the muscle is allowed to regain function.

For millennials, filler that promotes collagen is unnecessary. "As collagen and elastin are still healthy and vibrant in all teens and early 20s, this is not the protocol for most," says Santa Monica's celebrity skin-care expert Nurse Jamie, who counts Jessica Alba and Iggy Azalea as fans of her skin-care products.

With the age of physical discontent skewing younger and younger as millennials scrutinize themselves mercilessly on social media, expect cosmetic paranoia to descend upon their younger brethren, Generation Z. There are no U.S. laws preventing teens from indulging in Botox or fillers, but parental consent is required for patients under 18.

"We only operate on non-adults who have the full support of their parents," says Debra Johnson, M.D., president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Yet the use of hyaluronic acid fillers (most popular for lip enhancement) among 13- to-19-year-olds is up 9 percent in 2015 from 2014. "I have mothers coming in who tell me that once their kid turns 18, they are bringing them in because they are already starting to develop eye lines from squinting at their cellphone," says Chiu. "And they are only 12!"

This story first appeared in the Nov. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Read more: Hollywood's New Thing: $199,000 a Year for "Resting Rich Face"
Less than 48 hours after being elected the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump is not having a great time. Americans across the country are protesting against him saying "not our President".

By India Today Web Desk: Hillary Clinton won the popular votes. Only with a narrow margin, but she did. But Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States of America because he won the electoral votes.

All those Americans who dreaded this from coming true lost their cool and protested against Trump in the streets. In big numbers. In huge numbers. Watch this video to get an idea of the turnout.



New York City protests against Donald Trump's presidency. They haven't stopped coming. pic.twitter.com/qwZlBe2i0L Phil McCausland (@PhilMcCausland) November 10, 2016

advertisement



Also read: Post election results, Donald Trump removes 'ban all Muslims from the US' page from his website

Also read: Filmmaker Michael Moore predicted Donald Trump's win four months ago, here's his 5-point analysis



The new president-elect was invited to the White House by the current President Barack Obama and they had a 90-minute-long chat. While Obama called the meeting 'excellent', Trump said the 'chemistry was good' and that his wife "liked Michelle Obama a lot."

But maybe it's after that it struck him that he didn't say a word about or against the protests against him that has been happening across the country.

He tweeted "just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. VERY UNFAIR."

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016



To be fair, whether he won the popular votes or not, Donald Trump has won the presidential elections, and as Barack Obama says, the only was is forward.

Now that he's been elected, the man should be given a chance.



--- ENDS ---
New York (AFP) - If Donald Trump owes his stunning victory to anyone it might be campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, a diminutive, ever smiling pollster, Republican strategist and mother of four.

The 49-year-old New Jersey native is the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign in US history, thereby shattering one glass ceiling on election night if not the one that most expected.

On Thursday she announced that she had been offered a job in the White House.

"Could it be those 'sources' want the WH job I've been offered?" she tweeted after a journalist said she was reluctant to work in the administration because she wanted to keep running her polling company.

"I will serve in whatever capacity I'm asked, where I feel like I can be most helpful," she told CNBC on Wednesday, hours after Trump's acceptance speech when lesser mortals might have been sleeping off a very late night.

In an indication of her importance to the campaign, she was the first person outside the family whom Trump thanked in that 3 am speech that sent a political earthquake across the world.

When the president-elect then made his way down the line of family and aides in a Manhattan ballroom, he gave Conway a kiss on the cheek.

In an eye-catching tailored red dress, Conway reached up to hug him, whispered something into his ear and gave him a motherly pat on the back. They were later photographed, Trump with an arm round her waist and his right index finger pointing at her in pride and gratitude as she waved to the crowd.

- Concession call -

The victory over the vastly more experienced Hillary Clinton was so extraordinary that even Conway referred to it on twitter as #surreal.

For months she was his indefatigable spokesperson and careful manager, an apologist for his worst excesses, emphasizing the good, deflecting the bad by pivoting to Clinton's weaknesses and handling his ego with dexterity.

"I love the fact that he restrained himself tonight and he was a gentleman," Conway said after Trump resisted bringing up Bill Clinton's reputed affairs in the first presidential debate in September.

Story continues

That she was a woman was crucial as Trump came under fire for vulgar remarks about groping women and was accused by a dozen women, says Gabriel Kahn, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

"The fact that she could, with a straight face, go on talk show after talk show and explain away all these transgressions, inconsistencies, multiple flaws what have you, was an effective tool to make crazy seem normal," he said.

She made his remarks "seem not so awful, simply because she was an attractive, articulate and blond white woman," Kahn told AFP.

Conway never indulged in the vicious mudslinging that characterized so much of the election, earning the trust of the Trump children and respect from her detractors.

It was Conway whom Huma Abedin, Clinton's closest aide, called in the middle of the night to put her boss on the line to concede to Trump.

- Third time lucky -

It must have been an extraordinary moment for a woman raised by a single mother who worked for a casino before going on to study political science and get a law degree from George Washington University.

She founded her own company in 1995 with offices in Washington and New York, and has worked with the likes of Ronald Reagan's pollster, Newt Gingrich, reportedly a possible Trump secretary of state, and Mike Pence, vice president elect.

Recently someone on whom Republican politicians called to help reach out to women voters, she initially worked this year for Ted Cruz, but ultimately joined team Trump after impressing his daughter, Ivanka.

It was not a propitious start. She was the third campaign manager in two months. The first, Corey Lewandowski, was fired in June after being sidelined and accused of manhandling a woman reporter.

The second Paul Manafort, who resigned over pro-Kremlin ties, battled to keep Trump in line. But as aides have confided to the US press, you cannot order around a 70-year-old billionaire who thinks he's invincible.

Instead, Conway took a more subtle approach. A New York magazine article compared her talk of managing Trump to a mother of "unruly toddlers."

"It's like saying to someone, 'How about having two brownies and not six?''" she told the magazine.

Married to George Conway, a partner in a New York law firm, the couple live in a $6 million mansion in Alpine, New Jersey, one of America's wealthiest zip codes, with their four young children.
Kids left the sweetest chalk messages for Hillary Clinton outside her campaign headquarters

Hillary Clinton may not be stepping into the White House this coming January, but there are plenty of kids who want her to know theyre still on her side. Yep, get out your tissues, cause youre going to need them for this one  kids are writing chalk messages outside Clintons campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, and its the little bit of sweetness we all need in our day today.

In the wake of what was an undeniably rough election year, people have been struggling to find a bright spot, but leave it to the golden hearts of children to solve that problem. These young Clinton supporters took to the sidewalks with a bit of chalk and a lot of hope, and were not crying, YOU ARE.

Breaking my Twitter silence to share this:



There are kids and families writing thank you notes in front of Hillary HQ.



 pic.twitter.com/CJQuityOdx  Mina Markham (@MinaMarkham) November 11, 2016

Little ones and their families came together yesterday to show their support for Clinton, leaving messages to thank her, with colored hearts aplenty. They included messages like Black Lives Matter, and her campaign slogan, Love Trumps Hate, proving that the goodness and kindness of children is exactly what we all need to make sense of whats to come next.

Many thanks written in chalk outside of Clinton HQ. Many thanks from me to everyone who contributed to this journey. I'm always with her. pic.twitter.com/dAlTCfPeCZ  Tim Carroll (@Tim__Carroll) November 10, 2016

None of us know exactly how a Trump presidency will play out, but if we keep the spirit of these Brooklyn kids in mind, were already headed in the right direction. These little acts of kindness are exactly what we need more of, especially in such uncertain and unnerving times. Check out a few more of these adorable messages from little ones to Hillary Clinton.

Story continues

I held it together all day. But some little Hillary supporters leaving notes broke my heart. pic.twitter.com/Mpi520BSHP  Jenna Lowenstein (@just_jenna) November 10, 2016

A dozen kids outside @hfa writing messages to Hillary in chalk.



This is the America I fight for. It's the America I love. We'll be ok. pic.twitter.com/SJuAcFYHbB  Rob Flaherty (@Rob_Flaherty) November 10, 2016

What a small but impactful way for kids to show their compassion and express their feelings. All the happy tears.

The post Kids left the sweetest chalk messages for Hillary Clinton outside her campaign headquarters appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Kristen Stewart is opening up about a significant time in her life.

The 26-year-old actress recently dropped by The Ellen DeGeneres Show, airing Friday, marking her first time in five years. The last time Stewart was on the popular daytime show was in 2011, when she appeared with the entire Twilight cast to promote The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1.

"I feel like I'm looking at a college yearbook," Stewart says when DeGeneres pulls up a picture from her last visit. "I don't jump right back into those memories but as soon as you see pictures, you're like, 'oooh God, it's like yesterday' ... and then maybe not."

WATCH: EXCLUSIVE: Kristen Stewart Opens Up About Feeling More 'Uninhibited' in the Public Eye, Has 'Twilight' Reunion

The actress admits it was a pretty "awkward" time in her life.

"I was 17, 18, when it all went down and that was the most uncomfortable, terrible, weird thing -- you're, like, 17 years old, 'Ahhh!'" she explains. "At the same time it's good. It kind of forced me to stand to attention in this way, which, I didn't have that."

"When I do stuff that really scares me I feel like good stuff happens," she adds.

But the notoriously private actress says she's only "relatively" shy.

"It depends, you know -- only on the weekend," she jokes.

WATCH: Kristen Stewart on Where Robert Pattinson Romance Went Wrong -- 'Our Relationship Was Made Into a Product'

These days, Stewart is certainly more open than ever when it comes to her personal life. The Clouds of Sils Maria star is rumored to be dating 34-year-old musician St. Vincent, and the two made their first public appearance together last month at the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Show and Tea event.

Earlier that month, the two also held hands in New York City after a dinner date.

Watch below:

Related Articles
U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

A battle is brewing over who will lead the Democratic National Committee following Donald Trumps stunning upset victory in Tuesdays presidential election. Several prospective contenders are eyeing the job, and Yahoo News has learned that another, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, is interested in the Democratic Partys top post.

On Friday afternoon, a source familiar with Perezs thinking said he is eager to take on Trump and interested in the impact he could have as DNC chair.

Anyone who knows Tom knows he will not be able to sit on the sidelines. He has fought on behalf of working people, Democrats and progressive values his whole life, the source said. Like all Democrats, hes trying to make sense of how best to continue that work, and DNC chair would be one of several fantastic platforms.

Another Democratic source told Yahoo News that a number of Democrats are floating Perezs name.

They want someone who can rally the party and progressives, the source said of Democrats pushing for Perez. Hes wrapping up stuff at the Labor Department as we speak and trying to figure out how to make the most impact.

Perez was previously considered as a potential vice presidential pick for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who was defeated by Trump. Clinton ultimately chose Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., but Perez consistently stumped for her on the campaign trail before and after the Kaine announcement.

The DNC chair plays a key role in strategy and fundraising for the party. The current selection process is shaping up to be a fight between the partys left flank and more centrist elements.

There may be a crowded field to replace outgoing Chairwoman Donna Brazile.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who emerged as a leader of the partys progressive wing during his unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign, has come out in support of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., for the job. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., set to be the ranking Senate Democrat next year, has also reportedly thrown his support to Ellison, who has not yet confirmed that hes running for the DNC post.

Story continues

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., speak at a news conference on Sept. 17. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Friday morning, former Maryland Gov. Martin OMalley, who also ran for president this year, issued a statement saying hes taking a hard look at the chairmanship after being approached by many Democrats.

And Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor and 2004 presidential candidate, tweeted Thursday that he is in for chairman again. Dean was also DNC chair from 2005 until 2009.

Other names reportedly in the mix include House Democratic Caucus Chairman Xavier Becerra, retiring Rep. Steve Israel of New York, South Carolina Chairman Jaime Harrison, and DNC Vice Chairmen R.T. Rybak and Raymond Buckley.

Perezs parents came to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and his father passed away when he was 12 years old. He went to Brown University and financed his studies by working in the schools dining hall, at a warehouse and as a garbage collector. From there he went on to Harvard University, where he obtained graduate degrees in law and public policy.

Obama nominated Perez to become labor secretary in 2013. Perez began his career as a prosecutor in the Department of Justices Civil Rights Division. During the 1990s, Perez served as the principal adviser to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy on civil rights issues. He also spent time in the Bill Clinton administration as director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services. While George W. Bush was in office, Perez became involved in Maryland politics and state government. He returned to the Justice Department in 2009, when he became an assistant attorney general heading up the Civil Rights Division.

During his time at the DOJ, Perez increased its focus on prosecuting hate crimes, investigating police misconduct and voting rights issues. At the Department of Labor, he has pushed for minimum wage increases, union organization and financial industry regulations.

Perezs resume could be appealing to the Democratic Partys liberal flank. As Perez was being considered as Clintons running mate, one former adviser to President Obama told Yahoo News the labor secretary was a true progressive with a great personal story who was part of a new generation of rising Democratic stars.
Laura Benanti as Melania Trump on Stephen Colbert

Laura Benanti didn't get the "home run" she was looking for.

In October, the Tony Award winner spoke with The Washington Post after her second spot-on impression of Melania Trump aired on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."

The first two spoofs were quite successful, currently having been viewed 8.8 million and 6.3 million times, respectively. But as for a third, Benanti told The Post that she and the "Late Show" team were only interested in doing it "if its going to be a home run."

Unfortunately, that didn't happen in Benanti's eyes.

Benanti reprised her role as Melania on Colbert's hour-long Showtime election special Tuesday night but soon into Wednesday, she was tweeting her regrets.

People saying the Melania sketch wasn't funny last night...I know. I'm so sorry. If I had anticipated this outcome I wouldn't have done it.  Laura Benanti (@LauraBenanti) November 9, 2016

Business Insider sat down with Benanti before an event to promote the special theatrical release of the filmed version of "She Loves Me," the show that garnered Benanti her latest Tony nomination and was the first musical ever to be streamed live.

Benanti told us she would not have done the third spoof had she known the outcome of the election. Benanti had been  and continues to be  politically vocal on her Twitter in her disapproval of the now President-elect Donald Trump.

"I think timing is everything with comedy, and unfortunately the timing of [the third sketch], although no one could have anticipated the timing of it, made it, to me, not funny," Benanti told Business Insider. "I can only speak for myself  Im literally in shock. Im devastated. I havent felt this way in a very, very long time."

But that doesn't mean her Melania impression is gone for good.

Story continues

The actress said once things settle in, she could see herself portraying Trump's spouse again if it brought "levity" and "awareness."

"I do think eventually we have to pick ourselves up and mobilize and unite and figure out a way to come together and figure out a way to make sure that the voices of women and minorities and the LGBTQ community are not lost," she said. "And then I think once we start doing that, that is the time to once again start using humor as a spotlight to the reality of our situation."

Until then, don't expect Benanti's killer Melania pout and twirl.

"Im not going to do it just to do it, so I have a job, or so that people think Im funny," she said.

Watch Benanti's third impression of Melania Trump on election night:

NOW WATCH: 'He's the founder of ISIS': Watch Trump and Obama trade insults throughout the years





More From Business Insider


By India Today Web Desk: India, Japan sign landmark civil nuclear deal, Tokyo's first with a non-NPT signatory

It is the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has concluded such a pact with a country that is not signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

Trump's business empire poses unprecedented potential conflicts of interest

advertisement

Donald Trump operated for president as a smart billionaire who would apply his business intuition to develop the US economy, biting taxes for Americans and trading better trade deals.

Rock On 2 movie review: Magik is back, but no Farhan-Shraddha magic here

In terms of making an impact on its viewers, Rock On 2 will do nothing. The one thing it will do is boost the Meghalaya tourism.

Pujara's hundred in hometown brings a smile on his father's face

Cheteshwar Pujara smashed his second successive hundred and the ninth of his career as India fought back against England in the Rajkot Test.



--- ENDS ---
Lawyers are using this hashtag to offer trans people free legal help before the inauguration, restoring our faith in humanity

Lawyers are using Twitter to offer trans people free legal help before Donald Trump becomes president in 2017.

#TransLawHelp began trending on the social media site Wednesday, connecting attorneys with trans folks who might need help with name changes, IDs, and figuring out what rights might be at stake with Trump and his running mate Mike Pence in charge.

Pence, in particular, has strong anti-LGBTQ sentiment: He believes in conversion therapy, for gay youth and plans to reverse President Obamas executive orders protecting against discrimination based on gender identity or sexuality.

If you're a lawyer willing to offer pro-bono services for trans ppl to get their docs now, please use the HT #TransLawHelp. #Election2016  Cishet Gay Squad (@dtwps) November 9, 2016

The hashtag became flooded with licensed attorneys offering to answer questions or walk trans people through legal processes for free.

Of course, anybody looking to connect with a lawyer should verify their identity and qualifications before accepting help or offering up information.

If you need money for passport fees, email me at kendra.serra@riseup.net. I have volunteers. We'll find you the money. #translawhelp  Kendra Albert (@KendraSerra) November 9, 2016

I'm a lawyer in Massachusetts & if you need help I'll help you navigate name changes & ID docs in MA. #TransLawHelp  mattbc (@mattbc) November 9, 2016

I am a lawyer licensed to practice in NJ and PA who will help you navigate name changes and ID documents NOW #TransLawHelp  Celeste (@CelesteOpsimath) November 9, 2016

In small ways, gestures of kindness and support like this one help to restore our faith in humanity.

The post Lawyers are using this hashtag to offer trans people free legal help before the inauguration, restoring our faith in humanity appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Prominent Hillary Clinton supporter Lena Dunham has been silent since Donald Trump won the presidential election early Wednesday morning, but the Girls creator broke her silence in her Lenny newsletter Friday morning.

Dunham wrote a passionate response to Donald Trump's win, mourning Hillary Clinton's loss and sharing the story of her Election Day.

In an essay titled with a Florynce Kennedy quote, "Don't Agonize, Organize," Dunham wrote about Trump's win, mourning Clinton's loss and her Election Day, which she said she began "like a bride," certain that by evening she'd be creating a story to tell her future children. Dunham, who campaigned for Clinton, said she "never truly believed" Trump could win.

"At a certain point it became clear something had gone horribly wrong," said Dunham, recounting the night at Clinton's Javits Center party. She recalls crying with boyfriend Jack Antonoff and breaking out into hives.

Dunham's shock, which has been mirrored by many Clinton supporters, was apparent in her letter. "Those f - ing emails, as if they were a worthy corollary to fraud and sexual assault," she writes at one point.

The Girls creator detailed the threats and abuse she endured while campaigning for Clinton: Her phone was hacked, she was sent images of aborted fetuses, called a "fat whore," a "retard," and told she should be killed.

"But we kept going, thinking these were the dying moans of the dragon known as the patriarchy being stabbed again and again in the stomach," said Dunham. "We believed that on Nov. 9, they'd be licking their wounds while we celebrated. It is painful on a cellular level knowing those men got what they wanted, just as it's painful to know you are hated for daring to ask for what is yours. It's painful to know that white women, so unable to see the unity of female identity, so unable to look past their violent privilege, and so inoculated with hate for themselves, showed up to the polls for him, too."

Story continues

Through her grief, Dunham talks about being in a better position than most Americans. "It's a privilege to be heartbroken by the system for the first time at age 30," she said, adding, "So many people - those in the prison system, those with undocumented American relatives, those who are trans, who are queer, who are people of color, who are Muslim, who are trying to prosecute their abusers - have felt the crushing failure of the system over and over again."

While she understands that people need time to grieve - "I'm giving us till Sunday" - she said after that's done, it's time to fight. Dunham points out that millennials "overwhelmingly voted against Trump" and expresses her hope for the younger generation. She said that "maybe" the nation should try to understand the minds of Donald Trump supporters, but adds, "It should not be the job of women, of people of color, of queer and trans Americans, to understand who does not consider them human and why, just as it's not the job of the abused to understand their abuser."

She takes time in her letter to thank Hillary Clinton for 30 years of public service. "Thank you, Hillary, for bravely taking every shot and standing tall, for weathering assaults from every direction, for telling us that no, this wasn't politics as we know it, and no, you were not going to let a chronic interrupter with a limited vocabulary of catchphrases stop you from speaking coherently about your dreams for this country."

In Dunham's final paragraph she writes, "So no, the work isn't done. It is only beginning."

This article was originally published on The Hollywood Reporter.
Athens (AFP) - Among the legions of fans mourning the death of Leonard Cohen at age 82 are the residents of Hydra, the small Greek island which held a special place in the heart of the iconic musician and poet.

"This was his haunt," Stavros Douskos, owner of the Xeri Elia tavern in the island's port capital, said on Friday upon hearing the news of Cohen's passing.

"We have good wine, and he loved to play his guitar here," he told AFP.

Cohen bought a 19th century stone house on Hydra, a 90-minute hydrofoil ride from Athens, in the early 1960s, a time when the island was a haven for bohemian artists.

"I was writing novels, putting books of poems together," Cohen reminisced in a 1988 BBC interview filmed in his Hydra hilltop house.

"We'd get up early, and have breakfast, and I'd go to work... I think I was on speed too, so I wasn't eating very much."

"I had a quota, I think it was three pages a day," he said.

During a seven-year spell there, he wrote "Flowers for Hitler", one of his most controversial poetry collections, his first novel "The Favorite Game", and "Beautiful Losers", a book about religion and sexuality that prompted comparisons to novelist James Joyce.

And the song "Bird on a Wire" was inspired by an electricity cable right outside his window.

This is also where he met his Norwegian muse and lover Marianne Ihlen, to whom he dedicated the ballad "So Long Marianne".

- 'I met a girl' -

"I just got off here. Somebody spoke English and I rented a house for $14 a month," Cohen said in the 1988 BBC documentary, Songs from the Life of Leonard Cohen.

"I met a girl, and I stayed for 8-10 years," he said.

After a pause, he adds with a glint in his eye: "Yeah, it's the way it was in those days."

Just before Ihlen died in July, Cohen wrote to her: "I think I will follow you very soon."

Story continues

"Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine," he wrote.

Douskos said Cohen "stopped coming to Hydra a few years ago after walking up (flights of stone steps) to the house became too taxing for him."

"But his son Adam still visits," he adds.

Douskos says that a poem dedicated by Cohen to his tavern still adorns the back of the menu.

"It's a poem describing the daily life of the Hydra sailors," said the island's mayor Yiorgos Koukoudakis.

In the past, local authorities have worked closely with Cohen fans to host concerts and screenings honouring the artist on the island, the mayor said.

Now, the street in front of his house will be renamed in his honour, and a Leonard Cohen bench will also be installed at the harbour.

And a meetup of fans already scheduled for June now assumes special meaning, adds the mayor.

"It will be an opportunity to do something organised in his memory," he told AFP.
By Lisa Lambert and Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When Jeb Hensarling, the Republican chair of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, released legislation this summer to weaken the major financial law known as Dodd-Frank, many said it was a pret-a-porter plan that his partys nominee, Donald Trump, could easily adopt.

Now that Trump is president-elect, he appears to be doing just that.

Language about financial services posted on the Trump transition website, www.greatagain.gov, echoes the tone of Hensarling's bill, known as the CHOICE Act.

It calls Dodd-Frank, passed in the wake of the 2007-09 financial crisis and recession, as a sprawling and complex piece of legislation that has unleashed hundreds of new rules and several new bureaucratic agencies and promises to dismantle and replace it with new policies to encourage economic growth and job creation.

Hensarlings legislation, which his committee approved in September, also takes a replacement approach.

The Texas Republican had unveiled his proposal in Trump's hometown of New York in June, and then met with the businessman later in the day. At the same time, Hensarling was mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary by Trump's team. He has said he is not pursuing a Cabinet position.

"The CHOICE Act accurately reflects the priorities that President Trump has placed on the Dodd-Frank problem," said J.W. Verret, an associate professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School and financial regulation expert. Verret regularly meets with and briefs members of Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission on financial regulation.

I think it is a great blueprint for everything that he has promised," said Verret, a former Republican congressional staffer.

The Hensarling blueprint would primarily allow banks to choose between complying with Dodd-Frank or meeting tougher capital requirements - primarily to maintain a ratio of tangible equity to leverage exposure of 10 percent.

Story continues

It would also reorganize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, throw out the Volcker Rule restricting banks from making speculative investments and eliminate the authority of the Financial Stability Oversight Council to designate non-banks as "systemically important."

It also differs from the Dodd-Frank legislation in the way it treats insolvent banks. Hensarling says his approach will prevent taxpayer dollars from being used to bail out failed institutions.

Alongside Obamacare, Dodd-Frank is considered one of Democratic President Barack Obama's signature domestic policies.

The most senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown, has been a vocal defender of it, as has liberal firebrand Senator Elizabeth Warren. That means a Dodd-Frank revamp could stall in one chamber of Congress. Senate rules allow a single member to block a bill from proceeding to a vote.

Trump said last May that he would dismantle Dodd-Frank, primarily because the law makes it hard for banks to loan money.

But few have called for total demolition of it, with bank industry sources privately saying they would like to see an easing of Dodd-Frank rules.

Trump campaign adviser Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street financier, said this week that the administration will review the law and "the worst anti-business parts of it will be gutted."

Verret said he believes some components of the CHOICE Act will appeal to the populist anger felt by Tea Party members and Trump supporters toward big banks.

One such provision, he said, would place limits on how central banks can lend to financial institutions in times of crisis, an in effort to prevent future bailouts.

This kind of reform, he added, appeals "to both populists and free market thinkers at the same time."

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert and Sarah N. Lynch; editing by Linda Stern and Jonathan Oatis)
The new drama Loving gracefully depicts the real-life story of the couple whose 1967 Supreme Court case eventually overturned laws against interracial marriage in the United States. The movie stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as Richard and Mildred Loving, the man and woman at the center of this love story. In the new clip above though, we also get a closer look at comedian Nick Kroll taking a rare dramatic role as Bernard Cohen, the inexperienced ACLU lawyer who handled their case.

Related: The Loving Cast on the Film Couples Perfect Last Name: It Was Fate

The Lovings married in Washington D.C. in 1958. The simple fact of their union led to their arrest and legal banishment from their small hometown in Virginia. After years spent living in the relative safety of D.C., but desperate to return home, Mildred wrote then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who referred their case to the American Civil Liberties Union, which was looking to challenge the Virginia statute. Cohen and Phil Hirschkop (played here by Jon Bass) were the two young lawyers who took up their case. In this scene, the attorneys acknowledge that their clients have secretly moved back to Virginia  and what that could mean for them. Theres no guarantee we can get them out if they get arrested again, says Hirschkop.

Loving is playing in select theaters now.
For the first time in its history, the United States is no longer a country where white Christians are in a majority. At 45 per cent of the population, white Christians are a shrinking demographic, which explains the bitter resistance to minorities of all kinds-Blacks, Muslims and Latinos.

He's a one-man demolition squad who destroyed 16 candidates who competed against him for the Republican Party nomination, bypassed the party during the campaign, cursed the media, mocked the Establishment, demonised his opponent and in spite of a dubious record, has become the President of America. For a rank outsider with no political experience to single-handedly achieve this is remarkable. Somewhat reminiscent of Narendra Modi's bid for power in the 2014 general election, he tapped into anger against the traditional politicians and alienation from the government.

It is the triumph of what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics, where the dispossessed feel the American way of life is being taken away from them. What the liberal establishment interpreted as his racism, misogyny and xenophobia are actually deep-seated resentments that large numbers of Americans feel at the moment. It is comparable to the emergence of the demagogic Barry Goldwater in 1964 after John F. Kennedy's administration which had endorsed civil rights and limited detente. It is also comparable to the rise in 1980 of the folksy Ronald Reagan who was seen as a man who could shake the grip of the Beltway on American policymaking.

advertisement

And yet it is a completely different moment in time. For the first time in its history, the United States is no longer a country where white Christians are in a majority. At 45 per cent of the population, white Christians are a shrinking demographic, which explains the bitter resistance to minorities of all kinds-Blacks, Muslims and Latinos. Eight years of Barack Obama's presidency may have seen economic prosperity but it deepened the distance white Christians felt from the levers of power. In Donald Trump's apocalyptic vision which sees a wall on the border with Mexico, no more financial support for NATO and a ban on Muslim immigrants, they see a man who has promised to burn down the house before rebuilding it. This kind of protectionism is precisely the mood that saw the British vote for Brexit, because they wanted their country back. It is also leading to the rise of right-wing movements all over Europe. There seems to be a trend of demanding strong leaders who offer simple solutions in a complex world. It's only later discovered that quick-fixes don't work.

What does it mean for America and its national identity? And what does it say about America's verdict on Hillary Clinton? In her, the world was hoping to find a leader they could deal with. But clearly there was enormous mistrust in America for her, especially with the e-mail scandal, the fund-raising for the Clinton Foundation and her role in the Benghazi debacle. It is a profound crisis of liberal democracy and its institutions that they have chosen Trump, a man who has refused to disclose his tax returns, created a university charged with defrauding its students, been accused of discriminating against racial minorities in his rental properties and not paid several people who've worked for him. He has also bragged about groping women, talked of them disparagingly and undermined those who have served in the US army.

In the last days of the campaign, he has had his Twitter account taken away from him by his campaign managers. He will now have his finger on the nuclear trigger. What kind of President will Trump be? Will the mandate embolden him to destroy the fundamentals of the great republic? Or will power tame him and office transform him? Our cover report looks at all this as well as his impact on India and the world. With the Congress aligned with him, he will be a powerful President. He has a great opportunity to be a good force for all Americans and the world. Let's hope he is.

advertisement

P.S. Prime Minister Modi made the boldest move of his premiership with an attack on the black cash economy. This has significant implications for the economy and politics. We have a detailed story on whether the short-term pain will be worth the long-term gain.

--- ENDS ---
China's prominent display of power in a Hong Kong legal case this week may have ramifications for another territory that has testy ties with Beijing: Taiwan.



Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) released a statement on Wednesday urging Chinese leaders to "listen to the aspirations of the people of Hong Kong eager to practice democracy."

The DPP and people of Taiwan were closely monitoring how Beijing handled "the problem in Hong Kong" and supported the right of Hong Kongers to choose their representatives in a democratic fashion, the statement continued.

In response, a mainland spokesman asked Taipei to stop such "misleading comments and conduct," according to Xinhua.



On Monday, the world's second-largest economy issued a ruling on a case involving pro-independence elected Hong Kong lawmakersa move that pre-empted local courts and called into question rule of law in the city , a special administrative region (SAR) of China.

Beijing's intervention in Hong Kong "signals the likelihood of elevated tensions with Taiwan in coming months," Eurasia analysts flagged in a note this week. Ahead of a key leadership transition in the Chinese Communist Party next year, "China's top leaders cannot afford to be seen as weak on matters considered core interests for the party, including Hong Kong and Taiwan," the note continued.

And Taipei's bold support for the SAR is likely to exacerbate already-tense China-Taiwan relations.

Five months ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping's administration cut off official communication with Tsai's administration for her failure to adhere to a principle that Beijing considers crucial to cross-strait tries.

Tsai has yet to acknowledge the "One China" policy under a framework called the "1992 Consensus," which Beijing claims is a tacit understanding reached between the two governments that acknowledged there was only one China. However, the contract also stipulates that the mainland and Taiwan could have their own interpretation of what 'One China' meant.

Story continues

But in contrast to Eurasia's views, some believe it may not be in Beijing's interests to intensify the quarrel with Taipei.

Unlike the SAR, Taiwan maintains a separate ruling authority, explained Katherine Hui-Yi Tseng, research associate at the National University of Singapore. "It will be unwise for Beijing to explicitly suggest that its treatment of HK will be equally applied to Taiwan."

Beijing considers Taiwan as a province, but political figures in the island-nation hold different views on Taiwan's status. Tsai and her DPP party are considered independence-leaning and do not recognize that Taiwan is part of the People's Republic of China. But the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) is pro-China and against the idea of Taiwanese autonomy.

Renewed protests in Hong Kong following China's legal ruling may trigger similar demonstrations of support in Taiwan, noted Mark Harrison, a Taiwan specialist and senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania.

"Hong Kong and Taiwan both see a possible future in each other: Taiwan sees one future under Beijing's rule, and Hong Kong sees a possible democratic future," he explained.

Harrison believed this week's developments in the SAR could actually benefit Taipei.

"Without the capacity to directly intervene in Taiwan's institutions of government, events in Hong Kong if anything strengthen Tsai's position, both in terms of her policy argument to Taiwanese voters and by showing the limits of Beijing's options over Taiwan."

Beijing has no capacity to install a KMT government except through military force, he noted. For now, Chinese policymakers are simply reaching out to the KMT in order to undermine Tsai, he said.

Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.
A major fire broke out at, in what is yet to be ascertained, an unauthorised garment factory killing 13 and injuring several others.

Locals alleged delay in response time. However, the fire department claimed that the call was made late and the approach road was very narrow. (Photo: K Asif)

By Mail Today Bureau: Thirteen workers died and many were injured in an early morning fire that broke out at a garment factory in Sahibabad area in Ghaziabad. The fire was apparently caused by a short circuit.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav announced an ex-gratia of Rs 2,00,000 each for the kin of those killed.

The fire broke out at the garment factory in Shaheed Nagar area near the Jaipal Chowk, which is close to the Delhi border. Ten of the men died of suffocation and three of them suffered burns at the makeshift factory. Only three of the 16 staff survived. They suffered minor injuries and were discharged from the hospital in the evening.

The labourers were sleeping on the top floor of the makeshift factory when the fire started spreading and firemen had to use ladders to rescue them. (Photo: K Asif)

advertisement

According to senior officials, 14 fire tenders reached the spot to douse the fire.

Due to narrow lanes in the area, fire department personnel found it difficult to reach the spot. By the time fire tenders could douse the blaze, a dozen people were dead. A large number of factory workers, mostly from Bareilly, were inside the facility when the fire broke out.

Only three people managed to jump to safety. The victims were identified as Aazad, Fazar, Negwan, Hasmat, Mehboob, Naazim, Sameer, Alauddin, Aamir, Salman, Momin, Naseem and Shaki.

"The fire department received a call at 5.20 am. The call signalled a major fire. Acting on the information, in the first phase six fire tenders were sent to the spot. Thirteen people died in the incident," a senior officer of the fire department said.

The fire, which started at around 4.30 am, spread from the ground floor that housed the stitching unit to the upper two storeys. The labourers were sleeping on the top floor.

THE FAULT LINES



Locals alleged delay in response time. However, the fire department claimed that the call was made late and the approach road was very narrow.

"The road is barely 10-metre wide and is crowded with material and parked vehicles. Still, we put up a ladder and rescued the trapped workers," the fire department officer said. Senior district officials rushed to the spot as relief and rescue work continued, a state home department official informed. The injured were taken to a nearby private hospital and GTB Hospital in northeast Delhi.

NOT CLEAR IF UNIT WAS OPERATED LEGALLY: OFFICIALS

As per initial reports, it appeared to be a case of short circuit. "We are probing the case from all angles. A team has been formed to identify the reasons of the fire. It is yet to be ascertained whether the unit was operating illegally or not," the officer said, adding that there are several illegal dyeing and garment units in the locality.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister has directed the Ghaziabad District Hospital to provide adequate help to all those affected by the fire.

advertisement

In his official statement the chief minister expressed "heartfelt condolences for the people who lost their lives in the incident."

--- ENDS ---
Demonstrators hold signs in support of President-elect Donald Trump outside Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, Calif., on Nov. 11, 2016. (Photo: Sandy Huffaker/Reuters)

After considerable pushback from the scientific community, the American Physical Society retracted a recent press release this week that congratulated climate skeptic Donald Trump on winning the presidential election.

The American Physical Society (APS) congratulates Donald Trump on being elected president of the United States of America, the Wednesday statement read.

APS, the worlds second-largest organization of physicists, urged the president-elect to adopt policies that prioritize science so the United States can reclaim its leadership role. The release noted that the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation ranked the U.S. just 10th in innovation worldwide, largely because it lacked adequate funding for scientific research.

APS urges President-elect Trump to incorporate the necessary policies that will enable our nation to reclaim its scientific leadership, which it has lost during the past decade, the statement continued. APS believes that such policies will help the Trump administration achieve its goal captured by its slogan, Make America Great Again.

The page that once hosted the press release now reads, APS has retracted the recent press release. We apologize and regret the offense it has caused.

Reaction to the press release, which Retraction Watch has archived, was swift after it was first posted online.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, PhD, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Washington, Seattle, is the 63rd African-American woman to earn a PhD in physics and was among the first to rebuke APS for congratulating Trump.

I am deeply concerned about how a statement like that could have seemed reasonable in the first place, she told Yahoo News. APS leadership has refused to put out a statement about Black Lives Matter, but that they can readily put out one quoting what has become to so many people of color an emblem of racist hate. Black physicists and physics students have to worry about their safety on the street right now, and APS is normalizing racism to ask for grant money.

Story continues

The statement smacked many readers as tone-deaf because of Trumps antagonism to science, as evidenced by his statements suggesting that climate change is a hoax, endorsing online polls over statistically modeled ones and linking vaccines to autism.

According to Prescod-Weinstein, the slogan Make America Great Again is problematic because it presupposes that the United States was great when African-Americans were more likely to be hanged from a tree than welcomed in the physics community and when Nazi war criminals became central to the American scientific establishment.

If APSs leadership had any imagination  or concern for those of us who are being threatened by emboldened racists/transphobes/etc., she continued, they would have said, We urge President-elect Trump to finally actually make America great through the allocation of resources that will combat discrimination and hate in all their forms.

The American Physical Society put "Make America Great Again" in a press release: https://t.co/PTX1VxEodI  Dr. Chanda ???????? (@IBJIYONGI) November 10, 2016

.@APSphysics Your statement is craven and undeserving of your PoC/LGBT membership. Withdraw it. Do not normalize hate.  Adrian Lucy (@adrianlucy) November 10, 2016

@APSphysics In endorsing Trump are you also claiming global warming is a Chinese conspiracy?  (((Richard Kenny))) (@richardjkenny) November 10, 2016

@APSphysics it's hard enough being the only black female in my department. now i have to validate my presence to you too?  Katrina Miller (@__katrinarenee) November 10, 2016

Is @APSphysics eager to join the Trump team? Judge for yourself. Not a word about protecting people they have openly threatened. https://t.co/gsVhjT2Y6p  Timothy McKay (@TimMcKayUM) November 10, 2016

Extremely saddened by these actions from @APSphysics. Retraction is not enough. Read @IBJIYONGI's full thread for context & impact. https://t.co/p3vlo1FbX3  Risa Wechsler (@RisaWechsler) November 10, 2016

When contacted by Yahoo News, an APS spokeswoman replied, APS has no further comment on the release beyond what is stated online.

_____

Related slideshows:

Tens of thousands protest Trumps election victory >>>

Donald Trump meets with Obama at the White House and visits the Capitol >>>

Protests after Donald Trumps victory >>>

Newspapers around the world react to Donald Trumps victory >>>

Tears and cheers as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters clash at the White House >>>

World reaction to Trumps stunning victory >>>
The following material contains mature subject matter. Viewer discretion is advised.

Marijuana was on the ballot in many states in this past election, from making medical marijuana legal to even recreational use. The Doctors discuss what you need to know about these measures and how it may affect you.

Florida, North Dakota, Montana and Arkansas voted yes on medicinal marijuana, which is now legal in those states. California, Nevada, Massachusetts & Maine all voted yes for decriminalizing marijuana and making recreational use legal. That brings us to a total of 28 states that have made marijuana legally available in some way shape or form.

Watch: Medical Marijuana for Kids?

In California, plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew Ordon points out, "It was just a matter of time." But he shares that it doesn't mean you can go ahead and smoke in public, or even in your car. It's legal in your home, you can't be in possession of more than one ounce, and it's even legal to grow up to six plants at home.

ER physician Dr. Travis Stork shares, "We've talked a lot about medicinal marijuana on the show, and our views have changed quite a bit. We've seen some amazing stories...We often use the example of people with epilepsy where their only hope has been medicinal marijuana. I am encouraged that more states are making it medically available."

Watch: Finding Hope in Medical Marijuana

But making marijuana legal in the state where you reside doesn't change the fact that it's still illegal nationally. The DEA has classified marijuana as a schedule one drug making it just as illegal as a substance like heroin. So if you're going to partake in medicinal and recreational use, know your rights.

And Dr. Ordon and Dr. Stork remind everyone that marijuana should be kept out of the hands of kids. It affects your brain, just like alcohol. It needs to be used responsibly, by adults, 21 and over.
MSF Jason Cone

A pharmaceutical company just made a major move to make its vaccine more accessible to people.

In October, Medecins Sans Frontieres, otherwise known as Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian group focused on supplying medical care in emergency situations around the world, turned down a donation of 1 million doses of pneumonia vaccines from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, arguing that the group would rather pay a lower price for each vaccine than getting donations that would allow the company to keep the vaccine's price higher.

Now, Pfizer is offering its vaccine, Prevenar 13, for $3.10 a dose in humanitarian emergency situations. Infants and toddlers are recommended to be given four doses, while children over 6 and adults are recommended to be given one. (A syringe-worth of the vaccine costs about $180 not accounting for insurance, according to GoodRx).

Pfizer said it will also be donating all proceeds for the first year of its program to humanitarian organizations, and will be launching a four-dose vial that the company noted is designed specifically for emergency settings.

Pneumonia  which can be caused by a virus, bacteria, or fungus  killed 920,000 children worldwide in 2015, according to the World Health Organization. Pneumonia vaccines protect against the bacteria Streptococcal pneumoniae.

MSF has been concerned with the pricing and donation practices of two pneumonia vaccines out there: one made by GlaxoSmithKline, the other by Pfizer. In theory, a donation seems as though it would make sense: Give vaccines away for free, and then they can be used by people who might not otherwise be able to afford them.

But MSF argued that it would be better if the organization could just pay for the drug at a discounted rate than deal with the potential complications and restrictions that come with donations.

Other organizations that provide vaccines to developing countries, such as the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, have policies in place about drug donations. GAVI, for instance, resorts to donations only "under exceptional circumstances."

Story continues

For the past two years, Pfizer and GSK have donated the vaccines to MSF. MSF has been pushing both companies to supply the vaccine for $5 a child, and GSK agreed in September to provide it for around $9 a child.

"This is definitely a step in the right direction and will help to protect millions of vulnerable children around the world and in MSF projects," Jason Cone, executive director of Medecins Sans Frontieres in the US said in a statement. "We now hope that Pfizer will extend its efforts to developing countries by offering a lower price to all governments which still cant afford to protect their children against pneumonia."

NOW WATCH: Watch Jeff Sachs destroy the anti-vaccine movement in under two minutes





More From Business Insider


Maybelline is launching a luxurious mascara and this might be our new favorite drugstore product

No matter how you choose to celebrate the holiday itself, New Years always presents an opportunity to exchange the disappointment of an old year in exchange for the hope of a new one. As their own way of celebrating, Maybelline is launching a drugstore mascara, and its just in time to say goodbye to 2016 and hello to the glamorous possibilities of 2017. The consistently affordable cosmetic brand Maybelline first made the announcement in a series of Instagram posts earlier in the week, before giving a more in-depth sneak peek of the new holy grail of mascara on their SnapChat feed.

The upcoming voluminous mascara from Maybelline is named Big Shot Mascara and promises to give us the cosmetic boost well need during the first cold months of 2017.

#bigshotmascara for big, bold and bossy lashes. Launching at the end of this year! Don't miss our big shot celebration on snapchat. : Maybelline A photo posted by Maybelline New York (@maybelline) on Nov 7, 2016 at 12:57pm PST

While they still havent announced the official release date, all our guesses go towards New Years Eve, or around that time of year. The gold packaging does remind of us the glitzy season during the holidays!

Of course, we had to snatch some shots from SnapChat to share with you lovelies.

Why do they have to torture us? Probably because we love it.

The gold tube definitely gives off New Years vibes and we are swooning over the pretty packaging.

Also, the women in these Snapchats are killing it on multiple levels. That white sweater is everything.

ALSO WHERE DID THEY FIND THESE GOLDEN SKULLS?! WE NEED ANSWERS.





Seriously, where in New York is this Tomb Raider style photo shoot happening?!

The birth of 2017 will come before we know it, and with its death will come more drugstore mascara.

The post Maybelline is launching a luxurious mascara and this might be our new favorite drugstore product appeared first on HelloGiggles.
By PTI: New Delhi, Nov 11 (PTI) Former World Bank Chief Economist Kaushik Basu today said the Modi governments decision to demonetise high denomination currency notes is not good economics and the collateral damage of demonetisation is likely to far outstrip the benefits.

"GST was good economics; the demonetization is not. Its economics is complex and the collateral damage is likely to far outstrip the benefits," Basu, who was also Chief Economic Advisor in the Ministry of Finance, said in a tweet.

advertisement

Basu is currently professor of Economics and C Marks Professor at Cornell University.

Basu on November 8 had said that with demonetisation, it is very likely that there will be a spike in gold and silver prices in India.

In its biggest crackdown ever on black money, the government on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bank notes and asked people holding them to deposit into bank accounts.

Since yesterday, people have been thronging banks amid concerns over exchanging and depositing the scrapped currencies.

People can deposit old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in their accounts till December 30, 2016, without any limit. Rstrictions have also been imposed on withdrawal limit and people can withdraw up to Rs 10,000 per day or Rs 20,000 per week. This limit will be reviewed after few days.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley yesterday had said the Centre is making all efforts to build consensus on sticky issues, especially on jurisdiction of assessees, to ensure GST roll out from April 1, 2017.

As per the GST Constitution Amendment Bill, which was notified on September 17, 2016, the government is required to complete the process of implementation of GST within a year. PTI BKS JM

--- ENDS ---
The New York Times received an advance copy of Megyn Kellys new memoir Settle for More, and the tidbits include everything from Donald Trump threatening her to the now-president-elect inviting her to his South Florida resort.

Reviewer Jennifer Senior said she is nervous for Kelly now that Donald Trump is Americas president-elect, after reading the books account of how the prospective POTUS retaliated against the Fox News host when she upset him with questions about his treatment of women during a 2015 primary debate.

Trump did not take kindly to Ms. Kellys questions, and he appeared to retaliate in creepy, personal ways. Many journalists are already concerned that he has little regard for their professional responsibilities or First Amendment rights. Settle for More wont allay their fears, Senior wrote.

Also Read: New York Times Promises to Cover Trump Administration 'Without Fear or Favor'

The book explains that Trump threatened to use his Twitter account against Kelly, according to Senior, who said Trump once called Fox executives claiming to have advance knowledge of her debate questions. That prompted assumptions that then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes was in bed with Trump.

Kelly took umbrage at Seniors interpretation of the passage in question on Thursday, tweeting, For the record, my book Settle for More does not suggest Trump had any debate Qs in advance, nor do I believe that he did.

Ailes has since resigned in disgrace after sexual harassment complaints from multiple women, but while he ran Fox News Trump complained about Kellys line of questioning.

Folks were starting to worry about Trump  his level of agitation did not match the circumstances, Kelly wrote in her book, according to the Times. Yes, it was his first debate. But this was bizarre behavior, especially for a man who wanted the nuclear codes.

Story continues

Also Read: Harry Reid Blasts 'Sexual Predator' Donald Trump in Scorched-Earth Parting Shot

As Senior points out, Trump did go on to attack Kelly on Twitter, calling her overrated and a bimbo. The book also has details of Trump offering gifts to reporters, including the time he invited Kelly to his Mar-a-Lago resort.

This is actually one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign, Kelly wrote, according to the Times. I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous  from hotel rooms to rides on his 757.

The review concludes: Like most superstars, Ms. Kelly is a metabolic anomaly. Shes willed herself into her own spectacular existence. Along the way, she got the best of the next president of the United States. And the worst.

Settle for More will be released on Nov. 15.

For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS.

Related stories from TheWrap:

New York Times Promises to Cover Trump Administration 'Without Fear or Favor'

Pollsters to Investigate Methods After Massive Trump Prediction Fail

Michael Moore, Who Predicted Trump's Presidency, Also Predicts It Won't Last a Full Term (Video)
The changing of the guard has begun.

As their husbands, President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama, met to discuss the upcoming transition between their administrations, Melania Trump and Michelle Obama sat down for their own tete-a-tete.

WATCH: Donald and Melania Trump Meet With Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House

Melania, who arrived at the White House on Thursday with her husband in a black coat and black Christian Louboutin pumps, seemed a little more relaxed as she wore a sleeveless black dress for her tea with the first lady.

Getty Images

WATCH: Laura Benanti's Melania Trump Wishes a Woman Could Be President

Michelle, meanwhile, opted for a little color, dressed in a 3/4 sleeve, deep purple dress featuring a bold orange stripe, and silver heels.

The White House

RELATED: Barack and Michelle Obama's First and Last State Dinners: How Their Style (and Love!) Has Evolved

The 90-minute meeting between the current and future first lady seemed to go well, President Obama later told reporters. "Michelle has had a chance to meet the incoming first lady and they had an excellent conversation as well," he said. "We want to make sure they feel welcome as they prepare to make this transition."

Vice President-elect Mike Pence will also meet with Vice President Joe Biden later in the day.

Melania's dark ensemble was a far cry from the sassy white jumpsuit she wore while Donald made his victory speech on election night.

The 46-year-old former model donned a silk one-shoulder jumpsuit from Ralph Lauren's Fall 2016 collection, which retails for $3,990.

EXCLUSIVE: Rep Joyce Beatty Wears Same Style to DNC as Melania Trump: She's a Size Zero, But I'm a 10

See the look in the video below.

Related Articles
Melania Trump and Michelle Obama talked at the White House on Thursday. (Photo: Chuck Kennedy/the White House)

On Thursday, President Obama welcomed President-elect Donald Trump to the White House. The conversation, which Trump expected to be 15 minutes, lasted for an hour and a half. And while POTUS and PEOTUS talked in the Oval Office about the transition of power, domestic issues, and international policies, their wives discussed childrearing, according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest. The current first lady also gave her successor a tour of the residence, and White House curator Bill Allman walked them through the rest of the building.





For the occasion, FLOTUS wore a navy blue Narciso Rodriguez dress with an artful orange and yellow stripe (this is her second time wearing the piece publicly; she chose it for her arrival in Argentina for an official state visit in March). She paired it with metallic Jimmy Choo heels. As for the former model, her look was bit more simple, opting for a sleeveless black sheath.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell walks with President-elect Donald Trump, his wife, Melania, and Vice President-elect Mike Pence at the U.S. Capitol for a meeting on Nov. 10, (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The future first couple then traveled down the street to Capitol Hill, where they met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and other top Republicans. Melania covered up in a black jacket during parts of the meeting.

Melania, who usually favors clothing in light colors such as white, powder blue, and pink, wore a black ensemble at the third presidential debate in October. The Ralph Lauren jumpsuit with a pussy-bow tie detail had many social media users wondering if the dark shade symbolized that Melania was in mourning in anticipation of her husband losing the election.

And while he actually won and the presumption was premature, Twitter users found that the black look postwin actually symbolized something similar.

Melania looks like she is going to a funeral  Zelda dan (@Zeldadan2) November 10, 2016

melania mourning tweet

Michelle (our lovely First Lady ????) is wearing a nice colored dress. Melania the next flotus looks dressed for a funeral. How metaphorical https://t.co/yv4xwl0Ycd  Megan (@MHawkney) November 10, 2016

@CBSNews I see Melania's in mourning with most of the country.  Whitney (@WhitWright) November 10, 2016

Melania, whose name comes from a Greek word meaning black or dark, has inspired lots of theories surrounding her wardrobe choices. Notably, to cast her vote on Election Day, she wore a white sheath dress from Michael Kors with a camel coat designed by Balmain. Cant help but wonder who shes really voting for,

Story continues

Cant help but wonder who shes really voting for, Susan Lamontagne asked, referencing the fact that lots of women showed up to the polls in white ensembles as a show of support for Hillary Clinton, because American suffragists protesting for the right to vote more than a century ago wore the color. The former Democratic presidential nominee wore the shade on multiple occasions to send just that message, and many assumed that Melania doing the same revealed she was secretly supporting Clinton. Melania also wore a $3,990 white jumpsuit early Wednesday morning as her husband delivered his victory speech. The one-piece was made by Ralph Lauren, the label of the majority of Clintons pantsuits throughout her campaign.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.




Categories Celebrity Style

Mom-in-chief, role model, style iconthese are only some of the words we use to describe First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama. As one of the countrys most inspirational figures, shes launched two education initiatives, won standing ovations at speeches and made headlines for her impeccable fashion instincts. And now that shes preparing to depart the White House (cue tears everywhere), our FLOTUS decided to reveal a few things about her eight-year tenure with husbandand other half of #couplegoalsPresident Barack Obama.

Any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role, she said in an interview with Vogue. (She graces the magazines December cover.) Theres no legislative authority; youre not elected. And thats a wonderful gift of freedom.

Michelle, a Harvard-educated lawyer, used that opportunity to create the Reach Higher and Let Girls Learn programs as well as start a public health campaign called Lets Move! to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity in America. But the First Lady also likes to have funshes appeared on James Cordens wildly popular Carpool Karaoke, established a social media presence and received accolades for her thoughtful and impactful designer choices, from that state-dinner Atelier Versace when entertaining the Italian prime minister to the all-white Brandon Maxwell gown following Hillary Clintons DNC acceptance speech.

So what guides her fashion selection? It all boils down to comfort level: If Im going to make you comfortable, then I have to be comfortable first, she said. So my first reaction isnt Who made this? But Lets try it on. What does it look like? Oooh, thats cute. Oh, wow. I never thought of wearing something like this. Lets put a belt on it. I feel gooood in this.'

While shes admitted to feeling sentimental about leaving (so long, South Lawn and Washington Monument), Michelle explained that shes ready to move on from the White House. I think our democracy has it exactly right: two terms, eight years, she said. Its enough. Because its important to have one foot in reality when you have access to this kind of power.

Story continues

Ready or not, were going to miss you, FLOTUS.
Michelle Obama wears symbolic purple dress, takes a cue from Hillary Clinton

After a hard-fought battle for the presidency, Hillary Clinton conceded the win to Donald Trump in a moving speech Wednesday. And in a subtle expression of unity, she donned a purple suit  the color made when red and blue are mixed together.

Then, on Thursday, Michelle Obama wore a purple dress that echoed Clintons sartorial sentiment when she hosted soon-to-be First Lady Melania Trump at the White House. Was it a nod of sisterly solidarity with Hillary? Was it her own expression of unity and cooperation? We may never know the exact motivation, but FLOTUS choice of dress surely held symbolic weight.

First Lady @MichelleObama wearing Narciso Rodriguez Spring 2016 dress while meeting Melania Trump at the @WhiteHouse today. #narcisorodriguez #michelleobama #flotus #whitehouse A photo posted by Narciso Rodriguez (@narciso_rodriguez) on Nov 10, 2016 at 3:39pm PST

The chic three-quarter sleeve dress is from American designer Narciso Rodriguezs spring 2016 collection. The design house has been a favorite of Michelles for years: She wore a Narciso Rodriguez dress the night Barack Obama delivered his first victory speech in 2008, and donned a custom coat by the designer at her last speech for Hillary Clinton the day before the election at a rally in Philadelphia.

First Lady @MichelleObama wearing custom Narciso Rodriguez coat at last night's @HillaryClinton rally in Philadelphia. #narcisorodriguez #michelleobama #flotus #hillaryclinton #election2016 A photo posted by Narciso Rodriguez (@narciso_rodriguez) on Nov 8, 2016 at 7:30am PST

The choice of designer may hold as much weight as the purple shade of her dress. Rodriguez is the Cuban American son of immigrants, and what The New York Times calls a classic American success story. Raised in Newark, New Jersey, he studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York, went on to work under other designers, and eventually launched his own line in 1997.

President Obama has made historic strides to reopen relations with Cuba  which Trump may reverse  so perhaps Michelle had more than fashion on her mind when she chose her outfits this week.

The post Michelle Obama wears symbolic purple dress, takes a cue from Hillary Clinton appeared first on HelloGiggles.
young donald trump supporter

Some students at

Royal Oak Middle School in Michigan were recorded chanting "build the wall!" during their lunch period on Wednesday in a video that is quickly going viral.

Their words echo the same ubiquitous call that took hold during President-elect Trump's campaign.

A video that appears to show the incident currently has more than 4.7 million views on Facebook, and shows students sitting around tables in the school's cafeteria while a group of students chant.

District Superintendent Shawn Lewis-Lakin confirmed the incident in a public statement, and said that the chants were confined to a "small group of students."

"Because of the strong emotions and intensity of rhetoric that the posting of this incident to social media has elicited, we have had families express concern regarding student safety," the statement read. "Know that we work with our partners in law enforcement on responding to any and all threats that have been or will be made involving our students or schools."

Police were on hand at the middle school all day on Thursday, The Detroit News reported.

"It is so sad. Latino children were crying," wrote the Facebook user who uploaded the video. "The taunts, the 'Build that Wall' with such bullying power and hate from children to children. Just Horrifying!"

Here's the video:

During Trump's campaign, a proposal to erect a wall on the border between the US and Mexico became a clarion call for supporters.

NPR's Cokie Roberts confronted Trump in March about the effect his immigration rhetoric has had on American children, which he called "a very nasty question."

NOW WATCH: Here's the ad that Ivanka Trump reportedly doesn't want America to see





More From Business Insider


JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa has identified a number of "sleeper cells" set up by militant groups that aim to use the country as a logistical base, its interior minister said on Friday, without giving further details. Malusi Gigaba's comments come after police arrested four people in July who they said were planning attacks on U.S. and Jewish-owned targets in the country. "The South African government is aware that there are people who are using South Africa as a logistic hub, as a hideout, and there are sleeper cells," Home Affairs Minister Gigaba told a news conference. He said the government knows who they are and has the situation under control. Asked what action was being taken, he said: "We don't talk about those things. Our security forces are acting on those issues in a manner which we think is best for us." In July, South African police said they had arrested four people, including twins, who were accused of planning attacks on the U.S. embassy in the capital, Pretoria, as well as on buildings owned by Jewish people. Quoting the charge sheet, the News24 news organization said the twins had been attempting to fly to Syria. The arrests came a month after Britain and the United States warned of a high threat of attacks against foreigners in shopping malls in South Africa. Security officials said then there were no known militant groups operating in South Africa, which has a Muslim minority but has seldom been associated with militant Islam. Gigaba affirmed that Pretoria would continue to try to ensure it did not become a target. "We don't want to be mobilized into other people's fights," he said. (Reporting by Ed Stoddard; Editing by Ed Cropley and Catherine Evans)
President-elect Donald Trump, flanked by his wife, Melania, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., gives a thumbs-up on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, after their meeting. (Photo: Molly Riley/AP)

The election of Donald Trump as president is a bitter pill to swallow for millions of Americans  and some are backing a quixotic campaign to reverse that outcome.

As of Friday afternoon, more than 2.4 million people had signed a petition to the U.S. Electoral College, urging its members to ignore their states votes and cast their ballots for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic, wrote Elijah Berg, who launched the petition on Change.org.

Berg, of North Carolina, argued that the Electoral College can award the White House to either candidate and should use its own most undemocratic institution to ensure a democratic result.

Berg continued: 24 states bind electors. If electors vote against their party, they usually pay a fine. And people get mad. But they can vote however they want and there is no legal means to stop them in most states.

Protesters against President-elect Donald Trump march peacefully through Oakland, Calif., on Nov. 9, 2016. (Photo: Noah Berger/Reuters)

Another petition on Faithlessnow.com similarly calls for more than 160 Republican electors to set aside their votes in states that dont have laws binding them to do so: Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia. The petition has assembled a list of the relevant electors.

Clinton is the first presidential candidate since 2000 to win the popular vote while losing the White House. In that year, Al Gore lost the Electoral College to George W. Bush. While Americans were still waiting to see whether Gore or Bush had won Floridas 25 electoral votes, Clinton, the first lady at the time, called for the college to be disbanded so that no one would ever have to doubt again whether his or her vote counted.

We are a very different country than we were 200 years ago, she said then. I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means its time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.

Story continues

And in a deep twist of irony, Trump has also called for the Electoral College to be abandoned. On the eve of the 2012 election, between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, Trump called the Electoral College a disaster for a democracy.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

After that election, in a tweet he has since deleted, Trump said, The phoney [sic] electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one! [sic] Trump tweeted this at a time when he thought Romney would win the popular vote, which ultimately was not the case.

The last time Gallup checked to see whether Americans would vote for a law to abolish the Electoral College was in 2013  and 63 percent said they would.

So what is the Electoral College, exactly? American citizens did not in fact elect a president on Nov. 8; they chose electors. On Dec. 19, the 538 electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots for a candidate and ultimately decide the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The authors of the Constitution established this system for two reasons.

First, the founding fathers intended the Electoral College to serve as a buffer between the electorate and the presidency. They feared that a tyrant or someone incompetent would be able to manipulate the population and that better-informed, judicious electors could prevent this from happening. In other words, the Electoral College is supposed to act as a check on the citizenry, should it be hoodwinked by a demagogue.

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787; oil painting on canvas by Howard Chandler Christy, 1940. The painting is 20 by 30 feet and hangs in the United States Capitol building. (Photo: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

Founding father Alexander Hamilton articulated this view in the Federalist Papers: A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder.

The Electoral College was also created as a result of compromises with smaller states, to ensure that they would not be overlooked. Each state has the same number of electoral votes as it has congressional representatives. Voters in smaller states thus have more influence than those in larger states, because every state, no matter how small, has two U.S. senators.

But some historians point to slavery as another driving factor in the formation of the Electoral College. Southerners were worried that direct democracy  one person, one vote (in actuality, one white, male landowner, one vote)  would give Northern states greater sway in political affairs. But if the South had been allowed to include its slave population in determining the numbers of representatives and electors, it would have greater political power. This resulted in the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person.

The writer Joyce Carol Oates and others have argued that this system will always benefit rural, more conservative voices at the expense of urban, more liberal ones.

electoral college will forever tip balance to rural/conservative/"white"/older voters a concession to slave-holders originally.  Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) November 9, 2016

The Change.org petition is part of a growing trend of petitions prompted by Trumps election. Many are directed explicitly at the president-elect and urge him to rethink his policy positions or behavior on the campaign trail. A voter in Virginia is calling for Trump to meet with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to learn about the reality of climate change. A Californian mother of two children with chronic illnesses is urging Trump to protect the commitment enshrined in the Obamacare legislation that forbids discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. Another woman in California is asking for Trump to condemn hate crimes that his supporters commit in his name.

But these petitions for Trump to re-examine specific policies or actions have not yet resonated with the public as strongly as the petition to the Electoral College calling upon its members to stop Trump from entering the Oval Office. Many supporters have been promoting the Change.org petition on social media.

If you feel scared about the current state of American politics and Whitehouse sign this petition: https://t.co/2K88hLD8hn  #CountryOfKindness (@ladygaga) November 10, 2016

There is a way for Trump not be president, that is protected by the constitution. https://t.co/tV6aU8KH1M  Ahmed Shihab-Eldin (@ASE) November 11, 2016

Electoral College Electors: Electoral College Make Hillary Clinton President on December 19  Sign th https://t.co/5Jrcl6ETgh via @Change  Dj hb smooth (@DJhbsmooth) November 11, 2016

Electoral College Electors: Electoral College Make Hillary Clinton President on December 19 https://t.co/xXQnjxurtY via @Change  Rosie Perez (@rosieperezbklyn) November 10, 2016

Electoral College Electors: Electoral College Make Hillary Clinton President on December 19 https://t.co/ak9cNhg5tB https://t.co/ZHzfDOcBF4  Sinbad (@sinbadbad) November 11, 2016

I don't know if this will do anything but I signed it and I hope it will ???????? I encourage you to do the same https://t.co/BLynzJxRUP  Lizzy Plapinger (@MissGoldUSA) November 11, 2016

This petition to the Electoral College to go with the popular vote (Hillary) is gaining around 1000 sigs a min https://t.co/pR3SEJdiTb  Catherine Gee (@catherinegee) November 11, 2016

Not that I can sign, but has this got any chance of succeeding? Petitioning the electoral college? Seems unlikely https://t.co/S3OdCaJ4UE  Dr Vicky Forster (@vickyyyf) November 11, 2016

Feel helpless/angry and want to tell the Electoral College NO? Sign it: https://t.co/OLqEkqjAMr #Election2016  Brittany Gibbons (@brittanyherself) November 11, 2016
By Devarsi Ghosh: Leonardo DiCaprio is just 42. Let's say he has got another 30 years in him as an actor. Now, he started his film career in 1991 with Critters 3. It has been a 25-year-long career. Within 25 years, he has been nominated five times for Best Actor at the Oscars, of which he has won one.





Within 25 years, he has given an all-time blockbuster like Titanic, a masterful biopic like The Aviator, a politically conscientious film like Blood Diamond, a gritty gangster film like The Departed, a science-fiction extravaganza like Inception and simply, a work of art like The Revenant. If a person can produce this quality of cinema in 25 years, just imagine what he can do in another thirty years with the power, prestige and influence he has today.

advertisement

Happy Birthday Leonardo DiCaprio: 12 iconic roles to the Oscar-winning actor

MOVIE REVIEW: LEONARDO DICAPRIO'S BEFORE THE FLOOD

Perhaps, the most interesting thing about DiCaprio is that once Titanic made the 22-year-old actor a global superstar, Leo did not take his stardom for granted. Stardom happened to him by chance. The actor who had earned his first Oscar nomination as an actor for 1993's What's Eating Gilbert Grape had mostly starred in independent, risky films when James Cameron offered him Titanic. DiCaprio was initially appalled by and not really pleased with how Titanic looked. But Cameron was insistent.





And the film worked. DiCaprio could have lost his head and gone the Will Smith way - dumb, family films to cater to a huge market. But Leo was intelligent enough to know that fad is temporary, class is permanent. So, he continued to do films he believed in.

DiCaprio starred in the trippy coming-of-age film The Beach directed by Slumdog Millionaire's Danny Boyle. Then, he acted in Gangs of New york, his first of many collaborations with master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. After that, he starred in Steven Spielberg's caper Catch Me If You Can. Scorsese, Boyle, Spielberg are good, marquee filmmakers who have made both critically and commercially acclaimed films. DiCaprio wanted to be the poster boy of that space; not too simplistic and dumb to be written off as 'just a star' and also, not too arcane and mysterious to be slotted an art-house hero. DiCaprio, with his film choices, carefully positioned himself as a critical darling and also a film producer's delight.



His next few films include 2004's The Aviator where he portrayed the neurotic billionaire Howard Hughes. This performance catapulted DiCaprio's image as a dedicated method actor. Soon, he starred as a hardened cop forced to go undercover to infiltrate a mafia gang in The Departed (2006). That very year, Leonardo DiCaprio played a South African smuggler, yet another gritty, physical role. These films, which were otherwise politically charged and pushed the envelope in various ways, were successful globally simply because of Leonardo DiCaprio's all-round appeal; that of a global superstar who can act.

advertisement

This variety is very rare today. In fact, DiCaprio maybe the last of these types. While Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and DiCaprio enjoyed global stardom as well as critical love, the best actors today are too caught up in doing obscure films with minimal international appeal. Likewise, the stars of today, like Dwayne Johnson, are not really known for their acting chops.

A good actor only becomes a star when he is successful internationally. In that respect, to make an R-Rated raunchy film like The Wolf of Wall Street a blockbuster requires a star and an actor with the calibre of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Inception, Django Unchained, The Revenant.... Nolan, Tarantino, Innaritu, the man has worked with them all. What next for the world's last great superstar?

[Featured image painted by OrangeMonKey92 obtained under a Creative Commons license]



(The writer tweets as @devarsighosh.)

--- ENDS ---
The search for a missing Texas teen  whose family was found slain in their home earlier this week  came to an end Thursday with the discovery of her body, PEOPLE confirms.

An AMBER Alert was issued for 16-year-old Kirsten Fritch after police discovered both her mother and sister dead in their home in Harris County, Texas, on Tuesday morning, authorities said in a statement.

Police said Cynthia Morris, 37, and her 13-year-old daughter, Breanna Pavilicek, had been shot.

On Thursday, Kirstens body was found behind a bar in a wooded area in Galveston County, Texas, according to Baytown, Texas, police Lt. Steve Dorris. Her body was discovered by a volunteer on an ATV helping comb the area in a community search.

The day before their discovery, Kirstens 21-year-old boyfriend, Jess Dobbs, was arrested outside that same bar. The owner told KPRC 2 that Dobbs was barefoot and covered in sweat.

He was charged with resisting an arrest and is a person of interest in all three killings, Dorris says.

 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.

There is no known motive, Dorris tells PEOPLE. Dobbs refused to speak to police and asked for an attorney.

Kirstens grandmother Barbara DeRamus told KHOU that Dobbs and Kirsten met online.

DeRamus said he moved into the familys Baytown home a few weeks ago  against her mothers disapproval.

He just seemed like a low-life, DeRamus told the station. I thought, What was Kristen doing with this idiot?  (DeRamus could not immediately be reached by PEOPLE.)

Police have not yet charged Dobbs with murder in the three killings, Dorris says.

It was not immediately clear if he has entered a plea to his resisting arrest charge or actually retained an attorney after requesting one. He remains in custody.




Stocktrek Images/Getty Images

Your alarm jolts you awake, and you blindly reach for the lights. No sunshine enters your small, windowless room, which is buried 6 feet underground. You check the newly installed environmental control unit on the wall to make sure the air pressure is stable and enough oxygen is pumping into your modest quarters. And then you take off down the hall. With less gravity, you can easily run faster than any Olympic athletes, without breaking a sweat.

You wash up quickly in a bathroom that recycles every drop of wateryou have only 2 minutes of allotted shower time. Your breakfast includes an orange plucked from one of the hydroponically grown trees lining the hallway you pass on the way back to your room.

Then you start pulling on your extravehicular activity garmentyour spacesuit. Youre excited. Youll be taking your weekly 15-minute stroll outside today. And 15 minutes is just fineany more than that could kill you.

This is not some post-apocalyptic fantasy. This is life on Mars. And it could well become a reality within your lifetime.

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Elon Musk, best known as the CEO of Tesla Motors, announced in October that his company SpaceX plans to send people more than 30 million miles away to Mars as early as 2022.

Thats just five years from now.

What I really want to try to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible  something we can achieve in our lifetimes, he said last month at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. He hopes to later build a self-sustaining colony there, perhaps in 40 to 100 years.

Separately, NASA plans to send humans to the red planet in the 2030s, a decade or more after Musk.

Ever since the fourth planet from the sun was first identified as a wandering object in the night sky by ancient Egyptians, it has been the subject of speculation, wonder, and even fear.

It has inspired scores of sci-fi novels like War of the Worlds, movies like last summers The Martian, even an awesome David Bowie song. The National Geographic Channel is debuting its own miniseries about the fist crewed mission to the planet, simply titled Mars, on Nov. 14.

Story continues

And now its inspiring something else entirely: real-life plans. Mars, a planet with an average wintertime temperature of minus 195 degrees Fahrenheit, is hot again.

But what would it be like to actually live on Mars? We talked to scientists, space architects, and futurists to find out.

One thing is for sure: It wont be easy.

Itll happenthe only question is when

Sunrise on Mars gmutlu/iStock

Scientists agree that humans will eventually colonize Mars, setting up homes and even cities on the planet. But they dont concur on the timeline.

Could a fully functioning human community really be established on the red planet in just a few decades?

Its optimistic, no doubt about it.  [But] its realistic in the next 100 years for sure, says architect Gui Trotti, who helped design the International Space Station. Everything is doable. Its just a matter of money and will.

However, The Martian author Andy Weir told realtor.com that he believes the first truly livable settlements on Mars will not happen in our lifetimes. The writer, who famously and vividly depicted the hellish challenge of surviving on the planet, stresses how difficult the going will be for the early settlers.

The first colonists will be a fairly small groupprobably less than 100 people, Weir says. And they [will] barely be able to survive on their meager crops.

Whatever community is created, its unlikely that it will be filled with restaurants and bars, sporting venues and shopping centersuntil the population reaches the critical mass needed to support these Martian businesses, and the technology develops to build them.

Certainly the idea of resettlement to Mars wont be an easy sell, especially for the first pilgrims. Let us count the reasons: Theres the potentially cancer-causing radiation. The lack of readily available oxygen and water. The lethally low air pressure and the brutally cold temperatures.

And did we mention that the early settlers will probably have to drink their own purified urine? So, yeah. A tough sell.

Were designed for living on Earth, says Trotti. On Mars, youre in constant danger.

The very first Mars settlements: home, collapsible home

Before humans set up settlements and cities on the red planet, they have to get there. And that itself is a dangerous and pricey proposition. Those brave enough to embark on the six- to nine-month voyage, crammed like sardines along with their fellow space adventurers, have to be prepared to die if something goes wrong, Musk has said. (SpaceX suffered major setbacks when two of its unmanned rockets exploded on launch, most recently in September.)

Musk hopes to eventually cut the voyage down to 30 to 80 days and the price of a ticket to between $100,000 and $200,000. He also plans to outfit his spaceship with movie theaters, lecture halls, and a restaurant so travelers dont go completely mad with intergalactic cabin fever.

Habitat as depicted in The Martian 'The Martian': Fox

But life on Mars, at least initially, probably wont be much to write back to Earth about. Then again, the New World and the Wild West were no picnics eitherat first.

The initial dwellings would be collapsible structures, packed on the spacecrafts and then inflated on the red planet, says architect Trotti. They would need to be quick and easy to erect, protect well against the elements, and be movable. Sound familiar? Matt Damons castaway spaceman in The Martian lived in one.

These curved dome- or cylinder-shaped inflatables could even be several stories high. The frames and parts would be lightweight aluminum and titanium metals, with exteriors made from materials like Kevlar, used in bulletproof vests, or other synthetics, Trotti says.

He envisions the inflatables having dorm-style setups, where everyone has their own room but shares common spaces like kitchens and bathrooms. (Living space will likely be at a high premium.)

People could sleep in bunk beds or on inflatable cushions. And furniture would need to be ultralight and foldable to better facilitate space travel and movement from area to area on the surface. After all, a Martian Ikea outlet likely wont be opening any time soon.

Colonizers will likely use 3-D printers to make whatever else they need: books, chairs, even blankets.

With the harsh climate on the planet, fruits and vegetables would need to be grown indoors. So instead of decorative houseplants, Mars dwellers would be surrounded by edible vegetation. Itll be like living in a greenhouse.

Building will be limited less by gravity, more by radiation

Eventually, human civilizationseven entire citieswill evolve. They just might not look like anything on Earth.

The first direction people will likely build, is down.

Detail of a subterranean Mars habitat Ashley Walker

Since there is not much of an atmosphere to block out radiation, scientists expect most people to live in specially constructed housing at least 6 feet underground. Large-scale, multiunit Martian hubs could be constructed well below the surface. Time to break out the shovels!

To ward off the lack-of-sunlight depression, skylights made of glass several feet thick could be installed to give inhabitants a few rays of sunlight.

The bedrooms would probably be in the basement or the sub-basement, says Rob Lillis, a Mars scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. And everyone will have to own a spacesuit to go outside.

Another option, scientists believe, would be for humans to move into the planets lava tubesessentially giant, natural cave formations. A series of small homes and businesses could fit inside some of the largest ones.

It [could] be like living in an underground mall, theorizes Jeffery Greenblatt, an energy scientist and CEO of space technology consultancy Emerging Futures in Berkeley, CA. Youre protected from the radiation, but its big enough to have a sense of airiness.

A depiction of a lava tube habitat Ashley Walker

And scientists believe housing construction could also reach upward.

They hypothesize that above-ground, single-family houses, like the ones found in suburbs everywhere on Earth, will eventually dot the surface of Mars as well. This could be done, in theory, with 3-D printing of exterior walls and roofs made from Martian soil, which could potentially provide protection from radiation. The technology to pull this off doesnt exist yetbut it certainly could by the time a settlement is founded.

3-D printers will source construction materials on-site. NASA/Team Gamma

In time, though, skyscrapers much taller than anything on our own planet could rise. Picture the World Trade Center, only twice as tall. Why not? With gravity only about a third of what it is on Earth, building materials can be lighter and foundational structures wont need to be so strongly enforced or rigidly constructed.

[They] could be more inventive and push the boundaries of engineering, Greenblatt suggests. This could give architects more license to experiment, because theyre not as [constrained by] gravity.

Martian Ice House concept: Constructed from the ice on Mars, it would shield inhabitants from radiation. NASA/SEArch/Clouds Architecture Office

Since there wont be much room on the spaceship to bring over building materials, its likely these Martian dwellings will be made from the rocks, dirt, and sand on the surface of the planet. These can potentially be turned into glass and concrete, Greenblatt says.

The planet is also metal rich, so steel and aluminum might be manufactured on-site to be used for those towers.

But settlers can kiss their front lawns and hardwood floors goodbye. There arent any forests or grass growing on Mars. And even if there were, water would be too precious to spare for them.

Seeking the future of humanity in the stars

NASAs Journey to Mars posters NASA

For its part, NASA sees Mars as a research location. The agency is not yet planning a settlement there. Instead, it is looking at creating short-term sites where astronauts could live while conducting research.

We want to explore Mars because it is a rich destination for scientific discovery as we expand our presence into the solar system, NASA spokeswoman Tabitha Thompson said to realtor.com. Its formation and evolution are comparable to Earth, helping us learn more about our own planets history and future.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to create a settlement on the planet is that it may be the only way for the human race to survive indefinitely, say many scientists. Super volcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, or biological disaster, the fodder of countless Hollywood blockbusters, are very real threats to humanity. And despite denials from even our own future president, global warming does exist, and has catastrophic implications.

This planet should not be the only place we are, says Mars scientist Lillis. If we care about preserving our species, our heritage, our culture  we need to think long-term about not remaining a single-planet species.

Angelo Vermeulen, a space systems researcher and TED Senior Fellow, would agree.

We cant just have our eggs in one basket, he says. Look at the dinosaurs.

The post Mission to Mars: Will Real Estate on the Red Planet Take Off? appeared first on Real Estate News and Advice - realtor.com.
MUMBAI (Reuters) - Cyrus Mistry, the ousted chairman of India's Tata Sons Ltd, denied on Friday that he mishandled a harassment case at the company's hotel arm, an incident that media reports said was one of the factors leading to his removal.

The Tata group said in a statement this week that it removed Mistry because of poor profitability, increased indebtedness and - among other reasons - what it said was the poor handling of critical issues including the sale of British steel operations and negotiations with NTT DoCoMo Inc (9437.T) of Japan.

Tata has not mentioned the hotel harassment case, although it has been widely reported in local media.

A statement from Mistry's office on Friday confirmed he was approached by an employee complaining of harassment by a senior colleague at Indian Hotels Company Ltd (IHTL.NS). It did not name the colleague but detailed his response.

"Mr Mistry set aside time to meet with her and assured her that the Tata Group stands fully committed to support her," the statement said.

The employee was offered an alternative position but left the group, the statement said, adding that Mistry set up an investigation and a review of practices across the group.

Tata Sons declined to comment.

Indian Hotels, whose properties include Taj hotels and The Pierre in New York, said in a statement it had set up an internal committee to review the matter, but gave no further detail.

Mistry's departure last month has triggered a trading of blows with the Tata camp, leading to a drop in share prices of listed Tata entities and sparking concern among shareholders and other stakeholders.

Mistry was ousted as chairman of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS.NS), but remains chairman of Indian Hotels and Tata Chemicals Ltd (TTCH.NS).

Shares in Indian Hotels slumped 6.1 percent on Friday, compared to a 2.7 percent fall in the NSE index (.NSEI).

(Reporting by Rafael Nam and Aditi Shah; Editing by Clara Ferreira-Marques and Edmund Klamann)
The mother of a South Carolina man whose dead body was found buried alongside his wifes on a property belonging to a suspected serial killer is grieving his loss.

On Wednesday, Johnny Joe Coxie, 29, and wife Meagan Leigh McGraw Coxie, 25, of Spartanburg, were identified by authorities. On Saturday, Todd Kohlhepp, 45, allegedly said their names and pointed to their graves, after which the bodies were unearthed, Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger said at a Wednesday press conference.

According to family friend Karyl Gaehring, Johnnys mother, Cindy, is turning to her faith.

Shes numb, very numb, Gaehring says. But shes very stable at the same time. She feels like this was an answer.

The news comes nearly a week after authorities discovered a living woman who had allegedly been bound and chained for two months inside a metal storage container on Kohlhepps 95-acre property in Woodruff, authorities have said.

The Coxies had been buried for 11-months, Clevenger said, adding that Meagan appeared to have died from a gunshot wound to the head while Johnny was shot in the torso. Their bodies were clothed, Clevenger said, adding that some parts of their remains were missing.

At Wednesdays press conference, Lt. Kevin Bobo of the Spartanburg County Sheriffs Office said the couple was reported missing by Meagans mother on Dec. 22, 2015.

Authorities believe Kohlhepp knew the couple but have not indicated how, citing an ongoing investigation.

Both victims had a history of panhandling on local roads to make money, Bobo said. They leave behind a one-and-a-half year-old son who is in the custody of family, says Bobo.

 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.

Gaehring says Cindy came to the ministry nearly a year ago asking for prayers to help find her son.

Story continues

She said, I dont know where he is but Im asking God to lead us to him. If hes alive and if hes not, I still want to know,' Gaehring says. She really does feel like this has been answer because she could have for years like the other families.

During police questioning, Kohlhepp allegedly confessed to the unsolved murders of four people at a motorcycle shop in 2003.

Kohlhepp has so far only been charged in the 2003 murders and has not entered a plea or retained an attorney. Bobo tells PEOPLE he believes more charges will follow soon.

For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS.
By Alan Baldwin SAO PAULO, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Mexican Formula One driver Esteban Gutierrez accepted on Friday that he would not be racing for the U.S.-owned Haas team next year. "Dear friends, I want to share with you that I will no longer be with Haas F1 team for the next season," the 25-year-old said in a statement on his Facebook page. The announcement came after Renault's Danish driver Kevin Magnussen was widely reported to have signed a multi-year deal to join Haas as partner to France's Romain Grosjean. Gutierrez, who has not scored a point in 19 races so far this year, thanked the Ferrari-powered team and owner Gene Haas for the opportunity to drive for the F1 newcomers in their debut season. "I wish them all the best. There are two races left, which I intend to enjoy to the fullest and as always, I'll give my best," he said. Haas principal Guenther Steiner said at the Brazilian Grand Prix on Thursday that he expected the team to announce their 2017 lineup within days.. Gutierrez's chances of staying in Formula One look bleak, with only Mercedes-powered Manor now having a declared vacancy after their French driver Esteban Ocon was announced on Thursday as part of Force India's 2017 lineup. Struggling Sauber have yet to confirm their drivers but both Brazilian Felipe Nasr and Sweden's Marcus Ericsson look likely to stay. Gutierrez had a tough time with the Swiss team in 2013 and 2014, despite scoring his only points to date with them in 2013. The Mexican spent 2015 as a Ferrari reserve and has always driven for Ferrari-powered teams. (Editing by John O'Brien)
Donned in rock 'n' roll-appropriate black attire and an "I Love New York" T-shirt, Dina LaPolt doesn't fit the image of the stereotypical stuffy lawyer -- and she would have it no other way.

The woman who has handled legal matters for Steven Tyler, Fifth Harmony, the estate of Tupac Shakur and Deadmau5, among others, sat for a candid Q&A session with The Hollywood Reporter staff editor Ashley Cullins at the Billboard Touring Awards and Conference at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills on Nov. 10. Among the revelations of the 30-minute talk: how being "bold and taking risks" is a daily requirement of her job and how routinely she goes to bat for her clients, handling every crisis imaginable. "I have flown therapists out to talk to artists, I have had to talk to kids and wives and baby mommas -- I have done it all," LaPolt said. "It's all about helping people. The only difference between me and a hooker is my rates and my services."

LaPolt's no-nonsense manner made for an endlessly entertaining discussion, even when addressing serious issues like artist safety. Recalling the shooting of The Voice alum Christina Grimmie at a Florida meet-and-greet earlier this year, LaPolt described similar issues with overzealous fans. "I had a client who had this guy that was creeping her out on Twitter. The manager called me freaking out, saying that this fan is threatening to come to a show. I said we should get a restraining order against this guy, but then learned that there needs to be minimal contact -- a degree of physicality in -- or it will impede on the guy's first amendment rights."

Never one to take "no" for an answer LaPolt worked her magic and got a temporary restraining order. "For every time someone told me I couldn't do something ... my ass wouldn't be sitting here right now," she said, later adding, "I have been told that a lot in my career: You can't open up a law firm; you can't go up against Death Row Records, they kill people; you can't sue the Department of Justice."

Speaking on matters related to touring, LaPolt said that music lovers don't just listen to one genre anymore, and selling tickets for an act like Aerosmith is competing for dollars that could just as easily go to Katy Perry.

Crediting terrestrial radio -- "it reaches 116 million people a week, more than having a No. 1 song on Pandora, YouTube, Spotify and Sirius XM [combined]" -- and downplaying the impact of festivals, LaPolt said having the experience of being a headlining act is key, even in the world of pop. "Having a hit at pop, even though it's a big market trigger, it doesn't make money," she said. "Touring makes money."

Fifth Harmony, she said, is a perfect example of building a fanbase the old-fashioned way by starting with a mall tour and growing to playing venues of 5,000. "That's a good and healthy trend," she said. "Pop music is starting to develop itself in touring."

That leads to important negotiations like radius clauses which prevents an act from playing within a certain proximity after being booked to play a festival, or VIP ticketing, she said, which also drives revenue.

"For $900 you get a seat in the first three rows, you get a platinum pass to get you nowhere except to meet the drum tech on the side, some free hot dogs and a Coke and a pin that tells everybody else in the audience that you are a dumbass," she said. "Just kidding, but the point is, touring is hit or miss, and we are all competing for the same fan."
The head of a major Myanmar media group was detained on Friday after a minister sued him for writing an allegedly defamatory column about the politician and his ties to businessmen.

Than Htut Aung, CEO of the Eleven Media Group, which publishes a number of prominent newspapers and websites, was seen by an AFP photographer wearing handcuffs inside a Yangon police station on Friday.

Police did not respond to requests for information. But on Thursday investigators said they were seeking the media mogul's arrest after he failed to respond to a defamation summons.

In a column published on Monday, Than Htut Aung accused veteran democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi's government of failing to tackle the country's famously entrenched corruption and crony capitalism since winning elections last year.

The piece also referred to "social media stories" accusing a minister of wearing a $100,000 Patek Philippe watch allegedly given to him by a businessman who served jail time on drugs charges and later won plum contracts.

The minister and businessman were not named in the piece but both called press conferences to deny the allegations.

Announcing his plan to sue for defamation under the country's broadly worded telecommunications law, Yangon chief minister Phyo Min Thein said the watch he wore was a more affordable Rolex and was a gift from his wife.

In a statement the Foreign Correspondents Club of Myanmar described the detention as "an attempt to intimidate the media from doing its job" adding the arrest set "an alarming precedent".

Myanmar's media was strictly controlled by the military junta that ruled the country for half a century.

Since reforms earlier this decade a noisy plethora of newspapers and websites have sprung up with varying standards.

While media freedoms have increased under Suu Kyi monitors say many outlets still exercise self-censorship, especially when it comes to the military, Myanmar's persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority and shady business deals.

Activists and critics also find themselves falling foul of the telecommunications law, with those convicted facing up to three years in jail.
A large metal cylinder thought to be from a Chinese satellite or aircraft fell from the sky and slammed into a jade mining area in northern Myanmar, state media reported on Friday.

The large barrel-shaped object, 4.5 metres (15 foot) long and just over a metre in diameter, crashed onto property owned by a jade mining company in Kachin State's Hpakant township on Thursday, reported the Global New Light of Myanmar.

Another smaller piece of metal bearing Chinese writing tore through the roof of a house in a nearby village at the same time, the paper said. No one was injured.

"The metal objects are assumed to be part of a satellite or the engine parts of a plane or missile," the Global New Light said, adding that authorities were still trying to confirm their origin.

Pictures circulated on social media showed what appeared to be pieces of technological equipment and wiring attached to the inside of the vast cylinder.

Local residents reported hearing a loud bang before the hunk of metal landed and then proceeded to bounce some 50 metres across the mining area before coming to rest in the mud.

The bizarre events came the same day Chinese state media reported Beijing had recently launched a satellite into space.

"It could not be confirmed whether the launch of the satellite and the metal objects found in Kachin state were related," the Global New Light said.

Hpakant is the centre of Myanmar's murky multi-billion dollar jade industry, which feeds a voracious demand for the stone in neighbouring China.

A string of deadly landslides in the mine-pocketed area have killed scores over the past year.
Comcasts NBCUniversal is in exclusive talks to buy a stake in European multilingual news outlet Euronews.

According to a report from Reuters, NBC News said it was in discussions with Euronews about a potential investment and collaborative partnership. Euronews supervisory board has mandated its chief exec Michael Peters to conduct exclusive talks with an aim of finding an agreement by the end of the year.

NBCUniversal is understood to be looking to acquire between 15-30% of Euronews. Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who owns 53% of the Lyon-based broadcaster following a 35M ($38.1M) capital increase last year, would remain the majority shareholder.

Under the plan, NBCUniversals minority stake would look to expand news division NBC News operations across the pond as well as potentially bolstering Euronews current offerings. NBC News is headed up by Deborah Turness, a former British journalist and ITV News editor.

Euronews was created in 1993 with an aim to cover world news from a pan-European perspective. It was borne out of the first Gulf War, when CNN became the preeminent source of 24-hour news programing. In answer to that, the European Broadcasting Union decided to establish Euronews to present information from a European point-of-view, or rather a European CNN. Its main headquarters are in Lyon, France, and it broadcasts in 13 different languages, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

At this years Cannes Film Festival, Peters unveiled a new visual brand identity with a complete graphic overhaul of its news segments, main programs and digital products. It repped a modernization of the brand and said it had a new mission statement: To live and share a unique and global experience of news, knowledge and cultures, expressed through a genuine diversity rooted in our European identity.

Story continues

Related stories

Steve Harvey To End Daytime Talk Show, Launch New One With IMG & NBCU

NBCUniversal & Comcast Slapped With Age Discrimination Suit By Ex-E! SVP

Donald Trump Blames NBCU Microphone For His Lewd 'Access Hollywood' Boast In New Interview
The court rejected the petition on the ground that the MP government had appointed a judicial probe into the incident.

By Rahul Noronha: The Madhya Pradesh High Court on Friday disposed off a petition demanding a court monitored probe into the alleged encounter, in which 8 SIMI terror suspects were killed by the police on October 31, on the outskirts of Bhopal. The court rejected the petition on the ground that the MP government had appointed a judicial probe into the incident.

advertisement

Bhopal based social worker Awadhesh Bhargava had filed the petition demanding a judicial probe into the encounter.

A division bench of the high court chaired by acting Chief Justice Rajendra Menon on Friday, who ruled that since the state government had appointed a judicial probe under retired High Court judge SK Pande, the demand of the petitioner has largely been met.

Also read: SIMI encounter: Senior official suspended for jailbreak

Additional Advocate General Purushendra Kaurav appearing for the state government also contended that the state government's general administration department had already issued orders for a comprehensive probe.

He said that the state government had acted on the directives of the Supreme Court in the PUCL vs State of Maharashtra case by ordering a judicial probe and also an inquiry by the CID.

The petitioner, claiming that the encounter had been staged had submitted evidence in the form of a video clip, that showed a policeman firing at a lifeless body and pulling out a knife from a corpse. He had also claimed that there was no reason for the SIMI terror suspects to escape when their trial was at the final stages and that they were in a strong position in court.

Also read: Finish everyone, Sahab about to reach: Audio clip shows order to kill all 8 SIMI men came from the top

--- ENDS ---
Comcast's NBCUniversal is in exclusive talks to acquire a minority stake in European news network Euronews, Europe's answer to CNN.

Reuters first reported the news, saying NBC News confirmed "discussions" about a "potential investment and collaborative partnership."

Euronews' supervisory board has asked CEO Michael Peters to lead the negotiations with an eye toward reaching a possible agreement by year's end, the report said.

NBCUniversal is understood to be looking at buying a stake of 15 to 30 percent. Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris owns 53 percent of Euronews and would remain the controlling shareholder.

With the two news operations being seen as complementary, a deal could expand NBC News' ability to cover Europe, where Brexit and other topics have been big stories, while it could also boost Euronews' U.S. coverage at a time Europeans are interested in how president-elect Donald Trump will affect American politics.

Observers say Euronews could also benefit from having a partner that produces different formats and has increased its digital presence. Plus a U.S. partner could help Euronews further with its new mission statement of representing "all views."

NBC News is led by president Deborah Turness, a British journalist who is a former ITV News editor.

A price tag wasn't immediately clear. Sawiris bought his 53 percent stake in Euronews for a reported price tag of 35 million euros, or around $40 million at the time.

Created in 1993 with the goal of becoming the "European CNN," Euronews was originally owned by a consortium of state-owned European networks, which later became minority shareholders. Based in Lyon, France, it airs in 13 languages and covers 155 countries.

On its website, it says it is the most-watched news channel in Europe with more than 400 journalists.

Read more: Egyptian Mogul Plans to Buy Controlling Stake in Europe's Answer to CNN
Donald Trump

Republican national-security leaders and experts who signed an open letter opposing Donald Trump in March have reacted to his presidential win with a range of emotions, from cautious optimism to abject terror.

"What Im thinking is it's the end of the liberal order as we know it from 1945," Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, told Business Insider. "Now that might be an overreaction  but that's what it feels like right now.

Drezner was one of more than 100 Republican national-security experts who, during the GOP primaries, added their names to a letter asserting that Trump was unfit for office and would "make America less safe." Another letter signed by 50 GOP officials warning that he would be "the most reckless president in American history" circulated in August.

Drezner noted a "surge of populist nationalism" in recent years, such as the Brexit vote and the election of Phillippine President Rodrigo Duterte, which ultimately culminated in the election of Trump.

"I have to admit this: My first reaction was, 'I cant believe this happened," Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College who made clear he was only representing his own personal views, told Business Insider. "But my next reaction has been, 'Of course this happened.' Because Hillary Clinton was such a terrible candidate.

Now that Trump has secured victory, reports have suggested he could tap advisers such as retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn or Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to prominent positions within the Pentagon. The developments could very likely lead to a rollback in Obama administration policies, such as sequestration and lifting the ban on women in combat.

And Trump's foreign-policy positions, which have at times swung from isolationism to military adventurism, and his embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin, have some experts who signed the letter afraid of the unexpected to come after January 20, 2017  Inauguration Day.

Story continues

"I'm totally f---ing horrified," Drezner said. "The fact that they get to be back in power is going to be interesting."

What happens next?

US Army troops soldiers patrols war in Afghanistan

"There's a lot of mystery" as to what Trump will do as president, said David Adesnik, a policy director for independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin who signed the March letter. "Because he changes positions radically on so many things."

"We really don't have a good sense of how he feels about US interests abroad," Michael Auslin, director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the forthcoming book "The End of the Asian Century," told Business Insider.

Others in the intelligence community echoed those concerns, telling The Washington Post there was a palpable "fear of the unknown."

At least one area on which Adesnik and others hope Trump changes course is his position on the use of torture. On the campaign trail, Trump often endorsed the enhanced-interrogation tactics carried out under the Bush administration, saying the US was going to "have to do things that are unthinkable." He has since offered varying walkbacks of those statements.

"His most egregious comments about ordering people to commit torture," Adesnik said. "Hopefully itll never come to that.

On Wednesday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a former Army officer, told CNN that waterboarding was not torture, perhaps foreshadowing greater Republican support for the now-banned practice.

Trump also owes specifics on his plan to defeat ISIS, since he had repeatedly refused to provide even general themes on the campaign trail about how he would combat the terrorist group. He often used what he called a need for surprise as cover for what many believe was no plan at all.

"There is no secret plan" that Trump had hidden away during the campaign, Drezner said. "I'm sure they'll come up with one now."

"I don't think [the Trump campaign] expected to win," Nichols said.

"This is The Candidate where he wins and in that last frame, he turns and says, 'What do we do now? he added, mentioning a classic 1972 film starring Robert Redford.

Cautious hope

Trump Tower

Despite the initial shock of a Trump win among so-called Never Trump Republican national-security experts, some were expressing hope for what could happen next, though even that was somewhat tepid.

"Our job is not to pretend that he didnt win or not to say that we arent going to help him, because he is our president," Auslin said. "A lot of people that wrestled with whether or not to support Trump during the primaries and the campaign ... the calculation changes once hes the president."

Auslin wouldn't say whom he voted for in the election, but he did say that he would think about serving in a Trump administration if he were asked.

"I would very seriously consider a request to serve in the Trump administration," Auslin said, because "at some point politics ends and policy begins. Its up to Trump himself to make that transition from politics to policy."

Dr. Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as one of the top advisors to Gen. David Petraeus during the Iraq surge, made clear he would not serve a Trump administration in any capacity. Nichols also rejected the idea of joining a Trump administration, though he added that he had no desire to serve any political appointment, regardless of who was in charge.

"I think anyone who signed that letter shouldn't be under any illusions that they'll be offered anything in a Trump administration," said Mansoor, now a professor of military history at Ohio State University.

"Although I have been warning  along with many others  of the catastrophic consequences of a Trump presidency," Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Foreign Policy, "I have no idea what he will actually do. Nobody does, probably including Trump himself."

But, he concluded: "Im hoping against hope that he will grow in the White House  that the office will make the man. Because if that doesnt occur, the consequences are too ghastly to contemplate."

NOW WATCH: Startling facts about World War II





More From Business Insider


MEXICO CITY, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Given the widespread global volatility in the wake of Donald Trump's shock U.S. election win, a local currency intervention would have had little impact, Mexico's Finance Minster Jose Antonio Meade said on Friday.

Mexico declined to intervene to stem a dramatic peso collapse the morning after Trump's win, a move analysts had expected, and said it plans to stick to the current timetable when the central bank will meet on Nov. 17 to decide on whether to move rates.

Meade said the government was ready, alongside the central bank, to implement any necessary measures.

(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter)
DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / November 11, 2016 / North American Cannabis Holdings, Inc. (USMJ) today announced that the Company has been identified by the OTC Short Report as a "Most Shorted OTC Stock." The detailed report estimates over 4 billion shares have been sold short within the last 30 days at an average weighted price per share of $0.00047. Accordingly, short sellers would have to purchase shares below this price to cover short sales and profit.

Short Squeeze Potential To Contribute To PPS Increase

On the other hand, if short sellers are not able to profit, they could be forced to buy-in making a short sale strategy backfire and instead contributing to an increase in price per share while buying an estimated 4 billion shares to cover short positions.

Revenue Growth, New Contracts and a Pending Dividend with Another In The Works

North American Cannabis Holdings has recently reported a 23% increase in year to year sales with over $500,000 in revenue. The Company has announced a number of strategic contracts and a recent dividend declaration date. A dividend payment date announcement is pending finalization of regulatory requirements. A second transaction is in the works intended to lead to a second dividend issuance.

To learn more about North American Cannabis Holdings: growusmj.com

Follow the Company on Twitter: US_HEMP

Safe Harbor Act: This release includes forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involves risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the impact of competitive products, the ability to meet customer demand, the ability to manage growth, acquisitions of technology, equipment, or human resources, the effect of economic business conditions and the ability to attract and retain skilled personnel. The Company is not obligated to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release.

Story continues

USMJ Contact:

Steven Rash

info@growusmj.com

+1-972-528-0162

SOURCE: North American Cannabis Holdings
trump park

WASHINGTON, DC  As the world adjusts to America's newest commander in chief, uncertainties about what policies Donald Trump will pursue  toward North Korea in particular  remain.

"Trying to predict President Trump's policy toward Asia, or any global region for that matter, is difficult if not impossible," Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow of Northeast Asia at the Heritage Foundation, told Business Insider.

"We are in uncharted territory because Trump has not articulated an Asian policy nor does he even have an identifiable cadre of Asian advisors," Klingner added.

Echoing that sentiment, David Straub, former State Department Korea director and associate director of the Korea Program at Stanford University, told Business Insider that Trump knows "next to nothing" about the region.

"He didn't say very much about North Korea during the campaign, and what he did say was incoherent," Straub told Business Insider.

Notably, while on the campaign trail, Trump said he would hold a summit with the North's reckless leader Kim Jong Un over hamburgers.

"It's clear he knows next to nothing about the area and the problems there, and it will take him and his administration a long time to get up to speed," Straub said.

trump foreign policy speech

"I can't see Trump negotiating a denuclearization agreement with North Korea," Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told Business Insider.

"And after Libya and what I anticipate will be the collapse of the agreement with Iran, I don't see any appetite in North Korea either."

Story continues

Trump also said he would remove US troops from host nations throughout Asia and Europe if these countries did not pay their share of the costs.

Straub added that Trump should focus on North Korean threats instead of "complaining about how much our allies South Korea and Japan are paying for the upkeep of US forces in their country."

"The fact is that they already pay a great deal of those costs, and that it would cost more to move them to the US than keep them where they are, not to mention the fact that strategic stability in Northeast Asia is very much in US interests as well as in the interests of our allies," Straub said.



'Bewilderment' and 'uncertainty' will be the keywords for the assessing the 2016 presidential election and the path ahead.

In regards to China, Pyongyang's closest ally and the region's most powerful nation, Trump has said he would pressure Chinese president Xi Jinping to address North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

"Given Trump's statements on trade policy with China, it is difficult to imagine how he can get China to do what he wants," Eric Gomez, a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told Business Insider.

"Despite the instability North Korea causes, Beijing is willing to keep supporting it so long as it can be a hedge against US military power in the region. China probably has the best chance of pressuring North Korea on the nuclear weapons issue, but right now it's difficult to see how Trump would get Beijing to change its current position," Gomez added.

Similarly, Melik Kaylan, co-author of "The Russia-China Axis," says that Trump will most likely be unable to adjust Beijing's stance.

Xi Jinping

"China uses North Korea as a lever to distract its regional rivals," Kaylan said. "If Trump is true to his words, he will try to confront China on a series of issues. China will play the North Korea card."

"Trump will ultimately fall back on the alliances as they exist," Kaylan added.

Straub notes that Trump may even follow the same policy carried out by President Obama when dealing with North Korea.

"If Trump is guided by our government experts and institutions, he will eventually follow roughly the same policy as President Obama, i.e. ratchet up US and international pressure on North Korea to give up nuclear weapons each time it commits a provocation, at the same time bolstering our missile and other defenses against the North and preparing for all manner of contingencies," Straub said.

And while the current administration has slapped Pyongyang with several rounds of heavy sanctions, the Hermit Kingdom's brazen rocket launches and nuclear detonations continue.

"This year, Pyongyang successfully conducted two nuclear tests, an intercontinental ballistic missile test, breakthrough successes with its road-mobile intermediate-range missile and submarine-launched ballistic missile, re-entry vehicle technology, a new solid-fuel rocket engine, and an improved liquid-fuel ICBM engine," Klingner told Business Insider in a previous interview.

What's more, during one week in October, the North launched what are thought to be two Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles  one on October 15 and another on October 19.

"This twice-in-a-week stuff also suggests that they must have an inventory of these things that they're willing and able to expend to advance the program," Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Business Insider in a previous interview.

kju

Hours after the aforementioned dual missile test, US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter met with South Korea's minister of defense, Han Min Koo, at the Pentagon.

"Make no mistake, any attack on America or our allies will not only be defeated, but any use of nuclear weapons will be met with an overwhelming and effective response," Carter said during the press conference.

"The United States remains committed to defending our allies against any threat with the full spectrum of American military might," Carter added.

Looking to the future, experts agree that Trump's policies will not be known for many months after he transitions to the highest office in the land.

"North Korea will of course seek to use that time to its own advantage, which will not be to ours," Straub said.

"'Bewilderment' and 'uncertainty' will be the keywords for the assessing the 2016 presidential election and the path ahead," Klingner said.

NOW WATCH: Meet THAAD: Americas answer to North Korean threats





More From Business Insider


This Pennsylvania nurse went to every extreme to make sure her patient was comfortable in her final days, even if that meant adopting the woman's son after she passed.

Read: Mom of 3 Adopts Cancer-Stricken Friend's 6 Kids After Her Death

Tricia Seaman, 43, was an oncology nurse in Harrisburg when she was assigned to care for Tricia Somers in March 2014.

Somers, who was 45 when they first met, was diagnosed with a rare liver cancer the year before, and although she was in recovery, doctors were not optimistic about her future.

"When I walked into the room, I felt a sense of sadness for her," Seaman said. "It was such a sad thing to see someone so ill, so young."

She said she quickly discovered her patient had an 8-year-old son, Wesley, "who was probably really missing his mom," and that she was a single parent.

At the end of Somers' three-week hospital stay, she discovered she was terminal.

The single mother asked her nurse the unthinkable. "When I die, will you and your husband take my son?" Seaman recalled.

Seaman said the request came as a shock, but she didn't decline.

She said that after having four children, she and her husband have been considering adding to their family through adoption. Though they had been approved as foster parents the previous year, they hadn't yet been contacted.

Read: Dad Shares Heartbreaking Photo of Daughter, 4, Battling Cancer After Being Given Weeks to Live

The nurse also noticed the single mother did not have many visitors or a support system during her stay.

The families then began spending more time together, and Somers and her son even came to stay with Seaman's family of six over Mother's Day weekend.

"It was pretty clear after the visit [that Wesley] was going to fit great," she said. "We just loved being with Trish and she enjoyed being with us."

As Somers' health further declined, she and her son moved in with the Seamans to give Wesley a chance to adjust to a larger family.

Story continues

"Initially it was hard," Seaman recalled. "She and I are complete opposites. They had a flexible schedule, but with a large family, you have to have mealtime, you have to have bed time."

But, she and Wesley eventually became an integral part to their larger family, including going on vacations together.

"The transition was very slow. She prepared him about as well as any parent could prepare a child in any situation. He knew this was what was going to happen," Seaman said.

She added: "We made a lot of really wonderful memories as a family."

Read: Couple Adopts 4 Babies in Less Than 24 Hours: 'Life Doesn't Always Go as Planned'

In the winter of 2014, Somers passed away, and the Seamans were able to seamlessly take over guardianship of Wesley.

Over the last two years, Wesley, now 10, has quickly adapted to the Seaman family, including accepting Seaman's three daughters and one son as his new brothers and sisters, and referring to Seaman and her husband as his parents.

"He blends right in," said Seaman, who retold her story in a book, God Gave Me You. "I cannot imagine life without him."

Watch: Cancer Patient, 10, Becomes Flower Girl at Camp Counselor's Wedding After She's Given 48 Hours to Live

Related Articles:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday sent a request to Congress for an additional $11.6 billion in supplemental war-related funding, which would include money to fight Islamic State militants and sustain high overseas troop levels. The request, detailed in a letter released by the White House, seeks an additional $5.8 billion for the Pentagon for military operations in Afghanistan and fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and an $5.8 billion for the State Department and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for fiscal 2017. Obama made the request just before Congress returns to Washington for its lame duck session before the new Congress starts in January. "For the Department of Defense, this plan reflects the evolving nature of our military campaign against ISIL and our efforts in Afghanistan," U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said in a statement, using an acronym for Islamic State. Carter added that the funding would also allow the State Department and USAID to counter extremism. "Swift passage of this plan will help the Department of Defense and our partners in the U.S. government and around the world protect this nation, and I urge Congress to support it," the statement said. U.S. Representative Mac Thornberry, the chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, said he would review President Barack Obama's request but that it was too low. "While we will review the request carefully, the amount still does not accommodate the increased pace of operations against ISIL and does nothing to begin addressing the readiness crisis," Thornberry said in a statement. (Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by James Dalgleish)
The three-month open enrollment period for Affordable Care Act insurance started on November 1. Early retirees who are too young for Medicare can now obtain health insurance through their state's health insurance exchange regardless of their pre-existing conditions, and might qualify for federal subsidies to help pay for it. Here's how to navigate the enrollment as efficiently as possible:

[Read: Medicare Out-of-Pocket Costs You Should Expect to Pay.]

Estimate your 2017 income. The enrollment process at Healthcare.gov will be more productive if you compile several pieces of information beforehand. To start, make sure you have the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers for everyone in your family. You will also need a good understanding and estimate of what your 2017 household income will be. This information will help determine if you qualify for tax credits that could offset the cost of the insurance premiums. As an individual, you qualify for a credit until your income exceeds $47,520, and for couples and families it depends on how many people are counted in your household. For a family of four, the credits phase out once your income exceeds $97,200.

Collect medical information. Compile a list of primary care doctors, specialists and prescriptions for all members of your family. This data will help you navigate the complexity of ensuring that the doctors and prescriptions that you count on will still be available to you in the coming year. The same insurance company may offer different in-network plans. If you shop only on price, you may not be able to see the doctor you choose. It is best to input the doctors you work with to ensure that they are available within the plans you are reviewing. If the exchange website shows that your doctor is not covered by any of the policies you are considering, give that doctor's office a call. Your doctor's office might be able to provide advice about the plans he or she accepts. It is worth a phone call to make sure you have a complete understanding of which doctors and hospitals will be available to you in 2017.

[Read: Medicare Enrollment Deadlines You Shouldn't Miss.]

Consider whether a plan can be used with a health savings account. Contributions to health savings accounts are tax deductible, they grow tax deferred and they are completely tax-free if used for medical expenses. Your HSA balance carries over from year to year and could be used to help pay for future medical needs in retirement. Only some plans on the exchange are HSA eligible. The exchange website allows you to refine results to locate plans with a HSA option.

Get outside help. It is easy to become overwhelmed with all the health insurance choices and options. If you would like to find someone nearby to help you navigate and apply, HealthCare.gov has a tool that can direct you to local resources.

Be an advocate for yourself and your family. Several insurance companies have left the marketplace. So, some parts of the country have fewer health insurance options than others. However, since this is a major issue nationally, there is also an opportunity to be an advocate for your family. If you find that major hospitals and service providers in your area are completely excluded from the current health insurance options, then consider reaching out to your elected officials and local media outlets. For example, in Nashville the largest hospitals were considered out-of-network for all exchange insurance options, but a call to the hospital yielded the information that the hospital is actively trying to get added to the approved networks.

[See: 10 Medical Services Medicare Doesn't Cover.]

Navigating the new health care landscape is not easy or seamless, but a little bit of preparation can often help you find a plan that meets your needs. And if you do find yourself in a situation with limited options and losing your trusted providers, start to advocate for yourself and share your concerns. With enough interest and dialogue, you just might be able to inspire some tangible change.

Brian Preston and Bo Hanson are fee-only financial planners who host the podcast, "The Money-Guy Show".
Thousands of Hindus took position in front of the National Press Club in Shahabag area in the capital around 12 pm today.

By Sahidul Hasan Khokon: The Hindu community in Bangladesh today protested against communal violence and recent hate crimes in Brahmanbarhia area of Dhaka.

Thousands of Hindus took position in front of the National Press Club in Shahabag area in the capital around 12 pm today.

They came under the banners of Hindu student organisations based in Dhaka University. Other organisations and regular people also joined the demonstration.

advertisement

Traffic movement in the area was also disrupted due to their presence.

Vehicles were stuck in traffic jams - from the National Press Club, Matsya Bhaban to Ruposhi Bangla intersection, Katabon and on the university campus - despite Friday being a weekend. Buses were taking other routes to the university campus.

An effigy of Fisheries Minister Sayedul Hoque who represents Brahmanbarhia's Nasirnagar in Parliament was burnt by the protestors who hold him responsible for the October 30 attack on Hindu temples and homes.

READ: 17 temples, dozens of Hindu houses vandalised in Bangladesh



They demanded his immediate resignation as minister. Some of the placards they carried, read 'Is it a crime to be born a Hindu?', 'Is leaving home the only way?'.

Hindu students of the Dhaka University took out a march outside the Jagannath Hall around 10 am against recent incidents of attacks on religious minorities.

The procession passed TSC and Doyel Chattar before reaching the National Press Club.

Several organisations, already present in the location, joined the students' procession and marched with them to Shahbagh.

Organisations that were holding protests against communal violence outside the National Museum also joined in.

President of the Bangladesh Hindu Oikyajot Gobinda Chandra Pramanika said, "A gathering, a secular country or element can not have any communal discrimination." He said Bangladesh is a secular country but our war is against the communal forces.

--- ENDS ---
By Ginny McCabe

CINCINNATI (Reuters) - Jurors in the trial of a white former University of Cincinnati police officer charged with murdering a black man during a traffic stop told the judge their deliberations had deadlocked on Friday but were ordered to redouble efforts at reaching a unanimous verdict.

The 12 panelists were sent back to the jury room by judge Megan Shanahan at around 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT) after telling her they had failed, since beginning deliberations on Wednesday, to agree on whether former officer Ray Tensing was guilty or not guilty of murder or voluntary manslaughter.

At around 6 p.m. EST jurors remained at an impasse and were dismissed by Shanahan for the night. Jurors are scheduled to begin deliberations again on Saturday morning.

The killing fueled demonstrations against use of lethal force by white officers against unarmed blacks and other minorities, which has been the focus of nationwide protests and a renewed national debate over racial bias in the criminal justice system.

The jury consists of six white men, four white women and two black women.

Tensing has pleaded not guilty and has remained free on $1 million bond. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.

"You should listen to one another's opinions with the disposition to be persuaded," Shanahan told jurors in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas. "Do not hesitate to reexamine your views and change your position if you are convinced it is erroneous."

Body-camera video of the July 2015 traffic stop showed Tensing, 26, shooting Samuel DuBose, 43, in the head after pulling him over for a missing front license plate on his vehicle. The entire incident lasted a few minutes.

Tensing asked DuBose to take off his seatbelt and tried to open the car door, but DuBose did not comply and closed the door. The vehicle started rolling forward slowly as Tensing pulled his gun and fired once.

During closing arguments in the case, the defense maintained that Tensing feared for his life and fired in an attempt to protect himself from being run over by DuBose car or pinned to a nearby guard rail.

Story continues

In emotional testimony on Tuesday, Tensing said he had no intention of killing DuBose when he fired into the car.

The defense has countered by saying that Tensing has falsified his account of events by exaggerating that he was being dragged by DuBose's vehicle and was never in danger.

(Writing by Timothy Mclaughlin in Chicago; Editing by Steve Gorman and James Dalgleish)
For global energy markets, the potential knock-on impacts of a Donald Trump presidency could be meaningful in a few areas. With respect to U.S. oil and gas producers, we can say that the tail risk for regulation of hydraulic fracturing and methane emissions is now somewhat lower. Thus far, the Environmental Protection Agency has maintained that the systemic environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing is benign. A Trump-led EPA is less likely to reverse this view than a Hillary Clinton-led EPA. More tangibly, certain high-environmental-impact upstream segments could benefit from a lighter touch, such as sand mining to supply hydraulic fracturing proppant. Overall, however, state and local governments rather than federal authorities have had the lions share of impact on upstream economics.

Additionally, exploration and production firms producing in areas with disadvantaged transportation economics due to incomplete pipeline infrastructure could benefit if Trump-led regulatory agencies accelerate approval of new projects (for example, the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, which would service the Bakken). We also believe the likelihood that pipelines carrying Canadian heavy oil to the United States, such as Keystone XL, will proceed has increased, which could address the potential takeaway issues that loomed on the horizon for Albertas oil producers. However, Trumps desire for the U.S. government to capture a bigger piece of the profits could be a barrier to breaking ground on new pipeline infrastructure.

Morningstar Premium Members gain exclusive access to our full analyst reports, including fair value estimates, bull and bear breakdowns, and risk analyses. Not a Premium Member? Get this and other reports immediately when you try Morningstar Premium free for 14 days.
The doorbell rang at 4.30 a.m., politely at first and then more insistently. When Drisia, a French Muslim citizen, finally staggered out of bed and opened the door, she faced 10 armed police officers in riot helmets. They stormed into her apartment in a town in the French Alps, rifling through her drawers while her seven-year-old daughter cowered nearby. Days after that police raid on Dec. 3 last year, her employers fired herafter 10 years of servicefrom her administrative job with the company that manages the Mont Blanc Tunnel connecting France to Italy, on the suspicion of links with potential Islamist terrorists. I asked what had happened, but they said the decision was made at a level far above them, Drisia told TIME on Thursday, adding that she was still too shaken to have her full name in print. There was no explanation, she says. They marched me out like a suspect.

Read More: Putin Cancels France Trip After President Hollande Accuses Russia of War Crimes in Syria

Drisia is hardly alone. France has been under a state of emergency since ISIS sympathizers mounted the deadly Paris attacks last November 13, massacring 130 people in the bloodiest terror attack in years. President Francois Hollande imposed the raft of supposedly temporary security measures within hours of the attacks, while the country was reeling from the bloodbath. The new rules allowed police to raid houses across the country for the first time during nighttime hours, and with little judicial oversight; place suspects under house arrest for months; ban street demonstrations; and monitor millions of peoples communications. Since then pieces of these supposedly temporary measures have migrated into French law, including a broad expansion of surveillance powers for police and intelligence agencies. We are in a changed time, and in many ways, we also have a changed people, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, the architect and overseer of the new tactics, told local magistrates and police chiefs at a gathering in Paris on November 7.

Story continues

This Sunday, France marks the first anniversary of the Paris attacks with solemn ceremonies to honor the dead and finally move beyond grief and unease. And yet, one year on, it is far from clear whether the governments anti-terrorism strategy is working. In interviews with regular French people over the months, almost all say they are resigned to the fact that another terror attack is inevitable, somewhere, sometime. Desperate to avoid a repeat of the Paris massacre, the government has reassured few people that they are capable of averting assaults especially from lone-wolf attackersand indeed some believe its anti-terrorism campaign might even have inflamed the situation.

Read More: Dismantling the Calais Jungle Camp Wont Be Enough

In a report released last week, the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights, or FIDH, says Frances anti-terror tactics have been a serious setback to the rule of law, but asserts that the country is no safer from jihadist attacks. Describing dozens of police raids on seemingly innocent people, the report notes, There is little evidence that this approach is working and it comes at a cost to fundamental rights.

Lawyers tackling cases under the state of emergency say police have largely targeted Muslims who look conservativemen with long beards or women in long dresses and headscarfs. Many, they say, are regarded in the streets and at work as potential jihadistsa feeling they believe the state of emergency has only helped to cement. The government created a theory that when you are becoming more and more religious, in an orthodox way, you can become a terrorist, or make an allegiance to terrorism, says Arie Alimi, a Paris lawyer, who is suing the government in about 15 different cases of wrongful arrest or police abuse under the state of emergency. These people have nothing to do with terrorism, says Alimi, himself an observant Jew. They are just Muslims.

Read More: The Left Behind Refugees of the Jungle in Calais

Indeed, the state of emergency has targeted almost entirely the 5 million or so French Muslimsthe biggest Muslim population in Europe. That is hardly surprising, since the jihadist attackers have all been Muslim, and have acted in the name of aAl-Qaeda or ISIS. There is this kind of witch hunt where you are looking for anybody related to conservative Muslim movements, says Marwan Mohammad, executive director of the French Collective against Islamophobia, or CCIF. He his group has received 320 reports of police abuse since the Paris attacks. The vast majority involved are innocent families with no reason to suspect them.

Alimi says several of the clients suing for police abuses or wrongful arrests under the state of emergency are French converts to Islam. Those converts are frequently more religious than Muslim-born French people. The converts Alimi represents include Willy Benali, a 30-year-old , a sniper for the French military who has fought in Gabon, Central African Republic and Kosovo, and whom police raided shortly after the Paris attacks. Another is a man in the Val D dOise region northwest of Paris, who runs an import-export business, and who did not want to be named in print; he too is a convert to Islam, whose Jewish grandparents were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Shortly after the Paris attacks local authorities, and placed him under house arrest for four months, eventually clearing him after Alimi sued the government. In the court findings, the magistrate describes what led authorities to suspect the businessman, saying that ISIS has instructed French Muslims to adopt techniques of dissimulation, in order to hide their jihadist allegiances. When you read the conclusions of the administrators, there are very racist, disciminatory remarks, Alimi says.

At the heart of these accusations are the police themselvesand they arent happy either. Heavily criticized for failing to stop a series of terror attacks, they are on a constant lookout for the next eruption of jihadist violencea terrifying prospect that is always in the back of many French peoples minds. We have the means now, but it is not sure that they wont be further attacks, says Christophe Crepin, spokesman for the national police trade union, UNSA. There is a savagery that is very, very strong now.

Crepin says police feel deeply rattled, even burned out, in the face of a cryptic and nimble enemy that has outmaneuvered them. The state of emergency has helped us in terms of raids, he says. But it mobilizes a lot of police. And if you never have a vacation, and you are always under stress, you cannot function.

The limitations of the police tactics were starkly clear last July 14Bastille Day. That day President Francois Hollande trumpeted his anti-terrorism success in a televised holiday address and said he would soon end the state of emergency. Hours later, however, a Tunisian immigrant delivery man, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, rammed a giant truck into a holiday crowd on the Nice promenade, killing 87 peopleFrances second-biggest terror attack, after Paris.

After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, which killed 17 people in separate incidents over a few days, the Nice attack was the third jihadist assault in 18 months. Worse, it appeared to emerge from nowhere. Despite months of police raids, intelligence monitoring, and hundreds of arrests, Bouhlel, 31, had no police record and no known jihadist connections or sympathies. While ISIS claimed him as its soldier, that was news to the police, and his friends. He didnt do Ramadan, he didnt pray, one acquaintance told TIME in Nice. Within hours of the Nice massacre, Hollande immediately reversed himself, reimposing the emergency measures; days later, the French parliament made some of those measures law.

Now it is left to lawyers like Alimi to sort out the consequencesand to those targeted to prove their innocence. Drisia, the woman fired from her job at the Mont Blanc Tunnel in the French Alps, has yet to find new employment. With the help of the organization CCIF, she won a six-figure compensation package in court from the companythe exact figure remains secret under the settlementand a small sum from the regional authorities. While that has helped, she says she has struggled to find new work, especially since local newspapers widely publicized her firing, saying she was on the path to radicalization. Drisia, who is a single mother of a girl recovering from a brain tumor, believes police targeted her as a suspected jihadist, because I was someone who adhered to religion even though my daughter had cancer, she says. It has affected me a lot. This has been a very difficult year.

For France, there are likely to be more tough times to come.
More than 20% of Americans waking up the morning after Election Day did so in a state that has legalized recreational cannabis.

At least six states voted to legalize marijuana in some form, with California, Massachusetts, and Nevada voting to legalize adult-use, or recreational cannabis, while Arkansas, Florida, and North Dakota legalized medical pot. (Maines vote on recreational cannabis was still too close to call as of Thursday morning.) Now the US has 29 states with legal medical marijuana, and at least seven states have legal recreational pot markets.

The legal marijuana industry could generate roughly $22 billion in annual sales across the US within four years.

At the same time, there is some cause for concern over what Donald Trumps surprise victory could mean. Would the president-elects administration go against the will of voters in an ever-growing number of states? Trump has previously voiced support for legalized medical marijuana, but Vice President-elect Mike Pence is an opponent of cannabis legalization. So are New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani--both of them close advisors to Trump.

"The prospect of Donald Trump as our next president concerns me deeply," Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement to The Washington Post, citing Pence, Christie and Giuliani. The legalization advocacy group Marijuana Majority quickly launched a post-election petition calling on Trump to end the federal governments marijuana prohibition and to honor his pledge to respect states rights with regard to marijuana laws.

Fortune reached out to a Trump campaign spokesperson for comment on the latest states to legalize cannabis, and the industry in general, and we will update this article with any response.

Meanwhile, though, business owners and investors in the cannabis industry reacted enthusiastically to the latest wave of marijuana legalization votes this week:

Story continues

Investors Jumping In

Brendan Kennedy, co-founder and CEO of cannabis company Privateer Holdings: Kennedys firm Privateer was the industrys first to raise more than $100 million in total financing. Now, he told Fortune, hes seeing an explosion of interest. There is, he says, a fear of missing out as legalization efforts across the country continue to open new markets. Three to six months ago, we started being approached by firms who would have never looked at making an investment in this industry a year ago [and who], frankly, we would have never imagined making an investment in this industry six years ago, Kennedy said. But, they're all in the industry now.

California the Epicenter of Cannabis Industry

Giadha DeCarcer, founder and CEO of New Frontier Data: DeCarcers New Frontier partners with the ArcView Group to produce an annual report estimating the size and scope of the nascent legal marijuana industry. On Tuesday, a joint release from New Frontier and ArcView projected that Californias legal marijuana market could reach $7.6 billion in annual sales by 2020 alone. California, with its population of more than 38 million people, is now the new epicenter of the legal cannabis industry, she said, adding, As both the oldest medical cannabis state and the largest cannabis consumer population, sales in California are projected to dwarf those of any other market. Additionally, the integration of California's technology and marketing expertise will be enormously into the cannabis industry both domestically and internationally.

Troy Dayton, CEO of ArcView Group, said in a statement that Californias vote to legalize recreational cannabis will be the vote heard round the world and will be creating a seismic shift.

A Bipartisan Issue

Steve Deangelo, co-founder of Oakland-based dispensary Harborside Health Center (and president of ArcView) told Fortune that he prepared for Californias long-expected decision by planning a business expansion that includes expanding into cultivation while also planning new Harborside locations in California (the company currently operates locations in Oakland and San Jose).

He also pointed out that some of the states that voted to legalize cannabis, such as Arkansas and Florida, also voted in huge numbers for Republican president-elect Donald Trump. The only way that could happen is for a very significant number of Trump voters--red voters, Southern voters--to vote in favor of cannabis reform. And, if you look at what happened yesterday as a whole, I think what you see is that cannabis reform was the one issue that was able to cut across party lines and unite voters in a bipartisan consensus.

Henry Wykowski, San Francisco-based attorney, represents roughly 100 cannabis industry clients, also agreed, adding, I think that, regardless of who makes up the [Trump] Administration, they have to realize that the population of the United States no longer thinks that cannabis is a bad drug. More people than not are in favor of its legalization, and theres a lot better things to do with [the federal governments] time and money than to pursue an agenda against cannabis.

New Regulations Coming

Wykowski, a former Justice Department prosecutor, expects California lawmakers will produce more well-defined regulations for the states legal cannabis market now that recreational pot will be legal to grow and sell.

Nicholas Vita, CEO of medical marijuana dispensary operator Columbia Care, a company operates medical dispensaries in Arizona, Massachusetts, and New York, also said he thinks that the votes show the need for the federal government to take a step back and consider adopting a long-term, data-based analytical process to determine whether or not the merits and the observations and the risks and the concerns that different stakeholders have are validated or invalidated, and to really come up with an informed federal policy that would reshape the federal governments current regulations on marijuana, which is currently listed as a Schedule 1 drug.

A Green Rush Is Coming

Adrian Sedlin, CEO of Southern California cannabis-growing operation CannaDescent, earlier this year raised $6.5 million from investors to help fund a new, 9,600-square-feet cultivation facility in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., with plans to open more facilities in the area over the next few years. Having recently gone through the process of raising money, Sedlin said he expected the approval of Californias Prop 64 will make that Green Rush accelerate, opening up the industry to a wave of new investments.

There is no way the federal government is going to allow an economy as large as California to remain unbanked on this issue. Its not a tenable position, he told Fortune, referring to the fact that major banks have been afraid to take on cannabis business clients because the drug remains illegal on the federal level. Sedlin added: The big money is about to come in. Prop 64 passing, to me, is the large domino that allows banking and de-scheduling to finally happen in a matter of time that is then going to open up all of the institutional capital.

See original article on Fortune.com

More from Fortune.com
Palau's President Tommy Remengesau has claimed victory in the Pacific nation's elections but labelled the win "bittersweet" as he defeated his own brother-in-law.

Remengesau scraped home by just 264 votes against his challenger Surangel Whipps, notching 5,124 votes to 4,860 in the November 1 election to win a fourth term.

"I thank you for your support, faith and trust in having me continue to serve you as your president," he said in a statement released late Thursday.

The 60-year-old said the campaign had been the most difficult he had experienced because his opponent is married to his sister.

"Family should not run against a family... it's a bittersweet victory," he told AFP.

"I wish that my brother-in-law and my sister were celebrating the victory with me. Its something nobody should go through, It's been the toughest and most emotional election."

Whipps campaigned on a platform of change, pointing to social problems in the nation of 22,000, which lies about 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) east of the Philippines.

Remengesau argued for stability, saying his policies had helped the economy and boosted tourism to the world-renowned diving destination.
On Nov. 13, 2016, one year will have passed since the terrorist attacks across Paris that left 130 dead and hundreds injured.

Caroline Langlade was in the Bataclan concert venue when terrorists opened fire during an Eagles of Death Metal concert, eventually killing 90 people. Since then, Langlade has devoted her time and energy to Life for Paris, an organization formed in the wake of the terrorist attacks to help victims get the support they need and share their strength and resilience with each other.

This Sunday (Nov. 13), Life for Paris is holding a ceremony to honor the victims and survivors of the tragedy. There will be speeches, a panel discussion about dealing with shock after a traumatic experience, a moment of silence, and musical performances, including a performance from a production of Godspell. You can find out more details about Life for Paris' plans here.

Ahead of the Day of Remembrance, Billboard spoke with Langlade about her work with Life for Paris, finding strength with her fellow survivors and why honoring the one-year anniversary of this tragedy matters. "I hope people never forget us," she says. "It's important for us. It's important for us to be supported by other countries and people around the world so we never feel alone."

Note: This interview was conducted in English, which is not Langlade's first language.

I don't want to make you talk about anything you don't want to, but I did want to ask the basics of your experience in the Bataclan. I understand you were on the balcony when it started?

I was on the balcony, but I don't like to speak about my personal experience. We have hundreds of people in the Bataclan that night, for me my story is not any more important than any other.

It's nearly been a year. Does it feel like that long?

I feel like it was yesterday. I'm a little bit frightened about a lot of things. Like going to cinema or concert, I can't do that again. It's like it's 10 years ago for some people, a lot of people are going out in their lives, so it's very strange. Sometimes I feel like, "Oh my god, it's 100 years ago." When I remember all the things I'm doing [for Life for Paris] I realize it's been a year.

Story continues

Has it helped to talk about it with people in Life for Paris?

Yeah. One thing that's very similar for everyone is we have a lot of white in our memory about this night. So everybody is like one piece of a puzzle and it's very important for us to find each other because we try to make the puzzle [complete], and it's a collective work. So we have to find everybody to be better after. One of the problems with a terrorist attack is you feel really alone after this kind of thing. You have a lot of injuring, you feel very alone with your story. You feel very strange -- you're not in normal society. To be collective is better. When you have one problem like, "I'm a little bit stressed, I can't sleep" and someone can say, "Yeah I have the same and I did this medical or therapy [thing] and it helped me a lot." And you're like "oh, okay." So it's very important to be a group. We have a lot of people who come from other cities or the country or other countries. We try to make a lot of events with all the people who can come. And to help people set up [chapters] in their areas.

Have you returned to Bataclan since then?

We have organized with the victims of Bataclan some visits to give the possibility to come back to Bataclan to try to explain, to find some memories. A lot of people asked to do that. That was my first time going back, but I think to going to Bataclan for concert? Maybe one day, but not today. It's a bit too soon. It's too soon to go back to any concert for me. I can't actually go back.

Do you think you're better now than six months ago?

Oh, I don't know. It's one year ago, I feel like it was yesterday for me. I don't know. I hope one day, and I hope it's very soon, but I really don't know.

Well, you're helping other people, which is very impressive and brave.

It's very difficult for us. We have a lot of work to do about this. Because in France, psychological victims are considered it's like, "Okay, you're frightened, take the pills and go out." No, no, it's a real physical injury because the brain is broken. It's just invisible. We're fighting about this with the French government. I hope they recognize this, actually people are not ready and they don't have good therapy. For me it's a very big fight. I hope we can find solution for the victims. And European victims [who aren't French] don't have any support, that's another fight with the ministry of foreign affairs. We have a lot of meetings with the French government, but it's difficult in France to find a solution, not all of the ministry can work together. We have a lot to do for people, we have a lot of injuring, and I'm the same like everybody. I'm very anxious.

I saw you work with film for your career. Are you doing any of that now?

I make movies, that's my job, but I can't actually [now]. My creativity brain is broken. I can't be creative. It's like it's broken, I have tried but I can't. I don't know why. It's like, I'm blind, but for my brain. I can't be creative. I'm more better with other things. Maybe one day it comes back, I hope. And if it never comes back, it's okay, I can find another life. This is my new life, we have a lot to do for people. In another way, it is creative to find solutions for people and help them to not be enraged, to help them be positive. I hope one day we can build solidarity with humanity. It's a better way to fight the terrorists I think. Maybe I'm like a magic pony, but I think it's a better way. Of course I'm angry, but it's my problem. I'm angry about what is happening, I'm terrified all the day, I feel sad some days, but I try to kick myself in the ass and help people.
Rajeshwari,a film artiste used to honey-trap men and later threaten them to extort money on online dating sites

By Ashish Pandey: Cyberabad Police of Hyderabad arrested a woman, allegedly for extorting money from various persons, after chatting with them on dating websites.

The accused, identified as B Rajeshwari, a 31-year-old film artiste was honey-trapping and cheating people on several online dating and chatting sites, and mobile based apps.

While investigating, police found that on dating sites, Rajeshwari was extorting huge money from the victims and even allegedly uploaded photos and mobile numbers of those who refused to give her money. The incident came to light after a software employee approached the Cyber Crime Police and registered a complaint.



MODUS OPERANDI



The victim had chatted with a woman with profile name 'Cuty' (27) on a dating site last month and further after that had booked four movie tickets for her. He had sent the movie ticket booking id's to the email id of the woman. The police searched for the woman through her Facebook profile and the email id.

advertisement

Also read: Hyderabad: Woman commits suicide as she thought that all her money in home is valueless



On October 28, the woman called the victim and demanded Rs 3500, threatening to post all his family photos on the dating site, if he refuses to do so. The victim, afraid such a situation, gave her Rs 3500 initially but she again called him and demanded another Rs 50,000. The victim who panicked, however, failed to oblige this time and the woman posted all his family photos on two different dating sites with derogatory messages.



INVESTIGATION

Rajeshwari was said to be habitual of creating fake profiles on dating websites and chatting with people and later demanding money. The investigators have found her profile with IDs 'CUTY27', 'VYSHALI33' and 'SMILY31' on dating sites like www.twoo.com, Meet4u & Fast Meet mobile App. Based on the complaint, police registered a case and arrested Rajeshwari on Thursday.

Also read: Hyderabad man takes selfie with noose before committing suicide

--- ENDS ---
Mexico City (AFP) - Mexicans lambasted President Enrique Pena Nieto in August when he hosted Donald Trump despite his slurs against migrants and his vow to build a massive border wall.

Fast forward to November: Trump defeats Democrat Hillary Clinton in the US election and now Pena Nieto's gambit doesn't look so bad after all.

"Crises open opportunities. President Pena, you were right and a visionary," former president Vicente Fox, one of Trump's most strident Mexican critics, tweeted on Wednesday.

That may be a bit of stretch, considering Pena Nieto also extended an invitation to Clinton, who declined.

But analysts say the first meeting, while awkward, enabled them to build a relationship and set the stage for the next get-together, which they plan to have before Trump's inauguration in January.

This time, they could hold more substantive talks on controversial issues such as Trump's demand that Mexico pay billions of dollars for the wall and vow to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

"Maybe he will confirm and say 'yes, there will be a wall and yes you will pay,'" said Jose Antonio Crespo, political expert at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching.

"Or if Trump was not taking all these threats seriously, maybe he will say that 'it was part the campaign, there won't be a wall.'"

- Hasty first meeting -

The first meeting caused a backlash against Pena Nieto, with one poll showing that many saw it as the biggest mistake of his presidency.

They slammed the president for not publically condemning Trump during a joint news conference.

The Republican candidate had infuriated Mexicans by threatening to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and calling them rapists and drug runners.

Analysts said the visit also allowed the New York billionaire to look presidential during a tough moment in his campaign.

Pena Nieto later acknowledged the invitation to be somewhat hasty, saying he had not expected Trump to come or anticipated such public anger.

Story continues

But he always maintained he was right to open a dialogue with the potential next president of the United States.

The ruckus led to the resignation of Pena Nieto's close confidant and finance minister, Luis Videgaray, after it emerged that he had orchestrated the get-together.

"The legacy of Donald Trump's campaign visit to Mexico will continue to be a controversial one," said Christopher Wilson, an expert at the Washington-based Mexico Institute of the Wilson Center think-tank.

"But the alternative explanation that he began a relationship with Donald Trump off to a good start is increasingly compelling given the fact that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States."

There was some discord after the meeting when Trump said the wall had not been discussed and Pena Nieto countered on Twitter that he had told his visitor that he would never pay for it.

Despite that episode, Wilson said, "a visit, the beginnings of a personal relationship, these things are unequivocally positive in the context of a relationship that matters so much to the United States and Mexico."

- 'Friendly' talks -

Pena Nieto has enjoyed a good relationship with President Barack Obama and it remains to be seen if he can find the same chemistry with Trump.

The Mexican leader voiced optimism Wednesday about the "new phase" in relations with Washington, stating that he had a "cordial, friendly and respectful" phone conversation with Trump.

Mexico's economic health -- with $531 billion dollars in two-way trade in goods last year -- is closely tied to the United States, and the government is keen to appease markets after Trump's victory caused the peso to sink to record lows this week.

Fox, who has called Trump "crazy" and dropped the F-bomb saying he wouldn't pay for the wall, put it this way: "Even though (Trump) is not the prettiest gal in the room, we still have to dance with her and find a way to work together."
Hong Kongs colonial past is still alive in the citys courtrooms. There, judges are called my lord or my lady, and barristers stride in black robes and heavy wigs that ripple with thick skeins of horsehair. The scenes connote sobriety, stability, and, for many Hong Kongers, equality before the law  even though they unfold within the Peoples Republic of China, where legal proceedings are cloaked in mystery.

Hong Kong has the only legal system in the world with an independent judiciary that operates within a socialist dictatorship, according to Cora Chan, an associate law professor at the University of Hong Kong. Its been a struggle to balance the odd marriage between Leninist doctrine and Western common law, especially at those moments when the Communist government tips the scales and privileges party preservation over transparency and fairness.

This week saw one such moment. On Nov. 7, Chinas de facto legislature, the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress (NPCSC), intervened in an ongoing Hong Kong court case and effectively banished two newly elected lawmakers who champion the regions independence. Sixtus Baggio Leung and Yao Wai-ching derided the Peoples Republic during their swearing-in ceremony last month, and the citys executive went to court to bar them from retaking their oaths. Before the judge could rule, the Standing Committee issued a rare legal directive on Nov. 7.

The directive effectively imposes a loyalty test on Hong Kong officeholders, and clouds the future not just of Leung and Yao but of two other lawmakers, whose initial vows were deemed invalid. The document could also prevent pro-independence residents from seeking office and muzzle secessionist talk by opposition lawmakers. [The central government] is determined to firmly confront the pro-independence forces without any ambiguity, said Li Fei, the chairman of the Beijing-based committee that oversees Hong Kongs constitution, known as the Basic Law, as he explained the decision. Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung said his government will enact the Beijing doctrine in full.

To advocates of Hong Kongs legal  if not national  independence, this was a death knell. On Nov. 8, Hong Kongs lawyers organized a silent march to protest the NPCSCs decision. Hundreds of lawyers and other residents, dressed in black, quietly walked the citys streets. Three days earlier, a much larger protest over Beijings intrusion drew young Hong Kongers; a few hundred defied police and were pepper-sprayed.

Beijings intervention puts the Hong Kong government in a bind. Using a one-sentence line in Hong Kongs constitution concerning oaths, Beijing expanded the duties of Hong Kong officials and suppressed free speech  a rewriting of city law that violates the established process to amend Hong Kongs constitution.

If Hong Kong follows Beijings directive, as Chief Executive C.Y. Leung has promised, the impact could be enormous. The city would lose at least two lawmakers chosen by popular vote, possibly more, and some legislators critical of the government would be silenced. The directive might also be applied retroactively, legal scholars say, allowing the government to remove more lawmakers whose oaths  or politics  might not match the Beijing line.

Most troubling is that the decision threatens the citys independence and punctures the 50-year firewall, created in 1997, that protects Hong Kongs rights and powers from the authoritarian system to the north in a framework called one country, two systems.

This is the most brutal form of intervention with a judicial interpretation, says Johannes Chan, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong and former faculty dean. Its interfering with the judicial process. Its far worse than any time before  The NPC has no power to make law for Hong Kong, as such. The blow, apart from the fatal blow to the judicial system, is how could anyone have confidence in one country, two systems?

Nineteen years after Britain ceded Hong Kong to Chinese control, many residents are furious with what they consider Beijings encroachments and demands for allegiance. Thousands of people attended a rally in August to support five candidates who were blocked from running for Legislative Council, or Legco, after they voiced support for independence or a referendum on the citys future. Many protested last year after five employees of a publishing house disappeared, believed to have been kidnapped and detained on the mainland. A Chinese legal decision in 2014 promised free elections in Hong Kong, but only for candidates vetted by Beijing. The resulting fury fanned a vast street occupation that lasted nearly three months.

The Basic Law allows China to step in and issue interpretations of law, but legal scholars who have studied the process to draft the constitution with the PRC say that the intent was not to invite blatant interference in Hong Kong local governance. Yet, the NPCSC has tried to break the spirit of the agreement repeatedly since reunification, at least four times prior to this week. Because Hong Kongs constitution permits Chinas legislature to offer its views, Hong Kong cant ignore Beijings legal decrees, Johannes Chan says, but must find ways to work with or around them.

Hong Kong lawyers are now debating how to handle Chinas latest intervention. Hong Kongs government argued in court on Nov. 10 that Chinas directive justified an order to bar Baggio Leung and Yao from office, but lawyers for the dissenting lawmakers, both from the new party Youngspiration, asked that the edict be disregarded.

Other pro-Beijing groups are making use of the Beijing directive. That same day, a member of a taxi drivers group  one which successfully petitioned the court in 2014 to shut down the street occupation  asked the court to reject eight pro-democracy lawmakers because their oaths had been improper by Beijings definition.

The community is still hopelessly split on this, Johannes Chan said about city residents. There are no shortage of people who embrace the NPC interpretation. He noted the advertisements in some newspapers placed by pro-China associations and commerce groups lauding Beijings move. Society is more polarized and this creates more problems than it resolves.

What happens next is now in the hands of the Hong Kong judge presiding over the case. He could dodge the constitutional conundrum, decide that oath-taking is a legislative issue, and kick the problem back to that chamber. That would avoid some problems and create others. The president of Legco, who is considered a Beijing loyalist, would be expected to follow the NPC dictates. They now feel that whenever they interpret the Basic Law they can add whatever they like to it, says Kevin Yam, one of three conveners of the Progressive Lawyers Group. The Legco president will comply. Of course hes going to follow the interpretation, regardless of any legal basis for it  Its one rotten mess, really.

Or, the judge could accept Chinas legal directive and bar the two lawmakers from office. That might require that the courts review the words and actions of every sitting lawmaker, to ensure their oaths were declaimed sincerely and solemnly, as proscribed by Beijing. Ejecting the lawmakers in this way would also neuter the veto power of the legislatures pro-democracy camp, several lawyers said. Whats more, a decision to follow Beijings order would likely invite more interference from Beijing. The possibilities are endless, says Yam. They could interpret Basic Law and vastly expand the scope of executive power under the Basic Law. Alternatively, the judge could accept a less expansive version of Beijings argument, and decide that it applies only to future lawmakers and candidates.

A final option is what Cora Chan calls the nuclear choice. In theory, the court could reject Beijings paper as a nonbonding opinion that exceeds the framework of Hong Kongs constitution.

That would risk the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party.

Theres always this possibility that whatever the courts do, it might antagonize China and China might then issue another interpretation to overrule the courts understanding, she says. One might argue, if you antagonize Beijing, they might take away the entire common law legal system in Hong Kong. Thats a possibility.

There is precedent, though, for Hong Kongs resistance. In 1999, the citys Court of Final Appeal found that Hong Kong judges have the right to reject legislative acts from the NPC or its committee if they are inconsistent with Basic Law. In a 2001 case, Hong Kong judges found that a statement in Beijing interpretation was not binding and had no bearing on common law practice. The courts, the justices wrote, will not on the basis of any extrinsic materials depart from the clear meaning and give the language a meaning which the language cannot bear.

Cora Chan says Hong Kong could test Beijings limits and take a similar approach with the new interpretation; theres always a chance, she says, that Beijing wont intervene further.

In the long run, she says, Hong Kong must consider effective controls  political or legal  on Beijings power over Hong Kong. In Britain, Parliament is checked through elections. Chinas lawmakers arent subject to public choice. Going forward its not going to work, she says. Without effective political controls, we should probably start exploring other sources of control  We just cant have a high position-maker over Hong Kong that is not subject to any limits.

Whether the interpretation shapes the current courts decision or not, the battle over national  or local  loyalties is intense. C.Y. Leung, the citys chief executive, said he will adhere to Beijings repeated request to reintroduce a constitutional security act that would bar treason, secession, sedition and subversion. When the proposed amendment, known as Article 23, was last broached, the broad range of offenses enraged the public. Waves of massive demonstrations in 2003 pushed the government to shelve the bill.

Beijing has no respect for Hong Kongs legal system at all. So its determined to kneecap the judiciary, to kneecap the legislature, and it already has the executive [on its side], says Alvin Cheung, a Hong Kong lawyer and legal scholar at New York University. Then the government could delay having elections to replace the disbarred lawmakers to get whatever legislation they want passed. Then they can run the by-elections then and no one whos remotely sympathetic to democracy would be allowed to run, because theyre all national security threats. Unfortunately, thats all dangerously plausible.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote this election but lost the electoral college votes.

In addition to the protests in many cities across the United States, some Clinton supporters are asking the Electoral College to step in and vote Clinton into the presidency. A Change.org petition with more than 2 million signatures is "calling on the Electors to ignore their states' votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton."

The petition says Donald Trump is "unfit to serve" and "a danger to the Republic" and repeatedly points out that Clinton won the popular vote.

"The only reason Trump 'won' is because of the Electoral College. But the Electoral College can actually give the White House to either candidate," reads the petition, written by Elijah Berg from North Carolina. "So why not use this most undemocratic of our institutions to ensure a democratic result?"

Electors who break their pledge are called "faithless electors." In 26 states and Washington, D.C., electors are required to vote with the popular vote in their state. However, there's no federal law requiring this and electors can choose to change their vote and pay a fine. This is very rare and the chance of faithless electors changing who becomes president this election is highly unlikely.

Before the election, four electors had expressed interest in becoming faithless electors. Two were Democratic electors who had initially supported Sanders and said they would not cast their votes for Clinton, and two were Republicans against Donald Trump. One of the anti-Trump electors has already said he intends to support the president-elect.

In addition to Change.org, MoveOn and GoPetition petitions have called on the Electoral College to match the national popular vote. Ironically, Trump himself once called the Electoral College "a disaster for democracy."

President Obama and Secretary Clinton have both expressed their support of the results and spoken about the need for a peaceful transfer of power.

Read more: Lena Dunham Writes Grieving, Motivational Letter About Hillary Clinton's Loss in Lenny
By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer is to offer its pneumococcal vaccine at the lowest possible price to non-governmental organizations seeking to protect vulnerable people from illness in humanitarian crises. In what it called a major expansion of its humanitarian assistance work, the drugmaker said its Prevenar 13 shot, which protects babies and children against pneumonia and other diseases, would be offered in a new multi-dose vial at the lowest prevailing global price, currently $3.10 per dose. "In addition, given the acute need for aid on the ground, Pfizer will donate all sales proceeds for the first year of this program to humanitarian groups undertaking the difficult work of reaching vulnerable populations in emergency settings," the company said in a statement. The move follows a similar one by the British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, which said in September it would cut the price of its pneumococcal vaccine, Synflorix, to $3.05 when it is used in humanitarian crises. The World Health Organization said last month it was seeking to establish an emergency vaccine supply system aimed at getting vital shots to vulnerable people in crises such as wars or natural disasters. (Editing by Greg Mahlich)
Although some big names like AstraZeneca AZN and Mylan MYL reported Q3 results this week, earnings reports were overshadowed by the run-up to the Presidential election and the surprise win of Donald Trump. In fact, the pharma sector responded favorably to Trumps victory on hopes that there will be fewer drug pricing headwinds considering Trump was not as vocal as Hillary Clinton about rising drug prices and excessive price hikes. Trumps pro-business stand is also expected to benefit the sector. Major pharma companies should gain from Trumps proposed tax plan and proposal to repatriate corporate profits held offshore at a one-time tax rate of 10%.



Recap of the Weeks Most Important Stories



Crestor Generics Hit AstraZeneca Revenues: AstraZenecas third quarter results were mixed with the company beating on earnings but falling short on revenues. In addition to cost management, earnings benefited from a non-recurring inter-government tax agreement as well. Shares were down following the release of Q3 results with sales being impacted by the genericization of Crestor. AstraZeneca also said that it was not likely to seek approval for its experimental immuno-oncology treatment, durvalumab, for second-line head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) based on the phase II HAWK study. The single arm study was initially designed as a potential fast-to-market opportunity for the second line indication but the companys changed plans were based on the recent changes in the HNSCC landscape including the approval of Mercks MRK Keytruda for this patient population. Moreover, durvalumab was placed on partial clinical hold by the FDA in late October for HNSCC.



Valeant Q3 Results Disappoint: Valeant VRX reported disappointing Q3 results missing both earnings and revenue estimates. Valeant also slashed its outlook for 2016 (Read more: Valeant Pharma Q3 Earnings Miss, Slashes Guidance). The company is facing several headwinds apart from the drug pricing issue and ongoing investigations into its pricing policy. Generic competition for some products, soft performance of the dermatology business, a 3-month delay in the FDA action date for brodalumab (severe psoriasis), quality challenges related to manufacturing issues (Valeant got a warning letter for its Rochester, NY site from the FDA), product recalls, and back orders are some of the issues being faced by the company. Moreover, B+L international is facing challenges in Europe due to weakness in Poland and the Middle East, especially Turkey and Egypt. Not surprisingly, earnings estimates for Valeant are seeing downward revisions following the release of Q3 results.



Is Pfizer Contemplating Sale of Consumer Healthcare Unit? According to a Reuters article, Pfizer PFE is considering the sale or spin-off of its consumer health segment for as much as $14 billion. The companys consumer healthcare segment, which brought in sales of $2.5 billion in the first nine months of 2016, is known for products like Advil, Centrum and Chapstick among others.



We remind investors that earlier this year, Pfizer had decided against splitting up its business. However, on the third quarter call on being asked about the consumer business, CEO Read had said that the company evaluates all its businesses and subjects them to tests to see whether they are worth more inside or outside Pfizer.



Meanwhile, Pfizer was also in the news for the EU approval of Ibrance for a specific type of breast cancer. This makes Ibrance the first medicine in a new class of anti-cancer treatments, CDK 4/6 inhibitors, to be approved in Europe and also the first new medicine to be approved for the treatment of women with this particular type of metastatic breast cancer in the first-line setting in almost 10 years. Ibrance is one of the most promising new products in Pfizers portfolio and EU approval was expected considering the CHMP had issued a positive opinion in September. Ibrance sales were $1.5 billion in the first nine months of 2016.



Pfizer is a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



Mylan & Partner Biocon File Herceptin Biosimilar: Mylan, which missed Q3 estimates (Read more: Mylan Q3 Earnings & Revenues Miss on EpiPen Woes), announced the submission of a regulatory application for a biosimilar version of Roches RHHBY Herceptin (trastuzumab) in the U.S. This is Mylans first FDA biosimilar submission, and the company believes it has the potential to be the first to seek approval for a biosimilar version of Herceptin in the U.S.



Bristol-Myers Provides Updates on Opdivo, Signs Deal with Nitto: Bristol-Myers BMY came out with several updates this week. The company gained FDA approval for its immuno-oncology treatment Opdivo for use in head and neck cancer.



Opdivo also met the primary endpoint in a late-stage study for unresectable advanced or recurrent gastric cancer refractory to, or intolerant of, standard therapy. This is good news for the company as Opdivo is the first and only immuno-oncology agent to demonstrate overall survival advantage in this patient population.



The company also announced a 5-year research collaboration with Johns Hopkins University for the identification of mechanisms of response and resistance in patients whose cancer is being treated with checkpoint inhibitor-based immunotherapies, including Opdivo monotherapy, or Opdivo in combination with Yervoy or other investigational immunotherapies.



A clinical trial agreement was also signed with Infinity for Opdivo plus Infinitys IPI-549 in patients with advanced solid tumors.



The company has also signed an exclusive worldwide license agreement with Nitto Denko for the development and commercialization of Nittos investigational siRNA molecules targeting heat shock protein 47 (HSP47) in vitamin A containing formulations. The collaboration includes Nittos lead asset ND-L02-s0201, currently in early-stage development for the treatment of advanced liver fibrosis.



The agreement will see Bristol-Myers shelling out $100 million upfront and making subsequent payments in the form of clinical and regulatory milestone payments, royalties, sales based milestone payments as well as option exercise payments for lung and other organ fibrosis. This deal once again shows pharmas interest in developing treatments for fibrotic diseases and to develop therapies for patients living with advanced non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and cirrhosis due to NASH.



Performance

Story continues

Large Cap Pharmaceuticals Industry Price Index

Large Cap Pharmaceuticals Industry Price Index

The NYSE ARCA Pharmaceutical Index recorded a gain of 7.6% over the last five trading days reflecting a positive response to Trumps win. Moreover, Proposition 61, Californias ballot measure to ensure that the State of California is able to negotiate with drug companies for drug prices that do not exceed the price paid for the same drugs by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot down by voters.



Among major pharma stocks, both Pfizer and Bristol-Myers shot up more than 12% while AstraZeneca was down slightly on Q3 results. Over the last six months, Bristol-Myers declined 20.8% while Merck was up 18.8% (See the last pharma stock roundup here: Pfizer, Allergan Q3 Results Fall Short, Insulin Drugmakers under Pricing Pressure).



What's Next in the Pharma World?



Companies like Bristol-Myers will be showcasing data at the annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and the Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals (ARHP) in the coming days. Bristol-Myers will also be presenting data along with Pfizer on Eliquis at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2016.



Now See Our Private Investment Ideas



While the above ideas are being shared with the public, other trades are hidden from everyone but selected members. Would you like to peek behind the curtain and view them? Starting today, for the next month, you can follow all Zacks' private buys and sells in real time from value to momentum . . . from stocks under $10 to ETF and option moves . . . from insider trades to companies that are about to report positive earnings surprises (we've called them with 80%+ accuracy). You can even look inside portfolios so exclusive that they are normally closed to new investors. Click here for Zacks' secret trades >>



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



ROCHE HLDG LTD (RHHBY): Free Stock Analysis Report



ASTRAZENECA PLC (AZN): Free Stock Analysis Report



BRISTOL-MYERS (BMY): Free Stock Analysis Report



PFIZER INC (PFE): Free Stock Analysis Report



MERCK & CO INC (MRK): Free Stock Analysis Report



MYLAN NV (MYL): Free Stock Analysis Report



VALEANT PHARMA (VRX): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
Upon hearing A Tribe Called Quest's We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your Service for the first time, on Wednesday night in New York (Nov. 9), the mother of the late MC Malik "Phife Dawg" Taylor called the hip-hop group's final album "hot."

"I loved my baby boy's genius sound on it," Cheryl Boyce-Taylor told Billboard following the private listening party. "It sounded like the original history-making Tribe sound with a 2016 updated pulse."

Released on Friday (Nov. 11), We Got It From Here is the first album from the original lineup -- Phife, Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White -- in more than a quarter century. Its release marks a bittersweet closure for the group, heavier in its poignancy given their scheduled Saturday Night Live set on Nov. 12. It will be Tribe's first performance without Phife, who died in March from kidney failure and diabetes complications.

"I'm so nervous because he's not going to be there," she says of the performance. "In a way, I don't want to go to Saturday Night Live, but this is part of my journey as his mother. My heart is hurting. These last eight months since he passed away, I've been walking with joy and sorrow, side-by-side. I was the kind of mother that went on tour with him sometimes. I was always at his shows so this is going to be so difficult for me."

The so-called 5 Foot Assassin was a Type 1 diabetic, born premature in Jamaica, Queens in 1970, and his twin brother, Mikal, survived only eight hours. Phife's kidneys were half the size they should have been, and he spent his first three months in the hospital. Diabetes struck during his first tour with Tribe in 1990; self-care dialysis four times a day became part of his routine between shows.

Though Phife was seventh on an eligibility list for a kidney transplant last year, his health had been improving, Boyce-Taylor says, calling his death "a shock." (His wife, Deisha Taylor, had donated a kidney years before.)

Story continues

Boyce-Taylor visited her son for the last time on March 3, in Edgewater, New Jersey, while Phife was in town working on the album. It was 19 days before he died at his home in California. "He was completely ecstatic that day," she recalls. "We just talked rapidly about all that was going on in our lives. I was engaged, and planning a ceremony and reception with my partner of 20 years, Ceni. He was very excited for me."

We haven't heard the last music from Phife Dawg -- a second solo record is expected next year -- and next Saturday in his native Queens, his name will officially mark a section of that iconic piece of Tribe geography: Linden Boulevard. A section of it will be renamed Malik "Phife Dawg" Taylor Way, near his longtime home at 192nd Street, a day before what would have been his 46th birthday.

"He was my teacher, so I don't really know what I'm doing in the world without him. I don't know how to proceed without him," Boyce-Taylor says. "He lived the most magical life, and that is what comforts me the most."

Celebrate Phife Dawg's memory with ATCQ's We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service via Spotify below.
MANILA, Nov 11 (Reuters) - The Philippines' anti-graft agency has initiated an inquiry into whether the police chief broke the law by visiting the United States last week to watch boxer Manny Pacquiao's WBO welterweight victory, a spokeswoman said on Friday. Roland dela Rosa, a high-profile figure in the Philippines and a close ally of President Rodrigo Duterte, could face criminal and administrative action if the ombudsman found sufficient evidence to show the Las Vegas trip with his family was not from his own pocket. "The ombudsman has ordered a fact-finding investigation on the alleged travel perks received by the national police chief," spokeswoman Mary Rawnsle Lopez told reporters. She said dela Rosa may have violated a code of conduct and ethical standards for public officials and employees. If found guilty, he faces five years in jail or a fine not exceeding 5,000 pesos (about $100) or both. Dela Rosa, who said he was a friend of Pacquiao, said he had yet to be notified of any investigation. "Did I commit a sin?" dela Rosa told reporters on Friday "What's important is, it was not stolen money. Okay, then investigate me." The inquiry was triggered by dela Rosa's admission that he and his family were offered a free trip to Las Vegas to watch Pacquiao, a national icon and senator, beat American Jessie Vargas on Saturday. (Reporting By Manuel Mogato; Editing by Martin Petty)
Valerie Sagun is showing the world that any body can do amazing things, regardless of its size.

Sagun, known as Big Gal Yoga on social media, is a plus-sized yoga guru who uses her practice to encourage body positivity and acceptance.

Read: Airplane Pose: Meet the Woman Who Does Yoga Aboard Plane at 30,000 Feet

Her passion for yoga began five years ago when she was just a student at San Jose State University in California. Last January, she became a certified instructor.

According to Sagun, her practice is about remaining calm both mentally and physically through yoga.

"For myself, I use yoga as a way to calm my crazy mind, Sagun told InsideEdition.com. I struggle with anxiety and depression, so it calms me and makes me look at things in a positive way.

Not only does Sagun want to inspire others but she also wants others to believe that those with larger body types can do great things.

Unfortunately, yoga is not perceived as a practice for all bodies, said Sagun. There is a stigma; people judge others for the simple fact that they may not be as small or as thin.

Sagun, who is featured in a video by Hooplaha, said the responses she has received both online and in person have all been positive.

Read: Pregnant Fitness Guru Claims Baby Bump Video Got Her Kicked Off Instagram: 'I Was Outraged'

The inspiring instructor has more than 100,000 Instagram followers and 10,000 likes on her Facebook page.

People have seen me use yoga as a way to find a peace of mind, and people want that for themselves, said Sagun.

Sagun said she doesnt want anyone to feel scared or intimated when learning yoga from someone whose appearance doesnt mirror their own.

She is currently working on a new how-to book with her signature title Big Gal Yoga, teaching others about the importance of the exercises and different positions that are comfortable for all body types.

Story continues

People with big bodies can do great things and dont get enough credit, Sagun said. They have so much power.

Watch: People Doing Yoga Poses With Goats on Their Back

Related Articles:
MANDAN, N.D., Nov 11 (Reuters) - Police confronted protesters at a Dakota Access Pipeline construction site on Friday, after the same protesters said they halted construction equipment on the line.

Smoke was seen emanating from a large excavation vehicle and protesters had also climbed into other equipment, according to a Reuters witness. Two construction workers on the line were seen leaving the scene.

The Dakota Access Pipeline, set to run from North Dakota to Illinois, was delayed in September by federal authorities to re-review permitting under a federally owned water source near sacred tribal lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Energy Transfer Partners, which owns the line, was not immediately available for comment. They said Thursday that they expected a ruling from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "anytime" now.

(Reporting By Stephanie Keith in Mandan, North Dakota; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
By PTI: From Sajjad Hussain

Islamabad, Nov 11 (PTI) Pakistan today briefed Head of Missions of P5 countries on the alleged Indian aggression on the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, saying the use of "heavy weaponry" by the Indian Army threatens peace and stability and may lead to a "strategic miscalculation".

Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry provided details to the ambassadors of China, France, Russian, UK and USA, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, about unprovoked firing and ceasefire violations by the "Indian occupation Forces" in the past two months, the Foreign Office (FO) said.

advertisement

Chaudhry expressed grave concern over the increased frequency and duration of indiscriminate firing from the Indian side, deliberate targeting of villages and civilian populated areas, resulting in the death of 26 civilians and injuring 107 others, said FO.

The Foreign Secretary also alleged that the Indian side was resorting to such heavy weaponry use after a gap of 13 years.

"Pakistan has been compelled to respond but with maximum restraint. The Armed Forces of Pakistan gave a befitting response," FO quoted Chaudhry as saying.

He expressed apprehension that Indian actions, which constituted a threat for the maintenance of peace and security, may lead to a "strategic miscalculation".

He said India was also not cooperating with the United Nations Military Observers Group (UNMOGIP).

The Heads of Missions assured that they would convey Pakistans concern to their respective capitals, the FO statement said. PTI SH SUA AKJ SUA

--- ENDS ---
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f281658%2ffb34ab561a3f49fa9bcb69a0a0b8a441

At some point, you've probably had difficulty explaining modern music to your parents. But it's even worst when they try and explain it back to you.

Australian Liberal politician Luke Howarth was the lame dad nobody wants to talk about rap with Thursday, when he went to an little Tupac Shakur rant.

Howarth was talking about increasing employment among young people, when he regailed the gallery with a strange segue about wearing rapper merchandise.

"I had a guy came in a while back and he said 'Have you got a job for me?' And he was wearing a 2Pac shirt. I don't know if you know who 2Pac is, but he's a deceased rapper."

SEE ALSO: Tupac and Biggie murders coming to TV from 'The People vs. O.J.' director

A "deceased rapper" you say?

Not one of the greatest hip hop artists to ever grace the microphone? Not the Shakespeare of the West Coast? Civil rights activist and pure genius?

Surely listening to All Eyez On Me would change his mind.

A Liberal MP just flipped the bird during debate on the youth internship bill, explaining what "Tupac" is. "A deceased rapper" #auspol pic.twitter.com/j7HDcquClL  Rashida Yosufzai (@Rashidajourno) November 10, 2016

Apparently, showing your love for 2Pac is great way to ensure you stay unemployed according to Howarth.

"He was about to walk out the door and I grabbed him. I took him out the back and gave him a bit of advice ... said if he's looking for work it's probably not a good way to turn up with a 2Pac shirt with the middle finger up," Howarth said  giving his fellow politicians the finger to demonstrate what insolence looks like.

Thanks for the advice dad, but I'd rather be drinking Hennessy with Tupac.

[H/T Pedestrian.TV]
From Cosmopolitan

In a cordial beginning to their transfer of power, President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump met at the White House Thursday. Obama called the 90-minute meeting "excellent," and his successor said he looked forward to receiving the outgoing president's "counsel."

Afterward, Obama said to Trump, "We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, the country succeeds."

The two men, who have been harshly critical of each other for years, were meeting for the first time, Trump said. The Republican said he looked forward "to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel."

Obama blasted Trump throughout the campaign as unfit to serve as a commander-in-chief. Trump spent years challenging the legitimacy of Obama's presidency, falsely suggesting Obama may have been born outside the United States.



But at least publicly, the two men appeared to put aside their animosity. As the meeting concluded and journalists scrambled out of the Oval Office, Obama smiled at his successor and explained the unfolding scene. Trump called Obama a "very good man," according to CNN.

If Trump makes good on his campaign promises, he'll wipe away much of what Obama has done during his eight years in office. The Republican president-elect, who will govern with Congress fully under GOP control, has vowed to repeal Obama's signature health-care law and dismantle the landmark nuclear accord with Iran.

First lady Michelle Obama also meet privately in the White House residence with Trump's wife, Melania, while Vice President Joe Biden prepared to see Vice President-elect Mike Pence later Thursday.

Trump's Trip to Washington

Trump traveled to Washington from New York on his private jet, breaking with protocol by not bringing journalists in his motorcade or on his plane to document his historic visit to the White House. Trump was harshly critical of the media during his campaign and for a time banned news organizations whose coverage he disliked from his events.

Story continues

Also on Trump's schedule were meetings with House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to discuss the GOP legislative agenda. Ryan, who holds the most powerful post in Congress, was a sometime critic of Trump, was slow to endorse him, and did not campaign with the nominee. Pence intended to join both meetings.

As scores of journalists waited to be admitted to the Oval Office to see Obama and Trump together, they saw White House chief of staff Denis McDonough walking along the South Lawn driveway with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. A handful of Trump aides trailed them.

WH Chief of Staff @Denis44 walking down Colonnade with Trump son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushmer. (Pool photo by @IsaacDovere) pic.twitter.com/kziQIH3JZ7 - Mark Knoller (@markknoller) November 10, 2016

The anticipated show of civility at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. contrasted with post-election scenes of protests across a politically divided country. Demonstrators from New England to the heartland and the West Coast vented against the election winner on Wednesday, chanting "Not my president," burning a papier-mache Trump head, beating a Trump pinata, and carrying signs that said "Impeach Trump."



Republicans were emboldened by Trump's stunning victory over Hillary Clinton, giving the GOP control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

"He just earned a mandate," Ryan said.

In an emotional concession speech, Clinton said her crushing loss was "painful and it will be for a long time," and acknowledged that the nation was "more divided than we thought."

Still, Clinton was gracious in defeat, declaring, "Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead."

It's unclear whether Trump will embrace many of the traditions of the presidency. He'll enter the White House owning his own private jet as well as a hotel just blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue.



You Might Also Like
President Barack Obama delivered his final Veterans Day address while in office on Friday, thanking all 18.8 million veterans in the U.S. for their service. His remarks were short and direct, lasting no more than 15 minutes, but his message was meant to reach far beyond the ears of those who served.

In the wake of the remarkable 2016 presidential election, in which businessman Donald Trump emerged as the nations future commander-in-chiefa man who insulted a Gold Star family along with veteran and former prisoner of war Sen. John McCainPresident Obama called for unity and understanding in his Friday morning address.

As we search for ways to come togethersome of our best examples are the men and women we salute on Veterans Day, he said. Whenever the world makes you cynical; whenever you seek true humility, and true selflessnesslook to a veteran.

Our nations veterans, he said, are the embodiment of courage and selflessness and are deserving of not only our thanks but our support. The president remarked on the efforts his administration undertook to cut veteran homelessness, increase jobs for vets, and improve veteran health care despite the intense backlogs at Veterans hospitals that roiled the administration.

The president praised the U.S. military as the single most diverse institution in our country and urged Americans to tap into the spirit of commonality that defines the armed forces as the country moves forward.

We can show how much we love our country by loving our neighbors as ourselves, he said.
Nov 11 (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

Rio Tinto Plc reported itself to the Serious Fraud Office over a $10.5 million "consultancy payment" after it was confronted by a news website, despite having been aware of the issue for more than two months. http://bit.ly/2fGe2oe

Broadcaster ITV Plc is forecasting a 7 per cent year-on-year drop in fourth-quarter advertising revenues owing to caution from advertisers amid an uncertain political climate.

The Guardian

Amazon.com Inc is to extend its Black Friday promotion to almost two weeks as retailers gear up for the biggest shopping day of the year. Billions of pounds is expected to be spent by shoppers over the Black Friday weekend, starting 25 November, and over the 12 days in the run-up to it. http://bit.ly/2fGnQyL

The Pensions Regulator is seeking millions of pounds from Dominic Chappell and Retail Acquisitions in relation to the 571 million pounds deficit in the BHS pension scheme. http://bit.ly/2fGhlvJ

The Telegraph

Deloitte has been hit by a record 4 million pound fine and must pay at least 2.3 million pounds in costs after the accountancy watchdog found that misconduct by the "Big Four" firm led to a now-collapsed aircraft parts wholesaler giving misleading financial information to investors. http://bit.ly/2fGo2Ov

Johnston Press Plc, the publisher of the i newspaper, has reported a further deterioration in sales and a "heavy Brexit effect" as it battles debts and pressure from shareholders. http://bit.ly/2fGnB6E

Sky News

Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JP Morgan, met the Chancellor in Downing Street on Thursday, months after warning that Brexit could force him to move up to 4,000 jobs out of the UK. http://bit.ly/2fhFKt9

The Independent

The makers of multicoloured puzzle Rubik's Cube, have lost a key trademark battle after the European court of Justice (ECJ) said the toy's shape alone was not sufficient to grant it protection against copycats. http://ind.pn/2fGjp76

Chief executives of more than 1,100 US companies, including Coca-Cola, Boeing and Pfizer have written an open letter to President-elect, Donald Trump urging him to end his divisive campaign rhetoric. http://ind.pn/2fGgHhQ

(Compiled by Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Nov 11 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories in the Wall Street Journal. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

- Donald Trump's transition team raced to form his cabinet on Thursday as more names were floated for some of the biggest jobs in the U.S. president-elect's administration. http://on.wsj.com/2fGZbZh

- The Dow industrials climbed to a record and bond yields rose around the world for a second day, as investors applauded the prospects of expansive fiscal spending under a Trump administration. http://on.wsj.com/2fGLwFj

- The election of Donald Trump throws into doubt longtime fixtures of America's foreign policy and military posture, raising the stakes across the globe for the coming transition from one commander-in-chief to another. http://on.wsj.com/2fAwgr6

- Pollsters are rethinking how they operate after a string of astonishing misses around the globe this year-from incorrectly calling the Brexit vote in the U.K., the peace accord with rebels in Colombia and now the U.S. presidential election. http://on.wsj.com/2eGjOnC

- Wells Fargo & Co Chief Executive Timothy Sloan said during a town-hall meeting Thursday that the bank found "some instances" where reports by employees of bad behavior to its ethics line weren't handled appropriately, according to remarks reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. This follows allegations that some employees faced retaliation for reporting issues that later came to light as part of its sales-practices scandal. http://on.wsj.com/2fphx1G

- A Carlyle Group LP hedge fund has lost the $400 million it invested last year in a Moroccan oil-refinery deal, according to a securities filing and people familiar with the matter. http://on.wsj.com/2g1FWxF

- CME Group Inc Chief Executive Phupinder Gill, who has pushed the world's largest futures-exchange operator into new markets in Europe and Asia since assuming the job in 2012, intends to retire on Dec. 31. http://on.wsj.com/2fphuTg

- Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday fought back against accusations that the social network harmed political discourse this year by allowing fake news to flourish on the platform. http://on.wsj.com/2eH8hUY (Compiled by Aurindom Mukherjee in Bengaluru)
Nov 11 (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.

- President-elect Donald Trump has called human-caused climate change a "hoax." He has vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency "in almost every form." http://nyti.ms/2fidtTh

- Thousands of security forces were deployed on Thursday to keep the peace at India's banks, where crowds of people had formed lines in the early morning in a desperate attempt to change now-useless currency notes. http://nyti.ms/2fidp62

- For the second time in three months, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has forged a deal with developers and union construction officials to revive a program designed to create apartments for poor and working class in the city. http://nyti.ms/2fidaaR

- U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama met for a 90-minute discussion in the Oval Office. http://nyti.ms/2fibI8t

- The surprising outcome of the U.S. election and the political chaos that it has triggered is proving to be a boon for Washington's lobbyists. http://nyti.ms/2fievPd

- In the republican establishment, Trump's opponents are gradually warming up to the idea of his upcmoming presidency. http://nyti.ms/2fieJG2

- A key trend in Tuesday's election stands out; myriad women - 53 percent of all white female voters - voted for Donald Trump. http://nyti.ms/2fid3fA

- Colorado-based Dixie Brands is hoping to navigate complex laws in multiple states to sell its marijuana-infused edibles. http://nyti.ms/2fig4wf (Compiled by Gaurika Juneja in Bengaluru)
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / November 10, 2016 / Prophecy Development Corp. ("Prophecy" or the "Company") (TSX:PCY, OTC:PRPCD, Frankfurt:1P2N) is pleased to report that Bolivia's Minister of Mining and Metallurgy, Cesar Navarro, met with Prophecy and representatives from other international mining companies operating in Bolivia on November 9, to coordinate and prepare for the Minister's upcoming participation at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention to be held in Toronto, Canada from March 5-8, 2017.

Minister Navarro stated: "Both, public and private mining sectors will try to attract foreign investment disclosing and sharing their experience with investors from several parts of the world."

The other participants of the meeting were: the Presidents of Sinchi Wayra S.A. (Glencore Plc) and Manquiri S.A. (Coeur Mining Inc.), plus representatives from Empresa Minera San Cristobal (Sumitomo Corp.), Pan American Silver Corp., Empresa Minera Paititi (Orvana Minerals Corp.) and Organismo Latinoamericano de Mineria (OLAMI).

This gathering follows Prophecy's meeting with Minister Navarro in La Paz on October 9, which was facilitated by the Embassy of Canada in Bolivia. During that meeting, Minister Navarro stated that "the aim of the recent mining regulation is to support the investors and ensure the inclusion of cooperative labour in their projects."

Highlights and photos of both meetings can be accessed at: http://www.mineria.gob.bo/ and www.prophecydev.com.

The Company also announces that John Lee, of Suite 1301, 12 Harcourt Road, Central, Hong Kong, Executive Chairman of the Company, acquired 11,200 shares of Prophecy (the "Acquisition") through trading in the secondary market (i.e. the Toronto Stock Exchange) today.

Prior to the Acquisition, Mr. Lee beneficially owned 1,087,853 shares, representing approximately 22.85% of the issued and outstanding shares of the Company.

As a result of the Acquisition, Mr. Lee now beneficially owns and exercises control over an aggregate of 1,099,053 shares representing an interest of approximately 23.09% of the Company's currently issued and outstanding shares, and 34.80% of the Company's shares on a fully diluted basis assuming exercise of all of the Company's outstanding share purchase warrants.

Story continues

The securities were acquired by Mr. Lee for investment purposes only, and not for purposes of exercising control or direction over the Company.

Generally, Mr. Lee intends to evaluate his investment in the Company and to increase or decrease his shareholdings as circumstances require, depending on market conditions and other factors, through market transactions, private agreements or otherwise.

The information contained in this news release has been provided by Mr. Lee and the Company is not responsible for its accuracy.

A copy of the early warning report pursuant to National Instrument 62-103 required to be filed with the applicable securities commissions in connection with the acquisition of the shares described in this news release will be available for viewing under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. A copy of the early warning report can also be obtained from the contact number for Investor Relations below.

About Prophecy



Prophecy Development Corp. is a Canadian public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that is engaged in developing mining and energy projects in Mongolia, Bolivia and Canada. Further information on Prophecy can be found at www.prophecydev.com.

PROPHECY DEVELOPMENT CORP.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"JOHN LEE"

Executive Chairman

For more information about Prophecy, please contact Investor Relations:

+1.888.513.6286

ir@prophecydev.com

www.prophecydev.com

Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this news release, including statements which may contain words such as "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "plans", "believes", "estimates", or similar expressions, and statements related to matters which are not historical facts, are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations regarding Prophecy's future growth, results of operations, performance, business prospects and opportunities, are based on certain factors and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

These factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on the Prophecy's forward-looking statements. Prophecy believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements contained in this news release and the documents incorporated by reference herein are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. In addition, although Prophecy has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Prophecy undertakes no obligation to release publicly any future revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as expressly required by law.

SOURCE: Prophecy Development Corp.
By PTI: From Shirih B Pradhan

Kathmandu, Nov 11 (PTI) Indian Army chief Gen. Dalbir Singh Suhag arrived here today for a three-day official visit to Nepal and held bilateral talks with his counterpart Gen. Rajendra Chhetri on a range of security issues.

Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Gen. Singh met Gen. Chhetri at Nepal Army headquarters and the two chiefs discussed a wide range of military and security issues and various issues of bilateral interests, the Nepal Army said in a statement.

advertisement

Later in the evening, Gen. Singh will pay a courtesy call on President Bidya Devi Bhandari and will also attend a cultural programme being organised by Nepal Army Spouses Association.

Tomorrow, he will pay a courtesy call on Prime Minister Pushpakamal Dahal " Prachanda".

He will also visit Rupandehi district in western Nepal, where he will observe "Surya Kiran", the joint military exercise being held between Nepal Army and Indian Army, the statement said.

"Such kinds of high-level visits paid by Indian Army officials to Nepal from time to time, will further deepen bilateral relations between the two armies and expand areas of cooperation between them," it said.

The visit assumes significance as it came just days after the visit of President Pranab Mukherjee to Nepal last week. PTI SBP SUA AKJ SUA

--- ENDS ---
Yoko Ono's five unapologetically noisy, quietly influential albums released between 1968 and 1971 (two solo, three with John Lennon) are some of the most misunderstood and maligned in rock history. Rolling Stone's own Lester Bangs called the first two Ono/Lennon albums, "the ego-trips of two rich waifs adrift in the musical revolutions of the Sixties  Dilettante garbage, simply." A seasoned noisenik, Bangs' assertion was not totally incorrect; but Ono and Lennon's late night home-studio freak-outs and cassette-tape confessionals shouldn't be judged against John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen's freewheeling (but ultimately notated) clatter, nor the jazz-trained cosmic chaos of Musica Elettronica Viva, AMM or Spontaneous Music Ensemble.

Instead, Ono and Lennon's first two records together, Unfinished Music No. 1 and 2, were impulsive and pure. They were occasionally brilliant, occasionally idiotic and always honest  just like the best rock music. Those records and the rest of Ono's output would provide a crucial link between the bleeding edge of 20th Century Composition (she ran in the same circles as Cage, Morton Feldman and La Monte Young in the mid-Sixties) and the primitive forms of expression that would one day be called "punk rock." Rendering the tortured voices and tortured guitars of American rock & roll as an expressionist blurt, Ono and Lennon weren't academics, but travelers who stumbled across some of the same sounds and freedoms in the late Sixties as Cromagnon did in New York, Red Krayola did in Texas, Nihilist Spasm Band did in Canada and Amon Duul II did in Munich. Released by a major label and co-starring a Beatle, these records would be some of the most famous experimental art statements of generation.



Taking proper stock of her influence, Secretly Canadian and Chimera are remastering and reissuing 11 albums Ono recorded between 1968 and 1985. Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins is probably the most famous work to bear the Ono name, thanks to the iconic frontal-nude cover. The album itself is part diary, part jam session; a raw document of a night the pair spent goofing around and falling in love while Lennon's wife was out of town. The sizzling distortion and stretched audio bring to mind the tape music experiments of years past by more conservatory-centric artists like Pierre Schaeffer or Robert Ashley, but it's far more free, playful and silly  the "wop bop a lu bop" of making hideous racket. Vol. 1 is the first-ever released recordings of Ono's iconic screeching, ululating and emotional yowling and, in turn, it's not nearly as controlled as the wail it would evolve into. Ultimately Ono's voice is just part of the chaos instead of its defining element. The tornado it inhabits is a nauseous, blown-out piece of musique concrete where whistles and drunken barroom piano fight for attention over ringing noise, drones and tape loops. "Performing" for the couple means laughs and swears and jokes and, as an especially Cage-ian twist, just playing someone else's records. By accident or design, lots of the American cassette tape noise underground of the Eighties, Nineties and today would sound like variations of Two Virgins; there's a lot for fans of Wolf Eyes or Oneohtrix Point Never to enjoy. The reissue appends the LP with a gorgeous coda, Ono's tender, fragile proto-twee ballad "Remember Love." Served as the less famous B-side to "Give Peace a Chance," it probably hit more ears than the Velvet Underground's similar "After Hours."



Story continues

John and Yoko's second LP-length collaboration, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions, would tether the proceedings to what listeners generally understood as "rock music." Opening with a screeching, live 26-minute suite that's mostly Ono's spiraling onomatopoeia and Lennon's colorful flower bursts of guitar feedback, it's Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix as Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, an improvisation that takes the harshest tones of the psychedelic era and turns them into free convulsions. Ono's voice is leagues more assured from the opening squeal, defining itself more as a instrument ready for center stage, especially in the heaving, percussive parts. In turn, this blast would pave a way for the tantrums of Sonic Youth and Boredoms; the throat gymnastics of Mike Patton, Meredith Monk and Tanya Tagaq; and the deconstructed guitar torture of Glenn Branca and Sunn O))). Entire swaths of violent yet lighthearted avant-rock starts right here. The reissue features "Mulberry," an eight-minute acoustic WWII reflection with a similarly strangled sound.

The other half of Vol. 2 was recorded in a London hospital where, during Ono's stay, she would miscarry what would have been the couple's first child together. The conceptual, field recording of the hospital room allows the two celebrities to expose themselves well beyond showing their skin on an album cover. Rolling Stone called it "utter bullshit and perhaps in poor taste," but now we can see that it was prescient. In the pre-social media age, this was reality-show audio theater starring a wildly famous couple in their most private, heartbreaking moment. John and Yoko chant news stories about themselves like Gregorian monks, they play a recording of John Ono Lennon II's actual heartbeat and then allow for "Two Minutes Silence." This diaristic exploration closes with 12 mundane minutes of a telephone call, some flipping of the newspaper and some twisting with a radio dial. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da  is this how life goes on after tragedy?

After John and Yoko released their third experiment, 1969's indulgent Wedding Album, Ono released her first solo effort, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, at the end of 1970. Here is where Ono jumps fully from art icon to musical maverick with a sound that would be attempted, mutated and covered, but never duplicated. "Why?" "Touch Me" and R-rated dissonance-funk B-side "Open Your Box" should earn Ono a place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for single-handedly wiring the post-punk and no wave engines more than half a decade early. Sure, Ono wasn't the first rock musician to fuse rock with freaky goo-goo muckin' noise freak-outs  by 1970 the Velvets, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Pink Floyd were in full interstellar overdrive  but no one had done it with such propulsion, allowing chaos to live comfortably next to body music. With no choruses, searing outsider-style guitar, vein-popping vocal performances and hypnotic grooves, you can hear entire chunks of the class of 1979 being forged: the Slits, Public Image Limited, Gang of Four, James Chance & the Contortions, Liliput, the Raincoats, the Fall, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and, most importantly, the B-52s' "Rock Lobster."

Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band is a true showcase of Ono's voice as both jazz instrument and pop boundary-destroyer, the artist creating a dynamic pastiche of German opera, Tibetan throat singing, the voice-straining kabuki style of hetai and that ol' time rock & roll. Ono embarks on throaty aggro-scatting, swooning glide, moaning and deep breathing over blues-rock groove, dubby effects and an especially responsive collaboration with free-jazz architect Ornette Coleman. Previously released bonus track "The South Wind" includes Ono over 16 minutes of primitive acoustic guitar bending from Lennon. Like an expressive, emotionally rich version of the krautrock being forged a few miles west, the 41 minutes of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band joined minimalism, jazz, garage rock and free improvisation for something that funked and frazzled  and its importance should not be understated.

Related Content:
On Nov 11, Zacks Investment Research updated the research report on industrial goods manufacturer Regal Beloit Corporation RBC.



Headquartered in Beloit, WI, Regal Beloit is a leading manufacturer of electrical and mechanical motion control products. The company offers a wide array of stock model and customized electric motors, blowers, electric generators, transfer switches, switchgear, valves, gearboxes, power generation components and controls. Regal Beloit has manufacturing, sales and service facilities throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia. The company markets its products to a diversified customer base across the globe including OEMs, distributors and end users.



Q3 Earnings Beat But Sales Miss



Regal Beloit reported lackluster third-quarter 2016 results with a significant year-over-year decline in net sales and earnings owing to macroeconomic woes. On a GAAP basis, the company reported a net income of $59.6 million or $1.32 per share compared with $63.4 million or $1.41 per share in the year-earlier quarter. The year-over-year decline in GAAP earnings was primarily due to lower revenues.



Adjusted earnings for the quarter were $1.31 per share compared with $1.43 per share in the year-ago quarter. Although adjusted earnings declined significantly year over year, it beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.26.



Net sales fell to $809.6 million from $882.3 million in the year-earlier quarter owing to depressed oil & gas markets, adverse foreign currency translation and an adverse impact from divestitures. Quarterly revenues missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $829 million.



Narrowed Guidance



Regal Beloits third-quarter results were severely impacted by the fragilities in the oil & gas sector and the overall industrial end markets. The company expects its sales to be affected by the continued weakness in industrial markets. Regal Beloit trimmed its guidance for 2016 and currently anticipates adjusted earnings per share in the range of $4.40$4.50 per share, compared with the earlier projection of $4.35$4.55. GAAP earnings are expected to be within $4.45$4.55 per share. Regal Beloit continues to focus on simplification initiatives to lower operating costs and improve margins in the future.



Moving Forward



Electric motor manufacturing is a highly competitive and fragmented industry. With intensifying competition, Regal Beloit is witnessing a decline in its product prices, which is denting its overall margin. Moreover, the company has to continually invest heavily in R&D to introduce newer value-added products to cushion itself from competition. All these limit the companys profitability to some extent.



Regal Beloit also faces increased concentration risks as a significant amount of its revenue is obtained from a handful of customers. Loss of any of these customers could adversely impact the companys top line.



Nevertheless, Regal Beloit continues to focus on prudent investment decisions for disciplined capital allocation, strong and flexible balance sheet position and cash flow enhancement to support dividend growth. We believe that such moves along with its robust operating platform and an efficient management team will help in the execution of its strategic priorities and drive net asset value and dividend growth in the future.



Other Stocks to Consider



Regal Beloit presently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the industry include II-VI Incorporated IIVI, AO Smith Corp. AOS and Danaher Corp. DHR, each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



II-VI Incorporated is currently trading at a forward P/E of 26.5x and has beaten estimates in each of the trailing four quarters for an average earnings surprise of 39.8%.



AO Smith has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 10.7% and is currently trading at a forward P/E of 25.9x.



Danaher has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 11.8% and is currently trading at a forward P/E of 22.4x.



Zacks' Top Investment Ideas for Long-Term Profit



How would you like to see our best recommendations to help you find todays most promising long-term stocks? Starting now, you can look inside our portfolios featuring stocks under $10, income stocks, value investments and more. These picks, which have double and triple-digit profit potential, are rarely available to the public. But you can see them now. Click here >>



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



DANAHER CORP (DHR): Free Stock Analysis Report



II-VI INCORP (IIVI): Free Stock Analysis Report



SMITH (AO) CORP (AOS): Free Stock Analysis Report



REGAL BELOIT (RBC): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research
Rome (AFP) - Donald Trump's election has been good news for Italy's comedians.

Just when it seemed that ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi had become too irrelevant to poke fun at, another gaffe-prone leader with bizarre hair and orange skin has popped up.

And Italians are enjoying a laugh -- sort of -- about the similarities between the two business billionaires turned masters of populist politics.

"Americans, you've elected Donald Trump: Welcome to the Berlusconi experience," was how Naples-based satirists The Jackal put it in a video that has gone viral on social media this week.

The clip, a compilation of Berlusconi's sexist jokes, diplomatic blunders and general buffoonery concludes on a sombre note: "The only difference is that Trump has got the nuclear codes."

Under the hashtag Trumposconi, Twitter-wits meanwhile have been having fun photo-shopping Trump's bouffant hair onto Berlusconi's cosmetically tightened face.

Beyond the perma-tans and the questionable coiffures, many of the things the US president-elect and the former three-times Italian prime minister have in common are also the things that have made them such controversial figures.

They both head opaque business empires that generated enough cash to finance their successful switches into politics in later life.

- Locker-room bragging -

The tax affairs of both men have been subject to scrutiny: Trump says paying none "makes me smart" and refuses to release his returns. Berlusconi was found guilty in 2013 of fiscal fraud, a conviction that effectively ended his political career.

Despite their own wealth and extravagant lifestyles, both present themselves as comfortable with and champions of ordinary people, as outsiders untainted by the perceived failures of established elites.

Both are resolutely politically incorrect and have appeared at times to lack a self-restraint switch.

Trump had no problem mocking a disabled reporter. Berlusconi once likened a political rival to a concentration camp guard.

Story continues

And as The Economist noted this week, the pair share "a fondness for locker-room bragging and, while protesting their love of women, seem to judge them solely on their physical attributes."

Trump boasted of grabbing women by their genitals. Berlusconi once dismissed German Chancellor Angela Merkel as "an unscrewable lard-ass," and liked to organise "bunga bunga" sex parties with lavishly rewarded young women.

Both are twice-divorced. Berlusconi at age 80 lives with a girlfriend 50 years his junior; Trump, 70, is now married to former model, Melania, 46.

Both have been insulting to Barack Obama: Trump questioned the outgoing president's American-born credentials, Berlusconi has joked about him having "a good tan".

All of which is no laughing matter for those who regard the Berlusconi years as having exposed Italy to international ridicule while he delivered on few, if any, of his promises.

- Crying wolf -

Under the media tycoon, Italy's economy barely expanded, a chronic debt crisis worsened and the overall tax burden grew as he failed to implement long-overdue structural reforms.

He was ultimately ushered out of office with a Greek-style financial crisis looming in Italy.

John Foot, a professor of Italian history at Bristol University, said Berlusconi had tarnished democracy with his own brand of "post-fact politics" some 20 years before Trump.

"The lesson for America is that for far too long Berlusconi was treated as a joke and a clown," Foot wrote in the Guardian.

"By the end, nobody was laughing. Twenty years of Berlusconi at the centre of the system had a deeply damaging impact on Italys body politic and democratic culture and the wounds are by no means healed."

But Giovanni Orsina, a professor at the LUISS university in Rome, suggests a different conclusion can be drawn: that democracy is more resistant to the challenge posed by successful populism than some might suggest.

"People cried wolf after Brexit, now they are crying wolf about Trump. But us Italians have not been afraid of the wolf since Berlusconi came to power," Orsina said.

"It was said at the time it would be the end of democracy but even if Berlusconi was a disaster in many ways, that is not actually what happened."
Women can vid-con with a doctor about their abortion. (Photo: Trunk Archive)

Women who wish to receive an abortion in the U.S. currently need to visit a provider in order to do so. But new research is testing out the idea of allowing women to undergo medical abortions at home, through a mail-order service.

Known as TelAbortion, the study is a research project that aims to evaluate the use of telemedicine for providing a medical abortion to women who have difficulty getting to an abortion clinic, per the TelAbortion website.

Heres how it works: After consulting with an abortion provider by videoconference, participants are overnighted the necessary abortion medicines (mifepristone and misoprostol). The study is determining how well this service model works, as well as how women feel about it.

According to the New York Times, 12 women have participated in the study so far. Of the 11 who took the pills, none reported any complications.

About 25 percent of abortions in the U.S. are medical abortions, and nearly 3 million women in the U.S. have already used mifepristone to end a pregnancy since the drug was approved in 2000, according to its manufacturer.

While the concept of a mail-order abortion is new in the U.S., it isnt in other parts of the world. Australia and British Columbia, Canada, allow women to get abortion pills by mail, after consulting with a doctor over the phone or online, the Times reports. Several international organizations also offer medical abortions via mail to women in countries where abortion is unavailable or restricted. One organization, the Netherlands-based Women on Web, has provided abortion medications to about 50,000 women in 130 countries since 2006.

State laws in the U.S. dictate the exact procedure that must be followed for a medical abortion, but a woman who is less than 10 weeks pregnant and wishes to obtain an abortion will typically be given mifepristone and misoprostol to end the pregnancy, according to Planned Parenthood.

Mifepristone (also known as Mifeprex) works by blocking the pregnancy hormone progesterone. Without progesterone, the lining of the uterus breaks down and pregnancy cannot continue, Planned Parenthood says. Misoprostol, which is taken 24 to 48 hours after a woman takes mifepristone, empties the uterus.

Story continues

The Food and Drug Administration warns against buying these drugs online. You should not buy Mifeprex over the Internet because you will bypass important safeguards designed to protect your health (and the health of others), the FDA states.

But according to the TelAbortion website, the same evaluation procedures are used that a woman would undergo in a clinic, and women are given the same medications. Therefore, if you follow the instructions, we expect that it will be equally effective and safe, the website says.

Lauren Streicher, M.D., an associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, agrees, telling Yahoo Beauty that this is incredibly safe. Its really important to emphasize the science and not the politics, she says. While the current study has only been conducted with a few women (which Streicher says is of no value from a scientific standpoint), she points out that this has been happening safely in the Netherlands for years.

A telemedical abortion may be safer for many women because it can help them avoid a surgically induced abortion, which is required after 10 weeks of pregnancy, she says. Looking at the science, is this safe and appropriate? The answer is yes, she says.

But while womens health expert Jennifer Wider, M.D., agrees that it would expand access to an abortion, she has concerns about safety. My worry is that if women experience a complication or have serious side effects, theyll have no medical supervision, she tells Yahoo Beauty. Also, what if the pills are taken by someone else?

Wider notes that studies show that medical abortions are safe and effective and can save a woman time and travel expenses. But with any medication, there is the potential for side effects, she says. I always think it is safer to be under the care of a doctor.

Jessica Shepherd, M.D., an assistant professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology and director of minimally invasive gynecology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago, tells Yahoo Beauty that this method can be very useful. However, she adds, there should be safeguards in place. Its just a matter of correct balance, she says. Maybe a patient could get a blood draw from a local healthcare provider after taking the medications to make sure they are no longer pregnant or receive proper counseling from a doctor beforehand, she says, noting that the worst-case scenario is an ectopic pregnancy (an egg that is fertilized outside of the uterus), which these drugs wont end.

It just needs a little more work done, she says. Otherwise, Im all for it.

Currently, TelAbortion is only available to women in New York, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington.

Lets keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Are diners getting the wool pulled over their eyes when they order lamb in a restaurant?

Chef Alexander Papetsas of Kellari Taverna in New York City warned that some customers who order the pricier lamb may be getting meat of a lesser value.

Read: For the Love of Cod! Some Restaurants Are Serving Cheaper Fish Than What's on the Menu, Investigation Finds

"Everyone knows what a lamb chop looks like," he told Inside Edition. "Serving gyros or lamb and rice  or those dishes where it's a more shredded lamb  it's very easy to make a blend using such things as goat."

Food expert Larry Olmsted said that if you order lamb but see meat on your dish that doesnt look recognizable, it might not be what you expected.

The less recognizable it is to your eye, the more likely you are to be cheated, he told Inside Edition.

The Inside Edition I-Squad tested lamb dishes from 39 restaurants in Los Angeles and New York City. The food establishments included everything from tourist hot spots to food trucks.

The samples were sent to IEH Laboratories for DNA testing, and the results were startling.

Twenty-three percent of the so-called lamb samples were not lamb at all. Instead, they were goat, chicken, or beef, which are all cheaper than lamb.

Its much more than I expected to get 23 percent of the time... you order lamb and get goat for example. Its not acceptable, said Dr. Mansour Samadpour of IEH laboratories.

At one popular food truck in Manhattan, the lamb dish looked like the real deal, but tests showed it was actually a combination of chicken and beef.

Inside Editions Lisa Guerrero approached the man working at the truck. You're not trying to pull a lamb scam? she asked.

No we're not, we just messed up on your order, he responded. Sorry about that, guys.

One restaurant in Los Angeles offered lamb stew but tests found that it was actually goat stew.



"There was goat in our lamb dish because we had it tested at a lab," Guerrero told an employee. "So are you selling goat instead of lamb to your customers?

Story continues

The worker denied the test, saying: No, we never have goat.

At a few trendy spots in L.A. and New York City, lamb meatballs were on the menu. But test showed beef had been mixed in.

Read: No Country for Old Beans: Some Coffee Retailers Selling Years-Old Java

When Guerrero told a worker at one of the Manhattan restaurants that her meatballs were a beef and lamb combo, he insisted it was 100 percent lamb.

"No," she responded. "We had your meatball tested. There was also beef in the meatballs. Can you explain that?"

He continued to insist there was no beef in the meatballs even after she said the meat was sent to a lab for testing.

He replied: You did? Well, I don't know about that.

Food expert Larry Olmsted, author of Real Food, Fake Food, said if you order lamb but see meat on your dish that doesnt look recognizable, it might not be what you purchased.

The less recognizable it is to your eye, the more likely you are to be cheated, Olmsted told Inside Edition.

Watch: Some Pre-Grated Parmesan Contains Additive Derived From Wood Pulp, Investigation Finds

Related Articles:
Reynolds American Inc.s RAI subsidiary R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company is reinforcing its position in the e-cigarette category with the expanded distribution of its flagship e-cigarette brand VUSE. R.J. Reynolds VUSE VIBES - closed tank system variant of VUSE e-cigarette brand will now be available in 25,000 stores across the country.

VUSE VIBE comes in a vape pen format with closed pre-filled 2 ml. replaceable tanks. This provides a clean smoking experience by preventing mess from pouring liquids while filling the tanks as it is the case for other similar products available in the market. Additionally, VUSE VIBE comes with a rechargeable battery and a USB charger.

VUSE VIBES holds four times more liquid compared to VUSE SOLO which is already available nationwide. VUSE VIBES are available in four variants  Original, Melon, Mint and Nectar.

VUSE received favorable response since its launch in 500 stores in Colorado in Jul 2013 and gained major market share in Utah where it was launched earlier this year. Reynolds launched the brand in two varieties  VUSE VIBE, VUSE SOLO and VUSE SYSTEM.

REYNOLDS AMER Price

REYNOLDS AMER Price | REYNOLDS AMER Quote

VUSE is a digital cigarette as it is fitted with a proprietary computer chip modulating its performance. The chip delivers consistent flavor giving VUSE an edge over other e-cigarettes.

In order to facilitate smooth distribution, Reynolds two subsidiaries  R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company  entered into a service agreement last month to gear up the production of e-cigarettes within the next four years.

Zacks Rank

Reynolds, which is a peer of Altria Group Inc. MO carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

Some better-ranked stocks in the tobacco sector worth considering include:

Imperial Brands Inc. IMBBY, carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) and has an expected earnings growth of 8.7%. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Story continues

Philip Morris International Inc. PM, also carries a Zacks Rank #2 and has an expected earnings growth of 9.24%.

Zacks' Top Investment Ideas for Long-Term Profit

How would you like to see our best recommendations to help you find todays most promising long-term stocks? Starting now, you can look inside our portfolios featuring stocks under $10, income stocks, value investments and more. These picks, which have double and triple-digit profit potential, are rarely available to the public. But you can see them now. Click here >>



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



ALTRIA GROUP (MO): Free Stock Analysis Report



PHILIP MORRIS (PM): Free Stock Analysis Report



REYNOLDS AMER (RAI): Free Stock Analysis Report



IMPERIAL BRANDS (IMBBY): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research
From Popular Mechanics

Here is the second in a series of weekly riddles from your puzzle-loving nerds at Popular Mechanics. This week's riddle is a little trickier than last week's, The Farmer's Dilemma, but the two are similar in concept and the solutions have some things in common. So check out last week's riddle if you haven't already-especially if you are struggling with this one, because solving last week's will get you on the right track.

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Previous%20Riddle" customtitles="Riddle%20of%20the%20Week%20#1:%20The%20Farmer's%20Dilemma" customimages="" content="article.23689"]

This week's still not hard enough for you? Oh, just wait my friend, just wait.

Problem

You've taken a job as a researcher in a remote and mysterious laboratory high in the Swiss Alps. Late one night, while you're working in the lab, you hear a loud crash just before the lab assistant bursts through the door, fleeing from the outstretched arms of a reanimated corpse. You and the lab assistant manage to get out into the hallway and bar the door shut behind you. Rounding a corner, you bump into the janitor and the old professor who oversees the lab work. They tell you that you must escape through an emergency exit at the back of the building that hasn't been used in years, as the front entrance has been overrun with zombies.

You grab a flashlight and flee with your three companions out the rear emergency exit, into the darkness and down a hill before you arrive at a dilapidated rope bridge with fraying ropes and missing footboards. The bridge spans a wide gorge, and a fall means certain death, but it's your only method of escape. You hear the zombies crash through the emergency exit of the lab, and the professor quickly estimates that they will arrive at the foot of the bridge, where you are standing, in 17 minutes.

Story continues

Because the bridge is so worn and weathered, only two people can cross at once. Because it is pitch dark out with no moon to light your way, one person must come back across the bridge with the flashlight after they have crossed to allow anyone else to cross. And because the bridge is so rickety, you need to get everyone all the way across before the zombies arrive. (They'll run out onto the bridge and collapse it, so even if you're most of the way across when they reach the foot of the bridge, you'll die.)

You are a spry young researcher, and it only takes you 1 minute to dash across the bridge. The lab assistant is a bit slower, and it takes her 2 minutes to cross the bridge. The janitor managed to twist his ankle coming down the hill, so it will take him 5 minutes to cross. And the professor is an hunched old man with arthritis-it takes him a full 10 minutes to cross the bridge.

How do you get everyone across the bridge to safety in 17 minutes or less?

The Short Version: Four people are trying to cross a sketchy rope bridge in the middle of the night. Only two can cross at a time. They only have one flashlight, and so one person must bring it back across the bridge to the starting side before anyone else can cross. One person takes 1 minute to cross, another takes 2 minutes to cross, another takes 5 minutes to cross, and the last person takes 10 minutes to cross. Hypothetically, if the 2-minute person and the 5-minute person crossed together, that would take a total of 5 minutes (but someone needs to bring the flashlight back, resulting in 7 minutes spent if the 2-minute person returns with the light). Everyone needs to get across in 17 minutes or less, otherwise they will be ripped apart and consumed by zombies.

Hint

Are you sure you want a hint? Here it is:

The first assumption that many people make when attempting to solve this riddle is that the 1-minute person shuttles everybody across, returning with the flashlight every time. This is incorrect. There is a faster way.

Solution

After you have come up with an answer on your own, you can see the solution to the riddle here-we operate on the honor system.

You Might Also Like
From Harper's BAZAAR

Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna have just welcomed a baby girl, their first child together, Us Weekly confirms. Her name is Dream Renee Kardashian, E! announced (which could be a allusion to her mother's real name, Angela Renee).

Chyna gave birth-reportedly via C-section-in Cedars-Sinai Medical Hospital in Los Angeles today, November 10. The new parents were accompanied by Kardashian's mother Kris Jenner, her boyfriend Corey Gamble and several body guards, to prevent paparazzi from getting in, according to TMZ.

The couple has been together since the beginning of the year, and announced their engagement in April. They broke the news that they were expecting in May. The baby girl marks Kardashian's first child and Chyna's second. She shares her 4-year-old son King Cairo with her ex Tyga, who's currently dating Kylie Jenner.

Congratulations to the happy couple!

You Might Also Like
Rob Kardashian is already smitten with his new little bundle of joy.

On Thursday morning, Kardashian and his fiancee Blac Chyna welcomed their daughter, Dream Renee Kardashian, into the world  and the new daddy couldnt hold back from showing his emotions!

Rob was so emotional. He started crying when he saw his daughter, a source tells PEOPLE. Hes been waiting for this moment for such a long time! She already has him wrapped around her finger.

Kardashian, 29, was in the delivery room when his bride-to-be gave birth to the newborn via cesarean section. Chyna, 28, arrived at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles early Thursday morning and welcomed their baby girl at 9:18 a.m., weighing 7 lbs., 5 oz., according to E! News.

Hours after meeting his adorable daughter, Kardashian took to Instagram to share a photo of the newborn. Today was amazing



I am so lucky!! Thank you @blacchyna for having our baby and being so strong ! I love you so much and cant wait to see her get older day by day with you Chy! I love you and Dream so much and Appreciate both of you. I know everyone saying thats my twin but thats def your nose Chy lol, he penned in the heartfelt post.

In May, the couple shared the exciting news that they were expecting a little one shortly after Kardashian proposed with a diamond ring. On the September premiere of their reality show Rob & Chyna, the couple revealed that they would be having a girl.

Though the first season of Rob & Chyna had its finale on Oct. 16, a source previously confirmed to PEOPLE the couple will have the cameras rolling in the delivery room while they welcome their daughter into the world. On Thursday, E! confirmed that an hourlong baby special will premiere Dec. 18.




Robert Vaughn, whose Napoleon Solo on NBCs spy yarn The Man From U.N.C.L.E. set TVs 1960s standard for suavity and crimebusting cool, died this morning after a brief battle with acute leukemia. He was 83. His manager Matthew Sullivan confirmed the news to Deadline.

Mr. Vaughn passed away with his family around him, Sullivan said.

No Merchandising. Editorial Use Only. No Book Cover Usage. Mandatory Credit: Photo by Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock (1638273a) 'The Man From Uncle', Robert Vaughn, David Mccallum Film and Television

Vaughns lengthy list of credits includes everything from an uncredited role in The Ten Commandments to his angry, shouting audience member on Late Night with Conan OBrien, but he will no doubt be remembered for Napoleon Solo, televisions answer to James Bond. U.N.C.L.E. aired from 1964-68, and paired Vaughns elegant, dark-haired Solo with David McCallums blond Russian Illya Kuryakin, an early example of Cold War detente in the battle against global evildoers.

Although the series was not a huge, longrunning stateside hit  it finished in the primetime top 25 only once  it spawned a short-lived spinoff, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. starring Stephanie Powers and contributed mightily to the Secret Agent Man craze of the mid-late 60s. Its international popularity led to back-to-back of Golden Globe noms for Vaughn as Best TV Star in 1965-66.

Vaughn also had early roles in The Young Philadelphians (1959)  for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor  and played a gunman in The Magnificent Seven (1960), earning another Globe nom for Most Promising Newcomer.

More recently, Vaughn played con man Albert Stroller on British series Hustle (2004-12). During the first two months of 2012, he took on the role of Milton Fanshaw in Britains soap opera staple Coronation Street, wooing Stephanie Coles Sylvia Goodwin.

Although most closely associated with television, stretching back to appearances on such foundational series as Gunsmoke, Father Knows Best, Wagon Train, The Rifleman and The Dick Van Dyke Show, Vaughn boasted a solid resume of feature film work  1958s Teenage Cave Man notwithstanding. In addition to The Young Philadelphians (1959), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and Steve McQueen car-chase classic Bullitt (1968), Vaughn had memorable parts in such popular pictures as The Towering Inferno (1974), S.O.B. (1981), Superman III (1983) and, as the uncredited voice of Proteus IV, Demon Seed (1977).

Story continues

Vaughn earned an supporting Emmy for 1977s Washington: Behind Closed Doors and an Emmy nom for playing Woodrow Wilson in Backstairs at the White House (1979).

Perfectly willing to have some fun with his long-established image of charm and elegance, Vaughn made knowing appearances in cult fare like BASEketball (1998) and Pootie Tang (2001), not to mention his angry, ranting tirades on OBriens late-night show.

Born in New York City and raised in Minneapolis, Vaughn moved to Los Angeles, where he earned a masters degree in theater at Los Angeles State College of Applied Arts and Sciences, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in communications from USC in 1970. His dissertation, Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting, was published in 1972. His memoir, A Fortunate Life, was published in 2009.

Vaughn also appeared onstage, including a 1955 production of The Pilgramage Play in Hollywood, later taking roles in Tom Stoppards The Real Inspector Hound, and, more recently, Twelve Angry Men at the U.K.s Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 2013, continuing with the production when it transferred to the Garrick Theatre in Londons West End.

Vaughn is survived by wife Linda, son Cassidy and daughter Caitlin.

Denise Petski contributed to this report.

Related stories

Robert Vaughn Remembered; 'U.N.C.L.E.' Costar David McCallum "Utterly Devastated"

'Compton's $60.2M Opening Is Tentpole Turf; 'U.N.C.L.E.' Doesn't Find Relatives - Weekend Postmortem

'Rogue Nation' Revs Up Final $46M; 'U.N.C.L.E.' Spies $12M Bow, 'Compton' Doubles Estimate - Int'l Box Office Update
The Deputy Mayor for Business Rajesh Agrawal, who also chairs London & Partners, will announce the findings Friday during his trade visit to India, aimed at strengthening tech and trade links between London and India.

By India Today Web Desk: London's technology sector will continue to be a key driver of growth and jobs for the capital and wider UK economy over the next ten years, according to research commissioned by London & Partners, the Mayor of London's promotional company.

The Deputy Mayor for Business Rajesh Agrawal, who also chairs London & Partners, will announce the findings Friday during his trade visit to India, aimed at strengthening tech and trade links between London and India.

advertisement

According to the new research, employment in London's digital technology sector is predicted to grow by almost a fifth (18.5 per cent) over the next ten years, taking employment in the sector to 284,400 jobs by 2026. Meanwhile, the number of digital tech companies in London is set to grow by a third (33.2 per cent) during the same period, taking the total number of digital technology companies in the capital to 61,800 by 2026.

The increase in both the number of jobs and companies in London's tech sector over the next decade is set to outpace the growth of both the UK-wide tech sector and London's economy as a whole, a media release said Friday.

During his visit, the Deputy Mayor has been meeting with senior Indian business leaders and high growth companies to reassure them that London remains open for business. He has urged digital businesses to follow the lead of a number of Indian technology companies that have already committed to London including leading software company HCL Technologies and Infotech Software Services.

Agrawal, said: "With everything London has to offer to exciting tech companies - from start-ups to established firms - it's no surprise that this sector continues to play a crucial role in the capital's vibrant economy.

"Over the last week I have met leading figures from Indian politics and business, including some innovative tech companies, and discussed how we strengthen the relationship between London and India."

London, the UK and India have long established trade ties and share hundreds of years of trading history. Now, Indian businesses are the second largest foreign investors into London, with more Indian companies choosing to move to the capital than Japan and China, according to data from London & Partners. Meanwhile the UK is the largest G20 investor in India, accounting for just over 9 per cent of investment over the last 15 years.

Indian companies have shown a strong desire to be part of London's booming tech sector, with ICT companies representing the largest sector for growth and accounting for almost two thirds (62 per cent) of all investment projects. Across all sectors, Indian businesses employ nearly 50,000 people in London.

To further strengthen business links between London and India, London & Partners recently announced that it has opened applications for the next round of its India Emerging 20 (IE20) initiative, a programme to discover some of India's most innovative and high growth companies with global aspirations.

advertisement

Last year's competition saw more than 10 times as many applications as places from companies all over India and across the life sciences, technology and professional services sectors. The final 20 companies selected for the programme will be given the opportunity to come to London to meet and learn from senior business leaders, venture capital investors and decision-makers from major global companies.

Since being chosen for last year's programme, a number of companies have attracted investment and expanded into London including Teabox, Kyazoonga and Seclore, which have all received venture capital funding. Winners for the second cohort of companies will be selected by a judging panel early next year.

During his seven day visit to India, The Deputy Mayor has visited Delhi and Mumbai where he reassured Indian companies and business leaders that they remain welcome post-Brexit and that London is open to investment, trade and talent from around the globe.

--- ENDS ---
Felicity Jones in Rogue One (Photo: Disney/Lucasfilm)

In the wake of this weeks U.S. election, the symbol of Star Wars Rebellion had been adopted by many fans protesting the victory of Donald Trump  and now, two of the writers of next months Rogue One: A Star Wars Story have referenced the relationship between that movie and the current political reality on social media.

Chris Weitz tweeted the following Friday morning 

Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organization  Chris Weitz (@chrisweitz) November 11, 2016

Star Wars against hate. Spread it. pic.twitter.com/Dtf5uqpxba  Chris Weitz (@chrisweitz) November 11, 2016

Opposed by a multi-cultural group led by brave women. https://t.co/UUcjwflMWG  Gary Whitta (@garywhitta) November 11, 2016

And Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, retweeted the Star Wars against hate tweet.

Weitzs tweet followed his praise for this op-ed piece from CBR.com, which explicitly connects Rogue One to this weeks U.S. elections, with writer Brett White calling the movie the most relevant movie of 2016, explaining, When I look at the Rogue One trailers, I see what I want from America. I see a multicultural group standing strong together led by a rebellious and courageous woman. Thats what we are working towards, and what we will continue to work towards no matter what. Thats what America  a land created as a haven for the persecuted, to be able to realize their limitless dreams  was created to be.

As if to cement the connection, both Weitz and Whitta have changed their Twitter avatars to an image of the Rebel insignia with a safety pin through it, a reference to the symbol of solidarity with persecuted minorities that has gained currency in the U.S. following the election. (It came from the U.K., post-Brexit vote, where minorities faced similar prejudice and attacks.)

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story opens in the U.S. Dec. 16.

Related: Rogue One Trailer: The Biggest Star Wars Clue Was Easy to Miss




WWE Network

Roman Reigns, the guy with the biggest pecs, has had a fairly tumultuous 2016. He went from main eventing WrestleMania 32, to being suspended, to being shuffled down the card, to being our new unstoppable United States Champion overlord. And now theres another development thats sure to get people talking. Like us, right now, on this post youre reading. The system works!

If you watched WWE television this week, youre likely aware that the company is in the midst of one of their regular European tours. Reigns was on Raw from Glasgow this week, and he has been defending his U.S. title on all other live events on the tour against Rusev. But he was absent from Thursdays event in Vienna, and Big Cass faced Rusev instead.

Dave Meltzer is reporting that Reigns has been pulled from the tour due to family commitments, and will not be appearing on the remaining shows in France. He was also quick to note that Reigns hasnt been pulled due to injury, and its certainly not another Wellness Policy violation.

Was pulled off the rest of the tour. won't be at any shows rest of week. Don't know reason but not an injury. https://t.co/waigyZNhgq  Dave Meltzer (@davemeltzerWON) November 11, 2016

Nothing to be concerned over. Everything is fine. https://t.co/3I728OFVRU  Dave Meltzer (@davemeltzerWON) November 11, 2016

@davemeltzerWON so he did not failed the wellness policy again  Trevor Harlan (@trevor_harlan) November 11, 2016

Nothing of the sort. https://t.co/Lryj2DN6fq  Dave Meltzer (@davemeltzerWON) November 11, 2016

We hope all is well with Reigns and his family, and we trust that he will be back on WWE television in no time. Believe that, you sufferin succotashes. (Succotii? Whatever.)
A guy and a girl drive around Rome at night looking for a parking spot so they can have sex at her place. Thats the premise of 2night, a low-budgeter whose execution is as basic as its plot description. With such a bare-bones story, everything hinges on casting, and director Ivan Silvestrini is extremely fortunate to have Matilde Gioli and Matteo Martari in the front seats, since their charisma pulls off this talk-fest. Essentially a more minimalist remake of Roi Werners 2011 Israeli film 2 Night, this Italian version also aims to give a 21st century vibe to the age-old male-female thing, with mixed results. A targeted marketing campaign could boost business once it opens at home in February; elsewhere, Italian showcases may take a look.

If the movie manages to get traction on social media, theres likely to be some debate about whether its got a feminist edge  Giolis character is the driving force in the seduction  or if her sexed-up, take-control attitude merely plays into male fantasies. Shes got enough of a personality to not be defined by penile projections, yet her admission that she only feels alive when a man desires her essentially precludes any feminist leanings. It could be claimed that her ability to verbalize this feeling means her self-awareness counters reductionist readings, though that would be a hard argument to win convincingly here.

In any event, shes the character with lasting resonance, thanks in large part to Giolis considerable screen presence. Though still needing a major, meaty role after her breakthrough performance in Human Capital, Gioli again proves shes one of Italys most interesting young actresses, and if nothing else, 2night is an excellent showcase reel for her talents. Its not just her physical charms, although her huge blue eyes and full pouty lips are perhaps necessary attributes for this needy woman. But far more impressive is the actresss ability to make a character of only intermittent interest, often babbling inanities, into someone the audience cares about.

In the first of numerous bad moves, the screenwriters keep with the originals unfortunate decision to leave the characters unnamed, identifying them only as he and she. She picks him (Martari) up at a nightclub, gets into his car, and with brazen self-assurance tells him to drive to her place. They chat while he drives, her strong seduction meeting with his less forthright yet eager acceptance of the tryst. The gimmick is that no matter where they look, they cant find a parking space, forcing them to wend their way through Rome and enabling Silvestrini the chance to mix a two-hander character study with reasonably attractive images of the city (predominantly the outskirts).

Much of the dialogue is generically outre at the start, then devolves to expected blather folded into easy psychobabble, with occasional moments meant to reawaken the dulled set-up, such as when she says I love this song! and the radios volume is cranked up to move the action along. Perhaps the only real surprise is that, despite becoming bored with the scenario, viewers maintain a certain degree of curiosity about the characters, largely because the performers keeps our attention. Martari, a model-turned-actor, may be overshadowed by Gioli, but his quieter role is the more difficult one to pull off, and he holds his own. Sound quality however is occasionally problematic, as if deadened in the studio.

Related stories

Film Review: 'A Wedding'

Rome Film Review: 'At the End of the Tunnel'

Tokyo Film Review: '7 Minutes'
A royal baby is on the way!

Monacos Pierre Casiraghi and his wife Beatrice Borromeo are expecting their first baby, according to numerous European sources.

While the Monaco palace isnt commenting on the happy news, a very pregnant-looking Borromeo was spotted recently in New Yorks LaGuardia Airport alongside her husband, who is 7th in line of Monacos succession.

Borromeo is reportedly due in early 2017.

The royal baby will be the fourth grandchild for Princess Caroline, who happily celebrated her grandsons lavish wedding to the Italian heiress in July 2015.

Earlier this year, Borromeo told Glamour magazine that she wanted to start a family while continuing to concentrate on her professional career as a journalist.

RELATED VIDEO: Royals Fashion: Bride Beatrice Borromeo Weds Pierre Casiraghi in Pink Valentino

I come from a large family, and I want children of my own, she said. But at the moment Im thinking about putting my career in a place where it wouldnt get threatened by the presence of children.

Want to keep up with the latest royals coverage? Click here to subscribe to the Royals Newsletter.

The new baby, who will be eighth in line to the throne, wont have a shortage of playmates either. Casiraghiss brother Andrea and his wife Tatiana Santo Domingo have a young son and daughter, Sacha and India. And his sister Charlotte Casiraghi has a son, Raphael.

And Casiraghis uncle Prince Albert and wife Princess Charlene have twins, Prince Jacques and Princess Gabriella, wholl celebrate their second birthday next month.




Moscow (AFP) - The Russian military said Friday it has evidence of the use of chemical weapons by rebels in Syria's besieged eastern city of Aleppo.

"Experts from the Russian defence ministry have found unexploded artillery ammunition belonging to terrorists which contains toxic substances," the military said in a statement.

"After rapid analysis in a mobile laboratory, we have determined that the toxic substances in the rebels' ammunition are highly likely to be chlorine gas and white phosphorous."

The ammunition was discovered in the 1070 district on the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo, the statement said.

The Russian news agency Interfax said this zone was recaptured from the rebels by Syrian government troops a few days ago.

A more thorough analysis will be carried out by a Russian military laboratory accredited to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPWC), the Russian defence ministry said.

Syrian state media late last month accused rebel groups of having fired shells containing toxic gas into government-held parts of Aleppo, leaving dozens of people including civilians in need of treatment.

Last month, a joint OPWC panel concluded that Syrian government forces carried out three chlorine gas attacks on villages in 2014 and 2015.

Russia, however, has dismissed the findings of the joint investigative mechanism (JIM) as "unconvincing" and said no sanctions should be imposed on Syria for the chlorine gas attacks.

Using chlorine as a weapon is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in 2013 under pressure from its ally Russia.

Aleppo, Syria's former economic capital, has been divided since 2012 between the western districts held by the regime and those in the east controlled by the rebels.

Russia has conducted a bombing campaign in support of the government of President Bashar al-Assad for more than a year.

But Moscow has suspended its air strikes on rebel-held eastern Aleppo since October 18, after international condemnation over its ferocious bombardment of the city.

It has also ordered several "humanitarian" ceasefires in Aleppo in recent weeks.
(Adds quotes, context)

By Maria Tsvetkova

JERICHO, West Bank, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Russia expects Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict to stay in place despite Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidential election, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday.

"Our position is that sanctions will remain unchanged," Medvedev told a news conference in Jericho on the West Bank after earlier meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

"Irrespective of the results of elections in any country, including in one as important as the United States of America, our assumptions remain unchanged," he said.

Trump stunned the world by defeating heavily favoured rival Hillary Clinton in the U.S. vote on Tuesday. That led some to speculate that sanctions on Russia could be eased since Trump is widely viewed as friendly to the Kremlin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia was ready to do its part to fully restore ties with Washington following the election of Trump.

A senior diplomat also said the Russian government was in touch with members of Trump's political team during the U.S. election campaign.

(Writing by Alexander Winning; Editing by Christian Lowe)
Thanks to healthy food solutions earnings.

SATS ended its second quarter with sound earnings growth, registering a 4.9% increase in net profit to $62.3m from $59.4m last year.

This was mainly due to the improved group revenue, which rose 3.7% to $438.5m. What propelled overall headline was the healthy food solutions revenue, which has seen an uptick of 4% to $252.7m. Its gateway services also posted revenue growth, increasing 3.4% to $184.5m.

However, revenue wold have increased 7.7% if not for the transfer of the food distribution business to its joint venture company SATS BRF Food. Fool solutions would have also spiked 10.8% if not for the transfer. Meanwhile, SATS expenditures rose slightly by 3.1% to $374.9 million.

"Higher expenditures were recorded in most expense categories except for cost of raw materials and company premise and utilities expenses. Cost of raw materials fell $3.6 million mainly due to the transfer of food distribution business while the reduction in premise and utilities expenses was attributed to lower maintenance, utilities usage and rates," the group explained.

Staff costs also rose 4.9%, mainly due to service increment, increased subcontract costs to support the business, and the strengthening of the Japanese Yen.

Looking forward, SATS said the will continue harnessing technology to improve productivity as it seeks new opportunities in the aviation business beyond Singapore.

"SATS Inflight Catering Centre 2 is being expanded to handle larger batch sizes for the increased volume from Changis Terminal 4 when it opens in 2017. Our cargo projects in Dammam and Oman will increase our presence in the Middle East. SATS eCommerce AirHub, scheduled to be completed early 2017, will enable us to serve our customers better," the group stated.





More From Singapore Business Review


By Marwa Rashad

RIYADH, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's government has set aside 100 billion riyals ($26.7 billion) to pay debts that it owes to private sector companies after payment delays that have lasted months, an official document seen by Reuters shows.

To help curb a huge budget deficit caused by low oil prices, the government of the world's largest oil exporter has slashed spending and reduced or suspended payments that it owes to construction firms, medical establishments and even some of the foreign consultants who helped to design its economic reforms.

But the payment delays have seriously damaged some companies, slowing the economy, and earlier this week the government said it would make all delayed payments by the end of this year.

Authorities have not disclosed the total size of the unpaid bills, but private analysts have estimated they may total tens of billions of dollars.

The document, labelled urgent and issued by the finance ministry for transmission to all government agencies, says a royal decree has mandated the finance minister "to take the necessary procedures to pay all delayed payments by the end of the current fiscal year".

"Payments should not exceed 100 billion riyals," the document adds, saying the money will come from budget surpluses accumulated in previous years. It does not say whether the government expects actually to pay out all of the maximum allocation of 100 billion riyals.

Government agencies should register payment orders at a finance ministry website created for this purpose within three weeks, the document says.

Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan reiterated on Thursday that the government intended to make all delayed payments to the private sector "as soon as possible", estimating these payments could total a "significant amount of billions" of dollars.

The government's original budget plan for 2016 envisaged a deficit of 326 billion riyals, after a record deficit of 367 billion riyals in 2015.

Story continues

Local analysts have been forecasting this year's deficit, expected to be announced late next month along with the 2017 budget plan, will be smaller than the original projection by a large margin.

A 100 billion riyal payout by the end of this year would exceed the expectations of many analysts and could result in a larger deficit than they have been forecasting, perhaps around 250 billion riyals or more.

(Additional reporting by Reem Shamseddine in Khobar; Editing by Andrew Torchia and Toby Chopra)
By David Alire Garcia NOGALES, Mexico (Reuters) - Donald Trump's election victory and his plans to crack down on illegal immigration is so troubling for the groups of men gathered just south of a rusty, towering fence on the U.S.-Mexico border that some are even considering going home. For most poor Central Americans and Mexicans at travelers' shelters in the desert town of Nogales, Trump's threats to build a wall along the whole border and deport millions of illegal immigrants have not made them abandon their harrowing journeys and hopes of a better life in the north. But for some like Juan Alberto Lopez, the prospect of living in a country they believe will become more hostile to people like them no longer holds enough appeal to make the risky crossing across the desolate Arizona borderland. "Now everything's changed," said the despondent Lopez, 25, as he sat staring blankly at the ground in outside one migrant center, under a cobalt sky. Lopez hails from the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico's poorest, and lived for two years in Arizona and Utah working in construction before being deported in January. Under one of Trump's proposals, he would face a two-year federal prison sentence for returning after deportation. He had decided to go back to the United States when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was projected to win the election. Now, he plans to seek work in Nogales instead, or go home. "They're going to detain all the migrants, and if it's like that, it's better to stay here with your own people, be happy, and just endure it," he added, echoing the sentiments of a third of more than a dozen migrants interviewed by Reuters in Nogales following Trump's victory. In running for president, Trump promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants as well as build a wall along the border to stop others entering the United States, and make Mexico pay for it. His uncompromising stance helped drive a rush over the U.S. border as some migrants calculated it was better to cross over before the election in case Trump won. That could continue in coming months even as some like Lopez decide they no longer want to live in the United States. During fiscal year 2016, which ended in September, the number of people detained along the U.S.-Mexico border surpassed 408,000, a 23 percent jump from last year, although it was less than in 2014, official U.S. data published last month showed. "I really don't care about President Trump. I'm always going to cross regardless of any walls he wants," said Alexi Solano, 20, a migrant from El Salvador, whose wife and young son are already in Los Angeles. "That doesn't matter to us. What we want is to be together with our families." Mexico's deputy interior minister for migration, Humberto Roque Villanueva, said he expected that flow to peak in 2016 as Trump will ramp up already tough deportation policies applied by President Barack Obama. "A certain radicalization of the North American immigration policy is coming," Roque Villanueva said. THUGS AND SNAKES In Nogales, a city of 230,000 dotted with factories of multinational firms like Motorola and B/E Aerospace, migrants say people smugglers typically charge $4,000 per person for a one-way ticket across the border. As with long stretches of the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border, a 25-foot-tall fence already exists along the international boundary here, built in 2011 and made up of thick rust-colored metal beams that follow the rocky terrain for miles to the west and east of the city. Beyond the fence on the U.S. side, a parallel set of wooden posts are topped with cameras and sensors. In the distance, U.S. immigration vehicles slowly patrol the border. Some 25 miles (40 km) to the east of town, the towering fence comes to an end and is replaced with a waist-high barrier that mainly serves to stop trucks plowing through the desert. While some migrants trudge around the barricade, risking weather exposure on foot through rugged terrain menaced by drug cartel thugs and poisonous snakes, others opt to ride hidden in trucks that drive through official crossings, a route made possible, several said, by bribes. Maria Engracia Robles, a Roman Catholic nun who runs El Comedor center for deportees and migrants within sight of the border fence in Nogales, thinks Trump's victory will likely bring more hardship and worries about the challenges that mass deportations would bring. "More anguish, tears, laments, and lots of people in Mexico without work, without anything to do and no place to go," said Robles, whose center provides free meals, clothes and basic medical care. Braced against the dry wind, dozens of hungry migrants line up around El Comedor's entrance for breakfast each morning. On Thursday, two men just inside the shelter could be overheard on mobile phones asking for a coyote, or human trafficker, to attempt another crossing. "Here there is no work, and salaries are terrible," said Robles. The U.S.-Mexico border is home to the largest per capita wage differential of any land border on the planet, with average U.S. wages about five times higher than Mexican wages. Further south, in Central America, incomes are even lower, and crime worse, fueling a surge of migration in recent years. More Central American migrants were apprehended on the U.S. southern border than Mexicans this year. Jose Flores, 19, a Honduran migrant who set out for the United States three months ago, ticked off the perils posed by violent gangs and dismal job prospects in his home country. "I imagine it's going to get a lot harder to cross," he said. "But what hasn't changed is we're looking for a better life." (This story has been refiled to fix typo in 20th paragraph) (Additional reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Kieran Murray)
By PTI: Under the Indus Waters Treaty, signed between India and

Under the Indus Waters Treaty, signed between India and Pakistan and also the World Bank in 1960, the World Bank has a specified role in the process of resolution of differences and disputes.

Swarup said on the issue of differences between India and Pakistan on Kishenganga and Ratle hydroelectric projects under the Indus Waters Treaty, India had asked the World Bank to appoint a Neutral Expert to resolve the differences of a technical nature which are within the domain of a neutral technical expert.

advertisement

Pakistan had sought the establishment of a Court of Arbitration, which is normally the logical next step in the process of resolution in the Treaty. The Neutral Expert can also determine that there are issues beyond mere technical differences, he noted.

Pakistan has raised objections over the design of the hydel project in J&K, saying it is not in line with the criteria laid down under the Indus Water Treaty between the two countries.

"The World Bank has decided to proceed with both steps simultaneously. It was pointed by the government to the World Bank that the pursuit of two parallel difference/ dispute resolution mechanisms - appointment of a Neutral Expert and establishment of a Court of Arbitration ? at the same time is legally untenable," Swarup asserted.

Noting that despite Indias clear advice not to proceed with both together, the World Bank has decided otherwise, thereby, raising questions over the "viability and workability" of the 56-year-old Treaty. MORE PTI PYK ZMN

--- ENDS ---
By Ian Simpson and David Ingram WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump denounced Americans who protested against his election and hours later praised them on Friday, underscoring contradictions that have raised questions about his leadership style. "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!" Trump tweeted early on Friday. It was a sharp shift in tone from his tweet hours earlier dismissing the demonstrators in eight cities as "professional protesters, incited by the media." The contradictory tweets were further evidence of Trump's mixed messages since he announced his candidacy 17 months ago. After Clinton conceded defeat early on Wednesday, he took a far more conciliatory tone than he had often displayed during his campaign and promised to be a president for all Americans. Anti-Trump demonstrators voiced concerns his presidency, due to start on Jan. 20, would infringe on Americans' civil and human rights. They cited his campaign promises to restrict immigration and register Muslims, as well as allegations the Republican Trump, a former reality-TV star, sexually abused women. In various cities, marchers chanted slogans including, "No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!" and carried signs reading, "Impeach Trump." White supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan have praised Trump's election and some civil rights advocacy groups have reported a spike of attacks on minorities following Trump's Tuesday victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump has rejected the KKK's support. PLEDGE OF RESISTANCE Tensions were high on Thursday night in Baltimore where Mark Patro, 60, and his partner, Yanni Stavropoulos, 39, marched in an anti-Trump demonstration carrying the rainbow flag of the gay rights movement. "We're here to bring to Donald Trump's attention that we don't support his rhetoric," said Patro, a draftsman. "We intend to resist, and I believe that resistance will continue for many Americans throughout his presidency." The crowds on the streets of eight cities including New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, on Thursday were diverse in their ethnic makeup and largely made up of young adults and college students. One measure of young Americans' feeling for Trump: A poll by the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion prior to the election showed that some 66 percent of young U.S. adults aged 18 to 35 thought Trump should have dropped out of the race following the October release of a 2005 video in which he was seen talking about groping women. "This antipathy towards Trump is very real and very deep-seated," said Joshua Dyck, an associate professor of political science at the school. "I suspect that protests, especially on college campuses, will be a more or less permanent feature of his presidency." With the country evenly divided, many voters were shocked by the result given that opinion polls failed to predict Trump's triumph. The Republican Party also managed to maintain its majorities in both houses of Congress in Tuesday's vote. MORE PROTESTS PLANNED More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend in cities including New York and Los Angeles, and a group calling itself "#NotMyPresident" scheduled an anti-Trump rally for Washington on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, when the New York real-estate developer formally succeeds President Barack Obama. Thursday's gatherings were generally smaller in scale and less intense than Wednesday's, and teenagers and young adults again dominated the racially mixed crowds. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Friday acknowledged the tight race with Clinton, but said anti-Trump protesters had to accept the election results. He pointed to Trump's call for unity and meetings on Thursday with Obama and Republican leaders as reasons for reassurance. "Everyone needs to just take a deep breath, take the weekend ... count our blessings, and let's come back on Monday," Priebus said. Security barricades were in place around some of Trump's highly visible properties, including the newly opened Trump International Hotel near the White House and in Trump Tower on New York's Fifth Avenue, where he lives. Trump's base of support in the election was the broad middle of the country, from the Heartland through the Rust Belt, with voters in states that had long supported Democrats shifting their support to Trump after he promised to renegotiate trade deals with other countries. In Washington two Trump supporters carried signs reading: "All We are Saying is Give Trump a Chance". A protest in Portland, Oregon, late on Thursday grew violent with demonstrators throwing objects at police and damaging cars at a dealership. Police arrested at least 26 people. In Los Angeles, police arrested about 185 people, mostly for blocking roadways or being juveniles out past curfew, during a Thursday night march, police spokeswoman Norma Eisenman said in a telephone interview. One officer was hospitalized for injuries suffered during the protest, she said. (Additional reporting by Donna Owens in Baltimore, Steve Dipaola in Portland, Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles, and Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Howard Goller)
Jen-Hsun Huang

Shares of graphics chipmaker Nvidia surged roughly 15% after hours on Thursday after the company boosted its dividend and reported a strong sales forecast.

Nvidia said it expects Q4 revenue of $2.1 billion, well above the $1.69 billion expected by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

The strong results, reported after Thursday's close of market, followed a rough day for tech stocks. Investors sold off shares of Apple, Google, Facebook and just about every other tech company on Thursday on jitters about how President-elect Donald Trump's policies will affect the sector.

Nvidia, whose chips have traditionally powered the video game capabilities of desktop and laptop computers, has emerged as an important player in the budding field of self-driving cars. The company recently announced that its technology will be used by Tesla for autonomous driving features.

The company doubled its profit in the third quarter, with $542 million in net income, or $0.83 per share. Revenue of $2 billion, was up 54% year-over-year and above the $1.69 billion expected by analysts.

Nvidia also said it would increase its dividend by 22% to 14 cents per share and that it's board of directors has authorized $2 billion of additional stock buybacks over the next several years.

NOW WATCH: This hidden iPhone feature will boost your reception





More From Business Insider


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump should not scrap a nuclear deal between Iran and world powers but should take the nation to task for its "destabilizing activities" in the Middle East, said a former senior Saudi official. Gulf powers watched with alarm as U.S. President Barack Obama forged a deal with its top regional foe over Iran's nuclear program last year and warned it would embolden Tehran's pursuit of regional hegemony in part through support for proxy groups fuelling regional conflicts. Trump, who triumphed in the U.S. election this week, has said he would dismantle the nuclear deal agreed last year, although he has made other contradictory statements on the accord. Iran denies ever having considered developing atomic weapons. "I don't think he should scrap it. It's been worked on for many years and the general consensus in the world, not just the United States, is that it has achieved an objective, which is a 15-year hiatus in the program that Iran embarked on to develop nuclear weapons," Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and ex-ambassador to Washington and London said on Thursday. "To scrap that willy-nilly as it were will have ramifications, and I don't know if something else can be put in its place to guarantee that Iran will not go that route if the agreement is scrapped," he said at a think-tank event in Washington. Prince Turki said he would like to see if the deal could become a "stepping stone" to a more permanent program "to prevent proliferation through the establishment of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East." Prince Turki does not presently hold any official position in the Saudi leadership, and he emphasized that he was speaking in a personal capacity. His views are described by insiders as often reflecting those of the kingdom's top princes and as influential in Riyadh foreign policy circles. Prince Turki also said Trump should admonish Iran for its "very adventurous and very destabilizing activities" in the Middle East. Iran, the dominant Shi'ite Muslim power, supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and has dispatched teams to Syria to gather intelligence and train Syrian forces. As a rival of Sunni Saudi Arabia, Iran has fought decades of sectarian proxy wars in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. "I would like to see President Trump marshal American public opinion and American government activity to challenge that view of Iran that it can license itself to interference," he said. (Reporting by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)
By Abdul Matin and Sabine Siebold MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan/BERLIN (Reuters) - Taliban militants stormed the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, ramming its outer wall with a truck bomb before battling security forces in an overnight attack that killed at least four people, officials said. The explosion caused extensive damage to the building, a NATO spokesman said, but Germany indicated on Friday this would not deter it from continuing its work as part of the international mission in Afghanistan. Triggered by a suicide bomber, the blast shattered windows as far as 5 km (3 miles) away, NATO said. A local doctor said it and the subsequent firefight also wounded 120 people. Twenty consular staff survived the attack with no injuries, German officials said. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said soldiers had had to battle hard to repel the heavily armed attackers. "It was only possible to ... beat them back after fighting that occurred at the compound and in the building," he said, adding that Berlin would review its lead role in northern Afghanistan. His spokesman Martin Schaefer later said he did not expect a big policy shift. "I cannot imagine that the events of last night will lead to a fundamental change in Germany's thinking or that of the global community on the need for continued assistance for Afghanistan," Schaefer told reporters. The attack also highlights one of the tougher policy challenges facing U.S. President-elect Donald Trump when he takes office in January. U.S. combat operations against the Taliban largely ended in 2014, but thousands of its soldiers remain in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission. The Taliban said the attack was in retaliation for NATO air strikes against a village near the northern city of Kunduz last week in which more than 30 people, many of them children, were killed. Heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent "with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there", the Islamist militant movement's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone. Taliban forces came close to over-running Kunduz last month, a year after briefly capturing it in their biggest success in Afghanistan's 15-year-long war. INTO THE EARLY HOURS The NATO spokesman said at least one vehicle packed with explosives was rammed into the high outer wall surrounding the consulate, but authorities were investigating if a second car had been involved. "The extent of damage to the city is huge," said Abdul Razaq Qaderi, deputy police chief of Balkh province. "This kind of an attack, bringing a truck full of explosives and blowing it up in the city, had never happened before. Noor Mohammad Faiz, the head doctor in Mazar-i-Sharif hospital, said four bodies and 120 wounded, most hurt by flying glass, had been brought to the hospital. Qaderi said German troops later shot and killed two men on motorcycles who did not comply with orders to stop, with a third man seriously injured. German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said that incident was being investigated. It was not clear if the men were attackers or civilians. Germany, which heads Resolute Support in northern Afghanistan, has about 800 soldiers at a base on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, with another 1,000 troops coming from 20 partner countries. The explosion occurred about an hour before midnight local time, a spokesman for the German military joint forces command in Potsdam said. "It was a prepared attack for which we made all arrangements," the Taliban's Mujahid said, adding that dozens of German soldiers and intelligence personnel were killed in the attack. The Taliban often exaggerate casualties caused by its operations. Sayed Kamal Sadat, police chief of Balkh province, said the fighting was over by the early hours of the morning after Afghan special forces, German security personnel and NATO's quick reaction protection force intervened. At least one suspect was arrested from the area of explosion, officials said. The heavily protected consulate is in a large building close to the Blue Mosque in the center of Mazar-i-Sharif, where the Indian consulate was also attacked by militant gunmen earlier this year. (Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in BERLIN, James Mackenzie, Mirwais Harooni and Hamid Shalizi in KABUL, and Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR; Writing by Andrea Shalal; Editing by John Stonestreet)
This Immigrant Doctor Is Reimagining Health in the American City

With workplace initiatives geared toward breaking the glass ceiling and activists battling everyday sexism, the fight for gender equality is ongoing. Now a new public awareness campaign in New York City is putting the sexual and reproductive rights of women at the heart of the struggle.

Launched last week through a short video by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the initiative seeks to educate residents about a new term: sexual and reproductive justice. The video offers a definition: When all people have the power and resources to make decisions about their bodies, sexuality, and reproduction.

RELATED: The Worlds 10 Best and Worst Countries to Be a Mother

Sexual and reproductive justice really looks at womens lives over the full continuum, Deborah Kaplan, the assistant commissioner of the New York City Health Departments Bureau of Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health, told TakePart. Its not just about healthy babies. Its about healthy women. Its about women who often have been the nurturers, the carers, the ones carrying the heavy burden of caring for everyone and holding families together.

This includes the right to be able to raise our children in a safe and healthy environment, Kaplan said, and what that means is safe neighborhoods, access to healthy foods, shelter, lack of violence, and support for parentssuch as the example of paid family leave. Much of the pressure for women who work and raise children falls back on the individual woman or her partner, Kaplan said. At a time when the annual cost of child care in 33 states is greater than in-state college tuition, parents nationwide are stressed and struggling.

The video was created in partnership with the Sexual and Reproductive Justice Community Engagement Group, a coalition of roughly 60 activists, nonprofit organizations, and community leaders. The health department teamed up with people we never worked with beforewho felt concerned that their issues werent being brought up, that there wasnt a safe space to talk about transgender issues, about oppression, and racism, and the effect this could have on sexual reproductive health, Kaplan said. The video features a series of relatable vignettes that explain sexual and reproductive justice to viewers.

Story continues

If youre dealing with issues related to your reproductive health and youre not seeing your community or your stories reflected in that conversation, youre all alone, Alison Park says in the video.

I would have loved if there was sex education in my schools. It would have been great to see two women in love, especially two black women in love, but there was no visibility for people that looked like me, another woman, Ericka Hart, says in the video.

Along with raising awareness, Kaplan said the health department hopes to reduce reproductive and sexual health disparities and inspire people to get involved in the Community Engagement Group. Both the video and the group have been met with positive feedback, Kaplan said. What weve heard from people seeing this video is, this is about real people talking about personal experiences, whether it was sexual assault [or] having a cesarean, she said.

Does that mean that everyone in New York City is comfortable having this conversation? Absolutely not, Kaplan said. But people are often surprised that a health department is talking about racism and talking about, you know, these difficult issues. Kaplan attributes the departments willingness to tackle the topics to the leadership of its commissioner, Mary Bassett, who has challenged us to talk about not just racism, to talk about white supremacy, to talk about unfairness and inequity, Kaplan said. We see the fight for sexual and reproductive justice inextricably tied to the overall fight for health equity and social justice.

Take the Pledge: Stand With Working Women Around the World

Related stories on TakePart:





 Why More Bisexual Women Struggle to Afford Food

 Joe Biden and Lady Gaga Team Up to Prevent Sexual Assault on Campus

Original article from TakePart
Washington (AFP) - Donald Trump is to huddle Saturday with his White House transition team for a second day over cabinet picks as the president-elect says he is open to keeping parts of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law.

The billionaire real estate mogul said in interviews that he would consider an "amended" version of the 2010 health law, a shift in position after vowing on the campaign trail to repeal the measure.

The announcement was one of several surprises, as Trump shook up his transition team by putting running mate Mike Pence in charge and named a cohort of Washington insiders -- and three of his children -- to help with the process of choosing a new cabinet.

The reshuffle came as anti-Trump protesters spilled onto the streets for a third straight night, with the Republican facing mounting calls to reassure Americans who fear a xenophobic crackdown under his authority.

Throngs of people -- among them families and children -- rallied late Friday in New York's Washington Square carrying banners reading "Peace and Love" and "Your wall can't stand in our way." Local media estimated a turnout of some 4,000 protesters.

In Portland, Oregon, a demonstrator was shot and sustained non-life-threatening injuries after what police believe was a confrontation. The suspect then fled the area.

And more than 1,000 people gathered in Miami, with weekend protests planned in a number of other cities.

A focal point for New York protests is Trump Tower, where the real estate tycoon-turned-world-leader has been ensconced in his luxury apartment, mapping out his next steps.

The 70-year-old incoming president has a mammoth task of fleshing out his cabinet, as well as steering the complex transition of power, and announced on Friday he was elevating Vice President-elect Pence to lead the process.

Trump included three of his children and his son-in-law Jared Kushner on the transition team -- a move likely to raise eyebrows, since the tycoon earlier announced that should he win he would place his vast business interests into a blind trust operated by Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump.

Story continues

And in a clear shift from his abrasive campaign, he added to his transition team a string of insider figures from the very establishment that he railed against so strongly, including Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus -- now tipped as a possible chief of staff.

- Amending Obamacare? -

Trump took his first steps toward engaging with Washington on Thursday when he met with Barack Obama at the White House to discuss the transition ahead of the January 20 inauguration -- a conversation the outgoing president called "excellent."

The Oval Office meeting appears to have nudged Trump towards a compromise on his oft-repeated threat to repeal Obama's Affordable Care Act.

Trump told The Wall Street Journal the president asked him to consider preserving parts of the healthcare law -- and that he was open to the idea.

"Either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced," Trump told the newspaper. "I told him I will look at his suggestions, and out of respect, I will do that."

According to The Journal, Trump said he favored maintaining a prohibition on insurance companies denying coverage because of so-called pre-existing conditions. Before the law took effect, insurers had been able to refuse to cover people who had previously suffered almost any illness.

Trump also said he was not opposed to requiring insurers to allow children to remain on their parents' insurance policies until the age of 26, a key Obamacare tenet.

On the Syrian conflict, however, Trump indicated a possible sharp shift away from Obama administration policy.

"I've had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria," he told the paper, suggesting a closer focus on fighting the Islamic State group -- and arguing that in seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad, "we end up fighting Russia," the regime's ally.

Trump has already spoken with a string of world leaders including British Prime Minister Theresa May and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he reaffirmed Washington's strong relations.

The apparently harmonious meeting between Trump and Obama was designed to heal divisions and quell fears about the health of the world's leading democracy.

- Hillary's concession -

Meanwhile, in an interview to be aired on Sunday, Trump showed a rare softer side, speaking warmly of the election night call he received from Hillary Clinton conceding that he had won.

"It was a lovely call, and it was a tough call for her -- I mean, I can imagine," he said in the interview, excerpts of which were aired Friday.

"I mean, for me, it would have been very, very difficult. She couldn't have been nicer. She just said, 'Congratulations, Donald, well done.'"

And I said, "I want to thank you very much, you were a great competitor," he said, praising his vanquished political foe as "very strong and very smart."

He also spoke about a call he received from her husband, former president Bill Clinton, who he said "couldn't have been more gracious."

Trump said he wouldn't rule out approaching the former US leader for advice.
Walt Disney says its new $5.5 billion theme park in Shanghai will come close to breaking even by the end of its first full year of operation in 2017.

The Shanghai Disney Resort's launch has gone smother than past Disney theme park debuts, but little had been known about its actual performance. Disney CEO Bob Iger finally offered a first look at the park's visitor numbers on its Thursday earnings call, saying the park took in 4 million guests during its first four months of operation.

"Some of you may infer from this early performance that we could achieve 10 million in attendance in the park's first year, a number we would be thrilled with," Iger added, while emphasizing the company wasn't providing formal guidance. "It's very clear our guests are thoroughly enjoying it. They're enthusiastically embracing our stories and characters."

Read more: Shanghai Disneyland: An Inside Look at the Chinese Resort

Disney CFO Christine McCarthy added: "As Bob discussed, we couldn't be more pleased with the launch of Shanghai Disneyland. The financial results for the park's first full quarter of operations were ahead of our expectations. As we look to fiscal 2017, we expect Shanghai Disney Resort to be very close to break-even for the year."

On Wednesday, Disney announced that it had already broken ground on an expansion in Shanghai. A new Toy Story Land - the Chinese park's seventh themed area - will open in 2018, featuring three attractions and a character meet-and-greet.

Analysts were welcoming of the Shanghai Disney data. Stifel, Nicolaus analyst Benjamin Stifel lauded "a strong start to Shanghai Disney, with the park expected to be around break-even by the end of the year - much quicker than other international parks."

"We had been forecasting break-even for Shanghai in fiscal year 2017, but still consider these results encouraging," added Steven Cahall of RBC Capital Markets.

Georg Szalai in London contributed to this report.
(Reuters) - Maria Sharapova will be allowed to resume her role as a United Nations (UN) goodwill ambassador when her drug suspension ends in April, the body said on Thursday. Five-times grand slam champion Sharapova became an ambassador for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in 2007, but was dropped in March after admitting she had used the banned substance meldonium. The United States-based Russian was originally banished from the sport for two years, a suspension that was later cut to 15 months. She will return to action in time to contest three of the four grand slams next year, missing only the Australian Open. "The UNDP is glad to learn that Maria Sharapova can return to the sport she loves sooner than expected and we will lift the suspension of her role as our goodwill ambassador once the reduced ban expires," the UN said in a statement. The UNDP works to tackle inequality and poverty. (Reporting by Andrew Both; Editing by Greg Stutchbury)
Income Tax authorities today raided around 15 jewellery and bullion shops in Chennai with the belief that these shops allegedly accept old 500 and 1000 rupee notes for gold sale.

According to sources, these shops allegedly accept old 500 and 1000 rupee notes for gold sale. (Pic: Ani)

By Akshaya Nath: Income Tax authorities today raided around 15 jewellery and bullion shops in Chennai. The officials also raided a few hawalas in the city. According to sources, these shops allegedly accept old 500 and 1000 rupee notes for gold sale.

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement that Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes will be illegal it is believed that the black money in the country will come out.

advertisement

For the last two days, people have been standing in long queue outside banks and ATM booths to either deposit or withdraw cash.

"The government's initiative is commendable but could have been organised in a better manner. We have been standing in the queue for more than two hours," said Ramamoorthy, a private professional who was waiting in a bank for exchanging money.

While many people are happy about the government's move it has become a cause of concern for many and this has led to a lot of chaos.

"Only those who have been cheating the government will be concerned not honest people like us," said Sundaralingam while waiting outside a bank for more than half hour.

Also Read

Income tax dept conducts raids across India as illegal financial institutions crop up; shops call it a day

Income Tax raids in Delhi, Mumbai to find banned 500 and 1000 rupee notes



--- ENDS ---
Integrated energy major Royal Dutch Shell plc RDS.A recently announced its plan to invest $10 billion in Brazil over a span of five years. The company intends to tap into the increased opportunities for foreign companies in the Brazilian oil industry with this move.

Shell  the largest foreign investor in Brazil  plans to continue investing heavily in the country in order to double its global deep water production by the early 2020s. Shell plans to invest around $2 billion every year and it intends to fund the investment from the more than $30 billion in capital that it has already deployed in Brazil.

Following regulatory changes in Brazil, Shell seeks to expand its ultra deepwater oil exploration and production holdings in the country. Notably, the company already operates 5,500 energy stations in the nation and has acquired a large number of oil and gas assets via its takeover of BG Group this year.

In 2016, Shell became the biggest private sector partner in giant deepwater offshore field discoveries through its $50 billion acquisition of BG Group. After an investment of $10 billion, production from the companys deepwater portfolio is expected to rise from about 450,000 barrels per day to 900,000 barrels per day. This in turn, will increase Brazils share of the companys production from a fraction in 2015 to roughly halfover the next decade.

Headquartered in Hague, the Netherlands, Shell is one of the largest integrated oil and gas companies in the world. It explores for and extracts crude oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids. It has interests in chemicals as well as power generation and renewable energy.

Shell currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), which implies that the stock will outperform the broader U.S. equity market over the next one to three months.

ROYAL DTCH SH-A Price

ROYAL DTCH SH-A Price | ROYAL DTCH SH-A Quote

Other well-ranked players from the broader energy sector include Braskem S.A. BAK, Ultra Petroleum Corp. UPLMQ and McDermott International Inc. MDR. All these stocks sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Story continues

In the last four quarters, Braskem posted an average positive earnings surprise of 105.5%.

Ultra Petroleum, on the other hand, posted an average positive earnings surprise of 65.91% in the last four quarters.

In the last four quarters, McDermott posted an average positive earnings surprise of 250.00%.

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



MCDERMOTT INTL (MDR): Free Stock Analysis Report



ROYAL DTCH SH-A (RDS.A): Free Stock Analysis Report



BRASKEM SA (BAK): Free Stock Analysis Report



ULTRA PETRO CP (UPLMQ): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research
Shia LaBeouf recently stopped by Sway in the Morning to deliver a crazy "5 Fingers of Death" freestyle. Take a moment to say, "What?!" as many times as you need before continuing here. Alright, now that this fact has settled in a bit, let's move on.

Shia LaBeoufthe actor, director, and just full-on performance artistmade a visit to Sway's radio show to casually drop a few surprising bars. There's no doubting that the man who motivated us all to "Just Do It" can do anything he puts his mind to. After briefly discussing some of his favorite rapperslike Tupac, Biggie, and Missy ElliottSway opened the floor for LaBeouf to showcase his quick wordplay skills.

Frequent listeners and viewers of Sway in the Morning know that Sway often has his guest freestyle over five different beats to show off a bit of their talents. However, this challenge is usually only presented to the rappers who stop by the show. However, the results of this freestyle from Shia LaBeouf are even more impressive than they are unexpected.

Kicking things off with an attention-grabbing line like, "Get ready, get set, this a meme. This is wild, this a childhood dream." LaBeouf continued rapping over beats from some of his favorite artists who he previously mentioned. It's not often that artists end their freestyle on Sway in the Morning by dropping the mic, and it's far more rare to watch Sway put his shades on and hype the whole room up afterwards. Although that's an awfully hard act to follow, Sway and LaBeouf soon passed the mic over to Oswin Benjamin for him to spit a few bars of his own.

Watch it for yourself above.

Continue Reading On PigeonsandPlanes

More from PigeonsandPlanes
A message of hope and unity has inspired others to show a bit more kindness, thanks to a California woman and her Photoshop skills.

Amanda Blanc, a wife and mother from Sacramento, began designing her own brand of signs when a friend contacted her about creating birthday invitations.

Read: Take a Behind-the-Scenes Look at Historic Election Night as the World Waits for Results

However, it was her Make America Kind Again lawn signs which stood against the political campaign signs in her neighborhood that gained the most attention online and off.

From then on, her designs took off, and Blanc suddenly had her own business right out of her familys home.

Although the 2016 election has passed, her signs of change and positivity have encouraged others to band together, despite the obvious political divide.

With the election, it got really ugly on both sides, Blanc told InsideEdition.com. I saw friendships breaking, lines getting drawn, even in families in a time where we should be happy. Its time to move on.

Blancs husband is the proficient graphic designer in the family, but showed her the ropes, and she caught on quickly.

Her inspiration came from a local Facebook group of mothers sharing their insights and beliefs on motherhood, children, and the president-elect.

Blancs two young children also drove her to create the signs.

Read: Is the Election Stressing You Out? Voters Plagued by Psychological and Physical Health Issues

"Aside from politics, I believe in building a better world for our children," Blanc said.

Not only has Blanc received several requests on Etsy for signs since October, but she has also received requests for clothing such as hats and shirts with the uplifting logo.

According to Blanc, being American is about coming together, win or lose.

I dont believe in a Utopian society, said Blanc. We live in a diverse society and with diversity comes acceptance.

Story continues

Watch: Donald Trump's Win Shows How Badly 'Experts' Got It Wrong

Related Articles:
More bombs, more targets, still Syria. The U.S.-led air war in Syria is growing its target list. President Obama has told the Pentagon to go after al Qaedas branch in Syria, worried that the group, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham  formerly known as Nusra Front  has been allowing al Qaeda leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan to set up a new base of operations in northern Syria. Thats according to what officials tell the Washington Posts Adam Entous, who writes, Obamas new order gives the U.S. militarys Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, wider authority and additional intelligence-collection resources to go after al-Nusras broader leadership, not just al-Qaeda veterans or those directly involved in external plotting.

Many Syria watchers have long said that Nusra is likely a longer-term threat to the United States than the Islamic State, given the deeper ties it has established in the Syrian communities in which it resides, and the steady stream of alliances it has made with more moderate rebel groups fighting the Syrian regime.

The decision comes after months of debate within the White House, where some opposed widening the war, fearful that hitting Nusra would help the Assad regime by weakening the most effective anti-government forces on the ground. But, as one official told the Post, the president doesnt want this group to be what inherits the country if Assad ever does fallThis cannot be the viable Syrian opposition. Its al-Qaeda.

The big ask. More bombs means more money to pay for them, and President Obama on Thursday asked Congress for an additional $11.6 billion to fight the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. The staggering sum would be split in two: $5.8 billion for the Pentagon, and $5.8 billion for the State Department and USAID, for their counter-ISIS initiatives and humanitarian relief.

The request raises extra-budgetary the price tag for both wars to $85.3 billion for the 2017 fiscal year. Rep. Mac Thornberry, (R-Tx.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was unimpressed with the ask. In a statement, he said the cash still does not accommodate the increased pace of operations against ISIL and does nothing to begin addressing the readiness crisis.

Story continues

Lobbyists, defense execs, filling Trump transition. For all of the talk during the campaign that President-elect Donald Trump was running an outsider campaign, and promises to drain the swamp in Washington, his transition team is  by necessity  being led by a group of former Pentagon officials, K street lobbyists, and defense contractors.

The two people running the transition at the Department of Defense  Mira Ricardel, a long-time Boeing executive, and Keith Kellogg, a 12-year veteran of the defense industry  not only have spent years spent selling weaponry and technologies to the government, but are also veteran Pentagon hands.

The two reflect the reality of Washingtons often-derided revolving door, where officials move between government offices and the defense and consulting industry with metronomic regularity.

It appears that Ricardel will be doing most of the day-to-day transition work with the Pentagon, though as of Thursday, defense officials tell SitRep, the Trump team has yet to reach out to begin meetings, and receive briefings, from military brass. Ricardels work at Boeing saw her managing a variety of missile defense, satellite, and space systems between 2006 and 2015.

Before entering the private sector, Ricardel worked at the Pentagon in the Bush administration from 2001 to 2005, first as a deputy focused on Russia, Eurasia, and the Balkans, then for two years in a more high-profile role as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, where she assumed a wider portfolio over an array of national security issues.

Ricardel currently works as a consultant for the U.S. defense industry with Federal Budget IQ, a consultancy in Alexandria, Va. As for Kellogg, the retired three-star U.S. Army general has worked at a variety of defense contractors since retiring in 2003, taking a brief break in the early days of his retirement in 2003 and 2004 to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq, overseeing the early days of the U.S. occupation of that country.

He is also one of the first foreign policy advisors that Trump disclosed publicly in March, 2016. Asked about Kelloggs service in a war that Trump has said he opposed  although he told Howard Stern he supported it in 2002  Trump said earlier this year he likes different opinions.

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

Post-election hack attack

The election may be over but the hacks from Russia are still coming. Vice reports that the Russian intelligence-linked hackers behind the breach into the Democratic National Committees networks are at it again, sending spear phishing emails to news outlets like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the RAND Corporation as well as government agencies like the State Department. Reuters spoke to an anonymous former member of the Obama administration, who says the administration plans to retaliate against Russia now that the election is over but hasnt made its mind up about what form that will take.

Snowden

Will President-elect Donald Trumps relatively warmer relationship with Russia lead to the extradition of Edward Snowden? No one quite knows. In a webchat on Thursday, Snowden himself acknowledged the theoretical possibility it could happen but said hes not afraid. If I was worried about safety, if the security and the future of myself was all that I cared about, I would still be in Hawaii.

Iran

With an avowed critic of the nuclear deal with Iran headed to the White House, observers are wondering what the future holds for the nonproliferation agreement. Donald Trump has issued conflicting rhetoric on the issue, promising both to dismantle and re-negotiate the agreement. What form a re-negotiation would take and whether the effort alone would blow up the deal, no one knows. The AP reports that Republican members of Congress are already working on legislation to sanction Irans ballistic missile industry and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which could prompt opponents of the deal in Iran to leverage as an excuse to walk away from it.

Somalia

The Pentagon is walking back a claim that a drone strike carried out in Somalia killed members of the al-Qaeda-linked Shabab group, admitting that the attack instead killed 10 people from its local allies against the terrorist group. The Washington Post reports that the incident was triggered after American advisors embedded with local forces took fire from a suspicious group seen on surveillance imagery. The forces called in a drone strike on the source of the fire. The Pentagon initially reported the strike as having killed Shabab fighters, but has since acknowledged it killed members of allied Galmadug security forces.

Photo Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
Geneva (AFP) - Islamic State group fighters reportedly shot dead more than 60 people this week and hung some of their bodies from poles after alleging they had collaborated with Iraqi troops, the United Nations said Friday.

The UN human rights office has raised alarm over hundreds of grotesque atrocities allegedly committed by IS as Iraqi forces have pushed their nearly month-long offensive to retake Mosul, the last jihadist bastion in Iraq.

"On Tuesday, ISIL reportedly shot and killed 40 civilians in Mosul city after accusing them of 'treason and collaboration' with the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)," rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said in a statement, using another acronym for the Islamic State.

"The victims were dressed in orange clothes marked in red with the words: 'traitors and agents of the ISF'. Their bodies were then hung on electrical poles in several areas in Mosul city," she added.

Abu Saif, a resident of eastern Mosul, told AFP by telephone that he had seen bodies strung up in the city along with signs that read "agent" and "traitor".

He did not have an exact count of the total number of bodies, but said he saw between 30 and 40.

"The Daesh organisation gathered people in some of the streets of Mosul and publicly executed a number of people of various ages, some of them by gunfire and others by beheading," he said, using an Arabic name for IS.

According to the UN, a 27-year-old man was reportedly killed in public in central Mosul Tuesday for using a mobile phone, which IS has banned in areas it controls.

And on Wednesday, IS slaughtered another 20 people at the Ghabat Military Base in northern Mosul after accusing them of "leaking information," the UN statement said.

"Their bodies were also hung at various intersections in Mosul, with notes stating: 'decision of execution' and 'used cellphones to leak information to the ISF'", the statement added.

Story continues

All of the killings apparently followed rulings by the so-called "courts" established by IS.

Conclusively verifying the details of massacres allegedly perpetrated by the jihadists since the US-backed Mosul offensive began, has been a challenge for UN investigators amid the chaos of the fighting and the threat of reprisals against sources.

Shamdasani said Friday that one recent source was a man who pretended to be dead during a massacre and contacted UN staffers after escaping. She did not specify which incident the man had survived.
The Hague (AFP) - Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has urged people to work together to protect themselves from intrusive government surveillance as Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House.

"If we want to have a better world, we cannot hope for an Obama and we should not fear a Donald Trump. Rather we should build it ourselves," Snowden said late Thursday, addressing an audience in the Netherlands in a live video chat from Russia.

While he said Trump's victory in Tuesday's US presidential elections was "a dark moment" in American history, he insisted the bigger question was "how do we defend the rights of everyone, everywhere, without regard to borders?"

Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents in 2013 revealing the vast US surveillance of private data put in place after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

After fleeing from his home in Hawaii, he currently lives as a fugitive in Russia where he has been given shelter.

Snowden appeared Thursday via an encrypted live video stream at a cinema in Amsterdam ahead of the Dutch premiere of director Oliver Stone's new movie about his life.

"I try not to look at this as a question of a single election or a single president or even a single government, because we see these threats coming across borders," Snowden said.

- 'Civic dangers' -

He highlighted Moscow's "Big Brother" law passed earlier this year forcing online companies to store users' data and pass it to government agencies if requested, as well as China's new mass surveillance law.

"This is a dark moment in our nation's history, but it is not the end of history," Snowden said,

"If we work together we can build something better and we can enjoy a more free and a more liberal society that benefits everyone."

Snowden, 33, is wanted in the United States to face trial on charges brought under the tough Espionage Act. But he said he was unconcerned about the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin could send him back once Trump is sworn in.

Story continues

Although it would "be crazy to dismiss" the idea that Putin could strike a deal to extradite him, Snowden said he would have remained in Hawaii if he had been concerned about his own safety.

"While I obviously care about what happens to me, I am the least important part of any of this. This is not about me, this is about us," he said.

It was more important to focus on resisting the "civic dangers to everyone" rather than on individual cases.

Snowden has repeatedly said he would be prepared to return to the US if he is allowed to address a jury and tell them why he did what he did, saying he remained "proud" of his actions. But that is denied to him under the restrictions of the Espionage Act.
SOFIA (Reuters) - Former air force commander Rumen Radev, backed by the opposition Socialists, has expanded his lead over ruling party candidate Tsetska Tsacheva and is poised to win Bulgaria's presidential runoff on Sunday, two opinion polls showed. A win for Radev, 53, is likely to move Bulgaria closer to Russia, putting it at odds with its European Union and NATO allies, and trigger months of political instability after Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said he would step down if his candidate loses. An opinion survey by Gallup International showed support for Radev had grown to 51 percent, while parliamentary speaker Tsacheva, 58, backed by Borisov's center-right GERB party, is trailing with 40 percent. Another independent pollster, Alpha Research, put backing for Radev at 49.6 percent and gave Tsacheva 39.1 percent, suggesting about a quarter of the electorate in the Black Sea state are still undecided. Radev, a novice to politics, is winning over Bulgarians who are frustrated with a political elite they see as corrupt and self-centered. "People had high hopes for a quick, brief transition, prosperity, high living standards," the mild-mannered Radev said in a televised debate late on Thursday. "But this happened for a small part of the citizens only. The disappointment is that there is no justice." His lead also reflects disappointment with Borisov's government over its failure to push ahead with meaningful reforms to overhaul the graft-prone judiciary in the Balkan country of 7.2 million. Radev has pledged to support tough border security measures to prevent an influx of migrants and to draw lessons from neighboring Romania's greater success in tackling corruption. In Bulgaria, the government and parliament wield most power but the president can veto legislation once, appoints some key officials and is also chief commander of the armed forces. (Reporting by Angel Krasimirov and Tsvetelia Tsolova; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Four months of Kashmir unrest have passed and Friday prayers have not been allowed in Jamia Masjid, Srinagar

By Shuja-ul-Haq : Hurriyat Chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has been detained by the police, after he tried to move towards Jamia Masjid, from his residence in Nigeen area of Srinagar.

Authorities had already imposed curfew on Friday in parts of Srinagar to prevent the scheduled protest march called by the separatist parties. As per officials, curfew has been imposed in seven police station areas of the city, to maintain law and order.

advertisement

Today is the 126th day of consecutive shutdown and unrest in the Kashmir Valley. Four months have passed and Friday prayers have not been allowed in Jamia Masjid. Normal Life has been affected by these strike calls and subsequent restrictions imposed by the government. Separatists had called for a march to Jamia Masjid on Friday, in city's Nowhatta area.

Also read: Trump had 'offered' to mediate on Kashmir issue, Pakistan just welcomed it



The separatist parties have slammed the government for not allowing congregational Friday prayers to be held in the Jamia Masjid for the past 17 weeks.



While separatist leader Mirwaiz was detained today, JKLF chief Yasin Malik was arrested and shifted to the Srinagar Central Jail on Thursday and Syed Ali Shah Geelani continues to remain under house arrest.

Also read: India takes strong exception to World Bank decision on Indus Waters Treaty

--- ENDS ---
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., speak at a news conference on Sept. 17. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Following Donald Trumps inauguration in January, Republicans will control the White House, Senate, House and a majority of governorships and statehouses, leaving Democrats to decide on which direction to take their party. If some of the more prominent Democratic voices get their say, the man leading the charge at the partys national committee would be Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison.

Ellison has not confirmed hes in the running for the chairmanship post, but he has a Monday announcement planned. If he does win the Democratic National Committees top job, it would be a striking development in the aftermath of Hillary Clintons loss to Donald Trump in Tuesdays election.

Notably, Ellison is Muslim, and Trump during the campaign proposed barring all Muslims from entering the U.S. Additionally, Ellison comes from the liberal wing of the party that backed Bernie Sanders over Clinton in the Democratic primary this year. His ascendency would be a signal that the national Democratic establishment would likely be more open to Sanders-like candidates in the future.

So who is Ellison? The former state lawmaker won Minnesotas Sixth District in 2006, becoming the first Muslim to serve in Congress. Hes the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and is popular in his heavily Democratic home district (composed mostly of Minneapolis), where he won 69 percent of the vote in Tuesdays election.

As Democrats ponder who should take over the DNC after interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile departs, Ellisons supporters can point to a Sunday morning television appearance last year.

On a July 2015 episode of ABCs This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Ellison said the following about a recently declared candidate for the presidency:

Anybody from the Democratic side of the fence whos terrified of the possibility of President Trump better vote, better get active, better get involved, because this man has some momentum and we better be ready for the fact he might be leading the Republican ticket.

Story continues

The other panelists on the show laughed out loud at his comments, and Stephanopoulos said, I know you dont believe that. Heres a clip of the exchange:

Sanders, the Vermont senator whose progressive policies earned him a large following during the course of the 2016 Democratic primaries, voiced his support for Ellison on Thursday. In a statement on his website, Sanders said, We need a Democratic National Committee led by a progressive who understands the dire need to listen to working families, not the political establishment or the billionaire class.

Ellison and Sanders share many of the same policies. The Minnesota lawmaker is an advocate for debt-free college, a $15 minimum wage and supporting the Obama administrations Iran agreement. He is also an opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the trade deals that Trump spent much of his time on the trail campaigning against.

Sanders opinion was echoed Thursday night by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

I think hes terrific, and I think he would make a terrific DNC chair, Warren said in an MSNBC interview with Rachel Maddow.

While it is not surprising that two of the most prominent progressives in the Democratic Party support Ellison, he also appears to have the backing of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who will replace the retiring Harry Reid as the ranking Democrat in the Senate. According to a Politico report:

Soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is backing Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison to be the next head of the Democratic National Committee, a big boost for the Minnesota Democrat as the party searches for a new leader. Schumer spoke with Ellison Thursday afternoon and supports him for chair, according to a source close to Schumer, who added: Without a Democratic White House, Schumers view is the DNC is where grassroots organizing in sync with leg battles should be organized.

At this moment it looks like the main competitor for the position could be former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. Dean ran the DNC from 2005 to 2009, focusing on a 50-state strategy to compete across the nation in state, local and federal races. Under Dean, the Democrats regained control of the Senate and House in 2006 and then the White House in 2008. One of Deans arguments is that the chairmanship is a full-time job, and Ellison wouldnt be able to do it while also serving in Congress.

The dems need organization and focus on the young. Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman again.  Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) November 10, 2016

Former Maryland Gov. Martin OMalley said in a statement Friday that he also was taking a hard look at running for the position.
By Tiisetso Motsoeneng JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The head of South Africa's state power utility announced on Friday he would step down, a week after he was implicated in a report by the anti-graft watchdog on alleged influence-peddling. "I would like to reiterate that this act is not an admission of wrongdoing on my part," Brian Molefe, chief executive of Eskom, said in a statement. "It is rather what I feel to be the correct thing to do in the interests of the company and good corporate governance." He said he would leave the post in January. The report by the Public Protector, a constitutionally mandated watchdog, raised questions over coal deals between Eskom and a company controlled by the Gupta family, who are friends with President Jacob Zuma. Molefe has been with Eskom since April last year, when he was drafted in from state rail freight firm Transnet to try to stabilize the troubled utility, which at the time was battling to keep the lights on in Africa's most industrialized economy. He was confirmed as CEO in September last year and is widely credited with halting the power cuts. He leaves the company in the middle of the crucial construction of three new coal-fired power stations. Eskom is also considering a building a second nuclear power plant. "First head to roll. Put simply he had no credibility left after the report," said Peter Attard Montalto, Nomura International's head of emerging markets, in a note. Eskom's 2026 bond weakened on the news, with the yield rising 10 basis points. "UNWARRANTED ATTACKS" Public Enterprises Minister Lynn Brown was "sad" to lose Molefe, spokesman Colin Cruywagen said, while Eskom's Chairman Baldwin Ngubane said the resignation was "regrettable". The watchdog's report showed 58 telephone interactions between Molefe and Ajay Gupta between August 2015 and March this year. It stopped short of saying crimes had been committed, and called for an inquiry to investigate allegations of corruption in Zuma's government. Zuma denies granting undue influence to the three Indian-born Gupta brothers, who run a business empire ranging from media to mining, or to anyone else. The Guptas have denied seeking influence. Separately, the president's office said it was concerned about "unwarranted public attacks" on Zuma by former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela, a day after Madonsela defended the release of an audio recording of her meeting with the president during her investigation. Zuma, 74, survived a no-confidence vote in parliament on Thursday. He has defeated two other votes to unseat him this year, backed by the support of his African National Congress which controls about two-thirds of the 400-member assembly. (Additional reporting by Mfuneko Toyana; Editing by James Macharia and Andrew Roche)
Up to half-a-million people were expected to take to the streets of Seoul on Saturday to demand the resignation of scandal-hit President Park Geun-Hye, in one of the largest anti-government protests in decades.

On the back of official appeals for calm, around 25,000 police were on standby for the third instalment in a series of weekly mass demonstrations, triggered by a corruption scandal that has left Park fighting for her political life.

In an effort to soothe public anger, Park has issued several apologies, reshuffled her top officials and even agreed to relinquish some of her extensive executive powers, but the popular calls for her to step down have been relentless.

"We are feeling the weight of the serious public mood," presidential spokesman Jung Youn-Kuk acknowledged Friday.

Most experts believe Park, who has just over a year left of her single five-year term, will be able to ride out the crisis and remain in office, albeit with her authority and ability to govern seriously undermined.

Opposition parties have, so far, avoided direct calls for her to resign and appear more interested in extracting more concessions from Park in terms of devolving power to the legislature.

Police said they were planning for a crowd of around 170,000 for Saturday's demonstration, while organisers said they expect up to 500,000 people to turn out.

Those sort of numbers would make it one of the biggest anti-government rallies since the pro-democracy protests of the 1980s.

In a televised press conference on Friday, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Joon-Sik voiced concerns at the possibility of "illegal collective action or violence."

"We hope the public will cooperate so that the demonstration will be legal and peaceful," Lee said.

The two previous rallies were mostly peaceful, with a large number of families attending, including couples with infants and young children.

The last time Seoul witnessed mass protests on such a large-scale was in 2008 when around 100,000 people took to the streets to protest then-president Lee Myung-Bak's decision to lift an import ban on US beef.

Story continues

The scandal engulfing Park is focused on her long-time personal confidante, Choi Soon-Sil, who is currently under arrest on charges of fraud and abuse of power.

Prosecutors are investigating allegations that Choi, 60, leveraged her personal relationship with Park to coerce donations from large companies like Samsung to non-profit foundations which she set up and used for personal gain.

She is also accused of interfering in government affairs, including the nomination of senior officials, despite holding no official position.

Lurid reports of the unhealthy influence Choi wielded over Park have sent the president's approval ratings plunging to record lows.
By Denis Dumo JUBA (Reuters) - A popular South Sudanese radio station set up with U.S. backing was shut down on Friday by security officials, a journalist said, the latest media outlet to face pressure from the authorities. Nichola Mandil, a senior journalist at Eye Radio in Juba, which many listeners rely on for news, told Reuters that security officials stopped broadcasts without giving a reason. "Eye Radio has been officially shut down by the National Security indefinitely," he said, adding that three security officers "shut down the radio station, locked the three studios and took the keys with them." "They ordered all the journalists to leave the station immediately and we are now in the process of going home," he said, adding that the radio's chief executive was going to meet the director-general of National Security for an explanation. There was no immediate comment from government officials. One senior official contacted said he was not aware of the incident. Although radio broadcasts had stopped, the website www.eyeradio.org showed stories posted on Nov. 11. Journalists in South Sudan have often complained of harassment by the authorities during the civil conflict that erupted in December 2013 between troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and those backing his former deputy Riek Machar. A peace deal signed in 2015 failed to stick and fighting in Juba flared up in July, prompting Machar to flee after returning to the capital just a few weeks earlier. In September, the authorities shut the Nation Mirror newspaper, without giving a reason although it followed coverage of a report by a U.S.-based group alleging misuse of state funds by the nation's leaders. It remains closed. Another newspaper, the Juba Monitor, has also been closed temporarily on several occasions. Eye Radio, which usually operates 24/7 and is expanding its reach across the country, delivers broadcasts in English, Arabic and other local languages. It first broadcast in 2003, before South Sudan's independence in 2011 from Sudan, as a project backed with funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development. It now calls itself a "self-sustaining independent radio station." (Writing by Edmund Blair)
Madrid (AFP) - Spain's king will begin his first state visit to Saudi Arabia on Saturday, with the possible sale of five warships to the oil-rich kingdom on top of the agenda, sparking protests from rights groups.

Felipe VI will be accompanied during his three-day visit by Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis and Public Works Minister Inigo de la Serna.

He was invited to visit by Saudi Arabia's King Salman, who acceded to the Saudi throne in January 2015 following the death of his half-brother Abdullah.

Top-selling Spanish daily newspaper El Pais reported this week that "one of the imperatives of the visit" is the signing of a contract with Spanish ship builder Navantia to build five Avante 2200 corvette patrol vessels for the Saudi navy for over two billion euros ($2.2 billion).

This would be "the biggest contract every signed" by the state-owned firm and would likely guarantee jobs for 2,000 people for five years, the newspaper added.

Contacted by AFP, the royal palace declined to comment on the report.

The ongoing sale of military hardware to Saudi Arabia by Western states has been vociferously criticised by rights groups, who have pointed to the use of such equipment in deadly attacks on civilians in Saudi-led Arab coalition airstrikes in Yemen.

Amnesty International on Friday called on Spain's king to block the sale of the warships to the Saudi navy, arguing they could be used in Yemen to carry out "serious violations of international humanitarian law".

"They are bombing hospitals, public schools, health centres, among other infrastructure full of people," the group's director for Spain, Esteban Beltran, said in a video posted on Twitter.

He called on Felipe to use his influence with King Salman "to stop air attacks on civilians in Yemen".

In January other groups including Greenpeace and Oxfam sent an open letter to the Spanish government opposing the possible sale of the warships to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 to support the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi after Huthi rebels overran much of the impoverished country.

Over 7,000 people have been killed -- more than half of them civilians -- in the conflict, while another three million are displaced and some 70 percent of the population needs food aid.
Madrid (AFP) - Spain will quickly ratify a global pact aimed at taming climate change, a step which had been delayed by months of political paralysis, Environment Minister Isabel Garcia Tejerina said Friday.

Conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's new government, which was sworn in last week, will introduce the agreement in parliament on November 3 so it can be ratified "as soon as possible", she told a news conference after a weekly cabinet meeting.

"Ratification will allow us to participate fully in all the decisions which will start to be adopted" after UN climate talks currently underway in Morocco which Rajoy will attend, she added.

Spain took nearly 10 months to establish a government after two inconclusive general elections and several unsuccessful attempts to form a coalition in a country where the traditional two-party system was shattered by the rise of new political parties.

More than 100 nations representing 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions have inked the historic Paris Agreement, the world's first universal climate pact, which came into force in early November.

But the future of the pact -- which aims to cap global warming at well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and 1.5 Celsius if possible, compared with pre-industrial levels -- is in doubt after Republican Donald Trump's surprise election win in the US.

Climate change denier Trump, who has made no secret of his disregard for the United Nations, pledged earlier this year to withdraw from the Paris climate deal. In contrast, current US President Barack Obama has been a champion of the pact.

Tejerina said she was confident that Washington would not abandon the pact.

"It is a change in the global economy which already is unstoppable, not only by governments, but also by companies. We have to wait and see how the new American administration responds," she added.

Spain is one of the biggest consumers in Europe of fossil fuels. The country also has little or no oil reserves, making it heavily dependent on imported oil.

Story continues

Oil accounts for half of its energy consumption while natural gas accounts for roughly 20 percent.

The country encouraged the development of renewable energy in the 2000s through generous government subsidies awarded by the previous Socialist government.

But Rajoy, in power since 2011, slashed the subsidises as part of wider austerity measures aimed at reducing a ballooning public deficit.

Spain has the world's fourth biggest wind park after China, the United States and Germany.

Spanish renewable energy group Gamesa last month approved a merger with the wind power division of German engineering giant Siemens which will create a global giant in the sector.
The Aurora Winter Train in Alaska is departing on an overnight New Years Eve voyage to close out 2016 with the fantastic spectacle of the Northern Lights.

On December 31, the train will leave Anchorage and spend one night in Fairbanks. The city is known for its vibrant aurora borealis displays and opportunities to fly above the Arctic Circle.

Related:12 Inspirational Quotes to Get You Planning a New Years Eve Vacation

For those unable to make the New Years Eve date, trains will also leave Anchorage on December 27 and January 3.

Prices start at $395 per person, double occupancy, according to theLA Times. The price includes one train ride from Anchorage to Fairbanks, one night in a hotel in Fairbanks and then a return flight to Anchorage.

New Years Eve Train under Northern Lights

Theres also a longer, three-night option available, starting at $989, that includes one night in Anchorage, two nights in Fairbanks, a one-way train ride, a one-way flight, and a flight-seeing tour north of the Arctic Circle.

This article was originally published on TravelAndLeisure.com
On the morning of Election Day, I joined He Haibo, a legal scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, as he spent several hours observing a polling station in the upscale Graham and Parks public elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If I were a voter, I would vote for her just for this, He said, pointing at Massachusetts State Representative Marjorie C. Decker, who was running unopposed for reelection, aiding a very old woman walk up the stairs. I know its just a gesture, but its a nice gesture. Later that morning, Senator Elizabeth Warren, swarmed by cameras, entered to vote. She makes my heart sing, one elderly woman said, a look of bliss on her face. The world is such a mess, and then there is Elizabeth Warren. After He watched her purchase pastries at a bake sale, and then confirmed with the bake sale volunteers the amount she had spent$20he approached her with a shy smile. Im a visiting law professor from China. I come not to vote, but to observe American democracy, he said. Good for you, she said cheerily, as He flashed a thumbs up. This is American democracy. Voting and food. She paused for a minute, and tried again, before politely turning away: Voting and fundraisers for the kids.

He told me that Warrens ease with voters impressed him. She didnt say a word about her policies, he said. The election is not about those sort of things. She just shows up, shakes hands, takes pictures with people, and that makes her closer to voters. Its a wonderful thing.

He is spending the year at Harvard studying administrative and constitutional law and researching, writing about, and experiencing American democracy. In September, He blogged about his experience canvassing  in Chinese, the expression is to pull votes  in New Hampshire for the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. A Chinese citizen, He cheerily knocked on doors and smiled as his two fellow canvassers, both Americans, asked the residents about their voting choices. A gentle listener with a mischievous smile, kind eyes, and a wispy, Lincolnesque beard, He marveled at the personal nature of American democracy, the handshaking, easy compliments, and selfies. And, comfortingly, over the turbulent 24 hours I spent with him, he also marveled at the structural integrity of the American system.

Story continues

The evening of Election Day, He bar-hopped through Cambridge and Boston, speaking to roughly a dozen voters about their politics and outlooks. As the audacity of hopelessness sunk in at around midnight on November 8, He comforted me by comparing America in 2016 to China 50 years ago. The good thing about the American system is it prevents awful things from occurring. With the American system, you could never have a Cultural Revolution, He said, referring to the 10-year period in which a tyrannical Mao Zedong encouraged millions of young Chinese to rebel against, overthrow, and in some cases murder their teachers, bosses, and parents. Even if Trump wins, you cant say the American democratic system failed, he said. For a society to adjust itself to the will of its people, thats a great thing.

Its a fraught time to remember it, but the United States remains the preeminent democratic experiment in the world. We look at the United States differently from American scholars looking at China, He told me, choosing his words carefully. American scholars think, ok, [Chinas President] Xi Jinping is the highest leader in China, how does that affect China and Sino-U.S. relations? He and some other Chinese scholars, he said, studied which elements of the American system would benefit China. He asked polling officials about early voting, about how to divide wards and precincts, and whether they would tell him if his neighbors voted. Throughout the morning, He took photos every chance he got, sometimes asking for permission, a large camera in his hands, sometimes just surreptitiously photographing with his phone. I had assumed he did it for documentation purposes. But He described it as testing the tension between what is permitted and what is allowed. When I asked about taking photos [at the polling station], most of the people said no, He said. But even when they refused, sometimes they accepted itlike when Warren entered the school, and suddenly photographing seemed permissible everywhere. To He, that detail is a teaching point. We ask ourselves, he said, what parts of the system can we adopt?

Like many Chinese raised during the Mao years, when mass campaigns, sloganeering, and struggle sessions were regular features of life, politics got into He at an early age. But his positive association with politics come from his father, now deceased, who was the village head in Hes birthplace, a small village in the mountains of Zhejiang province in eastern China. Some people in China, and in America, think that politics is evil, but it doesnt have to be if peoples interests are respected, he said. He describes his father as a patient, intelligent man, who educated and bettered his compatriots without patronizing them. My father knew that Americans walked on the moon in 1969, he told me. His fellow villagers, however, dismissed this as impossible; instead, they believed the tradition of the Cowherd and the Weavergirl, two mythical lovers who every year on July 7 reunite as two stars moving across the sky. On one July 7, to prove that the two stars did not travel the length of the sky to meet each other, Hes father stayed up all night with one of the doubting villagers, observing the movement of the stars.

He grew interested in the American system in part because of its structural elements: the way the parties connected with one another, the separation of powers, the bustle and din of American presidential elections. When he was sixteen, his older sister gave him a book called A Brief Biographical Sketch of The Previous American Presidents, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter. He memorized biographical information about the U.S. presidents, and can recite most of them today: Polk. Only four years in office but pushed Americas borders to the Pacific Ocean. Good.

In 1989, He performed excellently on the gaokao, the national college entrance exam. But in June of that year, soldiers massacred pro-democracy protestors in Tiananmen Square. Because 1989 was a non-regular year, he said diplomatically, he could only get into Zhejiang Politics and Law Polytechnic, a mediocre school. He wanted to retake the gaokao. But my father said something to me, that even today, left a deep impression: You can find the Buddha even in a small temple, he recalled. He passed the bar at 21, becoming the youngest lawyer in his province. Then, after working for several years in his local Bureau of Justice, He entered Peking University, one of Chinas top schools, where he earned his Ph.D. and wrote a thesis on the legitimate foundation of judicial review.

In liberal Cambridge, He had difficulty finding Trump supporters. In his two months in the United States, he had only met two  a couple from North Carolina, who told him that God sent Trump to America. (It was at this point that I realized religion played a large role in American politics, He told me.) At a bar in Boston, we found two men wearing Make America Great Again hats, who He listened to speak passionately about their views of how Trump would improve their nation. Daniel Dahnke, a 25-year-old sales representative who told me Id hate to see Clinton shot, even though I cant stand her, praised Hes curiosity in observing the election. Instead of looking down at the election like from a blimp, Dahnke said, He is in the trenches with everyone else. I like that hes here, Dahnke said. Dahnkes friend, a 24-year-old who asked to just be quoted by his first name, Luke, imagined it might be frustrating for He, who comes from a country with no national elections, to watch Americans choose their leader. Despite the disagreement, Luke said, we get our own personal say, our own personal vote as Americans.

As the polls closed, and The New York Times began reporting that Trump had a greater than 95 percent chance of victory, He grew pensive. The basic things about the American system are unchangeable, he told me. The federal system, the separation of powers. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of Americas most powerful presidents, had to deal with a lot of constraints on his power. He, like everyone else at the Harvard Law School student center, looked shocked as Clintons loss grew apparent. But his faith in American democracy remained unshaken and unsullied. China may not choose a system like Americas, he told me, earlier in the day. But at least we can learn something.

Charlie Leight/Getty Images
Washington (AFP) - The number of migrants illegally entering the United States from Mexico jumped more than 16 percent in October, US officials said on Thursday.

The US Department of Homeland Security said it detained 46,195 people in October, up from 39,501 in September and 37,048 in August.

"There are currently about 41,000 individuals in our immigration detention facilities -- typically, the number in immigration detention fluctuates between 31,000 and 34,000," DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement.

"I have authorized US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to acquire additional detention space for single adults so that those apprehended at the border can be returned to their home countries as soon as possible," he said.

Immigration officials have said that most of the undocumented arrivals are actually Central Americans making the arduous journey through Mexico to seek work and safety in the United States -- amid poverty and a surge in gang-related violence at home.

US officials have "engaged with a number of countries to repatriate their citizens more quickly, and they have agreed to do so," Johnson said, noting that many of the new arrivals have been asylum seekers and young children.

"Our borders cannot be open to illegal migration. We must, therefore, enforce the immigration laws consistent with our priorities," he added.

"We prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants who are convicted of serious crimes and those apprehended at the border attempting to enter the country illegally."

The latest immigration figures come two days after the November 8 presidential election that closed a campaign in which immigration has loomed large.

The immigration issue has been central in the candidacy of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to build a wall along the southwestern border and make Mexico pay for it.

Trump met for an hour Thursday with the head of the US Senate Mitch McConnell, and again stressed his plans to highlight immigration during his presidency which starts in January

"We're going to look very strongly at immigration," the billionaire businessman said.
Dozens of celebrities including Lady Gaga, Rosie Perez, Amanda Seyfried and Marg Helgenberger and Pink have added their names to a long-shot movement underway to legally deny Donald Trump the presidency. Three days after the election, they and more than 2.7 million Americans have signed a Change.org petition calling on Republican electors to switch their votes and make Hillary Clinton president.

Although its allowed under the Constitution, the Hail Mary effort has little to no chance of succeeding because actually turning the votes of electors probably is more firmly rooted in fantasy. Still, the effort to keep Trump out of the White House is more evidence of the growing dissatisfaction with the elections outcome. And though

The former Apprentice star won the majority of electors, even though Clinton appears to have won the popular vote, but his election wont be official until December 19, when the Electoral College meets in each of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., to cast their votes for president and vice president.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Mandatory Credit: Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/REX/Shutterstock (7429706t) Barack Obama, Donald Trump President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands following their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington Obama Trump, Washington, USA - 10 Nov 2016

Votes still are being counted, but the electoral map suggests that Trump will finish with 306 electors to Clintons 232. But that margin of victory could be erased, and the election handed to Clinton, if 38 of those 306 Republican electors switch their votes. And prior to the election, several of them indicated that they just might do so if Trump won.

And it doesnt matter that Clinton has conceded or that President Obama already has met in the White House to congratulate President-elect Trump. The electors still will meet in state capitals all across the country in five weeks to confirm, or overturn, the voters decision. And if 38 Republican electors change their votes, Clinton would be president-elect.

RelatedTeamsters President James Hoffa Vows To Work With Donald Trump

On December 19, the electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots,

the petition states. If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump will win. However, they can vote for Hillary Clinton if they choose. We are calling on the electors to ignore their states votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton.

Story continues

Long derided as an archaic and undemocratic 18th century throwback, the Electoral College was designed for an election just such as this: a last-chance check-and-balance to undo a vote in which the people might have made elected a popular but unqualified demagogue who threatened to lock up his political opponent.

Unlike Brexit, where the British people werent given a second chance to reconsider what theyd done, the Electoral College was designed by the Founding Fathers as a last chance do-over  a second election to make sure the first one wasnt a gigantic mistake.

The role of the Electoral College was established in Article II, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution, which states: Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.

The Founders intention was that the Electoral College would serve as a second election, just as valid as the first. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers: It was equally desirable that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.

RelatedTrevor Noah: Obama Deserves Oscar For Performance During Donald Trump Meet-And-Greet

That complicated investigation is now in the hands of the 306 Republican electors, who must decide during the next five weeks whether they really want Trump as Commander in Chief with access to the nuclear codes.

All of the electors were selected long before the election, chosen at state conventions or through votes of the parties central committees. Theyre all regular folks  nurses and lawyers, real estate agents and teachers  and its in their hands that the fate of the country now rests.

There is no federal law that requires electors to cast their votes for their pledged candidate, and 29 states have no laws compelling them to do so. Seventeen of those states that went for Trump, including Texas, Arizona, Missouri and Indiana, have a total of 172 Republican electors. Twelve other states that Trump won  including Florida and Ohio  have laws against what are called faithless electors, but no elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged, and its happened 67 times since 1796.

Related stories

Alec Baldwin: NBC Execs "Kill" Any 'Saturday Night Live' Attempt "To Tell People Who To Vote For"

President-Elect Donald Trump's 1st TV Interview Surges '60 Minutes' Ratings, Seahawks Win Scores For 'Sunday Night Football'

Donald Trump's Steve Bannon Appointment Dominates Early Morning News Cycle
By PTI: New Delhi, Nov 11 (PTI) The turn of events in the Supreme Court which witnessed a contempt notice being issued to its former judge Markandey Katju for his comments on a blog about apex court judges, today prompted experts, barring an activist lawyer, to say that he "invited" the trouble himself.

Former Attorney General of India Soli Sorabjee, Rajya Sabha MP and senior advocate K T S Tulsi and Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) Vice President and senior advocate Ajit Kumar Sinha said that Justice Katju himself "invited it".

advertisement

However, former Additional Solicitor General and activist lawyer Indira Jaising differed with them saying the blog contained Justice Katjus personal opinion which cannot invite contempt notice.

"It was his personal opinion. Whether a Supreme Court judge agrees or disagrees does not amount to contempt. I personally do not think it was contempt," she said.

Differing with her, Sorabjee said, "The statement he (Katju) made was not appropriate. He himself invited it (order). It is a sad thing and his statement was contemptuous."

His view was shared by Sinha, who said, "Katju should have confined his criticism to the judgement and not the judges. Being critical of a judge is not permissible".

"Truth is a defence and if you say something, you have to justify it. You cannot make such comments on a person like a judge. You cannot attribute motives to a judge," he said agreeing with the apex court order issuing contempt notice to Katju.

Tulsi too felt that Justice Katjus remarks on the blog on the judges were "contemptuous".

The senior advocate and Rajya Sabha MP, who responded to the question after also going through the deliberations in the court room where Justice Katju was engaged in a heated exchange with the bench, said "today was a repeat of his contemptuous behaviour".

"Justice Katjus response to Supreme Court in court amounted to him repeating his contemptuous behaviour. The apex court judge told him that his blog was an assault on the judges and not the judgement.

"To this, Justice Katju started lecturing them. Justice Katju has to remember that he was appearing as a citizen and not as a judge or former judge. He ought to know that law is same for all citizens. By his intemperate language, the Supreme Court had no option but to issue him a contempt," Tulsi said.

Sinha was in agreement with Tulsi over the former judges conduct in the court room and said "in my personal capacity, I feel that his behaviour today in court was inappropriate". PTI PPS HMP RKS ARC

--- ENDS ---
The Steve Harvey show will be coming to an end after five seasons. However, Harvey will remain a daytime fixture with a new talker, set to launch in September. He will produce the new show with IMG. It will be distributed by NBCUniversal Domestic Television, which also distributed Steve Harvey. The NBC stations, which currently carry Steve Harvey, also will be the core station group for the new show next fall. NBCU is currently shopping it to other stations with the expectations that the new show will be taken on by the majority of stations that carry Steve Harvey. The terms of the deals are unclear but a shows of this caliber usually seek and get a two-year initial pickup.

There had been speculation that Harvey would end his successful talk show when his contract with EndemolShine North America ends in 2017. EndemolShine produced Steve Harvey, based in Chicago, which will wrap after completing its current fifth season in May. The comedian is teaming with a new producing partner, IMG, for the new talker, which will be based in Los Angeles. He also is gaining ownership and creative control, something he had been after. IMG, a management/production division of WME-IMG, has been actively venturing in production and distribution of TV shows on behalf of clients.

Because of the new location, the new show is expected to be more celebrity driven while keeping Harveys trademark comedy.

Harveys star as a TV host has risen meteorically since his eponymous talk show launched in 2012. Having his daytime talker in Los Angeles will be convenient for Harvey as three other shows he hosts are produced here, NBCs Little Big Shots and ABCs Celebrity Family Feud and Funderdome. (The Celebrity Feud syndicated strip films in Atlanta, but such game shows usually are filmed in large batches.)

Steve Harvey has consistently been a top tier talker, ranking #4 behind Dr. Phil, Ellen and Live With Kelly. During the most recent week reporting, it averaged 2.3 million viewers and a 1.7 in adults 18-49.

Story continues

EndemolShine last week announced a new Page Six gossip syndication strip for next fall. The new Steve Harvey talker is the second syndicated talk show announced for fall 2017.

Related stories

NBCUniversal In Talks To Buy Minority Stake In Euronews

NBCUniversal & Comcast Slapped With Age Discrimination Suit By Ex-E! SVP

Donald Trump Blames NBCU Microphone For His Lewd 'Access Hollywood' Boast In New Interview
Until now, President-elect Donald Trump has been dealing with play money in outlining his vision for government spending and tax policy.

Throughout his campaign, the billionaire businessman blithely tossed out proposals for bolstering the military and border security, building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, launching a massive new round of infrastructure construction, providing paid family leave for women and slashing taxes on the wealthy.

Related: Five Things Trump Wants to Do That Liberals Would Love

Much of this was political gamesmanship, as Trump sought to one-up his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, on spending and tax breaks for key constituencies. When the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that Trumps proposals, taken together, would add $5.3 trillion to the national debt over the coming decade, Trump and his advisers dismissed the startling figures as hyperbole that didnt take into account economic expansion under his policies.

As he prepares to take the reins of the country on January 20 and press for passage of his legislative agenda on Capitol Hill, Trump will have to drop the bluster and level with Americans about the implication of his spending and tax measures as he encounters the often harsh realities of budget politics. No longer able to use seat-of-the-pants calculations, Trump will be obliged to operate within the confines of budget resolutions, statutory spending caps, debt ceilings and Congressional Budget Office audits as he promotes his agenda.

Trump spent Thursday meeting at the White House with President Obama and then conferring with GOP congressional leaders in the afternoon. We can't get started fast enough, whether it's healthcare or immigration, so many different things, we'll be working on them very rapidly, and I think we'll be putting things up very quickly," Trump said in a statement after dining with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Vice President-elect Mike Pence.

Story continues

"We had a very good meeting, a very detailed meeting, he added. We're going to lower taxes as you know, we're going to fix healthcare [read: dismantle Obamacare] and make it more affordable and better, we're going to do a real job for the public."

Related: Ryan Declares GOP Has a Mandate to Enact Sweeping Changes

But Trump and his new advisers already are headed for budgetary headaches and tough political calculations almost as soon as the last bottle of champagne is uncorked at his Inauguration celebration in late January.

As is its wont, Congress punted on a series of tough spending decisions until after the election and will return to work early next week staring down a December 9 deadline for completing work on fiscal 2017 spending measures or risking another government shutdown.

The government is running on a stop-gap continuing resolution that provides funding at last fiscal years levels until December 9th. It is far from clear whether Congress will rush to pass the 11 remaining appropriations bills in an omnibus package  as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Obama would much prefer, or postpone final action until early next year when Trump succeeds Obama in the Oval Office.

Obama reportedly wants to resolve all differences before he leaves office to give him one last chance to shape spending policy in the Democratic direction before the Republicans totally take over. And McConnell is a big fan of regular order on Capitol Hill and would like to clear the decks of left-over spending controversies before the new Congress is sworn in.

Related: Despite Differences, President Obama Asks Americans to Unite Behind President Elect Trump

But Ryan is more hemmed in by arch conservatives in the House who despise Obama and dont want him to have the final say on spending levels for the remainder of the fiscal year that runs to next September 30. They are clamoring for another temporary extension of government spending authority to give Trump and his team time to settle in.

It would be inappropriate to negotiate a lame-duck spending deal with President Obama and [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid, which would further jeopardize the nations fiscal health, Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX), chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said in a statement.

Politico reported that the leadership is now leaning towards another continuing resolution through March or April, well after Trump takes office. We cant pass anything longer, and that gives Trump time to set up his administration, a Republican congressional aide told Politico.

Richard Kogan, a senior fellow and budget expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said on Thursday that the decision will come down to whether they want to close the deal at spending levels they already have agreed upon or do they want to try to improve their levels of the deal by threatening to wait until the spring to do it.

Related - Trump Proposes $1 Trillion for Infrastructure Without Raising Taxes

If they do decide to drag out the process with another continuing resolution, Kogan noted, it would work a hardship on government agencies that already are struggling to operate with added responsibilities under last years appropriations levels.

Regardless of what the Republicans ultimately decide, There will be one elephant in the room, according to Taxpayers for Common Senate, a government watchdog. And that is the persistent tight spending caps mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Congress approved those caps in a bid to get a better handle on the rising debt. The BCA caps on defense and non-defense spending will last until 2021 unless Congress and the new president decide to change them.

Trump may have big plans for raising defense spending to make the United States the most feared military power in the world. But for now, at least, he will run up against those caps  including a $609.9 billion fiscal 2017 defense spending cap that includes money for ongoing action in the Middle East. He and his GOP allies on the Hill also will have to contend with a $533.4 billion limit on non-defense discretionary programs next year, which could put a crimp in his infrastructure and border security efforts.

The Congressional Research Service estimates that together, the spending caps will achieve nearly $1 trillion in savings between fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2021 if left intact. Many conservative defense hawks are eager to raise the cap to allow for more defense spending and military weaponry, while Obama and the Democrats would much prefer to see the ceiling lifted on domestic programs for education, health care, job training and other initiatives.

Related: Dueling Trump and GOP Tax Plans Would both Cause Much Larger Deficits

The national debt is currently nearing $19.8 trillion and is likely to exceed $20 trillion in less than a year. Moreover, the budget deficit  the annual gap between spending and tax revenues  grew to $587 billion in fiscal 2016, the first increase in the deficit in five years.

If they scrap it, Congress and the new President have to explain to taxpayers what made them decide to be so extravagant, Taxpayers for Common Sense said in its analysis.

Like most candidates, Trump promised new spending on virtually every sector of the economy, it added. More for investments in infrastructure, more on defense, more for veterans, also no change to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Thats a lot of cash and would most certainly balloon the deficit and debt.

For the first time since 2007, Republicans will control both chambers of Congress and the executive branch. With the Democrats largely consigned to the sidelines, Trump and the Republicans will either take the credit or the blame for their fiscal actions.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) - Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday praised the "growing convergence" of views between his nation and Japan, saying strong ties will enable them to play a stabilising role in Asia.

Modi is in Japan to sign a landmark nuclear energy pact and strengthen ties as China's regional influence grows and Donald Trump's election has thrown U.S. policies across Asia into doubt.

India, Japan and the United States have been building security ties by holding three-way naval exercises, but Trump's "America First" campaign promise has stirred concern about a reduced U.S. engagement in the region - an approach that could draw Modi and Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe closer.

Modi told Japanese business leaders that the 21st century is Asia's century, urging them to invest in India.

"The growing convergence of views between Japan and India and our special strategic and global partnership have the capacity to drive the regional economy and development, and stimulate global growth," he said.

"Strong India and strong Japan will not only enrich our two nations, it will also be a stabilising factor in Asia and the world."

The nuclear agreement, which Modi and Abe are set to sign later in the day, follows a similar one with the United States in 2008 which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation, a step seen as the first big move to build India into a regional counterweight to China.

The Yomiuri newspaper said the main accord will likely be accompanied by a separate document stipulating that Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, will suspend nuclear cooperation if India conducts a nuclear test. Initially, Japan wanted that inserted into the agreement itself, but India resisted, it said.

India has declared a moratorium on such testing since its last explosions in 1998.

The two countries have also been trying to close a deal on the supply of amphibious rescue aircraft US-2 to the Indian navy, which would be one of Japan's first sales of military equipment since Abe lifted a 50-year ban on arms exports.

India's Defence Acquisitions Council met earlier this week to consider the purchase of 12 of the planes made by ShinMaywa Industries, but failed to reach a decision.

(Editing by Nick Macfie)
Blac Chyna and Her Squad Did the Mannequin Challenge While She Was in Labor [Instagram]

Little things like labor shouldn't get in the way of carrying out a social media challenge, right? That was apparently Blac Chyna's thinking when she posted a video of herself and her crew - including fiance Rob Kardashian, Grandma Kris Jenner and Jenner's beau, Corey Gamble - performing the uber popular #MannequinChallenge while she was in the delivery room on Thursday. Shortly after the video was filmed, Kardashian and Chyna welcomed a baby girl, Dream Renee Kardashian.

A video posted by Blac Chyna (@blacchyna) on Nov 10, 2016 at 2:50pm PST

Alibaba Sets Record on Singles' Day, Posting $1 Billion in Sales in 5 Minutes [Bloomberg]

On China's Singles' Day, a 24-hour shopping extravaganza celebrating the country's single population, Alibaba posted a record-breaking $1 billion in sales in only five minutes (last year's record was $1 billion in eight minutes). The holiday dwarfs the spending by Americans on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Singles' Day as a shopping extravaganza was launched by Alibaba in 2009, and has since been adopted by its competitors like JD.com. In addition to heavy discounts, Alibaba also utilized virtual reality technology so that Chinese consumers could purchase items from the Macy's New York store and Tokyo's Otaku Mode. The Singles' Day holiday was invented by college students in the '90s as a counter to Valentine's Day.

Agent Provocateur Downsizes [WWD]

As part of a new restructuring plan, London-based lingerie brand Agent Provocateur is shuttering 30 percent of its retail network and downsizing its headquarters staff by 30 percent. The brand also plans to "phase down" its diffusion line, L'Agent, expand its presence in Asia and continue focusing on its ecommerce business.

Models Carry Guns, Wear Gas Masks at Belarus Fashion Week Show [Yahoo]

In Belarus, one designer took the idea of the "military-inspired" look very literally. Belarusian designer of the brand Harydavets & Efremova sent models down the runway holding fake yet realistic-looking assault rifles while wearing gas masks during the label's spring 2017 presentation. The models got in character, too, with some walking with hands placed over their hearts while others marched. The presentation makes a statement, for sure.

A photo posted by Maison Carree (@maisoncarree_magazine) on Nov 9, 2016 at 11:16am PST
costco checkout

Two Costco members claim that the budget retailer's messy credit card swap stripped them of their American Express insurance with no warning.

Cheryl and Vic Matkovich lost their accident insurance when Costco ditched American Express and made Visa its official credit card issuer back in June, CBS Sacramento's Kurtis Ming reports.

According to the couple, they received notice that their Accident Guard Insurance would be canceled two days after it had already been terminated. The Matkovichs say they were notified by Costco in a letter dated June 25 that they would lose coverage on June 23.

The couple's Accident Guard Insurance policy was intended to provide their grown children with $150,000 each, in the event of a fatal accident. The couple began paying $21 a month for the insurance policy 12 years ago.

When the couple contacted American Express about the cancellation, they were reportedly told it was too late to renew or continue their policy.

Nancy Kincaid of the California Department of Insurance told CBS Sacramento that insurers must tell clients if they are going to terminate their insurance at least 10 to 60 days in advance, depending on the type of insurance. Soon after CBS Sacramento presented American Express with this information, the local news outlet says it received an email that the Matkovichs had been re-enrolled in their insurance.

It's likely that the Matkovichs weren't the only people whose insurance was impacted by the credit card swap. American Express told CBS Sacramento that enrollment to "certain insurance products" was disrupted in the credit card swap, and that former Costco card members who lost their insurance could continue enrollment using a different American Express card.

Neither Costco nor American Express responded to Business Insider's request for comment.

The insurance blunder represents another speed bump in Costco's transition from American Express to Visa as its credit card of choice. The move, finalized in June, affected 11 million Costco members who were required to transition from the TrueEarnings American Express Costco cards to the Costco Anywhere Visa to earn rewards through a Costco co-branded credit card. It also meant that customers paying with a credit card could only use Visa-branded cards, instead of exclusively American Express.

Story continues

Following the transition, users threatened to cancel their Costco memberships because of initial and ongoing issues.

Many customers did not receive their new Citi Visa cards in the mail prior to the swap. Others complained after finding themselves unable to use corporate American Express cards at Costco. Some said that charges were mistakenly being flagged as fraud, and that the transfer of rewards dollars has been lower than expected.

Despite the complaints, Citi says the swap has been an overall success.

Citi reported more than 337,000 new account acquisitions to date since the switch  a number that significantly exceeded Citi's expectations. Purchase sales on Costco Visa cobranded cards totaled $5.7 billion in the 3 1/2 weeks following the transition, according to Citi.

NOW WATCH: We tried the Costco food court and it totally blew us away





More From Business Insider


After a nearly two-week search, authorities arrested a suspect for allegedly running a Virginia woman off the road and sexually assaulting her for more than two hours on Oct. 31, PEOPLE confirms.

Robert Carlos Flores Sibrian, 26, was arrested in Sanford, North Carolina, on Nov. 10, according to a Stafford County Sheriffs Office news release. Flores Sibrian has been charged with rape and aggravated sexual battery.

This is a huge sigh of relief for the community, Stafford Sheriffs Office spokeswoman M.C. Moncure tells PEOPLE.

Flores Sibrian allegedly dragged the woman into a ditch to sexually assault her in the early morning, authorities have told PEOPLE.

The woman told police she never saw the vehicle used to run her off the road prior to the crash, which caused her car to spin out of control before the car stopped on the shoulder of the road, police said.

 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.

In her initial interview, the woman, who has not been identified, said she did not know the man and that he spoke Spanish and broken English, police said.

After the alleged assault, the victim said the man walked back to his car and drove away, police said. The woman waited for her alleged attacker to be out of sight before she went back to her car and used her cell phone to call 911, police said.

Flores Sibrian is currently being held in Lee County jail on a $10,000 bond and an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer, the news release states. He has no fixed address but was living in the Fredericksburg area prior to the incident, according to the release.

It is not clear whether he will be extradited back to Virginia to be prosecuted. He has not entered a plea or been appointed an attorney, Stafford officials tell PEOPLE.




STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden will seek assurances from U.S. president-elect Donald Trump that a recently signed defense cooperation agreement will be honored by the new administration and on his commitment to NATO, Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist said. After years of rising tensions with Russia in the Baltic region, Sweden and the United States signed a declaration of intent in June to increase defense cooperation. The deal includes joint exercises and adaptation of technologies and practices to a joint NATO-standard. "He has through his own actions in the election campaign created a long series of question marks," Hultqvist, told Reuters. "However, we assume that all contracts and agreements that we and other countries have signed with the United States still stand." During his election campaign Trump threatened to abandon U.S. allies in Europe if they do not spend enough on defense and praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin for his leadership. Hultqvist said he would seek assurances over Trump's position on NATO, Europe and how he sees the relationship with Russia. "We will get in contact with the new administration as soon as there is a structure to communicate with," he said. Late last month Russian media reported that the country is sharply upgrading the firepower of its Baltic fleet by adding warships armed with long-range cruise missiles. Sweden, which is not a NATO member, mounted its biggest submarine hunt since the Cold War in 2014 when the military said there were several credible sightings of possible Russian vessels. Neighboring Finland has complained that Russian fighter jets have violated its air space. (Reporting by Johan Ahlander; Editing by Simon Johnson)
Has the chocolate bar turned gray? Investors could have been thinking that, as Hershey Co. (ticker: HSY) seemed to unravel earlier this year.

With talks of a buyout offer floating, the trust that controls 80 percent of the company's voting shares faced a power change, while the CEO of Hershey announced he would resign next July. From the outside, it appears the chocolate brand has melted.

But while the stock plummeted 9 percent over the past three months, it has rebounded 7 percent in the last 30 days. After a hugely volatile year, HSY stock is outperforming the Standard & Poor's 500 index, up nearly 9 percent since January.

[See: 7 Notable Quotes From Warren Buffett.]

Has the chaos finally subdued, allowing this candy stalwart to grow again? Even if it does, it doesn't make it an automatic buy.

Cutting costs in order to improve profits. Hershey has struggled to find a way to grow revenues much beyond 4 percent for the year. In 2016, it gets a little better, expecting a 4.25 percent revenue growth. Part of the reason it has struggled is due to the trend of consumers focusing on healthy living.

Chocolate doesn't play "well with health and wellness," says Edward Jones analyst Jack Russo.

But in October, Hershey caught investors off guard when it released third-quarter earnings, raising its earnings-per-share estimates for the year to a range of $4.28 to $4.32. Part of the reason it did this, though, wasn't because of improved sales, but because of an effort to cut costs. It's targeting $100 million in annual savings from 2017 to 2019.

"Annually, the savings represent less than 3 percent of operating income," writes Christopher Growe, a managing director at investment firm Stifel.

Yet, the cost cutting is what Hershey has to do, since revenues aren't robustly growing. There is hope that new product offerings will improve sales next year.

The trust controls the company. The Hershey Trust Co. is a $12 billion charity that was set up more than 100 years ago to ensure the funding of the Milton Hershey School. It owns 80 percent of the voting shares of Hershey, even though it accounts for about 30 percent of the total shares. This means that what the trust wants, Hershey must oblige.

Story continues

"It makes this company difficult from an investment point," Russo says. "All that will play into how the company is run and managed."

[See: High-Tech Investing: 7 Sectors to Watch.]

But the trust has issues of its own. In July, it came to an agreement with the Pennsylvania attorney general's office, which has oversight of the trust, to reform its board of directors. The trust agreed to impose 10-year term limits on its directors, which means three of the members will step down by the end of the year, while two others will resign by the end of next year.

In addition to that, four board member seats were already vacant, by the time of the agreement. This leaves nine seats to potentially fill by the end of 2017.

This leadership gap puts Hershey in a difficult situation to make future acquisitions, without clear guidance from its most important shareholder. And now, it's also on the lookout for its next CEO, as John Bilbrey announced last month he would step down by next summer.

It makes investing in Hershey very uncertain, Russo says, but some people are comfortable with that type of uncertainty.

A low buyout offer highlights Hershey's plan. Much of this leadership uncertainty unfolded while confectionary and food company Mondelez International ( MDLZ) pursued Hershey. In June, Hershey rejected a $23 billion offer to merge with the company, which would include Mondelez, the maker of Oreos, taking the Hershey name. Part of the issue is that Pennsylvania's attorney general also has to sign off on any deal, and will listen to concerns from residents of Hershey that may not like the change.

Even with the complexity of closing a deal with Hershey, Mondelez's offer didn't force the company to "ever really think too serious about it," Russo says. He believes it was a low offer, one that Hershey couldn't take. According to reports, Mondelez indicated to Bilbrey that they would be willing to raise the offer from $107 a share to $115 a share, but Hershey wouldn't listen to offers below $125 a share.

In August, Mondelez dumped its effort to acquire Hershey. That doesn't mean another suitor couldn't come along. But Hershey has shown a desire to stay independent, despite consolidations in the sector. That could leave other suitors thinking, "why waste resources on this," Russo says.

It's not overvalued or undervalued. At 22 times 2017 price-earnings, Hershey is near its historic average. It's also at a "slight premium to its food peers," writes Growe.

While this doesn't make the company overpriced -- Russo believes that Hershey deserves some premium to its peers due to its name in the sector -- it also doesn't leave much room for growth. And with its leadership stuck in a turnover, trends of consumers eating less candy, and a lack of new ways to increase revenues, it's hard to get excited about the chocolate.

[See: 7 of the Most Loathed Stocks in the Market.]

If an innovation comes out next year, that could impact the short term. But the stewardship of the company isn't changing anytime soon.

Ryan Derousseau is a journalist with nine years of experience writing about investing and leadership issues. His work has been read in Fortune, Money, CNNMoney and Fast Company, among other publications. You can find more from him on Twitter @ryanderous.
The Golden Globes will have three times the dazzle thanks to Sylvester Stallones three daughters  Scarlet, 14, Sistine, 18, and Sophia, 20  who will share the title of Miss Golden Globe for the 2017 awards.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) President Lorenzo Soria made the announcement on Thursday revealing for the first time ever that a trio is receiving the title. The unveiling took place at a star-studded party at Catch in West Hollywood hosted by the HFPA and InStyle, and presented by FIJI Water.

Sophia Stallone said at the event: On behalf of my sisters and I, we are so thankful for Lorenzo and the Hollywood Foreign Press for making us your Miss Golden Globe 2017 and wed like to thank our parents for this amazing opportunity as well and were really excited to start.

While their father took home the best supporting actor Golden Globe for reprising his most iconic role in the Rocky spin-off Creed last year, the trio stole the spotlight during awards season due to their stunning looks on the red carpet.

They will follow in the footsteps of other Hollywood legends sons and daughters such as Dakota Johnson, Laura Dern and Melanie Griffith, who have previously had the honorable role (and turned into stars themselves). Scarlet, Sistine and Sophia will be tasked with escorting honorees on and off the stage and the responsibility of carrying the statuettes.

Miss Golden Globe 2016 was Jamie Foxxs daughter Corinne.

The 70-year-old actor stopped by The Ellen DeGeneres Show in April to talk about his new show, Strong, but the conversation quickly turned to Stallones upcoming 19th anniversary with his wife of 19 years, Jennifer Flavin.

I basically just keep my mouth shut and dont cause waves, he said of living in a household of four women. Again, shes fantastic, but its all women. Women rule. Even the dogs, theyre female and the one males been neutered.




Supreme Court led by Justice Ranjan Gogoi issued a notice of contempt to former apex court judge Markandey Katju for his blog criticising the judgment in the Soumya rape and death case and calling it 'grave miscarriage of justice'.

By Anusha Soni: In an unprecedented move, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India led by Justice Ranjan Gogoi issued a notice of contempt to former apex court judge Markandey Katju. High drama was also witnessed when escorts were summoned to take Justice Katju out of court after a heated argument between him Justice Gogoi.

Katju was asked to appear before the Supreme Court in the Soumya Rape case. He had written a blog criticising the judgment in the Soumya rape and death case and calling it "grave miscarriage of justice".

advertisement

The course of events that followed in court number six have never been witnessed in the judicial history where a retired Supreme Court judge was being asked to be taken out of the court room by security personnel present. A furious Justice Katju hit back by saying that this is not the way that the Supreme Court of India should behave and he was not scared of the consequences.

READ: Keralites are the real Indians, says Justice Katju. And Malayalis on Facebook go gaga



Katju told the bench that he has been provoked and does not appreciate the snide or sarcastic remarks made at him. "Don't try to be funny with me," a furious Katju told the Supreme Court bench.

"Judges of the Supreme Court must know how to behave, this is not the way that Supreme Court judge behaves," retorted Katju. Lawyers present in the court hooted against the order when security personnel were being asked to escort Katju out of court.

The court first dismissed the review petition in Soumya Rape and death case and then produced the blogs written by Katju. The blogs printed on a sheet of paper were shown to Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi also who was present on the court room. Rohatgi remarked by saying that at best you can call the blogs "intemperate" but nothing more than that.

READ: Justice Markandeya Katju is back on social media, slams Sharia law

Katju and Rohatgi argued against the judgment delivered in the Soumya rape case for over an hour. The Supreme Court bench had asked Justice Katju to come and argue as to why he thought that the judgment was flawed.

As Justice Katju stepped out of the courtroom packed with lawyers and journalists, he merely said that he was not scared and will respond. Some lawyers hooted in the court against the notice being served.

Also Read:

The judgmental ex-judge: 11 times Markandey Katju stirred a hornet's nest



Justice Katju tells BCCI not to interact with Lodha panel

90 per cent Indians can relax, Markandey Katju exits social media



--- ENDS ---
The U.S. telecom regulator, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently levied charges on U.S. telecom and pay-TV behemoth AT&T Inc. T on anti-competitive grounds. The companys recent zero-rating practices and its DirecTV service plans seem to suppress competition and thus violate the FCCs net neutrality rules. Hence, the FCC has set a deadline of Nov 21, 2016 for the company within which it has to respond to allegations.

AT&Ts DirecTV Now

AT&T has been gearing up for the launch of its over the top (OTT) online streaming service DirecTV Now by the end of 2016 for $35 a month. This OTT service will offer more than 100 channels. By foraying into the OTT space, the company has joined the likes of Dish Network Corp. DISH and Sony in offering OTT services such as Sling TV and Playstation Vue, respectively.

AT&T is also looking forward toward a Sponsored Data program wherein companies participating in its Sponsored Data program have to pay AT&T for it. Additionally, for its DirecTV portfolio, the company plans to offer free data for DirecTV video streams to its customers. This has been a common practice in the media industry termed zero-rating. T-Mobile US TMUS has been offering free data for music and movies for a year now and Verizon Communications Inc. VZ also zero rates video from its Go90 app. However, and it has serious implications for net neutrality.

FCCs Statement

The FCC claims that it is not against zero rating practices but is rather looking into different programs being offered at different prices. However, the regulatory body believes that AT&T has gone too far with the zero rating of DirecTV Now. Moreover, in the Sponsored Data program, DirecTV will be paying to AT&T which implies that one division will be shelling out money to another, which in a way implies that the overall company still ends up paying no money. Further, the FCC believes that the program raises serious concerns on competition. This is because the program is expected to be way more expensive for rivals not affiliated with AT&T. Further, consumers will be restricted from accessing existing and future mobile video services not affiliated with AT&T.

Story continues

AT&Ts Latest Deal

Last month,in a major thrust to the ongoing consolidation trend between the telecom and media sectors, AT&T agreed to acquire media giant Time Warner Inc. TWX in a $85.4 billion cash-and-stock deal. If the proposed merger finally goes through, the combined entity will become a major player in the consolidated telecom-media space and will be a major threat to the rivals.

Bottom Line

The online streaming service is gaining momentum which is evident from the growing success of companies like Netflix Inc. NFLX, which is a leading player in this space. This has resulted in massive subscriber losses for pay-TV operators. To put a check on customer churn, many pay-TV operators are adopting this model and AT&T is not an exception. Moreover, since AT&T operates its own wireless network, the company can price its DirecTV Now offering by bundling wireless data packages with the OTT service. AT&Ts DirecTV Now can prove to be a major revenue driver for the company in the coming years. However, aggressive pricing related to non applicability of data caps for the service in wireless plans may be subjected to net neutrality scrutiny.

However, it is to be seen whether AT&T can brave these adversities before Donald Trump takes office. This is because FCCs response to zero-rating practices under Trump administration is not certain. Although things may turn in favor of AT&T, Trump's comment on the Time Warner-AT&T deal raises concern.

AT&T INC Price

AT&T INC Price | AT&T INC Quote

AT&T currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Zacks' Top Investment Ideas for Long-Term Profit

How would you like to see our best recommendations to help you find todays most promising long-term stocks? Starting now, you can look inside our portfolios featuring stocks under $10, income stocks, value investments and more. These picks, which have double and triple-digit profit potential, are rarely available to the public. But you can see them now. Click here >>



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



TIME WARNER INC (TWX): Free Stock Analysis Report



NETFLIX INC (NFLX): Free Stock Analysis Report



AT&T INC (T): Free Stock Analysis Report



VERIZON COMM (VZ): Free Stock Analysis Report



DISH NETWORK CP (DISH): Free Stock Analysis Report



T-MOBILE US INC (TMUS): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
(KABUL, Afghanistan) Germanys consulate in northern Afghanistan was attacked when a suicide car bomber rammed the compound, killing six people and wounding more than 120, Afghan police and the German foreign minister said Friday.

Four of the dead  two civilians and two unidentified bodies  were brought to the Balkh hospital, said Dr. Noor Mohammad Faiz. He said 128 people were wounded in the attack.

Germanys Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said six people had been confirmed dead. He added in a statement that all German and Afghan employees of the consulate remained unharmed.

The car exploded at the gate of the consulate in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, destroying the gate and wall around 11.10 p.m. Thursday, said Abdul Raziq Qaderi, head of security for Balkh province.

The blast destroyed the Mazar Hotel, where the consulate is based, and surrounding buildings. Residents said that casualties were contained because it of the late hour, though an ensuing gun battle raged for around five hours.

Steinmeier said fighting took place on the premises and inside the consulate.

The attack was carried out by heavily armed terrorists, he said, adding: The attackers were fought off by the consulates security personnel, Afghan security forces, and German, Georgian, Belgian and Latvian special forces stationed in the city as part of the Resolute Support mission.

President Ashraf Ghani called the attack a crime against humanity and all international laws.

The United Nations assistance mission in Afghanistan also condemned the attack. In a statement it said the injured include 19 women and 38 children.

Most of the injured suffered minor wounds from broken glass while those with serious injuries remain hospitalized, it said. More than 100 homes and shops were damaged, it said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility.

Story continues

Germany has 983 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh province, as part of the NATO mission. Mazar-i-Sharif is the provincial capital and one of the richest and most important cities in Afghanistan.

The Talibans insurgency has spread from their southern heartland across the country in the past two years, following the withdrawal of most international combat troops. Attacks across the north have been increasing.

The Taliban statement from spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack was retaliation for recent airstrikes in the northern city of Kunduz, capital of the province of the same name.

A U.S. airstrike early this month killed dozens of people and is under investigation.
While I agree Trumps unsavory aspects appeals to Alt-Right miscreants and undoubtedly won him some votes, they are a minuscule portion of the electorate compared to women. The fact Trump won despite his reckless and bigoted remarks, which undoubtedly cost him millions upon millions of votes, only shows the weakness of the global capitalist vision that is at the heart of the DNC.

People need living-wage jobs in a nation state that preferentially serves their interests as citizens. Many of the more rarified, post-Marxist leftists out there dont seem to even believe in social democracy, or refuse to accept that social democracy requires social cohesion, labor protectionism, etc.

A lot of the hard core Critical Race Theory types may find themselves aligned going forward with libertarian capitalists of the NeverTrump variety. I mean what common ground do Bernouts like me have left with some of you except for a few social issues like reproductive choice?
DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - Tanzania has agreed with Uganda to accelerate implementation of a crude oil pipeline project between the two east African nations and award the construction contract to multiple contractors. The decision was reached during talks between Tanzanian President John Magufuli and his Ugandan counterpart, Yoweri Museveni, in Kampala on Thursday, Magufuli's office said in a statement on Thursday. Uganda said in April it would build a pipeline for its oil through Tanzania rather than Kenya, which had wanted to secure the export route. Picking a route is vital for oil firms to make final investment decisions on developing reserves found in Uganda and Kenya, which are among a string of hydrocarbon finds on Africa's eastern seaboard. Tanzania has found gas offshore. "I suggest we use the design and construct model to speed up implementation of the 1,410-km pipeline project ... and award contracts to five or six different contractors to build different sections of the pipeline at the same time," Magufuli's office quoted him as saying. "By doing that we will significantly reduce the time needed to build the oil pipeline and the entire project can be completed within just one year." Uganda discovered crude near its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo 10 years ago, but has yet to start production after repeated delays. Choosing a route to export the crude from the land-locked nation is a vital step. France's Total, London-listed Tullow Oil and China's CNOOC have been pushing for a decision on a pipeline. (Reporting by Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala; Editing by George Obulutsa and Susan Thomas)
By Aditi Shah and Abhirup Roy

MUMBAI (Reuters) - India's Tata Sons has called shareholder meetings at group companies including Tata Motors and Tata Steel in an attempt to drive out former chairman Cyrus Mistry from the operating businesses of the $100 billion steel-to-software conglomerate.

Tata Motors Ltd (TAMO.NS), which owns luxury brand Jaguar Land Rover, said on Friday Tata Sons [TATAS.UL] had called an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to vote on ousting Mistry as a director on the board of the automaker.

Tata Sons has a 26.51 percent stake in Tata Motors.

Holding company Tata Sons has also called EGMs at Indian Hotels CO (IHTL.NS), a Tata company that owns the Taj chain of hotels; Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) (TCS.NS); Tata Chemicals Ltd (TTCH.NS), and Tata Steel Ltd (TISC.NS) in a bid to vote Mistry off the boards of those businesses.

Tata Sons ousted Mistry as its chairman last month. While no immediate reasons were given, it was widely reported the holding company was unhappy with some of Mistry's actions, such as the sale of assets across group companies. This led to a bitter war of words between the two camps.

Infrastructure company Shapporji Pallonji, owned by Mistry's family, is a minority shareholder in Tata Sons and he remains a director on the board of the holding company.

STEEL LOSSES

On Thursday, Tata Sons removed Mistry as chairman of its main cash cow, TCS, where the holding company has a stake of more than 70 percent. Mistry remains, however, a director on the board of TCS.

Tata Sons has faced setbacks in its campaign against Mistry. The boards of both Indian Hotels and Tata Chemicals have both backed him to remain as chairman of those group companies.

Tata Sons is also seeking to remove Nusli Wadia, chairman of textile-to-aviation conglomerate the Wadia Group and a long-time independent director at several Tata group companies, from the boards of Tata Motors, Tata Chemicals and Tata Steel.

Wadia was reported to have voted in favor of retaining Mistry as the chairman of Tata Chemicals on Thursday.

Story continues

On Friday, television news reports said a board meeting at Tata Steel to discuss second-quarter results had not taken a stance on the possible removals of Mistry and Wadia.

Tata Steel posted a consolidated net loss of 493.8 million rupees ($7.34 million), mainly due to a weak performance in its UK steel making business.

It has been in talks since July over potentially merging its European steel business, which also includes a steel mill in the Netherlands, with Germany's ThyssenKrupp (TKAG.DE).

Lawyers have said removing Mistry as director of Tata group companies will be a bigger challenge than ousting him as Tata Sons chairman because he will have the right to be heard at an EGM and can also ask for an injunction.

All shareholders are invited to the EGMs and the decision will be made by a simple majority.

"This sort of a move is very unprecedented. I don't know why the Tatas are doing it this way. They should be settling this instead of dragging this in public. Mistry has a lot of insider information," a senior lawyer at a top corporate law firm in India said on condition of anonymity.

Details of EGMs are yet to be finalised.

Mistry's office did not respond to a request for comment.

($1 = 67.2705 Indian rupees)

(Additional reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Rafael Nam and Mark Potter)
Teamsters President James Hoffa, who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, has congratulated Donald Trump on his victory and vows to work with the him on numerous issues essential to the nations workers. Hoffas statement of support was posted today on the website of Hollywood Teamsters Local 399. Read it below.

In August, when Hoffa announced his endorsement of Clinton, he said: The Oval Office needs to be occupied by a serious candidate who understands what it means to govern responsibly. Donald Trump supports national right-to-work laws that are proven to weaken the middle class and has a long track record of shipping jobs out of the country as a businessman. He is no friend to working Americans.

Here is Hoffas statement about the next occupant of the White House:

On behalf of the 1.4 million Teamsters, I want to congratulate president-elect Trump on his victory. Americans have voted, and we respect their choice at the ballot box. The Teamsters will work with President-elect Trump on numerous issues essential to the nations workers in an effort to improve the lives of millions who continue to struggle to make ends meet. For more than a year, the Teamsters have been pushing a platform that prioritizes building, maintaining and repairing the nations faltering infrastructure  a stated priority of President-elect Trump. U.S. roads, rails, energy plants and water systems have been ignored for far too long. This country needs a plan to invest more, and we will work with the Trump Administration to craft a solution. Additionally, the President-elect has made promises to the American people on trade and manufacturing that are important to our members. We are ready to work with him to find common ground that will benefit working families. Finally, the Teamsters understand that workers who invest in their retirement through pensions, other savings and Social Security deserve to be able to rely on their nest eggs in their golden years. Again, we are ready to work with him to formulate a plan that allows seniors to live with dignity.

Story continues

Related stories

John Oliver: Donald Trump "Is Not Normal"

Donald Trump "Fine" With Same Sex Marriage, Vague On Roe V. Wade And FBI Director James Comey Future In '60 Minutes' Interview

Donald Trump Names Reince Priebus & Breitbart News' Steve Bannon To White House Staff, Riles TV Pundits
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Dozens of flights to northern Thailand will be canceled or rescheduled when the country celebrates its annual Floating Lantern festival next week, airport officials said on Friday. Chiang Mai International Airport, the main airport in northern Thailand - a destination popular with foreign tourists - said some flights would be canceled between Nov. 12 and Nov. 16. as floating lanterns released during the festival could affect safety. The Floating Lantern festival is celebrated at the end of the so-called "rainy season" when paper lanterns are launched into the air to coincide with a full moon. In recent years, authorities have asked revelers to refrain from launching the lanterns because they pose a fire risk. In 2015, a Bangkok Airways flight was canceled after a lantern was sucked into the plane's engine. The government has asked that activities held during the festival be scaled back this year as a sign of respect for revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died on Oct. 13. Thailand is officially in a one-year period of mourning for the late monarch. National carrier Thai Airways International said in a note on Thursday that it would cancel some roundtrip flights from the Thai capital Bangkok to Chiang Mai, adding that it would adjust its flight schedule and increase flights to compensate. (Reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre; Editing by Michael Perry)
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand's Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn returned to Bangkok on Friday, just weeks before he is due to ascend the throne, four senior military sources with knowledge of the matter said. Fresh questions about the succession arose when the prince flew to Germany last month to attend to personal business. Thailand is making preparations for the prince to ascend the throne on Dec. 1, though a formal coronation will be at least one year from now. The country has been without a monarch since revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej died on Oct. 13 and has been ruled by regent Prem Tinsulanonda, the 96-year-old former head of the royal advisory council. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said last month that the prince had asked to delay his ascension to the throne while he mourns his father. "His Highness has arrived back in Thailand from Germany and will attend an event this evening at the 1st Infantry Regiment, King's Own Guards. This is confirmed," said a senior military source who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter. The prince's return to Thailand, will likely ease any concerns about the succession, said Bangkok-based lecturer and analyst Gothom Arya. "His return will likely stop any lingering rumors that the ascension process, when it happens, will not proceed smoothly," he told Reuters. The prince has spent much of his adult life abroad, and has a home in Germany where his son, Prince Dipangkorn, is enrolled at a private school. Thailand's military government submitted a new constitution for royal endorsement on Tuesday. Prayuth Chan-ocha has said that only the new monarch can approve the charter. By law, the monarch or regent, has 90 days to approve the constitution after it is submitted. (Reporting by Bangkok Bureau; Editing by Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Michael Perry and Neil Fullick.)
Bangkok (AFP) - Thailand's Crown Prince flew back to the kingdom on Friday after a fortnight overseas, palace sources confirmed, although there is still no date for when he will officially succeed his father.

Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, 64, left Thailand last month, some two weeks after his father King Bhumibol Adulyadej died ending a seven-decade reign.

His death has sparked mass displays of grief and left the politically-divided nation without a rare pillar of unity.

Although Vajiralongkorn is the named successor, he surprised many and veered from tradition by asking to delay his proclamation as king in order to grieve with the nation, according to the junta that currently runs the country.

The prince, who has yet to attain his father's widespread popularity, spends much of his time overseas, especially in southern Germany.

Two palace sources told AFP the prince flew back to Thailand on Friday morning and would attend a military function in the evening and preside over a graduation ceremony at Bangkok's Thammasat University this weekend.

On Monday he is slated to attend an annual cultural event in Pattani, a Muslim-majority province in Thailand's insurgent-torn far south, according to an official schedule seen by AFP.

The government has not provided a timeline for when he will formally ascend the throne.

But they have sought to tamp down any doubts over succession, suggesting the Crown Prince will be named king in the near future.

Under Thai law, a successor is initially proclaimed king by parliament. He is then coronated once the previous monarch is cremated, often months later.

A strict royal defamation law and layers of official opacity make it difficult to confirm facts about Thailand's monarchy and all but impossible to openly debate its role.

All media based in Thailand must self-censor to avoid falling foul of the lese majeste law, which punishes criticism of the monarchy with up to 15 years in prison per infringement.

Story continues

Thailand's arch-royalist military government has ramped up use of the law, with a particular focus on online dissent, since coming to power in its 2014 coup.

Authorities and ultra-royalist vigilante groups have further stepped up enforcement since Bhumibol's death.

An initial 30-day mourning period for King Bhumibol ends on November 14, although civil servants and many more will mourn for a year until Bhumibol is cremated.
By PTI: From Aditi Khanna

London, Nov 11 (PTI) Theresa Mays first visit to India as British Prime Minister earlier this week sent a clear signal to the world of the close ties the two countries share, the acting high commissioner of India to the UK has said.

Dinesh Patnaik, who was involved in preparations for the high-profile tour, also dismissed any reports that the visit was overshadowed by visa and immigration issues.

advertisement

"The biggest outcome of the visit is the signal it sends to the world of the close relationship between India and the UK. We had agreed on a biennial visit, which is that every two years, the Prime Ministers on both sides would meet.

"The fact that Prime Minister Theresa May has gone within one year of Prime Minister (Narendra) Modis visit to the UK speaks volumes of the importance she attaches to India," he told PTI.

"This was the first major bilateral visit by her outside the European Union (EU). The message is that the UK considers India of primary importance... There is no question that the visit has moved the relationship forward and was overall a very successful one," he said.

Asked if the UKs toughening stance on visas overshadowed the visit, he said: "I really want to make it clear that nowhere was the visa issue a big thing for both our countries. After Brexit and the strong feeling around immigration control, it was assumed that it was topmost on the agenda.

"The main agenda was trade and technology. India is not wanting to push Indians into the UK. Our governments position is that we want access for our people everywhere in the world. We are a big nation with a lot to offer the world and we want Indians to be able to access anywhere in the world ? be it as tourists, short-term workers, professionals, businessmen, technical entrepreneurs, or as students.

"So our message is dont put in place rules and regulations which restrict access of Indians. But we dont want to push."

The envoy, who as Indias deputy high commissioner to Britain stepped in when Navtej Sarna recently left to take charge as the Indian ambassador in the US, said the visit reflected good chemistry between Prime Minister Modi and her British counterpart.

"Both Prime Ministers got on very well. Prime Minister Modi had a good relationship with former Prime Minister David Cameron and it was to be seen if the same chemistry and dynamics worked this time. And, it seems it has worked very well.

"The one-hour bilateral one to one meeting between the two PMs continued for almost two hours. Though we wont know what was discussed but the fact is they spoke cordially and the chemistry and body language between them showed that there is a great relationship between the two PMs," he said.

advertisement

In reference to the impact Brexit could have on India-UK ties, Patnaik described it as a "work in progress".

"In my view Brexit or no Brexit, the relationship between India and the UK is on an upward path. Brexit brings with it both challenges and opportunities. The opportunities lie in the fact that India and the UK bilaterally have a very strong relationship. And how Brexit will impact that is a work in progress, which has already started," he said. PTI AK SAI AKJ SAI

--- ENDS ---
From Harper's BAZAAR

After a meet-cute in Ibiza at a party at Sid's villa with a view of the ocean, it was pretty much love at first sight, recalls Sofija. "We felt a deep connection right away and couldn't stop talking. Sid actually told me on the first day I met him that I was going to be the mother of his children and we would marryit all turned out to be true!" Sid's predictions came to light during a vacation on the Amalfi Coast in August of 2015, which Sofija identified as the turning point in their relationship, and where she realized she was falling even more in love with Sid, and with Capri. Based between London, Ibiza and Hamburg, it was a toss-up where Sid would propose. He invited Sofija's friends from Hamburg to London for what he promised would be a surprise birthday celebration, but what turned out to be a "double party full of tears and excitement." Sid surprised Sofija with her friends, the ultimate birthday party and a proposal with a ring he had designed for her in India with Joaillier Prive.

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

With his family in India and busy schedules considered, the couple set out to plan their dream wedding in Southern Italyin two months. Both in hospitality and obsessed with all things celebratory, culinary and luxury service oriented, the two were focused on creating the ultimate Capri experience for their guests. The couple reached out to Italian-based planner Diana Sorensen to help them plan a three-day celebration in a matter of weeks complete with a forest ceremony, a quintessentially Capri reception and bespoke everything. Sorensen of Sugokuii Events turned to her design roots, all things Italian and designers like Dolce & Gabbana, who have such a strong Capri influence, for inspiration.

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Sorensen credits the couple's laid-back Ibiza vibes and how deeply in love they were with each other, with Capri and with their family and friends when speaking about the easy and exciting time she had planning their wedding weekend. "Capri is almost tropical, it's a fun island and not too uptight," she explained. "Sid and Sofija wanted something non-traditional and whimsical," like a ceremony in a fairytale forest setting and a lounge-like reception at the famous lemon tree restaurant, Da Paolino. Their weekend of events felt like the perfect marriage of posh and polish with the influence of Southern Italy, sprinkled with touches of Sid's Indian roots. A Mumbai-based stationer crafted their suite, using Indian motifs paired with Southern Italian tile designs and a hybrid of customary color palettes. The welcome basket, a straw bag by Micaela Spadoni, was filled with little pieces of Capri for each guest to enjoy throughout their stay: lemon cookies by local Pasticceria Buonocore, Sofia Prosecco by Coppola wines in honor of the bride's name, lemon scented candles by Carthusia, fresh lemons and chilies, charm bracelets from Russo Capri, homemade nutella from Napoli and cheeky notes, like a taxi coupon for guests to use as paid transportation to the ceremony and an Italian lottery ticket that guests had 'won' in being able to experience one of Italy's most luxurious locales.

Story continues

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

When looking for a wedding dress, "the McQueen designs were the closest to my spirit," remembers the bride. "Sid always wanted me to wear Alexander McQueen for our wedding day, as it is also a favorite designer of his. I made an appointment with the head of design to discuss what I imagined my dress to be and they understood very quicklyI wanted an elegant and timeless dress with open shoulders. They made some beautiful sketches and we started almost immediately. They did an amazing job in such a short period of time! After all, we moved the date of the wedding last minute from September to July, and consequently only had 6 weeks to design the perfect dress!" Sofija paired the gown with flat Rene Caovilla sandals, an Alexander McQueen veil and earrings by Sabbadini Gioielli. Sid wore a custom made Kiton suit, made in their ateliers in Napoli and Capri. For her bridesmaids, Sofija turned to friend (and bridesmaid) Millane Fernandez; together, they chose a sage green fabric embroidered with leaves that was inspired by the forest setting.

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

The night before the wedding included an Indian-Italian inspired rehearsal dinner on a mountain top, which guests could only reach by chair-lift. "The ceremony took place in a forest setting in Anacapri, an incredibly beautiful, unspoiled, private and tranquil location not known by many visitors, but familiar to locals. It has this unique combination of being woodsy while overlooking the sea, so it truly has the best of both worlds," Sofija explained. Guests walked through an archway of bougainvillea spelling "Amore" as they entered the forest. "We didn't want anything too traditional; we consequently didn't have an arch or your typical ceremony setup," said the bride. The ceremony was presented in the round, with a flower field of delphiniums planted to frame the small gathering of friends and family. "We added a whimsical aspect to the ceremony by having guests clutch balloons, which were released into the air at the end of their vows by all of our guests." Instead of ceremony programs, a book of poems by Pablo Neruda (a writer and poet who once called Capri home) was placed on each guest's seat along with a printed fan. Before the ceremony, guests were greeted with fresh limonata with rosemary and a table of fresh floral crowns to done as they witnessed the couple's vows. "We walked down the aisle to Cesaria Evoro's Sodade & Petit Pays which we love and sounded so magical in the setting and reminded us of when we met in Ibiza." After their vows and the balloon release, the couple were escorted to a flower-adorned vintage car by a procession of close friends and musicians to be driven to their reception.

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

From the start, the couple sought to establish a supper-club feel for their reception, full of good food and an easy-yet-polished ambiance. Guests entered the reception and plucked their names from an escort card fruit stand, full of illustrations of the bride and groom and topped with their hashtag in lights, which served as a backdrop for photos as the night wore on. "We really wanted to celebrate Capriand all things Capriand there couldn't be a better place to do that for us than Da Paolino," said Sofija. The dining institution set the tone for the genuinely Italian experience. "We were not looking to have an over the top wedding, we were looking for something that really represented us," she remembered fondly. The reception was an all-night party beneath the lemon trees; fun but stylish, with a focus on fun and local details. Tablescapes included bespoke plates adorned with illustrations, floral embroidered napkins with the name of each guest in lieu of place cards and straw placemats in floral shapes.

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Da Paolino was transformed by florists Capri Flor to accompany the lemon trees already in the spaceusing greenery, bougainvillea and bright florals. Custom circular sofas created an easy vibe, so much so that guests took to the dance floor mid-way through dinner. The menu, which the couple fine-tuned through multiple visits and tastings in the Amalfi, included a Caprese salad with a burrata from Puglia and three varieties of pasta, including a Cacio e Pepe served in hollowed-out, individually-sized Parmigiano rounds. For dessert, an abundant dessert bar was displayed along with a wedding cake adorned in Capri tile patterns, bougainvillea and lemons made of sugar. For the after party bites, pizzaioli from Napoli were brought in to make pizza in a custom designed tiled booththey take pizza so seriously that water was brought in from Napoli specifically to make the dough.

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

Late night dancing was irresistible when a Sicilian band from Palermo and a DJ took to their stations, and the bride changed into a cocktail dress by Hamburg-based brand Aikon Couture, paired with Giuseppe Zanotti sandals for the late-night festivities. In speaking about Sofija and Sid, planner Diana Sorensen could not stress enough the true, undeniable love one felt between the two of them, and that their friends felt towards them. The couple remember their wedding similarly, after capping off the weekend with a seaside post-nuptial brunch at Ristorante Il Riccio, "The energy was incredible, the people, the locations and the settingyou truly felt the love everywhere."

Photo credit: Aaron Delesie

FINE.

You Might Also Like
You learn a lot about America on its country roads.

My education came under the tutelage of my father, a man who taught me his love for driving through the South. Theres a beauty in the neat tobacco rows on Highway 64 and the tall, quiet sentinel trees on 87. With mouths full of sunflower seeds, my daddy would quiz me on each plant, animal, and landmark we passed, and I picked up both his habits of driving and cataloguing the things that made us Southern, black, and whole.

But things aint always beautiful, and I learned those too. One hot summer afternoon, taking the 74 east from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Elizabethtown in my daddys black Toyota truck, a man ran us off the road. We skidded on the dirt shoulder as the man sped on past, his Confederate battle flag license plate a final insult to our situation. The bile rose in my throat, and the hot anger and shame at the symbol made my skin prickle. Here was a man who could just be a jerk having a bad day, but whose choice of a single symbol suddenly made that bad day personal. My dad just cussed a little bit, put another handful of sunflower seeds in his mouth, and continued on our way down that road.

Recommended: The U.S. Media Is Completely Unprepared to Cover a Trump Presidency

At a gas station just outside of Rockingham, serendipity found us. As we pulled up to the pump, just there in front of our car was Mr. Confederate Plate, leaning like all villains do against the side of his car. Im not sure who recognized whom first, but I remember the shouting match, and Mr. Confederate Flag calling my father the one name he would never answer to, looking at me and saying the same, and then pantomiming that he had a gun in the car. I remember looking around at similar flags on another truck and inside the gas station, and knowing instinctively that we were not in friendly territory. I also remember my father shaking with rage and that same hot shame as my own when he climbed back in the truck.

Story continues

After another cussing fit, Vann Newkirk Sr. looked at me and said the thing thats always stuck with me since. This is who we are, he told me. Dont forget. And we went back down the road.

This is who we are. Those words often come to me when I see the ugly things in life now. When the first details about Tamir Rices death at the hands of police officers came to me on Twitter, they were a scream in the dark. When people questioned with straight faces if our president was even born in America, they echoed about my ears. When the Department of Justice report revealed that Ferguson, Missouri, was a racial kleptocracy, they were a whisper in the wind.

When a man who was accused of multiple sexual assaults, was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, had characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists, and has promoted stop and frisk as a national campaign of law and order was elected president, they boomed like thunder.

Recommended: The Lessons of Henry Kissinger

Donald J. Trump won going away. The election was not all that close on election night, truth be told, and if our models and forecasts had been more frank, they would have told us to hang it up by 10:00 p.m. ET. The Republican nominee won the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt, cutting wide swaths across the American electorate and even encroaching on the vaunted Clinton firewalls. He won Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin, and he did it in defiance of every prediction.

Reince Priebuss 2012 postmortem be damned, Donald Trump won the thing by appealing to white voters, and running an unabashed campaign of bigotry, racism, xenophobia, and other odds and ends of nastiness. This wasnt some short-lived populist revolt destined to fizzle out in the summer or disorganized anti-establishment rabble, nor was it a catastrophic rending of the Grand Old Party. It wasnt soul-searching. This was a juggernaut. It was a repudiation by the American electorate of the grand experiment of diversity of the past few years, as symbolized by Barack Obama. It was the half of America, a half that if not bigoted itself seemed mighty fine with being bigotry-adjacent. This is who we are.

As my colleagues and friends Jamelle Bouie, Adam Serwer, and Jenee Desmond-Harris note in three great columns, this election is a hard reminder that racism is a force that has always shaped this country. This is the same country that killed Emmett Till, and the same place that gave us Jim Crow. My reporting over the past few months has shown me that Jim Crow and the legacy of slavery are not just echoed in present-day events, but directly animate them. As Reconstruction was replaced with Redemption, so a post-racial America is replaced with whatever comes next. The rubber band always snaps back, so it seems. Its no coincidence that this is the first presidential election since the mighty Voting Rights Actthe crown jewel of the black struggle for humanity in Americawas diminished by Shelby County v. Holder. Its also no coincidence that the specter of black voter suppression returned to the polls in the South on Election Day.

Recommended: No, Electors in States Trump Won Should Not Vote for Clinton

This is also the first election of my life where my own vote and opinions so directly affect the lives of other people. My wife and I are expecting a child sometime in April, and Im left thinking about how whatever just happened will affect his life. By Trumps own promises, our son might be subject to the world-eating black box of stop-and frisk for no reason. The carceral state that threatened my well-being might also consume him. He might see his own rights of expression that I use to defend him rolled back. Perhaps the most frightening idea for me is not the fanciful visions of mass violence that many have conjured, but the anxiety that I might fail to provide something better to my children than what I had the misfortune to experience. Am I providing opportunity, or just passing on a curse? I wrestle with the idea that I have failed to defend my son even before he takes his first breath.

One day Im going to look that boy in the eye and have to explain the same thing my father did to me, and his grandfather to him. This is who we are. I know now that the wisdom of black fatherhood comes with a burden of sorrow.

This is the same country that killed Emmett Till, and the same place that gave us Jim Crow.

But what I also know is that America is a multiplicity of wes, of collective nouns and spaces of all sorts. When I remember my tears for Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, I also remember the young black protesters who traveled thousands of miles in buses and cramped cars to protest in clouds of tear gas and force the country to confront its history of brutality of black bodies. When I hear about voter suppression, I also think back to the dozens of activists who worked tirelessly to restore voting rights. When I recall the birther movement, I also recall Michelle Obamas speech at the Democratic National Convention, delivered in a sea of waving signs. I still feel the infectious energy after the crowd heard her now-famous phrase when they go low, we go high, and the radiance from black girls and grandmothers alike at collecting her signs hours after shed left the building.

When I worry about whether diversity and relations between races can ever be sustained, I think about my job here. I think about my editor, Yoni Appelbaum, and my colleague and mentor Ta-Nehisi Coates. I think about this diverse and diversifying newsroom of races, genders, sexual orientations, backgrounds, and views, and a media landscape that has seen multiple renaissances of thought and work from people of color. I think about the fact that the popular vote of this election belongs to one of the most diverse coalitions of voters in American history, and that regardless of party or creed, the most vulnerable people among us now form some of the most powerful voting blocs in the country. Thats not nothing.

Its fair to wonder if the forces and fighters arrayed against bigotry will ever share in a total victory. Perhaps the well is just too deep, and America will always return to what it has been, regardless of how far it is stretched and progressed. Its fair to wonder if the Trump coalitions Great America will involve returning to some time or era to which not all of us can safely return. Of those matters I am agnostic; history and hope are often at odds.

But on the whole, its also fair to keep building and keep dreaming, and to imagine or try to create a country where the common thread of empathy is the tie that binds. While the election Tuesday seemed an endorsement of everything divisive about America today, with a squint it also becomes a look at the right things: the activists and activated people, the young people thinking of new ways to make democracy work, and the coalitions of people building an America whose greatness will not be measured in which people are walled out of prosperity, but how many people are allowed in. There is still some glimmer of a chance that with enough work and elbow grease, my childdescended from slaves, slave masters, immigrants, and nativeswill find a way to live outside of the veil. This is why I write.

You learn a lot about America on its country roads, and I learned most of what I needed to know riding shotgun, drinking Cheerwines, and spitting sunflower seeds on trips with my father. But I hope that when I pass down his words, they have meaning in both senses. This is who we are. It occurs to me now that his phrase was both a warning and salvation.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Rabat (AFP) - Thousands protested in north Morocco on Friday to demand justice for a fishmonger whose grisly death when he was crushed in a garbage truck sparked outrage nationwide.

Mouhcine Fikri, 31, died last month in the city of Al-Hoceima as he tried to protest against the seizure and destruction of swordfish, which are not allowed to be caught at this time of year.

His death in the Rif -- an ethnically Berber region long neglected and at the heart of a 2011 protest movement for reform -- triggered protests nationwide.

"Rest, Mouhcine. We will continue the fight!" crowds chanted on Friday, according to footage streamed live on social media.

Protesters including many young people marched through the northern city's streets, carrying candles and flowers, and waving Berber flags.

"Long live the Amazigh," they cried, referring to Morocco's Berber community.

"Down with hogra," protesters shouted, using a Moroccan term used to denounce what they see as the unfairness of authorities towards ordinary Moroccans.

Protest organisers demanded to know who was responsible for starting up the rubbish truck's crushing mechanism on October 28, killing Fikri.

King Mohammed VI was quick to order an investigation, but it remains unclear who activated the crusher.

Authorities last week arrested 11 people suspected of involuntary manslaughter over Fikri's death and remanded eight in custody.

They included two interior ministry employees, two fisheries officials, the head of the local veterinary services and three rubbish collection workers.
By Makiko Yamazaki

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese conglomerate Toshiba Corp swung to an operating profit in the July-September quarter, driven by strong demand for NAND flash memory chips from Chinese smartphone makers.

That boom in demand has been a blessing for Toshiba, which is seeking to recover from a $1.3 billion (1 billion pound) accounting scandal by turning itself into a company more focussed on chips, nuclear energy and social infrastructure while getting rid of unprofitable businesses.

Toshiba posted an operating profit of 76.7 billion yen ($721 million) for the second quarter, versus a loss of 82.6 billion yen in the same period a year earlier. The result was roughly in line with a revised forecast announced in late October.

Toshiba revised up its annual outlook by 50 percent earlier this week and now expects 180 billion yen in profit, a turnaround from a 708.74 billion yen loss in the previous year.

In addition to robust orders from Chinese smartphone vendors eager to upgrade their devices with memory chips with larger storage capacity, Toshiba is receiving an additional boost from Apple Inc's iPhone 7.

An advanced Toshiba flash memory chip with a three-dimensional stacked cell structure is being used in a high-end model of the latest iPhone, analysts have said.

Toshiba forecasts its chips and devices division will be its the largest profit contributor, generating an operating profit of 130 billion yen this financial year.

But analysts have also said that Toshiba's depleted capital base in the wake of the scandal could limit its ability to make the necessary investments crucial to staying competitive in the global chip industry.

Toshiba had a NAND flash market share of 19.4 percent in 2015, ranking second after Samsung Electronics Co which has a 30.8 percent share, according to research firm His.

(Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
A travel survey predicted that 1 million British tourists would lose interest in travel to the U.S. were Donald Trump elected as president. This poll was taken before the election, as a hypothetical.

On Tuesday night, it became a very real situation.

If a president represents a nation on the world stage, Trumps reputation abroad raises questions for tourist arrivals in the U.S.

The businessman-turned-politician creates divisive opinion around the world. He is held in warm regard by some conservative parties abroad (Frances conservative leader Marine Le Pen said Trumps win was good for France), while other parties hold him up as an example of all that is wrong with American politics and economy. (French president Francois Hollande said that Trumps win opens up a period of uncertainty that must be faced with lucidity and clarity.)

According to a survey from The Telegraph, 34 percent of Brits are put off by the idea of visiting the U.S. during a Trump presidency. Another survey from bookings site Travelzoo found that about 20 percent of Brits would definitely not consider the U.S. as a destination were Trump elected president. (This survey was taken before the election results were announced.)

Following confirmation of a win for Donald Trump in the presidential election today, we are now forecasting an unstable 2017 for US tourism, with over one million U.K. travellers set to reconsider the country as a holiday destination, Travelzoos managing director told The Telegraph.

In 2014, 77 million foreign tourists visited the U.S. Of that total, over 17 million were from Mexico. (Canada sent the most tourists, 23 million.) After Trumps threats of deporting Mexicans in America and building a wall between the two countries, it is highly unlikely that this number will growor even remain the same.

The next largest swaths of tourists came from the UK, Japan and Brazil.

In 2015, foreign tourists spent $216.8 billion in the U.S., according to Skift. About 4 percent of Americans are directly employed by the tourism industry.

Related Articles
Washington (AFP) - Near the bottom of Donald Trump's new website, GreatAgain.gov, a telling plea sheds light on the magnitude of the challenge before the US president-elect in the coming 10 weeks: "Help wanted: 4,000 presidential appointees."

Trump faces the daunting task of building a new administration essentially from scratch -- a challenge even more severe for someone with zero political experience and who has alienated seasoned national security experts in his own party with his foreign policy rhetoric.

But the 70-year-old billionaire won, and he and his close aides gathered Friday in Trump Tower in New York, to map out their preparations for taking over Washington, a city where the smooth transition of presidential power has been a hallmark for two centuries.

The catch appears to be that Trump's transition team is peppered with several members of the very establishment that he blasted repeatedly on the campaign trail as he pledged to "drain the swamp" in Washington.

Ronald Reagan's attorney general Ed Meese, for example, is heading the management/budget aspect of the transition, according to a team structure chart obtained by Politico. Several transition team members are Washington lobbyists.

The transition had been headed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former Trump rival during the Republican primaries. But Trump suddenly announced that incoming vice president Mike Pence was taking over, and that Trump's three oldest children were joining the team.

He also appointed a cohort of Washington insiders to the operation, including Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus.

Below are the various components to Trump's transition, which shifts to a full-on presidential operation in 10 weeks, when the new head of state is sworn in on January 20.

Trump's Cabinet

Several of Trump's closest surrogates are being considered for plum posts. Attention is focusing on Priebus and Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon for chief of staff.

Story continues

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich was tipped as a possible next secretary of state. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker apparently is also in the running.

Trump is said to be looking at either Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, or former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin, the Trump campaign's finance chairman, as Treasury secretary.

Christie, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator Jeff Sessions, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, Bush-era US envoy to the United Nations John Bolton, House Homeland Security Committee chairman Michael McCaul and congressman Jeb Hensarling are all being considered for posts.

Time is short. Dozens of the top jobs, including cabinet posts, are traditionally announced before the Thanksgiving holiday two weeks from now.

White House guidance

President Barack Obama hosted Trump at the White House Thursday and pledged to his successor that he and his staff would "do everything we can to help you succeed."

As the nominees of their parties, Trump and his defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton received occasional intelligence briefings from senior US officials. That now gets amplified for Trump.

"The president-elect and other senior officials will begin receiving daily intelligence briefings from the intelligence community," the White House said in a fact sheet on the transition process.

It could provide a sobering assessment for Trump about the state of the world.

Administration officials will spend the next two months-plus working hand in glove with Trump staffers on multiple elements, from digital and paper archiving and computer operations to speeding application reviews for thousands of political appointee positions.

Congress

Trump will need to work closely with Congress if he is to implement his ambitious agenda, such as building a wall on the US border with Mexico. On Thursday he made a fence-mending trip to Capitol Hill, where he met with House Speaker Paul Ryan with whom he clashed bitterly during the campaign.

He will have the advantage of a Republican-led House and Senate, but his relations with some lawmakers soured during the campaign, including a number of Senate Republicans who refused to endorse him.

Trump will need to improve those ties as he seeks to fill a vacancy on the US Supreme Court. Such nominees require Senate approval.

National Security

A test of Trump's ability to repair the damage from his caustic campaign could come in the national security realm. It is among the most important and sensitive areas of an administration, but Trump is at a disadvantage, having no experience in the field.

His bombast about nuclear weapons, his threat to step back from NATO and his bizarre relationship with Russia's Vladimir Putin have also given foreign policy experts pause.

Fifty Republican national security experts wrote an open letter in August opposing Trump, saying he would be "the most reckless president in American history."

Trump has reportedly enlisted the respected former congressman Mike Rogers to head up the national security branch of his transition team.
Trevor Noah has a warning for protesters of Donald Trump: Keep your demonstrations peaceful, or become the hate that youre protesting against.

VIDEOSThe Daily Shows Hasan Minhaj and Michelle Wolf Just Delivered TVs Best Post-Election Takedowns

The Daily Show host began his Thursday broadcast by stressing how important it is for the world to see that not all of America supports the president-elect, yet going too far and letting anger consume us is not the right course of action.

We have to be careful about how we protest, Noah argued. You cant be throwing bottles at the police. You cant be burning effigies. (Or batting orange pinatas.) Thats not what American democracy is all about.

VIDEOSSeth Meyers: Chicago President Offer Still Stands for Trump

The comedian then equated protesting to sex, with an analogy thats hard to dispute. Press PLAY on the clip below if youre curious, then tell us whether you think it was fair of Noah to single out Trumps most aggressive protesters.

Related stories

Ratings: Trump Boosts 60 Minutes; Secrets and Lies, Quantico Tick Up

Donald Trump on 60 Minutes: The 10 Most Surprising Revelations

Dave Chappelle Wishes Donald Trump Luck in Saturday Night Live Monologue: 'I'm Going to Give Him a Chance'
Corey Lewandowski, a former advisor to President-elect Donald Trumps campaign who sparked controversy by joining CNN as a commentator, has left the network, according to a spokeswoman for the Time Warner-owned cable-news outlet.

His departure was reported previously by CNN.

Lewandowski served as a campaign manager for Trump before parting ways, then joined CNN in June. The move raised eyebrows, and had CNN Worldwide President answering questions about whether a partisan commentator  who, as it turned out, continued to collect severance from the Trump campaign  should be allowed on CNN. He was also unable to offer direct comment on some matters because of a non-disclosure agreement. To some viewers and critics, his hire represented a violation of traditional standards of journalism. Fox News Channel primetime anchor Sean Hannity was reprimanded in September, for example, for appearing in a promotional video for the Trump campaign.

The reason we hired Corey is that now that we are in the general election, I think its really important to have voices on CNN who are supportive of the Republican nominee, Zucker told Variety in August. Hes come under a much greater spotlight because of who he is, and the relationship hes had with the media. As a result, people are going to be more critical.

On CNN, Lewandowski maintained an aggressive presence, telling Clinton surrogate Christine Quinn in August, Dont touch me! And as Trump emerged as the winner of the electoral college votes needed to get into the White House, he was seen on CNN lording it over Democratic commentator Van Jones. You won, Jones said. Say it again. I didnt hear you, Lewandowski retorted.

Lewandowski was fired from the Trump campaign in June, after he became part of the news cycle he helped to spin. In March, Michelle Fields, then a reporter for Breitbart News, alleged she was grabbed forcefully by Lewandowski as she approached Trump, then a Republican candidate, to ask a question. He was charged with a simple count of battery in Jupiter, Florida, though he maintained his innocence. The Palm Beach County State Attorney declined to prosecute, citing insufficient evidence for a criminal investigation.

Story continues

Lewandowski is a former lobbyist who has worked for several campaigns. He also ran for political office himself  once in New Hampshire and once in Massachusetts  though he did not win in either instance.

Related stories

Oliver Stone on Donald Trump and the Perils of Cyber Warfare

PopPolitics: Hollywood Wonders What Happens Next with a President Trump (Listen)

Worried Internet Users Flock to Encryption App After Donald Trump Election
By PTI: Mumbai, Nov 11 (PTI) Mega Maldives Airlines today announced non-stop flights to Male from New Delhi starting November 15.

Flight number LV 305 (from New Delhi to Male) will be operational on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, whereas flight LV 304 (from Male to New Delhi) will fly on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, the Maldivian carrier said in a statement.

advertisement

Founded in 2009, Mega is a US-Maldives joint venture and has now become the fourth largest international airline flying to the island country, which is a popular tourist hotspot.

Ahmed Mohamed, Ambassador of Maldives to India, said, "We are very excited to start a direct flight from New Delhi to Maldives (its capital Male). This is a very good step considering that a large number of Indians travel to Maldives every year for vacation."

The airline has also introduced a special inaugural fare of Rs 23,500 for the first two flights.

Meanwhile, Air India has also started a direct flight (AI 263) from New Delhi to Male, via Thiruvananthapuram. PTI SM RSY ABM BAS

--- ENDS ---
Washington (AFP) - With the mainstream media almost uniformly hostile toward him, Donald Trump rallied supporters during the presidential campaign by delivering his message on Twitter and a loose network of alternative news sites.

The President-elect's ability to circumvent the main news channels to reach and energize his audience became a key factor in his victory, analysts say.

"Trump had a way of taking to Twitter and could literally change the narrative because he had such a large following," said Alan Rosenblatt, a digital consultant and strategist at Lake Research Partners and Turner4D who opposed Trump.

The real estate billionaire kept momentum even as major news organizations unearthed embarrassing episodes about his past, including on his finances and sexual conduct.

As mainstream media stepped up their investigations, going so far as to call him a "liar," Trump was able to sustain a counter-narrative on social media used by conservative, or "alt-right," news sites friendly to the Republican candidate.

A network of social media supporters amplified the Trump message, not only reinforcing his vision but also actively seeking to counter and quash messages from anti-Trump forces.

"It's organized digital bullying," Rosenblatt said.

"They would focus in on progressive Democratic tweeters and barrage them and abuse them to try to incite an inappropriate response."

- 'Alternate reality' -

The onslaught of pro-Trump messages on those platforms allowed him to survive the negative coverage, said Gabriel Kahn of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School and a former newspaper correspondent.

"It became possible for him to construct an alternate narrative, I would say an alternate reality," he said.

"In this way, you have untruths and falsehoods that transit through our media ecosystem and become a tidal wave."

Trump's message echoed through the alt-right media that supported his agenda, including Breitbart News, whose chairman Stephen Bannon served as chairman of the candidate's campaign organization.

Story continues

As a result, fact-checking by traditional media -- which revealed Trump's massive penchant for exaggeration and falsehood -- had less impact than might have been expected.

As online media outlets on both the left and right grow increasingly ideologically driven, the social discourse democracies require becomes limited, Rosenblatt said.

"The health of democracy depends on people being exposed to both sides of an issue," he said.

"These 'filter bubbles' and the idea of customized home pages and news feeds I think hurts democracy. It means people are not debating ideas to arrive at a consensus."

The mainstream media, important for promoting that discourse, has also been seen as failing, Rosenblatt said.

A Gallup survey this year found just 32 percent had confidence in the media's ability "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly."

There is a growing sentiment among conservatives that "the mainstream press is left-of-center and that the conservatives should have their own platforms," Rosenblatt said.

- Faking on Facebook -

Many Trump supporters and conservatives turned to Twitter, Facebook and other social media to spread their messages and counter the news in traditional outlets.

But much of the news on Facebook was fake, media watchers pointed out, compromising the platform as well as confidence in the media.

One local official shared news on Facebook with headlines such as "Hillary Clinton Calling for Civil War If Trump Is Elected" and "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President," said Joshua Benton, director of Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab.

"These are not legit anti-Hillary stories," he wrote in a blog post. "These are imaginary, made up, frauds. And yet Facebook has built a platform for the active dispersal of these lies -- in part because these lies travel really, really well."

The dissemination of such fake news was a key factor in Trump's win, New York Magazine editor Max Read argued.

"The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news," he wrote.

"Of course, lies and exaggerations have always been central to real political campaigns; Facebook has simply made them easier to spread."

Critics say Facebook should act like a media company and actively screen news, something the social media company acknowledged this week.

"We understand there's so much more we need to do, and that is why it's important that we keep improving our ability to detect misinformation," a Facebook statement to the website TechCrunch said.

"We're committed to continuing to work on this issue and improve the experiences on our platform."
Donald Trump has said that one of the top priorities for his presidency would be to remove the United States from international agreements to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

In particular, Trump has said he would renege on the historic Paris climate pact. In addition, he has selected Myron Ebell, who is skeptical that human-caused climate change is occurring, to spearhead the transition of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the new administration, as reported by ClimateWire. (The EPA is involved in developing the regulations that would reduce greenhouse gas output.)

But what would this mean for the world's climate?

It turns out that although it's relatively simple to remove the U.S. from its treaty obligations, the impacts of such a move are still not clear, experts say.

"If all the nations of the world fully met their Paris pledges, that would lead to avoided cumulative greenhouse gas emissions of about 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide" by around 2030, said John Sterman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and a senior adviser for the nonprofit Climate Interactive. The United States made up 22 gigatons of that total by 2025, so fully renouncing the pact would mean greenhouse gases would be that much higher. And in the worst case, it could lead to the complete unraveling of the deal, Sterman said. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

"It could be worse, because many nations may decide that if the United States won't live up to its agreement, why should they?" Sterman told Live Science.

However, the agreement was never binding and will not be enforced with penalties, so it was never guaranteed that all signatories would fulfill their commitments anyway, Sterman said. And in the best case, economic drivers or city or state initiatives could lead the U.S. to slash its emissions regardless of a pact, he added. [6 Unexpected Effects of Climate Change]



Story continues

Canceling agreements

Less than a year ago, President Barack Obama signed the historic Paris agreement. The United States, along with 195 other countries, agreed to make the carbon dioxide emissions cuts necessary to prevent more than a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) rise in global average temperatures above preindustrial levels.

In speeches all along the campaign trail, Trump has made it a priority to undo Obama's climate work.

The agreement itself allows signatories to remove themselves from the treaty only after four years.

"It's kind of designed for someone like Trump in mind," said Michael Wara, an expert on energy and environmental law at the Stanford Law School in California, referring to a leader who wants to get out of the obligations.

However, there are ways Trump could actually derail the process sooner.

"The Paris agreement has taken effect, but there's still a lot to do to spell out how it's actually going to be implemented," Wara told Live Science.

Right now, world leaders are congregating in Marrakech, Morocco, for the Conference of the Parties 22, to figure out this process.

"If the U.S. doesn't play ball in negotiating the implementation of Paris, that could be as impactful as U.S. withdrawal," Wara said. For instance, if the E.P.A. is run by a climate skeptic, they could simply scrap rules for regulating carbon dioxide, making enforcement of the goals impossible, he said.

Beyond this, the Paris climate agreement is part of a larger treaty, called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was first negotiated in 1992. Trump could potentially remove the United States from the UNFCC within a year with a stroke of a pen. This step would eliminate the requirement that the United States report its emissions levels, Wara said.

Early this year, Obama helped craft an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, a landmark agreement signed by197 countries in 1989 to protect the Earth's ozone layer. The new amendment aims to phase out production of superpotent warming gases called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by providing financial incentives to developing countries to cut these gases, but the Senate has yet to ratify it. So a future President Trump could simply decline to take action. That inaction, in turn, could lead developing countries to question whether to bother limiting their HFC emissions.

"India, in particular, was extremely nervous about signing onto it," Wara said.

Tangential effects

Trump could derail the U.S.' climate goals more strongly through other policies, Wara said.

"A lot of the key pieces of equipment that are going to be deployed in the next four to five years that could have the effect of reducing emissions  batteries, solar panels, wind turbines  have global supply chains," Wara said.

If Trump cancels trade deals and imposes steep tariffs, those products could become more expensive to manufacture, meaning renewable energy would no longer be competitive with other energy sources. For example, plummeting battery costs have made electric cars cost-competitive with conventional vehicles, but that momentum could be derailed by stiff trade penalties, Wara said.

On the other hand, there's a small chance that some of Trump's policies could  albeit indirectly  reduce emissions, Wara said.

For example, Trump has been a huge proponent of oil and natural gas drilling, and if he promotes that agenda as president, "the coal industry is really in big trouble," Wara said. "It's cheaper to generate electricity with gas than coal, and if we keep up, the coal industry is going away, full stop. It's becoming a shriveled hulk of what it once was."



Disastrous consequences

In the worst-case scenario, where the U.S. proceeds with business as usual, by 2100, the climate could warm by about 8.1 degrees F (4.5 degrees C), and the seas could rise by 6.5 feet (2 meters).

"That would lead to a high risk of climate catastrophe," Sterman said.

Such extreme warming could lead to water shortages and drought around the world; more heat waves, which could kill hundreds of thousands of people; mass migrations that would dwarf the refugee crisis of the past few years; and devastation that would make Hurricane Sandy look like a sideshow, Sterman said.

"It's extremely serious," Sterman said.

Original article on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations
From Town & Country

When I walked into my local cheese shop in Paris on Wednesday, the proprietor-who I think it is fair to say considers herself a political centrist-leapt up from behind the cash register and came over to me. "I am so sorry for you and for your country," she said sincerely. "And I hope the same doesn't happen to us."

The largest reverberation across France, and perhaps across Europe, of Donald Trump's election as president of the United States isn't that he might destroy NATO, or that he wants to pull the U.S. out of the Cop 21 agreement, or that he's alarmingly friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin-all, mind you, great concerns. It's that his election, like Brexit before it, is a bellwether for how politics are shifting-that once-radical movements are becoming mainstream.

Trump's election, like Brexit before it, is a bellwether for how politics are shifting-that once-radical movements are becoming mainstream.

There are a lot of European citizens who lived through the rise of German and Italian Fascism and the horror of World War II and remember how it crippled the Continent for decades. They see signs that it's returning-the anti-Muslim rhetoric, the anti-gay marriage protests, the rise in hate crimes, the radicalization of disenfranchised young people, the terrorist attacks-and they are worried. They are not alone.

[contentlinks align="left" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="More%20from%20Dana%20Thomas" customtitles="Europeans%20Are%20Baffled%20by%20the%202016%20Election%20" customimages="" content="article.8471"]

Among first phone calls of congratulations that Donald Trump received was from Marine Le Pen, the head of France's extreme right wing party the National Front.

This has terrified French center and left voters. Long on the fringe, the National Front has made advances in recent years as xenophobia and protectionism spreads across the country and the party now holds several municipal and European Parliament seats. Le Pen's supporters shout things like "France for the French," which is a thinly veiled way of saying, "France for heterosexual, white Catholics."

Story continues

There are a lot of European citizens who lived through the rise of Fascism and remember how it crippled the Continent for decades.

Like the Brexit supporters, the National Front wants to pull France out of the European Union, and the move would no doubt lead to the collapse of the 28-nation political-economic union it helped create in response to World War II to combat this sort of virulent nationalism. Marine Le Pen has made it clear that she plans to run for president next spring.

If she is elected, France, whose motto is "liberty, equality and fraternity," will become not only a symbol but also a leader of intolerance. And from there, who knows what could happen. The National Front's opposition frets, like anti-Communists during the Cold War, that one by one each country across the Continent will fall, like dominoes, to the same dogmatism and warring will return. Already, there are rumblings in Italy that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the center-left leader who President Obama welcomed in a state visit last month, is the next to go. Italy's anti-establishment Five Star Movement and its right-wing Northern League-the group that wants northern half of the country to secede-leading the fight.

Everywhere I went in Paris on post-election day, November 9-the 27th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as it happened-shopkeepers, hospital nurses, cafe waiters, cab drivers all echoed the sentiments of my fromagere: condolences, and dread. They seemed to be saying: if such a radical fervor can grip the United States of America, it can happen anywhere. Even here, in Gay Paree.

[contentlinks align="center" textonly="false" numbered="false" headline="Related%20Stories" customtitles="Republican%20Women%20on%20Why%20They're%20Excited%20for%20Trump%7C8%20Ways%20Trump%20is%20Different%20from%20Past%20Presidents%7CConfessions%20of%20a%20Hillary%20Clinton%20Voter%20in%20London" customimages="||" content="article.8618|article.8604|article.8607"]

You Might Also Like
trump china monkey

Donald Trump has said a lot about how he plans to punish China as president, with some of the ideas more likely to happen than others.

The most likely policy to pass is the defeat of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, but if that happens, Trump would actually be handing China a massive gift.

In fact, there are few things China wants more from America.

As Societe Generale analyst Wei Yao put it in a recent note to clients, "one upside to China under the Trump administration, in relative to the Obama administration, is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade pact  which excluded China  looks more certainly doomed."

The TPP is a trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries that includes the US but excludes China. If it doesn't pass, China would have an opportunity to fill a vacuum left by the US. The most likely vehicle for that would be China's "One Belt, One Road" initiative, which seeks to create partnerships to build infrastructure and trade with the country's continental neighbors.

And then there's the stuff that probably won't happen (most of the stuff)

The rest of Trump's China policy is harder to pull off but would be similarly likely to negatively affect the US economy.

Trump, who is set to be sworn into office on January 20, has promised to label China a "currency manipulator" on day one. He has long accused the country of keeping its currency, called the yuan or the renminbi, artificially low so that it can sell more exports.

The problem with that is there are measurable criteria a country must meet for the Treasury to classify it that way (yes, Walter, this is not 'Nam, there are rules).

Here are the criteria that must be met for a country to be considered a currency manipulator:

1) a significant bilateral trade surplus with the US;

2) a material current account surplus (>3% of GDP); and

3) persistent one-sided intervention in its currency market.

China meets only the first criterion. It does not fit the second, and as for the third, the country is doing the opposite.

Story continues

Even though the yuan is hitting six-year lows against the US dollar, China is actually trying to stop its currency from falling faster. It has been quite a costly effort too, but it's worth it when considering the country's ultimate goals.

China wants to keep the yuan strong because it is trying to move its economy from one dependent on selling exports to one driven by the purchasing power of its own people. For the country to succeed in that endeavor the people need to have a currency strong enough to buy all kinds of goods, foreign and domestic.

china changes in fx intervention chart

We should also note that China was labeled a currency manipulator from 1992 to 1994, and you know what that did to the country?

A steaming hot pile of nothing.

The other thing Trump has suggested is putting a high tariff on goods made in China  something like 45%. All this would end up doing is making goods more expensive for Americans. This is something a Republican-controlled Congress  much of it still in favor of free trade  would have to pass. In that sense, it's not looking good for this campaign promise.

A tariff has geopolitical implications too. It could also actually help China's leaders politically, according to Yao of Societe Generale. That's because Trump's policies, in the face of a slowing economy, could be used as a measure to stoke nationalism and place blame on the US rather than on China's government. This is a move the Obama administration has been careful to avoid.

Chinese leaders and the propaganda machines they control have actually already started using Trump to push a nationalist agenda. Even before he won, outlets like People's Daily were saying the US election's tenor proved that it was a "sick" democracy.

And by the way, we've tried this stuff

For what it's worth, we already do punish China for violating trade agreements  the Obama administration brought 11 of the 19 suits against China with the World Trade Organization, for example  but the results aren't always what we expect.

Take what has been going on with Chinese steel, for example. To keep its slowing economy going and keep people employed, China has been flooding the global market with cheap steel, despite promises to cut excess capacity.

The US, in turn, has slapped tariffs of 500% on Chinese steel. That has had unintended consequences on our manufacturers who buy that steel. As such, demand is slowing in the US.

The Australian bank Macquarie pointed this out in a note a few months ago.

"While output has been carefully managed by US producers to help maintain the tariff-driven price premium over other regions, apparent demand is clearly not good at -10% YoY over 2016 to date," analysts wrote, adding (emphasis ours): "While destocking can explain part of this, we would reiterate our concern that higher steel prices are hurting US manufacturing competitiveness (and thus steel demand). As our recent note showed, the US is the biggest negative drag on global industrial production at the present time."

And manufacturers that have to buy steel have been vocal about this.

"There's grumbling that the US mills are taking advantage of a tight market, and the price hikes are too much, too fast," Lisa Goldenberg, the president of Delaware Steel Co. of Pennsylvania, a steel trading and processing company, told The Wall Street Journal.

Remember, if steel costs more, someone has to pay for it. And that someone is you, America.

NOW WATCH: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is retiring, effective immediately





More From Business Insider


During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump often dismissed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear agreement signed between the United States and Iran. His critique, while vague, was sensible. The JCPOA did concede too much residual enrichment capacity, its sunset clauses were too short, and it offered sanctions relief that was too generous. On top of that, the White House indulged in its own cash-and-carry program, trading hostages for money.

It is hard to see how a prudent Iran policy can coexist with the JCPOA as it stands today. An actual Iran policy needs to move beyond arms control and emphasize ways of putting stress on the countrys theocratic regime and pushing back on its ambitions in the Middle East. The future Trump administration now has the opportunity to develop just such a comprehensive Iran policy.

Because the JCPOA is not a treaty ratified by the Senate, it is not binding on any administration. Its important to note that the House of Representatives actually rejected the accord while 56 U.S. senators similarly went on the record with their opposition. The Trump administration can thus render JCPOA null and void simply by declaring it so. But repealing the accord will also imply a willingness to negotiate a more robust agreement.

Thats why the new administration would be prudent to first articulate its own arms control precepts. In the process of transacting its flawed accord, President Barack Obamas team abandoned many of its own standards, and it is time to restore worthy principles as the basis of any new agreement. This means that the scope of the Islamic Republics nuclear program has to be defined by national needs. Given that an oil-rich Iran really does not require nuclear energy, this would mean at best a modest and symbolic program. The Obama administration also essentially whitewashed Irans past nuclear infractions, as the Islamic Republic did not really disclose its previous experimentation with nuclear weapons technology. This issue must now be categorically resolved, and Iran should be expected to reveal its previously undeclared procurement activities and work on triggering devices. Since the only plausible means of ensuring compliance with any arms control accord is to grant inspectors unfettered access to all sites and scientists, Irans nuclear inspection regime should be anywhere, anytime as opposed to JCPOAs managed access that relies on Iranian cooperation. And finally, ballistic missiles that are an important aspect of any nuclear weapons program must be part of any agreement.

As mentioned, these principles are not new. They were the policy of the first-term Obama administration and the official position of the so-called P5+1 that pursued negotiations with Iran, which included China, Russia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Thus, the Trump team would be merely asking its international partners to embrace judicious ideas that they themselves once endorsed  and which were only abandoned by a second-term Obama eager for an agreement and legacy.

Still, revising JCPOA with follow-on agreements will require considerable skilfull alliance management. Trump may benefit from the fact that European states will be eager for a positive start with a new administration. Moreover, the one potential benefit of the warmer relationship between Washington and Moscow that Trump wishes to pursue could be Russia conceivably playing a more constructive role in such renegotiations.

President-elect Trumps diplomacy will also benefit from a credible threat of force against Iran. Given his solicitations and the deference he paid to the mullahs, no one in Tehran took seriously Obamas claim that all options are on the table. The administration was so eager for an agreement and so averse to coercive measures that Irans rulers knew they were immune from any military repercussions. Can they wage the same bet on a Trump administration? The president-elects emphasis on renewing American power and occasionally unpredictable behavior may have already unsettled the ruling clerics in Iran.

The historical record is clear on the likely effects. In 2003, the Islamic Republic suspended all of its nuclear activities for it feared that an emboldened George W. Bush administration fresh from the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq may target Iran next. The mullahs are sensitive to power, and not blandishments, and will likely think twice before tangling with a hawkish administration.

Trump and his advisors would be wise not to limit themselves to arms treaties, however, but also focus on ways of stressing Iran at home and in the Middle East. Parallel with renewed nuclear negotiations, the Republican White House and Congress should cooperate on a rigorous sanctions regime that would once more segregate Iran from the world economy. Past experience has shown the power of the United States in excluding Iran from international financial markets and the global banking network. If Iran once more is incapable of financing its commerce and effectively selling its oil, then it will be deprived of funds to pay for both its domestic needs and imperial adventures.

The United States should also not be shy about supporting opposition movements and pressing for democratic change in Iran. Since the uprisings of the summer of 2009, the Islamic Republic has used repression and promises of a better economy to pacify a sullen and disenfranchised population. Iran very much resembles the Soviet Union of the 1970s: a bloated, bureaucratic state justifying its power by an ideology that convinces no one. The system itself invites instability as its corruption, internal intrigues, and persistent purges reflect a government that cant sustainably maintain its own cadre or co-opt its citizens. Irans overburdened security services may be able to cope with the occasional demonstration but cannot stem the tide of sustained protests.

The task for the United States is to persistently weaken Irans economy, isolate it globally, and make inroads to nascent opposition forces. The more the Islamic Republics regime weakens, the better the prospects for the countrys forces of dissent. Given the power of rhetoric, the new Trump administration should devote considerable effort to delegitimizing the Islamic Republic by highlighting its repression, the corruption of its elite, and the massive funds it spends propping up dictators such as Bashar al-Assad and terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah. The Iranian public neither wishes for its troops to die in Syria nor have its money spent on Arab radicals. By relentlessly pressing Iran on all fronts, not just the nuclear one, the future Trump administration may yet be able to push the state toward reform at home and moderation abroad. And that would be an Iran policy worthy of the name.

Photo credit: ATTA KENARE / Staff
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany supports a dialogue between the United States and Russia, but Donald Trump must not ignore Russian actions in Crimea and Aleppo when he sits down with President Vladimir Putin, the German defence minister said on Friday. Speaking at an event in Berlin, Ursula von der Leyen also said that NATO would be "dead" if any one of its members refused to come to the defence of another that was under attack. German President Joachim Gauck and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier also called for the EU and NATO to present a unified front after the U.S. election and in the wake of Russia's annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014. "We must unite with our partners to oppose wars and conflicts and also Russia's lust for power," Gauck told visiting Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid. "Germany will stand by Estonia's side when it comes to ensuring the security of the Baltic states." NATO is bolstering its forces in eastern Europe to reassure Estonia and the other ex-Soviet Baltic states, who worry that Moscow might try a repeat of its actions in Crimea. Trump, who defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential election this week, praised Putin repeatedly during his campaign and questioned whether the United States should defend NATO allies that were not shouldering their fair share of the financial burden in the alliance. "It is a good thing when the new American president immediately seeks a dialogue with the Russian president. It is good and it has our full support," said von der Leyen, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives. "What can't happen is forgetting - forgetting the annexation of Crimea, forgetting the hybrid war in Ukraine which continues, forgetting the bombardment of Aleppo," she said. Trump's election has deeply unsettled the government in Berlin, which has been the driving force behind EU sanctions against Russia for Putin's military intervention in Ukraine. It has also strongly condemned the bombing of civilians in rebel-held areas of the Syrian city of Aleppo by the Syrian government and Russia, its ally. Steinmeier told German broadcaster n-tv that the U.S. election was another wake-up call to Europe about the need for unity after Britain's vote to leave the European Union in June. "Fears that U.S. foreign policy could change are another reason that Europe should speak more with one voice in the future," he said. "If Europe is complaining that Trump backs a radical immigration policy, that is another reason for us to clear up the remaining questions about our own policy." Russia is hoping the united front between Europe and Washington on sanctions will crumble under Trump. On Thursday, a Kremlin spokesman described Trump and Putin's approach to foreign policy as "phenomenally close". Von der Leyen and Steinmeier both acknowledged that Trump's victory meant Germany and Europe would likely have to take on more responsibility for their own defence. But the defence minister said the German government was still struggling to answer the question of what a Trump presidency meant, saying "we know next to nothing". (Reporting by Noah Barkin and Andrea Shalal; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
(Adds details on transition team)

By Steve Holland and Luciana Lopez

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, Nov 11 (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump put vice presidential running mate Mike Pence in charge of a White House transition team that also includes three of his grown children on Friday as he began the work of filling top administration jobs.

Pence replaces New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Trump's campaign said, who remains as a vice chair of the transition effort as he deals with the fallout from the 'Bridgegate' lane closure scandal that has damaged his political standing.

The announcement came shortly after Trump aides convened at the real-estate mogul's Trump Tower in New York City to begin weighing candidates for some of the 4,000 jobs he will have to fill shortly after he takes office on Jan. 20, 2017.

Trump relied on a small circle of loyalists and family members during an insurgent presidential bid that frequently took on Republican party insiders. Those people will continue to play a prominent role in the transition, according to the announcement.

Trump's daughter Ivanka and sons Eric and Donald Jr., along with son-in-law Jared Kushner, were named as transition team members even though they will be overseeing his sprawling business empire. Trump's company said the arrangement would not violate conflict-of-interest laws.

The overhaul marks a further disappointment for Christie, an early Trump endorser who was once viewed as a top candidate for attorney general. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is now the leading contender for that job, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

Giuliani said he was happy to advise Trump but declined to say whether he will serve in his administration.

"I can see already how he is going to be a great president and I'm glad I could play a small role in it," he told reporters as he left Trump Tower.

Since Trump's surprise defeat of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's election, dozens of possible appointees have been floated, from grassroots conservative heroes like Sarah Palin to seasoned Washington hands like David Malpass.

Story continues

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus is a strong candidate for White House chief of staff, according to sources close to the campaign. Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, a conservative provocateur, is also being considered for the job.

SMALL POOL

Trump has a relatively small pool of candidates to work with, as many Republicans condemned his racially inflammatory rhetoric over the course of the campaign and some of his positions, such as his attacks on free trade, run against party orthodoxy.

Trump's campaign spent relatively little time on transition planning during the campaign, and even his Republican supporters had been bracing for a loss.

"I was on Romney's transition team, and it was a well-oiled machine months before the election. Now there's a scramble," said one Republican source, referring to the party's 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.

With a Republican-controlled House and Senate, Trump has the ability to follow through on his campaign promises to cut taxes, tighten immigration, scale back climate change rules and repeal President Barack Obama's signature Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare.

An Obama administration rule requiring retirement advisers to act in their clients' interests could also be on the chopping block.

But House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and other congressional Republicans may balk at his protectionist trade policies and expensive transportation spending plan.

Trump's most loyal supporters could play a prominent role in his administration. Campaign sources say Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions could serve as Defense Secretary, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich might be named as Secretary of State and retired General Michael Flynn could serve as national security adviser.

Those three, along with Giuliani and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, were named as vice chairs of the transition team on Friday.

Trump appears to be leaning toward seasoned Republicans for many economic and financial policy. David Malpass, a former Treasury and State Department official, and Paul Atkins, a former Securities and Exchange Commission official, are guiding the transition team on economic issues.

"This is one area where the most Republican orthodoxy will come out," said Brandon Barford, a former Republican congressional staffer.

Some advisers, like former Nucor Corp. chief executive Dan DiMicco, and economist Peter Navarro, have echoed Trump's fierce criticism of China trade policy. But another adviser, former CIA director James Woolsey, wrote in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper on Friday that the Trump administration would accept China's rise as long as it did not challenge the regional balance of power.

(Additional reporting by David Shepardson, Emily Stephenson, Ginger Gibson, Diane Bartz, Jason Lange, David Brunnstrom, David Lawder, Julia Harte and Julia Edwards Ainsley in Washington; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Bill Rigby and Mary Milliken)
By Steve Holland and Jeff Mason WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump met on Thursday for the first time, setting aside the deep rancor that dominated the long campaign season to discuss the transition to the Republican's inauguration on Jan. 20. Their 90-minute meeting in the White House Oval Office, with no aides present, took place just two days after Trump's stunning election victory over Hillary Clinton, Obama's former secretary of state. Obama, who vigorously campaigned for his fellow Democrat to succeed him, had repeatedly called Trump unfit for the president's office, while the businessman had often dubbed Obama's eight-year tenure a "disaster." But in separate post-election remarks on Wednesday, both men appeared to seek to help the country heal from a bitterly divisive campaign, and that tone continued into the White House meeting. Seated next to Obama after their talks, Trump told reporters: "We really discussed a lot of situations, some wonderful, some difficulties." He said Obama explained "some of the really great things that have been achieved," but did not elaborate. "It was a great honor being with you and I look forward to being with you many, many more times in the future," Trump said, with a tone of deference. Trump, a real estate magnate who has never held political office, later met congressional leaders, including U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican who has had a strained relationship with Trump. "A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry," Trump said on Twitter late on Thursday. Amid the efforts to bury hatchets, there were protests in a string of U.S. cities against Trump for a second day on Thursday as demonstrators expressed concern that Trump's election would be a blow to civil rights. "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Trump tweeted. Obama said he had offered assistance to Trump over the next couple of months, and urged the country to unite to face its challenges. "We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds," Obama said, adding he and Trump discussed a range of domestic and foreign policy issues and details related to the transition period. "The meeting might have been at least a little less awkward than some might have expected," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. The two men's relaxed, cordial demeanor in front of the cameras was in stark contrast to the months of harsh rhetoric during the campaign. Trump used Obama as a punching bag during his campaign speeches, repeatedly attacking the president's policies from healthcare to an Iran nuclear deal. Both Obama and first lady Michelle Obama attacked Trump as temperamentally unfit for the White House and dangerously unprepared to have access to U.S. nuclear codes. Asked at a White House briefing on Thursday whether the meeting had eased any of the concerns about Trump that Obama expressed during the campaign, Earnest said: "The president was never in a position to choose a successor. The American people chose his successor." ON THE HILL Trump went from the White House to Capitol Hill for meetings with Republican congressional leaders, most of whom had a frosty relationship with Trump during a campaign where he tore into the Washington establishment. Republicans retained control of the Senate and House in Tuesday's election, meaning at least some of Trump's agenda may find friendly terrain in Congress. Trump emerged from meeting Ryan, along with Vice President-elect Mike Pence, to tell reporters: "Were going to lower taxes as you know. He added, in reference to Obama's signature healthcare reform of 2010 that is a common target of Trump and congressional Republicans: Were going to fix healthcare and make it more affordable and better." Ryan has sought to smooth over his relationship with Trump and his spokeswoman, AshLee Strong, said he was "excited for the potential for unified Republican government and eager to get to work with Mr. Trump." Trump also met for an hour with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, saying afterward that he had told the senator his top three priorities were better control of immigration and the borders, healthcare and jobs. In what seemed like a possible early pivot by Trump, controversial campaign proposals, including his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, disappeared for a while on Thursday from the president-elect's campaign website. His campaign later blamed a technical problem and the statements were returned to the website. Trump declined to respond when asked by reporters after meeting with McConnell if he would ask Congress to ban Muslims from entering the country. On another Trump campaign pledge, a top Trump aide, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told NPR he did not expect him to spend much time trying to make Mexico pay for a proposed wall along the U.S. southern border, but "it was a great campaign device." Such proposals, along with his free-wheeling tone and frequent insults of critics and rivals, earned Trump the disapproval of not just Democrats but many in the Republican establishment during the election campaign. Trump's camp also showed signs it was beginning building a government, with names for top Cabinet positions being leaked. Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign chief, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus could be named chief of staff. Trump has long hinted that his Treasury secretary could be campaign finance chair Steven Mnuchin, formerly of Goldman Sachs, but there were reports U.S. Representative Jeb Hensarling and J.P. Morgan's Jamie Dimon were also being considered. Thursday's start at fence-mending also included meetings between Vice President Joe Biden and his future successor, Pence, and between the current and future first ladies. Michelle Obama met privately with Trump's wife, Melania, in the White House residence. Michelle Obama has raised two daughters in the White House and the Trumps have a son, 10 year-old Barron. The two women discussed raising children at the White House, Earnest said. "Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!," Donald Trump said on Twitter. (Reporting by Steve Holland, Jeff Mason, Roberta Rampton, Susan Cornwell and David Morgan; Writing by Richard Cowan and Ginger Gibson; Editing by Frances Kerry and Peter Cooney)
The two countries are expected to sign a civil nuclear deal which will facilitate leading US-based atomic companies to set up plants in India, besides discussing ways to step up cooperation in the areas like trade, investment and security.

By India Today Web Desk: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be meeting Japanese premiere Shinzo Abe. The two countries are expected to sign a civil nuclear deal which will facilitate leading US-based atomic companies to set up plants in India, besides discussing ways to step up cooperation in the areas like trade, investment and security.

Here are the latest developments:

PM addressed CII-Keidanren luncheon

advertisement

#Combination of our hardware and our software is fantastic. Let us join hands and march forward & explore bigger potentials & brighter prospects

#Japan has imp role as India needs scale, speed and skill. Involvement in our mega projects signifies scale & speed. Skill initiatives also underway.

PM:Japan has imp role as India needs scale,speed &skill.Involvement in our mega pjcts signifies scale&speed.Skill initiatives also underway pic.twitter.com/1D7Fk4KCmr Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

#India is pursuing a new direction of economic reforms. My resolve is to make it the most open economy in the world.

#Made in India & Made by Japan has already started to converge wonderfully. I promise that we are committed to boost

#India's development needs are huge and substantial. We seek rapid achievement for our developmental priorities, but in an environment friendly manner.

#We will be proactive in addressing your concerns.We will further strengthen special mechanisms including Japanese industrial townships

#Even against weak international economic scenario, news from India is of strong growth. It is of incredible opportunities & India's credible policies.

#21st Century is Asias century that has emerged as new centre od global growth. We will've to continue to play major role in Asias emergence.

#India gets inspiration through teachings of truth from Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. India and Japan are best suited to work together.

#"Japan" in India is benchmark of quality, excellence, honesty and integrity. We are familiar with Japan's contribution to development in other parts of the world

#My personal engagement with leadership, Industry and people of Japan is now almost a decade old.



PM begins speech at CII-Keidanren luncheon:My personal engagement w/ leadership, Govt., Industry &people of Japan is now almost a decade old pic.twitter.com/QK8NUvf1jH Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016 Ahead of the annual India-Japan bilateral summit later in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today called on Japanese Emperor Akihito.

"A rare audience that symbolises the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted. "Speaking of civilizations. PM @narendramodi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of #IndiaJapan and the future of Asia," Swarup said in another tweet. A rare audience that symbolises the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan: Vikas Swarup tweeted A rare audience that symbolises the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan: Vikas Swarup tweeted

Modi, who arrived here after a brief stopover in Thai capital Bangkok to pay respects to revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, met the members of the Indian community in the lobby of the hotel where he is staying.

Modi and Abe will travel on the Shinkansen high-speed rail to Kobe.

Modi arrived in Tokyo on Thursday and would participate in two bilateral business meets here before joining Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for the bilateral summit later in the day.

This is Modi's second visit to Japan in two years.

advertisement

--- ENDS ---
Donald Trump

The Supreme Court became a top issue in the 2016 election after the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February.

Senate Republicans held off on holding any hearings for President Barack Obama's nominee to fill the seat  Judge Merrick Garland  until after the election, saying they wanted voters to decide who should nominate Scalia's replacement.

It was considered far-fetched that Donald Trump would end up selecting the replacement, as it looked as if the Republican nominee had little chance of winning the presidency. Some Republican senators, including Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, openly discussed moving quickly on Garland after the election, even possibly before it in Flake's case, hoping to head off a potential pick by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.

But early on Wednesday morning Trump shocked the world by securing the White House.

Senate Republicans who held out now look as if their gamble to hold the seat open paid off.

And Trump's ability to fill not only Scalia's vacant seat but those of four other justices who could soon leave the court has the chance to set the court for decades.

"Ramifications for the Supreme Court are enormous," Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist who founded the Potomac Strategy Group, told Business Insider.

Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law professor at UCLA, agreed in an email to Business Insider, writing that Trump would "undoubtedly have a significant impact on the Supreme Court."

But while the ramifications on the court of a Trump presidency are indisputable, one professor doesn't think it will lead to sudden reversals on major cases such as Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges involving abortion and gay marriage.

David Primo, an associate professor of political science and business administration in the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester, told Business Insider he didn't see either case being overturned, no matter how many appointments Trump were able to make. He also said  after reviewing the list of judges Trump said he would draw from to fill appointments  that Trump wasn't picking anyone who appeared to be out of line with mainstream judicial thought.

Story continues

"Even though it's not elected, the court looks toward the sense of the nation and legitimacy, and I don't see a scenario in which Roe v. Wade is overturned," he said. "It seems to me to be an example of a decision that is so firmly engrained, entrenched, you may see tinkering around the edges, but the fundamentals of that decision seem unlikely to be in danger."

But "politics is about surprises, so we don't know until we get these members on the court," he continued. "This is going to be an opportunity for Trump to shape the court that presidents don't always get."

Primo added that appointments "sometimes" don't act as presidents think they will on cases. Examples include John Paul Stevens, who served from 1975 to 2010, and Anthony Kennedy, who was considered the swing vote on today's court before Scalia's death.

Focusing on the gay-marriage decision, Primo said he didn't see a shift in the court resulting in "people losing rights that previous decisions have given them," though it would be unlikely that the court would be progressive on issues regarding transgender rights.

"The court is not just going to go on a spree of reversing decisions," he said. "You have to keep in mind this is already a center-right court. So, it's just unlikely that we'll see sort of a major retrenchment. We might see further movement on campaign finance and more deregulation of the campaign finance system. A stronger reading of the Second Amendment. Those are the kind of changes we're likely to see."

"I think John Roberts as chief justice is very sensitive to how the court is perceived," he continued. "So we will see this a lot more gradually then either side either would like or not like. I think we're just going to see slow movement."

Another aspect of Trump's appointments is how much Senate Democrats will be able to oppose them. Should Democrats filibuster an appointment, Republicans would need more than a handful of Democrats to cross over for a confirmation.

"Will Mitch McConnell let that happen?" Primo said. "Will he say, 'We really just need a majority vote?'"

Because Senate Democrats were vocally opposed to their Republican colleagues' refusal to even consider Garland's confirmation, they might worry about looking hypocritical by similarly trying to block Trump's nominees. And Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the incoming Senate minority leader, told Bloomberg in an interview before the election that he thought "the party that's seen as obstructionist is going to pay a price in 2018."

Democrats will be defending 25 seats in that midterm election, compared with just eight for the GOP.

"But they could also say, 'This is a special situation, so we need to act accordingly,'" Primo said.

When it comes to Garland, who has been awaiting confirmation since March, his chances of joining the court are essentially dead.

"Obviously, Judge Garland's nomination is now a nonstarter," Carter Phillips, a Washington, DC, lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court more than any other lawyer in private practice, said in an email to Business Insider.

Primo said Garland knew what he was getting into before accepting the nomination, so it shouldn't come as a surprise.

"It wasn't like he was hoodwinked into accepting the nomination for Supreme Court justice," he said.

NOW WATCH: David Cay Johnston: 'Theres very good reason to believe Trumps been engaged in tax fraud'





More From Business Insider


GettyImages 621449634

President-elect Donald Trump hastily changed his tone toward protesters unhappy with his election, doing so just hours after coming under fire for criticizing demonstrations that took place in major cities across the US on Thursday night.

"Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country," Trump wrote on Twitter early Friday morning.

The president-elect added: "We will all come together and be proud!"

The remarks stood in stark contrast to comments Trump made on Thursday night as protesters took to the streets in cities including New York and Los Angeles.

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election," Trump wrote at the time. "Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!"

Following Trump's criticism of the protests, some political analysts skewered the billionaire for lashing out at those exercising their constitutional rights.

At the same time, protests in some cities descended into chaos on Thursday night. In Portland, Oregon, an anti-Trump demonstration was declared a riot by the police because of "extensive criminal and dangerous behavior." In Salt Lake City, protesters threatened reporters, according to reports from the scene.

Throughout his campaign, Trump heavily marketed himself as the "law-and-order candidate." The Republican businessman has promised to both restore unity to the country as well as crack down on criminal behavior.

NOW WATCH: 'Very unfair!': Trump sends mixed messages over ongoing protests





More From Business Insider


Donald Trump returned to his favorite social media account Thursday night as the anti-Trump protests raged across the nation.

Read: Don Gone? Secret Service Advises President-Elect to Move Out of Trump Tower

Trump posted Thursday night: Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

But on Friday morning, he appeared to do an about-face, praising the passion of the protests.

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Thousands took to the streets in Portland, Oregon, where demonstrations quickly turned violent. Local businesses were vandalized in acts that cops called "unlawful" and "dangerous," and authorities officially declared a riot.



In New York City, things were much more peaceful in a second night of demonstrations outside Trump Tower.

They were there when the president-elect returned home from Washington, D.C., after meeting with President Obama at the White House.

He took to Twitter for the first time since stunning the nation with his election victory.

Read: After Trump's First-Ever Trip to the White House, Obama Says They Had an 'Excellent Conversation'

A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!

 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Story continues

On Friday morning, Trump also said he would have a busy day in New York appointing people who will be involved in his cabinet.

Busy day planned in New York. Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Watch: From De Niro to Gaga, Celebs Who Stood Against Trump Still Reeling After His Presidential Win

Related Articles:
By Julia Harte WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Criminal justice reform advocates said they expect Donald Trump will embrace moderate change once he is in the White House, toning down the punitive but undefined "law and order" image he projected on the campaign trail. In another instance of experts trying to pin down Trump on an issue he used on the stump without offering much detail, two groups that have met recently with his staff said they expect him to back mainstream sentencing and corrections reforms. A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment. In a meeting a few weeks ago, Trump's staff was "very receptive" to arguments that crime rates have dropped in states that have reduced prison populations through sentencing reform, said Holly Harris, executive director of the U.S. Justice Action Network, a bipartisan coalition that spearheads legislative efforts to lower sentences for nonviolent offenders. Democratic President Barack Obama, many Republicans in Congress and several of Trump's conservative mentors have embraced changing sentencing standards and better prisons. During the campaign, Trump denounced Obama as being too soft on inner-city violence and for extremist plots against the United States and attacks on police officers. For instance, in the Oct. 19 presidential debate with Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, Trump said: "We need law and order, but we need justice, too. Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store. They have no education. They have no jobs." But in the same month, Trump's vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, said he was proud that Indiana approved criminal justice reform during his tenure as governor. "We have got to do a better job recognizing and correcting the errors in the system that do reflect an institutional bias in criminal justice," he said. Tim Head, executive director of the conservative Christian Faith and Freedom Coalition, said his group has held advisory talks with the president-elect's staff in recent days. Head said Trump's Justice Department is likely to emphasize greater "support for law enforcement, maybe deference for law enforcement" than Obama did. But Head and Harris also both noted that Republicans close to Trump, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie have advocated for reforms such as lowering sentences for some nonviolent crimes, improving prison conditions and helping former prisoners find jobs and housing. Christie and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani are reportedly on a short list of conservatives whom Trump is considering for U.S. attorney general. Inimai Chettiar, director of justice programs at the Brennan Center for Justice of New York University, said Trump made some "troubling" campaign-trail claims. One, she said, was arguing that rising crime justifies stop-and-frisk tactics and other police methods that critics say unfairly target minorities. However, she said, she also hoped the president-elect would fall in line with members of the Republican Party who support bipartisan criminal justice reform. (Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Jonathan Oatis)
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump threatened to sue those who crossed him: the scores of women who accused him of sexual assault, the journalists who wrote critical stories about him, and even the Republican National Committee over how it awarded delegates. He will enter the Oval Office on Jan. 20 as arguably the most litigious president in history.

And now, Trump will have vast influence in shaping the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI  and many of the powerful post-9/11 policies that tested Americas legal system by pitting security concerns against civil liberties.

The Justice Department has long prided itself as a fiercely independent agency, with many career prosecutors outlasting any one presidential administration. But even some of the most controversial DOJ alumni now worry how Trump will pursue his vision of justice.

He thinks all kinds of crazy things about prosecutions, said John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who, while serving at DOJs Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2003, helped write legal justifications for aggressive interrogation methods that critics call torture. Those memos have since been rescinded.

I dont think he has a very good sense of how our law enforcement system works, Yoo told Foreign Policy.

During the campaign, Trump distinguished himself by his volatility, his vindictiveness, and a desire to strike back at his enemies, qualities that may have served him well in the rough-and-tumble world of New York real estate.

But critics fear Trump will harness the Justice Department to pursue political prosecutions against enemies and otherwise trample civil rights. He will enter the White House after 15 years of presidents  Democratic and Republican  who have wielded nearly untrammelled executive power to conduct investigations, war, covert action, and surveillance operations.

We are faced with a situation where Trump is going to inherit extremely broad powers that are subject to no meaningful oversight by the other two breaches, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Story continues

When Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton argued during the Oct. 9 presidential debate that its just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country, Trump quipped: Because youd be in jail.

That disregard for judicial process and its outcomes has been a hallmark of the president-elects career. Trump has quite openly used litigation as a harassment, said Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a prominent civil libertarian. The point, Sanchez said, was to make someones life hell.

Throughout his career as a real estate developer and media personality, Trump frequently relied on lawsuits to address even minor slights.

In 2006, he sued journalist Timothy L. OBrien for questioning the moguls net worth in his book TrumpNation. After spending more than $1 million on the lawsuit, Trump for failing to prove that OBrien had shown reckless disregard for the media. And during the 2016 presidential campaign, he angrily pledged to open up U.S. libel laws to more easily win lawsuits against the media after receiving aggressive scrutiny from reporters.

While a revision to the libel law would likely require an act of Congress, Trump will have wide-ranging presidential powers as cto alter how the FBI conducts its investigations and to make them more aggressive, said Michael German, a former FBI agent now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.

In recent years, the Justice Department has relaxed strict standards the FBI must meet before opening and maintaining investigations. German said Trump could ease those standards even more so than they already are.

Its possible Trump could direct the FBI to investigate his enemies, German said. And, he said, it may not require a direct order from Trump to do so: Im not sure it would be necessary for Trump to make such a directive  a mere mention of an organization could trigger an agent in a field office to open an investigation, German said.

Such a move would violate decades of tradition holding that the president does not interfere in Justice Department investigations. Still, there is no explicit legal restriction to prevent Trump from directing prosecutions.

There are far more violations of federal law than police to investigate them, and the Justice Department has long fretted over how prosecutorial discretion can be turned into an instrument of repression.

Law enforcement is not automatic. It isnt blind. One of the greatest difficulties of the position of prosecutor is that he must pick his cases, because no prosecutor can even investigate all of the cases in which he receives complaints, Attorney General Robert Jackson told a gathering of U.S. attorneys in 1940. If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.

Former DOJ officials say politically motivated prosecutions would likely spark a revolt among the career prosecutors and other civil servants in the department, as it did after the Bush administration fired nine U.S. attorneys and replaced some with political loyalists. The firings were called fundamentally flawed by Justices own internal watchdog and led to the 2007 resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

That kind of internal policing could provide a check on Trumps desire to retaliate against his enemies. Still, much of the Justice Departments independence depends on whether the attorney general Trump will appoint will aggressively defend it.

Two top contenders for attorney general  former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie  previously served as U.S. attorneys during Republican presidential administrations. Both have shown a troubling willingness to use the Justice Department for political ends, said Carrie Cordero, a former DOJ official currently at Georgetown University Law School.

In an interview Thursday, Giuliani left open the possibility of pursuing charges against Clinton for compromising classified information included in emails sent to her unsecure homebrew server. FBI Director James Comey has declined to recommend prosecution, and closed the case last week.

Theres one tradition in America, right? Election is over. We forget about it. There is another tradition in America which is equal justice under the law, Giuliani told Fox News on Thursday. And it would depend on how bad the violations are.

During the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last July, Christie conducted a mock prosecution of Clinton while the crowd chanted, Lock her up!

If he wants to lessen peoples concern about how he is going to use to wield the powers of the Justice Department, then he needs to pick an AG who was not involved in his campaign, Cordero said.

The concerns over Trumps use of executive authority are not limited to the Justice Department. As president, he will have immense power of surveillance and covert action programs which Democratic President Barack Obama largely inherited, and solidified, from the Republican Bush administration.

Sanchez said drone and surveillance programs are largely governed by internal policy documents  many of which are reviewed by the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel  and as president, Trump will have wide latitude to alter such rules.

We have this massive surveillance apparatus that was created over the last 15 years with the participation of both parties and on the tacit assumption that the people in charge would always be people of integrity, said Jaffer, whose book The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law comes out next week. It should have been built with the possibility in mind that the whole system could be turned over to somebody who doesnt have the best interests of the country at heart.

Jaffer added: Now we are going to unfortunately find out how these powers are used by somebody who appears to be interested in using them in the most aggressive way possible.

JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images
By Laila Kearney (Reuters) - Seattle financial worker Harrison Karlewicz had been considering joining an environmental activist group for a while. The day after Donald Trump won the White House, he signed up. "That was a big push for me, kind of a wakeup call," the 25-year-old said, after joining 350 Seattle, a group that stages mass protests against fossil fuel use. "I thought, 'I don't feel involved. I want to get out there.'" During his campaign, Trump said global warming was a hoax and called for the Environmental Protection Agency to be gutted. He promised to "cancel" the Paris climate agreement between the United States and nearly 200 other countries to slow climate change, and he pledged to revive the coal industry. Karlewicz represents what environmental activists say is the silver lining of Trump's electoral victory: Environmentally minded people angered by the outcome are rallying to their cause. At 350 Seattle, people packed a volunteer drop-in meeting after news of Trump's confirmed win, said organizer Emily Johnston. The group blocked a rail line in Washington state that transports oil to Shell and Tesoro refineries earlier this year. "This was surprising to me, because I personally was so shaken that I felt practically paralyzed, and I know many other people did, too," Johnston said. "The fact that many others responded by immediately engaging is incredibly heartening." Jay O'Hara, a Vermont-based climate-change activist with the Climate Disobedience Center and a mastermind behind a coal shipment blockade in 2013 that spurred more radical fossil fuel activism, said Trump's win represents an opportunity for environmentalists to focus on a clear enemy. "In some ways, it can almost be seen as a relief, he said of Trump's win. "We are going to have a real fight here, or maybe an actual argument." Johnston, of 350 Seattle, who camped for a week at North Dakota's Standing Rock Sioux reservation to protest pipeline construction, said that protesters would continue to take advantage of the vulnerability of energy infrastructure. "All these pipelines, all these tankers, all these trains have to go through thousands of miles" and could be potential protest targets, she said. DEFENDING GAINS Some of the well established national environmental organizations that helped draft the Obama administration's environmental initiatives, like the Clean Power Plan to curb carbon dioxide emissions, will be shifting to a defensive posture under Trump's leadership. "We'll be in the Congress, in the courts, in the boardrooms and in the streets," said Gene Karpinski, president of the Washington-based League of Conservation Voters, which backed Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and spent over $45 million to support candidates in the 2016 elections. Karpinski said he expected legal action to prevent Trump from following through on his agenda. Trump has appointed Myron Ebell, a known climate skeptic, to guide the reshaping of the EPA, and Trump energy adviser Kevin Cramer, a U.S. representative from North Dakota, said Trump is likely to target the Clean Power Plan and Waters of the United States rules during his first 100 days in office. Dan Farber, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said the best that advocates for climate change action could hope for from courts is to play successful defense against an anti-environmental onslaught from the new administration. Its a fairly grim situation, he added. Several groups also said they would put a greater focus on state-level environmental initiatives to sidestep Trump's administration. The Sierra Club, which is headquartered in California, said it would push ahead with its Beyond Coal campaign, which has led to the retirement of hundreds of coal plants since it was launched more than a decade ago. The campaign mobilizes local activists and lawyers to push utilities and state regulators to shutter older plants and replace them with renewable energy. "Clearly, we are going to have to fight and resist the worst impulses of the next administration," said Michael Brune, Sierra Club's executive director. "But we are also mindful that despite all odds, we were able to make great progress during the Bush administration and we hope to do it again." (Reporting by Laila Kearned in New York; Additional reporting by Nia Williams, Nicole Mordant, Valerie Volcovici, and Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Simon Webb and Cynthia Osterman)
Theres a chance that the American public will be spared the embarrassment of watching their president-elect go on trial for fraud less than three weeks after selecting him. The Associated Press and other news outlets are reporting that the parties in the class action lawsuit against Trump University lawsuit, currently in pre-trial hearings in San Diego, may be entering settlement talks.

The suit against the for-profit training program founded by now-president-elect Donald Trump alleges that students were promised rigorous training in business skills and real estate market analysis that would equip them to get rich. What they claim they actually received were sketchily designed courses that came in tandem with high-pressure sales pitches insisting that the only way they could really expect to succeed was by purchasing further Trump University training, even if that required them to go into debt.

Related: Anti-Trump Conservatives Arent Giving Up Yet

The case received extra attention during the campaign because of Trumps decision to publicly attack the federal judge hearing it, Gonzalo Curiel. The president-elect declared that because the Indiana-born Curiels parents were Mexican, he was incapable of being impartial in the case. At the time, House Speaker Paul Ryan declared Trumps words the textbook definition of a racist comment.

On the Trump side, lead attorney Daniel Petrocelli said in court that he was all ears when it came to discussing a potential settlement. At the same hearing, he requested a delay of several months in the trial that is now scheduled to start Nov. 28. Trumps having been elected president, he said, meant that the trial would be a distraction during important transition planning.

Petrocelli did not address the likelihood that once he is inaugurated, Trump isnt likely to have a lot of spare time on his hands, either. Judge Curiel did not signal his intentions one way or another with regard to the request, however he has indicated in the past that he is not interested in further delaying a trial that had been working its way through the courts for years.

Story continues

Curiel did tell both parties that he had arranged for another federal judge, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Miller, also in San Diego, to be available to mediate settlement talks.

Related: Strict Budget Controls Could Scuttle Trumps Big Spending Plans

Both sides agreed to participate, although plaintiffs attorney Patrick Coughlin noted to reporters after the trial that in previous settlement discussions, the two sides have been miles apart.

Regardless of how the attorneys fare in their negotiations, though, the biggest impediment to a settlement may be Trump himself. He has bragged in public and in his books that he never settles court cases, although that is not actually the case.

I dont know if he has any willingness to settle this case, Petrocelli said in court. It is my judgment that it is an option that at least needs to be considered. Im sure he will give it consideration, given all the other responsibilities and obligations that he has.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
By Valerie Volcovici and Sue-Lin Wong WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) - The election of climate change skeptic Donald Trump as president is likely to end the U.S. leadership role in the international fight against global warming and may lead to the emergence of a new and unlikely champion: China. China worked closely with the administration of outgoing President Barack Obama to build momentum ahead of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. The partnership of the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters helped get nearly 200 countries to support the pact at the historic meet in France's capital. By contrast, Trump has called global warming a hoax created by China to give it an economic advantage and said he plans to remove the United States from the historic climate agreement, as well as reverse many of Obama's measures to combat climate change. He has appointed noted climate change skeptic Myron Ebell to help lead transition planning for the Environmental Protection Agency, which has crafted the administrations major environmental regulations such as the Clean Power Plan and efficiency standards for cars and trucks. Beijing is poised to cash in on the goodwill it could earn by taking on leadership in dealing with what for many other governments is one of the most urgent issues on their agenda. "Proactively taking action against climate change will improve China's international image and allow it to occupy the moral high ground," Zou Ji, deputy director of the National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and a senior Chinese climate talks negotiator, told Reuters. Zou said that if Trump abandons efforts to implement the Paris agreement, "China's influence and voice are likely to increase in global climate governance, which will then spill over into other areas of global governance and increase China's global standing, power and leadership." Chen Zhihua, a representative of the Chinese delegation and official in the climate change division of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country's economic planning agency, said Chinese and other countries' efforts will not change if the United States withdraws from the agreement. Action by the international community will not stop because of the new government of the United States. We still have confidence the international community will join hands and continue our efforts on climate change, he told reporters at the 200-nation U.N. meeting being held in Marrakesh to start fleshing out the implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement seeks to phase out net greenhouse gas emissions by the second half of the century and limit global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Each country has put forward national plans to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Some have raised concerns that without involvement and financial support from the United States, emerging economies like India may feel inclined to back out. One of the key advisors to Obama's team on climate change said he hoped China would take on the mantle and keep the global climate deal alive. Beijing should "continue to work in the spirit that we worked together in and before Paris," said Andrew Light, former senior adviser to previous U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern. CHANGING ROLE It is an ironic twist for the government of the world's second-largest economy. For years, Beijing fought attempts by foreign governments to limit carbon emissions, claiming it should be allowed the same space to develop and pollute that industrialized nations had. But with its capital often choked by smog and its people angry about the environmental devastation that rapid development has wrought across the country, Beijing has become a proponent of efforts to halt global warming rather than a hindrance. "China is acting on climate for the benefit of its own people," said Erik Solheim, executive director of the UN Environment Programme. "I am confident China will take a lead role." China has powerful domestic and global imperatives to play a high-profile role in continued global climate change talks, meant to avert more heat waves, droughts, floods and rising sea levels that could cause trillions of dollars of damage by 2100. China sees a perceived role as global climate leader as way to bolster its aspiration to become a "clean energy superpower" by leading in renewable energy technology such as wind and solar power and asserting itself as a key geopolitical power. Dealing with the pressures of continued urbanization in some of the world's largest cities has already put China ahead, said Andrew Steer, the president of environmental think tank the World Resources Institute. Beijing is innovating to build low-carbon cities, he said. "It sees carbon as an indicator of economic inefficiency," Steer said. Trump's victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton darkened the mood of delegates attending the current round of climate talks in Marrakesh. Some delegates at the talks say that China is already setting an example. "China is surprising us daily. Whatever they've promised they're delivering," said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, of Democratic Republic of Congo, who heads the 48-nation group of least developed countries at the talks. (Additional reporting by Alister Doyle in Marrakesh, Laurie Goering of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Timothy Gardner in Washington; Editing by Simon Webb, Stuart Grudgings and Meredith Mazzilli)
By PTI: Itanagar, Nov 11 (PTI) In a bid to help numerous patients from Arunachal Pradesh facing accomodation problems in metros where they go for availing medical assistance, Chief Minister Pema Khandu has directed state Chief Secretary to explore rented buildings in the vicinity of hospitals which are frequented by patients from the state.

In his directives, the chief minister asked the CS that till such time a permanent solution is made to solve the accommodation hardship of the people from the state in metros, rented accommodation in New Delhi, Kolkota, Chennai, Vellore and Guwahati through the respective Resident Commissioner / Deputy Resident Commissioners be looked for on an urgent basis, an official release said today.

advertisement

Due to lack of adequate health facility in the state, patients go out of the state in large numbers to referral hospitals for treatment of various ailments.

With this, the patients are sure to get relief from the difficulty of finding an accommodation. It will also cut down on the cost of the huge expenses incurred only for accommodation in hotels or guest houses apart from the medical expenses, the release said. PTI UPL MM

--- ENDS ---
Washington (AFP) - One of President-elect Donald Trump's most divisive promises -- to ban Muslims from entering America -- disappeared from his campaign website before reappearing.

Trump's campaign staff told US media that text of the pledge, posted in December following terror attacks in San Bernardino, California, vanished because of a technical glitch.

It reappeared after journalists questioned the disappearance.

"The website was temporarily redirecting all specific press release pages to the homepage. It is currently being addressed and will be fixed shortly," the campaign said in a statement.

Trump said in December that Muslim immigrants pose the United States a security threat and called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."

It was one of a number of his statements -- including a pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border and criticism of women who accused him of sexual harassment -- that prompted the greatest backlash against his campaign, with accusations of xenophobia.

Later, he shifted to say immigration should be suspended from any country "that has been compromised by terrorism."

His stance apparently helped win him the presidency with the support of a majority of white, working-class voters.
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkey on Friday detained the board chairman of opposition daily Cumhuriyet, the target of an intensifying crackdown since July's failed coup which has further fuelled tensions between Ankara and Europe.

Akin Atalay was taken into custody at Istanbul's main international airport after arriving from Germany, said Cumhuriyet, which also saw nine of its staff arrested last week amid swelling concern over media freedom in Turkey.

The paper has in recent years taken a strong line against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Atalay was targeted by a warrant that was part of a probe into "terrorist activities", and ushered into a police vehicle waiting for him on the tarmac.

Some 35,000 people have been arrested and tens of thousands more have lost their jobs -- including military officers, judges, teachers, civil servants and journalists -- in a sweeping crackdown in the wake of the failed July bid to oust Erdogan.

Since the coup attempt, more than 100 journalists have been arrested while 170 media outlets including newspapers and broadcasters have been closed down, the Turkey Journalists' Association has said on its website.

Turkey was ranked 151st of 180 countries in the 2016 World Press Freedom index published by the campaign group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Speaking to AFP, RSF editor-in-chief Virginie Dangles described what she called "an unprecedented wave of arrests... under the guise of absurd accusations."

She appealed to the world community to "make the Turkish government understand that this repressive response cannot go without consequences."

Last week, nine MPs from the opposition pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP), including its co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, were detained pending a trial on terror charges expected to begin Friday.

The arrests have fuelled tensions between Ankara and the European Union, which has made no secret of its concerns over the scale of the Turkish crackdown since the foiled coup.

Story continues

Protesting against the criticism, hundreds demonstrated outside the French embassy in Ankara and the German consulate in Istanbul on Friday, chanting anti-Europe slogans.

"We stand with our government," "Stop supporting terrorists," "Terrorism will burn you one day" were among the chants outside the French diplomatic mission, an AFP photographer said.

- 'Backsliding' on fundamental rights -

Cumhuriyet's exiled former editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, fled to Germany earlier this year while appealing against a prison term for revealing state secrets.

Dundar was given nearly six years behind bars for a story about a shipment of arms intercepted at the Syrian border, which had prompted a furious Erdogan to warn him he would "pay a heavy price".

Among the nine to be held ahead of trial were Cumhuriyet's editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu, celebrated cartoonist Musa Kart and influential anti-Erdogan columnist Kadri Gursel.

However, two columnists were released on bail on health grounds and because of their age, while two other suspects from the newspaper's accounting department were released without charge.

The suspects are charged with links to the Kurdish militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the movement of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, blamed for the failed coup bid. Gulen denies the accusations.

In its latest report on Turkey's long-stalled EU bid, the bloc said on Wednesday that it had serious concerns over "backsliding in the area of rule of law and fundamental rights."

Turkey blasted the report saying it was "far from objective".

Meanwhile Friday authorities in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast said a bomb blast had killed a local government official and wounded at least two other people.

The explosion, which state-run Anadolu news agency blamed on the PKK, tore through the area near a government building in the town of Derik on Thursday.

Also Friday a French journalist was detained while on a reporting trip to the southeastern Gaziantep province, his employer said.

Olivier Bertrand was "detained without reason,"! Isabelle Roberts of online media Les Jours told AFP, adding: "We demand his immediate release .. We are very worried, we are waiting for news."
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish police detained the chairman of opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet at Istanbul's main airport on Friday, less than a week after nine of its executives and journalists were formally arrested, the paper said. Authorities had ordered the paper's editor and senior staff be held in jail pending trial over the secularist newspaper's alleged support for a coup attempt on July 15. Chairman Akin Atalay was detained at the city's Ataturk Airport on his return from Germany after an arrest warrant was issued for him, Cumhuriyet said. Since the failed putsch, more than 110,000 judges, teachers, police and civil servants have been suspended or dismissed and 36,000 formally arrested in a crackdown that President Tayyip Erdogan's critics say is quashing legitimate opposition. Under the state of emergency declared after the coup attempt, police can detain suspects for up to 30 days before a court must decide whether to issue a formal arrest warrant pending trial. Turkey has also closed more than 130 media outlets since July, raising concerns among its Western allies about deteriorating press freedoms. Cumhuriyet's previous editor, Can Dundar, was jailed last year for publishing state secrets involving Turkey's support for Syrian rebels. He was later released and is now overseas to avoid arrest. State-run media said on Thursday prosecutors were seeking life sentences for nine staff of pro-Kurdish newspaper Ozgur Gundem, including prize-winning novelist Asli Erdogan, on a charge of membership of a terrorist organisation. (Writing by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Daren Butler and John Stonestreet)
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's ruling AK Party hopes to make constitutional changes that could give President Tayyip Erdogan more power with the support of the nationalist opposition party, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Friday. Yildirim met with the chairman of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Devlet Bahceli, on Thursday to discuss changing the constitution, after which Bahceli made comments on Twitter indicating his party may support constitutional changes that could give Erdogan the stronger presidency he has long sought. "MHP leader Mr Bahceli has once again put the future of the nation first with foresight and patriotism, putting aside political goals, and we will carry out the constitutional change with the MHP," Yildirim said in a speech at a ceremony in the Black Sea town of Rize, broadcast live on television. (Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by David Dolan)
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - A district governor has died after a bomb attack on his office in the largely Kurdish southeast of Turkey and police have detained 30 people in the investigation, security sources said on Friday. The YPS, a youth wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack in Mardin, according to the ANF news agency, which is close to the militant group. Derik district governor Muhammed Fatih Safiturk was one of three people hurt in the attack, suffering second-degree burns. He died in hospital in the city of Gaziantep on Friday, having been flown there by helicopter, the Dogan news agency said. Around 30 people, including staff from the governor's office, have been detained in connection with the attack, security sources said. Police were looking into the possibility that explosives were hidden in a bag placed in the governor's office and detonated remotely, or were sent in a package to the office and exploded on being opened, Dogan said. Safiturk had been given the additional responsibility in July of running the local municipality as part of moves to replace elected officials from a sister party of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). A report by the HDP on Wednesday said that more than 3 million people were under the leadership of such government-appointed trustees in around 30 municipalities. Ankara accuses the HDP, parliament's third-biggest party, of ties to the PKK, which is fighting for autonomy in the southeast. The HDP denies any direct links and says it is working for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The PKK often carries out bomb and rocket attacks in the southeast, where violence has raged since a two-year-old PKK ceasefire collapsed in July last year. Fourteen PKK militants were found dead after an air-backed Turkish military operation against them in the eastern province of Tunceli, state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Friday. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict since the PKK took up arms in 1984. It is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. The leaders of the HDP were jailed this month pending trial over alleged ties to the PKK, drawing strong international condemnation of the widening crackdown on dissent under President Tayyip Erdogan. More than 36,000 people have been jailed pending trial and around 110,000 suspended or dismissed from their jobs since an attempted coup on July 15 which Ankara blames on U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen and his supporters. Pro-Kurdish politicians have been targeted in the crackdown, with 6,000 HDP members detained since the putsch, HDP spokesman Ayhan Bilgen told a news conference on Thursday. Some 2,000 of them have been remanded in custody, he said. Six advisers of leading HDP officials were among the latest detainees on Friday, security sources said. (Additional reporting by Gulsen Solaker; Writing by Daren Butler and Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Nick Tattersall and David Dolan)
Two million people have signed a petition asking for the electoral college to vote for Hillary, and heres what that means

Hillary Clintons historic run for president has been a major topic of conversation the past few days  especially after it was determined that she technically won the popular vote (aka, the actual majority of votes).

And Cosmo let us know that over two million people have signed a petition asking the electoral college to vote for Hillary instead of President Elect Donald Trump on December 19th.

Some of you out there may be asking what exactly this means. Donald Trump won, and thats final, right? Not exactly. Ultimately, the president is voted in by the members of the electoral college (i.e. specifically selected people in each state who have pledged to vote for the candidate who won the majority of votes in their state).

This means that technically, a candidate who won the majority of votes nationwide (like Clinton did) could still lose the election, because some states are way more populated than others. And yes, theres also a petition to get rid of the electoral college altogether floating around out there, just in case you were wondering.

The particular pro-Hillary petition gives people an opportunity to state a reason why they favor Hillary over Trump, and many are arguing that Trump is unfit to serve due to his lack of political experience, and that Hillary has been preparing for this job her whole life.

While its unlikely that members of the electoral college (aka electors) will vote against who theyve pledged to vote for, in theory the results of the election could change if enough of them chose that route. Whatever happens, its great to see people banding together in this tense political time, and standing up for what they believe in.

A great example of that is Hillary herself, who voiced her commitment to this country during her concession speech.

If youd like to read the petition or sign it, you can do so here. And regardless of your political affiliation, this is a powerful reminder to ALWAYS voice your opinion, no matter if its controversial, expected, or unexpected!

The post Two million people have signed a petition asking for the electoral college to vote for Hillary, and heres what that means appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Negotiations for the nuclear deal between India and Japan have been going on for a number of years.

By India Today Web Desk: One of the highlights of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's trip to Tokyo is the landmark civil nuclear deal he is likely to sign with Japan later today. Negotiations for the nuclear deal between the two sides have been going on for a number of years, but the progress was halted because of political resistance in Japan after the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

advertisement

ALSO READ | Made in India & Made by Japan have already started to converge wonderfully: PM Modi in Tokyo



The two countries had sealed a broad agreement during Shinzo Abe's visit to India last December, but the final deal was put on hold as certain technical and legal issues were to be thrashed out.

Here's why a nuclear deal with Japan matters for India:





A deal that will allow Japan to supply nuclear reactors, fuel and technology is ready for signing after six years of negotiations. India is in advanced negotiations with US-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba, to build six nuclear reactors in southern India. India plans to ramp up nuclear capacity more than ten times by 2032. A deal with Japan is significant because India is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a major condition earlier put by Tokyo. Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has been seeking assurances from New Delhi that it would not conduct nuclear tests any more. India has declared a moratorium on such testing since its last nuclear test in Rajasthan's Pokharan desert in 1998. India calls the NPT discriminatory and says it is concerned about nuclear-armed China and Pakistan in its neighbourhood. The nuclear agreement with Japan follows a similar one with the United States in 2008 which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation. The India-Japan civil nuclear deal also matters because China's regional influence in South Asia continues to grow and Donald Trump's election throws US policies across Asia into doubt. India, Japan and the US have been building security ties and holding three-way naval exercises, but Trump's 'America First' campaign promise has stirred concern about a reduced US engagement in the region.

--- ENDS ---
By Warren Strobel WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A September U.S. air strike in Somalia killed local militia forces and not al Shabaab militants as the Pentagon had initially believed, the U.S. military acknowledged in a draft statement obtained by Reuters on Thursday. The Sept. 28 strike in Somalia's Galkayo area killed 10 fighters and wounded three, the statement said. No civilian casualties were caused by the strike, it said. Somalia's government had asked the United States to explain the strike, which it said had been conducted against forces of the semi-autonomous, northern region of Galmudug. The errant strike illustrated the perils of Washington's efforts to battle al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-aligned group, by working with armed Somali factions that are often feuding. Shabaab has been responsible for numerous attacks, including the September 2013 siege of Kenya's Westgate shopping mall that left at least 67 dead. The day after the Sept. 28 U.S. strike in Somalia, officials in Galmudug accused a rival region, Puntland, of duping the United States into believing members of its security forces were in fact Islamist rebels. An al Shabaab spokesman told Reuters at the time it did not have any fighters in the area of the strike. The draft statement by the U.S. military's Africa Command said the air strike was carried out at the request of Puntland Security Forces "and our own assessment of the situation." A PSF-led patrol had come under attack by a group of armed fighters and in response, "the U.S. conducted a self-defense strike to neutralize the threat, killing 10 armed fighters and wounding three others," the statement said. A review of the strike, which began Oct. 4, determined that "The armed fighters were initially believed to be al-Shabaab but with further review it was determined they were local militia forces," it said. "Operating under legal authorities, U.S. forces lawfully utilized self-defense to support the PSF in response to hostile actions conducted by the armed group against a partnered force," the review concluded. "No U.S. forces were killed or injured as a result of this incident." (Editing by Jonathan Oatis and David Gregorio)
By Deena Beasley and Toni Clarke LOS ANGELES/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans' growing alarm over rising prescription drug costs will pressure a new U.S. administration and Congress to take action on pharmaceutical pricing, industry executives and healthcare experts say. Drugmaker stocks, battered in recent months, soared this week after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's victory. Democratic rival Hillary Clinton had vowed to take on pharmaceutical "price gouging," and some pundits predicted the Democrats would gain control of the Senate, giving her a stronger hand. The Republican sweep of Congress eliminated those fears, while boosting chances for other measures, such as corporate tax reforms that would benefit industry. However, the vote did not change a key dynamic: U.S. consumers are paying more of the cost of drugs through higher health insurance deductibles and copayments, making them more sensitive to manufacturer price hikes. Most recently, a sixfold increase in the price of Mylan NV's EpiPen stoked outrage for families who rely on the lifesaving allergy shot and prompted investigations by state attorneys general and Congress. If a manufacturer sharply raises the price of a drug, "it will be in the headlines. I don't think it matters which party is in office," said Sandra Hunt, principal at PricewaterhouseCooper's health industry practice. Republican lawmakers have taken up drug pricing alongside Democrats. Republicans Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Representative Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led inquiries into Mylan's EpiPen pricing. "A very strong majority of Republican voters want the Congress to address drug prices," said John Rother, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Health Care, which campaigns for lower prices. An October Kaiser Family Foundation survey showed that 74 percent of respondents said making drugs for chronic conditions affordable should be a top health care priority for the federal government. Among Republican respondents, 68 percent put drug prices as a top priority. A poll conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 64 percent of voters - including 78 percent of likely Clinton voters and 48 percent of Trump supporters - believe the federal government should be able to limit pharmaceutical drug price hikes. BIGGER PRIORITY THAN OBAMACARE Trump and Republican leaders have vowed to repeal President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law, known as Obamacare, which has extended medical insurance to more than 20 million Americans. Despite complaints about Obamacare insurance premium increases, just 37 percent of Kaiser poll respondents said that overturning it was a high priority. Chaffetz is "evaluating his next steps" on the drug pricing issue when the next Congress convenes, an aide said. A representative for Grassley said he would press forward with a scheduled Nov. 30 hearing into Mylan's EpiPen pricing. "The U.S. has always been a country that supports innovation ... and we hope it will remain the same," said Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca Plc, which sells drugs like cholesterol-fighter Crestor. "But we also believe we will continue to have to deal with price ressures." Clinton's proposals to curb drug prices included capping consumers' monthly out-of-pocket costs. In the past, Trump has suggested allowing the government's Medicare health program for seniors to negotiate prices and making it easier to import drugs from countries where they sell for less. A Trump administration also could provide extra funding to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to speed approval of generic drugs, which still tend to cost far less than their brand name equivalents, health policy experts said. Capital Alpha Partners analyst Kim Monk, in a research note on Wednesday, said she expects advisors and Congress to steer Trump toward "more Republican-oriented ideas," including pricing drugs based on their relative health benefit and requiring more disclosure of pricing details. Consumer advocate Rother cited the FAIR Drug Pricing Act, introduced in September by Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin Democrat, as a potential vehicle for federal action. The bill would require manufacturers to explain annual price increases of more than 10 percent. "It is a bipartisan bill consistent with traditional Republican health policy based on transparency and competition," Rother said. In California, voters on Tuesday rejected a ballot measure that would have require drugmakers to provide state health plans with discounts similar to those given to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA pays the lowest prices in the country. Drugmakers spent more than $106 million on a campaign to defeat the measure. A similar measure will go before Ohio voters, who backed Trump in the election, next November. The coalition behind California's proposition on Wednesday urged legislators to come up with "a more comprehensive solution to lower sky-rocketing drug prices." (Reporting by Deena Beasley in Los Angeles and Toni Clarke in Washington; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Lisa Girion)
By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission wants a federal judge to allow the agency to take additional testimony from Volkswagen AG's (VOWG_p.DE) U.S. unit over allegations the German automaker intentionally destroyed documents last year over its diesel emissions scandal.

The FTC said in court documents filed late Thursday that it has been investigating since March whether Volkswagen Group of America destroyed documents related to its "Dieselgate" scandal.

VW admitted in September 2015 to installing secret software in its diesel cars to cheat exhaust emissions tests and make them appear cleaner in testing than they really were. In reality, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times the legally allowable pollution levels.

The FTC said a Volkswagen witness at an August deposition could not answer 250 separate questions and now wants court approval to question another VW official.

Volkswagen spokeswoman Jeannine Ginivan said Friday the automaker "continues to cooperate with the U.S. Department of Justice and work with other government agencies to make things right for our customers and achieve a fair resolution."

VW has previously faced allegations it destroyed documents - both in a whistleblower lawsuit and state lawsuits.

In March, a fired Volkswagen Group of America employee filed a whistleblower lawsuit, accusing VW of deleting documents and obstructing justice in the diesel emissions investigations.

Daniel Donovan, who worked as an information technology employee in VW's general counsel office, claimed in his lawsuit that he was fired in December 2015 "because of his refusal to participate in a course of action" that would destroy evidence and obstruct justice.

The lawsuit was settled in June, and Donovan agreed to cooperate with VW's internal investigation. A lawyer for Donovan did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Three U.S. states filed suit in July against Volkswagen, asserting at least eight employees in VW's engineering department deleted or removed incriminating data in August 2015 after a senior attorney advised them of an impending order not to destroy documents. The lawsuits said "some but not all of the data has been recovered."

Story continues

In total, Volkswagen has agreed to date to spend up to $16.5 billion in connection with the scandal, including payments to dealers, states, clean energy programs and attorneys for owners.

A court filing this week said lawyers for VW dealers are seeking legal fees of up to $36.2 million. Lawyers for 2.0-liter owners confirmed in a court filing that VW has agreed to pay $175 million in legal fees.

VW has agreed to spend up to $10.03 billion to buy back as many as 475,000 polluting 2.0-liter vehicles. As of last week, 78 percent of owners who have registered for the settlement are choosing the buyback option, VW said. Buybacks will begin later this month.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
(Adds attempt to reach whistleblower lawyer)

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON, Nov 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission wants a federal judge to allow the agency to take additional testimony from Volkswagen AG's U.S. unit over allegations the German automaker intentionally destroyed documents last year over its diesel emissions scandal.

The FTC said in court documents filed late Thursday that it has been investigating since March whether Volkswagen Group of America destroyed documents related to its "Dieselgate" scandal.

VW admitted in September 2015 to installing secret software in its diesel cars to cheat exhaust emissions tests and make them appear cleaner in testing than they really were. In reality, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times the legally allowable pollution levels.

The FTC said a Volkswagen witness at an August deposition could not answer 250 separate questions and now wants court approval to question another VW official.

Volkswagen spokeswoman Jeannine Ginivan said Friday the automaker "continues to cooperate with the U.S. Department of Justice and work with other government agencies to make things right for our customers and achieve a fair resolution."

VW has previously faced allegations it destroyed documents - both in a whistleblower lawsuit and state lawsuits.

In March, a fired Volkswagen Group of America employee filed a whistleblower lawsuit, accusing VW of deleting documents and obstructing justice in the diesel emissions investigations.

Daniel Donovan, who worked as an information technology employee in VW's general counsel office, claimed in his lawsuit that he was fired in December 2015 "because of his refusal to participate in a course of action" that would destroy evidence and obstruct justice.

The lawsuit was settled in June, and Donovan agreed to cooperate with VW's internal investigation. A lawyer for Donovan did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Three U.S. states filed suit in July against Volkswagen, asserting at least eight employees in VW's engineering department deleted or removed incriminating data in August 2015 after a senior attorney advised them of an impending order not to destroy documents. The lawsuits said "some but not all of the data has been recovered."

Story continues

In total, Volkswagen has agreed to date to spend up to $16.5 billion in connection with the scandal, including payments to dealers, states, clean energy programs and attorneys for owners.

A court filing this week said lawyers for VW dealers are seeking legal fees of up to $36.2 million. Lawyers for 2.0-liter owners confirmed in a court filing that VW has agreed to pay $175 million in legal fees.

VW has agreed to spend up to $10.03 billion to buy back as many as 475,000 polluting 2.0-liter vehicles. As of last week, 78 percent of owners who have registered for the settlement are choosing the buyback option, VW said. Buybacks will begin later this month.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Saddam Hussein was allied with al-Qaeda, and helped finance the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Hussein regime had sought uranium from Niger. Iraq had obtained aluminum tubes to be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

All of those assertions turned out to be false. But they echoed throughout the press in the months-long run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and only after the war turned to disaster did the media engage in soul-searching and self-criticism. And even then, many sought to deflect blame. Judith Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter whose front-page story about the aluminum tubes bolstered the case for war in Iraq explained: My job isnt to assess the governments information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, reporters marveled at the ability of Donald Trump and his surrogates to create an alternate reality in which statements made by the candidate had not been made at allfrom his view that global warming is a hoax, to his nonexistent opposition to the Iraq War, to his refusal to say he would concede in the event of a loss, to his remarks about his relationship to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. These are people who could argue that the sky is green without a blink. They were able to win a presidential election while doing so. Now they will have the entire apparatus of the federal government to bolster their lies, and the mainstream press is woefully unprepared to cover them.

Recommended: The Lessons of Henry Kissinger

The first reason is that political journalism is highly dependent on official sources, which are chased with abandon. Millers defense of stenography seems absurd in hindsight, but there is a grain of truth in it. Government sources are granted a high degree of credibility, and official lies can be difficult to dispute. Contrary leaks from highly placed sources can offer an important check on the official story, but the breadth of the surveillance state built by Bush and Obama, a surveillance state now in Trumps hands, will make such leaks difficult.

Story continues

For Trump administration mouthpieces, both public and anonymous, lies will now come with an officiality that will be difficult to contest. The total Republican control of government means that Democrats will struggle to get their objections to carry much weight, much as they did prior to the Iraq War.

Another obstacle is that media objectivity is not a fixed point. It is carefully calibrated to the perception of public opinion, because media organizations do not want to alienate their intended audience. MSNBCs Chris Matthews offers a telling example of how media figures shift to identify with their perceived audience, which can ultimately mean cozying up to power. During George W. Bushs absurd war pageantry in May 2003, Matthews remarked that Bush looked like a high-flying jet star, and that Bush won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. The Iraq War is arguably still ongoing.

Recommended: The Narcissist

The Matthews episode illustrates that in addition to reporting itself being manipulated, members of the media themselves engaged in careful brand-management exercises in order to portray themselves as in touch with Real America, granting themselves permission to dismiss criticisms of the Bush administration as the ravings of pampered liberal elites. Only days after the 2016 presidential election, this process is already taking place, with prominent media figures seeking to defend the victorious Trump coalition against the slights of those religious and ethnic minorities who fear for their fate under a president who campaigned using them as scapegoats for the nations problems.

Adversarial coverage of the Bush administration notably increased once his approval ratings dipped so low that media figures felt as though they were reflecting public opinion when they criticized him. The Bush administrations ability to shape the narrative in the aftermath of public crises like Hurricane Katrina was noticeably diminished, because unlike with Iraq, reporters could contrast official statements with what they saw with their own lives. Trumps ability to forge an alternate universe of belief for himself and his supporters suggests that reality may prove far less of an obstacle for him than it was for Bush.

Nevertheless, the ability of the Bush administration to use its power to compel the press to adopt its alternate reality led to the greatest foreign-policy blunder since Vietnam, and the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the rise of ISIS. The consequences are, arguably, immeasurable, and the stats I have mentioned simply cannot do them justice.

The media is not ready to cover this president. And the American people, and possibly the rest of the world, will pay for it.

With Trump, the United States has elected a president who has shown a complete disregard for free speech, arguing that his detractors do not have a right to criticize him. He believes the First Amendments protections for the press are too strong. He has a thirst for vengeance against those whom he perceives as having wronged him, and now he has the power of the federal government to pursue his vendettas. The Bush administrations ability to manipulate the press, and the medias willing acquiescence in the name of relating to its audience, led to catastrophe.

I want to emphasize that all administrations lie. The Lyndon Johnson administration successfully snowed the press on Vietnam. The Obama administration continually underestimated the strength of ISIS. With Trump, however, we are entering an era in which a president, prior to taking office, has already shown an ability to be entirely unbound by facts, with no political consequences.

Recommended: What Does Donald Trump's Election Say About America?

The temptation to accept the Trump administrations unrealityparticularly given increased distrust of the media and his ability to insulate his base from the truthwill be tremendous. His ability to use the powers of the federal government to bolster his dishonesty will magnify his powers of deception a thousandfold. And the inability of the Democratic opposition to affect the outcome given their marginal presence in the U.S. government will ensure that any dissent is muffled.

The media is not ready to cover this president. And unless something changes, the American people, and possibly the rest of the world, will pay for it.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
By Philip Blenkinsop

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Donald Trump's election to the White House has consigned EU/U.S. trade talks to the deep freeze and they are unlikely to resume for some time, the European Union said on Friday.

A pause in negotiations towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was always expected with the end of Barack Obama's presidency, but Trump's win brings in a leader hostile to international trade pacts.

Trump has said he will withdraw from the unfinalised 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"For quite some time TTIP will probably be in the freezer and then what happens when it is defrosted, we will have to wait and see," EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told a news conference after a meeting of EU ministers responsible for trade.

"I think we should be realistic. I don't see the resumption of any TTIP negotiation for quite a long time."

EU officials have said it is not clear what Trump's stance is on TTIP, but that NAFTA and TPP would likely take priority.

The EU has faced a wave of criticism from protest groups over TTIP, who say it and other such pacts are done only for big business.

One high-level critic, French trade minister Matthias Fekl, said Britain's vote to leave the EU and Trump's election victory were signs of crisis in countries traditionally attached to free trade.

"We need to rethink the way the global economy functions or does not function... Nothing would be worse now than to think we can simply go on with business as usual," he said.

'GETTING TOUGH' WITH CHINA

Mirroring talk from Trump of 'getting tough' with China, EU ministers also sought on Friday to bolster the bloc's trade defences to floods of cheap imports.

They are weighing measures designed to shorten investigations into alleged dumping and to permit higher duties than normal in cases of foreign state interference

Proposals were made in 2013, but the 28 EU members have failed to agree, with a group of countries including Britain opposed. That blocking minority appears to be getting smaller.

Story continues

"I think ...we have moved a step closer to a possible agreement by the end of the year," said Peter Ziga, economy minister of Slovakia, which holds the six-month rotating EU presidency.

The EU has had a tough time with trade policy in recent years, also struggling to pass a deal with Canada.

On Friday, it scored a minor success, adding Ecuador to an existing pact with Colombia and Peru.

(Additional reporting by Stever Scherer in Rome; editing by John Stonestreet)
By Philip Blenkinsop

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Donald Trump's election to the White House has consigned EU/U.S. trade talks to the deep freeze and they are unlikely to resume for some time, the European Union said on Friday.

A pause in negotiations towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was always expected with the end of Barack Obama's presidency, but Trump's win brings in a leader hostile to international trade pacts.

Trump has said he will withdraw from the unfinalized 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"For quite some time TTIP will probably be in the freezer and then what happens when it is defrosted, we will have to wait and see," EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told a news conference after a meeting of EU ministers responsible for trade.

"I think we should be realistic. I don't see the resumption of any TTIP negotiation for quite a long time."

EU officials have said it is not clear what Trump's stance is on TTIP, but that NAFTA and TPP would likely take priority.

The EU has faced a wave of criticism from protest groups over TTIP, who say it and other such pacts are done only for big business.

One high-level critic, French trade minister Matthias Fekl, said Britain's vote to leave the EU and Trump's election victory were signs of crisis in countries traditionally attached to free trade.

"We need to rethink the way the global economy functions or does not function... Nothing would be worse now than to think we can simply go on with business as usual," he said.

'GETTING TOUGH' WITH CHINA

Mirroring talk from Trump of 'getting tough' with China, EU ministers also sought on Friday to bolster the bloc's trade defences to floods of cheap imports.

They are weighing measures designed to shorten investigations into alleged dumping and to permit higher duties than normal in cases of foreign state interference

Story continues

Proposals were made in 2013, but the 28 EU members have failed to agree, with a group of countries including Britain opposed. That blocking minority appears to be getting smaller.

"I think ...we have moved a step closer to a possible agreement by the end of the year," said Peter Ziga, economy minister of Slovakia, which holds the six-month rotating EU presidency.

The EU has had a tough time with trade policy in recent years, also struggling to pass a deal with Canada.

On Friday, it scored a minor success, adding Ecuador to an existing pact with Colombia and Peru.

(Additional reporting by Stever Scherer in Rome; editing by John Stonestreet)
During the UFC 205 pre-fight press conference on Thursday, UFC president Dana White said the historic fight card in New York City has stayed mainly intact with only the middleweight bout between Rashad Evans and Tim Kennedy falling off the card.

That changed Friday morning when the scheduled welterweight bout between Donald Cowboy Cerrone and Kelvin Gastelum fell through after Gastelum missed weight or the third time in his UFC tenure.

TRENDING > Conor McGregor, Tyron Woodley Weigh-in Incident Leads to Twitter Blow-up

Gastelum withdrew from the fight without stepping on the scale. Cerrone weighed in at 170.4 pounds and will receive his show money for the bout. The UFC 205 fight card will move forward with 11 fights, featuring five main card bouts.

Cerrone will reportedly be rebooked for the UFC 206 fight card in Toronto on December 10. FoxSports.com broke the news that Cerrone and Matt Brown verbally agreed to fight at UFC 206.

Brown is coming off back-to-back losses to Jake Ellenberger and Demian Maia and will look to rebound when he reportedly faces Cerrone next month.

Follow MMAWeekly.com on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
The minor girl cannot abort the child as it has already crossed 2 months of pregnancy.

By Saurabh Vaktania: Problems for the 14-year-old mentally unstable girl, who is pregnant after she was gang raped in Mumbai, are far from over. According to law, one cannot abort a child, if it has crossed 2 months of pregnancy.

The police has arrested 5, including a minor boy, for gang-raping the minor girl. The case was registered by police on October 21.

advertisement

Police have taken the case on priority basis. DCP Kiran Chavan, said, "We have put the case on priority basis. We have written to juvenile court and regular court also, so that the child can be aborted and the girl stays safe. We are trying our best to save the girl and get the child aborted."

Also read: Mumbai: Street vendors worst hit by demonetisation

CASE DETAILS

On October 21, the minor girl had gone missing, after which the cops had registered a case of kidnapping. On October 27, the girl was found from the same area.

The girl then revealed all the details to her family. Later, the family members took the girl for a medical check-up where it was revealed that she is pregnant.

Also read: Mumbai: Surgical strike on black money, chain snatcher on roll for gold

The 5 accused are of same area and repeatedly raped the girl for several days. The cops have registered a case under section 363, 376, 376(g), 506 of IPC and further investigation is going on.

--- ENDS ---
By Matthias Williams and Natalia Zinets KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian authorities are laying the groundwork for President Petro Poroshenko to visit Washington early next year, hoping to shore up U.S. support against Russia and allay concerns about what a Donald Trump presidency means for Kiev. Ukraine has relied on Western support and economic aid since street protests in 2014 which toppled a Kremlin-backed president and were followed by a war with pro-Russian separatists and Russia's annexation of the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine. Some of Trump's campaign comments, from appearing to recognize Crimea as part of Russia to contemplating an end to U.S. sanctions on Russia, stoked fears in Kiev that Trump will mend ties with Moscow at Ukraine's expense. Kiev is already wary of losing the backing of the European Union over the bloc's own sanctions, imposed on Russia over its seizure of Crimea and support for the separatists fighting government forces in eastern Ukraine. EU diplomats say the bloc is likely to approve a six-month extension of the sanctions at a summit in December but that it may find it harder to renew them again after Trump is inaugurated in January. Ukrainian officials, however, say that whatever he said on the stump, they believe Trump will not change U.S. policy on Russia and Ukraine. "We are confident that the new U.S. administration will continue to work closely with the leadership of Ukraine, providing the assistance that is necessary to counter Russian aggression and carry out internal reforms," Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said in a statement to Reuters, echoing similar remarks by Poroshenko. Trump's victory was cheered in the Russian parliament on Wednesday and raised hopes in Moscow that an easing of the sanctions would give succor to Russia's ailing economy. The same day, Ukrainian dollar-denominated bonds tumbled in a sign of investors' concern about the potential impact of Trump's victory. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Trump's foreign policy approach was "phenomenally close" to President Vladimir Putin's. But Kiev believes bipartisan support for Ukraine in the United States is strong and that the Republican Party, which will control the U.S. Congress, has the backing of a large Ukrainian diaspora which is lobbying for no change in the firm U.S. line on Moscow, a senior Ukrainian official told Reuters. "The policy of the United States will be consistent," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. "It's not only about Trump," he added. "He's not a Tsar, he's not an emperor." SEEKING REASSURANCE Despite these comments, Kiev has been seeking assurances of continued U.S. support. "Mission in NYC done: more than 50 mtgs (meetings), 30 calls in 3 days to support UA (Ukrainian) resolution on human rights in Crimea and Donald Trump Pres-elect," Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin tweeted on Thursday. He was referring to a resolution submitted to the United Nations condemning what Kiev says is discrimination in Crimea and calling on Russia to halt alleged rights violations there. Deputy Parliament Speaker Iryna Gerashchenko, who is part of a working group in talks on ending the war in eastern Ukraine that has killed nearly 10,000 people, said neither Republicans nor Democrats had shown a desire to soften sanctions. "It is also clear for me that a change of administration in the White House will not change the U.S. position," she told Reuters in an interview. While Ukraine's main objective is ensuring sanctions on Russian remain, Kiev is also hoping Washington will agree to supply it with lethal weapons, the senior Ukrainian official said. Two contenders to become Trump's Secretary of State, former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, support such aid. Gingrich met Poroshenko on a visit to Ukraine in September. "We're preparing the visit of the president of Ukraine to the United States," the senior official said. He did not say how far preparations had progressed. NEW "FRONT" Trump's campaign remarks infuriated many Ukrainians and his election triumph was greeted by Ukraine's deputy prime minister as another "front" on which Kiev had to fight. Officials in Kiev fear his victory will embolden Russia. Trump has praised Putin as a strong leader and his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, helped propel pro-Kremlin Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovich to power before he was part of the president-elect's campaign team. Home Minister Arsen Avakov took to Facebook in July to denounce statements by Trump on Russia's annexation of Crimea, calling them a dangerous indulgence of the "dictator" Putin. Oleh Lyashko, the head of the opposition Radical party, initially said a Trump presidency would be "disastrous" for Ukraine, though he later qualified that by saying he hoped Trump's overtures to Putin were just "campaign rhetoric". Nadiya Savchenko, a servicewoman who became a symbol of resistance to Russia after being captured in eastern Ukraine and later freed, wrote an open letter to Trump urging him not to abandon Ukraine, or risk starting a new world war. Trump "gives preference to Russia and in fact does not recognize Ukraine as a sovereign country," Kiev resident Volodymyr Nazarenko said. In comments underlining the depth of concern among the population about Trump's election triumph, Nazarenko said: "He will talk to Putin and Ukraine doesn't mean anything to him. This is the most terrifying thing." (Additional reporting by Margaryta Chornokondratenko, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
LONDON (Reuters) - The leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat Party said on Friday his lawmakers would vote against triggering the formal process of leaving the European Union unless the government promises to hold a second referendum. Tim Farron, whose party has only have eight members in parliament's lower House of Commons, has long called for a second referendum on the terms of any deal with EU leaders. He said his party would now vote against triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty which kicks off the EU divorce process, if its demand was ignored. "We'd vote against Article 50 if our 'red line' is not met ... which is we want to respect the will of the people and that means they must have their say on a referendum on the terms of the deal," he told BBC radio. British Prime Minister Theresa May has said she will invoke Article 50 before the end of next March but last week London's High Court ruled that this would require the approval of parliament, a step which could potentially delay or even derail her plans. May has still promised to deliver a full exit from the EU and the government are appealing the legal decision to the Supreme Court, the UK's highest judicial body which will hear the case next month. In June, Britons voted in a referendum to leave the EU by 52 percent to 48 percent but Farron said a second referendum was critical "so that nobody would have imposed upon them something they didn't vote for." "We believe that what started with democracy last June, which we totally respect, must not now end up with a stitch up, with a deal being imposed on the British people that absolutely nobody voted for," said Farron. Several lawmakers (MPs) from Britain's opposition Labour party have also said they might vote against triggering Article 50, though the party's leadership has indicated it would not seek to block the process. "Because they didn't like the first answer, Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs seek to put the question all over again in hope of a different answer," said junior Brexit minister David Jones. (Reporting by James Davey; editing by Michael Holden)
Juba (AFP) - The UN's special advisor on preventing genocide, Adama Dieng, said he feared escalating ethnic violence in South Sudan, as the EU offered emergency aid for the swelling number of refugees on Friday.

Speaking in Yumbe in neighbouring Uganda, the EU 's humanitarian aid commissioner offered 78 million euros ($85.2 million) to help the refugees, with 30 million earmarked for Uganda.

"I am truly alarmed by what I saw today," said Christos Stylianides. "I think that the crisis is largely underestimated. The needs are huge and they continue to grow."

Uganda, one of the world's poorest countries, currently hosts 530,000 South Sudanese refugees, 330,000 of whom fled fighting in the world's newest country this year alone.

The UN's Dieng meanwhile warned of "extreme polarisation among some tribal groups, which has increased in certain places" since July's fierce fighting in Juba between President Salva Kiir's largely Dinka soldiers, and his arch-foe Riek Machar's mostly Nuer rebels.

"Inflammatory stereotyping and name-calling have been accompanied by targeted killings and rape of members of particular groups, by violent attacks against individuals or communities on the basis of their perceived political affiliation," the UN advisor said at the close of a week-long visit.

Dieng said that "what began as political conflict has transformed into what could become an outright ethnic war".

"There is a strong risk of violence escalating along ethnic lines with potential for genocide," he added.

"With the stalling of the implementation of the peace agreement, the current humanitarian crisis, stagnating economic and proliferation of arms, all the ingredients are there for escalation of violence."

South Sudan, the world's newest country, gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but plunged into civil war in December 2013, leaving tens of thousands dead and displacing more than 2.5 million people.

Story continues

A peace deal between Kiir and Machar in August last year had raised hopes of peace, until clashes erupted once again in July in the capital.

Dieng said that in Yei, in the southwest, he had "heard reports of violence that included targeted killings, assault... mutilation and rape by armed men, some in uniform and others not.

"There are cases of barbarous use of machetes which reminds (us) of Rwanda," he added, referring to the 1994 genocide there.

"Genocide is a process, it doesnt happen overnight. And because it is a process and one that takes time... it can be prevented," he added.

"I urge the people of South Sudan to reconcile."

Stylianides urged donors to step up aid while thanking Uganda for its help to the rapidly increasing numbers of people seeking shelter from conflict.

Touring Bidibidi refugee settlement which, since its establishment in August, has swollen to become the third biggest refugee camp in the world, Stylianides said: I promise to continue assistance as long as it takes. You are not alone.

Bidibidi is home to more than 215,000 refugees who each receive a plot of land to cultivate and materials to build a basic shelter. An average of about 2,400 new refuges arrive each day.
For years, American allies in East and Southeast Asia have been quietly preparing to rely less on the United States for regional stability and security. That shift came despite President Barack Obamas strategic pivot to Asia, which was a centerpiece of his administrations foreign policy and was likely to continue if Democrat Hillary Clinton had won Tuesdays U.S. presidential vote  notwithstanding her election-year renouncement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

President-elect Donald Trumps upset in the election, however, could mean a very different future for U.S. foreign policy in the region, and could hasten the drive toward the self-reliance among Asian allies that is already underway.

Asians have quietly been hedging their bets for many years that Americas distraction with the Middle East and lingering budget woes would eventually lead to a retrenchment of American leadership, said Lindsey Ford, who advised senior Defense Department officials on Asia policies for more than four years under the Obama administration, until 2015.

Unless a new Trump administration moves quickly to assuage these fears, this trend will only increase, Ford, now director of Asian security at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said in a statement just after Tuesdays election.

On the campaign trail, Trump said he would call on Japan and South Korea to pay more of a share in the expenses of security cooperation with the United States, and expressed openness to the idea of nuclear proliferation among U.S. allies. Obama is set to leave office at a time of rising tensions over disputes in the East and South China Seas and North Koreas continued development of nuclear weapons. Foreign Policy asked Ford to outline a sense of what U.S. allies in East and Southeast Asia should expect.

This interview, conducted by email, has been condensed and edited.

FP: What is the most telling example of Asian allies hedging in preparation for a diminished U.S. presence in the region?

Story continues

LF: One of the most telling examples of Asian hedging is the careful balancing act weve seen Association of Southeast Asian Nations nations engaging in for quite some time. This has included diversifying both their economic ties as well as their military investments between the U.S. and China. Witness this past months visits by [Philippine President Rodrigo] Duterte and [Malaysian] Prime Minister Najib [Razak] to China as a great example. Weve also seen this balancing act play out time and again in the South China Sea, where ASEAN nations have wrestled with how to avoid hewing too closely to either the United States or China.

FP: What specifically might Trump do to assuage these fears?

LF: President-elect Trump could begin by publicly reaffirming that Americas extended deterrence commitments  its nuclear umbrella  remains rock solid. His earlier suggestion that countries like Japan and the Republic of Korea should perhaps seek out their own nuclear capabilities seriously spooked Asian partners. While he may not wish to explicitly walk back these statements, he needs to make clear that nuclear proliferation is in no ones best interests and that the United States remains firmly invested in protecting its allies from nuclear attack or provocation.

FP: U.S. partners like Japan and the Philippines are already looking to further boost their own military capabilities  what might an acceleration in those efforts look like?

LF: Under President [Shinzo] Abe, Japan has slowly dipped its toes in the waters of becoming a more normal military power for the first time since World War II. Thus far, Japan has proceeded relatively cautiously in reinterpreting its definition of self-defense and the appropriate role for its military forces. However, this change could be accelerated should Japan feel more convinced it could not rely on the U.S. security umbrella. We could potentially see Japan moving to increase military spending above its traditionally limited levels of one percent of gross domestic product. We could see an Abe government push to more fundamentally revisit or overturn Article 9 of the Constitution, allowing Japan to build a more traditional offensive capability for its forces. Either of these developments would worry neighbors such as the Republic of Korea and China, potentially setting off ripple effects in terms of their own military spending and posture.

FP: Does the imminent breakdown of the Trans-Pacific Partnership have security implications?

LF: From a security perspective, the biggest implication of our failure to secure the TPP would be the loss of American credibility in Asia. If our allies and partners view our failed follow through on issues such as TPP and Syria as evidence that America will not make good on its word, it will greatly diminish their trust in our security commitments and leadership. This could, in turn, make it harder for the U.S. to build coalitions of support on any number of thorny international security problems, such as countering the Islamic State and deterring North Korean provocations.

FP: A line of presidents have failed to make substantial diplomatic headway with North Korea. What might a Trump approach look like  are there any clues?

LF: Dealing with the North Korea situation is perhaps the biggest looming issue in Asian security affairs at the moment, and one that the incoming president will need to move quickly to address. There is very little indication that Donald Trump has already developed these plans, or that he fully appreciates the long graveyard of failed North Korea policies that have preceded him. In brief statements on the issue thus far, he has suggested he would merely tell China this is your problem. This approach will almost certainly fail. One can only hope that in the coming months he will reach out, as he has suggested, to solicit creative thinking on this and other issues.

FP: Does Taiwan face increased risks under Trump?

LF: Its simply too soon to speculate what a Trump presidency could mean for Taiwan. Taiwan has typically enjoyed strong bipartisan support within the U.S. Congress, but like the rest of Asia, they will need to spend some time sounding out the new team and taking the temperature to see where things stand.

Photo credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty

From Seventeen

Please note that this story has been updated.

As fears of Islamophobia ripple through Muslim-American communities in the wake of this week's presidential election, police in Louisiana and California are investigating two campus assaults on female Muslim college students that reportedly occurred just hours apart on Wednesday. Both women were wearing hijabs at the time of the attacks, and in both incidents the attackers either invoked Donald Trump or wore Donald Trump apparel.

A Muslim girl in Louisiana was beaten and robbed by two men, one of whom wore a Trump hat.

The University of LouisianaLafayette student told law-enforcement officials that she was walking near a campus road around 11:00 a.m. when a gray sedan stopped in front of her, and two white men - one wearing a hat that bore Trump's name - stepped out. According to a report in The Advertiser, the men shouted racial obscenities at the student, who is Middle Eastern, and repeatedly struck her with a metal object. The men then robbed the student of her hijab and wallet and drove away.

Kareem Attia, president of the university's Muslim Student Association, said the school historically has been a haven of religious faith and tolerance.

"The idea that a person in your community could be targeted just for wearing a headscarf, which is part of our religion, it's disgusting," he told the Washington Post. "It's very un-American. ... I don't think that a campus that has such ties of religiosity could really stomach the idea of another religion being attacked. It's like, I have a religion, you have another, and that's sacred to both of us."

UPDATE: Thursday, November 10, 2016, 7:45 p.m.:

The Lafayette Police Department is no longer investigating the Louisiana victim's story after she told police that her story was not true.

"This entire story was fabricated; she admitted that to our detectives," Cpl. Karl Ratcliff, a spokesman for the Lafayette Police Department, told the New York Times.

Story continues

A girl in California was stripped of her hijab and robbed by two men who made comments about Trump.

A Muslim student at San Diego State University reported that she was walking to her car in a campus parking garage around 2:30 p.m. when a pair of men accosted her in a stairwell. A community safety alert issued by the university detailed that the men - said to be white and Hispanic - made statements about Trump and Muslims during the assault, yanking off the student's hijab with such force that she was momentarily choked. In addition, the men stole her car keys. The victim's vehicle now is missing.

The SDSU Muslim Student Association issued a plea for love and solidarity on Facebook:

"We are calling on all students, faculty, staff, and community members to come and show solidarity with our sister that was attacked and also stand against anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and all other forms of discrimination that have become increasingly normalized during the campaign and now election of Donald Trump," the group said on Facebook. "It is time we make it clear that the hate and racism of Donald Trump will not find a home in San Diego."

Young Muslim women across the country have been turning to social media to share their own scary experiences.

Guys, a trump supporter tried pulling off my hijab... This is not a joke anymore, all non-whites have become targets. Stay safe  - bye (@Palestixian) November 9, 2016

At @Walmart a woman pulled her Hijab off today and threatened her.



Day 1 of Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/MXKtavyCPF - Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 10, 2016

@realDonaldTrump what do I do when people rip off my hijab and tell me to leave my country I was born and raised in :-( can you help me - A (@Hopeless909) November 10, 2016

Nevertheless, many refuse to be silenced.

I am not going to take off my hijab, I'm just going to tie it tighter.

I'm not going to sacrifice a part of me to adhere to your ignorance. - kat (@whackkat) November 9, 2016

If you feel you might be threatened in any way, make a plan to stay safe - say, by walking with friends - and don't hesitate to seek emergency help if you need it.

Hannah Orenstein is a writer at Seventeen.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

You Might Also Like
Brussels (AFP) - Talks on a vast free-trade deal between the EU and US are likely to be "frozen" for years after the stunning election victory of Donald Trump, the EU said on Friday.

US president-elect Trump campaigned furiously on a promise to scrap international trade deals, throwing the ambitious pact with the European Union into serious doubt.

Brussels and Washington tried to get the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) through by the time Barack Obama left office but fell short.

"TTIP will probably be in the freezer for quite some time and then what will happen when it is defrosted, I think we will need to wait and see," EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem said after trade ministers held talks in Brussels.

"We don't know what he thinks about TTIP," Malmstroem said, referring to Trump, although she acknowledged that the brash billionaire was clearly opposed to big trade deals.

TTIP has been under negotiation since 2013 and was supposed to be one of the most ambitious free trade accords ever attempted.

It would create the world's biggest free trade market of 850 million consumers stretching from Hawaii to Lithuania.

But it had attracted increasing opposition in Europe, where voters have grown increasingly dubious to the benefits of globalisation.

The stalled talks come as a huge setback to Europe's trade strategy with a similar deal with Canada facing an uncertain ratification process and difficult talks expected next year with the UK over Brexit.

"These (TTIP) negotiations... are dead and I think everybody knows it even though lots of people don't want to admit it yet," said French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl after talks in Brussels with his EU counterparts.

"Never mind who is president in the US, what is important is that Europe ... affirms itself as a global player as the most important commercial entity in the world," Fekl added
Washington (AFP) - The United States is continuing to reinforce its military forces in Europe as planned, irrespective of President-elect Donald Trump's future intentions, the Pentagon said Thursday.

Trump, who will take office in January, raised serious concerns in Europe by promising during his campaign that US engagement in NATO under his presidency would be conditional on members' payments to the alliance.

Washington is scheduled to start deploying an additional combat brigade in Europe in February to bring the number of brigades on the continent to three.

The plan is part of an effort to boost Eastern European defenses against possible attack by Russia.

"We are executing plans as they were constructed with our NATO allies," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said.

"We leave it to the next administration to speak their policy choices," he added. "We have one commander-in-chief at a time."

The new brigade is set to begin its deployment with an exercise in Poland before sending companies to Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic States.

Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, has criticized President Barack Obama's policy toward Moscow, saying he wants to improve relations.

Asked about the possibility that the current defense secretary, Ash Carter, would remain in office under Trump, Cook declined to comment on what he called "hypothetical" situations.

Carter "is focused on his job right now and he wants to serve this president until the end of his term," he said.


Alibaba says its online Singles Day shopping extravaganza generated $17.7 billion on November 11, easily shattering last years sales record of $14.3 billion.

Those are enviable sales numbers that have many US retailers scrambling to get on Alibabas e-commerce platform.

Thats something New Yorkbased Stadium Goods managed to do this year. Just a year old, the sneaker reseller, which has a flagship brick-and-mortar store in New York City, has partnered with Alibabas online Tmall platform to sell its rare and collectible kicks to Chinese shoppers craving authentic Western brands.

John McPheters, CEO and co-founder of Stadium Goods, considers China the biggest growth market for the $1.2 billion sneaker resale business. He tells me the companys first Singles Day was massively successful and says the sneaker store did more than a months worth of volume in just one day.

Launched in 2008, Tmall quickly became popular with Chinese shoppers who can buy both international and local brands on the platform. But in a market flooded with counterfeit goods, Chinese shoppers want to be reassured that the merchandise they are buying is the real thing.

Thats where Stadium Goods stands to profit. Currently the only US sneaker consignment store on Tmall, Stadium Goods other founder, Yu-Ming Wu, tells me all of their sneakers must pass an authentication process to ensure that the kicks they are selling are genuine. That process includes scrutinizing the stitching, fabric, logos and color ways to spot fakes.

The e-commerce market in China is already the worlds largest, and its estimated to grow to over $1 trillion by 2018. McPheters knows that could potentially include a whole lot of sneaker heads.
Val Kilmer struggled to speak during his first public appearance since denying reports that he had cancer.

The actor, 56, presented the film version of his one-man play Citizen Twain in Los Angeles on Thursday, where he took the stage to introduce the project and answer audience members questions. Kilmer slurred as he spoke and continuously dabbed his mouth with a tissue.

He told the audience that he had to cancel his upcoming tour for the play because his tongue swelled.

I went into rehearsals down in Florida and started having trouble with my speech, he said. Obviously Im still recovering. My tongue swelled up and I canceled the tour. As Im recovering Im showing this.

While he declined to discuss his health any further, the actor appeared to be in good spirits throughout the night. Kilmer cracked numerous jokes, causing the audience to break out in laughter.

The event comes after Kilmer denied Michael Douglas claims that he was battling oral cancer. Kilmer addressed the comments in a Facebook post, writing that after seeing a specialist to get a diagnosis for a lump in his throat, he was told he did not have cancer.

I have no cancer whatsoever, he wrote. I still have a swollen tongue and am rehabbing steadily.

Reporting by RAHA LEWIS
On October 4, Mumbai traffic police employed a system through which traffic defaulters who have been caught on CCTV cameras will be informed about fine through sms.

By Vidya : Mumbai traffic police have sent over 57,144 e-challans over sms in the past one month.

"Over 90 per cent of the cases that we catch right now are people who cross the stop-line at signal while other cases are that of talking on phone while driving and not wearing belt for a four-wheeler or not wearing helmet for a two-wheeler," said Kishore Shinde the police inspector managing this entire project at traffic head quarters.

advertisement

On October 4, Mumbai traffic police employed a system through which traffic defaulters who have been caught on CCTV cameras will be informed about fine through sms. As of now 60 out of 3,400 traffic constables are working in 12-hour shifts with the new system, till the computers have been updated.

HOW DOES IT WORK

Traffic department has all details about a vehicle owner including his mobile number, so when an offender is caught on camera breaking a traffic rule, a sms is sent specifying the fine and a link. Clicking on the link, the person is directed to Mumbai police's site which describes in the detail the the offence. The offender can choose to pay the fine online or even go down to the traffic police in person.

SPEEDING CAMERAS

Mumbai police has installed cameras on Bandra-Worli sea link. "This camera records the speed and the registration number of any vehicle which is over-speeding and makes a list of defaulters," said Shinde.

Apart from this two traffic divisions of the department also have hand-held e-challan machines while other divisions will be one soon. These machines which resemble a mobile have a camera and can issue challans and also accept payments through debit or credit cards.

"Cashless transactions where traffic policemen does not have to handle cash at any point, is the system of future and the department is gearing for it," Shinde said.

--- ENDS ---
Val Kilmer slurred his words and struggled to speak during an event in Los Angeles on Thursday, his first public appearance since denying he has cancer earlier this month.

The 56-year-old actor presented the film version of his one-man play, Citizen Twain. Kilmer did address his health at one point, when he told the audience that he had to cancel his upcoming tour for the play because his "tongue swelled," People reports.

"I went into rehearsals down in Florida and started having trouble with my speech," he said. "Obviously, I'm still recovering. My tongue swelled up and I canceled the tour. As I'm recovering I'm showing this."

WATCH: Michael Douglas Claims Val Kilmer Is Battling Cancer, Hasn't Heard From Him in Over a Year

Last month, Michael Douglas claimed Kilmer is battling tongue cancer during a Q&A with Jonathan Ross at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London, England. Douglas himself is a tongue cancer survivor, but the 72-year-old actor has been cancer-free since January 2011.

"Val was a wonderful guy who is dealing with exactly what I had, and things don't look too good for him," Douglas said of his Ghost and the Darkness co-star. "My prayers are with him. That's why you haven't heard too much from Val lately."

However, the Top Gun actor took to Facebook shortly after to refute Douglas' comments.

"I love Michael Douglas but he is misinformed," Kilmer wrote in a post. "The last time I spoke to him was almost two years ago, when I asked him for a referral for a specialist to get a diagnosis for a lump in my throat."

"I ended up using a team at UCLA and have no cancer whatsoever," he continued. "I still have a swollen tongue and am rehabbing steadily."

WATCH: Val Kilmer Slams Hospitalization Reports, Says They're 'Totally Untrue'

Kilmer, an outspoken Christian Scientist, also addressed rumors about his health and religion, writing that some of his fans have "mistakenly thought my silence about my personal issues meant that somehow I wasn't being responsible to my health, because of my reliance on prayer and Love."

Story continues

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he wrote. "I hope this puts to rest any further concerns about my health. ... Being healthy and having the respect of my peers and love from my family, friends and fans is a DAILY source of inspiration, for which I am so grateful, you have no idea."

Watch below:

Related Articles
By Carl O'Donnell

NEW YORK, Nov 10 (Reuters) - Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Plc, the drugmaker that became a poster child for high drug prices during the U.S. election season, may change its name to help boost its reputation, board member and top investor William Ackman told CNBC on Wednesday.

A name change would be the latest effort by the company to break from its past, after hiring a new chief executive, overhauling the board and exploring billions of dollars in asset sales to pay down a $30 billion debt load.

Valeant's stock has declined more than 90 percent in the past year, erasing nearly $90 billion in market capitalization, over disclosures that it secretly worked with a specialty pharmacy to boost sales of its medicines. The company is the subject of multiple investigations by federal agencies and state prosecutors.

A number of names are being considered, including taking on the well-known moniker of its largest business, eyecare specialist Bausch & Lomb, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the press. There has been no final decision to change its name at all, they added.

Previously named Biovail and based in the United States, the drugmaker acquired Canada's Valeant in 2010 and chose that as its corporate identity.

The acquisition, a so-called "tax inversion" because Valeant moved its headquarters to low-tax Canada, was a key step in its aggressive, debt-financed dealmaking spree under former CEO Michael Pearson. The acquisitions helped reshape the specialty pharmaceutical industry and eventually left Valeant with around $30 billion in debt.

Some of the high points of Pearson's buying binge include its $8.7 billion acquisition of Bausch & Lomb in 2013 and its $14.5 billion purchase of stomach-drug company Salix Pharmaceuticals in 2015.

The deals made Valeant a darling of Wall Street, attracting such big name hedge funds as Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management and the Sequoia Fund and notching returns in excess of 1000 percent during Pearson's tenure.

In recent weeks, Valeant has been exploring a sale of its Salix business, according to media reports, that could fetch around $10 billion and would leave Bausch & Lomb as the largest single business in the company.

(Reporting by Carl O'Donnell)
Thank you, veterans, for your outstanding service to this country! In honor of Veterans Day, many businesses are offering freebies and discounts on Friday, November 11, to the millions of Americans who are currently serving or have retired from the U.S. Armed Forces. Heres a list of just some of the deals for past and present military personnel, including free meals, haircuts, movie tickets and more. Dont forget your military ID! Most places require proof of service or a uniform.

PHOTOS: Stars  They're Just Like Us!

Starbucks

Stop by for a free tall brewed coffee at any location.

Krispy Kreme

Identify yourself as a veteran or active-duty military personnel to get a free doughnut and small coffee  no ID required!

Bob Evans

Pick out a free meal from a special menu, available all day.

IHOP

Get your pancake fix with free red, white and blue flapjacks from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Select locations are also offering a combo of two eggs, hash browns and choice of bacon or sausage as part of the promotion.

PHOTOS: Stars Who Played the President

Little Caesars

Your lunch is on the house today when you bring your military ID! From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., grab a Hot-N-Ready meal, which includes pizza and a drink, from this nationwide pizza chain.

Applebees

Veterans and active-duty officers receive a complimentary meal from a special menu and a $5 off coupon valid from November 12 to 27.

Outback Steakhouse

Snag a free Bloomin Onion and beverage, plus come back and visit the steakhouse between November 12 and December 31 for 15 percent off.

PHOTOS: Celebrities Chowing Down On Corn On the Cob!

Ruby Tuesday

This Friday, get a free appetizer (up to a $10 value) at the family restaurant chain.

Buffalo Wild Wings

As a thanks for your service, get a small order of traditional or boneless wings with a side of fries on the house.

Chipotle

All U.S. military, military spouses and vets can buy one, get one free on burritos, bowls, salads or tacos from 3 p.m. onward.

Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Brews

Yum! Veterans and active-duty service members will receive a free Reds Tavern Double Burger and bottomless fries at participating locations.

Story continues

PHOTOS: Celebrities Stuffing Their Faces

Chilis Grill & Bar

Veterans, come hungry. Eat for free when you pick a meal from a special menu.

Olive Garden

U.S. Armed Forces members past and present will be served a free entree upon visiting the casual Italian establishment.

On the Border

Drop into this Mexican locale for a create-your-own combo meal gratis.

Great Clips

Need a haircut? Get a coupon for a free trim valid through December 31.

Sports Clip

Stylists at this men-focused establishment are also offering haircuts at no cost on Veterans Day.

iPic Theaters

Catch the latest blockbuster free of charge! All veterans and active-duty military personnel get a complimentary movie ticket.

Brooks Brothers

Upgrade your wardrobe with 25 percent off for military members through November 13.

Duane Reade

Restock on everything from toiletries to snacks at this drugstore chain with 20 percent off eligible store items.

Orangetheory Fitness

Hit the gym gratis with free workouts for veterans, including up to two classes.









Related Content:
BERLIN (Reuters) - Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) expects global deliveries of its core brand to keep growing in the months ahead but sales are driven almost exclusively by Chinese demand, data published by the German carmaker on Friday showed.

Volkswagen (VW) said brand sales appeared to have turned a corner after growing 4.4 percent to 511,500 vehicles in October, the third straight monthly gain, following a run of mostly declines in the February-to-July period.

The brand's chief executive, Herbert Diess, on Thursday said for the first time that he expects full-year deliveries to exceed the 5.82 million sales reported in 2015. Ten-month brand sales were up 1 percent to 4.89 million cars, VW said on Friday.

"The positive overall trend for the Volkswagen brand has stabilised compared with 2015," brand sales chief Juergen Stackmann said. "The trend is therefore clearly headed in the right direction, but we still continue to work on the challenges the brand must master in some regions."

Except for China where brand sales jumped almost a fifth last month to 278,100 cars, registrations kept falling in the Americas and also declined in Europe because of a 21-percent slump in VW's German home market.

Without Chinese sales, VW brand deliveries actually declined 9 percent in October to 233,400 vehicles and were down 8 percent year-to-date to 2.48 million, according to Reuters calculations.

(Reporting by Andreas Cremer; Editing by Maria Sheahan)
I volunteered for Hillary Clinton on Election Day and am so proud to have done so

Tuesday night, I witnessed the most heartbreaking election of my 22 year-old life as Hillary Clinton lost her bid to become the first female President of the United States of America. This morning, I cried along with millions of women as she conceded with the grace and class we all knew she possessed. Despite this incredible pain, today I remain proud of the hours I spent on election day doing my part to get Clinton elected.

On Election Day, my sister and I volunteered in Portland, Maine. We were calling voters all over the state, encouraging them to vote and reminding them where their polling place was located. Phone banking in itself can be kind of a thankless task. You sit in a room, calling strangers with the hope that theyll: 1. Answer the phone; 2. Not yell at you; or 3. Not hang up on you after you tell them why youre calling. While it can be tedious, it can also be an incredible and rewarding experience.

At this particular phone bank, morale was high as we played games to entertain ourselves and ease the sting of disgruntled hang-ups, awarding points based on the reception we got. If people had already voted, we earned points. If they swore, or hung up we lost points. It was our own road to 270. It was inspiring to be in a room with people who gave up precious time and made a tired, election activity something that embodied our own excitement for a truly extraordinary candidate.

We also talked to each other about our unique stories that drove us to phone bank and support our candidates. Sitting at the table next to me was a woman who graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 with Hillary Clinton. She recounted her experience of watching Hillarys graduation speech from her seat amongst the graduates and as she spoke about her classmate, pride radiated from her.

Sitting behind me was a 13 year-old girl, who upon having the day off from school, decided that she needed to phone back. Shed been volunteering for months and spent a total of eight hours volunteering on Election Day. She expressed frustration in not being able to vote in this election or even the next presidential election, but still believed her voice mattered, because it does. The three other teens phone banking with us agreed that they wanted to do their part, despite not getting to vote.

Story continues

Despite the outcome (which I am so, so disappointed about), I got to spend my Election Day doing something I felt was so important. I felt like I was contributing to the campaign in a way that made up for my lack of sizable monetary donation. As a recent college graduate, I decided that my time could be worth something, since I couldnt donate more than a few dollars. Not only did I get to expand on my civic duty, I got to do so with the people who restored my faith in humanity as I watched the results.

I know Im going to look back on this campaign and my support for Hillary Clinton and feel honored by having the opportunity to donate, vote, and volunteer for her campaign. Im grateful for the people at the Portland, Maine, office who gave me something to smile about through the pain of watching the results come in against our candidate. Most of all, Im grateful for Hillary Clinton, who genuinely gave me, and millions of other young women, the hope and opportunity to see that the glass ceiling can and someday will be shattered.

The post I volunteered for Hillary Clinton on Election Day and am so proud to have done so appeared first on HelloGiggles.
BERLIN (Reuters) - Volkswagen <VOWG_p.DE> expects global deliveries of its core brand to keep growing in the months ahead but sales are driven almost exclusively by Chinese demand, data published by the German carmaker on Friday showed.

Volkswagen (VW) said brand sales appeared to have turned a corner after growing 4.4 percent to 511,500 vehicles in October, the third straight monthly gain, following a run of mostly declines in the February-to-July period.

The brand's chief executive, Herbert Diess, on Thursday said for the first time that he expects full-year deliveries to exceed the 5.82 million sales reported in 2015. Ten-month brand sales were up 1 percent to 4.89 million cars, VW said on Friday.

"The positive overall trend for the Volkswagen brand has stabilized compared with 2015," brand sales chief Juergen Stackmann said. "The trend is therefore clearly headed in the right direction, but we still continue to work on the challenges the brand must master in some regions."

Except for China where brand sales jumped almost a fifth last month to 278,100 cars, registrations kept falling in the Americas and also declined in Europe because of a 21-percent slump in VW's German home market.

Without Chinese sales, VW brand deliveries actually declined 9 percent in October to 233,400 vehicles and were down 8 percent year-to-date to 2.48 million, according to Reuters calculations.

(Reporting by Andreas Cremer; Editing by Maria Sheahan)
After 24 years of marriage and four children together, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening admit that one of the keys to their happy union defies familiarity: Its a continuing sense of surprise.

Every day she surprises me, Beatty told PEOPLE Thursday at the world premiere of his latest effort as actor, writer and director, Rules Dont Apply, which opened the American Film Institutes AFI Fest at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The movie marks Beattys first film in 15 years and the couples fourth film together since they met while making Bugsy and married soon after.

Definitely he surprises me  absolutely, Bening was quick to agree. He does the unexpected thing.

That sounds kind of good! chuckled Beatty.

One thing that doesnt surprise him, though, is his wifes acting prowess, which he says is on full display in the upcoming film 20th Century Women, which she headlines. Shes great in it!

Even as the couple enjoy keeping their union lively with a sense of the unexpected, for Rules Dont Apply  in which he plays the iconic, enigmatic billionaire industrialist, inventor, aviator and Hollywood studio mogul Howard Hughes, while Bening plays a concerned mother chaperoning her aspiring actress daughter (Lily Collins) dreaming of a promised big break from Hughes  Beatty, 79, was eager to explore territory he felt he knew intimately: the Los Angeles he encountered when he first arrived to embark on his now legendary six-decade-long career as an actor and filmmaker.

I came here in 1958, so I feel like I know what Im talking about, he explained, recalling the time in which he found early success on Broadway and television before his first major film breakthrough, Splendor In the Grass, in 1961. There have been a lot of changes, but then there are a lot of things that havent changed: Hollywood and movies, what they mean to America  I think we shouldnt take lightly.

Beattys often expressed an attraction for portraying quirky, high-profile iconoclasts at crucial points in history  mobster and Las Vegas visionary Benjamin Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy, journalist and American socialist John Reed in Reds, bank robber Clyde Barrow in Bonnie & Clyde. Hughes fit the mold as well, and he admits the reclusive and eccentric billionaire has long fascinated him.

Story continues

In the back of my mind, Ive always been very amused by Hughes, said Beatty. The complexities that arose in his dealings with people, and how much people really did like him, but found it impossible to deal with him. I thought it was a good basis for something that could be funny, and sometimes sad.

But I never met him, noted Beatty  whos encountered just about every other public figure he could hope to during his storied career  having come of age in Hollywood well after Hughes notorious retreat from the public eye, which he chronicles in the film. I sometimes feel that Ive met everybody who did. It lends itself to some pretty good comedic situations.

The films leading lady, Collins, said that Beatty loves to play  Hes like a little kid sometimes, and he gets really excited, and its nice to see someone whos been around for so long get excited. He always says hes so inspired by the young generation. Well, were totally inspired by him, so its really nice to see that joint relationship.




Weve already covered how this years lead actor race is pretty fluid once you get beyond powerhouse work from Denzel Washington (Fences) and Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea). There are slots to fill, and even for a film like Warren Beattys Rules Dont Apply  a Howard Hughes yarn that doesnt fully work and feels like a much bigger idea haphazardly whittled down  theres room to maneuver.

Beattys film opens AFI Fest Thursday night, adding the 13-time Oscar nominee to this years awards equation. And dont snooze on him  this performance could absolutely land a nomination. Its a fairly mannered portrayal, flashy at points and big throughout, with Beatty leaning in on all of Hughes notorious quirks. It ought to be a solid bet for Golden Globe recognition, particularly if the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. agrees with Foxs comedy placement, and from there, who knows?

Each of the four films Beatty has directed have landed at least one Oscar nomination. Indeed, he came out with a bang in 1978 with Heaven Can Wait, nabbing four nominations for himself alone (for picture, director, actor and screenplay). He was the first person to pick up that quartet in one year  and then he did it again three years later with Reds.

Dick Tracy in 1990 landed seven nominations and three wins, mostly in below-the-line categories, while Bulworth eight years later secured an original screenplay nomination.

While Rules Dont Apply pales to Beattys previous work, its nevertheless a film in a traditionalist vein that might appeal to Academy voters. Craft elements could find traction, particularly Caleb Deschanels lensing, Jeannine Oppewalls production design and Albert Wolskys costumes  legends all.

But Beatty draws the eye when hes on screen, even and particularly when hes shrouded in shadow for much of his early scenes. Hes adamant that the film isnt a biopic, but it basically is, and early efforts to position him for a supporting campaign hit the skids when industry audiences first saw the film last month.

Story continues

So keep an eye out. Its been 18 years since Beatty was in the directors chair and Hollywood loves a comeback. Rules Dont Apply presents a unique, if imperfect, opportunity to recognize one this year.

Related stories

AFI Film Review: 'Rules Don't Apply'

AFI Fest Adds Global Cinema to Starry Awards Contenders

Lily Collins Reveals the Best Advice She Received From Warren Beatty on 'Rules Don't Apply'
The Columbus Zoo is seeing double the cuteness  and thanks to a new video, so are we!

The Ohio zoo welcomed a set of new polar bear twins on Election Day and is happy to report that the babies are doing well so far.

First time mom Anana, 9, is caring for the cubs, who appear to be strong, the zoo said in a press release. In new footage above, you can actually hear the little ones crying like healthy human babies.

Animal care staff observed both births  which took place at 3:53 p.m. and 6:52 p.m.  via a camera mounted in Ananas den, which theyre using to continue round-the-clock observation that is critical at this time.

Polar bear cubs are only about a pound at birth  imagine a baby about the size of a stick of butter  and we are cautiously optimistic about their survival, Tom Stalf, president and CEO of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, said in a statement. Our hope is Anana will raise her cubs but our team, who now have experience with the difficult process of rearing a tiny cub, are prepared to step in if necessary.

The zoo said that if Anana continues to care for her cubs they will remain in a private den area away from public view until spring, giving us all something super-scrumptious to look forward to this winter.

While Anana is in mommy mode, we assume the cubs proud papa, 28-year-old Nanuq, is busy handing out cigars following the blessed event.

Nanuq, who came to the zoo in 2012, is the sire to all the cubs at the zoo. He is the oldest male polar bear to reproduce in a North American zoo.




Imagine leaving for a tour of duty unsure of who will be taking care of your beloved pet  its a heartbreaking situation that no one who serves our country should have to face.

Thanks to Project Active Duty, the Locke family didnt have to.

With the help of a $50,000 donation from PetSmart Charities, the program, launched by the Arizona Humane Society in response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks, allows loving pet owners leaving for a tour of duty to entrust their pets with the AHS, who provide peace of mind during their deployment.

Layla, the Locke familys 4-year-old pit bull mix, was taken in by hero foster parents Larry and Janet LeBlanc, from Surprise, Arizona, who cared for the dog for 15 months while Master Sergeant Doug Locke  who theyd never even met  was deployed to South Korea.

The family was reunited with the dog over the weekend, and the emotional experience was captured on the video above.

There are happy tears now but there were a few sad ones back then: The Lockes were scared in August of 2015 when Doug was heading for deployment and Layla had nowhere to go. They turned to Project Active Duty for help.

The program, which is free of charge to members of the military, places pets into AHS foster homes for the length of the deployment, regardless of the duration. To date, nearly 100 pets, including cats, dogs and rabbits, have benefited from the program.

Larry and Janet LeBlanc took Layla in and cared for her as if she was their own, and, as you can imagine, as happy as they were for Layla to return to her loved ones, they were sad to say goodbye, too.

I think our faces tell , says a crying Janet in the video. But were not sorry that we did it. Not at all. Its just a different bond. And you know, well have a bond with them for the rest of our lives now.

To learn more about Project Active Duty, visit the Arizona Humane Societys website.




By Indo-Asian News Service: The Chhattisgarh government on Friday assured the Supreme Court that it will not arrest Delhi University Professor Nandini Sundar, who has been named as an accused, in the alleged murder of a tribal person in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

The assurance came as the bench of Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel indicated that they may put on hold the FIR, in which Sundar and other civil society activists have been named as accused, in the November 4 murder of Shamnath Baghel by Maoists.

advertisement

While telling the court that no coercive action would be taken against Sundar, Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said the state would submit to the court its report in a sealed cover before the next date of hearing on November 15.

Also read: DU professor Nandini Sundar booked for tribal man's murder in Chhattisgarh



In an apparent reference to Sundar being booked in the murder case, the bench observed, "You are aggravating the situation. You have to take a pragmatic view of the situation and find practical solutions."

--- ENDS ---
Stephen Colbert is still struggling to accept that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.

He opened Thursdays episode of Late Show by praising President Obama for managing the transition well, and joked that Obamas staff screened an episode of School House Rock so that Trump, who will hold elected office for the first time, could bone up on checks and balances.

But the host dedicated the bulk of his monologue to criticizing a list of rumored new advisers who could potentially fill Trumps White House, referencing the President-elects promise to eliminate corruption, drain the swamp.

Trumps plan to drain the swamp of corruption means bringing back [Rudy] Giuliani, [Chris] Christie, [Newt] Gingrich, and [Sarah] Palin. It makes sense. Theyre exactly what Id expect to find at the bottom of a drained swamp, Colbert said.

To close, Colbert played a clip of Omarosa Manigault, Trumps campaign director of African-American outreach, suggesting that Trumps election was the ultimate revenge.

After the snippet, Colbert broke into a faux panic. It was Sam Bee and Seth Meyers! Theyre the ones who said all those horrible things about you! I was just joking the whole time! All hail our glorious leader! Giant hands! Youve got giant hands! Youre gonna be great, he yelled.

Colbert then explicitly communicated to his audience  using a word that became prevalent during the campaign  that he would not be backing down. Watch the full clip above.
To honor and recognize the veterans and those currently serving, who give so much to our country, the New York Knicks gave one United States Army Retired Sergeant First Class his best friend.

As part of the teams Hoops for Troops program, the Knicks set up a big surprise for Sgt. Luciano Yulfo: a new service dog.

Sgt. Yulfo spent 36 years in the military serving in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. In July 2014, he was injured while deployed in Afghanistan and medically retired from active duty. Following his injury, Sgt. Yulfo was stationed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for two years and retired in April 2016.

After returning to America, Sgt. Yulfo applied for a service dog to assist him with his injuries, and has been on the waiting list for over 18 months. During their game on Nov. 9, the Knicks brought Sgt. Yulfo to center court and surprised him with his new service dog and loyal companion Murphy, which was donated to the veteran by Paws of War.

The connection the man and his best friend share is instant and beautiful to watch.




By Anthony Deutsch AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The executive body of the global chemical weapons watchdog voted on Friday to condemn the use of banned toxic agents by the Syrian government and by the militant group Islamic State, a source who took part in the closed session said. Roughly two-thirds of the 41 members on the Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), endorsed a text compiled by Spain, sources told Reuters. An initial U.S. draft was replaced with a compromise text drafted by Spain, which dropped a reference to sanctions against those responsible for violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention, sources added. The OPCW's Executive Council, which meets behind closed doors, seldom votes on such matters, generally operating through consensus. But this text was supported by 28 members, including Germany, France, the United States and Britain. It was opposed by Russia, China, Sudan and Iran. There were nine abstentions. Russia and Iran are Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main allies against rebels seeking to overthrow him. Western and Gulf Arab states back the rebels. "There is a clear determination across the international community to hold those who have used these heinous weapons to account," said British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson in a statement responding to the vote. But a U.S.-Russian split over Syria highlighted continuing divisions. It was these two countries that in 2013 took the lead in getting the Damascus government to join the OPCW and avert threatened U.S.-led military intervention in Syria's civil war. A 13-month international inquiry by the OPCW and United Nations concluded in a series of reports that Syrian government forces, including helicopter squadrons, were responsible for the use of chlorine barrel bombs against civilians. The OPCW-U.N. mission found that the Syrian government carried out three toxic attacks in March and April of last year, while Islamic State militants had used sulphur mustard gas. The findings set the stage for a U.N. Security Council showdown between the five veto-wielding powers, likely pitting Russia and China against the United States, Britain and France over how those responsible for the attacks should be held accountable. Syrian authorities deny having used chemical weapons in the conflict. Islamic State has not commented. (Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Washington; Reporting by Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
The Hague (AFP) - The executive body of the global chemical arms watchdog on Friday took the unprecedented step of condemning Syria and Islamic State jihadists for using toxic weapons, demanding increased inspections.

The leading body of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons also voiced concern about "gaps and discrepancies" in Syria's 2013 declaration about the size of its toxic arms stockpile.

The resolution, adopted by a rare majority vote, "condemns in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic," the OPCW said in a statement.

It pointed to findings by a recent joint UN and OPCW investigation which concluded that "the Syrian Arab Armed Forces and the so-called Islamic State ... have been involved in the use of chemical weapons".

Sources, who attended the closed door talks, had told AFP it was the first time the watchdog had found a state member to have violated the Chemical Weapons Convention.

But this was not spelled out in the resolution, which nevertheless urged Syria "to comply fully with its obligations," the OPCW statement said.

The joint UN-OPCW panel's report released last month concluded Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces had carried out three attacks on villages in 2014 and 2015.

Government helicopters from two regime-controlled air bases dropped chlorine barrel-bombs on the villages of Qmenas, Talmenes and Sarmin, in rebel-held Idlib province.

IS jihadists meanwhile used mustard gas in August 2015 in Syria, the panel determined.

The executive council said those using such weapons must "desist immediately and authorises additional inspections at selected sites... of concern in Syria."

- 'Accountability' -

Based in The Hague, the OPCW usually works by consensus, but after weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations on the text it became impossible to reach unanimity, mainly due to Russian objections, one source who attended the session told AFP.

Story continues

When it was clear that "an overwhelming majority" supported the four-page resolution put forward by Spain it was decided to put it to a vote, the source said.

A total of 28 countries including Britain, France and the United States voted in favour, gathering the two-thirds needed to pass, separate sources said.

Four countries voted against -- China, Iran, Russia and Sudan -- while nine countries abstained.

"There is a clear determination across the international community to hold those who have used these heinous weapons to account," said British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in a statement.

The OPCW body ordered inspections twice a year at the Barzah and Jamrayah research centres, warning Damascus must "facilitate promptly, and fully cooperate with, these inspections."

Syria officially joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in October 2013, vowing to hand over its stockpile of toxic arms for destruction and undertaking never to use chemical weapons.

After years of denying it possessed chemical weapons, Syria was pushed into the convention under a deal brokered by the United States and Russia, averting a threatened US air strike following an August 2103 gas attack.

All its declared stock of chemical weapons have now been destroyed, but attacks have continued.

Friday's vote again pitted Washington against Moscow. Russia has blocked moves at the UN Security Council to sanction Syria for atrocities committed by Syrian forces on civilians during the five-year war.

The OPCW's resolution will now be submitted to the Security Council, and Syria will likely top the agenda at the annual conference of the watchdog's 192 member states which opens on November 28 in The Hague.
These were the most popular Google searches after the election

Though it isnt the most official form of gathering information, Google searches can tell you a lot about the social climate surrounding a particular topic. After all, we use it for everything  from planning a road trip to decoding your mysterious sick symptoms. But in post-election America, where we were are all reeling from what happened on election night, there was a slew of interesting searches after the results of the race were announced.

Google Trends posted the top election-related searches from November 9th, and the results may surprise you. Mainly, the top search results showcase the confusion that many Americans felt following the announcement of Trumps victory. Of course, searches that used either candidates names garnered more election-based results, but even searches that began with How did garnered more election-focused results.

Here were some of the top results from the Google Trends results:

"How did Donald Trump win?" Top questions on Google outside the US today#USElection2016 pic.twitter.com/JgkYcfGBkZ  GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) November 9, 2016

Understandably, theres a lot of confusion and mixed feelings surrounding what the future will hold now that the election is over. But these results provide some clarity in that we are all looking for how to move forward post-election.

The post These were the most popular Google searches after the election appeared first on HelloGiggles.
By Swati Bhat and Rahul Bhatia

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Indians are inventing ingenious ways to try and hide their money from the tax inspector, as the government attempts to flush out vast undeclared wealth by abolishing high denomination bank notes.

The shock announcement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday gave people only a few hours to spend or deposit 500 and 1,000 rupee bills before they were abolished, although plans are in place to allow a more gradual conversion to new notes.

Those plans involve depositing old bills in bank accounts, however, where they can be seen and analyzed, and, as millions of Indians scramble to convert savings using this method, some with piles of so-called "black money" are looking for loopholes.

Retailers and wedding planners say they have been inundated with frantic calls from people looking to bring forward large-item purchases from anyone willing to accept the old notes.

In Mumbai, a senior marketing executive at an event management company that organizes large weddings has witnessed the scramble, and said his firm was debating whether to accept payment in the old money.

Like many others, he was unwilling to be quoted by name when discussing his customers' requests.

"It has been a stressful day. Wedding clients are going mad," he said this week. "One client called and said 'I'll give you 30 million rupees ($450,000) in (old) 1,000 rupee notes.' There is loads of black money."

That amount is not unusual for a wealthy Indian family's wedding celebrations.

Others are looking to line up friends, domestic staff, and even senior citizens who are prepared to legally exchange the cash in small enough chunks to avoid scrutiny from banks.

Simply stepping forward and declaring the money is not an appealing option for tax dodgers, as banks have to report to tax authorities anybody depositing over 250,000 rupees ($3,765).

Being found to be holding undeclared cash can lead to a penalty of 200 percent of the tax owed.

Story continues

TRAIN TICKETS

Other unusual methods of exchanging cash are appearing on social media.

One tweet described how people were paying agents for expensive first-class train tickets with old bills and then cancelling them later to get reimbursed in new notes, all in order to get around the tax man.

State-run Indian Railways was one of the few places still allowed to accept the old notes until Friday.

Anil Kumar Saxena, spokesman for Indian Railways, said ticket purchases for first class, air-conditioned compartments, the most expensive category, had surged.

"We usually sell about 2,000 tickets every day," he said. The day after the demonetization measures were announced, that rose to 27,000, Saxena added.

Officials have caught on to some schemes.

The railways will refund tickets worth over 10,000 rupees booked on November 9, 10, and 11, but not in cash.

"It will be done by check, or electronically," Saxena said.

A jeweler in Mumbai said he stopped accepting cash payments after someone he believed to be a revenue official lingered outside his shop.

Jewelers stayed open into the early hours of Wednesday, and one well-placed industry source in Mumbai estimated that about 250 kg of gold, worth an estimated 750 million rupees at spot prices, was sold in the city within a few hours of the ban.

The source said jewelers were paid anywhere between 20 and 65 percent above the going rate by buyers snapping up the precious metal with old notes.

Meenakshi Goswami, Commissioner of Income Tax, underlined how hard it was for the authorities to detect such activity.

"I'm not aware of anything going on," she told Reuters.

"But (the) income tax (department) can't be sitting in the marketplace unless there is a specific complaint."

SHADY ECONOMY

The problem of the shadow, or "black" economy in India is pernicious. Transactions that take place outside formal channels amounts to around 20 percent of India's annual $2 trillion gross domestic product, according to investment firm Ambit.

Shrinking it is a major objective for Modi, who is trying to get more money into tax coffers.

India's tax revenue as a percentage of its GDP was 16.7 percent in 2016, compared with 25.4 percent in the United States and 30.3 percent in Japan.

Macquarie estimated the government could raise $30 billion in additional tax revenues from its scheme to withdraw higher-denominated bills, enough to significantly reduce India's fiscal deficit, which in the previous year stood at around $80 billion.

Modi's administration also implemented a tax amnesty scheme that brought in nearly $10 billion in undeclared income, while regulators are also trying to target unreported accounts overseas.

Bringing money into the legal economy without declaring it is proving tough. A senior citizen in Mumbai with around 500,000 rupees in undeclared cash told Reuters she split up the amount and opened bank accounts for four of her domestic workers.

Others say they are asking cousins, employees, and senior citizens for help to exchange the cash in the hope that it attracts less attention.

"For smaller sums, there are ways to change the money," a partner at an investment firm told Reuters.

"But for large amounts, like 400 million (rupees) and up? I've tried looking. I have not found a way. Modi really is serious about black money."

($1 = 66.3929 Indian rupees)

(Additional reporting by Abhirup Roy, Savio Shetty, Rajendra Jadhav, and Aditi Shah in MUMBAI and Sudarshan Varadhan in NEW DELHI; Writing by Rafael Nam; Editing by Mike Collett-White)
From ELLE

Scrolling through the posts on Pantsuit Nation, the private but not-so-secret Facebook group for Hillary Clinton supporters, it was impossible not to feel that women had this election in the bag on Tuesday. Photo after photo showed proud women in pantsuits and suffragette white, wearing "Nasty Woman" T-shirts and "I'm With Her" buttons. Many of the faces in those images-a visual majority, without question-were white.

Photo credit: Tyler Joe

And yet, as many of those same women woke in a fog on November 9 to learn that Donald Trump had indeed done what polls had predicted to be practically impossible, another reality was revealed: It wasn't just men that pushed him to victory. White women put their weight behind Trump, too.

Photo credit: CNN

For those who were #WithHer all the way, it's an uncomfortable truth-53 percent of white women who voted in the election supported Trump, while only 43 percent supported Clinton. This isn't a huge leap from previous elections-Mitt Romney managed to get 56 percent of the white female vote in 2012-but this was no ordinary race. Trump's campaign was filled with sexist and racist rhetoric and multiple sexual assault and misconduct allegations. Meanwhile, Clinton outwardly embraced feminism, speaking about challenges she'd faced in her career because of her sex, and appealing to female voters on issues such as child care, fair pay, and access to abortion.

The racial gap among women voters opened even wider when age and religion came into play. The NBC News exit poll found that 58 percent of white women voters ages 45-64 cast their ballots for Trump, as did 64 percent of white Protestant women. Meanwhile, 88 percent of black voters and 65 percent of Latino voters supported Clinton, per CNN's poll. And white, female Trump supporters weren't just those with less education. As Quartz reports, 45 percent of white, college-educated women who voted chose Trump. Meanwhile, just 6 percent of black college-educated women supported the president elect.

Story continues

What happened? Clinton needed American women of all races to have her back, and instead millions of white women chose Trump. This is particularly galling since it seems to underline a glaring limitation of the feminist movement and a fundamental lack of empathy.

It's not straight white women who have been threatened with deportation, discriminatory bathroom laws, or challenges to their marriages. It's not white women-especially wealthy white women-who are most impacted by abortion restrictions: Black women are almost four times more likely to have an abortion than white women, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely. And that's before factoring in gaps in insurance coverage, mandatory waiting periods, and other legislative hurdles that specifically impact low-income women.

It's not white women-especially wealthy white women-who are most impacted by abortion restrictions.

"It's a devastating message," says Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a feminist group that began in the 1960s. "My first thought last night was that I wanted to write a piece that starts with: 'I'm sorry.' Women who look like me voted the wrong way, and as a leader of a women's organization, I know we have to do better than this."

Diane Rhodes, director of public policy for the sexual health organization Advocates for Youth, which includes the pro-choice '1 and 3 Campaign,' agrees that the numbers are troubling. "I think the message to our black and Latino sisters, and quite honestly communities of color and women of color, is that reproductive justice was not a priority in this election," she says. "I'm really hoping that those numbers mobilize and galvanize our communities to work together and move forward to make sure more restrictions aren't happening."

Understandably, the fact that such a large number of white women helped keep Clinton from winning was incredibly disappointing to her supporters who are women of color. "I wasn't surprised. There's this idea that White women experience and identify with gender first and race second, and as a Black woman that has not been my experience. When forced to choose, they often chose race overwhelmingly," says ELLE.com contributor Chaedria LaBouvier. "I was like, 'Wow. Y'all won't even show up for someone that looks like you.' I wasn't thrilled about Hillary, but I voted for her, because, freedom." On Twitter, user "R.C." tweeted, "Black women have been trying to tell us for YEARS that white women will choose their race over their gender, every time. And here we are." Avi, @AVISKINSWEAT, wrote, "I'm just stuck on white women deliberately not choosing a president that IS them. Black people took advantage of that TWICE." White women who voted for Clinton expressed similar sentiments. Shauna @goldengateblond posted, "Probably the most painful realization for me is that white women did this. White men couldn't do it alone. We are complicit. I'm so sorry."

"There's this idea that White women experience and identify with gender first and race second, and as a Black woman that has not been my experience."

Apologies don't change election results, however. So where do we go from here? "We must put our African American sisters' experience right up in the center of our analysis and see what that does to our policy," says O'Neill. "As white women, we occupy a particularly privileged place in society, particularly as white women in the progressive movement."

NOW is focusing on "the most vulnerable women," working on a national campaign that will ensure coverage for abortions, as well as efforts to help women in what O'Neill calls the "school to prison pipeline." "When you look at it with a gender lens, but you realize is that it's the 'sex abuse to prison pipeline,'" says O'Neill. "Over 75 percent of girls 15-25 years old, if they are incarcerated in the juvenile or adult system, they have experienced sexual assault before that and ended up getting in trouble at school." NOW will also focus on the Equal Rights Amendment, says O'Neill, and, "We will try to make the argument that it can be an intersectional document. What would it do for women of color? What would it do for immigrant women? What would it do for LGBT women?"

Rhodes also encourages women to speak out. "You can start by just talking about what you are feeling, and what you are going through today," she says. "By really sharing, we educate one another, and raise awareness on the issues that matter most." And if you want to take action today, right this second, you can do that too, whether in person or on your social feeds. "At this point, I think one of the things people can do is elevate your voice and be loud," says Rhodes, "whether you are angry or sad or hopeful."

For white women who voted for Clinton, this may feel like making a moot point. You did your part, right? But if one of the lessons of this election is that race can overwhelm gender, it might just help to have more white women saying that the concerns of women of color are their concerns, too.

O'Neill says there is reason to have hope. "People are going to be absorbing the fact that she won the popular vote as an unashamed feminist woman fighting for women and their families," she says. "That's huge." The NOW leader believes that even women who voted for Trump "will slowly come to our side." We can only hope.

You Might Also Like
Handstand scorpion, anyone? Yoga poses depicted in magazines and other media outlets may draw eyeballs, but most people probably shouldn't try them, a new study suggests.

Images of yoga in the media often show poses that are unsafe, or just aren't doable for the average person, the researchers said. This means that people could get hurt if they attempt the poses. And for people who've never tried yoga, seeing the images might turn them off from starting yoga altogether, the researchers said.

"It kind of scares people off from starting a practice," said study researcher Nadezhda Vladagina, a graduate student at Pacific University School of Professional Psychology in Hillsboro, Oregon. "They might feel that they're not flexible enough and [yoga] isn't something their body is capable of doing," Vladagina said. "Meanwhile, already existing practitioners [of yoga] see these images of what yoga's supposed to look like, and they force themselves into these postures, essentially often causing injury."

Practicing yoga has been linked with a number of health benefits, including reduced stress, anxiety, depression and chronic pain, as well as improved sleep. However, yoga can lead to injuries if people don't practice it properly. Many yoga injuries happen when people push themselves beyond their capabilities; for example, by overstretching, or by putting their joints under too much tension, the researchers said. Such unhealthy poses may be reinforced by images of yoga in the media, they said.

In the study, Vladagina and her colleagues evaluated more than 1,500 images of yoga postures published in 33 issues of a popular yoga magazine between 2007 and 2014.

They found that about 45 percent of the images showed poses that were determined to be unsafe because they were presented in a way that could lead to injury. For example, some images showed misalignment of the shoulders or the neck.

Story continues

What's more, 50 percent of images showed people attempting to do moderate or advanced versions of a pose, and about 22 percent showed people in extremely difficult versions of a pose.

About one-quarter of images showed beginner-level poses, but still, 20 percent of these images showed the poses being done in a way that could lead beginners to hurt themselves, the researchers said.

"The more people are looking through these magazines, the more often they see these poses that there's no realistic way they're going to get into them, and if they do there's a high chance of causing injury to themselves," Vladagina told Live Science. [3 Ways to Keep Yoga Risk Free]

Stereotypical images

Study researcher Elika Razmjou, also a graduate student at Pacific University, said that people can be harmed when they compare themselves to images they see in the media, and create an expectation of what they're supposed to look like, instead of listening to their own body.

"I think those expectations are what can kind of push people sometimes to push beyond what their body is willing and able to doand that can present a risk of injury," Razmjou said.

Another aspect of the study looked at the demographics of people shown in the yoga poses in the magazine. They found that of 3,100 images analyzed, 71 percent of people in the images were young, 46 percent were thin, 72 percent were white and 74 percent were female.

These limited demographics may discourage people from starting a yoga practice, because they may think they don't fit the image of yoga practitioners portrayed in the media, the researchers said.

"If we're only showing able-bodied, white, skinny, already-fit women, those are the only people who think yoga is applicable to them, and that's not the case at all," said study researcher Heather Freeman, also a graduate student at Pacific University.

Holistic view of yoga?

Finally, the researchers looked at the articles in the magazine, to see how often the articles mentioned the foundational principles of yoga (called the eight limbs of yoga). These principles go beyond the physical practice of postures and breathing exercises, and include ethical practices (such as the practice of nonviolence), self-care practices and meditation.

The researchers found that introspective practices, such as meditation, were mentioned explicitly in only about 8 percent of the articles, and ethical practices were mentioned in 5 percent of the articles. In contrast, yoga postures were explicitly mention in 47 percent of the articles, and breathing exercises were mentioned in 25 percent.

"When we just rely on [the physical] aspect to get people involved in yogathats such a limited door, when we could be opening up so many other doors," for people who may not be able to do the physical aspects of yoga, Freeman said.

The researchers said they would like to see more holistic representations of yoga in the media, as well as more diversity in the people depicted practicing yoga.

Above all, yoga should be seen as a personal practice that helps people have a better relationship with themselves, they said. "Yoga should really be an individualized practice as opposed to a broadband thing thats applied to everyone the same way," Vladagina said.

Original article on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations
From Cosmopolitan

Yesterday, New Balance Vice President of Public Affairs Matt LeBretton told Wall Street Journal reporter Sara Germano that the company was happy with the election of Donald Trump. "The Obama administration turned a deaf ear to us," LeBretton said, "and, frankly, with President-Elect Trump, we feel things are going to move in the right direction."

New Balance: "The Obama admin turned a deaf ear to us & frankly w/ Pres-Elect Trump we feel things are going to move in the right direction" - Sara Germano (@germanotes) November 9, 2016

In protest, some New Balance owners set fire to their once-loved sneakers, posting pictures and videos on social media.

New Balance opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which Trump promised to roll back if elected, as did Hillary Clinton.

TPP is a trade deal made under the Obama administration that lowered tariffs (taxes on imports and exports) and other costs associated with the import and export of materials and goods between the U.S. and partner nations, including Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, and Australia. Such a deal greatly benefits their competitors like Nike and Adidas, which make a large portion of their products overseas and thus stand to save a lot more money than New Balance, which makes 70 percent of their products in America and recently invested in new equipment that would allow them to cut out foreign manufacturing all together.



Story continues

In an interview with NPR in April, LeBretton said New Balance kept their initial opposition to TPP quiet in the hopes of securing a government contract to make running shoes for the military. The military is required to buy uniforms and boots made in the U.S., but they don't hold sneakers to the same standard because of the difficulty of finding running shoes that are 100 percent made in the USA.

New Balance customers furious with the company's pro-Trump statements are burning their shoes https://t.co/NB3PL5S92c Photo: @MMArtinitus pic.twitter.com/Iz7NoKZFis - The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) November 10, 2016

Earlier today, New Balance responded to the backlash by posting the following message on social media:



Get non-boring fashion and beauty news directly in your feed. Follow Facebook.com/CosmoBeauty.

Follow Charles on Twitter and Instagram.

You Might Also Like
Prime Minister Narendra Modi after interacting with business leaders in Tokyo said that he wants India to be the "most open economy" in the world.

By Indo-Asian News Service: Stressing that strong India-Japan ties will be a "stabilising factor" in Asia and the world, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said that he wants India to be the "most open economy" in the world.

Modi, who is on a three-day visit to Japan, reached Tokyo on Thursday.

"I have also been saying that India and Japan will play a major role in Asia's emergence," he said in a tweet after interacting with business leaders in Tokyo.

advertisement

The Prime Minister said that Asia has emerged as the new centre of global growth, and it was because of its competitive manufacturing and expanding markets.

Modi praised Japan for its good quality products.

"The very word 'Japan' in India symbolises quality, excellence, honesty and integrity," he said, adding that both the nations must march forward and explore bigger potentials and brighter prospects.

"'Made in India' and 'Made by Japan' combination has started working wonderfully," he said in one of the tweets.

Modi also lauded Japan for being the fourth largest source of foreign direct investment in India.

Modi will attend the annual bilateral summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe later in the day.

On Saturday, Modi and Abe will travel on the Shinkansen high-speed rail to Kobe.

During Abe's visit to India last year, Japan committed itself to the development of a high-speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

This is Modi's second visit to Japan in two years.

--- ENDS ---
Hillary Clinton addresses her staff and supporters about the results of the U.S. election at a hotel in the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Hillary Clinton was spotted Thursday while out on a hike in Chappaqua, New York.

Margot Gerster and her daughter posed for a photo with Clinton while the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee was out with Bill Clinton.

Bill took the picture, according to a reporter whom Gerster spoke with.

Gerster wrote on Facebook after posting the photo, which has since been removed, that she was "heartbroken" after the former secretary of state lost to Donald Trump in Tuesday's presidential election.

It was the first time Clinton had been seen in public since she conceded the election to Trump on Wednesday.

"I got to hug her and talk to her and tell her that one of my most proudest moments as a mother was taking Phoebe with me to vote for her," Gerster wrote. "She hugged me and thanked me and we exchanged some sweet pleasantries and then I let them continue their walk."

Gerster tagged the post with #imstillwithher, referring to the "I'm with her" slogan Clinton's supporters used during Clinton's campaign.

Mom taking a hike runs into @HillaryClinton this afternoon (Photo: Margot Gerster) @billclinton took the photo pic.twitter.com/FXQNW6iA0q  Michael Cappetta (@MCappetta) November 10, 2016

NOW WATCH: 'America has lost': The Philippines president just announced that he's allying with China, wants to talk to Putin





More From Business Insider


Xyza Cruz Bacani, Philippines The Mahammud family with Lugo, a Marine officer, rest inside their home in Zamboanga, Philippines. (Photo: Xyza Cruz Bacani)

Since 2010, the Magnum Foundation has provided scholarships and intensive training each year to regional photojournalists and activists to tell stories within their home communities. In an effort to strengthen this growing network, the foundation brought together nine former fellows: Abbas Hajimohammadi from Iran, Anastasia Vlasova from Ukraine, Manca Juvan from Slovenia, Eman Helal from Syria, Poulomi Basu from India, Santiago Arcos from Ecuador, Yuyang Liu from China, Xyza Cruz Bacani from the Philippines and Muyi Xiao from China to produce a collective project. "What Works" explores the global issue of intolerance through local examples of bridge building among groups that might otherwise be in conflict.

In today's climate of increased sectarian conflict and rampant xenophobia, there is an urgency to point to instances of people coming together. From a community of Tartars integrating peacefully and constructively into a predominantly Christian area after the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, to a Muslim couple attempting to create positive dialogue around Islam by offering free doughnuts to passersby in Cambridge, Mass., these stories offer highly contextualized, critical perspectives on positive responses to current social issues.

Throughout the year, the photographers worked independently in the field with ongoing one-to-one mentorship. Midway through production, the group came together in New York to attend a range of workshops, lectures and in-depth editing sessions, and to develop a framework for showcasing the resulting work. "What Works" has been shaped into a multimedia narrative that the photographers can screen locally in their home communities.

"The work the Magnum Foundation fellows produced in this year's program represents the best of what documentary photography and visual storytelling can do. The quality, geographic scope, intelligence of the projects and innovations in techniques show not only the power but also the creativity and vitality of this universal medium," said program mentor and renowned photographer Ed Kashi. "It was an honor to work with folks representing so many different cultures, religions, artistic approaches and concerns, and to witness how they came together to support one another and ultimately create this thought-provoking and inspired body of work."

Story continues

The Magnum Foundation fosters creativity and diversity in documentary photography, activating new audiences and ideas through the innovative use of images. Through grant-making, mentoring and creative collaborations, we partner with socially engaged image-makers experimenting with new models for storytelling. Learn more at magnumfoundation.org.

What Works: Critical Explorations of Local Solutions is on view at the Bronx Documentary Center, Nov. 10-20, 2016.

See more news-related photo galleries, and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Tumblr.
Who will be Americas next secretary of state?

Several names keep popping up on the list to become the top U.S. diplomat in the wake of Donald Trumps victory Tuesday. They include Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and European history buff; Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department official in the George W. Bush administration; and John Bolton, U.N. ambassador under Bush.

Obviously, any one of these men  all veterans of the D.C. swamp Trump said he would drain  could be tapped. Corker, one Hill staffer says, was called out of a staff meeting to speak with Trump during the president-elects visit to the Capitol on Wednesday; Haass briefed Trump on foreign policy last summer, though a source familiar with the Trump team says, Haass may be angling for the job, but its not entirely clear.

And whoever ends up at Foggy Bottom will play an outsized role in shaping and carrying out Trumps foreign policy, an ill-defined slurry of isolationism, anti-Islamic aggression, and Russophilia. Its hardly a mix that would have sat well with the pre-Trump Republican party.

But John Bolton seems eager to give it a whirl.

Currently a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute and founder of the John Bolton PAC, Bolton has said he would be honored to serve the country again. He tweeted on Thursday, America electing #Trump was a clear repudiation of #Obamas failed foreign policy. Voters want to restore American leadership in the world.

So, too, did he tweet on Wednesday, Congratulations to President-Elect @realDonaldTrump on his hard-fought victory. I know hell work hard to restore American leadership and Trump will rebuild the military that has suffered under #Obama, which is perfect opportunity to work w/ GOP Congress to reverse that trend.

The tweets are revealing, and not just because they show Bolton uses hashtags like its 2011. During the Bush era, Bolton was often the face of Americas unilateralist, interventionist policies, the torch-bearer of American exceptionalism, resolute in his belief that to manifest Americas destiny was to lead the wider world wherever America said it was to be led, by any means necessary.

Story continues

In his memoir, Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, he writes of his dissatisfaction with the second-term shift in the Bush administration toward increased communication and cooperation, and said he sees treaties as essentially only political documents.

He deeply dislikes international organizations, whether the U.N., the International Criminal Court, or the architecture underpinning nuclear test bans. In a Boston Globe essay last year, he wrote, Washington should announce that, henceforth, all US financial support would be treated as voluntary rather than assessed  When international organizations  like businesses or private charities  have to demonstrate competence, efficiency, and effectiveness, they either perform or disappear. This would be an extraordinarily valuable lesson for the entire UN to learn. The United States should also never forget that withdrawal from certain UN agencies is an available option, as Ronald Reagan proved by leaving UNESCO.

But if he were picked  and got confirmed in the Senate  a Secretary of State Bolton would be heading toward a frontal collision with much of the foreign policy sketched out by the president-elect on the campaign trail. America may still, to use Trumps parlance, bomb the hell out of ISIS, but Trump has insisted that America retreat from its global obligations, shun allies, and abandon the postwar international order that Washington built.

Getting Secretary Bolton to help foster more cooperation with Russia might be even trickier  Bolton just three years ago urged the United States to to do things that cause him [Putin] pain as well such that America might focus Putins thinking. Last month, Bolton gave an interview with the Boston Herald to say, bizarrely, that the last thing that Russia wants is a Trump presidency.

But then, some in Russia arent celebrating anyway. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, Were not experiencing any euphoria. Pavel Sharikov of the Russian Academy of Science said, Trump probably isnt going to be able to lift sanctions. Andrei Kolesnikov, senior associate at Moscow Carnegie Center told Foreign Policy, I dont believe in [another] reset. President Trump is not the same thing as Trump the candidate. On Wednesday, anti-Putin activist Alexei Navalny tweeted out a podcast exploring whether its true that Trump is very good for Russia (spoiler: no).

If Bolton is indeed running the State Dept., Russia might do well to heed that spoiler.

John Hudson and Reid Standish contributed to this post.

Photo credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Correction, Nov. 11, 2016: Richard Haass is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. A previous version of this article misspelled his last name.
On Nov 9, 2016, we issued an updated report on Xcel Energy Inc. XEL. The companys long-term investment plans will strengthen its operations and help it to serve its expanding customer base in a more reliable and efficient manner. However, rising debt levels is a concern, given that its debt/capital ratio is presently higher than the industry average.

Recently, Xcel Energy reported third-quarter operating earnings of 90 cents per share, outpacing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 87 cents by 3.5%. Quarterly earnings also improved 7.1% on a year-over-year basis. Meanwhile, Xcel Energys third-quarter revenues of $3,040.1 million surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2,965 million by 2.5% and were up 4.8% from the prior-year quarter level of $2,901.3 million.

Xcel Energy continues to invest substantially in its utility assets to provide reliable services to its customers and to effectively meet the rising electricity demand. The companys capital expenditure budget of $18.4 billion (for the 20172021 period) is directed toward transmission, distribution, electric generation and renewable projects. Sizeable investments are expected to drive rate base growth of 5.4% compounded annually, thereby aiding the top line. Xcel Energy will fund the capital program with cash flows, existing debts and by issuing new debts.

XCEL ENERGY INC Price

XCEL ENERGY INC Price | XCEL ENERGY INC Quote

Moreover, economic improvement is increasingly evident across Xcel Energys service territories, especially in Minnesota, in comparison with the nation as a whole. The consolidated unemployment rate in the companys service territory was 3.5% in September, lower than the national average of 5%. The company witnessed customer additions of 1% in the third quarter that resulted in electric sales growth of 1.6% in the quarter. Its thus clear that market optimism continues to drive Xcel Energys sales. Going forward, the companys performance is likely to improve with the gradual economic recovery.

Story continues

However, Xcel Energys long-term debt has increased from the 2011 level of $8.8 billion to $13.4 billion in third-quarter 2016. Rising debt levels translate into higher interest cost burden, which eats into the companys margins.

Besides, Xcel Energys debt/capital ratio stands at 55% compared to the industry average of 50% and the S&P 500 level of 42.6%. Note that the higher the debt relative to its capital, the higher the financial leverage and risk of default.

Zacks Rank & Key Picks

Xcel Energy carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Other favorably placed stocks in the same space include Ameren Corporation AEE, DTE Energy Company DTE and Avista Corp. AVA.

Ameren Corp. has seen three upward estimate revisions over the last month for 2016. The stock carries a Zacks Rank #2.You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

DTE Energy, another Zacks Rank #2 stock, has seen six upward estimate revisions over the last two months for the full year.

Avista has seen one upward estimate revision over the last month for 2016. The stock carries a Zacks Rank #2.

Zacks' Top Investment Ideas for Long-Term Profit

How would you like to see our best recommendations to help you find todays most promising long-term stocks? Starting now, you can look inside our portfolios featuring stocks under $10, income stocks, value investments and more. These picks, which have double and triple-digit profit potential, are rarely available to the public. But you can see them now. Click here >>



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



AMEREN CORP (AEE): Free Stock Analysis Report



XCEL ENERGY INC (XEL): Free Stock Analysis Report



DTE ENERGY CO (DTE): Free Stock Analysis Report



AVISTA CORP (AVA): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
From Esquire

This will inaugurate a new feature here in the shebeen entitled, "Yeah, he's going to do what he said he was going to do." Today's installment, thanks toThe New York Times, is regulatory policy.

While many questions remain about how Mr. Trump will govern, a consensus emerged Wednesday in many circles in Washington and on Wall Street about at least one aspect of his impending presidency: Mr. Trump is likely to seek vast cuts in regulations across the banking, health care and energy industries. "This is going to be a president who will be the biggest regulatory reformer since Ronald Reagan," Stephen Moore, one of Mr. Trump's economic advisers said in an interview on Wednesday. "There are just so many regulations that could be eased."

Sorry, but if Stephen Moore is one of the economic advisers, then there are very few "questions" that remain. It's Springtime For e.Coli!

Mr. Trump will probably find common ground with many Republicans in Congress, including Speaker Paul D. Ryan, on cutting regulation. They clashed during the campaign over Mr. Trump's past conduct toward women and inflammatory statements about ethnic groups, and many Republicans do not see eye to eye with Mr. Trump on immigration and trade. "But Ryan and Trump are like-minded on regulation in a way they are not on trade and immigration," said Ted Gayer, director of the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution and a former Treasury official under President George W. Bush. "That is red meat for both of them."

Not for nothing, but Luzerne County in Pennsylvania is one of those famous counties that "flipped" from supporting the current president to supporting the next one. Right now, there's a huge fight going on in Luzerne County over a tort suit regarding a subsidiary of Kerr McGee, the energy and chemical behemoth for which the late Karen Silkwood once worked. Per The Washington Post:

Story continues

The company has said the so-called Avoca plaintiffs can't appeal the judge's order because it enforces the status quo already created by an injunction agreed to in the 2014 settlement barring "trust derivative" or duplicative claims, but the plaintiffs argued Monday their claims aren't trust derivative, so they aren't barred. "Kerr-McGee praises itself for having entered into one of the largest environmental and toxic tort settlements in U.S. history, but it ignores that its payment was in response to the equally historic pollution that it created," the plaintiffs said.mThe residents' consolidated case involves more than 4,000 workers, residents and former residents of the area surrounding the shuttered plant in northeastern Pennsylvania. The group has recovered a small share of the proceeds from the adversary case against Kerr-McGee and its parent, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., but have said they have only begun to be compensated for their losses. "Many have died and many more are critically and terminally ill," the plaintiffs said. "While it is true that the Avoca plaintiffs have had a small taste of the apple, they have received far less than will make them even approximately whole."

The Market will get these people justice. That's Telling It Like It Is. There is going to be more of this as the Trump era goes alone.

Click here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page.

You Might Also Like
New Yorkers blanket subway walls with Post-it notes of hope New Yorkers covered a subway wall with a rainbow of Post-its bearing messages of fear and anger but also of love and hope. Click through to see some of our favourite messages.

Some New York City commuters have found a colourful way to cope with the recent election results.

On Nov. 9, the usually white walls of the subway underpass on 14th Street was blanketed in a rainbow of Post-its bearing messages of fear and anger but also of love and hope.

The vibrant takeover was an initiative by artist Matthew Levee Chavez who called it Subway Therapy. Chavez sat for hours in the subway underpass handing out sticky notes and markers, and inviting commuters to share their thoughts and frustrations.

The last couple days have been stressful and I wanted to provide people with an opportunity to engage in a small and easy way, he wrote on his website. It gave people an outlet to express their hopes and fears in a safe space.

The idea took off with people flocking to cover the walls of the underpass. Chavez estimates that he gave out over 1,500 Post-it notes in a day.

Click through the gallery above to see some of our favourite messages and dont forget to let us know what you think of #SubwayTherapy by tweeting us @YahooStyleCA.
A young girl brought hope to a crowd of predominately University of Texas students who marched from campus to the state capitol in Austin on Wednesday, November 9, to protest the election of Donald Trump as president.

Despite not being old enough to vote, the girl said powerful things about being heard, and the crowd repeated her words. This video of her speech went viral and her mothers Facebook post is beginning to pick up shares. Credit: Twitter/pilotsmemes via Storyful
By PTI: Kathmandu, Nov 11 (PTI) Nepal Prime Minister Prachanda today said his government was committed to table a proposal in the parliament by next week to amend the new Constitution and meet the long-pending demands of agitating parties, including Madhesis.

Prachand told reporters that the amendment proposal would be tabled in the parliament before the current Nepali month Kartik ends on November 15, the Kathmandu Post reported.

advertisement

Marking his governments first 100 days in office, he said would put forward the proposal by taking all sides on board.

The amendment proposal has already been prepared and the government is holding discussions with the main opposition CPN-UML regarding the same, the prime minister said, adding that he has always strived to create an environment of trust between the ruling and the opposition parties.

The amendment to the Constitution, adopted in September last year and which led to months-long protests by Madhesi people and created a huge shortage of essential goods and fuel in the landlocked country, is a thorny issue in Nepal.

Madhesis, who share family and social bonds with Indians, allege that the Constitution compromises their interests.

They want more political representation in the parliament through re-demarcation of the provincial boundaries, and some issues remain over citizenship criteria.

Prachanda reiterated his commitment that the government would move ahead by forging a national consensus to deal with the issues of constitution amendment and over the impeachment motion against suspended chief of Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority, Lok Man Singh Karki.

He said after he became the prime minister he has been working to take Madhesis, and other disgruntled groups, into confidence and his efforts have been successful so far.

He also said that his government would give momentum to the implementation of the new Constitution as the formation of high courts in provinces, selection of attorneys office and other remaining tasks like the peace process were in progress.

He claimed his government has been successful in improving Nepals ties with both its neighbours - China and India. PTI ABH

--- ENDS ---
Haji Zai (Pakistan) (AFP) - Abbas Khan feeds a hot wire from a rickety generator into a river, a fishing technique he argues is more environmentally friendly than others used in northwest Pakistan -- though he also admits it has killed several of his friends.

Hundreds of fishermen risk their lives daily to hunt the rare fish known as "sher mahi", found in the Kabul River which flows from the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan into neighbouring Pakistan, before merging with the Indus.

Some swim for hours on inner tubes, dragging nets behind them. Others use more brutal -- and illegal -- techniques: spraying pesticides directly into the river or, like Khan, using the electric current from generators to stun the river's inhabitants into submission.

And, for those in a hurry, there is always the brutal but effective "Khatin bomb" -- dynamite.

These imprecise techniques are a threat to the river's population, say dismayed conventional fishermen who have made their living selling sher mahi, considered the best for eating in Pakistan's northwest.

"Fishing with dynamite and generators kills the entire population," says Ghani Ur Rehman.

Like dozens of his fellow fishermen, the 58-year-old spends hours each day swimming the river on an inner tube, dragging his net behind him, catching only a few kilos at a time. He has done so for 25 years.

"Now, the fish's population has decreased and the main reason is an increase in fish hunting," he says, emptying his net on to the shore.

Along the banks of the Kabul River hundreds of visitors can be seen enjoying family days of boating and wading, topped off with a hearty meal of fresh sher mahi and other river fish at dozens of huts and restaurants.

Sher mahi, with few bones and found in Pakistan only in the Kabul River, is similar to catfish, growing to a maximum of 30 centimetres (12 inches).

Some fishermen say its name come from the Persian word "sheer", or "milk", due to its rich oily taste.

Story continues

Rehman says he makes on average 600 to 1,000 rupees a day -- but on days when the fish are plentiful his income can soar to 10,000 rupees.

Speaking with AFP along the river, Khan admitted using a generator in the water was "scary" -- but said that, despite his lack of safety gear, he has learned the correct the technique.

"Some of my friends had died because of electrofishing but now we have learnt it, now we know how to hunt in the best way," he explained, before demonstrating how to attach wires to a metal rod then place the rod in a net in the water.

"It stuns the fish and brings it to surface. Then we collect the fish and put it a cooler," Khan said.

"Some people use pesticides for fishing but that destroys the entire population of fish. It also poisons the water and kills everything in the river, wherever it flows," he argued.

- 'Scary' -

Rehman and Khan's anxiety is echoed by other fishermen in Haji Zai, in the suburbs of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial capital Peshawar.

Fishing by dynamite was banned by authorities in 1982, but there was not a serious decrease until after the launch of a military operation in the adjacent tribal areas in 2009 made the explosives slightly -- but only slightly -- more difficult to get ahold of.

Fishing with generators and chemicals remains common, despite also being banned.

Khair Gul -- known as "Larram", or "Scorpion", an old childhood nickname that stuck -- is mayor of Haji Zai village and himself an avid fishermen. Authorities, he says, are not serious about stopping poaching.

"We have taken action against such groups but the local officials used to set them free after taking (a bribe) of 400 to 500 rupees ($5)," he tells AFP.

"Use of dynamite, generator shocks and poisonous chemicals is not only a crime but also dangerous for health and causes disease. We ask the government to ban it completely," he adds.

But the problems with a ban become obvious after speaking with officials.

A team of nine people covers the entire district of Peshawar -- a more than 70-kilometre stretch along the Kabul River -- with no vehicles, no boats, and no equipment, says senior government official Hidayat Shah, who works in government's fisheries department.

Somehow Shah's team managed to lodge cases against more than 60 illegal hunters from 2015 to 2016, confiscating some 23 generators -- but, thanks to the molasses-like courts system, not a single case has yet reached a resolution.

In Charsadda and Nowshera the teams are less than half the size of that in Peshawar, another government official told AFP.

But time is running out, the fishermen say.

"It will eliminate the entire fish population if this illegal hunting is not stopped," fishermen Khad Gul told AFP.
These are the states where you could plan a weed vacation.

Three more states voted to legalize the use of recreational marijuana on Tuesday night.

Massachusetts, California and Nevada all voted to legalized recreational marijuana last night.

Now recreational use has been legalized in those three states along with Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, and Washington, D.C. With the addition of the new states, the amount of Americans living in a state where recreational marijuana use is legal increased from 5 to 20 percent.

Effective at midnight Wednesday, residents and visitors over the age of 21 in the three states will be able to possess up to an ounce for recreational use. Californians will be able to grow up to six plants in private residence, if they are hidden from public view.

Sale of recreational marijuana will take much longer to come into effect. Dispensaries must wait for licenses, a process that could take at least two years.

The newly-legalized states already see some of the highest tourism numbers in the country. California is already the most popular state for tourism in the country. Nevada is ranked third.

California is expected to see huge growth in the marijuana tourism industry. Many are projecting that the state could turn into a super-producer of the plant.

The entire west coast has become a marijuana bloc, with Colorado and Nevada extending the reach.

Since Colorado legalized recreational pot in 2014, the state has seen growth in its tourism. The state has reported that availability of marijuana positively influenced 23 percent of trips to Colorado, and 11 percent of visitors over the age of 25 have visited a dispensary.

But there have also been several instances of marijuana tourists requiring medical attention after enjoying too much on their trip; The number of out-of-staters who ended up in the hospital doubled when pot was legalized in Colorado. And pot tourists remain in need of education about local laws. Even though recreational marijuana is legal, it is illegal to smoke in public and most hotels prohibit smoking in rooms.

Story continues

Residents of Maine also voted on legalization, but as of Wednesday morning, the vote remains too close to call. Arizona voters rejected legalization while voters in Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota voted to legalize medical marijuana.

In October, a Gallup poll found that nationwide support for recreational marijuana legalization is at 60 percentthe highest it has been since the organization started tracking the issue 47 years ago.

Related Articles
David Marcus of Facebook and Loic Le Meur of Leade.rs discuss the use of chat bots at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. (image: Web Summit)

LISBON Rural broadband, Messenger bots and security improvements were the order of the day as several Facebooks executives took the stage at the annual Web Summit technology conference here this week. The representatives talked about to everything from satellite-based web access for poorer countries to why you shouldnt use the same password for all of your apps. And naturally, it was all streamed on Facebook Live for the world to see.

Bringing broadband to the world

Facebooks chief technical officer Mike Schroepfer opened Web Summit Tuesday morning with a keynote explaining the companys agenda for the next 10 years. Expanding Internet access to the 4.1 billion people worldwide without it is a huge part of that mission, and Facebook has projects afoot for rural, suburban and urban areas.

In the farthest reaches, Facebook is betting on satellite access  an effort set back by Septembers launchpad explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the AMOS-6 satellite that was set to provide Facebook Internet access across Africa. Schroepfer played a video of that explosion, saying You dont make big bets unless you have huge failures.

Things are going better with Facebooks solar-powered Aquila drone, a major subject of Schroepfers talk at last years Web Summit in Dublin. The propeller-driven aircraft, with the wingspan of a Boeing (BA) 737, flew for the first time in July. A constellation of these will eventually provide the Internet backbone we need over suburban areas, Schroepfer predicted.

In cities, Facebook is testing two systems, Terragraph and ARIES, that will provide Internet access over unlicensed wireless spectrum. That has the promise to inject some competition in a market currently dominated by cable Internet.

Schroepfer also touted Facebooks efforts in teaching computers to recognize photos and making virtual reality a tool to connect with far-flung friends. He called social VR the technology thats going to enable these deep social connections over long distances.

Story continues

Banter about bots

Facebook executive VP of messaging products David Marcus also spoke at the event on Tuesday. Hes the guy behind Facebooks launch of Messenger bots, the software-driven chat partners that even he admitted has gotten a little oversold.

Youre right that there was a lot of hype, Marcus said. Its never as good as its portrayed and its never as bad as its portrayed.

He said the key to what he called a much more complex and refined experience than the traditional chat-bot environment of typing plain text and getting scripted replies: leveraging the same artificial intelligence that goes into the machine-vision efforts Schroepfer talked about.

Marcus made a case for bots as a new way for companies to connect with mobile users  they provide more features than many mobile sites allow, but dont require installing a companys app, the usual way to get around the mobile webs limits.

The latest version of the Messenger platform, which launched on Tuesday, brings one new feature for bots: A News Feed ad can link you directly to the advertisers bot. But you have to click or tap that link, so Messenger spam will continue to be reserved for humans.

Security for distracted people

On Wednesday Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos spoke about security issues in an always-connected world. Before joining Facebook last year, Stamos was the chief information security officer for Yahoo Finances parent firm (YHOO).

If were going to connect the world, its also our responsibility to connect the world safely, Stamos led off. He used the word safely, not securely, because the concept of security assumes the user will follow instructions all the time; safety also requires minimizing the damage when they dont.

Like, for example, when they reuse passwords, what Stamos called the number-one source of harm on the Internet.

He endorsed using Login Approvals, where you confirm unusual logins with a code sent to your phone, and Trusted Contacts, in which designated close friends can also send you one-time codes that get you back into your account if somebody takes it over.

But what about the users who dont bother? We cannot say, oh, you didnt use Login Approvals, you didnt use Trusted Contacts, what you did is not our problem, Stamos said. Instead, it subjects each login to the kind of scrutiny a credit-card issuer uses to detect fraud.

We take about 80 data points from your browsing session and we feed it into a machine learning algorithm, he said. In a moment, that math yields an answer: Is this login the real person or an attacker?

Facebook also cant count on smartphone vendors to do the right thing. Stamos showed a picture of a popular Android phone that sells for about $65 in Nigeria and runs an obsolete version of Android, saying that phone will probably never be patched.

To counter that, Facebooks app ships with its own open-source cryptography code instead of relying on the software built into Android. We try to build self-defending apps, Stamos said.

(Disclosure: I moderated four panels at the conference, in return for which the organizers are covering most of my travel costs.)

More from Rob:

Email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com; follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro.
By Elzio Barreto HONG KONG (Reuters) - Financial services firms are increasingly turning to digital technology to meet onerous regulatory demands aimed at fighting financial fraud, creating a niche tech market that is estimated to grow to around $120 billion by 2020. Regulatory technology, or RegTech, offers banks automated solutions that can speed up the cumbersome process of vetting clients and transactions, which is necessary to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes. Regulators are also looking for more standardized digital transaction reports from banks to spot potential fraud more reliably and with fewer staff. "The demand for this is enormous, everybody needs it," said Peter Hetz, a director at Veridate Financial, whose software helps family offices and fund managers verify the identity and background of new clients and create reports for regulators. Speaking at the Thomson Reuters Pan Asia Regulatory Summit this week, officials at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and markets watchdog Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) said they saw major opportunities for technology to help financial firms meet growing regulatory requirements. "Crooks will always exist, but you can reduce the risk. If you haven't been doing your job in risk and compliance with technology, I'd be incredibly surprised," Benedicte Nolens, head of risk and strategy at Hong Kong's SFC, told the summit. "It's not only superior in a number of factors, it's probably a lot (cheaper) and it's certainly a lot faster" than banks' back offices, she added. Consultancy Quinlan & Associates estimated in a report this week that one such technology, blockchain, could cut the costs that banks incur to comply with anti-money laundering rules by $4.6 billion a year  or 32 percent of current annual costs  through reduced headcount, technology spend and regulatory fines. Start-ups like Hong Kong-based Veridate and FixNix, which automates audit and risk tasks for small firms in India, are betting that as financial firms look to avert regulatory fines and focus on their core businesses, more of their compliance budget will go to technology. Veridate said its automated audit process can reduce the time to sign up a new client at banks and asset managers to several minutes from weeks currently. By digitizing different tasks, watchdogs can also request regular checks to make sure banks' clients remain compliant and monitor potential risk and fraud more closely. The SFC is launching a pilot project with 20 banks to monitor and detect systemic risk using RegTech. In India, FixNix signed an agreement to offer its software to hundreds of community banks through the Reserve Bank of India's technology arm. "Having partnerships with regulators opens many doors," said Shanmugavel Sankaran, founder and CEO of FixNix. (Reporting by Elzio Barreto; Additional reporting by Michelle Price and Saeed Azhar; Editing by Lisa Jucca)
By Axel Bugge LISBON (Reuters) - The Nov 10 2016 story was refiled to correct paragraph four to read "...including $50 million last month in a financing round led by Dubai port operator DP World..." instead of "...including $50 million last month from Dubai port operator DP World..." Hyperloop One, which is developing a futuristic high-speed transport system, aims to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of fresh capital next year after a first full-scale test that could secure firm orders from clients, its founders said. The founders of Hyperloop One, which uses magnets to levitate pods inside huge airless tubes at speeds up to 750 mph (1,100 kmh) to transport people and cargo, said they have also now signed agreements on feasibility studies with the Dutch and Finnish governments. Earlier this week, the company said it agreed to jointly evaluate a Hyperloop One transport system in Dubai. Early next year the company will carry out its first full-scale test of the system at a facility in Nevada, which could demonstrate the system's viability. So far the company has raised $160 million to finance its growth, including $50 million last month in a financing round led by Dubai port operator DP World. "Basically, we are looking to do a big raise next year," Josh Giegel, co-founder and head of engineering at Hyperloop One, told Reuters at the Web Summit, a tech conference held in Lisbon this week. "If we can have a customer on the hook, it will be all that much easier." He said the size of the funding round would "be something in the hundreds of millions, but not high hundreds of millions," and that it would depend on the potential of the projects under consideration by countries. The concept behind Hyperloop One originated in a paper by Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc, in 2013. Skeptics still wonder if the technology can move from science fiction to reality. But Hyperloop One's increasing number of agreements on feasibility studies with countries suggests growing optimism. Giegel said he has no doubts that the test will work. "There is no doubt about it working at this point, it's just that how quickly can you go through the regulatory process, the customer process and to basically get the funding situation in place?" Giegel said. Building networks of the huge tubes being built by Hyperloop One, either above or under ground, would cost billions. Hyperloop One co-founder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar said he expected governments to embrace the technology once they understand the huge time savings the system can offer, for transporting people and cargo. "Once governments see what the potential is, they will basically accelerate the regulatory process," Pishevar said, adding that regulation may not be that cumbersome as it would start from a blank sheet as the system is completely new. The feasibility study for Finland includes a possible transport link between Helsinki and Stockholm in Sweden, a trip which would take about half an hour in a Hyperloop rather than overnight on a ferry through the Baltic. (Reporting By Axel Bugge; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
(Reuters) - Japan Display Inc is in advanced talks to receive a bailout amount of about 75 billion yen ($704.49 million) from Innovation Network Corp of Japan (INCJ), a government-backed fund and the display maker's largest shareholder, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The two companies are looking at options including the issuance of subordinated bonds by Japan Display to INCJ, the Journal reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter. INCJ owns a 35.58 percent stake in Japan Display, according to Thomson Reuters data. Japan Display's banks also are considering additional support for the company, the Journal reported. No final decision has been made yet, according to the report. INCJ was not immediately available for comment and Japan Display could not be immediately reached. Japan Display said on Wednesday it was slashing 30 percent of its workforce, or 4,700 jobs, to improve profitability but added that concerns about its cash position have eased as it is seeing strong demand for its screens from Chinese smartphone makers. The firm faced a funding crunch earlier this year and took out short-term loans from lenders due to slower iPhones-related demand from Apple Inc, whose products account for more than half of Japan Display's sales. Japan Display was formed in 2012 by combining the display units of Hitachi Ltd , Sony Corp and Toshiba Corp. (Reporting by Gaurika Juneja; Editing by Amrutha Gayathri)
Tencent comany name is displayed at a news conference in Hong Kong, China March 17, 2016. REUTERS/Bobby Yip/File Photo

By Sijia Jiang

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd is giving its employees more than HK$1.7 billion ($220 million) worth of company shares to help celebrate its 18th anniversary.

Asia's most valuable listed company will give every employee 300 company shares to mark its foundation on November 11, 1998, it said on its official WeChat account on Friday afternoon.

The giveaway accompanies an online shopping frenzy in China on Friday with sales celebrating Singles Day led by Tencent rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

With Tencent stock at HK$200 apiece - making it the most valuable company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange - the giveaway is worth HK$60,000 ($7,735) to each of the firm's 31,557 employees.

Tencent founder and chairman Pony Ma has been giving away virtual "red envelopes" with amounts ranging from 188 yuan to 1,888 yuan on WeChat on Friday. Tencent prepared 30 million yuan worth of gift money for its current and former employees and contractors to thank them for their contribution and mark its "coming-of-age", according to the WeChat post.

"(Alibaba founder) Jack Ma's employees are busy sweating over-time, Pony Ma's employees are busy counting cash" - a popular joke circulated among Tencent employees and on Chinese internet.

Alibaba on Friday smashed its own sales record 15 hours into the 24-hour discount shopping event that is now the world's largest shopping bonanza.

Alibaba is expected to rake in more than $20 billion in sales by the end of the day after overtaking last year's total of $14.3 billion on Friday evening.

The date of Tencent's foundation coincides with that of the festival also known as "Double 11" that has become a key barometer of Chinese consumer sentiment. Alibaba first launched the event in 2009 to encourage consumers without a partner to treat themselves.

The shares will be given to Tencent employees in three equal batches in three years starting from next week, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.

($1 = 7.7571 Hong Kong dollars)

(Reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Ruth Pitchford)
For months, if not years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk boasted that there hadn't yet been one death attributable to a Tesla with Autopilot mode switched on. But earlier this year, we learned that a Tesla driver in Florida was tragically killed when his Model S crashed into a tractor-trailer. It was later revealed that the Autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash but that Tesla's software likely mistook the white trailer for a road sign.

DON'T MISS: Target Black Friday 2016 ad leaks: Huge iPhone 7, Xbox One S, TV, and other tech deals

Since then, the number of stories centering on Autopilot-related Tesla crashes have continued to roll in at a steady clip. And even though most of those crashes are not fatal, it has prompted many to question ready or not Tesla's technology is sufficiently capable of ushering in an era of true autonomous driving.

In the wake of these complaints, Tesla has seemingly implemented a two-pronged approach. First, Tesla has been vocal about stating that some Tesla accidents are a function of drivers using the Autopilot incorrectly, which is to say that they use Autopilot as an excuse to take their eyes off the road. Second, Tesla has implemented various fences around the Autopilot feature to lessen the opportunity for abuse. For example, Tesla cars will now alert a driver if they've gone too long without putting their hands on the wheel. If such alerts are ignored, auto-steering will eventually turn itself off.

Having said all that, Germany's transport minister Alexander Dobrindt all but demanded that Tesla stop using the phrase "Autopilot", arguing that it was incredibly misleading insofar as it leads customers to believe that their Tesla vehicles are safer more autonomously capable than they really are.

In light of that, Tesla recently hired a third-party survey company in an effort to ascertain if its owners truly grasp the capabilities and limitations of the Autopilot feature. As Tesla notes, "98% of customers surveyed said they understand that when using Autopilot, the driver is expected to maintain control of the vehicle at all times."

Story continues

The survey firm's results read in part:

A significant majority of german Tesla customers understand the meaning and functions of the Autopilot. On the one hand they are aware of the car warnings that Tesla provides, on the other hand the customers also know that they have to keep control over their car. Different to what is heard in the media, Tesla owners absorb the information that appears on the center screen of the car. Besides that the name Autopilot did not cause the customers to believe that the car is fully autonomous. Based on the warnings about 98% of the current Tesla owners understand to maintain control of the vehicle at all times.

The survey's results can be read in their entirety over here.

Trending right now:

See the original version of this article on BGR.com
Imax on Thursday said it has raised $50 million for a virtual reality fund, working with strategic investors to create at least 25 interactive VR content "experiences" over the next three years for the local mall and multiplex.

The giant-screen exhibitor is already working with tech developer Starbreeze on its VR content, using the Swedish company's headsets and games. VR content will eventually come from Hollywood filmmakers using a camera that Imax is building with Google.

The company also is in advanced talks with Hollywood studios, gaming publishers and others about developing VR content. Imax has now revealed that strategic investors in the $50 million VR fund include hardware maker CAA; Acer; China Media Capital; China's Enlight Media; Studio City, an investment company active in China; and WPP, the advertising and marketing services giant.

Imax said its VR product will roll out across all VR platforms and at previously announced Imax VR centers. "We will be leveraging our collective relationships with world-class filmmakers and content creators to fund VR experiences that excite and attract a larger user base to capitalize on opportunities across all VR platforms including Imax VR," Imax CEO Richard Gelfond said in a statement.

The first pilot VR centers are planned for Los Angeles and at Odeon & UCI Cinemas Group's Printworks multiplex location in Manchester, England. Imax also plans additional test facilities to open in the U.S., China, Japan, the Middle East and Western Europe in the coming months.

Imax expects that the VR experiences, typically lasting around 10 minutes, will cost between $7 and $10 and that VR content developed will be tied to film franchises. The company also expects to follow its screen tech business model, licensing the VR equipment to theater operators and malls and then taking a percentage of the revenue.

Read more: Imax to Open VR Locations in Multiplexes, Malls
Kin say it has been a long standing request which went unnoticed during and the previous Congress regime and they now appeal before Prime Minister Narendra Modi to give Netaji his due.

By Indrajit Kundu: With the Reserve Bank of India introducing new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 currency notes in the market, family members of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose have reiterated their demand that Bose's image must also be used in new notes. They say it has been a long standing request which went unnoticed during and the previous Congress regime and they now appeal before Prime Minister Narendra Modi to give Netaji his due.

advertisement

"The demand to have Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's photograph on the currency notes has been raised by the people of India for many years. For whatever reason the Congress government did not accept the demand of the people of our nation," said Netaji's grand nephew Chandra Kumar Bose.

"Now that the new notes are being printed, I think in order to honour Netaji the NDA government must accept the demand of the people and have Netaji's picture put on the new currency notes," he added. The new 2000 and 500 rupee notes have the same Mahatma Gandhi image on both of them apart from modifications in the overall design from the old ones.

Chandra Bose, who joined the BJP earlier this year before the West Bengal assembly elections said, "Since Independence, Mahatma Gandhi's picture has been there on all notes but Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose who was the liberator of India has not received his due honour till date," adding that the NDA government has been trying to make amends to that histoical legacy.

"Modi Ji is trying to find out the truth about Subhash Bose by declassifying the files ever since he came to power. So in the same spirit I urge Modi Ji to immediately accept the people's demand and put Subhash Bose's picture on the new currency notes which will be released later," he added.

Not just members of the Bose family, even public groups like the Open Platform for Netaji & Mission Netaji that have been vociferously campaigning for declassification of all secret files on Bose have lent their suppoort to the family's demand.





Dear @narendramodi: Please consider issuing new bank notes with images of national icons such as Bhagat Singh, Babasaheb and Netaji. pic.twitter.com/kCkYGzGMsO Anuj Dhar (@anujdhar) November 10, 2016

Absolutely right. As a country, we must learn to respect and remember all those who brought us freedom. https://t.co/1faqXIYUGe Sreejith Panickar (@PanickarS) November 10, 2016

It is worth noting that currency notes issued by the Bank of Independence established in 1944 by the Azad Hind provisional government under Netaji at erstwhile Rangoon had Subhash Bose's image on them. Bose had established the Azad Hind Bank inorder to manage funds donated by the Indian community from across the world to aide his fight against the British Raj.

advertisement

The currency, of denomination one lakh, had a photograph of Bose on the left side and a pre-independence map of the Indian territory with the inscription "swatantra bharat" in Hindi on the other. In the middle are inscribed the words "Jai Hind" in English, with the words "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of one Lac" below it. On the top of the note is a series of flags of the Azaad Hind Fauj over a bold inscription saying "Bank of Independence" inscribed on top.

One such note was released for public viewing in Bhopal in 2010 on Netaji's 113th birth anniversary. In 1980 a person in Madhya Pradesh had discovered the note in his grandfather's old Ramayana who had served in the INA (Indian National Army) under Netaji.

READ | Operation Black Money: Here is the inside story of Modi's bold move







--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Mumbai, Nov 11 (PTI) The Bombay High Court has refused to grant relief to a BSF constable who was dismissed from service as he had unauthorisedly remained absent from duty for several days in 2011-2012.

"Even one day unauthorised absence of a constable of BSF must be regarded as serious... We are therefore of the opinion that there is no need to intervene in the matter," a division bench said while dismissing the petition filed by aggrieved constable Deepak Jadhav.

advertisement

"The very nature of duties attached to the petitioner as a security constable requires his presence and attention at the field. If his personal affairs compel him to stay away from duties, definitely the authorities, which have to maintain the discipline, have every reason to take harsh decision," the bench observed.

The constable had availed leave from November 2 to 20, 2011. Thereafter he did not report for duty and only on March 4, 2012, he joined duty after overstaying for 102 days. Later, he remained absent without seeking leave or permission from March 19 onwards. An order was passed on June 26, 2012, dismissing him from service. He then challenged the decision.

The impugned order indicated that within a period of 90 days from the date of dismissal, the constable can make an application for reinstatement. However, no such application was made within the specified period.

Later, Jadhav made an application and it was decided on merits by the authorities who rejected his plea for reinstatement on the basis of his past record and unauthorised absence from duty.

"At this stage, we fail to understand which order the petitioner intends to challenge by amending the writ petition. The latest order is nothing but reaffirming the dismissal order of June 26, 2012. As a matter of fact, we notice from the prayer in the petition that he has already challenged the latest order dated February 6, 2014," said the bench. PTI SVS DK ZMN SDM

--- ENDS ---
It is the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has concluded such a pact with a country that is not signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

By India Today Web Desk: India and Japan today signed the landmark civil nuclear agreemen t during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Tokyo, the External Affairs Ministry said - a move that will boost bilateral economic and security ties and facilitate US-based players to set up atomic plants in India.

Watch: PM Modi, Japan PM Shinzo Abe enjoying the Shinkansen bullet train ride



advertisement

The signing of the deal, witnessed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe, opens the door for Tokyo to supply New Delhi with fuel, equipment and technologies for nuclear power production, as India looks to atomic energy to sustain its rapid economic growth.

PM Narendra Modi said, "I wish to thank Prime Minister Abe for the support extended for India's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism."



JAPAN'S FIRST



It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has concluded such a pact with a country that is not signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The two countries had reached a broad agreement for cooperation in civil nuclear energy sector during Abe's visit to India in December last year, but the deal was yet to be signed as some issues were yet to be worked out.

"A landmark deal for a cleaner, greener world! PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo witness exchange of the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement," External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted today.



Also Read: Why a civil nuclear deal PM Modi will sign with Japan today is huge for India

WHY IT'S A LANDMARK DEAL

The deal would allow Japan to export nuclear technology to India, making it the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo. It would also cement the bilateral economic and security ties as the two countries warm up to counter an assertive China.

The accord stipulates nuclear fuel and equipment provided can only be used for peaceful purposes, and a separate document signed alongside the nuclear agreement has a clause allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducts a nuclear test.

There was political resistance in Japan - the only country to suffer atomic bombings during World War II - against a nuclear deal with India, particularly after the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

PM @narendramodi: I wish to thank Prime Minister Abe for the support extended for Indias membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. pic.twitter.com/FhUEYG5ZuB Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

advertisement

Japan is a major player in the nuclear energy market and an atomic deal with it will make it easier for US-based nuclear plant makers Westinghouse Electric Corporation and GE Energy Inc to set up atomic plants in India as both these conglomerates have Japanese investments.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mangolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.



Modi is in Japan as China's regional influence grows and Donald Trump's election has thrown US policies across Asia into doubt.

The two countries have also been trying to close a deal on the supply of amphibious rescue aircraft US-2 to the Indian navy, which would be one of Japan's first sales of military equipment since Abe lifted a 50-year ban on arms exports.

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: From Lalit K Jha

Washington, Nov 11 (PTI) President Barack Obama will meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and key European allies next week as he seeks to reassure other nations about the US role in the world following Donald Trumps election victory.

Obama is scheduled to leave on a week-long three-nation tour next week to Greece, Germany and Peru.

advertisement

The trip will highlight the Presidents commitment to trans-Atlantic solidarity, a strong and integrated Europe, and to cooperation with its Asia Pacific partners, the White House said.

Obama would meet leaders of top European allies including those from Britain, France and Germany during his visit to Berlin, said Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor.

On the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Summit in Lima, Peru, Obama would meet President Xi of China, Rhodes said.

"The Presidents schedule will underscore the linkages between our security interests and our economic agenda, our efforts to promote balanced, sustainable, and strong global economic growth, and our support for trade liberalisation and economic reforms that reduce inequality and deliver opportunities for the middle class around the world as well as regional economic institutions that foster private sector growth," the White House said. PTI LKJ NSA

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Bhubaneswar, Nov 11 (PTI) With the people, mostly in rural areas, facing difficulties following demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, the Odisha government today set up a state level Monitoring Group to track the situation.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik asked banks to open mobile banks or temporary counters in panchayats having no banks and said he would take up the matter with Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

advertisement

The decision to constitute the state level Monitoring Group was taken at a level meeting chaired by Patnaik and attended by officers of RBI, State Level Bankers Committee (SLBC) and senior government officials.

The Group will be headed by principal secretary, finance and representatives of RBI, SBI, SLBC convenor, principal secretary of social security and empowerment of persons with disabilities and commissioner-cum-secretary of panchayati raj department will be the members.

"The Group will track the development closely and brief the government on day to day basis," Patnaik said while asking banks to ensure that people do not face any harassment or delay when they come for deposit or exchange of notes.

Stating that 4,400 of the total gram panchayats in the state have no bank branches, Patnaik suggested bank officers to explore if mobile banks or temporary counters could be opened in those GPs and said the state government would provide the necessary support.

"I would be taking up this issue with the Union Finance Minister shortly," he said.

Of the 51,313 villages in the state, only 2,700 have bank branches. So people of remote villages have to travel to the bank branches as far as 15-20 km away to exchange or deposit Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes, officials said.

Official data shows that a total 4,889 bank branches were operating across the state by end of March this year. Out of them, 3,041 were of nationalized banks, 514 were of private banks, 991 were of rural banks and 343 branches were of cooperative banks.

Similarly, a total 6,028 ATMs were operating in the state, out of which the number was 1,784 in rural areas. There is no bank branch or ATM operated in tribal dominated regions.

According to reports from various places, brokers have started exploiting people taking advantage of the crisis.

Patnaik said the social sector beneficiaries like old-age pension holders, students scholarship holders, inmates of schools run by the government as well as MGNREGA workers needed timely payments.

"This should be closely monitored and appropriate remedial measures be taken in a proactive manner by the banks," he said. PTI AAM NN AQS

--- ENDS ---

advertisement
In a unique move, Pizza Hut is dropping in with free pizzas at banks to uplift the spirits of bankers and customers.

Pizza Hut is dropping in at select bank branches with free pizzas for bankers and consumers. Picture courtesy: Instagram/pizzahut_india

By Shreya Goswami: If you thought standing in a long queue was boring, you were right. But nothing could have prepared us all for the queues we've been facing since yesterday at Indian banks, thanks to the government's new currency policy.

With frequent quarrels and fights breaking out, bankers and consumers have to dig deeper within themselves to keep their spirits up. And if that sounds like an impossible thing to do, here's a bit of news that might help.

advertisement

Pizza Hut employees are dropping in at a number of banks all over India with slices of piping hot pizzas--and they're for free!

The employees of the popular restaurant chain visited select bank branches across Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru today. They served free slices to the hard-at-work bankers and throngs of customers waiting in the lines, along with a glass of water to keep them hydrated during this tough time.

Also read: The LOC Pizza at this cafe in Pakistan could just be the recipe for peace



And that's not all there is to it. The initiative got such an overwhelming response today, that Pizza Hut will continue to make the same efforts tomorrow and the day after as well!

So cheer up all of you waiting in lines to get your money exchanged! Pizza Hut is doing all of this just to make sure that you keep your chin up, and dig into pan pizzas and pizza slices.

This just goes to show that it doesn't matter how tough the times get--there's always some pizza around the corner to cheer you up!



--- ENDS ---
This is the second time such a conference is bringing together on one forum all heads of higher education institutions and is being convened by President Mukherjee.

By Manjeet Negi: President Pranab Mukherjee will host the second Visitors Conference i.e. a conference of Vice Chancellors, Directors, Director Generals of Institutions of higher learning for which he is Visitor from November 16 to 18 at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

This is the second time such a conference is bringing together on one forum all heads of higher education institutions and is being convened by President Mukherjee. Earlier, separate conferences were held of Vice Chancellors of Central Universities, Directors of NITs, IITs, IISERs and IISC.

advertisement

The agenda for the Visitors Conference includes:

(a) Creating world-class higher educational institutions

(b) Creating global alliance of institutes for research, innovation and technology development

(c) Making India a favoured destination for higher learning

(d) Technology-induced models of pedagogy

(e) Funding options for higher education.

On the first day of the Conference, the President will launch the National Student Startup Policy in the presence of Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Shri Prakash Javadekar and Prof. Anil D Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, AICTE.

The National Student Startup Policy has been formulated by AICTE with the aim to propel Indian youth to contribute to the nations socio-economic progress through promotion of technology-driven student start-ups. Through an exposure on entrepreneurship, the policy will lend crucial soft skills like decision-making in the students.



SCHEDULE

On the same day, eminent persons like KV Kamath, President, New Development Bank Ela Ramesh Bhatt (Founder, SEWA); Prof. Ramachandra Guha, (Historian); NR Narayana Murthy, Founder, Infosys will address the participants. An Industry-Academia session will also take place on the first day of the Conference where eminent personalities from Industry and Academy will participate. 32 Central Institutions and 65 industry organizations will exchange as many as 68 MOUs on the occasion.

On the second and third day of the Conference, there will be panel discussions and group work on agenda items of the Conference as well as a presentation on converting Rashtrapati Bhavan into a smart township and extending the experience to select villages through Smart Model Gram project.

President Mukherjee is Visitor of 126 central institutes of higher learning. The Conferences at Rashtrapati Bhavan have accorded an opportunity to heads of central institutions to share their views on a host of important issues that affect the higher education sector in India.

Recommendations and action points emerging from the deliberations are pursued by the administrative ministries, regulatory bodies, the institutions of higher learning and others concerned. This has resulted in significant improvements in our institutions and in the higher education system of our country over the last four years.

--- ENDS ---
After Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes on November 8, the nation lost its calm, and so did the social media. As many as 3,13,312 people 'unfollowed' him on Twitter.

By India Today Web Desk:

As soon as Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, he appeared to have lost over three lakh followers on Twitter.

According to the Twitter counter, Modi's Twitter handle lost 3,13,312 followers a day after the announcement was made.

Modi, who tweets from @narendramodi, has over 24 million followers on the social platform being a popular figure on the internet.

advertisement

As part of sweeping steps to check black money, Modi on November 8 announced that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes will cease to be legal tender from midnight.

The Prime Minister said in a televised address that all the 500 and 1,000 denomination notes can be deposited in banks and post offices between November 10 and December 30.

Soon after the news got out, people got out of Narendra Modi's 'followers' list as well.



--- ENDS ---
In the land of Shantiniketan, a thatched roof hut is producing doctors and engineers in an area that was the hotbed of maoist violence.

By Manogya Loiwal : What IIT-Kharagpur is doing today, Probhat Rajani- an education institute located in the same district- has been doing that for more than one-and-a-half decades but with a little extra.

Located in West Midnapore district of West Bengal, the institute aims to provide better education facilities for the economically weak students of Jhargram.

Known as Maoist infested region to the outside world, the area stood witness to Lalgarh Operation last decade to flush out insurgents from here. The land is land now yielding meritorious students, who fail to pursue their dreams because of being financial crisis.

advertisement

READ| Poor show of Bengal students in JEE Advanced 2016

Established in 2000, this institute offers free education for the aspiring engineers and doctors, who once established come back to teach next generation aspirants.

In the course of almost 16 years, this institute has proudly given out 400 successful doctors and engineers, who promised to return after getting established to teach the new students.

SAURAV GANGULY BATS FOR PROBHAT RAJANI



A thatch roofed hut is all this institute is made up of sans basic chair and tables. However it has developed a network of more than 800 students and alumni.

Parthabrata Maity, principal of Probhar Rajani said, "What IIT Kharagpur has started now- Earn, Learn and Return policy-, this institute has been doing since 2000. We don't let any meritorious student compromise on their dream of becoming an engineer or doctor because of financial problems. Sourav Ganguly also encouraged us to help the bright minds of Jhargram."

96 students from Probhat Rajani were among top 500 candidates selected in WBJEE this year.

Probhat Rajani runs on the funds collected from those students, who can pay their fees, but has been made free of cost for the poor children. The alumni network of this institute teaches the underprivileged.

SUCCESS STORIES CONTINUE

"In the year 2000 I went to Kalighat and met chief minister Mamata Banerjee. She told us that after completing the MBBS course, we have to come back to Jangal Mahal and serve the poor people free of cost and also take the responsibility of a needy student", said K N Mahata, a former student and now a teacher at Probhat Rajani.

With the aim of not letting a single bright mind go to vein, the institute pledges of producing more success stories of aspiring engineers and doctors each year.

This year more than 96 students from the institution got selected in the West Bengal Joint Entrance Exam (WBJEE) securing top 500 ranks. The number is all set to rise with every passing year.

(With Debendranath Tiwari in Jhargram)

ALSO READ:

Protesting students tell Bengal Govt to oppose NEET



--- ENDS ---
The 46-year-old leader was seen waiting in line and talking to people in front of the SBI's Parliament Street branch in the heart of the national capital.

By India Today Web Desk: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi queued up at a State Bank of India branch in New Delhi to exchange his old Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes following the government's decision to demonetise them.

The 46-year-old leader was seen waiting in line and talking to people in front of the SBI's Parliament Street branch in the heart of the national capital.

advertisement

An angry Gandhi said he has lined up in solidarity with the common people in the line. "I have come to exchange Rs 4000. I am asking why were common people driven out of the bank?" he said.

Rahul Gandhi in queue. (Photo: ANI)

Gandhi's colleague from Assam Gaurav Gogoi also tweeted about a note outside the bank, which said only Members of Parliament (MPs) were allowed to exchange their money.



"Notice outside SBI branch inside Parliament privileges MPs over officials and staff. This should be removed immediately @arunjaitley ji," Gogoi tweeted, calling for the Finance Minister's attention.

(Photo: Twitter@GauravGogoiAsm)

Gandhi and his party have attacked the government over the inconvenience caused to common people after the old Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes were declared illegal in an effort to check black money.

Also Read:

Demonetisation nightmare hits peak marriage season

Crackdown on black money: Is Govt's bold decision a real game-changer?

Modi's masterstroke, inconvenience to common people temporary: Amit Shah on demonetisation

Suicide, shock death, out of cash: How Modi's surgical strike on black money has hit some people hard



--- ENDS ---
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has said that there has been some communication between Donald Trump's political team during the US election campaign.

By Reuters: The Russian government was in touch with members of President-elect Donald Trump's political team during the U.S. election campaign and knows most of his entourage, one of Russia's most senior diplomats told the Interfax news agency on Thursday.

Accused by defeated Democratic contender Hillary Clinton of being a puppet of President Vladimir Putin after praising the Russian leader, Trump has dismissed suggestions he had anything to do with the Russian government during the campaign.

advertisement

But in comments that could prove politically awkward for the president-elect, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said there had indeed been some communications.

Also read: What does Donald Trump's HISTORIC win say about Americans?



"There were contacts," Interfax cited Ryabkov as saying. "We are doing this and have been doing this during the election campaign."

Such contacts would continue, he added, saying the Russian government knew and had been in touch with many of Trump's closest allies. He did not take names.

"Obviously, we know most of the people from his (Trump's)entourage. Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions," he said.

"I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives."

Also read: Hello President Trump, here's what Twitter feels about your win



Moscow was just beginning to consider how to go about setting up more formal channels to communicate with the future Trump administration, said Ryabkov.

A spokeswoman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

FBI INQUIRY

The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a preliminary inquiry in recent months into allegations that Trump or his associates might have had questionable dealings with Russian people or businesses, but found no evidence to warrant opening a full investigation, according to sources familiar with the matter. The agency has not publicly discussed the probe.

The U.S. government has blamed Russia for cyber attacks on Democratic Party organizations.

Trump, who has spoken of his desire to improve tattered U.S.-Russia ties, has said he might meet Putin before his inauguration, but Putin's spokesman has said there are currently no plans for such a meeting.

Also read: Americans protest against Donald Trump big time, president-elect calls it unfair



Interfax reported on Wednesday that Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, would be in New York this week for a chess tournament, a few blocks from Trump Tower, where the president-elect has his office.

advertisement

But it cited Peskov as saying he did not plan to pass any message to Trump from Putin.

The Russian parliament erupted in applause on Wednesday when it heard that Trump had been elected and Putin told foreign ambassadors he was ready to fully restore ties with Washington.

Ryabkov was more circumspect though, saying the Russian Foreign Ministry felt no euphoria about the Republican's win despite wanting to normalise relations with Washington.

Moscow and Washington are at odds over Syria, Ukraine and NATO.

Also read: 5 reasons why Vladimir Putin is to Russia what Narendra Modi is to India



Ryabkov said Trump's allies had made some tough statements about Russia during the campaign and that his ministry was therefore not harbouring any "rose-tinted" hopes.

"We are not expecting anything in particular from the new U.S. administration," Interfax cited Ryabkov as saying.

--- ENDS ---
By India Today Web Desk: Salman Khan's relationship with Iulia Vantur has been the subject of innumerable gossip columns. The actor has kept everyone guessing about his on-off relationship with the Romanian beauty, until reports emerged last week that the two have called it quits. According to a report on Deccan Chronicle, the break-up was not because of Salman's hesitation to commit as many tabloids speculated, but because of their irreconcilable differences.

advertisement

ALSO READ: After Iulia Vantur, is Salman Khan now seeing Urvashi Rautela?

ALSO READ: Did Iulia Vantur fast for Salman Khan on Karva Chauth?

The report quotes the source as saying, "There were too many differences between them, cultural and emotional. Not that the poor girl didn't try her best. She made every effort to play the 'good bahu' in Salman's family. She befriended Salman's mom and sisters, as Salman expects all his girlfriends to do. Sadly an ideal wife from Salman's friend Sooraj Barjatya's film doesn't seem to be part of his karma."

Iulia's friendship with her ex-lover also did not go down too well with Salman, said the source, and the Sultan actor ended his relationship with Iulia for good. If these reports are true, it looks like the nation's most eligible bachelor is not settling down anytime soon.

--- ENDS ---
Bollywood actor Salman Khan was today issued notice by Supreme Court on Rajasthan's appeal against his acquittal in Chinkara poaching case.

By India Today Web Desk: Bollywood actor Salman Khan was today issued notice by Supreme Court on Rajasthan government's appeal against his acquittal in Chinkara poaching case.

The apex court has also agreed to expedite the hearing and registry to decide the date of hearing.



The Rajasthan government on Tuesday had said it will file an appeal in the Supreme Court against the High Court's decision acquitting actor Salman Khan in two cases of chinkara poaching.

advertisement

"The government is studying the merits and demerits of the case and has decided to appeal against the decision in the Supreme Court," the state's Law Minister, Rajendra Rathore said.

The Rajasthan High Court had on July 25 acquitted Khan in two cases of chinkara (black buck) poaching in Jodhpur, while observing that the statement of a key witness could not be considered as he had "disappeared" and the defence could not cross-examine him during the trial.

The witness, driver of the vehicle in which the actor was travelling when the alleged incidents had taken place, surfaced after the High Court verdict and claimed Khan had shot the gazelle.

Two separate cases were registered against the actor under section 51 of the Wildlife Protection Act for poaching two chinkara, an endangered gazelle, in Bhawad village on September 26-27, 1998 and one in Mathania (Ghoda Farm) on September 28-29, 1998.







--- ENDS ---
People across UP, Kolkata, Delhi queue outside ration shops, not for new currency notes but sugar and salt. Here's why.

By India Today Web Desk: WhatsApp messages about shortage of sugar and salt created panic in some parts of the country today evening.

Reports also said that salt was being sold at exorbitant prices going as high as Rs 250 per kg, because of the shortage.

Fearing the number of days this would last, people crowded in front of the shops to buy salt and sugar.

advertisement

However, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav refused that such a crisis and asked the district magistrates in the state to take strict measures against the people who spread this rumour.

Mumbai Police also tweeted, "Please do not believe in any rumours. There is no shortage of salt or any other necessary commodity nor any price hike info."



#WATCH: Panic among people after rumours of salt shortage in UP, authorities say there is no shortage (visuals from Allahabad) pic.twitter.com/batUz6ylhM ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) November 11, 2016

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also refuted the rumours, "Some people are spreading rumours that there is shortage of salt and sugar, this is false."

Some people are spreading rumours that there is shortage of salt and sugar, this is false: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Ram Vilas Paswan said that there is no shortage and appealed the state governments to take action against the person spreading rumours.

No shortage of salt, prices are the same. State Govts need to take action on those who spread rumours: Food minister Ram Vilas Paswan pic.twitter.com/v35TX3mctW ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

I appeal state Govts to take action if any wrongdoing, or rumour mongering is taking place: Food minister Ram Vilas Paswan pic.twitter.com/Px3RslfNHd ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

--- ENDS ---
The maths teacher, Pushpendra Patel, chopped off the hair of students saying they did not come to school to show off their hair.

By Press Trust of India: A government school teacher has been arrested for allegedly cutting off the hair of six girl students in Raigarh district of Chhattisgarh, police said today.

"The accused, identified as Pushpendra Patel, posted as maths teacher at Government Higher Secondary School, Naharpali under Bhupdeopur police station limits, was held last night based on the complaint of the students' relatives," Raigarh Additional Superintendent of Police UBS Chauhan said.

advertisement

As per the complaint, Patel forcibly chopped off the hair of six girl students of class IX and X with a pair of scissors yesterday, saying they come to school for studying, not to show off their long hair.

Also read: DU Professor Nandini Sundar will not be arrested, Chhattisgarh tells Supreme Court



When the students reached home, they narrated the incident to their parents, who approached the police, he said.

The accused was booked under IPC Sections 352 (assault or criminal force), 509 (act intended to insult the modesty of a woman) and Section 23 of Juvenile Justice Act, the ASP said.

Further investigation into the case is on.

--- ENDS ---
Earlier, I had nothing to lose, so, I did a lot of things and didn't question them but now may be I don't," Shah Rukh Khan says.

Shah Rukh Khan says directors do not offer him variety of roles as they do have perceptions about him.

By Mail Today: Superstar Shah Rukh Khan says filmmakers do not offer him variety of roles as they have a perception about him, thanks to his stardom.

"Stardom hasn't restricted me but it is sometimes awkward to say that being in this position, the choices are fewer," Shah Rukh said at the launch of his biography, SRK: 25 Years Of a life, in New Delhi on Wednesday.

advertisement

"I sit with different directors and they say, 'We will make a big film!' so, even before I start working, the film becomes big and I say, 'Let's just make a film!' and it goes out of hands sometimes and everybody wants the film to be big," he said.

When asked if being a superstar restricts him, the 51-year-old actor admitted that commerce is something that stars cannot remain untouched from but he, on his part, has always tried not to change his approach towards work.

"It is a good excuse to make. If not excuse, then a good reason because people say stardom takes things out of you as an actor, and yes somewhere it happens that when you become a star you have little issues (about) Rs 100 crore, Rs 200 crore.

"Howsoever, if we remain untouched from this; it does come to our mind. You are in a business and hence, business remains in your head. But I would still like to believe that whenever I have got an opportunity, like a Fan or a Chak De! India, I have never questioned it.

"I have never designed a film for myself. Limitations also come from the people who you work with, said SRK. The actor added that people prefer making an out-and-out commercial film with him and though he does not blame them, he does feel this approach puts limitations on him. "A lot of people will offer me a film saying, 'Why should we make an offbeat film with you, let's make a commercial movie.' I am not blaming them; it is a good thought because if I sell, then selling me is but natural.

"I can't be two-faced about it because even I sell many things. It's a business finally. "Having said that, I have tried to maintain some kind of balance. Earlier, I had nothing to lose, so, I did a lot of things and didn't question them but now may be I don't, but people around me question, 'Will this work? Should you do another love story?' I don't listen to them," the superstar said.

--- ENDS ---

advertisement
After receiving a series of derogatory messages from a stalker named KG Guruprasad, actor Shruti Haasan has filed a police complaint in Chennai.

By India Today Web Desk: Shruti Haasan, who is currently shooting for the Telugu film Katamarayudu, has filed a complaint against a stalker named KG Guruprasad, a Karnataka-based doctor, who allegedly threatened to murder the Premam actor.

ALSO READ: Gautham Menon to team up with Vikram for his next?



ALSO READ: Soundarya Rajinikanth to direct Dhanush's Velai Illa Pattadhari 2



According to The Times Of India, the stalker has been sending a series of derogatory messages on Twitter since September 7.

advertisement

Shruti Haasan has approached the Cyber Crime Grievance Cell in Chennai and lodged a complaint against the person, who even threatened to kill her.

In the report, Shruti, the elder daughter of veteran actor Kamal Haasan, has mentioned that the person has been sending ill-intended messages on Twitter since September.

Earlier to this, it must be noted that Shruti Haasan was attacked by a stalker at her residence in Mumbai in 2013.

Meanwhile, Shruti Haasan will be next seen in powerstar Pawan Klayan's Katamarayudu, which is directed by Dolly.

Produced by Sharrath Marar, the film is a Telugu remake of Tamil blockbuster Veeram. The film which has music by Devi Sri Prasad is slated to release next year.

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Jabalpur, Nov 11 (PTI) The Madhya Pradesh High Court today disposed of a PIL demanding probe by a sitting high court judge into the alleged encounter deaths of eight SIMI activists on the outskirts of Bhopal, asking the petitioner to approach the judicial commission instead.

A division bench here headed by acting Chief Justice Rajendra Menon also refused to monitor the probe, as demanded by journalist Awdhesh Bhargava who questioned the genuineness of the police encounter.

advertisement

During the hearing, Additional Advocate General Purshendra Kourav informed that the government had constituted a judicial commission comprising retired high court judge S K Pandey to conduct inquiry into the encounter.

The commission had been asked to complete the inquiry in three months and there was no need for the high court to monitor the probe separately, he said.

The court accepted the argument and disposed of the petition, asking Bhargava to approach the commission with his submission. Eight undertrial activists of the banned outfit Students Islamic Movement of India were killed in the alleged encounter with police on October 31 after they escaped from the Bhopal Central Jail. PTI Cor MAS KRK ZMN BAS

--- ENDS ---
The company ditched its 'one cup for the festive season' policy to go with the designs made by 13 women from six countries.

By Shreya Goswami: If you're a Starbucks fan, you must have heard of the uproar over the minimalist red cup the coffee chain launched for its holiday season last year. The usual pretty green cup turned plain red to mark the coming of Christmas, but not many enjoyed it.

In case you didn't know, Starbucks first launched the holiday cup in 1997. Since then, the red cup has become symbolic of Christmas season in the US of A. So wen the crowds saw the bare red cup hat was released last year, they lost their cool.

advertisement

This year, the red cup has returned. And before you jump to any conclusions, it's not bare like last year.

The new cups were launched on 10 November. Picture courtesy: Twitter/starbucksnews

In fact, a number of customers reacted to the bare red cup by drawing Christmas-themed sketches on them. What Starbucks as done this year is to select the 13 best cups drawn out by customers, mass produced them, and launched them as this year's holiday cups!

Also read: Attention tea lovers! Your humble cuppa has just got a five-star makeover



The selected 13 cups were designed by these women from six different countries: Birds & Flowers, by Florencia from Bandung, Indonesia; Holiday Lights, by Maria Lauren from New York City, United States; Birch Forest, by Chloe from Plainfield, Illinois, United States; Candy Canes,Jennifer from Seattle, United States; Ornaments, by Anz Soza from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Woodland Deer, by Samantha from Broomall, Pennsylvania, United States; Love and Joy, by Anna from Toronto, Canada; Poinsettia, by Christina from Bakersfield, California, United States; Graphic Swirls, by Erica from Markham, Ontario, Canada; Snowflake Sweater, by Alisa from St. Petersburg, Russia; Evergreen Forest, by Bronwyn from Moscow, Idaho, United States; Sleigh Ride, by Eun Joo from Daejeon, South Korea; and Wooden Wreath, by Tracy from Los Angeles, United States.

The new holiday cups were designed by 13 women from six countries. Picture courtesy: Instagram/amillee_secondhand The new holiday cups were designed by 13 women from six countries. Picture courtesy: Instagram/amillee_secondhand

That's the story behind these 13 beautiful holiday cups, which have already hit the stores in America on 10 November(the very day Donald Trump emerged as the President-elect).

In case you're wondering why the cups were released on this particular day, you should know this--according to a report by Business Insider, the Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, endorsed Hillary Clinton's candidacy back in September. On 10 November, he was reported to be left aghast by the election results, and encouraged his employees to move 'onward together'.

Perhaps, the cups are meant to bring in some joy into the world at a time when we need it the most?

Whatever the reason, these 13 red holiday cups are here to stay, and we hope to see them in India soon.



--- ENDS ---
In an interview with the India Today Group, Punjab deputy CM Sukhbir Singh Badal asserted that the SAD-BJP government was not ready to share Sutlej river water despite SC ruling.

By India Today Web Desk: Despite the supreme court ruling, Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal on Friday said that his government would not share the Sutlej water with any other state. Badal asserted that Sutlej water is the lifeline of Punjab.

Speaking with India Today Group, Sukhbir Singh Badal said, "It (Sutlej Yamuna Link Canal) is an emotional issue for Punjab. It is not an election issue. We will not let even a single drop of water go out of the state. It is the lifeline of Punjab."

advertisement

READ: Sutlej Yamuna Link Canal and the controversy around it: All you need to know



Meanwhile, all the 42 Congress MLAs in Punjab have tendered resignations in protest of the SC ruling. The Congress MLAs met Governor E S L Narasimhan on Friday over the SYL row. Punjab Congress president Captain Amarinder Singh also resigned as member of parliament over the issue.

Earlier, the supreme court held the 2004-law passed by Punjab assembly to terminate the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water sharing agreement with neighbouring states as unconstitutional.

The SC held that Punjab could not take a unilateral decision to terminate the water sharing agreement with Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi and Chandigarh.

READ: Punjab can't scrap water sharing with states, says Supreme Court; Amarinder, Congress MLAs resign

As the election fever grips the state, Badal spoke on a range of issues including the chief ministerial candidate of the SAD and post poll scenario.

'I AM NOT IN RACE FOR CM'

Sukhbir Singh Badal ruled himself out of the contention for the chief minister's post should the SAD-BJP ruling alliance gets back to power in the assembly elections.

Badal said, "Prakash Singh Badal will continue to be the chief minister after the polls. I don't want to be CM."

ON AAP CHALLENGE

Sukhbir Badal played down the role of Aam Aadmi Party in the upcoming assembly elections in Punjab. He said, "The Congress is our competitor, not the AAP, which does not exist in Punjab. People know about their track record and performance in Delhi, where they said one thing and did some totally different."

Responding to a query about the issue of drugs, which AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal repeatedly referred to as the key poll agenda, Badal said, "Development is the real issue in the assembly polls in Punjab, not the drugs. It is an illusion that the AAP people are trying to create."

READ: President's rule looms over Punjab

ON ROLE OF SIDHU

Navjot Singh Sidhu, who resigned from the BJP and had been seen being cozy to AAP as well as Congress at different times, is being considered a crucial player in these elections. But, the Punjab deputy CM rejected the suggestion that he could influence polls in Punjab.

advertisement

Badal said, "Navjot Sidhu is a comedian. Punjabis do not take him seriously. He tilts towards the party he gets the maximum rate from, be it Congress or Arvind Kejriwal."

"Sidhu does not matter in Punjab politics. He is not going to affect the election results anyways. He speaks about prominent people like the Badals to remain in limelight."

WATCH:





--- ENDS ---
The explosion, triggered by a suicide bomber, caused extensive damage to the building and shattered windows as far as 5 km (3 miles) away, a NATO spokesman said.

Afghan security forces investigate at the site of explosion near the German consulate office in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan on November 11, 2016. Photo: Reuters

By Reuters: Taliban militants stormed the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, ramming its outer wall with a truck bomb before battling security forces in a late-night attack that killed at least four people, officials said.

The explosion, triggered by a suicide bomber, caused extensive damage to the building and shattered windows as far as 5 km (3 miles) away, a NATO spokesman said. A local doctor said the blast and subsequent firefight also wounded 120 people.

advertisement

No consular staff were among the victims, but Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germany would review its lead role in the international mission in northern Afghanistan, where violence has escalated sharply during 2016.

Thursday's attack also underlines one of the tougher foreign policy challenges facing U.S. President-elect Donald Trump when he takes office in January. U.S. combat operations against the Taliban largely ended in 2014, but thousands of its soldiers remain in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.

The Taliban said the attack was in retaliation for NATO air strikes against a village near the northern city of Kunduz last week in which more than 30 people, many of them children, were killed.

Heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent "with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there", the Islamist militant movement's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone.

Taliban forces came close to over-running Kunduz last month, a year after briefly capturing it in their biggest success in Afghanistan's 15-year-long war.

HUGE BLAST

The NATO spokesman said at least one vehicle packed with explosives was rammed into the high outer wall surrounding the consulate, but authorities were investigating if a second car had been involved.

"The extent of damage to the city is huge," said Abdul Razaq Qaderi, deputy police chief of Balkh province. "This kind of an attack, bringing a truck full of explosives and blowing it up in the city, had never happened before.

"The city is still recovering from the shock."

Noor Mohammad Faiz, the head doctor in Mazar-i-Sharif hospital, said four bodies and 120 wounded, most hurt by flying glass, had been brought to the hospital.

Qaderi said German troops had shot two men on motorcycles who did not comply with orders to stop. German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said that incident was being investigated.

Foreign Minister Steinmeier said six people were killed. All German consular employees were safe and uninjured, he added.

After coordinating the response on Thursday, the government's crisis task force was meeting again Friday and would review Germany's role in the Afghan mission.

advertisement

"It was only possible to defeat the attackers and beat them back after fighting that occurred at the compound and in the building," Steinmeier said.

Germany, which heads Resolute Support in northern Afghanistan, has about 850 soldiers at a base on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, with another 1,000 troops coming from 20 partner countries.

INTO THE EARLY HOURS

The explosion occurred about an hour before midnight local time, a spokesman for the German military joint forces command in Potsdam said.

Witnesses reported sporadic gunfire from around the consulate and said the blast had shattered windows in a wide area around the compound.

"It was a prepared attack for which we made all arrangements," the Taliban's Mujahid said. "First a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden vehicle rammed the main building of the consulate and that enabled other fighters to move in and kill all the foreigners there."

He said dozens of German soldiers and intelligence personnel were killed in the attack. The Taliban often exaggerate casualties caused by its operations.

After Afghan special forces, German security personnel and NATO's quick reaction protection force intervened, fighting was over by the early hours of the morning, said Sayed Kamal Sadat, police chief of Balkh.

advertisement

At least one suspect was arrested from the area of explosion, officials said.

The heavily protected consulate is in a large building close to the Blue Mosque in the centre of Mazar-i-Sharif, where the Indian consulate was also attacked by militant gunmen earlier this year.

--- ENDS ---
The half-naked thief had barged into the store through an air vent and stole cash, and few other things from the store.

By Pramod Madhav: A robbery was reported at a grocery shop in Coimbatore and people were shocked to see a semi-naked man on CCTV footage, wandering inside the shop, stealing things.

A fruit and grocery shop owner recently reported of a robbery at his shop in Vadavalli, Caimbatore to the police but was hesitant to show the CTTV footage. When the police acquired the tapes from him, the video showed a man wearing nothing but a shirt while robbing the shop.

advertisement

The half-naked thief was seen entering the shop through an air vent. He reached for the refrigerator and took a few items and hid them inside his shirt.

The thief then reached for the cash drawer and took some money out of it. The thief then noticed the CCTV and out of panic, covered his face and began to crawl on the ground.

Also read: This Tamil Nadu man handed a beggar Rs 1000 note. He refused.



The CCTV footage showed the thief was inside the shop for nearly 45 minutes.

Madan, the owner of the shop saw the footage on November 7, when he noticed that a few items and cash worth Rs 78,000 was missing and informed the Vadavalli Police.

Police have filed a case and are searching for the thief.

Also read: Why Tamil Nadu is the overall most improved state in India Today's annual State of the States rankings?



--- ENDS ---
There was much anticipation as the board of directors of the Indian Hotels Company Ltd (IHCL), a Tata Group firm that owns the prestigious Taj Group of hotels, met at the iconic Bombay House, the headquarters of the $140 billion group. Cyrus Mistry, ejected a few days earlier as chairman of Tata Sons, arrived for the meeting amidst mayhem outside. Inside, there was unexpected bonhomie as Mistry chaired the meeting that took on record IHCL's second quarter results. The board-with seven independent directors, including HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh, former Hindustan Lever chairman Keki Dadiseth and industrialist Nadir Godrej-approved the financial results, as the company, on a stand alone basis, posted profits of Rs 27.65 crore for the quarter, compared to a loss of Rs 7.12 crore a year ago.

But what took everyone by surprise was what happened thereafter. In a statement to the Bombay Stock Exchange, IHCL's independent directors expressed "full confidence" in Mistry as their chairman, and "praised the steps taken by him in providing strategic direction and leadership to the company". This, they said, was to enable investors and the public at large, who trade in securities of the company, "to make an informed decision". This move by the independent directors punctured, in the public eye, the allegations that Tata Sons had levelled against Mistry, removing him as its chairman in a boardroom coup on October 24, saying his tenure "was marked by repeated departures from the culture and ethos of the group", without elucidating what exactly these departures were. The move also, to an extent, dispelled the popular notion that Mistry was fired for non-performance, and helped justify some of the arguments he had put forth in his letter to the Tata Sons board after he was shown the door.

advertisement

"[The move by IHCL directors] signifies that corporate governance has evolved in India," says Shriram Subramanian, the founder and MD of InGovern Research Services, a proxy advisory firm. "The views of the independent directors as a collective are being put out for the first time. The view seems to be in divergence with the actions of the promoter shareholder, Tata Sons. Tata Sons should put out the reasons for replacement of Cyrus Mistry as chairman." The IHCL board's statement was also significant considering that the boards of some of the other major Tata companies where Mistry is chairman are meeting soon to take the quarterly results into account, and could issue a similar statement. This has the potential to blow up the Tata-Mistry episode into a full-fledged showdown, tarnishing the well-crafted image of the Tatas. Mistry is chairman of seven of the 26 listed group operating companies of the salt-to-software Tata Group.

DAGGERS DRAWN

Mohan Parasaran, former solicitor general and an advisor to the Tata Group, termed the move by the IHCL independent directors a "well-crafted strategy for a long-term battle". "Tatas will have to take some precipitative action," he said, and questioned the hurry in which the directors took their decision to the stock exchanges. However, H.P. Ranina, a lawyer with the Supreme Court, said that the action to tell the exchanges quickly is laudable, and reflects the high standards of corporate governance the company board has adhered to.

Most point to the unceremonious removal of Mistry, without a convincing reason, as a sore point that will go against the Tatas. Tata Sons is an unlisted company and therefore accountable only to a limited set of stakeholders. However, its actions affect the entire Tata group of companies, and in a sense, all of corporate India, says Amit Tandon, MD of Institutional Investor Advisory Services, another proxy advisory firm. "Given the importance of Tata Sons to the group, and the respect that the Tata name commands across a cross-section of stakeholders, it is imperative for Tata Sons to disclose more than it has," he adds. "Leadership succession is like a relay race and it is important for both runners to be aligned for a smooth transition," says Kavil Ramachandran, professor and executive director, Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. The Tata board, which included nominees of the trusts, should have worked out along with Mistry a set of clear financial and non-financial goals for short- and long-term performance, all within the ambit of the Tata values, traditions and overall vision, he adds.

advertisement

"I don't know what goals Mistry was given. He was a board member for some time before he became chairman, so it would be surprising if he did not understand the values," says Morgen Witzel, writer, lecturer and consultant, who wrote the book Tata: The Evolution of a Corporate Brand. "My feeling is that this is a dispute about strategic direction, though of course, at Tata, strategic direction and values are closely connected."

SUPPORT FOR MISTRY

In his five-page letter to the Tata Sons board, Mistry had said that the amendments to the articles of association of Tata Trusts, a majority shareholder in the company, acted as a severe constraint and limited his ability to engineer a turnaround. He also named a few individual companies and projects-Tata Steel and its European arm, now proposed to be sold, Indian Hotels, Tata Capital and Tata Motors' Nano project, among others-and elaborated on why they needed to be fixed. The Group was staring at write-downs to the tune of $18 billion due to poor investments, he cautioned.

advertisement

Investors seem to have backed Mistry, going by the way the shares of Tata Group companies have performed under his leadership. Among the companies where Mistry is chairman, Indian Hotels topped the performance charts with 21.3 per cent annual growth in market capitalisation during his tenure, from December 2012 to October 2016. TCS (19.1 per cent), Tata Motors (17.1 per cent) and Tata Chemicals (14 per cent) followed. These could further complicate Mistry's removal from the chairmanship of group companies, unless a more plausible reason for his removal is put forward by Tata Sons. "There is no doubt about the legal right of Tata Sons to appoint or remove a chairman," says J.N. Gupta, a former executive director with market regulator Sebi. "However, the procedure adopted for the removal doesn't give much confidence."

"Bringing in Ratan Tata as interim chairman shows that there is no succession planning in place for planned and unplanned departures of senior executives within the group," says InGovern's Subramanian.

advertisement

In the past, there was no problem for the Tata Sons chairman to also chair the group companies, as all shareholders and directors seemed aligned on their choice. However, the situation is different now, with many board members of these companies sympathetic to Mistry. Also, unless the shareholders vote against Cyrus, the new chairman of Tata Sons will not automatically become the chairman of the listed companies.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Mistry is not planning to step down from the boards of the Tata Group companies. And, more and more boards may choose to repose faith in his leadership. While directors in each of these companies-Bhaskar Bhat and R. Mukundan in Tata Chemicals; Koushik Chatterjee and T.V. Narendran in Tata Steel; Guenter Butschek, Ralf Speth, Ravi Pisharody and Satish Borwankar in Tata Motors-are likely to side with him in a boardroom battle, it is the independent directors who'll play an important role (see graphic: Power Players). Some, like Tata Power's Nawshir Mirza, have publicly said Mistry was "a good chairman and has contributed good values in that role to the board and management".

BOARDROOM TO SHAREHOLDERS

If the independent directors do rally around Mistry, then Tata Sons will have no other option but to seek Mistry's ouster from the group companies by calling for extraordinary general meetings (EGMs) of each company. EGMs can be called by giving investors a notice of 21 days, and through electronic voting over three days, the chairman's removal can be sought. Considering that Tata Sons is a large shareholder, holding over 30 per cent in Tata Steel, Tata Motors, and Tata Chemicals alone, they, along with financial institutions such as Life Insurance Corporation of India, can sway the result. But retail investors have a significant voice too: Tata Group has more than 39 lakh retail shareholders, with Tata Steel leading the lot with over nine lakh. If it goes to the EGM phase, the board has very little role to play, says Subramanian. "Since it is e-voting, shareholders raising protest at an EGM is just drama, and inconsequential." If the individual company board disagrees with Tata Sons, it can recommend that shareholders vote against the proposal. But the final decision rests with the shareholders-the proposal will be decided based on a simple majority of shares of those who vote.

There is also a possibility that if Tata moves to remove Cyrus from the boards of individual companies, they will also probably move to remove independent directors who voted for him. Sources say the actions of Keki Dadiseth are also being watched keenly because while he is a director in two of the Tata trusts, he still voted for Mistry in Indian Hotels.

Tandon says the Tata Group needs to clarify whether Mistry will remain chairman of the major group companies, and if not, what the mode of transition would be. Moreover, the dual power structure at the group-which could create friction between the chairman of Tata Sons, and the chairman of Tata Trusts, Ratan Tata-should be reviewed. "Such duality blurs the lines of accountability and creates confusion in the rank and file,'' he says. "The group must put in place well-articulated roles, responsibilities and rights."

PICKING THE NEW CHAIRMAN

There are several names doing the rounds as potential candidates, including N. Chandrasekaran, CEO and MD of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS); Noel Tata, chairman of Tata's retail arm, Trent; S. Ramadorai, former TCS CEO; and Ralph Speth, CEO of Jaguar Land Rover, a division of Tata Motors. If the chairman's post is split, Chandrasekaran is likely to be CEO, given his success at TCS, which tripled its market capitalisation to Rs 1.09 lakh crore ($16.5 billion) in financial year 2016 on his watch. The chairman, then, could be someone from within the family, or even an outsider-but with close ties to Ratan Tata and in sync with his ideas.

"It is very difficult at this stage to make any guess on the new head for the Tata Group except to say that the person will need to have fair exposure to both manufacturing and services businesses and will command respect before joining," says Ramachandran. "The person should have strong trusteeship values so that there is no deviation from the overall vision and values of the organisation.''

"The new chairman will have two key tasks-to gain the trust of the group, and to gain the trust of the shareholders, all the while reassuring markets (especially overseas) that s/he has a firm hand on the tiller," says Witzel. "Whether that takes an insider or an outsider is hard to say. It may well come down in the end to character and experience; [someone]who can step into this very demanding and challenging role, and make it work, all the while protecting those all-important core values."

At the moment, all eyes are on the ousted chairman and how he fares in the upcoming board meetings. Also under scrutiny is Tata Sons' next move in the light of the rising support for Mistry from different quarters. From all available indications, however, the leadership crisis at the Tata Group is not blowing over in a hurry.

Follow the writer on Twitter @MGArun1



--- ENDS ---
Tata Sons, which holds 26.51 per cent stake in Tata Motors, asked the manufacturer of Land Rover to convene an extra-ordinary general meeting of the company to consider its resolution seeking removal of Mistry and Wadia.

By PTI: Taking estranged former chairman Cyrus P Mistry head on, Tata Sons today sought his removal as well as that of the groups friend-turned-foe Nusli N Wadia from the board of Tata Motors.

Tata Sons, which holds 26.51 per cent stake in Tata Motors, asked the manufacturer of Land Rover to convene an extra-ordinary general meeting of the company to consider its resolution seeking removal of Mistry and Wadia.

advertisement

READ: Independent directors of Tata Chemicals stand by Cyrus Mistry



Mistry continues to be chairman of several listed companies of Tata Group even after he was removed as chairman of the holding company, Tata Sons.

These companies include Tata Motors and Tata Chemicals. The move comes a day after independent directors on board of Tata Chemicals reposed faith in leadership of Mistry.

READ: Ratan Tata vs Cyrus Mistry: Why Tata Nano could never become a 'Lakhtakia' car





Wadia is on the board of Tata Chemicals as well and is said to have switched sides to join the Mistry camp. In a regulatory filing, Tata Motors said: "The company has received a requisition and a special notice dated November 10, 2016... from Tata Sons Ltd, the companys promoter and shareholder representing 26.51 per cent of the companys voting capital, for convening an extraordinary general meeting of the company for considering and passing resolutions for removal of Cyrus P Mistry and Nusli N Wadia, Directors of the Company under Section 169 of the said Act."

Also Read:



Cyrus Mistry replaced by Ishaat Hussain as TCS chairman: Tata Sons

Here's all you need to know about Tata Sons' rebuttal of Cyrus Mistry's allegations

Tata Sons says Cyrus Mistry betrayed trust, sought control of main firms

Cyrus Mistry was given opportunity to resign, but he chose not to: Tatas



--- ENDS ---
The apex court has asked the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) to file a report within four weeks on the money spent in the construction of the 9.2 km stretch connecting the national capital with Noida, an important suburb.

By Anusha Soni: The Supreme Court today refused to grant stay on the Allahabad High Court judgement which had made the Delhi Noida Toll Plaza free for the commuters. The apex court has further appointed an auditor in the matter so that the apex court gets a perspective on the finances.

Earlier the Chief Justice of India T.S Thakur had said that it's important that an independent auditor looks into the cost and contract in the DND toll plaza. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India will appoint a representative that will submit it's report to the Supreme Court within four weeks.

advertisement

The Noida Residents Welfare Association, which had moved the Allahabad High Court seeking an end of toll, said the World Bank had estimated that it would take Rs 193 crore to build the DND. The group alleges that the actual cost of construction was Rs 450 crore, more than twice the World Bank estimate.

The DND flyway, which started operations in 2001, is believed to have already collected a total of Rs 2,000 crore in toll.

Last month, the Supreme Court had ordered the Noida Toll Bridge Company Limited to not levy further cess, telling the company it should not claim it has built "a road to the moon".

--- ENDS ---
Cassandra De Pecol is vying for the Guinness World Record for the fastest person to travel to all 196 countries. If you are not insanely jealous, you're lying.

By Geetika Sasan Bhandari: Chances are, you haven't of Cassandra De Pecol, or what she's up to. But if you enjoy travel, and dream of visiting countries in your life, then you will definitely be interested in this amazing lady's story once you read what she's doing.

Cassandra is a 27-year-old from the US who embarked on an amazing adventure in July 2015 with an attempt to visit all 193 Sovereign States (plus an additional 11 countries). According to Boredpanda.com, Cassandra has already visited 181 countries and is well on course to break the Guinness World Record for the fastest person to travel to all the countries in the world. She's travelling as an Ambassador for Peace on behalf of the International Institute for Peace Through Tourism and her journey, called Expedition196, is being documented on @expedition_196 (on Instagram).



Also Read: SEE PICS: Lisa Ray's Lebanese vacation will give you major travel goals



advertisement

Once she's done, Cassandra will not only be the world's fastest person, but also the first female and the youngest American to do so. She's also an athlete and has run the Ironman race several times. An environmental activist, she has been involved in Eco Tourism and Sustainable Hospitality since the age of 18. Her site, Cassiedepecol.com says she spent her college education studying Environmental Studies and has since worked with boutique hotels around the world to increase their energy efficiency and regenerative measures.

Some of the countries she's been to include Mongolia, Thailand, Indonesia, Bhutan, the UAE, Iceland, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland.



Also Read: Pictures of Ranveer Singh 'chilling' in Switzerland will make you crave a vacation

In one of her posts about Tunisia, she talks about how to immerse yourself in the travel experience:

"Being a traveler who likes to venture into countries with no preconceptions and an open mind, I'll admit that I was a little nervous about going to a place that's experienced as much turmoil as France and Lebanon in the past several months, just based off of the news. I knew nothing about Tunisia, other than it being a country in North Africa, and I wanted to keep it that way, hoping that I'd learn more about its beauty and history from the local people and a pair of open eyes. I chose to go two days without internet in order to fully immerse myself in the way of life here. I boarded a 14 hour ferry with Italians and Tunisians who either spoke Italian, French or Arabic. Upon disembarking, I was alone in the streets of #Tunis, not knowing the language and on a whole new continent. But I had confidence in myself and trust in the goodness of the people.



Tunisia has made it to my top 5 favorite countries I've ever been to. It blew me away with its beauty, allure, kind-hearted and helpful people and safety factor being a woman traveling alone. I felt 100% comfortable here. Tourism is really hurting here after the recent ISIS attacks, but despite this, people need not be afraid of traveling to these countries based off what they hear on the news. Fear is something I'm leaving at the door from here on out."



advertisement

See her incredible journey (and go all shades of green) though these photos:

In Christmas Island, a Pacific Ocean raised coral atoll in the northern Line Islands and part of the Republic of Kiribati

At the El Nido island in Palawan, Philippines

Running a 5k race in the gorgeous Phuket in Thailand

Enjoying a breathtaking sunset in Mongolia

At Tiger's Nest, Paro, Bhutan, where she arrived after a 1 hour 15 minute trek, and enjoyed the place sans her mobile phone and camera

At Angkor Wat is a temple complex in Cambodia and the largest religious monument in the world

Living the high life at Soneva Fushi in the Maldives



At Mogadishu in Somalia, a country not many would be keen to visit



In the beautiful Jordan







--- ENDS ---
The Army today paid tributes to its soldier Havaldar Satnam Singh who had attained martyrdom on November 9.

By Ashraf Wani: The Indian Army today paid tributes to its soldier Havaldar Satnam Singh who had attained martyrdom on November 9 in Machil Sector of Kupwara in North Kashmir during his duty on the Line of Control (LoC).

Homage was paid to the valour and sacrifice of the late soldier in a solemn ceremony held at Badami Bagh Cantonment.

advertisement

Satnam Singh had sustained a gunshot wound due to Pakistani sniping from across the Line of Control while he was deployed at a forward post in Machil sector. He was provided immediate first aid and evacuated from the post but unfortunately he succumbed to his injuries.

Singh was known for his high sense of duty and patriotism. Earlier, he had served in the specialist counter terrorist force, Rashtriya Rifles. The departed soldier hailing from Punjab's Amritsar is survived by his wife Baljit Kaur and three young children.

Saluting the brave soldier on his final journey, Lt General JS Sandhu, the Chinar Corps Commander said, "Every soldier, in his martyrdom, further inspires his comrades to thwart nefarious designs of the adversary."



--- ENDS ---
By PTI: From Lalit K Jha

Washington, Nov 10 (PTI) The World Bank today asked India and Pakistan to "agree to mediation" in order to settle on a mechanism for how the Indus Waters Treaty should be used to resolve issues regarding two dams under construction along the Indus river system.

The World Banks move came as it told the two countries that it was responding to their separate proceedings initiated under the Indus Waters Treaty 1960.

advertisement

Simultaneously, the World Bank held a draw of lots to determine who will appoint three umpires to sit on the Court of Arbitration that Pakistan has requested.

The draw of lots was held at the World Bank headquarters here.

"The World Bank Group has a strictly procedural role under the Indus Waters Treaty and the treaty does not allow it to choose whether one procedure should take precedence over the other. This is why we drew the lots and proposed potential candidates for the Neutral Expert today," said Senior Vice President and World Bank Group General Counsel Anne-MarieLeroy.

"What is clear, though, is that pursuing two concurrent processes under the treaty could make it unworkable over time and we therefore urge both parties to agree to mediation that the World Bank Group can help arrange.

"The two countries can also agree to suspend the two processes during the mediation process or at any time until the processes are concluded," Leroy said.

The Bank said the Indus Waters Treaty 1960 is seen as one of the most successful international treaties and has withstood frequent tensions between India and Pakistan, including conflict.

The Bank is a signatory to the Treaty.

The Treaty sets out a mechanism for cooperation and information exchange between the two countries regarding their use of the rivers, known as the Permanent Indus Commission which includes a commissioner from each of the two countries.

It also sets out a process for resolving so-called "questions", "differences" and "disputes" that may arise between the parties.

The current proceedings under the treaty concern the Kishenganga (330 megawatts) and Ratle (850 megawatts) hydroelectric power plants.

The power plants are being built by India on Kishenganga and Chenab Rivers.

Neither of the two plants are being financed by the World Bank Group. PTI LKJ NSA

--- ENDS ---
This New York woman described her warm encounter with Hillary and Bill Clinton in a Facebook post and it has gone viral.

By India Today Web Desk: The unexpected happened. Donald Trump became the 45th President of United States of America beating Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.

America witnessed anti-Trump protest wherein thousands of people chanted "not my president" while rallying. Demonstrations were held outside Trump's properties and protest took place in at least 25 US cities.

Clearly, many Americans could not believe that Hillary had lost the presidential race. A New York woman was one of them and was heartbroken since the result came out so to keep her mind off it, she decided to go for a hike.

advertisement

Little did she know that she would meet Hillary Clinton.

Also read: Why Hillary and Bill Clinton wore the colour purple

In a Facebook post, Margot Gerster describes her encounter with both Hillary and Bill Clinton. She went to Chappaqua and got a surprise when she ran into the Clinton couple on the trail.

While Hillary Clinton was walking her dog in upstate New York with her husband in Chappaqua where the couple owns a house, Margot was hiking with her 13-month-old daughter Phoebe.

The hiker told Hillary that one of her proudest moments as a mother was taking her daughter along to vote for democrat nominee.

Margot posted a pic of a chance encounter she had on a hike today in Chappaqua, New York. Hillary sure looks relaxed and happy. pic.twitter.com/0eCDjMuF1Z Trevor Donovan (@TrevDon) November 11, 2016

"She hugged me and thanked me and we exchanged some sweet pleasantries and then I let them continue their walk", she wrote. She posted a picture of her with Hillary which was apparently taken by Bill Clinton and the post has gone viral on social media.

Also read: Google shows Hillary Clinton's photo on searching pathological lying. We tell you why







--- ENDS ---
Five women and two men were arrested who had committed burglary in the area of PS Greater Kailash on November 7.

By Tanseem Haider: Based on a tip off, seven burglars of a gang including 5 women have been arrested by the Police of Soorvar, Ajmer. The gang was headed by one Savra resident of Ajmer, Rajasthan.

These burglars used to live temporarily under the Nehru Place flyover. The gang had committed burglary in the area of PS Greater Kailash on November 7, wherein they stole cash of Rs 5 lakhs and jewellery worth Rs 15 lakhs, subsequent to which they left for their native place at Sarsunda village, Ajmer.

advertisement

Also read: Rahul Gandhi queues up to exchange Rs 4000 at bank near Parliament



The police recovered cash worth Rs 1 Lakh and gold/diamond jewellery weighing 523 grams from their possession.

--- ENDS ---
Ive seen a lot since the fall of 1972, when as a 16-year-old I first got involved in politics driving the back roads of Missouri stuffing mailboxes for George McGovernbut today I am as much in shock as everyone at the turn our country took on Tuesday.

President-elect Donald Trump is a demagogue who has demeaned women, ridiculed the disabled, and fanned the flames of racial and ethnic hatred. He is a threat not only to values you and I hold dear, but also to the cherished institutions of our country and our democracy. Dont underestimate for a minute the enormity of the challenge we now face.

In the days and months ahead, In These Times will stand in solidarity with and unequivocally defend all who have reason to fear for their future, whether thats undocumented immigrants Trump plans deport, Muslims who he vows to ban, workers whose rights hes threatened, women whose right to health care he plans to assault, or our planet itself. And we will be reporting from the front lines of the resistance to Trumps presidency, which we are already seeing play out in protests across the country.

As devastating as Trumps victory is, to call this Trumps America would be to overlook the fact that a clear majority of voters cast their ballot against him.

But what happened on Election Day was not simply a result of too many voters turning toward Trumpismit was the predictable outcome of the Democratic Partys decades-long turn away from working people in favor of corporate interests. With the Democratic Partys neoliberal establishment now discredited, the wing of the party led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is ascending. Lets embrace that opportunity.

Over the past 12 months, more and more people have come to see that another, better world is possible. We have already witnessed a true political revolution, not just in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign, but also in the new and revived movements for economic, racial and environmental justice, and for workers rights. We cant lose sight of that.

Young people voted overwhelmingly for this vision of a progressive America, and the future belongs to them. But its up to all of us to do our part to help build that better world.

With the election over, our challenge is twofold. First, stand up to the worst excesses of the Trump presidency. Second, begin the hard work of creating a new political base that truly speaks to the needs of working people.

Thats the task we rededicate ourselves to today.

In the weeks ahead, well be kicking off one of the most important end of year fundraising drives in the 40-year history of the magazine -- but if youre ready to join us in this work now, you can make a tax-deductible donation today, or subscribe to In These Times magazine here.

Remember that you are not alone, there are millions on our side who believe in creating a more just and equal society. We still have the opportunity to write the future of this country that we want to see. Lets seize it, together.
Phrenic, ansthetic, anti-spasmodic and hypnotic. Unlike opium, it does not constipate the bowels, lessen the appetite, create nausea, produce dryness of the tongue, check pulmonary secretions or produce headache. Used with success in hysteria, chorea, gout, neuralgia, acute and sub-acute rheumatism, tetanus, hydrophobia and the like.

Advertisement kept these patent medications in the public eye and gave the belief that no disease was beyond the cure of patent medication. The medicine mans key task quickly became not production but sales, the job of persuading ailing citizens to buy his particular brand from among the hundreds offered. Whether unscrupulous or self-deluded, nostrum makers set about this task with cleverness and zeal.

The process was so simple that for the first part of the 19th Century "Tincture Cannabis" was the domain of the local apothecary shop. But all of that would soon change. By the late 19th century, Brand-Name drugs slowly began to replace locally (apothecary shop) made products. People really wanted the security and presumed superior quality that only a "Brand-Name" could give them. As an example, the Cannabis Tincture used by the great American writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow (who wrote much-quoted articles about his experiences with Cannabis) was a brand name product manufactured by Tilden & Company of New Lebanon, New York. Without question, he could have bought a much cheaper, locally made product, but chose instead to use a well- known Brand-Name product.

 the compounders of such nostrums used a primitive version of branding to distinguish their products from the crowd of their competitors.

Lets step back from the supercharged atmosphere of this weeks electoral events and focus on a curious side-show. First, perhaps for the sixthtime in U.S. electoral history, the winner of the electoral vote did not win the popular vote. Second, several American states were simultaneously holding various ballot initiatives on the legalization of cannabis. This Kat began to wonder: has there ever been a juxtapose between the two in connection with any previous presidential election? Mirabile dictu the answer is yes, the election of 1876. And in this lies a unique tale about Samuel J. Tilden, Tilden's Extract, and the world of intellectual property during that period. Samuel J. Tilden was the presidential nominee of the Democratic party in 1876, running against the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes . Tilden won the popular vote over Hayes, but he lost the vote in the Electoral College. It seems that the Electoral Commission, charged with resolving the issue, voted on partisan grounds in favor of Hayes. Popular wisdom also says that Tilden lost the electoral vote as result of an agreement, whereby Democrats agreed to Hayess election in exchange for removing all Federal troops from the South, thereby ending the Reconstruction_Era that followed the U.S. Civil War.OK Kat, I get the idea about the popular and Electoral College votes, but what does this have to do with cannabis? It turns out that the Tilden family was widely identified at that time with Tilden & Company, which manufactured and sold a medical cannabis extract (described as a pure medicinal extract) under the company name. The product was popularly known as Tilden's Extract, and it was a type of so-called patent medicine (more on that below). Tilden's Extract was described as cannabis indicia, being Indian hemp (The true Cannabis Indica is imported from India [and]  is cultivated largely in parts of Europe and Asia.).Advertisements for Tilden's Extract characterized it as--The origin of Tilden's Extract was a formulation made by a well-known (in his time) English botanist named J ames Edward Smith , who inter alia had founded the Linnean Society of London . It is not clear when Smith arrived at the formulation for Tilden's Extract, but it seems to have been at the end of the 18th or beginning of the 19th century. Nor could this Kat find any definitive explanation how this formulation reached Tilden & Company. What does seem clear is that, by the time that Tilden & Company begin to manufacture and market the medicinal cannabis product, Smith had no claim of patent rights (or, more likely, he never had any claim of rights).As noted, Tilden's Extract was a type of patent medicine (also called a nostrum). This does not mean that these products were necessarily the subject of patent protection (which was almost never the case). Rather, the use of the term derives from a practice in the late 17th century, whereby a letters patent was given to certain favored manufacturers to use the fact of royal endorsement in promoting their nostrum, as part of what we call today advertising the product. The dubious quality of at least some of these patent medicines led to the term snake oil , which was one such patent medicine that was sold at the time.There is no indication that the quality of Tilden's Extract was suspect. Moreover, the product received a big boost when a 19th century author named Fritz Hugh Ludlow used Tilden's Extract recreationally, and published a book, called The Hasheesh Eater , about his experiences with the cannabis product. But the more sustained key to the products success was in its advertising and branding. As described by WikipediaThe development of the branding of the medical cannabis product has been explained as follows:In effect,Two thoughts come from this consideration of Tilden's Extract.First, the family business did not appear to have affected Tildens political career. Indeed, it is possible that this name recognition mighthave even helped him. One wonders how a modern-day candidate, no matter how legal the activities related to medicinal cannabis have become in some jurisdictions, would fare at the national level with a company background such as that of Tildens family.Second, greater IP attention should be given to these early attempts at branding patent medicines. Indeed, some of them, such as Ludens lozenges, dating back to the 1870s, are still on the market.The upshot is that, even in the context of the U.S. presidential election of 1876, there was a IP back story worthy of mention.
During the American presidential campaign, Iranian state media had taken to airing American programming relevant to the political process, including the fictional political drama House of Cards and the last two debate between Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Khamenei also spoke out to the Iranian public in response to those debates, describing them as evidence of the low moral character of the American leadership. Furthermore, Rouhani responded to questions about the US election by expressing no preference for either candidate. Instead, he described the election as a choice between bad and worse.

On the other hand, the day before the election, some Iranian informed sources suggested that the Iranian establishment, particularly the avowedly hardline faction, harbored an unstated preference for Trump. The reasons given for this conclusion included the lack of an established relationship between Trump and Irans regional enemies, Saudi Arabia and Israel. In fact, the campaign between Trump and Clinton had extensively highlighted apparent connections between Trump and Russia, which has been growing increasingly close to Iran, especially against the backdrop of the Syrian Civil War, in which Iran and Russia both support President Bashar al-Assad.

These alleged ties to one of Irans key allies may bolstered another factor, the notion that the Republican presidential candidate might turn out to be more willing to open up back-channel discussions with the Iranians, as had Republican President Ronald Reagan at the time of the Iran-Contra affair.

Such back-channel talks would be made even more likely by comparative disinterest in issues like Irans human rights abuses. Some analysts suggested that this sort of disinterest might be more likely from the Republican candidate than from the Democrat, although it bears noting that human rights organizations had widely criticized the outgoing Obama administration for focusing too narrowly on the Iran nuclear deal, at the expense of human rights.

Still, there is no sign that Trump would be an improvement in this regard. While he has aggressively criticized the nuclear deal, even to the point of suggesting it is the worst deal in recent history, these criticisms have focused on how the US might have more greatly benefited from the deal. Contrary to some other critics, Trump has not emphasized Irans objectionable domestic behaviors in the context of the deal. Meanwhile, his positions on human rights have been called into question by his political opponents in the US because of specific remarks made on the campaign trail, including promises to reinstitute waterboarding and other forms of torture as military interrogation techniques.

But even if Trumps criticisms of Iran turn out to be limited in scope, they can be expected to be of much greater intensity than anything that has been seen under the presidency of Barack Obama, whom opponents fiercely criticized for permissive policies and even appeasement. Insofar as those critics view the nuclear agreement itself as an example of such policies, they are sure to encourage President-elect Trump to follow through on his campaign promises to tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

However, those promises were inconsistent and we contradicted by other statements suggesting only that he would somehow renegotiate the agreement, finalized in July 2015 between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. In the immediate aftermath of Tuesdays election, the Trump team appeared to have come down on the side of the less extreme threat. According to CNN, Trump foreign policy advisor Walid Phares has declared that the Trump White House will review the JCPOA and demand changes, but will not tear it up altogether.

By some accounts, the more extreme threat is unrealistic, in large part because of the multilateral nature of the agreement. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that President Rouhani had responded to Trumps election within hours by telling his cabinet that the incoming US president will simply not be able to tear up the nuclear agreement. Rouhanis Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif said much the same thing, enjoining Trump to fully understand the realities of todays world. But according to Reuters, Zarif also said that Iran has other options in the event that the US takes steps to undermine the deal.

Zarif made this comment specifically in response to questions from the international press regarding Irans nuclear enrichment program. In this way, his statements seem to reflect previous statements from more recognizably hardline Iranian figures who insist that the country is prepared to ramp up enrichment and expand it well beyond prior levels, in response to the merest provocation.

And depending upon the measures President Trump decides to take, that provocation may in fact turn out to be quite substantial. Although many Western analysts technically agree with Rouhani and Zarif that Trump will not be able to singlehandedly tear up the agreement, the Wall Street Journal pointed out on Thursday that there are definite steps he could take to overturn parts of the agreement, and that this could effectively undermine the whole thing. Those steps include ending American participation in the deals implementation and using the power of the executive order to revoke the relief from US sanctions that was granted to Iran under the deal.

While it is clear that the Iranians do not wish to lose that relief, what is not clear is whether they will be willing to do what is necessary to preserve it during the next US presidential administration. Although Rouhanis comments following Trumps election praised a recent Iranian strategy of outreach to the world, Foreign Minister Zarif struck a tone much closer to that of the Supreme Leader and other Iranian hardliners when he told reporters that he did not feel the need to develop a relationship with the next US Secretary of State, as he had with current Secretary of State Kerry.

We had a long nuclear negotiation between Iran and the United States. I do not expect another negotiation, certainly not on the nuclear issue, but nor on any other subjects, Zarif said, according to Reuters. In the immediate aftermath of the nuclear agreement, Supreme Leader Khamenei ordered his subordinates to avoid discussions with the West over issues unrelated to that agreement. He subsequently took a leading role in accusing the US of violating the spirit of the JCPOA by doing too little to help Iran in its economic recovery.

This accusations and the generally non-cooperative sentiment may give the incoming American president continuous incentive to either pressure Iran toward higher levels of compliance, or else to effectively cancel the deal. Incentive, however, does not necessarily equate to justification. But that justification may well exist in the form of perceived violations or actual, nominal violations of the JCPOA on the Iranian side.

On Thursday, Business Insider was among the outlets to report that the International Atomic Energy Agency had found Iran to have exceeded the quantities of heavy water it is permitted to possess under the terms of the nuclear agreement. The recorded violation was only slight, as Iran acquired 0.1 metric ton more of the plutonium-enrichment byproduct than that 130 metric tons that are permitted. However, this violation, which was revealed within hours of Trumps victory, was the second of its kind, and thus may be presented as part of a pattern of Iranian non-compliance, whether willful or negligent.

The first heavy water violation passed without serious criticism from the countries involved in the nuclear agreement. In fact, the Obama administration made arrangements to purchase the substance from the Iranians, in a move that was strongly derided by his Republican opponents, who went on to attach a provision to the congressional energy bill, barring the president from making similar purchases in the future.

Trumps past statements lead to the conclusion that Congress, which will have an even stronger Republican majority when he is sworn in in January, will not have to impose such constraints on the new presidents actions toward Iran. And if faced with more violations like the one just revealed by the IAEA, Trump will likely be much less forgiving, perhaps even to the point of threatening the life of the JCPOA.

Yet, despite his antipathy for that deal, some suggest that it is too well-established and too popular among other signatories for Trump to be able to pull out without risking serious political consequences. One CNN analysis speculated that those consequences would come in roughly equal measure from the three European members of the P5+1 group and from China and Russia. This is not to say that Trump would refuse to take such a step anyway, but there are other measures he could employ that would still be in keeping with his pre-election attitudes toward Iran and the nuclear deal.

One of those possibilities, the CNN piece goes on to say, would be to leave US policy on the JCPOA to the Republican Congress, which could put the survival of the agreement at risk while leaving the new US president with some degree of political cover.

Congress has already been making various efforts to undermine the agreement, but these have been obstructed by President Obama and his allies among congressional Democrats. This situation is poised to change dramatically in January, both because of Trumps Republican administration and because of the diminished power of Democrats in both houses of Congress.

There is some question about the degree of cooperation that can be expected between Trump and that Congress, given that some high-ranking legislative Republicans refused to support his candidacy. But the Iran nuclear deal seems unaffected by this factor. In fact, the Washington Post reports that an initiative to increase sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran is the very first item on the agenda of the Never Trump faction when it comes to working with the new president.

Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain are planning to reintroduce the Iran Ballistic Missile Sanctions Act on the first day that Congress is back in session. By thus compensating for some of the relief from nuclear-related sanctions, Republicans hope to put additional pressure on Iran, apparently with an eye toward encouraging Trumps renegotiation of the JCPOA.

The Washington Post also points out that there is support for such measures among some Democrats, including New York Senator Charles Schumer, who will be taking on the position of minority leader. It remains to be seen whether their support for expanded sanctions will translate into other legislative measures that will widely diverge from the policies put in place by President Obama.

But while we wait to see what role both Democrats and the Trump administration will play in the future activities of the Republican majority, that majority continues to pursue a raft of measures aimed at undermining the perceived permissiveness of the outgoing administration. First among these measures as of Thursday was a piece of legislation seeking to block the US government from financing a pending deal between Iran and Seattle-based Boeing for the sale of over 100 commercial jet aircraft.

According to the USA Today, the House Rules Committee is planning to convene on Monday to set terms for how the bill will be debated. Once debate has concluded, the bill is likely to pass the House, though its fate is less certain in the Senate. And even if it does pass the upper house of Congress, the bill would presumably face a presidential veto. However, any similar legislation that reaches the presidents desk after January will be certain to meet with a much different fate.
According to Parchizadeh, those who fail the vetting process will be barred from pursuing higher education, regardless of their qualifications.

The dean of the Islamic Azad University of Iran, Hamid Mirzadeh, has stated that all those who have already been admitted to the university will also be vetted by the Ministry of Intelligence and its dependent organizations.

Parchizadeh writes, The new law, passed by the Supreme Committee of the Cultural Revolution, has led to the screening of Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, vetting and barring the activities of all sorts of academics for ideological reasons has been the order of the day in Iran. The so-called Cultural Revolution of the early 1980s managed to purge all kinds of allegedly Westernized professors, students and staff from Iranian colleges. Many were expelled or arrested and imprisoned, and not a small number were tortured and killed. That was admittedly done in order to purify the Iranian academy and to render it Islamic.

Many programs in liberal humanities departments were deemed Western and Anti-Islamic, in recent years. Law, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and political science, have been replaced with Islamic counterparts, reflecting the regimes ideological stance.

In addition, foreign languages and literature came under heavy scrutiny. Militant versions of Third-Worldist and post-colonial theories that adopted radical anti-Western attitudes became the official discourse in Iranian humanities departments. Most recently, a number of universities and academic organizations have introduced separate courses for men and women, says Parchizadeh.

The new vetting process is one more way the regime shows its disregard human rights in general, and the Iranian citizens right to a free and liberal education in particular.
President Hassan Rouhani, on Wednesday, said that there is no possibility for the nuclear deal, made by the Obama administration with Iran, to be overturned by Trump, although Trump has threatened to do just that.

Phillips calls this an outright lie. President Barack Obama purposely structured the deal as an executive agreement to make an end-run around Congress, which he knew would oppose the flawed and risky deal.

Once hes been inaugurated, Trump will have authority to revoke this executive agreement. During his campaign, Trump has called the deal disastrous and said his No. 1 priority would be to dismantle it.

According to Irans state television channel, Rouhani told his Cabinet that Tehrans understanding in the nuclear deal was that the accord was not concluded with one country or government but was approved by a resolution of the U.N. Security Council and there is no possibility that it can be changed by a single government.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian Foreign Minister, urged Trump to accept the agreement. Every U.S. president has to understand the realities of todays world. The most important thing is that the future U.S. president stick to agreements, to engagements undertaken.

Phillips call this advice, laughable, since its, coming from the hypocritical leaders of a country that regularly violates international law by sponsoring terrorism, taking hostages, harassing shipping in international watersnot to mention violating U.N. Security Council resolutions by exporting arms to Palestinian terrorist groups, Hezbollah terrorists, Syrian militias, and Yemeni rebels. Phillips adds, Iran has also been caught trying to covertly buy illicit dual-use nuclear technology in Germany. This violates its commitments under the nuclear agreement to obtain international approval for all nuclear purchases. Trumps administration could use these violations to do away with the nuclear deal.

Trump stated that he will enforce the nuclear deal so strictly, making it clear that Iran is solely responsible for its demise.

During his presidential campaign Trump said, You know, Ive taken over some bad contracts. I buy contracts where people screwed up and they have bad contracts. But Im really good at looking at a contract and finding things within a contract that, even if theyre bad, I would police that contract so tough that they dont have a chance. As bad as the contract is, I will be so tough on that contract. Irans dictators have had an easy time out-negotiating and out-maneuvering the Obama administration, which eagerly sought to clinch a deal. The administration made huge concessions that allowed Iran to dismantle international sanctions without dismantling key elements of its nuclear program, which continues to advance.

From what weve heard during the presidential race, the Trump administration will take a much harder line on the Iran nuclear issue, one of the earliest foreign policy issues to be addressed.
Murphy says this this is the second time the 130 metric tonne threshold for heavy water has been surpassed since the nuclear deal was put in place last January. Heavy water is a material used in reactors, like the unfinished one at Arak, in Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) watchdog said that it had 130.1 tonnes of the material on Tuesday.

The first time Iran went over the mark, last February, when it exceeded the limit, with 130.9 tonnes, passed without major criticism from the U.S. and other countries who signed the nuclear deal, but there are questions as to how the incoming Trump administration will react to such incidents.

In a confidential report seen by Reuters, the IAEA said, On November 2, 2016, the director general expressed concerns related to Irans stock of heavy water to the vice president of Iran and president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran,  Ali Akbar Salehi.

Irans nuclear activities is being policed by the IAEA, under the deal it signed with the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany, which also lifted international sanctions against Tehran. As agreed to in the deal, Iran told the agency it would prepare to transfer 5 tonnes of heavy water out of the country, and a senior diplomat said Iran planned to carry out the shipment in the coming days.

Mark Toner, U.S. State Department spokesman, confirmed Irans intention to export the excess heavy water, when he spoke at a regular news briefing in Washington. Its important to note that Iran made no effort to hide this, hide what it was doing from the IAEA, Toner said.

A strict limit was not set on heavy water as was set for enriched uranium. The deal estimated that Irans needs to be 130 tonnes and states that any amount beyond the countrys needs will be made available for export to the international market.

President-elect Trump has called the agreement, which some view as one of President Barack Obamas top achievements, the worst deal ever negotiated and said he would police that contract so tough they (the Iranians) dont have a chance.
In a letter, Sedighe Moradi disclosed the crimes she saw committed by the regime in the 1980s. She calls on authorities and human rights organizations to legally prosecute the perpetrators of the Massacre of 1988.

She writes, I am Sedighe, born in 1960. I was charged and imprisoned in 1981 for supporting the Peoples Mujahidin Organization (PMOI/MEK). I was initially transferred to Ghezel Hesar and then to Evin Prison.

She tells how she witnessed how some prisoners being separated from the others, and subsequently shot. In a chilling statement, she says, By counting the shots at night, we could recognize that the prisoners were killed.

She was arrested once more, in 1985, again serving her time in Evin Prison. I was one of the witnesses of the great Massacre of 1988 that it continued from July to August of that year, she says, Many prisoners were separated from the ward which I was in and they were executed after that. The friends who bade farewell and never came back. Our friends such as Azadeh Habib, Ashraf Fadai, Monireh Rajavi, Mansoureh Moslehi and many of those who were arrested, and I cannot remember their names. I witnessed those whose verdict was issued and were executed. They even executed those who were not mentally and psychologically balanced. In one of the wards, only one person was left and the rest of the prisoners were executed. I can never forget those days. The pictures and incidents have stuck in my mind.

No word can describe the brutalities, she adds.

Sedighe Moradi was arrested for a third time, and sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment by Judge Moghiseh in 2011. She says, I have an eighteen-year-old daughter and I havent seen her for 5 years although I am 56 years old and suffering from different sorts of diseases.

As the witness of the Massacre of 1988, I call on human rights organizations, organs and all of those who seek truth, freedom, and humanity to legally prosecute the perpetrators of the Massacre of 1988 in order to reclaim the rights of those who were innocent. They must not withhold any attempt to follow the case, Sedighe Moradi concludes.

The NCRI also reports on number of political prisoners in Gohardasht Prison (West Terhran) prison who have written an open letter in support of Maryam Akabari Monfareds attempt to seek justice for her family members, who lost their lives during the 1988 massacre, by filing an official complaint with Iranian regimes Judiciary for an investigation, as well as for the families of other victims of the fatwa issued by the Supreme Leader. They also condemned the prison officials pressure against her.

Maryam Akbari Monfared is the first survivor of the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners, and this reason, she has been under pressure in the prison. Officials have denied family visit and hold her incommunicado.

The political prisoners letter read in part:

Last Wednesday, we were informed that the political prisoner, Maryam Akbari Monfared, has been held incommunicado for some time. Maryams three brothers and a sister were executed in the 80s, two of whom were executed during the massacre of political prisoners in the summer of 1988.

Now Maryams lawsuit itself, which is published in her letters, is considered by the regime as a crime and the corrupt regime in fear of these letters has resorted to psychological pressure and threats against her, and upon the orders of high prosecution officials her weekly phone call and meeting with her husband and children have been cut off until further notice.

With this approach, the regime not only tortures her but also inflicts suffering and mental torture on her husband and young children. In addition, officials of the prosecution office told her relatives the perpetrators of executions have already died (or are very old) why are you defaming Islam (the regime).

This is while we all know that members of Death Commissions are now holding high official positions and still engaged in their crimes.

No matter if the perpetrators of the 1988 massacre are death or alive, the regime and its high officials are responsible for these crimes, (justice must be served) and they must await their trial and punishment.

We, the undersigned, from Ward 4 Hall 12 of Gohardasht prison in Karaj sympathize with Maryam Akbari Monfared and support the lawsuit by families of the martyrs of 1988 massacre. We draw attention of the international community and human rights organization, in particular the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, Ms. Asma Jahangir, to the pressure put on these families by the regime.

The letter is signed by Reza Akbari Monfared, Saeed Shirzad, Mohammad Ali Mansouri, Behnam Mousivand, Saleh Kohandel, Saeed Masouri, Khaled Hardani, Javad Fouladvand, Hassan Sadeghi, Shahin Zoghi-Tabar, Ali Moezi, and Mehdi Farahi Shandiz.
[November 10, 2016] WinSystems Debuts Single Board Computers Built on Intel Atom E3900 Series CPU in PC/104 Form Factor for High-Reliability Industrial Environments

ARLINGTON, Texas, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- WinSystems today announced a new line of single board computers with dual Ethernet that feature the Intel Atom Processor E3900 Series for high-performance industrial IoT and other embedded systems. The leading manufacturer of industrial embedded computer modules designed its PX1-C415 SBCs to capitalize on the latest-generation PCle/104 OneBank expansion to support rugged applications. Not only do they withstand temperatures ranging from -40C to +85C, they deliver exceptional functionality and processing performance while supporting the latest Microsoft Windows 10 and Linux operating systems. The full-featured PX1-C415 SBCs incorporate dual video interfaces, dual Ethernet ports, four serial ports, 24x bidirectional GPIO lines, and USB Type-C and M.2 connectors in a form factor barely 4.5 inches square. "Engineers designing embedded systems for Industrial IoT applications look for the latest technology and a long product life cycle along with reliable operation and the ability to add functionality," said Technology and Engineering Director Jack Smith. "The PX1-C415's dense I/O mix is unique in this compact size and extended temperature range. It allows customers to easily connect and control the specific elements in their system for optimal performance." EXPANDED I/O OPTIONS AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE

A full sectrum of I/O expansion options, provided by its ecosystem of PCle/104 and M.2 modules, allows designers to easily add functionality and satisfy their unique project requirements. WinSystems' evolution of the rugged PC/104 form factor is also ideal for other embedded systems within the industrial control, transportation, Mil/COTS and energy markets that demand greater computational capabilities. Furthermore, these modules improve the performance of low-power x64 PC-compatible designs. The cutting-edge Intel Atom E3900 (formerly known as Apollo Lake) processors deliver more computing performance, faster I/O, and higher-resolution graphics than previous industrial CPUs while consuming less power.



The PX1-C415 series offers quad-core or dual-core System on Chip (SOC) for processing and graphics. It provides up to 8GB of DDR3-LV System RAM with support for error detection and correction. It accommodates up to two simultaneously active displays with interfaces available for DisplayPort and LVDS connections. For networking and communications, the PX1-C415 series utilizes dual Intel i210IT Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and provides eight USB 2.0 channels, one SuperSpeed USB 3.0 channel, four serial COM channels, 24 general purpose I/O (GPIO) lines, stereo audio and a watchdog timer.

Linux, Windows and other x86 operating systems can be booted from the eMMC SSD, SATA 3.0 or M.2 (PCle, USB, SATA) interfaces, supporting multiple data storage options. WinSystems provides drivers for Linux, Windows 10 and other PC-compatible, real-time operating systems. ACCELERATING DEVELOPMENT  EXTENDING SERVICE LIFE

The new PX1-C415 line leverages and supports the latest processor technology to improve performance while capitalizing on newer interfaces for greater design flexibility. It compresses time to market compared to designing a CPU or carrier board internally, or sourcing additional modules to attain the same robust functionality. "By integrating the latest industrial CPU designs, this state-of-the-art, small-scale SBC increases users' avenues for expansion, extending the useful life of their high-reliability embedded systems," added Smith. "What's more, WinSystems' customers benefit from a full seven years of product life before their system becomes obsolete, further extending the return on their investment." PRODUCT AVAILABILITY

Engineering units will be available early 2017 with full production targeted for Q2 2017. ABOUT WINSYSTEMS

Founded in 1982, WinSystems, Inc. designs and manufactures industrial single board computers (SBCs), I/O modules, and panel PCs that operate over extended temperatures. Product lines include rugged, compact standards such as 3.5-inch SBC, COM Express carrier boards, PC/104, PC/104-Plus, EPIC, EBX, and STD Bus. These products are engineered for harsh, rugged environments, which include industrial IoT, automation/control, transportation management, energy management, Mil/COTS, medical and communications applications. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438000

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438001LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/winsystems-debuts-single-board-computers-built-on-intel-atom-e3900-series-cpu-in-pc104-form-factor-for-high-reliability-industrial-environments-300360908.html SOURCE WinSystems, Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] Roland Devices to be Featured in GSN's "Window Warriors" TV Series

IRVINE, Calif., Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Roland DGA Corporation, a leading provider of wide-format digital printers and other advanced digital devices has signed on as a promotional partner on "Window Warriors," a new skill-based competition series premiering on the GSN on Tuesday, November 15 at 9 pm ET/PT (8 pm Central). Roland devices play an important role in the series, with the company's innovative printers and vinyl cutters serving as key creative tools for the show's window designers vying for the $100,000 grand prize. Hosted by actress Garcelle Beauvais ("Hollywood Today Live," "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), GSN's "Window Warriors" lifts the curtain on the intensely competitive and theatrical world of visual merchandising. The new series brings together art and commerce, as the country's most talented window designers are challenged to design and create jaw-dropping displays each week. In each episode, the contestants are given a new theme that correlates with one of the promotional partners, with one person sent home each week until the final top designer remains. Along with the $100,000 cash prize, the winner will receive the opportunity to design a holiday display for a major retailer in New York City and will be featured in design:retail magazine. Roland devices to be used by contestants throughout the course of the series include the company's SOLJET Pro 4 XR-640 wide-format printer/cutter, VersaUV LEJ-640 hybrid wide-format printer, and CAMM-1 GS-24 vinyl cutter.



"We're thrilled the producers chose Roland equipment for GSN's 'Window Warriors,'" said Andrew Oransky, president of Irvine, California based Roland DGA. "These innovative devices will help the competitors make the most of their creative talents and produce impactful graphics on a variety of materials for their window displays. They'll also be able to incorporate Gloss and White inks to produce stunning dimensional and textural effects that really pop." "Window Warriors" comes from Michael Levitt Productions, the team behind GSN's most watched original series ever  "Skin Wars." Executive producers include Michael Levitt ("Skin Wars," "Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List," "Billboard Music Awards"), Jill Goularte, and Liz Cook. Award-winning visual merchandising icon Paul Olszewski is consulting producer, and Douglas Little, a master in the world of visual merchandising, serves as a judge and creative consultant for the show.

For more information and photos related to "Window Warriors," visit http://corp.gsn.com. To learn more about Roland DGA Corporation, or the complete Roland product lineup, visit www.rolanddga.com. Link to Related Press Release Images: https://www.rolanddga.com/company/pressroom/images/window-warriors About Roland DGA Roland DGA Corporation serves North and South America as the marketing, sales and distribution arm for Roland DG Corporation. Founded in 1981 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Roland DG of Hamamatsu, Japan is a worldwide leader in wide-format inkjet printers for the sign, apparel, textile, packaging and vehicle graphics markets; engravers for awards, personalization and ADA signage; photo impact printers for direct part marking; and 3D printers and CNC milling machines for rapid prototyping, part manufacturing and the medical and dental CAD/CAM industries. For more information on Roland DGA, or the complete Roland product lineup, visit www.rolanddga.com. For more information, contact: Marc Malkin

(949) 727-2100 ext. 1372

[email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/roland-devices-to-be-featured-in-gsns-window-warriors-tv-series-300360941.html SOURCE Roland DGA

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] U.S. Cyber Insurance Market Grows Amid Data Breach Concerns

NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- U.S. insurers are becoming more skilled at underwriting and pricing stand-alone cyber insurance policies as businesses show a greater interest in protecting themselves from data breaches and attacks, according to the Insurance Information Institute (I.I.I.). "More than 60 carriers offer stand-alone cyber insurance policies, and it is estimated the U.S. market is worth over $3.25 billion in gross written premiums in 2016, with some estimates saying it has the potential to grow to $7.5 billion," write Dr. Robert Hartwig, special consultant to the I.I.I., and Claire Wilkinson, author of the I.I.I.'s award-winning Terms + Conditions blog. They are the co-authors of the I.I.I.'s newly released white paper, Cyber Risk: Threat and Opportunity. Cyber incidents were ranked as the third-highest global business risk in 2016, Allianz's Risk Barometer determined. The average cost of a breach in the United States reached $7 million in 2016, a Ponemon Institute survey cited in the I.I.I.'s report found. Most traditional commercial general liability policies do not cover cyberrisks. Tailored to a business' specific needs, a stand-alone cyber insurance policy typically offers the following coverages, the I.I.I.'s white paper explains: LiabilityCovers the costs (e.g., legal fee, court judgements) incurred after a cyberattack, such as data theft, or the unintentional transmission of a computer virus to another party, causing them financial harm.



Crisis ManagementCovers the cost of notifying consumers about a data breach that resulted in the release of private information, and providing them with credit monitoring services, as well as the cost of retaining a public relations firm or launching an advertising campaign to rebuild a company's reputation. Directors & Officers (D&O)/Management LiabilityCovers the cyber liability risks faced individually by a company's key decision makers while acting on behalf of the company.

Business Interruption--Covers loss of income due to an attack on a company's network that limits its ability to conduct business. Cyber ExtortionCovers the "settlement" of an extortion threat against a company's network, as well as the cost of hiring a security firm to track down the blackmailers. Loss/Corruption Of DataCovers damage to, or destruction of, valuable information assets as a result of "viruses, malicious code and Trojan horses," the white paper states. Criminal RewardsCovers the cost of posting a criminal reward fund for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a criminal who has attacked a company's computer systems. Data BreachCovers the expenses and legal liability resulting from a data breach. Identity TheftProvides access to an identity theft call center in the event of stolen customer or employee personal information. Cyberrisks, however, remain challenging for insurers to underwrite, Dr. Hartwig and Ms. Wilkinson acknowledge. The three reasons the paper cites include the constantly changing range of perpetrators, targets and exposure values; a lack of historical actuarial data; and the interconnected nature of cyberspace, which makes it difficult for insurers to assess the likely severity of cyberattacks. The I.I.I. has a full library of educational videos on its You Tube Channel. Information about I.I.I. mobile apps can be found here. THE I.I.I. IS A NONPROFIT, COMMUNICATIONS ORGANIZATION SUPPORTED BY THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY. http://www.facebook.com/InsuranceInformationInstitute

http://twitter.com/iiiorg

http://www.linkedin.com/company/insurance-information-institute

http://www.youtube.com/iiivideo

https://plus.google.com/113369356227754162778 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438055-INFO Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150428/212128LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-cyber-insurance-market-grows-amid-data-breach-concerns-300360965.html SOURCE Insurance Information Institute

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] Vantiv Announces Agreement to Acquire Moneris Solutions USA

CINCINNATI and TORONTO, Nov. 10, 2016 /CNW/ -- Vantiv, Inc. (NYSE: VNTV), a leading provider of payment processing services and related technology solutions, announced today its agreement to acquire Moneris Solutions, Inc. (Moneris USA) from Moneris Solutions Corporation (Moneris) for $425 million USD, subject to certain adjustments. Schaumburg, IL-based Moneris USA is the U.S. subsidiary of Moneris, which is a joint investment between BMO Financial Group and Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). Upon closing of the transaction, Vantiv will begin servicing Moneris USA's merchants and other business relationships, including its relationship with BMO Harris Bank, which operates approximately 600 branches in the United States. Moneris USA processed approximately $12 billion in U.S. transaction volume in 2015. "Acquiring Moneris USA will further accelerate Vantiv's growth in key high-growth channels," said Charles Drucker, president and chief executive officer of Vantiv. "We look forward to serving their technology and bank partners with our deep payments expertise and strong customer service." Vantiv, the nation's second largest payment processor, serves more than 800,000 merchant locations and 1,400 financial institutions. "The acquisition will enable Moneris USA to continue its successful path and provide merchants the high-level of service they've come to expect while leveraging Vantiv's scale and omni-channel payments capabilities," said Angela Brown, president and chief executive officer of Moneris. "Working together with Vantiv, Moneris will continue to support our mutual cross-border customers with a focus on innovation and service." The transaction is expected to close in the furth quarter of 2016, subject to required U.S. antitrust clearance and other customary closing conditions. Vantiv will fund the transaction with cash-on-hand. Vantiv expects the acquisition to have an immaterial impact on its 2016 results and be accretive to its pro forma adjusted net income in 2017.



Credit Suisse acted as lead financial advisor and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and BofA Merrill Lynch also acted as financial advisors to Vantiv; Benesch served as its legal advisor. BMO Capital Markets and RBC Capital Markets LLC were financial advisors to Moneris. Sullivan & Cromwell acted as legal advisor for Moneris. ABOUT MONERIS SOLUTIONS CORPORATION

As one of North America's largest providers of payment processing solutions, Moneris offers credit, debit, wireless and online payment services for merchants in virtually every industry segment and processes more than three billion transactions, annually. Moneris offers electronic loyalty and stored-value gift card programs. With more than 350,000 merchant locations, Moneris provides the hardware, software and systems needed to improve business efficiency and manage payments. For more information please visit www.moneris.com.

ABOUT VANTIV

Vantiv, Inc. (NYSE: VNTV) is a leading payment processor differentiated by an integrated technology platform. Vantiv offers a comprehensive suite of traditional and innovative payment processing and technology solutions to merchants and financial institutions of all sizes, enabling them to address their payment processing needs through a single provider. We build strong relationships with our customers, helping them become more efficient, more secure and more successful. Vantiv is the second largest merchant acquirer and the largest PIN debit acquirer based on number of transactions in the U.S. The company's growth strategy includes expanding further into high-growth channels and verticals, including integrated payments, eCommerce, and merchant bank. Visit us at www.vantiv.com, or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.  2016 Vantiv, LLC. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks, service marks and trade names referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. Vantiv and other Vantiv products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of Vantiv, LLC in the U.S. and other countries. CONTACTS

Nathan Rozof

Investor Relations, Vantiv

866-254-4811 or 513-900-4811

[email protected] Andrew Ciafardini

Corporate Communications, Vantiv

513-900-5308

[email protected] Darren Leroux

Corporate Communications, Moneris

416-734-1442

[email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vantiv-announces-agreement-to-acquire-moneris-solutions-usa-300361003.html SOURCE Vantiv, Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] Fitch Affirms Temple University Health System's (PA) Revs at 'BB+'; Stable Outlook

Fitch Ratings has affirmed the following series of bonds issued by the Hospital and Higher Education Facilities Authority of Philadelphia on behalf of Temple University Health System (TUHS) at 'BB+': --$302,905,000 series 2012A and B; --$203,985,000 series 2007 A and B. The Rating Outlook has been revised to Stable from Positive. SECURITY The bonds are secured by a pledge of gross revenues of the obligated group, mortgages on certain properties of the obligated group, and a debt service reserve fund. The obligated group represented approximately 95% of the assets and 100% of the revenues of the consolidated system in fiscal 2016 (June 30 year-end). Fitch reports on the performance of the consolidated system. KEY RATING DRIVERS REVISION OF THE OUTLOOK TO STABLE: The revision of the Outlook to Stable from Positive, despite a second year of positive operating results in fiscal 2016, was driven by higher maximum annual debt service (MADS) of $49.5 million, related to inclusion of several equipment loans and capitalized leases, which were not included in the MADS used by Fitch in the prior analysis. The resulting 1.8x MADS coverage is lower than expectations since coverage during Fitch's last review was based on bonded debt only. MAINTAINING POSITIVE OPERATING RESULTS: Temple produced a second year of positive operating results in fiscal 2016, and management is projecting further strengthening of operating performance in the next year. The system ended fiscal 2016 with operating income of $3.6 million for an operating margin of 0.2%, on par with the prior year, despite operating in a very difficult and competitive market, significant investment in EPIC implementation, increased transfers to the School of Medicine (SOM) and decreased support from Temple University (University). Management budgets to end the fiscal 2017 with $15.8 million in operating income. ESSENTIALITY AND HIGH DEPENDENCE ON (News - Alert) SUPPLEMENTAL PAYMENTS: TUHS's flagship facility - Temple University Hospital (TUH) - serves both as a provider of high-end specialty services and as a de facto safety net hospital for North Philadelphia. As such, its continued viability is of critical importance to the greater Philadelphia market, which has been reflected in the significant support the institution has been receiving in the form of supplementary revenues, which in 2016 remained significant and slightly higher than in 2015, though not all of it was received before the end of the fiscal year. While there are uncertainties about the composition and level of the supplemental funding, management anticipates that it will be maintained at close to the historical level in 2017. GOOD VOLUMES AND HIGHER ACUITY: Despite the competitive nature of the market and the general decreasing volume trend in the greater Philadelphia area, TUHS was able to maintain a stable level of discharges in fiscal 2016 and increased its share of the high acuity discharges by 1.8%, which was one of the drivers of the positive operating performance. TUH's overall case mix index increased to 1.77 in fiscal 2016, as compared to 1.59 in fiscal 2013 and the system has increased its share of the high-end cases to 6%, from 4.9% in fiscal 2011. MIXED LEVERAGE: The system's coverage of maximum annual debt service (MADS) by EBITDA was 1.8x in fiscal 2016, but the system's MADS as a percent of revenues is still a moderate 3% of revenues, lower than Fitch's 'BBB' median of 3.6%. Further mitigating the slim coverage, TUHS has an all fixed rate debt structure, no swap exposure and no additional debt plans in the near term. MODEST LIQUIDITY: Liquidity remains light, unrestricted cash and investments were $336.1 million at 2016 year-end, slightly below budget due to delay in the receipt of $22 million of the supplemental funding. Unrestricted cash and investments at 2016 year end translate to 77.6 days cash on hand (DCOH), cushion ratio of 6.9x and cash equal to 64.9% of debt. RATING SENSITIVITIES NEED TO STRENGTHEN OPERATING PERFORMANCE: A return to the investment grade rating category would require Temple University Health System to generate meaningful improvement in operating performance leading to strengthened coverage and balance sheet metrics. CREDIT PROFILE TUHS is a Philadelphia based health care system, whose flagship is TUH, a 722-bed teaching hospital located on the campus of Temple University (University) in North Philadelphia. TUH sits on the University's health science campus, along with the University's School of Medicine and its other research and educational facilities. TUHS also owns and operates Jeanes Hospital (Jeanes), a 146-licensed bed community hospital located in a residential area in Northeast Philadelphia and the adjoining 100-bed American Oncologic Hospital d/b/a Fox Chase Cancer Center (Fox Chase), one of only 41 National Cancer Institute designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers in the nation. TUHS reported $1.64 billion revenues in fiscal 2016. MAINTAINING POSITIVE OPERATING RESULTS Led by a strong and stable management team, TUHS produced a second year of positive operating results in fiscal 2016, recording operating income of $3.5 million, equal to a slim, but positive 0.2% operating margin and 5% operating EBITDA margin compared to sizeable operating losses of $15.8 million and $24.8 million in 2014 and 2013. Fitch's calculation of TUHS's metrics excludes the non-preferred appropriations ($6.2 million in both 2016 and 2015), for which TUHS only serves as a conduit for Temple University. The improved performance was partially driven by an increase in the high acuity discharges based on continued recruitment and retention of high caliber physicians, as well as improved performance at both the Fox Chase and Jeanes. Constraining profitability was the $19 million increased expense related to the implementation of EPIC at TUH, as well as increased pharmaceutical expense, and increased transfers to the SOM - at $89.3 million, almost twice the level two years ago. At the same time, as planned, the University cut back its support for physician recruitment from $36 million two years ago to $0.5 million. Management budgeted a stronger $15.8 million operating income (0.9% operating margin) for the systm for fiscal 2017, which includes the last year of Epic implementation expense of $20.9 million.



SUPPLEMENTARY PAYMENTS MECHANISM EVOLVING The supplementary payments are essential to supporting the organization's position as a safety net provider to inner city Philadelphia with close to 40% of gross revenues from Medicaid. Management has historically worked closely with the Commonwealth for the critically needed supplemental payments. The 2016 funding was $138.6 million, up from $131 million in 2015, but only $75 million of that amount had been received by the fiscal year end, impacting the liquidity level. The balance of the 2016 funding was remitted in the first quarter of fiscal 2017. There continues to be concern regarding the level and sources of the supplemental funding, but management is fairly optimistic in expecting that the level in fiscal 2017 will be close to prior year levels.

MODEST LIQUIDITY The $336.1 million of unrestricted cash and investments at 2016 year end was a slight decline from $374.3 million in the prior year with the variance including higher amounts owed from the Commonwealth, as well as increased spending on IT and higher volumes resulting in higher net receivables. The supplemental funding expected to be received by June 30, 2016 was $22.6 million less than had been budgeted. Management has budgeted liquidity at $350 million for fiscal 2017 and set a goal of 100 DCOH by 2019. WEAK COVERAGE TUHS had $517.8 million of long-term debt at 2016 fiscal year-end, which is 100% fixed rate and the system has no swaps. Consolidated MADS is $49.5 million and occurs in fiscal 2017. The increase in MADS from $38.9 million (at the time of Fitch's last review in December 2015) is due to the debt service related to several equipment loans and capitalized leases, which were not included in the MADS used by Fitch in the prior analysis. Coverage of MADS based on the TUHS consolidated EBITDA was 1.8x in fiscal 2016. The obligated group reported higher coverage of 2.4x in fiscal 2016 based on the master trust indenture calculation, which is on annual debt service. DISCLOSURE TUHS covenants to provide timely annual quarterly financial and operating data to MSRB's EMMA system. Additional information is available at 'www.fitchratings.com'. Applicable Criteria Revenue-Supported Rating Criteria (pub. 16 Jun 2014) https://www.fitchratings.com/site/re/750012 U.S. Nonprofit Hospitals and Health Systems Rating Criteria (pub. 09 Jun 2015) https://www.fitchratings.com/site/re/866807 Additional Disclosures Dodd-Frank Rating Information Disclosure Form https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/press_releases/content/ridf_frame.cfm?pr_id=1014645 Solicitation Status https://www.fitchratings.com/gws/en/disclosure/solicitation?pr_id=1014645 Endorsement Policy https://www.fitchratings.com/regulatory ALL FITCH CREDIT RATINGS ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS. PLEASE READ THESE LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS BY FOLLOWING THIS LINK: HTTPS://WWW.FITCHRATINGS.COM/UNDERSTANDINGCREDITRATINGS. IN ADDITION, RATING DEFINITIONS AND THE TERMS OF USE OF SUCH RATINGS ARE AVAILABLE ON THE AGENCY'S PUBLIC WEB SITE AT 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. Copyright  2016 by Fitch Ratings, Inc., Fitch Ratings Ltd. and its subsidiaries. 33 Whitehall Street, NY, NY 10004. Telephone: 1-800-753-4824, (212) 908-0500. Fax: (212) 480-4435. Reproduction or retransmission in whole or in part is prohibited except by permission. All rights reserved. In issuing and maintaining its ratings and in making other reports (including forecast information), Fitch relies on factual information it receives from issuers and underwriters and from other sources Fitch believes to be credible. Fitch conducts a reasonable investigation of the factual information relied upon by it in accordance with its ratings methodology, and obtains reasonable verification of that information from independent sources, to the extent such sources are available for a given security or in a given jurisdiction. The manner of Fitch's factual investigation and the scope of the third-party verification it obtains will vary depending on the nature of the rated security and its issuer, the requirements and practices in the jurisdiction in which the rated security is offered and sold and/or the issuer is located, the availability and nature of relevant public information, access to the management of the issuer and its advisers, the availability of pre-existing third-party verifications such as audit reports, agreed-upon procedures letters, appraisals, actuarial reports, engineering reports, legal opinions and other reports provided by third parties, the availability of independent and competent third- party verification sources with respect to the particular security or in the particular jurisdiction of the issuer, and a variety of other factors. Users of Fitch's ratings and reports should understand that neither an enhanced factual investigation nor any third-party verification can ensure that all of the information Fitch relies on in connection with a rating or a report will be accurate and complete. Ultimately, the issuer and its advisers are responsible for the accuracy of the information they provide to Fitch and to the market in offering documents and other reports. In issuing its ratings and its reports, Fitch must rely on the work of experts, including independent auditors with respect to financial statements and attorneys with respect to legal and tax matters. Further, ratings and forecasts of financial and other information are inherently forward-looking and embody assumptions and predictions about future events that by their nature cannot be verified as facts. As a result, despite any verification of current facts, ratings and forecasts can be affected by future events or conditions that were not anticipated at the time a rating or forecast was issued or affirmed. The information in this report is provided "as is" without any representation or warranty of any kind, and Fitch does not represent or warrant that the report or any of its contents will meet any of the requirements of a recipient of the report. A Fitch rating is an opinion as to the creditworthiness of a security. This opinion and reports made by Fitch are based on established criteria and methodologies that Fitch is continuously evaluating and updating. Therefore, ratings and reports are the collective work product of Fitch and no individual, or group of individuals, is solely responsible for a rating or a report. The rating does not address the risk of loss due to risks other than credit risk, unless such risk is specifically mentioned. Fitch is not engaged in the offer or sale of any security. All Fitch reports have shared authorship. Individuals identified in a Fitch report were involved in, but are not solely responsible for, the opinions stated therein. The individuals are named for contact purposes only. A report providing a Fitch rating is neither a prospectus nor a substitute for the information assembled, verified and presented to investors by the issuer and its agents in connection with the sale of the securities. Ratings may be changed or withdrawn at any time for any reason in the sole discretion of Fitch. Fitch does not provide investment advice of any sort. Ratings are not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Ratings do not comment on the adequacy of market price, the suitability of any security for a particular investor, or the tax-exempt nature or taxability of payments made in respect to any security. Fitch receives fees from issuers, insurers, guarantors, other obligors, and underwriters for rating securities. Such fees generally vary from US$1,000 to US$750,000 (or the applicable currency equivalent) per issue. In certain cases, Fitch will rate all or a number of issues issued by a particular issuer, or insured or guaranteed by a particular insurer or guarantor, for a single annual fee. Such fees are expected to vary from US$10,000 to US$1,500,000 (or the applicable currency equivalent). The assignment, publication, or dissemination of a rating by Fitch shall not constitute a consent by Fitch to use its name as an expert in connection with any registration statement filed under the United States securities laws, the Financial Services and Markets Act of 2000 of the United Kingdom, or the securities laws of any particular jurisdiction. Due to the relative efficiency of electronic publishing and distribution, Fitch research may be available to electronic subscribers up to three days earlier than to print subscribers. For Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea only: Fitch Australia Pty Ltd holds an Australian financial services license (AFS license no. 337123) which authorizes it to provide credit ratings to wholesale clients only. Credit ratings information published by Fitch is not intended to be used by persons who are retail clients within the meaning of the Corporations Act 2001 View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161110006609/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 10, 2016] European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Markets - 2016-2022

NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Markets - 2016-2022 2010, 2015 & 2020 With 1.8 million asylum seekers (UN reports) crossing Western Europe's external borders in 2015, the European border agencies are facing challenges with a far greater reach than ever before. More than 1000 ISIS-trained jihadists returning to Europe every year, coupled with the surge of migrants to Europe are alarming concerns; as present capabilities of the European border, coast guard, intelligence services and immigration agencies simply cannot meet these challenges.



The EU-Turkey deal (if implemented) might lead to a significant decrease in the flow of refugees (by March-April 2016 the rate of migrants entering Greece declined by 90%). However, the agreement faces formidable practical, political and legal challenges (e.g., each and every one of the 22 EU parliaments has to endorse the treaty).



In the aftermath of the migration crisis and the Paris and Brussels terror attacks, a major overhaul of the Western European border security and immigration infrastructure, strategy and funding is already underway.



Following a 2010 to 2015 annual market growth of 10-13% the 2015 to 2020 annual market will surge by 104%.



The "European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Markets  2016-2022" report is the most comprehensive review of the market available today. It provides a detailed and reasoned roadmap of this growing market.



The European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Market is boosted by the following drivers:

The Western European border security, coast guards, immigration agencies and intelligence agencies are ill-equipped to counter the surge of refugees and 21st century jihadists who use sophisticated means to return to the continent.



The Schengen Area is comprised of 26 European countries that have abolished border control at their common borders. Several Schengen Area governments reinstated border checkpoints by 2015.



Europe cannot build a wall to keep out refugees and terrorists or enlist millions of border guards who would need to watch every inch of its over 10,000 land borders and 80,000 coastlines.



Europol estimates that up to 5,000 European jihadists have already returned to Western Europe after obtaining combat experience on the battlefields of the Middle East.



On 15 December 2015, the European Commission presented a proposal for a new agency that would replace and succeed Frontex, having a stronger role and mandate, and forming a "European Border and Coast Guard" along with national authorities for border management.



Of Europe's approximately 50 countries, Russia has by far the longest coastline as well as the longest land border.



Western Europe, the largest economy in the world with a 2015 GDP of approximately $22 trillion (vs. the U.S. $17.5 trillion), can invest "whatever it takes" to protect its citizens from the looming jeopardies of mass migration and terrorism.



The border security and immigration enforcement industry faces a considerable challenge in seeking to provide the necessary solutions to current and future threats. At the same time, this challenge presents multi-billion USD opportunities to the defense, ICT and security industries able to deliver effective functions, integrate systems, and maximize security and productivity per $ invested.



According to European intelligence services, ISIS has approximately 5000 original European blank passports which can be used by jihadists returning to the EU.



The EU and the rest of the European border security and immigration infrastructure enforcement market for products and services are served by local defense and security companies. Even with a preference for locally manufactured products, foreign products can usually strongly compete o the basis of cost-performance. They do not encounter any EU direct trade barriers or quotas. Non-tariff, indirect trade barriers may be the approval process of dual use goods, which include many security market products.







This report is a resource for executives with interests in the market. It has been explicitly customized for the security industry and other decision-makers in order to identify business opportunities, developing technologies, market trends and risks, as well as to benchmark business plans.



* Customers who purchase a multi-readers license of the report will get the "Global Homeland Security & Public Safety Industry  2016 Edition" report free of charge. Single-reader license customers will get a 50% discount for the Industry report.





Questions answered in this 289-page report + one* reports include:

What will the market size and trends be during 2016-2022?

Which are the submarkets that provide attractive business opportunities?

Who are the decision-makers?

What drives the immigration enforcement & border security agencies to purchase products and services?

What are the customers looking for?

What are the technology & services trends?

What is the market SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats)?

What are the challenges to market penetration & growth?



With 289 pages, 31 tables and 49 figures, the "European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Markets  2016-2022" report covers 12 countries and regions, 4 technologies and 3 revenue source submarkets, offering for each of them 2015 data and assessments, and 2016-2022 forecasts and analyses.



Why Buy this Report?

A. Market data is analyzed via 3 key orthogonal perspectives:

With a highly fragmented market we address the "money trail"  each dollar spent  via the following 3 viewpoints:

By 12 Country and Region Markets:

UK

France

Holland & Belgium

Sweden , Norway , Finland & Denmark

Germany

Austria & Switzerland

Italy

Spain

Poland

Hungary & Czech Republic

Russia

Rest of Europe

By 3 Revenue Sources including:

Products Sales Revenues

After Sale Revenues Including: Maintenance, Service, Upgrades & Refurbishment

Other Revenues Including: Planning, Training, Consulting, Contracted Services & Government Funded R&D

By 4 Technologies:

Automatic Border Control (ABC) Systems

Border & Perimeter Barriers

Visa Issuance IT Systems

Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Technologies

B. Detailed market analysis frameworks for each of the market sectors, including:

Market drivers & inhibitors

Business opportunities

SWOT analysis

Competitive analysis

Business environment

The 2015-2022 market segmented by 36 submarkets

C. The report includes the following 5 appendices:

Appendix A: European Homeland Security & Public Safety Related Product Standards

Appendix B: The European Union Challenges and Outlook

Appendix C: Europe Migration Crisis & Border Security

Appendix D: Abbreviations

D. The report addresses over 300 European Homeland Security and Public Safety standards (including links)

E. The supplementary (*) "Global Homeland Security & Public Safety Industry  2016 Edition" report provides the following insights and analysis of the industry including:

The Global Industry 2016 status

Effects of Emerging Technologies on the Industry

The Market Trends

Vendor  Government Relationship

Geopolitical Outlook 2016-2022

The Industry Business Models & Strategies

Market Entry Challenges

The Industry: Supply-Side & Demand-Side Analysis

Market Entry Strategies

Price Elasticity

Past Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) Events

F. The supplementary (*) "Global Homeland Security & Public Safety Industry  2016 Edition" report provides a May 2016 updated extensive data (including company profile, recent annual revenues, key executives, homeland security and public safety products, and contact info.) of the leading 119 Homeland Security and Public Safety vendors including:



3M

3i-MIND

3VR

3xLOGIC

ABB

Accenture

ACTi Corporation

ADT Security Services

AeroVironment Inc.

Agent Video Intelligence

Airbus Defence and Space

Alcatel-Lucent (Nokia Group)

ALPHAOPEN

American Science & Engineering Inc.

Anixter

Aralia Systems

AT&T Inc.

Augusta Systems

Austal

Avigilon Corporation

Aware

Axis

AxxonSoft

Ayonix

BAE Systems

BioEnable Technologies Pvt Ltd

BioLink Solutions

Boeing

Bollinger Shipyards, Inc

Bosch Security Systems

Bruker Corporation

BT

Camero

Cassidian

CelPlan

China Security & Surveillance, Inc.

Cisco Systems

Citilog

Cognitec Systems GmbH

Computer Network Limited (CNL)

Computer Sciences Corporation

CrossMatch

Diebold

DRS Technologies Inc.

DVTel

Elbit Systems Ltd.

Elsag Datamat

Emerson Electric

Ericsson

ESRI

FaceFirst

Finmeccanica SpA

Firetide

Fulcrum Biometrics LLC

G4S

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.

General Dynamics Corporation

Getac Technology Corporation

Hanwha Techwin

Harris Corporation

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hexagon AB

Honeywell International Inc.

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd

IBM

IndigoVision

Intel Security

IntuVision Inc

iOmniscient

IPConfigure

IPS Intelligent Video Analytics

Iris ID Systems, Inc.

IriTech Inc.

Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd.

ISS

L-3 Security & Detection Systems

Leidos, Inc.

Lockheed Martin Corporation

MACROSCOP

MDS

Mer group

Milestone Systems A/S

Mirasys

Motorola Solutions, Inc.

National Instruments

NEC Corporation

NICE Systems

Northrop Grumman Corporation

Nuance Communications, Inc.

ObjectVideo

Panasonic Corporation

Pelco

Pivot3

Proximex

QinetiQ Limited

Rapiscan Systems, Inc.

Raytheon

Rockwell Collins , Inc.

Safran S.A.

Salient Sciences

Schneider Electric

SeeTec

Siemens

Smart China (Holdings) Limited

Smiths Detection Inc.

Sony Corp.

Speech Technology Center

Suprema Inc.

Synectics Plc

Tandu Technologies & Security Systems Ltd

Texas Instruments

Textron Inc.

Thales Group

Total Recall

Unisys Corporation

Verint

Vialogy LLC

Vigilant Technology

Zhejiang Dahua Technology Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03837918-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 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/european-smart-borders-immigration-enforcement--border-security-markets--2016-2022-300361287.html SOURCE Reportlinker

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
[November 11, 2016] Saluting Security: Dashlane Honors Veterans & Military Personnel

NEW YORK, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- In honor of Veterans Day, Dashlane, the leader in online identity and password management, is proud to offer U.S. military personnel a 50% discount on up to 5 years of its Dashlane Premium service. The discount will begin Friday, November 11 at 7:00 AM ET and conclude on Sunday at 11:59 PM ET. All current and former members of the U.S. military can visit Dashlane.com/Veterans to sign up and ensure that their passwords, credit cards, and identities stay safe and protected online. From well-publicized data breaches to political hacks, cybersecurity threats are ever evolving, posing a unique threat in 2016 and beyond. Despite a heightened awareness of hackers in the news, many consumers don't fully grasp how vulnerable their own passwords are or the value of information passwords intend to safeguard. Dashlane protects its users against online threats by identifying weak or reused passwords and generating unique, strong passwords for every site or account in use. "We are proud to offer a discount to past and present servicemen and women, hereby ensuring the online safety of those who hav sworn to serve and protect us offline," said Emmanuel Schalit, CEO of Dashlane.



For most people, properly managing passwords verges on impossible, given the increasing number of devices and digital services we rely on daily. Dashlane makes it easy for anyone to manage their online accounts and activity securely and safely, whether logging into websites and apps or making transactions. Premium users will enjoy the benefits of Dashlane's password manager and digital wallet across unlimited devices, with automatic sync and backup for accounts. With this discount, military personnel will receive one year of Dashlane Premium for just $19.99. Visit Dashlane.com/Veterans for more information. About Dashlane

Dashlane makes identity and checkouts simple with its password manager and secure digital wallet app. Dashlane allows its users to securely manage passwords, credit cards, IDs, and other important information via advanced encryption and local storage. Dashlane has helped over 5 million users manage and secure their digital identity. The app is available on PC, Mac, Android, and iOS, and has won critical acclaim from top publications, including: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

Dashlane was founded by Bernard Liautaud and co-founders Alexis Fogel, Guillaume Maron, and Jean Guillou. The company has offices in New York City and Paris and has received $52.5 million in funding from TransUnion, Rho Ventures, FirstMark Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Learn more at Dashlane.com. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/saluting-security-dashlane-honors-veterans--military-personnel-300358549.html SOURCE Dashlane

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
CHARLESTON -- Sarah Bush Lincoln is partnering with Novo Nordisk to host Diabetes Academy, a free class to help people learn about managing diabetes, at 6 p.m. on Nov. 14, at the Charleston Public Library, 712 6th St., Charleston.

The event is open to the public and is designed to answer a broad range of questions individuals may have regarding diabetes. The interactive session will feature a game of Jeopardy to test peoples knowledge about diabetes. Prizes will be given away, and light refreshments served.

Diabetes is Americas fastest growing chronic disease. It comes in several forms, Type 1, Type 2, and pre-diabetes. Through diabetes education, people suffering with any type of diabetes can learn the best ways to manage their disease or in the case of pre-diabetes, how to manage their lifestyle to prevent becoming diabetic.

Complications associated with diabetes can be life threatening and include heart disease, stroke, blindness, kidney disease, nerve disease and amputation.
CHARLESTON -- On Saturday, a group of students at Eastern Illinois University will stay up all night at McAfee Gym in solidarity with children battling cancer.

The Up Til Dawn student organization is hosting its annual event to raise money for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital. Throughout the year, six-member teams each raise $600, which St. Jude uses to help ensure that the families of its patients never receive a bill for treatment.

St. Judes Up Til Dawn is a fundraising organization that exists at more than 180 colleges across the nation. Eastern has hosted this annual fundraiser since 2004.

Last year, at Eastern Illinois we raised over $16,000 for the kids of St. Jude, but we wont stop until no child dies from cancer, said executive board member Jennifer Smutz in a press release.

Eastern has increased its fundraising goal to $25,000. Typical donations range from $35 to $100. Just $30 can provide one day of meals for an entire family in the St. Jude cafeteria.

Students wanting to participate can sign up in a team of six at https://www.facebook.com/EIUUTD/. For those not actively participating, they can still sponsor a member or donate directly to St. Jude. For more about St. Jude, visit https://www.stjude.org.
Nebraska will send state troopers back to North Dakota after a second request from officials there seeking law enforcement help with protests of the Dakota Access pipeline, Nebraska Emergency Management Agency officials said in a news release Thursday.

A team of state troopers were requested through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an organization allowing states to lend support to each other in times of emergency, the release said.

Under the compact, the requesting state pays for the assistance.

The release didn't say how many troopers or if any tactical vehicles will be sent to North Dakota, and an agency spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The release said NEMA wouldn't release "operational details."

Thirteen Nebraska State Patrol employees, including 11 troopers, returned Tuesday after working with North Dakota law enforcement since Oct. 23. An aircraft also responded.

Opponents argue the $3.8 billion pipeline designed to carry North Dakota oil through South Dakota and Iowa to Illinois could taint drinking water if it leaks into the nearby Missouri River and possibly disturb cultural artifacts including burial sites on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

Officials from Energy Transfer Partners building the pipeline insist it's safe.

More than 260 people have been arrested since August in connection with protests against the pipeline.
Principal Mark Larson got to Lincoln High School the day after a divisive, difficult presidential election planning to do his regular morning announcements over the intercom.

Before long, he changed his mind. It was clear, he said, things were different Wednesday morning.

When students began to enter the building there was a palpable tension, a palpable anxiety in the air, he said. You could feel it. Students were raw yesterday, emotionally. More than any other day that I can remember in my career.

At the states most diverse high school, where students come from 50 countries and speak 34 languages, they were looking to adults for answers.

What does the election -- one where the candidate elected president built his campaign on building a wall on the Mexican border, deporting all undocumented immigrants and banning Muslim immigrants -- mean for them?

Larson already had sent staff a message encouraging them to stress to students that school was a safe place for all of them. After feeling the tension in the building, he decided to do more.

He shut his office door, he thought about the conversations hed had with students and looked out the window at the statue of Lincoln Highs mascot: the Links.

A short time later, he got on the intercom for the daily announcements -- about lunch and clubs and upcoming events -- and then he continued.

I know there are many of us who are thinking about the results of the election last night, he said. I feel compelled to speak on that for a moment. You go to a place that since 1871 has had a history of being one of the most loving, welcoming and accepting places in our city. That does not change today.

He talked about what the mascot -- the Links -- represented: tradition, excellence, diversity and unity. He told students how proud the school was of that diversity and unity, of a place where everyone feels safe and welcome.

Upstairs, in Susan Hertzlers class of English Language Learners, it was quiet. Some students cried. Larsons message was a place to start, to let students ask questions, express their worries. Would they have to leave? When?

Hertzler said she was honest: that she didnt know, but that there were people -- not just here but nationally -- who supported them.

At Culler Middle School, Dr. Chandra Diaz-Debose said the atmosphere was somber. Students showed up to her class early, and they came to her at lunch with similar questions.

I felt like I had to give them an avenue to speak, she said.

At Belmont Elementary, a first-grade student in Laurie Martinez's English Language Learner class raised her hand.

How soon am I going to have to go back? she asked.

Martinez said she was not prepared for first-graders to be worried about the election.

"I was naive,"she said.

She told them there were lots of people in the country that wanted to protect them, that they should be worrying about what to have for lunch, who they should sit next to, maybe what theyd do when they got home.

Those are the concerns first-graders should have, not going back to the country they came from, she said. You know that saying, You could hear a pin drop? Well, you could yesterday.

She pulled two long tables together, had all the students sit together. She read a story. They talked.

East High media specialist Jane Raglin Holt said library staff had deep conversations with several students. Some needed comfort, others clarification. There were impromptu civic lessons on the three branches of government, of the checks and balances, the importance of voting, the legitimacy of the electoral process.

School was really difficult yesterday, for kids and adults alike, she said. Lot of folks, I suspect, thought about not coming, myself included. But when I got there and saw the kids that I get to see every morning before school, I knew how important it was for all of us to be there. It was a quiet, strange, tiptoeing-around kind of morning.

Incidents popped up on social media Thursday: a 15-year-old Asian American student in Lincoln who told his mom someone yelled You dont belong here as he walked home from school.

Another Lincoln high school student called a dirty Mexican.

Across the district, teachers and counselors countered the divisiveness of the election by stressing that school was a caring, accepting place where people show concern for each other, said Brenda Leggiadro, the districts counseling coordinator.

There was a full range of emotion at schools, students who supported both candidates, those excited by the results, those worried and anxious. Many students were just curious -- what all the talk of change really meant, she said.

We had some reminders about how this is a great time to think about how we can be good winners and good losers, to disagree and be respectful.

Oscar Rios Pohirieth, LPS cultural specialist who works with the districts 23 bilingual liaisons, said he tried to help students focus on remaining productive and proactive, despite the uncertainty. While the election created uncertainty, so do many other life events, he said.

The message, he said, was part of the work the district has been doing -- unrelated to the election -- to devise ways to help students who suffer such "cultural anxiety."

At Lincoln High, Larson asked five students to read a part of his announcement in five different languages.

"Let Lincoln High be an example to our city and our nation how to respect and care for one another. You are a Link. We are all Links. Unity."
The Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs will host an event Sunday to encourage Native youth to be physically active.

The NB3FIT DAY: A National Day of Native Youth Health and Fitness will start at 1 p.m. in Centennial Mall in front of Andersen Hall at 15th and P streets. Participants will then proceed north to R Street before traveling back south on Centennial Mall to the State Capitol.

Participants are encouraged to travel that route twice, a distance of more than 3 miles. The event is free and open to anyone.
On Veterans Day I would encourage everyone to pause and think about our nations commitment to taking care of veterans.

For the past ten months I have been very fortunate to lead the Lincoln VA Regional Benefit Office. Taking care of Nebraska veterans the way they deserve cant be done with a one-size-fits-all solution. It will take working with other federal agencies, local government, and the private sector to address all the challenges veterans face.

We will also need to come up with new and innovative ways to serve our current veteran population.

One way of accomplishing this mission is by hosting claims clinics throughout the state of Nebraska. Over the past year we have partnered with multiple stakeholders both public and private across the state of Nebraska to host five different claims clinics. Claims clinic allow veterans to file claims for compensation, submit evidence, speak to a claims processor, and see a VA examiner.

In some cases the veteran received their rating decision on the same day. During the last year the Lincoln Regional Office saw over 100 Veterans at our claims clinics and paid out over $155,000 in retroactive payment to veterans entitled by law.

We have also continued to grow our reach to veterans not located close to the Lincoln Regional Office. We now have benefit counselors working in the Omaha, Lincoln, and Grand Island VA Medical Centers. These counselors are helping veterans submit claims, check the status of pending claims, signing them up for eBenefits, and answering other benefit questions. This service has grown very popular with our veteran population.

We are now partnering with the Grand Island VA Medical Center to pilot a new service called Telebenefits. Telebenefits is a program in which Veterans are provided with benefits information and assistance through the use of Video Teleconferencing (VTEL) Equipment. Veterans are able to video chat with benefit counselors and get assistance with VA benefits related questions and services. Veterans are also able to submit claims and supporting documents during the Telebenefits session. Telebenefits is now available to Grand Island area Veterans on Thursday afternoon by appointment. The phone number to schedule an appointment is (308)382-3660 ext. 2213.

I am honored to be part of an organization that serves our Nebraska Veterans every day, but there is still more work to be done. The employees here at the Lincoln Regional Office look forward to continuing to serve each and every Nebraska veteran with the same compassion, accuracy and timeliness we have for the last many years.

If you are a Veteran and have not checked to see what benefits you are entitled to, I strongly encourage you to stop into one of our many offices in the State of Nebraska or visit your local County Veterans Service Officers.

On behalf of the employees at the Lincoln Regional Office, I would like to thank all Veterans who have served and continue to serve our great Nation.

Happy Veterans Day!
I hope and pray that the man that has just been elected to be President of the United States will take a second look at himself. From what I have seen during the campaign, he will do anything and say anything to get what he wants. He has done nothing but belittle everything that he talks about. I think the one thing that bothered me the most was of the Muslim father who's son was killed in the war. The father is a much better citizen of the United States than Donald Trump is. He has made a lot of promises and I hope he can follow through.
Gov. Pete Ricketts said Friday the Chinese he has talked with during his current trade mission to China are "asking questions (rather than) expressing concerns" about the impact of Donald Trump's election as president.

"People are wondering what the Trump administration is going to do," the governor said during a news media conference call from Shanghai.

"The Chinese are very interested in the election," he said.

Trump expressed during his presidential campaign concerns about trade deals negotiated by previous administrations, talked about the possibility of imposing higher U.S. tariffs and opposed the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement negotiated by the Obama administration.

That agreement, which does not include China, would open up expanded markets for U.S. pork and beef.

Ricketts repeated his desire to "get the message to the Trump administration about why trade is important" to U.S. economic interests.

Expanded trade "creates jobs on both sides of the Pacific," he said, and is "mutually beneficial."

Ricketts noted that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who will become vice president in January, has promoted expanded trade during his governorship.

Asked about demonstrations in some American cities protesting the results of Tuesday's election of Trump, the governor suggested "it is time for people to come together" after a free and fair election.

Ricketts said the graffiti scrawled on the State Capitol this week equating both him and Trump as racists was "disgraceful."

"I encourage people to express themselves," he said, "but defacing public property is not the way to do it."

People should "use free speech rights responsibly," Ricketts said.

During his conference call, the governor saluted Werner Enterprises, which is headquartered in Omaha, on the 10th anniversary of its entry into China's transportation and logistics market.
OMAHA  Students have staged a walkout at an Omaha high school, saying they're protesting the election of Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States.

Hundreds gathered Friday morning on a sidewalk and onto the grounds of Central High, a school with a diverse student population that sits a few blocks west of downtown Omaha. No incidents of violence have been reported.

Several students carried signs. Among them: "Love Trumps Hate" and "We Are Stronger Together."

Officials stationed along the curb kept students from spilling onto a busy street.

Administrators held an assembly Thursday to talk to students about the election and the students' political and social concerns. Hillary Clinton had won a mock election at the school.

A downtown Omaha anti-Trump protest Wednesday ended with two arrests.
Four Nebraskans -- two in the U.S. Attorney's office and two in the FBI -- are among 376 Department of Justice employees nationwide being recognized by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Senior Litigation Counsel Michael P. Norris, Paralegal Specialist Harolene J. Bailey and Special Agents Sara K. Stanley and Jeffrey D. Tarpinian, of the FBI's Omaha Field Office, were recognized for their role in a multi-national investigation involving child exploitation.

Operation Torpedo used first-of-its-kind techniques to infiltrate the dark internet and identify individuals who, under the perceived cloak of anonymity, secretly congregated to trade images of children being sexually abused and to celebrate the sexual abuse of children.

"The impact of this investigation was huge in its impact on child exploitation," Nebraska U.S. Attorney Deborah R. Gilg said.
WIND POINT  Many households in Racine County that earn more than the federal poverty level still struggle to make ends meet.

That reality was the focus of the United Ways presentation of its statewide ALICE study at The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread, 33 Four Mile Road, Thursday evening. A communitys threshold of ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, represents a modest living income which meets the bare-minimum needs of a given household but leave that household vulnerable to unexpected expenses.

The ALICE threshold significantly exceeds the federal poverty level but more widely represents struggling American households, according to United Way of Wisconsin Executive Director Charlene Mouille, who led Thursdays presentation.

The federal poverty measure, its pretty well accepted that its outdated, Mouille said. It hasnt been adjusted. Its very, very low. It doesnt index for places in the county, its just set.

Mouille believes that the ALICE threshold better captures the economic struggles of places like Racine County, where 13 percent of households live in federally defined poverty but 41 percent live below the ALICE threshold, which in Racine County is $25,968 for a single adult and $59,112 for a family of four. By comparison, 42 percent of all Wisconsin households live below the ALICE threshold, which statewide is $23,196 for a single adult and $54,804 for a family of four.

Within Racine County, ALICE rates vary. In Racine, 57 percent of households live below the ALICE threshold, compared to 45 percent in Burlington, 36 percent in Mount Pleasant and 29 percent in Caledonia.

Theres a wide disparity, in your county even, of households below the threshold, Mouille said. Its pretty easy to look at where some of your challenges are in the county.

Racial disparity

Mouille also provided data broken down by race about households below the ALICE threshold. In Racine County, 36 percent of white households, 62 percent of Hispanic households and 74 percent of black households live below the ALICE threshold.

According to Mouille, Racine County has a smaller percentage of its population living below the ALICE threshold than Milwaukee and Kenosha counties, but thats not necessarily something to be encouraged by.

Racine may be faring a little bit better, she said. That doesnt mean that its good. Thats a number of households, a lot of people.

After the presentation, County Executive Jonathan Delagrave said that the ALICE research supports the countys sustainability efforts.

It validates what were doing at the county in terms of trying to make sustainable families, he said. It shows that youve seen the needle move in a positive direction.

Rodney Prunty, the president and chief professional officer of the United Way of Racine County, spoke about how his organization uses research like the ALICE study to target issues in the community.

We basically arrived at the conclusion that we needed to be an issue focused United Way, Prunty said. Our issue is building an educated workforce...we do it through using education, income and health strategies as well as supporting it with basic needs and services.

And according to Mouille, that workforce is improved by getting families above the ALICE threshold.

We are better together, we are a better workforce when families are thriving and families are stable, she said.
RACINE  Racine Unified School Board President Michael Frontier says there have been reports of Hispanic children in the district being harassed following Tuesdays election of President-Elect Donald Trump.

Reportedly some Hispanic students were waiting for a bus when some individuals shouted Youre going to have to go back to Mexico.

On Thursday, Frontier told members of the community about the incident during a United Way event at The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. The purpose of the event was to highlight a study about residents living in poverty.

Frontier said in the wake of Trumps election on Tuesday there is fear in schools. During his campaign, Trump said he would work to deport undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Latin America.

Learning is tough enough, Frontier said, adding some students might be worried about those who are undocumented. We need to listen to our kids.

On Wednesday, Unified officials sent out a message to the school principals not asking them to take any action, but to make sure they are aware that some students may be emotional about the election and to provide support where they see fit.

Valeria Ruiz, an adult who works as a youth organizer for Voces de La Frontera in Racine, said organization members have heard of several racial incidents affecting students at different Racine schools, both at the high school and elementary grade levels.

Were talking about children 9 to 12 years old that are hearing this news in the community, at school, that their parents are going to get deported, Ruiz said. Its traumatizing to them.

Ruiz said they have heard of other incidents happening at schools in different parts of the state.

Voces de La Frontera, an immigrant rights group, is planning a community forum for 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, at the Racine Labor Center, 2100 Layard Ave., to talk about what Trumps victory means for their community.

At the meeting, Ruiz said Voces members plan on reflecting on the election and informing members community about what their rights are.

Its for just in case if something happens, they know what to do, Ruiz said, adding the organization wants to give people hope To not be afraid; as a whole, as a community, we will get through this.
RACINE  Woof Gang Rescue has been providing foster homes and adoptions for dogs in and around Racine since 2012. This week, the business took a major step forward by acquiring a permit for its first ever physical location.

According to founder and Executive Director Jodie Hoffmann, Woof Gang operates with a network of about 147 foster homes in Wisconsin and Northern Illinois. The organization will now work out of 1535 Layard Ave., where it will be able to store paperwork and supplies that have previously been stashed at homes of people connected to the organization.

What we are seeking is a building where we can house paperwork, Hoffman said. Were seeking somewhere where we can house that stuff so that volunteers can go and grab their extra crates or bowls or whatever for their foster dogs.

The building will not serve as a permanent home to any dogs, according to Hoffman. Rather, it will give foster families a place to drop their dogs if they need to go on vacation and also provide a place to show dogs to potential adopters.

Were not meaning to be like a Wisconsin Humane Society, Hoffman said. Our intention is still to keep our foster homes and run that way, but it would be nice if during the week if a foster home has a couple of extra hours they could bring their dogs down to the adoption center. People could come and just see it, as well as on the weekends we could host adoption events.

On Wednesday, the City Plan Commission granted Woof Gang a conditional-use permit to operate out of the new site, which still needs final approval from the City Council Tuesday. Commissioner Ann Brodek asked Hoffmann whether the property has grassy space for the dogs to play and Hoffman said Woof Gang plans to use a nearby walking path.

Right down the road, theres a nice walking path, right by the railroad tracks, Hoffmann said. Its maybe 15 feet away. Thats our plan to exercise the dogs. Like I said, there might be times when there are no dogs there at all.

Both Hoffmann and Assistant Director Jill Davidson, who also helps the organization with fostering, are aware of the negative stigma surrounding some dog adoption groups in Racine and said that Woof Gang strives to be different.

Were going to do everything by the book and by the law, Hoffman said. We actually care about the dogs.

Added Davidson, When you do things in the appropriate way and dogs are introduced in the appropriate way and introduced into loving families, it is a positive experience for all involved.
Demonstrators in Madison and across the country took to the streets Thursday to express their outrage over Donald Trump's unexpected presidential win, while Trump supporters took to social media and denounced demonstrators as hypocrites or worse for not accepting defeat in a democratic process.

A crowd of hundreds of UW-Madison students and others who gathered Thursday night at the top of Bascom Hill swelled to around 2,500 by the time it reached the steps of the state Capitol.

Demonstrators also hit the streets in San Francisco and gathered in a New York City park.

As the Madison rally picked up new protesters along its route, the crowd chanted slogans including, "Not my president," "Black lives matter" and "This is what democracy looks like." Many carried signs stating "Love trumps hate," a slogan used by Democrat Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Ginger Baier, 66, who is transgender, came to the protest to "send a message that some of the ideas Mr. Trump has are not acceptable in this country."

Trump's campaign garnered widespread criticism throughout the nomination and election process as he called for the building of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico boarder, expressed fear of Muslim immigrants and refugees and made demeaning comments about women.

"It's devastating how much progress is going to be turned back in the next four years," Baier said.

Some demonstrators called for members of the Electoral College to vote in opposition to their state's popular vote and put Clinton in office. Others joined the rally to show solidarity with members of the various groups of people that protesters said Trump has ostracized.

"(Trump) threatened so many communities in the United States," said Heide Knoppke-Wetzel, 19.

Knoppke-Wetzel's parents came from what she calls areas "ruled by fear." Her father grew up in Europe after World War II, and her mother was raised in Chile during the political uprising there.

Ginny Hesness, 27, said she signed a petition for the Electoral College to change its vote. To her, Trump's campaign was too volatile.

"I don't think he's ever going to recognize the hate that he spreads," Hesness said.

Baier said that while a Trump candidacy is "terrifying," it shows that people are too concerned about the current "political machine."

Elsewhere, high-spirited high school students marched through San Francisco's downtown, chanting and holding signs urging a Donald Trump eviction. They waved rainbow banners and Mexican flags, as bystanders in the heavily Democratic city high-fived the marchers from the sidelines.

In New York City, about a hundred protesters gathered at Union Square in Manhattan to protest a Trump presidency. They held signs that read "Divided States of America" and "Not My President" and "Let the New Generation Speak!!"

At a subway station along 14th Street, New Yorkers expressed their thoughts  "Time to Fight Back" and "Keep the Faith! Our work is just beginning!"  along the walls of a walkway using sticky notes.

On Twitter, Trump supporters accused protesters of not respecting the process because it didn't work out in their favor.

"You're literally protesting against free democratic elections. Go live in North Korea, you absolute trash," one wrote.

Some protesters in Madison who called for Trump's removal said they were willing to disrupt the country's legacy of a peaceful transition of power because of their fear of Trump's presidency.

"I'm not upset because my candidate lost," said Amir Mohamadi, 32. "This isn't about the conservative-liberal spectrum. This is about things that are more universal." He said the protest was a call to end racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.

Since Tuesday night, thousands have demonstrated around the country. Flames lit up the night sky in California cities as protesters burned a giant papier-mache Trump head in Los Angeles and started fires in Oakland intersections.

Marchers protesting Trump's election chanted and carried signs in front of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and gathered outside Trump Tower in Chicago, chanting "Not my president!"

Deepti Hajela of The Associated Press and State Journal reporter Shelley K. Mesch contributed to this report.
A Resounding Vote Against Due

Process and the Second Amendment

By Jacob Sullum . November 10th, 2016

Like a California law that took effect last January, the gun control initiative that Washington voters overwhelmingly approved on Tuesday authorizes court orders that deprive people of the right to arms without due process. In fact, Initiative 1491, which was backed by Gov. Jay Inslee and attracted support from 71 percent of voters, is even less respectful of due process and the Second Amendment.

Both laws allow police officers and other concerned, meddlesome, or possibly malicious individuals to ask a judge for a "gun violence restraining order" (in California) or an "extreme risk protection order" (in Washington), which prohibits its target from buying or possessing firearms and requires him to surrender any he already owns. In California, orders can be requested by "immediate family member[s]," a category that includes spouses, domestic partners, current or former roommates, parents, step-parents, parents-in-law, grandparents, step-grandparents, siblings, step-siblings, siblings-in-law, children, stepchildren, children-in-law, and grandchildren.

The authors of Initiative1491 thought that list was not long enough, so they added "dating partners," baby mamas (or papas), former legal guardians, and all relatives, including aunts, uncles, and cousins. They also extended the deadline for a former roommate (which could be an ex-spouse or ex-lover) seeking an order from six months after moving out to a year. ......

It is almost beyond belief that voters would choose something that could so easily strip someone's constitutional rights - dangerously so. Two things show as being of paramount importance - 1)Where is due process? - and 2) What an ideal mechanism for disgruntled people to fabricate a 'reason' for a judge to issue an order against a person who just happens to have 'upset' another. This almost seems like anti-Second Amendment subterfuge.

"You don't have to be Jewish to fight by our side."

 2016 JPFO All rights reserved.

jpfo@jpfo.org

1-800-869-1884

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

12500 NE 10th Pl.

Bellevue, WA 98005 USA

Americas most aggressive civil rights organization

We make the NRA look like moderates

Join JPFO

Back to Top


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.
Afghanistan: Fatal attack on German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif

A suicide bomber has rammed a truck into a German consulate in Afghanistan, killing at least six civilians and wounding 120, officials said.
Chinese make up half of arrivals to Poon Hill

Chinese tourists have fallen in love with the famous Ghandruk-Ghorepani-Poon Hill trail which offers a short and scenic trek in the Annapurna area. More than half of the visitors at this popular sightseeing destination are from the northern neighbour.
Clouds and silver linings

Ratification of the Paris climate deal set the ball rollingonly to be confronted by short- and long-term challenges
Constitution amendment proposal will be registered by Nov 15: PM Dahal

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has remarked that the government would register the amendment proposal to the new constitution before the end of current Nepali month Kartikby November 15.
Demonetisation of IC Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes hits India-returnees

The Indian government's sudden decision Tuesday to demonetize the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes has hit hard people like Karan Awasthi who have returned home after working in India.
Deuba denies sharing dais with Tibetan leaders

Former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba again denied sharing a dais with representatives of Tibetan government in exile during a conference in Goa, India, last week.
Dolma Impact Fund marks 2nd anniv

Dolma Impact Fund marked its 2nd anniversary of operation in Nepal amid a programme here on Wednesday.
Elderly couple beaten to death for witchcraft

An elderly couple was beaten to death by their neighbour on charge of practising witchcraft at Likhu-2 in Nuwakot district on Wednesday night.
Firms, personalities awarded

Frost & Sullivan, a global consulting firm headquartered in California, has honoured Nepals top firms and personalities during the first edition of its flagship event  Growth, Innovation and Leadership Summit (GIL 2016: Nepal)  in Kathmandu on Wednesday.
Govt's 100 days: PM to address the nation

With the first 100 days of the Maoist party-led coalition government completed, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal is scheduled to address the nation on Friday.
Guerrillas from the mist

Former Maoist combatants grievances should be addressed before their nonviolent protest turns into violent action
Honour three-point agreement, says Sanghiya Gathabandhan

The Sanghiya Gathabandhan, an alliance of the Madhesi and Janajati parties, has said the constitution amendment proposal should honour the three-point agreement the alliance of the CPN (Maoist Centre) and the Nepali Congress signed with it before the formation of the government three months ago.
Morcha boycotts parliament meet

Leaders of Samyukta Loktantrik Madhesi Morcha (SLMM) boycotted the parliament meet held on Friday demanding the government implement the three-point agreement signed with them.
Mahabir Pun's National Innovation Centre provided Rs 200,000

The National Innovation Centre, set up by researcher Mahabir Pun, has been provided with Rs 200,000 amid a programme here on Friday to fuel its researches and innovations.
Nepal becomes party to anti-biological arms pact

Nepal has become the state party to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction after formally depositing the Instrument of Ratification.
Oli, Deuba for finding way out through trilateral meet

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has expedited talks with top leaders of major parties to find a way out for the amendment proposal to be registered in Parliament following a meeting of his partys headquarters.
Photo shows Deuba with Tibetan leader

Despite his claim that he did not meet any Tibetan leader during his recent visit to Goa, India, former PM and Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba was pictured along with Lobsang Sangay, the Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government in Exile, who is known as Sikyong.
Police probe suspected murder-suicide

Police are investigating into a suspected murder-suicide case after a woman, 76, and her son, 43, were found dead at Serna VDC-9 in Okhaldhunga.
President Bhandari's family tour to Chandragiri [photo feature]

President Bidhya Devi Bhandari visited Chandragiri Hillsa popular tourist destination on the outskirts of Kathmandu on Friday.
RBI asks NRB about amount of banned Indian notes in Nepal

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked the Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) to provide details of the stock of Indian currency in denominations of 500 and 1,000 in the Nepali financial system.
Real or gimmicky?

Plan to end load-shedding in Kathmandu risks becoming just another tall promise
Roadmap for an organic Nepal

Biopesticides can greatly reduce the use of conventional pesticides, while keeping the crop yields high and organic
Security forces okayed to operate tank trucks

The Supplies Ministry has given the green signal to the Nepal Army, Nepal Police and Armed Police Force to operate their own tank trucks so that they can ensure regular supplies at their gasoline stations.
Trump presidency: Protests turn violent in Portland, Oregon

A second night of protests in the US against President-elect Donald Trump has turned violent in Portland, Oregon.
Victims lack suitable land to build homes

Most of the earthquake-displaced families in Sindhupalchok district may have received the first tranche of housing reconstruction aid, but they have no suitable land to build new houses.
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.
World class IT and engineering academy planned

The government is mulling over setting up a world class engineering and IT institute with the focus on research-based study. Such an institute will be established with the support from the Asian Development Bank, according to government officials.
No

Yes, a light case

Yes, two or more light cases

One serious case

Two or more serious bouts

Vote

View Results
KENDALLVILLE  You go out and come back. You go out, lose five or 10 guys, and come back. You go out with replacements and hope you come back.

Thats how U.S. Army veteran Denny Nestor described his infantry regiments daily cycle of life and death in the Vietnam War in 1967-68 to East Noble High School students during the schools annual Veterans Day program Friday.

Nestor spent 11 months in country before he was wounded, and then spent six months recovering at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.

There aint no glory in war, just lots of dead friends, he said. Nestor was among several veterans attending the program.

Students showed their appreciation for the veterans with standing ovations, accolades in words and music, cheers and applause, individual recognition and face-to-face smiles, handshakes and gentle hugs.

The Veterans Day program began at 8:15 a.m. for what would be a long day of programs and ceremonies at area schools, nursing homes and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts and American Legions for the aging veterans.

Today, we honor our veterans for the sacrifices they made for the common good, Principal Kathy Longenbaugh told the students and guests assembled in the school gym.

Veterans from World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and from all branches of the military, proudly wearing their service caps, shirts and vests, sat in chairs in front of the bleachers.

Senior Zoe Heffley explained the history of Veterans Day, and senior Jocelyn Hutchins played a flute solo of Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story, joined by a recording of President Frankin Roosevelts inspiring speech during World War II.

Freshman Sheridan Asher accompanied herself on the piano in singing America the Beautiful, and the advanced concert band under the direction of Bryan Munoz, East Noble director of bands, performed the Armed Forces Salute, with veterans standing when their branch of the militarys hymn was played.

Senior Kinzie Gura told the story of Private 1st Class Jack Lucas, a 17-year-old Marine, who used his body to shield three of his fellow squad members from enemy grenades in the battle for the Pacific island of Iwo Jima during World War II. He received 250 pieces of shrapnel in his body and endured 26 surgeries, but he survived. President Harry Truman awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Senior Abbie Peterson told the story of a small-town boy who fought in Vietnam and risked his life to save his wounded commander. When the commander called him crazy and asked why he did it, the soldier replied, I did it to protect you, sir.

Forty years later, the boy was telling his grandchildren about his service in the Vietnam War, and his youngest granddaughter asked him, Why did you do it? Werent you scared? He replied: No. I did it to protect you.

Longenbaugh told the students: Our appreciation for veterans on this day is especially deep. She encouraged students to say thank you to a vet.

Students climbed down from their bleacher seats, quietly formed a line and filed past the veterans, shaking their hands and saying: Thank you for your service.

At VFW Post 2749, retired U.S. Army Master Sgt. Max Franklin, who spent 26 years in the military and served three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, spoke to fellow veterans, their families and guests about the meaning of Veterans Day and about four of his buddies he served with who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I never knew what the true meaning of ultimate sacrifice really was until I served with these American heroes, said Franklin. He escorted Sgt. Larry Roukeys remains back to his family in Westbrook, Maine. Seeing their faces made a lasting impression on Franklin.

At that point, he strayed from his prepared speech to describe the 1,200-mile motorcycle trip he took five years ago with another veteran to visit Roukeys wife. We cried together, then she had questions, lots of questions about how her husband died, said Franklin. I had the opportunity to tell her about his last days, and that helped her and me.

The Francis Vinyard VFW Post 2749 program included recognition of veterans in attendance, a ceremony honoring area veterans who had died in the past 12 months, a 21-gun salute and the playing of Taps.

Franklin, who serves as the posts chaplain, asked those present to pray to God that wars will some day end and the need to make the ultimate sacrifice for ones country is something written on the pages of history.
The La Crosse Chapter 370 of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees (NARFE) will meet Dec. 14 at Perkins Restaurant on Hwy. 16. Gathering will be at 11.30 a.m., with lunch at noon. Any federal employee, retiree or spouse is welcome.
District officials hope to have all Melrose-Mindoro School District students under one roof by the beginning of the 2018 school year.

Voters in the district approved borrowing $24.7 for the project Tuesday, 1,154 to 955, to build a preschool through eighth-grade addition on the high school site. It would also add a junior high wing to the school, upgrade the high school science and music rooms, and add a secure entrance for seventh- through twelfth-grade students.

There also would be a shared-use addition of a kitchen, cafeteria, restrooms and storage, along with other renovations to existing buildings. Taxpayers with $100,000 of property value are expected to pay $222 per year for the next 20 years.

Superintendent Del DeBerg said the district is dealing with aging buildings and seeing infrastructure problems, such as the need to improve entrances and be more energy efficient. The unified campus will allow the district to address space shortages at the current elementary buildings in Melrose and Mindoro, as well as increase efficiency as many staff members currently travel between sites in the district.

Our resident and taxpayers have always been supportive of the district, he said. Election night that showed once again.

The next phase will be to design the unified campus building. DeBerg said the district hopes to break ground in July or August, with the new campus ready for students at the beginning of the 2018-19 school year.

The school board realizes the current elementary buildings are an anchor for their communities, he said, and finding good uses for them is a top priority. Nothing official has taken place, he said, but future discussions will focus on the districts options to keep, sell or tear them down.

Mike Hesse, town of Farmington chairman, said the future of the Mindoro Elementary School building has been a town board discussion topic in recent months, with members wanting to keep the building in the community. They had discussed using it for childcare, as a support school for the district or even relocating the town hall to the building.

Wed like to see another use for it, he said.

That would create the potential to bring a small grocery store, community kitchen or farmers market to the current town hall, Hesse said, something he has championed. The town just built sidewalks to the school, he said, and many want to see that investment paid back  by using the site as a pickup location for kids taking the bus to the new campus, as an example.

We have to work to make sure the facility remains an anchor to the community, he said. This will be the first time since 1854 we havent had a public school in Farmington.
Come January, a group of superheroes will descend on Gundersens Childrens Miracle Network Hospital to bestow a bit of courage and joy on kids who need it most.

The Capes 4 Kids program at Wesley United Methodist Church, organized by church members Heather Talbot and Shirley Sachs, will host its inaugural sewing bee Sunday to make colorful capes for hospitalized children, along with crocheted teddy bears and miniature capes to match. Talbot contacted a pair of nurses in Dallas who turn a local coffee shop into a cape making factory every month for advice about getting a similar venture going in La Crosse.

There are cape-making teams in Australia and Ohio as well, Talbot said. There is kind of a new trend of domesticity, getting back into sewing and knitting. Shirley really has an acumen for sewing, and with my energy and zaniness, I think we can really do something positive in the community. I really think people will rally around something like this.

Talbot and Sachs have secured a Thrivent grant and a financial donation to get the program started, and they hope to have enough materials to create 25 capes Sunday. Community members are invited to help with tracing, cutting, pinning and sewing while enjoying music, treats and camaraderie. Capes will be made in four sizes, with colorful prints on one side and a Shazam! decal affixed to the back.

We want this to be something people of all ages can help with, said Talbot, who plans to make sewing kits for people who want to work on capes at home during the winter. I think this can be a unifying thing in the community and bring happiness to kids who are fighting super villains in the form of illness.

Talbot reached out to Childrens Miracle Network, which often receives blanket donations, to see what colors and prints the kids would get excited about, and found the staff was thrilled with the novelty of the project.

This is going to be something different and fun for the kids in the department, said Rena Cash, program specialist with Gundersens Childrens Miracle Network Hospital. I think our families are going to love it. Having something special can turn what is not really a good experience into something that brightens their day with a bit of sunshine.

Talbot, who plans to have her team in super hero costumes during the cape delivery, knows firsthand the effect a thoughtful gift can have during a tough time, a feeling she aspires to pass on.

I grew up in foster care, Talbot said. People would send care packages and the boost it gave me in life  the love and encouragement  was huge. It goes beyond a utilitarian thought. These capes arent externally necessary for something like keeping warm, but when you look at the meaning behind them, the internal joy and encouragement, you realize they really are necessary.
La Crosse Mayor Tim Kabat Thursday called for the city to remember its values in the wake of the brutal presidential election cycle as he opened the La Crosse Common Council meeting.

Before the council authorized an agreement with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to turn its attention on Jackson Street, Kabat took a moment to ask his fellow local government officials to remember the importance of compassion and empathy as the city joins the country in bringing the 2016 election season to a close.

We have all experienced one of the most  probably the most  brutal and longest campaigns for president, Kabat said. I dont have any great words of wisdom or advice; Im still trying to process it myself.

Kabat acknowledged that the city was filled both with people who were pleased to see Donald Trump elected and those who were not, adding that he didnt have much to say on the results themselves.

The one constant that I would like to suggest is that for all of us in this room, especially those of us who are local elected officials, is to remember the values of respect and compassion and empathy and how we treat each other and the fact that we all are in this together are probably more absolutely critical today than they were a few days ago, he said.

Kabat shared the common themes of Thursday mornings Diversity Council Training, which called for mutual respect and active listening, as well as a floodplain discussion that reviewed how critical the natural resources of the area are.

Im sure there are going to be many challenges ahead that we probably dont have any idea about, but I know here locally, and with all of you I am very confident, we will remember all of those values and really work together to move our city forward, Kabat said.

The city council got down to business following Kabats remarks, spending an hour in closed session discussing the boundary agreement with the town of Shelby and unanimously authorizing the mayor to sign a standard agreement with the DOT, which plans to make improvements to Hwy. 33 where it follows Jackson Street from Third to 23rd streets in either 2020 or 2021.

Third to Fourth street will be a reconstruction because the pavement is so broken up, but the rest will just be a resurface, said project manager Todd Waldo in an interview Thursday.

The project will be similar to the Hwy. 16 improvements a few years ago and the Lang Drive resurfacing done late this summer.

The entire roadway will get an asphalt cap, Waldo said.

The design for the road is its early stages, with the DOT floating ideas for bumpouts to ease pedestrian crossing, but nothing has been finalized.

We havent really decided anything. Its pretty early. Well talk to the city about what they want to do about parking accommodations and thatll drive the conversation as far as bike accommodations as well, Waldo said.

The project is expected to cost $2.2 million, with the city funding 25 percent of the project.

Im sure there are going to be many challenges ahead that we probably dont have any idea about, but I know here locally, and with all of you I am very confident, we will remember all of those values and really work together to move our city forward. Mayor Tim Kabat
SALT LAKE CITY (AP)  Minnesota is among a dwindling number of states banning full-strength beer sales at food markets after Oklahoma voters abandoned alcohol content limits on beer and wine sold in grocery stores and convenience stores.

That leaves Minnesota, Utah and Kansas as the last three states limiting beers alcohol content to 3.2 percent by weight when the changes go into effect over the next few years.

Minnesota law allows only 3.2 beer to be sold in grocery stores and other retailers not holding a full off-sale liquor license and is the only alcoholic beverage sold for off-premise consumption on Sunday. Minnesota law also provides for special 3.2 beer licenses for restaurants and taverns not selling strong beer, wine or liquor.

The ballot measure approved Tuesday allows full-strength beer for the Oklahoma stores and comes after a similar change in Colorado.

The amount of lighter beer sold nationally as a result would go from 1.8 percent of all beer brewed in the U.S. to 0.7 percent, said Jim Olsen, president of the Utah Beer Wholesalers Association.

It also narrows the national market for weaker booze to a trickle, raising questions about whether it would make financial sense for big beer companies such as Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors to keep making as many 3.2 beer styles.

There wont be that much beer consumed under the 3.2 label, Olsen said. Utah also limits beer on tap at bars and restaurants to 3.2 percent, and the selection there could be affected as well.

Anheuser-Busch, for one, said in a statement that it will continue making lighter beer.

The Beer Wholesalers Association says the solution is to change state law to allow for higher-alcohol beer in grocery stores. But Utah lawmakers, many of whom are teetotaling Mormons, may not agree.

But if big beer makers pull back, it could also open up potential opportunities for Utahs craft beer brewers to fill the shelves instead with locally made product.

If theres less of it from big beer, its more opportunity for us to fill the void, said Matthew Allred, spokesman for Salt Lake Citys Epic Brewing Co.

Bigger beer companies often offer stores incentives to stock prime grocery store space with their product, leaving smaller producers with less space in stores to catch customers eyes, he said

State liquor officials are monitoring national changes.

Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control spokesman Terry Wood said the department has been aware of the Oklahoma initiative for some time now and are analyzing the impact of the vote.

Minnesota law allows only 3.2 beer to be sold in grocery stores and other retailers not holding a full off-sale liquor license.
On this Veterans Day, I want to thank every person who ever donned an armed forces uniform. No matter the era or where duty called you, you took a solemn oath to defend this great nation of ours. That by itself puts you in the minority of our citizenship  a dedicated few who have earned the great esteem of being called a veteran.

Earning this status  and it surely is earned  is not easy. Beyond pledging yourself to something greater than yourself, many of you have been called to action to actually fulfill that pledge. It is one thing to think about patriotism and being a patriot. Its another to say and mean the words, I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. Its another entirely to answer your nations call and physically act on that oath, taking up arms against the enemies of our country.

Our living veterans have earned respect by taking up arms in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the first and second Gulf Wars, and Afghanistan, among many others. We have veterans of the Cold War, Grenada, Panama and Somalia. Joining the U.S. armed forces means the possibility of serving anytime, anywhere in the world.

While our veterans have served the world over in wars, soldiers do not make our nations foreign policy  they deliver it. They deliver it with boots on the ground and from high in the sky, from rifles and cannons, and also from their presence, professionalism and empathy for those they help after the fight. This world and our veterans have been shaped by the places our veterans have been and the things they have seen.

More than 100 years ago, armies clashed in Europe, carrying out the orders of their nations leaders. World War I began in 1914. That war left the world with a path to World War II and with many of the final political boundaries and nations we see today, as well as with much of the enduring religious, ethnic and political strife that continues to this day.

In 1917, after years of standing by, the United States of America entered into the Great War, as it was called then.

Americans were called upon to serve in great numbers, including, of course, many Wisconsinites, who served with great distinction. From Wisconsin, 122,215 served, with 3,932 casualties.

The end of the Great War came Nov. 11, 1918  Armistice Day. Its the day we celebrate today as Veterans Day. As veterans, we can all trace our lineage back to a starting point, and World War I is no different. Wisconsinites served then as they do now and did before, carrying on the tradition of selfless service and passing it along today through others.

While we have no living veterans of World War I  a soldier named Frank Buckles, who died in 2011 at the age of 110, was the last living American veteran of the war  we use days like today to remember them.

The history of World War I is a solemn reminder of the cost of war, that time marches on, and old veterans fade away. Their memories are kept alive by future generations of veterans.
Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on unauthorized immigration, including the deportation of anyone living in the country illegally. That pledge from the president-elect worries some Hispanic children  including those in Madison  who wonder what will happen when he takes office in January.

Madison-area teachers and school staff said some students broke down in tears Wednesday and Thursday after voters elected Trump president Tuesday, a reaction that surfaced in schools across the country.

"The day after was a really emotional day for me," said an 18-year-old senior at East High School. "Because being undocumented, I know there's a possibility that in my future, I could get deported."

Anti-Trump protests continue; opponents call them hypocrites A crowd of hundreds of UW-Madison students and others who gathered Thursday night at the top of Bascom Hill swelled to around 2,500 by the time it reached the steps of the state Capitol.

President Barack Obama signed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order in 2012, temporarily protecting undocumented children from being deported, allowing them to get work permits, receive scholarships and attend college. Trump has said he would immediately terminate the order once elected.

"So I sit in school  I'm doing my work  and I think about, if I continue to do this work, will all my effort I'm putting in right now, will it all be in vain?" the East senior said. The Wisconsin State Journal is not naming the student because of his fears of being deported.

Ultimately, the student said he decided he couldn't "run away" and has adopted a strategy he hopes others will adopt of striving to be "successful and one day make the change ourselves by becoming educated."

"I wouldn't suggest it makes me feel better, but I feel like that it is a way for me to continue," he said.

Silvia Gomez, a bilingual resource specialist at East, said of the couple hundred Hispanic students she works with, more than two dozen sought counseling this week because of Trump's election.

She said most fears surround deportation, even though Trump's suggestion has been downplayed in recent days by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus who said Trump would only deport undocumented people who have committed crimes.

"I do not say it's going to be OK," Gomez said. "I don't say that because we don't know what's going to happen. I do say this is a time to basically represent yourself  to not be what people think you are. This is a time to do better and to get all the education that you can."

The undocumented student said he moved to Madison from Veracruz, Mexico, with his parents when he was 2 years old. He has three siblings who were born here after the move and are U.S. citizens.

"It'd be really difficult leaving them here," he said. "That's the reality of Hispanics here  I know many people in the same situation."

Jon Hawkins, a teacher at Wright Middle School, said his task of trying to soothe fears of families splitting up has also included being honest with students about what could happen.

"I received a note from a student today asking, 'How do I explain deportation to my little brother,' " Hawkins said. "I try to comfort them and I try to let them know that we are there for them but I also have to be honest with them  we are powerless in that situation."

A call to action from 15-year-old

Trump's election spurred protests at a number of schools across the country, including West High School in Madison on Thursday.

About 200 students gathered on the school's front steps chanting "Love Trumps Hate," and some urged others to become active in politics.

"It's going to be like this forever, unless we do something about it," 15-year-old sophomore Janessa Bingham said to the crowd.

Teachers this week are balancing remaining impartial about the election's result with also being sensitive to students who are upset about the outcome.

"It's that fine line. We want to support all of our students, but don't want to make it seem like we are criticizing the results of the election," said Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District spokesman Perry Hibner.

At Madison's Sandburg Elementary School, knowledge of the election among the young students varied, and some students who are not Hispanic have become worried for the future of their friends who are.

"Each child is different, and the reactions span the gamut from having apparently no knowledge of the election or its significance to other children crying and asking, 'Why do they hate us so much?' " Principal Brett Wilfrid said.

Michael Hernandez, principal of East High School, said school staff have been trying to create an environment in which students feel comfortable sharing their concerns and opinions about Trump's election and his past statements that may have been hurtful to some groups of students.

"When you're looking at a face of a 15- or 16-year-old who is truly scared because of their fear of how that could affect their family ... my job was to provide a safe space," Hernandez said. "When you have an elected leader using the term 'anchor baby,' and you have many (students and families who are) first-generation, myself included, (it) becomes an issue. That's hard to process when you're 44 years old; I can't imagine that for a 15-year-old."

Teaching lesson

The task of turning Tuesday's election results into a social studies lesson has been made complicated by the emotional reactions being felt by students, said Verona High School social studies teacher Jason Knoll.

He said interactions between students who support Trump and students who don't have been civil. Grant Jensen, a 16-year-old sophomore at Memorial High School, said the same is true at his school.

"There have been lots of peer conversations about the outcome but they've all been very respectful," said Jensen. "There hasn't been a lot of conservatives mentioning their excitement for a Trump win; it's been liberals being emotional about the outcome."
Last year, I wrote an article describing what it is that an Ag Extension educator does. I wrote about providing unbiased and scientifically supported information and about running educational programs. At the time, I had only been on the job for two or three months, and while I may have been generally on point, I certainly had a lot to learn over the coming year.

The local Ag Extension Educator position is very dynamic. This position has a wide range of responsibilities, from organizing public education events to doing scientific research and from attending meetings around the state to taking part in local 4-H events. With so many different things to work on, sometimes the needs of the local population can get lost in the day-to-day activities.

Thankfully, both Fillmore and Houston County have excellent county Extension committees that help guide the direction of this position. Local Extension educators also have access to many experienced leaders within the University of Minnesota Extension on whom they can always call on for help or advice. But to truly tailor local educator positions to the needs of their area, Extension offices need direct feedback from local populations.

While anyone can contact the Extension office with questions, comments or concerns, University of Minnesota Extension would like to provide another avenue for public feedback on the local Ag educator position in Fillmore and Houston counties. The following web address will link you to a needs assessment survey that is designed to collect public feedback on this local Ag educator position: http://z.umn.edu/1a7a

This needs assessment is designed to assess three different aspects of the local Ag Extension educator position: the effectiveness of methods used to deliver educational materials, the importance of specific relationship/partnerships to the success of Extension programming, and the importance of general program focus areas as well as specific programs within those focus areas.

Your feedback is important. For this needs assessment to truly represent our area, we need individuals from all stakeholder groups to respond. Rest assured that all individual responses will be kept confidential and only composite information will be used when reporting results. University of Minnesota Extension takes all feedback it receives very seriously and the comments we collect from this needs assessment will shape the future of your local Ag educator position. Thank you very much for considering using this line of communication with the University of Minnesota Extension.
Donald Trumps historic election victory, which turned Wisconsin red for the first time in more than three decades, helped sweep one La Crosse area Democrat out of office and brought a GOP challenger to within five dozen votes of unseating the Senates minority leader.

The Trump wave was just too big, said state Rep. Chris Danou, who was unseated by Mondovi Mayor Treig Pronschinske in the 92nd Assembly District. You look at the numbers, I just dont think I could overcome it.

Danou, a four-term incumbent, said he also felt strong sense of resentment toward Democrats and urban elites in what used to be friendly territory.

The district encompasses most of Trempealeau and Buffalo counties and part of Jackson County. Before legislative redistricting, Trempealeau and Buffalo counties were in the 91st Assembly District, which was represented by a Democrat from 1984 through 2012.

Were seeing whats becoming a very, very strong urban-rural divide in the state, Danou said. The irony is the policies pursued by Republicans  havent been good for rural Wisconsin.

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse political scientist Joe Heim said Trump clearly connected with rural voters, especially in areas like Trempealeau County, which has seen a rapid surge in the Hispanic immigrant population.

The rural areas were receptive to the Trump message about immigration and being left out of the economy, Heim said. And in some respects not being respected by urban people.

Republican incumbents Nancy VanderMeer and Lee Nerison both posted solid victories in rural Assembly districts to the south and east of La Crosse. Incumbent Ed Brooks of Reedsburg also cruised to re-election despite being on the Democrats target list. He beat Democrat Art Shrader with 58 percent of the vote in a district that includes a small part of Monroe County and all of Juneau County.

In the 24th state Senate District, which includes six counties stretching from west of Sparta to east of Stevens Point, Republican Patrick Testin ended the 18-year legislative career of Democrat Julie Lassa. The city of Stevens Point will be represented by a Republican in the state Senate for the first time since Democrat William Bablitch claimed the seat in 1973. Redistricting moved northern Monroe County into the 24th after the 2010 elections.

Though Trump won just 41.5 percent of the votes in La Crosse County, his rural appeal in Monroe, Vernon and Crawford counties also helped bring Republican Dan Kapanke to within just 58 votes of Sen. Jennifer Shilling in a 32nd District rematch that could very well end up in a recount.

With all precincts reporting Wednesday, Shilling finished with 43,565 votes to 43,507 for Kapanke, who was seeking to retake the seat he lost in a 2011 recall.

La Crosse County almost looks like a little bit of an island of Democratic success, Heim said, noting the population center of the district broke for both Hillary Clinton and Senate candidate Russ Feingold.

Shilling, the Senate minority leader, vowed to continue pushing the Democrats agenda even as Republicans strengthened their majority by unseating Sen. Julie Lassa of Stevens Point.

While the end result is not what many had hoped for or anticipated, we must come together and move Wisconsin forward, she said in a statement.

From student loan debt relief and higher family wages to infrastructure investments and groundwater protections, Senate Democrats are committed to advancing solutions to the most pressing issues facing our state. I look forward to continue working with my Senate Democratic colleagues to strengthen Wisconsins middle class, reinvest in our schools and expand economic opportunities for hardworking families.

Heim said that while Trumps success was a surprise to both pollsters and political observers, it makes sense that down-ticket candidates benefited from his late surge.

Republicans in Wisconsin are better at getting votes out than people give them credit for, he said.
Dear reader, we're asking for your help to keep local reporting available for all today during our fall fundraiser. Your financial support keeps stories like this one free to read, instead of hidden behind paywalls. We believe when reliable local reporting is widely available, the entire community benefits. Thank you for investing in your neighborhood.

Start your day with LAist Sign up for How To LA, delivered weekday mornings. Subscribe

Anti-Trump protests have been raging across L.A. County since election night. The most prominent, so far, was a demonstration on Wednesday night that saw about 3,000 people flock to City Hall, then later overtake a section of the 101 Freeway. Numerous acts of vandalism were also performed, with various anti-Trump graffiti being tagged across the downtown area. According to the LAPD, 28 arrests were made during Wednesday night's protest.

Mayor Eric Garcetti, in a statement issued Thursday morning, referred to the event and said that he was "proud that the demonstrations in Los Angeles have been mostly lawful and peaceful." He added that, "I understand that the results of Tuesday's election are painful for many of us, and this kind of engagement can be a meaningful part of the healing we need after such a long and divisive campaign."

In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, he reiterated his praise for the demonstrations and said, "I think we're modeling good behavior. We're showing what a democracy is about."

Garcetti did, however, also warn against certain actions that had taken place on Wednesday night, saying that, "walking and throwing objects onto freeways is dangerous for pedestrians and driversand it puts a heavy burden on people just trying make it home to their families or get to work safely."

These warnings were repeated at the press conference. "We want to make sure that destroying property or other things don't get in the way of the important messages that people have to share with their fellow Americans," Garcetti said to reporters.

"I urge everyone to look out for their fellow Angelenos and put safety first," Garcetti concluded in his statement. Here's a video of the conference taken from KCAL 9:

The protests have continued on Thursday. Reporter Stephanie K. Baer followed a group of high school students from the Santee Education Complex after they'd walked out of class to stage a protest. She reported that there were at least a couple hundred students involved, and that their demonstration led them through the USC campus and to a 110 Freeway overpass.

A couple hundred students from nearby Santee Education Complex also just walked onto the USC campus to also voice opposition to Trump pic.twitter.com/gWcNWZwEoX  Stephanie K. Baer (@skbaer) November 10, 2016

High school students marching through USC campus, chanting "Fuck Trump." pic.twitter.com/IIeIKb7d1L  Stephanie K. Baer (@skbaer) November 10, 2016

Students walking down Vermont, mostly getting love from people driving down the street. pic.twitter.com/L2eTt0mLH0  Stephanie K. Baer (@skbaer) November 10, 2016

Coming up to Figueroa now, Santee students' chants have mostly been "Fuck Trump" & "everywhere we go..." #LosAngeles pic.twitter.com/38GZJqse0s  Stephanie K. Baer (@skbaer) November 10, 2016

Walkouts were also reported at Franklin High School and Eagle Rock High School. ABC 7 reports that students from Manual Arts High School had also taken to the USC campus:

#LIVE: Students spotted forming human chain at USC in protest of Donald Trump https://t.co/9lpm5fVzJc pic.twitter.com/3R5EAt9WqT  ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) November 10, 2016

Also, out in Boyle Heights, a group of demonstrators waving signs had blocked the westbound lane of the 10 Freeway on Thursday afternoon. According to CBS 2, the demonstration started at around 3 p.m. by the N. Eastern Avenue exit. LAPD officers cleared the crowd at about 3:45 p.m.
Biddeford-Saco-OOB Courier

Those who habitually put items in their recycling bins that don't belong there are the target of the ordinance amendment, not those who make an occasional, accidental mistake, said Public Works Director Jeff Demers.
This week on our national parks journey, we visit a mountainous landscape on Americas east coast. Within the park are rocky peaks, rolling green hills, and spectacular waterfalls. It is also home to hundreds of black bears.

Welcome to Shenandoah National Park in the state of Virginia.

Shenandoah sits in the heart of Blue Ridge Mountains. The mountains are part of the larger Appalachian Mountain range. The parks hiking trails, waterfalls and wildlife appeal to nature-lovers and adventurers.

Driving on top of the mountain

Shenandoah National Park is perhaps best known for the road that goes through it: Skyline Drive.

Skyline Drive runs nearly 170 kilometers north to south. It is the only road in the park. There are more than 70 overlooks along the way, where people can pull their car off the road. These overlooks provide visitors with beautiful views of the Shenandoah Valley.

The road was built in the 1930s, at a time when the automobile was becoming popular.

Shenandoahs north entrance lies less than 120 kilometers from Washington, D.C. Early planners wanted a major national park like those in the American West here on the East Coast, close to big cities.

In fact, Shenandoah was described as an Eastern park in the Western tradition.

And, early park planners wanted Skyline Drive to be the single greatest feature of the park.

Denise Machado is a park ranger at Shenandoah. She explains that the park soon became a place for people to escape the noise -- and heat -- of big cities.

It was created just so people could kind of get away, a place to escape the big city hustle and bustle. Pre-air-condition days, this was the place to be. The temperatures were about 10 degrees cooler up here on the mountain.

But, Shenandoahs history is not without controversy. To create the place that park planners envisioned, many families were forced to leave behind properties in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Shenandoah National Park was formed from more than 3,000 individual land purchases. They were presented to the federal government by the Commonwealth of Virginia. Shenandoah officially became a national park in 1936.

Today, most of the buildings and structures that once stood in the area are long gone. But, you can find some signs of the past. A log building called Corbin Cabin still stands. George Corbin, who built the log structure, was forced to leave the land in the late 1930s, just after the creation of the national park. Today, the cabin is operated by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. The club permits people to rent the cabin.

Hiking Shenandoah

Shenandoah National Park has more than 800 kilometers of hiking trails. They take visitors to rocky mountain peaks, grassy meadows, and forested canyons. Hikers are especially drawn to the parks famous waterfalls.

The waterfalls are definitely the most popular. We have nine waterfalls. Dark Hollow Falls is our most popular. Its a beautiful waterfall, it's a 70-foot waterfall. It 1.4 mile hike round-trip. It follows along a stream. And youre right at the base of the falls and youre looking up and you can feel the spray. Its a really great experience.

Grace Williams hiked to Dark Hollow Falls with her daughter on her birthday.

My daughters gift for me to bring me to the national park. And its on my bucket list. I always love falls, I like the sound. The water is refreshing. So, they did tell us it's kind of like a moderate hike. I do have knee problems, but I just wanted to challenge it, and Im glad I came. Its beautiful.

Another of Shenandoahs famous hikes is called Old Rag. It is almost 15 kilometers long.

To get to the top of Old Rag Mountain, hikers must scramble up large rocks. It is a long and difficult hike. But, the views from the top bring hikers from all across the country and world.

Because it is close to many big cities, Shenandoahs trails are often crowded with people. More than 1 million people visit the park each year.

Although Shenandoah was created to be an easy escape from big East Coast cities, today it sees visitors from all over the world.

It's amazing how many people you meet that come from far-flung countries and corners of the world. We've had people from Africa. We get a lot of people from Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, so you just never know where they're going to come from."

Machado says summer and fall are the most popular times to visit the park. While summer is a good time to enjoy the waterfalls, the fall brings beautiful autumn colors. In the middle of October, the trees begin to lose their leaves. The leaves change from green to different shades of yellow, orange, and red as winter approaches.

On weekends in October it can take up to two hours just to get into the park.

Shenandoahs black bears

Visitors to Shenandoah National Park have a good chance of seeing a black bear. The park is home to between 400 to 600 black bears. It has one of the densest black bear populations of any national park.

Denise Machado knows a lot about these black bears. In fact, her nickname is the bear lady.

Well, I am known in Shenandoah as the bear lady. I see a lot of bears every season. I'm in the park early in the morning and late in the evening. I see anywhere from 400 or so bears every year. And, it's wonderful to see. I never get tired of seeing them. They are all different and they are all special.

Machado gives visitors advice for what to do if they see a black bear.

So, if you see a bear, you want to clap your hands, you wanna say Hey bear! Hey bear! They really dont like to be startled. You dont want to try to sneak up on them to get a photo or anything. You want to make sure that they are totally aware you are there.

Malachi and his older brother Brent visited Shenandoah National Park with their parents. The family traveled here from Cincinnati, Ohio. The family hiked the Little Stony Man Trail. Along the way, they came upon a black bear.

I really liked how we could see the animals. We saw a really big bear. And he was really friendly and he didnt do anything. And he was just eating.

The parks bears and other wildlife are a big part of what attracts so many visitors to Shenandoah. Carol Bair and her husband visited the park from York, Pennsylvania. She said visiting Shenandoah is like a breath of fresh air.

It's just quieter. You hear the birds. You look at trees different. The wind blowing through the fields, it's just really neat.

I'm Ashley Thompson.

And I'm Adam Brock.

Ashley Thompson reported and wrote this story. Adam Brock was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

peak - n. the pointed top of a mountain

spectacular - adj. causing wonder and admiration

hustle and bustle - expression. busy and noisy activity

meadow - n. a usually flat area of land that is covered with tall grass

canyon - n. a deep valley with steep rock sides and often a stream or river flowing through it

bucket list - n. a number of experiences that a person hopes to do in their lifetime

moderate - adj. average in the level of difficulty

scramble - v. to move or climb over something quickly especially while also using your hands

recreation - n. activities done for enjoyment

dense - adj. having many of something in a certain area

startle - v. to surprise or frighten suddenly

sneak up - phrasal verb. to approach (someone) quietly and secretly in order to avoid being noticed
A Nobel Peace Prize winner thinks it unlikely that opposition groups will rise up in North Korea.

Former Polish President Lech Walesa says, It is questionable at this point whether North Koreans will fight for freedom because they are too poor.

Walesa helped formed and led the Solidarity labor movement in Poland during the 1980s. He spoke with VOA during a visit to Seoul.

He was in South Korea to attend a meeting on how the international community can influence peaceful change in North Korea.

Facing repression

The former president spoke about his part in the Solidarity movement. He said what was important to that movement was the power of belief.

What we emphasized was that they could kill us or imprison us, but we had a belief that we would never give up, Walesa said. We wanted to emphasize that we would not work for communism while they at some point would give in.

He noted the conditions in North Korea today are worse than those that existed in Poland in the early 1980s.

In 2014, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry released a report on human rights abuses in North Korea. The report accused the North Korean government of holding 120,000 people in political prisoners. And it gave a list of abuses that include forced labor, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence.

Walesa said the government of Kim Jong Un mistreats its people while supporting a program to develop nuclear weapons. He said such behavior can only bring harmful effects.

Nuclear activities

North Korea has tested nuclear devices five times since 2006. Two tests have taken place this year. The country also has tested medium- or long-distance missiles about 25 times this year. The most recent international sanctions appear to have little or no effect on North Korea.

The United Nations Security Council has considered additional measures against the North. But, reports say China has postponed negotiations on new sanctions until after the American presidential election.

A different approach from increasing pressure

Lech Walesa suggested that South Korea and other countries should open up talks with the North about peaceful reunification of the Koreas.

Of North and South Korea, Walesa said, Both need to cooperate well and understand each other. The world is open for North Korea. North Korea does not need to escape. Freedom opens many doors, he said.

Those opinions are similar to ones discussed by a task force organized by a U.S.-based group, the Council on Foreign Relations. Its members suggested offering North Korea incentives for agreeing to suspend nuclear and missile tests. The goal would be for the North to return to international talks and to restate the goal of banning all nuclear weapons from the area.

The plan described by both Walesa and the task force are similar to the Sunshine policy of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in 2000.

Im Mario Ritter.

Brian Padden reported this story for VOANews.com. Mario Ritter adapted his report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

emphasize  v. to give special attention to

sanctions  n. measure against a country to force it to obey international laws by limiting or stopping trade with that country

incentives  n. something that encourages a person or group to do something


Last Friday, French police began tearing down a huge camp in northeastern Paris.

The camp was home for thousands of Afghans and Africans. Their removal to shelters is part of a government effort to stop migrants from living on the streets.

The migrant camp was sometimes called Stalingrad because it was near the French capitals Stalingrad metro station.

Aid groups said at least 3,000 people occupied the camp; however, broadcaster CNN said the number was closer to 4,000.

Most migrants leave their home countries in search of work or a better life. But many of the people who lived in Stalingrad are considered refugees. They were forced to leave their home country because of war or oppression.

Some migrants held their possessions while waiting for buses to take them to holding centers around Ile de France, a French province that includes Paris.

Didier Leschi is the director of the French Immigration and Integration Office. He promised his agencys teams would be present at the holding centers. He also said language aides would be available.

The migrants will be able to stay in Ile de France temporarily. Then they will be sent to reception centers all over France. At the centers, they will be told how to make an official request for asylum.

Orientation process

The police operation to clear Stalingrad came a week after French President Francois Hollande ordered the destruction of another camp near the port of Calais.

That camp was known as "the Jungle." Hundreds of migrants fled to Stalingrad after the Jungles demolition.

Calais is near the English Channel. Thousands of migrants used the camp as a temporary stop on their way to Britain.

Many risked their lives by traveling through the Channel Tunnel, an underwater transportation link connecting France to Britain.

President Hollande said 5,000 migrants had been evacuated from the Calais camp in the past week and sent to 450 centers around France.

Hollande also said he spoke with British Prime Minister Theresa May to ensure that British officials would "play their part" in welcoming the new arrivals.

Frances refugee crisis

After the demolition of The Jungle, France began busing an estimated 1,500 unaccompanied young people to other parts of France. Most of them were from South Sudan and Afghanistan.

The youngsters will be taken to temporary shelters around the country, while British and French officials consider their individual cases.

People who lived in the temporary camps have made long and dangerous trips, often by boat, to Europe from Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, or other countries.

The terrible conditions in Frances migrant camps have become a sign of Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II.

Frances Interior Minister told the Reuters news agency that 85 percent of the Calais migrants are expected to meet the governments requirements for asylum.

Migrants in the Jungle faced severe security and health problems, such as scabies and tuberculosis, according to a study in 2015. A water source was also polluted with deadly bacteria.

Leigh Daynes, director of charity group Doctors of the World, told The Guardian newspaper that Calais was a humanitarian emergency. The residents were already hungry, he said. But their suffering was made worse because of their unsafe and difficult trips to reach France.

Hollande said his country should not accept the camps because they are not worthy of France. They are not a long-term answer for migrants and refugees, he said.

A mixed welcome

Throughout France, people have shown mixed feelings toward the Calais migrants. Some towns have been filled with protesters for and against migrants. Some local leaders launched a campaign against taking them in.

But some towns around France are happy to receive the migrants from Calais. For example, people in Reims offered hot coffee and treats to 29 Afghans and Sudanese as they arrived in October. Residents have been calling aid groups to donate clothes for the migrants and volunteer their services.

Philippe Wattier is the director of the Salvation Army office in Reims. He said that a number of migrants have a poor image of France because many people, including police, have mistreated them.

Sometimes, there are threats of violence against migrants. A letter to the Salvation Army last week threatened to burn down the buildings where migrants are staying.

Wattier said the hostility in the letter is similar to feelings in other parts of Europe and the United States.

Im Jill Robbins.

Alice Bryant adapted this story for Learning English from many reports from VOANews.com and other media. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

province - n. any one of the large parts that some countries are divided into

reception  adj. of or related to a place where people are received, welcomed or accepted

migrant  n. someone who moves from one place to another to find work

English Channel - n. a body of water that separates France from England

tunnel - n. a passage that goes under the ground, or through a hill or mountain

unaccompanied - adj. in the context of this story, unaccompanied means without the presence of parents

play ____ part  expression. to do what you can or should do to help reach a goal. The structure of the expression is: play + possessive pronoun + part.

scabies - n. a disease that is caused by small insects and that causes itching and red spots on the skin
History was made this week when a 34-year-old former refugee was elected to the Minnesota state legislature.

The woman, Ilhan Omar, will become the countrys first Somali-American lawmaker.

Omar was the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate for the legislature in Minnesotas 60th district. She easily defeated her Republican opponent on Tuesday.

Omar told supporters Tuesday night that her victory means a lot. "My success is not only for me but for every Somali, Muslim and minority, particularly the young girls in the Dadaab refugee camp where I lived before coming to the U.S.," she said.

From Refugee to Representative

As a girl, Omar fled her home in Somalia because of the countrys civil war. She spent four years at the Dadaab Camp in Kenya, before moving to the United States with her family. She was 12 years old at the time.

Her family first began their new life in Arlington, Virginia, and then settled in their current home in Minneapolis.

Omar began her career as a community activist. She is currently director of policy at the Women Organizing Women Network. The group works with immigrant women, helping them become engaged citizens and community leaders.

Concerns about Trump

Minnesota is home to the largest population of Somali refugees and immigrants in the United States. Many Somalis who spoke to VOA before the election said they were supporting Hillary Clinton for president because they felt that Donald Trump was anti-Somali.

Earlier, Trump has said there are problems in Minnesota caused by poor vetting of refugees. He said there were large numbers of Somali refugees entering the state, and that this was unknown to state officials. He also said that some of the refugees had joined the Islamic State group. He accused them of spreading their extremist ideas all over our country and all over the world.

Asha Ahmed, a Somali American, said "We are shocked that Trump is president, but we got relief that Ilhan will be representing us at our state House of Representatives. For me, America is my country, it is where my future and dreams always depended on and the only home for my children... [Omar's] success means a lot to me and my family, three children and a husband."

Jibril Mohamed, a lecturer at Ohio State University, expressed satisfaction at Omars election to the Minnesota state legislature.

"It is like an anti-pain relief for the Somalis, who voted against Trump because of Trump's anti-Somali rhetoric that continued even to the last days of the election campaign," he said.

Ahmed Hirsi, Omar's husband, told VOA that the campaign was a long struggle for his family to witness this day.

"It is a big historic day for us and Ilhan, a symbol and role model for many Somali refugee girls. It is a success that came through hard work and the support of our Minnesota people," he said.

Im Phil Dierking.

Mohamed Olad Hassan wrote this story for VOANews.com. Phil Dierking adapted his report for Learning English. He also used information from other media. George Grow was the editor.

What do you think of this story? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

concentration  n. a large amount of something in one place

engage  v. to get and keep someone's attention or interest

relief  n. a pleasant and relaxed feeling that someone has when something unpleasant stops or does not happen

rhetoric  n. the art or skill of speaking or writing formally and effectively especially as a way to persuade or influence people

vet  v. to check something carefully to make sure it is acceptable
This is Whats Trending Today.

Groups of Americans protested Donald Trumps election on Wednesday night and into Thursday. The events were both peaceful and violent. They happened in many places around the country, from New York to California.

More demonstrations were planned for Thursday and into the coming weekend.

People filled Midtown Manhattan in New York City Wednesday night. Videos and photos showed a huge crowd marching past Rockefeller Center.

People also gathered in front of a building with Trumps name on it in New York City, as well as around a new Trump hotel in Washington, DC. The hotel in Washington is a short distance from the White House. Protesters held signs that read Love Trumps Hate.

Many of the Americans who gathered this week were protesting against the views Trump expressed about women, minorities and immigrants during the presidential campaign. Trump promised to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. and to build a wall along the border with Mexico if he were elected.

Trump also said he would cancel a public healthcare law passed by President Barack Obama. He also spoke about renegotiating huge international trade agreements.

Protests also took place in Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Police arrested some people who blocked a large road in Los Angeles.

In front of the Los Angeles city hall, people shouted together, we reject the president-elect and support women of color.

A protester in Chicago told the Associated Press news agency that Trump will divide the country and stir up hatred.

The Reuters news agency says more protests are planned for the weekend.

Demonstrations are also expected to take place on January 20, the day Trump takes office.

And thats Whats Trending Today.

Im Dan Friedell.

Dan Friedell wrote this story for Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

What did you think of the protests in the U.S.? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

trump  v. to be more important than

stir-up  v. to cause a reaction

renegotiate  v. to discuss again the details of a formal agreement especially in order to change them
World leaders congratulated Donald Trump on his presidential election victory over Hillary Clinton.

Many also have voiced a willingness to meet with the president-elect to begin talks on beginning a new phase in relations with the U.S.

Japan

Japans Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said Thursday that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will meet with Trump next week in New York City. It will be Trumps first meeting with a foreign leader since he won Tuesdays presidential election.

Suga said the two spoke by telephone on Wednesday. Trump and Abe said they remain committed to continue U.S.-Japan cooperation on Asia-Pacific security, he added.

Trump often said during his campaign that Japan and other allies should be required to pay more of the costs to keep U.S. forces in their countries. The candidate also suggested U.S. forces might withdraw from nations that do not support more of those costs.

China

Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory message to Trump on Wednesday, state television reported. Trump criticized Chinas trade policies during the campaign. He said he supported placing import taxes, or tariffs, on Chinese goods coming into the U.S.

The report said Xi told the president-elect that the two biggest economies in the world share a responsibility to support global development and prosperity.

I place great importance on the China-U.S. relationship, and look forward to working with you to uphold the principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation, Xi was quoted as saying.

South Korea

The office of South Korean President Park Geun-hye said she spoke with Trump by telephone on Thursday. It said the president-elect promised he would make sure the U.S. will stand with South Korea 100 percent.

In a statement, Parks office said the two agreed to continue U.S.-South Korean efforts to counter North Koreas military threats.

Australia

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he briefly spoke with Trump to discuss the history of military cooperation between the two countries. Turnbull also said he spoke about why Australia supports U.S. approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.

Trump has criticized trade deals, including the TPP. He has called a disaster that would kill many American jobs.

Mexico

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he agreed to meet with Trump soon to discuss cooperation on a number of issues. Nieto said he welcomed Trumps victory speech promising to seek common ground and partnerships with other countries.

Dialogue to make agreements is still the best for Mexico, and my government will seek opportunities that benefit both nations in this new phase of bilateral relations, Nieto said.

However, Mexican Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu repeated her governments position about Trump's proposal to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out of the U.S. She said her government did not want to pay the cost of the wall.

Paying for a wall is not part of our vision," she told a local television station. Trump made his promise to make Mexico pay for the wall a major part of his campaign.

Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a telegram to Trump after his victory on Wednesday. The Russian leader said he looked forward to a constructive dialogue based on the principles of equality and mutual respect.

Putin also promised to work with Trump to help solve the current crisis in Russia-U.S. relations.

During the presidential campaign, U.S. officials repeatedly accused the Russian government of being involved in attacks on American computer systems. They also warned that Russia may launch cyber attacks meant to disrupt the U.S. election.

Russia denied the accusations, with one official saying the idea was an attempt by U.S. officials to create anti-Russian hysteria.

Israel

Israel's leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reacted by calling Trump a "true friend of the state of Israel." In a video message, he said he believes the two leaders will continue to strengthen the unique alliance between our two countries and bring it to ever greater heights.

European Union

In a joint letter, the leaders of the European Commission and EU Council congratulated Trump on his win and invited him to come to Brussels for talks. Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker and council leader Donald Tusk noted it was more important than ever to strengthen transatlantic relations.

They pledged to cooperate with a Trump administration on issues including climate change, migration, counter-terrorism, and the threat to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story for Learning English based on VOA News reports from Daniel Schearf, Luis Ramirez, Mark Young, the Associated Press and Reuters. Mario Ritter was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

phase - n. a stage or period

counter v. to act against or to balance out

dialogue  n. discussions; communications

opportunity  n. a good chance for advancement or progress

mutual  adj. shared by two or more people or groups

hysteria  n.  extreme fear, excitement or anger

unique  adj. very special or unusual
You have permission to edit this collection.

Edit Close




Particularly during my sojourns in South Africa, it may not be possible for me to perform the moderation function speedily. I regret the necessity of moderation but it has been rendered inevitable by the behaviour of a particular commentator whose contributions will always and without exception be rejected.





No correspondence will be entered into regarding moderation decisions.

Readers are invited to comment on blog posts. All comments require to be pre-moderated by me, and I shall reject all (a) that are not related to the Lockerbie disaster or (b) that fail to meet my -- perhaps idiosyncratic -- standards of courtesy towards other contributors. Comments will not be rejected simply because I disagree with them or because I, or other contributors, find them irritating. But comments will be rejected if they distort or misrepresent the evidence; are defamatory; or if they risk embroiling me, as publisher, in defamation proceedings. I am perfectly relaxed about being sued in respect of material which I personally have posted -- but not in respect of material that others wish to post as comments and which, in any case, I often strongly disagree with.
Linda M. Keller (Thomas Jefferson School of Law) has posted The Continuing Peace with Justice Debate: Recent Events in Uganda and the International Criminal Court on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This article revisits the truth versus justice debate in the context of recent developments in Uganda related to the International Criminal Court. It updates the prior article, Linda M. Keller, Achieving Peace with Justice: The International Criminal Court and Ugandan Alternative Justice Mechanisms, 23 Conn. J. Intl L. 209, 209 (2008) (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1018539). Although the notorious Joseph Kony of the Lords Resistance Army remains at large, one alleged LRA commander is facing trial at the ICC, Dominic Ongwen. Another alleged LRA commander, Thomas Kwoyelo, has been imprisoned in Uganda during a long controversy over whether he is entitled to amnesty; after a Supreme Court ruling overcoming the obstacle of Ugandas Amnesty Act, he is supposed to go to trial before the Ugandan High Courts International Crimes Division.



The more recent events do not offer much insight on the peace versus justice dilemma. With regard to whether domestic prosecution or traditional alternatives further the goals of international criminal justice, the current situation remains murky. It seems that neither the ICC nor Uganda has faced the hard questions. Rather than requesting that Ongwen be prosecuted in Uganda, it seems that Uganda found it more convenient, for resource and political reasons, to leave Ongwens controversial prosecution to the ICC. Rather than using the Kwoyelo case as an opportunity to establish a coherent policy on amnesty or other non-prosecutorial alternatives, it seems making an example of Kwoyelo was politically expedient at the time. Although the prosecution of Kwoyelo could be the harbinger of a push for prosecutorial accountability for LRA in Uganda, the far more numerous examples of LRA members receiving amnesty call this into question. Given the difficulties encountered to date in prosecuting Kwoyelo before domestic courts, it seems unlikely the Ugandan government will be eager to withhold amnesty from others. A successful conclusion to the Kwoyelo prosecution, however, may lead to the opposite reaction.



Although both Ongwen and Kwoyelo could have presented opportunities for Uganda and the international community to grapple with serious questions raised by different theoretical approaches to peace and justice, neither seems to have yielded a well thought-out approach or strategy. It remains to be seen whether future opportunities will present themselves, and if so, whether the Ugandan government and international community are able to take advantage of them to advance peace with justice.
Hundreds of people turned out in Tampa on Thursday to protect the election of President-Elect Donald Trump.

Protest against President-elect Trump at Tampa federal courthouse

Protesters concerned about his plans, campaign hatred

Supporters: Trump's message twisted

A rally was held in front of the Federal Courthouse downtown and a separate march took place in Ybor City.

"I'm worried about our country. I'm worried about it becoming more divided than it already is," said Sam Alex.

Protestors held up signs with slogans like "Dump Trump" and "Not My President." They also yelled vulgarities about him.

The group's concerns ranged from policies like a proposed plan to build a wall along the US-Mexican border to comments Trump made during the campaign.

"The hatred that Donald Trump spewed out, it's just been so divisive and I'm still in shock. I'm in total shock that he was elected the President," said Tina Buie.

Trump has his supporters as well. As protestors passed, one man said he things Trump's message has been "twisted".

"We are stronger together and I think regardless of the slogans, Trump is going to show everybody that we're stronger together. He's going to be more bi-partisan I think than what we've seen in the recent past," said Johnny Gomes.

Law enforcement officers did keep tabs on the protests but so far locally things have remained peaceful.
The effect the recent rise in populist sentiment globally will have on the African market remains to be seen. In the run-up to the US presidential election, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offered economic proposals that would have a possible long-term impact on African trade with the United States. Then there is the prospect of a 'Hard Brexit' and its possible implications on trade with Sub-Saharan Africa.

A continual theme throughout the Republican nominee, Donald Trumps campaign has been that the United States had entered into numerous trade agreements which he feels are unfavourable. Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton, has argued to rather intensify the enforcement of trade laws by creating a chief trade prosecutor and by tripling the number of trade enforcement officers.

Whether the newly elected President sticks to their promise remains to be seen. However, it is likely that African countries will face further out-of-cycle reviews of AGOA.

The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act with over 40 eligible Sub-Sahara African countries has been a boon to the region. According to the report titled Beyond AGOA from the Office of the US Trade Representative, non-oil total goods trade has grown from $13 billion a year to nearly $30 billion since AGOA was enacted.

That increased out-of-cycle reviews will be likely has been further evidenced by the July 2015 out-of-cycle review regarding South Africas eligibility and Burundis ejection due to crackdowns in the country on political opposition. The threat of an out-of-cycle review with Sub-Saharan Africas leading country South Africa has again resurfaced with the South African Poultry Association (SAPA) and South African Pork Producers Organisation (SAPPO) looking to obtain a court injunction to block US chicken imports.

Lesothos inclusion is likely to face scrutiny as a result of the on-going political crises facing the country. Lesotho has to an extent been one of the largest beneficiaries of AGOA with around 80% of their textile and garment exports going to the US.

Hard Brexit

The prospect of a Hard Brexit by the United Kingdom could cause considerable uncertainty for a number of Sub-Saharan countries. The oft-quoted term Hard-Brexit denotes the United Kingdom severing all links with EU institutions, pulling out of the single market and curbing EU immigration. Its unclear what the full effect this will have on Sub-Saharan Africa however the effect is likely to be largely negative with trade agreements such as EU-SADC Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) becoming void.

Renegotiating terms for an agreement could take years. However this is likely to be fast-tracked should this scenario come to fruition, given the significant exposure African export markets have to the United Kingdom with the largest exposure lying in South Africa. Countries will be inclined to negotiate new trade deals with the UK within the framework of the various regional blocs, increasing their leverage in negotiations and speeding up the process.

The increased populist sentiment is expected to have longer term effects on Sub-Saharan Africas relationship with the world. Nevertheless, in the short term these moves are expected to reduce capital flows into the higher risk Sub-Sahara African region with jittery investors looking to safer markets for generating returns. There is however a silver-lining to the rise of populist sentiment in the form of increased opposition to austerity. Of late, there have been numerous pronouncements regarding the reintroduction of fiscal stimulus measures.

In the run-up to the election, the newly elected US president has pledged to make use of various infrastructure spend initiatives. Japan has announced a 28.1 trillion yen stimulus programme, Canada has also announced a further increase of 60 billion Canadian dollars in new infrastructure spend and China has also released their 1.6 trillion yuan Northeast Revitalisation Plan 2.0. These will optimistically have the effect of boosting demand for Sub-Saharan African commodity exports, increasing commodity prices and leading to increased levels of growth in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Multiple TV reports have claimed that the Supreme Court has issued a notice to actor Salman Khan after

the Rajasthan Governments plea which moved the High Court's acquittal of the actor in two blackbuck

poaching cases.

Earlier this year in July, Rajasthan High Court had acquitted Khan in the 1998 chinkara (blackbuck) poaching case. The decision prompted the Rajasthan Government to move to the Supreme Court where it contended that Khan should be ordered to surrender.

The case dates back to 1998 when Khan was shooting for Sooraj Barjatyas film Hum Saath Saath Hain in Jodhpur, Rajasthan.

Khan was accused of hunting two blackbucks at Bhawad in Mathania, 40 km away from Jodhpur. He was accused of hunting another blackbuck at Ghoda farms two days later, according to a report by The Indian Express.

The Bishnoi community lodged a police complaint against Khan who was detained but released on bail days later. Though Khan was convicted by a trial court in 2006 under relevant sections of the Wildlife Protection Act, his sentence was suspended by the Rajasthan High Court. The High Court revised the charges against Khan in 2012 but went on to acquit him four years later.

The notice by the Supreme Court has spelled fresh trouble for the actor who is currently busy shooting for filmmaker Kabir Khans Tubelight, and the latest season of reality show Bigg Boss.
New Delhi: Airfares are set to rise with the government deciding to levy up to Rs 8,500 per flight on major routes to fund the regional air connectivity scheme.

The levy amount would be for an entire flight and the price of each ticket could go up depending on the number of seats in that particular flight.

Civil Aviation Secretary R N Choubey today said the levy would be up to Rs 8,500 per flight depending on distance. The ambitious scheme -- UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik) -- seeks to connect small cities by air as well as make flying more affordable for the masses.

To provide viability gap funding for the flights operated under the regional connectivity scheme, the Ministry would impose a levy on every departure on major air routes such as the national capital, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata.

"The levy for an up to 1,000 kilometre length of scheduled flight will be Rs 7,500 per flight, Rs 8,000 for a 1,000 to 1,500 kilometre flight and Rs 8,500 for flights above 1,500 kilometre," Choubey said here.

For UDAN, the government would be creating the Regional Connectivity Fund (RCF).

With the levy, the government estimates to have Rs 400 crore for RCF, Choubey said. "In addition to this, another 20 per cent (funding) will come from state governments. We are roughly looking at around Rs 500 crore per year available in the kitty," he noted.

The move would push airfares slightly higher as airlines are expected to pass on the burden to fliers.

The funding is being provided since the fares of half of the seats operated in a particular flight under UDAN would be capped at Rs 2,500 for one-hour duration. This cap would be applicable for distance of 476-500 kilometres.

The limit of RCS airfare would vary from Rs 1,420 to Rs 3,500 for fixed-wing aircraft. For helicopters, half-an-hour ride under the scheme would cost Rs 2,500 and for over one- hour duration, the cap would be Rs 5,000.

RCF is to be funded by the Centre and respective state government participating in UDAN.
New Delhi: The defence ministry could in the next "few months" finalise higher defence reforms to bring in jointness among the three armed services which will include creation of the post of Chief of Defence Staff (CDS).

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar admitted that the services did not want to leave their "turf" but they have

"slowly" come to understand that jointness would be much better than individual separate forces.

"I am very clear on it but there were certain aspects which need to be also taken along. I have to take all the

three services on board. Let me be very clear, no one wants to leave his turf," he said during a book launch on Thursday.

Underlining that he was not speaking in Indian military context alone, Parrikar said across the militaries, the same situation prevailed.

He added that the question was whether one will "force it down the throat" or get everyone on board.

"I think, I have been discussing with the chiefs and slowly they have also come to understanding that jointness

would be much better than individually separate forces," he said, seeking a "few more months".

However, the defence minister made it clear that the final call would be taken by the Prime Minister.

Incidentally, the chiefs of both the Army and the Air Force will retire this year end.

Without naming any operation, he said though India has not gone for jointness, "recent operations" were quite successful joint operations.

"The Air Force and the Army integrated so well in recent operations, not saying which operation. There was total

synergy and there was no problem in working together," he remarked.

The post of CDS was recommended in 2001 by a Group of Ministers (GoM) which was set up in April 2000 to review the national security system in the aftermath of the Kargil War.

The recommendation, if implemented, would be the first major military reform by the Narendra Modi government, which has already announced significant changes in the procurement process.

Sources said the appointment of CDS is aimed at promoting "jointness at the top" when it comes to planning, operations and modernisation of the military.

Though India has a tri-service command, it is headed by a three-star officer who is junior to the military chiefs who are four-star.

The post of the CDS is likely to be a four-star and he would be in-charge of the tri-services command at Andaman and Nicobar islands, the strategic command in-charge of nuclear weapons along with the upcoming cyber and space command.

Parrikar said in the coming months the Andaman and Nicobar command will become a joint command in "real sense" as it was the "need of the hour", adding that currently there was only a "partial joint command".

Stating that some joint acquisition was being done, Parrikar pointed out that jointness can save the country lot

of money.

"We are are replicating the same thing. Air Force does the same thing. Army does the same thing. If there is

jointness, lot of things can be synchronised.

"Jointness of acquisition will be advantageous. In fact we are doing some joint acquisition. Give me few more months," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had late last year called for "jointness at the top" of the military establishment.

Parrikar had in March last year said that CDS was a must and hoped to propose a mechanism for the creation of the post within the next three months.

The defence minister said he does not care about what people say about him taking more time even though he had given a time period.

"I realised if I hurry, I will do something which will not taste well just because my ego says 'I said six months, I should force it in six months'," he said, adding he was "not there to satisfy his ego".

"I am there to ensure it happens properly. So I decided that someone may say anything about it, I will do it properly. Today I am confident that I have understood," he said.
As New Delhi grapples with its worst smog in 17 years, the head of India's largest mobile payment firm got on a plane and left the city. He is one of the thousands of professionals, who left the capital city to escape the pollution. The hardest hit are the tour operators and real estate agents who are witnessing a slowdown in businesses.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of Paytm, left last Sunday for a temporary stay in Mumbai, worried about the impact of hazardous clouds of dust, smoke and fumes that hang over Delhi during winter.

"It became very visibly clear that it is going to be tough in Delhi, especially with young kids," Sharma said in Mumbai, reported Reuters.

"We were worried that it could create long-term (health) problems."

His company, which has considered moving from its base outside Delhi, has installed air purifiers, brought indoor plants and masks and offered extra health assistance.

Telecom operators Idea Cellular and others have allowed more employees to work from home, and arranged for buses so that car traffic is reduced  all at their own expense.

Manufactuers of air purifiers and face masks are the only ones making money. But others, like car manufacturers, are in the firing line of politicians, while estate agents and tour operators have complained of a slowdown in business.

Do you want to wait till people start dying: SC raps CPCB

"Do you want to wait till people start dying... people are gasping for breath," a fuming Supreme Court asked Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) on Thursday, slamming it for not having an action plan ready to deal with the "emergency" smog situation and asking the Centre to come out with time-bound measures to tackle the graded level of worsening air quality.

"The response cannot be sluggish. People are gasping for breath. People are in such a situation and you are waiting," the bench comprising Justices AK Sikri and SA Bobde said.

Observing that CPCB does not appear to have any "definite plan" to deal with the issue, the bench said the board, in consultation with government, will prepare a detailed plan specifying what measures have to be taken and which authority will be responsible for implementing those recommendations in a time bound manner.

The bench said the "emergency plan" will also comprise the measures needed to tackle graded level of pollution and identify how many central pollution control units are required to have a clear picture of the air quality.

Delhi's air quality has deteriorated, even by the standards of a country with some of the world's most polluted cities. Conditions had improved by Friday, but the problem is perennial and has been particularly acute this winter.

Companies have yet to tot-up the cost of a week of coughing, spluttering and watering eyes, but local industry lobby group Assocham estimates "several billions of dollars" of new investments are under threat.

A study by the World Bank shows Asia's third-largest economy lost 8.5 percent of its GDP in 2013 due to air pollution.

Expatriates are also thinking twice about living in Delhi

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), a global real estate firm serving large corporates, said some clients were reconsidering Delhi as a base, as costs of working there rise.

"This is increasing their operational costs as they are being made to spend more to provide a healthy workplace to their employees," said Santosh Kumar, a senior executive at the firm.

Delhi's image is deteriorating more widely, a headache for tour promoters and a government touting "Brand India".

Some local tour operators say they are already receiving requests from overseas partners to redraw the itinerary of foreign tourists to avoid even an overnight stay in Delhi. Business travellers say they are cancelling trips.

"The ongoing tourism season, which is yet to pick up, could see a maximum hit," Assocham said.

Expatriates are also thinking twice about living in the Indian capital. JLL's Kumar said more smog could see foreigners packing their bags, a blow to real estate as well as employment.

Lisa Akerman, a Swedish national who lives in an affluent Delhi neighbourhood, said authorities needed to do much more than they were.

Akerman moved to the city two years ago with her family and has taken measures to ensure clean air in her apartment for her two small daughters. Still, the choking smog left her worried about their health.

Earlier this week, she decided to take them out of the city for a while.

"The pollution level is too much for the children," she said over phone from Goa, where she is camping with her kids. "While I love Delhi, its air quality will be a major consideration in deciding whether we want to extend our stay here."

Not everyone loses

The local government has taken steps to reduce traffic amid widespread public anger at pollution that has caused choking, wheezing and breathlessness.

Licences are being withdrawn for diesel-powered vehicles older than 15 years, and authorities are considering resuming an "odd-even" scheme, under which cars can only travel in the city on alternate days depending on their registration number.

Those steps, and the risk that India's courts will impose stricter rules on emissions are a potential blow to foreign and domestic carmakers, some of whom have asked for greater clarity.

But not everyone is complaining about the smog.

Japan's Daikin has seen sales of air purifiers have increased by up to three times since the Diwali festival, and its stock that had been expected to last until March is exhausted.

To meet growing orders, the Osaka-based air-conditioner maker increased shipments from its Thai factory by 50 percent.

Nirvana India, which distributes the Vogmask face mask in South Asia, reported soaring sales.

It sold 300 to 400 pieces a week around this time last year, but since Diwali at the end of October, it has sold 5,000-8,000 a week and is seeking emergency stocks from Singapore, China and Korea.

"Earlier, only expats, patients and government departments would buy these masks," said chief executive Jaidhar Gupta. "Now everyone is buying."

With inputs from agencies
New Delhi: The DND flyway connecting Delhi and neighbouring Noida will remain toll-free for commuters with the Supreme Court on Friday refusing to stay the Allahabad High Court verdict restraining Noida Toll Bridge Company Ltd from levying cess.

A bench of Justices JS Khehar and L Nageswara Rao also asked the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to verify the cost of the DND flyway project and submit a report before the apex court.

"We have requested the CAG to verify the cost of the project..." the bench said, adding, "We refuse to grant any relief."

The apex court had on 28 October refused interfere with the HC order restraining the company, saying it will pass directions after Diwali vacations.

On the toll collecting firm's plea for interim stay on HC order, the apex court bench headed by the Chief Justice had said, "You have only ten kms of highway and you claim that you have made a road to the moon. ... You have done well but not something (great)."

The firm had said the High Court did not take into account all aspects and submitted that factors like interest on construction cost, depreciation and maintenance expenses, which come to around Rs 12.5 lakh per day, have not been duly considered.

The high court, on 26 October, had brought cheers to millions of commuters ruling that no toll will be collected henceforth from those using the 9.2 km-long, eight-lane DND flyway. The order was passed as the high court allowed a PIL by the Federation of Noida Residents' Welfare Association.

The PIL, filed in 2012, had challenged the "levy and collection of toll in the name of user fee" by the NTBCL.

In an over 100-page judgement, the high court had held "the user fee which is being levied/realised is not supported by the legal provisions relied upon by the Concessionaire (Noida Toll Bridge Company), Infrastructure Leaning and Financial Services (promoter and developer of the project) and Noida Authority."
A fire at a suspected illegal garment factory in Sahibabad in Ghaziabad district, Uttar Pradesh killed 13 people and injured several others early Friday morning, officials said.

The workers were sleeping in the cramped leather factory, which was in a residential building on the edge of New Delhi, when the blaze broke out, likely caused by a short circuit.

"The fire broke out at a factory in a residential area of Sahibabad around 4:30 am in the morning. 13 people, who were sleeping there have died and another two or three people are getting treated at the hospital," Bhagwat Singh, local police spokesman told AFP.

News reports also said that the fire began at 4 am after which twelve fire tenders were rushed to the spot.

ANI posted the first visuals of the factory where fire had erupted.

#Firstvisuals: 10 dead after fire broke out in a garment factory in Sahibabad (UP). pic.twitter.com/A06ozqCngk  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) November 11, 2016

Local fire officer Abbas Hussain told AFP that two people were rescued after they woke up soon after the fire started. "The two of them woke up by chance and say they screamed for others to wake up while running towards the terrace but others didn't wake up, perhaps it was already late," Hussain said.

He said that the factory was most likely illegal.

"From what we see, there was nothing proper and the factory must surely not have been a legal one but we can say for sure only after a proper investigation," he said.

The Times of India further reported that many have been injured and they have been taken to nearby hospitals.

"The fire broke out at a factory in a residential area of Sahibabad around 4.30 am in the morning. 13 people, who were sleeping there have died and another two or three people are getting treated at the hospital," Bhagwat Singh, local police spokesman told AFP. The fire was likely started by a short circuit, Singh added, describing the factory as making leather jackets and clothes.

The fire started at a denim factory in Sahibabad and the factory workers were present inside. Those injured have been rushed to a private hospital nearby, Hindustan Times quoted Anup Singh, circle officer, Sahibabad, as saying.

Fire and other deadly incidents are often reported from small scale industrial units where track record of workplace safety are often alarmingly poor.

Eight workers were killed last month in a huge explosion at a fireworks factory in the southern state of Tamil Nadu while a massive blaze in a firecracker factory killed 15 people in May 2014 in Madhya Pradesh.

A fire at a factory where leather bags were being stitched killed six workers in November 2013 in New Delhi. Some of the victims were trapped inside the building and burnt beyond recognition.

South Asia's lucrative garment industry has a particularly alarming safety record, with watchdogs saying safety rules are routinely flouted.

A huge fire triggered by a boiler explosion at a packaging factory just north of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka left 25 people dead in September.

In November 2012, at least 111 workers were killed when a devastating fire engulfed a nine-storey garment factory outside Dhaka.

The accident was followed by an even bigger disaster six months later when 1,138 people died after another clothing factory complex collapsed, trapping more than 3,000 workers.

The Rana Plaza tragedy triggered international outrage and put pressure on European and US clothing brands to improve pay and conditions at the factories that supply them.

With inputs from AFP
Cementing bilateral ties in leaps and bounds, India and Japan on Friday signed a landmark civil nuclear agreement in Tokyo in the presence of visiting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his host and Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The Indian premier is on a three-day visit to Japan. This is his second visit to Tokyo in as many years.

1. According to reports, after this deal is being implemented Japan can export nuclear technology to India giving it an edge over its neighbours so far as the use of civil nuclear energy is concerned.

2. The deal was put on hold after talks were held last year in December as some issues were to be ironed out. PM Modi was keen on this deal as it would better India's chances of getting into the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), according to a report in Firstpost.

3. According to a NDTV report, this deal makes India the first non-NPT signatory to ink a nuclear pact with Japan. The fact that this agreement has taken place with Japan is indicative of the fact that the two countries have shared a mutually respectful relationship over the years despite differences with regard to the nuclear policy that both the countries have. According to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) bilateral relations brief, Japans friendliness towards India was tested in 1991, after it bailed India out of its balance of payments crisis.

4. The India-Japan civil nuclear deal will be watched closely by China as Beijing shares territorial concerns with both New Delhi and Tokyo. This deal has come at a time when China is increasingly looking to expand its footprint in the South China Sea. What US President-elect Donald Trump in mind regarding his South Asia policy is also likely to keep China on its toes.

5. Japan is the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack. It has sought assurances from New Delhi that it would not conduct nuclear tests in the future. India first conducted nuclear tests in 1974 which was code named 'Smiling Buddha'. A series of nuclear tests were conducted again in 1998 known as the Pokhran-II.

6. India had signed a landmark nuclear deal with the US in 2008. Pakistan too demanded for a similar deal then but America rejected the offer and explained India's case as an 'exception.' It can be expected that Pakistan may demand a similar deal with China. But will China pay heed? One has to wait and watch.

7. India aims to ramp up nuclear capacity ten-fold by 2032 and is in negotiations with Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba. The nuclear deal augurs well for India as ties with Japan will strengthen.

8. India plans to build six nuclear plants in the south. The nuclear deal takes India a step further in this direction. Japan's technical know how and superior expertise will help India in setting up the plants.

9. PM Modi's visit to japan wasn't about the nuclear deal alone. The Indian PM, accompanied by Shinzo Abe, will travel to Kobe by the Shinkansen bullet train. The same technology will be deployed for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Railway.

10. Japan and China are in an intense battle for gaining supremacy in the field of bullet trains. PM Modi's visit to Tokyo is further expected to fuel the competition. India expects co-operation from Japan for developing bullet trains. India has no bullet trains, yet.
Washington: The World Bank on Friday asked India and Pakistan to "agree to mediation" in order to settle on a mechanism for how the Indus Waters Treaty should be used to resolve issues regarding two dams under construction along the Indus river system.

The World Bank's move came as it told the two countries that it was responding to their separate proceedings initiated under the Indus Waters Treaty 1960.

Simultaneously, the World Bank held a draw of lots to determine who will appoint three umpires to sit on the Court of Arbitration that Pakistan has requested.

The draw of lots was held at the World Bank headquarters in Washington.

"The World Bank Group has a strictly procedural role under the Indus Waters Treaty and the treaty does not allow it to choose whether one procedure should take precedence over the other. This is why we drew the lots and proposed potential candidates for the Neutral Expert today," said Senior Vice President and World Bank Group General Counsel Anne-Marie Leroy.

"What is clear, though, is that pursuing two concurrent processes under the treaty could make it unworkable over time and we therefore urge both parties to agree to mediation that the World Bank Group can help arrange.

"The two countries can also agree to suspend the two processes during the mediation process or at any time until the processes are concluded," Leroy said.

The Bank said the Indus Waters Treaty 1960 is seen as one of the most successful international treaties and has withstood frequent tensions between India and Pakistan, including conflict.

The Bank is a signatory to the Treaty.

The Treaty sets out a mechanism for cooperation and information exchange between the two countries regarding their use of the rivers, known as the Permanent Indus Commission which includes a commissioner from each of the two countries.

It also sets out a process for resolving so-called "questions", "differences" and "disputes" that may arise between the parties.

The current proceedings under the treaty concern the Kishenganga (330 megawatts) and Ratle (850 megawatts) hydroelectric power plants.

The power plants are being built by India on Kishenganga and Chenab Rivers.

Neither of the two plants are being financed by the World Bank Group.
Has India changed its nuclear doctrine? If one goes by the reactions of some political parties and a section of the press, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has jeoparadised Indias chances of joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the prospects of nuclear commerce with leading nuclear countries of the world. Because, while answering a question in a book-release function on 10 November, he counter-questioned why the countrys policy of No First Use of its nuclear weapons should not change.

The problem with these reactions is the fact that they are based on a half-truth. The other half of the truth is that in the same answer, Parrikar made it absolutely clear what he was saying was his personal opinion and that it was not the viewpoint of the government of India. He reiterated that Indias nuclear policy remained unchanged under the Modi-government. Well, one could argue that being the defence minister, he should have avoided his private view at a public function, but to say that the rest of the world will take the ministers private view as the government of Indias changed policy is preposterous. In fact, the pointlessness of such a logic was manifested on Friday (11 November) when Japan, arguably the worlds most sensitive country on nuclear issues, signed a formal nuclear agreement with India, an agreement that will greatly facilitate the nuclear commerce with the United States as well (since American nuclear companies have significant Japanese components that could not be transferred without Japans consent).

Global arrangements or regimes are based on the declared policies of the governments of the member-states, not on the individual pronouncements of the ministers and ruling party members. In fact, the in its manifesto for 2014 general elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had promised to review Indias nuclear doctrine. But has it prevented countries like Australia, Canada and now Japan entering nuclear pacts with the Modi-government?

Similarly, it is a highly faulty notion that gaining membership in the NSG is dependent on a countrys NFU policy. We are already a declared nuclear weapon power. We are building our case as a responsible nuclear power with an impeccable record of non-proliferation and a well-laid out nuclear command structure. The international community is now working towards no further nuclear tests and non-proliferation, which is as different from how to use ones weapons as chalk from cheese.

In fact, in my considered view, the Modi government should go for a formal review of the countrys NFU policy. Let me explain why. In the strict sense of the term, India does not have a proper nuclear doctrine. I think that it is a part of our strategic culture to keep things and policies as ambiguous as possible, leaving them to many and different interpretations.

What we have actually is a "draft nuclear doctrine", released on 17 August 1999, by the then national security advisor Brajesh Mishra. Some clarifications on this draft were "shared with the public" on 4 January 2003, through a press release by the then Cabinet Committee on Security. I do not think any major power will ever deal with such a sensitive issue in such a cavalier manner.

Be that as it may, Indias draft doctrine at the moment has the following key features:

 While committed to the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world through global, verifiable and non-discriminatory nuclear disarmament, India, till the realisation of this goal, will possess nuclear weapons.

 India will build and maintain a credible minimum deterrent.

 India will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states.

 India will not be the first to use nuclear weapons. But if it is attacked by nuclear weapons in its territory or on Indian forces anywhere, then its nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage to the aggressor.

 In the event of a major attack against India, or Indian forces anywhere, by biological or chemical weapons, India will also retain the option of retaliating with nuclear weapons.

 India will continue strict controls on the export of nuclear and missile-related materials and technologies, participation in the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty negotiations, and continued observance of the moratorium on nuclear tests.

 Indias Nuclear Command Authority comprises a Political Council and an Executive Council. The Political Council is chaired by the Prime Minister. It is the sole body which can authorise the use of nuclear weapons. The Executive Council is chaired by the National Security Advisor. It provides inputs for decision making by the Nuclear Command Authority and executes the directives given to it by the Political Council.

It may be noted here that in the clarifications that were given in 2003, there were two important changes that were made to the draft doctrine of 1999. The draft doctrine had said: "Any nuclear attack on India and its forces shall result in punitive retaliation with nuclear weapons to inflict damage unacceptable to the aggressor." The 2003 clarifications said: "Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage to the aggressor." The emphasis here should be given to the addition of the word "massive".

The second important change in the 2003 clarifications was that a new scenario was added under which India would retaliate with nuclear weapons, and that was the attack through biological or chemical weapons on India or on Indian forces anywhere.

What emerges from the above is that India's nuclear weapons posture, after the country went officially nuclear in 1998, did undergo changes during the Vajpayee regime itself. The point is that beliefs and principles are not immutable. Nations and their leaderships change with the efflux of time. And circumstances require their national doctrines to be revisited, reviewed and recast if deemed necessary.

Our NFU policy really needs a healthy debate. The United States or for that matter other western nuclear powers such as Britain and France do not have the NFU policy. Russia, which initially had NFU pledge, has withdrawn it long ago. China, another country that professed NFU policy, is now silent on it. Its biannual defence white paper (2013) omitted for the first time a promise never to use its own nuclear weapons first. Even otherwise, China had asserted before that its NFU would not apply against countries that are in possession of the Chinese territory. That means that Chinas NFU does not apply to India as it claims over our lands in Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh.

That leaves Pakistan, our other major adversary. But Pakistan too does not believe in NFU. It has developed "Nasr" ballistic missiles with a range of 60 km that is capable of carrying nuclear warheads. These have been specifically built with the intention of targeting not only Indian cities but also Indian military formations on the battlefield.

The concept of NFU has other problems as well. For one, imagine that there is a conventional war between India and Pakistan (or for that matter China), and Indian forces target at military establishments within the enemy territory. They do not know which of these establishments are nuclear or nonnuclear and in the process of their operations, they hit at an enemy target that turns out to be a nuclear one and the consequent results are strategically horrible. Will it mean that India did not observe its NFU pledge?

For another, imagine also a situation when the Indian forces engaged in conventional wars simultaneously against China and Pakistan find it difficult to carry on. And here, as the situation challenges the very integrity of the country, should one not exercise the nuclear option? After all, we have already modified our nuclear posture in the events of chemical and biological attacks. Why should then we tie our hands with the NFU when faced with multi-fronted attacks on our territories or forces?

Thirdly, a review is also due on the concept of our massive nuclear retaliation when attacked by nuclear weapons, particularly when Pakistan is openly preparing to use what it says tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) through "Nasr" missiles against Indias superior conventional forces. Now, suppose, one of our Armys tank columns is attacked by Pakistans TNW. Should then India go for a massive retaliation to destroy the whole of Karachi or Lahore? Will not that be highly disproportionate and unethical? If so, should India not go for a proportionate retaliation with its own TNW?

And if we really go with our TNWs, then there will be a new problem. By their very nature, the TNWs and their eventual uses are better determined on the spot, that is, on the battlefield itself, by the military commanders concerned. How then will that go with our strict provision that it is only the Prime Minister who will decide when and where to use our nuclear weapons?

All these are very tricky but vital questions. But answers to them cannot wait anymore. The future Indian government cannot sit on them.
At a time when a large section of the Indian media has spoken about hyper-nationalism while another section is guilty of it, when relations between India and Pakistan are already tense, and merely a day before a special meeting to consider the criterion for India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday expressed his 'personal opinion' that India should not bind itself a 'no first use policy' on nuclear weapons.

Explaining the need to be unpredictable in warfare strategy, Parrikar had said, "Why should I bind myself? I should say I am a responsible nuclear power and I will not use it irresponsibly. This is my (personal) thinking."

The 'no first use' (NFU) policy is the principle adopted by a nuclear power to not use nuclear weapons unless first attacked by nuclear weapons by another country. India had declared an NFU policy following the nuclear weapons test in 1998.

"It has not changed in the government. It is my concept. As an individual, I also get a feeling. I am not saying you have to use it first. Hoax can be called off," PTI had quoted the minister as saying. He also added that prior to the surgical strike, the Pakistani defence minister used to threaten India with the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.

"From the day the surgical strike happened, no threat has come. They realised that we can do something which is not well-defined," he pointed out.

It is true that Pakistan does not have an NFU policy. But if Parrikar was trying to suggest that Pakistani aggression has reduced after the surgical strikes, one only needs to consider the simple fact that out of the 151 incidents of ceasefire violations across the Line of Control this year, 110 of them have taken place since September. Moreover, over half of these violations took place after the surgical strikes, according to The Indian Express.

That is far from Parrikar's description of "no threat". If anything, Pakistani aggression has only increased after the surgical strikes.

There are many good reasons why the government has distanced itself from Parrikar's personal opinion. In fact, this is perhaps the best evidence to show how erroneous and ill-timed the defence minister's opinion was. The government was forced to resort to damage control and stress on how it did not agree with that opinion.

But Parrikar should realise that he is, after all, the defence minister of the country and his opinion will have an impact on how the world perceives India. His 'personal opinion' has already led to some consequences, with The News International (a Pakistani daily), misinterpreting his remark and publishing a report titled 'India going back on no-first-use nuke stance'.

Here's why Parrikar's remark on the NFU policy can damage India's reputation:

Government's support to NFU policy

Before the Lok Sabha polls, BJP in its manifesto had made a pledge to "study in detail India's nuclear doctrine, and revise and update it, to make it relevant to challenges of current times", causing worry that BJP would go back on the 18-year NFU policy if it came to power.

However, the then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi had made it clear that "No first use was a great initiative of Atal Bihari Vajpayee  there is no compromise on that. We are very clear. No first use is a reflection of our cultural inheritance." Rajnath Singh had also said that the BJP would stick to the NFU policy.

In April 2016, when US president Barack Obama had asked India to reduce its nuclear arsenal, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup had said, "Yes, we have seen those remarks. There seems to be a lack of understanding of Indias defence posture. Conventionally, India has never initiated military action against any neighbour. We also have a no-first use nuclear weapons policy."

Apart from the fact that Parrikar's remarks go against the statements of the prime minister, home minister and the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), India's justification for not reducing its nuclear arsenal would disappear if the NFU policy was rejected.

This brings us to the second point.

India's reputation and its link with NSG membership

NSG is the elite club of countries controlling access to sensitive nuclear technology. At the NSGs plenary session in Seoul, China had blocked Indias bid for membership. The meeting ended after an agreement was pushed by Australia and Mexico that a special meeting would be held in November to discuss the criteria for Indias entry.

That special meeting will be held on Friday and Saturday during a plenary session in Vienna.

China is already leading opposition to a push by the United States and other major powers for India to join the NSG. Other countries opposing Indian membership of the NSG include Ireland and Austria (at least).

By the way, China has also pledged to follow the NFU policy. If India now rejects the NFU policy, what effect do you think it will have on its chances of joining the NSG, which are already bleak because of a nation, which follows the NFU policy, blocking India's membership?

Apart from virtually destroying India's chances of getting NSG membership in the near future, this may further damage India as the NSG may choose to review the 2008 exemption to NSG rules granted to India to support its nuclear cooperation deal with the US. The exemption was granted although India has developed atomic weapons and never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the main global arms control pact. And while the NFU policy is not explicitly articulated in the India-US Civil Nuclear Agreement, the political climate of South Asia could even force the US to consider a review if India drops its stand on first use.

Additionally, India going back on NFU policy will be an embarrassment because India has always been vocal about nuclear disarmament. India has a reputation of being a peace-loving country. In 2012, a study called 'Towards a treaty banning nuclear weapons' had said that 146 nations had declared their willingness to negotiate a new global disarmament pact. Out of these 146 nations, only four were nuclear weapons states: India, Pakistan, China and North Korea.

In 2006, during a UN General Assembly meeting, 125 state parties  including India  had called for "commencing multilateral negotiations leading to an early conclusion of a nuclear weapons convention prohibiting the development, production, testing, deployment, stockpiling, transfer, threat or use of nuclear weapons and providing for their elimination."

Pakistani and Chinese aggression

As far as Pakistan is concerned, going back on the NFU policy may actually escalate the already tense situation. In an article published in the International Affairs Forum (a publication of Centre for International Relations  an unaffiliated US-based organisation focusing on global relations), it was argued that it was India's NFU policy which had kept the nuclear arsenal in both India and Pakistan in a de-mated posture, which means that the nuclear warheads are not mated with the delivery systems. A first strike policy may change this situation, which increases the chances of nuclear terrorism in Pakistan, something India should avoid at all costs.

And if India goes back on its NFU policy, it makes it more likely that China will also see less reason to continue its own NFU policy, leading to more tension in South Asia.

With inputs from agencies

Note: This article was updated to clarify the point on the India-US Civil Nuclear Agreement
New Delhi: In an unprecedented action, the Supreme Court today issued notice of contempt to its former judge Markandey Katju for using "intemperate" language and "scandalising" judiciary as he appeared before a bench and had heated exchanges with it.

A bench comprising justices Ranjan Gogoi, PC Pant and UU Lalit said Katju's statement in a recent blog constituted a serious assault on judges and not on the judgement and therefore the notice of contempt to him.

Katju protested against the decision saying the judges were threatening him and it was not proper for them to behave in such manner with a former judge of the apex court. "I am not scared of it. Don't give me threat," the former judge remarked as Justice Gogoi pronounced the order in a surcharged atmosphere.

Justice Gogoi warned him saying "don't provoke us any more" to which Katju said "you are provoking me by this type of threat. You requested me to come here and assist you."

At this point, Justice Gogoi asked, "is there somebody to escort Justice Katju (out)". Katju replied, "What is this behaviour. On your request I came here. Is this the way I am to be treated."

However, the Bench continued with the dictation of the order saying that prima facie the statement (of Katju) constituted a serious assault on judges and not on judgement. Therefore a notice of contempt."

The issue of contempt was raised after the bench had dismissed the review petitions filed by Kerala government and mother of Soumya challenging the acquittal of the convict of the murder charge.

Justice Katju was summoned as he in his blog had claimed that there was error in the judgement acquitting the accused for the murder and he was asked to assist the bench during the hearing of the review petition.

Addressing Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Katju said a Supreme Court judge should not behave like this and it was like a threat to him. "Don't try to be funny with me. I came on your request.

Don't treat me like this," he said after Justice Ranjan Gogoi pronounced the order as to why a contempt proceeding be not initiated against him for scandalising the judiciary.

The Supreme Court issued notice after taking the view of Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi who was shown a copy of the blog which he described as "scandalous". Taking note of this, the Bench said "we are issuing notice of contempt". Taken aback Rohatgi said his view was restricted only to the underlined portion of what he was shown as he had not read the entire blog.

"I am changing my position and I am reading the entire page. The underlined portion is intemperate and nothing beyond," he said. When the Bench pointed to the other part of the Katju's blog which was not underlined by it, Rohatgi said the second one is also intemperate. Justice Katju repeatedly said he has appeared before the Bench and it should not have threatened as he was also a senior to the judges on the bench.

However, before taking up the contempt issue, Justice Katju along with the Attorney General assisted the Bench and tried to show how the judges have gravely erred in acquitting the convict of the murder charge.

Katju said that the judges have not applied "common sense" in arriving at a decision that the victim was pushed to death as she jumped out of a slow-running train in a semi-conscious state after the convict had inflicted head injuries on her.

The court had last month asked Justice Katju to appear and debate his Facebook post criticising the judgement by which the accused had escaped gallows in the Soumya rape case in which he was acquitted of murder charge.

The court had asked Justice Katju to appear in person before it to point out the "fundamental flaws" as claimed by him in the sensational Soumya rape case. Subsequently Katju tweeted that he would be appearing before the court for the hearing on the review plea in the case.

Experts had said it was for the first time that the Supreme Court has asked its former judge to appear in person before it in connection with any matter. In his Facebook post, Justice Katju had criticised the apex court saying it had grievously erred by "not holding" the convict, Govindachamy, "guilty of murder" in the case.

While issuing notice to Justice Katju, the bench had also quoted his Facebook post criticising the Soumya case verdict, which said "It is regrettable that the Court has not read section 300 carefully. The judgement needs to be reviewed in an open court hearing".

In another post on the same issue, Justice Katju had written "I submit that the Supreme Court has erred in law in not holding the accused guilty of murder, and its judgement needs to be reviewed to this extent".

Justice Katju, through his Facebook post on 15 September, had criticised the verdict commuting to life the death sentence awarded to Govindachamy for raping 23-year-old Soumya on 1 February, 2011, after pushing her out of a train in Kerala. Following the apex court order, the state as well as Soumya's mother had filed review petitions.
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's astonishingly witless statements straying from India's carefully-worded official nuclear-weapons policy on Thursday comes at a particularly bad time.

As India embarks on a renewed mission to compel Pakistan to course-correct by deploying all instruments of statecraft while simultaneously lobbying for a place in the global nuclear high table, Parrikar's musings will be noticed and filed up for propaganda value by those who seek to block both objectives. One imagines minions in Zhongnanhai and GHQ Rawalpindi to be exceedingly pleased with this enormous Indian self-goal.

Watching the defence minister's grandstanding  he was speaking at the launch of a very interesting new book that seeks to lay out a national security strategy for India in the 21st century  one is reminded of a late-night college bull session where a senior seeks to impress sophomores with his cleverness.

This is not the only bizarre statement from Parrikar. Not too long ago, the defence minister compared the Indian Armys stance before the 29 September cross-LoC raids to that of Hanumans before being blessed by the wisdom of Jamwant. Perhaps it would be more productive for the minister to explain why that uncalled for impromptu on nuclear weapons by a key member of Cabinet Committee on Security was a terrible idea.

First, and this is to state the obvious, the real utility of nuclear weapons are as tools of coercive diplomacy  to deter an adversary from initiating a certain action, or to compel it to change its position on a political issue. Nuclear weapons are primarily tools of bargaining, in other words. But in order for this to work, messaging around nuclear weapons (non-) use has to be consistent across all stakeholders.

The first challenge that any new nuclear-weaponed state faces is to simultaneously assure its adversaries that its assets will not be used imprudently while seeking to reap political-strategic value from the mere possession of the same. Deterrence is primarily a psychological play buttressed both by resolve and restraint. Statements and restatements determine the moves and countermoves of a nuclear bargaining game whose overarching rubric is determined by a state and its adversarys implicit or explicit nuclear-weapons policy.

Any off-the-cuff statement stands to vastly undermine the unwritten rules of this game with unpredictable consequences. This is why states are extremely reluctant to sharply change their nuclear postures, for the fear of upending the strategic calculus that upholds the "delicate balance of terror", to steal a phrase of Albert Wohlstetter, a leading Cold-War strategist. This is why  as an example  President Barack Obamas personal opinion notwithstanding, the United States has been extremely reluctant to adopt a no-first-use policy in a break with its historical position.

But while nuclear weapons are tools of bargaining, they are also determinants of national prestige. New members of the nuclear-weapons club often leverage their apparent responsibility as custodians of these weapons to seek concessions in international fora. This was the main reason why India  soon after becoming a declared nuclear-weapons state in 1998  published a draft nuclear doctrine that had the imprimatur of the newly-established National Security Advisory Board, after imposing a voluntary moratorium on further testing. The strategic benefits of this calculated stance of restraint were tremendous. It led to the landmark civil nuclear agreement with the United States and  more crucially  to a diplomatic de-hyphenation with Pakistan insofar as the US was concerned.

The BJP learnt the importance of not publicly toying with the declared doctrine the hard way, after its 2014 election manifesto  which promised a rethink on Indias nuclear weapons policy  caused a furore both at home and abroad. Since coming to power it has backed away from its election promise.

None of this is to argue that Indias extant nuclear doctrine is perfect. Far from it, it is in urgent need of a rethink. For one, the doctrine of no-first-use that India ascribes to was predicated on the conventional military balance favouring India or, at worst, on parity with other powers in the region. Certain scholars have argued that Pakistans flirtation with nuclear maximalism  and its development of tactical/theatre nuclear weapons  presents significant challenges to the Indian doctrine, perhaps rendering it meaningless. Chinas ongoing quest for asymmetric means of waging war, through anti-satellite and cyber weapons, could also force India to move from being a reticent nuclear power, with de-altered nuclear weapons systems, to a more forceful posture with an alerted nuclear triad.

But these discussions are  as they should be  carried out within the closed confines of the security establishment. And it is not the case that the informed public does not have any avenues to understand the contours of the debate that is likely to be taking place within the government, should it rethink Indias nuclear doctrine. They would just have to turn to the published writings of well-placed analysts with ideological affinities to the current government.

That the defence minister  and his loyalists  needs to be told all this is ironic. And troubling.

Abhijnan Rej is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi and a national security columnist for Firstpost. Views expressed here are personal. He tweets @AbhijnanRej.
As Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads to Tokyo for the annual India-Japan Summit, China is keeping a sharp watch on the visit. India and Japan are likely to sign a civil nuclear agreement which has been in the works for the last six-years. China's concern however, is not the nuclear deal but what it sees as India's interference in the South China Sea dispute by colluding with Japan.

It is also true that unlike in the past, India is much more articulate on the South China Sea. During US President Barack Obama's visit to India in 2015, a joint statement on the need to ensure the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea raised Chinas ante. There has also been talk, mainly from the American military, of future joint patrolling of the South China Sea by US and Indian navies. New Delhi has however, turned down the suggestion.

Unlike the previous UPA government, which backed off when Japan was invited for the Malabar exercises between India and the US, Modi is not worried about offending China. This years naval exercises had Japan participating and it was further announced that Tokyo would from now on be a regular part of these exercises. China is, undoubtedly, not pleased with it.

India's growing friendship with Japan which got a boost during Manmohan Singhs term is now being further cemented by Modi. Shinzo Abe, Japan's nationalist prime minister has often spoken of the need to counter Chinas growing aggressive maneuvers in the South China Sea and the north Pacific. During his first term as PM, Abe tried to build a loose alliance of democratic nations: US, Australia, Japan and India to try and foil Chinese moves. That effort fizzled out, but Abe has not given up. China is privy to that.

Beijing views India and Japan's closeness as an attempt to challenge its growing military might. Since China blocked Indias entry to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and refused on technical grounds to place Pakistans Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar on UN terror watch list, New Delhi and Beijing have been having cold vibes.

Ahead of Modis visit, Chinas state controlled media has warned India not to get involved in the South China Sea dispute. India should beware of the possibility that by becoming embroiled in the disputes, it might end up being a pawn of the US and suffer great losses, especially in terms of business and trade from China, The Global Times said with typical flourish."India wont benefit much by balancing China through Japan. It will only lead to more mistrust between New Delhi and Beijing," it said.

Neither Abe nor Modi will be deterred from closer cooperation in strategic, political and trade issues because of China's concerns. The long pending nuclear deal with Japan, which allow Tokyo to sell nuclear reactors to New Delhi, will be signed during the Modi's visit. India officially has, however not confirmed it. Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup merely said, "The negotiations have dragged on for over six years since 2010. After the Fukushima radiation leak in 2011, the negotiations halted, but were taken up again when Abe came to power."

One reason for the delay was because public opinion in Japan is against nuclear agreement with a country which has not signed the Nuclear non-proliferation Treaty.(NPT). After India's 1998 nuclear tests, when Delhis move was criticised worldwide, the Indian government hit back at the P5 countries (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States) for their double standards.

Japans criticism did not irk India because the Vajpayee government could understand the sentiments of the people who had experienced the deadly power of the atom bomb. The mood against civilian nuclear power is as much after the Fukushima disaster. But Shinzo Abe is hoping to push the deal. Japan Times noted that the nuclear deal"will allow Japan to export nuclear power plants to India, giving a boost to Prime Minister Shinzo Abes push to promote infrastructure exports as a way of fueling economic growth."

It is not just nuclear reactors but India is also likely to order a dozen amphibious aircrafts from Japan for the Navy and the Coast Guard. A bullet train from Mumbai to Ahmedabad is already on the works. Modi will travel to Kobe by the Shinkansen bullet train. Shinzo Abe will accompany his guest. He will also visit the facility where the high speed rail is manufactured.

While trade and business ties beneficial to both the countries is high on the agenda, the political and strategic dialogue is of much more significance. The recent elections in the US will certainly be on the cards. No one yet knows what a Donald Trump presidency will be all about and whether he will continue Barack Obamas policy of pivot to Asia. China will certainly loom large in the discussions. Japan is keen for India to be much more vocal about Chinas role in the South China Sea and beyond. Whether Modi thinks the time is ripe for doing so is not yet known.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi should have a word with his defence minister once he returns from his visit to Japan. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar needs to have the responsibilities of his high office explicitly explained to him. For a defence minister to talk loosely about Indias nuclear prowess at a time when the PM was en route Japan is unconscionable.

The garrulous minister poked a hole through Indias nuclear posture on Thursday, questioning a basic premise of India's nuclear policy which New Delhi has been using in its negotiations with Japan as well as in its campaign for admission to the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Parrikars strenuous, but late efforts claiming that these were his personal views do not hold water. Persons holding important offices should keep their personal views private and not bandy them at official functions.

Addressing the audience at a book release function, the defence minister expounded on India's nuclear policy, saying that India should not bind itself to a no-first-use policy. Why should I bind myself? Parrikar asked.

India had announced a moratorium on nuclear testing shortly after conducting nuclear tests in 1998; the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government had announced a no-first-use of nuclear weapons policy in 2003.

India's nuclear policy has an important bearing on the Indo-Japan nuclear cooperation deal, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed on Friday. Japan has always stressed on a nullification clause in the nuclear agreement, which states that Japan would nullify the agreement if India were to conduct further nuclear tests.

On its part, India always cited its "unilateral moratorium" on nuclear testing to counter the Japanese demand. It had urged Japan to accept the declaration in the same way as other countries have done in their nuclear cooperation agreements with India. Indian and Japanese negotiators have been working to devise a way around this impediment by conveying the same sentiment in more acceptable phraseology.

Not just that, Indias case for admission to the Nuclear Suppliers Group is based on its record as a responsible nuclear power. Being a non-signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), India holds that its "no-first-use" of nuclear weapons policy meets the same purpose. Under the no-first-use policy, India declared that it would not use nuclear weapons unless attacked with nuclear weapons.

Indians have often assumed an air of superiority when Pakistani leaders have spoken of using nuclear weapons, including tactical battlefield weapons. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had asked "what do we have nuclear weapons for?" in a television interview. Parrikars remarks are in a similar vein. A defence minister should have a greater understanding of the implications of stated government policy.

Parrikar is known to put his foot in his mouth quite regularly. He had once referred to the Bharatiya Janata Party patriarch, LK Advani as "rancid pickle" during the tussle for supremacy in the party. The former Goa chief minister is not fluent in Hindi as he often proclaims during his speeches, but it is his thoughts and personal opinions that are more bothersome than his grammatical errors.

The IIT-Mumbai trained Minister was roundly criticised for his gratuitous insult to the Indian Army as he tried to appropriate the credit for the surgical strikes. In his first remarks after the Indian Armys surgical strikes along the Line of Control, the defence minister likened the army to Hanuman, who needed to be reminded of his extraordinary powers by Jamwant. The Minister had said that the Indian troops were like Hanuman who did not quite know their prowess before the surgical strikes".

The NDA government has a record number of gabby ministers who like to spout off on their pet peeves or are quick to get into controversy through instant tweets or off-hand remarks. Prime Minister Modi was forced to caution his ministers and senior BJP leaders not to speak out of turn and indulge in chest-thumping in their comments after the Indian Army's action along the LoC. On more than one occasion, Modi has indicated to his council of ministers that he wants them to stay away from controversies, stick to their own subjects and concentrate on their work. But, verily, someone should tell Parrikar to stick to his brief.
New Delhi: Long queues were witnessed at banks and ATMs, which opened after two days, as people rushed to get new banknotes in lieu of their old defunct bills. Many ATMs ran out of cash in couple of hours as there were heavy rush to withdraw lower denomination currency. Most of the machines were equipped to tender Rs 100 notes, while some were still not working.

Banks are saying that they are trying to recalibrate their machine for higher denomination notes, it will take some days before they start tendering new high security Rs 500 and 2000 notes which is expected to ease pressure.

However, to ensure customer convenience, banks have been asked to provide all cash withdrawal transactions at their ATMs free of cost till 30 December. Banks across country are witnessing heavy rush on the second day as people gathered to get new banknotes in exchange of old bills.

After the government scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, banks were shut on Wednesday, and ATMs were supposed to be out of service for re calibration on Wednesday and Thursday. In the financial capital of the country, shutters of ATMs of State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda, Yes Bank, Dena Bank were down in many parts. ATMs of many banks reported running dry.

From Friday onwards, customers are allowed to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day from ATMs till 18 November. The withdrawal limit will be raised to Rs 4,000 per day per card from 19 November, 2016.

In the two days when the ATMs were out of service, the banks said they will re-configure their ATMs to dispense Rs 100 and Rs 50 notes.
The sudden demonetisation move by the NDA government faced mixed reactions from the public on Friday as banks failed to open ATMs to dispense cash. People queued up in front of ATMs from early morning only to be told by the bank officials that the machines were not working.

Ramesh Kumar who came to the Noida Sector 50 branch of the ICICI bank said that he was sure that the ATMs will be opened by Friday morning as the Prime Minister had declared on Tuesday. But he only met with frustration. I came to collect cash from the ATM at 7 in the morning. But at 9 am I was told that dispensing money from the ATM will not be possible today, he said.

Many of the people who visited banks were surprised to see "out of order" bills outside ATM booths.

I thought that ATMs will be opened today (Friday). I do not have (any) money. I have to go to work. I do not know what to do," said Sahil Hussain, a customer.

Though ATMs were not working, most of the banks dispensed cash from their counters. Long queues were seen throughout the day in front of banks with people trying to withdraw money from the counters.

Raju Singh a shopkeeper near a branch of ICICI bank said, "I opened my shop at 7.30 am and saw a long queue outside the bank. I do not know from when they were standing.

Pramod Chauhan who was waiting to collect cash from the bank said, The bank is allowing only five or six people in at a time to collect cash or exchange money. So, it is taking too much time for the queue to end."

Chauhan added that the inability of banks to open ATMs only added to the problem. "If ATMs were open than the queues would not have been so long," he said, adding that he had been in the queue for more than five hours.

However, some like Sanjay Srivastava, a sales executive have been trying to collect cash since Thursday but had no luck even on Friday. Yesterday I went to a bank to collect cash. My token number was 71. But the bank ran out of cash before my number was called. Today I am here in an another bank, he said.

There are also some banks which did not dispense money but only accepted deposits.

The problems faced by the common man has prompted mixed reaction over the demonetisation move by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, some like small trader Sanjay Agarwal expressed his gratitude to the prime minister for his measure to curb black money. Whatever is done is done for our welfare. We need to bear it with the nation. For it will make our economy flourish, he said.

But another small trader who did not wish to be named said that the demonetisation move is going to do no good to the health of the economy. Black money cannot be curbed only by changing the currency. That we can see from the galloping gold prices," he said.

He also added that the new currency note of Rs 2000 denomination will make black money hoarding easier. "It will bring in troubles for the common man due to the difficulties in exchanging it with notes of smaller denomination," he said.

The trader also criticised the banking industry's inability to deal with the change in the currency policy. "Some political leaders in the opposition are alleging that the country has faced an economic emergency like situation because of the new currency. We know that it is not true. But what we know is that our banking industry lacks the resilience needed to face one given its inability to operate the ATMs even after 48 hours," he said.
Seeking to reassure the common people distressed over governments sudden announcement to withdraw high denomination currency, BJP President Amit Shah on Friday said that only anti-social elements will be upset over the decision and common people are ready to face "slight inconvenience" for the betterment of the nation.

Reiterating that there will be no inquiry on people depositing up to Rs 2.5 lakh in demonetised currency in banks, he said that the law-abiding common man had nothing to fear.

"The middle class, the poor and small traders will face no problems," he said, adding that there is no need to rush as the currency notes will be accepted till December end.

Amit Shah was addressing a press conference on the governments surprise move to demonetise higher denomination currency in the country.

Shah said that the Narendra Modi government's move to demonetise high value currency notes would greatly benefit the economy and urged the people to join the campaign against corruption.

"The Narendra Modi government has embarked on a campaign to end corruption. I appeal to people to join in and give it speed," Shah said.

Admitting that people had to wait in queues outside ATMs to get fresh cash in view of the demonetisation, he urged people to extend their cooperation. "The step which has been taken will greatly benefit the economy," he said. He appealed to the people to remain patient over the next few days so the transition could be implemented smoothly.

Demonetisation has dealt a severe blow to Naxalites, terror groups, hawala operators and anti-national elements Common people and honest taxpayers have no reason to worry, Shah said. Rubbishing the opposition claims that the move will hurt small businessmen, housewives and the poor, Shah claimed that the government has already made provisions that target only those operating against the law.

The Congress party had alleged that a majority of poor daily waged labourers, unemployed, housewives and farmers will not have bank accounts or the means to bear the brunt of the abrupt move.

Responding to this Shah said that the governments decision was well planned and the Jan Dhan Yojna was a precursor to this move. He also added that accounting for the poor population who is not yet linked to the banking system, the government had already made provisions to disburse new currency notes through Post Offices across the nation.

He urged the media to avoid furling panic amid people.

Lashing out at the Opposition for criticising the governments move to pull back Rs 1000 and Rs 500, Shah said that the opposition should explain their distress at a move that simply targets black money operators and terror groups that were blossoming on fake currency.

Challenging his political opponents to raise the issue in front of the people during elections, Shah said that the parties have only exposed themselves. If the government is taking a decision to crop out black money from our election process, why is the AAP, Congress and SP troubled over it, Shah asked. He asked the opposition leaders to explain their objections to the nation.

Taking on TMC president and Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, he said that he fails to understand her grievances on an issue that will only help bring unregulated cash into the mainstream economy. Shah also hit out at Mayawati, who had termed the governments move an economic emergency imposed by government.

Such a move can only be an economic emergency for the BSP only, Shah said.

He also thanked the Bank employees across the nation who were giving up their holidays and working beyond the normal hours to facilitate the transition.

Shah also said that the BJP did not bring these changes in view of the upcoming elections in major states as preparations were underway for a long time. When questioned on the timing of implementation of the move, Shah said, In this country, some or the other elections are always round the corner almost every year. He however added that the way the opposition parties were reacting will definitely benefit the BJP in the elections.

With inputs from IANS
New Delhi: Assuring people that their hard earned money is safe, the Finance Ministry today said there is no need to panic and depositing junked Rs 500/1,000 notes of up to Rs 2.50 lakh in bank accounts will not be reported to the tax department.

It also cautioned people against depositing the money of unknown people in their own accounts or falling prey to cheats, thugs and rumour mongers.

Besides, the ministry said, farm income continues to remain tax free and can be easily deposited in bank. Small businessmen, housewives, artisans, workers can also

deposit cash in their accounts without any apprehensions, it added.

"Deposits up to Rs 2.50 lakh will not be reported to the Income Tax department. There will be no harassment or investigation. All honest citizen need not worry. Farmers' income is tax free and can be easily deposited in bank," the ministry said in newspaper ads.

In its biggest crackdown ever on black money, the government on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and asked people holding such notes to deposit in bank accounts.

Since yesterday people have been thronging banks amid concerns among people over exchanging and depositing the scrapped high denomination currency.

People can deposit old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in their accounts till December 30, 2016, without any limit. Restrictions have been imposed on withdrawal limit and people can withdraw up to Rs 10,000 per day or Rs 20,000 per week.

This limit will be reviewed after few days. Besides, old notes up to Rs 4,000 can be exchanged at any bank or post office till November 24, 2016, by showing photo

ID proof.

ATMs can be used to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day per card till November 18 and Rs 4,000 from November 19 onwards. This limit too will be reviewed subsequently.

The ministry also advised people to make payments using cheques, demand drafts, debit or credit cards and electronic fund transfers and there is no restriction on such

transactions.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on Friday asked the Union government to consider extending the period of exemption for accepting old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes at government hospitals and pharmacies.

Hearing a PIL seeking extension of the exemption period from Friday for another month, a bench of Chief Justice R Subhash Reddy and Justice VM Pancholi issued notices to the Centre and the state government and adjourned the matter to 16 November.

Petitioner Dharam Kambalia, principal of a Rajkot-based college, also demanded that this exemption be extended to private hospitals. The high court observed that it would be better if the Centre took cognisance of the issue on its own and positively considered extending the exemption period, instead of the court passing a direction.

The petitioner contended that people were finding it difficult to exchange the old currency notes due to the heavy rush at the banks after Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were withdrawn on 8 November.
Following the Supreme Court's verdict on Thursday of the Punjab government's 2004 law as unconstitutional to terminate the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water-sharing agreement with its neighbouring states, MP Amarinder Singh along with 42 Congress MLAs submitted their resignation in protest.

The 43 MLAs are expected to personally handover their resignations on Friday to Vidhan Sabha Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal, said a report in The Indian Express.

Captain Amarinder Singh's resignation letter as MP to Lok Sabha speaker protesting the Sutlej Yamuna link canal row Verdict. pic.twitter.com/C9WWOYr1bG  ANI (@ANI_news) November 10, 2016

"Haryana will never get the water," Amarinder Singh told News18, and also blamed Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal for entering into the water-sharing agreement.

Reacting to the verdict, Badal assured the people of Punjab that only the SAD can make sure that Punjab "will not let the water go" and that the resignation by the Congress party members was just drama, reported ANI. Badal also said, "Punjab ka paani kahin nahi jaayga, nahin jayga aur nahin jaayga (Punjab's water will not go anywhere)." Badal then stressed that SYL canal dispute was not political but "a livelihood and economic issue".

Punjab ka paani kahin nahi jaayga, nahin jayga aur nahin jaayga: Punjab CM Parkash Singh Badal #SYL pic.twitter.com/LLQDLPvdrl  ANI (@ANI_news) November 10, 2016

This is not a political issue for us, this is a livelihood and economic issue: Punjab CM Parkash Singh Badal on #SYLVerdict pic.twitter.com/uvQjZSv18P  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

The Aam Aadmi Party has announced an indefinite morcha at Kapoori village from Friday to protest against the SC verdict  Kapoori village, located in Patiala, is where Indira Gandhi had performed the stone-laying ceremony of the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal in 1982, reports The Indian Express. The report also mentioned that AAP would not allow the implementation of the verdict if it came to power in Punjab. BJP MLA Vijay Sampla called Amarinder Singh's resignation "another excuse to stay away" from Parliament as he was "anyway never seen" there, ANI reported.

He anyway was never seen in Parliament,so this is another excuse to stay away: Vijay Sampla,BJP on Capt Amarinder resigns as MP #SYLVerdict pic.twitter.com/jCwY9vW5Sd  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Meanwhile, Haryana minister called the verdict a "ray of hope" and advised Punjab CM Badal to accept the decision to give water to Haryana.

Now that we see ray of hope post #SYLVerdict,Badal sahab should accept decision to give water going to Pak to Haryana:Haryana min OP Dhankar pic.twitter.com/y4pb1g9jxL  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

The Bains brothers (Balwinder and Simarjeet Singh Bains), who floated Lok Insaaf party ahead of the Punjab elections, have asked Badal to convene an emergency session of the Assembly, adding that they will wait for two or three days for the session, else they will submit their resignations as well, according to The Indian Express.

The Supreme Court on Thursday responded in "negative" to all the four questions referred to it by then President APJ Abdul Kalam on the constitutional validity of the law passed by then Punjab government-led by Captain Amrinder Singh to nullify the court verdicts and unilaterally terminating the almost three-decade old SYL water sharing agreement.

A five-judge constitution bench headed by Justice AR Dave said in its advisory verdict, "Once a conclusion is arrived at to the effect that one state, which is a party to the litigation or an agreement, cannot unilaterally terminate the agreement or nullify the decree of the highest court of the country, the state of Punjab cannot discharge itself from its obligation which arises from the judgment and decree dated 15, January, 2002, and the judgment and order dated 4 January, 2004 of the apex court."

The controversial 1981 water sharing agreement came into being after Haryana was carved out of Punjab in 1966. The Indus Waters Treaty, 1960 which was executed between India and Pakistan, later led to inter-state division of water share among states like Punjab, Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir.

Punjab, which was entitled to 7.20 million acre feet (including 1.30 MAF for Pepsu) out of 15.85 MAF of surplus water from Bhakra-Nangal project, was required to give 3.5 MAF water to Haryana from its own share.

For effective allocation of water, the SYL canal was conceptualised and both the states were required to construct its portions in their territory.

Haryana constructed the portion of SYL canal in its territory. However, Punjab after initial work, stopped the work leading to a spate of litigations. In 2004, the Congress government of the state came out with the Punjab Termination of Agreement Act with an intention to terminate the 1981 agreement and all other pacts relating to sharing of waters of rivers Ravi and Beas.

With inputs from PTI
Kabul: A Taliban suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a wall around the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif late on Thursday, killing at least four civilians and wounding scores, officials said.

A Nato spokesman said the explosion had caused "massive damage" to the building, where around 30 people normally worked. Heavily armed attackers followed up the blast, battling with Afghan and German security forces late into the night.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for Nato air strikes against a village near the northern city of Kunduz last week in which more than 30 people were killed.

The Islamist movement's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone that heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent "with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there".

Noor Mohammad Faiz, the head doctor in Mazar-i-Sharif provincial hospital, said four dead bodies and 120 wounded had been brought to the hospital and that the numbers may rise.

The attack highlighted the security problems spreading across Afghanistan in recent months, with heavy fighting in areas from the volatile southern province of Helmand to Kunduz in the far north.

More than 30 people, many of them children, were killed last week when US aircraft carried out air strikes in support of Afghan and US special forces who came under attack during a raid against suspected Taliban militants threatening Kunduz.

Germany, which heads the Nato-led Resolute Support mission in northern Afghanistan, has about 850 soldiers at a base on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, with another 1,000 troops coming from 20 partner countries.

A foreign ministry spokesman in Berlin said the attack was suppressed in the early hours of Friday by Afghan and German security personnel, as well as Nato special forces.

"All German employees of the Consulate General are safe and uninjured," he said. It was not yet known how many Afghan civilians and security personnel were killed or wounded, the spokesman said.

Shattered Windows

The explosion occurred about an hour before midnight local time, a spokesman for the German military joint forces command in Potsdam said.

Witnesses reported sporadic gunfire from around the consulate and said the huge blast had shattered windows in a wide area around the compound.

"It was a prepared attack for which we made all arrangements," Mujahid said. "As per our plan, first a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden vehicle rammed the main building of the consulate and that enabled other fighters to move in and kill all the foreigners there."

By the early hours of the morning, Afghan special forces were conducting search operations but were not encountering any more resistance, said Sayed Kamal Sadat, police chief of Balkh province.

Another provincial official, deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qaderi, said at least one suspect had been arrested from the area of explosion.

The Nato spokesman said at least one car packed with explosives had been rammed into the high outer wall surrounding the consulate, but authorities were investigating if a second car had been involved.

The heavily protected consulate is located in a large building close to the Blue Mosque in the centre of Mazar-i-Sharif, where the Indian consulate was also attacked by militant gunmen earlier this year.

A crisis task force was set up in Berlin and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was receiving continual updates, the German foreign ministry spokesman said.
News headlines in America on Thursday reflected on the meeting between President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump designed to discuss the transition of power. None claimed for it to be a smooth one, even as both of them sat side by side to exchange peaceful and friendly words for each other.

Setting aside the deep rancour that dominated the long campaign season to discuss the transition to the Republicans on 20 January, Obama and Trump held their first meeting in the Oval Office.

Obama, who vigorously campaigned for his fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton to succeed him, had repeatedly called Trump unfit for the president's office, while the real estate mogul had often dubbed Obama's eight-year tenure a "disaster."

But in separate post-election remarks on Wednesday, both men appeared to seek to help the country heal from a bitterly divisive campaign, and that tone continued into the White House meeting.

This peace between Obama and Trump comes at a time when America grapples with major protests against Trump's win, which took place even during their 90-minute meeting. Just hours later, Trump went back on Twitter to slam media for having incited the protests, as reported by the Chicago Sun Times.

Where some US newspapers and magazines focused on this newfound cordiality between Obama and Trump, pointing to the momentousness of the moment, some suggested that all was not forgotten, sticking to the former aggressive tone of the campaigns.

Take an early look at the front page of The Wall Street Journalhttps://t.co/5xQPDPcm8q pic.twitter.com/VomM0C4jSw  Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) November 11, 2016

Though in the face of this conciliatory move, some emphasised the two's former enmity. And some, Trump's penchant for hyperbole.

A look at tomorrow's front page:

OPEN HOUSE https://t.co/6zSE6XeBp1

After years of animosity, Trump holds civil chat with Obama in new digs pic.twitter.com/KdHSeBMxVX  New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) November 11, 2016

Trump launched his political career by questioning Obama's place of birth. Thursday Obama showed him his new home https://t.co/2RiWm1pqET  POLITICO (@politico) November 11, 2016

NEW: Trump tries on the presidency https://t.co/Y5ocCxi1FA  Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) November 10, 2016

Trump told a small but perfectly Trumpish falsehood after his meeting with Obama. https://t.co/Uka58Mv26n pic.twitter.com/FeIFrERnlh  Slate (@Slate) November 11, 2016

Before they were all smiles in the Oval Office, Obama and Trump had mostly insults for each other https://t.co/TFR5erzajY pic.twitter.com/mCSh2Beyuk  Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 10, 2016

Don't they look happy? Here's how the meeting went https://t.co/mibLa3EryC pic.twitter.com/KHc5pI23Uk  Houston Chronicle (@HoustonChron) November 10, 2016

Others mostly quoted Trump in their headlines, showing how he had a lot to learn from Obama and their 90-minute meeting.

Trump calls it a "great honor" to meet with Obama https://t.co/9LoTsvZe2M  New York Post (@nypost) November 10, 2016

President-elect Trump says Obama "explained some of the difficulties" of the job https://t.co/QnlR92rlWa pic.twitter.com/MpP2ScMrZW  Bloomberg Politics (@bpolitics) November 10, 2016

Allegedly, all public figures were on their best behaviour after the election, but the same cannot be said for all their supporters.

President Obama and President-elect Trump just met for the first time. And they were cordial, but there were a few things noticeably absent. pic.twitter.com/sISdrQoSlx  CBS News (@CBSNews) November 10, 2016

With inputs from Reuters
Washington: Bernie Sanders is leaving open the possibility of another presidential bid as shell-shocked liberals focus on helping the Democratic Party rebuild after Donald Trump's victory.

"Four years is a long time from now," said the 75-year-old Vermont independent, noting that he faces re-election to the Senate in 2018. But he added: "We'll take one thing at a time, but I'm not ruling out anything."

Democrats have begun post-election soul-searching, with Sanders and Sen Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, urging the party to embrace a more populist economic message. As some Democrats protested across the country, the party's liberal wing began jockeying for power, arguing that Clinton's loss could be attributed to her reluctance to fully focus on economic inequality and tougher Wall Street regulations.

"The final results may have divided us  but the entire electorate embraced deep, fundamental reform of our economic system and our political system," Warren told the AFL-CIO on Thursday. "Working families across this country are deeply frustrated about an economy and a government that doesn't work for them."

Warren laid out the principles she believes should govern Democrats during the Trump era: Standing up to bigotry, pushing for economic equality and combating the influence of Wall Street.

"We will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled Americans  on anyone. Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever," she said.

The sweeping Republican gains have thrown the future of the party into uncertainty, as Democrats process the scale of their losses and try to figure out the best way to come back in the 2018 elections. The Democratic National Committee may end up being ground zero for the fight, with no clear successor in line to replace interim chairwoman Donna Brazile. Sanders is backing Minnesota Rep Keith Ellison.

Warren and Sanders were articulating the frustrations among many liberals in the aftermath of Trump's stunning triumph over Hillary Clinton. But their influence underscores another problem facing Democrats: Many of the party's leading voices are senior citizens, older than their core constituencies of young and minority voters. Warren is 67.

Sanders said that millions of working-class voters' decision to back Trump was "an embarrassment" to the party and Democrats must take a strong stand against the role of corporate interests in politics. He said the party as a whole was unable to make a strong enough case to struggling workers, particularly in the industrial Midwest, who sided with Trump.

"You cannot be a party which, on one hand, says we're in favour of working people, we're in favour of the needs of young people, but we don't quite have the courage to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class. People do not believe that. You've got to decide which side you're on."
SANTIAGO A plane travelling between Santiago and the southern Chilean city of Punta Arenas had to return to the capital and make an emergency landing on Thursday afternoon, a civil aviation authority spokeswoman said, with media citing a bomb threat.Local broadcast media showed the LATAM Airlines LAN.SN plane parked on the runway at Santiago. They reported that a Brazilian woman on board had made the threat.Passengers were escorted off the plane, the spokeswoman said. She would not comment on whether or not an explosive device had been found, but said the incident was being investigated.

LATAM Airlines said it could not comment under aviation protocols.

(Reporting by Anthony Esposito and Rosalba O'Brien; Editing by Sandra Maler)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
One of the strangest things about the 2016 US presidential election is how little we know about the winner: Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States.

To a certain extent, this is quite amusing given the excruciatingly lengthy nature of the campaign. As Emma Roller counted in The New York Times, "By Election Day, the campaign will have gone on for 597 days. In the span of which weve been paying attention to the same presidential campaign, we could have instead hosted approximately four Mexican elections, seven Canadian elections, 14 British elections, 14 Australian elections or 41 French elections."

And yet despite numerous articles and several hours of TV debates over the last 19 months, tragically, all we have on Trump is a caricature as grotesque as his naked statues.

We know that he boasts about grabbing female genitalia, walks in unannounced inside changing rooms of beauty pageants, doesn't pay taxes, threatens immigrants and vows to ban Muslims. But apart from his scandals and moral failings what do we know about the man who will be the most powerful leader in the world? What do we know about his views on America's foreign policy, trade relations, geostrategic and geopolitical affairs  stuff that may affect us and the world around us  beyond a few broad brush strokes?

This is chiefly because the media never took "Trump the candidate" seriously and dismissed him as a clown on the sidewalk. It remained trapped in a self-created illusion even though Trump was moving up the primaries, caucuses and knocking Republicans off (and fumbling his way through the debates). The media gave him no chance. Cocksure in belief and cocooned in utter disconnect from the people on the street, the media mistook the affluent coastal cities, a few Silicon Valley tycoons and Hollywood superstars for America.

So, now we are saddled with the task of deciphering how Trump presidency would impact the world and India based on the scrapings from his campaign. In the absence of the vetting that the media should have done before he was elected to the Oval Office, we must, post-facto, try to piece together a coherent picture.

I believe there are five broad areas to focus on when it comes to the Indo-US relationship under Donald Trump. These would be (in no specific order) geostrategic affairs, trade relations, immigration and visa policy, the personal equation between leaders of the two nations and bilateral relationship.

Geostrategic affairs: Early reactions indicate that Pakistan and China are nervous about resetting their relationship with the US. That would imply good news for India because America under the Democrats had been very convenient for both. While Pakistan has successfully exploited its geostrategic positioning to blackmail the US into providing a perpetual line of credit, China has sucked dry US manufacturing jobs and runs a huge trade surplus.

Not surprisingly, both nations have issued nervous statements, warning Washington that any change in the terms of engagements will end up harming US interests. While China is concerned about increased American isolationism, Pakistan's nervousness stems from Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric and his open admiration for India.

At this point, it is difficult to be sure just how much of Trump's campaign rhetoric will spill over and affect his normative thinking but any resetting of the US-Pak relationship should be good news for India. As Pakistan's foreign policy analyst Hasan Aksari Rizvi told Reuters, "America will not abandon Pakistan, but definitely, Trump will be a tougher President than Hillary Clinton for Pakistan... I think India will have a better and smoother interaction compared to Pakistan."

We get a peek into Trump's mind when he talked to CNN in Wisconsin about the cocktail of radical Islamist terrorism and nuclear weaponry that is brewing in Pakistan, or his assertion in an American radio show last September that Pakistan is the world's most dangerous country and the US needs to work very closely with India to check it. Again, one isn't sure how much of this he may successfully carry into the White House when he sits down with the Secretary of State and his policy wonks but this should give an indication to Islamabad that it may not be business as usual.

Hillary Clinton's presidency would have ensured a measure of continuity of Barack Obama's policies. For China, though, Trump presidency might be a mixed bag. While more duties and tariffs on imports may hit China hard at a time when its domestic economy is grappling with a slowdown and bursting of credit bubble still looms as a Damoclean sword, it would be heartened by Trump's assertion that he intends to reduce America's interventionism in global affairs. Translation: American submarines might not patrol the South China Sea any longer.

When that happens, sovereign nations affected by China's aggressive geopolitical ambition might veer towards the other great Asian power: India.

It would be pertinent to remember that at this stage, all of this is little more than guesswork and Trump is marvellously unpredictable.

Trade relations: Trump faces an incongruity of policies because the angry, forgotten men and women who propelled him to Oval Office demand a greater share of the economic spoils that globalisation promised but failed to deliver. A tiny few seemed to have gotten richer in a globalised world at the expense of a vast number of the discontented, and the inequality of wealth has caused an angry populace to install a protectionist leader at the helm.

Trump vowed, just like Nigel Farage (the father of Brexit) did, that he would slap duties, taxes and tariffs but in a world which runs on interconnectivity, that would mean raising costs of the nuts and bolts of the engine that drives America.

As New York Times points out, "the American economy depends on access to a global supply chain that produces parts used by innumerable industries, along with a great range of consumer goods. Mexico and China are central actors. Disruption threatens to increase costs for American households. Tariffs on China might provoke a trade war that could slow economic growth, while most likely just shifting factory work to Vietnam and India."

If America raises the cost of trade with China, India stands to benefit in more ways than one.

Immigration policy: This has been the biggest area of concern for Indians. Given the fact that we are witnessing a global backlash against softer borders and easier immigration policies, one may be inclined to think that Trump's term might be bad for India's IT industry. But the reality isn't so simple. Trump has been contradictory, at certain times he has been praising the contribution made by skilled Indian workers and at other times needling US companies for hiring them in large numbers.

As a report in Times of India elucidates, Trump said in October last year that he was in favour of bringing skilled foreign workers into the US, as long as they come legally. He repeated it in March saying how Silicon Valley cannot be run without Indians and that very smart ones educated in the US should be allowed to remain there. "Many people want to stay in this country and then want to do that. I think somebody that goes through years of college in this country we shouldn't kick them out the day they graduate, which we do," he added, according to the newspaper. Yet he has also canvassed for increasing the H1B visa fees to pressurise US companies into hiring domestic workers.

Overall, one gets an impression that Trump regime may not go for any radical overhaul of the system that has been working well.

The personal equation between leaders: Trump has never hidden his admiration for Narendra Modi and has been effusive in his praise for Hindus and Indians  though it isn't clear just how much he understands the fact that the terms are not synonymous. Speaking to NDTV during a fundraiser organised by Republican Hindu Coalition, Trump said: "I have great respect for Hindus. I have so many friends that are Hindu and they are amazing entrepreneurs. I have jobs going up in India right now. I have great respect for India. Its an amazing country." He also asserted that were he to be elected, "Indian and Hindu community will have a true friend in the White House".

He even borrowed Modi's 2014 slogan during the campaign, tweaking it to "Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar" during an Indian American outreach programme. He has praised Modi's leadership, his effort to simplify the tax system through GST and on his part, Modi has carefully veered away from reacting to any of the controversies that dogged Trump during the election campaign. With a better personal equation between the two leaders, Indo-US relationship should remain on the path of a greater synergy.

Bilateral relationship: When it comes to government to government relationship, A Trump regime might be just what the doctor ordered for India, which is boxed in by an irritant in Pakistan and a formidable power in China. Indo-US areas of interest converge on a number of issues and Trump, for one, has not been hesitant in calling India America's "natural ally".

As news agency PTI had reported, during the Republican Hindu caucus Trump extolled India before a cheering crowd as "the worlds largest democracy and a natural ally of the US". He said, "Under a Trump Administration, we are going to become even better friends, in fact, I would take the term better out and we would be best friends... We are for free trade. We will have good trade deals with other countries. We are going to do a lot of business with India. We are going to have a phenomenal future together."

Indian wonks and political leaders should find it easier to deal with a businessman rather than a career politician like Clinton who carried a greater understanding of bilateral relations but also a huge baggage of past mutual suspicion. Trump, who still has large business interests in India, should be a refreshing change. On India's areas of foremost concern such as cross-border terrorism, Trump has taken a firmer stand than Clinton would have ever taken. A Trump regime should be good for India.
New York: US President-elect Donald Trump should begin work to kick-starting the economy, enforcing immigration laws and tackling terrorism in Asia, a US-India political action committee has said, as it expressed confidence that the US will have "greater relations" with India under his presidency.

The US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) congratulated Trump on winning the 2016 Presidential race and commended efforts of all Indian-American supporters who canvassed and fund raised for this successful campaign.

USINPAC Indiana Chair and Chair for Asians for Trump-Pence Campaign Raju Chinthala described Trump's election win as "historical" in American history, saying "he has changed a major political system in the US. He will be a great president and will build greater relations with India."

Assuring the support of Indian-Americans to a Trump administration, USINPAC Chairman Sanjay Puri said Trump "must work on kick-starting the economy, tackling ISIS and terrorism in Asia. The Indian-American community congratulates President Trump on such a decisive win and pledges to work with the new administration."

RNC National Committee woman from California Harmeet Kaur Dhillon said Trumps "stunning" victory "heralds a new era of opportunity and promise" for all Americans, which will

naturally benefit Indian-Americans.

With Trump's penchant for hiring the best talent, Dhillon expressed confidence that many prominent Indian-Americans will be inducted into the new administration.

"As a diverse community, Indian-Americans can expect the new President to focus on lowering regulatory burdens, reducing taxes on individuals and corporations, focusing on jobs and growth for America before other countries, enforce the laws of the United States, including its immigration laws, and keep our nation safe from harm," Dhillon said.

Dhillon added that the countrys leaders have failed to put the nation first, enabling foreign nations to perceive America as weak.

The committee said foreign policy challenges for Trump will include eliminating ISIS, renegotiating the Nato treaty, reconfiguring US relations with Russia and the war in Syria

and illegal immigration.

"President Trump now has the mandate to navigate the party to the future with a mix of conservatism and populism," it said.

The political action committee focuses on the over 3.2 million Indian-Americans and works on issues that concern the community. It supports candidates for local, state and federal office and encourages political participation by the Indian- American community.
Firstpost produced an eight-hour-long live US election online video broadcast and for the last 10 days, that is all that I have known. I remember packaging Donald Trump Wins videos and graphics and telling my co-workers that it is unlikely we would ever use them.

Why are you affected? my editor asked me in jest and laughed, sitting in the middle of the newsroom, palpably excited by the big news day: Narendra Modis ban on Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and, of course, the American presidential election. Across the busy newsroom, I endeavoured to answer him and mumbled, It had very little to do with American politics He chimed in: Yes, about the idea and the nature of the newsroom is such that it tends to drown conversations with news.

In the final minutes, when it became evident that Donald J Trump would be president-elect, my colleague turned towards me and shook his head. Disappointed. Another had just walked in to takeover from the previous nights shift when AP called it: Donald J Trump is president-elect. I became quiet.

I went to the restroom and cried.

Why are you affected?

Really. Why?

Hillary Clinton running for president in the United States of America has very little to do with Vishnupriya Bhandaram, an Indian living in Mumbai who has never lived in the US and never even visited the country.

Hillary Clinton running for president in the United States of America has everything to do with Vishnupriya Bhandaram, the woman who has had to deal with unwanted sexual advances, molestation, and casual sexism, a woman who is acutely aware of the gender imbalance and institutionalised sexism.

In the lead-up to the results, my colleagues and I would come to work early to catch the debates and push out copies. We watched him make a fool of himself  Wrong!, Yuge!, Bigly, Youre the puppet, "Nasty Woman" became a part of our newsroom banter. Of course, the man didnt have the necessary gravitas to become president? During breaks, my colleagues and I would laugh loudly and whole-heartedly about Trumps late-night tweets. When news of his p****-grabbing comments made headlines, I had written him off, so did many of my colleagues  Trump couldnt become president after this?

Well, now I know why they say: Never say never.

Clintons candidacy itself was a testament to the growing idea that women will not keep quiet any longer, or deny sexual assault. Clintons candidacy and campaign absorbed and celebrated the idea of womanhood, the experience of it and reflected an idea that women will not apologise to the world anymore. They will fight like girls, they will be emotional and sensitive and there is nothing wrong about it. Clintons candidacy also shone a bright light on the power of sisterhood and its collective movements. Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren cheered her on.

America is somehow seen as Mecca by most of the world. The American Dream has sold like hotcakes to rest of the world through globalisation. Clintons candidacy meant that the American Dream now also had a place for its women. As the largest economy lording over everyone else in the world, Clintons candidacy perhaps became the validation the contemporary womens movement needed. Well, if America finally did it, the win would have definitely given a fillip to the struggle for equality. Women are not stupid; weve known that a Clinton win would not render feminism unnecessary. Its just hurtful in this particular moment because Donald Trump's win feels like a crackling slap, telling women to go back to the kitchens  their rightful place in the American Dream.

Does the world not have any women in charge? (Why are you so affected?) Of course it does. I come from a country that has women chief ministers, had a female prime minister and president, after all. And those women have come a long way and have had to deal with sexist double standards in life and politics.

Clintons win wouldnt have been the be all and end all for women everywhere. Its just disappointing what her loss means. People still think that women are not to be trusted, that they are emotionally unstable, selfish, agenda-driven... Sure, as the stunned media is slowly recuperating and trying to make sense of this dramatic upset win, there will be more explanations  Trump captured fear and hope, he tapped into the anti-establishment anger etc. And they will be good explanations, sure. But as a woman, who has indoctrinated the motto that hard work, commitment and an educated mind is the way forward, Trumps win is indeed dramatically upsetting. It sends out the same message, that I have spent my entire adult life fighting against  women are judged by different standards; they are less than. Its true in Clintons case, like it has been in so many non-famous everyday womens lives who are accosted by casual sexism, live and breathe the poisonous fumes of rape culture every day. And because I have a vagina, I feel short-changed by life (society, mainly) in general.

My social media timeline is full of overnight poll pundits regurgitating how the presidential race was never about gender, it was not about sex and it was Clintons fault for making it about sex and gender. I get tired of thinking of ways to respond to them. Clintons loss is about how vehemently blind and deaf people are to gender disparities. This election result is a whitelash, but saying that it had nothing to do with her being a woman makes you sexist. You might not want to hear it, but it is.

So why should I be bothered by an election that showed:

The vituperative rhetoric around gender in the world, normalised rape culture, women having to work quadruply hard to be taken half as seriously, the glass ceiling is f******g difficult to break (and men dont have one), sexual assault is no big deal...

You tell me.
By Anthony Deutsch

| AMSTERDAM

AMSTERDAM The executive body of the global chemical weapons watchdog voted on Friday to condemn the use of banned toxic agents by the Syrian government and by militant group Islamic State, a source who took part in the closed session said. Roughly two-thirds of the 41 members on the Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), endorsed a U.S.-tabled text, the source told Reuters.The OPCW's Executive Council, which meets behind closed doors, seldom votes on such matters, generally operating through consensus. But this text was supported by 28 members, including Germany, France, the United States and Britain.It was opposed by Russia, China, Sudan and Iran. There were nine abstentions. Russia and Iran are Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main allies against rebels seeking to overthrow him. Western and Gulf Arab states back the rebels.

"There is a clear determination across the international community to hold those who have used these heinous weapons to account," said British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson in a statement responding to the vote.But a U.S.-Russian split over Syria highlighted continuing divisions. It was these two countries that in 2013 took the lead in getting the Damascus government to join the OPCW and avert threatened U.S.-led military intervention in Syria's civil war.

A 13-month international inquiry by the OPCW and United Nations concluded in a series of reports that Syrian government forces, including helicopter squadrons, were responsible for the use of chlorine barrel bombs against civilians.The OPCW-U.N. mission found that the Syrian government carried out three toxic attacks in March and April of last year, while Islamic State militants had used sulphur mustard gas.

The findings set the stage for a U.N. Security Council showdown between the five veto-wielding powers, likely pitting Russia and China against the United States, Britain and France over how those responsible for the attacks should be held accountable.Syrian authorities deny having used chemical weapons in the conflict. Islamic State has not commented. (Reporting by Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
By Stephen Kalin

| KOKJALI, Iraq

KOKJALI, Iraq The Iraqi police interrogator paced back and forth, towering over a dozen men from Mosul who were crouching in the dirt after escaping an area of the city recently recovered from Islamic State."The security forces are now going to liberate your city. How is it possible that you don't know who those rats are?" First Lieutenant Qaisar Mohammed asked the men in the village of Kokjali on Friday, demanding names and phone numbers of the jihadists controlling the rest of Mosul.Government forces are relying on intelligence from evacuees and sources still inside the city in their campaign to recapture Mosul from Islamic State, which seized a third of the country in 2014.Authorities are also keen to screen people leaving the city to prevent fighters from slipping through front lines in disguise and going underground to resume their insurgency.Twenty five-year old Najah, who had left his home in Mosul hours earlier, acknowledged that he knows some neighbours who were with Islamic State.But he says his information is limited because the militants kept changing houses and instilled such fear in ordinary people that nobody dared spend much time with them or ask too many questions.More than 45,000 civilians have fled their homes since the Mosul operation began less than a month ago, a fraction of the 1 million people the United Nations has warned could eventually evacuate the city.Mohammed, who previously worked in a western Mosul district that was a hotbed for Islamic State's al Qaeda predecessor, told Reuters that most residents cooperated with the authorities.

Some have been less forthcoming."After two years under Daesh (Islamic State), they have terror in their hearts," he said. "Their reaction is fear. They think maybe the Iraqi forces cannot liberate Mosul and then they will return. That is how they think."The Iraqi operation, involving a 100,000-strong alliance of troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga and Shi'ite militias, backed by U.S.-led air strikes, is doing everything it can to make sure that doesn't happen, but so far it has gained just a small foothold in the city.

FLEEING FROM MORTARS

The checkpoint in Kokjali, manned by counter-terrorism forces and local police, is the first stop for residents leaving eastern Mosul.Vehicles packed with civilians stop for a brief weapons check before continuing towards Kurdish-controlled areas.Tears streamed down the face of a woman in one car, betraying the mixture of fear and relief expressed by many.

Those who arrive at Kokjali on foot are sometimes questioned by police while they wait for government buses. They are then taken to another checkpoint where their names are entered into a database and checked against lists of Islamic State suspects.People who are cleared head mostly to camps, while others are held for further questioning.Mohammed's checkpoint is more than a kilometre from the front line inside Mosul, but it is far from safe.Earlier this week, an Islamic State fighter slipped among civilians at a similar site north of Mosul and blew himself up, he said. A few days later, a person wearing a black face veil and carrying a child did the same on the southeastern front.Along with such suicide attacks, the retreating jihadists have begun bombarding heavily populated civilian areas with mortars.A 54-year-old man from the Zahra district of the city said he had escaped with his two sons after a hellish night. Islamic State had launched shells randomly, he said, and laid down gunfire so heavy "it was like it was raining". (Reporting by Stephen Kalin; editing by Giles Elgood)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
India and Japan on Friday signed 10 pacts covering a range of areas such as boosting Japanese investment in infrastructure, railways, and for cooperation in space and agriculture, as part of agreements to bolster bilateral ties.

Furthermore, making an exception, Japan also signed a historic civil nuclear cooperation deal with India, opening the door for collaboration between their industries in the field.

Below is the full text of PM Modi's statement:

Your Excellency, Prime Minister Abe,

Friends,

Mina-Sama, Komban Wa!

A Zen Buddhist saying in Japanese says - "Ichigo Ichie , which means that our every meeting is unique and we must treasure every moment.

I have visited Japan many times, and this is my second visit as Prime Minister. And, every visit has been unique, special, educative and deeply rewarding.

I have met Excellency Abe on many occasions in Japan, India and around the world. I have also had the privilege of receiving several high level Japanese political and business leaders in India in the last couple of years.

The frequency of our interaction demonstrates the drive, dynamism and depth of our ties. It also reflects our continuing commitment to realize the full potential of our Special Strategic and Global Partnership.

Friends, In our conversation today, Prime Minister Abe and I took stock of the progress in our ties since the last Summit. It is clear to both of us that our cooperation has progressed on multiple fronts.

Deeper economic engagement, growth of trade, manufacturing and investment ties, focus on clean energy, partnership to secure our citizens, and cooperation on infrastructure and skill development are among our key priorities.

Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership.

Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of Climate Change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan.

I thank Prime Minister Abe the Japanese government and the Parliament for their support to this agreement.

Friends,

India and its economy are pursuing many transformations. Our aim is to become a major centre for manufacturing, investments and for the twenty-first century knowledge industries.

And, in this journey, we see Japan as a natural partner. We believe there is vast scope to combine our relative advantages, whether of capital, technology or human resources, to work for mutual benefit.

In terms of specific projects, we remain focused on making strong progress on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail project. Our engagement and agreement on cooperation in the financial sector will help us in accessing greater resources for infrastructure development.

Our dialogue in regard to training and skills development has broken new ground and is an important component of our economic partnership. We are also shaping new partnerships in areas such as space science, marine, and earth science, textiles, sports, agriculture and postal banking.

Friends,

Our strategic partnership is not only for the good and security of our own societies. It also brings peace, stability, and balance to the region. It is alive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges in Asia-Pacific.

As countries with an inclusive outlook, we have agreed to cooperate closely to promote connectivity, infrastructure and capacity-building in the regions that occupy the inter-linked waters of the Indo-Pacific.

The successful Malabar naval exercise has underscored the convergence in our strategic interests in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific.

As democracies, we support openness, transparency and the rule of law. We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism.

Friends,

The relations between our two countries are blessed by deep cultural and people to people ties. During Prime Minister Abes visit to India in December last year, I had committed to take steps to create basis for their further expansion.

And, as a result, since March 2016 we extended Visa-On Arrival facility to all Japanese nationals. We have also gone a step further in extending a long-term 10-year visa facility to eligible Japanese business persons.

Friends,

v India and Japan also consult and cooperate closely in regional and international fora. We will continue to work together for reforms of the United Nations and strive together for our rightful place in the UN Security Council.

I wish to thank Prime Minister Abe for the support extended for Indias membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Excellency Abe,

We both recognize that the future of our partnership is rich and robust. There is no limit to the scope and scale of what we can do together, for ourselves and for the region.

And, a key reason for this is your strong and dynamic leadership. It is indeed a privilege to be your partner and friend. I wish to thank you for the most valuable outcomes of this Summit, and for your generous welcome and hospitality.

Anata No O Motenashi O Arigato Gozaimashita!

(Thank you for your kind hospitality!)

Thank you, Thank you very much.
By Emily Flitter

| NEW YORK

NEW YORK Some of the most controversial proposals Donald Trump made while running for U.S. president disappeared from his campaign website on Thursday, but a spokesman said what some observers took as a softening of Trump's policies was due to a technical glitch.The link to Trump's Dec. 7 proposal titled: "Donald J. Trump statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration," in which he called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" vanished temporarily from the website but later reappeared.So too did a list of Trump's potential Supreme Court justice picks as president and certain details of his economic, defence and regulatory reform plans."The website was temporarily redirecting all specific press release pages to the home page," Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email. Links to Trump's policy proposals, including the Muslim ban, were working again by 3:30 p.m. EST (2030 GMT).The links, which had redirected readers to a campaign fundraising page, appeared to have been removed around Election Day on Tuesday, when Trump won a historic upset against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, according to a website that records historic snapshots of web pages.

In an appearance on CNBC on Thursday, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal praised Trump for removing the Muslim ban proposal from his website and also said Trump had deleted statements offensive to Muslims from his Twitter account.The prince could not be reached for comment after the links were restored.Several tweets attacking Muslims that Trump sent while campaigning for president remained in his feed on Thursday, including a March 22 tweet in which Trump wrote:

"Incompetent Hillary, despite the horrible attack in Brussels today, wants borders to be weak and open-and let the Muslims flow in. No way!"After initially praising the removal of the Muslim ban proposal at a news conference with other civil rights leaders on Thursday, Samer Khalaf, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said in a follow-up interview the group was hoping to see better behaviour from Trump."False hope just came over us," Khalaf said, but "we didn't really think it was monumental that they took down the language."

Khalaf said Trump's policies were more important than any statements. "Hes elected, he said some horrible things, now we have to see what his policies are. If theyre good policies were going to commend him for it. If theyre horrible policies were going to challenge him on it."Despite the temporary glitch, most of Trump's core policy positions had remained on his website, including his central immigration promise to build an "impenetrable physical wall" on the border with Mexico and make Mexico pay for its construction.It was not the first time the Trump campaign blamed technical difficulties for changes to its website. The campaign this year also replaced the part of the site describing Trump's healthcare policy with a different version. When contacted about it by Reuters in September, the campaign put the original page back up. (Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson and Julia Harte in Washington, Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Tom Brown)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
By Nick Carey

| JANESVILLE, Wisc.

JANESVILLE, Wisc. Semi-retired Wisconsin pig farmer John Lader does not think much of Donald Trump as a messenger, but voted for what he described as the Republican president-elect's message of change and economic hope for America. "The last few years, there hasn't been much optimism and hope among working people in rural areas in this country," said Lader, 65, who lives in the farmland outside the southern Wisconsin city of Janesville. Around 65 miles (105 km) to the northeast in the state's biggest city of Milwaukee, Jose Boni, who cleans offices at a local university and rents out several homes, heard a different message: Trump's plan to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and vow to deport the estimated 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally, most of whom are Hispanic. "He doesn't care about our community or working people, he only cares about himself," said Boni, 57, an Ecuador-born U.S. citizen. The different worlds of Lader and Boni help illustrate the rural-urban divide that was critical to the outcome of Tuesday's U.S. presidential election.A country once defined by regional voting now is more clearly divided by the differences between rural and urban voters. The combination of a strong Trump turnout in the countryside and a weak showing by Democrat Clinton in the cities went a long way toward deciding the election.Rural and small-town working-class white voters, who already tended to vote Republican, propelled Trump. Urban areas, where black and Hispanic voters are concentrated along with college-educated voters, already leaned toward the Democrats, but Clinton did not get the turnout from these groups that she needed. For instance, black voters did not show up in the same numbers they did for Barack Obama, the first black president, in 2008 and 2012. Trump beat Clinton by 26 percentage points among voters who live in non-metropolitan areas, while Clinton bested Trump by about 7 percentage points in urban areas, according to the nationwide Reuters/Ipsos national Election Day poll.'THE PERFECT SLOGAN'

Steven Schier, a political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, said rural voters "feel they've lost something, that America is moving away from them." "Trump came up with the perfect slogan for them in 'Make America Great Again' because it hits them exactly where they live," Schier said.Democratic presidential candidates had won in Wisconsin in every election since 1988, until Trump's victory on Tuesday.In Wisconsin, overall turnout was lower than in the 2012 presidential election. Trump actually was a few hundred votes shy of 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney's total in the state, but Clinton was around 240,000 votes short of Obama's 2012 tally. She ended up around 24,000 votes behind Trump in the state. "Those couple hundred thousand Democratic voters for whatever reason decided not to vote," Mordecai Lee, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "They stayed home, and Wisconsin went Republican. I think that was the pattern around the country."

Turnout in Milwaukee's Hispanic neighbourhoods was down 9 percent versus 2012, while citywide turnout in Milwaukee fell 14 percent. Clinton took 65.6 percent in Milwaukee County, which includes the city, to Trump's 28.6 percent. But Trump won in rural counties, for example taking 59.9 percent to Clinton's 33.6 percent in Fond du Lac County in the middle of the state and 71.4 percent to 25.1 percent in Florence County in the far north.In Milwaukee, Election Day canvassers found Trump's comments about immigrants were not enough to get people to the polls. Christine Neumann-Ortiz, director of community group Voces De La Frontera, said about 15 percent of the voters reached by the group in Milwaukee raised concerns about Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state or were undecided. "If we reached people, we were able to convince them to vote, but I don't think we could ever have reached enough by ourselves to overcome Trump's advantage with white working-class voters," Neumann-Ortiz said. The rural landscape was rich Trump territory, with people concerned about a slump in commodity prices and layoffs among manufacturers. Rural areas, especially in the Midwest and Northeast, have also seen a demographic shift in recent years with the arrival of Hispanic immigrants.

Demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington said census data from 2008 to 2015 showed Hispanic populations in non-metro counties in the Midwest rose 18 percent while the white population fell 9 percent. The counties still are 84 percent white, but those voters are feeling the change, Frey said."They're a little bit fearful of it, and if they're being hit hard economically, that can add to it," Frey added.Austin Arndt, a beef cattle farmer and neighbour of John Lader outside Janesville, hometown of Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Paul Ryan, said his vote was more against Clinton than for Trump.He said his vote was based on Trump's promise to cut taxes and repeal Obama's signature 2010 healthcare law, which has enabled millions of previously uninsured Americans to gain medical coverage but is detested by conservatives as a government overreach. "From the social point of view as candidates, they were both terrible people," said Arndt, 33. "For me, it was all about the economics." (Reporting by Nick Carey; Editing by Will Dunham)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Tokyo: India and Japan on Friday signed a landmark civil nuclear cooperation deal after talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his counterpart Shinzo Abe, a move that will boost bilateral economic and security ties and facilitate US-based players to set up atomic plants in India.

The two countries had reached a broad agreement for cooperation in civil nuclear energy sector during Abe's visit to India in December last year, but the deal was yet to be signed as some issues were yet to be worked out.

"A landmark deal for a cleaner, greener world! PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo witness exchange of the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement," External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted on Friday.

The deal would allow Japan to export nuclear technology to India, making it the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo. It would also cement the bilateral economic and security ties as the two countries warm up to counter an assertive China.

There was political resistance in Japan - the only country to suffer atomic bombings during World War II - against a nuclear deal with India, particularly after the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

Japan is a major player in the nuclear energy market and an atomic deal with it will make it easier for US-based nuclear plant makers Westinghouse Electric Corporation and GE Energy Inc to set up atomic plants in India as both these conglomerates have Japanese investments.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mangolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.
By Martin Petty

| MANILA

MANILA Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday he would respect defence treaties with "friends" and "ally" the United States, but still wanted foreign troops to leave his country by the end of his term.Duterte spared the United States one of his trademark verbal lashings and took a more conciliatory tone than usual, although he hinted at revoking the 2014 Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that gives U.S. troops rotational access to Philippine bases."We are friends, with an ally, we have a military pact that would bind us," he told a pre-dawn news conference upon his return from a visit to Malaysia."We will maintain our cooperation ... and respect is there, and in all matters between the two countries, especially the treaties we signed with them, so many agreements, we will honour all of these things."Duterte has been strongly against, at times furious about, dependence on the former colonial power and has called for the scrapping of dozens of joint exercises.

He said the Philippines did not need the exercises and by the end of his six-year term he wanted no foreign soldiers in his country."We do not need any foreigners to train Filipino troops. By themselves they are warriors," he added.He also said he would be turning to other countries for defence procurements, like China, Israel, Japan and Russia, because U.S. "gadgets" were expensive.

Duterte, who is often dubbed "Trump of the East" due to his fierce rhetoric and outrageous comments, was asked by a reporter if he thought the Donald Trump comparison was accurate."I am just a small molecule on this planet, he is now president of the most powerful country in the world. I am just a president struggling barely just above the water," he responded.

"No I don't think so, what we share in common maybe is the passion to serve."A change at the White House would not affect his decision to build closer alliances with countries beyond the United States, like China and in Southeast Asia, he said."I will pursue what I started, I'm not into habit of reneging on my work," he said. (Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Tokyo: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday called on Japanese Emperor Akihito ahead of key bilateral talks with counterpart Shinzo Abe during his three-day visit.

"A rare audience that symbolises the unique warmth between India and Japan. PM Narendra Modi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

A rare audience that symbolizes the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan pic.twitter.com/ZZf73xxFoy  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

"Speaking of civilisations. PM Modi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of India and Japan and the future of Asia," he said in another tweet.

Speaking of civilizations. PM @narendramodi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of #IndiaJapan and the future of Asia pic.twitter.com/KcpuyjB9gs  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

The call on came ahead of wide-ranging talks between Modi and his counterpart Abe aimed at giving a fillip to the bilateral strategic relations.

After the annual Summit, about 12 pacts will be signed by the two sides, sources said, adding there were also high expectations about the civil nuclear deal being signed.
By James Mackenzie

| KABUL

KABUL With so much riding on American support, Afghanistan is waiting anxiously to see if President-elect Donald Trump matches his maverick image and reverses policy or keeps to a path that has cost billions and committed thousands of troops to propping up a fragile ally.Much to the private annoyance of officials in Kabul, America's longest war barely featured in the election campaign, but few were expecting the billionaire property developer to beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton."It's been a complete surprise," said one senior Afghan official closely involved in national security issues. "I think everyone was expecting the opposite result."It (Afghanistan) wasn't a priority in the campaign, that's obvious. No one talked about Afghanistan at all. At least with Mrs. Clinton, though, you knew more or less what you were getting."Afghanistan will nonetheless present the incoming Trump administration with one of its most intractable foreign policy challenges.The United States has spent some $115 billion in aid for Afghanistan, but 15 years after the hardline Islamist Taliban were toppled after the Sept. 11 attacks, a third of the country is out of government control and security forces are struggling.As recently as last week two U.S. service members were killed fighting the Taliban near the northern city of Kunduz, and expectations that Afghan security forces could survive without extensive foreign assistance have proved illusory.Faced with a mounting Taliban insurgency, Obama dropped his original aim of pulling out of Afghanistan entirely. In July, he decided to keep 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, shelving earlier plans to bring the numbers down to 5,500 and leaving it to his successor to decide how to move forward.

Before the election, U.S. officials told partners that Afghanistan, whose war-ruined economy depends heavily on billions of dollars in foreign aid, will not be neglected by the new administration and that ties will remain strong and close."You can be assured that Afghanistan will remain at the highest levels of our foreign policy agenda," Ambassador Michael McKinley told an election day party at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, before the final results of the ballot were in.LITTLE INTEREST

However, Trump's "America First" doctrine has left many wondering if he will be willing to continue spending billions of dollars funding Afghanistan, particularly given his declaration that: "We're getting out of the nation-building business".

Among Afghans who use social media, a sense that the incoming president is opposed to their old enemy Pakistan made some hope his election would be good for Afghanistan, but there is little to go on for those trying to parse his public remarks.So far, he has shown little interest in Afghanistan, although his most recent comments suggested he favoured keeping troop numbers at around 5,500, the level they were intended to reach by the end of the year before Obama shelved the plan and set the number at 8,400.But in other comments, he has described America's involvement in Afghanistan as "a terrible mistake" and appeared to set conditions on the U.S. commitment to NATO, which leads the Resolute Support advise-and-assist mission in Afghanistan.Security officials in Kabul say the threat that Islamic State militants could build their presence in Afghanistan should act as an incentive to keep a U.S. force in place, although they admit they remain in the dark about Trump's intentions.

"As Trump promised during his campaign that he would eliminate Daesh (Islamic State), we don't think he would withdraw American forces from Afghanistan as Daesh is a new threat for Afghanistan and the region," said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue."But we are still in a state of uncertainty and we will wait and see what Trump has for Afghanistan," he added.The decision will be vital for a country that is likely to depend on American support for years to come."The United States will almost certainly continue to be the leading source of both military and civilian reconstruction aid to Afghanistan for years to come," the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a Congressional oversight body, said only last month.In an interview with CNN television last year, Trump himself appeared to accept that it was too late to pull U.S. forces out."And at this point, you probably have to stay because that thing will collapse about two seconds after they leave," he said, in the interview in October, 2015. (Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
New York: American college campuses from Boston to Los Angeles have struggled to come to terms with Donald Trump's victory. For the most part, the campuses have been rocked by anti-Trump protests, but there are growing episodes of barefaced hostility against foreign students and minorities.

Flyers showing beefy white men, wielding assault rifles against the background of a fluttering American flag, sprung up like poison ivy on Wednesday in the sprawling Texas State University campus calling for "tar and feather vigilante squads."

The image used appears to be from a 2007 YouTube comedy series titled Vigilantes.

Other flyers advocated stuffing the Rio Grande River with alligators, snakes and flesh-eating piranhas, so students could watch the "gladiator spectacle" of Mexicans and immigrants "rush the wall only to get stanched and eaten by predators".

"It's frightening and quite uncomfortable to see this virulent outburst of animosity directed at non-white students," said Reema Bhosale, who is enrolled for her Masters in Economics at Texas State University.

"I live in a campus residential hall with a lot of other Indian students so we are taking precautions by staying in groups when we go out at night," said engineering student Amar Kumar, who is a member of the large Indian Student Association at Texas State University.

On Tuesday, Trump beat his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton with a 10 percentage point lead in Texas which is Americas largest red state. Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) data released by US immigration authorities show that the maximum Indian students, over 37 percent, study at schools in fiercely conservative Texas and the two bluest of blue states; California and New York.

"One of the core values of international education is about celebrating diversity and learning from differences," said Dr Rahul Choudaha, co-founder of interEDGE.org.

"Trumps viewpoints are insular... Its likely that policies will start looking inward and slow down international education exchanges and student mobility," said Choudaha. "Trumps anti-immigrant stance may create stricter visa and immigration policies that may make it difficult for students to come to the US and find internships and jobs."

For decades, the US has been the gold standard in education and exerted a strong pulling power on Indian students. India sends the second biggest contingent of foreign students to America after China. According to the annual Open Doors report compiled by the Institute of International Education, the number of Indian students enrolled in US institutions rose to 132,888 in 2014-2015. However, the vitiated atmosphere in US college campuses after Trumps victory could put off foreign students.

Within days of Trumps mercurial victory, posters promoting a white nationalist organisation called Identity Evropa led by Iraq war veteran Nathan Damigo were plastered across campuses urging Americans to protect their White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) heritage.

The obnoxious Texas State and Identity Evropa flyers are just the tip of the iceberg.

"At San Jose State University in California, a Muslim woman complained that she had been grabbed by her hijab and choked. The police are investigating," reported The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/us/police-investigate-attacks-on-muslim-students-at-universities.html

Meanwhile, thousands of students from the University of Texas, Austin, the University of Southern California and universities in New York have spilled out of classrooms to take part in massive anti-Trump street rallies.

"Not my president," shouted vocal students in rallies from the East to the West Coast.

A colossal "white-lash" helped Trump clinch the presidency. He was propelled by angry male white voters unhappy with the status quo who bought into his evocative promise to "Make America Great Again". A first-time politician, Trump ran one of the nastiest presidential campaigns by playing the race card, but Americans are hoping that he will not govern like he campaigned. Still, Trump has let the genie out of the bottle and the impact is being felt across American college campuses.
Donald Trumps surprise victory in the United States election has sent the world into a tailspin, especially Europe and American neighbours. Going by his election rhetoric  of pulling out of NATO, not honouring American trade agreements and asking Japan and other US allies to shoulder their own responsibilities  it seems inevitable that his actions, if followed, will change the shape of the world as we know it.

For India, which has steadily come closer to the US since signing the civil nuclear deal in 2005, Trump is almost a wild card.

The Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC), who are admirers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had been working to help Trump. So much so, that Trump even reached out to them before the elections and mouthed a version of Modis 2014 election tag line, "Agli bar Trump sarkar."

Indications suggest that Modi and Trump will have extremely warm personal relations, all thanks to the RHC members who helped mobilise Indian American votes for Trump.

But personal relations do not drive international affairs. There will be a vast difference between candidate Trump and President Trump. He was the star of his own campaign and did not have a battery of advisers. He ran his campaign mostly based on his own instincts. But once Trump moves into the Oval office, and takes over as President of the most powerful nation in the world, he will have a whole team of advisers to guide him. Much will depend on who these people are.

Luckily for India, there is bipartisan support for better relations between the world's oldest and largest democracy. A Hillary Clinton win would have been equally good for India though, as she is familiar with the country and would have quickly picked up the threads of the Obama administration.

As secretary of state, she did her bit for closer ties with India and in a public address in Chennai, had asked India to shoulder a greater responsibility to ensure peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region. Placing India as a counter-balance to China has been part of the American policy ever since George W Bush was the President. This policy was also followed by President Barack Obama.

"There will be continuity in US policy towards India," said Lalit Mansingh, former Indian foreign secretary. "India will not be a top priority in the first few days. It will take six months to a year for the Trump administration to deal with India. Much will also depend on his team of advisers, but generally I dont expect much change," added Mansingh.

Former Indian Ambassador to the US, Naresh Chandra, however, had a different take: "America under Trump is likely to be protectionist in its economic policy. This will certainly hurt Indian businesses as well as that of all emerging markets," Chandra said.

"Protectionist barriers in the US, which is the worlds largest consumer, will have multiple effects on both the IT industry and pharmaceuticals, and perhaps even on the garment export business. There will also be instability in the world financial markets initially," said the former cabinet secretary.

Trump's strong emphasis on ensuring that American jobs do not go outside the country and his tough views on immigration may have an adverse effect on India and its businesses.

Most European leaders see Trump with some degree of scepticism. It is very likely that US influence among Europeans would go down temporarily. America's word would not carry much weight and many member states of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which were supporting Indias entry bid, may now side with China and the naysayers instead.

Here, it may be recalled how former President Bush and his administration had worked overtime at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get a waiver for India.

Trump is unlikely to have this kind of clout over other world leaders. He may not be in a position to mobilise international support as well as past US presidents could, or be able to counter Chinas anti-India stand in the nuclear organisations.

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has already issued a statement congratulating the President-elect: "CII looks forward to working with President Trump and his administration on critical issues that impact US-India trade and investment partnership. We hope that challenges relating to skilled labour, marker access for pharmaceutical products from India, and for financial services institutions and SMEs will be addressed."

Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC) chairman, TS Bhasin, is upbeat about the result, as he believes that the US economy will recover quickly under Trump. In a statement, he said: "Trump has stated clearly that his focus would be to spend huge funds on building the US infrastructure  like highways, airports etc. That would generate great demand for engineering exports in areas like steel, machinery and high technology domains. The Indian industry would certainly look forward to be a partner in that great endeavour of the next US President."

He said that while the engineering exports to the US had been slowing, it was in sync with the rest of the world. He added that, with the new administration, "we can expect a great recovery in the US economy, which is great news for India."

According to Chandra, the fact that Indian-American Trump supporters in the RHC had projected India as a Hindu state to a man who knows little about the country, may play as a spoiler. "Hopefully Trump does not regard India from that narrow vision of a Hindu country. That would not be good for us because relations cannot be built on a communal plank," Chandra warned.

Luckily, once he takes office, Trump would be much more circumspect  as was clear from his victory speech. Having fought an election where he referred to his rival as "crooked Hillary", he was gracious in victory and appreciated her long service to the nation.

Shalab Kumar, a leading member of the RHC, claimed that Indian-Americans across the US had voted for Trump and had helped in his victory. RHC hopes that Trump would side with India on terrorism, as he is already aware of Pakistans role in sponsoring cross-border attacks. They believe that since Trump is not a regular politician, he would not be inclined to be politically correct and hence would do right by India.

All this is, of course, wishful thinking. Trump's policy on the region is not known at all. Will he continue with Obamas policy or will he take a different route, nobody seems to know.
Los Angeles: A US federal judge on Thursday encouraged lawyers involved in a class-action lawsuit against President-elect Donald Trump's now-defunct university to settle the case out of court.

US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump accused of bias during the campaign because of his Mexican heritage, said at a hearing in San Diego, California, that another judge had offered to work with both sides on a possible settlement.

"I can tell you right now I'm all ears," Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli told Curiel, according to local media.

Petrocelli told the judge it was unlikely that Trump, who has been called as a witness in the case, would be able to attend the trial set for 28 November in San Diego. He added that he planned to file a motion for the trial to be delayed for several months while Trump prepares to take office on 20 January.

Attorneys for Trump have sought to exclude from the trial any comments their client made during the presidential campaign on the grounds it could prejudice the jury.

Trump repeatedly hit out against the Indiana-born Curiel during his run for the White House. He claimed that the jurist's Mexican heritage would stand in the way of a fair trial given Trump's controversial stand on illegal immigration and his vow to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.

The six-year-old lawsuit alleges that Trump University fleeced students by tricking them with aggressive marketing that amounted to fraud.

Students paid as much as $35,000 to enroll, believing they would make it big in real estate after being taught by experts hand-picked by Trump, the suit says.

Trump's lawyers counter that many students have given the program a thumbs-up and those who failed to succeed have only themselves to blame.
GET OUR APP Our Spectrum News app is the most convenient way to get the stories that matter to you. Download it here.
It was the eighth failure to pass a Trade Union Law in the Legislative Assembly (AL). Twelve lawmakers voted in favour and 15 against the bill that was raised by lawmakers linked to the Macau Federation of Trade Unions (Kwan Tsui Hang, Lam Heong Sang, Ella Lei). The result was not closer because lawmaker Jose Pereira Coutinho, who is currently in Lisbon, was absent.

Although rejected again, the law seems to have gained more support from the lawmakers. Several concerns were raised by the opponents, for instance, it was questioned whether this was the right time to establish such a law when Macaus economy is still in recovery.

The question of how it will be possible to define a trade union when Macau has more than 7,000 associations was asked again, as well as how the new law could meet the requirements of international agreements and of the MSAR Basic Law.

These three topics were the ones that drew the most attention from the opposing lawmakers. Many of them also pointed out that the current labor affairs law is able to protect the rights of employees, so there is no need to establish a trade union law.

Tsui Wai Kwan voiced his support of the establishment of such a law, however, he acknowledged that now would not be the right time. The economy is still not diversified enough; the single [gaming] industry is still weak. The current industry is not prepared for embracing the great impact [that will be generated by the laws], explained Tsui. The lawmaker believes that in the present moment there are no conditions [] to adopt this law.

Ng Kuok Cheong argued that the economy does not have any bearing on the likelihood of the law being passed. When Macaus economy was in its peak and Macau was at the top of the world, the law was rejected. There is no reason for it to be rejected again, said Ng.

In the articles written down in the law, a penalty system says that a maximum fine of MOP250,000 might be applied to employers when they break the law.

Fong Chi Keong was, as usual, the most vociferous in his opposition to the law. He believes that, according to what is written in the articles, SMEs would not be able to survive, as any complaints coming from employees can lead to a fine levied against the employers.

Since I was born until now, there was never a trade union law, it has always been about fines and nothing happened. This law will ruin the whole society, because it will create a special social class. I dont want to see this class, said Fong. Almost in every legislature, we receive a trade union law proposal. That means that such law is not needed. Why do you insist? he said. According to Fong, the only problems in Macau related to unscrupulous employers happen in the construction industry and are not generalized. There is already a Labor Law, society is harmonious and tolerant, associations have space to express their opinions.

Gabriel Tong expressed strong doubts towards the bill, saying, these laws cannot fill in the gap in terms of trade union laws in the territory, and they are unable to comply with international agreements. If it is passed, all those who voted pass should explain this to the society.

The last point that was discussed was brought forward by Melinda Chan. She questioned if the law would include expat workers besides Macau residents.

The laws proponents, including Kwan Tsui Hang, remarked that no workers should be excluded from the trade union laws. Julie Zhu

Financial entities entitled to check customers background

Financial entities will not encounter inconvenience under the regions latest version of laws regarding the prevention of money laundering activities, the Secretary for Economy and Finance, Lionel Leong, said during yesterdays Legislative Assembly meeting.

Lawmakers passed the amendments of two laws, including the aforementioned. The other law is related to anti-terrorism.

According to the law, financial entities are now required to check their clients basic identities and are obliged to preserve this information.

Lawmaker Gabriel Tong agreed with the amendments, although he also raised his doubts. He said that the amendments comply with international standards, and are also related to the development of Macau. However, he questioned if the authority has taken financial industrys convenience into consideration.

Leong, in reply to Tongs question, said it will not cause inconvenience to the financial industry.

He claims that the industry has been conducting a series of measures which comply with the new amendments. The financial entities, they do basic background confirmation. The big transactions are not included in the group whose background is being checked. However, [when a] continuous business relationship [takes place] with the financial entities, and when the activity is producing more values, then the customers should be inspected, explained Leong.

The law of prevention and suppression of money laundering contains expanded definitions of money laundering. The extended list of activities considered to be related to money laundering include bribery and acts of corruption, smuggling, crimes of copyright infringement, crimes against industrial rights, and prostitution. JZ

ON THE LAWMAKERSAGENDA

Parking lots management: Chan Meng Keng said that some government officials have illegally outsourced public tenders, and that the government has allowed public parking lots to become dirty and run down. Chan claims that once DSAT had outsourced public parking lots contracts to management companies it would then stop its supervision of said companies.

The parking lots are built with public money, [] DSAT does not check the receipt handed in by the companies afterwards. Its a world-class joke, said Chan.

Transportation: Zheng Anting is worried about Macaus cross-sea transportation, which he considers to be lagging behind, thus affecting the citys economic and social development. The government wrote down on the regions five-year plan that the fourth cross-sea bridge will be put into operation in 2020. Zheng thinks that the bridge cannot help ease the transportation pressure alongside the region between the center of the Macau peninsula and Taipa. He suggested the government to rebuild the Governador Nobre de Carvalho Bridge as well as to consider rebuilding it into a six-way bridge with specific lanes for motorbikes. He also pointed out that the government should consider building a tunnel at the roundabout at the junction of the Taipa Olympic Centre and the Galaxy.

Rising populism: Tsui Wai Kwan addressed the fact that populist beliefs are increasing among the residents of the city. Tsui said that the reaction to the latest two typhoon predictions have led the governments administration to feel affected by populism. He added that the public criticism towards the meteorological authoritys predictions for typhoons Nida and Haima have rendered the department unable to raise the right signals. Societys doubts towards the planned containment buildings, which will meet WHO standards, have proved that the populism is already making an impact on the formation of laws. He stated that if the government continues to be swayed by populism, there will be horrible consequences. Making decisions based on subjective expectations is called the rule of man, not the rule of law, said Tsui, adding that the publics attitude should guide legislation onto the right track.
A top Chinese police official was elected president of Interpol yesterday, setting off alarm bells among rights advocates over abuses and a lack of transparency within Chinas legal system, as well as the potential misuse of the police organization to attack Beijings political opponents.

Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei was named as the first Chinese to hold the post at the organizations general assembly on the Indonesian island of Bali, Interpol announced in a press release.

The Lyon, France-based International Criminal Police Organization has 190 member nations and has the power to issue red notices. Its the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use today. Interpol circulates those notices to member countries listing people who are wanted for extradition.

While Interpols charter officially bars it from undertaking any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character, critics say some governments, primarily Russia and Iran, have abused the system to harass and detain opponents of their regimes. Interpol says it has a special vetting process to prevent that from happening.

Quoted in the Interpol release, Meng said he takes over at a time when the world is facing some of the most serious global public security challenges since World War II.

Interpol, guided by the best set of principles and mechanisms to date, has made a significant contribution to promoting international police cooperation, Meng was quoted as saying. Interpol should continue to adhere to these principles and strategies, while further innovating our work mechanisms in order to adapt to the changing security situation we see today.

Interpols president is a largely symbolic but still influential figure who heads its executive committee responsible for providing guidance and direction and implementing decisions made by its general assembly. Interpol Secretary General Jurgen Stock is the organizations chief full-time official and heads the executive committee.

Meng, who takes over from Mireille Ballestrazzi of France for a four-year term, will assume his new duties immediately.

His election comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping is seeking to give new momentum to his 4-year-old campaign against corruption, including a push to seek the return of former officials and other suspects who had fled abroad. China filed a list of 100 of its most-wanted suspects with Interpol in April 2014, about one third of whom have since been repatriated to face justice at home.

The anti-corruption drive is led by the Communist Partys internal watchdog body, the highly secretive Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, rather than the police, prompting questions about its transparency and fairness.

More than 1 million officials have been handed punishments ranging from lengthy prison terms to administrative demerits or demotions. While authorities deny their targets are selected for political purposes, several of the highest-profile suspects have been associated with Xis predecessor Hu Jintao and other rivals.

Chinas police and judicial systems have been routinely criticized for abuses, including confessions under torture, arbitrary travel bans and the disappearance and detention without charges of political dissidents and their family members. That has prompted reluctance among many Western nations to sign extradition treaties with China or return suspects wanted for non-violent crimes.

China also stands accused of abducting independent book sellers who published tomes on sensitive political topics from Hong Kong and Thailand. U.S. officials have meanwhile complained that China has asked for the return of corruption suspects while providing little or no information about the allegations against them.

Given those circumstances, Mengs election is an alarming prospect, said Maya Wang, Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch.

While we think its important to fight corruption, the campaign has been politicized and undermines judicial independence, Wang said. Mengs election will probably embolden and encourage abuses in the system, she said, citing recent reports of close Chinese ally Russias use of Interpol to attack President Vladimir Putins political opponents.

Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty Internationals regional director for East Asia, tweeted: This is extraordinarily worrying given Chinas longstanding practice of trying to use Interpol to arrest dissidents and refugees abroad.

At the same time, Chinas 3-decade-old economic boom has produced waves of embezzlement, bribery, corruption and other forms of white-collar crime that have forced the government to spread a wide net to track down suspects and their illicit earnings. China also says it faces security threats from cross-border extremist Islamic groups seeking to overthrow Chinese rule over the far-western region of Xinjiang.

Along with electing Meng, Interpol also approved a call for the systematic collection and recording of biometric information as part of terrorist profiles shared by the organization.

About 830 police chiefs and senior law enforcement officials from 164 countries joined in the four-day meeting. China became a member in 1984. Christopher Bodeen, Beijing, AP


The southern African state of Angola has gained its independence from former colonial power Portugal.

The leader of one of the countrys rival factions, Dr Agostinho Neto, of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), has been proclaimed the countrys first president.

In the capital, Luanda, huge crowds cheered and soldiers fired shots into the air as the new countrys flag was raised at midnight.

However, the main groups vying for power held separate independence ceremonies.

The MPLA held a huge ceremony at a stadium in the capital, Luanda, attended by a representative from the Soviet Union.

In a speech, Dr Neto was critical of the Portuguese for not recognising the MPLA as the sole legitimate representative of the Angolan people.

Meanwhile, the rival Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) announced it had joined forces with another liberation movement to form a national council which would act as Angolas government.

Angolas independence ends nearly 500 years of Portuguese rule.

Initially the Portuguese used Angola as a slave pool for its more lucrative colony in Brazil and mined Angolas precious gemstones and metals.

Resistance to Portuguese rule was widespread by the mid-20th century but was complicated by clashes between the various African communities.

Courtesy BBC News

In context

After Angolas independence the civil war intensified and was bolstered by foreign involvement.

The Soviet Union and Cuba supported the left-wing MPLA and the US and South Africa backed Unita.

After 16 years of fighting in which up to 300,000 people died, a peace deal made it possible for elections to be held.

But Unita rejected the outcome and resumed the war.

However, the death of Unita leader Jonas Savimbi in February 2002 raised the prospect of peace.

In April 2002 the Angolan army and Unita signed a formal ceasefire in Luanda to end the 27-year conflict.
A Japanese journalist deported from Iraq denied yesterday allegations by Kurdish officials that he is a sympathizer of the Islamic State extremist group.

Kosuke Tsuneoka told reporters in Tokyo that he was in Mosul only to report as a journalist on the battle to retake the IS-held city. Iraqi and Kurdish troops are currently fighting to expel the militant group out of Mosul.

Let me remind you that Im not an IS member, not even a supporter, said the Muslim convert who also goes by Shamil Tsuneoka. Im fundamentally against the belief of the Islamic State group [] That is not the Islam that I believe in.

Tsuneoka, a journalist who has covered militant groups in the Middle East, was arrested Oct. 27 after he was going through a security check and found to be carrying a key chain with an IS logo. He said it was given to him by a bus passenger on an earlier reporting trip. He said he kept it hoping to trace its origin.

He said it was merely his stupidity to have kept the key chain in a pocket of his backpack that he handed in for a security check. He was handcuffed at the spot and taken into custody for interrogation by Kurdish intelligence officials, Tsuneoka said. Obviously I was suspected as an IS member trying to sneak into a news conference, he said.

The Kurdistan Region Security Council accused him of having links to the IS group. They said an investigation showed Tsuneoka had contacted IS members through his smartphone and has posted photos suggesting his link with the fighters on social media.

Tsuneoka said Kurdish intelligence officials asked him for details about how they communicated. The Kurdistan authority handed him over to Japans Foreign Ministry on Monday for deportation out of the country, with his case still pending.

Tsuneoka said he hopes to be cleared soon so he could return to Mosul and resume reporting despite what he had just gone through. He said he was the only Japanese reporter there at the time and felt strongly about the need to inform the Japanese of the situation.

I hope to go back, Tsuneoka said. Someone must keep reporting on the situation. Mari Yamaguchi, Tokyo, AP
Young Macau violinist Sophia Feinga Su recently won the third prize in the 8th International Louis Spohr Competition for Young Violinists, making her the first young local musician to receive an award in an international competition in a category other than piano.

15-year old Su is currently studying in the Juilliard School in the United States, with a scholarship from the Cultural Affairs Bureau.

Seven musicians from the Juilliard School participated in the competition, but only Su was selected for the finals and was awarded the third prize in the Category II (for those born between 1999 and 2001).

The International Louis Spohr Competition for Young Violinists, which takes place in Germany, is an international competition for young musicians held every three years. Over 100 young musicians from 24 countries and regions participated in the competition.

According to a statement issued by the Cultural Affairs Bureau, Su was encouraged by her mother to learn piano at the age of three before she studied violin with her father.

In 2006, she participated in the 24th Macao Young Musicians Competition, in which she won first prize in the Violin Elementary Solo category.

She was then admitted at the Macau Conservatory School of Music of the Cultural Affairs Bureau.

In 2008, at the age of six, she was the youngest winner of the Cultural Affairs Bureau Prize in the Macao Young Musicians Competition.

In 2012, Su participated and won the first prize in the Yundi Macao Young Musicians Competition, being hailed as a genius violinist from Macau by the press.

Su has extensive performance experience and has given solo concerts at the Juilliard School in the past two years. With the support of the local government, the young violinist gave a solo concert at the variety show for the 10th anniversary of the regions handover to China.

Last year, in cooperation with the Macau Orchestra, she participated in the Linz Bruckner Festival 2015 in Europe and performed for the first time in the concert for Macau resident musicians Bravo Macao! that was integrated into the Macau International Music Festival.

Su has also taken part in several concerts in cooperation with the Macau Orchestra and the Macau Chinese Orchestra.
Catia Silva is the owner of local party and wedding planning company Bad Bad Maria, which took off about two years ago in the territory. The company has recently revamped its website, advertising new services like made-to-order breakfast.

She says that her approach to wedding planning differs from other more traditional planners. Silva is focused on the unusual and unconventional, bringing a sense of individuality to the celebration.

She specializes in organizing and arranging destination weddings  where couples travel to often far-flung locations not only for the wedding, but also for other pre- or post-wedding activities, like honeymoons and photo-shoots.

Silva says that while Macau is a somewhat popular wedding destination for mainland Chinese tourists, it has not appealed to one of her key target markets: Portugal.

The Portuguese-born event planner, who has also lived in Angola, sat down with the Times to talk about what she does and why she does it, and offered her thoughts on the wedding sector in Macau.

Macau Daily Times(MDT)  Whats in the name Bad Bad Maria?

Catia Silva (CS)  Bad Bad Maria [Portuguese: Mau Mau Maria] is a Portuguese idiom that you use with the kids. Normally you use this when kids misbehave, but it is used in a fun way. Its actually caused some more confusion too; some people have asked me if I organize naughty parties [Silva laughs]. But the idea [behind the name] is to communicate some good and cheerful vibes.

MDT  What is the main focus of your company?

CS  The intent is to do destination weddings  whether in Portugal or Macau or Thailand or China. [] Traditional weddings are not really what I am doing [with my company]; I am working on unconventional and destination weddings.

My main goal at the moment is to bring people from [the West] to have a wedding in Asia. That can include Macau, but it is usually Vietnam, Cambodia or Thailand  the more exotic locations. The idea for now is to do weddings and parties in the winter in Macau, as that is Macaus peak season, actually, and then to spend the summer organizing weddings in Portugal, which is their peak season. There is also interest in going to Portugal for pre-wedding [activities] like photo-shoots. [] There is an interest among people from Macau in going to Lisbon  instead of Paris, London, Korea or Japan  for the photo-shoots as they tend to have a curiosity about Portugal.

MDT  Why did you decide to pursue this career?

CS  I love weddings and I think they are a really special celebration of love. But not everybody wants to have the same, traditional type of wedding [] I dont think that we should have [this kind of wedding] just because society says we should. So thats why I like to bring some individuality [in my wedding planning], and organize unusual and unconventional weddings.

MDT  Is it usual for the Portuguese to consider Macau for their weddings?

CS  Its not so popular right now for the Portuguese to have their weddings in Macau. Actually, many of the Portuguese living here tend to have quite simple weddings, and those that live in Portugal are often interested in more exotic [or unfamiliar] locations in Asia, like Hong Kong or Thailand.

MDT  Can Macau become a world-class destination for weddings, like Las Vegas or Japan?

CS  Macau is not yet really known for weddings  I mean we want to be, right? But we are still no Las Vegas. You never know though, we could be!

Of course I believe Macau can become a world-class destination for weddings; we have amazing casinos and venues and other facilities. But people need to have a will to do it. Even myself, I am considering approaching the government to see what sort of support they can offer, and I am interested in participating in the wedding expositions at the large casino resorts.
15. Question: Im only here for 3 months, can I rent an apartment ?

Yes, it is possible, but its not easy.

There is usually great difficulty attached to renting an apartment for less than 6 months. Most owners consider it too much trouble, and many agents refuse to handle such short leases.

However, it is possible to rent for shorter periods.

One option is using a Corporate Rental program where the rental agreement is signed under the company name, and the agreement provides the tenant with more flexibility than a traditional long-term lease.

Another option offered by JML is using a studio in a hotel, which of course has the advantages of not having to pay deposits, having use of facilities such as a swimming pool, gym etc available, and not having to pay for utilities.

Air BnB is also used in Macau, although the service is illegal and does carry with it an element of risk, including the possibility of legal repercussions, security issues regarding access to the apartment and safety concerns especially in older buildings.

14. Question: What happens if I dont pay the rent ?

Not paying rent is a bad idea in Macau.

Once a rent is overdue for 9 days or more, the landlord is entitled to charge a late fee premium of 50 percent of the rental amount.

If a rent remains overdue for 30 days or more, the landlord can now charge a late fee premium of 100 percent of the rental amount. In other words, once a rent is 30 days late, you would now owe double the normal rental amount.

This is why it is so important to pay rent at the end of a tenancy agreement.

The 2-month security deposit cannot be used in lieu of rent, and if you dont pay rent for the last 2 months, the debt owed will be equal to 4 months rent.

13. Question: Whats the difference between gross and net area ?

The net area is the area inside the walls of the apartment that can be used by the occupants.

The gross area is the net area plusa proportional amount of the common areas of the building such as the lobby, lift space and recreational club.

The net area in modern buildings with recreation facilities is usually around 70 percent of the gross area. This is sometimes referred to as the efficiency or the ratio of the building.

12. Question: What happens when the leasehold runs out on my property ?

Leasehold property in Macau is under Portuguese law, and the leasehold is until 2049 (2 years after Hong Kong).

Leases ending earlier than 2049 are renewed on a 10-year basis, and will continue to do so until 2049.

At that point, the government will announce new lease terms and of course the price of the lease.

The leasing of land is usually a governments main sources of income, but it is also a measure of their credibility.

A government that tries to rebuke land ownership rights and property titles would effectively destroy any confidence in the country, and is therefore extremely unlikely.

It is more likely that the government will, at that time, issue new leases that expire in 2099, by which time I will be approximately 130 years old and less able to move if I have to

11. Question: How much notice do I have to give on my rental apartment ?

As a tenant, you have a few choices.

When the tenancy agreement is coming to an end, you can let the owner know you will not extend at any point leading up to the end of the lease.

If it is prior to the end of the agreement, you can give notice in accordance with the contract. For example, it may say that the agreement can be terminated with 2 months notice.

If the agreement does not have a termination clause, you can give the owner 3 months notice.

When a lease is broken, the owner has the right to retain part or all of the security deposit dependent on the notice period and the wording in the tenancy agreement.

Next Week: 5 of the final top 10 questions.familiar with Macau Law on legal matters, and independent investment advisors on financial matters.

* Figures expressed in MOP unless otherwise stated

Juliet Risdon is a Director of JML Property and a property investor.

Having been established in 1994, JML Property offers Investment Property & Homes. It specializes in managing properties for owners and investors, and providing attractive and comfortable homes for tenants.

www.JMLProperty.com

info@JMLProperty.com
The total population of Macau stood at 647,700 as of end-September, a decrease of 4,800 quarter-to-quarter, according to information released from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) yesterday. Female residents accounted for 51.4 percent of the total.

DSEC revealed there were 1,885 live births delivered in the third quarter of 2016, an increase of 15 percent quarter-to-quarter.

Male babies totaled 1,003 and the sex ratio at birth stood at 113.7, corresponding to 113.7 male babies per 100 female babies.

In the first three quarters of 2016, a total of 5,188 live births were recorded, down slightly, by five, year-on-year.

Mortality has totaled 480, a decrease of 85 compared to the corresponding quarter from the previous year. According to the data, the top three underlying causes of death were Neoplasms, Diseases of the Circulatory System and Diseases of the Respiratory System.

From January to September this year, mortality increased by 186 year-on-year to 1,703, of which mortality due to neoplasms went up by 32.

Meanwhile in the third quarter of 2016, there were 1,573 Chinese immigrants and 373 individuals granted right of abode, up by 302 and 34 respectively quarter-to-quarter.

Non-resident workers totaled 180,277 at the end of the third quarter, a decrease of 2,182 over the previous quarter.

A total of 929 cases of marriage registration were recorded in the third quarter, down by 79 quarter-to-quarter.

In the first three quarters of 2016, marriage registration cases increased by 159 year-on-year to 2,912.
Singapore police identified Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho, also known as Jho Low, as a key person of interest in a money laundering probe surrounding 1Malaysia Development Bhd., according to testimony in court yesterday.

The countrys investigation into Low started in 2015, officer Oh Yong Yang said during an obstruction of justice hearing involving an ex- BSI SA banker, Yeo Jiawei. Oh described the probe as a complex sophisticated money laundering investigation involving billions of dollars.

Yeo is accused of obstructing justice in the sprawling corruption and money laundering probe, the first banker to be charged from the 1MDB investigations. The Malaysian investment fund is at the heart of multiple investigations across the globe, with U.S. prosecutors characterizing Low as the controller of a scheme involving dozens of illicit payments draining billions from 1MDB.

The Malaysian fund has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Low had previously described his role with 1MDB as informal consulting that didnt break any laws. His Hong Kong-

based company Jynwel Capital didnt immediately reply to an e-mail request for comment.

Low, known for partying with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, directed funds from 1MDB to connected individuals and for his and his associates personal gratification, U.S. prosecutors say. He bought art and real estate and paid for lavish parties and gambling, and helped Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razaks stepson launch his career as a movie mogul by supplying the funding for the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street, they said. Najib, who formerly chaired 1MDBs advisory board, has consistently denied wrongdoing.

Singapore regulators have ordered BSI and Falcon Private Bank to stop operations for money laundering breaches in moving funds associated with 1MDB.

Yeo, the ex-BSI banker, usually addressed Jho Low as boss, Yeos former BSI supervisor Kevin Swampillai testified in Singapore court on Nov. 1. Yeo is believed to have worked with Low after leaving BSI, Swampillai said.

Other key people of interest to Singapore authorities include Lows associate Eric Tan Kim Loong and former Aabar Investments CEO Ahmed Badawy Al-Husseiny, Oh said.

Yeo was also a consultant and adviser to Al-Husseiny, who was a former chairman of Falcon. The Monetary Authority of Singapore last month said Al-Husseiny misled and influenced Falcons Singapore branch to process unusually large 1MDB-related transactions despite multiple red flags. Andrea Tan, Livia Yap & Chanyaporn Chanjaroen, Bloomberg
A Romanian ship carrying around 150 containers of toxic waste has been refused entry and permission to unload the chemicals at multiple ports along the coast of China, including Macau.

After being denied permission to unload its cargo in Shanghai, Macau and then Hong Kong, it was rumored that the ships crew had set sail for Port Klang in Malaysia.

Malaysias Natural Resources and Environment Minister, Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar, denied the rumors, asserting that the ship had not arrived in Port Klang as it had been prevented from leaving the Hong Kong port.

According to the minister, local authorities had received a warning from Hong Kong that the ship could be heading in the countrys direction.

We got a tip-off from the Hong Kong authorities and I immediately informed the maritime police and other agencies to stop the ship from leaving Hong Kong. The ship did not reach out waters, said Wan, as cited by Free Malaysia Today.

After being refused permission to unload in Shanghai and Macau, the ship then headed towards the port in Hong Kong. [] Authorities then came aboard and conducted a check on the containers and after investigations they discovered the hazardous materials and did not allow the vessel to unload, he added.

The crew then decided to try their luck in Malaysia, hoping to go undetected by splitting the cargo into a greater number of smaller containers.

However, the minister informed Hong Kong environmental authorities that Malaysian authorities would not allow the ship to enter our waters and the vessel should not be allowed to leave Hong Kong port.

Wan said that the ship had been carrying some 150 containers of toxic waste, suspected to contain arsenic and cadmium.

This was not the first time that a foreign ship has tried to unload its toxic cargo illegally in Malaysia. Previous incidents have resulted in costly lawsuits filed against companies by the Malaysian government. DB
Chinas vice-premier is holding talks yesterday with Britains Treasury chief as the two countries try to smooth over a rocky patch in their growing economic relationship.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond is meeting a delegation led by Vice Premier Ma Kai as Britain seeks more Chinese investment in U.K. infrastructure.

The mutual benefits are clear, Hammond said, noting that China is the worlds second largest economy.

Ma is also meeting Prime Minister Theresa May.

The U.K.-China relationship wobbled in July when May unexpectedly delayed approval of a nuclear power plant being built with Chinese investment. May eventually approved the Hinkley Point power plant in September.

Im determined that as we leave the European Union, we build a truly global Britain that is open for business, she said in a statement ahead of the talks.

She said Britain and China were in a golden era of relations  echoing a phrase used by Chinese President Xi Jinping during a state visit to Britain last year. AP
Vietnams government is scrapping plans to construct the countrys first two nuclear power plants, citing slowing demand for electricity and the declining price of other sources of energy, state media reported yesterday.

The state-controlled Tuoi Tre newspaper said the lawmaking National Assembly will ratify the government decision later this month.

In 2009, the assembly approved construction of two nuclear power plants with a combined capacity of 4,000 megawatts. A contract to build the first plant was awarded to companies from Russia and one for the second plant was given to companies from Japan.

Construction was initially scheduled to start in 2014, but has been delayed several times. In early 2014, the government pushed back the plants construction to 2020.

The newspaper quoted Duong Quang Thanh, head of the state-

run Electricity of Vietnam Group, which was to pay for the plants, as saying they are not economically viable because of other cheaper sources of power.

Thanh said when the plants were approved in 2009, the government had projected power demand growth of 17-20 percent per year, but that has been revised to 11 percent for 2016-2020 and 7-8 percent in 2021-2030.

Currently, power demand growth is not high, while domestically generated and imported sources of energy are sufficient for social-economic development. In particular, prices of imported sources of energy are much cheaper now, he said. Nuclear power, therefore, cannot compete economically with other sources of energy.

Currently, coal, oil and gas-fired power plants produce about half of Vietnams power needs. Much of the rest comes from hydropower.

Tuoi Tre quoted Le Hong Tinh, vice chairman of the National Assemblys Science, Technology and Environment Committee, as saying that another reason for the governments decision was that the price tag for the plants had doubled to USD18 billion. AP
TWIN FALLS  One of two inmates in the county jail charged with beating a Twin Falls murder suspect has pleaded guilty to the crime.

Spencer Coy Vulgamore, 27, of Castleford pleaded guilty Monday to a felony count of aggravated battery causing great bodily harm. As part of a plea agreement, prosecutors will seek a three to eight year prison term and restitution.

Vulgamore and James Russell Hunt-Pyeatt, 29, of Buhl, were charged with beating up 41-year-old suspected murderer Glenn Joseph Tures, leaving him with fractures in both cheek bones, his right eye socket, the nasal bone and his back.

Jail deputies said Tures had a hit out for him because of his case. Hes accused of strangling Anessia Shaye Winterholer, whose body was found Aug. 21 in the basement of a Filer Avenue home.

Vulgamore waived his preliminary hearing in the case, while Hunt-Pyeatt is set for a preliminary hearing Nov. 18.

Vulgamore also pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of a firearm, the charge he was in jail awaiting when he beat up Tures. Prosecutors will seek a prison sentence of two to four years in that case to be served at the same time as the aggravated battery charge.

But Vulgamore also admitted to violating his probation on a drug possession conviction. If hes sentenced to prison on the probation violation charge, his new prison sentences must be served after that sentence is complete.

Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 19.
KIMBERLY  A Kimberly man who used his property as an illegal dump site was sentenced Wednesday to a year of unsupervised probation. He also must pay a fine and court costs of more than $600 and was ordered to follow all zoning ordinances.

Cord Robert Thorpe, 23, the owner of Thorpe Demolition, has drawn the ire of his neighbors, who say hes been using his property in a residential and agricultural zone as an illegal dump site for three years, despite their constant complaints and several legal battles concerning the issue.

Neighbors told 5th District Magistrate Judge Thomas Kershaw on Wednesday that Thorpes junk could contaminate well water, was driving down property values and has affected their quality of life.

The state is concerned with the deliberate disregard for the peace and property rights of the neighbors, Twin Falls County Deputy Prosecutor Nancy Austin said during Wednesdays sentencing.

Thorpes attorney, Brooke Baldwin Redmond, said the whole thing was a misunderstanding and the result of miscommunication. Though Thorpe hasnt been perfect, she said, hes tried to comply with the various citations and orders to clean up his property.

Redmond provided Kershaw with photos showing Thorpe, as of Wednesday, was in compliance with all zoning regulations. Austin said she went by the property Wednesday morning and agreed it appeared to be up to code.

Jill Skeem, one of three neighbors to make victim impact statements, said Thorpe seems to constantly clean up right before he goes to court each time.

This has all been deliberate, Skeem said. He feels like hes above the law.

Kershaw also imposed 30 days of jail but suspended the sentence in favor of unsupervised probation. Thorpe must pay a $500 fine and $157 in court costs within seven days.
TWIN FALLS  A Twin Falls man who in August said he woke up naked in a field and couldnt remember the previous night has pleaded guilty to stabbing another man in the throat and will spend at least three years in prison.

Roberto Vidales Rodriguez, 31, pleaded guilty Monday in Twin Falls County District Court to a felony count of aggravated battery. A plea agreement showed both sides settled on a 12-year prison sentence with a minimum of three years to serve. He also must pay restitution and could be responsible for a civil fine up to $5,000 for his victim, Kenneth Bushnell.

Police arrested Rodriguez on Aug. 16, several hours after officers had investigated a stabbing at a home in the 300 block of Eastland Drive South. Rodriguez was naked except for a tarp wrapped around his body and told officers he couldnt remember anything from the night before.

But Bushnell, who had a large gash on his neck under his jaw line, told police Rodriguez had grabbed him from behind, stabbed him and then told him he was going to stand there and watch him die. Bushnell said Rodriguez left in a red and silver Chevrolet pickup, which police found covered in blood near the spot they arrested Rodriguez.

In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors dismissed a deadly weapon enhancement, which could have added up to 15 years to his prison sentence, and dismissed a felony charge of unlawful possession of a firearm.

Rodriguez is set to be sentenced Dec. 19.
POCATELLO  Idaho State University has received a five-year, $1.2 million grant to serve non-traditional students in the Magic Valley, it announced Thursday.

ISUs TRiO program will use the money for an educational opportunity center.

The school is collaborating with the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls to create space for the center.

The grant will allow ISU to serve about 1,000 adults in Cassia, Twin Falls, Minidoka, Gooding and Jerome counties.

Theyll receive help with needs such as applying for college and financial aid, and earning a general educational development (GED) certificate.

TRiO advisers will also reach out to community groups  such as the CSI Refugee Center, drug court and Community Council of Idaho  to identify potential participants.

Of the participants, two-thirds will be first-generation college students who have a limited income.

For more information, call 208-282-3242 or byersari@isu.edu.
When it comes to Thanksgiving dinner, the turkey is the main attraction for many families.

Before your crowd of hungry turkey lovers can dig in and enjoy there are some steps that need to be followed in order to ensure a safe and tasty meal.

To begin with, you will need to decide if you want a fresh or frozen bird. Frozen turkeys are flash-frozen immediately after they are packaged to 0F (-17C) or lower, and are kept frozen until they are purchased. Once thawed, the meat of a frozen turkey is virtually as fresh as the day it was packaged.

Fresh turkeys are chilled after packaging, rather than frozen. Because they require special handling and have a shorter shelf-life than frozen birds, fresh turkeys are often more expensive than their frozen counterparts.

When trying to decide how big of a bird to purchase, figure at least one pound of uncooked turkey per person. This will provide enough meat for the main meal, and leave some extra for turkey sandwiches or turkey and noodles later on.

If you do opt for a frozen bird, remember you will need time for it to thaw. Safely thawing a frozen turkey is one of the most important steps in preparing for the meal. There are two recommended methods, depending on the amount of time available. Refrigerator thawing is preferred and the least labor-intensive but it will require more planning on your end. Base the thawing time on 24 hours for every four to five pounds of whole turkey. Cold water thawing is an alternative method for thawing where you would submerge the whole turkey, which is still in the packaging, breast-side down in cold water. Cold water thawing takes less time but requires more attention as you should change the water every 30 minutes.

The one thing you dont want to do is leave the bird on the counter overnight or in the sink without water. This is the quickest way to give all of your guests some nasty form of food borne illness.

Once the turkey is thawed, remove the neck and giblets from the body cavities and keep everything refrigerated until it is ready to be cooked.

When it comes to cooking the bird, whether you like roasted or deep fried, the key thing to remember is to cook the turkey to a minimum internal temperature of to 165F. Be sure to use a meat thermometer and insert it into the thickest part of the thigh. Roasting a nine-pound to 18-pound turkey at 325 should take a between 3-3  hours. Stuffed turkeys will take longer, but it is recommended to cook your stuffing in a casserole dish instead. Make sure to use a thermometer in the stuffing as well. It should also reach 165F.

Once the meal is over, make sure to refrigerate the leftovers right away. Temperature and time allow bacteria to grow. Reheat cooked leftovers to 165F. Sauces, soups and gravies should be reheated by bringing them to a boil. Leftovers, even when refrigerated properly, should be eaten, frozen or discarded within three to four days.

Thanksgiving is a special time to share a wonderful meal with your family. Taking a few extra steps will help ensure its prepared and stored properly for maximum food safety.
Cairo has reacted to President Erdogans latest accusations of the Egyptian regime providing support to the Gulen movement claiming that Ankara was back-stabbed. Erdogan in an interview with Al Jazeera aired on Thursday said we differentiate between the Egyptian people and the administration there. We love the nation like it was ours and thats why we have provided all support to them but we are against coup governments and the violation of freedoms, and we will stand with the Egyptian people in their fight for democracy.

The Egyptian foreign ministry responded that President Erdogans irresponsible statements highlight Turkeys double standard approach over the past years. Spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid questioned Erdogans human rights and democracy records especially after the mass arrest that followed the July coup attempt. He stated that he was surprised by the presidents remarks of portraying himself as a guardian of democracy and protector of freedoms.

Moreover, Zeid accused Ankara and Al Jazeera on collaborating to destabilize Egypt because the interview was aired on the eve of planned demonstrations against the economic reform policies of al-Sissi regime. He recalled that the banned Muslim Brotherhood which is supporting the demonstration is a close ally of Erdogans government.

Turkeys embassy in Cairo has warned its nationals against going out on Friday unless they have to because of the possibility of demonstrations being held countrywide based on reports in the Egyptian media.

Cairo and Ankara used to have close ties when the Muslim Brotherhood was in power but the ousting of Morsi by al-Sissi, in a military backed coup detat, has been strongly rejected by Erdogans and he refuses to recognize the government. In August, President al-Sissi stated that they were giving Turkey the time to review their position while Prime Minister Yildirim stated that Ankara was looking forward to improving the relations.

Meanwhile, there are intense efforts by pro-government supporters to discredit the protests planned on Friday while the organizers are hoping that holding a successful one could be the beginning of the end of the al-Sissi administration often criticized for ruling the country with an iron hand.
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.
In their study, Heidenreich and his team found evidence to support the ACC/AHA guidelines. They determined that high-intensity statins do in fact increase rates of survival, not only in younger and middle-aged patients with cardiovascular disease, but also in a patient population not well-studied: adults over 75.

The greatest strength of this study is that we used a very large, well-defined clinical cohort, said Fatima Rodriguez, MD, a cardiology fellow at Stanford and the studys lead author. The results show that high-intensity statins confer a survival advantage for patients with cardiovascular disease, including older adults.

Large sample size reduces possibility of chance

The researchers studied the medical records of 509,766 patients across the country receiving care from the Veterans Affairs Health Care System. This is a very large patient population rich in cardiovascular disease, said Rodriguez. In addition to defining this large, national patient population, we also had access to their detailed clinical data, including comorbidities and cholesterol values.

The primary purpose was to look at overall patient death rates from 2013 to 2014, the researchers said. They included patients with coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease and peripheral artery disease. These are basically the three main areas affected by plaque buildup  the heart, the brain and the large arteries of the rest of the body, Heidenreich said.

Patients were taking high-intensity, moderate-intensity or low-intensity statins in many different but commonly prescribed forms, such as rosuvastatin and atorvastatin. The researchers also followed one group that wasnt taking any statins. Patients had different severities of cardiovascular disease, making some more likely to be prescribed higher-intensity statins than others. So the researchers assigned each patient a score for the propensity to receive high-intensity statins and adjusted the results of the study accordingly.

The results showed a 9 percent increased chance of survival for patients taking high-intensity statins compared to those receiving moderate-intensity treatments. We found basically the same risk reductions reviewed by the Veterans Affairs guidelines, but they didnt think the benefit was significant because the sample size was small, Heidenreich said. We have so many more patients, we can be confident that it wasnt due to chance.

Examining specific patient groups

The study considered data from patients over 75  a group little studied in clinical trials. It found that patients between the ages of 75 and 85 taking high-intensity statins had a survival-rate benefit comparable to that of younger patients: a 9 percent higher chance of survival compared to those on moderate-intensity statins.

This suggests to practitioners that instead of starting a patient on a low dose, just to go ahead and put them on the maximum dose they can tolerate.

Our results suggest that clinical trial data from heart studies for those younger than 75 could also be applied to this older population, Heidenreich said.

Finally, they studied the effect of different doses within the high-intensity statin group. Patients treated with the maximum dose of statins were 10 percent more likely to survive than patients on submaximal doses. This suggests to practitioners that instead of starting a patient on a low dose, just to go ahead and put them on the maximum dose they can tolerate, Rodriguez said.

A limitation of the study was that the researchers were unable to determine whether patients died of cardiovascular disease or another cause.

Settling the debate

The next step, researchers said, is to find out why some patients who should be on high-intensity statins are not. They hope doctors will take their studys results into consideration when prescribing statins. There are a lot of guidelines and recommendations out there, so I think we also have to make the system better, Rodriguez said. Maybe hospitals can employ a clinical reminder to doctors, a message that pops up on the doctors screen that asks why a cardiovascular patient isnt on a high-intensity statin.

The researchers also hope to follow up on longer-term data from these patient populations. Not only do we hope to continue studying this population, but we also hope to study patients without prior cardiovascular disease but who are at high risk for it, said Rodriguez.

Finally, they hope these results will help to settle the debate on which guidelines doctors should use when prescribing statins to patients. Heidenreich said, We think this should give clinicians, physicians and nurse practitioners more comfort in following the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association guidelines and putting people with prior cardiovascular disease on a high-intensity statin.

The work is an example of Stanford Medicines focus on precision health, the goal of which is to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill.

Other Stanford affiliated co-authors are David Maron, MD, clinical professor of medicine and Joshua Knowles, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine.

Stanfords Department of Medicine supported this study.
Morocco could officially return to the African Union next week during the AU head of states summit on the sideline of the underway COP22.

Some 30 African heads of state will attend the summit on 16 November in Marrakech, Moroccan diplomatic source told AFP on Friday.

The North African nation has reportedly been lobbying the leaders of several African countries on this issue.

Last Sunday, King Mohamed VI announced in Senegal that the reintegration of Morocco in the African Union is not a tactical decision, but a logical outcome of an in-depth reflection.

In his words, Morocco is back to find its natural place. It has an overwhelming majority to occupy its seat in the African institutional family.

In recent years, several African countries have called upon Morocco to return to its seat at the African Union.

In May 2015, Senegals Foreign Minister Mankeur Ndiaya said the AU cannot be fully viable of without Morocco.

Morocco withdrew from the then Organisation of African Unity in 1984 after it accepted the self-proclaimed Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) as member.

Some AU member states, including Algeria, consider the SADR to be sovereign and have diplomatic relations with Western Sahara, which has recently elected Brahim Ghali as new secretary general of the Polisario Front and president of the SADR.
South African President Jacob Zuma survived a no-confidence vote on Thursday, over what the opposition called his reckless leadership.

Zuma, who has faced mounting criticism from within the ANC, came under further pressure last week after a corruption probe raised fresh allegations of misconduct.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) launched the motion following the release of former Public Protector Thuli Madonselas explosive State of capture report which revealed how the Gupta family played a key role in Cabinet appointments, made under-handed deals to pursue business interests and how the president failed to take action.

After fierce debate, ANCs parliamentary majority delivered a resounding signal of support as 214 lawmakers voted against the motion and 126 voted in favour with 58 MPs not voting.

The main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) called for a re-count, a request which the deputy speaker granted.

We had sincerely hoped that the ANC would do the right thing, vote with their consciences and choose South Africa over Jacob Zuma. But we knew that was unlikely. If they would not support us in ending the corruption of Jacob Zuma, as they could have done, then it was important for the public to see for themselves how far the ANC has fallen, said DA leader Mmusi Maimane after the ANC majority rejected the motion of no confidence.

The Constitutional Court this year found the president guilty of violating the constitution after he refused to repay taxpayers money used to refurbish his Nkandla home.

He is also fighting a court order that could reinstate almost 800 corruption charges against him over a multi-billion dollar arms deal in the 1990s.
Even under deep anesthesia, nerve cells remain highly active. A study conducted by researchers from Charite - Universitatsmedizin Berlin has shown by high-resolution cellular imaging that local neuronal networks remain active even when the brain is unconscious. Under anesthesia, the nerve cells change their mode of operation by firing more synchronously, and by becoming surprisingly reactive to environmental stimuli. Results from this research have been published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.

Establishing how the brain produces consciousness is one of the most challenging research questions in the field of neuroscience. In an effort to get closer to an answer, a team led by Dr. Mazahir T. Hasan, a researcher with Charite's NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence, joined forces with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. By visualizing neuronal activity in the brains of mice, they were able to compare how brain activity differs in conscious and anesthetized mice. NeuroCure's Dr. Hasan explains: "We used a fluorescent protein that converts electrical signals into light signals. This enabled us to visualize the frequency and average amplitude of neuronal responses, and allowed us to reveal the existence of neuronal synchrony." Results from this research would suggest that consciousness is not simply dependent on the number of active neurons inside the cortex; instead, it seems to be dependent upon the way these nerve cells communicate and on the degree to which they manage to differ in terms of their activity patterns.

The awake cortex showed complex activity patterns, with individual cells firing at different times. Under anesthesia, all neurons displayed identical activity patterns and fired at the same time. "While one might expect the brain to cease its activity under anesthesia, in reality, the situation is quite different. Neurons remain highly active but change their communication mode. During unconsciousness they become highly synchonizedin simple terms all neurons start doing the same thing. " explains Mr. Thomas Lissek, a neurobiologist from Heidelberg and the study's first author. Another surprising finding was that neurons were more sensitive to environmental stimuli under anesthesia than when the brain was awake. "This is especially surprising, as anesthesia is used to block both pain and environmental stimuli during surgery," says Mr. Lissek. Some of the brain regions that are normally dedicated to tactile perception even responded to sound information.

These new insights into neuronal activity patterns provide information regarding the identity of the cellular parameters involved in producing consciousness and the loss of consciousness. Once combined with further advances that would allow us to measure neuronal activity inside the human brain, these findings could contribute to improving our diagnostic capabilities in conditions such as coma and locked-in syndrome. For the first time, this study succeeded in showing that it is possible to observe visually identifiable neuronal networks over a period of several weeks in order to study the after-effects of anesthesia. "It is clear that investigation of anesthesia will produce deep insights into the mechanism of consciousness", emphasizes Hasan.

More information: Thomas Lissek et al, General Anesthetic Conditions Induce Network Synchrony and Disrupt Sensory Processing in the Cortex, Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience (2016). Thomas Lissek et al, General Anesthetic Conditions Induce Network Synchrony and Disrupt Sensory Processing in the Cortex,(2016). DOI: 10.3389/fncel.2016.00064
Sixty percent of the 5.9 million children under five who died last year were in just 10 countries in Africa and Asia, an evaluation of global infant health revealed Friday.

Pneumonia was the leading killer in five of them, all in Africa: Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania, said a study published in The Lancet medical journal.

In Bangladesh, Indonesia, India and Pakistan, the main cause of death was preterm birth complicationsalso the global leaderwhile in China birth defects claimed most of the children who never made their fifth birthday.

"Accelerated investment in child survival is imperative," to meet the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the authors wrote.

These targets include an under-five mortality rate of no more than 25 per 1,000 births in every country by 2030.

The worst-performing countries today lose more than 90 children under five per 1,000 live births, said the researchers, citing including Angola, Central African Republic, Chad, Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Somalia.

The team recommended "the uptake of breastfeeding, providing vaccines for pneumonia, malaria and diarrhoea, and improving water and sanitation," to prevent child deaths in the worst-afflicted nations of the world.

In countries with low death rates such as the United States and Russia with fewer than 10 per 1,000 births, the causes were very differentmainly birth defects, complications from preterm delivery, and injuries such as stove burns, car accidents or drowning.

The study said nearly half2.7 millionof the 5.9 million children lost last year died within their first 28 days.

The research was funded by the UN's World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates philanthropic organisation.

Globally, four million fewer under-five children died in 2015 than in 2000, the researchers found.

Unequal progress

This represented a 53-percent declineshort of the two-thirds reduction target for 1990-2015 set in the Millennium Development Goals which preceded the SDGs.

The slowest progress, said the new study, was in reducing newborn deaths.

"Child survival has improved substantially since the Millennium Development Goals were set," the study's lead author Li Liu of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said.

"The problem is that this progress is uneven across all countries, meaning a high child death rate persists in many countries."

In a comment on the study, also published by The Lancet, Peter Byass of the Umea Centre for Global Research in Sweden said it was an indictment that researchers had to rely on estimates and not real, recorded numbers.

Only a small proportion of under-five deaths are properly documented, especially in poor countries.

"Despite the global information revolutionresulting in a single modern 256 GB laptop having enough capacity to hold a 250-character record on each of the 670 million under-five children in the world, with space left over for full details of each of the six million annual under-five deathssuch data are simply neither collected nor available," he wrote.

"That six million under-five children continue to die every year in our 21st century world is unacceptable, but even worse is that we seem collectively unable to count, and hence be accountable for, most of those individual deaths."

 2016 AFP
Online offerings can facilitate psychological improvement in suicidal people. Credit: Fotolia

Numerous offerings are available on the Internet for suicidal people desperately seeking advice. These can be divided into professional offerings run by crisis centres and those operated by non-professionals. Even the latter can help to improve the subjective situation, so long as they are so-called "anti-suicide forums."

The effect of media reports upon suicidal people has been investigated many times. We know about the "Werther effect", that is to say imitative behaviour based on sensational reports of suicides in the media, which serve as a role model. Or even the opposite "Papageno effect", whereby reports about how suicidal thoughts have been dealt with constructively have a preventive effect upon potentially suicidal people. All of this data was collated for traditional print and AV media. Now, for the first time, a team of scientists from the Center for Public Health at the Medical University of Vienna has conducted a study looking at the question of communication behaviour on the Internet.

Says study author Thomas Niederkrotenthaler: "The online offering is very accessible. It falls into two main groups  the professional forums and the non-professional ones, operated by lay people." The study looks at the latter group, which in turn can be sub-divided according to two main parameters: "Anti-suicide forums" are clearly focussed upon suicide prevention and facilitate constructive exchange about crisis situations. "Pro-suicide forums", on the other hand, are aimed at the more specific requirements of a closed group of people and quite often involve a superficial exchange about suicidal tendencies, which can be harmful to vulnerable people.

It is no surprise that long-term help is available on professional forums. The fundamental question of the study was whether non-professional forums had any beneficial effect in terms of deflecting people from their suicidal intent. Niederkrotenthaler's team looked at seven German-speaking forums and analysed 1,200 threads with around 25,000 postings. That is to say, in each case they examined one communication thread of a first poster about his/her issues.

The study concluded that beneficial effects were found particularly for anti-suicide forums, which indicate that the psychological state of the poster improved over the period of his/her posting activities. Niederkrotenthaler: "It is important to stress that, in the successful examples, psychological improvement is associated with a dialogue setting, in which each poster discusses his/her own experiences in intimate terms and is actively listened to. At the same time, however, it is important to remember that professional help should also be sought, if necessary. Conversely, it is a good idea for professional helpers to talk to their patients and clients about posting on non-professional forums. This will prevent any potentially negative effects and also provide a better insight into the sufferer's situation."

Niederkrotenthaler advises that non-professional forums should in no way be demonised, because they represent an important target group for preventive work. What is important, he says, is that these offerings can provide sufferers with extra help and that experiences can also be discussed in professional settings.

More information: T. Niederkrotenthaler et al. Predictors of psychological improvement on non-professional suicide message boards: content analysis, Psychological Medicine (2016). T. Niederkrotenthaler et al. Predictors of psychological improvement on non-professional suicide message boards: content analysis,(2016). DOI: 10.1017/S003329171600221X
From left to right, Wenyao Xu, University at Buffalo assistant professor of computer science and engineering, and undergraduate Kun Woo Cho, show a smartphone with the autism tracking software they are developing. The purple blotches show where a child looks. This photo indicates no autism spectrum disorder. Credit: Douglas Levere.

What if someone invented a smartphone app that could help detect autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children as young as 2 years old? Could it lead to earlier detection and therefore better treatment?

A study co-authored by a University at Buffalo undergraduate and presented at the IEEE Wireless Health conference at the National Institutes of Health last month could provide the answer. It involves the creation of an app for cell phones, tablets or computers that tracks eye movement to determine, in less than a minute, if a child is showing signs of autism spectrum disorder.

Early detection is important

Early detection of autism can dramatically improve the benefits of treatment, but often the disability is not suspected until a child enters school.

"The brain continues to grow and develop after birth. The earlier the diagnosis, the better. Then we can inform families and begin therapies which will improve symptoms and outcome," said Michelle Hartley-McAndrew, MD, clinical assistant professor of pediatrics and neurology at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB. Hartley-McAndrew, medical director of the Children's Guild Foundation Autism Spectrum Disorder Center at Women & Children's Hospital of Buffalo, is a co-author of the study.

"Although it's never too late to start therapy, research demonstrates the earlier we diagnose, the better our outcomes," said Kathy Ralabate Doody, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Exceptional Education at SUNY Buffalo State College and a co-author of the study. "We offer many educational interventions to help children with autism reach the same developmental milestones met by children with typical development."

Young author, strong team

The principal author is Kun Woo Cho, an undergraduate majoring in computer science and engineering. She worked with her research advisor Wenyao Xu, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "This is an ongoing study on how to analyze ASD by monitoring gaze patterns. I used the Wasserstein metric, designed the system protocol, and visual stimuli using social scenes. This is teamwork, and I learned from my advisor and graduate students in the lab," Cho said. "On all the research work, we are working together."

Those lab co-workers and study co-authors are Feng Lin, PhD, research scientist, and Chen Song and Xiaowei Xu, PhD, students in UB's Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Eye tracking measurements

The app tracks eye movements of a child looking at pictures of social scenesfor example, those with multiple people. The eye movements of someone with ASD are often different from those of a person without autism. In the study, the app had an accuracy rating of 93.96 percent.

"Right now it is a prototype. We have to consider if other neurological conditions are included, like ADD, how that will affect the outcome," Cho said.

The study, entitled "Gaze-Wasserstein: A Quantitative Screening Approach to Autism Spectrum Disorder," was one of the top-ranked papers at the flagship Wireless Health conference this year, Xu said.

Social scenes elicit different gaze patterns

Autism spectrum disorder affects 1-2 people per 1,000 worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that about 1 in 68 children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with ASD.

"The beauty of the mobile app is that it can be used by parents at home to assess the risk of whether a child may have ASD," Xu said. "This can allow families to seek therapy sooner, and improve the benefits of treatment," he said.

The study found that photos of social scenes evoke the most dramatic differences in eye movement between children with and without ASD. The eye tracking patterns of children with ASD looking at the photos are scattered, versus a more focused pattern of children without ASD.

"We speculate that it is due to their lack of ability to interpret and understand the relationship depicted in the social scene," Cho said.

Use of the app takes up to 54 seconds, which makes it less intrusive than other tests and valuable with children with short attention spans, Cho said.

The study included 32 children ranging in age from 2 to 10. Half of the children had been previously diagnosed with autism in accordance with DSM-V diagnostic criteria. The other half did not have ASD.

Further research will include expanding the study to another 300 to 400 children, which is about the annual enrollment for new evaluations at Children's Guild Foundation Autism Spectrum Disorder Center at Women & Children's Hospital of Buffalo.

Leading to a product

Xu called the research "highly interdisciplinary" because of the need for computer technology, psychology for stimuli selection and medical expertise for the application of autism screening.

"This technology fills the gap between someone suffering from autism to diagnosis and treatment," Xu said.

Hartley-McAndrew said a lot of research is going into the use of technology to help in detecting autism. "We still don't have a completely objective measure to diagnose ASD. The diagnosis is based on expert judgment. There are tests considered the 'gold standards,' but they still are somewhat subjective," she said.

One benefit of the technology is that parents could use it at home to determine if there is a need for clinical examination. And, she said, the technology crosses cultural lines, and language is not a barrier.

"Nowadays, most people have a smartphone," she said.
A tickled rat. Credit: Shimpei Ishiyama & Michael Brecht

A new study from Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin has found how "ticklishness" is represented in the rat brain. The study has been published on 11th November 2016 in Science

Of all physical sensations, ticklishness is perhaps the most mysterious. Why do we laugh in response to tickling? Why are certain body parts more ticklish? Why can't we tickle ourselves? Indeed, the mystery of ticklish perception has been discussed for more than two millennia by great intellectuals including Aristotle and Charles Darwin. Despite such longstanding interest, the mechanism of ticklishness remained elusive.

The new study investigated tickling in rats. Earlier work had shown that young rats respond with 50 kHz ultrasonic "laughter-calls" to tickling by humans. In the study, rats also reacted enthusiastically to the ticklingthey emitted numerous calls. As judged by their calls, rats were most ticklish on the belly and underneath their feet. Rats often performed unsolicited joy jumps (Freudensprunge) after tickling, a behavior that can be seen in joyful subjects in various mammalian species. Rats also played with the researcher's hand and chased it, and emitted similar calls during play.

The researchers then investigated the response of the rat's brain to such tickling. Specifically, the investigators studied the rat's somatosensory cortex, a large brain structure that contains an ordered representation of the body and handles stimuli on the body. In the trunk region of the somatosensory cortex, the researchers observed nerve cells that responded strongly to tickling. Interestingly, the researchers found very similar brain responses during play behaviours, even though the rats were not touched by the scientist. Making rats anxiouswhich reduces ticklishnessalso reduced the activity in these cells and suppressed the calls. Remarkably, rats emitted calls just to electric stimulation of the cells in the trunk region of the somatosensory cortex without being tickled. Taken together, these results suggest that activity in the trunk somatosensory cortex represents ticklish sensation.

Credit: BernsteinNetwork

Professor Michael Brecht, who led the study, says, "The data suggest that we identified the ticklish spot in the rat brain. I also find the similarity of brain responses to tickling and play remarkable. Perhaps ticklishness is a trick of the brain that rewards interacting and playing."

Bottom left: the researcher tickling the belly of a rat. Bottom right: activity of trunk somatosensory cortex (thin vertical black lines) during belly tickling (beige box). Credit: Ishiyama & Brecht

More information: Neural correlates of ticklishness in the rat somatosensory cortex. Science 11 Nov 2016: Journal information: Science Neural correlates of ticklishness in the rat somatosensory cortex.11 Nov 2016: DOI: 10.1126/science.aah5114

Provided by Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin
When a patient has their wisdom teeth extracted, surgeons provide information about what to expect post-operatively, as well as potential complications that may occur from the surgery. For most patients, following the guidelines for proper care keeps these issues from arising. Unfortunately, that's not true for all patients; it certainly wasn't for Davina Leedy.

A wisdom tooth that wouldn't grow through the gums caused several infections, and ultimately the tooth had to be removed. A local oral surgeon performed her initial surgery but shortly after, Leedy realized something was amiss with her recovery. When Leedy went back to the doctor a week later, her lower jaw was still numb. When the numbness in her face eventually went away, it was replaced by excruciating pain in her lower chin and lip. "It hurt when the wind would blow or even when my hair would touch it [her face]," Leedy said. There was only one physician in the state of Kentucky who had the training to provide the treatment Leedy needed, Dr. Larry Cunningham, chief of the Division of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Kentucky's College of Dentistry.

As Leedy eventually learned, the root of her wisdom tooth had been positioned so close to the nerve in her jaw that removing the tooth had disrupted the nerve, causing the numbness and then the pain she was experiencing. Initially the issue was treated with medications to try and relieve her pain, but these medications were only marginally helpful. In January 2016, Leedy required a more permanent and extensive fix: neuroplasty and a graft of her inferior alveolar nerve. While Leedy worried about the procedure, she was thankful she was able to receive the care she needed in Lexington, just a short drive from her home. "As a mom of three boys, it was much better to just drive an hour and a half than to have to travel out of state."

The procedure Leedy needed was extensive and complicated. The injured nerve travels within the lower jaw bone. Therefore, the lower jaw bone needed to be cut in order to see the nerve and repair it. The injured portion of the nerve is removed and a nerve graft is placed in the defect. After the repair is completed, it can take several months before feeling comes back to the affected area. The procedure takes about four hours to complete. Thinking back on how complicated the procedure sounded, and was, Leedy said, "I'm amazed there's someone that has the knowledge to do something like this."

As Leedy's original physician pointed out to her, the issue she experienced is not very common. The doctor told her that in his 30 years practicing, her case was only the third time he'd seen this complication. According to Cunningham, "nerve injuries after dental work or dental extractions are uncommon and occur in less than 1 percent of wisdom tooth extractions." That explains why Leedy had no idea this complication could happen.

Since her procedure, Leedy has been pain free and has regained much of the feeling in her jaw. "The pain is gone, I can feel pressure in the area but it's way better than what it was," Leedy said. Leedy will continue to have post-op visits to check if there are any additional improvements; so far, it's a good sign the pain hasn't returned.
10 month data: Georgia exports 38m bottles of wine, earns $88m

Georgia has exported 38,392,510 bottles of wine to 50 countries in the first 10 months of 2016, bringing $88.3 million back into the economy.Between January-October 2016 Georgia exported 37 percent more wine year-on-year (y/y), and generated 14 percent more revenue by selling its wine abroad, said Georgias Ministry of Agriculture.The top five countries that imported Georgian wine in January-October 2016 were: Russia  20,531,892 bottles China 4,307,825 bottles Ukraine  4,212,110 bottles Kazakhstan  3,019,147 bottles Poland  1,819,542 bottlesGeorgias Ministry of Agriculture said wine exports increased to the European Union (EU), China, and Georgias more traditional export markets.Year-on-year exports of Georgian wine increased to: China  138 percent (4,307,825 bottles) Ukraine  64 percent (4,212,110 bottles) Belarus  57 percent (931,602 bottles) United Kingdom  47 percent (74,188 bottles) Poland  44 percent (1,819,542 bottles) Russia  40 percent (20,531,892 bottles) Estonia  33 percent (516,048 bottles) Kirgizstan  17 percent (202,666 bottles) Japan  12 percent (141,774 bottles) United States  12 percent (234,616 bottles) Germany  11 percent (234,422 bottles) Canada  7 percent (157,860 bottles) Latvia  6 percent (978,762 bottles)Meanwhile, exports of Georgian-made brandy also increased to over seven million bottles. Figures showed Georgia exported 7,129,158 bottles of brandy to 16 countries. This was a 31 percent increase y/y between January and October 2016.So far this year Georgia generated $16.3 million by selling brandy abroad.In total Georgia enjoyed $148.3 million by exporting wine, brandy, Chacha and all alcoholic beverages.
The News in Brief

Pre-trial detention ordered for detainees accused of murdering a 70-old-woman



Pre-trial detention has been ordered for all five detainees, who stand accused of murdering a 70-old-woman.



The next trial has been scheduled for December 8.



Five people were detained for murdering a 70-year-old woman on 4 November. One of the detainees is the victims 18-year-old daughter, the other the girl's boyfriend, the remaining three are their friends.



Three of the detainees used an electric shocker and a knife to kill the woman, after which they dismembered the body and took it to a landfill with two bags. There they poured petrol on the bags and burned them.



Three of the detainees are charged with murdering a person, while the rest two are accused of not reporting of the crime.

(IPN)







Lavrov Meets New Abkhaz Foreign Minister in Moscow



Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held talks with new Abkhaz Foreign Minister Daur Kove on November 3, who paid his first visit to Moscow in his new capacity.



During the meeting, the sides discussed at length the ways of deepening bilateral relations as well as key avenues of cooperation in regional and international affairs, including participation in the Geneva International Discussions on security and stability in the Trans-Caucasus, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.



The talks have revealed similar or identical positions on the issues discussed along with their mutual commitment to further intensify the diverse cooperation between our states, it said.



We are allies, and this is the main prerequisite of the republics peaceful development, Lavrov said in his opening remarks during talks with the Abkhaz Foreign Minister.



Daur Kove was appointed as the breakaway regions foreign minister in early October after Vyacheslav Chirikba resigned from this post.



The Russian Foreign Minister said that bilateral relations with Sokhumi are based on firm legal frameworks involving almost all spheres of relations. In this context, he mentioned Russias ratification of the treaty with Abkhazia on establishing a Combined Group of Forces that was condemned by Tbilisi as yet another unlawful episode of factual annexation process that significantly threatens the stability of the entire region.



Lavrov said that Moscow is mostly focused on social and economic cooperation. He also spoke about foreign issues, and noted that Russia plans to strengthen its support of Abkhazia on the international arena.



We hope for close coordination of actions in the context of the Geneva discussions on the South Caucasus, primarily, the promotion of legally binding agreements on the non-use of force, as envisaged in the Medvedev-Sarkozy plan that initiated international discussions on the security of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Russian Foreign Minister said.



The non-use of force commitment is one of the key issues discussed by the negotiators for many rounds already in Geneva. Georgia, which made a unilateral non-use of force pledge in 2010, insists that Russia should reciprocate, but Russia refuses to make such a declaration as it does not consider itself to be a party in the conflict, and instead wants Tbilisi to sign non-use of force treaties with Sokhumi and Tskhinvali. In the Geneva talks, the participants have been discussing the possibility of adopting a joint statement on non-use of force for a long time already. Tbilisi wants the text of such a statement to make reference to the need of Moscow to undertake non-use of force pledge.



I know that on November 9 you expect a delegation of mediators participating in the Geneva discussions. We will be interested in knowing your assessments of the forthcoming contacts, Lavrov added.

(Civil.ge)







29-year-old man arrested for beating his 15-year-old wife



A 29-year-old man was arrested a few days ago in Georgia for beating his 15-year-old wife.



The young victims mother says her underage daughter has broken teeth, broken ribs and a broken nose after suffering systematic abuse at the hands of her husband.



After the case became publicly known one week ago, police began investigating it, on the basis of article 126 of the Criminal Code about family violence, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in jail.



But the family also wants the man punished for having sexual relations with a minor, which may be punished by 9 to 12 years in jail.



The girl married the 29-year-old man four months ago by her own free will, her mother told Maestro TV, but the marriage was unofficial.



After a month of marriage, the husband began beating and insulting her, the mother said. Sometimes he beat her with a bottle, sometimes a stick and sometimes he kicked her, she continued.



The mother also accused the man of infecting the girl with tuberculosis.



An expert told us that it was a murder attempt, she said.



The girl hid the systematic violence she was subjected to until she found out her husband had tuberculosis. Then she told her parents.



He ruined the entire life of my child. He has to be held responsible for infecting my daughter, the mother said.



Lawyer Eliso Rukhadze, who represents the girl, told DFWatch that the case is not only about family violence, but it is a serious crime.



After the girl told her story a week ago, the police soon arrested her husband. The 15-year-old then moved back in with her mother and siblings. She is in good health, but suffering from psychological stress.



Sexual relations with a person under 16 is punished by law and if it is repeated, then the punishment will increase. Information [about this case] is confidential, and I cannot tell you anything in advance [of the trial], she told us.

(DF watch)




Allison Tant beat Alan Clendin in a hard-fought race for Florida Democratic Party chair.

Tant won 587 votes to Clendenin's 448 507. UPDATE NOTE: the original count didn't include at least one ballot that wasn't initially counted.

"Thank you, Alan Clendenin, for making me a better candidate," Tant said.

Tant's win spared Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson a measure of embarrassment. Both pushed hard for Tant. They wanted her to lead the party because she knows how to fundraise. And they need money, truckloads of it, to unseat Gov. Rick Scott in 2014.

"We are going to have to work to out-raise, out-organize and out-work the GOP," Tant said. "Weve done it before. Were going to do it again."

But they havent done it during a governors race since 1994, when incumbent Gov. Lawton Chiles beat challenger Jeb Bush.

Ever since that election, though, Republicans took over the entire Legislature. Bush then won the governor's mansion in 1998 and Republicans now control every statewide elected seat based in Tallahassee. Nelson is the only Democrat elected statewide.

But President Obama's re-election in Florida and nationwide has Democrats feeling stronger than ever in recent years. He's the first Democrat to carry Florida twice since 1936. Also, Republican Gov. Rick Scott has terrible poll numbers.

Democrats know they have a problem: Their voters show up in outsized numbers in presidential election years, but often get out-voted during governors' races.

"Can we get them to show up in off year elections? Can we get that same energy in off year elections?" Rod Smith, presiding over the election in his last act as chair, asked the crowded room of Democrats.

"I dont know about you all, but I wouldnt mind attending something Ive not been to in a long, long time  and that would be the inauguration of a Democratic governor in this state," Smith said. "Rick Scott has done his part for us. His work alone wont be sufficient to get us elected. But it should give us a running start.

Annette Taddeo, Miami-Dade County's Democratic chairwoman who nominated Tant pointed out that Scott also has prodigious personal wealth.



"One number should worry you: $70m," she said. "That's how much Rick Scott spent in 2010."

Actually, Scott spent millions more of his own money.

The Democratic chair race was unusually bitter  not between Tant and Clendenin, but between their supporters.



Democrat attacked Democrat behind each others back and on blogs. Some tried to block others from voting in the chair race.



Smith refused to block Democrats from voting if they had been certified previously.



I will not tolerate any effort at voter suppression," he said in a letter.



On the final day, Friday, liberal activist Susannah Randolph rebuked another Democrat by email when he accused another of fraud. Randolph, a backer of Tant along with husband and Orange County Tax Collector Scott Randolph said that tensions were so high that someone taped a sign on her office door that said Beware of Bitches.

Clendenin had widespread and early grassroots support. But it wasn't enough to overcome the institutional support of Tant.

Before the vote, Clendenin sought to make the race a contest between the rank-and-file and the elite.

"Does our party belong to a group of Tallahassee insiders, consultants and lobbyists or does it belong to us?" he asked.

After he lost, Clendenin was elected vice chair and took the loss with grace. He hugged Tant and then held her hand high.

"Make no mistake, GOP, this team's coming to get you," Clendenin said.


via @learyreports

Attorney General Pam Bondi was named today as a member of Donald Trump's top transition team, joining a group of political insiders and newcomers, including members of Trump's family.

Bondi was with Trump for most of the campaign, save for a couple months when she stayed off the trail amid questions of a political donation Trump gave her in 2013 around the same time Trump University was being investigated. Bondi served as a prominent female voice for Trump as he reeled from the release of a video in which he made sexually aggressive comments toward women and suggested he attempted an adulturous affair. Bondi said his comments were "disgusting" but "I believe in forgiveness."

It had already been speculated that Bondi would play some role in his administration. Today she was named to the Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee, which includes several lawmakers, Trump's children, Jared Kushner, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and Breitbart News' Steve Bannon.

The overall effort will be led by Mike Pence, who takes over the top job from Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor will serve as a vice chairman.

"Together this outstanding group of advisors, led by Vice President-elect Mike Pence, will build on the initial work done under the leadership of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to help prepare a transformative government ready to lead from day one, the president elect said. The mission of our team will be clear: put together the most highly qualified group of successful leaders who will be able to implement our change agenda in Washington. Together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding this nation - specifically jobs, security and opportunity. This team is going to get to work immediately to Make America Great Again.

--ALEX LEARY, Tampa Bay Times

Photo credit: Chris Urso, Tampa Bay Times
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your dedication and tireless effort on behalf of our party. While this wasnt the outcome we worked so hard for, we stood for what is best in our country  justice, equality, compassion and hope.

As Hillary said in her speech, This loss hurts. But please never stop believing that fighting for what's right is worth it. It is. It is worth it.

It has truly been a privilege and an honor to serve as your chair and I wanted you to hear from me first that Ive decided to not seek reelection in January. I will use the remainder of my term to ensure that the next chair is able to hit the ground running on day one with as smooth of a transition as possible.

Again, thank you for your support and inspiration over the last few years. You worked your hearts out and I couldnt be more proud. But there is still so much work to be done to protect the progress weve made  and we dont have a minute to waste. Its on each and every one of us to defend the values we hold dear. Lets keep up the fight and do all we can to move the state and country we love forward together.

Ive loved meeting and working with you all and I know we will rise from this defeat to build a brighter future.

Sincerely,

Allison
A 43-year-old man is in custody on a felony charge after prosecutors say he attacked his girlfriend following an argument.

Roland Eugene Nunley was arrested Wednesday after a warrant was issued earlier this month.

According to a court affidavit, in mid-October a pair of Missoula police officers were sent to a reported assault near the intersection of Phillips and Burns streets. They found a woman with red marks on her neck and a bloody cut on her hand.

The woman told police that during an argument, Nunley grabbed her neck, threw her to the floor, and allegedly said, I should kill you, you little (expletive).

In court Thursday, Justice of the Peace Landee Holloway set his bail at $5,000 and allowed him to be screened for pretrial supervision, with a condition that if released, he could not have contact with the woman.

Court records show Nunley has three prior convictions for partner or family member assault. Most recently, he was charged with a felony in December 2008 after police were called to an area hospital, where a woman who had previously been in a relationship with him in Washington told police he had followed her to different towns as she moved to get away from him.

When he found her at the Poverello Center, Nunley allegedly attacked the woman for refusing to leave with him. In May 2009, under a plea agreement with prosecutors, he received a four-year, all-suspended prison sentence.

Later that year, his sentence was revoked for multiple probation violations, and District Court Judge Douglas Harkin sentenced Nunley to four years in the Department of Corrections. He was released in August 2012.
Saying an effort to block a $35 million hotel in downtown Missoula is based on nothing more than fanciful conjecture and guesswork, attorneys for the owner of the historic Missoula Mercantile building have informed a judge that a historic preservation groups legal maneuvering could condemn (the Merc) to many more years of sitting vacant while continuing to deteriorate.

Both sides in the legal dispute over the future of the Mercantile filed more legal briefs this week, a prelude to a showdown in Missoula County District Court later this year.

Preserve Historic Missoula seeks to halt a Bozeman developer from obtaining a demolition permit and deconstructing most the Merc to replace it with a five-story Marriott hotel with a ground-floor restaurant space.

The pharmacy portion of the building has to be saved, per an agreement with the city. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The preservation group argues in a new brief that the Missoula City Councils decision to overturn the Historic Preservation Commissions denial of a demolition permit was an abuse of discretion.

The group also says the Historic Preservation Commissions findings of fact were not granted a presumption of correctness, as required by Missoula ordinance, and thus a summary judgment to reverse the city councils decision is necessary.

Lawyers for the buildings current owner, Octagon Partners of Virginia, say Preserve Historic Missoula's allegations concerning the decisions of the city council have no merit.

The City Council did not abuse its discretion in issuing a partial demolition permit because it weighed and considered all applicable provisions of the Downtown Master Plan, the defendants brief states. (Preserve Historic Missoula) may be unhappy with the city councils decision, but they advance no credible argument that an abuse of discretion occurred.

Lawyers for the owner again repeated their assertions that the legal action by Preserve Historic Missoula is threatening to sink the whole project.

(The owner) wishes to sell its private property  something it has been trying to do for a number of years  and was just days away from closing on a $3.7 million sale, the brief states. Then Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit. By doing so, Plaintiffs blocked (the owner) from closing, and their legal maneuvering may very well destroy the envisioned transaction.

The buildings last tenant moved out in 2010, and although many potential tenants have looked at the building, it has been vacant since. Currently, Andy Holloran, the Bozeman developer, is in the process of removing the asbestos from the building.

To make matters worse, the undisputed facts conclusively demonstrate Plaintiffs have wreaked this havoc without having suffered any actual harm themselves, the brief continues. Their abstract claims of potential future harm are not distinguishable from the common interest of the public and are based on nothing more than fanciful conjecture and guesswork.

Preserve Historic Missoula argues that there is absolutely no way one can argue that the city councils decision to overturn the HPCs denial of a demolition permit is in substantial compliance with the provisions of the Downtown Master Plan.

The Missoula Downtown Master Plan has an entire section devoted to historic preservation, an attorney for Preserve Historic Missoula wrote.

Demolition of the facade of the Missoula Mercantile is the opposite of historic preservation; it is the destruction of history. Furthermore, the Missoula Downtown Master Plan cites, multiple times, the goal is to strengthen historic neighborhoods and character. Demolishing an historic building is not strengthening historic character or neighborhoods, it is destroying history.

Another interesting legal angle has been taken up by Preserve Historic Missoula as well. They argued before a judge that if he were to throw out their case, then it would set a bad precedent that citizens can not appeal land use decisions made by the city council.

Judge Robert Dusty Deschamps seemed intrigued by this argument the last time the sides were allowed to present their cases before him. David and Nancy Tyrell, two of the plaintiffs, own property in downtown Missoula and have argued that the destruction of the Merc would harm them by decreasing the value of their property. Deschamps, at the last hearing, said he is remodeling a historic house in Philipsburg and that if other historic buildings in that town were torn down, he could lose property value as well.

The attorneys for the Mercs owner addressed this argument in their latest brief.

Their legal theory warrants discussion, the brief states. The theory is premised upon a remarkable notion: that any citizen is sufficiently aggrieved and has standing to sue if he or she disagrees with a government decision and can speculate about potential effects the decision may have on citizens generally. Needless to say, this approach would spell debilitating consequences for the operations of city government and spawn an endless stream of litigation. Not surprisingly, it has been squarely rejected by the Montana Supreme Court.

A lawyer for Holloran filed a brief saying the Historic Preservation Commission's process resulted in multiple material errors in its findings of fact and a "lack of fairness and objectivity" in its deliberations. The lawyer wrote that the city council's decision is "thoroughly documented and supported by ample fact and foundation."

Deschamps has not yet set a hearing to decide the case.
When you're playing music, particularly when you're just starting out, not much else can weigh on your mind. That's the way Clinton Decker feels.

"When I'm playing guitar, I kind of forget everything else, and just focus on getting the music right," he said.

On a weekday evening last month, he and four other veterans worked their way through some classic rock songs as part of a new nonprofit.

The Hero Sound Project was started about a year ago by Decker, an Illinois native who served as a private in the U.S. Army in Iraq from 2003 to 2004.

About three years ago, Decker bought a guitar for himself. His son took a liking to it as well, and they began playing together. Toward the end of the last summer or fall, he noticed how beneficial it was to his mood

He began thinking about ways he could help other veterans have that experience. He's keenly aware of the high numbers of U.S. veterans who commit suicide every day. The widely circulated number online is 22; the Veterans Affairs Department places it at 20.

There are similar groups around the country, but not one in Montana that he could find. He considered starting a local chapter of a national group, but decided a homegrown effort would be better suited to a city that prides itself on local.

The project began with informal jam sessions at the Ole Beck VFW Post 209 on Main Street in downtown Missoula. Attendance was hit or miss, and he knew he'd need to make adjustments.

"The biggest thing is that I wanted it to be taken seriously," he said. He'd "need to get it away from the bar scene so it can really be viewed as beneficial."

He found a new home for the project at the ZACC. The nonprofit community arts center has a large basement that it recently renovated for kids' music camps. It's equipped with a stage and PA, equipment, private rooms and more.

At this point in the project, Decker's focused on the once-weekly jam sessions. He'd like to bump it up to two nights a week: one for jamming, and one for a more dedicated band practice. If they can get a solid band together, it could play sets around town to raise money and make the project more self-sustaining.

They're raising money right now so they can offer individual lessons with instructors to veterans who don't already know how to play. They're target is $6,660, which would let them pair three vets a month for individual sessions plus a band instructor. They recently got some money that will help with lessons and they're looking around for instructors.

***

Summer was a little slow for jam sessions, as everyone likes to get outside, but it picked up again in August. Attendance varies between four and six guys. On a recent Thursday, they had five guitarists show up, plus bassist Justin Stahl, U.S. Marine Corps, and drummer Jacob Howard, also a Marine. As they tuned up, they openly joked about how everybody wants to be the lead guitarist.

After everyone was set up, they began working through their set of tunes. Decker said their experience levels vary widely: He's only been picking for a few years. Rawlings has been playing for decades. CT Calloway, a 24-year-old who served in the Marines, played from ages 7 to 18, but got busy for a few years. Only recently did he pick it up again.

Since it's a new venture, they have a selection of rock guitar classics like "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Simple Man," Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."

Rawlings sang a few tunes, and then Conan Nunley, who's tall enough that his name is perfectly appropriate, took over lead on "Heaven's Door." Nunley was in the Army in the Sunni Triangle from 2004 to 2005, where he served as a scout attached to an engineer company. They did reconnaissance, cleared improvised explosive devices, and provided convoy escorts. It involved a lot of night missions. "That's usually the time they bury IEDs," he said.

About 30 minutes into the session, he took a seat on a couch, and he and Decker strummed along as Rawlings sang lead vocals on "Simple Man" with a solid country-rock drawl, and often played lead lines.

He's been playing longer than many of the veterans: His dad had a band that played around Texas and up into Oklahoma and Arkansas and Louisiana. Even at 6 years old, Rawlings would jump up on stage and sing a bit or play a few lead lines.

He enlisted in the Army and served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, a specialist E-IV on cavalry scout missions

Among the ailments he says he incurred are tinnitus, a nonstop ringing in his ear, from explosions and gunfire. He suffered night sweats for years from post-traumatic stress disorder. He says he was exposed to a "devil's concoction" of chemicals and suffered hand tremors for years that prevented him from shaving or brushing his teeth.

He had difficulty holding down jobs because of the lack of sleep  he'd sweat through his sheets and move to the other side of the bed, then move back, then to a new bed, through the night.

He'd "wake up in the morning and put my feet on the floor. I was surprised it was carpet. I expected sand," he said.

After he left the Army and he found a steady job, he moved into his own apartment, but depression set in. He said that after he returned from the Gulf, he felt "all used up," like there wasn't anything more he could offer than what he had. He felt older than his dad, and told him that.

"A lot of guys come back like that," he said. "Kids in their 20s feel like they're 80 years old." The military trains its service members as much as it can, but once in combat they're exposed to situations that can't be prepared for, he said.

Eventually, his goods from Germany arrived, including a guitar he bought over there.

"When I'm sitting there trying to learn a song, I'm not thinking about the night sweats, or the bad dreams, or the chronic fatigue," he said.

"When that guitar came back and I started playing it, it was a release. I felt freedom, an emotional freedom, that I hadn't felt for quite some time," he said.

He enjoys it enough he drives in from Superior for their weekday evening practices, and wants to share that experience with other veterans who might not have discovered it yet.

It doesn't matter if they were combat veterans or not, only if they need some structure and camaraderie adjusting to civilian life, where the absence of military discipline gets lonely or alienating.

"We want to help other veterans to find a little peace of mind and give them a semblance of a sense of purpose," he said.
What inspires a young person to leave a comfortable American lifestyle to assume an obligation to serve their country? Is it a sense of adventure to see the world, even though it's an exciting but potentially dangerous place, or the training and educational benefits, or perhaps a steady job?

Through conscription or the volunteer Army, young people have been doing this for the life of our country. The vast majority complete their service and return to civilian life expecting nothing in return. They were just doing their job. What they may not have initially realized is that they return to civilian life with new skills and confidence.

Veterans live all around us and they bring valuable experiences into our communities. These veterans go on to become our community leaders, bankers, business owners, managers, skilled technicians and teachers. Generally they are good with people as a result of their shared experiences and the teamwork required for mission accomplishment. Veterans are focused on completing tasks. They have done this in some of the most inhospitable places on earth, often with limited resources or being pressed for time. These circumstances teach them to be adaptive and innovative problem-solvers.

A day to recognize America's veterans was initiated by President Woodrow Wilson just after the First World War. World War I was considered the Great War or the War to End All Wars because of the tremendous loss of life by the European nations and the United States. Nations could not even imagine a future conflict as terrible that would decimate another generation of young men. America and many other countries celebrated Armistice Day on Nov. 11 to commemorate the sacrifices made by their service members in World War I.

In 1954 America renamed Armistice Day as Veterans Day to better honor the service of World War II and the Korean War veterans as well. This month our nation also counts millions of Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in the rolls of Americans who have honorably served.

Despite periodic calls for national service, in 2016 only 1 percent of Americans serve in the military. It's a different military from the one their parents knew. Tough, challenging training continues to be the hallmark; enabling these volunteers to accomplish things they never thought possible. While it's still a young person's game, all branches of the military rely more heavily on women and include LGBT service members who bring their talents to make America's military the best in the world.

Recently, America has placed unprecedented requirements on our reserve component forces; asking these citizen soldiers to leave family, friends, jobs and college in numbers not seen since World War II. Just as our active duty military, they have never let us down.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen take an oath to defend the Constitution and serve America's elected leaders. As a former Army leader, I recognized the awesome responsibility to competently lead America's sons and daughters; our nation's treasure and future.

On Veterans Day, slow down, take a minute to remember the sacrifices that millions of veterans have made to ensure our American way of life. It's a legacy of selfless service that we all can be proud of.
Recently Wells Fargo Bank agreed to a multi-million-dollar settlement for setting up fraudulent bank accounts for existing customerswithout their knowledgeand charging those same customers fees for those accounts. This prompted a hearing by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with the star attendee being the then-CEO of Wells Fargo, Robert Stumpf. Stumpf was properly chastised for this latest in a series of his companys fraudulent practices by committee members, most notably by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the few Senators on the committee who has not taken campaign contributions from Wells Fargo employees or political action committees.

Stumpfs patent answer to questioning seemed to be, I didnt know about it, but like a good soldier, he resignedunder pressure, and lost some 56 million in stock benefitsunder pressure. However, he will more than likely not be charged with criminal behavior because he didnt know. In fact, most CEOs of large banks are in the same enviable position; enviable at least to those CEOs of small to mid-sized financial organizations who are now serving prison time foramong other thingsmoney laundering, defrauding customers and just plain lying.

These smaller fish would not be in jail without the efforts of a small government agency named SIGTARPSpecial Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program. SIGTARP was created to police the financial institutions that received government bailout (TARP) money after the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession. It has proved to be one feisty little outfit led by an equally feisty chief, Special Inspector General Christy Goldsmith Romero.

Since 2009 SIGTARP has filed charges against 366 financial company executives and convicted 259 of them, 163 of whom are serving lengthy prison sentences with the rest waiting for sentence to be imposed. But none of those charged with criminal activity are top officers of the really big financial institutions.

The big fish arent in jail because they didnt know what was going on in their own companies. They claim that the companies they run are so large and complex that they cant be expected to know everything that goes on in them. This raises the question; why are they paid so much when they know so little?

And its true, they dont know because they are not told. This is not lower level executives hiding their criminal activities. It is the culture of entire corporations to keep their top officers in the dark about any questionable practices going on so they cant be held accountable by law enforcement. If they dont know, how can they be guilty of anything other than ignorance of the company they run?

This immunity by way of ignorance can be changed. In SIGTARPs Oct. 26, 2016, Quarterly Report to Congress, Goldsmith Romero proposed a simple solution; Require the top officers of large financial institution to certify that there is no fraud or criminal activity being carried on in their organization. By putting CEOs, etc., in a position of potential liability, it could be expected that criminal activities in the company would be discouraged, if only to keep the top officers out of jail. This seems to be a reasonable and fair approach, and the committee, which includes Montanas Sen. Jon Tester, would be well advised to pursue it.

What is really disheartening, however, is the amount of fraud and deception that goes on in so many financial institutions; activity that cheats the taxpayer and devastates homeowners. Its a painfully long list which is available at SIGTARP.gov under Investigations.

I would like to think that not all financial organizations are running con games, but considering the number of organizations and individuals who have been investigated and convicted by SIGTARP, it is tempting to draw the conclusion that fraud, deceit and cover-up runs rampant in our financial institutions. A little jail time for top executives might help them hew to a moral compasseven if its not pointing to their direction of choice.
I look forward to George Ochenskis Monday column for his inevitable whopper of the week. In the Nov. 7 Missoulian, he blames the Canada lynxs threatened status on deforestation of the Rockies by a timber industry that has literally cut itself out of a future. The big, old growth trees are mostly gone from the remaining forested lands in the West

Had Ochenski done some research, he would have found that forest tree cover has actually increased due to a century of fire suppression. Theres been no deforestation. Furthermore, while timber harvest has certainly removed extensive stands of old forest, the percentage of dense, old spruce/subalpine fir forests (that lynx inhabit) has increased to above-average conditions. In this case, tree recruitment, again resulting from fire suppression, has more than offset what was lost from timber harvest at about a 2:1 ratio. Timber harvest has certainly generated its share of ecological problems, but a shortage of dense, old forests, particularly at high elevation, isnt one of them. So why arent lynx rebounding? It could be warmer, shorter winters, or more predators. Who knows?

Heres a thought, Ochenski: If youre going to write about forest conditions in the Rockies, rather than make it up, maybe you could consult with the University of Montana forestry staff or the U.S. Forest Service regional office silviculture staff. Theyd be glad to point to some peer-reviewed research.

Heres another tip: the Alliance for the Wild Rockies website isnt really your best source for unbiased research data on forest conditions.

Mike Hillis,

Missoula
In an unprecedented move, Glacier National Park officials have closed all boating in park waters while they evaluate a threat of invasive mussels.

If the waters in Glacier become infested with these invasive species, that flows to many different parts of the country, park spokeswoman Lauren Alley said on Thursday. We have a tremendous responsibility to the rest of the ecosystem and the economic impacts that an infestation can have to the rest of those communities downstream.

While no traces of mussels have been found in park waters so far, the detection of the invasive species in the Tiber Reservoir east of Shelby on Wednesday triggered statewide concern. Alley said the National Park Services 2014 invasive species plan calls for the boating closure in the event mussels are reported inside Montana waters.

We are in the early stages of talking with a lot of partners about what this closure will look like, Alley said. Its simple for the Park Service to restrict boating on internal waters like Lake McDonald or Bowman Lake. Private inholders and tour companies with boats on some park lakes may be able to have their craft inspected before launching again next spring.

Its less clear how to manage boundary waters such as the North Fork and Middle Fork of the Flathead River, which share jurisdiction with the Flathead National Forest and Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. That affects boaters who travel for miles to take on the whitewater rapids, trout fishing and scenic floating those rivers provide. Because Glacier Park has almost no public access points to either river, Alley said those decisions would probably be worked out by other stakeholders.

We have no plans for closing any waters now, said FWP fisheries division manager Eileen Ryce. At this time of year, the chances of anything being moved around are very slim. So we have a little bit of time on our hands to get things in place for spring.

FWP biologists detected the mussel larvae in routine water samples from Tiber Reservoir, which impounds the Marias River north of its confluence with the Missouri River, east of Glacier Park. Ryce said its uncertain at this time whether the larvae are zebra or quagga mussels, although either species means big trouble.

Chances are there are adults present somewhere in the reservoir, and we just havent found them, Ryce said on Thursday. Theres an outside chance there was positive water in a live well [on a fishing boat]. But larvae are typically only present in the water column at certain times of year when adults are reproducing. When the water temperatures drop, they're no longer present.

Until now, Montana had been free of zebra and quagga mussels. The mollusks have infected waters as close as South Dakota, and are well-established in the Great Lakes and Midwest states.

If they become established, it impacts water delivery structures, irrigation systems, hydropower facilities, and it can affect fisheries through food-web disruption, Ryce said. The mussels have threads that are sticky, which they use to attach to each other and clog up things.

Flathead National Forest spokeswoman Janette Turk said the U.S. Forest Service doesnt have as comprehensive a response plan for invasive mussels as the National Park Service. Because it owns several campgrounds and boat ramps on the Flatheads Wild and Scenic River system, the Flathead Forest will be cooperating with state FWP river managers on future access decisions.

Meanwhile, we hope people will be using best practices, rinsing their boats and being careful, Turk said. Mussels arent the only invasives out there.
BILLINGS  Montana authorities have taken the first step toward revoking the probation of a man who was granted clemency by the governor last year in a 1979 murder and then jailed this week for allegedly violating a restraining order.

Barry Beach appeared in court Thursday via video from the Yellowstone County jail on a probation violation stemming from the violation of the restraining order. Justice of the Peace David Carter set a $50,000 bond for his release.

Beach's attorney rejected the latest allegation and said it stemmed from a child custody dispute.

The temporary restraining order was issued in October after a woman filed a court petition claiming Beach had fathered her son and had stalked her since his release from prison.

The woman filed a report with the Billings Police Department Sunday alleging Beach violated the order, which requires him to stay at least 300 feet away from her, according to court documents. Beach was wearing a GPS monitoring system at the time of the alleged offense, which a probation officer said underscored his "very poor judgment," according to court documents.

He was arrested Wednesday, the same day probation officers became aware of the alleged violation, Montana Department of Corrections spokeswoman Judy Beck said. Within 10 days of his arrest, corrections officials plan to file a violation report with the Roosevelt County attorney, Beck said.

That's a first step toward asking a court to revoke Beach's probation. The action was taken "for the safety of the petitioner, her family and the community," Beck said.

A judge would have the latitude to revoke Beach's probation entirely, impose additional restrictions or take no action. A Nov. 18 hearing on the probation violation was scheduled in state District Court in Plentywood.

Beach has said the woman's 4-year-old boy is his and that the stalking claim was a response to his efforts to gain visitation rights.

"All we have are allegations that we believe are not credible," Beach's attorney, Tim Baldwin, said during Thursday's court appearance. "This really boils down to what's going to be a custody issue."

Baldwin said a parenting plan had been filed with the court seeking to resolve the dispute.

Beach was sentenced to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole in the 1979 death of 17-year-old Kimberly Nees of Poplar in Roosevelt County. During his more than 30 years in prison, his cause was adopted by hundreds of supporters and attracted backing from numerous Montana politicians.

In 2011, he was released temporarily after a judge ordered a new trial in the murder case based on new evidence. The state Supreme Court reversed that order and sent Beach back to prison after 18 months.

It was during that period of freedom that Beach had a brief relationship with the woman, according to her restraining order petition.

Gov. Steve Bullock granted him clemency last November, noting that Beach was 17 at the time of Nees' death and had been a model prisoner. Beach had long denied the crime.

In his clemency order, Bullock noted that three psychological reports concluded Beach posed a minimal risk to public safety. Bullock commuted his sentence to time served with an additional 10 years suspended, during which time Beach would remain under state supervision.

Beach's mother, Bobbi Clincher, said Thursday that he found out he had a son when the mother was arrested. Beach was contacted by the Department of Family Services and told he needed to take a DNA test, she said.

"He went in for the DNA test, and sure enough the child is his. For him to be locked up all those years, not able to have children when he was younger, it was a nice surprise," Clincher said. "If he has to go back to prison just because he was trying to have a relationship with his son, (that) would be really sad."

In early October, Beach's probation restrictions were tightened after a woman alleged he propositioned her 12-year-old daughter in January. No charges were filed in that case following a months-long investigation by law enforcement.
Copyright  2022 HT Digital Streams Ltd All Right Reserved
The following is an excerpt from Bernie Sanders speech at a meeting of the National Committee for Independent Political Action in New York City on June 22, 1989, published under the title Reflections from Vermont in the December 1989 issue of Monthly Review. [wc_highlight color=red] Ed.[/wc_highlight]

It seems obvious to me that there is no way that we can deal with the enormous economic, social, and environmental problems facing this country without making radical changes in the economic system, and weve got to be honest about that. I believe that democratic socialism is the appropriate framework for making those changes, and we should be upfront about our beliefs

When the rich are getting richer while the poor and middle class are getting poorer; when the standard of living of the average worker is in rapid decline; when people cant afford health care, cant afford housing, cant afford to send their kids to college, and the environment is being destroyed for quick profits, when you put it all together, what do you have? Youve got a disaster. And the people understand that. They know whats going on, and they want a movement which will speak to these issues, the issues that are wrenching out the guts of this country, but which the Democrats and Republicans and the corporate media will never honestly deal with.

Now, who do we hold responsible for these problems? I know thats a strange question, very rarely asked, but lets pursue it. Well, whats in vogue now, you see, is: Gee, that Ronald Reagan was a terrible president, what a reactionary guy. Well, he was. But let me give you some interesting news that most of you already know. Throughout the eight years of the Reagan presidency another political party, its called the Democratic Party, controlled the U.S. House of Representatives, controlled every important committee in the House of Representatives. For six out of the eight years of the Reagan presidency the Democratic Party controlled the U.S. Senate. The Reagan Revolution was not brought about by Reagan and the Republicans. It was brought about by Reagan with the active support of the Democratic Party. It was a truly bipartisan effort. Democrats and Republicans working together  protecting the interests of the rich and the powerful.

Now what I think is crying out in this country is the need for a new political movement which talks truth and common sense to the ordinary people. I often speak on campuses and other places around the country, and the disgust with the two-party system is incredible. Very, very few people have faith or belief in either of those parties. People will vote for one of their candidates because theyll say that this guy is better than that guy, but its very much a question of the lesser of two evils. The people know that the present political system is failing. They want an alternative.

Now I know that there are people, good and honorable people, people who are friends of mine, who believe that the Democratic Party can be turned around. I dont. I believe that what we have got to do right now is create a progressive, independent political movement which brings together all of the single-issue groups who are currently banging their heads against the wall. The unions, the minority groups, the womens organizations, the environmentalists, the senior citizens, the youth, the peace activists  and all the people who know that we need fundamental change in this country. More than anything, I believe that weve got to bring those people together and articulate the real reality of America  not the TV reality. Weve got to make people understand that the enormous problems that they are facing are not primarily personal problems, but social problems. Further, weve got to articulate a democratic vision which is based on social justice, peace, and respect for the environment.

Now the argument, and Im sure that well discuss this later on because some of you will disagree with me, the argument for working within the Democratic party is that, presumably, thats where the people are. Youve got to go where the people are. All I can tell you is two things. In Burlington, in Vermont, the people have shown that they are not dumb. They can read and they can think and they are quite capable of voting for someone who is not a Democrat or a Republican. They discovered that their fingers didnt fall off when they pulled the lever for someone outside of the two-party system. People can do that. Not only in Vermont but all over the country. It is absurd to believe that, for some mysterious reason, people will only vote for a Democrat or a Republican, and that we will always have to support the two-party system.

Secondly, and equally important, if we are interested in getting people excited about politics and the possibility of real social change, how can you do that within the Democratic Party? I think that its impossible to get people excited, to get people motivated, when you say to them, Come on into the party of Jim Wright, Lloyd Bentsen, and worse. Were really going to change things around and heres my good friend Lloyd Betsen. You cant do it.

Im not here to tell you that I have a magic solution to the problem and that everybody else is a jerk. I have no easy solutions. Nobody does. There are enormous obstacles that will have to be overcome if we are going to build a successful third party. But I do believe this: Winning elections tomorrow is important, but its not necessarily the most important thing. In a country which has such a low level of political consciousness; in a country where the level of political debate is so pathetically low, it is absolutely imperative that the progressive movement raise the issues and the analyses which will educate the people of our nation to begin to understand what the hell is going on. And I honestly dont believe that that can take place within the Democratic Party. . . .

To my mind, it is absolutely imperative that we build an independent, democratic socialist left which has the guts to raise the issues that all of us know to be true, but which are very rarely even discussed within establishment politics. Our major task is to change the entire nature of political discussion in the country. In my view thats just not going to happen within the Democratic Party. It seems to me that if you add up all of the people who are getting a raw deal from the system today youre talking about a majority of the population. Thats our potential constituency, and I think weve got to form a political movement which brings these people in.

To read the full text of the speech excerpted above, subscribe to Monthly Review. Click here to read a preview of the Notes from the Editors in the December 2016 issue of Monthly Review.
BILLINGS  Nicole Walksalong has special expertise in the area of foster and adopted children, a knowledge that comes from beyond her formal education.

Shes the adopted mother of twin girls and her own mother was adopted into a white family as a child. The family raised her mother on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, which later allowed Walksalong to stay connected to her culture.

Walksalong's intimate knowledge on the topic of adoption and fostering children is part of the reason she will help to define a newly created position within Yellowstone County's Court Appointed Special Advocates.

"The important thing to remember is that you're not saving these children," Walksalong said. "You're helping them."

Walksalong began in October working as CASA's Indian Child Welfare Act program coordinator. Part of her job is helping programs like the Center for Children and Families and Child Family Services, understand the cultural background of Native American children.

About 40 percent of the countys foster children are Native American, Walksalong said. CASA hopes to reduce the number of Native American children in foster homes and connect more Native American families with resources to help them through the foster care system.

Shes also working with county Judge Rod Souza to establish what would be the fourth special ICWA court in the nation. The court is scheduled to begin taking on cases in July 2017.

Congress passed ICWA in 1978 in order to keep native families and tribes together. The act requires states to place native children removed from their families with relatives or other tribal members.

Taking children from Native American families without their consent goes back to when trains would run through reservations picking up children and shipping them to boarding schools to be educated, Walksalong said. Tribes lost much of their culture when that generation of children was taken.

There are some cultural differences with Native American families, Walksalong said. Its normal for multiple generations to live in a household, and older children are taught to look after their younger siblings, she said.

These arent signs of neglect, Walksalong said. It is part of a childs education.

Many Native American families feel like theyre often misunderstood when dealing with dependent or neglect cases, she said. The special court could be a more relaxed place where families can discuss what is happening in their homes.

The changes would be small. Things like scheduling the court in the afternoon to help with travel time from the nearby reservations and having the judge sit at the table with parents rather than speaking from the bench, Walksalong said.

She is reaching out to Northern Cheyenne and Crow tribes to see what they need and what they are struggling with when it comes to members of their tribes in foster families.

While in high school, Walksalong worked with children in the foster care system at Watson Childrens Shelter in Missoula. The shelter provides short-term care for children who have been abused, neglected, abandoned or whose family is in crisis.

She was awarded a full scholarship to Rocky Mountain College. After earning a bachelor's degree in psychology, she began working for New Day, a private nonprofit working to improve the lives of troubled youth, particularly Native American kids.

My heart is with kids, Walksalong said.

It was through New Day that Walksalong met her twin daughters. The girls had been placed in 19 different homes before she adopted them. Their last placement had been with Lavonna Bird, who was arrested in 2012 after killing a boy she was fostering along with the girls.

Walksalong was an ideal parent for the girls, having worked before with children who suffered huge traumas. Her husband is also an enrolled member of the Crow tribe, and able to help the girls continue to connect with their culture, Walksalong said.

She encourages Native American families to foster Indian children, or be a CASA volunteer. Even if a family can't adopt a child, the foster system needs more Native American advocates working for the children in the court system, Walksalong said.

It takes a lot to adopt, and you have to give them a certain type of love, because youre taking in children you didnt get a chance to raise, to mold, Walksalong said. But to me, theyve always been my kids.

Walksalongs mother, Lonette Keehner, was adopted as a child from her Blackfeet family. Keehner and her two siblings were the first set of triplets born to the Blackfeet tribe in recent history. Keehner and the surviving sister were adopted by a white hospital nurse after the two got sick soon after their birth. Their brother died in the hospital.

That experience had helped Keehner bond deeply with Walkalongs two adopted daughters.

They started calling their grandparents grandma and grandpa, before they called my husband and me, mom and dad, Walksalong said.

Keehner was murdered on Dec. 21, 2015, in Missoula by Scott Austin Price. Walksalong struggled to help her children through another painful loss. She said her grief overcame her for a time, before realizing she needed to help herself before she could help others again. She entered therapy to help her process what had happened.

When Keehners side of the family met to spread her ashes in Glacier National Park, Walksalongs daughters were included. The two girls wear a piece of their grandmothers jewelry every day in memory of her, Walksalong said.

The tragedy of her mothers death brought her daughters closer to their family in many ways, she said.

If we look at our old ways, our traditions say all children deserve a home, Walksalong said. All children deserve a family.

The last three informational sessions this year for people interested in becoming a CASA will be at 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 16 and Dec. 14 as well as an evening session at 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 1. All informational sessions will be held at the CASA offices located at 1201 Grand Avenue, suite five.

For more information, people can visit the Yellowstone CASA website.
State transportation officials say a history of accidents was behind their decision to install solar-powered, flashing red lights on stop signs at Granite Street and Excelsior Avenue.

Now they have another problem on their hands.

Neighbors say its an over-the-top solution that blares ambulance-like lights into their houses and bounces them off of parked cars and anything else reflective up and down the block.

Nobody comes to a full stop before the signs on Granite anyway, they say, because they cant see past the parked cars on Excelsior. They have to ease into the intersection to know if theres oncoming traffic.

And, they claim, its just plain cheesy  kind of like a neon no vacancy sign that flickers on and off into cheap motel rooms.

We dont want even minor accidents, but this isnt the answer, said Joan Heinz, who got 22 residents in the area to sign a petition opposing the flashing lights. This is a historical neighborhood. This makes it look like a construction zone.

Heinz said area officials with the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT), which has jurisdiction of the intersection, told them the flashers were installed months ago because there had been numerous accidents over the years.

But their concerns have not been addressed, she said, so they took their case to Butte-Silver Bow Commissioner Cindi Shaw, who has taken it to the rest of the council.

Shaw said the flashing lights were part of a federal aid project overseen by the MDT that commissioners signed off on last year.

We gave it our blessing, she said, but they had no idea the lights would be so bright and troublesome.

The countys Public Works Department has since put shields over the lights to reduce their reflection into adjacent houses, but Shaw, Heinz and others say they are still a problem.

LeRoy Wosoba, an MDT traffic safety engineer, told the councils Public Works Committee on Wednesday night that 33 accidents have been documented at the intersection over the past eight-and-a-half years.

Heinz said she had been unable to get any records, but Wosoba gave her a list at the meeting. The document did not include detailed police reports because those have personal information, but it did list the incidents.

Heinz said the list showed only two accidents this year and only two last year, but Wosoba said the numbers fluctuate and there had been more accidents in some previous years.

Regardless, he said it might be possible to have the solar-powered lights kept on during the day and turned off at night. Because the intersection is on a hill, the rising and setting sun often blinds drivers momentarily heading east or west on Granite and without the lights, they cant see the stop signs.

Wosoba acknowledged the flashers were much more intense than I anticipated getting.

Lee Alt, an MDT traffic engineer in Butte, said the agency had used yellow lines to designate a portion of the streets at the intersection as off-limits to parking. That was designed to give drivers on Granite Street a better view of any traffic on Excelsior.

But Heinz said that has not alleviated that problem and even a police officer has to eke his way out into traffic.

Public Works Director Dave Schultz agreed it was still a problem and suggested the no-parking lines should be extended so drivers have a better view.

Alt said that would upset residents who park in those spots, but Schultz said it was probably needed anyway.

Two Public Works officials were at the intersection Thursday morning to determine how much farther the no-parking zone should be extended. Once that is decided, Schultz said, residents in the area would be informed of any new plans and the reasons behind them.

We have got to have a wider safety zone, he said.

The issue also will remain before the council committee for further consideration.
There have been some articles published in The Billings Gazette concerning the behavior of Barry Beach over the past months since his well-publicized release, earlier.

These articles were not conducive to make your general readership and the citizens of Montana/Billings comfortable with the reasons he was released.

Beach's current behavior appears to be somewhat different than was stated and believed by all of the Free Barry Beach supporters of the past.

It is curious as to the current feelings of these very visible supporters with the recent developments in his actions. Could it be possible that these folks were incorrect in their actions to Free Barry Beach, especially the current governor of Montana?
HELENA  This year, nine Native Americans will serve in Montana's Legislature, an increase over last year, though members of the American Indian Caucus are concerned about how they will work with a state government that is more dominated by Republicans.

American Indians make up 7.4 percent of Montanans but have historically been under-represented in the Legislature. In the 2015 session, there were eight American Indian legislators  three in the Senate and five in the House  for 5.3 percent of the 150 members. This year it will be 6 percent. The most it's been since 1989, when the state started tracking, was 10 members in 2007.

The Native caucus is critical to addressing issues that affect the people, families, and communities on Montana's seven reservations and the Little Shell tribe, said Amanda Frickle, executive director of the Montana Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

"They bring really important legislative priorities to the table that might otherwise be overlooked. It's an important part of a representative democracy."

Frickle said having people in the Legislature who understand and see what happens daily in Indian Country ensures the body takes up issues that disproportionately affect reservations  like a lack of access to health care and high suicide rates. But she expressed concern over the caucus's ability this year to work with Republicans, who she says often don't support Native issues, citing a failed bill from 2015 that would have directed money to a program that works to improve poorly performing schools.

Going into Election Day, Natives were guaranteed at least eight seats in 2017, including holdover state Sen. Lea Whitford, D-Browning.

In the House, incumbent Native Democrat George Kipp III ran unopposed in House District 15. The same is true for Native Democrats incumbent Susan Webber of Browning in HD 16, Jonathan Windy Boy of Box Elder in HD 32, incumbent Rae Peppers of Lame Deer in HD 41, and Sharon Stewart Peregoy of Crow Agency in HD 42.

Native Republican Jason Small of Busby won Senate District 21, which was a contest between two Native candidates, the other being Democrat Carolyn Pease-Lopez. In Senate District 16, Native Democrat Frank Smith of Poplar beat Native Republican G. Bruce Meyers of Box Elder who had been the state representative for House District 32 last session.

Native Democrat Shane Morigeau of Missoula won against non-Native Republican Cyndi Kenck of Frenchtown in House District 95.

Democrats had hoped for 11 representatives, but Native Democrat Joey Jayne lost his primary in Senate District 47, and on Tuesday in House District 25, Native Democrat Garrett Lankford, a member of the Little Shell Tribe, lost against non-Native Republican Jeremy Trebas of Great Falls.

Republicans had a net gain of two seats in the Legislature and hold all statewide elected offices except the governorship. Native communities often support Democratic candidates, though there are exceptions such as Small and Meyers.

Webber said the Native caucus has always faced an uphill battle.

"We've been literally and figuratively the minority's minority," Webber said. "I know it looks like we have a lot of people in the Indian caucus, a lot of people were elected, but in reality it should be more. But just us getting in there, from my perspective, is a real positive."

Native legislators often carry bills that represent other groups of society that struggle, such as the poor or disabled, Webber said. "What effects the Indians, we look at it also effecting those other groups within the larger population."

She said Republicans can get into the mentality of viewing the state's Indians as what she calls "fort Indians."

"Indians a long time ago, they were at the gate of the fort asking for food. For the food that was supposed to have come to us with our treaties but was squandered or sold off. We couldn't go out and hunt anymore, so we became fort Indians. That's what we're seeing. It's a stereotype, but we're getting better."

Last session was dominated by Medicaid expansion and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes' water compact, Webber said. She hopes this year to take up issues of economic development.

"I see that we are people who want to pick themselves up," Webber said. "So many people here have so many ideas, and the reservations are just gold mines for business if we actually had the opportunity and the capital."

During her freshman session in 2015, Webber said she felt the division between the other Legislators.

"As an Indian in the Legislature, you stand out. You're a different color, and that really plays a part in it." She said racial tensions played a much larger role than she expected.

"We're educated; we've paid our dues. We're survivors," Webber said. She added that she expects to see the same thing this session.

Jeff Essmann, the chairman of the Montana Republican Party and state representative from Billings, said his party will work with the Native caucus and that the Republican platform offers many things Indian Country wants.

"I do not think the Native American caucus is in the sole possession of the Montana Democratic Party," Essmann said. In 2011, the Republican party had four representatives in the Native caucus, last session had Rep. G. Bruce Meyers of Box Elder, and this session will have the newly-elected Small.

"I believe that our pro-growth policies are in the best interest of all Montanans, including our Native populations," added Essmann.

At the Republican party's winter meeting, the vice chairman of the Crow tribe at the time spoke, as did Carlyle Begay, a former state senator from Arizona. Begay in 2015 switched parties from Democrat to Republican because he felt the GOP platform better aligned with the needs he saw among his state's Native population.

Essmann said the same is true in Montana, that his party's policies are the best way to help Natives out of poverty.

He said, "The best way out of poverty is steady income. A good paycheck brings self esteem, the ability to make choices and not be stuck with a poorly managed, federally controlled health service."

He said Republicans are best suited to address the economic concerns like those of Webber.

"Why would you want to continue to be dependent on a federal government that has done nothing but mismanage your assets for 100 years or more and a poorly managed, federally run health care system when you could be independent and make your own choices and have your own life?"
NOTICE OF APPLICATION TO APPROVE REAL ESTATE OFFER TO PURCHASE

IN THE MATTER OF THE

ESTATE OF

DONALD D. COLE,

Deceased.

To: Peggy Azqual and all other persons interested in the estate of Donald D. Cole, deceased, who died on or about February, 2016.

You are hereby notified that on October 27, 2016, an Application to Approve Real Estate Offer to Purchase was filed, seeking authorization to sell real estate locally known as 3365 Pearl Street, Muscatine, Iowa (legal description per abstract) for the indicated price.

Hearing on this Application is scheduled for December 27, 2016, at 8:30 a.m. Objections to the Application shall be filed, in writing, at least 20 days before the scheduled hearing.

Dated the 7th day of November, 2016.

/s/___________

John Wunder

AT0008702

300 E. 2nd Street, Suite 301

Muscatine, IA 52761

Phone: (563)263-8525

FAX: (563)264-3521

ATTORNEY FOR ADMINISTRATOR
Register for more free articles. Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading.

Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! Already a Subscriber? Already a Subscriber? Sign in Terms of Service Privacy Policy
MUSCATINE, Iowa  Although the Muscatine Police Department says Muscatine has not seen protests or other incidents following the election, an altercation at Jefferson Elementary School on Wednesday was due to tensions following the election.

Police responded to an altercation between two students that occurred as a result of tensions over the results of Tuesday's election, according to Lt. Jeff Jirak of the Muscatine Police Department.

No charges were filed, and school and police authorities believe it to have been an isolated incident, according to Lt. Jirak.

Emily Wenger of the Muscatine Journal
AMES, Iowa  Iowa State Universitys Research and Demonstration Farms has hired new staff members at its locations near Crawfordsville and in Fruitland.

Brad Bathey has joined the Muscatine Island Research Farm staff as an agricultural specialist. He will assist Vince Lawson, farm superintendent, in conducting 15 to 20 field trials annually.

Bathey is a 2015 Iowa State graduate with a bachelors degree in horticulture and experience at the ISU Horticulture Research Station near Ames.

The Muscatine Island Research Farm in Fruitland focuses on fruit, vegetable, soybean, pests and irrigation field research on the sandy soils near the Mississippi River. The farm is owned by the Muscatine Island Research Farm Association and operated under a long-term agreement with CALS. The farm opened in 1935 and consists of 120 acres.

Cody Schneider has joined the Crawfordsville-area Southeast Research Farm staff as an agricultural specialist. He will assist Myron Rees, farm superintendent, in conducting about 50 field trials annually.

Schneider is a 2013 Iowa State graduate earning a bachelors degree in agronomy and is from Riverside. He has experience with Syngenta Seeds as a seed corn production technician.

The Southeast Research Farm near Crawfordsville focuses on research on corn, soybean, soils, pests, and water quality. The farm is owned by the Southeast Iowa Agricultural Research Association and operated under a long-term agreement with ISUs College of Ag and Life Sciences (CALS). The farm opened in 1987 and consists of 273 acres.

Schneider and Bathey will be coordinating Iowa States on-farm trials in their areas and assisting extension staff during the winter meeting season.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  Public Works Director Brian Stineman discussed several upcoming projects at the Muscatine City Council meeting Thursday night, and residents provided input on what should be done about the intersection of Houser Street and Fulliam Avenue.

A traffic flow study in 2015, Stineman said, showed 5,900 vehicles per day traveling northbound, and 9,500 traveling southbound on Houser Street. The study showed 210 traveling westbound on Fulliam Avenue at Houser Street and 5,900 moving eastbound. He said he only wanted to broach the subject with the council and begin the discussion process, because something needed to be done at the intersection in the near future.

Since 2006, he said 16 accidents have occurred at the intersection.

The simplest would probably be a four way stop sign, but were not recommending anything today, he said.

Other options, he said, include stoplights or a small roundabout. The signals would be at least $130,000 not including installation, and more than $200,000 with install, according to Stineman. The roundabout, he said, could be folded into a repair project at the intersection to cut down on the cost, but overall it would be around $300,000.

Several area residents attended the meeting to provide input. Karen Fisher, who lives on Duncan Drive, said she moved to the area two and a half years ago, and she has seen a need for a stop sign at the intersection.

When this issue came up I was very excited to talk, she said.

When she and her husband first moved to the area, she said a stop sign was in place for a time at the intersection and it worked well. Now, Fisher said, nothing stops residents from moving quickly on Houser Street.

People fly through down Houser, she said. It takes me sometimes eight or nine minutes to make my left hand turn.

Several other residents also expressed their concerns, and the majority hoped for a stop sign at the intersection.

Stineman also stated that the city plans to take speedbumps out of the public roads. He said requests for speed bumps and concerns frequently arise.

I feel like we have better options to control speed than these speed bumps, he said.

He said the existing speed-bumps will be removed, as they do not help much to reduce speed, are difficult to maintain, and are hard on pavement.

In other business, the city council approved the first reading of a resolution amending floodplain management regulations.
WAPELLO, Iowa - The Wapello School Board agreed Wednesday to table action on purchasing up to 200 Chromebook computers for the elementary school, so technology director Nate Miller has time to investigate other possible costs.

The school board had agreed earlier to investigate the computer purchase for the elementary school after implementing a 1:1 computer program at the high school this year. Around 300 of the machines were purchased for the secondary building and assigned to students to use in the classroom or at home.

According to officials, the 200 elementary Chromebooks would be placed on carts that could move between classrooms and be available primarily to the upper elementary grades during the day. They would replace other computers that would likely be shifted down to use in the lower elementary grades. Elementary students would not take the computers home.

Miller provided several quotes for the new computers, but told board members he wanted to get more information on the number and cost of access points and other details.

I would hate to order 200 Chromebooks and have to get new access points and firewalls, he said.

Board members agreed, but before voting to table the issue, questioned elementary principal Brett Nagle on the computer need at the elementary.

I understand fifth and sixth grade, but Im skeptical of the lower grades, board president Duane Boysen said.

Every day they are running these machines, Nagle replied, suggesting the board members stop by the school to see the students working.

I think it will be a good tool, board member Eric Smith said.

Officials said funding for the computers would come from $475,000 in sales tax revenue that was earmarked for the original 1:1 program and some replacements. Around $83,000 of that funding has been spent.

After Miller completes his review of the additional equipment need, the board is expected to act on the computer purchase at an upcoming meeting.

In other action, the board approved two requests seeking Additional Modified Allowable Growth (AMAG) from the School Budget Review Committee (SBRC).

Superintendent Mike Peterson said both a $96.690 request for Open Enrolled - Out students and a second request of $24,736 for expenses incurred through the districts Limited English Proficient program were important to the districts budget.

I would strongly recommend (both requests), he told the board.

The board also needed to go back and approve a Resolution of Intent, Instructional Support Program, for the second time.

Officials said an original approval of the resolution had not met a required publication window, prompting the second action. The resolutions approval also included holding a Dec. 14 public hearing.

The board also:

 Approved trips by the FFAs Soils Judging Team to a May 2-4 national competition in Oklahoma City, OK; and the 4-H/FFA team to Greeley, Co., for a meat judging competition. FFA Poultry Team members also reported on their recent trip to the national convention;

 Heard from Peterson that members of the Morning Sun School Board would be meeting with board presidents from Wapello, Winfield-Mt. Union and Mediapolis to discuss the sharing agreement between the schools. Peterson, who is shared with the Morning Sun School District, said he was recommending the Wapello board continue the agreement with the current terms.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  A group of volunteers, former teachers, and a reading specialist are working to help first and second grade students enhance their reading, spelling, and writing abilities.

Grace Lutheran Church has organized an After School/Summer Enhancement Literacy Program for students from McKinley and Ss. Mary & Mathias Elementary Schools.

The program is in its fourth year, and volunteers and organizers say they have enjoyed watching the children enrolled in the program progress.

"This is an awesome program," said Janna Gusmano, the director for the program.

Gusmano is a reading specialist and wrote a curriculum for the program. A former classroom teacher, she recently moved to Muscatine and joined the program in July.

The around 13 students meet at the church on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school. They read a story together, have snacks, and then rotate to different stations. At the spelling center on Thursday, students played a version of Candy Land, moving spaces based on the words they spelled correctly.

Gusmano coordinates with the students' teachers, and incorporates the spelling words they are working on at school into the spelling games the students play.

"What I love about this program is that it's very very specific to the reading skills they need to be successful," she said.

Research has shown, Gusmano said, if students have not reached the reading level they are expected to by third grade, they will have difficulty developing those skills back up to their grade level.

"It's always good to catch them really really early and work on those skills because those are the formative years, first and second grade," she said. "You're really building foundation skills for the rest of their life, really. We want them to be lifelong readers."

Deb Holliday, a member of the supervisory committee and an organizer for the program, said Jack Smith, a member of the church, and his family developed a proposal for the the literacy program in memory of his wife Betty Smith, who was very involved with early childhood education.

"So he and his family wrote a proposal to present to the church to see if it was something we could do as a ministry, and then it just grew from that," Holliday said.

Holliday is a retired teacher, so helping to provide students with an extra literacy boost is important to her, and to the church.

"The reason is because of how important literacy is, and we work with first and second-graders because you want to close that achievement gap if you can while it's still narrow," she said.

The elementary schools communicate with parents about the free program, which Holiday said has had a waiting list because they want to keep it small so students and volunteers can work one on one.

The literacy program, Holliday said, is funded through donations and grants.

Seven-year-old Hayle Tils, a student who attends the program, said she likes the fun writing and reading activities.

"I like the reading station because I really like to read, and I like the writing station because we do really fun things, and we play games," she said.

After her group finished at the writing station, she rang a bell and the three groups rotated, each spending about 20 minutes at each station.

Leiam Estrada, 7, said he is going to the church after school for his second year, and he has enjoyed meeting new people.

"And I like writing," he said.

Volunteer JoAnne Fisher said she has seen some progress from the students, and said she is happy to help.

"It's very important," she said.

Volunteers JoEllen Kill and Mary Houick are both retired teachers

"I think we just want to support education with the children and give them the support they need to be better readers," Kill said. "Plus retired teachers love working with kids."

The program runs for one month in July, 12 weeks in the fall, and 12 weeks in the spring.

"I love it," said Abeer Dabeet, as she came to pick up her child.
COLUMBUS JUNCTION, Iowa - Installing new stop signs at locations around the Columbus School earned the city council some thanks from Columbus Superintendent Gary Benda Wednesday.

They are awesome, Benda told the council.

Before the city put the new signs up, Benda indicated he and other staff had been rolling temporary signs out into the middle of the street. However, residents who had become used to stopping when the signs were in the street have been having some difficulty seeing the new signs on the side of the street.

Benda suggested the city investigate the possibility of installing a flashing light on the new signs.

Ill talk with (Columbus Junction Police Chief) Donnie (Orr). Hopefully people will get used to them, Mayor Dan Wilson said.

The council also received a monthly update from librarian Amanda Grimm.

Grimm said the library board and city officials had recently met to discuss a revised Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulation that was scheduled to go into effect Dec. 1 for overtime pay.

According to Grimm, the regulation will revise the salary threshold for requiring overtime pay for a salaried employee. Grimm said the revised regulation will require overtime pay for any hours she worked over her normal 30 hours per week if the new threshold of $47,476 is not exceeded. Grimm said that is over $20,000 more than she is currently receiving.

Grimm said rather than raising her salary to the threshold, the library board decided to change her from a salaried employee to an hourly employee. That will still mean a boost in her pay because she will be eligible for overtime, but the estimated cost may only be around $10,000, Grimm and other city officials said.

Our budget will look very different, Grimm told the council.

Grimm also said the library was continuing to have good circulation numbers, with October 2016 figures up nearly 40 percent from last years monthly report.

She also reported the library was trying to attract more adults. A book tasting event and Bingo drew some new people, Grimm said.

One problem Grimm reported was the librarys Internet service. She said the Internet had been down for the past three days and over the past six weeks had been lost for nine days.

Up until the last three months we have not had any problem, she said.

Grimm said Mediacom, which provides the Internet, has not yet sent anyone to investigate and that has prompted her to contact Louisa Communications to investigate service from that provider.

In final action, the council reviewed the citys Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 Annual Financial Report.

According to the report, the city ended the fiscal year with total revenues and other sources of $1,946,883 and total expenditures and other uses of $1,858,476, which left a revenue surplus of $88,407.

The beginning budget balance on Jul. 1, 2015 was $364,010 and with the additional revenue surplus from FY16, the ending balance on Jun. 30, 2016 was $452,417.
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 []
The latest MyBroadband speed test results show that BitCo had the fastest average download speed of all fibre-based Internet service providers over the past month.

MyBroadbands speed test servers make use of Ooklas platform and are hosted in Teracos vendor-neutral data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Through NAPAfrica, all network operators at its peering points are provided with a free 1Gbps connection to the MyBroadband speed test platform.

MyBroadband filters speed tests based on network information from Internet service providers to ensure accurate, real-world results.

The table below shows the fibre ISPs with the fastest average download speeds, based on over 20,000 speed tests.
US president-elect Donald Trump is a major fan of Nelson Mandela, but he believes South Africa is a crime-ridden mess that is waiting to explode.

Trump pulled off a surprise victory in the 2016 United States presidential election and is set to become the new US president on 20 January 2017.

Election experts and media houses predicted an easy win for Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton, but Republican Party hopefuls warned that these polls were misleading.

A Trump presidency is not good news for South Africa. Global investment firm Nomura said a Trump win spells uncertainty for markets linked to the United States.

Trump is a controversial figure in the United States and around the world, which is fuelled by his strong statements on Twitter.

He commented on a variety of issues before he was elected president, with South Africa subject to attacks.

Here are some of his comments on Twitter regarding South Africa over the past few years.

1 July 2013  Commenting on US President Barack Obama Power Africa pledge of $7 billion to help to alleviate frequent power blackouts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Every penny of the $7 billion going to Africa as per Obama will be stolen  corruption is rampant!

13 December 2013  Commenting on Thamsanqa Jantjie, the fake sign language interpreter who served at Nelson Mandelas memorial service.

Can you believe that the corrupt and pathetic South Africa police force has yet to arrest the sign language guy. Such danger-give 10 years!

14 December 2013  Commenting on South Africa in general after Nelson Mandelas death.

I really like Nelson Mandela, but South Africa is a crime ridden mess that is just waiting to explode-not a good situation for the people!

28 December 2013  Replying to Proudly SA regarding his previous comment.

@ProudlySA As a major fan of Nelson Mandela and the people of South Africa, all of my statements are made with love. Protect his legacy now

12 September 2014  Commenting on Judge Thokozile Masipa and the Oscar Pistorius murder trial.

The judge in the Oscar Pistorius case is a total moron. She said he didnt act like a killer. This is another O.J. disaster!

21 October 2014  Commenting on Judge Thokozile Masipa sentencing Oscar Pistorius to 5 years imprisonment for culpable homicide.

Oscar Pistorius only gets five years in prison for killing his girlfriend. Ridiculous decision! Judge couldnt even read her own writings.

21 October 2014  Commenting on Judge Thokozile Masipa sentencing Oscar Pistorius to 5 years imprisonment for culpable homicide.

Oscar Pistorius will likely only serve 10 months for the cold blooded murder of his girlfriend. Another O.J. travesty.The judge is a moron!

21 April 2015  Commenting on South Africa.
Oops... This is embarrassing...

We're Sorry, the page you're looking for may have been moved.

Let's help you find the page you were looking for...

First, try using the search form below. Type what you're looking for and search;

If the search forms above won't help you find exactly what you're looking for, perhaps one of the links from our sitemap below will help you;

If you prefer to visit a particular school's information page on this website, please select the school from the form presented on the Myschool Homepage by clicking here.

Sitemap

Home

Store | News | Classroom | Scholarships | Questions | Connect2Me | Marketplace | Events | Groups | Dashboard | Contact Us

Buy Now

Myschool Mobile App | Myschool Computer Software | Post-UTME Past Questions | Project & Research Materials | Video Lessons Subscription

News

Post a News | All News | Latest News | JAMB | O' Level (WAEC, NECO, NABTEB) News | Post-UTME

Classroom

Classroom | Take a Free CBT Test | Topic by Topic Video Lessons | Past Questions Video Lessons | Study Novels | JAMB Novel | JAMB Syllabus | JAMB Brochure

Scholarships

Local Scholarships | International Scholarships | Undergraduate Scholarships | Undergraduate Scholarships | All Scholarships

Questions

Ask a Question | Academic Questions | School-based Questions

Connect2Me

Find a Friend | Update Your Profile | Create an Account

MarketPlace

Buy an Item | Sell an Item

Events

Check all Events | Post an Event

Groups

Join a Group | Create a Group

Dashboard

Dashboard | Notifications | Blog: View Posts | Create Post | Events: View Events | Create Event | Reminders | Private Messages: Inbox Messages | Compose | Sent Messages | Friends: Friend Requests | Confirmed Friends | Sent Requests | Orders: All Orders | Place an Order | App Manager: Mobile App Activation Codes | Desktop App Activation Codes | Mobile App Customization | Desktop App Customization | Materials & Research Works: Post a Research Work | All Research Works | Sales Information | Downloads | Groups: Join a Group | Membership | Create a Group | View Groups | Classroom: Exam History | Performance Analysis | Video Subscription | Bookmark | Questions: View all your Questions | Post a Question | MarketPlace: Post an Advert | All Your Adverts | Transactions: Request Payout | All Transactions | My Account: Update Profile | Change Password | Bank Information | Logout
As Tuesday night wore on and it became increasingly clear that Donald Trump would become our countrys 45th president, Democratic strategist Van Jones articulated how the half of America who did not vote for the Republican nominee might be feeling at that moment. He called the results a nightmare.

Its hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us, the former Obama White House adviser said on CNN. You tell your kids, Dont be a bully. You tell your kids, Dont be a bigot. You tell your kids, Do your homework and be prepared. And then you have this outcome, and you have people putting children to bed tonight, and theyre afraid of breakfast. Theyre afraid of How do I explain this to my children? 

Whatever your political beliefs, this years election battlecovered 24/7 by online news outlets, cable channels and your Twitter feedwas one of the most polarizing and bitter in history. And it ended with a populace that is on edge. Even before the final results, the American Psychological Association said, 52 percent of Americans said the race was a very or somewhat significant source of stress.

Trumps surprise upset over Democrat Hillary Clinton appears, at least anecdotally, to have made the situation worse for many people. Children may be especially vulnerable. Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets are full of reports (some verifiable and some unsubstantiated) about how their anxiety is playing out: kids who are gay or Muslim being too fearful to get on the school bus Wednesday morning. Episodes of bullying in which kids repeated things Trump has said. Children expressing fears about conflict, war and their future.

Daniel Griffin, a psychologist in the Washington areaa Democratic stronghold that supported Clintonsaid in an interview that many patients were walking into his office shellshocked. Griffin, who has been working for more than 30 years in counseling, said many families are reacting as if they had gone through a personal tragedy and that the first thing he reminds parents is that kids really do pick up on parents emotions. So its important to put on a positive face.

Politics is pretty complicated, and their parents emotional expression is what kids rely on just to say if a situation is safe and manageable or whether its a catastrophe, he explained.

Griffin also said that parents need not excuse or minimize behavior or remarks by Trump that dont conform to their value system but could instead explain that how theres a system of checks and balances in the country so that the government is more than a single person.

Its impossible to shield most kids from this, but you should marshal the reserves to normalize the situation, he said. Explain that weve been through many many difficult things in the history of this country and well get through this one.

Similarly, Michael W. Yogman, a pediatrician in Cambridge, Mass. and the chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on psychosocial aspects of child and family health, said the most important message a parent can give to a child is that we as adults will protect you.

There are democratic processes in this country and institutions that will protect all Americans and not allow bigotry to take over. That includes children with same-sex parents, gay children, disabled children and minority children, he said, describing how one African American boy came in with the heartbreaking worry that all African Americans might be jailed or deported and wondered what might happen if he changed the color of his skin.

Yogman said that in such situations, parents might consider borrowing from President Barack Obamas message about the values at the heart of the American democracy being bigger than whomever is elected.

Griffin advises parents to keep their initial sharing Twitter-sized, meaning that they dont need to get into all the details of why they are upset, but to offer some information, watch the childs response and then follow his or her natural curiosity. Young children may have already picked up on a parents fears that may have translated into their own. For older children, teens or college students, it can help to get others in the community involved as they deal with their feelings.

Especially around here in Washington, there are a lot of sources. If a child has a strong emotional feeling, they can share some of this concern with other folks over breakfast or dinner or something like that and get other perspectives, he said.

Another idea parents can emphasize is that even children have the power to make a difference in their lives and in the lives of others. Children have a choice and dont need to be quiet and live in fear when they feel like something is wrongwhether they are being bullied or discriminated against or mean to, Yogman said.

Griffin said parents could tell their children that its okay to be vulnerable and have feelings and worries, but here is something you can do something about.

It is important for them to know we live in a participatory democracy, he said. Depending on the issue that concerns a particular child, a course of action may involve things like creating a petition or writing a letter to a member of Congressor even to the president-elect himself.
Napa County wants to hear from the public as it begins planning how to turn its former Health and Human Services Agency campus into a housing site.

It will hold a community meeting at 6:30 p.m. Monday at Harvest Middle School, 2449 Old Sonoma Road. That is a few blocks from the now-vacant, 8.6-acre Health and Human Services campus that will be the topic of the planning effort.

County supervisors at their Oct. 18 meeting reaffirmed they want housing to be built on the site. But a host of questions remain, such as how dense the housing should be, what ratio of housing should be market rate and low-income and whether the site should include stores.

Also at stake is the fate of the sites iconic, crescent-shaped driveway and three century-old buildings along it.

The county is working with MIG consultants on the project. Its goal is to create a master plan for the site by March, finish environmental studies by early 2018, win approvals from the city of Napa in spring 2018 and sell the site to a developer.
This is the question I plan to ask the governors of the various states that will be affected by the proposed Energy Transfer Partners pipeline.

How does a private pipeline company deserve to have security forces, from seven states, using military equipment and weapons on unarmed people? Isn't that against the law and yet the law is actually doing it with impunity. We taxpayers need to see the bill (from the beginning until the present) on how much this mockery of justice is costing us.

Thankfully, through the amazing technology of social media, the circumstances of those at Standing Rock have been brought to light. No longer can those responsible, starting with the infamous officials of the Energy Transfer Partners and on through the president, the governors of the seven states and the law enforcers are now being brought to light in vivid videos.

Worse is the fact that because of the impurities, this oil is considered too dirty for U.S. consumption. So if the pipe line leaks into the Missouri River and contaminates the water supply, we only reap the damage and not the benefit.

Not just North Dakota could be affected: Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wyoming could have serious consequences if the line leaks.

Not just the need of keeping the water source pure but even more honoring the integrity and the commitment of a people who have long been ignored and for centuries have been treated as less than human. Originally, the pipeline was supposed to go through Bismarck but because of the opposition (NIMBY), it was rerouted to Standing Rock.

Recently, Richard Hazeltine wrote an excellent letter entitled, "What if America was truly great?"

He started with, "I wonder how different America (or we, the people) would be if our forefathers had not overrun the native population and destroyed their culture when they invaded the land." I totally agree with the rest of his letter and he ends with how we need, "a vision that involves sacrifice and risk and a people who can look beyond their own interests. A nation that values people above everything else -- all people."

Sir Rabindranath Tagore once wrote; Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high. Where knowledge is free; where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action-into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

Teresa Cahill

Napa
In 1983, while working at The Water Club in New York, Roy Hersh was introduced to the 1963 Sandeman Port. Sommelier Sam Correnti had purchased the 1963 Sandeman Port and whenever he opened a bottle, he would call me in for the decanting, Hersh recalled.

Correnti would decant the Port, pouring it through a cheesecloth to catch the sediment. He would take the cheese cloth, with the sediment, and strain some into my mouth. Tasting this 20-year old vintage Port, Hersh was hooked.

Hersh, who holds both culinary and hospitality degrees and has worked in the restaurant industry in New York, Colorado, Virginia, Washington DC, Miami and Washington, spent the next 11 years saving up money to go overseas for the first time. His first trip was to Portugal in May 1994 and since then he has been there more than 30 times.

Throughout this time, Hersh promoted Port wine, introducing it to many restaurants on both coasts, hosting tastings, and in 2000, Hersh began writing about Port and Madeira for the website WineLoversPage.com.

As a leading promoter of Port wine, Hersh was inducted into the Confraria do Vinho do Porto, or Porto Wine Brotherhood, in 2003. Hersh was one of only two Americans enthroned that year.

The Confraria do Vinho do Porto was established in November 1982 to promote Port wine, the sweet red, fortified wine produced exclusively in the Douro Valley in the northern provinces of Portugal. The Brotherhood recognizes those who work in Port wine companies as well as journalists, retailers and advocates who work to share their passion for Port wine both locally and internationally.

The Brotherhood is led by a five-person group that includes the Chanceler (Chancellor, the senior representative in the Confraria), the Almoxarife (Administrator), the Coperio-Mor (Head-Cupbearer), the Almotace (Treasurer) and the Fiel das Usancas (Warden of Usages). Members of the Confraria are known as Confrades (Brothers), of which there are three ranks. Cancelario (Vice-Chancellor) is given to Heads of State; Infancao (Nobleman) is given to notable people or institutions who make a significant contribution to the promotion and prestige of Port, of who otherwise merit distinction; Cavaleiro (Knight) is given to those who have made a significant contribution to the understanding and prestige of Port Wine.

After taking his oath to Port in 2003, Hersh quit his day job in the hospitality industry and created the first For The Love Of Port newsletter in February 2004. Hersh met Stewart Todd later that year and with Hershs ideas and content and Todds knowledge of computers and website development, they launched the For The Love Of Port (FTLOP) website in July 2005.

For The Love Of Port is an independent, interactive website that is first and foremost focused on Port wine, but also includes Madeira and non-fortified wines from all regions in Portugal.

Other features of the website are the Forum, which has more than 4,600 members and nearly 115,000 posts. FTLOP offers a vast user-driven Tasting Note Database, including nearly 10,000 from their participants and an additional 3,500-plus of Roy Hershs tasting notes.

Hundreds of articles, photos and videos on Port, Madeira and Douro wines are available in the archives, including comprehensive reports on specific Port vintages and a detailed vintage chart.

The FTLOP Newsletter, which currently has more than 5,000 opt-in recipients and subscribers from 78 countries, is launching its 90th issue in this month. For The Love Of Port also organizes tours to Portugal, offering guests opportunities to experience insider expeditions and learn about the wines, food and viticulture.

For The Love Of Port has built a global community with Port Wine Clubs across Europe and North America. Hersh explains, increasing this Port community is our raison detre and what drives us to be the worlds leading independent Port wine website.

Last month, the Confraria do Vinho do Porto was in Seattle and San Francisco to induct new members. Joining Hersh in the Brotherhood as Cavaleiros are FTLOP colleagues Stewart Todd, vice president of Technology, and Andy Velebil, forum moderator.

Todd, based in Seattle, is in the midst of developing a new website with Hersh and teaches classes on Port wine; Velebil, based in California, also hold classes on Port wine and moderates the FTLOP forum.

In addition, For The Love Of Port was enthroned in the Brotherhood as an Infancao (Nobleman). FTLOP is the first non-human entity brought into the Confraria and recognized for its work as an educator and promoter of port wine for more than a decade.

This is a significant honor, as Roy Hersh noted: When learning that the website, For The Love Of Port, was selected as the first ever social media entity to be inducted into the Confraria (attributed the rank of Honarary Confrade), especially at the level of Infancao (Nobleman), it was a very humbling moment. Having dedicated my service in honor of my original oath to the Confraria do Vinho do Porto (2003), For The Love Of Port has been my lifes work. I am grateful for this recognition and it is dedicated to our team that has successfully made FTLOP the most innovative and active Port website in the world.

FTLOP has introduced hundreds of thousands of people to port, madeira and now all the wine regions of Portugal. If you want to learn more about these wines or are looking to travel to Portugal, check out www.fortheloveofport.com.
TRENTO, ITALY  Located in northeastern Italy, and bordered by the tip of Lake Garda to the south, and the Alto Adige and the Italian Alps to the north, the Trentino is a fascinating region of Italy.

The River Adige bisects the region with a fertile valley, called the Vallegarina (valley of the little lakes) and has been traveled for millennia by people coming over and through the Alpine Brenner Pass. Referred to as the doorway to Italy, travelers and traders passed through this area down in to the heart of Italy and points south. The majestic Dolomite Mountains tower over the valleys and form the backbone of Trentino.

The region has been fought over many times, and became part of Austria in 1815, where it was renamed South Tyrol. This infuriated the Italians who yearned for the return of the region.

In 1915, as World War I raged throughout Europe, Italy broke its treaty with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and attacked the entrenched Austrian Army, attempting to regain control of the Trentino.

This deadlocked mountainous war lasted four years. The bloody and senseless campaign cost the lives of hundreds and thousands of men (mostly on the Italian side) with little or no territory retaken. At the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of the Great War, the victorious Allies (which included Italy) gave the Trentino and other northern areas back to the Italians.

Even today, in the northern portions of the Trentino bordering the Alto Adige region, German is spoken widely. The people living in this scenic and mountainous area are more modest and reserved than in many other portions of Italy. Its a mix of European, Germanic and Italian sensibilities.

Today, grapegrowing is widespread in Trentino in the valleys, in small towns and up on the many hills and mountains. Grapes such as pinot grigio and International varieties including chardonnay, cabernet and merlot are popular, while local grape varieties such as marzemino and teroldego can be sampled.

The calcareous minerals of the Dolomites produce soils in this region that are very similar to those found in Champagne, France. (The Dolomite Mountains are named for the predominate type of calcareous rock found there, dolomite.

This discovery led some early vintners to replicate the Methode Champenoise type of sparkling wine found in Champagne. Although there were a few dating to 19th century, but sparkling wine production in Trentino can really trace its roots back to 1902, when Giulio Ferrari produced some 200 bottles of fine bubbly using traditional techniques such as secondary fermentation. Here, they call the process Metodo Classico.

Trentodoc is an Italian Wine Institute and consortium, which was founded in 1985. In 1993 it received official D.O.C. recognition and today there are 45 producers making only sparkling wines. This mountainous region surrounded by the Dolomite Mountains is beautiful but relatively cool, with chalky soils. There are big temperature swings due to the snows from the mountains; though summers are hot with cool nights. Grapes here struggle and tend to exhibit adequate sugar content with high acidity.

An important distinction to make concerning the sparkling wines of Trentodoc is that these wines are not prosecco. That type of sparkling wine is produced using the quick and inexpensive Chamat method, and compared to Trentodoc wines, proseccos are much simpler, sweeter, less expensive and mass produced. Some 300 million bottles of prosecco sold annually, where only around 12 million bottles are produced in all of Trentodoc. The Dolomites tower over the vineyards and small towns, offering stunning visuals. Most wineries blend grapes from higher vineyards with some from lower altitude vineyards such as those nearer to Lake Garda. These blends produce complexity.

Only four grapes varieties are allowed in the Trentodoc region for sparkling wines. Chardonnay is the most widely planted, then pinot noir, pinot blanc and pinot meunier, though the last two are in small quantities. Another distinctive factor is the use of the pergola vine training system.

I sampled many excellent Trentodoc sparklers during my visit. One of the best is called Flavio, a special cuvee made by Rotari, a large state-of-the-art winemaking co-op. With five years on the lees, Flavio is oh so smooth, creamy and memorable. It reminded me of Krug Grand Cuvee Champagne. Quore Riserva, made by Letrari, a family-run business is another clear winner. Made from 100 percent chardonnay grapes, its on sur lees for 60 months and offers a delightful bouquet of freshness with a complex flavor profile and powerful finish.

The Altemasi di Cavit Graal Riserva Brut was an excellent Brut, clean and complex while the Rotari Brut was another tasty Brut that hits the mark. Various wines are produced as Zero, or sans dosage. My favorite in this category turned out to be the Ferrari Perle Nero Riserva. This wine exhibits clean lines with a hint of nuttiness, and a long finish. The Revi Rose Brut was a standout in its category, fresh and bright. All in all these Wines from the Mountains delver elegant texture, freshness, complexity, and tiny bubbles that will satisfy discerning palates.

When I visited recently, I stayed both Trento and Rovereto, a few miles to the South. And in this part of the world, its curious how history can affect the present day. For instance, opposed to the Hapsburg Monarchy ruling Trento, Rovereto was ruled by Venice beginning in 1411. You can see Venetian styles in the architecture and the people in this town are proud of their Venetian heritage. Incidentally, the Castle of Rovereto houses an impressive Italian War History Museum with emphasis on World War I. A cave in the lower portion of the museum, accessible from the outside displays a large array of massive and frightful artillery pieces uses in the Great War.

If in the area, the Casa del Vino Della Vallagarina near Rovereto boasts the largest Trentodoc and Trento area wine list of any restaurant in Italy. A lovely restored building; this hotel/restaurant has great views, cuisine and of course wines.

Trentodoc sparkling wines are food-friendly, excellent sparklers guaranteed to impress. These Bollicine di Montagnes or Bubbles for the Mountains compare favorably to many Champagnes, but at a much less expensive price. Seek them out or better yet, plan a trip to this alluring part of Italy.
MELBOURNE, Florida  A Brevard County woman was dragged along a gas station parking lot when she attempted to stop a thief from stealing her car in Melbourne, Florida.





(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});





30-year-old Brandy Johnson had pulled into a Chevron gas station located at the intersection of Babcock Street and Brevard Avenue on Sunday, November 6, 2016. When Johnson left her vehicle to go inside to the Food Mart, a man lurking nearby walked up to the vehicle, opened the door, and sat in the drivers seat.





Video shows Johnson running out of the store to intercept the car thief. However, the man reversed the car while Johnsons arms were through the open window, which caused her to be dragged across the parking lot. Bystanders also attempted to help stop the auto theft, but the man was undeterred and drove away with the vehicle.




One morning in March of this year, Matt Barnes was on the porch of his home on a rural 10-acre parcel of land near Cartersville, Georgia, cutting lumber for a remodeling project. In the distance, he could hear gunfire not unusual for that area due to hunting and recreational shooting. But on this particular day, the gunshots continued, unrelenting, throughout the day.

That month marked 11 years since Barnes was discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps, and more than a dozen since he stepped on the airplane that would bring him home after nearly a year on the front lines of the war in Iraq. Yet each rifle crack that day brought the memories closer.

My anxiety just started getting higher and higher," says Barnes, who finally took a break for dinner with his wife, Crystal, and his mother-in-law. "When we came back, I was fine. I went back out on the porch, cutting wood, and shots start getting fired again. I dont remember anything after that."

Some time later the women noticed he was gone from the porch and began to search for him.

Crystal and her mom found me in the barn. I had kicked the door in, I had my .45, and I was clearing rooms, Barnes says, referring to the military close-quarters combat practice of checking the interior rooms of buildings for threats. I dont remember any of it. The first thing I remember after being on the porch was her mom touching me on the shoulder and saying, Matt, give me the gun. 

Though he had suffered symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since before leaving Iraq and had been discharged from the Marines for drug use little more than a year after returning from overseas, Barnes had never sought treatment.

During years of nightmares and unpredictable mood swings; substance abuse; violent arguments with two ex-spouses; and avoidance of social situations, friends, and family, he chalked it all up to stress and bad relationships.

I didnt think I had an issue, I just thought I was an asshole, Barnes says candidly.

After the incident in the barn, Barness family encouraged him to seek help for what they were sure was PTSD, but he wasnt sure where to go. On a visit to the Wounded Warrior Projects website a few days later, Barnes saw a link for the Warrior Care Network, an initiative launched in June 2015 to meet the needs of thousands of post9/11 veterans suffering from PTSD and traumatic brain injury regardless of geographic location or ability to pay.

It was by pure miracle I saw that link, says Barnes, who applied to the program and was referred to the Emory Veterans Program (EVP), one of four national centers that are part of the Warrior Care Network.

View Full Story in Emory Magazine 
Anthropologist David Nugent, South African ethnomusicologist Brett Pyper and global diabetes research administrator Mark Hutcheson have been named the 2016 recipients of the prestigious awards presented each year by Emorys Office of Global Strategy and Initiatives.

This years award winners have not only demonstrated outstanding commitment to global understanding in their own careers, theyve also empowered many others to pursue meaningful work across the globe, says Philip Wainwright, vice provost for global strategy and initiatives at Emory.

Its gratifying to see how they have amplified that commitment beyond their individual spheres, whether it be enabling researchers to improve health outcomes in South Asia or training students to become international development leaders in Latin America," he says.

Nugent, Pyper and Hutcheson will be recognized at International Awards Night on Nov. 17 at the Emory Conference Center Hotel. The invitation-only event is part of International Education Week, which features a variety of events Nov. 14-18.

Creekmore Award for Internationalization

Nugent, an anthropology professor, will receive the Marion V. Creekmore Award, which is given to an Emory faculty member who advances the university's commitment to internationalization.

He is the founding director Emorys Masters in Development Practice (MDP) program, which combines cross-disciplinary academic study with field experience in global settings. In this role, he has expanded Emorys network of strategic partnerships with leading international development organizations, including CARE, Oxfam and Heifer International, as well as federal agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development. Last summer the program sent students abroad for 10-week field practicums with 21 organizations in 25 countries.

Mentored and trained by Professor Nugent, MDP graduates constitute a cohort of emerging leaders who are at the forefront of the struggle to eliminate structural inequalities, promote global cooperation and foster respect for human dignity among diverse peoples of the world, said Carla Roncoli, associate director of the program.

Nugent is also co-principal investigator of the Communities of Practice initiative at Emorys Laney Graduate School, which began this fall. Funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the pilot program aims to better incorporate global skills into doctoral education.

Nugent began his research career in the northern Peruvian Andes, where he studied regional patterns of economic growth and stagnation. Over the course of three decades, he has also conducted field research on the impact of land privatization on farming communities in Kenya, the environmental management practices of Inuit people in the Canadian arctic, and indigenous land and water rights in the western United States.

Sheth Distinguished International Alumnus

Pyper will receive the Sheth Distinguished International Alumni Award, which recognizes international alumni who have distinguished themselves through service to universities, governments or the private sector. He earned a master of arts from Laney Graduate School in 2000, having arrived from South Africa as a Fulbright Scholar.

He is now head of the Wits School of the Arts at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. An ethnomusicologist by training, Pyper was previously CEO of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival and founding chair of the South African Society for Research in Music.

Bretts interdisciplinary efforts have engaged people from all areas of society  scholars, artists, activists and government officials  to advance South African public discourse, particularly around complex issues of culture, history and memory, says Lisa Tedesco, dean of Laney Graduate School. He is a stellar example of the benefits of international engagement and the caliber of Emory graduates who work to change our world."

International Outreach Award

Hutcheson will receive the International Outreach Award, which recognizes Emory staff who have made significant contributions to the internationalization of the university, as well as international professional networks in their fields.

He is managing director of the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center (EGDRC), where he oversees all research and training activities. He has played a key role in developing partnerships with leading health research institutions in India and Pakistan, the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia and collaborators in Malawi and Denmark.

Mark embodies Emory's spirit of ethical engagement, interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, and improving the lives of people globally, said K.M. Venkat Narayan, Ruth and O.C. Hubert Chair of Global Health and director of EGDRC.

During his nine years at Emory, Hutcheson has helped grow strategic programs such as the Fogarty Global Health Fellowship Program, the Center for Cardiometabolic Risk Reduction in South Asia and the Public Health and Leadership Implementation Academy. Together the programs have trained more than 200 investigators from around the world and led to $25 million in research funding.
His collapsible white-tipped cane leading the way, Jesse James Jones, Jr., wasnt sure what to expect when he tentatively entered the Starbucks coffee shop across from Ponce City Market on Monday afternoon.

With soft lighting and light jazz music  punctuated by the hiss of an espresso machine  it felt like a far cry from a traditional law office, the Veterans Administration (VA) or any of the other resources Jones might visit to seek help filing a claim for military disability benefits.

Seated at a long table with her laptop, Keely Youngblood 16L rose to meet him.

For Youngblood, a recent Emory Law School graduate who is one of the two full-time AmeriCorps legal fellows who helps supervise nearly two dozen law student volunteers with the Emory Law Volunteer Clinic for Veterans (VCV), this is a satellite office. And twice a month the coffee shop hosts Military Mondays  a laidback, walk-in clinic intended to lend U.S. service veterans answers, advice and encouragement.

But mostly, she gives hope.

Founded in 2013, the Emory VCV provides pro bono legal services for U.S. veterans and their families, assisting them with negotiating the often-overwhelming bureaucracy of seeking disability benefit claims before both the VA and subsequent appeals proceedings.

Through the support of the Military-Veterans Section of the Georgia Bar Association and the Military Legal Assistance Program, the student-run clinic was launched to provide free legal assistance to area veterans struggling to find their way in the system.

Many have moved back into civilian life with service-related injuries, including post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, that can create barriers to self-advocacy. Others also grapple with legal issues related to their disability claims, discharge upgrades or other civil matters.

We can help," says Drew Early, an Atlanta attorney and co-director of the VCV who teaches veterans law as an adjunct professor at the Emory School of Law.

I work with smart, eager students and local attorneys who volunteer their time to respond to a tremendous need in the state thats not being met by conventional procedures, which can be ponderous and overwhelming, says Early, who is himself a West Point graduate and retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel.

Clinic impacts veterans, students

To date, the student-run clinic has assisted with 158 cases, aiding in the recovery of some $4.7 million in expected lifetime benefits for its clients, who range from World War II veterans and their spouses to those only recently discharged from active duty.

Georgia has 776,000 veterans by the VAs count, says Early. When you add to that active-duty military in the nine different bases in Georgia, and family members, there are potentially about 2 million people out there who could be eligible for VA benefits  yet there is only one VA office in the state to handle all of that.

Not only is the clinic impacting the lives of veterans and their families, its also providing valuable first-hand experience to Emory law students, along with a chance to network with and learn alongside lawyers from some of Atlantas top firms.

Overall, its reflective of Emory, says Early. This is the Law Schools 100th year and our motto is 100 Years of Public Service.

Through the clinic, students see how they can make a difference and why its important, he adds. And it also helps them understand how to deal with bureaucracies and administrative agencies in order to get things done.

For volunteers like Youngblood, an Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellow, the chance to make a difference in the lives of veterans has had a profound personal impact.

Veterans law is a quickly-evolving field with a lot of room for nuanced arguments and legal creativity, Youngblood says. In my position as a fellow, I get to see students grow more empowered by the day as they learn to take ownership of their legal analysis, and I get to see veterans grow more empowered when they come to the clinic and find energetic people ready to listen.

"The clinic gives me the resources to do good work for my own clients while also developing relationships with students and attorneys in the community," she says. "It makes it easy to roll up my sleeves and get to work every day."

The experience has also offered an illuminating post-graduate education into the litany of diseases that veterans can face as a result of Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam to how prevalent PTSD among that community really is, she adds.

Though discouraged by the barriers that veterans and their families routinely face, Youngblood finds the work motivating.

Seeing clients get back on their feet after a hard knock with humor and optimism, as many of them can do with just a little help, makes me a better lawyer and a better person, she says.

Building bridges

As president of the Georgia regional chapter of Blinded Veterans Association, Jones first heard of the Emory VCV at a state conference in April that was attended by Mallory Ball 15L, the clinics other AmeriCorps legal fellow.

Jones decided to drop into the Military Monday walk-in clinic this week in part for his own disability claims questions, but also to test the system for fellow veterans, who lost their vision or have had it adversely impacted as a result of service injuries and exposures.

I was curious to go there first, before recommending it to others, in order to assess first-hand how things work, he said. The experience was great, definitely more than I hoped for.

Nursing a free cup of coffee from Starbucks, Jones worked with the young attorney for nearly an hour, then stayed on to help her consult another visually impaired veteran.

Youngblood patiently asked questions and gathered facts, strategically going over critical points that might have been missed at a service office for veterans, observed Jones, who served in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves in the late 1970s until receiving an honorable discharge in 1983.

From the records I had, it appears that I have some hope that I could be awarded for my claims, Jones said. Not knowing the law, Keely was giving me some hope.

For Youngblood, there is value in that.

When veterans are reintegrating to society I think they have a really long bridge to build, she says. Sometimes it feels no one is available to help them.

"The clinic cannot build the whole bridge, but I do think the clinic uses its resources well to help veterans lay a lot of the bricks," she says. If we can do that well, lead them where they need to be to take ownership of their lives, I think that is important and rewarding.
21:24

Turkey's military killed 18 Islamic State terrorists in northern Syria over the last 24 hours, the army said, intensifying strikes against the militant group.





Four buildings and one vehicle used by the Islamic State fighters were destroyed in the strikes, an army statement said.





Separately, five Turkey-backed rebels and five Islamic State militants were killed in clashes on the ground, the army said in its statement. In addition, it said coalition forces conducted six air strikes which killed another 10 Islamic State militants.





Turkey is backing a group of Syrian Arabs and Turkmen in northern Syria in its Euphrates Shield operation, which has swept Islamic State from its southern border.





The hardline Sunni group claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack in the Turkish southeastern city of Diyarbakir that killed 11 last week.
Pakistan's envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi deposited the "Instrument of Ratification" signed by the President of Pakistan, a Foreign Office statement said on Friday.

"With the ratification, Pakistan has become 104th country to ratify the agreement, which entered into force earlier this month," the statement said. Pakistan had signed the agreement on the first day of its opening for signature in New York in April this year.

The ratification by Pakistan corresponds with the ongoing Marrakech Climate Change Conference, which was formed to take important decisions for the comprehensive implementation of the Paris Agreement.

On October 5 the conditions for the agreement's entry into force were met which required ratification by at least 55 countries, accounting for 55 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

The agreement obliges member states to keep global warming below 2 degrees centigrade - regarded as the threshold for safety by experts and scientists.

Pakistan's ratification is in line with its firm commitment to the purposes and objectives of the Climate Convention. It also highlights the resolve of Pakistan to remain fully committed to the implementation of the Paris Agreement, the statement said.

India on October 2 became the 62nd country to ratify the agreement.

--IANS ahm/rn

( 247 Words)

2016-11-11-13:16:04 (IANS)
A Pakistani opposition party lawmaker has submitted a resolution in the Senate to withdraw 1,000 and 5,000 rupee notes from circulation in the country to tackle corruption, citing the example of India where Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered withdrawal of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation. The resolution submitted by Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Senator Osman Saifullah Khan comes at a time when Pakistan's population is gradually shifting to cash economy due to the government's ill-conceived taxation policies, said Express News. "The house urges the government to take steps to withdraw from circulation as legal tender the high denomination Rs 5,000 and 1,000 notes so as to reduce illicit money flows, encourage the use of bank accounts and reduce the size of undocumented economy," reads the resolution. This is the only way that will compel people to use banking channels and launch a crackdown on black money circulating in the economy, said Khan, speaking at a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Finance on Thursday. However, Committee Chairman Senator Saleem Mandviwalla underlined the need for taking the views of all stakeholders. The General Pervez Musharraf-led government had introduced the Rs 5,000 denomination notes despite resistance from the State Bank of Pakistan. The notes made it easy for the people to keep cash instead of depositing money in banks. Referring to India as an example, he added that the world over such notes were being discouraged. In a dramatic blitz on tax evasion, the Indian Prime Minister ordered the move. In India, banks and cash machines were ordered to close on Wednesday in preparation for the turnaround, triggering a late night rush by customers to withdraw smaller notes from ATMs. Senator Khan said that the issue of withdrawal of currency notes should be taken up with the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank. --IANS ahm/rn ( 320 Words) 2016-11-11-12:40:03 (IANS)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday described Japan as a valuable partner in India's journey to prosperity and capacity building after the two countries signed the landmark civil nuclear agreement. "Japan has always been a valuable partner in India's journey to economic prosperity, infrastructure development, capacity building and technology advancement," Modi said at a banquet hosted in his honour by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe following the annual bilateral summit between the two countries. "The scope and scale of our cooperation extends to diverse fields," he said. The civil nuclear agreement, along with nine other agreements, were signed following Friday's delegation-level talks headed by Modi and Abe. Modi said that the India-Japan Special Strategic and Global Partnership was marked by a growing convergence of economic and strategic issues. "There is also a lot that we can do together as close partners, not just for the benefit of our societies, but also for the region and the whole world," he said. The Prime Minister said that "together with the global community we can, and we must, combat the rising threats of radicalisation, extremism and terrorism". Stating that economic links between the two countries continued to flourish, he said: "Trade ties continue to grow. And, investments from Japan are on the rise. Japanese companies have much to gain by participating in our flagship development initiatives. We, in turn, have much to gain from Japan's unparalleled status as the leader in technology and innovation." Modi also described the increase in contacts and cooperation between states in India and the prefectures of Japan as "a welcome feature of our ties". "It is a reflection of the high priority that we accord to Japan in our worldview," he said. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the state government of Gujarat and Hyogo prefectural government of Japan was among the agreements signed following Friday's summit. Stating that the destinies of India and Japan were interlinked, Modi said: "The ocean waters of the Indo-Pacific that lap the coast of Japan also form the surf that breaks on the shores of India. Let us work together for peace, prosperity and development." Friday's was the eighth meeting between Modi and Abe in the last two years. It was his second visit to Japan after he became Prime Minister. --IANS ab/bg ( 393 Words) 2016-11-11-17:58:03 (IANS)
With the seventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) bringing together delegates from almost every country across the world to India, a team of international experts has warned that any attempt to limit the choice of e-cigarettes to consumers would be a huge mistake and do untold harm to millions of smokers. "Much of the campaign against e-cigarettes has been driven by emotion and ideology, not evidence," said Riccardo Polosa, Director of the Institute for Internal and Emergency Medicine at University of Catania in Italy. Several studies have, in fact, shown that electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), of which e-cigarettes are the most common prototype, can help smokers quit and they are significantly less harmful than combustible cigarettes, according to the experts. "In reality, no one is dying from this product," Polosa said. The seventh session of the Conference of the Parties that has brought together the WHO FCTC's 180 Parties is being held in Greater Noida from November 7-12. "There are widespread rumours in social media that delegations of countries with little or no experience on the topic are driving an agenda to prohibit ENDS," Polosa and his colleagues said in a statement. "Such a course of action would be a huge mistake and do untold harm to millions of smokers. We hope these rumours are untrue and do not reflect the current climate and the real intentions of WHO COP7 delegates. ENDS represent the greatest opportunity in generations to prevent and reduce the harm of smoking," the statement added. Julian Morris, Vice President of Research at US-based non-profit Reason Foundation, emphasised that smokers need to have wide range of harm-reduction choices. Konstantinos Farsalinos, a research fellow at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Athens, Greece, and Christopher Russell, a behavioural psychologist and senior research fellow at the Centre for Substance Use Research, Glasgow, Scotland were other signatories of the statement. Athens, Greece, and at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Patras, Greece. "Many states in India have banned the use of e-cigarettes without any evidence on their adverse effects," Morris, who co-authored the paper "The Vapour Revolution: How Bottom Up Innovation is Saving Lives" with economist Amir Ullah Khan, noted. "In India, there is hardly any data on the extent of e-cigarette use. How is it possible to assess the impact of the product without any local data and surveillance?" Morris asked. Experts who have assessed vapour produced by heating e-liquids in a vape device have found that it contains only a tiny fraction of the number of chemicals in tobacco smoke -- and most of those chemicals are harmless, Morris and Khan noted in the paper. Although not binding, the World Health Organization and its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) exert considerable influence on domestic policies towards tobacco in many countries, and therefore the conference should include all stakeholders to encourage detailed deliberation and transparent decision-making, the experts pointed out. --IANS gb/vm ( 507 Words) 2016-11-11-11:16:06 (IANS)
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday questioned the resignation of the president of the Punjab unit of the Congress party, Captain Amarinder Singh, from the 16th Lok Sabha moments after the Supreme Court ruling declared a 2004 law passed by the state assembly to deny Sutlej Yamuna Link Canal water to Haryana as illegal and unconstitutional. "Has anyone seen Captain Amarinder Singh in the Lok Sabha? A person who has not gone to the Lok Sabha automatically becomes eligible for resignation. He should have been dismissed, he has just done some face saving exercise," Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment and BJP MP Vijay Sampla told ANI here. "About the Punjab MLAs, their term was about to get over by next month, that is why this is a drama," he added. Sampla also blamed the Congress for being the root cause of the water sharing problem. "When the SYL was constructed by Indira Gandhi, then Captain Amarinder Singh was prominently behind it,"Sampla added. Post his resignation from the Lok Sabha, Captain Amarinder Singh has sought a personal meeting with the speaker next week. Congress MLAs have also sent their resignations to the Speaker of the Punjab Assembly, and will meet him this morning to personally hand over their letters. The Supreme Court held as unconstitutional the 2004 law passed by Punjab to terminate the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water sharing agreement with neighbouring states. In his resignation letter, Captain Amarinder said he had decided to quit as a member of the 16th Lok Sabha from Amritsar constituency in Punjab with immediate effect "as a mark of protest against the deprivation of the people of my state of the much-needed Sutlej river water. The Centre had said that it was having a neutral stand in the matter in which the court has recorded the stand of Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir(ANI)
The Supreme Court will today hear an appeal filed by the December 16 Nirbhaya gang rape convicts, who have moved to top court challenging their death sentence. The death sentence of four of the convicts- Akshay, Vinay Sharma, Pawan and Mukesh was upheld by the Delhi High Court. They had challenged their death sentence awarded by the Delhi High Court in the Supreme Court. In the last hearing on November 7, the top court' amicus curiae in the case, Raju Ramachandran, has asked the apex court to set aside the death penalty awarded to the accused. In his written submissions, the senior advocate listed six fundamental errors committed by the trial court while awarding death sentences, including not taking the mitigating circumstances of the accused persons into consideration and not hearing them in person on their punishment. Amicus curiae refers to someone who is not a party to the case but volunteers to offer information on a point of law or some other aspect of the case to assist the court in deciding a matter before it. The top court had on April 4 begun final hearing of the convicts' appeal almost two years after staying their execution. Two of the four death-row convicts had written to Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justice Deepak Misra, stating that they do not approve of the defence counsel appointed by the court to argue their case before the top court as they had given statements against them to the media in the past. The trial court had in September 2013 awarded death sentences to the convicts. Six months later, the Delhi High Court upheld their conviction and sentence. All the convicts moved the apex court in 2014, which stayed their execution. Six people, including a juvenile, had brutally assaulted the woman in a moving bus in South Delhi. Later, the accused threw out the victim and her male friend at an isolated spot. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29, 2012, triggering nation-wide protests that resulted in giving more teeth to laws related to rape and other forms of sexual harassment. (ANI)
While pollution is directly threatening the physical health however it is bad for your complexion also as it is adversely affecting your skin and can cause skin irritants premature ageing, wrinkles, loss of elasticity, dark patches and spots chemical pollutants in air also disrupt the normal balances of the skin and scalp, leading to problems like dryness, sensitivity, rashes, acne, irritative or allergic reactions, dandruff and related conditions. They also make the skin and hair dull, lacking vitality. However the good news is that Its easy to get back to blooming by taking ayurvedic home remedies and also planting ancient house plants to purify the air and remove toxins, making the air safe for us as such plants actually absorb harmful gases and clean the air inside our homes. The skin is the first to bear the brunt of air pollutants, which not only attack the skin surface, but also lead to an accumulation of toxins. In fact, they are potent skin irritants. There are both long and short term effects of pollutants. Firecrackers also add to the chemicals in the air, which are potent skin irritants. Chemical pollutants cause oxidation damage and this can lead to the manifestation of premature ageing signs on the skin, like wrinkles, loss of elasticity, dark patches and spots, etc. Chemical pollutants also disrupt the normal balances of the skin and scalp, leading to problems like dryness, sensitivity, rashes, acne, irritative or allergic reactions, dandruff and related conditions. They also make the skin and hair dull, lacking vitality. Cleansing of the skin assumes more importance in order to get rid of the impurities and pollutants that are deposited on the skin. If you have a dry skin, use a cleansing cream or gel. For oily skins, cleansing milk or face wash may be used. Look out for products with ingredients like Sandalwood, Eucalyptus, Mint, Neem, Tulsi, Aloe vera, etc., when you buy cosmetic products. The anti-toxic and tonic properties of such ingredients have helped in clearing skin congestion and eruptions that result from exposure to chemical pollutants. Aloe vera, for example, is also a powerful moisturizer, relieving dryness and making the skin healthy and soft. So are ingredients like apricot kernel oil, carrot seed, wheatgerm oil, etc. Anti-pollution cosmetics help to provide protection and reduce the damage caused by pollutants. These are basically "cover creams" that form a barrier between the skin and pollutants. Sandalwood protective cream, is very useful for this very purpose. It forms a transparent protective cover. Sandalwood soothes the skin and protects it from irritative reactions and eruptive conditions. It suits all skin types and increases the skin's moisture retention ability too. Pollutants also collect on the scalp. Mix one teaspoon each of vinegar and aloe vera gel with one egg. Massage the mixture lightly into the scalp. Leave on for half an hour and then wash the hair. Rinse well with water. Or, give the hair hot oil therapy. Heat pure coconut oil and apply on the hair. Then dip a towel in hot water, squeeze out the water and wrap the hot towel around the head, like a turban. Keep it on for 5 minutes. Repeat the hot towel wrap 3 or 4 times. This helps the hair and scalp absorb the oil better. Leave oil on overnight and wash hair the next day. The impurities and pollutants can also affect the eyes, causing burning or redness. The eyes should be washed with plain water several times. Soak cotton wool pads in chilled rose water or green tea and use them over the eyes as eye pads. Lie down and relax for fifteen minutes. This really helps to remove fatigue and brightens the eyes. Pollutants in the air are making our cities increasingly hostile to our good health and well-being. We are facing unprecedented high levels of pollution in Delhi and some other major cities. Respiratory and lung problems have become real health hazards. Indoor air pollution has also been causing headaches, burning eyes, nausea, In fact, the primary concern of governments and scientific research agencies is the reduction of pollution to safer levels. Nasa has also recommended keeping specific house plants to purify the air and remove toxins, making the air safe for us and specially our children. Research has shown that many of such plants actually absorb harmful gases and clean the air inside our homes. Plants not only give off oxygen, which purifies the air, but also cleans the air of dust, paint and building materials. One of the plants, mentioned by Nasa, is Aloe Vera, which is actually easily available in many homes. It is also an antioxidant and prevents oxidation damage. It is said to release considerable quantities of oxygen, while it absorbs carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, as well as formaldehyde; this making the air much cleaner and purer. Another plant, which is said to be very hardy and easy to maintain is Ficus. It also helps to purify the air. The Spider Plant is also recommended by NASA, as it absorbs toxins from the air. A plant, which is hardy and endurable, is the Snake plant. It is easy to maintain and can easily be kept in the bedroom to purify the air while we sleep. The other plants that purify the air and remove toxins, as identified by Nasa, are the Areca Palm, English Ivy, Boston Fern and Peace Lily, which are easily available in India. These remove a variety of toxins from the air. Some are said to clean the air within a few hours of keeping them in a room. (ANI)
After banks largely failed to meet customers demand for exchange of demonetised notes, ATMs in most parts of Assam also did not open due to cash crush of the banks. People had queued up in large numbers before ATMs since early this morning but most ATMs were yet to open till after 1100 hours. The few ATMs that had opened had run out of cash. Few State Bank of India ATMs were working but cash was exhausted in most of these also. ATMs of other banks had a worse tale as some ATMs did not even open their shutter. It was the same situation across the state, including Guwahati, Nagaon, Jorhat, Tinsukia and Bongaigaon. Bank branches, which had officially opened yesterday, have also failed to meet the demand of the customers. Most nationalised banks officials complained that they were not disbursed enough cash. However, the SBI has maintained that there were enough cash to meet the requirement. UNI SG AD -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0108-1017988.Xml
Police last night laid a surprised check point at Hakkal Morh Chatha, Satwari and arrested four hard core criminals alongwith two shot guns, one sharp edged weapon and 30 grams heroin.

During checking, police signalled to stop two motorcycles coming from Chatha.

The riders instead of stopping tried to escape from the spot, police added.

After hot chase the police party nabbed all the miscreants identified as Pawan Kumar, Paramjeet Singh, Gurpreet Singh and Simranjot Singh, all residents of Jammu.

"Two shot guns and one Tokka were recovered from their possession while during frisking of Pawan Kumar, 30 grams heroin was also recovered from his possession," police added.

Police have registered case under NDPS Act and Arms Act while the investigation started.UNI VBH VS ADG 1118

-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0440-1017914.Xml
The apex court requested CAG to file report within four weeks on money invested and spent in the construction of the DND flyway.

A three judge bench of the apex court, headed by Justice Jagdish Singh Kehar, refused to stay the Allahabad High Court order

"The Supreme Court has ordered a CAG inquiry. An audit has been ordered into the matter and has asked to file report within four weeks. It is very big relief for the commuters," said advocate Ankur Prakash.

The Supreme Court last month also had refused to stay the Allahabad High Court order restraining Noida Toll Bridge Company Limited from levying the cess.

The Allahabad High Court last month ruled that there will be no toll collected from those using the DND flyway.

The order was passed as the high court allowed a PIL by the Federation of Noida Residents' Welfare Association.

The PIL, which was filed in 2012, had challenged the "levy and collection of toll in the name of user fee by Noida Toll Bridge Company".

In an over 100-page judgment, the high court had held, "the user fee which is being levied/realised is not supported by the legal provisions relied upon by the Concessionaire (Noida Toll Bridge Company), Infrastructure Leaning and Financial Services (promoter and developer of the project) and the Noida Authority." (ANI)
According to sources, the Governor performed rituals in the sanctum sanctorum and also prayed for the prosperity of the people of the state.

The temple management also honoured him with shawl, photo of Lord Mahakaleshwar.

Mr Kohli, who is also the Governor of Gujarat and was given the additional charge of Madhya Pradesh, arrived here yesterday and inaugurated the Akhil Bharatiya Kalidas Samroh. UNI XC-BDG SB ADG 1236

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0044-1018023.Xml
The Congress Party on Friday mocked of Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar by calling him a 'Joker' after Parrikar asked India to call itself a responsible nuclear power. Congress leader Manish Tewari told ANI, "With great respect to the honourable defence minister of India, he is a bit of a joke. Is the defence minister of India entitled to have a personal view in the public's pace on such an extremely sensitive issue?," "The 'no first use policy' was not put in place by a congress government. But as a part of the draft nuclear doctrine was formalised by Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee," Tewari said. "The 'no first use policy' is located in the larger context of India's commitment to universal nuclear disarmament so unfortunately you have a defence minister who completely and absolutely doesn't understand nuclear theology," he added. Union Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said that instead of saying 'India won't use nuclear weapons first', it should be said that 'India is responsible nuclear power'. "If written down strategy exists or you take a stand on a nuclear aspect, I think you're actually giving away your strength in nuclear. People say India has not first used nuclear concept. I should say that I'm a responsible nuclear power and I'll not use it irresponsibly. This is my thinking. Some may say that Parrikar says nuclear doctrine has changed. It has not changed in any government policy," Parrikar said at a book release function. The no-first-use commitment was made after India conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998. Pakistan responded within weeks by conducting tests of its own. India carried out surgical strikes late on September 29; days after Pakistani terrorists attacked an army camp in Uri in Kashmir, leaving 19 Indian soldiers dead. (ANI)
With just a couple of weeks leftfor the general council meeting of the Nadigar Sangam, also called as South Indian Film Artistes Association, a crucial meeting of the top office-bearers would be held here tomorrow to discuss several important issues. Nadigar Sangam Sources said the executive committee meeting would be presided over by its President Nasser. The issues that would come up for discussions includedthe construction of an own building at the Nadigar Sangam premises. Sources said that the meeting will also discuss about the notices issued to former office-bearers of the Sangamfor alleged financial irregularities during their tenure. Actor and Nadigar Sangam General Secretary Vishal will dwelve on the resolutions to be passed at the November 27general council meeting. Besides honouring veteran artistes, the Nadigar Sangam was also planning a grand function to felicitate thespian Kamal Haasan for being honoured with the prestigious Chevalier award by the French government.UNI GV 1505 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0275-1018269.Xml
A Gas cylinder exploded in a school canteen at Roypaettah area in the city today. Police and school sources said no one was injured in the incident as the school was yet to open for the day. The incident occurred at around 0600 hrs at the CSI Monahan Girls Higher Secondary School on the Peters Road. Three cylinders, used for domestic purposes, exploded following a gas leak, damaging the roof of the canteen. Two fire fighting units rushed to the spot and put out the fire immediately. According to School Principal Ms Inbakumari, nobody sustained any injuries and classes resumed as usual this morning. The present owner took over the canteen three months ago. Police are investigating the incident.UNI GV 1512 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0275-1018283.Xml
Superintendent of Police KL Dhurv said that the rebels attacked assistant constable Rahul Raidu -- nephew of former president of Bijapur District Congress Committee with axe when he came out from his house in Bhairamgarh area last night. He was rushed to District Hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.

Panic gripped the area after the killing of Raidu, Mr Dhurv said while adding that search was intensified in the area.

In another incident, DRG constable Budhram Mandra was martyred when an improvised explosive device planted by ultras -- blast during searching operation in Mandem Ghati area three km away from Forsegarh police station yesterday. His body was brought to Bijapur police line where officials paid homage to him. UNI XC-BDG SB 1408

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0044-1018147.Xml
Chairman of moderate Hurriyat Conference (HC) Mirwaiz Moulvi Omar Farooq was today detained after he defied house arrest restrictions and stepped out of his residence to lead a march to historic Jamia Masjid. Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief Mohammad Yaseen Malik was yesterday lodged in the Central Jail Srinagar while hardline Hurriyat Conference chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani continued to remain under house arrest. Chairmen of both the factions of the HC and the JKLF chief had urged people to march towards "Jamia Masjid" and offer Friday prayers there. However, authorities imposed curfew in SeK and Downtown Srinagar to prevent 'Jamia Challo March'. A moderate HC spokesperson told UNI that Mirwaiz defied house arrest restriction and left his Nigeen House to lead a procession to historic Jamia Masjid in the Shehar-e-Khas, where no Friday prayers were offered for the 18th consecutive week today. However, immediately after Mirwaiz stepped out of his house, he was taken into custody and lodged in police station Nigeen. He was released from Sub Jail Cheshmashahi after 60-day detention, a day before five-member delegation from New Delhi, led by former union minister and senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, arrived here to meet separatist leaders. However, he was put under house arrest the same day. Mirwaiz was again detained on October 28, where he defied house arrest restrictions and tried to lead a march towards Jamia Masjid to break the "siege" to offer prayers in the historic mosque. The Hurriyat chairman was released on October 29 and placed under house arrest. The house arrest restriction on Mirwaiz was lifted on November 8, when separatists held a meeting to discuss the plan of action with various stake holders, including traders. But he was again put under house arrest yesterday to foil Jamia Masjid Challo called by separatists.MORE UNI ABS SHS SNU 1601 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0433-1018340.Xml
A Supreme Court bench and former judge Markandey Katju were locked in an ugly exchange of words on Friday over a blog he had written criticising an apex court verdict. The exchange took place after the court issued notice to Justice Katju on why contempt proceedings cannot be initiated against him for casting aspersion against the judges in a blog. This is the first time the apex court has issued such a notice to one of its former judges. Judges Ranjan Gogoi, Prafulla C. Pant and Uday Umesh Lalit issued the notice to Justice Katju. Giving Justice Katju eight weeks time to reply, the bench said that in the blog he had criticised the judges and not the judgment. This was done after showing a copy of his blog to Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, who said the highlighted paragraph was "intemperate" but would not amount to contempt. Apparently displeased over the court decision, Justice Katju asked the bench if this was the way they treated a retired judge whom "you have invited" to the court. He told Justice Gogoi: "You judges should learn how to behave." As the judges asked if there was anyone in the court to escort Justice Katju out, he retorted: "Don't try to scare me. I am not scared of you people." Justice Katju was in the court in pursuance of a notice issued to him on October 17 asking him to appear and explain how the court erred in the application of Section 300 of the Code of Criminal Procedure while setting aside the death sentence of a Kerala man convicted for rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman travelling on a train on February 1, 2011. Justice Katju in his Facebook post had said that the top court had "grievously erred" in its verdict. --IANS pk/mr/sac ( 314 Words) 2016-11-11-17:44:02 (IANS)
A 15-year-old school student was killed and his relative suffered serious injuries when their motorbike collided with a private bus at Pappinissery in the morning. According to police, K Shammas (15), a resident of Keechery, was a tenth standard student of Thajul Uloom higher secondary school at Valapatanam. His friend and relative Shinodh (19) suffered serious injuries and admitted to a private hospital here. The incident occurred around 0930 hrs, when they were on the way to school from Keecheri, their motorbike collided with a private bus bound to Payyanur from Kannur. Shammas died on the spot. The body was shifted to Pariyaram Medical college hospital for a post-mortem.UNI AK SW SNU 1747 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0101-1018490.Xml
The Supreme Court today issued notice to former Justice Markandey Katju as to why contempt proceedings should not be initiated against him for casting aspersion against the judges in one of his blogs relating to the Soumya murder case. The top court said ex-Justice Katju's remarks on Justice Gogoi was an assault on three-judge bench and it was not criticism of judgment in the Soumya case. A bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi, Prafulla C Pant and Uday Umesh Lalit issued notice to the former Supreme Court Judge , who was present in the court, after showing the copy of the blog to the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi who said the highlighted paragraph was "intemperate" but would not amount to contempt.UNI XC SW RP1735 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0101-1018645.Xml
Government has released funds for modernisation of fishing harbour at Sassoon Dock in Mumbai under Sagarmala programme. As part of its Coastal Community Development under Sagarmala, the Ministry of Shipping has provided Central financial assistance of Rs 6.52 crore as part of the first installment to the Maharashtra government for modernisation of the existing fishing harbor at Sassoon Dock, in Mumbai. The project has been identified as one of early bird projects under Sagarmala Programme to enhance the livelihood of the coastal communities, an official from the Ministry of Shipping said today. The total proposed cost of the project is Rs 52.17 Crore and will be funded in a convergence mode of implementation under Sagarmala Programme of Ministry of Shipping and Central Sector Scheme on Blue Revolution: Integrated Development and Management of Fisheries of Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries. The remaining 50 per cent of the project cost will be funded by the State Government of Maharashtra. Sassoon Dock Fishing Harbour is one of the seven major fishing harbours in the country. The dock operates around 1,000 fishing vessels and lands an average of 48,000 tonnes of fish annually under the management of Mumbai Port Trust. The initiative will modernise the fish handling facilities to improve the hygiene and sanitation standards in the harbour and develop a fully integrated fishing harbour with all modern amenities like ice plant, cold storage, modern auction hall, etc. This would help in maintaining sea food export quality as per the international quality requirements and food safety standards. The old and new Sassoon Dock area is a major Fish Landing and marketing centre of Mumbai, Metropolis, serving the needs of both Domestic and Export market. The Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) would also be undertaking the work of Dredging of Sassoon dock basin at a cost of Rs 60.00 lakhs. MbPT has also taken initiative of developing the Sassoon Dock Complex and repairing of Gate House and clock tower. Setting up a Marine Food Park, Sea Food Restaurant and an Art Gallery in the premises has also been proposed.UNI NY RSA 1856 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0099-1018880.Xml
Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee president N Uttam Kumar Reddy today accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of pushing the entire nation into chaos by imposing the decision of demonitising Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 currency notes in a hasty manner. Addressing a massive public meeting in Nereducherla in Palakiddu mandal in the district, Mr Reddy said poor and middle class have literally been pushed to starvation. While daily wage workers were not hired by anyone during the last two days, the middle class population was not left with smaller denomination currency to meet their daily expenses. "The Prime Minister has created this crisis in everyone's life just to display the power of his dictatorship," he alleged. The TPCC chief said the Centre's decision has infringed citizens' right to life and trade, among others. The Congress party supports crack down on black money, he said the PM's hasty move has only hit the poor, middle class, farmers, daily wage earners, small traders, students, self employed and the housewives. He said long queues at banks and post offices for the last two days clearly showed that all sections were badly hit with the decision. He said the government should ensure quick replacement of old notes by new ones. He said the limitation for exchange of old notes with new ones and withdrawal limits from ATMs should be relaxed. Stating that the regular cash flow into the market might not be possible in near future, he demanded that the Centre and State Government make some alternate arrangements to help the poor, especially the daily wage earners, who are victims of Mr Modi's economic misadventure. "The conditions, especially in rural areas, are extremely bad and lakhs of people have fallen victim to this 'economic calamity'. Besides ensuring immediate help, the Central and State Government should also compensate for the losses which common people have suffered due to this sudden decision," he said. The Congress leader said Mr Modi had promised to put Rs 15-lakh in each account by bringing back the black money stashed in foreign country. However, he said with his hasty move of demonitisation, Mr Modi has put all Indians into trouble wherein they could not access their own hard-earned money, although for a brief period.UNI KNR PY SNU 1904 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-1018865.Xml
US Based North American Punjabi Association(NAPA) today urged all the political parties of Punjab not to play politics on SYL issue. Executive director Satnam Singh Chahal who is presently here, warned all the political parties of Punjab that if they continue playing politics on this sensitive SYL issue then Punjab can lose this case and people of Punjab will never forgive these leaders in the centuries to come. This is the time to unite on SYL issue for the welfare of Punjab and all leaders cutting across the party politics should sit together to chalk out the future stragedy on SYL issue. Chahal's comments came soon after the supreme court ruling to terminate Punjab Termination of Agreements Act of 2004, passed by the Punjab Assembly when Capt Amarinder Singh was Chief Minister. He said SYL matters have come full circle since the Indira Gandhi-led Congress initiated the canal idea in 1976 during the Emergency, and when Bansi Lal, a former Chief Minister of Haryana, was close to her heir-presumptive Sanjay Gandhi. Re-elected, the Congress revived the proposal and the canal's foundation was laid in 1982 following an agreement between the leaders of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. However, the Rajiv-Longowal accord of 1985, inter alia, set up the Eradi Tribunal to re-examine the issue. Rajiv Gandhi conceded that this had been one of various wounds nursed by Punjab since the 1950s when Rajasthan, a non-riparian state, was made a co-sharer of the Punjab river waters. Chahal said with Punjab elections approaching, the debate feeds into local politics. Similar river water disputes had persisted between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over the Kaveri waters since 1892; between Andhra and Telengana now and with other neighboring states over the Krishna and Godavari waters since the reorganisation of states post 1956 and so on. The difference between them and Punjab's case is that Rajasthan was never a riparian state in respect of the Ravi, Beas or Sutlej, and Haryana's case needs closer examination as abutting the Yamuna it belongs to that watershed, whereas the Indus river system runs south-west, via Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, added Chahal.UNI XC RSA 1759 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0293-1018636.Xml
The accused handed over visa and air ticket to the victim which were found fake .

The accused was produced in a local court here which granted two days police remand for further investigation and recovery of cash. Giving this information, SP Sumer Partap Singh told media persons here today that Manish Kumar of Matour village under PS Kalayat had lodged a complaint in June 2015 in which he alleged that he met a Delhi based travel agent in September 2014 who promised to send him to Australia and demanded Rs 13 lakh from him.

As per settlement, he paid Rs 6 lakh in cash to accused Rajinder of Lakshmi Nagar Delhi and rest was to be paid after he reached Australia. However, the accused handed him over a fake visa and

air ticket. He could neither go to Australia nor his advanced money was refunded .

UNI XC AE 1954

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0293-1018982.Xml
Congress workers led by Fatehgarh Sahib MLA Kuljit Singh Nagra today blocked railway traffic in protest against SYL verdict. Due to protest on railway line, Jan Sewa Express had to halt at Sirhind railway station. Nagra, who had submitted his resignation from MLA today, said Punjab Congress will extend support to people over SYL issue. He said Punjab has no surplus water. He said Akalis are playing politics over SYL issue.UNI XC SW 1952 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0293-1019018.Xml
The police arrested international Red Sander smuggler Subramanyam alias Subram along with five accomplices and seized 125 Red Sander logs, Rs 3.50 lakh Indian currency, foreign currency, a lorry and a car from them. Superintendent of Police PHD Rama Krishna at a press conference here today said the police arrested Subramanyam and his accomplice Venkatesh on Kadapa-Rayachoti NH 40, at Kamballi check post and seized red sander logs being transported in car.The police based on the information given by the accused, during the interrogation, arrested Sundaram alias Karthikeya and three others Kamballi tank in Chintakommadinne mandal and seized 125 red sander longs weighing 3.5 tonnes, a lorry, a car, Rs 3.40 lakh, 19 currency notes of US dollars in 100 denomination, 50 UAE Dirhams from them.During the interrogation, Subramanyam, who was born in Tamil Nadu and settled in Singapore, confessed that he had illegally transported over 2000 tonees of red sander to China. The SP appreciated SP (operations) B Satyayesu Babu, Faction Zone DSP B Srinivasulu and Kadapa Rural CI B Venkata Shiva Reddy.UNI DP PY AE 2100 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-1019154.Xml
Even as the people were reeling under currency crisis, a rumour has created panic among the people of Uttar Pradesh today about shortage of common salt. There was a rumour that there would be acute shortage of salt and hence the prices would rise from tomorrow. Due to the rumour people rushed to shops to purchase creating law and order in the state. Salt which usually sold at Rs 20 per kg was now selling on premium at Rs 100 to Rs 300 per kg. UP government has issued an alert over the rumour while all the districts have been cautioned to deal with the situation sternly. Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Daljit Choudhury told reporters here tonight that there was no shortage of salt in the state and people should not be panic. "We have directed all the SPs to monitor the situation in there area and diffuse the rumour besides taking strict action against the rumour mongers," he said. Reports said some people thronged a wholesaler in Udayganj market in the state capital and police was called to control the crowd who were purchasing salts packets in bulk. In Indiranagar locality of Lucknow, shopkeepers refused to sell bulk salt to people after people in large number rushed to shops to purchase a full bag of salt which contains 10 kgs. Lucknow district officials here tonight claimed that there was no shortage of salt and it was just a rumour. Similar reports were also reported from Moradabad,Bareilly and other cities close to Uttarakhand. In Bareilly police had to resort to lathi charge a crowd fighting among themselves to purchase salts in Cantonment area this evening. It was also said the rumour generated from Uttarakhand this afternoon which now has reached several cities of UP. A similar rumour about salt was generated in 1998 in the entire country.UNI MB PY AE 2157 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-1019213.Xml
Now travelling to Maldives from Delhi has become easier as Mega Maldives Airlines has announced its non-stop flights to Male from New Delhi which will start from November 15. The flight has also introduced a special inaugural fare of Rs 23500, for the first two flights on 15th and 18th November.According to an official statement issued by Mega Maldives, the brand new Boeing 737 Aircraft will be used in the flights having two seating configuration of 150 Economy and 12 Business class seats.Flight number LV 305, New Delhi to Male will be operational on Tuesdays, Friday and Sunday, where as flight LV 304, Male to New Delhi will be operational on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays.On the flight, Ahmed Modamed, Ambassador of the Republic of Maldives to India, said, ''We are very excited to start a direct flight from New Delhi to Maldives. This is a very good step considering that a large number of Indians travel to Maldives every year for vacation.''Air India has also started a direct flight AI 263 from New Delhi to Male via Thiruvananthapuram.As connectivity to Maldives from India is getting better, it will be interesting to know that Italian cruise company Costa NeoClassica is launching a weekly cruise which has a capacity to accommodate 1,700 passengers, from Mumbai to Maldives on December 16, 2016. The cruise will operate until March 18, 2017.UNI ADP AE -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0429-1019157.Xml
While hearing a petition by a Bhopal-based journalist, a division bench comprising acting Chief Justice Rajendra Menon allowed the petitioner to submit his complaint before the judicial inquiry commission.

The petitioner told the court that he had submitted an application to the state's Home Minister expressing doubt over the role of police in the alleged encounter and demanding high-level probe into it. However, no action was taken.

In his application to the Home Minister, he pointed out that close circuit camera television (CCTV) did not work on the day. Eight SIMI prisoners managed to lay hands on 35 bed-sheets and gather wood for making ladder. The slain SIMI rebels were wearing shoes similar to those worn by policemen.

The petitioner also submitted a photograph and compact disc (CD) to the court in connection with the encounter.

Madhya Pradesh Additional Advocate General Purushaindra Kaurav told the court that a judicial inquiry commission headed by retired Justice SK Pandey has been formed to probe the matter. The commission will submit its report within three months. Therefore, a monitoring by the High Court was not needed.UNI XC-PS AE 2106

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0044-1019161.Xml
A police spokesperson here this evening said following specific information about transportation of contraband, a checkpoint was established at Sumbal in Bandipora.

He said police intercepted a pedestrian at the checkpoint and during checking recovered one kg of charas from his possession.

The accused was immediately taken into custody, he said, adding police have registered a case and initiated investigation to nab other people involved in drug trafficking.UNI ABS AE 2113

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0433-1019153.Xml
An official statement issued by the collectorate here said the hospital was asked to accept higher denomination currency of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000, which had been demonetised on November 8, to avoid any inconvenience to the patients.

Through the notice, the collector asked why action should not be taken against the hospital under section 188 of Indian Penal Code and also Bombay Nursing Home Registration Act of 1949.

The notice further stated the the hospital had violated the directions of the Director of Health Services and the Thane District Civil surgeon.

The collector has sought a reply from the hospital by November 12, failing which, action would be taken against it, the notice stated.UNI XR SS AE 2246

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0171-1019253.Xml
The ministry's spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters on Thursday that Russia has heard some statements made by the US President-elect during his presidential campaign, which could "inspire optimism", Xinhua news agency reported.

However, she added that "the team is just being formed and it will take time".

Trump has pledged to fix US-Russia relations during his campaign and said he is confident about getting along with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin on Wednesday sent a message of congratulations to Trump on his victory, saying that he hopes to work with Trump to lift bilateral relations "out of the current crisis".

Russia-US relations have been dwindling since the Ukraine crisis in 2014 with a series of confrontations and disagreements on issues ranging from military operations in Syria, Crimea's absorption into Russia, and alleged cyber attacks.

--IANS vgu/

( 173 Words)

2016-11-11-06:32:04 (IANS)
"Speaking of civilizations. PM @narendramodi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of #IndiaJapan and the future of Asia. A rare audience that symbolizes the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan," Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in a series of tweets.

Later in the day, Prime Narendra Modi will have wide ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe at the11th India Japan annual summit in Tokyo which will include security, trade and investment, skill development and infrastructure development.

Several agreements will be signed after talks between the two leaders.

Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Tokyo last night will also address Japanese business leaders.

Bilateral trade at 14.51 billion dollars witnessed a decline of about 6.5 per cent in 2015-16 as compared to 2014-15.

India's export to Japan was 4.66 billion dollars while import stood at 9.85 billion dollars.

Prime Minister during his talks with Abe and Japanese business community may try to address this downward trend in bilateral trade. (ANI)
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday that he is against the implementation of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that Manila and Washington signed in 2014. With the statement, Duterte again hinted that he might scrap the agreement that allows prolonged deployment of American forces in the country as well as build logistics hub in Philippine military bases. Duterte, who arrived in Davao City after an overnight official visit to Malaysia, told a news conference that he does not want to see any foreign troops on Philippine soil, Xinhua news agency reported. He added that the joint military activities that will be carried out this year by the Philippine and US troops would probably be the last. Duterte also said that he is against the joint war games between the Philippines and US forces as only the US soldiers benefit from these exercises. He added that the Americans do not share their sophisticated and state-of the-art communication equipment with Philippine troops. In October, he also told a business forum in Tokyo during his visit in Japan that he wants his country "freed of the presence of foreign military troops" in the next two years. "I want them out, and if I have to revise or abrogate agreements, executive agreements, I will," he had said. Asked whether there would be changes in policies with the new US administration, Duterte said, "I will pursue what I've started." He reiterated that the Philippines will continue to honour the treaties that the Philippines signed with the US, including the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty. --IANS vgu/ ( 275 Words) 2016-11-11-07:50:03 (IANS)
"A rare audience that symbolizes the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

"Speaking of civilizations. PM @narendramodi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of #IndiaJapan and the future of Asia," Swarup said in another tweet.

Modi, who arrived here on Thursday, is scheduled to participate in two bilateral business meets here before joining Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for the bilateral summit later in the day.

On Saturday, Modi and Abe will travel on the Shinkansen high-speed rail to Kobe. During Abe's visit to India last year, Japan committed itself to the development of a high-speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

This is Modi's second visit to Japan in two years.

--IANS ab/vgu/

( 161 Words)

2016-11-11-07:52:04 (IANS)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is on a three day-visit to Japan, pitched his 'Make in India' initiative here saying that Tokyo plays an important role in the scheme, as India needs scale, speed and skill. Speaking at the CII-KEIDANREN business luncheon in Tokyo, he said that his personal engagements with leadership, government, industry and people of Japan are now almost a decade old. Stating that Prime the 21st Century belongs to Asia, the Prime Minister said that India and Japan will have to continue to play a major role in Asia's emergence. "The growing convergence of views between Japan and India under our Special Strategic and Global Partnership has the capacity to drive the regional economy and development, and stimulate the global growth," he said. "Strong India - Strong Japan will not only enrich our two nations. It will also be a stabilising factor in Asia and the world," he added. Prime Minister Modi said that even against a weak international economic scenario, the news from India is of strong growth and abundant opportunities. It is of incredible opportunities, and about India's Credible Policies. "In 2015, the Indian economy grew faster than other major economies. World Bank and IMF assess this trend to continue. Lower labour costs, large domestic market and macro-economic stability combine to make India a very attractive investment destination," he said. The Prime Minister said that today every global company has an India strategy and Japanese companies are no exception. It is no surprise that today Japan is India's fourth largest source of FDI, he said. He said, "On our part, we would, of course, want greater influx of Japanese investments. For this, we will be proactive in addressing your concerns." "And, we will further strengthen the special mechanisms including Japanese Industrial Townships," he added. Encouraging Japanese travellers to make use of the ten-year business visa, the e-Tourist Visa, and the Visa-On-Arrival facility, the Prime Minister said that the Social Security Agreement with Japan has also been implemented, which is good news for the growing number of professionals on both sides. Prime Minister Modi said, "India's development needs are huge and substantial. We seek rapid achievement of our developmental priorities, but in a manner that is environment friendly." Thanking and congratulating those Japanese people who are already in India, he said that cars being made in India by a Japanese car maker are already selling in Japan. Promising the people of Japan who are looking to explore their options in India, Prime Minister Modi said that his government is committed to further refining the policies and procedures to boost make in India. He further assured that it it remains his top priority to creating an enabling environment for business and attracting investments. "Stable, predictable and transparent regulations are redefining the nature of doing business in India," he said. Prime Minister said, "I have long maintained that India needs scale, speed and skill. Japan has a very important role to play in all three." "Its involvement in our mega projects like Dedicated Freight Corridors, Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor, Metro Rail and High Speed Rail signifies scale and speed," he added. Prime Minster Modi reiterated that the combination of Japanese hardware and Indian software is a fantastic combination that would benefit both countries. (ANI)
Modi, who is on a three-day visit to Japan, reached Tokyo on Thursday.

"I have also been saying that India and Japan will play a major role in Asia's emergence," he said in a tweet after interacting with business leaders in Tokyo.

The Prime Minister said that Asia has emerged as the new centre of global growth, and it was because of its competitive manufacturing and expanding markets.

Modi praised Japan for its good quality products.

"The very word 'Japan' in India symbolises quality, excellence, honesty and integrity," he said, adding that both the nations must march forward and explore bigger potentials and brighter prospects.

"'Made in India' and 'Made by Japan' combination has started working wonderfully," he said in one of the tweets.

Modi also lauded Japan for being the fourth largest source of foreign direct investment in India.

Modi will attend the annual bilateral summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe later in the day.

On Saturday, Modi and Abe will travel on the Shinkansen high-speed rail to Kobe.

During Abe's visit to India last year, Japan committed itself to the development of a high-speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

This is Modi's second visit to Japan in two years.

--IANS sk/ksk/vm

( 252 Words)

2016-11-11-11:32:04 (IANS)
US President-elect Donald Trump said his wife Melania likes First Lady Michelle Obama a lot following a transition meeting between them at the White House. "A fantastic day in DC. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!" Trump tweeted on Thursday night. The tweet came after Michelle gave a traditional tour of the White House to Melania, who will succeed her as First Lady from January 20, 2017, Efe news reported. The tour included a look around the private residence, the Truman balcony, the official reception area and the Oval Office, the White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said. The women also had tea together and talked about how to raise children in the White House. Melania's son Barron is 10, the same age as Michelle's oldest daughter Malia was when they moved into the presidential mansion. "The meeting was a gesture of hospitality. Michelle Obama has publicly explained the stress of moving to a new place, living in a fishbowl, a museum, and I'm sure Melania Trump is feeling part of that same anxiety," said Earnest. The connection between the two wives began before they got to know each other when Melania plagiarised a part of Michelle's speech during the Republican National Convention in July. Although the plagiarism sparked a row, Trump himself joked about it at a charity dinner months later. "Michelle Obama gives a speech, and everyone loves it. It's fantastic. They think she's absolutely great. My wife, Melania, gives the exact same speech, and people get on her case! And I don't get it. I don't know why," he said. "This one's going to get me in trouble." Melania, 46, will be an unquestionably atypical first lady, only the second to have been born outside the US. However, the former model still seeks to play the role in the most traditional way. --IANS ksk/mr ( 329 Words) 2016-11-11-12:50:02 (IANS)
Demonstrators took to the streets across the United States for a second day yesterday to protest against Donald Trump's presidential election victory, voicing fears that the real estate mogul's triumph would deal a blow to civil rights.On the East Coast, protests took place in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, while on the West Coast demonstrators rallied in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland in California, and Portland, Oregon.The protests were for the most part peaceful and orderly, although there were scattered acts of civil disobedience and damage to property.Protesters threw objects at police in Portland and damaged cars in a dealership lot, the Portland Police Department said on Twitter. Some protesters sprayed graffiti on cars and buildings and smashed store front windows, media in Portland said."Many in crowd trying to get anarchist groups to stop destroying property, anarchists refusing. Others encouraged to leave area" the department said on Twitter after declaring the demonstration a riot.The demonstration continued into Friday morning as Portland police arrested a handful of protesters and used pepper spray and rubber bullets in an attempt to disperse the crowd, the department said on Twitter.Dozens in Minneapolis marched onto Interstate 94, blocking traffic in both directions for at least an hour as police stood by. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles freeway before police cleared them off.Baltimore police reported about 600 people marched through the downtown Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street. Two people were arrested, police said.In Denver, a crowd that media estimated to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through downtown in one of the largest of yesterday's events. Hundreds demonstrated through Dallas.Yesterday's gatherings were generally smaller in scale and less intense than Wednesday's, and teenagers and young adults again dominated the racially mixed crowds."Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Trump said in a Tweet yesterday night.Police pitched special security barricades around two Trump marquee properties that have become focal points of the protests - his newly opened Pennsylvania Avenue hotel in Washington and the high-rise Trump Tower, where he lives in Manhattan.In the nation's capital, about 100 protesters marched from the White House, where Trump had his first transition meeting with President Barack Obama yesterday, to the Trump International Hotel several blocks away.At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many of them chanting "No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!" and carrying signs with such slogans as "Impeach Trump" and "Not my president.""I can't support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It's heart-breaking," said Joe Daniels, 25, of suburban Alexandria, Virginia.'GIVE TRUMP A CHANCE'Two Trump supporters stood off to the side carrying signs reading: "All We are Saying is Give Trump a Chance" - an apparent play on lyrics from the John Lennon song "Give Peace a Chance".Trump's critics worry that his often-inflammatory campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, women and others - combined with support from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists - could spark a wave of intolerance against minorities.Taking a far more conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech early Wednesday than he had at many of his campaign events, Trump vowed to be a president for all Americans.His campaign rejected a Klan newspaper endorsement this month, saying Trump "denounces hate in any form."Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a high-profile Trump supporter, called the demonstrators "a bunch of spoiled cry-babies" in an interview with Fox News.Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer urged the protesters to give Trump a chance once he is sworn in to office in January."I hope that people get it out of their systems ... but then they give this man that was just elected very historically and his new vice president an opportunity to govern," Spicer told MSNBC.In San Francisco, more than 1,000 high school students walked out of classes yesterday morning to march through the financial district carrying rainbow flags representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, Mexican flags and signs decrying Trump.Civil rights groups and police reported an uptick in attacks on members of minority groups, some by people claiming to support Trump. There were also reports of Trump opponents lashing out against people carrying signs supporting Trump.More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend.REUTERS SHS NS1516 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-1018271.Xml
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies hope to benefit from Donald Trump's election win, believing it has saved them from the risks of an interventionist Clinton administration.Trump's win may have already shifted the course of the Russian-backed military campaign in Aleppo. A senior pro-Assad official told Reuters that plans to capture the rebel-held east by January were shaped around an assumption Clinton would win.The confidence in Damascus will have been justified if some of Trump's comments on Syria crystallize into policy, though there are questions over how far he will follow through on suggestions such as cooperating with Russia - President Bashar al-Assad's most powerful military ally - against Islamic State.One complicating factor could be Trump's tough stance on Iran, Assad's other main military backer. Trump has threatened to rip up the nuclear deal with Iran and heaped criticism on the sanctions relief it brought. Long-standing Republican aversion to Assad may also block any big policy shift, analysts say.Yet Trump has struck a different tone to current US policy on some aspects of the multi-sided Syrian conflict, where the United States with allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia has backed some of the insurgents who have been fighting to topple Assad for more than five years.Trump has questioned the wisdom of backing rebels, played down the US goal of getting Assad to leave power, and noted that while he didn't like him, "Assad is killing ISIS" with Iran and Russia. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State."This is very comforting for us and our allies in Syria," said the senior official in the military alliance fighting in support of Assad, who is backed by the Russian air force, Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Lebanon's Hezbollah, and other militias."The wave is currently with us, serving our interests, and we must benefit from it as fully as possible," said the official, who declined to be identified by nationality or affiliation so he could give a frank assessment.The war has shattered Syria into a patchwork of areas controlled by Assad's state, rebels battling to topple him, a powerful Kurdish militia, and the Islamic State group. It has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and created the world's worst refugee crisis.While Washington has provided significant support to the opposition, it has never matched the backing given to Assad by Russia and Iran. The rebels have seen US policy as a betrayal of their revolt, with Washington focusing mostly on the fight against IS in the last two years.TRUMP "A NEW FACTOR" FOR DAMASCUSThe ground war between Assad and the rebellion has this year focused largely on Aleppo, in the north west of Syria. The government is trying to recapture the rebel-held east of the city, the opposition's most important urban stronghold.Expectations of a Hillary Clinton win have been shaping military planning in the Aleppo campaign for some time, and the aim had been to conclude the campaign before the new US president took office, the senior official said.While that is still the plan, the official said Trump's victory was a "new factor". Russian President Vladimir Putin would "certainly have a different approach towards the entire Syrian crisis based on what will happen with Trump".The Syrian newspaper al-Watan said most Syrians had felt "joy" at the result, and that many had spent the night up following the US election. Trump had no designs in Syria, or the region, it declared.While some in the opposition expressed concern about Trump's statements and views on Putin, others still hold out hope for a US policy that serves their cause. A senior rebel leader noted Trump's views on Iran were "positive" for the Syrian opposition."Today, the role of the United States remains active and essential in Syria, regardless of whether he tries to distance himself from it, he won't be able to," said the rebel, who declined to be identified so he could talk freely.A build-up of Russian forces has fuelled speculation of an imminent escalation in the campaign for eastern Aleppo, where hundreds of people were reported killed in air strikes before Russia declared a pause on October 18.Rebels say they are well-entrenched in eastern Aleppo, a besieged area the United Nations says is home to 270,000 people. The rebels say it will be impossible for government forces to take the area.Russian firepower has in recent weeks focused on rebel-held areas to the west of the city, from where insurgents recently launched their own offensive on government-held parts of Aleppo. Rebel shelling has killed dozens of people in western Aleppo.Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster but the city had "basically" fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favour of rebels without knowing who they were.The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed programme, and jihadists such as the group formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.Rather than focusing on fighting Assad, Islamic State, has prioritised the expansion and defence of its self-declared "caliphate" in eastern and central Syria.REPUBLICAN AVERSION TO ASSAD, PUTIN, IRANDamascus had hoped that it could win back international legitimacy as part of the international fight against Islamic State, but the United States has rejected that idea, viewing Assad as part of the problem.The U.S.-led fight against Islamic State in Syria is fraught with complications. The United States has built its strategy around a powerful Kurdish militia that has carved out a self-governing areas across much of northern Syria.But its alliance with that militia, the YPG, has angered Turkey, a US ally worried that Kurdish influence in northern Syria will fuel separatism among its own Kurdish minority.The YPG has in turn fought FSA rebels backed by Turkey, which is itself waging a major operation in northern Syria.One senior adviser who Trump will inherit is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine General Joseph Dunford.Dunford told Congress in September he thought it would not be a good idea for the military to share intelligence with Russia on Syria, something Moscow has long sought. Republican stalwarts who might join Trump's cabinet or become advisers are unlikely to want close relations with Putin.Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, forecast that Trump would start out by sounding out Russia on options for a political transition or agreement to end the war.Failing that, he may decide to leave western Syria as a Russian zone of influence, with the United States and its allies fighting Islamic State in the east."I think it is going to be fluid. Remember a lot of the Republican foreign policy folks in Washington will probably go into this government, and they have very strong feelings about Iran and about the Assad regime, so I don't see a situation where the United States suddenly cozies up to Assad," he said. REUTERS SHS AS1556 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-1018378.Xml
The State Duma, the Lower House of Russian Parliament, today ratified the agreement between Russia and China on cooperation in fighting terrorism, separatism and extremism. Russian President Vladimir Putin had recently submitted the agreement between the two countries. The agreement, which the countries signed in Beijing on September 27, 2010 is aimed at development of bilateral cooperation in fighting terrorism, separatism and extremism. The agreement regulates the use of joint measures to reveal and stop effectively actions to plot and make terrorist attacks. It provides a legal base for bilateral counter-terrorist cooperation between Russia and China. Under the agreement, the two countries will exchange information in preventing and fighting criminal activities by terrorists and extremists. This information will include data on "illegal production, keeping and turnover of propagandistic materials, weapons, armory and explosives, on criminal groups use of nuclear materials, radioactive substances or sources of radioactive sources or toxic, poisonous, hazardous chemical or biological agents, on sources and channels of funding criminal organizations, on specific terms, regularities, methods and ways of their activities, as well as on persons, suspected of committing crimes in the area of terrorism, separatism and extremism - categories and numbers of identifying documents, their places of residence or whereabouts." Along with the agreement, the sides also introduced norms of support in investigation into criminal cases at the request from either side. Speaking in the house, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov said Russia's cooperation with China in information security is "very good." "We have very good relations in the sphere of information security, the consultations are held twice a year, and this is only as part of the Foreign Ministry. There are also contacts between the special services and the Interior Ministries," Mr Syromolotov said. "The problem of information security emerged not only now," he said. The special services and the Foreign Ministry have been organizing cooperation with China on the issue for many years, he added.UNI XC PY SNU 1919 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-1018940.Xml
News Story not available

This story has been published on: 2022-11-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.

This story is no longer available on our site.
The executive body of the global chemical weapons watchdog today comdemned the use of banned toxic agents by the Syrian government and by militant group Islamic State, a source told Reuters. In a rare vote by the Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibiton of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which meets behind closed doors, roughly two-thirds of the 41-member body supported a US-tabled text, said the source, who attended the meeting. REUTERS SHS RAI1902 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-1018897.Xml
US President-elect Donald Trump today praised demonstrators for being passionate about their country, just hours after he accused them of being "professional protesters" incited by the media. "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!" Trump tweeted early today. Yesterday night, the president-elect had posted: "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Mostly peaceful and orderly protests took place in at least eight cities following the Republican businessman's defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's election. Demonstrators have voiced concern Trump would harm Americans' civil rights. Trump's critics worry that his often-inflammatory campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, women and others - combined with support from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists - could spark a wave of intolerance against minorities. East Coast protests took place on Thursday in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, while on the West Coast, demonstrators rallied in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland in California, and Portland, Oregon. After Clinton conceded defeat early on Wednesday, Trump took a far more conciliatory tone than he had often displayed during his campaign, promising to be a president for all Americans. His campaign rejected a Klan newspaper endorsement days before the election, saying Trump "denounces hate in any form." But civil rights groups and police reported an uptick in attacks on minority groups, some by people claiming to support Trump. More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend. Trump takes office on January 20, succeeding President Barack Obama. Thursday's gatherings were generally smaller in scale and less intense than Wednesday's, and teenagers and young adults again dominated the racially mixed crowds. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus today acknowledged the tight race with Clinton, but said anti-Trump protesters had to accept the election results. He pointed to Trump's call for unity and meeting with Obama and Republican leaders as reasons for reassurance. "Everyone needs to just take a deep breath, take the weekend ... count our blessings, and let's come back on Monday," Priebus said.REUTERS SHS BD1940 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-1018994.Xml
A district governor has died after a bomb attack on his office in the largely Kurdish southeast of Turkey and police have detained 30 people in the investigation, security sources said today.The YPS, a youth wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), claimed responsibility for yesterday's attack in Mardin, according to the ANF news agency, which is close to the militant group.Derik district governor Muhammed Fatih Safiturk was one of three people hurt in the attack, suffering second-degree burns. He died in hospital in the city of Gaziantep today, having been flown there by helicopter, the Dogan news agency said.Around 30 people, including staff from the governor's office, have been detained in connection with the attack, security sources said.Police were looking into the possibility that explosives were hidden in a bag placed in the governor's office and detonated remotely, or were sent in a package to the office and exploded on being opened, Dogan said.Safiturk had been given the additional responsibility in July of running the local municipality as part of moves to replace elected officials from a sister party of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).A report by the HDP on Wednesday said that more than 3 million people were under the leadership of such government-appointed trustees in around 30 municipalities.Ankara accuses the HDP, parliament's third-biggest party, of ties to the PKK, which is fighting for autonomy in the southeast. The HDP denies any direct links and says it is working for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.The PKK often carries out bomb and rocket attacks in the southeast, where violence has raged since a two-year-old PKK ceasefire collapsed in July last year.Fourteen PKK militants were found dead after an air-backed Turkish military operation against them in the eastern province of Tunceli, state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Friday.More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict since the PKK took up arms in 1984. It is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.The leaders of the HDP were jailed this month pending trial over alleged ties to the PKK, drawing strong international condemnation of the widening crackdown on dissent under President Tayyip Erdogan.More than 36,000 people have been jailed pending trial and around 110,000 suspended or dismissed from their jobs since an attempted coup on July 15 which Ankara blames on US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen and his supporters.Pro-Kurdish politicians have been targeted in the crackdown, with 6,000 HDP members detained since the putsch, HDP spokesman Ayhan Bilgen told a news conference yesterday. Some 2,000 of them have been remanded in custody, he said.Six advisers of leading HDP officials were among the latest detainees today, security sources said. REUTERS SHS RAI1949 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-1019051.Xml
An attack on the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif killed several civilians and wounded dozens of others but all the Germans at the compound have been rescued, the police chief of the local province said.Sayed Kamal Sadat, police chief of Balkh province, said those wounded by shattered glass from the powerful explosion had been taken to local hospitals. Afghan special forces were still conducting search operations but were not encountering any more resistance, he said yesterday. The area would be locked down until morning when the search would continue after daybreak. REUTERS SHS RAI1953 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0329-1019071.Xml
Police confronted protesters at a Dakota Access Pipeline construction site today, after the same protesters said they halted construction equipment on the line. Smoke was seen emanating from a large excavation vehicle and protesters had also climbed into other equipment, according to a Reuters witness. Two construction workers on the line were seen leaving the scene. The Dakota Access Pipeline, set to run from North Dakota to Illinois, was delayed in September by federal authorities to re-review permitting under a federally owned water source near sacred tribal lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Energy Transfer Partners, which owns the line, was not immediately available for comment. They said Thursday that they expected a ruling from the US Army Corps of Engineers "anytime" now. REUTERS PY BL2337 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0298-1019281.Xml
Considering their stonghold over Mosul threatened as the Iraqi army advances, the Islamic State (IS) fighters have started employing boys as young as 12 to the frontlines with suicide belts, media reports said. Witnesses in Raqqa and Mosul - as well as the UN's high commissioner for refugees - said Isis had also displaced tens of thousands of residents for use as human shields as it came under increasing military pressure, the Guardian reported. Of the nearly 48,000 refugees that have fled Mosul, many have described how the Islamist occupiers are becoming more brutal. Several residents have said that in the past week, many had been killed by Isis for reasons as trivial as carrying a mobile phone sim card. According to the UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, Isis has killed nearly 60 alleged spies and battlefield deserters in Mosul in the last two days. On Monday, an underground prison was found in the Shura district, containing 961 emaciated men and boys who had been forced into tiny cages and had been tortured. Mosul fell to the jihadis in June 2014 and their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, chose a mosque in the city as a place to proclaim the establishment of a "caliphate". On October 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the start of a major offensive to retake Mosul, the country's second largest city. Since then, the Iraqi security forces have inched to the eastern fringes of Mosul and made progress on other routes around the city to drive out the IS terrorists. --IANS vgu/ ( 272 Words) 2016-11-12-01:32:02 (IANS)
Luiz Philipe, who was born with microcephaly, sleeps in his house in Marica, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, on March 9, 2016. (Xinhua/Estefan Radovicz/Agencia o Dia/AGENCIA ESTADO)

LA PAZ, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- Women in regions of Bolivia affected by Zika virus should delay pregnancies to avoid microcephaly cases in newborns, recommended the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) on Wednesday.

Fernando Leanes, PAHO representative in Bolivia, said at a press conference that it was one of several advised measures to avoid the proliferation of microcephaly cases.

"The epidemic of Zika, from what we have seen in other countries, will have a rise and fall in Bolivia. Therefore, there are options such as delaying the decision to get pregnant in areas where Zika is spreading. This will avoid the dreaded microcephaly and the complications it represents," explained Leanes.

He warned people against the "relatively low" probability that a pregnant woman contracting Zika will lead to microcephaly in her child. In order to avoid this, he urged authorities to provide contraceptives, adding that the virus can also be sexually transmitted.

Leanes also called for buildings to be cleaned to eliminate potential breeding grounds for the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

According to a report released on Nov. 1, Bolivia registered the first three births of babies with microcephaly due to Zika in the province of Santa Cruz.

The province has seen 127 cases of Zika, including 57 pregnant women, of which 41 have given birth, with three fetuses confirmed with malformation.
By Xinhua writers Li Laifang, Qin Yazhou

BEIJING, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- More than 70 of 250 trustees have left the China Institute of Internal Audit. Under a new reform, they had to choose between their government posts and trustee positions, and they chose the former.

It is just one of the new changes to take place at the non-profit organization, which was previously affiliated with the National Audit Office (NAO). From now on, the institute will learn to support itself financially.

Thursday was the deadline for the separation reform, which began last year, for a first group of 148 nationwide industry associations and chambers that had been affiliated with or directed by different ministries such as agriculture, industry and state-owned assets. The pilot reform makes them independent of these ministries in terms of personnel, finance, assets and business.

Due to their official associations, such agencies are known as "red hat" intermediaries. Many of them provide positions for present or retired senior officials.

The China Institute of Internal Audit is among the 148 associations, and the only one connected to the NAO.

"We have basically completed the reform," said Shen Liqiang, vice secretary general of the institute, who resigned from his post as deputy head of a research body under the NAO.

The reform bans government employees from holding posts in such associations. Some left the institute due to their government posts. A few gave up their government jobs and chose to stay at the institute.

Seven branches of the institute were closed due to their failure to meet the reform requirements, and only two branches remain.

REFORM BRINGS VITALITY

In July 2015, the central government released a plan to eliminate the affiliations between industry agencies and government departments to boost the former's vitality and service role.

The reform is in full swing at the provincial and municipal levels.

Kong Xiaohong, secretary general of an animation industry association in central China's Zhengzhou City, used to be influential among local animation firms, mainly due to his other powerful title in the city's culture bureau.

"In the past, as the bureau's division head, I had some power as to how to distribute the government industry support fund of 50 million yuan (7.4 million U.S. dollars) each year. These animation companies had to do as I told them," said Kong.

He resigned from his government post as head of the industrial development division at the Zhengzhou Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, TV, Press and Publication in May last year, and now retains his sole title as the organization's secretary general.

"Now, I have to rely on improving service for companies," said Kong.

After the reform, the government no longer provided the animation association the annual support fund. As a result, 20 members have dropped out of the association.

But other members have fared well.

With the help of the association, Soyoo Culture Development Co., Ltd has expanded its business from animation to children's education and is planning to go public.

Cui Guangbo, chairman of Soyoo, said that in the past, the company eyed the government support fund and joined the association, doing a lot to cater to the government, but with little consideration for the market.

Cui said he attributes the company's new development to the guidance of the association in finding market-oriented development models following the reform.

One year after the reform was adopted in Zhengzhou, 60 percent of the city's 56 associations have improved services and boosted their vitality remarkably, said Wei Yihong, an official in charge of civil organizations with the Zhengzhou Civil Affairs Bureau.

Elsewhere, the Civil Affairs Bureau of the southwestern Sichuan province demanded the first group of 62 provincial associations finish their separation from administrative units by the end of November.

In the northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, 27 social organizations have closed and 121 government officials left associations as part of a special campaign to address "red hat" agencies, said the regional civil affairs bureau on Monday.

"The reform is part of the country's intensive efforts to deepen overall reforms since 2012," said Xu Yaotong, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Governance. "It is aimed at forming a clear relationship between the government and enterprises and preventing corruption."

Some agencies, if they are unnecessary, should be closed, he added.

The second group of 144 nationwide associations and chambers are scheduled to finish the reform in July 2017, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

LEARN TO MAKE A LIVING

Without a connection to the ministries, survival is not easy for these agencies after their "red hats" are removed.

The China Institute of Internal Audit is an example.

"We will probably face difficulties, such as the shortage of personnel, shrinking business and less local support in the short run," said Shen.

"We need to change our mindset and come up with new ideas to expand the market and adapt to competition," he added.

The institute continues to enjoy some financial support from the NAO during the transition until the end of 2017. After that, it will be totally self-reliant.

The vice secretary general said the institute should provide more quality services to its members, which is a new challenge. He also hopes the government will buy services from the institute.

"We expect the government to empower us in participating in industrial policy-making and management," said Zhang Hongbo, secretary general of the China Chamber of Commerce for Motorcycle, which has also completed the reform.

The chamber, set up in 2006, was previously affiliated with the Commerce Ministry. It has 120 member companies, which jointly account for 90 percent of the country's motorcycle output. The separation reform was a bit easier for the chamber, as it had been independent in terms of finance and personnel prior to the reform.

The country's motorcycle industry has been greatly impacted by the growing popularity of electric bicycles in recent years and faces falling sales, which affects the chamber's revenue from member fees, said Zhang, also deputy general manger of Jinan Qingqi Motorcycle Co., Ltd. in Shandong Province.

"The reform is new and difficult for many. I hope the government will follow up with separated associations and provide guidance and exchange platforms, such as training, to enhance our abilities and influence in our respective industries," said Zhang.

Shen said he still has confidence in the future of the institute after the separation. "As a professional organization, we have a lot of things to do."

"In the past, we felt no pressure. But now we must learn to survive and adapt ourselves to market competition. Otherwise, we will be tossed away," he said.
ADDIS ABABA, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Chinese investors have shown their keen interest to invest in Ethiopia, said Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) head Fitsum Arega on Thursday.

The African country in the past three months received 124 investors who have keen interest to invest, out of whom 71 were from China, said Arega.

Data from the EIC also show that the number of Chinese investors with keen interest to invest in the country is larger than other countries combined.

Arega also expressed his regret and sadness over "the appalling damages, indiscriminate looting and destruction sustained by national and foreign investment projects operating in some parts of Ethiopia and the short-lived state of insecurity".

"The chain of unfortunate incidents last month have come at greater cost to business and had created a sense of insecurity and business uncertainty. Since, the government has taken decisive measures to restore peace and order and assuage the concerns leveled by various investors," he noted.

According to Arega, despite challenges such as drought and insecurity, the country's foreign direct investment has registered a 50-percent increase to reach 3 billion U.S. dollars in last budget year.
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) meets with President-elect DonaldTrump to discuss transition plans in the White House Oval Office in Washington, U.S., November 10, 2016. (Xinhua/REUTERS)

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama said Thursday he and President-elect Donald Trump had a wide-ranging conversation during their first post-election meeting at the White House.

"My number one priority in the coming two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures that our president-elect is successful," Obama said, adding that if Trump succeeds, "then the country succeeds."

In light of the deep rift among the U.S. society that became evident during the election, Obama said "it is important for all of us, regardless of party, regardless of political preferences, to now come together to deal with many of the challenges we face."

For his part, Trump said "A lot of different situations" were discussed during the one-and-half-hour meeting, which was much longer than expected.

Trump also expressed the eagerness to work with the government and Obama in the future.

The meeting was the first such event held between Obama and Trump since the former real estate billionaire was elected president on Wednesday.

Obama has said Wednesday during a speech acknowledging the election result that despite of the differences between him and Trump, it's paramount to make sure the transition was peaceful.

The incoming first lady and vice president also accompanied Trump to the White House and held meetings with their counterparts respectively.

According to a statement released by the White House Thursday, the president's team had started preparing since early 2016 to facilitate a smooth transition.

Related:

How the world is reacting to Trump's win

BEIJING, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Following Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, reactions poured in from across the world. Full story

Trump good for U.S. economy, potential issues for emerging markets: CBA economist

SYDNEY, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Headline global growth is likely to lift under a Donald Trump presidency, however ensuring rises in the U.S. dollar, faster than expected U.S. Federal Reserve rate hikes and punitive trade barriers may cause global issues. Full story

Spotlight: Trump's win spurs concern over possible U.S. withdrawal from climate deal
MOSUL, Iraq, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi security forces continued on Thursday their advance near the city of Mosul and recaptured a village from the Islamic State (IS) militants, security sources said.

The Iraqi army and allied Sunni tribal fighters made a new progress and took control of the village of Abbas al-Rajab near the archeological site of Nimrud, which located some 30 km south of Mosul, according to a statement by a media office affiliated to the Joint Operations Command (JOC).

The troops are expected to recapture the ancient Assyrian archeological site of Nimrud, which was founded in the 13th century B.C. and became the capital of Assyrian empire.

The move was part of a campaign against heritage sites under the control of the IS extremist militants, in addition to other archeological sites in the ancient province of Nineveh.

Also in the day, the troops fought fierce clashes with IS militants in the districts of Intisar, Jadidat al-Mufti and Shaymaa in the eastern side of Mosul, killing 13 militants, including a local IS leader named Khalid al-Mtaiwati, and destroying three booby trapped motorcycles, the statement said.

Earlier in the month, the Iraqi army made a significant progress at the eastern side of Mosul, and managed to seize six districts.

The advance unleashed the most intense street battles against IS militants since the offensive to retake the city which started more than three weeks ago.

The battles inside Mosul pushed the number of displaced civilians to around 34,860 since the start of the military offensive, according to the recent report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

On Oct. 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the start of the major offensive to retake Mosul, the country's second largest city.

Since then, the Iraqi security forces have inched to the eastern fringes of Mosul and made progress on other routes around the city, preparing for a major battle to storm the city and drive out IS militants.

Mosul, some 400 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, has been under IS control since June 2014, when Iraqi government forces abandoned their weapons and fled, enabling IS militants to take control of parts of Iraq's northern and western regions.

Related:

Kurdish forces free town from IS militants near Iraq's Mosul
UNITED NATIONS, Nov.10 (Xinhua) -- The UN Office for the Coordination Affairs (OCHA) on Thursday said that a further 3,300 people have been displaced since Wednesday, bringing the number of people displaced in context of the Mosul military operations to more than 45,000 since Oct. 17, a UN spokesman told reporters here.

"At this rate, camp capacity is still keeping pace with the steady flow of displacement, but additional camp space and emergency shelter options will be needed in the next week to accommodate anticipated displacements," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here.

Total camp capacity is expected to expand to 90,000 available spaces by mid-November, the spokesman noted.

A Wednesday humanitarian mission to Hamam Al Alil and Al Shura, approximately 23 kilometres south of Mosul City, reported that an estimated 71,000 people in the villages, he said.

"Priority needs include food, potable water and health care," Dujarric said, adding that the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement has organised a first distribution, but sustained humanitarian assistance is needed in these villages.

On Oct. 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is also the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi forces, announced the start of a major offensive to retake Mosul, the country's second largest city, in a bid to liberate the northern Iraqi city, the last major Islamic State (IS) stronghold in Iraq.

So far, the Iraqi security forces have inched to the eastern fringes of Mosul, and made progress on other routes around the city preparing for the major battle to storm the city and drive out the IS militants.

Mosul, some 400 kilometers north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, has been under IS control since June 2014, when Iraqi government forces abandoned their weapons and fled, enabling IS militants to take control of parts of Iraq's northern and western regions.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- The United States on Thursday slapped sanctions on four key leaders of al-Nusrah Front, in an effort to disrupt operations of the terrorist organization in Syria.

The four leaders are Abdallah Muhammad Bin-Sulayman al-Muhaysini, Jamal Husayn Zayniyah, Abdul Jashari, and Ashraf Ahmad Fari al-Allak, according to a statement issued by the Treasury Department.

As a result of the action, all property and interests in property of the designated individuals subject to U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them.

"From recruiting fighters to raising funds, these sanctioned individuals are responsible for providing key financial and logistical support to al-Nusrah Front," said John Smith, an official of the Treasury Department. "Treasury will continue to target al-Nusrah Front's financial networks and choke off their access to the international financial system."

Also on Thursday, the State Department amended the designation of al-Nusrah Front as a terrorist group to add new aliases, most notably, Jabhat Fath al Sham.

In July 2016, Abu Muhammed al-Jawlani, the leader of al-Nusrah Front, announced his group would henceforth be known as Jabhat Fath al Sham.

"Whether it calls itself Jabhat Fath al Sham or al-Nusrah Front, the group remains al-Qa'ida's affiliate in Syria," the State Department said in a statement.
LIMA, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- The 24th APEC Economic Leaders' Week is set to promote 150 different public and private events next week, the president of the Lima Convention and Visitors Bureau, Carlos Canales, said on Thursday.

In addition to the gathering of economic leaders from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, business delegations from the bloc will attend APEC's CEO Summit.

These events "generate more than 80 million U.S. dollars for the economy, of which 50 million dollars have benefited business in the city of Lima," said Canales, whose agency operates the venue that will play host to the economic leaders' meeting.

The gathering, attended by private-sector experts as well as government officials, will offer Peruvian business leaders a chance to exchange trade experiences with their counterparts from APEC, a potential market of around 2.8 billion consumers, noted Canales.

Peru will be showcasing its natural resources during the event, as well as its traditional export products and its tourism attractions.

"The country's image should impress the nearly 15,000 visitors of all types who have arrived for the events," said Canales. "They should serve as the bridge to draw a larger number of investors."

The immediate impact should be on tourism, said Canales, since the eyes of the world will be on the meeting and therefore on Peru and its rich cultural heritage.

APEC's influence should be felt beginning next year, when Peru holds business rounds with the bloc's members, he said.

APEC represents 57 percent of the world's gross domestic product, and 49 percent of world trade.
People protest against Donald Trump's presidential election victory outside the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York, the United States, Nov. 9, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Changxiang)

NEW YORK, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- As many as 5,000 people gathered Wednesday night in front of Trump Tower in New York City to protest the billionaire's election as president.

The demonstration started at 4 p.m. (2100 GMT) with only a dozen protesters in front of the Trump Tower, residence and campaign headquarters of the president-elect.

In just a couple of hours, the small gathering snowballed into a massive demonstration that filled the Fifth Avenue stretching several blocks.

Holding such signs as "Not my president," "Our city does not support hate," and chanting "We reject the president-elect," the protesters, mostly young people, were visibly angry and upset.

"I felt agony, betrayed and despair," Sarah Curry described her feelings after learning that Trump has won the election.

"I don't know the future of our country and it terrifies me," Curry said.

Protesters had also raised many issues against Trump, including immigration, health care and women's rights. Many also questioned the country's electoral system that allowed Trump to snatch the presidency without winning the popular vote.

The city's police force was on high alert during the demonstration that dragged into the next morning. Traffic was cut off around the premises, and several street-cleaning trucks were deployed in front of the entrance of the building to prevent protesters from rushing in.

As a traditional Democratic stronghold, nearly 58 percent of voters in the State of New York cast ballots for Hillary Clinton, compared with 37 percent for Trump, according to official figures.

New York City leans blue in a more dramatic fashion. In New York County where the Trump Tower is located, an overwhelming 86 percent of the votes went to Clinton.
BELGRADE, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Serbia and Britain will develop their relations further despite Brexit, said Boris Johnson, visiting British secretary of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs, here on Thursday.

Johnson arrived in Serbia on Thursday for a two-day visit during his regional tour.

Johnson said at a press conference here that Britain, despite its decision to leave EU, remains dedicated to friendly relations with European countries such as Serbia.

"We will continue to support Serbia on its European path," Johnson said, stressing the economic and political progress that Serbia achieved.

He expressed a wish for the intensification of relations between the two countries as "there is an increased interest among British investors for Serbia."

"We remain a friend of Serbia and I thank you because you said that we will strengthen and intensify our relations on all levels," Johnson told Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic at the conference.

Vucic said that Serbia wishes to continue cooperation and establish better relations with Britain, especially the political and economic ones.

"I am sure that we have many opportunities to advance economic cooperation as well as cooperation in areas of security and safety," he said.

However, Vucic said that the trade balance between the two countries is relatively small and that it recently increased from 290 million to 370 million euros, but that there is room for a bigger increase.

At the beginning of his two-day visit to Serbia, Johnson also met with Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic, with whom he discussed possible exchange in areas of judiciary and fighting organized crime as well as migrations.

According to the press announcement of the Serbian Foreign Ministry, Dacic and Johnson stressed the need for strengthening political dialogues between Serbia and Britain, and Johnson repeated that Britain is willing to support Serbia on European integration.
LISBON, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Hyperloop One is aspiring to convince countries around the world that a futuristic transport system could carry passengers and things in "hyperpods" at plane-like speed.

U.S. startup Hyperloop One revealed on Thursday at Web Summit that it is working with the Finnish and Dutch governments to gain an approval for its plans for a high-speed transportation system.

"We are creating a high speed backbone for future mobility," Josh Giegel, Hyperloop One Co-Founder, told Xinhua on Thursday.

"So just like Uber has tied together an intercity (drives), what if that could get you between cities extremely fast," he explained.

"I could get an airplane between two cities, but I would have to go to the airport, wait for two hours. So this would not only cut the journey time but also the waiting time," he added.

Hyperloop One will travel at over 1,100 km an hour, faster than a plane, Giegel told Xinhua.

The man behind the idea is the founder of Space X and Tesla, Elon Musk.

Headquartered in Los Angeles and employing over 200 people, Hyperloop has raised over 200 million dollars in two years.

"I hope to prove that this technology works and that it can be made more cost-effective," Giegel said.

A successful test of the technology was carried out in the Nevada desert in May, but the full scale test is set to take place in early 2017.

Hyperloop One, which its founders refer to as "the next broadband" would work by propelling pods at high speeds through a tube.

"It is a smooth experience that will feel like an elevator ride," Giegel explained to the audience at Web Summit.

"Hyperloop One is a transportation system we want to spread around the world and make the world a smaller place," co-founder Shervin Pishevar said during a conference at Web Summit.

"If we can work together and our economies become more tied together that is probably the best contribution our generation can make."
LISBON, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Artificial intelligence and how it will affect jobs was the key topics at Web Summit, one of EU's largest technology event which was held in Lisbon this year.

Over 53,000 people, including entrepreneurs, startups and investors, attended the three-day event between November 7 and 10.

Over 20,000 companies participated, as well as 2,000 startups, 663 speakers, 1,500 investors, 7,000 CEO's from technology, sport fashion and health companies among others. There were also around 2,000 journalists covering the event.

Web Summit moved from Dublin to Portugal this year. The event would generate at least 200 million euros for the Portuguese economy, according to the Lisbon Tourism Association.

One of the hot topics at this year's Web Summit was artificial intelligence. which Paddy Cosgrave, CEO of Web Summit, said governments have to start to prepare for the situation in which millions of workers see their jobs at stake.

"In 2010 and 2011 there were photo sharing apps, social networks, but there was little talk about artificial intelligence, and little talk about big data, and over 24 months in particular, there has been an explosion of AI startups," he told journalists at a press conference during the event.

The future of technology was also discussed in several conferences.

Thursday wrapped up with "The age of moonshots and Hyperloop One" with Hyperloop One co-founders Josh Giegel and Shervin Pishevar revealing negotiations with the Finnish and Dutch governments to implement their plans for a high speed transportation system.

The winner of the startup competition, Danish Company Kubo Robot, a robot designed to teach young children programming, was announced to close the event. The company won 100,00 euros.

Cosgrave said he believes the number of people attending the conference will begin to grow, and that the maximum capacity of 80,000 people will be reached by next year. (1 euro = 1.09 U.S. dollars)
WELLINGTON, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand's manufacturing sector is on track to growing faster this year than in 2015, according to the latest performance of manufacturing index (PMI) out Friday.

The BNZ-Business New Zealand PMI for October was 55.2, on a scale where above 50 indicates expansion and below 50 contraction.

The reading was 2.3 points down from September, and the third time in four months activity has been in the 55 point range.

The sector remained solidly in expansion in almost all months since October 2012, Business New Zealand executive director for manufacturing Catherine Beard said in a statement.

The results over most of 2016 had been in a fairly consistent zone of expansion.

"The headline result for the first 10 months of 2016 shows expansion only varying by 2.8 points, with most months seesawing between the 55 and 57 point range," said Beard.

"At this stage, 2016 is shaping up as better than 2015 for the sector, although the next two months will determine the extent to which the sector can keep momentum going to provide healthy levels of expansion."

BNZ senior economist Craig Ebert said in the statement that October's PMI level was "handsomely positive certainly well above its long-term average of 53.2."
MANILA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday that he is against the implementation of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that Manila and Washington signed in 2014, hinting again that he might just scrap the agreement that allows prolonged deployment of American forces in the country as well as build logistics hub in Philippine military bases.

Duterte, who arrived early Friday back in Davao City from an overnight official visit to Malaysia, told a news conference that he does not want to see any foreign troops on Philippine soil.

He added that the joint military activities that will be carried out this year by the Philippine and U.S. troops would probably be the last.

In fact, he said that he only gave the go-ahead for the EDCA activities to push through this year because they were already firmed up by Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana.

"By the time I talked to (Lorenzana) the arrangement has already been firmed up. I do not want to embarrass the Philippines and, of course, not so much because I was already vocal against it. But in deference to the secretary of defense I said go ahead but this should be the last time," Duterte said.

Last month he also told a business forum in Tokyo during his visit in Japan, "I want, maybe, in the next two years, my country, freed of the presence of foreign military troops. I want them out, and if I have to revise or abrogate agreements, executive agreements, I will."

Asked whether there would be changes in policies with the new U.S. administration, Duterte said, "I will pursue what I've started."

"I'm not into the habit of reneging on my word. And my partnership with China and the rest of the ASEAN remains. I will sail the stake of the nation and it should be pushed by the wind of self-interest only, self-interest of our nation," Duterte said.

He reiterated that the Philippines will continue to honor the treaties that the Philippines signed with the U.S., including the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.

Duterte reiterated that he is against the joint war games between the Philippines and U.S. forces, saying only the U.S. soldiers benefit from these exercises. Besides, he said that the Americans do not share their sophisticated and state-of the-art communication equipment to Philippine troops.
SUVA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Fijian Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama has congratulated U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and requested U. S. support on fighting climate change and ocean pollution.

"We especially seek America's support in our struggle against the extreme weather events and rising sea levels caused by climate change, which pose a particular threat to the Pacific islands and other low lying areas of the world," Bainimarama told Trump in his letter of congratulations, which was disclosed to local media Friday.

"We also look forward to working with you to protect our oceans and seas from the threat of pollution and overfishing," Bainimarama added, while wishing Trump "every best as you prepare to assume the presidency."

Republican presidential nominee Trump, 70, won the Nov. 8 presidential election in the United States and is set to succeed Democratic Barack Obama as the next U.S. president.
TAIYUAN, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Zhao Liping, a former senior political advisor and police chief of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, was sentenced to death for murder, bribery and possession of fire arms and explosives on Friday.

Zhao was also stripped of his political rights and had personal property worth two million yuan (293,535 U.S. dollars) confiscated, according to a statement from the Taiyuan City Intermediate People's Court in China's central Shanxi Province.
NANNING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Zhu Mingguo, former head of the political advisory body in the southern province of Guangdong, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve on Friday for accepting bribes and holding "a huge amount" of assets from unidentified sources.

Zhu was found guilty of using his power, when he held public posts between 2002 and 2014, to seek profits for others bidding for projects and land, and aided personnel to secure promotions, according to a statement from the Liuzhou City Intermediate People's Court in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

During the period, Zhu's positions included director of Chongqing public security bureau, Standing Committee member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Guangdong Provincial Committee, and deputy secretary of CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee.

Zhu accepted 141 million yuan (20.7 million U.S. dollars) in assets and bribes directly or through his wife, and had property worth over 91 million yuan from unknown sources, the statement said.

All his assets from unknown sources have been confiscated, the statement added.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said on Friday that revolutionary pioneer Sun Yat-sen had staunchly championed the integrity of the country and unity of the nation, at a gathering to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's birth.

"Sun Yat-sen unequivocally opposed any remarks or actions that attempted to split the country or the nation," Xi, who is also Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in his speech.

Quoting Sun, Xi said that united, the people of the entire country benefit; disunited, people suffer.

"Any attempt to split the country will be resolutely opposed by all Chinese people," Xi said, vowing "we'll never allow anyone, any organization or political Party to rip out any part of our territory at any time or in any form."
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's just-concluded trip to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Russia has taken pragmatic cooperation with the four Eurasian countries and the wider region a stride forward.

In addition to paying official visits to the four countries, Li also attended the 15th prime ministers' meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and a meeting with leaders of 16 Central and Eastern European (CEE) nations.

From synergizing development strategies, boosting production capacity cooperation to signing new cooperation documents with the countries concerned, the premier's tight schedule has yielded fruitful results in a wide range of areas.

BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE TO CONJOIN WITH KYRGYZ DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

At a meeting with Kyrgyz Prime Minister Sooronbay Jeenbekov in Bishkek, Li said China is willing to translate the high-level political mutual trust with Kyrgyzstan into more substantial cooperation results.

The two economies are highly complementary with abundant points of converging interests and great potentials for cooperation, said the premier.

Li said his country is willing to conjoin the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative with Kyrgyzstan's development strategy, and push forward production capacity cooperation.

Li also expressed the hope that Kyrgyzstan will further improve its investment environment.

For his part, Jeenbekov said Kyrgyzstan is willing to further increase political dialogues with China and boost the building of the Belt and Road Initiative through bilateral economic cooperation.

Kyrgyzstan would also carry forward the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway project and highway projects in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz prime minister said.

After the meeting, the two leaders released a joint communique between the two countries and witnessed the signing of a number of cooperation documents in such fields as economy, technology, production capacity, transport, agriculture and intellectual property rights.

The SCO prime ministers' meeting, which was also held in Bishkek, concluded with a six-pronged proposal by Premier Li, who called upon all its members to enhance cooperation in security, economic development, production capacity, innovation, regional financing and people-to-people exchanges.

SILK ROAD ECONOMIC BELT ALIGNING WITH KAZAKHSTAN'S BRIGHT ROAD

Upon his arrival in Kazakhstan, Li said China and the country have carried out fruitful cooperation, especially in production capacity, which has played a leading and exemplary role.

When meeting with his Kazakh counterpart, Bakytzhan Sagintayev, Li pledged to better align China's Silk Road Economic Belt initiative with Kazakhstan's new economic policy of the Bright Road to usher in a new phase of bilateral cooperation.

The Chinese premier called on efforts to explore potentials through production capacity cooperation and the construction of major projects on connectivity.

China is willing to expand cooperation with Kazakhstan to set a good example of good neighborly relations and win-win cooperation, the premier said.

For his part, Sagintayev said Kazakhstan would like to integrate its new economic policy of the Bright Road with China's Silk Road Economic Belt initiative, and further deepen cooperation in production capacity, transport, energy, agriculture and innovation.

During his meeting with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Li reiterated China's willingness to augment production capacity cooperation with Kazakhstan, and expand cooperation in energy, connectivity and deep processing of agricultural products.

Nazarbayev hailed Kazakhstan-China ties as a model of friendly cooperation between countries, saying Kazakhstan stands ready to boost cooperation in production capacity with China and push forward the implementation of more projects in the Central Asian country.

Kazakhstan is also willing to expand cooperation with China in energy, agriculture and technology innovation, and strengthen bilateral trade, Nazarbayev said.

CHINA, CEE COUNTRIES TO PROMOTE COOPERATION

While meeting with Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis, Li said China is willing to align its development strategies with Latvia's, promote bilateral cooperation in connectivity, trade and infrastructure construction, and enhance people-to-people exchanges in areas like tourism and education.

Latvia looks forward to fortifying cooperation with China in transportation, innovation, logistics and agriculture, and welcomes more Chinese investment, Vejonis said.

Cooperation in trade, connectivity, production capacity, finance, agriculture and forestry were highlighted by the leaders of China and the 16 CEE countries during the Riga summit.

On trade and investment, the participants gave encouragement to the progress in the ongoing EU-China negotiations over an ambitious and comprehensive investment agreement. They welcomed further cooperation on enhancing trade through e-commerce platforms and urged Chinese and CEE countries' businesses to promote exports and imports of their high-quality and characteristic products through e-commerce.

Trade volume between China and CEE countries reached 56.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, up 28 percent over 2010. Chinese investment in the 16 CEE countries exceeded 5 billion dollars, while they have invested more than 1.2 billion dollars in China.

To boost connectivity, all sides supported the development of transport routes between Europe and Asia, including the development of Europe-China international railway container traffic, the establishment of multi-modal logistic centers in CEE countries and throughout the whole Eurasian Land Bridge areas, and the improvement of the international supply chain and border crossing rules on the transport corridors.

With regard to production capacity cooperation, China and CEE countries voiced willingness to strengthen the Adriatic-Baltic-Black Sea Seaport Cooperation in the Riga Declaration issued at the end of the summit.

They agreed to support the development of industrial clusters in ports, encourage cooperation in infrastructure development, such as construction of railways and roads, logistics and warehousing facilities at sea and inland ports and industrial parks, and encourage closer cooperation in financing.

On financial cooperation, related institutions and businesses from CEE countries are invited to contribute on a voluntary basis to the investment fund set by Sino-CEE Finance Holding Company Ltd. to jointly promote China-CEE cooperation on connectivity and the development of relevant industries.

Participants in the "16+1" summit encouraged Chinese financial institutions, including the Silk Road Fund, to provide financing support for China-CEE cooperation, and support China and CEE countries in boosting practical cooperation within the framework of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, including third-party cooperation with other countries and regions.

The China-CEE Countries Investment Cooperation Fund (Stage II) will be launched and put into operation in 2017.

They also planned to explore the possibility of establishing a China-CEE Countries Inter-Bank Association.

BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE TO SYNERGIZE WITH EEU

China is willing to work with Russia to synergize the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), and lift the levels of China-Russia ties and cooperation, Li said during his meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

The Chinese initiative, which comprises the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, aspires to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient Silk Road routes. The EEU groups Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.

The Chinese premier pointed to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and innovation in particular as the areas where the two countries should step up efforts to promote future cooperation.

Li also called for more efforts to strengthen financial cooperation and increase the volume of settlement in national currencies.

He said the two sides should jointly work to expand trade, safeguard world trade system and rules, and promote trade cooperation and facilitation and mutual investment.

Medvedev asked the two countries to boost cooperation in SME innovation, while actively conducting cooperation in major projects in the areas of oil and gas and nuclear energy.

They also should boost financial cooperation, he added.

The meeting produced a joint communique calling upon the two countries to deepen cooperation in a wide range of fields, including economy and trade, investment, energy and people-to-people exchanges.

Li also met with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Xi Jinping said that the best tribute to Sun Yat-sen is to continue the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of.

Xi made the remarks here at a gathering to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's birth on Friday.

"The best way we commemorate Sun Yat-sen is to learn and carry forward his invaluable spirit, to unite all that can be united and mobilize all that can be mobilized to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of," Xi, who is also Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in a speech.

Born in 1866, Sun was the founder of the Kuomintang Party, and is a revered revolutionary leader who played a pivotal role in overthrowing imperial rule in China.

CPC members are the firmest supporters, most loyal collaborators and most faithful successors of Sun's revolutionary undertakings, Xi said.

"Today, we are closer, more confident and more able to achieve national rejuvenation than ever before," Xi said.

With lots of challenges and difficulties ahead, there is still a long way to go until we have truly modernized the country, revitalized the nation and realized the common prosperity of all Chinese, said Xi.

"I call on all Chinese who revere Mr. Sun Yat-sen, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese, to unite, no matter their political affiliations," Xi said.

Xi called on the Chinese people to learn from Sun's noble patriotism and devotion to the motherland.

Sun's tough life and prolonged struggle for the country, said Xi, taught him that reforming China must be based on the nation's reality and it must follow a development path suitable for China's national conditions.

As it has been proven by the history of both China and other countries,the prosperous nations are the ones that have found development paths suitable for their reality, Xi continued.

Today, to revitalize the Chinese nation, we need to carry forward patriotism, Xi said.

To love the country, the Chinese people should uphold the leadership of the CPC, the socialist system in China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics developed by the Chinese people under the CPC's leadership, he noted.

Xi added that the fundamental principles of the CPC and the Chinese people -- respecting the Chinese reality, learning from the outstanding achievements of all cultures and the independent development of the country -- should also be firmly adhered to.

Xi urged the Chinese people to strengthen confidence in the path, theory, system and culture of the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
LIMA, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- A total of 260 commandos from the Peruvian Airforce (FAP) carried out a test on Thursday of the security measures deployed for the 24th APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting next week in Lima.

The test, lasting around two hours, was carried out by the 8th Air Group at Lima's Jorge Chavez international airport.

Among the measures was the deployment of canine units to safeguard the participants of the meeting from Nov. 19 to 20.

Commander Luis Gonzalez, in charge of the operation, told the press that "the FAP has been training on a permanent basis in recent days," to prepare for any eventuality, including a potential aircraft hijacking.

"A rescue in a plane is not the same as a rescue in a building. The considerations are different, and the personnel must have a knowledge of aeronautics to decide where to enter, how to activate emergency handles and how to use the emergency exits," Gonzalez pointed out.

During the operation, journalists were also shown the application of biometric and facial controls, surveillance cameras and X-ray machines to check all personnel.

To prepare for emergencies, three other airports around Peru will also serve as bases for operations if needed.
PHNOM PENH, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia's royalist party Funcinpec held an extraordinary congress on Friday to design strategy to increase its popularity ahead of two major elections in 2017 and 2018.

The congress was attended by some 1,000 party members and activists from across the kingdom.

Funcinpec Party's President Prince Norodom Ranariddh said the congress is aimed at encouraging the party members and activists to work harder to increase the party's popularity ahead of the upcoming elections.

"Also, the congress is vital to setting out strategy to compete in the 2017 commune election and the 2018 general election," he said.

The 72-year-old prince also called on all the royalists and the Sihanoukists to reunite for the prosperity of the monarchy regime.

Ranariddh, a son of late revered King Norodom Sihanouk, led Funcinpec to victory in the UN-run elections in 1993. He was former co-prime minister from 1993 to 1997, and ex-president of the National Assembly from 1998 to 2006. Currently, he is the head of the Supreme Privy Council to King Norodom Sihamoni, his half-brother.

Founded in 1981 by Sihanouk, Funcinpec was once the country's largest political party, but its popularity has gradually diminished due to internal rifts and the party failed to win a single seat in the 2013 general election. Enditem
MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Four Afghans have been killed and 115 others injured as a vehicle bomb targeted the German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif in the northern Balkh province, a local security official said Friday.

"At least four people had been killed and 115 others sustained injuries as a result of a vehicle bomb attack against the German consulate at 11:05 p.m. local time Thursday which followed by a gun battle," the official told Xinhua but declined to be named.

Almost all the victims are civilians, the official added, saying the Taliban militants apparently detonated an explosive-laden truck, which has damaged houses about 5 km away from the site of blast.

Meantime, Balkh provincial police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat, told the media that two persons had been arrested following the explosion.

Director of civilian hospital in Mazar-e-Sharif, Khawja Noor Mohammad Faiz has confirmed that four dead bodies and 115 injured persons, including 17 children and 10 women, have been taken to hospital.

There is no report on possible casualties of consulate staff in the bombing.

Taliban outfit has claimed of responsibility for the deadly bombing, saying the attack on the German consulate was to revenge the killing of Taliban militants in the northern Kunduz city last week, including Taliban commander Mullah Taqi.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday held their first post-election meeting at the White House on a wide-ranging topics.

After the behind-closed-doors meeting, Obama said "my number one priority in the coming two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures that our president-elect is successful," adding that if Trump succeeds, "then the country succeeds."

He said they had discussed domestic and foreign policy and was "very encouraged" by Trump's interest in working with Obama's team on issues facing the United States.

He called for unity, saying "it is important for all of us, regardless of party, regardless of political preferences, to now come together to deal with many of the challenges we face."

For his part, Trump said "a lot of different situations" were discussed during the one-and-half-hour meeting, which was much longer than expected.

"We discussed a lot of different situations -- some wonderful and some difficulties," he said.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said although the two man did not resolve their differences, "the meeting might have been at least a little less awkward than some might have expected."

The meeting was the first such event held between Obama and Trump since the former real estate billionaire was elected president on Wednesday.

Obama said Wednesday during a speech that it is paramount to make sure the transition was peaceful despite the differences between him and Trump.

Despite appeals for unity, thousands took to the streets in some major U.S. cities on Wednesday after the former real estate billionaire was declared the 45th president of the United States.

In New York, as many as 5,000 people gathered Wednesday night in front of Trump Tower to protest the billionaire's election.

Holding such signs as "Not my president," "Our city does not support hate," and chanting "We reject the president-elect," the protesters, mostly young people, were visibly angry and upset.

Protesters had also raised many issues against Trump, including immigration, health care and women's rights. Many also questioned the country's electoral system that allowed Trump to snatch the presidency without winning the popular vote.

As a traditional Democratic stronghold, nearly 58 percent of voters in the State of New York cast ballots for Hillary Clinton, compared with 37 percent for Trump, according to official figures.

In San Francisco, California, two groups of protesters took to the street on Wednesday night chanting for racial equality and women's rights and against the discrimination they said was emboldened by Trump's rhetoric along the campaign trail.

A speaker of the organization said it was the first step against the president-elect's "bigoted, extreme right wing agenda" and more would follow in the coming days.

In the neighboring San Francisco Bay city of Oakland tear gas was deployed by police as protests entered a second night. The crowd reportedly grew to some 7,000 people at one point on Wednesday and several buildings were vandalized; bonfires were set on at least one street.

Students at several schools in the cities of Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose, and in Contra Costa County earlier in the day walked out of class along with their teachers. At Berkeley High School, 1,500 students walked to downtown Berkeley in the morning and staged a silent sit-in at a plaza.

In Los Angeles, protesters blocked a section of Highway 101 for hours on Wednesday night.

A majority of voters in California, the largest state in the country, voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Up north in the state of Oregon, about 300 people marched through downtown Portland and dozens of them blocked traffic in the city and enforced a delay for trains on two light-rail lines. A crowd of much smaller size showed up in downtown Seattle in the state of Washington, and four males and one female were injured in an unrelated shooting incident nearby.

In downtown Chicago, protesters on Wednesday night held signs reading "No to Trump, No to Racism and Sexism," "Not my America, Not my President," "Dump Trump," "Hate won't make America great," and zigzagged through the bustling South Michigan Avenue, Lakeshore Drive and the Magnificent Mile before returning to the rally site opposite Trump Tower across the Chicago River and staged a sit-in.

Throughout the country, protesters were mainly young adults, and statistics show 55 percent of people in the group aged 18 through 29 voted on Tuesday for Clinton, and 37 percent of those in the same group voted for Trump.

In an election year when Americans were eager to hear policy positions on real issues facing the country, the most important issues along the campaign trails were Trump's comments on women and Clinton's email scandal.

Many voters felt frustrated or even despaired that they had no other choice but to choose from the two most disliked candidates in American history.

The probably most divisive and scandalous election in American history has eroded voters' faith in the two-party system, with many voters calling it a game of money, power, and influence. Enditem
By Liang Xizhi, Deng Qian, Gui Tao, Peter Barker

LONDON, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- As China and Britain have entered a "Golden Era" of relations, their opportunities to strengthen economic and financial cooperation in third party markets has emerged, experts say.

Britain remains "open for business" and committed to maintain the Golden Era relations with China, British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Wednesday during her meeting with visiting Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai in London.

Many in Britain believe that China and the UK should take the opportunity during this Golden Era to bolster cooperation in third party markets.

Professor Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King's College, London, said in an interview with Xinhua that there are opportunities for Chinese companies to work with British companies in third party markets because they are quite complementary.

Brown said the two countries will see a lot more of this sort of cooperation in the future, particularly in Africa and in the Middle East.

"I think the UK would bring analysis and local knowledge to the table, and the fact that it has got very very internationalized companies that have been out foraging overseas for a long long time. So there is a lot of knowledge," said the professor.

"China would bring capital to the table, and the ability to get things done, some of it new technology; and the fact that it is politically welcomed in a lot of these places, whereas the UK may have more political inhibitions in the way it operates," he added.

Stephen Perry, chairman of the 48 Group Club in UK, praised China's Belt and Road Initiative and believed the two countries could cooperate more in markets along this road.

"The Chinese imagination demonstrated by Belt and Road Initiative is exactly what the world needs to get out of QE and dull growth," Perry said many nations can experience development because of the Chinese initiative.

He pointed out that UK has a lot of experience in dealing in many unusual economies in various stages of development. The two countries can benefit from and can jointly develop third party markets.

"If the UK decides to prioritize the new areas of Belt and Road Initiative in Africa, then China and the UK can, indeed, have a golden era ahead," Perry said. "If we limit ourselves to bilateral trade and investment there will be a silver era. But it is the addition of third party work that heralds a golden era."

Keith Bennett, vice chairman of the 48 Group Club, says China and the UK have great potential to cooperate in third markets.

China is now a major player in the global economy and Chinese companies, both state and private, are being encouraged by the government to go out. In many cases, these companies are looking to invest and do business in countries, territories, industries and economic sectors where the UK has a long-standing presence, as well as deep connections and experience, sometimes dating back centuries, he said.

Bennett says that Chinese and UK companies have already worked well together in some part of Africa.

"I have seen this for myself, for example, when I accompanied a Chinese business delegation to South Sudan four years ago. The skills, possibilities and synergies of British and Chinese enterprises are therefore highly complementary not only in a bilateral sense but also for third markets and can deliver benefits not only to each other but also to local enterprises, people and economies," he said.

Professor Xiong Yu, chair of technology and operations management of Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University, believes that the stable partnership between the two countries is particularly important in a current volatile international environment.

Xiong said Britain's Northern Powerhouse strategy will form a win-win relationship with China's Belt and Road Initiative, which will not only benefit the two countries but have a positive impact on the whole world.

"The close cooperation between China and Britain will go beyond the scope of the two countries to influence the world. The two countries will bring other countries of the same values to participate actively in this cooperation mechanism and form a sound platform for economic and trade cooperation in third party markets," he said.
SEOUL, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- South Korean exports, which have struggled with sluggishness amid global economic slowdown, showed signs of recovery in early November thanks to demand for chips, auto parts and oil products, customs data showed on Friday.

For the first 10 days of this month, the economy's overseas shipments reached 13.92 billion U.S. dollars, up 19.7 percent from the same period of last year, according to the Korea Customs Service (KCS).

Exports adjusted for working days also increased 5.6 percent in the cited period, indicating a recovery in overseas shipments that account for about half of the export-driven economy.

The country's exports kept a downward momentum for 19 months through July, before rebounding 2.6 percent in August. The exports resumed the downward trend in September and October.

The resumption of export growth in early November was led by semiconductors, auto parts and oil products, of which shipments jumped 25.9 percent, 39.0 percent and 11.8 percent respectively.

Exports of telecommunication devices, including smartphones, and ships tumbled 7.9 percent and 26.1 percent compared with a year earlier.

Despite the positive signals, concerns emerged about the South Korean economy as Donald Trump was elected as U.S. president in a surprising upset over Hilary Clinton.

During his presidential election campaign, Trump pledged to re-negotiate a free trade agreement with South Korea and impose higher customs duty, indicating a protectionist policy toward South Korea.

The United States is the second-largest trading partner of South Korea.

South Korea's top central banker also expressed worries about economic uncertainties that may come from the U.S. president elect's trade policy. The central bank froze its policy rate at an all-time low of 1.25 percent for five straight months.
HANOI, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank (WB) will help Vietnam build five water-supply plants, according to Vietnam's Ministry of Construction (MoC) on Friday.

Nguyen Hong Tien, head of the MoC's Department of Technical Infrastructure was quoted by Vietnam's state-run news agency VNA as saying that the ministry is coordinating with agencies and the WB to study building water-supply plants for the Mekong Delta region.

Statistics showed about 250,000 households in Vietnam's Mekong Delta face shortages of water for daily use.

Five plants are expected to be built with a total capital of 1.3-1.7 billion U.S. dollars in three stages, said Tien, adding that capital for the first phase from 2017-2023 is estimated at 440 million U.S. dollars.

Le Duy Hung, WB's senior urban specialist, said the Vietnamese government's corresponding capital in the first phase will be 40 million U.S. dollars, while the WB will lend Vietnam the rest.

Earlier, the WB dispatched a loan worth 7 million U.S. dollars to prepare a feasibility study of the first phase.

Parts of the Mekong Delta have experienced the most serious drought and saltwater encroachment in the past nearly 100 years in 2016, said Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
MANILA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- At least 10 gunmen on Friday abducted five Vietnamese crew of a foreign vessel off Basilan province in the southern Philippines.

The Philippine coast guard reported that armed men seajacked a Vietnamese vessel, MV Royale 16, around 7 a.m. Friday near Sibago Island in the Basilan Strait, a strait of water separating the islands of Mindanao and Basilan province.

Maj. Filemon Tan said in a statement that the coast guard had immediately reported the incident to the military. "Sea and naval assets already deployed to search and rescue the kidnap victims," he said.

Tan and the coast guard said that the gunmen fled with the captives.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's upcoming tour to Latin America is expected to promote friendship and cooperation between China and the region and accelerate integration in the Asia-Pacific.

Xi will visit Ecuador, Peru and Chile from Nov. 17 to 23 and attend the 24th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting from Nov. 19 to 20 in Lima, Peru.

Experts say Xi's trip will inject dynamism into the development and prosperity of China, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific.

DEEPENING FRIENDSHIP WITH LATIN AMERICA

Xi's trip to Latin America, which will be the third since he took office in March 2013, is expected to deepen traditional friendship between China and the continent and consolidate the public opinion basis of China-Latin America relations.

Xi's visit to Ecuador is the first by a Chinese president since the two countries forged diplomatic ties 36 years ago.

In Ecuador, Xi will exchange views with President Rafael Correa on bilateral ties. The two presidents will also witness the signing of a series of deals, meet with the press and attend a launch ceremony of an assistance program.

The two heads of state will blueprint the future of bilateral relations from strategic perspectives, which will promote the China-Ecuador strategic partnership to a new height.

In January 2015 in Beijing, Xi and Correa decided to establish a strategic partnership between their countries. Since then, bilateral ties have entered a new phase of all-round rapid development.

Now, China is Ecuador's third-largest trading partner and Ecuador is one of the main destinations for Chinese investment and financing in Latin America.

Ecuadoran Foreign Minister Guillaume Long said that all sectors of the Ecuadoran society are looking forward to Xi's visit and that the historic visit will further deepen the brotherly friendship between the two peoples.

Peru is the second leg of Xi's visit. China and Peru, both with ancient civilizations, have enjoyed deep friendship. More than 400 years ago, maritime routes between China and Peru were explored, starting trans-oceanic exchanges.

Peru's close ties with China gives the country a pivotal role in promoting China-Latin America ties.

China has become Peru's largest trading partner and largest export market, while Peru is one of the first countries with which China conducted international cooperation in production capacity.

During his stay in Peru, Xi is expected to hold talks with President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and deliver a speech at the Peruvian Congress.

Chile, the last leg of Xi's visit, has always led in developing relations with China. It is the first South American nation that forged diplomatic ties with China, the first Latin American country that signed a bilateral accord with China on China's joining the World Trade Organization and signed a free trade agreement with China.

Last year, the first clearing bank for transactions in renminbi in South America was opened in Chile's capital, Santiago.

Xi's visit is expected to upgrade the China-Chile strategic partnership.During his stay in Chile, he is scheduled to hold talks with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, attend a signing ceremony for agreements and meet with the press.

In the eyes of Liu Yuqin, former Chinese ambassador to Ecuador and Chile, Xi's Latin America tour has fully reflected that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core holds a perspective of the overall situation in China's diplomatic strategy.

"China-Latin America relations have made a great stride since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012. Elevating the strategic position of policies toward Latin America and including Latin America in China's diplomatic strategy priorities accord with the common interests and realistic demand of both parties," Liu said.

FURTHERING CHINA-LATIN AMERICA ALL-ROUND COOPERATION

Ernesto Samper, secretary-general of the Union of South American Nations, said Latin American countries eagerly anticipated Xi's visit. He believed that the visit would greatly promote economic and trade cooperation between China and Latin America and strengthen bilateral all-around cooperation.

In fact, China and Latin America have made great progress in furthering their all-round cooperation in recent years.

In July 2014, Xi and leaders of Latin American and Caribbean countries held a summit in Brasilia, during which both sides decided to establish the China-Latin America comprehensive cooperative partnership of equality, mutual benefit and common development.

In January 2015, the first ministerial meeting of the forum of China and the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States was held in Beijing. Xi attended the meeting and made an important speech.

In 2016, China-Latin America relations have moved forward with the setup of new platforms such as the China-Latin America cultural exchange year and the forum of China-Latin America cooperation between local governments.

Official statistics show that the trade volume between China and Latin America rose more than twentyfold during the past decade to reach 236.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.

Currently, China is the second-largest trade partner and third-largest investment source country of Latin-America, while Latin America is China's seventh-largest trade partner.

Although bilateral trade has been affected by a sluggish global economy and the fall in commodity prices, both parties have been optimizing trade structure, diversifying areas for investment and transforming the model of economic and trade relations from one that used to be led only by trade to one driven by trade, investment and finance.

Now, China and Latin America are facing a new task of comprehensively upgrading their cooperation. Meanwhile, the development of bilateral ties has attracted much attention amid some changes in Latin America.

Against such backdrop, Xi's Latin America trip will deliver China's confidence in the stable development of the continent and send a signal of the bright prospects for bilateral cooperation.

"During Xi's visit, China will put forward a blueprint to enhance China-Latin America economic and trade cooperation. Latin America, which is under the pressure of economic transformation, needs China's market, production capacity, capital and experience in construction. China's proposal will be welcome," said Chen Fengying, an economist with China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

ACCELERATING ASIA-PACIFIC INTEGRATION

Under the theme of "Quality Growth and Human Development," the 21 APEC members will seek to make decisions to facilitate trade and investment as well as consolidate liberalization policies at the Peru summit.

Xi is expected to deliver a speech to the APEC CEO summit, meet representatives of the APEC business advisory council, attend two phases of the economic leaders' meeting and have meetings with some leaders.

China has grown into an important leader in Asia-Pacific cooperation.

During the 2014 APEC summit in Beijing, APEC member economies pushed forward the process of the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) by sketching out a historic roadmap for FTAAP.

The meeting also adopted important documents for an integrated, innovative and interconnected Asia-Pacific.

Now, the Beijing consensus is becoming reality, with the FTAAP process being carried forward orderly. A collective strategic study on issues related to the realization of FTAAP has been completed and the final version of the study along with recommendations will be presented to leaders at the Peru summit.

"I believe that Xi's attendance at the meeting will greatly promote the implementation of the fruits yielded at the Beijing summit and push forward FTAAP and connectivity from the highest level to make vision come true," said Chen, the Chinese economist.
File photo taken on July 18, 2013 shows the first direct cargo train leaving from Zhengzhou to Europe at the railway container center in Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Henan Province. (Xinhua/Zhu Xiang)

KIEV, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Kiev is stepping up its efforts to fully join the Belt-and-Road Initiative, viewing it as a great opportunity to boost agricultural trade between Asia and Europe, especially between China and Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official told Xinhua.

"It is very important for us to the take advantage as a Silk Road country and let agricultural producers to reap benefits from it," Vladyslava Rutytska, an advisor to Ukrainian Agriculture Minister, told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview.

Next year, Ukraine plans to open a cargo train route to China via the rail-sea Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR) -- an international corridor, which is part of China's Belt-and-Road Initiative.

According to Rutytska, the main advantage of the new train service is allowing a faster transfer of agricultural products from Ukraine to China.

"The Silk Road is an essential trade tool, because the goods could be delivered to consumers within 12 to 14 days, while their transportation on the traditional maritime routes takes between 28 and 30 days. It is of great significance for the producers of short-lived commodities," Rutytska said.

Although China became Ukraine's largest trading partner in agriculture and food products last year, accounting for 7.2 percent of the total trade, the East European country estimates that the potential of bilateral sales between the two sides is untapped.

According to Rutytska, opening a new route for transferring the goods would allow China and Ukraine to boost and diversify their agricultural merchandising.

"For our manufacturers, the Belt-and-Road Initiative means increased trade in dairy products and organic products, our traditionally strong sectors. Also, we are working with China on the opening of the berries and fruits markets," she said.

Apart from boosting its commercial cooperation with China, Ukraine is also willing to explore new trade opportunities with other countries encompassed in the TITR corridor, Rutytska noted

"For the agricultural sector, it is very important to establish cooperation with all the countries on this route, namely Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan andother states," she said.

According to the official, Ukraine views the establishment of the new logistic link not only as a tool to boost its exports, but also as an instrument to import more goods from Asian countries.

Speaking about the prospects to extend the route via Ukraine to Europe, the official said that many European Union countries welcome this initiative.

"Northern European counties are keen to export their products to China and the transit link through Ukraine is a good opportunity for them, Rutytska said.

For Ukraine, the Silk Road is a step towards an increased trade and prosperity of the business, and the country is doing its utmost to join the initiative, she said.
PHNOM PENH, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia's national flag carrier Cambodia Angkor Air (CAA) will launch direct flights between northwest Cambodia's Siem Reap province and China's Beijing, starting from Dec. 16 onwards, said a CAA's press release on Friday.

The airline will operate thrice-weekly flight service by using an Airbus A320 aircraft, which is capable to seat 180 passengers, the press release said.

"This is a new regular flight connecting Cambodia and China in addition to the existing flights to Guangzhou and Shanghai," it said.

According to the press release, the new flight is to respond to the rapid growth of Chinese tourists to Cambodia and will be easy for tourists in Beijing to travel to Siem Reap province, the home of famed Angkor Wat Temple.

Also, it will be easy for Cambodian people to fly to Beijing for leisure or business purposes, it added.

"The five-hour flight between the two destinations will make Chinese tourists easier to travel to Siem Reap-Angkor," said CAA's chairman Tekreth Samrach.

China ranked the second largest source of tourists to Cambodia after Vietnam. According to a tourism data, some 700,000 Chinese tourists visited Cambodia in 2015, up 24 percent year-on-year.

Established in 2009, CAA is using seven aircrafts--three ATR72-turboprop planes and four Airbuses--to operate two domestic routes and 10 regular international routes.
By Raimundo Urrechaga

HAVANA, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Donald Trump's electoral victory does not represent a "disaster" to the ongoing U.S.-Cuba thaw, despite his promise to reverse America's historic opening with the island, said a renowned Cuban expert on Thursday.

"I do not think Trump's victory means he will revert the Obama policy and everything that has been achieved. He is a businessman and he has a practical way of going about life. Therefore, regarding the Cuba policy, I am sure he will respond in a business approach," Jesus Arboleya, a researcher in Cuban-U.S. affairs, told Xinhua.

Arboleya said the billionaire's victory should neither be a "tragedy, nor chaos" for Cuba, even though he demanded Cuban President Raul Castro to provide greater "political freedoms" on the island, a statement that Havana has rejected.

He added, however, that Cuba will not be an immediate priority for Trump.

"In the coming months, I believe progress should be made between both nations. Agreements or topics under discussion can continue to be discussed. Business people interested in investing here will continue to explore those possibilities and Americans who want to visit the country will continue to do so," he said.

The Cuban academic said it is "too soon" to determine what approach Trump will take on Washington's policy towards the island.

"This is a policy in which countless factors, diverse interests and economic pressures affect. I believe his victory is not necessarily bad for Cuba," he stated.

During the campaign, Trump said Obama's Cuba policy is "weak" and that he would seek a "better deal" that benefits Washington.

However, he did not specify if he would revoke all of Obama's executive orders since both governments decided to normalize relations in December 2014.

Arboleya believed that Trump's words during the campaign were "electoral rhetoric" to secure the vote of the older generations of Cuban exiles in the state of Florida and gain the support of Republican political circles in Miami.

He also said that, despite a Republican-controlled Congress, Trump can take positive steps towards Cuba.

"With a Republican-controlled Congress it would have been impossible for Hillary Clinton to lift the economic blockade on Cuba. But if Trump proposes it and is capable of involving his party, the process could gain greater speed," he said.
NEW YORK, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- After the long and grinding process of vote counting that went into 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, the result was finally out and put much of the U.S. mainstream media, many experts and the general public in a state of disbelief.

The New York real estate mogul and reality show star turned politician, Donald Trump, who was embroiled in controversy for the most of the overextended presidential campaign period, won the U.S. presidency against all odds.

Virtually none of the polls before the vote were in his favor. Most of the media did not expect his victory. There was only an extreme narrow path for him to win, which included winning all of the battleground states and at least one or two of the democratic-leaning states.

Yet he was able to pull one of the biggest upsets in recent history, and in its aftermath has rippled throughout U.S. society.

SHOCKED MEDIA

The U.S. mainstream media did not try to disguise their surprise, and the shock was apparent in the headlines. "Outside mogul captures the presidency, stunning Clinton in battleground states," wrote the New York Times. "Stunning Trump win," at the Los Angeles Times. "House of Horrors," was the headline following Trump's win at the New York Daily News.

"The surprise outcome," wrote the New York Times in its front page story, "threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world."

A series of adjectives used by the Wall Street Journal story also clearly expressed disbelief. "The election, an unedifying, raucous and unpredictable contest, the strangest in the modern era, defied all the predictions," wrote Michael C. Bender and Peter Nicholas.

Most of the mainstream media in the U.S. had been labeled "biased" by Trump and his supporters. In a recent poll released by Suffolk University/USA Today, 75.9 percent of the 1,000 adults surveyed believed that the media wanted the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win, and only 7.9 percent said Trump was the one that media supports.

But when Fox News, considered by many as the only media outlet that represents right-wing values, called the result a "stunner" and "historic upset," it was clear the shock was universal.

"There is just utter shock," said Maggie Hagerman in a recent broadcast.

Hagerman is a political correspondent for The New York Times and had been covering both Trump and Clinton "in some form or another for 20 years".

"Donald Trump did everything short of cutting off his own ears try to hurt himself over and over again and dared voters to reject him, and they just wouldn't do it," Hagerman said.

BAFFLED EXPERTS

"Although I didn't have 100 percent confidence that Clinton would win, I'm still surprised by the result, even baffled," said Jingsi Wu, assistant professor of journalism, media studies and public relations at Hofstra University in New York.

The Trump win has shown how the U.S. media and society vastly underestimated his appeal to voters, especially whites without a college degree, said Wu.

"It was a great surprise. Every single major polling prediction was frustrated by the vote count on Tuesday," said David Birdsell, Dean of the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College.

Birdsell said it was clear that Clinton had underperformed Barack Obama by failing to motivate her base.

"She lost every one of the demographics that Democrats need to go into office," Birdsell added.

"Trump had challenged and questioned the mainstream media time and time again during his presidential campaign, and even showed inclination to shut some outlets off," said Wu.

"This indicates that the operation of the media will face difficult challenges when he's in office, and they also have to reflect on how they can win back the trust lost by the public," she added.

CONCERNED PUBLIC

Worrying about the prospect of a Trump presidency, thousands of people took to the streets in protest in major cities across the U.S.

In New York City, a crowd of as many as 5,000 young people gathered in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue chanting "We reject the president-elect."

"I think that I can say that pretty unanimously in New York that we are completely devastated," said Briana Berry.

"We've introduced volatility, chance and randomness into the government," said Vassar College student Lorenzo, who didn't disclose his last name.

"Anything can happen in the next two years, and it's a scary thought," said Lorenzo.

"I'm scared that since the Republicans have control of the House and Senate, they are going to take away all the hard work that we have put into the country," said Viena Hoffmann, a New York University Student.

Many protesters complained about the Electoral College system, which they claimed had helped to put Trump on top.

"There's a massive problem with the electoral process, because it's not actually a democratic vote," said protester Sarah Curry.

"Hillary won the popular vote. Technically she should have been the president. But because of the Electoral College, we wound up with 'Mr. Cheetos'," she added.

"Why does a small state like Wyoming have such a powerful opinion? Why does the popular vote not matter? These are important questions that need to be addressed," said Lorenzo.

"It's an outdated system," he said.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese across the world held a series of events to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen, the Father of Modern China.

At a gathering commemorating the 150th birthday of Sun, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the best tribute to the revolutionary pioneer is to pursue his wish for a rejuvenated China.

"The best way we commemorate Sun Yat-sen is to carry forward his invaluable spirit, to unite all that can be united and mobilize all that can be mobilized to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of," Xi said at the event held on Friday morning in Beijing.

Born on Nov. 12, 1866 in south China's Guangdong Province, Sun was known to the Chinese as a "great revolutionary and statesman" for his leading role during the 1911 Revolution, which overthrew the imperial Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and put an end to more than 2,000 years of feudal rule.

Ceremonies and other events have also been held across the world by overseas Chinese to commemorate the country's great national hero and patriot.

Last weekend, members of Peru's Chinese community marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun by holding a photo exhibition.

The exhibition, titled "Sun Yat-sen and the Overseas Chinese Communities," opened Saturday at the headquarters of the Chinese community's leading charity organization near the historic downtown district of Lima.

The exhibition, with pictures and bilingual texts, presents Sun's lifetime experiences and his contribution to China's democratic revolution, including leading the 1911 revolution that ended imperial rule in China.

The show was launched by Chinese Ambassador to Peru Jia Guide and the charity's president, Alfonso Lian.

The Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall in Singapore also launched a special exhibition on Saturday to mark the anniversary.

The exhibition chronicles the story of the Wuchang Uprising and the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and eventually led to the birth of the new China.

Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security, Teo Chee Hean, and Chinese Ambassador to Singapore, Chen Xiaodong, were present during the ceremony's launch and were given a tour of the exhibition.

The Memorial Hall, known to many as Wan Qing Yuan, served as the Southeast Asian headquarters for Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary activities.

Sun's ideal of "Universal Love" inspired many as he raised funds and sought support from Chinese expatriates in his fight to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. Sun planned three uprisings from Wan Qing Yuan before the successful Wuchang Uprising during the Xinhai Revolution.

In the Spanish capital of Madrid, an exhibition marking the anniversary opened to the public since early November.

The exhibition, showcasing works by 32 Chinese artists, was dedicated to telling Sun's story and illustrating his ideals.

In Japan, a forum commemorating Sun was launched in late October in the southwestern city of Fukuoka.

The forum, gathering some 200 scholars, entrepreneurs and college students from countries including China, Japan, Singapore and Canada, was dedicated to reviewing and studying Sun's ideals and their significance.

Last month, a forum commemorating Sun was also held in the U.S. city of Chicago.
PYONGYANG, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un on Friday guided a shell firing drill when he inspected the army on the western front, the official news agency KCNA reported.

Kim, while inspecting the defense detachment on Mahap Islet in the western part of the front, gave a surprise order to the artillery to open fire and strike a designated naval target, according to the state media.

He was satisfied with the result of the firing drill and gifted the soldiers with a pair of binoculars, an automatic rifle and a machine gun.

Kim underscored the need to train the soldiers into "indomitable fighters" through political and ideological education and called for providing better cultural living conditions to them.

He also learned in detail about the supply to the army and education of children of military officers and instructed to place attention on the living conditions of service personnel and officers' families.

Senior military officials, including director of the General Political Bureau of the Korean People's Army Hwang Pyong So and chief of the General Staff of the army Ri Myong Su, accompanied Kim in the inspection.
MANILA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The spokesman of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said Friday that the burial of the remains of ousted President Ferdinand Marcos will take place within the year.

Asked if there is a date set already for the interment, presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said, "The best we can say is it will be within the year."

In an interview with local media on Thursday, Imee Marcos, the eldest daughter of Ferdinand Marcos, said that her family wants a "simple soldier's burial" for her father. "He's a simple, rather austere man," she added.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Marcos' remains can be interred in the heroes' cemetery, saying there is no law that bars Marcos from being buried in the cemetery reserved for former presidents and soldiers. Marcos was also a soldier before he became president.

Reacting to the Supreme Court ruling, Duterte reiterated that he simply "followed the law."

Marcos's embalmed body is currently on display in his home city of Batac in Ilocos Norte province north of Manila.

Marcos was elected in 1965 and he declared martial law in 1972.

Millions of Filipinos took to the streets in February 1986, deposing Marcos and his wife, Imelda. The Marcoses was forced to flee to Hawaii where the elder Marcos died in 1989. His body was brought back to the Philippines in 1993.

The Marcos family has long lobbied for an honorable burial in the heroes' cemetery. But the anti-Marcos and human rights groups had vehemently opposed the plan, saying the disgraced leader does not deserve a military honor and a plot in the hallowed ground.
by Xinhua writer Huang Xin

BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- After eight years of wild growth, China's e-commerce industry is seeking new ways to prosper.

The Singles' Day online shopping bonanza, which happens in China on November 11 every year, showcases the rise of online retailing platforms such as Vipshop, JD and Alibaba.

While turnover of domestic e-commerce companies ballooned from 52 million yuan (7.6 million U.S. dollars) in 2009 to 91.2 billion yuan in 2015, traditional "bricks and mortar" retailers are losing ground.

British retailing giant Marks & Spencer announced on Wednesday that it will shut its 10 stores on the Chinese mainland and lay off more than 400 workers, the latest in a growing list of major western retailers such as Best Buy and Tesco to pull out of a difficult market.

Though e-commerce has seen explosive growth over the past eight years, widespread fraud now haunts online retailers that fail to take appropriate measures.

Just before Singles' Day, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce held talks with the country's 15 leading e-commerce companies, telling them that price fraud, false advertising, unfair competition, sales of fake and shoddy goods, as well as scalping were strictly prohibited.

Even for sales-record holder Alibaba, Singles' Day is a double-edged sword. The company's earnings and share price usually slump in the first quarter of the year after climbing to giddy half-year or full-year highs in November.

"E-Commerce should not develop like a campaign because the economy needs steady growth," said Zhang Li, an e-commerce expert with the Ministry of Commerce.

Zhang noted that generally speaking, e-commerce has a positive impact on the real economy and national economic development. "If it brings a negative impact, the investment-driven business mode should be blamed," she said.

Set to tap the country's growing e-commerce industry, a huge amount of capital has flooded into the sector, but the pace of consumption growth has failed to match the rapid expansion of online platforms. That has led to price wars between e-commerce companies, which have hurt traditional retailers.

A hopeful sign is that many e-commerce companies are reflecting on issues such as how to integrate online and offline marketing and the influence of Singles' Day on inventories.

Meanwhile, e-commerce has become rational and moved to abandon price wars, highlighting new trends such as respect for individuality, global connectivity and increased consumption. In addition, the Internet economy has given birth to intelligent logistics and cloud-based infrastructure.

Law-making for the e-commerce sector is also quickly developing. Insiders say that a draft law has been submitted to the country's top legislature and is expected to clear its first hurdle within the year.

"E-commerce can create value through services," Zhang said.

Alibaba's online marketplace Tmall launched Buy +, the world's first virtual reality (VR) shopping store Friday.

Buy + allows customers to shop and experience far away places with nothing more than a smart device, according to Alibaba. For example, shoppers can enjoy the Rainbow Bridge in Tokyo's Odaiba, or tour Times Square in New York in a 1965 vintage car, all while browsing the online marketplace on their cellphones.
HANGZHOU, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Since mid-June police have arrested 101 suspects implicated in transnational-telecom crimes involving 20 million yuan (2.94 million U.S. dollars), the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) announced Friday.

Of the suspects, 76 were from the mainland and 25 from Taiwan and they have been linked to 135 cases currently under investigation, the MPS said.

The fraudsters had targeted victims living in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and police across the province first began to receive complaints about telecom and Internet fraud in April this year. The subsequent investigations led to outfits based in Cambodia, where the suspects were allegedly swindling victims out of their money by pretending to be government or law enforcement officials.

Chinese police captured 39 suspects, 14 from the mainland and 25 from Taiwan, in Cambodia, and seized the apparatus they had been using.

Following the arrests and raids in Cambodia, and under the coordination of the MPS, police departments from seven provinces in China carried out multiple raids and arrested 62 suspects and dismantled three transnational fraud outfits.

Around 590,000 telecom fraud cases were reported in 2015, involving the loss of 22.2 billion yuan.
MINSK, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Belarus and Ukraine have agreed to remove trade barriers between the two countries, Belarusian Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Semashko said Thursday after the session of the Belarusian-Ukrainian intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation held here.

In particular, the problem with Belarusian cement supplies to Ukraine, which fell significantly over the last two years, has been resolved. The two countries have also removed the restriction on the supply of aircraft fuel, according to the press service of the Belarusian government.

Meanwhile, Semashko suggested the two countries find new growth points and boost the trade turnover to 8 billion U.S. dollars within the next few years, which is the highest record registered in 2012.

Promising areas for cooperation between the two countries include manufacturing, transportation, logistics and equipment production in municipal and agricultural sectors. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Gennady Zubko said that Ukraine is also considering the possibility of oil processing at Belarusian oil refineries.

Moreover, Ukraine confirmed its readiness to use railway and waterway transport corridors more actively. Joint production of electric buses and other vehicles can also be very fruitful.

Trade turnover between Belarus and Ukraine dropped significantly over the past two years, before rebounding with an increase of 10 percent to 2.8 billion dollars in January-September this year.
SANTIAGO, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Chile is ready to be a bridge between China and Latin America and hopes to address challenges jointly with China, former Chilean ambassador to Beijing said.

Fernando Reyes Matta said Chile is "happy to receive Chinese President Xi Jinping, not only to speak of the path we have traveled together in the past, but also to strengthen what we can do together in the future."

Xi will pay a week-long state visit to Ecuador, Peru and Chile from Nov.17 to 23 and attend the 24th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting from Nov. 19 to 20 in Lima, capital city of Peru.

During his stay in Chile, Xi is scheduled to hold talks with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, attend a signing ceremony for a number of agreements and issue a joint statement, according to Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Chao.

"Chile has always been present to help make dialogue between China and Latin America," said Reyes.

Chile was the first country in South America to establish diplomatic ties with China, and was among the first to recognize it as a market economy, and to back its entry into the World Trade Organization. It was also the first Latin American country to sign a bilateral free-trade agreement with China in 2005, which went into effect the next year.

Ties between Chile and China "are excellent," said Reyes, noting 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the bilateral free-trade agreement.

The agreement "has been very important to increasing trade, but the main product gained over these past 10 years has been trust," said Reyes.

"Today, Chile has greater trust in China, and China has greater trust in Chile, and knows how to open new possibilities of cooperation," said the diplomat, underscoring the need for joint efforts in energy and urbanization, both key contemporary issues for China.

There are many challenges the two can tackle together, said Reyes, such as "the challenge of developing modern agroindustrial techniques to boost the potential of generating new foods, as well as creating new maritime routes in the Pacific Ocean, which both China and Chile share."

Future projects potentially include an underwater fiber optic cable linking the coasts of China and Chile to strengthen connectivity with South America.

"We have new topics and potential projects to dream about, create and imagine, with feet planted in the 21st century, to develop both nations," said Reyes.

The big questions are "what can we create together for global markets?" and "How can we insert these China-Latin America ties into the global economy?" said Reyes.

"That is today's challenge, and I believe the talks between leaders at Peru's APEC summit should take place within that framework."

Talking about the second forum between China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to be hosted by Chile next year, Reyes said "On that date, we need to have a proposal, a platform, a vision of these new matters so we can talk with our Chinese friends in a different way, with a long-term outlook and a more expanded scope for bilateral cooperation."
A gathering is held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen on Nov. 11, 2016. (Xinhua/Ma Zhancheng)

BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- China on Friday held a grand ceremony to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the revolutionary pioneer Sun Yat-sen who led the movement to overthrow imperial Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and put an end to more than 2,000 years of feudal rule in China.

Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivered a 6,000-character keynote speech at the grand gathering held in the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing, hailing Sun as the champion of national integrity and unity.

Sun, born on Nov. 12, 1866, in southern China's Guangdong Province, has been known to the Chinese as a national hero, patriot and frontrunner of democratic revolution. He was also the founder of the Kuomintang Party.

The following are some quotable quotes from President Xi's speech that may shed light to the reasons why such a grand ceremony is made necessary.

-- "CPC members are the firmest supporters, most loyal collaborators and most faithful successors of Mr. Sun's revolutionary undertakings."

-- "Today we are able to honor Mr. Sun as we are closer than ever to the goal of our national rejuvenation, and we are more confident and competent than ever to achieve it."

-- "The best commemoration is for us to learn and carry forward his invaluable spirit, to unite all that can be united, to mobilize all that can be mobilized, and to keep fighting for our national rejuvenation that he had always dreamed of."

-- "We must learn from Mr. Sun's noble manner of loving and dedicating to the motherland ... his affection for the people ... his pursuit of truth and tendency of keeping pace with the times... his perseverant and indomitable spirit of fighting."

-- "Mr. Sun has firmly safeguarded national unification and ethnic unity, and he has firmly opposed any remarks or behaviors splitting our nation or ethnic groups ... we'll never allow anyone, any organization or political Party to rip out any part of our territory at any time or in any form."

-- "I call on all Chinese who revere Mr. Sun, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese, to unite more closely, regardless of where you are or what your political affiliations are, and to carry forward the grand undertakings of Mr. Sun and other revolutionaries."
RIGA, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- A center-right party in Latvia is facing a financially tight situation after losing public funding over breaches of campaign spending, the party's leader Andris Piebalgs admitted Thursday.

The Corruption Prevention Bureau this week decided to suspend public funding for the Unity Party after a court found the party guilty of violating campaign financing rules and fined it 4,000 euros (4355.41 U.S. dollars).

Last year, the anti-corruption watchdog decided to punish the party for not providing full information about its campaign expenses prior to Latvia's 2014 parliamentary election and for exceeding the legal campaign spending limit.

Unity, which denies the accusations, filed a complaint with a Riga district court, but the judge dismissed the complaint and upheld the Corruption Prevention Bureau's ruling.

Since the last parliamentary election, Unity has been receiving 141,670 euros (154257.5 dollars) in public funding a year as one of the six political parties that received more than 2 percent of votes in the 2014 election.

Left without the financial support, the party may now face difficult times, although its leader Piebalgs does not think it will lead to Unity's demise.

The Unity party used to be the leader of Latvia's previous government coalition but has recently seen its influence dwindle.

The party's statement of income and expenditure shows that last year, when there were no elections, Unity spent more than 420,000 euros (457337.69 dollars), with public funding accounting for one third of the party's annual budget.

The penalty will make Unity tighten its belt, Piebalgs admitted, adding that the party will save money on advertising, campaigns and party offices.
MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Up to four people, all Afghans, were killed and 33 others injured in a deadly attack on German Consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif on Thursday night, police here said Friday.

Mazar-e-Sharif is the capital of the northern Balkh province, 305 km north of Kabul.

"It was a car bomb detonated next to the building of German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif city at around 11:00 p.m. (local time) Thursday, leaving four civilians dead and 33 others injured," provincial police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told reporters at a press conference here.

"No German national has been hurt in the attack," the official asserted.

However, he confirmed that three security personnel sustained injuries in the blast and gunshots there.

Disputing the figure given by Sadat, a doctor in Mazar-e-Sharif hospital confirmed that four dead bodies and 120 injured people had been taken to hospital since Thursday night.

Earlier, director of regional hospital in Mazar-e-Sharif, Khawja Noor Mohammad Faiz confirmed taking four dead bodies and 115 injured persons including 17 children and 10 women to the hospital in Mazar-e-Sharif city.

Meanwhile, Zabihullah Majahid who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit in contact with media claimed responsibility for the attack, insisting the suicide bombing against the German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif had inflicted casualties on German and Afghan security personnel providing security for the building, a claim utterly rejected by the Balkh police chief.

Balkh police chief Sadat categorically stated that no German national had been hurt in the attack.

To stabilize security around the diplomatic mission in Mazar-e-Sharif, the NATO-led Resolute Support mission deployed its quick reaction forces in response to the attack on the German Consulate last night.

The northern Balkh province has been regarded as a peaceful province in the militancy-plagued Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the attack on the German Consulate Thursday night has shattered the trust of Balkh residents for future.

"Several innocent people were killed and injured in the attack last night and who knows what would happen tonight or in coming nights and days," a resident of Mazar-e-Sharif, Mohammad Mirza, told Xinhua.
Photo taken on Nov. 11, 2016 shows the blast site of German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. (Xinhua/Yaqub Azorda)

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Up to four people, all Afghans, were killed and 33 others injured in a deadly attack on German Consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif on Thursday night, police here said Friday.

Mazar-e-Sharif is the capital of the northern Balkh province, 305 km north of Kabul.

"It was a car bomb detonated next to the building of German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif city at around 11:00 p.m. (local time) Thursday, leaving four civilians dead and 33 others injured," provincial police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told reporters at a press conference here.

"No German national has been hurt in the attack," the official asserted.

However, he confirmed that three security personnel sustained injuries in the blast and gunshots there.

Disputing the figure given by Sadat, a doctor in Mazar-e-Sharif hospital confirmed that four dead bodies and 120 injured people had been taken to hospital since Thursday night.

Earlier, director of regional hospital in Mazar-e-Sharif, Khawja Noor Mohammad Faiz confirmed taking four dead bodies and 115 injured persons including 17 children and 10 women to the hospital in Mazar-e-Sharif city.

Meanwhile, Zabihullah Majahid who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit in contact with media claimed responsibility for the attack, insisting the suicide bombing against the German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif had inflicted casualties on German and Afghan security personnel providing security for the building, a claim utterly rejected by the Balkh police chief.

Balkh police chief Sadat categorically stated that no German national had been hurt in the attack.

Photo taken on Nov. 11, 2016 shows the blast site of German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. (Xinhua/Yaqub Azorda)

To stabilize security around the diplomatic mission in Mazar-e-Sharif, the NATO-led Resolute Support mission deployed its quick reaction forces in response to the attack on the German Consulate last night.

The northern Balkh province has been regarded as a peaceful province in the militancy-plagued Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the attack on the German Consulate Thursday night has shattered the trust of Balkh residents for future.

"Several innocent people were killed and injured in the attack last night and who knows what would happen tonight or in coming nights and days," a resident of Mazar-e-Sharif, Mohammad Mirza, told Xinhua.

Photo taken on Nov. 11, 2016 shows the blast site of German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. (Xinhua/Yaqub Azorda)
SHIJIAZHUANG, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The death of a boy who fell into an abandoned well in northern China has sparked public concerns across the country.

The boy, surnamed Zhao, was found dead on Thursday night in Lixian County, Hebei's Baoding City, after search and rescue teams had been looking for him for over 100 hours, according to Wu Sujie, Lixian's vice county head.

The boy, 6, fell down the 80-meter-deep dry well on Sunday morning when helping harvest vegetables with his father, rescuers said.

The accident generated attention home and abroad, after the boy's father put out a call for help on social media platform Wechat.

"May the boy be found and safe," said a Facebook comment by Stanley Lim from Malaysia as rescue efforts were ongoing.

It took so long to find the boy, the public raised questions about the rescue efforts, while others were concerned about the dangers of disused wells in China.

RESCUE EFFORTS IN QUESTION

It took over 500 rescuers and 100 excavators more than 100 hours to find the boy's body, according to the local government, leaving many to wonder why it took so long.

After the boy disappeared, rescuers used life-detecting devices, infrared cameras and mechanic rescue arms to try to find him, but all efforts were in vain, Wu said.

As the 30 centimeter-diameter well was too narrow for an adult to enter, rescuers had to dig a 120-meter diameter, funnel-shaped area to try to find the boy, said Pang Zhi, head of a rescue team at the site.

"On four occasions the ground nearly caved-in," he said.

The rescue was hampered by the soft sandy soil, which is prone to collapse, Pang said. Measures were taken to support the shaft during the excavation.

Ma Xiaochun, an associate professor with the faculty of engineering at China University of Geoscience, said that when such accidents happen, rescuers usually contact the victim first, while providing oxygen, lights and food.

"In this case, it was difficult to do so because they were unable to detect the boy, not to mention his physical condition," Ma told Beijing News.

"HUMAN-EATING WELLS"

The case left many worried about China's dry wells, with many netizens coining the phrase "human-eating wells" on Weibo, a Twitter-like service.

According to the boy's grandfather, the well was once used for irrigation but has been out of service for five years, and the well had not been refilled or covered. "There was no warning sign around," he said.

Wu said that the well was dug in the late 1990s, and that there had initially been a cover, but it was somehow removed.

The county government has launched an investigation into all dry wells in Lixian, Wu said.

Thirty-one people have fallen into dry wells in China since 2015, with 80 percent children, according to Beijing News. Forty percent of the victims lost their lives, the newspaper reported.

Northern and eastern regions of China have long experienced water supply issues amid rapid urbanization and growing demand, with underground water dropping to alarming levels in many areas.

As a result, many wells have been abandoned as residents have dug deeper wells searching for more underground water.

In Hebei, about 100,000 wells dried up or had insufficient water as of 2012, according to government figures.

"In China, a lot of rural land has been appropriated for commercial uses, and many farmers have left their wells abandoned," said Zhang Yong, head of China's Blue Sky Rescue, a non-governmental rescue organization.

Zhang said it was urgent to take measures to guard such wells, suggesting a comprehensive inspection of dry wells across the country was needed.

"Abandoned wells should be refilled," he said. "Fences should be established to prevent accidents."
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), the country's central bank, on Friday downplayed the high price volatility in the ringgit exchange market, saying that ringgit should not be priced out of sync with fundamentals.

The ringgit continued its losing streak and moved to 4.2775 per U.S. dollar on Friday afternoon, compared with 4.1885 per U.S. dollar on Nov. 1, according to data from the central bank.

At one point, the ringgit plunged to 4.5280 per dollar, its weakest in more than 12 years in offshore markets, said the state news agency Bernama.

"As the ringgit is a non-internationalized currency, prices should be fully determined by onshore financial market transactions that are driven only by the fundamentals and genuine trade and investment activities in Malaysia", said Assistant Governor of BNM Adnan Zaylani in a statement.

BNM is taking measures to ensure the markets do not price ringgit excessively and out of sync, while providing the necessary liquidity in the foreign exchange market, he added.

Earlier on Friday, when announcing Malaysia's third quarter GDP growth, BNM governor Muhammad Ibrahim said the bank will not peg the ringgit despite the recent volatility the currency has been facing due to the external environment.

The Malaysian economy posted a 4.3 percent growth in the third quarter, a 1.5 percent increase than the second quarter's 4 percent.

Due to price volatility, some commercial banks even set a 1,000 U.S. dollars limit for foreign exchange transactions.
by Xinhua writer Liu Chang

BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The past 16 years of Washington's conduct abroad seems to have done more harm for the world than good, and now is the right time for Donald Trump, America' s president-elect, to start contemplating a reset of his country's relations with the rest of the globe.

Putting behind him a highly-charged and extremely negative campaign, Trump came to grab the U.S. presidency at a time when the world is at a critical fork in the road.

The global economy is teetering on the precipice of a potential global economic recession. Talks against free trade and globalization are rampant at unprecedented levels. The Middle East is as chaotic as ever.

The Asia-Pacific's economic exuberance and geopolitical stability is being tested. All these writings on the wall have some sort of connection with Washington and its decades of self-serving foreign policy.

The presidency of George W. Bush was characterized by the doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive strikes.

The deliberate invasion of Iraq with no probable cause and a war that killed more than half a million Iraqis remain a classic example of how abusive a superpower can be.

Barack Obama wants to shift Washington's diplomatic and military resources from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific. Yet his ill-advised and overhasty retreat from Iraq left some breathing room for terrorism. The rise of the Islamic State is the result of poor policy.

In Syria, the Obama administration stubbornly supports a regime change by keeping the oppositions breathing in a pro-longed civil war that has displaced many millions of Syrians who are flocking into Europe and other parts of the world.

Obama's pivot-to-Asia has also churned up the waters in the Asia Pacific. Washington's interventionist engagement into many of the region' s maritime spats has one simple purpose: to keep regional countries divided and distracted and to keep its supremacy in the region unchallenged.

Yet the execution of this very doctrine has deepened mutual suspicion between Beijing and Washington and could potentially destabilize the whole region.

While campaigning for presidency, Trump has proposed numerous jaw-dropping political and economic ideas to tackle world affairs. Although the "America-first" approach should be altered, his isolationist and anti-free trade approach is certainly not a blessing for the international community at this critical moment.

As president, he should come around to help boost slack global trade growth, not counter it. Being a successful business man, he is no way a stranger to the kind of benefits a robust trade transaction can bring to his country and the wider world.

However, he should treat trade as what it is, a key booster of global economic growth, not a geo-political weapon. The near-death and high-rise unpopularity of the Trans-Pacific Partnership have proved not the death of free trade but rather the outcry for more inclusive trade arrangements, both local and global.

In the Middle East, the United States should be a responsible power, not a hit-and-run meddler. Ending the long-running blood shed in Syria and the threat of terrorism need to be at the core of his Mideast agenda. That is how the refugee crisis can be cured fundamentally.

The Trump White House also needs a re-think in the Asia-Pacific, the world's most animated economic region, with the ultimate goal of maintaining the tranquility and vitality there.

For that end, the threat of naming China a currency manipulator and blaming America's trade deficits on Beijing would be poor choices for the incoming U.S. administration as China's peaceful rise ought to mean more opportunities for the United States and the world, not something that should be balanced.

As President-elect Trump prepares to take over the world's most powerful country, he should know that the gravity of doing the right thing, though unpopular at times, is more important than keeping up with the poisonous promises of the campaign trail.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Xi Jinping said that the best tribute to Sun Yat-sen was to continue the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of.

Xi made the remarks here at a gathering to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's birth on Friday.

"The best way we commemorate Sun Yat-sen is to learn and carry forward his invaluable spirit, to unite all that can be united and mobilize all that can be mobilized to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of," Xi, who is also Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in a speech.

Born in 1866, Sun was the founder of the Kuomintang Party, and is a revered revolutionary leader who played a pivotal role in overthrowing imperial rule in China.

CPC members are the firmest supporters, most loyal collaborators and most faithful successors of Sun's revolutionary undertakings, Xi said.

"Today, we are closer, more confident and more able to achieve national rejuvenation than ever before," Xi said.

With lots of challenges and difficulties ahead, there is still a long way to go until we have truly modernized the country, revitalized the nation and realized the common prosperity of all Chinese, said Xi.

"I call on all Chinese who revere Mr. Sun Yat-sen, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese, to unite, no matter their political affiliations," Xi said.

Xi called on the Chinese people to learn from Sun's noble patriotism and devotion to the motherland.

Sun's tough life and prolonged struggle for the country, said Xi, taught him that reforming China must be based on the nation's reality and it must follow a development path suitable for China's national conditions.

As it has been proven by the history of both China and other countries,the prosperous nations are the ones that have found development paths suitable for their reality, Xi continued.

Today, to revitalize the Chinese nation, we need to carry forward patriotism, Xi said.

To love the country, the Chinese people should uphold the leadership of the CPC, the socialist system in China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics developed by the Chinese people under the CPC's leadership, he noted.

Xi added that the fundamental principles of the CPC and the Chinese people -- respecting the Chinese reality, learning from the outstanding achievements of all cultures and the independent development of the country -- should also be firmly adhered to.

Xi urged the Chinese people to strengthen confidence in the path, theory, system and culture of the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Sun cared deeply for the people, Xi said, and he was dedicated to helping them find happiness.

Time and time again, Xi said, Sun reiterated that the people were the greatest strength in the fight to achieve the goals of the revolution. Sun was also cautious, saying that everyone should "work for the great cause, not just to secure an official post."

Any cause that goes against the will of the people would only result in alienating them and, thus, it would be doomed to fail, Xi said.

Xi called on all cadres to remain committed to putting the needs of the people first.

"We should ensure that the achievements of reform benefit every element of society, and strive for common prosperity by pooling the strength of our more than 1.3 billion people," Xi said.

Xi also spoke highly of how Sun continued to keep up with the times, learning from past experiences -- the successes and the failures -- and never stopped exploring.

"Today, we must be bold to adhere to the truth and correct mistakes, so as to promote innovation in all respects including theory, practice, system and culture," Xi said.

"If China prospers, we need to not only restore the status of our nation, but also shoulder great responsibilities for the world," Sun said 92 years ago.

Chinese people want growth, happiness and safety for themselves and for the people of the world, Xi said, reaffirming China's commitment to establishing a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation and a community of shared destiny.

China will always be an advocate of world peace, a contributor to global development, and a caretaker of international order, said Xi.

China should calmly judge the profound and complex changes in international situation, understand the tough tasks of promoting reforms, development and stability in an all-round way, as well as make unremitting efforts, in order to break new ground in revitalizing the Chinese nation, Xi said.

Never assume that achieving our goals will be easy and smooth, Xi said, adding that China must keep its responsibilities at the forefront of its mind, and be prepared for major challenges, risks, difficulties and contradictions.
GENEVA, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- Swiss scientists have developed a new implantable device to help monkeys with spinal-cord injuries regain the use of their legs, which may eventually lead to a cure for paralyzed humans.

The device, which is a neuroprosthetic interface, can function as a brain-spine connector, transmitting signals wirelessly from the brain to stimulate electrodes in the legs, said the researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL).

It means the interface can relay the movement instructions while bypassing the damaged area of the spine causing the paralysis, according to their study released Wednesday by the scientific journal Nature.

The treatment used in monkeys is seen as a potential boon for immobile patients. "For the first time, I can imagine a completely paralyzed patient able to move their legs through this brain-spine interface," said Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon at the Lausanne University Hospital, in a press release from EPFL.

Meanwhile, Gregoire Courtine, a Swiss neuroscientist who led the research, warned that challenges still remain ahead as the brain decoding of a human being is much more complicated. "It may take several years before all the components of this intervention can be tested in people," he said.

With the new device, the scientists have successfully treated two monkeys each with one leg paralyzed by a partial spinal cord lesion.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson said on Friday that China is willing to work with the Philippines to expand friendly cooperation.

"Through the joint efforts of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including the Philippines, the South China Sea situation had been easing off and is back on the right track of seeking solution and managing differences through negotiations by parties directly involved in the issue," said spokesperson Lu Kang at a regular briefing.

He was commenting on some remarks by the Philippines' incoming ambassador to China Jose Santiago Sta. Romana, in which Romana voiced optimism over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Lu urged other parties and the media to respect the progress, make objective and responsible remarks, and contribute more to regional peace and stability.

Noting that China has border treaties with 12 out of its 14 land neighbors, Lu said that as long as nations are sincere and patient, most differences can be handled through consultation and negotiation.

Lu reiterated that China and the Philippines reached consensus during Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte' recent visit to China, and both agreed to focus on cooperation, put aside their differences and bring the South China Sea issue back to the correct track of bilateral negotiation and consultation.
CAIRO, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Egypt on Friday condemned the statements of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan as "irresponsible" and part of Turkey's double-standard policy.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid expressed discontent over Erdogan's excessive statements against the Egyptian president in a statement.

On Thursday, Erdogan has accused during an interview with the Qatari news channel Aljazeera the Egyptian regime of providing support to the Gulen movement, which has been accused of orchestrating the failed coup in Turkey in July.

"We are supporting the Egyptian people, but we are against coup governments and the violation of freedoms, and we will stand with the Egyptian people in their fight for democracy," the Turkish president added.

The foreign ministry statement deemed the Turkish remarks as continuation to the blundering and double standards approach in the past years against Egypt.

Abu Zeid expressed his surprise when the Turkish president has considered himself as "the guardian of democracy and freedoms at a time when his government is arresting hundreds of university professors, media people and lawmakers, shutting down dozens of newspapers and sacking army officers, judges and employees under the pretext of involvement in a failed coup attempt."

Erdogan's statement is an obvious incitement that aims at shaking Egypt's stability, Abu Zeid added.

The Turkish president's interview was aired on Thursday, one day before a protest against the Egyptian government that have been called upon by the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

"This timing in particular is meant to destabilize Egypt," Abu Zeid said.

The Egyptian Turkish ties have been strained after the military-led ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, in response to massive protest against his rule.

The two sides have cut their diplomatic ties, and the ambassadors were deported. Egypt has been accusing Turkey of intervention in domestic affairs and providing a safe sanctuary to members of the banned brotherhood group.
TOKYO, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi concluded talks on Friday on a wide range of collaborative bilateral issues, with the signing of a contentious civilian nuclear pact.

The civilian nuclear pact will allow Japan to export nuclear power technology and military equipment to India, very much in the spotlight.

The move has drawn staunch criticism from some sections of the international community as well as anti-nuclear advocates, as this marks the first time Japan has inked this kind of deal with a country that is not a signatory of the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The treaty is a key international push aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons-related technology and making sure such dangerous capabilities do not fall into the hands of terrorists, militant groups or other insurgents.

The treaty, not signed by India, is also central to promoting cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy and to advance the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament.

However, analysts close to the matter have pointed out the fact that there are no guarantees India won't carry out further tests of nuclear explosive devises, and that there is no means for Japan to ensure its technology is not redirected and misused.

India has tested nuclear bombs in the 1970s and 1990s. In May, 1998, for example, India conducted tests on 5 nuclear bombs known as Pokhran-II. The first nuclear test India conducted was in May 1974 and was dubbed "Smiling Buddha."

Non-proliferation issues aside, some observers have also rebuked Friday's pact as there still remains a great deal of concern over the safety standards of Japan's nuclear technology in the wake of the devastating Fukushima disaster in 2011, the multiple meltdowns of which were the worst commercial nuclear disaster to ever occur.

The talks on Friday also saw Abe and Modi discuss India using Japanese Shinkansen bullet train technology for its 500-km railway project that will connect Mumbai and Ahmedabad in western India.

On Saturday, the two leaders will take a Shinkansen bullet train to Kobe in western Japan, and visit a plant of Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd., which makes Shinkansen cars.
Moroccan security forces stand guard during the COP22 international climate conference on November 9, 2016, in Marrakesh. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

JERUSALEM, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Delegates from around the world are gathering in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh for the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference.

The conference began days after the Paris Agreement on efforts of countries to tackle the issue of climate change came into effect.

For some, this is a reason for optimism. But while there has been progress made on this important issue, much work is yet to be done and there are many stumbling blocks on the way.

The main goal of the Marrakesh conference is how to implement the landmark Paris Agreement which sets out a global action plan to put the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2 celsius degrees.

Professor Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University's Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences in Jerusalem, is an expert on climate change, sees challenges still remain despite achievements in recent years.

"The recognition that there is a global warming caused by man made emissions of greenhouse gases -- this is important, because it is necessary to recognize the problem before we can address it," he believes.

Rosenfeld has conducted extensive research on factors that are affecting global climate change.

One of the main problems remains the developing nations. Their efforts to hasten their development and improve their standard of living may very well come at the expense of the environment.

According to Prof. Rosenfeld this will "inevitably accelerate further the emissions, well above the curbing action of the most developed nations."

This will require a delicate balancing act and significant funds. Developed countries, which are already industrialized, have the historical responsibility to provide assistance to developing nations in finding greener alternatives to industrialization and progress.

Incentives for rich nations to change their ways will also be needed. Private and public funding is critical for the process.

Rosenfeld sees that agreement that warming beyond 2 degrees as undesirable as a declarative success, however he assesses that "it looks hardly attainable not to surpass such warming."

So even though it seems the world is making progress with resolutions and treaties, the implementation may be farther away than desired.

No debate on environment and global warming would be complete without politics.

The election of Donald Trump as next U.S. president may dampen the cautious optimism delegates at the conference felt. Throughout his campaign, Trump threatened to back out of the historic Paris Agreement. Should he deliver on his promise, the U.S. backing out of such an agreement may be detrimental.

The United States is one of the most polluting countries in the world.

In the past, Trump called the issue of human-caused climate change a "hoax." While chances that he will completely back out of previous commitments are slim as there are legal mechanisms in place that will make such a move difficult. However, a negative and less cooperative attitude may have an adverse affect on the efforts to curtail climate change.

As the world grapples with the consequences of global warming -- such as super storms or extensive periods of drought, environmentalists are encouraging the use of renewable energy that will help reduce CO2 levels.

Yet again, the path to using such energy is not a smooth one.

"Going to renewable energy is becoming very difficult on the background of newly discovered huge resources of natural gas, fracking and other forms of fossil fuel," Rosenfeld said.

The World Bank is funding several programs to encourage countries to use renewable energy. The question remains whether this is sufficient.

Ultimately, the greatest challenge is the translation of words and proclamations into actions.

While declarations in Paris a year ago and work in Marrakesh at the moment are welcome, deeds are necessary.

"The actions that are taken by various countries to limit emissions are far below what is required to reach the goal of curbing the warming," Rosenfeld said.

The weakness of the Paris Agreement is in its voluntary nature. Countries are to determine themselves how much they contribute to the global effort of combating climate change by setting their own goals for reducing carbon emissions.

Such voluntary goals are not legally binding and there is no sanction for lack of implementation. This weakness accompanies the Marrakesh convention.

The Marrakesh conference may be a baby-step in a series of steps needed to make substantial progress on the critical issue of global warming and climate change.

If the meeting can agree on a clear sanctioning and obligatory mechanism for the implementation of the Paris Agreement, there is reason for optimism over the chances for success.
SHANGHAI, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Shanghai Disneyland received 4 million visitors in its first four months of operation since mid-June, the Walt Disney Company announced Friday in its 2016 fiscal year report.

"Shanghai Disneyland is now a national tourist destination -- more than half our guests come from outside Shanghai, and millions of people across China are developing a much greater awareness and affinity for the brand," said Robert Iger, the company's chairman and CEO.

He added that visitors to Shanghai Disneyland loved classics like Mickey Mouse, as well as new Disney creations such as Zootopia.

The company's revenues for the year exceeded 55 billion U.S. dollars, up 6 percent year-on-year, with net income increasing 12 percent to nearly 9.4 billion dollars.

Iger cited the Shanghai resort as a contributor behind the company's growth.

On Thursday, the Shanghai resort announced that a new themed area, Toy Story Land, will be the first new addition to the resort. It is expected to be completed and open to visitors in 2018.
TEHRAN, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Austria plans to open several bank branches in Iran to facilitate mutual trade activities, an Austrian trade official was quoted by Press TV as saying on Friday.

Key banks such as Bank Austria and Raiffeisen Bank International are interested in cooperating with their Iranian partners, Helmut Steurer, head of the Chamber of Commerce of Austria's Vorarlberg region, said.

Iran and Austria have already signed several investment protection pacts that will help prepare an appropriate base for the expansion of investment activities in Iran in the future, Steurer said.

There is a huge potential in Iran for investments by European partners, he said, adding that Vorarlberg can also help enterprises in Germany, Switzerland and Lichtenstein bordering this region step into the Iranian market.

Austrian Ambassador to Tehran Friedrich Stift said Monday that banks of Austria are ready to open branches in Iran in the near future to facilitate financial cooperation.

"The Austrian banks intend to return to Iran, and an Austrian bank has already voiced its preparedness to launch its branch in Iran," Stift said addressing a conference on developing Iran-Austria trade cooperation.

"In some junctures in the past, the trade balance between the two countries hit 800 million euros (about 885 mln U.S. dollars), and Austrian imports hit 400 million euros from Iran, but now the level of the economic relations has been reduced," he said, underlining the need for the expansion of mutual ties.

In his visit to Austrian capital Vienna in June, Iranian Economy Minister Ali Tayyebnia discussed bilateral ties, particularly in the economic and banking fields, with Director General of the Austrian Control Bank Rudolf Scholten and emphasized the need for the enhancement of collaboration.

The Iranian economy minister pointed to the measures taken in Iran to fight money-laundering and stressed readiness for further cooperation in the specified financial and banking sectors.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- As global policymakers hammer out detailed plans to battle climate change at the ongoing Marrakech summit, outside the conference halls, Chinese electric buses are leading the way.

The carbon-free vehicles are official transportation at the 22nd Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP22). Marrakech ordered 50 buses from Yangtze Automobile, the first African city to do so.

Apart from that deal, the Wuhan car maker has an agreement with local companies to invest 150 million U.S. dollars in a factory producing new energy vehicles (NEVs) for North African and European markets.

The world's largest NEV market, China manufactured 340,000 electric cars last year. NEV production has increased since the government began support for high-tech, low-pollution industries to help fulfill its ambitious emission cut targets.

From solar panels to green agriculture, environmentally friendly industries are booming in China.

Energy conservation and environmental protection sectors grew at an annual rate of more than 15 percent during the past decade, generating 4.5 trillion yuan (around 660 billion dollars) in 2015, a significant part of GDP.

Non-fossil fuels have been vigorously promoted and China has become the top new energy user in the world. The International Energy Agency calculated that China contributed 40 percent to global renewable energy growth last year.

Rating agency Moody's said China had the leading share -- 44 percent -- of global green bonds issued in the third quarter of the year, followed by the United States.

China is taking much stronger action on climate change than before, Xie Ji, deputy chief of Chinese delegation to COP22, said on the sidelines of the conference.

By the end of 2020, China will reduce carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 18 percent compared with that in 2015, according to the 13th Five-Year Plan.

The COP22, the first UN climate change conference since the Paris Agreement took effect, has gathered around 20,000 participants to discuss how to translate plans on greenhouse emission control into concrete results.
General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Xi Jinping, also Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, addresses a gathering to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's birth in Beijing, capital of China, Nov. 11, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Xi Jinping said that the best tribute to Sun Yat-sen is to continue the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of.

Xi made the remarks here at a gathering to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's birth on Friday.

"The best way we commemorate Sun Yat-sen is to learn and carry forward his invaluable spirit, to unite all that can be united and mobilize all that can be mobilized to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of," Xi, who is also Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in a speech.

Born in 1866, Sun was the founder of the Kuomintang Party, and is a revered revolutionary leader who played a pivotal role in overthrowing imperial rule in China.

CPC members are the firmest supporters, most loyal collaborators and most faithful successors of Sun's revolutionary undertakings, Xi said.

"Today, we are closer, more confident and more able to achieve national rejuvenation than ever before," Xi said.

"I call on all Chinese who revere Mr. Sun Yat-sen, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese, to unite, no matter their political affiliations," Xi said.

Li Keqiang, Yu Zhengsheng, Liu Yunshan, Wang Qishan and Zhang Gaoli, all members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, also attended the event.

The gathering was chaired by Yu, also top political advisor.

NATIONAL INTEGRITY, REUNIFICATION

Xi said that Sun had staunchly championed the integrity of the country and unity of the nation.

"Sun Yat-sen unequivocally opposed any remarks or actions that attempted to split the country or the nation," Xi said in his speech.

Quoting Sun, Xi said that united, the people of the entire country benefit; disunited, people suffer.

It is the shared conviction of Chinese that China is a unified country, and it is this belief that ensures the continuation of the nation as a whole, Xi said, quoting Sun.

To achieve the complete reunification of the motherland is in the fundamental interest of the Chinese nation and it is common aspiration as well as sacred duty of all Chinese, Xi said.

The peaceful development of cross-Strait relations is the correct path toward peace across the Strait, shared development and the improved well-being of compatriots from both sides of the Taiwan Strait, Xi noted.

"We are ready to engage with any political Party, organization or individual from Taiwan, as long as they acknowledge the 1992 Consensus and recognize that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, no matter what they may have supported in the past," Xi said.

Xi called on compatriots from both sides across the Taiwan Strait and Chinese all across the globe to unite and oppose "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces, saying the future of compatriots of both the mainland and Taiwan is closely intertwined with the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

China experienced more than 100 years of upheaval and struggle and this was still very fresh in the memories of Chinese, Xi said.

"It is our solemn commitment to the history and the people" to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to make sure that the country is never torn apart again, Xi said.

"Any attempt to split the country will be resolutely opposed by all Chinese people," Xi said, vowing "we'll never allow anyone, any organization or political Party to rip out any part of our territory at any time or in any form."

While presiding over the gathering, Yu called for uniting more closely around the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core, holding high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and contributing more to the country's peaceful reunification and the Chinese nation's rejuvenation.

PATRIOTISM

Xi called on the Chinese people to learn from Sun's noble patriotism and devotion to the motherland.

Sun's tough life and prolonged struggle for the country, said Xi, taught him that reforming China must be based on the nation's reality and it must follow a development path suitable for China's national conditions.

As it has been proven by the history of both China and other countries,the prosperous nations are the ones that have found development paths suitable for their reality, Xi continued.

Today, to revitalize the Chinese nation, we need to carry forward patriotism, Xi said.

To love the country, the Chinese people should uphold the leadership of the CPC, the socialist system in China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics developed by the Chinese people under the CPC's leadership, he noted.

Xi added that the fundamental principles of the CPC and the Chinese people -- respecting the Chinese reality, learning from the outstanding achievements of all cultures and the independent development of the country -- should also be firmly adhered to.

Xi urged the Chinese people to strengthen confidence in the path, theory, system and culture of the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

PUT PEOPLE FIRST

Sun cared deeply for the people, Xi said, and he was dedicated to helping them find happiness.

Time and time again, Xi said, Sun reiterated that the people were the greatest strength in the fight to achieve the goals of the revolution. Sun said that everyone should "work for the great cause, not just to secure an official post."

Any cause that goes against the will of the people would only result in alienating them and, thus, it would be doomed to fail, Xi said.

Xi called on all cadres to remain committed to putting the needs of the people first.

"We should ensure that the achievements of reform benefit every element of society, and strive for common prosperity by pooling the strength of our more than 1.3 billion people," Xi said.

Xi also spoke highly of how Sun continued to keep up with the times, learning from past experiences -- the successes and the failures -- and never stopped exploring.

"Today, we must be bold to adhere to the truth and correct mistakes, so as to promote innovation in all respects including theory, practice, system and culture," Xi said.

"If China prospers, we need to not only restore the status of our nation, but also shoulder great responsibilities for the world," Sun said 92 years ago.

Chinese people want growth, happiness and safety for themselves and for the people of the world, Xi said, reaffirming China's commitment to establishing a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation and a community of shared destiny.

China will always be an advocate of world peace, a contributor to global development, and a caretaker of international order, said Xi.

China should calmly judge the profound and complex changes in international situation, understand the tough tasks of promoting reforms, development and stability in an all-round way, as well as make unremitting efforts, in order to break new ground in revitalizing the Chinese nation, Xi said.

Never assume that achieving our goals will be easy and smooth, Xi said, adding that China must keep its responsibilities at the forefront of its mind, and be prepared for major challenges, risks, difficulties and contradictions.
MOSCOW, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The Russian State Duma, or the lower house of parliament, ratified an agreement on Friday between China and Russia on cooperation in fighting against terrorism, separatism and extremism.

Russian President Vladimir Putin submitted the agreement to the State Duma for parliamentary ratification on Sept. 28.

The agreement, signed in Beijing on Sept. 27, 2010, is aimed at developing bilateral cooperation in combating terrorism, separatism and extremism by taking joint measures to prevent and stop terrorist attacks.

The two countries will exchange information in fighting criminal activities of terrorists and extremists, hold regular meetings and consultations, and work together to prevent and suppress crimes in the border regions between China and Russia.

The agreement also introduces norms for joint investigation of crimes at the request of the other country, and stipulates the exchange and joint manufacture of special equipment between the two countries.

The agreement is a follow-up to the Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism, signed on June 15, 2001, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Convention on Counter-Terrorism, signed on June 16, 2009.
LONDON, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The world has more confidence in China-Britain relations as the two countries have maintained a definite direction against the background of more instability and uncertainty of global society, Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai said here Thursday.

Ma made the remarks when meeting with British Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, during his visit to Britain to attend the eighth China-Britain Economic and Financial Dialogue.

Ma recalled that during the prince's visit to China in April this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping met him and both of them have unanimously pledged to strengthen the China-Britain all-round exchanges and cooperation to benefit the two countries and the two peoples.

He said the Chinese side appreciated Prince Andrew's positive proposals for further promotion of bilateral relations during his recent visit to China.

President Xi and British Prime Minister Theresa May met in Hangzhou in September this year, confirming the general direction of the "Golden Era" of bilateral relations, which give the world more confidence in China-Britain relations, he said.

Briefing the prince about the situation of the eighth China-Britain Economic and Financial Dialogue, the vice premier said he hoped Prince Andrew would continue support the development of the comprehensive global strategic partnership between the two countries.

For his part, Prince Andrew said that with the successful visit of President Xi to Britain last October, the relations between the two countries have been strengthened.

He said Britain is a reliable partner of China and is willing to open its market to the Chinese side and further strengthen cooperation with China in areas such as innovation, technology, finance, capital and third-party markets.

The prince said he would like to play a role in promoting China-Britain relations and bilateral cooperation in various fields to make greater progress.

Ma traveled to Britain Tuesday to co-chair the eighth China-Britain Economic and Financial Dialogue with British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond. He is also going to attend the fourth China-France High-Level Economic and Financial Dialogue in France.
Wan Exiang, vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, presides over the first round of a ceremony to pay respect in front of a Sun Yat-sen monument at Biyun Temple to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sun's birth, in Beijing, capital of China, Nov. 11, 2016. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)

BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- China on Friday morning organized a ceremony to pay respect at a Sun Yat-sen monument in Beijing's Biyun Temple to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sun's birth.

During the first round of the ceremony, representatives from the general office of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, Beijing municipal government as well as Sun's relatives, overseas Chinese and international friends stood in silence for three minutes and bowed before a statue of Sun.

In the second round, representatives of people from Taiwan paid their tribute in the same fashion.

On March 12, 1925, Sun died in Beijing and his coffin was preserved at Biyun Temple in Beijing's northwestern Fragrant Hills. In 1929, the coffin was transferred for burial in Nanjing.
COLOMBO, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Embassy to Sri Lanka and China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC) have made donations to a rural school in Kalutara, 40 km south of the capital Colombo.

The donations are part of the ongoing efforts China has been making to support the South Asian country's education sector especially in rural areas, according to a statement released by the Chinese Embassy on Friday.

At a donation ceremony held Thursday in Kalutara, Chinese Ambassador to Sri Lanka Yi Xianliang said China and Sri Lanka are traditional friends and China stands ready to help Sri Lanka.

Around 300 sets of pencil cases and backpacks were provided to students of the school which is located near the country's historic Fa-Hien caves at the ceremony.

Ambassador Yi said the Chinese government constructed a friendship village near the caves and the main building of the school around 30 years ago.

Now China would like to continue this friendship by further donations, renovating the school building and building a play ground inside the school.

At the ceremony, scholarships were also handed over to the students by CMEC. The scholarships were donated to the school annually since 2014.

CMEC has helped Sri Lanka develop many projects such as the first coal power plant in the country.
GENEVA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- A number of 47,730 civilians have fled their homes since military operations to retake the Islamic State (IS) controlled Iraqi city of Mosul began last month, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported Friday.

"Numbers have approximately doubled in the last week and are expected to continue to rise as the fighting continues," the agency warned in a statement.

"Several significant population movements from Mosul were recorded in the last week, especially around Gogjali and the city's eastern neighborhoods," it added.

As fighting for one of the IS last strongholds in the regions continues, these developments come amid ongoing reports of mass killings, summary executions and sexual exploitation carried out by IS fighters.

"Heart-breaking images of children being forced to carry out executions, stories of women being 'redistributed' among ISIL fighters, of killings for possession of SIM cards, and killings of those perceived to be opposed to ISIL's takfiri doctrines," the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein deplored in a statement.

"The forced displacement of tens of thousands of civilians and their exploitation as human shields ... the extent of civilian suffering in Mosul and other ISIL-occupied areas in Iraq is numbing and intolerable," he added.

The alleged use of chemical weapons used by the extremist group has also been documented, with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) warning that reports suggest that the IS has been stockpiling large quantities of both ammonia and sulphur in the same locations as civilians.

Supported by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Iraqi troops kicked off operations on Oct. 17 to recapture the city which fell into IS hands in June 2014 after government forces abandoned their weapons and fled, enabling IS militants to take control of parts of Iraq's northern and western regions.

International aircraft as well as Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition artillery units are supporting ground operations there.

According to reports, more than 5,000 IS militants were initially holed up in Mosul to defend the city, though they are quickly losing ground amid ongoing military operations.
Photos about the 1994 Rwanda genocide are on show during an international seminar to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the tragedy, in Rwanda's capital city of Kigali April 4, 2004. (Xinhua Photo/Sun Yongming)

KIGALI, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda is set to investigate French officials it alleges to have orchestrated the 1994 genocide that killed close to 1 million people in the African country.

Addressing a news conference on Thursday, Rwandan foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo said the judicial process against the accused French officials will start with a thorough investigation.

A photo of the skulls of victims in the 1994 Rwanda genocide is on show behind candlelight during an international seminar to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the tragedy, in Rwanda's capital city of Kigali April 4, 2004. (Xinhua Photo/Sun Yongming)

"We will use means at our disposal to conduct our own judicial process against those in France that have cases to answer. We will request France to give us access to specific individuals," she told reporters.

She stressed that France had political and military advisors to both the government and militia who perpetrated the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Last month, the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (CNLG) released a list of 22 senior French military soldiers it accused of deliberately aiding the genocide planning.

Mushikiwabo said the names of French politicians who played a role in the genocide would also be published, as "Rwanda is not going to be subjective to judicial bullying by France."

She stated that for every effort Rwanda has made to mend relations with France, the European country has taken a step back.

France-Rwanda relations continued to worsen following France's announcement of plans to reopen investigations into the shooting down of a plane carrying ex-genocidal president Juvenal Habyarimana, an event widely seen as sparking the genocide.

Last month, Rwanda President Paul Kagame warned that revisiting the case of plane crash of Habyarimana would lead to diplomatic standoff between Rwanda and France.

Between 2006 and 2009, relations between the two countries completely broke off after a French judge claimed that top Rwandan officials were involved in the downing of the plane.

France's role in the 1994 genocide has for years been the subject of intense scrutiny and much controversy, with both Paris and Kigali trying to pin responsibility of the genocide on each other.

While Rwanda has repeatedly accused France of backing the genocidal government by arming and training the Hutu perpetrators responsible for the mass murder, France has denied the accusations and insisted its forces had worked to protect the civilians.
GUANGZHOU, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese state-owned conglomerate Gree Group has removed its iconic chairwoman, Dong Mingzhu, from the top post, but retains her as the head of its electronics arm, the Forbes 500 Gree Electric Appliances Inc., local government officials confirmed on Friday.

The move was ordered by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Zhuhai City, where the multi-sector corporation is based.

Sources with the commission explained that it was a normal position adjustment as the group usually does not allow a person to serve as both group chairperson and the director of its listed subsidiary.

Dong, 62, joined Gree Electric Appliances Inc. in 1990 as a salesperson and worked her way up to the top. Under Dong, Gree emerged as China's top air-conditioning manufacturer and a major player in the world market. The company's revenue last year was 100 billion yuan (14.7 billion U.S. dollars).

The outspoken and confident Dong is considered one of the most successful Chinese businesswomen and a leader of China's manufacturing sector.

The sources said Dong's removal from the top of Gree Group "won't affect" the operations of the Shenzhen Stocks Exchange-listed Gree Electric Appliances Inc.
SHANGHAI, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Police in Shanghai have busted a gang suspected of fabricating official documents and spreading rumors online.

A Ministry of Public Security statement Friday said the group, with members from over 20 provincial-level regions in China, used WeChat as a major platform to spread rumors about the Chinese government's control of free of speech online.

Han Wencai, a government official in Inner Mongolia, as well as five other suspects in the group have been placed under "compulsory measures" by police for public order violations, the statement said.

"Compulsory measures" include arrest, detention, issuing a warrant to compel a suspect to appear, bail pending trial or residential surveillance.

The statement said Han and other members of the group claimed to be officially employed "public opinion workers," and fabricated payroll lists for these "workers" before publishing the lists on WeChat.

Some of them said they were senior government officials and posted photos online. They also faked details of senior state leaders, including official speeches, discussions of official meetings about public opinion control, and voice records.

The materials gained attention online and were used to attack the Chinese government for violating freedom of speech.

According to the ministry's statement, the suspects have shown repentance.
KABUL, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- A deadly vehicle-laden explosion in the vicinity of German consulate in Afghanistan northern Mazar-e-Sharif city on Thursday night for which Taliban outfit claimed responsibility has been widely condemned on Friday.

The deadly offensive claimed at least four lives and injured more than 100 others including women and children, besides damaging scores of houses and properties nearby.

President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani in a statement released by his office put the attack on the enemies of Afghanistan and condemned it in its strongest terms.

"Afghanistan's enemies, who are against all international and human laws and are committing crimes against humanity by attacking public and diplomatic places, should realize that this act of terror (Attack on German Consulate) will not weaken the will of Afghanistan and Germany in their combat against terrorism," Afghan president said in the statement.

Similarly, Afghan Foreign Ministry termed the deadly attack as a coward terrorist act and stated that "terrorists by targeting diplomatic missions and residential areas once again demonstrated their enmity with Afghanistan, its international friends and human beings."

Joining the condemnation, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) in a statement released here expresses its sincere condolences to the families of victims and wished a speedy recovery to those injured ones.

"Attacks deliberately targeting the civilian population and violence aimed at spreading terror among civilians may amount to war crimes under customary international humanitarian law," said a statement of UNAMA released here Friday.

Equally, the NATO-led Resolute Support (RS) mission in a statement also flayed the attack on German consulate.

"This attack by the Taliban once again shows that they use violence indiscriminately and don't care about the safety of civilians," Lieutenant General Sandy Storrie, Deputy Commander, Resolute Support, said in the statement.

"We condemn this attack and pledge that we will continue our mission to help the Afghan government and the Afghan people achieve peace, security and stability," the statement of NATO-led RS said.
HANOI, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Senior Communist Party leaders from both China and Vietnam have pledged to push the China-Vietnam comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership to a new level.

They made the pledge during a meeting Wednesday in Hanoi between Zhang Dejiang, member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) Central Committee.

Zhang, also chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, arrived in Hanoi on Tuesday afternoon for a four-day friendly official visit to Vietnam which concluded on Friday.

Zhang conveyed the greetings to Trong from Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee. Zhang also spoke highly of achievements made by the party and state of Vietnam in recent years.

Zhang said both China and Vietnam are socialist countries under the Communist Party leadership, and it is of crucial importance to strengthen and deepen the relations between the two parties.

The Chinese side is ready to exert joint efforts with Vietnam to implement the important consensus reached by both party leaders, based on the 16-character motto of "friendly neighbourliness, comprehensive cooperation, durable stability and looking toward the future" as well as the "four good" spirit of "good neighbours, good friends, good comrades and good partners," said Zhang.

Zhang also called for both sides to carry on the traditional friendship, strengthen strategic guidance and the docking of development strategies, enrich the connotation of cooperation, enhance communications and consultation, eliminate the interferences, increase people to people exchanges, and constantly consolidate and deepen the Sino-Vietnam community of common destiny.

Trong said Vietnam's new party and state leadership attach great importance to the bilateral traditional friendship and comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.

Vietnam will never forget China's non-selfish support in the past, and regard developing friendly ties with China as its "strategic choice and top priority in foreign policy," said the CPV general secretary.

Vietnam is ready to exert joint efforts with China, to enhance political mutual trust, expand pragmatic cooperation, properly control the differences, thus to carry on the bilateral traditional friendship from generations to generations, he said.

During his visit in Hanoi, Zhang also met with Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and held talks with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, chairwoman of the National Assembly of Vietnam, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam.

Zhang also briefed the Vietnamese leaders about the sixth plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, held last month.

Zhang also attended the 3rd Sino-Vietnam Youth Festival in Hanoi.

Zhang concluded his visit and was back to Beijing on Friday.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- High Speed Railway (HSR) trains are joining the battle to deliver goods for the Singles' Day (Nov. 11) shopping spree, in Beijing from Friday.

According to Beijing Railway Bureau (BRB), four daily trains will be running at 160 km per hour to carry goods from Beijing to Shanghai and Guangdong in the next 10 days, shortening each trip to 15 hours, including loading and unloading time.

"Each train has 15 compartments, and can carry 340 tonnes of goods," said Zhang Jinchao, deputy director at the BRB logistics center. "A total of 1,837 tonnes of goods have been transported today, with one of the trains carrying goods sold on JD.com and delivered by SF express," Zhang said Friday.

According to BRB, the center expects to send around 13,500 tonnes of goods and receive 14,000 tonnes during the Nov. 11-20 period, both 80 percent increases compared with a year earlier.

HSR now covers over 500 cities in China, including major cities as well as counties in eastern and central China.

Since the first piece of HSR track was laid in the early 2000s, China's HSR network has seen average 30 percent annual growth in passenger trips, and the network exceeded 20,000 kilometers long as of September, according to China Railway Corp. The network is expected to reach 38,000 km by 2025.

Sales on Alibaba surpassed 10 billion yuan (about 1.47 billion U.S. dollars) in just six minutes 58 seconds after the Singles' Day began, almost six minutes ahead of last year, the company said.

According to China Express Association, over one billion packages are estimated to be transported for the Singles' Day shopping spree, double last year's figure.

Nearly 14 billion packages were delivered in China in 2014, exceeding the United States for the first time.

"People say that e-commerce in China is a miracle, but in my opinion, the fast development of express services in China is the real miracle," said Jack Ma, president of the nation's e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Online shoppers in China reached 447 million by June this year, according to a China Internet Network Information Center report.

"We are selling more goods and delivering them faster. Delivering goods was a headache during Singles' Day five years ago, but now shoppers can receive what they bought in two or three days," said Zhang Yong, Alibaba's CEO.

Cainiao, an express delivery platform using big data, has made it possible for goods to travel faster. Over 70 percent of packages in China use this platform.

"If we don't try a new method and build a stronger logistics network, online retail will be hindered," said Tong Wenhong, Cainiao's CEO.

"Courier services have been renovating the delivery network. Cainiao uses big data to help courier companies optimize the process and improve delivery efficiency," added Tong.

Over 20 billion packages were delivered last year, using more than 2 million delivery staff. Aliresearch has predicted that the number of packages in China will reach 100 billion in the coming five to eight years.

Social logistics now accounts for nearly 11 trillion yuan (about 1.62 trillion U.S. dollars), accounting for 16 percent of GDP last year, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
NAIROBI, Nov.11 (Xinhua) -- Wildlife conservationists on Friday urged Kenya's private sector to support the country's wildlife conservation efforts.

Africans for Elephants Founder Akinyi Adongo told a media briefing in Nairobi that the level of support from the private sector is very low.

"There is a feeling that the private sector is not doing enough to support wildlife conservation efforts," Adongo said.

"A lot of people globally feel that we as Africans are not doing much to control poaching," said Adongo during a ceremony where Crown Paints donated 10,000 U.S. dollars to the Walk with Rangers Initiative. Adongo noted that the private sector can help Kenya achieve zero poaching levels.

"The current anti-poaching campaign can receive a boost through donations in cash and kind from the private sector," she said. She noted that wildlife conservation efforts are largely funded by external donors.

"However, this source of funding is not sustainable given the global financial slow down," she added.

According to the Africa for Elephants, the private sector should plough back some of its profits into wildlife conservation efforts. "Wildlife is the backbone of Kenya's tourism industry, which is a significant contributor to the economy," she noted.

Walk with Rangers Initiative Founder Raabia Hawa said there are many organizations doing important conservation work but are underfunded.

"So we are asking the private sector to channel some of their resources to these organization in order to enhance the country's conservation efforts," Hawa said.

She noted that wildlife conservation efforts can be boosted if rangers' work conditions are improved.

"Currently they are not well compensated compared to the value they provide to the country," Hawa said.

"Many spend up to 11 months a year away from their families due to the nature of the jobs," she added.

The conservationist noted that rangers put their life on the line for endangered wildlife species for very little compensation.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) holds a welcoming ceremony for visiting Chilean President Michelle Bachelet Jeria at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Nov. 12, 2014. (Xinhua/Zhang Duo)

SANTIAGO, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Chile is ready to be a bridge between China and Latin America and hopes to address challenges jointly with China, former Chilean ambassador to Beijing said.

Fernando Reyes Matta said Chile is "happy to receive Chinese President Xi Jinping, not only to speak of the path we have traveled together in the past, but also to strengthen what we can do together in the future."

Xi will pay a week-long state visit to Ecuador, Peru and Chile from Nov.17 to 23 and attend the 24th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting from Nov. 19 to 20 in Lima, capital city of Peru.

During his stay in Chile, Xi is scheduled to hold talks with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, attend a signing ceremony for a number of agreements and issue a joint statement, according to Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Chao.

"Chile has always been present to help make dialogue between China and Latin America," said Reyes.

Chile was the first country in South America to establish diplomatic ties with China, and was among the first to recognize it as a market economy, and to back its entry into the World Trade Organization. It was also the first Latin American country to sign a bilateral free-trade agreement with China in 2005, which went into effect the next year.

Ties between Chile and China "are excellent," said Reyes, noting 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the bilateral free-trade agreement.

The agreement "has been very important to increasing trade, but the main product gained over these past 10 years has been trust," said Reyes.

"Today, Chile has greater trust in China, and China has greater trust in Chile, and knows how to open new possibilities of cooperation," said the diplomat, underscoring the need for joint efforts in energy and urbanization, both key contemporary issues for China.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (L) shakes hands with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet at the opening of an economic and trade seminar marking the 45th anniversary of the establishment of China-Chile diplomatic relations and the seventh meeting of the China-Chile Business Council in Santiago, capital of Chile, May 26, 2015. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)

There are many challenges the two can tackle together, said Reyes, such as "the challenge of developing modern agroindustrial techniques to boost the potential of generating new foods, as well as creating new maritime routes in the Pacific Ocean, which both China and Chile share."

Future projects potentially include an underwater fiber optic cable linking the coasts of China and Chile to strengthen connectivity with South America.

"We have new topics and potential projects to dream about, create and imagine, with feet planted in the 21st century, to develop both nations," said Reyes.

The big questions are "what can we create together for global markets?" and "How can we insert these China-Latin America ties into the global economy?" said Reyes.

"That is today's challenge, and I believe the talks between leaders at Peru's APEC summit should take place within that framework."

Talking about the second forum between China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to be hosted by Chile next year, Reyes said "On that date, we need to have a proposal, a platform, a vision of these new matters so we can talk with our Chinese friends in a different way, with a long-term outlook and a more expanded scope for bilateral cooperation."
TEHRAN, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Iran's minister of Industry, Mines and Trade said Friday that the election of Donald Trump as the new president of the United States will have no impacts on its international industrial deals, Press TV reported.

The international deals pertaining to Iran's major industrial projects are independent from Iranian nuclear deal that has come under repeated attacks by Trump in his presidential campaign, Mohammad-Reza Nematzadeh was quoted as saying.

Foreign parties to Iran's industrial contracts demanded to devise a mechanism to link the fulfillment of the accords to the fate of Iran's nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Nematzadeh said.

"However, none of the contracts that we have signed contain any reference to the JCPOA and we will go ahead with them under any condition," he added.

Iranian minister further said that the United States under Trump cannot unilaterally cancel the nuclear deal as it is not a unilateral but an international deal.

The JCPOA does not involve only the United States and Iran, Nematzadeh said, adding that "other countries are also involved in it. Therefore, it cannot be cancelled unilaterally. This was an international decision that was endorsed by the United Nations."

On Friday, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that all parties should abide by their commitments to the JCPOA.

Zarif was referring to Trump who said during his election campaign that the nuclear deal sealed by Iran and the world powers in July 2015 and implemented in January was "the worst deal ever negotiated."
Zhang Dejiang (L), member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and chairman of the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress, meets with Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee, in Hanoi, Vietnam, Nov. 9, 2016. Zhang paid a friendly official visit to Vietnam from Nov. 8 to 11. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

HANOI, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Senior Chinese and Vietnamese leaders have pledged to push forward the bilateral comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership to a new level.

They made the pledge during a friendly official visit to Vietnam by Zhang Dejiang, member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.

At the invitation of his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, chairwoman of the National Assembly of Vietnam, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Zhang arrived in Hanoi on Tuesday afternoon for a four-day friendly official visit to Vietnam which concluded on Friday.

During his visit in Hanoi, Zhang met with Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) Central Committee, Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and held talks with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan.

Zhang also briefed the Vietnamese leaders about the sixth plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, held in Beijing late last month.

STRENGTHENING PARTY RELATIONS OF CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE TO BILATERAL TIES

In meeting with Trong, Zhang conveyed the greetings to Trong from Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee. Zhang also spoke highly of achievements made by the party and state of Vietnam in recent years.

Zhang said both China and Vietnam are socialist countries under the Communist Party leadership, and it is of crucial importance to strengthen and deepen the relations between the two parties.

The Chinese side is ready to exert joint efforts with Vietnam to implement the important consensus reached by both party leaders, based on the 16-character motto of "friendly neighbourliness, comprehensive cooperation, durable stability and looking toward the future" as well as the "four good" spirit of "good neighbours, good friends, good comrades and good partners," said Zhang.

Zhang also called for both sides to carry on the traditional friendship, strengthen strategic guidance and the docking of development strategies, enrich the connotation of cooperation, enhance communications and consultation, eliminate the interferences, increase people to people exchanges, and constantly consolidate and deepen the Sino-Vietnam community of common destiny.

Trong said Vietnam's new party and state leadership attach great importance to the bilateral traditional friendship and comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.

Vietnam will never forget China's non-selfish support in the past, and regard developing friendly ties with China as its "strategic choice and top priority in foreign policy," said the CPV general secretary.

Vietnam is ready to exert joint efforts with China, to enhance political mutual trust, expand pragmatic cooperation, properly control the differences, thus to carry on the bilateral traditional friendship from generations to generations, he added.

SINO-VIETNAM RELATIONS MAINTAIN POSITIVE DEVELOPMENT TREND

In meeting with Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang in Hanoi on Wednesday, Zhang conveyed President Xi Jinping's greetings.

Zhang said, under the strategic guidance by the general secretaries of both parties, bilateral relationship, in overall, maintain positive development trend with the perception of "community of common destiny" gradually be rooted among people in both countries.

The two sides should grasp the correct development direction of bilateral ties, constantly consolidate the political, economic and social foundation, thus pushing forward the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership to develop in a steady and healthy manner, said the top Chinese legislator.

The Vietnamese president asked Zhang to convey his greetings to Chinese President Xi Jinping and said his country value the traditional friendship with China and will exert all efforts to developing bilateral ties.

EXPLORING NEW HIGHLIGHTS OF PRAGMATIC COOPERATION

During his meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Zhang termed economic and trade cooperation as "important foundation" of bilateral ties.

In recent years, as pragmatic cooperation between the two countries maintain sound development in various areas, the two countries should make overall arrangements and well implement the cooperation projects, speed up the docking of the Belt and Road Initiative and Vietnam's "Two Corridors and One Economic Circle" plan, so as to bring about fruitful results to benefits both peoples.

The Vietnamese prime minister agreed with Zhang's suggestion, and said Vietnam is ready to seize the development opportunities, brought about by the docking of development strategies between the Belt and Road Initiative and "Two Corridors and One Economic Circle" plan, and constantly pushing forward the bilateral mutually-beneficial cooperation to a higher level.

SHARING EXPERIENCES IN PARTY BUILDING, GOVERNANCE AND LEGISLATIVE SUPERVISION

In meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, chairwoman of the National Assembly of Vietnam, Zhang said the two legislative bodies boast fruitful exchange and cooperation results since they established friendly ties 60 years ago.

Both sides should make it a priority to well implement the important consensus reached by both party chiefs, enhance friendly exchanges at all levels and all areas, and share experiences in party building, governance and legislative supervision, thus creating sound policy and law environment for economic and trade cooperation and personnel flow.

The Vietnamese top legislator pledged utmost efforts to safeguard the bilateral friendship and advance the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.

During the visit, Zhang also attended the Sino-Vietnam Friendly Cooperation Forum and the 3rd Sino-Vietnam Youth Festival in Hanoi.

Zhang concluded his visit and was back to Beijing on Friday.
Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai (L) holds a joint press conference with British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond after the 8th China-Britain Economic and Financial Dialogue in London, Nov. 10, 2016. (Xinhua/Han Yan)

LONDON, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- China is willing to deepen cooperation with the new British government and continue to enhance partnership, said Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai Thursday.

Ma made the remarks when co-chairing the eighth China-Britain Economic and Financial Dialogue with British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond.

Sixty-three outcomes were reached after the two sides held fruitful discussions on the macroeconomy and relevant policies, trade investment and market access, financial service and market, as well as infrastructure and industrial strategies.

Ma said that in September, leaders of the two countries, both important members in the world, met in Hangzhou, where they reaffirmed the commitment to working together for the "Golden Era" of bilateral relations, and blueprint the practical cooperation in economic and trade relations.

The Chinese vice premier pointed out that the China-Britain Economic and Financial Dialogue, a high-level mechanism to implement the two sides' economic and financial cooperation, has become irreplaceable in deepening strategic communication, promoting comprehensive cooperation and enhancing bilateral and multilateral coordination.

The dialogue, the first high-level one between the Chinese and British governments after the Hangzhou meeting, is also the first of its kind held after the British new cabinet took office, Ma said.

He added that the meeting is expected to offer a platform for the two sides to implement the consensus of leaders of the two countries and make plans for the bilateral pragmatic economic and trade cooperation in the future.

This year is the start of the "Golden Era," and next year marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of the bilateral ties, Ma said, adding China is willing to deepen cooperation with the British government, continue dialogues, and further the China-Britain comprehensive global strategic partnership for the 21st century.

For his part, Hammond said that the successful visit to Britain by Chinese President Xi Jinping in October last year marked the coming of the "Golden Era" for the bilateral ties. The British side congratulated China on its successful hosting of the Group 20 (G20) Summit in Hangzhou this September.

He said the two sides work closely together under the G20 framework, and respond effectively to various risks and challenges.

In recent years, the bilateral trade has maintained steady growth, and Britain has attracted more Chinese investment than other European countries, a fact that has demonstrated the vitality of bilateral cooperation, he said.

The British official said as China's partner, his country is committed to benefiting more from the partnership, and is willing to promote the lasting development of the "Golden Era."

China and Britain agreed to further promote the strategic docking of British regional development plan and China's "Belt and Road Initiative" as well as "Strategy of UK Industry 2050" and "Made in China 2025," to enhance the level of investment and trade cooperation.

The two nations agreed to take Hinckley Point project as an opportunity to deepen cooperation in such fields as civil nuclear power, high-speed railway and aerospace projects.

They also vowed to promote the normalization of financial service cooperation, strengthen exchanges on financial supervision, and conduct the cooperation in green and inclusive finance and financial science and technology.

The two sides eyed the cooperation on third-party market, facilitate their coordination in international affairs and macroeconomic policies, and implement the fruits of the G20 Hangzhou Summit, so as to promote the world economy for a strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth.

Ma traveled to Britain Tuesday to co-chair the Eighth China-Britain Economic and Financial Dialogue with Hammond. He is also going to attend the Fourth China-France High-Level Economic and Financial Dialogue in France.
BEIJING, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Latin American countries should actively participate in the Belt and Road Initiative as an effective way to boost south-south connection and cooperation, Chilean ambassador to China Jorge Heine told Xinhua.

Jorge made the remarks ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping's week-long state visit to Ecuador, Peru and Chile from Nov.17 to 23. During the visit, Xi will attend the 24th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders' Meeting from Nov. 19 to 20 in Lima, capital city of Peru.

"Chinese capital and technology will help Latin America improve its infrastructure, industry and connectivity," Jorge said, adding that Chile hopes to attract Chinese investment and boost cooperation with China in digital technology.

Official data showed that two-way trade volume between China and Chile reached over 31.885 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.

"The Belt and Road Initiative and Xi's upcoming visit is of great significance and will boost two-way cooperation in politics, economy and trade, as well as culture," the ambassador said.

China and Chile have maintained close relations for a long time. Chile was the first South American nation to forge diplomatic ties with China, the first Latin American country to acknowledge China's complete market economy status and the first to sign a free trade agreement with China.

The Belt and Road Initiative, consisting of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and proposed by Xi in 2013, has brought together over 100 countries and international organizations in Asia, Europe and Africa via land and maritime networks.

The initiative is part of China's efforts to provide public goods and honor international responsibilities that are commensurate with its status as a global power.
Turkish police detain a student in Diyarbakir on September 19, 2016, during a protest against the suspension of teachers for suspected links to militants. (AFP/Xinhua)

ANKARA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Turkish government shut down 370 non-governmental organizations with links to terror groups on Friday, Local daily Hurriyet reported.

The interior ministry said in a statement that the organizations in 39 provinces were closed due to threats against national security.

Up to 190 of these organizations are linked with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is listed by the Turkish government as a terrorist organization, while 153 others are connected with the Gulen movement, which was accused of plotting the July 15 coup attempt by the authorities, it said.

The rest are linked with the Islamic States group and the outlawed Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front, it added.

The ministry also said that investigations of these organizations are ongoing, pledging "determination to fight all kinds of structures, groups and institutions with links to terror organizations."

The move was taken under the state of emergency legislation, the statement said.

Turkey declared a state of emergency after the July 15 coup attempt that killed more than 240 people and injured around 2,200.
ISLAMABAD, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan on Friday condemned a suicide attack on German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif which killed at least four people and injured nearly 100.

Taliban had claimed late Thursday's attack.

"The Government of Pakistan strongly condemns the suicide attack on the German Consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif that led to loss of several precious lives, left scores wounded and caused massive damage to the property," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

It said Pakistan conveys its deepest condolences to families of those who lost their lives in this terrorist incident and prays for early recovery of the injured. "Pakistan also expresses its sympathies with the German Government on their Mission in Mazar-e-Sharif."

The Foreign Ministry said Pakistan reiterates its unequivocal condemnation of terrorism in all forms and manifestations and reaffirms its commitment for continued efforts and cooperation for eliminating this menace.
NEW DELHI, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- India will take a call on finalizing defence reforms within the next few months that may include the creation of the post of Chief of Defense Staff, the country's defense minister has said.

"I am very clear on it but there were certain aspects which need to be also taken along. I have to take all the three services on board. Let me be very clear, no one wants to leave his turf," Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said at an event in the national capital Thursday.

"I have been discussing with the chiefs and slowly they have also come to understanding that jointness would be much better than individually separate forces. The Air Force and the Army integrated so well in recent operations... there was no problem in working together," he added.

However, the minister made it clear that the final decision will be Prime Minister Narendra Modi's.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivers a speech during a rally marking the 12th anniversary of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death, in the West Bank city of Ramallah on November 10, 2016 (Xinhua/EPA)

RAMALLAH, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Friday on the U.S. president-elect Donald Trump to implement the two-state solution in order to achieve peace in the Middle East.

Abbas said in a press conference following a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev in the West Bank city of Jericho that the election of Trump is an American affair and "we have followed up the electoral process for over a year."

He added "what we call on him to do is to accept and work on the implementation of the two-state solution with the establishment of the Palestinian state to live in peace next to the State of Israel."

In response to questions of journalists regarding his position in case he was invited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold direct bilateral negotiations, Abbas said "we have been and still are, ready for direct talks with the Israeli side."

He went on saying that "Netanyahu must understand that if he does not believe in the two-state solution there will be no peace, and we want him to support the two-state solution on the 1967 borders. If he says that, then everything would be possible."

The peace talks between Palestine and Israel have been stalled since April 2014. The U.S. sponsored talks that lasted for nine months achieved no tangible results.
HO CHI MINH CITY, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The Argentine Film Week opened here for the first time on Friday evening to introduce Argentina's people, culture and other aspects to Vietnamese audience.

Argentine cartoon, comedy and romance films are being screened at Cinebox cinema in Ho Chi Minh City's District 3 from Friday to Saturday free of charge.

Vietnam and Argentina established diplomatic relations in 1973. Their two-way trade is predicted to surge to some 3 billion U.S. dollars this year from nearly 2.5 billion U.S. dollars last year.
People hold candles and pray in Abuja during a vigil calling for the release of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted in the remote village of Chibok, May 15, 2014. (REUTERS PHOTO)

ADDIS ABABA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The African Union (AU) has reiterated its continued support to the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) fighting against the Boko Haram terrorist group.

Smail Chergui, AU Commissioner for Peace and Security, has made the remarks during his meeting with Senior Military Leadership of MNJTF fighting the Boko Haram, according to an AU statement late Thursday.

The meeting was to discuss the security situation in the MNJTF area of responsibility and other issues relating to enhancing the efficiency of MNJTF operations, said the statement.

It stated that the delegation was composed of the Force Commander for MNJTF, Deputy Force Commander, the Chief of Staff and Head AU Liaison Office in Chad.

The AU Commissioner has commended MNJTF efforts aimed at "eliminating the terrorist group and bringing back the situation in the region to normalcy."

The Commissioner also noted the increasing number of Boko Haram terrorists surrendering to MNJTF forces, with particular reference to the reporting of 325 fighters with their families to the MNJTF on 8 Nov. 2016 in Chad.

"It was observed that the situation calls for specialized organizations to handle the group in order to prevent them from re-joining the terrorist group. It was further noted that the humanitarian situation in the MNJTF area of responsibility is worsening and this calls for immediate intervention."

The Commissioner has reiterated the need for the international community to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to alleviate the suffering of the people in the MNJTF area of responsibility, as well as the Commission's continued support to MNJTF in fighting Boko Haram.
BISHKEK, Nov.11 (Xinhua) -- President of Kyrgyzstan Almazbek Atambayev on Friday signed a decree appointing Sooronbay Zheenbekov as the prime minister of the country, the president's press service reported.

By this decree, the Kyrgyz president also appointed new vice prime ministers and members of the new government.

On Wednesday, the Kyrgyz Parliament approved the new composition, structure and program of the government proposed by candidate for the post of Prime Minister Sooronbay Zheenbekov.

The structure of the Kyrgyz government remained the same. Small changes affected only the composition of the cabinet.

The government was forced to resign after the collapse of the coalition of parliamentary majority at the end of October. In early November, a faction of the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan (SDPK) mandated by President Almazbek Atambayev to form the alliance, has created a new coalition and nominated Zheenbekov's candidacy for the post of prime minister.
BRUSSELS, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The Council of European Union (EU) on Friday adopted a decision allowing five Schengen states to carry out internal border controls for another three months, despite that the influx of migrants has fallen dramatically.

Starting from the date of the adoption, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway should prolong proportionate temporary border controls for a maximum period of three months, according to a press release of the council.

These countries were supposed to lift all internal border controls by November 12, in accordance with the decision made by EU members in May.

"Our ultimate objective is to get back to Schengen as soon as possible. Although we are not there yet, the situation is improving. The prolongation will therefore be for three months only, " said Robert Kalinak, Slovak Interior Minister, adding " there will be more intensive reporting obligations compared to the previous period."

According to the press release, border controls should be strictly targeted and limited in scope, frequency, location and time.

The five Schengen states not only should review the border controls each week, assessing whether the measures are still necessary, but also should report to the European Commission every month.

Given the current fragile situation in Greece and the residue of pressure remaining in the members most affected by the secondary movements of migrants and asylum seekers, the commission submitted on October 26 a proposal recommending that the five Schengen states prolong the temporary internal border controls for a maximum period of three months.

The Schengen area included 26 European countries that have abolished passport and any other type of border control at their mutual borders. However, border checks have become the norm in parts of Schengen area that saw massive influx of migrants last summer and autumn.
VIENNA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on Friday convened here to discuss "Technical, Legal and Political Aspects of Non-NPT States' Participation in the NSG", in accordance with the mandate adopted by the Seoul Plenary in June this year.

Wang Qun, Director-General of the Arms Control Department of China's Foreign Ministry, headed the Chinese delegation to the NSG meeting.

China maintains that, any formula worked out should be non-discriminatory and applicable to all non-NPT states; without prejudice to the core value of the NSG and the effectiveness, authority and integrity of the international non-proliferation regime with the NPT as its cornerstone; and without contradicting the customary international law in the field of non-proliferation.

China is ready to work with all parties to promote early progress by the Group in this regard, the Chinese delegation said in a press release.

This is the first time, not only since the Seoul Plenary, but also since the NSG's inception in 1975, for the Group to formally take up the issue of non-NPT states' participation in an open and transparent manner.

The participating governments offered their observations on the key issues dealt with in the above papers as they pertain to the issue of technical, legal and political aspects of non-NPT states' participation in the NSG.

The Chinese delegation participated in the meeting in a constructive manner and contributed its substantive inputs.

China believes that, the meeting marks a good beginning of the two-step inter-governmental process launched by the Group.

China supports the continuation of this open and transparent inter-governmental process, in accordance with relevant rules of the Group, and to ensure a solid first step taken towards an early formula on the above issue, so that the Group can proceed to the second step of taking up country specific membership application by non-NPT states at an early date.
BRUSSELS, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Ecuador on Friday signed a free trade deal with the European Union (EU), joining its free trade agreement with Colombia and Peru.

The protocol of accession was signed at a ceremony by EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, Slovak Economy Minister Peter Ziga, whose country is holding the rotating presidency of the EU, and representatives from Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru.

The deal now needs the consent of the European Parliament and is expected to be provisional implemented from Jan. 1, 2017.

The agreement will eliminate tariffs for all industrial and fisheries products, increase market access for agricultural products, improve access to public procurement and services, and further reduce technical barriers to trade, the European Commission said in a statement.

The EU said the deal will benefit all parties' main exports. These include automobiles, alcoholic beverages and dairy products on the EU side, and fisheries, banana, cut flowers and cacao on the Ecuadorian side.

Once fully implemented, the savings for EU exporters will be at least 106 million euros (115 million U.S. dollars) in tariffs annually, and Ecuadorian exports will save up to 248 million euros in removed duties.

However, the tariff-cuts will be implemented only gradually over 17 years, with the EU liberalizing almost 95 percent of tariff lines upon entry into force, and Ecuador about 60 percent.

Meanwhile, the benefits for the EU will be significant. For example, the EU agriculture sector will benefit from increased market access for its products, as well as from the protection of about 100 EU geographical indications on the Ecuadorian market.

Gains can also be expected for the EU in specific sectors, including new market access for cars and machinery.

"This agreement is a milestone in relations between Ecuador and the EU and creates the right framework to boost trade and investment on both sides," Malmstrom said.

"We need to create more trade between us because trade is a key factor for growth and jobs in the EU but also for an economy like Ecuador, which wants to diversify and integrate into global value chains. It creates a foothold for European business and an anchor for reforms in Ecuador," she added.

In 2015, the EU was Ecuador's second largest trading partner while Ecuador was the EU's 60th trading partner, with 13.2 percent and 0.1 percent respectively of each other's external trade. The volume of EU-Ecuador trade reached 4.5 billion euros in 2015.

The EU's trade agreement with Colombia and Peru was signed in June 2012. It has been provisionally applied with Peru since March 1, 2013 and with Colombia since Aug. 1, 2013. Ecuador suspended its participation in the negotiations for the initial agreement in 2009. Negotiations to access the agreement resumed in January 2014 and were concluded in July 2014.
The first batch of KenyaDefence Forces (KDF) soldiers who had served in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in South Sudan arrive at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, Nov. 9, 2016. (Xinhua/Nyalwash)

NAIROBI, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The second batch of Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) soldiers arrived in Kenya on Friday as the country's opposition criticized the order to have them withdraw from South Sudan's peacekeeping mission.

The first batch of another 100 soldiers arrived from Juba on Wednesday. So far, 200 soldiers who were taking part in the South Sudan mission have returned home.

They are among the 1,000 soldiers to return home after President Uhuru Kenyatta announced he would pull out Kenyan troops serving under the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) following the sacking of the Kenyan commander of the UNMISS over the hotel attack in Juba in July.

A UN report attributed the July attacks on a civilian compound and a site that houses UN staff to lack of leadership among key senior mission personnel, which culminated in a chaotic and ineffective response to the violence.

Meanwhile, Opposition leader Raila Odinga on Friday faulted Kenyatta for ordering KDF troops to withdraw from South Sudan, saying the Kenyan leader may have made the decision out of anger and without due consultation on its implications.

"The manner in which the president has handled this particular incident and the unnecessary diplomatic row he is opening with the international community through the UN is regrettable," Odinga said.

Kenyatta strongly defended Kenya's decision to pull troops out of South Sudan, saying regional peace should not come at the expense of the country's dignity, honor and pride.

Kenyatta reiterated that the structural failures of the mission should not be blamed on the Kenyan general.

"Even if there were problems, it would have been courteous for the UN to consult IGAD (Inter-Governmental Authority on Development) member states before taking the drastic decision," Kenyatta said.

He said Kenya has communicated its decision and forwarded its complains to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Lisbon Mayor Fernando Medina (L front) presents a symbolic city key to Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave during the opening ceremony of the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on Nov. 7, 2016. Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said Monday the Web Summit opened in Lisbon would be an important contribution to the Portuguese economy. (Xinhua/Zhang Liyun)

LISBON, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Artificial intelligence and how it will affect jobs was the key topics at Web Summit, one of EU's largest technology event which was held in Lisbon this year.

Over 53,000 people, including entrepreneurs, startups and investors, attended the three-day event between November 7 and 10.

Over 20,000 companies participated, as well as 2,000 startups, 663 speakers, 1,500 investors, 7,000 CEO's from technology, sport fashion and health companies among others. There were also around 2,000 journalists covering the event.

Web Summit moved from Dublin to Portugal this year. The event would generate at least 200 million euros for the Portuguese economy, according to the Lisbon Tourism Association.

One of the hot topics at this year's Web Summit was artificial intelligence. which Paddy Cosgrave, CEO of Web Summit, said governments have to start to prepare for the situation in which millions of workers see their jobs at stake.

"In 2010 and 2011 there were photo sharing apps, social networks, but there was little talk about artificial intelligence, and little talk about big data, and over 24 months in particular, there has been an explosion of AI startups," he told journalists at a press conference during the event.

The future of technology was also discussed in several conferences.

Thursday wrapped up with "The age of moonshots and Hyperloop One" with Hyperloop One co-founders Josh Giegel and Shervin Pishevar revealing negotiations with the Finnish and Dutch governments to implement their plans for a high speed transportation system.

The winner of the startup competition, Danish Company Kubo Robot, a robot designed to teach young children programming, was announced to close the event. The company won 100,00 euros.

Cosgrave said he believes the number of people attending the conference will begin to grow, and that the maximum capacity of 80,000 people will be reached by next year. (1 euro = 1.09 U.S. dollars)
BAKU, Nov.11 (Xinhua) -- Cooperation between Azerbaijan and China is meeting great expectations in such areas as energy, transport, transit transportation and investment, Azerbaijan's Minister of Economy Shahin Mustafayev said while meeting with Chinese businessmen here on Friday.

The minister pointed out that Azerbaijan is interested in further development of relations with China.

According to Mustafayev, the volume of trade between Azerbaijan and China grew by 56 percent in the first nine months of 2016, compared to the same period of 2015.

Member of the board of directors at the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) Wang Shihong praised economic and political relations between Azerbaijan and China. He emphasized the importance of the construction of chemical and oil refinery complex in Azerbaijan.

The sides also discussed the ways of expanding cooperation between the two countries' entrepreneurs.

China is one of the main trade partners of Azerbaijan. More than 50 agreements were signed between the two countries so far.

Azerbaijan Export and Investment Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO) has recently opened a representative office in China to support and encourage relations between the two countries' businessmen, as well as expand Azerbaijani goods export to the Chinese market and attract China's leading investment funds to the Azerbaijan economy.

Azerbaijan also plans to appoint sales representative in China by the end of this year.

Trade between the two countries reached 641.39 million US dollars in January-September 2016 with 145.81 million US dollars accounting for export to China, according to Azerbaijan's State Customs Committee.
BUENOS AIRES, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The upset victory of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has injected "uncertainty" into U.S. ties with Latin America, and into the financial markets, said Argentine experts.

As a political outsider, Trump's election brings a degree of unpredictability to the U.S. administration that leads to "great uncertainty," Juan Manuel Karg, a political scientist at the University of Buenos Aires, told Xinhua.

"I think they are most worried in Cuba, because in the past two years there has been significant progress in terms of diplomatic ties (with Washington). That may possibly have been put in jeopardy, which could complicate the Cuba issue," said Karg.

While during the campaign, reports surfaced that Trump had pursued business ventures in Cuba, the candidate at one point said he would reverse advances made in bilateral relations so far, unless Cuba did more to meet U.S. demands for political and religious reforms.

Those remarks, however, were made in Florida, home to a large and vocal Cuban-American community that is antagonistic to the Cuban government, and may have been aimed mostly to win their backing. In Tuesday's elections, Trump handily won the state of Florida.

But Cuba may have nothing to fear, since it is probably not high on Trump's agenda, said Karg.

Those who voted for Trump essentially said: "'solve the domestic problems for me', rather than 'get involved in foreign problems'. It remains to be seen whether Trump lives up to that (message) or not," said Karg.

Either way, his presidency will mark a turning point in U.S. foreign policy, Karg said, since Trump's campaign platform made it clear he would pursue an "isolationist" policy.

Washington's role abroad, under a Trump presidency, "is the great question mark for international analysts the world over. The United States that got involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya ... it seems that there is going to be a ceiling on this policy, or at least a certain limit on this policy, according to Trump's discourse. Only time will tell," said Karg.

FINANCIAL UNCERTAINTY

Trump's win is also set to "generate greater financial volatility that will make credit more expensive in the short term, and lead to more talk of trade protectionism in the medium term," said Dante Sica, head of financial consulting firm ABECEB.

Stock markets momentarily dipped on news Trump won the elections, but recovered quickly.

Still, the election turnout "is a cause for concern," said Sica, though he added "we have to wait for Trump to designate his cabinet and outline the first measures."

In a post-election report, Sica predicted "the local financial market is going to feel the effect of Trump's victory, in instability and resistant equity assets, especially those related to commodities."

After an initial shake up, however, "the market should stabilize given that its conditions depend more on internal rather than external factors," he added.

Sica echoed Karg's belief that Trump's focus will be on domestic issues or elsewhere, not on Latin America.

"The region is not going to be a priority for the United States. There are no urgent threats or important challenges in the region to draw the attention of the United States, and Argentina is no exception. The incoming administration doesn't seem to be too interested in regional integration," said Sica.

"U.S. policy will mainly center on bilateral ties and, in that sense, we hope that the relationship between Argentina and the United States, which had been reactivated by the arrival of (President Mauricio) Macri, doesn't cool off by delayed progress," Sica added.

Washington-Buenos Aires relations warmed up when the pro-business Macri took office in December last year, taking over from Argentina's previous more left-leaning government.

While trade between the two had steadily declined, from 14 percent of Argentina's total trade exchange in 2002 to just 9 percent in 2015, the U.S. "continues to be an important trade partner, the third biggest after Brazil and China," said Sica.

"The impact (of a further drop in trade) could be considerable in some sectors. Even though the U.S. market is not as important now as it used to be, it continues to be key for several food products, such as sugar, juice and wine, and other products, such as aluminum, some chemicals and crude," said Sica.

He added Trump's "more protectionist outlook ... could also endanger several advances made in recent months in the bilateral agenda, particularly the opening of the lemon and meat markets, and the recent decision to assess Argentina's reentry into the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP)," which the U.S. uses to apply lower trade tariffs on allied developing countries.
Smoke billows from Islamic State positions as a convoy from the Iraqi Special Forces 2nd division move into position during fighting in the eastern Samah area of Mosul on November 11, 2016. (AFP/Xinhua)

MOSUL, Iraq, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi security forces on Friday pushed forward slowly and freed new districts in the city of Mosul from the Islamic State (IS) militants, as the extremist militants are using civilians as cover, security sources said.

The commandos of the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) broke through the IS defensive lines and entered the districts of Qadsiyah and Baker in the eastern side of Mosul, leaving many militants killed and destroying several booby-trapped cars, said a statement by a media office affiliated to the Joint Operations Command (JOC).

The troops managed to recapture more than half of the district in the afternoon after heavy street battles with the militants, according to Lieutenant General Abdul-Amir Yarallah from the JOC.

Earlier in the month, hundreds of the CTS commandos and Iraqi army made a significant progress from three directions at the eastern side of Mosul, locally known as the left bank of the Tigris River, and managed to seize six districts.

The advance unleashed the most intense street battles against IS militants since the offensive to retake the city began more than three weeks ago.

The offensive has slowed recently as the security forces, including the CTS commandos, have pushed into more densely populated areas of eastern Mosul, where they cannot rely as much on heavy shelling and airstrikes because of the risk to civilians who have been told to stay in their homes.

Nevertheless, the fierce battles inside Mosul pushed the number of civilians who were displaced from their homes to around 37,730 since the start of the military offensive on October 17, according to the recent report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

On Oct. 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the start of a major offensive to retake Mosul, the country's second largest city.

Since then, the Iraqi security forces have inched to the eastern fringes of Mosul and made progress on other routes around the city, preparing for a major battle to storm the city and drive out IS militants.

Mosul, some 400 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, has been under IS control since June 2014, when Iraqi government forces abandoned their weapons and fled, enabling IS militants to take control of parts of Iraq's northern and western regions.
LUSAKA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The Zambian government on Friday unveiled its 2017 national budget of 6.5 billion U.S. dollars, while promising an economic and financial rebalance in the face of an economic meltdown.

The Zambian economy has suffered a meltdown with the economic growth for 2016 projected at 3 percent, the lowest since 1998.

Minister of Finance Felix Mutati said while presenting the budget to parliament that the government would ensure that the finances go towards supporting key sectors of the economy.

"With this budget, government will rebalance the economic and financial position of our country, thus setting conditions for sustained economic growth," he said.

He said the gravity of the state of the economy requires the government to put in place bold measures to stabilize and grow the economy.

He acknowledged that the economy was facing turbulent times due to external and internal pressures, adding that turning the economy around will require making hard choices and implementing difficult reforms

According to him, implementing the 2017 budget will be challenging due to weak global economic growth while the country's low water levels will continue to hamper electricity generation.

Among fiscal and policies to be implemented under its economic recovery program, the government intends to restrict new capital projects and major equipment procurements until ongoing projects are completed, to implement a phased removal of electricity subsidies and restrict new public sector recruitment to only the health and education sectors.
JUBA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The UN refugee agency on Friday condemned the abduction and killing of refugees near a refugee hosting area of Lasu Payam in South Sudan's southwestern region of Yei.

In a statement released in Juba, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said shooting and machete attack by armed groups killed two and wounded five Sudanese refugees who were from Sudan's South Kordofan region.

They were released members of the 39 refugees abducted on Oct. 19, according to the UNHCR.

"To date, four women and 28 children are still in captivity in an unknown location," the statement said, adding that efforts were being made to obtain details about their whereabouts and their captors.

According to the UNHCR, armed men freed seven abducted refugees on Nov. 5. The released refugees were then attacked by another group.

"One refugee was shot dead and six others cut by machetes. Before reaching Yei town on foot, one refugee bled to death from their wounds. UNHCR has airlifted the five wounded refugees to Juba for better medical treatment," it said.

"UNHCR urges the government of South Sudan and armed groups in the refugee hosting areas to respect human rights and take appropriate measures to ensure the safety of refugees, create a secure corridor for movement of displaced refugees and free movement of humanitarian actors to reach refugees with much-needed relief aid," said Vincent Parker, UNHCR's Deputy Representative in South Sudan.

It was not the first attack against refugees in Lasu as armed men in September went on a looting spree in the camp, robbing refugee homes and destroying the medical clinic

"This forced thousands of refugees to flee alongside the host community and seek safety in the surrounding dense forest areas," the agency said.

Prior to the September raids, Lasu hosted over 10,000 refugees, mainly from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR). The camp is currently empty, with access to the area extremely challenging due to the ongoing conflicts.
CAIRO, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive board approved on Friday Egypt's request for a three-year 12 billion U.S. dollars loan, Egypt's state TV reported.
DAR ES SALAAM, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Nine poachers on Friday appeared before a Tanzanian court charged with killing 86 elephants and five buffaloes.

State attorneys told the Mbeya regional court that the suspects killed the animals between August 2006 and September 2014 in Mbeya, Iringa, Tanga and Morogoro regions.

The attorneys told the packed court that most of the suspects were related to a heavyweight politician from the country's ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM).

They said the killed elephants and buffaloes were valued at 1 million U.S. dollars.

The state attorneys said one of the suspects, identified as the son of a Member of Parliament on the ticket of the ruling party, was two weeks ago found guilty of illegal possession of government trophies.

On October 29, President John Magufuli directed Tanzanian security forces to hunt down poachers and all criminals financing the poaching of elephants.

The order was made following the President's visit to the Natural Resources and Tourism Ministry where he saw 50 elephant tusks that were seized from poachers.

He said the Tanzania's National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) have his full support in their fight against elephant poaching.

According to a 2015 census, the elephant population in Tanzania shrank from 110,000 in 2009 to around 43,000 in 2014, while rhinos are said to be on the verge of extinction.
CAIRO, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive board approved on Friday Egypt's request for a three-year 12 billion U.S. dollars loan, Egypt's state TV reported.

Meanwhile, Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) Tarek Amer told official MENA news agency that Egypt has received Friday an initial 2.75 billion dollars from the IMF.

Egypt reached an initial deal with the IMF on a 12 billion dollars loan in August, a move seen by many experts as a necessary step to help the country's ailing economy.

"This will make our foreign currency reserves jump to 23.5 billion dollars," Amer affirmed.

The foreign currency reserves at the CBE declined since the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak from 36 billion dollars to 19.6 billion dollars as of the end of September 2016.

Earlier this month, the CBE announced the devaluation of the Egyptian pound by 48 percent which would allow the pound to float in the financial market based on supply and demand.

The move was meant to limit the hike and shortage of dollar, boost foreign investments and meet a key demand of the IMF to provide Egypt with the loan.

Meanwhile, the Washington-based IMF board said in a statement that further disbursements following the immediately released 2.75 billion dollars will depend on the country's economic performance and implementation of reforms.

"The reform program will help Egypt restore macroeconomic stability and promote inclusive growth," said the statement.

Policies supported by the program aim to correct external imbalances and restore competitiveness, place the budget deficit and public debt on a declining path, boost growth and create jobs while protecting vulnerable groups, said the statement.

Egypt has been struggling to survive severe economic recession that led to a decline in foreign currency reserves, a growing budget deficit and rising foreign debts.
TEHRAN, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- Iranian officials have expressed concerns and anger over the remarks of the U.S. president-elect Donald Trump against Iran's nuclear deal during his campaign.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Friday urged the incoming administration of the United States to remain committed to the last year international agreement which put an end to Tehran's nuclear disputes.

Zarif warned that Iran might consider "other options" in case any party involved in Iran's nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, fails to comply with its commitments, Press TV reported.

He said that Iran has been implementing its part of the bargain, while the U.S., even with the current administration, has not fully implemented its part.

A senior Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, also warned Trump Friday against making mistakes about Iran, saying the U.S. must avoid "playing with fire."

Meanwhile, Iran's minister of Industry, Mines and Trade, Mohammad-Reza Nematzadeh, said Friday that the election of Trump as the new president of the U.S. will have no impacts on its international industrial deals, as it is independent from Iranian nuclear deal that has come under repeated attacks by Trump in his presidential campaign.

Trump has said in the campaign that the nuclear deal sealed by Iran and the world powers in 2015 and implemented in January was "the worst deal ever negotiated."

The minister further noted that the U.S. under Trump cannot unilaterally cancel the nuclear deal as it is not a unilateral but an international deal, endorsed by the United Nations.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday that his country expects respect from Trump for the international nuclear deal.

Rouhani stressed that the result of the U.S. presidential election will have no impact on the Islamic republic's policies, as "Iran's policy of constructive interaction with the world and breaking up nuclear sanctions has placed Iran's economic ties with all countries on an improving and irreversible course."

Washington will no longer be able to continue the spread of Iranophobia as before, he added.

The nuclear agreement resulted in the lift of western and international sanctions against Iran's financial and energy sectors in return for the partial freeze of Iran's nuclear program. It raised hopes to reengage the Islamic republic with the global economy and develop its energy resources.
This file photo taken on October 4, 2016 shows Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence speaks during the US vice presidential debate at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. (AFP/Photo)

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped his running mate Mike Pence to head his transition team, removing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie from the post, local media reported Friday.

The replacement was aimed to tap into Pence's resources and contacts in Washington to speed up the process, the New York Times cited sources in the transition team as saying.

Pence, who has served six terms in the House of Representatives, was seen to have a better understanding of the Washington political landscape than Christie, whose political life was mainly limited to the state of New Jersey.

Christie, who has led the team since May, will serve along side former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and retired general Michael Flynn as vice chairs of the team, according to the report.

The news came as Trump tweeted earlier Friday "Busy day planned in New York. Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!"

Speculation on Trump's picks for his new government has circulated since his election Wednesday, with the media connecting inner members of his campaign team with important government jobs.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Trump's campaign chief Steve Bannon are also popular guesses to fill in top slots.

Trump has met with President Barack Obama in the White House on Thursday to discuss the transition, and both men vowed to facilitate a smooth handover.
GENEVA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein on Friday called for immediate action to ensure that the rights and the needs of victims and survivors in Mosul and other ISIL-held areas in Iraq are met, including the need for justice, truth and reconciliation.

The UN rights chief cited recent reports as saying that over the past few days, ISIL appeared to be continuing to carry out killings based on decisions of its self-appointed "courts".

On Tuesday, ISIL reportedly shot and killed 40 civilians in Mosul city after accusing them of "treason and collaboration" with the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF).

The victims were reportedly dressed in orange clothes marked in red with the words: "traitors and agents of the ISF", and their bodies were then hung on electrical poles in several areas in Mosul city.

The same evening, a 27-year-old man was allegedly publicly shot to death in the Bab al-Jideed neighbourhood of central Mosul following a so-called "court's decision", while his crime was just using a mobile phone in Mosul.

Six other civilians were also reportedly hanged on Oct. 20 in Mosul for keeping hidden SIM cards, in violation of ISIL's order to surrender all SIM cards.

"Heartbreaking images of children being forced to carry out executions, stories of women being 'redistributed' among ISIL fighters, of killings for possession of SIM cards, and killings of those perceived to be opposed to ISIL's doctrines, the extent of civilian suffering is numbing and intolerable," High Commissioner Zeid said.

"The people of Iraq, all the people of Iraq, must see that their State, by its actions, is capable of protecting them by bringing to justice those guilty of the horrible crimes that have been committed against them," he stressed.
Amcham calls for offensive strategy

We cannot simply seek to take more from those sectors of the economy that are already producing and contributing. We have to allow those sectors to grow, and we have to create new sectors that would drive economic growth. To do that we have to redefine our roles, he explained.

Tewarie was speaking on Wednesday, day two of AMCHAMs 20th Annual Health, Safety, Security and Environment (HSSE ) Conference and Exhibition, held at the Hyatt Regency Trinidad. This years theme is Innovative HSSE Strategies for Todays Challenges. More than 300 professionals from the local business community, public sector, regulatory agencies and non-governmental organizations attended.

The two-day conference will include a number of Technical Sessions, and Panel Discussions.

He said the Governments role is to facilitate, and the private sectors role is to advocate and to find ways to match capital with good investment opportunities.

Tewarie noted that they are committed to do that as long as there are consultation, and collaboration, As we interact with the National Tripartite committee and other fora with Government and Labour we believe that there are enough people who understand the situation and committed to Trinidad and Tobago to ensure that we can come out of our current challenge. He said the exhibition provides opportunities for companies to share information and promote services to HSE professionals and the wider public. It is also why we embarked on the National Youth Productivity Forum (NYPF), which provides a forum for young people to critically discuss pertinent issues. This year they discuss tolerance and next year the theme will be centered on the education curriculum and how teaching is delivered, he explained
Bulgarian man nabbed

According to reports, officers led by Snr Supt Totaram Dookhie and including Cpl Lutchman and others executed a search warrant at the guest house and detained the foreigner after a search of a room booked in his name resulted in the seizure of US$168,000; an electronic device used to skim ATMs and a quantity of bank cards among other items.

The man was taken into cusotdy and was being questioned at the Fraud Squad office in Port-of- Spain.

Police sources said the Bulgarian is believed to have entered the coutnry at the end of October and linked up with local criminals involved in the skimming operation in which devices are placed in ATMs which then read the personal identification codes entered by persons wishing to withdraw money from their accounts via the ATMs. The information is then transferred onto a dummy bank card which is then used to clean out the unsuspecting persons bank account of funds. Police have sourced the services of an interpretor to assist in the interrogation process.
Now, Bolt takes legal action

with apology: Colms wife paid $7.5M. Williams- Imbert is a director of Bolt and the wife of Finance Minister Colm Imbert.

On Monday, Imbert initiated legal action against Singh and the Express regarding the same article.

In a signed letter dated November 8 (Tuesday), Stephanie Moe of Fitzwilliam, Stone, Furness- Smith and Morgan law chambers told Singh that the firm has been instructed by Bolt and Williams-Imbert to request that Singh make a full and unequivocal public retraction and apology to be approved by the firm.

Moe said Singh is also requested to give an undertaking not to repeat the allegations made in her article.

Referring to the allegations contained in the article, Moe said the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) did not pay $7.5 million to Bolt in April 2016 and the sum paid to Bolt at that time was $102,489.75. Bolt did not receive two consultancy contracts from the HDC in 2004.

The company received one in July 2004 from the National Housing Authority (NHA) following a competitive tendering process and another in 2006 from the HDC. Moe said to the best of Bolts understanding, the HDC selected it for the 2006 contract based on its past performance and work history with the HDC.

She further stated that the 2004 and 2006 contracts between Bolt and the HDC were not, as far as Bolt and Williams- Imbert are aware, procured by or tainted with any wrongdoing on the part of Bolt, Mrs Williams-Imbert or anyone else for that matter. At all material times, the fees charged by Bolt for services rendered by in it relation to these contracts, fell within the acceptable range of fees charged by comparable service providers in the industry. Moe said Imbert, is not now and has never been a director, officer, employee or shareholder of Bolt.

She stated that that no time did Williams-Imbert, any other officer, employee or shareholder of Bolt engage in any conduct designed to influence Imbert to release funds to the HDC for the purpose of the HDC satisfying its payment obligations to Bolt. Moe added that the HDCs public statement made it clear that none of the monies paid to Bolt by the HDC in respect of the sums due and owing under the 2004 and 2006 contracts were paid as a result of any action on the part of Imbert designed to favour Bolt.

After telling Singh that she failed to make proper enquiries to Bolt and Williams-Imbert on events dating some 12 years ago and did not give them ample opportunity to respond, Moe said such conduct falls well below the standard of acceptable journalism. She drew Singhs attention to a High Court ruling on May 12 of this year in which Justice Frank Seepersad awarded $100,000 in damages against the Trinidad Express. With respect to that matter, Moe said Justice Seepersad observed that the Express and certain journalists connected to it, had engaged in reprehensible conduct in publishing certain defamatory articles and, moreover, that such conduct on their part warranted punishment. Moe told Singh that the firm expects to hear from her without delay and if a satisfactory reply is not received within 14 days of receipt of this letter, Bolt and Williams-Imbert, will take such steps as they may be advised.
WAND rounds off year with Christmas luncheon

FOR THE past 18 years, the Women in Action for the Needy and Destitute (WAND) has been in the business of giving.

Since its 1998 inception, its accomplishments have been far and wide among them being awarded the National Medal Gold for the Development of Women.

The group continued its work toward assisting underprivileged women and children in our society through its charitable drives done throughout 2016.

At its recently concluded, annual Christmas Luncheon it was announced by its president, Jan Bocas Ryan that the group will be supplying 14 community centres throughout TT with computer equipment. The 2016 Christmas Luncheon was held at Hyatt Regency Trinidad, on November 4.

The project will be launched on November 15 this year.

The strains of Spontaneous Sounds filled the room as scores of women and a handful of men gathered for the 16th annual Christmas Luncheon.

It drew the presence of the US Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, John L Estrada and wife, Dr Elizabeth Estrada, as well as Sharon Rowley, wife of Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, Justice Nadia Kangaloo and other high court judges, MP for Laventille West Adrian Leonce and MP for Toco/Sangre Grande Glenda Jennings-Smith and Dr Denise Tsoiafatt-Angus, Secretary of Community Development and Culture, Tobago House of Assembly among others.

Bocas Ryan told the audience the 14 community centres throughout TT will benefit from the work done by the charity over the past year.

In her address she said, These funds are being spent in education, 14 community centres throughout Trinidad and Tobago will benefit from computer equipment through this grant.

We have partnered with the University of Trinidad and Tobago who will play a key role. Trinidad Systems Ltd is also playing a major role in overseeing the hardware, delivering and co-ordinating installation and ensuring transparency.

The Ministry of Community Development co-ordinated our site visits to the community centres and successfully negotiated with Flow for free service for one year to all 14 centres, she added The organisation received a donation of TT $500,000 from the The Price Philanthropic Foundation, California, US. As well as receiving TT $100,000 from a private citizen as well as having its gala ball well-attended. The pilot project done at Romain Lands/ St Francois Valley Road Community Centre in Morvant was credited for its success.

The organisation, Bocas Ryan said, was also actively working on rebuilding its Transition Home at Coora Camp, Siparia for the residents of WAND Drug Rehab Centre, Palo Seco run by New Life Ministries.

Throughout the year, WAND gave to several groups among them the Cascade School for the Deaf which received 43 special books with videos for the hearing impaired.

The organisation also partnered with Servol to provide two early childhood centres. One in Belmont and the other in South Port-of-Spain.

At St Martins in South Port-of-Spain, we completed general works and provided a kitchen where there was none before.

We then turned to the toddlers at the Paradise Heights in Morvant.

That Centre received, infant beds, cribs, books and other play items.

The screen will paint the picture of some very happy faces.

In addition to these projects, for the third year running, we were able to assist two young paraplegic women with diapers and toiletries as their existence depends on others like you, she closed.

Those gathered at the event were also treated to the fashion of Charu Lohcan Dass and entertained by vocalist, Natasha Benjamin.
Rowley congratulates Trump

Rowley took the opportunity to reaffirm the commitment of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to strengthening and deepening the already excellent bilateral ties, which exist between TT and the US. Citing Trumps victory as an indication of the confidence placed in him by the American people, Rowley conveyed best wishes to Trump, his administration and his family.
Rowley: Proportional Representation might be repealed

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley expressed his disdain for the system introduced in 2013, while speaking at a PNM public meeting at Market Square, Point Fortin on Wednesday night, and said that the government is considering repealing the system.

It was not genuinely any reform, Rowley said.

What it was, it was an attempt to use their arrangements to benefit a political party that might have not gotten any seat on a corporation. But at the time that they did that, they were afraid they would get no seat in Point Fortin, no seat in Diego Martin, no seat in Arima and so on. The proportional representation system, introduced for the first time in the countrys history in 2013, allocated aldermen to regional corporations based on the number of votes earned in the election.

For a party to have one alderman, the party needed to earn at least 25 percent of the votes.

Rowley said that the system was implemented so that the Partnership could increase their chances of having a representative in the corporation through whom they could work.

The existing law says that once the corporation ends and even before it ends, the minister controls local government and the minister controls the corporation and if they had got one alderman in Diego Martin, the Minister would have controlled the Diego Martin Corporation.

If they had gotten one alderman in Point Fortin, it was their intention that the Minister would control the corporation even though the PNM had all the seats. That was their intention, you know? But we have noted that intention and therefore it looks very likely, on consideration, that we are going to repeal that piece of foolishness. The PNM political leader also said that the law which demanded that persons being considered as aldermen have their names listed and published before the elections, was intended to let the public know who aldermen were but actually caused unnecessary confusion.

You know our people. We feel a-how very easily. So if I ask you to put your name on the list because I think you would be a good alderman in the borough, and you go in there with six, five other people, and they choose four and the other two were not chosen, they feel hard done by and of course some might even get angry. You create discord. Despite the legislative changes, said Rowley, the PP still failed in their plan to win aldermen in Arima, Point Fortin and Arima.

So the system failed. Their nefarious intention failed and I am sure that on November 28, when you come out to vote, the existing arrangements would not allow them to get any aldermen either. In response, former Works and Infrastructure Minister, Surujrattan Rambachan, told Newsday, That mechanism that was proposed by us was done so that we can have more people represented at local government and particularly the interest of minority parties who are often excluded from representation at local government. Rambachan, the Member of Parliament for Tabaquite, added, The fact that the prime minister cannot understand the philosophy of such an important piece of legislation that advances democracy and the opportunity for participation of the greatest number of people in the political process is regrettable. He accused the PNM of being backward in still wanting to have a winner take all system.
Moses holds out hope to Caracas five families

As a result, Moses stated, Well need to issue new documents ... valid documents. He said a meeting scheduled between officials from the TT embassy in Caracas and officials from the Servicio Bolivariano de Intelligencia National (the agency holding the five men) and the Venezuelan immigration authority did not materialise as planned on Wednesday.

He said his understanding was had that meeting happened, the five men could have returned home either today or next Monday.

We are very hopeful that shortly such a meeting will be held and that will allow the actual issuance of the travel documents.

In short order thereafter, the persons could travel to TT, Moses said.

He told reporters that while embassy officials have been treating with these detained people on an ongoing basis, they have not been allowed visiting rights over the past year but we are hopeful that shortly that will take place. Reiterating that the five men have been receiving whatever consular services they require from the TT embassy in Caracas, Moses said he was advised that the men are in good health.

Overall we are very hopeful that they can be reunited with their families in TT, he added.

Moses reminded reporters that the men were charged with conspiracy and espionage.

Acting Attorney General Stuart Young said things are in place for when the five men return to TT.

Stating that legal officers and national security officers have been properly briefed on the mens situation, he said, When the Venezuelan authorities return them to TT, we will deal with our nationals as they arrive. Young added this would involve some kind of debriefing but he declined to give any further details, citing national security reasons.

On the eight people detained in Turkey who are believed to be TT nationals, Moses said, Two of them dont have valid travel documents. He said these individuals are being held at a Turkish immigration facility and certain requirements need to be met before they can travel.

He reiterated there are a number of young people in the group and the group was held trying to cross the border into Syria under suspicion of belonging to groups that are deemed to be illegal. Moses declined to comment further, for security reasons.
Restoration of Magnificent Seven still unknown

Asked yesterday, at the installation of the Council of the National Trust, Robinson-Regis said the Red Houses completion (of restoration) was stalled by the Amerindian burial ground discovery.

She identified five sites in her address for a historic restoration project by the Government.

The buildings are Mille Fleurs, Stollmeyers Castle, White Hall, the Red House and Presidents House, the latter to be given priority.

Robinson-Regis addressed and handed out letters of appointments to the six-member council.

The council is headed by Margaret McDowall-Thompson, deputy chair is Geoffrey Maclean, Candice Ramsaran, Secretary and Neisha Ghany, Aduke Willimas and Louis Vilian as members.

Robinson-Regis said Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley had taken a stewardship role in the restoration , preservation and conversation of the Magnificent Seven Buildings and the Parliament.

She said a historic buildings restoration project was being co-ordinated through the office of the PM to ensure the effective completion of all these projects with its main focus being the restoration of the five buildings.

The cabinet appointed committee, she said, composed of Rowley, Attorney General Faris Al Rawi, Minister in the Office of the Attorney General and Office of the Prime Minister Stuart Young, Minister of Finance, Colm Imbert and Regis.

She added that the Old Post Office in Sangre Grande had also been assessed and was being developed for restoration.

She added the Lapeyrouse Cemetery among others was, an interesting venue for slowly building niche market in grave yard and cemetery tourism. The newly appointed council was charged, she said, with developing a strategic plan for the national trust to become sustainable.

She asked a feasability study be done by the council to find out how much the sector could add to the economy. She noted that the Trusts staff achieved a revenue growth of 308 percent in one year.
OAS Construtora to pay $8.8M to Aranjuez firm

The companys owner Surujdeo Parai filed a lawsuit against OAS seeking to recover outstanding fees for services it rendered in the construction of the La Brea segment of the over $7 billion project, which is still incomplete. In a ruling, Justice Devindra Rampersad ordered OAS to pay Unishore a total of $8.860 million, including costs.

The company filed the lawsuit after it had not been paid since completing its services.

Under the contract between the two parties, OAS had agreed to make payments within 30 days of the company completing works which included delivery of aggregate, and conducting road markings.

OAS had offered to pay Unishore in heavy machinery as payment but the company refused and several attempts were made to negotiate with the firm. The contract with OAS was entered into in 2013.

This is just one of several million dollar lawsuits against OAS.

OAS is no stranger to controversy as in late 2014, several executives the construction giant were indicted by Brazilian law enforcement agencies for of making bribe payments to politicians and committing administrative irregularities in several Latin American countries.

The highway project is a reportedly only a little over 50 percent complete and has been marred with controversy since it commenced in 2011.

Construction had to be delayed on several occasions due to protest action at various sites taken by the Highway Reroute Movement (HRM), who opposed it based on environmental concerns and issues with the displacement of residents, whose land had to acquired by the Government for construction.

HRM has initiated a constitutional motion challenging Governments decision to construct the highway, which is currently before High Court Judge James Aboud and is yet to go on trial. Unishore was represented by attorneys Kelvin Ramkissoon and Leon Kalicharan while Devesh Maharaj and Associates appeared for OAS.
Concentration of force

I had a meeting with the acting Commissioner of Police (Stephen Williams) and divisional commanders of both Northern and Central Division to look at restrategising as to how we deal with the murders in those two areas, in particular, because I believe that we can use what I consider concentration of force in the right time and place to focus some attention on those two divisions with a view of reducing especially the murder rate in Trinidad and Tobago, Dillon said.

He was speaking to reporters after delivering the feature address at the formal launch of The Right Tunes initiative at the East Port-of-Spain Regional Complex, East Dry River, Port-of-Spain. The six-month pilot initiative, a collaborative effort between legendary musician Dr Roy Cape and the Ministry of National Security, seeks to use music as a means of reducing crime, particularly among young people in the troubled community. It is hoped that the project will spread to other at-risk areas in the country.

At present, the minister said 98.1 percent of the murders are being committed in the Northern Division while 39.6 percent have been recorded for the Central Division.

He said the TT PS continues to work assiduously to reduce crime in TT . Dillon again responded to questions about the worrying issue of illegal immigrants, following Donald Trumps elevation to the Presidency of the United States. We have to give this new United States Government some time to see what kind of policies are being enunciated, he said.

As you well know, in politics, sometimes we make certain kinds of statements and until you see them being enforced then you realise they beocme part of Government policy. So, we have to wait and see what the new Government of the United States of America would enunciate in so far as policy with respect to deportees returning to Trinidad and Tobago. In any such case we have tp be prepared as a country to treat with any such eventuality. Earlier, during his address, Dillon praised Dr Roy Cape for launching the music initiative and using his talents to uplift the quality of life of the young people in Laventille and environs. However, the minister, who regarded Cape as his close friend, issued a challenge to the music icon.

Once you start in Laventille, it will have to spread throughout Trinidad and Tobago.

You will be openly using the Laventille area as a pilot project because the next thing I want him to do is to come to Point Fortin (Dillons constituency)
California hashtag #Calexit surfaces after liberal voters suggest secession from the U.S. over Trump

Who would ever have thought that Brexit would have left such a huge impression on the United States?

Moments after Brexit passed, the Texit movement began, with many people in the state of Texas expressing their desire to secede from the union due to feeling as though the federal government wasnt working in their best interests. While Texit and Brexit were both logical  based on unsatisfactory policies that had been enacted and lived through  the latest movement is not logical in the slightest. In fact, its pretty ridiculous in every way.

Shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected to be the next president of the United States, the liberal crybabies in California began threatening to leave the union, and the #Calexit movement began. Instead of actually waiting until Trump took office and enacted policies in order to form an opinion on what kind of president he would be, the leftists decided that they didnt care.

Eugene Scott of CNN reports, Hundreds of protesters  many of them Latino  hit Los Angeles City Hall Wednesday night chanting Si se puede! (Spanish for yes, its possible or yes, one can  a longtime rallying cry of the United Farm Workers). Activists chanting #NotMyPresident in cities from coast-to-coast occupied the streets protesting the election results that made the former reality show star the next president.

It seems as though nobody in the Regressive Left was prepared for Hillary Clinton to lose, so they are now reacting extremely erratically to the idea of President Trump. Unfortunately for them, getting the working class in America to care about this is going to be an uphill battle, since most of us are overjoyed that we avoided President Clinton 2.0. What would have surely been a complete disaster filled with corruption was completely avoided and the establishment was destroyed.

Why should we care about the tears of a bunch of liberal idiots?

Luckily, nothing will end up coming of this. The leftists have regularly proven that they cannot see things through until the end, and this will be no different. They will continue to whine and protest for another week or so until there is something else for them to be outraged about and then theyll go on and do that. Its par for the course for liberals.

Welcome to Trumps America, everyone. Leftists continue to cry about everything, but the hard-working Americans no longer have to deal with the globalist regime  and thats a win for us all.

Sources:

Metro.co.uk

CNN.com

ZeroHedge.com

Submit a correction >>
No feud, but love with Sofia Vergara, says Julie Bowen

United States,Cinema/Showbiz,Hollywood, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Los Angeles, Nov 11 (IANS) Actress Julie Bowen has dismissed rumours that she is caught in a feud with fellow "Modern Family" co-star Sofia Vergara. She says there is nothing but love between them.

The 46-year-old spoke about what really goes on behind closed doors between her and her co-star, to Ellen DeGeneres during an appearance on her show "The Ellen DeGeneres Show", reports dailymail.co.uk.

Bowen told DeGeneres that just the previous day she had heard a rumour that she was "icy towards Sofia Vergara because (she's) jealous of her fame".

"So, I email her last night and then we talk and I'm like 'What shall I say you're funny' and she says 'Aye please just borrow my blouse'. So, I borrowed her blouse," Bowen said.

Bowen was wearing a one-shouldered top with a large puffy sleeve. Bowen and Vergara have now been on "Modern Family" for eight seasons.

"The Ellen DeGeneres Show" is aired in India on Romedy NOW.

--IANS

sug/rb/vm
Sugar Tax key to tackling obesity epidemic: Australian doctors

Australia,Health/Medicine, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Canberra, Nov 11 (IANS) A coalition of Australia's most respected doctors' groups called for a tax on sugar on Friday.

They claim that obesity, which is often brought on by excessive sugar consumption, is the most pressing public health issue in Australia.

In a six-point plan to tackle obesity, the Committee of Presidents of Medical Colleges, recommend that obesity be classified as a chronic disease and a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks be introduced.

Nick Talley, head of the committee, said the government needed to tackle sugar over-use as a public health issue in the same way it tackled smoking.

"We need leadership, not just telling people to lose weight," Talley told the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC). "With smoking and tobacco control, we took risks and it had a dramatic effect."

Talley said obesity was a "real disease, not simply a lifestyle choice."

Bastian Seidel, president of the Royal Australasian College of GPs, said the medical profession would lead the way by offering healthier food choices to staff in hospitals, medical colleges and universities and restricting the access to sugar-sweetened drinks.

"We need to live by the advice that we are giving to our patients," Seidel told the ABC.

Research published in October revealed that Australians were consuming an average of 16 teaspoons of added sugar every day, more than double the amount recommended by WHO.

--IANS

mr/
65 arrested in anti-Trump protests, Trump-themed graffiti found

United States,Politics, US Elections, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

New York, Nov 11 (IANS) At least 65 people were arrested in protests following Donald Trump's surprise victory in the US presidential election, even as Trump-themed swastika graffiti was found in a local town here, media reports said.

On Wednesday in Wellsville, New York a passer-by spotted a swastika and the phrase "Make America White Again" on a softball dugout, according to a local daily.

Graffiti, with Nazi imagery and the word "Trump", was also discovered on a storefront in Philadelphia.

Police said they would look into the incident, though they haven't received any reports.

Meanwhile, thousands of people gathered on Wednesday afternoon in Union Square, Columbus Circle and other parts of New York City for demonstrations that had been organised via social media.

The New York City Police Department confirmed on Thursday that at least 65 people were detained on different charges, including disturbing the peace and resisting arrest, ABC News reported.

As in other cities, the protesters in Manhattan chanted "Not Our President" and "New York Hates Trump" and held up signs with messages that included "Don't Lose Hope".

Even after police intervention, hundreds of protesters continued toward Trump Tower, where police formed a barricade to prevent people from getting too close to the 58-story building.

In another development, disturbing footage from Chicago has emerged showing a mob beating a man for supposedly voting Trump.

The footage shows the victim being clobbered by at least two others, as onlookers heartily cheer in the background.

A spokeswoman for the Chicago police said Thursday the department learned of the footage on Wednesday.

"We're looking into it. We have no new information to add to it," New York Post quoted a Chicago police officer as saying.--IANS

vgu/
Demonetisation leaves markets desolate in Gurugram, Rewari

Haryana,Business/Economy,Human Interest/Society, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Gurugram, Nov 11 (IANS) Markets of Gurugram and neighbouring Rewari and Nuh districts were desolate on Friday in the wake of November 8 demonetisation of high denomination notes.

A curfew-like situation prevailed in the markets in Gurugram, tghne tech hub and suburb of Delhi, and other places since customers and traders in old markets still prefer to carry out most business transactions in cash and not through credit/debit cards.

On the other hand, a huge rush of people was seen both inside and outside bank branches and automatic teller machines' booths in Gurugram.

Markets such as the main Sadar Bazaar, Bara Bazaar, and businesses on the Khandsa Road and other markets in the old city area of Gurugram were shut due to low footfalls of customers, who apparently had no money in small denominations currency notes.

A local business association said both traders and customers were running out of cash and rumours of Income Tax Department raids have only added to the fear and chaos.

The bankers association has said at least Rs 100 crore is needed in Gurugram banks on a daily basis to fulfill customer requirement.

Gurugram Additional Deputy Commissioner V.P. Singh has written a letter to the Reserve Bank of India on the demand for cash by bankers in the district.

Gurugram has over 700 branches of various banks and more than 1,300 ATM booths.

The Haryana Police have deployed nearly 2,000 policemen for security and to keep law and order outside banks and ATM booths.

Most of the people facing problems in getting the old currency notes exchanged said the demonetisation step taken by the Modi government on November 8 night was right.

They said it will inconvenience the common man at least for a week or two, but it will help the country in the long run.

With the beginning of the marriage season from November 11, families who were to organise such functions faced problems in the absence of cash for various transactions.

A few families even postponed weddings scheduled for Friday and even the next week.

Markets in Ahirwal's heartland Rewari also were deserted as if struck by curfew-like situation.

Similar situation was reported from different markets of Nuh district in Haryana's Mewat areas.

--IANS

pradeep/tsb/vt
Africa50 Fund willing to invest in Morocco

Morocco,COP 22,Environment/Wildlife, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Marrakech, Nov 11 (IANS) The Africa50 Fund is willing to invest in Morocco and turn the country into a hub to invest in other African countries, said its Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

"In Morocco, we intend not only to carry out investments, but also to work with Moroccan companies in order to invest in other African countries," Alain Ebobisse told MAP news agency on Thursday on the sidelines of his participation in COP22.

Regarding the Fund's strategy to fight climate change, the CEO said that Africa50 can capitalise up to 50 per cent of its funding in renewable energy if profitable projects are presented to the board.

"We want to finance projects that are profitable and have a positive impact," said Ebobisse, adding that the approach of the bank is to finance projects with sufficient profitability compared to risk.

Africa50 is an infrastructure fund owned by African governments, the African Development Bank and institutional investors.

--IANS

ask/dg
Curfew imposed in parts of Srinagar

Jammu And Kashmir,National,Kashmir,Defence/Security, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Srinagar, Nov 11 (IANS) Authorities on Friday imposed curfew in parts of Srinagar to prevent a protest march called by the separatists, officials said.

"Curfew has been imposed in seven areas to maintain law and order," the police said.

Separatists have called for the march to the Jamia Mosque in the city's Nowhatta area.

Congregational Friday prayers have not been allowed inside the mosque.

Separatist leaders Mirwaiz Umer Farooq has been kept under house arrest while Muhammad Yasin Malik was arrested and shifted to the Srinagar central jail on Thursday.

Syed Ali Geelani continues to remain under house arrest.

Meanwhile, the ongoing unrest has entered the fifth month after it started here on July 9.

Ninety-five people have been killed and over 12,000 injured during the ongoing violence in the valley.

--IANS

sq/ksk
No fee for registration of MSMEs, clarifies government

Delhi,National,Business/Economy, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) Denying reports that the government is charging a registration fee for filing Udyog Aadhar Memorandum, the only form of registration for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) in India, the ministry said the registration is free of cost.

"The Udyog Aadhar Memorandum has no fee. You can get it free of cost in three minutes. It is on our ministry's site," MSME Secretary K.K. Jalan told gfiles magazine in an interview.

"You can go to our website and there is no charge. What the people have done is that they have created websites, claiming they will help you in getting the registration and, in addition, provide other services," he said.

"We have made the registration of MSMEs possible online. There is just one page simple registration form online. One can get his firm or SME (small and medium enterprise) registered online within 3-4 minutes, without any cost," he added.

Jalan added: "There are some complaints with us. We have also filed a complaint with the CBI, mentioning some sites which are fleecing people. I would like to clear that it is free of cost, it is a three-minute job and you should not pay even a single rupee for registration."

People facing problems with the registration can just walk into any MSME office or MSME tool room and get it done, Jalan said. The ministry has 100 offices across the country.

He said the sector creates around 15-20 lakh jobs every year.

The three categories of enterprises under MSMEs are based on the size of investment.

Micro is where the plant and machinery investment is about Rs 25 lakh or less. Small is where the investment is not more than Rs 5 crore, and medium is where investment is not more than Rs 10 crore.

The MSMEs can be divided into three categories. One category of MSMEs can be called ancillary industry, which has come up for assisting a large industry to produce.

The second category comes up for providing services to the population. The third category is for converting farm produce or raw material into value-added product.

--IANS

mm/ag/pgh/vt
Opposition slams Parrikar's 'irresponsible' comments on 'No First Use'

Delhi,National,Politics,Defence/Security, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) Opposition parties on Friday slammed Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar for his "irresponsible" statement on India's No First Use of nuclear weapons policy, after the minister suggested that India should not bind itself to the doctrine.

While the minister, and the Defence Ministry clarified it was his personal view, the opposition questioned if Parrikar was entitled to have a personal view while holding the key portfolio.

"You have a motormouth Defence Minister, who is irresponsible in every manner," Congress leader Anand Sharma said.

Party leader Manish Tewari added: "Is Defence Minister of India entitled to a personal opinion on No first use of Nuclear weapons? If he is then why does MOD (Defence Ministry) issue clarifications?"

"When Defence Minister of a de-facto NWS (nuclear weapon state) talks of Nukes in such a cavalier manner the world will think has India turned into a banana republic? (sic)" Tewari said in a tweet.

Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) also denounced the statement, and said it will have serious implications both for India's security concerns and for India's standing in international relations.

"This statement represents a complete reversal of the long standing position of India as a country that champions a nuclear weapon free world and consistently stood by its commitment for peaceful use of nuclear energy," the CPI-M said in a statement.

"The Defence Minister's contention that these are his personal opinions is completely untenable. As a member of the cabinet collective in a parliamentary democratic system, under oath to the Indian Constitution, such opinions that are contrary to India's long established policy direction is a reflection of the complete lack of 'governance' of this government," the CPI-M said.

"If the Defence Minister wishes to air his personal opinions then he may do so after resigning from the Cabinet," it added.

The CPI-M also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should issue a clarification.

Parrikar, at a book release function on Thursday, said India should say it will use its nuclear powers "responsibly" instead of stressing on "no first use", but stressed that this was his personal view.

Talking about India's nuclear doctrine, Parrikar questioned why it is said that India is for no first use, saying: "Why lot of people say that India is for 'not first use;... Why should I bind myself. I should say I am a responsible nuclear power and I will not use it irresponsibly," he said.

--IANS

ao/rn
SC appoints judicial panel on night shelters

Delhi,National,Immigration/Law/Rights, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) Observing that destitute people in urban areas continue to suffer without shelters, the Supreme Court on Friday appointed a judicial committee to inquire into availability of infrastructure and other facilities for night shelters in India.

The National Urban Livelihoods Mission (NULM) remains a distant dream even after a lapse of long period, it said.

The committee will be headed by former Delhi High Court judge, Justice Kailash Ghambir.

An apex court bench of Chief Justice T.S. Thakur, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice L. Nageswara Rao said: "A careful consideration of the submissions of the parties and the material on record discloses that the destitute in urban areas continue to suffer without shelters."

"In spite of the availability of funds and a clear mechanism through which to disburse them, the order said, "we see an extremely unsatisfactory state of affairs on the ground. This is despite our continuous monitoring of the matter," the court said.

Asking the committee to submit its report in four months, the court said: "Yet another winter approaches and enough has not been done for the protection of many homeless in our towns/cities."

The court said Justice Ghambir will be assisted by a Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation - which will be the nodal ministry for providing logistical support to the committee.

The court also asked the Chief Justice of Delhi High Court to nominate, in consultation with Justice Ghambir, a judicial officer -- either retired or serving -- from the Delhi Judicial Service to be member-secretary of the committee.

"In spite of several directions issued by us, the infrastructure for the shelter homes has not been achieved. The Union of India has been constantly claiming steady progress but the NALSA (National Legal Services Authority) report suggests to the contrary."

Observing that providing requisite infrastructure was only the first step, the court said that thereafter the other facilities have to be provided and proper maintenance of the shelter homes has to be ensured.

Noting that the states were not utilising the huge amount of money that the Centre was releasing to them, the court order said: "The Union of India has formulated a scheme and released huge amounts of money to the state governments which are responsible for the implementation of the scheme. The reasons for non-utilisation of funds for the welfare scheme are not forthcoming."

--IANS

pk/tsb/bg
Rahul's photo op signals success of demonetisation scheme: BJP

Delhi,National,Politics, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) The BJP on Friday took a jibe at Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi for standing in queue at a bank to get demonetized currency notes exchanged, saying this photo opportunity signalled "success" of the government's demonetisation scheme.

"Rahul Gandhi wanted to create a scene at the State Bank of India, Parliament Street by standing in a queue. He thought it was a great photo opportunity. He visited the bank perhaps for the first time," Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said in a statement.

"The irony is that, on the contrary, his photo opportunity turned out to be a success of Prime Minister Modi's scheme. Even those in privileged dynasties will now have to queue up and face the law. The age of privileges for a few is over now," he added.

The BJP leader said that those born into dynasties lived under the impression that they were born to rule.

"They never stood in a queue. Succession to positions of power was a birth right," he said.

Taking a dig at Gandhi, Javadekar said, "Rahul Gandhi never stood in a queue to become the leader of his party. He superseded men of greater experience and competence merely because dynasties do not queue up. That is the feudal order. Only if he had queued up within the Congress party and the fittest had survived, the party would have been better off."

He said the decision to replace high denomination currency in order to get rid of black money and corruption has placed a premium on honesty of the common-man.

"Those with unexplained cash are in trouble," he said.

Gandhi on Friday took people by surprise when he arrived at an SBI bank on Parliament Street here and stood in a queue to get the demonetized currency notes exchanged.

"I have come here to get Rs 4,000 exchanged," he told reporters.

Gandhi also criticized the bank authorities for abolishing the queue as soon as he became a part of it.

"I want to stand in the queue...people are suffering, neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor owners of big media houses would understand it," he angrily told mediapersons, who wanted to enquire about his move to come to the bank to get the notes exchanged.

--IANS

bns/rn
Demonetisation caused financial chaos, anarchy: Congress

Delhi,National,Politics,Business/Economy, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) Senior Congress leader Anand Sharma on Friday accused the Modi government of creating "financial chaos and anarchy" in the country by demonetising Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes.

The former Union Commerce Minister in the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government said he also raised his concern about the government's "no information to the people" on the issue with Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

The Congress leader said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had raised strong objection to the then UPA government's decision.

"On January 23, 2014 in a press conference by the BJP, they opposed the withdrawal of currency notes from before 2005. They said this would hurt the common man," said Sharma.

He further asked what right does Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Finance Minister have to put a limit on how much people can withdraw.

Sharma also dismissed as a "baseless argument" Jaitley's contention that "terrorists and black money holders would have been alerted had the people been informed" of the government move on demonetisation.

"I asked the Finance Minister -- he had called up -- why people weren't informed and given time. There are provisions in the Reserve Bank of India Act for such situations. People need to be alerted."

"Had they been informed, people would have made arrangements. He replied, had this been done, the terrorists and defaulters who hoarded black money would have been alerted," said Sharma.

"He said 'they would have gone to the banks and deposited their money'. There can't be more baseless an argument than this," added Sharma.

Sharma further argued that in August, 2016, the finance minister had said in Parliament that the counterfeit currency in circulation was only 0.02 per cent of the total currency.

"The suspected counterfeit currency was Rs 400 crore as against Rs 16,46,000 crore in circulation. When it comes to Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination, then is even less. It is a negligible amount with regards to total currency," said Sharma.

Sharma flayed Jaitley for saying that farmers could take payments in cheques.

"He told me farmers could take payments in cheques or use credit cards. Are they living in India or somewhere beyond the earth?"

"Our economy has significant section which is cash-based. This is not all illicit. Farmers go to mandis and use cash for transactions. The textile sector also uses cash transactions. Farm labourers and contract labourers are paid in cash.

"Which farmer carries a swipe machine when he goes to the mandi," asked Sharma.

He also asked if the currency has been printed, then why has it not reached the banks.

"People are standing in long queues outside the banks so that they can get some liquid currency to cater to their daily expenses. The people were promised that they would have currency from November 10. The government knew there was not enough currency," said Sharma.

"The procedures were made in a manner that common people would be delayed and face difficulties. There is not enough currency for the demand and banks are not being able to service the people. For the first time the people weren't alerted about this change," he added.

Sharma further said: "India has amongst the highest savings rates in the world. All this money was accounted for. What right do Modi and Arun Jaitley have to tell the people, who have savings accounts, that they will put a limit on how much one can withdraw."

--IANS

sid/pgh/bg
E-cigarette prohibition will be a huge mistake: Experts

Delhi,National,Health/Medicine, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) With the seventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) bringing together delegates from almost every country across the world to India, a team of international experts has warned that any attempt to limit the choice of e-cigarettes to consumers would be a huge mistake and do untold harm to millions of smokers.

"Much of the campaign against e-cigarettes has been driven by emotion and ideology, not evidence," said Riccardo Polosa, Director of the Institute for Internal and Emergency Medicine at University of Catania in Italy.

Several studies have, in fact, shown that electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), of which e-cigarettes are the most common prototype, can help smokers quit and they are significantly less harmful than combustible cigarettes, according to the experts.

"In reality, no one is dying from this product," Polosa said.

The seventh session of the Conference of the Parties that has brought together the WHO FCTC's 180 Parties is being held in Greater Noida from November 7-12.

"There are widespread rumours in social media that delegations of countries with little or no experience on the topic are driving an agenda to prohibit ENDS," Polosa and his colleagues said in a statement.

"Such a course of action would be a huge mistake and do untold harm to millions of smokers. We hope these rumours are untrue and do not reflect the current climate and the real intentions of WHO COP7 delegates. ENDS represent the greatest opportunity in generations to prevent and reduce the harm of smoking," the statement added.

Julian Morris, Vice President of Research at US-based non-profit Reason Foundation, emphasised that smokers need to have wide range of harm-reduction choices.

Konstantinos Farsalinos, a research fellow at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Athens, Greece, and Christopher Russell, a behavioural psychologist and senior research fellow at the Centre for Substance Use Research, Glasgow, Scotland were other signatories of the statement.

Athens, Greece, and at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Patras, Greece.

"Many states in India have banned the use of e-cigarettes without any evidence on their adverse effects," Morris, who co-authored the paper "The Vapour Revolution: How Bottom Up Innovation is Saving Lives" with economist Amir Ullah Khan, noted.

"In India, there is hardly any data on the extent of e-cigarette use. How is it possible to assess the impact of the product without any local data and surveillance?" Morris asked.

Experts who have assessed vapour produced by heating e-liquids in a vape device have found that it contains only a tiny fraction of the number of chemicals in tobacco smoke -- and most of those chemicals are harmless, Morris and Khan noted in the paper.

Although not binding, the World Health Organization and its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) exert considerable influence on domestic policies towards tobacco in many countries, and therefore the conference should include all stakeholders to encourage detailed deliberation and transparent decision-making, the experts pointed out.

--IANS

gb/vm
Priyanka Chopra's maiden Punjabi production to release in December

Maharashtra,Cinema/Showbiz, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Mumbai, Nov 11 (IANS) Indian actress Priyanka Chopra's maiden Punjabi film as a producer, titled "Sarvann", will release in December.

The actress, who produces movies under the Purple Pebble Pictures banner, tweeted: "*Drum roll* So proud to announce Purple Pebble Pictures' debut Punjabi film 'Sarvann' Coming this December! Watch this space for more! Sarvann."

The Punjabi film is the second project in the regional zone for the "Bajirao Mastani" star. Earlier, she produced a Marathi film titled "Ventilator".

The film features Amrinder Gill and will be produced by Priyanka's mother Madhu Chopra under their home banner.

It is written and directed by Karan Guliani, who has also penned the story with Ambadeep Singh serving as screenplay and dialogue writer.

Meanwhile, Priyanka is busy in the west with the second season of American TV series "Quantico" and her debut international film "Baywatch", which stars Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron.

--IANS

dc/rb
13 workers killed in Ghaziabad factory fire

Uttar Pradesh,National,Crime/Disaster/Accident, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Ghaziabad, Nov 11 (IANS) At least 13 persons were killed and more than a dozen injured in a factory fire in Uttar Pradesh's Sahibabad industrial area here, police said on Friday.

The victims were charred to death inside a leather factory after a fire broke out at 5.00 a.m. due to an apparent short circuit at the manufacturing unit at Shahid Nagar area along the G.T. Road.

The police said the sudden blaze within the closed confines of the facility on a narrow lane of a densely populated area, caught at least 40 workers by surprise who were reportedly inside.

As the workers tried to flee, the narrow passage at the entrance blocked their escape. Though some did succeeded in fleeing the conflagration, about 20 workers could not get out.

Thirteen of them were charred to death while three who reportedly jumped out were rescued and taken to a local hospital in critical condition.

"As we came to know of the incident, about a dozen fire tenders were rushed to the spot," said Chief Fire Officer Ashfaque Hussain.

"The real constrains were the narrow lanes that lead to the factory. We could not reach our fire tenders at an advantageous position to tackle the blaze.

"However, we managed to bring the fire under control after two long hours," Hussain said.

"An investigation has been initiated to ascertain the cause of the fire and check whether there were any security lapses by the owner, Rizwan," said SP City Ghaziabad Salman Taj Patil.

--IANS

sps/in
Lillete Dubey, Mahesh Dattani to hold scriptwriting workshop in Goa

Delhi,Cinema/Showbiz,Art/Culture/Books, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) Playwright, theatre actor and director Mahesh Dattani and popular actress Lilette Dubey are joining hands to present Script Lab, a four-day scriptwriting residency workshop at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa next month.

The Script Lab will be held from December 16-19.

The purpose of this workshop is to introduce playwriting, tap talent, assist with character development, constructive feedback and also to help writers turn a critical eye on their own works.

Dattani, the first playwright in English to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, and well-known for writing plays like "Dance Like a Man", "Bravely Fought the Queen", "On a Muggy Night in Mumbai" and "Final Solutions", will lend his expertise on all aspects of storytelling during the residency program.

The workshop will focus on screenplay structure, character development, dialogue, theme, visualisation and dramaturgy.

The residency program will include two days of instruction, one day of mentorship and will conclude with dramatised readings of the plays in an outdoor setting at the festival.

Talking about the project and his experience of working with Lillete, Dattani said in a statement: "In the world of Indian theatre, there exists a major lacuna of scriptwriters and quality writer'' which needs to be addressed immediately.

"Keeping this thought at the forefront, Lillete and I felt that it was imperative to include this in a hands-on, yet fun format at the Serendipity Arts Festival, which is how the residency workshop was conceptualized. The four-day workshop in December will include devising, structure, scene-design and dialogue-writing as part of the training, and would be ideal for anyone who wants to take up scriptwriting professionally""

The registration fee for the four-day workshop is Rs 10,000, which will include boarding, all meals, mentorship and materials required for the program. For the same, 15 participants have been shortlisted.

Talking of her role as a curator, Lillete said:""For me, being a part of this festival is extremely exciting and exhilarating. To be able to put aside my role as a director, producer and actor and don the hat of a curator, with the freedom to explore and platform new genres, styles and forms of contemporary theatre from India and across the world."

Serendipity Arts Festival will be a multi-disciplinary arts event that will celebrate the diversity in art with a special focus on music, dance, theatre, crafts, visual arts, culinary arts and photography.

--IANS

rb/vm
Pope Francis doesn't 'judge' Donald Trump

Italy,Politics, Sat, 12 Nov 2016 IANS

Rome, Nov 12 (IANS/AKI) Pope Francis on Friday refrained from expressing a view on US President-elect Donald Trump, saying he doesn't "judge" him.

"I don't judge people and politicians, I just seek to understand the suffering their actions cause to the poor and the marginalised in society," Francis said.

"I don't judge Trump," Francis said during an interview with the editor of Italian daily La Repubblica.

Protests have taken place in cities across the United States since Trump's shock victory against Democrat Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's presidential election.

The protesters, mainly young people, say a presidency under the outspoken billionaire would create deep divisions along racial and gender lines.

Earlier this year, Pope Francis suggested Trump was "not Christian" because of his hardline views on immigration, prompting Trump to call the remarks "disgraceful".

A papal spokesman later claimed the pontiff had not made a personal attack on the Republican party candidate.

Trump has proposed building a wall along the border with Mexico, barring Muslims from the US and mass deportations of illegal immigrants, although he has since signalled an apparent softening of his stance.

--IANS/AKI

pgh/nir
Turin lecturer held 'for offering student good grades for sex'

Italy,Crime/Disaster/Accident,Education, Sat, 12 Nov 2016 IANS

null

Turin, Nov 12 (IANS/AKI) A law professor at the University of Turin is under house arrest for allegedly demanding sex from a female student in exchange for good exam grades, police said on Friday.

A local daily named the academic as 47-year-old Luca Sgarbi, a professor of labour law.

Prosecutors were due to question other university students who may have been targeted by Sgarbi, the daily said.

Sgarbi asked his student for sex and for explicit photos, promising her top marks if she complied and threatening to disclose details of her private life if she didn't, according to prosecutors.

The woman told prosecutors Sgarbi claimed to have recognised her in an erotic chat room earlier this year.

The suspected is under house arrest in the city of Bologna, where he lives.

--IANS

vgu/

null
Share



To start, some very bad news: the fastest 4G LTE (News - Alert) networks on Earth are not found in the United States. In fact, the United States isn't even close to the top of the heap. There will be some good news for the Americans in the recent OpenSignal rankings of the fastest LTE signals on Earth, and there will likely also be surprises on hand.





When it comes to LTE speed, the current top of the heap is Singapore, which barely edged out second-place finisher South Korea by boasting an average speed of 45.9 Mbps against South Korea's 45.8 Mbps. The top five is rounded out by much less expected names: Hungary comes in third at 40.6 Mbps, while Romania hits fourth at 36.5 Mbps and New Zealand finishes out the roster. The United States, meanwhile, is down toward the bottom of the list with an average speed closer to 13 Mbps.

However, the United States does do much better on availability, where it's in the top 10 of surveyed nations. Availability and speed are often two different matters, though here, South Korea distinguishes itself by having the second-fastest speeds on Earth and the highest availability at 95.7 percent. For availability, Japan comes in second with 92 percent.

With these figures in mind, certain points become clear. Note how many of the best nations in terms of speed and availability are geographically much smaller than those who are lower on the scale; it's often easier to connect a smaller space since it requires less infrastructure overall to cover and has a more rapid payback period due to greater population density. More people connecting in a smaller space means a shorter time to payback, which encourages investment. In the United States, one of the largest countries around in terms of land massthe United States is third in land mass behind Russia and Canadaconnecting that wider scale is much more challenging. This is often why cities have much better Internet access than rural areas; the investment is there because return can be realized much faster.

There have been moves to change this, but all of these by necessity are large-scale endeavors that require a lot of time, resources and expertise to successfully pull off. When even Google (News - Alert) drops out of the fiber races, at least somewhat, to instead more closely consider wireless options, it's obvious that this is a bigger problem than just a matter of running more fiber.

Still, knowing who has the best speeds is important; it encourages those farther down the list to build up speeds and it encourages those at the top of the list to maintain speed and availability to hold their high ground. Both are valuable points, and in the end, should help more people get online and partake in the opportunities found therein.

Edited by Alicia Young
Share



The business case for 5G fixed broadband is not a slam dunk.

So says Joe Madden, principal analyst of Mobile Experts, which has come out with a study exploring the potential return on investment mobile carriers can expect on 5G builds to support fixed broadband.

The study looks at link distance, spectrum, and traffic density costs of 5G. And it notes that 5G networks, which will run on high-frequency millimeter spectrum, will involve 50-meter links. That means this new technology will require much denser radio deployments than weve seen with past cellular technologies. As a result, Madden says, pre-5G deployments will be targeted rather than rolled out nationwide.





Link distance is a key factor in the pre-5G business case at 28GHz, he says. We've conducted some in-depth link budget calculations and compared our results to trial results reported by Samsung (News - Alert), Ericsson, Intel, and others. Based on this deep technical work, we have some concerns about the power, linearity, and heat dissipation in pre-5G infrastructure. The laws of physics will limit these pre-5G networks.

Madden refers to pre-5G networks, because the 3GPP is still working on 5G standards, which will go to the ITU review after they are frozen by 3GPP. Parts of the initial 3GPP work on 5G, called Release 15, and are expected to be delivered in December of next year. Release 15 in total is expected to be frozen by June 2018. Release 16 of 5G should come out 15 months after that.

But whether were talking about pre-5G or 5G, the conclusion that 5G technology is not expected to be deployed on a nationwide basis, at least not any time soon, is not a revelation. Thats both because the millimeter wave spectrum that the Federal Communications Commission is expected to make available for 5G will require a lot of radios  which means more expense in terms of both gear and management, and because LTE (News - Alert) continues to progress to support ever-larger bandwidths and functionality. So, the expectation is that 5G will be deployed on an as-needed basis and will existing alongside 4G technology, which will provide blanket coverage.

LTE still has quite a bit of gas left in the tank in terms of capabilities coming out, Mike Murphy, CTO for North America at Nokia (News - Alert), told me in an interview earlier this week.

What 5G is expected to bring to the table is very fast connectivity  up to 10 gigabits per second; the ability to support a very large number of devices; and the ability to enable ultra reliable low latency communications. The latter two features will be particularly important for select Internet of Things applications, such as the connected car and the use of robotics in surgery. But some service providers, namely Verizon (News - Alert) (which recently released pre-standard specifications for lower layer protocols targeting CPE and interoperability to address fixed wireless implementations), are also apparently considering 5G as a way to support fixed services. That makes sense given 5G now puts cellular on par with the speeds wireline technology can deliver.

Edited by Alicia Young
We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription.
The role organic agriculture can play in fighting climate change effects and in boosting food security was the main theme of a debate held in the COP22 Green Zone by the federation of Moroccan organic agriculture professionals (known by its French acronym FIMABIO.)

Speaking on this occasion, Andre Leu, President of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), underscored that organic agriculture can reverse climate change.

He highlighted the global momentum towards adopting organic agriculture to counter climate change, notably through the 4 for 1000 initiative, which aims to increase the amount of organic matter in soil by 4 per thousand (0.4%) each year, which would be enough to compensate for all global greenhouse gases emitted due to human behavior.

Organic agriculture practices are conducive to the global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before the point of no return, he said.

Organic agriculture can help reverse climate change because it can take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil as soil organic matter, he explained, noting that average organic systems can store around 3.5 tons of CO2 per hectare per year.

Echoing him, President of FIMABIO called on the Moroccan government to include organic agriculture in climate resilience plans.

During the event, FIMABIO distributed a document dubbed Manifesto for a Bio Morocco and for the Support for a Bio Africa which calls for including the promotion of organic agriculture in the COP22 agenda.

The event is part of the activities taking place in the Knowledge and Traditions area of the Green Zone of COP22, taking place this November 7-18.
Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Just when you thought the Clinton familys time in electoral politics had reached an end, the New York Post has a report today that says Chelsea Clinton is being groomed for a congressional run. The seat Clinton is reportedly eyeing is currently occupied by Democrat Nita Lowey, who was just reelected for her 14th term representing New Yorks 17th Congressional District in Westchester County.

The Posts source says Clinton, who lives in Manhattan but is expected to move into a home next door to her parents Chappaqua residence, will run for the seat when Lowey retires.

While it is true the Clintons need some time to regroup after Hillarys crushing loss, they will not give up. Chelsea would be the next extension of the Clinton brand. In the past few years, she has taken a very visible role in the Clinton Foundation and on the campaign trail. While politics isnt the life Hillary wanted for Chelsea, she chose to go on the campaign trail for her mother and has turned out to be very poised, articulate and comfortable with the visibility.

This isnt the first time Clintons name has come up in connection to Loweys seat. Five years ago, New Rochelle Talk reported that Chelsea Clinton was planning to run upon Loweys expected retirement in 2012. Two terms later, the 79-year-old shows no sign of slowing down.
Trump crazy and defiant, Trump cool and shrewd, Trump creating his own reality  all of these roles are possible for him. Photo-Illustration: Getty Images

As the country gets used to the outlandish idea of President Donald Trump, and journalists begin speculating about his cabinet picks, there are some bigger, more central decisions the new regime needs to make about its direction and goals. It says a lot about the Trump (as he calls it) Movements inchoate and sometimes psychedelic shape that there are three very different paths it could take from the get-go.

Possibility No. 1: Trump acts like he did during most of the campaign  constantly creating chaos and pursuing vendettas that distract him from his main work.

This is the version of the Trump administration that has inspired the most fear, not just among progressives but in respectable circles across the ideological and partisan spectrum. Its that of Trump the pure disruptive force, coming to Washington to drain the swamp and essentially continue the campaigns guerrilla theater stylings. As a practical matter, it would be the opposite of consistency and predictability: One day Trump could be attacking the routed forces of the Democratic Party by demanding the repeal of all of Obamas policies. The next day he could be attacking the Wall Street benefactors of his fellow Republicans, and expanding intra-party policy fights by insisting on an immediate sea change in trade or immigration policy. There would never be a dull moment, but also no clear blueprint for governing, either.

All those who figure Trump has no real set of core principles other than self-promotion, and who do not think he has any real interest in governing, would probably bet on this Visigothic model for the new administration. Perhaps the clearest sign Trump is pursuing it would be a vengeful attitude toward people like Paul Ryan, who will be central to his ability to accomplish anything legislatively, and choices for early appointments that violently offend Establishment sensibilities. Secretary of Energy Sarah Palin would be a very clear signal that Trump is more interested in continuing to defy elites than in running the country. And by the same token, an unhealthy interest in promoting criminal investigations of Hillary Clinton would show the campaign is still roaring along even though its prime objective had been achieved.

If the new administration does get off to a destructive start, with the president of the United States continuing his late-night tweets, lashing around angrily at critics, and abandoning the graceful tone of his Election Night victory speech, the big question will become, Who is running the country?

In theory, any group of people with influence over the White House could quietly shape policy even as The Boss is mugging for the cameras and terrifying foreign governments and undocumented immigrants. But whether these implicit rulers are alt-right bravos or conventional conservative ideologues matters a great deal. It is anybodys guess at this juncture whether the dominant force in a Trump White House a year from now is going to be a populist bomb-thrower like Stephen Bannon, a steady Republican hand like Reince Priebus, or an superannuated demagogue like Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich.

Possibility No. 2: Trump will help the GOP Congress execute a brisk and rather traditional conservative policy revolution.

In this scenario, Trump will quickly come together with congressional Republicans to enact all of the right-wing policies on which they agree, with or without cutting a deal on the issues where they differ. This is the path I made a habit of warning about before the election and on Election Night: It requires a Republican Congress, which the election returns confirmed, and the willingness to use procedural mechanisms  most notably a big, nasty, fast-tracked, un-filibuster-able budget reconciliation bill  to achieve long-desired conservative policy goals and the elimination of the Obama administrations legacy as quickly as possible. House Speaker Paul Ryan has already pointed in that direction (a similar blitzkrieg plan was in place four years ago had Romney won and Republicans kept control of the Senate), and for all the talk of civil war in the GOP, most of the big-ticket items in a big budget bill (a huge upper-income and corporate tax cut; a boost in Pentagon spending; the crippling of Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, and other targets dependent on federal funding; and a comprehensive attack on low-income programs including Medicaid) involve things Trump has endorsed or is unlikely to care about at all.

The big budget bill could also include some token Trump items like infrastructure spending (though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is already reportedly making some discouraging noises about that!) and shots at token federal tax and budget subsidies that can be said to represent crony capitalism (which most conservative ideologues oppose anyway). It all depends on whether the worlds greatest negotiator pays much attention to the details. But a conservative policy revolution could also be pursued by Trump alone: He is certain to reverse Obamas immigration-enforcement and climate-change orders and regulations; the question is how far he goes in other areas  like financial regulation, labor policy, and land-use policy  to do what conservatives have long wanted.

We should know pretty soon whether Trump is interested in giving conservatives their hearts great desire, as perfectly expressed by Uber-lobbyist Grover Norquist way back in 2012:

We dont need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget.  We just need a president to sign this stuff. We dont need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate. []



Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

Short-fingered or not, Trump has enough working digits to let Ryan and McConnell do the heavy lifting and sign a bill reversing the Obama legacy and Democratic accomplishments dating back to the Great Society before the opposition knows whats hit them.

Possibility No. 3: Trump remakes GOP in his image and aggressively pushes for populist policies.

A third option might appear if Trump and his people take their own rhetoric seriously about representing a movement that is aimed at outflanking both parties elites and giving the silent majority the kind of government it allegedly craves. That would require making Trumpism a distinct populist agenda instead of a series of atavistic impulses with certain policy implications. And it also means continuing to impose Trumps will on the Republican Party and not just rubber-stamping a conservative agenda created by Congress.

More immediately, the movement option would suggest driving a very hard bargain with congressional Republicans, and perhaps even a refusal to rush something like the Ryan budget into law. After all, conventional conservative policies are unpopular; thats why you only hear of them being enacted with breakneck speed by processes that violate normal policy-making. If Trump wants to succeed substantively and maybe even get reelected, his instincts will lead him away from too cozy a relationship with the very GOP he just conquered. He could instead offer his most active supporters a mix of governing policies that reflects what they really seem to want: efforts to get the economy roaring; an attack on big money in politics; a commitment to rebuilding the manufacturing sector; and of course the repudiation of past Republican trade and immigration policies. These are all things the GOP Establishment has long opposed, but whether they fight Trump or roll over, hell hold the whip hand if he chooses to wield it.

The big question about this movement option is where exactly Trump will get the specific policy ideas to chart an independent course. His closest friend in Washington, Jeff Sessions, is the most conventional of conservatives once you get past trade and immigration policy. The so-called reformocons, conservative policy innovators who typically shared some of the Trump critique of GOP elitism, dont exactly have instant access to Trump circles; most of them publicly refused to even vote for him. And while the alt-right folks actually may have access to the levers of power, it is not like they have any expertise at or any interest in health-care policy or putting together a budget. Indeed, they would probably like the Ryan budget just fine.

In any event, Trump and his inner circle need to choose a path and begin taking steps in the desired direction right now, when the media are cowed, the opposition is confused, and the manipulative GOP elites have not had time to wire everything. Trumps biggest problem may be the perception that, having defied all logic in becoming a major-party presidential nominee and then the leader of the free world, he doest need logic at all. He will soon discover that governing is not just another reality show filmed in the Oval Office.
Protesters in Seattle on November 9. Photo: Karen Ducey/Getty Images

Throughout his campaign, people predicted that Donald Trump was on the cusp of pivoting to a more presidential version of himself. That never happened before the election, but for two days, it looked like actually being elected president might have done the trick.

First, Trump gave a shockingly gracious victory speech in which he praised Hillary Clinton  a woman he called the devil  and promised to be president for all Americans. After meeting with President Obama  the incompetent alleged co-founder of ISIS  at the White House, Trump said he has great respect for his predecessor and repeatedly called him a very good man.

Trump was behaving so nicely that someone decided to let him use Twitter again. In his first 48 hours as president-elect, Trump tweeted only three times, promising that Americans will all come together as never before, celebrating the Marines, and writing this about his trip to the White House:

A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Then, on Thursday night, this happened:

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

In under 140 characters, the president-elect complained that he was being treated unfairly, and criticized two elements of the First Amendment. And thats coming from a man who suggested the election would be anything but very open, questioned the current presidents citizenship, and called for a march on Washington immediately after Obamas reelection in 2012.

Nine hours later, he changed his tune after what one can only assume was a lecture from one of the clearer-thinking people in his orbit. Or maybe someone snatched his phone while he was on a bathroom break. In any case, this is what Trump tweeted early Friday morning, in clear contradiction of his message Thursday night.

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

On Thursday, the nationwide anti-Trump protests that began immediately after Trumps election continued for a third night. Thousands of people took to the streets, and the vast majority are not professional protesters. The demonstrations even include people who are not old enough to vote.

As for the idea that the media is inciting the protests, its not entirely clear what Trump means. Media outlets have certainly encouraged those unhappy with the election results to turn their emotions into action, and to stay and fight for their beliefs rather than whining about moving to Canada. But there is no coordinated media effort directing the actions of professional protesters.

There is also no mainstream media outlet calling for people to literally fight for their beliefs. While the demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, some have burned flags and effigies of Trump, and Politico reports that at least 124 people have been arrested across the country. On Thursday night, police called the protest in Portland, Oregon, a riot due to extensive and dangerous behavior, such as throwing projectiles and use of illegal fire devices. Police said they used tear gas several times, and three officers were injured.

Portland's anti-Trump protest turns to chaos as anarchists smash cars and bus stop. Photos by @chrisonstott. https://t.co/4U5XGixqL6 pic.twitter.com/po6oIbIOIQ  Aaron Mesh (@AaronMesh) November 11, 2016

One protester interviewed by CNN on Wednesday said, There will be casualties on both sides. Anchor Don Lemon responded, No one should be advocating violence, I want to make that very clear. Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said President Obama or Hillary Clinton needed to step up:

Not cool. @POTUS or Hillary should address. 'People Have to Die': Anti-Trump Protester Calls For Violence on CNN https://t.co/NfEqhkrTvu  Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 10, 2016

Both Clinton and Obama have urged Clinton supporters to accept the results of the election and give Trump a chance  but yes, politicians should discourage people from resorting to violence.

Theres another person, however, who Conway forgot to mention: the man who was just elected president. America needs a leader to condemn the violence happening at anti-Trump protests, and try to assure fearful, angry demonstrators that theyll be treated fairly under a Trump administration. America needs a leader to condemn some Trump supporters efforts to intimidate women and minorities. But instead of trying to prove that hes a leader who will bind the wounds of division, as he promised on election night, so far Trump has only sent out a tweet complaining that people are being unfair to him.
Judge Curiel.

Heres some more fodder for the theory that Donald Trump doesnt plan to do a lot of the heavy lifting during his presidency. During a hearing on Thursday in the Trump University fraud lawsuit, which is set to begin on November 28, the president-elects lawyers asked that the trial be moved to February or March, when hell have less on his plate.

Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli explained to reporters after the hearing that the transition period will be too intense for the president-elect to participate in the case, according to the Washington Post. Petrocelli called it a very difficult circumstance for a sitting president  more so, I would say, for a president-elect, because hes turning, right now as we speak, to a mountain of challenges in front of him, to get himself up to speed.

Judge Gonzalo Curiel seemed skeptical about the wisdom of pushing the case to after January 20, but said he may allow Trump to testify via video link rather than in person. He said hell probably issue a ruling by Monday.

As Petrocelli noted, a president-elect facing a civil fraud suit is uncharted territory. The president can face civil litigation for actions that occurred before he took office, as the Supreme Court determined in the 1997 Paula Jones sexual-harassment case against President Clinton. But the Trump case raises unique issues. Trumps lawyers had argued that all campaign rhetoric  including his claim that Judge Curiel could not be impartial because of his Mexican heritage  should be excluded from the trial. Judge Curiel rejected that blanket request, but said they could argue against admitting specific testimony. Judge Curiel also said hes inclined not to allow the questioning of witnesses about their political affiliation.

In addition to the California case, Trump is facing a second federal class action over Trump University in New York. Altogether, the president-elect is involved in about 75 pending lawsuits.
Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

In 2001, White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer blurted out that people need to watch what they say, watch what they do. The line was wrenched largely out of context  he was mainly urging people to avoid offensive statements, and had previously affirmed the right to free speech (Its important for all Americans to remember the traditions of our country that make us so strong and so free are tolerance and openness and acceptance.). The comment provoked a massive furor, and Fleischer proceeded to clarify his meaning and apologize for his original formulation.

As awful as the circa-2001 Republican Party may have been, it had certain shared democratic assumptions, including a belief in the validity of dissent. It is much less true today. Emblemized by the rise of Trump, but in ways that go well beyond him, the Republican Party is evolving toward authoritarianism. It is not a fully authoritarian party, but the direction is depressingly evident. New signposts of this direction appear every day.

Maine governor Paul LePage said not long ago, We need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country. David Clarke, who spoke at Trumps nominating convention and is a reported candidate to lead the Department of Homeland Security, demanded that anti-Trump protests be quelled. The president-elect denounced what he called professional protesters, incited by the media. (Later this morning he essentially retracted his statement.) Trump was not questioning the legal right to protest, but he was treating protesters as unrepresentative of any source of genuine dissent. This is a classic dictators analysis  a refusal to acknowledge the authenticity of dissent, instead depicting it as a front for hidden interests. Months earlier, pressed about his glowing praise of a Russian dictator who murders journalists, Trump defended it: Hes running his country, and at least hes a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.

The unimaginable is already upon us. Once-forbidden associations and patterns of thought have opened up in the age of Trump. A party that once shunned white supremacists as beyond the pale now works with them as allies  gingerly, but in a way that would have seemed unimaginable not long ago. Steve Bannon has crawled in from the sewer. Kris Kobach, the arch-restrictionist, spoke before racist organizations. These things are barely even newsworthy anymore. The only question is how much farther it advances.

Masha Gessen, a journalist who has reported bravely from Russia for years, has an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled Autocracy: Rules for Survival. The essay helpfully applies lessons she learned in the Putinsphere to the Trumpistan she sees unfolding in the United States. Its weakness is that it treats as settled fact that Trump will rule as a full autocrat when it is only a possibility. It is a harrowing and almost unimaginable possibility, and one too few observers have considered seriously.

One reason for the relative complacency greeting the threat Trumps government poses to democracy has been the casual assumption that normal Republicans will restrain him. Several months ago, I wrote about the lessons to be drawn from Hitlers Thirty Days to Power, Henry Ashby Turners account of the political intrigue that gave power to a figure seen by fellow conservatives as a dangerous clown. Any time Hitler is invoked, it is important to emphasize that a direct comparison is not my intent. Hitler is worse than the worst-case scenario under Trump, who is neither a fascist, genocidal, nor a warmonger. What the history shows instead are certain timeless dynamics. Conservative politicians who feared and abhorred Hitler respected his ability to connect with the public. They believed that they could use him.

The aftermath of the election has reprised that dynamic almost eerily. The Republican lobbying class is vibrating with ecstasy at Trumps arrival. They are not wrong to believe it. Trumps agenda will have certain distinct Trumpian touches  infrastructure spending, mass deportation  that dont directly threaten core right-wing doctrine (and which also make money for construction firms and other contractors). My phone is ringing off the hook with people who were on the outs asking how they can get into Trump world, one Trump campaign operative told Politico. Another Republican said, Paul Ryan will make policy and Donald Trump can Make America Great Again. The first and most important factor binding the GOP to its president will be the irresistible chance to sign their agenda into law  a chance Republicans rightly believe is unlikely to come again in a rapidly diversifying country that, in the wake of Hillary Clintons clear national vote majority, has not given the GOP a plurality in a presidential election since 2004. Trump is likely to cede policy to the Ryan wing because he cares very little and knows even less about its details.

The second factor is fear. Since he started his campaign, a year and a half ago, we have grown accustomed to seeing Trump as a figure outside his party and facing deep resistance. That resistance is tiny, and shrinking. Harry Enten finds that, on average, Trump performed just one percentage point worse than Republican Senate candidates. There were regular Republican voters who couldnt bear to pull the lever for Trump, but they amount to one percent of the public  functionally nonexistent. Alabama Republican Martha Roby, one of a handful of Republicans to call for Trump to step aside in the wake of the Billy Bush tape, barely squeaked into office in her heavily Republican district, because 22,000 of her constituents cast write-in votes to punish her disloyalty.

The handful of conservatives who opposed Trumps election all envisioned a short exile culminating in a clear Trump defeat, after which they would return to the party fold. Few were prepared to leave permanently. Already, partisan instinct is drawing many of the Never Trump conservatives back to the comfortable embrace of the Republican-run government.

The result of all this is a party tightly bound together by self-interest and survival, with no important sources of internal dissent. Any abuses of power Trump may commit  attacking the media; unleashing the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies, or to pardon his cronies; or using other arms of the state to intimidate his opposition  will be accepted and even defended by the overwhelming bulk of the Republican Party. Any controversy will recede into the normal din of endless partisan debate.

Trump may simply govern like an ordinary Republican, or at least a modern one, like George W. Bush. But if Trump decides to marshal his powers to crush his opposition, Republicans will have his back, and to most Americans the controversy will play out much like the Clinton email story or the Billy Bush tape. It will be the partisan war extended incrementally into new frontiers. There wont be tanks in the streets all of a sudden or a firebombing of the Constitution. It will be the step-by-step acceptance of the unthinkable as normal. Many of those steps have already happened.
Photo: Richard Nowitz/Getty Images

Since Donald Trump was elected on Tuesday evening, reports of harassment, bullying, and racist graffiti have trickled out across the country. Burned pride flags in Rochester, New York. A student handing out deportation letters to classmates in California. Trumps name scrawled across the door of a Muslim prayer room in New York City. Swastikas spray-painted on store windows in South Philly. And now, a student at the University of Pennsylvania reports that black freshmen have been targeted and added to a GroupMe (group texting app) entitled N- - - - - Lynching.

The student, Calvary Rogers, shared a post on Facebook earlier today, where it has already been shared by over 3,000 people in just two hours. In the post, which was screenshotted and shared to Twitter by activist and New York Daily News writer Shaun King, Rogers explains that he spent the morning talking with a vice-provost at Penn after he discovered the group. I stared an administrator in the eye and literally lost it. And quite honestly I just cant stop crying, Rogers wrote. I feel sick to my stomach. I dont feel safe.

Dear @Penn,



I need you to step up in a MAJOR way right now. Every single Black student on your campus feels unsafehttps://t.co/SuGJflkNuz pic.twitter.com/xnRugLjcXZ  Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 11, 2016

Since then, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Amy Gutmann, has published a statement explaining that the school is investigating the origin of the group, calling it repugnant and horrible.

We are absolutely appalled that earlier today Black freshman students at Penn were added to a racist GroupMe account that appears to be based in Oklahoma. The account itself is totally repugnant: it contains violent, racist and thoroughly disgusting images and messages. This is simply deplorable. Our police and information security staff are trying to locate the exact source and to determine if any steps can be taken to block the account. Staff in the Office of Vice Provost for University Life are working nonstop with us and our students to determine exactly who has been targeted and how many, and we are doing everything in our power to provide the necessary support and will continue to do so. The University is also taking every step possible to address both the source of the racist material and the impact it has had on Black students on campus.

Update 11/11/16, 5:30 p.m.: An earlier version of this story mistakenly labeled the group as a Facebook group instead of a GroupMe group.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

While stunned Democratic voters in the heavily liberal tech industry try to acclimate themselves to four years of a Trump presidency, at least one person is feeling pretty good: Peter Thiel, the Facebook billionaire who loudly and expensively stood by his candidate despite the opprobrium and scorn of his peers. This afternoon, the Huffington Post is reporting that Thiel is even being considered to lead Trumps transition team, replacing Chris Christie.

Its just the latest in a string of ominous successes for Thiel, who earlier this year admitted that he was funding a lawsuit against the blog network Gawker Media  the same lawsuit that would ultimately bankrupt the company and its founder and shut down the flagship site. Last month, at a moment when it seemed unlikely Trump would ever reach the White House, Thiel announced a $1.25 million donation to his chosen candidate. At the time, it seemed to the press like a bafflingly silly decision made by a Silicon Valley crackpot; now, it looks like an inauspicious sign that Peter Thiels presence in our political and cultural life isnt going to go away.

Thiels support of Trump had always been an outlier in the overwhelmingly liberal consumer tech industry, and he has rightly faced pressure from activists over his support of Trump, whose campaign implicitly endorsed and emboldened racists and misogynists and xenophobes. There have been repeated calls for companies like Facebook, on whose board he sits, and the startup incubator Y Combinator, where hes a part-time partner, to distance themselves from Thiel. (One gets the impression that Thiel loves this. His statements have repeatedly conjured up the image of Tina Fey high-fiving a million angels as a loud crowd boos.)

Thiels Facebook board seat, and position at Y Combinator, was safe, however, in part because his Trump donation seemed to be seen more as a curiosity than a real threat. Silicon Valley has been ascendant for the last ten years, supported and touted by a Democratic president whose liberal views on tech-industry issues like immigration were part of a friendly environment that allowed its software to eat the world. While Thiels support of Trump might be distasteful, it was also difficult for his peers to take seriously. Not only was it hard to believe that Trump could win, but Thiel himself is gay, as he proudly proclaimed at the Republican National Convention earlier this year, and an immigrant. What did he see in the candidate that others couldnt? Was he currying political favor? Was he sowing the seeds of a future run for office? Was he positioning himself as a primary force among the so-called alt-right?

The answer he eventually gave, in a stilted speech in Washington, D.C., was none of the above. Thiel genuinely liked and supported the candidate. Like most Trump supporters, Thiel responded to broad rhetoric about the country being broken, about the power of outsiders. It was silly (and self-contradictory) enough that we called him a crank.

But, of course, cranks can be billionaires  they can even be president  and with billions of dollars comes the material power that demands, if not respect, then wary attention. We now live in a post-election world in which Trump will be president, and in which Thiels donation to Trump was a prescient investment, rather than baffling self-sabotage. Ill try to help the president in any way I can, Thiel told the New York Times. He declined to elaborate further on his vision, though he said he would have no formal role, did not aspire to the Supreme Court, and would continue to reside in California. (At least, until seasteading becomes viable.) But with Thiels positions of power in astronomical data-mining operations like Facebook and Palantir (a major government contractor), and his various investments in education, we should pay very close attention to where and how Trump and Thiel overlap.

In some ways, Thiels choosing not to engage in Washington directly is a more menacing prospect for liberals. He and Trump are aligned in their belief that the liberal media is vicious and deserves to be curtailed, that outlets like Gawker should be sued out of existence, buried in untenable paperwork and legal costs. A Peter Thiel empowered by Trumps victory and his successful campaign against Gawker, one whos suffered no ill effect on his finances or on his relationships with his industry peers, is one we all might be wary of.

But we might be more scared of what comes after Peter Thiel. For the most part, techs class of billionaires has been philanthropically inoffensive, if not always effective, focusing money on education, immigration, and, uh, curing all diseases. This philanthropic focus has, in turn, made Silicon Valley largely well-regarded outside the tech world. Thiel would appear to be  and would appear to delight in being  the first overnight billionaire to put his money toward causes deeply opposed by his community. And hes demonstrated that this model of activism  of a billionaire putting small fractions of his unprecedented net worth behind active political efforts to shut down hostile media outlets and elect xenophobes  works, with no downside. The tech industry is creating new billionaires every year. How many of them are going to be Bill Gates, and how many will be Peter Thiels?
Photo: Image Source/Getty Images

My mom wants me to stop being a sad human being and get the hell up: Its 8 a.m., and 8 a.m. on a weekday is no time to be swaddled under the bedsheets. If I open one eye and manage a strained stare, I can sort of see her. Ah, there she is  an amorphous blob across the room. What do I want for breakfast, she wants to know. I need to be dressed by the time she returns with the food, she informs me. If my glasses were within reach Id be able to see the details of her face  calm, wearing a touch of foundation, no doubt, and her favorite mascara from Yves Saint Laurent. Its November 9, 2016, Donald Trump just became the president-elect and this chick  Judy, my mom  wants me to get up.

Disappointment has a texture, a weight. Its hard and heavy and it sits on your chest just long enough to convince your lungs they may never touch air again. Ive felt it plenty of times. Disappointment in myself, when I choose not to speak up after being ignored in a store; disappointment in others, when I arrive for an interview and the publicist struggles to conceal surprise upon seeing my brown face.

My mom knows this feeling too, but tenfold. Disappointment hardens you as you climb the corporate ladder when youre black, a woman, and equipped with the audacity of an M.B.A. Disappointment of this kind courses through your veins when you live as a person of color in this world, no matter your proximity to wealth, education, or accomplishment. Its source is an IV of racism  casual, systemic, and overt  that congeals in your arteries until you become numb to it all, to injustice and to disrespect, and you find yourself heavy with apathy.

This chick  my mom  has lived nearly 60 years under the weight of disappointment. Which is why, on Wednesday morning, instead of allowing her body to retch as the election results unspooled, she requested my breakfast order and instructed me to be ready when she returned. We were in the middle of a mother-daughter trip in Charleston, and shed be damned if shed let another disappointment  the outcome of the presidential election  foil her plans.

This week Ive been thinking a lot about the woman who ran for president of the United States, my mom, and me. Ive been thinking about how so many of the women I know were shocked and dismayed beyond expression when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and, for a brief moment, I was too. But that cumulative legacy of hurt  the inexorable weight of disappointment  along with my mom had pulled me back to reality. My mom didnt read Ta-Nehisi Coatess Between the World and Me, but her actions Wednesday morning brought back a passage from the book. Coatess son has begun to cry after learning that Michael Browns killers would not be indicted, and Coates describes his response, as a father:

I didnt hug you, and I didnt comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.

It would be wrong to say that being a person of color in this world  particularly a woman of color  means you dont taste the sour loss of this election. It does not. But this race of mine, this gender of mine, has been confronted from birth with the disappointment that this world can deliver. Wednesday mornings mood was familiar.

And this is why I didnt cry when Hillary lost. My tears had dried up many disappointments ago. Im scared for whats to come, sure, but isnt it more of the same? Trump inspires the same anxiety in me as a routine traffic stop. I brace myself for the repercussions of what his administration will execute, but Im not naive; I know I live close to this realm of fear already.

Enough about that, though. This chick, Judy, she has plans for the both of us today. Well tour the high points in Charleston, visit the place where the Civil War started and see where the oldest African-American church in the state stands. Judy lived through MLK and Malcolm X; Nixon and Reagan; Loving v. Virginia; Rodney King and O.J. Were going to go through some shit, yes, but its hardly any worse than what weve seen.
Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Early Wednesday morning, Chicago-area physician Ume Khan and her husband Asif woke their two kids to talk to them about Donald Trumps victory over Hillary Clinton, Islamophobia, and the Khan familys place in this country as American Muslims.

For over an hour, they answered questions and reassured 9-year-old Rayya and 13-year-old Azmer that America is a democratic country and no one can do anything to harm us. She told them that no one has the right to make them feel bad about their culture, race, religion, or anything else. We need to believe whatever we believed before [Trump] came in.

But, despite her guarantees to her children, Khan says, Im really mad. How could he get away with it?

Across America, similar conversations unfolded in living rooms and classrooms and offices, on Twitter and television and street protests in major cities. How could he get away with it? they asked. Muslims are mad. Muslims feel betrayed. Muslims fear a rise in harassment and hate crimes and surveillance. The Trump campaigns comments throughout the election cycle vilifying the Muslim community and religion, and his statement calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States made the idea of a President Trump feel like a ridiculous joke, in Khans words. If this election was a referendum on values, culture, and identity, Trumps victory was a slap in the face to multicultural America.

I thought we lived in a country where everyone is broad-minded, where race doesnt matter anymore, Khan says, whose affluent Cook Country suburb went for Clinton by wide margins and where Democrats picked up a Senate seat with Tammy Duckworths win over Mark Kirk. This opened our eyes. Now we know how divided we are.

But others say that this dissonance  between the ideal of a colorblind, equal-rights America and the reality of white, economically and politically frustrated America that overwhelming voted for Trump (58 percent of white voters, according to a Pew Research election report)  is nothing new. Pooya Mohseni, an Iranian-American trans actress who plays Zarmina on the USA show Falling Water, says: Its not the first time Ive felt this hate, this marginalization. At some point, you realize that trying to convince people who think that people of color or women from a trans background dont deserve the same rights is like trying to drill through concrete with a spoon.

In an Instagram post on Wednesday morning, she described the hate the election results had made her aware of, as a trans woman, an immigrant, a woman of Muslim background, and a woman of color. She tells me that, the symbol of their patriarchy is Donald Trump but vowed to keep speaking, writing, and acting to tell the stories of others like her.

Outside Kansas City, Mahnaz Shabbir, who runs a strategic consulting firm and is a community activist speaking about Islam and Muslim-American relations in her area, also grappled with the question of where did all this hate come from? On Wednesday morning, after watching the election results with three generations of her American Muslim family, she cancelled her 7:30 a.m. meeting to spend time by myself healing. Watching Clinton and Obamas class-act concession speeches helped this process, and tears streamed down her eyes as Clinton spoke from the heart.

And despite all of Trumps fanning of the flames during the election cycle, she tells me that his acceptance speech was a meaningful step in the right direction: He was almost a different person. Shes hopeful that wounds can be healed. People have to go through the grieving process. Once they go through it, it depends on how Donald Trump comes across. If he lives up to his acceptance speech, things will be better and his followers will listen to him.

Yet, some Muslim women were happy with Trumps victory  like Saba Ahmed, the founder of the Republican Muslim Coalition. Ahmed became a feminist Muslim icon last year when she faced off against Trump spokesman Katrina Pearson on Fox News in an American flag hijab, arguing against the wholesale shutdown of mosques in response to the Paris terrorist attacks. Despite this and the many other examples of the bigotry and ignorance by the Trump campaign on Islamic issues, Ahmeds vote went to Trump. I feel my values aligned with the Republican party, she explains.

Ahmed discounts fears that hate crimes, including harassment of hijab-wearing women like herself, will increase, citing the Constitutions protection of civil liberties. This is a country that values religious freedom, she says. I myself wear [the hijab] every day and feel quite comfortable. A lot of the ignorance in the Republican party is because we havent been involved, and weve strayed from our own conservative beliefs. If we were involved in the GOP, that would make a huge difference.

Looking ahead to the next four years, she says, Its a two-way street. Both sides need to get over their fears and meet each other halfway.

But in California, Nahida Nisa, 25-year-old founder of Islamic feminist website The Fatal Feminist, is talking revolution.

I accept that were going to reach a breaking point, says Nisa, whose distrust of Clintons hawkish foreign policy approach led her to vote for Jill Stein. If its not now, its going to be soon. Theres no way the KKK can endorse a president and there can be any illusion of a united country. Theres going to be some kind of revolution, and thats maybe what we need.

Nisa says that its on Muslims now to stand in solidarity with others [Trump] is oppressing like blacks, undocumented immigrants, and the LGBTQ community as the only way to move forward. We cant expect the entire country to take a step forward unless we are willing to play a part in the revolution which would mean supporting others. It would be hypocritical to expect justice done to us when we havent been just to other people.

Shabbir has a gentler take, though she agrees that political action and putting ourselves out there is the answer. Otherwise, hate triumphs through ignorance and misunderstanding.

You have to ask yourself, what did you do in this last election? she says. The vote is the icing on the cake. But did you make the cake? Did you knock on doors? Did you make phone calls? Did you contribute to the campaign? If you didnt do that, theres another election in two years, start working toward that.
COPYRIGHT NZCIVAIR

All information and photographs used on this blog are copyright to NZCIVAIR.


I'm happy the girls are doing well! And I love Touch, hopefully that'll be a single!

Reply

Thread

Link

already love TOUCH



and I've been obsessed with nothing else matter since yesterday





Reply

Thread

Link

I really admire them for still trying. Being so mediocre and flopping all the time could be discouraging.

Reply

Thread

Link

At least they're talented

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

delete this FLOP comment tbh!!!

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

love them! looking forward to this album

Reply

Thread

Link

I'm so ready for this album



Super excited for:

Touch

Down & Dirty

Power

Freak



RISE sexy!Mix. Also... I've been bopping to Nothing Else Matters all morning

Reply

Thread

Link

OH! And Private Show

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

I think I'm gonna really like this album! Minus the flop lyrics to You Gotta Not.

Reply

Thread

Link

The instrumental bangs tho

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

Yeah it's definitely a fun song musically. I shake my booty around for sure.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

Nothing Else matters is perfect. Such an improvement over get weird overall.

Reply

Thread

Link

i like freak and down & dirty the best. i was getting worried with the songs they were releasing but now i'm excited for the album again :)

Reply

Thread

Link







Edited at 2016-11-11 04:46 pm (UTC) yes @ touch, down & dirty, power, freak, no more sad songs and the rest of the album

Reply

Thread

Link

sounds like Justin Bieber, M, Major Lazer and DJ Snake type of songs...which is a good thing I guess bc those are popular songs

Reply

Thread

Link

Get Weird. "Nothing Else Matters" sounds cute. I wish "Beep Beep" was a cover of the I'm glad you posted this excellent, thorough post. This sounds way better than. "Nothing Else Matters" sounds cute. I wish "Beep Beep" was a cover of the iconic Girls' Generation song tho.

Reply

Thread

Link

their voices sound really good as usual but i think they've peaked musically for me tbh. between this album and get weird, it's kind of frustrating how they're constantly chasing these sounds that are no longer sonically relevant almost two years after the fact. this actually kind of strengthens the fan theory that a large portion of glory days was probably from the original scrapped get weird album.



private show sounds like a bop tho

Reply

Thread

Link

I'm weirdly okay with that fact lol. Maybe it's because I get easily tired of most relevant music starting to sound the same :( I see what you mean though. I'd never heard that theory before oddly enough.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

yeah, i mean i think there's something to be said of the "freshness" that incorporating a retro sound has when so much of the mainstream is tired and played out (see: carly rae), but i think they did that more successfully on salute than here, since the trends of this album are off by like a year or two.



re: the fan theory, back when we were waiting for get weird to drop, lm did an interview where they said they had written and completed an album that ended up getting shelved bc the label didn't think it would do well. so it seems highly likely given the sounds and themes of gd that the majority of it was probably that shelved album

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

wow then they're being done dirtier than fans thought and that's saying a lot. no wonder they were playing it so horribly safe since salute (the lack of commercial success of it, again, their label's fault. they actually promoted inferior get weird and go figure it was their most successful one). if they don't bounce to a better label after completing their contract, they're idiots

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

yeah, it'll be interesting to see what they do after this. salute was the best and most adventurous album they've put out and it's 100% a shame that they've regressed to this basic trend-chasing sound when they're clearly capable of more. if they're smart they'll put out a greatest hits collection for their fifth album and take their talents elsewhere, but i also wouldn't be surprised if they go on "hiatus" a la 1d and do their own things for a while.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

IA

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link
ABC family tho?

Reply

Thread

Link

YASSS ABCF know how to produce low budget comedies that are actually funny.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

their sitcoms are pretty good sometimes tbh, baby daddy is really cute and harmless and i lowkey stan young and hungry



Edited at 2015-09-29 07:16 pm (UTC)

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

idk it just seems kind of random to me. i don't understand how they'll make her life a funny sitcom when it just seemed so sad and tragic.

Reply

Parent

Thread

Expand

Link

WHAT

Reply

Thread

Link

No thanks, just give me more necki eps

Reply

Thread

Link

this seems so random but i'm hf it

Reply

Thread

Link

Can't wait to see /that/ casting call.

Reply

Thread

Link

Think I could pull off a Carol? #CastingGoals @NICKIMINAJ https://t.co/GX1S0cbgy6  Jackee Harry (@JackeeHarry) September 29, 2015





i would love it if jackee was in it i would love it if jackee was in it

Reply

Parent

Thread

Expand

Link

but i'm here for this lady getting more work.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

It would already elevate the show tbh.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

I love her twitter

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

Ok I would watch this show if Jackee was in it. I adore her.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

I'd watch if she was on it

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

...what. I thought she had a really difficult childhood with abusive parents?? How is this gonna be a sitcom on ABC Family??? At least it's not multi-camera, but still. Mess.

Reply

Thread

Link

mte, I'm imagining the scene of Nicki's dad burning their home down with a tacky ol laugh track behind it

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

right? iirc her father burned her house down when she was a kid too

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

so fucking messy, I hope this gets the kibosh fast

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

Well, ABC glossed over the abusive stuff in Eddie Huang's biography so they could probably do the same here.

Reply

Parent

Thread

Expand

Link

...... im .. here for this?

Reply

Thread

Link

why

Reply

Thread

Link

I saw a little bit of an MTV documentary on her and she seemed so normal and nice; it totally changed how I felt about her.

Reply

Thread

Link

wat? the one where she came off like a total diva and was throwing tantrums?





Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

That was my first thought too.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

im never gonna get over the scene where she obliterated and humiliated her stylist over a steamer.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

maybe I should have watched the rest of it...

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

What lmaoo did you watch the whole thing or..? She is crazy af Google ha

Reply

Parent

Thread

Expand

Link

she is normal and nice, don't listen to these haters.



Edited at 2015-09-29 07:36 pm (UTC)

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

Kevin From Work is adorable, Noah is pretty charming as an actor in it

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

Tumblr will love this

Reply

Thread

Link





i hope they recreate this iconic scene from her childhood

Reply

Thread

Link

my first thought



i hope her ass flat as a pancake too

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

omg what is this

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

what is this from? lol

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link





Edited at 2015-09-29 07:09 pm (UTC)

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

LMAOOOO

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

lool bless

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

are they gonna pull a fresh off the boat and make the father seem loving and caring when he was an actual psycopath/abuser?

Reply

Thread

Link

you know they will.

Reply

Parent

Thread



Link

ABC Family though? Really?

Reply

Thread

Link





@NICKIMINAJ LMFAO LOVE U MOMMY  caio (@BLOWMINAJ) September 28, 2015





(She RT'd the reply.) Oh girl. LOL, and of course she's one of those celebs who actually loves the "mom" thing:(She RT'd the reply.) Oh girl.

Reply

Thread

Link
Subsidiaries of oil majors Schlumberger and Golar LNG signed an agreement to pursue a joint venture for the Fortuna project, which will be executed in Equatorial Guineas offshore Block R, according to World Oil.

Golars OneLNG and Schlumbergers Ophir will each take a 66.2 percent and 33.8 percent share, respectively, of the joint company JOC, which will help to ease the process of financing and developing the two firms portion of the project.

First-gas from the site is expected by the beginning of 2020, with 2.2-2.5 million tons of production per year for 15-20 years.

The deals current structure dictates that JOC will own Ophirs Block R license as well as the Gandria floating liquefied natural gas vessel, but before any cash exchanges hands, both firms must make a final decision on initial financial contributions to the project.

Schlumberger had previously agreed to be part of the deal, but withdrew when the ventures financials proved to be unwieldy.

Formation of the Fortuna JOC provides the framework for FID and clear line of sight to first gas, said Nick Cooper, CEO of Ophir, who expects the JOC to spend around $2 billion before tasting the first profits from the extracted gas, with $1.2 billion from loans.

This progress is due to the innovative partnering between OneLNG and Ophir, the quality of the resource base, the excellent project economics and support from the government of Equatorial Guinea.

Cooper added that his firm would not spend more than $150 million in cash to jumpstart the projects operations.

Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund said it expects Equatorial Guineas economy to shrink by a massive 10 percent in 2016 - after having already contracted by 7.4 percent last year - as low oil prices batter the economys dominant oil and gas sector.

The central African country is often used as a poster child for the resource curse.

By Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Tiffany Koehler lived in 19 foster homes from birth to age 3 and again from 12 to 18. For a brief time, she lived with her mother, who suffered from mental illness, and attended Shorewood public schools. A few years later, her mother's health declined and she was placed with a foster family outside of the district.

"I was upset that I was in foster care again and I was not allowed to stay in the Shorewood school system," says Koehler. "That was devastating for me."

Two years after graduating from Milwaukee Public Schools, Koehler enlisted in the U.S. Army through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's ROTC program.

"I wanted to enlist because my grandfather served in World War II and I needed to earn a living and I was proud to be the first woman in my family to serve," says Koehler.

Koehler served in the army for 14 years. Her unit was on standby during the Gulf War. She was deployed three days after Sept. 11 to Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii where she worked on the psychiatric floor and served soldiers and their families.

"At the time they were calling it the second Pearl Harbor and Tripler was a few miles down the road from the Pearl Harbor National Memorial. Security was high. Jets monitored the sky and battleships were out in full force guarding the islands," says Koehler.

Koehler, who was ranked a specialist / E-4, says her military experience taught her "what she was made of." She learned multiple military occupation specialties including behavioral science, locomotive dispatch and military justice.

"I was pushed mentally and physically," says Koehler. "Overall, I really enjoyed my years in service. I would not trade them for anything as they were some of the best years of my life. We have strong, smart and technologically sophisticated forces. I am proud of the men and women who monitor and respond as our nation calls."

Koehler eventually left the military to become her mother's full-time caregiver. Her mother, Mary Koehler, passed away in 2010.

In 2006, Koehler graduated from Cardinal Stritch University. She later worked for former Gov. Martin Schreiber's public relations firm as well as on numerous political campaigns throughout the country. In 2012, she ran for the Assembly's 58th District and came in second. If she had won, Koehler would have been the first black female Republican ever to serve in the Wisconsin Legislature.

"I believe in less government and more freedom. Less taxation and shifting many of the roles government is providing back to civic organizations and nonprofits," she says.

Her interest in politics stemmed from a desire to create change and to work as an advocate for others. Growing up, she remembers sticking up for kids who were bullied and her own experience in foster care made her eager to work for reform in a less-than-perfect system.

"I have been an advocate the majority of my life. I believe to create lasting change you have to be at the table able to vote and lead others to create an environment that utilizes all people and talents and fosters growth and prosperity for common good," she says. "I walked across the state of Wisconsin to bring awareness to those suffering in silence with a mental illness."

Koehler was continuing to build her political career when she was diagnosed with stage IV Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in May 2015. "My prognosis was poor," she says.

However, after six rounds of aggressive chemotherapy  each round she received chemo for five days straight  she learned she was in remission. Koehler says cancer reminded her how quickly her life was going by and that every moment counts.

"Life for me after cancer is more vibrant. I see, feel and hear things more deeply. When I was told I had cancer I knew I had to beat it. I wanted to live. I have so much I want to do before I am called home," says Koehler.

Currently, Koehler works as a volunteer a few hours a week as she continues to rehabilitate. She lives near Holy Hill with her two dogs and two cats. In the future, she plans to write a book, return to politics and stay in remission. For now shes reflecting on many aspects of her existence, including what it means to be an American.

"We have a lot of potential in our country. We have a great responsibility to be good global neighbors. We have to work together," says Koehler. "I truly believe no matter where we live we all want the same opportunities: to live safely, to love and to be loved, to have access to healthcare, food and clean water, a place to call home and the ability to enjoy our lives. We have to keep moving forward to ensure all people are heard, seen and are able to really live without persecution and fear. Thrive not just survive. I was given a second chance at life and now I take nothing for granted."
Milwaukee firefighters have been raising money throughout the year to support the "Warm Up Winter" campaign. At the conclusion of this years campaign, Milwaukee firefighters will have donated 23,000 new winter coats to children across 42 Milwaukee-area schools over a five-year period.

Oftentimes, when children do not have proper coats, they will either not go to school, or they will not participate in outdoor recess which helps them burn excess energy that then allows them to focus during class. Providing warm coats to these children protects them from the harsh Wisconsin winter while helping them be better students.

This past June, Milwaukee-area residents helped raise nearly $130,000 when Milwaukee firefighters collected donations at intersections throughout Milwaukee. Thanks to the generosity of supporters, Milwaukee firefighters will deliver 7,000 new winter coats to students at twelve schools in the City of Milwaukee this year.

To make a donation, or get more information, please use the following link: www.warmupwinter.org.

2016 schedule of events
Today is Giving Tuesday and thus we are re-sharing this post from earlier this month about organizations that could use your help. The only changes have been to update links and remove some information that is now out of date.

For many Americans, yesterday was a day of shellshock.

While many saw Election Day as a huge victory, large portions of the nation's population woke up Wednesday morning hurt, fearful and deeply concerned about their future and the futures of those they care about. Some fear President-Elect Donald Trump does not care about their rights or existence  and that the other branches of government are in no place to fight for them either.

No matter where you placed your vote Tuesday, we ALL deeply hope that Trump is good for our country, that the next four years do not live down to the ugly moments from his campaign and that America will continue to shine in the world as a great and promising place for all to live and thrive.

But in the meantime, there undoubtedly is uncertainty.

For those concerned, while yesterday was a day to cope, to think, to stress, to lick wounds and to be angry, today  and all of the days after  are for getting to work. American progress and democracy, the voice and will of the public, all of it does not stop after Election Day. But standing still won't do anything.

Here are just a few ways those looking to help can reach out, make a difference and do some good.

1. Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee

The Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee offers safe places and fun activities, positive role models, educational programming and other needed resources for local children and teens. To become a member, donate or become a volunteer, visit the Boys and Girls Club's website, or calling (414) 267-8100.

2. RAINN

RAINN is the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the nation, providing services to survivors, informing and educating people across the U.S. about sexual violence, and helping improve public policies and criminal justice response to sexual violence. RAINN also operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline, available both online and by phone (800-656-4673). Click here to to donate or learn how you can volunteer.

3. It Gets Better

Created by columnist and author Dan Savage, It Gets Better is an organization dedicated to communicate hope and optimism to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth around the world, as well as create and inspire change toward building acceptance. To donate and learn more what you can do, visit It Gets Better's website.

4. Homeless shelters and food kitchens

The Milwaukee Rescue Mission, Hope House of Milwaukee and Guest House of Milwaukee are great places to get involved, whether you are donating food, essential items or you time. To find other nearby homeless shelters, visit the Homeless Shelter Directory.

5. Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood provides important sexual and reproductive health services. To donate or learn more what you can do for the 21 health centers and clinics spread across the state, and many more around the country, visit Planned Parenthood's website.

6. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) provides free and confidential support for those in need and in distress. Visit the website to learn how you can get involved with the lifeline. Dr. John Draper also recently made a video for Facebook concerning the election and methods of coping for those who need them.

7. Anti-Defamation League

The Anti-Defamation League is a civil rights and human relations agency dedicated to stopping the defamation of the Jewish people, as well as to secure justice and fight bigotry for all. Click here to donate to the ADL and learn more what you can do to support it.

8. Sojourner Family Peace Center

The Sojourner Family Peace Center in Milwaukee is the state's largest nonprofit provider of domestic violence prevention and intervention services, helping family violence victims and their children be safe, as well as find justice and wellbeing. To learn how to donate or volunteer, visit its website.

9. ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union works to defend the and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and by the laws of the country. To donate and learn more, visit the ACLU's website  which has already claimed that "if Trump implements his proposed policies, we'll see him in court."

10. NAACP

To donate to the NAACP  which fights to ensure equal political, social, economic and educational rights for all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination  or become a member at its local branch (located at 2745 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr.), visit its website. The NAACP has already called for the reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act after Tuesday's results.

11. Immigrants and new Americans

For those looking to help in immigration organizations, this immigration law firm has gathered links to many groups working for immigrants' rights. Pick one, and find out how you can donate or help.

12. NARAL

If you are a pro-choice advocate, NARAL is an organization focused on expanding and protecting reproductive freedom for women. To donate or volunteer, visit NARAL's official website.

13. National Organization for Women

NOW's website is currently down for reasons that are fairly obvious, but the organization  dedicated to maintaining access to reproductive health care, fighting for economic equality, ending violence toward women, as well as racism and bigotry toward the LGBT community  is taking donations on its temporary page.

14. Milwaukee LGBT Community Center

The Milwaukee LGBT Community Center strives to serve the needs of the Milwaukee LGBTQ community and to make the Greater Milwaukee area safer and more inclusive through programming focused on anti-violence, counseling, healthy relationships and more. To donate or volunteer, visit its website  and also visit this directory of additional LGBT support organizations and groups to see what else you can do.

15. Milwaukee Women's Center

The Milwaukee Women's Center, a division of Community Advocates, works to provide treatment and services for women, men and children affected by domestic violence, addiction, poverty and mental health issues. To donate or volunteer, click here.

Also...

16. Don't move to Canada

Or Ireland. Or Sweden. Or anywhere else outside of America. If you're in a concerned group alienated by Trump over this campaign and you truly feel America is no longer where you feel you can live your best, healthiest life, go for it. It'd be far from fair for me  a straight white man  to tell say there's nothing for you to fear. I couldn't know.

But for everyone else, don't leave. America, and the rest of the people who live here, won't disappear if you move to a different country, and the ramifications won't be limited to its borders. If you don't agree with Trump or the next four years, make your voice heard, fight for people's rights, maybe  as Slate argues here  move to a swing state if you have the means and you really want to make sure your vote has power and, in general, stand up for what you hope for in America. Too many people worked too hard to found America, to keep America together, to fight for their rights as Americans and to fight just to get to America for you to bail when things might get hard.

17. Get out the vote

No matter who had won Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, we should all agree that an election where almost half the population didn't vote is a real problem. Whether it's because of the stricter voter ID laws or just a general malaise toward politics and the candidates offered this year, a government by the people, for the people, should be voted upon by more than barely half of those people. So help get out the vote, for whomever you believe in, next time  and not just every four years. Get involved.

18. Talk to people

The reasons why people voted for who in this election are as complex as many of the issues on the table. Nobody achieves anything by demonizing entire swaths of people on either side  especially when it seems everyone on both sides agrees these were beyond imperfect candidates. Ask questions, actively listen, don't be dismissive, work to understand diverse perspectives, communicate your feelings and values in productive ways, and make steps toward unity and cooperation.

Believe in the good in America. Believe in the good in all people. We can do this.
John Feffer argued on Wednesday that Demagogue Donald, whose very existence will lead me to pretend I'm not from the U.S. the next time I'm in Europe, is part of a wider trend that's already hit Europe hard:

"The ugliness has been percolating in Europe for some time now. It wasn't just Brexit, Britain's unexpected rejection of the European Union. It was the election of militant populists throughout Eastern Europe -- Viktor Orban in Hungary, Robert Fico in Slovakia, the party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland. It was the electoral surge of the National Front in France and the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany. It was the backlash against immigrants, social welfare programs, and 'lazy Mediterraneans' -- but also against bankers and Brussels bureaucrats."

I think the trend is even wider and deeper if the trend we're talking about is that of making everything worse, of increasing inequality, of increasing militarism, of destroying the environment, of pushing profit over people. If that's the trend, the bankers are its vanguard, not its victims, and it has saturated the international establishment almost as thoroughly as it has the rightwing sectarians.

But the trend Feffer seems to have in mind is one of nationalism or ethnic identity or racism in opposition to global humanitarianism. Feffer's new dystopian novel, Splinterlands, tells a future of shattered nations and international institutions, replaced with ever smaller and more disastrous warring city states. It's a vision that should disturb us deeply, a vision of what this world could actually become if it gains nothing in wisdom, miraculously survives its nuclear weapons, and plows right ahead into climate chaos and total capitalist consumption.

Feffer's utopia seems to be a globe unified in peace. But his dystopia is not unlike that of an author like Ian Morris whose utopia is a globe unified by imperial war. The great threat on the horizon for both is balkanization or splintering. Feffer sees this brought on by bigotry, militarism, and environmental destruction. Morris sees the threat as, basically, un-Americanism. But where does barbaric tribalism stop and the promotion of more direct local democracy begin? Is bigger always better and smaller always worse?

Feffer may not think so, because, in fact, a small utopia hidden in one corner of a sinking Titanic of an earth shows up in Splinterlands -- something of a Luddite communal organic farm of a sort that essentially exists right now, a creation that cannot save us all or even itself unless expanded to a radically larger scale or duplicated innumerable times. The trick, then, may be to duplicate sustainable and just local living within a global system of nonviolent dispute resolution, cooperation, and fairness.

Feffer says he thought a Trump figure wouldn't arrive for four more years -- though it's interesting that a big role in his fictionalized future dismantling of the world is played by a hurricane named Donald. My question is whether Trump's disastrous arrival might not in some ways be put to good use toward human survival. I'm thinking of a particular good use to which Hillary Clinton's disastrous arrival would not have leant itself. That is to say, can we not now appeal to other nations to recognize that the presence of U.S. military troops on their soil represents their subservience to the odious Donald Trump, a figure hardly to be imagined as the mythical Barack Obama, man of peace?

Can we encourage nonviolent resistance to U.S. militarism without encouraging a dive into a dystopian Splinterlands? Can the world refuse to participate in U.S. wars and U.S. weapons dealing while increasing its participation in cooperative non-military endeavors with the United States and the globe? Can U.S.-led war making, and the war making of other nations, come to be understood as the enemy of good globalism, not as the embodiment of UN humanitarian intervention in the affairs of those deemed less developed?

The alternative to the world figuring out how to resist U.S. wars would seem to be the people of the United States shutting down its war machine from within, without the assistance of the other 96%. But how does that seem to be working out?
Do not wait. Do not let things settle. Get rid of the corrupt, election rigging despicable liar.

CNN has already fired her. The first step the DNC should do, now that she doesn't have the cover of her crooked crony Hillary is to purge all the Clinton insiders from the dirty DNC den they've created-- every lying, election-rigging one.

Salon reported on Wednesday that Brazile said she'd do it again, rigging the debate, giving Hillary info,

"Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, is not only refusing to apologize for giving debate questions to candidate Hillary Clinton. She's also saying she would do it again if given the opportunity. "My conscience -- as an activist, a strategist -- is very clear," she said in an interview with talk-radio host Joe Madison that aired on Monday."

Brazile should not only be fired from the DNC, she should be banned from working with anyone in the Democratic Party again. End her career as a political operative immediately. This should be done with a statement from the few remaining Democratic leaders who can be trusted that they are going to purge the DNC and the Democratic party, from the Top Down to the lowest rungs, ie., aides and staffers who were brought in by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz or Brazile or Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders supports congressman Keith Ellison to be to head of the DNC, according to The Hill, which stated,

"The co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus has expressed interest in the DNC chairmanship for some time and according to a report from Politico, Ellison had previously reached out to Hillary Clinton campaign officials and state party chairmen. Sanders told Minnesota Public Radio that he supports Ellison to fill the position of party chairman.

While we're at it, now that we know that the DNC helped rig the primary, including colluding with the mainstream media and literally helping Trump to win the Republican primary, Bernie Sanders should be given the titular position of leader of the Democratic party. It is the only way that the Democratic Party has a viable path forward as an honest party.

Other Democratic leaders who strongly advocated for for Hillary should also lose their leadership positions-- Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer, who is planning on replacing Harry Reid, in the Senate. Both should have no role in the Democratic leadership. They were part of the problem.

Time is of the essence. We need to raise our voices and demand that this happen now.

Update:

I just received this email from Bernie Sanders:

The declining middle class is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics, and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes, and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids - all while the very rich become much richer.

Next Page 1 | 2 | 3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Congress Switchboard: 202-224-3121

"We need a more Open digital world -- that's good for business, the economy and the future of humanity. To get there is going to take "bottom-up" effort and Rob Kall's book is an exciting roadmap for how that can happen."



Rufus Pollock, author of "The Open Revolution", Founder of Open Knowledge, and formerly Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge


Kinship Circle - 2008-09-27 - Palin's Pro-Death Platform -. | Flickr

(Image by flickr.com) Details DMCA



[Re: Bernie Sanders not ruling out running in 2020: please see:

click here]





NEWT GINRICH AS TRUMP'S SECRETARY OF STATE? Really?



Copyrighted Image? DMCA





After reading a brilliant article from gifted Common Dreams Journalist, L auren McCauley, I am moved to merge many of her conclusions, plus those of other pundits, with my own insights. Remember that this may be the first discussion of many more to come.

In the time-tested context of Machiavellian political realism and the proven parameters of "Realpolitik," I really am trying very hard to keep an open mind about the future Trump Cabinet, even while, like most of the nation's progressive, liberals, and the remaining shambles of the Democratic party, I am genuinely frightened about the Supreme Court and what it will be like in 4 years....but, don't start worrying about what you can't influence or even begin to fix.

Lauren McCauley describes the Cabinet appointment predicament like this: "Climate skeptics, oil tycoons, campaign loyalists, war hawks, and [stronger] law enforcement enthusiasts top the list of potential appointees"

Remember, with the Republican majority in the Senate, he has almost carte blanche in appointing whoever he wants to whatever position, and our only chance to influence this is to clarify better alternatives as they materialize.

As President-elect Trump starts his transition to power, there are eaaly reports on what the nation can expect as his cabinet appointments. Remember also that these names were intentionally leaked to news mediam, as if to brace us, or run it up the flag pole and see who salutes...

Former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as Secretary of Interior, the former vice presidential candidate made famous for her love of hunting and frequent chants of "drill, baby, drill."

Newt Gingrich as Secretary of State? "with major implications for U.S. foreign policy and Washington's role in the international community." (AFP) Gingrich during the campaign continually praised Trump's approach to foreign policy, with his own international policy precepts considered by many to be "hawkish," and "shameless."

Ben Carson as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare? A good job for a loyal Trump supporter, one of the few that makes sense to me....

Salon's Brendan Gauthier wrote, "The people whose names you don't recognize are as bad or worse as those whose names you're sick of hearing." Former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is being considered to head the Pentagon, "was fired from his post as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, which he attributed to his hawkishness," Gauthier reported.

More likely than Palin, Forrest Lucas, oil executive, is favored to take over the Department of the Interior, "a position that oversees land management, national parks and wildlife reserves, and Lucas at the helm would represent a nightmare scenario for environmentalists," AFP reports.

Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
(Washington, DC) A senior Russian diplomat announced that the Russian government had ongoing ties to the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.

A centerpiece of the Clinton presidential campaign was Russian interference with the 2016 United States election. From charges that Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee email server to horror show claims that the Russians would somehow hack election voting machines, Clinton and her cadre were clear about the threat posed by Russia. In addition, there were charges that Trump had ties to Russian oligarchs as a source for business funding. Worst of all, there was the general claim that somehow Donald Trump was under the sway of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who rose to power through the Russian intelligence apparatus known as the KGB.

The U.S. mainstream media supported the Clinton campaign charges. In late September, ABCinvestigative reporters ran a detailed article about the "hundreds of millions of dollar" in investments Trump has received from Russian businessmen. The Daily Beast ran a comprehensive four part series on consecutive days starting on November 3. The series outlined Trump's alleged role as a useful idiot for Putin and business entaglements exposing him to Russian influence (parts one, two, three, and four). The series culminated with a description of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manefort's ties to the deposed pro Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich.

Trump denied "any relationship with Vladimir Putin" and any influence due to business conducted with Russian business interests. Trump surrogates denied any Russian influence and countered with charges that as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton gave a sweetheart deal to Russian oligarchs in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

The lines seem clearly drawn. The Clinton storyline argues that Trump endorses policies favored by Russia likely in return for financial and mind control influence by Putin and Russian business interests.

Why did the Russian's give credence to the Clinton campaign charges?

The Washington Post headlined a story on November 10 about a statement by senior Russian diplomat, Sergei Ryabkov:

"Obviously, we know most of the people from his [Trump's] entourage," Ryabkov said. "We have just begun to consider ways of building dialogue with the future Donald Trump administration and channels we will be using for those purposes," Ryabkov was quoted as saying. Ryabkov provided no further details, and his remarks drew a swift denial from Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks, who said the campaign had "no contact with Russian officials" before Tuesday's election. Washington Post, November 10



For just a moment, let's assume the veracity of the Clinton campaign and mainstream media claims of Russian influence on the Trump campaign. Why would the Russians go out of their way to admit this? Why would the Deputy Foreign Minister, of all the possible Russian sources, provide this information?

Even a cursory review of Russian diplomacy over the past several years demonstrates a high degree of discipline and caution. Unlike the U.S. government, the Russians speak with one voice. Russian diplomatic efforts are couched in international law. President Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and other Russian diplomats are precise in their language and proposals. They don't shoot from the hip. This may be difficult to grasp for the politically motivated Clinton campaign and media sources that benefit from demonizing Putin but these are the facts nevertheless.

This statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov was no accident. His remarks clearly opened the way for speculation that the Trump campaign was somehow in collusion with Moscow. Ryabkov's claim that these were routine contacts is an explanation without an audience.

Of special interest is the timing of the reported contacts with Trump. The Russians didn't respond to allegations of contact. They announced the relationship with the Trump campaign. They also announced that a similar offer of contact to the Clinton effort was turned down.

Why did the Russian's initiate this announcement knowing it could hurt Trump at a critical post election juncture? He's losing the popular vote and demonstrations are emerging all over the country protesting his policies. The New York Times estimates a 1.2% popular vote victory by Clinton when all the votes are tabulated. Trump will be subjected to the battle accusation of imposing extreme changes in policy based on a minority mandate.

Why would Russia deliberately release this information?

Next Page 1 | 2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Obama met Donald Trump

President Barack Obama greeted Trump at the White House as the first public step in a transition of power after the Republican businessman's surprise victory in a bitterly fought election campaign.



There is no love lost between the two men, who have had almost no one-on-one contact previously. Trump led the birther movement that questioned Obama's US citizenship and has pledged to overturn the Democrat's signature policy achievements after he takes office on January 20.



Obama campaigned vigorously for Trump's Democratic rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and called Trump both temperamentally unfit for the presidency and dangerously unprepared to have access to US nuclear codes.



Obama and Trump will seek to put their tensions behind them, at least for the cameras, during their Oval Office meeting.



Trump's motorcade took a South Lawn entrance into the White House, out of view of television cameras.



On Wednesday, Obama said that despite his major differences with Trump, he would follow the lead of former Republican President George W Bush in 2008 and ensure a smooth handover to Trump.



Eight years ago, President Bush and I had some pretty significant differences, but President Bush's team could not have been more professional or more gracious in making sure we had a smooth transition, said Obama.



So I have instructed my team to follow the example that President Bush's team set, Obama added.



After an unexpected election win on Tuesday that stunned the world, Trump spent Wednesday focusing on the transition during meetings with his staff at Trump Tower in New York.



While Democratic politicians in Washington were urging cooperation with the newly-elected president, anti-Trump demonstrations broke out in cities across the United States.



Not my president, shouted hundreds in New York. Demonstrators sat down on a highway interchange in Los Angeles blocking traffic and around 1,800 people in Chicago chanted No Trump! No KKK! No racist USA outside the Trump International Hotel and Tower.



Republican Chris Christie, who is leading Trump's transition team, said, We heard a lot about the peaceful transfer of power during this election, and I think you'll see that symbolised today.



During the campaign, Trump hinted that he might not accept the result if he lost to Clinton.



When asked whether Trump would apologise to the president for questioning his birthplace and legitimacy, the New Jersey governor, who could end up with a job in the Trump administration, said, "The controversy was just politics and they [Trump and Obama] have a lot more important things to talk about.



Upon taking office, Trump will enjoy Republican majorities in both chambers of the US. Congress that could help him implement his legislative agenda and scrap or roll back Obama policies that he dislikes, such as the Obamacare healthcare law, the nuclear deal with Iran and US participation in the Paris agreement to fight global warming.



White House spokesman Josh Earnest said,"Obama would brief Trump about the benefits of those policies during their meeting."



Later on Thursday, Trump will hold separate meetings with the Republican leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.



Ryan and Trump shared a strained relationship during the campaign, although they both ultimately said they supported each other. McConnell also kept a distance from Trump for most of the campaign.



Trump and Ryan will discuss how they can hit the ground running in a Trump administration,said a Republican source.



Trump's advisers are considering JP Morgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon for the post of Treasury Secretary, CNBC reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.



The White House has laid out its plan to ensure a smooth transition, including giving representatives selected by Trump briefings on the work of US federal agencies. "Trump and his senior aides will also start to receive daily briefings by US intelligence officials," said the White House .
Pakistan welcomed Donald Trump offer of mediation between Pakistan-India on Kashmir dispute

Foreign Office (FO) Spokesman Nafees Zakaria on Thursday said that Pakistan 'welcomed' the US president-elect Donald Trump's offer to mediate between Pakistan and India on the Kashmir dispute, Radio Pakistan reported.



During a weekly press briefing in Islamabad, while responding to queries about the victory of Republican Donald Trump in the US presidential elections, Zakaria said that the president-elect had earlier offered mediation between Pakistan and India on Kashmir dispute and said that Pakistan had welcomed that offer.



Zakaria reiterated Pakistan's concern over continued 'atrocities' committed by Indian forces in held Kashmir and said Pakistan would continue to raise the issue at the international level and extend moral, political and diplomatic support to the cause of the Kashmiris.



The FO said Pakistan desires a close relationship with the US, and wishes to further strengthen ties in areas including the economy, defence, science and technology, education, strategic issues and counter-terrorism.



Pakistan will continue to promote and strengthen existing ties in areas of common interest, the FO said.



Responding to a question regarding the Indus Waters Treaty, the FO said Pakistan has approached the World Bank to establish a Court of Arbitration regarding the matter and is looking forward to its establishment at the earliest.



The Foreign Secretary on Thursday summoned the Indian High Commissioner and condemned the unprovoked ceasefire violations on the Line of Control (LoC) and the Working Boundary, said a statement released by the Foreign Office.



"The Foreign Secretary summoned the Indian High Commissioner this evening and condemned the continued unprovoked firing and ceasefire violations by the Indian occupation Forces on the LoC and the Working Boundary, in complete violation of the 2003 Ceasefire Understanding and the International Law," said the statement.



The Foreign Secretary urged India to investigate the continued incidents of unprovoked ceasefire violations on the LoC and the Working Boundary and ensure respect for the 2003 Ceasefire Understanding, in letter and spirit.



Responding to a question regarding the killing of Muslims in 'fake encounters' in India, the FO spokesman said the international community has serious concerns over the situation of Muslims and other minorities in India.



He claimed that international human rights organisations have documented scores of fake encounters in India.



Nafees Zakaria claimed that eight leaders and commanders of the Haqqani network have been killed since July 6 this year in Afghanistan. He said this was 'reflective' of where Haqqani network leaders are situated.



He retirated Pakistan's desire for peace and stability in Afghanistan and said Pakistan is committed to helping all peace initiatives for Afghanistan. Peace in Afghanistan is in Pakistan's and the region's interest, he said.



Earlier in October, Pakistan welcomed an offer by United States President-elect Donald Trump to ease tensions with nuclear-armed rival India over ongoing unrest in Kashmir.



Trump had said he would be pleased to be a mediator between Pakistan and India, in an interview with the Hindustan Times.



Well, I would love to see Pakistan and India get along, because that's a very, very hot tinderbox.... That would be a very great thing. I hope they can do it, Trump said.



Islamabad had said it did not comment on media reports usually but in this case it welcomed the mediation offer.
The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher,
Last spring, in The Arboretum at Penn State's chestnut orchard, researchers performed controlled pollination, bagging flowers on selected trees to keep unwanted pollen away and then introducing pollen from trees known to have a high level of blight resistance. Credit: Penn State

Efforts to restore American chestnut trees to their rightful place in the North American forest ecosystem are progressing, although progress has come at a slower pace than once expected, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, who explain they have reached a pivotal point.

The 27-year-old traditional breeding program, which has attempted to infuse blight resistance from the Chinese chestnut tree into American chestnuts, is receiving a boost from tree molecular geneticists at Penn State and five other universities working collaboratively in a bid to improve the process. While traditional breeding has been taking place, so have parallel lines of research into genetic modification and also bio-control of the fungus that causes the blight.

"Teams of researchers are now at a crossroads where all three methodologies may be combined to provide a more robust product," said Sara Fitzsimmons, a research technologist who is also director of restoration for The American Chestnut Foundation, the group leading the chestnut-restoration effort. "By merging successes in genetic modification, hypovirulence and traditional breeding, restoration of a disease-resistant American chestnut tree is closer."

The chestnut blightwhich wiped out the American chestnut species across its 180-million-acre range in the first half of the 20th centuryis caused by a fungus inadvertently introduced from Asia. Some view the loss of the chestnuts, which produced untold tons of food for wildlife and food and lumber for humans, as one of the worst U.S. ecological disasters.

"We didn't account in our time estimates for how long it would take after we got nuts with blight resistance to plant out orchards and select progeny with the strongest resistance and eliminate material susceptible to the blight," said Fitzsimmons. "When we plant these trees with nuts generated by our latest generation of backcrossed trees, only 1 percent have the resistance that we are looking for. So you can imagine, if we're planting 27,000 trees, only about 270 have the combination of blight resistance and American chestnut characteristics we need."

The chestnut orchard in The Arboretum at Penn State and the Chestnut Foundation's Meadowview Research Farms in Virginia contains the latest generation of traditionally bred plant material with the most chestnut blight resistance and American character. At the Penn State orchard last spring, Fitzsimmons and her colleagues conducted controlled pollination of selected trees. The tactic underlines challenges faced by researchers trying to bring back the American chestnut.

Some view the loss of the chestnuts, which produced untold tons of food for wildlife and food and lumber for humans, as one of the worst U.S. ecological disasters. Credit: Penn State

"Because we still haven't finished planting out the orchard and we still haven't finished selecting and culling highly blight-susceptible trees we planted a few years ago, the blight-susceptible trees are pollinating trees that are selected and resistant," she explained. "So, when we collect nuts in this orchard, they have a wide variety of resistance and very few have full resistance, because there is so much pollen at this location."

Fitzsimmons and other researchers bagged flowers on selected trees to keep unwanted pollen away and introduced pollen from trees known to have a high level of blight resistance. Blight resistance is measured after the fungus that causes the disease is applied to wounds made in the young chestnuts' trunks or branches.

"When we were collecting open-pollination nuts, we were hoping that they wouldn't have this much susceptibility in the progeny, but because there is so much susceptibility in the pollen cloud, we were not able to get rid of it," Fitzsimmons explained. "So this year, we took the best of the best, and we performed controlled pollination. Controlled pollination, however, yields about 50 percent or fewer nuts than open pollination does.

"These control-pollinated nuts will be a true test of levels of resistance possible in this population."

The American Chestnut Foundation started its cross-breeding program in 1989, and Penn State got involved in 1997. The first orchard was planted by Professor Emeritus of Forest Genetics Henry Gerhold on State Game Land 176, not far from the University Park campus, as part of Christmas tree improvement research he was conducting. Kim Steiner, professor of forest biology and now arboretum directorand also the senior science adviser to The American Chestnut Foundationthen conducted silvicultural trials with chestnuts at the University's Stone Valley Recreation Area, starting in 1997.

The chestnut orchard in The Arboretum at Penn State was started in 2002. In 2004, Professor of Molecular Genetics John Carlson started to examine the underlying molecular components of blight resistance. In a project funded by the National Science Foundation from 2006 to 2009, his laboratory identified several potential blight-resistance genes by painstakingly comparing genes expressed in cankers of susceptible American and resistant Chinese chestnut plants.

The American chestnut's 180-million-acre range once stretched all the way from Maine to Florida. Credit: Penn State

With funding from The Forest Health Initiative, Carlson since 2009 has led a project to sequence and characterize the entire genome of one of the blight-resistant donor Chinese chestnut trees in the chestnut foundation's breeding program, with an eye toward identifying all of the resistance genes.

Carlson, director of Penn State's Schatz Center for Tree Molecular Genetics, is now collaborating with tree geneticists and researchers at the University of Kentucky, Clemson University, Virginia Tech, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the State University of New York at Syracuse and the foundation to unravel the mystery of blight resistance. The group also is testing a genome-sequence-based system to accelerate the selection of blight-resistant plants that now are genetically American, using nuts harvested this fall from the trees that underwent controlled pollination in the Penn State orchard.

Developing blight resistance in American chestnut is complex and challenging, concedes Carlson, who also has applied molecular-genetics techniques to modify poplar trees for bioprocessing and biofuels. "Our aspirations are to move the resistance genes from Chinese chestnuts into American chestnuts and find out which combinations of genes would give the best resistance," he said.

"That has proven to be extremely complicated because more than a few genes are involved, and we haven't yet pinned down which ones are the most important. Genetic engineering groups have been testing about a dozen blight-resistance genes that have been identified. We have to test them in combination because we know that blight resistance is not a single-gene trait, so we have to test multiple combinations of genes, which is very difficult to do and takes time."

If biotechnology researchers do develop a genetically modified, blight-free American chestnut, current federal regulations would limit distribution of the plants, Fitzsimmons noted. An estimated five years will be required to have the product deregulated by governmental agencies before it is available for widespread distribution and planting.

"We expect to have research plantings of GMO backcross trees within the next two years," she said. "While GMO cannot be allowed to open pollinate under current regulations, GMO American chestnuts appear to offer an excellent chance of creating a blight-resistant American chestnut."

Sara Fitzsimmons, a research technologist in Penn State's college of Agricultural Sciences and director of restoration for The American Chestnut Foundation, shows a canker that formed where a young chestnut tree was inoculated with fungus to see whether it was resistant to the blight. Credit: Penn State

The Chestnut Foundation also is planning to soon deploy a biocontrol, developed by pathologists from West Virginia University and the University of Maryland, to weaken the fungus that causes chestnut blight. The biocontrol involves infecting the fungus that causes chestnut blight with a virus that makes the fungus sick and reduces its virulence.

"We are now focusing on the three Bs in concert to restore the American chestnutbreeding, biocontrols and biotechnology," Fitzsimmons said. "This gives us a bigger suite of tools to fight off this fungus and blight."

But even if all of these initiatives to restore the American chestnut come off without a hitch, it may take a century or more to see chestnuts again across their former range, from Maine to Florida, she concedes. Based on research she is conducting in Maine and Vermont on naturally regenerating sites, it looks like it takes at least 20 years for a plot of chestnuts just to become established beneath a forest canopy.

"Tree breeding, especially hardwoods, takes extraordinary patience because results often aren't seen over a lifetimewe knew that," she said. "To see a naturally regenerating American chestnut population regaining its reproductive niche in the ecological landscape will take a long time50 years at least after we plant nuts from truly blight-resistant trees."

No matter how long it takes, the chestnut reintroduction effort is monumental, Steiner stressed, because it is likely the most complex and long-term attempt to rescue a plant species ever pursued. Breeding trees to develop blight resistance is difficult enough, but in this particular case the rescue requires transferring genes from one species to another while still maintaining the genetic diversity of the original species.

"A 'horticultural' solutionwhere a successful product is commonly a single, clonally propagated genotypeis not sufficient because we are attempting to restore a species to the wild where it must survive, reproduce and eventually evolve on its own," Steiner said. "A remarkable feature of this project is that it is being performed by a small non-profit with the help of thousands of volunteers. Fortunately, the work of the foundation has catalyzed millions of dollars in research by collaborators such as John Carlson, and this has greatly assisted progress."
This image shows the galaxy cluster Abell 1689, with the mass distribution of the dark matter in the gravitational lens overlaid (in purple). The mass in this lens is made up partly of normal (baryonic) matter and partly of dark matter. Credit: NASA, ESA, E. Jullo (JPL/LAM), P. Natarajan (Yale) and J-P. Kneib (LAM).

(Phys.org)Currently, one of the strongest candidates for dark matter is weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPS, although so far this hypothetical particle has not yet been directly detected. Now in a new study, physicists have proposed that dark matter is not a WIMP, and further, it is not any particle that is so far known or theorized to exist.

Instead, the physicists argue that dark matter is made of particles from one of the many "hidden sectors" that are thought to exist outside of the "visible sector" that encompasses our entire visible world. The team of researchers, Bobby Acharya, Sebastian Ellis, Gordon Kane, Brent Nelson, and Malcolm Perry, from institutions in the UK, Italy, and the US, has published their study in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

Hidden sectors are so-named because particles in these sectors don't feel the strong and electroweak forces like those in the visible sector do, which greatly reduces their interaction with the visible sector. So hidden sector particles could be all around uswe just currently have no way to detect them.

In the proposed scenario, dark matter consists of particles in the hidden sector that communicate through a portal from the hidden sector to the visible sector, and in this way exert the gravitational effects that scientists have long observed.

While such an idea may sound far-fetched, hidden sectors and portals have long been components of string theory and M-theorytwo theories that seek to explain particle physics at its most fundamental level.

The main support for the new claim boils down to a question of stability. In general, heavier particles decay into lighter particles. So lighter particles, being more stable, are much more likely candidates for dark matter. This is where the long-standing support for WIMPs comes from, since WIMPs are the lightest supersymmetric particle, and therefore, until now, considered to be stable.

However, since approximately 100 hidden sectors are thought to exist, but only one visible sector, the scientists argue in the new study that some hidden sector likely contains a particle that is even lighter than WIMPs.

The scientists show that WIMPs could theoretically decay into one or more lighter hidden sector particles, which could in turn decay into even lighter hidden sector particles. So the lightest supersymmetric particle in the visible sector wouldn't be stable enough to be dark matter. Instead, according to this argument, some currently unknown hidden sector particle would be a much more likely dark matter candidate.

"The greatest significance of our work is that it forces theorists to rethink the paradigm of what is called WIMP dark matter," Ellis, a physicist at the University of Michigan, told Phys.org. "WIMPs have been the most popular candidates for what constitutes dark matter for over 30 years. A WIMP is a particle a bit like the Higgs or Z-boson that are electrically neutral, heavy particles which participate in the weak nuclear interactions, but unlike the Higgs or Z-boson, WIMP dark matter would be stable on cosmological scales. WIMP dark matter has most commonly been discussed within the context of supersymmetry (SUSY).

"For 30 years, theorists have thought that in SUSY models, the lightest SUSY particle was a good dark matter candidate due to its stability. However, in our paper we argue that if you take the Standard Model of particle physics as residing in a greater, string/M-theory framework, then supersymmetric WIMPs are probably not a good dark matter candidate, because we show that they are typically unstable.

"The string landscape encompasses a vast number of possible low-energy theories. However, we found that nearly all of the landscape would exhibit this feature of WIMP instability. Such a conclusion means that if we are to think seriously of embedding our visible universe in a string theory, we have to seriously consider the natural possibility that dark matter resides in a hidden sector, or we are forced into a very untypical corner of the string landscape."

If dark matter does turn out to be a hidden sector particle, it would explain why WIMPs have been so difficult to detect in particle colliders. In order to detect a WIMP, scientists will have to modify their search and look in different places.

"If dark matter comes from a hidden sector, it poses a serious issue of how to detect it, other than through its gravitational interactions," Ellis said. "String/M-theory can provide so-called 'portals' which connect these hidden sectors to our visible sector, thus potentially leading to a means of searching for hidden sector dark matter. Also, if dark matter is 'proven' experimentally to be in a hidden sector, it would fit very naturally with typical models of the universe that arise in string and M-theory."

In the future, the scientists plan to further investigate the exact signature of a WIMP decaying into a hidden sector particle, which would guide future experiments.

"We are currently finalizing a follow-up paper where we consider typical string/M-theory hidden sector constructions which could give good candidates for dark matter," Ellis said. "Most importantly, we find there are such candidates. The typical signature of such constructions is that when SUSY particles are produced in a collider, the WIMP will decay promptly into the hidden sector and other visible particles. Thus one would expect the typical collider signature for SUSY, namely missing energy, but accompanied by more particles than in a typical SUSY event."

More information: Bobby S. Acharya, Sebastian A. R. Ellis, Gordon L. Kane, Brent D. Nelson, and Malcolm J. Perry . "Lightest Visible-Sector Supersymmetric Particle is Likely to be Unstable." Physical Review Letters. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.181802

Also at arXiv:1604.05320 [hep-ph] Journal information: Physical Review Letters

 2016 Phys.org
The Varroa mite and the deformed wing virus are main factors responsible for alarming bee mortality. Credit: Benjamin Lamp/Vetmeduni Vienna

In recent years, massive losses of honey bee colonies have occurred during winter in Europe and North America. It could be shown that the Varroa mite and the deformed wing virus are the main factors responsible for the alarming bee mortality. Researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna have succeeded for the first time in simulating the course of disease using artificial genetic material of the virus. The symptoms of the so-called mite disease were reproduced in the laboratory without mites by the injection of synthetic RNA. This enabled the prudent development of new strategies in order to protect the bee population in the future. The results were published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The honey bee Apis mellifera plays an important role for the pollination of fruit and vegetable plants, besides its significance for the production of honey and wax. Losses of entire bee colonies during winter have economic and  in particular  ecological consequences as pollinators are missing in spring during blossom. Apiculture in North America and Europe is especially affected by partly massive losses. Only during the winter months of 2014/2015, up to fifty per cent of all bee colonies in some Austrian regions collapsed.

The main trigger of this bee mortality does not seem to be the use of pesticides in modern agriculture. Many studies have shown that the survival of bee colonies strongly depends on the infestation with Varroa mites, widespread blood-sucking parasites, and the transmission of deformed wing virus by these mites. A research group from the Institute of Virology at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna has developed a new laboratory system, which enabled them to make an important step forward in the investigation of the virus. By using a molecular clone, they have simulated the course of disease in a targeted way under laboratory conditions.

Artificial viral genomes of deformed wing virus

Up to now, scientists have only used samples of the deformed wing virus, which they had taken from infected bees. "However, mixed and multiple infections can bias the results of such tests", stated lead author Benjamin Lamp. For the new test system, the researchers used artificial genetic material instead of natural samples of the deformed wing virus, in order to clearly correlate the course of disease to the virus.

"Initially, we amplify the genetic RNA material of a virus and save it as a DNA copy in a vector, a specific transport vehicle for genetic material. The resulting molecular clone enables us to produce artificial viruses, which are identical and genetically defined," explained Lamp. Insects infected with the artificial virus showed the same symptoms such as discolouration, dwarfism, death or the eponymous deformation of the wing that also occur in natural infections. Thus, it could be unambiguously shown that these symptoms are caused by the deformed wing virus.

Deformed wing virus detected in gland tissue

Besides the infection with the viral RNA under controlled laboratory conditions, also an unbiased picture of the disease process could be shown. The scientists infected not only fully developed bees with the artificial genetic material of the virus, but also larvae and pupae. During the pupal stage, Lamp and his team analysed the target tissues and the host cells  the cells the virus preferably infects.

The scientists found viral antigens  the specific protein molecules of the deformed wing virus  in all body areas. However, neural, gland and connective tissue cells were particularly affected. "The high concentrations of viral proteins  the antigens  in the glands could also indicate an oral transmission of the virus from one bee to another in the hive," explained Professor Till Rumenapf, last author and head of the Institute of Virology at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. This could explain why the virus also remains present in the hives if it is not transmitted by the Varroa mite. However, no viral proteins were detected in muscle and blood cells.

Various applications of the new method

By using the molecular clone, different aspects of the viral lifecycle could be simulated, manipulated and studied under laboratory conditions. This concerns the transmission of the virus by the Varroa mite, the course of the infection and the viral replication in different stages of development of honey bees. Controlled experimental conditions will enable the development of new strategies in order to effectively reduce the losses of bee colonies caused by the virus.

The described experiments involved only one DWV strain, but the method can also be used for other strains. "In many cases, a bee is not only infected with one virus species. Our test system provides a tool to find out, which viruses are especially harmful and how viruses behave in multiple infections," explained Lamp. "Thus, we can develop targeted strategies against disease-causing viruses."

About the deformed wing virus

The deformed wing virus (DWV) belongs to the family of Iflaviridae. These viruses are so-called RNA viruses. Their genetic material only consists of one ribonucleotide strand, unlike the prevailing double-stranded DNA in mammals. In most but not all cases, infections with the deformed wing virus are bound to an infestation of a hive with the Varroa mite. "The virus persists in the hives and can even be detected if there are no parasites in the hive," explained Benjamin Lamp.

More information: Benjamin Lamp et al. Construction and Rescue of a Molecular Clone of Deformed Wing Virus (DWV), PLOS ONE (2016). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0164639 Journal information: PLoS ONE
A new satellite mission carrying CU-Boulder space weather instruments is expected to help mitigate damage to satellites and communications systems caused by powerful solar storms. Credit: NASA

A multimillion dollar University of Colorado Boulder instrument package expected to help scientists better understand potentially damaging space weather is now slated to launch aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite on Saturday, Nov. 19.

Designed and built by CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), the instrument suite known as the Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance Sensors (EXIS) is the first of four identical packages that will fly on four NOAA weather satellites in the coming decade. EXIS will measure energy output from the sun that can affect satellite operations, telecommunications, GPS navigation and power grids on Earth as part of NOAA's next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites -R Series (GOES-R).

"We are ready for launch and are looking forward to a successful mission," said LASP Senior Research Scientist Frank Eparvier, principal investigator on the EXIS project. "These extremely sensitive instruments will help scientists better understand solar events and help to mitigate the effects of space weather on Earth."

NASA's contract with CU Boulder on behalf of NOAA to design, build, test, deliver and scientifically support the four instrument packages is for roughly $105 million. The GOES-R satellite was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. in Littleton, Colorado and will be launched on an Atlas V rocket built by United Launch Alliance, headquartered in Centennial, Colorado.

EXIS consists of two LASP instruments, including XRS, an X-ray sensor that can determine the strength of solar flares and provide rapid alerts to scientists, said Eparvier. Large solar flares, equivalent to the explosion of millions of atomic bombs, can trigger "proton events" that send charged atomic particles flying off the sun and into Earth's atmosphere in just minutes. They can damage satellites, trigger radio blackouts and even threaten the health of astronauts by penetrating spacecraft shielding, he said.

"The XRS gives the first alert that a solar flare is occurring, providing NOAA with details on its timing, magnitude and direction within seconds," said Eparvier.

The second EXIS instrument, EUVS, will monitor solar output in the extreme ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is completely absorbed by Earth's upper atmosphere, said Eparvier. When the extreme UV light wavelengths penetrate the upper atmosphere during active periods on the sun, they can break apart, ionize and change the properties of the atmosphere through which satellites fly and radio waves propagate.

Fluctuations in extreme UV wavelengths from the sun ionize the upper atmosphere and interfere with communications like cell phones and GPS signals, said Eparvier. In addition, such fluctuations can create satellite drag, causing spacecraft to slowly fall out of orbit and burn up months or years before such events are anticipated.

"Modern technology has made us vulnerable to extreme variations in space weather that can have significant effects on Earth communications," Eparvier said. "Extreme solar activity can cause problems for power companies all around the world, for example, in part because they all are interconnected."

NOAA's GOES satellites are a series of weather satellites that help scientists make timely and accurate weather forecasts. Two GOES satellites are now in geostationary orbit at a height of about 22,000 miles, with one focusing on the east part of the Americas overlapping with another focusing on the west. Satellites in geostationary orbits complete one revolution in the same amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate once on its polar axis, allowing them to "stare" at a portion of Earth, said Eparvier.

LASP also built key solar instruments for NASA's Van Allen Probes mission launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts, and designed and built a $32 million instrument package for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory that launched in 2010.

More than 100 LASP personnel ranging from scientists and engineers to technicians, programmers and students have worked on the EXIS program since 2006. CU Boulder's LASP will support EXIS on the four NOAA GOES satellite missions through spacecraft integration, testing, launch and commissioning, said Eparvier.

Each instrument package, roughly the size of a large microwave oven and weighing 66 pounds, is three times heavier than normal due to extra shielding that protects them from high-energy particle penetration. LASP's Mike Anfinson is the EXIS project manager.


   ,         

,                   ,      .
GLENS FALLS  A South Glens Falls man was arrested Tuesday for allegedly stealing from a local business.

Devon Shawn MacDuff, 27, of Main Street, has been charged with felony fourth-degree grand larceny.

Police did not want to discuss details of the case because arrests of other suspects are pending.

MacDuff remains in Warren County Jail on bail of $750 cash or $1,500 bond.
MOREAU  A woman paying her respects at her mothers grave on Thursday found a book written by one of Hitlers top military officials in the Jewish cemetery on Gansevoort Road.

Stephen Adler, president of Temple Beth El in Glens Falls, brought the matter to the publics attention after the woman contacted the synagogues office. The woman, who formerly lived in the area, is a member of the congregation, and had traveled from Boston to the cemetery.

Adler said it is disturbing, and the timing is suspect coming days after the election of Donald Trump, who has been criticized for his rhetoric on religious and ethnic groups.

In our experience, its too coincidental, Adler said.

The book, now at Temple Beth El, is titled Skorzenys Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitlers Commando Ace.

It was written by Otto Skorzeny, who was called The Most Dangerous Man in Europe and who believed that unconditional warfare tactics should be used deep behind enemy lines.

Skorzeny conducted an operation to free Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and was behind a plot to assassinate President Franklin D. Roosevelt, according to the website About Education.

Adler contacted the Saratoga County Sheriffs Office and on Friday was going to bring the book to the cemetery to meet with investigators.

Adler said, in the past, swastikas have been written on the side of the temple building. The congregation, which includes about 88 families, has cleaned up the racist grafitti and not made a big deal about it.

But he believes times are different now, although he added he did not want to disparage people who voted for Trump.

The president of the United States is the leader of the greatest country in the world. This country stands for freedom for all people, tolerance of all religions and the opportunity for all oppressed people to find sanctuary in a troubled world, he said.

Adler said Temple Beth El is grateful for the support of the Glens Falls community during its 90 years of existence. By sharing this incident at the cemetery with their neighbors and friends, the hope is no more incidents will occur, he said.
QUEENSBURY  It was time to move.

A parade of students moved in the Langan School at Prospect Centers great room via wheelchair and a variety of guided walking devices to cheers and applause.

The students were the stars of the ceremony, which was to celebrate the school being officially recognized as a MOVE International site. MOVE stands for Mobility Opportunities Via Education. The program teachers about mobility and skills development in peoples lives in the classroom, home and work. The program requires the use of specialized equipment that assists people with disabilities in walking.

The Langan School, which is a division of the Center for Disability Services, becomes the 35th site in the United States, Australia and New Zealand to receive certification. The process requires organizations to submit application and undergo a site visit.

Julie Sue Delaney, program manager for MOVE International, said she could sense the dedication of the staff when she came to see the program.

She observed that every student was greeted when they arrived at school and the staff members waited for the students to respond, which often does not happen right away.

The staff meets the students at their level  wherever that is. Students are enthusiastic and eager to take on tasks, according to Delaney.

Theyre happy to be at school, she said.

Delaney said it takes a team effort for a school to become MOVE certified and the Langan School at Prospect Centers commitment could be seen in Thursdays dedication ceremony.

Not a single person who came up here today used the word I, she said. Its what do we do for our students.

Alan Krafchin, president and chief executive officer, of the Center for Disability Services said this is the organizations third MOVE International Model site. The other two sites are the centers Langan School in Albany and its adult program at the Smith Center in Guilderland.

Students were assisted by a variety of devices including one called a gait trainer, which consists of supportive bar that students can lean against upright or sit down and move forward.

Another piece of equipment, called a dynamic stander, allows students to stand up and lean against a bar and be guided by one or two large wheels.

Linda Miller, MOVE coordinator said the equipment can be adapted and changed based upon students needs. Miller and fellow MOVE coordinator Amber Menshausen accepted the dedication plaque from Delaney.

Staff member Julie Brochu said when students first use the equipment, they can be like deer in the headlights. Soon, they get the hang of it.

All of a sudden, they realize that my body can do this. My body can move, she said.

Staff member Kat Dingman said it is exciting to work at the center and watch our children reach their full potential (and) show the world what we always knew they could do.

Nikki Harrison, who also works at the school, said students are encouraged to push themselves.

Im blessed to acknowledge every small and large victory these students achieve through MOVE, she said.

Abbey Mae Monroe is able to communicate through a program that allows her to use her eyes to pick something on the screen and then use her head to tap a voice message.

I love the move program because it makes me proud of myself and everyone is proud of me, she said.

I love the MOVE program because it gets me up and out of my wheelchair, said Nolan Surber, who was also using a speech adapter.

It makes me feel independent, added student Shaylah Shattuck, through a speech program.

Parent Susan DeJong of Fort Edward said she has seen a lot of positive changes in her daughter Abby since she started participating in the MOVE program.

Every day, she gets to interact with her peers and friends in the classroom, she said. Shes a lot more alert and responsive to visual stimulation.

Abby suffers from seizures and not a lot of strength in her head and neck. The equipment allows her more maneuverability. She can do similar activities at home with her.

Bill Richmond, chairman of the schools Board of Education, said the students are some of the hardest working he has ever seen and the staff is innovative and supportive.

Im always in awe of the tremendous work that goes on here every day, he said.

The school is grateful to receive this designation.

Its really a day of celebrating our students who inspire and amaze us with the things that they accomplish, said Principal Sally Filicetti.
Two Vermont communities decided in a nonbinding referendum Tuesday to continue designating Granville and Salem as the schools for their students in grades 7-12.

Some Vermont schools only go up through sixth grade and they designate that they will send their junior-senior high school students to either Granville or Salem.

Voters in Rupert and Pawlet headed to the polls to decide whether continue the status quo arrangement. Some people had sought more school choice.

A no" vote would have meant that parents would have been free to send their children to a junior-senior high school of their choice, with the cost covered by a state-provided grant of roughly $14,500.

The outcome in Pawlet was 413 votes in favor of continuing to designate the New York schools and 306 votes in opposition. For Rupert, it was 235 in favor and 145 against.

Granville has 92 students from Vermont, which generates about $800,000 in revenue for the district this year. Salem receives about $224,000 in tuition from its 29 Vermont students  23 from Rupert and six from Pawlet. Granville charges $8,750 per student for tuition and Salem has a price of $7,739.

School officials in those districts had worried that if the no votes prevailed, their districts could see a drop in enrollment and revenue by losing some of the Vermont students to other schools in the Green Mountain State.
GLENS FALLS  Despite the north wind that whipped the flags and chilled the crowd of about 50 people, local veterans groups kept alive a tradition that dates back to 1921.

That was the first year a Veterans Day  then Armistice Day  commemoration was held in Glens Falls, and in 1927, the Peace and Victory Memorial in Crandall Park was built in memory of veterans.

Not even a portable stereo malfunction could slow down the ceremony.

When the tape player became balky at the end of the event, Tony Garcia, representing the new local chapter of the Sons of the American Legion, stepped to the podium and led the crowd in God Bless America.

Queensbury Supervisor John Strough said the day needs to serve as a reminder.

Today is a reminder day, Strough said. Its a reminder that we should spend every day honoring our veterans.

We need to thank them for hope, happiness and unitedness, he said. They deserve to be objects of our honor.

The main speaker for the event was Mike Hoag, a Vietnam veteran who is commander of VFW Post No. 2475 and regional commander as well.

Stand a little taller today, he told veterans. That will remind people of your selfless dedication.

Hoag said that veterans not only were the honorees Friday but also made the day possible.

We are able to gather here today to honor their sacrifice because of what they did, Hoag said. It is our obligation to honor them.

U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro, who was re-elected to Congress, had been invited to the ceremony but was in Washington, D.C., for a ceremony there.

She sent words with staff member Halie Northrop, who read a letter from Stefanik expressing her sincere gratitude, and offering veterans any help she could give them.

After the ceremony, Bob Borngesser, commander of American Legion Post No. 223 in Glens Falls, who served two years in Vietnam, said he would serve the nation again.

I would do it all over again if I could, Borngesser said. But after a while, your body just wont let you do it. But I would do it again.

The Glens Falls ceremony was one of more than a dozen held in the region, from Whitehall to Saratoga. Many of them were held at 11 a.m., commemorating the armistice that ended World War I on Nov. 11, 1918.
After our second presidential election in about 15 years to be decided by a small number of votes in a few key states  and the second in recent years to split the electoral college and popular vote results  I have no patience with people who make convoluted arguments for not voting, especially when those people are journalists.

Various reporters and editors have proclaimed over the years (not that anyone was asking) that they dont vote, to keep themselves pure from any taint of political bias.

The former editor of The Washington Post, Len Downie, declared he abstained from the act of casting ballots, as if that could transform him into some sort of priest of neutrality.

Ive even read the confession of a political reporter in the Capital Region that he, too, had taken a vow of political celibacy, a statement met with a yawning indifference by any readers who stumbled across it.

Earlier this week, Chris Cillizza, a well-known political reporter and columnist for The Washington Post, wrote a sort of apology for his participation, too, in this abstemious Election Day charade.

Not voting is about as effective in keeping a journalist free of political preferences as fasting for a day is at removing a preference for New England over Manhattan clam chowder.

At least Cillizza admits its a charade: Most of the reporters I know vote. That they do so has zero impact on their merits as reporters.

He even mentions the word sanctimonious, which is apt, although he works hard to avoid pinning the word on himself. His explanation for ducking one of the easiest duties of citizenship is defensiveness.

He doesnt vote because he doesnt want to be put on the defensive by readers accusations that he favors one political party over another, never mind that his column is full of his own opinions and judgments about politicians.

Cillizza says that, in the interest of transparency, he would have to tell people how he voted, if they asked. But the higher interest here is the privacy of the ballot box. No one has to reveal how they voted if theyd rather keep it to themselves  not to their readers, not to their spouse, not to their boss.

Journalists used to be able to get exempted from jury duty in New York, just because stories about the case might have run in the papers where they worked. But you dont get exempted any more as a journalist in New York, and you shouldnt.

Journalism has a special role in our political system as a counterbalance to powerful financial and political interests, but journalists dont get special privileges. Were better off, as a society, with reporters and editors who participate in the nitty-gritty of citizenship.

People in my profession who choose not to vote are exalting the role of journalist beyond what the sometimes-grubby, often-boring, always-flawed reality of the job can bear. We try to tell the truth, within constraints that make that truth partial, narrow, and frequently, in hindsight, incorrect.

As this election and others have shown, doing our job as citizens is too important to wriggle out of. We all have our partialities, all of us, and journalists have no more excuse than anyone else to fail to show up and vote.
Welcome Guest! You Are Here:
I do admit that language is part of our culture... I am a believer in languages; language everywhere is important and we cannot have excuses for our children. I speak four Ghanaian languages and I speak them pretty well. It is possible for someone to speak eight or ten or twelve Ghanaian languages without a blink, so as for me, it is not really an issue. she said.

There are some languages in Ghana that crosses the borders, so if Arabic or Ewe crosses the border and that child wants to learn it, please lets us support that course, she reiterated.

Dzifa Gomashie was speaking on the sidelines of an event organized at the Peduase Valley Resort to promote arts and culture in the country. This was minutes after renowned sculptor Kofi Setordji called for increased incorporation of Ghanaian culture into the education system.

She said once the Ministry of Education had convened experts and led to the introduction of this policy, her opinion "would not matter."

Speaking at a campaign event at Nsawam Zongo in the Eastern Region, the Chief of Staff, Julius Debrah said the president had agreed to introduce Arabic in senior high schools in 2017 and then in basic schools in 2018. Initial media reports said Arabic was going to be made compulsory in schools in 2017 but government has had to come out to deny this.

According to 2014 Early Grade Reading Assessment, 98 percent of pupils in primary two could not read English.
This follows the re-introduction of the language as one of the elective subjects on the roster of the West Africa Secondary School Certificate Examinations.

But speaking with journalists, a presidential staffer, Emelia Arthur said: The chief of staff did not use the word compulsory, he did not say that the government will make Arabic a compulsory subject.

The chief of staff said that government is considering making Arabic an examinable subject. An examinable subject, optional, not compulsory, she said.

Nevertheless, the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has accused the governing NDC of plagiarising its policy on Arabic.

A likely decision to make Arabic compulsory is expected to cause a major uproar in Ghana.
Rob shared the first photo of Dream on Instagram with the caption: "Today was amazing :) I am so lucky!! Thank you @blacchyna for having our baby and being so strong ! I love you so much and can't wait to see her get older day by day with you Chy! I love you and Dream so much and Appreciate both of you...I know everyone saying that's my twin but that's def your nose Chy lol"
News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that the order was handed down on the suspect by the Magistrate, Mrs E.E. Edokpayi, who frowned at the accused persons act and vowed not to grant him bail.

The Magistrate reasoned that if he was granted bail, he would go back home and continue the same act or even kill his parents.

The prosecutor in the case, Violet Soyemi had earlier told the court that the accused committed the offence on November 4, 2016, at Agbanbe Street, Evbotubo Quarters, Benin.

The accused who pleaded not guilty to the two-count charge leveled against him, was however happy that he was going to prison as he was heard telling his girlfriend who accompanied him to the court:

I am happy going to the prison and will see you on the next adjourned date.
Punch reports that Tajudeen was stabbed to death by one Abeeb, a notorious hoodlum in Ilaje Otumara, in the Iponri area of Lagos State, on Monday, November 7, 2016, after the assailant alleged that he (Tajudeen) had gate crashed a party the previous Saturday without being invited.

It was learned that the Ilorin, Kwara State-born Tajudeen, was trailed to his house by Abeeb and other hoodlums who wanted to punished him for daring to gatecrash their party.

The incident, it was also learned, created serious tension in the area as the hoodlums also injured two other youths before fleeing the community while the matter was reported at the Iponri Police Division who has declared the runaway Abeeb.

His parents are also said to have fled the area to evade arrest by the police.

A resident narrated that Tajudeen's offense was that he attended a birthday party in a gangsters area.

The party Akeem and his friends went for was on Saturday in Olokodana. At the party, Abeeb, one Austin and other hoodlums challenged them for attending the birthday party, but they settled it and left.

But on Monday, the same Abeeb went to Ilaje Otumara and started a fight with some boys.

Akeem was spotted and Abeeb stabbed him with a knife in the chest, saying he gate crashed their party on Saturday. The boy slumped and was left in a pool of blood.

We tried to arrest Abeeb, but he stabbed two other youths before he escaped. When policemen from Iponri came, Abeeb and his gang members had escaped from the scene. His parents have also relocated due to fear of arrest.
The Winnipeg Police Service reports that the 26-year-old Nigerian, Michael Ose Odine, has been running a marketing scam that was targeting people on the Internet through false advertisements.

A statement by Constable Jason Michalyshen of the WPS reads:

He would go online, he would respond to ads. He would place ads, where individuals would respond to him. WPS's investigations revealed that the suspects communication typically occurred by email and text messages."

Constable Michalyshen explained further that the online advertisements were about romance, employment and rental scams and the victims were from a number of places across Canada, the United States, and Europe, and were defrauded of more than $230,000 by Odine.
People sometimes believe that localisation drives up costs, but thats not true. We have to understand the obstacles that contribute to the increase in costs. One of the obstacles in Nigeria, for example, is the erratic supply of electricity which affects local manufacturing. There are also issues in the region around taxation, fiscal regimes and import, export costs that add to the overall project costs, said Oseragbaje, who believes that addressing these structural issues will have a positive impact on overall project costs.

GEs philosophy is that localisation is worth investing in. This thinking has seen the complexity of supply chains reduced, costs of transporting parts decreased and the creation of jobs having a positive impact on local economies. GE recently built locomotives in South Africa and given that a high percentage of the leadership team was made up of business leaders from the SSA region, this proved that localisation was having a positive impact on the development of skills in Africa.

We have to start somewhere and if we dont, then 30 years from now, well still be having the same conversation. There will be marginal increases in cost as you try ramp up, but thereafter, you would have built up sufficient competency to compete on a global scale, said Oseragbaje.

GE manufactures its Subsea Christmas Trees, which are used for shallow water and deep water oil drilling, in Aberdeen, Brazil, Luanda, Australia and in Onne, Nigeria. Onne is one of five places in the world where we are able to do this. It took us about two-and-a-half years to build this capability in Nigeria. We went ahead and made the investment, and the next step is that we get to a point where we can bring trees from other countries and refurbish them in-country for Nigeria, said Oseragbaje.

GE considers SSA to be one of the fastest growing regions, which has significant opportunities for the development of products and services across its energy sectors.

From a resource perspective, Nigeria and Angola are considered to be two of the most interesting places on the continent due to their significant resource bases. The challenge is to create the right enabling environments that allows companies to get excited about investing in these countries. All industry players have to work together to come up with models that bring development costs down, but which also ensure that projects are still viable.
We scrambled in the dark to look for the problem, said Shantnu Mathuria, a GE Power employee who had trekked to the isolated spot in Northern India to bring electricity to the people of Rakuru. They found one loose contact and then tried it again. This time the room lit up with bright light. The people were hugging each other and dancing, said Shivani Saklani, a GE Power project management specialist who also made the journey. The experience was so powerful it made me cry.

Perched like a snow pigeons nest 13,000 feet high on the granite flanks of the Karakoram Range, Rakuru consists of eight stone homes surrounded by fields of wild flowers, barley and green peas sustaining approximately 70 villagers. But since this summer, its also a beacon of light shining across the stark, treeless landscape.

Saklani and Mathuria were part of an eight-member expedition dispatched by GE Power and Global Himalayan Expedition (GHE) in late summer to electrify Rakuru. People want to be working on significant things that leave a lasting impact, said Ricky Buch, a GE Power senior marketing leader who helped organise the trip and recruit Saklani and her colleagues. We tapped into that desire.

Electricity is a basic human right, says GEs Ricky Buch. He helped organize the trip that brought power to people living in the remote Indian village of Rakuru. Image credit: GE Power

The journey to electrify Rakuru started seven months earlier in a different mountain oasis half a world away. GE Power President and CEO Steve Bolze and other GE leaders were at the World Economic Forums annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, when he sat down with GHEs Jaideep Bansal to discuss their shared belief that electricity is a basic human right and their desire to collaborate to bring power to people without access and in the most remote locations in the world. As a result, GE Power and GHE plan to electrify a total of 10 villages throughout the Himalayas.Starting just a few weeks before the late-July trek, GE Power put out a call to local employees and asked them to apply for the first trip to Rakuru. Employees from all over India applied for the eight available spots. We were looking for passion and an excitement to contribute, said Buch.

The team gathered in the capital and boarded a plane bound for the medieval mountain city of Leh. Surrounded by snow-capped mountains, they spent two days in the city hydrating, sleeping and getting used to the altitude, and also to each other. We were from all over India, Saklani said. Most of us met for the first time. She remembers sitting around a bonfire and watching shooting stars streaking over the black sky above. It was pitch dark at night, and the Milky Way stretched overhead, she said. It was an amazing sight.

Two days later the team loaded a white minibus with their equipment and gear and piled inside. They climbed along a narrow winding road to the Khardung La pass  at 17,582 feet one of the worlds highest highway passes  and then dropped 6,000 blood-curdling feet along tight turns to the village of Skuru in the Nubra Valley, their basecamp. Rakuru was nestled in the clouds some 3,000 feet above them and 8 miles away.

The next morning the team woke up in the dark and met with their mountain guides. They arrived with a pair of donkeys and a dzo  a cross between yak and cattle  that would carry some 200 pounds of baggage as well as all of the equipment needed to electrify the village.

When they set out at 5:30 a.m., the temperature was hovering just above freezing, but the sky was clear and besotted with stars. After the first gentle incline, the narrow, rocky path started alternating between steep climbs and drop-offs. You had to pay attention to your every step, Mathuria said. In some places the path was just one and a half feet wide. One false step and you end up in a deep valley. Saklani said the guides taught her to meditate as she was walking and focus on the moment, not the far-off destination. There was a cool breeze blowing in our faces. I spent a lot of time inside my head, reflecting on life and where I came from.

The exhausted trekkers reached Rakuru more than 10 hours later. The villagers were waiting for them outside with kataks  ceremonial silk prayer scarves  yak butter and cups of chang, the local milky beer-like beverage made from fermented barley. But since it was getting dark and it was freezing, they went inside and tucked in for the night.

The next morning the team got up early and used a translator to explain to the villagers  many of whom only spoke the local Ladakhi language  what exactly they would be doing. They started by installing two grids in the village and a third one stretching to a home occupied by an 81-year-old woman, one of the oldest Rakuru residents. They divided themselves into groups. One team was stretching wires, another was installing solar panels and batteries, and yet another was hammering sockets into wooden beams supporting the roof. The houses had eight to 10 rooms, and they had to make sure there would be enough light in each.

After they overcame the wiring mishap, the party trekked to the house of the 81-year-old woman, who had never experienced electricity in her life, and turned the lights on for her. This lady stole the show, Saklani said. She snuffed out her candle and gave us her blessings. We were tired, but our work was finished. We illuminated the whole village.
There were fireworks at the Supreme Court yesterday when the infamous Alfred Agbesi Woyome case came up for hearing.

WOYOME PAYS GH TO STATE

Businessman Alfred Agbesi Woyome has refunded GH4 million to state coffers, representing part payment of the GH51.2 million he owes the state.

OBINIM CHARGED WITH PHYSICAL ABUSE OF 2 TEENAGERS

The leader of the International Gods Way Church, Bishop Daniel Obinim, and two of his pastors, were yesterday granted bail by the Accra Circuit Court for allegedly abusing two teenagers during a church service.

POLITICAL PARTIES PUT SPIN ON POSITIONS ON BALLOT

Hours after the EC conducted balloting for positions on the presidential ballot paper for the upcoming elections, some key political parties have taken advantage of their positions to do vigorous campaigning across the country.

CHILDHOOD DIABETES ON THE RISE

More than three million Ghanaians are currently living with diabetes, the President of the National Diabetes Association of Ghana, Mrs Elizabeth Esi Denyoh, has said.

Wa Central falls for Nduom

Obinim charged for assault

SPIRITS MADE ME STEAL BABY  WOMAN, 20, CONFESSES

A young unemployed woman, who claimed to be at war with her family shrine for a baby to serve as a fetish priestess, is blaming the gods for plunging her onto the wrong side of the law.

ALL NOW SET FOR DEC 7 POLLS  EC
In fact, Mr President, I look you in the face and tell you that her appointment is the worst mistake so far, Ayariga fumed at the press conference.

The EC disqualified Ayariga for the second time after he filed his nominations again because he did not meet the standard. But Ayariga accused the EC chair of targeting him unfairly.

He said that was the reason Mrs Osei claimed that Hassan Ayariga will not win the elections during an address in the UK.

Even though he hinted of a possible court action earlier he said he would not want frustrate the election process which has already been beleaguered with a number of court cases.
This was revealed by the Central Regional Director of the EC, Mrs Philomena Adusei.

She explained that the list of voters given to the EC in the region for instance had some names of electorates who were to vote in other regions.

She said there will be consequences for voters whose names have appeared in the special voting list in a different region instead of where they are expected to vote.

READ ALSO: EC to allow TV cameras in collation centre

Mrs Adusei was speaking at a meeting at the Central Regional Coordinating Council in Cape Coast on Thursday.

Mrs Adusei said most of the people whose names are on the list are security personnel.

She explained that the error might have occurred because the security agencies might not have indicated where each voter would vote.

She said the EC had reached some of the affected voters to rectify the situation but some could not be reached.
This is despite the challenges faced by the party her husband is leading into the presidential race.

Speaking on Accra-based Starr FM Mrs Yvonne Nduom said I dont have any reason to doubt her. I trust she will do good.

She said she believed Mrs Charlotte Osei will exhibit much integrity during the elections because she (Mrs Osei) has often said she needs to have extra powers to be able to rig the elections.

READ ALSO: Mrs Nduom jubilates after court ruling

Mrs Yvonne Nduom also encouraged Ghanaian electorates to make a bold decision and vote for her husband, Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom.
Mahama as part of his tour is expected to inaugurate two Community Day Senior High Schools at Frafraha and Kwabenya respectively.

The President is also expected to inaugurate the Gold Coast Refinery.

Read more:Mahama campaigns in Ashanti region

The inauguration of the Gold Coast Refinery is expected to create many direct and indirect jobs for the youth while the commissioning of the Community Day Schools adds up to efforts to ensure Accessible, Affordable and Quality education for Ghanaians.

He will also call on Chiefs and people of the region, inspect and inaugurate some projects.

See also: Mahama campaigns at Kyebi

He will interact with traders and drivers at Tema Community one market and address party supporters at Kwasia Dwaso.
Nana Addo was speaking when he paid a courtesy call on the Omanhene of Kenyasi Number Two, Odeneho Bediako Nsiah Ababio in the Brong Ahafo Region.

He encouraged the electorates to desist from skirt and blouse style of voting. He asked them to vote for the NPP parliamentary candidates as they also voted for him.

READ ALSO: EC should have resorted to dialogue than go to court
According to him, "I was telling the congregation of a revelation that I had a year ago pointing to the fact that the NPP is gaining root in Ghana now because in the spiritual realm they are more in numbers than NDC. So I showed them a classical example right in the Church by calling out all NDC members to stand on their feet. When I counted them, they were 44 out of the over 5000 members of my church. And I asked NPP members to also stand, and it confirmed it all."

Read more:Florence Obinim defends husband Bishop Obinim

However, speaking on Accra-based Kasapa FM, Bishop Obinim said he was misquoted and said he rather asked his congregation to pray for a peaceful election.

He said in the spiritual realm; "the New Patriotic Party is 100% whiles the National Democratic Congress is 60%. So, if we are going to vote freely and fairly and the EC will be truthful who do you think will win," the man of God asked rhetorically.

But Obinim dismissed reports in the media suggesting that he predicted victory for the NPP flagbearer.

See also:Bishop Obinim charged with assault

"That was what God revealed to me a year ago and periodically Ive been reviewing it and still the NPP out numbers the NDC and so what I said was that all things being equal, if the situation remains unchanged and it is reflecting more in the physical as we approach this elections, then, NPP is more likely to win the elections. However, in my speech I strategically used the word but to indicate that things can also change."
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!
This is coming just a few days after the election where the eccentric billionaire business mogul narrowly defeated Senator Hillary Clinton who had been globally tipped to win.

To key into the victory of Trump, Ale, the Chief Executive Officer of Male Integrated Nigeria Limited, a company with interest in water engineering as well as oil and gas, decided to identify with the man he describes as the best thing to happen in America.

In the advertorial, Ale, who is an engineer and the National President of the Association of Water Well Drilling Rig Owners and Practitioner (AWDROP), wrote:

"Mr. Donald Trump, the 45th : Words alone cannot express the shock in the face of the world at your recent victory in the election.

Mr. President-Elect, you look so controversial and highly disdained by your critics.

Mr. President-Elect, you expressed your mind freely in what you believed for the Americans, but you were termed racist.

Mr. President-Elect, you have made a clarion call to the world leaders to put their people first in their heart before anything.

Mr. President-Elect, am intrigued by the recent wave and surprises the world is experiencing. Your victory shows a part of characteristics of Water to be turbulent.

Mr. President-Elect, as a wrestling fan, watching you shave WWE owner hair after victory on the ringside, shows the presidential victory, confirming your spirit of doggedness, hope, and ruggedness.

Mr. President-Elect, your victory is a global revolution."

Ale also added that Male Integrated is rolling out Water for Trump's victory with the commencement of sinking 10 boreholes in each of the 36 states of Nigeria.
The man identified simply as Fabian was apprehended by members of the Otukpo vigilante on Friday, November 11, Daily Post reports.

ALSO READ: Father of 8 arrested for stealing yam tubers in Niger

Fabian admitted to the crime while pleading for forgiveness, and added that he only committed the crime in order to feed his family.

He claimed that his family had had nothing to eat in the last two days as a result of his joblessness.

Fabian said he has been unable to secure a job due to the current economic crisis in the nation.
The suspect, a member of a syndicate operating in the Dopemu area of the state, was said to have been nabbed after a victim reported their activities to the police.

Punch reports that the Ibadan Oyo State-born Simon, was arrested on Thursday, November 10, 2016, by the Dopemu Police Division, following complaints of swindling the victim of the sum of N150,000, while her accomplices slipped from the police.

A police source at the Dopemu Police Division narrated that Simon and members of her gang posed as prophets who gave fake prophecies to unsuspecting victims and in the process, dupe them of their money.

In her statement, she confessed that the syndicates mode of operation was to lurk around bank premises, while her role was to accost a bank customer suspected to be with money.

The suspect explained that she would pretend that she was new in Lagos and asked for direction from the victim.

Simon would subsequently make shocking spiritual revelations about her victim, after which she would advise that a special prayer must be offered for the victim.

The next move was to take the victim to a nearby place where the three other accomplices were waiting and they would replace the money withdrawn by the victim with disposable papers, covered with a few naira notes.

A man who the suspect tried to swindle on Thursday of N150,000 raised the alarm, and a police patrol team in the area apprehended Simon.
The student of a polytechnic in the state, Mr Fatai Olasile, bagged the sentence for his secret cult membership and involvement in cult-related activities.

ALSO READ: 4 suspected cultists remanded in prison for murder

The case which was presided over by Justice Sikiru Oyinloye, on Wednesday, November 9, saw Olasile sentenced for unlawful possession of a locally-made pistol, punishable under Section 3 (1) of the Robbery and Firearms Act, 2004, Punch reports.

Olasile was docked on two counts bordering on belonging to cult contrary to Section 2 of Secret Cult and Secret Societies Law of Kwara State.

In the same vein, another person, Mohammed Kehinde, along with two others were arraigned on three counts of criminal conspiracy, initiation of new members to secret cult and membership of the secret cult.

Olasile was found guilty and convicted after the prosecution team, led by the Kwara State Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Kamaldeen Ajibade, called three witnesses who tendered exhibits proving the case.

Oyinloye sentenced the first and second to 10 years imprisonment each with a fine of N50,000.
Nonyelu, who resides at No. 57, Okito St., Ajegunle in Apapa area of Lagos, is facing trial on a two-count charge of stealing and issuance of a dud cheque.

The prosecutor, Sgt. Innocent Odugbo, said that sometime in 2009, at Awolowo Way, Ikeja, Lagos, the accused stole a Nissan Pathfinder Jeep worth N1.7 million belonging to Mrs Doris Waheed.

Odugbo said that on Sept.9, 2011 at Ojodu, Lagos, the accused issued a Bank PHB cheque No. 40709338 of N1.4 million to Mr Alfred Chine on behalf of Mrs Waheed.

The prosecutor said that the cheque was dishonoured on presentation at the bank due to insufficient fund in the accuseds account.

Odugbo said that the alleged offence contravened Sections 285 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State and Section 1 (1) B (1) of the Dishonoured Cheque Act, Cap 102, Laws of the Federation 2004.

Nonyelu pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The Magistrate, Mr S.B. Bakare then granted him bail in the sum of N300, 000 with two sureties in like sum.

Bakare said that the sureties must be resident in Lagos.
The accused are 44-year old Felix Oghenero, an unemployed; John Mapamilekun, 22, a barber and Dare Jimoh, 20, a security guard.

The accused persons, who reside at Ishawo area of Ikorodu, a suburb of Lagos, are being tried for conspiracy and breach of peace.

The prosecutor, Sgt. Donjor Perezi, told the court that the offences were committed midnight of July 31, at Owutu area of Ikorodu, Lagos state.

Perezi said that a police patrol team intercepted the accused who could not give reasonable explanation of their mission at that hour.

He said the offences contravened Sections 166(1) and 409 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2011.

The accused, however, pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The Chief Magistrate, Mrs O. A Layinka granted each of the accused N50,000 bail.
The spokesperson for the command, Ogbonnaya Nta, made the disclosure while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Umuahia on Thursday, November 10.

ALSO READ: Former LG councillor beheaded in Rivers State

According to Nta, the deceased identified as Onyemaechi, who was a member of the staff of Isialangwa North Local Government, the venue of the election which took place on Wednesday, November 9, died in a fire at the Chairmans office.

NAN reports that the deceased died in the office fire set by aggrieved delegates. Nta said that the command arrested four persons in connection with the fracas.

According to eyewitness accounts, trouble began when some delegates who showed up at the council headquarters in Okpuala-Ngwa for the poll, rejected the list presented by the partys officials that conducted the exercise.

NAN reports that the group threatened to disrupt the exercise claiming that the list was doctored in favour of a particular aspirant.

The agitation reportedly caused tension and confusion at the venue.

An eyewitness said that in the midst of the crisis, someone sneaked into the chairman's office with a can of petrol and set it ablaze.

Somebody sneaked into the chairmans office with a jerry can of petrol and set the place ablaze.

The intention was to burn the disputed list, the account said, adding that the fire escalated, and killed one person on the spot.

ALSO READ: 2 brothers killed while scrambling for political campaign gifts

Nta also revealed that three other persons who were in the office sustained severe burns and were rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment.

According to him, the command has begun an investigation into the case.
Punch reports that the victim, Musa Lawal, just stepped out of a bank when the gunmen hustled him into a waiting vehicle and drove off.

ALSO READ: Soldiers arrested for kidnapping businessman in Rivers

According to an eyewitness who identified himself as Emma Abang, the incident took place at about 10 a.m in the presence of security officials at the bank.

The army officer was kidnapped in front of one of the popular banks along Calabar Road after he had finished his transactions.

It was not clear whether they kidnapped him because of the transaction he went to carry out, but they just whisked him into their vehicle and zoomed off. They took him to an unknown destination, he said.

Punch reports that a security operative, who pleaded anonymity, confirmed the kidnap.
The memoir will be out on Monday, November 28, 2016, and fans will get the chance to know the real Toke Makinwa, from bubbly child to lonely teenager after the devastating loss of both her parents and now one of Nigerias most successful media personalities.

She also breaks her silence on the marriage scandal and how it changed her life, finding forgiveness and strengthening her faith in God.

Now, it's no news Toke Makinwa is one of the biggest media personalities in Nigeria but is she big enough to release a book?

Her critics will say she is reaching and no one will be interested in her book. Do not forget that Toke Makinwa has an army of haters whose duty is to drag her at every chance. To Toke's haters, her memoir is just a PR attempt to make her look bigger than what she is.

Yes, Toke Makinwa has haters no doubt but most importantly she has an army of supporters, lovers and fans who are ready to die for her at any given moment.

You have to understand that Toke Makinwa's vlog has played a huge part in her rise to fame. On a weekly basis, the on-air-personality talks about love and relationships from an unapologetic female perspective. Her opinions are unabashedly pro-feminine and that is what has made her vlog series a huge hit among women of her age bracket.

ALSO READ: 5 reasons we love Toke Makinwa

Also, Toke Makinwa's colourful love life has made her more relatable to women with the same issues. Her love life has not been squeaky clean and that has attracted her to women who have the same issues. These women prefer the scarred love life of Toke Makinwa than the PR-polished images of female celebs.

The women with love issues, who are looking up to God for bae are the ones who are going to buy Toke Makinwa's book. Her army of loyalists will buy her book and make it a success.
Mr Dennis Mordi, the IHVN Communications Manager, quoted the institutes Senior Programme Officer, Strategic Information, Mr Charles Ohikhaui, saying this in a statement issued on Friday in Abuja.

Ohikhaui stated that the annual operational plan would also guide the prevention and treatment of malaria in the state in 2017.

According to him, the plan is an outcome of a five-day stakeholders workshop on the fight against malaria in the state.

The workshop brought together stakeholders to develop the plan that is state-driven and not dependent on donors like Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and malaria.

I hope that the commitment they have shown in the past five days will be continued throughout the implementation.

"The plan is to be state funded and the stakeholders have made inputs on activities they want to do, he said.

Mordi also quoted the State Director of Public Health, Dr Umar Bulangu, as saying that the 2016 plan was concluded within the workshop period unlike previous years.

This will reduce the problem we have been facing about non-implementation of many activities due to late dissemination.

We are following the strategic plan to eliminate malaria by 2020 and we have to create activities that will help us to achieve the objectives of that strategic plan, Bulangu said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop was attended by officials of Jigawa Ministry of Health and staff from the National Malaria Elimination Programme (NMEP).
According to the WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the fight against measles is being hindered by a lack of political will to get every child immunized against the disease.

Without this commitment, children will continue to die from a disease that is easy and cheap to prevent, UNICEF's head of immunization, Robin Nandy said according to Reuters.

The organizations however noted that deaths from measles had fallen by 79 percent worldwide since 2000 mainly due to mass vaccination campaigns.
Sagay also criticized Justices Sylvester Ngwuta and John Okoro of the Supreme Court for accusing Amaechi of bribery instead of defending themselves against corruption allegations.

Two Justices of the Supreme Court affected by the DSS raids of October 8, 2016, have been quoted as stating that Minister of Transportation, Mr. Amaechi, once attempted to induce them to favour the APC in an election petition," Sagay said.

This outburst by the two Justices is surprising, considering that it is totally unrelated to the raids of their premises, their arrest and subsequent charges before our courts. Men of that status should not indulge in such diversionary activities in the midst of grave and ominous charges facing them.

I would have thought that they would use the time at their disposal to prepare their defences against the serious charges they are facing. In any case, given their statuses as Supreme Court Justices, even in the middle of the adversity confronting them, they should not have engaged in a distraction totally incompatible with the dignity and respect that their high offices attract.

It is demeaning for them to abandon their legitimate defence in order to smear a high official of the Buhari government, whom they probably considered to be the source of their predicaments. Mere allegations cannot have enough weight to affect the position of such a high official as Amaechi, otherwise knowing the disposition of Nigerians for putting people down, no office holder will be safe in this country.

It is, therefore, improper and ridiculous to compare the position of the Justices in whose houses millions of naira and hundreds of thousands of dollars were recovered, to that of Amaechi against whom there is only the mere (ipse dixit) words of mouth of the judges.

This sudden anti-Amaechi narrative is consistent with the objectives and interests of the chief promoters and funders of judicial corruption during election petitions.

These allegations are intended to undermine and weaken the Buhari Federal Government, by depriving it of the service, input, ideas and productivity of some of its brightest stars. This is intended to set the stage for charging the government with ineffectiveness and cluelessness.

In other words, it is an attempt to reduce the image and perception of this Federal Government to the low level of their own late and unlamented government. Therefore, the call for Amaechi to step down is malicious and vindictive. It should be ignored with complete ignominy, he added.
Ambode disclosed this at the opening of a two-day Lagos Food Security Summit and Exhibition organised by the states ministry of agriculture.

The summit had the theme: Actualising Sustainable Food Security in Lagos State: A New Comprehensive Agenda.

The figure of food items consumed daily indicates that the investment climate in the state is bright.

Investors are guaranteed a profitable return as the state is the largest consumer of food commodities in the country.

This is, therefore, a call for huge public and private sector investments in the agricultural sector to ensure food security and create employment opportunities for the youths, Ambode said.

According to him, some areas of investment opportunities in the states agricultural sector include modern abattoirs; agro processing for export, storage facilities, dairy farming, and livestock feeds production.

He said his administrations core policy was geared toward achieving food security to maximise the states comparative advantage in agriculture and establish partnerships with other states.

One of the challenges the current economic recession has brought to the fore is the urgent need to develop a sustainable programme that will guarantee food security for our people.

Our country is blessed with very good arable land and climate that supports food production.

We need to review and redirect our energies to food production, rather than spend billions of foreign exchange on importation of food and food items that can be cultivated in our country.

This summit will help proffer solutions to the challenges militating against the achievement of food security and explore various investment opportunities in agriculture and agro-allied business in the state.

These solutions will help stimulate private investment in the sector so that we can feed our nation and our people without resorting to importation, he said.

Also speaking, Alhaji Sani Dangote, Chairman of the summit, advised the state government to rename the agriculture ministry the ministry of agri-business.

Dangote said that agriculture was a profitable business and was not only about poverty alleviation, as popularly viewed by Nigerians.

According to him, there cannot be any development where there is no food security in any given nation.

Nigeria can grow its economy and increase its GDP, if agriculture is adequately given the attention it requires.

Im happy that the Lagos State Government recognised the place of agriculture and is already working in that direction, Dangote said.

A Department for International Development (DFID-Nigeria) official, Mr John Woodruf, said the agricultural sector remained a key sector that should be given adequate attention by the Nigerian government.

Woodruf is the acting Deputy Director, DFID-Nigeria Development for International Trade.

The UK Government recognises the great potentials of agriculture in Nigeria as a positive contribution to its economy.

I urge you to import less and produce your foods.

The UK government is ready to assist you to take this forward in ensuring food security and sustainability in Lagos and Nigeria as a whole, he said.

In his address, Mr Oluwatoyin Suarau, Commissioner for Agriculture, said the state government was taking proactive steps, as the issue of food security had been attracting global attention.

Suarau said the government was creating the enabling environment, providing adequate infrastructure and evolving policies to improve food production, food security and alleviate poverty.

In his remarks, Mr Sanni Okanlawon, Special Adviser to Gov. Ambode on Food Security, said the summit was to review and discuss ways of ensuring food security in the state.
The President made the pledge when he received the Executive Secretary of the Gulf of Guinea Commission, Mrs Florentina Adenike Ukonga, at the State House, Abuja.

Buhari said that the Commission was of strategic importance, as most of the crude oil siphoned from Nigeria was taken through the Gulf of Guinea.

The region between Senegal and Angola affects our financial and physical security as a country.

Nigeria will, therefore, meet all its obligations to the Gulf of Guinea Commission, and also encourage other member countries to do same.

This administration will do its best to strengthen maritime security," he said.

According to the President, the rejuvenation of the Gulf of Guinea Commission is vital, and Nigeria will participate more effectively because of the security implications.

In her remarks, Ukonga disclosed that the Commission was established in 2001 to tackle piracy, unregulated fishing, drugs and human trafficking, environmental pollution, among others.

She said that the Gulf of Guinea Commission, with headquarters in Luanda, Angola, also generates awareness among member states on the need to maintain security in their territorial waters.

We have been giving the bad guys in maritime a run for their money, she added.
Wike also criticized the government for forcing some corrupt officials to resign while pardoning those who are members of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

He made the comments on Thursday, November 10, while delivering a speech at the 2016 annual conference of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, in Port Harcourt.

We think the Federal Government must hold every public officer and everyone of us to the same standards of accountability, Wike said according to Punch.

It smacks of double standard for the Federal Government to force some public officers accused of corruption to step aside pending the conclusion of their cases, while keeping other public officers similarly accused in their public posts simply because they happen to be top members of the ruling party. Such inequities strike at the very essence of our moral values and rubbish the demand for character and personal integrity in public service.

By resigning from his public position on account of the allegations of bribery against him, Muiz Banire (SAN), a former legal adviser of the All Progressives Congress, has proven to be a man who loves his character more than anything else.

Let all those public officers with the smear of corruption step aside honourably and concentrate on clearing their names. We totally support our Presidents fight against corruption. However, we are on our way to anarchy if we encourage or allow law enforcement agencies the latitude to abuse the fundamental rights of our citizens under the guise of fighting corruption, he added.

Wike has repeatedly accused his predecessor, Rotimi Amaechi, who is an APC member, of corruption.
The forces that propelled Trump to the Presidency were evident in the U.K in June when 52 percent of the population voted to exit the European Union.

No one saw the Brexiteers coming until the U.K was left standing alone.

Those same forces catapulted UK Independence Party leader, Nigel Farage, into the poster child for a radical anti-establishment unit.

ALSO READ: Why Christians voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton

After Trumps shock win in the U.S presidential contest, pollsters and pundits in France served notice that a Marine Le Pen Presidency in 2017 is now more feasible than first thought.

Far right leader, Le Pen, is at the point where Trump was, before the party primaries commenced in the U.S.

The establishment in France has laughed off her candidacy, but if recent history is anything to go by, they should begin to take her seriously.

According to Reuters:On Wednesday morning, many French politicians warned the possibility of a president Marine Le Pen should no longer be dismissed as the stuff of political fiction.

"Reason no longer prevails since Brexit. Mrs Le Pen can win in France," former said.

Socialist party chief tweeted: "The left has been warned! If we continue with irresponsible squabbling, we'll get Marine Le Pen."

Le Pen was quick to congratulate Trump on Wednesday, saying his win was part of a much wider revolt by voters against political elites worldwide.

Anti-establishment sentiments are also taking a foothold in Germany and much of Europe.

This, it appears, is the era of the demagogue and the populist. They often start out with unpopular ideologies, before becoming the toast of disenchanted voters.

Will those forces of change, voter revolt and anti-establishment, ever berth in Nigeria with the 2019 presidential election drawing ever so close?

Nigeria is a peculiar country, though. Establishment forces in Africas most populous country have gone nowhere since the country gained Independence in 1960. Theyve swapped Military fatigues for the Babariga (a traditional Nigerian outfit); and have staged returns to the Palace as converted democrats.

Its been a recycled mess for Nigerians.

Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari transformed from military dictators to democratically elected Presidents.

Between retired Generals and an ageing political class, Nigeria has remained mired in poverty and underdevelopment since it emerged from under the shadows of the colonial masters.

However, it will be foolhardy to dismiss the Trump effect in Nigeria so soon. In 2015, Buhari swept to the Presidency on the crest wave of change. It was his fourth time of asking.

The PDP which had governed Nigeria since the countrys return to democracy in 1999, never saw it coming. At the height of its power drunken state, PDP leaders took turns to boast that their party will govern Nigeria for 60 years.

They were booted out after 16 years, by angry voters.

The millennials are becoming a powerful voting bloc in Nigeriamore than 50 percent of the countrys population is aged 35 years and under.

But voter apathy is still prevalent among this upwardly mobile generation and the emerging middle class; owing to distrust of government and the establishment.

In rural Nigeria, the stomach infrastructure phenomenon is still a thing and voters remain largely unenlightened.

Will Nigerians finally revolt and elect an outsider in 2019 like the U.S and much of the West is doing?

Dont bet on that happening just yet.

However, you can bet on the fact that shaking up and displacing the old order has become the new global currency. Its a phenomenon that wont be going anywhere soon.

The most despised and unfancied political candidates will be enjoying their rise to the top in a dynamic and unpredictable political climate; by preying on people's fears and prejudices.

Just look at Trump.

He was the outsider candidate voters eventually entrusted with the responsibility of leading the most powerful country in the world.

Hillary Clinton's long years in public service was her biggest sin.

A year ago, we were all laughing at the possibility of a Trump Presidency. He was the joker in the pack, we sneered, until he became the only man standing from the GOP primary.

The media wrote him off and despised him.

The joke is now on us.
In the last decade or so, we experienced growth in the region of about seven, seven and a half, eight percent, but the commentary that followed those growth records was that people were still struggling, and ultimately, the public coined a narrative known as non-inclusive growth, he said according to The Cable.

There is a need to invest in infrastructure, and that is the meat of the point. That is the globally tested parameter for driving growth. In the science of economic management and governance, nobody has found a different way.

I say this in the context of those who are tempted to lay some claim to any form of credit about why our economy was growing at seven percent for almost a decade, and I say very very clearly, without mincing words, that I dont that anybody can fairly lay claim to any economic policy that drove that growth.

It was growth that was driven by high oil prices. If we agree that infrastructure is the driver of growth, when you get high oil prices, what do you do with it? So, where are those towers, where are those bridges, where are those highways?

It is fair to concede some initiatives, especially in the same sector in the petroleum industry, about promoting local content, but how far did local content go? It wasnt in the productive part of oil, the rigs were not locally made, and all the technology wasnt local, he added.
The Managing Director of NPA, Ms Hadiza Usman, who stated this on Thursday during a tour of Warri Port, described the story of retrenchment as a rumour.

Usman said rather than the NPA retrenching staff, management would recruit more staff.

She said that the management had tasked the General Manager, Human Resources, to bring up ideas on succession plan of the organisation.

Usman said the management has introduced performance-based appraisal whereby every personnel would be appraised based on his or her performance,

The managing director said that the management would take remedial measures so as not to allow ships to be grounded at the Escravos breakwaters due to high siltation.

She suggested that emergency remedial measures should be put in place to ensure that no vessel runs aground at the Escravos breakwaters.

The Port Manager of Warri Port, Mr Simeon Okeke, had highlighted the dangers posed by the breakwaters and the channels leading to the port due to high siltation.

He said that in the absence of vital buoys, it has become impossible to navigate, adding that a number of times, vessels went aground.

The port manager also lamented that the right vessels were not coming into Warri Port because of the shallow nature of the berths.

Okeke suggested dredging and mooring of the channels of Warri Port as well as the removal of wrecks.

He said that more manpower should be recruited into the various departments.

The port manager also talked about the problem of encroachment of port land and litigations.

Okeke said there should be a review of port tariffs and restructuring of the port.

The port needs intensive promotion to give the correct image as well as the complete rehabilitation of the facilities in the port, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) quotes him as saying.

The Chairman of the Board of NPA, Mr Emmanuel Adesoye, said that NPA should carry out Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) .

Adesoye urged the management to do physical development of the communities around them.

The Chairman, Maritime Workers Union, Mr Monday Ihembe, said that the dredging of the Warri Port to accommodate bigger vessels was very important.

There should be provision of operational vehicles to monitor operations of jetties, NAN quotes Ihembe as saying.

During a courtesy visit by the Management of NPA, the Olu of Warri, Ogiame Ikenwoli, urged the Federal Government to make Warri and Koko ports to work so that there would be jobs for the restive youths.

Employ our youths and restiveness will be a thing of the past.

Do your best for us so that our youths can be gainfully employed. Lagos ports are overflowing, while ports here are under-utilised.

ALSO READ:Usman announces plan to audit funds for dredging

"It is my heartfelt desire that if this is achieved, myself and the whole Warri kingdom will be very grateful, the Ogiame said.
President of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki, made the threat when members of Leather and Allied Products Manufacturers Association of Abia State (LEAPMAAS) visited him in Abuja.

He charged chairmen of all standing committees of the senate to ensure that MDAs comply with the law on patronage of local manufacturers in the course of oversight functions of the committees.

Saraki challenged all military and para-military agencies in the country to emulate the Army by procuring items like booths and other needs locally.

He said that the Federal Government spent more than N2 trillion annually on the procurement of goods.

He stated that the upper chamber was determined to ensure that a large chunk of the funds on procurement went into the coffers of Nigerian manufacturers.

The president of the senate advised local manufacturers to petition the red chamber whenever any government agency denied them patronage.

He said that the senate would bring erring MDAs to book.

I commend you for your determination and creativity. Today, we have made it a national project.

I also promise that we will amend the existing law to give your efforts a solid legal backing that will ensure patronage for your products and that of other local manufacturers.

This has also been done with the amendment of the Public Procurement Act.

I have a promise from the House of Representatives that they will soon pass the same bill, Saraki said.

He also said I also commend your persistence such that over the years you have been there, giving your support to the growth of the economy.

With little or no assistance, you continued to demonstrate that you have the capacity to produce different high quality goods for the use of Nigerians.

This is a very big agenda that we are promoting. I want to thank my colleagues and let me remind you that we have kept our promises, so you should not disappoint us.

You must improve on the quality of the goods.

On our own part, this is an agenda we believe in; we will continue to support you.

ALSO READ:
Two of the bombs subsequently exploded killing all three women instantly.

The incident has been confirmed by police spokesman in the state, Victor Isuku to Premium Times.

This morning at about 0530hrs, three (3) female suicide bombers with IED strapped to their bodies were sighted by military patrol team in Umarari village, near Mulai towards Maiduguri, he said.

They were promptly gun down and the IED on two of them exploded killing all three of them. The unexploded IED on the third was rendered safe and detonated by Police bomb disposal Unit who promptly mobilized to the scene, he added.

Soldiers in Maiduguri had recently also stopped an impending attack by shooting a male suicide bomber at the Bakassi IDP camp.

ALSO READ: 2 suicide bombers kill at least 9 in IDP camp
Dikko gave the figure on Friday at the Nasarawa Prisons, Nasarawa Local Government Area, while briefing newsmen at the end of his four-day tour of prison formations across the state.

Dikko said that out of the 23, nine were from Lafia Prison, two from Wamba Prison, eight from Keffi Prison and four from Nasarawa Prisons.

He said that the routine prison visit was part of his duties aimed at decongesting prisons in the state and ensuring justice to inmates wrongly detained.

Dikko frowned at the attitude of counsel who abandoned their cases in courts and allowed their clients to languish in prison custodies.

He urged the National Human Rights Commission to get in touch such counsel and request that they should continue with the matters.

Inadequate police counsel and counsel from the state ministry of justice is one of the things responsible for delay in justice delivery and prisons congestion.

Both the police and the state ministry of justice need to get more hands by employing more counsel in order to effectively prosecute the rising number of cases in the state, he said.

He urged the police, prisons authorities and other stakeholders to rise up to their responsibilities to ensure speedy administration of justice in the state.

The chief judge also assigned counsel from the Legal Aid Council of Nigeria to inmates awaiting trial who lacked money to engage the services of counsel.

He advised the discharged inmates to exhibit good character and shun crimes to avoid being returned to prison.

Earlier, Mr James Lander, Deputy Controller in charge of Keffi Prison, said that the prison lacked vehicles, accommodation and potable water, among some other necessary things.
Sagay is pissed with Judges who were recently picked up by law enforcement for alleged corruption.

Some of his stinging remarks are reproduced below:

1. Wike and Akpabio, heres your sub

Some of the arrested Judges have blamed Transportation Minister, Rotimi Amaechi, for their woes.

In letters addressed to the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) a few of the indicted Judges said Amaechi had tried to financially induce them in the past to sway judgments the way of the APC.

Sagay was irritated that the Judges could drag Amaechi into their own mess.

Said Sagay: This sudden anti-Amaechi narrative is consistent with the objectives and interests of the chief promoters and funders of judicial corruption during election petitions. These powerful opposition politicians are well known. To be more specific, they are from Rivers and Akwa Ibom states.

They are the ones who financed judicial corruption and brought that great institution, the judiciary, to its knees, after the 2015 elections.

Seeing as delivering subliminals (or subs) is not illegal in Nigeria, the two most powerful opposition politicians in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States are Nyesom Wike and Godswill Akpabio, respectively.

ALSO READ: Judges blaming Minister for their corruption troubles should be ashamed of themselves

Wike was out in the dead of the night to stop DSS operatives from arresting one of the Judges. He got a finger bruised for his troubles.

They can either claim their subs or have it delivered to them by courier.

2. Judges who accused Amaechi should be ashamed of themselves, Sagay says

Justice Sylvester Ngwuta and Justice Inyang Okoro, wrote letters alleging that Amaechi is taking his pound of flesh from them.

Sagay isnt even amused.

This outburst by the two Justices is surprising, considering that it is totally unrelated to the raids of their premises, their arrest and subsequent charges before our courts.

Men of that status should not indulge in such diversionary activities in the midst of grave and ominous charges facing them. I would have thought that they would use the time at their disposal to prepare their defences against the serious charges they are facing, Sagay said.

Now, that really hurts!

3. This is an attempt to bring the Buhari administration down, Sagay says

These Judges are all part of a grand move to undermine the Buhari administration and kill the anti-graft war.

These allegations are intended to undermine and weaken the Buhari-led Federal Government by depriving it of the service, input, ideas and productivity of some of its brightest stars.

This is intended to set the stage for charging the government with ineffectiveness and cluelessness. In other words, it is an attempt to reduce the image and perception of this Federal Government to the low level of their own late and unlamented government.

****

Ah, Sagay, they don't use to play with you again?

We. Have. No. Words.
A group, under the aegis of the Concerned Edo Leaders of Thought (CELT) told newsmen that they will resist any attempt to remove Oyegun.

CELT called on the APC National Leader, Bola Tinubu to join hands with Oyegun to move the party forward.

According to Vanguard, the group also said those calling for the removal of the APC Chairman, are doing so to serve their selfish purposes.

According to Vanguard, Col Paul Ogbebor (rtd), the President of CELT, said Nigerians are aware that no one can be blamed for the current problems besetting the APC and indeed the nations economy. To do otherwise is an attempt to give a dog a bad name in order to hang it.
For today, November 11 2016:

THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER

Jegede wins first round in guber suit appeal

The Court of Appeal, sitting in Abuja, has allowed the application filed by the factional candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Eyitayo Jegede, to challenge the judgment of Justice Okon Abang of the Federal High Court.

More corrupt judges to go, new CJN Onnoghen vows

Acting Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen yesterday, vowed to continue with the fight against corruption in the judiciary.

Militants give oil firms ultimatum to leave Niger Delta

Angered by the alleged call by the president of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), Igwe Achese asking the Federal Government to engage the service of a security outfit managed by some ex-militants to guard oil facilities in region, the Adaka Boro Avengers yesterday issued a seven-day ultimatum to all multinationals to evacuate the area.

THE VANGUARD NEWSPAPER

2015 presidential poll: How Judiciary aborted another June 12 saga  Ex-CJN

RETIRED Chief Justice of Nigeria, CJN, Justice Mahmud Mohammed, yesterday, said the Nigerian Judiciary withstood immense pressure in order to guarantee the emergence of President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015.

FG approves take-off of Nigerian Armys 6 Div for S-South

Indications have emerged in Abuja that the Federal Government has given approval for the establishment of 6 Amphibious Division of Nigerian Army for the South-South, with its headquarters would be based in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

How Nigeria can be great again, by Maitama Sule, Ofonagoro, others

Elder statesmen, religious leaders and economists, yesterday, called for the re-adoption of the 1960 constitution, and asked that the country returned to agreements reached during the independence, if Nigeria must attain greatness, surmount its political, economic and social crisis and also achieve true national integration.

THE PUNCH NEWSPAPER

Buhari inaugurates Onnoghen as acting CJN

President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday inaugurated Justice Walter Onnoghen as the acting Chief Justice of Nigeria.

Opposition leaders in Rivers, AIbom corrupted judiciary Sagay

Eminent lawyer, Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), has said opposition leaders in Rivers and Akwa Ibom states corrupted the judiciary after the 2015 elections.

Defection: South West APC leaders await Tinubus directive

There are strong indications that a gale of defection will soon hit the All Progressives Congress in the South-West.

THE THISDAY NEWSPAPER

Justice Mohammed: No Apologies for Refusing to Do Politicians Bidding

The former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Mahmud Mohammed, yesterday said he had no apologies for refusing to do the bidding of politicians who wanted to intimidate the judiciary.

Trump Meets Obama, Says He is a Good Man

United States President-elect, Donald Trump, has called President Barack Obama a very fine and good man as the two, long-time antagonists, met in the Oval Office in a ritual epitomising the peaceful transfer of power.

Senate Returns 2016-2018 MTEF, External Borrowing Plan to Executive
Ajulo gave the warning on Thursday, November 10, during an interview in Abuja.

According to Ajulo, destruction of a green card would amount to willful destruction of government property and could attract a jail term of three to seven years.

I have no problem with Kongi; he is an opinion moulder, an elder statesman and nation builder, who should know the implication of such act, he said according to Vanguard.

Under the American law losing or having your U.S. green card destroyed can be a serious problem, he added.

Soyinka had said that he would cut up his green card if Donald Trump emerged victorious in the US presidential elections.

If in the unlikely event he does win, the first thing hell do is to say [that] all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US. Well, Im not waiting for that, Soyinka said.

The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up, he added.

After Trumps victory, Nigerians reminded him of his comments and urged him to rip up the card.

ALSO READ:Donald Trump wins US Elections
Wike made the assertion at the opening of the 2016/2017 Legal Year of the states judiciary in Port Harcourt.

He said the rule of law and independence of the judiciary are twin values that defines the essence of true democratic society.

"While the rule of law suggests equity irrespective of status or position to reflect the laws of the land, the judiciary must be independent and effective to enforce the universal application of the rule of law.

"Outside of any or both values, is a recipe for anarchy," he said.

The governor said Nigerians are in support of the fight against corruption but that the fight should be done within the confines of the law.

ALSO READ: APC accuses gov of interfering with police investigation into fake result sheets

He said the National Judicial Council (NJC), has given approval to swear-in two new high court judges for the state judiciary.

The Chief Judge of the state, Justice Adama Iyayi-Laminkara, said 8,632 cases were brought forward at the state high courts as at September.

She said that new cases filed at the high courts during same period were 7,189 while 4,913 cases were disposed of by the courts.
As part of the week-long event whose activities are spread across the Filmhouse-IMAX, Genesis Cinema and Silverbird Cinema, Victoria Island and AfriNolly Space, Oregun, Lagos, CCNA is offering further support skills and capacity development among creative and talented youth and professionals in Nigeria on film and photography.

We aim to familiarise Nigerian filmmakers and photographers, and the attendees to the festival with cutting-edge professional technology that is used internationally, said Katie Simmonds, Canons Strategic Operations Professional - Emerging Markets Africa/Sustainability Projects.

ALSO READ: undefined

According to Simmonds, Canon is always committed to launching new innovative programmes that help provide the knowledge and skills needed to promote creative talent and drive the growth of a vibrant local industry.

Our partnership with AFRIFF, Nigeria, underlines our focus on supporting the nation in building the next generation of talent who will drive the growth of the countrys television, film and photography sectors. It will empower youth, build their skills, and help facilitate rewarding careers in the industry," Simmonds adds.

So far, about 50 would-be trainees, made up of film students, practitioners and the media have registered for the cinematography class.

Simmonds said the Canon sessions will provide the perfect opportunity for aspiring filmmakers to benefit from short courses and seminars in videography and filmmaking.

During this collaboration, Canon will be conducting a filmmaking workshop and a filmmaking seminar led by an expert in the field and look forward to rolling out more activities in near future.

Simmonds disclosed that the association has been inspired by Kyosei, Canons corporate philosophy which embodies the ideal of living and working together for the common good.

She said: AFRIFF is a noted film festival that presents a complete immersion into the world of film making with participation from local and international industry bodies, which over the years has fostered film and television education. Canon is proud to partner with such an organisation and would like to thank the management for their continued support as we move forward, we will continue to build on the positive relationships that we share and take it to the next level through our new solutions.

ALSO READ:

CCNA is a division within Canon Middle East FZ LLC (CME), a subsidiary of Canon Europe. The formation of CCNA within CME in 2015 is a strategic step that aims to enhance Canons business within the Africa region - by strengthening Canons in-country presence and focus. CCNA also demonstrates Canons commitment to operate closer to its customers and meeting their demands in the rapidly evolving African market. Canon has been represented in the Africa continent for more than 15 years through distributors and partners that have successfully built a solid customer base in the region.
The screening was attended by MO Abudu, Kemi Adetiba, Banky W, Sola Sobowale, Ireti Doyle, Beverly Naya, Emma OhMaGod, Zainab Balogun, Moses Babatope, Somekele Idhalama, Kene Mkparu among others.

Directed by Kemi Adetiba, the romantic comedy which was first announced in April 2016 screened for the first time on Thursday, September 8, 2016, at the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) as a selection of the Spotlight City to City programme.

The movie also screened at the 2016 Joburg Film Festival which held from October 28 to November 5, 2016.

ALSO READ: undefined

The romantic comedy stars Adesua Etomi as Dunni Coker, Banky Was Dozie, Alibaba and Sola Sobowale as Dunnis parents, and Ireti Doyle and Richard Mofe-Damijo as Dozies parents.

"The Wedding Party" also stars Zainab Balogun, Enyinna Nwigwe, Frank Donga, Saka, AY, Ikechukwu, Beverly Naya, Emma OhMaGod, Lepacious Bose amongst others.

ALSO READ: undefined

Synopsis:

Set in Lagos, Nigeria, "The Wedding Party" is a riveting tale of the complexity of love. It is the story of Dunni Coker, a 24 year old art gallery owner and only daughter of her parents about to marry the love of her life, IT entrepreneur Dozie. The couple took a vow of chastity and is looking forward to a ground-breaking first night together as a married couple.

The date has been set and the brides parents, who have recently enjoyed a surge in their fortunes, are going all out to make this the wedding of the century. Dunnis about to be mother-in-law, Obianuju, is having second thoughts about allowing her son marry into a family she considers as beneath them.

Between matchmaking attempts on the bridal train, a wedding planner on a mission to succeed, the unruly behaviour of some village guests and the grooms ex-girlfriends looking to make their mark, it is clear the Wedding Party will be the talk of the town.

Will it all be too much to bear for the bride or will true love stand even the most chaotic of wedding celebrations?

ALSO READ: undefined
Buhari was expected to attend the event with Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo but they were noticeably absent leading to speculations that all is not well in the ruling party.

However, according to state publicity secretary, Abayomi Adesanya, an emergency prevented Buhari and Osinbajo from attending the event.

The President and the Vice President had an emergency state matter they had to attend to and so could not turn up, he said.

APC National Leader, Bola Tinubu was also absent from the event.

The APC primaries in Ondo have caused crisis in the party due to the emergence of Rotimi Akeredolu as governorship candidate instead of Segun Abraham, who was supposedly Tinubus choice.
The governor made the comments on Thursday, November 10, in Ado Ekiti, the state capital.

The current situation whereby the federal government is running after perceived opposition suggests that of a man that is interested in pursuing reelection rather than solving economic problems, Fayose said according to Leadership.

A situation whereby government is borrowing far and above its external reserves means that the 2016 budget is not implementable because about 30% will be used to service external debt and if this happens, then our economy will go into depression in 2017.

At the departure of President Goodluck Jonathans government, a dollar was at the upper limit of N220 and official rate of N190. But today, a dollar is N477 which shows clearly that Buharis government has damaged the economy by 30%.

As we speak now, Nigeria is gradually entering autocracy. Judiciary no longer has courage to defend democracy. The government is clueless about how to solve the economic problem. All they are pursuing is how to demonize opposition. No justice and justice is the bedrock of democracy.

If they are really serious about diversification, they should spread the countrys commonwealth. As we speak now, no good irrigation in the whole of southwest. They should stop round-tripping of dollars.

How can I join a party that is making Nigerians hungry and angry? God forbid. I have seen the body Language of Senator Saraki that he was planning to hit the garvel in support of external borrowing. I want to warn that the National Assembly must not kill Nigerians perpetually, he added.

ALSO READ: I flew Obanikoro with huge bags of money to Akure - Pilot
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had earlier accused the APC of destroying Jegedes posters during their rally in Akure.

The PDP also alleged that some APC chieftains personally supervised the destruction of their candidates bill boards.

According to Punch, the Police Public Relations Officer, Ondo State Police Command, Femi Joseph, said there has been no report of such incident.

Joseph also said Nobody has reported such a case to us. If they formally report to us, we shall take the necessary steps, but as I am speaking to you, we have not received the report of billboard destruction.

Also, the Ondo APC in a statement issued by its Publicity Secretary, Abayomi Adesanya, said We are law-abiding in APC, our members cant do such. I have not seen any posters destroyed. If you go to the areas they are talking about today, you will see Jegedes posters and billboards. It may be part of the plot to discredit our party.

We dont need to destroy any poster or billboard before we can win the election, Jegede or no Jegede, we are winning the election.
He said this on Thursday in Akure during a campaign rally of APC governorship candidate in Ondo State.

He said that the state would remain important to the Federal Government and therefore there was need for the APC to win the state in the coming gubernatorial polls slated for Nov. 26.

This, he said, needed the commitment and determination of all APC members in the state as it would not be easy to wrestle power from incumbent government.

Also at the event, Gov. Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun stressed the need for unity among party members, saying where there are disputes, we must resolve them.

We must not entertain malice; we should put all hands on deck to ensure that the party emerged victorious at the election.

We should embark on house to house campaign ahead of the election to ensure that we win the election come Nov. 26, he said.

Governors of Borno, Sokoto, Plateau and Ogun states as well as Ministers of Solid Minerals, Health and Labour and Employment, among others, were present at the campaign rally.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that members of the APC National Working Committee (NWC) and some members of the National Assembly were also present.

NAN reports that many APC members at the event said they were optimistic about the partys chances in the election.

Some notable politicians in the state defected to the APC at the rally. They include Mr Gbenga Akereke, Pastor Peter Ojo, Mr Deji Ashiyeshrare and Mr Ben Orimoloye and several others.

The APC flag was handed over to partys Governoship Candidate, Mr Rotimi Akeredolu by the Secretary to the Federal Government, Mr Babachir Lawal.

Akeredolu at the party`s primary, defeated Dr Segun Abraham, who polled 635, while Chief Olusola Oke came third with 583 votes, while Sen. Ajayi Boroffice came forth with 471 votes.
This is coming after the APC campaign rally in Akure, aimed at drumming up support for its candidate, Rotimi Akeredolu.

According to Punch, the PDP also alleged that APC chieftains personally supervised the defacing of the posters.

The spokesman of the Eyitayo Jegede campaign group, Kayode Fasua, said APC thugs, under the supervision of the partys chieftains, had hit the streets in Akure, pulling down the billboards of Jegede and tearing his posters in a desperate attempt to hoodwink President Muhammadu Buharis representatives into believing that the APC is popular in Ondo State.

The vandalism reached a crescendo at about 7am today (Thursday) when APC thugs mounted the pedestrian bridge at Oja-Oba, in Akure, and pulled down the banners of Jegede and his running mate, Mr. John Ola Mafo.

ALSO READ:APC accuses Governor Mimiko of planning to cause crisis

While it is true that Jegede is at the Court of Appeal trying to reclaim his mandate from Mr. Jimoh Ibrahim, one wonders the law relied upon by the APC chieftains and their thugs to pull down the billboards and also tear his posters, simply because Buhari was being expected in the state.
Ayokunle made the statement at the 29th General Assembly of the Christian Council of Nigeria (CCN) held at First Baptist Church, Garki, Abuja, on Thursday, November 10, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

ALSO READ: Donald Trump may no longer be interested in banning Muslims

During the three-day programme tagged: God of Life: Lead Nigeria to Justice, Peace and Dignity, Ayokunle called on Americans to watch the new administration closely, as issues of immorality will no longer be tolerated in the country.

He said that the country once known as God's own has quickly turned into Sodom and Gomorrah, and that Trump was put in place to fight the immoral life of the American society.

Ayokunle also called on Nigerians to be on guard at all times as Boko Haram has not been fully defeated, following the recent killing of Lt. Col. Abu Ali and some soldiers in Maiduguri.

He said it is not over until it is over; the fact that a top army officer was killed is a signal to the fact that we have not defeated them.

It was also an attestation to the commitment of the Federal Government to fight this demon called Boko Haram.

So, everybody should be more committed so that the souls of those who died might not be in vain.

NAN reports that Ayokunle urged Christians to be united despite their doctrinal beliefs because Jesus Christ prayed for the church to be one.

We are diverse because of our doctrinal beliefs but we must be one because Jesus says the church must be one; He prayed for the church.

I think the problem with us is the placing of much emphasis on autonomy where it becomes its petals when we lack respect for one another.

There should be collective recognition of leadership, desire to put up the things of the world and eternity-centred in such a way that occupying position does not matter to anybody, he said.

ALSO READ: Why Christians voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton
He has recently spoken out against the increasing cases of fraud involving pastors and church finances, Daily Post reports.

Adeboye urged the erring pastors and pastors, in general, to be more responsible to their congregation by taking care of those in need while instructing the branch heads to have a petty cash book, asset register, income analysis and bank book to serve as a quality audit of the ministrys account book.

The RCCG General Overseer also warned all Men of God to abandon their fraudulent ways or face the full wrath of God.

All of these was contained in a letter, sent out to all suspected corrupt RCCG pastors.

This is not the first time the general overseer has admonished his pastors.

On July 31, 2016, Pastor Adeboye warned his ministers to stop arranging marriages at the RCCG 2016 convention.

"The Governing Council asked me to caution ministers of the mission to avoid the error of match-making brothers and sisters for marriage. This could result in some adverse effects.

The Governing Council also asked me to warn you not to get yourself entangled with marriage among your members.

Dont arrange marriages. Dont forget you cannot also arrange for them to be fruitful. If you arrange a lady for a brother only for him to discover she is a witch, such brother will curse you for life, he warned.
The VC said this on Wednesday, November 9, while leading a team from Crawford University on a courtesy visit to The Punch Place, the corporate headquarters of PUNCH Nigeria Limited along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.

Ajayi suggested this move over what he describes as the ill-informed decision of the Senate to extend the validity of results from one to three years.

He said that this would boost the chances of candidates, adding that extending the validity of the UTME results would destroy the spirit of academic excellence among Nigerian students.

I hope the extension of the UTME results will not defeat the spirit of academic excellence. The Senate was not well advised. And that was why JAMB rejected it because the Senate did not carry it along. Rather than extend the validity of the UTME results, what I will suggest is that JAMB should run exams more than once in a year, may be twice or thrice to give more candidates the opportunity of getting admission, Ajayi said.

He also noted that over a million candidates who were qualified for admission would not be admitted this year due to lack of space in the universities.
The foods, drinks and wedding ideas might differ, but in essence, the day is one for fun and rejoicing.

If you ever feel like incorporating a little foreign idea to spice up your big day, you could use these.

A croquembouche

Instead of a cake or cakes, couples in France present their guests with a croquembouche which is nothing but a mountain of tasty pastries.

Now you could do this, too.

If you are worried of disappointing those who came majorly for the cake and little else, you could make a cake and a croquembouche.

Hey, who says you can't be a trendsetter.

Eat chocolate

Still another idea from France. The couple eat a lot of chocolate out of a toilet bowl. This one is said to give them extra strength towards the consummation of their wedding.

Well, you could eat the chocolate not for the strength [Jollof rice and dodo will do a better job at that], and you could as well bypass the toilet-basin aspect of things.

Maybe take it from each other's lips as an alternative.

Long celebrations

If you are interested in long, elaborate weddings, you could travel to India for a destination wedding where their ceremonies last several days.

On the other hand, you could wed here in Nigeria and celebrate it for a number of days, maybe four or five.

That idea is not entirely new in Nigeria by the way, as Orobosa Igbinedion and Ibrahim Mantu recently did something similar.

Other ideas that you might find fascinating is one in Germany where the parents of the couple plant a tree as soon as she is born, so as to sell it when she gets engaged and use the proceeds of the sale to fund the wedding.
The talks came two days after Donald Trump's election as US president, though the meeting had long been planned.

Israel and Russia have held a series of talks in recent months to coordinate their actions in Syria, where Moscow has been conducting an air campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad.

Iran is a key ally of Assad as well as Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, also Israel's enemy.

"We are determined to do two things: first, prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons, and second, to prevent Iran... from establishing itself militarily in Syria, on the ground, in the air or at sea," Netanyahu said as he met Medvedev.

"We are also determined to prevent it from bringing about the establishment of Shiite militias, which it is organising, and of course, the arming of Hezbollah with dangerous weapons aimed at us."

Netanyahu called Israel and Russia "partners in the war on radical Islamic terror" and noted that the two countries along with the United States and others "share the goal of eliminating" the Islamic State jihadist group.

Israel opposes Assad but has sought to avoid being dragged into the Syrian war.

It has however carried out strikes there to stop arms deliveries to Hezbollah, which fights alongside Assad's forces.

Netanyahu admitted publicly for the first time in April that Israel had attacked dozens of convoys in Syria which were transporting weapons to Hezbollah.

Last year, Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to set up a "hotline" to avoid accidental clashes.
Mr Mark Toner, the Deputy Director of Press, via a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), in New York said Obama was committed to well coordinated transition.

President Obama and Secretary Kerry are obviously very committed to preparing for a well coordinated and effective transition to the incoming administration.

Several months ago, Kerry designated three experienced senior career officials to oversee that transition  Counselor Kristie Kenney and Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy, and theyre working closely with Executive Secretary Joseph MacManus.

The spokesman said when Trumps transition team arrives at the department, the full expertise and support of the office would be at the president-elects disposal.

He said as it had done with every transition, it would provide administrative support staff to assist the Trumps team as it requests information or briefings from the department.

Toner said in spite of the heated presidential election, the calm outcome had assured the international community and vindicated America that peaceful transition was the hallmark of U.S. democracy.

President Obama put it very eloquently when he said that a peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy.

I think the world saw that and hopefully was reassured by it in full display in President-elect Trumps remarks, Secretary Clintons very gracious concession speech, and also in President Obamas remarks.

The spokesman said the focus of the department in the next few weeks would focus on foreign policy and national security.

Our focus at the State Department is to work, I think, to ensure two things: one, that we continue to work to make progress on our foreign policy priorities in the time remaining for this administration.
The Republican elected to the White House Tuesday made his fortune by building a network of hotels, office towers and luxury apartment buildings as the head of the Trump Organization.

His real estate empire is primarily located in the United States, but also extends to countries such as South Korea and Turkey. Managing political relations with such US allies while president risks creating a curious mix of competing goals.

The Trump Organization is not publicly traded, so many of its activities are closed to scrutiny. But US media have reported it has financial ties with people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who the real estate mogul praised leadership during his campaign.

"For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia," Trump tweeted in July.

The potential for conflicts of interest from Trump's business activities are not limited to countries like Russia. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump has received some $2.5 billion in loans from Deutsche Bank since 1998.

But US regulators are currently in negotiations with the German bank over imposing a possibly multi-billion dollar fine for its role in the 2008 financial crisis. This raises questions about how the Trump administration will react if it inherits the case, and whether the new president's business interests will be considered.

'Unprecedented'

Accusations of conflicts of interest are not new in US politics. They tainted the administration of president George W. Bush, whose vice president Dick Cheney, until his appointment in 2000, headed the Halliburton oil services and logistics company, which went on to win lucrative contracts in Iraq after the US invasion.

But the problem takes on another dimension with Trump, whose name is inextricably tied to his business empire.

"It's unprecedented in the history of the US in part because we don't know the scope or the nature of his many financial ties in particular," Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told AFP.

She said one ethical point of particular concern is that Trump financed his company's expansion through debt.

"We don't know to whom he owes money. In some ways owing money is a much more significant financial contact than an investment," she said.

Trump so far has not spoken much about his potential conflicts of interest. Possibly because few imagined he would end up in the Oval Office, but also perhaps because US laws on the issue are flexible when it comes to the president.

Under current law, while non-elected members of the US administration face stringent constraints on their business activities, those rules do not apply to the president or vice president.

Although the US Constitution prohibits any politician from accepting any "fee" from a foreign power, there is no prohibition on doing business with private partners abroad.

Trump had pledged during the campaign to entrust his business to a blind trust which would wall him off from any say in the company's activities.

But the tycoon added that this would put the company under the control of three of his children who already are executive vice presidents of the Trump Organization.

Is that really enough to separate a President Trump away from his business empire?

"We're not going to discuss those things ... Trust me. As you know, it's a very full-time job. He doesn't need to worry about the business," son Donald Trump Jr said in September of his father's becoming US president.
"We are going to fight to defend our people, as you would expect," Hernandez said in an interview with the private television network Televicentro.

Among his campaign promises, Trump said he would deport undocumented migrants in the United States, focusing on those with criminal records. He also said he would jail deported migrants who attempted to return.

The United States has an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants, the overwhelming majority from Latin America, especially Mexico and Central America.

There are around one million Hondurans in America, most of them there illegally. They send some $4 billion a year in remittances to their families in their native country -- accounting for 20 percent of Honduras' gross domestic product.

The Honduran president said he was not unduly "preoccupied" by Trump becoming US president, explaining that the US Congress and other institutions can limit executive power.
"Experts from the Russian defence ministry have found unexploded artillery ammunition belonging to terrorists which contains toxic substances," the military said in a statement.

"After rapid analysis in a mobile laboratory, we have determined that the toxic substances in the rebels' ammunition are highly likely to be chlorine gas and white phosphorous."

The ammunition was discovered in the 1070 district on the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo, the statement said.

The Russian news agency Interfax said this zone was recaptured from the rebels by Syrian government troops a few days ago.

A more thorough analysis will be carried out by a Russian military laboratory accredited to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPWC), the Russian defence ministry said.

Syrian state media late last month accused rebel groups of having fired shells containing toxic gas into government-held parts of Aleppo, leaving dozens of people including civilians in need of treatment.

Last month, a joint OPWC panel concluded that Syrian government forces carried out three chlorine gas attacks on villages in 2014 and 2015.

Russia, however, has dismissed the findings of the joint investigative mechanism (JIM) as "unconvincing" and said no sanctions should be imposed on Syria for the chlorine gas attacks.

Using chlorine as a weapon is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in 2013 under pressure from its ally Russia.

Aleppo, Syria's former economic capital, has been divided since 2012 between the western districts held by the regime and those in the east controlled by the rebels.

Russia has conducted a bombing campaign in support of the government of President Bashar al-Assad for more than a year.

But Moscow has suspended its air strikes on rebel-held eastern Aleppo since October 18, after international condemnation over its ferocious bombardment of the city.
Some 1,800 asylum seekers that journeyed by boat to Australia after July, 2013 are currently being held at Australia-run offshore processing camps on Papua New Guineas Manus Island and Nauru.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told newsmen that Australia was poised to announce a resettlement deal for all the asylum seekers, after months of negotiations with the U.S.

There is always speculation about these things and we never comment on them.

These are people who are refugees, who have been found to be refugees, who, if they are settled in a country like the U.S., that will be a good thing, Turnbull told reporters in Canberra.

However, opposition Labour Partys Anthony Albanese said the news was good.

In September, the Turnbull government agreed to resettle a group of Costa Ricans in an agreement with the U.S.

It is not clear how the alleged deal to transfer Australias refugees could be affected by new U.S. president-elect, Donald Trump, who has campaigned partially on an anti-immigration platform.

On Tuesday, Australias conservative government introduced a bill to parliament that would ban those currently held in offshore detention from ever visiting Australia in the future, even as a tourist.

The bill is likely to fail because the opposition has said that they would not support it.

Human rights groups have criticised the Australian government about the conditions for refugees and asylum seekers in the camps, saying it was cruel and amounted to torture.
Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, 64, left Thailand last month, some two weeks after his father King Bhumibol Adulyadej died ending a seven-decade reign.

His death has sparked mass displays of grief and left the politically-divided nation without a rare pillar of unity.

Although Vajiralongkorn is the named successor, he surprised many and veered from tradition by asking to delay his proclamation as king in order to grieve with the nation, according to the junta that currently runs the country.

The prince, who has yet to attain his father's widespread popularity, spends much of his time overseas, especially in southern Germany.

Two palace sources told AFP the prince flew back to Thailand on Friday morning and would attend a military function in the evening and preside over a graduation ceremony at Bangkok's Thammasat University this weekend.

On Monday he is slated to attend an annual cultural event in Pattani, a Muslim-majority province in Thailand's insurgent-torn far south, according to an official schedule seen by AFP.

The government has not provided a timeline for when he will formally ascend the throne.

But they have sought to tamp down any doubts over succession, suggesting the Crown Prince will be named king in the near future.

Under Thai law, a successor is initially proclaimed king by parliament. He is then coronated once the previous monarch is cremated, often months later.

A strict royal defamation law and layers of official opacity make it difficult to confirm facts about Thailand's monarchy and all but impossible to openly debate its role.

All media based in Thailand must self-censor to avoid falling foul of the lese majeste law, which punishes criticism of the monarchy with up to 15 years in prison per infringement.

Thailand's arch-royalist military government has ramped up use of the law, with a particular focus on online dissent, since coming to power in its 2014 coup.

Authorities and ultra-royalist vigilante groups have further stepped up enforcement since Bhumibol's death.
As protests against the Republican property mogul's shock election rumbled across US cities and world capitals contended with a suddenly uncertain world order, Obama and Trump vowed to carry out a smooth transfer of power.

After a nasty campaign that culminated in the election of a 70-year-old billionaire and former reality TV star who has never held public office and who gained power on a populist platform, the message was: this is business as usual in a democracy.

The outgoing Democratic president and his successor huddled one-on-one in the Oval Office, for what Obama characterized as an "excellent conversation" and then put on a remarkably civil joint public appearance.

"It is important for all of us, regardless of party and regardless of political preferences, to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face," Obama said.

"Mr President, it was a great honor being with you," Trump said, calling Obama a "very good man."

Cordial

The meeting, which came less than 36 hours after Trump's shock election victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, had the potential to be awkward.

After all, Trump championed the so-called "birther movement" challenging that Obama was actually born in the United States -- a suggestion laden with deep racial overtones -- only dropping the position recently.

And if the president-elect fulfils his campaign promises, he will unravel almost all of Obama's signature achievements.

Trump -- who previously called Obama the "most ignorant president in our history" -- said he looked forward to receiving the president's counsel.

Obama -- who previously said Trump was a whiner and "uniquely unqualified" to be commander-in-chief -- vowed his support.

He told Trump that his administration would "do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds."

The two men ended the improbable and historic White House encounter with a handshake and refused to take questions, appearing to find common cause in their opinion of the press.

"Here's a good rule. Don't answer questions when they just start yelling," Obama told Trump.

Current, future first ladies

While their husbands were getting acquainted, First Lady Michelle Obama also had a sit-down at the White House with her soon-to-be successor, Melania Trump.

Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, met in his West Wing office with Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, the new vice-president-elect.

In the evening, Trump tweeted: "A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!"

White House officials said that Obama and Trump discussed a range of issues including global hotspots and the president's meetings next week abroad with leaders from Germany, Greece and across the Asia-Pacific.

On that trip, Obama is likely to be inundated with panicked questions about America's role in world affairs.

The White House hopes that by rolling out the red carpet for Trump, they can bind him to some of the conventions of the office.

Trump then traveled to Capitol Hill to meet Republican leaders who had been at best cool to him winning their party's nomination.

The president-elect proclaimed that health care, border security and jobs will be his top three priorities when he moves to the White House next January.

He held talks with House Speaker Paul Ryan and then with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"We had a very detailed meeting," Trump told reporters. "As you know, health care -- we're going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on health care," he said.

Trump made repealing Obamacare, and building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, pillars of his presidential campaign.

jpegMpeg4-1280x720Trump said he and the Republican majority in Congress were going to accomplish "absolutely spectacular things for the American people," adding he was eager to get started.

Afterwards, following an hour-long meeting with McConnell on the other side of the Capitol, Trump stood at the Senate majority leader's side and stressed that "we have a lot to do."

"We're going to look very strongly at immigration," he said.

"We're going to look very strongly at health care, and we're looking at jobs -- big league jobs."

Trump did not elaborate.

Team Trump unveiled a transition website that highlights the colossal human resources challenge facing the incoming administration under the headline "Help wanted: 4,000 presidential appointees."

During a bitter campaign that tugged at America's democratic fabric, the tycoon pledged to deport illegal immigrants, ban Muslims from the country and tear up free-trade deals.

jpegMpeg4-1280x720Those campaign messages were embraced by a large section of America, grown increasingly disgruntled by the scope of social and economic change under Obama.

But they were passionately rejected by Clinton supporters.

Protesters turned out for a second day in cities across America from New York to Los Angeles to express continued opposition to the incoming leader they accuse of racism, sexism and xenophobia. Thousands had rallied on Wednesday.
"The high court has said the charges were flawed and, therefore, should be set aside," lawyer Perpetua Dube told AFP.

She said the judge had ruled Thursday that the charges "did not constitute an offence.

"It's a great relief for Mr Bronkhorst," said Dube.

The high court ruling followed an application by Bronkhorst's lawyer for a review of a previous decision by a magistrate's court to have him tried over the 2015 hunt which led to the death of the iconic lion renowned for its distinctive black mane.

The hunt provoked worldwide outrage after it emerged that Cecil not only was a popular attraction for visitors to famed Hwange National Park, but that he wore a collar as part of an Oxford University research project.

Bronkhorst, 53, had been charged with "failing to prevent an illegal hunt" when American trophy hunter, dentist Walter Palmer, paid $55,000 to shoot the lion with a bow and arrow in July last year.
If the latest apocalyptic climate change projections come true -- with sea levels rising upwards of 28 inches (70 cm) by 2050 -- Wall Street and Ellis Island could be swallowed up.

The wrath of Superstorm Sandy -- which killed more than 40 people -- paralyzed New York in October 2012. The storm left the city shocked and sodden, ushering in new urgency among many over the looming threats of climate change in America's largest city.

"The conversation changed," said Daniel Zarrilli, who oversees the mayor's office of recovery and resiliency. "It's not something that's happening 100 years from now to someone far away.

"It is happening here and now."

A professional engineer, Zarrilli supervises the city's efforts to fortify its infrastructure and strengthen more than 500 miles (800 kilometers) of coastline against the threat of rising waters. The number of days hitting more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) is predicted to triple.

"New York City is staying where it is," Zarrilli said, seeking to project assurance about an uncertain future. "It has developed over the last 400 years.

"We are here because we are the gateway to America."

Building for a warmer era

The engineer says the key to climate adaptation is assessing and reducing risk, and swiftly investing in those zones under the greatest threat.

Many hard-hit areas -- as well as parts of the city's subway system -- are still rebuilding from the destruction wrought by Sandy, reconstruction funded by a budget of more than $20 billion allocated by the city, state and federal governments.

At the same time the city has been erecting new developments in some of its most vulnerable areas: the new Hudson Yards district on Manhattan's northwest coast boasts skyscraper apartment buildings practically teetering on the banks of the Hudson River.

But Zarrilli says those buildings are actually among the city's most secure: "The safest place to be right now during any sort of threat is in a new building."

Steven Cohen, the executive director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, explained that future skyscrapers will install heating and electricity units on the second or third floors, rather than in basements, which had been standard protocol.

Cohen said scientists assume sea levels could rise anywhere from 4.5 to 15 feet in the future, but abandoning one of the world's most economically powerful cities is unreasonable.

'Climate-ready' construction

The now abandoned Oakwood Beach neighborhood of the Staten Island borough saw entire rows of seaside bungalows bulldozed after Sandy's passing.

After New York Governor Andrew Cuomo offered local homeowners the chance to sell, the vast majority of residents did so, even if they had lived there for decades.

jpegMpeg4-1280x720But in Manhattan such a buyout program would be "completely impossible," said Joe Tirone, a Staten Island real estate agent.

"It would not make sense in Manhattan, just because of the price of the properties," he said.

For many New Yorkers, the main short-term risk lies in skyrocketing insurance premiums. The areas covered by flood-zone maps will likely double, putting the number of residents living in high risk areas at 400,000.

The resulting insurance premium hike could prompt wealthier New Yorkers to flee swanky neighborhoods for higher ground, while threatening to push what's left of the city's dwindling lower classes out of their homes.

Zarrilli remains optimistic for the city's future flood resistance because of what he sees as the commitment from elected officials to support protective urban planning -- even if the election of climate change skeptic Donald Trump creates an element of doubt.

"We will never be climate-safe," he said. "We will be climate-ready.
"If we want to have a better world, we cannot hope for an Obama and we should not fear a Donald Trump. Rather we should build it ourselves," Snowden said late Thursday, addressing an audience in the Netherlands in a live video chat from Russia.

While he said Trump's victory in Tuesday's US presidential elections was "a dark moment" in American history, he insisted the bigger question was "how do we defend the rights of everyone, everywhere, without regard to borders?"

Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents in 2013 revealing the vast US surveillance of private data put in place after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Snowden appeared Thursday via an encrypted live video stream at a cinema in Amsterdam ahead of the Dutch premiere of director Oliver Stone's new movie about his life.

"I try not to look at this as a question of a single election or a single president or even a single government, because we see these threats coming across borders," Snowden said.

'Civic dangers'

He highlighted Moscow's "Big Brother" law passed earlier this year forcing online companies to store users' data and pass it to government agencies if requested, as well as China's new mass surveillance law.

"This is a dark moment in our nation's history, but it is not the end of history," Snowden said,

"If we work together we can build something better and we can enjoy a more free and a more liberal society that benefits everyone."

Snowden, 33, is wanted in the United States to face trial on charges brought under the tough Espionage Act. But he said he was unconcerned about the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin could send him back once Trump is sworn in.

Although it would "be crazy to dismiss" the idea that Putin could strike a deal to extradite him, Snowden said he would have remained in Hawaii if he had been concerned about his own safety.

"While I obviously care about what happens to me, I am the least important part of any of this. This is not about me, this is about us," he said.

It was more important to focus on resisting the "civic dangers to everyone" rather than on individual cases.
"We can return to true democracy, to honest talk, away from the crippling restraints of political correctness. We are living in great days and great times," the rightwinger said in Budapest.

"Western civilisation has managed to free itself from the captivity of an ideology," he said.

"The era of what we call 'liberal non-democracy', that we have been living in for the last 20 years, is over," he told a conference organised by the European Bank for Research and Development.

In July, Orban, 53, came out in favour of Trump, praising his policy proposals on immigration and security. Most of Europe's other leaders were highly sceptical and in some cases outright alarmed about the Republican.

Orban, who has long been accused of eroding democratic norms in EU and NATO member Hungary, was also one of the first world leaders to congratulate Trump after his victory was confirmed on Wednesday.

By contrast, the combative Hungarian crossed swords several times with the administration of outgoing President Barack Obama over Washington's criticisms of his policies since coming to power in 2010.

In a 2014 speech, Obama included Hungary among countries where "endless regulations and overt intimidation increasingly target civil society" in a remark that prompted a government complaint to the US envoy in Budapest.

'A new start'

Relations between Budapest and Washington soured again soon after when several unnamed Hungarian government officials were denied entry to the US over alleged corruption.

In 2011 while on a trip to Budapest as secretary of state Hillary Clinton -- later Trump's election rival -- also expressed concern over Hungary and warned Orban against dismantling democratic "checks and balances".

Orban has also clashed with Brussels over his refusal to accept any of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who arrived in Europe in 2015, seeing them as security threats and a danger to European Christian culture.

"Hungary has had its debates with the US, but with the Democratic Party not its people," Orban's chief of staff Janos Lazar told reporters Thursday.
The Scott County Democratic Party selected Rep. Jim Lykam on Thursday as its candidate for the vacant Senate District 45 seat.

Lykam, the House District 85 representative, will face off against Davenport Republican Mike Gonzales in the Dec. 27 special election to fill the vacancy left by the death of Sen. Joe Seng in September.

"I'm humbled by this opportunity, but we've got a lot of work ahead of us," Lykam said. "December 27 is going to be a low voter turnout and not by accident so we'll need everybody pulling together and start rebuilding both the House and Senate."

Lykam, Rep. Cindy Winckler and Monica Kurth were all nominated during the convention held at Davenport West High School, but Winckler and Kurth declined their nominations.

Winckler said this was the time to work and bring differences together, which was why she removed her name from nomination.

"This is not an easy thing to do and against someone I've known since junior high," Winckler said. "But it is an opportunity that we will not see in a long time because this is a good Democratic seat and we have good Democrats that want to be apart of this."

Winckler was teary-eyed as she left the podium, drawing a long standing ovation at the nominating convention.

Kurth, a professor at Scott Community College, said her work affirmed her commitment to the Democratic ideals of access, equity and opportunity for all walks of life.

"As I watched, and am sure you watched with a great deal of sadness, the election turnout on Tuesday, I did not see a rejection of these ideals," Kurth said. "Instead, I saw concrete evidence and a deficiency that we as Democrats must face."

But while she considered running, Kurth said the party needed unity to maintain the crucial Senate seat.

Kurth, too, received a standing ovation as she declined her nomination.

With the Dec. 27 election date, which was set by Gov. Terry Branstad, Lykam said the race likely will be expensive and require greater absentee voting given the proximity to Christmas.

"Let's pick up the pieces and continue our fight for better schools, a skilled workforce, mental health funding and improved infrastructure," Lykam said.
Dave Van Horn has only one photo from his 13 months in the Vietnam War.

The image shows his 19-year-old self holding a rifle, sitting shirtless on a rock with a campsite in the background.

He hadnt thought about the photo, which he carried in his pocket for six months while serving in Vietnam, since 1972 when he returned home to Charlotte, Iowa. And he hadnt talked that much about the war in as many years.

That is, of course, until somebody  his artsy friend Gwen Heil Costello  asked him about it.

Costello was looking for Vietnam veterans to include in her art series, called Men of Service. She transforms their war photos, often weathered from time, into paintings.

I figured Id dig around my house and see, Van Horn said. I was surprised I still had it.

The 70-year-old veteran also was surprised by what happened when he saw the painting.

I was thrilled by it and what it helped me remember, Van Horn said. All of these things in your mind  you dont realize it, but theyve never left.

Since starting the project, Costello has seen those reactions a dozen times. The veterans talk about things theyve never said out loud. They let out tears and, even if its more than four decades later, they heal.

Theyre not expecting it, but they see the paintings, and something comes over them, she said. Thats when the flood of memories come back.

The good and bad

Before she started Men of Service, Costello didn't think about the Vietnam War.

She didnt remember getting a former classmates war photo in the mail in 1971, while she was studying art at University of Northern Iowa.

At the time, I was so involved with what I was doing and my future, Costello said. I saw the protests on TV and watched from afar. Looking back, I feel ashamed that I was that much in my own world.

Two years ago, Costello, 65, had recently lost her job and was in a routine of painting, praying and cleaning to keep busy. During one afternoon at home, she came across a shoe box full of photos.

One photo  showing that classmate, Gary Sander, at 18, sitting at a firebase in Vietnam  jumped out at her.

The look on his face haunted me; he looked so young, Costello said. It was ripe for painting, so thats what I did.

A few months later, she reached out to Sander  they lived 15 miles apart  and gave him the painting.

He cried when he saw it.

I was looking at that painting and thinking, 'Man, thats me, and thats how I looked in Vietnam, he said. It was overwhelming. It brings back the good and bad memories, even though there wasnt a whole lot of good.

Sander doesn't typically talk about his time in the service, saying it's "nobody elses business." But this time, with Costello, he couldnt stop talking.

It was the forgotten war, and we were the forgotten soldiers, Sander said. We were getting shot at, and my buddies were getting killed. That doesnt go away.

For Costello, that interaction started an obsession with painting the Vietnam guys.

Had I been born male, I would have been drafted, she said. It could've been me, but I have no idea what they went through. A lot of us dont.

Therapy for me and for them

Costello has heard a flurry of reactions.

"When the families see the paintings, they say, 'We didnt know, because dad never talked about it,'" she said. "A wife told me, 'Weve been married 50 years, and he never told me that happened or what he did in the war.'

And when someone asks Van Horn about the painting hanging in his computer room, hell start letting details out.

I had never been away from home for a night, Van Horn said. I didnt know what to think or do, so I just did the same thing everyone else was doing.

I was scared. I did a lot of praying.

Costello, who was recently hired as the drama director at Northeast High School, also paints beach and boat scenes and portraits of her 10 grandchildren. But she calls the veteran paintings her higher purpose.

Its therapy for me and for them, she said. Its teaching me to have empathy and put myself in their shoes.

She wants to continue the paintings in her spare time.

Theres a whole generation of young boys now nearing the end of their lives that never got the credit for what they did and they weren't welcomed home, she said. This is a small way I can give back.

'Say thank you, ask their story'

Now each day, and especially on Veterans Day, Costello's hope is this: I want people to hug veterans, say thank you and ask their story, she said. They might not tell you so, but it means a lot.

To Sander, you can tell it  sitting with him and asking about memories  means something.

"Veterans Day is the most important day of my life and so is every day, because it's a reminder I survived," he said. "There's a lot to be remembered."

That's one thing, after hours spent painting veterans, that Costello has learned.

"The stories just roll out if you ask and care," she said. "What if nobody ever asked them?"
Sporting a scruffy white beard and salt-and-pepper wavy hair, Chris Dunn blends in well with those around a breakfast table at Timothys House of Hope, a meal site in Davenport for the hungry.

Ill keep you in my prayers, Dunn told a man, who asked not to be identified as he fought back tears over a plate of biscuits and gravy. Hes struggling through a divorce and living out of the back of his truck, which needs a new timing chain. I love you like a brother, Dunn added as he patted the man on the back.

By now, its obvious the 56-year-old Dunn, whos rocking close-fitting jeans, a wool sweater and Under Armour shoes, isnt there for the free spread; he's there to listen.

As a homeless outreach worker for The Center, 1411 Brady St., he spends part of most days checking in on his friends at various spots that serve those living in poverty.

In normal social situations, Dunn, who stands at 6 feet, 3 inches, thinks he may come across as awkward. But the married father of two, who has a home in Rock Island, said he feels most comfortable when hes consoling those on the streets.

These people are so honest once weve established trust, which sometimes comes right away and sometimes takes time, he said.

Its hard for Dunn to go unnoticed at a place like Timothys.

The same people hes looking for usually approach him first.

Rick Powers, a Vietnam War veteran who used to be homeless, caught up with Dunn on his way into the building.

He (Dunn) got me off the street corner about two years ago, Powers said. I was sleeping outside, and he helped get me clothes and an apartment.

'He carries Jesus with him'

The Long Island, New York, native, who studied education at Boston University, couldnt put a number on the amount of homeless people he knows on a first-name basis. However, he estimated he has assisted hundreds of people over his 15 years in the Quad-Cities.

Following his visit at the table, Dunn pedaled his bicycle, which he rides to work most days, one block south to the Laundromat, 1351 W. 3rd St. A few people outside greeted him with hugs and handshakes as he arrived.

From 9-11 a.m. on Wednesdays, twice a month, Dunn and other volunteer do-gooders host laundry ministry there, where people can clean their clothes for free during the two-hour time frame.

Margot Hary, whom Dunn referred to as the laundry angel, praised the man for his work in the community.

He carries Jesus with him, Hary said. Its not just because he looks like him (Jesus); he acts like him, too.

The modest Dunn, who still carries around a flip phone, said the majority of people he sees are chronically homeless who suffer from alcohol and/or drug-related addictions and mental health issues.

He strives to form bonds with as many of them as he can.

Some of these people come from so many broken relationships and broken promises, he said. I just try to be consistent and do what I say Im going to do.

Revolving door

In downtown Davenport, the homeless population frequents multiple locations for food and shelter at various times of the day, including:

 Cafe on Vine, 632 W. 6th St.

 Humility of Mary Shelter, 1016 W. 5th St.

 Kings Harvest Ministries, 825 W. 3rd St.

 Salvation Army, 301 W. 6th St.

 St. Anthonys Catholic Church, 417 Main St.

Dunn, who formerly worked at Kings Harvest, touted Humility of Marys resources.

The shelter, which is full all the time, houses about 75 people, Christine Adamson, director of services, said.

Residents there can stay up to 90 days at a time between January and December.

Its a revolving door for some people, said Adamson, who is in need of adult winter coats.

The Center, where Dunn works, also is open to anyone during the day, but he thinks the steep Brady Street hill deters many from going there.

Unfortunately, the hill is a barrier, he said. A lot of people cannot walk that far.

So, he also routinely stops by the downtown Davenport Public Library and the downtown Davenport transit station, other hot spots for homeless people during the day.

Library is safe haven for the homeless

As he walked through the doors of the Main Street Library on Thursday, Dunn scanned the crowd of patrons until he spotted a familiar face, Becky Peters.

Although shes legally blind, Peters knows her way around down there.

The former homeless woman, with the help of her white cane, spent the morning researching potential future business endeavors.

One of my goals is to open my own food truck, said Peters, who recognized Dunn by the sound of his voice, and referenced his good listening skills. Im tired of working for others.

Library director Amy Groskopf said anyone can access services at any of the citys three branches, but they dont offer any specific resources to homeless people.

If people are homeless and use us as a safe haven during the day, we dont have a problem with that, she said. As long as people are using the library as a library, then theyre welcome in our facilities.

Dunn said many people go there for shelter from extreme weather and free access to the internet and reading materials. The downtown branch has 20 computers, and guests can use a maximum of two hours of Wi-Fi per day there.

From the library, Dunn, who also paints houses and plays live music, planned to head home before performing at Friendship Manor, a continuing care retirement community, in the afternoon.

He credited his wife, a math tutor, for her support. Without it, he said, it would be a heck of a lot harder to do what I do.

For now, hes content with his daily duties.

It just seems like its a good fit for my personality, he said. This is where God wants me to be as far as I can tell.
We asked our Facebook fans to share a photo of a veteran they're proud of on our wall and to let us know why they were proud of them. Like us 
With more than 13,000 islands, Indonesia is the world's largest archipelago. Only about 6,000 of the islands are inhabited, but that still leaves a lot of options for island-hopping.

Most travelers know about Bali, the surf-and-sand island of "Eat, Pray, Love" fame, and Java, home to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and 60 percent of the country's population.

But I recently traveled with friends to two lesser-known  though still tourist-friendly  islands, and from there, a few even smaller islands, that gave glimpses of local culture while offering heart-stirring views of serene aqua water, dazzling waterfalls and thrilling volcano peaks.

Lombok

Next door to world-famous Bali, Lombok offers many of the same attractions as its better-know neighbor: waterfalls, white-sand beaches, snorkeling and scuba diving, but with a fraction of the tourists. Here are some of its top destinations:

 Senggigi. Located on the northwest part of Lombok, Senggigi is the main tourist area lined with hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, massage parlors and more. The town of Senggigi is where visitors can set up tours or find guides to take them to different parts of the island.

 Sendang Gile and Tiu Kelep waterfalls: Icy, cold and slippery, these waterfalls are probably some of the most awe-inspiring sights on the island. We hired a guide to lead us to them.

 Authentic handicrafts: Banyumulek is a village known for its world-class pottery. We visited a family of three generations creating pieces of various sizes. Farther inland, Sukarara is a community where visitors can learn about the process of traditional hand-weaving and attempt to give it a try themselves. Pottery is available for purchase at Banyumulek, and sarongs, wall hangings, blankets and scarves are available for purchase at Sukarara.

 Gili islands: A string of three tiny islands off the northern coast of Lombok, the Gili islands are popular for their laidback feel and lack of traffic. We headed to Gili Air because it was the closest, hiring a private speedboat and driver and spending a few hours walking around the island and jumping in and out of the water. Don't forget to get your picture taken at one of the well-known water swings.

Flores

Known mainly for being the jumping-off point to Komodo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the island of Flores is much larger than you may think. I made the mistake of thinking we could fly into the city of Maumere  the largest town on the island  and take local transport to the western side of the island and head on to the Komodo area. I was wrong. It turned out to be at least a 12-hour drive, and with just a few days on Flores, we decided to stick around Maumere instead of being rushed. But we were not disappointed.

One interesting aspect of visiting Flores was the Christian influence here. Indonesia is the world's largest majority-Muslim country, but here Christian churches and a large cross can be seen along the coast. Flores means flowers in Portuguese; it was a colonial outpost for Portugal in the 16th century.

Other attractions here:

 Local market: An authentic slice of life here, with vendors selling fruit, livestock and chatting with each other and customers.

 Pangabatang Island: We decided on the fly to try to visit Pangabatang Island, an uninhabited island about an hour off the coast of Flores. With the help of some friendly locals, we flagged down a bemo, a public transport van, found out one of the women on board was married to a boat captain, and headed to meet him at the fishing village of Nangahale. He spoke no English, but I was able to communicate with my rudimentary Indonesian language skills, and we hopped on his rickety boat. We sat in stunned silence snapping photos of some of the most scenic water views we'd ever seen. Once at Pangabatang, we suntanned, jumped in and out of the sea, and, of course, took selfies. One note of warning: Ferry sinkings and boat accidents are not uncommon  including a glass-bottomed boat that capsized off Bali in early November, killing three people including a Japanese tourist. So use your judgment on boat rides, especially if traveling with kids.

 Mount Egon: Hiking Mount Egon takes several hours and lots of stamina. It's very steep with lots of loose gravel. We hired a guide to take us up to the summit, where a volcanic crater and outstanding views made the trek worth it.

Tips

Learn a little bit of the language, Bahasa Indonesia, and it will help tremendously.

Being on time is relative. A 7 a.m. meeting time with your guide may actually mean 8 a.m. Sip some coffee and wait.

There are three time zones across Indonesia. Keep this in mind when booking flights.

Approximately 13,000 Indonesian rupiah equals U.S. $1.

Getting there:

Several direct flights go from the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta and from Bali to Lombok each day.

Getting to Flores is more complicated and takes longer. From Jakarta, flights can connect through Bali or even Kupang. Be ready for small planes, small airports and adventure.

Slow ferries between the islands are also an option.
While most people wait to decorate for Christmas until after Thanksgiving, others like their Christmas cheer a little earlier.

Then there is Llynde Llucaas. For her, anytime is the right time for some holiday spirit.

I keep my tree up all year round  it cheers me up, said Llucaas, a 61-year-old Rapid City resident, who also leaves her Christmas stocking hanging up throughout the year.

I like to think that Santa can always bring me things; it appeals to the child in me, Llucaas said while laughing.

Though Llucaas enjoys a perpetual early start to the cheery season, Marlow Scherbenske, owner of the decor store the Weathered Vane, says shoppers are eager to start adding their trimmings as soon as his stores array of ornaments are showcased in October.

Scherbenske begins setting up the stores assortment of Christmas decor on October 1 and it takes four weeks to complete the decorations in his store. He has a variety of table top decor, ornaments, floral decorations and 12 Christmas trees.

People are asking all the time, when Christmas is going to be ready, Scherbenske, said. Im always encouraged and amazed by the new Christmas items that are developed every year, added Scherbenske.

The hot theme this Christmas season features modern metallics including: copper, bronze, gold and silver according to Scherbenske.

My tree at the entrance is called 'Romantic Opulence,' and its a combination of those colors, he explained. Its very romantic, it has chandeliers on it  just a beautiful collection of ornaments.

Other themes include Elk Haven Hideaway, which has lodge themed ornaments and Rustic Red, which features a Western decor.

Llucaas has a theme of her own.

She has a small white Christmas tree decked with lights and pink high-heeled ornaments.

At the Christmas Village, some shoppers find its never too early to prepare for Christmas. Though the store is primarily a tourist attraction, shoppers still buy their ornaments, especially the South Dakota and Black Hills inspired Christmas tree ornaments during tourist season, which is their busiest season.

They like Christmas whether its 90 degrees outside in the middle of the summer  its something fun for them, said employee Kim Marso.

We have more than 15,000 ornaments in the store, said Christmas Village store owner Ken Sheffield, who explained that locals usually start buying ornaments in November.

Though Llucaas, keeps her decorations up all year, she is still eagerly waiting for her favorite holiday to arrive.

I love Christmas and I look forward to it all year  and I sit and watch Christmas specials  theyre great, she said.
On a quiet street in a small Spearfish neighborhood, Kenneth Higashi sat at his kitchen table, and carefully reached for a small black box.

This is my Purple Heart medal, he said.

Higashi is 94, but he can clearly recall the day in 1945, weeks before the end of World War II, when he received the special honor given to soldiers wounded in battle. I was in the hospital, shot in both knees, he said. They came to my bedside and gave me the medal.

He fully recovered, and the member of the Greatest Generation brought back the distinction of serving in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, consisting primarily of Japanese Americans. Today, as their nation honors them on Veterans Day, Higashi and others who have served are flooded with emotion and memories.

For Higashi, those memories are dominated by his combat experiences with the 442nd regiment.

Nicknamed The Purple Heart Battalion for the high number who fought and were injured, about 14,000 members of the 442nd earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, 4,000 Bronze Stars, and 21 Congressional Medals of Honor.

Higashi was born in 1921 to Japanese immigrant parents in Belle Fourche. He grew up in Spearfish, and fondly reflects upon the agrarian, small-town lifestyle he encountered.

I helped my parents with their vegetable farm, he said. My mother was exceptionally good at growing things. His father passed away in 1940, but the family continued selling produce locally.

Higashi graduated from Spearfish High School in 1941, and took odd jobs that next summer and fall, unsure of his future path.

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, all Japanese Americans were in the spotlight, and not in a good way.

I remember my mother was very upset about Pearl Harbor, recalls Higashi.

Higashi, his older brother, and 3 younger sisters knew their parents were from Japan, but he never visited Japan or learned the language. My mother spoke some English and I spoke a little Japanese. We got by.

Nevertheless, the federal government rushed to quarantine every citizen of Japanese descent, and in spring of 1942 the Higashis were faced with potential internment in a relocation center.

Heart Mountain Internment Camp, located outside of Cody, Wyo., was the most likely destination.

The government visited the Higashis home. We were informed that we had to give up our shotgun and our radio, Higashi remembers.

They also said our whole family would have to go to the camps unless I or my older brother, Clarence, enlisted, Higashi said. One of us could stay and take care of our mother and sisters.

Faced with this decision, the two brothers discussed the options.

It was my idea, Higashi said, that Clarence stay and I go. He was a good mechanic, and I thought he had more skills that would help our family.

The Army sent Higashi to Italy, where he gained combat training and experience with the 442nd Combat Regiment.

Almost all of these young soldiers were Nisei, the term for people of Japanese descent born in America or Canada. In the mid-20th century, most were settled in Hawaii, California, and Washington. The California families all had to go to the camps. These guys went to war knowing their parents and brothers and sisters were in camps, Higashi said.

The 442nd, nicknamed Go For Broke, quickly earned the reputation of being tough in battle, regardless of personal sacrifice, as they proved their devotion to their cause and country.

Their uniforms sported a unique Battalion shoulder patch: An arm holding Lady Libertys torch, inside a coffin.

By April 1944, Higashi had earned two good conduct medals and obtained the rank of sergeant.

In October 1944, the 442nd received orders and was immediately sent to the border of France and Germany, where more than 200 members of the 36th infantry from Texas had been surrounded.

Nazi troops had positioned machine gun nests in the dark forest, and had trap door holes in the thick underbrush. Two other battalions heroically tried for a week and failed to rescue the men of the 36th. Supply drops by air got stuck in tall trees. Several attempts to reach them ended in high casualty counts.

It was cold, Higashi recalls, raining, then snowing. But it was the priority of the 442nd to get them out and we did.

The 442nd fought steadily, scrambling up a steep ridge dubbed Banzai Hill, under heavy enemy fire.

One German was shooting at me, and he put four bullet holes in my raincoat and through the back of my pant legs, said Higashi. But he didnt get me.

When the battle was over, the 442nd had lost 814 soldiers, but saved the so-called Lost Battalion of Texas.

Higashi said he was in charge of a platoon of 29 men, only 9 of whom survived.

This accomplishment of the 442nd has been recognized in military history as significant, even helping to turn the tide of the war for area Allied forces.

Through his Army travels, Higashi saw pristine Alpine vistas, felt the sun on French Riviera beaches, visited towering cathedrals, and even climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

But his favorite view of all came after the war had ended?

Coming down the hill and seeing downtown Spearfish, he said.

Higashi spent the next 30 years working for the U.S. Postal Service in Spearfish. He married Phyllis Moser in 1978, who says she and her family are dedicated to Higashi and are proud of his service.

All the young men his age who volunteered and were drafted should be saluted, but what he had to go through was different because of his heritage, Phyllis said.

American Legion Post 164 Americanism Officer Fred Nelson is also proud of Higashi and others like him who served in World War II.

Very few are left; they are going fast, Nelson warned. Its really important that we locate our WWII veterans, ask them their stories, and tell them we are grateful.

Nelson challenges the public to consider how different things would be if American soldiers and their families had not sacrificed so much, including those who were immigrants. For sure, the world wouldnt be as nice of a place, he said.

Higashi views his service in a simple way. We just tried to stay alive and do a job and show our loyalty. It wasnt fighting, it was living history.
The sheriff managing a wild-horse sanctuarys impounded animals in north-central South Dakota said Thursday that horse adoptions must be handled by the embattled sanctuary president, who has apparently received a deadline extension as she tries to get some horses back.

Dewey County Sheriff Les Mayer has been overseeing the care and feeding of 810 horses at the ranch of the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros near Lantry. The horses were impounded at the ranch after a judges order on Oct. 7, following a state veterinarians finding that the horses were being neglected and allegations by a former ranch employee that some horses were starving to death.

The impounding order included a set of conditions under which the societys president, Karen Sussman, could seek the return of the horses. She reportedly met an Oct. 21 deadline to draft and deliver a comprehensive ranch management plan, in which she reportedly sought the return of 400 horses to her control, according to Sheriff Mayer.

The states attorneys of Dewey and Ziebach counties, who are handling legal aspects of the impounding, have failed to return calls and emails from the Journal for the past several weeks. The two counties share a border that is straddled by the societys ranch.

The impounding order set another deadline of today for Sussman to produce evidence that she has enough funding or feed for the next 18 months. Mayer said that deadline has apparently been extended to Dec. 1 following a meeting this week involving Sussman, the state's attorneys and a state veterinarian.

Mayer also said the county governments will not lead or participate in the adoption of horses. He previously said he was compiling a list of potential adopters to consult after todays deadline, when the counties would take over the adoption process. On Thursday, he said that action was the result of his misunderstanding of the terms of the impounding order.

All adoptions will instead go through Sussman, Mayer said, and inquires should be directed to her. He provided her email address, ispmb@lakotanetwork.com.

The local prosecutors and the state Animal Industry Board will meanwhile consider the adequacy of Sussmans management plan. They will use their judgment of the plan, paired with the extent to which Sussman meets the Dec. 1 deadline to produce 18 months of feed or funding, to determine how many horses to put back in Sussman's care.

Any horses not returned to Sussman following the Dec. 1 deadline will be put up for public auction, probably to buyers for foreign slaughter plants, with the proceeds directed to the counties to pay their impounding costs. Those costs so far total about $80,000, Mayer said, mostly from hay purchases.

A community of wild-horse enthusiasts around the country has been encouraging adoptions of the horses, largely through the use of social media. Mayer said Sussman has allowed about 55 horses to be adopted so far. Some in the online community have also called for criminal animal neglect charges against Sussman.

Meanwhile, Sussman has been emailing supporters and asking them to donate toward a $150,000 fundraising campaign to help return horses to the societys ranch, which is only 665 acres and is badly overgrazed.
Two 17-year-old girls detained on animal cruelty charges

MOSCOW, November 11 (RAPSI)  A court in Russias far eastern city of Khabarovsk ordered the detention of two 17-year old girls who were charged with animal abuse, the Investigative Committee reported on Friday.

The girls residing in Khabarovsk published images of animal cruelty on the Internet.

Investigators allege that they abused about 15 animals and birds.

15 biological material sample s and spoils of two animals were seized by law enforcement officers. A cats skull was found during searches at the apartments of one of the girls.

The girls have been charged with collusive cruelty to animals committed by a group of persons.

Complex psychological and psychiatrical examinations have been scheduled for them.

Investigators claim that the girls are involved in several other crimes including robbery, incitement of hatred and animosity and violation of religious feelings. Robbery charges have been already brought against them.

Their alleged 18-year old accomplice was arrested.




Russian Constitutional Court to study ECHR ruling on 1.9 bln compensation to Yukos

MOSCOW, November 11 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov)  Russias Constitutional Court will examine on December 15 a request filed by the Justice Ministry to study the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling regarding 1.9 billion compensation to former Yukos shareholders, RAPSI learnt in the court on Friday.

The request for the Constitutional Court to review ECHRs July 31, 2014 ruling in Yukos vs Russia case was signed on October 12, according to the Ministrys press-service. It was prepared based on the Ministrys conclusion on the impossibility of following through with the ECHR ruling as well as reports of the Federal Bailiff Service and the Federal Tax Service.

The Justice Ministry believes that obligations put on Russia by the ECHR are based on the Convention of Human Rights in interpretation conflicting with the ones of the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

In the summer of 2014, the ECHR ruled that Russia must pay 1.9 billion euros in compensation and legal expenses to former Yukos shareholders.

At the end of 2015 Russia's Constitutional Court was granted the right to recognize decisions of international courts, including Strasburg based ECHR, as non-executable. The legislation was developed taking into account the respective Constitutional Courts ruling establishing that each case of ECHR decision implementation should be reviewed individually and these decisions should be executed only on the principle of supremacy of the Russian Constitution.
Rosneft increases claim against RBC to $48.5 mln over alleged reputational damage

Context Rosneft files defamation suit over privatisation allegations

MOSCOW, November 11(RAPSI)  The Moscow Commercial Court granted petition filed by Rosneft seeking to increase its claim against RBC Media Holding to 3.179 billion rubles (about $48.5 million), RAPSI learnt in the court on Friday.

The court also dismissed the RBCs motion to join UK oil giant BP as a party to the action saying that its ruling would not affect BPs rights and legitimate interests.

At the same time, the court granted the holdings petition to adjourn hearings until December 12 agreeing that RBC needed more time to thoroughly study documents presented by Rosneft.

Russias top oil company Rosneft filed a lawsuit with the Moscow Commercial Court, accusing RBC Media Holding of libel over allegations concerning the company's privatization.

RBC journalists Timofey Dzyadko, Lyudmila Podobedova, and Maxim Tovkailo, alongside BisnessPress company, RBC newspaper publisher, have been named co-defendants in the case.

The lawsuit was brought after an article about Rosneft privatization headlined 'Rosneft requests authorities to protect it from BP' had been published on the website of the newspaper on April 11.

Rosneft claims that "information contained in the article published on RBC website is misleading." "It is a baseless fantasy on the part of journalists, or their so-called undisclosed sources, the company said in the press-release adding that only the Russian government had the right to decide how the company was to be privatized.

Rosneft sought a retraction of the allegations reproduced by a number of other Russian outlets.

A statement of Rosneft denying the allegations was later published, but without a full retraction of the article, according to Mikhail Leontyev, Rosneft spokesman.
Student use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs is down in Ravalli County.

Every two years the Montana Department of Public Health & Human Services conducts a Prevention Needs Assessment at schools looking at risk and protective factors especially around alcohol and drug use. This year in Ravalli County, the MDPHHS polled 557 kids in eighth, tenth and twelfth grades.

Faylee Favara is the prevention program manager for Western Montana Addictions Services.

Ravalli County is one of the few counties in the state where the statistics have dropped, Favara said. That is more significant than it might sound. I say this is because of our families, our educators, our law enforcement, our judicial system and DUI Task Force. That is because of the prevention programs that I work with and Tobacco Free Ravalli, public health; everybody has a hand in that statistic. You cant point to one thing. It is a community wide effort.

Favara said that she evaluates the responses to the survey.

Part of what I do is look at the date and data and see what is going on, what we need to work on or what are some things that going spectacularly and how do we keep that momentum going, she said. This shows our kids are still using drugs or alcohol. How to we keep the progress to create the protective factors they need to stop using and how do we decrease the risk factors?

The positive responses included most kids believing their families have clear rules about alcohol and other drugs, most kids believe they would be caught by their parents and most kids feel close to their parents and can share thoughts and discuss personal problems. Most kids have never smoked or been drunk.

Favara said the results also show issues of concern.

Close to 30 percent of our 10th and 12th graders reported being drunk or high at school, she said. Close to 20 percent of our 8th and 10th graders reported riding in a car driven by someone who is drinking alcohol. That to me is the scariest result.

Favara said she sees this as a problem for kids in rural Montana.

You go to a party with a group of friends and youre not drinking, youre fine, but your ride starts drinking. How do you get home? Youll get in the car because you have no options, Favara said. Parents should let their kids know that they can call for a ride and that they will not even talk about it that night. Count your lucky stars that your kid is home and safe.

In E-cigarette use responses, kids answered that 20 percent of eighth grade students, 40 percent of tenth grade students and 50 percent of seniors used E-cigarettes for the first time.

Favara said E-cigarettes have a murky risk factor.

We do know there are more risk factors attached to E-cigarettes than benefits, she said. We also know companies are making money off of making the cheapest type of E-juice that they can. The cheapest is made with the poorest possible ingredients. The risk in using this new fad is crazy-high, it is affecting brain chemistry and organ balance.

Favara said adults need to reduce the accessibility of E-cigarettes in Ravalli County.

Alcohol is the number one drug of choice in all of Montana and 50 percent of kids said they had tried it or have used it within the past 30 days.

The sad part is how damaging alcohol is to the teen brain and all the risk factors attached, Favara said.

She said other worrisome responses included that antisocial behavior is increasing and more tenth grade students have a low commitment to school.

I keep spreading the news around on where we are excelling and what we want to keep working on, Favara said. Ravalli is in good shape in general and we want to keep that going for sure. There are so many factors that make the good news such a great thing.
The Corvallis American Legion Post #91 is hosting a Turkey Shoot, with free admission on Nov. 12 and 13.

The event is part of the Veterans Day celebration and will take place both afternoons 1-5 p.m.

Organizer Doug Mason said the public is invited.

Participants can bring their own 12-gauge shotgun or you can use the posts shotgun, Mason said. Do not bring any ammo. All ammo will be supplied.

Mason said the event is a fundraiser.

You buy a shot and then compete against nine other marksmen. This is called a flight, he said. There are different flights such as: Turkey Flights, Challenge Flights, Ammo Flights and Special Legion Flights. So come early and shoot all day.

Practice shots cost $2 and each flight shot costs $4.

The money supports the American Legion and American Legion Auxiliary programs such as covering the costs of Corvallis and Victor students to attend Boys and Girls State.

In the spring, juniors from Corvallis and Victor are chosen to attend American Legion Boys State and American Legion Auxiliary Girls State in Helena, Mason said. Around the first of June the selected students travel to the capital city, stay at Carroll College and learn about state government.

Mason said one delegate to Boys State costs the post $250 and one delegate to Girls State costs the auxiliary $300.

This year we are hoping to send at least seven boys and seven girls, Mason said.

The Turkey Shoot is 1 to 5 p.m. on Nov. 12 and 13 just south of Sheafman Creek Road.

Mason said all shotguns will be cleared on and off the range by the safety officers. For more information, call Doug Mason at (406)546-4244.
BILLINGS - Nicole Walksalong has special expertise in the area of foster and adopted children, a knowledge that comes from beyond her formal education.

Shes the adopted mother of twin girls and her own mother was adopted into a white family as a child. The family raised her mother on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, which later allowed Walksalong to stay connected to her culture.

Walksalong's intimate knowledge on the topic of adoption and fostering children is part of the reason she will help to define a newly created position within Yellowstone County's Court Appointed Special Advocates.

"The important thing to remember is that you're not saving these children," Walksalong said. "You're helping them."

Walksalong began in October working as CASA's Indian Child Welfare Act program coordinator. Part of her job is helping programs like the Center for Children and Families and Child Family Services, understand the cultural background of Native American children.

About 40 percent of the countys foster children are Native American, Walksalong said. CASA hopes to reduce the number of Native American children in foster homes and connect more Native American families with resources to help them through the foster care system.

Shes also working with county Judge Rod Souza to establish what would be the fourth special ICWA court in the nation. The court is scheduled to begin taking on cases in July 2017.

Congress passed ICWA in 1978 in order to keep native families and tribes together. The act requires states to place native children removed from their families with relatives or other tribal members.

Taking children from Native American families without their consent goes back to when trains would run through reservations picking up children and shipping them to boarding schools to be educated, Walksalong said. Tribes lost much of their culture when that generation of children was taken.

There are some cultural differences with Native American families, Walksalong said. Its normal for multiple generations to live in a household, and older children are taught to look after their younger siblings, she said.

These arent signs of neglect, Walksalong said. It is part of a childs education.

Many Native American families feel like theyre often misunderstood when dealing with dependent or neglect cases, she said. The special court could be a more relaxed place where families can discuss what is happening in their homes.

The changes would be small. Things like scheduling the court in the afternoon to help with travel time from the nearby reservations and having the judge sit at the table with parents rather than speaking from the bench, Walksalong said.

She is reaching out to Northern Cheyenne and Crow tribes to see what they need and what they are struggling with when it comes to members of their tribes in foster families.

While in high school, Walksalong worked with children in the foster care system at Watson Childrens Shelter in Missoula. The shelter provides short-term care for children who have been abused, neglected, abandoned or whose family is in crisis.

She was awarded a full scholarship to Rocky Mountain College. After earning a bachelor's degree in psychology, she began working for New Day, a private nonprofit working to improve the lives of troubled youth, particularly Native American kids.

My heart is with kids, Walksalong said.

It was through New Day that Walksalong met her twin daughters. The girls had been placed in 19 different homes before she adopted them. Their last placement had been with Lavonna Bird, who was arrested in 2012 after killing a boy she was fostering along with the girls.

Walksalong was an ideal parent for the girls, having worked before with children who suffered huge traumas. Her husband is also an enrolled member of the Crow tribe, and able to help the girls continue to connect with their culture, Walksalong said.

She encourages Native American families to foster Indian children, or be a CASA volunteer. Even if a family can't adopt a child, the foster system needs more Native American advocates working for the children in the court system, Walksalong said.

It takes a lot to adopt, and you have to give them a certain type of love, because youre taking in children you didnt get a chance to raise, to mold, Walksalong said. But to me, theyve always been my kids.

Walksalongs mother, Lonette Keehner, was adopted as a child from her Blackfeet family. Keehner and her two siblings were the first set of triplets born to the Blackfeet tribe in recent history. Keehner and the surviving sister were adopted by a white hospital nurse after the two got sick soon after their birth. Their brother died in the hospital.

That experience had helped Keehner bond deeply with Walkalongs two adopted daughters.

They started calling their grandparents grandma and grandpa, before they called my husband and me, mom and dad, Walksalong said.

Keehner was murdered on Dec. 21, 2015, in Missoula by Scott Austin Price. Walksalong struggled to help her children through another painful loss. She said her grief overcame her for a time, before realizing she needed to help herself before she could help others again. She entered therapy to help her process what had happened.

When Keehners side of the family met to spread her ashes in Glacier National Park, Walksalongs daughters were included. The two girls wear a piece of their grandmothers jewelry every day in memory of her, Walksalong said.

The tragedy of her mothers death brought her daughters closer to their family in many ways, she said.

If we look at our old ways, our traditions say all children deserve a home, Walksalong said. All children deserve a family.

The last three informational sessions this year for people interested in becoming a CASA will be at 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 16 and Dec. 14 as well as an evening session at 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 1. All informational sessions will be held at the CASA offices located at 1201 Grand Avenue, suite five.

For more information, people can visit the Yellowstone CASA website.
Guwahati : Union Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, Assam Governor Banwarilal Purohit and Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Thursday laid foundation stones for an electrification project between Raninagar (Jalpaiguri) and Guwahati section and projects related to doubling of rail track between New Bongaigaon and Kamakhya Junction via Goalpara and doubling of Digaru- Hojai Section.

The foundation stone laying function held at the parade ground of RPF Reserve Lines also saw the flagging off a passenger train from Karimganj to Maishashan.

The projects have been designed to meet the aspirations of the people of the State considering that electrification and doubling of track was a long cherished dream of for railway in Assam.

Speaking on the occasion Assam CM said that electrification and doubling of track is a welcome step which will help in the boosting railway service in Assam besides facilitating a seamless train operation.

Lauding the Centre for taking special care for Assam and North East, Sonowal said it was during the tenure of former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, foundation stone of the Bogibeel Bridge was laid and now under the present dispensation led by Narendra Modi the Bridge will be dedicated to the Nation in 2017.

On the doubling of track and electrification projects in Assam, Sonowal said these projects once commissioned would usher in revolution of railway communication in the State.

He also requested the Railway Minister for taking steps for railway network to touch all district headquarters of Assam including Barpeta Town, Majuli and Sadia.

Sonowal also demanded that the Railway Ministry should take tangible steps for recruiting all locals in Grade III and Grade IV positions in the railway.

Moreover, he urged upon the Railway Minister for utilising the unused railway lands for setting up skill development centres in Assam.

Governor Banwarilal Purohit while speaking on the occasion hailed the efforts of the Railway Ministry for taking Assam and other parts of North East into priority zone for extension and development of railway.

Appreciating the role of the present State Government led by Sarbananda Sonowal on clamping down on corruption in the State, Purohit said that the move will create a conducive atmosphere for the developmental activities to assume high importance.

Speaking on the occasion Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said that in the last two years investment for railway projects in North East has increased phenomenally like never before.

He also said that plans are on the anvil for including Sikkim in the railway map of the country.

The Union Railway minister said that the electrification project stretching 382 km of route distance and 387 km of track distance will be commissioned within three years.

Prabhu also informed that for the first time an Automatic Railway Wiring Train will be pressed into service for completing the electrification work to enable Railway Ministry to expedite the development of Assam in sync with the nature.

He also informed that plans are on the pipeline for transforming Guwahati Railway Station to a world class station complete with all modern amenities.

Prabhu also stated that the Railway Ministry is also contemplating construction of elevated Train Line in Guwahati to decongest and eliminate all surface crossings in the interest of public safety.

Union Minister of State for Railway Rajen Gohain also spoke on the occasion.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Kathmandu, Nepal: The Federal Alliance (FA), an alliance of the agitating Madhesi and Janajaties parties boycotted a Legislature-Parliament meeting on Friday.

Members of the parliament affiliated to the parties under the alliance walked out of the Parliament building announcing their boycott the parliamentary meeting.

The alliance, which has been demanding amendment to the constitution, boycotted the meeting alleging that the government failed to act in line with the three-point deal sealed between the Madhesi parties before the formation of the incumbent government.

The leaders of the FA have said that the decision to boycott the parliamentary meeting is their symbolic protest to press the government to register constitution amendment proposal in the parliament by mid-November.
The Hindu - November 09, 2016

Fifty years ago, an anti-cow slaughter mob nearly stormed Parliament House. Those who launched that attack constitute the core of the ruling establishment today

We are great at celebrating silver jubilees, golden jubilees and diamond jubilees. One such occasion has just passed unnoticed. November 7 marked the 50th anniversary of the very first assault on Parliament. On this day, in 1966, thousands of sadhus of different varieties and denominations and many others gathered near Parliament demanding an immediate end to cow slaughter all over the country. Incited by the rabble-rousing Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) MP, Swami Rameshwaranand, who represented Karnal in undivided Punjab, the huge crowd marched towards the Parliament House complex with a clear intent to storm it. Finding the gates closed, the agitationists launched a free-for-all attack on government buildings on Parliament Street. The Congress president, K. Kamaraj, who was in his house nearby, had a narrow escape. After about an hour of mayhem not seen in Delhi since 1947, the police responded and brought about some semblance of order. Official numbers put the death toll at seven or eight but the loss to commercial property was substantial.

Dealing with crisis

The Prime Minister was just less than 10 months in office and she was unsure of her political position both within her own party and in the country. In fact, on that very day, a no-confidence motion against her was being debated and voted upon in the Lok Sabha. It was the fourth crisis to confront Indira Gandhi in her very first year of office after the monsoon failure, the controversial devaluation, and the contentious reorganisation of Punjab. On each of these three occasions, she had shown courage, something her critics are loath to admit. This time also was no different.

Indira Gandhi sacked her Home Minister Gulzarilal Nanda the very next day. As patron of the Bharat Sadhu Samaj, he was widely seen to be sympathetic to the protesters, if not actually a co-conspirator in the agitation in the precincts of Parliament. Ironically, the Congress bosses thought that he and Indira Gandhi were in the same aleft-of-centrea camp when it came to economic policy although what she did in June 1966 was quintessential aright of centrea a devaluation, liberalisation of imports, delicensing, and opening up to foreign investment.

After the February 1967 elections in which the Jan Sangh more than doubled its tally, Indira Gandhi knew that she had to do something on the issue. She confabulated with her colleagues, and on June 29, 1967, the formation of a high-level committee under the chairmanship of A.K. Sarkar, who had just retired as the Chief Justice of India, was announced. The committee was given a wide-ranging mandate that included examining the feasibility of a national law to ban cow slaughter by amending the Constitution. The composition of this government committee was unusual. Perhaps it has been without parallel in recent Indian political history. It had M.S. Golwalkar, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, R.P. Mookerji, a retired judge and elder brother of the founder of the BJS, and the Shankaracharya of Puri as prominent members. Two Chief Ministers a Charan Singh of Uttar Pradesh and D.P. Mishra of Madhya Pradesh a were included as were some other anti-cow slaughter activists. Three non-politicians were also made part of the committee a V. Kurien of the National Dairy Development Board, Ashok Mitra, economist and then chairman of the Agricultural Prices Commission, and H.A.B. Parpia, Director of the Central Food Technological Research Institute.

The committee was given six months to submit its report. It began actively, had numerous meetings and met a large cross-section of society. But it never actually submitted a report. Questions would keep getting asked in Parliament and the answers would be of the usual athe matter is under examinationa type. Finally, after 12 years of its existence, Morarji Desai wound up the committee in 1979 when he was Prime Minister.

Both Kurien and Dr. Mitra have left delightful accounts of the committee in their memoirs. Kurien, for instance, has written in his I Too Had a Dream that Golwalkar admitted to him in so many words that the RSS had launched the November 1966 campaign to embarrass the government and with definite political objectives in mind. Dr. Mitra too, in his A Prattleras Tale, makes critical observations of the obscurantism of some of his fellow members on the committee and recounts with great glee what happened in Anand during a tour by the committee. Coming to know that the Shankaracharya of Puri was very fond of cottage cheese, Kurien sent boxes of paneer to everyone. Golwalkar was delighted, but there was great consternation in the Shankaracharyaas camp when the Amul man casually remarked the next day that cheese prepared at Amul used rennet from the fifth or seventh intestine of young calves.

Ecological consequences

The cow protection issue was to galvanise the conservation community as well. People like ornithologist Salim Ali and conservationist Zafar Futehally had been worried about the impact of cattle grazing on sanctuaries like the famous Keoladeo Ghana Bird Sanctuary at Bharatpur. Futehally was to write in a leading newspaper in November 1967 that the Sarkar committee should examine the ecological consequences of having a large and uncontrolled cattle population. He persuaded Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institution to support a study to be conducted by the Bombay Natural History Society on this very subject. An overenthusiastic Ripley wrote to Indira Gandhi directly on October 3, 1967 expressing his views on the issue of cattle and conservation. She did not reply, but U.S. Ambassador Chester Bowles reprimanded him on November 7, 1967, saying, aAt my request, my deputy Mr. Greene found an opportunity the other day to sound Mrs. Gandhias right-hand man, P.N. Haksar about your letter. Haksar readily confirmed that it had been receiveda and as much said that he thought it better to leave the complexities of the cow problem to the Government of Indiaa .

Fifty years later, those who launched that attack on Parliament constitute the core of the ruling establishment. Such are the vicissitudes of democracy. It was a watershed and continues to reverberate.

Jairam Ramesh is a Congress Rajya Sabha MP.
Thank you for reading!

Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Film tells the story of social activist and patron of the arts

Mabel Dodge Luhan, and her marriage to Tiwa Indian Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo:

A woman 100 years ahead of her time

Awakening in Taos, an award-winning film by Mark Gordon and narrated by Ali MacGraw will screen at this years Red Nation Film Festival on Wednesday, November 16, at 6 PM at the LAEMMLE PLAYHOUSE 7, 673 E Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91101

The timing of this films release is serendipitous with major stories in todays news including the nomination of a Woman President and the conflict in North Dakota. This story is set almost one hundred years ago and it involves a strong independent woman who marries a Native American and fights with his tribe to protect 600,000 acres of sacred tribal land from private sale to squatters. Like the Standing Rock Sioux, their sacred sites are desecrated and their religious practices are threatened.

Taos Pueblo fought for 64 years for the return of 48,000 acres and their sacred Blue Lake, granted to the tribe by Spain in the 1500s. It was illegally annexed as part of a National Forrest under Teddy Roosevelt. After filing many civil suits against the US Government Taos Pueblo finally succeeded by filing a First Amendment rights suit. This case was won on the right of religious freedom violated by the US Government, as they prevented the tribe from observing sacred spiritual practices. In 1970, Richard Nixon signed legislation, the first instance in history where the US Government returned Native land taken illegally. Perhaps there is a message in this story that could help the Standing Rock Sioux get the US Government to honor its original treaty with the Sioux!

Awakening in Taos follows the personal evolution of Mabel Dodge Luhan as a writer, salon hostess, art patroness, social activist and a resident of New Mexico. Born in Buffalo, New York, Mabel was a woman unique to her time. Her influence extended into the world of arts, music, literature and activism for social change. In her late 30s she experienced a life-altering arrival into a small town in Northern New Mexico and embraced the Taos Pueblo Indians in a way that seized the attention of the artistic and literary world. Her unconventional marriage to Antonio Lujan, a full-blooded Tiwa Indian from Taos Pueblo, created a revolutionary bridge between two cultures. Mabel and Tony helped to defeat federal legislation in 1924 that would have taken away 600,000 acres of sacred land belonging to the 19 tribes of New Mexico.

Mabel lured progressive thinkers and artists, including D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Willa Cather, Dorothy Brett, Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keeffe and others to the remote town of Taos to attend her salons. Many of these visitors stayed for periods of time and several remained their entire lives. Mabel's home and salons made an extraordinary contribution to the culture of Taos County and the State of New Mexico. Luhan was a writer and advocate for the arts, womens rights and Native American culture in a time when women were still fighting for the right to vote.

Shot entirely in New Mexico with a local cast and crew, the film features breathtaking cinematography and aerial footage of Taos landscapes and landmarks. These physical features produced a visual response captured in 20th-century paintings and photos by Mabels guests.

It was a book, Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality written by Mabel herself that piqued Gordons interest and set him off on a ten-year journey to get the book transformed into a film worthy of the topic.

Filmmaker Gordon assembled a large team of writers, editors, art experts, historians and documentary producers to bring the many varied details of Luhans life into sharp focus. Actress Ali MacGraw happened to sit next to him on a plane and they began discussing the book, which she already loved. She offered to read some pages at a fundraiser in Taos and then signed on when the project was green lighted. Through a biographer of Luhans, Gordon met actress Leslie Harrell Dillen who wrote and performed a one-woman show portraying Mabel. She joined the production and appears as Mabels voice reading her words from books and letters.

Awakening in Taos: The Mabel Dodge Luhan Story won Best Feature made in New Mexico at the 2015 Santa Fe Film Festival. The film has received special recognition and an award for Best Writing at the Hollywood Independent International Film awards. Awakening in Taos was produced in partnership with New Mexico PBS.

The film will be shown Wednesday, November 16, at 6 PM at the LAEMMLE PLAYHOUSE 7, 673 E Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91101

For tickets and information: http://www.rednationff.com/awakening-in-taos/

Or call (310) 478-3836.
Ah, if only I'd been able to write all of this while I'd been at Morbido 2016. But when traveling, sometimes the wifi gods won't enable us to get on with our work. Anyway:

Day 4

I have breakfast with other filmmakers in our hotel: Justin McConnell, Steve Kostanski, Jeremy Gillespie and Dre Boulet and Olivia Saperstein. We discuss filmmaking, politics, movies playing Morbido later, and where to go to start our day. Kostanski and Gillespie (The Void) head off to see Doctor Strange on our recommendation, and Boulet and Saperstein (Recipe) head off to the Frida Kahlo museum (unfortunately, it was so crowded they couldn't get in).

McConell (Do You See What I See?) and I head to the anthropology museum and we get an amazing, overwhelming eyeful of early Mexican culture. We see a staggering array of bones, jewelry, artifacts, an enormous Mayan sun dial and so much more. Afterward, we get street corn and tostadas from the vendors in the park outside. There's a show going on --- several men swing by one foot in a circle from a tall post --- while playing flutes. It's impressive. Having seen a rather old depiction of this in a painting in one of the museums, I know that it's a cultural tradition, but am not sure what it's called. Still, the stamina to do that is simply awesome.

On the walk back to the hotel, McConnell and I encounter an inquisitive squirrel. McConnell offers a peanut to it, and the hungry critter snatched and ate it up immediately. However, the squirrel nicked McConnell's finger badly in the process. Live and learn; at least I had a Band-Aid to offer.

After returning to Colonia Roma, the part of the city where we are all staying, we get some tacos.

And then we head to the drive-in presentation of An American Werewolf in London. It's the 35th anniversary of the film, and a big deal for those of us who've never had the luck to attend a drive-in. Plus, Morbdio was sponsored by Fiat; that meant that Fiat provided brand-new cars for us to watch the film in! It was such a great experience. The burgers sold at the drive-in were pretty good, too.

If you have never been to Morbido, than you have never experienced the showman flair of festival director Pablo Guisa Koestinger. This is an integral part of what makes this festival very special.

To start the film, Pablo shows his own short version of the famous Thriller video Landis directed 33 years ago. You can see his werewolf/werecat getup in the photo I took above. And then, we are treated to the orginal music video --- complete with a choreographed zombie dance.

Afterward, Pabo introduces a "very special zombie" to lead Landis to the stage. It's Mick Garris, dressed up in the zombie outfit and makeup he wore in the video three decades ago. When they're onstage, a flood of zombie children run up and join them. Landis introduces the film.

Later, we head to karaoke downtown and sing and scream our hearts out.

What a night; it's a fantastic experience.

Day 5

A bunch of us head to the witchcraft market, upon the recommendation of fest guest, filmmaker, and author Mick Garris. I'm aware that we are foolish American and Canadians who may get in over our heads. After all, some horror movies start out this way, when over-eager tourists veer off the path of what's considered safe in a foreign country.

We see lots of potions, animals, spices, herbs, and Santa Muerte figurines. It's interesting.

Next, we head to our respective short film blocks, Postcards From a Crime Scene and Extreme Delights, indulging in street gorditas on the way. The audience is somewhat small, but they are receptive and energized crowds. Everyone is happy.

Not much later, we get dinner (more tacos, yay!!) and board a double-decker bus filled with celebratory drinks. We all have to duck the street light cables as we ride beneath them. We make a few stops, one to dole out the awards, which are really cool skull statues, and the other to listen to live mariachi bands!

Eventually, we are delivered back to our hotel after being told of the history of several more landmarks.

It was hard to leave, and that's when you know you've attended a great festival. We'll be back, Morbido!
While we were all playing Luc Besson's Valerian trailer on constant repeat yesterday a certain other science fiction film also slipped out a new trailer with a new spot for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story rolling out in Japan. There's loads of new footage in this one as it balances out back story, with a bit of Vader, battle sequences both large and small and footage of the Death Star being tested from the perspective of the target site, which I believe is the first time that's ever been put on screen.

An interesting factor here - to me, at least - is that this new Japanese promo entirely plays up the serious, epic nature of the story and it's that element that is by far the most interesting to me so far as I absolutely love the sweeping, grand scale of this particular spot while it's precisely that tone that Disney has reportedly been worried about when ordering reshoots to lighten things up a bit. Curious.

Check it out below!
And here she is as Michele Leblanc in Elle, as a survivor of a brutal rape who is willing to bury the axe... preferably IN the rapist.

This picture isn't part of the quiz yet, but the others are. Browse through them all, and see how many you recognize!
If you are currently a print subscriber but don't have an online account, select this option. You will need to use your 7 digit subscriber account number (with leading zeros) and your last name (in UPPERCASE).
 "Sentence Appeals in England: Promoting Consistent Sentencing through Robust Appellate Review | Main | Two notable SCOTUS criminal law arguments (with federal mandatory minimums at issue) 

November 11, 2013

How about a few clemency grants, Prez Obama, to really honor vets in need on Veterans Day?

In 2008 the RAND Corporation surveyed a group of veterans six months after their return. It found that almost one in five had either PTSD or major depression. In recent years rates of substance abuse and suicide among veterans have also ticked steadily upward. A certain number of veterans suffering from mental-health issues will, invariably, end up in jail or prison. After Vietnam, the number of inmates with prior military service rose steadily until reaching a peak in 1985, when more than one in five was a veteran. By 1988, more than half of all Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD reported that they had been arrested; more than one third reported they had been arrested multiple times. Today veterans advocates fear that, unless they receive proper support, a similar epidemic may befall soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. No one knows how many veterans are incarcerated, but the most recent survey, compiled by the Department of Justices Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2004, found that nearly one in 10 inmates in U.S. jails had prior military service. Extrapolated to the total prison population, this means that approximately 200,000 veterans were behind bars.

On Veterans Day, I always find myself thinking about veterans who, after serving our country in the military and thereby supporting of our nation's commitment to liberty and freedom, return home and discover the hard way that these constitutional values are not always paramount in our modern criminal justice systems. This Daily Beast piece , headlined "From PTSD to Prison: Why Veterans Become Criminals," highlights that there are now probably hundreds of thousand of veterans in America's prison and jails:

As the title of this post highlights, I would like to see President Obama go beyond the usual symbolic gestures and use his historic clemency powers to salute at least a few veterans in federal prison with commutations that would create just a bit more physical liberty and honor a few more veterans with pardons that would free offenders from the enduring collateral consequences of a federal criminal conviction.

This effective recent op-ed by Mark Osler, headlined "Clemency is a task for people and institutions of faith; It should also be a task for the president, but he seems unwilling or unable to use his powers," starts by noting why, sadly, I am not expecting the President to step up to the clemency plate today or anytime soon:

President Obama is, by a wide margin, the stingiest president in modern times in his use of the pardon power. He seems unwilling or unable to use this simple constitutional tool, even as both conservative and progressive commentators are criticizing the federal governments overincarceration of nonviolent offenders. A simple way to alleviate that problem would be to commute (shorten) the most egregious of these sentences using the pardon power.

Some recent and a few older posts concerning federal clemency practices:

November 11, 2013 at 10:10 AM | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:

https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451574769e2019b00f16769970d

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference How about a few clemency grants, Prez Obama, to really honor vets in need on Veterans Day?:

Comments

I wonder how much of Obama's reluctance to use the pardon power is a reaction to Clinton's last-minute pardons of Marc Rich and others. It seems that Clinton gave pardons a bad name, at the end of his second term.

Posted by: Late Inning Relief | Nov 11, 2013 4:10:58 PM

Pardon me for saying this Mr. President but the pardon is now something that you are entitled to "give" like you give your nephew a birthday gift. The Pardon Power is an obligation of your office to exercise and not lay dormant.

The word Pardon also conveys a sense of forgive. We will not forgive your failure to exercise the pardon power and especially for veterans. Screw what Clinton did. Do your job!

Posted by: Liberty1st | Nov 11, 2013 11:32:58 PM

Post a comment
Besides those indefatigable and still-not-dead-inside high school students showing us all up today with their walk-outs and marching, I'm not coming up with a lot of reasons not to just start drinking early. There's a petition now to get the Electoral College electors to just cast their votes for Clinton, which seems completely unlikely and could lead to a Constitutional crisis, but hey, I signed it.

Anyway, above is a fairly calming video to help you wrap up your afternoon, featuring mountain bikers and LEDs. Colossal first posted about it, and it's the creation of filmmaker Mike Gamble and VFX creator Tom Wood in an attempt to mimic the lightbikes from TRON. Laughing Squid picked up the video today to help brighten moods, and I pass it along.
Love the new Instagram Stories feature, but bummed you can't tag your friend in that video of him drunkenly weeping at the election of Donald Trump? Think the Snapchat rip-off is great, but could really use some destination-obscured hyperlinks that will magically whisk you away to a Facebook page promoting fake news stories about the president-elect? Well then, you're in luck: Instagram today announced that the social media company is updating its popular new Stories feature to allow for tagging people and building in links.

While the tags will work just like elsewhere on Instagram, the links have their own little unique twist  but more on that in a bit. First, the tags: "Mentioning people in stories works the same as it does in captions and comments," a blog post announcing the changes reads. "When you add text to your story, type '@' followed by a username and select the person youd like to mention. Their username will appear underlined in your story." Pretty straightforward.

The link feature, however, works a little differently than you might expect. Instead of including a readable URL like "www.sfist.com," users will be presented with the words "See More" at the bottom of the post. Clicking that will take you to a URL of the poster's choice  which could be a virus-laden porn site. It is perhaps because of this potential for abuse that the links feature is still in test mode and only available to verified accounts  possibly suggesting that Instagram filters may not yet be ready for the likely monumental task of preventing malicious links from hijacking users' accounts.

TechCrunch reports that the ability to include links in Stories will allow brands and famous people to send followers directly to purchase pages. If you like the jam playing in the background of a post, for example, you can now click "See More" to be taken to a website offering to sell it to you. Or, maybe offering you 12 free months of credit score monitoring?

Along with this update comes the opportunity to record Boomerang videos right in the Instagram app. A standalone app allowing users to create short looping videos (it's totally not Vine), Boomerang previously required users to exit Instagram in order to use it. They will now be able to do so directly in Stories, although not in the regular old Instagram.

As Instagram today promised, these news features will "make your story even more fun."

Related: Instagram Introduces 'Stories,' Essentially Copying Snapchat
Peter Thiel will "have the ear" of President Donald Trump, or so the tech billionaire and Facebook board member tells the New York Times, and perhaps, according to an anonymous source for the Huffington Post, the more formal duty of transitioning power from sitting President Barack Obama to the President-Elect.

A page in the book of history has turned, and there is an opening to think about some of our problems from a new perspective, Thiel told the Times following the election results. Ill try to help the president in any way I can. He added that Trump's odds "were very badly underestimated... Trump voters were not being captured by the polls. A lot of the dynamics were very similar to the Brexit vote in the UK. Thiel didn't comment on the possibility of steering the Trump transition team, but HuffPo writes that his name is being considered in the event that New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who currently has that role, is further undone by the George Washington Bridge scandal in which two of his former top aides were convicted just last week.

Thiel's net worth of $3 billion comes from his cofounding of PayPal, his secretive investment firm Palantir, and his early investment in Facebook. Thiel's contrarian, libertarian views and open support of Donald Trump were unique in Silicon Valley, even embarrassing to his colleagues as recently as last month. Indeed, under pressure from Silicon Valley to justify his support for Trump when the world seemed a vastly different place than it does today (maybe it wasn't?) and a Trump presidency felt unlikely (lol, not anymore), Thiel appeared at The National Press Club to defend his views. There, he also assured journalists that his secret funding of a lawsuit against Gawker Media was motivated by his love for free speech and an independent press. As Thiel put it in a preview of the talk to the Times, "The millions of people who vote for Trump are not doing it because of the worst things he said or did... Thats ridiculous. The Americans who are voting for Trump are doing it because they judge the situation of the country to be urgent. We're at such a crucial point that you have to overlook personal characteristics.

Thiel was also asked to justify his $1.25 million donation to Trump, which directly followed the leak of an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump gloated about sexually assaulting women. I moved on her like a bitch," Trump said on the tape according to coverage in the Washington Post. Trump could "Grab them by the pussy," he said. "You can do anything."

Nobody thinks his comments about women were acceptable," Thiel said of Trump at the Press Club interview, defending the timing of his donation as coincidental. However, Thiel has never shown great concern for survivors of sexual assault: According to the Guardian, he wrote in his book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus that The purpose of the rape crisis movement seems as much about vilifying men as about raising awareness, describing some instances of rape as no more than "belated regret."

Although the tech community as a whole appears shocked and appalled by Trump's victory, Thiel has always been in a different camp, and tells the Times he hopes his cohort will come around. Its important for it to be able to work with the rest of the country and the world, he said. At the end of the day, it would be crazy to simply spend four years issuing denunciatory tweets on Twitter. For a day or two, thats fine. But I hope Silicon Valley will be more productive than that.

Thiel might not be completely alone in the tech community, though: Perhaps his was just the most open Trump support. As he told the Times, I was having dinner last week with a high-profile venture capitalist and he said, Im voting for Trump but I have to lie and tell everyone Im voting for Gary Johnson.'" And Thiel? I did vote, he told the Times, indicating that his ballot was indeed cast for Trump. I dont always vote," he added, "but I thought you might ask, so I did.

Related: The Tech World Is Losing Its Collective S**t Over Trump's Win
While a raucous Trump election protest rocked Market Street last night, a peaceful, somber, but emotionally charged candlelight gathering brought out about 800 mourners and activists to register a collective WTF over the presidential election results. The crowd held candles, hugged, and cried as several speakers fired them up and gave various pep talks to remind them of the struggle that now lays ahead.







Photo: Jay Barmann/SFist

We will win again. It will be because we are fabulous. a minister named Victor Floyd told the crowd. Despite the Electoral College, we are the majority.



Photo: Joe Kukura/SFist

Other speakers stressed the difficulty a Trump presidency poses for people outside of our comfortably left-leaning San Francisco. I had clients calling me all morning, terrified, said Laura Gibbon, a family law attorney from Modesto who handles name change, gender change and undocumented immigrant cases. Do not forget people outside this bubble.



Photo: Joe Kukura/SFist

The two rallies would converge when the Market Street protesters made their way to the Castro  but not without incident. One speaker was booed by most of the crowd when shouting into the megaphone, We can thank Hillary Clinton for undermining Bernie Sanders and creating this defeat.



Photo: Joe Kukura/SFist

That sentiment was quickly shot down, and most of the messages were more unifying. Were all in this together, gay, straight, black, white, documented, undocumented, activist Cleve Jones told the crowd.



Photo: Joe Kukura/SFist



Photo: Joe Kukura/SFist



Photo: Jay Barmann/SFist



Related: 'Not My President': San Francisco And Oakland Take To The Streets In Protest, Dismay
A man was left with life-threatening injuries Wednesday night, after two suspects chased and shot him on an SF street.

The shooting went down at 11:53 p.m. Wednesday, near the intersection of 17th and Harrison Streets. According to the San Francisco Police Department, two men in their 30s were chasing a third man down 17th, when one of the pursuers "pulled out a silver revolver and fired."

Their shots struck the person they were chasing, a 42-year-old man. According to the SFPD, he was left with life-threatening injuries in the attack, and was transported to San Francisco General Hospital. No update on his condition was available as of publication time.

Police say that no arrests have been made: The suspects fled the scene, and remain at large. As of Thursday afternoon, no information on the motive behind the shooting had been released.
Last night, thousands of San Franciscans marched to protest the bigoted demagoguery that elected Donald Trump to the presidency. But, as usual, it looks like Oaklanders had a thing or two to show us about political demonstrations. There, the New York Times writes, crowds larger than 6,000 swelled, beginning as indicated on Facebook at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Officers in riot gear were called in, and according to protesters at the scene, they deployed tear gas to disperse demonstrators.

ABC 7 calls the protest mostly peaceful at first, but later, windows were smashed, people began spraypainting graffiti, and some started fires, including at the soon-to-be Uber headquarters, the former Sears building that's under renovation. The news channel reports that one officer was injured in the protests.

"To me it's like I kind of lost faith in America," one protester told a reporter for the channel. "When we don't have equity and we don't have justice we will resist."

A newly re-elected Oakland school board member, Jumoke Hinton Hodge told ABC 7 that "Many of our teachers had to be with students who are scared to death of what may happen, Latino children, Muslim Arabic children."

The Chronicle writes that there were still other scuffles with the police: One protestor, for example, reportedly lobbed a flare at a line of officers. OPD tells the paper that splinter groups threw rocks, bottles, and even Molotov cocktails at buildings, though they estimate it to have been a small number of protesters engaging in such acts of vandalism and violence. Several arrests were reportedly made and citations were given for crimes including assaulting an officer, vandalism, and failure to disperse.

Protesters daringly jump through flames of bonfire in Oakland street during anti-Trump demonstration. https://t.co/67V4Xpvlgs pic.twitter.com/992SkTt8T8  NBC Bay Area (@nbcbayarea) November 10, 2016 It's a dumpster fire on Broadway from 20th to 14th in #Oakland. Anti-Trump protest pic.twitter.com/ngwSUQs1hp  David DeBolt (@daviddebolt) November 9, 2016

Mayor Libby Schaaf had choice words for the Chronicle: "The best way to protest this election is to show that Oakland comes together and does not fall apart," she said. "Show that diverse, progressive cities like ours work and remain committed to social justice.

Related: 'Not My President': San Francisco And Oakland Take To The Streets In Protest, Dismay
The Potrero View, a charming and cool and good neighborhood newspaper, is not the Chicago Tribune. But much like that larger news outlet, which famously printed the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman" on the cover of its November 3, 1948 issue, copies of the latest Potrero View bear a similar mistake front and center.

Having gone to press too soon  it's a monthly, so perhaps with too much confidence in Clinton's win  the View published its premature, almost hopeful declaration of a Clinton presidential victory that was not, actually, to be. And now it's a wistful relic.

Obviously the View wasn't alone in its incorrect prognostication  at various times, and really till the end, mainstream (biased liberal lol) media outlets wildly underestimated the number of voters President-Elect Donald Trump had amassed with his blustering rhetoric. Especially in San Francisco, the result was one few saw coming, although perhaps the one tenth of SF voters who cast their ballots for Trump had more of an inkling, and now they have some of us looking around at San Franciscans we see with a bit more suspicion.

The View's front page is a symbol of all that, I suppose. SFist has reached out to the paper for comment: We'll update this if and when they respond. The Chronicle noticed the copy before the election results were in, and Publisher Steven Moss explained to them, We think thats the likely outcome  the very likely outcome  and the opposite outcome is unthinkable. So it seemed like the right way to go.

Related: Nearly Ten Percent Of San Francisco Voted For Trump
SPENCER, Iowa | After announcing the layoffs of 70 Spencer employees in June, officials at Eaton Manufacturing, once the largest employer in Spencer, will shut down its plant here in September 2017, laying off its remaining 140 workers.

The reductions will come in phases beginning in January, Eaton spokesman Jim Michels said.

We are committed to working with employees, their families, and the Spencer community," Michels said in a phone interview from the Detroit area. "We told the employees that we strongly encourage them to apply for other jobs at Eaton, which has two other Iowa manufacturing sites, in Shenandoah and Belmond.

The manufacturing done in Spencer will either be moved to other Eaton facilities, or outsourced, he said.

The Spencer plant, which opened in 1974, makes hydraulic pumps and motors, predominantly for agricultural equipment and specifically combines, Michels said.

Agricultural equipment production is down significantly this year compared to last year, he said, adding that North American OEM agricultural equipment sales are down 15.8 percent from September 2015 to September 2016. North American combine sales are down 26.5 percent in the same period, he said.

Michels said there has been a slight improvement in combine equipment sales for the first nine months of 2016. But theres no disputing that were seeing on-going declines in our key markets, he said.

The company does not divulge information about its customers, he added.

The Spencer plant covers about 337,000 square feet. About 35 years ago Eaton reported some 800 employees here, making it the largest employer in the city.

In recent years, the company has downsized its workforce. Eaton laid off 20 employees in February, and 70 in June. After the most recent cuts, the company said further evaluation of Spencers product lines would take place.

Spencer city manager Bob Fagen said Thursday the plant closing is "something we were hoping would never happen."

"Its never a good thing to see a company like Eaton thats been around for a long time to make an announcement like this," Fagen said. "Eaton has been good not only for workers, but it has been a good corporate citizen. Weve been fortunate to have had Eaton a part of the Spencer community for 42 years.

Iowa Great Lakes Corridor of Opportunity President and CEO Kiley Miller said the regional economic development group and the city have been in constant communications with Eaton about what steps the community could take to preserve the Spencer plant.

In the last year or more weve worked hard to make sure the plant officials and corporate officials were fully aware the community was ready to help in any way possible, Miller said, noting that Eaton officials in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, the divisional headquarters for the hydraulic division, rejected several overtures, including a request by local officials for a meeting to make a case for keeping the Spencer plant open.

We never even got a response to that request, Miller said.

Miller said the corridor and city stand ready to market the facility to another employer if the company offers it.

We already have a couple of businesses wed like to approach," Miller said. "And well also work with site location experts to give us advice on the best industry to go into that plant, that property and that location.

Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Eaton Corporation is a power management company with 2015 sales of $20.9 billion. Eaton has about 99,000 employees and sells products to customers in more than 175 countries.
Mannheim Steamroller has recorded so many holiday songs theres only enough material left for one more Christmas album.

With five previous ones, weve covered just about every song in the Christmas repertoire, says founder Chip Davis. But there is enough left to do Christmas 6.

Because the selling window is short for holiday albums, Davis doesnt like to get on a one-a-year cycle. They take a lot of time to do and technology changes so rapidly.

After the first one  Mannheim Steamroller Christmas -- we waited nine years to do another. That was enough time to get the lay of the land, reach independent distributors and build a following.

Now, Mannheim has a solid fan base, an annual holiday show (which comes to Sioux City Nov. 18) and enough non-Christmas projects to keep Davis and company busy all year long.

I might start working on the sixth one this summer, the 69-year-old Grammy winner says. Then, its a flurry of activity until its finished. I start dinking around on the keyboard and one thing leads to another, he says. Because Davis handles orchestrations as well, hes steeped in the process.

If I have an idea when I wake up in the morning, I can have it done by 11 a.m. Sometimes, Ive had songs that take a couple of days. He starts early, too, and stops at noon. After lunch my brain is too caught up in everyday life. I like to write before clutter gets in the way.

Still riding the wave of its 30/40 anniversary collection, released last year, two groups of Mannheim musicians will blanket the country with concerts during the holiday season. Davis, who used to be with one of them, will be busy conducting How the Grinch Stole Christmas in Orlando.

One of the complications of having two bands is which one do you go visit? I have a plane and I can get around pretty quick, but theyre performing every night.

In the old days  when Davis was part of the group, we played Thursday, Friday and Saturday and a matinee. Now, two Steamrollers are performing throughout November and December.

To prep for those annual treks, Davis rents the Orpheum Theatre in Omaha, sets up the shows LED screens, does a big tech rehearsal and keeps two orchestras rehearsing at once. One band is at the theater, the other is at his American Gramaphone shop. I go back and forth.

Luckily, he says, those early videos he shot for the first tours still hold up because they were shot on film. You can really blow that stuff up.

For Davis, its like memory lane. I was there on every shoot. And now, I think, Dont mess with it. The stuff looks fine to me.

When he watches the crowd reaction to old favorites, the composer/director/creative genius smiles. The show is flawless. The crowd reaction is pretty much the same every night. Its almost as if we move the audience with the show. They applaud in the same places.

While those huge LED screen are a marked change in the Mannheim Christmas, the music still has that quirky steampunk sound that wowed audiences 30 years ago.

Get Davis talking about the technical aspects of the program and he can geek out with the best of them. Always ahead of the computer curve, he says the process is constantly changing. Youre not just stepping, youre running.

The music business has veered as well. When we started, the price of our CDs used to be $15.99. Some were $18.99 and there was enough margin to hire an orchestra, Davis says. Now, with iTunes, kids can download a song instead of a whole album for 99 cents. ITunes gets half of it and the publisher and artists have to split whats left. I dont think that will ever turn around.

Vinyl, however, is making a comeback. Mannheims last big release, 30/40, has been pressed in Prague on see-through vinyl and includes a collection of photos. Davis says its expected to be a big seller for the holidays.

Meanwhile, hell be wielding the baton in Orlando. The show is a lot of fun, he says, but its a licensing nightmare. Dont expect that anytime soon in your neighborhood. Instead, Davis adds, look for the Steamroller to just keep rolling.
Blood drives

Dakota Valley High School blood drive, 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Friday at Dakota Valley High School, 1150 N. Shore St.

Elk Point Community blood drive, 1-6 p.m. Tuesday at St. Joseph Catholic Church, 605 E. Main St.

Screenings

Free blood pressure screenings, 9:30 to 11 a.m. Wednesdays at Countryside Senior Living, front lobby. No appointment necessary.

Programs/Self-Help Groups

Al-Anon Information Center, call 712-255-6724.

Al-Anon and Alateen, meetings locally. For times, dates and locations of area meetings, call 712-255-6724.

Alcoholics Anonymous, beginners information, call 712-252-1333.

Arc of Woodbury County, serving the mentally challenged, 5:15 p.m. meeting, second Monday of the month at Mid-Step Services, 4303 Stone Ave. For families and interested persons.

Child Care Resource and Referral, provides resources, education and advocacy for children, parents, and child care providers. Assists in child care needs. For more information, call 712-277-1180.

Co-Dependence Anonymous, 7 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays at First Lutheran Church, Fireside Room.

Co-Dependents Anonymous (CODA), 10 a.m. Saturdays at Hawkeye Club, 420 Jones St.

Compassionate Friends, 7 p.m. fourth Wednesday of each month (third Thursday in November and second Sunday December) in Mercy Medical Center's Leiter Room. For families who have lost children. Contact Nancy Webb 712-212-4032 or Don Mulder 712-541-5512.

Eating disorder coalition awareness event, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Oct. 29 at Boy's and Girl's home and family services, 2101 Court St. Contact Lisa 712-251-0570 or Michele 712-898-2351.

Clinics

Siouxland District Health immunization clinics, call for appointment, 712-279-6119 or 1-800-587-3005.

Information

Family and Addictive Illness series, for more information, call 234-2300.

Iowa Fathers, 6 to 8 p.m. fourth Tuesday of each month at Hope Lutheran Church, Education Building, 218 W. 18th St., South Sioux City, Neb. Support group to help single, divorcing and divorced parents residing in the state of Iowa.

Mercy Pathways Outpatient Program, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, on the third floor, Mercy's Central Medical Building, 801 Fifth St., Suite 360. Provides hope, help, opportunity to connect through group therapy for individuals experiencing personal, relationship, psychiatric issues. For more information, call 712-279-5991.

Narcotics Anonymous, meetings daily, various times, dates and locations. For more information, call 712-279-0733.

Overeaters Anonymous, 1 p.m. Tuesdays at Wesley United Methodist Church, 3700 Indian Hills Drive; 6 p.m. Tuesdays at St. John's Lutheran Church, 402 Lane Ave., Storm Lake; 7 p.m. Tuesdays at Church of the Nazarene, 226 N. Main St., Viborg, S.D.; 5:30 p.m. Thursdays and 9 a.m. Saturdays at Newman Center, 320 E. Cherry St., Vermillion, S.D.; 10:30 a.m. Saturdays at Hawkeye Club, 420 Jones St. A 12-step recovery program for people who have problems with food and weight. No fees.

St. Lukes Outpatient Behavioral Health Program, 9 a.m. to noon Monday, Tuesday and Thursday on fifth floor of St. Luke's, located at 2720 Stone Park Blvd. Offers several levels of outpatient care including partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, and group therapy. This program provides support and integrated treatment to individuals experiencing personal or relationship issues as a result of their mental illness. For more information and admission criteria, call 712-279-3906.

Sobriety By Faith, 8:30 a.m. Saturdays at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, 1421 Geneva St. For more information, call James Mothershead at 712-577-9715.

The Link-Recovery and Freedom, 1603 Glen Ellen Road; 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. Saturday workshop, and Christian 12-step meeting 7 to 8 p.m. Tuesday. For all ages. Call Dee at 389-7432.

Women in Recovery, meets monthly at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, 1421 Geneva St. For details, call 712-255-4623.

Tarahouse Meditation Center, 8 a.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 6:30 p.m. Fridays; 10 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays, all at 3112 Rebecca St. Three easy 10-minute sessions in small group; beginners welcome. For more information, call 490-6410.

Blood pressure and blood sugar screening, 9 to 11 a.m. Wednesdays in the lobby at Westwood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. Free to public.

Support Groups

Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous, 7-8:30 p.m. Wednesdays at Hawkeye Club basement, 420 Jones St. For more information, call 277-5935.

Celebrate Recovery, Bible-based 12-step recovery group. Thursdays at 6:30 at Sunnybrook Community Church, 5601 Sunnybrook Drive. Daycare provided. 712-490-3343.

PFLAG of Siouxland, (Parents & Friends of Lesbians and Gays), 7 p.m., fourth Monday of January, March, May, July, September and November. St. Mark ELCA Church, 5200 Glenn Ave., in the upstairs meeting area. 712-258-3116.

Singles widowed and divorced, all ages, 4 p.m., Sundays. McDonald's at Sixth Street and Lewis Boulevard. 712-252-2675.

GriefShare, 6:30 -8:30 p.m. every Tuesday until Dec. 6 at Sunnybrook Community Church, 5601 Sunnybrook Drive, Sioux City. 712-276-5814.

HIV/AIDS Support Group, meets weekly. For more information, call Darla or Teri at Siouxland Community Health Center, 712-252-2477 or 888-371-1965.

Hospice of Siouxland, seeking volunteers. For more information, call 712-233-4144 and ask for a volunteer coordinator.

La Leche League of Siouxland, breastfeeding support group meets every third Thursday at 11 a.m. at Morningside Lutheran Church. Children are welcome. For more information, call Mary at 712-546-7280 or Jacquie at 712-255-2998.

Living Each Day Cancer Support Group, 7-8 p.m. second Thursday of the month, Floyd Valley Hospital, Conference Center Room 2, Le Mars, Iowa. Open to all cancer patients, cancer survivors and family members. No charge. Pre-register by calling 712-546-3441 or 800-642-6074, ext. 441.

Mom and Baby Support Group, 10-11 a.m. last Monday of the month at the Orange City (Iowa) Hospital, lower level. For new moms and babies. 712-737-5260.

Tri-State Sober Project, 12-step meeting, 7:30-8:30 p.m., Tuesdays, Friendship Community Church, 305 Sergeant Square Drive, Sergeant Bluff. 6-7 p.m., Thursdays, Transitional Services of Iowa, 1221 Pierce St., Sioux City.

Doug's Donors Support Group, information for organ donors and recipients, 12:30-1:30 p.m. Fridays, 5:15-6:30 p.m. second Thursdays of the month at Mercy Cafeteria Woodbury Room. 712-277-1050.

Divorce Care, 6:30 -8:30 p.m. every Tuesday until Dec. 6 at Sunnybrook Community Church, 5601 Sunnybrook Drive, Sioux City. 712-276-5814.

NAMI Siouxland, (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Support Group meets 6:30 p.m., second Tuesday of the month at Friendship House, 1101 Court St. For individuals and family members dealing with mental illness. 712-255-4209.

New Life Life Support Group, 3:30 p.m. every Saturday at 2929 W. Fourth St. Spiritual 12-step program. For more information, call Donald at 712-574-1744 or James at 712-255-7624.

Orphan Sunday, 3:30-5 p.m. Sunday at Sunnybrook Community Church loft, 5601 Sunnybrook Drive.

Post Polio Support Group, 11 a.m. first Thursday of the month at Perkins Restaurant by Menards. 712-490-8213.

Relationship Support Group, 7 p.m. Fridays at Marketplace Mall. For more information, call 239-3129.

Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, Individual and Support Groups. For more information, call CSADV in Sioux City at 712-258-7233; Plymouth County at 712-546-6764; Monona County at 712-423-3443. Advocacy and support available 24 hours a day at 1-800-982-7233. All services free of charge and confidential.

Sickle Cell Disease Support Group, 11 a.m. third Saturday of each month at St. Luke's Hospital, meeting room 1. For patients, their family and any concerned member. Call La'Keshia Rainey at 712-203-2019 for more information.

Single and Parenting, 6:30 -8:30 p.m. every Tuesday until Dec. 6 at Sunnybrook Community Church, 5601 Sunnybrook Drive, Sioux City. 712-276-5814.

Sioux City Association of the Deaf, 7 p.m. third Saturday of the month at Morningside Church of Christ, 5015 Garretson Ave. Regular meeting, September-May; no meeting, June, July, August and December.

Siouxland Autism Support Group, second Thursday of the month at Northwest Area Education Agency, 1520 Morningside Ave. For more information, call Julie Case at 712-490-8939.

Siouxland Epilepsy Support Group, 5 p.m. third Tuesday of the month at Prestwick Apartment Clubhouse, 4230 Hickory Lane. For anyone diagnosed with seizures or epilepsy and family or friends. For more information, call Steve at 274-6927.

Siouxland IC support group, meets quarterly in Sioux City. For patients struggling with interstital cystitis. For more information, call Jacque Dundas 316-641-9766.

Siouxland Informational Group for the Blind, 2-5 p.m. second Tuesday of the month at Northern Hills Retirement Community, 4002 Teton Trace. For more information, call 712-266-8926 or 258-8151.

Grief support group, 5:30-7:30 p.m., beginning Oct. 5 for 13 weeks (may join at any time), Crescent Park United Methodist Church, 2826 Myrtle St., Sioux City. Scott, 712-899-6315.

Siouxland Ostomy Association, 2 p.m. first Sunday of each month (except September, which will be second Sunday; and no meetings June, July, August), in Room 300 at Mercy Medical Center, 801 Fifth St. For more information, call Dick Lindblom at 251-2453.

Siouxland Parkinson Disease Support Group, 1 p.m. fourth Monday of the month at Siouxland Center for Active Generations, 313 Cook St. For more information, call Sally Reinert at 402-987-3516.

Sojourners, support group for families of persons with life-threatening illness, 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays at St. Luke's Regional Medical Center, Room 416. For more information, call Marjorie Jarvill at 402-241-8637.

South Sioux City Weight Support Group, 8:30 a.m. Wednesdays at St. Paul United Methodist Church, South Sioux City. For more information, call 494-1401 or 494-2133.

Disabilities Resource Center of Siouxland, 520 Nebraska St., Suite 101: Women's Support Group, 1:30 p.m. first Wednesday of the month; LGBT Support Group, 1:30 p.m. first Friday of the month; Adult ADHD, 6 p.m. second Tuesday of the month; Advocacy Group, 1:30 p.m. third Tuesday of the month. For more information, call 712-255-1065.

Take Off Pounds Sensibly, group meetings various times, days and locations in Siouxland. For information on the chapter in your area, call 1-800-932-TOPS.

Voice Disorder Support Group, meets as needed at Mercy Medical Center, Buena Vista Room. 712-279-2686.

Women's Peer Support Group, in Wayne and South Sioux City, Neb., for those who have experienced domestic abuse. For more information, call the Wayne office at 402-375-4633 or 1-800-440-4633; in South Sioux City, call 402-494-7592. Help and support available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Services free and confidential.

Woodbury County D.M.D.A., noon-2 p.m. first Saturday of the month at Country Friendship Acres, 4501 West St.; 7-8 p.m. first Tuesday of the month at 515 Court St. in the Community Room; 7-8 p.m. second Tuesday of the month at 441 W. Third St. in the Community Room; 7-8 p.m. third Tuesday of the month at 409 W. Third St. in the Community Room. Support group for people with disabilities and mental disorders.

Natural Mamas in Siouxland, 1 p.m., third Tuesday of each month in the Garretson room of the Morningside Public Library. All ages of children are welcome to come with moms. For sharing natural living tips, recipes, natural remedies and health, homemaking, mothering, etc. For more information, call 402-913-0038 or visit their Facebook page.

A Step Beyond support group, 3:30 p.m. second Tuesday of the month, except for August, November and December when it meets at 5:30 p.m. (no meeting in January) at the Christy-Smith Resource Center, 1819 Morningside Ave. For more information, call 712-276-7319.

Divorce care, 5 p.m., Sundays. Fireside room, Morningside Lutheran Church, 700 South Martha St.

Gamblers Anonymous meetings, 4 p.m. Thursdays at Immanuel Lutheran Church, 315 Hamilton Blvd.; 7 p.m. Wednesdays, Morningside Presbyterian Church, 4327 Morningside Ave.; 7 p.m. Tuesdays, St. John Lutheran Church; 7 p.m. Sundays, Hawkeye Club, 420 Jones St.. 712-277-2901.

Art therapy support group, 5:30 p.m. second Thursday of the month at the June E. Nylen Cancer Center. Registration required, call 252-9387.

After Breast Cancer Support Group, 5:30 p.m. third Tuesday of the month at the June E. Nylen Cancer Center. For more information, call Brenda, 252-9370.

After Prostate Cancer Support Group, 5:15 p.m. first Tuesday of the month at the June E. Nylen Cancer Center. For more information, call 252-9426.

Alzheimer's Association, Big Sioux Chapter Support Group, 2 p.m. second Tuesday of the month; 4 p.m. third Tuesday of the month (under age 65) at 201 Pierce St., Suite 110 (Famous Dave's building); and 6 p.m. first Tuesday of the month at the Barnes and Noble Cafe. For more information, call Emily Lord at 712-279-5802.

Christy-Smith Funeral Homes of Sioux City, extensive grief library at the Morningside location. Open to the public during weekday hours. For more information, call 276-7319.

Chronic Pain/Chronic Illness Support Group, 7:30 p.m. fourth Wednesday of the month in the lower level of the Orange City Hospital. For more information, call 712-737-5260.

Connections Area Agency on Aging, and Mercy Medical Centers Older Adult Services Welcome to Medicare, 1:30-4 p.m., the first Friday of every month at Connections Area Agency on Aging, 2301 Pierce St. To pre-register, or for more information, contact Connections Area Agency on Aging at 712-279-6900.
NICOSIA, Cyprus  Nechema Friedman says her parents often recalled how the months they spent in a detention camp in Cyprus after World War II nurtured their desire to plant roots in Palestine.

The 69-year-old returned to the east Mediterranean island this week along with dozens of fellow Israelis also born in Cyprus to mark the 70th anniversary of the camps where 52,000 Holocaust survivors were interned by the British.

Cyprus' Defense Minister Christoforos Fokaides unveiled a memorial at a Cypriot Army camp that formerly housed a British military hospital where 800 Jewish infants were born after the war. Some 2,200 children in all were born to Jewish couples in the camps.

"People still brought children into this world, their hopes revived here on this ground," Friedman said at the memorial created in the semi-circle shape of the corrugated iron hut that housed detainees.

Friedman's parents, Moshe and Gita Weissler, were among the Holocaust survivors fleeing Europe on 39 crammed, rickety boats who were interned in a dozen camps on Cyprus while trying to reach Palestine.

At the time, Britain controlled the territory that would become Israel. British warships intercepted the boats and kept the passengers behind barbed wire and guard towers between 1946 and 1949, events depicted in the 1958 novel "Exodus" and the 1960 movie of the same name.

But along with separation, the camps also fostered communities where schools, libraries, theater and music flourished, fanning the hope of return, Friedman said.

"We prepared ourselves, we knew that one day we would be out of the camps," she said.

By virtue of a decree issued by Britain's King George VI to celebrate his birthday, the Jewish detainees slowly were allowed to leave the camps and head to Palestine. Friedman was 7 months old when her family reached Haifa on Nov. 29, 1947.
SIOUX CITY | As sexually transmitted diseases have surged in the United States causing nearly 20 million new infections annually, Woodbury County is also seeing an uptick in reportable STDs, including gonorrhea.

More than 395,000 cases of gonorrhea were recorded in the United States last year. The bacterial infection, which if left untreated in women can lead to serious reproductive complications, including tubal infertility, ectopic pregnancy and chronic pelvic pain, increased by 13 percent nationwide between 2014 and 2015.

Gonorrhea has steadily increased in Woodbury County since about 2012, when 58 cases were tallied. Last year, 164 cases of the bacterial infection were recorded.

"Gonorrhea is not a harmless infection and it's important that people do everything they can to prevent it," said Siouxland District Health Department deputy director Tyler Brock.

More than 1.5 million cases of chlamydia were reported nationwide in 2015, up 6 percent from the year before, while at just under 24,000 cases, syphilis jumped by 19 percent. Many STDs go undetected because they produce mild symptoms or none at all for years.

The total number of reportable STDs in Woodbury County, which includes chlamydia and syphilis, as well as gonorrhea, rose to 726 in 2015, up from 541 in 2010.

Brock said gonorrhea cases have always tended to rise and fall, while chlamydia stays fairly consistent. In 2015, 555 cases of chlamydia were reported in Woodbury County, down from 576 cases from the year before. So far, Brock said preliminary numbers show similar STD statistics for 2016. Seventy-six percent of the cases in 2015 involved people ages 15 to 29, according to Brock.

While the number of antibiotic-resistant cases of gonorrhea more than quadrupled in the United States from 2013 to 2014, Brock said antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea currently isn't common in Siouxland.

A CDC report showed the number of cases of gonorrhea with strains that showed "decreased susceptibility" to the common antibiotic azithromycin dramatically jumped from 0.6 percent to 2.5 percent in just a year's time.

Last spring, seven patients in Hawaii were diagnosed with a strain of gonorrhea with high resistance to azithromycin and reduced susceptibility to ceftriaxone. The CDC now only recommends the two drugs in combination to treat an infection.

Brock said the key to STD prevention is early detection and treatment. He said it's critical to get the sex partners of infected patients treated as quickly as possible to prevent reinfection.

Dylan Greene, a physician at Siouxland Community Health Center, said there are medications available that are "incredibly effective" at treating STDs.

"However, if left untreated, there's significant side effects or disease processes that can happen. It can lead to infertility. It can lead to social stigma," he said.

What's behind the increase in STDs?

Federal health officials cite cuts in funding for prevention, which resulted in the closure of more than 20 health department STD clinics in the United States in one year. Brock said funding cuts haven't impacted Siouxland District Health Department's STD prevention efforts, which are predominately funded with local dollars.

Greene said he thinks how young people are learning about sex may be contributing to the rise in STDs. He said sex education should be coming from parents rather than media channels. Schools and health care providers, he said, also play important educational roles.

"Sex has always been something that's been incredibly taboo in our culture. I think there's a huge gap in information, so this puts our young people at even more risk," he said.

"These kids are left incredibly vulnerable to learn about it from other places, which may not be the best source of information."

Brock said an emphasis on testing in recent years, especially among young people, as well as advances in testing methods, likely account for some of the increase in STDs. He said specimens used to be collected via urethral swabbing, which was an uncomfortable process and dissuaded some men from getting tested.

"Now, testing is done with a simple urine sample and that takes away the painful old sampling processes," he said. "But none of the above fully accounts for the significant increases in gonorrhea cases in recent years."
Here are some of the many Veterans Day ceremonies that are taking place in Siouxland Friday.

The Journal's "Korea Remembered" ceremony

A photo exhibit honoring Siouxland veterans of the Korean War will open with a program at 2 p.m. at the Betty Strong Encounter Center. The event is a culmination of The Journals 20-part series, Korea: Forgotten war remembered, produced by Journal newsroom staff. The opening program features writer Tim Gallagher. The public and veterans are welcome.

Akron-Westfield Community School

From 8:15 to 8:50 a.m., grades K-5 will gather in the new gym for a presentation of colors by the 185th Air Guard, Akron-Westfield chamber choir and guest speaker former Navy Seal Trevor Maroshek and his war dog Chopper. From 9:05 to 9:50 a.m., there will be a program for grades 6-12 in the auditorium. Then from 10:30 a.m., the community is welcomed to attend a ceremony at the American Legion Hall in Akron.

Bishop Heelan Catholic Schools

USS Sioux City members will be visiting Sacred Heart School at 5010 Military Road from 8:40 to 9 a.m. for a program. Also, at 1:30 p.m. there will be a student assembly for Veterans Day at Mater Dei Nativity at 4243 Natalia Way in Morningside. Both events are open to the public.

Education Service Center

Local veterans and their family members in the local community are encouraged to attend a gathering at 9:30-11 a.m. at the Air Force Junior ROTC, Education Service Center, 627 Fourth St. For 24 hours starting at 5 p.m. Thursday, AFJROTC Cadets will march past the flagpole at the Sergeant Floyd Monument in remembrance of those who have served. At 5 p.m. Friday, cadets will release balloons honoring the veterans of WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Global War on Terrorism.

Freedom Park, South Sioux City

Starting at 11 a.m. there will be a presentation at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall at Freedom Park in South Sioux City. American Legion members will guard the wall throughout the day until closing ceremonies around 5 p.m.

Sergeant Bluff American Legion

At 11 a.m., the Sergeant Bluff American Legion is holding a ceremony at the veterans' memorial south of its building at 901 Topaz Drive. The legion is also holding a presentation at the middle school and elementary buildings at 2:30 p.m., which are both open to the public.

Storm Lake St. Mary's

Veterans and the public are welcomed to the school's annual Veterans Day program 2:15 p.m. at the school gymnasium, 312 Seneca St.

Woodbury County Courthouse

At 11 a.m., the Woodbury County Commission of Veteran Affairs is holding a Veterans Day observance at the Courthouse, 620 Douglas St. There will be a speaker from the USS Sioux City. The Journal's Tim Gallagher will emcee the event. Doors open at 10:30 a.m.
SIOUX CITY | Taya Kyle, author of the New York Times best-selling book "American Wife," will be the keynote speaker for the 17th annual United Way of Siouxland Women's Power Lunch in April.

The lunch will be from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. April 26 at the Sioux City Convention Center, 801 Fourth St.

Taya Kyle's late husband, U.S. Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, is the author of the New York Times bestselling book American Sniper." Chris Kyle was killed in February 2013. Taya Kyle honors her husband through the Chris Kyle Frog Foundation, which supports military members, first responders and their families.

Tickets for the luncheon are $55 apiece and are on sale at missiontix.com/womenspowerlunch.

A 10:30 a.m. VIP reception will precede the lunch, giving guests a chance to meet Kyle and have photos taken with her. VIP packages, which include the reception and the luncheon, will be sold for $130.

Table sponsorships including regular and VIP tickets are available at $5,000, $1,300 and $550 levels.

A "Power of the Purse Raffle" will feature at least 100 purses and three grand prizes. Raffle tickets will be sold before and at the event for $5 each or $20 for five tickets. Those who purchase tickets do not have to be in attendance at the event. Purse donations are also being accepted.

All proceeds of the lunch will fund scholarships and certification grants awarded to single parents in Siouxland who qualify for the assistance.

Additional information is available at the United Way of Siouxland's website.
Todays top picks from our online calendar. Find more events at siouxcityjournal.com/calendar.

'Korea Remembered' photo exhibit

A photo exhibit honoring Siouxland veterans of the Korean War will open with a program at 2 p.m. Friday at the Betty Strong Encounter Center. It will be the culmination of The Journals 20-part series, Korea: Forgotten war remembered, produced by Journal newsroom staff. Opening program features writer Tim Gallagher.

Honor our Veterans vigil

The Vigil will end with a flag-folding ceremony at 5 p.m. at the Floyd Monument. Cadets will release balloons honoring the veterans of WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Global War on Terrorism. Local veterans and their family members in the local community are encouraged to attend.

History of Cherokee MHI

The Sanford Museum and Planetarium, 117 E. Willow St., Cherokee, Iowa, will share the history of the Cherokee Mental Health Institute, which opened in 1902, in the West Gallery. Visit sanfordmuseum.org or call 712-225-3922 for more information.
WASHINGTON -- At dawn Tuesday in West Quoddy Head, Maine, America's easternmost point, it was certain that by midnight in Cape Wrangell, Alaska, America's westernmost fringe, there would be a loser who deserved to lose and a winner who did not deserve to win. The surprise is that Barack Obama must have immediately seen his legacy, a compound of stylistic and substantive arrogance, disappearing, as though written on water in ink of vapor.

His health care reform has contributed to three Democratic drubbings. The 2010 and 2014 wave elections, like scythes in a wheat field, decapitated a rising generation of potential party leaders. Then came Tuesday's earthquake, which followed shocking increases of Obamacare's prices. This law has been as historic as Obama thinks, but not as he thinks: It might be the last gasp of progressivism's hubris expressed in continentwide social engineering imposed from the continent's Eastern edge. Hillary Clinton's proposed solution to Obamacare's accelerating unraveling was a "public option": intensified government manipulation to correct the consequences of government manipulation of health care's 18 percent of the economy. Her campaign's other defining proposal, "free" tuition in public higher education, insulted the intelligence of voters aware that "free" means "paid for by others, including you."

Obama's foreign policy legacy, aside from mounting chaos worldwide, was the Iran nuclear agreement. By precedent and constitutional norms, this should have been a treaty submitted to the Senate. Instead, disdainfully and characteristically, he produced it as an executive agreement. Because the agreement lacks legitimizing ratification by senators, the president-elect will feel uninhibited concerning his promise to repudiate it.

The simultaneous sickness of both parties surely reveals a crisis of the American regime. The GOP was easily captured, and then quickly normalized, by history's most unpleasant and unprepared candidate, whose campaign was a Niagara of mendacities. And the world's oldest party contrived to nominate someone who lost to him.

To an electorate clamoring for disruptive change, Democrats offered a candidate as familiar as faded wallpaper. The party produced no plausible alternative to her joyless, stained embodiment of arrogant entitlement. And she promised to intensify the progressive mentality. "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it"? Actually, you can't even keep your light bulbs.

Americans perennially complain about Washington gridlock, but for seven decades they have regularly produced gridlock's prerequisite -- divided government. From 1944 through 2016, 22 of 37 elections gave at least one house of Congress to the party not holding the presidency; since 1954, 21 of 32 did; since 1994, eight of 12. Republicans now lack excuses: If 40 Democratic senators block repeal of Obamacare (or Supreme Court nominees), the Republicans' populist base will demand Democratic behavior -- revision of Senate rules to make this body more majoritarian.

For constitutional conservatives, the challenge is exactly what it would have been had Clinton won: to strengthen the rule of law by restoring institutional equilibrium. This requires a Republican Congress to claw back from a Republican executive the legislative powers that Congress has ceded to the administrative state, and to overreaching executives like Obama, whose executive unilateralism the president-elect admires.

From Clinton's nastiest aspiration, we are now safe. She promised Supreme Court justices who would reverse Citizens United, thereby eviscerating the First Amendment by empowering the political class to regulate the quantity, content and timing of campaign speech about itself. This will never happen.

Demography need not dictate for Republicans a grim destiny but it soon will, unless they act to counter adverse trends. Republicans should absorb Tim Alberta's data in National Review: Arizona whites have gone from 74 percent to 54 percent of the population in 25 years; minorities will be a majority there by 2022. Texas minorities became a majority in 2004; whites are now 43 percent of the population. Nevada is 52 percent white and projected to be majority-minority in 2020. Georgia is 54 percent white, heading for majority-minority in 2026. Because of inexorably rising minorities, Clinton, an epically untalented candidate, did better than Obama did in 2012 in Georgia, Texas, Arizona and where one in eight Americans lives -- California.

The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on, perhaps soon to inscribe this: In 2016, Republicans won a ruinous triumph that convinced them that they can forever prosper by capturing an ever-larger portion of an ever-smaller portion of the electorate.

This kamikaze arithmetic of white nationalism should prompt the president-elect to test his followers' devotion to him by asking their permission to see the national tapestry as it is and should be.
DES MOINES | For nearly two years, political experts in Iowa watched closely as the candidates barnstormed the state.

They observed and analyzed the race for the White House  and other federal and state offices  as candidates came and went and campaigns surged and struggled.

What did those experts, the people who have followed and analyzed the 2016 elections perhaps more closely than anyone else in Iowa, think when the results came in Tuesday night with a wave of Republican victories from Donald Trump at the top of the ticket to legislative races for the Iowa Capitol?

We asked them.

Here is what Iowa political experts had to say when we asked what stood out to them most about the 2016 election results.

Brad Best, Buena Vista University

Best said he also marveled at how Trump was able to flip Iowa, which had gone for the Democratic presidential candidate in six of the past seven presidential elections, starting with 1988 when it was one of just 10 states that went for Michael Dukakis.

He also noted how Trump flipped rural counties in eastern, northeast and central Iowa.

Best also said turnout was noteworthy.

The bottom line is that between 2012 and 2016, more than 150,000 Obama supporters migrated to another candidate or decided not to fill out a ballot in the presidential race, Best said. When lined up against the nearly 71,000 votes Trump added to Mitt Romneys total in 2012, Hillary Clinton faced long odds in Iowa.

Dennis Goldford, Drake University

Goldford, who has written a book on the Iowa caucuses, said he was struck by the unity shown by how Iowas Republican leaders supported Trump, even when the GOP nominee was being criticized by many, including from within the party, over things he said on the campaign trail.

The Republican establishment, led by Gov. Terry Branstad, Lt. Gov. (Kim) Reynolds, and Sen. (Joni) Ernst, wrapped itself tightly around the Trump candidacy, Goldford said.

Goldford also noted the sweeping Statehouse results that resulted in Republicans taking control of both chambers in the Iowa Legislature and the governors office, and the deep hole into which the Iowa Democratic Party has fallen.

At the congressional level, Goldford said Democrats once again could not mount a competitive challenge for longtime U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, and he was taken by the outside money poured into the 3rd Congressional District race to support Republican incumbent Rep. David Young against Democratic challenger Jim Mowrer. The Republican Party and a pro-Republican group both spent $1.8 million to defeat Mowrer, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Christopher Larimer, University of Northern Iowa

Larimer said he was surprised by how dramatically the state swung for Trump after going twice to Democratic President Barack Obama.

In 2012, Obama won Iowa by 5.8 percentage points; last week, Trump won the state by 9.4 points. Thats a 15.2-point swing from one presidential election to the next.

Larimer said he also was surprised by how few counties Clinton won in Iowa: six of 99.

And she probably won the six easiest to win, Larimer said, adding that normal Democratic stronghold Dubuque County didnt even go for Clinton.

Steffen Schmidt, Iowa State University

For Schmidt, drawing something that stood out to him Tuesday night was easy.

The collapse of the Democratic Party. Period, Schmidt said. The GOP just had to have a pulse and would win.

Schmidt also offered that because the Iowa Democratic Party was a de facto arm of the Clinton campaign that hurt Democrats elsewhere on the ballot.

Robin Johnson, Monmouth College

Johnson said he found turnout figures in Iowa interesting. He said Clinton struggled in counties with white, working-class, old-factory towns, including Dubuque.

The point is, the outcome played to the narrative that white, working-class counties made the biggest difference, Johnson said.
CEDAR RAPIDS  With two judges from his home state on President-Elect Donald Trumps list of possible nominees, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley sees a good chance for an Iowan to sit on the countrys highest court.

However, the freshly re-elected Grassley said its not his personal mission to put an Iowan on the Supreme Court for the third time in history.

I only have a personal stake in just one thing and thats getting strict constructionists on the Supreme Court, Grassley said following the election.

Among the 20 strict constructionists Trump identified as possible nominees are Steven Colloton and Edward Mansfield.

Colloton, an Iowa City native and Yale Law School graduate, serves on the Eighth Circuit Court of appeals. He clerked for former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Before joining the Eighth Circuit Court, he was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa and an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Iowa from 1990 to 1991. Colloton also was an associate independent counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in 1995 and 1996.

I think his (Collotons) record is very clear when I suggested him to George W. Bush as a strict constructionist and being, you might say, a disciple because he was a clerk for Justice Rehnquist, Grassley said. I think he falls very much into that pattern of a person who ought to be considered.

Mansfield, also a Yale Law School graduate, was appointed to the Iowa Supreme Court by Gov. Terry Branstad in 2011. Previously, he served on the Iowa Court of Appeals. He was a former clerk with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit worked in the private sector and has been teaching as an adjunct law professor at Drake University since 1997.

Putting an Iowan on the court is not his priority.

Obviously, Ive never done that before, Grassley said. I dont know the last time a United States senator (from Iowa) did put somebody on the Supreme Court. It could have been when the guy from Keokuk went on in 1862 or the dean of the Iowa law school went on in 1943. I suppose Iowa senators had something to do with that, but not since.

Iowans who have served on the Supreme Court were Abraham Lincoln appointee Samuel Freeman Miller from 1862-90, and Franklin Roosevelt appointee Wiley Blount Rutledge from 1943-49.
London's Evening Standard front page reflects the global reaction to Donald Trump's upset victory. (Photo: Mina Haq)

LONDON

(Nov. 10, 2016)It was 4 a.m. at the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and Republican Donald Trump was a handful of electoral votes away from the presidency, a possibility that had often been compared to the Brexit vote to leave the European Union that shook this island nation in June.Trump, a New York city real-estate mogul, had defied all polls and pundit predictions in a stunning upset-in-the-making over Democrat Hillary Clinton.A Clinton supporter watched the CNN projection on a television screen at the embassy's election night party as Trump won North Carolina. She buried her face in her hands. "Oh God," she said, wiping away tears. Reporters surrounded her, but she was too overwhelmed to speak. A few feet away, Malise Sundstrom, the lone Trump supporter in the room, couldn't stop smiling."I think a lot of pollsters will be out of work tomorrow," said Sundstrom, a U.S. citizen at the embassy and chair of Republicans Overseas U.K. She wore a Trump-Pence sticker and happily spoke with the media as momentum irreversibly shifted toward her candidate.At the end of the night, a glass shattered on the floor in an almost-empty press room. It would be the only glass to do so that night.The embassy's guests were largely Democratic and liberal, and watched tensely as Trump's lead grew throughout the night.The party began at 10 p.m. and ended at about 4:30 a.m., three hours before the Associated Press called Trump's victory. The U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's, longtime Barack Obama campaign fundraiser Matthew Barzun, spoke around midnight."I want to raise my glass, or my can, to this special relationship, to all that we have done, all the aid we have administered, all the businesses we have built, all the culture we have created, all the wars we've waged, all the peace we've promoted," he said. "And yes, the mistakes we've made, the lessons we've learned."British Prime Minister Theresa May congratulated Trump on his victory in a statement Wednesday, saying the "special relationship" between the two countries will endure."I look forward to working with President-elect Donald Trump, building on these ties to ensure the security and prosperity of our nations in the years ahead," she said.U.K. Independent Party leader and Brexit's strongest advocate Nigel Farage made a statement Wednesday as well, expressing excitement over what he sees as the potential for a closer relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States."We now have a President who likes our country and understands our post-Brexit values," he said. "Prepare for further political shocks in the years to come."Out on the streets of the British capital, people were digesting the overnight surprise from America.Valerie Balzan, a resident of Maidstone, England, said she thought Trump was the lesser of two evils and will make America safer and more stable. She has one message to those who are anxious about Trump's tenure: "Get over it, because you never know what might happen and what God can do in the future."Some British were skeptical of the global effects of Trump's victory. Ben Traviss, a Durham, England, resident, said the Republican nominee's win was similar to the Brexit referendum that rocked the world last summer, but he added Trump's plans were even vaguer."I thought people would have a little bit more sense, if I'm honest, about voting for Hillary (Clinton)," he said, calling the next few years unsure, testing times."Just like in the U.K., we've got to have faith and see what happens," Traviss said. "There's nothing we can do about it. The U.S. have voted, so let's see what goes down."Los Angeles resident Manish Jain has spent the past few days in London on business, and said he can't escape talk of the election results despite being so far from home. He said he was shocked, but not surprised as he watched the results unfold."I was personally expecting Hillary to win hands down," Jain said. "I really don't know what's changed between debate number three and now, probably that email issue that came up. But that was resolved too."He added the world is facing a period of uncertainty "until things settle down" in the next year.Oren Zvigi, who is from Israel but was visiting London, said he "has no reason to worry," though he expected Clinton to win."We don't know what (Trump) will do," he said. "He doesn't know nothing about politics, but maybe he will do something good. Nobody knows."
On June 12, 1967, the United States Supreme Court struck down all statewide bans on interracial marriage. This decision was the result of a lawsuit filed by Mildred Loving, an African American woman--she and her husband Richard, who was white, were a quiet, simple couple in Virginia. The Lovings had been arrested shortly after their 1958 marriage. All the Lovings wanted to do was to raise their family and love each other, and they shunned the spotlight they were thrust into.

In the new film Loving, now playing in theaters, the lives of the Lovings and the battles they were forced to fight are recreated.

"Is there anything you want me to tell the judge?" Richard Loving is asked by his attorney as a court date looms on the horizon.

"Tell him I love my wife," Loving (Joel Edgerton) replies. It's one of many powerful moments in a film, which serves in part as a character study of the couple who fought the original marriage equality battle.

As the story unfolds, some viewers might indeed note the striking similarities between the Loving story and the marriage battle fought by the LGBT community more than forty years later. In one particularly infuriating scene, which underscores the injustices they were subjected to, the Lovings are told by a judge that they can avoid jail time if they leave Virginia and agree not return to the state for twenty-five years.

"The LGBT marriage equality fight was definitely in the back of our minds during filming", director Jeff Nichols said after a recent press preview of the film. "The two battles were more or less the same."

Nichols added that while much of Loving was based on historical documents, little was known about the years during which the couple lived under the radar as their case worked its way through the courts.

"What were they doing in their day to day lives while the court case was progressing?" Nichols wondered, as he explained how he pieced the story together. "Since details of their years in hiding weren't available, I tried to focus on the pervasive psychological threat that was hanging over them during those years."

The results are mesmerizing. Though it's largely speculation--both Richard and Mildred have passed on--Nichols presents a plausible look inside the couple's private lives as they eat their meals, watch TV and raise their kids amidst a facade of normalcy, all the while knowing that either or both of them could be arrested at any time.

Actor Joel Edgerton, who plays Richard Loving, said that he went to bricklayers school. Loving had worked as a bricklayer and is seen at work in several scenes  Edgerton wanted absolute authenticity in his portrayal of Loving. He also said that he watched Nancy Buirski's documentary film The Loving Story so he could capture the nuances of his character's vocal mannerisms and body language.

"In the documentary we see Richard and Mildred at home, interacting with each other and with their kids," he said. "This gave me a chance to see how they walked and talked, and how they lived their day to day lives."

Edgerton emphasized that he wanted to do more than just mimicry. "What was going on between the two of them?" he wondered. "What was it they felt for each other? What was going on when there weren't cameras in the room? I wanted to capture that."

Nichols said that the scenes involving the couple's arrests and court battles were historically accurate and not based on speculation. "The first two thirds of the events portrayed in the film are pretty well documented," he noted. "Their marriage in Washington DC, the arrests, their exile from Virginia, even Mildred's cousin telling her to write to Bobby Kennedy, it's all been documented."

The end result is a profoundly moving look back at a couple who would not give up. The Lovings knew they were meant for each other. Like their LGBT counterparts decades later, they refused to accept the intolerance of the world around them. As is often the case, love won out.
Elisa Rolle is an historian who has done her homework. The openly lesbian writer and editor is authoring a series of books which document the history of Queer culture and the people who made that culture happen.

Her 2014 book Days of Love: Celebrating LGBT History One Story At A Time, chronicles the lives and loves of those who came before us. With that book, Rolle took us on a journey back in time, across the 20th, 19th and 18th centuries  and much further back  to revisit the lives of people who were known or believed to have been LGBT.

That book was a fascinating read which offered a few startling surprises, such as the inclusion of blind/deaf author/educator Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, the woman who taught Keller how to read braille and to communicate. Other than Sullivan's short lived, failed marriage in 1905, she and Keller lived together exclusively for 49 years. Is it really a stretch to believe that they may have loved each other?

In Rolle's latest book Queer Places: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ People Around the World, Volume 1, Rolle serves as our travel agent, taking us on a trip to all fifty states. Rolle is our tour guide as we visit the homes, birthplaces and gravesites of many of the historical figures we learned about in her earlier book. Volume 1 covers the U.S. The yet to be published Volume II will trace the steps of LGBT people in the United Kingdom, while Volume III will journey across the rest of the world.

Queer Places begins with Keller and Sullivan. Rolle takes us to Ivy Green, the Alabama estate where Keller was born in 1880. As we see the house where Keller lost her sight and hearing, and where she first met Sullivan, the author once again recounts the story of their relationship. Rolle then continues onward, letting us know where other Queer Alabamians lived, and where LGBT people can go to find other Queers when visiting the state.

Later on in the book, in the section devoted to Washington DC, Rolle shows us where Keller and her "lifelong companion Annie Sullivan" rest together at the National Cathedral.

Rolle divides the book state by state. Countless LGBT lives are remembered as we visit the places where each of them lived, worked and died. Hundreds of historical photographs are included.

But Rolle goes much further. She also lets the current LGBT generations know where they can go to find others like themselves while travelling--yes Virginia, there really are gay bars and bookstores in Alaska.

Rolle walks through the streets of various neighborhoods in numerous cities, such as New York. Iconic buildings like the Dakota, among others, are photographed by the author in all their glory as she lists the names of famous historical LGBT figures who once occupied those elegant homes--many were forced to live closeted lives during their earthly sojourns.

Rolle doesn't forget the sunshine state either. She opens the Florida section of Queer Places by naming the state's gay villages: Key West, South Beach, and even Wilton Manors, home of SFGN. Readers will be taken to the various Key West Homes of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) the acclaimed playwright who wrote Southern Gothic tales of madness, which were often infused with less than subtle references to homosexuality. Williams' success was all the more impressive when we realize that he lived an openly gay life as early as the 1940s.

Rolle then takes us on a street by street tour of the Island city, showing us where other famous Queer writers penned their works. As she continues her journey across SoFla, readers will learn that the state was in fact a haven for LGBT people for nearly a century.

At 600 pages, Queer Places is an exhaustive and brilliant work. Readers might wonder if there's a single street in the country that Rolle didn't visit. Is there an historical archive whose records she failed to study?

Rolle is without a doubt our most important historian.
Some of Hillary Clintons supporters havent been whupped yet.

A petition launched on change.org is asking electors of the Electoral College to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in the U.S. Presidential election.

And that candidate would be Hillary Clinton.

The former Secretary of State leads Donald J. Trump in the popular vote -- 60,122,876 to 59,821,874.

SHE WON THE POPULAR VOTE, the petition reads. There is no reason Trump should be President. Its the Peoples Will.

The petition, started by Elijah Berg of North Carolina, amassed 647,819 signatures by Thursday afternoon. The argument is state electors can choose to disregard their state results in favor of the overall popular vote totals.

Last ditch hope for a Hillary victory. Sign if you are as horrified as I am and feel as helpless as I do, tweeted Gabriella Gershenson, food features editor for the Rachel Ray Magazine.

Per the U.S. Constitution, Electoral College electors meet Dec. 19 at their respective state capitals to cast their votes for President. The term used to describe an elector who bucks the will of the state is called faithless elector and it has happened before.

In the 2004 election, a Minnesota elector declined to cast a vote for Democrat John Kerry and instead voted for his running mate, John Edwards. The move was largely ceremonial as Republican George W. Bush won the election with 286 Electoral College votes.

As of Thursday afternoon, Trump had 279.

Faithless electors are barred in 29 states and face fines for ignoring their states final vote totals.
Brown dwarf observations NASA

In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, NASAs Spitzer and Swift space telescopes joined forces to observe a microlensing event, when a distant star brightens due to the gravitational field of at least one foreground cosmic object.

This technique is useful for finding low-mass bodies orbiting stars, such as planets. In this case, the observations revealed a brown dwarf.

Brown dwarfs are thought to be the missing link between planets and stars, with masses up to 80 times that of Jupiter. But their centers are not hot or dense enough to generate energy through nuclear fusion the way stars do. Curiously, scientists have found that, for stars roughly the mass of our sun, less than 1 percent have a brown dwarf orbiting within 3 AU (1 AU is the distance between Earth and the sun). This phenomenon is called the brown dwarf desert.

The newly discovered brown dwarf, which orbits a host star, may inhabit this desert. Spitzer and Swift observed the microlensing event after being tipped off by ground-based microlensing surveys, including the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). The discovery of this brown dwarf, with the unwieldy name OGLE-2015-BLG-1319, marks the first time two space telescopes have collaborated to observe a microlensing event.

We want to understand how brown dwarfs form around stars, and why there is a gap in where they are found relative to their host stars, said Yossi Shvartzvald, a NASA postdoctoral fellow based at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and lead author of a study published in the Astrophysical Journal. Its possible that the desert is not as dry as we think.

What is microlensing?

In a microlensing event, a background source star serves as a flashlight for the observer. When a massive object passes in front of the background star along the line of sight, the background star brightens because the foreground object deflects and focuses the light from the background source star. Depending on the mass and alignment of the intervening object, the background star can briefly appear thousands of times brighter.

One way to understand better the properties of the lensing system is to observe the microlensing event from more than one vantage point. By having multiple telescopes record the brightening of the background star, scientists can take advantage of parallax, the apparent difference in position of an object as seen from two points in space. When you hold your thumb in front of your nose and close your left eye, then open it and close your right eye, your thumb seems to move in space  but it stays put with two eyes open. In the context of microlensing, observing the same event from two or more widely separated locations will result in different magnification patterns.

Anytime you have multiple observing locations, such as Earth and one, or in this case, two space telescopes, its like having multiple eyes to see how far away something is, Shvartzvald said. From models for how microlensing works, we can then use this to calculate the relationship between the mass of the object and its distance.

The new study

Spitzer observed the binary system containing the brown dwarf in July 2015, during the last two weeks of the space telescopes microlensing campaign for that year.

While Spitzer is over 1 AU away from Earth in an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun, Swift is in a low Earth orbit encircling our planet. Swift also saw the binary system in late June 2015 through microlensing, representing the first time this telescope had observed a microlensing event. But Swift is not far enough away from ground-based telescopes to get a significantly different view of this particular event, so no parallax was measured between the two. This gives scientists insights into the limits of the telescopes capabilities for certain types of objects and distances.

Our simulations suggest that Swift could measure this parallax for nearby, less massive objects, including free-floating planets, which do not orbit stars, Shvartzvald said.

By combining data from these space-based and ground-based telescopes, researchers determined that the newly discovered brown dwarf is between 30 and 65 Jupiter masses. They also found that the brown dwarf orbits a K dwarf, a type of star that tends to have about half the mass of the sun. Researchers found two possible distances between the brown dwarf and its host star, based on available data: 0.25 AU and 45 AU. The 0.25 AU distance would put this system in the brown dwarf desert.

In the future, we hope to have more observations of microlensing events from multiple viewing perspectives, allowing us to probe further the characteristics of brown dwarfs and planetary systems, said Geoffrey Bryden, JPL scientist and co-author of the study.

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASAs Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. NASAs Swift satellite was launched in November 2004 and is managed by NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center i
Brussels (Belgium), November 11, 2016 (SPS) - The situation of Saharawi political prisoners in Moroccan jails is "unbearable" and constitutes a "serious violation" of the international law, Portuguese activist Isabel Lourenco said Thursday, denouncing the attitude of the international community which "has acted as an accomplice" by keeping silent over Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara.

"There is an urgent need for the international community to take measures and break the silence surrounding this issue," Lourenco told APS on the morrow of the presentation of a 2016 report, in which she described the situation of Saharawi political prisoners before the members of the intergroup "Peace for Western Sahara" at the European Parliament.

Judicial proceedings are illegal, according to the activist who called for the "immediate release" of all political prisoners as there is no evidence confirming the charges against them.

Isabel Lourenco stressed that "arbitrary imprisonment, abductions, ill-treatment and torture are a reality" in Moroccan prisons.

They are "common practice" against Western Sahara's prisoners, she added.SPS

125/090/700
Some of harness racings brightest stars of the sophomore ranks were in action Thursday at Dover Downs, as the Delaware oval hosted a quartet of rich Matron Stakes.

Caprice Hill, who experienced traffic woes in the Breeders Crown and settled for a fifth-place finish, was a dominant winner in the $149,000 Matron Stakes final for the trotting fillies.

Brian Sears picked up the catch-drive on the daughter of Kadabra-Bramasole, and he made the most of the opportunity. Spicedbourbongirl shot to the top and cut the quarter in :26.3 before All The Time popped out of the three-hole and rushed to the front. Once on the lead, that filly sliced out middle splits of :56.1 and 1:24.3. Sears had Caprice Hill on the move in the backstretch and she was pressing All The Time around the final turn. Caprice Hill kicked home in :28 to win by 3-1/2 lengths over race favourite All The Time in a lifetime best 1:52.3, with Non Stick finishing third.

Tony Alagna trains the 15-time winner for Tom Hill of Hamilton, Ont. The filly has manufactured a flashy record of 8-5-0 from 15 starts this season. The lions share of the loot from her Matron Stakes score sent her lifetime earnings soaring past $1.2 million.

Dayson won as he pleased for driver Yannick Gingras in the $178,650 Matron Stakes final for trotting colts and geldings.

The son of Conway Hall-Nerveys Taurus got away third while Double L Lindy and the parked out Sutton battled to the quarter in :26.4. Sutton worked his way to the lead and led the group through middle fractions of :56.2 and 1:24.4, but Dayson proved to be too much when he put heavy heat on the leader around the final turn. Dayson charged home in :28.1 to win by three-quarters of a length over the pylon-skimming Double L Lindy in 1:53. Taking home the show dough was Lagerfeld.

Ron Burke trains the gelding, who was sent off as the 4-5 choice, for Burke Racing Stable LLC, Our Horse Cents Stables, J And T Silva Stables LLC and Rossie Smith. It was the 12th win of the year and the 19th to date for the career winner of $665,860.

Pure Country also proved to be a popular winner thanks to her dominant score in the $148,400 Matron Stakes final for pacing fillies.

Penpal shot to the front and supplied the opening panel of :26, but Brett Miller revved up the engine on Pure Country and asked her to step out of the three-hole  and step she did. She brushed to the top and cruised through middle fractions of :54.4 and 1:23. She then used a :27.2 closing quarter to seal the deal by nearly three lengths in 1:50.2. The even-money favourite defeated Penpal and Blue Moon Stride.

Jimmy Takter trains the 20-time winner for Diamond Creek Racing of Wellsville, PA. Shes put together a 10-4-3 record from 21 trips to the track this season, and thats helped lift her lifetime bankroll to $1,939,427.

Boston Red Rocks, who many thought had the tools to be a big player in the Glamour Boy division this year, finally broke through and posted a major stakes score in his sophomore campaign.

Tim Tetrick mapped out the winning trip for the Steve Elliott trainee, who got away fourth and watched Check Six blaze his way through fractions of :25.2, :54.2 and 1:21.3. Tetrick went on the first-over attack with Boston Red Rocks as the field neared the half, and together they chipped away before sprinting home in :28 to win by 2-1/4 lengths over Western Fame in 1:49.3. Race favourite Check Six faded to finish third.

Sent off at odds of 7-2, the son of Rocknroll Hanover-Mcgibson lit the lamp for the fifth time this year and for the ninth time in his career. Peter Blood and Rick Berks share ownership on the career winner of $1,073,063.
This 2015 file photo posted on the Twitter page of Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, shows al-Nusra fighters in Idlib province where the United States has begun to strike the groups leadership. (AP)

President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, U.S. officials said.

The decision to deploy more drones and intelligence assets against the militant group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra reflects Obamas concern that it is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al-Qaeda on Europes southern doorstep, the officials said.

The move underlines the extent to which Obama has come to prioritize the counterterrorism mission in Syria over efforts to pressure President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, as al-Nusra is among the most effective forces battling the Syrian government.

That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Trump has said he will be even more aggressive in going after militants than Obama, a stance that could lead to the expansion of the campaign against al-Nusra, possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow. The group now calls itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham  or Front for the Conquest of Syria  and says it has broken with al-Qaeda, an assertion discounted by U.S. officials.

President Obama arrives at the 71st annual U.N. General Assembly in New York, on Sept. 20, 2016. (Peter Foley/Via Bloomberg)

The United States has conducted sporadic strikes in the past against veteran al-Qaeda members who migrated to northwestern Syria from Afghanistan and Pakistan to join al-Nusra and whom U.S. officials suspected of plotting against the United States and its allies.

Obamas new order gives the U.S. militarys Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, wider authority and additional intelligence-collection resources to go after al-Nusras broader leadership, not just al-Qaeda veterans or those directly involved in external plotting.

The White House and State Department led the charge within the Obama administration for prioritizing action against the group. Pentagon leaders were reluctant at first to pull resources away from the fight against the Islamic State.

But aides say Obama grew frustrated that more wasnt being done by the Pentagon and the intelligence community to kill al-Nusra leaders given the warnings he had received from top counterterrorism officials about the gathering threat they posed.

In the presidents Daily Brief, the most highly classified intelligence report produced by U.S. spy agencies, Obama was repeatedly told over the summer that the group was allowing al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to create in northwest Syria the largest haven for the network since it was scattered after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Officials also warned Obama that al-Nusra could try to fill the void as its rival, the Islamic State, lost ground.

Lisa Monaco, Obamas White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, said Obamas decision prioritized our fight against al-Qaeda in Syria, including through targeting their leaders and operatives, some of whom are legacy al-Qaeda members.

We have made clear to all parties in Syria that we will not allow al-Qaeda to grow its capacity to attack the U.S., our allies, and our interests, she said in a statement. We will continue to take action to deny these terrorists any safe haven in Syria.

In this 2013 photo, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, rebels from al-Qaida affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra sit on a truck full of ammunition at Taftanaz air base, that was captured by the rebels, in Idlib province, northern Syria. (Edlib News Network/AP)

To support the expanded push against al-Nusra, the White House pressed the Pentagon to deploy additional armed drones and intelligence-collection assets in the airspace over northwestern Syria, an area that had been sparsely covered by the United States until now because of its proximity to advanced Russian air-defense systems and aircraft.

A bitterly divided Obama administration had tried over the summer to cut a deal with Moscow on a joint U.S.-Russian air campaign against al-Nusra, in exchange for a Russian commitment to ground Syrian government warplanes and to allow more humanitarian supplies into besieged areas. But the negotiations broke down in acrimony, with Moscow accusing the United States of failing to separate al-Nusra from more moderate rebel groups and Washington accusing the Russians of war crimes in Aleppo.

Armed drones controlled by JSOC stepped up operations in September, according to military officials.

Drone strikes by the U.S. military under the program began in October and have so far killed at least four high-value targets, including al-Nusras senior external planner. The Pentagon has disclosed two of the strikes so far. One of the most significant strikes  targeting a gathering of al-Nusra leaders on Nov. 2  has yet to be disclosed, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operations.

So far, Russian air-defense systems and aircraft havent interfered with stepped-up U.S. operations against al-Nusra. Officials attributed Moscows acquiescence to the limited number of U.S. aircraft involved in the missions and to Russias interest in letting Washington combat one of the Assad regimes most potent enemies within the insurgency. U.S. officials said they provided notifications to the Russians before the al-Nusra strikes to avoid misunderstandings.

Officials said the expanded al-Nusra campaign was similar to those that Obama has directed against al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

While al-Qaedas central leadership in Pakistan has been decimated, the United States now faces more threats involving more extremists from more places than at any time since 9/11, Nicholas J. Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a Senate committee in September.

The push into the province of Idlib and other parts of northwestern Syria coincides with Pentagon-backed offensives in and around Islamic State strongholds in eastern Syria and in Iraq, which have attracted the majority of U.S. military resources and public attention.

White House officials had considered launching a more systematic campaign to destroy al-Nusra from top to bottom, much like the Pentagons approach to the Islamic State. But that option was rejected as too resource-intensive. Many of al-Nusras fighters are Syrians who joined the group because of its ample supply of weapons and cash, and its commitment to defeating Assad, not to plot against the West.

Officials said the strikes on leadership targets were meant to send a message to more-moderate rebel units, including those backed by the CIA, to distance themselves from the al-Qaeda affiliate. At critical moments during the five-year-old civil war, moderate rebel units have fought alongside al-Nusra in ground operations against Assads forces. In fact, U.S. officials credit those rebel campaigns in the spring of 2015 with putting so much pressure on the Syrian government that Russia and Iran decided to double down militarily in support of Assad.

U.S. officials who opposed the decision to go after al-Nusras wider leadership warned that the United States would effectively be doing the Assad government's bidding by weakening a group on the front line of the counter-

Assad fight. The strikes, these officials warned, could backfire on the United States by bolstering the groups standing, helping it attract more recruits and resources.

Officials who supported the shift said the Obama administration could no longer tolerate what one of them described as a deal with the devil, whereby the United States largely held its fire against al-Nusra because the group was popular with Syrians in rebel-controlled areas and furthered the U.S. goal of putting military pressure on Assad. Russia had accused the United States of sheltering al-Nusra, a charge repeated Thursday in Moscow by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The president doesnt want this group to be what inherits the country if Assad ever does fall, a senior U.S. official said. This cannot be the viable Syrian opposition. Its al-Qaeda.

Officials said the administrations hope is that more-moderate rebel factions will be able to gain ground as both the Islamic State and al-Nusra come under increased military pressure.

A growing number of White House and State Department officials, however, have privately voiced doubts about the wisdom of applying U.S. military power, even covertly, to pressure Assad to step aside, particularly since Russias military intervention in Syria last year.

U.S. intelligence officials say they arent sure what Trumps approach to U.S.-backed rebel units will be once he gets briefed on the extent of the covert CIA program. Trump has voiced strong skepticism about arming Syrian rebels in the past, suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies dont have enough knowledge about rebel intentions to pick reliable allies.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and other Pentagon leaders initially resisted the idea of devoting more Pentagon surveillance aircraft and armed drones against al-Nusra. In White House Situation Room meetings, Carter and other top Pentagon officials argued that the militarys resources were needed to combat the Islamic State and that it would be difficult to operate in the airspace given Russias military presence, officials said.

While Obama, White House national security adviser Susan E. Rice, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and special presidential envoy Brett McGurk agreed with Carter on the need to keep the focus on the Islamic State, they favored shifting resources to try to prevent al-Nusra from becoming a bigger threat down the road.

A senior defense official said additional drone assets were assigned to the JSOC mission. Carter also made clear that the Pentagons goal would be to hit al-Nusra leadership targets, not take strikes to try to separate the moderate rebels from al-Nusra, officials said.

If we wake up in five years from now, and Islamic State is dead but al-Qaeda in Syria has the equivalent of [the tribal areas of Pakistan] in northwest Syria, then weve got a problem, a second senior U.S. official said.

Read more:
Play at the new site will be free and first come, first served through the year's end.
Thanks to $40,000 from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the state will thin hundreds of acres in the Mount St. Helens Wilderness for elk habitat preservation beginning in the spring.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlifes $80,000 project will thin between 300 and 500 acres in the Hoffstadt and Mudflow units of the Mount St. Helens Wildlife Area, helping turn what had been a tree farm into a diverse wildlife habitat.

Trees and shrubs have also been planted along three miles of Bear Creek in the Mudflow area to help prevent erosion. Noxious weed treatment was applied to 150 acres in the Toutle River drainage area. Some money will also go to education efforts at nearby visitor centers.

The foundation has spent $270,000 on 24 projects in Washington this year to benefit elk. Across the country, the nonprofit has helped preserve land for public use and rehabilitate elk habitat on an estimated 6.8 million acres.

The areas being thinned are heavily used by elk during the winter, according to the foundation.

Doug Doherty, RMEF regional director for Western Washington, said the project will help an estimated 1,000 Rocky Mountain elk, one of two subspecies of elk in Washington.

What were trying to do is provide some opening that will provide forage (areas) for the elk. Theyre grazers. Theyre like cattle, Doherty said. Were increasing opportunities for them.

Elk graze in herds in grasslands, meadows and clearcuts. In the fall and winter, they feed on grass, sprouts and even the branches of shrubs and trees.

Daren Hauswald, manager for the St. Helens and Shillapoo (in Clark County) wildlife areas, said the state will remove mostly Douglas fir trees with some alder. Both the Mudlflow and Hoffstadt units were owned by Weyerhaeuser Co. before the state took them over, and essentially havent been touched since the company last logged them. Thinning the forest is the first step toward making the former tree farm a natural forest by allowing the remaining trees to grow and provide more bird habitat. More sunlight will reach the forest floor and allow the shrubs and grasses that elk feed on to thrive, too.

Right now its a closed canopy, (with) not much undergrowth to it, Hauswald said. (The forest floors) basically become the desert.

Along Bear Creek, volunteers helped remove Scotch broom, the ubiquitous, invasive yellow flowering shrub, along the banks and plant several varieties of trees and shrubs to create understory and overstory coverage, Doherty said.
Seventy years have passed since the attack at Iwo Jima, but the memory of one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps still stirs emotions for veteran Lee Robinson.

I lost a lot of friends. A lot of close friends, Robinson said, tearing up at his Beacon Hill home. At the time it was just part of war. You know thats what we were there to do, but as I have grown older and more sentimental  less of a Marine I guess  just those things  they really get to me.

Robinson, who is almost 93, was in his early 20s when he was deployed to the Pacific Theater, first to the Solomon Islands in 1943 and to Iwo Jima in 1945. Iwo Jima was a pivotal U.S. victory immortalized by a photograph of Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi.

Robinson graduated from high school in Idaho 1942. Like many young men at the time, the Pearl Harbor bombing rattled his plans and inspired him to enlist. After training in San Diego, his company was assigned to a small island named Choiseul.

Marines were to fake a full-scale invasion there to draw Japanese troops away from Bougainville, where Allied troops actually wanted to take over. At one point, his squad found itself surrounded by the enemy. They hid behind brush overnight until a squad members crawled out to the beach and used flags and hand gestures to signal for help. It worked, and the squad made a run for it from the jungle to a boat off the beach, amid enemy fire.

I owe my life to a Boy Scout, Robinson said with a smile.

In January 1945, he was shipped out with the Fifth Marine Division to attack Iwo Jima, a critical base near the Japanese coast. The island was heavily fortified with an elaborate network of dugouts, caves and tunnels, plus about 23,000 Japanese soldiers.

On Feb. 19, 1945, Robinson said he found himself aboard a landing craft bound for Iwo Jima. While he was one of about 5,000 soldiers in the initial attack, he wrote in a manuscript of his experience that he felt strangely alone.

Amid the booming of navel guns from battle ships and whistling bombs, the vessels bow ramp opened to a cloud of gray smoke and black sand, he wrote. Immediately a few hundred feet in front of him, a fighter plane crashed in the water and burst into flames. Within a few minutes the reality of war became very apparent, he said.

For the first few days, Robinson said they fought in the jaws of the enemy, with Japanese troops to the front and behind them as well on Mount Suribachi. Then on the fourth day, he and his squad caught a glimpse of the red, white and blue fluttering on top of the mountain.

What a glorious sight! Some shouted, some wept, some prayed to thank God for his help. All rejoiced at the sight of that tiny flag atop an iron pipe signaling a great psychological as well as a tactical victory, he recalled. (Later, the smaller flag was replaced by a larger flag. The famous photo by Joe Rosenthal depicts the raising of the second flag, a powerful image that is often erroneously rumored to be posed picture.)

During Robinsons 33 days in combat in the 36-day battle, he witnessed friends violent deaths and narrowly escaped death himself when a grenade exploded nearby. At the start of the battle, his squad had 11 men. By the end, three men were wounded and six were dead. Robinson was one of just two who could walk away on their own.

Anywhere from 5,900 to 6,800 Americans died and 17,400 to 19,200 were wounded. Japan lost 17,800 to 22,000.

Robinson has recorded his personal history in a manuscript, and he has spoken about this war experiences to students and community groups, reminding them that freedom isnt free and that vets have paid a terrible price.

I show a picture of the cemetery of the Fifth Marine Division and all the crosses that were in the cemetery. That was just one battle, one division, one war, and when you think of what we have done to each other as human beings and the countless, countless million ... lives that have been taken through wars and the lust for power, he said.

After his honorable discharged in November 1945 with a bronze star, Robinson made it back home, where he was greeted with a warm reception. In 1951, he moved to Longview with his first wife, Aliene, and worked at Longview Fibre Co. for 38 years.

WWII era, veterans, he said had the blessing, the benefit of the unity of the people, the GI bill, and a few good years of economy.

The greatest generation had a lot of advantages and one of them was the unity of the people when were fighting, he added.
Anirudh Regidi

Sonys mid-season console update finally launched yesterday. The PlayStation 4 Pro, an update to the original PlayStation 4 (PS4), is now available for sale in the US and other countries at $399.

Sadly, India isnt yet included in that list.

But what is the PS4 Pro? Whats new and why would I want to buy one?

The PS4 Pro is essentially an upgraded PS4. It features a new and improved AMD chipset, a faster clock-speed, more RAM and a larger hard disk. Its also larger than the original PS4.

Specs PS4 PS4 PRO GPU 18 Radeon GCN compute units @ 800 Mhz 36 improved GCN compute units @ 911 Mhz CPU 8 Jaguar cores @ 1.6Ghz 8 Jaguar cores @ 2.1Ghz RAM 8GB GDDR5 @ 176GB/s 8GB GDDR5 @ 218GB/s (plus 1GB DDR3) HDD 500GB / 1TB 1TB Compute Power 1.84 Tflops 4.14 Tflops Official Price $299 plus free games $399

When the PS4 and Xbox One launched, they came with a promise of smooth 1080p gaming and vastly better visuals. Overall, the consoles did deliver on the latter, but hardware limitations restricted resolutions to the 720p to 900p range. There were exceptions, but not many.

The PS4 Pro (and Microsofts upcoming Xbox Scorpio) comes with the same promise, but this time, the promised resolution is 4K. The PS4 Pro does seem to deliver on that promise, but with some caveats.

For starters, the PS4 Pro doesnt actually have the grunt to render most games at 4K resolutions. Instead, Sony uses a technique called checkerboard rendering to fool you into thinking that 2K is 4K. The system does seem to work as a number of people whove actually experienced it claim to be impressed by the systems capabilities.

Secondly, Sony doesnt expect developers to create games in 4K. Developers actually have three options at their disposal. They can render their game either at 4K, at 2K with better visuals, or at 1080p with much better visuals and a higher frame rate.

Either way, the PS4 Pro promises vastly improved visual quality and more stable frame-rates.

PSVR should also benefit greatly from the PS4 Pros updated hardware. I had a chance to try the PSVR on a PS4 myself, but the visuals were disappointing and it wasnt a fun experience. The PS4 Pro, on the other hand, should have the grunt to churn out the visuals that the PS4 Pro deserves.

At 1080p, the resolution required for the PSVR, developers can use techniques like supersampling and anti-aliasing, along with improved textures, to improve fidelity.

One drawback of the PS4 Pro is that it doesnt actually support 4K Blu-Ray video playback. Its a strange omission on a system that claims to be 4K-ready. That said, the console does support 4K playback from YouTube and Netflix and the audience for Blu-Ray is admittedly small.

So whos the PS4 Pro for?

Youre a console gamer who demands the best visuals

You have a 4K TV and want a 4K gaming experience

You plan to invest in the PSVR platform

Youre buying a new game console and dont want the Xbox One

Whom the PS4 isnt for:

Youre happy with your PS4

You dont have a 4K TV

Youre not planning on getting a PSVR

You're not a PlayStation fan

If youre on the older PS4, dont worry. Sony has reiterated its commitment to gaming on the platform and have stated in no uncertain terms that all games developed for the PS4 platform, including VR titles, will be compatible with all variants of the PS4.

Not to be left out, Microsoft has already unveiled their plans for Project Scorpio, an upcoming console that will best the PS4 Pro by offering true 4K gaming. Sadly, we wont see Scorpio till around this time next year.

If youre desperate for the PS4 Pro and have the cash to burn (Perhaps literally?) you can get the console now on eBay and a few other sites at a whopping Rs 60,000 (excluding customs duties).
hidden

Eleven-year-old Pune girl Anvita Prashant Telang has been named national winner of the "Doodle 4 Google" contest. The sixth standard student from Vibgyor High School in Balewadi area was chosen for her Doodle submission on the theme titled "If I could teach anyone anything, it would be". The Doodle will be featured on the Google India homepage on November 14 to celebrate Children's Day.

"With 'Doodle 4 Google' competition, we aim to promote creativity, passion and imagination in younger users. We congratulate Anvita for being judged as the winner this year," said Sapna Chadha, Head of Marketing, Google India, in a statement. The entries that came from over 50 cities across the country were evaluated on artistic merit, creativity and theme communication as well as their unique and novel approach to the Doodle. The Doodle represents greeneries, water, water life, balloons, making it a lovely vibrant picture.

This comes after an elaborate call for voting for the finalists announced of for the 8th Doodle 4 Google event. The finalists went through two rounds of judging, first by school judges and then by national judges comprising of Art Director Savio Mascarenhas, Googles Chief Doodler Ryan Germick, Cartoonist Ajit Ninan and Creative Rob.

With inputs from IANS
tech2 News Staff

Dolby has dragged Vivo and Oppo to court for illegally selling phones with Dolby technology. The court has ordered the two companies to deposit Rs 32 per infringing device manufactured, imported and sold in escrow while royalty terms are discussed.

The two smartphone manufacturers have been told by the Delhi High Court, which is hearing the case, to furnish the particulars of manufacture, sale and import of the devices using Dolbys tech illegally. These details have to be furnished by the 5th of every month and the deposit, equivalent to a royalty of Rs 32 per device, needs to be deposited by the eighth.

The companies will then need to discuss licensing terms with Dolby under the Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing terms.

Vivo and Oppo will be allowed to sell their smartphones while the licensing deals are being negotiated.

The total amount, once negotiated, will need to be paid in full in US dollars, reads the high court directive. The total number of infringing phones sold by Oppo and Vivo is unknown at this time, but both companies have been doing exceedingly well in India. Reports suggest that Vivo has seen a 759 percent year-on-year growth in sales and Oppo has seen a 159 percent year-on-year growth. The two company's actual market-share is still very small, however.

Dolby Laboratories is an American company that specialises in audio noise reduction, encoding and compression techniques. The company licenses this technology out to third-party manufacturers.

Dolby is, of course, best known for Dolby Digital, the 5.1 audio compression standard that popularised the concept of surround sound.
hidden

Hong Kong's banking regulator received applications from two banks to test emerging biometric technologies under a new regulatory regime, Hong Kong Monetary Authority Chief Executive Norman Chan said on Friday.

The banks have applied to test the use of biometric authentication of securities trading, Chan said at the regulator's first ever financial technology or "fintech" day on Friday.

"So far two banks have already made use of the sandbox to conduct private trials of their biometric authentication in securities trading services. A few banks are discussing with us and planning to make use of the sandbox for...areas such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and many more," he said, without naming the banks.

The HKMA launched the new regime in September, allowing banks to use a "sandbox" to test new technologies on a limited basis before deploying them to the general public.

Biometric authentication has seen a big jump in the past two years especially among smart devices. Almost all new smartphones, be it budget or high-end, are offering a fingerprint scanner today which are further being used as a method for payment authentication. The introduction of biometric authentication in banks could mean a secure but a more simpler way to perform transactions.

Reuters
hidden

Hyperloop One, which is developing a futuristic high-speed transport system, aims to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of fresh capital next year after a first full-scale test that could secure firm orders from clients, its founders said. The founders of Hyperloop One, which uses magnets to levitate pods inside huge airless tubes at speeds up to 750 mph (1,100 kmh) to transport people and cargo, said they have also now signed agreements on feasibility studies with the Dutch and Finnish governments.

Earlier this week, the company said it agreed to jointly evaluate a Hyperloop One transport system in Dubai. Early next year the company will carry out its first full-scale test of the system at a facility in Nevada, which could demonstrate the system's viability. So far the company has raised $160 million to finance its growth, including $50 million last month from Dubai port operator DP World.

"Basically, we are looking to do a big raise next year," Josh Giegel, co-founder and head of engineering at Hyperloop One, told Reuters at the Web Summit, a tech conference held in Lisbon this week. "If we can have a customer on the hook, it will be all that much easier." He said the size of the funding round would "be something in the hundreds of millions, but not high hundreds of millions," and that it would depend on the potential of the projects under consideration by countries.

The concept behind Hyperloop One originated in a paper by Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc, in 2013. Skeptics still wonder if the technology can move from science fiction to reality. But Hyperloop One's increasing number of agreements on feasibility studies with countries suggests growing optimism. Giegel said he has no doubts that the test will work. "There is no doubt about it working at this point, it's just that how quickly can you go through the regulatory process, the customer process and to basically get the funding situation in place?" Giegel said.

Building networks of the huge tubes being built by Hyperloop One, either above or under ground, would cost billions. Hyperloop One co-founder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar said he expected governments to embrace the technology once they understand the huge time savings the system can offer, for transporting people and cargo. "Once governments see what the potential is, they will basically accelerate the regulatory process," Pishevar said, adding that regulation may not be that cumbersome as it would start from a blank sheet as the system is completely new.

The feasibility study for Finland includes a possible transport link between Helsinki and Stockholm in Sweden, a trip which would take about half an hour in a Hyperloop rather than overnight on a ferry through the Baltic.

Reuters
hidden

European Union lawmakers on Thursday approved plans to coordinate the rollout across the bloc of the 700MHz spectrum band for wireless broadband by 2022 to provide faster mobile broadband and improved access to Internet services. The 700 MHz band (694-790 MHz), currently widely used for digital television signals and wireless microphones, can penetrate buildings and walls easily and cover larger geographic areas with less infrastructure than frequencies in higher bands.

The EU hopes that the new allocation of the 700 MHz band will facilitate the launch of the next-generation 5G mobile technology that is expected to support driverless cars, remote healthcare and billions of everyday objects connected to the Internet. "5G will change the logic of our economies. Successfully launching 5G in the European Union will require the efficient use of spectrum," said MEP Gunnar Hokmark, who steered the legislation through European Parliament.

"This proposal is a first and very important step forward." Member states will allocate the 700MHz band to wireless broadband services by June 30, 2020, but can delay it by up to two years for legitimate reasons such as unresolved coordination issues with neighbouring non-EU countries or if they need more time to reallocate the spectrum from broadcasting services.

Thursday's vote means that the European Parliament can start negotiations with EU member states to reach a final accord, after which the proposal will become law. "Europe needs to ensure enough spectrum is allocated to mobile broadband in order to cope with future data traffic needs," said Lise Fuhr, Director General of ETNO, a trade group representing telecoms operators such as Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica.

Reuters
hidden

Nvidia Corp reported its biggest quarterly revenue growth in more than six years as demand soared for its gaming chips used in personal computers. Shares of the company, which also forecast current-quarter revenue above analysts' average estimate, rose 14.2 percent at $77.40 in after-hours trading and were set to open at a record high. Revenue rose 53.6 percent to $2.00 billion in the third quarter, blowing past analysts' expectations of $1.69 billion.

"I certainly had suspected that the possibility of them beating consensus by a decent margin was certainly on the table," Canaccord Genuity analyst Matt Ramsay said. "Did I expect them to beat consensus by $300 million? No." Nvidia commands a dominant share of the high-end PC gaming market, where its chips are used to power graphically demanding games such as Electronic Arts Inc's "Titanfall 2" and Activision Blizzard Inc's "Call of Duty" series.

Revenue from the company's graphics processing units business, which contributes 85 percent to its total revenue, rose 52.9 percent to $1.70 billion in the quarter. "Our new Pascal GPUs are fully ramped and enjoying great success in gaming, VR, self-driving cars and datacenter AI computing," Jen-Hsun Huang said. "The GPU is no longer a niche component." Revenue at the company's fast-growing data center business, which counts Amazon.com Inc's Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp's Azure and Alibaba Group Holding Inc's cloud business among its customers, nearly tripled to $240 million.

Revenue from the company's automotive business, which recently signed an agreement to supply chips for Tesla Motors Inc's Autopilot system, soared 60.8 percent to $127 million. Nvidia also increased its quarterly dividend to 14 cents per share from 11.5 cents and said it would buy back an additional $2 billion of its shares. Nvidia forecast revenue to increase to $2.10 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, in the current quarter. Analysts on average were expecting a rise to $1.69 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Excluding items, Nvidia earned 94 cents per share in the second quarter. The company's net income rose to $542 million, or 83 cents per share, for the three months ended Oct. 30 from $246 million, or 44 cents per share, a year earlier. Up to Thursday's close of $67.77, shares had more than doubled this year, far exceeding the 6 percent gain in the broader S&P 500 index.

Reuters
tech2 News Staff

OnePlus is working on bringing latest software updates to all generations sold by the company. According to a recent report by Engadget, the company is planning to bring the latest version of Android, Android Nougat 7.0 to OnePlus 3 before the end of the year. The report says that the company will bring the beta version of Android Nougat 7.0 based Oxygen OS to its Community Builds before the end of this month with the final version rolling out before the end of the year.

The company teased that it is working on Android Nougat 7.0 a few weeks back in a teaser video on its Twitter account. OnePlus has received a lot of criticism for the slow pace of updates to its limited product lineup. The company has merged the OxgenOS, the global variant of its Android forked system and HydrogenOS, the variant shipped with OnePlus devices sold in China to improve the software update speed. This has resulted in improved alignment of resources and faster pace of updates.

Already hard at work on the latest and greatest. #NeverSettle pic.twitter.com/pirsJS3jOD  Pete Lau (@petelau2007) October 4, 2016

The company also outlined its detailed Beta program in a blog post giving details about Android development in the company and the different branches like the internal build, community build and stable build. OnePlus has reassured users that it is working on Android Nougat updates for OnePlus 2 users. One this to point is that the track record of providing updates has vastly improved with the launch of OnePlus 3. However, things have not improved for OnePlus 2 or OnePlus X users.

OnePlus announced the rollout of new Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 based Oxygen OS 3.1.4 to OnePlus X users in coming days. This is the second update that the company has issued in a long time. The first major update (Marshmallow update) was pushed in October. The new update doesn't bring any groundbreaking changes and limits itself to bug fixing for launcher and screen brightness while improving system stability and Google Security Patch for November. This comes right after the official confirmation that OnePlus 3T will launch with Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 on November 15,2016.
tech2 News Staff

Now, that Donald Trump has been elected as the 45th President of the United States of America, it has raised several concerns. In the past two days, we've heard how it could affect net neutrality, broadband expansion and so on. Another wave of concern is over government surveillance and encryption. According to SiliconBeat, many tech companies are worried to the extent, they are considering moving their servers out of the country.

To be fair, there is no dearth of spying tools in the country and Democrats have been facing a flak for sometime now. However, many are concerned this may only increase in the Trump administration. If you remember Trump had called on Apple to let the FBI break into the device of the San Bernardino shooter. But, more bizarre was asking people to boycott Apple products.

With people fearing Trump could abuse his power, many have begun tweeting out security measures.

https://twitter.com/jonrog1/status/796217343311417344

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has said that if Trump decides to follow some of the things he has said about tracking Muslims in the United States, then it would be against the law. Edward Snowden, the whistle blower, speaking from Moscow said that those worried about surveillance shouldn't worry about Trump as they are the ones who can make a change. He also said that people should save themselves from surveillance instead of being worried about Trump.
Ruet closed after BCL infighting

Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology (Ruet) authorities on Friday closed the university until

November 18 following a clash between two factions of Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) on the campus.



The decision was taken in a syndicate meeting around 11.45 am, said Mohammad Rafiqul Islam, Vice-Chancellor of the university.



The students have been asked to vacate their dormitories by 3 pm today.



A student was injured in a clash between two factions of BCL on the campus on Thursday night.



Additional police have been deployed to avoid further trouble.--Rajshahi, Nov 11 (UNB)


Melania Trump, Michelle Obama carry on an awkward tradition, too

First Lady Michelle Obama meets with Melania Trump for tea in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House, on Thursday.

The Washington Post :

Michelle Obama carried on an awkward White House tradition when she hosted Melania Trump for tea Thursday. It was their first meeting, coming on the heels of the ugliest campaign in recent history.

They talked about raising children and took a tour of the White House's private residence before heading to the Oval Office to meet with the president and president-elect. The tour also included a visit to the Truman Balcony, which overlooks the South Lawn, and a tour of the State Floor of the executive mansion with the White House curator.

Mrs. Obama's aides offered no further details of the meeting. Donald Trump and his wife arrived at the White House via a backdoor on the South Lawn, an area not visible to the public.

There were no grip-and-grin photos of the meeting between Michelle Obama and Melania Trump and no indication of how well they interacted.

Still the meeting of the current and future first ladies was a moment to consider both the fraught public relationship between the two and their differing styles.

Michelle Obama played an unprecedented role in the failed campaign to elect Hillary Clinton, traveling the country to make the case that Donald Trump was a poor role model for the nation's children and unfit for the presidency.

Melania Trump was less involved in her husband's campaign. She rarely gave public speeches, saying she preferred to stay home in Manhattan and care for her young son, Barron.

Mrs. Trump's most prominent moment of the campaign came during the Republican National Convention when she gave her first speech before a large national audience. It was well received - until a journalist discovered that several phrases had been plagiarized from a 2008 Michelle Obama speech. Trump's campaign later explained that Melania was an admirer of Michelle's.

Obama addressed the plagiarism matter only briefly, when talk-show host Stephen Colbert asked her about it during a September appearance on his show. "That's tough," she said.

Aside from being mothers whose children were young when their husbands won the presidency, Obama and Trump have little in common. Trump, who is from Slovenia, is only the second first lady to be born outside of the country.

Though Melania Trump has evidently read up a little on the current first lady, Michelle Obama has said she never expected to become first lady and purposely did not read the memoirs of other East Wing inhabitants before she took on the role.
Muslim students targeted in California campus attacks

On Thursday, police were investigating attacks against female Muslim students in California.

AFP, Los Angeles :

Authorities at two universities in California said on Thursday police were investigating attacks against female Muslim students, one of which was described as a hate crime.

Both attacks came on Wednesday, the day after Donald Trump was elected president at the end of a campaign during which the Republican was criticized for divisive and inflammatory language against Muslims.

In one of the incidents, two assailants confronted their victim at San Diego State University and "made comments about President-elect Trump and the Muslim community," according to campus police.

The woman had her purse, backpack and car keys stolen. She went to get help and returned to the scene with police officers, only to find her car had been stolen, police spokesman Ronald Broussard said.

The case was being investigated as a suspected hate crime as well as a strong-arm robbery and auto theft, Broussard said.

"Comments made to the student indicate she was targeted because of her Muslim faith, including her wearing of a traditional garment and hijab," university president Elliot Hirshman and interim police chief Josh Mays said in a joint statement.

San Jose State University police said in a statement they were investigating a similar attack against a female student at a campus parking garage.

A male assailant approached the victim from behind, pulling at the victim's head scarf, choking and throwing her off balance, according to the statement circulated to students on Wednesday.

"Campus officials are closely monitoring the situation as the investigation continues. No arrests have been made," university spokeswoman Pat Harris said in an emailed statement to AFP.

"We are, of course, very concerned that this has occurred on our campus. No one should experience this kind of behavior at San Jose State," she added.

New York University's Muslim Students Association issued a statement on Wednesday saying engineering undergraduates had arrived that morning to find "Trump" scrawled on the door of their prayer room.

The organization said members were "realizing that our campus is not immune to the bigotry that grips America."

A Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette told police on Wednesday that she was attacked by two men, one of whom was wearing a white hat emblazoned with "Trump."

Local media reported a police statement on Thursday however alleging that the girl had made up the attack.

The Lafayette Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hate group hold victory parade for Trump in North Carolina

Members of the Ku Klux Klan participate in cross burnings after a \"white pride\" rally in rural Paulding County near Cedar Town, Ga.

International Business Times :

A 'victory' parade announced by the Loyal White Knights, a KKK chapter, will take place in North Carolina during December. "Trump's race united my people," read the announcement, according to the News Observer.

David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the KKK, hailed Trump's election "one of the most exciting nights of my life" and rejoiced in the fact that "our people" helped him keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

The KKK's official newspaper lent their backing to Trump during the election campaign, and the president elect was forced to distance himself from the hate group's support. Last week, the Trump campaign sent out a statement that the property billionaire "denounces hate in any form".

In 1927, Donald Trump's father was arrested after a KKK riot in Queens when over 1,000 white-robed Klansmen marched through the Jamaica neighbourhood.

A Daily Star article stated that Trump Senior was detained "on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so."

On Wednesday (9 November), protesters took to the streets in at least 10 US cities to march against president-elect Donald Trump. Nazi graffiti was spray painted on the glass window of a South Philadelphia building with the words "Seig Heil 2016", while a swastika was added to the word Trump.

The Philadelphia Police Department are investigating the vandalism although have not yet said whether it will be treated as a hate crime.

The incident happened between 9-10 November, the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when Jewish-owned businesses were attacked by the Nazis in Germany. Synagogues were set on fire and nearly 100 Jews were killed.

"We are horrified by the appearance of hate graffiti on a storefront in South Philadelphia," said Nancy K. Baron-Baer, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. "Swastikas and the Nazi salute send a message of intolerance and hate to the entire community. The fact that today is the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht adds another layer to this already sickening act."

Most states use a "winner-take-all" system when it comes to electoral votes, although there is no Constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote a certain way. Twenty-six states and Washington, D.C., do, however, "bind" their electors to vote for the promised candidate on Dec. 19 - in this case, Trump. In many cases, "faithless electors" are forced to pay a fine if they vote against the popular choice.

Maine and Nebraska follow a different method, called the congressional district method, which allots two electoral votes to the popular vote winner, and additional votes for each congressional district won by the candidates.
Accused cannot be shown arrested

Appellate Division L :

(Civil)

Surendra Kumar Sinha CJ

Syed Mahmud Hossain J

Hasan Foez Siddique J

Mirza Hussain Haider J

Order

May 9th, 2016

Government of Bangladesh and others Petitioners

vs

Mahmudur Rahman and another

.. Respondents*

Code of Criminal Procedure (V of 1898)

Section 167

Order May 9th, 2016

It is now settled that an accused person cannot be shown arrested without being produced in court and without afforded an opportunity of being heard through his lawyer.

The manner in which the respondent is being dealt with is deprecated. From the order sheet of some cases we have reasons to believe that the respondent has been harassed by the law enforcing agencies. We modify the interim order of the High Court Division and direct that the respondent Mahmudur Rahman should not be shown arrested in connection with any other case unless there is true complaisance of section 167 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Even he should not be arrested at the Jail gate after he is released from the custody which is not permissible in law.

Mamotazuddin Fakir, Additional Attorney-General instructed by Haridas Paul, Advocate-on-Record -- For the Petitioners.

AJ Mohammad Ali, Senior Advocate instructed by Zainul Abedin, Advocate-on-Record -- For the Respondents.

Order

We have perused the impugned order and heard the learned Counsel of both the parties. This petition relates to an interim order passed by the High Court Division by which it has directed the writ respondents not to create any obstruction or showing him arrested in connection with any other cases in which the respondent Mahmudur Rahman was not an FIR named offender or to arrest him from the jail gate after his release from the custody without due process of law. We noticed that the writ petitioner has been shown arrested in a good number of cases and some of the order sheets have been placed before this court. On perusal of the order sheets, we have noticed that the police officers have not complied with the provisions of section 167 of the Code of Criminal Procedure while praying for showing him arrested and repeatedly made petitions showing him arrested in many cases and the Magistrate passed mechanical orders on their applications.

2. It is now settled that an accused person cannot be shown arrested without being produced in court and without afforded an opportunity of being heard through his lawyer. The learned Additional Attorney-General submits that the order of the High Court Division is so vague and if this order remains, it would be difficult on the part of police to implicate him in other cases even if the police officers after investigation find his complicity in an occurrence. True, the order is vague, but the manner in which the respondent is being dealt with is deprecated. From the order sheet of some cases we have reasons to believe that the respondent has been harassed by the law enforcing agencies. In view of the above, we modify the interim order of the High Court Division and direct that the respondent Mahmudur Rahman should not be shown arrested in connection with any other case unless there is true complaisance of section 167 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Even he should not be arrested at the Jail gate after he is released from the custody which is not permissible in law.

3. The High Court Division is directed to dispose of the Rule within 3 (three) months from the date of receipt of the order.

This petition is disposed of with the above observations.
Court of Settlement should apply judicial consideration impartially

(From previous issue) :

4. Mr Khandaker Shariar Shakir, the learned Advocate appearing for the Petitioner submits that admittedly the Petitioner as constituted attorney of Abid Hossain, son of SG Mustafa, has been possessing the case property since 1982 and before that Abid Hossain was in possession. In this situation the Respondent-Government ought to have served a notice under Article 7 of PO 16 of 1972 upon the owner or the occupier asking them to surrender the possession of the property to the Deputy Commissioner but in the present case no such notice was issued and subsequently when the Ordinance No. 54 of 1985 came into force before enlistment of the property as abandoned property in the "Kha" list, the Government ought to have served a notice upon the owner or occupier of the property under section 5(1)(b) of the Ordinance 54 of 1985 asking the owner or possessor to surrender the property or to explain on what basis they are occupying the disputed property but in the instant case no such notice was issued and served upon the Petitioner or upon her principal Abid Hossain, as such inclusion of the property in question in the "Kha" list of the Abandoned Buildings is palpably illegal and without lawful authority. Mr Shakir referring an inquiry report dated 30-9-1996 Annexure I (1) furnished by the Officer-in-Charge, Abandoned Property Division, Khulna, submits that in the said report it has been clearly stated that there is no paper in the office to show on what basis the house in question included in the 'Kha' list of the abandoned buildings.

5. He also submits that from the said report it is evident that the property in question was never declared abandoned or any notice to that effect was issued or served upon the owner or occupier of the disputed property. Mr Shakir also argued that to substantiate the claim of the Petitioner, she deposed before the Court of Settlement and exhibited relevant documents in support of her claim such as the original lease deed, mortgage deed executed in favour of HBFC, death certificate of SG Mustafa nationality certificate of Abid Hossain, Affidavit sworn by Abid Hossain before the Magistrate, First Class, utility bills, succession certificate, registered power of attorney, payment receipt showing payment of loan money to HBFC by the petitioner but the Court of Settlement totally failed to consider those documents in its true perspective and upon misconstruction of the said documents most illegally dismissed the case holding that the property has been rightly declared abandoned and included in the "Kha" list of the Abandoned Buildings. He further argued that the record of Khalishpur Housing Estate placed before the Court Settlement shows that wife of SG Mustafa, namely, Hosneara Begum filed an application on 13-12-1972 before the Housing Authority, Khulna praying for allotting the said quarter in her favour stating that the property was leased out to her husband SG Mustafa in the year 1963 and subsequently her husband SG Mustafa constructed a two storied building on the property obtaining loan from HBFC who was killed on 10-3-1972. It is also argued that the Government file shows that said SG Mustafa died in Bangladesh in 1972 and several notices were issued by the Housing Authority demanding outstanding, installments from said SG Mustafa. Therefore, it is established that the original owner of the property was present in Bangladesh at the relevant time and he never left this country leaving the property uncared for but he died in this country and after his death his heirs had been in possession of the disputed property till 1980 and thereafter Abdur Rob Biswas and then the Petitioner as attorney of Abid Hossain has been possessing the disputed property.

6. For the above. reason the property in question cannot be declared abandoned and as such the listing of the property in the "Kha" list of the Abandoned Buildings is illegal and without lawful authority. In support of his submission he has referred to the cases of Jebon Nahar vs Bangladesh reported in 49 DLR 108, Bangladesh vs Chand Sultana reported in 1 MLR 310 = 51 DLR (AD) 24.

7. Mr Md Shahidul Islam, the learned Deputy Attorney General with Mr Sukumar Biswas, the learned Assistant Attorney General appearing for the Respondent Government submit that the Petitioner is not the owner of the property and as such she cannot file application before the Court of Settlement for release of the property from the 'Kha' list of the Abandoned Buildings. It is also argued that the Petitioner having failed to prove the case, the Court of Settlement has rightly dismissed the case. Mr Islam further submits that the burden of proof squarely lies on the Petitioner to prove that SG Mustafa or his heirs occupied, managed and supervised the case properly on the relevant date i.e. on 28-2-1982 to establish that the said property is not an abandoned property. But the petitioner having failed to prove the same the inclusion of the Building in the "Kha" list is proof of its being an abandoned property and the Government has nothing in prove or deny .

8. In the present case the petitioner could not show that SG Mustafa was present in Bangladesh on material dates or that he occupied, managed or supervised the case property when PO 16 of 1972 came into operation, as such the listing of the property in the "Kha" list as abandoned property is lawful and conclusive proof of facts. It is also argued that the papers and documents submitted on behalf of the Petitioner to prove her case showing payment of utility bills are after 1980 onwards as such it can not be said that the Petitioner or her principal was in active control and possession of the property in question. He further argued that the Court of Settlement rightly observed that though the Petitioner submitted some documents but those have not been proved by evidence. Mr. Islam also argued that the Petitioner is not the owner of the property and she can not be a claimant of the property as per law. It is also argued that this Court can not sit as a Court of appeal sitting in writ jurisdiction. This Court only can interfere if it is found that the Court of Settlement acted malafide and in violation of principle of natural justice. But in the present case no such allegation has been brought on behalf of the Petitioner. In support his of submissions he referred to the cases of Bangladesh vs Md Jalil reported in 48 DLR (AD) 10, Secretary Ministry of Works vs Rowshan Ara Begum reported in 57 DLR (AD) 167 and Bangladesh vs ATM Mannan reported in 1 BLC (AD) 8 and an unreported judgment dated 29-10-2009 passed in the case of Md Feroj Mia vs Bangladesh in Writ Petition No. 4971 of 2001.

9. Heard the learned Advocates for the parties, perused the Application, Supplementary Affidavits, Affidavits-in-opposition, Supplementary Affidavit-in-opposition and Affidavit-in Reply, along with the annexures annexed thereto.

10. In the instant Rule the moot question to be looked into whether the property in question has been legally declared as abandoned property and whether the property is at all come within the purview of the definition "abandoned." Before going through the merit of the case the provisions of law in this regard may be looked into.

11. The purpose of PO 16 of 1972 is to make provisions for the control, management and disposal of certain property abandoned by certain persons who are not present in Bangladesh or whose whereabouts are not known or who have ceased to occupy or supervise or manage in person their property or who are enemy aliens.

12. It appears that the purpose of PO 16 of 1972 is not to declare as abandoned the property of citizens who are very much present in Bangladesh and who have been occupying, supervising and managing their property at all times. In the present case the Government submitted the concerned record before the Court of Settlement. This Court finds that there are some papers which show that the Housing Authority on different dates Wrote letters to the lessee after 1972 onwards demanding payment of outstanding instalments. It is also found that wife of original lessee SG Mustafa has filed an application on 13-12- 1972 praying for allotment of the house in her name since her husband has been killed on 10-31-972. Apart from this the petitioner in her application categorically asserted that the original owner of the case property died in Bangladesh in the year 1972. Subsequently, while his son Abid Hossain was in active control, supervision and management of the case property, he, by a registered power of attorney, authorized the Petitioner to manage, supervise and control the property on his behalf. The Government though claimed that the property was rightly declared abandoned and enlisted in the "Kha" list as abandoned property, but could not produce any document in support of enlistment and declaration of the property as abandoned or even a notice to surrender under Article 7 of PO 16 of 1972 or under Section 5(1) (b) of the Ordinance 54 of 1985 Furthermore, the Government could not show any paper in respect of treating the property as abandoned except a Gazette notification. The record of the Housing Settlement shows that the original owner of the case property SG Mustafa was present in Bangladesh at the relevant time i.e. on 28-2-1972 when PO 16 of 1972 came into force, as such the claim regarding whereabouts of the original allottee was not known to the Government was not correct. The Petitioner in support of her claim submitted all the original documents before the Court of Settlement including Deed of Lease, Mortgage Deed executed in favour of HBFC. Receipt showing payment of loan to HBFC, payment of utility bills and other connected documents. The Court of settlement though discussed about the documents but upon a misconstruction raised question about the genuineness of those documents.

13. It is true that there are some anomalies in the papers of he Petitioner submitted before the Court of Settlement as well as before this Court but those anomalies in this court's view contributes a little in the merit of the case.

14. Furthermore, it is always to be borne in mind that in any case as this it must be accepted as a truism that the act of abandonment implies two fundamental factors:

(i) Desertion of the property; and

(ii) Giving up one's right to the property.

15. The word "abandonment" connotes in this sense the idea of the owner not merely temporarily vacating but deserting the property with the intention of never returning to it. Such absolute desertion must be concomitant with the positive intention to give up the right vested in the property. It follows, therefore, that mere temporary or occasional absence of physical possession shall not of itself suffice to treat the property as abandoned. These two determinants of the notion of "abandonment" appear not to have been established in this case.

It is true that the petitioner before us is not the owner of the property she represents the heirs of S.G. Mustafa namely, Abid Hossain and in other words she has some interest and she produced the power of attorney, receipt showing payment of loan money to the HBFC and possessing the disputed house, as such the case property does not in any way answer to the description of the abandoned property as mentioned above and defined particularly under Article 2 of the PO 16 of 1972 as there was no deser1ion of the property accompanied by a giving up the right to the property by the owner.

16. A perusal of the Government file pertaining to the case property at Page 113 it is found that the Officer-in-Charge of the Abandoned Property, Khulna submitted a report on 30-9-1996. He relevant portion of the said report is reproduced below for ready reference.

(To be continued)

? ???? ?????????? ???? ???????? ??? ? ??????? ??? ?? ??????? ?????? ???????? ???? ??-?-???? ?????? ?????? ??? ??? ?? ??? ???? ???? ???? ?????? ????? ?????? ??? ?? ??????? ????????? ???? ?????? ????? ?????? ????? ???????? ?? ??? ??????????? ??? ????????? ??? ? ???? ????? ??? ??? ??? ???? ???? ?????? ???????? ????? ????? ?????? ?? ?? ? ?????????? ??? ???? ???? ????? ????? ???? ??? ????"??? ?"?? ???

??????? ???? ?????? ??? ?????? ????????? ????????? ?????? ??? ????????? ????? ??????????

17. The above mentioned observation of the concerned Officer of the Abandoned Property Division, Khulna, establishes that the Government never declared the property as abandoned. In the present case the ownership of the property is not paramount consideration for this Court. The main question is whether the property in question has been rightly included in the "Kim" list of the Abandoned Building in accordance with law. This court also finds that the Government- Respondent never issued and served any notice upon the owner and the occupier under Article 7 of PO 16 of 1972 or under Section 5(1)(b) of the Ordinance, 1985 non-service of notice as required by law disentitled the Government-Respondent to claim that the property was legally declared abandoned and enlisted in the "Kha" list of the Abandoned Buildings. It is also noted that there is nothing on record to show that the Petitioner was ever asked to show cause about inclusion of the property or to surrender the same which has definitely denied the right of natural justice to the Petitioner.

18. In the case of Syeda Chand Sultana vs Bangladesh reported in 1 MLR 310 = 48 DLR 547 which was affirmed by the Appellate Division and reported in 51 DLR (AD) 24, it has been held that,

"Where the owners as Bangladeshi nationals having lawful title have been in possessions of the property all through and never having ceased to manage or supervise the same and not having "left the country and when there was no proper service of notice upon the petitioners as required under Article 7 of the PO No. 16 of 1972, the inclusion of the said building in the "Kha list" of abandoned properties being violative of the fundamental right as contained in Article 42 of the Constitution is illegal, without jurisdiction and of no legal effect and as such the petitioners are entitled to invoke the writ jurisdiction for enforcement of fundamental rights.

19. In the present facts and circumstances, this Court finds itself wholly subscribing to that ratio decidendi in the Syeda Chand Sultana Case.

20. Given this Court's understanding of the essentials of enquiry as to the status of property under the relevant provisions of Ordinance as above explained, it is found that the claimant had duly discharged her onus of proving her case independently of the Government and that in doing so she had by a set of mutually reinforcing evidence produced generally established a continuous scenario of active ownership, occupation, supervision and management of the said property through her principal both before and after the promulgation of PO 16 of 1972. There was nothing on record that could have reasonably led the court of Settlement to find otherwise. However, the Court of Settlement without. following a judicial approach in determining the question of facts involved in this case unfortunately passed the Judgment without giving a judicial consideration of the whole dispute between the parties and decided the matter erroneously. By that reason, and by confining this Court's scrutiny to the objective of finding whether the impugned Judgment is perverse or not, this Court has inevitably arrived at the conclusion that the Court of Settlement's Judgment and Order dated 22-2-2001 is indeed highly perverse, one being contrary to the facts and circumstance and evidence on record and by that reason we are inclined to interfere with the impugned Judgment of the Court of Settlement as prayed for.

21. In the result, the Rule is made absolute without any order as to costs.

22. It is hereby declared that the Judgment and Order dated 10-12-2009 passed by the Respondent No.3 in Case No. 221 of 1992 dismissing the case and thereby refusing to release the property being House No. T-57, Khalishpur Housing Estate Khulna from the "Kha" list of abandoned buildings. published in the Bangladesh Gazette on 23-9-1986 at Page No. 9764(36) against serial No. 615 (mistakenly mentioned in the decision as published in the Bangladesh Gazette dated 28-4-1986 against serial No 634 is without lawful authority and is of no legal effect and the Respondents are hereby directed to exclude the same from the "Kha" list of the Abandoned Buildings within 60 (sixty) days from the date of receipt of this Judgment and Order.

23. The order of stay granted at the time of issuance of this Rule is stand vacated.

Communicate a copy of this Judgment and Order to the Court of Settlement concerned at once.


US auto union UAW willing to work with Trump

AFP, Detroit :

The United Auto Workers, which campaigned to defeat Donald Trump throughout 2016, said Thursday that it is looking forward to working with the US President-elect to reshape trade policy and other issues.

"We're going to find some common ground," UAW President Dennis Williams told reporters during a post-election roundtable at the headquarters of the country's main union for the auto industry.

"I think his position on trade is right on. I'm prepared to talk about that," said Williams, noting that the Republican billionaire wants to scuttle the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership and re-negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The 1994 NAFTA agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada was instrumental in helping move manufacturing jobs from the "Rust Belt" in the Midwest to Mexico.

"Trade is a huge problem for the American people, who have seen their jobs and communities destroyed by these trade deals, and they're angry," Williams said.

More than a third of the UAW's 425,000 members voted for the Republican candidate, especially those over 50, he estimated, despite US organized labor's traditional support for Democrats.

Trump upset his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton with a surprisingly strong showing in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

"I think Hillary Clinton got blamed for NAFTA," Williams said of the deal negotiated by her husband, former president Bill Clinton. "I think Donald Trump had a good message about how NAFTA destroyed jobs."

At the same time, Clinton appeared unable to capitalize on Democratic accomplishments such as President Barack Obama's crucial bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler, he added.

"When I look at the amount of money General Motors, Ford, Toyota and Nissan are putting into Mexico, that represents jobs walking away from our citizens."

Williams said he would like an opportunity to sit down and talk with Trump.

"I don't see him as traditional Republican," he said. "I see him as someone who made a lot of commitment to blue collar workers."

He also said he expects Trump to keep his promise to rebuild the country's basic infrastructure, which could also create many jobs.

"We're going to protect our traditional values and we'll try to raise the awareness of organized labor," Williams said.

"We're not going to change who we are as a union."




5 fortune seekers held at Ctg Airport

Chittagong Bureau :

RAB forces in Chittagong detained five Iraq bound fortune seekers from Chittagong shah amanat International Airport on Wednesday midnight .

RAB senior official Md. Sohel Mahmud told the media that on Wednesday midnight after conducting raid in airport area, forces detained five Iraq bound passengers on fake visas .

These fortune seekers supposed to board on Air Arabia flight on way to Sharjah and then UAE to Iraq via Qatar.The detained fortune seekers identified as Md. Tuhin Islam of Munshigonj, Morshed Dali of Munshigonj, Md. Shohag, Sajib Ahmed and Md. Ripon of Netrokona district .

After searching their luggages, law enforcers recovered passports with fake visas of Qatar and Iraq from their possession. After scrutinizing the ticket and visas their ultimate destination was to Iraq via Sharjah and Qatar.

Mentionable that one October 12 last, 39 Libya bound fortune seekers were detained from Chittagong airport.

After interrogation by the lawenforcers, the victims apprised the name of the 4 human traffickers of Dhaka and Munshigonj.

The names of the traffickers named as Md. Sabuj, Sajib Ahmed of Munshigonj and Rabiul and Jasim of Dhaka, victims sources said.


Protests turn violent in US

A demonstrator holds a pinata head of Donald Trump on a stick as they march in protest through the streets of downtown Los Angeles in protest following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States in Los Angeles, California No

BBC Online :

A second night of protests in the US against President-elect Donald Trump has turned violent in Portland, Oregon. Several thousand demonstrators gathered in the centre of the western city. Some smashed shop and car windows, threw firecrackers and set rubbish alight.

Police declared a riot and arrested over100 people. Protests in other US cities were smaller than on Wednesday.

Mr Trump earlier said in a tweet the demonstrations were unfair and had been incited by the media.

The protesters, mainly young people, say a Trump presidency would create deep divisions along racial and gender lines.

Police in Portland accused some demonstrators of carrying bats and arming themselves with rocks. Objects were thrown at the police, who responded with pepper spray and rubber baton rounds.

The state of Oregon voted 51-41% in favour of Democrat Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's election.

Mr Trump criticised the protesters after his meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House.

Senior Trump adviser and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani called protesters on college campuses "a bunch of spoiled cry-babies" on Fox News.

Mr Giuliani, who has been mentioned as Mr Trump's possible attorney general, was responding to the suggestion that students suffering anxiety over the election result were being offered therapy.

There were no reports of violence at the other protests, although demonstrators in Minneapolis briefly blocked an interstate highway in both directions.

In Philadelphia crowds gathered near City Hall holding placards bearing slogans

such as "Not Our President", "Trans Against Trump" and "Make America Safe For All".

In Baltimore, police said a peaceful crowd of 600 people marched through the city, blocking traffic. In San Francisco high school students waved rainbow banners and Mexican flags.

A small crowd also gathered outside Trump Tower in Chicago, a day after thousands marched through the city centre. Some passers-by cheered them but at least one driver shouted that they should "shut up and accept democracy", the Associated Press news agency reported. Protesters also returned to Trump Tower in New York for a second night.

Meanwhile Mexico's president said he was optimistic his country could have a positive relationship with the US under Mr Trump, despite his anti-Mexican rhetoric during the campaign.

Enrique Pena Nieto said he and Trump had agreed to meet, possibly during the transition period before Mr Trump's inauguration in January. In Russia, President Putin's spokesman said Mr Trump and Mr Putin were "very much alike" in how they see the world.

Dmitry Peskov said Russian experts had been in contact with some members of Mr Trump's staff during the campaign. But he said the Russian government had nothing to do with the theft of emails from the Democratic campaign that were later published by the transparency organisation Wikileaks.

Earlier Mr Trump said it was a "great honour" to meet President Obama for transition talks at the White House.

Mr Obama said his priority was to "facilitate a transition that ensures our president-elect is successful".

A BBC correspondent says that despite their cordiality, Mr Trump is intent on dismantling much of President Obama's legacy. That includes Obamacare, the act extending medical insurance to more Americans than ever before. During the campaign he called Mr Trump "uniquely unqualified" to be president.

The president-elect was accompanied by his wife, Melania, who had a meeting with First Lady Michelle Obama. Mr Trump later tweeted that he had had "great chemistry" with Mr Obama, while his wife "liked Mrs O a lot".


RUET closed for 7 days after BCL infighting

Rajshahi Correspondent :

Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology was closed on Friday for seven days after two groups of Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) activists clashed over a missing laptop.

The university authorities took the decision in a emergency meeting of the university's academic council at 11am, said Student Welfare Advisor Kamruzzaman Hiro.

The decision had been taken to avoid further untoward incident, he said, and the students were asked to evacuate the residential halls within 3pm.

The residential halls will open on November 18 and classes and examinations

will begin from the next day.

Two factions of the ruling Awami League's student front fought pitched battles on Tuesday and Wednesday nights over the missing of a laptop on the campus. At least two students were injured.
Protesters want Minister Sayedul`s resignation

General students under the banner of Hindu student organizations on Friday blocked the Shahbagh inter-section protesting against recent attacks in B\'baria and other parts of the country.

Staff Reporter :

Several hundred protesters on Friday blocked the busy Shahbagh intersection in the city for hours in protest against attacks on the members of the Hindu community at Nasirnagar upazila in Brahmanbaria district and other parts of the country.

The protesters under the banner of general students of Dhaka University started demonstration there 10am and thereby halted traffic movement.

Buses, mini-buses, private cars, microbuses, rickshaws and other vehicles were stuck from the National Press Club to Rupashi Bangla Intersection and Katabon and to the

University campus - despite Friday being a weekend. Buses were taking other routes to the University campus.

The law enforcers took position around the protesters.

They (protesters) burnt an effigy of Fisheries and Livestock Minister Muhammed Sayedul Hoque around 11:00am who used abusive words targeting the Hindus.

They demanded resignation of Sayedul Hoque from the Ministry. Some of the placards they carried, read - 'Is it a crime to be born as Hindu?', 'Is migration the only way?'.

Earlier in the day, different organisations comprising Hindu community members blocked Topkhana Road in front of the Jatiya Press Club around 9:00am, said Ukhing May, Assistant Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (Traffic).

Later, the students of the Dhaka University joined the protest, who were also chanting slogans demanding punishment of the culprits.

Ripon Dey, a fourth-year student of DU said, "No government official has taken the issue (attack on minorities) seriously." Padmabati Debi, a Central Committee Member of Bangladesh Hindu Bouddha Christian Oikya Parishad (BHBCOP) said, "The government should take these communal attacks more seriously to regain the confidence of the minorities of the country."

On October 30, an unruly mob equipped with sharp weapons went berserk and demolished a number of Hindu temples and nearly 100 houses in Nasirnagar upazila following a rumour of a Facebook post
BB betting high hope

Kazi Zahidul Hasan :

Bangladesh Bank (BB) is betting high hope to retrieve the $81 million stolen from its account maintained with the New York Federal Reserve Bank and later channeled through the Philippines banking system, officials said.

The BB high-ups led by Governor Fazle Kabir on Thursday held a meeting with the Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali to discuss the progress of retrieving the stolen fund from the Philippines.

The meeting also discussed the ways of expediting the process of the recovery of the heist fund.

"We are betting high hope to recover the heist fund from Philippines after getting all-out cooperation from the Philippines and New York Fed authorities," a senior BB official told The New Nation on Friday.

He said, the government of Bangladesh has already launched a 'coordinated effort' to negotiate the matter with the Filipino government.

"Our embassy in Manila is working sincerely for getting back the stolen BB fund," he said,

adding that the Philippine government's investigation is near to end as it could trace the whereabouts of the stolen money.

The BB official said that the Philippines authorities recovered $15.25 million, portion of $81 million laundered fund. It will be deposited in the BB account with the New York Fed by November 24. A BB team is now in Manila to complete the process.

"The Filipino authorities have already traced an additional $38 million of the fund. The fund is expected to be recovered from a Philippine casino, money exchange house and some other businesses which were involved with transferring the laundered money," he added.

The BB official mentioned that assets of these organisations had already been frozen by the Philippine authorities and process is underway to get their assets forfeited for return of the fund to Bangladesh central bank.

"If any found goes missing will be recovered from Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) of the Philippines as the bank was responsible in transferring the $81 million BB's heist fund," he noted.

In August this year, Philippine central bank Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) imposed the RCBC a fine of one billion pesos ($21 million) for committing the crime.

When asked, the BB official said, "We are confident the entire heist fund will be recovered from the Philippines through legal procedures. It's a matter of time".


Trump due in court before Oval Office

US President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands during a transition planning meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on Thursday in Washington, DC.

Reuters :

Lawyers said they could think of no similar situation like the one now involving Trump.Lawyers said they could think of no similar situation like the one now involving Trump.

Within a few weeks of winning the White House, President-elect Donald Trump could face another group of US citizens, a federal jury in California, courtesy of a lawsuit by former students of his now-defunct Trump University who claim they were defrauded by a series of real-estate seminars.

A hearing in federal court in San Diego is set for Thursday, and the trial is scheduled to begin on Nov. 28, barring any delays or if Trump decides to settle the case.

While presidents enjoy immunity from lawsuits arising from their official duties, the US Supreme Court has held that this shield does not extend to acts alleged to have taken place prior to taking office. The 1997 ruling came in the sexual harassment lawsuit filed against President Bill Clinton by Paula Jones, which was settled before it went to trial. Lawyers said they could think of no similar situation like the one now involving Trump

"I'm certain there is nothing comparable to this," said Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. Lawyers for both Trump and the plaintiffs declined to comment on Wednesday. Dershowitz said the Supreme Court also held that a case cannot be delayed just because the defendant is president, though judges are still free to grant reasonable delays to any party.

Miami trial consultant Sandy Marks, who is not involved in the case, said he thought Trump might ask the presiding judge, Gonzalo Curiel, to postpone the trial in an effort to settle the case before taking office.

"I think the judge would be foolhardy not to give him a short (delay)," said Marks, "which would give him a chance to resolve the case with all these people and put it behind him."

Trump repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail that he would win the lawsuit, and he accused Curiel of being biased against him because of his campaign promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico. The judge was born in Indiana to Mexican parents. At the hearing on Thursday, lawyers will argue pre-trial motions, including one by Trump to block potential jurors from hearing comments made or publicized during the campaign, such as those about the judge. Lawyers for the students have argued the comments could help jurors assess Trump's credibility as a witness. Trump is listed as defense witness in the case and could be called to testify by the plaintiffs as well. He was previously deposed by the students' lawyers. Claims against Trump over the seminars date to 2010, with two class actions filed in federal court in San Diego and another case brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on behalf of students who claim they were misled into paying as much as $35,000 each to learn worthless real estate investing "secrets" from instructors "hand-picked" by Trump.

Trump has admitted he did not hand-pick instructors, but has argued the claim was marketing language not meant to be taken literally. He claims most students were happy with their courses.

If the trial goes forward, several legal experts said it would be hard to seat an impartial jury, since so many people already have strong opinions about the president-elect.

Parties often hire specialized jury consultants to pick jurors, but New York lawyer Robert Anello said they were not infallible. "If experienced pollsters can't get it right," he said, "how can a jury consultant who is not spending as much time studying the demographics?"

In an interview a day before the election, Jeffrey Goldman, a lawyer for Trump in the New York case, said the media's "drumbeat of distortion" about Trump University would make it hard to find impartial jurors.

Several experts noted that jurors, who will answer a questionnaire in addition to being questioned by the lawyers and the judge, are generally taken at their word when they say they can be impartial. Boston jury consultant Edward Schwartz said he expects both sides to make an effort to vet jurors by their public social media postings. Dershowitz noted that San Diego, though located in deep-blue California, is not as politically monolithic as, say, San Francisco. It has an ethnically diverse population and also has a large military presence.
Call to protect climate victims` rights

UNB, Marrakech :

Civil society leaders here on Friday urged the new political policy regimes to protect and promote the human rights of climate-induced displaced people.

Climate-displaced people deserved new political policy regime for human rights protection, they said at a seminar on the sidelines of Marrakech Climate Conference.

The side event seminar titled "Climate Displacement: Protecting and Promoting Rights of the Climate Migrants" was jointly organised by Action Aid (AA) International, Asia People Movement of

Debt and Development (APMDD), Climate Action Network South Asia (CAN South Asia), Coastal Association for Social Transformation Trust (COAST), Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) and Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

Environment and Forests Secretary of Bangladesh Dr Kamal Uddin Ahmed, Atle Soleberg of Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD), Marine Frank of UNHCR (United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees), Benjamin Schechter of United Nations Human Rights (UNHR), and Asad Rehman of EoEI spoke in the seminar as panel speakers which was moderated by Rezaul Karim Chowdhury of COAST and Lidy Nacpil of APMDD, according to a press release.

Sanjay Vashist said they in their latest study found that increasing nature of climate displacement and migration in South Asia is keeping a severe impact on women, which is creating tensions among the communities.

Giving references of several studies from Africa, Rita Uwaka narrated how the displacement is increasing and the situation is getting complicated due to development projects.

Dr Kamal said Bangladesh is trying its best to tackle the climate displacement, but the problem is getting complicated as the country's nearly 39 million coastal people are vulnerable to climate displacement.

He said it will be difficult for Bangladesh to deal with the problem without global support, and to protect the human rights of climate induced displaced people.
College on govt payroll without students

A news item published in The New Nation on Friday has exposed the ugly loopholes of our education system. It said, the government approval to 204 colleges may be cancelled due to zero students at Higher Secondary level and for no pass in different public examinations. These colleges are running under six education boards includes Dhaka Board, where no inspection could detect the open cheating. Otherwise allowing them to siphon government allocation running these colleges in name-sake essentially under protection of politically influential persons.

Citing the Ministry sources the news report said, Education Ministry is preparing show-cause notices for sending to the respective colleges asking to explain as to why their approval will not be cancelled. Disclosure said out of the 204 colleges, no student was admitted into 184 colleges at Higher Secondary level and the candidates did not pass in the HSC examination from the remaining 20 colleges this year.

Teachers, students and managing authority compose an educational institute and get government's approval. Without a single student how nearly 200 colleges could obtain approval of Education Ministry and continue is a mystery. Definitely, there is a strong ground that some underhand dealings played a vital role in these abnormal approvals. No student could pass in HSC examination from 20 colleges is also a shameful reality of our education system. After 10 years of continuous study in schools and passing SSC examination one gets admission in colleges and then study for two years before sitting for HSC examination. Then if none of the students of 20 colleges could cross the pass mark how we can explain it. Suspicion arises whether or not they are fake students enrolled for cheating. Again are these really educational institutes worthy of name? Is there no mechanism in the Education Ministry and Boards to monitor educational activities of the colleges? Most of the 204 colleges now under fire are receiving allocation of MPO programme of the government. That means the lion's share of salary of these college teachers comes from government exchequer and some people have taken away much of this money. Government is paying money for promoting educational activities, but not checking what is going on there; it is not acceptable.

We often say that education is backbone of a nation. But in practice we probably do not mean it seriously. This is no secret that our total education system is riddled with corruption and indiscipline at every level. In the case of 204 colleges we can apprehend how deep the irregularities are. We must say the irregularity must be properly investigated and wrong-doers must be sternly dealt with.
Hopeful judgement for protecting rights: Refusing bail helps abuse of power

Editorial Desk :

The Supreme Court in the epoch making judgement on arbitrary arrest and detention on suspicion and torture on remand under Section 54 of CrPC on Thursday which is now used to harass innocent people has discarded it and asked the respective authorities to follow the new guidelines. It has also asked lower judiciary to use new guidelines when police will produce arrestees before courts for detention and remand.

The judgement showed SC's utter disapproval to how police are misusing the criminal codes asking them to earn respect of the people by protecting their rights. Denying citizens' rights enshrined in the Constitution is surely disrespect to the country's independence, the judgement further said.

Police excesses were subject to higher judiciary's scrutiny but not so effectively. As constitutionally being protector of individual's fundamental rights the accountability of the courts needs to be asserted.

The help from the SC was sought to rein in police excesses back in 1998 by a group of human rights organizations and individuals after the tragic death of a University student in police custody.

The Appellate Division delivered the verdict in May upholding a previous High Court judgement against law enforcers' arbitrary use of powers. The HC verdict on April 7, 2003 had asked the government to amend some provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) of 1898.

But the BNP government appealed against the verdict and later on the Awami League government did the same. But the SC dismissed the appeal. There is no secret of the fact that both were misusing police on political motive and none was ready to give the people the constitutional protection from police excesses.

The full verdict of the SC this time disapproved such police excesses while approving the earlier judgement with a 19-point detailed guidelines for police, magistrates and judges how to interpret the Section 54 and associated clauses dealing with arrests and processing of cases in lower courts.

The court has asked police to prepare record of arrests with signature of the arrestees. Moreover it said police must produce their identity during arrest if so demanded by the arrestee and nearer relatives must be informed of the arrest within 12 hours. Arrestees should also be allowed to consult a lawyer and meet relatives.

The lower courts on the other hand should not blindly allow police to detain the arrestees or put them on remand as it is widely taking place on political motive. The SC order says the court should release an arrestee if police demand detention without a copy of arrest record and the forwarding says arrest has been made for preventive detention.

It can't also issue order for shown arrest of a detained person in a new case without a copy of the case. Moreover, no order for detention should be issued if the arrest is made for preventive detention.

In most cases the police officers cannot complete the investigation within the stipulated period sanctioned by law and normally they take years together, the SC observed.

The detention or remand of an accused person beyond 15 days is not only an exercise of power not sanctioned by the law but also violative of Article 32 of the Constitution dealing with protection of a person's right to life and liberty, it noted.

The court has rightly said Section 54 is a nefarious provision allowing police to arrest anyone on mere suspicion and whims. Information of being involved in a cognizable case is not enough. Under several other sections of the criminal law, arrestees are placed on remand and detained in violation of their fundamental rights. It can't be done anymore from now.

The SC has asked police to use power judiciously, curtailing police's authority to arrest anyone applying this section for detaining him under Special Powers Act. Preventative detention is the imprisonment of a person with the aim of preventing him from committing further offences without being sure he is going to do anything unlawful.

The SC said, "We have reasons to believe it (Police) has forgotten its core value that it is accountable to the community it serves and at the same time the prevention of crime is its prime operational priority."

The court's advice to police that they must earn public respect which will bring down crime is what the police must work for. The court's comment is far-reaching when it said, "If we cannot maintain the fundamental rights of the citizens .... and allow police officers [to] use abusive power it will be difficult to establish constitutional law and the rule of law at any point of time."

The court said the CrPC was promulgated by the British colonial ruler to consolidate their power through the exercise of abusive powers by the police. There was no Constitution at the time and the fundamental rights of a citizen were a far cry.

"After driving out two colonial powers . we cannot detain and prosecute an offender with a draconian law,". The objective of the CrPC for which it was implemented then does not exist now. The present procedures for holding trials by magistrates and judges are inadequate and conflicting with constitutional law.

Sections 54 and 167 as well as three chapters of the CrPC dealing with the process for producing documents and persons wrongfully confined, the trial of such cases by magistrates and summary trials are inconsistent with the Constitution and the judgement in the Masder Hossain Case.

In the judgement it appears that their Lordships have observed about the need of changing the present Code of Criminal Procedure. We are not sure that to happen as our political leadership has very little time to make changes for securing the people's rights.

Even under the present laws the courts are constitutionally empowered sufficiently to save our people from abuse of police power at the behest of the politics. It is for the courts to tell the police that they are bound to respect the Constitution and must not feel free to trample on the rights of the individuals life and liberty.

The Constitution has trusted the courts and not the government to protect the people's rights and liberty. The police cannot violate the Constitution to be politically subservient.

Not long ago the IG of Police spoke boldly to say that they are not colonial police, they are the people's police.

The Supreme Court has offered the nation the bold hope of protecting their rights constitutionally as against the abuse of police excesses.

The independence of the judiciary has been ensured, their Lordships of the Supreme Court provided the backbone of courage by this judgement for the courts to exercise that independence. The police have no right to take life. Only the courts can pass death sentence after one has been found guilty of a serious crime.

Refusing bail means punishment by police. Facilitating bail is the best way of protecting the people from the abuse of false cases. Not only the laws have to be changed the attitude of the courts has to be changed also. Rights must be given more importance than police power.




The Golden Rut is a film by Lafayette natives Joshua and Nick Holden, who both wrote and directed the film, which will have its Louisiana premiere at the Southern Screen Film Festival in on Sunday, Nov. 13, at the Acadiana Center for the Arts.

The films world premiere was held in October at The Austin Film Festival, where the festival held an additional third screening due to the films popularity with audiences.

In this witty and quirky feature shot on location in Austin last year, opposites attract, and mischief beckons when a broke, bohemian playboy actor falls for a sweet-natured, career-driven entrepreneur with a sexy identical twin sister.

Scottie Johnson (played by Josh Holden of Cal Express) is loving life until he starts dating Ebby (played by Laura Flannery of American Horror Story fame), a beautiful savvy, sweet-natured entrepreneur who tells him she cant date another broke, struggling artist.

In an attempt to secure her love, Scottie makes a promise to take his career to the next level and starts hounding his agent Dick Nacho (played by Michael Joplin, Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction) to get him more work.

Dick reveals a top secret: the famous art-house director Moses Duvall (played by Bill Wise, Boyhood) is in town to film his new movie, and so Scottie sets his sights on landing his breakout role in Duvalls movie.

The Southern Screen Film Festival screens The Golden Rut on Sunday, Nov. 13, at 6:15 p.m. at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, which will be the final film screened at the festival. The Official Wrap Party will follow with a special performance from the Lost Bayou Ramblers at 8 p.m. at the Blue Moon Saloon. For more information, visit www.SouthernScreen.org.
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:
MARION  Williamson County Regional Airport will be known by a new name.

The airport opened its new terminal Friday and announced its new name during the dedication of the building on Veterans Day. The airport, at the intersection Illinois 13 and Illinois 148, is now called Veterans Airport of Southern Illinois.

Bernard Paul, chairman of the airport authority, said the name reflects the regional nature of the airport, as well as honors veterans. Paul was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1958, and served six and a half years of active duty, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He then joined the Illinois Air National Guard and served 25 years.

The airport was a patch of grass with a wooden terminal building when Paul started flying. He has seen it grow over the years.

We have a new airport. We have a date with the future, Paul said.

Doug Kimmel, airport director, said it was an honor to rename the facility Veterans Airport of Southern Illinois on Veterans Day.

The new terminal itself was named the Capt. Robert W. Duncan Airline Terminal. Capt. Duncan served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and the Korean War, and as chairman of Williamson County Airport Authority from 1980 to 2001.

Duncan was the first pilot on the USS Yorktown to become an ace when he shot down his fifth Japanese plane on Feb. 16, 1944. He shot down seven enemy aircraft in his career, flew more than 100 missions and is credited with sinking a Japanese cargo ship.

Kimmel said the project began 10 years ago.

We stayed the course, and it has not been an easy road, Kimmel said.

During the course of the project, the airport authority faced a change in airlines, reduced passenger counts and a state budget crisis.

Although the new terminal was built with federal and local airport monies, the airport authority had to suspend construction on the new terminal June 25 after notice from IDOT that all work had to cease by the end of June. Work only was suspended a few days before a stopgap budget was signed by Gov. Bruce Rauner.

Brandi Bradley, representative of U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, said the airport has created more than 200 jobs and has an economic impact of $21 million.

Our office looks forward to your continued success in the heart of Southern Illinois, she said.

Cape Air, the only airline offering commercial flights out of the airport, celebrated its seventh anniversary in Marion on Nov. 8, according to Matt Reinhardt, Midwest regional director for Cape Air.

Cape Air is thrilled to be moving into our new home, Reinhardt said.

Cape Air will begin flying out of the new terminal Sunday morning.

When entering the new terminal, visitors immediately notice the light. Large glass windows throughout the building let in natural light. The lobby has a check-in counter and lounge area. To the left is a baggage claim and secure waiting area. To the right of the main lobby is a charter flight lounge that can also be used for events.

Large groups fly in and out of the airport on a regular basis. Its layout and design is to accommodate those large groups, Kimmel said.

A spiral staircase with an elevator leads to second floor administrative offices and operations, including a board room and break room. An observation area runs across the back of the second floor, an idea Kimmel said was borrowed from the Joplin, Missouri, airport.

The new building is ADA compliant, and is a modern airline terminal. It has a curbside canopy for loading and unloading, modern passenger waiting areas, more direct access from rental car offices and parking, an area for a modern baggage carousel system, enhanced security and surveillance systems, more efficient energy systems and the ability to expand to meet future growth.

It was built to last 50 years at least and designed to easily add on to, Kimmel said.

Nancy and Gale Beachum of Herrin were excited to see the new terminal. Nancy owns World Wide Travel/Five Star Tours. The couple flies out of Marion on a regular basis.

Its a beautiful facility with plenty of room for growth, Nancy Beachum said.

What a pleasant surprise to see how they named it, Gale Beachum said. Gale also is a veteran.

We are so proud to contribute this piece to the Southern Illinois landscape for both Southern Illinoisans and people from all over world. This means a lot to us, Kimmel said.
Brian. D. Pheasant, 43, appeared before a judge via video Nov. 2, where he was read the charges against him, two counts of first-degree murder, each carrying a potential sentence of 25 years to life in prison. He asked to be represented by a public defense attorney and has not yet entered a plea in the case. He has a preliminary hearing date of Nov. 23 at the Franklin County Courthouse. A judge has yet to be assigned.
Giles A. Whitson Sr. of Gorham has seen a lot during his 91 years, and he has a lot of stories to tell. He says cannot tell all of his stories  some are still classified.

He served in the U.S. Navy twice. During World War II, Whitson served aboard the USS Hyades. He says his last rank was boatswain's mate, a rank the Navy no longer uses.

I was out for three years, and they sent me a letter saying, we know you can run a boat. So, I went back in, Whitson said.

He re-enlisted and began a second stint with the Navy on May 13, 1950. After his second discharge in November 1951, Whitson worked for several aviation companies and NASA.

Whitson was transferred to the USS Hyades and says it was during his service that he experienced things some people would not believe.

The Hyades was the lead ship of her class of Navy stores ships. Her task was to carry food to the fleet, remote stations and staging areas. Whitson said the Hyades carried about 10,000 tons of food when fully loaded.

While serving on the Hyades, Whitson said they survived two typhoons and a hurricane. Wikipedia says the Hyades was headed to Trinidad and the Panama Canal in 1944, accompanied by the destroyer Warrington. The ships encountered a severe hurricane and the Warrington sunk. The Hyades traveled to her last known destination and rescued 61 survivors.

The Hyades went on to the Panama Canal to pick up food for the fleet, then headed for the South Pacific. They were about five days into a 10 day trip when they were under attack from the Japanese.

Whitson said the Japanese submarines would sink a ship, then come back around and surface to shoot any survivors left in the water.

The Hyades was attacked at about 10 p.m., and lost power. There were no lights anywhere.

The Japanese came to the surface, but they couldnt find us, Whitson said. The power came back on the next day.

The crew on the Hyades saw the submarines hatch open and Japanese sailors look for the ship. Eventually, the Japanese moved on.

The ships propeller was damaged, with only one blade left to propel it through the ocean. It took her 10 days to return to Hawaii, usually a five day trip. Once there, she was put into dry dock and repaired.

In 1945, the Hyades saw rough seas again when it survived a typhoon in 1945. Whitson said it was only half loaded, which helped it survive.

The ship was in Naha, Okinawa, in March 1946 when they got world of another typhoon. This one had winds of 150 miles per hour and waves 100 feet high.

After the typhoon, the ship was sent to China.

Technically, the war was over, but the Japanese had not received word, Whitson said. The war was still being fought in the northern part of Shanghai and we were in the south.

Whitson was put off the ship in 1925 and took a troop transport ship to San Diego. The ship carried 22,000 soldiers who were going back for a discharge.

People were so glad we are back, all the guys ran out to the top deck to see San Diego, Whitson said.

The ship began to tilt and the captain come on the intercom asking half the men to go to the other side to keep the ship upright. When the men disembarked, they were met by the USO, Red Cross and other organizations with a hot cup of coffee and a doughnut.

Whitson was discharged at Great Lakes Naval Base in Chicago, but had trouble finding work. He took a job working for a St. Louis company that cleaned toilets.

When he received a letter from the Navy in 1950 asking him to re-enlist, it said the Navy had a job for him, but did not tell him what is was. He was sent to Hawaii and told that the U.S. had exploded an atomic bomb at Eniwetok. The debris was collected from the Ocean and put into large crates on barges at Pearl Harbor. His new job was to guard the debris. He served for a year and half before being discharged on May 4, 1951.

After the war, Whitson went to work for Douglas Aircraft Co. in Los Angeles for seven years, including working on four different aircraft that flew world speed record runs. He was laid off in November 1958. He went to work for North American Aviation  Missile and Space Division in 1960. He went to work on the missile line because it paid $7 per hour as opposed to aircraft lines $3.85 per hour. He was laid off six months later.

Whitson went to work for Lockheed and the Air Force. In 1962, he worked four days on the Cuban Missile Crisis. He said information about that event was declassified in 2014.

We did lose men and airplanes, but we had a strong president, Whitson said. Thats why you never had an atomic war from Cuba.

During his employment at Lockheed, Whitson made a mistake on the ground crew of a missile. In those days, one mistake was reason to fire an employee, and he was fired.

Whitson heard about a group in Huntsville that was hiring, so he put in applications as NASA and Chrysler.

When I was fired, I was black balled in the industry for 11 months, Whitson said.

After some discussion and time, Whitson was hired by NASA and put under a 90-day program to see if he would work out. He went to work on the Saturn/Appollo project as a rocket engine technician.

I did good work and was allowed to stay five and half years, Whitson said.

He did not work on Apollo 1, but he did work on Apollo rockets 2 through 11. During his first rocket launch, he was three-quarters of a mile away from the launch pad behind a concrete wall.

I was ready to run. I was scared to death, Whitson said.

Whitson returned to his hometown of Gorham in 1968, a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Whitson has six children, Giles Jr., Sharon, Linda, Anna May, Harold and Zane.

Whitsons work in aviation and the space industry earned him a spot on the Wall of Honor at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. You can find Giles Arthur Whitson Sr. on Foil 9, Panel 4, Column 1, Line 106.
My feelings Wednesday morning were so radically mixed that my brain resembles a Cuisinart. I cannot help but be glad that Hillary Clinton was defeated. I am shaking my head in amazement about the Senate, and accordingly about the Supreme Court.

The election results feel like a gorgeous, gleaming new BMW in the driveway. But instead of a bow on the roof, there's a vial of nitroglycerin.

I wish president-elect Donald Trump nothing but good this morning. I pray for him and for the country, but fingers of fear still grip my heart. The glow of victory cannot obscure or perfume who the man is. Trump has demonstrated emotional unsteadiness, cruelty, and wild irresponsibility. He is most unhinged when his fragile ego is wounded. He is, in many ways, a spoiled child.

His character is the great challenge for the nation and the Republican Party going forward. On the post-election morning, it seemed advisable that those Republicans who signed statements of opposition to him  particularly foreign policy experts  reassess. A president has the most scope for independent action on the world stage, and it is there that he can do the maximum amount of damage. Trump has indulged in ignorant bluster to gain popularity (he would crush ISIS "very quickly," "take the oil" from the Middle East, renegotiate NAFTA, force Mexico to pay for a border wall, "get along very well" with Vladimir Putin, and encourage nuclear proliferation). But one thing we know about Trump is that he will say almost anything for attention and effect, and he has contradicted himself thousands of times. He will need advisers with experience, judgment, and keen psychological skills to temper his instincts and guide him toward policies more in line with American interests and values. Even foreign policy experts who were appalled by Trump's campaign rhetoric  in fact, especially they  should consider serving in his administration.

Trump has been on both sides of most of the contentious issues in American life. He's been pro and anti socialized medicine, for and against (mostly) entitlement reform, for (mostly) and against abortion. He is, primarily, an entertainer, who hasn't given much thought to public policy at all, but is expert at playing to a crowd and ventilating its resentments. But even more than riling up his audiences, Trump's lodestar has always been himself. Everything comes back to him, especially when he's feeling attacked or disrespected.

I am praying that because he will now have his heart's desire  the nonstop shower of attention and yes, flattery, that comes with the Oval Office, that this will serve as a tonic for his outsized ego and perhaps supply him the calm he will need to serve wisely.

Others will need wisdom as well. After the shock of his victory wears off, the press will return to treating him as radioactive  which will be taken by his supporters and much of the Republican Party as evidence that he must be right. That's a mistake for both sides. The mainstream press is biased, openly so, and they need to swallow hard and own it. That doesn't mean they are always wrong. As I've said often during the general election, the press and Democrats have cried wolf on racism and xenophobia so many times that they've discredited themselves. A few (Bill Maher, for example) have acknowledged as much. But what the Republican grass roots did not grapple with adequately is that this time, many of the outrageous charges the media trotted out were true. Their job was easy. All they had to do was quote the candidate, not dig through his middle school records to find some prank. Trump has said reprehensible things and winked at open bigotry. He is indecent and loutish. The right-wing media Trump empowered have circulated absurd conspiracies and lies. They are no better, and in some ways they are worse, than the "lying media" they despise. Our duty to stand for responsible journalism and to rebuke the Brietbarts and InfoWars types only grows more urgent this morning.

Trump has frightening, undemocratic impulses. He admires strongmen. But  perhaps this is a saving grace  he also has a notoriously short attention span. The great challenge for Republicans will be to oppose him if (when?) he strays in dangerous directions as president, whether in restricting civil liberties, undermining international alliances, inaugurating devastating trade wars, or casting aside constitutional restraints on executive power. This will be the most difficult of trials for Republican officeholders, because their constituents will not thank them for it, only their posterity.

May God grant all the charity and grace to navigate the uncharted waters we're in.
As wildfires cause major problems in drought-plagued areas of the Southeast, the weather forecast is not encouraging.

La Nina has arrived and could hang around through winter, government weather forecasters say.

La Nina, the flip side of El Nino, is the periodic cooling of the central Pacific Ocean that affects weather patterns around the globe. Predictions called for fleeting La Nina conditions that could last through February.

It's "anticipated to be a weak, short-lived event," said Mike Halpert of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center.

In the United States, the arrival of La Nina usually brings wetter winters to the northern Rockies, Pacific Northwest and Ohio Valley and warmer, drier conditions to southern parts.

There's a 55 percent chance La Nina will stick around through winter, causing the drought to persist in regions of the Southeast, Southern California and the southern Plains, NOAA said.

NOAA plans to release a winter forecast update in the coming week. Last month, the agency predicted warmer and drier-than-normal conditions for the South.

Already in the South, drought has turned pine trees into matchsticks and forced people to evacuate their homes ahead of fast-moving flames. With humidity so low, the normally lush Appalachians and Great Smoky Mountains had plenty of tinder. Tens of thousands of acres have burned and authorities are bracing for more.

The national drought report shows 41.6 million people in parts of 15 Southern states living in drought conditions. The worst is in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, but extreme drought also is spreading into the western Carolinas. Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina all have fierce fires.

Smoke from the fires is affecting areas far from the blazes, with haze and smoky conditions in The T&D Region and around South Carolina.

On Thursday, the S.C. Forestry Commission expanded its State Foresters Burning Ban from five Upstate counties to all Piedmont counties. The counties covered by the ban include Abbeville, Anderson, Cherokee, Chester, Edgefield, Fairfield, Greenville, Greenwood, Laurens, Lexington, McCormick, Newberry, Oconee, Pickens, Richland, Saluda, Spartanburg, Union and York.

State Forester Gene Kodama expanded the ban because of weather conditions in the Piedmont region that present an elevated risk of wildfire. The diversion of additional agency resources to a wildfire in Pickens County also contributed to the expansion of the burning ban.

A State Foresters Burning Ban prohibits outdoor burning, which includes yard debris burning and burning for forestry, wildlife or agricultural purposes. While campfires and open-fire cooking are not included in the ban, the Forestry Commission strongly encourages all citizens in the five counties to refrain from any unnecessary burning.

Residents in counties not subject to the burning ban are cautioned to be extremely vigilant when burning yard debris and/or conducting prescribed burns. State law requires that citizens outside of unincorporated areas notify the Forestry Commission before burning outdoors. The notification is a quick, easy, automated process, and the toll-free numbers for each county are provided at http://www.state.sc.us/forest/fyard.htm
NORWAY -- Efforts to keep the town of Norway litter free and the need to improve the curb appeal of residential properties were discussed during Norway Town Council's Nov. 7 meeting.

Citizen Bobby Pooser thanked Coker Fogle of the Norway Beautification Committee for his cleanup efforts around town and asked about holding a town cleanup day.

Mayor Ann Johnson said the Norway Girl Scouts are planning such an event and the town will be notified of the dates and times for it.

Pooser also asked about installing anti-littering signs, noting there are lots that need to be cleaned and abandoned vehicles around town that need to be removed. In addition, he said the grass at the water tower needs to be mowed and the tree that fell on Third Street should be removed because it is lying partially in the road.

Pooser was told Orangeburg County will address the abandoned lots/vehicles. It was also noted that the town's mower is being repaired and will be put back into service as soon as it's ready.

The county is still working to remove Hurricane Matthew debris from the town and will cut back the fallen tree on Third Street as soon as possible, the mayor said.

Resident Joey Williamson asked Norway citizens to be aware that the curb appeal of their properties is very important, especially to the success of area businesses that front U.S. 321. He warned that if curb appeal is not upgraded and maintained, business in the town would decline.

Currently, Norway seems to be on an upswing, Williams said, adding that he hopes to see this trend continue.

Sealed bids for the town's streetscape project were opened by Johnson and Councilman Gregg Covington. The high bid was from JRC Specialties at $127,442.50, and the low bid was from Hayden's Nursery at $99,605.

Johnson said before any bid could be accepted, the bidder must be state Department of Transportation-approved and board certified as a contractor. Covington said this process should not take more than a week and the bidders would be notified.

Fogle suggested the contractor be assigned a single contact person in order to avoid confusion during the streetscape work, and the mayor selected him for that role.

In other business:

Police Chief Scott Ward reported another leak on U.S. 321 across from the Horizon station.

"This is the third time there has been a leak there, Ward said.

Johnson said two copper water lines run under the highway at that spot and when heavy trucks and other vehicles cross over it, the lines vibrate, causing the fittings to come loose and resulting in leaks.

A new line should be run along the side of the highway instead of down the middle under the roadway, the mayor said, adding the town is currently working on that idea.

Continuing the water and sewer department report, Ward said, "Because a turtle got stuck in a line, one of the aerators at the sewer plant had to be pulled out by a crane and cleared before it was re-installed.

Ward reported there was a burglary recently at the building in the town park.

"We are still considering putting bars on the windows and a deadbolt lock on the door, he said, adding that the purchase of surveillance cameras is also being considered.

Council gave first-reading approval to proposed ordinances related to building inspection codes and community development codes. Both proposed ordinances would give authority to the county to monitor and enforce the codes in Norway.

Johnson said the county has been doing this for the past nine or 10 years and that the proposed ordinances are more or less a formality.

Johnson said a public hearing on the proposed ordinances will be held 15 minutes prior to December's council meeting. Second reading will be considered at that meeting, she said.

Pooser announced the Norway Citizen of the Year will be selected at a committee meeting at 10 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 18.

Fogle announced the Norway Christmas Parade will be held on Dec. 3, with the Tree Lighting Ceremony immediately following the parade.

The Norway Matrons Club Tour of Homes will begin at the Willow School Museum at 3 p.m. and end at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 4, Fogle said.

In response to a question from citizen Sandy Blake about the town hall roof, council said a new roof truss is being installed due to damage from Hurricane Matthew.
Brighter days

ahead for Democrats

The following was addressed to South Carolina Democrats by Party Chair and Orangeburg native Jaime Harrison.

To say that I am disappointed in the Nov. 8 results would be an understatement, as I know it would be for many of you. The implications will take some time to fully assess, process, and come to terms with.

But the time for reflection must be brief, and must be followed by action. As the minority party in both Washington and South Carolina next year, Democrats must seek to work collaboratively across the aisle when we see opportunities to do good. When no such opportunities are available, we must clearly lay out the stakes and offer an alternative vision to our fellow citizens.

In a democracy, there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats. We must fight to ensure that last night's defeat is as temporary as possible and that its negative consequences are minimized, especially for the most vulnerable.

I am hopeful for the future because of what I've seen from all of you during this campaign. I know how many doors you have knocked on, phone calls you have made, and resources you have donated; I thank each and every one of you for your efforts. The core of the South Carolina Democratic Party is strong.

In South Carolina and the nation as a whole, while we suffered a setback, the Democratic Party is only getting stronger. If we have faith in each other, I can say with confidence that there will be brighter days ahead.

As we reflect today and act tomorrow, let us keep at the forefront of our minds that which is truly important, the things that inspire us to fight as Democrats. I am inspired to fight on for the countless families, like my own, who love their children and want them to have an opportunity to meaningfully contribute to our society regardless of what they have, where they live, where they come from, or who they are. When every child has this opportunity, we all benefit from their contributions.

I still believe we are stronger together. Let's keep fighting so we can prove it.

May God guide

our leaders

Its over! All the ads and speeches are behind us, some won and some lost but for the winners what comes next?

I would like to add my two cents worth and remind all those who are now in some political office you have a mandate to serve those who elected you. According to my Bible, you are in office because God has allowed you to be. (Jn. 19-10)

Whether you believe the Bible or not, I will pray you seek this opportunity to make your community or our nation a better place for those who live there and pay taxes to support you and your office. Much has been said about corrupt politicians. Whether true or not, its not for me to decide.I do believe you should not be getting richer and your constituents poorer.

Any nation or community deserves leaders who look to make life better in all respects and not at the expense of some not others. I believe we are all entitled to the best and for some reason you were given this honor to serve your community. Jesus, the Son of God, once said: Luke 22:26 (HCSB) But it must not be like that among you. On the contrary, whoever is greatest among you must become like the youngest, and whoever leads, like the one serving. You can do no better that He.

I pray Gods richest blessings on all leaders and may God give you guidance. God bless America.

-- Frank Hay, Orangeburg
DENMARK -- Voorhees College inducted five new members into its 2016 Homecoming Hall of Fame during the 14th annual Hall of Fame banquet on Friday.

The new inductees are Wilmer Freeman, Tanya Martino, Dr. Mary Stover, Mary Houser-Hyacinth and Marvetta Megget-Smalls.

Freeman, a Denmark native, graduated from Voorhees High School in 1968. Upon his return from the Vietnam War, he graduated from Voorhees College in 1984 with a bachelors degree in business administration.

While at Voorhees, he met his wife, the late Lavenia Whitten Freeman. Freeman spent his professional career at Voorhees in the following capacities: facilities manager, bookstore manager and procurement officer. Currently, he is retired, but serves as a professional driver for the president.

Freeman is a member of Mount Zion Baptist Church, where he has been serving as a deacon for more than 35 years, In addition, he is a member of the AFM Masonic Lodge #246 in Denmark and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 10595, where he previously served as vice commander.

Martino, a native of Brooklyn, New York, currently works as an instructional support teacher in special education. She graduated from Voorhees College in 1995 with a bachelors degree in business administration.

After graduating, Martino began working at Voorhees as an administrative assistant in the business department until moving to Atlanta. From 2012-2013, she returned to Voorhees to serve as an admissions counselor and recruiter.

Martino earned a masters degree in higher education and leadership from Kaplan University and a certification in special education from Clark Atlanta University.

She spent most of her professional career working for the Wachovia Bank Operations Center in Atlanta, where she was a representative for 10 years. During this time, she was a member of the Black Executive Exchange Program.

Martino is a member of the Metro-Atlanta Alumni Chapter, where she previously served as president, co-founder of the Alumni Alliance of the White and True Blue, HBCU Alumni Alliance member and treasurer of the Clark Atlanta-DeKalb Alumni Chapter.

Stover graduated from Voorhees College in 1971 with a bachelors degree in secondary English. She later received a masters degree in writing from Columbia College in 1984, a certificate of theology from the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta and doctorate degree in Christian education from Central Christian University of South Carolina in 2013.

Stover is a 2014 retired professor from the Humanities Department of Allen University and former Richland County English teacher for 24 years. She is also the former ambassador of the afterschool program for Richland School District One, former test coordinator at both W.G. Sanders Middle School and C.A. Johnson Preparatory Academy, former ordained minister at Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church and associate to the pastor at St. Mark Baptist Church.

Stover is currently the founder/CEO of the Reading Arts Mathematics Summer Enrichment Program, where she directs at two sites.

She is an active member of Alpha Delta Kappa Sorority and Voorhees Colleges Midlands Alumni Chapter. She is a recipient of the 2012 Martin Luther King Jr. Teacher of the Year for High Schools and Colleges Award and of the 2015 M.A. Lee Humanitarian Award.

Hyacinth, a native of North, graduated from Voorhees College in 1971 with a bachelors degree in history. She received a masters degree in human resource management from the University of Utah and furthered her studies at Long Island University in guidance counseling.

She spent her professional career with the New York State Department of Labor and the New York City Board of Education. She retired after 36 years of professional experience in supervision and counseling.

Hyacinth holds professional affiliations with the Voorhees College National Alumni Association, the New York State American Counseling Association, the International Association of Workforce Professionals and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In addition, she served as a minister and adult Sunday school teacher for more than 35 years and founded the Christian Women Fellowship. She most recently established the Helping Hand Ministry to assist the needy.

Smalls, a native of Charleston, graduated from Voorhees College with a bachelors degree in office administration in 1981. She is currently a coordinator at Charleston Water System, where she has been employed for 34 years.

She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc.; the Edisto District Missionary Society, where she serves as first vice president; Eastern Light Chapter #360 Order of Eastern Star, where she serves as the trustee; and the Charleston chapter of the NAACP, in which she serves as the treasurer.

In addition, Smalls is a member of the Charleston Contact Center Alliance, the South Carolina Utility Billing Association, a Parent Teacher Organization board member for Baptist Hill High School, vice president of the Charleston Alumni Chapter and an active member in her church, Calvary African Methodist Episcopal Church.




It started out as another opportunity to share my story with the general public of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and possibly the world .





That was easy. Ever since my diagnosis of breast cancer, I had had a passion for doing just that. I clearly remember setting out on a mission, mostly as a singular activist, to broadcast my experiences to women who would listen, and to reiterate the importance of breast self-examination and yearly mammograms, and simply talking up about suspicions of something going on abnormally in ones body. I gave many a talk at schools, offices, churches and community groups, so I easily told my friend Joy, "Sure, Ill do it. Thats no problem!





It was Project Pink, a selfless action of a few, giving to many the understanding of what the affected goes through, while allowing those enthusiasts to help financially to ensure that those yet unidentified, those yet undiagnosed could afford treatment before matters careened out of hand; early detection being the best situation for treatment and survival. It was to have chronicled the survivors journey in such a way that the message, so profound, would cause listeners and onlookers alike to make a definitive decision to take action. It, too, was to make the survivor feel special.





First time interaction





I was in the United States at the launch of the project and, being on holiday, I chose to carry on with my carefree musings and pay no attention to the fact that I may just be missing out on something. I was told that each survivor would be paired with a local designer who would make an outfit for the survivor to display on the night of the "gala. Upon my return, I was told that I had been given a designer. It turned out to be Kimon Baptiste. I had known Kimon, but not in a personal way at all. As a journalist, I had covered almost all of her fashion engagements, and had always been very generous in the quality of the accolades I had given her. The thing is, her clothes were always the bomb, so I had always felt justified. It was not until Kimon and I made that one-on-one connection that I got to realize how special she was.





Could anyone imagine the phenomenal designer asking me, "What kind of neck line do you like; and sleeves, do you want caps, short or long sleeves? She went on to question about the form and fit I wanted, the length and all other things pertinent. Then she exclaimed, "Oh, so you want a gown then? Well, a gown it will be! That did it for me! I began to feel really special.





You see, on my journey with the disease, life had asked me questions and I had to choose. Could my choice have been sufficient to make a stamp on my situation? Well, my doctor had presented me with two simple alternatives: a lumpectomy or a mastectomy. I chose, but my choice cost me. It would have, either way, though.

The appointment for measurement and discussion of fabric use and so on was arranged and, in retrospect, it followed the dictates of that fateful day when my doctor had called me in to discuss the way forward after that dreaded verdict of a positive result. The doctors visit was bitter sweet in that, from the get go, I felt I would kick this thing  I had a chance.





Another opportunity in which to revel





Like my visit to Kimon, a wonderful chance was handed to me. Just as I had accepted my diagnosis and was determined to live a full life in retaliation of a diseases desire to wreak havoc on my body, I exulted in my current situation, realizing that as a result of this gown, crafted by this quietly unassuming designer, I was going to wrest the opportunity to revel in my status of remission.





I became so over-awed by this new opportunity that when asked whether I wanted to see my fabric or if I preferred a surprise, I gushed, "Surprise me! I was prepared to leave things in my designers hands. That was exactly how I had felt about my doctor. After all, the ramifications were out of the way, I had simply said, "Just make the appointment for the surgery. I wasnt scared. I opted for the functional approach, because I had already begun to look ahead to my survival, regardless of what was going to come along to challenge me.

It was no surprise at all that I had to go overseas. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy took me there, measures to ensure a better life after diagnosis. My designer also had to take a journey of anxiety but she took on the responsibility for my gown with enthusiasm - to have it completed and shipped to me in due time.





On the edge





But that was where a problem arose. In life, plans do not always follow mankinds chartered courses. They didnt in this case and after one thing had led to another, my gown was complete but still thousands of miles away from me. Unbelievably, that significantly mirrored what I went through overseas: I was treated to glorious possibilities of wellness, but I had to wait while I faced almost insurmountable turmoil and setbacks and anxiety and hurdles as I wrestled with my ailment.





It was on Independence Day, two days away from the Pink Gala, when I got the news that, more than likely, I might not receive my gown as the shipping agency considered the independence holiday a significant hold up for its delivery. The bottom was threatening to fall out of my world. My designer contacted me to explain all the problems she had been having. She was distraught, "Im so upset that I have this gown here up on a mannequin and cant get it delivered to you, she told me. I started to panic, but I remembered those days in Trinidad when matters seemed to be going south for me; how I had to push myself up so that my head could remain above water, so that I could breathe the sweet breath of life. I did just that, and became the one to try to calm down Kimon. She was surprised at my composure but I nonchalantly told her, "Dont worry, it will work out. In life Ive learned never to make a mountain out of level ground.





It all worked out, eventually





To cut a long story short, it was divine intervention that brought my dress to me; the same intervention that took me into remission. As I tried the gown, all the ups and downs seemed to dissolve.





As they melted away, my resolve and spirit emerged with greater sense and purpose. I was ready to walk the runway in a special gown, designed and made by a special person, whose hand had, this night, made me an even more special person. My dress was here, and so were my prospects for the future. As fragile as its fabric appeared, so too did my life at many points throughout my journey seem fragile; but that gorgeous gown was made of fabric that surpassed fragility, and my body also showed its resilience to withstand the abusive onslaught of chemo drugs and radioactive beams that promised to pull me out of danger.





And so on gala night, like the person I am, I refused to be conventional. I didnt even follow the suggested route to the letter but I made sure that I enjoyed my dress, that I was special, and that the onlookers and listeners got to see a revved-up soul totally unafraid to express who she was, coming from the point of where she had been and heading always to a point upwards.





To me, Project Pink came in for many accolades for organizing such a function; but it was Kimon Baptiste who did it for me. My dress told a tale all its own, and succinctly lined itself up alongside my experiences. Heartfelt thanks to all.
Left:Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will retrace some of his fathers footsteps on an upcoming trip to Cuba. (Photo Credit: Al Jazeera) Right:Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Justins father, is greeted by Fidel Castro after arriving in Cuba on Jan. 26, 1976. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)/Getty)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will travel to Cuba next week, arriving on the night of Tuesday 14th November and departing the next day.





In that brief visit he is expected to meet with Cubas President Raul Castro and possibly an old family friend, retired Cuban Leader Fidel Castro.





While there has been no confirmation that the Prime Minister will meet with Fidel Castro , the Canadian Ambassador to Cuba said, "Im sure Fidel would like to meet him, and it would be a great opportunity for him to say hello to a friend of his father, and for Fidel to greet his closest friends son as a prime minister.

But Fidel Castro has had a sporadic public profile since he formally ceded control of the Caribbean island country, 135 kilometres off the southern tip of Florida, to his younger brother, Raul. He has met world leaders, including the visiting president of Portugal just weeks ago, and Pope Francis last year.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus father - Pierre Trudeau, became the first NATO leader to visit Cuba when he touched down on Jan. 26, 1976 with his wife Margaret, and his then four-month-old son Michel in tow.

The three-day visit rankled some of Canadas allies, not least being the UK.

The photos of the visit, especially of the bearded father of the communist revolution holding the prime ministers infant son, have become iconic.





"From a personal point of view, it impressed us that he came to Cuba with his family. He brought his son, who was only three months and 26 days old, Castro told the CBC National Magazine in an October 2000 interview.

"I met that little baby when he came here when he wasnt even four months old, and he won everyones heart.

Trudeaus youngest son died in a British Columbia avalanche in 1998.

Two years later, Castro made a stunning appearance at Pierre Trudeaus funeral in Montreal, where he also rubbed shoulders with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

The report then was that Fidel Castro immediately dropped everything and made plans to travel to Montreal.

Justin Trudeau will spend less time in Havana than his father.





The Cuban government hopes that the visit will highlight potential trade and investment opportunities for Canadian businesses in Cuba, particularly in the biotechnology sector, a Cuban official disclosed.

Cuba hopes that the decision of the Barack Obama administration in December 2014 to restore diplomatic ties might make some Canadian companies a little less skittish about running afoul of the U.S. government and seek some long-term investment opportunities.





Canadas decision to host the secret talks between the U.S. and Cuba that led to Obama thawing relations with Cuba was a pivotal step in the long process towards "normalization of relations between the US and Cuba.

"Canada served as the connection to be able to carry out such important conversations - talks - in a discreet manner, a Cuban diplomat said. "Not because of anything against the press, but because things could not be achieved if there was a leak.
A Police Officer, singing under the sobriquet of Master 9, delivered two performances that left the audience at the Russells Auditorium convinced beyond any doubt that the crown was his.

Master 9 sang his way to victory at the Police Calypso Show, held in conjunction with the Miss Police Queen Show, on Friday, October 4th, 2016.

Competing from a field of four officers that included Niquette Singing Quetty Best, Trevor The Mighty Stranger Grant, and Renrick Mighty Bamboo Joint Cato, each competitor was required to render a new composition and another of his/her choice.

Master 9 sang his new composition entitled, I Just Cant See in the first round, and did a rendition of Posers Bull Pistle in the second round. His clarity of lyrics, his easy-flowing and catchy melody, his harmony of voice with music, and even his attire which played a poignant role in telling his story, combined to a deserving victory.

Add to this the fact that he had the audience on their feet giving serious exercise to their lungs, and his performance was nothing short of riveting.

In second position was The Mighty Stranger whose original composition was entitled Wat Does Make Me Vex, and his second number Black Stalins, Black Man Feeling to Party. His delivery too, was of great quality, enough to prevent Mighty Bamboo Joint from edging him out of second position.

Might Bamboo Joint  third place - made a creditable bid with his This is Wickedness and his version of Black Ebos s Bear Yuh Grinds.

In fourth position was Singing Quetty who performed Dat Aint Right and the popular Skinny Fabulous hit, I am a Vincy.

It was clear that from the lyrics of the original songs - the first round  that there was much to comment about the state of affairs in the Police Force.

With the stage at the Russells Auditorium as their platform, an independent platform so to speak, the calypsonians belted out lyrics that had many with mouths agape, while others jumped repeatedly to their feet, either in surprise or support at the mention of particular issues.

The singing officers, though, were able to cleverly conceal direct punches with appropriate metaphorical and satirical licence. It was a pleasure to listen to their presentations.

According to the Chairman of the Police Welfare Association, Mr. Trevor Bailey, the joint Queen and Calypso Show was last held in May of 2005, and a suggestion was tabled for its reintroduction in June, 2016, while Commissioner Michael Charles was still in office.

The activity, according to current Commissioner of Police (Acting), Mr. Renold Hadaway, "is used as a means to engender a better police .., raise funds to assist police officers in need, and showcase the talent of the men and women of the Force.

He also announced the decision to reintroduce the Annual Police Dance in 2017.
Except for those close to Isabelle Lorna Lewis, whom she might have confided in, hardly anyone else knew what she was about to speak on at the Philadelphia-based St. Vincent and the Grenadines Organization of Pennsylvania (SVGOP Annual Independence Banquet/ Anniversary Dinner/Dance.





So, when Lewis, an author and founder/president of the non-profit group Giving Life Anew Meaning (GLAM), took the microphone to deliver the feature address at the gala event held at the Vincentian-owned Calabash Banquet and Catering House on Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia, last Saturday night, many patrons were either stunned, dismayed or very sympathetic over her unexpected declaration.





"As it has been said many times over, it takes a village to raise a child, said Lewis, who hailed from Diamond Village in South Central Windward, "I stand before you to affirm that I am a child that was raised by a village  a village where I witnessed and experienced the good, the bad and the ugly; a village where it appeared that domestic violence was everywhere; a village where men beat their wives and girlfriends  beating that left these women with swollen red eyes, cuts and bruises on their bodies, with marks more visible than marks traced on a roadmap.





Lewis claimed that residents of Diamond Village, at the time of growing up, "and the women themselves, seemed to have accepted these criminal acts as the norm.





"They did nothing, and these men were never prosecuted, she said. "Men, it appeared, had power over everything, and the abused women continued to be subservient to them, having their babies, year after year.

Without holding back, Lewis said it was a village "where I was first raped at age 7  rape committed on me until I was 11.





Yet, she said, she "kept these rapes as secret, fearing the threat of my rapist  that he will kill my grandmother and me if I were to tell anyone.





"For years, I kept the rapes on me as secrets, living in pain and with the shame; but, yet I rise, rise high as a wave, because I believe in God and the power of prayer, Lewis said. "I believe in the power of prayer because every Sunday my grandmother and mother made sure I attended church and Sunday School, and they also taught me how to pray.

"I also believed that I had to get away from the village, she added, stating that her only way out was to receive a well-rounded education.





Encouraged by her former primary school principal to focus on a well-rounded education, Lewis said she was the first in her family to complete high (secondary) school (at the St. Josephs Convent).

In pursuit of her dream, Lewis said she left Diamond Village "and all the injustices I witnessed and migrated to the United States while still a teenager.





Lewis said she first broke the silence of her rape when she told the "secrets to her husband, Gideon Lewis.

Afterwards, she said, she wrote and self-published The Journey of a West Indian Soul, detailing her story as a victim of childhood rape.





She said she considers herself a survivor and speaks to several groups on Domestic Violence and Sexual Childhood Abuse.





"Today, I stand [here] speaking out against childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence in the communities, our Caribbean communities, Lewis told the Independence Banquet. "And am urging others to lets stand united, speak out and speak now against these crimes.





"Together, each of us can achieve more, Lewis said. "Together, we have the power to make changes, changes in law of injustice, changes that will protect our mothers, sisters, brothers and sisters, and the communities as a whole, from these predators  sexual and others.
A blog for students in my introductory classes in government, and any interested passersby. You'll find news items and random stories that illustrate any of the topics we cover in class. Special attention will be paid to the constitutional issues associated with contemporary issues and disputes. Feel free to send me stories you find important. Please note that due to spam, I'm limiting the ability of people to comment on these pages. My apologies.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking Accept, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
By Azernews





By Laman Ismayilova

The fifth Azerbaijan-Turkey-Georgia trilateral business forum will be organized in Istanbul on November 16.

Turkey is one of Azerbaijan`s largest trade and investment partners as it invested $10.1 billion in the country`s economy, including $2.6 billion in the non-oil sector, Azertac reported.

Azerbaijan invested $7.9 billion in the Turkish economy. By 2020 the total amount of Azerbaijans investment in Turkey is expected to make $20 billion.

More than 2,600 Turkish firms operate in Azerbaijan, while more than 1,700 Azerbaijani companies work in Turkey.

Azerbaijan invested 40 percent of the total investments made in the economy of Georgia in 2015, the National Statistics Office of Georgia reports.

Last year, Azerbaijan invested $542 million (58.9 percent growth) in Georgia and became the largest investor in the country.

The trilateral business forum is assessed as important event in boosting of cooperation among businessmen and overall relations among Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

Business Forum is traditionally followed by bilateral meetings among businessmen, during which expansion of business ties among entrepreneurs are discussed.

Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia are successfully cooperating in the political, economic, scientific, technical, and cultural spheres. The three countries are connected by several important regional projects, including the Baku-Supsa, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipelines, Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas line and Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway.
By Azernews





By Nigar Abbasova

Azerbaijan may soon turn into a regional hub of automotive industry, as the interest of foreign car manufacturers in the market is rising steadily.

Being a favourable platform for major automakers, the country is now enlarging its car production and encourages foreign investments.

Azerbaijan has an access to major transportation routes, which enables investors to easily reach the markets they are aiming at. The roads leading from East to West and West to South that pass through Azerbaijan, substantial road, maritime and air transport infrastructure of the country, transform the country into strategic logistics hub of the region and make it an alluring destination for foreign investments.

Moreover, the interest of investors is also triggered by such factors, as a reputation of a reliable partner, stable political situation, construction of state-of-the-art port in the country, as well as favourable conditions created for investors.

The country imported only 3,454 units of cars in January-August 2016, while the figure is less by 17,693 units or some 83.67 percent, as compared to the index recorded last year. The significant drop in imports is mainly due to the switch to the Euro-4 ecological standard in 2014.

At present, only cars produced in the EU since 2005, in the U.S. since in 2004, in China and Japan since 2011, in Korea since 2006, and in Turkey since 2009 can be imported to the country.

Certain countries have already made investments in the development of automotive industry in Azerbaijan.

Iranian multinational giant automaker Iran Khodro is currently engaged in the implementation of automotive plant project in Azerbaijan. The project, which is implemented jointly with Azerbaijans AzEuroCar LLC will be located at Neftchala industrial district and cover an area of 10 hectares. The total cost of the plant is $15 million, while some 25 percent of the cost will be provided by the Iranian side.

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 car factory is expected to launch its first products as of May 2017.

Moreover, Bipek Avto  Group, the largest holding in the automobile market of Kazakhstan earlier expressed its interest in exploring the possibility of entering the market in Azerbaijan.

Also, the country is studying the possibility to build a GTL (Gas to Liquid) plant for the production of synthetic motor oils as the worlds leading car manufacturers recommend using synthetic oils and their aggregates in the automotive engines.

That can eliminate a shortage for such products, as the country is well placed to develop the GTL technology.

There are currently two operating plants for the production of motor vehicles in the country located in Nakhchivan and Ganja.

Nakhchivan Automobile Plant was put into operation on January 11, 2010, as a result of the Azerbaijani-Chinese cooperation in the sphere. The capacity of the plant is the production of 5,000 cars per year. The plant will soon launch the manufacture of new generation of cars in cooperation with Chinese auto producer Lifan.

Ganja Automotive Plant, which started its operation in 2004, is engaged in assembling Minsk tractors and trucks. The plant also produces tractor trailers, communal machinery, and snow removal equipment. The assembly of communal machinery is conducted as part of an agreement signed with the German Haller Company. Currently, the plant is engaged in the assembly of Belarus tractors and MAZ, KAMAZ and Ural vehicles.
By Azernews





By Nigar Abbasova

Azerbaijan and the Islamic Republic of Iran are keen to develop cooperation in the sphere of shipping. The issue was high on agenda during the meeting between management of Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping Company and delegation representing Iranian Ports and Maritime Organization.

Spokesperson of Iranian delegation Jabbar Jalilian expressed his confidence in the possibility of joint projects with the Azerbaijani side.

The sides mentioned the necessity of cooperation in the sphere of freight transportation, maintenance of vessels, agency service, as well as operations beyond the Caspian Sea.

Azerbaijan is highly prioritizing the development of the shipping industry and improvement of the maritime infrastructure. The government has already approved the State Program on Development of Shipping in the Republic of Azerbaijan for 2016-2020.

The program envisages renewal of the transport and specialized offshore fleet, expansion of activities outside the Caspian Sea, increase of the volume of freight transportation through the territory of the country, modernization of shipbuilding and maintenance yards and improvement of the academic base of marine education, as well as implementation of certain measures to turn the country into major transport-logistics hub of international importance.

Iran launched expansion of maritime and port cooperation following the conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) between Tehran and world powers.

The country is now negotiating with a number of European, Chinese and South Korean, as well as domestic companies, for building ships. Moreover, international firms have also made commitments to increase shipping ties with Iran.
By Azertac





A press conference on awarding an honorary professorship of Astrakhan State University to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has been held at the university.





On October 24 this year, the Academic Council of Astrakhan State University conferred honorary professorship upon the Azerbaijani President for his role in developing relations between Azerbaijan and Astrakhan in the field of education as well as his contribution to deepening ties with Russia, including the Astrakhan region.





In his remarks, rector of Astrakhan State University Alexander Lunyov hailed the importance of educational cooperation in developing relations between the Astrakhan region and the Republic of Azerbaijan.
A total of 25 companies from around the world will showcase their latest achievements and advanced technologies in district energy at an exhibition to be held alongside the upcoming Idea District Cooling Conference in Dubai, UAE.



Emirates Central Cooling Systems Corporation (Empower), the worlds largest district cooling services provider, has announced a trade exhibition to be held alongside the seventh Idea International District Cooling Conference 2016, which will take place from November 13 to 15 at Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Dubai.



The event is organised by the International District Energy Association (Idea) and hosted by Empower, under the patronage of Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, chairman of Dubai Supreme Council of Energy and chairman and chief executive officer of Emirates Airlines and Group.



The conference and trade show reflects the remarkable efforts deployed by the emirate of Dubai and the UAE in order to facilitate the move toward an eco-friendly economy based on green technologies and innovative solutions while also raising awareness of deployment of technologies critical for sustainable urban development at local, regional and global levels.



The exhibition is a key part of the conference as a whole. This event is the right platform to interact directly with potential key stakeholders of the DC industry in the world, meet the global Idea community and share the expertise and knowledge of this sector, said Ahmad bin Shafar, chief executive officer of Empower.



Other Idea members and guests are expected to join Empower at the exhibition including dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa), Dubai Supreme Energy Council, Johnson Controls, Evapco Europe BVBA, Flow Control Industries, GulfSondex, Siemens, Belimo Automation, Carrier, CB&I, Cooltech Water treatment company, Daikin Middle East and Africa, Onicon, Delta District Cooling Services, DN Tanks, ELIPS, Innovative Water & Energy Technologies, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Tower Engineering, Trane, Wideco Oryx Piping, and Kamstrup.



This is a real opportunity for all providers, manufacturers, suppliers and business partners in the district energy sector to showcase their capabilities to an international audience, said Rob Thornton, president and CEO, Idea.



The conference theme this year is District Cooling: A Climate Solution reflecting how the Gulf region is investing in district cooling to support the larger objectives of the COP 21 Paris Agreement which recently entered into force. We expect to see district cooling operators share their expertise in conserving electricity and water through highly-efficient operations. In addition, the event greatly enables executive and industry networking among peers and supports members seeking industry best practices.



Idea has been supporting the international district energy industry since 1909 and brings together global companies that operate in the fields of reliable, economical, efficient and environmentally sound district heating, district cooling and cogeneration (also known as combined heat and power or CHP) services and microgrids.



Previous Idea events have attracted many hundreds of participants from more than 30 countries and this years event is expected to be even bigger in scale and number of participants, in view of the fact that the UAE tops the Middle East region in DC services, concluded Bin Shafar.  TradeArabia News Service
A private Iranian company is seeking joint venture partners to help develop copper, steel and other projects in the country, said a senior official in a report.



Mahan Company for Mines and Industries Development (Macmid) has two copper mines already under development, the Chah Firuzeh mine and the Daralou mine. They are being developed with a group that includes state-owned National Iranian Copper Industries, Ebrahim Sadeqi, managing director of Macmid, was quoted as saying in an Iran Daily News report.



The group is seeking $600 million from one or more international joint venture partners to help develop the two copper mines and associated processing plants, each aiming to produce about 26,000 tonnes of copper a year by 2019, it said.



Sadeqi said that the construction of the Chah Firuzeh mine is about 20 per cent complete, and Daralou is around 35 per cent complete.



Macmid was set up in 2013 as a private joint stock company, backed by Iran's Tourism Financial Group.
GAC Motor, one of China's leading automobile manufacturers, released its first seven-seat SUV, the GS8, at Hangzhou International Expo Center, the main venue of the G20 summit held on October 26.



A c-level high-end SUV self-developed by GAC Motor, the GS8 meets the North American SUV roof anti-force standard and redefines Chinese high-end SUV market. It integrates the GAC production system, global R&D network and global supply chain system and has formed the core competitive advantage of sustainable development, leading Chinese brands with innovative paces.



An important step in GAC Motor's strategic plan to fully enter high-end market, the GS8 is a c-level high-end product based on the creative cross-platform modular architecture, a platform focusing on technological innovation to guarantee quality consistency, lowers production and manufacturing cost, accelerates development speed, and expands technical advantages among competitors.



Key features of GS8 include:

 Ti POWER 320T engine and i-4WD 2.0 four-wheel drive system: powerful and smooth ride across six driving modes with second generation

 Electronic stability program 9.1 (ESP 9.1): Improved stability by detecting and reducing loss of traction

 Upscale Design: seven-seat, three-row layout with matrix-type LED headlights and U-shaped taillights

 Intelligent Technology: automatic tailgate opening, auxiliary driving assistance systems for active and passive protection



"The GS8 is another milestone for GAC Motor in terms on global outreach demonstrating our R&D capability and quality assurance system," said Yu Jun, GAC Motor's general manager speaking at the release conference."



GAC Motor has now released GS8 and GA8 and is planning to release GM8, another self-developed high-end product, and will become the first Chinese brand to provide high end products in sub markets of sedan, SUV and MPV. - TradeArabia News Service


Adnoc, Abu Dhabis integrated oil and gas company, in conjunction with the Abu Dhabi Chamber, hosted the Adnoc Private Sector Forum, as part of its efforts to strengthen its partnerships with suppliers and local businesses.



Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of State and Adnoc Group CEO said: Abu Dhabis private sector will play a fundamental role in helping deliver Adnocs 2030 strategy and five-year business plan. Together, we must develop a win-win partnership model that is performance based and that will maximize the economic impact from ADNOCs growth plans.



The improvements we are introducing to our procurement will ensure it is easier for everyone to do business with us, by making the whole process faster and more efficient, while at the same time maximising value for ADNOC.



The forum was attended by over 600 of Adnocs SME, oil and gas, exploration and production, construction and infrastructure suppliers and partners.



Held under the theme of Strengthening Cooperation With Our Private Sector Partners, the forum provided a platform for sharing Adnocs growth strategy and revised procurement policies and procedures which aim to strengthen the companys private sector partnerships and support the growth of the Abu Dhabi economy.



Mohamed Thani Murshed Al Rumaithi, president of the Federation of UAE Chambers of Commerce and Industry and chairman of the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry stressed the importance of private sector companies partnering with Adnoc, which he described as one of the most important drivers for economic acceleration in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the UAE.



"At the Abu Dhabi Chamber, we view this forum as an excellent opportunity to introduce private sector companies and businesses to the projects and opportunities being offered by Adnoc, and to enhance the private sectors contribution to the execution of services and developmental projects in Abu Dhabi, he said.



A key component of Adnocs efforts to strengthen its relationship with the private sector is the groups overhauled procurement system, which will deliver a more efficient and effective process.



The new procurement policies will benefit vendors by providing a single entry for registration and prequalification for tenders. Repetitive tendering for the same goods and services has been eliminated. In addition, Adnoc has standardised contract terms and conditions, streamlining the negotiation process, and simplified contract requirements.



Along with a centralised commercial directory and transparent key performance indicators, these changes are part of the companys strategic goal of ensuring fair competition among vendors. - TradeArabia News Service
Airbnb accommodations are quickly growing popular among business travellers, reporting a 44 per cent increase year-over-year, a new analysis has showed.



According to an in-depth analysis by Concur, a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions, the findings showed which industries and segments were driving Airbnb usage in business travel.



"Concur travel and expense data shows us that while Airbnb usage is growing across all segments and industries, momentum is strongest among small and midsized businesses and in the tech and higher-ed segments," said Tim MacDonald, executive vice president of Global Products at Concur. "While hotel spend still accounts for the majority of business lodging spend, there's an increase in business travellers exploring alternative lodging, especially during major conferences and events."



Concur found the number of organizations using Airbnb increased by 32 per cent and overall spend increased by 42 per cent year-over-year, from Q2 2015 to Q2 2016. The average Airbnb expense was $242, but average cost varied among major US cities.



A deeper analysis revealed:



 Small and midsized businesses are among the fastest adopters. Small and midsized businesses (up to 1,000 employees) increased spending on Airbnb 38 per cent in Q2 2016 compared to Q2 2015. On average, small and midsized companies spent $2,800 on Airbnb stays in Q2 2016, while a small number of organizations spent more than $20,000 in the same quarter.



 Hotel usage and spend are still on the rise. Use of major hotel chains grew year-over-year, but at a substantially lower rate than Airbnb. In Q2 2016, total business travel spend on major hotels was more than 250 times greater than business spend on Airbnb.



 Technology companies aren't the only ones using Airbnb. As Airbnb adoption grows, the user base is diversifying. The academic sector is now a major driver of business travel spend on Airbnb stays. In Q2 2016, six of the top 20 Airbnb spenders were universities while eight of the top 20 spenders on Airbnb were technology companies.



 Business travelers may be blending work and exploration. From Q3 2014 through Q2 2016, more money was spent on Airbnb stays in San Francisco than in any other city. Meanwhile, London held steady at number two in the two-year timeframe, followed by New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Austin, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Sydney, illustrating a growing shift in how employees approach business travel. Business travelers might see Airbnb as a cost-effective opportunity to explore a city's scenic neighborhoods that are beyond walking distance from major hotels.



 Major conferences are a driver. Looking at daily volume of Airbnb expenses, bookings increase dramatically in San Francisco during Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference held in October. In fact, Airbnb usage was six times higher than average during the 2015 Dreamforce conference. Austin is ranked number three in Airbnb spend globally during Q1 of 2015 and 2016, which corresponds with South by Southwest. However, it ranks significantly lower for every other quarter in the two-year window. - TradeArabia News Service
Turkish company PTA has been selected by Oman Airports Management Company to provide food and beverage services at Muscat International Airport, said a report.



The 10-year agreement was signed by Sheikh Ayman Bin Ahmed Al Hosni on behalf of Oman Airports Management and Sadatin Jasoor of PTA, said a report in Oman Tribune.



According to Al Hosni, the agreement is in line with Oman Airports' 2020 strategy to place the sultanate's airports on par with the international level.


WEST GLACIER, Mont.  Glacier National Park officials have temporarily closed boating on park lakes as a precautionary response to the discovery of larvae from invasive mussels in Montana waters for the first time.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials said Wednesday that no adult mussels have been found in Tiber Reservoir in north-central Montana.

Glacier superintendent Jeff Mow said park scientists will work with the state to understand the scope of the threat and how best to protect park waters. The park has had a mandatory boat inspection program in 2011 to reduce the risk of invasive mussels.

Quagga and zebra mussels can clog water pipes and they eat microscopic organisms that fish rely on for food. Initial tests found invasive mussel larvae in Canyon Ferry Reservoir near Helena, but further testing is needed to confirm their presence.
Perched on a hill overlooking the North Platte River, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Casper Memorial Post can be a little hard to find.

A lot of people dont even know were here, said bartender Katie Maxwell.

The post is housed within a simple metal building. An old green helicopter sits out front behind a sign reading, Welcome Home.

For the 80 or so regulars, the clubhouse provides camaraderie and a mellow place to have a drink or play a game of billiards.

Dave Birthday Henninger said its the community that has kept him coming back to the club for 30 years.

I know everybody, Henninger said Thursday afternoon as he sat at the bar sipping a beer.

Its true. Shannon Campbell, one of the youngest veterans who can regularly be found at the clubhouse, said she comes to hear stories from folks like Henninger.

Campbell finished her service in 2006 but first came to the post just three months ago. She is close to her brother Ishmael, who served three tours in Iraq. But by spending time at the club, shes also found it easy to relate to the older veterans, most of whom served during the Vietnam War.

I like to hear their stories more than mine, Campbell said. They have a lot more wisdom.

About 15 people spent Thursday afternoon at the post. A few played dice while others shot pool. Country music mixed with the clanking of billiard balls and laughter from the bar. Plastic American flags hung from one wall, and a bulletin board near the entrance advertised truck driving school and a pistol raffle.

Vietnam veteran Kirk Adams has a simple explanation for why veterans of different ages and different wars all get along: People were shooting at you, he said.

Adams said that he has made a point to be especially welcoming to those who served in the Middle East after receiving a frosty reception from World War II veterans when he first started visiting VFW posts.

Now were the old guys, so we try to extend hospitality to the Iraq and Afghanistan vets, Adams said.

But despite the hospitality, Campbell is something of an exception. Henninger, who served in the Merchant Marines during the 1950s, said the younger crowd is looking for more of a party scene.

They dont want to join because there aint no young women up here, he said. Where do they go? The Beacon. If I was young, Id be there, too.

Adams said it has been about 10 years since World War II vets stopped coming in large numbers, and now the Vietnam veterans are getting older.

Henninger thinks he may be part of the last generation to frequent the club. Its going to die out because all the old people are dying, he said.

Maxwell, the bartender, said the Casper Memorial post has around 300 members who either served in a foreign war or are directly related to a veteran. While membership has remained stable over the last few years, she said the post hasnt attracted many younger members.

Henninger said that he has regularly helped older veterans with errands like grocery shopping or trips to Veteran Affairs hospitals. But he hasnt seen many younger veterans do the same and believes theyre missing out.

Theyd learn a lot, Henninger said. Every veteran has got a story.
Saturday support meetings

Alcoholics Anonymous: 9:30 a.m., womens meeting, 500 S. Wolcott; 10 a.m., 328 E. A; noon, 500 S. Wolcott; 7 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott; 8 p.m, 328 E. A; 8 p.m., 917 N. Beech; 10 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: 10 a.m., 4600 S. Poplar, Shepherd of the Hills Church.

Narcotics Anonymous: Noon, 500 S. Wolcott, 12-24 Club; 6 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott, 12-24 Club, closed; 7 p.m., 15th and Melrose, at the church. Web site: http://www.urmrna.org.

NAMI: 4 p.m., 133 W. Sixth St. NAMI C.A.R.E. (Consumers Advocating Recovery through Empowerment) Support Group for individuals with mental illness. Info: 234-0440.

Adult Children of Alcoholics: 1:30-3 p.m., 12-24 Club, 500 S. Wolcott St., Suite 200. Open meeting.

Geneologists meet

Natrona County Genealogical Society will meet at 7 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 17, at the Casper Senior Citizens Center, 1831 East 4th St. Our class this month is Scandinavian  Swedish Research, presented by Myra Lindgren. Many of us are interested in finding that link of our ancestors that will take us back to the family names country of origin. Myra will present some techniques for those who have Scandinavian roots. Myra primarily has roots back to Sweden, but has expanded her topic to the other Scandinavian countries  in many ways there are similarities. Please join us as Myra examines some of the unique data sources that are available and share some of her insights. Guests are always welcome. For more information, please call Marcia, 265-5568.

Fleece blankets

Nov. 19

The Fleece Blank Project will be making fleece blankets from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., on Saturday, Nov. 19, at First Christian Church, 520 CY Ave. We have now made over 240 blankets that have been given to people in need of comfort and warmth, and to agencies that provide services to those in need. Anyone interested in tying fleece blankets is welcome to join in the fun.

Mommy, Teddy & Me tea party Dec. 3

The 10th annual old fashioned Mommy, Teddy & Me Tea Party is noon to 2:30 p.m., on Saturday, Dec. 3, at Crest Hill Elementary School.

Mothers, aunts and grandmothers are invited to attend this fun family event with school age girls from 3 to 8 years old. Dont forget to dress your Teddy Bear, or favorite stuffed animal, to sit with you at the party. An afternoon of fun includes a cake pop walk, a lunch of tea sandwiches, veggies, chips, cake, face painting, crafts, photos, raffles, silent auction, and of course, a visit from Santa Claus.

The Mommy, Teddy & Me Teddy Bear Tea is sponsored by Wyoming CARES. Tickets are $25 for two and must be pre-purchased by calling the office of Wyoming CARES at 237-7035. Seating is limited and there will be no tickets available at the door.

Wyoming CARES is a statewide not-for- profit charitable agency with the mission to provide assistance to residents in need. Since incorporation, Wyoming CARES has provided assistance to over 1870 infants, adults and senior citizens in 89 communities in Wyoming.
In the syllabi for his theater classes at Casper College, Tom Empey often quoted President John F. Kennedy: I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human Spirit.

The quote is fitting, Empeys friends said, for a man who gave so much of his life to his students and the Casper arts scene. Empey died Wednesday at the age of 70. He is survived by his wife, three children and five grandchildren.

Tom understood that we can survive without the arts, but we cant thrive without them, said Bill Conte, who teaches theater history and literature at Casper College. He gave his life to that.

Empey joined Casper College in 1979 as part of a two-person theater faculty. Over the next 30 years, Empey expanded the faculty to nine, began a musical theater program and worked to build and later renovate the Krampert Theatre, which now houses a space bearing his name.

The sense of energy, commitment and vision it took to build this over the years are a monument to a life, Conte said. It will never go away.

Jim Olm, current chair of the colleges Theatre and Dance Department, couldnt stop hearing Empeys deep, booming voice as he walked the halls of Casper College on Thursday. The college was an extension of Empey, especially the theater department that he built, Olm said.

Its like hes coming out of the walls, he said.

Empey stood out for his deep voice and lanky stride, said Rich Burk, who worked with him at the college for 26 years. He was a talented and thoughtful director, Burk said, but it was Empeys devotion to Casper as a whole that truly defined him.

He helped people know that the arts are not just for the elites  theyre for all of the community, Burk said.

Empey retired from the college in 2010 because he had pulmonary fibrosis and needed to move somewhere with a lower elevation. The department he left behind was far different than than the one he joined in 1979.

Jean Tichenor joined the faculty soon after Empey and remembers the two spending long nights building sets together in a tiny room, which would later become a computer lab.

After rehearsal on Fridays, Tichenor and Empey would paint props and stencil backgrounds until the early morning. Empeys wife, Lissa, would bring homemade food to the paint-stained workers every few hours. More than once they worked until sunrise.

We were like the three musketeers, Tichenor said.

The two worked closely together for years, exchanging ideas and making large productions fit in the theaters tiny space. Although the days were long, those early years are host to some of Tichenors favorite memories of Empey.

He just allowed me to grow, and encouraged it, she said. Its the same as what he did with all of his students.

Empey refused to give up on students who were struggling, Olm said. His students would often call him at home, and Empey never failed to answer. He even invited students to live in his home when they had nowhere else to go.

Watching him in class, in productions and outside of those walls he always lived what he truly believed: that students come first, Olm said. It was as much as a mission for him as it was a job.

Empeys love for his students and passion for the arts came from the very depths of himself, Tichenor said.

That desire to create art was something God built into him when he was created, she said. He had to do it.

Empeys desire to create expanded well outside of the college, Conte said. When the college hired Conte in 2010 to fill Empeys teaching position, Empey took his replacement under his wing and taught the New Yorker about Casper and Wyoming.

He taught me that you have to work toward the benefit of the community you serve, Conte said. He taught me you have to understand the hearts and minds of the people youre working for.

Olm has written plays for decades but said he could not craft a character like Empey. An audience just wouldnt find him believable.

He had such a unique outrageousness, he said. Everything about him was larger than life. You dont usually run into people like that. He was a tour de force.
A federal judge sentenced a Casper man Thursday to more than six years in prison for possession of child pornography.

Federal agents arrested Rick Olsen in May after a local FBI agent received information through a tip line that Olsen had pornographic images of children, according to court documents.

Olsen told the agent that he used the phone to find and store child porn. He wasnt surprised he had been caught and told the agent he knew this day was coming, the documents state.

Another agent searched the phone and found multiple sexual images of prepubescent girls.

Olsen pleaded guilty to one charge of possession of child porn in August. A charge of transportation of child porn was dismissed.

The maximum sentence for possession of child pornography is 20 years and a $250,000 fine, according to the documents.

Olsen will serve his sentence in Englewood, Colorado, and will also participate in a program for sex offenders.
CHEYENNE  With only about two months until the next Congress convenes, Republican Rep.-elect Liz Cheney is already starting her transition to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Formal orientation for freshman lawmakers begins next week, and Cheney will also be working with outgoing Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, as part of the changeover.

I have had several really good conversations with Cynthia, and will be sitting down with her and folks on her staff to make sure we have a really smooth transition, Cheney said Thursday.

Cheney said she and Lummis want to make sure that no one falls through the cracks during the move to Cheneys office.

While Cheney said her priorities remain the same, she feels she and other members of Congress will be able to advance their platform much faster with a Donald Trump presidency.

Such priorities include repealing the Affordable Care Act and Clean Power Plan and reducing regulation on fossil fuel industries.

Well be in a position where we can have movement very quickly on some of those issues, she said.

Cheney wants to see laws relaxed that affect the agriculture industry, too, with the goal of just relieving the burden people have had to deal with from Washington.

Cheney said she hopes to serve on the House Natural Resources Committee, just as Lummis does currently.

Military funding is also a priority for Cheney, as is reforming the VA health care system.

Lummis, who did not run for re-election, agreed a Trump administration, combined with a Republican-controlled Congress, will make it simpler for the party to enact its agenda.

Much of my eight years as Wyomings sole voice in the House has been spent fending off the disastrous policies of an Obama administration, including former Secretary (Hillary) Clinton, run completely amok, Lummis said in a statement after Tuesdays election. Donald Trump taking the White House and Republicans keeping the Senate and House marks a chance to make up lost ground, revitalize our economy, and reverse the Obama legacy of federal overreach and the Obamacare takeover of health care.

I offer my congratulations to Liz Cheney on being elected to succeed me. I am proud of the work I have accomplished with Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso and wish Wyomings congressional delegation well in a Republican Congress and under a Republican White House.

Overall, Cheney said she was pleased with the election and with turnout.

It was a just an honor to have the chance for the last nine months working with people and talking with people across the state, she said.

One of the frequent criticisms of Cheney by her primary and general election opponents was over her dedication to Wyoming and investment in the state.

Cheney and her husband bought a home in Wilson in 2012, and she ran for U.S. Senate in 2014 against Sen. Mike Enzi, though she dropped out of that race.

When asked what she would say to voters concerned about her dedication to Wyoming, Cheney said she is committed to being in the state often and being accessible.

She said she wants to continue the type of relationship Wyomingites have had with their congressional representatives and wants to work with those who voted for her, as well as those who voted against her.

Im absolutely dedicated to representing every single person all across the state, she said.

Cheney has yet to formally announce her staff picks, including a chief of staff.

The 115th Congress, of which Cheney is part, will convene in January prior to the inauguration of Trump.
CHEYENNE  A Cheyenne man accused of killing a 13-month-old boy and putting the child's body in a dumpster has waived his right to a preliminary hearing.

Logan Rogers on Thursday waived his right to a preliminary hearing, meaning his case will go directly to Laramie County District Court. The 23-year-old is charged with involuntary manslaughter and child endangering with a controlled substance in the death of Silas Anthony Ojeda of Cheyenne.

Investigators say Rogers told them the boy died after falling off a counter and that Rogers put his body in a trash container.

Investigators are still searching a landfill near Ault, Colorado, searching for any trace of the missing boy's body. The search began Nov. 1.
BILLINGS  The push to scrap the Clean Power Plan is on following Donald Trumps presidential victory, though its unlikely to save coal-fired polluters like Colstrips power plant.

Meeting with the press Wednesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he hoped Trump would immediately scrap the Clean Power Plan, which called on states to cut greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources by 2030.

Day one would be a good idea, McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, told Roll Call, suggesting the new president stop the EPAs legal battles supporting the Clean Power Plan.

Montana is one of 24 states suing the EPA over the emissions plan, which is aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Montana Attorney General Tim Fox has said the EPA is overstepping its authority by making new law with the CPP.

The EPAs prescribed emission reductions for Montana were the nations steepest, 47 percent. Gov. Steve Bullock accused the EPA of moving the goalposts because based on earlier planning, Montana had expected a prescribed emissions cut of about half that amount.

Colstrip was an obvious emissions target. It was the nations 15th-largest producer of greenhouse gases, emitting 13.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to the EPA. Carbon dioxide contributes to climate change.

Trump has said climate change is a hoax promoted by China.

But Colstrip is facing more imminent challenges, which will persist regardless of whether Trump scraps the Clean Power Plan.

Talen Energy and Puget Sound Energy, the owners of the two oldest units at the four-unit power plant, have agreed to shut down their units no later than 2022. The agreement settled an emissions violations lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club and the Montana Environmental Information Center.

The units targeted for closure opened in the 1970s. Agreeing to shutter the units made better financial sense than adding costly pollution controls, the owners said. Cheap natural gas has cut into coals share of the energy market and eroded profits. Talen Energy, which operates all four Colstrip units through an agreement with the power plants four other owners, said this summer that it is currently losing millions.

The settlement with the Sierra Club is whats determining the future of Units 1 and 2 at this point, said Grant Ringel, of Puget Sound Energy.

The timing of the closure means the two oldest units will be shuttered before the Clean Power Plan came into play.

Montana shelved its efforts to curb greenhouse gases under the Clean Power Plan as soon as a federal judge granted the states a stay in February. Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock appointed a 27-member advisory panel to address the Clean Power Plan in January, but disbanded it after a couple weeks.

Since the task force was suspended, at DEQ we havent worked on the Clean Power Plan, said Kristi Ponozzo, of the Department of Environmental Quality.

Last month, a federal judge ordered the EPA to assess the jobs lost from enacting the Clean Power Plan.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.  A 113-year-old church in Manitou Springs is considering closing in part because of parking problems caused by a nearby hiking trail.

Leaders of the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs told parishioners on Thursday that they want to close and sell Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

According to a letter from the Rev. Ronald Raab, the 2,000 or so people who trek to the Manitou Incline on Sundays have decreased parking around the church, leading to dwindling attendance at Sunday Mass. For the past two fiscal years, tithing and other income has not been enough to meet basic operating expenses.

Manitou Springs officials say they have been working with the church to address parking issues.
As the executive director of the Wyoming chapter of the Alzheimers Association, I champion the fight to end Alzheimers and am proud of our states efforts. In September, over 500 residents from across Wyoming joined the Alzheimers Associations Walk to End Alzheimers, united in a movement to reclaim the future for millions. Through their dedication, participants raised over $80,000. The Alzheimers Association is grateful for these passionate people. Every dollar raised through the walk will further critical efforts to advance advocacy and education, enhance care and support programs, raise awareness and promote research. We have a strategic National Alzheimers Plan in place with a goal of preventing and effectively treating Alzheimers by 2025 and we have a state full of citizens with an unwavering devotion to raising funds. But without a substantial federal investment, our plan to end Alzheimers disease is simply an empty promise. Alzheimers disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. and the only one without a way to prevent, cure or even slow its progression. In addition to the human toll of the disease (on the more than 5 million Americans living with Alzheimers and their over 15 million caregivers), Alzheimers is the most expensive condition in the nation. Nearly 1 in 5 Medicare dollars is spent on a person with Alzheimers. Having seen the effects to my family and friends with Alzheimers, I know personally the issues our state faces in dealing with the escalating effects of Alzheimers and am committed to the cause. On behalf of the over 9,100 Wyomingites who have Alzheimers and the family members and friends who care for them, I call on Sens. Barrasso and Enzi, along with Rep. Lummis, to heed the guidance of the National Institutes of Health and please support an additional $400 million for Alzheimers research in fiscal year 2017. You can help save millions of lives and trillions of dollars. For more information, call 1-800-272-3900 or visit alz.org.
The forever step-child of the movie world, the "short film," is so generally neglected (and, yes, he admits it, by, too) that the collection of shorts that makes its home video debut this coming week is at least some cause for celebration. Titledand featuring five documentary tales of people and life in the Big Apple, the total movie is definitely worth a watch -- if a bit uneven in terms of interest and success. The five shorts have all won awards at various fests, however, so chances are you'll find something worthwhile.One of the five directors,(shown at right), also produced this anthology. Back in 2014, Mr. Workman made the year's best documentary, so far as I am concerned: a little amazement called. (The doc is now available to stream on, so if you have not seen it, consider it a "must.") Workman's contribution to this anthology --, the third film of the five -- has, at its center another obsessive character similar to the one found in: a fellow named(below) who has dedicated most of his life to his self-financed study of the New York Subway system, with special attention to much of the architecture, art and history found in every single one of the system's many stations.How he has managed this and what has resulted takes up the 22 minutes of the film -- the shortest but also the best of the group. Coppola is a man who clearly loves the subway, but he also possesses a nice ironic sense of humor, even about himself and his work (watch him pretend to fall asleep, as he views himself being interviewed on TV!).Workman is, as you'll be, too, charmed by, interested in, and impressed by the man and his task. And the filmmaker brings it all to fine life with the help of his camera, Coppola, and a few talking head interviews that bolster the case., the short that opens this film, takes us to a certain spot in the Bronx (the title rock) overlooking the Harlem River, off of which (anywhere from 30 to 110 feet up) jump boys and young men as a kind of rite-of-passage. This has been going on for generations (we meet at least three of these in the film), as the youngster tell us, between their many jumps, what it all means to them, while the oldsters relive their youth.At 29 minutes, the film seems over-extended (all that jumping proves finally a bit tiresome), but I must admit that the place is impressive, and the idea of jumping -- while maybe a tad dangerous (the movie's end credits go out of their way to mention that no encouragement was provided the jumpers by the filmmaker,) -- certainly makes a spectacular visual.The second film of the five --(originally titled) by-- is the kind of movie that might give Donald Trump heart failure (gosh, could someone show it to him, please?), it's such a paean to what so many of us love about the wonderful diversity of New York City and its boroughs. From the humorous old Jewish guy -- kindly but street-smart to the max -- who runs the place to his hugely diverse cab drivers (mostly recent immigrants), everyone we meet here seems like the salt-of-the-earth and then some.In heat and snowstorm we watch them at work and learn a little of their lives and their desires. Made four years ago, before the onset and co-opting of Uber, the movie will make you wonder if thecompany remains in business. (I just now tried the phone number we so often see throughout this little movie -- 718-786-5811 -- and sure enough, the company seems to be up and running.New York's Muslim community is given a look in the fourth short doc,by, that details how and why a young man named Imran (above) decides to take over his aging father's halal slaughterhouse in Queens. We meet that father, and get a short glimpse of the mother, but mostly concentrate on the son.The movie allows us to see some interesting prejudice from Muslims themselves (when they suspect someone isa Muslim) and also view various slaughterhouse practices. By the time we finally arrive at exactly what the sacrifice in question will be, we've learned enough about these people and their work that we can better understand and appreciate just how great this sacrifice both is and -- after all that Imran has now learned and experienced -- maybe is not.The final film of the five --byand-- is in some ways the most bizarre, as it shows us a father (Otis Houston, Sr., who is failing via Alzheimer's) and his caretaker son (Otis Houston, Jr., an artist and performance artist), shown above and below, who sells his wares on the streets.In its short 23 minutes, the movie tackles everything from art and freedom to caretaking and providing for family. As odd and oddly appealing is the younger Houston, there is so much more we might like to learn about this man and his beliefs that I wish the movie has spent a little less time simply watching him and more time asking him some questions. But that perhaps was not the moviemakers' intentions.More to the point, however, is another question: In a movie entitled, how "true" is it if a full 50 per cent of the population has been left out? I am talking about New York women, whom we barely see in any of these films. (Workman does interview a couple of them for his film; we catch a glimpse of one lone female taxi driver; and Imran's mom makes an appearance cooking in the kitchen, whis his dad manages to insult a woman at the family's slaughterhouse.) Granted, each film here was made in its own time and for its own purpose, but I would think that, in choosing the films to be included here, at least one of these ought to have concentrated on a female. Or is it possible that no female filmmakers or female subjects of short films actually exist? So much for diversity. (The fellow shown above, now deceased, is one of the most interesting of all's drivers.)This five-part documentary anthology, fromand running 131 minutes, hits the street on DVD this coming Tuesday, November 15, for purchase and/or rental.
PHOENIX  A 2011 state law requiring employees to pay more into their retirement plans is unconstitutional, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday, meaning higher future expenses for state and local governments.

In a divided ruling, the justices said when judges took the bench they were told they would have to contribute 7 percent of their earnings to the Elected Officials Retirement Plan. Acting Supreme Court Justice Randall Howe, writing for the majority, said that became part of their contract with the state.

What that means, Howe said, is the state could then not unilaterally boost the judges contribution to 10 percent in 2011 rising to 13 percent two years later, even if lawmakers said that was necessary to maintain the financial stability of the pension fund.

The case affects more than those judges on the bench as of 2011 when the law changed.

It also means refunds of about $220 million to about 26,000 state and local police, firefighters and corrections officers who are in other government-run pension plans that made similar hikes in employee contributions  hikes that Thursdays ruling found illegal.

What remains to be decided is how the pension funds make up the money they have to refund. They could assess the government employers retroactively or simply boost what the employers have to pay in the future to make up the money.

Employees have no financial reason to let the pension funds keep the extra money. Their retirement benefits are based on a percentage of their salaries, a figure unaffected by how much they contributed during their working years.

Joyce Garland, the chief financial officer for the city of Tucson, said she does not know what the ruling will cost taxpayers  or when. She said when the high court struck down another change in pension laws two years ago the city was given several years to pay off the additional funds needed. (See related box on Page A4)

Doing nothing about the loss is not a likely option.

Christian Palmer, spokesman for the three affected funds, said the ruling adds $1.3 billion in unfunded liabilities to the retirement plans, which have assets of about $8 billion but liabilities of $16 billion.

Thursdays ruling drew a stinging dissent from Justice Clint Bolick who insisted there is no contract between the government and its workers on pension contributions. He called the concept a work of legal fiction to which the likes of John Grisham could only aspire.

And Bolick said while Thursdays ruling portends a huge financial windfall for those who will get back the money, it is a burden the taxpayers will shoulder.

As it turns out, Bolick is the only actual member of the Supreme Court to have a voice in this case.

The other four justices disqualified themselves as they were on the bench when the 2011 law was approved and have a financial stake in the issue. Bolick was appointed earlier this year; the other four who heard this case are judges from lower courts who were named since 2011.

This is the second financial setback in as many years for the retirement plans.

Two years ago the justices  the actual ones  struck down another provision of the same law that reduced automatic cost-of-living increases for retired judges.

At the heart of the dispute is a provision in the Arizona Constitution that says that public system retirement benefits shall not be diminished or impaired.

Howe said that was not a problem in the 1990s when the retirement system was generating high returns. But he said decisions to invest in tech and telecommunications companies made the plan vulnerable to major financial shocks.

By 2011, he said, the plans assets were just 62 percent of liabilities, down from 121 percent in 1998.

That year, in a bid to fix the problem, lawmakers made two changes.

One was that now-overturned future cost-of-living increases. Thursdays ruling involves the mandate that judges put more into the pension fund.

Two judges sued on behalf of themselves and others to strike that down.

Howe said lawmakers acted improperly.

The law in Arizona has been clear that public employees are contractually entitled to the retirement benefits specified in their initial employment contract, he wrote for the majority. And Howe said that contract includes not just how much they get when they retire but also how much they have to pay to get those pension benefits.

Bolick, however, said even if there was a contract between the state and the judges and other employees it could be voided because it was based on the mutual mistake of how much the retirement funds would be earning to cover the cost of future pensions.

Thursdays ruling does not affect the much larger Arizona State Retirement System with its more than 211,000 active state and local state workers and teachers. Its formula requires employees to match employer contributions on a 50-50 basis, a ratio that has remained the same.
When Ariana Ramirez and Andrian Alvarez tried to cross the border from Nogales into Mexico, customs officers discovered their car was loaded down with firearms and ammunition bound for a drug cartel.

Officers found two assault rifles and six high-capacity magazines under the seat where Ramirezs two infants sat, court records show. In the center console were more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition and a $930 receipt from the United Nations Ammo Company in Glendale. Another 1,500 rounds were tucked under the Ford Explorer and a dismantled .50-caliber machine gun tripod mount was stashed in the back seat.

Ammunition-smuggling busts at Arizona ports of entry  like this one  jumped 600 percent over the past two years, U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show. A total of 54,000 rounds and 25 firearms were seized at the states ports in fiscal year 2016, statistics obtained by the Arizona Daily Star through a public records request show.

But thats a small fraction of whats actually getting across the border.

Its just scratching the surface, said Jose Wall, a retired Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who worked on arms trafficking into Mexico from 2000 to 2013.

Few smuggled weapons are seized

Thousands of cars cross the border every day, and its impossible for agents to tell which ones have guns and ammo, Wall said.

CBP seized 297 firearms and 282,000 rounds at Arizona ports of entry since 2005, while 1,135 guns and 764,000 rounds of ammunition were seized borderwide.

Many more guns than that slipped through the border during that time.

Police at crime scenes in Mexico recovered 120,000 firearms that originated in the United States, annual reports from the ATFs International Firearms Tracing System show. Firearms from the United States accounted for 70 percent of the 173,000 illegal guns recovered by the Mexican federal police at crime scenes and sent to the ATF for tracing since 2007.

Authorities also found receipts showing that Alvarez purchased more than $11,000 worth of ammunition between March 1 and his March 27 arrest. He told investigators that he smuggled guns and ammunition during four previous trips across the border that month. Each load was bound for a drug cartel and typically consisted of two assault rifles and several thousand rounds of ammunition, he said.

Based off of those receipts, federal prosecutors estimated that Alvarez alone smuggled more than 36,000 rounds of ammunition and at least 10 assault rifles into Mexico that month, which is equivalent to two-thirds of the total seizures at Arizona ports in fiscal year 2016.

Alvarez claimed he was smuggling to save his brother, who was being held hostage by the cartel for stealing $1 million. Every time Alvarez crossed the border, the cartel would deduct $1,000 from his debt, he told authorities.

Alvarez was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison after pleading guilty to a charge of smuggling goods from the United States. Ramirez pleaded guilty to the same charge but has not been sentenced yet.

Needle in haystack

Mark Hammond made it through U.S. customs southbound inspections on June 20, 2015, but apparently panicked when Mexican customs officials tried to inspect his backpack.

Rather than hand it over, Hammond dropped the pack and ran to the front of the inbound U.S. inspections line, court documents show. All the while, Mexican customs officials were yelling that Hammond had a gun.

Inside the backpack, CBP officers discovered five mini AK-47 pistols, five high-capacity magazines and a receipt showing he paid $2,600 for the guns and ammunition from J&G Sales in Prescott.

Hammond claimed he had no intention of smuggling guns into Mexico. Court records show police found a mini AK-47 in Mexico that Hammond had purchased a week before, indicating an earlier successful smuggling attempt.

He pleaded guilty to one count of exportation of firearms in connection with the backpack incident and was sentenced to more than two years in federal prison.

With thousands of people crossing the border every day, finding smuggled firearms and ammunition is almost impossible, said CBP spokeswoman Teresa Small.

Authorities are  having to look for that needle in the haystack, Small said.

Officers are trained to look for signs of nervousness or something amiss inside a vehicle. But from smuggling guns to smuggling fruit, nothing really distinguishes which crime is in progress, she said.

Just south of the border in Sonora, Mexican federal police recovered more than 6,700 firearms from January 2006 to March 2016, the newspaper El Imparcial reported.

In one case from February 2015, police reported finding 10,000 rounds of ammunition, nine magazines and seven assault rifles in compartments built into a trucks side paneling on Highway 15, the federal route that leads south from Nogales.

In another case, a man was arrested in August on the highway between Sonoyta and San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, with 10 assault rifles and eight high-capacity magazines inside a hidden compartment in his vehicle, according to Mexican newspaper El Universal.

Most of the guns and ammunition smuggled across the border are headed to organized crime operations in Mexico like drug cartels, retired ATF agent Wall said.

Wall was a whistleblower in the ATF gun-walking scandal Operation Fast and Furious, when the agencys Phoenix field office allowed weapons purchased in the U.S. across the border so agents could trace them to drug cartels. However, the guns disappeared and were found at crime scenes on both sides of the border  including the 2010 shooting death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

The types of weapons seized at the border and the caliber and quantity of ammunition are characteristic of the weapons used by criminal networks, Wall said.

Unless youre doing some serious dove hunting, youre not going to need more than 100 shotgun shells or, if youre going deer hunting, you might take 20 rounds, he said.

Your large purchases of AK-47s and AR-15s are going to organized crime, Wall said. Any type of weapon or ammunition that has a similarity to the military, any trafficking of those are going to organized crime.

Cross-border solutions

As was the case with Hammonds and Alvarezs smuggling attempts, most of the weapons recovered by Mexican police were legally purchased at gun shops and gun shows in Southwestern border states, a U.S. Government Office of Accountability report released in January found.

The high volume of weapons in Mexico is the result of gun policies in the United States, said Sarah Kinosian, an arms-trafficking policy analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and human rights advocacy organization.

Its, without a doubt, the lax U.S. gun laws that contribute to the high levels of gun violence down in Mexico, Kinosian said. Its so easy to get a gun in the United States and move it across the border.

However, retired ATF agent Wall said the gun laws in Mexico created the conditions for the thriving cross-border gun trafficking industry.

Mexico has strict firearm regulations. Citizens are constitutionally entitled to possess a small-caliber firearm that must be registered with the government. Most types of guns are exclusively restricted for use by the military.

Guns can kept only in a residence, and a special permit must be obtained to take it outside for activities like hunting.

The only place to legally obtain a gun in Mexico is a government-operated store in Mexico City, tucked away on a military base.

Theres always going to be gun traffic to Mexico, always, because of just the necessity, Wall said. If its not narcos, its criminals who want a gun, or its the guy who tells his buddy, Hey, can you bring me a gun because I want to go shoot rabbits, or I want a gun for protection.

Kinosian said a policy change in Mexico is needed, but such a change could be far off.

I dont get the sense that there is a really big push to do anything about the problem of trans-border trafficking, she said.

One way to discourage smuggling is for Mexico to increase its border security, Wall said.

Its not going to be popular, he said. We all love to go to Mexico and not have to stop at the border and just get waved on through.

Kinosian advocated for the Mexican government to crack down on gun-trafficking networks, as well as more proactive policing and detection by U.S. customs officers looking for smugglers.

As it stands right now, if they dont break any laws, then they wont be pulled over, she said.

Wall said the best way to combat the cross-border smuggling is a see something, say something approach.

If youre a guy in a gun store and youre buying a gun, and you see someone buying 10 AK-47s, report it, the same way you report suspicious narco activity, Wall said. Because ultimately, if we can reduce the flow of guns, it helps the American gun owner because theres less crime and less pressure on the politicians to do stuff.
President Barack Obama issued a 2012 executive order protecting from deportation more than 700,000 young people brought illegally to this country by their parents. An appeals court blocked the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, and the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked, which let that ruling stand.

President-elect Donald Trump's immigration plan states he would "immediately terminate President Obama's two illegal executive amnesties." If Trump were to revoke DACA, an estimated 4,000 Pima County residents who crossed the border illegally before they were 16 years old would find their futures in jeopardy.

Under DACA, "Dreamers" were eligible to avoid deportation for two years  and that was renewable  if they stayed out of legal trouble, were studying or graduated from high school, or served honorably in the military.

If Trump revokes the program, the roughly 27,000 Arizona residents who have DACA deferrals and another 19,000 whose deferrals were renewed as of March, would lose their driver's licenses and their ability to work legally in the United States.

Undocumented students at the University of Arizona or Pima Community College could see their tuition rise enough to put it out of reach altogether. Both schools let DACA students pay in-state tuition  but without DACA protection they would be subject to an Arizona law that denies in-state tuition to undocumented students.

Beyond all that, their greatest fear is that the information they provided on their DACA application could be used to round them up and deport them.

Not only could Trump rescind DACA with a stroke of a pen, he also could undo a 2014 executive action that offered similar protection to about 5 million more undocumented young people and to the parents of U.S. citizens or legal residents.

A Trump nominee to the Supreme Court also could do the job for him. The 2014 action was blocked by the courts and a deadlocked eight-member Supreme Court.
People like me who avidly opposed Donald Trump have had a tough couple of days facing reality.

Tuesday night: Almost no sleep. Covers on, covers off. Sitting up on the side of the bed. Getting up for water. Back to the pillow, mind exploding.

Wednesday: Mopey unreality. I brought a lunch to work, forgot about it, then went out and bought lunch. Did I smile all day?

Wednesday night: Went to bed reading a book about Putins Russia: The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep. Sleep came hard and I never wanted to wake up.

Thursday: Political Notebook deadline day. Nothing to do but get cranking.

Shock TUSD winner

The biggest surprise of the election for me was not Donald Trump winning the presidency.

I started to feel that result coming as I toured the Tucson area Tuesday interviewing voters.

No, the big surprise was the apparent election of Rachael Sedgwick to the Tucson Unified School District board. With ballots still to be counted, she had a likely invulnerable 1,000-vote lead on her nearest opponent, Betts Putnam-Hidalgo.

This is a race in which I judged that there were three strong challengers and three incumbents out of a total of seven candidates running for three seats. Sedgwick was the seventh.

I didnt think she lacked the brains or ability to do the job, but just that she was an outlier: a former teacher who is now a law student, doesnt have any children and didnt display intimate knowledge of the district.

The others all have or had children in TUSD or were incumbents and know the district deeply. Sedgwick, 37, didnt. She decided to join the race after doing a law-school paper related to TUSDs Mexican American Studies conflict.

When I watched one of the many candidate forums, I found Sedgwicks biography interesting  shes been a teacher, has lived in Colombia and Italy as well as being a law student  but her knowledge lacking.

But credit her with this: Sedgwick spent a tiny amount of money on her campaign, $3,357 according to the last report. She put out campaign signs, made a few radio appearances, and won  something even she didnt expect.

There was a very slim chance I was going to win, Sedgwick told me and my colleague Alexis Huicochea on Thursday. It was a total upset.

Sedgwick won over some Republican support by appearing on conservative-leaning radio shows on KVOI, 1030 AM. She also may have benefited from being an outsider.

An outside group called TUSD Kids First, which opposed incumbents Kristel Foster and Cam Juarez, spent an unprecedented $41,746, much of it on signs supporting incumbent Mark Stegeman, as well as challengers Brett Rustand and Putnam Hidalgo.

Another outside group, Protect Our Schools, formed to support Juarez and Foster and spent at least $20,419. Much of that money went to attacking Stegeman, which may have had the reverse of the intended impact by raising Stegemans name ID. He was the top vote-getter, with Foster second.

Sedgwick had another possible explanation that she heard from a variety of supporters.

People figured I wouldnt win, but they liked me as a candidate, she said. They put me as a No. 2 or No. 3 favorite.



My instinct led me to Big Heart Coffee on Wednesday morning, where I shared a hug with general manager Diana Acosta-Bacon and settled in to work a bit. I ended up chatting with a fellow customer who is a naturalized citizen from Ecuador, a country where I spent almost a year over trips in 1989 and 1992.

Despite being a naturalized citizen, she worried that immigration enforcement or other police activities might affect her or her family in the Trump administration. Talking with her brought to mind some of Trumps similarities to one of her home countrys strongman presidents  Abdala Bucaram.

Bucaram is the rich son of wealthy Lebanese immigrants, but he ran for president as a populist candidate of the poor. Sound familiar? I looked up video of his 1996 victory speech, and he was wildly entertaining as always, singing and shouting to a throng of poor supporters.

We are all united against the Ecuadorean oligarchy, he said. What I heard him saying, though, was Drain the swamp.

Border bluster

wins, loses

Arizona voters gave a mixed verdict Tuesday to the border fears and nativism that have run strong in state politics for more than a decade.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was voted out of office, and Congressional District 1 voters rejected Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu. Both have built their brands on raising alarms about border insecurity and about foreigners among us. But then, of course, the state voted for Trump, whose most intense appeals were on fears of an insecure border, refugees and violent illegal immigrants.

So, what does it all say about the states views on these issues? It probably simply means that each race was individual.

Arpaio lost, most likely, because of his continuing legal troubles, now criminal, and what theyre costing the county. Babeu simply didnt have much appeal beyond his border rhetoric, which is a harder sell in a district that spreads across northern Arizona. So far, Babeu is winning the part of CD 1 in Pima County by more than 4,000 votes but losing Coconino County by almost 12,000 votes.

Trump  well, he ended up winning over the Republicans in a GOP-dominated state. I dont think its much more complicated than that.



My bedtime reading reminds me of the Russia connection, which worries me as much as anything about president-elect Trump. Ive never been to Russia but have known people from there, and I read book after book about the place. The last one, It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, makes the point that Russia never has come to terms with the crimes of its Soviet past.

In fact, under Vladimir Putin, the country has done the opposite: It has embraced the Soviet era as an expression of the Russian states natural greatness. Make Russia Great Again is a slogan that would fit perfectly there.

Trump supporters downplay the significance of his appreciation of Putin and the Russian efforts to interfere against Hillary Clinton. They shouldnt: These are deadly serious flaws that represent an un-American tendency toward totalitarianism.

Money wins

county board

The unprecedented spending on the Pima County Board of Supervisors race meant that money would win the board no matter who won.

A dark-money group led by land investor Don Diamond formed to defend Sharon Bronson and the Democratic majority. Their budget: $175,000. A PAC led by car dealer Jim Click and friends formed to elect a Republican majority. Their initial filing showed they raised $122,750.

Add to that nearly $300,000 total the amazing $231,468 Bronson raised for her own campaign. And add to that the $109,021 challenger Kim DeMarco raised for her campaign. Total with the outside spending: About $638,000  and control of the board stayed the same.



Poe Kem is enigmatic. He and his wife, Nina, are Cambodian refugees who run a shop, Alvernon Donuts, that harks back to the United States of the 1950s, an era before they even arrived. Swing and pre-rock pop play on the radio, sweet creations sit lined up under glass, patrons lounge on the hard, orange seats of a line of booths, drinking coffee out of informal mugs.

I visited Wednesday morning because I was thinking about Poe during the campaign, when Trump trash-talked refugees as a threat to American society. Poe had good news. Not only was his youngest daughter, Tavy, celebrating her 2nd birthday, but he is about to buy the property he has leased for 13 years.

Poe would never talk politics in his shop. Undoubtedly, his customers include many supporters of both Trump and Clinton. But the place itself is a rejection of the pessimistic view of immigration and foreigners. This is a refugee who has built an archetypal American refuge for Americans of all types.
If Rachael Sedgwick takes her place on the TUSD Governing Board dais in January, she will get noticed.

She would not only be the sole newcomer on the five-member volunteer board, it will be the moment Sedgwick could cement her place as the likely swing vote.

Sedgwick was winning the race for one of three governing board seats up for grabs in this years election, with the remaining two being retained by incumbents Mark Stegeman and Kristel Foster.

Sedgwick would fill the position held by Cam Juarez who failed in his effort for a second term. However, late Friday an updated vote count by the county showed Sedgwicks lead over her nearest opponent, Betts Putnam-Hidalgo, was getting more narrow. No major vote-count updates were expected over the weekend, county officials said Friday.

The departure of Juarez breaks up an alliance with Foster and Board President Adelita Grijalva who as a majority often voted against Stegeman and Michael Hicks.

The prospect of being stuck in the middle of the two camps is not overwhelming Sedgwick. In fact, she describes the role as pretty fabulous.

Typically as a brand new board member, I wouldnt have very much authority at all to make any change on a board, Sedgwick said. But the fact that there are two members each on either side means I get to be the swing vote, and I really get to consider things and decide according to my intellect and what I know is best and based on what parents, teachers and community members have shared with me.

I feel like it actually puts me in a pretty powerful spot.

Despite the power post, Sedgwick says she is not planning on joining any particular alliance. Still, she admits approving of the job being done by Stegeman over the last several years and says she disagrees on a number of issues with Foster and Grijalva.

Sedgwick says her commitment is to students and schools, not her fellow board members. And Sedgwick says she feels she can best serve parents by holding the district and its superintendent, H.T. Sanchez, accountable.

I feel like one of the most important things the school board does is to ask the superintendent the right questions and make sure he is focused on the things that are important to parents and students, Sedgwick said.

It is that sense of independence that Sanchez says he appreciates.

Throughout the race there were a couple of candidates that really maintained a separation from any other candidate, and she was one, Sanchez said.

I feel that shell be somebody who comes in, much like I did, as an outsider who will look at things and weigh them for what theyre worth and will ask questions. What strikes me is she is a law student, which speaks well to someone who will read through information, research information and make informed decisions.

Throughout the campaign season, there was talk of Sanchez looking to leave TUSD if the board majority changed. But Sanchez says he is not job hunting.

I have another year on my contract, and I intend to fulfill it, Sanchez said.

As long as were able to do work to move the district forward and improve all of the areas weve been working hard on  getting to unitary status, dealing with teacher recruitment and helping students improve their academics  as long as we can continue to work together to brainstorm solutions and solve those challenges, Im committed to continuing to work in the district.
World War II book sale honors vets

Bill Pennebaker spent the last year of his life dragging his caretaker to estate and library sales on the hunt for any book about World War II.

He was a man on a mission to support Tucsons 390th Memorial Museum.

On Veterans Day, the museum within the Pima Air and Space Museum, will launch a fundraiser selling the books that Pennebaker collected in Midland, Texas.

The museum honors veterans such as Pennebaker who served in World War II in the 390th Bomb Group that flew in the B-17 Flying Fortress out of England and over Europe, said Jodi Gonzales, director of development for the museum. Visitors can also see a restored B-17 and learn from docents, often veterans themselves.

Pennebakers daughter Mary Pennebaker Truitt, a former member of the museum board, accompanied her father to deliver a few hundred books in April.

In October, just days before Pennebaker's death at the age of 98, the family delivered another three boxes of books during the annual reunion of the 390th Bomb Group.

We still have four bookshelves, not fully loaded, but probably another 100 books in Midland, Truitt said, adding that her father read or skimmed every book he collected.

Pennebaker, who eventually became second in command of the 390th Bomb Group, also looked up online resale value and noted it inside each book, Gonzales added.

Charles Chuck Baker, 97, has attended the reunions of the 390th Bomb Group since the 1980s. In World War II, he flew over Normandy on D-Day. The museum reunions are a time of camaraderie and friendship.

At the last meeting only about a dozen veterans could make it. Baker came in from Los Altos, California.

Of Pennebaker's book sale, Truitt said it stemmed from his enjoyment of the reunions and "his passion for keeping the museum alive."

The book sale begins Friday, Nov. 11, when the museum opens at 10 a.m. and will continue until each book is sold.

Find the museum on the grounds of the Pima Air and Space Museum, 6000 E. Valencia Road.

Admission to the museum is included with paid entrance at the Pima Air and Space Museum.

For more information, visit 390th.org or call 574-0287.
A former Cochise County deputy arrested in a murder-for-hire conspiracy resigned from the agency last year after it was discovered he took prescription painkillers while on duty, documents show.

Israel Burkholder, 43, was arrested by the Sierra Vista Police Department Nov. 6, after an undercover investigation revealed he was trying to hire someone to kill a local man, said department spokesman Cpl. Tim Wachtel.

Burkholder quit his job at the Cochise County Sheriffs Office in March 2015, after spending 11 years with the force, according to documents obtained by the Arizona Peace Officers Standards and Training Board, the state agency that certifies law enforcement officers.

When an officer is found to have violated department policies, its mandatory the agency report the violations to the AZPOST.

On Wednesday, the AZPOST will review Burkholders case and decide if theres cause to initiate proceedings to revoke his peace officer certification.

The Sheriffs Office began an internal investigation in February 2015, after a deputy notified his sergeant that hed given Burkholder prescription pain pills while both men were on duty, documents show.

In December 2014, Burkholder told another deputy that he wasnt feeling well and was out of his prescription migraine medication, asking the man if he had any narcotic painkillers.

On two occasions, the coworker obliged, giving him oxycodone pills, but after the second time, he became uncomfortable and reported the situation up the chain of command, the documents show.

Investigators also interviewed a civilian employee who told them that hed given Burkholder Vicodin four times.
Rebecca Minors neon orange jacket isnt the only thing that sticks out on Mt. Bigelow on a chilly Friday morning in November. Boxes of wires, spinning wind gauges and a 100-foot-tall tower also grace the slopes of this patch of forest near Mt. Lemmon, part of the Critical Zone Observatory, or CZO, where Minor collects data for research at the University of Arizonas School of Geography.

In 2014, the National Science Foundation renewed five-year funding for the project, which brings together multiple scientific disciplines to study the soil and ecosystem on top of the Catalina Mountains. For this next round of funding, the project will focus more on human influence and how the ecosystem operates during a time of heavy human use. The new budget also accommodates more outreach and education, funding a CZO exhibit at the UA Flandrau Science Center.

Minor, research specialist for the UA School of Geography and Development, comes to the CZO weekly to maintain the research area and gather data. She is part of a team headed by Greg Barron-Gafford, research scientist and associate head of the School of Geography and Development.

The CZO allows researchers to focus on an ecosystem in the lower boundaries of the atmosphere, about as high up as you can see and are concerned with, said Barron-Gafford referencing the highest elevation that directly affects air we breathe, our water, soil, vegetation, trees and atmosphere.

"Where all those earth sciences come together, that's the critical zone," Barron-Gafford said. Mount Bigelows CZO is a complex ecosystem, a semi-arid environment with many dips and slopes, making it a challenging and invaluable source of data. Gathering the data in a complex environment takes time, said Barron-Gafford, but a lot can be learned about the global carbon cycle especially when scientists can go from desert to forest in 30 minutes.

"If you think about how climate is going to change in the future, places like Colorado might have temperatures and precipitation that look more like Arizonas current temperatures and precipitation, said Minor. So, we have a lot to offer the rest of the region because of research that we're doing on this forest in our area.

Scientists here gather data from plants, soil, wind and water and use a multitude of tools that measure rates of photosynthesis, water usage and carbon dioxide in the air. The massive scaffolding structure, known as the flux tower, rises high above the tree line and measures carbon dioxide and water in the atmosphere as invisible swirls of air run through its dizzyingly high sensors.
On July 27, Rijiju said in the Lok Sabha that the BJPs ideology on the uniform civil code should be taken as the country's ideology on the same. Basil Islam | TwoCircles.net NEW DELHI  Union Minister Kiren Rijijus recent remarks on implementing the uniform civil code have re-ignited the debate on the viability of a uniform civil code and its possible...
Help India!

By Vinay Bhat, TwoCircles.net

Linda Anouche a New York based anthropologist talks to Vinay Bhat about her upcoming documentary film Dreadlock Story which charts out the common cultural traits between Rastafaris in Jamaica and Hindus in India.

Support TwoCircles



Q. Tell us something about yourself

Linda: I was born in France and have since the past few years ended up in New York. I am an Anthropologist, and I have always been interested working among communities whose cultural history has been misunderstood. Documentaries are a great way of exhibiting cultural aspects. They perfectly complement anthropology. I have enjoyed the process of making this documentary Dreadlock Story, even though documentary making takes a lot of research and effort, and especially patience and tact when it comes to rebellious and religious people.







Q. What was your inspiration behind Dreadlock Story?

Linda: I have lived in the past with the Jains in India and keep working on Indian religions. I have also stayed in Jamaica and therefore got deeply acquainted with Jamaican culture. I always knew the connection between Rastafari and Hinduism because it seemed so obvious when we quickly examine both of them. There is also a historical aspect of connection between the Africans and Indians in the Caribbean. Indians and Africans met in the plantations. From this meeting, a unique culture emerged to express the mode of resistance against British oppression. Dreadlocks were one of the features of this new culture. I wanted to use the dreadlocks, the matted hair, as a tool to talk about this historical artifact. I wanted to open the window of this historical page through the medium of hair. Also because I am a woman I am taking greater pleasure in depicting this Rasta culture in giving a voice to women who embrace it. There are a lot of sexist aspects within this as well. Historically though without the African and Indian women Rasta culture would maybe not have existed.

DREADLOCKS STORY  Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign from Linda Ainouche on Vimeo.

Q. Tell me a little bit more about the history of Indians in the Caribbean.

The British moved Indians from all over the subcontinent without any discrimination of religions into these plantations. About in Jamaica, the census reported Hindus, Muslims, Christians, one Jain, and no Sikh, which does not mean that none was there either. In Kingston, the late Professor Ajai Mansingh is the first one who studied the connection between the Rastas and Indian culture and wrote a book called Home Away From Home: 150 years of Indian presence in Jamaica with his wife Laxmi Mansingh. She still lives in Kingston along with their son. I have done two very relevant interviews with both of them for the film. I find in my travels that many around the world know about the dreadlocks but are unaware of the connection between Rastas and Hindus. I find even the Jamaicans are not really unaware of their historical past. They are more akin to thinking of the connection with Africa but either through ignorance or their unwillingness to accept they do not associate themselves with Indian culture. This is normal in my mind. It is if I may say a human self-defense mechanism. Each of us takes all the credit for what we are convinced. At the same time, they speak about beliefs regarding Africa and notably Ethiopia while I speak about way of life turning to India. In certain ways, we do not even talk about the same thing!







Q. Were there any things that did not turn the way you wished in the documentary?

I spoke to everyone I wanted including Sadhus in India and Rastas in Jamaica, which was a very difficult job. I am pretty satisfied with the way things have turned out. So far, I have done my best to realize a feat with a very little budget. I have been working in 4 countries (India, Jamaica, France, USA) in 4 languages (Hindi, Jamaican Patois, French, English) with 4 local crews. Needless to say that my flexibility has been tested and sharpened.

Q. Did you observe the practice of caste among the Hindus in the area?

Linda: Most of the Indians in the Caribbean who have lived for generations have been forced to convert to Christianity. Also most of them who were brought to the Caribbean belonged to the same laboring classes. Due to this I have not observed the practice of caste at all.







Q. When does the film release and what is your hope from the film?

Linda: I am hoping it will release by the end of winter. There are many things that can come out from this film and it opens up other possibilities for me. But I am hopeful that it reaches as many people as possible and can educate them about the connections between Jamaican and Indian culture. I have been already invited by many universities and countries like India, Jamaica and even Italy. So I am hoping for the best.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to tell the readers?

Linda: In the coming days we will be launching a crowd funding campaign online to fund the post-production? For those who want to get involved they can take a look at Indiegogo  Dreadlocks Story (http://igg.me/p/590354/x/5402885)

Also interested people can follow the film on www.dreadlockstory.com

Linda Anouche can be contacted for questions at : [email protected]
The poppy, a symbol of remembrance. Every year, with winter looming and November beginning, the streets of England are dotted with veterans, their chests heavy in medals, groups of cadets in uniform and other well-meaning individuals all with the aim of selling poppies. The majority of people will tell you the same thing, we wear the poppies to remember our armed forces and the men and women, past and present, who have fought and died in service of the country.

But why has the poppy become a symbol of remembrance and when did it come about?

The 'Great War'

It started in Belgium, 1915. The fighting had ravaged the countryside around the city of Ypres, turning it into a hellish scene of corpses, boggy mud and water-filled craters. The city itself was nothing more than an empty broken shell; pocked walls stood unsupported where buildings once were and a despairing ragged stump stood where the cathedral had been just a year earlier. The location of Ypres made it strategically important to both the Germans and the Allies and two major offensives had already taken place previously, with each battle playing its own devastating role in the destruction of the city. Amongst the ruins, a Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was suffering with the recent loss of his friend as he one day eyed the surrounding fields, he noticed little red flowers, poppies, had started sprouting through the mud, despite the turmoil and chaos.

The defiance of the poppies inspired him to write a poem which he called In Flanders Fields.

From despair came hope

The poem inspired Moina Michael, an American academic, to make and sell silk poppies and in 1921, after the war was over, the newly formed Royal British Legion bought 9 million of them to sell, in the hope of using the money to help injured veterans with employment and housing.

They hit the streets on the 11th November 1921, on the three year anniversary of the armistice of 1918, the date that seen an end to the fighting in Europe, and they raised an astonishing 106,000, a lot of money in the day. The first ever poppy appeal was done.

These days, the act of remembrance is commonly done on the nearest Sunday to the 11th of November, the day of armistice.

Veterans, serving members of the forces and civilians alike all gather together for parades and silent contemplation in order to remember those that have fought and died for their country. Although it was originally aimed at those who lost their lives during the 'Great War', it has since become a day of respect for anyone who has served in the forces, past or present, living or not.

To me, the act of remembrance is important and one that shouldn't be taken lightly. Not just for the obvious reason of showing respect for those who have died fighting in wars; but to show gratitude for the freedom that we enjoy each day here in our part of the world. We are able to go on holidays abroad as we please, work, be educated, build a career, receive unemployment benefits when we're struggling, get free health care 24 hours a day and fully agree or disagree with who we want in politics, all without fear.

It's something that is sadly often overlooked and taken for granted these days. Our system is far from perfect but whether you agree or not, the rights and freedoms we do enjoy each day, were at least in part granted to us by the fact that men and women throughout our country's history, were willing to leave their homes and go to war. And for this, I am grateful.
Every year on 11th November UK commemorates the signing of Armistice which ended World War I. Europe observes Armistice Day on 11th November every year to remember and pay tribute to the sacrifices of their soldiers in the most epic war in the history of mankind i.e. the World War I.

Prince Harry and Prince Charles will be seen commemorating the Remembrance Day

Accordingly, Prince Harry will lay down a garland of flowers at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire and will also be seen reading the poem The Soldier by Rupert Brooke. Prince Charles who is currently touring the Middle East will attend the said ceremony in Bahrain.

The common man in Europe shall be observing the commemoration and paying tribute by dedicating two minutes of silence at war memorials which have been erected at public places. It is a very important day in not only Europes history but also for mankind since it was this day in 1918 when the guns went silent and the bloodshed of World War I finally came to an end with the end of the war between Germany and the forces on the Western Front.

The Poppy symbolism is highly misunderstood

It is informally known as the Poppy Day and the UK celebrates the Veteran Day on the same day as well. The red poppies came into the picture and got associated with the day through Canadian army officer John McCraes poem named In Flanders Field which has the mention of poppies blowing in its very first line.

Apparently, the Canadian officer wrote the poem after helping bury his own friend and after he noticed how poppies flourished around his grave. The poem thus presents a dead soldiers perspective on the bloodshed in the war. It was only in 1921 that his efforts to portray soldiers plight through his poems lead to the poppy being adopted as the official emblem of Remembrance.

It was adopted back then both by British and American Legions.

Though the attachment of poppy with the Remembrance Day is significant and touching, wearing poppies has over the years become more of a symbol of glorification of war and endorsement of the British Military powers. The British Legion also recently came out with a video named Rethink Remembrance to clear the air on the same and make the general public more aware of the symbolism and the hardships of the veterans.
On this Remembrance Day across the Commonwealth and within Britain itself, at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of the year the fallen soldiers of World War 1, and other wars are honored with parades, with poppies, with moments of silence and with respect. But for the forgotten soldiers of Southern Rhodesia, there is no official commemoration. The irony is that many good men - both Black and White died for their King in that horrendous war.

Small band of pioneers made their mark on the Western Front

Southern Rhodesia in the early 1900's was still a new nation, and numbers of men were not large.

In fact, when the first world war broke out in 1914 it was still under the administration of the British South Africa Company. They were a small band of pioneers and still settling into building the nation that started off as a dream in the mind of Cecil John Rhodes, but the colony's wartime contributions became a great source of pride to the country that later became Rhodesia and is now known as Zimbabwe.

Across the world small remnant bands of aging "Brothers in Arms" come together to remember their dead soldiers from the First World War, from Malaya, from the Second World War and from their own war. But you won't hear the Queen mention them, nor the leaders of other countries who remember their dead today.

They did their King and country proud over forty years before Rhodesia became a dirty name in world politics after Ian Smith unilaterally declared Rhodesia an Independent country in 1965.

Many Southern Rhodesians paid their own way to enlist

Immediately after the declaration of war Sir William Milton sent a wire to the UK Government saying that All Rhodesia stood...

ready to do its duty, " and they did. Many of the young men paid their own way to travel to England and enlist for the war. Many of them fought on the Western front where they were renowned for their marksmanship. Others served with the Royal Flying Corps, and the Rhodesia Regiment, the Rhodesia Native Regiment, and the British South Africa Police served in the African theater of the conflict, contributing to the South-West African and East African campaigns.

Forty percent of the male population went to fight for the King

Southern Rhodesian troops numbered 5,716 white men - in the region of 40 percent of the white male population of the country. More than 1500 of them served as commissioned officers. 2,507 black soldiers enlisted into The Rhodesia Native Regiment and 350 of them served in British and South African units. Over 800 Southern Rhodesians of all races lost their lives on operational service during the war, with many more seriously wounded.

Gallant soldiers - black white lie in the fields of the dead

The bones of both black and white lie today under the sands of the East African savanna, the deserts of Namibia, the clay of far away Europe.

As reveille rings out to sound the last call on Remembrance Day remember them. They left their homes, their families, their country and their hopes and dreams to fight for a King. But in the palaces and revered places, in the cathedrals and churches, only a few will say a prayer for them, or whisper "Rest in Peace, Gallant Soldiers."
About Me

I am an urban/commercial district revitalization and transportation/mobility advocate and consultant and a principal in BicyclePASS, a bicycle facilities systems integration firm, based in Washington, DC. Urban economic competitiveness is dependent on efficient transit and mixed use, compact places. Therefore, I end up writing mostly about mobility and urban design. While I am based in and write about Washington, DC issues, I try to write so that "universal lessons" are evident in the entries.

View my complete profile
In one of the biggest upsets in American political history, Donald Trump has been elected as the next President of the United States. Election 2016 has finally come to and end, which brings a whole new set of problems to the table.

Duke rises

It was shortly after 2:30 a.m. EST when Hillary Clinton made the phone call to the president-elect and officially conceded the race. As of press time, Trump has been awarded 288 electoral votes, passing the 270 needed for victory. The results come as a major shock to pollsters, political pundits and politicians in Washington, D.C.

who never thought Trump would walk out the winner. When Trump announced his campaign over a year and a half ago, he did so by labeling illegal immigrants from Mexico as "rapists" and "murderers." Since that time, Trump has attracted support from members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other controversial groups. As reported by The Huffington Post on November 9, a former KKK leader celebrated the victory.

Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke expressed his support for Trump early during the primary.

The billionaire real estate mogul came under-fire for not disavowing the endorsement for close to a week, leading to instant backlash. Other white supremacists have come out to cheer Trump on, and he was just endorsed by the offical KKK newspaper last week.

#BREAKING Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump to concede defeat in the presidential election, CNN and NBC report https://t.co/WMRWFIbTqy  USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 9, 2016

Taking to his offical Twitter account early Wednesday morning, Duke expressed his joy.

"GOD BLESS DONALD TRUMP! It's time to do the right thing, it's time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!!!," Duke tweeted, before using the hashtags, "#MAGA #AmericaFirst #LockHerUp #GodBlessAmerica." In a follow-up message, Duke called Trump's victory "one of the most exciting nights of my life."

This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MAGA pic.twitter.com/HvJyiJYuVa  David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) November 9, 2016

Election reaction

The reaction to the election results are as expected.

For Trump supporters, it was a collective celebration of vindication. For those who oppose the former host of "The Apprentice," the night ended in heartbreak, fear, and uncertainty. The idea of a Trump presidency was initially met as a joke or a fantasy, which quickly became a reality on election night. Most of the big swing states that were expected to go to Clinton swung the other way. Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all shocked voters and landed in the hands of Trump as he makes preparations to move into the White House.
New dumping criteria opposed Updated: 2016-11-11 03:15 By Zhong Nan,Fu Jing(China Daily)

Beijing urges EU to drop calculation proposal that won't treat China as a full market economy

Beijing has urged the European Union to drop its proposed use of new criteria in calculating dumping, which may not recognize the full market economy status that has been granted to China by nearly 100 countries.

Ministry of Commerce spokesman Shen Danyang said on Thursday that the new method proposed by the European Commission would continue its practice of not treating China as a full market economy regarding China's foreign trade activities.

"These new measures have no basis in (World Trade Organization) rules, and are likely to be taken as the tools of trade protection. China thinks that countries have different economic development modes and economic management modes because of different national conditions, development phases and cultural traditions," said Shen.

In Wednesday's proposal, Brussels introduced the concept of "market distortions" for calculating dumping. The European Commission said several criteria will be considered, such as state policies and influence, the widespread presence of state-owned enterprises, discrimination that favors domestic companies and the independence of the financial sector.

The European Commission submitted the proposed amendment on protection against dumped imports to the European Council and the European Parliament on Wednesday.

Chi Fulin, president of the China Institute of Reform and Development, said the proposal has indicated that the European Commission is "backsliding and playing a dangerous game" in dealing with the China-EU relationship.

"This has long been debated between China and Europe, but the European Commission's proposal, against a backdrop of rising protectionism in the West, is damaging and unwise," Chi said. "I think the European Commission should withdraw this before it enters the approval process."

Pierre Defraigne, executive director of The Madariaga  College of Europe Foundation, a Brussels think tank, said the EU should have treated China as a market economy at an earlier date, but it has failed due to its longtime policy of following the United States regarding China policy.

"I have long called on the EU to treat China as a market economy, but it is regretful that it has not shown such political vision as of today," Defraigne said.

Ministry of Commerce spokesman Shen said: "These new measures have no basis within the WTO framework and are likely to be taken as the tools of trade protection.

"We urge the EU to use the common WTO practices and rules in the anti-dumping calculation," he said.

Shen said the EU has a responsibility to take the lead in abiding by WTO rules, to fulfill international obligations, to use trade remedy measures properly and to avoid sending wrong signals of trade protectionism to the world.

If the EU insists on the proposed calculation method, "China will reserve all the necessary means to protect its rights," Shen said.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Thursday that the EU is the "core member" of the WTO and a champion in advocating multilateral trade and free trade.

"We hope the EU will fulfill its WTO obligations in a timely manner, completely and utterly, in a bid to protect the order of the international trade system and further boost Sino-EU relations," Lu said.

Contact the writers at fujing@chinadaily.com.cn
Xi's visit to Ecuador, Peru, Chile to bring development deals Updated: 2016-11-11 06:52 By AN BAIJIE(China Daily)

China will sign agreements with Ecuador, Peru and Chile in areas including trade, investment, finance and nuclear power during President Xi Jinping's third trip to Latin America next week, according to the Foreign Ministry.

China attaches great importance to the development potential of Latin America despite the region's slow economic growth in recent years amid global sluggishness, Vice-Foreign Minister Wang Chao told a news conference on Thursday.

Xi will make state visits to the three countries beginning Nov 17. He will also attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders meetings in Lima, Peru, as part of the weeklong trip.

While in Ecuador, Xi will talk with President Rafael Correa, meet with reporters, attend launch ceremonies for Chinese-assisted projects and witness the signing of agreements, Wang said. It will be the first visit by a Chinese president to Ecuador since diplomatic ties were established 36 years ago.

Zhang Xiangchen, a senior official at the Ministry of Commerce, said China will announce assistance plans and issue loans to Ecuador during the president's visit.

China will offer to help with rebuilding work, including the construction of hospitals, houses and roads in the country, which was hit by a strong earthquake in April, Zhang said. China has already provided $2 million as well as $60 million worth of materials for quake relief, he added.

China will also initiate negotiations with Chile over expanding the free trade agreement that was signed 11 years ago, Wang said.

Since becoming president in March 2013, Xi has visited Latin America twice, going to Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico in 2013 and Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba in 2014.

China is the largest trade partner of Peru and Chile and the third-largest of Ecuador, and is the main investment source for the three countries. Last year, China's direct investment in Latin America reached $126.3 billion.

Although China's trade volume with Latin America dropped last year, Latin America's agricultural exports to China increased last year, Wang said.

Xu Shicheng, a researcher of Latin American studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that China-Latin America trade volume dropped in recent years due to the price decrease of commodities like crude oil and minerals.

Latin America needs China's support in building infrastructure, factories and hydropower stations, he said.

China's capacity in steel, manufacturing and equipment could be exported to Latin American countries to benefit both sides, he added.

Zou Shuo contributed to this story.
First Chinese named as new Interpol chief Updated: 2016-11-11 07:25 By Zhang Yan(China Daily)

Meng Hongwei has been elected president of Interpol.[Photo/China Daily]

A senior Chinese public security official was elected president of the International Criminal Police Organization on Thursday, a move that gives the country another leading spot in an international agency.

Vice-Minister of Public Security Meng Hongwei was chosen for a four-year term during Interpol's 85th members' meeting in Indonesia, becoming the first Chinese to take the post. His predecessor was Mireille Ballestrazzi of France.

Meng promised in a speech to work together with all member states of Interpol to build the international group into a stronger platform for global police cooperation.

Meng said he will also improve coordination among regional and global police forces with a view to building a safer world and a more efficient Interpol that will benefit all member states.

Interpol, which was founded in 1914, has 190 members, making it the second-largest international organization after the United Nations. Its headquarters are in Lyon, France.

"China highly values the role of Interpol and is willing to shoulder more responsibility and make a bigger contribution in pushing forward global law enforcement and security cooperation," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Thursday while congratulating Meng on his new role.

Yu Chengtao, a senior official from the Public Security Ministry's International Cooperation Bureau, said Meng got rich experience in international law enforcement while serving as vice-minister.

With Meng as the new head of Interpola capacity in which he must maintain a neutral stance and respect the sovereignty of countriesChina will be more active in promoting international judicial cooperation and fighting transnational crime, Yu said.

China has worked closely with Interpol in recent years. Last year, Interpol released "red notices", similar to international arrest warrants, for China's 100 most-wanted fugitives suspected of corruption. At least one-third of them have been brought back to China so far.

Meng's new Interpol post shows China is playing a bigger role on the international stage, said Hong Daode, a criminal law professor at China University of Political Science and Law.

"China has spared no efforts in offering judicial assistance to other countries in fighting cross-border crimes such as terrorism, human trafficking, drug smuggling and cybercrime," he said. "These efforts have left a strong impression on the international community and won their respect and support."

Other Chinese nationals holding senior positions in world organizations include Zhang Tao, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Li Yong, director-general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

Xinhua and Reuters contributed to this story.
Xi calls for strong, modern military logistics Updated: 2016-11-11 07:32 (Xinhua)

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), speaks at a CMC meeting on logistics, in Beijing, capital of China. The meeting was held from Wednesday to Thursday in Beijing. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - President Xi Jinping has called for the building of strong and modern logistics forces that will guarantee the realization of the Chinese dream as well as the dream of a strong army.

Xi, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), made the remarks at a CMC meeting on logistics held from Wednesday to Thursday.

Xi praised the logistics forces' contributions to the country's revolution, construction and reform periods, urging logistics staff to strengthen a sense of responsibility to achieve "leapfrog development" and secure a foundation for the construction of a leading military.

"As the international military competition situation experiences profound changes, and national interests and military missions develop, logistical construction is becoming an increasingly crucial factor that affects wins or losses in battle... and occupies a key place in the development of the Party, the country and the military," Xi noted.

"We must build a logistics force in which everything exists for fighting a war. It must always remain true to the fundamental purpose of helping win a war," Xi said.

Stressing strategic planning and guidance, Xi called for more efforts to research logistics theories and innovation while solving problems that hold back logistics development.

The president urged Party committees and military commanders at all levels to attach great importance to military logistics work, with a focus on the reform of logistics policies and optimization of structures and distribution.

Xi called for scientific and economic management of logistics work, urging military funds and resources to be subjected to centralized and unified management, allocation and use.

According to Xi, more efforts should be made to use state-level resources and enlist the help of local governments as well as social groups and individuals to develop a series of innovation projects that cater to both military and civilian uses.

Since the CPC's 18th National Congress in late 2012, Xi has attached great importance to logistics work. Xi met with attendees of a PLA meeting on logistics in November 2013. In September 2016, Xi conferred flags to joint logistics units as the CMC established a joint logistics support force.

Xi asked logistics staff to push forward their work in line with the requirements of comprehensive and strict Party governance.

Xi also called for efforts to prioritize ideological and political construction and remain determined in fighting corruption in the army and clearing up the bad influence of Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou.

The president urged the military to stay clear-minded and safeguard the authority of the CPC Central Committee and the command of the CPC Central Committee and the CMC, asking them to strengthen intra-Party supervision.

Xi also urged efforts to build strong logistics forces by fostering high-quality talent.

CMC vice chairmen Fan Changlong and Xu Qiliang attended the meeting.
Playing the waiting game Updated: 2016-11-11 07:45 By Zhang Yu(China Daily)

As Singles Day rolls around once again, some young people are employing extreme measures to resist family pressure to marry in haste. Zhang Yu reports from Shijiazhuang.

Having seen the pressures Chinese parents bring to bear on their unmarried offspring, Jeremiah Christie said falling in love with a Chinese woman could become an unnerving experience.

The 30-year-old United States national, who has lived and worked in China for four years, has had relationships with local women but none lasted long. Being unmarried at his age means he has been relegated to the category of a "leftover" in the eyes of many Chinese.

"People are surprised when I tell them I'm not married and don't have any kids," Christie said, adding that the surprise expressed made him feel shy.

As an English teacher at Hebei Normal University in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei - the province that effectively surrounds Beijing - Christie started to become aware of the pressure applied by the "normally, you should not be single by now" philosophy when he turned 27.

That was because he had reached an age when most people in China are either married or are in the process of getting hitched.

A recent report published by the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed that 39.4 percent of the couples who married last year were aged between 25 and 29.

Christie said he felt that 27 was an appropriate age for marriage - not just in China, but in most places around the world. However, he was incredulous and saddened that young single people in China come under extreme pressure from their parents if they fail to marry at the "appropriate" age.

Parental pressure

Eighty-six percent of single people ages 25 to 35 face parental pressures to marry as quickly as possible, according to a report released by a health development center run by the China Working Committee for the Care of the Next Generation earlier this year.

These people have usually been educated to a high level and work in a different city to their parents. Every time the parents call, they ask questions their children have come to dread, such as "have you found a boyfriend/girlfriend?" and "when do you plan to marry?"

It's easy for the children to dodge questions over the phone, but there's no way of avoiding the inevitable queries when they visit their parents during the holidays.

Moreover, parents often make full use of the holidays to arrange as many xiangqin - blind dates - for their children as possible.

Blind dates

Zhang Cui was forced to go on five blind dates during the Dragon Boat Festival, a three-day holiday in June.

The 28-year-old works in Beijing, while her parents live in Dongquancheng village in Shijiazhuang.

"My single status at the age of 28 is hard for my parents to bear," said Zhang, adding that most people her age who still live in the village have been married for at least two years, and many have already started their own families.

"In their eyes, I'm already a leftover woman who will find it hard to meet someone to marry," she said, referring to her parents. "But the dates they arranged were no good; the men were usually unsuitable and for me the success rate was zero."

The pressure can become so intense that some young single people, driven to despair by the endless nagging and frequent xiangqin, will try every means to avoid phone calls from their parents or try to avoid returning home, even during public holidays which are usually devoted to family reunions.

Some even "rent" partners - total strangers - to go home with them during Spring Festival or the Mid-autumn Festival, just to assuage their parents and relatives.

Zhang refuses to rent a boyfriend, calling the idea "absurd". Instead, she opts to travel for the duration of the holidays: "It's not that I don't want to find a life partner, I'm just waiting for the right person."

She said she has learned from the experience of her older sister, who rushed into marriage with a man her parents thought would make a suitable match.

The union ended after just a year, when Zhang's sister found herself in an intolerable situation because of frequent arguments with her husband.

Despite the failure of the marriage, Zhang's parents still believe that it is better to marry at the perceived "correct time" than to be left out.

Even though Zhang finds it hard to disobey her parents, she refuses to concede to their wishes because she doesn't want to become a potential divorcee.

In the past decade, marital breakdown has become more prevalent in China. Last year, more than 3.8 million couples divorced, a rise of 5.6 percent from the previous year, while the number that married fell by 6.3 percent to about 12 million, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Song Qingjia, a psychologist who has worked extensively in Beijing and Hebei, said 30 percent of his customers consult him about marital problems, 10 percent of which are caused by rushed marriages.
China commemorates 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen Updated: 2016-11-11 11:06 (Xinhua)

A gathering to commemorate the 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen is held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 11, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said on Friday the best tribute to Sun Yat-sen is to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that Sun had dreamed of, at a gathering to commemorate the 150th birthday of Sun.

"The best way we commemorate Sun Yat-sen is to learn and carry forward the invaluable spirit of his, to unite all that can be united and mobilize all that can be mobilized to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of," Xi, who is also Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in a speech.

Born in 1866, Sun Yat-sen was the founder of the Kuomintang Party, and is a revered revolutionary leader who played a pivotal role in overthrowing imperial rule in China.
Safeguard national unity, Xi urges Updated: 2016-11-12 04:26 By AN BAIJIE(China Daily)

President honors Sun Yat-sen as hero, calls on all Chinese to work for country's rejuvenation

President Xi Jinping pledges to safeguard national unity and fight separatists at a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday to mark the 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen. Photo by Li Tao / Xinhua

President Xi Jinping sent a strong signal of safeguarding national unity and fighting separatists at a high-profile ceremony on Friday to mark the 150th birthday of a statesman who was widely respected by people on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan.

"We will never allow any people, organization or political party, at any time, in any way, to split from China any part of its territory," Xi said during an hourlong speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Sun Yat-sen played a pivotal part in the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the imperial rule of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and founded the Republic of China. He also was the founder of the Kuomintang, which governed Taiwan from the 1940s to 1990s and from 2008 to last year.

"We will never tolerate a reoccurrence of the tragedy of national separation," Xi said, adding that China had experienced a century of misery resulting from separation.

Wang Hailiang, a researcher at the Taiwan Research Institute in Shanghai, said that Xi spoke at a time when Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which takes an ambiguous position toward the one-China policy, is trying to erase Sun's influence on the island.

The DPP's move goes against Sun's last wish to unify China, as well as against a historic trend, he said.

Zhu Lijia, a professor of public administration research at the Chinese Academy of Governance, said that national unity is the core of Sun's thought, since he opposed all forms of separation.

Zhu said Taiwan's ruling party is "not enthusiastic" about Sun.

Xi, who called Sun a national hero and compatriot, said the revolutionary leader was a firm supporter of national unity.

The mainland would like to communicate with all political parties, organizations and people in Taiwan, as long as they acknowledge that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, he said.

The president called on all Chinese people, including those in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, regardless of their political affiliations, to make joint efforts for national rejuvenation, a goal to which Sun was dedicated.

"Mr Sun Yat-sen said, 'What is the biggest issue for a people? That is, to know how to love the nation'," Xi quoted him as saying.

Yu Zhengsheng, chairman of China's top political advisory body, said that Xi's speech showed China's "solemn stance and firm determination" to safeguard national unity.

Hung Hsiu-chu, chairwoman of Taiwan's Kuomintang, visited the mainland early this month.

During the trip, Xi met with her and made a six-point proposal on cross-Straits relations that included opposing "Taiwan independence" and promoting social and economic cooperation across the Straits.

Zou Shuo contributed to this story.
Will EU's new trade rules be fair and transparent? Updated: 2016-11-11 07:52 (China Daily)

British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the EU summit in Brussels, Belgium, October 20, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

It is unreasonable and regretful that the European Union, China's largest trade partner, is proposing to modify its anti-dumping and anti-subsidy regulations rather than granting China market economy status next month as it should.

Without market economy status, China risks being targeted repeatedly by other World Trade Organization members in anti-dumping cases because its export costs can be calculated using prices in a third country as a benchmark.

So far, China, as the world's largest trading nation, has been duly granted market economy status by about 150 economies, of which nearly 100 are WTO members.

But despite China having the right to market economy status 15 years after it joined the WTO, the EU seems intent on not granting China that status in mid-December as it ought to. Instead, in a sort of halfway house to fulfill its obligation to international trade rules, it is proposing to modify its anti-dumping and anti-subsidy regulations.

The proposal put forward by the European Commission says that in general the normal reference value in dumping cases involving WTO members would be the domestic prices. But if there are "significant distortions" affecting domestic prices as well, investigators can instead use international benchmark prices.

The commission says it will issue reports identifying such distortions in certain countries or certain sectors.

The commission insists the new measures are country-neutral. But as they come just one month before the Dec 11 expiration of provisions in the protocol on China's accession to the WTO that would require its members to end the "surrogate country system", under which the cost data of production in a third country are used to calculate the value of products from China, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are intended to target Chinese products.

Beijing is interpreting the proposal as meaning the EU plans to cancel China's non-market economy status, but without completely nullifying China's surrogate country status.

From the EU's perspective, building higher trade barriers against competitive Chinese products may seem necessary. Economic recovery is slow across the EU, and many of its members are still deep in debt.

But protectionism is not the solution.

Beijing remains steadfast in opposing the use of trade remedy measures, preferring to pursue a stable and fair trade environment through talks and negotiations. That is the way to ensure healthy trade between China and the EU in the long run.
A sampling of Tibet comes to Houston Updated: 2016-11-11 12:34 By May Zhou in Houston(China Daily USA)

If Texans can't go to the mountains, then why not bring the mountains to Texas?

A delegation from Tibet shared their history, life and culture through discussions, a photo exhibition, film, dance and music performance with Houston residents on Wednesday, at the University of Houston, University of St. Thomas and the Asia Society Texas Center (ASTC).

Titled Experience China: US Tour of West Region Culture, the exchange was a collaboration between China's state council's information office, the Consulate General of China in Houston and the ASTC.

At the University of Houston, five speakers from the delegation presented various topics related to Tibet. The panel consisted of professors, officials responsible for economic development in Tibet and a Tibetan living Buddha.

Topics ranged from Tibet's natural wonders available for tourism and Buddhist monks day-to-day life in the temple to the current economic state of the region.

The Third Pole, a film showcasing Tibet and the Tibetan Plateau, was screened for students and faculty.

At the University of St. Thomas, political science scholars and members of the US-China Friendship Association exchanged information with members of the delegation, touching on topics such as the potential for healthcare collaborations and the diversity of Tibet's religions.

"All religions are regarded equal in Tibet," said Dawaciren, a Tibetan living Buddha. "There are Christian churches and Islamic temples in Tibet, and there is interaction between them and Tibetan Buddhism."

The photo exhibition at ASTC drew a large crowd.

Charles Foster, a member of ASTC's board, said, "The exhibition is very colorful and impressive. I have been to Lhasa and it was a special trip of a lifetime. We enjoyed it thoroughly. A picture is worth a thousand words and they really showed the grandeur of that part of the world."

Lu Guangjin, director of the state council's information office and head of the delegation, said that the exchange was a result of an agreement reached by the heads of China and US.

"We came when the US was electing a new president, which made this a more special occasion," Lu said. "It's has been a few decades since Deng Xiaoping put on a cowboy hat in Texas. The US-China relationship has experience rainy days and sunshine, but there has been more sunshine. Today we bring part of west region's culture to our friends here. We hope this helps them better understand China's culture."

Consul General of China in Houston Li Qiangmin welcomed the audience, saying he had visited China's west region many times.

"It shares similarities with Texas with its vast open spaces, different ethnicities working together and fast economic growth," Li said. "You get a sense of its immense beauty from the performances, the photos and film."

Experience China is a program presented by the information office of the State Council. Since it started in 1999, it has visited more than 40 countries.

Tiffany Wang in Houston contributed to the story.

mayzhou@chinadailyusa.com
A filmmaker explores the magic of the Yangtze River

For Chinese people, the Yangtze River doesn't just exist physically, it is a river of time. It exists in China's history, said Yang Chao, director and scriptwriter of the new film Crosscurrent.

A blend of water imagery, fantasy, poetry and history, the award-winning film is now showing in the US.

It all happens along the ever-flowing Yangzte, from the megalopolis of Shanghai to the snow-capped mountains of Tibet, where Gao Chun sails his cargo ship up the Yangtze, going back in time and becoming more and more intrigued by An Lu, a beautiful woman who appears in different guises at each port.

After passing a pagoda that still echoes with the Buddha's voice, a flooded town reappears alongside the Three Gorges Dam and other transformed places - after which he finally arrives at the source of the Yangtze, where the secret of An Lu is finally revealed.

Filmed by Mark Lee Ping-Bing, Crosscurrent won the Silver Bear Award for cinematography at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in February.

Yang has said that the Yangtze River has been portrayed by countless artists and writers for centuries. What he has tried to capture is the grandiose, supernatural and sublime side of the Yangtze that belonged to the Tang and Song dynasties.

"A daring mix of realism and lyrical fantasy," commented CineVue. "Rarely has China's explosive economic growth been captured with such grace and with such a heavy heart."

"Strongly affecting landscapes that seem to leap out of Chinese painting," said Hollywood Reporter.

Born in 1974 in Xinyang in Central China's Henan province, the director has had a special affinity with water since a very young age. He still remembers how he envied people who played in the river flowing through his hometown because he didn't know how to swim.

He didn't do well in the gaokao (China's college entrance exam), so he spent a year in a transitional program at the Wuhan Railway Television College and got into Beijing Film Academy.

At the time, the hallway outside of his classroom had a view of the Yangtze. Seeing such a grand river deeply impressed Yang and he became obsessed with the wide surface of the water.

After becoming a director, Yang first shot the Yangtze River in two scenes from his 2004 film Passages. He then decided his next film might be about the Yangtze.

In 2005, Yang started writing a draft and shooting footage of the Yangtze, even though he didn't have a clear story in mind.

But by the end of 2008, when Yang traveled to the Yangtze River again, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

He dropped everything and started working on the script. By 2010, he had been through seven rounds of rewrites.

The first round of production started in January 2012 and lasted 63 days.

Sailing through the ages, the new film Crosscurrent takes viewers to a China few people ever get to see. Stills from the film Crosscurrent . Photos Provided to China Daily

In the finished film, 80 percent of the scenes were shot on the Yangtze River, even though shooting while sailing on the river was more challenging than Yang originally thought it would be.

The crew used three ships: The Guangde, the cargo ship shown in the movie, a second ship for the cameras to shoot from and a third ferry that the cast and crew lived on.

"We set off from Shanghai (where the Yangtze flows into the East China Sea). Everyday, we just stopped the cargo ship somewhere along the river, shot some footage, sailed away and repeated," Yang recalled. "In this manner we shot the script in chronological order and sailed all the way to Yibin. We all found the trip to be a very special experience."

The film was shot in winter, because Yang wanted to show a stern-looking Yangtze in cold colors like those in traditional Chinese paintings.

"It was freezing on the Yangtze River in January. We had to get heat from burning fuel on the cargo ship. That drove our producer crazy. He would turn off the heat after midnight. Then someone would wake up shouting 'It's freezing!' around 2 in the morning," Yang said.

It costs a lot to shoot on the water. The crew ran out of money around Luzhou and was dismissed there.

In November 2013, with the additional investment they got, Yang spent 20 days shooting more footage, including the snowy mountains of Tibet, which is the source of Yangtze River.

After three rounds of editing, the film was shown in Berlin in February.

After returning to China, the team spent more funds to rescan the film and make a 4K version.

"It shows the audience a China they have never seen before," said Yang.

xiaohong@chinadailyusa.com
Tibet comes to Houston Updated: 2016-11-11 10:04 By May Zhou(chinadaily.com.cn)

Tibetan dancer Zewangluo performs Dancing Bells at Asia Society Texas Center.[Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

If Texans can't go to the mountains, then why not bring the mountains to Texas?

A delegation from Tibet shared their history, life and culture through discussions, a photo exhibition, film, dance and music performance with Houston residents on Wednesday, at the University of Houston, University of St. Thomas and the Asia Society Texas Center (ASTC).

Titled Experience China: US Tour of West Region Culture, the exchange was a collaboration between China's state council's information office, the Consulate General of China in Houston and the ASTC.

At the University of Houston, five speakers from the delegation presented various topics related to Tibet. The panel consisted of professors, officials responsible for economic development in Tibet and a Tibetan living Buddha.

Topics ranged from Tibet's natural wonders available for tourism and Buddhist monks day-to-day life in the temple to the current economic state of the region.

The Third Pole, a film showcasing Tibet and the Tibetan Plateau, was screened for students and faculty.

At University of St. Thomas, political science scholars and members of the US-China Friendship Association exchanged information with members of the delegation, touching on topics such as the potential for healthcare collaborations and the diversity of Tibet's religions.

Tibet Living Buddha Dawaciren (right) presents a hada to Hans Stockton, director of the Center of International Studies at University of St. Thomas, while Lu Guangjin (left), director from the Information Office of the State Council, looks on.[Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

"All religions are regarded equal in Tibet," said Dawaciren, a Tibetan living Buddha. "There are Christian churches and Islamic temples in Tibet, and there is interaction between them and Tibetan Buddhism."

The photo exhibition at ASTC drew a large crowd.

Charles Foster, a member of ASTC's board, said, "The exhibition is very colorful and impressive. I have been to Lhasa and it was a special trip of a lifetime. We enjoyed it thoroughly. A picture is worth a thousand words and they really showed the grandeur of that part of the world."

Lu Guangjin, director of the state council's information office and head of the delegation, said that the exchange was a result of an agreement reached by the heads of China and US.

"We came when the US was electing a new president, which made this a more special occasion," Lu said. "It's has been a few decades since Deng Xiaoping put on a cowboy hat in Texas. The US-China relationship has experience rainy days and sunshine, but there has been more sunshine. Today we bring part of west region's culture to our friends here. We hope this helps them better understand China's culture."

Consul General of China in Houston Li Qiangmin welcomed the audience, saying he had visited China's west region many times.

"It shares similarities with Texas with its vast open spaces, different ethnicities working together and fast economic growth," Li said. "You get a sense of its immense beauty from the performances, the photos and film."

After the photo exhibition reception, the audience watched a performance by Tibetans Zewangluo and Zuoni and the film The Third Pole.

Experience China is a program presented by the information office of the State Council. Since it started in 1999, it has visited more than 40 countries.

Tiffany Wang in Houston contributed to the story.
Kiev denies Russian report on Ukrainian saboteurs' detention in Crimea Updated: 2016-11-11 14:22 (Xinhua)

Dmytro Shtyblikov, a member of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's sabotage group, suspected of planning attacks on military sites in Crimea, is being detained by Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, Nov 10. [Photo/IC]

KIEV - The Ukrainian Defense Ministry on Thursday denied a statement by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) on the detention of Ukrainian saboteurs in Crimea.

"It is another story faked by Russian special services aimed at hiding their own intolerable actions against residents of the peninsula and at discrediting Ukraine in the eyes of the international community," said a statement on the ministry's website.

Earlier in the day, the FSB said in a statement that on Wednesday it has detained a group of armed saboteurs in the southwestern Crimean city of Sevastopol, who allegedly were members of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's intelligence forces.

The armed men, who were arrested with weapons and explosive devices, were plotting terror attacks on the peninsula's military infrastructure and utility facilities, the FSB said.

The incident marked another row between Kiev and Moscow over the detention of the alleged saboteurs.

In August, Russia said it had prevented several groups of Ukrainian intelligence officers from invading Crimea, a claim which Kiev denied.

The autonomous republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol were absorbed into Russia in March 2014 following a referendum, which was recognized by Moscow but rejected by Kiev.
Americans want to change presidential election system Updated: 2016-11-11 15:24 (Sputnik)

According to a new Sputnik.Polls survey, the majority of Americans (60%) want to change the electoral system in the United States. Moreover, almost half of Americans (45%) believe that they should change to a "one man - one vote" system. The survey was conducted by research company TNS UK for Sputnik News Agency and Radio.

When asked, "Do you agree with the current voting system in the United States?", 15% of Americans said that they want to move to a new voting process, which would include the principles of the current system with a "one man - one vote" element. Only 22% of Americans said that they believe the system should remain unchanged, 16% answered "dont know", and 2% suggested other options.

The US president is elected by the Electoral College, consisting of 538 electors. The number of electors each state has corresponds to the number of Senators and Congressmen and women from each state. This number also includes three electors from the District of Columbia. To win, a presidential candidate must receive 270 electoral votes.

The survey was commissioned by Sputnik News Agency and Radio and conducted by TNS UK research company from 3 to 7 November 2016 in the United States. A total of 1012 respondents aged 18 to 64 years took a the survey. The results were weighted to reflect the population in terms of sex, age, and geography. The maximum sampling error for the data in the whole country is was +/- 3.1% at a confidence level of 95 percent.
Australia poised to sign refugee deal with United States: media Updated: 2016-11-11 15:33 (Xinhua)

SYDNEY - Asylum seekers and refugees housed at Australia's offshore immigration detention centers could soon be on their way to the United States, local media reported Friday, though government officials remain tight lipped.

While the number of asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat pales in comparison to those seeking refuge in Europe, the nation's harsh immigration policies adopted in 2013 dictate they will never reach the mainland.

Asylum seekers instead are turned back to their origin at sea, or shipped to one of two offshore processing centers on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island or the Pacific island state of Nauru.

Australia has been in negotiations with third countries to resettle refugees from Nauru and Manus Island, however they remain protracted. Local media has reported New Zealand and Costa Rica are possibilities.

The Australian Newspaper on Friday reported a deal that would see the some 1800 asylum seekers and refugees housed at its controversial processing centers resettled in the United States is poised to be announced.

Asked about the report at an Australian parliamentary committee hearing, Australian Customs and Border Protection Service chief Michael Pezzullo declined to confirm the US was the destination.

"We are working actively on those (third country settlement) arrangements ... today we are closer than what we were yesterday," Pezzullo said, declaring a public interest immunity on providing exact locations.

Third country resettlement has become a controversial topic in local politics after Australia made a 55 million Australian dollar (41.88 million US dollar) deal with Cambodia to resettle refugees from its controversial centers. That deal has all but failed after only six refugees took up the offer, with local media reporting four have decided to return to their home countries.

Australia in September signed an agreement with the United States to resettle a group of Costa Ricans, however officials denied it could amount to a people swap with those housed in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru.

Australia is also facing a renewed challenge in PNG's supreme court after refugee lawyer Ben Lomai re-filed applications for 302 refugees to be returned to Australia with monetary compensation after it was originally dismissed on technical grounds.

The application is designed to right a wrong after the nation's highest court in April ruled the original Memorandum of Understanding establishing the Manus Island centers as unconstitutional, Lomai said. The court ruled asylum seekers entering PNG were doing so against their will and having their freedom of movement hindered despite not breaking local laws.

PNG has become less enthusiastic to host the controversial Manus Island processing center over the past few years over attacks to its reputation and the fact it can ill-afford the cost of refugee resettlement.
Amazon moves in on rival Alibaba's big day Updated: 2016-11-11 12:05 By Paul Welitzkin in New York(China Daily USA)

Jack Ma (right) applauds as a giant screen shows Alibaba's sales passing 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion) within seven minutes of the start of China's Singles Day online sale on Nov 11. Shen Bohan / Xinhua

As Alibaba's Singles Day shopping spree unfolded on Friday, the focus was on numbers: For consumers, it was the selling price. For analysts, it was how many orders did Alibaba process and what were the total sales.

And there was a major participant to watch: Amazon Inc, America's biggest e-commerce company and a rival to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, and how it fares in what has become the Chinese version of "Black Friday" - the huge sales day after Thanksgiving in the US.

To jumpstart its business in the mainland, late last month Amazon launched its Prime membership program that targets Alibaba and other rivals like JD.com. According to iResearch, Amazon has less than 1.5 percent of the market, and to reach the market, it launched a store on Alibaba's Tmall last year.

The Prime program, which will cost about 188 yuan ($27.83) for the first year in a discounted introductory promotion, will offer Chinese consumers unlimited domestic shipping and free international shipping with a minimum purchase of 200 yuan. Alibaba and JD.com Inc offer free shipping but mainly for domestic transactions.

Michael Zakkour, vice-president of the China and Asia practice at global consultants Tompkins International, said the introduction of Prime is not just focused on competing with Alibaba, JD and others for market share.

"This is an aggressive move on Amazon's part in its quest to become the first truly global e-commerce platform. That is where the real competition between Alibaba and Amazon lies. They both want the global consumer. They both want 2 billion customers. Amazon wants to roll out Prime globally to provide the sell from anywhere-to-anywhere platform to achieve that goal," he said in an email.

Although both are the biggest e-commerce companies in China and the US respectively, the similarities pretty much end there as they have different business models. Amazon focuses on selling merchandise directly via an online marketplace. The Seattle-based company receives about three-quarters of its revenue from merchandise sales and the rest from providing digital content.

Hangzhou-based Alibaba acts as a middleman between online buyers and sellers and facilitates sales between the two parties through a network of websites.

Amazon has struggled in China and is looking to Prime to help it take market share from Alibaba and the others in the mainland.

"Alibaba via TMall and then JD.com essentially control consumer e-commerce traffic in China. Even if a consumer doesn't end up buying via one of those platforms, they still check them first so Amazon isn't the first online storefront that a consumer thinks of," noted Ben Cavender, senior analyst at the China Market Research Group in Shanghai in an email.

Pricing will be important for Amazon Prime in China, according to Nicole Peng, research director at Shanghai-based consultancy Canalys.

"Amazon's existing relationship with overseas sellers is a key for Amazon to provide the products at a competitive price," she said.

Cavender said Prime and Amazon's fate in China will come down to how successfully they are able to tie it to products that Chinese consumers are interested in buying.

"Amazon has an opportunity to offer a range of brands or products that Alibaba can't necessarily offer simply because of Amazon's global supply chain and strong product selection in the US, but it's going to have to work hard to figure out which of those brands and products are potentially valuable to Chinese consumers," he said.

paulwelitzkin@chinadailyusa.com
Chinese in US go after beauty products Updated: 2016-11-11 12:05 By Hezi Jiang in New York(China Daily USA)

The online check-out page of luxury-goods department store Neiman Marcus was stormed early Thursday when tens of thousands of Chinese and Chinese Americans kept adding expensive skincare sets and $400 hair dryers to their shopping carts.

"$350 off on orders over $1,000 for almost all of their beauty products! 35% off, that's probably the best deal I've ever seen for beauty," said Vivian Cai, 28, who moved from Beijing to the US to go to college and now resides in New York.

Cai and those thousands of consumers in the US who shopped online for the products at Dallas-based Neiman Marcus were taking part in Singles Day - the world's largest online shopping day.

While Singles Day in China is a one-day event, consumers in the US get more time to shop because of the time difference between the two countries.

In 2009, Alibaba spotted a commercial opportunity with the day, and marketed it as a shopping day for single people to buy things to pamper themselves.

The singles shopping spree has grown. This year, analysts expect Singles Day retail revenue to surpass $20 billion, shattering last year's record of $14.4 billion. By comparison, last year's Black Friday in the US brought in $2.72 billion in e-commerce sales and $12 billion in total sales over two days.

On Singles Day, Cai used to sit in her New York apartment and shop for her parents, who are in Beijing, through Alibaba. Then two years ago she started to see good deals for herself offered by American retailers through Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, and deal sites that specifically target Chinese consumers in America.

"Singles Day has become more relevant to us Chinese in the US. It's amazing to see that many great deals are just for us. The Neiman Marcus promo code this year was 'Dealmoon'," she said.

DealMoon, the largest shopping-recommendation site for Chinese Americans and a major player in promoting the 11.11 shopping bonanza in the US, partnered with more than 250 department stores and international brands this year, up from 180 in 2015.

Focusing on high-end beauty products and fashion for Chinese Americans who are known for their buying power and devotion to luxury brands, its partners include Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, La Mer, Lancome, Estee Lauder and Michael Kors.

"Some of our partners sold over $1 million last year," said its co-founder Jennifer Wang. The top winners were American luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman and beauty brand Glam Glow.

"It's becoming the Cyber Monday for luxury brands," said Wang. "Almost all that participated last year will be making offers again this year, some with deeper discounts, and we have more brands joining us, including Adidas and Jimmy Choo."

According to the 2010 US Census, the Chinese American population in the US was approximately 3.8 million. There are also about 300,000 Chinese students studying in the US, along with a good number of people who have graduated and now work in the country.

Last year, DealMoon received 53 million screen views and 2.9 million visits on its mobile app. Wang expects the number to increase this year.

When they went shopping on the Neiman Marcus site, Wang and Cai bought the La Mer gift set for $410 and La Prairie caviar eye cream for $335.

"I've never bought them before because they are too expensive, but with this discount, I'm going for it," said Cai.

hezijiang@chinadailyusa.com
Students asked to share China experiences Updated: 2016-11-12 00:50 By HONG XIAO in New York(China Daily USA)

Stephen Orlins of NCUSCR says 'to whom much is given, much is expected' in pitch for overseas students to spread word on China

Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on US China Relations gives a speech about his experience studying and living in China at a young age and the important role that mutual learning plays in bilateral relationships at a reunion reception for returnees from China at the Chinese Consulate General in New York on Wednesday. Photo by Hong Xiao / China Daily

Students who have studied in China are being encouraged to play a larger role in promoting US-China relations.

The Chinese Consulate General in New York held its annual reception for returnees from China on Wednesday. About 400 students and representatives from universities and organizations in the New York consular district attended.

"My study abroad in China gave me access to an international platform. ... I really hope that I can continue my learning toward China and my level in Chinese can help break down these walls between culture and understanding," said Daniel McMonagle, a student at State University of New York-Binghamton.

"To me, language and especially Chinese is about culture and people, and mannerisms, and customs ... it's about art and history and identity," said Carrie Buck, who has studied Peking Opera at the Academy of Chinese Traditional Opera in Beijing.

"I didn't realize all of these before I studied in China and truly experienced it first hand and understood how all of these components work together to form that language and that identity," said Buck.

Peking Opera, song and dance, a fashion show and a guzheng ensemble were performed by students from the Confucius Institute at Alfred University and from SUNY-Binghamton. Photos by hong Xiao / China Daily

Peking Opera, song and dance, a fashion show and Guzheng ensemble were performed by students from the Confucius Institute at Alfred University and from SUNY-Binghamton.

In a keynote speech, Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on US China Relations (NCUSCR), shared his experiences of studying and living in China at a young age and talked about the important role that mutual learning plays in bilateral relationships.

Orlins said that those who have been had the privilege of studying in China, of seeing it up close and developing an understanding of the country, have an obligation to participate in the debate about US-China relations.

"To whom much is given, much is expected; you have been given much, so the question becomes 'Will you give back, will you participate in the discussions that are recurring in America about US-China relations?'" he said.

Orlins said more Chinese investment in the United States and more American students studying in China and vice versa will greatly boost mutual understanding.

"In the long term, it is going to strengthen the US-China relations to where we work together to confront the global problems that we must work together to confront," he said.

"When I look at the horizon, I'm optimistic about US-China relations, I've seen the promised land," Orlins said.

Cheng Lei, Chinese deputy consul general in New York, said that international students in China are an important part of China's reform and opening up to the outside world.

China is now the third-largest destination for overseas students in the world.

In 2015, more than 390,000 international students were studying at Chinese colleges and universities  21,975 from the United States.

In September 2015, President Xi Jinping paid a state visit to the United States. During his visit, Xi reached many agreements with President Barack Obama, of which people-to-people exchange is an important component.

Xi also announced that in the next three years, China would fund up to 50,000 students from the two countries to study in each other countries.

At the same time, Obama announced a goal of 1 million American students studying Chinese by 2020.

The Chinese government also has signed exchange-student agreements with many other countries and organizations.

"I believe that with the concerted efforts of all parties, the number of international students studying in China will reach its peak, which will definitely make a new contribution to world peace and friendship," Cheng said.

xiaohong@chinadailyusa.com
IMF approves 3-year 12 bln dollars loan for Egypt Updated: 2016-11-12 04:36 (Xinhua)

CAIRO -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive board approved on Friday Egypt's request for a three-year 12 billion US dollars loan, Egypt's state TV reported.

Meanwhile, Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) Tarek Amer told official MENA news agency that Egypt has received Friday an initial 2.75 billion dollars from the IMF.

Egypt reached an initial deal with the IMF on a 12 billion dollars loan in August, a move seen by many experts as a necessary step to help the country's ailing economy.

"This will make our foreign currency reserves jump to 23.5 billion dollars," Amer affirmed.

The foreign currency reserves at the CBE declined since the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak from 36 billion dollars to 19.6 billion dollars as of the end of September 2016.

Earlier this month, the CBE announced the devaluation of the Egyptian pound by 48 percent which would allow the pound to float in the financial market based on supply and demand.

The move was meant to limit the hike and shortage of dollar, boost foreign investments and meet a key demand of the IMF to provide Egypt with the loan.

Meanwhile, the Washington-based IMF board said in a statement that further disbursements following the immediately released 2.75 billion dollars will depend on the country's economic performance and implementation of reforms.

"The reform program will help Egypt restore macroeconomic stability and promote inclusive growth," said the statement.

Policies supported by the program aim to correct external imbalances and restore competitiveness, place the budget deficit and public debt on a declining path, boost growth and create jobs while protecting vulnerable groups, said the statement.

Egypt has been struggling to survive severe economic recession that led to a decline in foreign currency reserves, a growing budget deficit and rising foreign debts.
Moroccan security stand guard in front of the entrance of the World Climate Change Conference 2016 (COP22) in Marrakech, Morocco, November 9, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

With the election of Donald Trump as the next US president, who has promised to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Change Agreement, the European Union indicated on Friday that it will work closely with China to prevent the US from backsliding on its commitment to making the Paris accord effective.

The message was delivered by the European Parliament delegation, consisting of 12 parliament members, before they fly to Marrakech, Morocco to attend the second week of United Nations climate change conference.

The parties which have approved the Paris agreement will embark on their first talks at the conference and Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama have signed three presidential documents to inject special political will in the process of talking and approving the global pact.

Though it is still unknown whether the incoming Trump administration will reject the Paris agreement, during his presidential campaign Trump called global warming a hoax and promised to withdraw from the US from the accord.

"Trump's victory will undoubtedly have severe consequences on the way of tackling climate change at global level," Jo Leinen, vice-chair of the European Parliament delegation told China Daily on Friday in an email. "The EU and China should join forces in Marrakech in order to move forward the Paris agreement."

Leinen predicted that Trump's election risks to "paralyze or even jeopardize the process of ratification and implementation of the Paris agreement."

China and the US approved the agreement shortly before the G20 summit in Hangzhou in September and European Union followed the suit in October. The leading global emitters' approval and ratification have paved the way to ensure that the agreement took effect earlier this month.

Leinen said in Paris, China and the EU played a key role of honest brokers among different "camps" during the negotiations, which contributed to the final conclusion of the ground-breaking agreement.

"And this time in Marrakech, China is expected to line up with the EU," he said. "These two global powers should assume their responsibility by forming a new coalition with the aim of fighting for a progressive global climate policy."

The delegation chair, Giovanni La Via, said in Marrakesh that the 12 parliament members will work on the implementation of the Paris agreement.

"We helped to make it become binding, but it is evident that the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions currently on the table are not sufficient to achieve the objective of limiting climate change to well below 2 degrees", said La Via.

"We shall also work to consolidate the trust between developed and developing countries."

"Marrakesh should send out the signal that the path chosen in Paris is irreversible", said Leinen. "The climate targets need to be achieved step by step in the coming years. The European Union must be an engaged player in this process and act as a broker between the partners of the North and the South."
iStock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- President Obama on Friday renewed his call for national unity in the wake of a divisive election, saying in a Veterans Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery that Americans must "find strength in our common creed."



Speaking after laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Obama noted that Veterans Day "often follows a hard-fought political campaign -- an exercise in the free speech and self government that you fought for ... [that] often lays bare disagreements across our nation."



"But the American instinct has never been to find isolation in opposite corners; it is to find strength in our common creed. To forge unity from our great diversity," the president said.



"And when the election is over as we search for ways to come together, reconnect with one another, and with the principles that are more enduring than transitory politics, some of our best examples are the men and women we salute on Veterans Day," he added.



Obama cited "the example of a military that meets every mission, one united team, all looking out for one another."



"It's the example of the single most diverse institution in our country," he said. "Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who represent every corner of our country, every share of humanity, immigrants and native-born, Christian, Muslim, Jew and nonbeliever alike. All forged in the common service."



"Whenever the world makes you cynical, whenever you doubt that courage and goodness and selflessness is possible, then stop and look to a veteran," he said.



Obama acknowledged that work still needs to be done to honor veterans, such as by addressing wait times at veterans hospitals and veterans' mental health issues.



But the president pushed against calls to privatize the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, as Trump called for during his campaign.



Honor guards representing veterans from various wars, veterans' organizations and Gold Star families were among those participating in the event.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
[Sanders retains strong lead over Clinton in N.H. before Tuesday's primary] IfClinton loses to Sanders despite her husband's attacks,the battle for the nominationmay get only harder. Next up is Nevada and then South Carolina, whereHillary Clinton may be relying onminority votersto help her beat Sanders a"but, then again,Bill Clinton's perceived racism hurt his wife's attempts to win South Carolinain 2008 when he called Obama's candidacy "thebiggest fairy tale I've ever seen." The former president later said he was only pointing out that Obama, as senator, voted against the Iraq War, but then voted to fund it. "So 'that story is a fairy tale' a"now, that doesn't have anything to do with my respect for him as a person or as a political figure in this campaign," Clinton toldthe Rev. Al Sharpton at the time. "He's put together a great campaign. It's clearly not a fairy tale. It's real." Bill Clinton Revs Up Attacks Against Bernie Sanders The Big Dog turns attack dog Bill Clinton did not mince words when it came to his wife's Democratic rival at an event in New Hampshire on Sunday. At an event in Milford, the former President blasted Sen. Bernie Sanders' positions on health care, his assertion that Hillary Clinton is a part of the establishment during hisfiercest attack on the candidate ahead of Tuesday's pivotal primary. "When you're making a revolution you can't be too careful with the facts," Clinton said,the New YorkTimesreports. The former Secretary of State trails Sanders in the Granite State, a state that has in the past boosted Clinton campaigns. On Sunday, Clinton also derided Sanders' assertion that he is running a positive campaign, saying the actions of his staffers and the conduct of his supporters online shows that's not the case. "You guys say you're running a positive campaign, but it was your campaign that made 25 separate inquires in the mere space of 30 minutes trying to loot information [from Hillary Clinton's campaign] out of computers," Clinton said. "And said, 'Well, I apologize for that.' Yeah, in public they did. In private, they sent an email out complaining, blaming the Democratic party for leaving the keys in the cara.'All I did was drive it out.'" Clinton also called attention to a collection of male Sanders supporters dubbed 'Bernie bros' who launch vitriolic attacks on Clinton supporters online in solidarity with the Senator's cause. Though the Sanders campaign has distanced itself from the "bros," Clinton suggested that Sanders supporters made it difficult for women to speak freely about his wife's campaign online. Bloggers "who have gone online to defend Hillary, to explain why they supported her, have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat," Clinton said Sunday. The sexism suggestion was striking coming from Clinton, whose past misdeeds with women have become part of the 2016 election. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said the former president has a "penchant for sexism" at one point this cycle. According to theNew YorkTimes, Sanders' camp said Clinton's rhetoric was "disappointing." "Obviously the race has changed in New Hampshire and elsewhere in recent days," said a senior Sanders advisor Tad Devine.
Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page.

Loading...

Checking your browser before accessing the website.

This process is automatic. Your browser will redirect to your requested content shortly.

Please wait a few seconds.
HA NAM  The Viglacera Corporation JSC today begins construction at the ong Van IV Industrial Park (IP) in northern Ha Nam Province.

The IP, which has been considered one of the key projects in the province for the 2016-17 period, seeks to attract several large investors in the electronics and hi-tech areas.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, three South Korean investors were granted investment certificates for their official operation in 2017.

Covering an area of 600 hectares, the IP includes two phases. The first phase of 300 hectares is to be carried out in the provinces Kim Bang District. The IP has a favourable location on National Highway 38 to easily connect to National Highway 1 to Ha Noi and Ha Noi  Hai Phong Expressway to Hai Phong Port. Businesses will find it convenient to export goods by both air and road.

In addition, the IP is expected to create jobs for 500,000 workers in the province, as well as four million people from neighbouring localities.

Viglacera is to build housing for workers and specialists close to the IP to attract human resources.

In recent years, Ha Nam has been one of the countrys leading localities in attracting FDI, with several preferential policies for businesses, such as 24 hour electricity, clean water supplies and waste water treatment systems, favourable customs procedures and simplified administrative procedures.

Viglacera also has completed land clearance, infrastructure and handing over land to businesses for construction.

Plants in the IP are expected to become operational next year.  VNS
HA NOI  The Cooperative Union of Agricultural Consumption (UCA) opened three safe farm produce supermarkets in Ha Noi on Wednesday.

The stores are located at No 6 Duong inh Nghe Street in Nam Tu Liem District, No 6 Tran Thai Tong Street in Cau Giay District and 36B HH3A Linh am urban area in Hoang Mai District.

Pham Minh Tuan, chairman of the UCA board of directors, said the union was co-ordinating with nearly 200 co-operatives nationwide to sell safe products to local and foreign customers, thereby promoting the image of Vietnamese safe farm produce and increasing the value of the products.

UCA plans to open 50-100 similar supermarkets in Ha Noi, HCM City and other localities nationwide by 2017, he said, adding that the union would seek partners in overseas markets to send the commodities abroad.

Vo Kim Cu, president of the Viet Nam Cooperative Alliance (VCA), said farm produce sold at the UCA supermarket chain was strictly controlled by VCA chapters across the country, from producing, harvesting and processing stages to packaging and tracing the products origin.

Nguyen Thien Nhan, president of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front (VFF) Central Committee hailed the model of safe farm produce supermarkets, saying it would help link farmers with co-operatives and assist enterprises in selling their products.

At the same time, through the supermarket chain, producers could easily measure consumers demand, Nhan said.

He suggested expanding this model nationwide while encouraging farmers to join the UCA.

He hoped from now until March 2017, the UCA would sign contracts with foreign partners to export Vietnamese farm produce.

In the next four years, the VFF would support the UCA to build a chain of supermarkets and call for more private investment in creating a safe farm produce retail channel.

In mid-September, the first supermarket for safe agricultural products was opened on No 14 Mac Thai Tong Street in Ha Nois Cau Giay District.  VNS
Viet Nam will use no more than VN2 quadrillion (US$88.89 billion) from the State budget for public investment over the next five years, legislators said adopting a resolution in Ha Noi yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo Doan Tan

HA NOI  Viet Nam will use no more than VN2 quadrillion (US$88.89 billion) from the State budget for public investment over the next five years, legislators said adopting a resolution in Ha Noi yesterday.

Roughly 90 per cent of National Assembly deputies voted for the scheme.

Of the total amount, VN1.12 quadrillion will come from the central budget, including VN300 trillion from foreign finances and VN820 trillion from domestic sources such as Government bond issuances and sales of State stakes in enterprises.

The remaining VN880 trillion will come from budgets of nationwide localities.

The resolution says the quotas aim at efficient use of public investment capital while the country is restructuring public investments and completing essential infrastructure systems to serve economic reforms and medium-term development goals.

The country will concentrate capital to speed up progress of national target programmes and key projects that are imperative for socio-economic development.

Specifically, it will reserve nearly VN72.82 trillion for two national target programmes, with about VN43.12 trillion for building new-style rural areas and some VN29.70 trillion for sustained poverty reduction.

It will spend VN5 trillion on site clearance at the Long Thanh international aviation terminal project in southern ong Nai Province.

It will allocate VN80 trillion for other important projects later named by the Government in accordance with the Public Investment Law.

The country will prioritise investing in mountainous, border and island areas, besides remote districts of ethnic minorities and regions suffering natural calamity or having extremely tough socio-economic conditions.

Investment priorities will also be given to accommodating people serving revolutionary causes of the nation and coping with climate change.

It is urgent to deal with drought in the Central Highlands and south central provinces, salt water penetration in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta, and contaminated sea along the central coast.

The resolution says Viet Nam must tackle massive investments but will not provide capital for projects and areas where other economic sectors can invest.

It will use non-bond capital sources for settling debts in capital construction and implementing official development assistance (ODA) and public-private partnership (PPP) projects.

It will issue bonds to carry out traffic and irrigation projects specified by the National Assembly Standing Committee (NASC), and implement works in a resettlement scheme involved in the Son La hydroelectric plant in nothern Son La Province.

Bonds also serve urgent healthcare and education projects in remote areas.

The resolution says Viet Nam is to cut regular spending to increase capital investments, and ministries, sectors and localities are to spend money economically on every project.

Supervision will be intensified in implementing public investments, and heads of the Government, ministries, sectors and localities must be responsible for investment decisions.

The resolution says the country will boost PPPs in developing infrastructure, and accelerate the involvement of the private sector in providing public services related to healthcare, education, sport, culture and residential living.

NASC agree with deputies that in total social investments, resources mobilised from enterprises and citizens is still modest compared to potential, although this is an important channel to raise capital, NASC member Nguyen uc Hai said in a report.

The NASC will direct the Government to intensify measures to improve the investment climate to enhance investment efficiency, Hai said.

Yesterday, policies makers also discussed revisions of a law on mutual legal assistance, and another one on use and management of State assets.

They also considered ceasing construction of a nuclear power plant in south central Ninh Thuan Province.  VNS
HA NOI  Following the recent unexpected increase in arrivals, Airports Corporation of Viet Nam (ACV) has begun expansion of the Phu Quoc International Airport (PQC), hoping to accommodate five million visitors annually.

At this point, Phu Quoc International Airport is in need of development. The forecast of 2020 shows that the number of visitors to the airport could be some 2.5-3 million, so a comprehensive extension is necessary, said Huynh Quang Hung, Vice Chairman of the Peoples Committee of Phu Quoc District in southern Kien Giang Province.

The airport initiated its second phase in April 2015, with total investment of more than VN2 trillion (US$89.4) for all categories, including runway, hangar, passenger terminal and outdoor parking.

On average, the airport daily serves 42 flight both arrivals and departures. In the last nine months, it served 1.6 million visitors to Phu Quoc, an increase of 47.18 per cent compared with the same period last year.

Hung also noted that the total land area provided to the airport by the district to date and in use since 2002 was 905ha, helping the airport to serve the increasing number of visitors.

Presently, some 35 per cent of total construction project has been completed. It is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2017.

The number of visitors to Phu Quoc through the four main domestic routes from Ha Noi, HCM City, Hai Phong and Can Tho, together with international direct routes from countries such as Russia, Sweden or China is increasing significantly due to a larger number of flights available to the area.  VNS
HCM CITY  Concentrated information technology (IT) parks across Viet Nam obtained certain initial success during operation but still fell short of expectations, heard a workshop in HCM City on Thursday.

There are four concentrated IT parks in Viet Nam, at present - Quang Trung Software City in HCM City, a Nang Software Park in central a Nang City, and Cau Giay Concentrated IT Park and Ha Noi Software Technology Park, which is under construction, in the capital city.

Data released at the workshop shows that these parks attracted investment from large domestic and foreign IT firms. They raked in more than US$200 million in revenue for the software industry, compared with the industrys total earnings of $1.6 billion in 2015.

Nguyen Thanh Hung, deputy minister of information and communications, said the parks effect on the software industry was, however, not yet as significant as expected. They failed to create a favourable environment for business activities or attract major companies investment in setting up research and development centres.

The failure is attributable to various causes, including modest investment from the State and society and poor implementation of support policies targeting these parks. Meanwhile, investment promotion activities remain neglected, he said.

Le Quoc Cuong, deputy director of the HCM City Department of Information and Communications, said manpower is a fundamental factor in the software industry, but the lack of skilled workers has eroded opportunities to win global IT firms attention for Quang Trung Software City.

Less developed infrastructure and a workplace unable to satisfy high-quality workers demand are also weaknesses of this park, he added.

Hung said his ministry and the Ministry of Planning and Investment are preparing to implement a target programme on IT for the 2016-2020 period. This programme is set to support seven concentrated IT parks nationwide. Some VN40-60 billion ($1.8-2.7 million) in initial support will be provided for each park to help them attract investment.  VNS
Hung Vo

HA GIANG  Trees that are hundreds of years old as well as rare, valuable plants are at serious risk of being lost to rampant illegal logging and deforestation in northern mountainous Ha Giang Province.

The Prime Minister has ordered the Phong Quang Special Use Forest (SUF) closed to commercial exploitation, but there has been no let up in the illegal harvesting of nghien timber.

Nghien (Burretiodendron hsienmu) is an evergreen flowering tree, found in Viet Nam and China. Nghien timber is highly valued for its hardness, toughness, and durability.

A Vietnamplus report last week said authorities are aware of the grave situation, but unable to curb the violations.

Nguyen Van Hung, head of the Phong Quang rangers unit, said they do not have enough enforcement staff to cover this whole wide area that lies on the border with China.

Another reason was given by ang Van Cong, from the legal office of Phong Quang rangers unit. He said given the complex terrain of the area, the only way to access the SUF was via a solitary trail on the rocky mountains, where illegal loggers constantly kept watch.

Unexploded ordinance in the area further complicates protection efforts, the report said.

The main tool used to harvest timber was the gasoline-powered saw  legitimate private property that could not be banned, Cong said.

Poachers are difficult to catch because they carry out their logging only during the night, when patrols using flashlights could easily be spotted.

Local officials say that on average, 10 nghien trees are cut down during one illegal logging trip.

Most of the loggers are locals bribed by traders to cut the precious trees and carry the timber across the border and sell them to Chinese traders.

Some traders even buy machine saws for local people to do the cutting. A nghien block  40-50cm in diameter and 25-30cm thick  can sell for VN1.2-1.5 million (US$54-67), sometimes as high as VN1.8 million, so the margin is certainly attractive, Hung said.

Last April, rangers in Tan Son Village (Minh Tan Commune) caught red-handed three people logging trees in the SUF and seized some 10.3 cubic metres of wood. One of the three men arrested was Sung Ngoc Chung, head of the Ta Leng Village then.

Rangers check a large nghien tree chopped down by illegal loggers in the Phong Quang special use forest, Ha Giang Province. - VNA/VNS Photo Hung Vo

Managers failure

Bui Van ong, head of Ha Giangs Department of Forest Protection (DFP), said that in the first nine months of the year, 251 cases of forest resource violations were recorded and fines of VN1.8 billion ($80,700) levied.

He squarely blamed the Phong Quang SUF management board for the rampant illegal logging.

The law clearly states that the responsiblity for deforestation lies with the forest managers. Of course, we have to see if the forest area where logging takes place has been assigned to anyone else, ong said.

Besides prosecuting forest owners, many violations occurring in Minh Tan Commune, Vi Xuyen District, have been dealt with through show trials, to serve as a warning for offenders and to propagate the law.

In August, the prosecutors office and Peoples Court of Vi Xuyen District organised a public trial to highlight violations of regulations on forest exploitation and protection. The trial day fell on market fair held by ethnic minorities in the area and attracted widespread attention.

Four individuals from local villages  arrested for illegally cutting down nghien trees and causing damage worth of VN77.1 million  were sent to prison for 18-30 months.

Still, experts warned that despite the authorities stepping up efforts, no headway can be made in saving the centuries-old trees without engaging locals in protection efforts.

Future capital

Nguyen Minh Tien, Deputy Chairman of the Ha Giang Peoples Committee, said Forests are valuable capital for future generations, and measures are being implemented to preserve and promote this capital.

He said the provincial administration is set on providing stable livelihoods for local people as the best way to discourage them from engaging in illegal poaching.

Concrete roads and electricity lines have been built to reach remote villages. Some households will be moved from core forest areas and others given forest tenure - where they have the rights to sustainably exploit the resources and land, but also the obligation to protect the forest.

The SUF will receive priority attention because it holds the most value and rare plants, he added. Apart from conventional awareness raising campaigns, the authorities recently utilised an age-old practice to help boost the understanding of the need to protect forest resources. The worship of forest deities residing in ancient trees will be organised more often by respected figures of local communities, rekindling a valuable tradition.

Other measures being implemented by the authority include more control on the purchase and use of saws, support for local vigilante, and collaboration with border guards in patrolling forest areas.  VNS
AK NONG  Trees near Cot a waterfall, a tourism spot in the Central Highlands province of ak Nong, have been cut down illegally, ruining the scenic beauty, local residents and a company previously licenced to build a resort nearby have alleged.

Nguyen Van Tran, director of Trade and Tourism Southern Highlands Ltd. Company, whose licence to build a waterfall tourist resort was revoked in January, said he had reported the matter to ak Nia Peoples Committee and that the authorities promised to inspect the site.

Five months ago, Tran said, he saw trees being cut down both near the top and bottom of the waterfall. When he approached the loggers, questioning them about permissions to cut trees, they rebuffed him.

What right do you have to ask questions? Now this area is state-owned. We can do as we please, Tran quoted them as saying.

The offenders had also built an embankment around the bottom of the waterfall to turn it into a water reservoir for agriculture, he said.

Previously, this area was untouched, with a charming waterfall, bamboo trees and imposing basalt stone columns. Its beauty attracted many tourists. But now it looks like a hydroelectric reservoir. There are no bamboos left at all. There are just stones lying everywhere, like a huge construction site.

Residents of ak Tan village said such violations had been going on for years and started with the logging of trees in the forest near the top of the waterfall. The current situation was the result of repeated violations without intervention by local authorities.

Speaking to Vietnam News Agency reporters, authority of ak Nia Commune expressed surprise that Cot a waterfall has been embanked, and promised to look into the matter immediately.

The authority said the embankment was actually a road built to walk across the waterfall and that a company named Tam Nong Gia Nghia was responsible for its construction.

The fact was that a decision to build the road was agreed at a meeting between the head of ak Tan village, the companys director and some households. As per agreement, the company would finance the construction as the local authority had not granted a budget.

ong Quang Huy, head of ak Nia Communes Peoples Committee, said that after the meeting, head of ak Tan village should have informed local authorities about the decision, and that construction could start only once the plan was approved by the committee.

Land administration officials in ak Nia Commune said the path could be considered as an encroachment on 3,500sq. m of state-managed land within the ak Kut quarry - also teeming with stone mining violations.

The Cot a waterfall violations is not an isolated incident, but just one among the many encroachments on natural spots in ak Nong Province, according to the Viet Nam News Agency report.  VNS
HCM CITY  Loi Krathong, one of the most important festivals in Thailand, will be held at District 2 Thao ien Village on Sunday (Nov 13).

In Thai, loi means to float, while krathong means lotus-shaped floats made of banana leaves. At the festival, Thai people float the krathong into the river to show gratitude to the Goddess of Water.

The festival takes place on a full moon day in the 12th lunar month, which falls this year on November 14.

At the event in HCM City, participants will learn how to make a krathong and drop it into the Sai Gon River with flowers, candles and incense.

There will be a launch of a book titled Thailand in Hand, providing useful tips on travelling to Thailand and a meeting with famous travelers.

Thai cuisine will be featured at night.

The event was organised by the HCM City offices Tourism Authority of Thailand, and is expected to attract hundreds of participants. VNS
Last week, Viet Nam News asked its readers if Viet Nam should, in a way, follow South Koreas steps in limiting cheap tours into the country.

Here are some of the responses:

Nguyen Viet Loan Foster, Chairwoman of Journeys to the East, Ha Noi

South Korea has enjoyed steady growth in tourism. If the Korean Tourism Organisation has decided they will no longer fund promotion campaigns for any cheap tour from Viet Nam to South Korea ( less than US$538), it means they know what the countrys booming tourism industry needs to do to sustain high paying visitors.

According to a report of the Financial Times (2016), plastic surgery has been one of the most successful export areas for the countrys medical sector. The trend will create a boom in demand for medical services  a dynamic that the government is keen to complement by promoting rapid growth in the countrys medical tourism, pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries.

It shows that the government sees the great potential in this sector and is determined to aim at high-end services in medical tourism.

If Viet Nam wants to boost growth of its lifestyle and leisure industry it needs to make up its mind and put policies in place to promote high-end tourism and curtail mass arrivals of what we call "zero revenue tourism" at borders where the foreign tour operators bring their own guides, take their customers to their own shops where they buy what they want with vouchers, leaving no revenue to the locals.

Viet Nam is blessed to have it all: mountains, a long coastline dotted with state of the art resorts & spas, ancient citadels and a historical background.

As a high-end cultural tourism operator my aim is to push the bar higher and higher - as tourism has shifted to a travel experience, more than a destination per se. So the Government needs to support and provide funding for infrastructure in remote regions as well as marketing assistance. The potential of developing sustainable high-end tourism is real.

Andrew Burden, Canadian, Ha Noi

The question of tour guide promotions versus costs is confusing. Governments should let the market and fair competition decide. Traditionally, the Ministry of Tourism promotes culture and tries to present a good image.

Individual companies should be the ones pricing tours and trying to attract customers. The cost of the tour reflects the contents of the tour plus the level of service, location and length. Viet Nam is different than South Korea. Just cross into China, Laos or Cambodia and youll see how different things are.

Rather than react to South Koreas decision to place a lower end limit cost on tours into their country, Viet Nam should act in an independent and mature manner. You should encourage interesting cross-cultural events and educate your people about the opportunities to study, work and vacation in South Korea.

Dont let them or anyone else determine your market strategy. Learn to compete on a global scale and become the frontrunner in ASEAN. If you are wise, patient and look to the long term, you will be successful. Pretty soon there will be long line ups for tours into Viet Nam, regardless of price. Forget about South Korea!

Heading overseas is fine, if you can afford it. Not everyone is rich or needs to visit Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California.

Hari Chathrattil, Ha Noi

Who are the people who take these cheap tours into the country? What do such tours entail? A study several years ago found that backpackers spend more money in a country than the high-end tourists because they tended to stay in the country for longer. More importantly, they tend to be more respectful of the host countrys traditions.

All tours, whether cheap or high-end, need to protect the countrys cultural traditions. Viet Nam has had a problem with retaining visitor interest, with many tourists reportedly not interested in returning. Authorities should find out why, and take follow up action.

I have seen many hostels for backpackers offering cheap accommodation that are very creatively designed. They use scarce resources far more efficiently than five-star establishments.

Viet Nam needs to remain authentic, in order to sustain its tourism sector. This will be very difficult it focuses mainly on promoting high-end tourism. A counter-intuitive solution maybe called for.  VNS
Zhang Dejiang (Second from Right), Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Chinese National Peoples Congress, visits the construction site of the Viet Nam-China Friendship Palace in Ha Noi yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo Phuong Hoa

HA NOI  Zhang Dejiang, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Chinese National Peoples Congress, visited the construction site of the Viet Nam-China Friendship Palace in Ha Noi yesterday as part of his official visit to the Southeast Asian nation.

The building of the friendship palace, initiated by then Prime Ministers Phan Van Khai and Wen Jiabao in 2004, officially started on March 4, 2015. It is scheduled to be put into use in 2017.

on Tuan Phong, Vice Chairman and Secretary General of the Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organisations  the projects investor, thanked the two countries Parties, States, parliaments, Governments, relevant ministries and authorities, and the Chinese Embassy for creating favourable conditions for the project.

He asked the projects contractor, Chinas Yunnan provincial construction holding group, to continue working closely with the projects management board to ensure progress as well as the safety and quality of the building.

Phong said the palace will be a venue for cultural and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries, helping them enhance mutual understanding so as to further treasure their amity  a precious common asset.

Meanwhile, Zhang, who is also a member of Chinas Politburo Standing Committee, said the palace construction itself is a symbol of the bilateral friendship, adding that the two Parties and States are paying great attention to this project.

He also told the Chinese contractor to ensure the projects quality and schedule while asking for Viet Nams close co-ordination and best possible conditions for the building.  VNS


Irish President Michael D. Higgins and his wife visited the central province of Quang Tri this week as part of their State visit to Viet Nam.  Photo quangtri.gov.vn

QUANG TRI  Irish President Michael D. Higgins and his wife visited the central province of Quang Tri this week as part of their State visit to Viet Nam.

During their November 9-10 stay, President Higgins and his wife saw an infrastructure construction project in Vinh O Commune, Vinh Linh District, one of the most disadvantaged communes in Quang Tri.

Provincial leaders also met with Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Charles Flanagan.

Nguyen uc Chinh, Chairman of the provincial Peoples Committee, said he hoped the Irish government would continue supporting Quang Tri to achieve development goals in the 2017-2020 period and consider extending financial assistance to ethnic minority areas in the province.

Quang Tri is seeking Irish support in overcoming war consequences, especially a project on clearing unexploded ordnance carried out by the UKs Mines Advisory Group (MAG) organisation.

The province is also inviting Irish investors to invest in such fields as infrastructure, tourism, service, seafood farming and processing, coffee and rubber, he noted.

For his part, Minister Charles Flanagan praised Quang Tris co-ordination with the Irish Embassy in Viet Nam in implementing the Irish governments assistance programmes. He affirmed that the Irish government and people will continue supporting Viet Nam, in general, and Quang Tri, in particular, in implementing programmes for poverty reduction as well as in surmounting post-war bomb and mine consequences.

The two sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding agreeing to strengthen co-operation.  VNS
President Tran ai Quang delivers speech at a working session with the investigative agencies under the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of National Defence and the Supreme Peoples Court in Ha Noi yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo Nhan Sang

HA NOI  Investigators should focus on bringing to light major economic crimes and corruption cases that have generated public concerns, President Tran ai Quang said yesterday.

He spoke at a working session with the investigative agencies under the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of National Defence and the Supreme Peoples Court in Ha Noi.

President Quang, who is also head of the Central Steering Committee for Judicial Reform, alerted the investigators that economic and corruption criminals are fleeing to other countries that have not yet signed extradition agreements with Viet Nam.

The investigation agencies need to deploy preventive measures to prevent those being investigated from fleeing the country, he said.

Quang noted, however, that Viet Nams legal documents are incompatible with those of several foreign countries, raising difficulties in judicial assistance and criminal extradition.

He urged the investigative agencies to implement guidelines and policies regarding the judicial sector issued by the Party and State.

He said the agencies need to improve the competence of investigators and promote a law-abiding spirit in a bid to ensure social order, serve national socio-economic development as well as the countrys international integration.

At the same time, the agencies should expand their international co-operation in investigating and handling crimes, especially organised, cross-border drug, economic, corruption and high-tech crimes, as well as terrorism and human trafficking, he noted.

More measures should be taken to minimise unjust cases and ensure compensation for victims, the President said, calling on the agencies to focus on researching and compiling a draft law adjusting and supplementing the 2015 Criminal Law and other relevant bills.

The Party, State and people always pay special attention to building the judicial sector, including investigation agencies, he affirmed.  VNS
Viet Nam strongly protests the use of force by Indonesian forces against Vietnamese fishermen and their fishing vessels, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Le Hai Binh said yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo

HA NOI  Viet Nam strongly protests the use of force by Indonesian forces against Vietnamese fishermen and their fishing vessels, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Le Hai Binh said yesterday.

He made the statement in reply to a reporters query on Viet Nams reactions to an October 21 incident in which an Indonesian navy ship chased and shot at two Vietnamese fishing boats, injuring three of 13 fishermen on board. One later died due to serious wounds.

The fishing boats were operating in the overlapping waters in the exclusive economic zone delineated by Viet Nam and Indonesia.

The Indonesian actions are not commensurate with the strategic partnership between Viet Nam and Indonesia, as well as the principles of humanitarian treatment of fishermen, Binh said.

Viet Nam requests competent Indonesian agencies to promptly clarify the incident, seriously punish violators, and satisfactorily compensate the Vietnamese fishermen, the diplomat stated.

On November 1, a Foreign Ministry representative handed over a diplomatic protest note to the Indonesian Embassys representative in Ha Noi.

The Vietnamese Embassy in Indonesia is also working closely with Indonesian agencies to obtain more information and offer timely assistance to the injured fishermen, Binh said.

He extended deep sympathies to the family of the bereaved, assuring them that the Vietnamese Embassy is co-ordinating with competent Vietnamese and Indonesian agencies to bring the body home as soon as possible.  VNS
AK LAK  The Natural and Cultural Reserve in the Central Highlands Province of ak Lak has completed building an electronic fence around the reserve campus to protect the habitat of elephants.

Huynh Trung Luan, director of the reserve, said an electronic fence was set up within 14 days with the support of technical staff of Viet Nam-based Animals Asia.

The electronic fence, with capacity of between 6.4kw and 8.4kw, will cover an area of some 6,000 sq.m. of the reserve, releasing the elephants from an iron leash and helping them integrate into nature.

The fence has a length of 1,320m, including five iron pillars and had four electronic lines, with 220V power lines and two large capacity batteries backup, which could cause panic for the elephants but not threaten their lives.

Luan said the electronic fence had been used effectively at many animal reserves around the world and would help the animals move freely and comfortably.

Currently, there are two wild elephants in the reserve.

In February 2014, a five-year-old male elephant was found trapped in a forest in the province. Its left foot was seriously injured and ivory was nearly fractured. The animal, named Jun, was treated and raised by the reserve.

This April, a one-year-old elephant was rescued by the reserves staff. It was found trapped under a well. The animal was named Gold and has been living in the reserve since then.  VNS
HCM CITY  Peoples Council members of HCM City will work with municipal authorities to identify potential breeding grounds for the Zika virus at project sites where construction has been suspended.

This was agreed at a meeting between the Standing Board of the HCM City Peoples Council and citys Peoples Committee late last week.

Once the work is done, the citys Department of Natural Resources and Environment will report results to district and grassroots councils who will oversee the spraying chemicals to kill mosquitoes and larvae at the identified sites and other areas, said Nguyen Thi Quyet Tam, Chairwoman of the HCM City Peoples Council.

Tam said the city Peoples Council was keeping a close watch on the situation in order to help prevent an outbreak of the Zika virus.

Nguyen Thi Thu, deputy head of the Peoples Committee, said at the meeting that every district has sites where construction has been suspended, and the builders had not kept the sites clean. District administrations lacked sufficient funds to monitor and clear the sites, she said.

Tam advised the municipal administration to co-operate with the city-based Viet Nam Fatherland Front and other departments as well as organisations to launch campaigns to spraying chemicals and kill both larvae and mosquitoes.

She said leaflets about ways to prevent Zika infections and their spread should be distributed to all households in order to improve public awareness about the need to kill mosquitoes and their larvae.

Dr Nguyen Tan Binh, head of the citys Department of Health, reported that 29 patients had tested positive for the Zika virus as of November 6. Districts with the highest Zika incidences were 12, 9, 2, Binh Thanh and Tan Phu, he said.

As of November 5, 36 patients had tested positive for the Zika virus in HCM City and the provinces of Khanh Hoa (1), Long An (1), Binh Duong (2), ak Lak (2), and Phu Yen (1), according to the General Department of Preventive Health.

Department head Tran ac Phu told the Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that five of the patients were pregnant women.

The Preventive Health Department had on October 30 confirmed the countrys first case of microcephaly, or abnormal smallness of the head, in a four-month-old baby in the Central Highlands province of ak Lak. It said the condition was likely related to Zika.

The Ministry of Health has prioritised efforts to ensure the health of pregnant women and reduce the risk of fetal microcephaly caused by the Zika virus.

Thu said she has asked district authorities to compile lists of pregnant women in their areas and advise them about preventive methods.

Six hospitals and institutes in Ha Noi, HCM City, Nha Trang and the Central Highlands region can provide testing for the Zika virus, with results available in seven days.

At a meeting with the Emergency Operation Centre in Ha Noi on November 5, Dr Tran Danh Cuong, deputy head of the National Hospital of Obstetrics and Gynecology, said the countrys prenatal diagnosis system requires pregnant women to have ultrasound checks at 12, 22 and 32 weeks.

If patients follow the ultrasound schedule, fetal microcephaly can be detected and treated early, Cuong said.

However, many women are unaware of the importance of these examinations and fail to comply with the recommended schedule, she said. VNS
YEN BAI  Fragile suspension bridges in the mountainous districts of Yen Bai Province are threatening the lives of residents who cross them every day.

The Khe Rong suspension bridge, which spans the Rao canal in Tran Yen District, is one of dozens of bridges that need to be either repaired or replaced in the northern province. Stastictics compiled by the provinces transport department show that of 130 suspension bridges, 11 are damaged beyond repair.

Twenty-seven others require major repair to their decks, and their horizontal beams and vertical piers have been severely damaged, making them dangerous to cross.

The poor conditions of the bridge worries Bui Van Kieu, a local resident. The bridge vibrates every time motorbikes cross it, ready to collapse, Kieu said. Its joints have come loose and become rusted.

Some parts of the bridge are only held together by old ropes. Its deck is covered with rotten wood pieces with several holes in them, which are darned by local residents with bamboo and dried branches.

Kieu said that the bridge has a high volume of traffic as it connects Quy Mong and Kien Thanh communes.

Nguyen Ngoc Nguyen, head of Village 11 in Quy Mong Commune said local authorities had advised residents to only cross the bridge in small groups in order to avoid overloading it.

He was still terrified about the collapse of the Chu Va 6 bridge in Lai Chau Province in 2014, which killed eight people and injured more than 30.

Nguyen Duy Khanh, chairman of the communes Peoples Committee, said the committee has encouraged residents to fix as much of the bridge as possible themselves with available materials. He also advised people to refrain from crossing the bridge to avoid accidents.

The mountainous terrain of the province and its lack of infrastructure resources hinder traffic, especially during the rainy season. In Village 3 of An Lac Commune, residents, mostly students, use a temporary bridge to cross a 50-meter-wide river every day.

The transport department had proposed improvement plans for 32 bridges, but only 13 have been repaired or replaced over the past two years.

Nguyen Trong Tien, head of the infrastructure division of the provinces transport department, said the Directorate for Roads of Viet Nam agreed that there are 49 locations near streams and rivers in the province that need bridges, which would hopefully be designed at the beginning of next year.

The province reported 30 additional locations requiring bridges, but the directorate did not approve them, he said.  VNS
ABC News/State of Indiana(WASHINGTON) -- President-elect Donald Trump has asked his running mate, Mike Pence, to take over the transition team efforts from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, ABC News has confirmed.



The announcement, which was initially reported by The New York Times, comes amid speculation over whether members of Trump's inner circle will be tapped for cabinet positions.



Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Christie have been named as vice chairs of the transition team.



Sen. Jeff Sessions and Gen. Keith Kellogg will also have expanded roles in the transition efforts as well, sources said.

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
HCM CITY The Viet Nam Baptist Churches (Southern) opened its 3rd general congress in HCM City on Wednesday, with the participation of 500 Baptist dignitaries and followers from 22 localities.

Speaking at the event, Tran Tan Hung, deputy chairman of the Government Committee for Religious Affairs, praised the contribution of the Baptist dignitaries and followers of charity programmes, and the poverty alleviation movement.

During the 2012-2016 period, the Viet Nam Baptist Churches (Southern) has consolidated the organisation and encouraged its followers to abide by legal regulations, becoming an integral part of great national unity.

The two-day congress reviewed the operation of the last term, elected a new executive board for the third tenure, and passed the 2017-2020 plan.

The Viet Nam Baptist Churches (Southern) was established in November 1962 in HCM City and was officially recognised by the Government as a religious organisation in 2008.

The number of Baptist followers has reached more than 43,000 in 44 cities and provinces. VNS
Farmers harvest tea in Phu Tho Province. Viet Nam must prepare a detailed action plan to successfully reduce poverty and improve gender equality, education, food security, climate change adaptation and long-term equitable economic growth as committed with the world community.  Photo tuyengiao.vn

HA NOI  In order to successfully reduce poverty and improve gender equality, education, food security, climate change adaptation and long-term equitable economic growth as committed with the world community, Viet Nam must prepare a detailed action plan.

This was the message delivered yesterday by Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment, Nguyen The Phuong, at a workshop in Ha Noi that brought together representatives of ministries, UN agencies, non-governmental organisations, research institutes, political and social organisations, province-level agencies and the private sector.

Implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a common business of every one, he said, calling for responsible contribution of all stakeholders and individuals to ensure that a highly practical and feasible National Action Plan (NAP) is developed.

UNDP Country Director Louise Chamberlain agreed that Viet Nams SDGs need to be owned by all people, all ethnic groups, women as well as men, and those who are socially excluded. This further emphasises the need for partnerships with civil society, the private sector, communities and citizens - this applies in target setting, planning, implementation efforts and monitoring and evaluation  and requires voluntary and active participation.

The UN agencies are committed to do its part and to offer experiences, technical expertise, and development solutions to support Viet Nam during this process, she said.

The consultant workshop on a draft NAP to implement 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was hosted by the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI), the lead agency for sustainable development in Viet Nam.

Phuong said the draft NAP was developed based on key development policies, strategies and plans of Viet Nam in order to provide a guidance framework for sustainable development goals and coordinate among different stakeholders in implementing them. This NAP will play a role as the legal basis for Viet Nam to fulfil its commitment to the international community, and to responsibly contribute to the global common efforts to achieve sustainable development, he said.

Nguyen Le Thuy, deputy head of the MPIs Department of Science, Education, Natural Resources and Environment, said that draft NAP contains 17 SDGs and 115 targets, including goals on poverty reduction, gender equality, education, food security, climate change adaptation, sustainable economic growth. The plan also assigns tasks to stakeholders to effectively implement the goals over the next 14 years.

Thuy said that the MPI plans to set up a fund supporting sustainable growth to mobilise internal and external resources.

The blueprint will be submitted to the Prime Minister by the end of this month. It will be discussed at the 14th National Assemblys third session in May next year.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted at the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York. The SDGs build on the success of the Millennium Development Goals and aims to go further to end all forms of poverty.  VNS
HA NOI  The New Zealand Embassy in Viet Nam hosted its second annual Ambassadors Alumni Awards to celebrate educational links between the two countries and recognise individuals who excel in their field.

Speaking at the event held in Ha Noi on Tuesday, New Zealand Ambassador Haike Manning said the links between people from the two countries is the bedrock of bilateral relations, serving as a basis for growing connections in education, business, and between the two governments.

Over 2000 Vietnamese students study in New Zealand every year and we now have thousands of alumni back in Viet Nam using the knowledge and skills they have learnt in New Zealand to contribute to the growth and development of Viet Nam and the relationship between our two countries, he said.

The evening culminated with Dr Tran Van, former Vice-Chairman of Viet Nams National Assemblys Committee of Financial and Budgetary Affairs, winning the alumni award in recognition of his work in strengthening connections between the two countries.

Dr Van has a long history with New Zealand, beginning with his English language training at Victoria University of Wellington following his appointment to the National Assembly. He has been a strong advocate of Viet Nam-New Zealand relations and has served as president of New Zealand-Viet Nam Parliamentary Friendship from 2011  2016, leading various delegations to visit New Zealands Parliament and publishing articles on its effective governance structure and scenery.  VNS
HA NOI  The Royal 16, a Vietnamese cargo ship with 19 crewmen on board, was attacked and captured by pirates today while sailing in the sea off the Basilan Island, the Philippines, according to the Viet Nam Maritime Administration (VNMA).

The pirates seized six crewmen, including the captain, after releasing the boat and 13 other crewmen, one of whom was shot in the hand by the pirates, the administration said.

Owned by the Quy Sang Maritime Transport Joint Stock Company in the northern province of Thai Binh, the vessel, which departed from the coast off Quang Ninh Province on November 5 carrying a large cargo of cement, sent an emergency signal at about 3:30pm today, while some 10 nautical miles west-southwest off Baliland Island, the administration reported.

After being released, the boat, with its 13 remaining crewmen, continued to sail until reaching Zamboanga, also in the Philippines.

The Filipino coast guard had begun an investigation, said the VNMA.

The Vietnamese maritime authority added that it had informed the regional anti-piracy co-operation agency about the abduction, as well as other agencies, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Earlier, AFP, a French news agency, reported that the Vietnamese cargo vessel was captured by gunmen in the southern Philippine waters, an area where the Abu Sayyaf Islamic militants have been on a kidnapping-for-ransom spree.

The attack brought to at least eight the number of people abducted from vessels in the region over the past week, including an elderly German sailor, raising fears authorities are unable to control the worsening piracy problem.

In recent months, Abu Sayyaf has been accused of kidnapping dozens of Indonesian and Malaysian sailors in waters off the southern Philippines.

Over the weekend, an Abu Sayyaf commander claimed responsibility for abducting a 70-year-old German sailor and murdering his wife, AFP reported. VNS
Many people looking for a new Vietnamese travel experience choose a motorbike trip to the northern mountains to admire the spectacular landscapes and enjoy a peaceful stay in a stilt house.

This is an ideal time to visit Sa Pa, Bac Ha and Bao Yen in Lao Cai Province; Mu Cang Chai and Tu Le in Yen Bai; Lac village and Mai Chau in Hoa Binh, and inh Hoa in Thai Nguyen to enjoy cool weather and flowers in full bloom.

Guests are advised to stay in stilt houses along streams, surrounded by the immense yellow rice fields, green of fruits and spectacular mountain views.

Guests staying overnight in stilt houses will be greeted with hot wine by owners showing their hospitality.

A nights stay will allow visitors to use blankets, pillows and mattress made of rustic materials.
The Viet Nam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) last week announced the launch of its new official tourism website www.Viet Namtourism.vn.

The website will feature articles by top travel writers and bloggers as well as photos of popular destinations.

It is currently available only in English, but more languages will be added.

Nguyen Van Tuan, the general director of VNAT, said: The goal is to make this one of the top 10 tourism sites in the world.

The portal hopes to attract 10 million unique users a year.

Viet Nam expects to have 9.7 million foreign and 62 million domestic visitors and earn total revenues of VN400 trillion ($17.9 billion) this year.  VNS
WASHINGTON  Barack Obama and Donald Trump on Thursday put past animosity aside during a 90-minute White House meeting designed to quell fears about the health of the worlds pre-eminent democracy.

As protests against the Republican property moguls shock election rumbled across US cities and world capitals contended with a suddenly uncertain world order, Obama and Trump vowed to carry out a smooth transition of power.

After a nasty campaign that culminated in the election of a 70-year-old billionaire who has never held public office and who gained power on a far-right platform, the message was: this is business as usual in a democracy.

The outgoing Democratic president and his successor huddled one-on-one in the Oval Office, for what Obama characterised as an "excellent conversation" and then put on a remarkably civil joint public appearance.

"It is important for all of us, regardless of party and regardless of political preferences, to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face," Obama said.

Trump appeared more subdued than usual, and was unusually cautious and deferential in his remarks.

"Mr President, it was a great honor being with you," Trump said, calling Obama a "very good man".

The meeting, which came less than 36 hours after Trumps shock election victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, had the potential to be awkward.

After all, Trump championed the so-called "birther movement" challenging that Obama was actually born in the United States -- a suggestion laden with deep racial overtones -- only dropping the position recently.

And if the president-elect fulfills his campaign promises, he will unravel almost all of Obamas signature achievements.

Trump -- who previously called Obama the "most ignorant president in our history" -- said he looked forward to receiving the presidents counsel.

Obama -- who previously said Trump was a whiner and "uniquely unqualified" to be commander-in-chief -- vowed his support.

He told Trump that his administration would "do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds."

The two men ended the improbable and historic White House encounter with a handshake and refused to take questions, appearing to find common cause in their opinion of the press.

"Heres a good rule. Dont answer questions when they just start yelling," Obama told Trump.

Current, future first ladies

While their husbands were getting acquainted, First Lady Michelle Obama also had a sit-down at the White House with her soon-to-be successor, Melania Trump.

Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, met in his West Wing office with Trumps running mate, Mike Pence, the new vice-president-elect.

White House officials said that Obama and Trump discussed a range of issues including global hotspots and the presidents meetings next week abroad with leaders from Germany , Greece and across the Asia-Pacific.

On that trip, Obama is likely to be inundated with panicked questions about America s role in world affairs.

The White House hopes that by rolling out the red carpet for Trump, they can bind him to some of the conventions of the office.

Trump then traveled to Capitol Hill to meet Republican leaders who had been at best cool to him winning their partys nomination.

The president-elect proclaimed that health care, border security and jobs will be his top three priorities when he moves to the White House next January.

He held talks with House Speaker Paul Ryan and then with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"We had a very detailed meeting," Trump told reporters. "As you know, health care -- were going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on health care," he said.

Trump made repealing Obamacare, and building a border wall between the United States and Mexico , pillars of his presidential campaign.

Trump said he and the Republican majority in Congress were going to accomplish "absolutely spectacular things for the American people," adding he was eager to get started.

Afterwards, following an hour-long meeting with McConnell on the other side of the Capitol, Trump stood at the Senate majority leaders side and stressed that "we have a lot to do."

"Were going to look very strongly at immigration," he said.

"Were going to look very strongly at health care, and were looking at jobs - big league jobs."  AFP
02:22 Taronga Zoo lions back in their enclosure after escaping Reports have surfaced five lions which escaped from their enclosures at Taronga Zoo have now been recaptured.

02:48 Benefit of handing out cheques for cost-of-living relief very short-lived: Jones Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones says the benefit of handing out cheques for cost-of-living relief will be very short-lived.

00:28 RBA consulting with government over $5 note A decision is yet to be made if King Charles III will replace his mother Queen Elizabeth II on Australia's $5 note.

00:32 Netanyahu seeks return to office as Israel heads to polls Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bidding for a return to power in the country's fifth election in four years.

00:27 Australia and Thailand to sign deal to combat human trafficking The Australian government will complete a deal with Thailand to combat human trafficking.
WATERLOO  When a mom says she feels overwhelmed, Shelley (Russell) Skuster can empathize.

In just a few years, shes gone from failed infertility treatments to building a family through adoption and pregnancy.

The former KWWL-TV reporter chronicles her experiences in Shelley Writes, a blog that covers motherhood, marriage, infertility, adoption and more.

Writing is my way to keep my sanity after all the ways my life has changed, said Shelley, who hopes to reach those silently struggling with infertility.

Her posts cover topics like, What Did We Do to Deserve This? The Infertility Question We Flipped on Its Head, The Day My Daughter First Called her Birth Mom by Name and To My (Adopted) Children Before I Give Birth.

Her work has been featured on TODAY Parents, Huffington Post, Adoption.com and more. Next week, Shelley Writes will receive an award from an organization that serves women and men diagnosed with infertility.

Shelley will receive the 2016 Hope Award for Best Blog from Resolve, a national network that promotes reproductive health and ensures equal access to all family-building options. Awards will be conferred at the annual Night of Hope gala in New York.

According to Resolve, one in eight U.S. couples of childbearing age is diagnosed with infertility. Many conceal their pain. Readers responded to Shelleys candor and willingness to share her story.

A lot of women struggling with infertility dont reach out, explained Shelley, a Waverly native. The extreme darkness of infertility is horrible; its something I absolutely wouldnt wish on anyone.

Infertility has led us down paths Id never choose. Looking back on how my life and marriage have changed, I know it has made me a better wife and a better mom.

As a result, Shelley writes to comfort those who dont reach out. She posted on the Resolve website to ensure theyd be seen by a larger group of people in need.

Recently, the organization informed her she is among the sites top five bloggers in terms of popularity. It was a shock  and comforting.

I dont write to be recognized, Shelley said. I write because its a gift to be able to reach people who are in a dark place and let them know things do get better.

In early 2013, she and husband, Chris, decided to build a family through adoption after learning they were infertile. Shelley decided to share their journey with KWWL viewers through a blog.

Within six months, they received a call about a newborn in Texas.

Two days after Olivia was born, (the mother) decided, early in the morning, to pick us, Shelley recalled. We had no diapers, no clothes. We were completely unprepared to bring a baby home.

She called work to explain why shed be absent. The Skusters then rushed to Texas to meet their daughter. Four days later, they returned to Iowa.

When Olivia was 18 months old, the Skusters began plans to become foster parents. Then a call came about a newborn in the Quad Cities. An attorney friend insisted the baby was meant for the Skusters.

As a transracial family built through open adoption, they also checked many of the birth mothers boxes.

The birth mother looked at us and said, I want that for my daughter, Shelley explained.

Shelley was skeptical. Chris believed they should be open to the possibility and convinced her to share their information. She realized he was right  that this baby was meant to be part of their family.

Twelve hours after that call, we were driving to the Quad Cities  to pick up our new daughter, Kendra, Shelley said.

Chris took a job in Des Moines, and Shelley decided to take a break from full-time journalism to stay home. Shortly after the move, Shelley learned she was pregnant.

Be careful what you pray for, she said, laughing. Its been a very crazy couple of years  a whirlwind.

Olivia is now 3, Kendra is 18 months and Addison is 7 months. Raising three daughters aged 3 and younger is tough. The awards ceremony will be their first trip away from their daughters.

To maintain perspective, Shelley writes. She also conceptualizes periods of time in seasons to keep a positive attitude; children grow, circumstances change and chaos isnt necessarily permanent.
FINCHFORD -- Fire destroyed a rural home Tuesday that its owners were in the process of selling, Butler County authorities said.

The fire was reported shortly after 2 p.m. at 30405 Butler Ave. The home is about a mile from Finchford but is in Butler County and has a rural Cedar Falls address.

Mitch Nordmeyer, Butler County emergency management coordinator, said the couple who live there were returning home and saw smoke from the road. When they turned up the driveway, they could see flames coming from the house.

The couple was able to enter a portion of the house that was not yet on fire to rescue some pets, Nordmeyer said. There were no injuries.

Firefighters form New Hartford, Shell Rock and Janesville responded along with Butler County deputies and emergency medical personnel.

"Unfortunately, the fire had made too much headway, and the home was a total loss," Nordmeyer said. Windy conditions that day contributed to the fire.

Nordmeyer said the property was in the process of being sold the day of the fire.

The State Fire Marshal's office is investigating the cause of the fire, Nordmeyer said. The couple was offered Red Cross assistance but is staying with family.
WATERLOO  Dream Iowa founder Monica Reyes spent the past year and a half approaching presidential candidates about their positions on undocumented immigrants. Once the nominees were chosen, she dedicated time on behalf of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Reyes motivation was obvious as an immigrant who was brought here illegally from Mexico as a child but now has benefited from a federal program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Reyes, 26, and her family who live in Waterloo could face real consequences from a President Donald Trump, who on the campaign trail often labeled Mexican immigrants as criminals, promised to build a wall at the Mexican border and said he would deport millions.

Now that the Republican Trump has been elected  he will be sworn in Jan. 20  Reyes way of life could be upended. But she offers a hopeful, if somewhat defiant, tone.

It can be summed up in one word: resilience.

I feel like theres a lot of fear in our community, but at the same time, I also know that our biggest asset for the undocumented community is that we persevere, Reyes said. I know that we can still make it through all of this.

Reyes, a graduate of University of Northern Iowa, knows it because shes seen the undocumented community, her community and her family, living in the shadows and persevering for decades. She, in fact, lived in the shadows for nearly two decades, until Democratic President Barack Obama signed an executive order for DACA.

Though it gives her status to live and work in the United States, it required her to come out of the shadows, give her history, and it was still only temporary.

I knew, when I applied for DACA, what I was risking, Reyes said in a separate statement, adding it was a risk worth taking. I was able to benefit in so many ways through DACA. I know what I have to offer, and the value of our community. I am confident that our government will choose not to deport people like myself.

Reyes said she doesnt see it as in the countrys best interest to deport her or take away the rights of immigrants like her who are working and contributing in their communities.

She added, Some day, we will have citizenship.

Though she is confident there will not be a mass deportation force going out in search of every undocumented immigrant in the United States, Reyes acknowledges there is fear in the community and things are likely to get a little bit worse for immigrants.

She thinks there will be additional border security and some additional scrutiny of undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes.

Reyes also expects there could be more hateful rhetoric toward immigrants, as well. Her 7-year-old sister has already faced some of that when the second-grader was told by a classmate she likely would be sent back to Mexico. Similar stories have been shared in Iowa throughout the campaign.

Its a change. Well have to see if its a change for the better or a change for the worse, but whatever it is, I know that we will get through it, Reyes said. We are a community that perseveres no matter what.

She isnt just making hollow promises, either. As part of Dream Iowa, she and others work with the undocumented communities throughout Iowa to help them navigate various systems and educate them about their rights.

Thats another thing thats very great about this nation is that although we are undocumented, as soon as we step foot on American soil we have human rights, and we are treated as individuals, Reyes said.

More information is available at www.dreamia.org/ or on the groups Facebook page.
WATERLOO  World War II U.S. Navy veteran Don Hansen was on a one-man mission  to pull together a last hurrah for World War II veterans.

Its the end of an era, so to speak with the dwinding numbers, said Hansen, 90. Maybe with a few years, there will be none.

He spread the word at local barber shops and hair salons  figuring, quite correctly, thats where a lot of ideas are born and discussed in town.

The result was frustration.

Ive been to 10 to 12 barbershops and hairdressers to spread the word, he said a week and a half ago. I havent had any response at all. I think there are very few living World War II vets. He went to a couple of veterans posts and found doors locked.

Just when hope seemed darkest, there was a breakthrough.

One of Hansens regular stops is the Grout Museum District, which has weekly coffees for veterans at the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum.

The Grout was planning a 75th anniversary commemoration of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that plunged America into World War II. Hansen was unaware of the Grout program.

Hansen and the Grout were oblivious to each others efforts, but both were talking to The Courier, which filled them in.

The result was, as Humphrey Bogart said in the closing line of the World War II drama Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

We are going to move on this, said Chris Shackelford, historical content and program developer for the Grout district. On Dec. 7 we will be holding our Pearl Harbor remembrance at 1 p.m. followed by the World War II last hurrah gathering throughout the museum.

There will be cake, coffee and other refreshments, with multiple tables throughout the museum. Admission will be free to the World War II veterans and their families.

We are hoping that the veterans interested in coming would RSVP so we can provide a gift to those in attendance, Schackelford said

The 1 p.m. program will feature a presentation by World War II U.S. Marine Corps veteran and Grout board member David Greene, who served at the Battle of Iwo Jima.

The event could draw a pretty good crowd, potentially  maybe more than the Grout or Hansen initially suspected. Thats according to numbers provided by Kevin Dill, executive director of the Black Hawk County Veteran Affairs Commission

From what I could gather from the Veterans Administration, we have approximately 634 living World War II veterans in Black Hawk County at this time, Dill said. Add their families, and the potential exists for a sizable turnout.

The gathering holds the potential for a lot of stories and reminiscences  like Hansens.

He served from 1944-46, most of that time on Navy destroyer USS Saufley in the Philippines in the Pacific, where the ship saw action in Leyte Gulf, helping sink an enemy submarine and also taking a hit from a Japanese kamikaze suicide plane. Among Hansens military memorabilia is three bronze battle stars for his ships combat engagements.

The Dec. 7 event, in addition to Greenes presentation, will feature a performance by the University of Northern Iowa Horn Choir and a memorial wreath laying.

The program is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be available. Regular admission will be charged for touring the museum before or after the program.

For more information about the Grout events, call 234-6357 or go to www.groutmuseumdistrict.org
WATERLOO  Bob Miecznikowski flew 400 missions in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s with the Marines.

He was shot down once. He earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, a Purple Heart for combat wounds and a gold Caterpiller Club lapel pin for having parachuted into the jungle when shot down.

He wore all those medals and more at a Veterans Day eve ceremony at Columbus High School on Thursday.

He also wore, with pride, the tears that welled up in his eyes during the ceremony  believed by longtime faculty to be the first such event in the Catholic schools 57-year history.

I think its great, he said, pausing to compose himself. Lost comrades were on his mind.

Ive got about 20 friends on the wall, he said, voice quivering, referring to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

I get very sentimental, said Miecznikowski, the father of several Columbus graduates. The guys that didnt come back, theyre OK. Its their families I always think of. Kids that had to go without a father, stuff like that.

Younger veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan also are on his mind.

I go to the VA for my medicine, and I see these young guys coming back with PTSD, he said.

Miecznikowski was one of the featured veterans on the program organized by student government leaders with help from adviser and Army veteran Dave Will and other volunteers.

Student government leaders Kyle Boe and Elinor Smith said the idea emerged from teacher Gary Schneiders advanced-placement European history class in which students tour European battlefields each spring.

There are a lot of veterans in the Columbus community and Waterloo, so we wanted to honor them, Boe said.

Everyone knows how important Veterans Day is, and student government wanted to step up, Smith said. It was a great experience to plan it.

Students compiled photos of family members who served in the military for a slide show during the program. It included a photo of Michael Lefty OConnor, one of the Columbus graduates killed in Vietnam.

Two World War II veterans were recognized. Longtime Traer hardware dealer Leroy Whannel, 102, served in the Navy on the USS Pinto, including at Omaha Beach on D-Day. Retired Waterloo clothier John DeLorbe Sr., who turns 96 later this month, flew 30 missions over Europe as a radio operator on a B-17 Flying Fortress.

Whannel said he suffers from memory loss, and Thursdays event helped him recall his war experiences.

It was four years you dont want to go through again. But you were fortunate you came out of it a winner and not a loser, Whannel said. Hitler had some weird ideas. Hopefully, we never have to go through a period like that again.

The priest who founded Columbus in 1959, the Rev. Msgr. Ambrose McAvoy, was a decorated World War II veteran. A military chaplain, he served at D-Day and was awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service.
Journalists are not supposed to blow their own horn. Thats because we are not the story. The people and events we write about are the story.

Thats definitely the case with what we are about to tell you.

Were pleased at a small bit of state recognition the Grout Museum District and The Courier received recently  not for ourselves but for the people we wrote about  and the ordeal they endured.

They are people for whom recognition was once short in supply, and its long overdue. And its appropriate to highlight them today, Veterans Day.

Those people, heroes in our midst, served our nation during the Vietnam War.

The Grout Museum, home to the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum, collaborated with The Courier last fall on a series, They Served with Honor. We featured 50 Vietnam veterans in 50 days based on videotaped oral histories previously provided to the Grout Museum District by the veterans themselves and further researched by our news staff.

The series received a state award at the Iowa Tourism Conference in Davenport for outstanding marketing collaboration between the Grout and The Courier. The series ran concurrent with the Grout Districts exhibit 365 Days and Counting: Iowans in the Vietnam War, displayed July 2015 to July 2016.

The exhibit was set up by an advisory committee of local Vietnam veterans and was kicked off with a homecoming parade in downtown Waterloo for those veterans.

The Grout has hundreds of oral histories from veterans of all eras. With the museum district staffs help, we selected primarily Northeast Iowa Vietnam veterans. A few of the veterans had died since providing their oral histories. We featured one veteran a day for 50 days.

The features helped shine a light on the stories of the men and women who proudly served our county during one of the most controversial wars in history and also helped spread awareness about a powerful exhibit that educated the public and helped heal those who lived through it 50 years ago, state tourism officials said in a release announcing the award.

Their stories are an important part of our history. These veterans speak for comrades who have passed on and those who didnt come back. They are our parents and grandparents, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sons, daughters and friends.

These veterans were received with indifference, even hostility, when they returned home. Their service needs to be acknowledged and never forgotten. We tried to do our part to accomplish that with this project. If it gave our readers new or renewed appreciation for those who served and what they endured, we did our job.

The stories may still be viewed online on The Couriers website at the link: www.wcfcourier.com/special-section/vietnam-veterans/

As Army veteran Charles M. Provinces poem It Is The Soldier says, in part: It is the soldier, not the reporter who has given us freedom of the press.

Were keenly aware of that. Thats why we were humbled and honored to do this series along with our ongoing coverage of veterans of all ages, eras, branches of service and conflicts.

We appreciate you. We honor you. And it is with the deepest gratitude we say to you all, Happy Veterans Day.
On Episode 11 of Understanding Latin American Politics: The Podcast, I talked with Christine Wade, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Washington College, about the recent Nicaraguan presidential election. We even discuss how to define "cheating" and "democracy." Naturally that leads us to how a Trump administration might approach Nicaragua.




past daily news Sep 13 (1) Sep 09 (15) Sep 06 (12) Sep 04 (10) Sep 03 (10) Aug 31 (17) Aug 29 (14) Aug 26 (13) Aug 22 (11) Aug 21 (12) Aug 19 (21) Aug 14 (6) Aug 13 (10) Aug 10 (10) Aug 08 (9) Aug 07 (10) Aug 06 (10) Aug 05 (8) Aug 03 (8) Aug 02 (7) Aug 01 (7) Jul 31 (14) Jul 29 (1) Jul 27 (7) Jul 25 (5) Jul 24 (10) Jul 22 (11) Jul 19 (16) Jul 17 (6) Jul 16 (10) Jul 15 (13) Jul 12 (7) Jul 11 (5) Jul 10 (8) Jul 08 (8) Jul 07 (3) Jul 06 (5) Jul 05 (8) Jul 04 (11) Jul 03 (8) Jul 02 (7) Jul 01 (5) Jun 30 (8) Jun 28 (7) Jun 27 (8) Jun 26 (7) Jun 25 (8) Jun 24 (6) Jun 23 (6) Jun 22 (9) Jun 20 (5) Jun 19 (9) Jun 18 (8) Jun 15 (9) Jun 13 (13) Jun 11 (11) Jun 09 (19) Jun 06 (10) Jun 04 (10) Jun 03 (8) Jun 01 (6) May 31 (5) May 30 (5) May 29 (6) May 28 (7) May 27 (7) May 26 (6) May 25 (4) May 23 (6) May 22 (6) May 21 (4) May 20 (7) May 19 (9) May 18 (4) May 17 (6) May 16 (5) May 15 (7) May 14 (3) May 13 (3) May 12 (9) May 10 (3) May 09 (7) May 08 (4) May 07 (3) May 06 (5) May 05 (8) May 03 (9) May 02 (1) May 01 (5) Apr 30 (8) Apr 29 (5) Apr 28 (4) Apr 27 (7) Apr 26 (12) Apr 25 (4) Apr 24 (8) Apr 23 (7) Apr 22 (5) Apr 21 (3) Apr 20 (1) Apr 19 (5) Apr 18 (3) Apr 17 (6) Apr 16 (6) Apr 15 (5) Apr 14 (2) Apr 13 (4) Apr 12 (2) Apr 11 (4) Apr 10 (3) Apr 09 (3) Apr 08 (3) Apr 07 (5) Apr 06 (3) Apr 05 (10) Apr 04 (2) Apr 03 (3) Apr 02 (9) Apr 01 (7) Mar 31 (10) Mar 30 (6) Mar 29 (7) Mar 28 (5) Mar 27 (3) Mar 26 (10) Mar 25 (4) Mar 24 (5) Mar 23 (10) Mar 22 (6) Mar 21 (5) Mar 20 (11) Mar 19 (8) Mar 18 (5) Mar 17 (4) Mar 16 (11) Mar 15 (10) Mar 14 (7) Mar 13 (7) Mar 12 (5) Mar 11 (3) Mar 10 (3) Mar 09 (5) Mar 08 (6) Mar 07 (8) Mar 06 (6) Mar 05 (12) Mar 04 (6) Mar 03 (8) Mar 02 (6) Mar 01 (8) Feb 28 (7) Feb 27 (5) Feb 26 (6) Feb 25 (7) Feb 24 (3) Feb 23 (6) Feb 22 (4) Feb 21 (3) Feb 20 (1) Feb 19 (6) Feb 18 (4) Feb 17 (4) Feb 16 (2) Feb 15 (5) Feb 14 (3) Feb 13 (6) Feb 12 (6) Feb 11 (4) Feb 10 (6) Feb 09 (6) Feb 08 (4) Feb 07 (6) Feb 06 (4) Feb 05 (2) Feb 04 (3) Feb 03 (5) Feb 02 (1) Feb 01 (4) Jan 31 (8) Jan 30 (2) Jan 29 (4) Jan 28 (1) Jan 27 (4) Jan 26 (7) Jan 25 (4) Jan 23 (4) Jan 22 (8) Jan 21 (2) Jan 20 (2) Jan 19 (3) Jan 18 (4) Jan 17 (2) Jan 16 (7) Jan 15 (6) Jan 14 (4) Jan 13 (6) Jan 12 (5) Jan 11 (4) Jan 10 (5) Jan 09 (4) Jan 08 (5) Jan 07 (4) Jan 05 (5) Jan 04 (4) Jan 03 (3) Jan 02 (2) Jan 01 (1) Dec 31 (5) Dec 29 (4) Dec 28 (5) Dec 26 (3) Dec 25 (2) Dec 24 (3) Dec 23 (2) Dec 22 (4) Dec 21 (4) Dec 20 (3) Dec 19 (3) Dec 18 (2) Dec 17 (1) Dec 16 (4) Dec 15 (2) Dec 14 (3) Dec 13 (7) Dec 12 (5) Dec 11 (4) Dec 10 (3) Dec 09 (2) Dec 08 (2) Dec 07 (4) Dec 06 (4) Dec 05 (1) Dec 04 (5) Dec 03 (3) Dec 02 (5) Dec 01 (6) Nov 30 (5) Nov 29 (10) Nov 28 (6) Nov 27 (2) Nov 26 (3) Nov 24 (2) Nov 23 (5) Nov 22 (4) Nov 21 (3) Nov 20 (6) Nov 19 (2) Nov 18 (5) Nov 17 (5) Nov 16 (3) Nov 15 (2) Nov 14 (3) Nov 13 (3) Nov 12 (2) Nov 11 (4) Nov 10 (5) Nov 09 (4) Nov 08 (5) Nov 07 (5) Nov 06 (5) Nov 05 (4) Nov 04 (5) Nov 02 (4) Nov 01 (4) Oct 31 (9) Oct 30 (9) Oct 29 (3) Oct 28 (2) Oct 27 (6) Oct 26 (6) Oct 25 (6) Oct 24 (3) Oct 23 (6) Oct 22 (4) Oct 20 (3) Oct 19 (6) Oct 18 (5) Oct 17 (5) Oct 16 (4) Oct 15 (5) Oct 14 (2) Oct 13 (4) Oct 12 (7) Oct 11 (5) Oct 10 (4) Oct 09 (5) Oct 08 (10) Oct 07 (1) Oct 06 (10) Oct 05 (6) Oct 04 (8) Oct 03 (3) Oct 02 (4) Oct 01 (6) Sep 30 (5) Sep 29 (1) Sep 28 (6) Sep 27 (6) Sep 26 (5) Sep 25 (3) Sep 24 (6) Sep 23 (5) Sep 22 (7) Sep 21 (6) Sep 20 (6) Sep 19 (5) Sep 18 (3) Sep 17 (5) Sep 16 (5) Sep 15 (5) Sep 14 (6) Sep 13 (4) Sep 12 (5) Sep 11 (7) Sep 10 (6) Sep 09 (5) Sep 08 (3) Sep 07 (4) Sep 06 (8) Sep 05 (6) Sep 04 (7) Sep 03 (3) Sep 02 (4) Sep 01 (5) Aug 31 (8) Aug 30 (6) Aug 29 (6) Aug 28 (6) Aug 27 (1) Aug 26 (4) Aug 25 (3) Aug 24 (7) Aug 23 (4) Aug 22 (4) Aug 21 (4) Aug 20 (7) Aug 18 (5) Aug 17 (8) Aug 16 (8) Aug 15 (4) Aug 14 (6) Aug 13 (5) Aug 12 (4) Aug 11 (2) Aug 10 (5) Aug 09 (4) Aug 08 (8) Aug 07 (4) Aug 06 (3) Aug 05 (4) Aug 04 (4) Aug 03 (10) Aug 02 (9) Aug 01 (8) Jul 31 (1) Jul 30 (3) Jul 29 (2) Jul 28 (11) Jul 27 (10) Jul 26 (10) Jul 25 (7) Jul 24 (5) Jul 23 (3) Jul 22 (2) Jul 21 (7) Jul 20 (10) Jul 19 (8) Jul 18 (7) Jul 17 (1) Jul 16 (10) Jul 14 (7) Jul 13 (6) Jul 12 (11) Jul 11 (7) Jul 10 (5) Jul 09 (6) Jul 08 (5) Jul 07 (8) Jul 06 (4) Jul 05 (6) Jul 04 (6) Jul 03 (7) Jul 02 (6) Jul 01 (2) Jun 30 (7) Jun 29 (7) Jun 28 (5) Jun 27 (8) Jun 26 (5) Jun 25 (6) Jun 23 (4) Jun 22 (4) Jun 21 (5) Jun 20 (8) Jun 18 (2) Jun 17 (3) Jun 16 (4) Jun 15 (3) Jun 14 (7) Jun 13 (4) Jun 12 (7) Jun 11 (3) Jun 10 (2) Jun 09 (8) Jun 08 (8) Jun 07 (8) Jun 06 (10) Jun 05 (14) Jun 04 (6) Jun 03 (6) Jun 02 (8) Jun 01 (6) May 31 (7) May 30 (2) May 29 (7) May 28 (7) May 27 (2) May 26 (4) May 25 (5) May 24 (4) May 23 (5) May 22 (5) May 21 (5) May 20 (3) May 19 (10) May 18 (6) May 17 (3) May 16 (6) May 15 (2) May 14 (3) May 13 (5) May 11 (1) May 10 (5) May 09 (3) May 08 (4) May 07 (2) May 06 (4) May 05 (6) May 04 (5) May 03 (5) May 02 (1) May 01 (6) Apr 30 (6) Apr 29 (7) Apr 28 (8) Apr 27 (9) Apr 26 (14) Apr 25 (6) Apr 24 (6) Apr 23 (7) Apr 22 (1) Apr 21 (8) Apr 20 (3) Apr 19 (6) Apr 18 (4) Apr 17 (7) Apr 16 (1) Apr 15 (8) Apr 14 (1) Apr 13 (7) Apr 12 (10) Apr 11 (7) Apr 10 (2) Apr 09 (2) Apr 08 (4) Apr 07 (3) Apr 06 (6) Apr 05 (6) Apr 04 (9) Apr 03 (4) Apr 02 (5) Apr 01 (2) Mar 31 (5) Mar 30 (4) Mar 29 (8) Mar 28 (5) Mar 27 (9) Mar 26 (4) Mar 25 (5) Mar 24 (11) Mar 23 (10) Mar 22 (9) Mar 21 (10) Mar 20 (11) Mar 19 (5) Mar 18 (7) Mar 17 (3) Mar 16 (7) Mar 15 (6) Mar 14 (6) Mar 13 (9) Mar 12 (6) Mar 11 (3) Mar 10 (3) Mar 09 (5) Mar 08 (6) Mar 07 (13) Mar 06 (6) Mar 05 (3) Mar 04 (7) Mar 03 (4) Mar 02 (5) Mar 01 (6) Feb 28 (6) Feb 27 (4) Feb 26 (5) Feb 25 (6) Feb 24 (6) Feb 23 (9) Feb 22 (6) Feb 21 (7) Feb 20 (8) Feb 19 (6) Feb 18 (3) Feb 17 (4) Feb 16 (6) Feb 15 (5) Feb 14 (7) Feb 13 (5) Feb 12 (3) Feb 11 (4) Feb 10 (5) Feb 09 (9) Feb 08 (8) Feb 07 (7) Feb 06 (10) Feb 05 (7) Feb 04 (2) Feb 03 (8) Feb 02 (7) Feb 01 (5) Jan 31 (4) Jan 30 (4) Jan 29 (7) Jan 28 (3) Jan 27 (7) Jan 26 (8) Jan 25 (6) Jan 24 (6) Jan 23 (5) Jan 22 (4) Jan 21 (6) Jan 20 (8) Jan 19 (6) Jan 18 (8) Jan 17 (12) Jan 16 (5) Jan 15 (4) Jan 14 (8) Jan 12 (6) Jan 11 (6) Jan 10 (7) Jan 09 (4) Jan 08 (6) Jan 07 (4) Jan 06 (6) Jan 05 (9) Jan 04 (9) Jan 03 (4) Jan 02 (6) Jan 01 (8) Dec 31 (2) Dec 30 (1) Dec 29 (5) Dec 28 (4) Dec 27 (8) Dec 26 (4) Dec 24 (5) Dec 23 (7) Dec 22 (12) Dec 21 (4) Dec 20 (7) Dec 19 (3) Dec 18 (5) Dec 17 (3) Dec 16 (1) Dec 15 (7) Dec 14 (10) Dec 13 (7) Dec 12 (12) Dec 10 (3) Dec 09 (6) Dec 08 (7) Dec 07 (12) Dec 06 (6) Dec 05 (13) Dec 04 (6) Dec 02 (8) Dec 01 (8) Nov 30 (6) Nov 29 (7) Nov 28 (7) Nov 27 (4) Nov 26 (8) Nov 24 (2) Nov 23 (5) Nov 22 (11) Nov 21 (7) Nov 20 (3) Nov 19 (10) Nov 18 (7) Nov 17 (6) Nov 16 (11) Nov 15 (10) Nov 14 (7) Nov 13 (3) Nov 12 (5) Nov 11 (12) Nov 10 (4) Nov 09 (14) Nov 08 (10) Nov 07 (11) Nov 06 (8) Nov 05 (5) Nov 04 (11) Nov 03 (9) Nov 02 (10) Nov 01 (8) Oct 31 (12) Oct 30 (5) Oct 29 (5) Oct 28 (5) Oct 27 (11) Oct 26 (13) Oct 25 (9) Oct 24 (10) Oct 23 (8) Oct 22 (5) Oct 21 (11) Oct 20 (8) Oct 19 (6) Oct 18 (5) Oct 17 (5) Oct 16 (6) Oct 15 (4) Oct 14 (9) Oct 13 (10) Oct 12 (11) Oct 11 (9) Oct 10 (10) Oct 09 (7) Oct 08 (5) Oct 07 (10) Oct 06 (9) Oct 05 (14) Oct 04 (9) Oct 03 (12) Oct 02 (4) Oct 01 (9) Sep 30 (5) Sep 29 (7) Sep 28 (13) Sep 27 (10) Sep 26 (11) Sep 25 (3) Sep 24 (9) Sep 23 (7) Sep 22 (10) Sep 21 (12) Sep 20 (12) Sep 19 (4) Sep 18 (5) Sep 17 (7) Sep 16 (11) Sep 15 (8) Sep 14 (5) Sep 13 (8) Sep 12 (8) Sep 11 (6) Sep 10 (10) Sep 09 (5) Sep 08 (9) Sep 07 (8) Sep 06 (11) Sep 05 (2) Sep 04 (8) Sep 03 (2) Sep 02 (6) Sep 01 (9) Aug 31 (9) Aug 30 (7) Aug 29 (9) Aug 28 (4) Aug 27 (8) Aug 26 (6) Aug 25 (5) Aug 24 (8) Aug 23 (4) Aug 22 (5) Aug 21 (2) Aug 20 (4) Aug 19 (6) Aug 18 (4) Aug 17 (4) Aug 16 (6) Aug 15 (3) Aug 14 (4) Aug 13 (7) Aug 12 (6) Aug 11 (3) Aug 10 (5) Aug 09 (8) Aug 08 (9) Aug 07 (7) Aug 06 (7) Aug 05 (7) Aug 04 (7) Aug 03 (11) Aug 02 (6) Aug 01 (9) Jul 31 (11) Jul 28 (7) Jul 27 (11) Jul 26 (5) Jul 25 (5) Jul 24 (1) Jul 22 (3) Jul 21 (2) Jul 20 (9) Jul 19 (8) Jul 18 (6) Jul 17 (7) Jul 15 (4) Jul 14 (2) Jul 13 (6) Jul 12 (10) Jul 11 (11) Jul 10 (2) Jul 09 (3) Jul 08 (5) Jul 07 (5) Jul 06 (6) Jul 05 (3) Jul 04 (6) Jul 03 (5) Jul 02 (3) Jun 30 (8) Jun 29 (5) Jun 28 (6) Jun 27 (4) Jun 26 (4) Jun 25 (1) Jun 24 (5) Jun 23 (11) Jun 21 (5) Jun 20 (5) Jun 19 (7) Jun 17 (4) Jun 16 (7) Jun 15 (4) Jun 14 (6) Jun 13 (4) Jun 12 (4) Jun 11 (6) Jun 10 (6) Jun 09 (8) Jun 08 (6) Jun 07 (8) Jun 06 (7) Jun 05 (5) Jun 04 (7) Jun 03 (1) Jun 02 (9) Jun 01 (5) May 31 (8) May 30 (7) May 29 (5) May 28 (5) May 27 (4) May 26 (4) May 25 (4) May 24 (3) May 23 (5) May 22 (2) May 21 (3) May 20 (7) May 19 (11) May 18 (1) May 17 (7) May 16 (3) May 15 (4) May 14 (3) May 13 (4) May 12 (4) May 11 (11) May 10 (2) May 09 (6) May 08 (6) May 07 (2) May 06 (3) May 05 (4) May 04 (5) May 03 (8) May 02 (4) May 01 (4) Apr 30 (6) Apr 29 (13) Apr 28 (5) Apr 27 (7) Apr 26 (5) Apr 25 (5) Apr 24 (2) Apr 23 (7) Apr 22 (9) Apr 21 (11) Apr 20 (2) Apr 19 (2) Apr 18 (5) Apr 17 (5) Apr 16 (6) Apr 14 (5) Apr 13 (2) Apr 12 (9) Apr 11 (10) Apr 10 (6) Apr 09 (5) Apr 08 (3) Apr 07 (10) Apr 06 (7) Apr 05 (7) Apr 04 (7) Apr 03 (9) Mar 31 (12) Mar 30 (9) Mar 29 (7) Mar 28 (4) Mar 27 (3) Mar 26 (6) Mar 25 (3) Mar 24 (8) Mar 23 (7) Mar 22 (4) Mar 21 (10) Mar 20 (6) Mar 19 (6) Mar 17 (7) Mar 16 (11) Mar 15 (6) Mar 14 (9) Mar 13 (4) Mar 12 (6) Mar 10 (3) Mar 09 (9) Mar 08 (10) Mar 07 (4) Mar 06 (5) Mar 05 (3) Mar 04 (2) Mar 03 (4) Mar 02 (5) Mar 01 (5) Feb 28 (3) Feb 27 (8) Feb 26 (9) Feb 24 (11) Feb 23 (8) Feb 22 (9) Feb 21 (8) Feb 20 (7) Feb 19 (4) Feb 18 (9) Feb 17 (6) Feb 16 (5) Feb 15 (7) Feb 14 (11) Feb 13 (2) Feb 12 (5) Feb 11 (5) Feb 10 (3) Feb 09 (10) Feb 08 (9) Feb 07 (9) Feb 06 (2) Feb 05 (9) Feb 03 (7) Feb 02 (5) Feb 01 (7) Jan 31 (4) Jan 30 (5) Jan 29 (6) Jan 28 (5) Jan 27 (2) Jan 26 (7) Jan 25 (7) Jan 24 (8) Jan 23 (4) Jan 22 (14) Jan 20 (8) Jan 19 (10) Jan 18 (11) Jan 17 (9) Jan 16 (5) Jan 15 (3) Jan 14 (9) Jan 13 (6) Jan 12 (7) Jan 11 (7) Jan 10 (2) Jan 09 (7) Jan 08 (6) Jan 07 (10) Jan 06 (8) Jan 05 (7) Jan 04 (9) Jan 03 (8) Jan 02 (5) Jan 01 (14) Dec 30 (13) Dec 29 (13) Dec 28 (9) Dec 27 (5) Dec 26 (4) Dec 25 (7) Dec 24 (4) Dec 23 (5) Dec 22 (4) Dec 21 (8) Dec 20 (3) Dec 19 (8) Dec 18 (9) Dec 16 (8) Dec 15 (5) Dec 14 (5) Dec 13 (8) Dec 12 (4) Dec 11 (17) Dec 09 (8) Dec 08 (5) Dec 07 (10) Dec 06 (12) Dec 05 (6) Dec 04 (8) Dec 02 (6) Dec 01 (7) Nov 30 (9) Nov 29 (6) Nov 28 (11) Nov 27 (6) Nov 26 (15) Nov 24 (7) Nov 23 (15) Nov 22 (9) Nov 21 (6) Nov 20 (11) Nov 18 (11) Nov 17 (13) Nov 16 (8) Nov 15 (13) Nov 14 (7) Nov 13 (7) Nov 12 (3) Nov 11 (13) Nov 10 (13) Nov 09 (6) Nov 08 (9) Nov 07 (6) Nov 06 (4) Nov 05 (12) Nov 04 (8) Nov 03 (9) Nov 02 (8) Nov 01 (6) Oct 31 (10) Oct 30 (8) Oct 29 (3) Oct 28 (8) Oct 27 (15) Oct 26 (10) Oct 25 (10) Oct 24 (13) Oct 23 (9) Oct 21 (8) Oct 20 (13) Oct 19 (6) Oct 18 (11) Oct 17 (8) Oct 16 (14) Oct 14 (9) Oct 13 (11) Oct 12 (9) Oct 11 (13) Oct 10 (7) Oct 09 (15) Oct 07 (7) Oct 06 (11) Oct 05 (18) Oct 04 (14) Oct 03 (1) Oct 02 (10) Sep 30 (11) Sep 29 (11) Sep 28 (11) Sep 27 (15) Sep 26 (7) Sep 24 (9) Sep 23 (11) Sep 22 (7) Sep 21 (17) Sep 20 (20) Sep 19 (4) Sep 18 (11) Sep 16 (10) Sep 15 (12) Sep 14 (9) Sep 13 (12) Sep 12 (14) Sep 11 (4) Sep 10 (8) Sep 09 (9) Sep 08 (5) Sep 07 (13) Sep 06 (15) Sep 05 (8) Sep 04 (11) Sep 03 (10) Sep 02 (12) Sep 01 (12) Aug 31 (14) Aug 30 (14) Aug 29 (8) Aug 28 (8) Aug 27 (9) Aug 26 (12) Aug 25 (6) Aug 24 (8) Aug 23 (12) Aug 22 (6) Aug 21 (5) Aug 20 (6) Aug 19 (9) Aug 18 (4) Aug 17 (7) Aug 16 (11) Aug 15 (2) Aug 14 (12) Aug 12 (15) Aug 11 (11) Aug 10 (6) Aug 09 (7) Aug 08 (3) Aug 07 (4) Aug 06 (5) Aug 05 (7) Aug 04 (7) Aug 03 (4) Aug 02 (5) Aug 01 (5) Jul 31 (7) Jul 30 (5) Jul 29 (9) Jul 28 (8) Jul 27 (8) Jul 26 (7) Jul 25 (6) Jul 23 (8) Jul 22 (6) Jul 21 (5) Jul 20 (9) Jul 19 (5) Jul 18 (15) Jul 15 (14) Jul 14 (5) Jul 13 (6) Jul 12 (12) Jul 11 (8) Jul 10 (3) Jul 09 (11) Jul 08 (8) Jul 07 (7) Jul 06 (10) Jul 05 (4) Jul 04 (4) Jul 03 (5) Jul 02 (7) Jul 01 (8) Jun 30 (7) Jun 29 (10) Jun 28 (8) Jun 27 (4) Jun 26 (5) Jun 25 (4) Jun 24 (2) Jun 23 (11) Jun 22 (5) Jun 21 (7) Jun 20 (3) Jun 19 (7) Jun 18 (10) Jun 17 (11) Jun 16 (5) Jun 15 (5) Jun 14 (7) Jun 13 (14) Jun 11 (6) Jun 10 (8) Jun 09 (9) Jun 08 (11) Jun 07 (14) Jun 06 (16) Jun 03 (8) Jun 02 (12) Jun 01 (5) May 31 (7) May 30 (15) May 28 (7) May 27 (5) May 26 (21) May 25 (14) May 24 (10) May 23 (7) May 22 (8) May 21 (11) May 20 (5) May 19 (4) May 18 (10) May 17 (11) May 16 (5) May 15 (6) May 14 (7) May 13 (12) May 12 (10) May 11 (7) May 10 (13) May 09 (4) May 08 (7) May 07 (3) May 06 (6) May 05 (9) May 04 (14) May 03 (7) May 02 (10) May 01 (10) Apr 30 (6) Apr 29 (9) Apr 28 (5) Apr 27 (9) Apr 26 (8) Apr 25 (8) Apr 24 (6) Apr 23 (14) Apr 22 (16) Apr 21 (11) Apr 20 (7) Apr 19 (16) Apr 18 (8) Apr 17 (7) Apr 16 (10) Apr 15 (8) Apr 14 (5) Apr 13 (11) Apr 12 (10) Apr 11 (8) Apr 10 (12) Apr 09 (5) Apr 08 (13) Apr 07 (9) Apr 06 (11) Apr 05 (15) Apr 04 (7) Apr 03 (15) Apr 02 (5) Apr 01 (11) Mar 31 (12) Mar 30 (10) Mar 29 (8) Mar 28 (7) Mar 27 (12) Mar 26 (8) Mar 25 (8) Mar 24 (7) Mar 23 (15) Mar 22 (17) Mar 21 (9) Mar 20 (8) Mar 19 (4) Mar 18 (16) Mar 17 (8) Mar 16 (19) Mar 15 (13) Mar 14 (7) Mar 13 (20) Mar 11 (5) Mar 10 (11) Mar 09 (13) Mar 08 (13) Mar 07 (7) Mar 06 (6) Mar 05 (9) Mar 04 (10) Mar 03 (16) Mar 02 (16) Mar 01 (13) Feb 29 (8) Feb 28 (6) Feb 27 (16) Feb 26 (10) Feb 25 (6) Feb 24 (12) Feb 23 (14) Feb 22 (9) Feb 21 (11) Feb 20 (8) Feb 19 (12) Feb 18 (12) Feb 17 (11) Feb 16 (8) Feb 15 (9) Feb 14 (7) Feb 13 (10) Feb 12 (11) Feb 11 (13) Feb 10 (5) Feb 09 (6) Feb 08 (4) Feb 07 (9) Feb 06 (13) Feb 05 (10) Feb 04 (11) Feb 03 (7) Feb 02 (19) Jan 31 (21) Jan 29 (11) Jan 28 (10) Jan 27 (13) Jan 26 (7) Jan 25 (5) Jan 24 (2) Jan 23 (8) Jan 22 (13) Jan 21 (11) Jan 20 (9) Jan 19 (13) Jan 18 (4) Jan 17 (11) Jan 15 (7) Jan 14 (13) Jan 13 (9) Jan 12 (9) Jan 11 (5) Jan 10 (8) Jan 09 (7) Jan 08 (7) Jan 07 (6) Jan 06 (11) Jan 05 (7) Jan 04 (7) Jan 03 (3) Jan 02 (8) Jan 01 (5) Dec 31 (10) Dec 30 (9) Dec 29 (7) Dec 28 (9) Dec 27 (4) Dec 26 (1) Dec 25 (5) Dec 24 (6) Dec 23 (6) Dec 22 (7) Dec 21 (6) Dec 20 (7) Dec 19 (13) Dec 18 (16) Dec 17 (10) Dec 16 (13) Dec 15 (11) Dec 14 (8) Dec 13 (4) Dec 12 (9) Dec 11 (10) Dec 10 (12) Dec 09 (10) Dec 08 (13) Dec 07 (7) Dec 06 (12) Dec 05 (8) Dec 04 (11) Dec 03 (12) Dec 02 (16) Dec 01 (14) Nov 30 (10) Nov 29 (11) Nov 28 (15) Nov 27 (16) Nov 26 (11) Nov 25 (9) Nov 24 (13) Nov 23 (10) Nov 22 (1) Nov 21 (7) Nov 20 (12) Nov 19 (10) Nov 18 (11) Nov 17 (11) Nov 16 (10) Nov 15 (3) Nov 14 (10) Nov 13 (14) Nov 12 (8) Nov 11 (13) Nov 10 (10) Nov 09 (6) Nov 08 (9) Nov 07 (11) Nov 06 (12) Nov 05 (17) Nov 04 (12) Nov 03 (11) Nov 02 (5) Nov 01 (12) Oct 31 (11) Oct 30 (11) Oct 29 (10) Oct 28 (18) Oct 27 (16) Oct 26 (11) Oct 25 (9) Oct 24 (12) Oct 23 (11) Oct 22 (14) Oct 21 (12) Oct 20 (17) Oct 19 (12) Oct 18 (13) Oct 17 (15) Oct 16 (14) Oct 15 (10) Oct 14 (16) Oct 13 (12) Oct 12 (13) Oct 11 (8) Oct 10 (12) Oct 09 (21) Oct 08 (22) Oct 07 (19) Oct 06 (18) Oct 05 (6) Oct 04 (17) Oct 03 (13) Oct 02 (14) Oct 01 (13) Sep 30 (14) Sep 29 (15) Sep 28 (12) Sep 27 (11) Sep 26 (15) Sep 25 (13) Sep 24 (9) Sep 23 (10) Sep 22 (12) Sep 21 (8) Sep 20 (4) Sep 19 (12) Sep 18 (12) Sep 17 (16) Sep 16 (21) Sep 15 (14) Sep 14 (7) Sep 13 (5) Sep 12 (10) Sep 11 (16) Sep 10 (7) Sep 09 (8) Sep 08 (10) Sep 07 (7) Sep 06 (5) Sep 05 (8) Sep 04 (9) Sep 03 (8) Sep 02 (11) Sep 01 (10) Aug 31 (4) Aug 30 (6) Aug 29 (1) Aug 28 (10) Aug 27 (8) Aug 26 (8) Aug 25 (14) Aug 24 (4) Aug 23 (3) Aug 22 (5) Aug 21 (13) Aug 20 (9) Aug 19 (13) Aug 18 (3) Aug 17 (3) Aug 16 (3) Aug 15 (6) Aug 14 (8) Aug 13 (7) Aug 12 (12) Aug 11 (9) Aug 10 (8) Aug 09 (14) Aug 08 (6) Aug 07 (1) Aug 06 (4) Aug 05 (8) Aug 04 (6) Aug 03 (6) Aug 02 (2) Aug 01 (6) Jul 31 (6) Jul 30 (3) Jul 29 (6) Jul 28 (8) Jul 27 (7) Jul 25 (4) Jul 24 (6) Jul 23 (5) Jul 22 (3) Jul 21 (7) Jul 20 (5) Jul 18 (6) Jul 17 (5) Jul 16 (4) Jul 15 (9) Jul 14 (2) Jul 13 (8) Jul 12 (1) Jul 11 (5) Jul 10 (8) Jul 09 (3) Jul 08 (3) Jul 07 (13) Jul 05 (2) Jul 04 (5) Jul 03 (6) Jul 02 (6) Jul 01 (7) Jun 30 (7) Jun 29 (3) Jun 28 (1) Jun 27 (4) Jun 26 (7) Jun 25 (4) Jun 24 (6) Jun 23 (9) Jun 22 (4) Jun 21 (3) Jun 19 (4) Jun 18 (7) Jun 17 (7) Jun 16 (7) Jun 15 (11) Jun 12 (6) Jun 11 (3) Jun 10 (10) Jun 09 (3) Jun 08 (3) Jun 07 (4) Jun 06 (2) Jun 05 (9) Jun 04 (8) Jun 03 (9) Jun 02 (6) Jun 01 (4) May 30 (7) May 29 (9) May 28 (13) May 26 (8) May 25 (5) May 24 (2) May 23 (8) May 22 (9) May 21 (7) May 20 (4) May 19 (6) May 18 (7) May 17 (8) May 15 (9) May 14 (5) May 13 (8) May 12 (6) May 11 (6) May 09 (7) May 08 (6) May 07 (11) May 06 (7) May 05 (4) May 04 (11) May 03 (5) May 02 (4) May 01 (9) Apr 30 (6) Apr 29 (4) Apr 28 (9) Apr 27 (4) Apr 26 (3) Apr 25 (5) Apr 24 (3) Apr 23 (10) Apr 22 (8) Apr 21 (9) Apr 20 (3) Apr 19 (4) Apr 18 (8) Apr 17 (7) Apr 16 (4) Apr 15 (6) Apr 14 (8) Apr 13 (3) Apr 12 (6) Apr 10 (2) Apr 09 (4) Apr 08 (5) Apr 07 (5) Apr 06 (2) Apr 05 (2) Apr 04 (5) Apr 03 (7) Apr 02 (7) Apr 01 (12) Mar 31 (12) Mar 30 (3) Mar 29 (1) Mar 28 (2) Mar 27 (6) Mar 26 (2) Mar 25 (5) Mar 24 (4) Mar 23 (7) Mar 22 (4) Mar 21 (6) Mar 20 (9) Mar 19 (9) Mar 18 (8) Mar 17 (9) Mar 16 (7) Mar 15 (11) Mar 13 (5) Mar 12 (12) Mar 11 (9) Mar 10 (12) Mar 09 (4) Mar 08 (5) Mar 07 (5) Mar 06 (5) Mar 05 (5) Mar 04 (6) Mar 03 (11) Mar 02 (5) Mar 01 (8) Feb 27 (9) Feb 26 (9) Feb 25 (8) Feb 24 (6) Feb 23 (4) Feb 22 (3) Feb 21 (6) Feb 20 (3) Feb 19 (10) Feb 18 (9) Feb 17 (7) Feb 16 (5) Feb 15 (2) Feb 14 (8) Feb 13 (12) Feb 12 (8) Feb 11 (10) Feb 10 (7) Feb 09 (6) Feb 08 (3) Feb 07 (2) Feb 06 (7) Feb 05 (4) Feb 04 (11) Feb 03 (5) Feb 02 (7) Feb 01 (4) Jan 31 (5) Jan 30 (8) Jan 29 (12) Jan 28 (6) Jan 27 (8) Jan 26 (13) Jan 24 (8) Jan 23 (12) Jan 22 (8) Jan 21 (10) Jan 20 (8) Jan 19 (6) Jan 18 (9) Jan 17 (6) Jan 16 (4) Jan 15 (11) Jan 14 (4) Jan 13 (6) Jan 12 (7) Jan 11 (6) Jan 10 (2) Jan 09 (6) Jan 08 (5) Jan 07 (6) Jan 06 (4) Jan 05 (4) Jan 04 (3) Jan 03 (6) Jan 02 (2) Jan 01 (3) Dec 31 (6) Dec 30 (4) Dec 29 (6) Dec 28 (4) Dec 27 (4) Dec 26 (2) Dec 25 (3) Dec 24 (5) Dec 23 (7) Dec 22 (5) Dec 21 (4) Dec 20 (4) Dec 19 (5) Dec 18 (8) Dec 17 (5) Dec 16 (9) Dec 15 (7) Dec 14 (3) Dec 13 (10) Dec 12 (10) Dec 11 (9) Dec 10 (10) Dec 09 (11) Dec 08 (5) Dec 07 (5) Dec 06 (6) Dec 05 (9) Dec 04 (3) Dec 03 (8) Dec 02 (10) Dec 01 (6) Nov 30 (1) Nov 29 (3) Nov 28 (9) Nov 27 (3) Nov 26 (7) Nov 25 (12) Nov 24 (3) Nov 23 (8) Nov 22 (4) Nov 21 (3) Nov 20 (12) Nov 19 (6) Nov 18 (10) Nov 17 (12) Nov 16 (5) Nov 15 (5) Nov 14 (12) Nov 13 (3) Nov 12 (7) Nov 11 (8) Nov 10 (7) Nov 09 (6) Nov 08 (5) Nov 07 (5) Nov 06 (6) Nov 05 (12) Nov 04 (9) Nov 03 (6) Nov 02 (14) Nov 01 (3) Oct 31 (6) Oct 30 (7) Oct 29 (9) Oct 28 (9) Oct 27 (3) Oct 26 (6) Oct 25 (9) Oct 24 (8) Oct 23 (4) Oct 22 (3) Oct 21 (4) Oct 20 (2) Oct 19 (11) Oct 17 (6) Oct 16 (7) Oct 15 (7) Oct 14 (8) Oct 13 (5) Oct 12 (8) Oct 11 (6) Oct 10 (5) Oct 09 (11) Oct 08 (10) Oct 07 (8) Oct 06 (3) Oct 05 (7) Oct 04 (8) Oct 03 (3) Oct 02 (10) Oct 01 (3) Sep 30 (7) Sep 29 (6) Sep 28 (5) Sep 27 (8) Sep 26 (11) Sep 25 (11) Sep 24 (15) Sep 23 (8) Sep 22 (9) Sep 21 (4) Sep 20 (8) Sep 19 (9) Sep 18 (10) Sep 17 (10) Sep 16 (5) Sep 15 (5) Sep 14 (7) Sep 13 (5) Sep 12 (5) Sep 11 (8) Sep 10 (6) Sep 09 (7) Sep 08 (5) Sep 07 (2) Sep 06 (4) Sep 05 (7) Sep 04 (11) Sep 03 (7) Sep 02 (7) Sep 01 (2) Aug 31 (3) Aug 30 (1) Aug 29 (10) Aug 28 (5) Aug 27 (4) Aug 26 (10) Aug 25 (6) Aug 24 (9) Aug 22 (11) Aug 21 (8) Aug 20 (12) Aug 19 (8) Aug 18 (4) Aug 17 (4) Aug 16 (3) Aug 15 (6) Aug 14 (4) Aug 13 (7) Aug 12 (8) Aug 11 (7) Aug 10 (12) Aug 08 (5) Aug 07 (6) Aug 06 (6) Aug 05 (8) Aug 04 (5) Aug 03 (4) Aug 01 (7) Jul 31 (6) Jul 30 (12) Jul 29 (4) Jul 28 (5) Jul 27 (7) Jul 25 (7) Jul 24 (8) Jul 23 (8) Jul 22 (3) Jul 21 (8) Jul 20 (6) Jul 19 (3) Jul 18 (8) Jul 17 (2) Jul 16 (7) Jul 15 (6) Jul 14 (9) Jul 13 (10) Jul 11 (9) Jul 10 (8) Jul 09 (3) Jul 08 (7) Jul 07 (7) Jul 06 (7) Jul 05 (10) Jul 04 (4) Jul 03 (6) Jul 02 (6) Jul 01 (8) Jun 30 (5) Jun 29 (6) Jun 28 (1) Jun 27 (15) Jun 26 (10) Jun 25 (9) Jun 24 (16) Jun 23 (6) Jun 22 (12) Jun 20 (6) Jun 19 (8) Jun 18 (10) Jun 17 (6) Jun 16 (7) Jun 15 (5) Jun 14 (5) Jun 13 (13) Jun 12 (7) Jun 11 (14) Jun 10 (3) Jun 09 (2) Jun 08 (2) Jun 07 (7) Jun 06 (16) Jun 05 (7) Jun 04 (18) Jun 03 (12) Jun 02 (8) May 31 (3) May 30 (6) May 29 (6) May 28 (7) May 27 (4) May 26 (4) May 25 (6) May 23 (4) May 22 (8) May 21 (5) May 20 (6) May 19 (2) May 18 (9) May 17 (1) May 16 (5) May 15 (5) May 14 (7) May 13 (7) May 12 (7) May 11 (4) May 10 (4) May 09 (5) May 08 (10) May 07 (4) May 06 (13) May 05 (4) May 04 (10) May 02 (2) May 01 (5) Apr 30 (9) Apr 29 (6) Apr 28 (3) Apr 27 (4) Apr 26 (9) Apr 25 (9) Apr 24 (7) Apr 23 (11) Apr 22 (7) Apr 21 (3) Apr 20 (10) Apr 19 (6) Apr 18 (5) Apr 17 (6) Apr 16 (6) Apr 15 (7) Apr 14 (11) Apr 13 (4) Apr 12 (5) Apr 11 (9) Apr 10 (4) Apr 09 (6) Apr 08 (6) Apr 07 (3) Apr 06 (6) Apr 05 (10) Apr 03 (9) Apr 02 (9) Apr 01 (12) Mar 31 (4) Mar 30 (9) Mar 29 (10) Mar 28 (7) Mar 27 (8) Mar 26 (8) Mar 25 (15) Mar 24 (11) Mar 23 (8) Mar 22 (7) Mar 21 (14) Mar 20 (6) Mar 19 (11) Mar 18 (11) Mar 17 (12) Mar 16 (8) Mar 15 (8) Mar 14 (13) Mar 13 (8) Mar 12 (10) Mar 11 (8) Mar 10 (7) Mar 09 (3) Mar 08 (12) Mar 07 (15) Mar 06 (16) Mar 05 (9) Mar 04 (6) Mar 03 (12) Mar 02 (20) Feb 28 (11) Feb 27 (8) Feb 26 (11) Feb 25 (6) Feb 24 (14) Feb 23 (5) Feb 22 (6) Feb 21 (8) Feb 20 (11) Feb 19 (7) Feb 18 (4) Feb 17 (8) Feb 16 (11) Feb 15 (3) Feb 14 (10) Feb 13 (4) Feb 12 (10) Feb 11 (7) Feb 10 (7) Feb 09 (4) Feb 08 (6) Feb 07 (5) Feb 06 (4) Feb 05 (10) Feb 04 (5) Feb 03 (4) Feb 02 (4) Feb 01 (3) Jan 31 (3) Jan 30 (5) Jan 29 (2) Jan 28 (6) Jan 27 (3) Jan 26 (2) Jan 25 (5) Jan 24 (7) Jan 23 (4) Jan 22 (4) Jan 21 (5) Jan 20 (5) Jan 19 (6) Jan 18 (7) Jan 17 (6) Jan 16 (4) Jan 15 (3) Jan 14 (5) Jan 13 (4) Jan 12 (5) Jan 11 (3) Jan 10 (5) Jan 09 (6) Jan 08 (6) Jan 07 (3) Jan 06 (1) Jan 05 (4) Jan 04 (5) Jan 03 (3) Jan 02 (6) Jan 01 (2) Dec 31 (6) Dec 30 (1) Dec 29 (5) Dec 27 (1) Dec 26 (2) Dec 25 (4) Dec 24 (8) Dec 23 (2) Dec 22 (1) Dec 20 (3) Dec 19 (8) Dec 18 (3) Dec 17 (4) Dec 16 (3) Dec 15 (3) Dec 14 (3) Dec 13 (3) Dec 12 (4) Dec 11 (4) Dec 10 (7) Dec 09 (5) Dec 08 (2) Dec 07 (5) Dec 06 (6) Dec 05 (10) Dec 04 (9) Dec 03 (4) Dec 02 (2) Dec 01 (8) Nov 29 (5) Nov 28 (7) Nov 27 (5) Nov 26 (9) Nov 25 (3) Nov 24 (5) Nov 23 (6) Nov 22 (5) Nov 21 (12) Nov 20 (12) Nov 19 (10) Nov 18 (4) Nov 17 (3) Nov 16 (8) Nov 15 (7) Nov 14 (7) Nov 13 (6) Nov 12 (12) Nov 11 (6) Nov 10 (3) Nov 09 (4) Nov 08 (10) Nov 07 (5) Nov 06 (5) Nov 05 (9) Nov 04 (4) Nov 03 (4) Nov 02 (3) Nov 01 (3) Oct 31 (10) Oct 30 (4) Oct 29 (11) Oct 28 (3) Oct 27 (7) Oct 26 (7) Oct 25 (6) Oct 24 (7) Oct 23 (11) Oct 22 (2) Oct 21 (7) Oct 20 (4) Oct 19 (6) Oct 18 (7) Oct 17 (5) Oct 16 (8) Oct 15 (5) Oct 14 (5) Oct 13 (3) Oct 12 (7) Oct 11 (20) Oct 10 (2) Oct 09 (4) Oct 08 (21) Oct 07 (20) Oct 06 (34) Oct 04 (24) Oct 03 (21) Oct 02 (3) Oct 01 (7) Sep 30 (3) Sep 29 (5) Sep 28 (6) Sep 27 (5) Sep 26 (6) Sep 25 (5) Sep 24 (2) Sep 23 (8) Sep 22 (4) Sep 21 (3) Sep 20 (9) Sep 19 (11) Sep 18 (5) Sep 17 (7) Sep 16 (6) Sep 15 (3) Sep 14 (7) Sep 13 (8) Sep 12 (11) Sep 11 (7) Sep 10 (6) Sep 09 (5) Sep 08 (3) Sep 07 (6) Sep 06 (10) Sep 05 (7) Sep 04 (7) Sep 03 (5) Sep 02 (4) Sep 01 (8) Aug 31 (5) Aug 30 (7) Aug 29 (10) Aug 28 (7) Aug 27 (6) Aug 26 (6) Aug 25 (3) Aug 24 (8) Aug 23 (6) Aug 22 (6) Aug 21 (8) Aug 20 (8) Aug 19 (4) Aug 18 (2) Aug 17 (5) Aug 16 (7) Aug 15 (4) Aug 14 (3) Aug 13 (4) Aug 12 (6) Aug 11 (6) Aug 10 (4) Aug 09 (8) Aug 08 (6) Aug 07 (4) Aug 06 (6) Aug 05 (4) Aug 04 (12) Aug 03 (3) Aug 02 (4) Aug 01 (10) Jul 31 (3) Jul 30 (7) Jul 29 (3) Jul 28 (6) Jul 27 (4) Jul 26 (5) Jul 25 (4) Jul 24 (7) Jul 23 (10) Jul 22 (8) Jul 21 (5) Jul 20 (4) Jul 19 (7) Jul 18 (9) Jul 17 (10) Jul 16 (11) Jul 15 (5) Jul 13 (5) Jul 12 (9) Jul 11 (11) Jul 10 (12) Jul 09 (6) Jul 08 (5) Jul 07 (8) Jul 06 (9) Jul 05 (10) Jul 04 (8) Jul 03 (10) Jul 02 (12) Jul 01 (8) Jun 30 (5) Jun 29 (6) Jun 28 (23) Jun 27 (18) Jun 26 (12) Jun 25 (14) Jun 24 (15) Jun 23 (11) Jun 22 (11) Jun 21 (15) Jun 20 (9) Jun 19 (8) Jun 18 (11) Jun 17 (7) Jun 16 (6) Jun 15 (6) Jun 14 (6) Jun 13 (5) Jun 12 (6) Jun 11 (9) Jun 10 (10) Jun 09 (9) Jun 08 (6) Jun 07 (2) Jun 06 (6) Jun 05 (4) Jun 04 (3) Jun 03 (4) Jun 02 (3) Jun 01 (6) May 31 (3) May 30 (5) May 29 (8) May 28 (7) May 27 (2) May 26 (2) May 25 (8) May 24 (7) May 23 (6) May 22 (9) May 21 (6) May 20 (5) May 19 (6) May 18 (9) May 17 (10) May 16 (11) May 15 (5) May 14 (11) May 13 (6) May 12 (7) May 11 (7) May 10 (5) May 09 (3) May 08 (10) May 07 (8) May 06 (11) May 05 (5) May 04 (9) May 03 (3) May 02 (2) May 01 (5) Apr 30 (5) Apr 29 (8) Apr 28 (6) Apr 27 (4) Apr 26 (9) Apr 25 (11) Apr 24 (4) Apr 23 (11) Apr 22 (7) Apr 21 (5) Apr 20 (7) Apr 19 (10) Apr 18 (8) Apr 17 (10) Apr 16 (8) Apr 15 (4) Apr 14 (5) Apr 13 (7) Apr 12 (11) Apr 11 (6) Apr 10 (7) Apr 09 (6) Apr 08 (3) Apr 07 (3) Apr 06 (9) Apr 05 (10) Apr 04 (7) Apr 03 (2) Apr 02 (6) Apr 01 (4) Mar 31 (3) Mar 30 (4) Mar 29 (3) Mar 28 (5) Mar 27 (10) Mar 26 (5) Mar 25 (4) Mar 24 (5) Mar 23 (7) Mar 22 (6) Mar 21 (9) Mar 20 (5) Mar 19 (5) Mar 18 (9) Mar 17 (2) Mar 16 (8) Mar 15 (10) Mar 14 (9) Mar 13 (10) Mar 12 (10) Mar 11 (2) Mar 10 (1) Mar 09 (6) Mar 08 (4) Mar 07 (4) Mar 06 (3) Mar 05 (3) Mar 04 (7) Mar 03 (6) Mar 02 (8) Mar 01 (9) Feb 28 (6) Feb 27 (3) Feb 26 (8) Feb 25 (7) Feb 24 (3) Feb 23 (4) Feb 22 (4) Feb 21 (7) Feb 20 (4) Feb 19 (4) Feb 18 (2) Feb 17 (1) Feb 16 (6) Feb 15 (6) Feb 14 (5) Feb 13 (4) Feb 12 (7) Feb 11 (2) Feb 10 (2) Feb 09 (5) Feb 08 (5) Feb 07 (9) Feb 06 (4) Feb 05 (9) Feb 04 (3) Feb 03 (3) Feb 02 (10) Feb 01 (9) Jan 31 (5) Jan 30 (8) Jan 29 (5) Jan 28 (3) Jan 27 (4) Jan 26 (5) Jan 25 (6) Jan 24 (5) Jan 23 (4) Jan 22 (8) Jan 21 (3) Jan 20 (3) Jan 19 (7) Jan 18 (3) Jan 17 (6) Jan 16 (8) Jan 15 (7) Jan 14 (9) Jan 13 (1) Jan 12 (7) Jan 11 (1) Jan 10 (3) Jan 09 (3) Jan 08 (5) Jan 07 (4) Jan 06 (2) Jan 05 (3) Jan 04 (5) Jan 03 (4) Jan 02 (4) Jan 01 (4) Dec 31 (3) Dec 30 (4) Dec 29 (5) Dec 28 (8) Dec 27 (4) Dec 26 (4) Dec 25 (2) Dec 24 (4) Dec 23 (4) Dec 22 (7) Dec 21 (5) Dec 20 (3) Dec 19 (4) Dec 18 (6) Dec 17 (4) Dec 16 (5) Dec 15 (5) Dec 14 (8) Dec 13 (3) Dec 12 (6) Dec 11 (8) Dec 10 (5) Dec 09 (4) Dec 08 (4) Dec 07 (7) Dec 06 (7) Dec 05 (6) Dec 04 (6) Dec 03 (7) Dec 02 (1) Dec 01 (6) Nov 30 (2) Nov 29 (8) Nov 28 (16) Nov 27 (7) Nov 26 (5) Nov 25 (2) Nov 24 (6) Nov 23 (5) Nov 22 (5) Nov 21 (5) Nov 20 (15) Nov 19 (8) Nov 18 (2) Nov 17 (3) Nov 16 (5) Nov 15 (7) Nov 14 (6) Nov 13 (9) Nov 12 (7) Nov 11 (8) Nov 10 (3) Nov 09 (5) Nov 08 (8) Nov 07 (9) Nov 06 (9) Nov 05 (1) Nov 04 (4) Nov 03 (8) Nov 02 (6) Nov 01 (3) Oct 31 (6) Oct 30 (7) Oct 29 (3) Oct 28 (3) Oct 27 (4) Oct 26 (4) Oct 25 (8) Oct 24 (4) Oct 23 (1) Oct 22 (6) Oct 21 (1) Oct 20 (8) Oct 19 (6) Oct 18 (10) Oct 17 (6) Oct 16 (15) Oct 15 (4) Oct 14 (5) Oct 13 (3) Oct 12 (9) Oct 11 (7) Oct 10 (1) Oct 09 (5) Oct 08 (7) Oct 07 (3) Oct 06 (8) Oct 05 (5) Oct 04 (3) Oct 03 (7) Oct 02 (6) Oct 01 (6) Sep 30 (8) Sep 29 (6) Sep 28 (13) Sep 27 (10) Sep 26 (8) Sep 25 (8) Sep 24 (8) Sep 23 (3) Sep 22 (7) Sep 21 (9) Sep 20 (7) Sep 19 (8) Sep 18 (4) Sep 17 (3) Sep 16 (4) Sep 15 (8) Sep 14 (5) Sep 13 (7) Sep 12 (7) Sep 11 (9) Sep 10 (4) Sep 09 (10) Sep 08 (4) Sep 07 (12) Sep 06 (13) Sep 05 (15) Sep 04 (5) Sep 03 (4) Sep 02 (6) Sep 01 (9) Aug 31 (7) Aug 30 (6) Aug 29 (8) Aug 28 (11) Aug 27 (2) Aug 26 (6) Aug 25 (15) Aug 24 (6) Aug 23 (8) Aug 22 (5) Aug 21 (6) Aug 20 (7) Aug 19 (2) Aug 18 (5) Aug 17 (5) Aug 16 (11) Aug 15 (4) Aug 14 (6) Aug 13 (9) Aug 12 (4) Aug 11 (5) Aug 10 (6) Aug 09 (5) Aug 08 (7) Aug 07 (9) Aug 06 (4) Aug 05 (4) Aug 04 (4) Aug 03 (8) Aug 02 (9) Aug 01 (10) Jul 31 (11) Jul 30 (4) Jul 29 (3) Jul 28 (11) Jul 27 (4) Jul 26 (7) Jul 25 (7) Jul 24 (4) Jul 23 (8) Jul 22 (5) Jul 21 (4) Jul 20 (10) Jul 19 (6) Jul 18 (9) Jul 17 (6) Jul 16 (7) Jul 15 (6) Jul 14 (4) Jul 13 (7) Jul 12 (8) Jul 11 (6) Jul 10 (14) Jul 09 (6) Jul 08 (5) Jul 07 (4) Jul 06 (9) Jul 05 (8) Jul 04 (5) Jul 03 (8) Jul 02 (5) Jul 01 (5) Jun 30 (6) Jun 29 (3) Jun 28 (3) Jun 27 (4) Jun 26 (8) Jun 25 (3) Jun 24 (5) Jun 23 (14) Jun 22 (11) Jun 21 (5) Jun 20 (8) Jun 19 (7) Jun 18 (4) Jun 17 (3) Jun 16 (12) Jun 15 (12) Jun 14 (10) Jun 13 (10) Jun 12 (9) Jun 11 (6) Jun 10 (12) Jun 09 (4) Jun 08 (3) Jun 07 (12) Jun 06 (6) Jun 05 (7) Jun 04 (6) Jun 03 (3) Jun 02 (4) Jun 01 (8) May 31 (4) May 30 (3) May 29 (8) May 28 (7) May 27 (4) May 26 (3) May 25 (5) May 24 (9) May 23 (16) May 22 (12) May 21 (11) May 20 (7) May 19 (10) May 18 (8) May 17 (8) May 16 (10) May 15 (8) May 14 (5) May 13 (1) May 12 (6) May 11 (9) May 10 (9) May 09 (10) May 08 (9) May 07 (6) May 06 (5) May 05 (7) May 04 (10) May 03 (7) May 02 (9) May 01 (10) Apr 30 (4) Apr 29 (9) Apr 28 (12) Apr 27 (9) Apr 26 (4) Apr 25 (5) Apr 24 (9) Apr 23 (4) Apr 22 (7) Apr 21 (8) Apr 20 (9) Apr 19 (6) Apr 18 (4) Apr 17 (2) Apr 16 (4) Apr 15 (10) Apr 14 (7) Apr 13 (5) Apr 12 (7) Apr 11 (7) Apr 10 (7) Apr 09 (6) Apr 08 (7) Apr 07 (10) Apr 06 (8) Apr 05 (8) Apr 04 (9) Apr 03 (6) Apr 02 (4) Apr 01 (4) Mar 31 (11) Mar 30 (12) Mar 29 (16) Mar 28 (8) Mar 27 (10) Mar 26 (12) Mar 25 (6) Mar 24 (9) Mar 23 (3) Mar 22 (12) Mar 21 (12) Mar 20 (14) Mar 19 (8) Mar 18 (7) Mar 17 (8) Mar 16 (4) Mar 15 (10) Mar 14 (9) Mar 13 (9) Mar 12 (6) Mar 11 (5) Mar 10 (13) Mar 09 (8) Mar 08 (10) Mar 07 (12) Mar 06 (6) Mar 05 (4) Mar 04 (2) Mar 03 (3) Mar 02 (12) Mar 01 (8) Feb 29 (11) Feb 28 (5) Feb 27 (3) Feb 26 (13) Feb 25 (10) Feb 24 (13) Feb 23 (10) Feb 22 (9) Feb 21 (18) Feb 20 (6) Feb 19 (7) Feb 18 (9) Feb 17 (5) Feb 16 (9) Feb 15 (7) Feb 14 (6) Feb 13 (5) Feb 12 (6) Feb 11 (4) Feb 10 (8) Feb 09 (5) Feb 08 (8) Feb 07 (10) Feb 06 (7) Feb 05 (7) Feb 04 (5) Feb 03 (11) Feb 02 (4) Feb 01 (3) Jan 31 (12) Jan 30 (7) Jan 29 (7) Jan 28 (7) Jan 27 (12) Jan 26 (7) Jan 25 (11) Jan 24 (4) Jan 23 (6) Jan 22 (8) Jan 21 (12) Jan 20 (11) Jan 19 (6) Jan 18 (6) Jan 17 (11) Jan 16 (9) Jan 15 (4) Jan 14 (3) Jan 13 (6) Jan 12 (9) Jan 11 (9) Jan 10 (10) Jan 09 (5) Jan 08 (10) Jan 07 (5) Jan 06 (6) Jan 05 (8) Jan 04 (5) Jan 03 (8) Jan 02 (7) Jan 01 (7) Dec 31 (10) Dec 30 (11) Dec 29 (6) Dec 28 (5) Dec 27 (10) Dec 26 (4) Dec 25 (5) Dec 24 (7) Dec 23 (2) Dec 22 (9) Dec 21 (8) Dec 20 (8) Dec 19 (5) Dec 18 (1) Dec 17 (5) Dec 16 (6) Dec 15 (5) Dec 14 (13) Dec 13 (8) Dec 12 (7) Dec 11 (9) Dec 10 (12) Dec 09 (7) Dec 08 (11) Dec 07 (9) Dec 06 (11) Dec 05 (10) Dec 04 (6) Dec 03 (8) Dec 02 (6) Dec 01 (14) Nov 30 (7) Nov 29 (8) Nov 28 (8) Nov 27 (6) Nov 26 (9) Nov 25 (10) Nov 24 (12) Nov 23 (10) Nov 22 (10) Nov 21 (10) Nov 20 (4) Nov 19 (4) Nov 18 (8) Nov 17 (9) Nov 16 (9) Nov 15 (12) Nov 14 (6) Nov 13 (9) Nov 12 (3) Nov 11 (9) Nov 10 (10) Nov 09 (10) Nov 08 (7) Nov 07 (8) Nov 06 (10) Nov 05 (8) Nov 04 (7) Nov 03 (10) Nov 02 (11) Nov 01 (10) Oct 31 (5) Oct 30 (8) Oct 29 (8) Oct 28 (8) Oct 27 (11) Oct 26 (6) Oct 25 (9) Oct 24 (10) Oct 23 (5) Oct 22 (14) Oct 21 (10) Oct 20 (8) Oct 19 (11) Oct 18 (13) Oct 17 (7) Oct 16 (6) Oct 15 (9) Oct 14 (7) Oct 13 (12) Oct 12 (13) Oct 11 (9) Oct 10 (8) Oct 09 (9) Oct 08 (7) Oct 07 (12) Oct 06 (8) Oct 05 (13) Oct 04 (11) Oct 03 (7) Oct 02 (5) Oct 01 (14) Sep 30 (12) Sep 29 (12) Sep 28 (11) Sep 27 (11) Sep 26 (7) Sep 25 (10) Sep 24 (3) Sep 23 (7) Sep 22 (8) Sep 21 (8) Sep 20 (8) Sep 19 (7) Sep 18 (5) Sep 17 (14) Sep 16 (7) Sep 15 (11) Sep 14 (13) Sep 13 (11) Sep 12 (9) Sep 11 (5) Sep 10 (4) Sep 09 (13) Sep 08 (11) Sep 07 (11) Sep 06 (16) Sep 05 (1) Sep 04 (10) Sep 03 (8) Sep 02 (8) Sep 01 (7) Aug 31 (1) Aug 30 (6) Aug 29 (2) Aug 28 (3) Aug 27 (6) Aug 26 (8) Aug 25 (5) Aug 24 (5) Aug 23 (6) Aug 22 (7) Aug 21 (6) Aug 20 (4) Aug 19 (9) Aug 18 (7) Aug 17 (7) Aug 16 (10) Aug 15 (2) Aug 14 (5) Aug 13 (5) Aug 12 (10) Aug 11 (5) Aug 10 (4) Aug 09 (8) Aug 08 (3) Aug 07 (5) Aug 06 (12) Aug 05 (5) Aug 04 (7) Aug 03 (6) Aug 02 (7) Aug 01 (14) Jul 31 (7) Jul 30 (7) Jul 29 (13) Jul 28 (10) Jul 27 (6) Jul 26 (7) Jul 25 (7) Jul 24 (4) Jul 23 (12) Jul 22 (14) Jul 21 (6) Jul 20 (9) Jul 19 (12) Jul 18 (9) Jul 17 (4) Jul 16 (6) Jul 15 (8) Jul 14 (15) Jul 13 (8) Jul 12 (10) Jul 11 (6) Jul 10 (6) Jul 09 (6) Jul 08 (6) Jul 07 (9) Jul 06 (15) Jul 05 (6) Jul 04 (10) Jul 03 (6) Jul 02 (6) Jul 01 (11) Jun 30 (7) Jun 29 (4) Jun 28 (8) Jun 27 (8) Jun 26 (5) Jun 25 (11) Jun 24 (9) Jun 23 (10) Jun 22 (8) Jun 21 (8) Jun 20 (6) Jun 19 (5) Jun 18 (15) Jun 17 (8) Jun 16 (13) Jun 15 (15) Jun 14 (11) Jun 13 (6) Jun 12 (15) Jun 11 (7) Jun 10 (7) Jun 09 (18) Jun 08 (20) Jun 07 (17) Jun 06 (9) Jun 05 (9) Jun 04 (12) Jun 03 (13) Jun 02 (14) Jun 01 (8) May 31 (13) May 30 (8) May 29 (6) May 28 (8) May 27 (17) May 26 (8) May 25 (13) May 24 (12) May 23 (9) May 22 (4) May 21 (4) May 20 (11) May 19 (14) May 18 (6) May 17 (10) May 16 (4) May 15 (5) May 14 (28) May 12 (9) May 11 (17) May 10 (15) May 09 (12) May 08 (5) May 07 (4) May 06 (10) May 05 (8) May 04 (10) May 03 (5) May 02 (6) May 01 (8) Apr 30 (8) Apr 29 (12) Apr 28 (6) Apr 27 (11) Apr 26 (12) Apr 25 (6) Apr 24 (3) Apr 23 (5) Apr 22 (10) Apr 21 (19) Apr 20 (13) Apr 19 (11) Apr 18 (11) Apr 17 (5) Apr 16 (12) Apr 15 (11) Apr 14 (17) Apr 13 (6) Apr 12 (16) Apr 11 (10) Apr 10 (1) Apr 09 (18) Apr 08 (14) Apr 07 (6) Apr 06 (10) Apr 05 (21) Apr 04 (12) Apr 03 (4) Apr 02 (13) Apr 01 (8) Mar 31 (10) Mar 30 (11) Mar 29 (10) Mar 28 (8) Mar 27 (6) Mar 26 (12) Mar 25 (15) Mar 24 (10) Mar 23 (12) Mar 22 (12) Mar 21 (8) Mar 20 (4) Mar 19 (11) Mar 18 (7) Mar 17 (7) Mar 16 (9) Mar 15 (10) Mar 14 (4) Mar 13 (2) Mar 12 (14) Mar 11 (13) Mar 10 (7) Mar 09 (9) Mar 08 (17) Mar 07 (5) Mar 06 (7) Mar 05 (13) Mar 04 (10) Mar 03 (14) Mar 02 (12) Mar 01 (18) Feb 28 (8) Feb 27 (2) Feb 26 (9) Feb 25 (13) Feb 24 (17) Feb 23 (13) Feb 22 (12) Feb 21 (11) Feb 20 (11) Feb 19 (16) Feb 18 (17) Feb 17 (15) Feb 16 (15) Feb 15 (15) Feb 14 (10) Feb 13 (8) Feb 12 (10) Feb 11 (15) Feb 10 (11) Feb 09 (13) Feb 08 (10) Feb 07 (9) Feb 06 (6) Feb 05 (15) Feb 04 (15) Feb 03 (11) Feb 02 (14) Feb 01 (15) Jan 31 (11) Jan 30 (9) Jan 29 (19) Jan 28 (9) Jan 27 (9) Jan 26 (16) Jan 25 (19) Jan 24 (17) Jan 23 (8) Jan 22 (15) Jan 21 (9) Jan 20 (11) Jan 19 (7) Jan 18 (9) Jan 17 (6) Jan 16 (7) Jan 15 (12) Jan 14 (9) Jan 13 (14) Jan 12 (11) Jan 11 (13) Jan 10 (8) Jan 09 (8) Jan 08 (20) Jan 07 (11) Jan 06 (11) Jan 05 (8) Jan 04 (14) Jan 03 (6) Jan 02 (7) Jan 01 (7) Dec 31 (14) Dec 30 (15) Dec 29 (7) Dec 28 (10) Dec 27 (4) Dec 26 (3) Dec 25 (11) Dec 24 (9) Dec 23 (9) Dec 22 (15) Dec 21 (12) Dec 20 (11) Dec 19 (4) Dec 18 (16) Dec 17 (6) Dec 16 (12) Dec 15 (14) Dec 14 (11) Dec 13 (10) Dec 12 (6) Dec 11 (10) Dec 10 (17) Dec 09 (11) Dec 08 (12) Dec 07 (16) Dec 06 (11) Dec 05 (5) Dec 04 (12) Dec 03 (15) Dec 02 (15) Dec 01 (12) Nov 30 (16) Nov 29 (7) Nov 28 (11) Nov 27 (13) Nov 26 (13) Nov 25 (16) Nov 24 (15) Nov 23 (10) Nov 22 (10) Nov 21 (4) Nov 20 (8) Nov 19 (9) Nov 18 (16) Nov 17 (11) Nov 16 (11) Nov 15 (10) Nov 14 (9) Nov 13 (6) Nov 12 (10) Nov 11 (12) Nov 10 (15) Nov 09 (9) Nov 08 (10) Nov 07 (6) Nov 06 (7) Nov 05 (12) Nov 04 (14) Nov 03 (10) Nov 02 (13) Nov 01 (9) Oct 31 (9) Oct 30 (11) Oct 29 (18) Oct 28 (13) Oct 27 (23) Oct 26 (12) Oct 25 (14) Oct 24 (20) Oct 22 (18) Oct 21 (18) Oct 20 (19) Oct 19 (12) Oct 18 (11) Oct 17 (5) Oct 16 (18) Oct 15 (8) Oct 14 (11) Oct 13 (9) Oct 12 (13) Oct 11 (6) Oct 10 (7) Oct 09 (27) Oct 08 (14) Oct 07 (10) Oct 06 (9) Oct 05 (7) Oct 04 (10) Oct 03 (6) Oct 02 (9) Oct 01 (13) Sep 30 (12) Sep 29 (13) Sep 28 (8) Sep 27 (9) Sep 26 (8) Sep 25 (14) Sep 24 (4) Sep 23 (14) Sep 22 (20) Sep 21 (11) Sep 20 (6) Sep 19 (9) Sep 18 (14) Sep 17 (8) Sep 16 (17) Sep 15 (6) Sep 14 (11) Sep 13 (9) Sep 12 (4) Sep 11 (7) Sep 10 (14) Sep 09 (12) Sep 08 (17) Sep 07 (12) Sep 06 (13) Sep 05 (9) Sep 04 (20) Sep 03 (16) Sep 02 (16) Sep 01 (10) Aug 31 (13) Aug 30 (4) Aug 29 (9) Aug 28 (6) Aug 27 (8) Aug 26 (11) Aug 25 (10) Aug 24 (14) Aug 23 (12) Aug 22 (13) Aug 21 (10) Aug 20 (13) Aug 19 (15) Aug 18 (8) Aug 17 (10) Aug 16 (8) Aug 15 (3) Aug 14 (11) Aug 13 (12) Aug 12 (15) Aug 11 (10) Aug 10 (17) Aug 09 (6) Aug 08 (13) Aug 07 (11) Aug 06 (13) Aug 05 (11) Aug 04 (11) Aug 03 (10) Aug 02 (7) Aug 01 (6) Jul 31 (10) Jul 30 (21) Jul 29 (14) Jul 28 (13) Jul 27 (16) Jul 26 (10) Jul 25 (15) Jul 24 (17) Jul 23 (15) Jul 22 (15) Jul 21 (19) Jul 20 (17) Jul 19 (9) Jul 18 (7) Jul 17 (26) Jul 16 (18) Jul 15 (20) Jul 14 (16) Jul 13 (19) Jul 12 (11) Jul 11 (5) Jul 10 (13) Jul 09 (11) Jul 08 (8) Jul 07 (12) Jul 06 (16) Jul 05 (9) Jul 04 (5) Jul 03 (15) Jul 02 (11) Jul 01 (14) Jun 30 (13) Jun 29 (19) Jun 28 (8) Jun 27 (9) Jun 26 (16) Jun 25 (22) Jun 24 (17) Jun 23 (11) Jun 22 (15) Jun 21 (14) Jun 20 (8) Jun 19 (17) Jun 18 (10) Jun 17 (10) Jun 16 (17) Jun 15 (13) Jun 14 (14) Jun 13 (4) Jun 12 (13) Jun 11 (15) Jun 10 (25) Jun 09 (10) Jun 08 (23) Jun 07 (14) Jun 06 (20) Jun 05 (10) Jun 04 (11) Jun 03 (12) Jun 02 (21) Jun 01 (14) May 31 (10) May 30 (14) May 29 (8) May 28 (23) May 27 (20) May 26 (16) May 25 (13) May 24 (12) May 23 (10) May 22 (18) May 21 (14) May 20 (12) May 19 (18) May 18 (14) May 17 (13) May 16 (4) May 15 (7) May 14 (16) May 13 (13) May 12 (8) May 11 (18) May 10 (8) May 09 (7) May 08 (13) May 07 (11) May 06 (15) May 05 (18) May 04 (17) May 03 (7) May 02 (5) May 01 (11) Apr 30 (19) Apr 29 (21) Apr 28 (18) Apr 27 (16) Apr 26 (8) Apr 25 (11) Apr 24 (9) Apr 23 (20) Apr 22 (23) Apr 21 (5) Apr 20 (16) Apr 19 (13) Apr 18 (6) Apr 17 (6) Apr 16 (16) Apr 15 (18) Apr 14 (13) Apr 13 (14) Apr 12 (9) Apr 11 (3) Apr 10 (16) Apr 09 (14) Apr 08 (12) Apr 07 (18) Apr 06 (7) Apr 05 (11) Apr 04 (9) Apr 03 (19) Apr 02 (17) Apr 01 (16) Mar 31 (16) Mar 30 (22) Mar 29 (16) Mar 28 (16) Mar 27 (19) Mar 26 (31) Mar 25 (25) Mar 24 (26) Mar 23 (27) Mar 22 (22) Mar 21 (22) Mar 20 (13) Mar 19 (21) Mar 18 (20) Mar 17 (24) Mar 16 (18) Mar 15 (9) Mar 14 (9) Mar 13 (29) Mar 12 (15) Mar 11 (11) Mar 10 (11) Mar 09 (20) Mar 08 (12) Mar 07 (6) Mar 06 (21) Mar 05 (22) Mar 04 (19) Mar 03 (9) Mar 02 (20) Mar 01 (11) Feb 28 (11) Feb 27 (27) Feb 26 (15) Feb 25 (18) Feb 24 (17) Feb 23 (19) Feb 22 (24) Feb 21 (10) Feb 20 (14) Feb 19 (25) Feb 18 (16) Feb 17 (19) Feb 16 (23) Feb 15 (8) Feb 14 (11) Feb 13 (25) Feb 12 (16) Feb 11 (12) Feb 10 (18) Feb 09 (12) Feb 08 (14) Feb 07 (8) Feb 06 (27) Feb 05 (28) Feb 04 (24) Feb 03 (17) Feb 02 (20) Feb 01 (23) Jan 31 (16) Jan 30 (20) Jan 29 (26) Jan 28 (17) Jan 27 (21) Jan 26 (24) Jan 25 (16) Jan 24 (14) Jan 23 (16) Jan 22 (17) Jan 21 (19) Jan 20 (21) Jan 19 (17) Jan 18 (13) Jan 17 (14) Jan 16 (10) Jan 15 (21) Jan 14 (16) Jan 13 (19) Jan 12 (30) Jan 11 (14) Jan 10 (11) Jan 09 (8) Jan 08 (23) Jan 07 (13) Jan 06 (21) Jan 05 (15) Jan 04 (18) Jan 03 (9) Jan 02 (12) Jan 01 (15) Dec 31 (18) Dec 30 (7) Dec 29 (13) Dec 28 (11) Dec 27 (8) Dec 26 (6) Dec 25 (8) Dec 24 (28) Dec 23 (12) Dec 22 (12) Dec 21 (17) Dec 20 (19) Dec 19 (19) Dec 18 (22) Dec 17 (24) Dec 16 (17) Dec 15 (29) Dec 14 (22) Dec 13 (12) Dec 12 (22) Dec 11 (24) Dec 10 (25) Dec 09 (18) Dec 08 (15) Dec 07 (21) Dec 06 (24) Dec 05 (30) Dec 04 (28) Dec 03 (26) Dec 02 (22) Dec 01 (33) Nov 30 (23) Nov 29 (9) Nov 28 (18) Nov 27 (25) Nov 26 (17) Nov 25 (23) Nov 24 (27) Nov 23 (12) Nov 22 (10) Nov 21 (15) Nov 20 (23) Nov 19 (23) Nov 18 (24) Nov 17 (21) Nov 16 (20) Nov 15 (13) Nov 14 (15) Nov 13 (27) Nov 12 (23) Nov 11 (19) Nov 10 (21) Nov 09 (13) Nov 08 (16) Nov 07 (16) Nov 06 (32) Nov 05 (24) Nov 04 (20) Nov 03 (29) Nov 02 (12) Nov 01 (15) Oct 31 (20) Oct 30 (22) Oct 29 (27) Oct 28 (20) Oct 27 (23) Oct 26 (21) Oct 25 (15) Oct 24 (23) Oct 23 (26) Oct 22 (27) Oct 21 (28) Oct 20 (24) Oct 19 (13) Oct 18 (9) Oct 17 (30) Oct 16 (8) Oct 15 (20) Oct 14 (14) Oct 13 (17) Oct 12 (16) Oct 11 (8) Oct 10 (19) Oct 09 (22) Oct 08 (16) Oct 07 (18) Oct 06 (23) Oct 05 (7) Oct 04 (15) Oct 03 (21) Oct 02 (17) Oct 01 (22) Sep 30 (25) Sep 29 (20) Sep 28 (17) Sep 27 (13) Sep 26 (20) Sep 25 (15) Sep 24 (24) Sep 23 (23) Sep 22 (18) Sep 21 (20) Sep 20 (11) Sep 19 (24) Sep 18 (25) Sep 17 (25) Sep 16 (19) Sep 15 (21) Sep 14 (15) Sep 13 (10) Sep 12 (23) Sep 11 (23) Sep 10 (25) Sep 09 (25) Sep 08 (17) Sep 07 (3) Sep 06 (17) Sep 05 (14) Sep 04 (24) Sep 03 (16) Sep 02 (11) Sep 01 (19) Aug 31 (20) Aug 30 (11) Aug 29 (24) Aug 28 (24) Aug 27 (16) Aug 26 (26) Aug 25 (21) Aug 24 (15) Aug 23 (19) Aug 22 (15) Aug 21 (25) Aug 20 (27) Aug 19 (19) Aug 18 (24) Aug 17 (14) Aug 16 (10) Aug 15 (15) Aug 14 (16) Aug 13 (21) Aug 12 (30) Aug 11 (19) Aug 10 (8) Aug 09 (12) Aug 08 (17) Aug 07 (21) Aug 06 (26) Aug 05 (23) Aug 04 (21) Aug 03 (12) Aug 02 (7) Aug 01 (19) Jul 31 (21) Jul 30 (25) Jul 29 (29) Jul 28 (23) Jul 27 (17) Jul 26 (11) Jul 25 (21) Jul 24 (14) Jul 23 (15) Jul 22 (19) Jul 21 (15) Jul 20 (9) Jul 19 (10) Jul 18 (15) Jul 17 (22) Jul 16 (18) Jul 15 (21) Jul 14 (20) Jul 13 (7) Jul 12 (9) Jul 11 (29) Jul 10 (19) Jul 09 (17) Jul 08 (26) Jul 07 (21) Jul 06 (18) Jul 05 (14) Jul 04 (20) Jul 03 (17) Jul 02 (24) Jul 01 (23) Jun 30 (23) Jun 29 (18) Jun 28 (16) Jun 27 (16) Jun 26 (17) Jun 25 (23) Jun 24 (32) Jun 23 (29) Jun 22 (8) Jun 21 (17) Jun 20 (25) Jun 19 (28) Jun 18 (19) Jun 17 (25) Jun 16 (23) Jun 15 (9) Jun 14 (11) Jun 13 (14) Jun 12 (22) Jun 11 (19) Jun 10 (17) Jun 09 (15) Jun 08 (16) Jun 07 (7) Jun 06 (29) Jun 05 (27) Jun 04 (24) Jun 03 (22) Jun 02 (22) Jun 01 (13) May 31 (9) May 30 (26) May 29 (19) May 28 (15) May 27 (15) May 26 (23) May 25 (13) May 24 (12) May 23 (24) May 22 (13) May 21 (21) May 20 (18) May 19 (16) May 18 (7) May 17 (12) May 16 (25) May 15 (24) May 14 (23) May 13 (19) May 12 (17) May 11 (8) May 10 (6) May 09 (14) May 08 (21) May 07 (26) May 06 (14) May 05 (14) May 04 (3) May 03 (3) May 02 (24) May 01 (13) Apr 30 (15) Apr 29 (24) Apr 28 (24) Apr 27 (11) Apr 26 (8) Apr 25 (13) Apr 24 (27) Apr 23 (15) Apr 22 (21) Apr 21 (19) Apr 20 (17) Apr 19 (8) Apr 18 (20) Apr 17 (27) Apr 16 (27) Apr 15 (21) Apr 14 (8) Apr 13 (8) Apr 12 (7) Apr 11 (7) Apr 10 (22) Apr 09 (15) Apr 08 (15) Apr 07 (17) Apr 06 (14) Apr 05 (5) Apr 04 (12) Apr 03 (19) Apr 02 (17) Apr 01 (19) Mar 31 (25) Mar 30 (13) Mar 29 (9) Mar 28 (16) Mar 27 (23) Mar 26 (22) Mar 25 (17) Mar 24 (25) Mar 23 (16) Mar 22 (13) Mar 21 (24) Mar 20 (27) Mar 19 (20) Mar 18 (24) Mar 17 (17) Mar 16 (11) Mar 15 (6) Mar 14 (20) Mar 13 (28) Mar 12 (30) Mar 11 (20) Mar 10 (21) Mar 09 (12) Mar 08 (8) Mar 07 (17) Mar 06 (20) Mar 05 (19) Mar 04 (15) Mar 03 (17) Mar 02 (8) Mar 01 (12) Feb 28 (16) Feb 27 (17) Feb 26 (8) Feb 25 (23) Feb 24 (15) Feb 23 (8) Feb 22 (10) Feb 21 (24) Feb 20 (14) Feb 19 (24) Feb 18 (19) Feb 17 (27) Feb 16 (13) Feb 15 (11) Feb 14 (15) Feb 13 (13) Feb 12 (13) Feb 11 (21) Feb 10 (16) Feb 09 (15) Feb 08 (10) Feb 07 (17) Feb 06 (21) Feb 05 (17) Feb 04 (14) Feb 03 (23) Feb 02 (5) Feb 01 (8) Jan 31 (17) Jan 30 (22) Jan 29 (23) Jan 28 (10) Jan 27 (24) Jan 26 (12) Jan 25 (9) Jan 24 (12) Jan 23 (19) Jan 22 (19) Jan 21 (14) Jan 20 (21) Jan 19 (12) Jan 18 (8) Jan 17 (20) Jan 16 (14) Jan 15 (23) Jan 14 (8) Jan 13 (20) Jan 12 (9) Jan 11 (7) Jan 10 (18) Jan 09 (11) Jan 08 (18) Jan 07 (13) Jan 06 (12) Jan 05 (12) Jan 04 (11) Jan 03 (10) Jan 02 (9) Jan 01 (9) Dec 31 (12) Dec 30 (11) Dec 29 (6) Dec 28 (9) Dec 27 (13) Dec 26 (15) Dec 25 (8) Dec 24 (6) Dec 23 (8) Dec 22 (5) Dec 21 (6) Dec 20 (14) Dec 19 (17) Dec 18 (14) Dec 17 (14) Dec 16 (13) Dec 15 (9) Dec 14 (9) Dec 13 (11) Dec 12 (16) Dec 11 (18) Dec 10 (4) Dec 09 (24) Dec 08 (11) Dec 07 (19) Dec 06 (6) Dec 05 (26) Dec 04 (15) Dec 03 (20) Dec 02 (17) Dec 01 (11) Nov 30 (10) Nov 29 (18) Nov 28 (21) Nov 27 (10) Nov 26 (22) Nov 25 (16) Nov 24 (12) Nov 23 (8) Nov 22 (18) Nov 21 (9) Nov 20 (17) Nov 19 (16) Nov 18 (16) Nov 17 (5) Nov 16 (9) Nov 15 (21) Nov 14 (17) Nov 13 (20) Nov 12 (16) Nov 11 (13) Nov 10 (9) Nov 09 (10) Nov 08 (16) Nov 07 (15) Nov 06 (18) Nov 05 (19) Nov 04 (16) Nov 03 (11) Nov 02 (5) Nov 01 (17) Oct 31 (17) Oct 30 (21) Oct 29 (9) Oct 28 (16) Oct 27 (6) Oct 26 (6) Oct 25 (16) Oct 24 (18) Oct 23 (14) Oct 22 (17) Oct 21 (10) Oct 20 (6) Oct 19 (8) Oct 18 (11) Oct 17 (12) Oct 16 (14) Oct 15 (19) Oct 14 (15) Oct 13 (11) Oct 12 (9) Oct 11 (10) Oct 10 (23) Oct 09 (13) Oct 08 (15) Oct 07 (20) Oct 06 (13) Oct 05 (4) Oct 04 (16) Oct 03 (17) Oct 02 (17) Oct 01 (20) Sep 30 (17) Sep 29 (9) Sep 28 (8) Sep 27 (14) Sep 26 (20) Sep 25 (19) Sep 24 (13) Sep 23 (11) Sep 22 (9) Sep 21 (5) Sep 20 (8) Sep 19 (21) Sep 18 (12) Sep 17 (20) Sep 16 (16) Sep 15 (10) Sep 14 (6) Sep 13 (18) Sep 12 (14) Sep 11 (24) Sep 10 (17) Sep 09 (16) Sep 08 (16) Sep 07 (10) Sep 06 (20) Sep 05 (13) Sep 04 (23) Sep 03 (14) Sep 02 (12) Sep 01 (11) Aug 31 (11) Aug 30 (13) Aug 29 (18) Aug 28 (14) Aug 27 (21) Aug 26 (10) Aug 25 (8) Aug 24 (10) Aug 23 (17) Aug 22 (15) Aug 21 (14) Aug 20 (20) Aug 19 (20) Aug 18 (7) Aug 17 (9) Aug 16 (11) Aug 15 (12) Aug 14 (14) Aug 13 (19) Aug 12 (14) Aug 11 (6) Aug 10 (12) Aug 09 (7) Aug 08 (18) Aug 07 (16) Aug 06 (16) Aug 05 (20) Aug 04 (12) Aug 03 (8) Aug 02 (12) Aug 01 (14) Jul 31 (16) Jul 30 (16) Jul 29 (11) Jul 28 (8) Jul 27 (9) Jul 26 (17) Jul 25 (20) Jul 24 (17) Jul 23 (11) Jul 22 (18) Jul 21 (7) Jul 20 (10) Jul 19 (14) Jul 18 (11) Jul 17 (15) Jul 16 (12) Jul 15 (10) Jul 14 (8) Jul 13 (8) Jul 12 (17) Jul 11 (18) Jul 10 (16) Jul 09 (13) Jul 08 (10) Jul 07 (12) Jul 06 (8) Jul 05 (16) Jul 04 (14) Jul 03 (17) Jul 02 (13) Jul 01 (16) Jun 30 (19) Jun 29 (7) Jun 28 (19) Jun 27 (21) Jun 26 (27) Jun 25 (23) Jun 24 (23) Jun 23 (12) Jun 22 (9) Jun 21 (18) Jun 20 (15) Jun 19 (24) Jun 18 (21) Jun 17 (13) Jun 16 (9) Jun 15 (9) Jun 14 (18) Jun 13 (24) Jun 12 (18) Jun 11 (23) Jun 10 (25) Jun 09 (24) Jun 08 (27) Jun 07 (5) Jun 06 (25) Jun 05 (30) Jun 04 (23) Jun 03 (22) Jun 02 (16) Jun 01 (17) May 31 (18) May 30 (19) May 29 (17) May 28 (23) May 27 (15) May 26 (10) May 25 (19) May 24 (16) May 23 (16) May 22 (27) May 21 (20) May 20 (26) May 19 (6) May 18 (8) May 17 (20) May 16 (8) May 15 (18) May 14 (5) May 13 (21) May 12 (9) May 11 (8) May 10 (12) May 09 (18) May 08 (11) May 07 (27) May 06 (12) May 05 (16) May 04 (19) May 03 (14) May 02 (18) May 01 (18) Apr 30 (25) Apr 29 (27) Apr 28 (11) Apr 27 (10) Apr 26 (18) Apr 25 (10) Apr 24 (29) Apr 23 (29) Apr 22 (14) Apr 21 (15) Apr 20 (20) Apr 19 (22) Apr 18 (16) Apr 17 (32) Apr 16 (12) Apr 15 (21) Apr 14 (21) Apr 13 (15) Apr 12 (13) Apr 11 (14) Apr 10 (16) Apr 09 (20) Apr 08 (36) Apr 07 (22) Apr 06 (11) Apr 05 (28) Apr 04 (20) Apr 03 (29) Apr 02 (32) Apr 01 (18) Mar 31 (12) Mar 30 (9) Mar 29 (15) Mar 28 (22) Mar 27 (24) Mar 26 (17) Mar 25 (17) Mar 24 (13) Mar 23 (5) Mar 22 (12) Mar 21 (15) Mar 20 (18) Mar 19 (19) Mar 18 (16) Mar 17 (10) Mar 16 (6) Mar 15 (18) Mar 14 (24) Mar 13 (18) Mar 12 (18) Mar 11 (17) Mar 10 (13) Mar 09 (12) Mar 08 (18) Mar 07 (25) Mar 06 (16) Mar 05 (16) Mar 04 (22) Mar 03 (17) Mar 02 (6) Mar 01 (23) Feb 29 (19) Feb 28 (25) Feb 27 (26) Feb 26 (23) Feb 25 (12) Feb 24 (13) Feb 23 (15) Feb 22 (26) Feb 21 (31) Feb 20 (12) Feb 19 (21) Feb 18 (15) Feb 17 (10) Feb 16 (15) Feb 15 (19) Feb 14 (15) Feb 13 (25) Feb 12 (20) Feb 11 (9) Feb 10 (7) Feb 09 (28) Feb 08 (20) Feb 07 (22) Feb 06 (20) Feb 05 (19) Feb 04 (14) Feb 03 (16) Feb 02 (28) Feb 01 (37) Jan 31 (27) Jan 30 (31) Jan 29 (18) Jan 28 (14) Jan 27 (10) Jan 26 (18) Jan 25 (26) Jan 24 (34) Jan 23 (21) Jan 22 (21) Jan 21 (18) Jan 20 (18) Jan 19 (18) Jan 18 (26) Jan 17 (24) Jan 16 (23) Jan 15 (30) Jan 14 (20) Jan 13 (18) Jan 12 (24) Jan 11 (11) Jan 10 (23) Jan 09 (22) Jan 08 (17) Jan 07 (17) Jan 06 (9) Jan 05 (18) Jan 04 (15) Jan 03 (19) Jan 02 (14) Jan 01 (6) Dec 31 (12) Dec 30 (4) Dec 29 (15) Dec 28 (11) Dec 27 (7) Dec 26 (10) Dec 25 (16) Dec 24 (13) Dec 23 (16) Dec 22 (11) Dec 21 (26) Dec 20 (28) Dec 19 (14) Dec 18 (25) Dec 17 (23) Dec 16 (19) Dec 15 (22) Dec 14 (38) Dec 13 (26) Dec 12 (25) Dec 11 (27) Dec 10 (31) Dec 09 (15) Dec 08 (30) Dec 07 (31) Dec 06 (27) Dec 05 (38) Dec 04 (25) Dec 03 (27) Dec 02 (15) Dec 01 (36) Nov 30 (23) Nov 29 (17) Nov 28 (23) Nov 27 (13) Nov 26 (16) Nov 25 (14) Nov 24 (18) Nov 23 (21) Nov 22 (21) Nov 21 (24) Nov 20 (20) Nov 19 (23) Nov 18 (17) Nov 17 (17) Nov 16 (34) Nov 15 (25) Nov 14 (17) Nov 13 (21) Nov 12 (18) Nov 11 (9) Nov 10 (15) Nov 09 (9) Nov 08 (9) Nov 07 (12) Nov 06 (8) Nov 05 (4) Oct 29 (1) Oct 01 (1) Jul 29 (1) May 11 (1) Jul 11 (1)
What many fail to realize!

Is that, once you leave the major cities, which are often bastions of the Democratic party, the rest of America is covered with Trump signs. Take a look at Illinois, for example. Chicago voted mainly for Hillary, and the rest of the state generally voted for Trump. This is normal across the country and that brings up the issue

The country of America is divided and divided not by race, color or creed, but by city people and rural people. The worst division possible. I talk about going back to our roots all the time on this blog and that is what we did at this 2016 presidential election

Trying to find our roots again

The map above shows how a cancer works in the body if left unchecked. Good or bad, cancer has taken hold of America and if you study what you see above in the image. You will see something very simple and very deadly. Liberal infiltration of the masses

I cannot and will not accept liberals as acceptable. I have spent my life being pushed around by liberals and their agendas

The roots of the country are still alive and the middle of the country shows just that

* * * * * * * * * *

What does this have to do with Russians?

We made them part of all this. We brought the Russians into this farce called an election and threatened them and brought thoughts of war upon their heads. Our lackadaisical attitude allowed our Neocons with the Democratic Party to spread their agenda of death, democracy by bombs and destruction as part of our presidential games

The cancer is trying to spread to the whole world and as you read this; Russians have been under attack by this liberal cancer. Many forms of this are being implemented across the world. China is under the strain. Libya has been destroyed. Syria is being destroyed. Iraq is destroyed. Venezuela is being destroyed. Brazil is on the hit list. On and on and on

Russians care if you jam your beliefs down their throats.In fact all the above countries believe that us Americans over stepped our boundaries and need to get our home in order first, before we try to spread miracle whip on the world in the name of democracy.as is done on a sandwich

We have allowed our desire to be equal, better, number one and Gods chosen people,) at all cost we shove it down others throats! This effects and or infects the world as a cancer does to the body. If it is left unchecked, and, Thus, Russia has finally stood her ground!

Cry Baby Cry!

We watch the Snowflakes whine and cry, we watch our media cry, we watch our Hollywood cry, our music people and on and on. We watched the media support Hillary literally 100%

We see the same manifestations being tossed out from our government and yes our government is in the terminal phase of cancer.If left unchecked the world will strike back and that is not acceptable to me

While many disfranchise that Neocons are not liberals, a neocon knows the best ones to garner support for their activities in the country and in the rest of the world and thus, they are liberal affiliated

No wonder the silent majority came out to vote in groves and groves

You slept through the part where the Democrats became the War party!

The cancer started first within the Democratic Party and has the party has become the nest for the liberal agenda and my friend; Liberals are Democrats

Conservative vs. Liberal Beliefs  Student News Daily

https://www.studentnewsdaily.com/conservative-vs-liberal-beliefs/

Liberals believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all. It is the duty of the government to alleviate social ills and to protect civil

* * * * * * * * * *

Democracy has become what we fought against in the past. We ourselves have become the issue and not the cure and until we cure ourselves, we have NO right to impose upon Russia our beliefs. This includes the rest of the world also.The fact is we never had and never will have the right (It is not right to do so!)

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.  William F. Buckley Jr.

Amen to that!

The video is reality and yes even Sveta has posted this video everywhere. She is stunned as to what is happening in America and how the children have become so brainwashed to the liberal policies

Our school systems, our government, our everyday life has become nothing but a liberal agenda and they are so use to getting their protect ways, that millions and millions of people and or mainly children have gone off the deep end and are wanting someone to fix the whole situation. They have never been challenged and that is what is wrong.WE should be challenged from birth to adulthood and thereafter all our lives. Challenge is what makes us grow

We do not all deserve a blue ribbon for just being alive and taking up space!

Safe space my ass!

* * * * * * * * * *

The silent, take it up the ass, conservatives finally got off there duffs and came out in force and if they waited 4 more years, They would have lost and never have this last chance to save America, the world and respect

This post will probably be slaughtered and I do not care. They are pulling videos as fast as they get posted on YouTube, due to censorship. I downloaded this video and put it elsewhere. The beauty of it is; in the years past, I would have to pull this video or be threatened with lawsuits, site shut down and such. Now I am out of their reach and will post what I damn well please. Their is our government (USA) that has censored me so heavily in the past

* * * * * * * * * *

Maybe it is a last hurrah? Maybe we have lost? But right now I feel good and so does millions like me!

It may not change in the long run; it may be inevitable; to become what we have allowed to start; a Liberal Utopia. But maybe we can slow it down for awhile and give the world a break?

* * * * * * * * * *

I know you do not see it; But the Neocons have switched to a new party. It use to be synonymous to say the warmonger party Republicans. Not anymore

And they are using our children to accomplish their goals, as is the GLBA and hundreds of other (infiltrated into the democrats) organizations. They found a weak link in our system and exploited it

Yes Russia had a right to be worried and scared, all they have to do is watch the children of our country, the ones in collage, and see what the future is

Yes I am a Deplorable and proud of it!

WtR

* * * * *

Donald Trump said in his campaign that that this is Americas last chance. If we lose this one, he said, we lose the country.The president-elect should ignore his more cautious counselors and act with the urgency of his declared beliefs. Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/memo-to-trump-exploit-your-win/#0hyAR8hJl7oAFRpC.99

* * * * *

There is disunity because the left views this as constant, never-ending war. We have tried. Our party, members of our party have tried to appease the Democrats and the left for as long as I have been doing this, and it never, ever works. It never makes the media less mean. It never causes Democrats to say they love us and like us more. Not that that matters, but it seems that some people want that to be the case. It never changes anything. But lets looking at this as it actually was, as it actually happened. Read More at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/11/10/i_m_getting_nervous_about_all_these_calls_for_trump

* * * * *
Poll : Which of these episodes from AHAs Unstoppable 2 impressed you the most?
Nov 11, 2016 | By Benedict

According to a report from P&S Market Research, North America holds the largest share in the global 3D bioprinting market, which was valued at almost $100 million in 2015. The global market is expected grow at a CAGR of 35.9% between 2016 and 2022.

Russian bioprinting company 3D Bioprinting Solutions

The medical sector and its millions of patients suffering from a major problem: there is a massive imbalance between the number of people waiting for critical organ transplants and the number of donated organs actually available. Simply put, the lack of available organs means that more patients are dying than could otherwise be the case. This state of affairs, though troublesome in and of itself, has provided a huge incentive for scientists in the 3D bioprinting industry, many of whom are working on ways to create 3D printed tissue and 3D printed human organs which could someday be used for transplantation, easing the burden on the donor system and potentially saving millions of lives.

As well as providing a way to create viable human organs, 3D bioprinting also holds the key for many advanced pharmaceutical testing procedures. Biologists are now able to effectively test the effect of certain drugs on human organs by 3D printing tissue from human stem cells. After fabricating tissue that functions like, say, part of the human liver, scientists can inject certain pharmaceutical products into the fabricated tissue to see how it reacts. This method could prove to be far more effectiveand less ethically complexthan animal (or human) testing procedures.

With so much riding on the 3D bioprinting market, it is little surprise to see the industry valued at a sizable $98.6 million, with an expected CAGR of 35.9% between 2016 and 2022. That is the estimation of P&S Market Research, a company that offers market research and consulting services for various geographies around the globe. P&S reports that the global demand for 3D bioprinting solutions comes from a demand for tissues and organs for transplantations and pharmaceutical research, as well as opportunities in cosmetic surgery. However, potential obstacles for growth include the high cost of 3D bioprinting, a lack of skilled professionals, and stringent regulatory processes.

According to the new report, syringe-based 3D bioprinting contributed the largest revenue in the global 3D bioprinting market in 2015, with syringe-based and pneumatic extrusion bioprinting together accounting for over 60% of the market. Because of their potential for high resolutions, pneumatic extrusion technologies are predicted to achieve the fastest growth of all 3D bioprinting technologies over the next six years.

Cyfuse Medical carrying out 3D bioprinting research

In terms of the geographical spread of the 3D bioprinting market, North America dominates, with the U.S. contributing the largest revenue to both the North American and global bioprinting markets. The P&S report estimates that the U.S. will remain the largest market for 3D bioprinting for the six-year period, with significant capital investments and development the driving factors behind the countrys bioprinting success. Although 3D bioprinting is used for many different applications, products and services for tissue and organ regeneration produced the largest portion of revenue in the industry in 2015.

The P&S report identifies some of the biggest names in the bioprinting industry as key players in overall market performance. These companies include Organovo, a company specializing in 3D printed organ and tissue services; Cyfuse Medical, developer of the Kenzan Method of bioprinting; and Russian medical innovator 3D Bioprinting Solutions.

Posted in 3D Printing Technology

Maybe you also like:









George Kramer wrote at 12/23/2016 4:13:44 AM:I'm surprised they didn't mention the new 3D bioprinter company Aether. Their Aether 1 costs $9,000 and it looks like users can print with 24 materials at once compared to 2 to 4 materials with Organovo and the other companies mentioned. Plus I read basically all the difficult parts of bioprinting are automated with this Aether bioprinter.




Nov 11, 2016 | By Tess

Close-up of "Sunset Sky" by Tom Thomson

In exciting news from the art world, 3D art re-creation company Verus Art has just announced that its latest collection of painting re-creations is now available for purchase. The collection, which was made in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada located in Ottawa, features such iconic pieces as Vincent van Goghs Iris, Claude Monets Agitee, Tom Thomsons Yellow Sunset, Frederick Varleys Squally Weather, Georgian Bay, and more.

For those unfamiliar with Verus Art, it is a collaborative initiative which essentially re-creates famous oil paintings using modern technologies like 3D scanning, and a proprietary form of elevated printing technology. The groups behind the innovative project are Vancouver-based Arius Technology, which manages the painting digitization; Netherlands-based Oce, which takes care of the elevated 3D printing; and Atlanta-based Larson-Juhl, which is responsible for framing and logistics.

The idea behind the initiative is to create extremely life-like prints that go way beyond simple 2D posters. That is, the 3D scanned and printed artworks, often based off of very famous paintings, take into account every paint stroke and dot of texture present in the real painting. The 3D scanning process itself, which uses hundreds of millions of data points, can capture detail as small as one tenth the width of a human hair. The results are pretty astonishing.

"Iris" by Vincent van Gogh

The recent collection, which consists of 12 pieces, is the result of a yearlong collaboration between Verus Art and the National Gallery of Canada. Each piece, which is based off of a detailed 3D scan of the original painting, is currently available to the public, though in limited numbers.

The launch of the National Gallery of Canada Collection reflects a significant technical achievement and a number of years of research by Arius Technology, Larson-Juhl, and Oce, commented Drew Van Pelt, CEO of Larson-Juhl. Until now, fine art reproductions were two-dimensional, lacking depth and texture. By accurately reproducing the color and relief of the artists brushstrokes, art enthusiasts have a more engaging experience, faithful to the artists original intent and vision.

The painting re-creations, which range in price from $500 to $8,000, will be available for purchase through the National Gallery of Canadas website as well as through a small number of galleries in Canada and the U.S. Additionally, a percentage of the proceeds from the 3D printed paintings will go towards establishing a Verus Art educational fund, and royalties from each sale will go towards supporting the National Gallery of Canadas educational programming.

Jean-Pierre Hoschede and Michel Monet on the Banks of the Epte" by Monet

The data from the detailed 3D scans of the original artworks will also be available and shared with various conservation organizations and for scientific analysis. Stephen Gritt, Director of Conservation and Technical Research at the National Gallery of Canada, said of the collaboration: To be able to assist in the development of a technology that will change the way we document and reproduce cultural heritage was an interesting opportunity.

"The scan data is incredibly rich and will lead to new avenues of research within Technical Art History. The resulting prints provide so much more information than flat images- they give you a direct connection to the artist by showing the nature of the brushwork, the texture of the paint, and physical interplay of tints. Most important for us was how we could use the prints for education as part of our Distance Learning Program  that's a new frontier well worth exploring, he continued.

The high profile collaboration for Verus Art could be a sign that their 3D scanned and printed replicas are the future of art re-creations and possibly even the future of conservation. As in other museal areas, 3D scanning and printing has offered a democratic way to capture, share, and in this case re-create art.

Posted in 3D Printing Application

Maybe you also like:












IndexBox has just published a new report World: Bismuth  Market Report. Analysis And Forecast To 2020.

This report has been designed to provide a detailed analysis of the global bismuth market. It covers the most recent data sets of quantitative medium-term projections, as well as developments in production, trade, consumption and prices.

The global trade in bismuth amounted to 151 million USD in 2015, fluctuating wildly over the period under review. Exports took a dip in 2008 and continued falling in 2009, reversing the trend the year after. They fell again in 2012, grew for the next two years, and ended 2015 with a decline.

According to IndexBox estimates, China continued to dominate in global supplies of bismuth, increasing its share over the period under review. In 2015, Chinas bismuth exports totaled 104 million USD, which accounted for a 69% share in terms of global exports. The UK, USA, Mexico, and the Republic of Korea were the other key global suppliers of bismuth in 2015, with a 17% combined share of global exports.

The Republic of Korea (+2.8% per year) was the only global supplier of bismuth that increased its exports over the period under review. The balance of key suppliers contracted their exports. China significantly strengthened its position in terms of the global exports of bismuth, growing its share from 44% in 2007 to 69% in 2015.

On the other hand, USA (24%, based on value terms), France (16%), Germany (15%), the Netherlands (9%), and China (4%) were the leading destinations of bismuth imports in 2015. Imports to the Netherlands grew at a rapid pace of +21.5% per year from 2007 to 2015. By contrast, the USA contracted its imports of bismuth over the same period. Frances share of global imports increased the most (+12 percentage points), while the share of the USA remained at 24%.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 REPORT DESCRIPTION

1.2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

2.1 KEY FINDINGS

2.2 MARKET TRENDS

3. MARKET OVERVIEW

3.1 MARKET VOLUME AND VALUE

3.2 CONSUMPTION BY COUNTRY

3.3 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES BY COUNTRY

3.4 MARKET FORECAST TO 2020

4. PRODUCTION

4.1 PRODUCTION IN 2007-2015

4.2 PRODUCTION BY COUNTRY

5. IMPORTS

5.1 IMPORTS IN 2007-2015

5.2 IMPORTS BY COUNTRY

5.3 IMPORT PRICES BY COUNTRY

6. EXPORTS

6.1 EXPORTS IN 2007-2015

6.2 EXPORTS BY COUNTRY

6.3 EXPORT PRICES BY COUNTRY

7. PROFILES OF MAJOR PRODUCERS

3 easy ways to order

Follow the link below to review a free sample or to buy the report: http://www.indexbox.co.uk/store/world-bismuth-market-report-analysis-and-forecast-to-2020/

Call us +44 20 3239 3063 to discuss your information needs and for special discounts on multi-report orders

Email your order to info@indexbox.co.uk

Price: 1490 EUR for Single License

Source: http://www.indexbox.co.uk/store/world-bismuth-market-report-analysis-and-forecast-to-2020/

Media Contact

Company Name: IndexBox Marketing

Contact Person: Inna Ivonina

Email: info@indexbox.co.uk

Phone: +44 20 3239 3063

Country: United Kingdom

Website: www.indexbox.co.uk
The IRS has announced special relief designed to support leave-based donation programs to aid victims of Hurricane Matthew.

Under these programs, employees may forgo vacation, sick or personal leave in exchange for cash payments that their employer makes, before Jan. 1, 2018, to charitable organizations providing relief for Matthew victims. The donated leave will not be included in the income or wages of the employees, and employers will be permitted to deduct the cash payments as business expenses.

This relief is similar to that provided following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and this summers severe flooding in Louisiana. Details are in Notice 2016-69, posted on IRS.gov.

Information on other relief available to victims of Hurricane Matthew can be found on the disaster relief page of IRS.gov.
A roundup of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

Jacksonville, Fla.  Preparer Candia V. Williams, 49, has pleaded guilty to nine counts of aiding in the preparation and filing of false tax returns.

According to court documents, Williams, owner and operator of Express Tax Returns, reported false information on clients returns, including inflated business income, to increase eligibility for tax credits. As a result of her actions, the U.S. Treasury lost more than $300,000 in tax revenue.

After being indicted on May 27, 2015, and initially released to await trial, Williams fled Florida in violation of the conditions of her bond. On Jan. 6, a fugitive task force determined that Williams was hiding in a home in Gulfport, Miss. After a standoff with law enforcement, she was found hiding under a pile of clothing in a bathroom closet in the home. She was arrested and returned to Florida.

Williams faces a maximum penalty of three years in federal prison on each count.

Gulfport, Miss.: Former preparer Emma Raine, 52, has pleaded guilty to failing to report her taxable income of some $332,500 in two years alone, according to published reports.

The three-time widow, avoiding trial on a 35-count indictment with charges including bankruptcy fraud, is serving a life prison term in Louisiana on a recent conviction on second-degree murder, reports said.

A jury in New Orleans in August believed testimony that Raine hired a hit man to kill her second husband in 2006, according to published reports that added that prosecutors described her as a black widow.

Raine reportedly pleaded guilty to a charge involving income she did not report to the IRS for 2011. According to her cited plea agreement, she admitted her unreported taxable income for 2010 and 2011 was $332,525.06, resulting in a loss to the IRS of $94,107.01. She also reportedly agreed that the false returns she filed for clients for the calendar years from 2008 through 2010 resulted in a government loss of $150,674.

Sentencing is Feb. 10, reports added, when she faces up to three years in prison, a $250,000 fine and payment of restitution.

Binghamton, N.Y.: Preparer Donald Grant, 40, has pleaded guilty to assisting in preparing a false return and attempting to interfere with the administration of the internal revenue laws.

Grant admitted that over four years he prepared 27 returns that contained false claims of business income, business losses and educational expenses, which gave Grants 13 taxpayer clients more than $100,000 in undeserved refunds. He also admitted that he interfered with the IRS inquiry into the returns, providing a client with a counterfeit P&L statement, encouraging clients to provide false information to investigators and providing false information himself when interviewed by an IRS.

Sentencing is March 9, when Grant faces up to three years in prison on both counts, a maximum fine of $100,000 for preparing a false return and $5,000 for interfering with internal revenue laws, and a maximum term of supervised release of a year. Grant may also be ordered to pay restitution to the IRS.
The 10th Indian Magazine Congress, held in Mumbai on November 9, 2016 under the aegis of the Association of Indian Magazines, put the spotlight on Incredible Magazines. The Congress was attended by the whos who of the magazine industry and had a good delegate attendance from across various publication groups.



The day long Congress saw various eminent speakers express their opinions and top publishers speak on the way forward for the magazine industry.



Speaking at the publishers forum, B Srinivasan, Managing Director, Vikatan Group, highlighted five things that magazine publishers should do, wherein he shared some mantras for success and stressed on treating People as the biggest asset of publishers. Quoting John Lennon, he said: Life is what happens to you while youre busy making plans. He noted that everything that we think about is important and thinking about something makes it more important.



According to Srinivasan, for a publisher, or a journalist or a stakeholder, sometimes it is good to look invert and then try to find out what we need to sort out and resolve it. Yes, content is one of the assets, but people are the biggest asset for a publisher, he affirmed. Further elaborating, he said, People who create the product for the community are probably the most important asset that we have. Know your people, it is our job to inspire those who are capable, try identify those are likely to be inspired and empower them. This will create a better content ecosystem, try to understand the community and serve mutually beneficial content across.



According to him, it is also very important to know the ability of every individual and the aspirations and needs of an organisation or a community. Next, he touched upon the significance of culture, which is the legacy of any organisation. Capture it, the same culture is something that we need to confront at times because it is the culture that decides what our magazine brand is and what is it that keeps us growing to the level that we can go. So in my opinion we need to confront those areas which really need detailing and processing to go forward and obviously to measure and manage the change that is required. Today, we are moving towards an open office kind of culture. So there it is not enough to sit in a room without communicating with our colleagues, bosses. It is important that we open up our minds and open up our ability to communicate with others.



Srinivasan pointed out that Listening and Learning is something that sincerely we have been attempting to do. Fail to succeed, was another mantra highlighted by Srinivasan, who added, When you fail, it is very important to know that you have failed to explore the possibilities and start again. With the right potential and collaborative solution, we should make an attempt in the right direction. Accept the failure and move on.



Speaking on creative solutions, he said, Solve, but dont sell. Plain vanilla pages alone dont make the cut. We need to be a part of the solution and not the problem. According to him, publishers themselves were very capable of being their own creative and planning agency. His advice was to get native in providing client solutions. Brand comes first, he added.



Train the trainers, was his next mantra. According to him, It is important to get recruits from within. Earlier, in our organisation only 5-10 per cent of the journalists were getting into digital. Now, one-third contribute to both digital and print. After training the trainers, get the trainers try and train around them. He also noted that it is important to know what is important. He bet on the point that print is still the king and brand is the boss. Never stop focussing on the evergreens because it never dies, Srinivasan maintained.



Concluding his address, Srinivasan noted, Your competition is not any other publication or media group. Consumer is the biggest competition; produce what he/she consumes on various media.
Great conversations start with great topics. Great topics come out of common interests. Common interests include ones undying love for great movies. Indeed, Movies are great conversation starters. These conversations can often unravel some interesting, unknown facts that are common across a diverse set of films  like profession of the characters or their graduation school or scenes shot at the same location or actors having the same name - factors that are random but unique. Sony Le PLEX HD is all set to bring out these interesting binding themes with a brand new slot called Its 9 O Talk starting Monday, November 14, 2016.

Airing once a month, Monday-Friday at 9 PM, the channel will showcase five different movies in Its 9 O Talk, that are connected on a string through one distinct theme. Creating a premium conversational platform for quality cinema lovers, Sony Le PLEX HD has introduced an innovative way to add to the enthusiasm of movie buffs. Reaching out to the movie lovers, anchor Neha Sareen will share some interesting facts around these themes before the airing of each movie. The first theme on the show is called Dollars in the Diapers, which connects 5 movies - The People vs. Larry Flynt, Mortdecai, After Earth, Prisoners and Still Alice  with a common theme of actors born with a silver spoon like Edward Norton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jaden Smith, Jake Gyllenhaal and Kristen Stewart.

The other interesting themes include Bling on the Ring - Biggest and the Best celebrity engagement rings, The AD-vantage Actors- actors who started their acting careers with ads and And The Award Doesnt Go To- actors you wont believe havent won an Oscar! to name a few.

Saurabh Yagnik, EVP and Business Head, English Cluster, Sony Pictures Networks India said, With the tagline Where You Belong, we created a community that brought together different or uncommon people through their common love for films. Listicles fit in with that idea of finding the common in the uncommon. It is a very popular format to drive online conversations amongst communities. We at Sony Le PLEX HD have introduced a new programing slot called Its 9 O Talk, which takes the trend of conversations around listicles on air. This unconventional programing initiative will be a delight for movie lovers as it gives them reasons to have interesting conversations through the week. The themes focus on finding a unique, unexpected and unusual connection between various films, which is supplemented with interesting information  essentially, fun trivia for movie lovers to discuss with their loved ones.
RJ Viny, host of the breakfast show  Salaam Indore, emerged as the Radio Personality of the Year at the Association of International Broadcasters in London. With this award she became the only Indian RJ and MY FM the first Indian radio station to be recognized at AIB.

AIB with members from Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio New Zealand International, Radio Romania International, Radio Taiwan International, BBC World News, Al Jazeera, Capital FM, Bloomberg, and such reputed media organisations selected RJ Viny, giving the country its first AIB award  Radio Personality of the year.

A proud Mr. Harrish Bhatia CEO, MY FM said, Its a great achievement and I am very proud of RJ Viny for bagging the 1st New York Festival award for Indore this year and bagging the 1st AIB London award for India, she is on a roll. Being a strong customer centric organization our focus is not only to entertain but also to add value to the listeners life by taking up issues of their concern. We invest a lot in understanding the taste and needs of our customers, this approach has helped in building in a strong differentiated product and showcase the real power of the medium. We are overwhelmed with the love being extended to us by our listeners not only making us the No.1 radio station in the cities that we are present in but also help us win the awards both nationally and internationally

An ecstatic RJ Viny shared her joy by saying, I am completely overwhelmed, it is one of the most fulfilling moments of my life. To do what you and be internationally recognized for it, what more can one ask for.

Speaking on the win Viplove Gupte, Chief Programming Officer ,We have been working on differentiated and meaningful content for last couple of years. Our listeners had recognized this sea of change in our content and delivery very early and hence apart from making us the leader radio station in our cities, they have also helped us win this award.

We have been constantly adding more and more meaning to radio content. We have not resorted to useless prank calls, ridiculous jokes, insults, meaningless conversation about bollywood gossips but have tried to showcase the real power and meaning of radio by making socio-economic changes. So far, we have taken baby steps but this award is a testimony that the path that we have taken is right.

Extremely proud of my colleagues RJ Viny and the content team who has worked very hard on this show and got us, the country the laurel of first ever AIB London award.

MY FM not only tops the list of radio stations in India but in the recent years MY FM and its talent has made a prominent mark internationally as well. In 2014, the bubbly RJ Meenakshi was chosen to host and represent India at International Radio Festival (IRF) in Zurich. Earlier this year, the campaign, Ek baar Phir Maregi Nirbhaya (Nirbhaya will die again), won at the New York Festivals Radio Program Awards under the Best Human Interest Story category.

Established in 1993, The AIBs  International Media Excellence Awards  are run by the Association for International Broadcasting which provides information, networking and insight for the international broadcasting industry  cross media, cross border, cross cultural. It has grown into a unique centre of information about international broadcasting, covering television, radio, and emerging media platforms such as online and mobile.
The campaign has been conceptualized by Rediffusion Y&R, who won the account following a Multi agency pitch.

The Kolkata Film Festival which was started in the year 1995 was the culmination of a film society movement that drew its inspiration from the masters of Bengali Cinema - Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen. KIFF is organized by the Kolkata Chalachitra Utsav Society, with financial and logistic support from the Government of West Bengal.

From 2014, the Kolkata International Film Festival has become a competitive festival. This year, like last year The Royal Bengal Trophy would be awarded to the Best Film and the Best Director. The festival also acknowledges the films made by women directors, from all across the globe and have therefore dedicated a separate competitive category to their films. In fact this year a new competitive category has been added to the list that of Innovations in Moving Images, to encourage new ideas and new concepts that have pioneered a change in the realm of cinema.

The brief this year was to communicate how cinema brings people closer and together, for which Rediffusion Y&R came up with a campaign idea Cinema for all. All for cinema. The agency initiated a contest on social media requesting people to share their very own pictures so as to be a part of the KIFF 2016, thus accounting all those received images the campaign creative has been created.

The 22nd Kolkata International Film Festival begins from 11th November to 18th November this year.

Commenting on the pitch win and campaign, Dhunji S Wadia, President  Rediffusion Y&R said, We have some really interesting campaign work coming out of this association. We are looking forward towards this eventful week ahead.

Nilanjan Dasgupta, Executive Creative Director  Rediffusion Y&R added, Since the brief was about human integration and cinema, our core idea was to involve the common people in the campaign. So we did facebook activation where we asked them to send selfies based on expressions of different film genres and then we made images of film icons with the selfies. The participation was beyond expectation and the best selfies were awarded.

Being associated with Kolkata International Film Festival has always been a privilege (we partnered with them last year too). This years campaign, at the logistics level was a mammoth task but we had planned it well digitally to make it successful. In fact a dedicated digital team was set up for this. It has been a very gratifying creative partnership for us, said Suparna Mucadum- Vice President, Rediffusion-Y&R Kolkata.

Credits

Client: Government of West Bengal

Brand: 22nd Edition Kolkata International Film Festival

Agency: Rediffusion Y&R, Kolkata

Vice President: Suparna Mucadum, Rediffusion Y&R, Kolkata

CCO: Rahul Jauhari

ECD (Copy): Nilanjan Dasgupta

ECD (Art): Piyash Ghosh

Brand Partner: Aniruddha Basu

Creative Partner: Niladri Deb, Aneek Ray

Copywriter: Kaushik Roy

Account Management: Shroyee Malakar

Digital team: Anahita Fatehpuria, Eshita Chakraborty
At a time when brands are always on the lookout for new agencies to offer them innovative and futuristic campaigns, we try to understand the importance of working with one agency and evolving with them.



Working with one agency not only builds trust, it also develops a connect between the two, which helps create a better and stronger brand image.



With WATConsult set to celebrate its 10th Anniversary in January 2017, we spoke to some of their old clients who have worked with the agency for long. These leading industry experts explained the importance of the Spirit of Partnership and gave us an insight into the long-term client-agency bond.



Is it the trust that binds them or creative capabilities or both? Lets find out.



Describe your experience of working with WATConsult.



Excellent! exclaimed Shaila Bothra, Senior Brand Manager, Emami Group. She continued, The agency brings in the agility of the youth. The fast execution makes our campaign in sync with current events. Digital is growing and so is our commitment.



Echoing similar views, Suman Saha, Head of Media and CRM, Mother Dairy, said, Its been an overall pleasant experience working with a young and energetic team.



Bhairavi Rangarajan, Digital Marketing, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co, elucidated, Working with WATConsult has been like working with an extended part of my team. From starting off with social media campaigns, we have now enlisted them for ORM as well. The team is reliable, understands the brief and passion that we share and translates it into an effective campaign idea. The team is committed, creative, and open to inputs, focus on quality of output and these according to me are their biggest strengths.



Atul Bawa, Marketing Manager, Nikon India, added here, WATConsult has been extremely easy to work with. The team is young and friendly and has an indepth knowledge of digital marketing. We would highly recommend WATConsult for digital marketing.



If you were to describe WATConsult in three adjectives what would it be?



Shaila Bothra: Dynamic, Fresh and Restless.

Suman Saha: Prompt, Enthusiastic and Creative.

Bhairavi Rangarajan: Energetic, Creative and Passionate.

Atul Bawa: Innovative, Hardworking Team and Focused.



If you can throw some light on working with an agency on a long term basis.



Bothra stated that brand building is a long term process. Digital media is new and is changing constantly and brands have to evolve, adapt and regenerate around the new technology. Consumers pay and want to be associated with brands. Therefore, it is imperative that agencies look at a combination of planning, creative execution and innovation in media spends on this platform as a conjoint process and not in isolation.



Rangarajan believes that it is easy for any agency to keep re-hashing same old ideas for an existing client, but only when the agency consistently delivers and is willing to push itself instead of getting comfortable with the status quo, is it successful in working with a client on a long term basis. Overtime, we have come to rely on WATConsult as one would with their own team rather than as a third party hired to execute briefs. The team is easy to interact with, takes feedback and works on them, understands our ambition and works on finding new avenues and ideas. WATConsult has made sure that they stay updated with the latest trends, present us with the latest tools and resources. They share our passion, see the bigger picture and make sure that the campaign delivery is not compromised. All these are the traits that have made us work on a long term basis with WATConsult, she added.



Appreciating all the work that WATConsult has been doing for Nikon, Bawa commented, We began working with WATConsult approximately five years ago. They have actually gone beyond their scope of work and helped us out on many occasions. The team provides an exceptional level of digital knowledge alongside practical hands-on day to day support. They provide excellent creative suggestions, media recommendations, and insight for strategy.
Zenith has developed ground-breaking automation of digital planning that delivers significant improvement in effectiveness for marketers and is set to fundamentally change the way that agencies and their clients optimise digital media.

Over the past six months a taskforce of data scientists and strategists from Zenith has been developing sophisticated automation of digital planning using the networks machine-learning technology and bespoke algorithms.

Marketers are currently faced with a confusing array of multi-touchpoint customer journeys, so Zenith has looked at how machine learning could be used to efficiently process large amounts of data and to automate the most complex and time-consuming aspects of digital planning.

Using live Aviva campaigns, the taskforce collected advertising cookie data from the technology stack of a leading demand-side platform (DSP) and matched it with corresponding first party sales data. Applying Zeniths machine learning algorithm, the taskforce was able to precisely attribute sales conversions to specific digital interactions.

Then, in an industry first, Zenith was able to automatically optimise Avivas digital planning by pushing the algorithm output back into the DSPs stack. This dramatic move closed the automation loop  data collection, attribution and a full set of planning changes across multiple digital touchpoints all done automatically.

But Zenith is not stopping there, the network is adding first party drivers-of-demand data into the algorithm in order to enhance the effectiveness of the automated planning changes. In this way, data - such as how price affects sales or the success of creative assets - will be fed into the automated optimisation.

This radical automation of digital planning is being done using cloud-based technology, with the client retaining full ownership of their first-party data throughout the process.

This application of machine learning saw Aviva benefit from a 6% cost-per-quote (CPQ) improvement on car search through implementation of the automation programme. For display, Aviva saw a 10% improvement in CPQ through automation.

Vittorio Bonori, Global Brand President at Zenith, said: Zenith is leading the way in changing the business model for digital. This important programme is part of our strategy to leverage the power of data and technology to drive profitable growth for our clients.

James Turner, Head of Marketing (Trading) at Aviva, said: Were delighted that as part of our commitment to digital and media transformation at Aviva we are breaking new ground with this pilot automation of our search and display. The benefits of attribution modelling will be realised in terms of ROI improvement as well as through operational efficiency.

Tanmay Mohanty, Group Chief Executive Officer at Zenith India says that machine learning and automation have the power to radically transform businesses. Machine gleaned insight and attribution modelling help connect the dots, where data is being collected on a massive scale. It leads to sharper deliveries, enhances creativity and brings in breakthrough strategies and ideas. In the new world, the companies that progress are the ones that are agile with data science, visualisation, automation and technology. We are pleased to be at the forefront of this great change.
Blog Archive Nov 2022 (2) Oct 2022 (64) Sep 2022 (60) Aug 2022 (61) Jul 2022 (55) Jun 2022 (60) May 2022 (73) Apr 2022 (60) Mar 2022 (58) Feb 2022 (65) Jan 2022 (69) Dec 2021 (106) Nov 2021 (84) Oct 2021 (58) Sep 2021 (67) Aug 2021 (62) Jul 2021 (54) Jun 2021 (50) May 2021 (58) Apr 2021 (44) Mar 2021 (57) Feb 2021 (64) Jan 2021 (93) Dec 2020 (82) Nov 2020 (62) Oct 2020 (50) Sep 2020 (45) Aug 2020 (51) Jul 2020 (56) Jun 2020 (53) May 2020 (70) Apr 2020 (66) Mar 2020 (169) Feb 2020 (211) Jan 2020 (184) Dec 2019 (54) Nov 2019 (56) Oct 2019 (55) Sep 2019 (63) Aug 2019 (54) Jul 2019 (69) Jun 2019 (56) May 2019 (65) Apr 2019 (68) Mar 2019 (72) Feb 2019 (76) Jan 2019 (62) Dec 2018 (55) Nov 2018 (69) Oct 2018 (90) Sep 2018 (82) Aug 2018 (58) Jul 2018 (36) Jun 2018 (47) May 2018 (44) Apr 2018 (64) Mar 2018 (63) Feb 2018 (68) Jan 2018 (92) Dec 2017 (85) Nov 2017 (64) Oct 2017 (82) Sep 2017 (54) Aug 2017 (89) Jul 2017 (60) Jun 2017 (86) May 2017 (84) Apr 2017 (62) Mar 2017 (86) Feb 2017 (91) Jan 2017 (113) Dec 2016 (109) Nov 2016 (100) Oct 2016 (82) Sep 2016 (95) Aug 2016 (84) Jul 2016 (84) Jun 2016 (99) May 2016 (93) Apr 2016 (106) Mar 2016 (145) Feb 2016 (125) Jan 2016 (103) Dec 2015 (83) Nov 2015 (80) Oct 2015 (100) Sep 2015 (111) Aug 2015 (94) Jul 2015 (98) Jun 2015 (151) May 2015 (125) Apr 2015 (109) Mar 2015 (122) Feb 2015 (113) Jan 2015 (135) Dec 2014 (131) Nov 2014 (115) Oct 2014 (146) Sep 2014 (112) Aug 2014 (128) Jul 2014 (94) Jun 2014 (104) May 2014 (140) Apr 2014 (132) Mar 2014 (81) Feb 2014 (89) Jan 2014 (141) Dec 2013 (100) Nov 2013 (96) Oct 2013 (99) Sep 2013 (94) Aug 2013 (95) Jul 2013 (95) Jun 2013 (91) May 2013 (139) Apr 2013 (179) Mar 2013 (73) Feb 2013 (76) Jan 2013 (85) Dec 2012 (59) Nov 2012 (71) Oct 2012 (85) Sep 2012 (70) Aug 2012 (71) Jul 2012 (53) Jun 2012 (51) May 2012 (52) Apr 2012 (52) Mar 2012 (69) Feb 2012 (76) Jan 2012 (70) Dec 2011 (60) Nov 2011 (54) Oct 2011 (57) Sep 2011 (75) Aug 2011 (72) Jul 2011 (64) Jun 2011 (76) May 2011 (56) Apr 2011 (73) Mar 2011 (114) Feb 2011 (71) Jan 2011 (80) Dec 2010 (92) Nov 2010 (82) Oct 2010 (73) Sep 2010 (95) Aug 2010 (86) Jul 2010 (81) Jun 2010 (76) May 2010 (71) Apr 2010 (74) Mar 2010 (74) Feb 2010 (82) Jan 2010 (101) Dec 2009 (108) Nov 2009 (182) Oct 2009 (136) Sep 2009 (102) Aug 2009 (120) Jul 2009 (151) Jun 2009 (136) May 2009 (180) Apr 2009 (145) Mar 2009 (113) Feb 2009 (113) Jan 2009 (124) Dec 2008 (108) Nov 2008 (69) Oct 2008 (89) Sep 2008 (76) Aug 2008 (75) Jul 2008 (87) Jun 2008 (80) May 2008 (99) Apr 2008 (93) Mar 2008 (115) Feb 2008 (147) Jan 2008 (162) Dec 2007 (124) Nov 2007 (95) Oct 2007 (67) Sep 2007 (42) Aug 2007 (78) Jul 2007 (75) Jun 2007 (123) May 2007 (110) Apr 2007 (108) Mar 2007 (92) Feb 2007 (136) Jan 2007 (119) Dec 2006 (41) Nov 2006 (34) Oct 2006 (12) Sep 2006 (13) Aug 2006 (13) Jul 2006 (16) Jun 2006 (12) May 2006 (21) Apr 2006 (38) Mar 2006 (27) Feb 2006 (25) Jan 2006 (18)
More than 200 surfers from around the world have been attracted to take part in the 2016 Taiwan Open of Surfing that will be held in Taitung County in eastern Taiwan, which boasts stable and beautiful waves that are recognized by the World Surfing League (WSL) as among the best in the world, in late November this year.

Tony Silvagni and Crystal Walsh, who both hold the 2015 champion titles in mens longboard category and women's longboard category respectively, will also be competing in the four-day event, which is scheduled to take place in Jinzun Harbor (), Taitung County between November 23 and 27.

The WSL Women's longboard champion Rachael Tilly and Japanese leading surfer Masatoshi Ohno, who may join the national team of Japan in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic, will also attend the competitions.

The 2016 Taiwan Open of Surfing, which carries a purse of NT$2.5 million (US$78,900), is a recognized WSF QS1500 event and will be the 48th leg in mens shortboard category, the 9th leg in mens longboard category and the 9th leg womens longboard category as part of the WSL.

The WSL has listed the waves off Jinzun Harbor in the same class as those in the United States, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Bali and Thailand, particularly when seasonal northeasterly winds are blowing.

This year the competitions will also include team longboard division, team shortboard division and junior division.

As Taiwan's only surfing event that is officially part of the WSL world circuit, it is expected to greatly elevate the level and broaden the horizon of Taiwan's surfing, the organizers said.

In addition, last year, the competitions live streaming on YouTube and WSL official website had successfully attracted up to more than 100,000 viewers to watch online, according to the organizers.

With so many worlds best surfers participating, fans are looking forward to an exciting event that will very probably be written into the most brilliant chapter in the history of Taiwan surfing, the organizers said.

Meanwhile, special gifts will be given to visitors during the four-day event as part of Taitung County governments efforts to encourage people to take part in the sport activity.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161110006725/en/

Taitung County Government

Delice Chen (), +886-89-322390

International Development and Planning Department

Journalism and Communication Section

j7016@taitung.gov.tw
BOSTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "Without Christians, there would be no Lebanon," Professor Marius Deeb argued at a lecture at Boston College on Wednesday. In Lebanon, he said, "Christian leaders have fought to preserve a democratic polity in which all the religious groups would be equal and represented at all levels of government, and in which all basic freedoms would be protected." In the election of General Michel Aoun as Lebanon's president last month, ending two years of deadlock in which the office went unfilled, Deeb saw positive signs of a "new dialogue among Lebanese," and expected that Aoun "will accomplish a lot."

In his lecture, Professor Deeb traced in detail the history of Christian leadership in Lebanon, from the establishment of Mount Lebanon as an autonomous zone after the massacres of Christians in 1860 to the 1975-1990 Civil War. Deeb argued that the Christians' desire for a "free and open society" helped preserve Lebanese society despite the horrific violence of the war.

Deeb described President Aoun as a "remarkable man." He is a Christian who began his career fighting against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and later aligned himself with Syria's Shi'ite Muslim ally Hezbollah. In Deeb's view, the conditions for the election of Aoun as President were made possible by the declining influence in Lebanon of both Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. The energy of Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, is being absorbed in Syria, while Saudi Arabia is bogged down in Yemen.

Deeb expects that Aoun can make progress on a number of issues in Lebanon, from reintegrating the exiled South Lebanon Army, to improving relations between Israel, Syria and Lebanon, to fighting corruption and improving basic services. Despite Deeb's description of Hezbollah as "villains," he believes Aoun's relationship with them will help "prevent conflict." "Christians in the West should be supportive of Lebanon," Deeb concluded, "and of Michel Aoun in particular."

Deeb also argued that efforts should be made to restore nationality to Lebanese living abroad, most of whom are Christian. While Christians made up the majority in Lebanon at the time of independence in 1943, their proportion of the population has sharply fallen due to emigration and higher birth rates among Lebanese Muslims. If the diaspora is counted, Deeb noted, "they are at least on par with their Muslim counterparts. To count only the Christians who reside in Lebanon is totally unacceptable." The Lebanese diaspora, Deeb explained, remains an organic part of Lebanese society.

"Despite the wars and the conflicts that have ravaged their homeland," Deeb concluded, "the Christians have always rebuilt their country and continue to have faith in a better future. The religious freedom they enjoy is a model for all the Christians of the Levant and Egypt. They ring the bells of their church loudly, and show their symbols in public without fear." Deeb drew a marked contrast between Lebanon and other states in the region like Egypt, where Christians "are harassed all the time, and their churches are burned," Qatar, where the only churches were built under diplomatic pressure and have no bells or crosses, and Turkey, where nearly all the Christians were wiped out decades ago.

Marius Deeb is a retired professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and the author of Syria's Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process. The full video of Deeb's talk can be seen online at www.middle-east-minorities.com, and was part of a lecture series on The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East being held at Boston College, and sponsored by Christian Solidarity International in cooperation with the Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages & Literatures, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and the Department of Political Science, Islamic Civilization and Societies.

Contact: Alexandra Campana

alexandra.campana@csi-int.org

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/prof-marius-deeb-lebanon-cannot-exist-without-christians-300361542.html

SOURCE Christian Solidarity International (CSI)
Air Force officials have selected 302 officers as the 2017 combat air forces squadron commander candidates.

Designees are the result of the CAF squadron command selection board held at the Air Force Personnel Center Sept. 13. Candidates are eligible for any worldwide command opening to include 365-day extended deployment command opportunities.

Wing and group hiring officials will use the candidate list to fill projected 2017 CAF squadron commander vacancies. Members appearing on this listing may also be considered for other command opportunities outside of the CAF.

Not all officers on the candidate lists will get command assignments, said Maj. Clint Carlisle, the AFPC assignments officer. The development teams typically select more qualified officers than there are projected vacancies to account for any unexpected events during the year.

The development teams reviewed all aspects of the candidates records, duty histories, demonstrated leadership ability, professional development and permanent change of station eligibility to identify the most qualified for command.

The selection process is highly competitive, Carlisle said. These candidates have demonstrated the leadership traits crucial for leading Airmen, setting goals and envisioning the future.

Furthermore, for the first time, the CAF candidate list includes an additional 68 CAF members previously selected by Air Education and Training Command who also appeared on the recent HAWK squadron commander candidate list.

Capt. Ana Ruiz, the CAF DT advisor at Air Combat Command, said this effort is groundbreaking.

CAF wing commanders will no longer have to search through two separate listings to seek out new squadron commanders, he said.

Ruiz recently took over as advisor to the ACC/A3 for all rated officer developmental matters.

Candidates will remain on the list if not selected for command until the list is superseded by the following years results, unless they are removed for one of a variety of reasons such as selection for another assignment opportunity.

The candidate list is posted to myPers. To view the list, select Active Duty Officer from the dropdown menu and search CAF Squadron.

For more information about Air Force personnel programs, go to myPers. Individuals who do not have a myPers account can request one by following these instructions.
Joint expeditionary Airmen bridge service gaps in todays fight

Trucks line up hood to bumper, resembling rush-hour traffic jams; pallets stacked with bags of rice or ammunition, sit in precise rows while armored vehicles wait to move to the flightline and join the fight. These sights may seem all too familiar for some aerial porters and loadmasters, but to one Airman, they tell a far greater story.



The story of a battle about to break out, or a conflict winding down are narrated by the type, amount, destination and urgency of cargo being processed and airlifted in and out of the aerial port terminal, said Tech Sgt. Ronald Gowen, a logistician assigned to the 387th Air Expeditionary Squadron.



Though hes performing a standard Air Force job ensuring supplies make it to the front line, Gowens deployed experience is different from many other Airmen. He is assigned specifically to support non-Air Force units. His unique skills as an Airman are in high demand by sister service elements engaged in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.



Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein recently outlined his vision for a future where Airmen are called upon more and more often to work in joint environments.



It is essential we strengthen the development of Airmen who are not only steeped in the business of Airpower, but also knowledgeable in how to optimize every component as part of a Joint Task Force, Goldfein wrote in a letter to Airmen published earlier this year.



When highly specialized Airmen like Gowen are assigned to joint units engaged in Operation Inherent Resolve, the 387th AES is there to provide for their administrative care and feeding, ensuring units have a direct line back to their home service. The squadron is responsible for more than 300 joint Airmen deployed in 10 to 12 different countries, said Lt. Col. Sang Kim, the 387th AES commander.



Over the years, I think the Air Force has been doing very well and continues to grow in joint environments, providing these critical skill sets to really make an impact in the fight, Kim said. Our efforts supporting Combined Joint Task Force  Operation Inherent Resolve is a prime example of our joint Airmen doing that mission.



For Airmen, working with other services can bring unique challenges. There are often miscommunications and difficulties as a result of the different cultures and languages that exist within each branch.



The 387th AES helps mitigate these cultural differences by opening the lines of communication. They make it a priority to regularly meet with their Airmens tactical supervisors from other services in order to forge partnerships and assist with managing their personnel, explained Kim.



Providing support to joint units isnt new to many Airmen like Gowen, who has years of experience operating with other services.



Throughout my other four deployments, working alongside other sister services or allied nations was the norm, Gowen said. I have worked closely with the Army at a Joint Mobility Operations Center as we directed rotary wing airflow, and coordinated the fixed wing ramp operations simultaneously. I have also been a part of a seven-person team of aerial porters that deployed to Forward Operating Base Farah, Afghanistan, under Navy command to orchestrate air transport and advisory in expediting the redeployment of the Navy, Marine Corps and Army units along with the Italian Brigade personnel and equipment for base closure.



Much like the process aerial porters go through getting supplies from point A to B, the Air Force must also continue to manage joint Airmen sent to various locations, Kim said. Maintaining communication with Air Force personnel assigned to joint units around the region remains a primary focus of his unit.



We provide (our Airmen) with operational and administrative control at their geographically separated locations and ensure open communication with our team members and their joint chain of command, Kim said. Finally, we conduct battlefield circulations into multiple regions of the combined joint operations area to strengthen relationships and check on our (Airmen) supporting OIRs primary mission to defeat (ISIL).
Maintainers: The driving force





JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-RANDOLPH, Texas (AFNS) -- The Profession of Arms Center of Excellence released a new video Nov. 10, as part of the Heritage Today series.



Driving Force  Maintainers pays tribute to aircraft maintenance Airmen and focuses on the dedication and culture of the more than 100,000 total force flightline warriors serving today.



Brig. Gen. Walter J. Lindsley, the director of logistics, deputy chief of staff logistics, engineering and force protection, Headquarters, Air Force at the Pentagon, described the Air Forces maintainers as crazy loyal to our country and tirelessly devoted to our mission.



And we need them -- active duty, Guard, Reserves, and civilians, he added. We work as one team  in one fight.



Master Sgt. James Weeks, the superintendent of the Maintenance Management School at Air Education and Training Command headquarters here, is the voice behind the recording.



I have worked on the B-2 (Spirit), the C-130E and H models, and most recently was part of the special airlift missions at Joint Base Andrews, he described. As the video states, aircraft maintainers are a special breed of individuals. They work in all conditions, at all hours and make sacrifices time and again to make the mission happen.



The 19-year veteran said it was an honor to work with what, I believe are the most dedicated, hardest working, mission driven, selfless group of people in the Air Force  the aircraft maintainers.



The Heritage Today video series is designed to inspire Airmen through stories of Air Force heritage linked to current real-world Air Force operations.



Our Heritage Today videos reinforce Airmen identities  we recognize, feel, and live them, said Col. Joseph Rizzuto, the PACE director. These videos help Airmen better understand principles of our Air Force culture and our core values.



I hope it (the video) will instill an added sense of pride in maintainers and help recruit those that we need to take our place, Weeks said.
Mara Delta entered into negotiations with New Mauritius Hotels Limited for acquisition of 45 pct interest in entity owning 3 hotel assets in Mauritius

Mara Delta, the pan-African property fund, is set to obtain exposure to three hotels in Mauritius with triple net eurodenominated leases, as it looks to provide strong consistent dividends for its investors.

Mauritian hotel manager New Mauritius Hotels, trading as Beachcomber Hotels, will own 55% and Mara Delta will own 45% of an entity that will hold the hotels.

New Mauritius is one of the 10 largest listed companies on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius.

The deal will bring our exposure to Mauritius to 24%. It is exciting for us, as it includes a parent company guarantee, which gives us security. The leases are also 15-year eurodenominated leases and the assets have been acquired at a euro property yield just under 8%. This is while we are financing the deal at about 3.75% from a Mauritian bank, said Mara Delta CEO Bronwyn Corbett.

She said she expected to receive annual escalations of between 1% and 2% on the leases. There are various kickers here which make the deal attractive. We feel we offer investors exciting exposure to African assets. Those funds which are investing in Europe are not receiving the same kind of escalations, for example, Corbett said.

She said the company would release more details about the value of the hotels in a few weeks time. The company would try to raise money for the deal through the Mauritianstock exchange.

Mara Delta, which is based in Mauritius, earlier in October concluded its first hospitality deal, acquiring the Tamassa Resort, located in Bel Ombre on the southwestern coast of Mauritius, through a sale and leaseback agreement.

Mara started out with two properties in 2014: a 30,879m shopping centre in Morocco and an office block in Mozambique.

Mara now has interests in assets in Mozambique, Morocco, Mauritius, Zambia and Kenya. Following the Tamassa deal, this portfolio of largely retail properties will include interests in assets worth more than $400m.

Mara intends to list its Moroccan assets separately in the near future. It wants to convert its Moroccan subsidiary into a Reit by the end of 2016, as it looks to gain from tax savings created by the dispensation.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]lmost entire world is at unrest with some or the other issues, with changing powers in respective countries. Around the USA from New York to Chicago to California, in red as well as blue states, hundreds of protesters trudged through streets, many for the third straight night though in somewhat smaller numbers. USA is undergoing turmoil from coast to coast post election. The situation in USA is like Egypt. If you remember, Egyptian ex-President Mohamed Morsi was an elected President. People moved against him. Signature drive was carried out and people were protesting against him on the streets against him. Security of the country was at stake. Now, he is in jail.

Anyway, USA may talk about equality and modernisation but the nation is much more mean and conservative towards women. Female workers in USA are not offered equal pay as their male counterpart. Women receive 79 cents to a dollar against man earns. It is a myth that USA has gender equality. Companies are reluctant to employ mothers with small babies or women in child bearing years. US President is also commander-in-chief implying masculine role. The world has had some 70 women leaders, but none hails from USA despite the fact that Hillary tried hard to establish herself as a worthy female candidate and failed to shatter the glass ceiling with no suitable female candidate on the distant horizon. Americans never choose a female to lead them. It is the bitter truth against whatever gender equality they speak. The results were startling to Clinton and her aides, who had ended their campaign with a tumultuous tour of battlefield states and had projected optimism that she would maintain the diverse coalition assembled by President Barack Obama in the past two elections.

Everywhere, politicians lie for coming to power and to stay there. A clear mandate has been given by the US electorate for Donald Trump as President. In fact, the Republicans have a clear lead in the House Senate and Electoral College. Such protests are unfortunate in the second largest democracy and most powerful nation in the world. These demonstrations will help enemies of the USA. Hillary Clinton has accepted election results with grace. Her followers also must respect the advice of their leader and the Constitution of America, which gives due weightage to each state through electoral system. If they are against this system, they should try to change it through constitution method. Even during the aftermath of emergency Indira Gandhi and her supporters made way for Janata Party and Morarji Desai became Prime Minister here in India. People cherishing democracy and values need to gracefully accept the will of mandate given by American people. The verdict should be respected without creating any trouble for the new president. In fact, it is the first time in the history of American presidential elections that such unrest has been visible. This division is easy to create but difficult to heal. The three protagonists of this election season  President Barack Obama, President-elect Trump and his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton  appealed for unity and calm, but protests broke out in many parts of the country. Motherlands fragrance never goes stale for her true daughters and sons! What a feeling it truly is, to live in ones own homeland- where ones ancestors too had toiled, loved, lived and gone! Can riches  however enticing they are  of so-called promised-lands come any closer to the intoxicating fragrance of ones motherland?

At least, in 25 cities across the country, protesters chanted not my President and lit candles while numerous social media initiatives sought support to ensure that Trump is a one-term President. The protesters marched against Trump in several cities. Muslims, Hispanics and Blacks, three communities that felt particularly at the receiving end of Trumps campaign, are more anxious. The most unsettling prospect for minority communities is the potential repealing of Obamacare, which Trump has promised to do. The programme ensured health insurance for 20 million people who were not previously covered, a large number of them from minority communities.

Amid the atmosphere of distrust and discontent between their supporters, Obama received Trump at the White House. The rivalry between Obama and Trump is the subtext to the current state of racial politics in the country. Trump supported Clinton in her run against Obama in 2008. When Obama became President, Trump led the nationality movement that alleged he was not born in America. Obama and wife Michelle cornered Trump throughout the campaign, and told African-Americans that all their progress is at stake in the event of a Trump presidency. Some 4,000 protesters surged into the downtown area late Thursday night with chants like we reject the presidentelect!. Officers began physically pushing back against the crowd that at times threw objects at them as midnight approached, arresting several people and using flash-bang devices and types of smoke or tear gas to force people to disperse. As expected, the demonstrations prompted some social media blowback from Trump supporters accusing protesters of sour grapes or worse, though there were no significant counter-protests.

Anyway, this protest may not change the fate of Trump. He will anyhow continue as President of USA for next four years. He has received a huge and clear mandate. As Trump has promised, it will be dreams of Americans and after that dreams of others if at all! That is how it should be and will be. Lets see, where and how USA gets led by Donald Trump.

(Any suggestions, comments or dispute with regards to this article send us on feedback@afternoonvoice.com)
Since the earliest of recorded history we have known dance either in celebration or during worship. It is more than just a pass time it is theessence of who we are and what our true nature represents. Dance is the strongest feeling from deep within. In a sense you could say, it is born into our souls. The desire to dance well is inside us all and it is usually a persons journey from emotion to motion. Dancing is not a reflection of life but is a basic human expression of life itself. It is an expression, which is inextricably connected to the finer nuances of life.

Ballroom dancing is the most artistic of social pastimes. In all countries and societies dancing forms an integral part of the lifestyle. While the initial motivation to dance is often a social one, once past that hurdle of actually learning to dance, many find the music, the atmosphere and the dance, an opportunity to take on a new persona. In an instant, the dancer can be mentally and emotionally transported to almost any scenario of their choice: an elegant gala ball in Vienna, a fun filled dance party on the Caribbean islands, a bull fight in Valencia or even to a back street bar in Buenos Aires. Yes indeed dance has that element of make-belief and imagination linked so strongly to it.

The Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) and The Ballroom Dancing Association (BDA), both world famous organizations known for setting rules and regulations for various styles of dances has divided Ballroom dancing into two major categories viz Standard, and Latin American Ballroom Dances. Under the Standard category we have the graceful Waltz and Viennese Waltz, romantic Foxtrot, energetic quickstep and the passionate yet angry Tango. Under the Latin American category we have the sensuous Rumba, the cheeky Cha Cha, fun filled Jive, festive Samba and Paso Doble, a fight on the dance floor.

Whatever may be ones musical taste or individual preferences, the variety of ballroom dances ensures that there is always something for everyone at any point of time. In romance and matters of the heart, ballroom dancing is a wonderful way of expressing your emotions. Express your love through the Rumba or the Waltz, tease your beloved with the naughty Cha Cha, show your annoyance with the Tango and if you want to fight it out there is nothing better than a Paso Doble. That is, why it is said that ballroom is one style of dance where one has A dance for every mood, so one should never complain, that one is not in a mood to dance. Usually, our moods also vary in a single day depending on the state of mind, environment, atmosphere and the company we are in. Dancing to great music with electrifying rhythm and tempo can change ones frame of mind and transform our mood to a great extent.

Ballroom dances are one art form that anyone at any age and fitness level can learn, enjoy and derive benefits from it. The only thing one needs is a strong urge and regular practice. Both the young/old, healthy/weak are fond of music, if taken seriously it can give a young person as much physical exercise as they desire, fast ballroom dances like Jive, Paso Doble, Samba, Quickstep and Viennese Waltz are as good or even better than going for a regular aerobic session. Records prove that a ballroom dance class can burn up to 600-800 calories in an hour. For a middle aged or busy working individuals dances like Cha Cha, Waltz and Tango can provide exercise which is effective without being too strenuous, it acts like a stress-buster and helps them to loosen up. For people facing health problems like; high blood pressure, diabetics, knee/back pain or in some cases even heart problems dances like; Rumba and Foxtrot can act as a natural healer, as these dances are just simple, rhythmic, graceful walking which helps them stay healthy, relaxed and calm.

Practicing regular ballroom dancing definitely helps to improve social life; it inculcates the aura of grace, poise, elegance and sense of balance in the body improving ones body posture. In fact medical profession also recommends ballroom dancing to people with bad body postures, so as to improve ones stance and spinal cord positioning. An individual with a royal gate is undoubtedly magnetic and attracts attention at any social gatherings, adulation and appreciation develops a special feeling from within which enhances personality making the person a self-confident individual. Going out for dances with like-minded people transforms individuals from being inhibited and introvert to outgoing, self-confident human beings who are completely rejuvenated and refreshed.

Many dance schools and studios along with dance also teach dance floor etiquette, social graces and manners which helps in an all round development of ones personality. Ballroom dancing is also a great way to learn the social niceties, which is vital for moving around in polite society. All ten styles of Ballroom dances come from different parts of the world they have their interesting culture, lifestyle and stories to narrate thereby helping people make knowledgeable interaction with each other specially when one travels abroad.

With the International Standard and Latin American Ballroom Dance competitions now a part of the Olympic Games, these dance styles are all set to inspire and reach an even wider audience and attain even greater popularity not only through competition dancing but also through local dance schools, events and parties. Therefore its advisable and recommended by the medical profession that people of all age groups, backgrounds and various job profiles should learn to dance as it is an easy way to stay fit, relax, unwind, make new friends and lose ones inhibitions. Above all its sheer fun! The sooner one learns to dance the longer one gets to enjoy it. By learning the correct techniques it will not be too long before you can say in a true sense that We had a ball of time.

(Sandip Soparrkar is a well known Ballroom dancer and a Bollywood choreographer who has been honoured with National Achievement and National Excellence Award by the Govt of India. He can be contacted on sandipsoparrkar06@gmail.com.)

Sandip Soparrkar

Artscape
Pakistan has said US president-elect Donald Trump offered to mediate between Pakistan and India to resolve the Kashmir dispute when he spoke last month about the tension between the two countries.

The US president-elect had offered mediation between Pakistan and India on Kashmir dispute during his campaign and we had welcomed that offer, said foreign office spokesman Nafees Zakaria in Islamabad on Thursday.

Trump had last month described the tension between India and Pakistan as a very, very hot tinderbox and offered to be the mediator or arbitrator if the two countries agreed.

Zakaria said Pakistan would sensitise the Trump administration about alleged human rights violations in Kashmir.

He said Pakistan had very close relation and bilateral cooperation with the US. There are numerous areas where both countries have convergence of interests and have worked in partnership on several issues. We look forward to closely working with the new administration in pursuit of our common ideals of freedom, democracy and prosperity, he said.

It will remain our endeavour to promote and strengthen this relationship further and also to work closely on areas of common interest with the new administration, Zakaria was quoted by the Express Tribune as saying.
Like millions across the country, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Friday stepped out of his residence to exchange his old notes and was seen taking selfies with people who were waiting outside a branch of State Bank of India (SBI) at Parliament Street in New Delhi.

Millions across India spent long hours at banks and ATMs trying to withdraw cash after Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly declared Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes worthless pieces of paper.

Mere logon ko kasht hua hai, mai unke saath khada hoon yahan (My people have suffered. I am standing by them), Gandhi said, standing in queue at the State Bank of India branch on Parliament Street here. Gareeb vyakti ko kasht ho raha hai (The poor are suffering).

I have come to exchange Rs. 4,000. My people are suffering, I have come to stand with them, the Congress Vice President said.

Crowds at the Parliament Street bank were in for a surprise when the 46-year-old leader joined the queue. Crowds jostled to get a selfie with Gandhi who said that he was there because his people were suffering due to the demonetisation.

Kya apko yaha koi suit boot pehne dikh raha hai, yaha par sab aam log hai jo pareshan hai, par Modi ji ko isse kya farak padta hai. (Can you see anybody here who is high and mighty? Only the troubled common people are here. But how does it matter to Modiji?) he said.

Taking a swipe at PM Narendra Modi and the government, he said, The government should be for these people, not a select 10 or 15 people who are not here and suffering.

Gandhi also sportingly posed for selfies with customers who were stunned to find a VIP in their midst.

When quizzed repeatedly why he was there, Gandhi replied, You will not understand that. You or your millionaire bosses or the media or the government will never understand what these people are suffering.

The Congress vice-president had earlier criticised the governments demonetisation move on Twitter saying that the real culprits who had stashed black money were sitting tight as the farmers, small shopkeepers and housewives faced troubles.
Meng Jianzhu, special envoy to President of China Xi Jinping along with a delegation today visited the iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus here.

CST, which is a UNESCO heritage building, is the headquarter of the Central Railway (CR).

CRs Additional General Manager AK Srivastava, along with Principal Head of Departments and Divisional Railway Manager, Mumbai of CR held a meeting and presented how the oldest railway system in the world works with such a great efficiency.

Meng Jianzhu and the delegation went around the UNESCO world heritage building and interacted with commuters on platform no 2, star chamber where the booking counters are situated and at the concourse, CR said in a statement.
This question was raised by Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant after several people lost their lives in the aftermath of Modi governments demonetisation drive.

Opposition parties questioned the manner in which Modi government has gone ahead with the initiative of demonetising Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes thereby causing huge inconvenience to citizens. Congress party attacked the government for taking this decision in haste which created chaos as people are making queues outside banks to deposit and replace old currency notes. Already five people have lost their lives after the government had surprised the nation by scrapping notes of higher denomination. Samajwadi Party had urged the government to roll back the demonetisation decision. Sachin Sawant, Congress spokesperson slammed the government and said that it is anti-poor as they have to stand in line for the entire day for depositing their hard earned money.

He said, The Modi government is responsible for the death of five people across the nation after it had declared currency notes of higher denomination as invalid. People residing in rural and urban areas are facing huge hardships on account of the governments flawed policy. The Modi government has taken the country into a state of economic emergency. Even hospitals are refusing to admit patients and stopped accepting Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. Some weddings have either been cancelled or postponed due to shortage of funds.

People had expected that Modi government will bring back black money stashed abroad and deposit Rs 15 lakh in everyones bank account. However people have to stand in queues for the entire day to deposit their hard earned money. Citizens are undergoing severe problems as ATMs are unable to dispense money. The condition of farmers is even worse as they are unable to sell their produce to traders as they are facing cash crunch, he added.

Vishwanath Vartak a 73 year old man died while standing in queue outside a branch of State Bank of India in Navghar area of Mulund (East) for exchanging old notes. Some people who also were in queue rushed Vartak to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead prior to admission. The body has been sent for post-mortem. According to initial reports, Vartak died of a heart attack, police said.

In Kerala a 48 year old man who had come to exchange notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 died after he fell from second floor of the building. The incident happened at Thalassery Narnagapparambu SBT bank. The deceased has been identified as Pinarayi native Unnikrishnan (48). Meanwhile Narayana a native of Kumarapurm in Alappuzha district died while he was standing in queue at Harippad Danappadi SBT branch.

A 40-year-old washerwoman died allegedly due to shock after learning that banks will reject denominations of Rs 1000. Tirtharaji came to know about centres demonetisation move only when she reached the bank. The incident took place at Captainganj tehsil of Kushinagar district in UP.

Pictures of the womans body lying on ground along with two Rs 1,000 denomination notes and a pass book went viral on social media. On the other hand, a 55 year old woman committed suicide by hanging herself at her residence in Sanagapuram village in Mabbubabad district, Telangana after learning that Rs 54.40 lakh stored in denomination of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 has no value after demonetisation of those currency notes.
Employees at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the mood in their office is somber.

Some employees in Atlanta outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they were anxious about President-elect Donald Trump leading the nation and appointing public health leaders who are against mandatory vaccinations.

The employees of one of the largest federal agencies in Atlanta said they're concerned about job safety, funding and new public health policies under Donald Trump's presidency.

At the General Muir deli across the street from the CDC, a few employees talked to WABE, asking that their names not be used. One microbiologist said her colleagues were crying in the hallways.

"It's really sad, she said. It's depressing. I'm eating a bagel to try and be happy."

She said she's worried Trump might appoint public health leaders who may not be in total support of mandatory vaccinations, pointing to Dr. Ben Carson or Florida Governor Rick Scott....

In an emailed statement, the CDC wrote: "As always in political transitions, CDC stands ready to work with the new administration to protect and advance America's health security."

Seriously, the CDC has lots of reasons to worry about what going to happen with Donald Trump as President of the United States. He may be the just the person to expose the horrendous fraud, cover-up and damage swirling around our unchecked, unsafe, heavily conflicted vaccination schedule.

Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10, 2016  Two men who played key roles in past presidential transitions offered their perspectives and some advice on what to expect as President-elect Donald Trumps transition team moves into high gear.

Much of the Washington establishment is still shocked that Trump won, but within the agriculture community, there is a lot of excitement, former Secretary of Agriculture John Block, told Agri-Pulse after addressing the CropLife America board of directors in West Virginia today. Block, who currently works at OFW Law was joined by OFW Law Partner Marshall Matz, who led Farmers and Ranchers for then-Senator Barack Obama during his first presidential campaign.

Block credits Trumps national agricultural advisory team, as well as Ag advisors in several states, with helping to magnify messages and increase voter turnout.

The Obama administrations support for extreme environmental regulations convinced the agricultural industry that they had had enough and needed a new direction, Block said. He noted that Hillary Clintons campaign didnt even have an official agricultural team and it hurt her in rural America.

Block expects the Trump administration to make an early push on tax reform, including elimination of the estate tax, and also address overregulation, including repeal of the controversial waters of the U.S. or WOTUS rule.

The only concern within the agricultural community is Trumps opposition to current and pending trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Block said Trumps stance on trade presents a difficult balancing act, even though there are ways to make it work. Trumps agricultural advisory team made it very clear during repeated conference calls with Trump advisors that they were concerned about keeping the ag trade door open, Block said.

Both men advised that, now that Trump has won, its important for the agricultural community to identify potential candidates to work in the new administration.

Its not a question of sitting back and seeing who we get, its a matter of being proactive and putting forward our best, Matz added. Over 4,000 political appointments will be open across several agencies and the White House.

Learn about the benefits of subscribing to Agri-Pulse. Sign up for your four-week free trial Agri-Pulse subscription.





Matz said that agricultural groups should try to recruit top candidates for USDA, as well as the Office of Management and Budget, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and others.

The Trump transition team has already launched a web site, www.GreatAgain.gov where individuals interested in serving can apply. And a document that was widely circulated in Washington, but not confirmed as being the most current, named Mike Torrey, CEO of Michael Torrey Associates, as the point person for agriculture within the transition team. Prior to founding his own lobbying firm, Torrey worked on Capitol Hill, worked for the International Dairy Foods Association and served as Deputy Chief of Staff at USDA under President George W. Bush.

#30

For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com
Journalists sometimes face arrest for reporting stories.

Usually, the charges are misdemeanors for trespassing or disorderly conduct while reporting at controversial protests. But prosecutors have ratcheted up the stakes with recent arrests of two documentary filmmakers who recorded protests in North Dakota and Washington State. As we noted this week 
USC Aiken Chancellor Dr. Sandra Jordan said, "We are proud of our veteran and military students achievements, and we will ensure USC Aiken lives up to being a Best for Vets university."
Aiken, SC (29801)

Today

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low 54F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low 54F. Winds light and variable.
This photo shows the Bloomfield Ten Commandments monument at the City Hall in Bloomfield, New Mexico. An attorney for Bloomfield says the northwestern New Mexico city will consider whether to appeal a court ruling that the town's Ten Commandments monument violates the U.S. Constitution.
Iconic Ancient Assyrian Sites Ravaged in ISIS's Last Stand in Iraq

A photograph of Nimrud taken in 1975 shows the remaining mudbrick core of the ziggurat, which still stood 140 feet high some 2,900 years after it was built. ( ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives) Recently released satellite imagery of archaeological sites around the northern Iraqi city of Mosul has revealed extensive destruction at two capital cities of ancient Mesopotamia, according to researchers with the American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives (ASOR CHI). The ziggurat of Nimrud, a towering sacred structure built nearly 2,900 years ago, was leveled between the end of August and the beginning of October, most likely by the Islamic State. Kurdish Peshmerga forces severely damaged archaeological remains at the site of Dur-Sharrukin while digging defensive berms and trenches at the site between mid-October and early November. Mesopotamia's "Most Spectacular Sacred Structure" Nimrud (known as Calah in the Book of Genesis) was established in the 13th century B.C. near the Tigris River, some 20 miles south of modern Mosul. It became the capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the ninth century B.C under the reign of Ashurnasipal II. In 879 B.C., the ruler built a sacred precinct dedicated to Nimrud's patron deity, the war god Ninurta. The precinct included a large temple and an enormous mudbrick ziggurat, or stepped tower, that measured nearly 200 feet by 200 feet at its base and likely measured 200 feet in height. When archaeologist Austen Henry Layard excavated the ziggurat some 2,700 years later, the ruins still stood 140 feet high. It was considered "the most spectacular sacred structure known from ancient Mesopotamia." Top: In this satellite image taken on August 31, 2016, the ziggurat at the ancient Neo-Assyrian capital of Nimrud is intact. Bottom: A satellite photo taken on October 2, 2016 shows that the area where the ziggurat once stood has been flattened by earth-moving equipment. ( ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives) Here are the ancient sites ISIS has damaged and destroyed. While no one has claimed responsibility for the destruction, it is likely the work of the Islamic State, says Michael Danti, ASOR CHI's academic director. In the spring of 2015, the terrorist group destroyed the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasipal II and the Nabu Temple at Nimrud. The motive behind the destruction is also unclear. The ziggurat ruins were the highest point in the surrounding Nineveh plains and could serve as an ideal defensive position, yet the site is in a remote area far from strategic locations. "We're seeing a lot of really peculiar activity like this in Islamic State-held territory," says Danti. The Islamic State may have destroyed the ziggurat for the same reasons that may have motivated earlier deliberate destructions at the site: to demoralize local populations and demonstrate a scorched-earth bravado in the face of oncoming military forces determined to liberate Mosul. Islamic State militants may have also been looking for artifacts in the mound, says Danti, but he points out that ziggurats are generally solid masonry structures that don't contain burials. "You'd have to be pretty na
Iraqi Assyrian Woman Impregnated By ISIS Fighter Refused to Abort Baby

"He's my son; he's not the son of ISIS."

Thus declared Umm Al'aa, a 40-year-old Iraqi Christian woman who gave birth to a baby boy after being raped by an ISIS fighter in Gogjali, Iraq.

Speaking to CNN, Umm Al'aa (not her real name to protect her family) said when her son grows up, she will never tell him who his real father was.

She named her son Mohammed, after her husband, an Iraqi soldier who was killed on Nov. 1 during the battles on Mosul's eastern outskirts, where Iraqi and coalition forces are battling Islamic State (ISIS) fighters.

Umm Al'aa said Mohammed's real father was an ISIS militant who raped her while she was being held captive by the terrorist group.

Despite this, she said she will never allow herself to undergo abortion since she considers her still unborn child already a part of her family as much as her other sons and daughters.

She told CNN that she was already a mother and grandmother when ISIS seized her hometown in 2014.

She said the terrorists targeted her family when they refused to pledge allegiance to the jihadist group, like what their neighbours did.

She said she and her children were at the mercy of ISIS fighters who regularly came to their home to threaten them. But they still refused to bow to the jihadis.

One day, she said the militants attacked one of her young daughters and were about to rape her when their commander stopped them and told them that "We want the mother" instead. At that time Umm Al'aa was not at her home.

But a few days later, the militants spotted Umm Al'aa and kidnapped her.

She said for a year and a half, she lived as a prisoner. Then one of the militants beat and raped her.

"I tried to fight, I cried a lot. There was a lot of pain, I was beaten a lot, but I couldn't do anything," she told CNN.

She was already pregnant by the time she was released.

Despite her condition, Umm Al'aa was filled with joy that she could be with her family again. However, their happiness was cut short when her husband was killed in battle.

"He loved me a lot. My best memory of him was how much he loved and respected me," she said of her husband. "Yes we are poor people, but we were happy."
Islamic State Bans Budgie-smugglers and Boxer Shorts

While France may have banned the burqa, Islamic State has burrowed under the combat-chic attire of its subjects to outlaw the budgie-smuggler and boxer shorts. A picture being distributed by Iraq's militia organisation, the militia mobilised to reinforce Iraq's government army in its push against Mosul, depicts the extent of control Islamic State had on its subjects. It was reportedly found in an abandoned headquarters building in the town of Hamman al-Alil on the outskirts of Mosul, Islamic State's capital and Iraq and that nation's second largest city. It joins a jihadist ban on T-shirts and jeans. Instead, the religiously-correct attire should be loose fitting, baggy clothing based on medieval styles. The preferred alternative: 'boxer-longs' that reach from above the belly button to the knee. Otherwise a skirt is acceptable. CULTURAL 'CLEANSING' American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) has released a set of satellite images which show retreating Islamic State jihadists have all but destroyed the remains of two ancient Assyrian capitals near Mosul. The famous, 2900-year-old mud-brick ziggurat of Nimrud appears to have been bulldozed in the past few weeks, along with several outlying structures. Advancing Kurdish forces have added to the destruction of the region's history, ripping up the site of Dur-Sharrukin to create trenches and defensive mounds. STRATEGIC ADVANCE Iraqi troops fighting inside Mosul have today largely paused their advance, regrouping and reinforcing their foothold inside the Islamic State stronghold. Elite forces are gathering their strength after closing to within sight of Mosul airport. While it may once have been a strategic asset, geopolitical analysis group Stratfor has analysed satellite photos which reveal the almost complete destruction of the airport's facilities. Deep trenches have been carved across the runways and airport infrastructure, including air-traffic control facilities and hangars, have been demolished. It is not likely to be of any use to advancing Iraqi or Coalition forces. TERROR MEETS TERROR Meanwhile, Amnesty International has formally reported allegations against Iraqi government security forces of arbitrary detention, forced disappearances and ill-treatment of prisoners. Amnesty cited an incident where up to six people were "extrajudicially executed" in late October over suspected ties to IS. The London-based rights organisation said the alleged killings took place near the area of Shura and Qayara outside Mosul, and it urged the government to investigate. "Men in Federal Police uniform have carried out multiple unlawful killings, apprehending and then deliberately killing in cold blood residents in villages south of Mosul," said Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty's Beirut office. "In some cases the residents were tortured before they were shot dead execution- style," she said, adding that it was "crucial" for Iraqi authorities to bring those responsible to justice.
November 9, 2016

In reaction to the result of the US presidential election, President Hassan Rouhani said Nov. 9 that Irans policies do not change because of changes taking place in the leadership of other countries.

Our foreign policy is based on constructive interaction with the world and lifting the international sanctions on Iran. This is an irreversible path, and [due to that] our economic relations with other countries have expanded, Rouhani said.

Regarding Iran's nuclear deal with the world powers, Rouhani asserted that the agreement has been reflected in a UN Security Council Resolution and therefore is not a deal with a single country.

He also noted that Washington cannot continue spreading Iranophobia to win an international consensus against Iran.

Americas position in the international community and worlds public opinion has been weakened because of wrong policies, Rouhani said, adding, This situation could become worse if the rift between the US and the global community increases.

The result of the election, its impacts and the US domestic instability will remain for a long time, added Rouhani.

In another related comment Nov. 9, Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, argued that Donald Trumps victory was a sign of the distrust of the majority of Americans in the countrys establishment.

He also stressed that the election result has no effect on Iran's policies in economic and security issues.

Unlike certain regional countries, Irans independent policy has never been affected by the changes occurring in other governments, said Shamkhani.

Far away from the capital of Tehran, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in a Nov. 9 press conference in Romania that regardless of who becomes president and according to international multilateral obligations, the US should fulfill its commitment to the nuclear deal.

This was the choice Americans made. But the president-elect should understand the reality of the world and our region, whoever the president is, he added.

Meanwhile, Atomic Energy Organization of Iran spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi also emphasized US obligations to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran is ready for all developments, Kamalvandi stated. Iran will keep implementing the JCPOA. We have long-term plans, he added.

Also reacting to the US election results, Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi focused on the role of Americans in Middle East conflicts.

The current instability in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea shows that the US government needs to reform and rethink its policies in the Middle East, Ghasemi said.

Iranians have bitter and unpleasant experiences [with] US policies, he added. More important than what the candidates said during their presidential campaigns are the next administrations policies and the measures it will take."

Iranians reactions to the US election have spread quickly on social networks through serious and also sarcastic posts.

After Donald Trumps Nov. 9 victory speech in New York City, the political deputy of Irans Presidential Office, Hamid Aboutalebi, tweeted, The image that Trump displayed of himself in his victory speech as the president-elect was different from his image in the election campaign. This is a considerable point.

Masuma Ibrahimi, an Iranian who lives abroad, said in a tweet, Democracy defeated on the day that Sanders defeated, not now.

Some other Iranians have compared Trumps victory to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads victory in 2005. A Twitter user called Samanta posted on her account, For eight years Ive been asked where [I was] from. I said Iran, and they said, Oh, Ahmadinejad!? ... Now I can tell them, Oh oh, Trump?

Mamadpori, another Iranian user, tweeted sarcastically, ISIS claimed responsibility for Trumps victory.
November 10, 2016

Congress is rushing to block President Barack Obama's administration from allowing Boeing aircraft sales to Iran following Donald Trumps election.

The House Rules Committee has made action on the legislation its very first priority when Congress returns from recess on Nov. 14. The full House could then vote on the bill from Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., as early as Nov. 16.

The Obama administration's nuclear agreement with Iran  opened the door for the sale of American-made aircraft to the world's leading state sponsor of terror, Huizenga, who chairs the committees trade panel, said in a statement ahead of a July hearing on the bills. I am extremely concerned that by relaxing the rules, the Obama administration has allowed US companies to be complicit in weaponizing the Iranian regime."

The Treasury Department granted Boeing a license to export 80 planes to Irans national carrier, Iran Air, back in September. The bill under consideration, however, would prohibit the agency from issuing the licenses that US banks would need to finance the transactions; the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Rules Committee further seeks to merge the measure with another bill from Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., that would prohibit the Export-Import Bank from helping to finance deals involving Iran. Both measures cleared the House Financial Services Committee in July and are expected to easily pass the full House, although prompt Senate action remains uncertain.

The nuclear deal with Iran bars US companies from doing business with the country but makes an exemption for civilian aircraft and parts, in what has been described as a humanitarian gesture to replace antiquated passenger aircraft that are falling apart. Critics, however, say Iran has been known to use its civilian airlines to ferry military personnel and weapons, notably to Syria.

The congressional moves come as Boeing and Airbus appear to be finalizing massive aircraft sales. Iranian Minister of Roads and Urban Development Abbas Akhoundi told local media this week that representatives of the two companies have been making frequent visits to Tehran to put the last touches on the texts of the deals, according to travel industry news site eTurboNews.

Iran is trying to secure the maximum  transfer of technical expertise in the texts of the deals, Akhoundi was quoted as saying. And this in the aviation industry concerns a certain percentage of maintenance operations or even the production of certain parts.

President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to renegotiate the deal with Iran, which he has called disastrous. Some deal advocates have floated an improbable proposal to have the Obama administration grant more export licenses to US businesses in its final days to appeal to the businessman in Trump, and the House bills would make such a move even less likely to succeed.

Editor's note: This article has been updated since its initial publication.
November 10, 2016

There are nearly 158,000 Gazan Palestinians who arrived in Jordan following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and they hold temporary Jordanian passports, according to statistics of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in 2015. Restrictions have been imposed on these Palestinians under Jordanian law, in terms of the right to own properties, work, receive medical treatment, study and join trade unions, which have resulted in high poverty and unemployment rates, the Phenix Center for Economic and Informatics Studies in Amman wrote in its 2013 economic report.

The Jordanian Al-Ghad daily revealed Oct. 31 the latest decision against Gazan Palestinians in Jordan, the majority of whom live in the refugee camp in Jerash, also known as the Gaza camp. It wrote that the Jordanian government started implementing its Aug. 28 decision, which was issued by the Jordanian Ministry of Education, to prevent Gazan teachers in Jordan from teaching in Jordanian schools. This has caused prejudice against hundreds of Gazan teachers in Jordan, who worked for years in this profession.

An informed Jordanian source at the Ministry of Education, who declined to be named, told Al-Monitor, Before the start of the academic year in September, the ministry demanded that private educational institutions refrain from renewing employment contracts with non-Jordanian teachers, which amount to 800 teachers of Gazan origin. The decision is not limited to teachers. It also includes drivers, administrators, office boys and guards.

Jihan Ali, a Palestinian teacher in the Gaza refugee camp, spoke to Al-Monitor over the phone. She said, I have worked for 15 years as a teacher in Jordanian private schools without a problem. Yet I was surprised in mid-September when the school asked me to go to the Jordanian Ministry of Labor for a work permit. It was the first time that I was asked to do so. The Ministry of Labor refused to issue the permit, due to the decision to ban non-Jordanians from practicing the teaching profession. It has been weeks since I had a job, although I provide for my six orphan brothers and sisters.

The Jordanian decision against Gazan teachers has coincided with a message, dubbed the most urgent needs of Gazans, addressed by Gazan residents of Jordan to the official authorities in Amman on Oct. 31. The message called on the authorities to exempt them from the treatment costs for incurable diseases, to exclude them from the Cabinet decisions on foreigners, to increase the number of seats for Gazan refugees in public universities, to allow them to apply for a job in government universities and to allow [Gazan] physicians, pharmacists, nurses and lawyers to obtain a license to practice their professions and work.

Former Palestinian Refugee Minister Atef Adwan told Al-Monitor, The Jordanian decision against Gazan refugees in the kingdom has pure political goals to pressure the Gaza Strip. Had it been administrative or technical, it would have included all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Yet the decision is a continuation of the previous Jordanian policies against Gazans, including the decision to prevent Gazans from entering Jordan in May. These Jordanian measures distance the Jordanian and Palestinian peoples from each other and strengthen the siege on Gazans at home and abroad.

Jordan's decision has preoccupied Jordanian public opinion and sparked debates and reports by columnists in Jordanian newspapers.

Columnist Fahd al-Khaitan reported for Al-Ghad on Nov. 1 that the Jordanian decision has turned the lives of Gazans in Jordan into a living hell, and forced thousands to live in poverty. Maher Abu Tair wrote Nov. 1 for Al-Dostor daily that the Jordanian decision reveals a strict policy toward Gazan refugees. Columnist Oraib Rantawi wrote Nov. 5 in Al-Dostor daily that the Jordanian decision has irritated Gazans, as thousands of people will end up in the street.

Omar Kallab, the head of the committee for Gazans living in Jordan, told Al-Monitor, The problem for Gazan refugees does not only reside in the decision to ban them from teaching. The decision is a consequence, not a reason. The main reason is the Jordanian decision that was issued in January 2016 to equate Gazan Palestinian refugees who have been residing in Jordan since 1967 with the newcomers to the kingdom by requiring them to obtain work permits. Thus, they no longer have access to 18 professions, most notably teaching and health-care professions.

Palestinian refugees from the Gaza Strip, who hold temporary Jordanian passports, opened a Facebook page where they expressed their rejection of the Jordanian decision and considered that it is designed to target them. They also listed the unjust Jordanian restrictions.

Yahya al-Saud, a member of the Jordanian parliament, called Oct. 22 on Prime Minister Hani Al-Mulki to give Gazans their civil rights and facilitate their right to acquire properties, to invest and have insurance. In fact, people from the West Bank live in Jordan under circumstances that are much better than what Gazans experience.

The Jordanian decision has shed light on the most prominent problems faced by Palestinian refugees in Jordanian camps, such as the poor housing conditions with tiny spaces and overcrowded houses, where Palestinian families resort to primitive heating means. Also, 11% of the houses in the camps are damaged, uninhabitable, and may collapse and put residents lives at risk.

Shaker al-Jawhari, a Jordanian political writer and editor-in-chief of Al-Mustaqbal al-Arabic news site, told Al-Monitor, The Jordanian decision is 100% wrong. Yet most of the decisions in Jordan are taken randomly, without taking into account their negative consequences and effects. These expected effects include the presence of hostile parties that may take advantage of this decision, pay those who were dismissed from the teaching profession and exploit them to tamper with the Jordanian security.

He added, A powerful current within the Jordanian authorities is demanding that Syrian refugees be accommodated in the kingdom, even though it is at the expense of Gazans. The latter arrived in Jordan 50 years ago due to the Israeli occupation, and there is no way they can return home. This is while the Syrians, Iraqis and others have the possibility to return to their country of their own free will whenever they want to.

The popular and official efforts in Jordan continue to be deployed in order to abolish the decision against Gazan refugees. Yet it is still unknown whether or not the kingdom will retract its decision. The decision reveals the renewed suffering of Gazan refugees in Jordan. Although they have served the kingdom, they are losing their job security, while the Jordanian official authorities have remained silent on the reasons behind the decision and refrained from giving any statements on whether or not the government will retract its decision.
November 8, 2016

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Oct. 28 in Moscow hosted his Iranian and Syrian counterparts, Mohammad Javad Zarif and Walid Moallem, respectively, to discuss the latest developments regarding Syria and to coordinate action to resolve the crisis there. The meeting, the latest sign of Russian-Iranian cooperation and coordination on Syria, took place as debate on the nature and level of Tehran-Moscow relations and the prospect of the presently close relationship continuing has again been raised in the media. In another sign of warming relations between the two countries, it was announced Oct. 24 that Russia plans to lift visa requirements for Iranian citizens. Furthermore, Russia has over past months declared its willingness to back Irans full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and to increase cooperation between Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union. Given these developments, one key question is whether it is possible to speak of an alliance being formed by Iran and Russia.

At the international level, it could be argued that a major part of Moscows current foreign policy conduct stems from its confrontation with the West, especially the United States, that began in 2014 over the Ukraine crisis and has since been intensifying over other heated issues, such as Russias military campaign in Syria and NATOs plans for further eastward expansion. Within this context of being under pressure by the West, Russia has been trying to increase its weight in international equations and balance against the United States by putting itself at the center of a series of counter-hegemonic bilateral and multilateral partnerships, building cooperation and partnerships with a range of regional and global powers.

Russia's agenda on its eastern front therefore includes cementing ties with China, and in South Asia, expanding and reinforcing relations with India. Meanwhile, at the institutional level, Moscow is trying to further activate and reinvigorate the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS.

Iran, as a regional power in the Middle East, could be part of Moscow's strategy of partnerships and cooperation, but this very notion means that for Russia, the development of relations with Tehran has an exogenous and passive logic, rather than an endogenous and active one. At the regional level, and in connection with the abovementioned points, it should be noted that in the Middle East, Moscows attempts to counter the United States have not been limited to developing ties with Iran. Although Russia has at present, and on a critical issue such as Syria, comparably the most expansive ties with Iran, it is also trying to develop relations with other important players in the region.

In the latter vein, following the of normalization of relations with Turkey this fall, the two countries have been rapidly moving toward regional cooperation. Furthermore, over the past few months, Egypt has also been slowly but visibly moving toward Russia, with the two sides reaching economic and military agreements. At the same time, Moscow has been serious about improving relations with Riyadh, at least in the economic sphere. When it comes to Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both regional rivals of Iran, the path being pursued by Moscow is not in line with Tehrans interests. As such, this shows that Russias approach toward Iran is not as unique and special as it may seem, but rather first and foremost is driven by the logic of creating a balance on the international stage with the aim of improving Moscows global standing.

At the bilateral level, apart from regional cooperation, especially regarding Syria, the Russian-Iranian relationship lacks a strategic dimension, thus effectively precluding an alliance. The Syrian crisis serves as an important example of this dynamic.

The main reason for Russias decision to become militarily involved in Syria was its desire to secure its bases in western Syria that guarantee it access to the Mediterranean Sea. In other words, to Moscow, the relationship with Damascus has an obvious geopolitical dimension and is directly related to its hard interests. In the case of Russias relations with Iran, however, ties have so far been limited to economic exchanges, the arms trade and, at the highest level, cooperation in the sphere of nuclear technology. For Russia, however, none of these areas of collaboration are considered strategic or non-negligible interests.

Thus, it could be argued in general that what Russia has so far been trying to achieve through its Middle East policy is obtain US recognition of its role and interests as an equal. If Russia can achieve this primary objective by establishing a successful balance of power or by another means  such as some form of compromise  its approach toward its international partnerships will change or at least result in a slower pace for the development of such partnerships.

Under these circumstances, the Russian-Iranian relationship can only move toward a serious partnership or an alliance by either being institutionalized through genuine Iranian engagement with Russian-centered regional initiatives, such as the Eurasian Economic Union, or by expanding the level of bilateral cooperation to a more structured relationship in harder political and security spheres, such as the signing of a mutual security agreement with certain conditions and promises. As such, given Moscows current foreign policy approach, if Iran really wants to elevate the level of its bilateral relationship with Russia, now is the best time to do so. If not, Iran should have in place alternative plans for the day when regional and international circumstances change.
November 10, 2016

Senior Arab-Israeli journalists argue that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also heads the Communications Ministry, is not limiting himself to trying to weaken the Israeli media outlets that broadcast in Hebrew, but is also trying to harm Arab-Israeli journalism as well.

We are very concerned about Netanyahus steps to dismantle the new Israel Broadcasting Corporation, and know that it wont end there. We are the next in line, a senior journalist from the Arab sector tells Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. The journalist explains that while written journalism in Arabic and the influential, popular Arabic radio station Radio al-Shams, which reaches the Northern District, have always enjoyed full freedom of the press, the future of these media outlets is now unclear. Netanyahus goal, he argues, is to scare the Arab press into enabling government control of its content that does not toe the line of the Zionist narrative.

Radio al-Shams station manager Sohail Karem was summoned last week for a hearing before the Second Authority for Television and Radio, the public authority that supervises commercial broadcasting in Israel. Karem was told that the government plans to establish an additional Arab-language radio station in Israels Northern District. This means that the new radio station will compete with Radio al-Shams for a slice of the already shrunken publicity pie. This could well be the death blow to a popular station that, according to Second Authority polls, has high ratings among Arab-Israelis.

The prime ministers divide and conquer tactic against the Israeli media is no secret to the station's higher-ups, who keep a close, concerned eye on Netanyahus attacks, especially on the electronic media. Netanyahu, who insists on keeping the media portfolio to himself, plans to split the commercial television Channel Two in the coming year. Through this move, the two franchisees (Reshet and Keshet, who now broadcast alternately) will each broadcast 24/7 on separate channels, with the extra costs of full-time broadcasting and separate news divisions while neither is in great financial shape.

Netanyahu is making no effort to hide his motives, and this week  in a blatant response to Ilana Dayans investigative report on the prime ministers office that was aired on her Channel 2 show Uvda  his office noted in a written statement that the program demonstrates perfectly why the media industry needs reform," and "The prime minister is determined to open the market up to competition that will add a greater variety of opinions, as well as an efficient national broadcaster. The message came in addition to a fierce personal attack on Dayan portraying her as a member of the radical left.

This is exactly the same argument we hear when they talk to us about granting a broadcasting license to another station to operate in the North, Karem tells Al-Monitor. But if their concern was primarily the Arab-Israeli public, as they claim, they would grant a license to an Arabic-language broadcasting station in Israels Southern District. Instead, they want to grant a license to a competing station that will weaken us.

Karems words are somewhat puzzling, because Netanyahus efforts are usually directed at weakening those who criticize him and those who have influence over Israeli public opinion, and the station does not fit into this category. We also wondered, Karem says, but we revealed that there is a group of people surrounding Netanyahu, including some from the Arab sector, who do not favor the existence of a strong professional entity like Radio al-Shams that exerts great influence on molding public opinion in Arab-Israeli society. In order to bring down this entity, they plan to grant a license to a radio station over which they will have access and influence, but in effect it will destroy everyone. We are the only media outlet standing on its own two feet in Arab-Israeli society, a station that operates according to meticulous professional codes. No one can accuse us of any type of bias, he says, his voice betraying much apprehension.

Radio al-Shams was founded 13 years ago by the Gaon Holdings company, replacing the previous station that broadcast to the Arab sector, Radio 2000, which shut down after going bankrupt. About two years later, al-Shams investors washed their hands of the station because they felt that it was not profitable. At that point, Sohail Karem personally acquired the station and succeeded in attracting many listeners from the Reshet D Arab Station of Israel's public radio service, Kol Yisrael. According to Karem, the station sets the daily agenda for Arab-Israeli society. Its goal is to modernize this sector and open it to becoming part of Israeli society as a whole.

It became known to Al-Monitor that one of the promoters of the second radio station in the Northern District is Deputy Minister of Regional Cooperation Ayoob Kara, together with a group of close Netanyahu "associates" from the Arab-Israeli sector, to use the term certain Arab-Israelis use with derision. These individuals were the ones invited to the prime ministers house after the last elections for Netanyahus much-publicized apology for the things he said on election day last year about "droves" of Arab-Israelis running to the polling booths.

Netanyahu doesnt give a damn about us. As far as hes concerned, we dont exist, Houssen Sweiti, editor of the highly esteemed weekly Arab-Israeli magazine A-Sinara, tells Al-Monitor. Even though we are listed in the Government Press Office, we have never received an invitation to join the prime minister in his travels abroad. We know that we are always being monitored.

According to Sweiti, pressure on the written Arab-Israeli media outlets is exerted by ongoing decisions of the Government Advertising Agency (Lapam) on whether to buy advertising space. These sales constitute a significant source of income, which can spell life or death for them. When the Arab-Israeli media outlets fight for their financial existence, the size of advertising space purchased by Lapam also functions as a tool of punishment. Media outlets that anger Netanyahu are likely to be punished, while those who dance to Jerusalems tune will be rewarded with an extra slice of the advertising pie, Sweiti concludes.
November 11, 2016

On Nov. 13, the Knesset's Ministerial Committee on Legislation will debate a proposed bill banning muezzins from using public address (PA) systems, that is, loudspeakers, to call the faithful to prayers. The legislation was proposed by Knesset member Moti Yogev of HaBayit HaYehudi and co-sponsored by Merav Ben-Ari of Kulanu and Miki Zohar and Nurit Koren, both from Likud.

Anastassia Michaeli of Yisrael Beitenu had proposed a similar bill five years ago. At the time, she claimed that the law was not directed at Muslims, but was simply intended to preserve the quality of life of Jews living near mosques and therefore disturbed by muezzins early morning calls to prayer.

Were talking about a green law, not a black one.  This is an environmental issue of the first order, she said. When it transpired that her proposal would not muster a majority, she withdrew it, but her party did not give up. Another Yisrael Beitenu lawmaker, Robert Ilatov, tried to revive it in 2014, but he, too, failed to push it through.

In November 2015, Yogev and other lawmakers tabled a new version of the proposed bill. Yogev argued that the bill was designed to prevent daily noise pollution, but he also raised another issue. He claimed, Freedom of religion should not be harmful to quality of life nor used to convey religious or nationalist messages, and sometimes even words of incitement. To Arab Knesset members, however, the proposal has clear nationalist overtones and is designed to target Muslims.

The Yogev bill was brought up for discussion in March 2016 at the Ministerial Committee on Legislation, but debate was postponed on it due to an absence of supporters. It is now up for debate again after being revised. The new version is not significantly different from the original one, and the references to nationalist messages and incitement have not been removed. Given the composition of Israel's governing coalition, many Arab citizens are worried that the bill will ultimately be approved by the Knesset.

When the bill was initially tabled in 2011, the Knesset Research and Information Center prepared an in-depth report on the issue, including comparisons with mosques in various parts of the Arab world and in Western states. Its authors explained that the use of loudspeakers had begun at the start of modern times as a result of trends in urbanization, industrialization and technological advances. In the past, villages were small enough that the muezzins voice could be heard unaided. When villages became towns, muezzins were forced to revert to PA systems to call worshippers to prayer.

The authors of the report recommended dialogue to resolve the problem. In some places, like [the mixed Arab-Jewish towns of] Jerusalem, Lod, Ramla and Jaffa, due to the sensitivity of the issue, local authorities preferred to handle it through quiet talks with the muezzins and local Arab leaders, the authors wrote. The dialogue often resulted in solutions such as turning down the volume of the loudspeakers or, in the case of Jaffa, an agreement to install a central wireless system connecting all the mosques to one uniform call aired at the same time and at the same sound level. Yogevs proposed bill makes no mention of these recommendations.

The Israel Democracy Institute also compiled a position paper on the issue, in which Mordechai Kremnitzer, Amir Fuchs and Eli Bahar warned that although the legislation refers to a house of prayer, in general, it clearly targets only Muslims. They warned that in addition to violating freedom of religion, the law could prompt bitterness and disputes within Israels Muslim community.

Khalil al-Baz has served as the muezzin of a mosque in the Bedouin town of Tel Sheva, in the southern Negev, for more than three decades. When Al-Monitor approached him to talk about the proposed bill, he said that he was in Germany attending an event for clerics from around the world to discuss religious tolerance. In a telephone interview with Al-Monitor, Baz said he makes sure to lower the volume of the loudspeakers during the early morning, as do all the muezzins in mosques that are near the homes of Jews. Baz believes Yogev is not motivated by concern for quality of life but by other factors.

This is a miserable and offensive proposal, he said. The state is moving to the right, and theres no tolerance of others any more, especially on the part of radical right-wingers like Moti Yogev, whose views we know. Baz added that as a cleric living in Israel, he feels he is part of the state. His daughter volunteered for two years of national service. In addition, he said, My son is also currently doing national service. His wife, Sanaa, was chosen to light a torch in 2008 at Independence Day celebrations on Jerusalems Mount Herzl in recognition of her work in establishing a day care center for Bedouin children in the Negev.

Baz rejects out of hand the charge that messages of incitement are broadcast in the mosques. My wife and I are soon going to visit the Birkenau Nazi extermination camp. I was the first Israeli Bedouin to visit the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, and I cried there. When I came back, I started giving lectures at my mosque about the Holocaust. People asked me, What did you see there? Were Jews really burned to death there, or is this Jewish propaganda? I told them that I will never forget what I saw there, and that such a thing must never recur. So now theyre trying to shut me up, to turn me into an inciter?

I asked Baz whether he would comply with the law if it is approved by the Knesset. I wont be able to, he responded. Moti Yogev himself says that the Jewish religious law takes precedence over the laws of the state. I, too, am a religious man. I will go to the mosque and make my voice heard. If they want to arrest me and send me to jail, let them. It will be horrible if this will be the image of Israel in the world, but I suggest that the bills sponsors listen and learn from President Reuven Rivlin, who said that we were not sentenced to live in this state [together], we were destined to live together.
November 10, 2016

BAGHDAD  After the attack by the Islamic State (IS) on Kirkuk on Oct. 21, the arms market in the city experienced a boom in reaction to the possibility of further attacks. An arms dealer told Al-Monitor, A weapon that used to sell for 400,000 Iraqi dinars [$338] now sells for 550,000 dinars.

The Oct. 21 attack was not the only breach that happened since the start of the Mosul operation. On Oct. 23, Rutba in the western part of Anbar province saw a similar breach that led to the fall of almost half the city. Rutbas situation is very similar to that of Kirkuk because large areas at their edges are under IS control, especially the area between Rutbah and Qaim. A similar attack on Rutba occurred Nov. 7.

On Oct. 4, Sharqat witnessed a violent security breach that led to the fall of most of the city, caused largely because the plain next to Sharqat was left under IS control.

Kirkuk has seen similar breaches before. On Jan. 30, 2015, IS launched a major attack on Kirkuk from three fronts. This breach also started from Hawijah toward Tal al-Ward, Maktab Khaled and Tazeh. The clashes continued for more than a day before the peshmerga forces were able to control the situation.

All this shows the danger of not liberating the areas adjacent to the Tigris River, such as Hawijah, Alzab and al-Abbasi; Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had promised to liberate them after he visited Kirkuk on Oct. 14.

What recently happened in Kirkuk and places like it reveals the method used by terrorist groups to bring about security breaches, and it shows why it is difficult to completely prevent such breaches before liberating and controlling all of the Iraqi territory.

What happened in Kirkuk and how had IS fighters been able to organize such a great attack? At 3 a.m. Oct. 21, the people of Kirkuk woke up to the sounds of explosions and bullets in the citys southern neighborhoods and streets. About 200 IS fighters attacked these neighborhoods, which are adjacent to areas still under IS control.

The fighters came on foot from Hawijah to areas close to Abadat village, and two trucks transported them to Sharikat Tarek in the south. They slipped into the Daquq area, which borders the southern parts of Kirkuk. Subsequently, IS sleeper cells in the city used four trucks to move the fighters to neighborhoods in Kirkuk.

IS fighters attacked several police stations and hotels, occupied them and rolled toward the city center. In conjunction with the attack on Kirkuk, IS attacked a number of villages around Dibs and attacked Albouhamdan, Maktab Khaled, Daquq, Sardek, al-Kibba and al-Bashir. It also spread into the following Kirkuk neighborhoods: Wahid Huzeiran, Dumez, al-Uruba, al-Nasr, al-Majidiyah, al-Wasati, al-Tiseen, al-Adala, al-Mamdouda, Ghirdata, part of al-Asra and Mafqoudin neighborhoods, and parts of the military district.

The fighters appealed to the inhabitants for support, telling members of the security forces to either repent or be killed. The fighters attacked security centers such as the emergency regiment headquarters, police stations in al-Adala and Dumez, the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the provincial headquarters. Thus, IS elements occupied most southern districts of the city.

In the district of Dibs, two suicide bombers blew themselves up while trying to break into the Dibs power station. The Ministry of Electricity said that the main power plant in the town has stopped working as a result of the attack and noted that the attack also targeted the new Dibs station, killing and wounding 19 technicians and security guards, including Iranian workers in the new station.

Amid this serious security deterioration, the security committee in the province declared a complete curfew in the city. Violent clashes took place in the streets of southern Kirkuk between the peshmerga forces, Asayish and dozens of local volunteers on the one hand and IS fighters on the other. Meanwhile, Abadi ordered additional troops to Kirkuk. According to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) media center, PKK fighters fought IS fighters inside Kirkuk. Also, Faleh al-Khazali, the jihadi associate of Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada (Master of the Martyrs Brigade) announced that brigade members participated in the Kirkuk events.

Finally, hours after the clashes, the security forces managed to regain control of the situation and break IS advance. But the danger is still there; IS elements dissolved into some neighborhoods that it used to control, according to Brig. Gen. Idris Rifaat, the security official in the province.

The clashes flared up again the next day inside Dumez neighborhood, south of the city. The security forces chased IS elements that were fleeing from the city to adjacent towns and managed to kill dozens of them. Brig. Sirhat Qader, the chief of police in Kirkuk, announced that the police forces and the peshmerga forces killed seven IS members between the village of Sari Tabba and Zindana, southeast of Kirkuk.

Despite that, the clashes continued intermittently. On Oct. 27, Helo Najat, the head of the security apparatus in the province announced that at least 89 fighters have been killed since the offensive began and that 15 IS fighters blew themselves up, with the rest getting killed by the security forces.

All these security breaches show that leaving large areas surrounding the liberated areas under IS control helps IS open up fronts to reduce the military pressure the group is under in Mosul. So there may be even more security breaches in the near future in other areas.
November 9, 2016

ISTANBUL  According to UN statistics, more than 4 million Syrians are in need of education inside and outside their country. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that some 3 million Syrians have fled their homes to seek safety in Turkey. With that, Turkey has become the neighboring country with the most Syrians fleeing the 5-year-old civil war. Children and youths under the age of 18 constitute half of the Syrian refugees in Turkey. As a result, the education issue has become a key priority there.

Several schools have been established in Istanbul and Gaziantep to help refugee children address the language barrier impeding integration into Turkish society. Some of these schools are funded by the Turkish government, while others were established through personal initiatives and funding.

Al-Monitor spoke by phone with Najdat Waez, a university teacher and founding member of the Syrian Education Commission, a Turkish nongovernmental organization based in Istanbul and with offices in several other cities that focuses on supporting schools for Syrians in Turkey. Waez, who resides in Turkey, said, I do not have accurate statistics on the number of Syrian schools in Turkey, but there are definitely more than 1,000. The commission has edited and published millions of books and so have the interim government [formed by the Syrian National Coalition] and some relevant organizations in the field. The Syrian curricula are good and capable of graduating a successful Syrian generation if properly edited to remove lessons about the Baath Party.

Waez further said, The Qatar Charity, the Abdulkader Sankari Foundation and the interim government have offered their support. School staff mostly consist of volunteer university students, and there are also many professional teachers and administrators who work in the education sector. The Turkish government has been offering broad support and cooperation to this sector.

Observers have noted that some of the Syrian schools in Turkey have been structured to serve the interests of those supporting them financially, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, in their particular case to propagate ideas among children to mobilize them politically or religiously in the future and to benefit from their capacities and numbers. The writer Leila al-Rifai asserted Aug. 22 in an Al Jazeera blog, The Sharia schools/institutes deal with their followers based on the master and disciple approach. The disciple surrenders his mind, soul and personality to his master. Here Rifai is referring to the disciples being the students, who blindly absorb what they are taught, and the masters being sheikhs playing the role of teacher. She further criticized the schools in Istanbul by describing them as chicken coops.

Samara al-Inabi, a Syrian mother of two in Istanbul, told Al-Monitor about her experience with Syrian Sharia schools, which are separate from the schools affiliated with the Syrian interim government. I had to take my children out of the free Syrian school [in Turkey] and put them in a private Turkish school after realizing that the curricula only included religious material and jihad and fiqh lessons and dismissed physics, chemistry and technology. The aim is to entrench the idea that the sciences oppose religion and to obtain the complete loyalty of children to the sheikhs, who take the place of teachers.

Inabi suggested a solution to the problem  putting Syrian schools under the direct oversight of the UN and banning any educational projects that take place without coordination with the official Turkish government to ensure proper education standards.

Not all Syrian children refugees are able to enroll in Turkish government schools, because they lack the requisite official documents, such as passports and their old school records, which many left behind in Syria when they fled for their lives. Some lack even identification papers, which also hinders their obtaining residency permits.

Rony Elias, a Syrian currently residing in Istanbul, related to Al-Monitor what happened with his 9-year-old son along these lines. I illegally entered into Turkey to flee the conflict, bombings and deteriorating living conditions back in my town of Qamishli, he said. I arrived in Istanbul with my wife and son and had to enroll him in a Syrian school [there], as he did not have a passport to be able to go to a Turkish school. We knew about the program and the Islamic books this [Syrian] school taught, and we were aware that it does not suit a Christian child. Yet he remained at this school for two months, before he got a passport from the Syrian consulate in Istanbul. This is when we enrolled him in a Turkish school.

For the current school year, the Turkish government took measures in August to standardize the education process in both Syrian and Turkish schools for refugees and expedite the integration of Syrian students into Turkish society. Students receive intensive Turkish-language sessions and are being taught the Turkish curriculum. Turkey's government also trained around 290 Syrian teachers under the supervision of UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, and distributed them across Syrian schools as staff and to build capacities.
November 7, 2016

Veteran film journalist Esin Kucuktepepinar had just arrived back in Turkey after attending the Tokyo International Film Festival when she spoke by phone to Al-Monitor on Nov. 3 from the Istanbul airport. During the interview, she offered her impressions on the success of Turkish TV soap opera series.

Interest in Turkish series is growing everywhere, said Kucuktepepinar, a member of the International Federation of Film Critics. Foreigners recognize our serial stars  ones I dont even know. Moreover, there is a lot of interest in the cities and locations where series are filmed. Kucuktepepinar said Indonesian film critics had told her that the series are very popular in their country.

TV series, as an important part of popular culture, can contribute significantly to tourism revenues by providing publicity for countries the world over. TV viewers who follow such series represent potential tourists. For example, Miami Vice, which ran from 1984 to 1989 in the United States, became an international hit and is credited with greatly boosting tourism to Miami, according to Effects of Films and Television Dramas on Destination Image, a 2009 report by the Journal of Business Research.

Now, Turkey has followed suit, attracting tourists and increasing its income through the export of TV series. For a time, Brazilian series had Turks glued to their TV sets even though, according to Kucuktepepinar, they were repetitive and rarely distinguished between fact and fiction. These days, however, Brazilians are avid fans of Turkish series, she said.

Explaining the popularity of these shows, Kucuktepepinar cited the gorgeous mansions with the latest-model cars where the rich and the poor mingle, allowing people to escape from their problems. She added, They show the rich and beautiful coping with mundane problems just like we do.

A 2015 report by Turkey's Touristic Hotels & Investors Association (TUROB) said the number of tourists visiting Turkey from South America, mainly from Brazil and Argentina, increased 70% during 2010-14. This unusually high growth rate came about despite the long distances involved and the economic hardships the populations in these countries faced.

Turkey, which exports series to more than 90 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, including, of course, the United States and China, is now the second-biggest TV series exporter, after the United States, according to the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce.

Turkish TV series exports reaped $250 million last year, and so far this year have already brought in $350 million, according to Ilhan Soylu of MIPCOM, the International Market of Communications Programmes. Speaking to the Anatolian Agency in October, Soylu said that the Turkish TV series sector is growing rapidly despite negative political developments in the country. He thinks the market will surpass its target of $1 billion in exports for 2023.

TV series have played a substantial role in the sharp rise in tourists visiting from Middle Eastern countries. Serdar Ali Abet, chairman of the Karnak Tourism Board, said his company used to bring 65,000 Arab tourists to Turkey each year, but with the increased popularity of Turkish TV series, the number has shot up six- or sevenfold from 2008 to the present. According to Abet, Arab tourists sustained Istanbul during the lean tourism years and, with good publicity, Turkey could attract 10 million Arab tourists each year. He cited, for example, how the tourist vacuum in Antalya in late 2015 after Russia banned its citizens from visiting Turkey could have been filled with Arab visitors. (The ban was lifted this summer.)

When selecting holiday destinations, people are guided by their perceptions, sentiments and factual information. In this regard, TV series producers recognize the importance of a destination's image as a marketing tool. For example, they create demand and tempt audiences through subliminal commercials, such as including scenes of exceptionally beautiful locations on the Bosporus and Mediterranean coast in their productions.

A report on tourism that Elif Nuroglu submitted at the 2013 International Economists Summit in Istanbul emphasized that Turkish TV series are elements of soft power and help spread Turkey's cultural appeal in influencing tourists from the Middle East and the Balkans to visit Turkey. The report, which analyzes the phenomenon of TV series tourism, states, Turkey on one hand earns export income while also publicizing itself without spending anything and spreads its lifestyle and cultural values to neighboring regions. Actually, Turkey has made clever use of this opportunity by marketing TV series produced for local [audiences] to buyers abroad. In surveys conducted with tourists, it emerged that Turkish series have been the best instrument of publicity for Turkey.

Serpil Varol, who served as Turkeys tourism attache in Paris and Brussels for a number of years, concurs with the assertion that nature- and tourism-themed scenes in TV series have been effective in Turkeys tourism promotion efforts.

For many years, Paris was the unchallenged setting for romance movies. People from many countries poured into Paris to visit the beautiful city they saw in films and even to propose to their lovers, Varol told Al-Monitor. Now our TV series are contributing directly to Turkeys economy and indirectly to publicity for it. For example Ask-I Memnu [Forbidden Love], filmed in Istanbul, increased the number of Arabs coming to Istanbul. There have been efforts to have some scenes for James Bond movies filmed in Turkey. Bringing the Troy wooden horse used in Brad Pitts movie ['Troy,' 2004] to nearby Canakkale doubled the number of tourists.

The series making the most money abroad today include Magnificent Century, Forbidden Lover, Las Mil y Una Noches (A Thousand and One Nights) and Valley of the Wolves. Turkish series have not yet achieved runs of two or three decades like some Brazilian series, but Valley of the Wolves and Back Streets have been popular for more than 15 years.
November 10, 2016

RAMALLAH, West Bank  A group of 50 journalists, bloggers and social media activists has embarked on a blogging tour in a bus sponsored by the Taghyeer media organization. On the morning of Nov. 4, the bus left for the town of Sebastia, northwest of Nablus, and the Village of Kur, southeast Tulkarm, both in the northern West Bank.

This is the second tour for the Social Media Bus in less than a month. The first started off Oct. 15 in the city of Jericho and visited several archaeological and natural sites suffering from neglect in the province, including Wadi Qelt and Nabi Moussa. The bloggers encouraged Palestinians to visit these areas and urge officials to focus on ailing sites.

The Social Media Bus idea produces vlogs, photography and articles about the geography and history of certain sites in Palestine to show them to the public and officials and urge them to bring about change. This tour aims to highlight the Palestinian authorities neglect of those sites and the weak tourist activity in those areas through social media posts including interviews with citizens and local officials. The group's posts were tagged with the hashtag #SMBUS and its Arabic equivalent.

From the city of Ramallah, the bus went to the town of Sebastia, some 60 kilometers (37 miles) away, with 50 bloggers and journalists on board. They were selected by the Taghyeer foundation officials based on their popularity on social media, their careers in local, Arab or international media outlets, and their skills in preparing written and visual reports. Chief among the participants was storyteller Hamza al-Akrabawi, who served as a tour guide as he gave historical background on all the sites visited.

The town of Sebastia, where the bus made its first stop, is one of the most important archaeological sites in Palestine, with sites belonging to seven civilizations that successively settled in the town since the Iron Age (900-548 BCE) up until the Ottoman Empire, during which the Prophet Yahya Mosque was established in 1892. Chief among these sites is the al-Ras Church, which was reportedly built over the place where John the Baptist (Prophet Yahya) was decapitated. Other sites found in the town include the Roman amphitheater, the Basilica Square and the street with 600 ancient columns.

The tour then passed by the village of Kur, Palestine's smallest, where the population belongs entirely to the Jayyousi clan. The village includes historical castles, the oldest of which dates back to the Mamluk era (1260-1516), while some date back to the Ottoman era (1516-1916). All the sites suffer from neglect and need restoration. They now face another problem, as a quarry has been established near them. The explosives being used there threaten to damage the castles and even lead to their collapse.

Saed Karzoon, Taghyeer's director, told Al-Monitor, The idea of the Social Media Bus is to bring bloggers, journalists and social media influencers together to highlight a cause and bring about positive change. The Social Media Bus is an extension of a project by the Taghyeer foundation two years ago.

The first blogging bus began in January 2014 under the name Blog from al-Aghwar, which is located to the east of the West Bank near the Jordanian border. At the time, the bus tour was intended to highlight the suffering of the citizens and share their stories and daily problems. They lived in Area C and were in need of power and water services. Also, their houses were constantly raided by the occupation forces and evacuated by the army for military training purposes. As such, bloggers wanted to raise awareness through social media and promote the al-Aghwar Palestinian narrative that the area is Palestinian, Karzoon said.

Karzoon said he hopes to expand on the idea of the Social Media bus by inviting ministers and officials to take part in it and talk to participants, answer their questions and address specific issues.

For his part, Akrabawi, the guide touring with the bloggers, told Al-Monitor, The youth tours are visiting Palestinian areas that are diverse in terms of their natural settings and histories as well as marginalized places in order to document the stories, history and suffering of the people.

He added, The youth tours are reviving the Palestinian homeland and presenting it through a different lens using live observations and real contact. This leads to experiences that educate [participants] in terms of geography and history. A cultural youth activity that is unaligned with any political side is using social media to present the Palestinian homeland to the largest audience possible.

Moaatassem Alawi from Nablus took part in the project. Alawi usually scours areas of the West Bank alone to get to know them and vlog about them, mainly through Snapchat.

Alawi told Al-Monitor that thanks to these tours he is getting to know Palestine and satisfying his passion for culture and the lives of the ancient people who lived in the places he visits.

Alawi said, I finished studying engineering in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 2014 and returned to Palestine and started my travels in November 2014.

He added that his posts are widely followed by friends and fans as he focuses on travel advice, like directions and details about the places he visits to encourage followers to visit them.

Alawi, whose travels sometimes last for 30 days, faces many obstacles. For fear of running into Israeli soldiers, he cannot carry a knife or any other sharp object that he might need to eat, climb, erect tents or defend against animals. He sometimes dresses as a foreign tourist to avoid problems with the army or the settlers.

Asked about the importance of blogging, Alawi said, Social media is as free media that allows us to reach out to thousands of followers at the lowest cost, and this was not available years ago.

Blogger and social media activist Mahmoud Hureibat told Al-Monitor that blogging conveys important issues to citizens and officials as it spreads national culture among the younger generation about the history and geography of Palestinian areas.

Despite the importance of blogging and its ability to shed light on many issues, there are questions as to whether such acts can help pressure decision-makers and institutions bring about change on the ground.
Vets, families remember D-Day landings

A 91-year-old veteran from Augusta, Maine, who landed on the beach soon after dawn on D-Day in 1944 with the 106th Infantry Division, walks to pay respects and share memories with other survivors in the Colleville American military cemetery, in Colleville sur Mer, western France. Veterans Day is Friday, and stores and restaurants across America are honoring those who served with free food and discounts. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Here are the top stories in business on AL.com for Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. Follow all of Alabama's business news here anytime.

Veterans Day is Nov. 11 and many businesses and restaurants are honoring those who served their country with freebies, deals and discounts.

What are this year's most in-demand seasonal jobs? A new report is out with a list of where you might score a job.

Law firm Hand Arendall will relocate its Birmingham office to be the anchor tenant in the redeveloped Historic Federal Reserve building in downtown Birmingham.

One of the most anticipated Black Friday ads is now available. Walmart's Black Friday sales will start Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) but there are a couple of changes this year designed to make shopping even easier.

Birmingham's Southern Research has received a $650,000 grant to expand a viral research project to include the Zika virus.

Gigi Douban has been named news director for Public Radio WBHM 90.3 / WSGN 91.5 FM. Most recently, Douban reported extensively for Marketplace.

When Regions Financial Corp. (NYSE:RF) closed its last branch in Virginia earlier this year, it took its total branch footprint from 16 states to 15.

By 2006, Jay Grinney had gotten used to constantly putting out fires at HealthSouth. The depths of the problem with HealthSouth's corporate office were far greater than he had anticipated.

The Alabama-based defense contractor Austal is set to benefit from Tuesday's sweeping and unexpected election victory by Donald Trump.

Birmingham-based Regions Financial Corp. donated $11,000 to a program for severely injured military at the Lakeshore Foundation Thursday.
When God speaks to Pat Lee, He often uses one phrase: "Be still." When she's patient, she has learned, God will lead her in the right direction, and to the right people, to accomplish anything she sets her mind on.

She heard Him say that the first time in the early 1970s, when she felt that God was calling her and her husband, Jim, to adopt. They already had four children of their own - she calls them "homemade" - but, even though she had no idea where to start, she knew she was meant to adopt a five-year-old boy.

Pat first contacted the Department of Human Resources and hand-carried her application to them. But she was told that as a stay-at-home mom with four children already, she wasn't a good candidate.

Someone in her prayer group mentioned Catholic Social Services, and though "they were as nice as they could be," they could only promise a newborn baby. But Pat was determined to find a five-year-old boy.

That's when she heard God tell her, "Be still."

And sure enough, she got a call from the woman she'd spoken to at Catholic Social Services, who told her she might try international adoption -- and if she could figure out how to do it, the agency would do the social work for her.

For her efforts, Pat was rewarded with not only the child she was looking for, but his sister, as well, from Vietnam.

After that, Pat was hooked on international adoption. "One you start, it's hard to quit," she said. In addition to Ann and Bryan, she eventually adopted Mary Beth and Emily from India and Katie from Korea, and raised Conlee from the time she was 11 until she went to college - for a total of 10 children.

Soon, she started traveling and doing relief work, and in 1996 she started her own nonprofit adoption agency, Children of the World, which was first housed literally in a closet at Fairhope United Methodist Church. The agency has placed more than 2,000 children in loving homes all over the United States.

"I never dreamed I'd be doing any of this," she said.

No unwanted kids, just unfound parents

On Saturday, Children of the World will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a block party at their new digs on U.S. 98 in Fairhope. The agency now occupies two offices, with a total of about 2,500 square feet for the five employees "doing the work of 100," Pat said.

November is National Adoption Awareness Month. There are 147 million children available for adoption worldwide, Pat said. She likes to say that there are no unwanted kids, just unfound parents.

All of the agency's families are invited to the event, but so is anyone interested in learning more about adoption or mission work.

Though she is often referred to as a saint, Pat remains humble about her own accomplishments over the years, giving all the credit to God. But for the thousands of lives she has touched, the petite "Mrs. Pat" is a symbolic figure who represents hope: the hope of child abandoned in an orphanage, who waits for parents to choose him or her; and the hope of parents who can't have children of their own, who have unlimited amounts of love to give.

Pat has never forgotten how she had to navigate the adoption process on her own. She is committed to making the time-consuming and sometimes overwhelming process of dealing with paperwork and meeting requirements of three separate government entities as simple as possible.

"I want my families to be so prepared," she said.

Not only does she help them every step of the way, she personally provides 24-hour-a-day support. "When they adopt from Children of the World, they become family. I want to know my families, who they are, their circumstances. I want to be there for them."

The process usually takes 12 to 18 months but can take two years, and the average age of the children is 2 years old.

Right now, Children of the World has more than 100 adoptions in the works. "We're really busy," she said. "It's awesome. When what you do brings a child home, it makes all the difference in the world."

'Where is my mama?'

In India alone, Pat said, there are more than 30 million orphans, "and that doesn't include street children." All of the children available to Americans have special needs of some kind, ranging from "very insignificant to very significant" - and can include defects like cleft palates, club feet or heart problems.

Baby girls are often given up, she said, because it can cost five years' salary to fund their dowries. "So many people don't realize the caste system is still in effect." Female babies are literally left in cradles that are scattered throughout the towns, in hopes that someone else will take care of them.

Recently, a Fairhope family adopted Grace, who, at 11 years old, weighed just 30 pounds. Pat had been trying to find her a home for her since she was a baby. Every time she visited the orphanage, little Grace would ask, "Where is my mama?"

"Now I know why it took so long," Pat said. "She found the perfect family."

Her own daughter Mary Beth, who she adopted from India in 1980, was found abandoned on the street when she was only two weeks old. She weighed just two pounds and had burns on her leg, and she'd been placed in a hospital in Calcutta, alone and unwanted.

Many children's stories don't end as well, and Pat can tell heartbreaking stories from her experiences doing relief work around the world.

After she adopted her first two children, she visited an orphanage in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, which was woefully deprived of medication and equipment. Seven out of 10 children were dying, she said. With the help of her brother, who was then a captain with Eastern Airlines, she flew back and forth to Bolivia for several years, helping to rebuild the orphanage.

She personally delivered two autoclaves, three incubators and other lab equipment donated from Thomas Hospital in Fairhope. She also brought much-needed medication. One time, she said, she flew into Bolivia with 25 boxes and started chatting with a man on the plane. It ended up that he worked at the embassy in La Paz - and was originally from Toulminville, a community in Mobile.

"From then on, I had preferential treatment at the embassy, and he became a dear friend of mine," she said of the chance meeting. "God just puts the right people in place."

While working in Bolivia, she was asked to help place children for adoption, which was the genesis of her agency.

On one of her trips, she got off in Paraguay to investigate the orphanages there. She placed children from Paraguay, Chile and Peru for as long as she could, but eventually the countries were closed to American adoption because of corruption and baby-selling, she said.

That's when her focus turned to orphaned children in India and China, where the agency now has offices.

'God does this'

Just eight weeks after the Indian Ocean tsunami in late 2004, Pat and a group of volunteers were on the ground in India, where Dr. Frank Bunch of Fairhope helped establish a desperately needed medical clinic that continues to provide care at no charge, even to the "untouchables," as the members of the lowest class of society are called.

While there, she met Dr. Maida Raja, who started Christ Faith Home for Children near Chennai. In addition to an orphanage, Dr. Raja runs a leper colony that's home to some 300 people. "There were about 12 of is on our team, and we were the first Westerners to come into a leper colony," said Pat.

She continues to help improve conditions there, and she also helps support about 50 widows who are mostly homeless. "They come to the orphanage for a meal and $10 that they will live on for the next month," she said. "If you give us $10, we'll use all of it."

In China, right after the earthquake of 2008 in Sichuan Province, Pat Lee was there, providing supplies and equipment.

And she's not slowing down anytime soon. "God has called me to do something with sex trafficking of young girls," she said. She has already raised $5,000 to start on that project.

Pat said one of the orphans she held in her arms as a baby is now an attorney in Tuscaloosa who wants to adopt. One of Pat's own daughters from India is in the process of adopting a baby from her native country, and Pat will accompany her on the trip to bring her new granddaughter home.

Though she has done so much good in the world, Pat doesn't seek any recognition or praise for it. The stacks of Christmas cards she receives every year are thanks enough.

"It's a God thing, it's not me," she insists. "God does this."

For more information about Children of the World, visit www.childrenoftheworld.com.

Saturday's event aims to bring together the families Children of the World has served for fellowship and fun in a neighborhood block party-style event. Families and individuals interested in adoption are also invited to come and see the organization's new office, meet the team and talk with families who've been on the journey of adoption. There will be food, live music, face painting, children's games and activities, and crafts for the whole family.

The party will take place Saturday, Nov. 12, from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Children of World office located at 22787 Hwy. 98, Suite E-3, in Fairhope. The event is free to attend. RSVPs are encouraged but not required. For more information and to RSVP, contact Mary Beth Rouse by phone at (251) 990-3550, ext. 1, or by email at marybeth@childrenoftheworld.com.
Future Federal Judge J. Foy Guin Jr. took time off as a student from the University of Alabama to serve as an infantry First Lieutenant during World War II.

Those who knew him say it's fitting his memorial service was held on Veterans Day.

"How fitting that his service will be on Veterans Day as Judge not only served his country during World War II, but for all of his life," said U.S. District Court Chief Judge Karon O. Bowdre of the Northern District of Alabama, one of his former law clerks.

Guin died on Nov. 8. He was 92.

As U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Alabama, Guin presided over a case that involved the right of veterans to have their service time computed as part of their retirement pay. As a result, the pensions of 7 million veterans were raised.

He also presided over the Birmingham school desegregation case, the right of a prisoner to have a prompt bond hearing and the Jefferson County sewer case.

Guin was born Feb. 2, 1924 in Russellville and graduated in 1940 from Russellville High School.

After graduating from Officer Candidate School in 1944 as a communication officer, he trained recruits and was sent to Camp Swift near Austin, Texas, where he met and married Dorace Caldwell. He was then sent to California to study Mandarin Chinese with plans to prepare to become a liaison officer to the Chinese.

When the war ended, he completed his law degree and began practicing law with his father in Russellville. He served on the State Bar Commission, the Board of the Alabama Law Institute, the Alabama Supreme Court's Advisory Commission to revise the rules of practice and procedure, and was the first chairman of the Judicial Commission, later renamed the Judicial Inquiry Commission.

He founded several companies and in 1973 was named Citizen of the Year in Russellville.

In 1973, President Richard Nixon appointed him U.S. District Judge and he presided over thousands of cases. After he retired in 1989, he continued to handle cases as a senior judge to ease the workload of active judges. Even when his hearing failed, he handled a substantial number of Social Security appeals. On Feb. 28, 2014, he took inactive senior status.

He was active in church, as an elder of the North Highlands Church of Christ in Russellville. After he moved to Birmingham, he was active in West End Church of Christ and then Palisades Church of Christ in Birmingham. He was chairman of the foreign missions committee in all three churches.

"Working for him inspired me to become a better lawyer, a better leader and in many ways a better person," said Cindy A. Liebes, regional director of the Southeast Regional Office of the Federal Trade Commission.

"He was the reason that I decided I wanted to be a judge," said former Shelby County Judge Hub Harrington, who served as a clerk under Guin. "He was always my ideal of the common sense, compassionate and learned jurist. While I tried to follow his example, I often times fell short. He set the bar very high. It was a great honor to have known such a man and to have had the gift of his mentorship. He will be sorely missed."

A memorial service was held Friday at at Palisades Church of Christ.

AL.com writer Kent Faulk contributed to this story.
Jan and Ronnie Whitworth.PNG

Jan and Ronnie Whitworth

If anybody should tell Jan and Ronnie Whitworth to go to hell, for any reason, they'd just laugh.

That's because the Hoover couple has already been there. Over and over in recent years.

Their oldest son, Ronald Loyd Whitworth Jr., a former police officer in Vestavia Hills and Anniston, is serving 20 years in federal prison on child sex charges. Their other son, 38-year-old Wesley Adam Whitworth, already a convicted felon, is now awaiting trial on state charges of an assault that hospitalized two Hoover police officers. He is currently in the custody of U.S. Marshals after he was indicted federally in July for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

And earlier this year, Ronnie Whitworth Sr. himself was arrested, accused of trying to smuggle a blade to his namesake who was at the time in the Shelby County Jail. "Our hearts have been broken and we have been shamed beyond belief,'' Jan Whitworth said. "We've cried a bathtub full of tears."

Shelby County officials have dismissed the promoting prison contraband charge against the elder Whitworth. He is cleared of any wrongdoing and the couple is now trying to reclaim their reputation, and their peace of mind. "I really think I got arrested for a reason,'' he said. "Something bad had to happen to get me to quit trying to fix things for my sons."

The grieving parents said life wasn't always this way. Their sons were good boys until, well, they weren't anymore, primarily because of alcohol and drugs. "We're not perfect parents, no one is,'' Jan Whitworth said. "We just tried to have a normal, average All-American family and they just ran their lives in a ditch."

"We raised them right,'' she said. "Alcohol and drugs have ruined our family, and a lot of other families. We know we're not alone. This wasn't our dream for their lives."

Ronald Whitworth Jr., 43, was booked into the Shelby County Jail March 29, 2015 on an arrest warrant from March 2010 involving an indictment filed that year charging him with possession of child pornography and production of child pornography. At that time, he also faced two other indictments from 2008 in Shelby County that accused him of rape, sodomy and sexual abuse, as well as child endangerment, and the two drug charges.

He had fled Alabama to avoid prosecution in 2008 but was later caught and convicted in the federal case. He pleaded guilty in September 2009 to transporting a child for sexual activity and was sentenced in January 2010 to 20 years in federal prison.

In March of 2015, there was a move to resolve his outstanding state charges in Alabama and that's when he was brought back to the Shelby County Jail. Though he pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect to the charges, he was convicted June 16, 2016 in a jury trial of first-degree rape, first-degree sodomy, sexual abuse of a child less than 12, and endangering the welfare of a child. He was later sentenced to 30 years in prison. The other charges, possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of pornography and producing pornography, were dismissed.

He is back in federal prison, and now serving time in a California prison.

His younger brother, 38-year-old Wesley, is now also in federal custody. In December 2015, he was arrested in Hoover on two counts of second-degree assault, felon in possession of a firearm and second-degree receiving stolen property. Officers were dispatched on a report of a suspicious man, and authorities said Wesley Whitworth then fled into a nearby wooded area. He fought with officers before being subdued, and two officers were taken to the hospital for treatment.

He had previously been convicted of assault in 2008 when he became enraged with a bicyclist and deliberately ran over the man. Then, in 2012, he barricaded himself inside a Pelham townhome and crawled through to the attic of another townhome while trying to avoid arrest on an indecent exposure warrant.

U.S. Marshals took Wesley Whitworth into federal custody in August on the federal indictment for being felon in possession of a firearm. He pleaded guilty to that charge on Oct. 3 and is set to be sentenced in that case on March 7. According to his plea agreement, the charges stemmed from his attempt to sell a pistol to another man, a transaction that took place in a church parking lot. In his plea agreement, he said he knew possession of a firearm could lead to federal prison time since he already had three prior felony convictions: assault, escape and burglary.

The senior Whitworth's brief legal troubles began in June as his older son was preparing for trial. Boxes of paperwork from his criminal cases had first been in his parents' house and then moved to their automotive business because Jan Whitworth couldn't stand even having them in her house. On Saturday, June 11, they moved the paperwork to nicer boxes and Ronnie Whitworth Sr. drove them to the Shelby County Jail at his son's request. He dropped the boxes off with a jail sergeant, and headed back toward home for his weekly Saturday evening dinner date with his wife. He said he didn't seal the boxes because he fully expected they would be searched before delivered to his son's cell.

On his way home, he got a call from a Shelby County sheriff's investigator saying they needed to talk, that day. They met, and he learned he was under arrest after deputies informed him an 81/2-inch Milwaukee Sawzall blade had been found at the bottom of the box of documents. He said the blade, which he has used in his automotive business for decades, was worn and obviously forgotten, but authorities said it "may be useful for escape."

"The last thing I would do is get myself in trouble to get my son out of trouble,'' he said. "I've been in the automotive business since 1969. I've had a great reputation. Now it's ruined."

Ultimately, Ronnie Whitworth passed a lie-detector test and, after speaking with investigators for hours, had the charges dismissed last week. "It was a wake-up call. I believe it was the Lord saying, 'Leave them to me,'" Jan Whitworth said. "If it hadn't been for our faith, we wouldn't have made it."

The stress was taking both an emotional and physical toll on the parents. They've now begun the painful process of distancing themselves from their sons and moving on with their lives. "We have less left than we've already lived," she said. "We don't want to live grieving, stressed and upset."

The decision hasn't been an easy one. Jan Whitworth has changed her phone number, and she won't even open her sons' letters from prison. Ronnie Whitworth can't change his phone number, but when he received 10 calls from prison in just one day this week, he didn't take those calls. The difficulty of ignoring those calls brought him to tears. "I'm 66 years old and I'm wearing myself out trying forget them,'' he said.

"You never stop loving your kids," Jan Whitworth said, "but you've got to give them up to the only one who can take care of it."
mary scott hunter before legislative committee.jpg

State Board of Education Member Mary Scott Hunter testifies before a legislative committee investigating how an anonymous complaint against a finalist for state school superintendent was handled.

(Mike Cason/mcason@al.com)

State Board of Education Member Mary Scott Hunter said she told the Ethics Commission about an anonymous complaint against Jefferson County Schools Superintendent Craig Pouncey in July, while the BOE was considering Pouncey as a finalist for the job of state superintendent.

Hunter, who is an attorney, said she was concerned that she had a legal obligation to report the complaint.

A letter from the Ethics Commission confirming receipt of the complaint was posted with an article in the Alabama Political Reporter in August, just days before the board made its decision on a superintendent.

Other news stories followed. Pouncey said the complaint was baseless and those with knowledge of what was alleged defended him.

In August, the BOE hired former Massachusetts education secretary Michael Sentance over Pouncey and the other finalists. Sentance received five votes from the nine-member board, one more than Pouncey.

Sen. Gerald Dial, R-Lineville, said today he believes the anonymous complaint changed two votes on the BOE and cost Pouncey the job.

Dial and Sen. Quinton Ross, D-Montgomery, sponsored a resolution to create a committee to look into the matter. Hunter and others testified before the committee today, with Dial and Ross asking most of the questions.

Dial said the nine-member BOE should have decided collectively whether to send the complaint to the Ethics Commission, which is prohibited by law from investigating anonymous complaints.

"It's apparent the system was not allowed to work as I would envision it doing," Dial told Hunter. "Your attorney should have had an opportunity to look at it, consulted with the board members and gotten a decision as a board what to do. And that part bothers me."

Ross said the BOE should have put the decision of hiring a superintendent on hold and decided how to deal with the anonymous complaint.

"But of course we know that one board member acted as the entire board to send this forward and that's unfortunate," Ross said.

Hunter, who is from Huntsville, said the circumstances and timing led her to the decision to call the Ethics Commission. She also pointed out that the BOE has no policy for how to handle such situations.

"I think the circumstances were unique ... the gravity of this coming at that time," Hunter said. "Had I it to do all over again, maybe I wouldn't have. But it was heavy. It was weighing heavy and it was worrisome."

BOE members found the complaint at their seats when they arrived for a July 12 board meeting. It consisted of a half-page, unsigned letter and copies of what appeared to be emails between Pouncey and state employees from 2009, when Pouncey was a top official at the state Department of Education.

Hunter said she was concerned when she read the complaint.

"I was troubled by it. Maybe I was more troubled than some of the other board members," she said.

Hunter gave her copy to then-interim Superintendent Philip Cleveland and told him to give it to the board's attorney, Juliana Dean.

Hunter later called Ethics Commission Executive Director Tom Albritton and told him about it.

Albritton relayed the information to Ethics Commission General Counsel Hugh Evans.

Evans, who testified today, said he called Dean and asked for the complaint. Dean hand-delivered it to the commission.

Evans said he could not recall if Dean told him the complaint was anonymous.

He also indicated that might not have mattered, even though the commission does not investigate anonymous complaints.

Evans cited a state law that requires department heads to report ethics violations.

That law, Alabama Code 36-25-17, reads: "Every governmental agency head shall within 10 days file reports with the commission on any matters that come to his or her attention in his or her official capacity which constitute a violation of this chapter."

Evans said he told Dean she was required to report the complaint.

"Report it to us and we'll take it from there," he said.

Evans sent Dean a letter confirming receipt of the complaint the day he received it, July 15.

Dean then emailed BOE members a copy of Evans' letter, the letter that was later posted with the Alabama Political Reporter story.

BOE members at today's meeting told the committee they did not share the letter with the press. Evans said no one at the commission shared it, either.

Dial asked Evans why Pouncey's name was included in a letter confirming an anonymous complaint.

Evans said the confirmation letter followed standard procedure.

Dial said the procedure needs to be changed because reputations are damaged when complaints become public.

"We're going to find a way to stop it," Dial said.

Board member Stephanie Bell of Montgomery told the committee the complaint should have been disregarded because it lacked substance.

"There was no reason in my mind to even consider handing that over to the Ethics Commission," Bell said.

"You're damaging someone long-term, not only their personal, but their professional reputation."

Bell said Pouncey was one of her top three candidates for state superintendent.

"He has a stellar reputation," Bell said.

BOE Member Cynthia McCarty of Anniston told the committee she was concerned when she saw the complaint.

"These were some serious allegations made against a finalist and we're in the middle of the superintendent search," McCarty said. "And I think we at the board said that this is probably the most important part of our job is choosing the state superintendent and someone to lead our children in education."

McCarty said the BOE had attended a retreat in February at which Albritton urged them to be cautious about ethics concerns and to reach out if there are questions.

McCarty said she was also concerned that the purported emails attached to the complaint could indicate there was a risk that personnel data or student data could also be exposed.

BOE Member Matthew Brown of Fairhope said he thought the allegations in the complaint were serious and said he was planning to report them to the Ethics Commission but was told that was already being done.

Brown is a county engineer in Baldwin County and said he has had training in ethics reporting requirements.

Ross questioned Hunter about whether she let Albritton know the complaint was anonymous when she called to tell him about it.

Hunter said she could not remember.

Ross asked Hunter if she had talked about the Pouncey complaint at a Business Council of Alabama event. Hunter said she did talk to other elected officials about it.

Ross asked: "Why discuss something that you don't necessarily know to be true if it was in the hands of the Ethics Commission?"

Hunter said she was being asked many questions about the candidates for superintendent.

"I always try to be very open, as open as you can be," Hunter said.

Dial said Hunter told him about the complaint at the BCA event.

Hunter said any implication that her call to the Ethics Commission was intended to hurt Pouncey's chances for the superintendent's job was wrong.

"I would absolutely refute that," Hunter said. "There was nothing on my mind except making sure that any reporting requirement was met."

She said the board needs to set up a procedure for handling anonymous complaints that is fair to all concerned.

Dave Pope, who is in charge of information technology security at the Department of Education, said the emails attached to the complaint appeared to include pieces of messages that were cut and pasted.

Dial said Ethics Commission Executive Director Albritton will testify at the next committee meeting.

Updated at 7:55 a.m. on Nov. 11 to add comment from Mary Scott Hunter.
Authorities believe they have found the body of a 59-year-old Tuscaloosa County man who has been missing for two months, and murder charges have been filed.

Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit investigators early today recovered skeletal remains at a dump site off of Calhoun Road in McCalla. The remains have not yet been positively identified as Morris David Watson, but lawmen were led to the body and the circumstances surrounding the discovery matched the information they had been given.

Watson has been missing since Sept. 9. He was last seen by family members in the 4900 block of Highway 171 in Northport in his 1992 white C2500 Chevy truck. They notified police and filed a missing person report on Sept. 23.

Investigators last week announced they wanted to question Donnie Lee McCutcheon, 31, and Annie Lynn Weir, 33, in Watson's disappearance. The pair had recently stayed with Watson, investigators said.

Both McCutcheon and Weir had recently been spotted in the Chattanooga area, and were believed to be in Watson's truck. They both were taken into custody shortly after 8 a.m. Wednesday in northern Georgia. Watson's missing truck was found about five hours later.

Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Lt. Kip Hart today said Weir is Watson's ex-stepdaughter, and McCutcheon her boyfriend. They found Wednesday in Flintstone, Ga.

Weir agreed to return to Tuscaloosa with investigators. McCutcheon was held in the Walker County, Georgia jail pending an extradition hearing. He waived the hearing this morning and is in the process of being transported back to Tuscaloosa.

After interviewing Weir, Hart said, she was charged with first-degree receiving stolen property and booked into the Tuscaloosa County Jail on a $30,000 bond.

Wednesday night, about 11:15 p.m., investigators discovered human remains in a concrete dump site located off Calhoun Road in the McCalla area. "This was based off information uncovered during yesterday's investigation,'' Hart said. "The human remains are believed to be those of Morris Watson."

The remains were transported to Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences for autopsy and identification. At this time investigators believe the manner of death to be homicide caused by gunshot.

Investigators have obtained a murder warrant on Donnie McCutcheon and it will be served after he is returned to Tuscaloosa.
The building inspector for the City of Warrior died early today in a house fire at his Blount County home.

The blaze swept through the home of Mike Tumlin at 80 Branchwood Lane off of Skyline Drive about 3 a.m.

Authorities said the 56-year-old Tumlin, his wife and their two children made it out of the home safely. Tumlin, however, went back into the house to possibly fight the fire, and didn't make it back out again.

He was pronounced dead on the scene. Warrior police and Blount County sheriff's deputies joined the West Blount Fire District at Tumlin's home. The fire appears to be accidental, but remains under investigation. The Alabama State Fire Marshal's Office is helping with the probe.

Tumlin, 56, was well-known in Warrior where he was active both professionally and personally in community efforts.

Warrior police Chief Ray Horn said Tumlin's death is a hard hit to the community. The mayor and other city workers gathered outside of Tumlin's home earlier today. "Everybody's upset,'' Horn said. "He was just a real good guy."
Huntsville Alabama honored its heroes Friday with one of the nation's largest Veterans Day parades. There were 172 entries in the annual parade that started at 11:11 a.m. November 11th. The start time marked the commemoration of the cessation of hostilities between German and Allied Forces at the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918.

Organizations participating included the Army Material Command Band, the Marching Maroon and White Band from Alabama A&M, local high school bands and JROTC units, veterans groups along with local church and civic organizations.

Thousands turned out to line the streets of downtown Huntsville to watch the parade which started at the Veterans Memorial Park on Monroe Street. The parade continued on to Green Street, then Williams Avenue before traveling back to Monroe and Clinton Avenue.

The weather was perfect for a day to say thank you and honor those who have served our country.
Tossing a lit cigarette while Alabama is under a burn ban could cost smokers up to six months in jail and $500 in fines -- if they cause a fire.

There's not a special punishment for tossing cigarette butts during the ban. But, if a fire breaks out and an individual can be linked to it, there's a criminal charge called illegal setting of a fire under a drought emergency.

That charge can be used to prosecute most any fire-setters during the ban, including burning trash or leaves, or failing to use a fire pit for a bonfire, for example.

The odds of getting caught if you toss a cigarette are low, said Colleen Vansant, public information officer for the Alabama Forestry Commission's north region. But, that doesn't mean you should do it.

After weeks without enough rain to quench the dry ground, the chances of something as small as a cigarette starting a fire are great, Vansant said.

"Put it in an ashtray, stop to put it out, or do whatever -- just don't toss it out the window or on the ground," Vansant said.

Regardless of drought conditions, the act is punishable by littering citations that carry different fines depending on which jurisdiction you're in.

Earlier this week, Decatur Fire Chief Tony Grande emailed the city's Police Department to let the officers know firefighters might call on them for help enforcing the burn ban.

"We're being very diligent about enforcing the burn ban," Grande said. "If we find folks that are burning, there's no edge where we can say that's OK right now. Things are so dry right now, we can't afford for you to be careless with cigarette butts or charcoal grills or any other kinds of flames."

Across the state, more than 12,000 acres have burned in wildfires. That brings the total for 2016 to nearly 40,000 acres.

Four active fires were burning this morning in DeKalb, Jefferson and Randolph counties. Additionally, 20 contained fires and 20 controlled fires were burning in several other counties across the state.

Although the Fire Department doesn't handle many citations or other legal action, Grande said they won't hesitate to contact the Forestry Commission or local law enforcement to handle it.

"Typically with cigarettes being tossed, it's without malicious intent because somebody just stopped at street and thumped it out of their car or they just dropped it on the ground," he said. "We're not going to be out just searching for people doing that, but we are being diligent."

But, what if it was malicious?

"That would be arson," said Steve Holmes, public information officer for the State Fire Marshal's Office. "Now, arson is one of the hardest crimes to prove. But, if it could be proved, we would be called in.

"You'd be surprised how often smoking is listed as a cause in house fires that actually killed people," Holmes added. "Especially right now, when the least little thing can ignite a major fire, it's a stupid decision to toss a cigarette or burn things in the yard."

At Blakely State Park in Baldwin County, Co-director JoAnn Flirt said smoking isn't allowed, and security workers look for it all of the time. Although the drought makes it that much more important to prevent.

"We have somebody on duty in the park 24/7," she said. "If somebody is found smoking, they are asked to stop. We have not encountered anyone who refused, but it's a matter of finding them."

While park employees don't have arrest powers or the ability to issue legal citations, the park rules are subject to fines if broken, Flirt said.

"We are always on top of preventing any kinds of fires," she said. "We routinely patrol during and after somebody leaves a camp site to make sure they have extinguished their fires, which are restricted to the rings we provide for them to burn in."
An Alabama mayor has a message for celebrities who pledged to leave the U.S. if Donald Trump was elected president: Don't let the screen door hit you on the way out.

Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon posted a message on his Facebook page announcing the creation of a GoFundMe page to raise money to purchase bus tickets for "celebrities, athletes and other high-minded elitists who are traumatized by the new Trump era."

The tickets will take the protesting celebrities to Tijuana, Mexico, and not Canada, a destination mentioned by many, Kennon said. Even before the election, celebrities ranging from Miley Cyrus and Cher to Barbra Streisand and director Spike Lee said they'd exit the US if the Republican nominee defeated Hillary Clinton.

Kennon's GoFundMe page is appropriately titled "Don't Let the Screen Door Hit You." Fourteen donors have contributed $230 - a far cry from Kennon's $10 million goal - in the past two days.

"Let us not forget those who promised to leave the country if Trump won," Kennon said on his Facebook page. "For us loving and sensitive Trump supporters, it is imperative that we help those downtrodden, multi-millionaire Hillary supporters find a better quality of life in Mexico or any other third world country for that matter and in the process help them gain a little perspective of reality instead of their worthless hyperbole."

While some people are appreciative of Kennon's efforts - "please allow some help to go to the poor souls at Berkeley and elsewhere who never worked a day in their life and want to relocate," one $10 donor said - others aren't laughing.

"New Movement. #Boycott Orange Beach," a GoFundMe commenter said.
America's heroes will be honored Nov. 11 at the annual Veterans Day parade held in downtown Huntsville.

The parade starts at 11:11 a.m. - a time chosen to commemorate the cessation of hostilities between German and Allied forces at the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918.

More than 175 organizations, including the Army Materiel Command Band, Marching Maroon and White Band from Alabama A&M, veterans groups, local JROTC organizations, school bands and church and civil clubs will be taking part.

Street closures to accommodate the parade will start early Friday morning, with traffic off limits to Monroe Street around Veterans Memorial Park, Green Street to Williams Avenue and a portion of Clinton Avenue.

The parade route itself will start along Monroe Street past Veterans Memorial Park to Green Street and then Williams Avenue before traveling back to Monroe Street and Clinton Avenue.
Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton waves as she leaves a New York hotel after speaking to her staff and supporters, Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016. Earlier in the day she conceded the race to Republican president-elect Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

(Seth Wenig)

Donald Trump won the White House Tuesday night but Hillary Clinton received the most votes, according to the latest totals. That fact is giving life to those who want to see the Democratic nominee in the White House.

The latest vote totals show Clinton with 60,467,601 votes, a razor thin lead over Trump's 60,072,551. That number will change as absentee and other ballots come in but if Clinton's lead holds, she will become the first presidential candidate since Al Gore in 2000 to win the popular vote but lose the White House.

Trump secured the victory with 290 Electoral College votes - 20 more than required - vs. Clinton's 228. His biggest boost in battleground states came from Florida (29 Electoral College votes); North Carolina (15); Ohio (18); Pennsylvania (20); and Wisconsin (10). Those wins, which hit in areas once thought to be in Clinton's camp, swung the election towards the Republican nominee.

Besides Gore, only three other candidates in U.S. history - Andrew Jackson in 1824 (lost to John Quincy Adams); Samuel Tilden in 1876 (lost to Rutherford B. Hayes); and Grover Cleveland in 1888 (lost to Benjamin Harrison) - won the popular vote but lost the election. Each of those races occurred in the 19th Century.

In 2000, Gore, a Democrat, received 50,999,897 votes - or 48.4 percent - to Republican George W. Bush's 50,456,002, or 47.9 percent. Bush won the election, however, with 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266 but it took Supreme Court involvement for winner to be finalized.

The 2000 race, like the 2016 one, led to questions about the Electoral College, which was established in part to put states on a level playing field when it came to selecting the president.

The Electoral College

The Electoral College consists of 538 electors, with each state's number corresponding to the size of its Congressional delegation.

The electors from each state go on to "vote" for the president, with some states having a "winner-take-all" method of awarding delegates; Maine and Nebraska award electors proportionally. Those electors meet in each state and cast their ballots, though there's no Constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote according to their state's results. However, laws binding the delegates, as well as political party pledges, exist in many states and the House Archives said electors have voted for their state's winner more than 99 percent of the time.

Not giving up on Clinton

Those hoping to overturn Trump's win aren't giving up though.

A petition launched on Change.org is calling on electors to defy their pledges or state laws and cast their votes for Clinton.

"Secretary Clinton won the popular vote and should be President," petition organizers said. "Hillary won the popular vote. The only reason Trump 'won' is because of the Electoral College. But the Electoral College can actually give the White House to either candidate. So why not use this most undemocratic of our institutions to ensure a democratic result?"

The chances of that happening are very slim.

For its part, Congress has been hesitant to address or change the Electoral College system, NPR reported. The last time it tried was in the late 1960s, when a proposal was introduced to provide for a direct election of the president and vice president with a runoff in the event no candidate received more than 40 percent of the vote.

The proposal passed the House in 1969, but failed in the Senate.

Updated Nov. 11 at 4:42 p.m. to reflect latest popular vote totals.
Veterans Day is a time to thank those who have served their country through military service.

Here's a look at some of the best thoughts on Veterans Day, patriotism and courage:

"I think there is one higher office than president and I would call that patriot." --Gary Hart

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." --John F. Kennedy

"On this Veterans Day, let us remember the service of our veterans, and let us renew our national promise to fulfill our sacred obligations to our veterans and their families who have sacrificed so much so that we can live free." - Dan Lipinski

"Honoring the sacrifices many have made for our country in the name of freedom and democracy is the very foundation of Veterans Day." - Charles B. Rangel

"The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." - Douglas MacArthur

"It's about how we treat our veterans every single day of the year. It's about making sure they have the care they need and the benefits that they've earned when they come home. It's about serving all of you as well as you've served the United States of America. Freedom is never free." - President Barack Obama

"Honor to the soldier and sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country's cause. Honor, also, to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field and serves, as he best can, the same cause." - Abraham Lincoln

"Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened." - Billy Graham

"How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!" --Maya Angelou

"The young patriots now returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other deployments worldwide are joining the ranks of veterans to whom America owes an immense debt of gratitude." - Steve Buyer

"This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave." --Elmer Davis

"Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." --Winston Churchill

"My heroes are those who risk their lives every day to protect our world and make it a better place--police, firefighters, and members of our armed forces." --Sidney Sheldon

"I believe it is the nature of people to be heroes, given the chance." - James A. Autry

"Our veterans accepted the responsibility to defend America and uphold our values when duty called." - Bill Shuster

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation." - George Washington

"Some people live an entire lifetime and wonder if they have ever made a difference in the world, but the Marines don't have that problem." - Ronald Reagan

"This year's Veterans Day celebration is especially significant as our country remains committed to fighting the War on Terror and as brave men and women are heroically defending our homeland." - John Doolittle

"A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. " --Joseph Campbell

"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave." --Patrick Henry

"Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul." -- Michel de Montaigne

"While we can never truly repay the debt we owe our heroes, the least we should do for our brave veterans is to ensure that the government takes a proactive approach to delivering the services and benefits they have earned, so they can access the care they need and so richly deserve." - Kristen Gillibrand

"Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him."- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Veterans Day - a time set aside to honor those who served in the U.S. armed forces - is Friday, Nov. 11.

The day traces its origins back to the end of World War I. On Nov. 11, 1918, an armistice between the U.S.-led Allied nations and Germany went into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Though the war wasn't officially over until the Treaty of Versailles was signed seven months later, the Nov. 11 is recognized as the end of the "war to end all wars," according to the Veterans Administration.

In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Nov. 11 as the first commemoration of what was then known as Armistice Day. The day was originally celebrated with parades and a brief suspension of business at 11 a.m. Congress officially recognized the day with a resolution passed on June 4, 1926.

It was then that the day - Nov. 11 - was officially recognized as the date of the holiday.

Almost 30 years later, after U.S. soldiers had served in World War II and Korea, Congress voted to change the name from Armistice Day to Veterans Day in honor of all those who served in the military.

Veterans Day remained on Nov. 11, no matter which day that fell, until the passage of the Uniform Holiday Bill. The 1968 law was intended to ensure three-day weekends for federal employees by celebrating four national holidays on Mondays: Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Columbus Day. Veterans Day was first moved off its Nov. 11 day to a Monday on Oct. 25, 1971.

The change was not popular.

"It was quite apparent that the commemoration of this day was a matter of historic and patriotic significance to a great number of our citizens," the VA said.

On Sept. 20, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed a bill returning Veterans Day to its original date of Nov. 11. It continues to be observed on Nov. 11, regardless of what day of the week on which it falls.

Veterans Day facts

Difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day: Veterans Day is a federal holiday that is celebrated on Nov. 11 each year. It's often confused with Memorial Day, which is set aside to honor those who died serving their country. Veterans Day is for all those who have served in the armed forces.

Alabama's role: In 1945, Birmingham veteran Raymond Weeks, a veteran of World War II, led a delegation to then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to convince him to turn Armistice Day into a time to honor all those who served in the armed forces. Weeks led the first national celebration in Alabama in 1947, something he continued to do until his death in 1985.

Celebrations in other countries: Britain, France, Australia and Canada commemorate those who served in World Wars I and II on or near Nov. 11th: Canada has Remembrance Day and Britain has Remembrance Sunday (the second Sunday of November). In Europe, Britain and the Commonwealth countries it is common to observe two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. every Nov. 11.

Its official name is Veterans Day: According to the VA's Office of Public Affairs, the correct spelling is Veterans Day, no apostrophe. The spelling reflects that the day does not belong to veterans but is instead a time to honor all those who served.
Award-winning Louisiana bluesman Kenny Neal will appear in Mobile Sunday evening at an all-star benefit concert raising money for Baton Rouge residents devastated by record flooding earlier this year.

The "Jazz 'n' Blues 4 Baton Rouge" concert starts at 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, at the Helena II ballroom, 1568 St. Stephens Road. In addition to the Kenny Neal Band, it will feature Bryan Morris, Gino Rosaria, Joe Lewis, JoJo Morris, Harolyn Bettis and Denise Small.

Drummer Bryan Morris, a Mobile native, has performed for years with Neal's band, giving Neal a strong Mobile connection. Neal describes himself as a "swamp-blues guy." His music tends to draw on the exuberance of Cajun music, the depth Delta blues and the sheer melting-pot variety of New Orleans tradition.

Disastrous flooding hit Louisiana in August, with some of the worst devastation in the Baton Rouge area. Thirteen people died and tens of thousands were displaced; officials have estimated that around 60,000 houses were destroyed.

Tickets for Sunday's event are $40; tables are $350. For information, call the venue at 251-434-2444.
School bus

Alabama school officials say that cars passing stopped school buses is a pervasive problem and a threat to children's safety. Mobile County schools are testing a camera system that can capture evidence of violations and lead to tickets; other systems may follow suit. (Birmingham News file photo)

In the near future, some lucky Mobile County drivers will open their mail to find $300 traffic tickets, courtesy of a high-tech camera system designed to improve safety for kids on school buses. And those citations likely will be a sign of things to come across the state.

In October, the Mobile County Public School System announced that it had begun installing the BusGuard camera system on its buses. The first tickets generated by the electronic watchdog are likely to go out in mid-December.

Mobile officials say the system is valued at $10,000 per bus but won't cost schools - or taxpayers - a thing. The camera company is installing them for free, and will recoup its costs via the traffic fines. A bill passed in 2015 gave Mobile County school systems the right to enter such contracts, and another passed in 2016 opened the door to statewide implementation. That makes Mobile County a test case, with a lot of eyes on it.

"Montgomery County Schools have discussed it ... Also Auburn city has discussed it," said Chad Carpenter, director of pupil transportation for the Alabama State Department of Education, "With a system the size of Mobile, you would find out very quickly whether it would work across the state. I think it will."

The need for school bus safety may be an issue everyone can agree on. Carpenter and others say the cameras could make a difference in a huge problem. In a single-day survey taken earlier this year, Carpenter said, Alabama school bus drivers reported 1,505 incidents where drivers ran their bus-mounted stop signs. "It's an epidemic," he said. "It's pretty severe."

On the other hand, BusGuard costs $10,000 per bus, and Mobile County is installing it on 300 buses for now, which suggests that camera company FXS will need to recoup $3 million over the five years of the deal. That's a lot of tickets.

For the drivers

For Ala. Rep. Margie Wilcox, R-Mobile, the issue started with conversations over coffee. "I have very dear friends that are school bus drivers," said Wilcox, who runs two transportation companies. With them, she noticed, the subject of drivers who ran bus stop signs was a recurring subject.

She was a little surprised. "I just didn't remember that happening as a child," she said. But as she looked into it, she found numbers like the ones quoted by Carpenter.

From left: Ken Kvalheim, transportation quality control manager for the Mobile County Public School System; Pat Mitchell, transportation director for the system; and State Rep. Margie Wilcox. (Courtesy of MCPSS)

Sophisticated camera systems now on the market make it feasible for school systems to document violations, leading to citations for violators. In 2014, Wilcox proposed a bill that would allow Mobile County schools to implement such systems. It went nowhere, but in 2015, a version was passed.

Wilcox said that State Sen. Jimmy Holley, R-Elba, whose district includes several southeast Alabama counties, had been trying to pass a statewide measure. She thinks her county-specific bill helped clear the way: During the 2016 session, the so-called Alabama School Bus Safety Act was passed. It gives school systems throughout the state the right to negotiate contracts like the one between Mobile County schools and FXS. Holley's co-sponsors on SB215 included Sen. Clay Scofield, R-Arab, whose district includes Marshall County, and Sen. Gerald Dial, R-Lineville, whose east Alabama district includes Chambers, Cleburne and Randolph counties, as well as parts of Cherokee, Clay and Lee counties.

Holley said he was motivated by hearing from education officials how pervasive the problem is. He stressed that his bill made it possible for school systems to install bus cameras but doesn't require them to.

Holley said he wasn't sure what specific school systems might be the first to take advantage of the law, but he's confident some will.

"Mobile may be the one that sets the example," he said. "Once someone has set the example, others will follow."

BusGuard

BusGuard is a product of FXS Inc., a company whose name stands for Force Multiplier Solutions. It is an impressively complex setup: According to information provided by the company its features (some of which are optional) include a cluster of cameras that capture images of cars running the bus stop sign; interior cameras that watch the bus driver, the passengers and the door; additional exterior cameras; a centralized processing unit that records the data; and a tablet that drivers can use to keep track of who boards and leaves the bus. It also allows for real-time bus tracking, turn-by-turn navigation and two-way voice communication between the bus and dispatchers.

"We designed BusGuard to address the major security & safety needs of the student transit industry as well as the logistical issues of fleet management and performance," company information says.

"Assault and illegal passing put our children in danger on a daily basis, but almost always occur away from the watchful eye of administration and law enforcement," says FXS promotional information. "Other problems are just as serious and often ignored - poor driver behavior, pedophiles and kidnapping, emergency health issues, and students left behind on buses."

Pat Mitchell, director of transportation for Mobile County schools, said the camera systems offer full coverage. "First of all," he said, "they will be running the entire time the bus is running."

That means that the system might provide useful evidence after any traffic incident or complaint, not just stop-sign issues. Mitchell said bus drivers so far are enthusiastic about the possibility of clamping down on other drivers who ignore bus stop signs.

"They are really excited about it," he said. "This is something drivers oftentimes encounter. You can imagine it really upsets the drivers, because they're responsible for the safety of the children they transport."

Mitchell said that installing BusGuard on 300 buses will be "a lengthy process." He said Thursday that installers handle two or three buses per day and have done their work on about 30. When a few more buses are wired up and the form of the citations has been finalized, the system will "go hot," he said. That means the first ticketed drivers likely will feel the sting next month as the semester winds down.

According to information released by the Mobile County system, the plan is to eventually equip all 750 buses. (If that sounds like a lot, Carpenter said that on any given school day, Alabama has about 7,700 buses running regular routes.)

To translate all that data into actual tickets, school systems have to make arrangements with local and state law enforcement agencies, adding another level of complexity. In Mobile County, FXS will send details of each alleged violation to law enforcement agencies, which will look at the photographic evidence and decide whether or not to approve citations. Neither the schools nor FXS will send citations directly to vehicle owners.

The FXS website touts that the system has resulted in 180,082 citations issued on behalf of 23 client systems, resulting in no lawsuits and zero cost to those school districts. But there have been teething problems here and there.

In Texas, Dallas County Schools ran into expensive startup costs due to a relatively unusual agreement in which they paid FXS for the system but also got the right to license it to other school districts, meaning it could become a long-term source of revenue. In Chesterfield County, Va., school officials interested in the program were tripped up by a ruling that local law required every citation to be personally delivered to its recipient by a law enforcement officers In Baton Rouge, FXS issued tens of thousands of dollars in refunds after a judge ruled that a point of conflict between parish law and state law rendered some tickets invalid.

The ticketing process uses the license tag of the car to identify its owner, and that's who gets the ticket. Drivers will have some recourse to challenge a citation. Supporters of the system said it will be similar to contesting a parking ticket or traffic citation.

"There's mechanisms set up so that if there's truly a mistake, it can be corrected," said Wilcox.

"The bill provides that violators who are ticketed can challenge it," said Holley. "You've got to have due process.

The bottom line

Under the law, once a company such as FXS has recouped its investment, a school system can receive a portion of the money collected in fines. Supporters of the systems said it's not about the money, however, it's purely about safety.

A BusGuard camera pod can be seen on the flank of a Mobile County school bus. Cameras in the pod can catch the license plate of a car passing a stopped bus, potentially leading to a ticket for the car's owner. (Courtesy of MCPSS)

"The number one thing we're providing for is the greatest amount of safety possible for those children," said Holley. "The main reason why we're looking to this program is the safety aspect," said Mitchell.

Carpenter agreed, and said the technology doesn't lessen the role played by bus drivers. "There's no better piece of safety equipment that we can put on a bus than a well-trained, loving, conscientious bus driver," he said.

Wilcox said the lesson for the average person is "don't disregard the stop arm. Think about it like it was your child or your grandchild. Is one or two minutes worth their life?"

She won't be surprised if the first round of tickets generates some backlash. She wants careless drivers to know she does not share their pain.

"I so want them to call me and give their great excuse for endangering a child's life," she said. "I want to hear it."
As hundreds of people spilled into the streets of downtown Birmingham during a unity rally opposing the election of Donald Trump as president, Bessemer resident Malik Robinson decided to let go of the fear.

Black, Vietnamese and queer, Robinson, 17, said he lived with the fear all his life. When unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer in 2012, Robinson stopped wearing hoodies. After Trump was elected president, Robinson contemplated suicide because he didn't feel like his life mattered, he said.

Instead of ending his life, he decided to make a stand for the lives of others. Not just the ones who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, but the ones who are also Muslim, African-American and disabled.

"I'm not giving up," Robinson said. "I don't want any of us to give in."

Creating an atmosphere of unity amongst America's minorities was the point of the rally that started at Kelly Ingram Park on Thursday night, organizers said. LBGTQ members held their rainbow pride flags high in the air. Their straight allies held colorful signs supporting marriage equality. Black and whites held their fists in the air while chanting black lives matter.

After watching videos of anti-Trump protests across the nation Wednesday night, Jordan Giddens, 22, was surprised there wasn't a rally scheduled for Birmingham. The night Trump became president-elect, Giddens said his Facebook page was flooded with worry. His LGBTQ friends worried about the fate of the Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriage. Disabled individuals recalled the time Trump mocked a disabled individual during his campaign.

Giddens said he and a handful of other local activists wanted to make sure no one felt alone. During his speech, Giddens asked the crowd to hug the person beside them. He said the crowd needed to stand together to protect one another.

"Yes, Donald Trump won. Yes, he is going to be our president," Giddens said. "But if we can take a stand during these next four years and say, 'You're going to treat us equal.' He can't do anything against us. This is day one. Do not let this stop here."

Unity Rally at Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham is starting. Organizer Jordan Giddens sets the tone. pic.twitter.com/MvIYtvhSse  Jonece Starr Dunigan (@StarrDunigan) November 11, 2016

Mercutio Southall, a local activist and one of the rally's organizers, expressed his appreciation about the diversity in the crowd during his speech. He quoted Fred Hampton, who was chairman of the Black Panther Party Illinois chapter during the 60s.

"You don't fire with fire. You fight fire with water. You don't fight racism with racism. You fight racism with solidarity," Southall said. "Coming from a black man in America, it means something that you are out here right now."

Local activist Mercutio Southall speaks to crowd during a unity rally at Kelly Ingram park on Nov. 10, 2016.

Some of the organizers were surprised by the number of people who came out to the event. Giddens created the event page on Facebook at 11 p.m. on Wednesday. Less than 24 hours later, more than 300 people were marching together. Their chants echoed through the streets.

"Not my president."

"Love Trumps hate."

"We reject the president-elect."

Unity rally against the election of Donald Trump in Birmingham Al Posted by Starr Civil Dunigan on Thursday, November 10, 2016

Giddens said the organizers did receive death threats following the event's announcement. But no violence was displayed during the peaceful rally.

After about an hour of marching, participants made their way back to the park to hug each other. Organizers are hoping for a better turnout during a second rally on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Kelly Ingram Park. Another rally is scheduled in Tuscaloosa at 10 a.m. at the Walk of Champions.

Robinson doesn't want the energy of the rallies in Birmingham and across the nation to end. He hopes people will gather together to talk about how they will protect each others rights as women, as LGBTQ members, as immigrants, as minorities.

Because he only has one fear now: people forgetting what could happen if they don't stand together.

"I'm afraid of complacency. I'm afraid the fire is not going to stay." he said. "If you can forget, that is a privilege. Some of us will never forget."
Donald Trump.JPG

Donald Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2017.

Those still in shock that

Donald Trump

won the U.S. Presidential election have until Jan. 20, 2017's inauguration to come grips with the new political normal.

Before the country makes it official in Washington D.C., we want to perhaps understand just what kind of president Trump could be once he takes the Oval Office, and which past U.S. presidents to whom he might favorably compare.

We reached out to a pair of

professors who specialize in American politics to ask them: Which past U.S. president does Donald Trump already remind us of, if any?

Answers varied based on Trump's rhetoric, temperament, proposed policies, how he's perceived by the political establishment, or whether it's too early to even tell.

One University of Alabama professor compared Donald Trump to (clockwise from top left) Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Lyndon B. Johnson. (whitehouse.gov)

The first past president that came to UA professor Steven Borrelli's mind? Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. President. Borrelli said Jackson was the first president after the founding generation, the first six presidents who were either founders or children of founders -- all from well-to-do backgrounds, highly educated, part of the cultural elite.



Like Trump, Jackson was a change of pace.



Jackson was kind of the first party-crasher," Borrelli said. "He came from the west, he was a populist. He claimed not only to speak for the people but that he was somehow one of the people or understood their concerns, and he was really the first presidential candidate to do that."



The quickest and easiest analogy most people make, Borrelli said, is Ronald Reagan, who also depended on colorful language at times to get his message across.



"Reagan, compared to Trump, was much more guarded in his rhetoric, yet especially in his days when he was more like a commentator and not really a politician yet, Reagan said some controversial things and was seen as somebody who was maybe unstable or could start a war, just kind of an extreme person in terms of his rhetoric and perhaps not as steady and reliable as he could be," Borrelli said. "To me, Reagan seems like a rock of stability compared to Trump. But that's how he was perceived, even as sort of a dangerous person.



"[Former President Jimmy] Carter, during the debates, said this was a person we can't really trust with nuclear weapons. Reagan soon proved to not live up to that image."



Despite serving two terms as governor of California, Reagan's relative political inexperience also gave voters the perception of "a non-politician or an outsider, a person who 10 years before people said it's impossible he could ever get elected president."



Based on perception and relationship with the political establishment, Borrelli said Jackson and Reagen currently work as the two historical analogies at least he would make. But as for actual personality itself, two more spring to mind.



"I would make comparisons with Lyndon Johnson and maybe to a much lesser extent Teddy Roosevelt in terms of being extremely self confident to the point of almost arrogance and liking to attract attention to themselves."



As for George Hawley, an assistant professor in the political science department who specializes in American politics, he thinks it's a little too early to make the judgment.



"It's really difficult to say," Hawley said. "We've seen things, at least on the Republican side anyway, that are somewhat similar to the Trump campaign in the sense that they were insurgent campaigns that challenged the established leadership and even the party's basic ideology."



Hawley instead calls back to past unconventional Republican candidates like Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996.



"But we never got to see what they'd do as president because they lost," Hawley said. "So we are entering into uncharted territory in terms of what a president who does not really care about some of the motivating principles of his party are. I don't think we've seen that, at least in the past 100 years."



Time will tell which past president to whom historians and the public will surely compare the next Commander-in-Chief. Trump's unique personality and brand of politics could prove the first of their kind.



"We've never seen a president quite with this temperament either, at least not in recent history," Hawley said. "Someone who is so completely disconnected, not just in style but in terms of substance from what the party has traditionally stood for. So the question is whether he is going to continue to remain aloof from traditional conservative republicanism, or if he's going to make peace with republicanism as we have known it for the past several generations."



Does President-elect Donald Trump already remind you of any past U.S. presidents? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Nancy worley.JPG

Nancy Worley

Recently, I received an email from the Alabama Democratic Party, which could be summed up, at best, as laughable. Here is the full text:



Although more Democrats than Republicans voted nationwide for the Democratic Party's stellar nominees for President and Vice President, the outcome was an Electoral College victory for the Republican nominees. We congratulate the winners and offer our support as they attempt to unify our divided country.

The Party also congratulates all our state and local candidates who were on the ballot. Regardless of the outcome, each candidate demonstrated undaunted courage and a strong commitment to service by qualifying to run for office and campaigning throughout the election season. We appreciate all of our Democratic volunteers who were an integral part of each campaign.

Most of us agree that our country and our state are divided, but we must all unify as a state and nation to guarantee that our children receive a world-class education in well-funded public schools. We must support our working men and women with job training and employment opportunities, higher pay, and affordable health care. We must protect our senior citizens' retirement and Social Security, as we expand their options for long-term independent living.

The Alabama Democratic Party will never stop fighting for the interests of the people of our great state.

Nancy Worley

Chair, Alabama Democratic Party



Um. What? Did I miss something? Can anyone recall when the Alabama Democratic Party even started fighting for the interests of the people? Because as far as I can tell, they don't even fight for the interests of the Democrats.



Now, if the ADP actually did care about the interests of the people, they could have shown it by:





Fundraising for Democratic candidates on this year's ballot.

Hosting campaign events.

Capitalizing on the Bentley scandal.

Capitalizing on Hubbard's conviction.

Capitalizing on Roy Moore being suspended from office....again.

Filling the seats at the SDEC

Putting together voter outreach programs, especially those focused on millennials.

Campaigning against Amendment 8.

Supporting the county parties.



And that's just off the top of my head. But no. None of that happened. And none of it will ever happen unless there's some change.



Craig Ford was right. Nancy Worley and Joe Reed have failed Alabama Democrats, and it's time for them to step down. 2018 is going to be a critical year, not just for Alabama, but for the country. And if we want to have even a modicum of success, we're going to need some better leadership.
Everything you need to know about what the controversial president-elect can and cannot do as leader of the US.

A crucial question people around the world are asking right now is if Donald Trump will be the same in the Oval Office as he was on the campaign trail.

Many are wondering: How many of his controversial campaign promises will actually become reality?

Its important to take a step back and look at the power of the president to see how a Trump presidency could play out.

Heres a quick rundown:

Can Trump build a wall and make Mexico pay for it?

If Trump wants to build a wall along the entire southern border he is going to have to ask the US Congress for tens of billions of dollars.

He cant do it without their sign-off. There has been some bipartisan talk in the past of doing more to secure the border but with a $20 trillion debt that is only going up, spending the amount it would take to build on the entire border seems like a tough sell, even with a Republican-led Congress.

He cannot  repeat  cannot make Mexico pay for it.

He said on the campaign trail that he would take remittances from the US that were being sent to Mexico. What would that even look like? Would FBI agents hang out at every Western Union and ask where the money is being sent?

If as president he signed an executive order to take peoples money, it would instantly be challenged in court.

He will be able to make sure the Supreme Court stays conservative-leaning but its hard to imagine any court not ruling that practice would be against the constitutional protection from illegal search and seizures.

Can Trump ban all Muslims from entering the US?

He did say he was going to totally shut down all Muslims from entering the United States. He later clarified that he was going to shut down people from entering who come from countries with a history of terrorism. The short answer is he cant ban an entire religion, but there are caveats.

First lets take a look at Americans who practise Islam. No president can keep them from entering the country. That would violate several provisions of the constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion.

READ MORE: Donald Trump  The Islamophobia president

For non-Americans it is pretty clear that he couldnt come right out and say he was stopping Muslims from immigrating or visiting the US. The courts would probably step in if that was the case.

That doesnt mean he cant do it though. The president is allowed to ban people from certain countries from entering the US.

It has been done before, in 1980, when Jimmy Carter, the Democratic president, during the Iranian hostage crisis banned Iranians from entering the US unless they opposed the new government or had a medical emergency.

That means Trump can also stop the resettlement of all Syrian refugees, another one of his controversial campaign promises.

Can Trump renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal?

He can try to change what he called the stupidest deal of all time. He can call up the Iranian foreign ministry and say he wants a better deal.

There is no reason to think the Iranians would agree. As president, Trump could call the other nations who took part and ask them to put sanctions back in place in order to force the talks to resume. It seems pretty unlikely the other countries would agree to that.

He could issue new US sanctions. That seems more likely because the incoming minority leader Senator Chuck Schumer has voiced opposition to the deal.

READ MORE: As America votes, a voice from Iran

He could say that the limited business US companies can do with Iran is no longer allowed. It seems unlikely that other countries are going to be willing to isolate Iran again to the extent they once did.

He could sign sanctions that make it tougher for foreign companies to do business with Iran and use the US financial system. In short, he can try to make Iran renegotiate but he will likely be left with only unilateral actions.

Can Trump start a trade war with China?

Yes, on his own without Congress and no one can stop him.

He can impose harsh tariffs on Chinese goods. That will mean that everyday goods that Americans are used to being able to buy fairly inexpensively at Wal-Mart will become incredibly expensive.

That would be hugely unpopular but he has the power to do it if he wants.

Can he renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA?

He can and officials in Canada and Mexico have said they are willing to start talking. If he can he get a better deal remains an open question.

Can he force American companies to move back to the US?

No. He quite simply cannot. He can impose heavy tariffs on the products companies make in Mexico and ship to the US.

Again, US consumers would quickly feel the pain of that move.

What can Trump do in Syria?

Anything he wants. The US involvement has been done under the legal authority of the Authorization for Use of Military Force from 2001.

Congress could pass a new bill forcing him to continue to arm opposition fighters or to stop providing assistance and that would be binding, but his own party controls both chambers of Congress and are unlikely to take that step.

READ MORE: What does Trumps victory mean for the Middle East?

Members of Congress have been reluctant to put their names to anything that authorises or stops the use of force overseas.

He can unveil his secret plan to stop the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS) or he can side with the Russians and stop backing the groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ISIL and there is little likely to stop him.

Can Trump stop normalisation with Cuba?

Yes. Just by signing his name on an executive order he can roll back every change President Barack Obama has made.

What can Trump do at the UN?

Anything he wants. He could try to lift sanctions on Russia over Ukraine in exchange for cooperation in Syria. Congress couldnt stop him, but the other veto-wielding countries can.

Can he rip up the Paris climate agreement?

Yes. With an executive order everything that was mandated under the agreement would simply go away.

Can he deport undocumented migrants?

He can do that and no one can stop him  short of a congressional bill.

Can Trump make America great again?

It seems we are about to find out.

Follow Patty Culhane on Twitter: @PattyCulhane
Ethiopia unrest and the troop withdrawals have come as a opportune boost for al-Shabab as they seize more territory.

Moqokori, Somalia  As the clock ticked past 11am and birds nestling on the short dry shrub trees chirped away, a large group of young men in camouflage uniforms and black face-wraps appeared from nowhere and marched towards an open clearing in the bush, their feet kicking up dust in the soft, sun-baked brown soil beneath.

Totalling more than 150 men and only their eyes visible, they made no eye contact or small talk among themselves as they lined up.

The men are part of al-Shababs Special Forces gathered in this rebel base in southern Somalia to undergo final training before they dispatch to nearby towns in preparation for taking them over from African Union (AU) and Somali government troops.

The training base is about 10km outside the strategic town of Moqokori in the Hiiraan region, a town the al-Qaeda-linked group retook after Ethiopian troops withdrew last month.

It is a pattern that has been repeated many times recently across south and central Somalia.

Ethiopia has more than 4,300 soldiers in Somalia as part of African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)  a UN security council-mandated mission to combat the armed group.

The East African country also has thousands of other troops that are not part of AMISOM in Somalia.

Recently, the Ethiopians have been abandoning their bases in towns in southern Somalia; 10 towns in the last four months, four of them in the past four weeks, without notice or explanation.

INTERACTIVE: Al-Shabab attacks in Somalia (2006-2016)

Jihad, shouts the groups commander under the watchful eyes of two of al-Shababs most senior and well-known figures.

Strength, honour, the fighters shout back, drawing admiring looks from their leaders.

This group of fighters  which includes medics, mechanics, explosives experts and suicide bombers  have been handpicked from al-Shababs many battalions as the group seeks to retake territories it lost to Somalias internationally recognised government and AMISOM.

Morale among the fighters appears sky-high as news reaches the training base of Ethiopia withdrawing from towns and al-Shabab taking them over without firing a single bullet or losing a fighter.

The reason they [Ethiopia] invaded our country, the reason they came to Moqokori, was to harm the Muslim population, Sheikh Ali Mohamud Raage, the groups spokesman, a tall, bulky figure with red eyes and a greying beard, told the gathered fighters who were now sitting on the hot sand.

They came here to mistreat and degrade our people and to stop them from worshipping Allah. But God chose you to defend His religion and the honour of the Muslim people, Raage said, as shouts of God is great from the fighters filled the midday air.

Changing fortunes

Ever since the rebel group was pushed out of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in 2011 by Somali and AU troops, they have been on the back foot, losing major towns and cities across the Horn of African country. The group has also lost several senior leaders in recent years.

However, the armed groups fortunes appear to be changing in central Somalia this year. Since January, Ethiopia has faced deadly street protests at home.

With no sign of the wave of unprecedented violent protests stopping or slowing down, Ethiopia declared a state of emergency this month in an effort to halt the demonstrations from spreading across Africas second most populous country.

INSIDE STORY: What is triggering Ethiopias unrest?

Horn of Africa observers believe events back in Ethiopia are the reason why Addis Ababa is cutting down its troop numbers in Somalia.

Ethiopia said it was in Somalia to preserve and protect its country from external threat, Abdullahi Boru, a Horn of Africa expert, told Al Jazeera. But Ethiopia is facing a domestic threat now  the largest threat since the overthrow of the Derg regime.

For the government, there is a change of priority. Ethiopia is a large country, and every boot is needed in Ethiopia to stem the domestic threat. The Oromo and Amhara protests are a bigger threat to the government than al-Shabab.

The protests in Ethiopia and the unexplained troop withdrawals have come as a timely boost for al-Shabab, and the groups leaders are trumping it as a victory.

They ran away in the middle of the night because they were too scared. They did not tell even the non-believers that used to work with them. Their country is falling apart. Their people are protesting because they do not want their government. But we will hunt them down until they leave all of our country, Sheikh Hassan Yakub, al-Shababs governor of the Galgaduud region, told the assembled fighters outside Moqokori.

Addis Ababa denies the latest troops withdrawal has anything to do with events back home.

We are pulling out because for a long time our country has shouldered a heavy financial burden having troops in Somalia and it is time the international community took over, Getachew Reda, Ethiopias communications affairs minister until earlier this month, told Al Jazeera.

We do not need our army to deal with any domestic issue. Our troops leaving towns in Somalia is not related to anything happening domestically in our country. It is purely an economic decision. We have done a lot to help our Somali brothers stabilise our country, but we cannot continue taking the financial burden. And I expect our troops to pull out of other towns, Reda said.

The minister also denied the troops that had been withdrawn were part of the African Union mission.

The troops are not part of AMISOM. We have a significant number of troops in Somalia as part of an agreement signed with the Somali government, Reda added.

The African Union mission said Ethiopias move would not make its operation in Somalia any easier.

The withdrawal of troops will, of course, bear more responsibilities on our troops and how we carry out our mandate. It is not an ideal situation, but we can manage with our current troop numbers, Joe Kibet, the spokesman for AMISOM, told Al Jazeera.

As the sun set behind the arid plains, the al-Shabab fighters and their military vehicles rolled into Miqokori attracting the locals, young and old, to come out of their homes.

As the troops made their way through the town and Ethiopia continued to threaten to pull its troops out of more towns, the locals were left to wonder whether their own, which changed hands more than twice in the past month, will experience a lasting peace.

Follow Hamza Mohamed on Twitter: @Hamza_Africa
In the past three months, 26 schools have been set on fire in India-administered Kashmir, affecting some 4,000 children.

Srinagar, India-administered Kashmir  They screamed and cried as they watched the fire spread in the darkness. Residents of three neighbouring villages rushed from their homes with buckets of water. But they couldnt save the school. All that was left was ash. The benches and chairs were charred. The windows were shattered.

When the firemen finally arrived, there was nothing left, just smoke, Tahseen Ali, a 31-year-old teacher at the Government Boys Middle School in Budgam, in India-administered Kashmir, says of the school that burned down on October 30.

Even the schools pupils, boys aged between eight and 14, had tried to put out the flames, says another teacher, Tasleem Arif. They tried to save the school but couldnt. Some were injured, others had their hands burnt.

I could see the gloom in their eyes, adds 35-year-old Arif. It takes years to build a school. You have to fight a lot to get a school in villages. We [teachers] are also restless now.

The school, which taught 88 students from the villages surrounding Budgam, was the 25th school in India-administered Kashmir to be set alight in the past three months.

On October 31, the Kabarmarg High Secondary School in Anantnag, in south Kashmir, became the 26th. Three hundred and forty-one students study there.

According to officials from the state education department, 12 schools have been completely destroyed, while the others have suffered partial damage.

The department says some 4,000 students are affected and there has been at least $750,000 worth of damage caused.

I have not slept for two days or eaten anything. This is a tragedy, says Showkat Hussain Shah, the principal of Kabarmarg Higher Secondary School. We had maintained the school very beautifully. It is the property of [the] community and its students.

People really tried hard to save the school and they were successful in saving records, [the] library and [the] laboratory but eight rooms have been totally gutted, he adds.

With no one having claimed responsibility for the arson and the police refusing to reveal details of their investigation, understanding who may be behind the attacks has been left to speculation.

Schools: The latest casualty

The schools are the latest casualty in the nearly four-month-long anti-India uprising in Kashmir.

Mass protests erupted in July after Indian troops killed rebel fighter Burhan Wani.

At least 90 people have been killed, more than 12,000 others injured, including hundreds maimed and blinded by lead-based pellets fired by the Indian security forces to quell one of the biggest protests in two decades.

Government officials have claimed that by calling for prolonged protests, the pro-independence movement has indirectly encouraged attacks on symbols of normality, such as schools.

The region has been under intermittent curfew since the latest uprising began, with internet and mobile access regulated at times and movement curtailed. As a result of the curfew and the protests, most children have not been attending school, and the government officials allege that the pro-independence movement would prefer for it to remain that way.

Nirmal Singh, the deputy chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, told local reporters that pro-independence leaders were encouraging  elements to burn schools.

Likewise, Aijaz Ahmed, the director of the Department of School Education in Kashmir, blamed the arson on anti-social elements, telling Al Jazeera that the perpetrators dont want children to study.

But pro-independence leaders deny that they are responsible.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a pro-independence leader of a faction of the Hurriyat party, a coalition of pro-independence parties, said in a statement that the attacks were mischievous acts [that] are part of the diversionary plan to shift the focus from dealing with the actual issue on the ground and [to] further harass and distress people.

READ MORE: Kashmiri doctors describe treating pellet injuries and share their fears for the future of their patients

Burning away our childrens futures

But as each side points at the other, parents such as Basir Ahmad Bhat, whose daughter Shariqa Bashir was a student at the Government Higher Secondary School in Kabarmag, which was partially destroyed, are left feeling that the fires are an attack on their childrens future.

The fires are burning away our children's future by Basir Ahmad Bhat

Kashmir has long been plagued by conflict. More than 500,000 troops are stationed in the Muslim-majority region and fighting between armed groups, sponsored in part by Pakistan, has resulted in more than 60,000 deaths over the past two decades. For many, education was the only way to escape this seemingly unending conflict.

It leaves a never-ending impact on the minds of children. My daughter feels traumatised, says Bhat of the fire at the Anantnag school on October 31. The fires are burning away our childrens future.

Bhat, who graduated from the same school in 1976, says his daughter Shaista and son Shakir also completed their schooling there, and are now earning their medical and engineering degrees respectively.

He recalls how, when the school was attacked by arsonists in the 1990s, villagers managed to put out the flames before too much damage was caused.

It is the oldest school in our district. Students come from more than two dozen villages to study here, he says, adding that the latest fire was a real surprise.

Teacher Tahseen Ali is concerned that if the children who attended his school arent able to return to classes soon, they may lose interest in studying altogether and, instead, get involved in some other work to earn [money].

In this village 90 percent of people are labourers or small time farmers, he explains.

And with the uprising and curfew, life is becoming tougher for them by the day, Ali says.

The poor villagers have nowhere to go. Their children were able to eat their midday meals at school and that meant a lot for them, he says. They cant think of admitting them into a private school. Their education was this school.

Even when the protests were at their height in July and August, teachers at the school in Budgam would try to offer early-morning lessons so that the students wouldnt forget what they had learned or lose interest in pursuing their education.

But now, without a school building, Ali says: We cannot help them.

Wajahat Ahmad, a lecturer in sociology at OP Jindal Global University in New Delhi, says education has long been a contested space in Kashmir. The state government has used peoples desperation for education as a form of leverage against the pro-independence movement, he says.

And the burning of schools is not new.

At the height of the armed rebellion in the 1990s, many schools were burned down, because the Indian army used them as camps. The occupation of schools by troops would often mean harassment for the residents. Young boys, girls, male and female teachers would need to be frisked, their every move watched by the army, Ahmad explains.

The state is trying to use education as a tool by Wajahat Ahmad

Whoever is doing it, there is a memory of burning schools. The intentionality of the actors is still unknown. They are playing out within the backdrop of the past and the present context, he adds.

There are thousands of people in prison. Where does this concern for education come from suddenly? The state is trying to use education as a tool. No one really cares about the poor who are at the forefront of the resistance.

Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a political analyst based in Srinagar, the summer capital of India-administered Kashmir, says that the return of soldiers to schools may be one of the reasons for the attacks.

Many school buildings have been again occupied by [the] army [and] it can be one reason for the attacks, he says.

Still, he adds, he cant rule out the possibility that some of the attacks on schools may have been an attempt to malign the peaceful uprising of the people.

Schools should be safe spaces

Human rights group Amnesty International India has condemned the attacks on schools and said in a statement that the presence of security forces in schools can increase the risk of them being attacked, and the long-term occupation of schools can increase dropouts and lower student enrolment and teacher recruitment.

Schools should be safe spaces under all circumstances. The vicious arson attacks on schools end up denying children in Kashmir their right to education, said Aakar Patel, the executive director of Amnesty International India.

Annual exams usually take place in Kashmir between October and December, but this year they are expected to be affected by the ongoing political turmoil as well as the arson attacks.

For many, it may be too late to salvage the academic year.

My son is in class XII, my daughter is in class X. They havent been to school for the last four months, says Srinagar resident Gulzar Ahmad.

The way the situation is unfolding, I dont think schools can open any time soon. The careers of hundreds of thousands of children is at stake. But I think thats the price we pay for living in a conflict zone, Ahmad says.
A former Peshmerga fighter has swapped his rifle for a paintbrush as he relives battlefield memories.

Sulaimania, Iraq  Thirty years ago, Ako Ghareb joined the Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Husseins regime, in a bid for Kurdish independence. At the age of 23, he fled to the Jafaiti Valley and surrounding mountains in northern Iraq, where he remained entrenched with the Peshmerga for seven years.

Following the first Gulf War, Iraqs Kurds achieved a measure of autonomy with the creation of a no-fly zone, and cemented those gains during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

With the ongoing war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) and a crippled economy, the struggle for fully fledged Kurdish independence is today described by many Kurds as an aspiration or a fanciful dream. But for Ghareb, the battle continues in a different form: Back in the 1980s, his weapon was an old Kalashnikov. Today, he uses an easel and a brush.

READ MORE: Hero Ibrahim Ahmad  The original female Peshmerga

Ghareb has found an outlet for his memories and his convictions on canvas. His watercolour paintings of the Kurakazhaw, Bargallo and Sara mountains  which saw countless battles with Baathist forces  are now on display at the Amna Suraka Museum in the city of Sulaimania.

The museum, set up in the old Baathist security prison, commemorates the struggles of the Peshmerga throughout the 1980s, as well as the Anfal mass killings.

There are scenes of Peshmerga fighters resting after a battle, along with an emotive portrait entitled Mother of a martyred Peshmerga. Many of these works resonate today, as some 150,000 Peshmerga form a crucial part of the ground forces in the campaign against ISIL across Iraq, most recently in Mosul.

Ghareb, who serves as director of the museum, says that his war paintings are all painted from memory.

I dont paint from photographs, he says. Each time I start painting, I am in a state of exhilaration, because it feels like Im reliving those days. But I get emotional too, because I remember some friends who are no longer with us  who died fighting.

Much like the work of Francisco Goya, who captured the horrors of war in Spain in the 1810s, or Eugene Delacroixs depiction of the Greek war of independence against the Turks, Ghareb feels that paintings can sometimes express emotion in a more powerful way than a photograph.

While many photographs were taken during the Kurdish rebellion of the 1980s, Ghareb says that his paintings convey a unique personal experience.

Photographs and paintings serve different functions, he says. A photographers duty and an artists duty are not the same. Through my paintings, I want to bring back to life aspects of Kurdish history for the next generation to visualise and understand. But when I paint historical scenes or a historical figure, its a different feeling. The amount of research that goes into each painting, and how, in a sense, I must live that era, by the end of the process, its as if I have published a book.

Through my paintings, I want to bring back to life aspects of Kurdish history for the next generation to visualise and understand. by Ako Ghareb, artist

Ghareb, 54, studied under established Iraqi Kurdish artists Ali Jola, Bakhtyar Kaftan and Abdullah Rasool, and his use of vibrant primary colours  especially in portraits and historical scenes  is reminiscent of the style of Abdul Qadir al-Rassam (1882-1952), who was once a pre-eminent figure on the Middle Eastern art scene.

In addition to his contemporary Peshmerga paintings, Ghareb has also worked on large canvases, including vibrant portraits of Sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji, a tribal leader who declared himself king of Kurdistan in 1922. Very few actual images of the Kurdish warrior-king exist, and all are monochrome in contrast to Gharebs colourful interpretation.

History isnt black and white, so why should we remember these figures in black and white? he asks. We want it in colour  every shade, every nuance.

The controversial Kurdish leader is celebrated in some circles, and vilified as a traitor in others.

We are proud of him, because he is so far the only Kurdish leader who until his dying day, called for Kurdish freedom and independence, says Ghareb.

READ MORE: The democratic republic of The Peoples Teahouse

The historical paintings are intended for the Bardaki Sera, an old municipal building recently restored with UNESCO funding. They have also become an integral part of a larger campaign supported by the regional government and UNESCO to preserve the heritage of Iraqs Kurdish region.

Gharebs paintings have been shown in galleries in Germany, China, Russia, Egypt and France, with prices ranging from anywhere between $6,000 and $30,000.

Meanwhile, as the battle continues in Mosul, is Ghareb interested in enlisting for another round of inspiration?

I signed up, gave them my name, but they havent called me, he says. Maybe Im too old for them. Who knows? But Im ready to go fight again.
In March 2013, the northern Syrian city of Raqqa fell under the control of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). More than a year later, in June 2014, a similar destiny befell Mosul, Iraq.

ISIL regards both cities as strategic, with Raqqa serving as its de-facto capital and Mosul its biggest population centre in Iraq. Although the two cities differ in size, demography and history, the battle currently raging in Mosul will probably affect civilians living in Raqqa.

Of course they [the people in Raqqa] are watching. They want ISIL to be defeated [in Mosul], but they also fear this will mean additional ISIL fighters will retreat to Raqqa, said Hussam Eesa, who currently resides in Europe and is the cofounder of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), a citizen journalism organisation that began as an anti-Assad activist campaign in Raqqa. When ISIL captured Raqqa, RBSS began posting videos and articles documenting their abuses in the city.

In Raqqa, merely following the news has become a dangerous activity since the ISIL takeover. TVs are banned in homes, and so is the internet. There are only five or six public internet places people can access, which are closely monitored by ISIL, Eesa stated.

Although internet access is limited in ISIL-controlled territory, Eesa claimed that the groups Facebook page has seen an increase in traffic recently since the battle for Mosul began, with as many as 30,000 views a day.

READ MORE: No jeans, no cigarettes on the bus from Beirut to Raqqa

Eesa said a major concern among civilians in Raqqa is that, as the offensive continues, ISIL will close all roads connecting it with Mosul  which could have major consequences for its residents wellbeing. Although Raqqa residents currently have access to food and water, they only have three to four hours of electricity a day, and the healthcare system is under heavy strain.

In by Hussam

and from the sky [Russian air raids].]

We have only one hospital left  and it is only for ISIL fighters. Civilians have to be treated at home, and there is severe shortage of medicines. This is becoming an important problem in Raqqa, Eesa said. Nor is ISIL the only threat that Raqqa faces: In Raqqa, the danger is on the ground [ISIL] and from the sky [Russian air raids].

Under ISILs totalitarian rule, sharing ones views and information about what is happening in the city can be a capital offence. Most people who were approached through organisations and NGOs, declined to comment to Al Jazeera.

On condition of anonymity, however, one source, who is originally from Raqqa, said that the battle of Mosul, putting pressure on ISIL, means more pressure on Raqqa  the two cities are the brain of ISIL. It is very likely that the high cadres [elite forces of ISIL] will be retreating increasingly to Raqqa. This movement will result in added pressure on civilians in the city and on their daily lives.

According to the source, the number of suicide bombers and the movement between the two cities will keep increasing while the battle of Mosul rages  a view he said is shared by many in Raqqa.





Both Eesa and the anonymous source, as civilians, said that they fear the Kurdish fighters who they blame for a number of human rights violations against Arab Syrians living in northern Syria.

An Amnesty International report published last year confirmed these abuses, and an article, published by RBSS in October, claimed that the Kurdish militias announced that they are imposing compulsory recruitment in Tal Abyad and its suburbs. This was the reason of the displacement of a large number of young people from the area.





We take for granted the fact that the local population [in Mosul and in Raqqa] views ISIL as the West does, said Lorenzo Trombetta, an Italian researcher who has done extensive work on Syria and Lebanon.

While ISIL certainly is feared and hated for its brutal acts, these acts are not perceived as less fierce than those perpetrated by the bombings of the Iranian-affiliated militia, or of the oppression suffered under the Kurds. Trombetta, who conducted interviews in the course of his research with civilians, activists, community leaders and businessmen from Raqqa, says that the general perception among the Raqqa population is that the Kurds are secessionists.

He pointed out that Raqqa, together with Deir Az Zor, now represents the last relatively secured stronghold for ISIL. The most plausible scenario for the ongoing battle for Raqqa is that the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, led by YPG [Peoples Protection Unit], exert pressure from Ayn Issa [50km north Raqqa] with the aerial support of the US-led international coalition, he explained.

In the short- to mid-term, he added, there are no other war fronts that could pose a serious threat to ISIL in Raqqa, as the city enjoys a territorial depth towards the south, east and west, despite a relatively close presence of rival forces close to Tabqa Dam.

Samir Aita, founder of the Syrian Democratic Forum, president of the Circle of Arab Economists and former editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatiques Arabic edition, said that while Mosul is the economic capital for ISIL, Raqqa is the first city they conquered and on which they based their state project.

As a state, ISIL will only disappear if they will lose control of Raqqa, he told Al Jazeera. What will be a determining factor is the way in which Raqqa will be liberated. This will shape the future of Syria.

Meanwhile, with ISILs territory shrinking, Eesa said a number of foreign fighters had contacted RBSS asking for help to leave the group and return to Europe.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced on Sunday that they were launching operation Euphrates Anger to liberate Raqqa. However, as mentioned by RBSS in an article posted in October, going after ISIL-held Raqqa would mean moving deeper into an explosive mix of regional and international rivalries.

According to Trombetta, the conditions for Raqqas residents will worsen regardless of whether Mosul falls rapidly or not. Even if ISIL were defeated militarily, Trombetta believes, it would not cease to exist as an idea in the minds of some supporters, who may continue to carry out attacks in Syria and Iraq.
I did a documentary about Trumps supporters and here is what I found out about them 

Over the span of this gruelling presidential campaign, I have read and studied countless well-meaning, thoughtful and intelligent articles about the 47 percent of American voters who elected Donald Trump President of the United States of America.

None of these examinations helped me to understand any better who the Trump supporters are and why they are so attracted to him, while many others firmly believe that he was clearly unfit for the job.

Like many of my fellow Americans, I was left with an eerie discomfort as to what would happen if he was to be elected, but I was baffled that so many others didnt agree with me.





Fuelled by this consternation, I decided to try to discover the truth in the most objective, non-partisan way I could. As a filmmaker, I travelled to Cleveland, Ohio, in July, during the Republican Convention that nominated Trump as its candidate, to make a documentary of discovery called Trump Tribe.

Together with my producing partner Peter Koper, we decided to adopt an anthropological approach to our subject  one where we as outside observers tried as little as possible to inject our own feelings into the investigation, while documenting the various tribal rituals we discovered.

As with any tribe, we uncovered many practices that help us to now understand how to analyse todays breathtaking political tsunami, and to use these findings to postulate about the future.

A new cult

While making Trump Tribe, Peter and I interviewed many of Trumps loyalists inside the Republican National Convention, and we embedded ourselves among his supporters, both inside and outside the Convention Hall.

What we witnessed was often amusing, sometimes heartwarming, and frequently troubling  an eye-opening view into what had developed from a political movement into a cult, with Trump as its leader.

His supporters feel that they are not part of the larger Republican Party structure, they resent that their beliefs are regarded by many people as extreme, bigoted or dangerous, and they are completely devoted to their leader. They show many signs of cult behaviour. Now that Trump has been elected president, Trumpism will have a major effect on American politics and culture for years to come.

In 2005, I directed Trump during the first season of his reality television hit series, The Apprentice, and when he started his campaign I was both fascinated and terrified.

To many Americans, and to most people I know, supporting him made no sense. To these Americans, his supporters were either misogynists, or racists, or uneducated, or just plain stupid. At first, they did seem to be, indeed, deplorable.

During filming we gave free rein to Trump supporters to explain themselves in their own words.

As expected, some were toeing the Republican Party line, while others were just plain crackpots. But many we talked to made sense, once we sat down to discuss their frustrations and feelings.

They believed that workers should be protected from the ravages of open trade, that illegal immigration should stop in order to protect American jobs, and that we should end our interventionist foreign policies of the past four decades.

Some even believed that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes, or that the minimum wage was too low. They often sounded like  Democrats! This was a far cry from the traditional policies of the mainstream Republican Party. And those supporters  not the traditional Republicans or the crackpots  are the ones who made the difference and got Trump elected.

Perhaps the Republican Party will successfully co-opt this force, as it did previously with the Tea Party, but I sense this time is different. The Republican Party and Trumpism are distinctly different sociopolitical entities, at war with one another.

Trumpism is smaller than the 47 percent of the electorate that voted for Trump in this election, but it is intense and unified. Trumpism is an existential challenge to the Republican Party, due to its political core ideology  one which has a strong backing among supporters of both political parties in the US.

The future of the Trump tribe

We are experiencing the end of Reaganism and the birth of a new nationalist and isolationist political movement that fully rejects the economics of neoliberalism and the politics of globalisation that have been the driving forces behind the United States since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Trumpism is a politics that is suspicious of our democratic institutions, including the free press. It has a vision for the future that is unprecedented in the country.

I firmly believe that Trump as its leader will use this cult to his advantage in order to reshape what remains of the Republican Party as we know it, by forming a transatlantic alliance of authoritarian political movements with the likes of the National Front in France, the UK Independence Party in Britain, Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and Jobbik in Hungary. This is a new era in the US, indeed.

OPINION: Donald Trump  The Islamophobia president

Pragmatic politics are not Trumps modus operandi; therefore to keep his tribe loyal, President Trump will pander to them with renewed energy and volume. How will his hardcore supporters react if their beloved president does not deliver on his promises?

They will rationalise, they will make excuses and they will twist the truth because, as in all cults, they are all in. Failure is not in their lexicon, when they think of their cult leader, so they will blame others.

Moreover, should President Trump get stalled by the quagmire of Washington politicking, he may get impatient and call on his tribe for help. If this happens, all bets are off.

James Bruce is a US-based film director and producer.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Election of Republican who focused much of his campaign vilifying minority communities has made some Americans nervous.

Its been about 48 hours since Donald Trumps surprise win in the US presidential election, but Alicia Scotland-Smalls still cannot shake off a feeling of shock and fear.

Given that racism was part of Trumps campaign, I am afraid that racists might feel emboldened to commit acts of violence and discrimination against our community, Scotland-Smalls, a 29-year-old African American from Greenville, South Carolina, told Al Jazeera.

While at work, I am always on guard because you never know who will come through the door, the shipping clerk said.

She is not alone in being worried. For many members of the African-American community, Trumps presidency represents genuine concerns of a resurgence of racism and institutionalised violence against them.

Before the election, Trumps campaign had focused heavily on minorities and foreigners, with rights groups raising concerns that the election of Trump might legitimise outward racism and physical violence. Just days before the election, a black church in Mississippi was burned and spray-painted with Vote Trump on one of its outside walls.

A former reality TV star who was endorsed by far-right groups and politicians, Trump received widespread criticism for a series of misogynistic, racist and xenophobic remarks, including a call for a ban on Muslims entering the US and a pledge to build a wall to block Mexicans from entering the country.

And over the past few days, many Americans have used social media to recount racist attacks that took place following the 70-year-olds election win.

The 2016 campaign has regularised racism, standardised anti-Semitism, and mainstreamed misogyny, Cornell William Brooks, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said in a statement after Trumps win.

While the NAACP, the nations oldest civil rights group, congratulated the president-elect, it also urged him to be more inclusive and stay away from his brash, unapologetic, racist politics.

We are now calling on the next president to speak and act with the moral clarity necessary to silence [his campaigns] racial politics, Brooks said.

Racist attacks might increase

Trump won the election partly because of the low voting turnout among the black community, which was significantly less than during Obama campaign, according to Bob Starks, professor emeritus of inner city studies at North Eastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Early exit polls reported by various US media showed that African Americans, as well as Latinos, did not support Trumps rival, Hillary Clinton, in the same way as when President Barack Obama was running for re-election four years ago.

The vast majority of African Americans, who comprise about 14 percent of the US population, have historically and consistently voted for the Democratic Party since the 1930s.

On Tuesdays election, about 88 percent of African-American voters backed Clinton, less than the 91 percent Obama  the first black president  got in 2012.

All things considered, we as African-Americans must reassess our stance vis-a-vis both the Democratic and the Republican parties and demand better representation in both parties, especially at this historic juncture, Starks told Al Jazeera.

With Trump in power, Starks claimed, the African-American community might witness more police shootings, more incidents of racist attacks against them and an increase in mass incarceration.

According to an NAACP criminal justice report, African-Americans constitute nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population in the US.

One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime, the report said.

Stoking fears

Ahead of the vote, both pollsters and major media outlets consistently predicted a landslide victory for Clinton.

But since then, many have argued that such false predictions ultimately helped suppress the black and Latino vote, as they led both communities to think a win for the Democratic candidate was a forgone conclusion.

Early exit polls reported by various US media showed that African Americans as well as Latinos did not support Trumps rival, Hillary Clinton, in the same way as when President Barack Obama was running for president.

For Salim Muwakkil, a well-known Chicago radio host, Trumps victory was not a total surprise.

He argues that Trumps presidency is part of a global trend of rising extreme nationalism and racism in response to massive immigration to Europe from poorer countries and violent attacks over the past few years.

Trumps election indicates that the US is reacting to the same factors that have occurred in Europe in recent years, he told Al Jazeera.

The president-elect was able to rally the white poor and working-class votes by using anti-refugee xenophobia or racism to stoke fears and uncertainty among a segment of the electorate against an alleged growing power of blacks or other minorities, according to Muwakkil.

But even without these issues, Muwakkil argues that it is hard for any political party to keep control of the White House for more than two terms.

The irony of it all is that the poor white working-class Americans have elected a billionaire who epitomises an economic policy that was directly responsible for their poverty, he said.

Follow Ali Younes on Twitter: @Ali_reports
Derik governor Fatih Safiturk succumbs to wounds, a day after explosion in his office in Mardin, near the Syria border.

Turkeys state-run news agency says an official has died of wounds sustained in an attack on a government building in southeastern Turkey.

The Anadolu Agency said Fatih Safiturk, the district governor of the town of Derik, died in a hospital on Friday.

Safiturk and two others were wounded on Thursday when assailants attacked his office, near the border with Syria, with an improvised explosive device.

Several others were wounded in the Derik attack.

Security forces launched an operation to catch the assailants, state news said, without providing details.

Authorities have blamed the attack on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

Kurdish fighters, however, have not claimed responsibility.

A fragile peace process between the government and the PKK broke down last year, leading to renewed violence in Turkeys mainly Kurdish southeastern region.

At least 700 state security personnel and thousands of Kurdish fighters have been killed since then, according to Anadolu.

Turkey has been rocked by a series of deadly bomb attacks in the past 18 months, carried out by the PKK or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.
ESCWAs $614bn figure equal to six percent of GDP of regional economies from 2010 Tunisia protests to end of last year.

The so-called Arab Spring of 2011 has cost the regions economies an estimated $614bn of growth because of governmental changes, continuing conflict and falling oil prices, according to a UN agency.

The figure from the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), equivalent to six percent of GDP up to the end of last year, is based on growth projections made before the revolutions started.

Published on Thursday, it is the first estimate of its kind by a global economic body.

In December 2010, protests broke out in Tunisia which led to the first of the series of revolutions that became known as the Arab Spring, which later toppled four leaders and mired Yemen, Syria and Libya in war.

READ MORE: My Arab Spring  Tunisias revolution was a dream

In its sixth year of conflict, Syria alone has suffered GDP and capital losses of $259bn since 2011, according to estimates from the National Agenda for the Future of Syria, another UN programme.

Oil prices began to slide in mid-2014 and fell to 13-year lows this January, hitting producer countries such as Saudi Arabia, and others including Lebanon that rely heavily on remittances from citizens working in Arab Gulf states.





Mohamed el Moctar Mohamed el Hacene, ESCWAs economic development director, said the oil downturn would probably benefit producer countries.

They will put in place economic reforms leading to real diversification, he told Reuters news agency.

Meanwhile, the region needed more financial support from the international community.

We have seen in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Balkans the support they got in order to recover after conflict. We have not seen so far such support occurring for the Arab region, Hacene said.

According to ESCWA, there has been some progress on social indicators, such as gender equality in Middle East.

READ MORE: My Arab Spring  Egypts silent protest

However, countries in and affected by political transition and conflict have regressed on a plethora of socioeconomic indicators over the past five years, the report stated.

The Survey of Economic and Social Developments in the Arab Region 2015-2016 uses recent data to assess the destructive impact of instability and conflict, including on growth and economic output.

It also draws on research by ESCWA on migration, social developments, the impact of conflict, womens empowerment and specific country-level analysis.
Early summer storms in South Africa have caused fatal flash floods in Johannesburg. At least six people are reported as dead in Gauteng, and more may be still missing.

Heavy rains caused national roads and the OR Tambo International Airport to flood on Wednesday afternoon. On approach roads and, indeed, other roads, many cars were washed away while drivers looked on helplessly.

The term flash flood was appropriate as the water level rose so quickly that people were trapped in their cars while on the highway. About 100 cars were reported as having been swept off the N3, the major freeway joining Johannesburg with Durban.

Hail fell in abundance around Johannesburg, ranging in size from small pellets to marbles. It fell to a depth of approximately 20cm in Pretoria.

On Thursday, thunderstorms bloomed further west, over Free State, Eastern Cape, Gauteng and Lesotho. Johannesburg escaped lightly.

The average rainfall for Johannesburg in November is 117mm. What fell on Wednesday was recorded as 90mm at OR Tambo airport. That is extreme and the results were obvious.

Thunderstorms developed again on Friday and the South African Weather Service issued a warning for Gauteng.

This is the worst thunderstorm in Johannesburg for decades, and follows a period of drought. The effects are made worse because storm drains have not had to deal with rushing water for some time and have accumulated blocking debris.

A positive note comes from the topping-up of nearby reservoirs. To the south of Johannesburg, the Vaal dam could hold 2.6m megalitres of water. Before the deluge, its level was at 26.5 per cent of this, a poor way to start summer; so this additional inflow will help.

Novembers average rainfall has now been surpassed in Johannesburg and the rain hasnt ceased. Flash flooding is still possible, but conditions will ease from Saturday in Gauteng. The most violent weather will then be in Mpumalanga and Swaziland and heading for the Mozambique border.

Additional reporting by Al Jazeeras Rob McElwee
Deaths of 13 people in Sahibabad, outside Delhi, seen as latest evidence of countrys poor workplace-safety record.

Thirteen workers have died in a fire at a suspected illegal garment factory on the outskirts of Delhi in India.

The workers were sleeping when the blaze started in the early hours of Friday on the ground floor of a narrow building, which was being used to make leather jackets in Sahibabad, a suburb of Delhi.

The fire broke out at a factory in a residential area of Sahibabad around 4:30am. Thirteen people, who were sleeping there have died and another two or three people are getting treated at the hospital, Bhagwat Singh, local police spokesman, told AFP news agency.

Abbas Hussain, a local fire officer, said two workers were rescued after they woke up when the fire started.

READ MORE: Manufacturing discontent  Indias workers in crisis

The two of them woke up by chance and say they screamed for others to wake up while running towards the terrace but others didnt wake up, perhaps it was already late, he said.

Hussain said workers died of smoke inhalation and described piles of leather stacked in the buildings narrow staircase and cramped workshop, adding that the factory was most likely illegal.





From what we see, there was nothing proper and the factory must surely not have been a legal one but we can say for sure only after a proper investigation, he said.

A dozen fire engines doused the flames after battling them for several hours. The cause of the fire is being investigated.

The fire is yet another blight on Indias poor record for workplace safety where deadly accidents are commonplace.

Eight workers were killed last month in a huge explosion at a firework factory in the southern state of Tamil Nadu while a blaze in a firecracker workshop killed 15 people in May 2014 in central Madhya Pradesh.

A fire at a factory where leather bags were being stitched killed six workers in November 2013 in New Delhi.

Some of the victims were trapped inside the building and burned beyond recognition.

South Asias lucrative garment industry has a particularly alarming safety record, with watchdogs saying safety rules are routinely flouted.

READ MORE: Portraits of child labourers

A huge fire triggered by a boiler explosion at a packaging factory just north of Dhaka, Bangladesh, left 25 people dead in September.

In November 2012, at least 111 workers were killed when a devastating fire engulfed a nine-storey garment factory outside Dhaka.

The accident was followed by an even bigger disaster six months later when 1,138 people died after a clothing factory complex collapsed, trapping more than 3,000 workers.

The Rana Plaza tragedy triggered international outrage and put pressure on European and US clothing brands to improve pay and conditions at the factories that supply them.
UN details series of reported ISIL abuses and warns that the armed group is stockpiling chemicals in civilian areas.

ISIL fighters have reportedly shot and killed scores of civilians in Mosul in recent days, according to the UN, which has also confirmed the discovery of a mass grave in the nearby town of Hammam al-Alil, in which more than 100 bodies were found.

In a brief published on Friday detailing a series of ISIL executions and abuses, the UNs human rights office said that 40 people were killed by the armed group on Tuesday for treason and collaboration with the Iraqi forces and their allies closing in on the city during a major military push.

Dressed in orange jumpsuits, the bodies of the victims were hung from electrical poles in several areas around Mosul, the UN said.

On Wednesday evening, ISIL reportedly shot to death a further 20 civilians in the Ghabat military base in northern Mosul, also on charges of leaking information.

Their bodies were also hung at various intersections in Mosul, with notes stating: Decision of execution and used cell phones to leak information to the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), the UN said.

The rights office also said the mass grave in Hammam al-Alil, south of Mosul, was just one of several ISIL killing grounds.

The site was discovered on Monday and contained the bodies of at least 100 people, including former ISF officers and ISIL detainees, as well as people killed for initiating anti-ISIL attacks since the beginning of the Mosul operation four weeks ago.

IN PICTURES: Life after ISIL on the outskirts of Mosul

Ive been in Erbil since the beginning of this military operation to retake the city of Mosul and we have documented hundreds of executions by ISIL, Belkis Wille, a spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch (HRW), told Al Jazeera from Erbil.

We are not surprised, unfortunately, to see mass graves like this one [in Hammam al-Alil]; it definitely is not the only one.

Chemical weapons, human shields

The human rights body said they had received reports of ISIL stockpiling large amounts of chemicals in civilian areas in order to be used as weapons.





At least four people died from inhaling fumes after ISIL shelled and set fire to the al-Mishrag sulfur gas factory in Mosul on October 23.

The UN also said it had gathered evidence that teenagers and young boys were being used by ISIL as suicide bombers during the offensive, while young girls and women were being sexually exploited by the armed groups fighters.

Since 27 October, ISIL has been relocating abducted women, including Yazidi women, into Mosul city and into Tel Afar town, the human rights body said in its brief.

Some of these women were reportedly distributed to ISIL fighters while others have been told they will be used to accompany ISIL convoys.

Atrocities on both sides

But in its brief, the UN human rights office also urged the Iraqi government to ensure that the rights of Mosul civilians are met amid accusations of atrocities committed by government forces.

It cited sporadic reports of retaliatory attacks, including allegations of revenge killings by civilians or by forces under the control of the Iraqi army.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein, said that he welcomed a statement by the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi condemning such acts, but urged the government to act to prevent reprisals and revenge killings.

Justice for the victims and survivors of human rights abuses and violations  irrespective of when, where or by whom such abuses and violations were committed  need to be impartial, transparent and effective, Zeid said.

The government of Iraq must act quickly to restore effective law enforcement in areas retaken from ISIL to ensure that captured fighters and their perceived supporters are dealt with according to the law.

One video circulating on social media on Friday appeared to show a teenage boy being shot and run over by a tank used by what seemed to be Iraqi-backed forces.

I think we need to exercise extreme caution with videos like this, HRWs Wille told Al Jazeera. We know that ISIL previously produced fake videos showing Iraqi forces committing abuses.





There is a possibility that this video had been faked by ISIL fighters to shift the public opinion against Iraqi forces, she said.

There is no flag on the tank in the video. That is a bit inconsistent with what Ive seen on Iraqi force tanks, Wille said. Also only one man in the video is wearing an Iraqi uniform, and there are no other armoured vehicles in the area.

But, she said, if the video is genuine, Iraqi authorities should take swift action to stop these kinds of extrajudicial killings.

Unfortunately in the battle to retake Fallujah, weve seen multiple instances of abuses perpetrated by pro-government forces against the civilian population.

And there is an extreme concern that this may happen again in Mosul.

READ MORE: Iraqi forces accused of killing civilians near Mosul

Separately, Amnesty International on Thursday accused Iraqi police of torturing and executing civilians in villages near Mosul.

The UK-based rights group said its researchers had gathered evidence that up to six people were extrajudicially executed last month in the al-Shura and al-Qayyarah sub-districts of Mosul over suspected ties to ISIL.

Later on Thursday, Iraqs federal police issued a statement denying its forces had been involved in extrajudicial killings.

Battle for Mosul rages

Meanwhile, Iraqi special forces said they pushed deeper into Mosul on Friday despite heavy resistance from ISIL fighters using civilians as cover, and were holding half a dozen city neighbourhoods seized in the past 10 days.

The elite Counterterrorism Service troops broke through ISIL defence lines to enter the city early last week and have since been embroiled in brutal, close-quarters combat with waves of suicide bombers and snipers.

The number of civilians killed in Iraq last month has nearly doubled since September, according to recently released figures by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq.

The latest statistics reported 1,120 killed, up from 609 in September; and 1,005 civilian injuries, an increase from 951 in September.
Landmark agreement signed in Tokyo despite criticism from anti-nuclear groups citing threats to safety.

Japan has signed a controversial deal to sell civil nuclear power equipment and technology to I ndia, despite resistance from campaigners, as the two countries seek to boost business and security ties.

The pact, signed on Friday in Tokyo by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi , marked the first time Japan agreed to such a deal with a country that is not a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Signing of Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy is a historic step in our engagement for a clean energy partnership.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) November 11, 2016

The treaty bans nations other than the five permanent members of the UN Security Council from developing and possessing nuclear weapons.

INSIDE STORY: India  Flexing its military muscle

Critics in Japan, the victim of US atomic bombings in the final days of World War II, have previously raised concerns about a risk of the countrys technology being diverted to Indias nuclear weapons programme.

Yet, the deal is limited to peaceful commercial use, and Tokyo cam terminate it if India conducts a nuclear test.

The pact allows India to reprocess fuel and enrich uranium, though highly enriched uranium that can be used to make nuclear weapons is not permitted without written agreement by Japan.





Abe and Modi insisted the agreement will contribute to peaceful use of clean energy.

This agreement sets a legal framework to assure that India acts responsibly for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, Abe said, adding that it gets India to effectively participate in the non-proliferation treaty framework.

It is also in line with Japans position to promote non-proliferation to create a world without nuclear weapons.

Abes pro-business government seeks to export nuclear power plants to counter shrinking sales at home since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, and has discussed similar deals with Vietnam and Turkey.

Modi praised the signing as a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership that will help India to combat the challenge of climate change.

Indo-Japanese #Nuclear agreement amounts to nuclear proliferation in Asia warns Greenpeace->>https://t.co/tjqFeHVB1i  Greenpeace India (@greenpeaceindia) November 10, 2016

Anti-nuclear groups denounced the agreement, citing threats to safety and regional peace and increased risk of proliferation.

There is no effective separation between Indias nuclear energy programme and its weapons programme, and the Japanese governments agreement conditions are meaningless, Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Japan, said in a statement .

Approving nuclear trade with India is a geo-strategic decision to support further nuclear weapons proliferation in Asia.

OPINION: Are India and Pakistan heading for a nuclear showdown?

The women of Fukushima, an anti-nuclear lobbying group, have issued an appeal to Modi to visit the disaster area and see at first hand the consequences of nuclear power.

Nuclear power plants will not bring happiness to your citizens, the group said in an open letter.

We who experienced the injury of the nuclear accident, we came to understand this through our own bodies and lives.

Energy-hungry India wants to increase nuclear power generation to support its strong economic growth. The country has signed similar nuclear agreements with France, Russia, Britain and the United States.
Donald Trumps election victory risks upsetting the relationship between the European Union and the United States, the president of the European Commission has said.

Speaking to students at a conference in Luxembourg on Friday, Jean-Claude Juncker said the 70-year-old former reality TV star was ignorant of the EU and its workings, and would waste time for two years while touring a world he is completely unaware of.





The election of Trump poses the risk of upsetting intercontinental relations in their foundation and in their structure, said Juncker, one of Europes most powerful political figures.

Juncker also warned against the pernicious consequences of Trumps statements on security policy.

He also recalled a Trump statement in which he seemed to think that Belgium, the country that hosts the headquarters of the EU and NATO, was a city.

We will need to teach the president-elect what Europe is and how it works, Juncker said, adding that Americans usually had no interest in Europe.

I think we will waste two years before Mr Trump tours the world he does not know, said Juncker, who on Thursday had already raised doubts about Trumps views on global trade, climate policy and Western security.

WATCH: How will President Trump deal with ISIL, Syria, Iran?

Junckers comments contrasted with the more diplomatic reactions of other European leaders, who said they looked forward to working with the next Republican president.

Within hours of the Republicans surprise win, EU Council President Donald Tusk said that despite the talk of protectionism and isolationism by Trumps campaign, both sides should consolidate the bridges we have been building across the Atlantic.

Federica Mogherini, the EUs foreign policy chief, said on Twitter that EU-US ties are deeper than any change in politics. Well continue to work together, rediscovering the strength of Europe.

Meanwhile, among Trumps main supporters, and some of the first to wish him well in his new role, were Frances far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who heads the National Front; Viktor Orban, Hungarys prime minister; and Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who believes Muslim immigration should be halted.
Victims take to social media to recount physical and verbal abuse as rights groups call on president-elect to act.

Americans have taken to social media to recount racist attacks that have taken place following the election of Donald Trump as the next US president.

Trumps campaign had heavily focused on minorities and foreigners, including Muslims and Mexicans, as he painted the two groups as threats to peace and the economy respectively.

Famously, Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the US during his campaign. He also promised to build a wall to block Mexicans from entering the country.

Rights groups have said that they are concerned about the future. Many believe the election of Trump, a former reality TV star who was endorsed by far-right groups and politicians, might legitimise outward racism and physical violence.

Among Trumps main supporters, and some of the first to wish him well in his new role, are the far-right European leaders such as Frances Marine Le Pen, who heads the National Front; Viktor Orban, Hungarys prime minister; and Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who believes Muslim immigration should be halted.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Americas largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation, on Thursday called on Trump to repudiate alleged attacks on Muslim students at universities in Louisiana and California reportedly by some of his supporters.

For its part, Human Rights Watch said Trump should abandon campaign rhetoric that seemed to reject many of the United States core human rights obligations.

He found a path to the White House through a campaign marked by misogyny, racism, and xenophobia, but thats not a route to successful governance. President-elect Trump should commit to leading the US in a manner that fully respects and promotes human rights for everyone, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Here are some of the social media posts detailing racist attacks that have taken place since Tuesday, when tens of millions turned out to vote for the 70-year-old:

https://twitter.com/nancyleong/status/796761192098332672

My letter to @USPS about what I witnessed today in Cambridge, Massachusetts. #Trump pic.twitter.com/MyeAQvP28l  Yarden Katz (@yardenkatz) November 9, 2016

https://twitter.com/akothawalaa/status/796536200265748480

Not even 24 hours yet. My friend's sister, who is Muslim, had a knife pulled on her by a Trump supporter while on the bus by UIUC campus.  not sarah harvard (@amyharvard_) November 9, 2016

San Jose State University sent an email that a woman had her hijab ripped off by a white male with such force it choked her as she fell  Pam Pho  (@NerdyPam) November 10, 2016

Guys, a trump supporter tried pulling off my hijab This is not a joke anymore, all non-whites have become targets. Stay safe   Leens (@Palestixian) November 9, 2016

https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/796754379370102784

https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/796787715450793985

https://twitter.com/mehreenkasana/status/796349158638686209
Project which began in 2010 and cost $7m opens in Ramallah on the 12th anniversary of the Palestinians leaders death.

A museum built on the grounds of the presidential headquarters in Ramallah, dedicated to the legacy of Yasser Arafat, has opened to the public, a day short of the 12-year anniversary of the Palestinian leaders death.

The museum, according to Nasser al-Kidwa, chairman of the board of the Yasser Arafat Foundation, intends to present the most important events in Palestinian history from the beginning of the 20th century until the death of Arafat in 2004.

Speaking on Thursday in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, at a rally commemorating Arafat, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said: 2017 is going to be the year to end the occupation, and even though Arafat is gone in body, he still lives among us in spirit.

Arafat died on November 11, 2004, at a French military hospital after suffering a sudden illness following three years of Israeli military siege around his Ramallah headquarters.

READ MORE: He deserves more than this

Construction on the $7m project began in 2010. Kidwa said visitors will be able to walk from the museum to Arafats former office and bedroom by bridge.

On display are a selection of personal belongings, including his pistol and his keffiyeh kerchief.

The team of curators had a hard time collecting all of Arafats belongings, Kidwa said.

He said while the belongings in Ramallah were easy to find, most of Arafats items in the Gaza Strip were lost after the Palestinian group Hamas took over the territory in 2007.

Kidwa said Arafats Nobel Peace Prize medal, which he won after signing the interim agreement with Israel in 1993, was found in a market in Gaza.
101 East investigates how every year, tens of thousands of girls and women in India are trafficked into slave marriages.

Decades of sex selection favouring male babies have left some Indian states with vastly more men than women, creating a lucrative and growing market for traffickers.

In the patriarchal and feudal state of Haryana where theres a shortage of women to marry, its normal for men to buy young girls trafficked from other states.

Known as paros, a term implying they can be purchased, they are regularly raped, forced into marriages and made to work as bonded labour.

Their uneducated families are often tricked into agreeing to send them away, lured by the idea of a happy marriage for their daughters. But tragically, there is no happily ever after.
In a bid to escape poverty and caste discrimination, some Hindu Dalits are converting to Islam and other faiths.

Filmmaker: Mostafa Bouazzaoui

For centuries Indias social structure was built around a rigid Hindu caste system. While the caste system was constitutionally abolished in 1950, its legacy still deeply affects contemporary Indian society.

The Hindu population, around 84 percent of the 1.2 billion people that live in the country, is still influenced by the four main traditional castes, which also have their own sub-sects: Brahmins, the priestly and academic class; Kshatriya, the warrior caste; Vaishya, which comprises the business community; and Shudra, the working class.

Garbage pickers already live in hell from the day they're born. It's not their fault they're born into a lower caste. All of this gets dumped on them. If you're born into a lower caste you suffer the worst type of slavery. Converting to another religion doesn't change anything and this includes Islam. by Ashif Shaikh, director of the NGO Jan Sahas, which works towards abolishing manual garbage picking in Madhya Pradesh

Outside these four groups are others, including the Dalits, who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Dalits have traditionally done jobs considered ritually impure, like garbage collection, street sweeping, the cremation of dead bodies and the disposal of human waste.

With Dalits continuing to face prejudice and discrimination within their own communities, some try to find social acceptance by converting to Buddhism, Christianity, Sikhism or Islam.

It bothers me whenever I introduce myself. People ask about my surname, says Rakesh, whos a dhobi, the washerman caste.

Rakesh has converted to Islam and changed his name to Ali Kanojia.

I tell them my name is Rakesh. They ask, Rakesh what? They normally ask you this at a Hindus house, he says.

But conversion is not simply a way out  prejudices still carry over into other religions. Many converts face resistance and even violence from their families or the communities they were born into and the new chosen faith can pose a different set of challenges  like those faced by Ali Kanojia from his own family.

Its not easy to convert to Islam, he says. They [the family] say its not right. I ask, Why? They say its because Muslims have a bad reputation.

Abdulrahman Bhartis conversion to Islam almost cost him his life.

I got shot by Hindu people from the Sawar clan  . When a person converts, the new religion welcomes them, but people from the old religion try to stop them. If they cant, theyll try to kill them. This happened to me, says Bharti who was shot in the chest and leg.

After independence in 1947, the Indian government introduced positive discrimination in favour of low caste groups, but not everyone enjoys the same benefits.

Its a highly complex benefit structure with certain jobs, education opportunities and political representation reserved for different social and religious groups.

The Reservation Act covers a wide range of eventualities, but for Dalits the disadvantages of conversion may arguably outweigh the advantages, especially when it comes to jobs.

The protection includes Sikhs and Jains, and Buddhists, but it doesnt include Christians and Muslims, so what happens is that they get excluded from those  the quotas for SCs [Scheduled Castes], says Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch.

Kanojia, for instance, has not been able to get a government job.

If you dont have a lower caste certificate you wont get a reserved job. I dont have the lower caste certificate. My parents were illiterate and had little understanding of things I cant get a job anywhere, says Kanojia.

Set primarily in Mumbai and in the Madhya Pradesh countryside, this film provides an insight into conversion to other religions  the social reformer and principal architect of the Indian constitution, BR Ambedkar, was born a Dalit and converted to Buddhism and many followed in his footsteps  and the processes for finalising conversions.

We hear the personal stories of different Dalit Muslims and the campaign of one man, descended from Muslim converts, to end garbage picking and discrimination against Dalits in Madhya Pradesh.

This is part of a broader struggle where castes, clans and religions determine the course of millions of lives.
The crowd grew quickly outside Gainesvilles City Hall on Thursday evening. Just days removed from the presidential election, hundreds of anti-Donald Trump supporters listened on as students, faculty members and community leaders painted an apocalyptic portrait of the billionaires impending presidency.

I will never call that man my president, said UF professor Paul Ortiz, who was among the first of dozens of speakers at a late afternoon rally that would continue for more than two hours.

Ortiz, an expert in African-American and Latino studies, saw his emotions following Trumps defeat of Hillary Clinton change from ashamed Tuesday to angry Thursday, as protests against Trump sprouted across the nation.

As several supporters held signs denouncing the Republican as a racist and a bully, Ortiz spoke about his wife, a victim of sexual assault, and about his father, a Mexican who faced racism growing up in Texas.

He called my family and my people thugs, Ortiz said, referencing Trumps comments about undocumented immigrants from Mexico.

Organized by a group of labor-union members, the rally was one of several acts of protest against Tuesdays election results. In the days since, thousands have marched in about 50 protests nationwide, according to a tally by USA Today.

After suggesting Thursday evening that the media had organized some of these professional protests, Trump himself took back to Twitter to glorify the groups of protesters as patriots.

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud! Trump tweeted Friday morning.

As dozens took turns speaking into a microphone on the steps of City Hall, others waved signs denouncing Trump as a racist. Still others brainstormed potential plans to halt the president-elects inauguration, calling Gainesville a city of resistance. In Alachua County, about 58 percent of voters supported Clinton over Trump, according to the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections Office.

The fight back begins with each of us, Ortiz said.

Diana Moreno, the program coordinator of Hispanic-Latino Affairs at UF, became emotional as she expressed concern for what a Trump presidency would mean for Hispanic students whose parents may be undocumented. Once in office, Trump hopes to begin deporting undocumented immigrants.

I am no longer going to assume the best, she said. I am going to prepare for the worst.

Enjoy what you're reading? Get content from The Alligator delivered to your inbox Subscribe Now

She recalled a time when she was undocumented after immigrating to the U.S. from Ecuador. She said the American people underestimated the strength of Trumps base and that Gainesville needed to unite against his immigration policies.

I need you all to tell me that you will be alongside us, she said, sobbing.

Ariana Giampietro, a UF psychology senior, said she fears Trump supporters disregard for their candidates lewd comments about women and the sexual-assault accusations against him could set a precedent for continued abuse against women in the U.S.

I dont want to see this kind of behavior permeate into our society, the 20-year-old said.

Evelyn Foxx, the president of the Alachua County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reminded the crowd of the civil rights movement and how proponents of equality for African-Americans made tremendous strides through decades of persistence.

It was just like this, she said. We were fighting for rights of African-Americans. We are now fighting for rights for everyone.

Foxx said Trumps rise to political prominence has opened up old wounds of racism across the country. She called him the scum of the lowest Ive ever seen in my life but encouraged the crowd to work together to stop his movement.

Donald Trump is only one man, she said.

@martindvassolo

mvassolo@alligator.org

Just days removed from the presidential election, hundreds of anti-Donald Trump supporters gathered outside Gainesville's City Hall Thursday evening to speak out against the president-elect.
Victor Lopezs time in Afghanistan still follows him to class.

Andrew Moore remembers the face of a burning child.

Scott Camil became a target after coming home.

Separated by age and deployment times, the three share a bond, having stared death in the face and seen comrades killed.

The pain is still there, Camil said.

On Thursday night, a day before Veterans Day, they shared their once-repressed stories, acting out their experiences during a theatrical performance downtown.

Joined by an African-American U.S. Navy veteran who faced incessant racism and the widow of a U.S. Air Force pilot, they spoke about the heartbreak of war and the struggle of returning to civilian life as a part of Telling: Gainesville," a free play running from Thursday through Saturday.

***

In a quaint, dimly lit room inside the Actors Warehouse on North Main Street, the strum of a guitar guided an audience through their stories, woven into an overlapping narrative of the military experience.

Enlisting. Deploying. Coming home.

Jeffrey Pufahl, who works at UF as the director of outreach theatre for the Center of Arts in Medicine, directed and produced the play, as part of the national Telling Project. He casted the ensemble after putting out fliers throughout the city and contacting veterans groups. He said he wanted to bridge the gap between service members and civilians.

Its time to speak and time to listen, he said. Thats at the heart of this project.

Enjoy what you're reading? Get content from The Alligator delivered to your inbox Subscribe Now

***

After four years in the Army, time he spent avoiding bullets, Lopez feels like an outsider walking through UFs campus.

During his time in Afghanistan, his unit was often under mortar and machine-gun fire. After leaving an army cafeteria with his comrade, he narrowly dodged a rocket-propelled-grenade assault.

Sharing look-out shifts from a guard tower with an Afghani soldier, he worried about Taliban infiltrators, pressing his back against a wall and clutching his rifle closely to his chest.

Before his deployment, Lopez held his then-5-month-old daughter, hopeful he would return alive. But when he returned, he realized he was absent for much of her early life.

I missed my daughters first steps, I missed her first teeth, I missed her first birthday and I didnt want to miss anything else, he said, fighting back tears.

The following weeks, he spent time sitting alone in the darkness of her room, contemplating what his service meant.

I started thinking about how fragile human life was, he said.

In class, his professors often announce his service, at which point he is asked the usual questions.

How was it? they wonder.

When the 28-year-old veteran shares memories of his time overseas, other students avoid him or change seats in class.

There hasnt been one semester where that hasnt happened, the UF sociology senior told the crowd.

***

During an especially gruelling three weeks in Iraq, Moore attended 20 funeral memorials for fallen soldiers.

Casualties just were happening back-to-back, to back-to-back, the 39-year-old Williston resident said.

On the battleground, he didnt have time to think about death.

He only had a moment to grieve. Anymore time could jeopardize the lives of the men still standing beside him.

After seven years in the army, one memory continues to haunt him.

Driving in a car, a civilian family  mother, father and children  wound up caught between Moores unit and an enemy vehicle. After a U.S. tank shot at the enemy vehicle, the vehicle crashed into the family.

The familys car burst into flames.

He remembers the father wiggling like a worm and a boys fingers falling off his hand. But there was no time to help, no time to find out if they survived.

What happened to that family? he wonders. Did they live?

When he returned home, he was a different man. He would get mad at his kids for playing in the house and still cannot stand loud noises.

He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and sleep apnea. He said soldiers who visited the militarys mental health counselor were labeled weak, which discouraged many to go.

People are afraid to get help, he said.

After being medically discharged for injuries including a herniated disk, he continues to think of the men he left behind and his service.

Sometimes, I still miss it, he said.

***

In Vietnam, success was measured by body count.

After an attack killed five U.S. Marines, and wounded 20 more, Camil wanted retribution.

In one of many free-fire zones, which were assumed to be evacuated areas, he and his comrades once killed 292 Vietnamese, including women and children, he said.

The war conditioned him to see the women as communist baby factories, and their children as future fighters, he added.

From that point on, it wasnt about fighting communism, the 70-year-old UF graduate said. It was about payback.

As a Jewish man, he heard stories about relatives escaping the Holocaust and Nazis shedding innocent blood.

After 20 months in Vietnam, he felt like them.

Looking back on the deaths, he still feels betrayed by his country.

While at UF, the trajectory of Camils life was changed after hearing the actress and activist Jane Fonda claim the U.S. government misled the public about the war. She urged veterans to speak out about what they witnessed.

She said the government was lying about Vietnam, he said.

In 1971, Camil  joined by other veterans and Vietnamese civilians  disclosed their painful memories during the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation, a media event sponsored by Vietnam War Veterans Against the War.

He soon became an organizer for the anti-war group in Florida, Alabama and Georgia. He organized demonstrations and his own winter-soldier investigations across the region.

But, years removed from war, Camil soon became a target.

At its height, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called to neutralize Camil because his activism had become a threat to the country, Camil said. Federal agents later detained him in Gainesville during a drug sting, shooting him through his back and nearly killing him.

Once again, I felt betrayed, he said.

A participant in a war many Americans have since disavowed, and one of the few veterans who adamantly continues to criticize it, Camil said he feels like an outcast among other Vietnam veterans

At reunions, he cant relate.

Its hard, he said. But the bottom line for me is that I got to be able to look into the mirror and respect the man I see.

***

After war, the men rarely shared their stories, closing themselves off from those around them.

They each took long periods of time before speaking about the horrors of their own experiences and sympathized with one another throughout the play, as members of the audience cried.

Civilians dont know about being in the military. This is an opportunity for us to share our stories and for you to learn a little, Camil said.

The mens battle didnt stop when they arrived home. They were unanimous in having struggled with PTSD.

Lopez plans to use his sociology degree after graduating to establish a support group for veterans. He wants them to know they are not alone.

During the play, Janet Davies, 57, wept in the audience.

The Gainesville resident said she couldnt believe the comradery among the veterans  their sacrifice to the country bonded them.

By the end, she felt she had a newfound sense of empathy and insight into military life.

They were vulnerable, she said. It makes me feel vulnerable.










English News China-Ecuador ties better than ever: Chinese ambassador

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 11 Novembre 2016



The pragmatic cooperation between China and Ecuador in trade and finance has yielded great success. China is now the third biggest trade partner for Ecuador, while Ecuador is Chinas important energy cooperation partner in Latin America, a major destination for Chinese investment and financing as well as a market for contract work. Bilateral trade volume reached $3.8 billion in 2015 and products including bananas, prawns and flowers exported from Ecuador are favored by Chinese consumers.

People's Daily



Chinese President Xi Jinpings state visit to Ecuador, the first visit to the Latin American country by a Chinese head of state, is of milestone significance and will lift bilateral relations to a new high, Chinese ambassador to Ecuador Wang Yulin said in an article published in the Peoples Daily on Friday before Xi kicked off his tour.

The following is the translation of the article:

Ecuador is a South American country of great importance. It covers 256,000 square kilometers and has a population of 16 million. With rich natural resources, great biodiversity and abundant agricultural products, the time-honored country is a major producer and exporter of bananas, cocoa, prawns and flowers.

Though China and Ecuador are far away from each other, the friendship between the two people goes back a long time. Since the two nations established diplomatic ties in 1980, they have enhanced mutual political trust, deepened pragmatic cooperation in trade and finance, intensified cultural exchanges and maintained close coordination in international and regional affairs.

I had a chance to visit Ecuador in 1997, during when I was touched by the friendship shown to China and the Chinese people from this South American country far away on the other side of the Pacific.

As the 13th Chinese ambassador to Ecuador, I am honored to witness the fruitful results of this bilateral strategic partnership. As bilateral ties now march toward multidimensional and wide-ranging development, China and Ecuador have become sincere and trusting friends with mutually beneficial cooperation, and their ties are now better than ever.

With increasing exchanges at all levels, both nations have also witnessed a deepening political trust. Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa completed a successful state visit to China in January, 2015, during which, the two heads of state announced the elevation of bilateral ties to a strategic partnership. At the same time, the two countries strengthened political, military, congressional and local exchanges on all fronts.

The pragmatic cooperation between China and Ecuador in trade and finance has yielded great success. China is now the third biggest trade partner for Ecuador, while Ecuador is Chinas important energy cooperation partner in Latin America, a major destination for Chinese investment and financing as well as a market for contract work.

Bilateral trade volume reached $3.8 billion in 2015 and products including bananas, prawns and flowers exported from Ecuador are favored by Chinese consumers. Over 90 Chinese enterprises have landed in Ecuador. A series of strategic projects, such as ECU 911,a nationwide system for emergency responses, and Coca Codo Sinclair, a hydropower station built by Chinese enterprises, have been put into use one after another. The hydropower station is the biggest in Ecuador.

These projects, brought about through bilateral pragmatic cooperation, have yielded tangible benefits to both countries.

Both countries have also increased their cultural exchanges and deepened person-to-person friendships. People in Ecuador admire the glorious Chinese history and profound Chinese civilization. Meanwhile, the beautiful natural views and exuberant local culture also draws more and more Chinese citizens to the wondrous South American nation.

Bilateral exchanges in technology, culture and education are showing great momentum. Over 400 students from Ecuador are studying in China. This August, a visa-free agreement formally took effect in both countries, which will allow more convenient exchanges.

After a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit the west coast of Ecuador on April 16, causing heavy casualties and property loss, the Chinese government reached out to the victims with compassion and sympathy. Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his condolences to his Ecuadoran counterpart Rafael Correa and the Chinese government and Red Cross Society of China offered monetary aid to Ecuador and the local Red Cross.

In addition to these efforts, humanitarian relief materials were provided by the Chinese government. Chinese enterprises and Chinese citizens in Ecuador also lent a helpful hand in the disaster relief. Despite the long distance, many Chinese rescue teams went to the disaster-stricken areas to send their help.

A friend in need is a friend indeed. In Ecuadors most difficult times, Chinas actions not only speak volumes for the bilateral strategic partnership and brotherly relationship, but also impress upon the world its responsibility.

Xis upcoming state visit to Ecuador will be the first made by a Chinese head of state. With monumental meanings, it will surely bring bilateral ties to a new level. I believe that with concerted efforts on both sides, the China-Ecuador strategic partnership will make greater developments and will bring benefits to both countries and their people.



Dans la meme rubrique : < > More robots entering people's daily life China sees accelerated development of express delivery sector in rural areas China's FAST discovers largest atomic cloud in universe Pour toute information, contactez-nous au : +(235) 99267667 ; 62883277 ; 66267667 (Bureau N'Djamena)
Goldwomen: Women comprise 23% (19 out of 84) of Goldman Sachs latest class of partners. Goldman says that is the highest proportion and greatest number of female partners of any class ever. Among those selected were: Kathryn Koch, global head of client portfolio management for Goldman Sachs Asset Managements equities business, and Kim Posnett, global co-head of internet investment banking. Goldman would not disclose how many partners it has overall or how many of them are women. But it is a privileged club: a Goldman partnership, considered one of Wall Streets highest honors, typically comes with a $950,000 salary, a cut of a special bonus pool and the opportunity to invest in private funds. The selection process hasn't changed much in the past few decades, according to Edith Cooper, global chief of human capital management. The evaluation is based on how individuals are performing and what their potential for leadership is. Cooper, a newcomer to our Most Powerful Women in Finance list, is vice chair of the partnership committee, which selects the partners from among Goldmans managing directors.

Confidence Matters: For Thasunda Duckett, the new chief executive of JPMorgan Chases Consumer Bank, there is no typical day. The few constants are that she aims to see her four kids in the morning before the workday begins, tries to talk to employees at all levels of the business and spends a lot of time mentoring others. I think it's beautiful to be me, to be a woman, to be black, to be born in New York and raised in Texas, because that is who I am, she says. I tell women or other minorities to be confident in who you are and know that you do belong  dont own someone else's bias and negativity. Don't subscribe to that. That's not who you are. Duckett, a repeat honoree on our Women to Watch list, held several top mortgage-lending jobs at JPMorgan Chase before she was named CEO of its auto finance arm in early 2013 and of the consumer banking unit this September.

One of the 50: Fortune named Synchrony Financial CEO Margaret Keane a 2016 Businessperson of the Year. There are six female CEOs in the 50-person ranking, which is based on company data, such as 12- and 36-month increases in profit, revenue, and stock price. Keane is also on our Most Powerful Women in Finance list, where she has appeared consistently since 2007.

Economic Booster: How can a country work toward ensuring equal pay for men and women? Christine Lagarde has some suggestions. The International Monetary Fund managing director says developed countries, for example, can attack the problem by easing the tax burden on families second income earners, typically women, and single-parent households, also usually women in the low tax brackets.

Yellens Next Steps: Donald Trump isnt planning to urge Janet Yellen to resign as chair of the Federal Reserve before her current term expires in February 2018, according to one of his economic advisers. However, he might not nominate Yellen for a second term as chair. Yellens term as a member of the Board of Governors expires in January 2024. She could stay on as a governor until then, regardless of whether she remains chair, but the tendency in the past has been for governors to leave when their term as chair ends.

Beyond Banking

Senate Women: The number of women of color in the U.S. Senate quadrupled Tuesday. Three Democrats  Kamala Harris, Californias attorney general; Catherine Cortez Masto, of Nevada, and Tammy Duckworth, of Illinois  are the new additions. Previously, Mazie Hirono, a Japanese American who represents Hawaii, had been the only nonwhite female Senator. Hirono is also a Democrat.

Great Divide: Whether you believe Hillary Clinton lost the race because shes a woman, one thing is certain from Tuesday: the U.S. gender divide has been underestimated. This was an election that showed how much we still talk past one another when we talk about gender. It made plain profound gaps in how men and women perceive one anothers lives and prerogatives, writes Susan Chira at the New York Times. The campaign became a battle of two caricatures: male chauvinist pig against scheming, dishonest woman. It exposed parallel universes. In one, women flooded social media with their memories of sexual assault after Mr. Trump was caught on tape boasting about forcing himself on women. In another, men dismissed the tape as locker room talk or were surprised at how many women told them such harassment was commonplace.

Dont Be Sorry: Given the discussion about how women apologize too frequently, its notable that about 20 seconds into Clintons concession speech Wednesday, she said, Im sorry we did not win this election. Its rare for a presidential candidate to use that word in a concession speech. Other losing candidates  including Romney in 2012, McCain in 2008, Gore in 2000 and Dole in 1996  began their speeches expressing disappointment at the outcome, but none have explicitly apologized for losing. Read Clintons full speech here.

If you see some news that should be included here, email us.

Please join our LinkedIn group to connect with other women in the industry and visit our Women in Banking page for more frequent news updates.
Bill.com has gained traction in recent years with a few large banks that market its electronic bill payment service for businesses, but reaching a wider audience has been tough because small businesses are a tough nut for banks to crack.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor recently decided to rethink its approach. Instead of burying Bill.com within banks' deeper menu of business services, what if it angled its service around a habit familiar to business owners  using a consumer-like online banking portal?

The result is Bill.com Connect, the company's new platform announced today enabling businesses to directly access bill payment and cash flow management through a bank's online banking portal or mobile app.

Adaptable for any size of enterprise, Bill.com Connect is particularly suited for small and midsize businesses, most of which still pay the majority of their bills by check and represent a big opportunity for banks looking to expand products and services for this group, said Rene Lacerte, Bill.com's CEO and founder.

"Small and midsize businesses are a huge market and most of these people are still paying the majority of their bills with checks and a filing cabinet," Lacerte said. "They want an easier way to do it, and we're delivering it through the online banking portal, which is a familiar tool to everyone."

Bill.com Connect handles businesses' payables and receivables, converting checks to ACH payments. The service also supports invoices and enables different users to approve payments. The new version, like the previous one, synchronizes with QuickBooks, NetSuite, Intacct and other accounting systems.

Along with switching the interface to the online banking portal, the main thrust for Bill.com Connect's redesign is to minimize the learning curve for businesses by offering two tiers: a basic, stripped-down version businesses can try out for free immediately, and an advanced version with a richer set of features, Lacerte said.

The subscription-based pricing model enables banks to price the basic service at a very low cost or free, giving business users the opportunity to upgrade to the higher-priced, more advanced model whenever they want, Lacerte said.

Thousands of businesses already are using Bill.com, and for those that adopted it, their ratio of check usage to ACH flipped from an average of 95% of bill payments by check and 5% ACH to about 70% ACH, he said.

Since Bill.com launched its services in 2008, Bank of America and PNC have adopted its older version, along with a few other large banks that decline to be named, according to Bill.com. BofA and Silicon Valley Bank are among its investors.

While businesses may go directly to Bill.com to get the service  which some accounting firms also market to their clients  banks are the company's prime delivery channel.

"By making the bank the go-to destination for the end-to-end payment process, Bill.com Connect has the potential to redefine the relationships banks have with their small-business customers," said Matt White, senior vice president of Small Business Banking at Commerce Bank.

Banks may want to take on more of their customers' payments business, but there is heavy competition in the niche.

FIS offers a broad range of treasury and cash management services that banks can offer in conjunction with small-business services through customizable modules. Fiserv markets a white-label ACH payments service and Bill Advantage, its digital billing presentment and payment service offered through online and mobile channels. Many independent software providers also offer solutions banks and corporation use, often in combination.

Analysts note there is opportunity for banks to capture more payments volume from small and midsize businesses, and Bill.com's strategy could help drive that.

But potential users have many choices, said Steve Murphy, director of commercial and enterprise payments at Mercator Advisory Group.

"Growing networks of cloud-based procure-to-pay solutions have captive suppliers and integrated features including e-invoicing, payables, and supply chain financing, to name a few," Murphy said.

Bill.com also might not be a fit for all banks, said Patricia Hewitt, CEO of PG Research & Advisory Services.

"There's no question an opportunity exists for banks to convert small business payments from paper to electronic," Hewitt said. "But Bill.com will have to ensure that their vertical capabilities align with a bank's horizontal product and service strategies for small business, and to do that within a downstream institution environment."
Citigroup has made some of its application program interfaces available for third-party developers.

The API Developer Hub was launched Thursday to foster collaboration and partnerships between fintech companies and consumer brands. Such portals allow developers to build their own financial services applications and client solutions that easily connect to Citi. Mastercard, Virgin Money and others are already leveraging Citi APIs to create customer solutions.

The rapid pace of technological change demands transformation from the inside out and the outside in, Stephen Bird, chief executive of global consumer banking, said in a news release. By creating a collaborative ecosystem of leading brands and developers, we will be able to offer a complete suite of products, services and experiences to meet our clients financial needs today and in the future.

APIs allow software programs to connect and share data with each other more easily. By using an open API, companies can build and design programs on top of an interface and save time, money and other resources.

For example, Citi customers can now pay for all or part of their purchases on BestBuy.com and 1800flowers.com because those companies have integrated Citis Pay with Points API.

Registered developers operating in the new hub receive tools to connect in a development sandbox and test their ideas.

There are four APIs currently available to developers: one that allows Citi customers to access their account summaries; an authorization API that gives customers secure access to their account data for more streamlined transactions; one that approves access to shared Citi customer profile information for deeper engagement; and the Pay with Points API, which allows an app to accept a customer's Citi rewards points to pay for their purchases.

The hub is open to developers in North America, Singapore and Australia.
WASHINGTON  Banking industry lobbyists and representatives are practically salivating over the election results, convinced that Republican control of the White House and Congress will finally give them the opportunity to roll back key parts of the Dodd-Frank Act.

President-elect Donald Trump's transition team declared war Thursday on the 2010 financial reform law, vowing to "dismantle" it while blaming the law for slow economic growth.

"The Dodd-Frank economy does not work for working people," the transition team said. "Bureaucratic red tape and Washington mandates are not the answer. The Financial Services Policy Implementation team will be working to dismantle the Dodd-Frank Act and replace it with new policies to encourage economic growth and job creation."

Changes to the financial reform law have effectively been off-limits under President Obama, who helped usher in the legislation and used veto threats to deter efforts to weaken financial regulation.

But the combination of GOP control of the legislative and executive branches and a 2018 election map that threatens vulnerable Democrats gives the industry its best chance in six years to change the law.

"It bodes better for achieving community bank regulatory relief to have the same party in charge of the administration and the Congress," said Paul Merski, executive vice president of congressional relations at the Independent Community Bankers of America.

Republicans lost two seats in the Senate and another six in the House, but in 2018, 25 Senate Democrats will be defending their seats with eight to 10 of them (depending on the final results of Michigan and New Hampshire) being in states won by Trump. In contrast, just eight Republicans are up for re-election.

"I think they would be more than willing today to offer and support bipartisan legislation" that would amend parts of Dodd-Frank, said Richard Hunt, president and chief executive of the Consumer Bankers Association.

Democrats have already said they support some regulatory relief, though they differ with Republicans over what to change and how far to go.

The most likely vehicle for change is the Financial Choice Act offered in September by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling. (The Texas Republican is close to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, and The Wall Street Journal said Thursday that Hensarling was being considered as Trump's pick for Treasury secretary.)

Hensarling's far-reaching bill would allow banks that hold higher capital to face a simpler set of regulatory requirements, and make a number of changes to federal regulators.

"We put down the marker with the Choice Act in this current Congress," Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Colo., who sits on the committee, said in an interview. "When we move into the next Congress, I believe we have a number of good markers down to be able to address a variety of overreach we have seen" with Dodd-Frank.

Still, Dodd-Frank reforms will require at least some Democratic support to clear the Senate.

"When you look at the bicameral approach to financial reform  reforms to Dodd-Frank  I think that is one of the most important considerations for the administration  the new Treasury secretary  is to assess what can be done in the Senate and what can be done in the House," said Rep. French Hill R-Ark., another member of the banking panel.

"As it relates to the House I think a good starting point is the Choice Act because it contains some core features" including tailoring regulations for community banks, said Hill.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., introduced his own regulatory relief bill, but was unable to reach a compromise with Democrats. Whether a similar bill gets revived will be up to Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who is expected to assume the gavel from Shelby. (GOP term limits prevent Shelby from serving as chairman.)

"Everybody is going to have their own vision of Dodd-Frank reform," said Hunt, who has been a strong advocate for changing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's structure from a single director to a five-member commission. "They need to take another look at the Choice Act and possibly see if that can move to the House Floor and through the Senate this year."

The Choice Act could prove to be too ambitious as it includes a laundry list of Republican proposals, but certain parts, like moving the CFPB to a commission and easing Basel III restrictions, could be points of compromise.

"The path forward would be to start to move the Choice Act in whole or in part," said Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, who is stepping down at the end of the year. "Sometimes if you try to do it in too big of a lift you have trouble finding consensus."

Whether Trump would be agreeable to the Choice Act is unclear. While running on the Republican ticket, his campaign was more populist and parts of the Choice Act are viewed as Wall Street favors.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the most prominent voices in the Democratic Party, said Thursday she would work with Trump to seek tough rules against Wall Street.

"He criticized Wall Street and big money's dominance in Washington  straight up," she said. "I will put aside our differences and I will work with him" to keep Wall Street in check.

But she also warned not to go too far.

"It does not mean handing the keys to our economy over to Wall Street so they can run it for themselves. Americans want to hold the big banks accountable," Warren said. "That will not happen if we gut Dodd-Frank and fire the cops responsible for watching over those banks, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If Trump and the Republican Party try to turn loose the big banks and financial institutions so they can once again gamble with our economy and bring it all crashing down, then we will fight them every step of the way."

J.W. Verret, a professor of banking law at the George Mason Scalia Law School and a former House Financial Services Committee staffer, said "it is not clear whether Mr. Trump's administration would take a populist note on financial regulation."

"I would hope not," he said. "I would hope they would take the more Reagan conservative approach, which I think is pretty well personified in the Choice Act."

Although Trump has said he wants to seek a complete repeal of Dodd-Frank, that is not likely.

"That would be a heavy lift," Verret said.

Hunt agreed. "What I have not heard from members of Congress and leadership is the repeal of Dodd-Frank," he said.

Eugene Ludwig, chief executive officer and founder of Promontory Financial Group, said repealing Dodd-Frank would also be politically risky.

"I don't think anyone wants to be hung in another banking crisis," he said. "I would be surprised if this would be anything like a wholesale repeal of Dodd-Frank."

Lalita Clozel contributed to this article.
WASHINGTON  President-elect Donald Trump's victory poses a unique quandary for the Federal Reserve both before and after he is sworn in  whether the central bank should attempt to finish the many rules still in process or keep its head down to avoid provoking a hostile Congress.

The Fed has a raft of rules still outstanding, many of which relate to the Basel III accords and Dodd-Frank requirements that remain incomplete.

Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president of Regulation at the American Bankers Association, said the big question is whether the agencies  including independent ones like the Fed  will push to complete those rules before Trump takes office.

"Will there be a rush on the part of these agencies  to rush things through before the new president is inaugurated in January?" Abernathy said. "I don't think there are as many opportunities to do that as in the past  but there might be some."

Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, said that there typically is a rush at the end of each calendar year to get rules out the door, and that this tendency is heightened during administration changes  even between terms of the same president.

But with this particular transfer of power, where there are major ideological differences between the parties relinquishing control and those assuming it, that normal rush will likely be intensified  even if just to make policies that much harder to reverse.

"I think that will be hyperactive policymaking, because I think the Obama administration and the federal regulators will try  to get as much done as they can before the new president and structure come in," Petrou said. "I think they will try to finish as much as they can to try to force policy reversals through a more lengthy, deliberative process."

There are a number of outstanding rules on the Fed's docket, some of which may be finalized.

The most likely regulation to be completed by the end of the Obama administration is the total loss-absorbing capacity rule, or TLAC, which the Fed proposed last October and which would require the U.S. global systemically important banks to hold unsecured debt that can be used to recapitalize a successor institution should it fail.

Fed Gov. Daniel Tarullo, who chairs the Fed Board's Committee on Supervision, said in an appearance at Columbia Law School last month that TLAC and other resolution rules are critical elements in the regulatory toolbox  elements that cannot be replaced by simply mandating higher capital standards, because capital can be expended in a crisis and when it is, the firm has nothing with which to recapitalize itself.

"At some point, the firm  is no longer in an actively capitalized state. So in a sense it doesn't matter where your capital level was beforehand, you now have to stipulate that they don't have it anymore  that's why they're in resolution," Tarullo said. "That's why you need an identifiable set of instruments which will, by definition, not have been eroded in the run-up to the stress period, which will then be available to the FDIC to convert into equity, thereby recapitalizing the firm."

The Fed is also considering a net stable funding ratio  another regulation outlined in Basel III  which is designed to ensure that the largest banks have stable funding sources to maintain operations for one year. That rule, which was proposed in April, hewed closely to the Basel outline but was still criticized by banks as unnecessary.

Other regulations include a single counterparty credit limit proposed in March, a plan to set capital weights for banks' commodity assets that was proposed in September, and an advance notice of proposed rulemaking  a kind of regulatory pre-proposal  for capital and supervisory standards for systemically important nonbanks in June. Tarullo also outlined a series of changes to the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review stress tests in a speech in September, but those changes have for the most part not been formally proposed.

The Fed  along with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the National Credit Union Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Housing Finance Agency  issued a proposal in April limiting incentive-based compensation for banking executives. That plan has been a high priority for the Obama administration, but its progress has also been uncommonly slow, owing in large part to the challenges of coordinating a single rule across multiple agencies.

Trump himself has been inconsistent in his attitude toward the central bank and its chair, Janet Yellen. He has by turns praised her stance on monetary policy as wide and measured, and has also criticized the same policies as being designed to benefit his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. He was critical of Wall Street during his campaign, even attempting to pick up former supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont by touting his antipathy to the finance industry.

But his fellow Republicans in Congress have criticized the Fed more consistently and on a range of issues. Yellen has routinely faced questions during her semiannual congressional testimonies about the virtues of a rule-based monetary policy, the need for the Government Accountability Office to audit the central bank's monetary policy decisions, scrutiny about a leak from the Federal Open Market Committee in 2012, and questions about the Fed's payment of Interest on Excess Reserves.

One banking industry official who asked not to be quoted on the record said that the Fed should take Congress' hostility into account when it considers whether to attempt to finish its regulatory agenda, particularly as it pertains to Basel commitments.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision  which is charged with outlining the accords  has been in a public feud with the European Union for months about whether and to what extent the final Basel rules will amount to higher capital requirements for member banks. EU officials have suggested that if that were the case, the bloc would simply not abide by them, whereas Basel officials have suggested that the rules would not amount to a substantial increase in capital.

The Fed would be ill-advised if it seeks to finalize a series of rules related to Basel before Republicans take over Washington in January, the banking official said, because it could draw unwanted attention and give Congress reason to push for the kinds of structural changes to the Fed that the central bank has fought so hard to avoid.

"I think they have a lot of reason for concern in a Republican Washington, which is interested in auditing the Fed, restructuring the Fed, and doing any number of things to the Fed," one banking industry official said. "I think this would be an inopportune time of them to be seen as subverting both the transition process for the administration and the Basel process by rushing out rules that the rest of the world is retreating from."

While Trump's views on bank capital requirements may be hazy, others in his transition team might have more definitive stances. If the Fed were to beat feet to try to get those rules out the door before Trump takes office, that might push the new president to put people in place who, like the EU and Asian countries, are loath to increase capital requirements for banks.

"There's a reason the Basel accords are fracturing in Europe and Asia, and it's because  the finance ministries have concluded that higher capital requirement are hurting their economic growth," the official said. "I wouldn't be surprised if some people in the Trump orbit have a similar belief, or come to have that belief. I would be very surprised if the Fed were unwise enough to rush out rules before the Trump administration comes in. That would probably be a very unwise thing to do in terms of their long-term interests."

Others are not so sure that a Trump administration would be easy on the banking industry. Upon arrival, Trump will have two vacancies to fill on the Fed board, one of whom could also be appointed as vice chairman for supervision  a yet unfilled position created by Dodd-Frank designed to focus a top official on banking supervision. Tarullo, whose term expires in 2022, is also widely expected to resign if and when Trump nominates someone else to that position, which would create a third vacancy within months of the new administration.

Former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair said that Trump could pick someone as vice chairman for supervision who could meet his congressional counterparts' demands for a more hawkish monetary policy on the FOMC and also be tough on Wall Street. FDIC Vice Chairman Thomas Hoenig, current Kansas City Fed President Esther George and Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker would all meet those criteria, she said, and those picks would likely face a relatively easy confirmation.

"I'd love to see a Tom Hoenig, Jeff Lacker, Esther George or some of those regional Fed presidents" take the job, Bair said. "Regional Fed presidents would be good candidates that would get bipartisan support. I could see some common ground."
The parcel giant signed a 10-year lease with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for a 20,625-square-foot building adjacent to FedEx and UPS facilities at Stewart International Airport.



DHL has signed a 10-year lease with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for a 20,625-square-foot building adjacent to FedEx and UPS facilities at Stewart International Airport, according to a report in Middletown, N.Y.s Times Herald-Record.

The company will invest $400,000 in the facility and employ about 30 persons, beginning early next year.

Robert Mintz, a DHL spokesman, told the newspaper that new facility is part of a plan to strengthen the companys overall U.S. network and that it is integrated with our JFK gateway facility where shipments are cleared by customs and reviewed by other regulatory agencies.

Mintz said the Stewart facility will help DHL provide earlier deliveries and later cutoff times for shipments.

Stewart is located about 60 miles north of New York City and was taken over by the Port Authority in 2007.


At MSC, we want to continue to improve towage service efficiency and expand Rimorchiatori Mediterranei, building on the impressive work of the Genoese families that have developed the company the past 100 years, MSC CEO Soren Toft said.
It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office: the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine.

Its difficult to grasp how much damage Clinton and her cronies would have inflicted on this country had she been elected. Hyperbole of this type has become a commonplace in political rhetoric in recent years  we hear every day that Obama destroyed the country, when in fact Tuesdays results demonstrated exactly the opposite. But Hillary Clinton is something else  a kind of human focus of corruption and vileness not often encountered outside of fiction. Four years of Clinton in office would have left the United States in a condition of degradation unseen since the collapse of the Italian republics of the Renaissance.

AT readers dont need any recital of Clintons crimes, nor do we have the space for them. A complete recitation from Rose Law Firm to Whitewater to Benghazi would require the wordage of many articles of this length. We need but mention the two that happen to bookend her career: that she helped free the rapist of a child and then laughed about it, and that she stole relief funds from the very wretched of the earth  the poor of Haiti.

It is not going too far to state that there is scarcely a single genuine act of magnanimity, of kindness, or of simple decency in Hillary Clintons record. It is exclusively a parade of crimes and cover-ups, any one of which would have totaled the career of another politician. Its difficult to recall even a successful attempt to fake a human episode, as is commonly found among dictators of the Kim or Castro variety. Such an effort would have totally unconvincing to an audience of any sophistication whatsoever. Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self  a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.

Similarly, its next to impossible to come up with any achievements. The reset? Benghazi? Syria? Clintons entire career is one vast Gobi composed of nullity, not even arising to the level of mediocrity.

Its even evident in her looks, which are enough to arouse anxiety in any healthy viewer. The near-demented glare, the coldness, the frown lines etched by decades of sneers  Clinton was everyones nightmare stepmother, vicious teacher, manipulative coworker or boss. I recall a line from a half-forgotten short story: a mask of atrocity. Thatll do.

This is further backed up by accounts from coworkers and underlings, an unending chorus of insults, tantrums, thrown crockery, and petty humiliations. Her sole close human relationship, following a marriage that failed in the most spectacular manner conceivable, is a grotesque friendship with another strange figure, Huma Abedin, who might possibly have established and cultivated it under orders.

In light of all this, how did her rise ever come about? With a record matching that of any criminal and a visage bespeaking anger, how did she get within a few million sane votes to taking control of the leading nation on earth? Throughout her career, men of distinguished reputation and otherwise have committed crimes, lied, and degraded themselves to smooth her path. Over the past few months weve seen members of the self-styled conservative elite whine that theyd prefer to vote for her for reasons not worth dwelling on. (We need a concise list of these people so that we know whose opinion to set aside in the future.)

Fear is no doubt part of the answer. There is the still not well-understood connection between the Southern mob and the Clinton machine. Theres the machines own very effective research and blackmail mechanism, which has dug up secrets of the great and near-great and held them over their heads (Recall Daniel Moynihan, by no means an ignoble figure, standing with his head down and speaking scarcely above a mumble as he endorsed Hillary for his Senate seat.)

Ideology is another answer. Somehow, Clinton became the standard-bearer for the left, both the slogan repeaters produced by the universities and their more rabid feminist sisters. Beyond that, there is the sad tribe of professional women promoted due to affirmative action to positions beyond their capabilities and then shunted off to obscure offices and slots where they can do no harm. Clinton has been the spokesman for this group, which is larger than many imagine, for quite some time.

But theres more to it than that. Looking at history we find numerous instances of individuals who defy every standard and violate every norm as they claw their way to the top, with no one making any meaningful effort to stop them. Hitler is an obvious example, but there are many others. It seems to be a historical pattern. I suspect that it has deep sociobiological roots, that it is a product of the cynicism and hypocrisy present in any society. One particular individual becomes the focus for feelings of defiance, and is allowed actions that others would like to carry out but dont dare. We see similar impulses in those who idolize criminals such as Dillinger or Willie Sutton, and the women who become pen pals and occasionally the romantic partners of the likes of Charles Manson.

Clintons career might well repay close study. We need methods of identifying these types and curtailing them. We also need to closely examine ourselves, our society, and our way of life to identify the weaknesses that allowed this creature to shamble across the political landscape unchallenged for so long.

We have time for that now. Clinton is finished. She is never going to become the American Messalina. She is too sickly to wait out another term. Beyond that, any bandit leader is always marked. When strong, things click along as if by perpetual motion. But if she shows any sign of weakness, her cronies will begin to desert her, those she trampled on and harmed will seek payback, and the authorities will at last stir themselves to look into things. The current investigations will continue and expand. Others will be opened. Clinton can look forward to an old age spent in courthouses and committee rooms. She will end up as one of those Mafia dons slumped in a wheelchair while the lawyers attempt to generate sympathy. And thats fine. She has earned the most Hellenic of punishments.

We have Donald Trump to thank for this. I still have doubts about Trump. He lacks experience and temperament. His reach is likely to exceed his grasp. His brashness will entangle him with the permanent bureaucracy. He will not preside over an American Renaissance.

But if he accomplishes only two things  reversing the immigration trend and saving the Supreme Court  that will be plenty. Because he has already fulfilled his great historical achievement  saving the United States from falling into the hands of a political banshee. Thats enough for any man.
Donald Trump's victory on November 8 was a shock to liberals all over the country, all over the world. So confident of their own brilliance, superiority and their own rightness in all things, his win was a major shock to their tender but blinkered sensibilities. It had apparently not occurred to them that he could actually win. So out of touch with the American people outside of their personal space, they were completely taken by surprise by his electoral success.

Hillary and her inner circle were shocked as well. It never occurred to them that her many crimes, her foundation schemes to enrich herself, her lifetime of lying and her carelessness about national security would filter down to voters. They assumed regular people, those stupid people Jonathan Gruber counted on to accept the nonsense that is Obamacare, would not know about or read the thousands of leaked Podesta emails that expose the totally self-serving nature of the Clintons and their staff. The emails prove that they care nothing about the country, the shrinking middle class, ISIS, or Iran's nuclear ambitions. They care only about winning, keeping power and staying rich. Liberals routinely and mistakenly view the American people as beneath them, as ignorant. To their great shock, the deplorables are more informed than Clinton and the DNC ever thought possible.

Van Jones on CNN of course blamed the defeat of HRC on racism. He called it a "whitelash." Clever? Not so much. He is among the most racist pundits we have had to endure these past eight years. His hatred of white people oozes out of every pore. He has no clue about the country he is so in the habit of vilifying. He is an Al Sharpton, a typical race hustler, in a fancy suit and expensive glasses.

Cokie Roberts reliably blamed sexism. Hillary lost because she is a woman. Men just don't want to see a woman in the White House! Nonsense. It curiously has not occurred to her that it might be Hillary's record abent of any achievement, her criminal history, her pathological lying, or her abuse of victimized women in the furtherance of her husband's career that turned voters against her.

The worst example of mind-numbed bias was Martha Raddatz, a long-time progressive who was inexplicably allowed to "moderate" one of the debates. Fighting back tears, not only did she describe Trump's victory as a victory for racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia -- all the usual accusations that spill so easily off the tongues of liberals when describing conservatives -- she claimed no military servicemen would be safe under a Trump administration because he so clearly knows nothing about the military or foreign policy.

Excuse me! Barack Obama has done such terrible damage to our men and women who serve that he should be in the brig. He tied the hands of his generals who stayed. He fired those, hundreds of them, who refused to do his anti-military bidding. Obama's ridiculous rules of engagement have been the cause of hundreds, maybe even thousands of American deaths in Afghanistan. Our guys are hardly allowed to defend themselves. Trump will change that. Raddatz is sadly typical of the uninformed left. So oblivious to facts that do not fit with her own ideology, she has become as ignorant as she thinks Trump's irredeemable voters are.

As many others have observed, Trump's victory is a repudiation of Obama's polices, nearly all of which have done terrible damage to this country. It is also a repudiation of a corrupt and biased media. The leaked Podesta emails prove that beyond a shadow of doubt. Nearly all of the mainstream broadcast news outlets  NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR -- are fixed extensions of the DNC and the Clinton campaign, so much so the campaign was running their interview questions for conservatives past Podesta and telling NPR what and when to air which stories concocted by the Clinton staff. They are not news organizations any more than the NYT is. For real news, citizens must rely on the alternative media. What we read there is easily fact-checked, not with any of those mainstream institutions.

College campuses all over the country sent blast emails to their students expressing their heartfelt understanding of the horror they must be experiencing due to the election results. They offered numerous locations of "safe" or "supporting" spaces they could come to for relief. In almost all cases, it was the administrations and faculties who were melting down as hysterically as Rachel Maddow did on MSNBC. On numerous campuses, students marched and rioted, vandalized and burned stuff to protest Trump's victory. This is what counts as "progressivism" in 2016; indoctrination works just as it did in Nazi Germany, Cuba, the former USSR, and the dictatorial states of Central and South America. In every one of those examples, the people lose -- and lose everything. They lose their freedom by drips and drabs as we have under Obama.

Trump was not the candidate of choice of all Republicans but he may just save us all from the tyranny of the left.
Some people are calling for "reconciliation" after Trump's election. Some even say that Hillary shouldn't be prosecuted.

The reality is that if we allow liberals to constantly misuse government power and break the law with no consequences, they will never stop. Like little children, they need a spanking to keep them in line.

President Trump should set up a special prosecutor to dig up all the government workers, from Hillary on down, who used government power to further tyranny.

People like Lois Lerner, who used the full power of the IRS to silence voices that disagreed with her political leanings, should not just be able to retire and collect a pension.

So long as liberals know they can misuse the power of government and get away with it, they will continue to wage war against the American people while being paid by the American people.

Hillary has to be tried for her pay for play schemes and her imperilment of national security. It's un-American for one set of laws to apply to citizens, like the Marine who was thrown out of the Corps because he sent a classified message on unclassified email in order to save lives, and another to people who are in power.

In 2008, a liberal Ohio government employee illegally searched government records for information on "Joe the Plumber," who had embarrassed Obama. She was suspended for two months but not fired. When sued, her legal fees were paid for by the taxpayers of Ohio. While Ohio passed a law requiring firing as a consequence of such actions, her getting off so easily clearly emboldened others in the federal government to misuse their governmental authority for Obama.

In addition to misusing government power to attack conservatives, liberals in government are constantly abusing their authority by covering up illegal actions by liberals.

During the Obama years, we've seen case after case of the government either ignoring court orders or congressional requests or slow-rolling them, saying they'll produce all of Hillary's emails by 2020, for example. If the government employees involved knew they faced immediate firing for such behavior, it would be much harder for corrupt politicians like Obama to get their minions to abuse government power.

We can't drain the swamp if all the alligators have life preservers and "get out of jail free" cards.

We need to strike fear in the hearts of all government workers. They need to know that if they intentionally abuse their power, they face serious negative consequences  just as citizens know that if they break the law, they face consequences.

Clearly, government workers can exercise their First Amendment rights, and it's no crime to support the Democratic Party. But violating their oath of office has to have consequences; otherwise, innocent people will continue to be crushed by the behemoth state that liberals have created.

We can't let liberal government employees be above the law and unanswerable to anyone for their actions.

That may sound harsh, but the reality is that today Americans are afraid of their government because it's impossible for any but the richest people to win a fight with government workers run amok.

If the IRS shows up at your door because you expressed conservative opinions, you're essentially doomed. So honest priests and ministers who have political views consistent with Christian teaching are afraid to speak out.

But at the same time, liberal preachers know they can openly advocate for liberals like Obama or Hillary because the government won't prosecute them.

Similarly, Catholic nuns have had to expend a huge amount of money fighting for their First Amendment right to not support abortion while the liberal government workers who are attacking them get paid with taxpayer dollars.

It's a double standard because conservatives who go against the liberal line are in danger of losing their jobs.

Scooter Libby was prosecuted for having a bad memory, and the prosecutor intentionally concealed exculpatory evidence. But Libby was a conservative.

That reflects the reality that if a conservative is perceived as abusing government power by liberals, he will be viciously attacked and prosecuted. But a liberal actually pleading the 5th knows that he will not suffer any adverse consequences.

That has to change. Every government worker should be constantly aware that if he abuses his power and citizens complain, he can be fired and prosecuted.

The first step in draining the swamp is making it clear that anyone who misuses his government authority, conservative or liberal, will lose his job. Without that, the swamp will be like the Augean stables, and we'll never be able to drain it.

Today we live in a tyranny because the people are afraid of the government. We need to change that so that the government is afraid of the people in order to restore the America the Founders left us.

You can read more of Tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.
For a long time I've been critical of the Muslim community, many of whom seem to revel in victimhood status even when it's clear that they are not the victims of anything. Meanwhile, a substantial number of their coreligionists are slaughtering people by the thousands, including, from time to time, Americans, and they don't seem to have any public opinions about that.

So nothing could be more surprising to me to see Asra Q. Nomani, a Muslim who penned an op-ed in the Washington Post announcing that not only did she vote for Trump, but she has a deep dislike for Hillary and, yes, wait for it... radical Islam!

I  a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman "of color"  am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I'm not a "bigot," "racist," "chauvinist" or "white supremacist," as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some "whitelash." I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the "Islam" in Islamic State. ... the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia [which Wikileaks emails claimed are funders of ISIS] killed my support for Clinton. I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a "Trump America." The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump's rhetoric to come to fruition. What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America. These dictatorships are no shining examples of progressive society with their failure to offer fundamental human rights and pathways to citizenship to immigrants from India, refugees from Syria and the entire class of de facto slaves that live in those dictatorships. We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims[.]

Nomani condemned radical Islam and the Democrats' refusal to fight it. Can you imagine if most American Muslims spoke this way publicly?

Can you imagine if even some American Muslims spoke this way publicly, instead of blaming people who want to scrutinize fundamentalists for our own safety?

Nomani's op-ed piece, while unprecedented, highlights the continuing moral crisis in the Muslim community by virtue of the near uniqueness of her perspective.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.
A friend whom I love told me yesterday that his teenage daughter cried herself to sleep when Trump won and that in school (a private and tony schoolnatch), counselors comforted the students in their grief. This was repeated throughout the city in public as well as private schools and in colleges.

He was quite outraged at my scorn, having expected more empathy. When I asked how she felt about the senatorial and congressional elections  after all, Congress can halt those dreadful actions that a Trump dictatorship would enactit was clear that neither father nor daughter knew who ran and on what issues.

After that jarring conversation, I reflected on those things that affected me at her age, although I generally dont engage in smarmy nostalgia.

When I was a teenager, the words iron lung terrified us as we saw schoolmates maimed and felled by a raging polio epidemic. We had to absorb a genocide that killed one of every three Jews in the world, including my grandparents and all my cousins, uncles, and aunts. We were affronted by racial laws that discriminated against negroes in the South and denied hiring and educational opportunities throughout the rest of the country; signs that said no dogs and no Jews; poverty and joblessness that afflicted and rendered whole families homeless as their possessions were placed on the sidewalks following their evictions; and the banning of books, films, and music.

But we did have the freedom to engage in debate and to differ with one another and agree on protesting the foregoing policies that were inimical to a proper democracy. And we did pass around clandestine copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer  both banned for their explicit sex.

At the Bronx High School of Science, we argued over Eisenhower versus Stevenson, over the use of nuclear weapons to end the war in Japan, over the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, over the Korean War and the firing of General MacArthur, over the threat of Communism, over local and national policies and politics and foreign policy.

Our debates were loud but civilized. When Adlai Stevenson lost the election to General Dwight Eisenhower, many students were in shock that the intellectual had lost to a military man. The faculty, which was very liberal, offered no safe spaces and no counseling. We did not need them.

What has happened to these coddled and spoiled and illiberal young people today?

Pediatricians have speculated that too many antibiotics have produced some allergies and immune problems among young people.

Liberal parents and teachers and schools have indoctrinated a whole generation of young people with immunities to debate, freedom of speech, and anything that rattles their ability to think outside the box.

Where is their outrage at real voter intimidation with threats of violence at the polls? Are they so indifferent to the racism of #BlackLivesMatter? Do they care a whit about the growing anti-Semitism in academia, which is more malignant than residential restrictions of the past?

What, besides the potty politics of the mandatory transgender bathrooms, are their rights that are threatened by the advent of a Trump presidency? Can they name a single achievement of the Obama administration that has made the lives of the poor, immigrants, or blacks any better? How have Democrats ameliorated the hardships of single mothers and grandmothers who are rearing three generations of children of unwed teenagers?

Can they name a single foreign policy success of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state?

Well, they really dont know, and they are just parroting the blather they hear from their parents and teachers.

They will soon be consumed by applications to colleges, and their liberal parents, who are such fierce advocates of affirmative action, will hire tutors to navigate them through competitive exams.

When they get to those colleges, there will be deans for counseling for microaggressions, sexual identities, perceived insults to their self-esteem, and cultural identity

And there are always co-ed crying sessions to get them through the ordeals of growing up rich and spoiled and traumatized by the sorrow of cheap sneakers.
During the primaries, most conservative outlets opposed Donald Trump. National Review devoted an entire issue to attacking Trump. RedState became a NeverTrump publication. Even after Trump won the nomination, the conservative leadership remained either skeptical of Trump or openly hostile.

But one group disagreed: the voters.

People who work at places like the American Enterprise Institute, or who write for publications like National Review, inhabit a world of data and arguments. They attempt to marshal facts and logic in support of conservatism. Trump is many things, but a policy wonk he is not. Strictly in terms of policy knowledge, Trump is no match for the likes of Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, but the voters chose Trump.

Trump's bull in a china shop approach to hot-button issues like immigration drove Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt nuts. They imagined Trump's heated rhetoric on immigration poisoning the Republican brand with Latinos, but Trump did better than Romney with Latinos.

At the end of the day, Trump was able to do what conservative think-tankers and journalists couldn't: connect with the common man. He was able to take basic conservative principles, such as the need for law and order, and make them understandable to the average voter.

For conservative policy wonks, the ideal Republican candidate is Mitt Romney, and if only policy wonks voted, Mitt Romney would be president. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, most people aren't policy wonks.

When Ronald Reagan emerged on the political scene, many people considered him a lightweight, unfit for the presidency. He even faced a challenge from third-party candidate John Anderson  the 1980 version of Evan McMullin  but defeated all comers and went on to become president. Sometimes the experts get it wrong.

Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan, but he is similar to him in some important ways. Reagan held heterodox positions on some important issues; much like Trump, Reagan was not an orthodox free trader. Reagan also reached out to Gorbachev, helping end the Cold War. Trump, in his own odd way, may be attempting to do something similar with Putin.

The ordinary Americans who chose Trump see a bit of themselves in him. They see Trump as a commonsense conservative  a man who may lack deep policy knowledge but who possesses sound judgment and instincts. Trump now has the opportunity to prove them right.
The other night, I watched a local newscast covering the crowds who took to the streets to protest the election of Donald Trump. Aside from the fact that the crowd resembled the crowds that had marched under the various Occupy banners (and seemed to use much of the same rhetoric), I noticed that the local reporter, rather than maintaining an air of professional detachment, barely hid her glee and, when describing the protesters aims, expressed them as we want such-and-such and we feel this way or that.

In the same newscast, we were treated to interviews with Hispanics who expressed that they didnt feel safe with Donald Trump as president.

And I can understand that. Everyone wants to feel safe. I imagine that these Hispanics (a term Ive never cared for; it actually means people from Spain or of Spanish heritage, which really doesnt adequately or accurately describe folks from south of the border) cherish the feeling of being safe as much as anyone else.

I guess they want to feel as safe as Kate Steinle felt, strolling on a San Francisco pier with her dad that evening in the summer of 2015, before she was shot to death (with a stolen handgun, and for no apparent reason!) by an "undocumented immigrant" from Mexico (who had already been deported multiple times but somehow managed to come back).

I guess they want to feel as safe as all the motorists (estimated as averaging ten a day) felt as they drove along, on their way to work or wherever, just before they were slammed into and grievously injured or killed by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico driving drunk and without a drivers license (many of whom have been deported multiple times but somehow managed to come back).

I guess they want to feel as safe as parts of the U.S. were before they became infested with violent Mexican gangs who bring in drugs as well as their murderous ways (and many of whose members have been deported multiple times but somehow managed to come back). And Im sure they want to feel as safe as we all felt before we had to worry about terrorists in our midst, whether such terrorists have infiltrated our borders, are among refugees brought in by our government, or are our own citizens who have been radicalized, and any of whom may walk among us until he one day decides to go on a murder spree.

Well, I can certainly understand why Hispanics, or any other American citizen or legal visitor, would want to feel safe here. And I hope that, with Donald Trumps policies regarding immigration, terrorism, and law and order, well all start to feel a lot safer starting Jan. 20.

Meanwhile, I already feel that our First and Second Amendments are safer, our Constitution and Supreme Court are safer, and talk radio is safer. So far, so good.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama put on his choirboy face for the cameras. In a televised meeting at the White House with President-Elect Donald Trump, Obama engaged in his usual kabuki theatrics, fooling no one.

We have become so accustomed to Obama's passive-aggressive antics that it wasn't even surprising that he and Michelle skipped the traditional photo op featuring the outgoing and incoming first couples together. The pair proved once again they are small, petty people.

It is vile how the Obamas had no problem posing with the founders of a Soros-funded violent terrorist group called Black Lives Matter, whose members chant, "What do we want? Dead cops" but chose not to stand next to an incoming Republican president and first lady.

Well, leftists are all about making statements via nasty gestures. Remember the Churchill bust?

No matter. The American people have spoken. They resoundingly rejected Obama's nation-killing fundamental transformation. We won.

The same brave, proud people, the ones who didn't turn into any angry mob blocking traffic, beating up people, and rioting in the streets when Obama was elected twice, have been richly and justly rewarded.

After eight years of apology tours; unemployment; underemployment; economic deterioration; $10 trillion more in debt; treating veterans like garbage; a phony Iran nuclear deal costing billions; leaving Americans, including an ambassador, behind to die in Benghazi; shoving the tyrannical Obamacare down our throats; sympathizing with Muslim groups instead of the victims of radical Islamic terrorism; and allowing illegals by the millions to cross our border and reap welfare benefits (our money), hardworking, tax-paying citizens peacefully voted to stop the insanity.

Like a fed up battered spouse, we stood up to our oppressor and said, "Enough is enough."

"We the people" are done with open borders, with Wall Street globalists raking in the money while chaining us to a welfare state we do not want.

With much prayer, faith, and hard work we stood up to those who called us racist, vulgar, low-info, irredeemable, and deplorable. Many Main-Street law-abiding citizens endured physical attacks by violent thugs paid $1,500 to incite fights at Trump rallies. Others, like the homeless woman guarding Trump's Walk of Fame star, were met with unbelievable cruelty.

Still, until the very end, on November 7, thousands of unintimidated, courageous Americans showed up at Trump's rallies to save this country from the pervasive darkness blanketing this nation.

On January 20, we will begin to sift through the wreckage of the Obama years. The out-of-control, angry, hate-filled protesters burning Trump in effigy, publicly calling for his assassination, and brutalizing innocent people are Obama's nightmarish children. Their lawless tantrums after the election remind us exactly why we, along with Donald Trump, beat Hillary Clinton.
Infamously associated with Hitlers rise to power, Munich is making news of a different sort these days. Breitbart London reports:

A 12 foot wall is being built in Munich to separate a housing estate from a new migrant center that will house 160 unaccompanied minors.

Locals living in the Neuperlach Sud housing development in Munich, less than 100 meters from the site at which young migrants will be staying, went to court to get the wall built.

Germans living in the area fear bad behavior among the newcomers, and concern over likely levels of noise when they arrive, will lower the value of their properties if the migrant center remains for an extended length of time, reports Der Spiegel...

That, at 12 foot tall, the wall will stand higher than the notorious Communist-era Berlin Wall has been noted by the media. German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year evoked the Berlin Wall as an argument against erecting border controls to protect from mass migration.

Since the arrival of over a million non-European migrants to Germany in 2015 the country has seen a massive increase in street crime and sex attacks.

This week the Catholic community in one town reported that not a day goes by without new cases of willful destruction of Christian statues. Police suspect the attacks, which they believe are carried out with a pure lust for destruction, could be religiously motivated.
Like many of you, I stop and get my morning coffee in the same place. It's not unusual to talk a little politics over coffee these days.

I asked the manager: were you surprised that Trump did so well with Hispanics? He answered no. By the way, my friend is a legal immigrant from Mexico with an outstanding work ethic and wonderful family.

There is a bit of disbelief in some corners about the Hispanic vote and president-elect Trump. It certainly did not turn out as predicted. In other words, Hispanics voted for Trump after all, as we see in this USA Today report:

The Hispanic vote was bigger and more influential in the 2016 presidential election, just as predicted, but it also provided one surprise: more support for President-elect Donald Trump than expected. Hispanics favored Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton 65% to 29%, a 36-point difference that helped her secure winning margins in states like Nevada and Colorado and kept her competitive late into the night in other key battleground states. But that margin, based on exit polling conducted by Edison Research, was smaller than the 71%-27% split that President Obama won in 2012. And it was smaller than the 72%-21% her husband, former president Bill Clinton, won in 1996.

Why did he do that well? My friend gave me the answer, and it is Obamacare. He told me what his new premium would be. He told me that several of friends had similar complaints.

Another problem with Obamacare and Hispanics is the idea that they are being forced to get it. My experience over the years is that a lot of Hispanics pay cash for doctors and medicine. This is especially true of young men, who rarely use insurance.

So what about the experts? They were wrong, especially so many in the Hispanic media. Why so wrong? My experience is that many Hispanic journalists are really Democrats working at a news agency.

Finally, the GOP has to do better. We will need more than 30% of a growing voting bloc. Hopefully, we can now focus on economic growth and school choice. Let's do that, and you will see that 30% grow over time!

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
On November 10, 2016, Rudy Giuliani said Obama should not pardon Hillary because the justice system should be allowed to investigate the William J. Clinton foundation:

"And also, it's hard to investigate other people," Giuliani said. "What do you say to a foundation that  where you have a fraud of $50,000 when you haven't looked at a foundation where there is an alleged fraud in the millions or hundreds of millions of dollars? Now, it may be true it's not true, but it hasn't been investigated." "That's a very tough balance and that's why I don't think President Obama should pardon her," Giuliani said. "I think President Obama should leave it to the system we all believe in to determine, is she innocent or is she guilty?"

Rudy raises a good point. While the email scandal has been investigated by the FBI, whether we agree or not with its conclusion and how it was conducted, we do not know the extent, if any, of the pay for play evidence against the William J. Clinton Foundation, aka the William J. Corleone Foundation. Nor do we know the details of the investigation if any.

Rudy raises the issue of equal justice. How can you charge a person for fraud of $50,000 when the Clinton Foundation has received hundreds of millions of dollars by person doing business with the State Department?

The equal justice argument also applies to the convictions of General Petraeus, General Cartwright, and Navy sailor Kristian Saucier, who is doing one year in prison for taking photos of a submarine, all of whom were convicted for less than what Hillary did using a private unsecured email server. All three should be pardoned if Hillary is pardoned.

I would agree to pardon Hillary if Hillary admits that she used her position at the State Department to raise money for her foundation and to arrange speech fees and consulting fees for Bill and herself. She must admit that she set up the private email server to keep private her dealings at the State Department.

In plain English, she tells the truth.

While an acceptance of the pardon is an admission of wrongdoing, given the extent of the scandals, Hillary should affirmatively admit what she did. This is the same as a plea in criminal court where a defendant has to allocute, meaning she admits she violated the laws and admits that there are sufficient facts to establish guilt. Also, since she and Bill profited in the hundreds of millions, she should have to pay to the U.S. Treasury the amounts directly attributed to the pay for play, which should be at least one hundred million. The pardon would cover Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea, who were all involved in the foundation.

If Trump is asked whether Obama should pardon Hillary, then he should reply yes, provided she tells the truth and gives the money back.

In summary, if Hillary wants a pardon, she must tell the truth and make restitution to the U.S. Treasury for using her office for private gain. We expect this of ordinary defendants every day in plea deals. We should expect no less from Hillary and Bill.
A pleasant surprise: Donald Trump won the election  and he won the Catholic vote!

From Catholic World News:

Contrary to pollsters expectations, a majority of Catholic voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election, according to exit polls cited by The New York Times. Trump won the Catholic vote by a margin of 52% to 45%, the polls showed. Most surveys before the election had shown Hillary Clinton winning more Catholic votes.

Thankfully, it appears that many Catholics  with the help of a dedicated pro-life movement  are finally beginning to see through that ugly seamless garment embraced and promoted by a number of clergy and religious over the last 30 years.

The so-called seamless garment philosophy tacitly places the intrinsic evil of abortion in the same moral category as other more prudential social justice issues. Thus, a (very) pro-abortion politician like Hillary Clinton gets a pass from Catholic liberals because she is, in their misguided minds, right on the other issues.

Also of note: In September, the dissident group Catholics for Choice even called for public funding of abortion  something that clearly goes against authentic Catholic moral teaching.

Tim Kaine, Clintons now former running mate, is well known as a pro-choice Catholic. A fat lot of good it did her candidacy.

Yet despite Trumps victory, liberalism still permeates the Churchs bureaucracy, which, in all likelihood, is quietly seething with rage over the election results. Just like the suburban Chicago priest who reportedly announced: I dont care who hears it. Anyone voting for Trump is going to hell. Its a mortal sin.

Gosh, whatever happened to Who am I to judge?
Smartwatches have been around for quite some time now, and quite a few companies have released their very own smartwatch versions. Weve seen quite a few Android Wear-powered smartwatches in the last couple of years, even though not that many were introduced this year, but that will probably change once Android Wear 2.0 lands (Q1 next year, most probably). Now, Android Wear might be the most popular platform for smartwatches, but its definitely not the only one, Samsungs Tizen platform is also quite popular, thanks to their Gear S2 and Gear S2 Classic smartwatches which are probably amongst the best watches out there still.

That being said, Samsung had introduced two new smartwatches at IFA 2016 back in September, the Gear S3 Frontier and Gear S3 Classic. Many consumers have been waiting for these smartwatches to hit the market, and youll be glad to hear that theyve just been released in Samsungs homeland, Korea, which means theyre coming to more markets soon as well. Samsung has confirmed that the Gear S3 will become available in the US on November 18th, as weve expected. The Gear S3 will also launch in Australia, France, Germany, UK, Singapore and the UAE later this month, and more markets will follow later on. You probably already know that both versions of this smartwatch have been available for pre-order in the US for quite a while now, and they are both priced at $349.99, though AT&T is currently offering the Gear S3 Frontier for only $249.99.

Both of these smartwatches feature a 1.3-inch (360 x 360) Circular Super AMOLED display, 768MB of RAM and 4GB of native storage. Both watches are fueled by a dual-core SoC running at 1.0GHz, and ship with Tizen 2.3.1 OS. You do get IP68 water and dust resistance when it comes to the Gear S3 smartwatches, and Samsung has included a 380mAh battery on the inside. The Gear S3 smartwatches ship with 22mm watch bands, and it seems like only the Frontier version comes with 4G LTE in Korea. That is more or less it, these two smartwatches will be hitting more markets soon, as listed above, so stay tuned.
Google Photos, which is a photo and video sharing platform created by Google, is constantly updated with new features to benefit users, especially in the past few months. The Google Photos app for Android has especially benefited from this, regularly receiving updates which brings new features such as a space-saving feature which automatically combs through a users gallery and collects all images and videos which have been backed up to the cloud so they can then be deleted easily, freeing up much needed device storage. Now, the latest update comes in the form of an offline capability for the Google Photos app for Android.

With this new feature, Google Photos users will be able to build animations inside the app itself when a working Internet connection is not available. Well, if you are planning to test out this feature, just temporarily turn on the airplane mode on your Android device and open up Google Photos. Once doing so, open up the Assistant tab which is located on the bottom left corner of the main page on the app, and tap the Create new animation option at the top. Then, simply select between 2-50 photos and hit Create. You could also select a day such as yesterday or today, and hit the same Create option. Google Photos will then create your animation which comes in the form of a GIF, which is stored locally for the time being. However, to be able to use this new feature, you will need to have the latest version of the Google Photos app which hit the Google Play Store yesterday. If your apps do not update automatically, then head over to the Google Play Store to manually update your Google Photos app.
HTC today announced their newest smartphone, the HTC Bolt. This is a smartphone that has been crafted with speed in mind. Therefore, the HTC Bolt is one which looks to offer the user a fast smartphone experience, whether it be playing games, downloading files or web browsing. Although, web browsing using data is one of the big selling points here as the HTC Bolt is a smartphone that has been built with Sprints LTE Plus network in mind and includes support for 320 MHz Carrier Aggregation, as well as coming equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X10 LTE modem.

In terms of the rest of the specs, the HTC Bolt comes packing a 5.5-inch display which offers a Quad HD (2560 x 1440 pixels) resolution and a 534 ppi (pixels per inch), the screen is made up of Super LCD 3 with curved-edge Gorilla Glass 5. Inside, the HTC Bolt comes packing 3GB RAM, 32GB internal storage and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 octa-core processor. In addition to the 32GB of storage, the Bolt also includes support for expandable storage via microSD cards (up to 2TB).

Advertisement

As is the case with any new smartphone nowadays, cameras are increasingly more important and on offer with the HTC Bolt is a 16-megapixel rear camera which supports phase detection autofocus (PDAF) and Optical Image Stabilization (OIS). Along with an f/2.0 aperture, Dual LED flash and 4K video recording with Hi-Res Audio. While the front facing camera is an 8-megapixel sensor which offers Full HD 1080p video recording, as well as a number of additional features like Auto HDR, Auto Selfie, Voice Selfie, Live Make-Up, and Selfie Panorama. And that is not all, typical of a HTC device, the Bolt also comes packing some fairly nice audio features including HTC BoomSound Adaptive Audio, Hi-Res Audio 24-bit playback, and HTC has even thrown in a free pair of USB Type-C headphones for good measure. Needless to say, USB Type-C support is therefore included, as is a fingerprint sensor and a 3,200 mAh battery which supports Quick Charge 2.0. One of the big changes with the design of the HTC Bolt (compared to the HTC 10), is that the HTC Bolt is IP57 certified for water-resistance. Not to mention, the HTC Bolt comes running on Android 7.0 (Nougat) out of the box.

In terms of availability, the HTC Bolt will be available to buy starting November 11 from Sprint (online and in-store), as well as Best Buy, RadioShack and Costco. In terms of the price and for those looking to purchase outright, the HTC Bolt does cost $599. While for those looking to spread the cost over time, the HTC Bolt can be picked up through Sprint on installment billing terms for $25 per month, over a 24-month basis. The HTC Bolt will be available in two colors, Glacier Silver and Gunmetal Gray and you can check out images of both colored models in the galleries below.

HTC Bolt Glacier Silver

Advertisement

HTC Bolt Gunmetal Gray
Qualcomm is a well known chipset manufacturer and is widely known for their Snapdragon processors. That being said, the company is expected to launch its upcoming premium processor, the Snapdragon 830 in the coming months and it has now been reported that the technology in this chipset will be able to support Quick Charge 4.0. According to an accessory manufacturer which was in contact with technology website Fudzilla, Quick Charge 4.0 will debut with the Snapdragon 830 processor and will support fast charging speeds of up to 28W. This will be Qualcomms most powerful fast charging solution to date.

According to the source close to Fudzilla, Quick Charge 4.0 will have the potential to support charging of 5V, increasing output to 5.6A, which is equivalent to about 28W worth of power. The source also mentioned that a 9V / 4A option may be supported, which will double the existing power output which is currently supported by Quick Charge 3.0, bringing the output to a whopping 36W. This does not seem plausible for a smartphone but there is already a Quick Charge solution at the moment which supports up to 36W to charge high power batteries as well as laptops.

Quick Charge 3.0 which is a feature in many flagship Android devices of 2016, currently allows smartphones to be charged four times faster than regular charging technology, it also works twice as fast as Quick Charge 1.0 and 38% faster than Quick Charge 2.0. Quick Charge 3.0 makes use of an algorithm called Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltage (INOV), which allows the exact amount of power needed by the device to be identified at all times. With INOV, the transferred energy is optimized to make it more efficient. Additionally, the devices can adjust the ideal voltage level supported by that particular device. Quick Charge 3.0 supports 18W for smartphones and offers a wider range of voltages, with 200 mV increments ranging from 3.6V to 20V. If the rumors turn out to be true, and if Quick Charge 4.0 will be able to support 28W for smartphones, this will surpass OPPOs VOOC which currently supports 20W of power and also Huaweis Super Charge which peaks at 22.5W. Smartphones which will be able to support Quick Charge 4.0, will most likely debut in early 2017.
If people were asked who the most innovative mobile OEM is, Samsung would likely be high up in the collective ranks, and for good reason. While TouchWiz is divisive, it also brought quick settings, multi-window, and a good number of other Android features that everybody takes for granted these days. This happened because Android in its early form needed a boost, and Google let OEMs give them that boost. Chrome OS, however, is far more locked down. With Chromebooks on the rise, rather than a fresh face on a crowded scene like Android was, Google has enough room to draw a clear line that OEMs cant cross, and that is messing around with the system UI. No Chromebook you lay hands on will run any differently at its core and on the default OS, than any other. With the exception of some Chrome web apps that may only work on x86 processor types, every Chromebook out there can fit the same use cases in the same ways. Samsung is known for differentiating on the software side, and the delay of their Chromebook Pro, a machine that seems all but ready to hit shelves, may point to them starting something far bigger than themselves.

If OEMs cant mess around with Chrome OS itself, and the Chrome OS app ecosystem lives in web apps, whats left? Android apps, of course. Android app and Play Store support is in beta for a number of Chromebooks right now, and will be hitting stable status with availability on almost all Chrome OS devices in the very near future. Have a good look at the Samsung Chromebook Pro. Yep, thats a Stylus. Without any additional software on top of Chrome OS, the PEN as its known here, is just another stylus. Maybe it has a pressure sensitive tip that lets you control line thickness, or some other bells and whistles, but Galaxy Note owners know its potential. That potential is unlocked through apps. Samsungs own apps, especially the S-Note app, are the difference between dipping a Nintendo DS stylus in capacitive rubber and unsheathing a glorious S-Pen to get stuff done. So, what if thats Samsungs game plan? If thats the case, it may be feasible for everybody to follow suit. In fact, this may be just what OEMs have been waiting for.

If Samsung is holding back on the Chromebook Pro until Android apps are out of beta so that they can release their own apps that are exclusive to the device, theyll not only differentiate and add value to a device without throwing their own skin on top of it, but theyll be giving consumers a choice. Want S-Note? Great. Dont want it? Remove it. All this without having to resort to rooting or other hacks. That last bit is important, because the Samsung Chromebook Pro is based on an ARM processor, as are many other Chromebooks. If you dont like the software on an x86 Chromebook, throw Linux on it. Maybe use CloudReady or Remix OS instead, or reach for the impractical stars and subject the poor device to the rigors of Windows. The joys of an Intel processor are freedoms just such as this. In the world of ARM, your choices are a bit more limited, and most Chromebooks with ARM processors are completely locked down anyway. Chrome OS isnt for everybody, and will never be, but for the people that its made for, its a great experience as it is. If the speculation that Samsung is backing off to wait for full Play Store functionality to push their own Android apps as value-adds to their flagship Chromebook, it will confirm the new paradigm; people can choose a Chromebook based solely on hardware if they like the core experience, while loyalists and those who happen to buy something from an OEM whos gone down the app development road can enjoy exclusive functionality.
In recent years, a Sprint and T-Mobile merger has been talked about quite a bit. In fact, SoftBanks Masayoshi Son has tried to talk regulators into approving such a deal so the two could better compete with Verizon and AT&T  both of whom are more than twice the size of both T-Mobile and Sprint  but were unsuccessful and in 2014 they opted to replace the CEO of Sprint and start their own turnaround. Recently, Son came out and said that their original plan was to buy Sprint and then buy T-Mobile to merge them. But the government wasnt having any of it. He did say that after the new administration takes office, come January, they may open up talks again. And with Trump being elected the 45th president, its been a hot topic this week.

Now analysts are coming out to talk about a potential tie up between the two companies, and they believe that it would be a good thing for tower companies: Crown Castle and American Tower. Well they believe that it wouldnt hurt them in the immediate future. New Street analysts wrote in a research note this week that the revenue exposure from overlapping sites is modestly lower and lease durations are two years longer than we previously thought. The overall impact is that site decommissioning should only drive 3% to 8% downside for the sector, with Crown Castle remaining most exposed. American Tower also announced this morning that it uses separate leases for antenna space with both Sprint and T-Mobile, and this is roughly at 5,500 sites that they own and/or operates.

Sprint and SoftBank may still be looking to pick up T-Mobile, but at this point, Deutsche Telecom may no longer be looking to sell T-Mobile USA, like they were just a few short years ago. Since John Legere came on at T-Mobile USA in 2012, he has turned the company around. Going from being a thorn in the side of Deutsche Telekom to now making the most money out of all of their businesses. So while SoftBank may still want the company, Deutsche Telekom may not be ready to sell.
For a lot of people, the idea of 4G LTE networks might be considered the height of modernity, but the world is ever-changing and 5G networks and technologies are in development as we speak. The standard surrounding 5G has yet to be formally ratified, but there are common themes and ideas that the industry has gravitated towards, and Verizon has started to work with the likes of Samsung in order to develop these new technologies. Speaking of South Korean firms, South Korean network KT is claiming to be the first one to get 5G on the market, with a launch target of 2019. The Korean network had originally aimed for 2020 as the launch of their new 5G network, but have now moved this forward to 2019, but Verizon, the only American network that appears bullish on 5G, remains undeterred by this news.

A Verizon spokeswoman simply said that We are collaborating closely with our peer operators in the Asian markets as we are very much aligned towards implementing 5G technology to time with standards. KT and Samsung Electronics have been working together as part of KTs 5G-SIG initiative to create working standards around 5G technologies, and Verizon themselves is hard at work creating some usable standards for the future. Theres a lot of testing going on around the frequencies and subcarrier frequencies that could be used in 5G networks, with Verizon using a 75 kHz frequnecy, which has jnot been considering by either the 3GPPP or other firms. Even so, working with Samsung and other operators the world over, Verizon will no doubt be able to one of the first carriers in North America to launch with 5G around 2020 themselves.

As for 5G networks being available for the general public, KT will be testing a 5G solution during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in 2018 along with help from Qualcomm, Intel, Ericsson as well as Samsung. The real push for 5G right now will be taken care of in the ratification of standards, as once an industry standard jhas been reached, networks and device manufacturers can start to build devices for 5G. Standards are important, as they allow things like WiFi to be supported by everyone.
Well, that was the easy part. All Trump had to do was vanquish people too stupid to pick up the thousand-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk  smug, smirking, out-of-touch establishment drones.

Now comes the part Americans have desperately hoped for, but almost never seen: A politician keeping his promises to the American people. (See, e.g., Senate candidate Marco Rubios 2010 promise to oppose amnesty if elected; Sen. Mitch McConnells 2014 promise to block Obamas executive amnesty if Republicans were handed a Senate majority; Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Ted Cruzs promise to support the 2016 Republican presidential nominee.)

Hey, anybody else remember Read My Lips? That was from the family too pristine to sully themselves by voting for Trump.

With the self-assurance of everything else theyve said wrong about Trump from Day One, the media are already announcing that he, too, will betray the American people.

I dont think so! To help Mr. Trump keep his promises, Ive compiled a detailed schedule for his first 100 days in office. Please note that each day is meticulously planned:

Day 1: Start building the wall.

Day 2: Continue building the wall.

Day 3: Continue building the wall.

Day 4: Continue building the wall.

Day 5: Continue building the wall.

Day 6: Continue building the wall.

Day 7: Continue building the wall.

Day 8: Continue building the wall.

Day 9: Continue building the wall.

Day 10: Continue building the wall.

Day 11: Continue building the wall.

Day 12: Continue building the wall.

Day 13: Continue building the wall.

Day 14: Continue building the wall.

Day 15: Continue building the wall.

Day 16: Continue building the wall.

Day 17: Continue building the wall.

Day 18: Continue building the wall.

Day 19: Continue building the wall.

Day 20: Continue building the wall.

Day 21: Continue building the wall.

Day 22: Continue building the wall.

Day 23: Continue building the wall.

Day 24: Continue building the wall.

Day 25: Continue building the wall.

Day 26: Continue building the wall.

Day 27: Continue building the wall.

Day 28: Continue building the wall.

Day 29: Continue building the wall.

Day 30: Continue building the wall.

Day 31: Continue building the wall.

Day 32: Continue building the wall.

Day 33: Continue building the wall.

Day 34: Continue building the wall.

Day 35: Continue building the wall.

Day 36: Continue building the wall.

Day 37: Continue building the wall.

Day 38: Continue building the wall.

Day 39: Continue building the wall.

Day 40: Continue building the wall.

Day 41: Continue building the wall.

Day 42: Continue building the wall.

Day 43: Continue building the wall.

Day 44: Continue building the wall.

Day 45: Continue building the wall.

Day 46: Continue building the wall.

Day 47: Continue building the wall.

Day 48: Continue building the wall.

Day 49: Continue building the wall.

Day 50: Continue building the wall.

Day 51: Continue building the wall

Day 52: Continue building the wall.

Day 53: Continue building the wall.

Day 54: Continue building the wall.

Day 55: Continue building the wall.

Day 56: Continue building the wall.

Day 57: Continue building the wall.

Day 58: Continue building the wall.

Day 59: Continue building the wall.

Day 60: Continue building the wall.

Day 61: Continue building the wall.

Day 62: Continue building the wall.

Day 63: Continue building the wall.

Day 64: Continue building the wall.

Day 65: Continue building the wall.

Day 66: Continue building the wall.

Day 67: Continue building the wall.

Day 68: Continue building the wall.

Day 69: Continue building the wall.

Day 70: Continue building the wall.

Day 71: Continue building the wall

Day 72: Continue building the wall.

Day 73: Continue building the wall.

Day 74: Continue building the wall.

Day 75: Continue building the wall.

Day 76: Continue building the wall.

Day 77: Continue building the wall.

Day 78: Continue building the wall.

Day 79: Continue building the wall.

Day 80: Continue building the wall.

Day 81: Continue building the wall

Day 82: Continue building the wall.

Day 83: Continue building the wall.

Day 84: Continue building the wall.

Day 85: Continue building the wall.

Day 86: Continue building the wall.

Day 87: Continue building the wall.

Day 88: Continue building the wall.

Day 89: Continue building the wall.

Day 90: Continue building the wall.

Day 91: Continue building the wall

Day 92: Continue building the wall.

Day 93: Continue building the wall.

Day 94: Continue building the wall.

Day 95: Continue building the wall.

Day 96: Continue building the wall.

Day 97: Continue building the wall.

Day 98: Continue building the wall.

Day 99: Continue building the wall.

Day 100: Report to American people about progress of wall. Keep building the wall.

Good luck, President Donald Trump!

COPYRIGHT 2016 ANN COULTER

DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK
Bleubeard and I welcome you

Art, including the journey, background techniques, sewing on both paper and fabric, new experiments, photos, failures, and successes will be shared on this site. I have removed my e-mail address until such time as I can get it to work again. Thank you for understanding. You can always leave a note on my blog and I will visit you.



Please check out my Previous Collaborations link above to see what projects I have been involved in over the past 12 years. Current and ongoing projects only are shown below.



Occasionally, Silent Sunday will showcase photos of my home, neighborhood, or community. A picture is often worth a thousand words.



Feel free to drop by every second Thursday of the month for my Second Thursday Tutorials. They are interspersed with my other Tutorials found at the link page above.


Arab world delegation at Rome's Grand Temple for dialogue Chief Rabbi Capo Di Segni calls it 'sign of hope'

(by Cristiana Missori) (ANSAmed) - ROME, NOVEMBER 11 - The synagogue of Rome on Friday opened its doors to a multi-confessional delegation from Bahrain and other Arab countries to reiterate the commitment of the religious communities to foster peace and tolerance. Representatives from the Eastern and Orthodox Churches as well as Buddhists, Sikh and Shia communities were present, as were ones from civil society in Bahrain, Egypt and Lebanon.



Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni and the head of Rome's Jewish community Ruth Dureghello welcomed the delegation. Di Segni said that ''the road was opened to dialogue between Catholics and Jews'' at the Grand Temple, which led to ''visits from three popes. And the time has come to open up to other religions as well''. The message was echoed by several Muslim representatives present, led by French imam of Tunisian origins Hassen Chalgoumi. ''We are ere to say no to barbarianism and hatred,'' the imam of Drancy said, ''and to launch a clear signal that we are stronger than them and we will not let them separate us.'' From the synagogue of Rome, ''we will say no once again to violence as well as no to any association of Islam with terrorism''.



The message of peace is also meant an homage ''to the 130 victims of the Bataclan'', killed in terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13 last year, he said. The imam is known for his position of being open to inter-religious dialogue - especially between Jews and Muslims - and has been called the ''imam of the Jews''. An example of peaceful co-existence, he said, ''is Bahrain'', the country from which most of the member of the delegation were from. ''Bahrain is a message of hope, where there are churches and synagogues and where Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists live together in peace.'' ''Since 1948,'' the head of the Bahrain Federation of Expatriate Associations said, ''we have managed to celebrate Hanukkah in Bahrain. This is a sign of openness of the small kingdom. Education is key to breaking down barriers and removing fears.'' The head of Rome's Jewish community, Ruth Dureghello, called it a ''unique experience and I am honored that this delegation has been welcomed into our synagogue, because we hope that this message can be sent to all of Europe from Rome. '' (ANSAmed).




Egypt: security boosted ahead of today's demos Organized by opposition groups including Brotherhood

(ANSAmed) - CAIRO, NOVEMBER 11 - The Egyptian interior ministry has implemented tight security measures after calls for protests Friday launched by some movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which was declared a terrorist organization by authorities. A security source told Mena news agency that ''all entrances to the governorates of Cairo, Giza and Qalyubiya are patrolled by security forces to avoid that elements of the terrorist group can potentially infiltrate demonstrations or organized protests''.



Security in Cairo's Tahrir Square is tight.



The ''calls to demonstrate - continued the source - vie to create a state of chaos that could bring clashes among citizens and security forces. Anyone violating the law or hampering the lives of citizens will be treated according to the law''.



The day of protest called the 'revolution of the poor' was organized on social media against the economic policies of the Egyptian government. (ANSAmed).




DAKAR - Italian foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni spoke Friday during a visit to the Senegalese capital about the need to fight illegal migration.

''I agree fully with the words of the president of Senegal (Mackj Sall, Ed.) on the fact that there is the need to fight illegal migration,'' he said during an interview with French broadcasters after meeting with his Senegalese counterpart, Mankeur Ndiaye, ''and I am saying this as the representative of a country that has one of the largest Senegalese communities in Europe, which is well-integrated, which produces jobs and creates jobs, with excellent relations with Italy and Italians.'' ''Gradually, as we reduce irregular migration we will be able to increase regular forms of migration. The phenomenon will not end tomorrow, it will last decades and we will have to decide whether these will be years of mourning and criminality or years of regular, controlled migration. This is the choice that we must make and for which excellent collaboration is needed beween Italy, the EU and Senegal,'' added the minister, who was leading a mission in West Africa of European Commission officials . Some 8,740 Senegalese came to Italy illegally in 2016, equal to 5% of the arrivals.


ROME - The next to last day of the Medfilm Festival in Rome opens with the Focus section dedicated to Iran, which is a guest of honor this year together with Tunisia. At 4:00 pm the latest short film by iconic Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, Take Me Home, will be presented, followed by Inversion by Nehnam Behzadi. At 6:00 pm, the Focus dedicated to Tunisia is scheduled, with Thala My Love by Mehdi Hmili, a love letter to the revolution.



French road movie Four Days in France by Jerome Reybaoud will be screened at 10:00 pm. The director will attend.



On the 10th anniversary of the Lux Film Days prize, the Italian representation in the European Parliament, with the aim of widening the public of films chosen for the 2016 prize, has organized a live event between the Festival Linea d'Ombra in Salerno and the MedFilm festival for the joint presentation of the first film made by Tunisian filmmaker Leyla Bouzid, Appena Apro gli Occhi, As Soon as I Open My Eyes. It will be held at 8:00 pm at the cinema Teatro delle Arti in Salerno, the city's cultural center, and the cinema Savoy in Rome. The movie was filmed in Tunis in the summer of 2010, a few months before the revolution. Farah is 18 years olf and has just graduated. Her family wanted her to go to medical school but she doesn't agree and sings in a rock band.



MP Isabella Adinolfi will talk from Salerno. She is a member of the commission for culture and education of the European Parliament. Gian Paolo Meneghini, the director of the information office in Italy of the EP will also be present. The deputy president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, the Italian distributor of the film, Paolo Minuto (Cineclub Internazionale Distribuzione) and Ginella Vocca, the director of MedFilm will intervene through a video conference. Also at the Savoy cinema, short films that are running for an international award, selected by Alessandro Zoppo will be screened, starting at 4:40 pm in Room 4.



They include Omi Mouna's Secret by Tunisian filmmaker Mohsen El Gharbi, who will attend the screening, and Israel's Daughter of the bride, by Tamar Rudoy, who will also attend. At 6:30 pm new Italian productions will star in the Perle section.



At 8:30 pm, for the international competition section for documentaries Open Eyes, the Palestinian A Magical Substance Flows into Me by Jumana Manna will be presented. At 6:00 pm, the Macro Museum will host the end of the first edition of events dedicated to Mediterranean literature with the presentation of the book Una Ballata del Mar Egeo (A Ballad of the Aegean Sea), by Patrizio Nissirio, published by L'Erudita.
Migrants: 'Exile Ensemble' created in Berlin's Gorki Theater To go to ten German cities starting in January

(ANSAmed) - BERLIN, NOVEMBER 11 - One of the most innovative and ''political'' theaters of the entire German-speaking area, the Maxim Gorki Theater of Berlin, will next year launch an 'Exile Ensemble' formed entirely of refugees. The intention to create an ensemble of migrants was announced months ago when an announcement was made for a competition - to sign up for by the end of July - to take part in a ''platform'' of seven ''artists/professionals forced to live in Germany'', and who for two years can now work in Gorki, a theater in East Berlin with a prestigious history. The announcement called for the launch of projects to take on tour, accompanied by seminars in theaters willing to take part. The tour will include ten German cities and will also go to Switzerland, ''to Zurich, where there is a tradition of exile theater'', theater manager Shermin Langhoff told foreign journalists recently in Berlin. Among the cities that the tour will include are - according to the Turkish-born German director - are Munich, Dortmund, Weimar, Mannheim and Frankfurt.



Four of the group' participants got their degrees from the Damascus Faculty of Fine Arts, two are Palestinian and one is an Afghan woman. The experiment on the artistic integration of migrants was born in a Germany that for over a year has been experiencing the impact of migration with repercussions especially at the political level, linked to the decision to temporarily open the country's borders in September 2015 to resolve the humanitarian crisis of refugees stuck in the Balkans. (ANSAmed).




Italian FM in Dakar calls for halt to illegal migration 'Regular forms of migration to increase afterwards'

(ANSAmed) - DAKAR, NOVEMBER 11 - Italian foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni spoke Friday during a visit to the Senegalese capital about the need to fight illegal migration.



''I agree fully with the words of the president of Senegal (Mackj Sall, Ed.) on the fact that there is the need to fight illegal migration,'' he said during an interview with French broadcasters after meeting with his Senegalese counterpart, Mankeur Ndiaye, ''and I am saying this as the representative of a country that has one of the largest Senegalese communities in Europe, which is well-integrated, which produces jobs and creates jobs, with excellent relations with Italy and Italians.'' ''Gradually, as we reduce irregular migration we will be able to increase regular forms of migration. The phenomenon will not end tomorrow, it will last decades and we will have to decide whether these will be years of mourning and criminality or years of regular, controlled migration. This is the choice that we must make and for which excellent collaboration is needed beween Italy, the EU and Senegal,'' added the minister, who was leading a mission in West Africa of European Commission officials . Some 8,740 Senegalese came to Italy illegally in 2016, equal to 5% of the arrivals. (ANSAmed).




Gabina VOA is designed to be an infotainment youth radio show broadcasting to Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Amharic language. The show brings varied perspectives on issues concerning young people in the Horn of Africa region. Gabina in the Amharic language is a front row taxi ridesymbolic of the shows content as a fun ride that takes audiences from point A to point B. Gabina VOAs main goal is Enlightening young people, introducing them to cutting-edge technological innovations, exposing them to new processes and ideas so they can be productive, informed and self-governing citizens.
Renzi urges Italians abroad to vote 'Yes' Brochure on December 4 referendum

(ANSAmed) - ROME, NOVEMBER 11 - Premier Matteo Renzi said Friday in a letter to Italians abroad that his constitutional reform will "make Italy stronger". The two-page brochure features photos of Renzi with various international heads of state, and explains how to vote from abroad by December 1.



Italians living in their home country will be called to a yes/no vote in a referendum on the reform on December 4. "Today we are at a crossroads," Renzi wrote. "We can go back to being those that evoke sniggers abroad, the ones that never change, that are notorious for their attachment to their seats and for brawling in parliament. Or, we can show...that finally something is changing, and that we're becoming a credible, prestigious country". The young center-left premier went on to point out that "everybody has been promising this reform for decades, debating it on TV and in parliament, filling newspapers and social media (with it). But they forgot to actually carry it out. Now the reform is here, it's cleared six readings in parliament and now depends on the vote of citizens. Yes, including yours". (ANSAmed).




TEL AVIV - US President-elect Donald Trump has said that he is confident that his administration will be able to play an important role in helping sides in the Middle East reach a just and stable peace, through negotiations, that is not imposed by other parties, in an interview on Thursday to Israeli pro-government daily Israel Hayom.



Trump said that he was aware that Israel was ''the only democracy in the Middle East and the only one to defend human rights there'', adding that it represents hope for many people.



He noted that he expects that the ''indissoluble connection between our two great nations'' will be strengthened under his administration and that he has already agreed in principle - ''as soon as possible'' - to a meeting with Premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas renews invite to Putin

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday said he hopes Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Palestine in the near future, renewing a former invite. ''We have invited President Putin to visit Palestine and hope that this visit will take place in the near future'', said the Palestinian leader in an interview to Interfax. ''For our part, we maintain contacts and we visit Russia each year for consultations and to exchange opinion on various regional and international issues and to strengthen bilateral relations'', he added. ''I once again invite President Putin to visit Palestine, where he will be a welcome guest of our people: his trip will be a splendid occasion to open a great multifunctional center of culture, art and the economy'', concluded Mahmoud Abbas.








Sadie and I are back from Japan and it was amazing. It's hard to sum it up in words. I took a ton of photos and at the end of each day I did an audio-to-text dump in Evernote so I can just edit that and add it to our photo album when we get it printed. I'm so gald I did it every day because it was all such a blur I would have never remembered the details. We went to Toyko, Okayama, Osaka, and Kyoto and were traveling with 3 others. It was such a good group, it was a very mellow mood and we all had a mix of interests which took us to places I think we wouldn't have normally gone, which was fabulous. It was such a gift traveling with Sadie, seeing her in such a different environment, thriving on all the new sights and culture, we will remember it forever.

The food, sights, and sounds were so vivid and strong. The fabric and textiles were amazing, as were the temples and shrines. I had a little bit of a freak out in a few shops, particularly this embroidered patch shop, KYO-TO-TO in Kyoto that we went to twice. I should have bought more patches. Loft was one of my favorite shops, with all the pens and papers I could want and the Sanjusangen-do shrine in Kyoto was incredible as was the art island, Naoshima. There are so many other places we went, it's had to list them all.

I had this all written a few days ago and was going to edit it, and then the election happened. And then I had a hard time focusing on anything. But here we are, moving forward, and staying strong.
Answers Africa is one of a kind platform created for Africans both locally and in the diaspora and those seeking for more in-depth information about Africa. We have always focused on creating the highest quality informational contents right from the beginning. We share the most relevant information on the latest and trending news, events, people, and places in Africa.

We produce contents across various categories including Politics, People, Love and Romance, Nature, Entertainment, Technology and pretty much everything else that Africans may find relevant.

We aim to answer the most relevant questions about Africa in areas of entertainment, famous people, emerging technologies while we also engage with various distribution capabilities to connect with Africans in need of information who rely on our website to keep in touch with the world that is changing so fast.

These are some of the articles you may be interested in reading:

10 Famous TV Personalities Born In Ethiopia Ethiopia is a country best known for its fast athletes like Dibaba and Bekele, breathtaking models like Liya Kebede and of course Haile Selassie but there are also famous TV personalities who are doing a great job in entertainment and pushing the country to civilization. The following is a list of ten most famous TV ...

Top 10 African Authors of All Time The pace of present African literature is moving at a high-speed; more defiant in both style and tone than those of the great independence writers generation. Here, the subjects of taboo are widely explored. The emerging African authors of this generation are not afraid to go further afield for the literary fodder. Meanwhile, since the birth ...

Maina Kageni Biography  Daughter, Salary and Gay Rumors Maina Kageni is one of those Kenyans who has remained as interesting as ever in the eyes of the public. A strong Red devil fan and lover of football, the man is currently a Breakfast Show presenter with Mwalimu Kingangi on Nairobis Classic 105 Radio Station. Many questions have always emerged on the man in serious ...

Kalekye Mumo  Biography, Boyfriend and Salary Kalekye Mumo has been described as someone who is as vibrant as she is beautiful, a Kenyan radio queen, TV host and media personality, movie actress, Musician, businesswoman, and fashionista but what else is there to know about this Kenyan icon, Kalekye Mumo and her co-host Shaffie Weru have been among the most listened to radio presenters ...

Julie Gichuru Bio  Age, Husband & Children In Africa, women have a long history of bringing under control obstacles to keep their heads above the water. So, it comes as no surprise whenever African women are recognized and decorated across the continent and globe for performing brilliantly well in their various fields of endeavor. In Kenya for instance, a list of national ...

Jeff Koinange Biography  All About His Age, Wife  Shaila Koinange & Family Jeff Koinange is a well-known Kenyan journalist. He currently hosts Jeff Koinange Live on KTN. Koinange has served as a journalist in the United States and has also worked for a few U.S. broadcasters. He was born in Kenya but attended college in the United States, which may explain his accent. There are several interesting ...

Caroline Mutoko Biography  Age, Daughter & House Caroline Mutoko is a Kenyan radio presenter, famously known for hosting a morning breakfast show on Kiss 100 FM. The station is based in Nairobi and ranks among the highly-rated radio stations in Kenya with online streaming services as well. Learn more about the Kenyan-born journalist. Caroline Mutokos Age and Bio Born on January 4, 1973, Caroline is ...

The Most Stunning News Presenter In Kenya Discloses Her Real Age  You Would Not Believe It In modern African societies, it is often regarded as impolite or outright lack of disrespect to ask a woman of her age. We also have seen celebrities lie about how old they are when asked their age. People, mostly women have refused to let people know their real age, despite being public figures. The few ...

Demystifying Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Biography, Husband & Education Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist, non-fiction writer, short story writer and actress. As a seasoned Nigerian writer, she has been called the most prominent of a procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors that is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature. She has been making Nigeria proud in the global scene ...

Wole Soyinka  Biography, Wife, Children, Family, Quick Facts Professor Wole Soyinka, a great and brilliant Nigerian writer and political activist, who was the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The name, Wole Soyinka, is a household name both in Africa and beyond especially in the field of literature. With over 50 pieces of work, his writing includes poems, novels, memoirs ...

5 Most Vulgar Kenyan Radio Presenters It appears being vulgar is the real deal nowadays especially for the fact that the world is becoming more exposed and civilized. Sadly, but true, young people are constantly being exposed to images, discussions, and content that most people would deem detrimental to the African culture and moral statutes. This is because most of us ...

6 Sexiest News Anchors In Kenya Some news anchors have been stealing eyes every time they appear on-screen. Most of us hardly concentrate on the programme they present as our entire focus is usually on their striking physique and beautiful faces. It is common knowledge that Kenyan women are amazingly beautiful. From the celebrities to the everyday woman, they are all in ...

Interesting Oprah Winfrey Quotes To Keep You Motivated Oprah Winfrey is one of the worlds most powerful women in the media and business sectors. Her life is the typical success story that motivates and lifts ones morale. One amazing thing about this media mogul is her sincerity about past hurts, mistakes, healing, and success. The renowned talk show host and media personality is the first ...

Chinua Albert Achebe Biography- Family, Net Worth & Death Chinua Albert Achebe, of blessed memory, was a Nigerian prolific author best known for his inventive style of writing and simplicity of expressions. Famed as one of the finest writers Nigeria has ever produced, Achebe lived and died an international hero and a literary giant, who left behind unforgettable legacies and footprints in the sands of ...

Steve Harvey  His Wife, Kids & Height Steve Harvey is an American comedian, actor, radio and TV show host, producer and an author of different relationship advice books. Steve Harveys Early Life Born in Welch, West Virginia, on January 17, 1957, as Broderick Stephen Harvey, Steve was the last of five children. His family relocated to Cleveland when he was young and there, he attended Glenville High School from ...

Intriguing Things You Should Know About Danny Kokers Rise to Fame and Who His Wife Is Danny Koker is popular as the star of the History Channel reality TV series, Counting Cars. Prior to him appearing on the show, the TV personality was a musician who had embarked on a number of national tours with his rock group, Counts 77. He and his group have released quite a number of songs ...

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 ...

Tracing Isha Sesays Career Until CNN, Her Worth And Why She Divorce Her Husband As far as journalists of African origin go, Isha Sesay is one of the most famous on the continent  and by extension, the world. The Sierra Leonean and British journalist has had a successful career since she joined the industry in 1998. In that time, she has worked for a host of major media ...

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 ...

Stpeach Age, Husband and Other Facts About The Twitch Streamer Lisa Vannatta, famously known by her online alias, STPeach is a Canadian video game streamer cum vlogger who has garnered fame through her appearances on different video-sharing/social networking platforms such as Youtube, Instagram, Twitch, Reddit, and Twitter. The beautiful lady got her career to a start in August 2015 when she joined the live streaming video platform, Twitch. She rose to ...

Insights into Seth Meyers Wife, Family and What His Net Worth Is Celebrities are mostly remembered and known for the work they do. For Seth Meyers, his career as a comedian, writer, actor, TV host, and producer is his biggest identifier. He was on Saturday Night Live SNL show as a head writer and cast member for more than ten years during which he built a reputation ...

Who Is Jessica Gadsden  Age, Net Worth & All About Charlamagne tha Gods Wife Jessica Gadsden is an American fitness coach as well as a personal trainer. She is better known as the spouse of popular American media personality, Charlamagne Tha God. Charlamange Tha God is a well-known TV and radio personality in the U.S. He has featured in several shows (both on the radio and TV) and is ...

Who Is Collins Tuohy  Michael Ohers sister ? Her Wedding, Husband & Net Worth Collins Tuohy is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, blogger, and social media personality. She is also better known as the adoptive sister of NFL player, Michael Oher, whose life story inspired the Hollywood blockbuster The Blind Side. The Blind Side tells the true life story of Oher who grew up in an impoverished background consisting of a ...

Eye-Popping Facts About The Personal Life And Career Success Of Sportscaster Heidi Watney Heidi Watney is a media personality who has created a niche for herself as a sportscaster. Starting out as a radio presenter, the brilliant young lady has gone on to work for several prominent sports networks, and currently, she is with the MLB. The sportscaster is also known to have been an avid sports lady right ...

Marty Lagina Bio  Siblings (Martina and Rick Lagina), Net Worth and Wife Marty Lagina is an American engineer and businessman who has risen to fame as a reality TV star. This is thanks to his involvement in the adventure TV series, The Curse of Oak Island. The Curse of Oak Island is a long-running TV series which airs on the history channel. The show aims to solve ...

Is Jordan Schlansky Just A Character or a Real Life Person and What Does He Do? The world of late-night television is an interesting one. Shows during that time are geared towards giving viewers comedic relief from a long day at work through interviews and comedy sketches. The often charismatic host of this show requires the balancing talent of a producer whose primary job is to deliver great episodes. It is ...

Heres How Wealthy Jimmy Kimmel Is From All The Phases of His Career, Marriages and Sons Health Jimmy Kimmel is a renowned late-night talk show host known for his charm, wit, and the A-list guests he features on his show. As the host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! On ABC, Jimmy has been serving comedy to television viewers for years which played a pivotal role in launching him into mainstream fame and enabled ...

Natasha Bertrand Biography  Is She Married? Who Is the Husband & What Is Her Age? Natasha Bertrand is not just a young prominent journalist but a first-rate investigative reporter. With her natural beauty and smile, Natashas sharp, insightful political commentary also makes her a thorough reporter. Her sound political perspective and coverage in the country have made her a force to be reckoned with in the profession. Renowned for her ...

What Happened to Shane Kilcher? His Injury Update, Net Worth and More Shane Kilcher is well-known thanks to the Discovery Channel series Alaska: The Last Frontier. It is a show that documents the daily lives of the extended Kilcher family, people who live without plumbing or modern heating. The episodes follow their routines as they rely on hunting and farming for their nutritional needs as well as ...

Is Stephanie Gosk Gay or Lesbian, Who is the Wife or Partner  Jenna Wolfe? In August 2013, NBCs Today viewers were greeted with two shocking news. Today weekend anchor, Jenna Wolfe, announced that she was as a lesbian, introducing her partner as NBC News correspondent Stephanie Gosk, and said the two are expecting their first child. A long time has passed since then and certainly, a lot of things ...

Nikki Mudarris  Bio and Net Worth: 5 Interesting Facts You Need to Know Nikki Mudarris, also known as Miss Nikki Baby, is a reality television star, model and fashionista. Shes best known for VH1s reality TV series Love & Hip-Hop: Hollywood. Her entrepreneurial skills enable her to create and run a successful lingerie line Nude by Nikki. Not only that, but Nikki has also successfully run the Las ...

5 Interesting Things You Need To Know About Kelly Nash Ever heard of the lady who gained national prominence for taking a selfie with a dangerous ball just a few inches away from hitting her? Its no other person than Kelly Nash, an American sports broadcaster currently working as host of The Rundown show which airs on MLB Network every weekday at 2 pm ET. ...

Understanding The Height of Fame John Oliver Achieved With The Daily Show and How He Met His Wife Without knowledge of who he is and his exemplary career, John Oliver cuts an unassuming figure of a regular man but he is one of the most influential personalities in America, especially on television. Since he began his career in 1998, he has been a loud and unapologetic agent of change, using his wit and ...

Why Did Big Chief Leave Street Outlaws, Where Is He Now And Why Did He Divorce His Wife? Justin Shearer, otherwise known by his professional name Big Chief is a famous street racer and television personality. He is famously known for being one of the main characters on the racing reality television series, Street Outlaws. Justin, who had been a significant part of the show since its premiere in 2013, appeared in a ...

Who is Josina Anderson of ESPN? Her Husband and Family Facts There has been a gradual paradigm shift in the world of sports which has today produced the likes of Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka, and other female athletes that are pulling great feats in different sporting fields. Their achievements have also been followed by the emergence of female sports journalists such as Jillian Mele, Eboni Williams, ...

Is Brittany Wagner Married, Who Is The Husband, How Old Is She? Brittany Wagner has been an inspiration to a lot of sports youngster. She has won the hearts of many athletic students with her role as a life coach and an academic counselor. She is well groomed in her career and has worked over a decade for The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and The National ...

Tati Westbrook Bio  Age, Husband & Net Worth With five videos dished out every week, alongside running her own brand, beauty guru, and YouTube superstar Tati Westbrook has proved to the world that theres utterly no impossibility or limit to whatever one is passionate about. Tati is best known for being the owner and manager of the worlds most-viewed beauty and lifestyle YouTube channel, ...

Cathy Areus Long Road to Becoming a Freelance Journalist and What to Know About Her Kids An American freelance journalist, news analyst, and author, Cathy Areu has built a lasting reputation for herself on cable television. Popular for her skillful and sassy presentation of professional views on varying topics including cultural and feminist issues, Cathy is an inspiration to many women across the globe. In addition to being a journalist, she ...

Tucker Carlsons Love Story With Wife Susan Andrews, their Children and Net Worth Today On the TV screens, Tucker Carlson is that fiery fellow who passionately dishes out his conservative and often controversial views on issues of national importance. Such brazenness has fetched him many enemies, especially on the left-wing, but it has also helped him cement a reputation as one of the foremost broadcast journalists in America. His ...

Paige Wyatts Net Worth, Boyfriend and Where She Is Now Paige Wyatt became popular after the Wyatt family began running the reality television show, American Guns. The Wyatt family comprises Rich Wyatt (father), Renee Wyatt (mother), Paige and Kurt Wyatt (children). Rich Wyatt originally ran a gun shop, the Gunsmoke Guns in Wheat Ridge, Colorado which is outside of Denver. The business which he ran together ...

The Progression of Howard Sterns Career As A Media Personality And Why He Divorced His First Wife Howard Stern is a legendary American radio host, who has also done some notable work as an actor, producer, author, as well as photographer. The radio personality achieved worldwide fame as a result of his self-titled radio program, The Howard Stern Show. As a professional radio personality, he has worked in different radio stations. Since 2006, ...

Lisa Joyners Biography  Ethnicity, Net Worth and Other Key Facts Lisa Joyner is an American Journalist, TV talk show host, and actress. Some of her well-known works are her correspondences for the Los Angeles based TV KCBS, inFANity show, Find My Family Show including her film and television appearances in Brimstone, American Sweetheart, The Bold and The Beautiful among others. Lisas passion for reconnecting people with their biological families ...

Amanda Balionis Rise Through the Ranks of Sportscasting and the Identity of Her Boyfriend Amanda Balionis is an American sportscaster currently working as a golf broadcaster for CBS Sports. Among so many of her works in the field of sports reporting, Amandas PGA Tour coverage seems to be the most popular so far. She covered the Super Bowl working with CBS Sports social media team in Atlanta, where she ...

Dissecting Charles Paynes Sexual Allegations, Its After Effects and More About His Wife Charles Payne had a respectable career as an analyst on Wall Street before he made the transition to television and became a contributor and later a host on Fox. In that time, his expertise has come under scrutiny, and he has been at the center of at least one major controversy. The major controversy in question ...

Erik Asla And Tryra Banks Split: Everything You Need To Know Tyra Banks and Erik Asla have called it quits! The couple, who began dating in 2013 and have a son named York Banks Asla, has decided to end what everybody taught was the perfect relationship. Neither person has come out to give a reason for the breakup, but what is obvious right now is that ...

What to Note About Dr Terry Dubrows Qualifications, TV Works and Marriage to Heather Kent In the realm of people that we expect to see regularly on our screens, medical doctors are closer to the bottom of the list. Aside from the fact that their work has little correlation with TV, they are presumably too busy to pursue life as TV personalities. Yet, a few of them have usurped this ...

Jessica Goch  Bio: 5 Things You Didnt Know About Ninjas Wife Jessica Goch is the Schofield-born American Social Media Influencer who has worked as a model but is now better known as a host and interviewer of prominent Electronic sports celebrities at popular gaming events/tournaments. The screen queen also serves as the manager of her famous husband Ninja aka Tyler Blevins whose exploits on Twitch and Fortnite has ...

CNNs Chris Cuomo Biography  Wife, Family & Net worth Chris Cuomo needs no elaborate introduction as he has starred graced many prominent Television cable networks and his voice has been heard through acknowledged radio shows. He is a television journalist and Lawyer who has previously worked for ABC News as Chief law and justice correspondent as well as a co-anchor on 20/20. If you still ...

Neil deGrasse Tyson  Family, Religion & Net Worth Neil deGrasse Tyson is a distinguished American astrophysicist and author who has been able to achieve so much after falling in love with astronomy at the age of 9. He has since attended and become an alumnus of prestigious universities such as Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, and also recorded numerous achievements in his field of ...

Is Simon Cowell Gay? Does He Have A Wife or Girlfriend and Why is He Famous? Simon Cowell is a well-known talent show judge, TV producer, entrepreneur and one of the most popular TV personalities that Britain has ever produced. In conjunction with his company, Syco, Cowell is the brain behind hugely successful talent hunt shows such as The X-Factor UK, The X-Factor US, Britains Got Talent, Americas Got Talent and ...

Everything To Know About Joanna Gaines Life With Chip Gaines, Their Business Pursuits and Kids Joanna Gaines and her husband Chip Gaines became celebrities after their television show Fixer Upper began airing back in 2013. The show which was about home renovation and decoration ran for about 6 seasons with a total of 79 episodes before the couple bade farewell to it in April 2018. Apart from their appearances on ...

Who Is Larry The Cable Guy? What To Know About His Wife And Net Worth Larry the Cable Guy is a self-professed country kid renowned for his trademark Southern accent and sensational catchphrase Git-R-Done! The famous comedian who talks about anything under the sun has gone on to become one of the most memorable characters in comedy history. Join us in unearthing lesser-known facts about the former on-air-personality, standup comedy superstar, movie ...

Who Is Patrick Starr, What Is His Net Worth and Gender? The make-up industry over the years has grown to become a billion dollar industry not just because there are probably more women wearing make-up but because a whole lot of men, especially the young ones, have become bold enough to wear it unlike before. A few of these men, like Patrick Starr, have even gone ...

How Did Chris Jansing Become a Senior Correspondent at MSNBC and Who Is Her Husband? An award-winning American television news reporter and journalist, Chris Jansing has succeeded in carving a spectacular niche for herself in the field of TV journalism. Outstanding for not just her excellence in journalism, Chris is also cherished for her incredibly gorgeous looks post 60! For close to four decades, Jansing has continued to soar in her ...

Jaclyn Glenn Biography  Age, Height & Ex-Boyfriend American Youtuber, Jaclyn Glenn, rose to prominence through her self-titled YouTube channel Jaclyn Glenn. She has remained an acclaimed atheist and continues to air her views on hot issues from politics, religion, animal rights, to atheism. During the heated 2016 US Presidential elections, Glenn featured in Hump Trump: Official Donald Trump Song. Her parallel acting career ...

Is Pat Sajak Married to a Wife or is He Gay With a Partner? Pat Sajak is one of the most popular TV game show hosts in America. He commenced his career as a radio disk jockey as well as a TV weatherman before being tapped to host Wheel of Fortune, the longest-running syndicated game show in the United States. Sajak has hosted the popular game show from 1983 ...

Nayyera Haqs Bio  What To Know About Her Husband, Parents And Family Nayyera Haq can take anyone on political debates as well as discussions on social issues affecting many. Her ability to masterfully deliver her stance on every issue or political debate has made her a regular face in morning and evening news media platforms. This is not a common feat especially for someone from her kind ...

Inside Guy Fieris Family With Wife, Kids and Sister Who Died of Cancer Over the years we have seen men dominate the kitchen and churn out amazing delicacies from it. Some do it way better than their female counterparts and one of such men is Guy Ramsay Fieri  an American TV host, celebrity chef, restaurant owner, bestselling author of four culinary books, and game show host. His ...

Meet Phil Mudd of CNN  The Former CIA and FBI Exec, Is He Married, Who Is The Wife? When it comes to discussing issues surrounding terrorism, American Counterterrorism and National Security Expert, Phil Mudd, occupies a globally significant position. He has voiced his interest in the fight against terrorism and insecurity on many popular media platforms, both print and broadcast, such as CNN, BBC, CBS, MSNBC, al-Jazeera, ABC, NBC, Fox, The New York Times, ...

Jim Hoffer: Biography, Wife  Mika Brzezinski, Children and Net Worth Jim Hoffer is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who works as an investigative reporter for Eyewitness News, New York City. In his over two decades of investigative journalism, Hoffer has been at the front lines of several crucial stories from the 9/11 attack to the crash of American Flight 587 to the 2003 Blackout. On top of ...

The Ups and Downs of Erin Mcpikes Journalism Career and Other Facts About Her Personal Life Erin McPike is a journalist working for the Independent Journal Review (IJR) as a White House Correspondent but she gained widespread recognition for her coverage of general news. Whether its breaking news or some mainstream story, McPike has a reputation of baring the facts. As a journalist, her work as a White House Correspondent for Independent ...

Bert Kreischer Is Married To LeeAnn Kreischer With 2 Kids  Meet His Family Those familiar with Bert Kreischer mainly have the image of a large-bellied party man whose college life inspired the National Lampoon film, Van Wilder. It is an image that one would not naturally associate with a wholesome family. The standup comedian still maintains his wild party animal image on stage. But, back at home, he is ...

How Brendan Greene Became a Game Designer to Look Out For and Facts About His Failed Marriage The name Brendan Greene may not easily ring a bell in the larger society but for gaming enthusiasts, he is considered a god and this is because of his invention of the video game, Player Unknowns Battlegrounds, also called PUBG. Based on the popular last-man-standing/battle royale concept, Greenes creation has taken the gaming world by ...

WFAAs Sonia Azad Bio  Does The Reporter Have A Husband Or Boyfriend? Emmy Award-winning journalist and Health & Wellness reporter Sonia Azad is on the news segment News 8 Daybreak for the television station WFAA-TV in Dallas, Texas, a channel which she joined in October of 2015. Besides her time on the news, Azad is also a marathon runner and a certified yoga instructor. She has covered major news ...

This Is Everything You Should Know About Caroline Heldman, Her Career Portfolio and Other Facts Love it or hate it, there is no escaping the fact that feminism has come to stay in our world. The movement has continued to garner momentum over the years and this is due to the sustained push by several women, and even men, including the likes of Caroline Heldman. A Professor of Politics at ...

Understanding The Enigma That Is Gavin McInnes, The Controversies He Has Stirred and All About His Wife Gavin McInnes is a polemical English-born writer and TV personality, who is best known for his racist and fascist ideologies, as well as his co-ownership of Vice Media and Vice Magazine. He is also an actor a
Royal Jordanian is transitioning its widebody operations over to the B787-8 of which it currently operates five with a further two set for delivery shortly.
Under the terms of the deal, Salalah Air will operate charter flights between Salalah and the northeastern Somali town of Bossaso effective November 18. Domestic flights from Salalah to Duqm Jaaluni, Sohar and Muscat are expected to debut early next year.
SHIJIAZHUANG - A direct sea and rail freight service between the Republic of Korea (ROK), China and Mongolia was launched Wednesday, cutting transport time by nearly half.

On Wednesday morning, a train carrying 100 containers departed from Qinhuangdao port in North China's Hebei province for Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia, marking the opening of the new route, according to local customs.

Previously, containers from the ROK were transported by ships to Qinhuangdao Port, and then went through several train transfers before arriving in Ulan Bator. The new service allows the trains to travel directly to Ulan Bator, reducing the route by four days.

The train, with a designed volume of 100 standard containers, is scheduled to depart every Wednesday.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. President-elect Donald Trump said on Thursday after a meeting with House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan that after his inauguration he will work very rapidly on issues like healthcare and immigration, Reuters reports.

Speaking in Ryan's office, Trump told reporters: "We are going to lower taxes, as you know," and added: "I think we are going to do some absolutely spectacular things for the American people."

Earlier CNN reported Donald Trump met with President Barack Obama at the White House, an historic encounter between two men who have been bitter enemies for years.

The Trump-Obama meeting was unexpected just days ago. The core of Trump's campaign was his claim that Obama is incompetent. Obama, meanwhile, had mocked Trump on the campaign trail.

But in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's results, Trump and Obama have both sought to set politics aside ahead of the transition.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. US President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, U.S. officials said, the Washington Post reports.

The decision to deploy more drones and intelligence assets against the militant group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra reflects Obamas concern that it is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al-Qaeda on Europes southern doorstep, the officials said.

The move underlines the extent to which Obama has come to prioritize the counterterrorism mission in Syria over efforts to pressure President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, as al-Nusra is among the most effective forces battling the Syrian government.

That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Trump has said he will be even more aggressive in going after militants than Obama, a stance that could lead to the expansion of the campaign against al-Nusra, possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow. The group now calls itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham  or Front for the Conquest of Syria  and says it has broken with al-Qaeda, an assertion discounted by U.S. officials.

The United States has conducted sporadic strikes in the past against veteran al-Qaeda members who migrated to northwestern Syria from Afghanistan and Pakistan to join al-Nusra and whom U.S. officials suspected of plotting against the United States and its allies.

Obamas new order gives the U.S. militarys Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, wider authority and additional intelligence-collection resources to go after al-Nusras broader leadership, not just al-Qaeda veterans or those directly involved in external plotting.

The White House and State Department led the charge within the Obama administration for prioritizing action against the group. Pentagon leaders were reluctant at first to pull resources away from the fight against the Islamic State.

But aides say Obama grew frustrated that more wasnt being done by the Pentagon and the intelligence community to kill al-Nusra leaders given the warnings he had received from top counterterrorism officials about the gathering threat they posed.

In the presidents Daily Brief, the most highly classified intelligence report produced by U.S. spy agencies, Obama was repeatedly told over the summer that the group was allowing al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to create in northwest Syria the largest haven for the network since it was scattered after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Officials also warned Obama that al-Nusra could try to fill the void as its rival, the Islamic State, lost ground.

Lisa Monaco, Obamas White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, said Obamas decision prioritized our fight against al-Qaeda in Syria, including through targeting their leaders and operatives, some of whom are legacy al-Qaeda members.

We have made clear to all parties in Syria that we will not allow al-Qaeda to grow its capacity to attack the U.S., our allies, and our interests, she said in a statement. We will continue to take action to deny these terrorists any safe haven in Syria.

To support the expanded push against al-Nusra, the White House pressed the Pentagon to deploy additional armed drones and intelligence-collection assets in the airspace over northwestern Syria, an area that had been sparsely covered by the United States until now because of its proximity to advanced Russian air-defense systems and aircraft.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen urged US president-elect Donald Trump to stick to the NATO principle of tough attitude toward Russia in a ZDF TV channel broadcast Friday, reports TASS.

Trump should clearly say whose side he is on: whether he is on the side of justice, peace settlement and democracy, or he just does not care", she said.

She added that Trump should not treat NATO as a business.

"This is not a company", the minister said.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. President-elect Donald Trump called "unfair" the protests that erupted after this weeks presidential elections in the United States, reports TASS.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!, Trump tweeted.

Thousands of US citizens took to the streets shortly after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in presidential race on November 8. On Thursday, anti-Trump protests were underway in Dallas, Texas.

Trumps opponents gathered in various US states and in such major cities as New York, Chicago and Seattle to express show their opposition to Trumps victory in the elections.

On Election Day the United States citizens cast their ballots and elected their 45th US President, Donald J. Trump.

By securing more than the needed 270 electoral votes, Trump, the Republican candidate clinched his presidential victory.

The election outcome was a spectacular culmination to a heated Presidential race between the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate, Donald Trump.

The former First Lady conceded to her rival by phone once the needed votes were in.








YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. US President Barack Obama on Thursday asked Congress for $11.6 billion in additional war-related funding, including money to fight Islamic State militants, sustain higher overseas troop levels, and modernize the Afghan militarys helicopter fleet, the Washington Post reports.

The request was sent to lawmakers for consideration during the lame-duck session that starts next week. Its evenly divided between the Pentagon and the State Department and foreign aid accounts related to battling IS.

In addition to enhancing our effort to defeat ISIL, this plan would fund the presidents decision to adjust our troop levels to better support the Afghan governments strategy to secure its nation, and would help enhance Afghanistans aviation capability, said Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Swift passage of this plan will help the Department of Defense and our partners in the U.S. government and around the world protect this nation.

The requests fate in the coming weeks is uncertain. Its not clear what Republicans controlling Congress want to do about a raft of unfinished spending bills now that Donald Trump has won the White House.

While top Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., want to clear away the unfinished budget work  and avoid cluttering the Trump agenda with this years leftovers  many conservatives hope to win better outcomes next year with Trump in the White House. At the very least, however, Congress must pass a temporary spending bill to avert a government shutdown next month, which would give lawmakers and the new administration time to hash out a final accord on more than $1 trillion in unfinished bills to fund agency operating budgets.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian President Serzh Sargsyans visit to the United Arab Emirates will boost the economic cooperation of the two states, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Armenia to the UAE Gegham Gharibjanian told Armenpress.

We experience a moment of pride. As you know, the last official visit from Armenia took place in 2002, in fact, almost 15 years later the Armenian Presidents official visit was held. There was a high-level reception in the Emirates, a warm attitude shown to both the President and Armenia, the Ambassador said.

The Ambassador said the major emphasis was on the economic issues. He said the projects that the Armenian President presented in a meeting with the business representatives, the Armenian community, are going to be implemented.

We all must try to carry out a well-planned work. I would like to say that the Embassy with all its capabilities does the maximum for the development of bilateral relations. Now we are entering an economic cooperation stage, thus, we must do everything to ensure a progress. The Emirates are interested in establishing agricultural, tourism joint enterprises. I want to state that the UAE visits to Armenia have been quadrupled in the last two years. The visitors are impressed by the attitude of Armenians and with the fact of being secured in Armenia, he said.

Gegham Gharibjanian said the UAE investors received instructions, they are going to send a delegation to Armenia to get acquainted with the investments opportunities.

President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan paid an official visit to the United Arab Emirates on November 9-10.During the visit the President held a private meeting with Crown Prince of Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Al Nahyan. Other official meetings were also held. Serzh Sargsyan also visited the Armenian Holy Martyrs Church of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. Within the framework of the visit the President held meetings with the heads of the UAEs investment and development companies.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Scholar George Gawrych got through no more than five sentences during his presentation on his book about Turkish army officer Mustafa Kemal Ataturk before Armenian students raised their voices in protest Thursday in the California State University Northridge, Armenpress reports citing the Universitys official website.

Over 20 protesters stood up from their seats, turned their backs on Gawrych and repeatedly chanted Turkey guilty of genocide and genocide denialist.

Gawrych waited briefly as other attendees voiced their opinions to let him speak, until he began walking up and down the aisle trying to get the protesters to face him.

Two police officers who guarded the entrance escorted Gawrych, a Baylor University Boal Ewing chair of military history, out of the library to sounds of chanting protesters.

Our initial message was to stop the denial of genocide that cost the lives of millions, said Eric Badivian, an Armenian protester.

Many Armenians feel that Gawrychs book The Young Ataturk: From Ottoman Soldier to Statesman of Turkey praises a leader who played a role in the Armenian genocide.

This man coming here and claiming these claims that genocide didnt happen is completely absurd and people know, Badivian said. Theres factual evidence to this happening all around.

Gawrych was unable to speak about his book or comment on the protest once police had him leave the library.

The book received the Distinguished Book Award in 2014 from the Society for Military History, according to Gawrychs Baylor University biography page.

John S. Harrel, who holds a masters degree in history from CSUN and authored The Nisibis War, said he expected this protest to happen.

Harrel added that Armenians have a legitimate grievance.

Art history professor Owen Doonan, who invited Gawrych to speak for the Middle Eastern Islamic Studies program declined to comment about the protest, but did address protesters outside the library.

The Armenian Student Association, Alpha Epsilon Omega and Alpha Gamma Alpha sent a protest-letter to William Watkins, dean of students, expressing their concern and disappointment in having the guest lecturer at CSUN.

It is quite bizarre that an event revolving around the ignorance and injustices against humanity is being allowed to take place on campus, as stated in the letter to Watkins.

Watkins later replied in an email sent to the organizations, addressing their concerns.

The university shares your commitment to the pursuit of truth about all aspects of Armenian history and to never forgetting those who have suffered from the tolerance and actions of others, Watkins wrote in the email.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Suren Karayan  minister of economic development and investments told ARMENPRESS quite productive meetings took place during President Sargsyans visit to the United Arab Emirates.

The President of Armenia presented the countrys investment field to the business environment of the Emirates, in terms of potential for Armenia to attract investments. Several agreements were achieved in terms of continuing works for developing the bilateral economic relations and maintaining mutual visits, Karayan said.

The minister says the UAE partners are interested in cooperating in the agricultural field, particularly to make investments in the greenhouse business, as well as food production. There is also interest towards tourism and infrastructure.

UAE business representatives expressed willingness to invest in hotel construction.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Minister of agriculture Ignati Arakelyan introduced the newly appointed head of the State Service for Food Safety Mr. Ishkan Karapetyan to the services staff.

Minister Arakelyan thanked Armen Hayrapetyan for all his previous work and said he will continue his activities in the public administration system, as advisor to the minister of agriculture.

Ignati Arakelyan congratulated Ishkan Karapetyan on the appointment and stressed that he is a skilled and trained expert, well aware of the field.

The minister wished successes and productive work to Ishkan Karapetyan.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Major Artem Margaryan  an official of the military commissariat of Gyumri, has been arrested on suspicion of accepting a bribe, the Investigative Committee told ARMENPRESS.

On October 31, a citizen reported he had addressed Major Margaryan  head of the Sgt., Pt. registration department of Gyumris military commissariat  to obtain a new service record, because he had lost his original one in Russia. According to the citizen, for more than a week Major Margaryan had refused to re-issue his service record, citing different reasons, after which, on November 8, the major requested 200 dollars from the citizen to for a new service record.

A criminal case has been initiated. Margaryan has been arrested.

Preliminary investigation continues.

Notice  Suspect is innocent until proven guilty by the Court of Law.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Bill Clinton today called President-elect Donald Trump -- who made an issue about the former president's sexual accusers on the campaign trail -- to congratulate him on his victory in the election, according to an aide, ABC News reports.

Ahead of the second debate, Trump gathered women who had made accusations about the former president decades ago and even had them as guests at the forum. Clinton has not been charged with a crime in the cases and has admitted no wrongdoing.

An aide to the former president said that President Clinton wished Trump well during the brief call.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Pope Francis declined to give a personal judgement on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in an interview on Friday, saying he was interested only in the impact of politicians' choices on the poor, Reuters reported.

Asked what he thought of the real estate mogul who won Tuesday's U.S. presidential election, the Argentine pontiff was quoted in Italian newspaper La Repubblica as saying: "I do not make judgements on people and political men, I only want to understand what suffering their behaviour causes to the poor and the excluded."

Francis went on to say that his greatest concern at the moment is for refugees and migrants, declaring: "We must knock down the walls that divide."

Earlier this year, the pope suggested Trump's stance on immigration, which included a campaign pledge to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants, was "not Christian".

A papal spokesman later said this was not a personal attack. The Vatican's highest-ranking diplomat wished Trump well in government on Wednesday, saying he would pray for the President-elect's "enlightenment".
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Political scientist Alexander Iskandaryan says a serious crisis of the electoral system is taking place around the world, reports Armenpress.

Referring to the US Presidential election results, the political scientist said Trumps election as US President was not due to the fact that the countrys people trust him, it is due to the crisis of the electoral system which is happening in the entire world.

Those people who have voted in favor of Trump, they simply voted against the system. People are already tired, and this is being realized not only in the US, but also the entire world, in Armenia as well. We see that political forces in Armenia including the opposition and the leadership have lost their rating. I think now a global crisis of electoral system is underway in the world, he said.

Iskandaryan said the same situation is in Europe, however, if in Europe the politics is being coordinated in Brussels, those issues are not so vividly seen, but in case of US there is no Brussels, and it can be seen.

He said those who have voted in favor of Hillary Clinton, they did it since her opponent was Donald Trump, and those who voted in favor of Trump, they just voted against the elite, the system.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Margot Gerster, who ran into Hillary Clinton on a hike just a day after she conceded the race, encountered the presidential candidate seemingly at peace and at grace, Gerster said Thursday, CNN reports.

In an image posted to Facebook, Clinton, who lives in Chappaqua, New York, can be seen smiling with White Plains resident Gerster, who was hiking with her daughter, 13-month-old Phoebe, and their dog, Piper. The photo was snapped by former President Bill Clinton, who was there as well.

It is the first time the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee has been seen outside the election bubble since she conceded the race to Donald Trump early Wednesday.

"She seemed as well as anybody could be expected after such a crazy, crazy experience," Gerster recollected to CNN's Erin Burnett on "OutFront" Thursday. "She couldn't have seemed any nicer or, you know, kinder and gracious to me."

Gerster said she was trekking a path she hikes every day when she found the former first couple and immediately flashed an "awkward, huge grinning smile" -- or, as she put it, "fan-girling."

Gerster told Clinton about how proud she was to vote for her, and how she very much wanted to hug Clinton after Election Day, which she did on Thursday.

"She was taking a nice, peaceful hike through the woods. I don't think she wanted to talk serious politics," Gerster said.

Gerster told CNN earlier on Thursday that she posted the photograph to "make people smile."
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Representatives of several agricultural food processing and producing businesses had a meeting with Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan, discussing the present issues and development directions.

The main function of the state, the government, is to be helpful to the fields entrepreneurs. The policy which we carry out in the agriculture field, is it right or wrong, the subsidizing, which we carry out, is it right or wrong, ubiquitously standing by everyones side, is it right or wrong? How should we stand: we have to stand by the side of the potential success, support the one who takes the burden, in order for us to jointly form our strategy in this sector, the PM said.

Issues related to agricultural producing companies and greenhouse businesses were discussed, particularly, export of agricultural products, imports and sales, transportation, accessibility of energy resources, tax and customs administration and state-private sector cooperation mechanisms.

PM Karapetyan listened to all raised issues at the meeting and said: The gas tariff will be priviledged for processing enterprises for as long as they become established, stand up, regardless of our possibilities, because with this we have caused problems for the gas supplier too.

In terms of subsidizing, we have to understand how to help our producers in order for them to be competitive. Are we going to help them be competitive forever? No, because we will close the field for competition, the producers will relax and wont do anything. We are going to sit and discuss, what keeps you back from being competitive.

Speaking on the reforms in tax and customs administration, Karapetyan said the government will continue steps in ensuring equal field of taxes, and will encourage law-abiding taxpayers.

In terms of food safety, the PM mentioned that the State Food Safety Service has a new head, who is tasked with strictly controlling the field.

Thats simply bastardic, allowing or not following what our children, our brides, our daughters eat, he said.

The PM also highlighted the issue of professional preparedness of farmers, finding it necessary to revise the educational programs of the national agrarian university.

Speaking on the issue of subsidizing in the field, PM Karapetyan said: We are going to definitely create a fund, with the main aim of assisting businesses, but  for the businesses to make profit. We will subsidize those businesses which have the chance of being established some day and not need subsidizing.

Prime Minister Karapetyan said he expects a proposal package from the participants of the meeting.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy chief Federica Mogherini is likely to travel to the United States soon for talks on the future of EU-US ties with US President-elect Donald Trump, a high-ranking official in Brussels said Friday, Sputnik News reported.

"Of course, she will want to go there very soon, same as others, for talks. We have already invited the president-elect to come over," the EU official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

"I cannot name any date. But she will probably want to go there soon," the source added.

He reaffirmed EUs willingness to maintain a close relationship with the United States, saying Brussels valued its transatlantic ties for their strategic importance and global influence.




I don't know how many young women come to this blog or how many are parents of teenage or young adult women, but here are some safety tips from Kelsey's Army:

T

I

P

S

1. Trust your instincts - If something feels wrong then something probably is wrong.2. Know your surroundings - know who and what is around you.3. Always have a plan for where you would go and what you would do if a situation arises.4. Be willing to make a scene in order to be noticed.5. Let someone know where you are going and when you will be back.Remember the acronym TIPS:ake Chargenform others of your whereaboutsrepare for any situationurvival Mentality (role play situations so you will respond should they happen)For more information, go to Kelsey's Army
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. At least 26 people have been arrested during anti-Trump protests in Portland, Oregon, police say, adding that officers deployed pepper spray as well as rubber ball distraction devices to disperse the rally, RT reports.

The demonstration against President-Elect Donald Trump has gathered for yet another night in the Pacific Northwest city.

Some 4,000 people started their protest at Pioneer Courthouse Square and moved to northeast Portland, according to The Oregonian daily. Police on Twitter wrote that protesters were preparing gas and flares and were arming themselves with rocks from construction site.

The demonstration heavily interrupted traffic in the city as protesters moved across other major roadways, local media reported.

Portland police called the protest a riot, citing its extensive criminal and dangerous behavior. At least 19 cars at Toyota of Portland were vandalized, a sales manager told the paper. Later police reported of new cases of vandalism in the city. Photos on social media showed the smashed windows of local shops.

Portland activist Greg McKelvey said Thursday that several human rights groups in the city would be working together under the new name, Portlands Resistance.

In order to survive President Trump there needs to be a strong resistance. Our group believes that Portland has an opportunity to become a beacon of light for the rest of the nation, McKelvey wrote in a press release on Facebook. The group has scooped over 3,000 likes so far.

After several orders to disperse, police have used less lethal munitions to effect arrests and move the crowd. Officers still taking projectiles, police tweeted.

Thousands of people have been out in the streets across the US, since Trump won the 2016 presidential race with 290 electoral votes November 8, leaving Hillary Clinton officially behind, although she won the popular vote.

Chanting anti-Trump slogans, such as not my president or we reject president-elect, people have been occupying streets in cities from California to New York, expressing their displeasure at the presidential races outcome.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 9, ARMENPRESS. In the framework of his official visit to the United Arab Emirates, President Serzh Sargsyan visited on November 9 the Armenian Church of Holy Martyrs in Abu Dhabi, the Ara Khanoyan Sunday School of the Church, the Grand Mosque of Sheikh Zayed, and the Embassy of Armenia in the UAE. As Armenpress was informed from the press service of the Armenian Presidents Office, the land for the construction of the Armenian Church in Aby Dhabi was gifted by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan in 2006. The newly constructed Church was consecrated on December 12, 2014 and the same day was founded the Armenian National Prelacy of Abu Dhabi. The Ara Knanoyan Sunday School of the Church started its works in May 2016, and currently educates 36 pupils. In the courtyard of the Church there is a cross-stone dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.

During his visit to the Church of Holy Martyrs, President Sargsyan laid flowers at the cross-stone and paid tribute to the victims of the Genocide. After the Te Deum prayer held in the Church the President of Armenia made a statement in which he spoke about the role of the Church in the preservation of our national identity and survival of our people. The President also expressed gratitude to the ruling family of the UAE in the person of the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Emirate, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan who made possible the construction of the Armenian Church of Holy Martyrs. Serzh Sargsyan underscored that this Church, located at the heart of the Arab world, is a vivid testimony of the religious tolerance, mutual respect and sympathy which create fertile soil for the peaceful coexistence of the representatives of different religions. At the National Prelacy in Abu Dhabi the President of Armenia held a brief meeting with the representatives of the Armenian community and clergy.

During his visit to the Grand Mosque of Sheikh Zayed  the President and founder of the UAE, Serzh Sargsyan at the mausoleum located inside the Mosque paid tribute to the memory of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan and made an inscription in the Book of Honorary Guests. Later, there took place the ceremony of exchanging gifts.

The contribution of the founder, President Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan to the establishment and flourishing of this wonderful country is invaluable.

During his reign, laid were the foundations for the Armenian-UAE high level interstate cooperation for which I express gratitude of the Armenian people and my own, wrote the President of Armenia.

At the conclusion of the first day of his visit to the UAE, Serzh Sargsyan in Abu Dhabi met with the representatives of the local Armenian community. The President spoke with our compatriots residing in the Emirate about the results of the meetings held on the first day of his visit, about the current stage of the Armenian-UAE interstate friendly relations and the prospects of the relations which have deep historical roots. He also stressed the importance of strengthening the Armenia-Spyurk relations and importance of consolidating the potential of the nation for the resolution of the issues of pan-Armenian importance and empowerment of Fatherland.

At the meeting, the President of Armenia awarded a group of community members with high state awards. For the considerable contribution to the strengthening and development of the Armenia-Spyurk relations and years-long patriotic work Hrayr Soghomonian, Ara Khanoyan and Harutyun Ohanessian were awarded the Movses Khorenatsi Medal.
Bawejas storytelling is, at best, gripping in parts, and has a few good visuals, but is full of awkward attempts to tell a linear story.

Rating:

Voices of: Om Puri

Director: Harry Baweja

There are many heroic tales of martyrdom that need to be told. Chaar Sahibzaade: Rise of Banda Singh Bahadur is one such story of a Punjabi warrior Banda Singh Bahadur, who finds the courage to raise his voice and make a change. Inspired by true events, this is a real hero who earned his remembrance in time and history. This 18th century ascetic-turned-warrior was also instrumental in removing the zamindari system in Punjab, and even gave away his lands to needy farmers. Legendary accounts of his fair deals and valour abound, and out of 11 wars that he fought, the one that chronicled for posterity is the one where he killed governor Wazir Khan, the ruler of Sirhind, and defeated his army of 15,000 men in the Battle of Chappar Chiri, remains most memorable.

An extraordinary tale of heroism unfolds on a grand scale, fast-paced animated adaptation that is both empowering and inspiring in its call for social justice and equality. Banda Singh Bahadur, who was born on 1670, remains an unsung hero but director Harry Baweja lends the film a valuable lesson in history by focusing on his awe-inspiring courage and loyalty towards Guru Gobind Singh. The film also shows his shortcomings and creates plenty of emotional momentum. The film marks the meeting between disciple Madho Das (Banda Singh Bahadur) and Guru Govind Singh in Nanded, Maharashtra, and how Das gets inspired to take charge of the Sikh uprising against Muslim rulers. Later, the despotic Wazir Khan, who kills two of Guru Govind Singhs sons, is targeted by Banda Singh to settle the score.

Those of us who have studied history are familiar with many insidious conspiracies that resulted in bloodshed, backstabbing and brutal beheadings. Here, the protagonist is someone you know little about, but we are well acquainted with the scheming and plotting that often led to heartless battles. Bawejas earlier film, Chaar Sahibzaade in Punjabi that maintained the sanctity of the religious content and dealt with the teachings of the 10th and final Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, and the martyrdom of his four sons, was a hit in 2014. The sequel probes further into Sikh religious history and follows the folklore surrounding Banda Singh.

The film is not without flaws: using photo-real animation, Baweja cant go beyond the photo-real animation of characters that limits interactive moments in the film. Also, it does little to showcase the history of times. Hence, barring Sikhs, not many outside their community would be genuinely interested in a narrative that looks one-sided. There are times when it just misses to touch your heart. For all its attempts at wonder and spectacle and play, it could be a slog. The emotional connection that should have the crowd cheering wildly for the heroes never clicks in. In that sense, it lacks a dramatic edge.

However, in spite of the glitches, children need to watch this one. Many of us would complain that it can in no way match up to the slick Hollywood animation films that they are constantly pampered with. Despite some tacky animation in places, it does have all the ingredients of a narrative that should serve them good to watch true stories of bravery closer home. Many a times, we sit through a film waiting for something spectacular to evolve, thinking that if the story doesnt grab us, the visuals will. Bawejas storytelling is, at best, gripping in parts, and has a few good visuals, but is full of awkward attempts to tell a linear story.

The writer is a film critic and has been reviewing films for over 15 years. He also writes on music, art and culture, and other human interest stories.
Deal to also expedite US firms move to build plants in India

Prime Minister Narendra Modi shakes hands with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe during an agreements signing ceremony in Tokyo. (Photo: PTI)

Tokyo/New Delhi: Japan and India signed a historic non-military nuclear accord on Friday, allowing Tokyo to supply New Delhi with fuel, equipment and technology for nuclear power production, as India looks to sustain its rapid economic growth through atomic energy.

The deal will also make it much easier for US-based companies like Westinghouse and GE to set up nuclear power plants in India since both companies have Japanese investments.

The deal signed after Prime Minister Narendra Modis meeting with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe will help Indias plan to ramp up nuclear capacity more than ten times by 2032.

The accord took six years of negotiations and is seen as a big move to build India into a regional counterweight to China. It also bolsters Indias non-proliferation credentials when its trying hard to enter Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). In all, India and Japan on Friday signed 10 agreements.

Mr Modi praised the growing convergence of views between India and Japan, saying strong ties will enable them to play a stabilising role in Asia and the world. Todays signing of the agreement marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership, Mr Modi said.

It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has concluded such a pact with a country that is not signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). Japanese firms are world leaders in nuclear energy. Barring the Russians, most others depend on them.

This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy, Mr Abe said.

The accord stipulates nuclear fuel and equipment provided can only be used for peaceful purposes, and a separate document signed alongside the nuclear agreement has a clause allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducts a nuclear test.

The nuclear agreement with Japan follows a similar one with the United States in 2008, which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation.

India is in advanced negotiations with U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japans Toshiba Corp, to build six nuclear reactors in southern India.

Former foreign secretary and former Ambassador to US Lalit Mansingh said, Japanese support is critical because American companies bidding under the Indo-US nuclear deal rely on Japanese technology and without Japanese clearance, progress under the Indo-US nuclear deal is not possible. A lot of components manufactured in Japan also cannot be used without Japanese clearance.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.

A memorandum of cooperation was also signed between Indias ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship and Japans ministry of economy, trade and industry on the manufacturing skill transfer promotion programme. It envisages training 30,000 Indian youths in the Japanese styled manufacturing in the next 10 years.

A memorandum of understanding was signed between ISRO and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on cooperation in the field of outer space.

Another pact was signed between Indias ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare, and japans ministry of agriculture, forestry and fisheries to deepen the bilateral cooperation.
For Patriarch Sako, old unclear policies have been rejected, but a sense of "foreboding and fear" for the future remain. The White Houses new resident is more a businessman than a policeman of the international order. Obama leaves a region worse off. Questions remain over Gulf States alliances with the Gulf and the future of the Iran nuclear agreement.

Beirut (AsiaNews)  Amid fears, hopes, and official greetings, for the Middle East, economics and business will be the main themes of a Trump presidency, despite his vitriolic anti-Muslim statements during the election campaign.

For analysts and experts, trade and billion-dollar contracts will carry more weight for the 45th US president than human rights or minority aspirations, event if the regions Christians are by and large pleased with the elections outcome.

Arms sales to Gulf countries will continue despite Saudis excesses in Yemen, whilst the situation in Syria and Iraq should not change radically.

Unlike Clinton, had she won, Trump remains a puzzle, an unknown quantity full of uncertainties. For Chaldean Patriarch Mar Raphael Louis Sako, the vote shows how Americans but also the Mideast are tired of "unjustified wars, deaths, violence and destruction."

Speaking to AsiaNews, the Chaldean primate points to widespread discontent "toward policies that lack clarity and balance. There is widespread hope that there might be a change in the interests of peace and stability."

In Iraq, among both leaders and ordinary citizens, a feeling of satisfaction prevails at the outcome of the election; however, the latter "has not wiped out a general sense of foreboding and fear" about possible escalation and regional conflicts.

Meanwhile, several Arab and international commentators focus on Donald Trumps business career. For The Economist, "though more a mercantilist than a policeman of the international order, he might not be averse to selling American protection. In the event of an escalation, will Mr Trump still defend Saudi Arabia? Probably so, for the right price.

It remains to be seen whether and how the Republican-backed law passed in Congress (opposed by Obama) will affect relations between Washington and Riyadh. The law narrows the scope of the legal doctrine of foreign sovereign immunity, and targets Saudi Arabia over the 9/11 attacks.

In the Gulf, intellectuals and opinion leaders were surprised, some even shocked, by the Republican outsiders victory and remain uncertain as to what will happen over the next four years.

Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a professor of political science, chairman of the Arab Council for Social Sciences, and a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, in an open letter published in Gulf News, writes, I did not expect you to win and in all honesty, I did not want you to win either. [. . .] It is disappointing and disheartening to me and to millions around the world.

Defining himself as a concerned citizen of the world but I am also more concerned as a citizen of the Arab Gulf states, the scholar sees Trump as a nightmare that brings political instability.

Noting that Trump talked about the Arab Gulf states as though they are nothing but oil-rich countries that need to pay America for its military presence in the region, the scholar said that the ultimate test of his credibility in this part of the world will be his pledge to tear up the Iran nuclear deal on Day One in office.

For other observers, failed US policies in the region in recent years favoured Arab elites and autocrats to the disadvantage of people. In view of this, Maha Yahya, director and senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut called on Trump to Act immediately to end genocide and population transfers.

The 45th United States president, she writes, inherits a fractured and splintering Middle East, presenting extraordinary foreign policy challenges." One of those challenges is gargantuan distrust of Arab citizens who believe the US [. . .] has actively obstructed their quest for a better future whether in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Egypt or Palestine.

To address the massive gap in citizen trust, the new US president also needs to shift American policy towards the Middle East from a predominantly security perspective focused on the fight against ISIL to one that engages with larger socioeconomic triggers for instability.

Abdullah Al-Arian, assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service in Qatar, remembers the expectations that followed Barack Obamas speech at Cairo University, which have remained largely unfulfilled.

Obamas only success in his eight-year presidency is the nuclear deal with Iran. Hence, his successor should start with this agreement, which has overcome decades of mistrust and hostility, as a "model" in relations with the governments and peoples of the region.

Others hope that Trump might open a new chapter in the fight against Islamist extremism, noting that Obamas "ambiguities" would have continued or worsened in case of Hillary Clintons victory.

The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia killed my support for Clinton, writes Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement, in a letter to the Washington Post.

Two patterns seem to be emerging in US-Middle East relations. They will shape the future political, economic and strategic choices of the new US administration.

Even though many Middle East problems are self-inflicted, there is a widespread feeling in the region that the situation today is "far worse" than in 2008, when Obama took office for the first time at the White House.

This is made that more complicated by the general "uncertainty" about the first decisions the new president will take and their repercussions for the region, especially since he is seen as the most unpredictable US leader since the 19th century, a man who has flip-flopped on many issues.

The future indeed appears uncertain.
by Melani Manel Perera

The current president and prime minister as well as a former president sent a congratulatory message. Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists urge the new president to defeat terrorism. Relations between our two countries have been strengthened since my election as President, said Sirisena.

Colombo (AsiaNews)  Sri Lankas three main political leaders describe Donald Trumps victory in the race for the US presidency as "historic". All three sent warm messages of congratulations.

Incumbent President Maithripala Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and former President Mahinda Rajapaksa believe that ties between the two countries will be strengthened as a result of Trumps election.

The Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), a far-right Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist group, hopes that Trump will be a strong president in the fight to defeat Islamic terrorism.

In his message, Sirisena says 'the US is the adopted home for a significant number of Sri Lankans and they serve as important agents to forge stronger people-to-people bonds, contributing in no small measure to the bilateral relationship between our two countries".

Relations between our two countries have been strengthened since my election as President in January 2015. I am confident that your election will help build on this existing close partnership to further expand our cooperation, the Sri Lankan leader added.

Prime Minister Wickremesinghe noted that "Despite geographic distance, the bilateral relationship between Sri Lanka and the United States of America span approximately 70 years of formal diplomatic relations, and over 200 years of close people-to-people ties. Today, our partnership is stronger and more robust than it has ever been in history".

He said the election showed the American public chose a businessman and not a politician as their new President as they wanted a change.

Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa said Trump's victory is a testament to the fact that love for one's country is indeed what's most important.

With your election as President of the United States, we look forward to a new world order based on the principles of the sovereign equality of all nations and non-interference in the internal affairs of nation states," Rajapaksa said.
by Padre Giuseppe

Christmas Masses shut down by police, celebrations held in houses, crowded by hundreds of faithful, the non-recognition of the government, which forces faithful to join the Patriotic Association. The daily life of an unofficial priest and his flock of faith. Fears that the China-Vatican dialogue will endorse membership in this association for everyone.

Beijing (AsiaNews) - A story about the difficulties and persecutions experienced by the underground community, not recognized by the Chinese government; the concerns on China-Vatican dialogue and an inability to join the Patriotic Association (PA), which wants to build a national and independent Church. This is what an underground priest from central China reveals in this letter to a friend.

The question of belonging or not to the Patriotic Association is a burning issue: it is whati will eventually qualify belonging to the underground community or the official one. It must be said that for some time now a campaign has been carried out by the government to register and absorb - even through ruses  underground priests into the association. In rumors surrounding dialogue between China and the Holy See it seems that this problem is not addressed, although the Letter of Benedict XVI to Chinese Catholics claimed that the PA is "incompatible with Catholic doctrine". Pope Francis reaffirmed the value of Benedict XVIs Letter. The official Church tends to view membership of the PA as a "lesser evil" compared to the criminalization of all unregistered religious activity.

Dear sister in the Lord, thank you for your letter!

This is my general response to some of the questions that you have at heart.



1. The situation of our parish



At present I work in an area that has about 6 thousand faithful. Among them 3 thousand belong to the official Church, about 1,500 to non-official Church, another 1,500 practice religious life little.

The parish where I work is an unofficial one; there is no church, not even a space that you could call public place of prayer. Our underground church only has 10 meeting points. They are all houses of the faithful, or provisional locations. Some larger ones can contain 200 or 300 people, others only a few hundred. Usually for Sunday Mass must be split into three or four points, otherwise all the faithful cannot take part in Mass.

Due to the constant control of the government on the Church, we could not get the permission for a registered location for religious activities. There are two reasons: the first is that the religious authority of the government [the State Administration for Religious Affairs, SARA- ed] does not recognize our identity as priests, so we cannot represent the ecclesial community as a legitimate religious personnel and make the request to the authority concerned. The second is that the official Church has five churches in my area: one more reason why SARA will not consent to a place for the religious activities for the underground Church.



Their method is to always ask the priest (underground) to make public his identity by registering with SARA. But at the same time you are obliged to join the Patriotic Association. So for the priest and the faithful of the underground Church there is no way out. This is why the practice of the life of faith and sacraments of the faithful, which are a priests routine pastoral care have become very difficult.

In these conditions, even when we celebrate a feast or solemnity of great importance, and have identified a relatively large place, SARA and the government police (Gong An) order us to shut it down, or to cancel the activities with the excuse that we would be carrying out "religious activities in a unregistered location" or holding an "illegal mass gathering", or under the guise of "security." Sometimes they use threats, harassment, intimidation, etc. Other times they ban us and confiscate the goods of the Church. These cases happen very often, especially - and this is particularly serious - at Christmas and at Easter.



Once, the faithful of our parish spent five months preparing for Christmas, finding a great place and decorating it with care. But on the afternoon of December 24, suddenly a group of people arrived: police (Gong An), members of the religious affairs bureau ... and they began to investigate those in charge taking photos of the place, ordering us thereon to take away everything at once: altar, pews, etc. They banned Mass on Christmas Eve. So, that year they prevented us from celebrating Christmas and we could not have even a normal liturgy.

In the underground church that I serve, we have so many important church holidays: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost. Most of the time we spend these in an extreme dread and fear. Just one example: when a gathering exceeds 500 people, we have to post some believers outside of the place of the liturgy to monitor and control from a distance against "visits" from police. Many Christmases, I was ready to risk being arrested by police. In this case it is better not to carry important documents to avoid damaging other priests if they detained me and took me away.



Despite these problems, obstacles, persecutions, the priests and the faithful of the Church are always faithful to God, to Christ, to the Church and to the Pope.



The faithful of the area want their priests who celebrate their Masses to be faithful [undergound] to the Church. And this despite the long waits before the start of the Mass on the cold night of Christmas Eve; although they must participate in the liturgy in a precarious and crowded place ..., nothing prevents their love of God! When they sing the vigil hymns, kissing the baby Jesus offered by the hands of the priest, kneel before the manger to adore and take communion at the hands of the priest, they are truly united with the universal Church! Their great devotion encourages me more and more to put myself in the service of the sheep, to shed blood for them, to be ready to sacrifice my life for the sheep.



Every Christmas Eve, the night of Peace, there is often no peace for us, but we suffer for a reason and so we have a peace and inner joy.

2. Some doubts and concerns on the agreement between China and the Vatican



First, does the content of the agreement exist or not? Is the question of the religious persecution in China part of these discussions or not?

Secondly, it seems, part of the agreement speaks of the Pope forgiving the illegitimate bishops, so that all the official bishops are in communion with the Pope. But we ask, should the Vatican not ask official bishops to abandon the Patriotic Association?

Thirdly, when it relates to the (so-called) Chinese bishops' conference: will this organization led by Beijing continue to exist or not?

If China and the Vatican were to sign the agreement on the appointment of bishops, we are faced with two major problems:

a) if we were to follow the spirit of the agreement, we should belong to and obey the bishops of the official Church. But if the Patriotic Association, the Office of Religious Affairs of the Government still exist they will demand that priests who belong to the official bishops to join the Patriotic Association, supporting the independence, self-management and autonomy of the Church. And what should we do?

b) If we do not belong to the official bishops, then are we not doubly illegitimate?

We would be illegitimate under Church law, given that priests cannot exist without reference (belonging) to the bishop.

We would be illegitimate from the government's point of view, [because] we refuse to allow it to control us, and that's because we refuse to join the Patriotic Association and receive their membership card (with the government's records). In this way we become what these new religious regulations define as "unlawful Church personnel.

Faced with this embarrassing situation, we ask ourselves: what should we do? Do we really just need to all go home?

Card. Zen said: "God does not want a successful prophet, but a faithful prophet"!

Father Zhang Bo Da, a persecuted priest, who died in the diocese of Shanghai said: "I prefer to be a believer who has a Pope, than a bishop without a Pope"!

Those who preceded us, gave us the example to follow. With the help of the Lord we will go forward, continuing to walk the road of fidelity to Christ, to the Church, to the Pope.

Chinese martyrs, pray for the Church in China!

Celestial Queen of China, pray for the Church in China!

Our Lady of Sheshan, help of Christians, pray for the Church in China!

Fr. Joseph
New Delhi (AsiaNews) - In the early hours of today, a huge fire spread in an illegal jeans factory in Sahibabad in Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh district), overcoming workers who slept in a small room next to the sewing machines. There were 16 employees in the structure: 13 died and three others were hospitalized in serious condition in nearby hospitals.



According to preliminary reports, the fire broke out at around 4:30 am (local time), perhaps because of a short circuit. The alarm was given almost an hour later, and rescuers had difficulty in reaching the fire, because of the maze of streets that characterizes the area. The flames were quelled after several hours.



In India similar fires are nothing new. The industrial and manufacturing areas are known for poor hygiene and safety conditions for workers. Last month eight workers died in the explosion of a fireworks factory in Tamil Nadu; in May 2014 a further 15 employees were killed in a fire in a firecrackers company in Madhya Pradesh; in New Delhi in November 2013 six workers died in a leather bags factory.



According to the latest ILO data (International Labour Organization) dating back to 2013, out of a total of 402 million workers, there were over 40 thousand fatal accidents in the workplace.
Some Californians Are Trying To Secede From The United States

Trending News: These Californians Are Calling For A 'Calexit' From The U.S.

Long Story Short

In the aftermath of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, the Yes California Independence Group is pushing for a referendum in 2018 that could make California an independent country.

Long Story

The Californian people may have voted for Hillary Clinton, but they are facing the prospect of four years under Donald Trumps leadership, such are the joys of being part of the United States of America.

But what if one of those states didnt want to be united any more?

A group called the Yes California Independence Committee believe they may have found a legal loophole that could allow California to break away from the rest of the USA and therefore not hail to The Donald.

The theory would be to meet the qualification criteria for a peoples initiative, meaning Californians would be allowed to vote for a Calexit in 2019 if there was enough support for it in 2018 in the ballot for new governor.

However, even then there would be a world of administrative, legal fuzziness to overcome before it might realistically happen.

Yes California explained its position in a statement on its website: As the sixth largest economy in the world, California is more economically powerful than France and has a population larger than Poland. Point by point, California compares and competes with countries, not just the 49 other states.

This far-out scheme already has support from angel investor and Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar and is starting to gather some serious traction on social media where Trumps victory has been much maligned.

The idea of Californian independence has been present for a long time, but Trumps victory has turned it from a fringe concept into something a lot of people might want to get behind.

For the time being though its probably not worth getting excited about because even if it were possible itd probably take most of Trumps presidency to get it in motion anyway.

So, fleeing to Canada it is

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

Is Californian independence a great idea or a bad knee-jerk reaction to Trump winning?

Drop This Fact

Back in May, a movement to try and allow Texas to secede from the United States nearly managed to force a floor vote at the Texas Republican Convention but fell short.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. A Taliban suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a wall around the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif late on Thursday, killing at least four civilians and wounding scores, officials said, Reuters reported.

A NATO spokesman said the explosion had caused "massive damage" to the building, where around 30 people normally worked. Heavily armed attackers followed up the blast, battling with Afghan and German security forces late into the night.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for NATO air strikes against a village near the northern city of Kunduz last week in which more than 30 people were killed.

The Islamist movement's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone that heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent "with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there".

Noor Mohammad Faiz, the head doctor in Mazar-i-Sharif provincial hospital, said four dead bodies and 120 wounded had been brought to the hospital and that the numbers may rise.

The attack highlighted the security problems spreading across Afghanistan in recent months, with heavy fighting in areas from the volatile southern province of Helmand to Kunduz in the far north.

Germany, which heads the NATO-led Resolute Support mission in northern Afghanistan, has about 850 soldiers at a base on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, with another 1,000 troops coming from 20 partner countries.

A foreign ministry spokesman in Berlin said the attack was suppressed in the early hours of Friday by Afghan and German security personnel, as well as NATO special forces.

"All German employees of the Consulate General are safe and uninjured," he said. It was not yet known how many Afghan civilians and security personnel were killed or wounded, the spokesman said.

The explosion occurred about an hour before midnight local time, a spokesman for the German military joint forces command in Potsdam said.

Witnesses reported sporadic gunfire from around the consulate and said the huge blast had shattered windows in a wide area around the compound.
Free newsletter

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.

Please enter your email address below and click on Sign Up for daily newsletters from Australasian Lawyer.
King & Wood Mallesons beleaguered Europe, UK and Middle East (EUME) business has caught a break but not without a requisite catch.The Chinese and Australian partnerships of the global firm are said to have agreed to financially back the EUME arm but with the condition of lock-ins for European partners, according to The Lawyer. KWM recently cancelled a 14 million (about $22.76 million) capital call after four prominent London partners who are said to collectively bring in about 9 million (about $14.63 million) in billings every year departed. The capital call was seen as one of the last options the firm could choose to stabilise the EUME arm.The lock-in condition of the bailout should thwart further partner exits which could sink the European partnership. KWM operates as a Swiss verein with independent Australian, European and Chinese partnerships.News of the aid for the legacy SJ Berwin partnership comes as the firms global managing partner, Stuart Fuller , has announced he is stepping down from the role by the end of the year.Fuller  who has held the reins since Chinas Red Circle firm King & Wood PRC merged with Australias Big Six firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques in 2012  will be returning to fee-earning at the firms Sydney office in early 2017. KWM is already looking for his successor.After over a decade in leadership roles in Australia and almost five years as global managing partner, I believe its the right time for a change for me, my family and the firm, says Fuller.I want to thank the partners, lawyers and staff of the global firm for their hard work and support and for the honour of serving as their global managing partner. I am proud of the global firm that we have built over that time and our achievements over that period, and continue to be excited by the firms enormous potential, he adds.Stuarts return to the Australian partnership is said to not be connected to the current EUME partnership trouble. The firms chairman is appreciative of the senior lawyer.KWM thanks Stuart for his commitment, drive and contribution to our global firm over the past five years. The central role he played in the historic combination between King & Wood and Mallesons in 2012 and with SJ Berwin in 2013 is among his many achievements. We wish Stuart well for his continued success at KWM, says Wang Junfeng, global chairman of KWM.
Lawyers and law firms were overwhelmingly in favour of Hillary Clinton compared to President-Elect Donald Trump, at least in terms of letting their money do the talking.According to data compiled by the Centre for Responsive Politics, lawyers and law firms donated US$36.42 million (about $47.48 million) to the Clinton campaign, far more than the US$942,400 (about $1.23 million) they donated to the Trump campaign.The non-partisan non-profit organisation compiled the data from numbers released by the Federal Election Commission on 28 October which cover only the 2016 election cycle.The data represent all political action committee contributions as well as contributions from individuals giving more than $200 based on their occupation and/or their employer.According to the data, four other Republican presidential hopefuls got more money from lawyers or law firms than Trump.US$4.36 (about $5.68 million) was contributed by the legal fraternity to Jeb Bush while Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich all got contributions of US$2.1 million, US$1.6 and US$979,684 (about $2.73 million, $2.08 million and $1.28 million) respectively.Meanwhile, Democrat Bernie Sanders has a slim lead over Rubio in the tally with contributions from lawyers and law firms also totalling nearly US$2.2 million.According to the data , Clinton raised US$687.2 million (about $895.9 million) including from direct fundraising and contributions from outside groups. Trump raised $306.9 million (a hair above $400 million).Taking the large picture into account, lawyers contributed roughly 5% of Clintons war chest, dwarfing the .3% they contributed of Trumps funds.Despite polling below Clinton in the days right before the US presidential election, Trump won the presidency with 279 electoral votes compared to Clintons 228. In terms of popular votes, 59.81 million Americans voted for Clinton while 59.61 million voted for Trump.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday announced he would visit Turkey next week and said it was important not to "slam the door" on Ankara despite Berlin's unhappiness over its post-coup crackdown, reports Reuters.

The German parliament also voted 445 to 139 late on Thursday to extend German military support for the U.S.-led fight against Islamic State through the end of 2017, including deployment of over 250 soldiers at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.

In a parliamentary debate in which he said he would visit Turkey on Nov. 15, Steinmeier said cutting off talks with Turkey about joining the European Union would hurt Turkish citizens as well as the government.

"If we slam the door now and throw away the key, then we will disappoint many people in Turkey who are looking to Europe for help and support, especially now," Steinmeier told lawmakers.

But Steinmeier repeated that reintroduction of the death penalty in Turkey would mean the "unmistakable end" of negotiations on Turkish entry into the bloc. He said Berlin would continue to press Ankara to respect the rule of law.

Turkey has detained, dismissed or suspended more than 110,000 soldiers, judges, teachers, journalists and others in the aftermath of an unsuccessful putsch by rogue military last July.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said a "limited measure" could be drafted to restore the death penalty, which was formally abandoned in 2002, and President Tayyip Erdogan has said he would approve such a measure if parliament backed it.

"We want good relations with Turkey, but the reality has changed and we have to adjust our policies accordingly," Steinmeier said.

Steinmeier told lawmakers that Germany was taking steps to help strengthen Turkish civil society, and would try to enable Turkish academics, journalists and artists who could not work in Turkey anymore to continue their work in Germany.
Donald Trumps position on mergers and acquisitions, particularly the proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner, may signal tougher times for major deals going forward.Trump, who defeated Hillary Clinton in the just-ended US presidential election, has been open about his opposition to the US$85.4 million (about $111.23 million) AT&T-Time Warner deal.As an example of the power structure Im fighting, AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN  a deal we will not approve in my administration because its too much concentration of power in the hands of too few, Trump said in a speech in Pennsylvania last month, Bloomberg notes.He had called the Time Warner deal, a manifestation of content creators either merging with fellow content creators or with distributors, poison to democracy, the news organisation adds.Trumps comments come as six of the largest global mergers announced in 2016 are still on the table waiting for regulatory approval in various jurisdictions.Apart from the AT&T-Time warner merger, the following deals are still pending according to Bloomberg: Bayer-Monsanto (US$66 billion or about $85.97 billion), British American Tobacco-Reynolds American (US$47 billion or about $61.22 billion), Qualcomm-NXP (US$47 billion or about $61.22 billion), ChemChina-Syngenta (US$43 billion or about $56.01 billion), Enbridge-Spectra (US$28 billion or about $36.47 billion).Much will depend on the extent to which President-elect Trumps campaign positioning translates to policy, said Mike Flockhart.The Herbert Smith Freehills London corporate partner said that if America becomes more protectionist, we could see an impact on cross-border deal activity.The possible slowdown in the US comes as domestic M&A activity in the UK has been reported to be at a 30 year-low after the Brexit vote.Nonetheless, other regions are bucking the trend, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region which recorded a 30% year-over-year increase and 67% quarter-over-quarter jump in cross-border M&A values for the third quarter of 2016.
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
Farmers and employers in the hospitality and tourism sectors want to encourage more backpackers to visit Australia amid concerns that they will be put off by the new tax regime in 2017.Already they are reporting a shortage of workers to take jobs over the busy festive season and are worried that when the new 19% tax on backpacker wages is introduced in January even fewer will be spending time in Australia. One of the attractions of the working holiday maker (backpacker) visa has been that young people can earn money during their time in Australia while paying minimum tax and also extend their stay by working in different regional locations.On top of the tax change a new report has suggested that there are too many backpacker visas being approved and that Australia's migration programme should concentrate on increasing permanent migration for skilled workers.According to Dr Anna Boucher, a senior lecturer in public policy and political science at the University of Sydney, the growth of working holiday visas and student visas has created a continuous, temporary, low skilled migration stream, which is potentially competing with naturalised citizens for job opportunities, particularly young people.In an analysis for the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia Boucher says that the Government has expanded the working holiday visa programme by allowing visa holders working in a number of industries to work with their employer for 12 months, rather than six.'This move will likely continue to support the "working" rather than "holidaying" dimensions of the visa remit, especially as the chosen industries include care work, where Australia faces a chronic domestic undersupply of workers,' she claims.She also argues that the expansion, starting with a small number of young people from the UK and Canada for work and travel purposes in 1975 but has increased by 170% to 239,592 entrants in the financial year 2013/2014, has meant more young people are attracted from countries where they can earn more than they would staying at home.She points out that a study by the National Institute of Labour Studies on the effects of working holiday maker visas upon domestic youth unemployment in Australia said that on balance it does reduce the job opportunities for Australians in local labour markets.'We do not have direct evidence on this point. We do know that working holiday makers overwhelmingly worked in relatively unskilled jobs that most Australians could do. We also know at the same time that the unemployment figures of Australian youth remain stubbornly high,' she adds.She acknowledges that more research is needed but suggests that it is 'inappropriate' to continue expansion of the working holiday maker visa programme until the distributional effects upon existing Australian-born and naturalised workers have been established.But farmers in particular are concerned that this could discourage backpackers even more and recruitment agencies are finding it hard to fill positions. According to the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) young backpackers make up 25% of Australia's agricultural workforce but for seasonal harvest jobs it is much higher and close to 80% in some areas.The NFF estimates that there has been a fall in applications for farm work of between 40% and 90% since the tax increase was proposed and this is having an effect on farming. For example one mango farmer in the Northern Territory has left 15% of his crop on the trees due to not having enough pickers and has shelved plans to plant 40,000 more trees.All industries are appealing to backpackers to visit Australia and not desert the country for others such as New Zealand.
Hyundai has launched the Tucson with prices starting from Rs 18.99 lakh; available in three trim levels and with a choice of two engines.

Update: Read our 2016 Hyundai Tucson India review

In recent years, the demand for SUVs in India has seen a major jump with multiple automakers trying to capitalise on the surge. Last year, the launch of the Creta proved to be a big boost for Hyundai, and it became one of the bestselling SUVs in the country. Now Hyundai has further bolstered its SUV line-up with a third model  the new, third-gen Tucson. The Tuscon name is not new to India with Hyundai having originally launched the first-gen SUV back in 2005, though it was dropped from the line-up after only a brief stint.

Now Hyundai seems confident that the Tuscon in its third generation will be able to rack in numbers, especially with the jump in popularity of SUVs in recent years. And given the new SUVs aggressive pricing, Hyundai is clearly looking to make a big impact in the segment.

Specifications

Hyundai is offering the new Tucson with a choice of a petrol and a diesel engine. The diesel one is a 2.0-litre four-cylinder motor that develops a healthy 185hp and 400Nm of torque. The petrol engine is a 2.0-litre four-cylinder unit that develops 155hp and 192Nm of torque. Both motors are paired with either six-speed manual or automatic gearbox and as only two-wheel-drive.

Features

The Tucson is available in three trim levels  2WD MT, 2WD AT GL and 2WD AT GLS. The diesel engine is offered across all trim levels, though petrol buyers do not have the option of getting the fully kitted out SUV. Interestingly, this is the same set-up as on the Creta, where too, the top trim is only diesel. Standard equipment on offer in the new Tuscon include automatic projector headlamps, LED daytime-running lamps, fog lamps, height- adjustable driver seat, electric adjust, folding and heated wing mirrors, puddle lamps, cruise control, reclining second row seat, rear wiper, and washer, 8.0-inch touchscreen, AVN system with navigation, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto and voice recognition. In terms of safety, dual airbags and ABS are part of the standard kit as are rear parking sensors and camera.

The top 2WD AT GLS trim gets some additional goodies such as LED headlamps (segment first), leather upholstery, dual-zone auto climate control with rear AC vents, 10-way power-adjust driver seat, drive modes, hands-free tailgate operation (segment first), side and curtain airbags, stability control, hill-start assist and front parking sensors.

To sweeten the deal, Hyundai is offering a three-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty along with a three-year/30,000 km free maintenance package and three-year roadside assistance package. Loyal customers get a one-year extended warranty as well.

Price

Hyundai has launched the new Tucson at an introductory price of Rs 18.99 lakh for the entry-level petrol model. The pricelist is as follows:

Hyundai Tucson prices Variant Petrol Diesel 2WD M/T Rs 18.99 lakh Rs 21.59 lakh 2WD A/T GL Rs 21.79 lakh Rs 23.48 lakh 2WD A/T GLS --- Rs 24.99 lakh

Rivals

The new Tucson is a direct rival to the petrol-only Honda CR-V which comes at the higher end of the Tucsons price range. While there is no direct diesel rival, the recent price cuts in the likes of the Ford Endeavour and Chevrolet Trailblazer bring them within the same bracket as the smaller Tucson.
All-new MPV from Mahindra (Codename: U321) to take on Innova Crysta; likely to come with carmaker's new 1.99-litre diesel engine.

An all-new MPV from Mahindra has been sighted testing. In the June 2016 issue of Autocar India, we reported that Mahindra had begun work on a new MPV that would likely replace the aging Xylo. Now, fresh spy photographs confirm that the carmaker has indeed begun work on this new model. The vehicle was sighted near Mahindras vehicle development centre, Mahindra Research Valley, which is usually responsible for initial vehicle development and testing.

Going by the spy shots, this new vehicle has the traditional tall MPV stance with a long wheelbase and short front and rear overhangs for maximum interior room. Up front, the now-familiar Mahindra grille is an instant giveaway about its identity. The shape of the headlights resemble the recently-launched Mahindra Imperio pickup, while the bumper looks tall with a prominent air intake and provisions for fog lamps. It has a very cab-forward shape, with a relatively short bonnet, which again should translate to better interior room. Moving on to the sides, the glasshouse gives it a typical MPV look however, going by the recent Mahindra designs, the final design may end up getting a number of aggressive lines and slashes here and there in a bid to make the design more interesting.

There are no interior pictures out as of now, but one can expect ample room for eight passengers and segment-rivalling creature comforts and equipment-levels.

Mahindra, like other manufacturers, has seen the runaway success of the recently-launched Toyota Innova Crysta, despite it being banned in the Delhi NCR. Whats more, Mahindra also has an advantage of its new 1.99-litre diesel engine, which will most likely power this MPV, allowing it to be sold nationwide without any issue. Mahindra is also reportedly working on a larger-capacity petrol engine from the same new-generation 'mFalcon' family that originated in the KUV100, which could also find its way under this MPV's bonnet in the future.

Mahindra has announced that the new MPV will hit Indian showrooms in the second half of next year.
Photo via Wikipedia.

The average fuel economy of new vehicles sold in October fell 0.4 mpg to 24.8 mpg, according to the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI).

The move likely reflects "a continuing increase in the proportion of light trucks sold each month, as well as the recent calculation adjustments for window-sticker values implemented by the EPA for model year 2017," according to UMTRI researchers Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle.

The institute has been tracking EPA window sticker fuel economy data since October of 2007. The value for October is up by 4.7 mpg since October of 2007.

The University of Michigan Eco-Driving Index (EDI)  an index that estimates the average monthly emissions of greenhouse gases generated by an individual U.S. driver  was 0.81 in August, down 0.01 from the value for July (the lower the value the better).

This value indicates that the average new-vehicle driver produced 19% lower emissions in August than in October 2007, but 3% higher emissions than the record low reached in both August of 2014 and August of 2015.
Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported on Monday that in a striking break from tradition, Toyota Motor Corp. is exploring the possibility of mass-shipping long-range electric cars to the public by 2020. Despite competition like Nissan, Volkswagen and Tesla rallying behind electric vehicle production, Toyota has shown reluctance, sticking to its hydrogen fuel cell cars.

The Tokyo-based carmaker expressed reservations about electric vehicles, citing its expensive rechargeable batteries and the amount of time it takes to charge. But according to Electrek, it predicted that the remaining proponents of hydrogen fuel cell technology would eventually move to battery-powered vehicles in their bid to keep up with stricter emission controls.

Toyota's recently released Mirai hydrogen cars have failed to sell in the US at the same level as the company is used to, despite cost-cutting measures that made the vehicles cheaper. Since hitting the market last year, only 782 units of the Mirai have been delivered.

Reuters reported that the Japanese car giant was assembling a team that would start work in 2017 to create the electric vehicles that could go on single-charge drives of over 300 km (186 miles). Toyota is planning to enter the global market with the cars, shipping to Japan, California and China within the next four years.

The reports on the Japanese media were neither confirmed nor denied by Toyota, who said it said it did not comment on the plans for future projects. It did confirm however the development of fuel-efficient technologies.

The company has promised that by 2050 its cars will be completely emissions-free. Toyota's decision to achieve this by switching to electric could be due to California's emissions regulations and the tilt of China, the world's largest car market, toward electric vehicles.

Takeshi Miyao, consulting firm Carnorama's managing director, pointed to "tightening regulations" as the reason for the turnaround.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. The United Arab Emirates and the Republic of Armenia have a great potential to develop the bilateral economic relations, UAE Minister for Higher Education Ahmad Belhoul told reporters in the UAE.

We have discussed all possible options for cooperation with Armenia. We think there is a great potential to develop the economic relations of the two countries. In my opinion, Armenia has a great potential for attracting investments in the agricultural sector. Moreover, there is a good chance to cooperate in the tourism sector since Armenia is a good destination for tourists, he said.

Ahmad Belhoul said they are going to send a delegation to Armenia soon to discuss the cooperation issues.

President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan paid an official visit to the United Arab Emirates on November 9-10.During the visit the President held a private meeting with Crown Prince of Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Al Nahyan. Other official meetings were also held. Serzh Sargsyan also visited the Armenian Holy Martyrs Church of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. Within the framework of the visit the President held meetings with the heads of the UAEs investment and development companies.
The 2016 BMW i8 joins the ranks of the Australian police yesterday as BMW donated the first of i8 for the Patrol Office at Rose Bay, Sydney. Initially, it will only participate in community events and not on public roads. However future is bright that the fast and furious i8 will later head criminal cases and cater to emergency situations making use of its top speed.

2016 BMW i8 Aims To Connect Ties

The Australian police are arming and not just with traditional weapons than you imagine as they seem to be gathering a fleet of luxury vehicles. Recently, the Audi Sportsback RS7 and the Audi RS4 Avant has been a part of their squad and after the arrival of those models comes the 2016 BMW i8, according to Mashable.

With 4.68 meters long and only 1.29 in height, the BMW i8 will not go unnoticed when driven. Its wing door and carbon fiber interior provides comfort and its hybrid engine is truly powerful. BMW has been committed to its new range of hybrid vehicles with which wants to show maximum sustainability. The BMW i8, with configuration 2 + 2 seats, wants its driver to experience a revolutionary way of driving while remaining faithful to the same BMW driving feeling.

But apparently, these vehicles were acquired not to chase criminals or patrol the streets every day. Not just yet. As of now, they are part of a project, which was acquired to perform work for the benefit of the community, participating in events that aim to bring citizens closer to the police. Its main goal is to attract the young and not so young to lectures and events organized by the police force and the government.

"This will help the police and the community approach and narrow ties. A car that breaks down barriers, when a citizen approach a police officer they will be intrigued by the car and can talk to the policeman and see that they are good people," said Chief Superintendent Brad Hodded.

Other luxury vehicles that are part of the project are the Porsche 911, Lexus RC F, Volvo S60 Polestar and Mercedes-AMG GLE 63 S Coupe, according to Drive.

Worldwide Hybrid and Electric Police Cars

The arrival of the 2016 BMW i8 in Australia's police force is not surprising at all. Hybrid and electric cars are getting more and more popular and are now being use as a police car in different countries. The BMW i8 is already in use for patrol in Dubai. While in Los Angeles, BMW i3 are use in patrol and the i8 are used for special events.

The LAPD are also reportedly testing out their new Tesla Model S given by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and is planning to get more to strengthen their car lineup as the Model S is the third fastest production vehicle in the world, and may even be the first now after its upgrade this week.

The future is bright for our police force. Criminals beware.
All Ferrari Cars leaving the Maranello factory starting 2019 will all be hybrids. This is according to Sergio Marchionne CEO of Ferrari and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Marchionne believes that hybridization is the key to increasing the brand's sales from less than 8,000 yearly to more than 10,000 a year on 2020.

More Than 10000 Ferrari Cars By 2025

The direction of this new era post Luca Cordero de Montezemolo of the Italian brand slowly begins to show the first consequences of the progress of the Italian government. After the increase of annual production, from 7,000 units a year to 8,000, new CEO Marchionne plans to even increase it with a new plan he had revealed this week in a press conference held at Ferrari's factory in Maranello, according to Cnet.

Ferrari has confirmed what all the experts predicted since the departure of Montezemolo, the brand dramatically expands manufacturing volume, standing now Ferrari aim more than 10,000 Ferrari cars sold annually starting 202 . The initial target is 8,000 units this year and increases to 9,000 in 2019, this figure will gradually increase from the end of this decade to reach more than 10,000 by 2025, according to Auto News.

This new approach to its business strategy is based on the simple search to maximize profits, as noted their analysis of the new Ferrari GTC4Lusso T, the first version of access to global markets in the history of the brand, created specifically to cash in, thereby breaking quite a few traditions of the Italian brand.

Ferrari Hybrid Car Future Looks Bright

How to achieve these figures? Marchionne believes that to achieve these sales figure, all Ferrari Cars will have hybrid technology on them starting 2019.

This means that future generations of the entire current range will feature electric hybrid systems to increase their mechanical performance. A power surge that according to the time announcement will be considerable, but has not gone into details.

Marchionne added that the brand also raises the possible emergence of more models to expand the target customer, putting precisely as an example the recent eight - cylinder GTC4Lusso T. So in addition to new models, Ferrari fans can face the emergence of new Ferrari cars releases. We are excited!
11 November 2016 16:20 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Armenias National Statistical Service has recently revealed a report Social Snapshot and Poverty in Armenia, 2015, which looks at the miserable economic picture of the country.

The records indicated in the report show that the poverty level in Armenia has not changed over the past two years.. Much of the bad is found in the employment and poverty chapters, which indicate the employment in Armenia is now the lowest on record.

Despite all the showy attempts of the government to overcome the poverty in Armenia, the situation remains the same. This rise in unemployment has knock-on effects when we look at the number of people with low income.

The Statistical Service gave a whole picture of the doleful situation, noting that 29.8 percent of the Armenian population lives in poverty. This is even more than it was in 2008  27.6 percent were poor eight years ago.

In detail, last year the total number of poor in Armenia amounted to some 900,000 people. Meanwhile, the number of very poor (including extremely poor) people was about 310,000, and 60,000 of them were extremely poor, the report states.

The report also contains other interesting facts, most notable of which shows that after the global economic crisis the level of the poorest in Armenia remained at the same level or regressed, while the richest have become even richer.

The general poverty line and extreme poverty line in 2015 were defined at the level of 41,698 drams ($87.1) and 24,109 drams ($50.4) a month respectively. Armenian experts note that such amount is not appropriate for life in Armenia  "they are more likely suitable for not to die".

Also increases in the cost of food, fuel and rent have hit lower-income families harder than others.

Meanwhile, the poverty, paired with violent corruption and unemployment, also forces Armenians to commit crimes and even suicides.

Thus, there were registered 14,237 crimes in the country for the first nine months of 2016, News.am stated. This is a significant leap, considering that in 2015 the figure was 12,827 crimes recorded.

The Statistical Service recorded 59 murders, 26 attempts to murder, 859 cases of intentional infliction of harm, 97 sexual crimes, including 19 incidents of rape or attempt to rape.

The suicide rate is also high in Armenia. Thus, the number of suicides increased by 20 compared to the same period of 2015.

All this shows that the Armenian population is unhappy with the situation in the country, which triggers violations of the law. Maybe that will change when the Armenian government finally fights the corruption and opens new jobs.

However, it does not seem possible as long as the current corrupt Sargsyan regime stays in power.

---

Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 11:34 (UTC+04:00)

Over the past 24 hours, Armenias armed forces have 27 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry on November 11.

The Armenian side was using 60 and 82-millimeter mortars.

The Azerbaijani army positions located in the Gizilhajili village and on nameless heights of Azerbaijans Gazakh district underwent fire from the Armenian army positions located in the Berkaber village of the Ijevan district and on nameless heights of the Noyemberyan district of Armenia.

Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani army positions located in the Alibayli village and on nameless heights of Azerbaijans Tovuz district were shelled from the Armenian army positions located in the Aygepar and Chinari villages of Armenias Berd district.

Moreover, the Azerbaijani army positions also underwent fire from the Armenian positions located near the Armenian-occupied Garagashli, Bash Gervend villages of the Aghdam district, Horadiz, Gorgan, Garakhanbayli villages of the Fuzuli district, Kuropatkino village of the Khojavand district, as well as on nameless heights of the Tartar and Khojavand districts.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 16:54 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Azerbaijan may soon turn into a regional hub of automotive industry, as the interest of foreign car manufacturers in the market is rising steadily.

Being a favourable platform for major automakers, the country is now enlarging its car production and encourages foreign investments.

Azerbaijan has an access to major transportation routes, which enables investors to easily reach the markets they are aiming at. The roads leading from East to West and West to South that pass through Azerbaijan, substantial road, maritime and air transport infrastructure of the country, transform the country into strategic logistics hub of the region and make it an alluring destination for foreign investments.

Moreover, the interest of investors is also triggered by such factors, as a reputation of a reliable partner, stable political situation, construction of state-of-the-art port in the country, as well as favourable conditions created for investors.

The country imported only 3,454 units of cars in January-August 2016, while the figure is less by 17,693 units or some 83.67 percent, as compared to the index recorded last year. The significant drop in imports is mainly due to the switch to the Euro-4 ecological standard in 2014.

At present, only cars produced in the EU since 2005, in the U.S. since in 2004, in China and Japan since 2011, in Korea since 2006, and in Turkey since 2009 can be imported to the country.

Certain countries have already made investments in the development of automotive industry in Azerbaijan.

Iranian multinational giant automaker Iran Khodro is currently engaged in the implementation of automotive plant project in Azerbaijan. The project, which is implemented jointly with Azerbaijans AzEuroCar LLC will be located at Neftchala industrial district and cover an area of 10 hectares. The total cost of the plant is $15 million, while some 25 percent of the cost will be provided by the Iranian side.

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 car factory is expected to launch its first products as of May 2017.

Moreover, Bipek Avto  Group, the largest holding in the automobile market of Kazakhstan earlier expressed its interest in exploring the possibility of entering the market in Azerbaijan.

Also, the country is studying the possibility to build a GTL (Gas to Liquid) plant for the production of synthetic motor oils as the worlds leading car manufacturers recommend using synthetic oils and their aggregates in the automotive engines.

That can eliminate a shortage for such products, as the country is well placed to develop the GTL technology.

There are currently two operating plants for the production of motor vehicles in the country located in Nakhchivan and Ganja.

Nakhchivan Automobile Plant was put into operation on January 11, 2010, as a result of the Azerbaijani-Chinese cooperation in the sphere. The capacity of the plant is the production of 5,000 cars per year. The plant will soon launch the manufacture of new generation of cars in cooperation with Chinese auto producer Lifan.

Ganja Automotive Plant, which started its operation in 2004, is engaged in assembling Minsk tractors and trucks. The plant also produces tractor trailers, communal machinery, and snow removal equipment. The assembly of communal machinery is conducted as part of an agreement signed with the German Haller Company. Currently, the plant is engaged in the assembly of Belarus tractors and MAZ, KAMAZ and Ural vehicles.

--

Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 11:28 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

The successful economic collaboration between Azerbaijan and Turkey, which is based on the huge transportation and energy projects, also extends to the area of mutual investments.

Ranking among top foreign investors in Turkey, Azerbaijan has so far invested some $7.9 billion in Turkey's economy.

Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev said in a meeting with the newly-appointed Turkish Ambassador, Erkan Ozoral that the overall sum that the country plans to invest in Turkeys economy stands at $20 billion.

The figure is expected to become Azerbaijan's largest investment abroad.

He added that Turkey invested around $10.1 billion in Azerbaijan with some $2.6 billion of the sum accounting for the non-oil sector. Over 2.600 Turkish companies operate in Azerbaijan, while more than 1,700 Azerbaijani companies operate in Turkey

Speaking about Azerbaijan-Turkey relations, the minister noted that the two countries enjoy the strategic cooperation, mentioning that the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway will be commissioned in 2017.

Mustafayev further said that the fifth Azerbaijan-Turkey-Georgia Business Forum, to be held in Istanbul on November 16, will contribute to the expansion of ties, adding that Azerbaijan and Turkey can hold similar events in the trilateral format with Russia, Iran and Kazakhstan.

Azerbaijans state energy giant SOCAR, has a lions share in the total volume of investments made by Azerbaijan in Turkey. Moreover, SOCAR is involved in a number of major investment projects in Turkey. SOCAR Turkey Enerji, a subsidiary of SOCAR is the most important representative of the constantly-reinforcing economic collaboration between Azerbaijan and Turkey.

The two countries are connected by several important regional projects, such as Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas line and TANAP.

Turkish businessmen also intend to increase investments in Azerbaijans economy. Turkish companies operate almost in all spheres of the economy: in the telecommunications, banking, insurance, transportation, food, textile sectors and in the field of construction equipment and furniture manufacturing. Nearly 25,000 people are currently employed by Turkish companies operating in Azerbaijan.

Ozoral earlier said that Turkish construction companies have invested $11 billion in 350 projects implemented in Azerbaijan since 2003, mentioning that the figure does not reflect the existing potential.

The trade turnover between the countries amounted to $1.67 billion in January-September 2016, more than $842 million of the sum accounting for the exports to Turkey.

---

Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 12:39 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

The fifth Azerbaijan-Turkey-Georgia trilateral business forum will be organized in Istanbul on November 16.

Turkey is one of Azerbaijan`s largest trade and investment partners as it invested $10.1 billion in the country`s economy, including $2.6 billion in the non-oil sector, Azertac reported.

Azerbaijan invested $7.9 billion in the Turkish economy. By 2020 the total amount of Azerbaijans investment in Turkey is expected to make $20 billion.

More than 2,600 Turkish firms operate in Azerbaijan, while more than 1,700 Azerbaijani companies work in Turkey.

Azerbaijan invested 40 percent of the total investments made in the economy of Georgia in 2015, the National Statistics Office of Georgia reports.

Last year, Azerbaijan invested $542 million (58.9 percent growth) in Georgia and became the largest investor in the country.

The trilateral business forum is assessed as important event in boosting of cooperation among businessmen and overall relations among Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

Business Forum is traditionally followed by bilateral meetings among businessmen, during which expansion of business ties among entrepreneurs are discussed.

Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia are successfully cooperating in the political, economic, scientific, technical, and cultural spheres. The three countries are connected by several important regional projects, including the Baku-Supsa, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipelines, Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas line and Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 15:53 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Azerbaijan and the Islamic Republic of Iran are keen to develop cooperation in the sphere of shipping. The issue was high on agenda during the meeting between management of Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping Company and delegation representing Iranian Ports and Maritime Organization.

Spokesperson of Iranian delegation Jabbar Jalilian expressed his confidence in the possibility of joint projects with the Azerbaijani side.

The sides mentioned the necessity of cooperation in the sphere of freight transportation, maintenance of vessels, agency service, as well as operations beyond the Caspian Sea.

Azerbaijan is highly prioritizing the development of the shipping industry and improvement of the maritime infrastructure. The government has already approved the State Program on Development of Shipping in the Republic of Azerbaijan for 2016-2020.

The program envisages renewal of the transport and specialized offshore fleet, expansion of activities outside the Caspian Sea, increase of the volume of freight transportation through the territory of the country, modernization of shipbuilding and maintenance yards and improvement of the academic base of marine education, as well as implementation of certain measures to turn the country into major transport-logistics hub of international importance.

Iran launched expansion of maritime and port cooperation following the conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) between Tehran and world powers.

The country is now negotiating with a number of European, Chinese and South Korean, as well as domestic companies, for building ships. Moreover, international firms have also made commitments to increase shipping ties with Iran.

---

Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 18:34 (UTC+04:00)

Euronews TV channel has posted a video footage on its website on the International Theatre Conference held in Baku.

Theatre today and tomorrow: directors from a number of countries took part in the 4th International Theatre Conference in Baku to discuss the new challenges they face.

The conference organized by the Culture and Tourism Ministry, the Union of Theatre Figures of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, was supported by Baku International Centre for Multiculturalism.

The event brought together about 150 theater workers, playwrights and theater leaders of international institutions from 38 countries. One of the aims of the conference was to familiarize the participants with the cultural platform in the country.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 11:10 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

A working meeting of military medical professionals from Azerbaijan and Georgia was held in Baku on November 10, Azertac reported.

The meeting was organized in accordance with the plan of bilateral cooperation between the defense ministries of Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Within the framework of the event, Chief of Main Medical Department of the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry, Major General Natig Aliyev met with the chief of the Medical Department of the Georgian Armed Forces, Colonel Medea Betashvili and commander of medical battalion, Major David Chabadze.

The sides discussed issues related to the preparation of the plan of joint activities of military medical services.

The officials visited the Main Clinical Hospital of the Armed Forces, where they got acquainted with the conditions created in departments, as well as the treatment centers, equipped with modern medical equipment.

Guests also visited the Military Medical Faculty of the Azerbaijan Medical University

The army building process is of particular importance for Azerbaijan, as twenty percent of the country's territory is under Armenian occupation and the country is in a state of war with Armenia.

Nowadays, the skills and combat readiness of the Azerbaijani army are growing year by year and the army building process is progressing as well.

Azerbaijani army stands at the 60th place in the world ranking military power Global Firepower Index. Azerbaijans military budget for 2016 is about $1.466 billion. The country's military budget exceeds the overall state budget of occupant Armenia by more than $1 billion.

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian Churches in the United Arab Emirates are actively operating, Minister of Diaspora Hranush Hakobyan told Armenpress in the United Arab Emirates.

We have two churches in the United Arab Emirates: the Holy Martyrs Church in Abu Dhabi and St. Gregory the Illuminator Church in Sharjah. Those Armenian Churches, belonging to the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia, are actively operating. Both the priest and the Holy Father are practical persons, and are engaged in issues of preserving the Armenian identity, she said.

The Minister said the Armenian community of the UAE is quite organized and active, and it doesnt face a problem of preserving the Armenian identity.

Everyone speaks Armenian, especially, the children, and this is a great pride. The schools function well, they get the necessary amount of literature. Here we have two one-day schools in Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. The community is well established, its members mainly came from Syria and Lebanon 40 years ago. We can surely state that they have managed to find their place, the Minister said.

Hranush Hakobyan expressed gratitude to the Armenian community of the UAE for helping their compatriots coming from Syria.

More than 10.000 Armenians live in the United Arab Emirates.
11 November 2016 11:41 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

The third National Advisory Group (NAG) meeting was conducted in Baku within the EU-funded Programme for Prevention, Preparedness and Response to Natural and Man-made Disasters in the Eastern Partnership Countries (PPRD East 2).

The meeting was attended by the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Azerbaijan and other national stakeholders from Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Ecology and Natural Resources, Health, Education, National Assembly, State Border Service, State Customs Committee, Republican Seismic Survey Centre and Institute of Geography of Azerbaijan National Academy of Science, Azerbaijan Red Crescent Society and Trend Agency, and representatives of UNICEF, French Embassy and EU Delegation in Azerbaijan.

The objective of the meeting was to report to the national stakeholders about the accomplishments of the Programme in 2016, and to present, discuss and agree upon the next steps and activities that will be undertaken within the PPRD East 2 Programme in the region and specifically in Azerbaijan.

Flood risk management, disaster risk assessment, civil protection volunteerism, raising awareness about disasters, and host nation support, complemented with civil protection capacity building, have been specifically addressed and discussed in details.

These are thematic topics selected by the national disaster risk management stakeholders at the 2nd NAG meeting organized in March 2016 to be further addressed within the PPRD East 2 Programme in Azerbaijan.

The EU-funded Programme for Prevention, Preparedness and Response to Natural and Man-made Disasters in EaP Countries (PPRD East 2) is contributing to the peace, stability, security and prosperity of the Eastern Partner Countries. It is also aimed to protect the environment, population, cultural heritage, resources and infrastructures of the region by strengthening the countries resilience, preparedness and response to man-made disasters and disasters caused by natural hazards.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 12:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

An agreement on cooperation was signed between the Foundation for Development and Support of the Valdai Discussion Club and Baku International Policy and Security Network in Moscow.

The agreement was unersigned by Foundations Executive Director Nadezhda Lavrentieva and Director of Baku International Policy and Security Network Elkhan Alasgarov on November 10.

Speaking about the traditions of friendship and cooperation between the peoples of Russia and Azerbaijan, the sides expressed intention to contribute to the consolidation, development and strengthening of relations of the two countries intellectual elites.

The parties plan to hold joint forums and meetings of representatives of the expert community, intellectual elite in order to promote cooperation and strengthen the scientific and socio-cultural relations.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 14:21 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

Prospects for strengthening the Baku-Berlin bilateral relations were mulled in Baku as Azerbaijan`s Parliamentary Speaker Ogtay Asadov has met with German ambassador in Baku Michael Kindsgrab, Azertac reported.

Asadov emphasized that Azerbaijan attaches great importance to developing relations with Germany.

The meetings held and documents signed as part of President Ilham Aliyevs visit to Germany elevated the relations between the two countries to a qualitatively new level. Today our relations are developing in the best interests of our nations, said Asadov.

He pointed to the bilateral ties in the spheres of economy, science, education and culture. Today around 170 German companies operate in Azerbaijan. The favorable investment environment in Azerbaijan will help increase this figure in the future, said the Speaker.

He hailed reciprocal visits of MPs of the two countries and their meetings in influential international organizations.

Asadov lauded Germanys role in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement and expressed his hope that the dispute will soon be solved within international law.

Kindsgrab, in turn, vowed to do his utmost to further strengthen relations between Germany and Azerbaijan during his diplomatic tenure.

He noted that Germany is interested in developing relations with this part of the Caucasus. There are wide opportunities to further expand relations in the inter-parliamentary, economic, cultural and humanitarian spheres, he added.

Diplomatic relations between Azerbaijan and Germany were established in February 1992.

Over the past two decades, the bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and Germany are developed into new heights and objectives. The exchange of official visits and extensive contact of the business community have played an important role towards transforming the bilateral relations between Baku and Berlin from formal and official diplomatic contacts into a strategic partnership that continues to flourish every day.

The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Germany stood at 415.33 million manats in January-May 2016 and Germany accounted for 6.51 percent of Azerbaijans total trade turnover, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee. In these terms, the country ranks fourth among Azerbaijans foreign trade partners.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 15:17 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijans Deputy PM, chair of the State Committee for Refugees and IDPs Ali Hasanov has met with the newly appointed World Bank country director in Azerbaijan Naveed Hassan Naqvi and WB Social Development specialist, Project Team Leader Robert Wrobel, Azertac reported.

Ali Hasanov hailed cooperation between the government of Azerbaijan and the WB, saying wide-ranging projects have been implemented in a successful and transparent manner, including infrastructure development, allocation of microcredits, and income generation support.

He highlighted the work done to solve social problems of more than 1.2 million refugees and IDPs expelled from their homes as a result of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

They discussed a new loan agreement signed between the government of Azerbaijan and the World Bank this July with the aim of addressing social, household as well as employment problems of refugees and IDPs.

Hasanov said the project will see the construction of social and infrastructure facilities for refugees and IDPs, including kindergartens, schools, community centers, drinking water and electric power supply, repair of inter-village and internal roads, renovation of sanitation and irrigation systems, as well as the implementation of various infrastructure projects in newly built settlements for refugees and IDPs in different regions of the country.

Naveed Hassan Naqvi, in turn, hailed what the Azerbaijani government has been doing to solve problems of IDPs and refugees.

He reaffirmed the World Bank`s interest in maintaining cooperation with the government of Azerbaijan and working with IPDs and refugees.

He pledged to do his utmost to develop cooperation between the World Bank and the government of Azerbaijan during his tenure in the country.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 16:01 (UTC+04:00)

A press conference on awarding an honorary professorship of Astrakhan State University to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has been held at the university, Azertac reported.

The Academic Council of Astrakhan State University conferred honorary professorship upon the Azerbaijani president on October 24.

The president was awarded an honorary professorship for his role in developing relations between Azerbaijan and Astrakhan in the field of education, as well as his contribution to deepening ties with Russia, including the Astrakhan region.

Rector of Astrakhan State University Alexander Lunyov, in his remarks, hailed the importance of educational cooperation in developing relations between the Astrakhan region and the Republic of Azerbaijan.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 17:19 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

An amazing parade of vessels was held in Baku Bay to mark the State Flag Day, Trend Life reported.

The event was organized by the Sailing Federation of Azerbaijan to honor this public holiday traditionally marked on November 9.

The state flag of Azerbaijan represents a rectangular panel consisting of three equal horizontal bands colored blue, red, and green, with a white crescent and an eight-pointed star are centered in the red band. The ratio of the flag's width to its length is 1:2.

The Sailing Federation of Azerbaijan (was established in 2000.

The federation aims to support the development of the sailing sport in Azerbaijan and to increase the interest to this sport by means of its promotion among the population of the country.

One of the main priorities of the Federation is to prepare and train the countrys national team and to ensure its participation in international competitions.

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 18:06 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Azerbaijan`s capital hosted a Human Resources-Baku 2016 Forum, which was organized by Pasha life Insurance Company on November 11, Azertac reported. The Forum brought together heads of local and international organizations and HR companies.

Chairman of the company`s Board of Directors Mursal Rustamov ,addressing the event, stressed the importance of the forum.

He noted that the event addresses automatization of human resources management, adding that the forum aims to improve the quality of the application of best international experience in human resources management in local companies.

Rustamov said nearly 1,500 delegates applied to attend the forum, describing this as increasing interest in the event.

A total of 190,000 people applied to the countrys employment services during the first ten months of 2016, and 53,000 of them were provided with jobs, Idris Isayev, Azerbaijans Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Protection said addressing the event.

Isayev noted that despite the fact that Azerbaijan did much to reduce unemployment in recent years (in 2015 this indicator dropped to five percent), changes in the global economy and the global financial and economic crisis, particularly the fall in oil prices, have led to the growth of this indicator.

The Government tries to fight unemployment by creating new jobs, expanding the measures of self-employment, etc., the deputy minister said.

He noted that since early 2016, the Ministry works together with the state companies to reduce unemployment. Thanks to this, more than 18,000 people were employed and nearly 17,000 people passed various trainings on employment.

For the first 10 months of this year there were concluded 339,200 labor contracts, while 312,600 were terminated, the deputy minister said.

Moreover, the proportion of people working in the public sector of Azerbaijan has decreased from 56 to 25.2 percent since 1995. In this context, the number of people working in the private sector, including individual entrepreneurs, has increased.

This is an indicator of a stable economy, Isayev said.

---

Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 11:32 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

BP has said a body has been recovered from the seabed in the vicinity of the Deepwater Gunashli (DWG) platform.

BP as operator of the Azeri-Chirag- Deepwater Gunashli field development deeply regrets to confirm that a body has been recovered from the seabed in the vicinity of the Deepwater Gunashli (DWG) platform.

The body was transported to shore where it was received by the appropriate law enforcement agencies, the company said in a statement.

It has been confirmed by KCA Deutag, the employer of the person who went missing from the Deepwater Gunashli platform on 8 November, that the recovered body is that of the missing individual.

All further enquiries should be directed to the relevant law-enforcement agencies, BP said.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 10:26 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

Several projects are being implemented in Turkmenistans mining industry by foreign investor companies under the production sharing agreements (PSA), the Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper reported.

In particular, Dragon Oil (the UAE), Petronas (Malaysia), RWE (Germany), Eni (Italy), CNPC (China) and several other companies are actively developing offshore and continental fields and increase annual volume and their share in total volume of oil and gas output by Turkmenistan, says the article.

The share of oil output by joint and foreign companies increased by 54 percent in 2015, as compared to 15.6 percent in 2006, and this figure reached almost 56 percent in the first half of 2016.

The share of gas output by foreign companies amounted to more than 25 percent in 2015 and 28.5 percent during the first six months of 2016.

Meanwhile, foreign investments in oil and gas output total tens of billions of dollars and continue to rise, according to the article.

Energy-rich Turkmenistan is producing about 70-80 billion cubic meters of gas a year.

Most of Turkmenistan's proven gas reserves are located in the Amu Darya basin in the south-east and in the Murgab South Caspian basins in the western part of the country. The Central Asian country has also been lately engaging in gas talks with China, India and Afghanistan.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 13:30 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Iran and Russia are currently in talks over the possibility of exclusive presentation of the Islamic Republics oil and gas contracts to Russian companies.

Russias Deputy Energy Minister Kirill Molodtsov said that the sides earlier agreed on the issue, mentioning that the talks are currently underway on defining the place and date of the presentation.

"We expect the agreements reached by heads of two ministries - of energy (of the Russian Federation) and Irans Petroleum Ministry - about a potential exclusive presentation of the current conditions and contracts, under which the Islamic Republic of Iran is planning to attract foreign companies and foreign investments in the projects on its soil, to be presented to Russian companies. Respective notes and respective documents have been sent and were expecting a response from the Iranian side about the date and location," he said.

Iranian Deputy Oil Minister Amir Hossein Zamaninia, in turn, said that Lukoil, Gazprom, Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, Zarubezhneft and Tatneft have already made preliminary agreements with Iranian companies.

Zamania earlier said that Iran intends to sign first contracts with Russian oil producers by the end of 2016.

Iran signed agreements on the exploration of fields with Russian Lukoil,Zarubezhneft, and Tatneft in the first half of 2016.

Iran, which needs foreign investment to develop its fields, has been trying to set favorable terms on oil development contracts to attract foreign investors deterred by years of sanctions.

The new type of oil contract will be presented to Russian companies on November 17 in Tehran, TASS reported.

---

Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. The Azerbaijani activeness in the line of contact is being met without panic in Stepanakert, noting that nothing unusual is taking place. Azerbaijan is violating the ceasefire, but its not strange.

Speaking about the provocative actions of Azerbaijan in the line of contact, spokesman of the Nagorno Karabakh President Mr. Davit Babayan told ARMENPRESS Azerbaijan is attempting to solve several issues. First, it attempts to keep the situation tense in the border, realizing its evil goals. That is, one loss in the NKR side, one wounded, is an achievement for Azerbaijan.

There is no panic mood whatsoever, and cant be, we are dealing with an abnormal, terrorist state, Babayan says, mentioning that the second issue is that Azerbaijan is attempting to restore its dignity, the armys spirit. For 22 years the Azerbaijani side had prepared for revenge, it tried to destroy Nagorno Karabakh with a Blitzkrieg in April, however it failed. Azerbaijan sustained a big loss  material, moral and physical. The Azerbaijani people understood that its impossible to win through war because Armenian soldiers will fight until the end. And now, it tries to restore its dignity through similar actions, David Babayan said.

In addition to this, the economy of Azerbaijan is declining, Aliyev has become a de jure Khan, and the people are discontented. Through holding military exercises it tries to raise their spirits. There is another message here also  addressed to internal political adversaries, national minorities. That is, that the Azerbaijani armys commander is the supreme Khan, and for maintaining power he may use the army to suppress domestic unrest, Babayan added.

Davit Babayan underscores the NKR Army is in control of the situation. According to him, there is always the possibility of a large-scale war, but its low, taking into account the Azerbaijani defeat in April.

The international community has also clearly stated that it doesnt accept the option of war. But this doesnt mean the Nagorno Karabakh forces are decreasing their vigilance and combat-readiness due to low probability of a large-scale war. The Army is always ready to suppress any aggression and inflict an adequate blow. Azerbaijan understands very well that its impossible to terrorize our men who are standing at the borders, Babayan added.

Azerbaijani forces continue provocative actions in several parts of the line of contact since the morning of November 11, the Defense Ministry of Nagorno Karabakh told ARMENPRESS.

The ministrys statement reads: As during last night, so since this morning the Azerbaijani forces continue taking provocative actions in several parts of the line of contact. Particularly, since 12:15, Azerbaijani forces are shelling the military posts of the Defense Army in the north-eastern (Talish and Yarmja) directions of the fronline with 60mm and 82mm mortars. Military posts located in the direction of Yarmja village are under especially intense bombardment.

The Defense Army forces are taking countermeasures to suppress the Azerbaijani aggression.

The NKR Defense Ministry announces that the responsibility for escalations at the border falls entirely on Azerbaijan.
11 November 2016 15:34 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Kazakhstan and South Korea signed 23 documents worth $640.2 million during a bilateral business forum held in Seoul, the Kazakh National Export and Investment Agency Kaznex Invest reported.

The forum, attended by 350 businessmen from the companies of both countries, was held on Nov. 10 during the visit of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev to South Korea.

The agreements were signed in the spheres of healthcare, information technologies, construction, finance, trade, tourism and others.

The major documents signed include a memorandum on establishment of a cluster of pharmaceutical and medical-biological plants Nefertem worth $350 million in Kazakhstan, a memorandum on cooperation between Korean SEOHA and Kazakh Investment and Development Ministry worth $150 million, as well as a memorandum on creation of the Kazakh-Korean Consortium to attract investment for the construction of a clinic worth $80 million, designed for 504 beds.

Today, 465 South Korean companies are operating in Kazakhstan in the spheres of production, trade and services, construction, agricultural and industrial complex, consulting and finance, subsoil use and exploration.

There are also 27 South Korean-Kazakh joint ventures that operate in chemicals industry, energy production, mechanical engineering, pharmaceutics, information and communication technologies, mining and metallurgical complex, infrastructure and light industry in Kazakhstan.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 15:11 (UTC+04:00)

Belarus and Turkey are capable of reaching a new level in the development of their relations.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko made the remark during talks with Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Minsk on November 11, BelTA agency reported.

I am convinced that as a result of your visit we will be capable of reaching yet another level in the development of our relations, the Belarusian head of state said. We have virtually no political differences of opinion. We have common views on the international agenda. The relations via diplomatic channels are very good.

The president noted that the bilateral trade and economic relations are slightly behind our personal and interstate relations, adding that however, even in this part the dynamics is positive and good progress has been secured.

Alexander Lukashenko assured Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Belarus' sincere attitude towards the friendly state of Turkey.

Our friendship and relations have passed the test of time. You can rest assured that our relations are solid. Belarus will always be predictable for Turkey. Our policy will always conform to the policy you've been pursuing for more than one year, stated the Belarusian head of state.

The Belarusian head thanked the Turkey president for bringing about 200 representatives and top executives of major Turkish companies as part of his delegation to Minsk.

We are going to open a Belarusian-Turkish forum. About 300 companies have been registered as participants. It may be the largest forum on record in the history of independent Belarus in terms of the number of companies, noted the head of state.

Noting that it was the first visit of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Belarus, the Belarusian head of state said he was confident that his Turkish counterpart will like the country despite the unfavorable weather.

Turkey would like to boost economic ties with Belarus, and increase mutual trade volume up to $1 billion, said President Erdogan.

"There was a drop in the trade volume between 2013 and 2015. We can increase this to $1 billion in a very short time," Erdogan told reporters along with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk, Anadolu Agency reported.

"This is not difficult [to do] when you consider the two countries have a combined population of 90 million," he said.

Erdogan added that Turkish entrepreneurs had investments worth about $1.5 billion in Belarus.

"The steps that they [entrepreneurs] take together with the businessmen here [in Belarus] would be a win-win for both countries."

Erdogan will address the Turkish-Belarus Business Forum later on Friday. He is also expected to attend the opening ceremony of the Minsk mosque.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
11 November 2016 14:10 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Russia has offered Azerbaijan to create joint tourism packages to attract tourists from China, whose outbound tourists amounted to 120 million in 2015.

Rauf Pashayev, the deputy head at the Tourism Department of Azerbaijans Culture and Tourism Ministry, said that Russia and China plan to launch flights to the south of Russia within the cooperation on the New Silk Road project.

Direct flights are expected to be performed from the Chinese province of Sichuan to Sochi and other southern cities of Russia. This is expected to result in increasing of number of Chinese tourists.

Given the preference of Chinese tourists for package tours, Russia offers us to discuss creation of joint tourist packages that would include, lets say, the North Caucasus and Azerbaijan, Pashayev told Trend, adding that this would allow both Azerbaijan and Russia to attract Chinese tourists to the region.

The deputy head noted the issue will be discussed in the Ministry, and the Azerbaijani side will consider its contribution to this project.

Pashayev further said that the Ministry seeks to gradually up the tourist flow in the country from neighboring countries, especially from Russia.

To this end, we have opened a representative office in Russia in 2016 and we will strengthen the promotion of tourism in Azerbaijan through adds on Russian TV channels, and raise awareness of the Russian population about our country, he said.

However, Pashayev mentioned that the activities of the office will be felt only in a few years, as it was in the case with the countries of the Persian Gulf.

Azerbaijani representation in those countries was opened in 2011, and its activities brought results only five years later  the number of tourists from the Gulf countries has increased exponentially, he clarified.

This year we see an increase in the number of tourists from Russia by a few percent, and I think this figure will only grow in the future, Pashayev said.

Over the past nine months of 2016, the number of foreign tourists visiting Azerbaijan amounted to 1,719,015 people, according to the data of Azerbaijans Ministry of Culture and Tourism. This number has risen by 169,430 people or 10.9 percent compared with the same period of 2015.

Today, there are about 570 accommodation facilities and 300 travel agencies in Azerbaijan. The prices for hotels and hostels became even more attractive for the foreign visitors due to the devaluation of the national currency in 2015.

The provided accommodation establishments are of any price range, starting from just $6-7 per night in hostel and $25 in hotels.

Azerbaijan's revenues from tourism amounted to 2,678 billion manats ($1,569 billion) last year, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC). Its experts predict that Azerbaijan will generate 2,848 billion manats ($1.668 billion) this year, or 6.4 percent more compared to 2015.

---

Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Birminghams NBC affiliate:

One Birmingham neighborhood received an unsettling wake-up the morning after Election Day when they discovered Ku Klux Klan recruiting fliers littering their neighborhood.

Roy Brown discovered the flier as he made his way to his mailbox Wednesday morning in the Glen Iris neighborhood. Its an interesting morning to wake up to it, he said.

The front cover reads, Get off the fence, whitey, and join the only group that has ever stood for the white man. The inside cover of the flier reads: Black radicals have reverted back to savages and more Muslims arrive daily.

Brown said hes going to keep the flier as a reminder of the past. Im old, and this city has gone through a lot. And to me, thats what the coincidence is from there. And we still have to be reminded about it, sometimes. And thats what this is. This is a reminder of our past, and we have to remember that, he said.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. President Sargsyans visit to the United Arab Emirates can be a turning point for the inter-state and economic relations, RPA lawmaker, economist Khosrov Harutyunyan told ARMENPRESS.

According to him, the UAE has a pretty big role in the Middle East, as well as in global economic developments.

Having such a partner is certainly very useful. In my opinion the Presidents visit can be perspective and can open new horizons for economic cooperation. Basically, an agreement was reached to form inter-governmental committees. This is already positive, since inter-governmental committees allow discussing both strategic and tactical issues. Obviously economic cooperation was the key issue during the entire visit, in the fields of mining, social, educational and energy. These are steps which can be fruitful in as result of consistent practice, Harutyunyan said.

According to the MP, the UAE might be interested in the Armenian platform for entering the Eurasian Economic Union and the EU. Forming production capabilities and investing in Armenia, according to Harutyunyan, will allow presenting more competitive products in the Arab world.

Harutyunyan says UAE investors can be interested in Armenia. Taking into account Armenias achievements in term of high technology, they can be materialized in some specific manufacturing.

MP Harutyunyan says the pharmaceutical field will be of interest for investors in the United Arab Emirates.

Armenia may produce good products, but may be unable to enter any international market. That market has very difficult, even extreme competition. To enter this market, companies with economic potential are needed. Such kinds of companies are present in the UAE, which have their traditional markets and partners in various countries. Cooperation with similar companies will undoubtedly be useful, he said.
BEIJING - After eight years of wild growth, China's e-commerce industry is seeking new ways to prosper.

The Singles' Day online shopping bonanza, which happens in China on November 11 every year, showcases the rise of online retailing platforms such as Vipshop, JD and Alibaba.

While turnover of domestic e-commerce companies ballooned from 52 million yuan ($7.6 million) in 2009 to 91.2 billion yuan in 2015, traditional "bricks and mortar" retailers are losing ground.

British retailing giant Marks & Spencer announced on Wednesday that it will shut its 10 stores on the Chinese mainland and lay off more than 400 workers, the latest in a growing list of major western retailers such as Best Buy and Tesco to pull out of a difficult market.

Though e-commerce has seen explosive growth over the past eight years, widespread fraud now haunts online retailers that fail to take appropriate measures.

Just before Singles' Day, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce held talks with the country's 15 leading e-commerce companies, telling them that price fraud, false advertising, unfair competition, sales of fake and shoddy goods, as well as scalping were strictly prohibited.

Even for sales-record holder Alibaba, Singles' Day is a double-edged sword. The company's earnings and share price usually slump in the first quarter of the year after climbing to giddy half-year or full-year highs in November.

"E-Commerce should not develop like a campaign because the economy needs steady growth," said Zhang Li, an e-commerce expert with the Ministry of Commerce.

Zhang noted that generally speaking, e-commerce has a positive impact on the real economy and national economic development. "If it brings a negative impact, the investment-driven business mode should be blamed," she said.

Set to tap the country's growing e-commerce industry, a huge amount of capital has flooded into the sector, but the pace of consumption growth has failed to match the rapid expansion of online platforms. That has led to price wars between e-commerce companies, which have hurt traditional retailers.

A hopeful sign is that many e-commerce companies are reflecting on issues such as how to integrate online and offline marketing and the influence of Singles' Day on inventories.

Meanwhile, e-commerce has become rational and moved to abandon price wars, highlighting new trends such as respect for individuality, global connectivity and increased consumption. In addition, the Internet economy has given birth to intelligent logistics and cloud-based infrastructure.

Law-making for the e-commerce sector is also quickly developing. Insiders say that a draft law has been submitted to the country's top legislature and is expected to clear its first hurdle within the year.

"E-commerce can create value through services," Zhang said.

Alibaba's online marketplace Tmall launched Buy +, the world's first virtual reality (VR) shopping store Friday.

Buy + allows customers to shop and experience far away places with nothing more than a smart device, according to Alibaba. For example, shoppers can enjoy the Rainbow Bridge in Tokyo's Odaiba, or tour Times Square in New York in a 1965 vintage car, all while browsing the online marketplace on their cellphones.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. The investigation of the criminal case of establishing a clandestine group by Artur Vardanyan initiated on November 24, 2015 is over, press service of the National Security Service of Armenia informed Armenpress.

The facts revealed after large-scale investigative activities, including interrogations, searches and expertise, combined with information obtained as a result of intelligence measures document that Artur Vardanyan, having experience in armed operations and military skills, created a clandestine group for plotting armed seizure of power.

Armenia citizen, former resident of Yerevan, Artur Vardanyan residing abroad arrived in Armenia in 2015, formed and headed a criminal group. According to preliminary agreement, the group illegally acquired a large number of weapons and ammunition concealing it in a rented house in Nork district of Yerevan.

In joint searches with the Police on November 25, different rifles, pistols, grenade launchers, grenades, explosive materials and equipment, cartridges, bullets etc. were discovered.

A criminal group was revealed on November 25, 2015 as a result of operative investigation works carried out by the National Security Service of the Republic of Armenia. The group intended to organize a number of grave crimes in the territory of the Republic of Armenia.

The indictment against Artur Vardanyan and another 19 have been sent the first instance court of Kentron and Nork-Marash districts.
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. The resolution supporting resettlement of Syrian-Armenians in Armenia is in the US Congress. It proposes to render $15 million assistance to Syrian-Armenians, Armenpress reports Regional Director of the Armenian Assembly of America Arpi Vartanian told the reporters.

Armenia is the third country in the world that transported and received most refugees from Syria. This is very important. It is a few months that the resolution is in process. The current congressmen will remain in office until next year and we hope there may be progress, but it is also possible that one of them will be against and the process will stall and we will have to start works in that direction again. We can face many surprises in the upcoming months, but we must be flexible to manage to work with the new administration so as questions find their answers and we reach our goals, Arpi Vartanian said.

She stated that there is a wrong impression that the USA-based Armenian organizations focus only on the issue of the Armenian Genocide. There are many issues connected with Armenia and date back the period of the earthquake (northern Armenia).

We hold a number of meetings with officials in both the USA and Armenia. We try to implement various projects to strengthen Armenian-US relations, the Regional Director of the Armenian Assembly of America concluded.
Dear Shareholders,

We refer you to the annual general meeting of shareholders to be held at the registered office of Kernel Holding S.A. (referred to as the Company or Parent Company as the case may be) on 12 December 2016 at 3.00 p.m. CET.

In accordance with the provisions of the Law of 24 May 2011 implementing the Directive 2007/36 EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 July 2007 on the exercise of certain rights of shareholders of listed companies, we hereby inform you of the resolutions to be proposed for adoption at the annual general meeting of shareholders:



AGENDA

1.Presentation and approval of the management report of the board of directors and the report of the independent auditor of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, after having reviewed the management report of the board of directors of the Company and the report of the independent auditor of the Company, approves these reports..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



2.Approval of the Consolidated Financial Statements of the Company for the financial year ended on 30 June 2016

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, after having reviewed the management report of the board of directors of the Company and the report of the independent auditor of the Company, approves in their entirety the Consolidated Financial Statements of the Company for the financial year ended on 30 June 2016, with a resulting consolidated net profit attributable to equity holders of the Company of two hundred twenty-five million one hundred and fifty thousand US dollars (USD 225,150,000.-)..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



3.Approval of the Parent Companys Annual Accounts (unconsolidated) for the financial year ended on 30 June 2016

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, after having reviewed the management report of the board of directors and the report of the independent auditor of the Company, approves in their entirety the Parent Companys annual accounts (unconsolidated) for the financial year ended on 30 June 2016, with a resulting net profit for Kernel Holding S.A. as parent company of the Kernel Holding S.A. group of elven million seven hundred fifty thousand nine hundred twenty US dollars and seventy-five cents (USD 11,750,920.75.-)..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



4.Approval of the dividend for the financial year ended on 30 June 2016

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting approves the proposal of the board of directors (i) to carry forward the net profit of the Parent Company annual accounts (non-consolidated) of elven million seven hundred fifty thousand nine hundred twenty US dollars and seventy-five cents (USD 11,750,920.75.-) and (ii) after allocation to the legal reserve of the Company, to declare a dividend at twenty five cents per ordinary share (USD 0.25.-) for the financial year ended on 30 June 2016. The general meeting delegates to the board of directors to set up record and payment dates for the dividends distribution..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



5.Granting discharge to the directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting decides to grant discharge to the directors of the Company for their management duties and the exercise of their mandates in the course of the financial year ended on 30 June 2016..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



6.Renewal of the mandate of Andrzej Danilczuk as independent director of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged the end of the mandates of directors and in consideration of the proposal to reappoint Mr. Andrzej Danilczuk for a one year term, decides to renew the mandates of Mr. Andrzej Danilczuk for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



7.Acknowledgment of the resignation of Ton Schurink as independent director of the board of directors of the Company with effect of 9 November 2016

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged the resignation of Mr. Ton Schurink as independent director of the board of directors with effect as of 9 November 2016 and decides to grant discharge to Mr. Ton Schurink for the exercise of his duties and mandate until 9 November 2016..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



8.Statutory election of Nathalie Bachich as new independent director of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, following proposal by the Board to appoint Mrs. Nathalie Bachich as new independent director of the Company, decides to appoint as new independent director of the Company Mrs. Nathalie Bachich born on 24th November 1973 in London, England, United Kingdom, residing at 7 York Avenue, East Sheen, London SW14 7Q for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the of the general meeting of shareholders held in 2017..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



9.Renewal of the mandate of Sergei Shibaev as independent director of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged the end of the mandates of directors and in consideration of the proposal to reappoint Mr. Sergei Shibaev for a one year term, decides to renew the mandates of Mr. Sergei Shibaev for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.

10.Renewal of the mandate of Anastasiia Usachova as director of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged the end of the mandates of directors and in consideration of the proposal to reappoint Mrs. Anastasiia Usachova for a one year term, decides to renew the mandate of Mrs. Anastasiia Usachova for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



11.Renewal of the mandate of Viktoriia Lukianenko as director of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged the end of the mandates of directors and in consideration of the proposal to reappoint Mrs. Viktoriia Lukianenko for a one year term, decides to renew the mandate of Mrs. Viktoriia Lukianenko for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



12.Renewal of the mandate of Yuriy Kovalchuk as director of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged the end of the mandates of directors and in consideration of the proposal to reappoint Mr. Yuriy Kovalchuk for a one year term, decides to renew the mandate of Mr. Yuriy Kovalchuk for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



13.Renewal of the mandate of Kostiantyn Lytvynskyi as director of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged the end of the mandates of directors and in consideration of the proposal to reappoint Mr. Kostiantyn Lytvynskyi for a one year term, decides to renew the mandate of Mr. Kostiantyn Lytvynskyi for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



14.Approval of the remuneration of independent directors of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged that fees (tantiemes) paid to the independent directors for their previous term in office amounted in total to two hundred seventy seven thousand and five hundred US dollars (USD 277,500.-), approves the independent directors fees for the new one-year mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the annual general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017, for a total gross annual amount of two hundred sixty thousand US dollars (USD 260,000.-)..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



15.Approval of the remuneration of executive directors of the board of directors of the Company

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, having acknowledged that fees (tantiemes) paid to the executive directors for their previous term as members of the board of directors amounted in total to two hundred forty thousand US dollars (USD 240,000.-), approves the executive directors fees for the new one-year mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the annual general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017, for a total gross annual amount of two hundred forty thousand US dollars (USD 240,000.-) including two hundred thousand US dollars (USD 200,000.-) to be paid to the chairman of the board of directors..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.



16.Granting discharge to the independent auditor of the Company for the financial year ended on 30 June 2016

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting grants discharge to the independent auditor of the Company, Deloitte Audit, a societe a responsabilite limitee, having its registered office at 560, rue du Neudorf, L-2220 Luxembourg, registered with the Luxembourg Trade and Companies Register under number B 67 895 for the financial year ended on 30 June 2016..



17.Renewal of the mandate of Deloitte Audit, a societe a responsabilite limitee, having its registered office at 560, rue du Neudorf, L-2220 Luxembourg, registered with the Luxembourg Trade and Companies Register under number B 67 895, as independent auditor of the Company in respect to the audit of the consolidated and unconsolidated annual accounts of the Company for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the annual general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017

The board of directors proposes the adoption of the following resolution:

The general meeting, following proposal by the board of directors to reappoint Deloitte Audit, a societe a responsabilite limitee, having its registered office at 560, rue du Neudorf, L-2220 Luxembourg, registered with the Luxembourg Trade and Companies Register under number B 67 895 as independent auditor of the Company, resolves to reappoint Delloitte Audit, a societe a responsabilite limitee, having its registered office at 560, rue du Neudorf, L-2220 Luxembourg, registered with the Luxembourg Trade and Companies Register under number B 67 895 as independent auditor of the Company for a one-year term mandate, which shall terminate on the date of the annual general meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017..

This resolution shall come into force on the day of its adoption.
Top 13 dealer tricks

Most car dealers arent really out to rip you off, but keep in mind that car dealerships are for-profit entities.
A spokesperson for Nagorno-Karabakhs Ministry of Defense denies any connection between the recent escalations and the military drills in Azerbaijan.

November 11, 2016, 14:35 Escalation on Karabakh frontline unrelated to Azerbaijans drills

STEPANAKERT, NOVEMBER 11, ARTSAKHPRESS: Meantime, Senor Harutyunyan gives his assurances that the Armed Forces of Nagorno-Karabakh are efficient enough to push back the adversary, Tert.am informs.

Regardless of the military exercises, Azerbaijan keeps the tension high on the frontline, he told Tert.am, adding that the repeated escalations and threats of war will continue as long as no peace deal has been signed to settle the long-lasting conflict.

Azerbaijan intensified the armed attacks on the frontline after midnight, targeting especially the defense posts in the south-eastern villages Talish and Yarimja.

Nagorno-Karabakhs Ministry of Defense said earlier today that the advance military units of the Defense Army take retaliatory action to suppress the aggression.
The office of the Personal Representative to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Chairperson-in-Office (OSCE CiO) is kept regularly informed about the situation in the Karabakh conflict zone.

November 11, 2016, 15:15 Armenia MOD: OSCE CiO personal representatives office is kept regularly informed on situation in conflict zone

STEPANAKERT, NOVEMBER 11, ARTSAKHPRESS: Press secretary of the Ministry of Defense (MOD) of Armenia, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, told the above-said to Armenian NEWS.am. He noted this commenting on the recent increase in ceasefire violations along the line of contact between the Karabakh and Azerbaijani opposing forces.

Press service of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh) Defense Army on Thursday informed that the adversary was shelling with mortars.

In accordance with the working procedure, we [i.e. the Armenia MOD] keep in constant contact with the office of [Ambassador] Andrzej Kasprzyk, the Personal Representative to the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, noted Hovhannisyan. The information is reported virtually every day."
Today, Nov. 11, is Veterans Day and many people across the Bay area are commemorating those who have served and sacrificed for our country.

Make sure to say thank you to a vet or active military member today and check out some photos of the ceremonies going on across the Bay News 9 area.

Indian Rocks Christian School had a ceremony today to honor our veterans.

Delta showed their American pride today with a patriotic hospitality table at Tampa International Airport.

Even students at Cotee River Elementary school went all out to honor our veterans and service members.

One Bay News 9 viewer also sent us some photos of an amazing Veterans Day tribute display at Archibald park in Madeira beach.

Residents at The Watermark at Trinity honored those who served with the unveiling of a Veterans Wall, featuring photos of veteran residents, their branch of military service, and years served.

Hundreds also turned out today at Veterans Memorial Park and Museum for Hillsborough County's "Honoring America's Veterans" event.

If you have any photos of you honoring our vets, please send them our way!
The youngest person ever in the Florida House was just elected for District 36 that covers parts of Pasco County.

Republican Amber Mariano beat incumbent Amanda Murphy by 699 unofficial votes.

Youngest person in history elected to Florida House

Amber Mariano turned 21 five weeks before she was elected

Mariano elected for District 36, covering Pasco County

Bay News 9 spoke with Amber Mariano over Skype Friday. The newly elected representative is in New Hampshire for a LSAT conference. On Monday, shell be in Tallahassee for orientation.

Everything in my life I've been working up to something like this, said Mariano. I've always wanted to run for office. I didn't think it would be at this point in my life, but I've always set myself up in everything I do so I can make this step."

Mariano turned 21 just five weeks before she was elected, making her the youngest person ever to serve in the Florida House. But she said dont let her age fool you. I balanced school, work and the campaign in two different cities so it was a lot of work, but I think persistence really helped me."

You might recognize the last name. Her father Jack Mariano served on the Pasco County Commission since 2004. Now its Amber Marianos chance to show what she can do.

She said she'll be starting with two big goals: Improving higher education and Pasco Countys flood problems. We have a lot of flooding issues. Even after a simple rain storm we'll get flooded out, so I think we need to work on getting some state funding to fix those problems, not just study those problems."

Mariano is a third year political science student at UCF. She said her main focus is on her constituents and shell be taking classes online when shes not in session.

She says she hopes if the people will keep electing her, to one day be the first female president.

Before Mariano, Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam was the youngest to be elected to the Florida House in 1996. He was 22 years old.
Azerbaijan is deliberately escalating the situation prior to international meetings.

November 11, 2016, 15:45 Azerbaijan normally escalates situation prior to international meetings  Tigran Balayan

STEPANAKERT, NOVEMBER 11, ARTSAKHPRESS: Tigran Balayan, Spokesman for Armenias foreign office, said the aforesaid to Tert.am as he commented on Azerbaijani shelling of Talish and Yarimja. Asked about the reasons for Azerbaijan escalating the situation on the border prior to a ministerial meeting of the OSCE MG process to take place in Hamburg, Mr Balayan said:

Azerbaijan remains committed to its style of deliberately escalating the situation on the border prior to important international meetings. Military exercises in Azerbaijan to start on Saturday follow the same logic of provocations. The exercises will be conducted in defiance of international arms control commitments.

According to the Vienna document, a country is supposed to officially announce military exercises 42 days before if the number of troops is 9,000 and more. Azerbaijan plans to conduct military exercises with involvement of 60,000 troops.
STEPANAKERT, NOVEMBER 11, ARTSAKHPRESS: The demonstration against President-Elect Donald Trump has gathered for yet another night in the Pacific Northwest city.

Some 4,000 people started their protest at Pioneer Courthouse Square and moved to northeast Portland, according to The Oregonian daily. Police on Twitter wrote that protesters were preparing gas and flares and were arming themselves with rocks from construction site.

The demonstration heavily interrupted traffic in the city as protesters moved across other major roadways, local media reported.

Portland police called the protest a riot, citing its extensive criminal and dangerous behavior. At least 19 cars at Toyota of Portland were vandalized, a sales manager told the paper. Later police reported of new cases of vandalism in the city. Photos on social media showed the smashed windows of local shops.

Portland activist Greg McKelvey said Thursday that several human rights groups in the city would be working together under the new name, Portlands Resistance.

In order to survive President Trump there needs to be a strong resistance. Our group believes that Portland has an opportunity to become a beacon of light for the rest of the nation, McKelvey wrote in a press release on Facebook. The group has scooped over 3,000 likes so far.

After several orders to disperse, police have used less lethal munitions to effect arrests and move the crowd. Officers still taking projectiles, police tweeted.

Thousands of people have been out in the streets across the US, since Trump won the 2016 presidential race with 290 electoral votes November 8, leaving Hillary Clinton officially behind, although she won the popular vote.

Chanting anti-Trump slogans, such as not my president or we reject president-elect, people have been occupying streets in cities from California to New York, expressing their displeasure at the presidential races outcome.
On the night of November 10-11 and during the day the Azerbaijani armed forces shelled the frontline positions of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic Defense Army near the villages of Talish and Yarimja from 60 and 82 mm mortars, press service of NKR MFA stated.

November 11, 2016, 22:18 Karabakh MFA urges OSCE Minsk Group to condemn destructive policy of Azerbaijan

STEPANAKERT, NOVEMBER 11, ARTSAKHPRESS: Such massive use of mortars occurring for the first time after a large-scale aggression against Nagorno-Karabakh in April, has become the continuation of recent escalation of tension on the Line of Contact by Azerbaijan.

It is of serious concern that the aggravation of the situation takes place against the background of Azerbaijan's preparation for the large-scale military exercises near the NKR borders, employing a large number of military equipment and manpower.

Such actions are a flagrant violation of agreements reached at summits in Vienna and St. Petersburg on inadmissibility of escalation of tension on the Line of Contact and indicate Azerbaijans intention to impede the measures aimed at creating conditions for the resumption of the negotiation process.

Moreover, Azerbaijan not only rejects creating incidents investigation mechanisms and expanding the office of the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, but also seeks to undermine the only international monitoring mechanism to maintain the ceasefire regime by firing an area where the OSCE mission carried out a planned monitoring the day before.

In this situation, we call on the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, the OSCE Chairperson in Office and the international community as a whole to condemn in the strongest terms the destructive policy of the Azerbaijani authorities, and to take effective measures to prevent a further escalation of tension.

For its part, the NKR will suppress any actions of Azerbaijan, threatening the security of the Republic, the peace and stability in the region.
Emergency checklists and manuals can improve safety in the operating room, according to a recent industry and market news alert by Anesthesia Business Consultants CEO and President Tony Mira.

These reminders work as cognitive aids, to ensure appropriate steps are followed in potentially chaotic emergency situations; Mr. Mira notes that these emergency manuals can be helpful for all anesthesia providers, including anesthesiologists, certified registered nurse anesthetists and other clinicians.

Here's what you need to know:

1. Sara Goldhaber-Fiebert, MD, of Stanford University in California, spoke on best practices to establish these guidelines at the American Society of Anesthesiologists' Anesthesiology 2016 meeting. She suggests convening a multidisciplinary committee of anesthesiologists, CRNAs, surgical nurses, surgeons, technicians and pharmacists to build a customized manual.

2. It's important for every emergency manual to be customized to each individual healthcare facility, to ensure it includes the organization's common terminology and local emergency phone numbers.

3. Once the emergency manual is established, successful medical teams can determine a "reader" for each operation. The reader may be an additional anesthesiologist, nurse or medical student who is not occupied in the operating room; this extra clinician will read the contents of the checklist in the event of an emergency.

"The key to successful implementation is a culture that embraces cognitive aids not as a sign of clinical incompetence, but as a tool to improve care," according to the news alert.
Officials from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Broward Health Imperial Point have alerted 126 former patients or next of kin of a privacy breach, which reportedly took place between November 2011 and March 2012, according to the Miami Herald.

Doris Peek, senior vice president and chief information officer at Broward Health, told the Miami Herald that police officers discovered the stolen patient information when responding to a domestic violence report. The police officers removed these documents, known as "Facesheets," from the individual's home and turned them over to the hospital's security department. Ms. Peek told the Miami Herald that the identity thieves acquired the patient information documents by paying hospital registrars.

The Facesheets included patient names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, primary insurance providers, insurance guarantors, reasons for visit and next of kin information. Broward Health has offered the 126 patients an identity theft protection service at no cost.
Here are seven developments in the healthcare sector since the presidential election ended Tuesday evening.

1. President-elect Trump released a brief, 310-word plan on his website outlining parts of his healthcare agenda. The document is similar to the president-elect's campaign platform, which includes allowing insurers to sell products across state lines, turning Medicaid into a block grant program and making tax-free health savings accounts part of an estate. The administration also vows to protect "innocent human life from conception to natural death," according to the website.

2. Since the election's close, some health insurance companies that did not anticipate a Trump win have had to devise new business strategies. "We started with a fresh piece of paper yesterday," Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said, according to the Hartford Courant. Mr. Bertolini said Aetna's stock jumped $14 after the election because investors believe the Department of Justice under President Trump is more likely to approve the Aetna-Humana merger.

3. Hospitals, healthcare providers and other industry organizations banking on a Clinton presidency have also had to regroup. "This is Day 1 of figuring out what all of this means," Sam Glick, partner at healthcare consulting firm Oliver Wyman, told New York Times Wednesday. Of the health industry clients he works with, he said, "I dont think I can name one that had done scenario planning around Trump being elected."

4. Repealing the Affordable Care Act is "pretty high on our agenda," Sen. Mitch McConnell told Politico Wednesday regarding the GOP strategy. "I would be shocked if we didn't move forward and keep our commitment to the American people."

5. Democrats and leaders of some advocacy groups in support of the ACA said they are ready to wage "total war" to defend the universal healthcare program. "We've got the battle of our lifetime ahead of us," Ron Pollack, executive director of advocacy group Families USA, told Politico. "Sen. [Chuck] Schumer and senate Democrats are interested in ways to improve the Affordable Care Act. But we will fight tooth and nail against any attempt to repeal it," a senior senate Democratic aide told Politico.

6. More than 100,000 Americans rushed to buy health insurance through the ACA Wednesday after news of Mr. Trump's victory  the single greatest consumer turnout this enrollment period. The surge of enrollees highlights the magnitude of any change to healthcare legislation.

7. A dip in some health IT firms' stock Wednesday reflected the post-election drop in hospital stocks. "Our new national leadership comprised of a Republican-led administration and a Republican Congress will advance a wide range of legislation and regulation that will have significant ramifications for Cerner, our clients and the patients they serve," Meg Marshall, senior director of public policy, wrote in a blog post. Cerner's stock fell 4.6 percent between market close Tuesday and market open Wednesday.
As a student at that time, I saw writing in English as presenting the kind of empowered voice of resistance that literature had offered throughout the post-colonial world.

Thats when I started writing about my experiences, reflections, perspectives, feelings, emotions, dreams, aspirations and everyday issues: issues capable of depriving us of our freedom.

My lecturers were the Papua New Guinean literary legends, Professor Steven Winduo, Russell Soaba and Dr Regis Stella.

IVE BEEN writing poetry and short stories for over a decade now. After completing my primary and secondary education in Alotau, Milne Bay Province, in 2003 I was selected to study Bachelor in Arts, majoring in literature at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Jorda n Dean has not only been quietly writing short stories and poems and publishing them using CreateSpace for a while now, he has also been helping other authors do the same thing. So far Jordan has published a collection of short stories and two collections of poetry. A fourth book is nearly complete. His independent approach is inspiring and we hope other Papua New Guinean writers will follow in his footsteps  PF

Writing was a significant medium for empowering Papua New Guineans to reassert and validate their identity. It was also a powerful weapon in resisting and challenging colonialism and exposing the biases of imperial discourse.

Writers reflect what their society is thinking. Without writers and writing, a country lacks soul. Writers are important people. They see the world differently and have an obligation to write about it.

It was unfortunate that I flunked the course in my second year, 2004, and had to take up accounting and management. But I still write as a hobby.

Ive recently self-published three books through CreateSpace, which provides a print-on-demand service: the book is only printed when someone orders it.

This is quite convenient; when you order one of my books on Amazon, it doesnt yet exist but a copy is printed within a few hours and shipped to you immediately.

Ive just signed an agreement with the University of Papua New Guinea Press to republish my three books, Tattooed Face: A collection of Poems (2016), Follow the Rainbow: Selected Poems (2016) and Stranger in Paradise and other Short Stories (2016).

My fourth book, Silent Thoughts: A collection of Poems, is almost complete and will be published soon.

I believe that we arent hapless creations put on the earth just to eat, talk, work and die.

I feel we were put here for a purpose, to make things better. We are here to change the world and leave it a better place than we found it. I want to contribute something to this nation and world that goes far beyond me. I hope my writing does make that difference.

I want to write as an authentic voice about life in contemporary Papua New Guinea; our experiences, struggles, fears, dreams and successes. Writers can provide a diverse and ambitious voice in our exploration and social observations of the multifaceted nature of modernity.

My poems and stories are based on real life experiences and show our incredible spirit of resilience and the voices of hope that have emerged from corruption, moral breakdown, inequality, injustice, poverty and struggle.

It is my sincere hope that my writing gives people some insight and perspective of our world. May our voices be heard!
Stay in the know with Becker's Hospital Review's weekly roundup of the nation's biggest healthcare news. Here's what you need to know this week.

1. Physicians shocked by abrupt closure of their own clinic

Naples, Fla.-based Coastal Physician Care closed its doors and terminated all staff Oct. 28, catching its own physicians by surprise.

2. Texas hospital data breach affects nearly 30k patient records

Denton, Texas-based Integrity Transitional Hospital said a security breach this summer may have compromised the confidential information of nearly 30,000 patients.

3. Head of NY's public hospital system to step down

Ramanathan "Ram" Raju, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals will step down from his post at the end of the month.

4. Kindred to close Texas hospital, leaving 92 without jobs

Louisville, Ky.-based Kindred Healthcare will close Kindred Rehabilitation Hospital in Arlington, Texas, at the end of the year.

5. President-Elect Donald Trump: 7 things to know

An unexpected victory for Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump defied polls that forecasted a modest lead for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

6. 12 key actions Donald Trump plans to take in his 1st 100 days in office  ACA repeal, take on mega-mergers & more

Donald Trump was elected president of the United States Tuesday. In an October speech in Gettysburg, Pa., Mr. Trump laid out what he would do in his first 100 days in office.

7. The post-election memo Kaiser Permanente's CEO sent to his team yesterday

Bernard J. Tyson, chairman and CEO of Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente, published on LinkedIn a letter he sent to the organization's leaders, employees and physicians early on Nov. 9.

8. BlackRock ups stake in CHS to become company's second-largest shareholder

New York City-based BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, increased its stake in Community Health Systems and now owns 10.9 percent of the Franklin, Tenn.-based hospital operator.
Nurses at San Diego-based Sharp HealthCare have voted to reject the health system's latest contract offer and authorize a potential strike, according to a Times of San Diego report.

The nurses are represented by the Sharp Professional Nurses Network. According to the union, 98 percent of 2,203 nurses who cast ballots voted to authorize a strike.

The Sharp nurses contend large wage increases are needed to prevent their colleagues from moving to other hospitals for better pay, according to the report. Sharp, for its part, has maintained that the health system's 2015 nurse turnover rates are lower than San Diego, Southern California and state turnover averages.

Nurses have asked for a 31 percent pay raise over the term of the next contract, while Sharp is offering a 16 to 26 percent pay raise over the contract term. The systems proposed raise would be based on a nurses' experience, advancement and academic degree earned, Sharp officials have said.

The vote to authorize a strike does not mean a strike will take place. The Sharp Professional Nurses Network, an affiliate of the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals, would have to formally notify Sharp 10 days before a strike begins.

In the meantime, Sharp HealthCare said in a statement from the report the health system "is hopeful that both parties will come to a contract agreement before a strike notice is given or a strike commences."

"To ensure quality patient care Sharp is making comprehensive plans to prepare for a strike, which includes securing qualified replacement nurses," the health system added. "Sharp will be fully prepared to provide high-quality care to patients and family members if a nurse strike comes to fruition."

Sharp HealthCare is scheduled to meet with the union Tuesday.

More articles on human capital and risk:

2 Catholic Health System hospitals reach labor agreements with nurses

Union nurses ratify 4-year labor contract with Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital

Tacoma General nurses say no to extra shifts in weeklong boycott
From Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens suing Palo Alto, Calif.-based Theranos to a judge approving a Connecticut hospital's pension fund settlement, here are the latest healthcare industry lawsuits and settlements making headlines.

1. Walgreens files breach-of-contract lawsuit against Theranos

Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens filed a federal civil lawsuit against Palo Alto, Calif.-based blood testing startup Theranos, alleging breach of contract and seeking $140 million in damages.

2. Judge approves Connecticut hospital's $107M pension fund settlement

A judge signed off on the $107 million settlement Hartford, Conn.-based St. Francis Hospital inked earlier this year to settle a lawsuit alleging it mismanaged its pension plan.

3. Rocky Allen, surgical tech who switched syringes at Swedish Medical Center, sentenced to 78 months in prison

Rocky Allen, a former surgical technician at Englewood, Colo.-based Swedish Medical Center who admitted to swapping syringes used at the facility, was sentenced to 78 months in prison.

4. Virginia Supreme Court to hear balance billing case

The Supreme Court of Virginia agreed to review a case concerning whether a hospital can bill a patient at its listed, chargemaster rate for out-of-network services.

5. 2 men sentenced for conspiring to illegally ship pharmaceuticals into the US

Two individuals were sentenced to prison for their involvement in a scheme to illegally ship pharmaceuticals from the United Kingdom and Pakistan to customers in the U.S.

More articles on health law:

6 latest lawsuits involving hospitals

Armed man reportedly impersonated Virginia Mason employee to steal patient information

Medical transportation company denies bilking MassHealth out of $19M
Knox County, Tenn., home to University of Tennessee Medical Center, tallied 118 deaths related to opioid overdoses in the first seven months of 2016. As UTMC is positioned in an area of the country hard hit by the opioid epidemic, the hospital addresses patient pain in a unique fashion, emphasizing multimodal analgesics and protocols designed to identify drug dependence in patients.

Jerry Epps, MD, was named CMO of UT Medical Center in April. With a clinical focus on pediatric and cardiology anesthesia, Dr. Epps has been practicing anesthesia in the state of Tennessee for nearly 30 years. In that time, he's witnessed the rise of the opioid epidemic first hand. In 2014, opioid overdose deaths in Tennessee reached a record high of 1,263, according to the Tennessee Department of Health.

Recently Dr. Epps spoke with Becker's about pain treatment at UT Medical Center and issues pertaining to the opioid epidemic.

Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Question: Has UT Medical Center experienced an increase in treating individuals suffering from opioid addiction?

Dr. Epps: Yes, there is no question. In Tennessee, we also have the problem of poor behavioral health services. So these services are a limited resource for our institution. We have patients who are in the thralls of drug abuse who do get help and are on a treatment plan to combat addiction with medications like buprenorphine, naloxone or Suboxone, a combination of the two. Only certain physicians are certified to prescribe those drugs, so we coordinate with the medical director of Cherokee Health [headquartered in Knoxville] because they have physicians with the certification to prescribe these medications. We also treat pregnant women who are on these medications, so we have to coordinate care across our two institutions.

Q: What role do you feel the patient's expectation of pain plays in the opioid epidemic? How does the Pain Management Pathway at UT Medical Center address patient expectations?

JE: Our pain pathways are both specific pathways for the patient and are also a standardization of procedures across the system. We start with assessing the baseline pain, or where the patient's pain starts when they come through the door. Assessment of baseline pain establishes the true goal of analgesic control in the hospital setting. We have an escalation process to address patient concerns, so for the patients who have chronic pain who don't feel that their pain is being addressed, we do have an outside source who can come in and conduct an evaluation. Also, our pain pathways encourage the use of nonnarcotic medication especially as it pertains to neuropathic pain, or chronic pain, pain is coming from the nerves themselves.

Historically we've always used a pain scale, in which patients rate their pain by numbers 1 to 10. The problem is a patient comes in the established pain was eight, the patient expects it to go to zero, the providers expectation is we are not going to get their chronic pain down to zero. We're trying to move away from the scale and focus instead on function. We can say to the patient "we want you to get up and walk after this procedure." We want to focus on a patient's functional ability and get the pain under control as opposed to just focusing on a number.

Built into our pathways are red flags designed to signal to nurses and caregivers when the cause of the pain is not being treated appropriately. If the pain is outside the expected location, if it is in excess or out of proportion for the type of injury, or if a nurse's intuition or gestalt is telling them something is off, then this will prompt a reexamination of the pain. An experienced nurse can tell something just is not right.

Q: The DEA recently reduced opioid manufacturing quotas by 25 percent. How helpful do you think recent actions taken by the federal government will be in curbing the rates of opioid abuse?

JE: It's really too little too late. If this had happened 10 to 15 years ago when the epidemic was surging, I might have a different answer. In 2013, the DEA allowed manufactures to increase opioid production by 25 percent because they thought there was going to be shortage. The new reduction still puts us above where we were in 2010 and 2012.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and his task force have greatly diminished the number of pills being prescribed [in Tennessee], but we're still seeing deaths. We know when the number of prescriptions diminishes, patients are switching to illicit drugs as opposed to illicitly obtained prescription narcotics. We're continuing to see high rates of heroin deaths and deaths due to narcotics being manufactured in other parts of the world. Fentanyl, the most commonly used pain control medication in surgery and anesthesia, is being manufactured in South America, Mexico and China. These fentanyl pills are designed to look like oxycodone and there have been a slate of deaths related to these drugs. Carefentil is being made to look like medication that resembles oxycodone. Carefentil was designed to be used to tranquilize large animals such as elephants and is extremely potent.

I don't think DEA's efforts are going to make that much difference at all.

Q: In your opinion, what is the future of pain management going to look like?

JE: The big difference now is identifying whether the patient has neuropathic pain or acute pain, and finding a way to incorporate multimodal nonnarcotic pain medication. The use of preemptive analgesia will continue to increase. This process can block the nerve impulse of pain from reaching the brain and the pain can be greatly diminished. We'll also see an increase in use of medications like gabapentin [a nerve pain medication] to treat neuropathic pain.

From the physician prescribing side, there's going to be even more attempts to make sure that the pills prescribed will be limited in number. We're seeing evidence that physicians are starting to decrease the number of pills prescribed. Pill mills are dramatically decreasing across the South.

If you would have asked us [physicians] in the past if a patient is given a limited number of pills, would that patient likely become addicted to narcotics after one procedure, most of us would have probably said no. Now we know a significant amount of people who are opioid naive who get one prescription of narcotics are still taking them a year later. That fact changes the physician perspective of treating pain with narcotics. Additionally, about half the people we prescribe narcotics to don't take the full prescription. When pills tend to lie around the house, improper use is more likely to occur.

On the cutting edge of things, we have what we described as pharmacogenetics. What we have recognized is that there are certain genes that predict addiction tendencies. Individuals reacted differently to medications. For example, codeine must be metabolized in the liver but 10 to 12 percent of Caucasians cannot metabolize it at all, which renders the medication ineffective. Now we can do a swab inside of your cheek and get your DNA and discover if you have addictive indicators in your DNA and how you process narcotics. Going forward, I imagine we will prescribe medicine based on individual DNA makeup.

More articles on quality:

44 hospitals with the lowest stroke death rates

6 hospitals in Pennsylvania with top nurse-patient communication scores

No hospital is perfect: Highly rated hospitals still rank low in certain procedures, FairChex finds
Dublin, Ireland-based Medtronic unveiled its new business unit, which will offer joint-replacement products, according to Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

Here are five observations:

1. In preparation for market entrance, Medtronic acquired Minneapolis-based Responsive Orthopedics, a startup developing affordable implants.

2. The new business unit, Medtronic Orthopedic Solutions, will assist hospitals in developing and managing bundled payment programs.

3. Medtronic plans to help providers plan procedures as well as offer implants and bleeding-control technology.

4. If Medtronic proves successful in cutting hospital costs, the company will receive a share of the saved amount.

5. Medtronic plans to launch its knee-implant service in 2017.
To continue following the latest news and information for Bedfordshire and surrounding areas, simply enter your full postcode below
Almac is expanding into the Republic of Ireland

Northern Ireland pharmaceutical firm Almac has unveiled a 20m investment in its Philadelphia premises as it continues to build its America business.

The company, which makes pharmaceutical products on contract, is also spending 5m on expanding its Craigavon headquarters, where it will build a new laboratory and office.

In the US, it could benefit if President-elect Donald Trump carries out campaign pledges to reduce corporation tax to 15%.

Almac also announced it was spending 2m on the Arran Chemical Company site in Athlone in the Republic of Ireland, which it acquired last year.

It comes shortly after the company expanded its North Carolina site.

It is now the biggest Northern Ireland firm to have major premises in America.

This year marks two decades in the territory for the business.

With the expansion in Craigavon, Athlone and Pennsylvania now giving the firm a total of 5,000 staff around the world, it will boast the biggest global workforce of any Northern Ireland-based business.

As part of the latest growth phase, the company is expanding its existing premises in Souderton in Pennsylvania and leasing a 26,000 sq ft office space in nearby Lansdale.

Almac said it was investing in new machines, computers and software and creating more than 300 positions in sciences, clinical services and pharma services.

It has received a 1.3m Pennsylvania First Program grant from the Department of Community and Economic Development towards the work.

Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf praised Almac's commitment to the State. He described the firm as a "major player in south-eastern Pennsylvania's strong bio-pharma industry".

Almac Group chief executive Alan Armstrong said: "Due to significant industry demand for our services, it is essential we build capacity and increase headcount to ensure we continue to compete at a global level.

"This year we are celebrating our twentieth year in the US and we are excited to make a further commitment within the Pennsylvania state and throughout North America.

"We are also delighted to announce our further expansion plans across Europe as we continue to build upon our global success, and we are looking forward to an exciting future."

In Craigavon, around 170 existing staff, including chemists and analysts involved in drug research, development and manufacture, will be transferred to the new building

At the end of September, Almac announced it was expanding its clinical services division and developing its diagnostics operations at its site in Durham, North Carolina.

As well as manufacturing and developing drugs on contract, the company also provides services such as research and product development.

In accounts for the year ending September 30 this year, Almac reported pre-tax profits of nearly 28m, partly due to increased licensing of its cancer tests and treatment.

Turnover was up nearly 15% from 341.6m to 393.6m on the firm's main activities in the USA and UK.

In a strategic report accompanying the results, the holding investment company said it received payments of $20m (13.7m) for the out-licensing of oncology products and diagnostic tests, developed in-house.

Last year, Almac and Queen's announced they had created a new therapeutic drug to slow down tumour growth in the advanced stages of ovarian cancer.

Almac was formed by the late Sir Allen McClay in 2002, although its roots go back to Galen Ltd, which the former pharmacist founded in 1968.

It floated as Galen Holdings plc in 1997 and was the province's first billion-pound company.
One of the big winners on an historic election night Tuesday was U.S. Rep. John Katko, who secured a second term representing central New York in Congress.

Katko, R-Camillus, cruised to victory over Democratic challenger Colleen Deacon, a former aide to U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Polls showed that Katko had a big lead in the race and that was reflected in the results. He won every county and received nearly 62,000 more votes than Deacon, a Syracuse Democrat.

KATKO WON ALL FOUR COUNTIES  AGAIN

When Katko defeated U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei in 2014, he won all four counties  Cayuga, Onondaga, Wayne and a portion of Oswego  in the 24th Congressional District. He repeated that feat on Tuesday.

His best showing in a county was 68.72 percent in Wayne, a Republican stronghold. He won 67.41 percent of the vote in Cayuga County, where Republicans enjoy a slight enrollment edge. And he received 66.87 percent in Oswego County.

In Onondaga County, Katko won with 57.8 percent.

24TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT RACE RESULTS County Katko Deacon Cayuga 19,972 9,656 Onondaga 109,310 79,807 Oswego 17,169 8,506 Wayne 24,081 10,959 TOTAL 170,532 108,928 PERCENTAGE 61.02% 38.98%

OUTSIDE SPENDING BURIES DEACON

You may have seen the television commercials claiming Deacon wouldn't be independent in Congress and didn't have a plan to fight ISIS.

Outside groups spent more than $4.4 million on the 24th Congressional District race, according to Federal Election Commission records. Of that total, $2,134,701.19 was spent by Republican groups to oppose Deacon.

The outside spending doesn't include expenditures made by either campaign. As of Oct. 19, Katko had spent more than $1.9 million in the 2016 election cycle. A portion of those funds were used to pay for ads targeting Deacon.

Republicans didn't have a plethora of issues they hit Deacon on, but it was the volume of ads that overwhelmed the Democratic candidate. The GOP defined her early on in the campaign and she couldn't recover.

KATKO'S VOTE TOTAL HIGHEST IN 12 YEARS

According to the unofficial tally, Katko received 170,532 votes. That's the highest in the Syracuse-area congressional district race since 2004, when then-U.S. Rep. Jim Walsh won with 189,063 votes.

The difference between Katko's performance and Walsh's is that Walsh didn't have a major party opponent. Howie Hawkins was on the ballot that year, but on a minor party line.

In races with major party opponents, Katko's vote total is the highest in at least 16 years. Dan Maffei received 157,375 when he was first elected to Congress in 2008.

Katko will add to his total after the county election boards count absentee ballots.

DEMOCRATS' PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION YEAR SUCCESS ENDS

When Maffei was elected to Congress in 2008 and 2012, there's no doubt having Barack Obama on the ballot aided him.

In this year's congressional election, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton didn't boost turnout like Obama did. Deacon's vote total  108,928  was the lowest for a major party candidate in a presidential election year since 2000.
Northern Ireland needs radical economic options and cannot rely solely on lower corporation tax to improve its competitiveness after Brexit, it has been claimed.

Malachy McLernon, the chairman of the Chartered Institute of Taxation in Northern Ireland, said the province had to work on the assumption that Brexit was now inevitable.

He added that Northern Ireland also had to work hard to make sure it could compete with all EU members, particularly the Republic of Ireland.

Mr McLernon, a director at Newry-based accountancy firm PKF FPM, spoke ahead of the annual branch dinner of the institute tonight.

He said the inevitability of Brexit had to "sharpen minds... to develop radical options for growth and international competitiveness, with a greater emphasis on the opportunities that Brexit may present".

Benefits could include less red tape and a continued boost to exports and tourism from the fall in value of the pound.

"We may see more mergers and acquisitions with more interest in Northern Ireland from overseas," Mr McLernon said.

He added that his clients were calling out for certainty on what Brexit would mean, particularly with regard to access to the single market and potential trade barriers with our neighbours.

Mr McLernon also warned that Northern Ireland needed more than a lower rate of corporation tax to boost its competitiveness. The rate will be cut to 12.5% in April 2018, bringing it in line with the Republic.

He said: "A cut to corporation tax to make it competitive with the Republic of Ireland will help attract foreign direct investment and contribute to moving Northern Ireland from a public sector economy to a more dynamic and entrepreneurial one.

"While the cut in corporation tax is exciting, the North needs to offer more to witness the radical change that our members and their clients would like to see in the economy.

"There is widespread agreement that more can be done to drive down business costs and improve access to finance, (with) more promotion of employment with a greater investment in skills education.

"A determined effort to streamline tax legislation and make it cheaper and easier to comply with both with taxes devolved to Stormont and those that remain at Westminster has an important part to play in this.

"The cut to corporation tax should not be a standalone tool disengaged from the needs of the rest of the economy."
JK Rowling said she was "delighted" Johnny Depp had been cast in the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.

The author said Depp, who faced domestic abuse accusations during his divorce battle with Amber Heard earlier this year, had done "incredible things" with his portrayal of dark wizard Grindelwald.

Depp, who vehemently denied the abuse allegations, appears briefly in Fantastic Beasts but is set for a more prominent role in the planned sequel.

"I'm delighted," Rowling said of Depp's casting at the film's world premiere in New York.

"He's done incredible things with that character."

Director David Yates said Depp - whose partner Heard filed for divorce in May - filmed his sequence in Fantastic Beasts in January and urged Harry Potter fans to trust the filmmakers about his casting.

"You have to trust us and see what he does in this movie," Yates said.

"You won't see very much in this movie because he appears in it very fleetingly. He appears much more in the second movie.

"What you have to remember about Johnny is that extraordinary talent and that talent never goes away.

"Hollywood is such a fickle place. People go up and go down.

"He's a huge Potter fan. He loves the world. He was beyond excited about working on this material. In fact he didn't even want to see a script, he just said 'I'm in'."

Rowling, who has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump, had earlier said she was in a "bleak mood" travelling to America to promote the film.

The author refused to speak directly about the president-elect at a press conference in New York but revealed the story of Fantastic Beasts was inspired by the rise of "populism".

"I think today is a day to focus on some good things and putting some good things out into the world hopefully," Rowling said.

"If you have read the Potter books, you'll know this period of history threatened to become very dystopian. You were looking at the rise of a very dark force.

"I conceived of this story a few years ago. It was partly informed by what I see as a rise of populism around the world."

She added: "Last night I was in a kind of a bleak mood boarding the plane and I thought I need to work.

"I got out the second screenplay and worked on that and it made me feel a whole lot better."

It has been reported that a sequel to Fantastic Beasts may feature a gay relationship between the character Depp's Grindelwald and a young Professor Dumbledore from the original Harry Potter stories.

Addressing the speculation, Rowling said: "I can't tell you everything I'd like to say because obviously it's a five-part story and there's lots to unpack in that relationship.

"I will say you'll see Dumbledore as a younger man and quite a troubled man because he wasn't always the sage. He was always very clever.

"We'll see him at what I think was the formative period of his life.

"As far as his sexuality is concerned, watch this space."

Rowling, who is currently working on a new novel, also revealed she hoped to bring the West End play Harry Potter And The Cursed Child to Broadway.

Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them is released in UK cinemas on November 18.
The number of operations cancelled for non-clinical reasons in Northern Ireland hospitals has jumped by 40% in four years. The total has soared from 3,976 in 2012/13 to 5,580 in 2015/16.

Non-clinical cancellations include a lack of available and proper beds, unavailable staff, another emergency has taken priority, another operation took longer than expected, equipment isn't working or there was an administrative error.

Last year, Belfast City Hospital had 894 non-clinical cancellations and the Royal Group had 1,561 non-clinical cancellations.

UUP MP Tom Elliott expressed his concern, specifically for the South West Acute Hospital in his constituency which cancelled 157 operations over the past year.

"This 157 is not just a statistic, rather it is the lives of patients. We all are aware of the length of time many patients have to wait for operations, and the further waiting only exacerbates the stress and anxiety patients and their families face," he said.

"Many of these cancellations are often without any explanation, which no doubt frustrates many of those who are delayed even further with their procedure.

"And in some situations these cancellations are often at the last minute, and again it is exasperating for patients who are preparing themselves for the surgery." The figures were obtained by the UUP and only cover non-clinical reasons. Operations can also be cancelled because of other medical issues with the patient, like their blood count or their blood pressure.

Mr Elliott said that there should be a sense of urgency in decreasing the numbers of cancelled operations.

"Some of those people may have been waiting quite some time and all that it does is, it makes a backlog of the number waiting even longer.

"You may have some people who have been in the system or waiting in the system for 18 months, maybe for a routine orthopaedic and then, the day that they go in to prepare for the operation they're told sorry, you can't have it.

"Not only does that delay them and frustrate them, but it also adds to the waiting list. It continues to increase the waiting list and lengthens the time that people have to wait."

Mr Elliott said that when someone is given a date for their operation, they have a few weeks to prepare themselves for something they've been waiting on for months, even up to a year.

"They have cancelled appointments, they have made themselves available probably for a couple of weeks that they're going to be out of action and they've carried out a lot of preparation.

"They may have even got to the stage where they are in hospital preparing for surgery and they're told, 'oh sorry, you can't do that surgery now. You'll get it done maybe in a few weeks' time'.

"Psychologically, that is a hugely difficult situation for those people, because they've made preparations and plans.

"They have got themselves and their mindset around having the operation and then all of a sudden it's cancelled. So they have built themselves up to this process and then it's just taken from them."

Mr Elliott said the rise in cancellations highlights the crisis facing the health service. "The problems facing our health service are vast and intertwined. This means that fixing one problem can lead to benefits in other areas," he said. "Facing head-on the shortage of beds and staff shortages, which is often cited as a reason for these cancelled operations, can be done by ensuring sufficient social care packages are available in the community, therefore freeing up beds as it can reduce the number of 'delayed discharges.'

"This could allow beds available for short-stay outpatients and surgical procedures are available."

The Department of Health declined to comment, saying that cancelled operations are an "operational matter" and depend on the Trusts.
A 25-year-old Antrim man was jailed for life today after pleading guilty to the murder of 65-year-old Randalstown restaurateur, Wing Fu Cheung in January last year.

Christopher David Menaul, originally with an address in Barra Street, Antrim, also pleaded guilty to wounding Mr Cheung's 57-year-old wife, Kam-Fung Cheung, who was stabbed in the hand, and robbing her of a handbag, an iPad, iPhone, 200, an Ulster Bank card and an American Express card.

Defence QC Martin O'Rourke asked Belfast Crown Court for his client to be re-arraigned on the three charges he had previously denied.

Following his guilty pleas, Mr O'Rouke also applied to Mr Justice Treacy to adjourn the tariff hearing on the life sentence which flowed from Menaul plea to murder.

Adjourning the hearing to determine the minimum term Menaul will have to serve, Mr Justice Treacy told him, that as his counsel pointed out, the law provided only one sentence for murder, life.

Although no details surrounding the case was given, last April a court was told that on the night of January 7, 2015, Mr Cheung, also known as Nelson, and his wife, Winnie, were driving to their Ballymena home in their 4x4.

They had left their Chinese restaurant the 'Double Value' in Randalstown. As they travelled along the Caddy Road their jeep was "rammed'' by another vehicle.

A prosecution lawyer said that after Mr Cheung got out of the passenger seat he was confronted by two males and was stabbed up to 18 times. It was also claimed that he was hit with such force, one stab wound, "went straight through his body and out his back''.

The trial of three others, including a husband and wife, facing charges arising out of the attack, has been fixed to begin in the New Year, and is now expected to last up to four weeks.

A 35-year-old Portuguese national, Virgilio Agusto Fernando Correia, originally with an address in Grant Avenue, Randalstown, is accused of Mr Cheung's murder and the attack and robbery of his wife. Also facing a charge of murder is an engineer, now living at an PSNI approved address, and whose wife is accused of a series of seperate charges.

They are Gary and Lisa Thompson, both 34 and formally of Cunningham Way, Antrim. In addition to the murder charge, Gary Thompson, is also accused of robbery, wounding, assisting offenders, handling stolen goods, and doing an act to pervert the course of public justice.

His care assistant wife Lisa, also living at an approved address, denies assisting offenders, handling stolen goods, and doing an act with intent to perverting the course of public justice.
The Northern Ireland Policing Board has renewed its support for the resumption of recruitment.

It comes after a damning report raised concerns about "pseudo militaristic" practices at the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) training college in Garnerville.

Board chairwoman Anne Connolly said, as good progress had been made on overhauling the system, the oversight body could now support the resumption of recruitment in January.

She said: "Subject to some final details being clarified on this programme to the December 1 meeting, the Board will support student officer intakes recommencing in the new year."

The internal review, led by Chief Superintendent Alan Gibson from Police Scotland, was commissioned after a cheating scandal rocked the Garnerville college in August.

Reviewers likened the east Belfast facility to a military boot camp and said there was an "unhealthy leaning towards punitive discipline".

They also received evidence which amounted to allegations of potential individual misconduct.

The report stated: "The review team was significantly concerned by certain elements of the prevailing culture at the Police College which failed, in their view, to provide a safe and supported learning environment which showcased the values of the organisation."

The PSNI has now ended some of the practices highlighted for criticism.

Ms Connolly added: " It is clear from the review that some of the practices and the overall college culture fell far short of the high professional and ethical standards that the Board expects from the PSNI, its officers and staff.

"It is for this reason Board members are agreed that the majority of the recommended changes have to be made before any new student officers commence training.

"Board members absolutely acknowledge and understand that the delay in recruitment has had some knock on effect on police resources, but it is equally important for policing that the training and its delivery is brought in line with best practice as outlined in the findings of the police college report. The community would expect no less."

The review focused on five key areas including the c ontent of the student officer programme; the c ulture within the police college as well as the leadership and governance at Garnerville.

Many of the 34 recommendations have been implemented and a team has been set up to take forward those still outstanding, said PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton.

The senior officer said: " This will ensure that student officer training is modernised and meets the highest of standards to equip our officers for a challenging and rewarding career in public service.

"We will continue to work with the Northern Ireland Policing Board as we take forward the recommendations and subject to some final details being clarified with them on December 1, hope to recommence student officer intakes in the new year."

The PSNI has also published the full report on its website.
A former UVF leader and bomb maker has died suddenly.

Samuel 'Pinky' Austin - who was at one time leader of the terror gang in the Maze prison - died on Tuesday at his Shankill Road home, according to funeral notices placed in today's Belfast Telegraph by family, friends and associates.

In 1994 Austin was arrested with UVF associates Ian 'Spud' Wilson and Jackie Anderson in a bomb-making factory in Ainsworth Avenue off the Shankill Road, after information was passed to police by a mole within the UVF's Shankill Road 'B' Company.

The three men were jailed for 10 years after being caught with explosives.

The booby-trap bomb they were manufacturing was supposed to have been handed over to an accomplice who was to bring it to another location.

But the switch never took place because the accomplice alerted his police handlers - who raided the house on Ainsworth Avenue in which the device was discovered.

Earlier this year, court documents revealed how the UVF terror clique had been comprehensively infiltrated by police agents and informers.

An affidavit, submitted to the High Court, listed the code-names and source reference numbers of 11 registered police agents. It also detailed how information that two of them provided led to the arrests and subsequent convictions of at least six UVF men, some of whom were at the very top of the terror gang.

It's understood that the Police Ombudsman's office is currently investigating the level of protection from prosecution given to UVF agents by their Special Branch handlers.

Among the people and groups mourning Austin's death were the Rex Bar, the Long Bar Social Club, the Tigers Bay Pool Team, the Pony Club, the Mountainview Tavern, the Young Calvary Volunteers Flute Band of Glasgow, and the Loyalist Prisoners and Widows Welfare Association.

His funeral will leave Lawnbrook Avenue at 10am tomorrow on its way to Roselawn crematorium.
The Christian bakers at the centre of a legal battle after they refused to bake a cake with a slogan backing same-sex marriage may have to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Lawyers for the McArthur family, which runs Ashers Bakery, believe it may not be possible to take an appeal to the UK's Supreme Court.

They have asked Belfast's Appeal Court to make a decision. The case could reach Strasbourg only if it cannot be referred to the Supreme Court in London.

Last year, Belfast County Court ruled that the bakery had unlawfully discriminated against gay activist Gareth Lee on grounds of sexual orientation and religious belief or political opinion.

The firm was ordered to pay 500 compensation to Mr Lee, whose legal action was backed by the Equality Commission. Last month the Court of Appeal in Belfast upheld that judgment.

Now, Belfast-based solicitors Hewitt & Gilpin have written to the Court of Appeal seeking a ruling to clarify whether an appeal to the UK Supreme Court is possible.

In their letter to the Court of Appeal, Hewitt & Gilpin said that it appears that "the Judicature Act  does not permit a further appeal by the appellants to the United Kingdom Supreme Court in this case."

Their letter continues: "In view of the complexity of these issues, however, and the wider public importance which this case clearly has, and in order to make clear that the appellants (Ashers) have exhausted their domestic remedies... we respectfully invite the Court of Appeal to consider giving a short ruling on the question of whether appeal to the UK Supreme Court is available in this case."

The McArthur family has not yet decided if they wish to pursue their appeal all the way to Strasbourg.

The process of having a case heard by the ECHR at Strasbourg can easily take a number of years.

Simon Calvert, spokesman for The Christian Institute, which has backed the McArthur family said: "Under the complex rules regarding appeals in civil cases, such as the Ashers case, the Court of Appeal decision seems to be final, according to the terms of the Judicature Act 1978."

The Christian Institute said NI Attorney General John Larkin could also potentially refer "devolution issues" linked to the cake case to the Supreme Court.
Northern Ireland's health service has spent 230m on agency staff in the last five years. The temporary workers - from medical, dental, nursing and midwifery agencies - are being called on to fill in where there are gaps in full-time staffing.

Spending on agency staff has almost doubled since 2011/12 - from 31.7m to 62.2m in the last financial year. On average, 170,000 was spent per day in 2015/16.

Unison official Joe McCusker said that Northern Ireland's Health Trusts should be looking for ways to secure their workforce, instead of spending so much money on agency help.

"We don't see a clear necessity to have such a large agency workforce working within the health service. More can be done by the health service employers to stabilise the workforce and recruit staff into the health service," he said.

He added that having a transient group of people working in the health service is an unsustainable model.

"What health employers need to do, they need to identify why they are spending so much on agency and then they need to assess whether they can justify spending this much or can they actually employ someone into the workforce."

UUP MLA Jo-Anne Dobson also expressed her concerns over the spending. "These figures confirm that the local health service is growing increasingly dependent on astronomically expensive locum staff just to maintain essential services," she said.

"While I understand some level of agency staff will always be required to fill temporary gaps in the workplace, these figures clearly demonstrate that the spending on agency staff has been spiralling year on year and is now most likely contributing to the local health service's financial woes."

Health Minister Michelle O'Neill said the use of agency staff "is to ensure that service provision is maintained for patients and clients, in specific short-term circumstances, to address workforce shortages".

"In recognition of this, I have already invested in providing an additional 100 pre-registration nurse training places from September 2016 and have committed to increasing the number of GP Trainees from the current 85 to an annual total of 111 by 2018.

"My Department looks to the HSC Trusts to ensure that agency staff are only engaged when alternative workforce supply sources have been exhausted."
The Ballymena actor poses for a photograph with the group

Oxfam Ireland campaigns executive Christine McCartney with a childs life jacket as Belfast Loughs foreshore was strewn with dozens of life jackets to highlight the realities of the refugee crisis. The life jackets were collected from the beaches of the Greek island Chios and were used by adults and children making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean

Liam Neeson with Syrian and Jordanian students at a community centre in a working-class neighbourhood of Amman, Jordan

Liam Neeson has travelled to meet displaced Syrian children and their families who have fled the violence of the conflict.

The actor, from Ballymena, was on a two-day visit to Jordan with his eldest son, Michael (21), stopping at the Za'atari refugee camp near the Syrian border.

He said that no one - least of all a child - should have to witness horrific violence.

"I truly admire the strength and spark of the children I met, the girls in particular," Neeson added.

"They want to be doctors, lawyers, police officers and engineers, so that when they can go back to Syria they can rebuild their country. It is incredibly inspiring to see how education empowers them. "

The actor also told how the violence of the Troubles affected him as a child.

"I kind of grew up cautious - very, very cautious," he said. "I have kind of seen it in some of the kids here, in their eyes, but once you engage them and talk to them that rapidly disappears."

The Taken actor met with girls and boys at a UNICEF-supported school and a centre that provides psychosocial support services to young people.

With a population of around 80,000, Za'atari is the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world.
China will replicate its success in the seven new free trade zones across the nation, a government official said on Friday.

Vice-Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said at a news conference that commerce and other government branches are preparing for establishing a third group of FTZs.

"We will replicate the success of the previous four trials in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, and Fujian in the new ones, such as the introduction of a negative list and simplified trade procedures," Wang said.

For instance, the free trade zones reduced the amount of time foreign investors need to establish a company.

90 percent of the foreign-invested enterprises, according to Wang, spend one to three working days for these proceedings. In the past, it took about 21 working days. And the number of required documents was reduced from 10 to three.

The State Council urged related branches to learn from the successful experience of running the existing FTZs, in order to guide their work in the next step, according to an official announcement on Thursday.

In August, the government gave the green light to seven new FTZs, including Liaoning province, Zhejiang province, Henan province, Hubei province, Sichuan province, Shaanxi province and Chongqing municipality.
Three days after his surprise victory, President-elect Donald Trump has filled out his transition team as he prepares to take office in January.

Trump announced Friday that the transition team will be chaired by Vice President-elect Mike Pence. The team will have several vice chairs, including former GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions.

Christie was leading the transition effort, but Pence will now take the reins as the team's chair.

Along with Pence and the six vice chairs, the transition team will have 16 other members of the executive committee. The notable members include three of Trump's children  Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka  and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is on the committee. So, too, is U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, a Buffalo-area Republican who was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump.

"Together this outstanding group of advisors, led by Vice President-elect Mike Pence, will build on the initial work done under the leadership of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to help prepare a transformative government ready to lead from day one," Trump said in a statement.

The transition team's main task is to help Trump select his Cabinet. He will need to fill many important posts, including secretary of state and secretary of defense. The team also will help make other political appointments.

Some of the members of the transition team have been floated as possible Cabinet secretaries. Giuliani has been mentioned as a candidate for attorney general. Christie, Gingrich and Sessions have each been rumored to be contenders for a range of positions, including secretary of state.

"The mission of our team will be clear: put together the most highly qualified group of successful leaders who will be able to implement our change agenda in Washington," Trump said. "Together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding this nation  specifically jobs, security and opportunity."

The transition team's executive director will be Rick Dearborn, Sessions' chief of staff. Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager and the first woman to manage a winning presidential campaign, will serve as senior advisor.

Here is the roster of members on the Trump transition team's executive committee:

U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta

U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi

U.S. Rep. Chris Collins

Jared Kushner

U.S. Rep. Tom Marino

Rebekah Mercer

Steven Mnuchin

U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes

Anthony Scaramucci

Peter Thiel

Donald Trump Jr.

Eric Trump

Ivanka Trump

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus

Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon

The transition team's staff includes:

Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor

David Bossie, deputy executive director

Stephen Miller, national policy director

Jason Miller, communications director

Hope Hicks, national press secretary

Dan Scavino, director of social media

Don McGahn, general counsel

Katie Walsh, senior advisor
The poor treatment of Northern Ireland prison officers made their strike ballot inevitable, it has been claimed. Finlay Spratt, the chairman of the Prison Officers' Association, said the vote, which will be held on Monday, was the result of a failure to introduce a promised 37-hour working week.

The disagreement has its roots in 2012, when the union was promised a shorter working week in return for helping to reduce costs by 52m.

Four years, later those reforms are yet to be implemented, despite the Prison Service slashing its budget.

Mr Spratt said: "They won't implement it (the working week). If you can't negotiate, how can you come to a decision?

"Our members are losing money coming up to Christmas.

"Management doesn't care even though we saved them costs over four years."

Mr Spratt added that the cuts to the Prison Service had left it with a small number of officers to look after inmates.

In the past, four would be assigned to look after 50 prisoners, but today it is just two.

There were also claims that younger, less experienced officers were being hired to replace long-serving members of staff because they cost less.

New officers are paid 18,000 a year, while veteran staff are paid up to 38,000.

Mr Spratt said: "I have been concerned now for years, but it has fallen on deaf ears.

"I understand it's a difficult time, but management shouldn't make agreements and then turn around and refuse - that's dictatorship."

The Ulster Unionist Party's justice spokesman, Doug Beattie MLA, said that the planned ballot on industrial action showed the extent of the enormous crisis within the prison system, as well as the worryingly low morale among staff.

He added: "Terms and conditions that were first agreed in 2014 as part of the Staff Deployment Agreement have not been implemented. Inadequate staffing levels inside prisons are contributing to the already unacceptably high levels of stress which are being placed on officers.

"It is clear to me that many of them (prison officers) are extremely frustrated at the lack of support and understanding which they are receiving from the powers that be.

"A recent response from the Justice Minister when asked when the Prison Service 2016 pay award would be finalised left me with no confidence that the Prison Officers' Association and Prison Service Management Board requests are being taken seriously.

"It is not good enough to say that talks with the Finance Minister are continuing in respect to the 2016 pay award, 11 months after they first started and on the cusp of negotiations beginning for 2017."

Across the UK, there has been a 26% fall in the number of frontline prison officers over the past six-and-a-half years.

A NI Prison Service spokesman said: Discussions have been taking place in recent months between NIPS and DOJ senior managers and the trade unions on a 2016 pay award for prison grades.

"The Minister has met the POA and advised them that she is in discussions with her Ministerial colleague, the Finance Minister."

Last Friday morning, prison officers at Northern Ireland's only high-security jail delayed starting work in the dispute over pay and conditions.

It is thought around 80 officers involved in industrial action held a meeting instead of beginning their shifts at Maghaberry at around 8am.

The BBC reported that staff involved returned to work just after 9am.

Legally, prison officers are not allowed to strike and could have faced legal and disciplinary action if they had refused to return to work. However, it is understood that the mood among many officers is such that they may now be prepared to contemplate strike action.
The large statue of an armed paramilitary in the City Cemetery in Londonderry

A DUP councillor has claimed Protestants are being deterred from visiting a cemetery because of a large statue of an armed paramilitary that forms part of a republican monument.

The statue was erected at the top of the City Cemetery in Londonderry in 2000 by the Irish Republican Socialist Party in tribute to its members who died during the Troubles.

Derry City and Strabane District Council has discussed running tours of the cemetery, but councillor Graham Warke said that while he recognised their potential, people from a unionist background would be put off because of the statue.

"There are members of my family buried in the City Cemetery, as there are many other Protestants' families," he added.

"I know many of them do find the presence of a 10ft statue of an armed terrorist intimidating. A cemetery is suppose to be a place of tranquillity and reflection, but being overlooked by a sinister statue of a republican terrorist adds nothing to that experience if you are a member of my community visiting the graves of your loved ones.

"I recognise the rich history of people from both communities within the cemetery, but it is 2016 and we are supposed to be moving forward.

"A 10ft statue of an armed terrorist isn't included in my vision of a shared city.

"I actually think a lot of Catholics who have loved ones buried near this statue also feel uncomfortable about it.

"No one is trying to deny there are not people buried in the cemetery as a result of the Troubles or indeed the two world wars or that their story should not be told as part of our shared history.

"I just think that this statue sends out the message that the City Cemetery is a cold place for anyone from the Protestant community.

"My point is that as long as this intimidating statue is there, the full potential of this project will not be reached."

The City Cemetery, which dates back to 1853, has fallen victim to increased antisocial behaviour and vandalism in recent months.

The council asked local historian Seamus Breslin to explore the potential of operating tours of the cemetery and the impact it could have on the city.

When he looked at other places offering tours, he found there was a decrease in vandalism.

SDLP councillor John Boyle said these benefits should be the focus of any discussions. "The proposed project by Seamus Breslin has shown that in places such as Glasnevin, Glasgow and Edinburgh, where tours of cemeteries are offered, there has been decrease in anti-social behaviour and vandalism," he explained.

"This is an opportunity for educating people and for teaching our young people about their own local history.

"And after the number of times we have witnessed vandalism in the cemetery, a bit of education could go a long way.

"I think this is where our focus should be, but having said that I do understand where Graham Warke is coming from when he said people from the Protestant community would not feel comfortable with this statue.

"There are issues around that particular statue, but these could only be addressed by the group that erected the monument.

"The other thing we must remember is that everybody has their own way of commemorating their dead, and that has to be respected too."
Disciplinary action was taken against two soldiers who committed suicide shortly before their deaths, a lawyer told an inquest.

Eight other service personnel self-harmed at the army base in Northern Ireland.

Five are still serving in the army, a legal representative for the MoD disclosed.

Lance Corporal James Ross, 30, from Leeds died in December 2012 and Rifleman Darren Mitchell, 20, from London two months later at Ballykinler Barracks in Co Down.

They had both fought in Afghanistan and their families have raised post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) concerns following their deaths by hanging.

They served in the Second Battalion the Rifles.

Family barrister Karen Quinlivan said: "Both the deceased had concerns about disciplinary administrative actions shortly before their deaths."

Mr Mitchell received three official warnings which he was stressed about, she added.

A preliminary inquest was held into the deaths in Belfast on Friday.

Legal representatives wrangled over whether information relating to the self-harming could be disclosed.

Coroner Joe McCrisken said: "There is no need to look in any degree of detail at the circumstances surrounding these other individuals but the deaths of these two soldiers should not properly be looked at in a vacuum but with a degree of background."

A lawyer for the MoD said there were concerns the greater army community could figure out who else had self-harmed if information disclosed to the coroner was further disseminated.

An army inquiry into the deaths has produced 2,000 pages of documents.

Mr McCrisken said: "Surely these people if they wanted to find out about what happened at Ballykinler could do this anyway?"

He ordered the MoD to explain in writing by next week why material should continue to be redacted.
Actor Liam Neeson listens to stories from Syrian and Jordanian students at a community centre in a working-class neighbourhood of Amman, Jordan (AP)

Actor Liam Neeson got a break from being famous when he listened to young Syrian refugees speak about the struggles of life in exile.

In his role as a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, he sat on the ground in the courtyard of a community centre in Amman, Jordan, and heard the stories of two dozen teenagers, who had no idea he is a Hollywood star.

A 15-year-old girl described how she was bullied at school, and a boy of the same age said he used to get into fights.

"They are all our children," Neeson later told the Associated Press. "They want peace, they want to be recognised."

Neeson's visit to Jordan this week was his first to the troubled Middle East on behalf of Unicef, one of a number of UN agencies and aid groups trying to ease the plight of displaced Syrians and their overburdened host communities.

Nearly five million Syrians, half of them children, have fled civil war at home since 2011 and settled in neighbouring countries, mainly in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Jordan hosts close to 660,000 displaced Syrians. Most live in Jordan's poorest communities where locals often complain that the influx is pushing up rents and driving down wages.

On Tuesday, Neeson and his son Micheal, 21, visited a community centre in a working-class area of Jordan's capital. At the centre, operated by the community development group Johud, Syrian and Jordanian teenagers get to know each other in after-school sessions. The programme is funded by Unicef and run by the Jordan-based group Generations For Peace.

After watching the youngsters compete in a relay race, the 64-year-old actor sat in a circle with them on the tiled floor of the courtyard to hear their stories.

Ahmed, a 15-year-old Syrian, said he used to get into fights with a Jordanian boy from the neighbourhood. Now they are like brothers, he said.

Reema Mohammed, 15, a refugee from the Syrian capital of Damascus, said a Jordanian girl in her school used to bully her and that the centre's programme had helped her handle the situation.

Neeson later said in an interview that he was particularly inspired by the Syrian girls, including those he met during a tour of Zaatari, Jordan's largest camp for Syrian refugees, on Monday.

"I thought they would be more oppressed because of their culture, and of course because of the ordeals they have been going through, coming from Syria, the horrors there," he said. "These girls I met, yesterday and ... again here today, they are so positive, so eager and keen to learn."

"I asked them ... what their goals were in life, in an ideal world what would they want to be," he said, adding that responses included mathematician, engineer, police inspector and teacher. "To see these girls being empowered by education and the focus in their eyes was incredibly humbling and very moving."

Nevertheless, Unicef says about 700,000 school-age Syrian refugees across the region are missing out on education, either because there is no space for them in overcrowded local schools or because they have to work and support their families. In Jordan and Lebanon, many schools are running double shifts to try to accommodate the refugee children.

Asked about the backlash against Syrian refugees in Europe and the US, Neeson said "we in the West tend to have a bias" against Muslims, a "sweeping generalisation because of what these fanatical fundamentalist groups will do in the name of God, in the name of Allah".

The actor said he grew up with violent conflict - between Protestants and Catholics - in his native Northern Ireland.

"I kind of grew up cautious, very, very cautious," he said. "I have kind of seen it in some of the kids here, in their eyes - but once you engage them and talk to them that rapidly disappears."

Neeson has appeared in more than 70 films, including the 1993 Best Picture winner Schindler's List, the action trilogy Taken, George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode 1 - Phantom Menace and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.

His forthcoming releases include another Scorsese film, The Silence, about two Jesuit priests who face persecution in 17th century Japan, and Felt, about the FBI agent who under the name "Deep Throat" helped uncover the Watergate scandal.

Next summer, Neeson will start shooting The Trainer, set in Ireland and centred on the relationship between a horse trainer and a troubled refugee from Eastern Europe.

In Jordan, he took his apparent lack of celebrity status among the local teenagers in his stride.

"I was appalled," he said, jokingly, when asked how he felt when he realised they really did not know who he was.

"It is kind of refreshing ... (the kids) saying, OK, thanks for coming to our school, but who are you?" he said, laughing.

AP
Michael D Higgins and Nicola Sturgeon will meet once more when the First Minister travels to Dublin

Nicola Sturgeon will meet politicians and business leaders in Dublin later this month in an effort to strengthen Scotland's relationship with Ireland.

The First Minister will host meetings with Irish President Michael D Higgins and minister for foreign affairs and trade Charlie Flanagan as well as meeting about 100 business representatives.

She will also become the first serving head of government to address the Seanad, the upper house of the Irish parliament, during the visit.

Ms Sturgeon said she looked forward to speaking about the Scottish Government's plans to protect Scotland's interests in the European Union (EU) following the vote for the UK to leave the bloc.

The announcement follows a report that the Irish Government had rejected direct talks with Ms Sturgeon over the plans.

The First Minister has said she will seek discussions with EU institutions and other EU member states to "explore all possible options to protect Scotland's place in the EU".

The Herald newspaper said Irish m inister for the diaspora and international development Joe McHugh had confirmed formal Brexit talks would take place only with the UK Government.

Speaking in advance of her visit, Ms Sturgeon said: "Scotland and Ireland have a shared history and a long tradition of co-operation on a range of issues.

"In the post-Brexit landscape, it has become even more important that we work together to protect our shared interests.

"Last year we established an innovation and investment hub in Dublin to strengthen our relationship with Ireland and promote inward investment.

"I am proud and humbled to have been invited to address the Seanad and recognise what an honour this is.

"I am looking forward to the opportunity to speak to senators about my hopes for continued work between our two nations and my plans to protect Scotland's interests in the EU."
The Prince of Wales on HMS Middleton as he visited the Mina Salman Naval Base during his Middle East trip

The Prince of Wales will attend a service of remembrance in Bahrain this morning.

Charles is in the Middle East with the Duchess of Cornwall on behalf of the British Government.

The couple have already visited Oman and the United Arab Emirates. They will leave Bahrain later.

Charles will meet senior military representatives and UK veterans before taking his seat for the service.

Towards the end, he will lay a wreath at the war memorial, followed by Bahraini representatives, foreign ambassadors and military officials.

At the end of the service, Charles - dressed in uniform - will meet other UK veterans who are currently working in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

The first remembrance service was held in Bahrain in 1993.

A service has been held every year since then in the Old Christian Cemetery, one of two Christian cemeteries on the islands.
Donald Trump could have waited so long to place a call to Theresa May after his election because of the insulting things senior Tory Cabinet ministers have said about him, Nigel Farage has suggested.

Speaking from the US where he plans to meet members of the president-elect's team, the interim Ukip leader singled out Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for criticism.

Asked if Mrs May being so far down Mr Trump's list of calls to foreign leaders should cause concern for the future of the Anglo-American relationship, Mr Farage told the Press Association: "Well, you have to face the facts that there are some very senior members of this administration who have said some very rude things about him."

Pressed if Mr Trump calling nine other presidents and prime ministers before Mrs May was payback for the criticism levelled at him by some Tories, Mr Farage said: "You'd have to draw your own conclusions on that. But this president is instinctively Anglophile."

Mr Farage criticised the strong attacks levelled at Mr Trump in the past by Mr Johnson.

As London mayor, Mr Johnson reacted angrily to comments by Mr Trump on Muslims, and his claims that some parts of London were "no go areas" for the police, saying: "I think Donald Trump is clearly out of his mind if he thinks that's a sensible way to proceed, to ban people going to the United States in that way, or to any country.

"What he's doing is playing the game of the terrorists and those who seek to divide us. That's exactly the kind of reaction they hope to produce.

"I think he's betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of President of the United States."

Mr Farage said he had no plans to meet Mr Trump personally, but would use his visit to underline the importance of the Anglo-American alliance on the US media.

After the shock election result, the interim Ukip leader appeared to make light of a now infamous 2005 videotape of Mr Trump in which he boasted about being able to grope women because of his celebrity.

"I will be encouraging him to make the UK his priority. I am now going to become a diplomat - 'Come and schmooze Theresa, don't touch her for goodness' sake'. If it comes to it I could be the responsible adult and make sure everything's okay," he told TalkRadio.

When Mr Trump did eventually speak to Mrs May after calling a number of other leaders, including Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny, Mr Trump invited the PM to visit him in Washington "as soon as possible" after his inauguration on January 20.

Ministers played down the delay, insisting the "special relationship" between the US and the UK remained intact.

A No 10 spokesman said Mr Trump had set out his "close and personal connections with, and warmth for, the UK" and expressed confidence the special relationship would go "from strength to strength".

Mrs May had then referred to the two countries' "long history of shared values" saying they had "always stood together as close allies when it counts the most".

Number 10 and Ukip have flatly denied a report suggesting that Nigel Farage - an ally of Mr Trump who appeared alongside him during the bitter election campaign - could act as a go-between as the UK seeks to build relations with the 45th president.

The Daily Telegraph reported that Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary who has his own close links to the Republican Party, intends to speak to Mr Farage before attempting to hold talks with senior Trump advisers.

But the suggestion was rejected by both Tory and Ukip sources and a Government spokesman said: "Dr Fox has no plans to talk to Mr Farage."

Meanwhile, Mrs May will meet outgoing US president Barack Obama during an international summit in Berlin next week at which the White House said it expects questions about Mr Trump to feature.
A teenage couple believed to be Britain's youngest double-murderers have been detained for at least 20 years for the brutal "executions" of a mother and her daughter

A teenage couple believed to be Britain's youngest double-murderers have been detained for at least 20 years for the brutal "executions" of a mother and her daughter.

The boy and girl - both 14 at the time of the murders - had sex, shared a bath and watched four Twilight vampire films as they "revelled" after the stabbing of dinner lady Elizabeth Edwards (49), and 13-year-old Katie.

Both killers stared straight ahead as they were handed life sentences by Mr Justice Haddon-Cave, who said the pair had a "toxic" relationship and acted in a "grotesque" way.

The male defendant, in a dark blue jumper and dark trousers, slouched in his seat in the dock as he was sentenced.

The court was told the boy, who admitted murder, stabbed both victims in the neck with a kitchen knife after attacking them as they slept at their home in Spalding, Lincolnshire, in April. His girlfriend, who helped plan the "cold, calculated and callous" killings, denied murder, claiming abnormal mental function impaired her ability to form rational judgments, but was found guilty after a five-day trial.

Sentencing the pair, both now 15 but who cannot be named for legal reasons, Mr Justice Haddon-Cave told Nottingham Crown Court: "The killings were brutal in the form of executions and both victims, particularly Elizabeth Edwards, must have suffered terribly.

Addressing the couple - who had been likened to Bonnie and Clyde - the judge said: "There was remarkable premeditation and planning - it was substantial, meticulous and repeated."

"You were in it together from the beginning, you conceived of the killings together and planned it together. You then revelled in what you achieved. I see no reason to distinguish between you in any way."

Elizabeth Edwards' partner was in the packed courtroom, along with Katie's father.

In a victim impact statement read to the court, Ms Edwards' eldest daughter Mary Cottingham spoke of her heartbreak.

She said: "I cannot believe what has happened. I have been thrust into the biggest nightmare of my life."
Protesters gather in Chicago as they demonstrate against the election of President-elect Donald Trump (AP)

President-elect Donald Trump is shaking up his transition team as he plunges into the work of setting up his administration, elevating Vice President-elect Mike Pence to head the operations.

It amounts to a demotion for New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who had been running Mr Trump's transition planning for months.

On the heels of Mr Trump's upset victory this week, the Republican's team has been scrambling to identify people for top White House jobs and Cabinet posts. It is an enormous undertaking that must be well in hand by the time Mr Trump is inaugurated on January 20.

In a statement on Friday, Mr Trump said Mr Pence would "build on the initial work" done by Mr Christie.

"Together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding this nation - specifically jobs, security and opportunity," Mr Trump said.

Mr Christie was a loyal adviser to Mr Trump for much of the campaign and came close to being the businessman's pick for running mate. But Mr Trump ultimately went with Indiana governor Mr Pence, a former congressman with Washington experience and deep ties to conservatives.

Mr Christie will still be involved in the transition, joining a cluster of other steadfast Trump supporters serving as vice chairs: former house speaker Newt Gingrich, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and Alabama senator Jeff Sessions.

For Mr Trump, who ran on a pledge to "drain the swamp" of Washington insiders, the team is strikingly heavy on those with long political resumes.

In addition, three of Mr Trump's adult children - Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka - are on the transition executive committee, along with Jared Kushner, Ivanka's husband. Mr Kushner played a significant role in Mr Trump's campaign and was spotted at the White House Thursday meeting with President Barack Obama's chief of staff.

Mr Pence said the transition staff is made up of the right people to "bring about fundamental change in Washington".

After ending his own failed campaign for president, Mr Christie emerged as one of Mr Trump's most enthusiastic supporters. He nearly became Mr Trump's running mate but was edged out by Mr Pence.

Mr Trump and Mr Christie grew apart through the last stretch of the campaign. The governor became increasingly frustrated that Mr Trump would not listen to his advice, particularly over the response to the release of a 1995 video in which the businessman is heard making predatory comments about women.

Mr Christie is also facing calls for impeachment in New Jersey following the conviction of two former aides in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing trial. Mr Christie has denied any knowledge of the lane closures until weeks or months after they occurred in September 2013.

The governor was notably absent from the steady stream of advisers entering Mr Trump's eponymous skyscraper in New York for meetings on Friday.

Among the first decisions facing the president-elect is whom to choose as chief of staff, a key post that will set the tone for Mr Trump's White House and be a key conduit to Capitol Hill and Cabinet agencies.

Mr Trump is said to be considering Steve Bannon, his campaign chairman and a conservative media executive, and Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus for the role.

Neither has significant policy experience, though Mr Priebus is well-liked in Washington and has deep ties with key politicians.

Kellyanne Conway, Mr Trump's campaign manager, is also said to be in the mix for a senior job. Ms Conway is a veteran Republican pollster who formed a strong rapport with the candidate after taking the helm of his campaign in the general election.

While Mr Trump has long led a large business, the scope of the federal government exceeds any of his previous endeavours. Those around Mr Trump, who is known as a hands-on executive, say he will likely have to make adjustments in his leadership style and decision-making, including more delegating.

Mr Trump has chafed at that a bit, but he has signalled willingness to relinquish some but not all, personal control. He also seems reluctant to expand his core group of aides beyond the inner circle with whom he feels comfortable.

AP
Prince Harry will join celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of Barbados's independence at a concert headed by Rihanna.

The Barbados-born pop star will perform for thousands along with other talents from the Caribbean nation, which Harry will visit in a 15-day tour.

It is likely he will meet Rihanna at the event on November 30 - Barbados's independence day.

At a press briefing for the trip, Harry's communications secretary, Jason Knauf, was asked how concerned officials were that news that the prince was dating US actress Meghan Markle would overshadow the tour.

He replied: "Not concerned at all. As you can see, it's a busy, full and varied programme."
Former SDLP leader Alasdair McDonnell has said he would meet US President-elect Donald Trump - in stark contrast to the man who succeeded him.

Current leader Colum Eastwood claimed he will refuse to attend the White House if invited.

Party leaders traditionally receive an invitation each year to the St Patrick's Day celebrations.

Last month Mr Eastwood said: "As leader of the SDLP and the progressive nationalist tradition on this island, I will not give any support to such an administration, founded on bigotry, by attending the White House under a Trump presidency."

However, Mr McDonnell said America has decided and he would meet Mr Trump if asked.

"It is not for me to tell them (the US electorate) who they should vote for," he told the Belfast Telegraph. "I would prefer the other candidate but they have decided on Trump. We have to live with that.

"Every American president back to Reagan and beyond has been a very good friend to Ireland. Hillary Clinton was a very special friend, I would hope that Donald Trump would not turn a blind eye to us.

"If I am invited to meet the American president of course I will, that is what you are elected for, I am obliged to. As South Belfast MP I have met a lot of people with whom I don't agree."

When asked what he thought of Mr Eastwood's planned snub, Mr McDonnell said: "I am not getting into that. Colum is entitled to make his own decision.

"I think a lot of people are distressed but we have to live with the hand we are dealt with. If Obama can meet him, then the rest of us can."

When asked whether Mr Eastwood would meet Mr Trump if he came to Northern Ireland, an SDLP spokesperson said a decision would be taken on it at the time. "Colum is not disengaging with the US, he is disengaging with Trump as an individual," the spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, a high-profile SDLP councillor said he would refuse to meet Mr Trump even if he came to Belfast to announce investment.

Belfast councillor Brian Heading said: "Mr Trump's election is a miscarriage of democracy.

"Most of us (in the SDLP) who followed the US Presidential campaign would have the same view as me."

Mr Heading said he feels very disappointed by Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness issuing a statement congratulating Trump on his election.

"Why Martin felt the need to congratulate him is for only him to know," he added.

"If the reason was potential investment, Trump is on record saying he wants to bring more jobs back to America.

"If the SDLP stands alone in this position, then so be it, we have stood alone before."

Mr Eastwood is standing by a pledge he made before Trump's election, insisting that he would refuse to attend the St Patrick's Day event at the White House if he was invited.

"I choose to stand by a very different set of values than those displayed by this man," he said.

Mr McGuinness described Mr Eastwood's comments as "naive" and said they will not go down well with Irish American business.

DUP MP Sammy Wilson queried why Mr Eastwood was comfortable carrying the coffin of a former paramilitary - Seamus 'Chang' Coyle - in 2012 but baulked at meeting the newly-elected US President.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny confirmed he has accepted an invitation to attend next year's St Patrick's Day bash at the White House - despite previously criticising Mr Trump.

The Executive Office last night did not confirm whether the First and Deputy First Ministers have been invited to the White House for St Patrick's Day. Both attended the event in earlier this year.

During a Westminster debate in January, DUP MP Gavin Robinson blasted Trump as a "ridiculous xenophobe".

A DUP spokesperson said: "We congratulate Donald Trump on his successful Presidential election. The DUP will work to strengthen the economic and political relationships between Northern Ireland and the United States.

"There are leaders in Northern Ireland, however, who apparently will now boycott the White House.

"It only remains to be seen whether anyone within the US administration will actually notice," the spokesperson added.
As the last outpost of archaic, regressive and small-minded thinking, right on the fringes of Western Europe, Northern Ireland shows few signs of being ready to join the 21st century. The usual answer to any form of progressive social change? No.

Even after all these years, Ulster still says no. No to basic reproductive rights and gay marriage, but a big fat yes to flags, emblems and sectarian culture wars. The ancient habits are the hardest to break. So it's heartening to see one sign that those entrenched old attitudes are at last beginning to shift.

This week, Stormont Justice Minister Claire Sugden announced that a motion will go before the Assembly calling for gay men convicted of abolished sex offences in Northern Ireland to be pardoned. "This is an opportunity for the criminal justice system to try and right the wrongs of the past," she said. The move will bring us into line with a similar initiative in England and Wales.

Ms Sugden confirmed that she had secured Executive agreement for the motion. Crucially, this means that the DUP, whose members have in the recent past notoriously referred to gay relationships as abominable and repulsive, are backing it too.

I was unimpressed by Arlene Foster's petty claim that online abuse from LGBT activists made her party less likely to vote for marriage equality law. To me, her yah-boo-sucks response smacked of the schoolyard. But removing this unconscionable slur against the characters of men whose only 'crime' was consensual relations between adults - that's more like it, Arlene. The DUP have an awful lot of ground to make up, but this is a small step in the right direction.

Normally, I'm unenthusiastic about retrospective pardons and apologies. Too often it's the wrong people saying sorry for the actions of others, usually many years too late. Tony Blair's apology for the Irish famine was particularly self-serving and devoid of meaning. "Moral vacuousness," Jeremy Paxman called it, and he was right.

But these pardons are not only posthumous, they will also benefit men who are still alive today. In other words, they matter - not just as a general admission that the State got it wrong, but in making reparation to innocent individuals who were badly harmed by the practice, before it's too late.

The veteran gay rights campaigner Jeff Dudgeon, who has long been seeking political support for the pardons, said it was a great moment - "it completes the circle now we have got decriminalisation and effectively an apology for the previous behaviour of the state".

Mr Dudgeon said the move was particularly important for people whose reputations were destroyed. "In some cases they died having gone to jail  Their characters were damaged and job opportunities seriously curtailed and quite often many men committed suicide rather than go to court."

After the mock gay wedding on Culture Night in Belfast, in which local playwright Martin Lynch 'married' a lesbian couple, I wondered how many people present were aware of just how horrendous it was for gay people in Northern Ireland during the days of 'Save Ulster from Sodomy'.

Matthew Parris, writing recently in the Spectator magazine, described his ambivalence about a champagne-fuelled London party, attended by bishops and peers and government ministers, to celebrate Oscar Wilde's birthday. He was glad that times had changed, of course. But it was wretched in the past: "the closed doors, ministerial brick walls, heart-rending letters from gay men, frightened teenagers, lonely bank clerks entrapped by the police." And now everyone acts "as though they always thought what they think now".

One man who knows exactly what it was like in those fear-haunted times was Jeff Dudgeon.

A radical and a reformer, it was Dudgeon who won the 1981 victory in the European Court of Human Rights, which decriminalised homosexuality in Northern Ireland. Opposition to the campaign for law reform was colossal and Dudgeon was one of many activists who had their homes raided and papers confiscated by the RUC.

As well as pardoning those who were hurt by anti-gay laws, we should be honouring people like Jeff Dudgeon, who stood up against that hostile, threatening culture and fought for justice.

Dudgeon's politics - he's an Ulster Unionist councillor at Belfast City Hall - mean he's not a natural fit with the liberal-left attitudes which dominate LGBT activism today.

So what? This is a man of courage and principle, and his bravery changed history. We should all salute him.
SDLP leader Colum Eastwood must have an inflated opinion of his standing in the world of politics. He grandly announced he would refuse to meet President Trump at the White House's annual St Patrick's Day event.

But Mr Eastwood is struggling to make his mark in Stormont, so he is unlikely to have featured on the President-elect's radar at this time. As a snub, it will hardly cause many ripples in Washington.

While it is possible to sympathise with Mr Eastwood's personal feelings toward Mr Trump, he should have looked across the border at the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, who branded the billionaire businessman a "racist" during the presidential campaign, but was quick to press Ireland's interests during a telephone conversation with him after his election success.

That is a lesson in real politics. Would Mr Eastwood refuse to meet Mr Trump if it meant scuppering an inward investment deal? We have seen plenty of examples of people refusing to engage in real politics here, but always with negative results. No matter who utters words like "never, never, never", they end up being forced to eat them later.

But perhaps the greatest example of pragmatism is that of John Hume, the former leader of the SDLP. A driving force in the creation of the peace process, he met Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams at a time when the IRA was still killing people, to persuade him to follow a political path.

Mr Eastwood should also remember that Mr Hume brought Northern Ireland's political problems right into the White House through the cultivation of influential US politicians who also played an important part in the peace process.

And at Stormont we have seen successive DUP leaders, Ian Paisley, Peter Robinson and Arlene Foster, work with Martin McGuinness to make the Assembly and Executive a proper-functioning administration, even if they are well aware of the Deputy First Minister's violent past.

Politics is the art of the possible. It involves all sorts of compromises, negotiations, and imagination to overcome obstacles. If politicians only met those people they liked, little would be done.

Mr Eastwood might want to contemplate how others view him over his decision to carry the coffin of a former republican paramilitary, Seamus Coyle. Would he think President Trump therefore was justified in leaving him off the White House guest list?
A recent campaign by the Auburn Rotary Club has helped bring water to Argentinian children in need.

The Auburn club raised around $5,000 over the last year to fund the installation of four water wells to service six schools in the Buenos Aires province.

The fundraising campaign was capped last month by Rotary members with a two-week trip to the Ezeiza region to see to the installation. Members said the wells will benefit more than 5,000 students between all of the schools.

Rotarians Matt Feola and Toni Colella  along with Feola's longtime friend Cheryl Mueller  made the trip to Ezeiza with luggage full of medical and school supplies to benefit a community embroiled in poverty. There, they worked with members of the Ezeiza Rotary chapter and distributed the supplies, in person, to the schools and the community.

It wasn't Feola's first trip to Argentina. The 76-year-old, a Rotarian since 1995, said he has made the trip at least a dozen times over the last decade or so during similar goodwill campaigns.

During these endeavors, Feola said he worked with the Auburn Rotary to raise money for supplies, such as mattresses and shoes, to help the children of Ezeiza. After these trips, Feola said, he planned the next ones with other Auburn Rotary members by taking note of what more is needed.

"It's not just me," he said of the campaign. "It's a combination of dozens of people. We could not have done it by ourselves."

For the water wells campaign, the inspiration was drawn from the sight of a little boy drinking water from a ditch.

It was about two and a half years ago when Feola said he saw the child "in the middle of nowhere," somewhere in Buenos Aires, while on his way to visit a school. He must have been around 7 years old, Feola recalled, squat beside the ditch and drinking water. The ground was muddied from rain the night before, he said.

Just further upstream were the carcasses of two dead dogs, with the water flowing between the bodies. Seeing the dogs, Feola said, he told the child not to drink from the brook.

The boy  with shoes "anyone else would've thrown away" and a face pocked with marks reminiscent of insect bites, Feola said  gave him a skeptical look.

"He looks at me like, 'What else am I going to do?' That really broke my heart," Feola said, later adding, "The poverty is beyond understanding."

After Feola returned, he drew up a proposal for the water wells and sought funding for a $2,500 matching grant from Rotary International.

However, the application was rejected, leaving doubts that the project would get off the ground. Feola said he reported as such last June, which is when two Rotarians  who prefer to remain anonymous  met with Feola about fronting money for the project.

Over the next year, the two Rotarians donated a collective $4,000 for the water wells, while Feola said he collected an additional $1,000 from folks in the Seneca Falls community where he resides.

"They came through in a way I'll never forget," he said.

The two-week trip reunited Feola with Ezeiza Rotary members whom he sees as family.

He said he has long worked with Dr. Hector Corvallo, a Rotarian there. Over the course of Feola's trips to Argentina, the Auburn Rotary Club's presence is commemorated through plaques on schools the group has helped in the past  including the Foundacion Camila Dragone school, where the cafeteria is named in Feola's honor.

Feola again met with Corvallo and his wife, Dr. Mirta Martin, while introducing Colella and Mueller to the country.

They eventually made the return trip home on Halloween. While they had time to enjoy some of the sights in the region, Colella said there were always reminders of their business in Argentina.

A paper sign, for example, taped outside a school they visited one day explained how afternoon classes were cancelled because of a lack of water. Colella said the Ezeiza Rotary chapter members, the school administrators and the schoolchildren were all very appreciative.

"The schools were just so welcoming. The children  everyone just had 'Merry Christmas' in their eyes. It was wonderful," she said.

Feola said, "What we do, I always say, is like a drop in the bucket. It surely helps, but there is so much more to do."
AUBURN  Questions lingered when Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last month that Auburn would be the site of a welcome center showcasing the central New York region.

City officials said the project would be developed in the downtown area, but no specific location had been identified. It was also unclear how the project would affect a separate endeavor that was being explored by Auburn officials: a 14,000- to 16,000-square-foot welcoming center emphasizing Harriet Tubman.

Both issues were clarified during Thursday's Auburn City Council meeting.

Mayor Michael Quill recommended the city-owned parking lot, across from Memorial City Hall and next to the Seward House, as the site of the regional welcome center. Councilors will vote next week to authorize the project site.

Welcome centers will be opened in each of the state's regions. As announced in October, the Auburn facility will be designed to promote central New York attractions with interactive kiosks and a Taste NY market with local food and beverage products.

Quill said the development of the regional welcome center means the city's previously proposed project is now off the table. The new project is still separate from a visitor's center proposed for the planned Harriet Tubman National Park.

City officials are working with representatives in Cuomo's office to continue to focus the project, Quill said. City Manager Jeff Dygert said the city will release a request for proposals to development firms on Monday.

Quill said the lot is an ideal spot because of its location along Route 34 and its size, making it capable of potentially handling bus and visitor parking.

"The governor has a very aggressive agenda to get this done," Quill said.

In other news

 City councilors stepped up their opposition to a plan to haul quantities of liquid landfill material through Auburn from Seneca Meadows.

The proposed plan is to haul quantities of leachate, or liquid drained from a landfill, by trucks to a station at Frank Smith Street. The leachate will be transferred onto rail cars for shipment.

Finger Lakes Railway is facilitating the move.

Hauling of landfill material from Seneca Meadows through Auburn concerns city councilors AUBURN  Auburn lawmakers are concerned with news that truckloads of liquid material from Se

Though the transfer was tentatively scheduled to begin around Nov. 15 over several weeks, councilors voted unanimously Thursday in opposition to the plan, citing concerns with any potential spills and traffic around the Frank Smith Street area, which is near a residential neighborhood.

With the move, Auburn officials have called for Seneca Meadows to adhere to City Code and license its transportation company with the city. A Seneca Meadows representative could not be immediately reached for comment.

Councilors have also requested the state Department of Environmental Conservation to review the matter through a permitting process with a public comment period.

In a letter to Dygert, Michael Smith  Finger Lakes Railway president  said the material is not hazardous and the transfer between the tankers and train cars would be conducted safely. He also said the railway must offer services to the handling of all legal products  the company cannot discriminate.

Bruce Habberfield, manager of business development with Finger Lakes Railway, further explained that Auburn was chosen as the transloading location  particularly over Seneca Falls  partially because the Seneca Falls track experiences high amounts of traffic with agricultural product transports.

Councilors, however, remain concerned. The transfer is expected to be carried out through six to nine tanker trucks per day for anywhere between two weeks to two months.

"Even if it was filled with cotton, it's a lot for one street to take all day," said Councilor Debby McCormick. "We're just looking out for the people in that area of town. We definitely don't want Finger Lakes Railway to feel we're opposing the business at all."




First up, Joe Biden is thinking about dropping tariffs against China. But theres a spy in prison this morning that helps us understand why he shouldnt. Ill explain.





Your second brief, If youre looking for a good paying job, you might consider being a CEO for a health insurance company. One executive made $142M dollars last year. Let's talk about that.





And as always, Im keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put this one on your radar. Mexican cartels are grooming American kids online and paying them cash to traffic illegals or run drugs across the border. Ill share details.





If you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief, remember to subscribe and listen daily at podfollow.com/pdb.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It can be tough to be a vegetarian. You have to work harder than everyone else to make sure youre getting all the nutrients your body needs. So, when its time to take a
AUBURN  A U.S. Army veteran was sentenced in Cayuga County criminal court Thursday for assaulting a police officer last year.

At the time of Ackerley's plea, Cayuga County Assistant District Attorney Chris Valdina said the Auburn Police Department received a call from Ackerley's mother on Nov. 17, 2015, saying her son had threatened to harm himself in the woods behind Cayuga Community College.

"His mother said he could have a knife on him," Valdina said, adding that Ackerley had also been intoxicated. "The police set up a perimeter and (Ackerley) came out and immediately attacked an officer."

Ackerley, however, told a different story, saying he went into the parking lot behind the college to talk to police when an officer reached for him. He then resisted arrest and the officer suffered a concussion from the scuffle.

At sentencing Thursday, Ackerley's attorney, David Elkovitch, said that the defendant was "difficult to get along with" when the case began last year, but said Ackerley has come a long way with treatment for alcoholism and mental health issues.

"I regret everything that happened that night," Ackerley told Judge Thomas Leone. "I never wanted to hurt anyone ... and I wish I could take back everything that happened."

Leone sentenced him to a total of five years probation, noting that he took into account Ackerley's service to the country, limited criminal history and compliance with seeking treatment.

Also in court:

 A former inmate at Cayuga Correctional Facility admitted assaulting another inmate in exchange for an additional three years in prison.

Uvaldo Gonzalez pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of second-degree assault and a reduced charge of first-degree attempted possession of prison contraband. The 41-year-old said he injured another inmate in February when he tied a padlock in a sock and swung it at the man's head.

"We had a fight," Gonzalez said. "He didn't reach his weapon in time and I hit him with the lock."

A second felony offender, Gonzalez could face a maximum of seven years in prison. However, Leone will likely sentence him on Jan. 12 to three years for the assault.
Pro-government columnist had written about coup in Turkey 3 months earlier

-

A

+

Following the operation against Turkeys one of few remaining opposition newspapers Cumhuriyet newspaper, journalist from Turkey Ahmet Sk wrote about the concept of new journalism in Turkey.

In one section of his news piece, Sk points out that a columnist of the Turkiye newspaper Fuat Ugur had actually written about the coup attempt three months before it took place. As Sk explains, columnist Ugur also explained in his writing that the AKP government had known about it, too.

The related part of the article is as follows: In the writing pieces that we will show, the plot about the coup is very openly expressedmonths before the coup attempt! Fuat Ugur published two interesting articles in Turkiye newspaper three months before the July 15 coup attempt. The first piece of Ugur on April 2nd had the title of The special ones (Hususi, in Turkish) of the Cemaat (Gulen community) met in Ankara to talk about coup.

As mentioned in the indictment and investigation documents about the Gulen community, Hususi (the special ones) was the name given to the soldiers involved in the organization of the Cemaat members within the Turkish Armed Forces. In his writing,

Ugur claimed that this group was calling on the Turkish Armed Forces to carry out a coup and also criticizing some journalists and columnists about the same thing without giving names

Source: http://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/yandas-yazar-darbeyi-3-ay-once-biliyordu-134999.html
NAIROBI, Kenya - Acumen, in partnership with GE, kicked off its fourth annual Collaboration Summit in Nairobi. Acumen, a nonprofit impact investor, created the summit to bring social enterprises and international corporations together to catalyse inclusive business models that address Africa's biggest social challenges.

Since 2001, Acumen has invested more than $35 million in 31 companies in East and West Africa working in agriculture, energy, health care, clean water and sanitation to better serve each regions poor. The Collaboration Summit is a key part of Acumens Technical Assistance Initiative, a five-year $1 million program that aims to accelerate the growth and impact of its portfolio companies so they become sustainable, financially viable and inclusive of poor and marginalised communities.

At Acumen, we believe there is much for social enterprises and large businesses to learn from each other and achieve together, said Duncan Onyango, Acumens East Africa director. With GEs support, we are working to cultivate an environment that enables companies, big and small, to understand the shared value of partnerships, strategically integrate social and environmental values into their models and ensure the success of all stakeholders.

For this years Collaboration Summit, held at the Villa Rosa Kempinski Hotel, Acumen gathered a select number of committed multinationals and more than 15 of its social enterprises to work together on redefining businesss role in driving social impact and growing inclusive emerging markets. GE offered its support as the sole Summit Partner while Dow supported as a technical assistance initiative partner and Intellecap as a knowledge partner, leading a summit session on partnerships to improve healthcare access.

"Were delighted to be part of this years Collaboration Summit to share ideas and learnings on doing business that drives social impact and inclusive growth in Africa, said GE Africas President and CEO Jay Ireland. "We see GE as partners in building Africa's sustainable future and I'm looking forward to working with the participating social entrepreneurs to explore innovative solutions to Africa's challenges."

This years summit focuses on the challenges holding emerging markets backincluding those obstacles facing individual companies as well as entire industries like agriculture or renewable energyand solutions that involve players from across big and small business, government, and civil society. For example, Unilever is partnering with Acumen and portfolio company BURN Manufacturinga clean cookstove manufacturer - to improve the livelihoods of Africas smallholder farmers and build sustainable supply chains that source from these vulnerable rural communities. Collaborations in healthcare and agriculture were also highlighted.

Some of Acumens participating investments include: Esoko, a mobile platform that provides Africas rural farmers with agronomic tips and market access that will improve their incomes; Devergy, a social enterprise that delivers affordable, reliable solar energy to low-income communities living off the grid; and Sanergy, a company that provides residents of Kenyas slums with affordable sanitation, and produces organic fertiliser to improve soil quality for Kenyan farms. Additional participating corporations involved include Unilever and Barclays, both partners of the technical assistance initiative, and EY, which provides professional services to some of Acumens portfolio companies in the region.

When we started this initiative we hoped that leading global corporations could help social enterprises to scale, said Yasmina Zaidman, Acumens director of strategic partnerships. Now we know that these enterprises, through their focus on underserved markets and breakthrough innovation, can be powerful allies to corporations as well.

Since its founding, Acumen has invested more than $101 million in 92 companies in East and West Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the United States to support a wide range of sustainable, scalable businesses using market-based approaches to deliver products and services to the poor. Though the Collaboration Summit, Acumen and the summit participants are working to find ways to expand these innovations to impact millions of lives across East and West Africa.
All the winners at last night's DMASA (Direct Marketing Association of South Africa,) Assegai Awards attributed their success to their close relationships with their clients.

Gorilla was named Agency of the year, and thanked its clients for allowing them to push them and be brave and produce brave work. The agency went home with four gold, seven silvers, four bronze and 10 Leader Awards. Agencies Conversation Lab and Lesoba Difference were the other big winners on the night.

Walking away with the Nkosi Award, an Award for an entry that has excelled about all others, as well as the only (two) Black Spears awarded on the evening to TBWA\HUNT\LASCARIS\DURBAN in the Most Effective Use of Content and Art Direction categories for their campaign, TOPS Novel Novel.

Tight relationships

Alan Edgar, executive creative director, TBWA/HUNT/LASCARIS, Durban, was at the Awards and was thrilled with their raft of awards. Im especially happy tonight for all the people, back in Durbs, who were involved in this work; SPAR and TBWA have been partners now for 35 years, and supported by Hirt & Carter (who we regard as extended family) we are showing what tight families can produce  'magic!'

He believes their success is due to two reasons the first being that the Assegai Awards have a meaningful significance as they are judged on creative effectiveness, that is, work that was both creatively fresh and strategically innovative which together resulted in measurable results for our clients brands.

Wow  that was a mouthful! It sounds like the cliched marketing gobbledygook everybody says... but its satisfying that weve simply delivered exactly what our clients pay us for  helping elevate their brands and moving product. Simple.

He also says he wishes more agencies had clients like SPAR  Because of their bravery and trust in us we're producing some of the best creative weve ever done. And in turn its delivering some of the best sales results theyve ever seen too. Ive just got to say thanks to them.

The Durban-based agency also won three golds, two silvers and a bronze and two leaser Awards.

Brand of the year went to Old Mutual. Head of marketing for Old Mutual, Gugu-Lisa Zwane says they are very honoured by the Award. Direct marketing is very important from a business-to-business perspective for us and we will continue to grow this part of our marketing.

The Award is also a reflection of their relationship with Demographica. This partnership is what has pushed the boundaries, forcing us out of our comfort zone to try something new.

Davy Ivins was the Lifetime Achievement Award winner and induced into the hall of Fame. He sent a message to the Awards, saying that this Award is for everyone in the direct marketing industry. What we do is different and we do it for people and in the process, we move mountains.

All about ROI

The emphasis in the judging process was on Return on Investment (ROI) and the judges were brutal in this respect. Long-time judge, Mortimer Harvey Group chief innovation officer, Luisa Mazinter says the judges pay great attention to detail, while another seasoned judge, Elizabeth Lee Ming, head of digital marketing and communications (or CMO: Creating Meaning Online) at Momentum, reiterated the emphasis on ROI, but adds that the judging process and scoring was very fair.

As for the quality of work, while the overall feeling appeared to be that this years work was of a high quality, with Mazinter saying that the standards of entries this year were as exceptional as they were last year.

However, Lee Ming felt that the quality of the work last year was better than this years. As integrated and direct marketing becomes more established, it is expected the agencies to push the boundaries more and be innovative, driving consumer behaviour.

The consensus was that the industry is growing from strength to strength and that the Awards reflect this. The power of direct marketing is better understood, especially in terms of measurement, says Mazinter.

The Awards, which recognise effectiveness and then creativity, play a valuable role in the industry especially because of the strong focus on measurable results. This is only a reflection that for agencies and clients, results are the most important, says Lee Ming.

The Assegai Awards celebrates the best in direct marketing and the outstanding work these agencies and partners have produced over the past 12 months. The Awards took place in Rivonia in Room 5.
A study, which draws on the data from the 500 procedures, confirms that robotic surgery offers excellent outcomes and effective early cancer control at a median follow up of 13 months in a cohort of male patients, more than half of whom had intermediate-risk or high-risk prostate cancer.

Robotic surgery to treat prostate cancer is growing by approximately 40% per year in South Africa and is increasingly being adopted as treatment of choice for high-risk and medium-risk cancer cases. Furthermore, this form of surgery is having a highly positive impact on local healthcare, and on urological medicine in particular, since its introduction in recent years.

This is according to Dr Greg Boustead, a specialist urologist and robotic surgeon, who was speaking about the outcomes that had been achieved by the Netcare da Vinci robotic programme.

Boustead, who has led the robotic-assisted surgery programme since its inception in June 2014 and has so far assisted in the training of 18 surgeons using the da Vinci system at Netcare Waterfall City, Netcare Christiaan Barnard Memorial, and Netcare uMhlanga hospitals, says that there are now more than 3,500 of these machines globally, and more that 80% of all radical prostatectomies are being performed .

In the study, robotic surgery patients had a hospital stay of almost half the duration as with traditional open prostate surgery - a median of 3,2 days, when compared with a median of six days in the open surgery patients.

Perhaps even more important, the patients suffered less than half the complication rates than those individuals who underwent open surgery. The risk of severe complications arising from robotic-assisted surgery was substantially lower at 1,6%.

The aim of the study was two-fold: Firstly, to ensure the safe rollout of a local robotic prostatectomy initiative that would achieve outstanding cancer control and good outcomes in multi-speciality hospital environments, while simultaneously training surgeons.

Secondly, we were also able to compare the length of hospital stay and complication rates with a cohort of age-matched men treated over the same time period by means of traditional open radical prostatectomy in similar facilities.

When we look at single surgeon data of our highest volume surgeons, both blood loss and continence outcomes continue to improve as surgeons gain more experience. Just 1,7% of the men who underwent robotic-assisted surgery required a blood transfusion during the procedures.

Outcomes with regard to urinary continence and recovery of sexual function were excellent and equivalent to those of other studies conducted around the world into robotic-assisted prostatectomies.

Studies from around the world are confirming a lower risk of primary treatment failure after robotic-assisted surgery. Primary treatment failure may then require secondary treatment, which carries the risk of additional side effects as well as substantially increased costs, explains Boustead.

The robotic surgical teams need to be highly trained and the hospital group has introduced thorough training initiatives for urologists and support staff. These cover both product and clinical aspects through a series of online modules, simulator training, as well as hands-on surgery performed in an accredited training laboratory in Belgium. As the programmes proctor, Boustead oversees the procedures until the doctors are fully versed and well experienced in the use of the robotic technology.

Boustead presented the findings of this study at the World Congress of Endourologyand the South African Urological Association Meeting, which is being held in Cape Town from 8 to 12 November.
Member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will make a leap into the African continent with their first joint trade mission and business expo, the inaugural Africa-ASEAN Business Expo (AABE), in South Africa next year. The expo, led by the Singapore Manufacturing Federation (SMF) and Conference & Exhibition Management Services (CEMS), aims to introduce African businesses to the newly established ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), as the two regions ramp up their bilateral trade and investment cooperation in the face of global economic uncertainties.

Edhar Yuralaits via 123RF

Formed in 1967, ASEAN represents the Southeast Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam, with a total population of over 622 million people.

The ASEAN market, worth over $2.6 trillion, is one of the most important economic regions in Asia.

The ASEAN market, worth over $2.6 trillion, is one of the most important economic regions in Asia. Trade between Africa and ASEAN has shown an annual growth rate of around 15% year on year over the past decade, worth a total of $42.5 billion in 2012, and is projected to top $384 billion by 2019.

Africa an atractive growth market for ASEAN firms

As the second largest and second-most populous continent in the world, Africa is seen by ASEAN firms as an attractive growth market. Currently more than 300 companies from ASEAN operate in Africa, predominantly involved in agribusiness, manufacturing, oil and urban development.

Edward Liu, group managing director of CEMS, says the trade mission and AABE series are designed to serve as a strategic platform linking businesses between ASEAN and the African Union (AU), via the commercial hubs of Singapore and South Africa.

AABE 2017 to boost bilateral trade

Supported by the IE Singapore and other trade agencies and chambers of commerce and industries in ASEAN, the premiere AABE 2017 will kick off at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa, from 6  8 November 2017, while the following edition will be held in Singapore, in 2018.

The inaugural AABE will focus on boosting bilateral trade between African and ASEAN business in the fields of energy, water, housing, building and construction, healthcare, transportation and logistics, food and beverages, IT and telecoms, franchising and licensing, education and financial and business services, says Liu.

The event will provide a forum for importers, traders, buyers, investors and retailers to discover opportunities and negotiate mutually beneficial trade agreements. AABE 2017 is expected to attract some 100 key exhibitors from Africa and ASEAN countries. In addition to the myriad of exhibiting sectors, the AABE series will also feature onsite business matching services as well as a hosted buyers programme specially tailored to bring in quality buyers from the AU and ASEAN to the event. Held in conjunction with AABE 2017 would be an Africa-ASEAN Business Forum, highlighting the immense business opportunities in the two economic regions.

There is keen interest in the upcoming event, says Liu, with business from both Africa and ASEAN looking to explore new business collaboration in the African continent. Enhanced trade partnerships between these two regions would be paramount to promoting economic growth for both regions, culminating in greater South-South investment and trade, he says.
Ninety-three percent of small business owners in townships expect amendments to the Liquor Act to damage their businesses.

This is according to a survey conducted by the Gauteng Liquor Forum, the SA Liquor Traders Association and the National Tourism Hospitality Association, which represent the interests of 35,000 small businesses.

The survey was held after the Department of Trade and Industry proposed to introduce the amendments to the Liquor Act 59 of 2003.

The amendments propose that the legal drinking age be increased from 18 to 21, among other restrictions.

The survey found that:

87% said the laws would create unnecessary problems between businesses and patrons;



75% said it would increase police corruption;



83% thought the laws would force them to close their businesses; and



95% said these laws would criminalise small businesses.

Liquor Traders Association president Mish Hlophe said small business owners would be the hardest hit by the amendments.

"By adding laws that are not feasible or workable in the township environment, the ministers are pushing us into crisis," Hlophe said.
It is a pity that the nuclear energy debate has been shrouded by what appears to be serious ideologues from the two sides; and, unsurprisingly, very rarely have cooler heads been allowed a voice. The litigation and policy ambivalence hasn't made things easier.

As a young person and a nuclear physicist, I've watched in despair as our youth are being used in this debate, especially by the well-resourced anti-nuclear lobby, which claims, mostly without evidence, that nuclear power will bequeath trillions of rand worth of debt to future generations.

The emotion-laden debate has obscured the benefits of what is potentially an exciting phase in the life of our 22-year-old nation. Notwithstanding the fact that we are going through uncertain times now, including prospects of a ratings downgrade within weeks, young people still have a lot to celebrate and a lot to live for.

Nuclear technology and the new nuclear build programme will happen in our lifetime. If handled responsibly, the programme will bring sustainable jobs for many of our youth.

The government, Eskom and the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation must put the youth at the front and centre of this programme through skills development and retention strategies for the industry.

The country is facing challenges in the nuclear space. There is constant scrutiny on the build programme by all interested parties. We welcome this, as nuclear is highly regulated, locally and internationally.

One of the challenges is plugging the nuclear skills gap. The youth need to be ready with specialised skills required for the nuclear build and operation.

In today's competitive economy, the vast gap between talented professionals and the industry at large has left the talent pool uninformed about the job market, the competencies and qualifications required, and current job opportunities.

Quality education and industry training relevant to the demands of SA's economic needs are essential.

Since the early 1990s, most of the focus of nuclear skills development in SA has been positioned at university graduate level and this has been a successful endeavour, with many graduates obtaining advanced degrees in nuclear science and engineering. Although essential for research and innovation, advanced academic qualifications are not sufficient for economic development based on technological and industrial advancement.

To realise true technological advancement, the country requires a large capacity of highly competent and skilled artisans and technicians. More than 70% of the nuclear jobs to be created through the proposed nuclear programme will be artisans and technicians.

Unlike technologically advanced countries such as the US, China, Russia, Germany, France, South Korea and Japan, SA has lost much of its technical and artisanal base over time. The dedicated technical trade schools have either been shut or are in relatively poor condition.

For a nuclear programme of this magnitude, as many as 15,000 artisans such as welders, boilermakers, plant operators, carpenters, electricians and pipe-fitters will be required. The quality of their workmanship would have to be of the highest standard.

The development of these skills requires at least two years of on-the-job training and mentoring by master craftsmen with decades of experience. Investment in these skills will help facilitate the diversification away from our reliance on traditional commodities and non-tradable services.

These artisans and technicians' skills are in high demand not only in SA but in the rest of the world. Having a highly skilled labour force would attract investors to establish more manufacturing facilities in SA, creating more jobs to grow the economy.

In many countries, a nuclear build programme is used to contribute to skills development and to facilitate manufacturing capability. For SA's programme to succeed, we need the mass-based skills development initiative to start at once.

This could start with sending about 200 of our current craftsman to nuclear facilities in other countries to get practical training for two years.

After their return, they could train local students at newly established artisanal development schools (about 10 of these with an intake capacity of 600 students a year), similar to the Nuclear Skills Development Centre at the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation, which currently develops some of the best artisans.

To reach a target of at least 15,000 of these skilled artisans by 2020 (when the peak of the nuclear programme will be upon SA), there needs to be a rapid implementation of an artisanal development programme, which should be developed jointly with suppliers of nuclear systems.

Given the advanced and portable nature of their skills, these artisans and technicians would be easily employable in many industries such as the water and sanitation, aviation, renewable energy, chemical, pharmaceutical, and the petrochemical sectors, which the Department of Energy is expanding through a refinery project and the shale gas opportunity.

Source: Business Day
The discovery and exploitation of very large shale gas reserves in countries like the United States have transformed the energy market . South Africa may also possess potentially large resources of shale gas. This could have a significant positive impact on the country's energy balance should it be decided to exploit these resources.

The exploitation of these key energy resources might also have a significant social, economic or environmental impact while also presenting considerable technical challenges.

Given the recent challenges the country is facing in terms of energy supply, the possibility of exploiting shale gas deposits for power generation is of current significance. Shale gas also presents other downstream opportunities. Some include providing a key resource for the production of liquid fuels and chemicals, or enabling the development of a domestic market for gas as a cleaner energy resource.

Uncertainties

South Africas Karoo region, in the south west of the country, is thought to have significant reserves of shale gas. Recently there has been considerable interest from the government and various companies like Shell, Falcon and Bundu to develop a shale gas industry there. Considerable uncertainties exist regarding the extent of these reserves and the geology at depths where they are typically found. These and other uncertainties and constraints include the following.

The quantum of shale gas in the Karoo is still unclear: estimates range between 20 and 400 trillion cubic feet. None of these reserves has yet been proven.



There are also constraints relating to geographical regions. For example, no fracking may take place in the vicinity of the Square Kilometre Array station project. The project consists of the largest network of radio telescopes ever built.



Ensuring that no hydraulic fracturing takes place at depths less than 1500m to protect groundwater resources will also reduce the geographical area of interest.



Shale gas exploitation requires the use of relatively large quantities of water. Given that potable groundwater should preferably not be used for any such exploitation, greater clarity is needed on the availability of deep-level saline water. This is considered to be acceptable for use in hydraulic fracturing.



Baseline studies need to be carried out to ascertain with greater certainty the environment at depths greater than 3 km underground. Such baseline studies should also ensure that there is a clear understanding of the status of the human and natural environments before any fracking commences.



South Africa has a serious shortage of the high-level skills that would be required to implement such an industry. Strategies need to be set in place to develop skills to ensure sustainable development of the shale gas industry.



International experience has highlighted the critical need to have all the necessary legislative and regulatory structures in place. But also, a sufficient number of regulators with the required skills before a shale gas industry is launched.



The implementation of a shale gas industry in an area like the Karoo may have a significant socio-economic impact on the local population. Similar concerns have been expressed in studies especially from Canada and Australia. So it is important to ensure that there is a full understanding of the potential impact. Plans must be developed to manage them.

Resolution of these uncertainties requires extensive and ongoing consultation with all relevant parties. As such government has an important role to play as an honest broker of key information.

Risk and challenges

These uncertainties point to specific risks and challenges associated with the establishment of a shale gas industry in South Africa. This will require government to create an enabling environment to encourage investment in the industry while also ensuring that the state and local communities benefit. It is also critical that there is clarity regarding the pricing structures that may prevail. This is crucial when the industry begins to exploit the shale gas reserves, and obviously requires a clearer understanding of the potential quantum of the known reserves.

Establishing a shale gas industry presents complex technical and economic challenges, and implementation will require a whole-of-government approach.

A structure at government level to facilitate and coordinate all the activities relating to the industry is recommended. This could coordinate the awarding of licences by various government departments and would have oversight of the activities of the regulators.

Awarding a production licence should proceed after satisfactory completion of terms associated with an exploration licence. This would require operators to demonstrate compliance of processes with legislation.

It is evident that before a shale gas industry in South Africa is implemented, important baseline studies need to be done. This will determine both the exact status quo prior to the commencement of a shale gas industry and the technical, social and economic consequences of such a development.


Agriculture is important for South Africa as well as the rest of the African continent. The challenge - and the excitement - is how we do it together.



This is according to Joyene Isaacs, Head of the Agriculture Department in the Western Cape, South Africa. I dont think the farmers in this province quite realise what they have. I have had farmers come here from Mpumalanga to tell the public Dont take it for granted guys. We dont have it anymore because we didnt understand that we needed to protect it. You still have it, use it wisely.

Isaacs said the drought has been highlighted by media but farmers have been struggling despite the drought for a long time.
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa says Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) play an important role in identifying the skills needs of every economic sector in the country.

He said thousands of artisans qualified through workplace training facilitated by SETAs.

The Deputy President said this when he responded to oral questions in the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Wednesday, 9 November 2016.

[SETAs] have been particularly successful at identifying scarce and critical skills needs in the labour market and facilitating practical workplace experience for learners from universities and TVET colleges.

Between 2012 and 2015, nearly 70,000 artisans qualified through workplace training opportunities facilitated by SETAs. In the same period, SETAs found work-based learning opportunities for over 186,000 learners, he said.

The Deputy President said SETAs provided bursaries for nearly 60,000 learners across all economic sectors in almost all institutions in the country.

He said SETAs have also provided training to over 13,000 adult workers through adult education and training programmes.

SETA landscape under review

A member of the NCOP asked the Deputy President whether it is viable to have the Local Government Sector Education and Training Authority (LGSETA) and the Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority (PSETA) as separate entities, in light of the plans for a single public service.

The Deputy President said because SETAs have such a significant impact on the development of the country's human capital, it was important that sufficient attention be given to their design, mandate and operations.

The Minister for Higher Education and Training [Dr Blade Nzimande] is responsible for making a determination as to the viability, number and economic classification of SETAs. The SETA landscape is currently being reviewed by the Department of Higher Education and Training. This review will take into account the potential impact of a single public service, he said.

The Deputy President said in so doing, consideration will need to be given not only to the sheer size of the public service in all spheres of government, but also to the variety of functions, responsibilities and skills requirements.

It must be remembered that SETAs are expected to keep a close link to those enterprises that contribute to their levy income and whose training needs they are meant to serve.

If this constituency base is too large or diverse, there is a great possibility that it will neglect some while seeking to serve others.

Against this backdrop, the regulating department has indicated that it does not immediately intend to merge these two SETAs.

However, there is every intention to increase cooperation between them, he said.
AUBURN  Tammy Bell knows better than most the mixed feelings of patriotism and pain recognized by Veterans Day. Her son, Sgt. Jerome C. Bell Jr., of Port Byron, was killed while serving with the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan in September 2008.

Eight years ago, we sadly and proudly received a gold star service flag," Tammy said Friday at the annual Veterans Day service at Veterans Memorial Park in Auburn. "He left behind us, his parents, a sister a brother, his loving wife, Melissa, and his three children, Katrazyna, Taylor and Jerry III.

Despite having already served one tour of duty in Iraq in 2004, and taking a year off to spend time with his family, Tammy said that Jerry decided to reenlist because of his his patriotism and dedication to his country and his love of the Marine Corps.

The service in Auburn  like others around the country  began at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month  a nod to the signing of the armistice that ended World War I  to honor those who served during wartime.

In his opening remarks, Terry Winslow noted the inclement weather but said, It didnt matter what the weather was our soldiers were there.

Members of S-K Post #1324 American Legion marched in, followed by the Knights of Columbus, and the American Flag was raised by members of the Auburn Police Department.

Larry Witt, director of the Cayuga County Veterans Service Agency, asked those in attendance to "remember all the vets who gave us our freedom, because freedom is not free.

As for the families left behind when after war, Tammy Bell said that joining the American Gold Star Mothers was a natural follow-up because its purpose is to provide comfort and healing to those who have lost sons and daughters.

The group also seeks to care for veterans, and Tammy said that meeting many Vietnam veterans has been one of the important parts of her service.

They treat us like we are their mothers," she said. "Our veterans need our support as much as we need theirs. Many Vietnam veterans have given their Purple Heart pins to the Gold Star Mothers, Tammy said.

This is the attention we never wanted," Tammy said. "Our son gave it to us. Jerry Jr. served and sacrificed for our country. He passed his strength and the torch on to us. We will continue helping and supporting our veterans.
The Department of Trade and Industry (dti) has extended the deadline for public comments and submissions on the National Liquor Amendment Bill for a second time.

The deadline has been extended for an additional two weeks with the closing date for comments being 30 November 2016.

The National Liquor Amendment Bill 2016 was published on 30 September 2016, for broader public consultation where interested parties are required to submit written comments within 30 calendar days from the date of publication.

In September, Cabinet announced that it has approved the publication of the bill which seeks to address the socio economic impact of liquor, the slow pace of transformation, standardisation of key aspects of regulation and improved regulatory collaboration.

The bill also addresses the eradication of manufacturing and trading of illegal and illicit alcohol, as well as challenges regarding regulatory capacity within the National Liquor Authority.

The intervention also focuses on reducing socio-economic harms and other costs of liquor abuse, restructuring the liquor industry and enhancing cooperation between all spheres of government.

In a statement on Thursday, Minister Rob Davies said the dti is currently having consultation sessions with affected stakeholders and associations. The Minister said he is pleased with the cordial and constructive manner in which stakeholders are participating.

Minister Davies said the extension will give members of Parliament and stakeholders an opportunity to provide valuable input following the consultative sessions.
South Afrca's tourism industry has welcomed the planned easing of visa restrictions, which should boost arrival numbers and offset slowing domestic holiday travel. According to Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), the stringent visa regime was the underlying cause of the decline in inbound tourism last year with international arrivals falling by 6.8% over the course of 2015.

However, a surge in visitors was recorded late in the year, with foreign arrivals up 5.4% year-on-year (y-o-y) in December, the height of South Africas summer break. Stakeholders will be looking for the new visa requirements to reinforce this trend in 2016 and beyond.

Relaxed restrictions

In early February 2016, the Department of Home Affairs announced plans to loosen some of the restrictions imposed over the past two years to make it easier for foreign visitors to apply for visas, including allowing Chinese tour companies to process visas on behalf of travellers and groups.

Under the current system, which was implemented in 2014, foreigners from non-exempt countries are required to submit their biometric data at a visa centre meaning they must apply in person. Many visitors had previously been able to obtain a visa on arrival or via online application. This has been widely viewed as limiting growth from key markets like China or India, which have only a handful of South African visa processing centres. As a result, Chinese arrivals fell by 23% in 2014, according to Stats SA.

Its not feasible and certainly not competitive with other destinations, Michael Tollman, CEO of South African tourism group Cullinan Holdings, told media after the biometric requirements were first announced. Other destinations are doing all they can to make visas easier because they recognise the value of the Chinese tourist market.

The added requirement that children from non-exempt countries travelling to and from South Africa carry certified, unabridged birth certificates, as well as a letter of consent in cases where a child was travelling with a single parent or a relative, is also set to be relaxed. The rule had been put in place in June of last year.

In addition, the Department of Home Affairs is reportedly considering a proposal to lift visa requirements for inbound travellers from China, Russia and India, and grant visas on arrival for visitors that have already been cleared to travel to the US, the UK or Canada, given those countries rigorous screening procedures.

While the reforms have been broadly welcomed by the local tourism industry, concerns remain over how long it will take to roll out the amendments, with some officials saying the full range of revisions could take up to a year to put in place. In the current economic climate, with everything else that is occurring, we are in desperate need of these funds coming into the country, and the door is ajar but its not open," Donovan Muirhead, chairman of the National Accommodation Association of South Africa, told local media in February.

Cost benefit

While the country is facing some serious economic headwinds, there is a silver lining, as some of them may inadvertently improve South Africas attractiveness as a holiday destination over the coming year.

In addition to relaxed visa regulations, depreciation of the rand, which lost more than 25% of its value against the US dollar last year, could help make South Africa a more attractive tourist destination in 2016, as cross-country travel and accommodation become more affordable. Moreover, with the real cost of overseas travel pushed up by a weaker rand, domestic tourism could prove to be a more popular choice for South African vacationers this year, helping to drive up local spending.

More robust sector growth could yield dividends for the broader economy, with tourisms direct and indirect contribution to GDP reaching 9.4% in 2014. Tourism also accounts for 9.9% of total formal employment, at around 1.5m jobs, according to data from the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Nonetheless, South Africa will likely have to contend with similar pressures as many other major tourist markets, with poor GDP growth in key source countries expected to weigh on sector results in 2016.

This South Africa economic update was produced by Oxford Business Group.
Africa is endowed with numerous natural resources including oil and gas, forests, wildlife, and massive water bodies including some of the most stunningly beautiful lakes in the world. From crystal-clear waters that give mirror-like reflections to hypnotic ripples whose effect create an amazing allure, here are the most spectacular lakes in Africa to float and sail.

Lake Tanganyika

Despite its breath-taking scenery, Lake Tanganyika is a glamorous source of pride for four African countries; Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ranked the longest freshwater and the second deepest lake in the world, after Lake Baikal in Russia, at 4,710 feet, its extensive horizon is a stunning view to behold. Its age and diversity has contributed to the evolution of numerous and unique aquatic life, with over 350 species of fish said to inhabit the lake. For adventure buffs, Lake Tanganyika offers several classic activities such as scuba diving, snorkeling and fishing among others.

Lake Nakuru

Its surface is covered by pink flamingos (attributed to the abundance of algae) that makes for a spectacularly inexplicable aura and a paradise for photographers. Lake Nakuru is protected by Lake Nakuru National Park and is found on Kenyas Great Rift Valley. It also boasts strikingly beautiful surrounding escarpment and scenic crests, so stunning and soothing to any traveler. The natural beauty is complemented by the wildlife in its nearby habitation.

Lake Bogoria

If you thought you had enough of Flamingos without seeing another of Kenyas pride, Lake Bogoria, think again. Nothing can beat the views of pink in the backdrop of green flora. The lake is most popular for its striking geysers, hot springs that are a tourist attraction. Lake Bogoria Resort & Spa is among the many accommodation options available for those taking their sweet time to enjoy the splendid lakeside vacation.

Lake Naverone

South Africas Lake Naverone is an irresistible water body whose charisma is drawn from its consummate serenity. It is in the Southern Drakensberg and offers amazingly breathtaking vacation sites and numerous lodges and cottages within its surroundings.

Lake Assal

Is Djibouti on your travel bucket list and you are wondering which destinations to visit once in the country? Lake Assal is one spot you will not want to miss out on as its shallow depth creates a geologic wonder. The Lake is one of the hottest places on earth with temperatures reaching a high of 50C during the day. The solid salt bed evaporates, creating a photogenic beauty.

Lake Retba

A first-time visitor to Lake Retba also known as Lac Rose in the north of the Cap Vert peninsula in Senegal, will be taken on a great adventure by the vivid pink color especially during the dry season between November and June. The color is the result of the lakes high salt content which attracts the Dunaliella salina bacteria, that produces a red pigment. The Pink Lake of Senegal is truly unique to the African continent.

Lake Bunyonyi

A boat ride in the refreshing beautiful Lake Bunyonyi, which is also known as place of many little birds, is beyond fascinating. Located South West of Uganda and close to the Rwandan Border between the districts of Kabale and Kisoro, Lake Bunyonyi is enclosed by opulent green hills. Its 29 islands strewn across the lake are made of different sizes and shapes - a magical view to behold.
SAN FRANCISCO: Yahoo provided more details on Wednesday about an epic hack of its services, including that the culprits may have planted software "cookies" for ongoing access to users' accounts.

In revelations that could jeopardize the company's pending $4.8 billion acquisition by US telecom giant Verizon, the internet pioneer said it was trying to pin down when it first knew its system had been breached and whether hackers gave themselves a way to get back into accounts whenever they wished.

"Forensic experts are currently investigating certain evidence and activity that indicates an intruder, believed to be the same state-sponsored actor responsible for the security Incident, created cookies that could have enabled such intruder to bypass the need for a password to access certain users' accounts or account information,"

Yahoo said in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

There is no evidence the state-sponsored actor is still active in the California-based company's network, Yahoo told regulators. Investigators are also trying to figure out how many people at Yahoo knew about the hack in late 2014, when the breach took place, according to the filing.

Yahoo announced the breach in September, saying it affected at least 500 million customers.

Stolen user information included names, email addresses and answers to security questions, but did not include payment card data or unscrambled passwords, according to Yahoo. The company warned users after checking into a hacker's claim of having stolen data.

Yahoo said in the SEC filing that law enforcement officials this week shared more data that a hacker claimed was pilfered from Yahoo, saying it was checking the authenticity. There have been 23 lawsuits filed on behalf of Yahoo users claiming they were harmed by the hack, according to the filing.

A Verizon executive overseeing the purchase of Yahoo said last month that the deal was moving ahead pending the outcome of an investigation into the hack.

"We are not going to jump off a cliff blindly, but strategically the deal still does make sense to us," Verizon executive vice president Marni Walden said at a technology conference in California.

"What we have to be careful about is what we don't know."

He declined to comment on what information or circumstances might cause Verizon to walk away from the deal inked in July. The company said earlier this month that the breach affecting Yahoo customers could have a "material" effect on the acquisition. Yahoo also warned of the possibility in its filing.

The use of the term "material" suggests a substantive change in Yahoo's value that was not previously known, and which could allow the telecom group to lower its offer or scrap the deal.

Source: AFP
Cisco yesterday released its Global Cloud Index (2015-2020), which reveals that global cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020. This rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures and their ability to scale quickly and support more workloads than traditional data centres.

With greater virtualisation, cloud operators are also able to achieve greater operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance. To better understand data centre growth, new analysis on application workloads was developed for this years report. The following business and consumer projections were revealed.

Business

 By 2020, business workloads will account for 72% (344.5 million) of total data centre workloads, compared to 79% (142.3 million) in 2015 (2.4-fold growth).

 By 2020, compute workloads will account for 29% of total business workloads, compared to 28% in 2015.

 By 2020, collaboration workloads will account for 24% of total business workloads, compared to 25% in 2015.

 By 2020, database/analytics/Internet of Things (IoT) workloads will account for 22% of total business workloads, compared to 20% in 2015.

Consumer

 By 2020, consumer workloads will account for 28% (134.3 million) of total data centre workloads, compared to 21% (38.6 million) in 2015 (3.5-fold growth).

 By 2020, video streaming workloads will account for 34% of total consumer workloads, compared to 29% in 2015.

 By 2020, social networking workloads will account for 24% of total consumer workloads, compared to 20% in 2015.

 By 2020, search workloads will account for 15% of total consumer workloads, compared to 17% in 2015

The IT industry has taken cloud computing from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution. With large global cloud deployments, operators are optimizing their data centre strategies to meet the growing needs of businesses and consumers, said Andy MacDonald, vice president Global Service Providers; Middle East, Africa and Russia, Cisco.

Hyperscale data centre impact

For the first time, Cisco also quantified and analysed the impact of hyperscale data centres. These data centres are expected to grow from 259 in 2015 to 485 by 2020. Hyperscale[1] data centre traffic is projected to quintuple over the next five years. These infrastructures will account for 47% of total data centre installed servers and support 53% of all data centre traffic by 2020.

A key infrastructure trend is transforming hyperscale (and other) data centres. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are helping to flatten data centre architectures and streamline traffic flows. Over the next five years, nearly 60% of global hyperscale data centres are expected to deploy SDN/NFV solutions. By 2020, 44% of traffic within data centres will be supported by SDN/NFV platforms (up from 23% in 2015) as operators strive for greater efficiencies.

Middle East and Africa Global Cloud Index forecasted highlights and projections

Data centre traffic highlights

 In Middle East and Africa, data centre traffic will reach 328 Exabytes per year (27 Exabytes per month) by 2019, up from 82 Exabytes per year (6.8 Exabytes per month) in 2014.

 In Middle East and Africa, data centre traffic will grow 4.0-fold by 2019, at a CAGR of 32% from 2014 to 2019.

 In Middle East and Africa, data centre traffic grew 40% in 2014, up from 59 Exabytes per year (4.9 Exabytes per month) in 2013.

 In Middle East and Africa, 59.9% of data centre traffic will remain within the data centre by 2019, compared to 74.0% in 2014.

 In Middle East and Africa, 33.0% of data centre traffic will travel to end users by 2019, compared to 18.9% in 2014.

 In Middle East and Africa, 7.1% of data centre traffic will travel between data centres by 2019, compared to 7.1% in 2014.

 In Middle East and Africa, consumer data centre traffic will represent 65% of total data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 32% in 2014.

Cloud traffic highlights

 In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic will represent 86% of total data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 61% in 2014.

 In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic will reach 280 Exabytes per year (23 Exabytes per month) by 2019, up from 50 Exabytes per year (4.2 Exabytes per month) in 2014.

 In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic will grow 5.6-fold by 2019, at a CAGR of 41% from 2014 to 2019.

 In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic grew 61% in 2014, up from 31 Exabytes per year (2.6 Exabytes per month) in 2013.

 In Middle East and Africa, consumer will represent 61% of cloud data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 30% in 2014.

Traditional traffic highlights

 In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic will represent 14% of total data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 39% in 2014.

 In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic will reach 47 Exabytes per year (4.0 Exabytes per month) by 2019, up from 31 Exabytes per year (2.6 Exabytes per month) in 2014.

 In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic will grow 1.5-fold by 2019, at a CAGR of 9% from 2014 to 2019.

 In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic grew 16% in 2014, up from 27 Exabytes per year (2.3 Exabytes per month) in 2013.

 In Middle East and Africa, consumer will represent 89% of traditional data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 35% in 2014.
The Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPI) has been the cause of much concern in the South African business landscape. Promulgated in 2013, it has not yet come into effect entirely, but once it has been implemented businesses will have one year to comply with the regulations laid down in the Act.

Intended to give effect to the constitutional right to privacy, PoPIs main aim is to prevent the unlawful disclosure of personal information and to ensure that all South African businesses conduct themselves responsibly when collecting, processing, storing and sharing personal information.

In effect, PoPI declares personal information to be a precious commodity, and grants individuals certain rights of protection and the ability to exercise control over information that is personal. What does this mean for businesses? South African companies are going to have to make some serious changes when it comes to their record and data management policies. While PoPIs requirements might appear to be onerous at first glance, it must be borne in mind that the end goal  protecting personal information that is of business value  is a worthwhile undertaking for businesses and the journey of achieving PoPI compliance will unlock a number of benefits.

PoPI unlocked

When it comes to personal information (any information that relates to an individuals identity, contact details, gender, race, criminal record or financial and educational information to mention a few) businesses are going to have to rethink their processes and strategies. PoPI requires that personal information of individual and juristic entities be sufficiently safeguarded and used in a manner that facilitates transparency regarding the types of information that can be processed and for what purpose.

PoPI regulates how information is used, the manner and reason for which it is processed (through the information management lifecycle, from collection, to usage, sharing, disposal and archiving) and also regulates who such information is shared with.

Whether the Protection of Personal Information Act is a friend or foe might seem to depend on which side of the fence youre sitting on. The reality is that PoPI will be enforced and while the date might not be set in concrete, its better for organisations to think about compliance now before it becomes a matter of urgency. From an IT perspective, many organisations have the tendency to think its an IT problem, therefore IT should be accountable for presenting a solution. This is misguided because while IT will make it easier for a business to manage and adhere to PoPIs requirements, IT is not in itself the panacea for the challenges of PoPI.

For businesses, achieving compliance with PoPI might seem complicated but with the right advice and approach it is possible to start with the basics now in order to build a foundation for compliance in the future. For organisations that process any personal information, this means rethinking record and information management policies in order to fulfil obligations imposed by PoPI.

Businesses will only be able to collect information as it relates to a specified purpose, and consent will need to be obtained before the information can be collected. As such, businesses will have to take reasonable measures to secure the information gathered, but may not keep it for longer than is reasonably needed.

They will thus be required to implement a retention and deletion policy within a bigger data management framework. On the other hand, individuals will now have the right to request access to their personal information held by business entities, including the nature of such information, as well as details of third parties that have shared in their information.

The implications of such rights will mean that businesses will need to locate personal information and have an associated history of that informations usage. This becomes complicated when personal information is contained in correspondence (like email) or is paper-based, or has already been archived. In short, PoPI has highlighted the need for South African businesses to handle and manage their data better and more effectively.

Unlocking the benefits of PoPI

With the correct legal advice and an appropriate data storage and management system implemented in the IT environment, it is possible for organisations to start unlocking the benefits of PoPI. This requires a change in mindset that will see data take its place as the lifeblood of every organisation and guarded jealously. Why? Because data is the only thing in a business that cannot be replaced. It is possible to replace the people, the network, the infrastructure and the equipment, but data cannot be replaced and as such has an intrinsic value to the business.

Organisations need to start thinking about managing their data better, not just because legislation tells us to do so, but because doing so makes good business sense. Instead of implementing isolated solutions for gathering, processing, backing up and archiving information, businesses should implement a unified platform for data management. This makes PoPI compliance attainable.

Partnering with a trusted data management solution provider in a vendor-neutral, locally-hosted data centre is a smart move, because a unified platform will make the processes more streamlined and cost-effective. Such a platform will make it easy to gather, process, retain, back-up, archive, expire or place certain information on hold. A cohesive management platform catalogues and indexes every piece of data it touches within an environment, making it easier to locate and manage. In addition to protecting clients and customers personal information and maintaining business integrity, once organisations are collecting and managing data more effectively, theyll be in a position to leverage that information.

Many businesses in South Africa may still be dragging their feet when it comes to adhering and following regulations set out in the PoPI Act but its implementation is imminent. Businesses should consider partnering with right data management specialist in preparation of the enforcement of the PoPI Act. Furthermore, they will be able to turn what may see as an onerous exercise into one that delivers real value.
The Constitutional Court on Wednesday ordered that the management of SA's Electronic National Traffic Information System (eNatis) be handed back to the government from private operator Tasima by the end of the year.

The long-running dispute over eNatis has sucked in former transport minister Sbu Ndebele, who was recently recalled from his posting asthe country's High Commissioner to Australia. Ndebele, who was the political head of the department when this happened, is accused of receiving more than R10m in bribes from Tasima and is due to appear in the Commercial Crimes Court in December.

The system enables the department to regulate and administer the licensing of all vehicles, learner drivers and drivers' licences, vehicle roadworthiness tests as well as the general implementation of the road traffic legislation.

Unlawful extension

The Constitutional Court on Wednesday found that a five-year extension won by Tasima to run the system from 2010 was unlawful, ordering that it be handed over to the Road Traffic Management Corporation within 30 days. At the end of the contract in 2007, Tasima was given a month-to-month contract to run the eNatis until a disputed five-year contract extension signed by the then transport department director-general George Mahlalela in May 2010.

"The merits of the challenge are nonetheless compelling. A web of maladministration surrounds the granting of the extension," said the majority judgment read by Justice Sisi Khampepe. The court upheld that the extension of the contract was unlawful, but noted that allegations of fraud and corruption were not properly made and were not considered by lower courts.

Tasima continues to deny the veracity of these allegations, which were not considered by the Constitutional Court. The company is wholly owned by Thuthukani Information Technology Services, which is jointly owned by technology entrepreneurs Fannie Mahlangu and Zuko Vabaza. Tasima and the Department of Transport are expected to meet in 10 days to discuss the terms transfer.

"No constitutional principle allows for an unlawful administrative decision to 'morph into valid act'.

"However, for the reasons developed through a long string of this court's judgments, that declaration must be made by a court," the judgment read. Should no agreement be reached, the original migration plan established in a 2001 agreement would be implemented.

Speaking outside the court, Transport Minister Dipuo Peters described the ruling as a "victory for all South Africans". The personal information of South African motorists would be handed back to the government department, which had been aligning its budget along with its entities in preparation to take over the management of the system.

The continued delays had contributed to qualified audit opinions, she said.

Source: Business Day
The online marketing world is changing at a very rapid pace. New tools and strategies are always emerging for driving traffic, increasing social engagement, building an email list, increasing conversions and improving search engine rankings. Therefore, business owners, marketers and bloggers must always be on top of their game in order to stay ahead of the competition. The good news is that there are many online marketing experts that you can learn from on a daily basis:

 Hongqi Zhang via 123RF

1. Neil Patel

Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSMetrics and CrazyEgg. Together with his co-founder Hiten Shah, Neil has created great tools that have been used by numerous online marketers all over the world. He writes about topics such as growing a blog audience and improving search engine rankings. His articles have been published on several major publications, as well as his own NeilPatel.com blog.

2. Melissa Mackey

Melissa Mackey is a marketer with years of experience in the industry. She is a supervisor at Gyro, one of the most recognised B2B agencies globally. She contributes regularly on The SEM Post and SEW, as well as on her own blog beyondthepaid.com. Her popular articles include Google Has Become Yahoo and Why We Need Control in PPC. Melissa is also a sought after speaker at conferences such as HeroConf, SES and SMX.

3. Angie Scottmuller

Angie is the growth marketing consultant at the Artisan Interactive Marketing and Consulting Services. She is a well known speaker at conferences where she empowers participants with free power tools, latest tactics and practical skills. Angie has been recognised by The Entrepreneur and Forbes as one of the top online marketers in the world. She has written numerous articles including Mobile Landing Page Optimization  10 Best Practices for Success and Color Usability: 4 Keys to Clockwork Conversion.

4. Perry Marshall

Perry Marshall is one of the top sales growth experts in the world. He has carried out successful AdWords campaigns for companies all over the world through his company, Perry S. Marshall and Associates. In addition, he has written several books on the topic of online marketing, including An 80/20 Approach to More Traffic and Conversions, and Profits. Perry has spoken at conferences in countries such as Australia, Israel, Canada and the U.S.

5. Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee, the co-founder of We-Care.com and Didit.com, is a recognised authority in the field of Search Engine Marketing. He is the creator of the Maestro, a search campaign technology that has become very popular with many companies. Kevin has been acknowledged as one of the most influential marketers by Deloittes Fast 500 and Inc 500.

6. Justin Cutroni

Justin Cutroni is an international speaker, blogger and author. He is also an evangelist for Google, and has helped create the Google Analytics training courses. Cutroni offers valuable tips on his own blog Cutroni.com, as well as on other leading publications. He is also the author of several books including Google Analytics.

7. Ramon Ray

Ramon Ray is a well-known entrepreneur as well as a best-selling author. One of his most popular books is the Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing. In addition, Ramon is an event host/speaker that has shared the stage with the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Daymond John and Seth Godin. He has even interviewed President Obama. Ramon is an expert in a wide range of technologies including online software, mobile computing and social media. He has been quoted on several major publications including Inc. Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine and the New York Times.
Exploring Form and Function Part Two with Gangs of Ballet

Much like their captivating live performances, sitting across from the MTV MAMA Award winning band, Gangs of Ballet, was both energising and thought-provoking. The trio, namely Brad Klynsmith, Josh Klynsmith and Jono Rich, lead me into the realm of the South African music industry and discussed their refreshingly authentic approach to their latest EP Form and Function Part 2, the second in the Form and Function trilogy.

Jono Rich, Josh Klynsmith and Brad Klynsmith. Photographer:  Craig Scott The band started as a side project in Durban, but soon went mainstream with the release of its first single Breaking the Silence back in 2011. Known to experiment with a mix of alternative, melodic, anthemic, electronic and dance music, the five times SAMA nominated band is a highly recommended act to witness live. Since the band is currently on tour, fans in Cape Town can catch the band at Cafe Roux in Noordhoek tonight (Friday 11 November). Heres what they have to say about their work Congratulations on your recent release of Form and Function Part 2. What inspired you to self-produce the EP? Congratulations on your recent release of. What inspired you to self-produce the EP? [Brad] The self-production in our hometown is one of the most homegrown of our recordings that weve done in a long time. I think that you can feel the energy around the sound, thats different to part one. I think were getting more and more honest with our music. Some of it isnt so much insight into Gangs, but the spirit of it is, whereas other songs like Follow, Life Goes On and The Wind are fairly telling, honest songs. I hope we get more and more honest about where we are in life. Its vulnerable though. 80% of people like beats, but when the 20% ask you about your lyrics, you find yourself in a vulnerable position.

[Josh] When we wrote our first EP back in 2011, we werent trying to get on radio. We just wrote songs which we thought were cool. Then that got on radio and, the next minute, this was our livelihood.

As much as you dont want peoples opinion to affect you, it does. Theres an expectation that you need to get something on air, so that you can carry on with your career. I think with this last EP, this is now becoming less and less of a thing for us. Not that we hate what we originally brought out, but some of that was definitely prescribed. Thats why we produced this new album ourselves. If it gets on radio, thats great!

What is the meaning behind the lyrics in Form and Function Part 2? What is the meaning behind the lyrics in

[Brad] Its song dependent, but I think theyre telling of where our headspace has been. Its been a challenging last year for Gangs. Weve really had to try push through a little bit. Its been an emotional year trying to succeed, while facing highlights and lowlights. For example, while Life Goes On is an obvious lyric, at the end of the song its big and bold and chaotic, so thats showing that life cant really be pinned down.

However, the tone of the album is actually quite light. We feel lighter now than we did a year ago. Its been a year of shedding.

Tell us about your songwriting process. Tell us about your songwriting process.

[Brad] Josh and I are basically the songwriters, but I do say that lightly, as we are the initial concept creators, but then whatever comes out as Gangs is very much a team effort. Id say almost all the songs weve written are 50/50 Josh and I. We then take that to the band room and get the actual Gangs sound. Its interesting, if you add or subtract a person from the creation pool, the whole sound changes.

Following on from my previous question, when or where do you have your best song ideas? Following on from my previous question, when or where do you have your best song ideas?

[Josh] I dont listen to radio when I drive, so Ill often have ideas while Im driving.

Sometimes Ill have ideas in the surf. Now thats an annoying one, because you cant record it anywhere. For one of the songs on this new EP Something, I had an idea just as I was paddling out for a surf with Brad. I was stuck with it and found myself literally singing this in my head for two hours. Eventually, I ran back to my car and put it on my phone!

 Craig Scott

You mention you dont listen to radio, what do you guys feel about radio in SA? You mention you dont listen to radio, what do you guys feel about radio in SA?

[Jono] A lot of what radio used to be isnt anymore. Its become pretty prescribed now. Back in the day, your typical radio DJ would choose songs that theyd enjoy, and it was an extension of their radio personality.

But radio today is also giving birth to a lot of people doing their own online stations. So, I think itd be interesting to see where things head and I think especially with everyone making their own playlists, its going to catch on pretty soon and okes are going to start catering to their audience.

To what extent is your music influenced by your fans requests? To what extent is your music influenced by your fans requests?

[Brad] I dont think we pander to fans. I think weve lost a lot of fans and gained a lot of fans, because people change. Im fans of bands, but dont listen to their latest album, because I dont enjoy it.

[Jono] A small part of your mind thinks I hope people like this, but this isnt the driving force behind what youre making. You make what you enjoy and what you are into.

What bands inspire you currently? What bands inspire you currently?

[Jono] Tame Impalas latest album has some really nice synth sounds. In fact, in our latest album, I was trying to reference a lot of late 80s synth sounds, too.

Navigating the SA music industry

What would you say is the greatest opportunity being SA artists? Likewise, whats the greatest challenge? What would you say is the greatest opportunity being SA artists? Likewise, whats the greatest challenge?

[Brad] I find the greatest opportunity is that, because its a smaller industry, you have access to more significant players in the industry - things like radio play, labels, festivals, promoters, etc. You dont have that elite vibe where you need to go through various networks to speak to the big dog. If youre willing to do a bit of work, you can accelerate your growth fairly quickly. The other pro is that smaller bands get to play to big crowds almost from inception. South Africa has an amazing festival culture with a minimum of 5,000 at shows and up.

Equally, theres a glass ceiling. Our industry probably fits into one of the genres in the States. You can only have so many fans in South Africa and our genre is a thin slice in a very small pie and of that genre, thats split between a couple of players, so your market share is tiny.

[Josh] The industry has also changed radically since we started. Theres a lot of guys coming through now who are getting a lot of radio play, but not a lot of shows. Bands cant start like we started in Durban. But a lot of shows are in Joburg and Cape Town. I would be interested to see who the next band is that will be able to live off being a band. If you want to be a full time band, you have to be in for serious graft.

Were in a fortunate position where we launched ourselves five years ago and have that many years hard work behind us.

Name three ways how bands can progress and stay relevant. Name three ways how bands can progress and stay relevant.

Keep writing good songs and stick to basic principles. Dont write stuff that wont get playlisted.



People want to listen to songs that they can remember, so sound choice is vital.



Keep a pulse on social. One of our music videos [Something] just dropped and received amazing attention. Im not saying we get social media right, but social media is huge and as important as music now.

Watch the music video for Something from Form and Function Part Two here:

Finally, apart from music, what other talents do you guys have? Finally, apart from music, what other talents do you guys have?

[Brad] I surf a lot - if I could choose to be a professional surfer or professional musician, Id choose to be a professional surfer, but Im not good enough to do that, so I have to do music. But I LOVE surfing.

[Jono] I used to be really good at spinning tops when I was younger - but that was primary school, hey. I also like designing and reimagining spaces, e.g. Shopfitting.

[Josh] I also like surfing and I love gaming - Im actually such a nerd! But its mostly just music.

Gangs of Ballet tour dates

11 November - Cafe Roux, Cape Town

12 November - Aandklas, Stellenbosch

13 November - V&A Waterfront, Cape Town

19 November - Sundowners, Johannesburg

25 November - River Town Shed, Durban

10 December - 5FM Live Loud, Johannesburg

Form and Function Part Two is available on iTunes

Facebook page | Instagram | @GangsOfBallet
For environmentalists and development experts, green is not just a colour, it also refers to activities that benefit the environment - the careful use of the earth's finite resources.

Africas policy wonks are already on the green bandwagon, having identified green industrialisation as the Holy Grail of the continents socioeconomic transformation. They believe infusing green initiatives into value-chain activities  during the sourcing and processing of raw materials, and the marketing and selling of finished products to customers  can cure economic stagnation.

At recent economic forums in NDjamena in Chad, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Abuja in Nigeria, Rabat in Morocco, even New York in the United States, and elsewhere, Africas experts have been expressing their support for green industrialisation.

Green industrialisation is the only way for Africa  it is a precondition for sustainnable and inclusive growth, highlights the Economic Report on Africa 2016: Greening Africas Industrialisation, published by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

Green initiatives will move Africa from the periphery to the centre of the global economy, said Fatima Denton, director of the ECAs Special Initiatives Division, during the African Development Week in Addis Ababa, in April.

Africas green industrialisation advocates have borrowed from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by world leaders in September 2015, and the Paris Climate Change Agreement of December 2015  both promote green initiatives.

Given that energy production and use contribute up to 87% of overall carbon dioxide emissions generated by humans, curtailing the exploitation of fossil fuels is at the centre of green advocacy. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas generates carbon dioxide, methane and water vapour, which in turn contribute to global warming.

However, it may be tough to sell Africas oil and natural gas exporters, like Angola and Nigeria, on limiting fossil fuel drilling. For both countries, oil accounts for more than 90% of exports and at least two-thirds of the national budget. The price of oil dropped from a peak of $100 a barrel in 2015 to about $50 by mid-June 2016. Before the oil price crash, even countries just discovering oil  like Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone  had anticipated a financial windfall from the sector.

These countries fear that limiting fossil fuel investments may severely damage their economies, although green advocates continue to insist that renewable energy, including energy generated by sun, wind, rain, waves and geothermal heat, all of which Africa has in abundance, is the way to go.

African countries must take advantage of new innovations, technologies and business models that use natural resources optimally and efficiently, notes the 2016 ECA economic report.

Kandeh Yumkella, who formerly held the title of special representative of the UN secretary-general for Sustainable Energy for All (a global initiative), offered a middle-of-the-road approach, recommending that Africa adopt an all-of-the-above energy strategy. Why should we burn gas? Why shouldnt we use gas for energy production? Yumkella asked rhetorically, in an interview with Africa Renewal.

Grudging acceptance

Globally, countries have been slow to embrace green technology because of the lingering belief that environmental regulations erode competitiveness, wrote Harvard University business professor Michael E. Porter and his co-author, Claas van der Linde, in an article for the magazine Harvard Business Review.

And in October 2011, Salifou Issoufou and Nama Ouattara, economists with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank respectively, presented a paper based on their research, titled Does Green Investment Raise Productivity? to a packed house at the African Economic Conference in Addis Ababa. Green investments lowered productivity growth, they told a shocked audience that included some of Africas top policymakers. Africa must adopt a cautious approach in attempting large-scale investments in green technologies, the researchers recommended.

The main problem with green investments, the 2011 paper showed, was that costs, made worse by regulations, further stifled interest. Investing in environmentally friendly agricultural equipment, for example, requires heavy upfront costs and the transition from the existing mode of production to the new one requires complementary technical innovation, wrote Issoufou and Ouattara at the time.

There is also the argument that since Africa contributes the least of all continents to global warming, it should not be compelled  or expected  to adopt policies that mitigate global warming.

Cost effective

Since 2011, when Issoufou and Ouattaras research findings lowered expectations for green industrialisation, the green economy train has been running at full speed due to several factors, including innovative technologies, which are bringing down the cost of renewables considerably. In addition, a crash in commodity prices, particularly in extractives, is sending some of Africas economies  such as Angola, Nigeria and South Africa  spiralling into chaos, forcing many countries to explore opportunities in green industrialisation.

Government leadership has been playing a key role in driving the growth of renewables, particularly wind and solar, in the power sector including many in Africa. As of early 2016, 173 countries had renewable energy targets in place and 146 countries had support policies. Cities, communities and companies are leading the rapidly expanding 100% renewable movement, playing a vital role in advancing the global energy transition.

Additional growth factors include better access to financing, concerns about energy security and the environment and the growing demand for modern energy services in developing and emerging economies.

Carlos Lopes, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, expressed optimism: We have the potential to access renewable energy at a time when the price of producing this energy is comparable to fossil fuel production.

Triple bottomline

According to Professor Mark Swilling of the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, the added value of renewables is their positive impact on the triple bottomline, a term that refers to a companys profit, its social responsibility activities and its environmental responsibility.

Africas capabilities for leapfrogging  another buzzword at economic forums  constitute a significant economic advantage for the region. Simply put, African countries implementing green initiatives wont have to go through every intermediary stage of technology, but

instead can directly access the latest available on the market. Africa can therefore be expected to take a giant developmental step: the leapfrog. Industrialised countries, on the other hand, will have to retrofit older infrastructure, said Lopes, a burdensome expense.

The ECA 2016 economic report states that Africas population is expected to hit 2-billion by 2050. The rapid growth of the working-age population (aged 2564), increasing urbanisation and the dominance of informal employment have weighty implications for the continents structural transformation. While young people provide a valuable resource to be harnessed in national development, they can also drive green industrialisation if they have green jobs in various sectors.

Many African countries are planning or already implementing green projects. In March 2014, an intergovernmental committee of experts from Central African countries (Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo and Sao Tome and Principe) met in Ndjamena to hash out a plan for transitioning to a green economies

Mariam Mahamat Nour, Chads minister of planning and international cooperation, said companies operating in the region must master production techniques based on low energy use.

Ethiopia in 2011 adopted a Climate Resilient Green Economy strategy as part of its ambitious plan to propel the country into middle-income status by 2025. The government is partnering with the private sector to help communities engage in sustainable farming.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a tree-cloning project is enhancing afforestation (establishing forests on lands that have not been forested for a long time) and reforestation (establishing forests where they have been destroyed). Climate change experts consider afforestation and reforestation effective methods of combating global warming. Despite the DRCs efforts, it is considering lifting the moratorium on logging that has been in place since 2002; this could threaten the forests, experts believe.

Last February the World Bank assisted Ghana in launching a Climate Innovation Centre in the capital, Accra, to support a green growth strategy. The centre is working with about a hundred local technology companies.

Nigerias Renewable Energy Programme is, among other things, executing a low-carbon development project to provide electricity for its capital city, Abuja, through improved insulation, energy-efficient devices for apartments and local power generation. The project, currently underway, is the first of its kind in Africa and the second in the world, after that of Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, according to Nigerias environment ministry. Also, the Tata Group of India is planning to establish in Nigeria a mass transit system of compressed natural gas vehicles to reduce emissions.

The ECA economic report recommends a step-by-step systemic approach, with a focus on value chains in agriculture, energy extractives, manufacturing, transport and water. Countries must identify green industrialisation entry points, set policies that support green industrialisation and mobilise resources from the public and private sectors, recommends the report.

The report further stresses that investments in infrastructure and innovation are critical and that countries should share best practices, strengthen national institutions and constantly review their green industrialisation policies and activities.

Overall, a general belief among Africas development experts is that going green  and clean  is no longer a moral question; it is now a socioeconomic imperative. They view it as the new pathway to Africas industrialisation.

Article published courtesy of Africa Renewal.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Barack Obama hands over the White House to Republican Donald Trump in 70 days, leaving the Democratic Party leaderless and with few up-and-coming stars among its aging stalwarts.

In what appeared to be a wave election, Republicans also secured majorities they already enjoyed in the Senate and the House and in governor's mansions and state legislatures across the country. Democrats were all but wiped out in places like Iowa and Kentucky.

The defeat of Hillary Clinton, an experienced Washington politician who sought common ground with Republicans, could make it more likely that the party will turn to its liberal wing as it grapples with its future. That's best represented by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom Clinton defeated in a long primary, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a pull-no-punches progressive darling.

The Democratic Party should remold itself in the image of Warren and Sanders "and offer a systemic critique of the rigged economy" that appeals to the same voters who put Trump over the top, said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

Green said Democrats must make a "conscious decision to separate themselves from the corporate villains who are to a large extent funding their campaigns."

Trump's open warfare with Republican leaders over the past year and a half obscured the extent of the Democrats' crisis, and they are only now beginning to contend with it.

"This is painful, and it will be for a long time," Clinton said in her concession speech Wednesday in New York. She implored those who want to fight for Democratic values  particularly young voters  to participate every day, not just every four years.

Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz urged careful deliberation as the Democratic reckoning begins. He said the "rush to recalibrate" strategy and messaging concerns him.

"Democrats need to take, not forever, but weeks and months to diagnose what just happened to us and why," he said.

But the outlook for Democrats may well get worse before it improves.

In two years, they will be defending about two dozen Senate seats, including at least five in deep-red states. That election could hand Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a filibuster-proof majority, further clearing the way for a conservative policy agenda.

"We have to ask ourselves what is wrong with our party," said Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, arguing it's at least in part a failure to connect with working-class people who are hurting.

One small Democratic bright spot this year was the election of three women of color to the Senate, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Kamala Harris in California and Tammy Duckworth in Illinois. At the same time, the party's marquee names are far older than the core Democratic coalition.

Sanders is 75, Warren 67 and soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer turns 66 this month. Across the Capitol, Democrats are led by 76-year-old Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.

In a telephone interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Sanders said Democrats must take a strong stand against the role of corporate interests in politics.

That millions of white working-class people voted for Trump "suggests that the Democratic message of standing up for working people no longer holds much sway among workers in this country," Sanders said.

Warren is speaking Thursday at an AFL-CIO executive council meeting. Although labor leaders spent millions of dollars backing Clinton, many union members, particularly in Rust Belt states that had been Democratic strongholds, appear to have voted for Trump.

"We should hear the message loud and clear that the American people want Washington to change," Warren is telling them, according to her prepared remarks. "Working families across this country are deeply frustrated about an economy and a government that doesn't work for them."

Democratic woes ripple into their party's infrastructure, as the Democratic National Committee in Washington struggles. Both the chairwoman who stepped down this summer and the woman who succeeded her in the interim have been dinged by embarrassing emails published by WikiLeaks after what the government believes was a Russian hack of their internal Democratic systems.

Sanders said he would support Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota to become the next chairman of the DNC.

Democrats emphasized their party's diversity, and some argued that Trump's singular appeal as a plain-spoken celebrity businessman does not translate into a wholesale voter rejection of Democratic policies.

Jaime Harrison, the South Carolina party chairman, downplayed the idea that Trump's nationalistic populism should necessarily push the Democratic Party leftward. "That might be overthinking what happened," he said.

Harrison argued it's more about finding the right messengers to take the Democratic platform to the pockets of the electorate that have drifted away from the party, naming New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker among others as potential role models for other Democrats.

Yet Walsh warned Democrats not to fall into the same trap as they did eight years ago, after an inspiring 47-year-old first-term senator with a powerful stage presence was elected president.

"Every now and then you get a shining star, and that person takes over the party," Walsh said. "And during that time you sort of lose the bench."
As La Funk vacate their full-time seat embedded in our office and move into the second tier of their IMPACT enterprise development programme with us, the opportunity arises for a hungry, aspiring young business to spend a year working with and alongside our teams. When an opportunity comes along to help a new company with great potential, we jump at the chance to get involved. Our IMPACT enterprise development programme is about doing just that, and through our work with young entrepreneurs, were excited by the opportunities that weve shared with these budding businesses and the impact that they, in turn, will have on us, our clients, and our industry.

With a fully integrated incubation structure, our enterprise development programme is a long-term partnership with the purpose of working with real people to take real actions and develop real results. For a full year, young businesses are given full access to our infrastructure, including (but not limited to) our internal teams, tech, networks, and facilities, giving them the boost they need to help get their business on track. After this embedded year, they are then given the opportunity to move on to the second tier of our enterprise development programme, staying connected to us and our clients and working alongside our teams when appropriate. And while weve invested in the impact this work has on empowerment and development, for us the real goal of the incubation programme is our commitment to genuine transformation.

To fill this role in 2017, your company will need to:

Be in the public relations/communications, hospitality, sports marketing, and/or sponsorship arenas



Be 100% black-owned



Be preferably female-led



Be young, but with at least one year of trade under your belt



Have an existing book of established clientele



Be ambitious and ready to hustle.

Having been in business for at least a year, youre looking for business guidance from an established agency with great experience across many business platforms in South Africa to help you to grow and become more  which is where we come in. With two incredible Lionesses at the forefront of our business in the form of Chief Growth Officer Kim Winstanley and Managing Director Jessica MacRoberts, we know that a female-led business in particular could learn a great deal from this unique opportunity.

As well as year-round access to both Kim and Jess, one of the biggest opportunities unlocked for our incubation teams is access to CEO John Paul Waites himself. Sitting directly across from JP right in the heartbeat of our business, the team will have the chance to spend a year learning just what its like to launch your business, what its like to be an entrepreneur, and what it takes to run your own business  all from someone who actually knows about it.

After a rewarding year with La Funk, we cant wait to meet the inspirational young companies that embrace this opportunity and take on the challenge. Real transformation is about much more than just codes. Its about spotting genuine talent and enabling young entrepreneurs. A chance like this is unprecedented, but it comes with responsibility. This access is wed with commitment, so we expect the incubation teams to turn up and hustle, says John Paul.

Ready to take up this remarkable opportunity and show us what youve got? Our next enterprise development intake runs for one calendar year, starting in January 2017  apply here.

Cant see the link? Send your application through to az.oc.prgxrw@7102vedtne




Cape Town-based PR agency Irvine Bartlett has rebranded to Irvine Partners, launched the Irvine Partners Education Trust and announced a partnership with black-owned media technology co-operative Collective Media.

The changes reflect growing client demand for the agencys services and its guiding ethos of partnership, said Irvine Partners CEO Rachel Irvine.

Building profitable, fast-growing and sustainable partnerships with clients, staff, suppliers, journalists, media houses and others in our value chain has seen Irvine Partners grow to become a high-impact agency in six short years. Our new name speaks to what we see as a critical success factor in our business today and into the future.

The agency has expanded its core service lines to include a digital division that provides campaign strategy, execution and evaluation  providing seamless end-to-end campaign service for clients. The agency has also established a dedicated content production unit and an in-house edit studio which creates high quality multimedia content.

The agency has also announced a partnership with Collective Media, a black-owned media technology co-operative. The partnership sees the co-op, a start-up that is one of Irvine Partners suppliers of content, named as the first beneficiary of the newly established Irvine Partners Education Trust.

Irvine said the partnership with Collective Media is a demonstration of the agencys commitment to growing high-potential small, medium and micro enterprises within its value chain into profitable, sustainable businesses.

The upheavals in the media ecosystem over the past two decades call for business models that suit new, dynamic realities. The relationship we have with Irvine Partners and within our co-operative of independent content producers allows us all to be more agile, adaptable and socially impactful in a fast-changing environment, said Osiame Molefe, MD of Collective Media.

Collective Media will be using the distribution from the Irvine Partners Education Trust to grow the skills, earnings and equity stake of young, black content producers, with a particular focus on young black women.
NEW YORK, USA - Light Reading, in partnership with KNect365, has launched a new online community, Connecting Africa, which will track, analyse and report on all the major developments in Africa's communications market, identifying the key trends and talking to the movers and shakers who are transforming the continent.

Connecting Africa will provide news coverage and analysis of the forces that are shaping digital Africa and will chart the latest developments, examining their potential to enable pivotal socioeconomic development.

The community will be the online portal that provides year-round coverage of a market that meets at the upcoming annual AfricaCom event in Cape Town, as well as at the regional events, Nigeria Com, East Africa Com and West Africa Com.

Connecting Africa will span all relevant topics and issues, including: mobile money; mobile content; broadband connectivity; digital inclusion; the role of OTT content and applications; the role of 4G and road to 5G; cloud, virtualisation, big data and other enterprise ICT developments; IoT and the development of smart cities; the startup community, and much more.

Leading the editorial coverage on Connecting Africa is Community Managing Editor Amy Turner, who will be supported by Light Reading's Editor-in-Chief Ray Le Maistre and News Editor Iain Morris.

"Many markets in Africa have made significant progress towards becoming a digital society, supported by enhanced international connectivity and greater investments in fixed and mobile connectivity, and have led the way in developing innovative mobile finance services," says Le Maistre. "This is a great time to be launching a dedicated online community that tracks the many different communications developments that are impacting individuals, businesses and whole nations."

"Like the region and sectors it serves, AfricaCom and its respective regional events have gone through a massive transformation this year, cementing their position at the forefront of the most dynamic markets and trends in the world," says Turner.

"The launch of Connecting Africa will see, for the first time, an online community serving both delegates of the KNect365 African portfolio of events, and the wider tech and telco community. This will facilitate a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the sector and the opportunities such insight can afford. In a telco sector worth more than $65 billion by 2018, Connecting Africa is undoubtedly the community for the architects of Africa's digital future."

AfricaCom's week-long festival of events takes place at the CTICC (Cape Town International Convention Centre), Cape Town, South Africa, November 14-18, 2016.
OWASCO  The rich sound of bagpipes filled Owasco Elementary School's gymnasium Thursday afternoon as children waved paper American flags high up into the air. About 30 veterans, spanning a range of service beginning with World War II until present day, were escorted to the front of the room before students' beaming faces.

After each veteran was introduced, students serenaded their special guests with a range of military songs from "Marines' Hymn" to "The Air Force Song." The veterans stood up for their respective songs, and the students waved their flags and clapped.

The assembly, however, was more than just about celebrating Veterans Day. For some students, it was much more personal. Ken Sargent, a speech therapist and one of the organizers of the ceremony, said about 95 percent of the attending veterans are family members of someone in the school.

That was the case for 8-year-old Aljay Henry. Aljay's older brother, 26-year-old Lamar Henry, attended on Thursday in his Army National Guard uniform.

"It was exciting," Aljay said, "because he never comes to school."

Lamar was happy, too, to be a part of the day's events. Stationed in Auburn and at times going up north to Fort Drum, he said it's important to show support for veterans all over the world.

"It was phenomenal," he said about the celebration. "It was a great experience. The kids were great."

Sargent, who has been helping to organize the ceremony since 2012, said it has grown over the years. Originally starting with about eight veterans, that number has nearly quadrupled. About five of those original veterans came back for the ceremony on Thursday, too, he said.

"It's hard because the younger kids don't really understand what it's all about, and you wouldn't expect them to understand," he said.

But one thing he asked all students to do between now and next year's ceremony is to say five words to every veteran a student sees: "Thank you for your service."

"That's your homework," he told the crowd. "Take that opportunity, boys and girls. Do yourself a favor, and do them a favor."
AUBURN  The news that the parking lot along Lincoln Street in Auburn could become the city's new regional welcome center brought mixed reactions from residents and area businesses that utilize the space.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo had announced Auburn as one of several sites across the central New York region to host a state-funded welcome center, and at Thursday night's Auburn City Council Meeting, Mayor Michael Quill had suggested the parking lot next to the Seward House and across from both the YMCA and City Hall be its location.

The city is expected to release requests for proposals to development firms on Monday, but city council will vote on the project site at the following Thursday night meeting. Quill could not be reached Friday afternoon for comment.

YMCA members often park in the lot, but in an email to The Citizen Friday afternoon, Chris Nucerino, CEO of the Auburn YMCA, said he did not have a comment as he had not spoken to Quill yet regarding the project.

That's a conversation Legislator Tim Lattimore, who represents District 13, said he hopes will happen soon.

"Whatever they (city officials) want to do, they're going to do," Lattimore said. "If the YMCA can somehow negotiate with the city and maybe grab that lot or stay in that lot in the back, then they wouldn't be losing any surface area."

Wearing gym clothes on Friday afternoon, Joel Weirick, of Auburn, parked his car in the Lincoln Street lot. He said that he often uses the parking lot when he goes to the YMCA, but that's the only time he uses it. He was surprised to hear it could be the new spot for the welcome center, but he would not be opposed to it. He's going to the gym to exercise, he said, so walking a little farther from the nearby city garage wouldn't hurt.

He was glad to hear about the welcome center taking more of a form, too.

"I would be willing to do the trade-off," Weirick said. "We need to have progress if we're going to be touting our city as 'History's Hometown.'"

Weirick said he did wonder what the Seward House Museum would do since that lot is often used for bus tours that drop off guests visiting the house. Billye Chabot, executive director of the museum, did not return calls for comment on Friday.

Angela Daddabbo, artistic director of the nearby Auburn Public Theater, said representatives from the city had contacted her about the project, and she thinks it's a great idea.

"We're in full support," she said. "Part of our mission is to need so much parking that we have to build 20 new parking garages all over Auburn, just to accommodate the people coming downtown, and we can't wait for more traffic jams and longer lights, and backed up traffic. That's part of our mission statement here, so no problem. Anything that honors Harriet Tubman, all joking aside, is totally on track with our mission."

While the welcome center will be separate from a visitor center planned for Harriet Tubman National Park, the regional welcome center will promote central New York and local attractions, as well as local goods through a Taste NY market.

Lattimore said he hopes the city will consider making the center a taxable property, since many of the downtown buildings are tax-exempt.

"It would be nice if somehow a new building in downtown would help pull the tax wagon  the burden that's getting bigger and bigger," he said.
That the poem "In Flanders Field" wasn't written by an American hearkens back to the World War that prompted Veterans Day as a national holiday for the United States. The Academy of American Poets notes in its listing for Canadian poet John McCrae:

In April 1915, McCrae was stationed in the trenches near Ypres, Belgium, in an area known as Flanders, during the bloody Second Battle of Ypres. In the midst of the tragic warfare, McCraes friend, twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed by artillery fire and buried in a makeshift grave. The following day, McCrae, after seeing the field of makeshift graves blooming with wild poppies, wrote his famous poem In Flanders Field, which would be the second to last poem he would ever write. It was published in Englands Punch magazine in December 1915 and was later included in the posthumous collection In Flanders Fields and Other Poems (G. P. Putnams Sons, 1919). Soon after writing In Flanders Field, McCrae was transferred to a hospital in France, where he was named the chief of medical services. Saddened and disillusioned by the war, McCrae found respite in writing letters and poetry, and wrote his final poem, The Anxious Dead. In the summer of 1917, McCraes health took a turn, and he began suffering from severe asthma attacks and bronchitis. McCrae died of pneumonia and meningitis on January 28, 1918. In Flanders Field became popular almost immediately upon its publication. It was translated into other languages and used on billboards advertising Victory Loan Bonds in Canada. The poppy soon became known as the flower of remembrance for the men and women in Britain, France, the United States, and Canada who have died in service of their country. Today, McCraes poem continues to be an important part of Remembrance Day celebrations in Canada and Europe, as well as Memorial Day and Veterans Day celebrations in the United States.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Public Affairs tells this story:

McCrae's poem had a huge impact on two women, Anna E. Guerin of France and Georgia native Moina Michael. Both worked hard to initiate the sale of artificial poppies to help orphans and others left destitute by the war. By 1920, when Guerin, with the help of the American Legion, established the first poppy sale in the U.S., the flower was well known in the allied countries  America, Britain, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand  as the "Flower of Remembrance." Proceeds from that first sale went to the American and French Children's League.

Guerin had troubles with the distribution of the poppies in early 1922 and sought out Michael for help. Michael had started a smaller-scaled Poppy Day during a YMCA conference she was attending in New York and wanted to use the poppies as a symbol of remembrance of the war. Guerin, called the "Poppy Lady of France" in her homeland, and Michael, later dubbed "The Poppy Princess" by the Georgia legislature, went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) for help.

The poppy was adopted as the official memorial flower of the VFW at its national convention in Seattle, Wash., in August 1922, following the first nationwide distribution of poppies ever conducted by any veterans organization.

In 1923, faced by a shortage of poppies from French manufacturers, the VFW relied on New York florists to make up the difference. This was a huge setback, however, and led to the idea by VFW officials to use unemployed and disabled veterans to produce the artificial flower. This concept was approved in late 1923 and the first poppy factory was built in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1924. This provided a practical means of assistance to veterans and also ensured a steady, reliable source of poppies. Veterans at Department of Veterans Affairs medical facilities and veterans homes help assemble the poppies, and each year the VFW distributes roughly 14 million worldwide.

It was around the same time the first poppy factory was built that the VFW registered the name "Buddy Poppy" with the U.S. Patent Office. The term "Buddy" was coined by the poppy makers as a tribute to their comrades who did not come home from the war or who were scarred and crippled for life.

The VFW celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Buddy Poppy as its official flower in 1997. While profits from its sales have helped countless veterans and their widows, widowers and orphans over the years, the poppy itself survives as a perpetual tribute to those who have given their lives for the nation's freedom.

It's Veterans Day--originally Armistice Day, as the VA history of the holiday notes. As a thank you to all veterans, Bluestem offers this reading of the poem, by Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen, who died yesterday.

Photo: Veterans, from Stars and Stripes.

If you appreciate our posts and original analysis, you can mail contributions (payable to Sally Jo Sorensen, 33166 770th Ave, Ortonville, MN 56278) or use the paypal button in the upper right hand corner of this post.

Or you can contribute via this link to paypal; use email sally.jo.sorensen at gmail.com as recipien
He said that four BGP officials from Myient Hlut BGP Camp came into the village and set fire to the teachers house, which is close to the BGP camp, at around 7.00pm on 7 November. He also said that there had been Rohingya sentries on duty at an outpost, but that the BGP men had forcibly tied them up before taking pictures of them.

As the BGP men were trying to set fire to the house a soldier from the Burma Armys Military Securiy Affairs force (Sa Ya Pa) ordered the BGP men to stop torching the house, but they ignored him.

Refun, a local resident said that when they saw the fire villagers, including the Village Administration Officer Myient Hlut, rushed to the teachers house. They captured the BGP men and handed them over to the commanding officer of the Myient Hlut BGP Camp.

He told the villagers that he would handle the situation and solve the problem, according to a villager who did not want to be named.

But then, according to the villager, on the morning of 8 November BGP troops fired at a villager selling fowls, but fortunately he was not hit.

He also said that all the villagers of Myient Hlut are very frightened of the Burma Army and BGP troops because they fear that they will just indiscriminately attack villagers.

A Myient Hlut village elder said: The army and BGP are not scared of killing Rohingya people, torching homes and looting properties and there are no obstacles [to prevent them from doing so].

Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
The KNU joint secretary (2) Pado Mahn Mahn Mahn and the WWF-Myanmars country director Mr. A. Christy Williams signed the MOU at the Queen Palace Hotel in Mae Sot, Thailand on 8 November.

Padoh Mahn Mahn Mahn told KIC News that the two groups would work together to protect the forest and wildlife in KNU-controlled areas.

He said: The leaders of the KNU Forestry Department and the leaders of the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) have discussed this issue for the past one or two years. Our aim is to protect the forests and the wildlife.

He also said that for forestry conservation and development to succeed there needs to be more than just aid. The Burmese government also needs to recognise the action that the KNU are taking.

Under the MOU the KNU and the WWF will cooperate on projects to enhance forestry conservation, build the capacity of forest rangers, raise awareness amongst local residents, hold workshops and conduct research in the forests.

At the MOU signing ceremony the WWF-Myanmar country director, Mr. A. Christy Williams , told KIC News that WWFs aim is to cooperate with the KNU Forestry Department and to share experiences with and give technical assistance to the KNU members so that they will know how to conserve their forests.

This is the first time that the KNU have signed an environmental conservation MOU with the WWF, it will last for three years.

Reporting by Sa Isue for KIC News

Translated by Thida Linn

Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
Speaking at an Election Day Watch Party held yesterday morning, Mr Marciel said the party was an opportunity to celebrate democracy and elections which are an essential part of democracy.

The Election Day Watch Party was held from 8:00 until 11:00 am, with the US Ambassador briefly addressing guests including Yangon Chief Minister Phyo Min Thein and the media.

Speaking before the final results were in, Mr Marciel said tens of millions of Americans had voted in the election which saw Mr Trump standing against Democratic candidate Mrs Hillary Clinton in a tight race.

He said it was wonderful that Myanmar had had its own elections a year ago, one that saw Aung San Suu Kyi gain power. He stressed how good it was to celebrate how democracy had been brought to Myanmar.

The US Ambassador told Mizzima that both the Republican and Democratic parties in his country have shown strong support for democracy in Myanmar. But he added they will have to wait and see once the new government takes up office in Washington.

In a stunning upset, Republican contender Trump beat Clinton in the November 8 US presidential elections. The victory reverberated around the world with markets tanking and a slew of commentators chipping in on what this upset could mean for the US and the world.

Trump received congratulations from a range of leaders around the world including the Russian and Chinese governments, as well as right-wing leaders in Europe.
Myanmars prisons are globally notorious as sites of human rights abuses. It is heartening to see that the government and the countrys parliamentarians, many of whom endured torture and other ill-treatment in these same prisons, are considering crucial prison reforms. Now, they must ensure that no other prisoners are subject to the same fate, said Rafendi Djamin, Amnesty Internationals Director for South East Asia and the Pacific.

The July 2015 draft Prisons Law represents a significant improvement on the archaic laws that are currently in force and that, for decades, facilitated conditions where prisoners were tortured, cramped into small cells or confined in overcrowded spaces, denied clean water and adequate healthcare, and subject to punitive transfers, forced labour and other horrific punishments.

However, the draft law still falls far short of international human rights standards. The new Amnesty International briefing, Myanmar: Bring Rights to Prisons, details how the proposed legislation fails to prohibit torture and other ill-treatment or include safeguards against some of the worst abuses the countrys prison system has been known for, including unlawful detention and forced labour.

If Myanmar is serious about improving prisons conditions and generally preventing torture and other ill-treatment, it needs to cast light into the dark cells where prisoners are kept and enact reforms that are worthy of the ambition

As it stands, the draft will still leave people vulnerable to the human rights abuses that earned Myanmars prison system its bad name in the first place. If Myanmar is serious about improving prisons conditions and generally preventing torture and other ill-treatment, it needs to cast light into the dark cells where prisoners are kept and enact reforms that are worthy of the ambition, said Rafendi Djamin.

The briefing outlines how mandatory independent monitoring of prison conditions and the establishment of an independent complaints mechanism for prisoners will create greater transparency for a prison system that has long relied on secrecy.

Amnesty Internationals briefing also urges Myanmars lawmakers to introduce provisions in the draft law that will guarantee that minimum standards of health, food, potable water, accommodation, sanitation and hygiene are met. The organization also calls for provisions that address the special needs of juveniles and women and regulate the use of force by prison officials to be added.

At the same time, Amnesty International is recommending that problematic provisions in the draft law be removed. These include, for example, the resort to restraint and prolonged solitary confinement as disciplinary measures.

In the briefing, Amnesty International carries out a detailed legal analysis of the draft law and offers alternative language that will ensure that international standards, including the Nelson Mandela rules that set out a minimum level of humane treatment of all prisoners, are met.

We welcome the spirit behind the new draft prison law, which will replace laws that are more than a century old and have no place in a modern, rights-respecting society Rafendi Djamin, Amnesty International's Director for South East Asia and the Pacific

Our briefing is designed to help lawmakers with their task. We welcome the spirit behind the new draft prison law, which will replace laws that are more than a century old and have no place in a modern, rights-respecting society. The recommendations we have made are there to help Myanmar break with a tradition of appalling prison practices and move towards a prison system that is focused on rehabilitation which treats detainees humanely. said Rafendi Djamin.
The quarry projects have been given permission to operate in the nature conservation area. However, those project areas have been limited to the boundaries. Those areas have been places of previous quarry projects for a long time [ago]. The department permitted them to use those areas only because they have historically been quarry sites. It didnt just permit what they requested, it was only after careful checking, said U Kyaw Zaw, director of ministry office of forestry at the Ministry of Natural Resource and Environment Conservation.

However, the Mon State government was not informed of the quarry projects work permission in the Kaylatha Mountain nature conservation area.

Firstly, there is already a letter regarding the quarry project from the State level director. However, this letter is only out in accordance with the union-level director. Why are they not acknowledging that this place is a sanctuary area? On September 1, there was letter that said further quarry operations would damage the environment. Subsequently, on September 29, there was no remark on the quarry projects. Therefore, the letter that came out on September 1 and the letter on September 29 are complete contradictions. Both letters were sent from district to Union level departments. Displaying that the state-level department was not involved and that no sector of the State government was able to be involved, said U Tin Ko Ko Oo, of Belin Township Pyithu Hluttaw Representative.

U Tin Ko Ko Oo will question the permitted quarry project in the Kaylatha natural conservation area at the Hluttaw [parliament].

I already asked the Forestry Department for the documents regarding the Kaylatha area [projects]. These are concerning which areas the companies are allowed for quarry activities, which are for the prison, and which areas are for the village area. I will ask whether the prison [administration] area and the quarry sites are permitted by the forestry department. If they are not permitted, this must be stopped. What I understand is that Kaylatha Mountain is a sanctuary. Therefore, if the quarry projects are permitted, the question would be raised, what do they mean when they say they are working for natural environmental conservation?,said Belin Township Pyithu Hluttaw Representative.

Rock Well Mining Co., Ltd has been permitted 45 acres of land at the Kaylatha Mount for quarry production. The companys official U Than Zin Htun and U Min Thein Myint, director of Mon States Forestry Department signed the agreement on June 1.
From the outset, the UWSA has been quite skeptic to participate in the Union Peace Conference (UPC), also dubbed 21st Century Panglong (21CPC), held from 31 August to 3 September, even though it had sent in a low-level functionaries because of Chinas urging, while the NDAA was quite enthusiastic and participated in the gathering headed by its leader Sai Luen, also known as Lin Mingxian, until the end of the conference.

The UWSA, however, opted out of the conference after just a day of attending, stating unfair treatment and discrimination over status of participation. Reportedly, the Wa delegation was given observer status, instead of the full-fledged participant cards. Apologies from the conference conveners blaming technical error came to no avail, as the delegation left the conference the following day.

UWSA-NDAA soured relationship

The NDAA, based in eastern Shan States Mongla Township (officially known as Shan State Special Region 4), has traditionally maintained close relations with the Wa army, which is considered the largest ethnic militia force in Burma with a troop strength estimated at 20,000. Commonly referred to as the Mongla Group, the NDAA has around 3,000 soldiers, according to data from the Myanmar Peace Monitor.

On September 28, the UWSA sent in its Battalion 468  some 600 troops pulled into NDAA territory in about 60 trucks. The Wa forces seized three NDAA bases: two mountain bases, Loi Kiusai and Loi Hsarm Hsoom, and a checkpoint at Parng Mark Fai. More than 150 NDAA guards were captured in the raids.

The NDAA troops were released later, but the occupation of the military bases continue with more reinforcement, even after the negotiation conducted between the UWSA and the NDAA, reportedly with the Chinese mediator on the Chinese side, a few weeks ago.

The NDAAs drift towards the militarys and governments orbit worried the UWSA tremendously, which resulted in the occupation of the military outposts in Mongla considered to be militarily, logistically and economically strategic for the UWSA.

The NDAA has been demanding a self-administered zone for the Akha ethnic minority, which it has made known that if accepted would lead to its signing of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA).

This is relatively easy to achieve as according to U Ye Htun, a prominent former Shan MP during the previous regime, in his article in Democratic Voice of Burma on 8 November, the constitutions paragraph number 54 could make it necessary. He said, the concerned Chief Minister of State only needs to endorse the proposal and forward it to the President, where he could decide as he sees fit, without going through the parliament.

Besides the area being strategically important, it is also the territory that the UWSA wanted to incorporate into its Wa State aspirations, according to its historical claims document that was made known, during the 21st Century Panglong Conference.

Burma Armys ultimatum

The Burmese armed forces have ordered the United Wa State Army (UWSA) to withdraw all its troops from territory under the control of the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA), by 24 October deadline, in and around the town of Mongla in eastern Shan State, according to Luo Zai Nub, an official from the UWSA, reported SHAN.

We and the Mongla are brothers, he said. We are here to support each other. We have been here since 2009. We cannot move out if we do not get orders from our headquarters.

Luo Zai Nub said that on 22 October the day the official request of withdrawal was made, two Burmese government military jets flew overhead. The following day, Sunday, another four planes conducted reconnaissance missions over Mongla, which borders China.

The UWSA refused to obey the Burma Armys withdrawal deadline, but instead just sent a reply to the governments query on the situation, saying that it would resolve the conflict peacefully with the NDAA to the governments vice chairperson of Peace Commission (PC) Dr Tin Myo Win and Aung San Suu Kyis top peace negotiator.

Following the UWSA refusal to withdraw, the beefing up and reinforcement of the Burma Army was carried out. According to Janes Defence Weekly of 31 October, the Tatmadaw mobilized assets under the Kengtung-based Triangle Region Command, including infantry battalions, tribal militia units and Chinese-built PTL-02 armored fighting vehicles.

Consequently, according to Myanmar Times of 27 October, around a thousand troops of the UWSA were manning the occupied outposts.

Chinese mediation

According to U Ye Htun, the Shan politician and observer of Burmas politics, the UWSA seems to be keen on resolving its conflict with the Burma Army peacefully, although it wouldnt withdraw its troops from the occupation of three military outpost in Mongla.

He reasoned that the UWSA might have asked China to intervene, as Chief of the Joint Staff of the Peoples Liberation Army, General Fang Feng-hui invited Min Aung Hlaing and later also met Major General Yu Kun, political commissar of Yunnan military region.

According to Myawady News of 4 November, Min Aung Hlaing said the over 2,000-kilometer long border mostly shares with Yunnan Province. Most of the national races of both countries living on the border came from the same tribe so they can be called brethren. Now, we are continuing to further cement the amicability built by the former leaders of the two militaries (China and Burma). Efforts will also be made for continued exchange of goodwill visits, meetings for border affairs, promotion of military industry sector and military training and border security and development together with the Southern Theater Command.

On 28 October, BBC reported that NDAA and UWSA also met in China, which was said to be productive and smooth but reportedly the occupied outposts by the UWSA wouldnt be withdrawn.

Perspective

The unfolding political situation could be assessed in the light of national interest, ethnic groups aspirations, proxy war and deterrence.

First of all, Chinas first priority is to interact with Burma as a whole unit that caters to its national interest. This includes satisfying or fulfilling its energy hunger; global, regional economic schemes; and backing for its claim on what is being accepted international sea lane, including the sea territorial disputes with various Southeast Asian countries and so on. In other words, realization of the Irrawaddy Myitsone Dam, Salween Dam and the likes that have been stalling, Kyaukpyu-Kunming railway project and seeking endorsement of its one China policy and its claim of legitimacy rule over Xinjiang, coupled with the backing for its South China sea claims, among others.

As such, China is interested to deal Burma only as a whole unit so that its national interest could be realized accordingly, not selectively with ethnic groups along the border economically. This clearly rejects the Burmese militarys often stated rhetoric dismemberment notion of the country and statements such as losing an inch of the countrys territory wont be tolerated and dealt with decisively. China is not at all interested in the breaking up of Burma, in any way.

That is why China is for a peaceful Burma for its own reason and is ready to use its weight where necessary to achieve it.

Chinas urging to its proxies like UWSA and NDAA to participate in the last 21CPC after the Aung San Suu Kyi China visit is the case in point. But this doesnt mean China would join hands in using military pressure to disarm or block the border, to help Burma defeat the ethnic armies.

This is evident when one looks at the military hardware sales to both the Burma Army and also to the UWSA.

Khernsai Jaiyane, Director of the Pyidaungsu Institute when interviewed by SHAN on 4 November, regarding Min Aung Hlaings China visit, whether it could de-escalate the military confrontation between the Burma Army and the UWSA, replied: There are four or five possibilities. Number one is China supplies both Burma Army and also the UWSA. For example, China gives airplanes to the Burma Army and the anti-aircraft weapons to the Wa. What the Chinese want to say is that by going with this pattern, it doesnt want them to fight. For if there is war both sides would die and suffer. Civilian will lose the most.

Perhaps, like Khernsai said, the Chinese government looks at it involvement as a kind of deterrence to help avoid the war between Burma Army and the UWSA.

He added that the UWSA allies like Kachin Independence Army (KIA), Arakan Army (AA), Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA), Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and Shan State Army -North (SSA-N) are fighting the Burma Army. And if the UWSA will join the fray, the war will spread to northern, central and eastern parts of Shan State.

Particularly, he was quite concerned of a brewing proxy war, with Burma Army backed by one powerful nation and the Wa, by another. He said nobody could say for sure that the recurrence of China backing the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) during the Cold War scenario would not happen again, in the setup of China backing the UWSA.

As for the Min Aung Hliangs China visit, for now it seems the Chinese has been able to persuade the Burma Army not to opt for an open warfare against the UWSA. But also highly unlikely that Min Aung Hlaing was able to woo the Chinese to subdue the UWSA.

And where NDAA is concerned, it has to swallow the hard reality of having to agree to the UWSA troops stationing on its territory reluctantly, due to the security and strategic concern of the latter, for the time being.

All in all, it looks like that the UWSA has benefited in two ways by using the Chinese card. One is that it was able to stop the Burma Army military advance and likely offensive with the help of China and the other, it could pull the NDAA back from getting too close to the government, through the use of force and with argument that sacrificing the strategically important chunk of territory would be unwise, which is vital for the survival of both organizations.

For the time being, Chinese deterrence strategy and persuasion are able to defuse an all out war between the UWSA and the Burma Army. Only it is not clear, whether this would be the case the next time such confrontation occurs, without a comprehensive peace treaty and holistic political settlement still in sight.
Artificial Eggs Found In Supermarkets! Pulse oi-Syeda Farah

Everything that is made in China has its own guarantee. These guys can produce a replica of just about anything and this case is an example of it!

Various reports have suggested that there are many artificial eggs that are found in supermarkets. All these eggs are claimed to have been imported from China and the citizens claim that the eggs contain rubber and plastic in them!

Also Read: Blind Woman Has Bad News For Donald Trump

Various consumers across Kerala, India, claimed that the eggs they had brought did not appear normal, and they had an unusual texture, smelt bad and tasted different.

Some of the consumers even alleged that the egg shells were hard to crack and the inner membrane was made of plastic.

This created a havoc among people who panicked over the "Chinese eggs". The Health Minister had to get the rumours checked based on the media reports, as no official complaint was lodged yet.



The Kerala Veterinary and Animal Science University in Mannuthy has tested and validated that rumours about these crazy Chinese eggs were nothing but merely Chinese whispers!

The reports confirmed that the eggs in question were the real ones, and very old ones that were probably just rotten. They said that the eggs were frozen at the production plants and were stored for more than the desirable time. This could have been the possible reason that could have led them to rot!

Also Read: A Woman Who Gets 50 Orgasms Every Day!!

So, the claim of Chinese eggs that are made of plastic seems to be a hoax. On a lighter note, the question is, who named these eggs "Chinese"??

Photo Credit: Giphy
Boy found dead in abandoned well after 100-hour rescue Updated: 2016-11-11 07:02 (Xinhua)

SHIJIAZHUANG - A Chinese boy was finally found dead in an abandoned well in north China's Hebei Province on Thursday night after over 100 hours of desperate rescue.

Wu Sujie, a rescue official, said the boy was found without signs of life.



The boy, 6, fell down the 80-meter-deep dry well in Lixian County, Baoding City, on Sunday morning, when helping harvest vegetables with his father. His father put out a call for help on the social-networking app Wechat and rescuers and the public rushed to the scene to help in any way they could.



Over 500 rescuers and some one hundred excavators were involved in the rescue operation.



As the 30 centimeter-diameter well was too narrow for any adult to climb into, rescuers dug out the well to try and reach the boy.



The rescue had been hampered by the soft sandy soil, which is prone to collapse. Measures were taken to support the shaft during the excavation.



During the past days, many members of the public have volunteered to help the rescue by donating food and money. Locals also rushed to the scene to prepare food for the rescue team.

The story is being widely shared and discussed across the Internet, and live-broadcasts from the scene are also being streamed.
Four score and seven years ago ... Whenever I hear those powerful words I visualize the presence of Abraham Lincoln, commander-in-chief, providing solemn wisdom in dedicating an eternal memorial to fallen soldiers. The Gettysburg Address, simple words yet so poignant written by a leader who shepherded a young nation in the darkest of times, providing inspiration to keep our nation as one. President Lincolns immortal speech laid the historical foundation for our nations appreciation for those who serve in our military.

On Nov.11, Veterans Day as we know it appears on our calendars. As individuals, we pause, reflect and perhaps dig deeply into the wells of our hearts to remember and honor the fallen and the living who have served our nation.

As a teacher, it is not uncommon to respond to the students questions of What is Veterans Day? Why do we get a day off from school? As an educator promoting civic literacy it is extremely important for Americans to know the history of Veterans Day so that we may and honor all service members properly. Veterans Day has also become synonymous with recognizing the sacrifices made by all Americans living and deceased in keeping our nation and her people safe from conflict.

Ninety-eight years ago during The Great War (World War I), an armistice was declared in 1918 on the 11th hour of the 11th day, 11th month as there was a temporary cessation of fighting between the Allies and Germany. In 1919, President Wilson proclaimed Nov. 11 as the first Commemoration of Armistice Day.

In 1926, the United States Congress officially recognized the end of World War I and declared the anniversary of the armistice should be commemorated with prayer and thanksgiving. The Congress also requested that the president should "issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

The original concept was for the nation to have a day filled with celebrations, parades, public displays of pride and recognition for those soldiers who had given their lives for our country as well as for the soldiers scheduled to return home.

Congressional legislation passed in1938 designated the 11th of November in each year as a legal holiday to be celebrated as Armistice Day. Originally the idea was to honor the WWI Veterans.

Unfortunately, WWI was not the War To End All Wars and in 1954 after having experienced the horrors of WWII and the Korean War, the 83rd Congress changed the 1938 law to strike the word Armistice and replaced it with the word Veterans. The congressional intent was to designate a day to honor veterans of all wars.

In October 1954 President Eisenhower issued the first Veterans Day Proclamation. In 1968 the Uniform Holiday Bill made an attempt to move Veterans Day to the fourth Monday of October. The bill took effect in 1971. The legislative intent was to create a three-day weekend for federal employees. However, this law created confusion as individual states disagreed with this decision and continued to hold their Veterans Day activities on Nov. 11.

In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford signed legislation designating that in 1978 Veterans Day would again be observed on Nov. 11. By a stroke of his pen President Ford returned the annual observance of Veterans Day to the original Nov. 11 date.

Fast forward to 2016. You may ask, How can I do my part? How may I observe Veterans Day?  How can I support veterans throughout the year?

There are many ways, in which we as citizens may show our appreciation, respect and provide and promote recognition for what our veterans have done for our country. Their multiple acts of courage and selfless service allow each of us to engage freely in our daily existence. The time has arrived for each citizen to accept the challenge of recognizing our Veterans on Veterans Day and everyday.

A Call to Action

Legislative representatives

Regardless of political affiliation, elected representatives must become sensitized, compassionate and visionary to focus on veterans' needs in the fields of health care, higher education, job training and employment, housing and support for veterans and their families.

Special attention should be provided for the treatment and specialized care for those who suffer from the ravages of post-traumatic stress disorder from their battlefield and assignment experiences. Regarding PTSD, perhaps one of the most horrific examples of how service in a combat setting affects a soldier is the story of Lt. Robert Buffum, a Union soldier who was one of the first Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients in the United States. President Lincoln personally presented Lt. Buffum with his Medal of Honor in 1863.

Buffums story is a blueprint for one that we too often read about in the media today. A decorated soldier recognized for his/her patriotism, valor in battle, personal skills and ability to defend our freedoms takes their own life in an act of desperation to seek a release from the physical and psychological trauma of their earthly suffering.

In April 1862, Lt. Buffin, a member of the Andrews Raiders, was captured while on a mission to disrupt enemy communications in Georgia. As a prisoner of war he suffered severe psychological damage at the hands of his Confederate captors. After his departure from the Confederate prison, Buffum spent time in a mental institution struggling with the demons of his battle experiences, uncontrollable alcoholism and mental illness.

In a heated fight, he killed a man who was critical of President Lincoln. Buffum was found guilty of murder and sent to the state asylum at Auburn as an insane criminal. Tragically, in 1871, his life ended at the age of 43 in a suicide at the Auburn Correctional Facility. The circumstances of his death revealed that he might have been a victim of PTSD. Lt. Buffums unclaimed remains lie in a mass grave with other inmates at Soule Cemetery in Auburn, New York. In 1995, the Medal of Honor historical society members placed a marker on the mass gravesite noting his service to our country.

Regardless of Lt. Buffums personal turmoil after the war, he was an American hero who risked his life and fought to keep our nation as one. The Dana L. West Students, the Cayuga Community College Auburn Criminal Justice Club and the Vietnam Veterans Chapter 704 will honor Lt. Buffum this Dec. 17 at the Cayuga County Wreaths Across America ceremony.

Community

Fly your flag

On Veterans Day nothing is so striking and proud as our magnificent Old Glory majestically waving in the wind over a public building, the front door or porch of a home or placed in tribute to a fallen hero. Multiple public flag displays have also been utilized as a Healing Fields for our Veterans throughout communities in the United States. Our flag is a universal symbol of freedom, individual rights, personal sacrifice and democracy.

Participate in the Stars For Our Troops Project

If you have a gently used, clean American made flag and wish to help honor fifty Veterans, please arrange to drop the flag off at the Port Byron School District Lehn entrance. Students are working on the project to take the stars from the flag cantons (the field of blue) and place individual stars in a personalized pack that is presented to a Veteran. The student goal for this school year is to create at least 5000 Veteran packs.

If you belong to a civic organization and can gather flags this is an excellent opportunity for community service and will help our students meet their goal.

Visit a veteran in a nursing home or hospital

Taking time from your schedule to spend a few moments with a veteran confined to a nursing home or hospital can raise their spirits, brighten their mood and create a shared empathy for the veterans service. If you or your family members cant visit, take a moment to fill out a card or have your child or your childs class members make drawings for veterans and drop them off to the facility. Having a unique personalized youngsters art creation to grace a residents room can provide a welcome addition to a veterans message board.

If you are handy with a camera, and after all necessary permissions have been cleared, you may offer your services to a nursing facility to allow you to take photos of a veteran and their family on a special day. This may usually be coordinated with the facility activity director. The photograph can help a vet preserve a pleasurable moment with family of friends.

Volunteer or provide a financial donation

The simple gift of your time and energy to assist a local veterans organization with their activities is appreciated. Opportunities may be found in contacting the local VFW posts or the local chapter of a Veterans organization. If you cannot find time in your day, consider making a financial donation to a community veterans organization or a community project that honors our veterans.

Talk to a veteran

Make the time, perhaps am hour of your day to visit and get to know and even interview a veteran. Each veteran has a unique story as their military service has shaped them as individuals in profound ways. He or she has many life lessons to share with a willing listener. It is truly fascinating to learn about their life experiences; what it was like to live through a war and the resulting personal and professional challenges and conflicts encountered upon his/her returning home. The personal visit and interview activity is a way to discover new information, ideas and to bridge the cultural gap between generations

Our veterans are a source of living history, a history that is slowly diminished and silenced with each soldiers death.

Due to the philosophical and political differences at the time, the Vietnam veteran who returned was not greeted by parades or enthusiastic community support. In this year as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, please make the effort to connect with a Vietnam veteran's story.

My honors students are participating in a heroes project that will provide them with the opportunity to interview a veteran and to gather the information for submission to the New York State Military Museum and The Vietnam Veterans Commemorative Committee. My students will be gathering oral histories from their family and friends. If someone wishes to share their story in an interview and have it recorded by my students, please contact me at my school email: heroes@pbcschools.org or call The Dana L. West High School at (315) 776-5728. The students will also be publishing a book about the veterans they interview.

By way of background information any veteran or family members may contact The New York State Military Museum, which has prepared an interview booklet. The booklet has questions that will allow a veteran to tell their story for inclusion in the New York State Military Museum Archives.

For further information you may visit dmna.ny.gov/historic/histpocs.html or write to New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center, 61 Lake Ave., Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 or call (518) 581-5100.

Dana L. West High School also has received the unique distinction of being designated as a Vietnam Veterans 50th Commemorative Committee Partner by the U,S Department of Defense.

In 2017, our nation will have the Vietnam War Commemoration. There are currently 9,000 organizations dedicated to assisting the nation in thanking and honoring our 7.2 million living Vietnam veterans and the 9 million families of those who served.

Our school plans on participating in the Vietnam commemoration by creating a special school showcase exhibit featuring the name rubbings and stories from The Wall That Heals, a veterans assembly program and a school community event to be held in June.

For more information about the Vietnam War Commemoration Program you may contact whs.vnwar50th@mail.mil or DOD Vietnam War Commemoration Program Office, 241 18th Street South, Suite 101, Arlington, VA 22202 or (877) 387-9951

Take the time to speak with Gold Star families

We as a community must make the time to learn about their son or daughter.

This allows the veterans families to know that the legacy of their childs sacrifice was not in vain and YES; we as a nation do remember and honor their childs sacrifice and their familys personal loss and sacrifice.

Due to the fact that the Vietnam War affected so many of our Cayuga County families, I am especially reaching out to the Gold Star families of those who perished in the war. I would like to obtain any available pictures or written remembrances that families, friends or classmates would be willing to share with my students for a Vietnam veterans school display during the school year.

I have listed below the names and branch of service for each of these young men who gave their "last full measure of devotion on behalf of our country":

Army

John S. Ailling, Jr., Gary A. Barmes, Robert S. Barnes, Larry R, Dewey,

David A. Dixon, Johnston Dunlop Gary W. Emmett, Starrett J.Ingleston

Merritt L. Murry, Brian P. Russell, Joseph A. Puryear, Thomas Y. Reynolds

Daryl K. Stannard, Robert F. Stryker, Terry E, Toole, Charles F. Whitfield, Jr.

Mark A. Woodworth

Marines

Joseph M. Donovan, Jesse G. Eastman, Ferdinand W. Glessing, Jr.

Lawrence W. Hoyt, Frank T. Nevidomsky, John J. Rhodes, Donald J. Ryan

Navy

Clarence A. Hodge, Frances D. Lupo

Air Force

Edward D. Smith, Jr.

Send a vet a thank you note

Even people who cant attend an event or visit a local veteran, you can still express their gratitude to veterans for their service. A simple thank you note, even from a stranger, can do a lot to brighten a persons day.

The students at Dana L. West funded with a grant from the Dr. Jane Goodall Institute were able to create write and send out over 300 letters and drawings last year to veterans throughout Cayuga County. The veterans' response was exceptional. The vets enjoyed connecting with a new generation of young citizens who thanked them for their service. One vet sent the school his service patches, another replied stating that the students letter was the first civilian thank you he had ever received. One vet was so thrilled that he saved the letter on his cell phone to show his buddies.

Dr. Jane Goodalls Institute and her Roots and Shoots Program were so enthusiastic and supportive of our students community service that they have provided a grant for students to continue the project in this school year.

The students Thank You Heroes Project will commence in November. If any vet would like to receive a letter from a student, please contact our e-mail listed previously.

Remember to honor and teach after Veterans Day

The Wreaths Across America (www.wreaths acrossamerica.org) organization has a program that promotes remembrance of Veterans. You may order a wreath for $15 from the local WAA Committee on Veterans Day specifically or throughout the month of November until Nov. 28 in recognition of or in memory of a vet. The balsam wreaths are delivered in December and are a universal symbol of remembrance.

You may also choose to attend or participate in the Cayuga County Wreaths Across America Remembrance Ceremony at noon on Dec. 17 at St. Peters and Johns Church in Auburn. The ceremony is an intergenerational activity with participation by the Vietnam Veterans Chapter 704 members, the Cayuga Community College Auburn Criminal Justice Club members and Dana L. West students.

You may also participate at no cost in the WAA Veterans Remembrance Tree Program. The program was established as another way to remember and honor our veterans. This program is open to all families who have had a loved one in the military It is a designed to allow a veteran's family to have a living memorial to their loved ones.

The WAA company has its own Dog Tag machine allowing a veterans family to create a customized message in memory of their loved ones(s). The dog tag is then placed on the trunk of an evergreen tree. A red, white, and blue ribbon is placed on the tree to show that it has been chosen as a memorial. A tree tagged in perpetuity in memory of your veteran ... what an honor! The trees are kept in production and are tipped every three years; the balsam tips are used to make the veterans wreaths that are used by the WAA programs throughout the nation each December.

For more information about the program please call (877) 385-9504 or email dogtags@wreathsacrossamerica.org.

If you have a family member or friend who served in WWII you may register the individual with the National WWII Veterans Memorial Registry Please visit wwiimemorial.com/home.aspx.

Say thank you

Stop and catch a moment to say five little words that can make the difference. Thank you for your service! Whenever you are in public and see a soldier in their uniform, stop, introduce yourself and extend your hand and tell them those words. It does make a difference to them. If you notice a retired vet wearing their service units hat, do the same. Be prepared that your five words may bring tears to their eyes because someone thinks enough of their sacrifice to thank them. This simple act of kindness makes our world a better place,

Recite the pledge

When you recite the Pledge of Allegeance do you ever think of the true meaning of its words?

Our Pledge of Allegiance is one of the first tributes to our nation that is learned memorized and recited by every child in America. The words that we as adults continue to recite at our public events and civic meetings.

The late Red Skelton spoke the following words on his television show, Janu. 14, 1969. He borrowed the words from his teacher; this translation on the meaning of our Pledge is a lasting testament of the credo upon which our nation is founded. (Please note: I have changed the 48 to 50 states to reflect the change since his speech.)

I - Me; an individual; a committee of one. Pledge - Dedicate all of my worldly goods to give without self-pity. Allegiance - My love and my devotion. To the Flag - Our standard; Old Glory; a symbol of Freedom; wherever she waves there is respect, because your loyalty has given her a dignity that shouts, Freedom is everybody's job.

Of The United - That means that we have all come together. States - Individual communities that have united into forty-eight great states. Fifty individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose. All divided with imaginary boundaries, yet united to a common purpose, and that is love for country. And to the Republic - Republic--a state in which sovereign power is invested in representatives chosen by the people to govern. And government is the people; and it's from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people. For which it stands One Nation - One Nation--meaning, so blessed by God. (Under God).

Indivisible - Incapable of being divided. With Liberty - Which is Freedom; the right of power to live one's own life, without threats, fear, or some sort of retaliation.

With Liberty And Justice - The principle, or qualities, of dealing fairly with others.

For All--which means, boys and girls, its as much your country as it is mine.

In 2016, as in all years, it is a time to give thanks for those who have served our nation. President Lincoln stated it best: And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

That is the legacy granted to us by our veterans through the ages.
Reciba en su email: noticias de ultima hora, analisis tecnicos o el cierre de mercado

Email no valido Nombre requerido Recibira las informaciones mas relevantes del dia en tiempo real Que informacion desea recibir? Noticias de Ultima hora Boletin Cierre de Mercado Boletin analisis tecnico Boletin Fundsnews Debe seleccionar un tipo de boletin Acepto la Politica de privacidad Debe aceptar la politica de privacidad Responsable EMPRESAS DEL GRUPO WEB FINANCIAL GROUP Finalidad La remision de informacion, novedades y promociones Establecimiento o mantenimiento de Relaciones Comerciales. Legitimacion Consentimiento del interesado. Interes legitimo en el desarrollo de la relacion comercial Destinatario Empresas del Grupo WEB FINANCIAL GROUP Derechos Acceso, rectificacion, supresion, limitacion, oposicion y portabilidad Informacion adicional Politica de Privacidad de nuestra pagina Web + INFORMACION
PR Newswire

SHENZHEN, China, Nov. 10, 2016

SHENZHEN, China, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- HTC Corporation ("HTC"), a pioneer in innovative, smart mobile and virtual reality (VR) technology, today is proud to support the unveiling of a breakthrough tether-less VR upgrade kit (preview edition) for VIVE VR system developed and produced by TPCAST, a Vive X Accelerator invested company. This kit will enable for the first time, users of high-end PC VR systems to have a fully untethered experience without compromising quality on all current Vive VR devices.

As the current global leader in high-end VR, HTC has continually delivered the most immersive and complete VR experiences on the market. It was the first to enable room-scale VR and 6-DoF controllers to the world, and today, TPCAST's upgrade kits will enable Vive to be the first devices to offer a seamless tether-less high-end PC VR experience. The tether-less upgrade kit will be available for pre-order at 1,499 RMB in limited quantity on www.vive.com/cn starting at 11pm Beijing time on November 11. Order fulfillment will be prioritized to existing customers who can provide a valid Vive serial number. Initial delivery is expected to begin in Q1 2017.

At the Tmall 11/11 Media Center, Alibaba and HTC jointly demonstrated Alibaba's new Buy+ mobile VR channel on the latest HTC-powered VR-ready smartphones to more than 600 journalists gathered from all over the globe. This is the first application to date that allows the completion of actual retail transactions fully in VR, showing China's gaining leadership in the VR space. HTC Vive and Alibaba have previously announced strategic partnerships relating to Cloud services and VR, as well as Video services cooperation with its Youku subsidiary. Today's joint VR demonstration is a further strengthening of cooperation across another business section connecting the two firms.

"We are glad to cooperate with Alibaba to enable the first mass-demonstration of a complete VR shopping experience and are honored that they have chosen Viveport M as the preferred download partner for the Buy+ mobile application," said Alvin W. Graylin, China Regional President of Vive, HTC. "We are also very proud that a Vive X team, TPCAST, has developed such an impactful product in such a short time. It will allow Vive customers worldwide to gain untethered mobility in VR from their existing devices, while satisfying the biggest feature request of potential PC VR customers."

Zhuoran Zhuang, Head of VR programs at Alibaba, said, "It's been a pleasure working with the VR market leader, HTC Vive on multiple VR related projects. We are continuously exploring on the next generation of shopping experiences via innovative technology, and looking forward to deeper collaboration with our partners to deliver even more immersive commerce experiences!"

HTC Vive has prepared a number of seasonal promotion deals for VR fans at this year's Tmall 11/11 global shopping festival. This includes Vive plus VR-ready PC sets, complimentary accessories and VR content, interest-free installment, and an upgraded Vive referral program! For more information, please visit: Tmall.com and Vive.com/cn.

About the Vive Virtual Reality System

Vive is a first-of-its-kind virtual reality system developed in partnership by HTC and Valve. Designed from the ground up for room-scale VR, Vive allows true-to-life interactions and experiences thanks to an adjustable headset displaying stunning graphics, two wireless controllers with HD haptic feedback and 360 degree absolute motion tracking. For a convenient and safe experience, Vive incorporates essential functionality from your phone and features a front facing camera that blends physical elements into the virtual world. Working in concert, this system immerses you visually, physically and emotionally in the virtual world. For more information on Vive, please visit www.vive.com.

About HTC

HTC Corporation aims to bring brilliance to life. As a global innovator in smart mobile and virtual reality devices and technology, HTC has produced award-winning products and industry firsts since its inception in 1997, including the critically acclaimed HTC One and HTC Desire lines of smartphones, and is now leading the VR industry with the Vive line of products. The pursuit of brilliance is at the heart of everything we do, inspiring best-in-class design and game-changing mobile and virtual reality experiences for consumers around the world. HTC is listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE: 2498). www.htc.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tpcast-reveals-worlds-first-tether-less-vr-upgrade-kit-for-htc-vivetm-devices-at-alibabas-tmall-1111-global-shopping-festival-300361300.html

SOURCE HTC Vive
HIT: To a continuing effort to keep Auburn green.

The city's department of public works joined forces with Grow Auburn's Trees and a bevy of volunteers last weekend to plant nearly 100 tress across the city. The group met up at Auburn Permaculture Park on Garrow Street for the annual community tree planting day, an effort that's been ongoing for 10 years.

The spring and fall plantings involve low and slow growing trees that have little chance of interfering with underground or overhead utilities. The work is making neighborhoods more attractive and the city a nicer place to live.

MISS: To a seemingly never-ending list of DWI arrests.

Police recently reported that a Port Byron man was drunk when his car went into a swamp while he was driving on Routes 5 and 20 in the town of Tyre. He was charged with DWI, speeding and having an open container of alcohol in the car.

And a Cato woman who already had one DWI in the past 10 years was charged with a felony after police said she crashed into the back of another vehicle on Route 31 in the town of Lysander.

HIT: To a boost for local education.

State funding will help more young children get an early start on their learning. The Auburn Enlarged City School District will receive $820,384 and the Jordan-Elbridge school district will get $510,912 from the state to open up pre-kindergarten to more 3-year-old students.

State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said that starting school young can have long-term consequences.

"High-quality prekindergarten programs, especially those that provide full-day services and serve low-income or high need students, help those students stay on track to graduate from high school and, over the long term, significantly reduce costs for remedial education, social services, health and criminal justice programs," Elia said.
City

 Marcus J. Sylvester, 22, 36 Franklin St., Auburn, was charged Nov. 9 with second-degree aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle.

 Austin R. Deal, 28, 189 State St. Apt. 2, Auburn, was picked up on a warrant Nov. 9 and charged with second-degree criminal contempt.

 Jason R. Thurston, 45, 39 Lafayette Place, Auburn was picked up on a warrant Nov. 9 and charged with endangering the welfare of a child.

 Kaitlynn M. Duvall, 24, 1 Church St., Port Byron, was charged Nov. 9 with petit larceny.

County

 Brandon E. Karschner, 25, Locke, was picked up on a warrant Nov. 1 and charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief.

 Liam T. Kaylor, 21, Falls Church, Virginia, was charged Nov. 6 with driving while intoxicated first offense and aggravated driving while intoxicated.

State

 Adam J. Lamphere, 33, Cato, was charged Nov. 8 with first-degree criminal contempt, third-degree assault and fourth-degree criminal mischief.

 Alicia E. Norfolk, 24, Elbridge, was charged Nov. 9 with driving while intoxicated first offense and aggravated driving while intoxicated.

 Misty L. Ellis, 30, Fleming, was charged Nov. 11 with aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle and driving while intoxicated with a previous conviction.
This blog is totally independent, unpaid and has only three major objectives.

The first is to inform readers of news and happenings in the e-Health domain, both here in Australia and world-wide.

The second is to provide commentary on e-Health in Australia and to foster improvement where I can.

The third is to encourage discussion of the matters raised in the blog so hopefully readers can get a balanced view of what is really happening and what successes are being achieved.


Volvo is expanding its lineup with its smallest and least expensive model on the market.

The all-new 2007 C30 hatchback is the creation of Canadian designer Simon Lamarre. The 38-year-old native of Quebec penned the exterior shape of the two-door hatch. And the result is a package that blends form and function beautifully  the look will likely appeal to cash-conscious, practical Canadians who generally adore hatchbacks.

The Volvo C30 comes in two trims  2.4i and T5. The base 2.4i starts at $27,495, while the top-level T5 is $31,995. Be cautious adding options, though; it's easy to push the price up with extras. My nicely equipped T5 tester rings in at nearly $40,000  perhaps a bit more than you'd want to spend on a hatch. But once you step inside, you'll appreciate the price premium.

Even though the C30 is Volvo's lowest-priced model, it doesn't look or feel cheap inside. The cabin is filled with high-quality, upscale touches. Soft leather covers the steering wheel and gear shifter knob on my T5 tester.

A thin floating centre console houses many functions including the audio system, climate control and controls for the heated seats. Everything is intuitively placed within arm's reach.

Aluminum on the console complements the door panel inserts and adds a modern, youthful feel to the cabin.

A nifty compartment behind the console is handy for hiding a wallet, cellphone or MP3 player; while a front armrest with bin and front seat-back pockets provide more storage.

The C30 T5 has an abundance of standard features, too, such as cruise control, dual zone climate control, a trip computer and a tilt and telescoping steering wheel.

My tester is also decked out with a premium sound system. For $1,000, the DynAudio package adds 10 speakers, an in-dash six-CD player with MP3/WMA capability, and a 650-watt Alpine digital amplifier.

While the C30 is Volvo's smallest car, it has lots of room for passengers and cargo. Unlike most Volvos, the C30 isn't marketed as a family car  it's more practical for singles or couples. That's why you'll find only two seats in the rear.

Just like the front bucket seats, the rear bucket seats are large and supportive. The only problem is getting in and out of them.

The C30 has only two doors and even though the front seats slide forward, it's still a challenge and awkward for adults to enter the rear. The space is too small to squeeze in easily, or gracefully, for that matter.

But once nestled in the rear seats, it's quite enjoyable and inviting. There's ample leg-, shoulder- and headroom. A folding rear centre armrest, side panel armrests and storage compartments are also practical features.

Accessing the cargo area is easy  just hit the key fob to unlock the glass tailgate. The tailgate opens high, out of head-banging range. A low liftover height also makes it a cinch to load and unload items.

There's ample cargo space at 364 litres. But if you need more room, the 45/45 rear seats fold flat, nearly doubling the area. The cargo area is also nicely carpeted for a clean look.

Normally I'm not a huge fan of hatchbacks, but the C30 is an exception. It's cleverly designed to resemble the profile of a coupe more than a hatch.

Elegant flowing lines, Volvo's familiar front end and large dual exhaust tailpipes give the C30 a sporty look.

Tinted glass, power heated side view mirrors with side-direction indicators, a heated rear window, front and rear fog lights are also nice touches on the T5.

An optional sport package adds 17-inch alloy wheels, bi-xenon headlights with twice the illumination of conventional halogen headlights, heated front seats, power and memory driver's seat, and headlamp washers. At $3,400, the package price is a bit steep.

While I love my tester's passion red colour, the exterior metallic paint costs an extra $650.

The C30 T5 is powered by a 2.5-litre, five-cylinder, turbocharged engine that delivers 218 horsepower and 236 lb-ft of torque.

A six-speed manual transmission is standard. The short-throw gear shifter is one of the simplest and smoothest I've ever used. The clutch is lightweight and the gear change is precise.

The ride is spirited, sporty and fun. It's also surprisingly quiet; bumps and potholes are nicely absorbed by the hatchback.

The C30's compact size and tight turning radius make it a great city car; it's simple to manoeuvre in crowded areas.

The rear glass tailgate helps when parallel parking, too  you can actually see more of what's behind you than most vehicles.

In general, the C30 has excellent all-around visibility thanks to long rear-side windows.

For me, there's something about a Volvo that feels extra safe. It probably has to do with the long list of standard features you'll find on all Volvos.

The C30 has multi-stage front airbags, side impact airbags and inflatable side curtains. Dynamic stability and traction control, ABS with electronic brake distribution, emergency brake assistance, a collapsible steering column, and whiplash protection system in the front seats are also standard.

The C30 is a well-equipped package that's outside of the Volvo box, yet still practical for singles and couples alike.




NEW DELHI (PTI): Further deepening the already close defence ties will be a major focus of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin's eight-day trip to India beginning Monday during which both sides are also set to ink a number of MoUs to expand cooperation in areas of energy, agriculture and trade.



Ahead of Rivlin's visit here, first by an Israeli President in nearly two decades, the Jewish country's envoy Daniel Carmon said the bilateral defence ties were beyond buyer-seller and military-to-military relationship and the message will be to broaden it further besides boosting cooperation in some other sectors.



During his stay, the Israeli President will hold extensive talks with his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi covering key bilateral and regional issues besides attending a ceremony in Taj Hotel and Chabad House in Mumbai to pay tribute to victims of 26/11 attack in which six Jews were also killed.



On defence cooperation, Carmon said Israel has plans for fresh joint ventures and technology transfer in developing weapons systems and ensuring implementation of Modi's Make in India initiative in the key sector which is a "major facet" of his country's "special relationship" with India.



On Modi comparing India's cross LoC military action against terror launchpads following Uri attack to Israeli-type response, the envoy said his country had to develop robust capability to protect its citizens, considering the geo-political situation.



He said Israel was ready to share with India its technology and enhance security ties.



In October last year, President Mukherjee had visited Israel, the first by an Indian head of state.



Rivlin will also visit Chandigarh where he will inaugurate an Agro Tech conference along with Mukherjee.



President Rivlin will head business and academic delegations including chancellors of 12 Israeli universities as well as Israeli companies, some of which are already active and successful in India.



He said at least 15 MoUs are likely to be signed between Indian and Israeli educational institutions during the visit.



Identifying agriculture and water conservation as key areas of cooperation, he said the number of agri centres set up by Israel in India will go up from current 15 to 40.



The visit will focus on strengthening the ever growing economic ties between India and Israel in the fields of agriculture and water, and promoting academic cooperation, he said.



Asked about India attempting to strengthen ties with countries like Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia, the envoy said Indo-Israel bilateral ties were not affected by New Delhi's relationship with other nations.



In Agra, the Israeli President will visit Taj Mahal and an Israeli water treatment plant. He will also visit the Indo-Israeli Agricultural Project's Center of Excellence in Karnal.



"It is a very deep relationship. India and Israel enjoy very unique relation in areas of defence.... There are plans for fresh joint venture and technology transfer," he told reporters, refusing to go into specifics.



India is Israel's largest buyer of military hardware and the latter has been supplying various weapons systems, missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles over the last few years but the transactions have largely remained behind the curtains.



Carmon said Rivlin's "large" delegation will comprise honchos of top Israeli arms manufacturing companies and senior government officials dealing with matters relating to defence.



Asked about Modi's proposed visit to Israel, he said it will happen and will be a very important trip.



It was being decided by the two governments when it will happen, the envoy said.



There were indications that the Prime Minister may visit Tel Aviv in first part of 2017 which will be 25th year of formal diplomatic ties between the two countries. India had established "full" diplomatic relationship with Israel in 1992 though it had recognised the country in 1950.



Asked about the proposed Free Trade Agreement between the two countries, he said its finalisation "should and could be a easier process henceforth".



The envoy said both countries are set to sign a raft of pacts in areas of education, energy, water, agriculture and research and development during Rivlin's visit.


Barclays has completed the sale of its Spanish and Portuguese credit card business as the bank charges ahead with asset disposals as part of a company-wide overhaul.

The bank said that its 1.2bn Barclaycard consumer payments business was "sold at a small premium" to Spanish online bank WiZink.

WiZink, previously known as Bancopopular-e, is owned by Varde Partners and Spain's Banco Popular.

Barclays has been working to sell down and dispose of its hinterland business as quickly as possible in order to focus on core US and UK operations.

The bank said that the sale of its Spanish and Portuguese credit card business will help reduce its risk-weighted assets by 1bn.

The sale, which was originally announced in April 2016 and will see WiZink acquire nearly 800,000 customers, has been given the green light by regulators.

In a statement released on Friday, Barclays said it would continue to offer corporate and investment banking services in both Spain and Portugal, calling them "important elements" of the bank's franchise.

Barclays Group chief executive Jes Staley said: "The Barclaycard consumer payments business in Portugal and Spain is a good business with a highly talented and dedicated workforce but no longer fits with our strategic ambitions. I am sure it will continue to thrive as part of WiZink."

Mr Staley added that the sale marks "further tangible progress towards our target of reducing Non-Core Risk Weighted Assets to c.23bn in 2017".

The overhaul has also seen the bank sell down its 62.3% stake in Barclays Africa, and offload its risk analytics and index unit to Bloomberg for about 615m.

In October, Barclays announced plans to sell its Egyptian business to Attijariwafa Bank for a price understood to be about $500m (then 392m).

The bank's strategic overhaul is part of plans to shore up the bank's balance sheet.

Last month, Barclays reported a drop in net operating income fell to 4.7bn in the third quarter, down from 5bn a year earlier, and said it was setting aside an additional $600m (currently 482m) to meet compensation claims for mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI).

It brought the total provisions over the past two quarters alone to 1bn.

Barclays is also suffering under the weight of a ballooning pension deficit, now worth 1.1bn.
Fair work and labour rights will be the focal points of an international conference today.

Last year the United Nations adopted a new agenda for sustainable development goals around poverty, health, gender equality, education and environmental sustainability.
By Greg Murphy

Senator Aodhan O'Riordain has given an impassioned speech in the Seanad in reaction the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

He said he was "embarrassed" by the reaction of the Irish Government and repeatedly asked if the best we could do was ask "whether it was ok to still bring the shamrock on St Patrick's Day".

"I'm embarrassed by the reaction of the Irish Government to what's happened in America. I can't believe the reaction from An Taoiseach and the Government," he said.

"America has just elected a fascist, and the best thing good people in Ireland can do is to ring him up and ask him is it ok to still bring the shamrock on St Patricks Day.

Mr O'Riordain went on to quote the contrasting and conditional reaction from Angela Merkel to Mr Trump's election.

In her statement she said: "Germany and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and dignity of man.

"Independent of origin, skin-colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views. I offer the next president of the United States close cooperation on the basis of these values."
Five staff members at a Limerick care home for children were found by the health watchdog to have been seriously assaulted over a number of months.

Staff at Coovagh House interviewed by HIQA said they did not consider the staffing levels to be sufficient to ensure the safety of individual children.
Four Irish war heroes have been honoured by newly-unveiled plaques during Armistice Day commemorations in Dublin.

The memorials in Glasnevin cemetery commemorate Frederick Edwards of the Middlesex Regiment and John Vincent Holland of the Leinster Regiment.
Update 2.49pm: The Ombudsman for Children, Dr Niall Muldoon, has called for swift action in fulfilling the commitment to relocate up to 200 unaccompanied minors to Ireland from the former refugee camp in Calais.

I very much welcome the news that Ireland is to accept up to 200 unaccompanied minors from the former migrant camp in Calais, he said.

However, this commitment must be followed urgently with action.

I have been in contact with the Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, since September, appealing to her to consider accepting unaccompanied minors from Calais under the Irish Refugee Protection Programme (IRPP).

Along with many others, including those involved in the #NotOnOurWatch campaign, we have continued to highlight this issue and I am very pleased that Minister Fitzgerald, and all members of the Oireachtas, have now committed to accepting up to 200 unaccompanied minors from Calais.

It is essential that swift measures are taken to ensure that the children affected receive appropriate assistance to recover from what they have experienced.

As highlighted by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in its statement on the situation in Calais, the best interests of the child were completely disregarded in the demolition of the Jungle at Calais.

Political and other considerations prevailed over the initial promises by the French and UK Governments that the situation of unaccompanied children would be their priority.

The Committee stressed that hundreds of children have been subjected to inhumane living conditions, left without adequate shelter, food, medical services and psychosocial support, and in some cases exposed to smugglers and traffickers.

We must therefore ensure that the mechanisms are in place so that these young people are provided with care, dignity and support in Ireland as soon as possible. I know that Irish children and young people are very anxious that our country works to help these refugees and they will be very pleased with this development.

Ireland is in a position to show leadership on this issue and to make a difference in the lives of some of the children affected by this humanitarian crisis.

Earlier:

Concern is being raised about the type of care Ireland can provide to refugee children fleeing war-torn countries.

The Government is proposing to take in up to 200 children who have been stranded as a result of continued violence in the Middle East.

Earlier this week, Minister for Children Katherine Zappone asked TUSLA to speed up the process to allow us offer refuge to youngsters in need.

However Shane Dunphy, an expert in child protection, is warning the system is already struggling to cope with demand.

"I do not believe we should do this unless we have the framework in place to do it," he said.

"Now let me be clear - there is no reason why we couldn't put the framework in place [but] if we are bringing these kids in without that framework in place, we are  condemning them to further pain."
Nicola Sturgeon will meet politicians and business leaders in Dublin later this month in an effort to strengthen Scotland's relationship with Ireland.

The First Minister will host meetings with Irish President Michael D Higgins and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Charlie Flanagan as well as meeting about 100 business representatives.

She will also become the first serving head of government to address the Seanad during the visit.

Ms Sturgeon said she looked forward to speaking about the Scottish Government's plans to protect Scotland's interests in the European Union (EU) following the vote for the UK to leave the bloc.

The announcement follows a report that the Irish Government had rejected direct talks with Ms Sturgeon over the plans.

The First Minister has said she will seek discussions with EU institutions and other EU member states to "explore all possible options to protect Scotland's place in the EU".

The Herald newspaper said Irish Minister for the Diaspora and International Development Joe McHugh had confirmed formal Brexit talks would take place only with the UK Government.

Speaking in advance of her visit, Ms Sturgeon said: "Scotland and Ireland have a shared history and a long tradition of co-operation on a range of issues.

"In the post-Brexit landscape, it has become even more important that we work together to protect our shared interests.

"Last year we established an innovation and investment hub in Dublin to strengthen our relationship with Ireland and promote inward investment.

"I am proud and humbled to have been invited to address the Seanad and recognise what an honour this is.

"I am looking forward to the opportunity to speak to senators about my hopes for continued work between our two nations and my plans to protect Scotland's interests in the EU."
The Mexican Ambassador to Ireland says his country will not pay for a wall between it and the United States.

Miguel Malfavon said that while Mexico was not happy with how the campaign was run, it is ready to work with President-elect Donald Trump.
Meng Hongwei has been elected president of Interpol.[Photo/China Daily]

A senior Chinese public security official was elected president of the International Criminal Police Organization on Thursday, a move that gives the country another leading spot in an international agency.

Vice-Minister of Public Security Meng Hongwei was chosen for a four-year term during Interpol's 85th members' meeting in Indonesia, becoming the first Chinese to take the post. His predecessor was Mireille Ballestrazzi of France.

Meng promised in a speech to work together with all member states of Interpol to build the international group into a stronger platform for global police cooperation.

Meng said he will also improve coordination among regional and global police forces with a view to building a safer world and a more efficient Interpol that will benefit all member states.

Interpol, which was founded in 1914, has 190 members, making it the second-largest international organization after the United Nations. Its headquarters are in Lyon, France.

"China highly values the role of Interpol and is willing to shoulder more responsibility and make a bigger contribution in pushing forward global law enforcement and security cooperation," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Thursday while congratulating Meng on his new role.

Yu Chengtao, a senior official from the Public Security Ministry's International Cooperation Bureau, said Meng got rich experience in international law enforcement while serving as vice-minister.

With Meng as the new head of Interpola capacity in which he must maintain a neutral stance and respect the sovereignty of countriesChina will be more active in promoting international judicial cooperation and fighting transnational crime, Yu said.

China has worked closely with Interpol in recent years. Last year, Interpol released "red notices", similar to international arrest warrants, for China's 100 most-wanted fugitives suspected of corruption. At least one-third of them have been brought back to China so far.

Meng's new Interpol post shows China is playing a bigger role on the international stage, said Hong Daode, a criminal law professor at China University of Political Science and Law.

"China has spared no efforts in offering judicial assistance to other countries in fighting cross-border crimes such as terrorism, human trafficking, drug smuggling and cybercrime," he said. "These efforts have left a strong impression on the international community and won their respect and support."

Other Chinese nationals holding senior positions in world organizations include Zhang Tao, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Li Yong, director-general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

Xinhua and Reuters contributed to this story.
A Zimbabwean court has dropped charges against a professional hunter accused of allowing an American dentist to kill Cecil, a lion whose death in 2015 prompted an international outcry.

Theo Bronkhorst was charged with failing to prevent an illegal hunt after leading dentist Walter Palmer to Cecil, a lion that was popular with tourists and was wearing a GPS collar as part of a research project.
Demonstrations against Donald Trump continued in cities across the US as the president-elect accused those taking part of being "professional protesters".

Police declared a protest in Portland, Oregon, to be a riot, while there were peaceful marches against Mr Trump's unexpected election as president in cities including Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York.

Mr Trump said the protests were "very unfair!"

He had earlier held a cordial White House meeting with President Barack Obama, and sketched out priorities with Republican congressional leaders in Washington.

The meeting with Mr Obama spanned 90 minutes, longer than originally scheduled. Mr Obama said he was "encouraged" by Mr Trump's willingness to work with his team during the transition of power, and the Republican called the president a "very good man".

"I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future," Mr Trump said from the Oval Office. He will begin occupying the office on January 20.

In Portland, hundreds of people marched throughout the city as protests turned violent, with people smashing store windows and lighting firecrackers.

Police declared a riot, said there were people with baseball bats in the crowd and told marchers via loudspeaker to move on.

Oregon Department of Transportation officials closed portions of Interstate 5 and Interstate 84 in the area intermittently as a precaution.

In Denver, protesters managed to shut down Interstate 25 near central Denver briefly on Thursday night.

Police said that demonstrators had made their way onto the freeway and traffic was halted in the northbound and southbound lanes for about 30 minutes.

Protesters hold signs during a rally against U.S. President-elect Donald Trump outside the still-under-construction Trump Hotel, in Vancouver, British Columiba. Picture: AP

In Dallas, dozens of demonstrators gathered for a second night at Dealey Plaza to speak against the election.

Just like on Wednesday night, the demonstration was peaceful with no disturbances or arrests reported. It ended with a march into the heart of Dallas by protesters carrying signs bearing such slogans as "Love Trumps Hate" and "Spirit Unbreakable".

A crowd that included parents with children in prams gathered near Philadelphia's City Hall. They held signs bearing slogans like "Not Our President," ''Trans Against Trump" and "Make America Safe For All".

About 500 people turned out in Louisville, Kentucky, chanting and carrying signs as they marched. A day earlier, five people were arrested at Western Kentucky University as demonstrators protested against Mr Trump's election.

The protests came as it was confirmed that Mr Trump had won Arizona's presidential contest and its 11 electoral votes.

The Republican president-elect had a solid lead over Hillary Clinton on election night, but a winner was not declared because there were so many uncounted votes. The latest batch of returns tabulated in Thursday made him the clear winner.

It extends a 20-year winning streak for Republican presidential candidates in Arizona. Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to take the state, winning in 1996.

Mrs Clinton was closer to gaining Arizona than Mr Obama, who lost by more than 9 percentage points during his two runs for president, to her 4 points.

Arizona was one of three races that had yet to be declared from the Tuesday election. Michigan and New Hampshire remain too close to call.

As of Thursday, Mrs Clinton was leading Mr Trump in votes nationwide 47.7% to 47.5%, but Mr Trump secured victory in the Electoral College.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence urged a rally in Indiana to support Mr Trump and to pray that the starkly divided country would be reunified.

He told the crowd he was humbled to be Mr Trump's vice president.
Fighters from the so-called 'Islamic State' group have killed some 70 civilians in Mosul this week over accusations of collaboration with Iraqi forces pushing into the city to drive them out, the United Nations has said.

It said in a report that 'IS' reportedly shot and killed 40 people on Tuesday after accusing them of "treason and collaboration", dressing them in orange jumpsuits and hanging their bodies from electrical poles.

The report said that in another incident, the extremists reportedly shot to death 20 civilians in the Ghabat Military Base on charges of leaking information.

Those bodies were hung at various traffic lights in Mosul, with notes stating that they had used mobile phones to leak information.

The reports were the latest evidence of 'IS' exactions on civilians as it retreats into dense urban quarters of Iraqi's second largest city.

Iraqi troops are inching ahead in their battle to retake Mosul.

The UN also revealed fresh evidence the extremists have used chemical weapons.

Exchanging small arms and mortar fire with 'IS' positions, the special forces have entered the Qadisiya neighbourhood, advancing slowly to avoid killing civilians and trying to avoid being surprised by suicide car bombers, said Brigadier General Haider Fadhil.

Regular army troops control 90% of the Intisar neighbourhood, said one officer, but progress had slowed because "the streets are too narrow for our tanks".

Iraqi troops are converging from several fronts on Mosul, the second-largest city and the last major IS holdout in Iraq.

Kurdish peshmerga forces are holding a line north of the city, while Iraqi army and militarised police units approach from the south, and government-sanctioned Shiite militias guard western approaches.

The offensive has slowed recently as the special forces - the troops that have advanced the farthest - push into more densely populated areas of eastern Mosul, where they cannot rely as much on air strikes and shelling because of the risk to civilians who have been told to stay in their homes.

Meanwhile, the UN human rights office has cited new details as proof that the terror group is using chemical weapons, which many fear the extremist group has and is saving for if they are cornered or about to lose the city, still home to more than a million people.

Amid concerns about the use of human shields by 'IS' in the city, rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said four people died from inhaling fumes after 'IS' shelled and set fires to the al-Mishrag Sulfur Gas Factory in Mosul on October 23.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Ms Shamdasani said reports indicated IS has stockpiled "large quantities" of ammonia and sulphur that have been placed in the same areas as civilians.

"We can only speculate how they intend to use this," she said. "We are simply raising the alarm that this is happening, that this is being stockpiled."

She added that international law requires protection of civilians near such chemicals.

"There does not have to be an intention to target civilians with the use of these chemical weapons, but particular care must be taken to avoid this affecting civilians," Ms Shamdasani said.

"If that particular care is not taken, or if action is taken instead through negligence or through active action, to cause damage to civilians, then this is clearly prohibited - this is a war crime."

UN officials say about 48,000 people have now fled Mosul since the government campaign began on October 17.
A British nursery worker has been charged with a number of child sex offences including the rape of a boy.

Jamie Chapman, 28, is due before Birmingham Magistrates' Court on Friday to face 15 charges after being arrested on Wednesday at his home in Tamar Drive, Smiths Wood.
KARACHI: The 2022 Aga Khan Music Awards concluded with the presentation of awards to 15 laureates by His Highness...

NEW YORK: Taylor Swift on Tuesday announced she was returning to touring, getting back on the road for the first...
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian palm oil futures jumped more than 4% on Monday, rebounding from last weeks losses after...
NEW YORK: US natural gas futures dropped about 5% on Tuesday on forecasts for the weather to remain mild for the ...
Tesla aims to start mass production of its Cybertruck at the end of 2023, two years after the initial target for the...
It's a weekday morning in late October at the National Gallery of Australia and, on the surface, the place feels exactly as peaceful and calming as one would expect from an institution devoted to showing art. Visitors stroll thoughtfully through the vast spaces, speak softly and soak up the civilised atmosphere. All is under control out here.

But behind the scenes, stress levels are at fever pitch. In just over a week (at the time of writing), the current major exhibition  a retrospective by the provocative Australian artist Mike Parr  will close. The works will be taken down, installations dismantled, video screens switched off. The surfaces will be repainted. Some of the walls will even be moved. False walls will be made, and ceilings, and doors. New lights will be fitted, cabinetry installed.

The Palace of Versailles provides inspiration for NGA's next blockbuster.

In the space of a few weeks, the Temporary Exhibition Space, as it's officially called, will be thoroughly transformed, from a confronting, raw and tough series of works by an artist who loves to shock  creepy prosthetics, scribbled diaries, fake blood, etc  to a glittering, gilded, elaborate evocation of the Palace of Versailles.

Having covered the NGA's big exhibitions for the past five years at least, I'm often stunned by how seamlessly these things happen  even up to the last literal minute before the director steps up to the podium to launch the show. It's hard to describe how profound the transformation is each time, or how efficiently it will happen. And it's a process that happens at least twice a year in the NGA (although the contrasts are not always this extreme). The shows are planned meticulously to the last minute, months and even years in advance. One show closes, an army of curators, couriers and contractors will converge, new signs go up, and ta-da! The doors open again to yet another perfectly contained new world.
Bubbly bub Lucinda was about a week old when a midwife warned Alex Warner's partner she was battling the "baby blues".

It was a hint of what was to come.

Alex Warner of Nicholls, with 14-month-old daughter Lucinda, wants more new mums to talk about postnatal depression. Credit:Karleen Minney

"It progressively sort of just hung around," the Nicholls mum said.

"I'm normally quite a bubbly person and outgoing and I noticed I didn't really want to go anywhere. As much as I love to go to the shops, I used to get really tight-chested and didn't like being around crowds.
"When the word diversity is used it's never used to mean people with disability," Ms Ryan said.

Disability Leadership Institute director Christina Ryan wants to see people with disability rise to prominence in politics. Credit:Elesa Kurtz

But Disability Leadership Institute founder Christina Ryan says one group  Australia's largest minority  is consistently missing from the conversation.

Some political parties are attempting to improve diversity by targeting the representation of women and culturally diverse, Indigenous and LGBTI people.

"It's a problem because it's close to 20 per cent of the Australian population and it's absent from the public domain."

Ms Ryan lobbied for 20 years for greater representation of people with disability in all leadership positions before starting her own business to support those looking to enter the space.

"It's recognising that Australia is doing deplorably in this area," Ms Ryan said.

"For this reason  (there's) very few people in the public sector, very few people in the corporate sector, almost no one in Parliament, and that won't change until there's some sort of commitment from government to develop people with disability and appoint people.

"It's still very difficult for people with disabilities to be there as leaders because there's no visible leaders with disability in the community. Because of that invisibility nobody actually thinks people with disability can be leaders."
ACT drivers have been caught speeding through school zones more than 400 times so far this year, though the number of fines issued has fallen from previous years.

The city's most dangerous school zone was near Radford College in Bruce, where 92 traffic infringement notices were given on College Street.

Radford College students Sacha, Mitchell, Stella and Jaime, who are concerned about the speed of motorists on College Street. Credit:Jay Cronan

School zones near Alfred Deakin High School and the Woden School on Denison Street in Deakin (30), near Franklin Early Childhood School on Oodergoo Avenue (26) and on Nullarbor Avenue near Harrison School (20) rounded out the four worst areas.

Of the 438 fines issued between February 1 and October 31, 244 were for speeds less than 15km/h over the speed limit, 186 for greater than 15km/h but less than 30km/h, seven for greater than 30 but less than 45km/h.
On September 13, 2011, I woke up unusually early to place a call from Melbourne, Australia, to New York.

I was instructed by the publicist arranging my interview with Donald Trump to speak to Rhona Graff, who would put me through to his mobile. (For all I know, Ms Graff may soon become secretary of a US department.)

I was interviewing Mr Trump ahead of his visit to Sydney and Melbourne as the headline speaker for something called the National Achievers Congress.

This annual event is run by Success Resources, a Malaysian-based company. They book high-profile speakers and then charge punters a lot of money to listen to 30 minutes of motivation on how to make more money. Some reportedly paid $10,000 for a personal meeting with Mr Trump.
Many millions of words will be written on the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Much of it will be beside the point. We cannot talk about what the American voters were trying to "communicate", or what "policies" they supported. It is surely clear by now that voting has nothing whatsoever to do with communication, the use of words to convey a coherent or rational idea with someone else. Rather it is about expression. You hit your thumb with a hammer and you cry out. You are not trying to communicate an idea or speak to anyone. You are expressing yourself, releasing an inner need.

The youths who set fire to the Paris suburbs in 2006 were not trying to communicate. Neither are IS or al-Qaeda. Neither were the voters who forced Brexit or who elected Trump. They are expressing themselves, which is not at all the same thing.

Freudian forces: American president elect Donald Trump's win is the victory of the rampant, undisciplined id over the controlling superego. Credit:Getty Images

As an expression of some inner reality, the US presidential election framed a deep conflict at the heart of our psychological make-up.

Freud described the id as the most primal part of our personalities. A newborn baby is nothing but id. It is devoted to desire, want, fantasy; to the satisfaction at all costs of instinctual feelings. Nothing but the immediate and irrational fulfilment of pleasure can satisfy the id, which Freud described as "a cauldron full of seething excitations".
A lot is being said now about the "silent secret Trump supporters."

This is my confession - and explanation: I - a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman "of colour" - am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I'm not a "bigot," "racist," "chauvinist" or "white supremacist," as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some "whitelash."

In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.

But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Celebrities like to do it, business leaders are not shy about it and even the new President of the United States has given it a go in recent times  we are talking about suing for defamation of course.

The public criticism of Donald Trump during the election campaign was wide spread and his team fought back with threats to sue for defamation, including against the New York Times.

US President-elect Donald Trump is fond of launching defamation action. Credit:AP

Tom Cruise is also famous for taking people to court, once winning $17 million in damages in a case against an "erotic wrestler" who claimed Cruise was his gay lover.

It might not be as public, but if you might find yourself in a situation where something false or hurtful has been said about you, whether it be by an employer, a colleague, business associate or apparent friend, the defamation laws could help you too.
The geography of Republican gains under Trump cuts a swathe through what was until recently safe territory for the Democrats and their allied labour unions. The message, quite apart from Hillary Clinton's palpable unpopularity, is emblematic of a decisive shift in political loyalties and voting habits, an entire demographic that feels it has been deserted by the Democratic Party.

If anything, Trump's victory signals the beginning of a new politics that has declared war on the old politics; it is the formal inauguration of the post-factual era with a chilling nod to the past in the form of his own confected "stab in the back" theory, reprising the fanciful notion that took root in 1920s Germany with devastating consequences for Germany and the world.

The Trump juggernaut, as influential as it will be globally, is merely the latest and biggest blow yet in what has been a succession of political insurgencies as old party allegiances fracture and new forces of anger are unleashed by those who feel they have been left behind.

Globalisation has been good for Donald Trump, one of the 1 per cent very rich; it has also, in a perverse sense, delivered him the presidency. Cleverly, he tapped into a deep vein of discontent and displacement due in no small part to the perceived effects of globalisation, the erosion of working-class jobs and, indeed, the disappearance of entire industries that once constituted the American economic heartland.

But it is not just a party shift; it is a hostile response to the entire political class, Republicans included. Donald Trump, it must be remembered, rode to the GOP nomination and then the presidency through his own carefully orchestrated insurgency, his diatribes against the political establishment directed at Republicans as well as Democrats.

Trump's candidacy was firmly based in a concerted attack on America's political establishment of which Hillary Clinton was seen as a member and intent on safeguarding the political order. It is this political order that is seen by many of the discontented as having betrayed them and as unsympathetic to their interests.

The election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines was a similar insurgency, a massive vote against what was seen as the self-serving smugness of the country's political (and largely hereditary) elite. The Brexit vote in Britain was largely the work of a core of activists, such as UKIP, who were certainly not part of the establishment. The political elites against which they railed were both within Britain as well as that useful Aunt Sally, the remote and seemingly uncaring EU.

Just as the Republican Party in the US has been subject to a series of insurgencies  first, the Tea Party and now, building on that, Trump  so too is the British Labour Party locked in insurgent warfare with the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, essentially a backward-looking throwback, who is probably unelectable, but nevertheless a fuzzy symbol of the indulgent politics of the warm inner glow.

In a sense, UK Labor and the US Democrats have a problem in common: they have increasingly become the playthings of the middle classes seemingly deaf to the pleas of those who feel they have been left behind (and in many cases through policies implemented by both parties while in government). In the case of UK Labour, a strand of anti-capitalist thought among a disgruntled segment of the comparatively comfortable middle classes has taken ideological and policy precedence over the problems of those whose interests Labour once purported to represent.
Fish being caught for our tables are shrinking according to 'concerning' survey of studies published in the journal Science.

There has been a 23 per cent decrease in commercial catches because of a reduction of body size, caused by rising ocean temperatures.

The study factored in over fishing when studying the reduced size of the fish. Credit:Andrew Quilty

Professor John Pandolfi of the ARC Centre of Excellence Coral Reef Studies said while the study encompassed all ecosystems, his particular interest was the sea.

"As a marine scientist we're particularly concerned about fisheries because they are now responsible for about 17 per cent of global protein consumption," Professor Pandolfi said.
On that point he is in agreement with conservatives such as Victorian Liberal MP Michael Sukkar. "I think what we want to do is focus on the main agenda and we'll revisit this probably six months out from the next election," Sukkar says. "We have no plans to take any other measures on this issue": Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull Credit:Andrew Meares If at first you don't succeed  Try and try again. The plebiscite might be dead, buried and cremated but it could easily have a second life, amended or not, if the government keeps attempting to have it passed. "Just because something gets knocked back doesn't mean you walk away from the policy," says Sukkar, citing the government's industrial relations bills as an example.

Liberal MP Warren Entsch, with colleague Trent Zimmerman, says fatigue has set in on gay marriage. Credit:Andrew Meares And Turnbull has definitely been willing to negotiate. Removal of public funding, making the result binding on MPs, conducting the ballot by post or electronically: all these changes were considered as the government tried to court a last-ditch potential saviour in Nick Xenophon. "We had a lot of wriggle room there to move, to make it happen," says Entsch, who tried to broker the compromise. "I spoke to [the PM] about all of these things and everything was on the table for negotiation." "Just because something gets knocked back doesn't mean you walk away": Liberal MP Michael Sukkar says the government may try to pass the plebiscite again. Credit:Jesse Marlow Even conservatives were happy with the compromises. Nationals MP Andrew Broad, who at one stage threatened to quit the party if it abandoned the plebiscite pledge, backed Entsch's proposal for a binding vote. "Broad actually went to the PM and said he would support it," says Entsch, who also got George Christensen on board.

And there's good reason conservatives want to rescue the plebiscite. With the numbers in Parliament now tipped in favour of change, a successful "no" campaign is the only way to kill off same-sex marriage for the long-term. Opponents are also feeling emboldened by Trump's triumph in the US. Hot on the heels of the Brexit shock, it's a reminder that published polls are not necessarily a good predictor of how people will vote. For some, it's also a sign of a turning political tide. "I think the narrative has been that the arc of history bends to the progressive course," says conservative Liberal MP Andrew Hastie. "Brexit and Trump repudiates that notion." He also points out that the anti-SSM group Marriage Alliance uses the same campaign software as the "Leave" camp in Britain and Trump's team in the US. "Perhaps the message to come out of this whole thing is maybe there's been a disruption of the way we organise politically," Hastie says. A free vote

This is the holy grail for the pro-equality side  an empowered Turnbull turns his back on the Abbott-era plebiscite and embraces what used to be his preferred option: a free vote for all MPs, which would certainly see the bill pass. It would need to be agreed by the Liberal party room and even then would risk a blow-up with the Nationals. Even advocates such as Croome, who led the charge against the plebiscite, concede a free vote is "unlikely" at the moment. "But that doesn't mean that it won't happen," he says. "These things can be turned around." Croome says his forces will target voters in electorates held by Liberal same-sex marriage supporters "with the message that they can't go to the next election having done nothing". Alex Greenwich, chairman of Australian Marriage Equality, says his focus will also turn to members of the government who support reform. "With the plebiscite behind us we have the clear air to have new discussions," he says. "I think there's a great number of MPs across the Parliament who don't want this to drag on and want it to be resolved." Government sources said such a sentiment was prevalent among some ministers, who worry the issue will become debilitating and sap the government's ability to focus on its economic agenda. But the feeling is the dust will need to settle over the summer before any other plan can be considered.

Pull the trigger Then there is the nuclear option: an insurgency of Liberal MPs crossing the floor to suspend standing orders and bring on Labor's marriage equality bill for debate. This possibility should not be discounted, but it remains a distant and dangerous prospect. For starters, three MPs would be required to cross the floor in the lower house. Speculation naturally surrounds the openly gay Liberal MPs Trent Zimmerman, Tim Wilson and Trevor Evans, but there could be others. The instigators would risk the stability of the government and their own standing among colleagues. They would also need to be sure they had the numbers in the Senate, where the big unknowns are Bob Day's replacement and the position of six Labor senators opposed to same-sex marriage. If they abstained, only one senator would be required to cross the floor  presumably Dean Smith, the gay WA Liberal who abstained from the plebiscite vote on Monday. Loading
No doubt it is a complicated challenge. The passage of time, the scarcity of evidence and the reluctance of victims to relive their experiences through the justice system only to see the accused possibly acquitted, mean holding individuals to account is difficult.

That was the view of former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick in her advice to the then Abbott government on what should be done to put to rest questions about the "very high level of sexual abuse of women" at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Revelations about sexual and physical abuse inside the military prompted a national outrage. Credit:Rob Homer

Of the 133 cases across Defence that the taskforce referred to police, just one saw the inside of a courtroom and no conviction was recorded. Of the 157 that were referred to the Chief of the Defence Force  including 33 relating to ADFA  none has resulted in formal action. Defence has to meet the same burden of proof as a criminal or a civil court depending on the seriousness of the charge. Again in many cases victims have not wanted to take action.

A royal commission does not change that. Royal commission sceptics argue no final reckoning is possible without punishing individuals and if that can't be done, there is little point in a further probe.

On the flipside, there has never been a proper accounting for the fact that on a tight-knit campus, at least 20 women allege to have been raped, in some cases gang-raped, and at least 19 more indecently assaulted or sexually abused between 1991 and 1998. Those are only the ones who lodged reports. Their reports were "grossly mismanaged" according to Ms Broderick's advice.

By whom? How? How was it allowed to go on? How far up the chain of command did the conspiracy, complicity or tolerance go?
"It's hard to build a generalisation about women candidates based on Hillary Clinton," said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University. "She is such a special case and unique figure, having been around for so long. Did people vote against her because she was a woman or because her name is Clinton? Of course it could be both." Still, many experts see an underlying bias that has discouraged American women from seeking political office, impeding the flow of potential female presidential candidates. Even after the ratification in 1920 of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, some states restricted their right to be candidates; Oklahoma did not allow women to seek executive office until 1942. "What we have in the United States is a pipeline problem," said Kathleen Dolan, chairwoman of the department of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "Not enough women in the high-visibility, high-credibility offices. Not enough women running for school boards, county councils." The United States ranks 97th among 193 nations worldwide in the percentage of women in the lower house of Congress, according to data compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Six of the 50 state governors are women, as are 20 of 100 US senators.

Shauna Shames, author of Out of the Running, a forthcoming book about why relatively few millennials - especially female ones - want to run for office in the United States, said many women are put off by the fundraising that can eat up to 70 per cent of a candidate's campaign time, and the media scrutiny. Her research showed many women expected to face discrimination in what is still very much seen as a man's world. "They think they won't get a fair shot, and so many don't try," Shames said. Susan J. Carroll, a political-science professor at Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, noted that other countries have quotas for the proportion of women who serve in office, which both fills the pipeline and gets voters used to seeing women on ballots. Rwanda, for example, added a 30 per cent female quota with other constitutional changes in 2003, and now has women filling two-thirds of the seats in the lower house - the highest percentage worldwide. The earliest examples of female leaders in modern politics abroad - as in the United States - derived from family relationships.

Take Sirimavo Bandaranaike, that pioneer leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. She got into politics after the assassination of her husband, and not only became the world's first female head of government in 1960 but also served two more times as Prime Minister, from 1970-77 and 1994-2000. (She is also the mother of Sri Lanka's only female president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, who served from 1994-2005.) In 1966, Indira Gandhi became the first female prime minister of India, the world's largest democracy. She was, of course, the daughter of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. She held the office until 1977 and then again from 1980-84, when she was assassinated by her bodyguards. Four years later in neighbouring Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, another daughter of a former prime minister, became the first woman to head a Muslim-majority country. Gandhi's ascent is widely regarded as a seminal event in the history of women in politics. She displayed toughness in war, ordering the invasion of Pakistan in support of the creation of Bangladesh, and decreed martial law when unrest and charges of corruption threatened to topple her administration. Another stereotype-defying woman leader was Golda Meir, who was prime minister of Israel when war erupted in 1973. She was known for pithy quotes about women in politics. "Women's liberation is a just a lot of foolishness," she once said. "It's the men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children." Perhaps the best known modern female wartime leader was Margaret Thatcher, Britain's prime minister, who was known as "the Iron Lady." Europe's first elected head of government, Thatcher ordered Britain's military into war against Argentina in 1982 over islands that Britain called the Falklands and Argentina the Malvinas.

While Thatcher was reviled among Britain's working classes for her economic austerity and conservatism, she was admired for her tenacity in the Falklands war, which the British won. Female leaders followed across Europe, including Iceland in 1980, Norway in 1981, Malta in 1982, Lithuania and Ireland in 1990, France in 1991, Poland in 1992, Switzerland and Latvia in 1999, Finland in 2000, Macedonia in 2004, Ukraine and Germany in 2005, Croatia in 2009, Slovakia in 2010, and Denmark in 2011. In Africa, women have ascended politically as peacemakers. The most prominent example is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her work in healing that country from civil war wrought by her predecessor. Although female leaders abroad are no longer rarities, men still far outpace women in politics: 22.8 per cent of the world's parliamentarians were women as of June 2016, according to the United Nations, up from 11.3 per cent two decades ago. Among the 193 member states of the United Nations, 18 women now serve in the top leadership positions.

"Executive positions are the hardest for women to crack," said Thomas, of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. "That's true in business, true in politics." Tuesday's election not only failed to break the glass ceiling and put a woman in the Oval Office, but it elevated to that throne a man accused of multiple sexual assaults who has made degrading comments about women. Other male leaders, too, are seen as misogynists. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has described women who choose not to have children as "deficient." President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has joked about rape. And President Vladimir Putin of Russia once tried to intimidate Merkel with his Labrador retriever. Loading
Michael Atkins and Matthew Leveson before Matthew's disappearance in 2007. "We could have walked over him and not even known - that's the hardest part," she said. "It's really mixed emotions for us." Mark Leveson said he and his family had searched extensively along this stretch of road before, especially near Waterfall train station and near the back of Waterfall Public School. An excavator helps in the search for Matthew Leveson's body in the Royal National Park on Friday. Credit:Peter Rae "We've looked along there a lot and Faye's convinced we've been there before.

"We knew the chances of finding Matt were one in a million without a tip, but at least it wasn't zero. Matthew Leveson (in white shorts) seen in a CCTV still outside ARQ nightclub on the night he disappeared. "Hindsight is a great thing but you can't think back and kick yourself." He said he often went into the Royal National Park at night to get ideas and would then come back in daylight. Detectives at the search site in the Royal National Park on Friday. Credit:Peter Rae

"Where or how do I hide a body is what I think to myself." He said the family often took a mattock and searched for areas where the ground "looked diggable". Police gathering evidence at the scene on Friday Credit:Peter Rae On Friday morning, Mr and Mrs Leveson visited the area where police were digging and hugged all the detectives involved in the search. "The goal was to bring Matt home; we made that promise nine years ago and we are going to bring him home," Mrs Leveson said.

Michael Atkins arrives at the Coroner's Court on October 31. Credit:Ben Rushton "We are going to give him somewhere to lay to rest where his brothers can go and talk to him, where we can talk to him, where his friends can say goodbye. "He hadn't been given that opportunity - he [the killer] just dumped him like a piece of rubbish." Police from Sutherland Local Area Command had guarded the section of bushland off McKell Avenue overnight. Detectives attached to Strike Force Bowditch arrived at the possible burial site at 7.45am on Friday, followed shortly by the NSW Police Dog Squad.

Up to a dozen police officers have joined the search with more expected throughout the day. Mr Leveson was last seen leaving the ARQ nightclub in Sydney with Mr Atkins in September 2007. Mr Atkins was acquitted by a jury of the murder and manslaughter of Mr Leveson in 2009 and has long rejected any involvement in his boyfriend's death. But in the early hours of Thursday, and after persistent questioning at an inquest last week, he took police to the Royal National Park. It followed a rare but potentially successful move, in which Mr Atkins was ordered in the Coroner's Court to give evidence under immunity, meaning it could not be used against him in any future criminal proceeding.

However, the immunity granted under the Coroners Act did not apply to any contempt of court or perjury offences that occurred when Mr Atkins gave evidence at the inquest. Mr Atkins has now struck a deal with the office of the NSW Attorney-General Gabrielle Upton granting him a separate immunity from prosecution for contempt or perjury on the condition that he gives information leading to the whereabouts of Mr Leveson's body. Although Mr Atkins did not give the evidence about the location of the body during the inquest, the Coroners Act says an immunity certificate covers "evidence of any information, document or thing obtained as a direct or indirect consequence of the person having given evidence." Last week, he spent five days in the witness stand, answering dozens of questions about his final moments with Mr Leveson. Loading
Gable Tostee has offered an explanation for why he didn't call for help after Kiwi tourist Warriena Wright plunged to her death from his Gold Coast apartment balcony.

The Surfers Paradise 30-year-old, was acquitted of the Lower Hutt 26-year-old's murder or manslaughter in a high-profile trial in Brisbane last month.

He made the comments in an upcoming paid tell-all interview widely tipped to have earned Mr Tostee a fee of up to $150,000.

A snippet of Mr Tostee's interview features in a second promotional trailer for the controversial exclusive tell-all with Nine Networks' 60 Minutes due to air in Australia this Sunday evening.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has denied that switching former police minister Bill Byrne back to his old job as Agriculture and Fisheries Minister is a demotion.

"Not at all," Ms Palaszczuk told media following the official swearing in of two ministers and two assistant ministers at Government House on Friday.

New Agriculture Minister Bill Byrne, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Police Minister Mark Ryan following the ministers' swearing in at Government House. Credit:Felicity Caldwell

"Bill Byrne retains his seniority and agriculture is a very important industry in this state.

"You only have to look at the recent Deloitte report to see that agriculture and tourism are some of the economic drivers that are powering our state."
Small businesses have delivered a scathing review of the Palaszczuk government's ability to reduce costs, manage the budget and deliver infrastructure.

The second instalment of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland (CCIQ) ReachTEL Small Business Survey delivered a damning report card for the government in several areas.

Small businesses have given the Queensland government a bad review on some key economic issues in the latest CCIQ survey but Treasurer Curtis Pitt says work is being done. Credit:Robert Shakespeare

And almost two in three businesses surveyed said they wanted to go back to the polls within the next six months.

More than two-thirds of businesses (67.5 per cent) rated the Queensland government's performance in managing the budget as poor or very poor in the survey, which polled 1600 businesses. Only 8.9 per cent rated it as good or very good.
The grieving mother of two young girls who drowned in the family pool south of Brisbane last week has given a heartbreaking account of the girls' final moments.

Speaking to mourners at a public funeral for four-year-old Taya and three-year- old Patricia Young in Loganholme, south of Brisbane, on Friday, Renise Young spoke of the affection the sisters shared.

Taya Young drowned in her family's Kingston pool on Tuesday afternoon.

"They truly loved each other," Ms Young said.

"In their last moments they hugged each other at the bottom of the pool, that's how much they loved each other."
The portraits of about half the number of Queenslanders who served in the First World War have been digitised for the public to search online in time for Remembrance Day.

Digital portraits of almost 30,000 Queensland soldiers who served in World War I can be searched online, commented on and downloaded as high-res images after a three-year project by State Library of Queensland.

Sharing a meal at Fraser's Paddock, Enoggera Army Camp Brisbane ca. 1914 Credit:State Library of Queensland

Staff alongside 30 volunteers worked to digitise each image and create a link to their war service record on the National Archives of Australia's Discovering ANZACs website where possible.

State Librarian and SLQ chief executive Vicki McDonald said the digital portraits represent individual Queensland stories of husbands, fathers, sons, friends and brothers.
Victorian juvenile jail escapee Lachlan Mitchell has evaded police for a third day, with South Australian police raiding six houses to no avail.

Mitchell, 20, fled the Malmsbury Youth Justice Centre on Tuesday and got into a black ute waiting for him with South Australian number plates.

Malmsbury Juvenile Justice Centre

The car is believed to have been involved in a violent carjacking on Thursday where two men held up a driver at gunpoint in Mount Gambier and stole his car.

The car was later found dumped in the same suburb.
After an emotional plea to the public, the family of fatal shark attack victim Jay Muscat family have had his stolen phone anonymously returned.

Mark and Sheryl Muscat reported the theft of their late son's mobile phone to Albany Police on Tuesday, one of more than 40 items stolen from their boat docked at South Coast Cranes.

This photo of Jay Muscat, taken by a shark nearly two years ago, is the lock screen of his stolen phone. Credit:Facebook

Among the stolen items were a stereo, amplifiers and fishing gear, but Mr Muscat wanted only the return of Jay's iPhone 4.

"It's very disheartening... it has texts to his mates, his photos and music," Mr Muscat said.
Washington: US President Barack Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of a jihadist group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, US officials said.

The decision to deploy more drones and intelligence assets against the militant group Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra or the Nusra Front, reflects Mr Obama's concern that it is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al-Qaeda on Europe's southern doorstep, the officials said.

That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Mr Trump has said he will be even more aggressive in going after militants than Mr Obama, a stance that could lead to the expansion of the campaign against the group, possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow. Jabhat Fatah al-Sham says it has broken with al-Qaeda, an assertion discounted by US officials.

The United States has conducted sporadic strikes in the past against veteran al-Qaeda members who migrated to north-western Syria from Afghanistan and Pakistan to join the group and whom US officials suspected of plotting against the United States and its allies.
Women may have played a key role in powering Donald Trump to the White House but protesters this week told a different story. They waved signs outside Trump's new Washington hotel: "Nasty Women Fight Back".

But on Wednesday night, Jennifer Pierotti Lim quietly planned her own rejection of Trump's rise: a dinner for conservative women who feel left behind.

"I'm getting all these calls, texts and emails," she said. "Everyone is saying, 'Okay, what are we doing next?"

Lim, 31, a United States Chamber of Commerce staffer, had never voted for a Democrat until Tuesday.
Beirut: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has welcomed Donald Trump's election victory, believing it has saved him from an interventionist Hillary Clinton administration.

Mr Trump's win may have already shifted the course of the Russian-backed military campaign in Aleppo. A senior pro-Assad official told Reuters that plans to capture the rebel-held east by January were shaped around an assumption that Mrs Clinton would win.

The confidence in Damascus will have been justified if some of Mr Trump's comments on Syria crystallise into policy, though there are questions over how far he will follow through on suggestions such as cooperating with Russia  Mr Assad's most powerful military ally  against Islamic State.

One complicating factor could be Mr Trump's tough stance on Iran, Mr Assad's other main military backer. Mr Trump has threatened to rip up the nuclear deal with Iran and he's heaped criticism on the sanctions relief it brought. Long-standing opposition within Republican ranks to Mr Assad may also block any big policy shift.
Today the Law School's Human Rights Implementation Centre, in partnership with Amnesty International, is launching 'Combating torture and other ill-treatment: a manual for action. In this Q&A we find out more about Debra Long, the principle drafter of the manual, and how she has carved out a career helping organisations put an end to torture.

"You have to have faith that what youre doing will have an impact, maybe not immediately but in the long term and thats the goal of Human Rights Being able to connect with people who have the same focus as you in different countries grounds what youre doing, especially when youre trying to change policy, laws or practice. Youre not working at the high level; youre on the ground day to day. This is what inspires me "

What first interested you in a career in law?

I did my first degree in history and then trained in law, qualified and worked as a solicitor. I was always interested in civil liberties and conservation and had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to work in Human Rights or conservation law but finding opportunities before the Human Rights Act was very difficult.

When did you specialise in Human Rights?

I was working as a solicitor doing personal injury law and wasnt really enjoying what I was doing and then saw an MA in Human Rights law advertised. It was interesting because it wasnt a pure law course, it also looked at Human Rights application and practice, and they had links to a number of organisations that offered internships.

I really enjoyed the course and realised what I wanted to do in the Human Rights field. As part of the course all students had to undertake an internship with an organisation as a means to gain experience of working in the human rights field in practice. I applied to do an internship with an organisation called REDRESS; they help survivors of torture seek justice and reparation. Because of my personal injury background they accepted me and that was a real turning point. The organisation was small but high profile and was set up by survivor of torture, who was very passionate about giving torture survivors a voice.

Ive been lucky in a way that Ive been able to maintain a focus around torture prevention since.

What, in your early career, was most significant in shaping how your career has developed?

After my internship with Redress I finished my course and was looking for a job  so I applied for an internship with The Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT), an international NGO based in Geneva and I moved over there for six months. My previous work experience, the MA and the internship all helped me secure that opportunity and I had a great experience.

Again, it was a small NGO so you had to do everything from putting letters in envelopes and then going to treaty body meetings. After my internship finished in 2001 they offered me a job as UN Programme Assistant and within a year I was UN Programme Officer.

They sent me down to review and sit in on negotiations on the Optional Protocol, which is where I first met Professor Malcolm Evans, as he was a board member of the APT. The negotiations had been going on for nine or ten years with very entrenched views and there didnt seem to be any movement.

The year I joined the negotiations someone suggested a change to the draft and the process came back to life. I was then following the treaty negotiations with a view of getting it adopted by the UN and within another year I was in charge of the UN Programme, pushing the process and working with a whole range of NGOs in Geneva and New York.

I think I was incredibly fortunate to be there at the right time. I was a good match for the organisation and it became a huge early career highlight. It has also taught me that the real work of Human Rights is getting these protocols implemented on the ground.

Ive remained very passionate about the Optional Protocol and its something Ive maintained a focus on, which is what eventually brought me to Bristol.

What did you go onto next?

I came back to the UK in 2004 and moved to Amnesty International as I felt I needed to get a bit more experience on other issues. I was initially The Legal Adviser for The Asia Programme and then subsequently I was Policy Advisor when they were dealing with the various abuses as a result of the so called war on terror.

I worked with researchers and campaigners when they were writing reports to ensure that they understood the legal standards and that they were applying them. I also checked to make sure everything was in line with Amnestys point of view for consistency across the whole of Amnestys network. I was there until 2008.

What did you enjoy the most about your role at Amnesty?

One of the things I enjoyed was the immediacy. As in youd see something on the news and you knew youd have to be involved in a press release on it the same day. There were also challenges and constraints, such as working on the death penalty and getting calls to say someone you were fighting for had died.

I wanted to maintain looking at the prohibition of torture so there was an element of that to my work. Its interesting that ultimately Ive realised that I like having a main focus on torture prevention, but my time at Amnesty was great as it expanded my issue base to poverty prevention, for example.

As a Legal / Policy advisor you dont often get the chance to go in country, however I did get to go on a trip to the Maldives where there were huge problems with torture and deaths in custody due to people protesting against the president and then being detained, tortured and one person had died.

I went to speak to the prisoners to help raise awareness of their situation, check they were ok and to get their stories. Meeting the prisoners was an interesting process. Those who were political activists werent scared of the guards and really wanted to talk to us, however one was a former Attorney General and he wasnt doing very well. He didnt know why he was there. The political climate had changed and the wheel of fortune hadnt favoured him.

The highlight was going to see the political prisoners. In the Maldives they have prison islands, which we were granted access to. One day as we were waiting at the dock to go back to the prison island we heard people calling our names and shouting because some of the women wed seen the previous day had been released. For me it demonstrated that the presence of Amnesty had encouraged the government to do something as a gesture of good will. It doesnt always happen but Amnesty tries to shine a light to create transparency around practices that are abusive to shame or encourage governments to do something about it.

What has been your most significant achievement to date?

Im still thrilled by the fact that I was involved in the adoption of the Optional Protocol. It was exciting but it was hard and the fact that we got it adopted, despite strong opposition from some states, was a good example of working together with NGOs and states and building the trust and relationship between the two. It was a hard won battle, so I guess I feel an emotional attachment to that process and the people involved in it.

Now seeing that the treaty body has been established and working at the international level, its great to have that continuity to get it implemented on the ground. I was in Rwanda last week and was asked why a section was worded a certain way, and because I was there I can explain. I can relate it back to discussions and real life. Its not without its imperfections, but its interesting because its focus is on an international level and Im pleased Im still able to work on it.

On a personal level it was an emotional thing to see people in prison one day and free the next, however you have to be prepared for the fact that you dont always have a good ending, like when I was working at Amnesty to try and prevent someone from getting executed and would get a phone call to say it had happened. It was distressing but you have to reflect in order to do your work better.

Whats your next major project?

Im involved in a Human Rights law implementation project, working in partnership with other universities and picking up on work that Professor Rachel Murray, the Director of the Human Rights Implementation Centre, and I have been doing with other bodies specifically looking at complaints.

Were looking at getting a better understanding of how complaints can get implemented and whether the body thats making a decision on a complaint can improve their processes. Its a three-year project. We are looking at decisions on complaints handed made by the main human rights bodies in Europe, the Americas and Africa, as well as the UN. Were going to be tracking a number of completed cases in nine States across these regions and talking to the victims, lawyers and organisations involved in bringing the cases to the human rights bodies, as well as government officials and the members of the human rights bodies themselves to find out what actually has happened and analyse any blockages hindering implementation of the decision to ascertain if they can be removed and how the process can improve.

Ill also be continuing to work with the Article 5 initiative to help the African Commission on torture prevention and implement the Optional Protocol. The Article 5 initiative draws its name from Article 5 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and of the African Charter both prohibit torture and ill treatment.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?

Its a difficult one in this particular field because there isnt an obvious career path. Its not like working in a law firm where youd aim to be a partner.

For me its about continuing to develop a body of work that Im committed to. I hope Ill still feel committed to torture prevention and I hope, by then, the discussions around that will have changed, because that will mean weve made progress.
President-elect Donald Trump might not crash the economy as badly as some people think, according to three economists at the Northern Arizona University and Alliance Bank Economic Outlook Conference Thursday.

NAU W. A. Franke College of Business professors Dennis Foster and Ronald Gunderson and investment adviser Elliott Pollack said they expected a number of big changes in policy, tax reforms and regulations in the first three to four months of Trumps term and then things will slow down.

Trump could make a huge difference in the economy, Pollock said. He could spur greater economic growth with his plans to cut regulations, cut taxes, open up local gas, coal and oil deposits to production and spend on infrastructure.

Pollack doubted that Trump would be able to bring back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. Those jobs have been replaced by service jobs, such as retail, restaurant and administrative positions. Theyre not coming back.

As long as Trump didnt start a trade war with a major U.S. trade partner, the economy would probably continue to improve and maybe at a greater rate, he said. If Trump got into a trade war all bets were off.

Pollack said that the recovery from the 2008 recession has been a long one. Recessions dont usually die of old age, but the older they get the more vulnerable they are to shocks and bubbles in the market that could cause a recession. Currently things are OK and if things are done properly the economy could continue to grow.

Pollack also hoped that Trump would back off his promise to build a border wall. The U.S. needed the labor provided by immigrants crossing the border for construction and other jobs.

Foster agreed and said that as long as Trump didnt get in a trade war and didnt pick a fight with the Republican Congress he could probably get most of his promises accomplished.

Gunderson added not messing with the Federal Reserve to the list. The Fed was designed to be independent of the political process and every time a politician has tried to order it around things have not turned out well.

The economy at the local level is actually doing better than the national economy, Gunderson said. Theres a building boom going on locally which is bringing in jobs. The medical and service industries are bringing in more diverse and high paying jobs. The tourism industry is growing and so is NAU.

Were very fortunate to be in a pocket of growth, he said.

However, there are some areas of concern, Gunderson said. The city needed to something about highway congestion and the high cost of living was keeping the price of housing too high.

However, high housing prices did create an incentive for people to sell, which would eventually bring prices down, he said.

One of the reasons why the state and local economy isnt improving more quickly is because the number of people moving to the state isnt increasing as quickly as it was before, Pollack said. When people move to the state they generate a demand for services, which creates more jobs and draws more people to fill those jobs. But people arent moving, so the national, state and local economy is stuck.

One reason people arent moving is because millennials, people who are 35 years or younger in age, have delayed getting married, partially because of student loan debt, he said. When you delay getting married, you delay buying a house and having children, all of which spur economic growth.

However, this has caused the demand for apartments to increase dramatically, Pollack said. This is because millennials arent buying houses and Baby Boomers are moving out of their homes and into apartments.
Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams

Brooklyn Heights is out of Huma.

Hillary Clintons embattled top aide Huma Abedin and campaign chairman John Podesta dropped by the losing presidential candidates headquarters at 1 Pierrepont Plaza on Wednesday afternoon to clean out their desks, shortly after Clinton gave her concession speech.

Hours earlier, somber staffers began emptying out the office, hugging and crying as they began vacating the campaigns nerve center.

Clintons team has been working out of tony Cadman Plaza West building as their office since April last year, and the location quickly became a popular target for protests aimed at the former New York senator  although Clinton was said to be an infrequent guest, generally working out of her own office in Manhattan.
Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams

Be the squeaky wheel who gets the grease!

Downtown-area residents can weigh in on the planned routes for Mayor DeBlasios $2.5-billion streetcar when city officials visit Community Board 2s Transportation Committee meeting at Long Island University on Tuesday night, and Community Board 6s committee at the Miccio Center in Red Hook on Thursday.

The city recently released maps of potential routes, including Community Board 2 streets in Fort Greene, Dumbo, Downtown, Brooklyn Heights, and Boerum Hill, and Community Board 6 thoroughfares in Red Hook, Cobble Hill, and the Columbia Street Waterfront District.

Officials say they want to give the trolley right-of-way on as much of the system as possible, so some of the marked streets may end up being closed to vehicle traffic and losing parking spaces to accommodate the tram.

On track: Potential streetcar routes through Community Board 2. NYCEDC

The city says the so-called Brooklyn-Queens Connector will connect transit deserts like Red Hook with job hubs such as the Navy Yard and Industry City, but critics at previous community forums have vented concerns that the pricey Sunset Park-to-Queens system will clog up traffic, replace parking spaces, gentrify the area, and be designed to benefit the wealthy living along the waterfront and the developers who are trying to sell them condominiums.

Community Board 2s transportation committee will take comments and questions from committee members first and then open up the floor for public comment on the issue.

Community Board 2 Transportation Committee Meeting at Long Island Universitys Metcalfe Hall, Jonas Board Room (1 University Plaza at Flatbush and DeKalb avenues Downtown). Nov. 15 at 6 pm.

Community Board 2 Transportation Committee Meeting at the Miccio Center (110 W. Ninth St. between Henry and Clinton streets in Red Hook). Nov. 17 at 6:30 pm.

On the Hook: And in Community Board 6. NYCEDC
For corporate America, theres a lot to like about President-elect Donald Trumps platform: fewer regulations, lower taxes and a singular devotion to deal-making.

Yet theres one signature campaign pledge  to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants  that has many executives across the country on edge. The proposal, if implemented even remotely as vigorously as Trump at times promised, would squeeze a labor pool that companies like Dunkin Brands Group Inc. and Bojangles Inc. say has already been tightening for months. That in turn stands to further drive up labor costs at a time when many businesses are facing jumps in state-set minimum wages.

All of that may be precisely the desire of many Trump supporters: Prop up stagnant wages for working-class Americans. But for companies in industries such as construction, restaurants, hotels and technology, it could make filling jobs more difficult.

We supply ready-mixed concrete to the housing industry, and if theres not enough workers to build houses, guess what? We dont get to supply the concrete, said Tom Hill, chief executive officer of Summit Materials Inc.

Hill said hes in favor of gaining control of the border to stem the flow of drugs and people without documents. But lawmakers would have to devise a guest-worker program to provide laborers and should find a way to make legal the workers who are already in the U.S., he said.

They tend to be really good hard-working people, he said. I would love to see them have a path to citizenship.

Business Sense

Some business leaders, including Douglas Yearley, CEO of luxury-home builder Toll Brothers Inc., said they hoped Trumps long experience as a businessman would inform his decisions.

Our business is an immigrant-based business. Then again, so are his hotels and so are his casinos, Yearley said at a conference Wednesday. You go on a construction site of any homebuilder and it is the United Nations. Ive been in this business 26 years and I dont think Ive ever met a Caucasian trowel hanger. Its just the nature of the business.

Trump has vowed to build a multibillion-dollar wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and hold legal immigration steady even as companies practically beg the government to raise the number of visas currently handed out. Trumps measures could have employers from meat packers to restaurants and software companies facing higher wages, renewed threats of work-site raids, the loss of seasonal workers and a continuation of decades-long backlogs for visas.

We look forward to partnering with the Trump administration and Congress as they transition in the coming months and years, Karen McLoughlin, chief financial officer of Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., said at a conference Wednesday. Obviously, immigration is a very important issue for Cognizant.

Tight Market

U.S. firms face a tight labor market. The unemployment rate sits at 4.9 percent, down from 10 percent in 2009, and wages have started to pick up steam. Most economists agree that the nation is on the verge of full employment, which could drive up wages further. The U.S. Federal Reserve noted in its June report on regional economies that there are labor shortages across the U.S., from Boston to Atlanta to St. Louis, where both high  and low-skilled industries reported having a hard time finding workers and filling job vacancies.

Its gotten to be a progressively tighter market over the last two years, said Firehouse Subs CEO Don Fox. Annual turnover at the chains company-owned restaurants has risen to about 95 percent from about 48 percent three years ago, he said.

My hope is that they will open the door for legalization, he said. I just dont see a situation where people will be deported by the millions.

With as many as 20 percent of construction workers composed of undocumented immigrants, Trumps plan to deport them could cause wages to double within a few years, said Mark Boud, chief economist at Washington-based research company Hanley Wood. Unemployment in the construction sector is already about 2 percent and even lower for some skilled tradesmen.

If you are going to remove 20 percent of the labor, that has a huge impact to the point where doubling labor costs from current wages is not unrealistic, said Boud. It will take some time, people arent going to be thrown out overnight, but a lot of those workers are going to go into hiding.

Flip Side

By the same token, U.S.-born workers could benefit from Trumps policies.

In the short run, it does create employment opportunities for native-born Americans and possibly higher wages, said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Trump built his campaign on immigration, making one of his first campaign stops near a dusty port of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border. He then won the endorsement of the Border Patrol union, which has seen the nearly 2,000-mile long border with Mexico become inundated with migrants from Central America, Haiti and other countries seeking asylum in the U.S.

Trump has promised that on Day One he would repeal Obamas executive actions, including an order that shielded up to 4 million undocumented immigrants from immediate deportation and allowed them to receive employment cards. If Trump undoes the action, that could strand the 750,000 people - many of them college graduates  who have so far been approved for employment authorization under the program.

Businesses do rely on and currently have workers with employment authorization based on having deferred action, said Robert Loughran, an immigration attorney and partner at Houston-based Foster Global, noting that those people are scattered across industries, from accounting to software engineers.
Gun-related arrest

Flagstaff police arrested a man over the weekend on suspicion of pointing a gun at multiple people downtown.

According to the police report, officers responded to the 100 block of North San Francisco Street at about 2:17 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 5. One victim told the police he was in the alley behind the Hotel Monte Vista when the suspect approached asking if he had any marijuana. The witness said he did not. The suspect pointed a gun at the him. The witness said the suspect then said "never mind" and walked away. The victim went inside.

Moments later, witnesses said, the suspect approached a woman who was urinating in the alleyway. Her boyfriend confronted the suspect, who was reported to be holding onto the woman's arms. During the argument, witnesses said the suspect pointed a handgun at the woman's boyfriend, then started waving it around as he backed away toward North San Francisco Street.

The boyfriend said the suspect turned away and appeared to put the gun in his coat pocket. He then thought the suspect said he was going to shoot or kill him. At that point, witnesses said, the boyfriend hit the suspect in the head with either a fist or an elbow, knocking him unconscious.

Bouncers and two witnesses who had encountered the same suspect when he tried to start a fight with them earlier that night helped secure the suspect and gun until the police arrived.

The gun was identified as the suspect's roommate's Walther P99 AS 9 millimeter semiautomatic handgun. It was loaded with one round in the chamber.

The suspect, who was unconscious when police arrived, was taken to Flagstaff Medical Center due to his injuries and intoxication. He later told officers he did not remember anything after leaving the bars.

Police arrested Alexander G. Morgan, 24, on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and disorderly conduct. He was booked into the Coconino County Detention Facility.

Charged with DUI

 Flagstaff police arrested Ruben Lopez, 57, of North Brians Way on a DUI charge Sunday, Nov. 6 at 12:27 a.m.

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.
latest news

October 31, 2022

Buddy TV

In November, there are hundreds of new and returning TV showsit can be overwhelming to try and choose what to watch. That's why we've selected some of the best options...
The Builders Merchants Federation (BMF) has nominated the Teenage Cancer Trust as its charity partner for 2017. During the year the Federation will raise funds through four major events, with the proceeds being shared equally between the Teenage Cancer Trust and the merchant industry's own charity, the Rainy Day Trust.



Fundraising initiatives will be held at the BMF's three main industry events in 2017  its Burns' Night Supper in January, the BMF All-Industry Conference in June, and Members' Day in September.

In addition, the BMF has agreed with the organisers of the Pavestone Rally (formerly the Vado Rally) that the proceeds of this event will be divided equally between the Teenage Cancer Trust and the Rainy Day Trust. This year's Vado Rally raised over 60,000 for charity, and the Pavestone Rally 2017 is aiming to raise an amazing 100,000.

John Newcomb, BMF managing director, said: "BMF members always contribute generously to our charity fundraising and in past years we have been proud to hand over significant sums to our nominated charity. However, with the support of the 2017 Pavestone Rally added to our other fundraising, we are delighted that we will be able to help fund the work of two very worthwhile charities with an extraordinary five figure contribution."

The Pavestone Rally, a fun event that involves teams driving from Dover to Monte Carlo in old cars purchased for 500 or less, will take place from 7 to 10 September 2017.

Aaron Frogley, who organises the Rally, said: "After the huge success of the Vado Rally I am looking forward to welcoming more teams on the 2017 Pavestone Rally. The four days are guaranteed to be filled with laughter! I am extremely grateful for the support that John and all at the BMF have given both rallies and Pavestone is proud to be supporting two such deserving charities."

Teams from the BMF and the BMF Young Merchants Group enjoyed the 2016 Rally so much they are both taking part for a second year.

If you would like to join them, the official entry will open on 1 January and close on 28 February. Contact Aaron.Frogley@pavestone.co.uk for further information.
Why do people keep leaving their cars unlocked in NJ? We asked

Vehicle thefts have steadily risen since 2020. To counteract that, the state Attorney General's Office is urging people to lock their cars.
President honors Sun Yat-sen as hero, calls on all Chinese to work for country's rejuvenation

President Xi Jinping pledges to safeguard national unity and fight separatists at a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday to mark the 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen. Photo by Li Tao / Xinhua

President Xi Jinping sent a strong signal of safeguarding national unity and fighting separatists at a high-profile ceremony on Friday to mark the 150th birthday of a statesman who was widely respected by people on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan.

"We will never allow any people, organization or political party, at any time, in any way, to split from China any part of its territory," Xi said during an hourlong speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Sun Yat-sen played a pivotal part in the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the imperial rule of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and founded the Republic of China. He also was the founder of the Kuomintang, which governed Taiwan from the 1940s to 1990s and from 2008 to last year.

"We will never tolerate a reoccurrence of the tragedy of national separation," Xi said, adding that China had experienced a century of misery resulting from separation.

Wang Hailiang, a researcher at the Taiwan Research Institute in Shanghai, said that Xi spoke at a time when Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which takes an ambiguous position toward the one-China policy, is trying to erase Sun's influence on the island.

The DPP's move goes against Sun's last wish to unify China, as well as against a historic trend, he said.

Zhu Lijia, a professor of public administration research at the Chinese Academy of Governance, said that national unity is the core of Sun's thought, since he opposed all forms of separation.

Zhu said Taiwan's ruling party is "not enthusiastic" about Sun.

Xi, who called Sun a national hero and compatriot, said the revolutionary leader was a firm supporter of national unity.

The mainland would like to communicate with all political parties, organizations and people in Taiwan, as long as they acknowledge that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, he said.

The president called on all Chinese people, including those in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, regardless of their political affiliations, to make joint efforts for national rejuvenation, a goal to which Sun was dedicated.

"Mr Sun Yat-sen said, 'What is the biggest issue for a people? That is, to know how to love the nation'," Xi quoted him as saying.

Yu Zhengsheng, chairman of China's top political advisory body, said that Xi's speech showed China's "solemn stance and firm determination" to safeguard national unity.

Hung Hsiu-chu, chairwoman of Taiwan's Kuomintang, visited the mainland early this month.

During the trip, Xi met with her and made a six-point proposal on cross-Straits relations that included opposing "Taiwan independence" and promoting social and economic cooperation across the Straits.

Zou Shuo contributed to this story.
Register for more free articles. Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading.

Get Government & Politics updates in your inbox! Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Sign up! Already a Subscriber? Already a Subscriber? Sign in Terms of Service Privacy Policy
on Thursday issued a statement relating the current situation at the group and its issues with former chairman Cyrus Mistry. In this letter, the group made many revelations on how Mistry had been counducting himself and the business of the group.



Here are a few takeaways from the statement:



Issues related to Tata Sons
The war of words between Tata Groups 78-year-old patriarch Ratan Tata and his former protege escalated on Thursday. Tata Group accused Mistry of ulterior objective, and of employing devious methods to take over Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) and other operating companies, with help from the independent directors.
The Delhi High Court on Friday directed the Tata Sons - Berhad (Malaysia) joint venture  India  to submit its brand-licensing agreement (BLA) with the Malaysian entity to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) within one week to determine who actually controls the Indian low-cost carrier.On paper, the Tata Group owns a 51 per cent stake in India Private Limited, while AirAsia Berhad (Malaysia) owns the remaining 49 per cent.

The high court order comes on an over two year old petition by Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy and the Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA), alleging the airline of violating Indian aviation norms to secure its operating license in 2014 and demanding immediate cancellation of the same.



Ever since commencing its business, AirAsia has witnessed considerable turbulence including the exits of several of top-level executives and serious allegations of fraudulent activity and financial irregularity.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has on Friday attached Rs 1,700 crore worth of personal shares of UB Group chief and his associate firms, in connection with the money laundering case involving the beleaguered liquor baron.
Unlock 30+ premium stories daily hand-picked by our editors, across devices on browser and app.

Full access to our intuitive epaper - clip, save, share articles from any device; newspaper archives from 2006.

Curated newsletters on markets, personal finance, policy & politics, start-ups, technology, and more.

Pick your 5 favourite companies, get a daily email with all news updates on them.

26 years of website archives.
Union Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha on Friday said the ministry has formed a committee to look into the telecom regulator's recommendation on the proposed Rs 3,050 crore penalty on telcos.

Last month, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) proposed a penalty of about Rs 3,050 crore on three telcos - Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular - as they failed to provide sufficient inter-connect points (PoI) to Reliance Jio resulting call drops.
The real estate group founded by US President-elect is looking to launch more projects in the country after the success of its previous projects here.


The war between the Tatas and the Mistrys has claimed the board seat of Nusli Wadia - the seniormost independent director of Tata Motors, Tata Steel and Tata Chemicals, with companies seeking Wadias ouster from their boards along with their Chairman Cyrus Mistry.
today said it has been directed by promoter, Tata Sons, to convene an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to remove the steel major's Chairman Cyrus P Mistry and independent director Nusli N Wadia.
A hygiene operator at Taunton-based manufacturer Ministry of Cake has celebrated 30 years of working for the company.

Patrick Cridland said the company was part of his family as he was photographed tucking into a special celebration chocolate cake.

Its gone so quickly I didnt really realise, he said. I have made some great friends along the way and Ive had a really happy time here.

MD of Ministry of Cake Chris Ormrod described Cridland as one of the most cheerful people that he had met.

In a world where people measure their work time in months and sometimes years, to go beyond 10 years is a start, to go beyond 20 is quite something but to get beyond 30 is a phenomenal achievement he said.

This weekend, Ormrod will share his success story at the Bread & Butter festival at the Institute of Directors in London.
From Katrina Kaif advertising hair removal cream Veet to adorning signboard with Paan Bahar, advertisers have long loved using celebrities to endorse brands across the globe. Who can forget Priyanka Chopra's self-deprecating monologue 'Acchai ki ek alag chamak'? Or Kapil Dev's famous line "Boost is the secret of my energy".
The appointment of judges has been a point of contention between the Centre and judiciary for long. The government on Friday has returned 43 names recommended by the collegium for appointment as high court judges.
Authorities on Friday imposed curfew in parts of to prevent a protest march called by the separatists, officials said.

"Curfew has been imposed in seven areas to maintain law and order," the police said.

Separatists have called for the march to the Jamia Mosque in the city's Nowhatta area.

Congregational Friday prayers have not been allowed inside the mosque.

Separatist leaders Mirwaiz Umer Farooq has been kept under house arrest while Muhammad Yasin Malik was arrested and shifted to the central jail on Thursday.

Syed Ali Geelani continues to remain under house arrest.

Meanwhile, the ongoing unrest has entered the fifth month after it started here on July 9.

Ninety-five people have been killed and over 12,000 injured during the ongoing violence in the valley.
Defence Minister on Thursday said that instead of saying 'India won't use nuclear weapons first', it should be said that 'India is responsible nuclear power'.

"If written down strategy exists or you take a stand on a nuclear aspect, I think you're actually giving away your strength in nuclear. People say India has not first used nuclear concept. I should say that I'm a responsible nuclear power and I'll not use it irresponsibly. This is my thinking. Some may say that Parrikar says nuclear doctrine has changed. It has not changed in any government policy," Parrikar said at a book release function.

The no-first-use commitment was made after India conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998. Pakistan responded within weeks by conducting tests of its own.

"We used to get threat from the defence ministry of neighbouring country that they are going to use tactical nuclear weapon if they're threatened. The day surgical strikes happened, no threat has come again. 'Be unpredictable' is part of the strategy. But we have to have a written book so that in general, we follow that direction. Necessarily if there is any question or danger to the country, I will not open the book first," he said.

However, the Defence ministry has clarified that the statement made by Parrikar was his personal opinion and not official position.

"What he said was that India being a responsible power should not get into 1st use debate. But once again it is clarified that this was his personal opinion," the ministry said in a statement.

India carried out surgical strikes late on September 29, days after Pakistani terrorists attacked an army camp in Uri in Kashmir, leaving 19 Indian soldiers dead.
People wait to deposit and withdraw their money outside banks and ATMs

Long queues were witnessed at banks and ATMs, which opened after two days, as people rushed to get new banknotes in lieu of their old defunct bills.

Many ATMs ran out of cash in couple of hours as there were heavy rush to withdraw lower denomination currency. Most of the machines were equipped to tender Rs 100 notes, while some were still not working.

People wait to deposit and withdraw their money outside banks and ATMs (Reuters)

Banks are saying that they are trying to recalibrate their machine for higher denomination notes, it will take some days before they start tendering new high security Rs 500 and 2000 notes which is expected to ease pressure.

However, to ensure customer convenience, banks have been asked to provide all cash withdrawal transactions at their ATMs free of cost till 30 December.

People wait to deposit and withdraw their money outside banks and ATMs (ANI)

After the government scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, banks were shut on Wednesday, and ATMs were supposed to be out of service for re calibration on Wednesday and Thursday.

In the financial capital of the country, shutters of ATMs of State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda, Yes Bank, Dena Bank were down in many parts. ATMs of many banks reported running dry.

From today onwards, customers are allowed to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day from ATMs till November 18. The withdrawal limit will be raised to Rs 4,000 per day per card from November 19, 2016.

In the two days when the ATMs were out of service, the banks said they will re-configure their ATMs to dispense Rs 100 and Rs 50 notes.
Modi reaches for annual bilateral summit

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday reached Tokyo to attend the annual India- bilateral summit to be held on Friday.

"Konbanwa Tokyo! PM @narendramodi arrives in for the Annual Summit, his second visit in two years," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

In a pre-departure statement here on Wednesday, Modi said the high-speed railway cooperation between the two countries would boost bilateral trade and investment.

"The high-speed railway cooperation between India and Japan is a shining example of the strength of our cooperation," he said.

"It will not only boost our trade and investment ties, but will also create skilled jobs in India, improve our infrastructure and give a boost to our 'Make in India' mission."

During Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to India last year, the east Asian economic superpower committed itself to a high-speed railway line between Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

"On November 12, Prime Minister Abe and I will travel to Kobe on the famed Shinkansen -- the technology that will be deployed for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed railway.

"Both of us will also visit the Kawasaki Heavy Industries facility in Kobe, where the high speed railway is manufactured," Modi said.

Stating that the India-Japan partnership was characterised as a Special Strategic and Global Partnership, Modi said the two countries "see each other through a prism of shared Buddhist heritage, democratic values, and commitment to an open, inclusive and rules-based global order".

"Today, Japan is one of the top investors in India. But many Japanese companies, which are household names in India, have been committed to the potential of Indian economy for several decades," he said.

The Prime Minister said that in Tokyo he would have a detailed interaction with top business leaders from India and Japan to look for ways to further strengthen trade and investment ties.

He will call on Japanese Emperor Akihito and review the entire spectrum of the bilateral cooperation with Prime Minister Abe in Tokyo on November 11.

Modi, who left New Delhi early on Thursday morning, made a brief stopover in Bangkok to pay homage to the late Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world's longest-ruling monarch, who died last month.
The effects of the government's scheme is in full swing as long queues form outside ATMs and banks, with anxious citizens waiting to finally get some cash in their pockets or exchange their old currency notes. With the ATMs finally opening today, and greater clarity emerging on how the process of transitioning to the new series of currency notes will take place, some people might find relief.
The CPI-M on Friday "strongly denounced" Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's statement that India should revise its "no first use" nuclear weapon policy.

"This has serious implications both for India's security concerns and for India's standing in international relations," the Communist Party of India-Marxist said.

"This statement represents a complete reversal of the long standing position of India as a country that champions a nuclear weapon free world and consistently stood by its commitment for peaceful use of nuclear energy.

"The statement clearly indicates that this government is negating India's established stand on use of in war.

"It jeopardises India's security concerns by undermining the declared good neighbourly relations approach," the CPI-M said in a statement.

"Further, it undermines India's efforts for membership of international bodies like the UN Security Council and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

"The Defence Minister's contention that these are his personal opinions is completely untenable," the CPI-M said.

"As a member of the cabinet collective in a parliamentary democratic system, under oath to the Indian Constitution, such opinions that are contrary to India's long established policy direction is a reflection of the complete lack of 'governance' of this government.

"If the Defence Minister wishes to air his personal opinions, then he may do so after resigning from the Cabinet," it said.

The CPI-M urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi, now visiting Japan, to clarify the government's commitment to India's long standing stand of universal nuclear disarmament and the non-use of in war.
Belfast-based Ashers Baking Company is exploring further legal options after a judge last month ruled against the business over its refusal to make a cake supporting gay marriage.

Two years ago, gay rights activist Gareth Lee asked Ashers to supply a cake marking International Day Against Homophobia and depicting Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie alongside the motto Support Gay Marriage.

Ashers refused to do so as the message on the cake went against the owners Christian beliefs, and Lee took the business to court where it was found guilty of discrimination.

The bakery last month lost an appeal against that decision, when Court of Appeal judges said that, under law, bakers were not allowed to provide a service only to people who agreed with their religious beliefs.

Lawyers for the McArthurs have now written to the Court of Appeal asking it to confirm that no direct route of appeal to the Supreme Court is available.

In civil cases, such as Ashers, the Court of Appeal decision seems to be final, said The Christian Institute, which has backed Ashers general manager Daniel McArthur and his wife Amy.

European Court of Human Rights

If there is no right to appeal to the Supreme Court, Ashers would still have the option of attempting to have their case heard at European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, if they decided to do so.

In the letter to the Court of Appeal, Belfast solicitors firm Hewitt & Gilpin wrote: In view of the complexity of these issues, and the wider public importance which this case clearly has, and in order to make clear that the appellants [Ashers] have exhausted their domestic remedies  we respectfully invite the Court of Appeal to consider giving a short ruling on the question of whether appeal to the United Kingdom Supreme Court is available in this case.

Family business Ashers was established in 1992 by Daniels father Colin McArthur. The business has previously refused other cake printing orders including pornographic pictures and offensive language, said the institute.

The Christian Institute said there may be a court hearing in the next few weeks to deal with administrative matters such as costs. The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, which took the case against Ashers, want the McArthur family to pay the costs of the legal proceedings, added the institute.
Prime Minister on Friday praised the "growing convergence" of views between his nation and Japan, saying strong ties will enable them to play a stabilising role in Asia.

Modi is in Japan to sign a landmark nuclear energy pact and strengthen ties as China's regional influence grows and Donald Trump's election has thrown U.S. policies across Asia into doubt.

India, Japan and the United States have been building security ties by holding three-way naval exercises, but Trump's "America First" campaign promise has stirred concern about a reduced U.S. engagement in the region - an approach that could draw Modi and Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe closer.

Modi told Japanese business leaders that the 21st century is Asia's century, urging them to invest in India.

"The growing convergence of views between Japan and India and our special strategic and global partnership have the capacity to drive the regional economy and development, and stimulate global growth," he said.

"Strong India and strong Japan will not only enrich our two nations, it will also be a stabilising factor in Asia and the world."

The nuclear agreement, which Modi and Abe are set to sign later in the day, follows a similar one with the United States in 2008 which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation, a step seen as the first big move to build India into a regional counterweight to China.

The Yomiuri newspaper said the main accord will likely be accompanied by a separate document stipulating that Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, will suspend nuclear cooperation if India conducts a nuclear test. Initially, Japan wanted that inserted into the agreement itself, but India resisted, it said.

India has declared a moratorium on such testing since its last explosions in 1998.

The two countries have also been trying to close a deal on the supply of amphibious rescue aircraft US-2 to the Indian navy, which would be one of Japan's first sales of military equipment since Abe lifted a 50-year ban on arms exports.

India's Defence Acquisitions Council met earlier this week to consider the purchase of 12 of the planes made by ShinMaywa Industries, but failed to reach a decision.
A nine-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court on Friday upheld the demand of by states for allowing goods and raw materials to their territories.
As New Delhi grappled with its worst smog in 17 years, the head of India's largest mobile payment firm got on a plane and left, one of thousands of professionals escaping pollution that could cost the capital and the broader economy dear.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of PayTM payment start-up, left last Sunday for a temporary stay in Mumbai, worried about the impact of hazardous clouds of dust, smoke and fumes that hang over Delhi during the winter months.

"It became very visibly clear that it is going to be tough in Delhi, especially with young kids," Sharma said in Mumbai.

"We were worried that it could create long-term (health) problems."

His company, which has considered moving from its base outside Delhi, has installed air purifiers, brought in plants and masks and offered extra health assistance.

Telecoms operator Idea Cellular and others have allowed more employees to work at home, and hired buses so that car traffic is reduced.

A few companies are thriving from the heavy smog hanging over the city earlier this month, including providers of face masks and air purifiers who have seen sales soar.

But others, like car manufacturers, are in the firing line of local and politicians who want to reduce the deadly haze, while estate agents and tour operators have complained of a slowdown in business.

Delhi, home to around 17 million people, is among the fastest growing states in India. Its $84 billion economy has been expanding at more than 8 percent for the past two years, faster than a 7.4 percent average.

Its air quality, meanwhile, has deteriorated, even by the standards of a country with some of the world's most polluted cities. Conditions had improved by Friday, but the problem is perennial and has been particularly acute this winter.

Companies have yet to make an estimate of the cost of a week of coughing, spluttering and watering eyes, but local industry lobby group Assocham estimates "several billions of dollars" of new investments are under threat.

According to a World Bank study, Asia's third-largest economy lost 8.5 percent of its GDP in 2013 due to air pollution.

"WORST ON EARTH"

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), a global real estate services firm serving large corporates, said some clients were reconsidering Delhi as a base, as costs of working are on the rise.

"This is increasing their operational cost as they are being made to spend more to provide a healthy workplace to their employees," said Santosh Kumar, a senior executive at the firm.

Delhi's image is deteriorating more widely, a headache for tour promoters and a government touting "Brand India".

Some local tour operators say they are already receiving requests from overseas partners to redraw the itinerary of foreign tourists to avoid even an overnight stay in Delhi. Business travellers say they are cancelling trips.

"The ongoing tourism season, which is yet to pick up, could see a maximum hit," Assocham said.

Expatriates are also thinking twice about living in the Indian capital. JLL's Kumar said more smog could see foreigners packing their bags, a blow to real estate as well as employment.

NOT EVERYONE LOSES

The local government has taken steps to reduce traffic amid widespread public anger at pollution that has caused choking, wheezing and breathlessness.

Licences are being withdrawn for diesel-powered vehicles older than 15 years, and authorities are considering resuming an "odd-even" scheme, under which cars can only travel in the city on alternate days depending on their registration number.

Those steps, and the risk that India's courts will impose stricter rules on emissions, are a potential blow to foreign and domestic carmakers, some of whom have asked for greater clarity.

But not everyone is complaining about the smog.

Japan's Daikin has seen sales of air purifiers increase by up to three times since the Hindu Diwali festival, and its stock that had been expected to last until March is exhausted.

To meet growing orders, the Osaka-based air-conditioner maker increased shipments from its Thai factory by 50 percent.

Nirvana India, which distributes the Vogmask face mask in South Asia, reported soaring sales.

It sold 300 to 400 pieces a week around this time last year, but since Diwali at the end of October, it has sold 5,000-8,000 a week and is seeking emergency stocks from Singapore, China and Korea.

"Earlier, only expats, patients and government departments would buy these masks," said chief executive Jaidhar Gupta. "Now everyone is buying."
The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre and Chhattisgarh government to find a peaceful solution to the Naxal problem in the state and adopt a "pragmatic" approach towards life.

A bench of Justices M B Lokur and Adarsh Goel said there has to be some peaceful solution to this problem, after Chhattisgarh government gave an oral assurance that no coercive action will be taken against social activist Nandini Sundar and others till November 15.

On November 7, Delhi University Professor Sundar, JNU professor Archana Prasad and others were booked on charges of murder of a tribal villager in the insurgency-hit Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

"We are trying to help you (Centre and Chhattisgarh), but you are not taking it seriously. You have to find a peaceful solution to the problem. We are not blaming you or anybody. You have to take a pragmatic view of life," the bench said.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said there were "authentic and contemporaneous" records which could be placed before the court against all the accused including Sundar.

Mehta's submission came after the bench said it will stay the FIR until the next date of hearing.

He urged the apex court not to form any opinion unless the record was produced before the court in a sealed cover, saying it was a "state of panic" for the country.

Senior advocate Ashok Desai, appearing for Sundar and others, informed the court that after the last hearing, an FIR was lodged against the two professors and the activists.

"This is the most astonishing thing which has ever happened, as the activists who went to the state in May were booked for the murder in November," Desai said.

Countering him, Mehta said there was "more than what meets the eye" and they will file the records in a sealed cover before the court on November 15, the next date.

Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, appearing for CBI, said political activist Manish Kunjam who was directed by the court to be provided with security has no threat perception and two Personal Security Officers have been provided by the state.

He said the Centre was not in a position to provide him security and if the court wanted, the state could upgrade it.

ASG said that in the last hearing of the case, the state government had suggested providing them with security but they refused the offer saying "they don't want to be under the eyes of police".

Police has claimed that alleged armed had killed

the villager, Shamnath Baghel, with sharp weapons on late night of November 4 at his residence in Nama village under Kumakoleng gram panchayat in Tongpal area, around 450 kms from Raipur.

Baghel and some of his associates were spearheading protests against Naxal activities in their village since April this year.

An FIR was lodged against Sundar, Archana Prasad (JNU Professor), Vineet Tiwari (from Delhi's Joshi Adhikar Sansthan), Sanjay Parate(Chhattisgarh CPI-M State Secretary) and others for the murder of Baghel based on the complaint of his wife, the state police had said.

They were booked under section 120B (criminal conspiracy), 302 (murder), 147 (punishment for rioting), 148 and 149 of IPC at Tongpal police station.
The World Bank asked India and Pakistan to "agree to mediation" in order to settle on a mechanism for how the Indus Waters Treaty should be used to resolve issues regarding two dams under construction along the Indus river system.

The World Bank's move came as it told the two countries that it was responding to their separate proceedings initiated under the Indus Waters Treaty 1960.

Simultaneously, the World Bank held a draw of lots to determine who will appoint three umpires to sit on the Court of Arbitration that Pakistan has requested.

The draw of lots was held at the World Bank headquarters here.

"The World Bank Group has a strictly procedural role under the Indus Waters Treaty and the treaty does not allow it to choose whether the one procedure should take precedence over the other. This is why we drew the lots and proposed potential candidates for the Neutral Expert today," said Senior Vice President and World Bank Group General Counsel Anne-MarieLeroy.

"What is clear, though, is that pursuing two concurrent processes under the treaty could make it unworkable over time and we, therefore, urge both parties to agree to mediation that the World Bank Group can help arrange.

"The two countries can also agree to suspend the two processes during the mediation process or at any time until the processes are concluded," Leroy said.

The Bank said the Indus Waters Treaty 1960 is seen as one of the most successful international treaties and has withstood frequent tensions between India and Pakistan, including conflict.

The Bank is a signatory to the Treaty.

The Treaty sets out a mechanism for cooperation and information exchange between the two countries regarding their use of the rivers, known as the Permanent Indus Commission which includes a commissioner from each of the two countries.

It also sets out a process for resolving so-called "questions", "differences" and "disputes" that may arise between the parties.

The current proceedings under the treaty concern the Kishenganga (330 megawatts) and Ratle (850 megawatts) hydroelectric power plants.

The power plants are being built by India on Kishenganga and Chenab Rivers.

Neither of the two plants are being financed by the World Bank Group.
A Pakistani opposition party lawmaker has submitted a resolution in the Senate to withdraw 1,000 and 5,000 rupee notes from circulation in the country to tackle corruption, citing the example of India where Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered withdrawal of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation.

The resolution submitted by Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Senator Osman Saifullah Khan comes at a time when Pakistan's population is gradually shifting to cash economy due to the government's ill-conceived taxation policies, said Express .

"The house urges the government to take steps to withdraw from circulation as legal tender the high denomination Rs 5,000 and 1,000 notes so as to reduce illicit money flows, encourage the use of bank accounts and reduce the size of undocumented economy," reads the resolution.

This is the only way that will compel people to use banking channels and launch a crackdown on black money circulating in the economy, said Khan, speaking at a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Finance on Thursday.

However, Committee Chairman Senator Saleem Mandviwalla underlined the need for taking the views of all stakeholders.

The General Pervez Musharraf-led government had introduced the Rs 5,000 denomination notes despite resistance from the State Bank of Pakistan. The notes made it easy for the people to keep cash instead of depositing money in banks.

Referring to India as an example, he added that the world over such notes were being discouraged.

In a dramatic blitz on tax evasion, the Indian Prime Minister ordered the move. In India, banks and cash machines were ordered to close on Wednesday in preparation for the turnaround, triggering a late night rush by customers to withdraw smaller notes from ATMs.

Senator Khan said that the issue of withdrawal of currency notes should be taken up with the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank.
After being cashless for over 24 hours, millions of people stood in queues outside on Thursday to exchange their now-defunct Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes with new Rs 2,000 notes, or simply withdraw some money. According to sources, still havent got the new set of Rs 500 notes as customers were given a mix of Rs 2,000 and Rs 100 notes.
Many, including some in the government, are saying that the withdrawal of high value currency notes will lead to a windfall to the Centre through dividends earned from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), but people familiar with RBI balance sheet say that is unlikely the case.
Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), the company which was tasked to set up IT infrastructure for the GST, said that by January it will start training around 60,000 state government officials to equip them to handle roll out. The non-profit organisation said that the Centre agreed to pay around Rs 500 crore every year on behalf of the tax payers as service charge.


Birthday wishes

Call 281-422-8302 or email sunnews@baytownsun.com to wish someone a happy birthday. We will print your birthday wish on Page 2 of The Sun.

Happy Birthday Wishes
At a time when many Indians were on Tuesday evening glued to the contest thousands of miles away between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for the US Presidency, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to catch the nation by surprise. He announced the of the existing Rs 500 and 1,000 currency notes with effect from midnight  a few hours from the announcement  as part of his governments fight against black money.
Queues outside banks grew longer as did confusion and chaos, with all cash vending machines still not functioning despite a two-day break for stocking up new currency notes.
The more the merrier is what roads and shipping minister believes on ports, even if there is excess capacity.
and corporate have welcomed the easing of the various debt restructuring norms by the Reserve Bank of India that has expanded the scope of these schemes allowing companies from other sectors apart from infrastructure to also be a part of some schemes. Apart from this, the provisioning requirement and the quantum of bad loans on the book of the is also expected to go down as these toold to manage bad loans can be extended to more companies that are struggling.
is leaving open the possibility of another presidential bid as shell-shocked liberals focus on helping the Democratic Party rebuild after Donald Trump's victory.

"Four years is a long time from now," said the 75-year-old Vermont independent, noting that he faces re-election to the Senate in 2018. But he added: "We'll take one thing at a time, but I'm not ruling out anything."

Democrats have begun post-election soul searching, with Sanders and Sen Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, urging the party to embrace a more populist economic message. As some Democrats protested across the country, the party's liberal wing began jockeying for power, arguing that Clinton's loss could be attributed to her reluctance to fully focus on economic inequality and tougher Wall Street regulations.

"The final results may have divided us  but the entire electorate embraced deep, fundamental reform of our economic system and our political system," Warren told the AFL-CIO on Thursday. "Working families across this country are deeply frustrated about an economy and a government that doesn't work for them."

Warren laid out the principles she believes should govern Democrats during the Trump era: Standing up to bigotry, pushing for economic equality and combatting the influence of Wall Street.

"We will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled Americans -- on anyone. Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever," she said.

The sweeping Republican gains have thrown the future of the party into uncertainty, as Democrats process the scale of their losses and try to figure out the best way to come back in the 2018 elections. The Democratic National Committee may end up being ground zero for the fight, with no clear successor in line to replace interim chairwoman Donna Brazile. Sanders is backing Minnesota Rep Keith Ellison.

Warren and Sanders were articulating the frustrations among many liberals in the aftermath of Trump's stunning triumph over Hillary Clinton. But their influence underscores another problem facing Democrats: Many of the party's leading voices are senior citizens, older than their core constituencies of young and minority voters. Warren is 67.

Sanders said that millions of working-class voters' decision to back Trump was "an embarrassment" to the party and Democrats must take a strong stand against the role of corporate interests in politics. He said the party as a whole was unable to make a strong enough case to struggling workers, particularly in the industrial Midwest, who sided with Trump.

"You cannot be a party which, on one hand, says we're in favour of working people, we're in favour of the needs of young people, but we don't quite have the courage to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class. People do not believe that. You've got to decide which side you're on.
In March, I was driving along a road that led from Dayton, Ohio, into its formerly middle-class, now decidedly working-class southwestern suburbs, when I came upon an arresting sight. I was looking for a professional sign-maker who had turned his West Carrollton ranch house into a distribution point for Trump yard signs, in high demand just days prior to the Ohio Republican primary. Instead of piling the signs in the driveway, he had arrayed them in his yard along the road. There they were, dozens and dozens of them, lined up in rows like the uniform gravestones in a military cemetery.
Donald Trumps surprise victory on Wednesday in the bitterly contested US presidential election might have shocked people the world over, but there were people, aside from those who voted for him, who have found a cause for joy. In particular, Indian right-wing group, the Hindu Sena, celebrated in Delhi as projections trickling in showed Trump leading Clinton in the race to the Oval Office.
US President Barack Obama came away with "renewed confidence" from his 90-minute meeting with his successor Donald Trump, the White House has said, adding that the emphasis of the discussions was on ensuring smooth transition to the next administration.

"I think that President Obama came away from the meeting with renewed confidence in the commitment of the President-elect to engage in an effective, smooth transition," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily news conference.

"The President was pleased to hear a similar commitment expressed by the President-elect," he said.

In the 90-minute meeting, Obama briefed Trump on domestic and foreign policy issues, besides his upcoming foreign trips to Greece, Germany and the APEC Summit in Peru.

"The President described to the president-elect some of the issues that he expects to come up with some of our allies and partners and other world leaders that he'll meet with on the trip," Earnest said.

A large portion of the meeting was spent in discussions on properly staffing up and organising White House operations, he said.

"The president-elect indicated a lot of interest and understanding the strategy of staffing and organising the White House, and obviously that's something that President Obama has thought about extensively during his eight years in office," he said.

Earnest said the two leaders during the meeting sought to lay the foundation for an effective transition from the Obama presidency to the Trump presidency.

"This administration, at the direction of President Obama, has been preparing for this moment and this meeting for the better part of a year. This obviously was an important early step, having the president sit down with the president-elect to discuss that transition," Earnest said.

The heated rhetoric witnessed between Obama and Trump during the presidential campaign did not spill over into the meeting, the spokesman said.

"They did not recreate some sort of presidential debate in the Oval Office today. They were focused on doing the work of the American people, fulfilling their institutional responsibilities, and on President Obama's part, that means laying the groundwork so that the incoming president-elect can hit the ground running," Earnest said.

"Based on the kind of agreement that was evident about the priority that they both place on a smooth transition, it sounds like the meeting might've been at least a little less awkward than some might have expected," he added.
prices have seen a reversal in trend, especially all industrial commodities that were not doing well for the last few years after China's economy started cooling down and several metal producers started cutting production of closing mines.
Punjab Congress president Capt Amarinder Singh has tendered resignation along with 42 Congress MLAs on Friday after the Supreme Court's ruling on Punjab's water-sharing agreement with other states.

Amarinder Singh told the media that hopefully they would come up with the two-thirds majority and use the constitutional powers to nullify this decision of the Supreme Court.

"Once our resignation is given the matter is over. And now, it is up to the Speaker, whether he will accept it tomorrow or day after. We have no connection with Vidhan Sabha anymore," Singh said.

"We are not in the house now. We are going to people of Punjab now. Tomorrow, in every constituency of Punjab, we will burn the effigies In all the 117 constituencies. We will start wide-agitation from Abohar on November 13. Sunil Jakhar will take take out mass protests, where everyone of us will participate," he added.

In a blow to Punjab, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that Punjab was bound to share the Ravi-Beas waters with Haryana and other states and comply with its two judgments for completion of the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal.

The case involves sharing of Ravi-Beas river waters largely between Punjab and Haryana, besides Rajasthan, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has asserted that the unprecedented move by the Centre to demonetise Rs. 500 and 1,000 notes looks like a hastily executed decision.

Tharoor Told ANI, "There is a sense that the government has caught people without any chance to prepare and has given them no time. It was a matter of hours between Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement and the money becoming illegal,"

He further said that a limited amount can be withdrawn from the ATMs which means, that the banks do not have enough printed notes.

"It looks like this is somewhat a hastily executed decision. I feel that the government is either not fully prepared or has not fully explained it to the nation," he said.

"I am not really making a political point here; I am saying what any ordinary citizen would feel that before the government should impose such hardship on people, they didn't think through all the consequences," he added.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has, however, defended the government's decision and said the country is moving towards a cash-less economy.

Reassuring the people that those having lawful money would have nothing to fear, Jaitley said this is a major setback to the parallel black money economy because a lot of currency operating outside the system will now have to be brought into the banking system.

"The government believes that this decision has been welcomed everywhere. This major step with help India's credibility," he added.

Jaitley further said this decision will change the way people spend and keep their money.

"It will take India towards a cash-less economy, it doesn't merely push the country in that direction, but significantly pushes it," he added.

He also said the decision is of significant advantage to the economy, adding both the Centre and states will benefit from more revenue accruing in the economic system.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Janata Dal (United) said Friday that if the Supreme Court issues an order, it should be respected by all.

Commenting on the en masse resignations of Punjab Congress MLAs, JD-U spokesperson Ajay Alok told ANI here, "Everyone should respect the SC decision. The Sutlej Yamuna Canal dispute between Punjab and Haryana is very old and, since people in both states are affected by it, so, the representatives of both states will be."

"But it is important to follow the order given by the Supreme Court because, if all parties keep giving their arguments, then there will be no resolution," he added.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court held the 2004 law passed by Punjab to terminate the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water sharing agreement between neighbouring states as unconstitutional.

Following which, Congress Punjab state president Captain Amarinder Singh decided to quit as a member of the 16th Lok Sabha from the Amritsar constituency in Punjab with immediate effect "as a mark of protest against the deprivation of the people of Punjab of the much-needed Sutlej river water.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A government school teacher in Chhattisgarh's Raigarh district has been arrested for allegedly chopping hair of seven girl students.

As per the complaint lodged by the family of the girls, the accused, identified as Pushpendra Patel, posted as Maths teacher at Government Higher Secondary School, Naharpali under Bhupdeopur Police Station, forcibly chopped the hair of seven girl students of class IX and X with a pair of scissors on November 8, saying they come to school for studying not to show off their long hair.

"You come for study not to show off long hair," he had told the students. After being arrested, the accused teacher said, "A student should remain as simple as possible, I had given them warnings."

Meanwhile, the victim students demanded that stringent action must be taken against the accused teacher for insulting them.

"We want him (teacher) to get punishment, he has insulted us by his action," one of the girls whose hair was chopped by the accused said.

The police have registered against the accused teachers under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Further investigation into the case is on.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday questioned the resignation of the president of the Punjab unit of the Congress party, Captain Amarinder Singh, from the 16th Lok Sabha moments after the Supreme Court ruling declared a 2004 law passed by the state assembly to deny Sutlej Yamuna Link Canal water to Haryana as illegal and unconstitutional.

"Has anyone seen Captain Amarinder Singh in the Lok Sabha? A person who has not gone to the Lok Sabha automatically becomes eligible for resignation. He should have been dismissed, he has just done some face saving exercise," Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment and BJP MP Vijay Sampla told ANI here.

"About the Punjab MLAs, their term was about to get over by next month, that is why this is a drama," he added.

Sampla also blamed the Congress for being the root cause of the water sharing problem.

"When the SYL was constructed by Indira Gandhi, then Captain Amarinder Singh was prominently behind it,"Sampla added.

Post his resignation from the Lok Sabha, Captain Amarinder Singh has sought a personal meeting with the speaker next week.

Congress MLAs have also sent their resignations to the Speaker of the Punjab Assembly, and will meet him this morning to personally hand over their letters.

The Supreme Court held as unconstitutional the 2004 law passed by Punjab to terminate the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water sharing agreement with neighbouring states.

In his resignation letter, Captain Amarinder said he had decided to quit as a member of the 16th Lok Sabha from Amritsar constituency in Punjab with immediate effect "as a mark of protest against the deprivation of the people of my state of the much-needed Sutlej river water.

.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
International Monetary Fund (IMF) has supported Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts to fight corruption by demonetizing 500 and 1000 rupees notes but cautioned that the move has to be managed prudently.

IMF spokesman Gerry Rice told reporters in Washington that the global body supports Modi government's measures to fight corruption and illicit financial flows in India.

He, however, said that the move has to be managed prudently to minimize possible disruptions keeping in mind the large role of cash in everyday transactions in Indian economy.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed happiness at the patient and orderly manner in which the citizens are getting the notes exchanged in banks following the cancellation of the legal tender character of the high denomination bank notes of Rs.500 and Rs.1000.

In a series of tweets, the Prime Minister also said that it is heartening to see such warmth, enthusiasm and patience of the citizens to bear this limited inconvenience for a greater good.

He assured that the Government is unwavering in its effort to create an India which is corruption free and in ensuring that the fruits of development touch every citizen.

Meanwhile, the Indian Government has taken a decision that old 500 & 1000 rupee notes will be accepted for making payments towards fees, charges, taxes and penalties payable to the Central and State Governments including Municipal and Local Bodies.

Such old notes will also be accepted for making payment of utility charges for water and electricity etc.

However, these facilities will be available only till midnight of 11th November, 2016.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Tourists in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, have been left inconvenienced after the Indian government demonetised 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes.

Foreign tourists visiting Taj Mahal were caught off guard as ticket counters refused to accept their 500 and 1,000 rupee notes. Groups of foreigners were seen chipping in with change to buy tickets.

"I cannot buy a ticket because the ticket counter told me that 500 rupee and 1,000 rupee notes do not work here. I don't know how, but I cannot find a way in India", said a Chinese tourist.

Most foreign tourists were also unaware of the government decision and its intricacies. They also faced a problem exchanging currency as with both banks and Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) shut; there was an acute shortage of 100 rupee notes.

Domestic tourists also faced problems.

"The problem is that we did not bring 100 or 10 rupee notes from our home. We came with just 500 and 1,000 rupee notes because of safety issues during the journey. We just have 500 and 1,000 notes. The government banned 500 and 1,000 rupees notes at night. Now, thousands of people are here, where will we go? What we will do? What will we eat at the hotel?" said a tourist, Vijay Patil.

In a surprise announcement, the Centre withdrew the two of its largest currency notes at midnight on Tuesday in a bid to flush out money hidden from the taxman.

The shock move was designed to bring billions of dollars worth of cash in unaccounted wealth into the mainstream economy, as well as hit the finances of militants who target India and are suspected of using fake 500 rupee notes to fund their operations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India and Japan on Friday inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in the field of outer space, which would enable cooperation in satellite navigation, planetary exploration and space industry promotion, joint missions and studies.

The MoU also provides for the establishment of a Joint Working Group (JWG) and signing of Implementing Arrangements to carry out specific cooperative projects.

Apart from that, a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) was also signed between the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship of India and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan on the Manufacturing Skill Transfer Promotion Program.

Under this, around 30,000 Indian youth would be trained in the Japanese styled manufacturing in the next 10 years.

This would be achieved through the programmes of Japan-India Institute for Manufacturing (JIM) and the Japanese Endowed Courses (JEC) in select engineering colleges.

Japanese companies would be encouraged to set-up JIM by utilizing their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) fund while the JEC would be supported by Government of Japan through technical experts. Programmes under this MoC would contribute to 'Make in India' and 'Skill India'.

India's Ministry of Earth Sciences and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) agreed on a mutual collaboration in the field of Marine and Earth Science and Technology.

It aims to promote cooperation in the areas of joint survey and research, exchange of scientific visits by researchers and experts, joint scientific seminars and workshops, exchange of information, data and studied results and any other mutually agreed forms of cooperation.

A MoC between India's Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare and Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan was inked in the field of agriculture and food related industry.

It was signed to deepen the bilateral cooperation in the fields of agriculture and food industries that includes food value chain networking and protecting Geographical Indication (GI) of agriculture products.

MOU was also signed between the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) Ltd. and Japan Overseas Infrastructure Investment Corporation for Transport and Urban Development to enable cooperation and promoting investment in infrastructure projects in railways and transportation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Indian Army chief General Dalbir Singh on Friday proceeded on his two-day visit to Nepal from November 11 to 13.

General Singh's visit assumes special significance in the light of India's relationship with the neighbouring country, underpinning India's priorities in maintaining friendly relations in the region.

The Indian Army chief was accorded with a guard of honour on his arrival at the Nepal Army Headquarters.

During the visit, General Singh also paid a courtesy call to Nepali President Bidhya Devi Bhandari and interacted with the chief of the Army Staff of Nepalese Army General Rajendra Chetri.

He is also scheduled to meet the Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal during his visit.

General Dalbir Singh will also be witnessing Indo-Nepal Joint Military Exercise Surya Kiran-X, conducted at Saaljhandi, here.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Supreme Court will today hear an appeal filed by the December 16 Nirbhaya gang rape convicts, who have moved to top court challenging their death sentence.

The death sentence of four of the convicts- Akshay, Vinay Sharma, Pawan and Mukesh was upheld by the Delhi High Court.

They had challenged their death sentence awarded by the Delhi High Court in the Supreme Court.

In the last hearing on November 7, the top court' amicus curiae in the case, Raju Ramachandran, has asked the apex court to set aside the death penalty awarded to the accused.

In his written submissions, the senior advocate listed six fundamental errors committed by the trial court while awarding death sentences, including not taking the mitigating circumstances of the accused persons into consideration and not hearing them in person on their punishment.

Amicus curiae refers to someone who is not a party to the case but volunteers to offer information on a point of law or some other aspect of the case to assist the court in deciding a matter before it.

The top court had on April 4 begun final hearing of the convicts' appeal almost two years after staying their execution.

Two of the four death-row convicts had written to Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justice Deepak Misra, stating that they do not approve of the defence counsel appointed by the court to argue their case before the top court as they had given statements against them to the media in the past.

The trial court had in September 2013 awarded death sentences to the convicts. Six months later, the Delhi High Court upheld their conviction and sentence. All the convicts moved the apex court in 2014, which stayed their execution. Six people, including a juvenile, had brutally assaulted the woman in a moving bus in South Delhi.

Later, the accused threw out the victim and her male friend at an isolated spot. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29, 2012, triggering nation-wide protests that resulted in giving more teeth to laws related to rape and other forms of sexual harassment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. elections is an outcome several Americans are just refusing to accept, as protests have broken out across the country in which at least 25 US cities overnight had demonstrations outside Trump's properties.

While most protesters were peaceful, dozens were arrested and at least three officers were wounded. And about 40 fires were set in one California city, reports CNN.

On Thursday afternoon, more than 200 anti-Trump protesters marched from the Union Square area to Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

Some carried signs with messages such as, "White men stop ruining everything." They chanted, "Trump and Pence make no sense."

Overnight, about 5,000 people protested the real estate mogul's victory outside Trump Tower, authorities estimated, this included pop star Lady Gaga who is a firm Hillary Clinton supporter.

The concern of the protestors ranged from policies, such as Trump's proposed plan to build a wall along the US-Mexican border, to the polarizing tenor of his campaign that they say stoked xenophobic fears.

At least 15 protesters at Trump Tower were arrested Wednesday night for disorderly conduct, New York police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
United States President Barack Obama met the President-elect Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, as both men put their bitter differences aside in a time-honoured ritual epitomizing the peaceful transfer of political power.

Three days after mocking Trump as unfit to control the codes needed to launch nuclear weapons, Obama told his successor that he wanted him to succeed and would do everything he could to ensure a smooth transition, reports CNN.

Calling Obama a "very good man" Trump, said that he would be seeking his advice in future.

The meeting reflected the sudden change in the political mood between the last days of an election campaign and the reality of government and the changeover of power between two administrations that follows.

Obama said that his number one priority in the next two months will be trying to facilitate a transition that ensures our President-elect is successful.

Obama informed Trump that "If you succeed, the country succeeds," as the two men sat in high-backed chairs in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office.

Thanking Obama for the meeting which originally been scheduled for 10 minutes and went on for 90, Trump said, "Mr. President, it was a great honor being with you and I look forward to being with you many, many more times," and adding that he and Obama had spoken about some wonderful and difficult things and "some high-flying assets."

Following the White House visit, Trump went to meet House Speaker Paul Ryan on Capitol Hill and also saw Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell while in the town. Vice President-elect Mike Pence met Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump outlined his priorities after meeting McConnell.

The President-elect said, "We'll look very strongly at immigration. We're going to look at the border, very important. We're going to look very strongly on health care. And we're looking at jobs, big league jobs."

At the same time as Trump and Obama were meeting, the billionaire's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and communications aide Hope Hicks met senior members of the White House staff.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Congress Party on Friday mocked of Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar by calling him a 'Joker' after Parrikar asked India to call itself a responsible nuclear power.

Congress leader Manish Tewari told ANI, "With great respect to the honourable defence minister of India, he is a bit of a joke. Is the defence minister of India entitled to have a personal view in the public's pace on such an extremely sensitive issue?,"

"The 'no first use policy' was not put in place by a congress government. But as a part of the draft nuclear doctrine was formalised by Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee," Tewari said.

"The 'no first use policy' is located in the larger context of India's commitment to universal nuclear disarmament so unfortunately you have a defence minister who completely and absolutely doesn't understand nuclear theology," he added.

Union Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said that instead of saying 'India won't use nuclear weapons first', it should be said that 'India is responsible nuclear power'.

"If written down strategy exists or you take a stand on a nuclear aspect, I think you're actually giving away your strength in nuclear. People say India has not first used nuclear concept. I should say that I'm a responsible nuclear power and I'll not use it irresponsibly. This is my thinking. Some may say that Parrikar says nuclear doctrine has changed. It has not changed in any government policy," Parrikar said at a book release function.

The no-first-use commitment was made after India conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998. Pakistan responded within weeks by conducting tests of its own.

India carried out surgical strikes late on September 29; days after Pakistani terrorists attacked an army camp in Uri in Kashmir, leaving 19 Indian soldiers dead.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Asserting that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's move to demonetise 500 and 1000 Rupee notes had dealt a deadly blow to those supplying fake notes and those involved in terror funding, the Centre on Friday lauded the historical step saying the massive development will break the very structure of terrorist organisations.

Speaking to the media here, Minister of State, Home Affairs, Kiren Rijiju said that India has been facing the grave challenge of corruption and black money, which is circulating very heavily illegally and now this decision will not only to check corruption and black money but it will also stop terror funding and circulation of fake Indian currency.

"The Home Ministry has been facing the problem of terror funding for a long time, so this particular decision has given a deadly body blow to those supplying fake notes and those involved in terror funding. So it's a historical step and this will break the bones of terrorist organisations and people who are funding behind the cartel," he said.

Earlier, International Monetary Fund (IMF) supported Prime Minister Modi's efforts to fight corruption by demonetizing 500 and 1000 rupees notes but cautioned that the move has to be managed prudently.

IMF spokesman Gerry Rice told reporters in Washington that the global body supports Modi government's measures to fight corruption and illicit financial flows in India.

He, however, said that the move has to be managed prudently to minimize possible disruptions keeping in mind the large role of cash in everyday transactions in Indian economy.

Meanwhile, with the ATMs opening today nearly 48 hours post Prime Minister Modi's radical announcement about scrapping of the 500 and 1000 rupees notes, long queues made by anxious citizens were seen across the nation with the new currency notes available for withdrawal.

The withdrawal limit is of 2,000 rupees per day per card for all the customers at bank ATMs.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) has been asked by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to provide details of the stock of Indian currency in denominations of Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 in the Nepali financial system.

The query by RBI comes following India's move to withdraw 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced that the currency notes of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 denominations will not be legal tender beginning November 9 in order to crack down on rampant corruption and forged currency.

The Indian currency of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 denominations were also banned by the NRB effective from Wednesday following the surprise decision by the Indian Government.

The head of the foreign exchange management department of the NRB, Bhisma Raj Dhungana, said that the RBI has been informed by the central bank that around 35 million Indian rupees in denominations of 500 and 1,000 is within the formal financial system in Nepal.

"The figure is based on the details submitted by the banks and financial institutions and money changers," the Kathmandu Post quoted Dhungana as saying. "It also includes the denominations that the NRB possess," he added.

Dhungana said they are yet to receive a response on that matter.

According to officials, the stock of Indian currency with Nepalis could be much higher than the reported 35 million in the financial system.

The NRB official said that possibilities of many Nepalis carrying bank notes of these denominations are quite high as Nepali citizens are allowed to carry Indian rupees prior to this ban.

The Indian government has set a deadline of 50 days to deposit the scrapped notes at banks and postal offices so it is necessary to exchange these bank notes at the earliest.

Talks were also held on Wednesday to discuss the matter between the Indian Embassy and officials from the central bank in Kathmandu.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The rutting season of the Hangul is at its peak in the world famous Dachigam Park of Kashmir.

In Kashmir, during the autumn season, different types of birds and animals start their breeding or rutting process and the Hangul is one of them.

Some weeks before the rutting season, the growing interaction between male and female Hanguls is distinctly visible.

Wild life department authorities are always monitoring the rutting season of Hangul very carefully to assess its population accurately.

The rutting season starts in October and ends mid-November. The arrival of the rutting or breeding season is heralded by the loud roar of a master stag as a challenge to any other stag over territorial rights and its harem of hinds.

These stags desert the hinds at the end of the rutting season and the fawns are born in late May or early June.

The Hangul Kashmir Stag is the only surviving sub-species in the Indian subcontinent of the Red Deer family in Europe.

This magnificent mammal could finally get some protection with the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) all set to declare it a 'critically endangered' species.

Known for its giant antlers bearing 11 to 16 points, the Hangul has been hunted for centuries and its habitat has been destroyed, leading to its population plunging to a mere 150.

Even then, the IUCN, the biggest international body assessing threat levels to flora and fauna, has categorised it as that of 'Least Concern' by clubbing it with European and other 'red deer' species of the world.

Once found in high altitude regions of Northern India, the Kashmir Stag is now confined to only Dachigam Park in Kashmir. It has been considered as one of rarest mammals in the subcontinent for the last six decades.

That's why tourists come from all over the world to visit the Dachigam Park.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New York [U.S.], Nov. 11 (ANI): Anti Trump protests are showing no signs of abating for the second day running in American cities, as tens of thousands of people came out on the streets the second night in protest in about 25 cities across America chanting 'Not My President'.

These disturbing developments emerged nearly 48 hours after the country elected its 45th president after a bitter campaign that many political pundits say has been the bitterest one they have seen in their lifetime.

In downtown Manhattan, home to both Presidential candidates Trump and Clinton about 200 protestors gathered in Washington Square Park chanting 'Trump and Pence make no sense'.

This even as Presidential-elect Donald Trump flew in to the country capital Washington DC to meet with President Obama for the first time ever.

However, Hillary Clinton stayed away from any political activity today as she went hiking with her dog in White Plains.

A woman who met her on the trail said she was surprised to see the Presidential candidate who was hiking with her husband.

Back in New York, Hillary's supporters which included celebrities were in a state of shock and revulsion over the results.

Over 5000 protestors including Lady Gaga were in front of the Trump Tower raising anti Trump slogans. 15 protestors were arrested outside Trump Towers.

Even as I file this report, protestors are pouring out into the streets in Baltimore, Maryland. Traffic was backed up in several points in the city as hundreds of people joined in spontaneously in the protests.

One of the protestors Philo told the Baltimore Sun, "We are just showing that this is going to be the next four years, it will be four years of resistance. Tonight in particular is supposed to serve as a catharsis for Baltimore residents to let their anger out in a peaceful way"

On the West Coast in many cities demonstrators carried flags and effigies of President-elect Trump declaring that they refused to accept Trump's victory.

Across college campuses and street corners, authorities are not stopping the demonstrations so long as it is peaceful. "They're not protesting Trump, they're protesting democracy and the right to disagree with them," said one observer.

The divisions are so stark in America that even after the results have been out for 48 hours there is no sign of a healing process visible.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha Subramanian Swamy on Friday has questioned the World Bank's interference in the long standing Indus Water Dispute.

"World Bank is just a cooperative bank in which all countries pay money and subscribe and on this basis it runs. They can facilitate an agreement as it is considered as an international bank but they can't decide on any issue," he said.

"I think the Government of India needs to be supported for taking a tough stand," he added.

The World Bank on Friday asked India and Pakistan to "agree to mediation" in order to settle on a mechanism for how the Indus Waters Treaty should be used to resolve issues regarding two dams under construction along the Indus river system.

The World Bank's move came as it told the two countries that it was responding to their separate proceedings initiated under the Indus Waters Treaty 1960.

The World Bank held a draw of lots to determine who will appoint three umpires to sit on the Court of Arbitration that Pakistan has requested.

The draw of lots was held at the World Bank headquarters here.

"The World Bank Group has a strictly procedural role under the Indus Waters Treaty and the treaty does not allow it to choose whether one procedure should take precedence over the other. This is why we drew the lots and proposed potential candidates for the Neutral Expert today," senior vice president and World Bank group general counsel Anne-Marie Leroy said.

It also sets out a process for resolving so-called "questions", "differences" and "disputes" that may arise between the parties.

The current proceedings under the treaty concern the Kishenganga (330 megawatts) and Ratle (850 megawatts) hydroelectric power plants.

The power plants are being built by India on Kishenganga and Chenab Rivers.

Neither of the two plants are being financed by the World Bank Group.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Yes you heard it right! Vidyut Jamwal starrer 'Commando 2' has indeed a Narendra Modi connect.

'Commando 2' is an espionage thriller, which revolves around a commando, portrayed by Vidyut.

In the flick, he is skilled in many aspects of survival, weaponry, hand-to-hand combat and is on a mission to eradicate black money, which has been siphoned to banks abroad.

But the most surprising element of the story, which will flabbergast everyone, is that the movie also has a Prime Minister who wants to eradicate the illegal black money from the country.

Recently, PM Modi has taken the nation by storm by demonetizing Rs. 1000 and Rs. 500 notes to stop the flow of black money in the country's economy.

Isn't this surprising! It seems that PM's speech has found its way for the silver screen through the story of 'Commando 2.'

Vipul Shah, the producer of the film, while listening to Prime Minister's address to the nation on Tuesday night, had a sense of deja vu.

Deven Bhojani, the director of the movie shared ," Vidyut Jammwal who returns as the commando is on a mission to trace black money which has been siphoned to banks abroad. The idea was to combine action and intelligence in an espionage thriller. Ritesh (Writer) touched on the subject of black money during a brainstorming session and both Vipul and I agreed that the subject was relatively unexplored and timely.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sales decline 22.41% to Rs 0.45 crore

Net profit of Amit Securities declined 96.00% to Rs 0.01 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 0.25 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015. Sales declined 22.41% to Rs 0.45 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 0.58 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015.0.450.582.2213.790.010.280.010.280.010.25

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Total Operating Income decline 6.02% to Rs 10485.17 crore

Net profit of Bank of Baroda rose 343.54% to Rs 552.12 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 124.48 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015. Total Operating Income declined 6.02% to Rs 10485.17 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 11156.36 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015.10485.1711156.3660.9664.66894.36445.32894.36445.32552.12124.48

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sales rise 522.59% to Rs 52.92 crore

Net profit of Energy Development Company declined 10.38% to Rs 3.28 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 3.66 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015. Sales rose 522.59% to Rs 52.92 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 8.50 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015.52.928.509.2063.763.985.123.224.283.283.66

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sales rise 10.23% to Rs 1176.33 crore

Net profit of Fortis Healthcare declined 37.47% to Rs 38.24 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 61.15 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015. Sales rose 10.23% to Rs 1176.33 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 1067.20 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015.1176.331067.204.021.7939.2571.8539.2571.8538.2461.15

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sales decline 34.17% to Rs 60.83 crore

Net profit of Kriti Industries (India) declined 18.46% to Rs 0.53 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 0.65 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015. Sales declined 34.17% to Rs 60.83 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 92.40 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015.60.8392.407.356.711.882.300.811.290.530.65

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sales decline 24.40% to Rs 162.56 crore

Net profit of Novartis India declined 78.58% to Rs 22.21 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 103.69 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015. Sales declined 24.40% to Rs 162.56 crore in the quarter ended September 2016 as against Rs 215.04 crore during the previous quarter ended September 2015.162.56215.049.515.2634.57140.5633.86139.6622.21103.69

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
ONGC rose 0.89% to Rs 278.35 at 12:45 IST on BSE after the company said its overseas arm, ONGC Videsh and Petroleos De Venezuela S.A. signed agreement for payment of dividend and financing of San Cristobal Project in Venezuela.

The announcement was made during market hours today, 11 November 2016.

Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was down 500 points, or 1.82%, to 27,017.60.

On BSE, so far 94,339 shares were traded in the counter, compared with average daily volume of 6.94 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 278.80 and a low of Rs 270.70 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 296.80 on 27 October 2016. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 188 on 12 February 2016. The stock outperformed the market over the past one month till 10 November 2016, advancing 3.14% compared with 2.01% fall in the Sensex. The scrip also outperformed the market in past one quarter, jumping 20.48% as against Sensex's 0.93% fall.

The large-cap company has equity capital of Rs 4277.75 crore. Face value per share is Rs 5.

ONGC said that ONGC Videsh and Petroleos De Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) through their relevant subsidiaries signed two definitive agreements for facilitating redevelopment of the San Cristobal joint venture project in Venezuela on 4 November 2016. San Cristobal project is located in the Zuata subdivision of proliferous Hugo Chavez Fria Orinoco Heavy Oil belt, in the Junin Norte Block in eastern Venezuela. The joint venture was incorporated in April 2008 consequent to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed in March 2005 at New Delhi to jointly develop oil and gas exploration and production projects in Venezuela. ONGC Videsh has an equity interest of 40% in the project with PDVSA holding the balance 60%.

The agreements provide for mechanism to liquidate ONGC Videsh's outstanding dividends from the project while at the same time, ONGC Videsh needs. to obtain long term financing for the capital investments for implementing the remediation plan of the project. The remediation plan aims to invigorate the field from its current production level of about 18,000 barrels per day (bbl/day) to 27,000 bbl/day by the use of water flooding technique.

Earlier on 1.August 2015 ONGC Videsh and PDVSA had entered into a memorandum of cooperation on training and education under which ONGC Videsh sponsored training for a batch of petroleum engineers from PDVSA in masters programs at the premier petroleum institute of India - Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. The petroleum engineers upon completion of their specialized course shall be posted in the joint ventures of ONGC Videsh with PDVSA. The ONGC alliance with PDVSA in the upstream sector is strategic in nature and will continue to build and grow with strong cooperation, in order to achieve corporate goals, ONGC added.

ONGC's net profit rose 6.3% to Rs 4974.92 crore on 10.3% decline in net sales to Rs 18286.62 crore in Q2 September 2016 over Q2 September 2015.

ONGC is India's largest oil and gas exploration firm by sales.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Held on 10 November 2016

Wockhardt announced that the Board of Directors of the Company, at their Meeting held on 10 November 2016, approved the acquisition of 100% stake in Wockhardt France (Holdings) S.A.S. ('WFH') (an existing step down subsidiary of the Company) from Wockhardt Bio AG ('WBG'), a subsidiary of the Company. By virtue of the said acquisition, WFH shall become a direct wholly owned subsidiary of the Company from erstwhile step down subsidiary. WBG continues to be a direct subsidiary of the Company.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Partners with Belinco and SRN Info

Ramco Systems announced that it is all set to expand its reach into the Chinese/ North Asian market with Ramco Avaition Suite. The Company has signed China-based aircraft maintenance and engineering company, Belinco as customer. The company also inked strategic partnership with SRN Info, to widen the horizon and offer a holistic next-gen technology experience to Aviation companies, in the region.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Shoppers Stop dropped 2.13% to Rs 342.75 at 11:50 IST on BSE after the company said that it closed Shoppers Stop stores at Inorbit Mall-Pune and Nirmal Lifestyle-Mulund.

The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was down 422.60 points, or 1.54%, to 27,095.08.

On BSE, so far 100 shares were traded in the counter, compared with an average volume of 1,039 shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 342.75 and a low of Rs 339 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 325 on 9 November 2016. The stock hit a record high of Rs 422 on 23 December 2015. The stock underperformed the market over the past one month till 10 November 2016, dropping 5.43% compared with 2.01% fall in the Sensex. The scrip also underperformed the market in past one quarter, shedding 7.11% as against Sensex's 0.93% fall.

The mid-cap retail firm has an equity capital of Rs 41.75 crore. Face value per share is Rs 5.

Shoppers Stop said that it closed Shoppers Stop stores at Inorbit Mall-Pune and Nirmal Lifestyle-Mulund, due to lower than expected businesses and its low profitability. During the last financial year ended 31 March 2016 (FY 2016), sales from Inorbit Mall-Pune was Rs 24.91 crore which is 0.66% of the turnover of the company and sales from Nirmal Lifestyle - Mulund was Rs 16.67 crore which is 0.44% of the turnover of the company. With these closures, the company has now 81 Shoppers Stop (including six airport stores) stores under its operations. And also, the company said that its 51% subsidiary company; Hypercity Retail (India); has closed Hypercity store at Inorbit Mall-Pune due to lower than expected business and its low profitability. The sale from this store for FY 2016 was Rs 13.27 crore which is 1.4% of the turnover of the Hypercity. With the closing of this store, there are now 19 Hypercity stores.

Shoppers Stop's net profit declined 11.1% to Rs 10.69 crore on 7.1% rise in net sales to Rs 939.53 crore in Q2 September 2016 over Q2 September 2015.

Shoppers Stop is engaged in the busines of retailing a variety of household and consumer products through departmental stores.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sun Pharmaceutical Industries rose 4.72% to Rs 698.40 at 9:25 IST on BSE after consolidated net profit surged 117.25% to Rs 2235.14 crore on 19.98% rise in total income to Rs 8384.52 crore in Q2 September 2016 over Q2 September 2015.

The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 238.09 points or 0.87% at 27,279.59.

On BSE, so far 2.91 lakh shares were traded in the counter as against average daily volume of 3.6 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 699.90 and a low of Rs 680.20 so far during the day.

Dilip Shanghvi, Managing Director of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries said that the synergies from the Ranbaxy acquisition are gaining momentum and the company is on track to achieve the targeted benefits. These synergies will continue to help in funding emerging specialty businesses. Post the close of Q2 September 2016, the company has further strengthened its branded ophthalmic pipeline through the acquisition of Ocular Technologies.

Sun Pharmaceutical Industries is the world's fifth largest specialty generic pharmaceutical company and India's top pharmaceutical company.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sorry liberals! How minority voters won it for Trump

https://thehornnews.com/sorry-liberals-minority-votes-won-trump/

Trump won the votes of Hispanic and African Americans in a greater total proportion among any Republican presidential candidate in 20 years.

When you break down the numbers, Trump had less support proportionally among white voters than McCain, Bush in 2000, and Romney did. But his support among African American voters was more than double John McCains support in 2008, and nearly twice as large as Mitt Romneys in 2012.

It wasnt huge, but in an incredibly tight election that small swing won him the critical swing states.

For all the mainstream media talks about racism, xenophobia, sexism and bigotry, the fact is that Obamas identity politics coalition failed.

In 2012, Mitt Romney lost Florida to Barack Obama by 1% of the vote. In 2016, Donald Trump won Florida over Hillary Clinton by 1.3%.

The difference? African American voters. Trump won a meager 8% of the black vote in Florida  but that was three points higher than Mitt Romney. The difference made up approximately a 0.6% shift in the total vote from one side to the other, a 1.2% total impact.

In other words, if Romney had the support among African Americans voters that Trump did, he would have won Florida too.

In state after state, the numbers prove that Trump had an unexpected groundswell of support among minorities. It was the difference maker that gave him the edge. Between Hispanic and African American support, Clinton lost 3% nationally to Trump TOTAL. In an election decided by less than 1% of the vote, thats significant.
Sun Pharmaceutical Industries' consolidated net profit surged 117.25% to Rs 2235.14 crore on 19.98% rise in total income to Rs 8384.52 crore in Q2 September 2016 over Q2 September 2015. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

Dilip Shanghvi, Managing Director of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries said that the synergies from the Ranbaxy acquisition are gaining momentum and the company is on track to achieve the targeted benefits. These synergies will continue to help in funding emerging specialty businesses. Post the close of Q2 September 2016, the company has further strengthened its branded ophthalmic pipeline through the acquisition of Ocular Technologies.

BPCL and Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) will announce Q2 results today, 11 November 2016.

Cipla said before market hours today, 11 November 2016, that as part of its growth strategy, the board of the company's subsidiary, Cipla Quality Chemicals Industries (CiplaQCIL) is evaluating its initial public offering. The certain shareholders may consider selling down part or all of their stake to enable sufficient free flat and liquidity while Cipla group intends to continue holding the majority stake and control in CiplaQCIL.

Tata Motors said that its group global wholesales rose 9% to 1.01 lakh units in October 2016 over October 2015. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016. Global wholesales of all Tata Motors' commercial vehicles and Tata Daewoo range rose 18% to 36,921 units in October 2016 over October 2015. Global wholesales of all passenger vehicles rose 4% to 64,145 units in October 2016 over October 2015.

Apollo Tyres signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Government of Andhra Pradesh government to set up a state of art manufacturing facility. The company is looking at investing about Rs 525 crore towards setting up this facility in Andhra Pradesh. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

NHPC said that the board of directors of the company in its meeting scheduled to be held on 18 November 2016, will consider the proposal for raising of Rs 2250 crore through issuance of V series corporate bonds on private placement basis. The proposed issue is out of Rs. 4500 crore already approved by the shareholders in their 40th Annual General Meeting held on 22 September 2016. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

Shoppers Stop said that the company has closed "Shoppers Stop" stores at Inorbit Mall-Pune and Nirmal Lifestyle-Mulund, due to lower than expected businesses and its low profitability. During the last financial year, sales from Inorbit Mall-Pune was Rs 24.91 crore which is 0.66% of the turnover of the company and sales from Nirmal Lifestyle - Mulund was Rs 16.67 crore which is 0.44% of the turnover of the company. With these closures, the company has now 81 Shoppers Stop (including six airport stores) stores under its operations. And also, inform that our 51% subsidiary company; Hypercity Retail (India); has closed Hypercity store at Inorbit Mall-Pune due to lower than expected business and its low profitability. The sale from this store for the last financial year was Rs 13.27 crore which is 1.40% of the turnover of the Hypercity. With the closing of this store, there are now 19 'Hypercity' stores. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

Jain Irrigation Systems reported consolidated net profit of Rs 28 crore in Q2 September 2016 compared with consolidated net loss of Rs 5.4 crore in Q2 September 2015. Total income rose 8.69% to Rs 1464.60 crore in Q2 September 2016 over in Q2 September 2015. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

IFB Agro Industries announced after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016, that West Bengal Excise Authority has increased the excise duty on Country Liquor (IMIL) with effect from 8 November 2016 vide notification dated 28 October 2016. Accordingly the company has increased the prices of its IMIL brands with requisite approval from West Bengal Excise Authority with effect from 9 November 2016.

Wockhardt's consolidated net profit dropped 81.59% to Rs 17.02 crore on 6.53% rise in total income to Rs 1284.59 crore in Q2 September 2016 over Q2 September 2015. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

Wockhardt said that the board of directors of the company, at a meeting held on 10 November 2016, approved the acquisition of 100% stake in Wockhardt France (Holdings) S.A.S. ('WFH') (an existing step down subsidiary of the company) from Wockhardt Bio AG ('WBG'), a subsidiary of the company. By virtue of the said acquisition, WFH shall become a direct wholly owned subsidiary of the company from erstwhile step down subsidiary. WBG continues to be a direct subsidiary of the company.

Tata Chemicals' consolidated net profit rose 0.08% to Rs 293.04 crore on 17.35% decline in total income to Rs 3522.29 crore in Q2 September 2016 over Q2 September 2015. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 10 November 2016.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Film: "Chaar Sahibzaade: Rise of Banda Singh Bahadur"; Director: Harry Baweja; Voiceover: Om Puri; Rating: **1/2

This motion capture animation film, is a historical faith film. It takes off from its prequel -- the 2004 released film "Chaar Sahibzaade" and yet, is holistic by itself.

Going back in history, nearly 350 years ago, the film recaps the lives of Sahibzaade Ajit Singh, Jujhar Singh, Zorawar Singh and Fateh Singh -- the four brave sons of the tenth Sikh Guru Gobind Singh and then proceeds to narrate the epic tale of Banda Singh Bahadur, one of the greatest warriors in Sikh history.

Narrated in a non-linear fashion, the film reveals, how after the death of his sons, Guru Gobind Singh meets an ascetic named Madho Das and takes him as his disciple, in a monastery at Nanded, on the banks of river Godavari.

The Guru renames Madho Das as Banda Singh Bahadur and with his blessings, urges him to protect the Sikhs. How Banda Singh Bahadur assembles a fighting force and leads the struggle against the Mughal Empire, forms the crux of the tale.

The script, credited to Harman and Harry Baweja, is replete with history, but not without its fair share of flaws. It is also packed with the teachings of Guru Gobind Singh. With no onscreen gore, the screenplay ensures to be audience sensitive.

Technically, Harry Baweja's direction is placid. He lacks the passion in his storytelling and it shows. The pace of the storyline drags, as the exposition is verbose in the form of a narrative voice over lent by ace actor Om Puri whose distinct, non-dramatic tone is apt for the subject. Ironically, the writing also quotes Rabindranath Tagore.

The film is inspiring. The design and creation of the animation along with its 3D effects, are first rate for a Hindi film and worth a mention. Each frame is attractive and impressive.

The music seamlessly integrates into the narrative and the background score elevates the viewing experience. Sukwinder Singh, Diljit Dosanjh and Amrinder Gill with their mellifluous voices beautifully render the ardas or prayers along with the hymns.

Overall, this epic story will appeal only to Sikhs and those who have a keen interest in history.

--IANS

troy/rb/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
China and Taiwan should make joint efforts to fight separatists and safeguard unity of the country, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Friday.

"Any attempt to split the country will be resolutely opposed by all Chinese people," Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying, who added that "we'll never allow anyone, any organisation or political party to rip out any part of our territory at any time or in any form".

The President's remarks were made to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen, who led a revolution in 1911 to end the imperialism rule of the Qing Dynasty and founded China.

To achieve the complete reunification of the motherland is in the fundamental interest of the Chinese nation and it is common aspiration as well as sacred duty of all Chinese, Xi said.

It is the shared conviction of Chinese that China is a unified country, and it is this belief that ensures the continuation of the nation as a whole, Xi said, quoting Sun.

Sun is also the founder of Kuomintang (KMT), which governed Taiwan for decades from 1940s to 1990s and from 2008 to 2015. Mentioning that Sun is a national hero and compatriot, Xi said that the late revolutionary leader is a firm supporter of national unity.

For all Taiwan political parties, organisations and personals, as long as they acknowledge that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, the mainland side would like to communicate with them, Xi said.

Xi called on compatriots from both sides across the Taiwan Strait and Chinese all across the globe to unite and oppose "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces, saying the future of compatriots of both the mainland and Taiwan is closely intertwined with the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

--IANS

ask/dg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Taking a cue from demonetisation of higher currency notes in India, a Pakistani opposition party lawmaker has submitted a resolution in the Senate to withdraw 1,000 and 5,000 rupee notes from circulation in the country to tackle corruption.

The resolution submitted by Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Senator Osman Saifullah Khan comes at a time when Pakistan's population is gradually shifting to cash economy due to the government's ill-conceived taxation policies, said Express News.

"The house urges the government to take steps to withdraw from circulation as legal tender the high denomination Rs 5,000 and Rs 1,000 notes so as to reduce illicit money flows, encourage the use of bank accounts and reduce the size of undocumented economy," reads the resolution.

This is the only way that will compel people to use banking channels and launch a crackdown on black money circulating in the economy, said Khan, speaking at a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Finance on Thursday.

However, Committee Chairman Senator Saleem Mandviwalla underlined the need for taking the views of all stakeholders.

The resolution was moved in the Senate a couple of days after Indian Prime Minister Modi announced the demonetisation of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 bank notes, making them invalid in a major assault on black money, fake currency and corruption.

"At this point, we do not see a reason to withdraw the Rs 5,000 currency note," Abid Qamar, spokesman for the State Bank of Pakistan, told Express News.

Pakistan's economy has already started making a gradual shift to cash as protection against the government's taxation policies, official statistics reveal.

In fiscal year 2015-16, the growth in banking sector deposits was far lower than the previous year while the currency in circulation increased at a much rapid pace, revealed minutes of the last Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting.

The General Pervez Musharraf-led government had introduced the Rs 5,000 denomination notes despite resistance from the State Bank of Pakistan. The notes made it easy for the people to keep cash instead of depositing money in banks.

--IANS

ahm/rn/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the India-Japan civil nuclear agreement, signed here on Friday after the annual bilateral summit, a "historic step" and added that Japan is a natural partner of India.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said in a joint address to the media along with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo after the delegation-level talks between the two sides.

"Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of climate change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan," he said.

"I thank Prime Minister Abe, the Japanese government and the parliament for their support to this agreement."

The agreement provides for the development of nuclear power projects in India and thus strengthening of energy security of the country.

It will open the door for collaboration between Indian and Japanese industries in India's civil nuclear programme.

Stating that India and its economy were pursuing many transformations, Modi said: "Our aim is to become a major centre for manufacturing, investments and for the 21st century knowledge industries. And, in this journey, we see Japan as a natural partner. We believe there is vast scope to combine our relative advantages, whether of capital, technology or human resources, to work for mutual benefit."

Modi said that both sides remained focused on making strong progress on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail project.

Japan committed itself to this project during Abe's visit to New Delhi for the annual bilateral summit last year.

The Prime Minister said that Friday's discussions in regard to training and skills development broke new ground.

"We are also shaping new partnerships in areas such as space science, marine and earth science, textiles, sports, agriculture and postal banking," he said.

Apart from the civil nuclear agreement, nine other agreements across multiple sectors were signed after the bilateral summit.

Modi said that the India-Japan strategic partnership "was not only for the good and security of our own societies", it also brought peace, stability and balance to the region.

"It is alive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges in Asia-Pacific," he said.

"As countries with an inclusive outlook, we have agreed to cooperate closely to promote connectivity, infrastructure and capacity-building in the regions that occupy the inter-linked waters of the Indo-Pacific."

Modi said that the Malabar naval exercise conducted by India, Japan and the US in June this year "has underscored the convergence in our strategic interests in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific".

"As democracies, we support openness, transparency and the rule of law. We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he stated.

As for people-to-people exchanges, the Prime Minister referred to the decision taken by India in March this year to extend the "visa on arrival" facility to all Japanese nationals.

"We have also gone a step further in extending a long-term 10-year visa facility to eligible Japanese businesspersons," he said.

Stating that India and Japan consulted and cooperated closely in regional and international fora, Modi said: "We will continue to work together for reforms of the United Nations and strive together for our rightful place in the UN Security Council."

He also thanked Abe for Japan's support to India's bid for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Modi arrived here on Thursday on his second visit to Japan in two years.

Earlier on Friday, he called on Japanese Emperor Akihito.

He also attended a meeting of the India-Japan Business Leaders' Forum and addressed a business luncheon of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Keidanren or the Japanese Business Federation.

--IANS

ab/vt

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The unprecedented cash crisis which hit the people due to demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination currency notes is gradually easing in urban areas but persisted in the rural and remote areas of northeast India on Friday.

Senior bank officials claimed on Friday that the currency notes problem is almost over in the cities and urban areas and the situation would become completely normal by Saturday-Sunday, when the banks will remain open to further ease the situation.

As tribals in northeast India are exempted from income tax, the situation in the tribal-dominated states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh is different.

Tribal people constitute 28 per cent of northeast India's 45.58 million population.

"The situation is almost normal in the cities, urban and semi-urban areas and it would get normalised in the rural areas too by tomorrow (Saturday)," United Bank of India's (UBI) Chief Regional Manager and Deputy General Manager Mahendra Dohare told IANS in Agartala.

He said: "In many places of northeast region, the new Rs 2,000 denomination currency notes are now available. We are yet to get the new Rs 500 notes. I do not know when they will reach us."

"Also, many ATMs are now functional in cities and urban areas and those in the rural and remote areas would be functional by tomorrow (Saturday) and the day after (Sunday). Banking and RBI (Reserve Bank of India) officials and employees are working extra time to help the customers to cope with the situation," Dohare added.

In Mizoram too, normalcy is gradually returning, with a section of traders now accepting the old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination currency notes, though some are still refusing those.

Zoramdinthanga, Chairman of a local urban body, told reporters in Aizawl: "Prime Minister Narendra Modi's sudden announcement of scrapping of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes was a very wise decision. The decision might create some problems for the people temporarily, but in the long run it would be good for all Indians."

In Silchar (Southern Assam's main commercial city), the situation is similar to Tripura.

Assistant General Manager of State Bank of India (SBI) Himanka Bihari Roy and UBI's Chief Regional Manager Hirendra Narayan Ghosal urged the people not to panic as the situation would become normal soon.

The banks in southern Assam, comprising five districts, are somehow dealing with the situation with the old stock of smaller denomination currencies.

"We are yet to get the new Rs 500 notes. We expect that the RBI in Guwahati and Kolkata would supply the new currency notes and smaller denomination notes soon," Roy told reporters.

Top Tripura government officials held a series of meetings with officials of RBI and nationalised banks on Thursday and Friday to review the situation.

"The banks and RBI officials have assured the Tripura government that the situation would normalise within the next three-four days. The RBI regional office in Guwahati has despatched truckloads of smaller denomination currency notes by road to various northeastern states to deal with the currency crisis," a top official of the Tripura Finance Department quoting RBI officials told IANS.

--IANS

sc/nir/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Actor Eddie Redmayne, who will soon be seen in the film "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", says passion makes people attractive.

"I always think that no matter what your characteristics are, if you have a passion for something, whatever it is, that makes you attractive," Redmayne said in a statement.

"Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" takes film buffs to a new era of J.K. Rowling's fantasy world.

Redmayne - known for "The Theory of Everything" and "The Danish Girl" - stars as Magizoologist Newt Scamander in the film, helmed by David Yates, who had directed the last four "Harry Potter" blockbusters.

The Oscar-winning actor says all the characters of the film have different things that they live for.

"And though they are outsiders, they are bound by that. That was what I loved about the piece," Redmayne added.

The film is set in 1926 with Redmayne arriving in New York as part of a global excursion to research and rescue magical creatures -- including some hidden in his briefcase. Chaos strikes when some of the creatures are inadvertently let loose. It is slated to release in India on November 18 in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.

It also marks the screenwriting debut of Rowling, whose seven beloved Harry Potter books were adapted into the top-grossing film franchise of all time.

"What I really loved - and I think it's something that J.K. Rowling has spoken about - is how she writes about outsiders," Redmayne added.

--IANS

sug/nn/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Suez, Nov 11 (IANS/AKI) Police in the Egyptian port city of Suez arrested a judge, his driver and an Egyptian-Polish woman after 68 kgs of cannabis was found in the car they were travelling in.

The judge was charged with possessing and trafficking in drugs, while his driver and the Egyptian-Polish woman were charged with abetting him, the Egypt Independent daily reported on Thursday.

Four mobile phones and one licensed weapon had been found in the judge's possession, the paper cited a security source as saying.

The judge denies the seized cannabis is his and claims it belonged to his driver and the Egyptian-Polish woman, who is a university student.

The Egyptian-Polish woman alleges the judge and his driver were transporting the cannabis from the Egyptian province of Sharqiya to a man in the Red Sea town of Ras Sedr in return for 1,200 dollars, the daily said.

Egypt Supreme Judicial Council lifted the judge's immunity to allow prosecutors to interrogate him. He heads a petty offenders court.

Sniffer dogs found the drugs while inspecting the judge's car at a police checkpoint as he was travelling from Sharqiya to South Sinai, according to the security source.

--IANS/AKI

vgu/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) is making efforts to make the working of Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI) online, Information and Broadcasting Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu said here on Friday.

The new process is aimed to bring transparency and accountability to the RNI, Naidu said.

The members of the Consultative Committee, chaired by Naidu, were apprised by him about the steps being taken by the ministry to streamline the processes and functioning of the RNI -- the office to keep records of all newspapers published in India.

He said that RNI has constantly re-engineered itself to make procedures and processes simpler and that the focus of the Ministry is to make the processes online thereby promoting transparency and accountability.

Naidu also mentioned the phenomenal growth of print sector, particularly after the opening up of the economy in the 1990s, and changes in policy and guidelines concerning it.

The minister expressed a need to update contemporaries, revise the legal mechanism in the print sector, and to give statutory backing to Print Policy and various guidelines.

To this end, he told the members about the salient features of the proposed Press and Registration of Books and Publication (PRBP) Bill.

Members of the committee gave suggestions regarding steps to be taken for modernisation of RNI, simplification of various processes and use of technology.

--IANS

vn/pgh/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Wooing Japanese investors, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that stable, predictable and transparent regulations are redefining the nature of doing business in India as the country aims to be the most open economy in the world.

"All of the economic reforms that India is pursuing point in to the new direction. My resolve is to make India the most open economy in the world. The impact of our efforts is being felt and recognised globally," Modi said at a business luncheon here, organised jointly by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Japan business federation, Keidanren.

India's Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) equity inflows have gone up 52 per cent in the last two years. Japan stands as the fourth largest source of FDI into India.

According to the World Investment Report of 2015, India is first among the top 10 FDI destinations of the world.

Creating an enabling environment for business and attracting investments remains top priority for India, with e-governance and new legislation regarding Goods and Services Tax (GST) set to simplify and ease the nature of doing business, Modi said.

He said 'Made in India' and 'Made by Japan' combination could work towards infrastructure building.

"There are futuristic infrastructure projects of the second generation, including dedicated freight and industrial corridorss, high-speed railways, smart cities, coastal zones and Metro rail projects. All of these offer unprecedented opportunities for the Japanese industry," the Indian Prime Minister said.

In 2015, the Indian economy grew faster than other major economies. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund assess this trend will continue. Lower labour costs, large domestic market and macro-economic stability combine to make India a very attractive investment destination, he said.

Modi said his government is looking at a greater influx of Japanese investments and that Indian laws have been amended for facilitating foreign investors.

"The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code passed recently will make it easier for investors to make an exit. We are setting up commercial courts and commercial divisions to ensure speedy disposal of commercial matters," he said.

The arbitration proceedings will now become faster as the law has been amended, he added.

--IANS

mm/tsb/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India and Japan signed the long-awaited civil nuclear agreement following the annual bilateral summit here on Friday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi wooed Japanese businessmen by reiterating his resolve to make India the most open economy in the world.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said in a joint address to the media along with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after delegation-level talks between the two sides.

"Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of climate change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan," he said.

"I thank Prime Minister Abe, the Japanese government and the parliament for their support to this agreement."

According to a joint statement issued after the summit, the two Prime Ministers welcomed the agreement "which reflects a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership in the cause of clean energy, economic development and a peaceful and secure world".

The agreement provides for the development of nuclear power projects in India, thus strengthening energy security of the country.

It will open the door for collaboration between Indian and Japanese industries in India's civil nuclear programme.

US firms like Westinghouse and GE Energy, which have significant Japanese investments, will also now find it easier to set up nuclear power plants in India.

Apart from Japan, other countries with which India now has civil nuclear agreements include the US, Russia, Australia, Canada, France, Britain, South Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Namibia and Argentina.

Stating that India and its economy were pursuing many transformations, Modi in his address to the media said: "Our aim is to become a major centre for manufacturing, investments and for the 21st century knowledge industries. And, in this journey, we see Japan as a natural partner. We believe there is vast scope to combine our relative advantages, whether of capital, technology or human resources, to work for mutual benefit."

Modi said that both sides remained focused on making strong progress on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail project.

Japan committed itself to this project during Abe's visit to New Delhi for the annual bilateral summit last year.

Besides the civil nuclear agreement, nine other agreements were signed in areas like skill development, cooperation in the field of outer space, agriculture and food industries, investment in infrastructure projects, textiles, art and culture, and sports.

Modi said that the India-Japan strategic partnership "was not only for the good and security of our own societies", it also brought peace, stability and balance to the region.

"It is alive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges in Asia-Pacific," he said.

Modi said that the Malabar naval exercise conducted by India, Japan and the US in June this year "has underscored the convergence in our strategic interests in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific".

"As democracies, we support openness, transparency and the rule of law. We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he stated.

According to the joint statement, both the Prime Ministers condemned terrorism in the strongest terms and "also called for Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks including those of November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai and 2016 terrorist attack in Pathankot to justice".

Stating that India and Japan consulted and cooperated closely in regional and international fora, Modi said: "We will continue to work together for reforms of the United Nations and strive together for our rightful place in the UN Security Council."

He also thanked Abe for Japan's support to India's bid for membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Earlier on Friday, Modi wooed Japanese investors saying that stable, predictable and transparent regulations were redefining the nature of doing business in India as the country aimed to be the most open economy in the world.

"All of the economic reforms that India is pursuing point into the new direction. My resolve is to make India the most open economy in the world. The impact of our efforts is being felt and recognised globally," Modi said at a business luncheon here, organised jointly by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Japan business federation, Keidanren.

Modi, who arrived here on Thursday, started Friday by calling on Japanese Emperor Akihito.

This is his second visit to Japan in two years.

--IANS

ab/vt

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Indian Naval Ships 'Tir' and 'Sujata', along with Indian Coast Guard Ship 'Varuna', comprising the 1st Training Squadron, arrived at Chittagong in Bangladesh on a visit on Friday, an official statement said.

The ships will be there till November 16 as part of their overseas deployment during the autumn term 2016.

"India and Bangladesh have a close, long-standing relationship covering a wide spectrum of activities and interactions, which has strengthened over the years," an Indian Navy statement said.

"The people of India and Bangladesh have close cultural bonds and a shared vision of a democratic society. The present deployment of the Training Squadron to Chittagong will further cement the close relations between the two nations and the two navies," it said.

The First Training Squadron forms part of the Southern Naval Command and comprises Indian Naval Ships Tir, Shardul, Sujata, ICGS Varuna and two Sail Training Ships Sudarshini and Tarangini, all of which have been built in India.

The primary aim of the squadron is to impart training to naval and Coast Guard trainees, with a 24-week ab initio sea training.

The trainees are skilled in seamanship, navigation, ship-handling, boat work, technical aspects etc. whilst being exposed to the rigours of life at sea, so as to earn their 'sea legs'.

The Southern Naval Command is the Training Command of the Indian Navy, which provides both basic and advanced training to naval officers and sailors.

The Indian Navy has also been providing training to personnel from friendly foreign countries for more than four decades, and more than 13,000 personnel from over 40 countries have been trained.

--IANS

ao/tsb/vt

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Rome, Nov 11 (IANS/AKI) Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has underscored the strategic importance of his country's alliance with the US in a phone call to congratulate President elect Donald Trump on his victory.

Renzi also told Trump that Italy wishes to work with the US ahead of the G7 Summit taking place in the Italian coastal town of Taormina in May, his office said in a statement late Thursday.

Renzi said he would work with whoever became the US President but backed the campaign of Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

He expressed surprise at political outsider Trump's shock win against Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election on Tuesday but said Italy must respect the result.

"We are sure that the friendship between Italy and America will remain strong and solid," Renzi said on Wednesday after Trump's victory was announced.

--IANS/AKI

pgh/nir

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ahead of the annual India-Japan bilateral summit, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and Economy, Trade and Investment Minister Seko Hiroshige called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Friday.

"Preparing the ground for the evening bilateral. Foreign Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida calls on PM @narendramodi," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted and posted pictures of the two leaders.

"Final call-on before evening engagements. @SekoHiroshige, Minister of Economy, Trade and Investment calls on PM @narendramodi," Swarup said in a separate tweet.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori also called on Modi.

Modi, who arrived here on Thursday, will hold the annual bilateral summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe later on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Modi called on Japanese Emperor Akihito.

"It was an honour to meet His Highness Emperor Akihito and discuss India-Japan relations," he said in a tweet.

The Prime Minister also attended a meeting of the India-Japan Business Leaders' Forum and addressed a business luncheon of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Keidanren or the Japanese Business Federation.

This is Modi's second visit to Japan in two years.

--IANS

ab/vt

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Practiced across different parts of the world, Sufi music that has an array of genres and is based on the common philosophy of transcending into the spiritual realm with Sama, is being celebrated in an ongoing festival here.

The three-day long festival, titled "Sama-The Mystic Ecstasy", at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) till November 13, comprises a cinematic representation of the journey of Sufia Kalam, Rajasthani Sufi Folk music, whirling dervishes and contemporary Sufi songs.

"Sama has been an attempt by NCPA to celebrate Sufi music traditions from across the world on one stage. It is a festival of spiritual ecstasy complete with songs, dances and music that allows the audience to experience the true mysticism of Sufism," NCPA programming chief (Indian Music) Suvarnalata Rao said.

"Sufi music is practiced in different regions of the world through myriad genres. Through Sama, we endeavor to bring to our audiences varied and truly immersive experiences," she added.

Sama opened with a 50-minute documentary, "Mann Faqeeri" by M.K Raina, the renowned theatre actor and director. It explores the evolution of Sufiyana Kalam.

The festival will see a riveting performance of Sama Ayins, (whirling prayer ceremonies) in its original form by the Semazen, whirling dervishes. The performance is an attempt to feel one with God through three stages which include knowing God, seeing God and uniting with God," the organisers said.

The third day will see a rendition of contemporary and popular Sufi songs by the versatile Rekha Bhardwaj. Her presentation will include a bouquet of sufiana compositions from traditional repertoire and also songs based from Bollywood.

--IANS

mg/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Practiced across different parts of the world, Sufi music that has an array of genres and is based on the common philosophy of transcending into the spiritual realm with Samara, is being celebrated in an ongoing festival here.

The three-day long festival, titled "Samara-The Mystic Ecstasy", at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) till November 13, comprises a cinematic representation of the journey of Sufia Kalam, Rajasthani Sufi Folk music, whirling dervishes and contemporary Sufi songs.

"Samara has been an attempt by NCPA to celebrate Sufi music traditions from across the world on one stage. It is a festival of spiritual ecstasy complete with songs, dances and music that allows the audience to experience the true mysticism of Sufism," NCPA programming chief (Indian Music) Suvarnalata Rao said.

"Sufi music is practiced in different regions of the world through myriad genres. Through Samara, we endeavor to bring to our audiences varied and truly immersive experiences," she added.

Samara opened with a 50-minute documentary, "Mann Faqeeri" by M.K Raina, the renowned theatre actor and director. It explores the evolution of Sufiyana Kalam.

The festival will see a riveting performance of Sama Ayins, (whirling prayer ceremonies) in its original form by the Semazen, whirling dervishes. The performance is an attempt to feel one with God through three stages which include knowing God, seeing God and uniting with God," the organisers said.

The third day will see a rendition of contemporary and popular Sufi songs by the versatile Rekha Bhardwaj. Her presentation will include a bouquet of sufiana compositions from traditional repertoire and also songs based from Bollywood.

--IANS

mg/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Actress Julie Bowen has dismissed rumours that she is caught in a feud with fellow "Modern Family" co-star Sofia Vergara. She says there is nothing but love between them.

The 46-year-old spoke about what really goes on behind closed doors between her and her co-star, to Ellen DeGeneres during an appearance on her show "The Ellen DeGeneres Show", reports dailymail.co.uk.

Bowen told DeGeneres that just the previous day she had heard a rumour that she was "icy towards Sofia Vergara because (she's) jealous of her fame".

"So, I email her last night and then we talk and I'm like 'What shall I say you're funny' and she says 'Aye please just borrow my blouse'. So, I borrowed her blouse," Bowen said.

Bowen was wearing a one-shouldered top with a large puffy sleeve. Bowen and Vergara have now been on "Modern Family" for eight seasons.

"The Ellen DeGeneres Show" is aired in India on Romedy NOW.

--IANS

sug/rb/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Opposition parties on Friday slammed Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar for his "irresponsible" statement on India's No First Use of nuclear weapons policy, after the minister suggested that India should not bind itself to the doctrine.

While the minister, and the Defence Ministry clarified it was his personal view, the opposition questioned if Parrikar was entitled to have a personal view while holding the key portfolio.

"You have a motormouth Defence Minister, who is irresponsible in every manner," Congress leader Anand Sharma said.

Party leader Manish Tewari added: "Is Defence Minister of India entitled to a personal opinion on No first use of Nuclear weapons? If he is then why does MOD (Defence Ministry) issue clarifications?"

"When Defence Minister of a de-facto NWS (nuclear weapon state) talks of Nukes in such a cavalier manner the world will think has India turned into a banana republic? (sic)" Tewari said in a tweet.

Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) also denounced the statement, and said it will have serious implications both for India's security concerns and for India's standing in international relations.

"This statement represents a complete reversal of the long standing position of India as a country that champions a nuclear weapon free world and consistently stood by its commitment for peaceful use of nuclear energy," the CPI-M said in a statement.

"The Defence Minister's contention that these are his personal opinions is completely untenable. As a member of the cabinet collective in a parliamentary democratic system, under oath to the Indian Constitution, such opinions that are contrary to India's long established policy direction is a reflection of the complete lack of 'governance' of this government," the CPI-M said.

"If the Defence Minister wishes to air his personal opinions then he may do so after resigning from the Cabinet," it added.

The CPI-M also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should issue a clarification.

Parrikar, at a book release function on Thursday, said India should say it will use its nuclear powers "responsibly" instead of stressing on "no first use", but stressed that this was his personal view.

Talking about India's nuclear doctrine, Parrikar questioned why it is said that India is for no first use, saying: "Why lot of people say that India is for 'not first use;... Why should I bind myself. I should say I am a responsible nuclear power and I will not use it irresponsibly," he said.

--IANS

ao/rn

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Friday urged US President-elect Donald Trump to abandon all anti-Islam policies and release Muslims imprisoned in the country.

"(Donald Trump) should abandon the anti-Islam policy in the name of terrorism and should release all Muslim prisoners, especially Afia Siddique, at the earliest," said Taliban spokesperson Mohammed Khurasani in a statement.

Siddiqui, a neuroscientist, who has lived in the US for years, was sentenced to 86 years in prison after being arrested in Afghanistan, accused of trying to kill American soldiers, Efe news reported

He also asked Trump to put an end to the military support to Pakistan in the fight against terrorism.

"Pakistan came into being in the name of Islam, therefore, we want Islamic law in it. They are killing us massively and destroying our properties for this demand," Khurasani added in the statement.

--IANS

ksk/dg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Friday paid tribute to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad on his birth anniversary and recalled his role in the freedom struggle.

"On his birth anniversary, tributes to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. We recall his role in the freedom struggle and efforts towards nation building," Modi said.

Gandhi also paid tributes to the memory of Azad, saying "Maulana Sahab was an outstanding thinker, scholar, educationist and patriot".

Remembering him as a strong believer of inter-faith unity, Gandhi said: "Secularism, religious freedom and equality were matters close to his heart".

During the Quit India movement, Maulana Azad gave decisive leadership to the Congress Party and Indian freedom movement, Gandhi noted.

--IANS

rak/ahm/vt

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
National Award winning actor Girish Kulkarni says commercialisation of cinema is affecting independent filmmakers as their films are being watched by a smaller audience -- reflecting how pure art is always consumed by fewer people.

"It has always affected independent filmmakers, but I feel commercial cinema has its own place. There shouldn't be any competition between commercial and independent cinema as such," Kulkarni told IANS on the sidelines of the recently-concluded fifth edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF 2016).

"Independent cinema would be consumed by a number of limited people for sure. Pure art is always consumed by fewer people and will not garner mass support. On the other hand, economy always depends on the numbers. That's why the two equations don't match," added Kulkarni, who has delivered acclaimed performances in films like "Gabhricha Paus", "Deool", "Ugly" and "Highway".

Kulkarni is all for "dedicated screens for independent cinema" in India. "In France, my film 'Gabhricha Paus' was screened for four weeks and was appreciated a lot. It was in 2008. This happens there because they want to inculcate that culture in their country. Art has been an important aspect in their being," he said, pointing out how this is not the case in India.

"Here, in India, we are not finding solutions to basic needs like roads, water or electricity. Culture needs come very late. I feel that culture needs are equally important as your bare necessities. They have to be addressed in that fashion, like there should be a small theatre in every single village," Kulkarni said.

"That's happening because we don't know how to appreciate art. We don't know how to appreciate a painting or a kathak performance. And at the same time, the Western pressure is pouring down on us," he added.

More than providing funds to filmmakers, Kulkarni feels that government intervention is required at the "very root stage and not pertaining to only films as such".

"In the education system, there have to be certain major reforms. Like why can't our schools have a screening of a nice film every month... So, the government should cater to those kind of needs, and not just fund money."

He also finds the Western influence playing a transformational role in how Indians perceive culture.

"Indian society is going through a transformational phase. We are very much influenced by the Western powers -- their cultural powers. Their understanding of films, lifestyle, food and other things is affecting us. But I find it interesting to deal with as an Indian," he said.

Apart from independent cinema, Kulkarni feels that it is also a tough time for those working in theatre.

"With the explosion of media and advent of technology, the access to this medium (films) has got very easy as compared to theatre, which has now become very difficult because people don't have time to watch a play. It has become very difficult to stage a play," he said.

Kulkarni is himself widening his horizon in Bollywood with roles in Aamir Khan's "Dangal" and Hrithik Roshan- starrer "Kaabil".

"I liked the roles and I liked the people. They invited me, I went there and I liked it," added the actor-writer-filmmaker, who chose to keep mum about the projects.

As a writer, he says he keeps on "nurturing stories within by going to places and meeting people".

(The writer's trip was at the invitation of the Dharamshala International Film Festival organisers. Sandeep Sharma can be contacted at sandeep.s@ians.in)

--IANS

sas/rb/vm/sac

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The BJP on Friday took a jibe at Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi for standing in queue at a bank to get demonetized currency notes exchanged, saying this photo opportunity signalled "success" of the government's demonetisation scheme.

"Rahul Gandhi wanted to create a scene at the State Bank of India, Parliament Street by standing in a queue. He thought it was a great photo opportunity. He visited the bank perhaps for the first time," Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said in a statement.

"The irony is that, on the contrary, his photo opportunity turned out to be a success of Prime Minister Modi's scheme. Even those in privileged dynasties will now have to queue up and face the law. The age of privileges for a few is over now," he added.

The BJP leader said that those born into dynasties lived under the impression that they were born to rule.

"They never stood in a queue. Succession to positions of power was a birth right," he said.

Taking a dig at Gandhi, Javadekar said, "Rahul Gandhi never stood in a queue to become the leader of his party. He superseded men of greater experience and competence merely because dynasties do not queue up. That is the feudal order. Only if he had queued up within the Congress party and the fittest had survived, the party would have been better off."

He said the decision to replace high denomination currency in order to get rid of black money and corruption has placed a premium on honesty of the common-man.

"Those with unexplained cash are in trouble," he said.

Gandhi on Friday took people by surprise when he arrived at an SBI bank on Parliament Street here and stood in a queue to get the demonetized currency notes exchanged.

"I have come here to get Rs 4,000 exchanged," he told reporters.

Gandhi also criticized the bank authorities for abolishing the queue as soon as he became a part of it.

"I want to stand in the queue...people are suffering, neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor owners of big media houses would understand it," he angrily told mediapersons, who wanted to enquire about his move to come to the bank to get the notes exchanged.

--IANS

bns/rn

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A coalition of Australia's most respected doctors' groups called for a tax on sugar on Friday.

They claim that obesity, which is often brought on by excessive sugar consumption, is the most pressing public health issue in Australia.

In a six-point plan to tackle obesity, the Committee of Presidents of Medical Colleges, recommend that obesity be classified as a chronic disease and a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks be introduced.

Nick Talley, head of the committee, said the government needed to tackle sugar over-use as a public health issue in the same way it tackled smoking.

"We need leadership, not just telling people to lose weight," Talley told the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC). "With smoking and tobacco control, we took risks and it had a dramatic effect."

Talley said obesity was a "real disease, not simply a lifestyle choice."

Bastian Seidel, president of the Royal Australasian College of GPs, said the medical profession would lead the way by offering healthier food choices to staff in hospitals, medical colleges and universities and restricting the access to sugar-sweetened drinks.

"We need to live by the advice that we are giving to our patients," Seidel told the ABC.

Research published in October revealed that Australians were consuming an average of 16 teaspoons of added sugar every day, more than double the amount recommended by WHO.

--IANS

mr/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The battle over the control of Bombay House, the headquarters of the Tata group here, on Friday mainly involved two crown jewels of the $103-billion empire -- Tata Motors and Tata Steel.

The first salvo was fired when stock markets were informed that Tata Motors and Tata Steel are in receipt of notices from Tata Sons, the holding company, seeking an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders for the removal of Mistry and Nusli wadia from the two boards.

In one notice, the voting right of Tata Sons in Tata Motors was mentioned as 26.51 per cent, but in the other, no figure was given for Tata Steel.

Wadia of Bombay Dyeing -- on the boards of both Tata Motors and Tata Steel as independent director -- is considered close to Mistry.

The counters of the two group companies were nervous. In the midst of extremely volatile trading, the shares of Tata Motors crashed Rs 26.75, or 5.01 per cent, at Rs 507.40, while that of Tata Steel fell Rs 10, or 2.29 per cent at Rs 426.85.

The Tata Steel results -- which were declared after the closing bell -- bore the signatures of Mistry as Chairman.

The company's standalone net profit stood at Rs 249.56 crore for the quarter ended September 30, against Rs 575.43 crore for the previous quarter and a loss of Rs 288.48 crore in the corresponding second quarter of last year.

Earlier in the day, Tata Chemicals said Bhaskar Bhat, Non-executive and Non Independent Director, has resigned from the board of the company. Bhat later said his views were not considered by the independent directors while issuing a statement reposing faith in Mistry.

Bhat is Managing Director of Titan Company and had reported the second quarter results to the stakeholders on Nov 4. He is also on the board of several other Tata Group companies.

On Thursday, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) had also issued a special notice under Section 169 (read with Section 115) of the Companies Act, 2013, and made a requisition for an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders to consider Mistry's removal as a director of TCS.

TCS replaced Mistry as its Chairman and appointed Ishaat Hussain as the new Chairman of the board of directors of the company with immediate effect.

Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group companies, removed Mistry, 48, as its Chairman last month and reinstated Ratan Tata in an interim capacity.

The holding arm for the group said Mistry had lost the confidence of the board due to several factors and that the trustees were increasingly concerned with the growing trust deficit.

Following this, on Thursday, Tata Sons the ousted Chairman should resign from all group companies and deplored the manner in which he sought the support of independent directors of Indian Hotels to continue as its Chairman.

"Mistry conveniently forgets that he was appointed as the Chairman of the Tata operating companies by virtue of and following his position as the Chairman of Tata Sons," Tata Sons said in a nine-page statement issued on Thursday.

However, following Tata Sons' statement, the independent directors of Tata Chemicals on Thursday had reposed their faith in Chairman Mistry, while taking up the second quarter results for the current financial year.

--IANS

ap-rv/dg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Donald Trump blasted the in his most aggressive tweet yet since he was elected the US President, alleging that the people protesting his victory were "incited by the media",

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election," he tweeted late Thursday.

"Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!"

Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in major cities across the US since Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night, with the slogan "Not my President", Politico reported.

Earlier Thursday, Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway called on Clinton and President Barack Obama to speak out against some protesters' calls for violence.

"Not cool. @POTUS or Hillary should address," she tweeted, linking to a story headlined "People Have to Die': Anti-Trump Protester Calls For Violence on CNN."

In a subsequent interview with Fox News , Conway said demonstrators should "take their cues" from Obama and former President Bill Clinton, who she said had a "warm conversation" with Trump on Thursday.

As for Trump, she said, "I know he's fully capable of being the president of all Americans and he's promised to do that."

She added: "But I would say to these protesters -- who are burning his image, and who have all nasty signs, 'not my president' -- can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had been elected, which I imagine they were all expecting, and the Trump protesters were saying 'not my president' about President Obama? That's all you would hear."

Conway also said people should have some "self-reflection" and realise that even if Trump is willing to work with people who don't agree with him, he will "be a tough leader".

"He got elected on certain issues and you can expect him to tackle that very quickly in his administration," Conway said.

On social media, some liberals have used the hashtag #NotMyPresident to express their rejection of Trump's victory, Politico said.

Since Tuesday, thousands of demonstrators, including immigration rights and environmental activists, have protested in cities like Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in front of the Trump International Hotel.

Although the demonstrations have mostly been peaceful, some protesters burned flags and effigies of Trump, and at least 124 people were arrested, charged with vandalism and assault on officers.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The probe by the US Department of Justice into the suspected price cartelization in the pharmaceutical industry will not have a major impact on the Indian drug firms, Fitch Ratings said on Friday.

In a statement Fitch Ratings said: "The ongoing probe by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) into suspected price collusion in the pharmaceutical industry is unlikely to have a significant impact on Indian pharma firms."

Citing news reports, Fitch said while the probe is likely to include more generic drugs, the situation is still evolving amid the current political environment in the US.

"In any case, we expect the impact to be minimal for Indian pharma, given the already-high price-based competition across most categories over the past few years and the reasonably diversified generic portfolios of Indian pharma companies," Fitch said.

The antitrust investigations which began about two years ago have attracted investor attention recently, with news of the likely expansion of the investigation into more generic drugs and the first charges being filed possibly by end-2016.

The probe has focused on a few high-priced complex generic drugs so far, which attracted prosecutors' attention due to considerable price increases amid the ongoing policy focus on limiting healthcare costs in the US.

Indian pharma exports to the US are focused mainly on simple generics, competing with a substantial set of competitors offering similar post-patent products.

Indeed, the high level of direct competition along with channel consolidation has caused downward pressure on prices, leading to deflationary trends in many generic drugs.

"Overall, we expect the regulatory environment in the US to remain supportive for generics-focused pharma," Fitch added.

This is in light of the underlying policy focus on containing healthcare costs and steps to enhance drug affordability such as faster Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) approvals under Generic Drug User Fee Amendments (GDUFA), which will increase the availability of economically priced generic alternatives, said Fitch.

--IANS

vj/in

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Donald Trumps victory is seen to confirm a trend seen worldwide, of the political Right returning to power, sweeping away the Left and along with it a lot of the liberal ideas which had grown bipartisan acceptance. In America, it was free markets, trade and immigration; in Europe it was the decline of nationalism. For us in India, religion was a purely personal thing until a leader was elected; once elected to power, every leader spoke to each community as her own and political correctness defined all public discourse. Now that has changed.
Keen to win back its earlier Dalit vote in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, the party on Friday said it had launched a massive community outreach programme targeting a million households over the next one month.
Political parties in Maharashtra, which are in the midst of election campaign for the upcoming polls to the local bodies, seem to have been hit by the sudden demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes, as it has affected the disbursal of election funds to party offices.
The Congress on Friday slammed the government for unleashing "financial chaos" across the country saying the centre had no power to limit people's access to their money deposited in banks.

"This government is insensitive. For the past two days, we have seen financial chaos unfold across the country. They have no power to impose withdrawal limits for people's money in banks," Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma said hours after BJP chief Amit Shah said that all those criticising the demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were supporters of black money.
LIU XINYI/CHINA DAILY

New chapter in relations about to be written

Shen Dingli is a professor and associate dean of Institute of International Studies, Fudan University.

Against the indications of most of the polls, Donald Trump has been elected to be the next US president, ending a year-long highly polarized political process to determine the new commander-in-chief of the United States.

Although Trump won the Elect-oral College vote, the president-elect lost the popular vote, and the election has revealed a deeply divided US.He has an unshirkable responsibility to reconcile the country when he enters office.

Many foresee the US having difficult relations with China under his leadership, especially if he honors his campaign vow to impose punitive tariffs of up to 45 percent against Chinese goods, which would surely result in a trade war erupting between the two countries.

However, one should consider that Trump is a businessman first and foremost, and he has already worked with the Chinese side for over three decades, regardless of any differences in political opinions. And as president, he will need to be pragmatic.

Indeed, it is reasonable to expect fair practice in conducting business. President-elect Trump should be mindful that although his campaign rhetoric has taken him to the White House, it will ruin his presidency if he tries to put it into practice. It is highly unrealistic to expect to impose upon others without backlash.

Actually, the arbitration mechanism of the World Trade Organization is already in place to reconcile trade disputes among member states. There is no reason or conceivable benefit for the Trump administration to bypass it.

The three main issues that cause friction between China and the US are human rights, trade and security. Again, as a business-man, Trump might take a more practical rather than ideological approach, while still respecting US values. As China has also toned down its attachment to ideology in terms of external relationships, the two countries might be better able to reconcile their differences under the Trump administration.

Turning to regional security, China is just safeguarding its territory and rights in the East China Sea and South China Sea, not attempting to impede any of the US' so-called freedom of navigation operations in the region. China has persistently proposed to resolve the territorial and maritime disputes it has with some of its neighbors through peaceful means, and has so far managed to shelve the disputes with the Philippines and Malaysia. Therefore, the Trump administration might keep away from the disputes.

Meantime, Donald Trump has pressed Japan and the Republic of Korea to share more of the costs of deploying US forces in these countries. He has indicated he would be inclined to bring some of the forces home should Japan and the ROK decline to pay up.

As US president, Trump will have to overcome a tendency of strategic shortsightedness by continuing to present public goods in the Asia-Pacific region and not seeking hegemony.

To sumup, the election of Trump as the next leader of the US presents both opportunities and challenges. As long as he adheres to a pragmatic approach, his administration can hopefully build up a collaborative and mutually beneficial partnership with China and other countries. His lack of experience and over-confidence bring uncertainties and could cause him frustration that might lead to impulsiveness. But at present, Sino-US relations are waiting to write a new chap-ter and it remains to be seen what will be written.
The Opposition came down heavily on the Narendra Modi government over the inconvenience caused to the people due to demonetisation. While many have accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of working against the people, some have called the move as 'economic emergency'.
Congress Vice-President on Friday was in queue outside the State Bank of India at Parliament Street in the capital to exchange Rs 4,000 with new notes.
Ten former governing body members and officials of a cooperative bank were arrested here today for alleged misappropriation of funds to the tune of around Rs 10 crore, police said.

A police team, led by DSP PP Sadanandan, arrested the accused in connection with the alleged fraud committed during 2006-2011 in Valapattanam Cooperative Bank.

"The accused were arrested based on a case registered in this regard two years ago. The investigation is still on," Sadanandan said.

According to the complaint, the accused had allegedly committed fraud to the tune of Rs 10 crore by taking loans showing an "exaggerated" value for a marshy land and also by pledging gold already hypothecated by customers in other banks.

Police also registered another case today against the same persons for taking loans from the cooperative bank by forging fake documents in the name of a woman without her knowledge.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Two persons have been arrested for allegedly holding a Gujarat-based businessman captive after calling him to Delhi to buy an old vehicle at low price, police said today.

The two accused, identified as Javed and Mosam, were arrested on November 9 from Sarai Kale Khan bus stand, joint commissioner of police (crime) Ravindra Yadav said, adding that two of their accomplices were nabbed in August.

"They used to give advertisements in newspapers in far flung areas of Maharashtra and Gujarat for sale of vehicles, especially cars and scrap materials, at throwaway prices. People used to fall prey to such advertisements and get trapped in their net," he said.

Valji Bhai, a Bhuj-based businessman reached Delhi on December 21 last year after he received calls from persons offering to arrange a car for him at low price, said Yadav.

After arriving in Delhi, he met a person at the railway station, who took him to Palwal on the pretext of showing him the car.

"On reaching Palwal, he noticed that there were more persons who were already present there. He was forcefully taken to a secluded place. They demanded a ransom of Rs 5 lakh from his son. The accused also took Rs 20,000 that he was carrying and his mobile phone," said the officer.

When there was an alarm about a police raid being conducted in the area, the kidnappers fled leaving behind the businessman, he said.

"A specific information was received and two accused, Taufiq and Sunny, were arrested by the Crime Branch on August 23," Yadav said.

During investigation, involvement of five more criminals -- Mosam, Javed, Sajid, Hussain and Saddam -- came to the fore and efforts were made to arrest these criminals, he said.

After police received an input that Mosam and Javed would be coming from Rajasthan to Delhi to meet their associates, a trap was laid and they were nabbed from Sarai Kale Khan bus terminus, the officer said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Most of the 43 names the government returned to the Supreme Court collegium recommended by it for appointment as judges in six high courts were from Uttar Pradesh.

But not all names returned were for reconsideration, sources in the government said.

In some cases, the names were returned as the government wanted certain "clarification".

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told a Supreme Court bench that the Centre has cleared 34 names out of the 77 recommended by the collegium for appointment as judges in various high courts in the country.

The sources said separate panels 43 names were returned to the collegium in the past 10 days either with a request to reconsider or seeking "clarification".

Out of the 43 names, some have been cleared, but as per established practice, the entire panel or file is returned to the collegium if a clarification is sought on some names or some names are returned for reconsideration in case of complaints against them.

Two panels of 19 and eight names respectively were sent to the government by the collegium for appointment as judges in the Allahabad High Courts. While some of the names have been cleared, both the panels were returned as the government wanted some clarification on some candidates.

In the cases of Karnataka high courts, the panel was returned as government wanted the collegium to reconsider some names as there were complaints against them.

Some names for appointment of judges in the Uttarakhand High Court were also returned due to various reasons, the sources said.

The government also apprised the bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur that as of now no file with regard to the recommendations for appointment as judges is pending with it.

Rohatgi said the Centre has already sent the fresh draft Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) for consideration of the collegium on August 3 but so far no response has been received by the government.

The bench then said that it would convene a meeting of the collegium, which comprises four senior judges besides CJI, on November 15.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A national bank officer, his wife and minor son died in a road accident in Assam's Dhubri district today.

The family was cutting short their vacation in the event of the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes to join back duty.

The Bank's Dhubri branch manger Suman Kumar Barnal was returning back half way from his family vacation in Jharkhand and was killed along with his family when his vehicle collided with a truck on NH-31 near Hoibazar under Gauripur police station, the police said.

Barnal's wife was identified Neha Anand and his eight-year-old son Sraith Barnal, the police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Four people have been arrested in connection with attacks on Hindu temples and members of the community in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, the police today said as villagers at the heart of the attacks formed neighbourhood watch teams to keep vigil.

Police arrested the four last night for their alleged involvement in the attacks in the Hindu-dominated Nasirnagar upazila of Brahmanbaria, the Daily Star reported citing the officer in-charge of the local police station.

With that, the total number people arested for the attacks last week by a group of religious zealots have reached 78. At least 100 homes and five temples were vandalised and torched by the mob after a Facebook post deemed offensive to Islam.

Kasipara is one of the six Hindu-dominated areas in Nasirnagar union that came under the attack.

Neighbourhood watch teams have been formed in each of the Hindu-dominated areas of the union including Banikpara, Akhrapara, Thakurpara, Hashpatalpara and Dattapara after the attacks on the nights of November 3 and 5, the report said.

"I came to my village [on Tuesday afternoon] and learnt that someone from my family would be with the vigilance team at night," Dhonu Das, a third-year student of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University in Gazipur, told the daily. "My younger brother was supposed to join, but I decided to do the job as he has a class in the morning."



Das is one of the five youths who were in the vigil team gurading the Kasipara village on Tuesday night.

According to the report, a team of eight people comprising members from Hindu and Muslim communities were guarding Namasudrapara village Wednesday night.

Majority of the residents in the Hindu localities are poor fishermen, farmers and small traders, and they depend on their daily earnings to feed their families.

And, thus, guarding the village at night is an added responsibility for them.

"We guard the village throughout the night. But we have to work during the day as we have no alternative means of earning a livelihood," said Jamal Hossain, a trader in Nasirnagar.

But Nasirnagar Police Station's Officer-in-Charge Abu Jafar welcomed the move to guard the villages at nights by the residents. "This is certainly helpful for us to maintain law and order following the incidents of attacks," he told the daily.

Many Hindu families have deserted their houses following the attacks and have taken refuge in neighbouring areas. Tension have escalated in the neighbourhood.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Four members of a group believed to be backed by LTTE and inspired by south Indian films have been arrested and today remanded to police custody in Sri Lanka for their involvement in violence in the Tamil-dominated Jaffna.

Six members of the sword-wielding Aava group were arrested last week for their violent acts against people in Jaffna.

Of the latest arrested members, one was said to be a military man, but military spokesman Brigadier Roshan Seneviratne denied that any person linked to the Sri Lankan military was among those arrested.

Acts of violence have recently increased in Jaffna suburbs like Manipay, Kopay and Chunnakam by the group. It is believed that the group was being backed by some politicians and former members of the LTTE.

The group is also said to be drawing inspiration from south Indian movies.

The group has been accused of murder, plunder of property and assault of people and people are in fear due to its attacks which have caused serious injuries to the victims.

Government spokesman Rajitha Senaratne claimed the group was a creation of the previous Mahinda Rajapaksa government.

Former defence secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa refuted the claim.

The police has launched a crackdown against the group.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 73-year-old man collapsed and died in a queue before a bank as cash-strapped people in the country's financial capital and suburbs rushed to the ATM counters on Friday to withdraw some money to meet their daily expenses.

Vishwanath Vartak, who was standing in the queue before an SBI branch for exchanging currency, collapsed and died on the spot at Navghar in Mulund in eastern suburbs, police said.

Vartak had been standing for hours in the queue to exchange Rs1000 and Rs 500 denomination notes. Though he was rushed to hospital by some people who saw him collapse, he was declared dead before admission, police said.

Running out of money for the last two days, men and women had thronged the ATMs since early morning while in many places, to their disappointment, they found the machines not working.

ATMs of various banks in south Mumbai, Lalbaugh, Parel, Dadar, Andheri, Ghatkopar and Mulund were found to be out of service and not dispensing money, forcing people to return empty-handed.

Ajeet Singh, a media professional, said when he went to an ATM in suburban Andheri, he found it closed and was told by a bank executive to come after an hour or two.

"When I went to exchange demonetised notes with new ones, I was told that the bank has not received the money yet and it would start exchanging it at 4 pm only," he said.

After finding some ATMs in the megacity not dispensing cash, Charles Asirvatham, an executive of a Malaysia-based company, took the twitter route to express his anguish.

Sanjay Dubey, working with a garment outlet, said, "I approached an ATM in suburban Kalyan around 8.30 am but it was shut. I hope government would take some corrective measures soon."

Claiming an SBI ATM to be non-functional, Gurudath Naik said he had complained about it to the bank's chairperson.

Despite the chaos, country's largest public sector lender SBI said in statement: "29,176 ATMs of State Bank of India (SBI) are up and functioning, rest are expected to be operational by tomorrow."

The SBI group, which includes associate banks, have an ATM network of 55,000 across the country.

Naresh Kadam, working in a pharmaceutical company, said he lined up before a new generation bank at 5.30 in the morning only to be greeted by a board after hours saying 'ATM out of service due to technical reasons'.

Narrating his vow, a senior citizen in Vikhroli said, "We thought of having some relief as banks were all set to open their ATMs today morning. But see what's happening here. Even bank officials do not bother to make separate arrangements for the senior citizens. Who will listen to us.
A day after Madras High Court pulled up Tamil Nadu government for non-allocation of funds to judiciary, DMK Treasurer M K Stalin today said the situation had arisen because the AIADMK regime did not take steps to improve its financial management.

Stating that judiciary was one of the pillars of democracy, he said the state government did not even disburse Rs 9.41 crore for procurement of office furniture and equipment for the judiciary.

"This is condemnable... It is an attempt to put a spoke in judiciary's wheel which upholds the rule of law. Only under such circumstances, the judiciary has asked the state government whether it proposed to declare financial emergency," Stalin, leader of the Opposition in the state assembly, said in a statement here.

"In the history of Tamil Nadu government's financial management, no other regime has been censured like this by the high court. AIADMK regime should bow its head in shame in the people's court," he said.

The high court yesterday took a serious view of non-allocation of funds to the judiciary and sought an affidavit from the State Finance Secretary as to whether the government "is proposing to declare a financial emergency."



Stalin said DMK had been "pointing out the poor financial management with over Rs four lakh crore debt and saying that the financial management should be set right."



However, Finance Minister O Panneerselvam did not even make "little efforts" to correct the situation and focussed his attention on "showering praises" on Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, he charged.

As a result of not taking efforts, the court has sought to know if there was a proposal to declare financial emergency by the state government, he said.

Terming the poser as "very suitable," he said the schemes announced in the budget too remained on paper.

Now, the court's view has brought to fore that the AIADMK regime "is not allocating funds for not only people's welfare schemes but also for the judiciary."



He said Tamil Nadu has slipped to 18th rank in ease of doing business and to 20th place in farm sector growth. Now, he alleged that the AIADMK regime was "pushing the State to a financial emergency to completely ruin Tamil Nadu's growth."



The financial management should be revamped at least now after the condemnation of the high court. The State government should immediately sanction requisite fund for the judiciary, he stressed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the aim of ensuring medical facilities to poor, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Friday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance minister Arun Jaitley to allow Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 invalid notes at private hospitals and medicine shops till November 30.

This will ensure medical facilities to poor, who are facing a lot of problems after ban of high denomination notes, he said in separate letters to Modi and Jaitley.

"As Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 were banned in haste, those undergoing treatment at hospitals and nursing homes are facing a lot of problems. I, therefore, request you to intervene and allow private hospitals, nursing homes and medicine shops to accept these notes till at least November 30," Yadav said.

"Due to the ban, those going to avail medical facilities in hospital are a harried lot. It is proving fatal for them. Allowing (Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes) currency will help people get medical treatment," he said.

As foreign tourists were facing difficulties due to demonetisation of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, Yadav had on Thursday directed the state Chief Secretary to ensure opening of extra counters for them to exchange currencies.

"The Chief Secretary should coordinate with banks and ensure opening of extra counters for foreign tourists in Agra and Varanasi. This will help them in exchanging their notes easily," Yadav in his directive.

As the Centre's move caught people by surprise, especially with wedding season round the corner, SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav demanded a roll back of demonetisation decision for a few days in view of the wedding season.

He suggested that people be given a week's time by the government.

BSP chief Mayawati has also said poor people and farmers have been badly hit by high denomination rupee ban decision, which reminded people of the dark days of Emergency imposed by then Congress government.
Army chief Gen Dalbir Singh Suhag today left on a three day visit to Nepal during which he will meet with top leadership and witness a bilateral military exercise.

The visit assumes significance in the light of India's special relationship with Nepal, underpinning India's priorities in maintaining friendly relations in the region, a statement by the Army said.

The close ties of both the armies can be viewed in light of the unique tradition of honouring each other's Chiefs of Army Staff with the Honorary rank of 'General'.

Presence of large number of Nepali Gorkha troops in Indian Army is also a key element in bilateral defence ties.

Upon his arrival at the Nepal Army Headquarters, he was accorded a Guard of Honour.

During the visit he paid a courtesy call to President of Nepal and interacted with the Chief of the Army Staff of Nepalese Army.

He is also scheduled to meet the Prime Minister of Nepal during his ongoing visit.

Gen Suhag will also be witnessing EX-SURYA KIRAN-X, a joint training exercise between Indian and Nepalese Armies being conducted at Saaljhandi, Nepal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
For the second day, people in large numbers continued to throng banks to exchange banned high denomination currency notes while most ATMs ran out of cash within hours of opening today across Tamil Nadu.

Though the government had announced that the ATMs would dispense cash for the customers with maximum limit of Rs 2,000 per person from today, most the ATMs of both public and private sector banks ran out of cash and were inactive.

Several ATMs in remote areas did not function.

Private sector ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank have announced extended working hours up to 8 pm to dispense cash for the customers.

"I was told there was enough cash in ATMs and there will not be any problem in dispensing the cash. But, when I came here, we were asked to leave as ATMs ran out of cash", Kumar, a customer of State Bank of India, said.

With ATMs remaining non-functional, serpentine queues could be seen before the banks for exchanging the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes.

(REOPENS MES4)



A Puducherry report said people requiring cash were unable to withdraw money from ATM centres in most of the areas as they remained closed for several hours.

Although a few of the banks started operating ATMs around noon under police security, long queueswere seen in front of them.

Tourists bore the brunt of the cap on withdrawal. One of the tourists from France said that the ceiling on Rs 4000 for exchange of banned currencies was not adequate to meet his expenses.

Business centres wore a near deserted look with absence of customers.

Bank sources said replenishment of cash in the ATM centres would be completed once necessary technical features such as configuration were completed.
The Charity Commissioner's office in Maharashtra has asked the temple authorities at several popular pilgrimage centres to open donation boxes only in the presence of authorised personnel due to the apprehension that the cash could be used by black-money hoarders to get rid of their ill-gotten wealth.

The decision was also taken to avoid the inflow of unaccounted for currency notes through temple donations, a senior officer at the Charity Commissioner's office told PTI.

Temple managements have been asked to take "extreme precautions" while counting the cash in the donation box, he added.

The authorities fear that those hoarding huge amounts of money in cash could, in connivance with the temple officials, get their Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 currency notes replaced by currency notes of lower denominations donated to the temples.

"We want to avoid such misuse of temple donations," the officer said.

Kolhapur District Collector Amit Saini has appealed to the devotees to avoid making donations in demonetised currency notes. Kolhapur-based Mahalaxmi temple is one of the most popular temples in the state with an annual footfall of a million.

The Charity Commissioner's office at Aurangabad, the jurisdiction of which extends to Aurangabad, Jalna, Nanded, Parbhani and Hingoli districts, has issued such instructions to around 45 temples of which, 15 to 20 are located in Aurangabad city and district.

A director of the famous Saibaba shrine at Shirdi in Ahmednagar district said devotees have been instructed to avoid making donations in demonetised currency notes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal is learnt to have sought time from President Pranab Mukherjee to meet him along with his council of ministers on the Satluj-Yamuna Link canal issue.

A letter, in this regard, has been to sent to the President today, official sources said.

However, no official confirmation could be made as senior officers were not contactable.

Badal, in the letter, referred to the Supreme court ruling which held Punjab Bill on Termination of River water Agreements as invalid.

"We respect the honorable court but we respect the Constitution of India more..." the CM is learnt to have written.

Punjab cabinet had yesterday decided to call on the President to request him not to accept the advice of the Supreme Court on SYL issue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Moving quickly to plug loopholes, the Income Tax Department has asked banks to report all cash deposits exceeding Rs 2.5 lakh during the 50-day window provided to tender the now-defunct 500 and 1000 rupee notes.

Previously, banks were required to report to the I-T Department only when cash deposits in an account exceeded Rs 10 lakh in one full year.

But in view of apprehensions that large number of illegal or black money may sought to be converted into white during the window provided till December 30, the Revenue Department has issued fresh set of instructions, a top official said.

"The attempt will be not to harass honest citizens who are free to tender all of their legal, old high-denomination currency savings in their bank accounts and get new ones," he said.

But the window provided to them will also be not allowed to be misused, he said, adding that the Income Tax Department is keeping a close eye on all high-value deposits.

Those depositing large amounts of unaccounted money will have to face the consequences under tax laws, which provide for a 30 per cent tax, 12 per cent interest and a 200 per cent penalty.

Earlier in the day, the Finance Ministry came out with newspaper advertisements assuring people that their hard earned money is safe and that depositing junked Rs 500/1,000 notes of up to Rs 2.50 lakh in bank accounts will not be reported to the tax department.

It also cautioned people against depositing the money of unknown people in their own accounts or falling prey to cheats, thugs and rumour mongers.

Besides, the ministry said, farm income continues to remain tax free and can be easily deposited in bank.

Small businessmen, housewives, artisans, workers can also deposit cash in their accounts without any apprehensions, it added.

"Deposits up to Rs 2.50 lakh will not be reported to the Income Tax department. There will be no harassment or investigation. All honest citizen need not worry. Farmers' income is tax free and can be easily deposited in bank," the ministry said in newspaper ads.

In its biggest crackdown ever on black money, the government on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and asked people holding such notes to deposit them in their bank accounts.

Since yesterday, people have been thronging banks amid concerns over exchanging and depositing the scrapped high denomination currency.

People can deposit defunct Rs 500/1,000 notes in their accounts till December 30, 2016, without any limit. Restrictions have been imposed on withdrawal limit and people can withdraw up to Rs 10,000 per day or Rs 20,000 per week. This limit will be reviewed after few days.

Besides, old notes worth up to Rs 4,000 can be exchanged at any bank or post office till November 24, 2016, by showing photo ID proof.

ATMs can be used to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 a day per card till November 18 and Rs 4,000 from November 19 onwards. This limit too will be reviewed subsequently.

The ministry also advised people to make payments using cheques, demand drafts, debit or credit cards and electronic fund transfers and there is no restriction on such transactions.
A Block Development Officer (BDO) in Odisha's Sundergarh district today lodged a police complaint against a Congress MLA, accusing him of "abusing and threatening" him.

The FIR was lodged at Lefripara police station.

However, the Sundergarh MLA, Jogeshwar Singh, denied the charges brought against him by Tangarpalli Tehsildar Soumendra K Das.

The BDO alleged that Singh "misbehaved" with him and "threatened" him with dire consequences over phone. The incident occurred around 7 pm yesterday.

"I received a phone call from the MLA who abused me in a foul language and also threatened me with life," the BDO stated in the FIR, adding that the MLA "forced him to favour" Congress workers in the Gopabandhu Grameen Yojana works.

"I expressed my inability and politely told him that it was not possible, but he did not listen to me and continued to abuse me," he said.

The BDO said he had informed the District Collector and SP about the incident, adding that the OAS Association had taken up the issue.

"The office-bearers of my association would meet the chief minister soon, possibly today, in this regard and would apprise him of this," said Das.

When contacted, the MLA said, "I have never misbehaved with the BDO or threatened him. He has been trying to malign me by taking my name in a fake case".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
People in large numbers thronged banks to exchange old currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination and withdraw money from ATMs, that went dry at several places, across Bihar on the second day of transaction.

In Patna, many stood in long serpentine queues in front of different nationalised and private banks to exchange old currency notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 besides depositing and withdrawing money.

Since morning till in the evening long queues were witnessed at almost every bank branch as panic-stricken citizens went to banks on the second day of their reopening after the Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced to demonetise Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes to fight menace of black money, corruption and fake currency.

Long queues were witnessed at ATMs too which opened today after the gap of two days. ATMs were closed for two days- Wednesday and Thursday- for their re-calibration to dispense money.

Many ATMs ran out of cash in couple of hours as there were heavy rush to withdraw money but a large number of ATMs, especially on Boring road or Boring canal road of the capital, were not working till 11 am since morning.

People were a harried lot as they were finding it difficult to meet their daily needs for paucity of money.

"After completing my morning walk, I went to the ATM of ICICI Bank around 7 am on Boring road roundabout but it was closed. One of the guards told me the ATM was to be replenished with cash in the night but the process could not be completed in the night and hence it was not dispensing money," said Ajay Kumar, a resident of Anandpuri area in the capital.

"Things have gone from bad to worse as I am completely run out of money and it is becoming difficult to meet my daily needs," Kumar added.

Vivek Kumar Singh, a resident of Rajiv Nagar, said, "I woke up early in the morning in order to avoid rush at ATMs thinking that ATMs would have been replenished in the night. But to my surprise, no ATM was opened in my vicinity.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A bomb blast in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast has killed a local government official and wounded at least two other people, authorities said today.

The explosion, which state-run Anadolu agency blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), tore through the area near a government building in the town of Derik yesterday.

The PKK, which has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, has resumed attacks on security forces since a fragile ceasefire broke down last year.

The fatality was named as Muhammet Fatih Safiturk, 35, who had served as sub-prefect as well as mayor of Derik.

He had been tasked by the government with running the area as part of a vast effort to replace local authorities suspected of PKK ties.

He "was martyred early Friday by wounds sustained in a PKK terrorist attack on his office a day earlier," provincial authorities said in a statement.

After the attack, security forces apprehended 20 people in the area and they were being held for questioning, Anadolu reported.

Ankara has replaced a string of local elected leaders in the Kurdish majority southeast, which the government says is part of its effort to battle the PKK.

In the latest such move, an administrator was appointed on Friday to take over from the mayor of Varto municipality in eastern Mus province, who was held on Wednesday on suspicion of "terrorist activities".

Turkey's main pro-Kurdish party, the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), on Sunday said it was pulling out of parliament after nine of its MPs including the two co-leaders were arrested.

Western allies worry that a state of emergency imposed after the coup bid is being used for a general crackdown against critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and not just the suspected plotters.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Boeing has said it is in talks with Indian companies to collaborate under the 'Make in India' initiative to manufacture Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) that could be used for surveillance by the Indian Navy.

Brad Jeisman, Senior Business Development Manager of Insitu Pacific which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boeing, said since the Indian Navy is looking to acquire a UAS, it is "actively working" on it.

"We had discussions with a number of Indian companies on what could be possible to support our make and buy Indian (products). We are working with different companies. We are meeting with some of the larger ones that we typically expect, but we are also interested in small to medium scale industries," Jeisman said.

Insitu Pacific builds UAS, apart from Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), Unattended Ground Sensors (UGS) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and supplies it to Australia and other countries in Asia-Pacific.

Under the UAS, it manufactures 'ScanEagle' that gives images and live video feed on land or at sea and can be used for surveillance methods.

'Interceptor' is another such UAS with cameras and communication capabilities.

Boeing recently announced its joint venture with the Tatas namely Tata advanced System Ltd (TASL) - Tata Boeing Aerospace Limited (TBAL).

He said the company is also in talks with small and medium enterprises in India.

Talks are also in progress on how much per cent of the product could be manufactured in India under the 'Make in India' initiative, he added.

"What we have found in our discussions, observations and meetings that India has incredibly gifted small and medium- sized companies with amazing technology on your doorstep," Jeisman said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
After Brexit, could there be a Calexit?



For some liberal Californians incensed by Donald Trump's election to the presidency over Democrat Hillary Clinton, secession from the United States is the only way forward.

Although observers say the Golden State has little to no chance to ever become a separate country, the idea is appealing for many who are disenchanted with the shock outcome of the vote and say they feel like strangers in a foreign land.

The election result marks a "real division" for California, said Kevin Klowden of the Milken Institute think tank.

"The presidential candidate who lost won California dramatically."



The state is known for its progressive politics on the environment, gun laws and gay rights. On Tuesday, it voted to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

On the other hand, Trump's anti-immigrant platform, his pro-gun stance and his skepticism about climate change couldn't be further away from the views of most Californians.

Shortly after Trump was declared the winner, protesters took to the streets in the state capital Sacramento, Los Angeles and other towns to express their dismay.

The hashtag #Calexit also began trending on social media with many Twitter users pairing it with #notmypresident.

"I cannot identify with bigotry, sexism, xenophobia," one Twitter user wrote. "I'm no longer American, I am Californian."



Said another: "We'll just take our avocados and legal weed and go."



Silicon Valley venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, who is Iranian-American, said he was willing to bankroll a secessionist campaign.

"If Trump wins, I am announcing and funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation," he tweeted on Tuesday as the unexpected election outcome sunk in.

He said the new nation would be called New California.

Mark Baldassare, head of the Public Policy Institute of California, said although the idea of seceding is unrealistic, it reflects the state's long history of thinking outside the box.

With a population of nearly 40 million, California is one of the most diverse states in America, with whites outnumbered by Hispanics and members of other ethnic groups,



In 2015, it also had the sixth largest economy in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund -- ahead of France and India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Army, Air Force and Navy today pitched for aggressive participation of the MSME sector in defence equipment manufacturing to tap a huge USD 9.6 billion market.

"The whole Indian defence budget is around USD 40 billion, of which a USD 9.6 billion market can be accessed by the MSME sector, wherein R&D (Research and Development) and technological requirements can be met by these industries," Deputy Chief of Army Staff (Planning and Systems) Lt General Subrata Saha said at an industry-defence interface here.

"With the kind of work going on at technical institutes at present, there is no reason why the money should go out," he said referring to his interaction with students of IIT Kharagpur yesterday and other such institutes earlier.

Pitching for greater participation of MSMEs in defence sector for making 'Make in India' a success, Lt Gen Saha said, "It is a 1.3-million strong Army and the requirements are enormous."



"At any given moment we have 130 to 140 schemes for procurement, out of which 40 per cent are worth below Rs 150 crore each and it makes it possible for MSMEs to participate in such procurements," he said.

Pointing out that it is not difficult to invest in prototypes, he said, "When we are using imported items, those have to be adapted for Indian conditions; it will be much better if these are developed locally suiting our needs."



A large number of single-engine fighter aircraft would be manufactured in India, Air Commodore H S Basra, Principal Director (Plans) Air Force HQ, said, adding that there were huge advantages of going the indigenous way.

"There may be some teething problems, but it is still better as field commanders can call vendors 24x7 for repairs, changes or improvisation in softwares or hardwares," Basra said while speaking at the Seventh Industry Defence Linkage organised by CII.

"We will not have to go through a circuitous route as in case of foreign vendors which takes time," he said while speaking in favour of an aggressive presence of indigenous MSMEs in defence manufacturing.

Rear Admiral S P Lal of Indian Navy said the different degrees of indigenisation have occurred over the years in the naval sector manufacturing and maintenance from 90 per cent to 30 per cent depending on standards of technology requirement.

He said new vendors are welcome in participating in new technological developments and supply of equipment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Centre has asked all states to ensure proper security to all banks, ATMs and vehicles transporting cash in the wake of demonitisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes.

The Home Ministry has deputed three officials to be in touch with state governments to ensure security of banks, ATMs and cash transporting vehicles.

The three officials are taking regular feedbacks from the Directors General of Police and the situation in respective states, a Home Ministry official said.

So far no report of any violence or untoward incident has come from anywhere in the country.

"We have conveyed to the states that if they require any assistance, we will provide immediately," the official said.

The central government is expecting the financial situation to be normal in the next four-five days.

Two separate advisories were sent to all states in this regard, the official said.

Chaos and confusion reigned at most banks across the country with harried customers having to stand in winding queues for hours on end for withdrawing or exchanging demonetised notes. Their problems have been compounded with a large number of ATMs being non-functional or getting emptied soon after being replenished.
Chinese police have arrested 101 suspects, including 25 Taiwanese from Cambodia, for their alleged role in transnational-telecom crimes involving USD 2.94 million, officials said today.

Of the suspects, 76 were from the mainland and 25 from Taiwan and they have been linked to 135 cases currently under investigation, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said.

The suspects were arrested in the crackdown since mid-June this year.

The fraudsters had targeted victims living in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and police across the province first began to receive complaints about telecom and Internet fraud in April this year, state-run Xinhua agency reported.

The subsequent investigations led to outfits based in Cambodia, where the suspects were allegedly swindling victims out of their money by pretending to be government or law enforcement officials.

Chinese police captured 39 suspects, 14 from the mainland and 25 from Taiwan, in Cambodia, and seized the apparatus they had been using.

Following the arrests and raids in Cambodia, and under the coordination of the MPS, police departments from seven provinces in China carried out multiple raids and arrested 62 suspects and dismantled three transnational fraud outfits.

Around 590,000 telecom fraud cases were reported in 2015, involving the loss of 22.2 billion yuan.

Taiwan has been protesting over the arrest of its national in the ongoing crackdown by China over the international telecom frauds.

Officials from China, which claims Taiwan as part of the mainland, defend the action saying that the Taiwanese were involved in committing crimes against Chinese nationals.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Two helicopters were today deployed to bring cash from Reserve Bank, Patna currency chest to Ranchi with an aim to minimise difficulties to customers in Jharkhand.

An official release said quoting Development Commissioner Amit Khare that the decision was taken after consultation with the local office of the central government's control room at Reserve Bank of India and SLBC.

The choppers brought money and currencies were being sent to all banks, he said adding the state government would use the helicopters to send currency notes to other parts of the state tomorrow.

Necessary steps were taken with regard to security, and transport, the release added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Anti-nuclear group Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) today opposed the Indo- Japan nuclear agreement, claiming it would fuel the nuclear arms race in South Asia besides leading to displacement and loss of livelihood and threat to environment.

Another advocacy group -- Greenpeace India -- alleged the deal will allow reactor equipment from Japan to make way into the Indian market and said the government should focus on renewable sources of energy rather than on "unsafe and economically unviable" nuclear energy.

"If it (deal) goes through than what will happen is this will free India's uranium supply for military use," CNDP founder member Achin Vanaik said, adding the deal will become the "final seal of legitimacy for India's nuclear weapons and will further fuel the nuclear arm race in South Asia".

Greenpeace India activist Priya Pillai questioned the signing of the deal, asking why India is focussing on nuclear energy when it has abundance opportunities of renewable energy which is safe and reliable.

On Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar comment on 'no-first- use nuclear' policy, she said it will lead to "more and more militarisation" and is a threat to peace in the entire Asian region.

Vanaik said what is being done here is to "actually bring into public discourse what is formally considered unacceptable... So as to legitimise through discussions".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Dispelling all doubts, Cochin Shipyard Ltd (CSL) refitted the largest Indian aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya a month ahead of schedule.

INS Vikramaditya is one of the biggest ships owned by India and ever to have docked in India till date.

"The Cochin Shipyard Limited dispelled doubts that CSL could repair the largest Indian aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, when on November, 5, 2016, the refit was completed a month ahead of schedule," the Ministry of Shipping said in a statement.

This aircraft carrier was purchased from Russia and commissioned into the naval fleet in 2014.

In September, the Navy, one of CSL's biggest clients, decided to dry-dock the carrier attached to Karwar Naval Base at CSL for repairs on contracted schedule of 70 days.

"It was clearly an opportunity for CSL to prove that India had the infrastructure as well as expertise for the task," the government said.

This will also ensure readiness and preparedness with an indigenous capability in the case of an emergency, without having to face the embarrassment of sending the ship outside the country for repairs.

Rajesh Gopalakrishnan, General Manager (Ship Repair Division) at CSL, said, "Till INS Vikramaditya docked in Cochin Shipyard and water was pumped out of the dock and we had her sitting safely, there was a real concern on whether India could do it."



The statement said CSL tasked IIT Chennai with undertaking a detailed dock floor strength analysis to prove that the CSL dock indeed had the capacity to accommodate loads of this nature.

The work package was contracted and scheduled for 70 days, but certain operational requirements called for significant compression of the time-frame and the ship was un-docked and taken out of the yard in 42 days, it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Welcoming the Supreme Court verdict on Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) Canal, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar today said conditions are now becoming favourable for the state.

"This is the golden jubilee year for Haryana and conditions are now becoming favourable. There is a good for people in the southern part of Haryana -- Faridabad-Mewat- Gurgaon-Mahindergarh-Rewari-Bhiwani area.

"The Supreme Court yesterday made a decision in favour of Haryana on the Satlej-Yamuna canal issue. Now people will get enough water for farming and it will also be made fit for drinking after processing," he said at Harchandpur village here.

The water dispute assumed a new dimension with the Supreme Court yesterday holding as unconstitutional the 2004 law passed by Punjab to terminate the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water sharing agreement with neighboring states.

The Haryana chief minister also lauded the Centre's demonetisation decision, saying the "revolutionary step" will help curb black-marketing, hoarding and economic crimes.

"Works which no one could imagine until recent are now happening. Now we have arrived at a situation where those who do not have anything are smiling while those who have lots are worrying what to do!



"The government's decision of scrapping Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes is a laudable effort because it will help curb black-marketing, hoarding and economic crimes," he said.

"Since the last two days, the we are getting is that the common man is happy. Those who have nothing are smiling and those who have a lot are worrying as to what to do. The trend has reversed.

"This is a huge moment when there is awareness. Those working honestly will progress and those trying to move forward by unwanted methods will face hurdle. This is a revolutionary step," he said.

Noting that farm produces are not fetching right prices in many areas due to lack of proper markets, he stressed the need for developing more market places in the state.

"The country is making progress. No productive item would be sold at rates below market price," he said.

(REOPENS DES23)



Meanwhile, Haryana Finance Minister Captain Abhimanyu said all political parties should play a constructive role for the implementation of the Supreme Court's decision on Sutlej Yamuna Link Canal, which is in favour of Haryana.

Abhimanyu said the decision of the Supreme Court was in the interest of the country.

He said that with this decision, water would be available for Haryana as well as Rajasthan.

Taking a dig at former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Abhimanyu said Hooda should apologise to the people as he, during his 10 years Congress regime, had not even made a little effort for early hearing and completion of SYL canal.

He asked what kind of "pressure" Hooda faced and why did he not understand the gravity of this vital issue.

Abhimanyu said that as Haryana's economic growth is much better than that of Punjab, it should consider reviewing and redesigning its economic structure.

The economic growth could not be ensured by relying only on agriculture thus Punjab should contemplate to work on manufacturing and service sectors and desist from raising political slogans.

Haryana has achieved rapid growth in last 50 years as a result of which its dependence has been lessened on agriculture.

Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij took strong exception to the remarks made by Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on the issue and said that Haryana had demanded the state's share of Ravi-Beas waters through the SYL canal on the basis of the same law and Constitution that Badal had taken oath to uphold when he had taken charge as Chief Minister.

Vij said Badal should obey the orders of the Supreme Court and take necessary steps instead of disregarding these orders by calling an emergency meeting of the Cabinet.

Vij said that Badal or former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh did not own Punjab, nor did the SYL Canal pass through the courtyard of their houses.

Haryana has a right to it, and the state is demanding its rights from the law of the country.

Lashing out at Amarinder, the Health Minister said that no decent citizen or judicial system of the country would accept the breaking of all SYL-related agreements between Haryana and Punjab in 2004.

(REOPENS DES72)



Later in the day, Khattar said the SYL canal issue that was politicised for decades had been "effectively pursued" by the present state government before the Supreme Court.

Addressing a function at Ateli in Mahendragarh district, he said in its preparation to receive the supply of surplus water, the Haryana government has started work to upgrade the irrigation system at a cost of Rs 2,000 crore.

The Chief Minister also laid foundation stones of an ITI building to be established at village Sujapur at a cost of over Rs 4.47 crore, railway over-bridge on Ateli-Behrod road at a cost of about Rs 25 crore and community centre at village Sehlang at a cost of Rs 27 lakh.

He announced various development projects for the Ateli Assembly Constituency which include construction of an auditorium at a cost of Rs 4.5 crore in a government college, a Kisan Bhawan at a cost of Rs 60 lakh in Anaj Mandi and a Multi Skill Centre in Fatni.

He assured canal based drinking water supply in 60 villages of the area and sanctioning Rs 5 crore for drainage of storm water in Ateli.

He announced construction of a roads from Bajar to Ganihar at a cost of Rs 81 lakh and Rs 10 lakh and Rs five lakh for building Gaushalas at Bihali and Kheri,respectively.

Khattar also inaugurated an eye checkup camp organised by Shree Swami Jagannath Charitable Trust, Ateli Mandi.
Tapping into the popular mood amid reports of public inconvenience following the Centre's demonetisation move, Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray today said it amounted to "torture" of people as he dared the Prime Minister to conduct "surgical strikes" on Swiss banks to bring back black money.

"People have put immense faith in you (PM). Do not betray their trust or you will see the impact of peoples' surgical strike against you," he told reporters here.

His comments came at a time when citizens are having a tough time to get cash from banks and ATMs after the government scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination notes, causing panic among people.

"If your move is against corruption, we are with you, but not at the cost of troubling the common man. Your (Modi) sudden decision at a time when new notes are not available adequately, is proving to be a torture for people," Udhav said.

Questioning the rationale behind the decision, the Sena chief said, "What purpose will it serve by harassing people and weeding out black money from the system (in such a manner)...If you have guts, conduct a surgical strike on Swiss banks where Indian money is stashed. Bring back this black money."



Thackeray demanded that the Centre extend the period for which old notes were being accepted by various government agencies, and that collection of road tax be completely suspended until there was an adequate supply of new notes.

The Centre yesterday allowed Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes for payment of electricity bills, water bills, property tax or any kind of government dues in Maharashtra on request of the state government. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had announced on Wednesday that all state roads would be toll tax free till November 11 midnight.

"Do you even understand what you are doing? The government should understand the plight of people and the consequences of their (people's) anger. Make the process (of conversion of old notes) convenient for people," he said.

As per the Centre's order, banks started exchanging scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes for lower denomination currencies since yesterday. Public can deposit any amount of the invalid currency in their bank accounts till December 30 and also exchange them for lower banknotes at special counters at banks and post offices till November 24, but with a limit of Rs 4,000 per day.

Though the ATMs reopened today after being closed for 2-days, the cash-strapped people were further disappointed as most of these machines ran out of cash and in many areas they did not open at all.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Some of the sitting legislators of Congress in Goa who have "drifted away" may not get tickets to contest upcoming Assembly elections as the party has decided to give preference to fresh faces, party veteran Digvijaya Singh said today.

"We have had a very detailed discussion on every seat. The political strategy for each Assembly seat has been worked out. Some more discussions will take place in next few days before the final list issent to Central Election Committee of AICC," the AICC general secretary said here.

He was speaking to reporters after chairing a meeting of the State Election Committee of Congress to shortlist candidates for the polls, due next year.

"We have decided to give preference to new faces and also at the same time our whole effort is to expose the non-implementation of electoral promises by BJP government, corruption in BJP, total violation of the regional plans and also various issues which they had promised during the last election but have gone back on them," Singh said.

Responding to a query, the Congress leader said at least two sitting MLAs have already "drifted" from the party.

"Mauvin Godinho (legislator from Dabolim constituency) has left the Congress party. While Atanasio Monserratte (Taleigao constituency) has not made it clear whether he will be contesting on Congress ticket or not," he said.

Singh said another legislator Pandurang Madkaikar (Cumbharjua seat) was giving "different signals", and "conflicting statements" for last one and half or two months.

On the election campaign to be undertaken by Congress, Singh said the party was extremely concerned about the "total collapse" of governance in state, "where dues of contractors are pending and government piling up a huge debt."



"We are also concerned about huge unemployment in mining industry in Goa, which the Congress party would like to bring to the notice of people of Goa through our mass contact programme," he said.

Singh informed that the election manifesto committee has been constituted and soon suggestions will be invited from the common people.

"Our chargesheet against the BJP and AAP governments of Delhi has been printed and its distribution has also started. We are also planning a 'padyatra' (march) from North to South Goa from November 19, which will be the beginning of the birth centenary celebrations of Indira Gandhi," the Congress general secretary said.

He said these programmes will be held throughout year



"The national executive of the NSUI will be held in Goa on November 23, 24, 25," Singh said.

In election held in 2012 for the 40-member House, Congress had won only 9 seats, as it was decimated by BJP under Manohar Parrikar.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Can Donald Trump govern this country?

He starts with several large advantages: the fervent support of white, working-class voters and the Republican control of Congress. In his victory speech, he struck generous themes of unity, vowing "to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all of Americans."

But Trump is going to learn very quickly that being president is far tougher than running for president. Even with his allies controlling Capitol Hill, he's going to face enormous obstacles that will make his job extremely difficult from Day 1.

Start with the way the campaign played out. Trump complained repeatedly that the system was "rigged" against him, but now it's the Democrats who will make that argument. The totally unprecedented -- and unjustified -- decision by FBI Director James Comey to interject himself into the campaign less than two weeks before Election Day stopped Clinton's momentum cold, and handed Trump a powerful argument to exploit his opponent's biggest vulnerability: her reputation for dishonesty. The impact is clear: Voters who decided at the last minute favored Trump by 5 points.

Add to Democratic grievances the facts that Clinton actually won the popular vote and lost key states by slim margins. Disappointment and frustration will be felt most keenly by women who hoped to see the first female president, and now believe that once again, a better-qualified woman has been passed over for a less-experienced man.

All these resentments feed into a second problem for Trump: an American system that was deliberately designed to check the power of even the most popular president. The new chief executive will soon learn a truism of Washington life: It's much easier to stop something than pass something.

Democrats are fully prepared to be hypocritical here. The same lawmakers who denounced the filibuster when Republicans used it against President Obama will now embrace the tactic with the fervor of a convert.

Their first focus will be the Supreme Court vacancy. And they will surely invoke Republicans who talked openly -- when they thought Clinton would win -- about blocking her appointees for her entire first term.

"The most difficult aspect of American politics these days is that governing moments are few and far between," wrote Princeton professor Julian Zelizer for CNN, before the election. "The forces of gridlock are extraordinarily strong."

Perhaps Trump's lack of experience will be an asset; perhaps he'll be able to combat these "forces of gridlock" with a fresh eye. But governing is a profession, and an honorable one. Trump would never turn his business over to amateurs. They'd make too many mistakes. An amateur in the White House is a far riskier bet.

Trump's problems don't end with Democrats. His own party is badly fractured, with a core of hard-line conservatives determined to push him toward a purist ideology and away from being a president "for all Americans."

Congressional leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan openly disdained Trump, and have a lot of fence-mending to do. Some party activists will agree with GOP strategist Peter Wehner who wrote in The New York Times that "a party that is recast into the image of Mr. Trump is something many of us would want nothing to do with."

Another problem for Trump: He made a series of promises he cannot possibly keep. Some, like repealing Obamacare, will almost certainly be blocked by Senate Democrats.

Others simply cannot work, even if Republicans held every seat in the Senate. Trump won the votes of many dispirited workers by vowing to restore the manufacturing jobs that have fled the industrial heartland. He blamed closed factories on bad trade deals and argued that a stronger negotiator could reverse the trend.

But every economist knows that's a lie. Manufacturing jobs were mainly lost because of two unstoppable forces: technological innovation and globalization. Global markets require companies to stay competitive by making products in low-wage countries. Those jobs won't come back.

Another promise that Trump can never keep: deporting the 11 million undocumented workers who fill vital roles in the economy, and often have children who are American citizens.

Trump cannot control markets, which plunged worldwide as his victory loomed. And neither China nor ISIS will be impressed with his bluster. How long will it take for disillusionment to set in?

President Obama graciously told Americans that "our democracy has always been rowdy and raucous. We've been through tough and divisive elections before and we've always come out stronger for it."

But his optimism will be severely tested by a Trump presidency.
US Ambassador to India Richard Verma today reiterated that convergence of views was the "new normal" in Indo-US ties which is "based on results" and not on "rhetoric", seeking to assuage nerves in New Delhi on Donald Trump's election as President.

Verma said the next administration in Washington will consider strengthening ties with India as one of its top priorities as the the two countries are "natural partners" at a time when the post World War-II order and its institutions are "under assault".

He was speaking on the future of India-US relations under the new administration, two days after Republican Party nominee Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States, clinching a stunning victory against Hillary Clinton.

"Even on issues that have divided us on recent years, climate change for example...There is convergence. Who would have thought that the US and India would lead the world to a global climate agreement? This is the new normal - strategic, political and economic convergence," Verma said.

In his nearly 20-minute speech, Verma, who is of India- origin, did not refer to Trump even once.

Recently, speaking at Jamia Millia University, he had reached out to Muslims, denouncing the "unacceptable rhetoric" against the community during the election campaigns in the US.

He listed four reasons as to why further building and strengthening of the US-India relationship will be one of the top priorities of Trump administration, including "a strong bipartisan consensus" in Washington in this regard.

"At a time of deep political polarisation in our country, enhancing the US India partnership is something that is refreshingly unifying across the political divide. We have greater convergence on the big issues of the day. We have made it clear that we support India's rise as a global power.

"We see the impact in our counter-terror declarations and the condemnation of terrorism of all forms including cross- border terrorism, our renewed convergence on issues related to Afghanistan, our trilateral cooperation with Japan," he said.

Verma, who took over as the US' top envoy in New Delhi in 2014, said shared values and systems including constitutional democracies, inclusive societies, protection of minority rights, free speech, assembly and religion are among the other major reasons that hold the two countries together.

"Our relationship is not just based on rhetoric but



results. In this era of doubts about the benefits of globalisation, this is a shining example of success that stands out in the crowd," he said.

Speaking at the event, organised by trade chamber FICCI, Verma said the number of Indian students studying in the US, which is at its highest now, has seen a substantial jump and the new figures will be announced next week.

Verma said nearly 1.1 million visas were issued for Indian visitors to the US last year which is "three times greater" than it was 10 years ago.

On the day of Trump's election, Verma had said the Indo- US ties, built on shared democratic values, "go beyond" the friendship of the American President and the Indian Prime Minister.

Ambassador Arun Singh, who was until recently India's envoy to US, was present on the occasion. He said India will have to continue pushing the argument that Indian skilled workforce is contributing to the US economy to counter Trump's anti-immigrants stance.

Touching on the same subject, Rajan Bharti Mittal of Bharti enterprises said although there is no problem with the argument that "jobs has to be brought back", there has to be a "give and take" relationship.

Later, Verma said amid declining exports across the world, two-way trade between India and the US has actually increased. The vision of India as outsourcing destination is somehow an "outdated view", he said.

"Not every country in the world has chosen the systems that we have and in today's world where the post World War II order and its institutions are increasingly under assault, US and India are such natural partners or natural allies as the Prime Minister likes to say," he said.

Appearing to strike a farewell note, Verma thanked the US embassy team here and officials across the two administrations for taking bilateral ties to new heights in the past two years.

"I am quite bullish about our future and confident our strong relationship would continue into the next administration



and we are committed to make this relationship even stronger in the years to come," Verma said.
A majority of companies in India have introduced a clutch of initiatives like adoption leave and second-career programmes to attract and retain young mothers at workplace, says a study.

The study conducted by diversity advocate and workplace inclusion expert AVTAR Group and Working Mother Media, a gender-parity champion in the United States, said the women- oriented initiatives are helping young mothers rejoin the workforce.

The study said 18 companies introduced 6 months of fully paid maternity leave in 2015 and a significant 86 per cent of companies have rolled out paternity policies at workplace.

Second-career programmes stand out to be the most effective of all for helping young mothers in rejoining the workforce. Around 52 per cent companies allow an average of 6.3 months of phase-back, in addition to paid maternity leave, for young mothers rejoining after their maternity breaks.

Accenture, Cummins India and Deloitte India have been named among the top 10 best companies for women in India (in alphabetical order).

Others in the top 10 list include EY India, Hindustan Unilever, IBM India, ICICI Bank, Intel Technology India, Mindtree Technologies, Morgan Stanley and People Combine Educational Initiatives.

"Creating an inclusive environment that enables women to achieve both their personal and professional ambitions, reflects Accenture's core values and culture," said Rekha M Menon, Chairman and Managing Director, Accenture in India.

As per the study, 32 per cent of the workforce in the top 10 best companies for women in India are women and 37 per cent of all the managers in the top 10 companies are women.

"The 100 best companies for women in India have exemplary policies that can plug the women talent drain. These policies cushion the career paths for women professionals during key life events such as maternity and help in retention and growth of these women," said Saundarya Rajesh, founder-President, AVTAR Group.

Around 70 per cent of the 350 companies that were surveyed in India offer an average of 4.7 months paid leave for adoptive mothers and 15 per cent of companies in India sponsor their women employees for infertility treatments, reveals the study.

The study further stated that 60 per cent of companies rate remote work, flexi-time , partial work and partial pay as the most favoured flexible arrangements for working mothers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A local AAP leader, who along with party MLA Rakhi Birla's father was accused of gangraping a 24 -year-old woman on the pretext of giving her a ticket for MCD polls, was today denied anticipatory bail by a Delhi court.

The court denied the relief to Ram Pratap Goyal saying his custodial interrogation was required not only for locating the alleged MMS of the married woman but also to identify the places where she was ravished.

"Although nothing adverse in respect of the antecedents of applicant has been stated on behalf of prosecution, yet the probability of investigation getting hampered and witnesses tampered cannot be ruled out, taking into account the position held by the applicant (Goyal).

"This court is not persuaded to accord pre-arrest bail to the applicant. His application, therefore, is dismissed," Additional Sessions Judge Sunil K Aggarwal said.

Recently Goyal, who is AAP's block treasurer in Rohini, and Bhupender, father of Delhi Assembly Deputy Speaker Rakhi Birla, were booked by Delhi Police under of sections 376D (gangrape) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC.

The court noted that the woman got in touch with a party official and on being promised that she will get the ticket, she did not "strictly oppose" their advances.

When she realised that she was being used by Goyal and others for enjoyment and blackmailed on the threat of making her sexual MMS viral, the woman lodged the case, it said.

Goyal sought anticipatory bail saying he was implicated due to political motives and the case was lodged to tarnish his image and that of the party. He claimed that on the day of alleged incident, he was at a religious place in Haryana.

The police and complainant's counsel Pradeep Rana opposed the plea, saying the woman was preparing to contest the next election in Delhi from the party to which Goyal belonged and was exploited.

The advocate said the plea of alibi by the accused cannot be considered at the state of anticipatory bail.

According to the woman, Goyal and Bhupender established physical relation with her on the promise of giving her party ticket for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections.

The complainant told police that she met Goyal at Sector 3, Rohini in north-west Delhi and exchanged numbers. They remained in touch for nearly 4-5 months and was promised a party ticket for the MCD elections.

She said Goyal called her near his office one day to talk about the ticket and took her to a vacant flat of his friend and established physical relations, police said.

As per the woman, she was "exploited" by the accused at various places, including hotels and her own house, and when she asked him about the ticket, he coaxed her to have sexual relations with Bhupender.

She alleged in her complaint that she was forced to sleep with Bhupender at her house and at a hotel in Connaught Place on November 5, police said, adding that the accused made an MMS of the crime and threatened to ruin her life.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Defence Ministry could in the next "few months" finalise higher defence reforms to bring in jointness among the three armed services which will include creation of the post of Chief of Defence Staff (CDS).

Defence Minister admitted that the services did not want to leave their "turf" but they have "slowly" come to understand that jointness would be much better than individual separate forces.

"I am very clear on it but there were certain aspects which need to be also taken along. I have to take all the three services on board. Let me be very clear, no one wants to leave his turf," he said during a book launch last night.

Underlining that he was not speaking in Indian military context alone, Parrikar said across the militaries, the same situation prevailed.

He added that the question was whether one will "force it down the throat" or get everyone on board.

"I think, I have been discussing with the chiefs and slowly they have also come to understanding that jointness would be much better than individually separate forces," he said, seeking a "few more months".

However, the Defence Minister made it clear that the final call would be taken by the Prime Minister.

Incidentally, the chiefs of both the Army and the Air Force will retire this year end.

Without naming any operation, he said though India has not gone for jointness, "recent operations" were quite successful joint operations.

"The Air Force and the Army integrated so well in recent operations, not saying which operation. There was total synergy and there was no problem in working together," he remarked.

The post of CDS was recommended in 2001 by a Group of Ministers (GoM) which was set up in April 2000 to review the national security system in the aftermath of the Kargil War.

The recommendation, if implemented, would be the first major military reform by the Narendra Modi government, which has already announced significant changes in the procurement process.

Sources said the appointment of CDS is aimed at promoting

"jointness at the top" when it comes to planning, operations and modernisation of the military.

Though India has a tri-service command, it is headed by a three-star officer who is junior to the military chiefs who are four-star.

The post of the CDS is likely to be a four-star and he would be in-charge of the tri-services command at Andaman and Nicobar islands, the strategic command in-charge of nuclear weapons along with the upcoming cyber and space command.

Parrikar said in the coming months the Andaman and Nicobar command will become a joint command in "real sense" as it was the "need of the hour", adding that currently there was only a "partial joint command".

Stating that some joint acquisition was being done, Parrikar pointed out that jointness can save the country lot of money.

"We are are replicating the same thing. Air Force does the same thing. Army does the same thing. If there is jointness, lot of things can be synchronised.

"Jointness of acquisition will be advantageous. In fact we are doing some joint acquisition. Give me few more months," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had late last year called for "jointness at the top" of the military establishment.

Parrikar had in March last year said that CDS was a must and hoped to propose a mechanism for the creation of the post within the next three months.

The defence minister said he does not care about what people say about him taking more time even though he had given a time period.

"I realised if I hurry, I will do something which will not taste well just because my ego says 'I said six months, I should force it in six months'," he said, adding he was "not there to satisfy his ego".

"I am there to ensure it happens properly. So I decided that someone may say anything about it, I will do it properly. Today I am confident that I have understood," he said.
Amid rumours of scarcity of salt, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav today said there is no dearth of the commodity and it was adequately available across the state.

He also appealed to the people not to pay attention to such rumours and avoid panic buying.

The Chief Minister also directed the Chief Secretary, Principal Secretary (Food) and all District Magistrates to take action against those indulge in hoarding, black marketing and creating artificial scarcity of the commodity, and warned strict action against them.

His directions came following rumours of black marketing of essential commodities like salt in the state after shopkeepers refused to provide change when offered with higher denomination notes.

In Moradabad, there were reports of panicked customers flocking to market as rumours flew thick and fast that salt has gone out of shelves and shopkeepers are selling at a premium.

Circle Officer Kotwali area Poonam Mishra said police has been sent to Katra Naj from where reports of black marketing had emanated.

She said complaints will be filed against some shopkeepers for allegedly triggering the rumours of salt shortage and charging premium for providing essential commodities.

In Makbara and Karbula markets also people thronged the area to purchase salt because of rumours of shortage and black marketing. Police force were sent to get the shops closed as people had lined up to buy the essential commodities.

ADM City Arun Kumar Srivastava said magistrates and police would be deputed to check any attempt to black market essential commodities.

In Allahabad, some claimed that shopkeepers in certain parts of the city were refusing to sell the salt.

Zainab Zafar, a resident of the city's Kareli area, "It was shocking that salt was not available in many of the local kiraana shops here, with some of the shopkeepers refusing to sell it saying the prices of salt will escalate tomorrow and will cost around Rs 300 per kg".

Zoha Rahman, a resident of Bamrauli on the city's outskirts, said kirana shops reopened in the night with people thronging them to buy salt following the that it will soon go out of stock and its prices will sky-rocket.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Department of Telecom (DoT) panel will decide on penalty recommendation ofRs 3,050 crore on three telecom companies for violating license agreement and denial of interconnection to newcomer RJio, Minister of State for Telecom,Manoj Sinha today said.

"The committee is considering the recommendations. Letthe report come and then we will decide," he toldreporters on the sidelines of the second meeting of BRICSCommunications Ministers here.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had recommended a hefty penalty of Rs 3,050 crore on Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, for violating license agreement and denying of interconnection to new playerReliance Jio.

Mukesh Ambani's RJio had allegedthat its subscribers were unable to make calls to other networks as other operator were not providing adequateinter-connection points.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Highlighting the increasing incidence of breast cancer in the country, Minister of State for Health Anupriya Patel today stressed the need for creating awareness for prevention and treatment of breast cancer.

Inaugurating the 4th Annual Conference of the Breast Imaging Society of India (BISI) at PGIMER, Chandigarh Patel said that increasing incidences are due to lack of awareness regarding breast screening examinations and cancer detection in the advanced stages.

"The Minister regretted that about 50 per cent women with breast cancer are dying in India as compared to 25 per cent breast cancer deaths worldwide.

"She stressed on the role of early diagnosis in prevention and treatment of breast cancer," an official statement quoting the Minister said.

In his inaugural address, N Khandelwal of the institute stressed upon the various challenges related to the early diagnosis of breast cancer and other breast diseases including the large volume of patients, inadequate imaging facilities and lack of availability of trained dedicated radiologists in the field of breast imaging.

About 300 faculty and delegates from India and abroad including a team of members from Society of Breast Imaging, USA are attending the conference.

Earlier Patel praised the "Asha Jyoti: Women's Health Care Mobile Outreach Program" started by the Department of Radiodiagnosis and Imaging, PGIMER, Chandigarh in 2012.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Kanyakumari to Chennai propaganda drive by farmers, urging the Centre to immediately set up the Cauvery Management Board (CMB), culminated here today after campaigning across Tamil Nadu.

Kicked off on November 5 at Kanyakumari by veteran Congress leader Kumari Ananthan, the 'Van Propaganda' of farmers travelled through the key towns of Tamil Nadu and reached here today.

"The campaign is to urge the Centre to immediately set up the CMB. We condemn the Centre for its stance in the Supreme Court against setting up of the board," Tamil Nadu All Farmers' Federations president PR Pandian told PTI here.

He demanded a financial aid of "Rs 25,000 per acre for the Cauvery delta farmers who are in distress", a payout of Rs 5,000 per month for farm labourers and Rs 10 lakh to the families of those farmers who passed away recently.

One of the farmers allegedly committed suicide in Tiruvarur district and another one died in the same district in the recent past.

Pandian demanded the Centre to inter-link all the rivers and nationalise them beforehand.

He said lakes and all other water resources should be desilted and repair works carried out to the tanks and dams in the state.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Zhu Mingguo, former head of the political advisory body in China's Guangdong province, was today sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for accepting bribes and holding "a huge amount" of assets amounting to over USD 20.7 million.

Zhu was found guilty of using his power, when he held public posts between 2002 and 2014, to seek profits for others bidding for projects and land, and aided personnel to secure promotions, according to a statement from the Liuzhou City Intermediate People's Court in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

During the period, Zhu's positions included director of Chongqing public security bureau, Standing Committee member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Guangdong Provincial Committee, and deputy secretary of CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee, state-run Xinhua agency reported.

Zhu accepted 141 million yuan (USD 20.7 million) in assets and bribes directly or through his wife, and had property worth over 91 million yuan from unknown sources, the statement said.

All his assets from unknown sources have been confiscated, the statement added.

Over a million Chinese officials have been punished in the three long crackdown against corruption launched by President Xi Jinping.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Even as Congress maintained silence on the possibility of an alliance for the Goa Assembly polls claiming that they are yet to get any written proposals, like-minded parties in the state have said that submission of proposal in politics is something new on the block.

"Submission of a written proposals in an era where coalition politics, at least against the BJP has come to stay, is something new to me," Vijai Sardesai, an independent legislator and mentor of Goa Forward Party told PTI today.

All India Congress Committee General Secretary Digvijay Singh who is currently camping in Goa to shortlist the candidates for upcoming elections had said that the party (Congress) has not received any formal proposal for alliance from any like minded parties.

"All the same, we in the Opposition are being closely watched by the people of Goa and they would never forgive us if we undermine prevailing public sentiment with popular surveys indicating 80 per cent Goans wanting BJP government out from Goa," Sardesai said today.

"If any of us intentionally work to sabotage the unity of Opposition forces then we would invite curse of Goans and their future generations," he commented.

Goa Forward and NCP have already showed their intention to align with the Congress to contest the upcoming Goa Legislative Assembly election.

"Till date we have not learnt lessons what happens after we stand divided. We are going to destroy ourselves if we contest against each other," NCP Goa President Jose Philip said reacting to the delay by Congress to decide on an alliance.

"What is the reason that Congress is acting adamant on the issue of alliance ? Whether they want us to destroy ourselves or want to give a chance to BJP to win. Nobody knows," he said.

Congress' strength in Goa was reduced to single digit in the State Legislative Assembly after the 2012 elections which saw BJP forming the government.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Youve probably heard the slogan: Beef. Its whats for dinner in Nebraska. From world-class packing plants in Omaha to ranches which span as far as the eye can see throughout the Sandhills, beef is our states largest industry. There are few things better than eating a (very!) rare steak at the Peppermill in Valentine or Plainsman Steakhouse in Juniata.

Increasingly, our beef isnt just being served for dinner in Nebraska, but also around the world. In 2006, Nebraska beef accounted for less than four percent of all beef exported from the United States. In the first six months of 2016, Nebraska beef has risen to over 18 percent of U.S. beef exports.

These successes didnt happen by accident. Theyve happened because Nebraskans have worked together to grow opportunities for our quality beef products over the past decade. Since 2005, the Nebraska Department of Agriculture (NDA) has worked in partnership with the Nebraska Beef Council on a focused effort to grow beef exports internationally. For decades, Nebraska Governors have been leading overseas trade missions to establish new relationships and expand existing ones as well as hosting overseas diplomats and investors here in our state.

In the first two years of my administration, we have built on this tradition. Last year, I led overseas trade missions to the European Union (EU) and Asia. This week, I will be leading a trade mission to China, Hong Kong, and Macau with 80 individuals, one of the largest trade delegations the state has ever had. Trade mission attendees include representatives from Nebraska businesses, the University of Nebraska, and farmers and ranchers. As Nebraskas fourth largest trading partner, China presents a lot of opportunities because of its growing middle class, which is demanding high quality food products. During the trade mission, we will be promoting Nebraskas commodities, meeting with potential investors, and working to establish new partnerships.

In addition to the trade missions I personally lead, my agencies also spearhead additional missions throughout the year. Just a couple of weeks ago, Nebraska Agriculture Director Greg Ibach returned from a trip to the European Union where he followed up on our trade mission from last year, and promoted Nebraska beef. He was joined by representatives from the Nebraska Beef Council, Greater Omaha Packing Company, and the University of Nebraska. During visits to England, Germany, France, and Spain, the delegation promoted Nebraska commodities as well as signed agreements with businesses and organizations to feature and promote beef from Nebraska.

Continued commitment to developing trade opportunities has resulted in a huge increase in market share for Nebraska beef in the European Union. In 2005, the U.S. exported $36.3 million worth of beef to the EU, and Nebraskas share of the market was only five percent valued at $1.8 million. In 2015, the U.S. exported $315.4 million worth of beef to the EU, and Nebraskas market share grew to 45.2 percent valued at $142.7 million.

Continued success will require continued commitment. As I travel to China, I look forward to sharing with you some of the success stories about the trade mission, and to highlight some of the individuals and companies that will be joining us to promote Nebraska.
The Andhra Pradesh government today constituted a Group of Ministers to look into issues regarding AP Reorganisation Act, 2014, and also the Telangana government's request for handing over of blocks in the Secretariat at Hyderabad currently under the state's possession.

The GoM was constituted in accordance with the decision taken by Andhra Pradesh Cabinet at its meeting late last month.

Deputy Chief Minister (Revenue), Deputy CM (Home), ministers for Finance, Health and Labour will be members of the GoM, an order issued by Chief Secretary Satya Prakash Tucker said.

The GoM would submit its recommendations to the Cabinet as and when issues are discussed and finalised.

The AP government had recently vacated the five blocks in the Secretariat at Hyderabad after the government departments were relocated to the state transitional headquarters at Velagapudi in Amaravati capital region.

The Telangana government, as part of its plan to demolish the Secretariat complex in Hyderabad, requested the AP government through the Governor that the blocks in its possession be handed over to the former.

Andhra Pradesh, however, is not ready to concede the request immediately as several other contentious issues, including the division of institutions listed in Schedules 9 and 10 of the Reorganisation Act, have to be resolved.

Accordingly, the Cabinet decided to constitute a Group of Ministers to look into all such pending issues and work out a solution.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Madras High Court has directed impleading the Union Secretary in the Department of Land Resources as a respondent on a plea seeking details of government land in Tamil Nadu and protection of these land by GPS mapping.

A PIL was filed by V B R Menon, an advocate, seeking for a direction to the authorities to constitute a permanent Special Task Force with adequate powers and responsibilities to conduct periodical inspections, field surveys and removal of encroachments from all categories of vacant government land in Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur districts.

He also sought appropriate actions to ensure proper utilisation of each properties including disposals of excess lands with a prescribed time.

Additional Advocate General submitted that the tender process for implementation of GPS for only three districts was complete and for whole state it would be worked out in a phased manner.

He also expressed apprehension regarding the funding by the Centre for floating of tender.

The bench which recorded the above in its order said "to avoid any such complication, we consider it appropriate to implead the concerned department of the Central Government as party in this petition".

The court posted the case for further hearing to December 12.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An armed anarchist group in Greece is calling for "attacks and clashes" during next week's visit by US President Barack Obama.

The Conspiracy Cells of Fire group is urging anarchists to "spoil the party ... And sabotage" the Nov 15-16 visit to Athens.

The nihilist group has organised a string of bomb attacks on judges, police and other authority figures. The attacks have caused minor injuries, but no fatalities.

In a posting on a left-wing website today, the group called on anarchists to use Obama's visit to "return a little of the violence we receive daily."



Anarchist groups are planning a protest march to the US embassy in Athens on Nov 15. Similar protests during a 1999 visit by then-president Bill Clinton led to extensive violence.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A sessions court today sent Abdul Rauf Merchant, a convict in the music baron Gulshan Kumar murder case who absconded after jumping parole in 2009, to Arthur Road jail here following his re-arrest from Indo-Bangladesh border.

Merchant, an aide of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim, was released from a prison in Bangladesh on Monday.

Border Security Force arrested him from the border in Meghalaya and informed Mumbai Police which brought him here.

He was first produced before the high court, and on the high court's direction, Merchant was produced before a sessions court here, said a Mumbai crime branch official.

The sessions court ordered that he be sent to Arthur Road jail in the city.

Merchant was arrested in the music baron Gulshan Kumar murder case and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1997.

While in Aurangabad jail, he absconded after being released on parole in 2009.

A resident of Mumbra township of Thane, Merchant fled to Bangladesh. He, however, was arrested there for illegal entry and carrying fake travel documents.

"BSF officials had contacted us regarding Merchant. We sent our team and arrested him. On court's order, we have sent him to Arthur Road jail today. Now the jail authorities will decide which jail he should be kept in for completion of his sentence," Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Sanjay Saxena said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
AirAsia India, a joint venture between Tata Sons and AirAsia Berhad, was on Friday asked by Delhi High Court to place before the DGCA its brand licensing agreement (BLA) with the Malaysian entity to determine who controls the Indian low-cost carrier.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) was also directed by a bench, comprising Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Pradeep Nandrajog, to examine the BLA and file a report on the aspect of ownership and control of .

The direction came on a plea filed by the Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA) alleging that according to the BLA, ownership and control in the airline was with the foreign entity.

The court also issued notice to the Centre, DGCA and AirAsia seeking their replies on BJP leader Subramanian Swamy's plea for impleachment of R Venkataramanan, Managing Trustee of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and a member of the Board of Air Asia India Pvt Ltd.

Swamy has sought impleadment of Venkataramanan regarding a letter of Cyrus Mistry, ex-Chairman of Tata Sons, that there was an alleged fraudulent transaction of Rs 22 crore in connection with the setting up of .

The BJP leader had also sought summoning of the report of a forensic investigation by an auditing firm into the alleged fraudulent transaction which was reportedly revealed in Mistry's letter of October 25.

The court directed DGCA to file its report by next date of hearing on December 16 by when the replies to Swamy's pleas also have to be filed.

AirAsia India, represented by senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, opposed Swamy's plea saying the allegations in his application have no connection with the main matter pertaining to grant of flying license to the airline.

Singhvi also said the FIA's plea that BLA should be examined to determine who owns the airline was a "fishing expedition".

He said BLA was not required to be filed as per the rules seeking Air Operator Permit (AOP) from DGCA and the no- objection certificate (NOC) from Ministry of Civil Aviation.

Meanwhile, the Ministry and DGCA, in their respective affidavits, have stated that BLA was not required to be filed while seeking AOP and NOC, and this document was not filed.

However, they have said that based on all the documents placed before them, they "found no reason to believe that substantial ownership and effective control was not vested in Indian national".

DGCA has also said there is no need to submit commercial agreements when applying for grant of AOP.
Coming down heavily on authorities, the Madras High Court has directed the Health Secretary to consider the case of a 75-year-old man who lost his eyesight allegedly due to negligence of doctors and staff of the Egmore Government Ophthalmic Hospital, and award suitable compensation.

The court in its order last week found fault with authorities with the way they have treated the elderly man's representation seeking suitable compensation.

"Every time the petitioner's representation was forwarded to one authority or another, the petitioner has been following it by personally visiting them and requesting them to take a decision on his request," the court said.

"The inaction on the part of the authorities in giving a reply to the representation from the year 2009 onwards amounts to clear dereliction of the duty on the part of all the authorities," it said.

It directed the Health Secretary to appoint a suitable officer to probe the cause of delay by respective authorities in giving a reply to the petitioner's representation which was given to the Chief Minister's Cell on June 2, 2009.

"The inquiry should be completed within a period of 12 weeks from the date of receipt of this order and a copy of the report should also be marked to the petitioner."



The court said the petitioner has been unnecessarily forced to file a petition by engaging a private counsel and incurring legal fees and expenses for obtaining a direction to respondents to perform the ordinary duties of their office.

"If the representation is not disposed of within a reasonable time, by a government authority, the Authority who has contributed to the delay is answerable to the same. Taking into consideration, the various responsibilities of a government servant, the reasonable time to consider any representation application can be specifically determined as '3 months'," the court said.

The court said the petitioner has not been furnished till date information about the name of doctors who performed the surgery. "Even this information has not been furnished by the Superintendent of the Eye Hospital to the petitioner till date. This fact should also be taken into account by the Health Secretary..."



".... If the Health Secretary is of the view that there is a prima facie negligence on the part of any doctor/hospital staff, necessary action should be initiated against them," the court said.

The petitioner had lost his eye sight in an operation that was performed on December 27, 2007.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
US president-elect Donald Trump and French President Francois Hollande vowed in a telephone call today to try "clarify positions" on potentially thorny issues including climate change, French presidential sources said.

In a first call lasting 7-8 minutes the two leaders discussed the fight against terrorism, the battle against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the Paris climate accord, a French presidential source told AFP.

The two men expressed a "desire to work together," the source added.

Climate change denier Trump has caused alarm in France by pledging to withdraw from the landmark deal to tackle global warming struck in Paris in December 2015.

The French also took a dim view of Trump's claim that the terror attacks that left 130 people dead in Paris a year ago this week might have been avoided if the country had looser gun laws.

But in their talks Hollande and Trump sought common ground, emphasising the friendship between their countries and the "history and values" they share, the source said.

Hollande, who is battling record low approval ratings ahead of presidential elections in France next year, had vowed a "frank" discussion with the Republican.

"Donald Trump has been elected. My duty is to ensure that we have the best relations but on the basis of frankness and clarity," Hollande told France 2 television earlier.

On Wednesday, he had warned that Trump's stunning election win "opens a period of uncertainty".

Hollande had made no secret of his desire to see Hillary Clinton win the White House, declaring a few months ago that Trump's excesses "make you want to retch".

His call with Trump came a day after talks between the forthcoming US president and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Merkel congratulated Trump and said she looked forward to meeting him, at the latest, when Germany hosts a G20 summit in July in the northern port city of Hamburg.

Merkel had offered Trump "close cooperation" and "stressed that Germany and the United States of America are closely tied through common values," her spokesman Georg Streiter said.

On Wednesday, Merkel had issued a first statement on Trump's election, in which she pointedly said cooperation must be based on shared democratic values and respect for human dignity and reminded him of the global responsibility he carries.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Farmers in Baramati taluk are facing a short supply of honeybee hives that are being extensively used here for pollinating crops like pomegranate and onion seeds.

India has the world's largest honeybee population.

Honeybees have been normally used for harvesting honey and not much for pollinating crops for better production, but this has gained a lot of popularity here, of late.

A pilot project -- Madhu Sandesh -- initiated by association of pesticide firms CropLife India, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Agriculture Development Trust's Krishi Vighan Kendra (KVK), Baramati, in November 2015 has changed the lives of farmers here, who have ever since started earning handsomely.

The success stories of pomegranate growers and onion seed producers associated with this project have encouraged many farmers in Baramati to pollinate their crops using honeybees and harvest better yield.

In fact, they are now willing to pay more for honeybee hives.

Pomegranate grower from Daund village, D D Baravkar, who has received training under the project, said: "Pomegranate yields have almost doubled after the crops were pollinated by bees. Even the quality of fruit has improved to an extent that there is more demand from exporters."



Four honeybee hives, which were kept on pomegranate orchard spread across three acres, have not only improved the productivity of pomegranates but also onion seed production undertaken on half an acre, he said.

"I had taken honeybee hives on rent. The rent was Rs 1,500 for each bee hive. I have decided to keep more hives but there is not much supply. I am even willing to pay more for them," he said.

Baravkar said that he harvested 7.5 tonnes pomegranate on three acres this year as against 4 tonnes last year. Even the cost on pesticide spray has come down.

Another pomegranate farmer Mahesh Bhagat from Korhale Bk village said the fruit output has gone up to 12 tonnes from 7-8 tonnes from 2.5 acres.

Seeing more demand for honeybee hives, Bhagat has taken requisite training to become a beekeeper from Baramati KVK.

The pilot project started with 250 beehives supplied by CropLife India to Baramati KVK to support 150 pomegranate growers and 34 onion seed producers, Baramati KVK Head Scientist Syed Ali told PTI.

Stating that success stories have encouraged more farmers to approach them with a demand for honeybee hives. "Making available more beehives is not a problem, but the issue is about providing hands on training to farmers and helping them to follow good management practices to ensure beehives are kept in good hygienic conditions. For this, more extension staff is required," Ali said.

At present, only four young professionals are travelling across 46 villages to help farmers on beekeeping.

Ali said that training is being imparted to farmers on



when and how to use pesticides without affecting honeybees.

"They were told to be cautious and avoid spraying when bees are foraging. This training helped them to yield good results," Ali said.

ICAR's project co-ordinator for honeybees R K Thakur said that there is more focus on promoting honeybees for pollination purpose with the government targeting to double farmers income by 2022.

Honeybees are the most efficient pollinators of various crops and India is endowed with greatest biodiversity as far as honeybees species are concerned. Normally,'Apis melligera species' of honeybees are reared in hives for pollination purpose, he said.

Thakur said pollination by honeybees help enhance quantity and quality of several other crops like oilseeds such as mustard and safflower, pigeon pea, apple, mango, citrus and some vegetables as well.

The ICAR official mentioned that "there has been 34.9 per cent increase in pomegranate yields and 70 per cent in onion seed production in Maharasthra, 28 per cent in apple yields in Himachal Pradesh."



However, integrated pest management is important for beekeeping, which is expected to become big enterprise in the coming years, he added.

It may be noted that after the successful results, the CropLife India has got further extension to continue the pilot project to promote pollination through honeybee hives in more crops and involving more farmers in the taluk.
Himachal Pradesh Transport Minister G S Bali today announced that the state government would release within a week Rs 15 crore to clear arrears of pensioners and pending payments of employees of the Himachal Road Transport Corporation (HRTC).

"An amount of Rs 15 crore would be released within a week to clear the arrears of pensioners and pending payments of employees of the HRTC," he said.

The state government will release Rs 8.17 crore from the total amount to clear the arrear of pension of 4,795 retired HRTC employees, Bali said.

"The state had released Rs 17 crore in June to pay eight month due over time allowance. The pending amount of Rs 2.30 crore would be covered by the funds to be released," he said.

The Transport Minister said that out of this amount, Rs 1.80 crore would be released to the retirees on account of pending leave encashment for the month of August and September and it would benefit 59 pensioners.

"Rs. 2.44 crore would be released on account of pending dues on account of gratuity for July and August last year and it will cover 53 cases," he said.

The Minister assured that all the payments would be released by the HRTC on or before November 20.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
HSBC today said it has set a target to hire only women students next year as interns for its Global Service Centres (GSCs), in line with its commitment to promote diversity across the bank.

"Our GSC internship programme is just the latest stage in our efforts to achieve a greater balance, in terms of gender, across all of our sites.

"This is also part of our commitment to create a workforce that reflects the diversity of the customers that we serve, and to provide the flexibility that our people need to perform at their best," HSBC Head of Recruitment Pradeep Reddy said in a release here.

The bank began an internship programme this year focused solely on GSCs, which are located in Kolkata, Visakhapatnam, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai.

A total of 130 interns, including 89 women, took up positions in a range of different departments across the GSCs.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the bank's partnership with Andhra University, which allows students to attend courses at the school of distance education at the university, while serving apprenticeships at GSC in Visakhapatnam.

Students who qualify from the course are offered Contact Centre roles in GSC Vizag.

HSBC in India offers a full range of banking and financial services through 42 branches and 140 ATMs across 21 cities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Dr Skinner received his Doctor of Philosophy in Art History from Victoria in 2006. He has spent his career working in museums in New Zealand and overseas, and is currently the Curator of Applied Art and Design at Auckland Museum. Dr Skinner describes himself as a historian of artistic modernism, with an interest in Pakeha and Maori art in the twentieth century.
Presenting India as a land of "incredible" opportunities, Prime Minister on Friday invited Japanese companies to invest, saying substantial finances are needed for development of the country and reforms were underway to make it the world's "most open" economy.

Addressing top Japanese business leaders here, he said India wants "greater influx of Japanese investments" and "for this, we will be proactive in addressing your concerns".

He said his government was committed to "further refine our policies and procedures" to boost 'Make in India' and was putting in place a "stable, predictable and transparent" regulatory mechanisms.

He mentioned progress on GST and talked about other "decisive steps" to usher in reforms in policies and laws to make India an attractive destination for foreign investment.

"Today, India is on the path of several major transformations. We have taken decisive steps and built a governance system that will help India realise its potential. The results are already visible," the Prime Minister told the luncheon session organised by Japanese business chambers - Keidanren, Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Japan-India Business Forum.

Noting that India's development needs are "huge and substantial", he said there are unprecedented opportunities for Japanese companies in the country.

Explaining why the Japanese companies should invest in India, he said: "Even against a weak international economic scenario, the from India is of strong growth and abundant opportunities. It is of incredible opportunities, and about India's credible policies."

Modi, who is on his second visit here since becoming the Prime Minister in May 2014, said that in 2015, the Indian economy "grew faster than other major economies" and "the World Bank and IMF assess this trend to continue".

He said lower labour costs, large domestic market and macro-economic stability combine to make India a very attractive investment destination.

Emphasising that his government is "pursuing a new direction of economic reforms", the Prime Minister said his "resolve is to make India the most open economy in the world".

Modi, who is on a three-day visit of Japan aimed at

pushing the bilateral relations, said, "to those who are exploring (opportunities), I promise you that we are committed to further refine our policies and procedures to boost Make in India".

The Prime Minister said India's prowess in software is complemented by Japan's strength in hardware. "Want to assure you that we will provide a level-playing field," he told the Japanese companies.

"India's development needs are huge and substantial. We seek rapid achievement of our developmental priorities, but in a manner that is environment friendly. We want to build roads and railways in a faster way; we want to explore minerals and hydrocarbons in a greener way; we want to build homes and civic amenities in a smarter way; and we want to produce energy in a cleaner way," he said.

In addition, Modi said, there are futuristic infrastructure projects of second generation which include the Dedicated Freight Corridor, the Industrial Corridors, High Speed Railways, Smart Cities, Coastal Zones and Metro Rail projects.

"All of these offer unprecedented opportunities for Japanese industry. 'Made in India' and 'Made by Japan' combination has already started to work and converge wonderfully," he said.

He congratulated the Japanese companies which are already in India and pointed out that cars made in India by a Japanese carmaker are already selling in Japan.

"The very word 'Japan' in India is a benchmark of quality, excellence, honesty and integrity," Modi said and noted that Japanese people have led the world in sustainable development with a deep sense of social responsibility and ethical behaviour.

He said India and Japan are best suited to work together.

"India's core values are rooted in our civilizational heritage. It gets inspiration through the teachings of 'Truth' from Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. It gets its wings from our democratic traditions, emphasis on both wealth and value creation, a robust sense of enterprise and quest to modernise and prosper its economy.

"Our past has desired us to stand together. Our present is encouraging us to work together," Modi said.

"I have been saying that this 21st Century is Asia's Century. Asia has emerged as the new centre of global growth. It is competitive in manufacturing and services, is becoming a hub for global innovation, is home to large talented workforce, and as home to 60 per cent of global population, it is an ever expanding market," he said.

(Reopens FGN18)

"I have long maintained that India needs scale, speed and skill. Japan has a very important role to play in all three," the Prime Minister said.

"Creating an enabling environment for business and attracting investments remains my top priority. Stable, predictable and transparent regulations are redefining the nature of doing business in India," he said, adding: "We will further strengthen the special mechanisms including Japanese Industrial Townships."

Modi said in the last two financial years, India received about $55 billion as foreign direct investment, which is "not only the highest ever FDI but also highest growth in FDI in India".

"Today, every global company has an India strategy. And, Japanese companies are no exception. It is no surprise that today Japan is India's fourth largest source of FDI," he said.

Japanese investments, he said, extend to both green-field and brown-field projects, manufacturing and services, infrastructure and insurance, and e-commerce and equity.

Japan's involvement in India's mega projects like Dedicated Freight Corridors, Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor, Metro Rail and High Speed Rail "signifies scale and speed", he said.

He asked the Japanese companies to make use of the 10-year business visa, the e-Tourist Visa, and the Visa-On-Arrival facility that is being offered by India to Japanese travellers.

The Social Security Agreement with Japan has also been implemented, he noted, adding it was good E-governance is no longer just a fancy buzzword, but a basic facility.

Talking about the changes in rules and laws in India, Modi said, "we have successfully enacted a new legislation regarding Goods and Services Tax (GST)."

The Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code passed recently will make it easier for investors to have an exit, he said, adding India is also setting up commercial courts and commercial divisions to ensure speedy disposal of commercial matters.

The arbitration proceedings will now become faster as the Arbitration law has been amended, Modi said.

"In June this year, we have further relaxed our FDI regime. We have also announced a new Intellectual Property Rights policy," he said while mentioning the specific reforms undertaken.

"All of these point to the new direction of economic reforms that India is pursuing. My resolve is to make India the most open economy in the world. The impact of our efforts is being felt and recognised globally," he said.

(Reopens FGN19)

Modi said FDI equity inflows have gone up by 52% in the last two years and India has gone up 19 spots on the World Logistics Performance Index 2016 brought out by the World Bank.

"We have done substantial improvement on Ease of doing business. Our ranking has improved considerably," he said, adding in the last two years, India has gone up by 32 places on the Global Competitiveness Index of World Economic Forum.

Citing the World Investment Report of 2015, he said India is first among the top 10 FDI destinations of the world.

Underlining that India and Japan will have to continue to play a major role in Asia's emergence, the Prime Minister said the growing convergence of views between the two countries under the 'Special Strategic and Global Partnership' has the capacity to drive the regional economy and development and stimulate the global growth.

"Strong India, Strong Japan will not only enrich our two nations, it will also be a stabilising factor in Asia and the world," he said.

Modi said India and Japan has a number of skill development initiatives already underway and "our partnership now extends to this crucial area of our priority".

He said "the captains of Japanese business and industry sitting here will agree with me that a combination of Japan's technologies and India's human resources will create a win-win situation."

He said he had mentioned it earlier also that the combination of Japanese hardware and India's software is a "fantastic combination" which will benefit both the countries.

"Let us join hands even more closely and strongly. Let us march forward and explore bigger potentials and brighter prospects," he concluded in his address to the gathering that also included some Indian business leaders.

After the CII-Keidanren Business Luncheon, Modi tweeted: "Had very good discussions with business leaders on ways to boost India-Japan economic ties.
Terming the resignation of Amarinder Singh as an MP over SYL issue a "drama to mislead the people", Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today said if the Punjab Congress president were "sincere and honest" he would have announced not to contest Assembly polls.

Protesting against the Supreme Court's verdict on the SYL canal issue, Amarinder had tendered his resignation as a Lok Sabha member yesterday. Today all Congress MLAs in Punjab resigned over the issue.

The Chief Minister accused the Punjab Congress leadership of "playing to the gallery" over the issue and said Amarinder and his colleagues were "trying to become martyrs" by tendering resignations just before Assembly polls.

"Amarinder being dubious by nature had enacted this drama just to mislead the people to better his electoral prospects. Had Amarinder been sincere and honest he'd have announced not to contest the forthcoming assembly polls," Badal said.

He dared the Punjab Congress chief to ask his fellow Congress MPs from state to step down on this issue if he was "really aghast" with Supreme Court verdict on the issue.

"Rather he was pitching for President's Rule in the state for paving a way for completion of SYL canal in the absence of any democratically-elected people's government," Badal said.

He was interacting with media on the sidelines of a summit on 'Sustainable Development Goals and Universal Health Coverage- States perspective' organised by the Health and Family Welfare Department Punjab in collaboration with PGIMER and WHO, India, here.

He said the SAD-BJP alliance would oppose the "anti- Punjab" decision as "we have absolute and legitimate right over the river waters as per universally accepted Riparian Principle".

He said common man would not allow Congress to succeed in its "nefarious designs" to betray the people and state.

"Congress is known for hatching conspiracies against the interests of Punjab and its people on the inter-state issues including sharing of rivers waters from day one," Badal said.

He said the Congress party was solely responsible for aggravating the "impending crisis".

Badal reiterated that not even a single drop of water would be spared for any state neither anyone would be allowed to lay even a single brick for the construction of this canal.

Recalling the Congress's "conspiracy" to divest the state



of its legitimate share in river waters, Badal held the then prime minister Indira Gandhi responsible for Punjab's "crisis" as "she forced" the then Congress Chief Minister of Punjab Darbara Singh into signing an agreement to "give away" Punjab's waters to Haryana.

"She also forced him to withdraw the Supreme Court Case filed by him to protect Punjab river water interests," the Chief Minister alleged.

Badal also held Amarinder responsible for inviting Indira Gandhi to start the digging of the canal at Kapuri in his own constituency Patiala by offering her a silver spade to start the digging.

He said the then Congress rejoiced the occasion, while the SAD had launched a long peaceful democratic morcha for Punjab's interests as a result of which no river waters went out of Punjab since.

"Water is the lifeline of every citizen of Punjab, especially farmers, industry and trade so as a custodian of state's interest I am duty-bound to ensure that nobody snatches it," he added.

Earlier addressing the summit, the Chief Minister reiterated the firm commitment of SAD-BJP alliance government to impart accessible, affordable and quality health services to the people.

Laying stress on living a quality life, Badal advised the people to have simple food and exercise daily.

He also advised people to regularly get their health check up done so as to ensure diagnosis of any disease at early stage.

"This would help in leading a healthy and long life by every one of you," he added.

(REOPENS DES15)



Meanwhile, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president and Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal today said the poor response to AAP's call for a dharna showed that the farmers of Punjab had given a "befitting" answer to AAP for "betraying" them on the issue of river waters.

He also took a dig at Congress and said the party which was responsible for "creating" this problem would meet the same fate soon.

In a statement, the SAD president said the game was over for AAP with a party appeal to hold a massive dharna at Kapoori village in Patiala district "evincing a crowd of a few hundred persons".

He said this was the second "successive jolt" to the party with farmers earlier refusing to respond to an appeal by its State Convenor Gurpreet Singh Waraich alias Ghuggi to hold protests in mandis.

"Now the motley crowd of AAP outsiders can pack their bags and go back to their home towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar," he said.

"Punjabi farmers have seen through your game. They will never trust you again," the SAD president told AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal while referring to the manner in which he had betrayed the farmers on the issue of SYL.

"You (Kejriwal) told farmers during a meeting in Punjab that they did not have any water to spare. However, on returning to Delhi you supported Haryana's stand and demanded the SYL canal be constructed," said Sukhbir.

On the resignation by Congress representatives, Badal said it was clear that Punjab Congress president Amarinder Singh had resigned from the Lok Sabha because he wanted to contest the next Assembly election from Patiala constituency.

He said the same was the case with the Congress MLAs who were ready to face a re-election.

"Our case is different. We have to safeguard the interests of the state. We cannot run away from our responsibilities like the Congress. We have called a special session of the Vidhan Sabha to course out our next action. I assure Punjabis we will come out with a solution to safeguard their waters," he said.
Income Tax and Central Excise Intelligence sleuths are conducting separate raids at jewelleries across Tamil Nadu following information that there were heavy gold purchases after the demonetisation of high-value currencies.

"We have begun our raids of gold jewellery retail and wholesale outlets today. We are seeing if unaccounted demonetised currencies were used for gold purchases and hawala operations through the gold market," a top Income Tax official told PTI.

The raids were being conducted following a tip-off that heavy gold purchases were witnessed after the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, the official said.

Replying to a query, he said, "There are some evidences...The searches are on and these are at a preliminary stage," adding that so far, the IT sleuths have searched eight outlets.

Central Excise Intelligence sources said surprise raids were being conducted at all the major jewellery shops in the state since yesterday.

As many as 35 officers of the ranks of senior intelligence officer, assistant and deputy director are conducting the raids.

The stock and sale details of gold jewelleries, from November 7 onwards, are being verified.

In case of discrepancies in the stock and sale details, appropriate legal action will be considered against the jewellers, the sources said.

Also, it is being verified if gold, imported through illegal channels, was being used for manufacture and sale of jewellery vis-a-vis unaccounted demonetised currency.

A press release from the Directorate General of Central Excise Intelligence, meanwhile, said, "The survey is basically aimed at verifying whether unaccounted currencies in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were used to invest in the gold market, subsequent to the declaration of demonetisation of these currencies."



So far, about 30 jewellery shops at Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore and Tiruchirappalli have been raided by the DGCEI teams.

"The exercise was taken up by the DGCEI as reports were received from reliable sources that some of the jewellers were accepting the demonetised notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations on commission basis," the release said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Voicing great concern over the growing menace of terrorism, India and Japan today called upon all countries to work towards eliminating terror safe havens, disrupting their networks and stopping cross-border movement of terrorists, in an apparent reference to Pakistan.

"The two Prime Ministers condemned terrorism in strongest terms in all its forms and manifestations in the spirit of 'zero tolerance'," said a joint statement issued after the annual summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe here.

The two leaders noted with great concern the growing menace of terrorism and violent extremism and its universal reach.

"They called upon all countries to implement the UNSC Resolution 1267 and other relevant resolutions designating terrorist entities," it said, referring to India's bid to get Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar designated as global a terrorist under this resolution.

China - a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council - had blocked India's move to put a ban on Azhar under the Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the Council.

The two leaders "called upon all countries to work towards eliminating terrorist safe havens and infrastructure, in disrupting terrorist networks and financing channels, and stopping cross-border movement of terrorists," it said, adding they underlined the need for all countries to effectively deal with trans-national terrorism emanating from their territory.

India accuses Pakistan of training, financing and arming militant groups such as LeT and JeM.

"They emphasised that the evolving character of terrorism called for stronger international partnership in countering terrorism and violent extremism, including through increased sharing of information and intelligence," the statement said.

The two Prime Ministers noted the ongoing bilateral dialogue on counter-terrorism and called for enhanced cooperation including through greater exchange of information and intelligence between the two sides.

They asked Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terror attacks including those of 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai and 2016 terrorist attack in Pathankot to justice.

The two leaders also expressed their condolences to the bereaved families of the victims of both countries in the recent terrorist attacks including in Dhaka and Uri.

They also expressed their resolve towards strengthening international cooperation to address the challenges of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, it added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh today exuded confidence that India will emerge as economic super power in 15 to 20 years following the steps being undertaken by the Centre to strengthen the economy.

"I cannot speak about a couple of years but on the basis of my limited understanding I can confidently say that no one can stop India from becoming an economic super power in 15 to 20 years if the economy continues to move in the direction it is being taken by the central government", Singh said addressing the meeting of Indian Commerce Association here.

"We can proudly claim that India's economy is progressing the fastest in the world and its GDP growth rate has reached 7.9 per cent ..I have full confidence that it will be in double figures in a couple of years", he said.

Investors from world over are coming to India despite slowdown and the highest investment has taken place in India in 2015-2016, he said.

The country has emerged as a favourite investment destination, he added.

Citing various achievements of the Narendra Modi government on the economic front, Singh said GST will come into force from April 2017 which will start a new taxation system.

The problems arising out of different taxation system in different states will come to an end and tax realisation will go up resulting in increase in government income and GDP growth will also go up by 1.5 to 2 per cent, he said.

Stressing that not a single minister in the Narendra Modi government is facing corruption charge, Rajnath Singh said that though he cannot claim that the entire administrative structure has been cleaned up but one thing is clear that there is no corruption at the top.

"When the Gangotri has been cleaned, the Ganga coming out from there will automatically be clean ...Efforts were on to ensure maximum transparency", he said.

Speaking about foreign trade, Singh said that it is facing slowdown which is being experienced by all the countries and India is no exception.

The Home Minister said that soon after coming to power it was decided that export has to be increased and India's share in world trade should be taken up to some 2.5 per cent from its present 1.6 per cent.

Claiming that ease of doing business will be achieved in a few years because of the steps to change the process and system of doing business, Rajnath Singh said there is an effort to bring transparency in economy.

Referring to the various schemes such as 'Make in India', 'Start ups and skill development' launched by the Modi government for the youth, he said that while coming to power, the Prime Minister had said that such schemes will help double the income of farmers by 2022.

Terming the contribution of construction sector as insufficient, Singh said that it has to be taken to 25 per cent from the present 14 per cent.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pakistan on Friday briefed Head of Missions of P5 countries on the alleged Indian aggression on the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, saying the use of "heavy weaponry" by the Indian Army threatens peace and stability and may lead to a "strategic miscalculation".

Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry provided details to the ambassadors of China, France, Russian, UK and USA, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, about unprovoked firing and ceasefire violations by the "Indian occupation Forces" in the past two months, the Foreign Office (FO) said.

Chaudhry expressed grave concern over the increased frequency and duration of indiscriminate firing from the Indian side, deliberate targeting of villages and civilian populated areas, resulting in the death of 26 civilians and injuring 107 others, said FO.

The Foreign Secretary also alleged that the Indian side was resorting to such heavy weaponry use after a gap of 13 years.

"Pakistan has been compelled to respond but with maximum restraint. The Armed Forces of Pakistan gave a befitting response," FO quoted Chaudhry as saying.

He expressed apprehension that Indian actions, which constituted a threat for the maintenance of peace and security, may lead to a "strategic miscalculation".

He said India was also not cooperating with the United Nations Military Observers Group (UNMOGIP).

The Heads of Missions assured that they would convey Pakistan's concern to their respective capitals, the FO statement said.
Indian Army chief Gen. Dalbir Singh Suhag arrived here today for a three-day official visit to Nepal and held bilateral talks with his counterpart Gen. Rajendra Chhetri on a range of security issues.

Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Gen. Singh met Gen. Chhetri at Nepal Army headquarters and the two chiefs discussed a wide range of military and security issues and various issues of bilateral interests, the Nepal Army said in a statement.

Later in the evening, Gen. Singh will pay a courtesy call on President Bidya Devi Bhandari and will also attend a cultural programme being organised by Nepal Army Spouse's Association.

Tomorrow, he will pay a courtesy call on Prime Minister Pushpakamal Dahal " Prachanda".

He will also visit Rupandehi district in western Nepal, where he will observe "Surya Kiran", the joint military exercise being held between Nepal Army and Indian Army, the statement said.

"Such kinds of high-level visits paid by Indian Army officials to Nepal from time to time, will further deepen bilateral relations between the two armies and expand areas of cooperation between them," it said.

The visit assumes significance as it came just days after the visit of President Pranab Mukherjee to Nepal last week.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
INS Vikramaditya, the largest warship operated by India and the third aircraft carrier inducted into the Indian Navy, is in the process of getting ready to go back to sea as she completed her "refit works" at Cochin Shipyard Limited here.

The ship, 285 metres long and 60 metres wide with 23 decks, was drydocked at the CSL on September 23.

The vessel was undocked on November 5 after carrying out "a large amount of works", a Navy official said here today.

"The ship is now in the process of getting ready to go back to sea. She is preparing all her machinery, all her equipment, all her systems and very shortly we will be sailing off from Kochi and going back to sea," Commanding Officer of the Ship, Captain Krishna Swaminathan, said.

Commenting on the "large amount of works" that have been undertaken at the CSL during the period, Captain Swaminathan said, "we are very happy to report that all the work we have undertaken at the Cochin Shipyard Limited has been undertaken more professionally and we are entirely happy with the quality of the work we have seen."



The ship represents 19.82 acres of "sovereign Indian territory" and projects, promotes and protects the country's maritime interests at sea "any time and anywhere".

Meanwhile, the ship, commissioned on November 16, 2013 by the then Defence Minister A K Antony, at Sevmash Shipyard, Severodvinsk (Russia), celebrated her third anniversary today.

As part of the anniversary, a 33km run was organised by the navy which involved 33 naval personnel. Called the 33 X 33 Anniversary Run of R33 (the ship's pennant number), the event was flagged off by Captain Swaminathan from Ernakulam Wharf.

The route covered Thoppumpady, Wellington Island, Mattanchery, Fort Kochi and several scenic places en route, culminating at the wharf.

"Besides being a part of ship's third anniversary celebrations, the run was also aimed at promoting team work, physical fitness and general well-being," the Navy said.

Officials said the zeal and gusto of the runners rightly brought out the never-die-spirit and attitude of INS Vikramaditya.

Rear Admiral R J Nadkarni, Chief of Staff, Southern Naval Command presided over the event as the Chief Guest. He felicitated the participants and addressed the crew of the ship on the occasion.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
China is on the "radar" of the Indian government after a few instances of import of spurious and sub-standard drugs from the country were reported, said officials of a regulatory body for pharmaceuticals.

"Drugs estimated to be worth Rs 18,000 crore are imported in India annually and China is the main source of importing drugs in bulk. About 60 per cent of the drugs come from China, while the rest come from Italy, Japan, Europe and the USA.

"It has come to notice that most of the cases of sub-standard drugs, drugs with dubious origin or suspected label are coming from China. To check such infiltration, we have put China on the radar," said an official of the Drug Controller General of India (DGCI) on condition of anonymity.

Clandestine operators push spurious drugs labelled under the name of authorised importers which compromise patients' safety, the official said, adding that during checks, it is often found that the drugs are not sourced from the Chinese manufacturers, whose names are referred to in the documents.

Notably, India imports medicines like antibiotics, anti-diabetic, anti-hypertensive, anti-cancer and other regular drugs from several countries and to keep a tab on such imports, the government has put in place an electronic platform -- ICEGATE -- to check their quality and authenticity.

Under this programme, the government has framed uniform procedures for sampling and inspection of the drug consignments that come from overseas.

"Through ICEGATE, consignments, bills of entry are electronically placed to the customs which are then scrutinised online by the DGCI port for quality and genuinity. The things which are checked for in imported drugs include documentation, quality, originality of labels etc," said the official.

Drug imports are only allowed from companies whose manufacturing units are registered with the Indian drug regulator.

However, at the domestic front, clandestine operators are much less because regular inspections and sampling of drugs are possible within the country.

DGCI in collaboration with state drug controllers have also launched risk-based inspections all across the country to check the quality of medicine and the manufacturing premises for GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice).

"200 units have been identified on the basis of risks and 105 of them have been inspected. None of them were found to be 100 per cent compliant," the official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Interest in pushing for California's secession from the United States has gained traction after Donald Trump won the presidency, media reports said today.

The "Yes California" campaign is backing an independence referendum in support of a constitutional exit of the state from the US.

In the wake of 60 per cent of the state's voters supporting the presidential loser, Hillary Clinton, the movement is getting renewed interest, CNN reported.

Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee lost to her Republican rival, Donald Trump in the November 8 presidential poll.

California which has a population of some 38 million is the most populous state in the United States. It is also the third most extensive by area. Los Angeles, in southern California, is the state's most populous city and the country's second largest after New York City.

"As the sixth largest economy in the world, California is more economically powerful than France and has a population larger than Poland. Point-by-point, California compares and competes with countries, not just the 49 other states," the campaign's website said.

The #calexit name stems from the successful "brexit" campaign in Britain to leave the European Union.

While the Yes Campaign has been considered a fringe movement in the past, it began trending on social media Wednesday night attracting more mainstream notice. Supporters are proposing a referendum on the issue in 2019.

The referendum would ask whether voters think California should become an independent country. It is mainly a way to gauge interest on whether Californians prefer statehood or want to move toward nationhood.

"Of course, a secession is highly unlikely. Other politicians have talked of their states leaving the Union in the past with to no avail," the report said.

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested his state might leave the United States in 2009 during the rise of the tea party. That effort never gained traction.

Thousands take to the streets to protest Trump win Still, Hundreds of protesters -- many of them Latino -- hit Los Angeles City Hall Wednesday night chanting "Si se puede!" (Spanish for "yes, it's possible" or "yes, one can" -- a longtime rallying cry of the United Farm Workers).

Activists chanting #NotMyPresident in cities from coast- to-coast occupied the streets protesting the election results that made the former reality show star the next president.

Police estimated that thousands of people stood outside New York City's Trump Tower protesting the president-elect's positions on immigration and law enforcement.

"I came out here to let go of a lot of fear that was sparked as soon as I saw the results," protester Nick Powers said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Archived Results for Friday, November 11th, 2016

Older Page 1
Continous efforts are being made for the safe return of 22-year-old Indian soldier Chandu Chavan from Pakistan but the process will take more time, according to Minister of State for Defence, Subhash Bhamre.

Bhamre, who was in the city to attend a function, told PTI that Pakistan government's admission that Chavan is in their custody is significant in view of the strained relations between the two nations.

"Though there is an official agreement between India and Pakistan over handing over of such jawans, in the current scenario it will take more time to get him back," Bhamre said.

"We have referred to the agreement and communicated with Pakistan government. It is true that relations between the two governments are a bit tense after the incident (cross-LoC surgical strikes). But, we will continue our efforts and bring him back," he said.

Earlier, the Pakistani Army had denied that it had caputred the jawan, who had inadvertently crossed the Line of Control after the surgical strikes in September.

On September 30, Chavan from 37 Rashtriya Rifles had inadvertently crossed over to the other side of the Line of Control following which Pakistan had been informed by the DGMO (Director General of Military Operations) on the hotline.

Soon after the broke, Chavan's aged grandmother Lila Chindha Patil died of shock.

The Army jawan was planning to get married around Diwali. His parents died when he was small and his grandmother had raised him.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Japanese business leaders and investors today said India is an attractive manufacturing base and market that has a huge potential for business but sought more "free and open" investment climate and relaxation of land acquisition policies.

Chairman of Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), Japan's most influential business lobby, Sadayuki Sakakibara, while addressing the business forum meeting attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi especially referred to the need for relaxing norms on land acquisition and suggested that India should have bidding processes.

He said that Japanese companies have "deepest regards for Modi's "strong leadership" and hoped that his government will address these issues.

"There is a high potential ahead for the bilateral collaboration to reach its full potential. There is a need for further improvemennt....There is a need for free and open investment climate," he said.

He also noted the progress made on Goods and Services Tax (GST) in India.

Referring to the growing friendship between India and Japan in various fields, including political and diplomatic, he said Japanese firms have benefited from this.

India with 1.2 billion people, a big middle class segment and an competitive workforce, is an attractive destination as a manufacturing base and market, he said.

He noted that 1,200 Japanese companies are already in India and Japanese FDI has grown six times in 10 years.

He appreciated Modi's campaign like 'Make in India' and 'Digital India'.

He said the ninth meeting of India-Japan Business Forum, which was held earlier in the day, had made a number of recommendation and these should be implemented.

Akio Mimura, Chairman of Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industries, said he looks forward to building economic ties.

He appreciated India's reform measures and referred to Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), saying it is the symbol of India-Japan cooperation.

He said there is need to invest further in such mega projects.

The bilateral trade between the two countries stood at USD 14.51 billion in 2015-16. India received USD 20.96 billion FDI from Japan during April 2000 and March 2016.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Making an exception, Japan today signed a historic civil nuclear cooperation deal with India, opening the door for collaboration between their industries in the field even as the countries signed nine other agreements in various areas to bolster bilateral ties.

The agreements, including the one for cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy, marks a historic step in their engagement to build a clean energy partnership, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after wide-ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries and Abe said at the joint media interaction with Modi that he was delighted over the signing of agreement on peaceful use of nuclear energy.

"This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in Non-Proliferation regime even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT," he said.

"It (the agreement) is in line with Japan's ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons," said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II.

He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said.

"Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of Climate Change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan," he said and thanked Abe, Japanese government and Parliament for their support to this agreement.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.

In his remarks, Prime Minister Modi said as democracies, the two countries "support openness, transparency and the rule of law".

"We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he said.

Later, speaking at a Banquet hosted by Abe in his honour,



Modi said there is also a lot that the two sides can do together as close partners, not just for the benefit of their societies, but also for the region and the whole world.

"Our capacities could also combine to respond to both, the opportunities and challenges that we jointly face in present times. And, together with the global community we can, and we must, combat the rising threats of radicalisation, extremism and terrorism," he said.

Abe pushed for universalization of the NPT, entry into force of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and start of negotiations at the earliest on Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT).

"The two Prime Ministers welcomed the signing of the Agreement between the Government of Japan and the Government of the Republic of India for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy which reflects a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership in the cause of clean energy, economic development and a peaceful and secure world," said a joint statement.

Modi said deeper economic engagement, growth of trade, manufacturing and investment ties, focus on clean energy, partnership to secure the citizens, and cooperation on infrastructure and skill development are among key priorities.

"India and its economy are pursuing many transformations. Our aim is to become a major centre for manufacturing, investments and for the 21st century knowledge industries.

"And, in this journey, we see Japan as a natural partner. We believe there is vast scope to combine our relative advantages, whether of capital, technology or human resources, to work for mutual benefit," he said in his joint interaction.

The Prime Minister said that the strategic partnership between the two countries also brings peace, stability and balance to the region. It is alive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges in Asia-Pacific, he said.

The successful Malabar naval exercise has underscored the convergence in the two sides' strategic interests in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific, Modi said.

On his part, Abe mentioned the high speed train corridor between Mumbai and Ahmedabad that is being built with the help of Japan, saying the project symbolizes a new dimension in the special relations.

Prime Minister Abe said the designing of the project will begin by the end of this year, construction will begin in 2018 and the high speed train will be in service from 2023.

He said Modi, who will travel by one such train to Kobe city tomorrow from here, will see for himself that it is the safest technology in the world.

The Japanese private sector also would be setting up an institute of manufacturing in India to train about 30,000 people in 10 years, particularly in rural areas, Abe said.

Abe said Japan will set up a tourism bureau in New Delhi to encourage people-to-people contacts. He said he wants to work with Modi in liberalizing the visa rules.

"India-Japan relations have the greatest potential in the world. Strong India is in the best interest of Japan and strong Japan is in the best interest of India," Abe said.

Noting that he had met Modi for the third time in one year, Abe praised him, saying he had a "global vision" and was a "decisive leader".
Jet Airways group today reported a nearly flat profit at Rs 85 crore in the second quarter ended September 2016 amid pressure on domestic ticket prices and lean travel season.

At the group level, the full service carrier had a profit of Rs 83 crore in the year-ago period.

The group's total revenues rose little over three per cent to Rs 5,682 crore in the latest September quarter. In the same period last year, it stood at Rs 5,504 crore.

Announcing the latest quarterly results, Jet Airways said it raked in Rs 85 crore profit "despite a traditionally 'lean' quarter and domestic yields being under pressure".

Jet Airways Chairman Naresh Goyal said improvements in operational performance have helped the airline participate in the strong growth being witnessed in Indian aviation market.

Domestic ticket prices have come under pressure amid local deploying increased capacity and aggressive pricing ways to attract more passengers. The domestic aviation sector has been growing over 20 per cent for almost two years now.

In the 2016 September quarter, the airline carried over 6 per cent higher number of passengers at 6.77 million. The same stood at 6.37 million in the year-ago period.

Total fleet utilisation rose to 12.7 hours daily while the use of Boeing 737 planes increased to 13.3 hours in the latest September quarter.

"Overall traffic from codeshare partners increased by 15 per cent to 1.17 million passengers (in Q2 FY17) carried from 1.02 million passengers in Q2 FY16," the release said.

Gulf carrier Etihad Airways owns 24 per cent stake in Jet Airways.

In the latest quarter, the domestic airline's overall codeshare traffic went up 15 per cent.

"Passengers and revenues delivered by Etihad Airways and Etihad Airways Partners rose by 32 per cent and 25 per cent respectively in Q2 FY17," the release said.

Jet Airways Vice Chairman as well as Etihad Aviation Group's President and CEO James Hogan said its continued collaboration has supported ongoing improvement in Jet Airways performance "despite the ongoing pressure on yields".

On a standalone basis, Jet Airways saw its net profit jump to Rs 108.11 crore in the 2016 September quarter compared to Rs 87.59 crore in the same period a year ago.

Standalone total income from operations increased to Rs 5,420.35 crore from Rs 5,257.97 crore in the year-ago period.

Shares of the company declined over 3 per cent to close at Rs 424.95 on the BSE.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Bengaluru-based job consultant has been arrested for allegedly cheating a local youth of over Rs 1 lakh by promising him a job in a noted software firm, police said today.

Police are also looking for two of his aides, one of them a former employee of Infosys who was also allegedly involved in cheating job aspirants.

Cyber Crime Team of Rachakonda Commissionerate arrested Ravi Kumar from his residence in Bengaluru last night and brought him to the city, Rachakonda Police Commissioner Mahesh M Bhagwat said.

According to police, an engineering graduate had lodged a complaint with them stating that he found an advertisement on a social networking site which mentioned of several jobs in reputed software companies including Infosys, following which he contacted one Suresh G on a contact number.

"Suresh promised the victim of providing him a job in Infosys and asked him to deposit Rs 1 lakh in the bank account given by him. Believing his version, the victim deposited the amount and got an appointment letter through an email in the name of one Jagadish stating it to be from HR Manager of Infosys," the CP said in a release.

However, the victim became suspicious as Suresh demanded another Rs 85,000 from him, and lodged a complaint with police on October 13.

Suresh was booked under various sections of IPC and IT Act.

Subsequently, a police team went to Infosys office at Electronic City in Bengaluru and found that the email ID through which Jagadish had sent the mail (to the victim), was already terminated long back.

On a tip-off, Ravi was arrested and he confessed that he, Jagadish and Suresh had been cheating job seekers by promising jobs in IT firms, the senior police officer said.

The investigation also revealed that the former employee of Infosys (Jagadish) had conducted mock interviews of 86 job-seekers claiming himself to be the HR Manager, without the knowledge of the Infosys management, police said, adding that Suresh and Jagadish are absconding.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Actress Julie Bowen wore her "Modern Family" castmate Sofia Vergara's blouse to a recent TV taping to prove the two actresses are not feuding.

Bowen was so concerned her spot on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" would revolve around a reported bust-up between the two pals she called Sofia and asked for advice, reported Contactmusic.

"So and so trash mag will be running a story: 'You are icy to Sofia Vergara'," she told DeGeneres during an appearance.

"So I email her last night, and then we talked and I'm like, 'What should I say?' She goes, 'Please just borrow my blouse. So I'm borrowing her blouse."



But Bowen admitted the constant gossip surrounding a made-up feud does get her down from time to time, adding, "You don't have to have the truth anymore, you just have to have the internet. You can just make up anything.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Noted rights activist from Uttarakhand Padmashri Avdhash Kaushal has been honoured with the prestigious Satpal Mittal National award in recognition of his work in the field of 'uplift and education' of the marginalised sections in Uttarakhand.

Kaushal, who runs an NGO Rural Litigation Entitlement Kendra (RLEK), has received the award in the individual category for "rendering outstanding service to humanity," Punjab Governor V P Singh Badnore said after handing him the award in Ludhiana, a RLEK release said.

The award carries a cash prize of Rs 2 lakh besides a citation and a memento.

Kaushal also bagged Nani A Palkhiwala award last year for his contribution to Civil Liberties.

Kaushal has done commendable work over the years for the upliftment and education of the poor, marginalised, downtrodden, SCs, STs, women and the nomadic tribes of Van Gujjars.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Union government's decision to demonetise Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes today received support from Kerala Congress (M) headed by former state Finance Minister K M Mani.

Hailing the decision taken by Narendra Modi-led government, KC(M) Vice Chairman and party's lone Lok Sabha MP Jose K Mani said it would "strengthen the foundation of the country's economy."



He, however, noted that the decision has created "some problem" for the farmers who have taken loans from banks and urged the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government in Kerala to take measures to protect the interests of farming community.

"Steps like revenue recovery should not be carried out till the normalcy is brought in the economic situation," said Jose, son of K M Mani.

KCM had recently severed its ties with the Congress-led UDF.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Telangana IT Minister K T Rama Rao today said State Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao is "concerned" about the implications of the Centres decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes.

"It is not that he is not happy (with the Centre's decision). It is just that the impact we see in terms of State's revenues, in terms of how the State is going to shape up right after this. As the gentleman running the State, it is something that is obviously, he is little concerned about. It is absolutely untrue that he is unhappy," KTR son of KCR told PTI.

Sources had said that the Chief Minister, who met the Governor yesterday understood to have expressed his "unhappiness" over the likely negative impact of the decision to demonetise high-currency notes.

The demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes is likely to cause about Rs 2,000 crore loss to Telangana per month, Rao told the Governor, according to sources.

The Centre's decision would adversely affect the real estate sector in Telangana and also transactions in motor vehicles, sources said quoting the CM.

He said the State Government is in the process of trying to minimise the impact.

"We are still assessing the impact and the fallout of this decision. In the long run, we all agree, that it is a great thing for the country and State as well. But I think the short term and medium term implications are something that we are concerned. This is what the Chief Minister had shared with the Governor," the IT minister said.

He said the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had agreed to his proposal to collect the some of utility charges such as power and municipal tax in older denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 for a limited period.

The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and the Hyderabad Metro Water Board yesterday announced separately that they will accept payments with demonetised notes till today.

He suggested that the common man of this country should not suffer as result of the decisions of the Government.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Korea was keen on strengthening industrial and cultural relations with India even as it wanted to explore tie-ups on educational exchange programmes between the two countries, Consul General of Republic of Korea in Chennai, Kyungsoo Kim, said today.

Calling on Tamil Nadu Governor CH Vidyasagar Rao at Raj Bhavan here, he said India had played a positive role in Korean affairs after its independence and was exploring more avenues like signing of MoUs with Universities and for educational exchange programmes.

"Globally, Republic of Korea ranks high in education, job security and is a launch pad of a mature mobile market. Korea looks forward to further strengthening its industrial and cultural relations with India and in Tamil Nadu in particular", he was quoted as saying in a Raj Bhavan release.

Noting that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Make in India' initiative paved the way for progress in all spheres, Rao said, "Tamil Nadu is one of the most industrialised states and shares historical and cultural relationship with Korea".

"Tamil Nadu is an automobile hub, a destination for healthcare and information technology, flourishing in food processing industry, buzzing with economic activity and is a most sought after destination for new ventures", he said.

Governor's Principal Secretary, Ramesh Chand Meena, Deputy Secretary, K V Muralidharan were also present on the occasion.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Then and now, thankful I can still smile.

Ray, there is a story out there, and if I have the courage to go through with this, what a story it will make.

Sometimes I doubt it.

I recently had a chance to reconnect with a fellow combat brother after 48 years. Back in August he sent me an email (my email address is on the unit web site) and said he would be traveling in their RV through my area in October and he wanted to reconnect. As the time approached, I began to have some trepidation's about the reunion. Like many veterans of Vietnam, I had made my peace with the war. I had finally also gotten to the point where I could openly discuss certain events that were and always be vivid in my memory.But to actually confront the reality of the memories by meeting a former buddy who walked the same paths and slogged through the same rice paddies was a bit of a challenge.I had come to the conclusion that my Vietnam experience was like a giant lake with calm waters. I could gaze out at the calm surface with a dispassionate perspective. The reflected memories dance on the surface like the clouds from the sky. All was well as long as I was looking at just the surface I could write and discuss some incidents and memories without diving in. But like most calm water, once you actually touch the surface the ripples will spread and you are no longer in control of their effect. To wade back into water that I know is too deep for you takes a full measure of courage that I am not sure I still possess. To dive in takes guts that I am almost sure I no longer possess.So I just sit and gaze at the surface with a peaceful feeling that all will remain calm if you just don't touch or disturb the calm. That metaphor worked well for me until I saw the movie "Field of Dreams." I have since felt that the perfect metaphor for Vietnam was contained in the movie. I recommend it to you and the readers if you have not seen it. Without rehashing the plot too deeply, it involves the thin line between life and death, past and present and the confrontation of both.The central character for me was played by James Earl Jones. Terrance Mann (who may have already been dead) is confronted with the cornfield and invited to wander back into the maze where that represents the time boundary between past and present. Within the maze is the where all the ghost still pay ball. It has the possibility of an adventure but also some danger. His statement is simple and yet profound.As he approaches the edge of the field he cautiously reaches out to test the reality of the dream, slowly but cautiously, he embraces the challenge and finally summons the courage to just step back into the unknown. Below is the tail end of the short video showing his transition this unknown universe. To see the entire clip just reset the time line at the bottom.I had promised myself that when the 50-year anniversary of my year in Vietnam came up in 2018, I would fly to Washington, DC. Walk up and touch the wall where the names of some past comrades are commemorated. I often used the phrase that if I had the guts and gumption to do that I could put the past to rest. That feeling and expression existed long before I ever saw the movie and has been a looming event on my horizon for 48 years now. I was always afraid that the wall would absorb me once again. Perhaps the new metaphor will be an adventure or a closure.By the way, when my friend and his wife called from Asheville, North Carolina to say they were leaving and heading to Atlanta on October 7, 2016, I had aand could not meet them. We talked for two hours on the phone about the old times and the old friends. I now wonder if I have the guts of Terrance Mann to reenter that metaphorical cornfield again in 2018 and perhaps touch that wall that separates me from the past that was never really past. Here is Part II of this story.
Facing shortage of cash for last two days, people in the country's financial capital and its suburbs rushed to ATM counters today, witnessing long queues of residents anxious to withdraw some money to meet their daily expenses.

ATMs of various banks in south Mumbai, Lalbaugh, Parel, Dadar, Andheri, Ghatkopar and Mulund were found to be out of service and not dispensing money, forcing people to return empty-handed.

Early in the morning, shutters of some ATMs of State Bank of India, Lakshmi Vilas Bank, HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda, Yes Bank and Dena Bank in suburban Mulund in Mumbai were down, while some went dry.

Ajeet Singh, a media professional, said when he went to an ATM in suburban Andheri, he found it closed. On enquiring with a bank executive, the latter suggested him to come after an hour or two.

"But when I went to exchange demonetised notes with new ones, I was told that the bank has not received the money yet and it would start exchanging it at 4 PM only," he said.

After finding some ATMs in the megacity not dispensing cash, Charles Asirvatham, a senior executive of a Malaysia-based company took the twitter route to express his problem.

Sanjay Dubey, an executive working with a garment outlet and staying in Kalyan township of neighbouring Thane district said, "I approached an ATM in suburban Kalyan around 8.30 AM but it was shut. I hope government would take some corrective measures soon."



Claiming an SBI ATM to be non-functional, Gurudath Naik said he had complained about it to the bank's chairperson.

Despite the chaos, country's largest public sector lender SBI said in statement: "29,176 ATMs of State Bank of India (SBI) are up and functioning, rest are expected to be operational by tomorrow."



The SBI group, which includes associate banks, have an ATM network of 55,000 across the country.

Naresh Kadam, an executive working in a pharmaceutical



company, stood in queue at the branch of a new generation bank at 5.30 in the morning. After sometime, a board was placed there saying-- 'ATM out of service due to technical reasons'.

A senior citizen, who came to exchange money at the branch of a public sector bank in suburban Vikhroli, said, "We thought of having some relief as banks were all set to open their ATMs today morning. But see what's happening here. Even bank officials do not bother to make separate arrangements for the senior citizens. Who will listen to us."



From today onwards, customers are allowed to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day from ATMs till November 18. The withdrawal limit will be raised to Rs 4,000 per day per card from November 19.

In the last two days when ATMs were out of service, the banks said they will re-configure their ATMs to dispense Rs 100 and Rs 50 notes.
The Madras High Court has dismissed a PIL seeking to quash the Centre's order demonetising the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and welcomed the motive behind the decision including curbing black money and preventing funding of terror activities.

Rejecting the petition by Indian National League General Secretary Seeni Ahamed, who contended that the demonetisation had been announced without proper arrangements, the court in its order yesterday said there may be some temporary inconveniences and the public should have to bear with them.

The courts could not interfere in the government policies, a division bench said.

It also rejected another prayer of the petitioner the issue of Rs 2000 denomination notes was also illegal.

When the government can print Rs 5, 10, 50, 100 and 1000 rupee notes, there was nothing wrong in printing Rs 2000 notes. Besides the government had demonetised notes in 1946 and 1978, the bench said.

The judges welcomed the motive of the government in demonetising the notes which included eradicating black money, developing economy, preventing fake currency circulation, eradicating corruption and preventing terrorists from using the money for funding terror activities.

The directors on the board of RBI also recommended the demonetisation of the notes on the ground that the notes were being used for drug smuggling, terrorists activities,etc.

The government had accepted the recommendation. Hence, there was no need to quash the order, it said.

The Additional Solicitor General submitted that the demonetising notes and issuing new currencies was government's policy decision.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The coffers of urban local bodies in Maharashtra swelled by whopping Rs 100 crore as citizens rushed to pay their pending bills and dues in scrapped bank notes of Rs 500 and 1000 as permitted by state government in a bid to ease the woes of common people.

The state government yesterday allowed citizens to use the demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes towards payment of their electricity bill, water bill, property tax or any kind of dues after the Central government accepted state's request in this regard.

The deadline for payment of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes closes midnight tonight.

"The cumulative recovery crosses Rs 100 crore mark," said an official in the Chief Minister's Office.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis yesterday said that government offices will accept now defunct notes till midnight of November 11.

According to a senior official, the move by state government evoked an unprecedented response from the common people.

"Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis's request to seek permission from Prime Minister's office and positive response to his request not only paved the way for crores of people to utilise their scrapped high denomination notes, but also led to swelling up the state's exchequer," he said.

He said while Mumbai received highest revenue through the discontinued tender, the second highest payment was received by Pune urban bodies. However, he didn't quote the exact figure of Mumbai as the deadline ends at midnight only.

"Even since yesterday, Kalyan Dombiwali Municipal Corporation received Rs 4 crore, Nashik Rs 2 crore, Thane Rs 2 crore, Meera Bhayandar Municipal Corporation Rs 51 lakh, Ulhasnagar Rs 3.11 crore, Nagpur 1.10 crore, apart from Rs 5.41 crore received from different municipal bodies by the Directorate of Municipal Administration, Mmaharashtra," he added.

Maharashtra has 27 municipal corporations whereas nearly 300 other local civic bodies, acting as semi-government agencies, are mandated to provide essential services to residents by levying bills.

"Normally, people wait for the last date to pay their bill, but ever since Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes have been demonetised, people didn't wait for it (last date) and at many places they cleared the bills pending from several months and years," the official said quoting authorities from Revenue Department.

(Reopens BOM 33)



Meanwhile, city-based activist and former Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi has lauded a Chief Minister's move wherein he had requested Centre to allow people to use the banned bank notes for payment of bills.

"This effort (of seeking the nod of the Prime Minister's office to accept demonetised notes) reflects that this government is extremely responsive towards the issues of common man and it works to remove the difficulties," he said, adding the people of the country have not shown any "significant unrest" post the demonetisation of high value denominations.
Maharashtra government has drawn up a scheme to ensure power supply to the agriculture sector for 12 hours a day through feeder-based solar energy, said Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today.

So far, 10,000 solar agricultural pumps have been set up across the state, he said, adding 16 renowned companies dealing in these instruments from across the world have approached the government to facilitate their installation.

He was addressing a gathering of farmers, agriculture scientists and representatives of allied business groups after inaugurating the 8th edition of "Agro Vision" at the sprawling Reshimbagh Ground here.

Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, chief promoter of the annual farm fair, presided over the function.

Giving statistics, Fadnavis said 94,303 pumps were cleared for installation in the last two years in Vidarbha followed by Marathwada (66,790), Western Maharashtra (48,000) and North Maharashtra (18,000).

Under the scheme, farmers can use feeder-based solar pumps instead of individually buying pumps.

Fadnavis called on farmers to reduce input cost and enhance production and said agriculture is now treated as a part of science and scientific farming is need of the hour.

Productivity must be increased to make agriculture sustainable, he said.

The government has decided to set up integrated textile units in 11 cotton-producing districts as part of its 'cotton to fashion' push, the Chief Minister said.

Recalling the twin occurrences of drought and excess rainfall in the past, Fadnavis said due to various initiatives like 'Jalyukt Shivar' (a water conservation scheme), farmers have succeeded in minimising the impact of scarcity.

Situation on the agriculture front is improving since the last two years when the sector recorded a negative growth of 16 per cent (2014-15). This year, the Government is hopeful of achieving positive growth of 5 to 10 per cent, he said.

State Ministers Pandurang Phundkar (Agriculture), Sudhir Mungantiwar (Finance), Mahadeo Jankar (Dairy) and Chandrashekhar Bawankule (Energy), among others, were present.

Speaking on the occasion, Gadkari lauded the efforts



of



Maharashtra Government in the farm sector and stressed on better use of drip irrigation.

He said farmers opting for drip irrigation should get interest subsidy on crop loans. This year the yield of cotton and soya had been much better and farmers should earn good money.

"Agro Vision" is a combination of exhibition, workshops



and conference which provides an excellent platform for farmers and the agriculture sector to explore various opportunities. The event will last for four days (Nov 11-14).

It was conceptualised to help farmers from Vidarbha, where



a large number of agriculturists have committed suicide due to debt burden and crop failure.
With a special PMLA court allowing its plea for further attachments, ED has seized under CrPC laws fresh assets worth Rs 1,620 crore of liquor baron Vijay Mallya in connection with its money laundering case against him and others.

Officials said orders for the fresh attachment of "freezed and pledged shares" have come into force with the pronouncement of the court order yesterday and the agency will soon serve the copies of the order to all the stakeholders involved in the case, including Mallya.

The special Prevention of Money laundering Act (PMLA) court of judge P R Bhavake here had yesterday declared Mallya a 'proclaimed offender' and directed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to attach movable properties which were listed by the agency in its plea to the court.

"The total value of these movable assets that have been seized is worth Rs 1,620 crore. This seizure is carried out under the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) and will be over and above the two earlier attachments worth Rs 8,041 crore issued under anti-money laundering laws," an official said.

The court had yesterday ordered ED that freezed and pledged shares belonging to Mallya be attached by way of seizure and by prohibiting the delivery of such property to the accused or any other person on his behalf until further order.

The court had, however, rejected ED's request for attachment of the liquor baron's overseas properties.

The agency had moved the court last month seeking that Mallya be declared a proclaimed offender and his properties be attached as he did not comply with a proclamation order issued against him in June requiring him to appear before the court.

ED had sought an order from the court under section 82 (proclamation of absconding person) of CrPC as several arrest warrants were pending against him.

A person against whom a warrant has been issued can be declared a proclaimed offender if the court believes that he or she has absconded or is evading execution of warrant.

ED wanted Mallya to join the investigation "in person" in connection with probe under the PMLA, and in cases related to a Rs 900-crore loan from IDBI Bank.

It had said it had exhausted other legal remedies like seeking Interpol arrest warrant and getting his passport revoked to make Mallya join the probe.

The total attachment made by the agency in this case has now shot up to Rs 8,041 crore as it had attached assets worth Rs 1,411 crore and Rs 6,630 crore a few months back.

This is one of the largest attachment of assets made by ED in a PMLA case till now.

Recently, courts had issued two non-bailable warrants (NBW) against Mallya in separate criminal cases, with both courts observing that he neither had any regard for law, nor any intention to return to India.

(Reopens DEL 57)



Meanwhile, the ED said Mallya has not cooperated with it in its investigation in the case till now.

"Mallya, who had been summoned by the Enforcement Directorate in the money laundering case has not cooperated in the ongoing investigation. He neither presented himself in pursuance of the summons issued to him by ED in March and April, 2016, nor honoured the directions dated June 21 this year of the court to appear before the court on July 29. The court had also issued non-bailable arrest warrants against him on April 20 this year.

"In view of his repetitive avoidance and non compliance, ED had filed an application before special court for PMLA to declare Mallya, a proclaimed offender under provision of section 82 of CrPC and attach his movable and immovable properties to compel the offender to join investigation," an ED statement said.

"Now on application of ED, the court has ordered attachment of shares having current market value of approximately Rs 1,620 crore.

"This is in addition to earlier attachment of movable and immovable properties worth Rs 8,041 crore (market value) under PMLA by the ED," it said.
Thirteen people were killed and three were injured in a massive fire which broke out today at an unlicensed garment manufacturing factory which was being run in a residential area here, police said.

Senior Superintendent of Police of Ghaziabad Deepak Kumar Singh said that around 5.30 am district fire control room received information regarding massive fire breaking out in a garment manufacturing unit situated near Jaipal Chowk in Shahid Nagar locality of Sahibabad.

Fire tenders from Sahibabad fire station rushed to the spot but due to narrow and congested lanes and the parking of vehicles in the area the fire dousing operations were hindered as the fire tenders could not reach near the incident site, the SSP said.

The garment factory was unlicensed and was being run in residential area, he said.

Electrical short circuit may be one of the probable cause of the fire, the SSP said adding police is investigating other angles also.

At the time of fire 16 workers were sleeping on first floor of the factory.

Ten of the workers were suffocated to death while three others were charred to death.

Remaining three workers with minor burn injuries jumped from the first floor to save themselves who were immediately rushed to nearby GTB Hospital in North East Delhi.

An FIR has been registered against the factory owners Nazakat and Rizwan under section 304A IPC (Causing death due to negligence) and both of them have been arrested, police said.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has announced ex-gratia compensation of two lakh rupees to 13 families of deceased labourers.

"Expressing heartfelt condolences for the people who lost their lives in the incident," he said condoling the deaths in the fire through an official statement here.

The Chief Minister has directed the Ghaziabad District Hospital to provide adequate help to all those affected by the fire, it said.

A committee has been constituted to scrutinise the illegal dyeing and other factories being run in the area, said District Magistrate Nidhi Kesrwani.

Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi condoled the loss of lives in the fire tragedy.

"Very sad to learn that a fire in a garment factory in Sahibabad has claimed many lives.My thoughts & prayers are with the bereaved families", he tweeted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Theresa May's first visit to India as British Prime Minister earlier this week sent a clear signal to the world of the close ties the two countries share, the acting high commissioner of India to the UK has said.

Dinesh Patnaik, who was involved in preparations for the high-profile tour, also dismissed any reports that the visit was overshadowed by visa and immigration issues.

"The biggest outcome of the visit is the signal it sends to the world of the close relationship between India and the UK. We had agreed on a biennial visit, which is that every two years, the Prime Ministers on both sides would meet.

"The fact that Prime Minister has gone within one year of Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi's visit to the UK speaks volumes of the importance she attaches to India," he told PTI.

"This was the first major bilateral visit by her outside the European Union (EU). The message is that the UK considers India of primary importance... There is no question that the visit has moved the relationship forward and was overall a very successful one," he said.

Asked if the UK's toughening stance on visas overshadowed the visit, he said: "I really want to make it clear that nowhere was the visa issue a big thing for both our countries. After Brexit and the strong feeling around immigration control, it was assumed that it was topmost on the agenda.

"The main agenda was trade and technology. India is not wanting to push Indians into the UK. Our government's position is that we want access for our people everywhere in the world. We are a big nation with a lot to offer the world and we want Indians to be able to access anywhere in the world - be it as tourists, short-term workers, professionals, businessmen, technical entrepreneurs, or as students.

"So our message is don't put in place rules and regulations which restrict access of Indians. But we don't want to push."

The envoy, who as India's deputy high commissioner to Britain stepped in when Navtej Sarna recently left to take charge as the Indian ambassador in the US, said the visit reflected good chemistry between Prime Minister Modi and her British counterpart.

"Both Prime Ministers got on very well. Prime Minister Modi had a good relationship with former Prime Minister David Cameron and it was to be seen if the same chemistry and dynamics worked this time. And, it seems it has worked very well.

"The one-hour bilateral one to one meeting between the two PMs continued for almost two hours. Though we won't know what was discussed but the fact is they spoke cordially and the chemistry and body language between them showed that there is a great relationship between the two PMs," he said.

In reference to the impact Brexit could have on India-UK ties, Patnaik described it as a "work in progress".

"In my view Brexit or no Brexit, the relationship between India and the UK is on an upward path. Brexit brings with it both challenges and opportunities. The opportunities lie in the fact that India and the UK bilaterally have a very strong relationship. And how Brexit will impact that is a work in progress, which has already started," he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today called on Japanese Emperor Akihito ahead of key bilateral talks with counterpart Shinzo Abe during his three-day visit.

"A rare audience that symbolises the unique warmth between India and Japan. PM Narendra Modi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

"Speaking of civilisations. PM Modi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of India and Japan and the future of Asia," he said in another tweet.

The call on came ahead of wide-ranging talks between Modi and his counterpart Abe aimed at giving a fillip to the bilateral strategic relations.

After the annual Summit, about 12 pacts will be signed by the two sides, sources said, adding there were also high expectations about the civil nuclear deal being signed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today called on Japanese Emperor Akihito and discussed the common bonds between India and Japan and the future of Asia.

"A rare audience that symbolises the unique warmth between India and Japan. PM Narendra Modi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

"Speaking of civilisations. PM Modi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of India and Japan and the future of Asia," he said in another tweet on the meeting between the 82- year-old Japanese emperor and Modi.

The call on came ahead of wide-ranging talks between Modi and his counterpart Abe aimed at giving a fillip to the bilateral strategic relations.

After the annual Summit, about 12 pacts will be signed by India and Japan, sources said, adding there were also high expectations about a bilateral civil nuclear deal being signed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today held wide-ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe here, aimed at giving a fillip to the bilateral strategic relations.

"Reviewing the strength of a Special Strategic and Global Partnership. PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo lead delegation level talks," External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted along with a picture of the meeting.

Ahead of the talks, Modi was accorded a guard of honour at Kantei, the Japanese Prime Minister's official residence.

"The ceremonies that strengthen a time tested friendship. PM @narendramodi receives formal honours at Kantei," Swarup tweeted along with some photographs of the occasion.

After his arrival in Japan yesterday, Modi tweeted that he was looking forward to fruitful deliberations that will boost economic and cultural ties between India and Japan.

At their annual Summit, Modi and Abe will discuss ways to enhance ties in a broad range of areas, including security, trade and investment, skill development and infrastructure development.

After the Summit talks, about 12 pacts will be signed by the two sides, sources said, adding these would cover areas like skill development, cultural exchanges and infrastructure.

Also, a civil nuclear deal is likely to be signed today.

The two sides had sealed a broad agreement during Abe's visit to India last December but the final deal was yet to be signed as certain technical and legal issues were to be thrashed out.

Both the countries have completed the internal procedures including legal and technical aspects of the text of the pact, Swarup said last week. When specifically asked whether the pact will be signed during Modi's visit, he only said, "I cannot pre-judge outcome of the talks."



Negotiations for the nuclear deal between the two sides have been going on for a number of years but the progress on these was halted because of political resistance in Japan after the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a night of impressive Republican victories across the country, and right here in North Carolina, the state's Democrats may well have accomplished their top priority of defeating Gov. Pat McCrory - by a whisker.At this writing, Roy Cooper's 5,000-vote margin will likely generate a recount. Nevertheless, it's worth pondering how so many things could go right for Republicans and still not necessarily end well for the state party's titular leader, Gov. McCrory.The problem wasn't the top of the ticket. Donald Trump won North Carolina by nearly 200,000 votes, thanks to strong turnout among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who were highly motivated to vote against Hillary Clinton. Critically, these voters didn't just vote for Trump and the party's top-polling candidate, Sen. Richard Burr, who defeated Democratic opponent Deborah Ross by six percentage points. Most Burr-Trump voters stayed at the polls long enough to vote all the way down the ballot.That's one reason that, contrary to most expectations, Republicans didn't lose any ground in the General Assembly this year. They maintained their supermajorities in both chambers, even padding their lead in the state senate. Moreover, the GOP won historic victories in Council of State races for state treasurer (Dale Folwell), state superintendent of public instruction (Mark Johnson), and insurance commissioner (Mike Causey), while reelecting Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler, and Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry by solid margins.In judicial races, Democrats won the biggest prize. Wake County judge Mike Morgan defeated incumbent Supreme Court Justice Bob Edmunds, thus flipping the high court Democratic. But Republicans won all five races for state court of appeals, where most cases get decided.I guess a key lesson here is that North Carolina politics remains highly competitive and volatile. This isn't just a function of turnout differentials. Although ticket-splitting is far less common than it used to be, some North Carolinians continue to mix and match their votes in seemingly inexplicable ways.I say "seemingly inexplicable" because, of course, such voters think their choices are entirely reasonable. Imagine that you were a non-ideological voter who didn't think much of either party and saw both the state and the nation as headed in the wrong direction. Wouldn't you consider voting against the incumbent party in the White House as well as the incumbent party in the governor's mansion?Here's another one: imagine that you were a Republican-leaning voter who believed the party should be more welcoming to gays and lesbians. That might lead you to vote for Trump, based on his prior history and recent statements on LGBT issues, and against McCrory, based on his defense of House Bill 2. You may also have voted for Dan Forest, who was at least as resolute in his defense of the bill - but because you don't follow state politics very closely, you didn't know that.Given the other election results, in other words, it would be highly problematic to interpret a possible Roy Cooper win by a tiny margin as some kind of sweeping message about Republican rule in Raleigh. If North Carolina voters truly thought the GOP's conservative policies on tax cuts, regulatory relief, entitlement reform, education, and other issues were the wrong direction for the state, why did they just give Republicans more power in the General Assembly and new authority over the state's finances and public schools? And why did they just vote for Republicans for president and Congress who promised to pursue a similar agenda in Washington?As I've pointed out all year, North Carolina Democrats hoped that the 2016 elections would produce victories from the White House to the school house. They worked hard to defeat Trump, Burr, and Republican lawmakers. But by far their fondest wish was to recapture the governor's mansion. They vastly outraised and outspent McCrory and his allies. They gave Roy Cooper every form of aid he required. They went all in.And if his thin margin stands, they'll have something most Democrats around the country won't have - something to celebrate.
Congress general secretary in-charge of Uttar Pradesh Ghulam Nabi Azad today accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of "ignoring farmers by not participating in debates over issues concerning them in Parliament".

"Since the current government took over more than two years back, there have been many debates on issues concerning farmers such as suicides but the prime minister did not participate in them to express his sympathy...This shows how concerned he is for them," he said at a programme where the Uttar Pradesh unit of the Kisan Manch merged with the Congress.

"Thousands of farmers have committed suicide over drought or debts, but the prime minister is always on foreign trips...Modi did not even feel the need to go among the farmers to understand their plight," Azad alleged.

On the other hand, he said Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi undertook the 'Deoria-to-Delhi Kisan Yatra' to "understand the difficulties of farmers".

He reiterated that the Congress and Rahul have promised that if voted to power in Uttar Pradesh, all farmers' loans will be waived, their electricity bills will be halved and they will get a "proper" support price for their produces.

Earlier, Kisan Manch state unit chief Shekhar Dikshit, along with his supporters, merged the unit with the Congress.

Congress' chief ministerial candidate in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election Sheila Dixit too addressed the gathering on the occasion.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Samajwadi Party (SP) president Mulayam Singh Yadav will address his first rally in the run-up to the 2011 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election at Azamgarh on November 23.

"The SP president will address a massive rally at the RTI ground in Ghazipur on November 23. Earlier, the rally was scheduled for November 11, but it could not be organised because of his tight schedule," said Misbahuddin, the general secretary of the Quami Ekta Dal (QED), which has since merged with the SP.

Claiming that Mulayam's rally will be "bigger" than Prime Minister Narendra Modi's November 14 rally at the same venue, Misbahuddin said scores of workers from various districts of Purvanchal -- Ghazipur, Mau, Azamgarh, Ballia, Varanasi, Sonebhadra, Bhadohi, Chandauli and Jaunpur -- will attend it.

SP state unit chief Shivpal Singh Yadav today held a meeting with party MLAs and unit chiefs of these districts among others for making the rally a big success, he added.

Earlier, the SP supremo was scheduled to address his first rally ahead of the Uttar Pradesh polls at Azamgarh on October 6, but it was postponed.

Ghazipur and Mau are known to be QED strongholds with Sigbatullah Ansari and his mafia-turned-MLA brother Mukhtar Ansari representing the Assembly seats from these districts.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In view of the currency shortage across India after Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were banned, Narayana Health Network of Hospitals in Kolkata today offered free consultation across all specialities at Howrah and Barasat



to ensure maximum ease to people in the state.

Announcing this here today, Narayana Health officials said its offers would be available at both of its hospitals in Howrah district - Narayana Super-speciality Hospital near Nabanna and Narayana Multi-speciality Hospital near Chunavati, besides at Narayana Multi-speciality Hospital, Barasat, in North 24-Parganas district.

"This will help patients all over Bengal to access specialist doctors, while consultations with doctors at the OPD will be free until November 15 (except Sunday) at these three hospitals in Howrah and Barasat," the officials said.

"Apart from OPD from 9 AM to 5 PM, free blood tests for Random Blood Sugar, CBC (Hb, TC, DC), Bilirubin, Total Cholesterol, Urea Creatinine, SGOT, SGPT, Uric Acid and ECG (if advised) will be available to patients during these three days. Discounts will be available for patients on other investigations," Narayan Health officials said.

Akshay Oleti, Facility Director of Narayana Hospitals, Howrah, said "We are making constant efforts to provide access to highly-qualified doctors at affordable prices. It is our utmost priority to ensure everybody hassle-free healthcare services. We are providing this small gesture of free OPD for all people to meet with the best doctors even during times of currency shortage.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Megastar Amitabh Bachchan was today all praise for West Bengal for educating girl children, but questioned the use of Hindi word 'Mardaani' (masculinity) to depict female valour in our society.

"Even the word 'Mardaani' is derived from the word 'mard' (men). The word which is a description of male valour and strength. Why can't we have an independent word for female valour? This is something which I feel needs debate and consideration," Bachchan questioned during a speech on the role of women in Indian cinema.

He said this while talking about actor Rani Mukherjee's 2014 film "Mardaani" in which she palys a brave and honest woman cop who unearths a human trafficking racket.

The actor gave numerous examples of films like "Cheeni Kam", "Neerja", "Mary Kom", "Ki & Ka", "Queen", "Piku", "Ae Dil Hai Mushkil", "Pink" to discuss how the changing role of women in the society have been reflected in recent Hindi films.

The "Sarkar" actor praised West Bengal and Kerala for leading the way in educating the girl child.

"The most revered in Bengal is Goddess Durga who is a woman," he said, adding how his wife Jaya Bachchan exclaims 'O Ma' or 'E Ma' whenever anything big happens.

"It is wonderful how you associate the mother with this," Bachchan said while mentioning that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has named a flyover as 'Ma' in Kolkata.

"Well done," he told the CM and also openly praised her government for the 'Kanyashree' scheme which provides financial support to girl children for their education.

He also raised the issue of female sexual harassment which was raised in his film "Pink", saying it brought the issues of sexual violence and sexual consent into urban middle class homes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Gujarat government today said the Centre had given its approval for conducting the 2017 NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) for medical admissions in Gujarati in the state, along with English.

"Due to numerous representations of parents, the state government had urged the Union Health Ministry to conduct NEET in Gujarati," Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel said.

"Union Health Minister J P Nadda in a letter to Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has informed that Health Ministry will conduct NEET 2017 in Gujarati language in our state," he said.

The Supreme Court has made NEET mandatory for medical admissions.

Parents of students, who want to appear for NEET next year, were pressing the government to conduct the exam in Gujarati for the benefit of Gujarati-medium students. They had also staged protests in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar on the issue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Nepal Prime Minister Prachanda today said his government was committed to table a proposal in the parliament by next week to amend the new Constitution and meet the long-pending demands of agitating parties, including Madhesis.

Prachand told reporters that the amendment proposal would be tabled in the parliament before the current Nepali month 'Kartik' ends on November 15, the Kathmandu Post reported.

Marking his government's first 100 days in office, he said would put forward the proposal by taking all sides on board.

The amendment proposal has already been prepared and the government is holding discussions with the main opposition CPN-UML regarding the same, the prime minister said, adding that he has always strived to create an environment of trust between the ruling and the opposition parties.

The amendment to the Constitution, adopted in September last year and which led to months-long protests by Madhesi people and created a huge shortage of essential goods and fuel in the landlocked country, is a thorny issue in Nepal.

Madhesis, who share family and social bonds with Indians, allege that the Constitution compromises their interests.

They want more political representation in the parliament through re-demarcation of the provincial boundaries, and some issues remain over citizenship criteria.

Prachanda reiterated his commitment that the government would move ahead by forging a national consensus to deal with the issues of constitution amendment and over the impeachment motion against suspended chief of Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority, Lok Man Singh Karki.

He said after he became the prime minister he has been working to take Madhesis, and other disgruntled groups, into confidence and his efforts have been successful so far.

He also said that his government would give momentum to the implementation of the new Constitution as the formation of high courts in provinces, selection of attorneys' office and other remaining tasks like the peace process were in progress.

He claimed his government has been successful in improving Nepal's ties with both its neighbours - China and India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Bombay High Court has refused to grant relief to a BSF constable who was dismissed from service as he had unauthorisedly remained absent from duty for several days in 2011-2012.

"Even one day unauthorised absence of a constable of BSF must be regarded as serious... We are therefore of the opinion that there is no need to intervene in the matter," a division bench said while dismissing the petition filed by aggrieved constable Deepak Jadhav.

"The very nature of duties attached to the petitioner as a security constable requires his presence and attention at the field. If his personal affairs compel him to stay away from duties, definitely the authorities, which have to maintain the discipline, have every reason to take harsh decision," the bench observed.

The constable had availed leave from November 2 to 20, 2011. Thereafter he did not report for duty and only on March 4, 2012, he joined duty after overstaying for 102 days. Later, he remained absent without seeking leave or permission from March 19 onwards. An order was passed on June 26, 2012, dismissing him from service. He then challenged the decision.

The impugned order indicated that within a period of 90 days from the date of dismissal, the constable can make an application for reinstatement. However, no such application was made within the specified period.

Later, Jadhav made an application and it was decided on merits by the authorities who rejected his plea for reinstatement on the basis of his past record and unauthorised absence from duty.

"At this stage, we fail to understand which order the petitioner intends to challenge by amending the writ petition. The latest order is nothing but reaffirming the dismissal order of June 26, 2012. As a matter of fact, we notice from the prayer in the petition that he has already challenged the latest order dated February 6, 2014," said the bench.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today said the VAT department was not carrying out raids on traders and termed as "completely false" such whispers as he appealed to the city's shopkeepers to report to police if anyone claimed to be from the agency.

Kejriwal's appeal came a day after the I-T department carried out raids in Chandni Chowk, Karol Bagh and Dariba Kalan in Delhi in the wake of reports of alleged profiteering and subsequent tax evasion by traders while converting demonetised currency notes in an illegal manner.

"Rumour that Del VAT dept doing raids. Completely false. No raids by VAT. If anyone claims to be from VAT, ask for his ID n report to police (sic)," the Delhi chief minister tweeted.

"Modi-ji gets raids carried out on everyone here, but does not do so on his friends," he said in another tweet, taking a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Earlier in the day, a section of city traders, led by AAP's Trade Wing convenor Brijesh Goel, met Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in this regard.

Sisodia told them the VAT department was not carrying out raids and that the Income Tax department was involved in such act instead.

The government has also started two helpline numbers -- 155055 and 1800110066 -- for traders to seek any clarification in this regard.

Yesterday, shopkeepers in Chandni Chowk area had shut their shops early following "rumours" of raids by the Income Tax department. Today as well, most of traders did not open their shops fearing action.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Delhi government tonight appealed to Delhiites not to pay attention to rumours of shortage of salt in the city and assured that there is no scarcity of such essential commodity.

Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said teams of food supply officers and sub-divisional magistrates are rounding city's markets where salt is available in sufficient stock.

"There is no shortage of supply of salt. Teams of food supply officers and sub-divisional magistrates are rounding the city's markets where salt is available.

"Everywhere salt is available. Don't pay attention to such rumours," the Deputy CM tweeted.

Rumours of salt shortage triggered panic among people in the evening who rushed to markets to buy salt in some of markets in the national capital.

Later, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also assured that there is no shortage of salt and sugar in Delhi.

Food and Civil Supplies Minister Imran Hussain said four teams have been deployed at different locations to crack down on black marketing of salt.

(REOPENS DES73)



Later, Hussain held an emergency meeting with the officers of his department to take stock of the situation and directed them to visit several markets so that people do not face any problem.
President Barack Obama will meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and key European allies next week as he seeks to reassure other nations about the US role in the world following Donald Trump's election victory.

Obama is scheduled to leave on a week-long three-nation tour next week to Greece, Germany and Peru.

The trip will highlight the President's commitment to trans-Atlantic solidarity, a strong and integrated Europe, and to cooperation with its Asia Pacific partners, the White House said.

Obama would meet leaders of top European allies including those from Britain, France and Germany during his visit to Berlin, said Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor.

On the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Summit in Lima, Peru, Obama would meet President Xi of China, Rhodes said.

"The President's schedule will underscore the linkages between our security interests and our economic agenda, our efforts to promote balanced, sustainable, and strong global economic growth, and our support for trade liberalisation and economic reforms that reduce inequality and deliver opportunities for the middle class around the world as well as regional economic institutions that foster private sector growth," the White House said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Administrators at the University of Florida recently notified students that a 24-hour counseling hotline is available to anyone who feels offended by Halloween costumes. Other colleges, in an attempt to pre-empt the psychological threat of offensive costumes, have created and distributed Halloween costume guidelines to help students make appropriate choices if they decide to dress up.The University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, for example, encouraged students to attend a special seminar titled " Is Your Halloween Costume Racist? " while Tufts University went a step further, sending a letter to students in fraternities and sororities indicating they could face investigation (by university police) and punishment for making the wrong costume choice.Of course, this issue is not about Halloween. More and more colleges are creating "bias response teams" that students can contact if they feel they have been victimized by microaggressions. There is an increasing demand for safe spaces and trigger warnings to protect students not from physical danger, but from ideas, course material, and viewpoints they may find offensive. Conservative speakers are being banned from campus because students claim to find them threatening. Professors are being investigated for not being sufficiently politically correct in class, failing to predict what material might trigger students, or refusing to use gender neutral pronouns that are not even part of the English language.Even more concerning perhaps are recent moves to create racially segregated student retreats, student unions, and campus housing in the service of offering marginalized groups places of refuge and healing.Many might see such examples as evidence of positive change, a greater sensitivity to gender, racial, and cultural diversity. The problem is that these efforts, even if well-intended, promote a false psychology, that humans are inherently emotionally fragile and can be mentally destabilized or incapacitated by subtle and ambiguous offenses.Unless students are suffering from a severe mental illness, the type of pathology that would likely keep them from being able to attend and succeed in college to begin with, they should be perfectly capable of remaining psychologically healthy in the face of offensive Halloween costumes, distasteful jokes or comments, and sensitive course material.People are generally quite psychologically resilient. After all, as far as we know, we are the only species aware of our mortality, and that death can come at any time for reasons we often cannot predict or control. And yet, most of us are not paralyzed by anxiety about our inevitable demise. We are able to get out of bed each morning and be productive citizens. As part of a research project, my colleagues and I collected autobiographical narratives from older British adults who were children during World War II and had very detailed memories of being separated from family, having to take shelter underground during German bombing raids, and facing a considerable amount of personal upheaval and loss.Those experiences did not mentally break these individuals. In fact, they became sources of meaning and triumph, life events that helped define character and generate gratitude.My grandmother once told me she was thankful for the hunger and poverty she experienced during the Great Depression because it helped her grow into an empathetic adult and inspired her to always help those in need.Ironically, the victim protection campaigns many colleges are engaged in not only underestimate human resilience, they may actually cause the problems they are designed to solve because they suggest to students who wouldn't otherwise feel like victims that they are, in fact, victims.For instance, feminist professors are encouraging college women to feel fragile and vulnerable, and teaching them that they are not in charge of their own destiny but instead are victims of the patriarchy. I recently interviewed Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on feminism. When describing modern academic feminism, she said(The full interview can be read here .)I am especially concerned about the push to segregate students. Research in social psychology has long shown that segregating people into different groups does not improve relations between groups. It actually causes greater tension, hostility, and conflict.By nature, people show favoritism toward those they perceive as part of their own tribe, so the key to positive relations between people from different groups is to bring them together under a unified group identity, to foster a sense of common humanity. As Leigh Ann Walls, an army veteran, recently told me,In most real-world contexts, fragility signals weakness and dependence. But in the victimhood culture promoted on many college campuses, because fragility is celebrated, it signals high status. This creates an arms race in which different groups try to one up each other on which is the most threatened and vulnerable. As Hoff Sommers puts it, on many college campuses victimhood status "confers authority and prestige."Historically, people have fought prejudice and discrimination by demonstrating that they are equally intelligent, strong, and capable. I have yet to see any evidence that playing up one's emotional vulnerabilities will actually lead to any long-term positive outcomes.The self-focus of the victimhood movement also diminishes the real suffering going on in the world. I worked for a couple of years in community social and mental health services. It was eye-opening. I counseled women who had lost custody of their children and were desperately trying to develop needed life skills and sever relationships with abusive men in the hope of getting their kids back. I worked with homeless people who were trying to find a job and a place to live, but were struggling with addiction and mental health problems, making it hard for them to reliably comply with our program. I saw up close the crystal methamphetamine epidemic wreck many young lives.America is filled with truly hurting and broken people. They are an entirely different class of individuals than the growing number of college students demanding safe spaces and trigger warnings.Curiously, the loudest cries often come from students attending the most expensive and elite colleges. Poor single moms trying to work their way through community college don't have time to fetishize victimhood. I know that there are students who legitimately struggle with mental illness and they should get the help they need, but as a nation we cannot afford to celebrate and promote psychological fragility.Nothing good can come from treating colleges like hospitals, places where sick students come to be quarantined and healed. Instead, we should treat colleges like fitness centers for the brain, places where students learn to build their mental muscles. Training is hard, sometimes painful. But it makes one stronger.
More than 20,000 Hindus and Sikhs are expected to visit Pakistan this year to participate in 548th birth anniversary celebrations of Guru Nanak Dev in Nankana Sahib.

Evacuee Trust Property Board spokesman Amer Hashmi said, "We have made arrangements for more than 20,000 pilgrims at the Gurdwara Janamasthan Nankana Sahib. Besides this, they will be provided with foolproof security by the rangers and police."



More than 3,300 Sikhs will here tomorrow from India via Wagah Border.

"Some 3,316 visas have been issued to Indian Sikhs by the Pakistan's embassy in New Delhi and they are arriving here on Saturday by three special trains at Wagah railway station," Hashmi told PTI.

He said ETPB chief Siddiqul Farooq and Pakistan Gurdwara Parbhandik Committee office-bearers will receive them at Wagah.

"After their arrival the Indian Sikhs will be transported to Nankana Sahib, some 80km from Lahore, where they will attend the main function on November 13," he said.

The Indian pilgrims will also visit other gurdwaras in the Punjab province before they leave for their home on November 21.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A refugee shelter with beds for 400 single men has opened in Paris, part of an ongoing drive to take asylum-seekers off French streets after the demolition of the Calais "Jungle" camp.

The centre in a disused railway yard near Gare du Nord station will take in 50-80 people a day -- the estimated number of migrants who arrive in Paris daily, most of whom end up sleeping rough.

They can spend up to 10 days at the site where they will receive medical care and advice on seeking asylum before being transferred to various refugee hostels.

Three Eritreans with backpacks and woolly caps were among the first to arrive at the site, where they were greeted by a "Welcome" sign in French, Arabic, Pashto, Dari and other languages.

"It's nice here," said Thierno Diallo, a 31-year-old Guinean after he entered the new shelter, adding that he had previously been sleeping on the street.

According to the Paris town hall, 60 men were housed in the camp by yesterday evening.

The plan is to process those in the centre quickly and move them on elsewhere to free up places for new arrivals.

The centre is made up of a giant inflatable white-and-yellow reception hall and a 10,000-square-metre (110,000 square feet) hangar with dormitories, bathrooms, a canteen and a games area. Around 500 people have volunteered to assist the 120 staff.

"The idea is to create a place where every newly arrived migrant can be welcomed and offered dignified, humane shelter," said Bruno Morel, head of the Emmaus Solidarite housing charity in charge of the centre.

A separate facility for families and women will open in early 2017 in the southeastern suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine.

Unaccompanied minors will be sent to existing children's shelters around the city.

The opening of the men's centre comes a week after police cleared a camp in northeast Paris where 3,800 people -- mostly Afghans, Sudanese and Eritreans -- had been living in tents and mattresses under an elevated metro line.

Last month, authorities also demolished the notorious "Jungle" shantytown in the northern port of Calais -- the main launchpad for attempts to smuggle across the Channel to Britain.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Personal letters written by Indian Muslim soldiers who fought in World War I sharing their impression of England 100 years ago in comparison to their home country were today released by a literature expert here.

Islam Issa from Birmingham City University earlier this year found that at least 885,000 Muslims were recruited by the Allied forces in the war between 1914 and 1918. He released the letters to mark Armistice Day, or the end of the war.

The over 100-year-old letters highlight the experiences of Indian soldiers as they share their impressions of England in comparison to their home country, Heritage Daily reported.

Issa has been researching individual stories from the war for an exhibition commissioned by and held at the British Muslim Heritage Centre in Manchester, called Stories of Sacrifice.

During his research, he found that 1.5 million Indians and 280,000 Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians fought for the Allies during World War I, many of them Muslims.

"When I decided to look at soldiers' letters, I expected a very bleak outlook on the war. Of course, sometimes, that's exactly what I found. But quite often, the letters were about individual experiences and very normal, human things," said Issa.

"These anecdotes certainly helped shape my narrative for the Stories of Sacrifice exhibition. While there's an important narrative about the war as a whole, the personal and human narrative was probably more striking. Whatever your ideology or stance, you end up realising that these Muslim soldiers were individual humans and as a result, they were making sacrifices at that individual, human level," he said.

Complete with a virtual library, lesson plans and a toolkit for schools, the British Muslim Heritage Centre's exhibition is the first long-term exhibition of its kind, devoted solely to exemplifying the Muslim community's contribution and sacrifices during World War One.

On his trip to a London department store in 1915, soldier A.

Ali writes: "We visited a shop where 2000 men and women were working and everything can be bought. There is no need of asking as the price is written on everything."



In the same letter, he shares his experience of the London Underground: "Then we went in the train that goes under the earth, it was for us a strange and wonderful experience - they call it the underground train."



In another 1915 letter by Abdul Said, more opinions on shopping and butchers are shared.

"Every shop in this country is so arranged that one is delighted to look at them. Whether you buy much or little it is properly wrapped up, and if you tell the shop man to send it to your house you have only to give him your address and he delivers it.

"The butcher's shops in Hindustan are very dirty, but here they are so clean and tidy that there is absolutely no smell.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Madras High Court today dismissed



a PIL for a direction to the Central Pollution Control Board, New Delhi, to capture the dust and smoke particles from the atmosphere by using electrostatic precipitators in the polluted public places in the country.

"At present, there is no cause of concern as the problem does not exist in Chennai and the petition is dismissed", the court said dismissing a PIL from N Janardhanam, a mechanical engineer seeking.

The petitioner submitted that the main cities in the country were polluted with dust and smoke particles by lakhs of vehicles, operated by fuels and also dust pollutions are caused by other type of vehicles like battery and electrically operated vehicles.

Stating that in this context, we have to capture the dust and the smoke particles from the atmosphere to for a clean India.

The petitioner said that there were several types of electrostatic precipitators are available. But the authorities failed to capture the dust and smoke particles from the atmosphere by using Electrostatic precipitators (ESP) in the Polluted Public Places.

Contending that ESP are highly efficient filtration devices that minimally slow down the flow of gases through the devise and can easily remove find particles such as dust and smoke from the air system the petitioner said that a suction pump to pass the polluted air in a moderated speed through this devise has to be provided.

"The petitioner a Mechanical Engineer, seeks to plead for Electrostatic Precipitators to be installed which are stated to be highly efficient filtration devices and used for industrial purposes in Delhi. The cause for actions is stated to be the Delhi Air Quality. We are however , of the view that we are concerned with Chennai and the State of Tamil Nadu and not with Delhi, which has its own peculiar problems so far as air pollution is concerned."



"The position is not so in Chennai on account of its locational advantage being nest to the sea and thus sea breeze is of a great assistance in this behalf. We cannot thus say that in future this problem will arise merely on the say of the petitioner. At present there is no cause of concern as the problem does not exist in Chennai. The petition dismissed", the court said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today claimed that his government has completely eliminated terrorism from the country in three years and is building a "new Pakistan" with several development projects.

"It is my government that has eliminated terrorism from Pakistan in three years. No one else could do this. It is only my government that has completely eliminated this menace," he said, addressing a public rally in Sangla Hills, some 80km from here.

He vowed that the agenda of "those people trying to stop progress" in the country would not be successful.

"Today's Pakistan is much better than it was three years ago. We are making a new Pakistan. However, some forces do not want to see Pakistan progress. They are trying their best to stop Pakistan from progress but they will not succeed," he said.

He alleged that former military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf and the previous PPP government did not do anything for the country.

"Our government will end electricity loadshedding from the country in 2018. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) will also change the destiny of Pakistan," he said.

Sharif further said that today whole world is accepting that Pakistan is progressing and in coming years it will emerge an economically strong country on the map of the world.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the arrest of three robbers, who allegedly used to commit the crime in posh areas in the national capital, the Delhi police has solved five cases of burglary.

The police arrested Uttar Pradesh residents Sachin, 24, Manoj, 24, and Mukesh, 27, and recovered from them Rs five lakh, several silver and gold articles, including biscuit and coins and three luxury watches.

It said Mukesh was the receiver of the stolen property and five cases of New Friends Colony police station were solved.

Police said that on October 7, it got information regarding incidents of house burglaries in Friends Colony East area where locks of two flats were broken and jewellery and cash was found stolen.

During the investigation, the details of stolen articles were recorded and the CCTV Footages of the spot and the probable route used by the criminals were collected. The pictures of the suspects retrieved from the CCTV footage were widely publicized.

It claimed that the gang members did not use mobile phone at the time of incident and thereafter, they regularly changed their rented accommodations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
President Pranab Mukherjee will host Vice Chancellors and heads of higher educational institutions at the second Visitor's Conference next week.

The two-day conference is scheduled from November 16-18.

The President will also launch the National Student Startup Policy on the first day of the conference which will be attended by HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar and Anil D Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).

"The National Student Startup Policy has been formulated by AICTE with the aim to propel Indian youth to contribute to the nation's socio-economic progress through promotion of technology-driven student start-ups. Through an exposure on entrepreneurship, the policy will lend crucial soft skills like decision-making in the students," a statement issued by Rashtrapati Bhawan said.

"An Industry-Academia session will also take place on the first day of the Conference where eminent personalities from industry and academy will participate. 32 central institutions and 65 industry organisations will exchange as many as 68 MoUs on the occasion," it added.

Issues like creating world-class higher educational institutions, creating global alliance of institutes for research, innovation and technology development, making India a favoured destination for higher learning, technology-induced models of pedagogy, and funding options for higher education will be on agenda of the conference.

"On the second and third day of the conference, there will be panel discussions and group work on agenda items of the Conference as well as a presentation on converting Rashtrapati Bhavan into a smart township and extending the experience to select villages through Smart Model Gram project," the statement said.

The President is Visitor to 126 central institutes of higher learning.

"The Conferences at Rashtrapati Bhavan have accorded an opportunity to heads of central institutions to share their views on a host of important issues that affect the higher education sector in India.

"Recommendations and action points emerging from the deliberations are pursued by the administrative ministries, regulatory bodies, the institutions of higher learning and others concerned," the statement added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A vigilance team today arrested Laxman Prasad, the Project Director of Agricultural Technology Management Agency (ATMA), on graft charge from Bihar's East Champaran district, an official release said.

Acting on a complaint, a vigilance team led by the Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Vinay Kumar Singh laid a trap and caught the Project Director (ATMA) Laxman Prasad red-handed while accepting Rs. 5,000 in bribe at his office from a man, the release said.

Prasad had damanded bribe of the above mentioned amount from one Vaidnath Sharma, a native of Dighra village under Pusa police station area, for releasing his salary, it said.

The tainted Project Director (ATMA) has been taken to Muzaffarpur where he will produced before a designated judge (vigilance) for judicial remand, the release added.

The vigilance department has so far this year laid 89 traps and arrested 100 government servants of graft charge, it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Government think tank Niti Aayog today said public sector units to be put up for strategic sale have been identified and now it is up to the Finance Ministry to start the process of their privatisation.

Vice-Chairman Arvind Panagariya said that Niti Aayog has pushed strongly for closure of many sick PSUs.

"We have pushed very strongly for closure of many of the sick units. That is something that has been talked about for decades but has not happened. It's now happening," he said here at the Economic Editors Conference.

The former Chief Economist at the Asian Development Bank further said that Niti Aayog has also identified units for strategic sale, and the Cabinet has given its approval.

"So, next step will be for the Finance Ministry to start privatising these public sector units," he added.

The Cabinet in September, cleared strategic disinvestment of Allahabad-based Bharat Pumps and Compressors Limited. It is the first PSU to be put up for strategic sale by the Narendra Modi government, setting in motion the process of privatisation of the PSU.

Strategic disinvestment denotes sale of substantial portion of government shareholding in identified central public sector enterprises (CPSEs), up to 50 per cent or more, along with transfer of management control.

The Centre has set a target of Rs 20,500 crore from strategic sale in loss-making and sick PSUs this fiscal. However, according to officials, it is unlikely that even the process of majority stake sale in Bharat Pumps will be completed in the current financial year.

Panagariya also said that Niti Aayog is pushing for reforms in Medical Council of India.

"There is a big need of reform. So it is being reformed wholesale," he said.

Among others, the Aayog is also working on bringing in reforms in UGC and AICTC.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Jewellery firm Rajesh Exports Ltd (REL) today reported a 10.67 per cent jump in consolidated net profit to Rs 309.71 crore during the second quarter ended September 30, mainly on account of robust sales.

The company had posted a net profit of Rs 279.83 crore in the same period last year, REL said in a BSE filing.

Total income of the company jumped 45.44 per cent to Rs 64,458.9 crore in the July-September quarter of the current fiscal compared to Rs 44,319.6 crore in the year-ago period.

The company's order book position was at Rs 39,251.6 crore as on September 30.

"The company has posted record revenue and profits for the quarter compared to any other quarter since inception," REL Chairman Rajesh Mehta said.

The company is working towards creating products which would be unique for the global markets, he said.

With successful acquisition of the world's largest gold refinery Valcambi, the company would now look forward to increasing its global presence by introducing these products in the European and American markets for growing its profitabiity, Mehta added.

The company will also focus on the second phase of retail store expansion, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BERLIN - Germany's Federal Foreign Office confirmed the armed attack on the German Consul General in Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan on its social media account on Thursday night.

According to the Federal Foreign Office, combat operations have broken out in front of and on the territory of the German Consul General.

Meanwhile, Afghan security forces and forces of NATO-led Resolute Support (RS) mission from German army's Camp Marmal have arrived at the site.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will be constantly informed about the situation, said the Federal Foreign Office.

The crisis unit has met at the Federal Foreign Office at the request of Steinmeier after an armed attack on the German Consul General killed at least two people on Thursday in Afghanistan.


ECU art professor Hanna Jubran, at left, and students pour hot metal into mold at the annual ECU iron pour held Oct. 29. (Photos by Cliff Hollis)

Guest artist Allen Peterson assisted ECU art professor Hanna Jubran before the start of the iron pour.

Much like a colony, East Carolina University sculpture students became worker bees at an Oct. 29 iron pour and public performance.Visiting artist Allen Peterson of Atlanta led the performance with ECU's School of Art and Design titled "Carolina Cross-pollination," based on the natural behaviors of honeybees.Five-foot metal rods were inserted into the cast bee molds, and once hardened, the students "flew" the bees across the ECU sculpture yard in a glowing nighttime exhibition.Peterson said.Dressed in layers of protective clothing, gloves and steel-toe shoes, ECU students and faculty said teamwork is a big component of the iron pour.said Chris Morgan, one of about 15 sculpture students participating in the event.The hive of activity was the multi-layer cold blast furnace, which reduces and changes iron oxides into liquid iron called hot metal. Students dumped iron and coke (clean coal) that they had already broken into small pieces into the top of the cylinder while air was blown into the bottom, heating the iron to about 3,000 degrees before liquefying to fill about 40 molds.said art professor Hanna Jubran.All the iron used is recycled and cleaned radiators, pipes, sinks or bathtubs, he said.Students had been planning the event since the beginning of the semester. Each student was expected to have at least one mold although some had as many as five or six. Students of ECU alumnus and Pitt Community College instructor Matt Amante also cast molds for the iron pour.Jubran said.Combining Peterson's visit and the annual iron pour gave students an opportunity to learn from a working artist and advocate for honeybees. Some of the pieces will be sold at the holiday show to be held the first weekend of December.The iron pour represents a community as well as an artistic medium, Peterson said.Peterson said.Peterson said colony collapse disorder heightened his interest in honeybees, food systems and agriculture. During the winter of 2006-2007, some beekeepers began to report unusually high losses of 30 to 90 percent of their hives, according to the EPA website. Recent data shows while colony loss has declined, the causes of colony collapse disorder and honeybee health are still being studied.Peterson said.The ECU Sculpture Guild sponsored Peterson's visit Oct. 27-29. The Atlanta-based Peterson holds a bachelor of fine arts in painting from Birmingham-Southern College and a master of fine arts in sculpture from the University of Minnesota. His work is featured in several public art displays and collections in the Southeast and internationally. More information is at www.allenpeterson.com
Information and Broadcasting minister M Venkaiah Naidu today apprised parliamentarians that the Registrar of Newspapers in India (RNI) has been constantly re-engineering itself to make procedures and process simple.

Naidu said this in a meeting of Consultative Committee of I&B Ministry to discuss on the subject 'Working of the Registrar of Newspapers for India' that he chaired.

The minister said the RNI has been constantly re-engineering itself to make procedures and process simpler. The focus of the Ministry is to make the processes online thereby promoting transparency and accountability, he said.

Naidu further mentioned that in view of the phenomenal growth of the print media sector, particularly after the opening up of economy in 1990s, the print media policy/guidelines had undergone some changes, an official statement said.

There was a need to update contemporaries and revise the legal mechanism in the print sector and to give statutory backing to Print Media Policy and various guidelines, he said and apprised the members about the salient features of the proposed Press and Registration of Books and Publication (PRBP) Bill.

Parliamentarians Manoj Kumar Tiwari, Vivek Gupta, Dr. Sanjay Jaiswal, Dev (Moon Moon Sen) Varma, Harivansh, Tapas Paul and Innocent attended the meeting, the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SBI Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya today said the bank is planning an initial public offering (IPO) of its life insurance JV, SBI Life, in the next 18-24 months.

Last month, SBI had said it would offload up to 5 per cent stake in its life insurance joint venture.

"We have already said we want to divest a small portion through an IPO. So, depending on the talks with JV partner, we will take a call on the public issue of SBI Life, which we hope will come in the next 18-24 months," Bhattacharya told reporters.

SBI Life, valued at over Rs 40,000 crore, is a joint venture between the bank and BNP Paribas Cardif. SBI owns 74 per cent in the JV while the French partner holds the remaining 26 per cent stake.

On SBI General Insurance stake sale, she said a plan is in place but it has not finalised the timing.

"We are quite okay that the company has just turned around. We are very happy with their progress and we believe that the valuation will come up in the next few quarters," she added.

SBI General is a JV between the bank and Insurance Australia Group. SBI owns 74 per cent of the total equity capital while the Australian firm holds the remaining 26 per cent.

When asked about stake sale in SBI Card, where GE had announced its plans to exit, Bhattacharya said the deal is likely to happen by the middle of January.

"In respect of SBI Card, the deal is on course to getting completed. Hopefully, we will be able to finish it, if not by Christmas, then definitely by January 15...," she said.

In April 2015, the American conglomerate General Electric had announced that it would be moving away from the financial business and would sell majority of assets under GE Capital.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SBI today said that the central board today approved issuance of 13.63 crore shares to minority shareholders of its three listed subsidiaries and Government of India, that wholly owns Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), as part of consolidation exercises.

The board has "approved issuance of maximum 13,63,65,146 equity shares, of face value of Re 1 each, to the shareholders of State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur (SBBJ), State Bank of Mysore (SBM), State Bank of Travancore (SBT) and the Government of India for its shareholding in BMB as on the record date at the agreed swap ratio...," SBI said in a filing to the BSE.

SBI will issue 4.42 crore shares to Government of India for its 100 per cent stake in BMB.

So the government is expected to get capital appreciation of 20 per cent to Rs 1,207 crore over its investment of Rs 1,000 crore in BMB as per the today's closing price.

Shares of SBI closed at Rs 272.90, down 3.09 per cent per share on the BSE.

Public holding in SBBJ is 24.93 per cent while in SBT is 20.91 per cent. In SBM, the public holding was 10 per cent at the end of September.

As per the agreed swap ratio, minority shareholders or public shareholders of SBBJ will get 28 equity shares of SBI of the face value of Re 1 each to be issued in lieu of 10 equity shares of SBBJ of the face value of Rs 10 each.

Minority shareholders of SBM and SBT will get 22 equity shares of SBI as against 10 equity shares of SBM and SBT of the face value of Rs 10 each.

It also said as much as 4,42,31,510 shares of SBI of the face value of Re 1 will be issued to the Government of India for their shareholding in BMB. Government holds 100 crore shares of the face value of Rs 10 each in BMB.

The entire exercises will result in increase in the issued capital of SBI from Rs 776.35 crore to Rs 789.99 crore subject to approval of the schemes of acquisition of SBBJ, SBM, SBT and BMB by the Government of India.

With the merger of all the five associates and BMB, SBI will become a global-sized bank and could compete with the largest in the world, with an asset base of Rs 37 trillion (Rs 37 lakh crore) or over USD 555 billion, with 22,500 branches and 58,000 ATMs. It will have over 50 crore customers.

SBI has close to 16,500 branches, including 191 foreign offices spread across 36 countries.

It first merged State Bank of Saurashtra with itself in 2008. Two years later, State Bank of Indore was merged with the parent.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India and Japan on Friday sought a peaceful solution to the territorial disputes in the strategic South China Sea, saying parties involved in the matter must not resort to "threat or use of force", in remarks that could anger China which is opposed to any outside interference.

After their comprehensive talks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe also reiterated their commitment to respect freedom of navigation and overflight, and unimpeded lawful commerce, based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

"In this context, they urged all parties to resolve disputes through peaceful means without resorting to threat or use of force and exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities, and avoid unilateral actions that raise tensions," according to a joint statement issued after their talks.

"Regarding the South China Sea, the two prime ministers stressed the importance of resolving the disputes by peaceful means, in accordance with universally recognised principles of international law including the UNCLOS," it said.

The remarks may not go down well with China, which has been asking countries to refrain from "interfering" in the disputed South China Sea.

Ahead of Modi's visit, a Chinese state media report on Wednesday warned India it may suffer "great losses" in bilateral trade if it joins Japan in asking China to abide by an international tribunal's ruling quashing Beijing's claims over the SCS dispute.

As the leaders of the state parties to the UNCLOS, Modi and Abe "reiterated their view that all parties should show utmost respect to the UNCLOS, which establishes the international legal order of the seas and oceans".

This assumes significance given that China had rejected a verdict given by an international tribunal striking down Chinese claims over the SCS.

China has been making aggressive advances in the strategic region - parts of which are also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei - by rapidly building artificial islets that experts fear could be potentially used as military posts.

China claims by far the largest portion of territory - an area defined by the "nine-dash line" which stretches hundreds of miles south and east from its most southerly province of Hainan.

China has also objected in the past to India's Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) undertaking exploration at the invitation of Vietnam in the SCS, which is believed to be rich in undersea deposits of oil and gas.

India and the US have been calling for freedom of passage in the international waters, much to the discomfort to China.

Modi and Abe asked North Korea, which in September claimed

to have conducted its fifth and potentially most powerful nuclear test, to comply with its international obligations towards the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

India and Japan's interest have been converging on strategic issues like the dispute in the South China Sea, through which USD 5 trillion of trade passes annually, and on the threat Japan perceive from a nuclear-armed North Korea.

"The two prime ministers reaffirmed their determination to cooperate against proliferation activities posing a threat to the region," the joint statement said.

India and Japan also called for "expeditious reforms of the UN including the UNSC to make it more legitimate, effective and representative, taking into account the contemporary realities of the 21st century and reiterated their resolve to work closely with like-minded partners to realise this goal."

"The two Prime Ministers reiterated their support for each other's candidature, based on the firmly shared recognition that India and Japan are legitimate candidates for permanent membership in an expanded UNSC," the statement said.

India and Japan along with Germany and Brazil are part of G4 nations, who support each other's bids for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council.

"Prime Minister Abe briefed Prime Minister Modi on Japan's efforts to further contribute to peace, stability and prosperity of the region including through initiatives such as 'Proactive Contribution to Peace,' the statement said.

It said Modi acknowledged Japan's positive contribution to regional and global stability and prosperity.

"Recognising India as the largest democracy and a fast growing large economy in the Asia-Pacific region, Japan firmly supports India's membership in the APEC. The two Prime Ministers decided to work towards liberalisation and facilitation of trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region," the statement added.

On clean energy cooperation, "they further desired to strengthen bilateral energy cooperation as it will contribute not only to the energy development of both countries, but also to worldwide energy security, energy access and climate change issue."

The two prime ministers welcomed the early entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and reaffirmed their commitment to work together in developing the rules for successful implementation of the agreement.
People in Delhi had a harrowing time for the second consecutive day today as they stood in long queues to exchange their Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes with new ones, with some even seen running out of patience due to non-functional ATMs and jampacked banks.

The entire process of exchanging notes, that the Centre had promised would be smooth, turned extremely chaotic and confusing as facilities like banks and post offices wilted under pressure.

Many ATMs ran out of cash within hours of opening due to heavy rush to withdraw lower denomination currency. The machines were equipped to tender Rs 100 notes, while most simply did not work.

Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi joined one such queue at the Parliament Street branch of SBI in the afternoon in "solidarity" with common men, but it left many fuming as they claimed they were not being allowed inside by his security posse.

Demonetisation of Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes also hit trade in the walled city and small traders. Hawkers and vendors complained of their daily earnings getting halved while many struggled to exchange notes in the absence of identity cards.

Delhiites found it difficult in paying for their household items, essential commodities and vegetables as they ran out of their savings of small currencies.

To manage anxious crowd, as many as 3,400 personnel of paramilitary and Delhi Police, along with 200 quick reaction teams, were deployed at ATMs and banks across the city.

Many of the ATMs were not operative despite an announcement made by the Centre on November 8 that they will be operational from Friday following two-day closure.

However, people returned empty handed as they were told by security guards that the ATMs have not been stocked up with cash till now.

"I had been saving money but it wasn't of any use as all of them were in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations. My only hope after surviving two days without cash was that the ATMs will be operational from today, but owing to many of the ATMs being closed, I had to borrow money from my neighbours," said Sunita Dass, a homemaker.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Madhya Pradesh High Court today disposed of a PIL demanding probe by a sitting high court judge into the alleged encounter deaths of eight SIMI activists on the outskirts of Bhopal, asking the petitioner to approach the judicial commission instead.

A division bench here headed by acting Chief Justice Rajendra Menon also refused to monitor the probe, as demanded by journalist Awdhesh Bhargava who questioned the genuineness of the police encounter.

During the hearing, Additional Advocate General Purshendra Kourav informed that the government had constituted a judicial commission comprising retired high court judge S K Pandey to conduct inquiry into the encounter.

The commission had been asked to complete the inquiry in three months and there was no need for the high court to monitor the probe separately, he said.

The court accepted the argument and disposed of the petition, asking Bhargava to approach the commission with his submission.

Eight undertrial activists of the banned outfit Students Islamic Movement of India were killed in the alleged encounter with police on October 31 after they escaped from the Bhopal Central Jail.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Residents of five Haryana villages, which have been adopted by President Pranab Mukherjee, can now have access to doctors at Rashtrapati Bhavan with upgraded facility of Ayush clinic being launched here today under the 'SmartGram' initiative.

The villages -- Alipur, Rojka Meo, Harchandpur and Taj Nagar, all in Gurugram district, and Dauhla in Nuh district -- were adopted by the President in July with an aim to develop them into smart villages using the existing resources on the patterns of development works in Rashtrapati Bhawan.

Besides, Ayush clinic and wellness centre, these villages will also have 'Water ATM' for supplying clean drinking water and skill training centre for youths to increase their employability.

The wellness centre has an e-doctor service which can be used for consultation with doctors in Rashtrapati Bhawan in times of need.

The inauguration of the upgraded facilities was done by Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar in the presence of Omita Paul, Secretary to the President.

In Alipur, Khattar, along with Paul, inaugurated a training centre, a wellness centre and a common service centre. While the training centre imparts knowledge in various skills like sewing, computer, the wellness centre has people trained at Rashtrapati Bhawan in Ayush practice.

"Only distributing money to help people is not the solution to the real problem. Providing them with jobs and skills so that they can sustain themselves is necessary," Khattar said.

Khattar said that after the Narendra Modi government asked all Members of Parliament to adopt a village each under Adarsh Gram Yojna, the Haryana government exhorted Members of Legislative Assembly to do the same.

"But the number of villages adopted remained 105 while there are a total 6,700 villages in Haryana," he said.

"While we were stepping up our efforts in this direction, the President announced he would be adopting five villages of the state to develop them as SmartGrams," Khattar said, expressing happiness and gratitude to Mukherjee.

Paul, while thanking the Haryana government for its support to the SmartGram initiative, expressed hope that in days to come these villages will become the centre-point of the project.

"The journey from Smart Rashtrapati Bhawan to SmartGram began on July 2 when the President and the Chief Minister in a meeting decided to select these five villages for developing them as models.

"We have done whatever was possible in these four months. This is an experiment which shows that when the Centre, the state government, district authorities, panchayat, people from public and private sector and committed citizens work together, there is hardly anything that cannot be done," she said.

Paul said, "According to our definition, a SmartGram is one with human values, high-tech and prosperous village which provides all villagers a life of happiness, and peace."



A SmartGram has all necessary physical and social infrastructures along with a layer of information which helps in governance and delivery of governance, she noted.

She said the project envisages a development model for villages which could be easily and conveniently emulated.

Khattar inaugurated the upgraded infrastructure at UdyogKunj in Alipur where he also distributed keys of e-rickshaws to the locals. He also awarded cheques to the heads of four villages for their works in promoting sanitisation and cleanliness.

In Rojka Meo village, Khattar also inaugurated a water ATM, providing clean water for 40 paise a litre.

On July 2, Mukherjee had inaugurated the smart model village pilot project under which works were initiated to develop Dauhla, Alipur, Harichandpur and Taj Nagar in Gurgaon district and Rojka-Meo in Nuh district as Adarsh Gram.

Khattar said his government has established a skill development university -- Vishwakarma University-- in Palwal in Faridabad district.

'Saksham Yojna' launched on November 30 under which postgraduates without jobs will be provided 100 hours of work in a month against a payment of Rs 9,000.

The registration for it has began and the government also plans to launch such schemes for other levels of educated people like graduates and 10+2 pass-outs, he said.

(REOPENS DES20)



The focus of the Haryana government is on e-governance which not only saves time but also enhances efficiency, the chief minister said.

"We want to push for providing WiFi connectivity in villages so that people do not have to run from pillar to post for delivery of services," he said.

Highlighting the government's commitment to the cleanliness drive, he said a new scheme has been started in the state as per which the cleanest village in a block will be awarded once a month.

"126 villages each month in Haryana will get the award money under the scheme," he said.

He said the Haryana government would observe 2017 as the "Garib Kalyan Varsh" with a host of schemes to be rolled out next year for the poor.
The number of migrants illegally entering the United States from Mexico jumped more than 16 percent in October, US officials have said.

The US Department of Homeland Security said it detained 46,195 people in October, up from 39,501 in September and 37,048 in August.

"There are currently about 41,000 individuals in our immigration detention facilities -- typically, the number in immigration detention fluctuates between 31,000 and 34,000," DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement yesterday.

"I have authorised US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to acquire additional detention space for single adults so that those apprehended at the border can be returned to their home countries as soon as possible," he said in his statement.

"We have also engaged with a number of countries to repatriate their citizens more quickly, and they have agreed to do so," Johnson added, noting that many of the new arrivals have been asylum seekers and young children.

"Our borders cannot be open to illegal migration. We must, therefore, enforce the immigration laws consistent with our priorities," he said.

"We prioritise the deportation of undocumented immigrants who are convicted of serious crimes and those apprehended at the border attempting to enter the country illegally."



Immigration officials have said that most of the new arrivals from Mexico are actually Central Americans making the arduous journey to seek work and safety in the United States -- amid poverty and a surge in gang-related violence at home.

The latest immigration figures come two days after the November 8 presidential election that closed a campaign in which immigration has loomed large.

The immigration has been central in the candidacy of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to build a wall along the southwestern border and make Mexico pay for it.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Creative works of 97 artists, cutting across disciplines, forms and styles will feature in the third edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which, the organisers claim, is the largest celebration of contemporary art in South Asia.

The art extravaganza, titled 'Forming in the pupil of an eye', will open on December 12 and run for 108 days till March 29.

"Over that near-four month period, KMB 2016 will feature the performances and production of 97 artists, cutting across disciplines, forms and styles. The final list includes writers, dancers, poets, musicians and theatre practitioners along with a host of visual artists from 36 countries," a KMB release said here today.

In keeping with the artistic vision of its curator, eminent artist Sudarshan Shetty, KMB 2016 seeks to question the labels attributed to and blur the lines between various modes of artistic expression.

The tone had been set as early as last year with the announcement of iconic Chilean poet-revolutionary Raul Zurita as the Biennale's 'first artist'.

There are 36 Indian artists participating in the Biennale, including some of the leading lights of their respective crafts.

KMB 2016 will feature works by master cartoonist E P Unny, eminent Malayalam litterateur Anand, renowned graphic artist Orijit Sen, stage performances by Anamika Haksar and Kalakshetra Manipur, Sangam poetry recitals, dance performances and printmaking, among other artistic mediums.

"The final list of artists is but a sampling of the richness and range to be found along the art spectrum. The coming together of, and the conversations between, their diverse approaches, sensibilities, practices, creations and performances as they unfold in Kochi will showcase to the world what the 'People's Biennale' is all about," Shetty said.

The main exhibition - spread across 11 venues in Fort Kochi-Mattancherry and Ernakulam - will be supported by an ancillary programme of events that includes the Students' Biennale.

It is a unique exhibitory platform for the works of over 350 young artists from 55 schools across the country and a core component in the Kochi Biennale Foundation's art education and outreach efforts.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Judges of subordinate courts here should have a "broad mindset" and not take "hasty decisions" while dealing with matters, Delhi High Court today said while hearing a plea for contempt action against some CBI officials for allegedly intimidating a trial court judge.

The trial court judge had written to the high court to initiate contempt action against some CBI officials as he was offended by some paragraphs of a judgement cited by the agency during arguments in a corruption case against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's principal secretary Rajendra Kumar and others.

During hearing of the contempt plea, CBI claimed before Justice Manmohan that it was doing its job and in no manner had its officers tried to intimidate or threaten the special judge.

"We won't be able to work as an investigating agency under these circumstances," CBI's counsel, senior advocate Maninder Singh, said.

Considering the CBI's contentions, Justice Manmohan said "the judge, who is hearing a matter, should have a broad mindset. The judge should not be handling matters in such a hasty manner."



CBI also said "the judges should not be so thin skinned (sic) that they get agitated by the submissions of the parties." It said the paragraphs from the judgement were only cited to put one's case and if that is taken against the investigators, "how will we investigate the case".

Singh also said that "this should not be a judicial temperament or the judicial officers' conduct".

On April 8, Special CBI Judge Ajay Kumar Jain had sent a reference to Delhi High court to initiate contempt of court proceedings against CBI'sDeputy Superintendent of Police Jayant Kashmiri and other agency officials for allegedly intimidating him and trying to interfere in judicial work.

Taking suo motu cognisance of the matter, the high court had appointed an amicus curiae in the matter to assist it.

During the hearing today, the amicus told the court that action of the special court was not warranted and it could have restrained itself from asking for contempt proceedings against the official.

"In no manner the investigating agency or its officials' act was contemptuous," the amicus submitted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
District 40 (R+3) Five-term incumbent Marilyn Avila (R-Wake) lost to a former judge, Democrat Joe John.

Five-term incumbent Marilyn Avila (R-Wake) lost to a former judge, Democrat Joe John. District 46 (D+4) Republican Brenden Jones beat Democrat Tim Benton and Libertarian Thomas Howell Jr. (Incumbent Democrat Ken Waddell did not seek re-election.)

Republican Brenden Jones beat Democrat Tim Benton and Libertarian Thomas Howell Jr. (Incumbent Democrat Ken Waddell did not seek re-election.) District 49 (R+1) Republican incumbent Gary Pendleton (R-Wake) lost to Democrat Cynthia Ball.

Republican incumbent Gary Pendleton (R-Wake) lost to Democrat Cynthia Ball. District 51 (R+5) First-term incumbent Democrat Brad Salmon (D-Harnett) lost to Republican candidate John Sauls.

First-term incumbent Democrat Brad Salmon (D-Harnett) lost to Republican candidate John Sauls. District 88 (R+6) Incumbent Rob Bryan lost his seat to Democrat Mary Belk.

Incumbent Rob Bryan lost his seat to Democrat Mary Belk. District 92 (D+1) Chaz Beasley, a Democrat, defeated Beth Danae Caulfield. Caulfield was named the Republican candidate after Rep. Charles Jeter resigned his seat and declined to run for re-election, though he had won the primary.

Chaz Beasley, a Democrat, defeated Beth Danae Caulfield. Caulfield was named the Republican candidate after Rep. Charles Jeter resigned his seat and declined to run for re-election, though he had won the primary. District 119 (D+1) Incumbent Joe Sam Queen was defeated by Republican Mike Clampitt.

According to initial voting returns, Republican legislators seem likely to keep clear control of the North Carolina General Assembly, losing one seat overall in the House of Representatives but gaining a seat in the Senate.In both houses the GOP apparently will keep veto-proof majorities, which will become more important if Democrat Roy Cooper holds on to his slim lead in the governor's race.According to the latest figures from the State Board of Elections, Republicans will hold a 74-46 edge in the House, and 35-15 in the Senate.It should be kept in mind that some of the initial tallies are very close, and there's a chance the final results could be different in some cases.A three-fifths vote in each legislature chamber is needed to override a governor's veto. In the House, this is 72 out of the 120 seats. In the Senate it is 30.Democrats had hoped they could cut into Republican supermajorities, but seem to have fallen short. A supermajority allows the legislature to override vetoes by the governor. Since gaining supermajorities in both chambers in 2012, just two years after gaining control of both for the first time in history, the Republican-led legislature has overridden four of five gubernatorial vetoes.Using the 2012 Civitas Partisan Index (CPI), earlier this year we winnowed down the key legislative elections to 20 races to watch in November. You can see more here The CPI compares votes cast for statewide races in each NC legislative district to votes cast statewide. The end result is a letter (D or R) followed by a number, indicating the extent to which each district leans one way or the other relative to the state as a whole. For example, a district whose voters gave 5 more percentage points to the statewide Democratic candidates compared to the statewide vote average for those Democratic candidates receives an index score of D+5.The one seat that switched parties in the Senate was in District 13, where Democratic Sen. Jane Smith lost to Republican Danny Earl Britt Jr. Britt, who runs a law firm in Lumberton and is a major in the North Carolina National Guard, took better than 55 percent of the votes in a district that leans Democratic with a D+12 ranking on the CPI.In the House, three seats previously held by Democrats were won by Republicans, while Democrats took four seats previously held by Republicans.
Upping the ante on SYL canal issue, all 42 Congress MLAs in poll-bound Punjab today resigned their membership even as the Parkash Singh Badal government constituted a 3-member panel to explore legal remedies after the Supreme Court yesterday ruled in favour of neighbouring Haryana in the water sharing dispute.

The MLAs marched to the state assembly after holding a meeting of the Congress Legislature Party and handed over their resignation to the secretary of the House in the absence of Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal to protest the SC order.

Under the rules, the resignation of an MP or MLA is accepted only if it has been handed to the Speaker in person. Assembly secretary Lakhanpal Mishra said he will submit the resignations to the Speaker and it was for him to accept or reject them.

Meanwhile, the Badal government has formed a three-member legal team to go into the issue and explore the possibility of a remedy after the apex court order.

"A legal team will study the judgement, examine it critically and then give some recommendations and advice to the government," Punjab Advocate General (AG) Ashok Aggarwal said. The team comprises three Additional Advocates General-- Kamal Sehgal, Vinod Bhardwaj and Rajat Khanna.

"By tomorrow evening we may be ready with the advice," he said.

The state's Congress leadership also decided to meet President Pranab Mukherjee to seek his intervention in the issue and demanded that a fresh tribunal be constituted to assess the availability of water in Punjab.

"We are going to ask for time to meet President and we will apprise him of the situation. President knows everything (about the issue)...We will present him Memorandum," Amarinder said after resignation by party MLAs.

Meanwhile, seeking to mine public sentiments over the emotive issue, Congress and Akali Dal leadership continued to attack each other.

Taking on the Badal government, Amarinder said it had failed to protect the interest of the state.

"If they are so concerned about the impact of the SYL verdict on Punjab, why have the Akali MPs not resigned their parliamentary seats?," asked Amarinder, accusing the Badal government of being "solely responsible" for the "mess".

The Punjab Congress chief demanded that Akali MPs



Harsimrat Kaur Badal, Ranjit Singh Brahmpura, Prem Singh Chandumajra and Sher Singh Ghubaya immediately quit their parliamentary seats to prove their interest in resolving the vexed SYL matter in the interest of Punjab.

"Till they do that, they really have no face to make allegations against others," he said.

Amarinder, who had quit his Lok Sabha membership yesterday, said all Congress MPs had handed over his resignation letters to him after the SC ruling yesterday, but he asked them not to press for acceptance and continue their fight on the SYL issue in Parliament.

Congress MP Ambika Soni said,"We have been asked to fight for the cause of Punjab in Parliament.

Asked if the Congress MLAs will attend the special session of the assembly called by the government on November 16 on the SYL canal issue, Amarinder said,"Once the resignation is given, the matter is over. It is up to the Speaker to accept it. We have nothing to do with assembly session. We will go to people."



Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal hit back at Amarinder, calling the resignation exercise a "drama".

"Had Amarinder been sincere and honest he would have announced not to contest the forthcoming assembly polls instead of pitching for President's rule in the state for paving the way for smooth completion of SYL canal in the absence of any democratically elected people's government," he said.

Accusing the Congress of being responsible for the present situation, Badal reaffirmed that "not a single drop of water will be allowed to be taken out of Punjab and not a single brick will be allowed to be laid for construction of the SYL canal."



Meanwhile, the CPI(M) asked the Centre to work out a mutually acceptable agreement between the states concerned on water sharing.

"In view of the Supreme Court verdict on the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004, the CPI(M) calls upon the Centre to work out a mutually acceptable and beneficial agreement on the sharing of waters with both the governments of Punjab and Haryana," the party's Politburo said in a statement.

A five-judge bench headed by Justice A R Dave yesterday ruled that the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004 was "unconstitutional" and that the state could not have taken a "unilateral" decision to terminate the water sharing agreement with Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi and Chandigarh.
The proposed deep sea Tajpur port will not hinder development of Haldia Multi-Modal Terminal under Jal Marg Vikas Yojana, a top official said today.

"We are targeting cargo coming to Haldia in mid-sized vessels and thus proposed Tajpur or Sagar ports do not come in the way," Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) Vice-Chairman Parvir Pandey said here on the sidelines of a maritime conclave organised by Bengal Chamber.

The MMT project would cost around Rs 500 crore and the contract is expected to be tendered very shortly, he said.

Pandey said World Bank has also given approval for the Rs 350 crore new navigational lockgate at Farraka contract awarded to L&T and SBE Belgium consortium.

The new lock gate is crucial for the Rs 5,369-crore Jal Marg Vikas project of national waterways-I.

Pandey said with the old lock gate, passage of ships takes two days, which will be reduced sharply.

He said Nepal government has agreed to tweak the Indo-Nepal treaty to include waterways as an additional method of transportation.

"Container cargo now can go till Kalughta, north of Patna from Haldia and then it can take roadways which is just 2.5 hours to Nepal," Pandey said.

India is also planning to transport LNG to Nepal and a terminal is been proposed at Gazipur under the project.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
All central government departments have been asked to take ex-post facto approval on any decision already approved by the Prime Minister and on Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) signed by them within one month time.

The move comes after instances of delayed submission of notes by departments were noticed by .

Existing norms stipulates that in cases where approval of the Prime Minister has been obtained "the note for seeking ex-post facto approval of the Cabinet or concerned Cabinet Committee should be forwarded to latest within one month of approval".

The departments concerned also have to take timely approval of Cabinet for all MoUs that are signed by them. In case of any delay, a note should specify the reason and justification for the late submission.

"In spite of the clear instructions on the subject, instances of delayed submission of notes by ministries and departments have been observe. In many cases, the ministry and department have not detailed reason and justification for the delay in submitting the note beyond the prescribed time period. This has been viewed seriously," a directive issued by to all the secretaries of central government departments said.

All departments have been asked to forward notes seeking ex-post facto approval of Cabinet/Cabinet Committee or for information well within the stipulated period of one month, it said seeking "strict compliance" of the order.
A powerful Taliban truck bomb struck the German consulate in Afghanistan's northern Mazar-i-Sharif city, killing at least two people and wounding more than 100 in a major militant assault in the war-torn country.

The Taliban called it a "revenge attack" for US airstrikes in the volatile province of Kunduz earlier this month that left up to 32 civilians dead.

The huge explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil city yesterday, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of German consulate in the city," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

German officials in Kabul declined to comment when contacted by AFP. A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting at his ministry.

"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."



Afghan special forces cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel. Helicopters were heard flying over the diplomatic mission early Friday as ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area, according to an AFP reporter near the scene.

At least two dead bodies and more than 100 wounded people -- including at least 10 children -- had so far been brought to two city hospitals, said local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez. Some of the wounded are in a critical condition, he added.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jumpstart stalled peace negotiations.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the German consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents are routinely known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The death toll from a powerful Taliban truck bombing at the German consulate in Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif city rose to at least six on Friday, with more than 100 others wounded in a major militant assault.

The Taliban said the bombing that occured late on Thursday tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars awas a "revenge attack" for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead.

The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

All German staff from the consulate were unharmed, according to the foreign ministry in Berlin.

But seven Afghan civilians were killed, including two motorcyclists who were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop, said deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri.

A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added.

Local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez said the city hospitals received six dead bodies, including two killed by bullets.

At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries, he added.

"The consulate building has been heavily damaged," the German foreign ministry said in a statement. "Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families."

A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting.

"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."

Afghan special forces have cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area after the explosion.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.
The Jharkhand government



today issued "letter of intent" to three private universities including Arka Jain University at a small function held in the chief minister's office in Ranchi.

Jain Group of Institution (JGI) has proposed to set up a university "Arka Jain University" in the vicinity of Jamshedpur and the letter of intent was today issued by the Chief Minister, Raghubar Das, Amit Shrivastav, Group Representative and COO, Jharkhand, said.

We have proposed to start Diploma/Polytechnic courses, which will be in line with government's vision of skill development and other courses at undergraduate level of commerce/computer application, Biotechnology, microbiology etc from 2017, he said.

Apart from JGI, he said letter of intent was also issued to two other private universities, to be established in Ranchi, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 10-day-old infant died at Sholayur in Attappady here, one of the largest tribal settlements in Kerala, owing to low birth weight, health officials said today.

The baby boy, born to one Manikandan and Mari, natives of Chavadiyur in Sholayur, died in Thrissur Medical College Hospital yesterday, officials here said.

The child, weighing 1.14 kilogram, was born at the Kottathara Super-Specialty hospital here on October 31, and later shifted to the Thrissur MCH last week, after his health condition worsened, they said.

As many as seven infants have died in various tribal hamlets in Attapapdy so far this year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
US president-elect Donald Trump pledged today to work for a "just, lasting peace" between Israel and the Palestinians, in his first public message on the issue since his upset victory.

"I believe that my administration can play a significant role in helping the parties to achieve a just, lasting peace," Trump said in a message published by the Israel Hayom newspaper.

He also said that any peace deal "must be negotiated between the parties themselves, and not imposed on them by others".

France is currently pushing for an international conference to revitalise the moribund peace process, but Israel has said it will not take part -- saying any peace talks should be bilateral between the two sides.

Russia has also offered to host direct talks between the two sides that have so far yet to take place.

The Palestinians have called for international involvement, accusing Israel of reneging on past agreements.

Speaking today after meeting Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said Trump's victory was "American business".

"We followed the electoral process for over a year. What matters to us is what Mr Trump will say once he enters the White House," he said at a press conference.

He added that he had stressed to Medvedev his willingness to hold negotiations in Russia "but the Israeli side asked to postpone it".

Medvedev said Russia was willing to "immediately" open a dialogue between the two sides, whether under Russian or international mediation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama have had frosty relations for much of the past eight years, but initial indications are that Trump's victory could see a warming of personal relations.

Netanyahu was among the first leaders Trump spoke to after his election victory, and the president-elect's message called Israel a "beacon of hope".

"Israel and America share so many of the same values, such as freedom of speech, freedom of worship and the importance of creating opportunities for all citizens to pursue their dreams," Trump's Israel Hayom message said.

"Israel is the one true democracy and defender of human rights in the Middle East and a beacon of hope to countless people."



Israeli right-wingers have hailed Trump's win as an opportunity to consolidate control over the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Two Bangladeshi nationals were arrested from Agartala airport for travelling without valid documents, police said today.

Officer-in-charge of airport police station, Rana Chaterjee said Abdul Momin Sheikh (24) and Sajid Alam were nabbed by CISF officials last evening.

They were scheduled to go to Mumbai via Kolkata on a SpiceJet flight.

On suspicion, the CISF officials asked them to show their identity cards and they showed Indian Pan Cards and Aadhar cards, but the addresses in their cards were not the same, Chaterjee said.

During preliminary interrogation they admitted that they hailed from Noakhali district of Bangladesh.

The CISF then handed them over to the Agartala airport police station.

Abdul Momin Sheikh works in a Mumbai Mosque as an Imam and Sajid Alam is his younger brother and both of them had obtained forged Pan Cards and Aadhar Cards from Mumbai, he said.

They had gone to their ancestral home in Noakhali and were returning to Mumbai yesterday.

Chaterjee said both of them were being interrogated by the state police and Central intelligence officials.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NO SHARING

DEMOCRACY IS TWO WOLVES AND ONE SHEEP VOTING ON WHAT IS FOR DINNER.

Regardless of who was your champion in this past presidential election: Will you recognize the duly elected leader of the Free World? I will never recognize President Donald J. Trump because he is not worthy. I will recognize President Donald J. Trump, providing he respects the office in which he holds. "At this point, what difference does it make?" 89 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



I guess protest were to be expected, as that seems to be the only way that a large percentage (perhaps majority) of our population reacts to the reality that not all things go their way. How could we elect a President who did not receive the most popular votes? Once again, we see the deficiency of our educational system. About the only thing this proves to me is that the Constitution of the United States is not the law of the land unless it allows the rule of mobs, malcontents, and disadvantaged.It is also somewhat interesting that the legal protection of the MINORITY population is not quite as important as it was on November 7, 2016.Bu minority I mean the voters for Trump who are less than 50%.I guess it depends on what the definition of MINORITY is is. Some anger is to be expected and protesters will point to the fact that they are protected by the 1st amendment which allows peaceful protest. Our country is quickly deteriorating into a society based on Chinese Menus of the mid-twentieth century. For those too young to remember the old Chinese restaurant menus allow us to pick our choices from two columns, A&B. If you wanted another item that came at extra cost as a side item. Today I suspect we are heading to the point where we get to pick our rights from a column of selections, but only with the approval of the chef. They added the Family Meal option later due to the demand for more variety and diversity of choice. I wonder if the left leaning champions of the rights will stand up and caution about the rule of mobs now that the roles are reversed.Unlike today's Chinese menus, our society has regressed from the diversity of a little bit of everything for everybody to share to the old yours and mine choices of bygone days. Perhaps the only thing missing is the all you can eat admonition.Here is what possibly won Trump the election. Some will not understand it but these are the people who make this country work and for the most part they are not part of the high population centers of the United States, but the one who eventually got fed up with the status quo.Just in case you are in the camp of Presidential Elections being determined by the rule of majority of voters, remember this little tidbit from an unknown author.Nine States hold over 50% of the population. Do you want them to make all the decisions?
The Tamil Nadu unit of CPI(M) today said the Centre's reported announcement scrapping the coal-bed methane extraction project in delta districts in the state, was a victory to the farmers.

The move to abandon the project was a victory of farmers in delta districts, who constantly fought against it, Tamil Nadu CPI (M) Secretary, G Ramakrishnan told reporters on the sidelines of a party meeting here.

The CPI(M) leader is here to oversee the arrangements for the three-day state-level conference scheduled to be held in Tirunelveli, from Nov 12 to Nov 14.

He stressed that the conference was meant to strengthen the party's structure in the state, especially in the southern districts.

On the proposed Uniform Civil Code (UCC), he said, it cannot be implemented without a consensus arrived.

Reacting to the govermet ban on Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes, he said, the move doesn't serve the purpose of eradication of black money completely.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A US federal judge has encouraged lawyers involved in a class-action lawsuit against President-elect Donald Trump's now-defunct university to settle the case out of court.

US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump accused of bias during the campaign because of his Mexican heritage, said at a hearing in San Diego, California, yesterday that another judge had offered to work with both sides on a possible settlement.

"I can tell you right now I'm all ears," Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli told Curiel, according to local media.

Petrocelli told the judge it was unlikely that Trump, who has been called as a witness in the case, would be able to attend the trial set for November 28 in San Diego. He added that he planned to file a motion for the trial to be delayed for several months while Trump prepares to take office on January 20.

Attorneys for Trump have sought to exclude from the trial any comments their client made during the presidential campaign on the grounds it could prejudice the jury.

Trump repeatedly hit out against the Indiana-born Curiel during his run for the White House. He claimed that the jurist's Mexican heritage would stand in the way of a fair trial given Trump's controversial stand on illegal immigration and his vow to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.

The six-year-old lawsuit alleges that Trump University fleeced students by tricking them with aggressive marketing that amounted to fraud.

Students paid as much as USD 35,000 to enroll, believing they would make it big in real estate after being taught by experts hand-picked by Trump, the suit says.

Trump's lawyers counter that many students have given the program a thumbs-up and those who failed to succeed have only themselves to blame.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
To help its pre-paid consumers who are short of balance post the demonetisation drive, telecom operator today said it is extending them a credit on talktime and data usage.

The pre-paid users, who form a big chunk of the subscriber base for all operators, will be given a credit of Rs 10 in talktime and data of 30 MB across network with a 24-hour validity, it said in a statement.

For post-paid customers in Mumbai, it has also extended the bill payment date by three days.

"To help our customers tide over the demonetisation period, has extended post-paid bill payment deadline by 3 days in Mumbai. Additionally, pre-paid customers can opt for small credits on both talktime and data, allowing them to stay confidently connected," Pushpinder Singh Gujral, Business Head for Mumbai, said.

The government's surprise move to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes has posed some temporary trouble for consumers in a cash-dominant economy like India.

For the second day, banks and ATMs witnessed longer queues of anxious customers waiting either to deposit the scrapped notes or exchange them to meet their expenses.

Vodafone said the special services can be availed either by calling a toll-free number or dialling a Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) short code on phones.
CPI(M) today claimed that BJP was aware of the Centre's decision to demonetise currency of higher value in advance, while ruing that the move has affected the party's campaigning ahead of by-polls in few seats in West Bengal.

"The BJP's Bengal unit had deposited an amount of Rs 1 crore in a Kolkata bank, hours before Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the announcement on Tuesday night.

"The move has certainly affected our campaigning in terms of expenditure. Workers are facing trouble in procuring election material at the grassroots level," senior party leader Rabin Deb told a press conference here.

Meanwhile, the West Bengal unit of the Left Front accused the ruling TMC of unleashing "all-out attack" on its activists ahead of the November 19 by-polls in two parliamentary seats and one Assembly constituency.

A delegation led by CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury submitted a memorandum to Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi highlighting the state administration's "collusion" with TMC and sought the EC's intervention in this regard.

Deb, who is a CPI(M) Bengal state secretariat member, said the Front urged the EC to deploy additional forces in Nandigram, which falls in the poll-bound Tamluk constituency, and to strike down photo voter slips from the list of EPIC alternatives.

"CRPF (personnel) must be deployed immediately in all the segments. They should also be instructed to immediately undertake route march everywhere till the end of the election for confidence building and area domination," the memorandum said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Area sown for wheat, the main rabi crop, has gone up by 38 per cent to 25.72 lakh hectare in the ongoing rabi season, even as farmers wait for government's announcement of support price for rabi crops.

Wheat is the main rabi crop and sowing starts from October, with harvesting beginning in April.

As per the latest government data, wheat has been sown in 25.72 lakh hectare so far in the rabi (winter) season, as against 18.65 lakh hectare in the year-ago period.

Higher wheat coverage was reported from Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Gujarat.

Area under paddy has increased to 9.68 lakh hectare from 6.46 lakh hectare, while pulses acreage has risen to 49.24 lakh hectare from 37.23 lakh hectare in the said period.

Oilseed acreage has increased to 42.03 lakh hectare so far this rabi season as against 31.11 lakh hectare in the year-ago period.

However, sowing area of coarse cereals was down at 20.17 lakh hectare as against 33.26 lakh hectare in the same period last year.

The area under rabi crops overall increased to 146.85 lakh hectare so far this rabi season when compared with 126.71 lakh hectare in the year-ago period.

It may be noted that farmers are waiting for the government to announce the minimum support price (MSP) of rabi crops to take a call which crop to grow this rabi season.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The chief of the Republican Party of India Ramdas Athawale, today said he was elated over the victory of 'Republican Party' candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential election.

The Union Minister of State for Social Justice said " Donald of the Republican Party has been elected as US President. I will go to the US soon to meet him."



"The way he has become the President, a person belonging to the RPI should also one day become the President," Athawale told reporters.

"I congratulate him (Trump) on behalf of the Republican Party and express happiness that the Republican Party candidate will now occupy the White House," 56-year-old Athawale said.

"I will be going to the US soon to meet him. I will be visiting the US in a month and greet him as President of the Republican Party," Athawale said.

Athawale, known for his comic sense, is a prominent Dalit leader from Maharashtra whose induction into the Narendra Modi government five months ago was seen as part of BJP's endeavour to reach out to the politically crucial segment ahead of elections to five states including Uttar Pradesh.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A day after Karnataka minister Tanvir Sait was allegedly caught looking at sleazy pictures on his mobile at a public function, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah today said he would seek a report on the incident, even as the Opposition staged protests demanding Sait's resignation.

"...I will seek the report and then will see whether it needs to be inquired, after inquiry I will take action," Siddaramaiah told reporters in Mysuru.

He rubbished media reports which quoted him as describing the incident as false.

"....Did I say media reports are false? Some channels are saying so. What I have said is let the report come, I will examine the veracity," the Chief Minister said.

Minister for Primary and Secondary Education Tanvir Sait had yesterday waded into a controversy after video footage emerged showing him purportedly watching pictures of skimpily clad girls on his mobile on dais at a public functionto mark Tipu Jayanti celebrations in Raichur district.

Opposition parties and organisations today heldprotests in various parts of the state, including Yadgiri, Madikeri, Mysuru, Dharwad and Chitradurga, demanding sacking of Sait.

A protest was also held under the leadership of JD(S) MLC Puttanna, in front of the minister's office at Vidhana Soudha, the state secretariat, in Bengaluru.

Speaking to reporters at Belagavi, Siddaramaiah said, "A mistake is a mistake whether it is committed by BJP or anyone else. I have spoken to Tanvir Sait over phone, he is in Raichur, he will return tomorrow and give an explanation."



"He (Sait) has said that he was not watchingobscene pictures but was only scrolling messagesreceived on Whatsapp in his phone," adding, "the minister told me that he was ready for any inquiry."



Meanwhile, state veteran Congress leader Janardhan Poojary also demanded that Sait be sacked.

"If we still sleep, a situation may arise where we will have to sleep during the upcoming elections. So Mr Chief Minister to safeguard the prestige of the people of your district Mysuru, please take action," he told reportersat Mangaluru.

Sait, who represents Narasimharaja constituency in Mysuru, was inducted into the cabinet in June.

The minister has denied any wrongdoing on his part, saying he was only browsing Whatsapp messages on Tipu Jayanti celebrations held across the state yesterday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Vowing not to allow anyone to rip out any part of Chinese territory, President Xi Jinping today called for unity between China and Taiwan under the leadership of the ruling Communist Party, amid political turmoil in Hong Kong and growing pro-independence sentiment in Taiwan.

"I call on all Chinese who revere Sun Yat-sen, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese, to unite, no matter (what) their political affiliations (are)," Xi told a gathering of top officials and military officers at the Great Hall of the People.

Chinese should unite in pursuit for a rejuvenated China Sun dreamt about, Xi said while commemorating the 150th birth anniversary of Sun, one of China's influential leaders in overthrowing monarchy before the advent of Mao Zedong.

But at the same Xi, who is the General Secretary of the CPC and head of the military besides being President, said to love the country, the Chinese people should uphold the leadership of the CPC, the socialist system in China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics developed under the CPC's leadership.

"Sun Yat-sen unequivocally opposed any remarks or actions that attempted to split the country or the nation," Xi was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua agency.

Quoting Sun, Xi said that united, the people of the entire country benefit; disunited, people suffer.

"All activities that intend to divide the country will certainly be firmly opposed by all Chinese people. We will never allow any one, any organisation, any party to split off any tract of territory from China anytime, or in any way," Xi said.

"The best way we commemorate Sun is to learn and carry forward his invaluable spirit, to unite all that can be united and mobilise all that can be mobilised to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of," Xi said.

It is rare for the CPC leaders to pay tribute to non-Communist leaders.

Born in 1866, Sun was the founder leader of the Kuomintang Party, which remained a prominent political party in Taiwan, after the island parted from China following the raise of the Communist Party of China headed by Mao.

Sun, who founded the Republic of China after the Qing Dynasty was toppled in the 1911 revolution, is also revered in Taiwan, which the mainland considers a breakaway province.

Xi's appeal for unity was significant as Taiwan's new President Tsai Ing-Wen was elected this year defeating Ma Ying-Jeou who promoted normalisation of ties between the two sides in election early this.

In his speech, Xi said CPC members are the firmest supporters, most loyal collaborators and most faithful successors of Sun's revolutionary undertakings.

"Today, we are closer, more confident and more able to achieve national rejuvenation than ever before," Xi said.

"With lots of challenges and difficulties ahead, there is still a long way to go until we have truly modernised the country, revitalised the nation and realised the common prosperity of all Chinese," Xi added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
sees EU plans to scrap some free carbon permits for energy-intensive industries as a threat to its European business, a senior executive at the world's biggest steelmaker told Reuters on Thursday.

In April, Europe's highest court ruled that such industries had received too many carbon permits under the European Union's Emissions Trading System (ETS), which charges power plants and factories for every tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) they emit.

It also said the European Commission's calculation for handing out the free permits was flawed and gave the EU executive 10 months to review the policy.

"This scenario is threatening the existence of plants in Germany, but also across Europe," Frank Schulz, the chief executive of ArcelorMittal's German unit told Reuters in an interview.

The permits are part of EU policy to limit greenhouse gas emissions and keep global warming to an internationally agreed target.

Under the new system, steel makers would receive a sharply reduced number of permits from 2021 to 2030, forcing them to purchase the required licences.

"Experts calculate that this would leave the industry with additional costs of ten to 30 euros ($33) per tonne of steel," Schulz said.

Average earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) were 35 to 40 euros per tonne last year, Schulz added.

The industry, which employs around 300,000 workers across Europe and is under added pressure from cheap Chinese steel imports, opposes the reform and says it raises the risk of businesses moving to regions where pollution regulations are less strict.

Schulz said that the new rules would affect roughly six million tonnes of ArcelorMittal's steel in Germany, resulting in additional costs of around 120 million euros per year.

"This is about the amount we invest in plant and equipment and would eat up the bigger part of our EBITDA," Schulz said, adding that the German unit, which last year posted revenues of 5.3 billion euros, invested between 90 and 100 million euros per year.

But he said Germany, where employs 9,000 workers at four sites and competes with Thyssenkrupp and Salzgitter, remained an important market.

"We have no plans to shut down any furnaces in Germany," he said.

ArcelorMittal, which produces around 40 million tonnes of steel across 20 European sites each year, had shut down a total of four furnaces in France and Belgium in recent years.
Indian banks' loans rose 9.1% in the two weeks to Oct 28 from a year earlier, while deposits rose 9.8%, the Reserve Bank of India's weekly statistical supplement showed on Friday.

Outstanding loans rose 502.20 billion rupees ($7.48 billion) to 74.12 trillion rupees in the two weeks to Oct 28. Non-food credit rose 400.70 billion rupees to 73.10 trillion rupees, while food credit rose 101.60 billion rupees to 1.02 trillion rupees.

Bank deposits rose 205.20 billion rupees to 99.84 trillion rupees in the two weeks to Oct 28.
In this episode of The John Woodard Show, John Woodard Interviews Sandy Smith. Sandy is a successful business executive who has started businesses, created jobs, and worked her way up the hard way. The high energy, can-do attitude Sandy brings is exactly what's needed in D.C. to drain the swamp...
By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan and India signed a civilian nuclear accord on Friday, opening the door for Tokyo to supply New Delhi with fuel, equipment and technology for nuclear power production, as India looks to atomic energy to sustain its rapid economic growth.

(Narendra Modi in Japan, see pictures http://in. .com/news/picture/pm-modi-in-japan?articleId=INRTX2T65I)

It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, had concluded such a pact with a country that is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).

"Today's signing ... marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a joint conference with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The accord stipulates that the nuclear fuel and equipment provided can only be used for peaceful purposes, and a separate document signed in parallel has a clause allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducts a nuclear test.

"As a sole nation to have been nuclear-bombed, we bear the responsibility for leading the international community towards the realisation of a world without nuclear weapons," Abe told the same conference.

"The agreement is a legal framework to ensure that India will act responsibly for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It will also lead us to having India participate practically in the international non-proliferation regime."

India says the NPT is discriminatory and that it has concerns about its two nuclear-armed neighbours, China and Pakistan.

India is already in advanced negotiations to have U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric, owned by Japan's Toshiba Corp, build six nuclear reactors in southern India, part of New Delhi's plan to ramp up nuclear capacity more than 10 times by 2032.

Japanese nuclear plant makers such as Toshiba and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd are desperate to expand their business overseas as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster chilled domestic demand for new nuclear plants.

The agreement with Japan follows a similar one with the United States in 2008, which gave India access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation.

That step was seen as the first big move to build India into a regional counterweight to China.

On India's infrastructure development, Abe said that construction of a high-speed railway connecting Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which will be based on Japan's "Shinkansen" bullet train technology, was scheduled to start in 2018, with commercial operation slated for 2023.

"In Japan, the era of high economic growth began when Shinkansen started its service in 1964. I hope the advent of high-speed railway will trigger fresh economic growth in India as well," Abe said.

Modi earlier on Friday praised the "growing convergence" of views between his nation and Japan, saying strong ties would enable them to play a stabilising role in Asia and the world.

(Editing by Nick Macfie and Kevin Liffey)

(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.)
By Aditi Shah and Abhirup Roy

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Tata Sons has called shareholder meetings at group companies including Tata Motors and Tata Steel in an attempt to drive out former chairman Cyrus Mistry from the operating businesses of the $100 billion steel-to-software conglomerate.

Tata Motors Ltd, which owns luxury brand Jaguar Land Rover, said on Friday Tata Sons had called an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to vote on ousting Mistry as a director on the board of the automaker.

Tata Sons has a 26.51 percent stake in Tata Motors.

Holding company Tata Sons has also called EGMs at Indian Hotels CO, a Tata company that owns the Taj chain of hotels; Tata Consultancy Services (TCS); Tata Chemicals Ltd, and Tata Steel Ltd in a bid to vote Mistry off the boards of those businesses.

Tata Sons ousted Mistry as its chairman last month. While no immediate reasons were given, it was widely reported the holding company was unhappy with some of Mistry's actions, such as the sale of assets across group companies. This led to a bitter war of words between the two camps.

Infrastructure company Shapporji Pallonji, owned by Mistry's family, is a minority shareholder in Tata Sons and he remains a director on the board of the holding company.

STEEL LOSSES

On Thursday, Tata Sons removed Mistry as chairman of its main cash cow, TCS, where the holding company has a stake of more than 70 percent. Mistry remains, however, a director on the board of TCS.

Tata Sons has faced setbacks in its campaign against Mistry. The boards of both Indian Hotels and Tata Chemicals have both backed him to remain as chairman of those group companies.

Tata Sons is also seeking to remove Nusli Wadia, chairman of textile-to-aviation conglomerate the Wadia Group and a long-time independent director at several Tata group companies, from the boards of Tata Motors, Tata Chemicals and Tata Steel.

Wadia was reported to have voted in favour of retaining Mistry as the chairman of Tata Chemicals on Thursday.

On Friday, television reports said a board meeting at Tata Steel to discuss second-quarter results had not taken a stance on the possible removals of Mistry and Wadia.

Tata Steel posted a consolidated net loss of 493.8 million rupees ($7.34 million), mainly due to a weak performance in its UK steel making business.

It has been in talks since July over potentially merging its European steel business, which also includes a steel mill in the Netherlands, with Germany's ThyssenKrupp.

Lawyers have said removing Mistry as director of Tata group companies will be a bigger challenge than ousting him as Tata Sons chairman because he will have the right to be heard at an EGM and can also ask for an injunction.

All shareholders are invited to the EGMs and the decision will be made by a simple majority.

"This sort of a move is very unprecedented. I don't know why the Tatas are doing it this way. They should be settling this instead of dragging this in public. Mistry has a lot of insider information," a senior lawyer at a top corporate law firm in India said on condition of anonymity.

Details of EGMs are yet to be finalised.

Mistry's office did not respond to a request for comment.

($1 = 67.2705 Indian rupees)

(Additional reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Rafael Nam and Mark Potter)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Jose Aldrich, Acting Dean, College of Business at Florida International University, which was recently ranked fifth among the best undergraduate international programmes in the US News & World Reports 2017 edition of Best Colleges, is in India to meet the faculty at Indias top IIMs, at a time when his B-school starts to take baby-steps in creating a branded presence in the Indian market. In a chat with Sohini Das, Aldrich says how a competitive educational environment in India can open doors to foreign varsities like his to attract talent from here.
Battling with multiple issues like the discontinuation of Galaxy Note 7, recall of 2.8 million exploding washing machines and a corruption scandal, South Korean giant Samsung has reportedly filed a patent with the Korean intellectual property office for a smartphone that can be folded in half and is expected to arrive next year.

"Called the Galaxy X, the front of the smartphone will sport traditional Samsung home button in between a back button on the right and a menu button on the left," said a report published on Friday at GSMArena.com.

Samsung has been working on foldable displays for years and is now ready to officially unveil its first offering in 2017.

"The aspect ratio of display of the device is close to 21:9, and considering the physical design of the device, it will be interesting to see how useful the screen will turn out to be," the report added.

Representatives of the South Korean prosecutor's office recently raided Samsung's offices in Seoul over suspicions that the tech giant might be involved in a corruption scandal involving President Park Geun-hye.

Hit by the Note 7 fiasco, Samsung Electronics has also decided to recall about 2.8 million top-loading washing machines due to risk of impact injuries.
Commercial Feature is a Business Standard Digital Marketing Initiative.

The Editorial/Content team at Business Standard has not contributed to writing or editing these articles.

For further information, please write to assist@bsmail.in
ATMs on Friday reopened two days after the government introduced the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes to crack down on black money.

The banks that had been open for cash transactions and to issue the new legal tenders saw a huge rush of cutomers lining up to deposit and exchange notes on Thursday.

After the two day shutdown, ATMs are now dispensing Rs 100, new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 notes.

Customers were seen rushing to ATMs and waiting in long queues since early hours.

Serpentine queues outside a bank in Delhi's Paharganj, police reach the spot #DeMonetisation pic.twitter.com/azkMxUrXvK - ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016



#DeMonetisation : Huge crowd gathered outside Canara Bank in Delhi's Yamuna Vihar. pic.twitter.com/41D9zUStlk - ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Crowds have been getting agitatged as some ATMs were still inactive or not fully equipped with cash.

Uttar Pradesh: Long queue outside an ATM in Lucknow #DeMonetisation pic.twitter.com/3gckpfYWWG - ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) November 11, 2016

ATM users can only withdraw Rs 2000 per day per card.

Meanwhile, withdrawal from banks are limited to Rs 10,000 a day.

State Bank of India said that it could easily take over 10 days until ATM servies go back to normal.

"It should be normal in ten days' time because you have to understand that there are two lakh ATMs (of all banks) in the country but there are only three to four vendors in the country," said SBI's chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya.



Surcharges of using ATMs of different banks have been waivered for the ease of customer transactions for now.

Banks will also remain open through the weekend with longer working hours.


Contact: Crystal Feldman

Crystal Feldman govpress@nc.gov

Raleigh, N.C. Governor Pat McCrory's Hurricane Matthew Recovery Committee will hold its first regional meeting next week in Robeson County. Regional meetings will be held in areas throughout North Carolina that suffered effects from the hurricane. The Committee will be taking comments from the public as well as discussing steps to address relief fundraising efforts, community outreach, long-term plans for sustainable communities and developing recommendations to address needs that will not be met by existing federal relief programs.said Governor McCrory.The first regional meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, November 15, at Robeson Community College in Lumberton from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm. A portion of the meeting will be devoted to taking comments from the general public.Governor McCrory announced the formation of the Committee in late October, and convened the first meeting in Raleigh on November 1.The governor is encouraging individuals and groups to help in the relief efforts by making a financial or other contribution. Monetary contributions to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund for Hurricane Matthew can be made by texting NCRECOVERS to 30306 or by visiting NCDisasterRelief.org . This is one of the best ways to help fund long-term recovery efforts.
After the official launch of UDAN scheme last month by the Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju, the government has taken its first step towards the implementation of UDAN (Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik), a plan that aims to making flying affordable for masses. However, the move is not expected to go down well with the existing flyers.

According to news reports, the government plans to impose a levy of Rs 7,500-Rs 8,500 on departure of every flight by scheduled carriers on major routes such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata. The levy will go into regional connectivity fund (RCF) that will provide corpus to the regional connectivity scheme. The state governments will contribute about 20 per cent to RCF. When combined, the government is looking at building around Rs 500 crore corpus each year.

When Business Today contacted an official in aviation ministry, he said that civil aviation secretary R.N. Choubey has been misquoted. "It's a big decision. Such decisions have to be consulted with the finance ministry," the official said.

Under UDAN, the airfare would vary from Rs 1,420 to Rs 3,500 for fixed-wing aircraft, depending on the distance covered. It will boost flying in regional centres as airfares will become affordable for a vast majority of middle class Indians. The intent of the government is to fly 300 million domestic passengers by 2022 from 85 million in 2015/16.
Many Indians who are traveling, studying and residing abroad have also been hit by the government's move to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.



Business Today Online spoke to Indians from UAE, America and Australia to find out if they were affected.



Some of the Indians living in Dubai said that they wanted to exchange the Indian currency they possess.

Sharmin who works in Dubai wanted to exchange a total of Rs 17,000, consisting of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, but wasn't able to do so.

When she called Bank of Baroda, in which she holds an account, on Thursday to ask if she could exchange her money, she received a negative response.

"They were busy like always when I called. A gentleman over the phone said that they are not accepting the Indian currency at the moment," she said.



She said money exchange centres in Dubai were also not accepting the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. She now hopes to get her notes exchanged when she visits India in December.

According to reports, money exchanges in the UAE have stopped accepting Indian currencies of any denomination soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the demonitisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on November 8.



However, Sneha Tirodkar, a mother of two and a Sales Support Manager at Emerson in Dubai, didn't sound too worried over the issue.



"We have nothing to worry about as we carry out legal transactions and we have ample amount of time to exchange the currency notes," said Tirodkar.

Mrs Tirodkar also plans to get the currency converted when she comes to India in December to visit her family.



Students studying in America were calm over the issue since many of them would be returning to India in December for their annual winter break.



"I always carry some money in case I need it while travelling to and from India. Right now I have around seven thousand rupees. I'm not going do anything about it. I've heard that you can deposit it until December end, so will probably do that when I come to Delhi," said 22-year-old Uday Chadha studying in California.



Another student studying at the O.P. Jindal University, who is currently in Washington DC for an exchange programme, said she had Rs 5,000 in Indian currencies. She said she will exchange it once she is back.



Jugal Shah, who recently migrated to Australia to join his extended family, said he had converted all his INR to Australian dollars right in time, but other members of his family were not as lucky. But none of them have a huge amount to be worried about.



"Our entire family stays in Australia, and we have barely Rs 5,000 per head so when one of our cousin sister goes for a wedding to India in December, we will be giving it to her to exchange them all. Not much to worry about," said Shah from Melbourne, Australia.



Options for NRIs or Indians traveling abroad:

1. According to the RBI guidelines, if you are an NRI and hold an NRO account, you can deposit these banknotes into the account conveniently.



2. The RBI in its Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) has said that NRIs who have bank notes in India can authorize, in writing, another person to deposit money into the bank account.



3. If NRIs are not traveling this year, they have time to exchange their bank notes up till March 31st by presenting ID proof.



4. Finally, the government has also said in a statement, "For those who are unable to exchange their Old High Denomination Bank Notes or deposit the same in their bank accounts on or before December 30, 2016, an opportunity will be given to them to do so at specified offices of the RBI on later dates along with necessary documentation as may be specified by the Reserve Bank of India."
We are at the beginning of a global transformation that is characterised by the convergence of digital and physical technologies. Every business has an aspiration to grow in a global environment, but it is important to understand the intricacies of the international markets and where they are heading. Global FDI flows jumped 36 per cent in 2015 to an estimated $1.7 trillion, their highest level since the global economic and financial crisis of 2008-2009, according to Global Investment Trends Monitor, UNCTAD, January 2016.

The overall growth has been cautious since then, and India is amongst the few countries currently showing strong signs of improvement. It can be said that the global economy currently is at its tipping point with new economic powers at an ascendant and emerging inter-regional relationships. Changing currents in demographics, technology, resources and social activities are already bringing about significant impact to mainstream businesses, capital markets, society, politics, etc. These mega trends are set to reshape the future of the investment industry considerably, with Asian countries or emerging markets taking centre stage.

India replaced China as the leading recipient of capital investment in Asia-Pacific with announced FDI of $63 billion in 2015, according to The fDi Report 2016 by fDi Intelligence. A total of 697 FDI projects have been in India, indicating that government's effort to improve ease of doing business and relaxation in FDI norms is yielding results. India, ranked 39th in competitiveness, (The Global Competitiveness Report 2016-2017, World Economic Forum, significantly increased its pace of positive economic momentum over the last few years and is aggressively working towards further improving its global rankings in the Global Competitiveness Index, and so are other countries in the Middle East region like Qatar.

As per the fDi Report 2016, for the past few years, Indian companies have been investing heavily worldwide - 302 FDI projects have led from Indian companies in 2015 alone, with a total of nearly $15 billion. There has been a perceptible shift in overseas investment destinations in the past decade. While in the first half, they were directed to resource rich countries like Australia, UAE, and Sudan, in the latter half, investments were channelled into countries providing higher tax benefits like Mauritius, Singapore, British Virgin Islands and the Netherlands.

UK recently announced that India has become the third largest source of FDI for them as investments increased by 65 per cent in 2015 leading to over 9,000 new jobs. As per the FDI consulting firm WAVTEQ, Indian companies like Zomato, Larsen & Toubro, Voltas, Shapoorji Pallonji, TCS, ICICI Bank, and Wipro, amongst others have been active in Qatar and have invested around $450 million over the past seven years. Cipla plans to invest $89 million in South Africa and has recently acquired two US-based generic drug makers, InvaGen Pharmaceuticals and Exelan Pharmaceuticals, for $550 million. Tech Mahindra has agreed to acquire UK-based Target Group for $163 million. Lupin has completed the acquisition of US-based GAVIS Pharmaceuticals for $880 million. Automobile giants too have announced expansion plans like, Ashok Leyland is investing $ 10 million in its unit in Ras Al Khaimah, in the UAE; and Tata Motors launched their assembly operations for light commercial vehicles in Tunisia in addition to opening the Gulf's largest automobile showroom in Saudi Arabia.

There has been a steady expansion across all sectors especially retail, automobile, technology and infrastructure and there is a huge opportunity for Indian companies to grow regionally. Indian companies looking at expanding internationally tend to gravitate to Middle East and North Africa (MENA) due to historical and cultural reasons, and they also present numerous opportunities. For instance, Qatar, with its strong macroeconomic background, has a hospitable environment and stands at 18th position, in the global competitiveness; followed by Saudi Arabia 29th, and Bahrain 48th as per The Global Competitiveness Report 2016-2017, World Economic Forum. This region presents a huge investment opportunity for other countries in the region such as India, which has several conglomerates and a vibrant service sector hungry with global ambitions. While the United Arab Emirates has traditionally been driving innovation from a trade and investments perspective, countries like Qatar are offering a highly efficient goods and services market coupled with access to exceptional finance and technology, making it a rapidly evolving regional investment hub.

Creating a business environment in a highly competitive realm to attract foreign investments, countries need to provide special benefits and tax breaks to investors. Moreover, these benefits need to be promoted aggressively across the extended Asian region. On the other hand, businesses will have to align their value proposition with the impending digital transformation and countries like India are rapidly moving in this direction. With the world markets completely integrated, businesses that focus on leveraging a technology-driven ecosystem that is fundamentally designed to be investor friendly, will be able to multiply growth.

India in particular is at the epicentre of a positive momentum. To capitalise on this, Indian enterprises should look out for new avenues that enable them to propel regional and international growth - platforms that provide a conducive regulatory, fiscal and market environment and facilitate rapid business expansion and pay rich dividends in the long-term. While the past 25 years marked India's liberalisation and attracted huge foreign investments, the next 25 years could well be India's turn to become a leading foreign investor overseas fuelling the region's growth on the global stage.



The writer is Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer, QFC Authority
South Korean carmaker, Hyundai Motor India will be the third carmaker in India to introduce hybrid and mild-hybrid technologies in its cars between 2018 and 2019.

Hyundai plans to introduce its global hybrid brand Ioniq at the 14th Auto Expo in Delhi/NCR in 2018 followed by the mild-hybrids in 2019, the company's managing director & CEO Young Key Koo told Business Today.

"We have plans to showcase our new Ioniq range of hybrid, plug-in and all electric vehicles to test the Indian market. It will give Indian customers a peek into our technology prowess, as well as prepare us for future alternative technologies," Koo said.

While Toyota and Honda have introduced full hybrid vehicles in India, Maruti and Mahindra & Mahindra are the two companies that have introduced mild-hybrids with reasonable success. Especially, Maruti whose Ciaz mild-hybrid has overtaken the segment leader Honda City this year. In comparison, however, full hybrids from Toyota and Honda cost upwards of Rs 35 lakh and haven't gained as much traction.

Koo added that the company is working on mild-hybrid technology that will be strapped in its current models like the Elantra sedan and other small car brands to utilize the concessional tax regime for such vehicles.

Mild hybrids technology has been used in the Maruti Suzuki Ciaz sedan that abets the petrol or diesel propulsion leading to higher mileage and efficiency. It also regenerates the kinetic energy produced during braking to enhance its motion. The technology has helped Maruti to emerge as the segment leader in the mid-size sedan segment and has propelled its peers to venture into the same bracket.

Globally companies are adopting these new technologies to make vehicles hybrid which are more efficient as they utilizes more than one form of onboard energy for higher propulsion and cover longer distances than petrol-diesel vehicles. Toyota and Honda sells hybrid Camry and Accord in the market.

Hyundai, the second largest carmaker in India has been negotiating with the Indian government to support the hybrid technology with strong incentives to

make the price of such vehicles viable for customers as multiple technologies strapped to these cars make them expensive.

"India is an evolving market where customers are choosing new and expensive vehicles that is rendering a huge opportunity to enter new segment and offer 'out of the box' mobility solutions. Hybrids are globally successful and we are looking at the opportune time to offer this technology to Indian customers," Mr Koo added.

Hyundai currently sells 10 cars in the Indian market ranging from compact EON hatchback to Santa FE SUV that is retailed at Rs 28.56 lakh onwards. In October this year it crossed the 50,000 sales mark in any month in the Indian market.
Irish and other EU agricultural producers are set to receive funding across 2017 to promote their products and find new markets globally.

The promotion budget will largely target countries outside the EU, including China, Middle East, North America, South-East Asia and Japan.

An improved 2017 budget of 133 million represents a significant increase compared with the 111 million from this year.

The products which will be the most advertised in the campaigns are fruits and vegetables (30% of the programmes), followed by meat (17%) and dairy products (15%).

This reflects the importance of promotion policy to support sectors experiencing difficult market situations, like dairy and pigmeat.

Returning from his business mission to Vietnam and Indonesia, Commissioner for Agriculture Hogan said: "I welcome these new programmes, especially in the context of the recent market difficulties. I was just now travelling in Asia as part of our efforts to boost agri-food exports, and I am struck by the interest being shown by importers and consumers in this part of the world. The further expansion of our promotion programmes next year is also particularly important as this will also help to stimulate growth and jobs in the agri-food sector.



Source: www.businessworld.ie

About Us
Many Irish gas and electricity customers are losing out on better value tariffs according to one industry expert.

As the latest Retail Markets Report from the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER) shows that the vast majority of electricity (81%) and gas (69%) customers are on standard plans, and not availing of discounted rates Eoin Clarke, Managing Director of Switcher.ie, highlights the fact that this could be costing households across Ireland up to an incredible 420 million per year.

Eoin Clarke said: Energy suppliers big and small continue to battle to win customers by cutting rates, launching increasingly competitive discounts, and introducing cash back offers as high as 175. Unfortunately, the continuing trend that we see through reports from the CER and our own research is that only a minority of consumers are taking advantage of these deals. As a result, vast numbers are unnecessarily paying well over the odds for their energy when there are huge savings to be made.

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Governor Philip Lane of the Central Bank of Ireland today praised the resilience of Irish SMEs at the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association Annual Conference in Dublin.

Governor Lane highlighted the challenges faced by SMEs, compared to large multinationals, and described how during the financial crisis SMEs faced significant financial stress.

According to Central Bank figures across 2012 forty per cent of credit applications from Micro-SMEs were for stressed reasons, by 2016 this figure had dropped to 13 per cent indicating more stable conditions for Irish SMEs.

A recent ISME surveys show that Brexit is now the biggest concern facing Irish SMEs with significant shifts in the Sterling-euro exchange rate since the UK voted to leave the EU.

Governor Lane also addressed other factors, such as employment, in the Irish SME sector; Between 2008 and 2012, SME employment levels declined by almost a fifth, which is about double the decline experienced by larger firms during the crisis. By 2014, employment in larger firms was just 5 per cent lower than 2008 levels, while still 15 per cent lower for SMEs. There are many factors which determined the magnitude of the economic shock faced by SMEs.

SME investment is also showing signs of recovery. Recent research from the Central Bank of Ireland shows that the share of SMEs investing has increased steadily since 2012, and currently about one third of SMEs are investing, with larger firms, exporters and innovators most likely to invest. He added.



Source: www.businessworld.ie
SAS is the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market and will expand their operations in Ireland with the opening of a new office at Le Touche House in Dublins IFSC.

The move is part of a six-fold increase in its workforce and significantly reinforces SAS presence in the region, following the announcement last year of plans to create 150 jobs over three years in Ireland.

The new office supports sales of data analytics software into markets across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and acts as a hub for the region, providing a multi-channel service centre for customer enquiries and support.

This project has been supported by the Department of Jobs through IDA Ireland.

SAS EMEA Head of Inside Sales, Brendan ODwyer, commenting on the announcement said We are delighted to be moving into this new office in Dublin which has built such a reputation within the technology sector. It will be home to the Inside Sales and Customer Contact Centre, which covers all of EMEA and has already delivered some fantastic results since it started just over a year ago. Weve developed close links with universities across Ireland to develop the talent pool in data science, and the new location will put us in an even stronger position to continue delivering for our growing European customer base.

Welcoming the opening of the company's new office in Dublin, Minister Mary Mitchell O'Connor said: I am very pleased that SAS has located in Dublin's Financial Services district for their expanding operation here. This company are at the cutting edge of the new world of 'Data Analytics' which is a high growth and very exciting area for business development, driven by changes in technology. SAS have committed to bringing quality, high-skilled jobs to Dublin and I very much look forward to their future success here in Ireland.

Source: www.businessworld.ie

About Us
The European Commission has asked the United States about a secret court order Yahoo used to scan thousands of customer emails for possible terrorism links, following concerns that may have violated a new data transfer pact.

Under the Privacy Shield agreement that came into force in August, the United States agreed to limit the collection of and access to Europeans' data stored on U.S. servers because of EU concerns about data privacy and mass U.S. surveillance.

The previous deal was thrown out by the EU's top court in October 2015, leaving thousands of firms scrambling for legal ways to provide data on transactions ranging from credit cards to travel and e-commerce that underpin billions of dollars of transatlantic trade.

Reuters reported last month that Yahoo had scanned all incoming customer emails in 2015 for a digital signature linked to a foreign state sponsor of terrorism, at the behest of a secret court order. That raised fresh questions about the scope of U.S. spying.

"The Commission services have contacted the U.S. authorities to ask for a number of clarifications," Commission spokesman Christian Wigand said.

The United States had pledged not to engage in mass, indiscriminate espionage, assuaging Commission concerns about the privacy of Europeans' data stored on U.S. servers following disclosures of intrusive U.S. surveillance programs in 2013 by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Two people familiar with the matter said the Commission had now asked the United States to explain how the Yahoo order fitted with its commitments, even if the program ran before the Privacy Shield was in place.

The Commission was seeking clarifications on the nature of the court order itself and how targeted it was, said one person familiar with the matter. Another said it had also asked if the program was continuing.

"The U.S. will be held accountable to these commitments both through review mechanisms and through redress possibilities, including the newly established Ombudsperson mechanism in the U.S. State Department," Wigand said.

Privacy Shield, which Yahoo has not signed up to, provides for a joint annual review to ensure the United States is respecting its commitment to limit the amount of data hoovered up by U.S. agents.

A senior U.S. government official said he could not confirm or deny the reports about Yahoo, but said if true the surveillance would have been targeted at identifying terrorists while protecting the privacy of others.

That would be "good intelligence work," he said. (Reuters)



Source: www.businessworld.ie
Germany's financial watchdog warned against a loosening of post-financial crisis bank regulations on Friday.

Felix Hufeld, president of Germany's top financial regulator Bafin, made the call at an industry conference days after the election of Donald Trump, who has said he would scrap some financial rules to help U.S. businesses if he became president.

The financial and banking lobby in the U.S. and Europe has also been pushing for less post-crisis regulation, which the industry says is hampering its ability to lend to companies and stimulate growth in economies still suffering after the effects.

"Barely 10 years after the start of the financial crisis I once more hear the bugle calls of deregulation," Hufeld said, without explicitly referring to Trump in his speech.

"And I have the impression that these sounds are becoming louder," Hufeld added. "That is not without risk."

President-elect Trump said throughout his campaign he would oppose financial regulations and in May said he would repeal the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, which was passed in the wake of the financial crisis and empowered federal regulatory agencies to restrict banks' ability to make risky investments.

Hufeld also warned that a loosening or scrapping of existing laws would lead to a new financial crisis.

"The industry, just as politics and regulators, are in need of predictability and continuity - not regulatory volatility," the Bafin head said. (Reuters)



Source: www.businessworld.ie
Analysts note that Trump not only needs to reach out to Clinton supporters but also must mollify critics within GOP circles

The 2016 presidential campaign is over, but President-elect Donald Trump now must work to unify the nation, and members of his own party, election analysts told Carolina Journal.Trump's sweep of 274 electoral votes over Hillary Clinton's 218 - propelled by wins in key swing states including North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania - shows that most Americans want different policies and new government in Washington, though it is impossible to know if or how soon Trump will connect with his critics, said David McLennan, visiting professor of political science at Meredith College.McLennan said.McLennan said the ideological divide separating the Clinton and Trump camps may make it difficult to bring people together.McLennan said.he continued.The president-elect began efforts to reach out during his victory speech early Wednesday.he told supporters in New York.Clinton followed suit during her Wednesday afternoon concession speech, asking her backers to keep an open mind about America's future under a Trump administration.she said, reiterating a belief in the American people and asking her followers to join her in accepting the outcome of the election.President Obama also showed support for an orderly transition on Wednesday by inviting Trump to the White House.Obama said.Attempts to unify the country are critical not only to make inroads with Democrats, but also to connect with Republicans who led anti-Trump efforts within the GOP coalition, said Andy Taylor, professor of political science at N.C. State University.Taylor said.Taylor added.While Trump's win holds no specific policy implications for North Carolina, the Tar Heel State's swing to the right is politically significant, he said.he concluded.
More Chinese banks want to set up shop in London despite the Brexit vote which has prompted foreign lenders in the capital to consider bases in continental Europe.

British and Chinese government officials met in London on Thursday to unveil a "strategic plan" to deepen financial and economic ties between the two countries.

"It will support the integration of China's financial markets into the global market through London's financial centre, exchange of expertise and increase market access," Britain and China said in a joint statement.

It takes forward plans for closer ties between the London and Shanghai stock exchanges.

The two countries underscored a commitment by their regulators to cooperate more closely in banking, asset management, insurance, and financial technology or fintech.

"Both sides welcome the continuing interest by firms, including Agricultural Bank of China (UK), Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, and others, in submitting further applications to establish branches in the UK, once they are ready to make applications," Britain and China said in a joint statement.

Regulators from both countries were committed to working together to ensure an "effective review" of all proposals from the banks, it added.

The announcement may help soothe jitters in the City of London financial district that foreign banks will shun Britain because it is leaving the EU.

British regulators have already authorised London branches for Bank of Communications Co, and China Merchants Bank.

The China Banking Association will also open a London office "when conditions permit". The Shanghai Clearing House also intends to set up a London office next year, the document said.

Chinese authorities will support Aberdeen Asset Management in its application to register private fund management entities in China, and then launch private fund products after authorisation.

Chinese authorities will also "positively" consider the application of Heng An Standard Life, part-owned by Standard Life, for a pensions licence in China, the document said. (Reuters)



Source: www.businessworld.ie

About Us
Regardless of who was your champion in this past presidential election: Will you recognize the duly elected leader of the Free World? I will never recognize President Donald J. Trump because he is not worthy. I will recognize President Donald J. Trump, providing he respects the office in which he holds. "At this point, what difference does it make?" 89 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



W-e-e-e-l-l-l dogies --- I feel like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" has come to pass today. Who wudda' thunk it???NC has a mandatory recount for Governor with a % tie on our voting. Burr gets sent back to the US Senate so no progress in DC balance of powers took place. The balance between Executive and Legislative branches in NC is as lop-sided as ever. . .Now we all know how the dog felt who caught the car and DID NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT!!!Maybe Trump was right --- THE WHOLE ELECTION IS RIGGED!!!I attended the Southern Baptist Convention years ago when the Conservatives pulled the same kind of surprise. In that case, we trusted religious folks to be honest, but it did not happen. It took several weeks for the facts to sort out, but ULTIMATELY THEY DID!We got a fundamentalist new President of the SBC by a 2% margin of voting. I saw it with my own eyes as church buses pulled up to the door of the Arena about 20 minutes prior to the vote. People poured off, picked up ballots, went in, voted as told, left throwing their un-used ballots on the floor as they quickly exited back home with smiles on faces.WHAT HAPPENED????It is now fully documented and proven that basic rules for proper number of church messengers with no more than 10 per church were lost in the rush -- and -- trust of the Registrars who had no way to check how many from any church were already registered. You can believe some safeguards were installed in the next years, but the damage was done and the worst result was total loss of trust that Conservatives would do the right things as per their pretense over why the SBC was corrupt and needed a total change.Next came some 10 years of locked in Conservative Presidents who had the power to name a Committee on Committees which steadily made every Committee or Board of the SBC into a Fundamentalist copy of the national group. Giving went down / new converts crashed and burned / the missionary enterprise hit a block wall as new measures of "propriety" were installed to cut out any but the Conservative view of theology and practice.Then came the NC reality of the "new conservatism" --- my graduate school in Wake Forest was turned upside down as the President was fired and many of my beloved professors had to leave in a purge. Dr. William Friday (of UNC fame) said that this was, perhaps, the greatest change in NC in the last 100 years. He saw it more clearly than most.If you steal the bus, someone has to still put gas in the tank. The SBC bus that was stolen is now an empty shell of what it once was in size and outlook. NC now has pulpits all over with Preachers telling members how to vote in any election and how they need a "New" Constitution and By-laws that makes the Preacher a Dictator controlling all decisions which members used to make . . .I have experienced "The Day the Earth Stood Still" in my religion and now I am seeing much of the same in the politics of yesterday and into today . . . Here is what I found:(1) The TRUTH always rose in due time over dirty votes.(2) A new group came from the destruction of a former good way of working together as Southern Baptists so the real ideal goes on.(3) Many tears were shed and many small churches will no longer call a Student Pastor from Southeastern Seminary as Pastor.(4) The same tactics and ideologues took over the NC Baptist State Convention so me and my friends don't waste our time by attending anymore.Sometimes it is better to "Switch than to Fight" . . . after all!!!
I've spoken to several young adults today, and they are in shock and experiencing overwhelming grief about the election. How could this happen in America? And what can we do?



I've also spoken to older adults, and they are terrified by the echoes of history. We need to be on guard, but not borrow trouble (I doubt the worst fears will come to pass).



First, we have to accept that Mr. Trump will be the next President.



Second, we must make our voices heard and start preparing for the elections in two and four years. I expect to disagree with many of Trump's policy proposals, but I will keep an open mind. Maybe he will surprise us (I doubt it). I will write about the economic policies on this blog, but I care deeply about the non-economic issues too.



Third, we must make it clear what is not acceptable in a civil society.



No good person should EVER accept as normal the racism, bigotry, misogyny and xenophobia Mr. Trump and some of his supporters exhibited during the election. All good people must speak out every time we hear a disgusting comment. I'd hope Mr. Trump would speak out against the rash of verbal attacks we've seen over the last day on immigrants and non-white Americans. This must stop.



We should NEVER accept any attack on the 1st amendment. Being able to speak out is the people's check on abuse.



We should NEVER accept Mr. Trump abusing his power to silence or intimidate his critics, political opponents and accusers.



We should NEVER accept policies that disregard science and evidence.



Make your voice heard. And get ready for 2018.
Regardless of who was your champion in this past presidential election: Will you recognize the duly elected leader of the Free World? I will never recognize President Donald J. Trump because he is not worthy. I will recognize President Donald J. Trump, providing he respects the office in which he holds. "At this point, what difference does it make?" 89 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



The dramatic election on Tuesday of the compellingly rambunctious and successful businessman Donald Trump as President of the United States was a clear sign that the American people were prepared to give a non-politician the opportunity to return the U.S. to its rightful position in a chaotic world.Among Trump's list of goals is the restoration of prosperity and security for the United States. Part of that is a return towhich entails not only rebuilding the armed forces, but also revisiting and the politically correct trend begun by the Obama administration that has handcuffed intelligence agencies overseas while allowing these same agenci es to violate the rights of American citizens.Following the Obama-touted nuclear deal with Iran, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her successor John Kerry boasted of preventing Iran from endangering its Middle Eastern neighbors and it's primary enemy, the United States. However, the Iranian government views the obsessions of Obama and Kerry to get a deal - any deal - as another indication of America's rapid deterioration of strength.According a report from the Homeland Security News Wire on Thursday, the nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), claimsIn February, the IAEA had cited Iran for the first time for producing more heavy water than allowed by the nuclear deal, according to the HSNW report.Speaking candidly and openly to a number of high-level Iranians in both public and private sectors, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, in a speech claimed the United States under Democratic Party leadership - especially under President Barack Obama's "lead-from-behind" strategy - no longer possesses the might and awe it once enjoyed, according to Middle Eastern news sources.Speaking during a meeting of Iran's Assembly of Experts in Tehran, the Ayatollah promised that the current "world order" will be replaced with a new world order that is already emerging not only in the Middle East but also in the West.Khamenei said.Ayatollah Khamenei, while encouraging his followers to believe his words, falsely claimed there was failure by the Zionist regime to win itsHe stated,according to corporate director of security and cyber crime expert Jonathan Christian Peters.Many Iranian officials criticized their country's priority of building up its military might with expensive armaments and projects such as their recent unveiling of a missile defense system and a new, domestically built stealth fighter jet. The Ayatollah said that the new world order will depend on a nation's economic and technological advantages being preferred over its military prowess.Ayatollah Khamenei, sounding very much like the leaders of industrialized Western countries, said that a transitional period will entail the end of theand the start of a unipolar world that hasn't arrived yet. The Supreme Leader said that theThe Ayatollah, who is considered the real power in Iran, noted thatIt's quite possible that President Barack Obama and his administration's minions are provoking many Americans to stage an actual rebellion, former NRA editor and leading weapons policy maven, John Snyder has warned.In addition, Snyder points out that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal also accused President Obama and other Democrats of waging war against religious liberty and education and said that a rebellion is brewing in the U.S. with people ready forof the nation's capital.[And] that seems to be the opinion of Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and others, as well."Gov. Jindal spoke in Washington, D.C, at the annual Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. During his presentation he accused Obama, his minions and sycophants of waging war against certain American valuessaid Snyder, who is also on the board of advisers for the National Association of Chiefs of Police.he added.
Today, Congressman Walter B. Jones (NC-3) responded to the Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General's (VA OIG) release of their investigative report concerning John Thomas Burch, Jr., a senior VA official. In March of this year, CNN reporters David Fitzpatrick , Drew Griffin, and Jake Tapper reported that Burch's charity, the National Vietnam Veterans Foundation (NVVF), gave less than 2 percent of donations to veterans, while the rest went to personal expenses. In response, Jones wrote to Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald , demanding the resignation of Burch.After a thorough investigation, this afternoon the VA OIG released its report, which found Burch to be guilty of "conduct prejudicial to the Government, to have misused his VA position for his private gain and misusing government resources in connection with his outside employment as Chairman of the Board and President of the veterans' charity." As a result, the VA immediately began the process to remove Burch from federal service. Additionally, the VA OIG worked with the New York Office of the Attorney General Charities Bureau (NYAGCB), and after further inquiry, Burch agreed to pay $100,000 to the New York Department of Law, and $5,331 to the charity in a settlement.said Congressman Jones.Congressman Jones has long been an advocate for veterans and has consistently taken action to hold the VA accountable. This Congress, Congressman Jones cosponsored a career record of 99 bills to help veterans by providing better access to more transparent healthcare, access to educational opportunities, affordable housing, and job opportunities. In fact, over the past three years, Congressman Jones has cosponsored more bills to help veterans than any member of Congress. The full VA OIG investigative report and press release are attached.For additional information, please contact Allison Tucker in Congressman Jones' office at (202)225-3415 or allison.tucker@mail.house.gov.
| BY Ricki Green |

Leading dip and yoghurt brand, Black Swan, has made its foray into the personalisation and creation space with the launch of a new experience-led campaign at Taste of Melbourne via Banter, and Mediavest Melbourne.

Black Swan Beta will give Taste guests the chance to be part of the future of Black Swan via a concept described as part laboratory, part kitchen and part hole-in-the- wall restaurant.

25,000 Taste guests will have the chance to design their own dip or yoghurt masterpiece, get their hands on one of Black Swans future innovations and indulge in the most expensive dip the brand has ever created. They will also be able to take a seat a seat to taste the wonderful world of the dip range on the Taste Train, a moving feast via a revolving conveyor belt.

Guests will be able to choose from a number of bases such as Hommus, Tzatziki and Greek Style Yoghurt. They can then mix in a number of the 28 add-on ingredients offer including Crumbed Bacon, Chia Seeds, Passionfruit Pulp, Diced Beetroot and Wasabi and infuse it with one of six flavoured oils with the likes of Roasted Onion, Basil and Lemon on offer.

If guests are overwhelmed with the paradox of choice, Black Swan has already done some of the hard work. Five signature limited-edition dips have been specially created for the event, with the Maple Bacon with Caramelised Onion, White Caviar and Edamame Hommus with Wasabi & Pickled Ginger dips sure to be a hit with foodies.

Black Swan will bring the experience to life with Born to Create, a multifaceted content campaign bringing the activation to life outside of Taste, demonstrating Black Swans love of real flavours, real stories, real people and their love to create.

All elements of the activation will be showcased across paid, owned and shared channels  allowing the diverse and versatile product range to be shared and engaged with a wide reaching audience.

Says Brooke Tierney, head of marketing, Monde Nissin Australia: We are really excited about launching Beta at Taste Melbourne, and reaching a wide audience with purpose built content. It is not only a great platform to allow consumers to experience the versatility of both our dips and yoghurt range but it encompasses the rich history and innovative spirit of the brand. As a collaborative team, we have pushed really hard to challenge the way in which we sample to consumers and we cant wait to see how consumers react to some of the flavours we have created and who knows we might see them on the shelves at a later date.

Brooke Tierney  Head of Marketing, Monde Nissin Australia

Sophie Brereton  Marketing Assistant, Monde Nissin Australia

Emily Andrews  Product Developer, Monde Nissin Australia

Mitchell Loadsman  Partner  Experience & Operations, Banter

Paul Den  Partner  Strategy & Ideas, Banter

Kate Provan  Group Business Director, Mediavest Melbourne

Emma Schmidt  Account Manager, Mediavest Melbourne
| BY Lynchy |

R/GA Sydney, in partnership with Google Play Music and Hilltop Hoods, has created an interactive film for Through The Dark; a song written by Dan Smith (aka MC Pressure) as his son underwent treatment for leukaemia.

The emotive experience harnesses mobile and digital technology to show a world turned upside down. Rotating and tilting high-spec Android phones reveals a father and sons journey through two 3D animated environments  the dark representing fear and the light representing hope. In the desktop version, navigation is controlled via trackpad or mouse.

This is a deeply moving story and a powerful song that had to be brought to life in a way that conveyed the emotional journey at its heart, said Hamish Stewart, Executive Creative Director of R/GA Sydney. We wanted to push the capabilities of mobile to their limit to do it justice.

The interactive film is driven entirely by code. The 3D environments are rendered in real-time with WebGL, enabling users to choose their own experience of the story based on the orientation of their device.

Balancing the technical and creative requirements was a significant challenge. The end result was achieved through close collaboration with some incredibly talented people who shared our passion for this project, said Stewart.

Through The Dark is part of Googles commitment to supporting Australian artists with projects merging art and technology to create innovative music experiences. Past launches include The Cube for The Presets No Fun, and Playing With Fire for Elizabeth Rose.

Sophie Hirst from Google Australia said, For anyone thats been to a Hoods concert, hearing this song live is a magic moment. We wanted to recreate that feeling for anyone, no matter where they were, to give depth to the musical experience and help raise awareness for young people living with cancer in Australia.

It was also vital to give fans a way to support this cause directly. Listening to the latest Hilltop Hoods album, Drinking From The Sun, Walking Under Stars Restrung, on Google Play Music via the link at the end of the Through The Dark film results in a $1 donation to leading youth cancer organisation CanTeen, thanks to Google and Hilltop Hoods.

Dan Smith from Hilltop Hoods said, Through The Dark was inspired by my sons fight against leukaemia; its a story of hope and perseverance throughout the journey of his recovery. Cancer is something that affects us all at some point in our lives, whether a personal struggle or someone close to us. Through a collaboration of music and technology we seek to empower and give strength to the suffering: our listeners can do the same by donating generously.

Head to throughthedark.withgoogle.com to experience the interactive film on high-spec Android devices* or as a desktop version.

Client: Google Australia

Artist: Hilltop Hoods

Agency: R/GA Sydney

Production Co: Exit Films

Director: Mike Daly

Executive Producer: Kim Wildenburg

Animation Studio: XYZ Studios

Design: Eran Hilleli

Senior TD: Richard Osellame

CG Lead: Stevie Watkins

Executive Producer: Garett Mayow
| BY Ricki Green |

Spirit of Tasmania has appointed Leo Burnett Melbourne as its advertising agency and reappointed Maxus as its media agency for three-years.

The decisions were made after a comprehensive agency review and a competitive tender process.

Leo Burnett Melbourne will manage the provision of Spirit of Tasmanias brand strategy and creative services for television, print, radio, outdoor and digital advertising.

Maxus will continue to provide media planning and buying services to Spirit of Tasmania across a variety of targeted and brand-building media channels.

Spirit of Tasmania chief executive officer Bernard Dwyer said following the refurbishment of the Spirit of Tasmania vessels, the introduction of a new-look website and enhanced online booking platform, the company enjoyed a successful 2015/16 and was now focused on keeping the momentum going.

Says Dwyer: Spirit of Tasmania will introduce a brand refresh and requires a new creative and media strategy for this work.

We have identified that we need to re-engage with existing customers and inspire new consumers to sail with Spirit of Tasmania to drive future growth and demand.

We have projected strong passenger growth for 2016/17 and beyond, and look forward to working with Leo Burnett and Maxus to help drive the execution of our marketing strategy until 2019.

Dwyer said he was confident Leo Burnett would deliver impactful campaign outcomes following its sound, detailed and precise pitch.

Says Melinda Geertz, CEO, Leo Burnett Melbourne: Were excited to be working with the team at Spirit of Tasmania. Its a totally unique experience in the Australian travel industry and were looking forward to more people discovering that the journey itself can be as memorable as the destination.

Dwyer said Maxus would continue to manage Spirit of Tasmanias media services.

Says Karly Leach, managing director of Maxus Melbourne: We are delighted to have retained the Spirit of Tasmania business and continue our longstanding relationship with the Spirit of Tasmania team.

As partners, we look forward to working collaboratively with Spirit of Tasmania to unlock growth via innovation and digital thinking, as we work together to lead change for the business over the next three years.
Contact: Kami Mueller

Kami Mueller Kami.Mueller@ncgop.org

Roy Cooper's legal defense team includes Democrat power attorney Mark Elias, former counsel to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.Elias' name may sound familiar to those covering North Carolina politics. He was the lead attorney working to undo voter ID laws in North Carolina and across the country with strong financial support from the liberal billionaire George Soros.Elias has been forthright in his reasoning for challenging North Carolina's voter ID law... to make it easier to elect Democrats.While Pat McCrory has fought to increase the integrity of our elections and combat voter fraud, Roy Cooper and his backroom lawyer have fought to erode the integrity of the ballot box, making it easier to commit voter fraud. While he was charged with defending North Carolina's voter ID law as attorney general, Roy Cooper accepted campaign cash from George Soros before dropping his defense of the law.Currently, about one tenth of one percent separate Roy Cooper and Pat McCrory's vote totals.The crusade of a Democratic superlawyer with multimillion-dollar backingBy Robert BarnesAugust 7, 2016...Elias, a go-to lawyer for Democrats in recount fights and redistricting battles, has now taken a prominent and somewhat controversial place among the coalition of groups challenging a wave of state election laws that were rewritten in recent years.With a multimillion-dollar commitment from liberal mega-donor George Soros......But Elias's efforts explicitly on behalf of Democrats have made 2016 different. Besides joining the efforts of civil rights groups in several states, he has also struck out on his own, bringing additional claims in states that are especially important for Hillary Clinton's campaign and future Democratic candidates...Elias joined civil rights groups in some cases but said he also filed lawsuits in places where a favorable ruling will help the Democratic Party......Even if anyone tried, there would be no way to separate Elias the voting rights lawyer from Elias the political lawyer. Asked about the clients he and his colleagues at the law firm of Perkins Coie represent, Elias replies:
"What is needed from the archbishop is not a focus on moving on but an undertaking to drive the changes that are needed in the church so that our grandchildren don't have to ask us why we didn't fix this problem when it happened to us."
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks after arriving from Malaysia, at Davao International airport in Davao city in southern Philippines, November 11, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

MANILA - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday that he is against the implementation of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that Manila and Washington signed in 2014, hinting again that he might just scrap the agreement that allows prolonged deployment of American forces in the country as well as build logistics hub in Philippine military bases.

Duterte, who arrived early Friday back in Davao City from an overnight official visit to Malaysia, told a news conference that he does not want to see any foreign troops on Philippine soil.

He added that the joint military activities that will be carried out this year by the Philippine and U.S. troops would probably be the last.

In fact, he said that he only gave the go-ahead for the EDCA activities to push through this year because they were already firmed up by Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana.

"By the time I talked to (Lorenzana) the arrangement has already been firmed up. I do not want to embarrass the Philippines and, of course, not so much because I was already vocal against it. But in deference to the secretary of defense I said go ahead but this should be the last time," Duterte said.

Last month he also told a business forum in Tokyo during his visit in Japan, "I want, maybe, in the next two years, my country, freed of the presence of foreign military troops. I want them out, and if I have to revise or abrogate agreements, executive agreements, I will."

Asked whether there would be changes in policies with the new US administration, Duterte said, "I will pursue what I've started."

"I'm not into the habit of reneging on my word. And my partnership with China and the rest of the ASEAN remains. I will sail the stake of the nation and it should be pushed by the wind of self-interest only, self-interest of our nation," Duterte said.

He reiterated that the Philippines will continue to honor the treaties that the Philippines signed with the U.S., including the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.

Duterte reiterated that he is against the joint war games between the Philippines and U.S. forces, saying only the U.S. soldiers benefit from these exercises. Besides, he said that the Americans do not share their sophisticated and state-of the-art communication equipment to Philippine troops.
BISMARCK  Law officers arrested about three dozen Dakota Access oil pipeline protesters in a confrontation Friday that also shut down a state highway.

The midday incident began after about 100 protesters confronted crews doing dirt work along the pipeline route where pipe had already been laid. Workers were safely evacuated, but protesters threw rocks, vandalized equipment, slashed tires on law enforcement vehicles, and used themselves and vehicles to block a county road and state Highway 6, according to Morton County sheriff's spokeswoman Donnell Hushka.

Authorities shut down a 10-mile stretch of the highway for public safety reasons for about two hours before the skirmish died down early in the afternoon.

There were no immediate reports of injuries. Highway Patrol Lt. Tom Iverson said six vehicles belonging to various law agencies were damaged.

The clash happened about 20 miles to the northwest of a protest camp where hundreds of pipeline opponents have gathered for months. More than 470 people have now been arrested since August. Cody Hall, a spokesman for the protest camp, said he couldn't comment on Friday's clash because he wasn't present and didn't have details.

The 1,200-mile pipeline that's to deliver oil from North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to a shipping point in Illinois is complete except for under the Missouri River in North Dakota. Work on that stretch has been delayed while the Army Corps of Engineers reviews its permitting. The Standing Rock Sioux and other opponents say the pipeline threatens drinking water and cultural sites. The company insists it's safe.

Energy Transfer Partners issued a statement Friday saying that it would agree to a Corps request to suspend work in the area to defuse tension, "if we can agree on a date certain upon which we can complete construction." The Corps didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday, which was a federal holiday.

The company also said it's made an offer to the state to help pay law enforcement costs related to the protests "but it has not moved beyond that at this time." A spokesman for Gov. Jack Dalrymple said the governor's office hadn't seen the offer yet and wouldn't speculate on whether the state would accept.
Leroy I. Pool, 69, of Arizona recently pleaded guilty in Sheridan County Justice Court to five misdemeanor charges for shooting and possessing too many Montana game birds.

Pool was charged with two counts of unlawfully possessing over-limits of pheasant and sharp-tailed grouse. Additionally, Pool was charged with failing to retain evidence of species and/or sex on his game birds.

This multi-year investigation lead Region 6 wardens to serve a search warrant on Pool's motor home at the Bolster Dam campground in Plentywood on Oct. 27. Pool had 27 game birds over his possession limit at the time of the search. Pool had been camped in the Plentywood area since before the beginning of the upland game bird season opener.

"It is important for nonresident hunters to be mindful of their total game bird possession limits while camped in Montana for any extended period of time," said Dirk Paulson, Region 6 investigator.

Pool was fined $1,750. He also lost his privileges to hunt, fish, and trap for two years in Montana and all 48 states that are members of the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact. In addition, Pool is required to complete FWP's remedial hunter education program.

Bird hunters are reminded to look at current regulations for the daily and possession limits for the species they are hunting.

Hunters also must retain identification on game birds that are harvested while being transported, or until they have reached the permanent residence of the processor. For sharp-tailed grouse, sage grouse, mountain grouse and Hungarian partridge, a wing must remain naturally attached. Pheasants must have one leg naturally attached for proper identification.
Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing.

You are our people. You Care. We Care2.
The capture and transfer of 30 to 45 bighorn sheep from Hunting District 482 in the Missouri Breaks is one of the items on the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission's agenda when it meets Thursday at 8 a.m. at Montana WILD in Helena.

The bighorns are proposed for release in the Sheep Creek/Beartooth WMA area in HD 455. The transfer is an attempt to reduce bighorn numbers in HD 482, which is over population objective and at risk of a density-related disease outbreak. The objective for HD 482 is 292 to 358 bighorns, and in July 417 were counted. Although FWP has increased ewe licenses it has not resulted in enough harvest to reduce the population.

The commission will also consider the fee-title purchase of about 640 acres adjacent to the Lost River Wildlife Management Area in Hill County at an appraised value of $700,000.

For the full agenda and background on the scheduled topics go to the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks website at http://fwp.mt.gov/; under Quick Links, click Commission, then Meeting Agendas and Minutes.

Audio and video of the meeting will be available at FWP's regional offices. People will also be able to make public comments from regional offices through the live feed. Audio of the meeting will be streamed online at fwp.mt.gov.
Kerala government has come to a considered to fund higher education scholarships for undergraduate and postgraduate students as a supplementary for demand of grants.

The disbursing of scholarship is been pending for the academic period from 2014 - 2017. The amount of Rs 2,374 lakhs will be disbursed to the Kerala State Higher Education Council as supplementary demand for grant.

According to reports, the grant-in-aid to the council was not sanctioned by the government hence the scholarship was not given during the academic year 2015-16.

The delay in disbursal of the scholarships has affected students, specially those belonging to financially poor background.

India's leading Science-based Ayurveda company, Dabur India Ltd, has embarked on a journey to promote Ayurveda amongst the young professionals with AyurMedha scholarship. This innovative program has been inculcated to encourage young talents in the field of Ayurveda. Through this initiative, the company will reach out to India's top 50 Ayurveda medical colleges and select 3 meritorious students for the scholarship prize. Read the complete story here.

The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) has invited applications for the NCERT Doctoral Fellowship 2016. This scholarship scheme is being offered to provide opportunities to young scholars to conduct research in the field of education from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the complete story to apply now.

Yale University, USA is offering Yale Young Global Scholars Programme (YYGS) for the year 2017 for school students of Class 10 and Class 11. YYGS is an academic enrichment and leadership development programme that brings together outstanding high school students from around the world for intensive two-week sessions on the Yale campus. Read the complete story here.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks game wardens are seeking information on a bull elk that was shot and left to waste sometime between Nov. 1-4 in southern Blaine County.

The 5x6 bull elk was found dead on the Biebinger Block Management Area, just off Sawtooth Road.

Anyone with information about the crime is encouraged to call FWPs 24-hour wildlife tip line at 1-800-TIP-MONT (1-800-847-6668).

The 1-800-TIP-MONT program is a toll-free number that allows calls to report violations of fish, wildlife or park regulations. Callers can remain anonymous and may be eligible for a reward up to $1,000 for providing information that leads to a conviction.
Billings police officers are investigating a downtown shooting early Friday that sent two people to a local hospital.

Billings Police Sgt. Harley Cagle said officers responded at about 3:03 a.m. to Twisted Spoke, 3016 First Ave. N., for a possible fight involving several people.

About 20 minutes after the call, two people checked themselves into a local hospital.

Lt. Neil Lawrence said one person had severe injuries while another person, a 29-year-old man, had a gunshot wound.

Neither injuries appeared to be life threatening and neither person was cooperating with the investigation, he said.

Police are getting a search warrant for the Twisted Spoke, Lawrence said.

There have been no arrests, and the investigation is continuing.
LeEco is currently facing financial difficulties due to their rapid expansion in various businesses, but what does this mean to the automotive industry?



According to Bloomberg, Jia Yueting  LeEcos CEO  apologized to shareholders and pledged to slash his income to 1 yuan (15 cents) in a letter sent to the companys employees.

No company has had such an experience, a simultaneous time in ice and fire. We blindly sped ahead, and our cash demand ballooned. We got over-extended in our global strategy. At the same time, our capital and resources were in fact limited, Jia wrote.

But why is this information so important, you might ask? Well, for starters, the entrepreneurs main venture  LeEco  acts as an umbrella company for a number of businesses, including LeEcos automobile division, Faraday Future, and other partnerships associated with them.

The fact that LeEco is running out of cash could mean the delay (or worse) of its own LeSee autonomous vehicle, Faraday Futures upcoming all-electric model, and even Aston Martins RapidE model  which began development earlier this year.

Regulatory finding show that Jias empire relies on a risky financial model, as the Chinese billionaire is using his original, successful business, Leshi (the equivalent of Netflix), as a launching ramp for his other companies. To make matters worse, Leshis stock has plummeted by almost a third since the start of 2016.

Moreover, in his memo, Jia accuses the car division for the reckless spending, saying it already devoured 10 billion yuan ($1,5 billion) in early development. By the looks of it, the future looks bleak, but its not over until the fat lady sings.

PHOTO GALLERY
The film has been in development for some time. It began with an initial idea from Luxx co-CEO Christian Haas which he saved in a drawer for three years. A treatment was then produced by Axel Melzener and a script written by Melzener and Luxx co-CEO Andrea Block, which was re-worked for English by Phil Parker. Haas and Block are co-directors.

Haas told Cartoon Brew that, as an independent production, Manou was initially a struggle to develop and get made. The producers and directors invested over 2 million for development and pre-production. Successful pre-sales and licensing deals added substantial amounts to the budget and German regional and national funds built the third column of financing.

Right now, Luxx is still looking to score a deal on English-speaking territories, including for the U.S. We did voice recordings in L.A. with American actors which is the basis for our rough edit, said Haas. Some of this will be polished and we are searching for two American/English cast members that will help sell the movie.

In addition to the work for Manou, Luxx Studios has worked on the visual effects for several high-profile films, including White House Down, Grand Budapest Hotel, and Independence Day: Resurgence.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets director Luc Besson has revealed that there are 2,734 vfx shots in the film, with only 100 not containing visual effects.

Bessons note on Twitter coincided with the release of the films teaser trailer, which clearly demonstrates how integral vfx and animation are to the film:

Valerian is based on the French science fiction comics series Valerian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mezieres. The principal vfx vendors include Industrial Light & Magic, Weta Digital, and Rodeo FX. The film is heavy on digital environments and creatures.
Photo: File photo

On average, there are 36,000 vehicle related crashes reported to ICBC in the Southern Interior each year.

Of those, more than 100 are fatal.

For local lawyer Paul Hergott, just one crash, is too many.

Hergott has organized a remembrance event the last five years in Kelowna to honour crash victims.

One Crash is Too Many is a campaign intended to raise awareness of the preventability of motor-vehicle-related injuries.

Hergott, a personal injury lawyer, was motivated to take a leading role after years of being exposed the life-changing aftermath of those crashes.

The Kelowna event follows the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims started by RoadPeace in 1993.

In 2005, the United Nations recognized the day as a global event to be observed every third Sunday in November each year.

This year's remembrance will be held at 6 p.m. Nov. 16 at Orchard Park Mall.

Prizes will be given to youth to encourage their creative talents to raise awareness of the issue.
Photo: Castanet Staff

A local woman is suing the City of Kelowna over a disagreement about who should pay for construction defects on her residential property.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Emily Pratt alleges the city issued building permits to the homes builder for plans that ran contrary to city bylaws.

The claim states the developer submitted plans for a home that saw its sanitary sewer line run directly into the citys storm sewer system. Despite being against Kelownas building and plumbing bylaws, the plans were approved and in August 2011 an occupancy permit was issued.

Last November, the city sent Pratt a letter about the defect and issued fines. The fines were eventually dropped, but the city is still demanding the plaintiff repair the defect out of pocket.

The lawsuit alleges the city should have never approved the building plans in the first place. Beyond that, it states that the citys building inspectors should have caught the defect, and should have never allowed the home to be occupied.

Pratt is seeking general and special damages and looking for the City of Kelowna to pay to fix the defect and cover any loss in value on the property.

The city has not filed a response to the claim, and none of the allegations have been proven in court.
The Yellowstone County veteran's court has less than half the number of mentors needed to give every participant in the program a listening ear.

The county's Court Assisting Military Offenders (CAMO) uses mentors to help veterans going through the criminal justice system, Judge Mary Jane Knisely said Wednesday.

The treatment court was created to serve veterans who commit felonies after being released from service, and to provide comprehensive substance abuse and mental health treatment under court supervision. Many have never interacted with the criminal justice system before their military service.

Tim Shaw has been a CAMO mentor for about three months. Many of the veterans in court have behavioral problems that come from PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, Shaw said.

That's true for Jeff Wiggins, who was discharged from the military for his substance abuse and behavioral problems. Wiggins was released while stationed in Germany and was among several others in his unit who were discharged after having trouble coping after active duty, Wiggins said. His unit was getting into fights with people and drinking heavily, something Wiggins saw as a result of PTSD.

"Everyone knew what it was related to," Wiggins said.

Wiggins was later arrested for a PTSD-related incident where he got into an armed standoff with officers. He only survived because police recognized what was going on, Wiggins said. After spending five and a half months in jail, Wiggins found CAMO court and began getting treatment.

Military officials are getting better at recognizing behavioral problems as a result of service, Shaw said. The military has reviewed the discharges of some service members who may have struggled with PTSD, Shaw said.

Knisely's court has helped some veterans with having their dishonorable discharges changed, which allows them a chance to receive benefits from veterans affairs.

Doug Rude, who has worked as a mentor for Knisely's CAMO court for about four years, said helping soldiers navigate the difficulties of the court system is the duty of all veterans. Part of the oath of all military branches includes a promise to leave no solider behind, Rude said.

"The scariest word in the English language is 'alone,' " Rude said. "I don't want anyone there, in court, to be alone."

Rude served in the Vietnam war and believes soldiers returning from the Persian Gulf are being treated better than soldiers who returned with him were, but more can be done.

Having someone to talk to helps prevent veterans from returning to an isolated lifestyle, CAMO court participant Travis Maxwell said. Sober for more than a year, Maxwell said after leaving the military, he worked in order to drink. He spent most of his days at home, with the curtains shut, pretending not to be home.

"Yesterday, I watched someone's kid," Maxwell said. CAMO and alcohol abuse treatment has changed his life. Now he attends meeting almost daily and avoids returning to isolation.

Drew Palmer was accepted into CAMO court after being caught with meth in a stolen car. He said if he had come into a court like CAMO when he was younger, his life may have been different. Palmer, like McCracken, does not have the active-duty experience that some in CAMO court struggle with. His problems stem from a broken home and a substance abuse problem going back to his early teens.

When Palmer was discharged from the military, he returned to an unfamiliar world where the only consistent thing he could find were drugs. He'd often trade his father stolen goods in exchange for meth.

"Veteran's court gave me a new lease on life," Palmer said.

CAMO mentor Jim McCracken said he spent about two years in the military after being drafted in 1969 and spent most of that time in Berlin. He connected to the veterans in CAMO court for the substance abuse struggles, McCracken said. But, after 30 years of sobriety, he wanted to help others who lost control.

"Most of the guys in there are there for a good reason," McCracken said. "They want to change their lives."

It's easier for them to open up to their peers, McCracken said. It is one of the reasons McCracken encourages younger veterans to volunteer with the court.

Veterans returning to war now face a different set of problems than veterans from the Vietnam era, Shaw said. Having Vietnam vets is incredibly important, but the men in court often need to connect with someone who has seen what they've seen, Shaw said.

The court lasts a minimum of a year, depending on each person's progress.

CAMO was funded through a joint collaboration of the Bureau of Justice and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

For people interested in becoming involved in the Veteran treatment court, contact Michelle Shaw at 406-867-2500.
Photo: Contributed

It appears as though the Olympics needs a new sport  poll vaulting is gaining popularity not just here in North America, but in Europe too.

Not too long ago the bookies and pollsters used to make a living from telling us what we are thinking  interesting concept to start with perhaps.

Now, not unlike the mentality of forum trolls where we quickly fall behind anonymity and confuse the pollsters. Such was the case with Christy Clarkes last re-election campaign, Brexit and now Trump.

If there were an Olympic record for poll vaulting however, I think Trump raised the bar a little higher last night.

Was it spin doctoring in the media that went so wrong?

Was the silent majority really looking to see a radical change in the approach to government?

Was America so desperate that they saw no option than to choose between a liar or a self-confessed philanderer who recommends his supporters beat em up or punch them in the face?"

Whatever it was, it ruined my night.

Not because of the outcome, but simply because I expressly told my wife I was not interested in the play-by-play politics during the evening.

Only what would happen once someone was elected. How wrong I was.

Driving back from the Kootenays, my wife and I were taking turns to commentate on a sea of red taking over the U.S. and in shock at how wrong almost every single media outlets predictions were.

I heard a leading Republican describe the conflict in simple terms, a battle of intelligence against stupidity, and stupidity won.

Whatever it was, the passion for Reality TV has created a star of sorts who with no political experience, no statesmanship and a checkered history in business has now gained arguably the most powerful office in the world.

I can only think that the U.S., in a Twinkie-induced coma, fell in to a trap after binge watching the latest episode Tuesday night.

Perhaps we will see the clapper board in a few days time to remind us it was just a practical joke, Trumps next TV series is complete  he did it, he fooled us all. He is off to make his next billion.

He did after all say all.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
Photo: Wayne Moore - Castanet File Photo

A popular, but short-lived, Christmas display may never return to downtown Kelowna.

The display was erected by the Capri Rotary Club in 2013 and 2014. It was donated to the club by West Kelowna resident Jerry Budnick after he decided he no longer wanted to put it up in front of his home.

The display was shut down last year when the BC Safety Authority refused to certify it, calling the display unsafe and dangerous.

Rotary club spokesman Lockie Bracken said the club does not have the funds necessary to bring the display up to code.

Therefore, he said the display won't be going up this year, and may never go up again in its current form.

"We are trying to determine a future for it. If there is someone else who could put new lights on and re-wire it to make it certifiable, then we would consider transferring ownership," said Bracken.

"It is a pretty costly process."

Bracken said they have reached out to Budnick to see if he would take it over and find a new home for it.

"But, nothing has happened to this point."

The display was used by the Rotary Club as a fundraiser.
Photo: CTV

A man who stole gold "pucks" from the Royal Canadian Mint by hiding them in his rectum to evade metal detectors has been convicted of theft.

In his written reasons, Ontario court judge Peter Doody noted the case against Leston Lawrence was circumstantial.

"Nobody testified that they saw him take the gold," the Ottawa judge wrote. "Nor is there a video of him taking it."

Lawrence worked at the mint from 2008 until March 2015. His job required him to purify gold the mint had bought. The process involved creating the pucks. Court heard that he sometimes worked alone and out of sight of security cameras.

In February 2015, a bank employee became suspicious after Lawrence asked to cash two cheques worth $15,200 from Ottawa Gold Buyers. When she asked what the money was for, he told her he had sold "gold nuggets," according to court records. The bank then notified police, who put him under surveillance.

Officers soon seized a gold puck Lawrence had sold to a business, Ottawa Gold Buyers. They also found four others in his safety deposit box. All five were almost pure gold and of identical size to mint pucks. They charged him with five offences, including theft.

The prosecution alleged Lawrence kept some of his loot at home and sold the rest, using the proceeds to build a house in Jamaica and buy a boat in Florida.

The defence argued that it was not definite that the seized pucks were identical to ones created at the mint and were therefore stolen. Doody was having none of it.

"There is only one conclusion that can be reached when the totality of the evidence is considered  that Lester Lawrence secreted gold pucks out of the mint," Doody said.

In all, Doody decided Lawrence had stolen 22 gold pucks from the mint worth $165,451.14.

The judge convicted him of theft over $5,000, possession of property obtained by crime, smuggling gold from the mint, laundering proceeds of crime and breach of trust by a public official.
Photo: Ottawa paramedics

Three workers trapped in a collapsed light rail tunnel under construction in Ottawa have been rescued.

Ottawa paramedics spokeswoman Manon Lavergne says one worker suffered a minor hand injury in the incident, which happened Thursday afternoon.

Lavergne says the injured worker was taken to hospital for treatment.

The other two were not injured.

Ottawa city Coun. Mathieu Fleury said at the scene (on Waller Street) near the University of Ottawa that the majority of workers escaped and the three were trapped in a "safe zone."

The city said on Twitter that the collapse was related to construction.
Photo: Twitter - Rona Ambrose

Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose says Hillary Clinton's defeat in the U.S. presidential election was not a rejection of women in politics.

Ambrose said her take on Donald Trump's victory is that the Democrats lost touch with working people  a lesson that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should heed.

"There is a message there and I don't think the message is that people don't want a woman in politics," Ambrose said Thursday.

"I do think that it is a message for left-of-centre politicians who focus on large policies that are out of touch with regular working people. We saw that in the U.S. election. We saw that in Brexit," she said.

"It is a message to Mr. Trudeau, who is more interested in impressing bureaucrats at the United Nations with his big policies that really are hurting working people. And the more out of touch you are with regular working people ... the more you will be rejected."

Ambrose made the remarks at a news conference she called to protest the Liberal government's plan to move a federal immigration processing office and its 280 jobs to Edmonton from Vegreville, a rural town in eastern Alberta.

Her visit comes after the only two women candidates in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race announced they were dropping out.

Calgary legislature member Sandra Jansen said she quit because of ongoing online harassment. She also said she was bullied at last weekend's policy convention by another candidate's volunteers over her support of women's reproductive rights.

Ambrose said being hassled is part of the job for women in politics. The answer is to keep confronting it head on and hopefully it will go away.

"Listen, politics is a tough sport," she said.

"Any woman who is in politics will tell you that they have experienced intimidation and harassment, but ... when you are faced with that kind of situation, you have to call it out.

"That is what you do on a daily basis. You confront it. You name it. You deal with it. All of us do ... so that those people that do the harassing and the intimidation and the bullying  particularly online  are seen for what they are, and that is important."
Photo: The Canadian Press - File photo Jane Philpott

Federal Health Minister Jane Philpott met with municipal and provincial officials on Thursday at Vancouver's Downtown Eastside fire hall to hear about the challenges that first responders are experiencing as they try to cope with the province's overdose crisis.

The fire hall has been overwhelmed by emergency medical calls since fentanyl spurred a deadly overdose crisis.

Vancouver Fire Chief John McKearney said crews at Fire Hall No. 2 have been making about 1,000 runs per month this year, compared to an average of 600 calls every month in past years, as overdose reports pour in from the neighbourhood.

The B.C. government declared a public health emergency in April because of the dramatic increase in overdose deaths in the province, much of them caused by fentanyl. There were 555 reported overdose deaths in the province as of Sept. 30.

Across the country, an estimated five to six people die every day due to overdosing, Philpott said to reporters ahead of the meeting.

"It is long past time that we all come together and do our part to respond to this," she said.

Firefighters in Vancouver have long been the first responder to medical emergencies and earlier this year they were trained to use the opioid antidote naloxone in response to the rising number of deaths, McKearney said.

The new lifesaving practice could set an example for other fire departments across the country to adopt, he said.

But the repeated calls to drug-related health emergencies takes a toll on first responders.

"The hardest thing on the staff is to keep going back and to see the same people, with their lives ruined, living on the street, with mental health issues either as a result of or caused by (substance abuse)," McKearney said.

Firefighters at the Downtown Eastside hall are allowed to work at the site for only a year and are then transferred to other locations in the city, reducing the mental health implications that come with the stress of the job, the chief said.

Regional health officials, including Vancouver Coastal Health, have called on the federal government to make it easier for communities to set up safe consumption sites as one method of tackling overdoses and other issues that result from drug use.

Philpott said the government is looking at reducing barriers for setting up such sites, but wouldn't be specific.

Legislative changes for safe consumption sites are under consideration and will be announced in the near future, she said.
Photo: Google Street View

A Kelowna man is now free after pleading guilty to beating up his elderly mother, breaking five of her ribs and causing significant head trauma.

The 62-year-old man, who can't be named due to a publication ban to protect the victim, was given credit for the time he had already served in custody, prior to his guilty plea. He had already spent 244 days in jail, and was given credit for 366 days.

He had originally been charged with aggravated assault for an incident in the late hours of March 10, 2016 in the 2300 block of Baron Road.

Police were called to the scene and found an 81-year-old woman suffering life-threatening injuries.

The son, who was heavily intoxicated at the time, had called police.

He claimed he had been attacked by his mother, and had been acting in self-defence.

He had been living with his mother for some time, and said he was taking care of her.

Both the man and his mother were taken to Kelowna General Hospital where he was treated for non-life threatening injuries.

The mother was cared for in the intensive care unit for several days.

On Nov. 8, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of assault, and was given credit for time served, along with 18 months probation.

While the man had no criminal record prior to the assault, he had been denied bail in May, in the interest of public safety.

Correction: A previous version of this story failed to mention the credit the man was given for the time he had already served in custody.
First actions for new council Penticton - 6:36 pm
Photo: Contributed

Police in Port Moody are on the look out for a man who may have allegedly grabbed a young girl, while she was walking home from school on Thursday.

According to CTV Vancouver the incident happened about 3:40 p.m. as the 12-year-old girl was walking through Bert Flinn Park.

Reports indicate the girl screamed the suspect ran off.

Port Moody Police units, Lower Mainland police dog service and the RCMP aerial unit searched the area but did not find the suspect.

The suspect is described as:

a white male,

about 5-6 tall,

in his mid to late teens,

wearing a dark blue jacket, dark blue jeans and black running shoes

his face was partially covered during the alleged attack

The investigation is ongoing and anyone with information is asked to call Port Moody Police at 604-461-3456 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

-- With files from CTV Vancouver.
Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved. FILE - In this Aug. 31, 2011 file photo, former Commander of International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan Gen. Davis Petraeus, standing with his wife Holly, participates in an armed forces farewell tribute and retirement ceremony at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Va.(AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

A senior U.S. military official says the author who had an affair with David Petraeus sent harassing emails to a woman who was the State Department's liaison to the military's Joint Special Operations Command.

The official says 37-year-old Jill Kelley in Tampa, Fla., received the emails from Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell that triggered an FBI investigation.

The official was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Another person who knows Kelley and Petraeus confirmed their friendship and said she saw him often.

Petraeus quit as CIA director last week after acknowledging an extramarital relationship with a woman, later identified as Broadwell.

The FBI probe began several months ago with a complaint against Broadwell. That investigation led to Broadwell's email account, which uncovered the relationship with Petraeus.
The Montana Infrastructure Coalition, which includes the city of Billings as one of its newest voting members, is working to improve the C-minus grade given two years ago to the overall quality of the states infrastructure.

That grade, given by the Montana Section of American Society of Civil Engineers, included a D-plus for wastewater, a C-plus for transit and a D-minus for schools.

Darryl James, executive director of the coalition, briefed city leaders, contractors and engineers Thursday on the steps it plans to take during the 2017 Legislature to increase available revenue and improve the state's infrastructure.

Coalition members agree they want to grow the pie rather than seek a larger slice of it, James said.

The coalition is not interested in going in and fighting over an insufficient pie, he said.

Over the past two sessions, lawmakers and Gov. Steve Bullock have failed to find compromise on funding infrastructure improvements in the state.

I think anything we can do, said Billings City Administrator Tina Volek, is better than sitting for another two or four years with nothing to show for it.

The coalition is separate from the group Authorize Community Transformation, which is lobbying the Legislature to allow communities to vote on a local option authority. The Billings City Council is set to vote on approving that initiative Monday.

The city council approved last month the city becoming a voting member of the Montana Infrastructure Coalition. Voting members pay $5,000 each. Nonvoting associate members pay $500 for membership. The city of Laurel is also a member.

The coalition seeks a number of avenues to help communities work on their issues around aging infrastructure, including drinking water, wastewater treatment, bridges and roads. Ideas on those funding sources, which will require legislative approval, include:

Increasing the states gas tax, now at 27.75 cents per gallon, which is less than gas taxes in neighboring states. While about $219 million in gas tax revenue is distributed in Montana annually, the share for cities and counties has been capped the past three decades at $16 million, James said.

A cap in the coal severance tax trust fund, which now contains more than $1 billion. James said the coalition wants to push more dollars through the Treasure State Endowment Program, which helps communities with infrastructure planning as well as constructing or upgrading drinking water systems, wastewater treatment systems, bridges and other infrastructure. That program ended June 30, so a coalition priority will be getting the Legislature to reactivate it, James said.

The difficulty of getting new funding sources enacted, James said, will be who pays the new tax and who gets the benefit.

Coalition members  which include more than a dozen municipalities and dozens of companies and organizations, including Big Sky Economic Development and the Billings Chamber of Commerce  will meet Monday in Bozeman to refine their proposal, which they plan to present to legislators as a united front.

We have to look at it as a package, James said. We want to keep this (infrastructure investment) going for the long run and continue the dialogue.

The coalitions contractor members play a huge role, he said, because theyre willing to throw in a significant amount of money, and they have a fair amount of clout and credibility with legislators.

City leaders said theyd have little problem taking a whack at the citys lengthy list of infrastructure needs. Volek said the citys transit program, for example, has been living on reserves which are set to run out in two years.

Vern Heisler, assistant public works director, said the department spends $4 million annually on replacing, among other things, aging water lines, and we could spend way more than that each year easily.

To find out more about the Montana Infrastructure Coalition, go to mtinfrastructure.org.
UP

More voters. More Montanans than ever before voted in the Nov. 8 elections: 504,409, according to Secretary of State Linda McCulloch. Nearly 497,600 Montanans voted in the November 2012 elections.

UP

Ballot options. Statistics from McCullochs office confirm that both early voting and same-day registration are important options for Montanans. Statewide, 354,897 absentee ballots were issued, and 93.67 percent were returned. An estimated 25,657 voters used Montanas late voter registration period (last 30 days before the election) to register and vote, including about 10,357 who registered and voted on Election Day.

UP

All-school powwow. The Billings Tribal Youth Council, whose membership includes students from Skyview, Senior and West high schools, hosted a powwow Saturday at Senior. Congratulations to the students who organized this great event and to the educators supporting them.

DOWN

Contract corruption. Billings contractor Kevin McGovern and his company, CMG Construction, were convicted by a U.S. District Court jury of defrauding the Chippewa Cree Tribe and bribing tribal officials to obtain $2.5 million in federally funded contracts without competing. The maximum penalties are 20 years in prison and fines of up to $500,000.

DOWN

Monster mussels. Glacier National Park officials took the precaution of closing all park lakes to boating temporarily after the larvae of invasive Quagga and zebra mussels were found in other Montana waters. Larvae were found in Tiber reservoir and suspected larvae were found at Canyon Ferry. These invasive species hurt native fish populations by consuming their food. The mussels also can clog water pipes.

UP

Veteran mentors. The veterans treatment court in Yellowstone County, led by District Judge Mary Jane Knisely, is recruiting veterans to volunteer as mentors for court participants working to stay in recovery. For more information about helping local veterans through Court Assisting Military Offenders, call Michelle Shaw at 406-867-2500.

UP

Veteran drivers. The VA Montana transportation program runs on volunteer power with vans donated by the Disabled American Veterans and local people volunteering to drive the vans to take veterans to and from medical appointments. More volunteer drivers are needed in Billings, Columbus, Glasgow, Lewistown, Malta and Miles City. Phone VA Montana at 406-447-7345 to find out how to help.

DOWN

Ag income shrinks. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reported that demand for farm loans continues to grow as agriculture producers income shrinks. The Kansas City Fed covers Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, northern New Mexico and western Missouri. Eighty-seven percent of bankers in that region reported declines in farm income for the third quarter.
A federal jury in Great Falls convicted Billings contractor Kevin McGovern and his company, CMG Construction, this week of corruption charges that accused them of defrauding the Chippewa Cree Tribe and bribing tribal officials to get $2.5 million in federally-funded contracts without having to compete.

The panel on Thursday found McGovern and his company guilty of conspiracy to defraud, a scheme to defraud and bribing a tribal official, Tony Belcourt, court records said. The jury acquitted McGovern and CMG of a second bribery count involving John Chance Houle.

The four-day trial began on Monday with U.S. District Judge Brian Morris presiding. He set sentencing for Feb. 16 and continued McGoverns release.

McGovern faces a maximum 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the wire fraud count. The company faces a maximum $500,000 fine for each conviction.

McGovern did not testify.

Defense attorney Mark Parker of Billings said, Were disappointed, and were weighing our options.

Montana U.S. Attorney Mike Cotter said in a news release, "The community expects that public officials and contractors handle federal funds with great care. When those lines are blurred, and federal funds are abused in the process, the integrity of the political system is in danger.

"That is why we will continue to vigorously prosecute public corruption" in Montana, he said.

McGovern and CMG were charged in a May 23 indictment, which was the latest in a series of corruption charges against McGovern for activity involving the Chippewa Cree Tribe, located on the Rocky Boys Reservation in north-central Montana.

The prosecution also is part of a massive, ongoing corruption probe by the Department of Interiors Office of Inspector General that has resulted in convictions of numerous tribal and non-tribal members.

The indictment accused McGovern and CMG of conspiring with former tribal officials, Belcourt and Houle, and with James Howard Eastlick, Jr., a Belcourt associate and former clinical psychologist at Rocky Boy Health Clinic, to get preferential treatment in construction contracts for project funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Belcourt, Houle and Eastlick all were convicted in separate corruption and bribery cases, sentenced to prison and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution.

Prosecutors alleged Belcourt and Houle awarded CMG Construction sole-source, non-competitive and unadvertised contracts for project. In return for the preferential treatment, McGovern and the company paid kickbacks to Belcourt and Houle.

The contract kickback conspiracy, prosecutors said, began in about December 2010, six months after flooding destroyed the tribes health clinic.

FEMA, which negotiated with Belcourt, who was the CEO and contracting agent of the Chippewa Cree Construction Corp. and who was designated by the tribe as its emergency incident commander, gave the tribe $11.6 million to help with recovery after the flooding.

The tribe also received about $25 million in an insurance settlement for losses caused by flooding.

In June 2011, Belcourt awarded McGovern and CMG Construction three sole-source, non-competitive and unadvertised contracts, the indictment said. The contacts totaled $2.5 million for consulting services, demolition of the health clinic and blasting and rock-crushing services on infrastructure reconstruction projects.

CMG Construction also deposited in July 2011 a $200,000 payment from the tribes CCCC and approved by Belcourt, the indictment said. The next day, McGovern wrote Belcourt a check for $50,000 from his personal bank account, prosecutors said.

In a separate indictment, McGovern and another of his companies, MC Equipment Holdings, LLC, are accused of conspiracy and bribery charges for allegedly conspiring with Belcourt and others to sell the tribe an asphalt plant at a premium price with the promise of McGovern paying Belcourt a finders fee.

And in a third case, MT Waterworks LLC., a Billings water pipe supply company founded by Belcourt, McGovern and Kent Boos, the company president, paid a $350,000 fine in September for conviction in a corruption case. Federal prosecutors said the company falsely claimed an Indian preference to get federal and tribal contacts from the Chippewa Cree Tribe for work on a federally funded water project.

CMG Construction specializes in site preparation and construction. The company was a subcontractor on the new $80 million James F. Battin Federal Courthouse in Billings and was hired earlier this year by Rocky Mountain College as the general contractor for its $10.5 million initial phase capital project to build a science building and enhance the Herb Klindt Field.
USA: Cemex Victorville receives WHC certification

11 November 2016

Cemex USA's Victorville cement plant in southern California recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and has received the Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) Conservation Certification for its ongoing sustainability, environmental protection and land stewardship efforts.



WHC presented the Victorville plant with the certification 3 November during a ceremony at the 2016 WHC Conservation Conference in Baltimore. The designation means all Cemex USAs cement plants in the USA are now WHC-certified and the company now has 18 WHC-certified sites in North America, of which 15 are in the USA.

WHC focusses on healthy ecosystems and connected communities. Cemex's WHC Conservation Certification programmes are mainly focussed on habitat restoration and sustainability. In 2013 two wind turbines were commissioned at the Victorville plant, generating electricity equivalent to the power requirements of more than 500 homes. The plant earned its fifth Energy Star certification this year for reducing its energy use and environmental impact. The Mojave Desert Air Quality Management District awarded Cemex USAs Victorville plant operation the 2015/2016 Exemplar Award, the districts highest honour for reducing carbon footprints.



The Victorville cement plant was established in 1916 and underwent extensive expansion in 1997 and 2001. During its history the plant has supplied cement for iconic projects like the Hoover Dam and Hollywood Boulevard.Today it has the capacity to produce more than 3Mta of cement to provide the building blocks for schools, roadways and homes across California, Nevada and Arizona.





Published under
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a Lame Deer woman who fatally stabbed her common law husband after a fight in 2014 to time served and ordered three years of supervised release.

U.S. District Judge Susan Watters followed a plea agreement in sentencing Tawnya Bearcomesout, 40, who pleaded guilty in August to involuntary manslaughter in the Nov. 22, 2014, death of her common-law husband, identified as B.B.

Watters said Bearcomesout has already served 17 months in Northern Cheyenne Tribal custody on essentially the same charge and will be returned to tribal custody to finish the 36 days still remaining.

Bearcomesout will then serve three years of federal supervised release during which she will be monitored and get treatment for substance abuse, mental health and anger issues, the judge said.

The judge also imposed $7,918 restitution to be paid to the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, Stevenson and Sons Funeral Homes and the victims brother, Lee Beckman.

Watters called the case a tragedy. While nobody knows exactly what happened that night, Watters said, the couple had a volatile relationship and events were fueled by drugs and alcohol.

Bearcomesout faced a guideline range of 18 months to two years.

Lee Beckman told the judge that his brother was a gentle, kind person and that Bearcomesout has a violent background and had stabbed him before. He called Bearcomesout a danger to herself and to others.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lori Suek said Bearcomesouts substance abuse and violent reactions have plagued her and that she needed treatment.

Assistant Federal Defender Gillian Gosch agreed and said Bearcomesout was in desperate need of mental health and anger management treatment as well as help for substance abuse.

Prosecutors said Bearcomesout fatally stabbed B.B. in the chest outside of their Lame Deer residence.

Earlier in the day, the couple, along with B.B.s brother, were drinking together. Later that evening, B.B.s brother and wife went to B.B.s and Bearcomesouts residence to borrow some movies.

Bearcomesout approached from a hallway, crying and looking bloody and dazed, and said she thought she had stabbed B.B.

B.B.s brother found the victim at the base of the stairs behind the residence. The victim was not breathing and was pronounced dead at the Lame Deer clinic.

Bearcomesout was treated at the clinic for a black eye and cuts on her face and head.

A Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement investigation found a bloody knife under a television stand in a bedroom, evidence of struggle in the kitchen and blood splatters down the stairs ending to where B.B. was found.

Bearcomesout told her mother in a call from the jail that she and B.B. got into a fight and that he hit her head against the sink. She explained that she stabbed him because he was beating her and nobody was helping her, the prosecution said.

The judge dismissed a second count of voluntary manslaughter.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye speaks during a meeting with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the presidential house in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, Nov 10, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

SEOUL - South Korean President Park Geun-hye's approval rating remained at an all-time low for a second week amid a deepening political crisis, according to a Gallup Korea poll released on Friday, underscoring the challenges faced by her administration.

Park's presidency has been rocked by allegations that a personal friend of hers used her ties to meddle in state affairs and wield improper influence.

Gallup said its survey of 1,003 South Koreans from Nov 8-10 showed that 90 percent of participants disapproved of her performance, up from 89 percent last week and a new high.

Park's support dipped to single digits across the country, including in her traditional support base in the conservative stronghold of the Southeast. She had zero support among people under the age of 30, the poll showed.

The results of the Gallup poll came after Park gave her second public apology last week and indicated she was willing to relinquish some power.

Park offered to withdraw her nominee for prime minister this week if parliament recommended a candidate that opposition parties could agree upon, but her offer did little to quell public anger.

The post of prime minister is largely a figurehead role in South Korea, where power is concentrated in the presidential office.

The two main opposition parties have rejected Park's offer and demanded she hand over most of her presidential authority to a new prime minister and the Cabinet.

Some lawmakers have called on her to step down but the main opposition parties have not raised the idea of launching impeachment proceedings.

A large crowd was expected at an anti-Park rally on Saturday, with organisers saying the number could reach 1 million, according to Korean media reports.
GILLETTE  An autopsy has determined that two men whose bodies were found dismembered in Gillette were shot in the back of the head.

The revelation came during a preliminary hearing this week for Michael Paul Montano, who is accused of killing the two men.

Circuit Judge Wendy M. Bartlett bound Montano over for trial.

Police say the decomposed bodies of 33-year-old Phillip Brewer and 38-year-old Jody Fortuna were found Oct. 8 in tote containers in the back of Montano's pickup and in a car-top container in a storage unit that he and his girlfriend had rented.

Montano is charged with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of mutilation of dead human bodies.

Montano's attorney, Kurt Infanger, argued there wasn't enough evidence to establish probable cause on the murder charges.


Catholic Family News A Monthly Journal Preserving our Catholic Faith and Heritage Home

Latest

Archives

Subscribe

CFN Media - videos

Contact Us

CFN Bookstore

Oltyn Library Services 2017 CFN Daily Blog

Originally started as a daily Blog update of news reports on the

Papal Conclave and ongoing news on Pope Francis, it is

now a general Blog updated daily on traditional Catholic topics

Updated Regularly  Book mark this page  click here



Luxury hotels in the historic center for a Catholic family. Only luxury hotels can provide a paradisiacal vacation for a big Catholic family. A high-level vacation for families, children and not only. The gorgeous views, divine service, and the best location are all luxury hotels. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and more. Everyone will find their place in this corner of paradise.

Popular destinations

Breckenridge, CO, United States

In Breckenridge, Colorado, there are plenty of places to visit, whether you're a nature lover or thrill seeker. For nature lovers, the Blue River runs right through town and there are plenty of trails to explore. If you're looking for a thrill, Breckenridge is home to some of the best skiing and snowboarding in the country. There's also plenty of shopping and dining options in town, so you'll never run out of things to do.

Breckenridge Luxury Hotels

Savannah, GA, United States

Savannah, Georgia is a beautiful city with lots of places to visit, including Forsyth Park, River Street, and the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace. Another place to visit is the Savannah History Museum, which is jam-packed with interesting exhibits on the history of the city.

Savannah Luxury Hotels

Naples, FL, United States

Naples is known for its stunning white sand beaches and crystal-clear waters. Its also home to a wide variety of attractions, including world-class golf courses, vibrant nightlife, and interesting cultural experiences. Here are five places to visit in Naples, Florida:  Naples Pier: Stroll along the pier and enjoy panoramic views of the Gulf of Mexico.  Fifth Avenue South: This popular shopping and dining district is home to eclectic boutiques, award-winning restaurants, and lively bars.  The Ritz-Carlton, Naples: This luxurious resort is set on 26 acres of pristine waterfront property and offers superb amenities, including a world-class spa and championship golf course.  The Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens: This zoological park is home to more than 700 animals representing 150 species, including flamingos, lemurs, and tigers.  Tin City: This eclectic shopping and dining district is housed in a series of restored waterfront warehouses and features eclectic shops, galleries, and award-winning restaurants.

Naples Luxury Hotels

Naples Luxury Resorts

Louisville, KY, United States

Louisville is in the heart of Kentucky and is known for being the home of the Kentucky Derby. There are a lot of great places to visit in Louisville, including the Louisville Zoo, the Muhammad Ali Center, and the Frazier History Museum. There are also a lot of great restaurants and bars in Louisville, and it's a great place to visit for a weekend getaway.

Louisville Luxury Hotels

Galveston, TX, United States

Galveston is a Texas coastal town that is rich in history and offers visitors a variety of places to visit and things to do. Some of the most popular attractions include the Moody Gardens, Schlitterbahn Waterpark, and Historic Downtown. There are also a number of museums and other historical landmarks, as well as plenty of shopping and dining options.

Galveston Luxury Hotels

Galveston Luxury Resorts

Omaha, NE, United States

The birthplace of Warren Buffett, Omaha, Nebraska, is a great place to visit. There are plenty of things to see and do in Omaha, from touring the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium to visiting the Durham Western Heritage Museum. Other popular tourist destinations in Omaha include the Joslyn Art Museum, the Ak-Sar-Ben Aquarium, and TD Ameritrade Park.

Omaha Luxury Hotels

Columbus, GA, United States

Columbus is a charming small town in Georgia that is worth a visit. There are several places to visit in Columbus, including the Riverwalk, the Chattahoochee River, the National Infantry Museum, and the Coca-Cola Space Science Center. The Riverwalk is a beautiful walkway along the Chattahoochee River that is perfect for a relaxing stroll or a bike ride. The Chattahoochee River is a great place to go fishing, swimming, or kayaking. The National Infantry Museum is a museum dedicated to the infantry of the United States Army. It is a must-see for history buffs. The Coca-Cola Space Science Center is a museum dedicated to space science. It is perfect for kids and adults alike.

Columbus Luxury Hotels

Anchorage, AK, United States

Anchorage is a great place to visit if you're looking for an adrenaline rush. From skiing and snowboarding in the winter to rafting and fishing in the summer, Anchorage has something to offer everyone. In addition to its outdoor activities, Anchorage also has a variety of cultural and historical attractions, including the Anchorage Museum and the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail.

Anchorage Luxury Hotels

Portland, OR, United States

Portland is a city that is located in the US state of Oregon and it is known for its art scene, food, and coffee. There are a lot of interesting places to visit in Portland, such as the Portland Art Museum, where you can see a variety of art from all over the world. Another place to visit is the Powell's City of Books, the largest independent bookstore in the world. If you're looking for a place to eat, Portland has no shortage of amazing restaurants, such as Pok Pok, which serves Thai cuisine, and Le Pigeon, which serves French cuisine. And, of course, no trip to Portland would be complete without trying some of the city's famous coffee, such as Stumptown Coffee Roasters.

Portland Luxury Hotels

Florence, Italy

No trip to Italy is complete without a visit to Florence. This historic city is home to some of the country's most famous attractions, including the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, and Michelangelo's David. There's also plenty to see and do outside of the city center, including the picturesque Tuscan countryside and the vibrant university town of Arezzo.

Florence Luxury Hotels

Florence Luxury Villas

Asheville, NC, United States

Asheville is a city in western North Carolina. It is the largest city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Buncombe County. Asheville is home to the Biltmore Estate, the largest private home in the United States. The city of Asheville proper had a population of 84,236 in 2010. The city is known for its art deco architecture, mountain scenery and outdoor activities, and as the birthplace of American novelist Thomas Wolfe. It is also home to the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, the second largest craft brewery in the United States.

Asheville Luxury Hotels

Asheville Luxury Cottages

Long Beach, CA, United States

There's plenty to do in Long Beach, California without ever having to leave the city limits. If you're looking for a little adventure, head to the Aquarium of the Pacific for a glimpse of the ocean's creatures or take a walk on the boardwalk at Rainbow Harbor. If you're more of a history buff, the Queen Mary is a must-see. This retired ocean liner is now a hotel and museum with plenty of stories to tell. And no trip to Long Beach is complete without a visit to the iconic Vincent Thomas Bridge.

Long Beach Luxury Hotels

Long Beach Luxury Villas

Cincinnati, OH, United States

Cincinnati is a city located on the Ohio River in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Ohio. The city was founded in 1788 and named after the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary War officers. Cincinnati is a major U.S. city and the metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million people. The city is well-known for its German heritage, Oktoberfest celebration, and its variety of chili dishes. Cincinnati is home to three major sports teams: the NFL's Cincinnati Bengals, MLB's Cincinnati Reds, and the NBA's Cincinnati Cavaliers. The city is also home to the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University. The city's historic neighborhoods include Over-the-Rhine, Mount Auburn, and Hyde Park. Cincinnati is a popular tourist destination and offers a variety of attractions and places to visit, including the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, the Newport Aquarium, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Cincinnati Luxury Hotels

Laughlin, NV, United States

Laughlin, Nevada is a great place to visit if you're looking for a fun and affordable vacation. There are plenty of casinos and resorts to choose from, as well as plenty of outdoor activities and attractions. Be sure to check out the local nightlife, and don't forget to take a trip down the mighty Colorado River.

Laughlin Luxury Hotels

Laughlin Luxury Resorts

Anaheim, CA, United States

Anaheim, California is home to both Disneyland and California Adventure Park. The parks are just a short walk away from each other, and make for a great day of exploration. Anaheim is also home to the Anaheim Angels and the Anaheim Ducks, so there's always a game to catch. If you're looking for something a little more low-key, Anaheim has a great shopping district and a variety of restaurants to choose from.

Anaheim Luxury Hotels

Santa Cruz, CA, United States

Santa Cruz is a great place to visit! There are so many places to see and things to do. Some of my favorite places to visit are the Boardwalk, the wharf, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Boardwalk is a great place to go for a walk, ride on the amusement park rides, and eat some of the delicious food. The wharf is a great place to go for a walk, eat some seafood, and listen to the street performers. The University of California, Santa Cruz is a great place to visit to learn about the history of the area and to see some of the beautiful architecture. I highly recommend visiting Santa Cruz if you are looking for a fun and interesting place to visit!.

Santa Cruz Luxury Hotels

Eugene, OR, United States

Eugene, Oregon is a great city to visit with a lot of places to see and things to do. One of the most popular attractions is the University of Oregon campus, which is home to a number of museums and a large football stadium. The city also has a vibrant arts scene, with a number of theaters and art galleries. Outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy the dozens of parks and hiking trails in the area, and there are also a number of wineries and breweries in the area.

Eugene Luxury Hotels

Branson, MO, United States

There's plenty to see and do in Branson, Missouri, from state parks and amusement parks to theaters and shopping. Here are some of the most popular places to visit: Silver Dollar City is a theme park with rides, shows, and craftsmen demonstrations. is a theme park with rides, shows, and craftsmen demonstrations. The Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Theatre puts on a variety of shows, including "The Legend of the Shepherd of the Hills" and "The Catfish Fry." puts on a variety of shows, including "The Legend of the Shepherd of the Hills" and "The Catfish Fry." Table Rock State Park has fishing, swimming, and hiking trails, as well as a nature center. has fishing, swimming, and hiking trails, as well as a nature center. The Titanic Museum features a half-sized replica of the ship, along with exhibits about the history of the Titanic. features a half-sized replica of the ship, along with exhibits about the history of the Titanic. Branson Landing is a shopping and entertainment complex on the waterfront. There's something for everyone in Branson, Missouri  come visit and see for yourself!.

Branson Luxury Hotels

Panama City Beach, FL, United States

The white sand beaches and emerald waters of Panama City Beach, Florida, are a popular tourist destination. The city is home to numerous hotels, resorts, and restaurants, as well as amusement and water parks. Visitors can also enjoy fishing, kayaking, and surfing.

Panama City Beach Luxury Hotels

Panama City Beach Luxury Resorts

Monterey, CA, United States

Monterey is a coastal city in Monterey County, California, United States. It stands at the southern end of Monterey Bay, on the Pacific coast. The city is also the home of the Naval Postgraduate School. Monterey is the largest city in the Central Coast region of California. The main attractions in Monterey are the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Fisherman's Wharf, Cannery Row, and the downtown area.

Monterey Luxury Hotels

Norfolk, VA, United States

Norfolk, Virginia is a great place to visit for its historical places and military bases. Some places to visit in Norfolk are the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk Botanical Garden, and the Norfolk Naval Station.

Norfolk Luxury Hotels

Palm Springs, CA, United States

Palm Springs is a vibrant city located in the Coachella Valley and is known for its year-round sunshine, resort atmosphere and Mid-Century Modern architecture. Top places to visit include the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, Palm Springs Art Museum, Indian Canyons and Moorten Botanical Garden. For a truly unique experience, be sure to check out the Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale  the worlds largest vintage furniture and design event.

Palm Springs Luxury Hotels

Palm Springs Luxury Resorts

Palm Springs Luxury Villas

Rochester, NY, United States

Rochester is a city in western New York State and is the county seat of Monroe County. Rochester is known for its annual festivals, including the Rochester International Jazz Festival, the Rochester Fringe Festival, and the Holiday Folk Fair International. Places to visit in Rochester include the George Eastman Museum, the Strong National Museum of Play, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, and the Seneca Park Zoo.

Rochester Luxury Hotels

Pigeon Forge, TN, United States

Visit the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge for a unique experience. This museum is dedicated to the Titanic, one of the most infamous ships in history. Tour the ship and learn about the passengers and crew who were on board. You can even see the actual artifacts recovered from the shipwreck. If you're looking for a little more excitement, head to Dollywood. This amusement park is home to roller coasters, a water park, and plenty of other rides and attractions. Plus, the park is themed around the life and music of Dolly Parton. No trip to Pigeon Forge is complete without a visit to the Great Smoky Mountains. These mountains offer a variety of activities, including hiking, fishing, and horseback riding. Plus, the natural beauty of the area is simply breathtaking.

Pigeon Forge Luxury Hotels

Jacksonville, FL, United States

Jacksonville is less than an hour's drive from the beaches of Amelia Island and St. Augustine, and a little more than two hours from Orlando. The city has a lot to offer visitors, including a riverwalk, museums, and a vibrant arts scene. Jacksonville is also home to the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL team.

Jacksonville Luxury Hotels

Minsk, Belarus

Minsk, the capital of Belarus, is a city that has something for everyone. If you're looking for a little history, Minsk has plenty of it, with churches and monuments dating back to the 12th century. If you're looking for a lively nightlife, Minsk has that, too, with plenty of bars, clubs, and restaurants. And if you're looking for a little nature, Minsk has parks and gardens to enjoy. Here are just a few of the places you can visit in Minsk: The Holy Spirit Cathedral, one of the oldest churches in Minsk, is a must-visit for history buffs. The National Library of Belarus is a huge library with more than 18 million items in its collection. The Opera and Ballet Theatre is a beautiful building that hosts performances of both opera and ballet. The Victory Park is a large park with a war memorial, a children's playground, and a lake. And for a little bit of nature in the heart of the city, the Botanical Garden is a great place to relax and take a break from the hustle and bustle of Minsk.

Minsk Luxury Hotels

Jaipur, India

Jaipur is one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. It is the capital of the state of Rajasthan and is known for its palaces, forts and temples. Some of the places to visit in Jaipur include the Amber Fort, the City Palace, the Jantar Mantar Observatory and the Hawa Mahal. Jaipur is also a great place to shop for traditional Indian handicrafts.

Jaipur Luxury Hotels

Chicago, IL, United States

Chicago is a city full of culture and history. There are plenty of places to visit, such as the Willis Tower, Buckingham Fountain, and the Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago is also home to many restaurants and bars, so there is something for everyone.

Chicago Luxury Hotels

Auckland, New Zealand

Auckland is a beautiful city located on the north island of New Zealand. There are many places to visit in Auckland, including the Sky Tower, the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and the Auckland Domain. The beaches in Auckland are also worth visiting, especially Karekare and Piha. Auckland is a great place to visit, and I highly recommend it!.

Auckland Luxury Hotels

Auckland Luxury Villas

Amsterdam, Netherlands

If you're looking for a city that's got it all, Amsterdam should be your go-to destination. From the city's lively and vibrant nightlife to its charming and quiet neighborhoods, Amsterdam has something for everyone. Be sure to check out the Anne Frank Huis, the Rijksmuseum, and the Van Gogh Museum, as these are some of the most popular attractions in the city. And if you're looking for a little bit of nature, be sure to take a walk or bike ride through Amsterdam's many parks.

Amsterdam Luxury Hotels

Berlin, Germany

There are so many great places to visit in Berlin that it can be hard to know where to start. From the iconic Brandenburg Gate to the fascinating Reichstag Building, there's something for everyone in this vibrant city. If you're looking for a bit of history, make sure to check out the Berlin Wall Memorial or the DDR Museum. And for those looking for a bit more fun, there's always the Alexanderplatz Christmas Market or the Zoologischer Garten. No matter what your interests, Berlin is a city you won't want to miss.

Berlin Luxury Hotels

Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok is a city of contrasts with its gleaming temples and skyscrapers, chaotic markets and tranquil canals. While it's a popular tourist destination, Bangkok is a city that can be enjoyed by visitors of all ages. Some of the top places to visit in Bangkok include the Grand Palace, Wat Arun, the floating markets and the Chatuchak Weekend Market.

Bangkok Luxury Hotels

Bangkok Luxury Resorts

Bangkok Luxury Villas

Bruges, Belgium

Bruges is a city in Belgium that is worth visiting. It is full of medieval charm and there are a lot of things to see and do. Some of the places to visit include the Markt, the Belfry, and the Begijnhof.

Bruges Luxury Hotels

Brussels, Belgium

Brussels is a city in Belgium that is best known for its chocolate, waffles, and beer. But there is much more to see and do in Brussels than just indulge in the local cuisine. There are a number of interesting historical landmarks to visit, such as the Grand Place and the Atomium, as well as a variety of parks and gardens. And, of course, Brussels is also a great city to explore on foot.

Brussels Luxury Hotels

Budapest, Hungary

Budapest, Hungary's capital, is a city of thermal baths and medival, baroque and art nouveau architecture. Crowded with tourists, the city is bisected by the Danube River into the hilly Buda and the more developed and flat Pest. Among the main places of interest are the neo-Gothic Parliament, the Chain Bridge linking Buda and Pest, the Matthias Church and Fisherman's Bastion on the Buda bank, and the State Opera House and Heroes' Square on the Pest side.

Budapest Luxury Hotels

Playa del Carmen, Mexico

Home to some of the best beaches in Mexico, Playa del Carmen is a favorite tourist destination for visitors from all over the world. With its lively nightlife, gorgeous coastline and ample shopping opportunities, there's something for everyone in this tropical paradise. Don't miss the opportunity to visit some of the area's most popular attractions, such as the ancient Mayan ruins of Tulum and Coba, or the eco-friendly Turtle Beach. With its friendly people, delicious food and stunning scenery, Playa del Carmen is a place you'll never want to leave.

Playa del Carmen Luxury Hotels

Playa del Carmen Luxury Resorts

Playa del Carmen Luxury Villas

Denver, CO, United States

Denver is a great city for visitors. There are so many places to see and things to do. Some of the top places to visit include the 16th Street Mall, the Denver Botanic Gardens, the Denver Art Museum, and the Colorado State Capitol. There are also plenty of great restaurants and shops to explore. Denver is definitely a city worth visiting!.

Denver Luxury Hotels

Dublin, Ireland

Dublin is a city located in Ireland. It's a city full of culture, with plenty of places to visit. Some popular tourist spots are the Guinness Storehouse, Trinity College, and the Dublin Castle. There are also plenty of pubs and restaurants to discover.

Dublin Luxury Hotels

Dusseldorf, Germany

Dusseldorf, Germany is a city with many different places to visit. The city has a mix of old and new buildings, and a variety of activities to do. The best places to visit in Dusseldorf are the Konigsallee, the Rhine Tower, and the Oktoberfest. The Konigsallee is an open-air shopping mall that has many high-end stores. The Rhine Tower is the tallest building in the city and offers great views of Dusseldorf. The Oktoberfest is a week-long festival that celebrates German culture and food.

Dusseldorf Luxury Hotels

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Edinburgh, Scotland is a beautiful city to visit. The architecture is very old and unique, and there are plenty of historical places to visit, like Edinburgh Castle. There are also plenty of parks and gardens, and lots of shops and restaurants.

Edinburgh Luxury Hotels

Rome, Italy

Rome is a city rich in history and filled with beautiful places to visit. Make sure to stop by the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Pantheon. Also be sure to visit St. Peters Basilica and the Sistine Chapel while in Rome. If youre looking for a little more nature in your trip, head to the Villa Borghese gardens or the Janiculum Hill for some wonderful views of the city. And of course, no trip to Rome is complete without a gelato!.

Rome Luxury Hotels

Rome Luxury Villas

New York, NY, United States

There are many amazing places to visit in New York State. Some of my favorites are the Niagara Falls, the Adirondack Mountains, and the Finger Lakes. If you're looking for a city break, New York City is definitely worth a visit. There's endless things to see and do, from touring the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to visiting world-famous museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. No matter what your interests are, you'll be able to find something to enjoy in New York State.

New York Luxury Hotels

New York Luxury Villas

London, United Kingdom

London is a city rich in history and full of amazing places to visit. Some of my favorite places are Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the Tower of London. There is so much to see and do in London, you could spend weeks here and never run out of things to do. If you're looking for a city full of culture and history, London is the place for you.

London Luxury Hotels

London Luxury Cottages

Madrid, Spain

Madrid is one of the most beautiful and culturally rich cities in the world. From the Royal Palace to the Prado Museum, theres plenty to see and do in Madrid. If youre looking for a little bit of nature, Madrid has plenty of parks, like the Buen Retiro Park, to relax in. And dont forget to try some of the delicious tapas and wine while youre in town.

Madrid Luxury Hotels

Memphis, TN, United States

The birthplace of rock 'n' roll, Memphis is a city rich in history and culture. From Graceland to Beale Street, there are plenty of places to visit in Memphis. Be sure to check out Sun Studio, where rock 'n' roll was born, and the National Civil Rights Museum, which tells the story of the African-American civil rights movement. Memphis is also home to some amazing food, so be sure to try some of the city's famous barbecue and soul food.

Memphis Luxury Hotels

Miami Beach, FL, United States

There is much to explore in Miami Beach, from the famous Art Deco district to the vast beaches and crystal-clear waters. Outdoor enthusiasts will love the opportunities for fishing, kayaking, and paddleboarding, while history buffs can explore the ancient burial mounds at Miami Beach. Shoppers and foodies will find plenty to keep them busy, with vibrant neighborhoods like Lincoln Road and Ocean Drive offering unique boutiques and award-winning restaurants. And of course, no trip to Miami Beach is complete without a visit to world-famous South Beach.

Miami Beach Luxury Hotels

Miami Beach Luxury Resorts

New Orleans, LA, United States

You can't visit New Orleans without trying some of the local food. Beignets, Po' Boys, and gumbo are just a few of the must-try dishes. While you're in town, be sure to check out the French Quarter, Jackson Square, and St. Louis Cathedral. If you're looking for some nightlife, Bourbon Street is the place to be. And, of course, no trip to New Orleans is complete without a visit to Mardi Gras!.

New Orleans Luxury Hotels

Milan, Italy

Milan is a city located in the Lombardy region of Italy. It is a popular tourist destination because of its historical and artistic heritage. Some of the places you should visit while in Milan are the Duomo, La Scala, and Castello Sforzesco.

Milan Luxury Hotels

Naples, Italy

Naples is one of the most beautiful and historic cities in Italy. There are countless places to visit, such as the Royal Palace, the Museum of San Martino, and the Church of Gesu Nuovo. Naples is also home to excellent shopping and dining options. Be sure to enjoy a cup of coffee at one of the city's many cafes and take a stroll through the picturesque streets.

Naples Luxury Hotels

Paris, France

Paris is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. It's home to iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Museum, as well as a thriving nightlife and restaurant scene. If you're looking to explore all that Paris has to offer, here are some of the top places to visit: The Eiffel Tower: This iconic landmark is a must-see in Paris. Climb to the top for stunning views of the city, or take a ride on the elevator to the bottom for a closer look at the structure. The Louvre Museum: This world-famous museum is home to some of the most famous works of art in the world, including the Mona Lisa. The Notre Dame Cathedral: This beautiful cathedral is one of the most famous landmarks in Paris. Make sure to climb to the top for some amazing views of the city. The Champs-Elysees: This famous avenue is a popular destination for shopping and dining. Be sure to wander down the street and take in all the sights and sounds. The Arc de Triomphe: This towering arch is another iconic landmark in Paris. Climb to the top for some amazing views of the city.

Paris Luxury Hotels

Paris Luxury Villas

Prague, Czech Republic

Prague is a city rich in history and culture. There are plenty of places to visit, including the Prague Castle, the Charles Bridge, and the Old Town Square. There are also plenty of restaurants and bars to enjoy, and the nightlife is vibrant. Prague is a truly unique city and a must-visit for anyone traveling to the Czech Republic.

Prague Luxury Hotels

Punta Cana, Dominican Republic

Located on the easternmost tip of the Dominican Republic, Punta Cana is known for its beautiful beaches and turquoise waters. This paradise is a favorite destination for travelers looking for a Caribbean getaway. Punta Cana is home to a wide variety of resorts and activities, from enjoying the sand and surf to golfing, spas, and shopping. Nature lovers can also explore the areas jungles, caves, and waterfalls.

Punta Cana Luxury Hotels

Punta Cana Luxury Resorts

Punta Cana Luxury Villas

Marbella, Spain

If you're looking for an idyllic and luxurious Spanish escape, look no further than Marbella. Located on the country's Costa del Sol, Marbella is home to stunning beaches, top-notch resorts, world-class golfing, and much more. A visit to Marbella is the perfect way to experience all that Spain has to offer.

Marbella Luxury Hotels

Marbella Luxury Villas

Marrakesh, Morocco

Marrakesh is a city in Morocco that is full of culture and history. There are several places to visit in Marrakesh, including the Palace of the Bahia, the Ben Youssef Madrasa, and the Saadian Tombs. The souks (markets) are also a must-see, where you can find everything from souvenirs to spices to traditional clothing. Be sure to enjoy a meal in one of the many restaurants or cafes in Marrakesh; the food is delicious and the atmosphere is always lively. Marrakesh is a wonderful city to explore and definitely worth a visit!.

Marrakesh Luxury Hotels

San Francisco, CA, United States

San Francisco is a popular tourist destination, and for good reason. There are plenty of things to see and do in this vibrant city. Here are some of the top places to visit: 1. Fisherman's Wharf: This neighborhood is home to a variety of shops and restaurants, as well as a popular pier where you can enjoy views of the bay. 2. The Golden Gate Bridge: This iconic bridge is a must-see for any visitor to San Francisco. 3. Alcatraz Island: This former federal prison is now a popular tourist attraction. It's a must-see for fans of history and crime dramas. 4. Chinatown: This colorful neighborhood is home to some of the best food in San Francisco. Be sure to check out the Dragon Gate entrance. 5. The Mission District: This trendy neighborhood is home to hip restaurants, bars, and art galleries.

San Francisco Luxury Hotels

Moscow, Russia

Moscow, Russia is a beautiful city with plenty of places to visit. Some of the most popular tourist attractions are the Kremlin, Red Square, and Saint Basil's Cathedral. Other great places to see include the Bolshoi Theatre, Gorky Park, and the Tretyakov Gallery. There are also many churches and other historical buildings to explore. Moscow is a lively city with a lot of culture and nightlife. There is something for everyone to enjoy in Moscow.

Moscow Luxury Hotels

Venice, Italy

Venice is one of the most beautiful places on earth. The city is built on a lagoon in northeast Italy and is known for its canals and gondolas. There are many places to visit in Venice, including the Grand Canal, St. Marks Square, and the Rialto Bridge. Venice is also home to many museums, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Venice Luxury Hotels

Vienna, Austria

Vienna, Austria is a city with a long and rich history. There are many places to visit in Vienna, including the Hofburg Palace, the Ringstrasse, and St. Stephen's Cathedral. Vienna is also home to some of the world's best shopping, including the Karntner Strasse and the Graben. Finally, no visit to Vienna is complete without experiencing the city's world-famous nightlife.

Vienna Luxury Hotels

Zurich, Switzerland

Zurich is a marvelous city located in the heart of Switzerland. It is a city that has something to offer for everyone. From amazing restaurants and beautiful architecture to exciting nightlife and gorgeous parks, Zurich has something for everyone. Some of the most popular places to visit in Zurich include the Bahnhofstrasse, which is the city's most famous shopping street, the Lindenhof, which is a beautiful park with amazing views of the city, and Grossmunster, which is a stunning Romanesque church. Zurich is also home to some of the best museums in the world, including the famed Museum of Art and the Swiss National Museum. With its mix of old-world charm and modern amenities, Zurich is a city that is definitely worth exploring.

Zurich Luxury Hotels

Acapulco, Mexico

If you're looking for a Mexican vacation spot with plenty of history and culture to explore, Acapulco is a great option. From the archeological wonders of the ancient city to the stunning coastal views, there's something for everyone in Acapulco. Plus, with its temperate climate, it's a great escape from colder winter weather.

Acapulco Luxury Hotels

Acapulco Luxury Resorts

Acapulco Luxury Villas

Nashville, TN, United States

One of the United States' most interesting places to visit is Nashville, Tennessee. There's plenty to see and do there, from the Grand Ole Opry to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Music is a big part of the city's history and culture, so be sure to catch a show while you're in town. Other popular attractions include the Ryman Auditorium, the Parthenon, and the Jack Daniel's Distillery. Nashville is also a great place to eat, with a wide variety of restaurants serving up everything from barbecue to Mexican food. So if you're looking for an exciting and diverse city to visit, be sure to add Nashville to your list.

Nashville Luxury Hotels

Nashville Luxury Villas

Atlanta, GA, United States

What's not to love about Atlanta? From the iconic Georgia Aquarium to the World of Coke, from the Fox Theatre to Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta offers a wealth of destinations for tourists. Sports fans will want to check out the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and history buffs will enjoy the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. Braves fans can take a tour of SunTrust Park, and shoppers will enjoy the many boutiques and malls in the city. There's also a great restaurant scene in Atlanta, and music lovers will want to check out the many venues offering live music. Whether you're looking for a fun family vacation spot or a place to explore on your own, Atlanta is a great choice!.

Atlanta Luxury Hotels

Miami, FL, United States

The Magic City is a top tourist destination for a reasonthere are endless things to do in Miami! From exploring the trendy neighborhoods and dazzling beaches to soaking up the Latin culture and nightlife, Miami is jam-packed with amazing places to visit. Here are a few of our favorites: 1. Wynwood Walls: This outdoor art exhibit is a must-see for any art lover. The colorful murals are awe-inspiring and definitely Instagram-worthy. 2. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens: This estate is dripping with luxury and opulence, from the grandiose architecture to the expansive gardens. It's the perfect place for a day of relaxation. 3. South Beach: This world-famous beach is a must-visit for any sun-seeker. The crystal-clear water and soft sand make for the perfect day-long beach getaway. 4. Little Havana: Experience Cuban culture at its best in Little Havana. From delicious food to lively music and dance, there's something for everyone in this vibrant district. 5. Art Deco District: This district is home to Miami's most iconic architecture. Take a stroll down the charming streets and admire the colorful buildings that make Miami so unique.

Miami Luxury Hotels

Miami Luxury Villas

Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo is a must-see destination in Japan. There are endless places to explore in this city - temples, shrines, gardens, and more. The Shinjuku district is a great place to start, with its neon-lit streets and myriad shops and restaurants. For a taste of traditional Japan, visit the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa or the Imperial Palace. Nature lovers will enjoy the Hamarikyu Gardens or the Hama-rikyu Teien Garden. And for a unique experience, take a trip to Mount Fuji.

Tokyo Luxury Hotels

Tokyo Luxury Villas

Buenos Aires, Argentina

There are plenty of places to visit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some popular tourist destinations include the obelisk, the Casa Rosada, and the Puerto Madero district. Every barrio (neighborhood) has its own unique culture and flavor. San Telmo, La Boca, and Palermo are some of the most popular barrios. There are also many parks and plazas, such as Plaza de Mayo and Plaza de la Republica, that are worth checking out.

Buenos Aires Luxury Hotels

Hamburg, Germany

One of the most popular tourist destinations in Germany is Hamburg. From the lively and colorful harbor district to the grandiose City Hall, there is plenty to see and do in Hamburg. Some of the other popular places to visit include the Reeperbahn district with its pubs and nightlife, the Planten un Blomen botanical gardens, and the architecturally stunning Rathausmarkt square.

Hamburg Luxury Hotels

Lisbon, Portugal

The capital of Portugal, Lisbon is a city of fascinating contrasts. From its coastal location, visitors can enjoy stunning ocean views, while its hilly, narrow streets are home to a maze of charming traditional homes and lively nightlife. A city of 7 hills, Lisbon is a bustling metropolis with something for everyone. Here are some of the top places to visit: The Belem Tower, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of Lisbons most iconic landmarks. This 16th-century fortress and lighthouse is a must-see for visitors. The Alfama district, with its winding streets and tile-roofed homes, is the oldest district in Lisbon. This is the perfect place to get lost and explore the citys history. The Lisbon Zoo is a great place to enjoy a day out with the family, with over 2,000 animals from around the world. The Christ the King statue, located atop a hill in the suburb of Almada, offers impressive views of Lisbon and the river Tagus. The Lisbon Oceanarium, located in the Parque das Nacoes district, is home to more than 12,000 marine creatures and is one of the largest aquariums in Europe.

Lisbon Luxury Hotels

Lisbon Luxury Villas

Malaga, Spain

Malaga is an attractive seaside city in southern Spain with a long history. There are many places to visit in Malaga, including the Gibralfaro Castle, the Alcazaba fortress, and the Malaga Cathedral. Malaga is also home to a variety of museums, including the Picasso Museum. The city is well known for its beaches, and there are many delightful places to relax and enjoy the sun and the sea.

Malaga Luxury Hotels

Malaga Luxury Villas

Munich, Germany

When planning a vacation to Munich, Germany, be sure to include these top places to visit: The Marienplatz is a must-see square in the city center, featuring a beautiful Glockenspiel show and the Old and New Town Halls. The Englisher Garten, Europes largest city park, is a great place for a relaxing stroll or a picnic. OlympiaPark is home to the famous 1972 Olympic Stadium as well as a huge amusement park. The Frauenkirche is a stunning church in the old town with a Glockenspiel of its own. Beer lovers will want to visit the Hofbrauhaus, the worlds most famous beer hall. For a bit of history and culture, check out the LudwigMaximilians-University and the Deutsches Museum. There is so much to see and do in Munich  these are just a few highlights!.

Munich Luxury Hotels

Granada, Spain

Granada is a city in southern Spain that is known for its Moorish architecture and history. The city is home to the Alhambra, a palace and fortress that was constructed in the late 1300s. Visitors can also enjoy the citys many churches, including the Cathedral of Granada. Granada is also a convenient base for exploring the other cities and towns in Andalusia.

Granada Luxury Hotels

Bucharest, Romania

Bucharest is a city full of history and culture. There are many places to visit, such as the Palace of Parliament, which is the world's largest civilian building. Other places to visit include the old city center, which is full of charming streets and buildings, and the Botanical Garden, which is the largest botanical garden in Romania.

Bucharest Luxury Hotels

Bologna, Italy

Bologna, Italy is a beautiful city with plenty of places to visit. Some popular tourist destinations include the Piazza Maggiore, the Tower of Asinelli, and the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca. There are also plenty of museums and churches to explore, and the city is full of charming restaurants and cafes. Bologna is an excellent destination for a vacation, and there is something for everyone to enjoy in this amazing city.

Bologna Luxury Hotels

Porto, Portugal

Porto is a port city in Portugal that is well known for its wine. It's also a city with a long and rich history. There are many places to visit in Porto, including the old city center, the Dom Luis I Bridge, and the Clerigos Tower. Porto is also home to the famous Port wine caves, which are a must-visit for wine lovers.

Porto Luxury Hotels

Cologne, Germany

Cologne, located on the Rhine River in western Germany, is a city well worth visiting. The city has a long and rich history, dating back to the time of the Roman Empire. Some of the city's most popular tourist attractions include the Cologne Cathedral, Hohenzollern Bridge, and the RheinEnergieStadion. Additionally, Cologne is home to a wide variety of museums, shops, and restaurants. In fact, the city has been ranked as one of the best places to live in Germany. So, if you're looking for a great European city to visit, be sure to add Cologne to your list.

Cologne Luxury Hotels

Istanbul, Turkey

If you're looking for an exotic and affordable vacation destination, look no further than Istanbul, Turkey. Filled with historical places to visit and bargains to be found, Istanbul offers something for everyone. Be sure to visit the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, and the Blue Mosque while you're there. Don't forget to bargain for the best prices when shopping in the bazaars, and enjoy some delicious Turkish cuisine while you're at it. Istanbul is sure to leave you with a lasting impression.

Istanbul Luxury Hotels

Istanbul Luxury Villas

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Dubai is a fascinating and exotic city that offers visitors a mix of traditional Middle Eastern culture and modern, cosmopolitan life. There are plenty of places to visit in Dubai, from the towering skyscrapers of Downtown Dubai to the luxury shopping malls and luxurious hotels of the Palm Jumeirah. Don't miss a chance to experience an Arabian night out on an epic dhow cruise, or take a trip out into the Arabian Desert to see the stunning sand dunes.

Dubai Luxury Hotels

Dubai Luxury Resorts

Dubai Luxury Villas

Antwerp, Belgium

Antwerp is a city located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital of the province of Antwerp and has a population of over half a million people. Antwerp is a popular tourist destination due to its many historical buildings, museums, and art galleries. Some of the most popular places to visit in Antwerp are the Cathedral of Our Lady, the City Hall, the Rubenshuis, and the Antwerp Zoo.

Antwerp Luxury Hotels

Lyon, France

Lyon is a beautiful city in the south of France that is full of culture and places to visit. Some of the most popular places to visit in Lyon are the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere, the Place Bellecour, and the Vieux Lyon. The Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere is a beautiful cathedral that is a must-see when visiting Lyon. The Place Bellecour is a large square in the heart of Lyon that is full of restaurants and cafes. The Vieux Lyon is a district in Lyon that is full of old buildings and is a great place to wander around and take in the sights.

Lyon Luxury Hotels

Athens, Greece

If you find yourself in Athens, there are definitely some spots you won't want to miss. The Acropolis, Parthenon, and Olympic Stadium are all essential stops, but there are plenty of others, too. If you're looking for a bit of history, the National Archaeological Museum is a must-see, while nature lovers will enjoy a visit to the botanical gardens. If you're looking to relax, take a walk along the beach in Glyfada or head to the Plaka district for a charming and picturesque setting. No matter what you're interested in, Athens has something for you.

Athens Luxury Hotels

Athens Luxury Villas

Helsinki, Finland

While in Helsinki, make sure to visit these popular tourist destinations: The Senate Square and Lutheran Cathedral The Sibelius Monument Ateneum Art Museum Market Square Helsinki Zoo.

Helsinki Luxury Hotels

Vilnius, Lithuania

The capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, is a picturesque city with a rich history. The old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is full of charming churches, narrow streets, and pretty squares. There are also lots of museums and other places of interest to visit, including the Hill of Crosses, Gediminas Tower, and the Presidential Palace. Vilnius is a great city to explore on foot, and there are plenty of cafes, restaurants, and bars to enjoy in the evening.

Vilnius Luxury Hotels

Reykjavik, Iceland

A city of remote beauty, Reykjavik is teeming with interesting places to visit. One of the worlds most northern capitals, Reykjavik offers stunning landscapes and a wealth of cultural experiences. From the iconic Hallgrimskirkja church to the popular Golden Circle tour, theres plenty to see and do in Reykjavik. Be sure to check out the citys lively nightlife scene, too  you wont be disappointed!.

Reykjavik Luxury Hotels

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Some of the most popular places to visit in Glasgow include the Gallery of Modern Art, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, the Riverside Museum, and the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. There are also many wonderful parks and gardens to explore, including the Botanic Gardens and Glasgow Green. For those interested in history and architecture, there are many fascinating old buildings to see, such as the Glasgow Cathedral and the University of Glasgow. And for those looking for a lively nightlife, Glasgow has no shortage of pubs, clubs, and restaurants.

Glasgow Luxury Hotels

Los Angeles, CA, United States

As the birthplace of Hollywood and home to some of the world's most recognisable landmarks, there's no shortage of places to visit in Los Angeles. Start by exploring the city's iconic neighbourhoods like Beverly Hills and Hollywood, then venture out to attractions like the Griffith Observatory, Venice Beach and Disneyland. And don't forget to savour the city's world-famous cultural scene, with its abundance of museums, theatres and restaurants.

Los Angeles Luxury Hotels

Los Angeles Luxury Villas

San Diego, CA, United States

San Diego is a city located in California and is a major tourist destination. One of the main reasons people visit the city is for its many beaches. Coronado Beach, Mission Beach, and Pacific Beach are some of the most popular and are all within close proximity to the city center. Other attractions in San Diego include the San Diego Zoo, SeaWorld San Diego, and the USS Midway Museum. Restaurants, bars, and shopping can be found throughout the city, and world-renowned museums, like the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, are also located in San Diego.

San Diego Luxury Hotels

San Diego Luxury Resorts

San Diego Luxury Villas

Washington, DC, United States

Washington, D.C. is a city full of history and places to visit. Some popular places to visit are the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, and the Smithsonian. D.C. is also home to a number of monuments and memorials, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial. There are also a number of museums in D.C., like the American History Museum and the National Air and Space Museum.

Washington Luxury Hotels

Cancun, Mexico

Cancun is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Mexico. Aside from its beautiful beaches, there are plenty of places to visit and things to do in Cancun. Some of the most popular attractions include the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza, the eco-park Xcaret, and the nightclubs and bars in the resort district.

Cancun Luxury Hotels

Cancun Luxury Resorts

Cancun Luxury Villas

Virginia Beach, VA, United States

Virginia Beach is one of the top tourist destinations on the East Coast. From the Virginia Beach Boardwalk to the miles of sandy beaches, there's something for everyone to enjoy. There are also plenty of restaurants, shops, and other attractions to keep visitors busy. Some of the most popular places to visit in Virginia Beach include: The Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center : This aquarium is home to more than 20,000 animals, including sharks, dolphins, and rays. : This aquarium is home to more than 20,000 animals, including sharks, dolphins, and rays. The Virginia Beach Boardwalk: This 3.5-mile boardwalk is one of the most popular attractions in Virginia Beach. It features a wide variety of shops, restaurants, and amusements. This 3.5-mile boardwalk is one of the most popular attractions in Virginia Beach. It features a wide variety of shops, restaurants, and amusements. First Landing State Park: This park offers miles of hiking and biking trails, as well as a beachfront area for swimming and sunbathing. This park offers miles of hiking and biking trails, as well as a beachfront area for swimming and sunbathing. Cape Henry Lighthouse: This lighthouse is one of the oldest in the country and offers stunning views of the Chesapeake Bay. There are plenty of other things to do in Virginia Beach, including dolphin and whale watching tours, kayaking, and golfing. Whether you're looking for a fun family vacation or a romantic getaway, Virginia Beach is sure to please.

Virginia Beach Luxury Hotels

Virginia Beach Luxury Resorts

Beijing, China

If you're looking for an amazing cultural experience, be sure to add Beijing, China to your travel bucket list! With beautiful temples, charming hutongs (traditional alleyways), and a lively food scene, there's something for everyone in this bustling city. Plus, Beijing is home to some of the most iconic attractions in China, like the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. So if you're looking for an unforgettable East Asian adventure, be sure to add Beijing to your list!.

Beijing Luxury Hotels

Seoul, South Korea

Seoul is a metropolitan city that is home to over 10 million people. It is a city full of culture, history, and a vibrant nightlife. There are plenty of places to visit in Seoul, including the Gyeongbokgung Palace, Changdeokgung Palace, and N Seoul Tower. The Jeongdongne district is a must-see for anyone interested in art and culture, and the Itaewon district is a great place to go for a night on the town.

Seoul Luxury Hotels

South Lake Tahoe, CA, United States

Known for its dramatic lake and mountain scenery, South Lake Tahoe offers visitors plenty of places to visit and things to do. Some of the most popular attractions include floating down the river on a tube, hiking the trails in the summer and skiing or snowboarding the slopes in the winter. The city also has a variety of restaurants and nightlife options, as well as casinos for those looking to try their luck.

South Lake Tahoe Luxury Hotels

South Lake Tahoe Luxury Resorts

Daytona Beach, FL, United States

Daytona Beach is a city in Volusia County, Florida, United States. It is approximately 40 miles northeast of Orlando, and 85 miles southeast of Jacksonville. The city is known as "The World's Most Famous Beach." Daytona Beach is a principal city of the Fun Coast region of Florida. The Daytona Beach area is a popular tourist destination. It is well known for its beaches, sports events, and motorsports. Daytona Beach was the birthplace of NASCAR and home to its first track, Daytona International Speedway. Dayton Beach also features a large number of tourist-oriented businesses, such as motels, restaurants, and bars.

Daytona Beach Luxury Hotels

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The coastline of Rio de Janeiro is breathtaking, and the views from Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf Mountain are unforgettable. Rio's world-famous beaches are the perfect place to relax and enjoy the sun and the surf. The city's rich culture and history can be experienced in its many museums and in the lively nightlife. Rio is also a great place to shop for souvenirs.

Rio de Janeiro Luxury Hotels

Rio de Janeiro Luxury Villas

Jaco, Costa Rica

Jaco is a town on the Central Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. It's about an hour drive from San Jose and is a popular spot for surfers, sunbathers, and tourists. There are a number of beaches in the area, as well as restaurants, bars, and hotels. If you're looking for a place to relax and enjoy the Costa Rican sun and beaches, Jaco is a great option.

Jaco Luxury Hotels

Oslo, Norway

Oslo, Norway is a city with plenty of places to visit. You can find the peace and tranquility of nature parks and green spaces, experience the city's vibrant nightlife, or take in the historical and cultural sights. Here are a few of the top places to visit in Oslo: The Royal Palace: Oslo's Royal Palace is the official residence of Norway's king and queen. The palace is open to the public year-round, and offers a glimpse into the lives of the royal family. Oslo's Royal Palace is the official residence of Norway's king and queen. The palace is open to the public year-round, and offers a glimpse into the lives of the royal family. Vigeland Park: Considered one of Oslo's most popular tourist destinations, Vigeland Park is home to over 200 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland. The park is a great place to spend a sunny day outdoors. Considered one of Oslo's most popular tourist destinations, Vigeland Park is home to over 200 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland. The park is a great place to spend a sunny day outdoors. The Maritime Museum: This museum is home to a variety of exhibits on Norway's maritime history. Visitors can explore everything from Viking ships to modern submarines. This museum is home to a variety of exhibits on Norway's maritime history. Visitors can explore everything from Viking ships to modern submarines. The National Gallery: The National Gallery is Norway's largest art museum, and home to a vast collection of paintings and sculptures from the country's most famous artists. The National Gallery is Norway's largest art museum, and home to a vast collection of paintings and sculptures from the country's most famous artists. Aker Brygge: Aker Brygge is a popular waterfront district in Oslo, home to a variety of bars, restaurants, and shops. The area is a great place to people watch and enjoy the view of the Oslo Fjord.

Oslo Luxury Hotels

Lima, Peru

If you're looking for a city that's bursting with culture and flavor, Lima, Peru is the place for you! This vibrant destination is home to some of the most amazing places to visit in all of South America. From ancient ruins to lush rainforests, there's something for everyone in Lima. Here are just a few of the must-see attractions in this amazing city: The Larco Museum is one of Lima's top tourist destinations. This incredible museum is home to one of the largest collections of pre-Columbian art in the world. The Historic Center of Lima is a must-see for any history lover. This vibrant area is home to some of the oldest architecture in Lima, including the iconic San Francisco Monastery. If you're looking for a little bit of jungle in the city, head to the Parque de la Reserva. This lush park is home to beautiful gardens, a zoo, and even a butterfly farm! No trip to Lima would be complete without a visit to Machu Picchu. This ancient Inca citadel is one of the most iconic sites in all of South America.

Lima Luxury Hotels

Ankara, Turkey

Ankara is the cultural and political center of Turkey. The city is home to many museums, including the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, and is a popular destination for tourists. The Citadel, the Ataturk Mausoleum, and the War of Independence Museum are all popular tourist destinations in Ankara. The city is also home to a vibrant nightlife and is a popular destination for students.

Ankara Luxury Hotels

Birmingham, United Kingdom

There are plenty of great places to visit in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Some of the most popular places to go include the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Black Country Living Museum. These places are all great for tourists, as they offer a variety of attractions, including beautiful gardens, interesting art, and a recreation of an old-fashioned town. Additionally, there are plenty of other great places to visit in Birmingham, such as the Jewellery Quarter and the German Christmas Market.

Birmingham Luxury Hotels

York, United Kingdom

With a rich history that spans back over 1,000 years, York is a must-visit destination in the United Kingdom. Explore the city's medieval architecture and narrow cobblestone streets, or enjoy a leisurely walk along the River Ouse. Visitors can also enjoy a variety of cultural experiences, such as the York Minster cathedral, the Jorvik Viking Centre, and the National Railway Museum. There are also plenty of shops and restaurants to enjoy in York.

York Luxury Hotels

Inverness, United Kingdom

Inverness, Scotland is a must-see destination on any traveler's list. Filled with rolling green hills, historical sites, and plenty of outdoor activities, there's something for everyone in this charming town. Start by exploring the city center, which is home to a variety of shops and restaurants. Make sure to check out the Inverness Castle, which offers commanding views of the area, and the Inverness Cathedral, a beautiful example of medieval architecture. Outside of the city center, there are plenty of other attractions to explore. The Loch Ness Monster is said to make its home in the loch here, and visitors can take boat tours to hunt for the mythical creature. If you're looking for a more active adventure, take a hike in the hills or go fishing on the loch. No matter what you choose to do, Inverness is a beautiful and welcoming town that is sure to charm you.

Inverness Luxury Hotels

Marseille, France

The Vieux Port (Old Harbor) is the oldest port in France. It is a beautiful place to visit with its sailboats, restaurants, and cafes. The Notre Dame de la Garde Basilica is also worth a visit. It offers stunning views of the city. If you're looking for a more lively atmosphere, head to the La Canebiere. It's a wide avenue with plenty of shops and restaurants.

Marseille Luxury Hotels

Marseille Luxury Villas

Honolulu, HI, United States

Honolulu is a city located on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, United States. It is the most populous city in the state of Hawaii and the county seat of the City and County of Honolulu. Honolulu is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Hawaii. Waikiki Beach is one of the most famous beaches in the world and is located in Honolulu. Other places to visit in Honolulu include Diamond Head, the USS Arizona Memorial, and Hanauma Bay.

Honolulu Luxury Hotels

Honolulu Luxury Resorts

Honolulu Luxury Villas

Bar Harbor, ME, United States

Famous for lobster and stunning ocean views, Bar Harbor is a popular destination in Maine. There are plenty of things to do in the town and its surroundings, including hiking, biking, whale watching, and exploring Acadia National Park.

Bar Harbor Luxury Hotels

Colorado Springs, CO, United States

There are many places to visit in Colorado Springs. Garden of the Gods is a popular park with beautiful rock formations. Pike's Peak is a 14,115 foot mountain that offers great views and outdoor activities. The Broadmoor is a world-renowned resort with lovely gardens and a championship golf course. Royal Gorge Bridge is the world's highest suspension bridge and a popular tourist spot.

Colorado Springs Luxury Hotels

Fort Myers Beach, FL, United States

Just an hours drive from the Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Fort Myers Beach is a popular tourist spot, especially in the winter when the snowbirds migrate down. The seven-mile-long beach is known for its white sand and clear water and is a popular spot for swimming, sunbathing, fishing, and kayaking. There are also a number of restaurants and bars in the area, as well as a few stores.

Fort Myers Beach Luxury Hotels

Biloxi, MS, United States

There are plenty of places to explore in Biloxi, Mississippi  from the citys iconic Beaches to the picturesque Bay Saint Louis. Venture into the citys downtown area to check out the many shops and restaurants, or take a walk along the shoreline. No matter what you choose to do, youre sure to have a great time in Biloxi.

Biloxi Luxury Hotels

Palermo, Italy

If you're looking for a city with a rich and diverse history, Palermo is the place for you. This coastal city in Italy is teeming with medieval architecture, churches, and cathedrals. Be sure to check out the Teatro Massimo, the largest opera house in Europe, and the Palazzo dei Normanni, the seat of the Sicilian government. Don't miss out on the city's vibrant nightlife and vast array of restaurants that serve up some of the best food in the country.

Palermo Luxury Hotels

Palermo Luxury Villas

Manila, Philippines

The capital of the Philippines, Manila is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant culture. There are plenty of places to visit in Manila, including the walled city of Intramuros, the Rizal Park, and the Manila Bay. The city is also home to a large number of churches, including the Manila Cathedral and the San Agustin Church. Manila is a great city to explore on foot, and there are plenty of restaurants and shops to enjoy.

Manila Luxury Hotels

Zermatt, Switzerland

Zermatt is an alpine village in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. It is famous for its ski resort, mountaineering and hiking trails. The views of the Matterhorn from Zermatt are iconic. The village is car-free, making it a cyclists' and pedestrians' paradise. There are many places to visit in Zermatt, including the village's beautiful churches, impressive museums, and great restaurants.

Zermatt Luxury Hotels

Basel, Switzerland

Basel is a city located in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine. Basel has a population of about 176,000 and is the third most populous city in Switzerland. Basel has many interesting places to visit, including the Basel Munster, the Basel Rathaus (town hall), the Basel Zoo, and the Munsterhof, the old town square. Basel also has a number of art museums, including the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Fondation Beyeler, and the Schaulager. Basel is a great city to visit, and I highly recommend it!.

Basel Luxury Hotels

Copenhagen, Denmark

There are a number of places to visit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Some of the most popular tourist destinations include Tivoli Gardens, Nyhavn, and the Rosenborg Castle Gardens. Tivoli Gardens is a beautiful amusement park that has something for everyone. It is perfect for a day of fun with family or friends. Nyhavn is a charming canal district that is popular for its brightly colored houses and lively atmosphere. Visitors can enjoy a relaxing cruise down the canal or take a seat in one of the many cafes and restaurants. The Rosenborg Castle Gardens are home to a majestic castle as well as beautifully landscaped gardens. There is plenty to see and do in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Copenhagen Luxury Hotels

Steamboat Springs, CO, United States

Steamboat Springs is located in northwestern Colorado. The town is named for the steamboats that traveled up the Yampa River in the 1800s. Today, the town is a popular tourist destination, known for its skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and rafting.

Steamboat Springs Luxury Hotels

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates and is home to many tourist attractions. Some popular places to visit in Abu Dhabi include the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the Ferrari World Theme Park, and the Yas Island Waterpark. There are also a number of museums and shopping malls in Abu Dhabi, making it a great destination for those looking for a mix of culture and leisure.

Abu Dhabi Luxury Hotels

Abu Dhabi Luxury Resorts

Abu Dhabi Luxury Villas

Bogota, Colombia

There's a lot to see and do in Bogota. Some of the top places to visit include the historical La Candelaria district, the cobblestone streets of Plaza de Bolivar, the Monserrate mountain, the Bogota Botanical Garden, and the Gold Museum. La Candelaria is home to many brightly-colored colonial buildings, churches, and plazas. Plaza de Bolivar is the center of Bogota and is surrounded by important landmarks like the Presidential Palace and the National Capitol. The Monserrate mountain is a popular tourist destination due to its stunning views of Bogota. The Bogota Botanical Garden is the largest in Colombia and features a wide variety of plants and trees. The Gold Museum is home to the largest collection of Pre-Columbian gold artifacts in the world.

Bogota Luxury Hotels

Cebu, Philippines

Due to its location and its rich history, there are plenty of places to visit in Cebu. Some of the most popular tourist destinations include the Cebu Taoist Temple, the Fort San Pedro, the Yap-San Diego Ancestral House, and the Magellan's Cross.

Cebu Luxury Hotels

Cebu Luxury Resorts

Lagos, Portugal

Lagos is a small town in Portugal with a population of around 22,000. It's located in the Algarve region and is a popular tourist destination. Some of the places to visit in Lagos are the beaches, the old town, and the Marina. The beaches are beautiful and there are a lot of them to choose from. The old town is a maze of narrow streets and alleyways with lots of shops and restaurants. The Marina is a great place to walk around and watch the boats.

Lagos Luxury Hotels

Medellin, Colombia

Some places to visit in Medellin, Colombia are: the Botanical Garden, the Ethnographic Museum, the Jardin Botanico, the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Park of Lights, and the San Pedro Claver Church.

Medellin Luxury Hotels

Genoa, Italy

While there are many places to visit in Genoa, one of the must-sees is the city's cathedral. Dedicated to San Lorenzo, the church features an intricate Gothic facade and a Renaissance interior. If you're looking for a place to take in some stunning views, head to the Genoa Aquarium, which is located on the promenade stretching along the city's harbor.

Genoa Luxury Hotels

Hoi An, Vietnam

Hoi An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Vietnam. Its a bridge town thats best explored on foot. The narrow streets are a mix of Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese architecture. There are tailors, artisans, and lantern shops galore. The food is also some of the best in Vietnam. Be sure to try the local specialties, like Cao Lau and White Rose dumplings.

Hoi An Luxury Hotels

Hoi An Luxury Resorts

Baku, Azerbaijan

Baku, Azerbaijan is a city with a lot of culture and history. There are a lot of places to visit, like the Palace of the Shirvanshahs and the Maiden Tower. There are also a lot of great restaurants, like the Flame Club, which has a great atmosphere and delicious food.

Baku Luxury Hotels

San Luis Obispo, CA, United States

San Luis Obispo is a city located in the central coast of California. It's known for its natural beauty, relaxed vibe, and abundance of things to do. Some of the top places to visit in San Luis Obispo include the Madonna Inn, Hearst Castle, and the Paso Robles wine country. The city is also home to a variety of beaches, parks, and other attractions. In addition, San Luis Obispo is a great place to live, with plenty of restaurants, shops, and other amenities.

San Luis Obispo Luxury Hotels

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Colombo is the largest city and commercial capital of Sri Lanka. The city is located on the west coast of the island and is the administrative, commercial, and industrial center of Sri Lanka. Colombo is also the center of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, with numerous Buddhist temples. There are a number of places to visit in Colombo, including the Galle Face Green, the Dutch fort, the Pettah Bazaar, and the Sri Lankan National Museum.

Colombo Luxury Hotels

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

The city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia is home to some of the most stunning temples and historical landmarks in the country. The city is also a great place to enjoy traditional Javanese culture and cuisine. Some of the must-see places in Yogyakarta include the Borobudur Temple, the Prambanan Temple, and the Sultan's Palace.

Yogyakarta Luxury Hotels

Cefalu, Italy

Looking for a beautiful and historic place to visit in Italy? Look no further than Cefalu. This town is teeming with history and stunning architecture, and its location on the coast makes it the perfect place to relax and take in the stunning scenery. Don't miss the Duomo di Cefalu, a 12th century Norman church that is definitely worth a visit, or the Palazzo dei Normanni, a former royal palace.

Cefalu Luxury Hotels

San Jose, CA, United States

San Jose, California, is home to a variety of tourist destinations. Some popular places to visit include the Winchester Mystery House, the Tech Museum of Innovation, and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. There are also a number of lovely parks, such as Kelley Park and Plaza de Cesar Chavez, that are well worth a visit. San Jose is also home to a number of great restaurants, so be sure to check out the local cuisine. Whatever your interests, San Jose has something to offer visitors.

San Jose Luxury Hotels

Hong Kong, China

Hong Kong is one of the most popular destinations for tourists in China. There are many places to visit in Hong Kong, including the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort, Victoria Peak, and the Temple Street Night Market. Hong Kong is also a great place to shop, with many high-end malls and markets.

Hong Kong Luxury Hotels

Hong Kong Luxury Resorts

Orlando, FL, United States

Orlando is a city in the central region of Florida, in the United States. The city is the county seat of Orange County, and the center of the metropolitan area also known as Greater Orlando. Orlando is well known for its theme parks, including Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando Resort, and SeaWorld Orlando. Other tourist destinations in Orlando include the Holy Land Experience, the Orlando Science Center, and the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. Orlando is also home to the University of Central Florida, one of the largest universities in the United States.

Orlando Luxury Hotels

Orlando Luxury Resorts

Orlando Luxury Villas

Philadelphia, PA, United States

If youre looking for a place thats rich in history and culture, Philadelphia is the place for you. The city is home to numerous iconic landmarks, including the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. Theres also a great variety of museums and other attractions to explore, such as the Philadelphia Zoo and the Please Touch Museum. And, of course, Philly is the birthplace of Americas favorite sandwich, the cheesesteak. So why not visit Americas most historic city and see for yourself what all the fuss is about?.

Philadelphia Luxury Hotels

Nice, France

France is known for its many beautiful places to visit, and Nice is no exception. With its stunning coastline and mild climate, Nice is a popular tourist destination. Some of the most popular places to visit in Nice include the Promenade des Anglais, the Castle Hill, and the Old Town. There is also a wide variety of shops and restaurants to enjoy in Nice. If you're looking for a beautiful and relaxing place to visit in France, Nice is definitely worth considering.

Nice Luxury Hotels

Nice Luxury Villas

Singapore, Singapore

Singapore is a popular tourist destination, brimming with cultural and natural attractions. From award-winning restaurants to serene gardens and pristine beaches, there is much to explore in this diverse city-state. Here are some of the top places to visit in Singapore: 1. Marina Bay: This iconic waterfront district is home to stunning architecture, world-class landmarks, and a vibrant nightlife. 2. Gardens by the Bay: These stunning gardens feature a mix of plants from around the world, as well as towering sculptures and a biodome. 3. Chinatown: This lively district is home to traditional Chinese shops and restaurants, as well as vibrant street markets. 4. Little India: This neighborhood is known for its vibrant culture and colorful temples. 5. Sentosa Island: This resort island is home to sandy beaches, lush rainforests, and a variety of entertainment options.

Singapore Luxury Hotels

Singapore Luxury Resorts

Nottingham, United Kingdom

Nottingham is a city in the East Midlands of England. It is one of the United Kingdom's major cities, with a population of over 321,000. The city is home to two universities, Queen's Medical Centre, and seven football grounds. Nottingham is known for its lace-making and bicycle manufacturing. The city has a rich history, dating back to the Bronze Age. There are plenty of places to visit in Nottingham, including the Nottingham Castle, the Sherwood Forest, and the National Ice Centre. The city also has a lively nightlife, with a variety of pubs and bars.

Nottingham Luxury Hotels

Cannes, France

Cannes is a city located in the south of France. Some of the places to visit in Cannes are the Palais des Festivals et des Congres, the Boulevard de la Croisette, and Le Suquet.

Cannes Luxury Hotels

Cannes Luxury Villas

Park City, UT, United States

Park City, Utah, offers visitors a wealth of places to visit and things to do. Main Street, with its charming shops and restaurants, is a must-see. The Park City Museum tells the town's fascinating history, and the Park City Utah Temple is a beautiful sight. For outdoor enthusiasts, there's plenty of skiing and snowboarding in the winter and hiking and mountain biking in the summer. And don't forget to visit the Olympic Park, where the 2002 Winter Olympics were held.

Park City Luxury Hotels

Park City Luxury Resorts

Port Angeles, WA, United States

If you're looking for a quaint, small town to visit in the US, Port Angeles is worth a stop. Located in the state of Washington, it's right on the Pacific coast with stunning views of the Olympic Mountains. There's plenty of things to do in the area, from hiking and fishing to whale watching and enjoying the local restaurants and breweries.

Port Angeles Luxury Hotels

Fort Lauderdale, FL, United States

If you're looking for a fun-filled Florida getaway, look no further than Fort Lauderdale! With its miles of pristine beaches, world-famous shopping and vibrant nightlife, there's something for everyone in this seaside city. Here are some of the top places to visit in Fort Lauderdale:  Las Olas Boulevard: This popular shopping and dining district is home to some of Fort Lauderdale's most upscale boutiques and restaurants.  The Beach: With its wide, sandy beaches and crystal-clear waters, Fort Lauderdale's beach is a major draw for visitors.  The Everglades: Just a short drive from Fort Lauderdale, the Everglades are home to an abundance of wildlife, including alligators, bald eagles and manatees.  The Broward Center for the Performing Arts: This world-class performing arts center is home to a variety of theater, dance and music performances. So what are you waiting for? Book your trip to Fort Lauderdale today!.

Fort Lauderdale Luxury Hotels

Fort Lauderdale Luxury Resorts

Myrtle Beach, SC, United States

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is a popular tourist destination. There are plenty of places to visit in the area, including amusement parks, beaches, and golf courses. Myrtle Beach also has a lively nightlife, with plenty of bars and restaurants.

Myrtle Beach Luxury Hotels

Myrtle Beach Luxury Resorts

Salzburg, Austria

Salzburg is one of the most visited places in Austria. It is a city rich in history and culture. There are many places to visit, such as the Hohensalzburg Fortress, the Mirabell Palace, and the Salzburg Cathedral. There are also many hiking trails and parks to enjoy.

Salzburg Luxury Hotels

Pattaya, Thailand

Pattaya is an amazing city with plenty of places to visit and things to do. One of the most popular tourist destinations in Thailand, Pattaya offers something for everyone. There are lovely beaches, interesting temples, great shopping, and exciting nightlife. With its moderate climate and affordable prices, it's no wonder Pattaya is a favorite destination for tourists from all over the world.

Pattaya Luxury Hotels

Pattaya Luxury Resorts

Pattaya Luxury Villas

Dallas, TX, United States

Dallas is a city located in the U.S. state of Texas. It is the ninth most populous city in the United States and the third most populous city in the state of Texas. Dallas is also the main city of the fourth most populous metropolitan area in the United States. The city's prominence arose from its historical importance as a center for the oil and cotton industries, and its position as a major transportation hub for the South. Dallas is home to the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League and the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association. The city's economy is primarily based on banking, commerce, telecommunications, technology, energy, healthcare and medical research, and transportation. The city is home to the world's largest airline hub and the third largest cargo airport in the United States.

Dallas Luxury Hotels

Kolkata, India

Kolkata, also known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. The city is located on the east bank of the Hooghly River. It is the second most populous city in India, after Mumbai, and the third most populous metropolitan area in India, after Mumbai and Delhi. The city is notable for its colonial architecture, art and culture, and for its overwhelming poverty. Kolkata is home to the Indian Museum, the Calcutta Stock Exchange, the National Library of India, and the Indian Statistical Institute.

Kolkata Luxury Hotels

San Antonio, TX, United States

San Antonio is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Texas. There are plenty of places to visit in this city, from the well-known River Walk to the exquisite Spanish missions. If you're looking for a fun place to spend the day, you can't go wrong with San Antonio.

San Antonio Luxury Hotels

Seattle, WA, United States

There are many wonderful places to visit in Seattle, Washington. Some of the most popular attractions include Pike Place Market, the Seattle Space Needle, and the Museum of Pop Culture. There are also many parks and gardens, such as Volunteer Park and Seattle Chinese Garden, as well as plenty of restaurants and shops. Located on the other side of the world, Western Australia is a great place to visit for those looking for something different. Some of the most popular attractions include Rottnest Island, the Margaret River region, and Monkey Mia. There are also plenty of beautiful parks and gardens, such as Kings Park and Botanic Garden, as well as restaurants and shops.

Seattle Luxury Hotels

Liverpool, United Kingdom

Liverpool is a city located in North West England and is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom. The city is known for its football teams Liverpool and Everton, The Beatles, and its maritime history. Liverpool is a popular tourist destination and is home to various tourist attractions including Mersey Ferry, Liverpool Cathedral, and Albert Dock.

Liverpool Luxury Hotels

Malmo, Sweden

Malmo is Sweden's third largest city with a population of over 310,000. It is located in the province of Scania on the country's southern tip. Malmo is a vibrant city with a strong arts and cultural scene. There are plenty of places to visit in Malmo, including the Malmo Castle, the Botanical Gardens, and the Turning Torso skyscraper. Malmo is also home to a large shopping district and a lively nightlife.

Malmo Luxury Hotels

Gothenburg, Sweden

Goteborg, Sweden's second largest city, is a major port on the country's west coast. It's a popular tourist destination, known for its lively nightlife, beautiful architecture and delicious seafood. Some of the city's highlights include the Liseberg amusement park, the Botanical Garden, and the charming old town district. Goteborg is also home to a large number of museums, including the Volvo Museum, the Maritime Museum and the Universeum science center.

Gothenburg Luxury Hotels

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Ljubljana is the capital city of Slovenia and is a city full of culture and history. There are many places to visit in Ljubljana, such as the castle, the old town, and the cathedral. The city is also home to many museums, art galleries, and parks. Ljubljana is a great city to explore on foot, and there are many restaurants and cafes to enjoy.

Ljubljana Luxury Hotels

Sydney, NSW, Australia

Australia is a vast country with plenty of stunning places to visit, but Sydney is undoubtedly one of the most popular tourist destinations on the continent. From the iconic Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge to the beautiful beaches and lush national parks, there's something for everyone in this lively city. There's also a thriving food and nightlife scene, so you'll never run out of things to do in Sydney.

Sydney Luxury Hotels

Sydney Luxury Villas

Melbourne, VIC, Australia

There's a lot to love about Melbourne  its lively arts and culture scene, its parks and gardens, its diverse range of restaurants and cafes, and its stunning architecture. Here are some of the best places to visit in Melbourne: - Federation Square: This iconic square is a great place to people-watch and take in the city's impressive architecture. It's also home to a number of museums and galleries, including the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Victoria. - Queen Victoria Market: This vibrant market is a must-visit for foodies and shoppers alike. It's the largest open-air market in the Southern Hemisphere, and offers a vast array of fresh produce, meat, seafood, and souvenirs. - Melbourne Cricket Ground: If you're a sports fan, be sure to check out the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is the largest cricket stadium in the world. It's also home to the Australian Football League, and has hosted a number of major sporting events, including the Commonwealth Games and the Rugby Union World Cup. - Royal Botanic Gardens: These beautiful gardens are a great place to relax and take in some of Melbourne's natural beauty. They're home to a number of different gardens, including the Australian Garden, the Sculpture Garden, and the Japanese Garden.

Melbourne Luxury Hotels

Melbourne Luxury Villas

Vancouver, BC, Canada

The top places to visit in Vancouver are Stanley Park, Granville Island, Gastown, and Chinatown. These are all must-see attractions that offer an array of activities, scenery, and history. Stanley Park is a world-famous urban park that features greenery, beaches, gardens, and a stunning view of the North Shore Mountains. Granville Island is a vibrant neighbourhood with unique shops, restaurants, and art galleries. Gastown is the city's oldest neighbourhood and is home to charming cobblestone streets and funky boutiques. Chinatown is one of the largest and most vibrant Chinatowns in North America and offers delicious food, interesting history, and vibrant culture.

Vancouver Luxury Hotels

Toronto, ON, Canada

From the CN Tower and Hockey Hall of Fame to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Distillery District, there are plenty of amazing places to visit in Toronto, Canada. With something for everyone, Toronto is a great city to explore. So what are you waiting for? Start planning your trip today!.

Toronto Luxury Hotels

Montreal, QC, Canada

Montreal is a vibrant city with something for everyone. There are plenty of places to visit, including the Notre Dame Basilica, the Olympic Stadium, and Mount Royal. The city is also home to a lively arts and culture scene, with theatres, art galleries, and music venues. Montreal is a great place to visit year-round, with festivals and events happening throughout the year.

Montreal Luxury Hotels

Seville, Spain

Seville is one of the most visited places in Spain for a plethora of reasons: its stunning architecture, tapas bars, flamenco and great weather. The Giralda Tower is a must-see when in Seville as is the Plaza de Espana. Andalusian culture is heavily present in the city and is best experienced by wandering the narrow streets and alleyways, popping into a lively tapas bar for a drink and some snacks or enjoying a flamenco show.

Seville Luxury Hotels

Seville Luxury Villas

Ocean City, MD, United States

Ocean City is a seaside resort town in Worcester County, Maryland, on the Atlantic coast. It is well known for its long promenade, its fishing, and its crab cuisine. There are plenty of places to visit in Ocean City, including the boardwalk, amusement rides, shopping, and restaurants. You can also visit the Assateague Island National Seashore, which is home to wild horses, or head to the nearby town of Berlin for more shopping and dining options.

Ocean City Luxury Hotels

Cambridge, MA, United States

If you're looking for a quintessential New England town to visit, Cambridge, Massachusetts is the place for you. With its elaborate architecture and Colonial history, Cambridge is a lively town with plenty of things to see and do - perfect for a weekend getaway. Some of the places you won't want to miss include the Harvard University campus, the charming and lively shops and restaurants in Harvard Square, and the leafy paths of the Cambridge Common.

Cambridge Luxury Hotels

Laguna Beach, CA, United States

Laguna Beach, California is a place known for its stunningly beautiful coastline, excellent restaurants, and art galleries. But there's more to Laguna Beach than meets the eye. Here are some of the best places to visit in Laguna Beach: Crystal Cove State Park: This state park is known for its coves, tidepools, and bluffs. It's a great place to go hiking, swimming, and snorkeling. Heisler Park: This park is a great place for a walk or a picnic. It's also home to some of the best views of the Pacific Coast. Downtown Laguna Beach: This charming downtown area is home to art galleries, boutique shops, and excellent restaurants. Aliso Beach: This beach is known for its excellent surfing and swimming conditions. It's also a great place to take a walk or enjoy a picnic.

Laguna Beach Luxury Hotels

Hot Springs, AR, United States

In downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, you'll find historic buildings, antique shops, and art galleries. For nature lovers, there are also plenty of places to visit, including the Garland County Arboretum, Ouachita National Forest, and Hot Springs National Park. Spa enthusiasts can enjoy a relaxing day in one of the area's hot springs. And no trip to Hot Springs is complete without a visit to the world-famous Bathhouse Row.

Hot Springs Luxury Hotels

Sedona, AZ, United States

There are many places to visit in Sedona, Arizona. Among the most popular are the Chapel of the Holy Cross, Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock, and Boynton Canyon. The town's unique red-rock formations and ancient ruins offer plenty of photo opportunities. Visitors can also enjoy hiking, biking, and horseback riding. Sedona is a great place to relax and take in the natural beauty of the Southwest.

Sedona Luxury Hotels

Sedona Luxury Resorts

Boulder, CO, United States

Boulder, Colorado is a breathtaking city nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The city is home to stunning views, ample outdoor recreation, and a lively arts scene. Outdoor enthusiasts will love exploring the city's many trails, parks, and open spaces. History buffs will enjoy checking out the city's museums and historic sites. Culture seekers will appreciate the city's many theaters, art galleries, and restaurants. No matter what your interests, you'll find something to love in Boulder.

Boulder Luxury Hotels

Key West, FL, United States

Key West is a small island off the coast of Florida that is filled with history, charm, and fun places to visit. Its lush tropical setting and the laid-back vibe of the island make it a popular destination for those looking for a relaxing getaway. There are plenty of places to explore in Key West, from the charming historic district to the crystal-clear waters of the Florida Keys. Here are some of the top places to visit in Key West: -The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum: This iconic museum is dedicated to the life and work of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Key West for over 20 years. -Duval Street: This lively street is the heart of Key West's nightlife and is home to many bars and restaurants. -The Southernmost Point: This landmark is located at the end of Duval Street and is the southernmost point in the continental United States. -The Key West Lighthouse: This picturesque lighthouse is a popular spot for tourists and offers stunning views of the island. -The African American Heritage House: This museum is dedicated to the history and culture of African Americans in Key West. -The Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory: This attraction is home to over 2,000 butterflies and a variety of other tropical plants and animals.

Key West Luxury Hotels

Key West Luxury Resorts

Key West Luxury Cottages

Key West Luxury Villas

Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm, Sweden is a city with many places to visit. One place is the Vasa Museum, which is home to a ship that sunk in 1628 and was raised from the ocean floor 333 years later. The ship is preserved and on display in the museum. Another place to visit is the Royal Palace, the official residence of the Swedish monarch. The palace is open for tours, and visitors can see the royal apartments, the throne room, and the Hall of State.

Stockholm Luxury Hotels

Destin, FL, United States

Looking for a place to visit in Florida? Look no further than Destin! This city is home to beautiful beaches, wonderful restaurants, and plenty of places to shop. No matter what you're looking for, you can find it in Destin. Be sure to check out the Destin Harbor and the fishing pier for amazing views and plenty of things to do. If you're looking for a place to relax, head to the beach and enjoy the sun and sand. There's something for everyone in Destin, so be sure to visit this amazing city!.

Destin Luxury Hotels

Destin Luxury Resorts

Ashland, OR, United States

There are many places to visit in Ashland, Oregon. Some of the most popular places are the Shakespeare Festival, Lithia Park, and Mt. Ashland. The Shakespeare Festival is a great place to see some of the best plays in the world. Lithia Park is a beautiful park with a river running through it. Mt. Ashland is a great place to go skiing in the winter.

Ashland Luxury Hotels

Seaside, OR, United States

One of the most beautiful places on the Oregon Coast is Seaside. With its wide, sandy beach and majestic promenade, Seaside is a popular tourist destination. There are plenty of places to eat and shop, and the Seaside Aquarium is a must-see. Visitors can also enjoy fishing, whale watching, or just taking a leisurely stroll along the beach.

Seaside Luxury Hotels

Newport, RI, United States

Newport is a picturesque town located in southern Rhode Island that is home to some of the most visited tourist destinations in the United States. The city is known for its miles of beaches and historic mansions that line the coast. Some popular places to visit in Newport include the Cliff Walk, the Breakers Mansion, the Museum of Yachting, and the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

Newport Luxury Hotels

Siena, Italy

Siena, Italy is a popular tourist destination, thanks to its well-preserved medieval city center. The city is famous for its art, food, and wine. Siena is located in the heart of Tuscany, making it the perfect base for exploring this beautiful region of Italy. Don't miss the Duomo (cathedral), the Piazza del Campo, and the Torre del Mangia.

Siena Luxury Hotels

Reno, NV, United States

Home to the University of Nevada, Reno and a wide variety of cultural and natural attractions, Reno is a great place to visit. Some of the top places to see in Reno include the Nevada Museum of Art, the Fleischmann Planetarium and Science Center, and the Reno Events Center. Outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy hiking and skiing at Lake Tahoe and biking and kayaking on the Truckee River. In addition, Reno is home to a diverse array of restaurants and nightlife venues.

Reno Luxury Hotels

Atlantic City, NJ, United States

Atlantic City is a popular East Coast tourist destination, known for its boardwalks, beaches and casinos. There are plenty of places to visit in Atlantic City, from the Boardwalk Hall and the Absecon Lighthouse to the Atlantic City Aquarium and Lucy the Elephant. For a more thrilling experience, head to one of the city's casinos, where you can try your hand at blackjack, slots, roulette and more. Atlantic City also offers a wide variety of restaurants, from seafood spots to pizza places, so you're sure to find something to your taste. And if you're looking for some nightlife action, the city has you covered there too. Atlantic City is definitely a place worth visiting!.

Atlantic City Luxury Hotels

Atlantic City Luxury Resorts

Lake George, NY, United States

Looking for a place to visit in upstate New York? Look no further than the stunning Lake George. This picturesque locale is located in the heart of the Adirondacks and is known for its pristine beauty and terrific recreational opportunities. Visitors can enjoy hiking, biking, boating, fishing, and skiing, among other activities. Don't miss the chance to take in the spectacular views from the summit of Prospect Mountain or from the water's edge.

Lake George Luxury Hotels

Buffalo, NY, United States

If you're looking for a city that has it all, Buffalo is the place to be. From its vibrant downtown district to its abundance of parks and nature preserves, there's something for everyone in Buffalo. Here are some of the top places to visit in Buffalo: 1. The Buffalo Zoo - One of the top zoos in the country, the Buffalo Zoo is a must-visit for animal lovers of all ages. 2. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery - Buffalo's answer to the Louvre, the Albright-Knox is home to some of the world's most famous paintings and sculptures. 3. The Buffalo-Niagara Heritage Village - This living history museum offers a glimpse into what life was like in Buffalo in the 1800s. 4. The Buffalo River - Take a walk or bike ride along the Buffalo River, one of the city's most picturesque areas. 5. Delaware Park - This large park is home to a variety of attractions, including a zoo, a golf course, and a nature preserve.

Buffalo Luxury Hotels

Rochester, MN, United States

Rochester, Minnesota is a city with plenty of places to visit. There's the Mayo Clinic, the Apache Mall, and several other shopping areas, as well as a variety of restaurants. There are also a few parks and golf courses. For those who love the outdoors, Rochester is also close to several state parks and the Mississippi River.

Rochester Luxury Hotels

Duluth, MN, United States

If you're looking for an amazing place to visit, Duluth, Minnesota should definitely be at the top of your list. This city is home to some of the most beautiful scenery in the United States, and there are plenty of things to do here that will keep you entertained for days on end. Some of the most popular places to visit in Duluth include the Aerial Lift Bridge, the Glensheen Mansion, and Chester Creek Park. Additionally, there are a number of excellent restaurants and shopping areas in the city, so be sure to explore everything that Duluth has to offer.

Duluth Luxury Hotels

Maputo, Mozambique

Maputo is the capital of Mozambique and a city full of culture and history. There are many places to visit in Maputo, such as the Jose Eduardo dos Santos Museum, the Maputo Cathedral, and the Rua da Independencia. Maputo is also home to the Maputo Bay, which offers beautiful beaches and great seafood.

Maputo Luxury Hotels

Barcelona, Spain

Barcelona, located on the northeast coast of Spain, is a renowned tourist destination and one of the most popular cities in the world. There are plenty of places to visit in Barcelona, such as the Gothic Quarter, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Parc Guell, La Sagrada Familia, and more. The city is also home to a lively nightlife and some of the best restaurants in the country.

Barcelona Luxury Hotels

Barcelona Luxury Villas

Split, Croatia

Split is a city on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea. It is the second-largest city in Croatia and the largest city in Dalmatia. It has a population of over 200,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area, which includes the City of Split and the surrounding towns, has a population of over 330,000. Split is a popular tourist destination and is the home of the Diocletian's Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Other popular tourist destinations include the Riva, the Peristyle, the Cathedral of Saint Domnius, and Sustipan.

Split Luxury Hotels

Split Luxury Villas

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Dubrovnik is a city on the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterranean Sea, a seaport and the administrative center of Dubrovnik-Neretva County. Dubrovnik is nicknamed "The Pearl of the Adriatic".

Dubrovnik Luxury Hotels

Dubrovnik Luxury Villas

Byron Bay, NSW, Australia

Byron Bay is a magical place. It's no wonder that it's one of the most popular destinations in Australia. The town is set in a beautiful location, surrounded by rolling green hills and the bright blue ocean. There's plenty to do in Byron Bay, whether you're looking for a relaxing beach holiday or an adventure-filled trip. Some of the top places to visit in Byron Bay include the iconic lighthouse, the stunning beaches, and the lush rainforest. There's also a great nightlife and plenty of restaurants and cafes to enjoy. If you're looking for an amazing Australian getaway, be sure to add Byron Bay to your list!.

Byron Bay Luxury Hotels

Wellington, New Zealand

If you're looking for a little slice of heaven on earth, look no further than Wellington, New Zealand. With its gorgeous landscape and plethora of activities, there's something for everyone here. Whether you're a nature lover or a city slicker, Wellington has something special to offer. Top Wellington attractions include the Zealandia eco-sanctuary, the cable car up to the Botanic Gardens, and the sprawling Te Papa museum. For those who love getting out into the great outdoors, there are plenty of hiking and biking trails, as well as lovely seaside towns and villages to explore. And of course, no trip to Wellington would be complete without trying some of the delicious local cuisine  be sure to sample a traditional Maori hangi feast! So what are you waiting for? Book your flight to Wellington today and start planning your perfect holiday!.

Wellington Luxury Hotels

Saint Louis, MO, United States

If you're looking for a fun place to visit with a rich history and plenty of things to see and do, look no further than Saint Louis, Missouri. This vibrant city is home to a variety of interesting attractions, including the Gateway Arch, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. There's also no shortage of restaurants and shopping options in Saint Louis. So, whether you're looking for a place to explore new cultures and cuisines or you're just looking for a place to have some fun, Saint Louis is a great option.

Saint Louis Luxury Hotels

Bloomington, IN, United States

The city of Bloomington, Indiana is home to a variety of attractions and places to visit. The Indiana University campus is a popular destination, as is the city's historic downtown district. Monroe County Courthouse
Dakota Access Pipeline protesters have gathered on an active pipeline construction site near Highway 6.

Videos posted on social media of the scene show 30-40 protesters on the site, several standing in front of running machinery to stop it. Construction crews have stopped work as more protesters continue to arrive.

A large group of protesters have also started a "prayer walk" traveling along the pipeline easement.

One video showed a protester stopping a construction worker driving an all-terrain vehicle. After stopping the vehicle, another protester took the worker's tools from the back of the ATV and put them on the ground.

Rob Keller, a spokesman for the Morton County Sheriff's Department, said police are responding to the scene where workers had been doing reclamation work, replacing dirt where pipeline has been laid.

Protesters shown on videos posted to social media are calling on the Obama administration to stop the pipeline. Several have said the goal of today's action is to delay construction, raising the cost for the pipeline's developer, Energy Transfer partners.

(Check back for more information.)
Food enthusiasts in search of an authentic barbecue joint wont have to look any further. Taylor Made BBQ is set to open next month in the old soda shop building, 316 W. Main St., in downtown Mandan.

Owners and married couple Adam Taylor, 27 and Kendra Taylor, 25, came up with the idea to open a Texas-style barbecue eatery after experiencing the cuisine in Austin, Texas. We both love to cook and we decided were going to open this barbecue restaurant, said Adam.

The restaurant will be a partial-serve style, where the meat will be sliced in front of the customer and then they can choose their sides. Beer and wine also will be available to purchase, along with Coke products.

Adam, who also is a crop duster pilot and aerial applicator, will be smoking the meat and Kendra will make all the homemade sauces, sides and desserts.

Mandan is currently in their Renaissance program, which Bismarck did five years ago and it went so well, so thats what drew us to Mandan, were part of the Renaissance program now, said Kendra Taylor about the incentives of opening shop in Mandan.

With a daughter of their own the Taylors want to bring a unique and family friendly restaurant to Mandan with a kids' corner in the restaurant equipped with books and toys.

We want to bring really good barbecue to Bismarck-Mandan, said Adam. Just high-quality food, said Kendra.

The projected opening date of Taylor Made BBQ is the first weekend in December. With repairs and remodeling still underway, the opening could be pushed to a later date.

The Taylors will use North Dakota meats in their restaurant and said each day theyll stay open until the meat sells out.

Taylor Made BBQ operation hours will be 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. They will be closed Sundays and Mondays. Coffee and baked goods will be available at 8 a.m. and barbecue will be served starting at 11 a.m.

Were basing our business around our home so it's going to be cozy and its going to be comfortable. As far as the food goes, there is nothing like it, said Kendra.

For more information on Taylor Made BBQ visit taylormadebbq.net or www.facebook.com/taylormadebbq1.
25 Years Ago-1991

The first Dakota Days Accordion Competition, with three divisions, was recently held at the Bismarck Civic Center. Winner of the Open Division was Caren Severson, New Salem, with Myron Schmidt, Mandan, as runner-up. Georgia Vetter of Mandan took first place in the Junior Division.

George A. Reichman, soil scientist, U.S. Department of Agriculture, an employee at the Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory south of Mandan, retired Sept. 30 after 40 years of service, 36 in Mandan. Reichman and his wife, Virginia, moved to Mandan in 1955 after accepting a scientific position at Great Plains. His main area of research was irrigation and nutrition of crops.

* * *

Funerals this week:

Bonnie (Carlson) Wilson, 74, Bismarck, raised, educated in Mandan. Graduated from Jamestown College, 1940. Married Henry Woody Wilson, 1942.Taught at Bismarck High School, retiring in 1980. Past president of local PEO chapter and Mental Health Association. Served on board of trustees at both Jamestown College and YMCA. Received Bismarck Gold Award, 1984. Inducted into State Speech Association Hall of Fame, 1990. Survivors include one son, one daughter and their families, and one brother.

Helmer Lundstrom, 77, Flasher, raised, educated at Flasher. Married Dorothy Tschider, 1941. Farmed near Flasher, retired 1988. Survivors include wife, two sons, one daughter and their families, two sisters, one brother.

Timothy C. Hoffman, 86, Mandan, raised, educated at St. Anthony. Married Katherine Kary, 1928. After her death, married Bertha Hoffman. Farmer and rancher in Fort Yates area, retiring and moving to Mandan in 1967. Worked for Green Thumb program, 11 years. Served on board of directors for Sioux County Farm Bureau, the Cannon Ball school board, Solen Equity Elevator board, Oak Grove school board. Member of St. Anthony Verein and Mandan Golden Age Club. Survivors include five sons, three daughters, three stepsons, three stepdaughters and their families, and one sister.

* * *

Temperatures recorded Nov. 11: a high of 32 degrees above zero, 15 above for the low.

50 Years Ago-1966

Sheriff Ed Wingenbach defeated Mandan policeman Bill Blotsky. In the race for judge of the new court of increased jurisdiction, Mandan attorney William Hodny easily defeated sticker candidate Lester Schirado. In District A county commission race, Jacob Kautzman defeated incumbent Joseph Kuhn, and in District D, Frank Miller defeated incumbent Oscar Carlson. In a close race, Morton County voters favored Democrat Rolland Redlin over Republican Thomas Kleppe, 3,397-3,103 in the West District congressional race.

* * *

Merlin Dahl, 15-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Merlin P. Dahl, Mandan, received the Pro Deo et Patara (God and Country) Scouting award during last Sundays morning services at First Lutheran Church in Mandan. Merlin, who became an Eagle Scout earlier this year, is the first Scout in the church to receive this award. The award is presented by the National Lutheran Commission on Scouting.

Vern Wann is the new president of the Mandan Hospital Association. Wann, who succeeds Robert Hammond, was elected at the associations annual reorganizational meeting held at the Mandan Hospital. H.G. Vander Vorst was elected the new vice president, while secretary Mrs. C.F. Ellis and treasurer Jack Danz were re-elected.

The Mandan Revelers Club staged a pre-election party at its monthly dinner-dance held at the Mandan Country Club. The candidates, flashing red, white and blue ties and stovepipe hats, gave the partygoers a back-slapping welcome at the door, ushering them into rooms brightly decorated with flags, bunting and humorous campaign posters. The candidates wives were dressed in red, white and blue dresses. Following the banquet, a Victory Ball was held, with dancing to the Cal Heine Orchestra.

The city of Mandan will play a big part in the communitys Christmas spirit this year as the city crews will now be installing and removing the colorful lights in the downtown area. At their Monday evening meeting, city commissioners went on record as favoring the request from representatives of the Mandan Chamber of Commerce that the city perform this annual task. According to the chamber men, Mandan was one of the few cities left in the state that didnt perform such duties, and if the job were to be done this year, it would have to be done by someone besides the Chamber of Commerce as only a few volunteers are available. Time to install the lights on the downtown street poles is estimated at one week for a four-man crew.

75 Years Ago-1941

Lee Mohr, proprietor of the Mohr photographic studio in Mandan, has announced the letting of a contract to E.E. Salzman for the construction of a new two-story brick structure, 25-by-65, to house his studio and independent offices. The current building was moved from the site at 200 Third Ave. N.W. to across the sidewalk and onto the boulevard just south of where it now stands. The basement and the first story of the building are being constructed especially for the needs of a photographic studio; five modern office suites will be on the second floor.

Organization of the first Missouri Slope chapter of Navy Mothers of America was completed at a meeting held in Hudson Hall when the club was presented its charter by Mrs. Mabelle Arndt, Whitefish, Mont., president of the national board of directors. Mrs. Steven Kidd was named president of the new club. which has a charter membership of 17. The list includes Mrs. John Engen and Mrs. Ann J. Miller, both of Glen Ullin; Mrs. John Pitzer, Huff; and Mrs. William Brown, Mrs. Edwin Zeller, Mrs. J.C. Reynolds, Mrs. F.C. Voight, Mrs. LaRue Shaw, Mrs. W.S. Kidd, Mrs. Walter Schmidt, Mrs. H.J. Rolfes, Mrs. Mina Chalfin, Mrs. Ira Place, Mrs. Hilda Dowd, Mrs. Bertha Schlosser, Mrs. Nick Paul and Mrs. Henry Lantz, all of Mandan.

100 Years Ago-1916

The United States presidential election 1916 occurred while Europe was embroiled in World War I. Though sympathetic with the allied forces, most American voters wanted to avoid involvement in the war, and preferred to continue a policy of neutrality as was endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson since 1914.

More than 17 million U. S. citizens cast their vote Tuesday, Nov. 7, but final results were unknown until Nov. 10 due to the close vote between candidates, Democratic incumbent President Wilson and Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes for the Republicans. Aided by the slogan He kept us out of war, Wilson defeated Hughes by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a narrow majority in the Electoral College, 277 to 254.

This was the last presidential election in which women did not have voting privileges. The 19th Amendment was passed just a few months before the next election in 1920, when 8 million women voted for the first time.

In North Dakota, the new Nonpartisan League won an easy victory with 41-year-old Lynn J. Frazier, an unknown farmer from Hoople, as the states new governor. He carried every county, receiving 79 percent of the vote. League candidates for state office also won, resulting in a majority of members in the House and 18 of the 49 members of the state Senate. NPL was a great socialist experiment organized in 1915 by Arthur C. Townley and William Lemke; the organization attracted thousands of disgruntled farmers who felt exploited by big business. The 1916 election brought the NPLers into the chambers of the state Capitol, where its newly elected people were determined to create a state-owned elevator and state-owned bank.

125 Years Ago-1891

On Wednesday, Nov. 11, at 2:30 p.m., the thermometer recorded 20 degrees above zero.

The hearty and jolly laugh of Dr. Stark could be heard first in one place and then another on Wednesday.

Mr. W.W. Bannister came in from the east on Wednesday morning, accompanied by his sister who has just arrived in this country from Scotland.

E.C. Rice & Co. have been painting the town red this week, or rather that portion of it occupied by their store. The color is bright carmine and has caused the building to appear the most prominent in that part of town.

If all of the prospective marriages that are being whispered about in society circles, in this city, should be solemnized by one parson, he would be almost able to erect a brick cottage from the fees he would get. It is said that three out of five bachelors, who are to become 'benedicts' before next summer, are railroad officials, and two of the brides wear widows weeds.
Dates to remember

The North Dakota Dairy Convention will be held Nov. 29 at the Baymont Inn & Suites on Old Red Trail in Mandan. This will mark the 50th anniversary of the convention. The theme for the convention is Looking Forward to the Future. It is vital for our dairy producers and industry stakeholders continue to use a collaborative to sustain and expand our valuable industry.
Nestled between the old soda shop building and Harvest Brazilian Grill on Main Street in downtown Mandan is Aid Inc. Self Help Center and Thrift shop. The organization was founded in 1983 by Father Charley, a priest at St. Josephs in Mandan, to assist with rent and utilities for those in the Bismarck-Mandan area who had fallen on hard times.

Aid Inc.s executive director and store manager Patti Regan said the organization is there to help the community as well promote self-improvement and independence. I like the whole idea of second chances, said Regan.

So far this year the organization has assisted 946 people financially and that doesnt include the food pantry or families whove lost items in a fire and need clothing.

The organization is not done giving yet. On Thanksgiving Day, Aid will host a free holiday meal for the community from 11:30 to 1:30 p.m. at the First Lutheran Church of Mandan. All are welcome to attend.

Then on Saturday, Dec. 9, Care and Share, a program through Aid Inc. will distribute food baskets and gifts to area children and families. The event will begin at 8:30 a.m. at the Braves center in Mandan. Applications for the Care and Share program can be picked up and dropped off at Aid Inc. and are due at 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11.

To donate to Care and Share, people are encouraged to purchase new toys, gift cards and more or send a check to Care & Share, P.O. Box 596, Mandan, N.D. 58554.

Aid Inc. client case manager Dawn Jahner said helping people to be successful is the best part of her job. At nighttime before I go to sleep, I do a check and I always say, have I done the very best that I can today? said Jahner.

Aid Inc. also has launched a counseling program that is free to people in the community without insurance coverage. The program caters to those who are in need of counseling but cannot afford the sessions.

Everything we touch gets a second life and I like that, its rewarding, said Regan.

Aid Inc. help center and food pantry hours of operation are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information on Aid Inc. or to get involved in upcoming events, call 701-663-1274 or visit www.aidincnd.com.
As settlers headed west in the middle of the 19th century, nations of Native Americans wanted them to keep their distance and their foreign diseases at bay. The United States wanted easements for trails and permission to build forts in Indian territories.

The result was the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851  a historic agreement that has found new resonance in the disagreement over the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

It really is an important thing, said Suzan Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute and a longtime Native American historian and advocate. These agreements  they all started out with peace and friendship.

Harjo curated an exhibit on treaties at the Smithsonians Museum of the American Indian and wrote an accompanying book, both called, Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States and American Indian Nations. The exhibit is slated to be open until at least 2018. President Barack Obama in 2014 awarded Harjo the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nations highest civilian honor, for her decades of advocacy on behalf of Native Americans.

Because of the unique standing of treaties under the U.S. Constitution, many parts of the treaty remain in effect, according to Harjo, who said she believes Dakota Access Pipeline opponents are correct in citing the treaty in their efforts to stop pipeline construction on treaty lands that are privately owned and not part of the Standing Rock Reservation.

The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 was an attempt to establish Native American territories and set ground rules for the westward spread of settlers, Harjo said. More than 10,000 Native Americans came to Fort Laramie for discussions with U.S. officials. Because the fort couldnt hold them, negotiations were held at Horse Creek, leading some to call it the Treaty of Horse Creek. Others call it the Great Smoke, because of the smoke when tribal leaders burned sage and buffalo grass and other symbolic things up to the Creator to signify the deal was done, Harjo said.

They made this treaty, and it was a reasonable treaty on all sides, she said.

A map drawn by Belgian Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet with information from famous guide and fur trapper Jim Bridger helped define the approximate boundaries of the tribes, Harjo said. The pool-table sized map now is at the Library of Congress.

The treaty also laid out rules for interaction among the tribes and with the United States, gave the government permission to build small forts and provided easements no wider than a Conestoga wagon for westward trails, said Harjo, who explained that is part of the reason for the width of railroad tracks: They originally had to fit in those same easements.

Areas on the Dakota Access Pipeline route run through the 1851 territories of tribal bands that make up the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Yankton Sioux Tribe, as well as through the Great Sioux Reservation drawn up in the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, Harjo said.

However, Congress in 1889 divided the Great Sioux Reservation into six separate, smaller reservations, which have remained intact. While Congress forced the tribes on to smaller parcels of land, the treaties of 1851 and 1868 didnt go away, Harjo said.

Grant Christensen, an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota School of Law, said he hasnt reviewed the two Fort Laramie treaties close enough to give an opinion on any legal standing related to them. But, he explained the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution makes any treaty the supreme law of the land" and the terms of treaties remain in place unless specifically repealed by Congress.

The U.S. Supreme Court also has held that subsequent treaties do not do away with an earlier treaty unless the new treaty specifically addresses and removes the terms of the older treaty, he said.

An example is a 1999 Supreme Court case called Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, in which the Mille Lacs Band successfully argued they never lost the right to hunt and fish on lands laid out in an 1837 treaty despite an 1855 treaty that made their reservation smaller, Christensen said.

Harjo said she believes Standing Rock still has claims to the lands in the 1851 territories. The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 didnt make the tribes change who they were, she said.

They didnt give up their right to speak their language or exercise their religion. They didnt give up their ancestors graves. They didnt give up their worship and other sacred places. They didnt give up their right to have a clear blue stream to jump in to conclude the Sun Dance, Harjo said.

Harjo said she believes the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the 1996 Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites  all of which she played a part in molding  have built on those treaty rights and also are in play.

The native people in this situation havent begun to mount the kind of legal case that they could, she said.
This service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact The Chanute Tribune office at 620-431-4100 if you have any questions
State Superintendent Kirsten Baesler convened a meeting of her new group of Student Cabinet members Thursday.

Twenty students from schools throughout the state, ranging from fourth grade to freshmen in college, spent the day at the Capitol discussing educational policy and school experience.

And the students didn't hold back when it came to talking about what they liked and didn't like at their schools, such as a lack of Advanced Placement courses and having "flex times" in their school schedules.

This isnt a fluff type of group, neither was the first Student Cabinet. This is a group that was brought together to intently discuss policy, budget and goals for K-12 education in North Dakota," Baesler said.

In April 2015, Baesler formed the first Student Cabinet as a way for the Department of Public Instruction to hear directly from students, just as it does teachers, school administrators and parents. Cabinet members serve for 18 months.

Im extremely pleased, because the conversation we had this morning has been very meaningful. Its been very substantive," Baesler said.

Dawson Schefter, a senior at Langdon Area High School in Cavalier County, who served on the inaugural Student Cabinet, said he'd like to talk about opportunities for students to take AP classes or enroll in dual-credit courses. At his school, there aren't any AP classes and only one dual-credit course is offered, he said.

Cabinet member Peyton Cole, a freshman at the University of North Dakota, who served with the first group of students, said she appreciated the opportunity for younger and older students to share their experiences and hopes to continue that this year.

"It was really cool. I learned a lot, and it was really eye-opening to hear everyone's perspective," Cole said.

At the cabinet's first meeting Thursday, Baesler and members discussed changes in education at the state and federal level, including rewriting math and English standards to replace Common Core and the new Every Student Succeeds Act.

Students set the agenda for their next meetings and will meet four times per year.

On Thursday, students also toured the Capitol and talked about other education bills in the afternoon.

Student Cabinet applicants had to submit letters of recommendation and answer a series of questions, including a question on what they believed to be top issues students face. Those students were evaluated and selected by a group of people outside the state superintendent's office.

Baesler said she told those evaluating the applications that she wanted a diverse group.

I dont want all just National Honors Society kids," she said. "And I want to make sure that Im hearing what isnt going so well, and I appreciate their ability to share with me the positive things that are going on in their schools, and then also the items that they have concerns about."

Cabinet members include 11 females and nine males from Abercrombie, Bismarck, Dickinson, Ellendale, Fargo, Hazen, Langdon, Mandan, Minot, Mohall, Oakes, Park River, Parshall, Watford City, West Fargo and Williston.
In North Dakota, we have a proud tradition of local control of education. We elect our school board members and put our trust in them. We have a chance to reinvigorate this tradition as we go about the task of implementing a new federal education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act.

This law gives more flexibility to our state and local education officials than we have had in more than 25 years.

The previous law put too much emphasis on academic standards and test results as a way of measuring the quality of our schools.

No more. This new law reinforces our authority in North Dakota to determine for ourselves how to measure the progress of our students. It gives us more room to develop their creativity and entrepreneurship, and to help them become productive citizens of our state, nation and world.

Putting this law into place means a lot of work. Shortly after the law was approved last December, I assembled a planning group of more than 50 people, including teachers, parents, school administrators, school board members, business people, legislators and representatives of gifted students and students with disabilities.

Since May, weve been holding monthly meetings. If you want to follow our progress, we have a page on the Department of Public Instructions website that is dedicated to the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA for short. It is here: www.nd.gov/dpi/SchoolStaff/SSI/ESSA/Planning/.

What does this mean for our North Dakota students? It means we have more flexibility to provide the programs they want and need. Schools can get credit for offering vocational and technical programs, music and fine arts. We can craft a system that encourages all students and teachers to improve.

The previous law focused on promoting the improvement of students who were struggling in the classroom. Our new focus is to improve the performance of all students, including our high achievers. After all, everyone can get better at learning, and at applying what they learn.

This new law gives North Dakota the opportunity to develop a school accountability plan that has the right blend of elements to measure the quality of our schools. It will go beyond just standards and test scores. We will have a system that guides and supports continuous improvement for all students and allows us to focus on the unique path of advancement for each of our students. Our schools and districts will provide periodic report cards to parents and taxpayers about how theyre measuring up.

The ESSA law provides soil in which to plant new ideas and encourage collaboration among parents, teachers, administrators and other education stakeholders throughout our state. We can then reap the rich harvest of young, well-educated North Dakotans prepared to take our state to a brighter future.
Dmytro Shtyblikov, a member of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's sabotage group, suspected of planning attacks on military sites in Crimea, is being detained by Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, Nov 10. [Photo/IC]

KIEV - The Ukrainian Defense Ministry on Thursday denied a statement by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) on the detention of Ukrainian saboteurs in Crimea.

"It is another story faked by Russian special services aimed at hiding their own intolerable actions against residents of the peninsula and at discrediting Ukraine in the eyes of the international community," said a statement on the ministry's website.

Earlier in the day, the FSB said in a statement that on Wednesday it has detained a group of armed saboteurs in the southwestern Crimean city of Sevastopol, who allegedly were members of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's intelligence forces.

The armed men, who were arrested with weapons and explosive devices, were plotting terror attacks on the peninsula's military infrastructure and utility facilities, the FSB said.

The incident marked another row between Kiev and Moscow over the detention of the alleged saboteurs.

In August, Russia said it had prevented several groups of Ukrainian intelligence officers from invading Crimea, a claim which Kiev denied.

The autonomous republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol were absorbed into Russia in March 2014 following a referendum, which was recognized by Moscow but rejected by Kiev.
Kevin Cramer is Donald Trumps mini me. Cramer is calling for hearings on media bias. Cramer has set a new standard for pots calling kettles black. No one exceeds Cramer when it comes to abusing the media with biased information.

Cramer is a frequent guest on local radio where he mimics Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump. The hypocrisy of the worst offender of media misuse in North Dakota crying foul is laughable.

Just like Trump, Cramer takes no responsibility for his mistakes and poor showing. It is all the fault of the biased media. The so-called biased media is what has brought both Trump, and Cramer, to prominence. It is not biased media when it represents Trump and his little brother, it is fair and balanced.
The Workforce Services Division of the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development say they are on track to issue a record number of Work Opportunity Tax Credits to employers across the state.



Jan. 1 through Oct. 31, the Department issued 71,336 WOTC certifications, which represents a potential tax savings to Tennessee employers of $159,367,400.



This tax credit can really impact the bottom line of an employer, while helping an individual who is struggling to find meaningful employment. It is a win-win situation for everyone, said TDLWD Commissioner Burns Phillips.



"Just in the month of October, the Department processed 13,400 certifications, with a potential tax savings to employers of $5.5 million. The state is on track to issue between 95,000 and 100,000 certifications during this calendar year, which would equate to over $212 million in potential tax savings for employers across Tennessee," officials said.



"The Work Opportunity Tax Credit program is designed to assist Tennesseans from certain targeted groups who have consistently faced significant employment barriers with re/entering the labor force. The program provides federal tax credit incentives to employers for hiring these individuals that range from $1,200-$9,600.



"Targeted groups include; long-term unemployed, veterans, SNAP recipients, ex-felons, persons in vocational rehabilitation, Social Security Insurance recipients, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients, as well as several other groups."



This program has made a tremendous impact on Tennessee. WOTC helps targeted workers move from economic dependency, into self-sufficiency, by earning a steady income and become contributing taxpayers. Participating employers simultaneously reduce their income tax liability, making it easier to do business, Commissioner Phillips said.



Last spring the TDLWD simplified the process for employers to apply for the WOTC program by transitioning to an online application. "This not only speeds up the approval process, it will eliminate the use of more than 700,000 pieces of paper each year," officials said.
Tennessee Commissioner of Education Candice McQueen announced Thursday the launch of a statewide #GoOpen initiative, making Tennessee one of the states recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for a commitment to supporting school districts and educators in offering high-quality, openly licensed educational resources in schools.As a #GoOpen state, Tennessee will provide educators access to a large collection of high-quality, digital teaching and professional development resources that can be easily used without the burden of restrictive commercial licenses and will develop a statewide repository of openly licensed resources.Participating in #GoOpen will allow Tennessee educators to easily collaborate and share resources with each other, regardless of geographical area, officials said.Tennessee is excited to join the #GoOpen movement to improve learning outcomes for our students by providing educators with high-quality educational resources, Comm. McQueen said. Tennessee is committed to personalizing instruction for all students, and the role of digital content through #GoOpen is an important part of our strategy.Since the launch of #GoOpen, 12 school districts across the country have been identified as #GoOpen Ambassador Districts. The Ambassador Districts have experience using openly licensed educational resources in place of traditional instructional materials and are mentoring #GoOpen Launch Districts that are beginning this transition. Two of the #GoOpen Ambassador Districts are in Tennessee: Tullahoma City Schools and Bristol City Schools.The #GoOpen initiative provides a tremendous opportunity for Tennessee schools and districts, Tullahoma City Schools Director Dan Lawson said. I am thrilled that our state is embracing a leadership role in the #GoOpen movement. Our active involvement as a state will provide access to exceptional open educational resourcesregardless of where a school is located or their budget. I look forward to seeing the content that Tennessee educators create and share through #GoOpen."Tennessees existing strategy to embrace digital content supports the #GoOpen goal of expanding and accelerating the adoption of openly licensed educational resources for pre-K12. For example, the Tennessee Department of Education recently launched a pilot program which makes high-quality, editable content for Algebra I and Integrated Math available to Tennessee educators. This pilot is the states first attempt to embrace openly licensed material and is a natural precursor to participation in the #GoOpen movement," officials said.
Previous Next

More than 70 veterans work at the WACKER POLYSILICON North America site in Bradley County. Friday morning, students from Bradley Central High School honored these veterans at the factory in Charleston.



Today is a very special day; to all our veterans, thank you for your service and your sacrifice, said Mary Beth Hudson, vice president and site manager for WACKER POLYSILICON North America at todays all-team meeting for employees.



Bradley Central High Schools JROTC colorguard presented and posted the flags, the choir sang the national anthem and the members of the band played an armed forces medley.



The students from Bradley Central truly made this morning special for our veterans and all our employees, said Ms. Hudson after the event. It was such a wonderful way to honor our veterans, and we are so appreciative of the school, the teachers and students for all they did to make this an incredible event. The students impressed us with their professionalism and talent.



Bradley Central High School is WACKERs Business and Education Serving Together (BEST) Partner. BEST is a program of the Cleveland/Bradley Chamber of Commerce that connects a business and a selected school to enhance the quality of life for our community and provide business support for our educational programs.


If youre a whiskey drinker, youre spoiled for choice. Your local liquor store probably has dozens of bottles of Scotch, bourbon, rye, and Irish whiskey available, all of them unique, and many of them delicious. But when it comes time to choose, its easy to find yourself reaching for the old standbys. Why take a chance on something new when you know exactly what that bottle of Jameson or Makers Mark is going to taste like, after all? Yet that too-cautious approach to buying booze might be causing you to miss out on something great. To help you discover your new favorite drink, weve put together this list of 10 under-the-radar whiskeys that you need to try.

1. Wild Turkey 101

Ron Swansons father may have put Wild Turkey on his cornflakes, but thats not the only way to enjoy this under-appreciated Kentucky bourbon, which is potent without being overwhelming, according to fans. Still, many people pass Wild Turkey 101 when restocking their liquor cabinet  it was the 18th-best-selling whiskey in the U.S. in 2014, behind Canadian Club, Dewars White Label, and Southern Comfort. They may be missing out on a gem.

This is the strongest of the mass-market bourbons, and by a wide margin at that, yet at the same time its not a fearsome tiger that scares novices away, wrote Richard Thomas of The Whiskey Reviewer.

2. New Hollands Beer Barrel Bourbon

Cant decide between whiskey and beer? New Hollands Beer Barrel Bourbon is bottled by New Holland Brewing in Holland, Mich., a company best-known for its craft beers. But they made a foray into the spirits business a few years ago when they began aging bourbon in barrels that previously held Dragons Milk, a barrel-aged stout.

Because the bourbon sits in those barrels for 90 days, the edge is removed and the bourbon takes on some of the smooth, malty characteristic of the beer the barrels once held, Nicholas Brennan, who writes the Hoppy Times & Mixed Moments craft beer and cocktail blog for ChicagoNow, told The Cheat Sheet. Its a delicious bourbon for the connoisseur, but its very appealing to the masses because the barrel aging process really mellows it out.

3. Rebel Yell Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey

Rebel Yell tends to live somewhere near the bottom shelf at your local liquor emporium. But thats no reason to turn up your nose at this budget-friendly spirit, which retails for about $11 a bottle. Will Gordon, the Bottom Shelf columnist at Serious Eats, declared Rebel Yell damn fine and a good bet for budget-conscious drinkers. Its very smooth for the category, with very little burn, and its almost overly flavorful. It starts with a burst of honey that sticks around till the end, and it picks up a touches of vanilla, cream, and orange along the way.

John Rempe, a spirits expert at Luxco, which bottles Rebel Yell, told The Cheat Sheet that its a particularly good bet if youre mixing drinks, offering honey and butter notes followed by hints of plum and raisins.

4. Buffalo Trace Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey

Another wallet-friendly option at about $25 a bottle, Buffalo Trace tends to earn high marks from experts, though its not as popular as some of its similarly priced competitors on the bourbon scene, like Makers Mark and Knob Creek.

Buffalo Trace has a smooth finish and pleasantly sweet notes of oak, toffee and anise, Jason Callaway, a certified sommelier and the beverage director at Bacon Bros. Public House in Greenville, S.C., told The Cheat Sheet, adding that he highly recommends the spirit.

5. 2 Gingers

If youre in the mood for an Irish whiskey, the chances are good youre going to reach for a big-name brand like Jameson or Bushmills. But the once-small selection of spirits from the Emerald Isle has grown in recent years, including newer entrants to the market like 2 Gingers. While they may lack the pedigree of the old standbys, that doesnt mean theyre not worth taking a look at.

Kieran Folliard, a Minnesota bar owner, created 2 Gingers, which is now made at Irelands Kilbeggan Distillery. The spirit will appeal to anyone who is looking for a smoother and less peaty alternative to traditional Irish whiskeys, says Paul Zahn, a beverage and event expert. Its aged for four years and has fruit notes [that] make it a perfect whiskey for sipping or cocktails, Zahn said.

6. Barrelhound

New to the market in mid-2015, Barrelhound Scotch whisky is designed to appeal to bourbon drinkers who are looking to make a foray into the world of Scotch. Produced by Chivas Brothers, its a blended Scotch thats aged American oak. Theres not another product quite like it out there, and at the moment you can only get your hands on a bottle in New York or Washington, D.C.

The Whiskey Reviewer rated Barrelhound a B+, calling it extremely easy to drink  a great whiskey for someone who is putting their toes in the water. Plus, at about $30 a bottle, its fairly affordable, especially if youre looking for a spirit for cocktails. Barrelhounds strong suit is its unparalleled mixability, said Rachel Sandon at DCist, who tried it in a number of light, summery drinks.

7. Redbreast 12

Another Irish whiskey that flies under the radar of more casual drinkers, Redbreast 12 has a loyal and devoted following who are eager to sings its praises. Unlike most Irish whiskeys, Redbreast is made in a single pot with a mix of malted and unmalted barley, which gives the spirit a distinctive flavor.

Food writer Larry Olmsted declared Redbreast 12 his favorite Irish whiskey. Redbreast is very much full-flavored, noticeably darker and richer and with a more aggressive taste than most Irish whiskies, while sharing the smoothness and drinkability its brethren are known for.

8. High West Campfire

Utah might not be a place most people look to for great booze, but the High West Saloon & Distillery in Park City churns out an impressive mix of craft spirits, most of them whiskeys and many well-received by connoisseurs. Yet with more than a dozen different products available, its bound that one or two would be overlooked. According to Aaron Goldfarb at Esquire, more people should be paying attention to High West Campfire.

Their one release I never see getting the respect it deserves is Campfire, a unique blend of sweet bourbon, spicy rye whiskey, and a smoky peated scotch, he wrote. Its delicious and far cheaper than any great single malt from Islay.

9. Laphroaig 10

For many drinkers, single-malt Scotch sits at the top of the whiskey pyramid, which makes it hard to label any one underrated. Still, some bottles get more attention than others, which can lead Scotch novice to simply reach for the familiar. If youre looking to explore the world of Scotlands signature spirit, Zahn suggests Laphroaig 10, which he calls one of the most distinct scotches in the market.

Laphroaig 10 is an Islay Scotch that retails for about $50 a bottle, making it an affordable indulgence. The liquid is full bodied and smoky . [and] has a surprising sweetness with hints of salt and layers of peatiness, said Zahn. If you want to take a chance on a fuller-flavored Scotch, this may be the one to try.

10. Crown Royal Hand-Selected Barrel

For a variety of reasons, Canadian whiskies tend not to get a lot of respect from serious drinkers. In the U.S., thats partly because Canadians are keeping most of the good stuff for themselves and sending us their leftovers, according to Bloomberg. But the reputation of liquor from north of the border is gradually improving with the introduction of more premium spirits like Crown Royal Hand-Selected Barrel.

Unlike your dads Crown Royal, which is a blend, the Hand-Selected Barrel contains Coffey Rye whisky from a single barrel. Drink Hacker, which rated it an A-, described it as sweet, soothing, and fun to drink.

Im simultaneously shocked and happy that this tastes as good as it does, wrote Josh Peters in his review at The Whiskey Jug. Crown Royal Hand-Selected Barrel is currently available in Texas and other select markets.

Follow Megan on Twitter @MeganE_CS
MOORHEAD, Minn. -- Military veterans living in Clay or Becker counties charged with committing a crime may find an ally in a new specialty court operating there.

Veterans Treatment Court offers veterans who have run afoul of the law an opportunity for greater access to mental health or chemical dependency treatment, more supervised probation and less time behind bars than in the traditional court system.

Advocates say the extra support is warranted and deserved.

Some of these vets are coming back with issues with the criminal justice system caused by their service to this country, said Don Kautzmann, coordinator of the Veterans Treatment Court and Drug Court in Clay County.

Clay County District Court Judge Michelle Lawson said veterans often have a harder time coming to terms with breaking the law.

Theres more shame involved, she said.

The court takes in veterans who have been charged with gross misdemeanor and felony crimes, and who have either chemical dependency problems, mental health issues or both.

It does not accept those who have committed serious violent crimes including murder or sex offenses.

The program was started in fall 2015 with a federal grant from the Office of Justice Programs and a smaller grant from the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs.

Clay County first conducted a pilot project with one participant, then started the court fully in January with four participants. The regional court can accept a total of 30 veterans -- 20 in Clay County and 10 in Becker County.

Lawson said it started slower than expected, but will pick up as they begin identifying veterans earlier in the process with a question about military service on initial paperwork.

When defendants are identified as a veteran at their first court hearing, Kautzmann can refer them immediately to the screening process, which involves the prosecutor, defense attorneys or probation agents.

Lawson said a crucial part of the program is linking veterans with the services theyre entitled to through the Veterans Administration.

The criminal justice system is a conduit for them to connect, she said.

Lawson said the program is highly structured, with a high level of supervision.

In addition to finding a job if they dont have one and making court appearances, the veterans attend appointments at the VA Medical Center in Fargo almost daily and are subject to random checks and drug tests from their probation officer.

Its hard work, Lawson said. As an adult, youre treated like a young teenager, being held accountable.

Most veterans who participate in the special court will hope for a stay of adjudication rather than a conviction for their crime. That means their case is pending while theyre on probation, but dismissed when theyve completed it. Lawson said if a veteran has any type of conviction, he or she is no longer eligible to serve in the military.

Whether active duty or National Guard, a split second bad decision can result in them losing their military career, she said.

But being involved in the court doesnt automatically mean participants wont serve a jail sentence. If its a serious offense, they may have to do time.

It takes an average of a year and a half for a veteran to complete the program. The last phase involves pairing the court participant with another veteran. About half of those who run the Veterans Treatment Court are veterans themselves, including Clay County Attorney Brian Melton.

Lawson said while Veterans Treatment Court cases take more resources up front, theres a big savings on the back side because there are fewer relapses into criminal behavior.

The average recidivism rate for veterans who dont go through a program like this is 50 to 60 percent, five years out. For those who complete the specialty court, its 15 to 25 percent.

Lawson also said veterans who complete the program become better functioning and contributing members of society; for example, staying current on child support.

Sometimes getting arrested turns out to be one of the best things to happen to anyone, Lawson said of the opportunity for a veteran in legal trouble to turn things around.
Write to the Point

By JOHN McCALLUM

Editor

Those of you who know me or read my past columns know that I spend time in Guatemala periodically on mission work. My first trip was in 2008, and I have been down to that Central American country in four of the last five summers.

I have made good friends in that country among the native Maya that we visit, and I follow what happens there. At times, I have even thought about what it might be like to live in Guatemala, to stay and not return home. Frankly, I feel the people we visit, the Qeqchi Maya, treat each other far better than we here in the U.S. treat ourselves.

But there are no illusions. Life in Guatemala, like many Third or Developing World countries, is hard and dangerous.

For someone in my profession, that hit home on Monday when I received an email update from an organization called Monitoring Guatemala. The headline was enough: Another journalist assassinated. Throw in the headline deck Journalist and his wife shot to death in Coatepeque and you get the idea.

Saturday, Nov. 5, local radio station broadcaster Hamilton Roeli Hernandez Vasquez, 28, and his wife Ermelinda Gonzalez Lucas, 35, were shot to death  three times in the back of the head for Vasquez and twice in the same spot for Lucas  with their bodies dumped alongside a dirt road between Coatepeque and Flores Costa Cuca in the province of Quetzaltenango.

Quetzaltenango is west, southwest of where we visit in the Central Highlands, closer to the Pacific Ocean. Still, I know people in mission who frequent that region, and similar violence has occurred around where we go to the city of Coban and the Baja Vera Paz and Alta Vera Paz mountains.

Guatemala is a place where people do actually die for freedoms we take for granted every day. And its not just freedom of the press, which is unfortunately coming more and more under fire in our own country.

We have the freedom of much cleaner air and water, along with efficient sanitation, thanks in part  and some people arent going to like this  to our government, local, state and federal. Pretty liberal statement, I know, because after all, government cant do anything right.

We have the freedom of a far better education system, one that is as equitable as possible to everyone regardless of race, sex or other considerations. In Guatemala, men are mostly assured of the equivalent of a sixth-grade education, women third-grade.

We have the freedom of good transportation systems, for the most part, which is again, a benefit from our government. In Guatemala, there are only a handful of paved highways, and when roads do get improved, its likely the money came from some other country or a private party.

For example, regarding the former, construction work widening a portion of the highway going north out of Guatemala City has been paid for by millions of dollars from Taiwan, given in appreciation of Guatemala being one of the first countries to recognize the breakaway Chinese province as a sovereign nation.

Locally among the Qeqchi, paving the road north to Senahu, a beautiful, small city nestled in a valley in the Alta Vera Paz, from Highway 7E on the Polochic River valley floor was paid for in 2010 by local sugar growers in order to make it easier for their employees to get to work.

There are more freedoms that we take for granted. And there are many other freedoms that are being eroded, pushing more and more towards being like our Central American brothers and sisters.

Its something to think about this Friday as we praise and thank members of our military  past and present  for their service protecting those freedoms. At the same time, we might want to ask ourselves if we are doing our part to not only ensure those freedoms for us, but also for others.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.
Find new books and literate friends with Shelfari, the online book club.
Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney  is facing a firestorm after speaking out against President-elect Donald Trump in an email to employees Wednesday, saying if employees don't agree with creating a culture of support and inclusiveness, they should resign.

In the original, nearly 300-word email sent to the online food-ordering company's 1,400 employees Wednesday afternoon, Maloney said he rejects the "nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics of Donald Trump."

Advertisement

By the next afternoon, a Twitter campaign to boycott the company was in full force, as headlines claimed he told all pro-Trump employees to resign.

Maloney said in a blog post Thursday night his comments had been misconstrued, and that he was trying to say he doesn't tolerate discriminatory activity or hateful commentary  not encourage Trump voters to quit.

Advertisement

In the original email, Maloney wrote: "While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr. Trump, I want to be clear that his behavior - and these views, have no place at Grubhub. Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination."

He also wrote that the company promised to fight for any employee who was scared or felt personally exposed.

"If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here," he wrote. "We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team."

In an emailed statement to Blue Sky, Maloney said his original email wasn't intended to call out all Trump supporters.

"At Grubhub, we welcome and accept employees with all political beliefs, no matter who they voted for in this or any election," he said. "We do not discriminate on the basis of someone's principles, or otherwise. The message was intended to advocate for inclusion and tolerance  regardless of political affiliation  during this time of transition for our country."

In a tweet that was later deleted, Maloney added: "To be clear, GrubHub does not tolerate hate and we are proud of all our employees - even those who voted for Trump."

In a statement posted by Grubhub later Thursday evening, Maloney said his comments had been misconstrued.

"I want to clarify that I did not ask for anyone to resign if they voted for Trump," the statement said. "I would never make such a demand."

Advertisement

On the Apple App Store Friday morning, Grubhub's current app version had a one-star rating. One-star reviews claimed Republicans were "not wanted" as customers of the service and accused the company of political discrimination.

Grubhub (NYSE: GRUB) shares closed Friday at $35.31 a drop of nearly 5 percent compared to the previous close. Trading volume spiked in early trading, with shares falling as low as $34.95, a nearly 6 percent drop, at one point.

On Friday morning, thousands of Twitter users were still urging others to #boycottgrubhub.

But those complaints may have a limited effect on the company's operations given the company's millions of users across major markets, said Aaron Turner, an equity research analyst with Los Angeles-based Wedbush Securities.

"Given this scale I expect limited impact from a boycott and believe investors will feel the same," he wrote in an email to Blue Sky. "This has been a very contentious election and tempers remain high on both sides, but I expect over time cooler heads, and hungry stomachs, will prevail."

Turner said he believes the email's impact on Grubhub's stock will be minimal when the dust clears  and foresees minimal reaction from institutional investors.

Advertisement

"Investors are more focused on the possible ramifications of Mr. Trump's policies on the tech sector rather than the knee-jerk reaction to an email intended to calm employees that may feel vulnerable after the conclusion of the election," he said.

As for Maloney's fate, Turner said he shouldn't be worried.

"I would ascribe a 0% chance Maloney loses his job over this," he said.

Nicholas Pearce, a clinical associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, said he thought forcing employees to agree with a leader's beliefs flies in the face of diversity and inclusion  though he said he did not think that was Maloney's intent.

He said Maloney's email may have landed better if it focused on the company's values and left the election out of it.

"If it's going to touch politics, it's important for the leadership to tie the conversation to the organization's values," he said. "If it doesn't touch the organization's values, then a political conversation is unnecessarily incendiary."

Advertisement

That said, Pearce said Maloney's message may have still been received poorly by some, Trump mention or not.

"I think the note could have benefited from a little more strategic finessing, to be sure. At the same time, there is no way to insulate yourself from the potential backlash that being a word and deed advocate of diversity, inclusion and equity is likely to engender," he said. "There will be a net business impact."

Michael Sheehan, an employment attorney and Chicago-based partner at DLA Piper, said employers should be careful about statements that might run afoul of National Labor Relations Board rules.

"I will advise clients, and my colleagues will advise clients, to stay away from chastising or in any way looking into or criticizing colleagues in the workplace for how they vote, period," he said.

But Joseph Yastrow, also an employment attorney and Chicago-based partner at Laner Muchin, said he found it unlikely there would be any legal action against an email like Maloney's. That said, "If they asked for my feedback, I think I would've softened the message," he said.

In the aftermath of this week's election, other CEOs have spoken out about the results to customers, employees and investors. Julie Smolyansky, President and CEO of Morton Grove-based Lifeway Kefir, had a strong message for shareholders after someone expressed displeasure at Smolyansky's support of Hillary Clinton.

Advertisement

"Hey stockholders, if you are a rape apologist, sexist, racist, demagogue, bigot, feel free to no longer own shares," she tweeted Thursday night.

Apple CEO Tim Cook also wrote an email to employees Wednesday, calling for unity.

"Regardless of which candidate each of us supported as individuals, the only way to move forward is to move forward together," he wrote.

mgraham@tribpub.com

Twitter @megancgraham

Here's the full text of Maloney's email to Grubhub employees, sent midday Wednesday, Nov. 9.

So... that happened... what's next?

Advertisement

I'm still trying to reconcile my own worldview with the overwhelming message that was delivered last night. Clearly there are a lot of people angry and scared as the antithesis of every modern presidential candidate won and will be our next president.

While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr. Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior - and these views, have no place at Grubhub. Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination.

We have worked for years cultivating a culture of support and inclusiveness. I firmly believe that we must bring together different perspectives to continue innovating - including all genders, races, ethnicities and sexual, cultural or ideological preferences. We are better, faster and stronger together.

Further I absolutely reject the nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics of Donald Trump and will work to shield our community from this movement as best as I can. As we all try to understand what this vote means to us, I want to affirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and everyone else here at Grubhub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States.

If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here. We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team.

I want to repeat what Hillary said this morning, that the new administration deserves our open minds and a chance to lead, but never stop believing that the fight for what's right is worth it.

Advertisement

Stay strong,

Matt

--

Matt Maloney

CEO, GrubHub
As the job market improves, employers may find it is more important than ever to focus on holding on to talented employees. Thanking workers for doing a good job is a simple but effective form of boosting retention, experts say. (iStock)

To answer the question of what makes a good workplace, the Chicago Tribune went to the people who would know the best: the employees.

On behalf of the Tribune, WorkplaceDynamics of Exton, Pa., a workplace survey and improvement specialist, conducted an engagement survey of Chicago-area employers with at least 100 employees.

Advertisement

The Tribune did not pay WorkplaceDynamics. The firm undertook the scientific survey for its research and business purposes.

To find organizations most likely to participate in the survey, the Tribune used print and online advertising to seek nominations from workers, bosses and others.

Advertisement

In total, 1,861 companies were invited to participate, compared with 2,426 in 2015. Of those, 233 companies completed the survey (261 last year), allowing WorkplaceDynamics to identify the top organizations, divided into three categories: small (fewer than 250 employees), midsize (250-999) and large (1,000 and more), the same divisions as previous surveys.

The surveyed companies employ 147,508 people in the Chicago area, of which 111,917 received surveys and 70,647 responded.

Working Lunch Weekdays Get the latest business news headlines, delivered to your inbox midday weekdays. >

In 2015, surveyed companies employed 160,020 people, with questionnaires reaching 116,036 and 72,838 responses.

WorkplaceDynamics delivered the top results to the Tribune. In addition, 11 companies received a Top Workplaces designation by surpassing minimum national-standard thresholds based on responses from more than 6,600 companies and 2.4 million employees during the past 12 months.

The list of companies not designated a Top Workplace was kept confidential by WorkplaceDynamics. The firm questioned employees using paper and online surveys. Employees responded to a set of statements about their feelings toward their workplace, using a seven-point scale.

The statements focused on issues such as the direction of the company ("I have confidence in the leader of this company"), execution ("At this company, we do things efficiently and well") and connection ("My job makes me feel like I am part of something meaningful").

A numerical value was attached to each statement, allowing WorkplaceDynamics to create an overall score for each company.

Afterward, WorkplaceDynamics ran a series of statistical tests to look for any questionable results. The firm said it sometimes disqualifies a small number of employers based on these tests.

Advertisement

The list is categorized by size because smaller employers tend to score higher than midsize employers, and midsize employers tend to score higher than large employers.
This building in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, photographed Nov. 9, 2016, was purchased out of foreclosure and later bought by a developer dedicated to preserving affordable housing. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

Four years ago, Gabriela Perez was a tenant living in a four-flat in foreclosure, worried her family would be tossed out on the street.

Today, Perez and her children remain in the same  but now remodeled  two-bedroom apartment because a local community group, a mission-based developer and a financial backer stepped in to help keep rents affordable in her rapidly gentrifying Albany Park neighborhood.

Advertisement

The program, ROOTS, an acronym for Renters Organizing Ourselves To Stay, launched in 2014 after area residents and community leaders noticed heavily discounted two- to four-flat buildings were being purchased by cash investors who flipped them, converting them into single-family homes for sale or apartments with much higher rents.

Gabriela Perez, at left facing camera, and her daughter Montserrat Angel, 12, talk Nov. 9, 2016, in the living room of an affordable housing unit in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. A coalition of groups launched a program in 2014 to help keep rents affordable in the area. (Kristen Norman / Chicago Tribune)

With the help of Communities United, a neighborhood group, and Enterprise Community Partners, a national community development organization, the Chicago Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. began buying foreclosed two-, three- and four-flat buildings, rehabbing them and then renting the units at less-than-market rates. But with the pipeline of cheaper, foreclosed properties dwindling, the program's challenge will be finding a way to secure pricier, market-rate apartment buildings before they join the wave of gentrification rippling through blocks.

Advertisement

So far, Chicago Metropolitan Housing has purchased 41 apartment units in 19 buildings in the Albany Park, West Ridge, North Park, Irving Park and Belmont-Cragin neighborhoods.

"Albany Park ... is traditionally affordable for immigrant families," said Nick Jefferson, housing organizer at Communities United. "We'd see foreclosed properties in Albany Park and a lot of times we'd see them being turned into luxury rentals or single-family homes that people couldn't afford," he said.

[T]he impact is very small. But we're making an impact for the families that will be displaced  Rafael Leon, executive director at Chicago Metropolitan Housing

Compared with fall 2011, the median price of single-family homes in Albany Park is up more than 30 percent, according to data from the Chicago Association of Realtors. In Belmont Cragin, the price is up more than 100 percent.

In some cases, foreclosed two- to four-flat buildings were selling for about 50 percent higher this fall than three years ago, according to Communities United's research.

Cash investors began scouring neighborhoods like Albany Park and Irving Park in 2012, pouncing on distressed small buildings. Communities United found that in 2014, nearly half of all sales of two- to- four-unit buildings in Chicago were purchased with cash  an indicator that they were bought as investment opportunities, not by people who planned to make them their homes.

Between 2014 and 2015, the sale price of the residential buildings tracked by Communities United on the Northwest Side increased at least 150 percent and in some cases, nearly 300 percent. Most of those, the group found, were converted to single-family homes.

"In my block alone, there was a three-flat converted into two-flat with a wine cellar put in the basement. Right across from me there was a two flat-that was converted into a beautiful single-family," said Diane Limas, board president of Communities United.

Rents have increased as well, according to Limas. Before the foreclosure crisis, Albany Park residents were paying $600 to $800 a month for a two-bedroom unit and the same apartments now rent for $950 to $1,300, she said. "This, along with the property tax and the gentrification, is really, really pushing a lot of longtime residents out."

Advertisement

Chicago Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. Executive Director Rafael Leon, left, and lead developer Scott Henry are photographed Nov. 10, 2016, at their office in Chicago. The housing group has teamed with other organizations to purchase apartments on Chicago's Northwest Side in a bid to preserve affordable housing. (Anthony Souffle / Chicago Tribune)

The initiative aims to buy an additional 45 units in the next year or so. "If you do some rehab, you don't need to gut a unit," said Rafael Leon, executive director at Chicago Metropolitan Housing. "The goal is to ensure the units are affordable and in good condition and the people will be happy to live in them."

Perez's building was the first one bought under the program and her rent dropped to $775 a month, about 9 percent less than before her building went into foreclosure.

The ROOTS organizations would like to expand its effort into other communities and not rely so heavily on foreclosed properties owned by Fannie Mae.

But expanding ROOTS could prove challenging. Chicago Metropolitan Housing has, on average, spent $160,000 to buy and rehab the units, relying on financial assistance from Enterprise Community Partners and a deal with Fannie Mae that provides a 20 to 30 percent discount on the properties. Chicago Metropolitan Housing already has put $1 million of its own money into the project.

With the pipeline of foreclosed properties slowing down, the metropolitan housing group will compete more with cash investors for properties, pushing up the cost.

To make the numbers work, Leon said the housing group will seek to acquire larger multiunit apartment buildings, and will need additional sources of funding.

Advertisement

"A private owner will sell her building for market value and we may not be able to afford that," he said. "In order to take this to a larger scale, we need help from others  banks, the city of Chicago and foundations."

What's happening to rents and housing prices in Albany Park and the surrounding neighborhoods is part of a national trend, said Lauren Nolan, an economic development planner at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement.

"When people thought about the foreclosure crisis, they think about homeowners losing their homes, but there's another ... story," she said. "Small properties have also been foreclosed on, which has affected renters as investment buyers have come in."

"Housing prices have grown at a higher rate for about 10 years now," she said. "Rents have grown ... in the wake of the housing crisis as more people have moved into or stayed in the rental markets."

In Chicago, where the median single-family home price was $215,000 in September, there are fewer neighborhoods available to middle- and working-class families, Nolan said.

"In 1970 there were many neighborhoods that were solidly middle-class, she said. "Now what we're seeing is polarizing  a concentration of high-income, high-cost neighborhoods and high poverty and dis-invested neighborhoods."

Advertisement

Leon acknowledged that preserving 41 units in an area where hundreds of units are available is a drop in the bucket. "Let's not fool ourselves, the impact is very small," he said. "But we're making an impact for the families that will be displaced."

crshropshire@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @corilyns
The state of Illinois has sued AT&T, alleging that the communications company lied about work that it was required to farm out to a minority business in a $144 million contract. (Kena Betancur / AFP/Getty Images)

The state of Illinois has sued AT&T, alleging that the communications company lied about work that it was required to farm out to a minority business in a $144 million contract.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Cook County Circuit Court, accuses AT&T Datacomm, a unit of the corporate giant, of violating the Illinois False Claims Act by falsely asserting that a subcontractor it hired was a minority business.

Advertisement

Also named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit is Antonio Burketh, the minority owner of Net Structure Assets Solutions. The Illinois resident claims his technology business was qualified to be a subcontractor for a 2008 deal under which AT&T would provide hardware, software and services, including equipment upgrades.

When AT&T sought the work, the company "knew that a proposed contract between the state and AT&T would need to be in compliance with the state's minority-owned business goals or requirements," even as it wanted to hire a nonminority subcontractor, the lawsuit says. "At that time, there were numerous minority-owned businesses" that were capable of being a subcontractor, but the company picked a nonminority firm.

Advertisement

"AT&T falsely represented to the state that it was and had complied with minority-owned business requirements mandated by the state," the lawsuit says.

The state and Burketh, who are being represented by law firm LeonardMeyer in Chicago, ask that AT&T be required to return payments made by the state and to pay damages and a civil penalty.

Burketh last year had sued AT&T, but the case was dismissed.

"This case is an attempt to resurrect claims previously made by this same plaintiff that were dismissed by a court last year," AT&T spokesman Jim Kimberly said. "We're confident the claims will be rejected again."

byerak@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @beckyyerak
President-elect Donald Trump leaves a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., at right, at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 10, 2016, in Washington, D.C. (Zach Gibson / Getty Images)

Look in your wallet. Do you see IOUs signed by Donald Trump, or did you merely imagine that he plopped them there?

Most of the Trump promises made during the campaign were big but vague. He promised to help all Americans prosper and to renew the American Dream. But what does that mean for your wallet? Often, ideas that sound good on the campaign trail dissipate or morph once they've made it through Congress.

Advertisement

And though Trump gets to work with a House and Senate controlled by Republicans, the ideas he trumpeted on the campaign trail are a political blend: His tax plan seems to come from the Republican playbook. His student loan relief plan sounds a lot like Obama's, and his pledge to keep Social Security completely intact differs from Republicans itching to make cuts.

Here are some key issues for your wallet:

Advertisement

Tax Cuts. One of the clearest plans described by Trump during the campaign was his tax plan.

Reviews by independent think tanks say his plan would cut taxes for all income levels, but it's bound to be controversial because most savings would go to the highest-income people and 20 percent of moderate-income people would face higher taxes.

In one example, a single parent earning $75,000 would face a tax increase of $2,440.

Trump would reduce the number of tax brackets, increase the standard deduction, hold the maximum rate for dividend and capital gains taxes at 20 percent, and get rid of federal estate taxes and the alternative minimum tax. He would limit deductions other than for charitable contributions and mortgage interest and cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent.

Making this happen will be a challenge. The Tax Policy Center says the plan would cost the government $6 trillion over a decade as people pay less in taxes. Unless the government makes huge spending cuts, the tax break would end up increasing the national debt by nearly 80 percent of gross domestic product by 2036. Yet, Trump argues that tax cuts will spur businesses and individuals to spend more and spark the economy so more money would flow into the tax coffers.

Student Loans. Trump hasn't spelled out his student loan plan as concretely as his tax plan, but in a speech he said that people with student loans shouldn't have to pay more than 12.5 percent of their income toward student loan payments. And they shouldn't have to make payments for more than 15 years.

Presumably that would mean that after 15 years  even if their loans weren't paid off  the remainder would be forgiven. That sounds a lot like Obama's current program of reducing student loan payments if the regular payments would be too high for the income a person earned. It's called income-based repayment.

Trump also says he's going to put pressure on colleges to reduce costs. Colleges get tax breaks from the government and Trump implied he could use them as a carrot or a stick. A popular study on college costs shows that many colleges could reduce prices for students if the institutions would devote more money from their endowments.

Advertisement

Obamacare. Trump, like other Republicans, has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, get rid of the requirement that everyone buy health insurance and start to build a new health insurance system. The current system, he said, has led to runaway costs, rationing care, high premiums and few choices. With about 20 million now covered by Obamacare, however, creating an alternative or getting the support needed from Congress won't be immediate or easy.

Ultimately, Trump says he will retain requirements like making insurers cover pre-existing conditions, and he plans to bring health insurance costs down by generating more competition between insurance companies.

Social Security and Medicare. Even though Trump said he wouldn't make cuts in Social Security or Medicare, he will be pressured by Republicans pushing for change. The pressure could intensify as Trump and Congress try to make tax cuts that, as mentioned earlier, come with a $6 trillion price tag.

While Trump has promised no cuts in entitlements, the position is at odds with his campaign trail comment that government needs to get rid of its $19 trillion in debt.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has suggested reducing benefits for future retirees earning $80,000 or more without Social Security. He also proposed eliminating Social Security for individuals making more than $200,000. House Speaker Paul Ryan wants to raise the retirement age and use vouchers to control Medicare costs.

gmarksjarvis@chicagotribune.com

Advertisement

twitter @gailmarksjarvis

.
The phrase "cold-pressed juice" conjures up images of early mornings, yoga pants and Fitbits. But now, you can quaff a version of that BluePrint cleanse in your evening cocktail at STK, the stylishly cavernous steakhouse in River North.

Even crazier: It tastes good.

Advertisement

The restaurant's new "adult juice boxes" (spoiler: they do not, in fact, come in little cardboard boxes a la Juicy Juice) mix cold-pressed juice with liquor. The most interesting of the bunch also has the best name: Don't Kale My Vibe ($15), a kale-cucumber-spinach-romaine juice spiked with Avion tequila. The vegetal notes mesh seamlessly with the tequila's agave tang, and a rim of Tajin (a seasoning of Mexican chilies, lime juice and sea salt) adds a nice touch of heat.

Rachel Richardson, STK events manager, says the juice boxes "appeal to anyone conscious about their health," which is pretty much all of us. The super-conscious have the option of forgoing the booze  but in our happy-hour book, that's going a little too far.

Advertisement

STK, 9 W. Kinzie St., 312-340-5636, www.stkchicago.com

David Hammond is a freelance writer.






Protest actions are scheduled for locations around the world on Tuesday as opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline aim to convince the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers not to issue a permit to allow the pipeline to be placed under the Missouri River.

More than 100 protest events are planned, with many of them slated to take place outside corps offices. The only North Dakota event currently planned is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Veterans Memorial Bridge over the Red River between Fargo and Moorhead, Minn.

Lacy Tooker-Kirkevold, a Concordia University student who is organizing the event along with the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group, said there is no corps office in the Fargo-Moorhead area, so they decided to hold an event on the bridge. It will be the second anti-Dakota Access Pipeline event theyve held there. The first drew 75 to 100 people, and Tooker-Kirkevold believes this one could draw even more.

Tooker-Kirkevold has visited the Oceti Sakowin camp with other Concordia students to volunteer and deliver supplies. She said the sense of community and spirituality there has inspired her. The event on Tuesday is a way to show that people in Fargo-Moorhead care even if they cant visit, she said.

We are still standing in solidarity with them at that time, and we still love them and support them, she said.

Pipeline opponents argue the corps OKd the pipeline, which is planned to run under the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, without adequate environmental review or input from the tribe.

The Tuesday events are part of a number of actions in solidarity with pipeline opponents who have camped out near the construction area in southern Morton County. Other activities have included asking people to take money out of banks involved in the pipeline. Organizers, who include individuals and environmental action organizations, are asked to plan protests at corps offices, if there is one in the community, or at banks, embassies or other symbolic locations.

"This is a call for all of our relatives who've been wanting to support," Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a statement. "Whether you've come to the camp, whether you haven't come to the camp. If you live near an Army Corps of Engineers office, we're asking you to step up to mobilize. We're asking you to come out in numbers and not only let the Army Corps of Engineers hear your voices, but let the Obama administration hear your voice. We need sincere action in order to stop this pipeline."
Officials escort "Serial" podcast subject Adnan Syed from the courthouse following the completion of the first day of hearings for a retrial in February. The state is opposing a request by Syed's attorneys for a bail hearing. (Karl Merton Ferron / TNS)

Lawyers for the state are arguing that "Serial" podcast subject Adnan Syed shouldn't be eligible for release on bail, saying he remains a convicted murderer with his new trial ruling on hold in the appellate courts.

Syed's attorneys last month said the appeals process could take years to resolve and that Syed has proven over the past 17 years in prison to be a good candidate for release pending a new trial.

Advertisement

But the Attorney General's Office on Monday filed a motion in opposition, claiming the defense had missed its chance to oppose a judge's order that stayed the new trial ruling and should have sought bail at that time.

Syed "remains a convicted murderer and kidnapper and continues to serve his sentence of life in prison," wrote Assistant Attorney General Charlton Howard. "Because of the stay, he is not in a pretrial posture awaiting trial nor is he cloaked in the presumption of innocence."

Advertisement

The court has yet to respond to Syed's request for a bail hearing.

Syed's lead defense attorney, C. Justin Brown, told The Sun Thursday that the defense "look[s] forward to having a bail hearing and having the opportunity to prove that Syed is neither a danger to the community nor a flight risk."

"Syed has spent 17 years in prison based on an unconstitutional conviction for a crime he did not commit. It is unconscionable that he is still in prison," Brown said in a statement.

Syed was convicted in 2000 and sentenced to life in prison for the killing of ex-girlfriend and Woodlawn High School classmate Hae Min Lee. Syed's case became the focus on the popular "Serial" podcast, helping raise questions that prompted a new hearing in his case. This summer, Baltimore Judge Martin Welch ordered a new trial.

In his request for a bail hearing, Syed's attorneys wrote that Maryland's Uniform Post-Conviction Procedure Act does allow for a circuit court judge to set bail for the defendant even while staying the order pending the appeal.

The state counters that even if given the chance, "there is no reason why Syed's bail should be different" from his original no-bail status after being charged. They say that is the "normal outcome" in bail hearings in Baltimore City for a person charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping.

Syed's attorneys, in their petition for a new bail hearing, said he has "strong personal incentive to prove his innocence" after receiving recent favorable outcomes in court. "Nothing would run more to the contrary to that desire than fleeing justice," they said.

Their petition also raised new allegations against Syed's convicted accomplice, Jay Wilds, unearthing new information about his criminal record since the trial.

Advertisement

Howard, the assistant attorney general, wrote that the defense was attempting to conduct a "mini-trial."

"Although the weight of the evidence prior to trial is not germane to bail review, Syed's conviction was then, and continues to be today, supported by overwhelming evidence of guilt," Howard wrote.

jfenton@baltsun.com
Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo, right, watches a game against the Cincinnati Reds at Wrigley Field on July 29, 2021. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

Anthony Rizzo wants to make sure a dog named for him gets drafted to a good home.

The Cubs first baseman is offering a signed jersey to anyone who adopts Anthony Rizzo the dog as part of the "Good Morning America" dog adoptathon.

Advertisement

Rizzo stopped by "GMA" Friday with the Commissioner's Trophy to discuss the Cubs' World Series victory with meteorologist Ginger Zee, who used to work in Chicago at WMAQ-Ch. 5.

Zee told Rizzo that three dogs named for Cubs players -- Rizzo, Ben Zobrist and Kris Bryant -- were up for adoption as part of the monthlong "GMA" event. Zee said the year-old American foxhound named for Rizzo had not yet been adopted.

Advertisement

"We need to get that one adopted. I guess whoever adopts that one I'll somehow reach out and I'll get them a signed jersey or something. So you get a free dog and a free jersey signed by me," Rizzo said.

The good news for Rizzo is that the person who adopted the Zobrist dog renamed the pup for Rizzo.

"The owners of Ben now renamed him Anthony Rizzo. So now there are three Anthony Rizzos," Zee said.

During the "GMA" appearance, Rizzo also discussed winning his first Gold Glove award, which was announced this week.

"That's one of the better awards I've ever won," Rizzo said.

"GMA" airs 7 a.m. daily on WLS-Ch. 7.

RELATED STORIES:

Watch country star Brett Eldredge, Anthony Rizzo sing 'Go Cubs Go'

Advertisement

Watch Conan O'Brien try to coin the nickname 'No Hit' for Ben Zobrist

'Go Cubs Go' makes debut on Billboard charts

Catcher David Ross discusses parade injury on 'Ellen': 'I got clotheslined on the bus'

Kris Bryant talks wedding plans with Jimmy Kimmel, see his registries







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)
A painting of Rekia Boyd is displayed during a gathering in her memory at Nichols Tower in Chicago on Nov. 5, 2016. Boyd was shot to death by an off-duty Chicago police detective in March 2012. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)

The top-floor party room at Nichols Tower overlooking North Lawndale was a pleasant cacophony of yellow. Yellow carnations in clear glass vases lit the staircase leading up to the balcony. Yellow balloons tied in bunches tugged at the corners of the balcony railing. Yellow cards brightened the tables.

Yellow was Rekia Boyd's favorite color, and this November Saturday would have been Boyd's 27th birthday. Instead people had gathered to celebrate her life, cut short in March 2012 by an off-duty police officer in nearby Douglas Park.

Advertisement

They were also asked, on yellow sheets of paper, to answer a question about art. A Long Walk Home, a community organization that helps young women cope with violence through artwork, wanted to know: What kind of memorial to Rekia would these people  her friends, her family members, the activists who have coalesced around her story  like to see go up in Douglas Park?

A bench honoring the life of Rekia Boyd is displayed as Boyd's brother, Martinez Sutton, speaks at a remembrance for Boyd hosted by A Long Walk Home at Nichols Tower in Chicago's Homan Square on Saturday, November 5, 2016. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)

Already there was a yellow wooden bench at the front of the room, one possibility for a memorial, painted with Rekia's likeness, almost smiling, and inlaid with a mosaic on the seat that read, "Say Her Name." Members of A Long Walk Home's Girl/Friends youth group had made the bench. Another Girl/Friend had shot photographs of the last places Rekia had visited. A close-up of a bench she sat on in Douglas Park, shortly before then-Chicago police Detective Dante Servin shot her in the head, occupied the slot on the room's piano where sheet music usually rests.

Advertisement

Above the lectern, overlooking the room, was a painting of Boyd, in full smile this time, wearing a red top and surrounded by autumn leaves and still more yellow balloons.

Using art and using visuals can help people tap into things that are hard to express verbally.  Marline Johnson, the program coordinator for Girl/Friends Leadership Institute

This was an event dedicated, in part, to the proposition that art can be effective in addressing violence and that, regardless of its impact in the greater world, sometimes it is important to just make the work and see what can happen. "Using art and using visuals can help people tap into things that are hard to express verbally," said Marline Johnson, the program coordinator for Girl/Friends Leadership Institute.

What artists should be doing is a question that has gained urgency as the city has struggled, and failed, to control a gun violence epidemic, one that has seen the death toll climb to levels not seen since the 1990s. Against human suffering and systemic failure, a protest sculpture, say, of a giant handgun can seem ineffectual, but it also can seem wholly necessary.

"Our model has shifted in the last year from not only including gender-based violence but also state violence and gun violence," said Johnson, herself an artist who, in the spring, will be the School of the Art Institute's next artist-in-residence in Nichols Tower. "We understand that sometimes these things are not mutually exclusive."

Chicago visual artists from the well-known to the little-known have been grappling with the issue of violence.

In spring, before his major retrospective "Mastry" went up at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I visited Kerry James Marshall in his Bronzeville studio. Marshall's project has been to bring the black figure into the art museum, and it's been a wildly successful one: After its Chicago run and before a visit to Los Angeles, the show is currently winning raves at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall in his Bronzeville studio in Chicago on Wednesday, April 6, 2016. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

Much of what Marshall has painted depicts an ordinariness: a couple out at a club, the bustling scene at a barbershop, moments that rarely make it into media depictions of African-American life. But in his studio he also had an image of a haunting, hot-off-the-news painting he had recently completed  and sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, incidentally. It showed an African-American Chicago cop, in shirtsleeves, vest, cap and badge, sitting on the hood of a patrol car on a blue-gray night, staring off into the middle ground.

"In all these conversations about police brutality, there are black policemen on these forces as well," Marshall said. "One always has to take into account: What are they thinking? That picture: A black police officer who simply thinks. He simply thinks, and one of the things he could be thinking about is just his condition as a police officer.

Advertisement

"When he is just there in a moment of contemplation, sitting on the hood of his car, what is the meaning of this man as a black police officer?"

Marshall sees an "unbroken string," he said, between artist Michael Stewart being killed by police, when Marshall was in New York in 1983, for tagging a subway wall with graffiti and Michael Brown lying in the street in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

And what the artist can do, Marshall said, is "doing by doing. You have to demonstrate a thing, not talk about it. I don't talk about the need for there to be a variety of different kinds of images with black people in them. I make a variety of different kinds of images with black people in them. Part of this whole notion of mastery that this show is organized around is, you have to take control of it. Know how the tools work and deploy them to your own self-interest  in a way that you can't be stopped by anybody. This is not negotiable."

Garland Martin Taylor is another African-American Chicago artist working out his own response to the violence around him in the city. He'll be part of a show opening Nov. 18 at the Bridgeport Art Center Gallery, "Inspired by Social Issues: Male Artists of Color Reflect on Today's Urban Experience." One of his works in that show is "Conversation Piece," a giant handgun sculpture he made out of parts he had around his studio.

Working in 2011 at the DuSable Museum of African American History, Taylor encountered  and continues to study  the pioneering late-19th-century black political cartoonist Henry Jackson Lewis. "His work inspired me to make more socio-politically directed work," Taylor said. "At the time, I'm an abstract painter. I'm only about the figure and abstraction, which is feeling kind of shallow to me."

He won a fellowship at the University of Chicago that exposed him to data about gun death in Chicago, which was largely African-American death. "This is a challenge to me," Taylor said by phone from Arkansas, where he is on a fellowship at Crystal Bridges Museum, researching the life of Lewis. "I usually start from feeling first, not from data. My co-collaborators are pushing me to think first, make later."

Advertisement

And what he thinks is "I wanted to make a three-dimensional political cartoon," both to honor Lewis and to address the gun violence issue. He came up with the notion of a giant handgun that he would adorn with the names of those under 20 who had been killed in and around Hyde Park, where he lives.

Making the gun was the easy part. Putting on the names proved much tougher. "It was during the stamping of the names that I, you know, drank too much to numb myself," he said.

And then, in the summer of 2015, he put the work in the back of a pickup truck to make it more like a political cartoon. "The reason I drove it around the country was to kind of mimic the circulation of a newspaper," he said.

He was stopped by Secret Service agents near the White House, and he showed them that the thing was, in fact, more cartoon than armament. He was called a "badass sculptor" by a guy at a stoplight who gave him a thumbs-up and revealed a swastika tattoo on his forearm.

In the end, he's not sure how successful the work has been. He worries that it's too little about the names on it. "It was too much about gun-ness. Gun-ness took over the issue of black death," Taylor said.

But there were successes, too: Watching kids in Chicago react to the names on the piece, when Taylor parked the work at Spike Lee's block party for the film "Chi-Raq."

Advertisement

He did it, he said, "for the same reason Lewis depicted a lynching in 1889. It's not to glorify it. It's to say, Look, we have a problem here. ... I don't know how an artist could know what I know and not respond."

This summer he was asked to contribute to a group show, "This Heat," about gun violence in Chicago at the Weinberg/Newton Gallery, which devotes itself to work with a social justice theme. What the gallery has learned, said director Kasia Houlihan, is that the work is important, but so is the programming, the artists' talks and the school visits, organized around it.

"A lot of times the artwork is really there to pose questions," she said, "and then the program can ... get into the nitty-gritty of the issues."

Taylor's work in the show included bullet casings suspended in the air with his own hair affixed to each, "a metaphor of black death," he said. He describes the materials in the in stallion, "Pflight," as "Colored hair, jungle cock feathers, spent Saturday night special casings suspended from guitar string ligatures."

It was an effective presentation, said gallery owner David Weinberg: "When you walked into the gallery you had to walk among the bullets. You had this feeling that bullets were flying at and by you."

Krista Wortendyke contributed to that same show with her piece called "Killing Season Chicago," photographs of the 172 spots where Chicagoans were killed in the summer of 2010. She arranged the photos in a bar graph format, and the piece has lived on for years now. From its showing this summer it's even become the basis, this year, for an interdisciplinary art, math and English project undertaken by the freshman class at a city high school, Clemente Community Academy.

Advertisement

"Going to the art gallery and seeing Krista's piece was huge for the kids," said English teacher Wendy Baxter. "They have friends and relatives who are killed on the regular, but then going in and seeing this huge art piece Krista created was something that was, I think, emotionally overwhelming for them."

So the students this year will be continuing "Killing Season," making their own artistic responses and memorials to Chicagoans killed in the summer of 2016. "It was a great opportunity to bring something that is happening in the students' lives today into the classroom," said math teacher Randy Noonan, who is using crime statistics in his classes.

The teachers hope that what the students create will be able to live on as its own, collective work of art. And the original artist couldn't be more proud.

"I always say my role as an artist is to try to investigate things I don't understand," said Wortendyke, a 37-year-old New York native who works primarily in photography. "It was in April of 2010. A man a couple of blocks away from me killed his two sons and himself. I thought I would be able to know where it had happened. I walked and walked and never found anything. This violent thing just like disappeared.

"From that I had this obsession with understanding that people are getting killed all the time, and it just disappears."

She thought she'd be walking into war zones. "Totally stupid," she said. "I thought when I started this project I'd have to wear a bulletproof vest  that I'm going to walk into this place and everyone's going to be shooting."

Advertisement

For me the real problem with the violence in Chicago is that nobody wants to take responsibility for it. It's not my problem. It's not my block. It's not my race...  Krista Wortendyke, artist

Instead, what she learned, what the work showed, is both the amount of violence and how ordinary it looked. The photos stacked up on her chart, but the places themselves were common.

"For me the real problem with the violence in Chicago is that nobody wants to take responsibility for it. It's not my problem. It's not my block. It's not my race. Any excuse to box the problem off and put it onto someone else. I'm trying to disrupt that and say, 'You actually have to acknowledge and think about this.'

"Before I did this, I felt that art was just so separate. It's this thing artists make. It speaks its own language. Now I feel that art is a really, really powerful tool to make people think about things in ways they wouldn't have thought about them before  without yelling at them."

sajohnson@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @StevenKJohnson

MORE FROM THIS SERIES:

Advertisement

If art can't fix problems, what good is it?

'Spike Lee and 'Chi-Raq' took on violence and flopped. What now?

Music cringes at Chicago's carnage, searches for answers
Remember "Chi-Raq"? Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" was supposed to be the movie that summed it all up, that took on Chicago's homicide epidemic.

It opened a little more than a year ago, and nobody went. It made a paltry $2.6 million in theaters before heading into the online streaming river. Instead of a searing, damning indictment of Chicago gun violence and gang warfare, here was this peculiar entity  a brightly colored, satiric novelty, with everyone speaking in rhyming couplets.

Advertisement

"Kind of a horrible movie" is how Chicago filmmaker Lonnie Edwards put it to me the other day.

Scene from Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq." (Handout)

"I'm a huge fan of Spike Lee and I love most of his work," said Edwards, who now lives in the Avondale neighborhood. "But I didn't expect 'Chi-Raq' to be what it turned out to be. And I didn't agree with the use of the title, which is connected to so many negative things that linger in this city. A lot of the killing now is so random, so connected to a lack of community cohesiveness and a lack of belief in yourself. The morale is so low, and the anger inside these people is so high. It's crazy."

Advertisement

One year after "Chi-Raq" screenwriter Kevin Willmott, who teaches film and media studies at the University of Kansas, told me the script was "always about gun violence in general. When we relocated the story to Chicago, we really wanted to link up with the specifics of the problems there. That's when the Father Pfleger character came into the script."

At the same time, Willmott said, it wasn't supposed to be documentary. He doubts it's even possible to make "a dead-serious movie about gang violence without romanticizing the violence. The attraction of violence in film is so strong, and young men, especially, are prone to enjoying it. Half the drug dealers who get busted have the same 'Scarface' poster on their wall."

"Chi-Raq" may have disoriented moviegoers expecting rough-hewn realism. But educator, video essayist and filmmaker Kevin B. Lee, who teaches documentary filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says the genre's parameters have shifted, both here and around the world. Lee said he talked at length with his students about the long-delayed release of the dashcam video chronicling the fatal 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. That video, Lee said, made it vividly clear "how much of a role moving images have to play in our lives."

Similarly, the wrenching aftermath of the fatal 2016 Falcon Heights, Minn., police shooting of Philando Castile, captured on cellphone camera by Castile's fiancee, Diamond Reynolds, proved to Lee that "Reynolds was a more influential filmmaker than Michael Moore."

Chicago is fertile territory for the expansion of documentary parameters. "This city," he said, "holds all sorts of potential for filmmakers. There's something radical going on now, with so many people showing us what's unfolding in their world, in real time. Now it's time for filmmakers to find ways to break through the boundaries the city seems to naturally construct for itself. But it involves leaving your comfort zone."

Not easy, when so many streets are so mean these days. It all goes back to the Capone image, historian and "Third Coast" author Thomas Dyla told me. "Maybe," he said, "the one bright spot (in the city's gun violence statistics) is that we'll finally lose the wink-wink, all-in-good-fun attitude toward violence  the mob and gangster glorification. That's always driven me crazy."

Edwards recently completed work on an experimental short film titled "Chavon Smith and the Atramentous Mind," about a young black woman's tense, accidental encounter with a white police officer. "I try to show both sides of the story," he told me. "I want people to take away a different perspective they might not have had, and to have a desire to look into something more. It's our duty as humans: to leave this world, this city, a better place."

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Advertisement

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune

MORE FROM THIS SERIES:

Scarface, Tommy guns and Chicago's gangster mystique in film

If art can't fix problems, what good is it?

From young women to famed painters, art deals with pain
Cayenne Harris, director of Lyric Unlimited at the Lyric Opera, said the upcoming collaboration with the Chicago Urban League on an original music theater work will likely address the challenges of growing up in Chicago. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

Through a variety of programs and services over the past 100 years, the Chicago Urban League has been advising and mentoring young African-Americans and local communities struggling on a daily basis with gun violence and a host of other social issues and obstacles.

Who knew that one of the Chicago institutions ready and willing to partner in that effort is now Lyric Opera of Chicago?

Advertisement

The company's education and community outreach division, Lyric Unlimited, is joining with the Urban League next year to produce an original music theater work based on the gun violence epidemic and other concerns that impact the lives of youths growing up in inner city neighborhoods.

Under the guidance of Lyric Opera artists and administration, some 30 youths selected by the Urban League from multiple Chicago communities are to meet regularly after school to brainstorm reality-based ideas that will generate scripts, songs, lyrics and choreography for the show.

Advertisement

The fact that the Urban League, whose centenary celebration began in July, focuses its efforts on helping Chicago youth stay in school and cope with economic, social and behavioral challenges makes the organization a fitting partner for Lyric in this initiative, which is set to launch in spring and culminate in a public performance at the Civic Opera House at the end of the 2017-18 season.

The multidisciplinary arts project reflects many of the objectives of the Urban League's Urban Youth Connection, a mentoring, violence-prevention program that addresses delinquent behaviors leading to violence and crime among high-risk African-American males ages 13-24.

The big difference, according to Shari Runner, the league's president and CEO, is that the youths performing and producing the music theater work under Lyric auspices will be telling their own stories about the various challenges and obstacles that confront them in their often perilous journey to adulthood  issues most of us know about only through sketchy secondhand news reports.

"We have a number of students in our program who are interested in performance art of all kinds," Runner said. "When Lyric extended this opportunity to us, we thought, 'What better way could there be to broaden these kids' minds and experience, to expose them to something they may not ever have a chance to do, to allow them to express themselves in ways they would not get in the schools, or otherwise?'

The amazing thing about this is that the youth are going to guide what the stories will be about. It will be up to them to decide what it is they want to talk about.  Shari Runner, the league's president and CEO

"Because Chicago remains so racially segregated, oftentimes we forget that because one side, or one part, of the city is ailing, that nobody has to really think about that. This project in particular will bring all parts of the city together."

All of the supervisory skills will be coming from the Lyric Unlimited staff, with no more than one or two Urban League staff members involved in the program, she pointed out.

"The amazing thing about this is that the youth are going to guide what the stories will be about. It will be up to them to decide what it is they want to talk about, what they think is important. It could be gun violence. It could be incarceration. It could even be relationships with parents, or just issues adolescents face growing up. That's the beauty of it  we don't know."

The goal is not to create an original work for the ages so much as a music theater piece that speaks to the gritty dangers, particularly for young residents, of daily life in some of Chicago's most fraught neighborhoods, said Cayenne Harris, director of Lyric Unlimited, which initiated the project.

Advertisement

"We want to create art about the challenges the youth in our city are dealing with directly, art that enables them to share their perspectives on issues we read about every day in the news," she said. Those issues are expected to include police misconduct, mass incarceration and other matters in addition to gun violence, along with "the trauma that results from those things," she added.

Not all of the participating youths will be performing  some will be designing and building sets, designing costumes and lighting, and so forth, Harris said. Plans are for Lyric to engage a professional composer to work with the younger contributors and help shape their musical contributions to the finished piece.

Presenting the finished artistic product at the Civic Opera House would shine "as big a spotlight on it as possible," she added.

The conceptually related Chicago Voices project, spearheaded by Lyric's creative consultant, soprano Renee Fleming, will conclude with a concert in February at the Opera House.

Runner was among the community leaders who reacted critically to Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Sept. 22 speech at Malcolm X College in which he introduced a multipronged solution to the city's gun violence problem.

"There was a lack of emphasis on education," the Urban League director told the Chicago Sun-Times, "which is concerning, because that's the pipeline to the future."

Advertisement

Fortunately, education promises to be a major takeaway from the new Lyric Unlimited/Urban League initiative, for participants and audience members alike.

"We are hoping this project will be a moment for people in Chicago to come together and support the young people of this city as they perform and relate their experiences," Harris said.

John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.

jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @jvonrhein

MORE FROM THIS SERIES:

Advertisement

RELATED STORIES:

If art can't fix problems, what good is it?

Chicago jazz artists address violence head-on

Music cringes at Chicago's carnage, searches for answers
Malcolm London, poet and rapper, discusses the beauty of Chicago's Austin neighborhood, where he grew up, and how inspiration still thrives dispite violence around it. (Roger Morales / Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune)

The pen is not mightier than the sword.

And it is certainly no match for the .40-caliber Glock, .38 special Ruger, 9 mm Smith & Wesson or any of the other contemporary instruments that bring daily death and lingering misery to the streets of Chicago and beyond.

Advertisement

But there is hope and that hope does come in words, some of them inspired by violence and many of them coming from the front lines of the war that is ravaging a generation of our children in parts of the city few of you reading this know, except as snippets and statistics in the papers or on the evening news.

On Sept. 24, 2009, in the Roseland neighborhood on the city's Far South Side, the savage beating death of 16-year-old Fenger Academy student Derrion Albert near the high school is what compelled writer/teacher Miles Harvey to action.

Advertisement

"I began to realize that Derrion Albert's death had left an indelible mark on my psyche," Harvey writes in the introduction to a remarkable and important 2013 book titled "How Long Will I Cry? Voices of Youth Violence."

An assistant professor of creative writing at DePaul University and the author of one of the best books ever by a Chicagoan, the 2000 nonfiction "Island of Lost Maps," Harvey sent dozens of his students into Chicago's most careworn neighborhoods to find people who would talk about their lives and the deaths that have cast long shadows.

The results form a profound, chilling, philosophical and fatalistic oral history. They first wound up on stage at Steppenwolf Theatre in a production that my colleague Chris Jones called a "measured piece of theater (that) is ... raising awareness, as it should. There is a lot to learn from this sincere, earnest piece."

The book was more expansive and detailed, filled with people remarkable in their candor. They include a gangbanger and a nurse, a cop and a funeral home manager, and a lot of kids. In the book you will find:

"God sees everything. The detectives are on the case. I will be getting a phone call one day. I will be going to court like all the other parents who have lost their children to gun violence."

"I didn't have a lot of examples of my own. All the dads in my family are either dead, in jail or hang with gangs."

"That's my biggest fear  to lose another child. If I lose another child, I probably will lose my mind."

Harvey is the book's editor and the author of its introduction. Alex Kotlowitz, author of many books, including the remarkable story of two boys growing up in Chicago public housing, 1992's "There Are No Children Here," wrote its foreword. In it he observes that, "(Some Chicago) neighborhoods are so physically and spiritually isolated from the rest of us that we might as well be living in different cities."

Advertisement

Sitting in a tavern last week, Harvey was pleased to say that the book is now in its fifth printing and that there are some 30,000 copies "including orders from 50 states and 16 countries, spanning five continents. And those numbers don't include all the digital versions that have been downloaded."

The book was the first from DePaul's Big Shoulders Books, which aims to publish one book a year "that engages intimately with the Chicago community," according to a university statement. It includes a list of resources and a study guide. Also, paperback copies are available free to those willing to spread the word.

"This is an example of the power of storytelling," says Harvey. "One of the amazing things is that it is reaching nontraditional readers. There has been a tremendous ripple effect. I recently had dinner with a guy from Newtown, Conn., who uses the book as part of an anti-violence effort he began after the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings. And it is reaching kids in classrooms across the city and country and in it they are hearing their own voices."

This type of outreach is a powerful if relatively new literary tool. Chicago history is filled with millions of words that have tried to tackle our burg's inherent violence, as far back as the bloody massacre at Fort Dearborn. But how far are words on a page able to take us?

Shawn Shiflett has taught creative writing at Columbia College for three decades and he says, "Some writers are drawn to violent material because they are trying to come to terms with personal issues caused by past traumatic experiences in their lives. That's certainly true of me and it is also true of more than a few students who during any given semester tackle themes such as rape, street gang shootings and physical abuse. As a psychologist friend of mine once explained to me, an activity that is therapeutic, without being an official therapy, is the best kind of therapy there is."

His recently published novel "Hey Liberal!" is a triumph set in the late 1960s in Chicago and is the story of a white teenager named Simon who is attending a predominantly African-American high school in the wake of the riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Advertisement

"That young man finds himself right next to an extreme act of violence," says Shiflett. "The reader cannot only see, but also feel blood showering 'down over him like millions of hot tingling freckles.' Later in the novel, another vicious incident 'flushed the air out of the alley and flushed the strength of Simon.' If I have been able to make readers share Simon's internal reactions, including his stages of grief later on, don't readers walk away with a better understanding of how violence negatively impacts themselves and the world around them?"

Yes, they do, and understanding is a key.

Kevin Coval listens in during a performance at Wordplay, a youth open mic at Young Chicago Authors, 1180 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago, on Tuesday, September 30, 2014. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)

Kevin Coval is a teacher, activist and poet. As the longtime artistic director of Young Chicago Authors and founder of the annual Louder Than A Bomb youth poetry festival, he has probably heard and read as many words about the city's woes as anyone has.

The author of a number of poetry collections, he has a new one set to be published in March. It is titled, in a bow to the work of the late historian-activist Howard ("A People's History of the United States") Zinn, "a people's history of chicago."

Many of its 77 poems deal with violence and its causes, none more powerfully than "82 shot, 14 murdered: the two cities celebrate independence day, July 4-7, 2014," which ends with:

small armies overrun the streets.

Advertisement

free and aimless, makeshift orchestras

of whistles, bottles, bombs. the war

of each day, reenacted every night

"We must bring attention to the causes of the violence, the inequities in many of our communities," says Coval. "Literature can lead to radical empathy."

Malcolm London is a YCA poet and activist, teacher and a child of the Austin neighborhood. He told me, "Every day I walk home from the bus stop and I see defiled vacant lots, buildings boarded up and decaying. And I see men and women who are decaying too. There are a lot of kids like me in places like this, places kind of pushed into the shadows by the people who run this city. We have stories to tell, stories not told in the news and media. I am getting the chance to tell mine, and others can too."

That is where literature may have its most profound impact, in the telling of stories and poems that make the war on our streets more palpable and real and detail the reasons for it.

Advertisement

"Malcolm London is that rare and important breed of poet-activist who can engage in a civic conversation via his art," says Coval. "We must bring attention to the communities where the violence is taking place, where people are living and dying away from the attention of the mainstream media. In that way the words, the literature can enlighten, affect change."

Ken Bennett was Mayor Rahm Emanuel's deputy chief of staff and director of the Mayor's Office of Public Engagement and is now a senior adviser for the tourism group Choose Chicago. His two sons who have been through the YCA/LTAB programs. The eldest is Chancellor, known professionally as Chance the Rapper, a star on the hip-hop scene and the author of the introduction to Coval's new collection.

Bennett told me: "Both of the boys were involved in high school, and I immediately, on a very personal level, saw the impact.  But it is important to remember that this is not only about what goes on the stage at (LTAB). What goes on behind it  the instilling of a strong work ethic, the freedom of self-expression, the exposure to the arts  this sort of thing is needed in every city in this country. These young people have a message that needs to get out there."

He is right. It is the spreading of the words that matter more than the way they read on the page of a book or the screen of an iPad. Every Tuesday night dozens of teens of all colors and backgrounds gathered at the YCA headquarters on North Milwaukee Avenue for WordPlay, the longest-running open-mic event in the city.

A parade of kids take the stage with their words. Some are rough, some playful, but all of them are part of a larger message. Most of these words will never be gathered in books, but they will echo and as these young people read and share, you know that at the end of the evening they will all be going home in some of the harshest parts of the city. But there, in schools and community gatherings, they will act as ambassadors of peace and understanding, as satellites of sanity and hope in a city that often seems to have gone mad  their only weapons words.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

Advertisement

Twitter @rickkogan

MORE FROM THIS SERIES:



If art can't fix problems, what good is it?

'Spike Lee and 'Chi-Raq' took on violence and flopped. What now?

Music cringes at Chicago's carnage, searches for answers
Seeing Utahs electoral votes go to the Republican candidate on election day in any other year, Logan Sisam would have gone to bed and felt pretty good about that fact.

Utah knew exactly what it was and he knew what he was: a Republican Mormon living in a conservative state.

Donald Trump upended all of that for him.

The Republican Party is a burning house, Sisam said. When [vice presidential nominee] Mike Pence came and told us to come home, I thought, I cant come home to a house thats on fire.

So the 37-year-old cast his ballot for Evan McMullin, the Utah native who was supposed to offer Mormons like Sisam a viable alternative to Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Mormons were disillusioned with Trump, Quin Monson, a political scientist at Brigham Young University, said, because he had made derogatory comments toward Muslims, used crude language and was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.

But McMullin, the former CIA operative and chief policy director of the House Republican Conference, simply ended up being a protest vote in Utah. Trump held 46.8% of the vote as of Wednesday. McMullin trailed Clinton by more than 7 percentage points with 20.4% of the vote.

I think some McMullin voters who really didnt like Trump ended up going back to him because their distaste for Clinton was so strong, Monson said. And when the race tightened nationally, they decided it was better to vote for Trump and not risk putting Clinton in a position to win.

Trump underperformed too, Monson said: A Republican running in a successful campaign in Utah should be winning with more than 60% of the vote.

In 2012, Mitt Romney won the state with 72%. In 2008, John McCain picked up 62% of the vote. Its remarkable that Trump was below 50%, Monson said.

But its a footnote in history, he added. Trump won the state and McMullin ended up being of no consequence other than exposing a rift among Republicans in the state.

The rift was first exposed when Romney urged voters to ditch Trump. He blasted Trump for his Access Hollywood tapes and avoided Trumps nomination in Cleveland. Monson said Romneys influence in the state contributed to the sub-50% vote total.

Greg Hughes, a Trump supporter and the states speaker of the House, said Romneys stance was tough for him to square with the man he actively backed in 2012.

It made it immediately harder for me, Hughes said. You have to go with your gut and do what you think is right, but I'd be lying if I told you it didnt make it harder. Romney is held in such high regard and he showed such vim and vigor going against Trump  much more than he did going against Barack Obama.

But Romney seemed to be open to Trumps presidency Wednesday.

Best wishes for our duly elected president, Romney tweeted. May his victory speech be his guide and preserving the Republic his aim.

Not everyone was ready to get comfortable with Trump.

Karen McCabe, a longtime Republican, stood with her daughter at the McMullin headquarters in Salt Lake City on Tuesday night after Trump had won. She worried about the nominees temperament.

It hasn't quite sunk in that he won, McCabe said. Trump is still scary to me.

She said she hoped McMullin would run for another statewide office or make another presidential bid in 2020.

Sisam, who posed for a selfie with his 10-year-old son in front of the dais where McMullin had addressed the supporters just moments before, said he thought McMullins calling was to start another party.

The Republican Party is Donald Trumps party, not my Republican Party, he said. I believe there is a need to return to our roots as a conservative party and I believe God will have a hand in this.
"The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog" by Adam Gidwitz, Dutton, $17.99, ages 10 and up.

It's 1242 and all of France is in an uproar over the deeds of three unlikely miracle workers: an impoverished peasant girl prone to eye-rolling "fits," a Jewish boy fleeing a vicious attack on his village and a young monk whose dark skin, uncertain parentage and towering height mark him as an outsider.

Advertisement

The girl, Jeanne, is said to be able to see into the future. The Jewish boy, Jacob, may or may not have broad healing powers. And William, the young giant? Let's just say that in his hands, even a donkey is said to serve as an effective weapon against murderous pink-eyed demons. How these three brave children and their remarkable greyhound have become the targets of the mighty king of France is a tale told, in turn, by visitors at a packed tavern, each of whom has witnessed an aspect of the strange goings-on.

(Chicago Tribune)

Gidwitz plunges us into a time and place intensely different from our own, where cows and peasants sleep in the same place, monsters lurk in the woods and kings have awesome, unchecked power. The children are like no children we've ever met before: so dignified, so self-sufficient, so, well, medieval. And yet, they are funny, intensely real and believably brave. Will they battle the king's armies? And, if they do, how will that go for them? It would be bad form to tell, but I will say that Gidwitz and illustrator Hatem Aly breathe life into a tale that you won't soon forget.

Advertisement

"The Very Fluffy Kitty, Papillon" by A.N. Kang, Disney Hyperion, $16.99, ages 3 to 5.

I know, I know. "Fluffy cat picture book" isn't exactly a new concept. But this one is fresh and weird and wonderful. First-time author A.N. Kang, who grew up in small-town South Korea and "now lives and works in New Jersey with her sassy cat, Papillon," tells us a (presumably) fictionalized tale of a cat named Papillon who is "so fluffy he floats!" As in, floats through the sky, a delectable black-and-white puffball in a colorized world. His owner, Miss Tilly, discovers that he can be weighted down. At first she simply straps a shrimp to his back, so he looks like a plump feline sushi. Then she gets fancy: a crown, a beret, a shark costume. Papillon goes along with this nonsense  until he doesn't. He floats through Miss Tilly's home, dancing, singing, trying out some synchronized swim moves. And then he floats out an open window and into the forest.

(Chicago Tribune)

A rotund troublemaker with undersized limbs and a dark tail, Papillon is a little bit Pokemon, a little bit owl, a little bit seal, and yet somehow all cat. He's marvelous enough to make you yearn for a sequel, which is a good thing, since "The Very Fluffy Kitty" is being promoted as "Book One" in a series. And yet there's a part of me that wishes that Papillon would quit while he is (so far) ahead. You can tell that the author has a story that she really needs to tell here, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and good parts that had to be edited out to make way for the great ones. That's rarely the case with sequels.

"Goodnight Everyone" by Chris Haughton, Candlewick, $15.99, ages 2-5.

A bright fireball of a sun is setting against a sky of layered blues, painting the trees plum and fuchsia, and throwing the collage-style animals on the forest floor into bold relief: the upright ears of the bunnies outlined against orange underbrush, the round ears of the mice popping against patches of olive and chartreuse.

(Chicago Tribune)

Everyone is ready to sleep: the droopy-eyed mousies, the sleeping-on-their-feet hares, the doe and her fawn, the burly mama bear. But one pair of eyes, half-hidden behind grape-colored foliage, remains wide open. Little Bear isn't sleepy at all, he tells his mom, before he sets off to find someone to play with him. Unfortunately, as the opening panel suggests, his friends are all well on the way to la-la land.

The story isn't the strong point here, but the text is pleasant and highly readable and the illustrations are eye-popping. How does Haughton make us see dusk in hot pink and acid green? How does he make us believe in a night sky with purple stars and a cotton-candy moon? Against these stunning backdrops his black-and-blue animals, at once satisfyingly bulky and marvelously expressive, tell a story as old as night. The conclusion is never in doubt, but the journey is full of magic.
In response to a column about Kio Starks new book, When Strangers Meet, readers share what they gain from talking to people they dont know. (Grady Coppell / Photographer's Choice)

Who's in the mood for a little unity?

Last week I wrote a column about the power of talking to strangers, inspired in part by author Kio Stark's new book, "When Strangers Meet: How People You Don't Know Can Transform You" (Simon & Schuster), and in part by Georgetown University student Oneil Batchelor, who made a point to get to know the workers who toil anonymously on campus.

Advertisement

Many of you wrote to me about talking to folks you don't know and how those conversations enrich your life. Here are a few of your notes, edited for length and clarity.

I'm 65, and as far back as I can recall, I've talked to strangers. Waiting in lines, on trains, in doctors' offices, anywhere. In one case, at a concert to see a renowned roots musician, I even lent my glasses to an older gentleman sitting next to me. We became friends, and he invited me to a song circle he belonged to. I've returned whenever I get the chance. Not everyone, of course, is going to open up and share whatever you may wish to share, but in all that time of talking to strangers, I can't remember one time when I was rebuked.

Advertisement

 Chas Zehner

Thank you for your reminder of how important it is to connect with strangers. I live in a small community in Mexico during the winter. Since I speak very little Spanish, I don't know a lot of details about the guards, restaurant workers and maintenance personnel. I am going to suggest that each week we find out more about the workers and their families and post it to our community Facebook page. I would like to know more about how I can help their families, especially their children. The story about the Georgetown University student really resonated with me  as it did with you.

 Anne Durst

I'm starting a New Year's resolution right now. My new goal is to say something nice to someone I don't know at least once every day.

Reading about Oneil Batchelor reminded me of "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich. The author worked as a hotel maid, waitress, house cleaner and other low-wage jobs and tried to live on her earnings.

While I always knew it was hard to survive on a minimum-wage job (I volunteer at the food pantry every Wednesday, so I get to meet a lot of people who are trying to do just that), this book was an eye-opener. It should be required reading in every high school, so our future leaders will have a better understanding of those who are struggling to support their families, and for every politician who thinks we don't need to raise the minimum wage.

After reading this book, I have tried to go out of my way to acknowledge people who do some of those invisible jobs. Every time I stop to talk to these workers, they all are so appreciative of someone recognizing their work. It's such a small thing on my part. My hope is that it makes their day a little brighter.

 Susan Vroman

Advertisement

I showed my wife your article on talking to strangers, in defense of my habit of doing that. I fall short of Stark's more affirmative model, but I often talk to dog owners or parents of little kids. Both seem to enjoy the interaction, and what mom does not like to hear that her kid is cute? A few seconds can make someone happy, at least briefly, and that in turn makes you feel good.

A couple of minutes spent talking with your waiter or waitress often opens up interesting conversational doors. That experience with our waiter (recently) led to a great description of the beer he recommended and why its flavors would match the meal I had ordered, and then to what he was doing to advance his career  he was taking the sommelier tests, apparently a very difficult process. It personalized the experience for both sides.

 Mike Rathsack

That is exactly one of the nice things happening since we moved into the Chicago area from the suburbs. We stayed in a friend's place in Old Town during the summer while our place got rehabbed. Immediately people on the sidewalk would greet me as I walked around.

It began the moment we parked our car to unload our suitcases. A gentleman of about 35-40 walked over to us and said, "Let me help," while he lifted a box out of the car trunk. That was a wonderful introduction to the neighborhood. Another encounter: While I was walking home from the grocery store carrying two bags, "Let me carry that for you," from a 40ish guy who picked up one of the bags from my hand and proceeded to walk me all the way to our friend's place, talking about how he has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years. Walking in the Lincoln Park area people would remark on the scenery, weather, wonderful city, the color of my shirt, hair style, all to engage in conversation. This was totally new to me.

I found I started to do the same, "Oh what a cute dog!" "What beautiful children you have!" "Can you believe this weather?" When we moved into our condo, the remarks continued on the street and in the elevator. Every day brings an interesting encounter.

Advertisement

 Barbara Haley

As an octogenarian and lifelong Chicagoan, I have always tried to do what your column so aptly suggested. Now that I live in the Loop, there are so many people looking at maps and pointing, totally unaware of where they are. When I approach them and ask if I can be of help, they are so grateful, thanking me profusely. They go on to praise our wonderful city and tell me what a wonderful time they are having. Even if they don't speak English, I can, most of the time, understand where they are going and be of help, which leads to more conversation.

Since being widowed over a year ago, I find these interactions most helpful  for them as well as for me. One comes to realize that the world is a beautiful place, and people are people no matter where they are from.

 Erna Pilchen

I've been embarrassing my children by talking to strangers for years. And as they've grown, I hope they've grown to believe there's a method to my madness. I totally agree that it builds empathy and reduces pessimism.

Standing in line at the grocery store. People either picking up magazines to read, looking at their phones or staring down at their carts of food. It feels cold, stiff, mundane. Why not compliment the woman in front of you on her outfit? Suddenly her face lights up, and she smiles and says, 'Thank you!' Why not just make someone's day?

Advertisement

If something odd or funny is happening that's worth commenting on, why hold it in when you can share it with the person in front of or behind you? Suddenly you have a connection and something to nod in agreement about!

I've had countless fun moments created by talking to strangers. I'll never stop doing it. It creates unity, softens edges, brightens days and connects me to others.

 Donna Granback

hstevens@tribpub.com

Twitter @heidistevens13

RELATED STORIES:

Advertisement

Soothing kids' fears about a Donald Trump presidency

Harvard womens soccer players response to sexist scouting report is perfection






Nobody expected that Illinois politicos would be at the front of the line for jobs in President-elect Donald Trump's administration.

But when even his top fundraiser in the state, businessman Ron Gidwitz, says it, you know the lines of communication between Chicago and the White House are likely to be slim.

Advertisement

"We've got a lot of very qualified people, and I think it's a little early to say," said Gidwitz, 71. "But we were not on the top-producing team."

It was no surprise that the state went heavily for Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's election. Given that and the fact he was disavowed by U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk and steadfastly ignored by Gov. Bruce Rauner, not a single Illinoisan is on Trump's transition team, which will be led by vice-president elect Mike Pence.

Advertisement

Gidwitz said he's yet to speak with Trump since the election and that he doesn't expect Trump to visit Chicago before the inauguration.

"Why would he?," he asked, adding that the City Council has done itself no favors by stripping Trump of his honorary plaza when "the city has serious budget and crime problems it should be dealing with."

Illinois Republican Party chairman and Cook County Commissioner Tim Schneider agreed that the state's vote on Tuesday likely didn't help Illinois Republicans' cause but said he expected that "President-elect Trump will pick the best people for the job, regardless of where they come from."

Like Gidwitz, he declined to name any potential Illinois candidates for cabinet posts in Trump's administration, though he said the state had a "deep bench" of talent.

kjanssen@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @kimjnews
James and Rochelle Anderson try out the new 35th Street pedestrian and bike bridge over Lake Shore Drive and the Metra tracks in Chicago on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

Sometimes, a bridge is more than just a way to get from Point A to Point B. It can be a landmark or form a gateway. It can elevate the quality of life, and maybe even property values, in neighborhoods that for decades were saddled with inferior infrastructure because they were poor and black.

Such is the case with Chicago's just-opened pedestrian bridge over South Lake Shore Drive and Metra commuter rail tracks at 35th Street.

Advertisement

The $26 million span, which connects the mid-South Side's Bronzeville with the lakefront's Burnham Park, is a unique "S"-shaped suspension bridge  smaller, curvier and less majestic than San Francisco's famous Golden Gate Bridge, but still a compelling synthesis of engineering and aesthetics. In this bridge, structure is celebrated, not costumed in historical decorations. Judging by the comments I heard Thursday  a day after Mayor Rahm Emanuel, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and other officials cut the ribbon  the design opens skyline views and a sense of possibility.

"Beautiful," Emeka Anyanwu, 27, a resident at University of Chicago Medicine, said after riding his bike across the bridge.

Advertisement

"It's cool," Sofia Sinnokrot, 17, a senior at Whitney Young Magnet High School, said before she jogged across.

The bridge, developed by Chicago's Department of Transportation and paid for by a mix of federal and state funds, was designed to elicit that kind of emotion. It's the polar opposite of the span it replaced  a rickety, ramrod-straight 1933 bridge with daunting flights of stairs that forced cyclists to dismount and made wheelchair use all but impossible.

Eighteen years ago, when I wrote a series of articles about the problems and promise of the city's lakefront, that bridge exemplified the sorry state of the south shoreline, much of which had fallen into disrepair as city officials devoted resources instead to shoreline parks lined by white neighborhoods. Things have changed for the better since those days of "benign neglect," with the construction of a marina at 31st Street, a beach house at 41st Street and new lake fill that has widened once-skinny Burnham Park. The bridge puts a cherry on top.

Designed by John Hillman, an engineer formerly with the Chicago office of exp, the bridge spans eight lanes of traffic and six sets of railroad tracks. A stretch that long, 620 feet, can be intimidating.

So like Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry's snaking BP Bridge in Millennium Park, the 35th Street span breaks things down into manageable parts. Its curves fool the eye into thinking that the bridge is shorter than its actual length. Its central pylon, roughly 120 feet tall, further subdivides the journey, acting as a kind of gateway from the city to the lakefront and vice versa.

Unlike Gehry's bridge, however, this one doesn't have a central support column holding it up from below. It's a so-called "self-anchored" suspension bridge, in which the main cable is attached to the ends of the bridge's deck rather than being grounded in large anchorages, as is typically the case. In this case, the cable descends to the deck on alternate sides of the bridge  the north side toward the lake, the south side toward the city. The bridge is further rendered unique because the deck itself consists of mirror-image curves that form the letter "S."

Complex? Yes. Arbitrary? No.

The design boasts several functional advantages. It keeps the bridge deck thin, easily allowing trains to pass below. There's no need for a supporting column in the Lake Shore Drive median, which makes things safer for drivers. The "S"-shaped deck steers the bridge away from a section of Burnham Park with mature trees. The views of the lake and skyline from the bridge are splendid because it doesn't wrap you in a web of cables.

Advertisement

Views of the bridge are equally persuasive. There's a nice contrast between its muscular central pylon and gossamer-thin cables. Its lines remain clean because lighting is integrated into handrails and elements. At night, the lighting  blue near the pylon's top, white on the cables  is striking. Stainless steel handrails echo the cables' complex curves. Seen from below, the bridge deck resembles a ribbon of concrete floating through the air  a new Lake Shore Drive "S" curve.

On the whole, the design lacks the iconic pop of the bridges by Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, but that's OK. Calatrava's bridges tend to be hyper-expensive and, at worst, dominate their settings. The idea here was different and appropriate: Make a statement along the lakefront but don't overwhelm it.

That's worth keeping in mind as the city gears up to start construction on another Lake Shore Drive pedestrian bridge at 41st Street this spring and continues planning a sister bridge at 43rd Street that will replace an outmoded span like the one that came down for the new one at 35th. The other projects, which like the one at 35th were winners in the 2005 city-sponsored design competition for new bridges across the drive, have been a long time coming. But if they meet the standard of what's just emerged at 35th Street, they will be worth the wait.

bkamin@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @BlairKamin
The former owner of two popular suburban movie theaters was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday for sales tax evasion and bank fraud.

Ted Bulthaup, 59, of Woodridge, was ordered to repay more than $1 million to the state of Illinois for not paying taxes on tickets and other sales at the Hollywood Boulevard and Hollywood Palms theaters in Woodridge and Naperville, respectively. He was also ordered to repay $2 million of a defaulted bank loan that authorities say was gained using false information.

Advertisement

DuPage County Judge Daniel Guerin said despite Bulthaup's lack of criminal history and record of a charitable life, his crimes required a prison sentence.

"Fraud, deceit and dishonesty cannot be met with indifference or excessive leniency," the judge told Bulthaup.

Advertisement

Before sentencing, a tearful Bulthaup spoke quietly before the judge for 20 minutes, expressing his remorse and accepting responsibility.

"I'm financially broken," he said. "I have nothing left."

Prosecutors from the Illinois attorney general's office said Bulthaup systematically avoided his tax obligations, perhaps over an eight-year period.

Assistant Attorney General John Greenwood told the court that Bulthaup had issued a report to theater investors at one point, admitting that in order to keep his theaters open, he had not paid sales taxes.

"But no one came knocking, and I'm not volunteering," Bulthaup wrote.

Greenwood said it was particularly distressing that Bulthaup qualified for a $4 million bank loan that was backed by a state economic development program, funded by state taxes like the ones Bulthaup had evaded.

To not sentence Bulthaup to prison, the prosecutor said, would invite citizens to treat tax obligations as a "catch-me-if-you-can system." Greenwood asked for an eight-year sentence on the sales tax charge and a concurrent seven-year sentence for the bank fraud.

Bulthaup's attorney, Michael Young, asked for a sentence of probation, saying that Bulthaup had not spent the missing tax money on himself but had plowed it back into the operation. The result had destroyed a career, Young said.

Advertisement

"Because of Ted's actions, he's lost everything," the attorney said.

Young said Bulthaup could get a job and begin repaying the money rather than be incarcerated. But the judge said a sentence of probation alone was not enough punishment to deter others from committing a similar crime. Most people who run into financial trouble find honest and ethical ways to deal with it, the judge said.

He often staged events at his theaters and helped earn a Hollywood Walk of Fame gold star for the "Wizard of Oz" Munchkins. The judge lauded Bulthaup for a history of charity but said the theater owner had perhaps been naive about business.

"I don't think you're an essentially deceitful or dishonest person, but your actions were deceitful and dishonest," Guerin said.

With day-for-day credit, Bulthaup could be paroled in about 30 months.

Clifford Ward is a freelance reporter.
The results of a referendum addressing term limits in west suburban Broadview are still unknown pending a decision from the state's high court about the wording of the question.

And the town's village president, who is at the center of the controversy, said the dispute has arisen because of a proposed strip club, which he opposes.

Advertisement

After an appellate court ruled the referendum question  which seeks to limit the village president to two four-year terms  was OK to go on Tuesday's election ballot, one judge who disagreed asked the Illinois Supreme Court to review it.

If the higher court agrees the question is valid, the election results will become public. If not, voters will not see the results.

Advertisement

That decision could come down in the coming weeks, attorneys said. Until then, Cook County Clerk David Orr's office is under court order not to make the results of the votes public, a spokesman said.

The court battle began last month when Matthew Ames, Broadview's public works director and a former trustee, objected to the referendum's wording, bringing the matter before a village panel. Ames said the question is confusing, and targets current Village President Sherman Jones, whose second term is coming to an end.

The panel agreed and said the question should not go on the ballot. However, Maxine Johnson  a former Broadview village clerk who originally filed the petitions that created the referendum  challenged that decision in court.

A trial court reversed the panel's decision, saying the question was appropriate to move forward. Although Ames brought the matter to the appellate court, the decision was affirmed, which is why the question appeared on Tuesday's ballot.

The question reads:

"Shall the terms of office for those persons elected to the office of Village President in the Village of Broadview, at the April 4, 2017 consolidated election, and at each election for said office thereafter, be limited such that no person shall be eligible to seek election to or hold the office of Village President where that person has been previously elected to the office of Village President of the Village of Broadview for two (2) consecutive full four (4) year terms?"

Ames said he's heard from residents who were confused by the wording, believing it wouldn't affect current officials in office.

Jones, in his second term, said he planned to run for a third in the April election. If the court rules the referendum is OK, and it passes, he would not be able to run for re-election.

Advertisement

Ames and Jones also say the effort is motivated by political enemies, and centers around an ongoing yearslong court battle over a proposed strip club between its developers and the village.

"They're trying to get me out of the way," Jones said.

Daywatch Weekdays Start each day with Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox. >

Johnson could not be reached for comment, but her attorney, James Nally, said Jones' claims of the club ties are inaccurate, and that the referendum question is not flawed.

"We think it was a well-tendered referendum," he said. "Obviously (Jones) is not in favor of it because he'd be barred from running."

It's not the first time the future of Broadview incumbents was threatened by election challenges that Ames said were also tied to the controversial proposed club. In 2013, more than a dozen candidates were challenged during the municipal election. At that time, Ames also said those raising the objections were aligned with club backers.

In 2007, the Village Board denied a permit that would have allowed a developer to serve alcohol at the proposed Chicago Joe's Tea Room, to be built off the Eisenhower Expressway. Eventually, a lawsuit was filed against the village, claiming in part that the zoning laws keeping the club from becoming a reality violate the First Amendment.

Advertisement

As of Thursday afternoon, the case surrounding Tuesday's referendum had yet to be placed on the state Supreme Court's docket, a court spokesman said, and because Friday is a court holiday, the earliest the case could be heard is next week.

kthayer@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @knthayer
A day after thousands marched in downtown Chicago, about 50 young people gathered Nov. 10, 2016, at Trump Tower to protest the election of Donald Trump as president. (Nereida Moreno / Chicago Tribune)

A day after thousands marched in downtown Chicago, about 50 young people gathered at Trump Tower to protest the president-elect.

The group peacefully marched around Trump Tower, a 98-story hotel and luxury high-rise along the Chicago River, and up and down State Street near the Chicago Theater about 7 p.m. Thursday.

Advertisement

They were met with cheers from several people shopping and dining in the area, though one driver shouted at them to "shut up and accept democracy."

"We're not happy with the president-elect and we're trying to let everyone know that," said 24-year-old Jessica Orman. "This is a healthy way to get out your frustration. It's a peaceful protest, we're not bothering anyone. We're not saying crude things. We're just saying our opinion."

Advertisement

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 94 Hundreds of Rutgers University students march to protest President-elect Donald Trump's policies and to ask school officials to denounce his plans on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2016, in New Brunswick, N.J. (Mel Evans / AP)

Orman said she was shocked to learn Trump had won because every election predictor said otherwise.

"He's a rapist, he's a racist, he's islamophobic, he's against Mexicans  I'm half Latina so I'm not comfortable with him calling my ancestors rapists," she said. "And the way that he treats women generally is disgusting."

Protesters held signs that read, "Not my president" and "No bigot will lead me."

Amanda Altobello, 30, said she joined the rally after hearing the crowd's chants from downtown.

"I think that at least, the new president should listen to what people are saying here and think about his initial proposals because I don't think that they fit how our country looks right now."

Information about whether police made any arrests related to the protest was not immediately available.
Paul Mulcahy, former village president of Lake in the Hills, was found guilty on two criminal misdemeanor charges of domestic battery. (Lake in the Hills)

The village president in suburban Lake in the Hills has been charged with misdemeanor domestic abuse, court records show.

Village President Paul Mulcahy was taken into custody at his home early Sunday. He later posted $200 bail and was released, according to the records. As a condition of his bond, he was ordered to have no contact for 72 hours with the alleged victim, an adult female.

Advertisement

According to documents filed in McHenry County court, Mulcahy, 64, is alleged to have "grabbed (the woman) by the feet and dragged her down a flight of carpeted stairs causing scrapes and carpet burns on her back."

According to the Lake in the Hills village website, Mulcahy served as village trustee from 1997 to 2001 and then again from 2007 until he was sworn in as village president in 2013. His term expires next spring.

Advertisement

Through an email, Mulcahy declined to comment.

Daywatch Weekdays Start each day with Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox. >

Jennifer Clough, interim village administrator, said she understands the public is interested in the situation but, because this is an open investigation by the McHenry County sheriff's office, she could not comment on Mulcahy's arrest.

She did say Mulcahy attended this week's committee of the whole meeting, and business was conducted as normal, without mention of the charges against him.

"President Mulcahy has been affiliated with the community for a number of years," Clough said. "He's served on our commissions, as a village trustee and as our elected president. He's worked to ensure the community has the services they need and expect. He's been a big part of providing our community not only with the essentials, but the events and activities that make the residents proud to call this community home."

She noted his part in the success of the annual Sunset Festival and the creation of the Veterans Memorial.

"Mr. Mulcahy has represented our community very well," she said.

He is due in court Monday.

Amanda Marrazzo is a freelance reporter.
A 30-year-old Jefferson Park neighborhood man is accused of leaving the scene of a fatal traffic crash earlier this month in Bucktown, police said.

Demetrius Frayzier, 30, of the 5500 block North Mango Avenue, is charged with reckless homicide with a motor vehicle and leaving the scene of an accident involving injury or death, according to police.

Advertisement

Frayzier is slated to appear in bond court Friday at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.

About 4 a.m. on Nov. 3, Frayzier was driving a Chrysler sedan south on Western Avenue and blew a red light at Logan Boulevard, hitting a Mazda being driven north on Western by 62-year-old Aliser Maldonado, according to police and the Cook County medical examiner's office.

Advertisement

After the crash, Frayzier left the scene on foot, police said.

Maldonado's family told WGN-TV that he was headed to work at a nearby Target when it happened.

An autopsy Nov. 4 determined Maldonado, of the 2800 block of North Milwaukee Avenue, died of multiple blunt force injuries from the crash and his death was ruled an accident, said the medical examiner's office.

Frayzier was placed in custody Tuesday about 1:30 p.m. at Area North Headquarters.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel welcomed the latest building development on Nov. 7, 2016. One Bennett Park is going up at 451 E. Grand Ave. (Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune)

Welcome to Clout Street: Morning Spin, our weekday feature to catch you up with what's going on in government and politics from Chicago to Springfield.

Topspin

Much of the political universe was centered on President-elect Donald Trump's initial visit and meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday.

Advertisement

Eight years ago, the same type of meeting unfolded between then-President-elect Barack Obama and then-President George W. Bush. Heavily involved was Rahm Emanuel, who had been picked to serve as Obama's White House chief of staff, though it had not yet been announced publicly.

Hacked emails from John Podesta, who co-chaired Obama's transition team and served as Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign chairman, show Emanuel's behind-the-scenes maneuvering on the Obama-Bush meeting. In one of the emails, posted in recent weeks by WikiLeaks, Emanuel complains about a draft of the press statement Obama's transition team was prepared to release about the meeting.

Advertisement

"I don't see how this carries us very far," Emanuel wrote about the brief statement acknowledging the meeting took place and little more. "It is so devoid of detail and will lead to a lot of freelancing by the press. That's the danger."

Emanuel long has fashioned himself as a messaging master, even teaching a class at Northwestern after leaving the Clinton White House titled, "The Presidency and the Press."

Obama's transition spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, responded to the 2008 email sent from Emanuel's congressional campaign account by writing, "My direction is that Obama doesn't want to be prescriptive."

Robert Gibbs, Obama's 2008 campaign spokesman and first White House press secretary, weighed in with the final say, disagreeing with Emanuel. Gibbs concluded if any additional detail needed to be given to reporters it could be done so "on background" and not in an official statement.

"He just didn't want to punk POTUS," Gibbs wrote of Obama, using the abbreviation for president of the United States to refer to Bush. (Bill Ruthhart)

What's on tap

*Mayor Emanuel is back from meetings in Washington, D.C., and plans a Veterans Day event and a school ribbon-cutting.

*Gov. Bruce Rauner will attend Veterans' Day events in Springfield and Champaign.

*Republican U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk and Rep. Tammy Duckworth, the Democrat who defeated him on Tuesday, will meet for a "sandwich summit" photo op at Manny's (formerly a "beer summit" at the Billy Goat Tavern).

Advertisement

What we're writing

*Preckwinkle saves her soda pop tax by casting tiebreaking vote.

*Ex-U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock indicted on federal fraud charges.

*Rauner wants meeting with legislative leaders ahead of veto session.

*U. of I. backs performance requirements in return for state funding.

*Ex-CEO at Chicago's red light camera vendor sentenced in massive bribe scheme.

*Metra expected to OK another fare hike Friday.

Advertisement

*AG forces Downers Grove to release more details on ex-Rep. Ron Sandack's "inappropriate online conversations" extortion case.

*Bystanders yell anti-Trump chants as man beaten after West Side car crash.

*CPS credit rating takes another hit.

What we're reading

*The Aaron Schock indictment.

*Unfortunate name, people?

*A new movie about aliens coming to Earth to take our minds off politics?

Advertisement

From the notebook

*City clerk field thins: Northwest Side Ald. Proco "Joe" Moreno has dropped out of the running for city clerk, and said whomever Mayor Rahm Emanuel appoints should be prepared to run for election in 2019, rather than simply retiring with a pension based in part on the office's $133,545 salary.

Moreno, 1st, who has on occasion butted heads with the Emanuel administration, said he pulled his name from consideration to finish state Comptroller-elect Susana Mendoza's term so he could keep his "political flexibility and independence."

"If you get appointed by the mayor, you need to be ready to really stand with him," Moreno said. "To get appointed by somebody, then turn around and disagree with him on issues, that's not me.

"And the person who takes this job shouldn't just be planning to ride off into the sunset in a few years," added Moreno, in apparent reference to some older officials who have thrown their hats into the ring.

Moreno insisted his decision wasn't based on the fact there was little chance Emanuel would pick him from the field of Hispanic politicians who hope to become clerk. Mendoza was elected comptroller Tuesday over appointed Republican Leslie Geissler Munger, leaving Emanuel to choose who will fill a clerk's office that has been led by a Latino since 2006.

Advertisement

Four other Hispanic aldermen have announced they want the mayor to consider them for the office that runs the city's vehicle sticker program and will be instrumental in the planned rollout of municipal ID cards for undocumented immigrants. State Sen. Iris Martinez is also interested in the job, and Emanuel is said to be considering Park District Board President Jesse Ruiz as well.

Ruiz on Thursday said he was surprised to hear he was on the mayor's list. "It's not something I sought out, but it's something I'm now considering," he said.

The partner at Drinker Biddle & Reath said he has "always enjoyed public service," but was not sure he wanted to give up his 20-year law career to dedicate himself to it full-time. Ruiz said he had not spoken to Emanuel about the possibility. (John Byrne)

*Nightmare on Trump Plaza for county health care?: Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said some bad dreams could be in store for county taxpayers if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his pledge to repeal Obamacare.

Since 2010, the county has reduced the local taxpayer subsidy to the county Health and Hospitals System to about $111 million from $400 million, mostly through the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, she said.

Repeal of the entire act, including the Medicaid expansion provisions, would "be a nightmare for us," Preckwinkle said Thursday.

Advertisement

"I'm hopeful that upon reflection, the Republicans decide to tweak the program rather than eliminate it. It's easy to say things on the campaign trail. It's hard actually, when you have to govern, to make the decisions." (Hal Dardick)

*The Sunday Spin: On this week's show, Chicago Tribune political reporter Rick Pearson will talk to Julie Vahling, associate state director with the AARP, on potential changes in electrical rates. In addition, there'll be a post-election political round-table featuring Bob Secter, director of investigations for the Better Government Association; David Yepsen, retired director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University; and Pat Brady, former chairman of the state Republican Party. The "Sunday Spin" airs from 7 to 9 a.m. on WGN 720-AM.

Fol l ow the money

*Track Illinois campaign contributions in real time here and here.

Beyond Chicago

*Trump, Obama hold "cordial" meeting, pose for pained-looking pictures.

*Trump, Speaker Ryan meet as president-elect hits the Hill.

*Russian diplomat: Moscow had contacts with Trump team during campaign.

Advertisement

*Down with TPP? Schumer tells labor leaders trade agreement dead.
SPRINGFIELD  Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner still avoided saying the name "Donald Trump" on Friday even after the president-elect's popularity in some parts of the state helped boost GOP candidates to victory in several highly contested legislative races this week.

Rauner made his first public appearances since Election Day, stopping by several events to mark Veterans Day. While brushing past reporters' questions about whether he voted for Trump, Rauner used the phrase "the president-elect" and once referred to the "Trump administration," but never used the full name of the person who will run that administration.

Advertisement

During the campaign season, Rauner avoided the name altogether while saying he would support "the Republican nominee." On Friday when reporters in Springfield asked him if he was going to spend the remaining two years of his term not saying Trump's name, he just laughed.

Rauner said it was time to move past the bruising election that's caused a deep divide in Illinois and across the country.

Advertisement

"I think the best thing we can do, the most important thing we can do to benefit the people of Illinois, is focus on the future," Rauner said. "Not dwell on the election, not dwell on the past. The past is the past, the good news is it's over."

Rauner's continued avoidance of Trump's name underlines the political tightrope he must walk.

Before the election, he was trying not to give Democrats fodder to use against him, while also trying to avoid alienating Republicans who did support the former reality TV star turned politician. Now Rauner will continually be asked to weigh in on policy decisions by Trump that will have consequences in Illinois, this time with the governor's own 2018 re-election bid on the line.

As such, Rauner said he has reached out to members of Trump's transition team, while at the same time noting he has never met Trump.

"I don't know the president-elect," Rauner said. "I've never spoken with him, I have never had any interaction. I do know some members of his transition team, and I've already had discussions with some of them. And I look forward to trying to develop productive working relationships. It's in the interest of the people of Illinois that we do that. There will be many changes probably coming, and we want to make sure the people of Illinois are well positioned to get good benefit from the changes coming."

Rauner also sought to downplay his involvement in state legislative races, in which he sunk tens of millions of dollars of his personal wealth to back Republican candidates in contested races. In all, Republicans picked up six seats in the legislature, including four spots in the House, where Rauner has made it a priority to chip away at the majority held by longtime Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan.

Rauner said he's focused on trying to cut a budget deal with Democrats in the coming weeks, with lawmakers scheduled to return to the Capitol next week. A temporary stopgap spending measure expires at the end of the month, though there's little indication there will be more of a desire to cut a deal now than there was before the contentious election.

The governor has made his economic agenda a prerequisite to a larger budget deal, saying proposals to curb payouts to workers injured on the job and limit collective bargaining rights will help businesses grow. Democrats argue the proposals would hurt the middle class, and should not be part of yearly budget negotiations.

Advertisement

Illinois has operated without a complete budget for nearly 18 months, sending state debt skyrocketing and putting everything from rape crisis centers to universities in jeopardy.

Rauner has invited all four Democratic and Republican legislative leaders to meet on Monday but said he has yet to get a response from Madigan.

Rauner also released his 2015 tax returns Friday, revealing that he and wife Diana had more than $188 million in state taxable income, a huge jump from a year prior when they reported an income of $58 million.

A longtime equity investor, Rauner paid more than $50 million in federal and state taxes, for a total tax rate of 26 percent.

In keeping with a practice since declaring his candidacy in 2013, Rauner released only the two-page Form 1040. Not disclosed were the schedules and other attachments that could provide more details about his earnings and the size and sort of tax breaks he might use to his advantage.

Rauner joked that his finances have benefited because he is no longer directly involved. Following his election, Rauner created a power of attorney that granted management authority over much of his wealth to a New York investment adviser.

Advertisement

mcgarcia@tribpub.com
Brexit, Donald Trump and, just maybe, Marine Le Pen.

The tidal wave of populist outrage coursing through the West has found an unsurprising cheerleader in France's Le Pen, the increasingly popular leader of the country's far-right National Front. In the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, Le Pen thinks she could write the next chapter in a global revolt against the status quo.

France's presidential election is less than six months away. Once confined to the political fringe - a poster girl for Europe's radical right - Le Pen is clearly preparing for a boost from Trump's tail wind. She may get it. In regional elections in December, a month after the terrorist attacks across Paris, she won nearly 30 percent of voters in the first round. And that was before Brexit, the July attack in Nice, the drama over the Calais migrant camp and, now, the U.S. election - all of which have played to her advantage.

As in Britain and the United States, a fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric has swept through a France still reeling from terrorist violence. It is largely directed at the historic wave of migration that has brought more than 1 million people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe in the past two years. Thousands of them ended up in camps on the northern coast of France, and when two newcomers took part in the Islamic State-orchestrated attacks on Paris last November, the migrants came to represent a national-security threat - and an entire religion - portrayed as a threat to the French way of life.

Since the Paris attacks, a palpable Islamophobia has emerged in France. Over the summer, there was the uproar over the "burkini" swimsuit, and now, after the closure of the Calais migrant camp, there is widespread anxiety over the other camps that have emerged across the country - including three within Paris. Prominent French intellectuals have now normalized the idea of a Muslim "invasion," and even Francois Hollande, the Socialist president, has said that France has "a problem with Islam." As it was in the Brexit campaign and the U.S. election, the theme of a national identity under siege is already the centerpiece of France's search for its next president.

And no one screams louder about national identity than Le Pen, who has promised to make France "great again" in the same nostalgic appeal that Trump successfully pitched to U.S. voters. "We, too, are keen on winning back our freedom," she said in September. "We want a France that is the master of its own laws and currency and the guardian of its borders."

Le Pen was probably the first foreign politician to herald Trump's victory, tweeting her congratulations before a winner had been officially announced. Then, hours later, she took to the stage at her party's headquarters outside Paris, presenting herself as the torch bearer of a long-brewing international mission to disrupt the established order.

She warned political leaders - inside and outside France - to watch their backs. "The political and media elites that were heavily chastised this morning can no longer ignore it," she proclaimed Wednesday, smiling for the cameras.

"The French referendum in 2005, the Greek one in 2015, the recent electoral successes of patriots in different European countries, the massive vote by the British in favor of Brexit and now Donald Trump - all are democratic choices that bury the old order and steppingstones to building tomorrow's world," she said.

But could she win? Most analysts still say there is little chance that the National Front could emerge on top in France's 2017 elections - despite the staggering unpopularity of Hollande.

For one, Le Pen and her populist platform will not be the only option for voters on the right, who could also support Alain Juppe, the grandfatherly mayor of Bordeaux, or Nicolas Sarkozy, the "bling bling" former French president with the supermodel wife and a penchant for Islamophobia that has come to rival Le Pen's.

For another, despite Le Pen's best efforts to improve its image, the National Front - which shares much of the nationalism, protectionism and pro-Russian sensibilities of the Trump campaign - has an unfortunate history of anti-Semitism that many voters have a hard time overlooking, even after their leader's recent attempts to "de-demonize" the party.

"I believe that she's played this well," said Francis Kalifat, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, the country's largest Jewish advocacy organization. "But in reality, nothing has changed. It remains a xenophobic party and a party that we share no values with."

In a country highly sensitive to the memory of its collaboration in the Holocaust, even the allegation of anti-Semitism can torpedo a political future, said Nonna Mayer, a political scientist at Paris's Sciences Po school. "It remains a major taboo in our history."

For many, the National Front is a synonym for that taboo. Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 88-year-old founder of the party from whom Marine Le Pen is currently estranged, once referred to the Nazi concentration camps as a "detail of history," a remark that led a French court to declare him guilty of "questioning a crime against humanity" and to fine him nearly $35,000.

So high is the instinctive French distaste for the National Front that, on the one occasion when the party actually made it to the final round of the presidential elections, in 2002, both the right and the left rallied around Jacques Chirac, a centrist conservative, who then trounced Jean-Marie Le Pen in a landslide victory. The view in Paris is that much the same would happen if Marine Le Pen ran against Alain Juppe, currently favored to win France's conservative primary later this month.

But depending on the results of the primary, Le Pen could be facing off against Sarkozy instead, which experts say would present a scenario where a National Front victory might be possible, largely because Sarkozy's hard line on migrants and Muslims has already alienated the moderate voters he would need to fight off Le Pen.

"He has used a very similar rhetoric to Le Pen herself," said Cecile Alduy, the author of a 2015 study of Le Pen's reliance on language, referring to the former president's recent turn toward Islamophobia to steal voters away from the National Front.

That, added Gerard Grunberg, a political scientist at Sciences Po, probably would hurt rather than help Sarkozy at the ballot box. "Many voters on the left and right won't support him against Le Pen," Grunberg said.

Before the presidential elections next year, France will remain in a state of anxiety over the possibility of future terrorist attacks and over the migrant crisis, in a country where the political establishment has been ridiculed for responses too little and too late.

Until the next president is chosen, one voice in particular is likely to be louder than its challengers, decrying the sitting government, political elites and the European Union itself to an audience of angry and world-weary voters.

"For the moment, there is very little chance that Marine Le Pen would win," Mayer of Sciences Po said. "But we should never say never, as Brexit and Trump show."
Ellison is a five-term congressman from Minnesota, and for a growing number of influential progressives, he's the answer to Democrats' failure to beat Donald Trump.

Senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., have all floated Ellison's name to be chair of the Democratic National Committee - a normally behind-the-scenes strategic position they want him to make more public.

So let's learn more about Ellison and why some Democrats think this relatively obscure congressman is their best answer to Trump.

The basics: Ellison was elected a decade ago to Minnesota's 5th District, which includes heavily Democratic Minneapolis.

Since coming to Congress, he's been a reliably liberal Democratic vote - he's campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq War and his support for universal health care, and he's been a vocal opponent of voter ID laws.

He's no Donald Trump: Ellison's biography could not be more of a stark contrast to the most controversial elements of Trump's message.

He's the first Muslim to be elected to Congress and one of only two serving in the House. When Ellison was sworn in for the first time in 2007, he made national news for taking his ceremonial oath with a Quran - one once owned by Thomas Jefferson, which he borrowed from the Library of Congress.

Since then, he's been frequently called on to be a spokesman for his faith. (Ellison was raised Catholic, but converted to Islam in college.)

He was also the first black person to be elected to Minnesota's congressional delegation.

And he's from the Midwest, a region where Tump snuck up on Hillary Clinton. (Minnesota voted for Clinton, but for a state that hasn't voted for a Republican since 1972, it was surprisingly close: President Obama won the state in 2012 by 49 percentage points. Clinton won it by 1.5 points.)

He's got progressive cred: Ellison is co-chair of the Progressive Caucus in the House, and he backed Sanders during the primary.

The Sanders and Warren wing is currently the loudest liberal voice speaking out after the election. Both are having an "I-told-you-so" moment with the Democratic Party, saying it should have focused on a more populist message if it wanted to reach the white working class voters that broke for Trump in higher-than-expected numbers.

Ellison, say liberals, is someone they trust to make the progressive wing of the party more mainstream. "There's a big challenge that people feeling really jilted by a party that tried to stop the nomination process before it began," said Neil Sroka with the progressive Democracy for America. "He would be really helpful for that."

But some moderates are skeptical that turning the party to the left will solve the Democrats' problems.

"It didn't matter what type of Democrat you were on Tuesday," said Jim Kessler with the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. "You were defeated. . . . every element of the party has to look in the mirror and reassess, and say 'What can we do better?' "

He can handle the cable news circuit: Ellison has a reputation as a level-headed politician who won't shy away from a political fight or controversy. Perhaps the most famous example of this came right after his 2006 election. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck, then at CNN, asked Ellison if he could be politically incorrect for a second, then demanded to know: "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies?"

Ellison, without getting flustered, replied: "Well, let me tell you, the people of the 5th Congressional District know that I have a deep love and affection for my country. There's no one who is more patriotic than I am. And so, you know, I don't need to - need to prove my patriotic stripes."

The media coverage from that conversation was largely favorable to Ellison. Beck later said it was "quite possibly the poorest-worded question of all time."

As the Huntington Post pointed out, doing battle with conservatives on TV could be one of the most effective ways for Democrats to reach voters and reshape their party, since there are fewer of them in office to do it the traditional way. Democrats have the fewest seats at every level of governance since the Reconstruction Era.

Which brings me to my next point:

He could shake up what the DNC does.

At the heart of Ellison's sudden popularity among progressives is the opportunity to fundamentally reshape the role of the DNC.

Think of the office of DNC chair as it exists right now as like the chief operating officer of a company - someone focused on logistics like fundraising and coordination to help the party, while the top Democrat in power is like the chief executive - the person providing the vision.

But the current formula, progressive Democrats say, is largely broken. Democrats were so badly decimated on Tuesday they are a leaderless party. So why not let this official position become the visionary leader of the party. The chair could focus less on fundraising - if people are excited about the party they'll donate anyway, Sanders argued - and more about giving the nation a solution to its economic anxiety.

Ellison's colleague in the progressive committee endorsed that idea in an interview with The Washington Post's John Wagner: "They have to be advocates, and not just conduits," said Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, D-Ariz. "The DNC should be both an organizing tool and an advocacy tool."
Spurred by fear and outrage, protesters around the country rallied and marched Friday as they have done daily since Donald Trump's presidential election victory.

In Portland, Oregon, rowdy protests continued for a second night as hundreds of people took to the streets. Police used flash-bang grenades in an effort to disperse the crowd. Some protesters spray-painted graffiti and threw items at officers. Authorities said vandalism and assault had taken place during the rally, which organizers had billed as peaceful earlier in the day.

There were also spirited demonstrations on college campuses and along downtown streets were mostly peaceful following previous outbreaks of window-smashing and fire-setting.

Evening marches disrupted traffic in Miami and Atlanta.

Trump supporter Nicolas Quirico was traveling from South Beach to Miami. His car was among hundreds stopped when protesters blocked Interstate 395.

"Trump will be our president. There is no way around that, and the sooner people grasp that, the better off we will be," he said. "There is a difference between a peaceful protest and standing in a major highway backing up traffic for 5 miles. This is wrong."

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets across California after night fell including downtown Los Angeles, where over 200 were arrested a night earlier. In Bakersfield, where Trump is far more popular than in most of the state, some held signs reading "Anti-Trump, Pro-USA."

Small protests also were held in Detroit; Minneapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; Olympia, Washington and Iowa City.

Hundreds joined an afternoon "love rally" in Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

Leslie Holmes, 65, a website developer from Wilton, Connecticut, took an hour-long train ride to the demonstration  her first protest since the 1970s, when she hit the streets of San Francisco to oppose the Vietnam War.

She described herself as an armchair liberal but declared, "I'm not going to be armchair anymore."

"I don't want to live in a country where my friends aren't included, and my friends are fearful, and my children are going to grow up in a world that's frightening, and my granddaughters can look forward to being excluded from jobs and politics and fulfilling their potential, so I'm here for them," she said.

More than 200 people, carrying signs gathered on the steps of the Washington state Capitol. The group chanted "not my president" and "no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA."

In Tennessee, Vanderbilt University students sang civil rights songs and marched through campus across a Nashville street, temporarily blocking traffic. A protest also occurred in Minneapolis.

In Chicago, multiple groups planned protests through Saturday.

Nadia Gavino, 25, learned about the rallies on Twitter and protested Thursday evening. Gavino, whose father is from Peru and whose mother is of Mexican and Lithuanian heritage, said she took Trump's harshest statements about immigrants and Latinos personally.

"I obviously agree that he's racist, he's sexist, he's phobic, he's misogynistic. He's all these things you don't want in a leader," she said.

Ashley Lynne Nagel, 27, said she joined a Thursday night demonstration in Denver.

"I have a leader I fear for the first time in my life," said Nagel, a Bernie Sanders supporter who voted for Hillary Clinton.

"It's not that we're sore losers," she said. "It's that we are genuinely upset, angry, terrified that a platform based off of racism, xenophobia and homophobia has become so powerful and now has complete control of our representation."

Demonstrations also were planned Saturday in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and other areas.

Previous demonstrations drew thousands of people in New York and other large urban centers. The largely peaceful demonstrations were overshadowed by sporadic episodes of vandalism, violence and street-blocking.
One of the largest Ku Klux Klan groups in the country has announced a parade to celebrate President-elect Donald Trump's win.



The Loyal White Knights of Pelham, N.C., says on its website that its parade will take place on Dec. 3.



"TRUMP = TRUMP'S RACE UNITED MY PEOPLE," says the website's front page.



No time or location for the event is listed, and a phone call to the number on its website was not returned.



The group has between 150 and 200 members and is "perhaps the most active Klan group in the United States today," according to the Anti-Defamation League. Last year, it was part of a South Carolina protest against the Confederate flag's removal from the state Capitol.

Several Klan groups endorsed Trump. Well-known former Klan leader David Duke, who on Tuesday lost a Senate bid in Louisiana, was also a vocal supporter.



The Trump campaign was criticized this year for initially refusing to denounce support from the Klan. Later, the campaign described the Klan's efforts as "repulsive."
Steve Crews served with an Army intelligence unit in Korea and got a journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (Family photo)

Steve Crews was a Tribune reporter who left the newsroom to became deputy press secretary for Mayor Jane Byrne before launching a career in public relations, crisis management and media training.

"One of the most interesting and intelligent people I've ever met  a great storyteller," said Dave Gilbert, who met Crews working at the Tribune and later worked with him at what is now the Golin public relations firm. "He was also one of the most creative people that I've ever known."

Advertisement

Crews, 75, died of acute myeloid leukemia Nov. 3 at JourneyCare in Glenview, according to his daughter Meredith. He had lived in Glenview for many years.

Stephen Crews was born and grew up in Highland Park. He started high school in Highland Park but finished at Shattuck-St. Mary's School in Faribault, Minn. After spending about a year at what is now Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., he enlisted in the Army around 1960 and served with an intelligence unit in Korea. After leaving active duty, he enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the GI Bill and received a degree in journalism.

Advertisement

He went to work for the Tribune in 1968 as a reporter, where his hometown and his habit of wearing suits and ties earned him the nickname "The Highland Park Swell."

"He was just a lot of fun, larger than life," said Joe McLaughlin, who like Crews had been in the Army in Korea before joining the newsroom, and who called the suits "one aspect of his sense of humor."

"He was a good clean writer, a very careful reporter," McLaughlin said. "He was a real pro and I think he cared about the right things."

Crews left the Tribune to work in the Byrne administration He went from there to public relations work, first with a small firm and then for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Mo., Alberto-Culver in Chicago and the communications marketing firm Edelman in Chicago.

His daughter said Crews helped craft the 1988 presidential campaign of 9Lives cat food mascot Morris the Cat.

In 1991 he moved to Golin, joining Gilbert and handling accounts that included McDonald's, Owens Corning, Chrysler, Michelin, Glaxo, Gerber, Star-Kist Foods, Volkswagen of America and many others.

His standout talents, Gilbert said, were in writing, teaching younger account executives how to write and media training. He left Golin after 12 years to start his own consulting business.

"He was sought out for his media training," said Gilbert, head of his own consulting firm, David R. Gilbert and Associates. "He did extensive media training around the country, training others in working with media and message development, creating messages for companies and executives."

Advertisement

Those travels coincided with another journey Crews was taking. After repeated invitations from Gilbert, Crews went to a church service.

"He later told me he agreed to get me off his back," Gilbert said. "He later said it was the beginning of a spiritual journey."

Crews attended once-a-week morning Bible study meetings. After an earlier bout with pancreatic cancer, Crews made a decision to forgo treatment that would do little to extend his life following a recent leukemia diagnosis.

"He really turned his life around," Gilbert said. "He was at peace with himself and at peace with his decision."

Crews is also survived by his wife, Evelyn; a son Sam; two sisters Jane Conway and Nancy Brown; and a brother Judson Morris.

Private services are planned.

Advertisement

Graydon Megan is a freelance reporter.
That didn't take long. Just hours after Hillary Clinton lost the presidency to Donald Trump  and hours after she left her disconsolate supporters at New York City's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and hightailed it to the confines of Manhattan's Peninsula Hotel  cries of "sexism" erupted across America.

On Twitter, under the top-trending hashtag #NotMyPresident, many Americans bemoaned the "misogyny" that allegedly doomed Clinton from the start. "Trump didn't win because of (FBI Director James) Comey," MSNBC's Jonathan Alter wrote on election night. "He won because he's a testosterone candidate and men weren't ready for a woman president." Introducing Clinton before her Wednesday concession speech, Clinton's vice presidential running mate, Tim Kaine noted that Clinton had "made history in a nation that is good at so many things, but has made it uniquely difficult for a woman to be elected."

Advertisement

"It turns out the glass ceiling is reinforced with steel beams," Charlotte Alter wrote in Time magazine, arguing that Clinton's loss "may be as good a sign as any that we're not ready for glass-breaking yet." The "stench of sexism," she added, "engulfed Hillary Clinton's quixotic bid for the presidency, magnifying her flaws and minimizing her considerable strengths."

Well, something certainly smells about all this hullaballoo  in fact, the entire ramshackle 2016 election has been chock-full of malodorous surprises  but when it comes to Clinton's numerous flaws and resounding electoral failure, the culprit sure doesn't seem to be sexism.

Advertisement

Democrats would prefer we believe otherwise. In the closing weeks of the campaign, President Barack Obama bemoaned the nation's latent misogyny. "There's a reason we haven't had a woman president," he told an Ohio rally. "Hillary Clinton is consistently treated differently than just about any other candidate I see out there." On Nov. 4, former President Bill Clinton chimed in: "I know there's a bunch of guys that are upset about having a woman president. They just don't want to 'fess up to it."

Over the course of the campaign, Hillary Clinton has played the woman card to the hilt  sometimes literally, dispensing tongue-in-cheek "woman cards" to fans, friends and supporters. "If I'm playing the woman card," she regularly declared at campaign rallies, "THEN DEAL ME IN!" For election night, Team Clinton even carefully chose the Javits Center that "unglamorous glass fortress on Manhattan's West Side," as The New York Times called it  so that Clinton could declare victory under a literal glass ceiling.

As an aside, when you think about it, this is actually kind of weird. What on Earth was the Clinton camp planning to do to that poor glass ceiling when they won? Yell at it? Sit in a circle and try to levitate it, like hippies used to do to the Pentagon? Give everyone in the audience hard hats, ladders and hammers, hope for the best, and watch the resulting glass-shard shower of terror? (CNN reported that the actual Clinton plan involved using cannons filled with confetti designed to look like shattered glass. Ho-hum. Like that would fool anyone. The ceiling would still be there!)

In the end, America never witnessed the potentially goofy endgame of this half-baked political metaphor. The glass ceiling remains unbroken, at least when it comes to the American presidency. (Women like the late Margaret Thatcher, who won the role of British prime minister almost 30 years ago, must be wearily rolling their eyes from up above.) Hopefully, in the future, we will leave the presidential ceiling cracking for a far superior candidate.

There are many reasons for Clinton's loss: obvious corruption, lockstep leftism, disastrous health care prescriptions, abortion fanaticism and basic incompetence are just a few. But her loss might best be summed up in a September video address she gave to the Laborers' International Union of North America. After bashing right-to-work measures allowing freedom from unions, Clinton stared at the camera, suddenly irate. "Now, having said all this," she bellowed, head bobbing, appearing as though she wanted to throttle the entire world, "why aren't I 50 points ahead, you might ask?"

Oh dear. Why indeed? It was a question that answered itself, and a moment that, for obvious reasons, went viral. You recognized that it eerily resembled a famous scene, if you've seen the movie "Office Space," where a terrified worker wildly shouts at downsizing consultants about how good he is with people.

Sexism certainly exists, but to blame it for Clinton's loss  the failed candidacy of an ossified political fixture with enough toxic baggage to crush 17 glass ceilings  is absurd. In the Rorschach test of life, some people will always see sexism lurking around every corner, hysterically labeling each slight as a sign of eternal misogyny. It must be an exhausting way to live. Some would argue that it helped fuel the backlash that brought us Donald Trump.

National Review

Advertisement

Heather Wilhelm is a National Review columnist and a senior contributor to the Federalist.
Donald Trump's Tuesday night stunner eerily mimicked the topsy-turvy finale of the 1948 presidential election: Both were won by an underdog  who was written off by his party, the pollsters and political mavens, but who was supremely confident of his supporters' loyalties. Then as now, clues to what was afoot were there to be found, had a dogged reporter been looking for them.

In 1948, the media downplayed the crowds that attended President Harry Truman's whistle-stop tour. The smart money was on New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, his Republican challenger. Speaking from the rear platform of a railroad car seemed a quaintly old-fashioned and inefficient way to campaign, as the Tribune noted when the president's 17-car train made three stops in California one day in September:

Advertisement

"Experienced observers sensed a disappointment in the large crowd that had gone all-out to welcome the president. In these observers' opinion the president was the victim of amateurish advice from his political advisers in tossing off a bob-tailed talk that fell short of meeting the occasion."

What those observers missed was the electricity that passed between Truman and his audience via a call-and-response mantra.

Advertisement

During a stop in Harrisburg, Ill., Truman was lambasting the Republicans when a supporter called out: "Give 'em hell, Harry!" To which the president replied: "I don't give them hell. I just tell the truth about them and they think it's hell."

When election returns started rolling in, the Tribune wrote its famous missed-by-a-mile headline over an early edition: "Dewey defeats Truman."

The famous front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which erroneously declared that Republican Thomas Dewey had defeated incumbent President Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election. (Chicago Tribune)

But the Tribune wasn't alone in having egg on its face. The Washington Post put a sign on its building: "Mr. President, we are ready to eat crow whenever you want to serve it." At a White House bash celebrating his victory, Truman debuted a drop-dead impression of H.V. Kaltenborn, who had forecast Dewey's victory, imitating the noted broadcaster's staccato delivery: "The pres-i-dent is still ahead ... but we have yet to hear from Cal-i-for-nia ..."

It wasn't just conservative publications that took a dim view of Truman's chances. Like Trump, he took guff from both sides of the aisle. Early in 1948, the New Republic, a venerable liberal magazine, published a front-page editorial, titled: "As A Candidate For President, Harry Truman Should Quit."

By September, Democratic officeholders and candidates were distancing themselves from Truman, just as some Republicans ditched Trump this year. In a dispatch from Jackson, Tenn., the Tribune reported: "Democrats here are beginning to feel President Truman's dead weight on the ticket. Estes Kefauver, Democratic nominee for senator, in the opening speech of his campaign Saturday deliberately threw Truman to the wolves, in the hopes of increasing his own chances."

Kefauver, who was leery of Truman because of the president's support for civil rights, announced he would vote for Truman "as the lesser of two evils." Other Southern Democrats went a step further. Bolting the party, they supported Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the presidential nominee of a newly formed, pro-segregation, States' Rights Democratic Party, commonly known as the Dixiecrats.

The Democrats were a hydra-headed party. An unholy alliance of Northern civil rights advocates and Dixiecrats, liberals and conservatives, it had been held together by the personal magnetism of President Franklin Roosevelt, Truman's predecessor. But in 1948, the first election since FDR's death brought Truman to the presidency, the Southerner wing was not the only faction to desert him. Liberals and leftists who feared Truman wouldn't continue the social reforms of FDR's New Deal pulled away too. They formed a Progressive Party and nominated the quixotic Henry Wallace, another former Democratic vice president. A peacenik in a Cold War political environment, Wallace didn't get a single electoral vote, but Thurmond won 39.

Not only did Truman have to battle on three fronts  against the Republicans and the two split-off Democratic factions  but he also was confronted by an inertial force built into American politics. FDR had been elected four times, including the term that Truman finished  an extraordinarily long time for one party to hold on to the White House. During those years, America had experienced the Great Depression and World War II. It seemed that the voters were ready for a change in 1948.

Advertisement

In an election two years earlier, the Republicans had won control of the Senate and House of Representatives. By 1948, public opinion polling, then in its infancy, showed a White House in the Republicans' future. An Elmo Roper poll taken just after Labor Day found that respondents preferred Dewey over Truman, by 44.3 percent to 31.4 percent.

When Truman completed his 31,000-mile campaign tour on Oct. 31, the Tribune reported him "cheerfully confident of victory," but that his "surface optimism contrasted with the jittery and fearful attitude of his entourage." On the eve of the election, under a headline "Landslide Predicted For Dewey-Warren," the Tribune confidently expected the Republican running mates to win 400 electoral votes.

But when the ballots were counted, Dewey had 189 and Truman 303 electoral votes. Truman won the popular vote, too, with 24.1 million votes to Dewey's 22 million. Standing on the courthouse steps in his hometown of Independence, Mo., Truman told a crowd of 30,000: "It was not my victory but a victory for the Democratic Party, for the people."

The subsequent search for the cause of the upset was accompanied by intramural backbiting. A Republican congressman, who won his race for re-election, said: "The trouble with Dewey was that he did not give the American people a clear-cut issue." On the other hand, some of Dewey's aides complained to the press that they couldn't get a hearing for their advice to come out slugging. "But they were overcome by a majority of the 'Dewey team,' including the defeated Republican candidate himself, who favored a 'high-level' campaign. based on a 'unite America' theme."

Analysis of the vote showed that the farm vote played a crucial role in Truman's victory, which Leslie Biffle said he already knew. A Democratic Party official, Biffle claimed to have predicted Truman's victory with his own "barn yard poll." With experts saying that Dewey was sure to win, Biffle traveled across the nation in an old truck, pretending to be a chicken buyer. He just couldn't believe that his old friend President Truman was as unpopular as the professional pollsters claimed.

"I went out to see what the people were thinking, and I found out," Biffle said of his methodology.

Advertisement

But perhaps the most evocative postmortem was the Tribune's. It acknowledged the error of its coverage with an analogy that could be applied also to this year's election.

"Our hearts were not bound up in Dewey's cause," the editors wrote. "We shared the sentiments of the lady from Atlanta who said, a few weeks before the election, 'Thank God, they both can't be elected.' "

rgrossman@chicagotribune.com
Donald Trump supporters jeer at the media as they listen to a speech by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign rally, Saturday, Oct. 29, 2016, in Golden, Colo. (Brennan Linsley, AP)

My father, who is now 98, tells a revealing story from his youth in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. He was working with his father  my grandfather  in the blacksmith shop that Grandpa operated in our little East Texas hometown.

Grandpa was the only "colored" man at that time who had a business downtown. In addition to blacksmithing, he operated a gristmill. He would grind corn into meal, take a portion of the product as payment and then sell the meal to anyone who needed it.

Advertisement

One day, while Grandpa was away briefly, a man showed up at the shop. He was a white man and he said he had walked 6 miles from a little settlement nearby hoping to get some cornmeal to feed his family. He told my dad that he had no money just then, but if he could get 10 pounds of cornmeal  30 cents worth  on credit, he would return the following week and pay for it. My dad agreed to let him have the meal.

The man picked up the 10-pound sack and started to leave. Then he turned back and said, "You know, there's some good colored people in this world. And when we get to heaven, we're gonna make a place for 'em."

Advertisement

In 2000 The New York Times published a lengthy series of stories under the rubric "How Race Is Lived in America." Among the stories was one about relations among workers  black, white, Mexican and American Indian  at a slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, N.C. One of the whites was a fellow named Billy Harwood, an inmate at a local corrections facility who was at the slaughterhouse on a work-release program.

Harwood was depicted as an indifferent worker at best; he always seemed to find a way to do the least work possible.

"He wanted to quit the plant. The work stinks, he said, 'but at least I ain't a n-----. I'll find other work soon. I'm a white man.' He had hopes of landing a roofing job through a friend. The way he saw it, white society looks out for itself."

And so it presumably did this past week as white voters, who made up 70 percent of the electorate, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, 58 percent of non-Hispanic whites voted for Trump, compared with 37 percent who voted for Hillary Clinton.

Presumably not all of those Trump voters were motivated by race  or racism  but it would be naive to suppose that none were. Trump was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, after all.

Amanda Taub, half of the team that produces The New York Times' "The Interpreter" column, wrote Wednesday that Trump's campaign was powered "at least in part by the dramatic rise of a new kind of white populism" that stems from three kinds of fear: fear of social change (the rise of women, gay rights, religious and demographic change); fear of physical attacks (by terrorists or domestic criminals); and fears born of the "collapse of white identity."

"White, in this context, does not merely mean those with white skin," Taub wrote. "Rather, it means the majority group that has traditionally enjoyed the privilege of being considered 'us' rather than 'them,' both culturally and politically."

She went on to suggest that the collapse of this identity stems from recent developments such as demographic changes brought on by the civil rights movement and immigration policy changes that have fostered a more diverse population.

Advertisement

But as my father's story indicates, white identity has long been a fragile thing  at least for certain whites. In his moment of dire need, that poor white man back in the 1930s couldn't bring himself just to say "Thank you" to a black man who had done him a good deed. He had to salvage some white pride by emphasizing that he had a guaranteed spot in heaven and would, out of the goodness of his heart, make a place for that black man.

And Billy Harwood  "at least I ain't a n-----  I'm a white man"  was expressing views at least a century and a half old. In her book published earlier this year, "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America," Louisiana State University historian Nancy Isenberg writes of how white Southern planters used the concept of white identity to get poor whites, who had no personal investment in slavery, to fight for the Confederacy. This even as those same planters privately trash-talked the poor whites, labeling them "crackers," "white trash," "clay-eaters" and other such derogatory terms.

Whiteness, it seems, conferred a psychic reward that made up for a multitude of other deprivations, including economic fairness and the respect of their social and economic "betters."

A decent pride is not to be demeaned or looked down upon. No person can be condemned for demanding decent treatment by others and decent, honorable behavior by those who ask for his vote.

Trump's white supporters were said to have felt disrespected by the "elites" who ignored their economic plight and their social anxieties. So angry were they that they gave their votes to a man who was Exhibit No. 1 for boorishness, cruelty and mendacity. One hopes that, four years hence, they feel the trade-off was worth it.

Don Wycliff is a former editorial page editor for the Chicago Tribune and editor of the book "Black Domers: Seventy Years at Notre Dame."
As Iraqi troops battle Islamic State fighters street by street in the northern city of Mosul, another crucial phase in the bid to neutralize the militant group is shaping up 230 miles to the west. A joint Kurdish-Arab militia has begun encircling Raqqa, the Islamic State's de facto capital in Syria. It wasn't long ago that Islamic State had all the momentum, seizing swaths of land in Iraq and Syria. Now the group is being squeezed in two strongholds by simultaneous offensives.

The strategy makes sense. As Islamic State relinquishes its hold on Mosul, its fighters will flee west into Syria. But Raqqa, their home base, will be sealed off by Kurdish and Arab fighters, and therefore untenable as a safe haven. No one knows how long it will take to free Raqqa, but once the Islamic State has been routed, the militant group will be without its nerve center.

Advertisement

It all sounds straightforward and easy, but it won't be. Complications abound. First, the militia moving on Raqqa, the Syrian Democratic Forces, is a tenuous coupling of Syrian Kurd and Syrian Arab fighters. Yes, they have a common enemy in the Islamic State, but historically they are adversaries. Arabs don't want to be governed by Kurds, and vice versa. The plan is for the SDF's Arab contingent to take the lead in the battle for Raqqa once fighting begins inside the city. That would allay fears Arabs in Raqqa have of a Kurdish takeover.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 64 A firefighter works to extinguish an oil well set ablaze by fleeing Islamic State fighters in Qayyarah, Iraq, on Nov. 9. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images)

But will the Kurds acquiesce? They have already established a semi-autonomous region across northern Syria, and have visions of a trans-border Kurdish state encompassing the northern sections of Iraq and Syria, bookended by Iran on the east and Turkey on the west. The Kurds could move into Raqqa, a northern city, and stay there. That's exactly what they did when they defeated Islamic State fighters in the town of Manbij, despite assuring the U.S. that they would leave once the town was liberated.

Advertisement

It's not just the Arabs who worry about what the Kurds say versus do. In Turkey, where Kurds are the largest minority, Ankara has been clashing with Kurdish separatists for decades. Turkey adamantly opposes the idea of Kurds at the vanguard of a Raqqa offensive. Turkish leaders have gone so far as to tell the U.S. they wanted Syrian Kurds excluded from the Raqqa effort. But of all the entities battling in Syria, Syrian Kurds have had the most success  so Washington's not about to leave Kurds out of the offensive.

On Tuesday, Turkey suggested it could send its own forces to lead the charge into Raqqa. The U.S. hasn't given Ankara an answer, but that answer should be, "Thank you, but we've got it covered." Turkish forces are already in Syria, and they have clashed with SDF fighters. Throwing Turkish troops into the caldron with Kurdish and Arab fighters risks a spasm of infighting that diverts the mission from its ultimate goal  defeating the Islamic State.

Retaking Mosul and Raqqa represent pivotal moments in the fight against the Islamic State. So far, the effort in Mosul is going well. What happens in Raqqa will unfold in coming weeks and months. It could fall on the desk of President-elect Donald Trump, who will be tasked with stewarding a disparate group of players with competing, even conflicting, interests. It won't be an easy job, ensuring that the unwieldy amalgam defeats the Islamic State  and not itself.
Millions of people in Illinois got their heart's desire when the Cubs finally won the World Series. Some people in Texas have a more mysterious yearning. They want the leg of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. And they are very unhappy that they are not likely to get it.

Their dispute is not with the Mexican general and dictator, who died in 1876. He was buried with his right leg. He had the other amputated after being wounded during an 1838 battle with French forces. He honored the separated limb with a state funeral in Mexico City, only to see it later dug up by protesters and dragged through the streets.

Advertisement

The leg at issue now, though, is a wooden one that Santa Anna used but carelessly allowed to get away from him. In 1847, the United States and Mexico fought what Americans call the Mexican War and Mexicans call the Invasion of Mexico. During that conflict, his forces were surprised by a gallant Illinois infantry unit. He fled on horseback, leaving the prosthesis behind.

Our troops took the abandoned appendage into custody and transported it to Illinois, prudently assuring it would never again be put to warlike purposes. It has resided here since, and is currently among the holdings of the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield.

Advertisement

Some Texans, however, expect Illinois to relinquish it. They had their own issues with Santa Anna, who led Mexican troops during their war of independence and gained infamy by executing more than 300 prisoners of war at Goliad, just weeks after the battle of the Alamo.

A museum at the San Jacinto Battlefield, where he was captured and forced to give up his claim to Texas, has petitioned the White House to get the leg moved there, where it would keep company with his knee buckle and tent stake. Students at St. Mary's University in San Antonio think they should get the leg so they can give it to Mexico. Our fellow editorial writers at The Dallas Morning News warned Illinoisans, "Texans are determined, and we don't give up easily."

We could understand if Texans coveted other things Illinois has  Lake Michigan, Lincoln's tomb, a sitting president of the United States. We wouldn't blame them for lusting after Chris Sale's pitching arm. But Santa Anna's leg?

In any case, we can't imagine why the Texans imagine they have a claim. At San Jacinto, Santa Anna still had the legs he was born with. Texans didn't inflict the injury that necessitated the replacement, and Texans didn't capture it or preserve it for 169 years. As we all know, possession is nine parts of the law.

Their request has gotten nowhere with the leg's faithful guardians. "The answer is no," Lt. Col. Brad Leighton, public affairs director of the Illinois Department of Military Affairs, told The State Journal-Register of Springfield. "We paid for that leg with Illinois blood."

His words bring to mind the response of Texas forces in Gonzales when Mexican troops demanded the return of a cannon. The Texans hoisted a flag emblazoned with their answer: "Come and take it." (The Mexicans failed in their attempt.)

If Texas wants something from Illinois, we have some things we might be willing to spare  an arctic day in February, say, or a corrupt alderman. And we're willing to offer a compromise on Santa Anna's leg: It can go to Texas, any time it wants to walk there.
See the winner here.

Blog extras:

Advertisement

"Except for Mike Ditka, you need to win more than one to own the city for more than a day."

Sheldon I. Saitlin, Chicago

"They say there's nothing he can't win."

Advertisement

Richard Anderson, Chicago

"Quick,repeal the ban on Goats".

Bob Angone, Miramar Beach, Florida

"Now they're going too far"...

Mike McPartland

"Your chances have just been eliminated!"

Mike Murrin, Northfield

"At least he's become something you haven't - he's the people's winning choice"

Veronica Marosi, Darien

Advertisement

"Looks like this is the new 'Wait Until Next Year'.

Mike Henry, Orland Park

"What next? Rizzo for Governor?"

Lana Depcik, Naperville

"I can think of an office that would trump that one."

Alex Zemansky, Plainfield

Advertisement

"No worries. 'twill be another 108 years before this happens"

Herb Ramlose, Mundelein

"No, Cubs, no!"

Lou Ritten, La Grange Park

"I'll arrange a chance meeting between him and Karen Lewis. That should put an end to it."

John Rappel, Chicago

Advertisement

"How do think I'd look with a beard and glasses?"

Dolores Minkley Gurnee

"Don't worry pal, he's too smart to want THAT job. "

Joe Alexander, Wilmette

"Holy cow! There's no beating a winner."



Stella Zajakala, Downers Grove

"Looks like it's the Cubs Way vs the Chicago Way."

Advertisement

Scott Waibel, Naperville

"I'm already five million votes behind."

Laura Waibel, Naperville

"Don't worry Rahm. He won't want to take the pay cut."

Michael Saken

"I wonder if even Maddon could manage Speaker Madigan"

Don Farrell, Glenview

"After this World Series win, even I'd vote for him!"

Angela Pasyk, Vernon Hills
A total of 33 Dakota Access Pipeline protesters were arrested Friday and N.D. Highway 6 was closed for part of the day after a group marched onto an active pipeline construction site.

Videos posted around 10 a.m. on social media Friday showed protesters standing in front of construction equipment to stop it at a site where workers had been doing reclamation work, replacing dirt where pipeline has been laid.

Protesters shown on the videos called on the Barack Obama administration to stop the pipeline. Several have said the goal of their actions was to delay construction, raising the cost for the pipeline's developer, Energy Transfer Partners, in an effort to get them to abandon the project.

Friday's action was just one of many protest events staged by opponents of the 1,172-mile crude oil pipeline, who say a leak in the pipeline crossing beneath the Missouri River would contaminate drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and others downstream.

Around 10 a.m., law enforcement responded to a call of about 100 protesters walking near the intersection of County Roads 135 and 81, blocking the roadways, according to Lt. Tom Iverson of the North Dakota Highway Patrol. About 30 arrests were made there.

In addition, a group went on a "prayer walk" along the easement to the east from Highway 6. Four arrests were made at that site for trespassing. Among them was a man who was injured and complaining of pain when an ambulance came and transported him to a hospital.

Construction equipment was not running at 11:30 a.m., as about 40 officers and approximately 100 protesters faced off. One officer told the protesters to leave the property or be arrested.

Shortly after that, protesters began falling back down Highway 6. One man holding a sign was pepper-sprayed.

"Fall back!" one protester yelled at the others. They started backing up slowly, and then some began running.

Taylor Peterson, of Salt Lake City, said her husband, Ethan, was among those arrested.

"I barely saw him on the group, and they put a black zip-tie around his wrists," she said. Another one of her friends was detained, too, Peterson said.

"They just rushed the line and everyone started running," she said.

Police formed a line across the highway and pushed protesters back. Around noon, many had gotten into their cars and left. A couple of buses filled with people left the scene to head back to camp.

"Warriors, let's go! No arrests today," one protester shouted from a car.

Occasionally the police line would stop, and then move faster toward the protesters. This went on for about 20 minutes.

Iverson said some construction equipment was vandalized and damaged. Six law enforcement vehicles also had their tires slashed, and one officer alleged a protester tried to attack them with a stake.

The Morton County Sheriff's Department said in a news release that Highway 6 was open only to local traffic as of 3:30 p.m. on Friday after protesters set up a roadblock on Highway 6 near Highway 21. A later release said the highway had been reopened as of 5:45 p.m.
Illinois House in afternoon recess on the last day of the Illinois General Assembly at the State Capitol in Springfield on Tuesday, May 31, 2016. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

Illinois Democrats lost a net four seats in the state House and two seats in the state Senate on Tuesday but still have a 67-to-51-seat advantage in the House and 37-to-22-seat advantage in the Senate. In the race for comptroller, the only contest for a statewide office, Democrat Susana Mendoza beat incumbent Leslie Geissler Munger.

House Republican leader Jim Durkin spun the results this way in a statement: "Illinois voters sent a strong message that it is time for Democrats to join Gov. (Bruce) Rauner and legislative Republicans in enacting reforms to lower property taxes, create more jobs, address the pension crisis and place term limits on the career politicians alongside a balanced budget."

Advertisement

Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan spun them another way: "Voters stated clearly that they wish to maintain a wide Democratic majority in the Illinois House of Representatives and maintain a strong check on Bruce Rauner and his anti-middle class agenda."

Here's the truth. The voters spoke in riddles, as they often do. And the bragging rights are negligible either way.

Advertisement

Sure, Rauner's team flipped five out of 118 House districts from Democratic control to Republican control, but all were districts in red areas of the state that Rauner won handily in his 2014 gubernatorial race against then-Gov. Pat Quinn. The one House seat Republicans lost to the Democrats was a 3 percentage point defeat in a district near East St. Louis, where the incumbent Republican won two years ago with 59 percent of the vote.

Similarly, the two state Senate seats that flipped to Republican from Democratic control were in districts Rauner won by more than 30 percentage points in 2014 and where voters were therefore presumably receptive to the anti-Madigan theme of the GOP's statewide effort.

The Illinois State Board of Elections database does not yet have the results of the U.S. presidential race broken down by state House and Senate districts, but overlaying the districts with county-by-county presidential results strongly suggests that downstate enthusiasm for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump boosted down-ballot Republicans just as Chicago-area turnout for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton boosted down-ballot Democrats.

No doubt, Clinton's 16 percentage point victory statewide helped Mendoza eke out her 4-point victory over Munger, a win that gives Democrats control of all state constitutional offices except governor.

But along with the race for comptroller, Rauner also lost a key talking point  the claim, parroted at me by his supporters every time I wrote about the partisan paralysis in Springfield  that the Democrats are wholly to blame because they could unilaterally end the budget standoff with their veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers.

"If the speaker and the General Assembly doesn't want to take up reforms, doesn't want to pass any real structural reforms, then they should go ahead and pass a tax hike," as Rauner put it during a July 2015 news conference. "They have a supermajority. They're fully capable of increasing the taxes."

It was always a cynical challenge. Madigan's one-vote supermajority, soon to be three votes short, included several recalcitrant members. But even if it hadn't, it's well-known that the notoriously cagey speaker has always insisted on Republican votes for such controversial measures as tax hikes in order to blunt partisan attacks. He never would have taken Rauner's bait and starting in January, when the new General Assembly is sworn in, he won't be able to.

If anything, the chance that lawmakers will break ranks with their caucus leaders to resolve the budget battle is smaller than ever in the wake of this election. The campaigns in contested districts were far costlier than ever  more than $2 million was spent per side funding largely vicious, relentless attack ads in seven of the races  and the winners and survivors have the largesse of party bigwigs to thank for their seats.

Advertisement

"Members are likely to conclude that they need protection from the other side in elections even more" than ever, Kent Redfield, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield said in my column last Sunday. "And that the best source of that protection is the governor for the Republicans and the Democratic leaders for the Democrats."

So, with feelings a little more bruised and party unity a little more solid than before, we're still about where we were a year ago:

Rauner refusing to negotiate on a proper budget until the Democrats agree to support certain nonbudget items in his so-called "turnaround agenda."

Democrats refusing even to consider Rauner's agenda items until he first agrees to negotiate a budget compromise.

And both sides thinking the voters are cheering them on.

In other words, for all the money spent and all the invective hurled, Tuesday changed nothing.

Advertisement

Twitter @EricZorn
Artist Ellen Sandor will open a new exhibit at Fermilab in Batavia. This work is called "Binary Bypass: Neutrinos for Data Communication." (Fermilab / Handout)

Fermilab artist-in-residence Ellen Sandor will have an opening of her new exhibit Dec. 2 at the lab in Batavia.

The exhibit called "Neutrinos in a New Light" will open at the Fermilab Art Gallery with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Members of the public are invited.

Advertisement

Sandor spent months talking with Fermilab scientists and learning about the ways they study subatomic particles called neutrinos, Fermilab officials said. Inspired by the things she saw and heard, she created a series of new works in several different media, works that visualize the invisible science of particle physics, officials said in a press release.

The pieces will be on display at the Fermilab Art Gallery from Dec. 2 through March 17 and are open to the public Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Advertisement

Sandor will present a talk about her work at 4 p.m. Dec. 7 in Fermilab's Wilson Hall.

Guided tours of the "Neutrinos in a New Light" exhibit will take place on select Saturdays  Dec. 10, Jan. 14, Feb. 18 and March 11  at 10 a.m.

Sandor, of Chicago, is the founder of the (art)n collaborative artists group. The group is the inventor of a new artistic medium called PHSColograms, according to the release. These three-dimensional pieces combine photography, holography, sculpture and computer graphics to create immersive experiences, lab officials said.

Sandor's exhibit will also include an interactive look inside one of Fermilab's neutrino detectors.

Fermilab's artist-in-residence program began in 2014. It offers artists the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes peek at the laboratory and create work based on Fermilab's scientific research. Artists spend their residence year interviewing scientists and translating what they learn into artwork. The artists then serve as ambassadors to the public, inviting them to look at the science of particle physics from a new perspective.

More information about the Fermilab Art Gallery is available at events.fnal.gov/art-gallery.
A little history was made at this week's Aurora City Council meeting.

After a short closed session, the City Council readjourned and elected Ald. Scheketa Hart-Burns, 7th, as mayor pro-tem.

Advertisement

"History was made, y'all," she said after the vote. "I am the first African-American elected by her colleagues in Aurora to be mayor pro-tem."

The mayor pro-tem presides over City Council meetings and Committee of the Whole meetings in the event the mayor is absent. Sometimes the mayor pro-tem fills in at other events for the mayor as well.

Advertisement

The council needed a new mayor pro-tem because the old one, Ald. Robert O'Connor, at large, is now Mayor O'Connor. He was chosen by aldermen to replace Mayor Tom Weisner when he stepped down last week after 111/2 years in the job. Weisner left due to health concerns.

Hart-Burns said Weisner and his wife, Marilyn, did a lot for the city of Aurora.

"You will be truly missed. Aurora is much better because of Tom and Marilyn Weisner," she said at the City Council meeting where Weisner left office.

Hart-Burns is a well-known person around Aurora. She has been an aldermen for 25 years and is chairman of the Government Operations Committee.

During her tenure, Hart-Burns has worked with neighborhoods throughout Aurora to organize many neighborhood groups, including Taking Back Our Community, Inner Circle Neighbor Group, Forest Ridge Tenant Council, Eastwood Tenant Council, and the Maple Terrace Tenant Council, city officials said.

She has also served as chairwoman of Circle of Wise Women for the Kane County Health Department, chairwoman of the Weed & Seed Steering Committee for the Kane County states attorney's office and has served as an adviser and board member of many community organizations, including the Quad County Urban League, the Marie Wilkinson Child Development Center and several food pantries in Aurora, according to city officials.

In 1987, she established the Back to School Bash at Martin Luther King Park, formerly Farnsworth Park, which now draws nearly 5,000 people per year for school supplies, according to the city. In 1995, she started Aurora's first communitywide coat drive that collected thousands of coats for youths in need.

slord@tribpub.com
A former government official of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation accused of accepting bribes and kickbacks from a construction contractor has pleaded guilty to federal charges in North Dakota. Randall Phelan was an elected representative of the governing body of the Three Affiliated Tribes from the end of 2012 to the middle of 2020. Investigators say Phelan used his official position to help the contractors business by awarding contracts, fabricating bids and managing fraudulent invoices. His trial had been scheduled to begin Tuesday. Phelan and two others were originally charged with receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the bribery scheme on the oil-rich Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The contractor has pleaded guilty to bribery.
Aurora's Veterans Day Parade and Ceremony on Friday looked to link the generations that have served this country in the military.

"We are reminded of Aurora's storied past and military service in the days of old, more recent times and even the very present," Aurora Mayor Robert O'Connor told the crowd of people gathered in front of the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall on Downer Place for the memorial ceremony after the parade. "We have veterans and members of the services who have carried the Aurora spirit throughout the world to make sure we were safe at our home."

Advertisement

A number of veterans going back to World War II took part in the activities. World War II veterans Kenneth Olson, Richard Miller and Raymond Moore were in the staging area ready for Friday's Veterans Day procession to step off.

Olson, 90, said he was in the U.S. Navy assigned to a mine sweeper on the open seas during World War II.

Advertisement

"We bounced around in the vessel like a cork in water. I don't relish those days," he said.

Richard Miller, 90, served on the USS Drexler in the Navy. Moore, 93, served in the Army Air Corps as a tail gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress.

Miller and Olson graduated from East Aurora High School. Both said they feel gratitude for having survived the war.

"Only our fellow veterans really know what we went through," Miller said.

"We all had different experiences in the war, and many do not wish to remember them. We are grateful for the country we live in. It's a great country," Olson said.

The Marmion Academy Flannigan Rifles march in the Veterans Day Parade in Aurora Friday. (Linda Girardi / The Beacon-News)

Lifelong Auroran Margaret Hornback has been coming to the Veterans Day Parade with her family for the past four decades and had an uncle who served in World War II, she said. Hornback, 79, said she came with her parents and then with her children when they were old enough.

"It's patriotic to honor our veterans," she said.

Hornback said she hopes the country comes together like Aurora did for the parade.

Advertisement

"I don't like seeing all of the protests after the presidential election. I hope people come together," she said.

Young people were also evident at the Veterans Day activities. Jillian Torres brought her son Meko, 6.

"It's important for my son to see the people who were willing to fight for our freedom," she said.

The parade was comprised of 22 units that stepped off from Benton Street and Broadway Avenue and featured representatives of the Aurora Police Department and Aurora Fire Department as well as the Kane County sheriff's office. Veterans organizations that marched in the parade were the Roosevelt-Aurora American Legion Post 84, Waidley VFW Post 468, Amvets Post 103 and Fox Valley Marine Corps League.

Navy veteran Herschel Luckinbill speaks in front of the Grand Army of the Republic Hall during the Aurora Veterans Day observances. (Linda Girardi / The Beacon-News)

The East Aurora High School Navy Junior ROTC, East Aurora High School's marching band and the Marmion Academy Flannigan Rifles were part of the procession as well.

The ceremony after the parade was held at the GAR Memorial Hall Post 20, a historical landmark completed in 1878. It recently underwent a multiyear restoration project and is open again to the public. It was originally funded by contributions from Aurora residents as a memorial to area veterans of the Civil War.

Advertisement

Linda Girardi is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
From left, veterans Neil Marshall, Jorge Arciniega and Cody Thorpe are all taking classes at Waubonsee Community College on the G.I. Bill. (David Sharos / The Beacon-News)

Military veterans across the country will be honored Friday, and while many will look back on their years of service, others are working to forge new lives in the Aurora area.

At the Sugar Grove branch of Waubonsee Community College, veterans Jorge Arciniega and Cody Thorpe, both 32, and Neil Marshall, 33, are looking to reinvent themselves after having careers in the military that averaged more than 10 years.

Advertisement

Yorkville resident Arciniega said he served in the Marine Corps from 2002 through 2014 and went into the service following the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

"I was sitting in a classroom at Morton East High School, and after watching what was happening, my teacher, who was a veteran, said to the class, 'This is the time your country needs you. Who is willing to go?' And I was the only one who raised my hand," Arciniega recalled. "I felt like even though I wasn't very patriotic at the time, everyone else around me was a coward."

Advertisement

Shortly after he stepped out of the classroom that morning, Arciniega said he ran into a Marine Corps recruiter in the hall and asked the staff sergeant, "How do I join?"

"He said to me, 'You know you're going to war, right?' And before I knew it, I was taking a battery of tests, and after it was over, I wound up serving in Iraq three times and Afghanistan twice," Arciniega said. "I left in 2014 as a sergeant with an honorable discharge."

Arciniega is looking to earn his associate's degree at Waubonsee in business and then plans to go to DePaul University for a marketing and business degree, with law school to follow. He and his fellow veterans are all attending classes at the community college thanks to the GI Bill.

"My goal is eventually to own my own business and establish either a nonprofit to help veterans or abused children," he said.

Arciniega is also the president of the Veterans Club on campus, which averages about 15 to 20 members each semester.

"Our goal with the club is to just be there and support one another," he said. "There are probably about 60 to 70 veterans here I know on campus, even if they're not in the club."

Thorpe, who lives in Plainfield, served in the Coast Guard from 2002 through 2014. He and his wife, Jessica, have a 3-year-old son, and another child was scheduled to be born this week.

Like Arciniega, Thorpe said he wants to go into business "and give something back."

Advertisement

"I still haven't figured out what kind of business I want to run, but it has to be something I'm passionate about," he said. "One of the things I miss about the military is that sense of structure. You always knew what you had to do, and for a lot of kids here, I see some of them just going through the motions."

Thorpe and his fellow veterans all speak passionately about their life experiences and believe their service will help them with their future careers.

Marshall, who lives in Batavia, said he is a nursing student and is still a member of the National Guard, following his years of service since 2004 in the U.S. Army.

"It's tough when you have to give up one weekend a month, and you have tests to take with your classes here on a Monday morning and no time to study," he said. "I was a medic at first in the Army, and then I went into doing military intelligence work."

Marshall said one of the problems for vets who are students is living with the stigma that "people in the military aren't smart and that enlisting was our only option."

"There is a lot of discrimination against people like us because there is the perception we're mentally unstable or adrenaline seekers," he said. "Some people feel going to college is a waste because there are no jobs afterward you can get, but I feel being in the military gives you a drive to succeed above and beyond your peers. Your destiny is what you make it."

Advertisement

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.

Veterans Day events

There are a number of events planned Friday to honor Veterans Day in the Aurora area.

The city of Aurora and the Aurora Veterans Advisory Council will host the annual Veterans Day Parade and ceremony on Friday. The parade will step off at 10:15 a.m. from Broadway and Benton Street and will travel north on Broadway, then west on Downer Place to the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall, 23 E. Downer Place, where the Honoring All Who Served ceremony will take place.

Marmion Academy in Aurora will hold its annual Veterans Day Observance Ceremony at 3:30 p.m. Friday in the Alumni Hall gymnasium at 1000 Butterfield Road. The Marmion JROTC Cadet Corps will honor all veterans, especially deceased alumni veterans of war, during the after-school formation and parade. The public is welcome to attend. The guest of honor for this year's Veterans Day ceremony is the Rev. Paul Weberg, monk of Marmion Abbey and Army chaplain.

North Aurora will hold its annual Veterans Day Ceremony at 2 p.m. Friday at the North Aurora Veterans Memorial at Farview Drive and Willow Way. The North Aurora Honor Guard, the Fox Valley Marines and Marmion Military Academy will participate in the ceremony.

Advertisement

Montgomery Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7452 will hold a Veterans Day ceremony at 11 a.m. Friday at Riverside Cemetery in Montgomery.

St. Charles will hold its annual Veterans Day Ceremony at 10:30 a.m. inside Fire Station 1, 112 N. Riverside Ave. The ceremony will begin with a reading of the official Veterans Day proclamation, followed by an invocation, a salute to the flag, a gun salute and the playing of taps.

In Oswego, the American Legion will honor veterans at 11 a.m. Friday at the Veterans Memorial in front of the Oswego Public Library.

In Plano, American Legion Leon Burson Post 395 at 510 E. Dearborn St. will host a dinner for veterans Friday. There will be a social hour at 5:30 p.m., with colors posted at 6:30 p.m., followed by dinner. The event is free for veterans and active-duty members of the military. The cost is $15 for adults, $12 for seniors age 60 years or older, and $5 for children age 8 and younger. Reservations are required by calling the post at 630-552-8313.
Veterans from around the Aurora area were invited to attend an all-school assembly at West Aurora High School Friday morning that honored vets and opened the new field house. (David Sharos / The Beacon-News)

It was a special day at West Aurora High School on Friday, as the school honored veterans while also celebrating the opening of the new Veterans Memorial Field House on campus.

At the all-school assembly Friday, the cadets from the school's Air Force Junior ROTC program, which has grown to more than 120 members, showed off their skills.

Advertisement

Erica Kegarise, West Aurora's assistant principal of activities, said "that the cool thing about this year's assembly is that the ROTC cadets have taken charge of a lot more of the program."

"It's definitely more student-driven as we'll have cadets speaking during the program as well as doing a number of musical performances," Kegarise said.

Advertisement

West Aurora Principal Charles Hiscock, an Army veteran, scanned the student body filing in before 8 a.m. Friday.

"In terms of Veterans Day, I feel vets are the bedrock our society has been built on, and supporting them is something we need to continue to build on," he said. "In terms of our school and this assembly, I've been to others in different schools, but no one does it like this. And I feel vets are honored a lot more than they used to be."

Cadets were lined up both inside and outside the building, greeting visitors and opening doors. Freshman Ellie King, of Aurora, stood on the sidewalk near rows of American flags and said her decision to enter the ROTC program came a year ago on Veterans Day when she was in eighth grade.

"I feel vets here are a large part of our community, and I was sitting in an assembly a year ago, and people there were talking about serving," she said. "That's when I decided I wanted to serve and protect my country. I knew right then that's what I wanted to do."

A mural in the lobby outside the new field house at West Aurora High School honors veterans. (David Sharos / The Beacon-News)

Speakers included Lt. Col. Erik Pettyjohn, who oversees the cadet program at West Aurora. Pettyjohn called Friday's program "a chance to give our cadets an experience in leadership training."

"I think things have come together well, and we like the fact our students have been given more of an opportunity to run things," he said.

Attending the event was North Aurora police Officer Paul Ivanyi, 44. He served in the Air Force from 1990 through 1995.

"My dad was a cop for 35 years, and obviously I've followed in his footsteps," Ivanyi said. "I've enjoyed helping people as he did, and I think the recognition the students are giving me and other officers and vets is great. I think because of conflicts going on in the world, people in the military remain more in the spotlight, and people realize more than ever their importance."

Advertisement

The new field house at West Aurora High School. (David Sharos / The Beacon-News)

Veteran Larry Bumbar, of Aurora, sat with a group of other veterans and said he served for two years in Vietnam, was wounded and spent 18 months in a hospital.

"I feel recognition for vets has finally come in this country, as those who served in Korea had it the worst," he said. "I went to this school for one year and eventually graduated from East Aurora."

Following the program, the school celebrated the opening of its new Veterans Memorial Field House with a traditional ribbon-cutting.

The new facility is part of $84.2 million in construction approved by voters in a 2015 referendum, which is set to include building additions and renovations, new heating and cooling systems, and a campus comprising a career and technical center, a new district office and an early childhood center.

At West Aurora High School, work continued during the school year on the new field house, which includes new locker rooms and drill space for the Air Force Junior ROTC.

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
Perturbed about pipelines: President Obama has warned us about these pipelines running through America. They are bad for our country and our land. To those of you won't don't realize this, wake up.

Keep Medicare afloat: Medicare is a gold mine for the medical community. The influx of doctors from foreign lands began after Medicare came into being. Today, longevity and outrageous medical costs will soon bleed the system to death. This is where Donald Trump is wrong. Working Hispanics help keep the system afloat by paying into Social Security.

Advertisement

Remark about PARCC scores: This is in regards to the East Aurora school district PARCC results that state less than 13 percent of East Aurora school district students are not proficient in English language arts and (math). It's time to admit that a two-superintendent system doesn't work. Changes need to be made from the top down before a generation of students are lost. School board members should be disgraced and embarrassed over these recent numbers.

Fix up abandoned house: The empty house on the 400 block of West Downer Place in Aurora continues to deteriorate. It was moved there with the city's assistance five years ago. All it has done is peel paint. When will something be done?

Advertisement

Angst about Aurora road repair: Whenever main thoroughfares are closed off for street work in downtown Aurora, it seems to go on indefinitely. I think an interstate highway could be started and completed before Aurora street work is done.

Sizing up sexual abuse claims: Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Dennis Hastert and many church clergy have all been accused of sexual abuse, usually decades after the alleged event. All the victims claim they are traumatized to this day. Wouldn't you expect that the most devastating trauma would have happened during or immediately after the assault?

Stand up against racism: We in America need to get rid of the racism. This is how we bring America back. Not with politicians. We need to bring it back by ourselves. Blacks and whites have been living together for over 200 years. We need to get over the slavery thing. We need to stop thinking one of us is better than the other and start getting along with each other. Politicians keep us at bay by making us opponents of each other. We must break this cycle if we want to make America great again. We are supposed to be the leaders of the world. We can't lead the world if we can't lead ourselves.

Scandal survivor: We should have a new system for electing the president. Put the one in office who survives the most scandals. In other words, choose the one who falls in the latrine and comes out smelling like a rose.

Social Security situation: Gee, I don't know where I'm going to spend that extra $3 I'm going to get from the government every month. How about the government giving back all that money they stole from Social Security for other projects?

Unhealthy health care: I'm receiving medical costs for a procedure done three months ago. The charges look like they are made up as they go along. How do you respond? Medicare should set a deadline for a billing period. Medicare and patients are being taken to the cleaners.

Puzzled about priorities: This year, the city of Aurora has spent $1.2 million of our tax money to subsidize the RiverEdge Park. At the same time, they cut the hours at the library due to lack of funding. Where are our priorities?

Vexed about voters: Illinois is a good example of the voting public nationwide. Look at how Rod Blagojevich came out of nowhere, and the people voted for him while knowing nothing about him. When I look at him, I can tell he held aspirations for the White House. Being governor was only a steppingstone. The voting public is so gullible.

Advertisement

Reaction against election: To all these people who are out there protesting in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia against the outcome of the election, half of them probably didn't even vote. If they had voted, chances are the other party would have won. But they sat on their butts and did nothing. Now they want to go out and raise hell, burn cars, or God only knows what. They are such a bunch of namby-pambies who can't deal with reality. The reality is Donald Trump won, whether you like it or not. It's time to move on.

Heed the speed limit: Traffic from Eola to Farnsworth in Aurora on the east side is becoming an absolute major problem. Speeding at 50 to 60 mph goes on all day and especially in the early morning hours. Even trucks are exceeding the 35 mph speed limit.

Roused about redevelopment: I read about a bakery that is going to be redeveloping the corner of Fifth and Hill Avenue. What I missed was any mention of Invest Aurora's involvement in the project. Do they know that La Chicanita Bakery exists? Where are they when it comes to the true challenges of redevelopment in Aurora?

Raise interest rate: My complaint is about Janet Yellen in the Federal Reserve. It's about time to get rid of her. She's afraid to make any changes. Every time I turn around, people are hitting me with increases. Yellen doesn't let the poor people make any interest on their money in the bank.

Stop soda tax: Don't fall on our government's propaganda on how bad soft drinks, or drinks in general, are for you. What a joke. All they want is a proposed tax to make up for their own shortcomings. Stand up for your rights.

Remark about parking garage: I'm calling about a Speak Out regarding the parking situation at Aurora University. I want people to know that in the mid-1980s, Aurora University went to the city council saying they wanted to build a parking garage. The city held an open meeting and invited the neighbors to the meeting. The neighbors said they didn't want a parking garage. They said it would obstruct their view and thought it would make their property values go down. The city council vetoed the whole idea. I believe at that time it would have cost $1 million per level. It's probably cost prohibitive to even think about it now.

Advertisement

Disparaging words: I am calling about Jay Z and Beyonce. Has anyone ever listened to the words and how he belittles women in his songs? She doesn't do much better. Just stop and listen.

Downtown dreams: I wish downtown Aurora would return to the way it was during the 1950s. I have been hoping that the Hispanic community would return the city to its former splendor. Perhaps we should rename it Los Auroras.

Generations in trouble: There are many senior citizens living on less than $2,000 a month. They are trying hard to hang onto their homes. People in the workforce are earning well over $100,000 per year. It's hard for seniors to pay taxes, insurance, food bills, medical bills, utilities and other expenses on less than $2,000 a month. Seniors worked hard in their day and saved for their retirement, but yesteryear's income does not support today's living conditions. Senior retirement homes are too expensive. The government only gave an increase of 3 percent. I'm sure seniors won't spend it all in one place. Families aren't taking care of their elderly these days. They are more interested in large homes, entertainment and traveling. They aren't saving for their own retirement years. Something is wrong with this picture. Have we lost respect for all generations?

Miracles happen: Folks waiting for Christ's return should take heart. The Chicago Cubs winning the World Series proves that miracles can happen. Today, however, Christ's return would be met with the gritting of teeth instead of cheers.

Troubled about Trump: Donald Trump said he will make America great again. It is already great. Trump says we need a change in leadership, meaning himself. He won't do it. I think he wanted the glory of winning but doesn't want to put in the effort to do anything. Whatever he does will probably mess up whatever good things we have now.

Highest bidder wins: The millions of dollars that were spent on the election is totally ridiculous. A cap should be considered on what a politician can spend to be elected. It's like buying yourself the presidency. Like an auction, the highest bidder wins. Life is all about money these days. Remember that money is the root of all evil.

Advertisement

Obama drama: Never before has a president gone on national television and told an illegal alien she could vote and the authorities would not arrest her. This blatant lawbreaking is harmful to our electoral system. Is this what we've become? Mass corruption, and nothing is done about it. I'm starting to be ashamed to be an American while I was once proud of it. God help us.

Vexed about election: I want to congratulate Linda Chapa LaVia. She didn't win since nobody else was running against her. It was given to her.

Halt the hiring: The Kane County board wonders if it should either cut expenses or raise taxes to achieve a balanced budget. Really? The Beacon-News reports that the Kane County board is also hiring 13 new bureaucrats. Guess what? Don't hire 13 new bureaucrats or even consider raising taxes. The voters have had enough.

Trump beats Democratic machine: Surprise, surprise. Donald Trump won. It appears the Democratic machine isn't what it used to be, and we all know The Donald is vengeful. How soon do you think it will be before his honorary street signs are back in Chicago?

Pumped up about Trump: It doesn't get any better in November. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, and Donald Trump won the presidency. How much better can we get? Despite all the evil words about him, the American people have won. We don't want any more negativity from the media. God bless America. The people have it back.

Come together: I would like to say I am a Hillary Clinton supporter, but Donald Trump is now our president-elect. We as a people need to come together. We have a new sheriff in town. Unlike other people who did not support President Obama through his day in the White House and would not stand by him, I will do the opposite. I will support Trump. He may do wrong or he may do right, but I will accept him as my president.

Advertisement

Elation over election: My horse came in. I'm glad the nightmare is over. I think the Democrats ran a very perverse pitch to the American people. I was for Donald Trump. I was so surprised he made it. The country was running a fever, but it broke now.

Choosing a cause: Melania Trump is making cyber bullying her cause as first lady. I assume she will start with her husband.

Unpopular politicians: Hey, we have a regular businessman by the name of Donald Trump who will run our United States. No politician is needed. We don't need a politician to run Aurora either. Remember Mayor Egan? He didn't care what people said about him. He just took care of the common people. Let's get rid of the politicians.

Presidential promises: Donald Trump ran his campaign on bringing manufacturing back to the United States. Now that he is the president-elect, I hope he will set the example by bringing his own product manufacturing back from China and other countries. I hope he does it fast. He said everything he wants to accomplish will be done quickly.

Hope for better jobs: I've been trying to believe that the American voters would have been smart enough not to elect Donald Trump. I was wrong. They did elect him. It has been reported that the biggest group supporting him were the uneducated white working class males. Apparently, they are unhappy with the jobs they have and are looking to Trump for better jobs. The problem comes from the fact they are uneducated. They don't have marketable skills.

Hollywood elite should take a hike: I hope Lady Gaga, Whoopi Goldberg and all the other television and movie people, the Hollywood elite, who threatened to leave the country if Donald Trump was elected are busy booking their departure. We don't need them here. In fact, people should take up a collection to get rid of these poor rich people so they get out of here quickly. It's so ridiculous.

Advertisement

Freedom of speech: There is nothing we can do against protesters. They have the freedom of speech. I liked Donald Trump right from the beginning and thought America needed a change. America has spoken, and Trump is the new president. We need to show respect for the winner and the electoral college.

Nuclear threat: Democrat pacifists have been fighting this country into nuclear destruction. Mideast terrorists and North Korea have openly threatened our demise. I think Donald Trump will be tested. Let's hope he answers with a swift response because all our enemies are sneaks and they will crawl back into their holes indefinitely.

Editor's note

Speak Out is a reader-generated column of opinions. If you see something you disagree with or think is incorrect, please tell us. Call us at 312-222-2460 or email couriernews@tribpub.com. Please include "speak out" in the subject line.
A Palos Hills teenager charged in a September kidnapping and sexual assault of a woman is suspected of being connected to four other attacks in recent months, police said.

Palos Hills police are not releasing the identity of the 17-year-old, who appeared in Bridgeview bond court Thursday charged with aggravated kidnapping, armed robbery and aggravated criminal sexual assault. He turns 18 this month, police said.

Advertisement

He was charged as an adult, police said.

Another attack in Palos Hills, two more in Hickory Hills and a fifth in August from Chicago all match the Sept. 9 incident, said Palos Hills Deputy Chief Traci Hlado.

Advertisement

In each case, a woman was held at gunpoint and made to drive to a different location where the attack occurred, Hlado said.

Additional charges are pending on the results of additional subpoenas and lab findings, police said.

Palos Hills police held a news conference Thursday announcing the arrest.

"That way, the people aren't still concerned about somebody being out on the street," Hlado said.

Officers executed a search warrant on Wednesday at a home in Palos Hills, police said.

A purse and wallet belonging to the victim from the Sept. 9 attack were found in the house.

Nick Swedberg is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
An Elgin man was arrested after he pointed a gun at another person last week, Bartlett police said in a news release.

Tomichael L. Maye Jr., 20, of the 300 block of South Belmont Avenue, was charged with a class A misdemeanor for aggravated assault and an Illinois Department of Corrections warrant for violating the conditions of his parole.

Advertisement

According to police, about 9:50 p.m., officers were called to the 200 block of South Main Street in Bartlett after a witness reported a man waving what appeared to be a handgun and then pointing it in the direction of the witness. Bartlett police arrested Maye after they found a pellet gun, resembling a realistic handgun, in a flower bed near where the incident took place.

Maye was released on $1,500 bond and was given a Dec. 15 court date at the Cook County Circuit Court facility in Rolling Meadows. He was taken to the DuPage County Jail to be held on the Illinois Department of Corrections warrant.
A Chicago man was charged with burglary following an incident at a home in Bartlett on Monday, according to a news release from the Bartlett Police Department.

David Williams, 35, of the 2000 block of West 111th Street, was charged with a class 2 felony count of burglary.

Advertisement

According to police, about 9:20 a.m., Bartlett officers were called for a report of a suspicious person at an unoccupied single-family residence for sale in the 400 block of West Devon Avenue. A home inspector discovered Williams in the basement near copper piping that was recently cut from the home. Bartlett police found Williams as he was attempting to drive away in a black Ford pickup truck and arrested him for burglary, police said.

Williams was taken to the Cook County court facility in Rolling Meadows on Tuesday for a bond hearing.
A tax on sugary and artificially sweetened drinks has been adopted by the Cook County Board of Commissioners in Chicago. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune)

A penny-an-ounce tax on sugary and artificially sweetened drinks has been adopted by the Cook County Board of Commissioners in Chicago.

With a portion of Elgin's east side in Cook County and the rest in Kane County, shoppers could be seeing different prices for the same items.

Advertisement

For the most part, shoppers at the Jewel-Osco on Summit Street  just east of the county line  have yet to express interest or curiosity about the tax. Manager Alan Anderson said he's heard from only one or two customers on when such a tax would go into effect.

"We're not doing anything different. It's business as usual," he said.

Advertisement

Just west of the line, Armando's Supermarket in Kane County doesn't expect an uptick in business. Among the items it sells, sugary drinks is just one of several.

"It's a specialty item  if they want it, they want it," said general manager Rick Mazzei. "It's not like milk. Plus, it's too far to (cross from Cook County into Kane) for a case of pop."

The Cook County Board on Thursday split 8-8 on the new tax, designed to raise millions in revenue but promoted as a way to reduce soda consumption and in turn improve public health. Board President Toni Preckwinkle cast the tie-breaking vote for the tax.

Preckwinkle said raising revenue isn't her first choice, but money is needed to prevent cuts to the county's criminal justice and health care systems.

The proposed tax generated fierce opposition from the American Beverage Association, which spent heavily to oppose it.

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spent $1 million promoting the tax's adoption, called its passage a "victory for American public health."

Associated Press contributed.

raguerrero@tronc.com
The large gold letters that were on the front entrance of the Haeger Potteries building in East Dundee have been taken down and put in storage. (Erin Sauder / The Courier-News)

The large gold letters that once adorned the front entrance of the now-shuttered Haeger Potteries building are no longer.

Company officials recently took them down.

Advertisement

It was "another end of an era," said Alexandra "Lexy" Haeger Estes, president of Haeger Potteries.

Earlier this year, she announced the factory store at 7 Maiden Lane in East Dundee would be closing after 145 years. The doors of the factory store closed for good July 29.

Advertisement

As for what will happen to the letters, which spelled out "Haeger," "We're going to store them for now," Haeger Estes said.

"I don't know what we'll ultimately do with them. We'll keep them and hope some answer may come one of these days," she said.

Originally made of wood, the letters were later coated with fiberglass and gold car paint to keep them from getting weathered over the years.

Haeger Estes, whose birthday was Tuesday, said the transition since then has been "very difficult."

"But you finally get past it," she said. "You have to. And you try to look ahead for what else you're going to be able to continue to do."

That includes getting employees "as situated as possible."

Haeger officials are in financial talks with a Carpentersville manufacturing company that wants to relocate to the Haeger Potteries site.

Gene Staples purchased Golden Bag Co., now Golden Plastics USA, in November 2015. Staples said the 35,000-square-foot facility at 290 Illinois St. is not large enough to accommodate the company's expected growth. He said relocating to the nearly 145,000-square-foot factory store space would mean increasing his employee base.

Advertisement

Many one-of-a-kind pieces from almost every decade Haeger Potteries has been in business will be sold in an auction planned for February in Chicago.

Haeger Estes said the response to the closing "has been absolutely incredible."

"There has been such an outpouring of love and just great care and concern," she said.

Erin Sauder is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
Perturbed about pipelines: President Obama has warned us about these pipelines running through America. They are bad for our country and our land. To those of you won't don't realize this, wake up.

Keep Medicare afloat: Medicare is a gold mine for the medical community. The influx of doctors from foreign lands began after Medicare came into being. Today, longevity and outrageous medical costs will soon bleed the system to death. This is where Donald Trump is wrong. Working Hispanics help keep the system afloat by paying into Social Security.

Advertisement

Remark about PARCC scores: This is in regards to the East Aurora school district PARCC results that state less than 13 percent of East Aurora school district students are not proficient in English language arts and (math). It's time to admit that a two-superintendent system doesn't work. Changes need to be made from the top down before a generation of students are lost. School board members should be disgraced and embarrassed over these recent numbers.

Fix up abandoned house: The empty house on the 400 block of West Downer Place in Aurora continues to deteriorate. It was moved there with the city's assistance five years ago. All it has done is peel paint. When will something be done?

Advertisement

Frustrated about food co-op: Elgin, please don't even consider giving money to that food co-op. If it's such a good idea, they shouldn't have any problem raising the funds. Anyone who truly wants to eat healthy will do so. There are plenty of healthy food choices at the local Jewel, Butera or wherever people want to shop. This is a bunch of nonsense. If it's such a great idea, they shouldn't have any problem selling it to the private market. Give me a break.

Angst about Aurora road repair: Whenever main thoroughfares are closed off for street work in downtown Aurora, it seems to go on indefinitely. I think an interstate highway could be started and completed before Aurora street work is done.

Editor's note

Speak Out is a reader-generated column of opinions. If you see something you disagree with or think is incorrect, please tell us. Call us at 312-222-2460 or email couriernews@tribpub.com. Please include "speak out" in the subject line.
Two precincts are separted for voting at Oakton Elementary School in Evanston on Nov. 8, 2016. (Kevin Tanaka / Pioneer Press)

As the results of Tuesday's presidential election sank in this week, some north suburban spiritual leaders said they're stressing love, faith and community as congregants confront a president-elect whose campaign was marked by controversial and divisive rhetoric.

"I'm not sure I can ever remember a moment when there was so much despair that seemed to fill the room," said Michael Nabors, senior pastor with 134-year-old Second Baptist Church in Evanston, which has about 2,000 members. The church, along with the NAACP and a black sorority, hosted a watch party Tuesday night where members saw Republican candidate Donald Trump elected president.

Advertisement

Trump, who was endorsed by a former leader of the white supremacy group Ku Klux Clan, had a low approval rating among African-Americans throughout the campaign.

"We are in significant trouble," Nabors said. "What is the next step?"

Advertisement

Nabors said they hosted a prayer vigil at the church Wednesday, at which congregants were able to reflect on the campaign and the days ahead.

At the Unitarian Church of Evanston, senior minister Bret Lortie said he has heard an outpouring of emotion from congregants who were surprised and shocked by Tuesday's results. He said many in his congregation supported Hillary Clinton. He said they too planned a prayer vigil for Wednesday night.

"How we're going to respond to this is as we always have: by standing with love," Lortie said.

For example, the church will continue its support of immigrants, Black Lives Matter activists and other communities at risk of marginalization and discrimination. But members should reach out to those who voted differently than they did and listen to the concerns those citizens have for the nation, he said.

"This is also a moment to develop some empathy," Lortie said. "It's an opportunity for us to go, 'what are we hearing in the lives of people?'"

At Dar-us-Sunnah Masjid and Community Center in Evanston, president Mohammed Saiduzzaman said he's seen people in tears over the election.

Muslim women and children, especially, talk of the harassment they suffered during the run-up to this presidential election. School kids were bullied and women were belittled and had things thrown at them on the street, he said.

On the campaign trail, Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States and criticized Muslim Gold Star parents who spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

Advertisement

"It's not easy. Tears is a powerful outpouring of people's hearts," Saiduzzaman said.

Saiduzzaman spoke of the confidence he has in the checks and balances of American government, and his belief that this discrimination will pass. He encouraged his congregation not to judge others based on the bad actions of a few. It's a situation those in his faith know all too well, he said, as some terrorists say they are committing extreme violence in the name of Islam.

"Morals are still there. People are still nice. At the end of the day, good will prevail," Saiduzzaman said.

At St. Martha Catholic Church in Morton Grove, the Rev. Dennis O'Neill said his is the most racially diverse parish he has ever seen, and represents the community it serves. He has led there for 16 years, and the church shares facilities with a Korean-Presbyterian church, an Indian Catholic congregation and a Greek Orthodox school.

O'Neill said he hasn't heard "a word" from congregants about the election. He doesn't mention the topic during services, but did preach last week on the value of humility.

"People respect each other here," O'Neill said. "We have people who feel very strongly on both sides. They're too polite to say anything."

Advertisement

At Harvest Bible Chapel, senior and founding pastor James MacDonald was a member of Trump's spiritual advisory team during the campaign but stepped down after a video was released in October that showed Trump talking in vulgar terms about sexually assaulting women.

MacDonald said members of his church's suburban Chicago campuses  including one in Niles  also are diverse and politically divided, but overlook their differences to come together in worship. He said he's praying Trump keeps the civil and inclusive tone he struck in his speech after meeting with President Barack Obama Thursday, as opposed to the divisive rhetoric that marked his campaign.

"I just don't think Christians should be divided over politics," MacDonald said. While he was appreciative of Trump's pro-life stance during the campaign, he also admired Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's passion for helping the poor.

"There isn't one party who was offering a saint and one who was a devil," MacDonald said.

Like Saiduzzaman, Rabbi Jeffrey Weill of Ezra-Habonim, the Niles Township Jewish Congregation in Skokie, said he has confidence in the American system of checks and balances.

While many have reached out to discuss the election with him, Weill said his congregation is split as to which presidential candidate members support. He said he has not experienced anti-Semitism during the campaign.

Advertisement

As before the election, "the challenge of any society is to protect the dignity and the rights of the other, no matter what the other might be," Weill said.

He said his temple did not hold a prayer service Wednesday night. Instead, he attended a service with about 1,000 other people to mark the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass," where Nazis smashed windows and vandalized thousands of Jewish establishments in Germany and Austria. The event marked an escalation of violence against Jews by German leader Adolf Hitler in the run up to World War II.

gbookwalter@tribpub.com

Twitter @GenevieveBook
The Rev. Katie Hines-Shah said calls and texts started coming in to her Hinsdale office before she even arrived Wednesday.

"I especially heard from our gay and lesbian members who were worried about marriage rights. I was texting back and forth with four gay people," the pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Hinsdale of reaction to Donald Trump's victory. "I heard from parents of teenage girls who were worried (Trump's victory) put the seal of approval on a rape culture. Girls worried whether this would embolden men to grab them or take advantage of them."

Advertisement

When two parents of 14-year-old girls stopped by, one said her daughter was crying in the car, she was so upset about the situation.

"The girls are a little hysterical and that will calm down," Hines-Shah said.

Advertisement

And the gay couples were not necessarily afraid their marriages would be annulled.

"But they are afraid they will be at a bus stop and somebody will beat them up," she said.

They fear is that Trump's victory allows people who are racists or misogynists or in the Ku Klux Klan to openly express those views or be violent toward people due to their race, religion or sexuality, the pastor said.

"The Trump supporters and Clinton supporters have to ban together and say this is not OK," Hines-Shah said.

Pastors of other churches in red states contacted her via Facebook and one from South Carolina called to say she wondered if she would keep her position in a state where her church members and many of her colleagues voted for Trump.

"I heard from immigrants, documented and undocumented, who were worried about what this would mean for them," Hines-Shah said.

"Some of the fears are over the top, just like people who thought Obama would take all their guns away when he was elected," she said.

But "with (Trump's) comments about refugees, immigrants and walls and grabbing women, promises made and hyperbole aside, it's jarring to hear that from someone who is going to be president," Hines-Shah said.

Advertisement

The fact that the election results came on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a night in Germany in 1938 when Nazis killed Jews, burnt synagogues and vandalized Jewish homes and businesses, added to some people's distress, she said.

But Hines-Shah also heard from African-American friends who said the election results did not alarm them. They told her this is the way the world has always been, but white, educated people just didn't know it..

Redeemer Lutheran holds a Wednesday evening worship service every week, but the day after the election they made a wider invitation to those people who might feel threatened by the outcome of the election, Hines-Shah said. About 40 people, many of them young people, came, compared to the 20 to 30 who usually attend.

The service "was not a grief-stricken response" to Trump winning the election, she said, because she knows some church members voted for Trump and they were at Wednesday's service.

"These people have compassionate hearts, too, and they want what's best for America," she said. "It was a service designed to be a calming place for people who were feeling threatened and hurt where they could find solace and support."

The format was not changed in response to the election, Hines-Shah said. The half-hour service with prayers, readings and the lighting of candles is held in the parish room, where the lights are lowered.

Advertisement

Her message was "maybe something new is beginning and Christ is in the midst of it. Jesus always promises to meet us at the darkest time."

But also, she said, "we need the Trump supporters and the Clinton supporters, as well as the supporters of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, to work together to defeat racism and violence."

The Rev. Pam Rumancik said the Unitarian Church of Hinsdale decided to hold a vigil, too, Wednesday night, "because of the distress I was hearing."

"We especially reached out to our Muslim neighbors," Rumancik said. "We are putting together a response as a church about the ways we will work with marginalized people. We will continue as a place of love and inclusion and let people know that this is a safe place for every single person."

"My deep sadness is (Trump) legitimized bad behavior and disrespectful behavior," Rumancik said.

She said she fears people who are different, especially children, may be subjected to more bullying or teasing.

Advertisement

But, she said, we don't live his rhetoric. Rumancik said she is hopeful because Trump "promised everything to everybody. Now he will have to deal with reality, and reality will keep him in check."

"We have to be vigilant to live our values," she said.

kfornek@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter @kfdoings
The Rev. Carly Stucklen Sather, pastor of the First Congregational Church of La Grange, at a Village Board meeting in 2015. (Jane Michaels / Chicago Tribune)

The Rev. Carly Stucklen Sather of the First Congregational Church in La Grange said she has received calls from church members who are worried as a result of the election.

Four people planning same-sex marriages in the next year have asked to have them by moved up and done by the end of this year in response to Donald Trump's election, she said.

Advertisement

"They're afraid their right to marry will be revoked by the new order," she said.

Getting four such requests in a week "is a huge surge," said Stucklen Sather, who noted that the church usually takes about a year to help people plan and prepare for marriage.

Advertisement

She said she has heard from a 13-year-old black child who's worried about her safety.

"She told me she doesn't feel safe being black," Stucklen Sather said.

Like her church members, Stucklen Sather said she is concerned about an increase in violence that the election may spur.

"What this election has done is give a license to anyone who is angry to transfer that anger toward individuals in (expressions of) misogyny, racism, homophobia and xenophobia," she said.

Since Trump's election, she said many people in her 460-member congregation feel "they've lost the floor beneath them. They feel very unsafe."

Her response, she said, is to tell them, "if you wear a hijab, are trans, a person of color, a person with a disability, an immigrant, a refugee, a veteran, a survivor of abuse, or are LGBTQ or if you are just tired or need a hug, I will be there for you. We will be there for you as a progressive voice."

Philip Bruening, pastor of St. John's Lutheran Church in La Grange, said there are only about five Hispanic families who are members of the church and a small number of Hispanic students in their school. Nonetheless, he is concerned for them and plans to talk with them individually about any concerns they may have.

"I'm planning to let them vent to me about what their concerns are on a personal level," he said.

Advertisement

Though St. Cletus Catholic Church in La Grange has a ministry for Hispanics, Father Bob Clark said he has not yet been approached by any Hispanic members of his congregation with concerns about Trump. He also said no programs or worship focused around the election are planned.

amannnion@tribpub.com

Twitter @triblocalam
During his unprecedented campaign for the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump said he would temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country, build a wall on the Mexican border and deport undocumented immigrants. He called Mexicans "rapists" and in 2011 was a leader of the conspiracy movement that doubted President Barack Obama's American citizenship.

Latino, Muslim and other minority groups in Lake County reacted this week with a mix of hope and fear to Trump's upset victory on Election Day, which shocked many across the political establishment.

Advertisement

"It's definitely a hard time for our community," said Megan McKenna Mejia, executive director of Round Lake Park-based Mano a Mano, a nonprofit providing resources to local immigrant families. She added that "the general feeling right now is a lot of fear."

From left to right: Jael Mejia (engaged citizens program coordinator at Mano a Mano); a Mano a Mano client and Lake County resident who recently naturalized and her daughter; and Megan McKenna Mejia (executive director at Mano a Mano). - (Mano a Mano)

Though Trump didn't win Illinois or Lake County  his opponent, Hillary Clinton, took 57 percent of the county vote, unofficial returns showed Friday  he stunned many political observers by scoring key victories in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Despite polls that favored Clinton leading up to Election Day, Trump rode a populist wave of passionate supporters who largely shunned so-called political correctness and the Washington, D.C., establishment. Results indicated that Clinton could win the national popular vote, but Trump picked up enough electoral votes to win.

Advertisement

McKenna Mejia, who emphasized that the nonprofit doesn't adopt official political stances or affiliations, said the group has "heard reports from different parts of Lake County that there is some bullying going on" at area schools, where Latino students are reportedly being told that "Trump is going to deport them."

Immigrant families seeking legal services are encouraged to reach out to Mano a Mano, McKenna Mejia said.

David Villalobos, a third-generation American who also identifies as Latino, serves on the Waukegan City Council, representing the city's 4th Ward. He said "to call (Trump's election) a shock would be an understatement."

"It scares me," Villalobos said. "Because I know people who are working toward citizenship, and they don't have the status yet. These are hard-working, talented individuals."

Some local Muslims reacted to Trump's victory differently. Vaseem Iftekhar, president of the Lake County-based Islamic Foundation North, said it was "very reassuring" that Trump's post-election speech "was constructive." He called for national unity and pledged to be president "for all Americans."

The Islamic Foundation North's location in Libertyville. (Luke Hammill / Lake County News-Sun)

"President Trump will have different rhetoric than candidate Trump, hopefully," Iftekhar said, though he did acknowledge "palpable fear" of "discrimination" among his congregation during the election process.

Iftekhar added he was "really, extremely impressed" by the "concern for our safety" from other faith-based groups such as churches and synagogues in the region throughout the election cycle.

On Trump and the future, Iftekhar said, "It's again a matter of hoping that justice and fairness are the American values that will prevail."

Advertisement

Iftekhar's congregation grows as large as 3,000 people on special Muslim occasions such as Eid and the end of Ramadan, he said.

At the Urban Muslim Minority Alliance Center in downtown Waukegan, volunteer Ali Albakri dismissed most of Trump's rhetoric as "just campaign talk." The organization provides a food pantry, a computer lab and other social services to Lake County residents living in poverty.

"I don't think he's possibly going to do all the things that he seemed he was going to do," said Albakri, a practicing Muslim.

The Urban Muslim Minority Alliance Center in downtown Waukegan. (Luke Hammill / Lake County News-Sun)

Albakri, who voted for Hillary Clinton, said a Trump presidency doesn't scare him.

"A lot of things he was saying were relatively extreme," Albakri acknowledged. "And I think more sober minds around him will prevent him from going to some of the extremes he mentioned in his campaign."

The Lake County arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, on the other hand, believes Trump's campaign rhetoric about ethnic groups was "alarming," said Jennifer Witherspoon, president of the chapter.

Advertisement

"There's a lot of shock and disbelief and just feelings of despair because of some of the things that he has said during his campaign," Witherspoon said. "People are frightened."

At the same time, Witherspoon said, everyone needs to "take a deep breath" and regroup "before we overreact."

"America is a strong country," Witherspoon said, adding that Trump "has made it clear that he understands that he will have to work with people from both sides of the aisle."

"Let's see what he does," Witherspoon said.

Though he worried about the implications of Trump's presidency, Villalobos said he's still "all about getting people involved in the community." He said he'll continue doing what he can to have an impact locally.

"I can't control the nation," Villalobos said. "But I can help my community out."

Advertisement

lhammill@tribpub.com

Twitter @lucashammill
President-elect Donald Trump gives his acceptance speech during an election night rally Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016, in New York. (John Locher / AP)

In the wake of Tuesday's presidential election, two immediate questions remain: What did it mean and where do we go from here?

I did not like the choices offered us, but if you are looking for an election rant, or name-calling of candidates or the voters, please go to Facebook. The country will go on, so I will try to give reasoned answers to those two immediate questions now facing us.

Advertisement

First, this election was Hillary Clinton's to lose and I believe she lost it for two reasons.

First, Clinton never gave a clear picture of what she wanted to accomplish or where she wanted take the country. She fell back on the same old themes and the same mud-slinging we always see, only intensified.

Advertisement

Second, she was a bad candidate in that she was not good at campaigning. She admitted as much many times. But guess what? John F. Kennedy was bad at it too, but he worked at becoming good at it. That's how you become president.

Why did Donald Trump win?

That's a mystery to be analyzed and debated over the next few months. I don't believe that in the last eight years, the American people have become a more racist and less tolerant country. And I don't believe we've suddenly become more xenophobic or sexist. Those explanations are too simplistic for a nation as diverse as we are.

Trump connected with a certain lingering anger and frustration that has been festering in the country for some time. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" first became a catch phrase 40 years ago.

Where does the anger and frustration come from?

The economy is weak and opportunity seems scarce. The college graduate living in his parent's basement is a sweeping generalization, but one that rings true.

Immigration law needs reform. I've always viewed Trump's call for a wall as the antithesis to Obama's thesis of open borders. Americans want synthesis on this issue.

The health care crisis is still a crisis, just in a different way. Yes, more people are insured than before, but wrecking insurance for everyone else to provide it is a bad answer.

Advertisement

The Iraq War was a tragic mistake, but what's happening in the Middle East now  with the rise of ISIS and Russia becoming the dominant player thanks to our exit  will not lead to a more just peace.

In the African-American community in our cities, the jobless rate is too high. The schools are underperforming. Quality housing is scarce.

So where do we go from here?

A lot will depend on what Trump does during the transition and the first few months of his presidency.

There are serious issues that need to be addressed and I do believe Americans want to see government  executive, legislative and judicial  come to reasonable and fair solutions to the issues facing the country. Compromise has been our genius. When did we forget it?

For whatever reason, President Barack Obama and the Congress refused to work together. It takes two to tango, and there is plenty of blame to pass around on either side when government breaks down

Advertisement

Now Trump will call the tune. Will those responsible to do what is best for America actually do so?

Near the end of the 1960 election, Sen. John F. Kennedy acknowledged that in the final analysis  as he so often phrased it  both he and Vice President Richard Nixon wanted what's best for the country, they just had different ideas on how to get there.

So now we are on a different path. If you haven't noticed, that's been our story as a nation for the past 240 years.

Randy Blaser is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.
Ferret standing on hind legs and looking up. Life On White, Photodisc via Getty Images (Life On White / Getty Images)

I was searching the Cook County website for information on the county's tax on soft drinks and  you know how it is  one Google search led to another.

And before I knew how, I found ferrets.

Advertisement

You may well ask: What does Cook County have in common with ferrets?

It seems the county will inoculate pet ferrets against rabies. Each year during warm-weather months, the county gives rabies vaccinations to dogs, cats and ferrets. Cost for a one-year inoculation is $7 for dogs and cats, $9 for ferrets.

Advertisement

I don't get it, myself. Ferrets look kind of bitey to me. Then again, I probably don't look so hot to a ferret.

The American Ferret Association  you heard me right, the American Ferret Association  says ferrets don't bite any more than dogs and cats. Ferrets and humans have gone together for thousands of years, back to ancient Egypt even.

Ferrets are a domesticated polecat. And if you think ferrets look kind of weasely, you are right. Ferrets belong to the weasel family Mustelidae. The family includes mink, skunks, weasels, otters, badgers and ferrets.

Not everyone views ferrets so benignly. In 1999, the city of New York banned the sale of ferrets as dangerous animals, along with lions and other dangerous animals.

But millions of Americans disagree and like the little codgers. And it doesn't seem as if Cook County officials view ferrets as a danger since they are willing to inoculate ferrets against rabies.

Ferrets can cost anywhere between $100 and $200. And there are many ferret accouterments  ferret chow, ferret toys, etc.

Ferret fanciers might be able to recoup some of these costs from the county, which has a rebate program for neutering some pets.

Check with your veterinarian to see if he or she is participating. The rebates are for up to $40.

Advertisement

For details, call the Cook County Department of Animal Control at 708-974-6140.

Remember, this program is just for dogs, cats and ferrets.

You are on your own with boa constrictors, which may or may not need neutering. I refuse even to contemplate that question.

Well, where was I?

Guess I was sidetracked.

Back to looking for information on that soft drink tax.

Advertisement

Paul Sassone is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.
Students walk home from May Watts Elementary School at the end of the school day Friday. May Watts in Naperville is one of five elementary schools in District 204 where Asian students are now the largest subgroup in the student population. (Jon Langham / Naperville Sun)

Minority students now make up the majority of children attending Indian Prairie District 204 schools, according to recently released statistics.

For the first time, the district's percentage of white students has dipped below 50 percent, 2016 Illinois Report Card figures show. The numbers reflect data collected in the 2015-16 school year in the district that serves parts of Naperville , Aurora , Bolingbrook and Plainfield .

Of the 28,282 students attending schools in the fourth-largest district in the state, 48 percent are white, 26 percent Asian, 11 percent Hispanic, 9 percent black and the remainder of mixed race, Native American or Pacific Island heritage.

Advertisement

The changing demographic is reflected in most Indian Prairie schools. Two of the district's three high schools, five of the seven middle schools and 14 of the 21 elementary schools are made up mostly of nonwhite students.

The shifting demographics started a little more than a decade ago during Indian Prairie's massive 20-year growing phase.

Advertisement

In 2002, when there were 23,786 students, the ethnic makeup of the largest subgroups in Indian Prairie was 77 percent white, 10 percent Asian, 7 percent black and 5 percent Hispanic.

By 2006, with 4,000 more students enrolled, the makeup shifted to 68 percent white, 14 percent Asian, 9 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic.

Students walk home from May Watts Elementary School at the end of the school day Friday. Watts is one of five elementary schools in District 204 where Asian students are now the largest subgroup in the student population. (Jon Langham / Naperville Sun)

"Overall, Naperville itself has a great reputation," said Krishna Bansal, chairman of Naperville Indian Community Outreach. "Naperville is a great city to live and a great environment for families."

Bansal said the school district draws members of the Indian community who put an emphasis on education as business professionals, doctors, entrepreneurs, franchise owners or specialists in the corporate world.

"We want to get the same things for our kids. We tend to migrate where the education system is better," Bansal said.

While the percentage of African-American students in the district has remained fairly constant, the number of Asian and Hispanic students increased significantly since 1998, when Illinois Report Cards were first issued.

The number rose so much that Asian students now are the largest subgroup in the student population at five elementary schools: Young in Aurora and Cowlishaw, Peterson, Watts and Welch in Naperville. The Asian student population includes Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Pakistani and Vietnamese, to name a few.

At Watts Elementary, 46 percent of the 746 students are of Asian heritage and 38 percent are white. Compare that to 1998, when 87 percent of the school's 720 students were white and 9 percent were Asian.

Advertisement

A little more than 3 miles way, Georgetown Elementary in Aurora saw a significant demographic shift as well.

Of the 566 students at Georgetown, Hispanic students account for 43 percent, 28 percent are white, 17 percent black and 5 percent Asian.

In 1998, more than three-quarters of Georgetown's 632 students were white, 12 percent were black, 6 percent Hispanic and 4 percent Asian.

Longwood Elementary in Naperville is the district's most diverse school, with a roughly a third its 373 students white, another third Hispanic, a fifth black and 13 percent Asian.

That was not the case in 1998, when the student population was 367 and 70 percent of the students were white, 15 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Asian.

What might be the best approach for reaching students at Georgetown is not necessarily the same at Watts Elementary, though both schools have more than 20 percent of their student populations recording limited English proficiency, officials said.

Advertisement

For the last several years, as it became clear that the numbers were changing, officials began taking steps to prepare, Chief Academic Officer Kathy Pease said. One way is through individual school improvement plans, she said.

Leadership teams from each school developed their own strategy for meeting the district's goals and implementing the district curriculum based upon the student population, Pease said. As such, each school might take a different approach to deliver the content and meet the needs of students.

District officials can tell school leaders what students need to learn, but "we can't tell them how," Pease said.

School improvement plans are constantly being updated as new assessment information is added. "It has changed from a document that was filed in a drawer to something that is ongoing and fluid," Pease said.

In addition, organizations such as Indian Prairie's Parent Diversity Advisory Council strive to foster a culture of inclusiveness for all races and genders.

Bansal said District 204 does a good job promoting cultural diversity, but "there still is work that can be done," he said.

Advertisement

For example, he'd like to see Indian Prairie officials adjust how they look at holidays, he said.

Dwali, the festival of lights, is India's biggest holiday of the year and is as important to Hindus as Christmas is to Christians, Bansal said. Although the festival was on a Sunday this year, it will be on a Thursday in 2017.

Schools need to be aware that a number of students might be missing that day to take part in their holiday tradition, he said.

subaker@tribpub.com

Twitter @SBakerSun1
A representative of Naperville's LGBT community said she was "shell-shocked" by Donald Trump's presidential win but it won't make her back down from her pursuit of equal rights. (Seth Wenig / AP)

The election of Donald Trump as the country's 45th president this week drew a wide range of responses from people in and around the Naperville area. Here is what some of them had to say:

'Open season' on LGBT

Advertisement

An active member in the Naperville LGBT community, Eva-Genevieve Scarborough is trying to wrap her head around electing Donald Trump president and Mike Pence vice president.

"I'm numb, shell-shocked. I'm angry," Scarborough said. "I keep asking myself, what did we do wrong? Where did we fall short?"

Advertisement

She said what scares her most is Pence's past efforts as governor of Indiana to fight measures to protect the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Because of that, supporters might get the idea it's "open season" on the LGBT community," she said. "It paints an even bigger target on the back of our heads."

But Scarborough remains hopeful.

"It's not going to send me into hiding. We're going to have to stand together," said Scarborough, who helped organize a Rainbow Circle discussion group. The next meeting will be at 10 a.m. Saturday on the North Central College campus at Kiekhofer Hall, 329 E. School St., Naperville.

She's also concerned about what will happen to the people who've been insured through the Affordable Care Act that Trump threatened to repeal as soon as he gets into office.

"We're going to have to care for the people who get kicked out of the health care system," she said.

To do that, Scarborough is urging Americans to move past the divisive election and work together.

Social media has allowed people to gather in narrow groups with like-minded individuals. "We don't know how to communicate and reach out to others anymore," she said.

Advertisement

Peter LaBarbera is excited to see what will happen once Donald Trump becomes president. LaBarbera is president of Americans for Truth and former executive director of the Illinois Family Institute. (Terry Harris / Chicago Tribune)

System need 'a jolt'

Peter LaBarbera is thrilled by the outcome of Tuesday's election.

"This is a repudiation of the elitism that has come to surround the Democrats," said the Naperville man, who is president of Americans For Truth and a conservative critic of equal rights based on sexual orientation.

LaBarbera said he wouldn't call himself a Trump supporter  he voted for Ted Cruz in the primary. But it was Hillary Clinton's stance on abortion and homosexuality that was in opposition to his faith, he said.

"Hillary Clinton would have threatened liberty itself," he said. "People have to stand by what they believe."

He also said Trump was brilliant tapping into the anger and frustration of "the forgotten man" and "average Joe."

Advertisement

"They felt government did not speak for them. That includes the Clintons, or the Bushes for that matter," LaBarbera said.

As a result, he said, the pundits, media and Democrats were shocked by the strength of Trump's momentum.

LaBarbera also said Republican friends who initially said they would never vote for Trump changed their minds at the last minute.

"I do think this is a huge shift," which LaBarbera described as almost "Reagan-esque," referring to the president's election in 1980.

"The system did need a jolt," he said. "We are going to have to wait and see what a united government will produce."

Aadil Farid, a board member of the Islamic Center of Naperville, shows messages of support given to his organization by Hope United Church of Christ on July 17, 2016. (Genevieve Bookwalter / Naperville Sun)

Muslim leader urges unity

Advertisement

Aadil Farid, a board member for the Islamic Center of Naperville, said he believes it is time to work together and unify the country following the election of Trump, who called for a ban on Muslim immigration during his campaign.

"The people have spoken," Farid said. "There will be differing opinions, but we do believe America has its values intact. We are willing to move forward and work together. It is one nation under God, never different nations within the same nation."

Asked about Trump's comments about immigrants and Muslims, Farid said there are concerns based on statements the president-elect has made, and he wants to make sure all voices are heard.

Farid spoke highly of the democratic process. If the country's new leader continues to create concern, Farid said he plans to work within the boundaries of the law by reaching out to senators and representatives.

"All people of all colors" should be respected, Farid said.

He called the election a "beautiful process" that is now behind us.

Advertisement

"We are the land of the free and home of the brave," he said. "We want to see our great country remain as great."

A representative of the Will County National Organization for Women says five people have contacted the group about joining following Donald Trump's election Tuesday. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

Women's groups embrace action

Expect to see a lot more activism during Trump's presidency from groups such as the American Association of University Women and the National Organization for Women.

While AAUW is nonpartisan, Naperville chapter co-president, Becky Glimco, said that every two years the group defines a list of policies to promote.

For 2015-17, AAUW supports affirmative action to improve racial, ethnic, gender and cultural diversity and inclusion. She said this includes "full rights for women in equal pay and all aspects of access to health care and reproductive choice as well as a fair and just path to legal status for immigrants."

"The rhetoric on the campaign trail was far from this objective and is a cause for concern with the president-elect," Glimco said.

Advertisement

That will not stop AAUW from going after discrimination in the workplace, particularly such issues as tenure in higher education or women in the military.

"Being in a blue state, I think we became insulated," Glimco said. "We know where our starting point is, and we will work from there."

Laura Welch, president of Will County NOW, had expected to be toasting Hillary Clinton as the first female president of the United States.

She said everything NOW stands for is supported by Clinton and the Democratic Party, such as advancing reproductive freedom, promoting diversity, ending racism, stopping violence against women, winning rights for the LGBTQ community, achieving Constitutional equality and ensuring economic justice for all.

"That being said, we are greatly disconcerted that a person with so little respect for women, minorities, people with disabilities and others marginalized by a growing disparity in America can become president," she said.

What Welch finds equally frightening is the possibility of seeing a new U.S. Supreme Court justice who "shares those values due to the control the Republican Party will have (over) our entire federal government."

Advertisement

She said NOW must work within local and state governments to bring forth more candidates that support the group's agenda.

"With the candidacies of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders, we need to continue the engagement of the young voters who were so energized, and we need to encourage those who support Hillary to not go silent," she said.

Organized a year ago, Will County NOW, which draws many people from Naperville, already is growing as a result of the election.

Welch said five people reached out to her group asking how they can get involved.

"I think we are going to have a groundswell of support," she said.

NAACP sees fight ahead

Advertisement

Not even 48 hours after Trump was elected, DuPage County NAACP president Michael Childress was stressing how the time to organize is now.

With Trump's stance on the Affordable Care Act, racial profiling, same-sex marriage, women's reproductive rights and voting rights  among other topics  Childress says action must be taken before the next election.

"We can't wait four years. We have to focus on the House of Representatives and the Senate," Childress said. "The Senate could really swing one way or another if we don't mobilize now."

Childress says many people are still stunned with the results, but losing hope is not an option.

"I really have a lot of trepidation about it, but we can't give up," Childress said. "Things have been a lot worse in the past for people of color."

Not giving up means taking action in a three-pronged approach: Voter registration, voter education and voter mobilization are the focus now, Childress said.

Advertisement

"If we work hard and stay focused on these key items, we have an opportunity to win back the House of Representatives in two years," Childress said.

When it comes to looking at why Clinton didn't garner enough votes, Childress points to the diversity that makes up the Democratic party. Each diverse group is often looking for the "perfect candidate" to address their needs. "Until the Democrats realize there is no such thing as the perfect candidate, these election results will continue," Childress said.

Despite Trump's win, Childress says he is proud of how Illinoisans voted as a whole. He gives a nod to Hillary Clinton's "landslide" win in Illinois and the election of U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth to U.S. Senate and Raja Krishnamoorthi to the U.S. House.

'Scary times' for Hispanics

Trump's call to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and to crack down on immigration has some Latino leaders concerned. Robert Renteria, a Latino author and activist from North Aurora, said the country needs to try and stay together and work for the common good.

"Donald Trump, without question, woke up the silent majority who believed that their voices and votes did not matter," he said. "But because people finally had a chance to be heard, America will hopefully have a president who can unite a divided nation."

Advertisement

Alex Perez, the 25-year-old coordinator of cable access for the city of Aurora, said Trump's election is worrisome.

"I have definite legitimate concerns," Perez said. "These are scary times, but America has spoken, and I will honor what the country has decided. They want change."

And while Perez, who is also gathering signatures now to run for District 131 School Board, says he does not support the rhetoric of Trump's campaign that has "created more racial tension," he does not "want to deepen the divide."

Chicago-area Trump supporters feel vindicated

"This is just day one," he noted. "We will see what happens."
A majority of voters in the City of Naperville voted "yes" to abolishing townships within the city limits if services could be provided at a more cost-effective price by another organization. (Jane Donahue / Naperville Sun)

Six townships have boundaries that cross into portions of Naperville, all of which would be abolished within the city if the majority of residents who cast ballots on a referendum question Tuesday had their way.

In Will County, 80 percent of voters said Naperville should get rid of townships within city limits, and 78 percent of Naperville residents living in DuPage County said the same.

Advertisement

The ballot question was not binding so the city does not have to take action, but Naperville City Councilman Kevin Coyne said it clearly shows residents are on board with getting rid of townships in the city in order to save money.

Coyne introduced the referendum question, which was put to voters with the blessing of the city council, in response to the Naperville Township highway commissioner's decision to reject a city proposal to take over road maintenance work in a move that city officials said could have saved taxpayers as much as $800,000 annually. A nonbinding referendum question asking if voters supported the city maintaining township roads also passed by a large margin.

Advertisement

"Voters are tired of government waste," Coyne said. "When the opportunity arises for partnership between any kind of government operations, those opportunities should be taken advantage of."

Naperville Township Supervisor Rachel Ossyra, who ran as a reform candidate for her position in 2013, said that with 78 percent of voters saying "yes"' to the abolishment question, it almost serves as a mandate for the city to take action.

"Township governments in metro areas, they're not the most effective or efficient," Ossyra said. "They do play an important role, but they're not the final answer."

Ossyra said Naperville Township provides services to about 2,000 city of Naperville residents every month, with most of its programs geared toward seniors and the economically disadvantaged. The programs and services wouldn't go away, she said, but could be consolidated and streamlined.

"We don't want to lose those personal touches, but it does make sense to look at modernizing," she said.

DuPage Township covers a small portion of southeast Naperville. Township Supervisor Bill Mayer said township services are crucial to vulnerable populations that a municipality might not be able to help.

"If the township is doing its job effectively, it's helping people who are falling through the cracks," Mayer said. "A city or village is not mandated to be that safety net."

The other townships that cross into Naperville are Lisle, Wheatland, Winfield and Milton.

Advertisement

Residents in the city of Evanston voted in 2014 to abolish the Evanston Township, which had the same boundaries as the city. Voters approved the binding referendum question by a margin of about two-to-one, and the city took over the township services.

While there is no plan yet to get rid of the townships in the city of Naperville, it is not clear how the city would proceed in order to make that happen. It is unclear if the townships could be abolished in one action or on a one-by-one basis.

ehegarty@tribpub.com
University of California Los Angeles students march on November 10, 2016 in Los Angeles, California, during a "Love Trumps Hate" rally in reaction to President-elect Donald Trump's victory in the presidential elections. (Frederick J. Brown / AFP/Getty Images)

College students will march through Naperville Friday to demonstrate in a "March in Solidarity" following Republican Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election.

Members of North Central College Democrat Club and other student organizations will be participating in the event that begins at 4 p.m. near Fredenhagen Park fountain at the Riverwalk in downtown Naperville. The march will take participants through the college campus.

Advertisement

"It's more of a preach-the-love kind of thing than an anti-Trump protest," said Emily Adams, a North Central student from Wisconsin. She said the theme will pick up Democrat Hillary Clinton's theme of "Love Trumps Hate."

The event is open to all, and participants are encouraged to wear all black, Adams said.

Advertisement

"The purpose of this march is to show that despite the political divisiveness in our country, minorities will always be on the side of love," according to a description on the event's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/events/688565137966067/.
Brunch is ideal on those glorious days when you're able to turn off the alarm clock and enjoy a few extra hours of sleep. As you rise, your stomach grumbles for the purity of eggs but also for something hearty and flavorful with something sweet tossed in. This moment of appetite indecision is what Michael LaPidus wants to address with a new weekend brunch menu at Q-BBQ, the fast-casual restaurant with locations in Naperville, La Grange, Oak Park and Schererville, Ind.

"We are constantly innovating, and we're looking for a new way to shake things up," LaPidus said. "There are no rules when it comes to brunch, so we decided to see what we could do."

Advertisement

Everything from pork to beef to chicken can be part of brunch when mixed with other breakfast favorites. For example, LaPidus' new menu has a dish that begins with familiar hash brown potatoes. Then corn, black beans, chopped red onion and pan-fried Brussels sprouts are tossed into the mix.

The next ingredient added to the potatoes are burnt ends. "If you don't know brisket, you don't know burnt ends," said Adam Chellberg, part of Q-BBQ's staff. "They are kept secret by pit masters."

Advertisement

To make burnt ends at Q-BBQ, a brisket is rubbed with herbs and spices, smoked for 22 hours and then cut into small chunks. These tender chunks are rubbed with a mix of paprika, brown sugar and other ingredients and tossed into the smoker for another couple hours until the edges are crispy and caramelized.

"I like to think of it as beef jerky meets a grilled filet," LaPidus said. The potato and burnt end mixture is seasoned, piled onto a plate and then topped with two sunny side up eggs.

LaPidus said there are many ways that meat can be paired with breakfast foods like eggs and potatoes to create great brunch dishes.

"My aunt is from lower Alabama  we used to say she was from L.A.  and she used to make a poor man's eggs Benedict that was biscuits topped with sausage links and eggs and covered with gravy," he said. He created a menu item called Alabama Benedict similar to this childhood dish in her honor.

"Actually, leftovers from dinner are great for brunch," LaPidus said. "Cut up leftover meat and mix it with eggs and potatoes and you have brunch. Just use the eggs and potatoes to pull it all together."

LaPidus said that although the ingredients are piled together, each one should still have its own flavor and texture in a brunch dish. Instead of a stew-like quality where everything melds together, the different components should each bring their own textures and flavors. For example, Q-BBQ offers a chicken and waffle combination that begins with a sugar encrusted Belgian waffle that is sweet and crispy. Next, there is a layer of smooth and creamy buttermilk mashed potatoes. Then, at the very top, there are savory, crispy chicken strips.

"And then, you can add the smoked maple syrup," said LaPidus, who takes pride in adding smoke to as many dishes as possible from sauces to syrup.

Another interesting brunch item is cornbread French toast. LaPidus noted many kinds of bread can be dipped into a batter and fried until crispy and brown to make French toast.

Advertisement

"When we were testing things for the menus, we had some leftover cornbread and decided to try it. We all tasted it and said, 'Wow, this is really good.' The cornbread is sort of savory and sweet with the crispy edges from browning it."

Cornbread is more challenging to dip and fry than other breads. Chef Luis Najera carefully lowers the cornbread into the batter with a spatula, pulls it back up and then gently slides it into the frying pan. He carefully holds onto the top as he slides the spatula under the cornbread to flip it. The naturally crumbly bread remains intact due to his gentle methods.

While Q-BBQ is "smoking" brunch on Saturdays and Sundays, LaPidus offers recipes for two of their brunch specialties for people to try at home.

Cornbread French toast

1 cup milk

2 teaspoons cinnamon

Advertisement

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 egg

2 pieces of day old cornbread

1 tablespoon butter

1. To make batter, whisk together milk, cinnamon, vanilla and egg in a shallow dish wide enough to fit cornbread slice. Heat butter in a pan over medium heat.

2. Carefully set one piece of cornbread into the batter and allow to set about 10 seconds to soak up batter. Flip over and dip other side. With a spatula, lift cornbread out of batter and slide into heated pan. Repeat for second piece of cornbread.

Advertisement

3. Cook 2 to 3 minutes on each side or until golden brown and crispy on the outside. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and drizzle with maple syrup.

Alabama Benedict

1 buttermilk biscuit

3 ounces pulled pork

4 ounces white sausage gravy

1 egg

Advertisement

1. Cut buttermilk biscuit in half, lengthwise. Pile pulled pork on halved biscuits. Start heating your favorite white sausage gravy (one seasoned with sage is preferred).

2. Fry or poach an egg to your desired hardness. Ladle gravy over biscuits. Place cooked egg on top and enjoy.

Michael's Culinary Cue

When making French toast, use bread that is at least a day old for the best results because it is firmer and will soak up the batter better without becoming soggy. Try different types of bread like raisin bread or brioche for interesting variations.
A proposed 8.9 percent increase to the village of Oak Parks property tax levy next year would allow the village to contribute $1.5 million to its firefighter pension fund. (Steve Schering / Pioneer Press)

A proposed increase to its municipal property tax could generate millions of dollars for the village of Oak Park, which plans to use the money to address infrastructure needs and pension shortfalls, officials said.

During a Nov. 7 public hearing, village officials announced a plan to seek an 8.9 percent property tax increase in the upcoming fiscal year. The increase is expected to become final with the adoption of the 2017 village budget next month.

Advertisement

According to a village memo, the total levy for next year calls for an increase of $4,264,652, which will bring the village's expected total levy up to a potential $30,884,469 for the 2017 fiscal year.

The plan calls for a $468,510 increase to the police pension fund, a $2,027,072 increase to the fire pension fund and a $2,170,000 increase to the village's general operations fund.

Advertisement

"The finance committee has made a recommendation that the firefighter pension fund receive an additional $1.5 million this year," Village Manager Cara Pavlicek said. "It is a first step toward beginning to work more aggressively to bring [the firefighter pension fund] up to the same level as the police officer's fund, and then to have a multi-year plan to address the funding level of [those funds]."

Pavlicek said the village's firefighter pension fund is less than 40 percent funded, while the police pension fund is slightly more than 50 percent funded.

Trustee Bob Tucker said the proposal has been discussed for weeks with the village's finance committee, and said it was his suggestion to contribute more to the funds.

"It's really a notion to bring some equity between our two largest departments within the village," Tucker said. "This is a small step. The funding of pensions in all municipalities in Illinois is a very difficult proposition. I think it's the responsibility of the community to fund those pensions at the proper level."

Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb said the village doesn't have a pension crisis, but rather a revenue crisis. He said in 12 of the last 15 years, the village spent more money than it took in.

"We cannot continue to have expenditures higher than our revenue," Abu-Taleb said. "In my view, we have a pension situation that's being dictated by the state, and it's up to our municipality to fulfill this promise. It's embarrassing to have our pension below 40 percent for the firefighters. It's important for us not to sugarcoat it."

Officials also pledged to use some of the additional money in next year's budget to address various infrastructure needs throughout the village.

"We have aging infrastructure," Abu-Taleb said. "We can wait until we are in a bad need, or we can prepare for the future. Right now, I feel we have the responsibility to prepare for the future."

Advertisement

According to Pavlicek, the village board will hold a public hearing on its full proposed budget on Nov. 21, with the expectation of adopting a final budget Dec. 5.
Caitlin Pecoraro, 15, in a flowing ivory dress, center, is a sophomore from Chicago. The play "Cinderella" will be staged at Trinity High School, 7574 W. Division St. in River Forest. From left are Jenny Yaccino of Melrose Park, Kathleen Burns of Riverside, Victoria Karavitis of Westchester, Maura Flanagan of Forest Park and Brianna Little of Brookfield. (Karie Angell Luc / Pioneer Press)

Just the right shoe means just the right fit, for Caitlin Pecoraro, 15, a Trinity High School sophomore who is excited to be cast in the lead role in the school's upcoming production of "Cinderella."

"This is my first play, and I love it," said Pecoraro of Chicago. "I couldn't have picked a better role. Cinderella has always been my favorite princess, so it's really cool."

Advertisement

"Cinderella," the 2013 Broadway production, is being staged Nov. 18, Nov. 19 and Nov. 20 in River Forest. The Nov. 18 and Nov. 19 shows are at 7 p.m. in the school's auditorium at 7574 W. Division St. The Nov. 20 show is a 2 p.m. matinee.

"The takeaway is empowerment," said Pat Henderson of Portage Park, theater director and theater teacher. "The prince is out killing dragons and slaying giants. Cinderella gets him through. You still have the classic love story ... But Cinderella teaches him to be a better person."

Advertisement

Prince Topher is played by Joseph Frantzen, 15, of Oak Park, a freshman from Oak Park and River Forest High School.

"He's a little airheaded, but he means well," Frantzen said of the prince.

Frantzen added, "Cinderella grows up in these awful, awful circumstances. She feels like she is never really going to go anywhere because she is bossed around her whole life. But despite everything, she was still a kind person. The whole time, she believed in herself."

Caitlin Daza, 17, of Elmwood Park and a Trinity High School senior, is the Fairy Godmother.

Caitlin Daza, 17, left, a Trinity High School senior from Elmwood Park, is the Fairy Godmother in "Cinderella," staged at Trinity High School, 7574 W. Division St. in River Forest. At right is Caitlin Pecoraro, 15, a sophomore from Chicago as Cinderella. (Karie Angell Luc / Pioneer Press)

"I've had a lot of roles throughout my high school career, and this is definitely the most challenging and the most rewarding role for me," Daza said. "I'm very honored to be playing the Fairy Godmother.

What's the lesson of the story?

"I think the message of Cinderella is to really follow your dreams and overcome adversities that come your way and that that anything is possible," Daza said.

Approximately 100 students comprise the cast and crew plus one dozen Benet Academy orchestra pit members. Nearly 30 cast members come from local middle and grade school students. International Baccalaureate Program dancers from the all-female enrollment school also perform.

Advertisement

Caitlin Daza, 17, a Trinity High School senior from Elmwood Park, is the Fairy Godmother in "Cinderella," staged at Trinity High School. (Karie Angell Luc / Pioneer Press)

Male leads are sourced from OPRF and Elmwood Park High School. Joseph Klockenkemper of Elmwood Park High School plays antagonist Jean-Michel.

"This is elaborate, wait until you see it!" Henderson said. "It's unbelievable."

Trinity High School art students under teacher Pam Costello's direction painted the kingdom landscape, Henderson said, adding, "That's pretty cool."

She said the art students also did a great job painting the prop balcony.

"I am so excited about it," Henderson said. "I love the show. It's fabulous!"

Get tickets (adults and seniors $10, children and students $5) at www.trinityhs.org/cinderella.

Advertisement

Karie Angell Luc is a freelance photographer and reporter for Pioneer Press.
Liz Monroe-Cook lights her candle from Hajjar Mohanned-Herbert, who wore a head scarf in support of her relatives during the Oak Park Solidarity Walk. (Kevin Tanaka / Pioneer Press)

Dima Ali, an Oak Park resident and a Muslim, said she doesn't normally wear her hijab, but she chose to don the head scarf during a march Thursday night in which about 200 Oak Park community members gathered in solidarity against hateful rhetoric.

The event was inspired by the election of Donald J. Trump, who made numerous controversial statements during his presidential campaign, including a promise to halt Muslim immigration to the United States.

Advertisement

Ali, 40, said she emigrated to the U.S. from Iraq 16 years ago to escape the same sort of cultural divisiveness she said is not apparent in the U.S. Though she's been nervous to leave her home since Trump won the election, she said she wore her hijab to make a statement that she will not be cowed by fear and she stands with her fellow Muslims against Islamophobia.

"I'm worried about the hate that is all of a sudden out in the open," she said. Ali said the rhetoric she's heard from the Trump campaign and some of his supporters has her alarmed and she's scared for the country's future. She said the election is, for her, a "traumatic" reminder of the country she left behind and what she hoped America never would be. Her concerns about which direction the U.S. would head under a Trump were shared by many of the residents who participated in Thursday night's demonstration.

Advertisement

Attendees chanted "Love Trumps Hate" as they marched in a several block radius around Buzz Cafe on South Lombard Avenue while many held real and faux candles. The group that gathered was predominantly white, and participants ranged in age from infants to senior citizens.

The peaceful event was organized by Oak Park residents Nell McNamara and Emma Arnold and was intended as a political demonstration and a show of solidarity against "Trump's bigotry, xenophobia, Islamophobia and misogyny," said McNamara, 35.

At the end of the march, McNamara's husband, Cameron McLaughlin, 36, hopped onto a sidewalk bench across the street from Buzz Cafe with his 2-year-old son wrapped around his abdomen.

While his son clung to him, McLaughlin assured the crowd that more action would follow Thursday night's demonstration. He said a Facebook group would be created and more demonstrations would be planned.

"As a white man born in America, able-bodied, straight, I feel afraid for what has happened this week, and I can't imagine how the rest of you feel," he told the crowd.

Like so many of the marchers gathered, Oak Park residents Pam Steigman, 47, and Ardith Zucker, 47, said Donald Trump's win shocked them.

"From the beginning, we never really took him seriously, " Steigman said.

Trump's election, however, "affects our family a lot," said Zucker. As same-sex partners and as Jews with a 2-year-old African American daughter, who they brought with them to the march, the couple said they're afraid for what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for their family.

Advertisement

"The fact that so many women voted for him -- that fact is incomprehensible," Steigman said. A decade-old recording of the president-elect using vulgar language to describe how he sexually assaulted women surfaced about a month before voters went to the polls. Trump apologized for the remarks.

Looking ahead, Zucker said her top priority will be to "protect our family."

Sixteen-year-old Oak Park River Forest High School student Henry Wolff, who also attended Thursday's march, said he's worried about the "potential for social regression under Trump and (Vice President-elect) Mike Pence."

Wolff said many of his peers at OPRF were similarly shocked by and concerned about Trump's victory. He said most of the high school students he's talked to have expressed a great deal of sadness, surprise and some have cried over the outcome of the election.

"It's like teenage emotions times 100," Wolff said.

Simone Boutet, 52, who is running for Oak Park village trustee this spring, also took to the sidewalk bench to address the crowd. She urged those in attendance to do more than just participate in a march; she encouraged community members to donate to local nonprofit organizations, to causes they support, to work the polls and called upon artists to continue creating.

Advertisement

"Keep yourselves involved in democracy," she said.

Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Social media are changing the face of elections, and candidates who effectively tap into social media are finding a new level of engagement with their electorate, experts and politicians say.

Facebook and Twitter, among other social media networks, played a bigger role than ever in the 2016 campaign season, and experts say that trend is only going to continue.

Advertisement

Subir Bandyopadhyay, professor of marketing at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, said out of the $8 billion spent on the 2016 election season, $1 billion of that was spent on digital media. Social media were so big on the national level that most candidates had both a communications manager and a digital manager, a specialist to handle social media.

"There's a legitimacy. (Social media) is no longer an iffy, doubtful kind of media. That's a tremendous strength. That strength gives power to candidates. It gives you a leg up," Bandyopadhyay said.

Advertisement

Social media offer several advantages to savvy candidates. The platforms are instantaneous, allowing candidates immediate access to who they are trying to reach. There is also a new accountability with social media; constituents can interact with candidates on a level never before experienced.

It is the immediacy and the interaction that can also pose challenges for candidates, he said. Negative responses to social media posts can be dangerous to a campaign, he said.

"Like a genie when it comes out of bottle, it gives you a lot of power. If it's not handled properly, you have to deal with that," Bandyopadhyay said.

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr., a Democrat locally renowned for his frank and sometimes inflammatory tweets and posts to Facebook, said he started with Facebook in 2008 and Twitter in 2014. He said his social media accounts, combined with those of his wife, Marissa McDermott, helped them reach thousands during her successful judicial bid.

"It allows us as elected officials and politicians to put our platform out there," Mayor McDermott said, adding that it also helps to personalize a politician. McDermott said his social media feeds are a mix of political material and things such as posts about the Cubs' World Series win, his children and even bicycle rides.

"It's like a window into your soul. If you look at my Facebook, you see what kind of person I am. You have a window into who Tom McDermott is," he said.

That connectively engages voters. He said President-elect Donald Trump, who tweeted without filter for most of the campaign, successfully used his Twitter account to connect with his base. McDermott said he also posts his own tweets and Facebook posts, which means he has to act as his own gatekeeper, which can be a challenge.

Social media are a supplement to traditional news sources. McDermott said he can supplement coverage of a topic in traditional media with details that those mediums do not have space to accommodate.

Advertisement

"It almost levels the playing fields," McDermott said.

Bandyopadhyay said social media are actionable platforms. Candidates have the ability to organize through social media. They can call together a rally, conduct polls, raise funds or solicit volunteers through social media, he said. Based on responses, they can change their message or direction as needed.

Trump brought social media to a new level in the 2016 campaign. Bandyopadhyay said that through his tweets, Trump was able to control the news cycle and direct attention to whatever he was tweeting about and away from information from which he wanted to distract voters.

Matt Reardon, who helped his wife, Democrat Mara Candelaria Reardon, successfully recapture the 12th District seat in the Indiana House in Tuesday's election, said social media were useful for the campaign. Reardon said he saw how Trump was using social media as an effective way to reach a large number of people.

"It's a pretty good way to get your message out and a really good start for free," Reardon said. Social media complement traditional campaign advertising, be it targeted mailers or newspaper, radio and television advertising.

"It was a great complement to the messaging," Reardon said.

Advertisement

Bandyopadhyay said social media give candidates an unprecedented platform to put their information before the population and to address misinformation that may be circulating.

Reardon said the campaign was successful in using social media to combat specific claims by Candelaria Reardon's opponent, Rep. Bill Fine, of Munster.

"In our experience and understanding, the availability of information and sharing of facts is key to allowing people to make informed decisions. It helps to remove emotion from some of the political decisions if you have the facts in front of you," Reardon said.

Carrie Napoleon is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Veteran B. J. Fitzgerald plays Taps during the Veterans Day service in front of the old Lake County Courthouse in Crown Point, In., on Nov. 11, 2016. (John Smierciak / Post-Tribune)

Veterans and their supporters gathered in front of the historic Lake County Courthouse in downtown Crown Point Friday to pay tribute to those serving past and present.

Crown Point Mayor David Uran and Lake County Councilman Eldon Strong, R-Crown Point, joined former Mayor James Forsythe with American Legion Post 20 to celebrate the men and women of the armed forces.

Advertisement

Uran said it is our veterans who have sacrificed for the flag and what it stands for and called on everybody to remember those who served whenever they see the American flag.

"We all need to respect this nation and stand for our flag without question," Uran said, emphasizing "stand." He encouraged those present to reach out to veterans and their families to show support.

Advertisement

Strong said to date more than 57 million Americans have served in the armed forces and that veterans should be celebrated on this day and every day.

"I pray the country always has brave men and women to protect us," Strong said.

Forsythe recognized the active duty service members in the crowd, Staff Sgt. Anthony Dalgaard and Staff Sgt. Joseph Von Bank.

Dalgaard, an Army recruiter in Merrillville who has served in Iraq and Kuwait, said Veterans Day programs like the one in Crown Point are something that all people can get behind after a week that revealed a deep divide in the nation. He said all people can show their support for veterans and the sacrifice they have made.

"Everyone bleeds red," Dalgaard said.

Carrie Napoleon is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
The American flag wraps around Valparaiso firefighter Danny Dever as the wind whips up during Veterans Day memorial services at the Valparaiso service memorial on Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Mark Davis / Post-Tribune)

Bob Carnagey said it took him "a long time" to feel like he was a veteran.

"I feel as though I'm representing a lot of people, because our military family in any community is much larger than you can imagine," the Vietnam veteran told about 50 people gathered in blustery winds and increasingly darkening skies for Friday's Veterans Day program, the Service Memorial at Foundation Meadows.

Advertisement

The plaza was established in 2003 to recognize and encourage acts of courage from members of the community, including teachers, pastors and scout leaders, and gives greatest prominence to those who serve in public safety and the military, said John Seibert, director of Valparaiso's parks and recreation department.

"On this day, we recognize those who have served our country and continue to serve our country, and have given the ultimate sacrifice," he said.

Advertisement

Carnagey, who is active in a wide array of veterans groups and military charities, landed in Vietnam in the late 1960s after flunking out of college and found himself volunteering at an orphanage on a Sunday, he said.

"There were 100 kids in the heart of Saigon and half of them were naked," he said, and a UNICEF refrigerator to hold scant food.

When his family asked what they could do, they sent boxes of clothing. When his sergeant asked what he could do, he sent pallets of food.

"Even in the midst of very bad things, good things can happen," Carnagey said.

And there were very bad things. One of Carnagey's buddies was sent to a mountain post and never returned, he said. Another friend was killed shortly after Carnagey returned home.

"I said, 'I don't even know how to be a veteran,' so I didn't do much," he said.

Then, in 1986, he went into downtown Chicago for work on the day of a "welcome home" parade for veterans with his army jacket with him. His co-workers, who didn't know he'd served in the military, told him to go to the parade.

So he did, and witnessed the parade leader, a veteran with no legs walking on gloved hands. When an Indiana unit passed, he joined them.

Advertisement

"There was a solid line of people and paper coming down from all the buildings," he said, adding he felt like a veteran, finally, when the parade turned on Monroe Street.

A World War II veteran asked Carnagey if he could join in, because he'd never received that welcome. Carnagey welcomed him. 'That's what a veteran does. They remember and remember and remember, because that's when the healing process begins," he said.

Six years ago, Carnagey became involved in Folds of Honor, which provides scholarships to children and spouses of soldiers killed or disabled through their military service.

He also was instrumental in starting the Sapper Six Memorial Run, to honor the six members of the 713th Engineering Company, based at the National Guard Armory in Valparaiso, killed in two separate incidents in 2012.

Friday's ceremony including ringing a chime made from a large, red "picket pounder" with the names of those soldiers on it, in conjunction with reading the names of Valparaiso veterans who lost their lives in service that are engraved in the Duty and Sacrifice Wall at the park.

"It doesn't matter if it's Memorial Day or Veterans Day, they're veterans," Carnagey said.

Advertisement

Joe Clifford, who served in Korea, said he's been going to the Veterans Day program ever since it started. The Valparaiso resident, who lives nearby, said he comes mainly because of his brother, who served in World War II and Korea and recently died.

"It's an honor and a privilege to be a veteran who made it home and I come here to pay respects for all those who didn't," he said.

Amy Lavalley is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Artem Kovchenkov and his son Vanya, from Elektrostal, Russia, visited Northwest Indiana during the presidential election. The financial consultant has a unique viewpoint on President-elect Donald Trump's shocking victory. (Jerry Davich / Post-Tribune)

Artem Kovchenkov is a supporter of President-elect Donald J. Trump, although he didn't vote for him. He's not legally allowed to.

He lives in Elektrostal, Russia, a city of 160,000 residents located 35 miles east of Moscow.

Advertisement

"I believe Trump really wants to make the United States great, from the inside," said Kovchenkov.

Like most of his countrymen in Russia, Kovchenkov kept a sharp eye on the recent presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Advertisement

"The election was discussed very much because the two candidates have diametrically opposed views on foreign policy," said Kovchenkov, 37, who has earned two degrees, one in economy, the other in law.

I met Kovchenkov just before Election Day, during his visit to Northwest Indiana to meet a mutual friend of ours. This was his first visit to our country. He brought along his young son, Vanya, who looked just as open-eyed about our region as his father during their week-long stay.

We shared breakfast and lighthearted chit-chat that day, but I stayed in contact with him as Election Day came and went.

"Most people in Russia sympathize with Donald Trump because his views on foreign and domestic policies seem more reasonable and practical than Hillary Clinton's," he told me after Trump's victory. "I think Hillary was just trying to divert the attention of voters from her failures."

"Unlike Hillary, he is not aimed at the unleashing of international conflicts and wars," Kovchenkov explained. "And he plans to dissect the domestic problems of the United States, as well as to build a pragmatic relationship with your international partners."

This is an intriguing perception of Trump from a foreign citizen who clearly understands the historical tension between his country and ours. This perception flies in the face of how most Americans (including many of his supporters) perceive our new president-elect, whose inflammatory rhetoric stood out during the campaign.

Kovchenkov told me he harbors "positive and hopeful feelings," same as many of his fellow Russian citizens.

"We hope that relations between our countries will become friendly, warm and a partnership," he told me.

Advertisement

Is this wishful thinking? Of course.

Most Americans now harbor similar wishful thinking in regard to Trump's upcoming presidential term. What other recourse do we have at this point?

I asked Kovchenkov his thoughts on Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was quick to congratulate Trump after his victory.

"He spoke about resuming and restoring relations with Russia," Putin told his citizens via Russian state television. "We understand the way to that will be difficult, taking into account the current state of degradation of relations between the U.S. and Russia."

"As I have repeatedly said, that is not our fault that Russia-U.S. relations are in that state," Putin told viewers. "Russia is ready and wants to restore the fully fledged relations with the U.S. I repeat, we understand this will be difficult, but we are ready to play our part in it."

Kovchenkov, who works for an investment company in Moscow, conducts commercial legal work and investment strategies as an attorney. He wants to believe in Putin's promises, just as we want to believe in Trump's promises regarding this country's relationship with our Cold War foe. But Kovchenkov stops short of blind faith in Putin.

Advertisement

"Nobody in Russia believes in Putin's connections with (Trump)," Kovchenkov said.

Similarly, not everyone in Russia believes Trump's campaign explanations regarding his business and political ties with Putin.

"Winter Is Here," tweeted Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster after Trump's victory. If you recall, Kasparov wrote the highly critical book, "Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped."

For more than a decade, Kasparov has been an outspoken critic of Putin, to the point of trying to steer the country's pro-democracy opposition to Putin in its 2008 presidential election.

"For as long as the world's powerful democracies continue to recognize and negotiate with Putin, he can maintain credibility in his home country," Kasparov writes in his 2015 book. "He faces few strong enemies within his country, so meaningful opposition must come from abroad."

Will this opposition come from Trump in 2017 and beyond? Again, time will tell.

Advertisement

Post Tribune Twice-weekly News updates from Northwest Indiana delivered every Monday and Wednesday >

As we learned from all those so-called political experts leading up to Election Day, Trump is an international X-factor that no one has yet figured out.

Before Kovchenkov returned to Elektrostal, he took several cruises through Northwest Indiana, finding more similarities than differences with his own city and its surrounding region.

"I felt like I was in Russia while looking through the car window," he said, sporting souvenirs of Chicago Cubs shirts and caps.

In light of our two countries' obvious obstacles and fears, possibly even more so under Trump's rule, Kovchenkov said his country's people want the same as our country's people.

"The same worries, the same problems, the same reasons for gladness, the same wishes, and the same hopes," he said.

jdavich@post-trib.com

Advertisement

Twitter@jdavich
Jim Chancellor, of Lowell, served in the Vietnam War as a door gunner on a helicopter, shown here in 1970. (Jim Chancellor / Provided by Jim Chancellor)

Military veterans' service to our country, regardless if they were drafted or enlisted, is one of most admirable acts of American citizenship.

What they do with their lives after serving Uncle Sam, however, can be just as admirable, if not more, depending on their deeds as a civilian. I often wonder why some civic-minded veterans return home to continue battling on behalf of other vets, while others return home and want nothing to do with duty of any kind.

Advertisement

I routinely ask this question to vets whom I meet at public functions or private events. My open-ended query typically triggers responses that are either packed with strong opinions or a shrug of their shoulders.

A soldier's service to our country, and his or her role in the military, is largely dictated by policy and procedure, once they sign on the dotted line. But their continued service to our country after being discharged, or after retiring, is entirely based on their values, character and personality.

Advertisement

"Your question is a tough one that many people much smarter than I have been trying to figure out for a long time," replied Jim Chancellor of Lowell, a Vietnam War veteran. "Every veteran's story is different, and every veteran's transition can be different. Nothing is written in stone."

Chancellor, who was drafted in 1969, said there are two major factors involved in determining a vet's civilian life and any leanings toward civic duty after military duty.

"First, the degree of combat you experienced and, second, if you return to a structured family and life," he said. "For example, if you returned home and your father was a World War II veteran who was involved with the VFW or American Legion. Then you would likely follow him into such a life after war."

"If you returned to a non-veteran family, but a family with a strong structure, than perhaps you would follow the expectations of your family and just bury the war," he added.

"It's not just a matter of putting on your big boy pants and dealing with it," he said. "I have shared conversations with veterans that started with, 'I'm OK, I don't think there is anything wrong with me,' but which ended up in tears."

When Chancellor co-hosts workshops for local vets on post-traumatic stress disorder, he first makes sure his audience knows two things: First, the majority of vets have mainstreamed back into society by leading happy and healthy lives, though there are some vets who struggle to do so.

"Second, PTSD isn't what is wrong with you. It's something that happened to you," he said.

Such combat-related trauma plays a huge role in how vets act, or react, in civilian life.

Advertisement

I specifically asked Chancellor my routine question after hearing about his history in combat and his history after returning home.

After being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1969, he served in combat as a door gunner on a helicopter flying low over enemy territory in Vietnam. In 1970, his chopper was shot down and he was later awarded a Purple Heart and other military honors.

He's proud of these medals, of course, and for his combat duty in that controversial war. But I believe he's just as proud for his work on behalf of veterans' issues after returning home from Vietnam.

"My dedication to our veterans began in the early 1970s with a 50-mile walk to raise monies for the families of our POW's here in Indiana," he told me. "It continues today with our work on educating our youth on PTSD and the total cost of war. It's been a long journey for me since Vietnam."

His journey culminated earlier this month when he was inducted into the Indiana Military Veterans Hall of Fame, along with 11 other Hoosier vets this year. Some of those vets are deceased, others are older than Chancellor, who's 66.

"Veterans from all branches of the U.S. armed forces, living or deceased, are considered equally," said Mark Moulton, administrative director for the nonprofit organization. "The purpose of the organization is to publicly emphasize the honor brought to our state and nation by the sacrifices of Indiana military veterans."

Advertisement

The organization honors veterans for their military service achievements as well as for honorable service afterward and for community contributions. Each nomination package (61 this year) is reviewed by a committee comprised of veterans, and scored accordingly.

This year marks the group's third year of inductions, bringing the total number of inductees to 46.

"My award, I believe, has more to do with my dedication to our veterans and their families today than my military service," Chancellor said. "I was very honored and extremely humbled by this award because I know there are many veterans who work tirelessly to better the lives of our veterans."

This brings me back to my initial question for him, the same routine query I ask most vets, especially on Veterans Day.

"Jerry, there are no right or wrong answers," Chancellor replied. "I just don't know why our veterans act the way they do, or even why they say the things they say."

"I just know that war can be hell on the very people who fight and die for our freedom," he said.

Advertisement

Helping homeless veterans today

Everyone talks about our homeless military veterans  a national disgrace, I say  but few of us (including me) do anything about it. Today, here's how you can do something to help, and it involves pizza so you know why I'm enlisting.

Post Tribune Twice-weekly News updates from Northwest Indiana delivered every Monday and Wednesday >

The National Exchange Clubs and Veterans Matter program have partnered to host "Raising Dough for Our Vets." The Portage Exchange Club has invited every pizza joint in the city to offer a donation for every pizza sold between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Friday.

At least seven pizza businesses in Portage are taking part in the program, with some donating $1 for every pizza sold and others donating a percentage of Friday's sales. Those donations will provide deposits needed to obtain housing for homeless vets across the state and in this region.

"The reality that any veteran is homeless, let alone nearly 50,000 of them, is a stain on our nation's honor," said Brad Clapp, Portage Exchange Club president. "But we don't have to be powerless. Working together, we can make a difference."

To date, Indiana has housed nearly 150 veterans through this program, with the average cost for each deposit costing roughly $750, said Clapp, who will be a guest on my Casual Fridays radio show at noon Friday on WLPR, 89.1-FM.

Advertisement

In Portage, participating pizza restaurants include Gelsosomo's, Cappo's, Domino's, Cici's, Bam, Salvora's and Santini's. For more information, contact Clapp at 219-916-9695 or baclapp1@comcast.net.

jdavich@post-trib.com

Twitter@jdavich
A small group of students from Lyons Township High School staged a protest, saying they are taking a stand against racist and other derogatory remarks they've received since the election of Donald Trump.

The students, about 10 of them, gathered at the north campus in La Grange and carried signs with such statements as "Make Bridges Not Walls." They walked in silence down Cossitt Avenue to the fountain next to La Grange Village Hall on Friday afternoon.

Advertisement

The protest was organized by senior Josh Leak, 17, of La Grange Park.

"After the election we've experienced a lot of hateful comments. We just want to be heard," he said.

Advertisement

Leak said the comments have been against people of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered students. He said they wanted to end their walk in the downtown business district to present a diverse face to the community.

"We want to be heard and seen and go into a predominantly white area," he said.

Even before the protest was held after school, another small group of students organized another counter protest that they called "an anti protest protest."

Colin Kubacki, a senior from Western Springs, put together the counter protest.

"This is not pro Trump," he said. "This is anti protest."

Students stage a counter protest at Lyons Township High School that they called an "anti protest protest." (Annemarie Mannion / Pioneer Press)

Henry Groya, 18, a senior from La Grange, said the group, that numbered about a dozen, was made up of students with various political views. He said he thinks people need to accept the election results.

"The results are the results. Suck it up," he said.

The group led by Kubacki walked around the school and took a more jocular approach to the event they staged.

Advertisement

Leak, who said he is a student activist for Black Lives Matters, said he plans to organize more protests.

"There is still lots of racism going on, discrimination against LGBQT, and (against) women's rights," he said.

amannion@tribpub.com

Twitter @triblocalam
By Dezan Shira & Associates

A cursory glance at a few key statistics will quickly reveal the size and potential of Chinas food & beverage industry. In 2011, the Middle Kingdom overtook the U.S. as the worlds largest consumer market for food & beverage products. Driven by a string of food scandals, a preference for foreign goods that are perceived to be safer shows no sign of abating, with 71 percent of Chinese people considering food safety a concern in 2015. And the country increasingly has the means to purchase foreign products  average disposable income levels continue to rise at an exponential rate, doubling from RMB 15,000 in 2008 to RMB 31,000 in 2015.

In this article, we aim to answer some of the most commonly asked questions regarding investing in Chinas rapidly developing food & beverage industry.

Q: What are some of the enduring challenges in Chinas food and beverage industry today?

A: Chinas food and beverage industry has more potential for foreign investment than ever before. However counterfeit goods and an underdeveloped infrastructure continue to threaten the industrys growth. China is seeing a trend towards utilizing e-commerce to purchase food. As demand increases, the physical infrastructure in place is struggling to keep up. A lack of proper cold storage warehouses, inefficient distribution channels, and growing demand threaten to strain an underdeveloped infrastructure.

Q: How will Chinas revised 2015 Food Safety Law affect foreign businesses in Chinas food & beverage industry?

A: Chinas revised 2015 Food Safety Law cuts down the number of regulations in Chinas food industry. The regulatory environment will be easier to understand and simpler for foreign businesses to navigate. However, as China becomes more heavy handed upon its food industry, foreign business should not fail to recognize that they will face a steady increase in competition as new regulations go into effect. If China is able to increase the quality of its domestic food products, and convince its population that local food standards can be trusted, some Chinese consumers may no longer find it necessary to buy foreign food products.

RELATED: Find more Q&As on Dezan Shiras Knowledge Sharing Platform

Q: Why does China rely heavily on imported food products?

A: A large part of Chinas reliance on imported food products stems from four major issues within the country. First off, China is the most populous nation on earth, and only 11% of Chinas land is suitable for farming. The second reason is that 20% of Chinas land and 40% of its rivers are polluted, further limiting its ability to produce foodstuffs within its borders. This well-known fact contributes to the third reason, which is that many Chinese worry over the quality of domestic food products. Various food scandals have played a role in driving Chinese consumers towards foreign products in the industry. The last reason is a growing appetite for foreign cuisine, which has been made increasingly attainable by the nations steady economic growth.

Q: What was the average growth rate of Chinas food and beverage market between 2009 and 2014?

A: Today, Chinas food and beverage market is the largest in the world. From 2009 to 2014, Chinas food and beverage market saw an average growth rate of 30%. As demand for higher quality products increases, the nation finds itself looking beyond its borders. Only 11% of Chinas land is arable. As a result, the Middle Kingdom has been forced to import large quantities of food in order to feed its massive population.

As Chinas food & beverage industry continues to develop and diversify, having a handle on the key market trends and regulatory hurdles will be essential for foreign businesses. For additional information on investing in Chinas food & beverage industry, see more questions and answers on Dezan Shira & Associates Knowledge Sharing platform or read the October 2016 issue of China Briefing magazine  China Investment Roadmap: the Food & Beverage Industry.



About Us Asia Briefing Ltd. is a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. Dezan Shira is a specialist foreign direct investment practice, providing corporate establishment, business advisory, tax advisory and compliance, accounting, payroll, due diligence and financial review services to multinationals investing in China, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Singapore and the rest of ASEAN. For further information, please email china@dezshira.com or visit www.dezshira.com. Stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends in Asia by subscribing to our complimentary update service featuring news, commentary and regulatory insight.

China Investment Roadmap: the Food & Beverage Industry

In this edition of China Briefing, we examine two areas of Chinese food regulations most pertinent for foreign investors today  licensing and certification, and food safety standards. Both have undergone significant change in recent years, altering the way in which foreign companies must engage with the food & beverage industry, and must be thoroughly understood prior to market entry.



Establishing & Operating a Business in China 2016

Establishing & Operating a Business in China 2016, produced in collaboration with the experts at Dezan Shira & Associates, explores the establishment procedures and related considerations of the Representative Office (RO), and two types of Limited Liability Companies: the Wholly Foreign-owned Enterprise (WFOE) and the Sino-foreign Joint Venture (JV). The guide also includes issues specific to Hong Kong and Singapore holding companies, and details how foreign investors can close a foreign-invested enterprise smoothly in China.



An Introduction to Doing Business in China 2016

Doing Business in China 2016 is designed to introduce the fundamentals of investing in China. Compiled by the professionals at Dezan Shira & Associates in June 2016, this comprehensive guide is ideal not only for businesses looking to enter the Chinese market, but also for companies who already have a presence here and want to keep up-to-date with the most recent and relevant policy changes
Hong Kong's top official said on Thursday that the upcoming Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect will strengthen Hong Kong's role as an international financial center, opening a new chapter for interconnectivity of capital markets between China's mainland and Hong Kong.

Leung Chun-ying, Chief Executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), made the remarks when addressing a forum on the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect and capital markets of China's mainland and Hong Kong.

Leung said the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect launched two years ago has been of groundbreaking significance for promoting the two-way openness of mainland's financial industry and internationalization of the Chinese renminbi (RMB).

Hong Kong has dual advantages of "One Country" and "Two Systems" which means the region is both a China's international financial center and a financial hub for the world that enables Hong Kong to be a "super connector" for cross-boundary financial markets, Leung said.

The Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect has been operating smoothly since its launch, which has accumulated many experiences for the upcoming Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, the chief executive said.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission has signed a joint announcement with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission on approving the establishment of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect mechanism.

The Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect will provide a new channel for the interconnectivity of stock markets between China's mainland and Hong Kong, further promote the RMB's cross-boundary flow and therefore strengthen Hong Kong's role as an international financial center and offshore RMB hub, Leung said.

Charles Li, Chief Executive of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, said at the forum that Hong Kong has made enormous contribution in the past 30 years to China's mainland in transshipment trade, direct investment and capital market. In the next 20 years, Hong Kong will become a major overseas center for the mainland people to allocate their wealth by channels such as Shanghai-Hong Kong and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect.

Li believed that thanks to a unique trading and clearing model of the two programs, mainland people could invest in many overseas projects and markets at home, and people outside Chinese mainland could also invest in China through the Shanghai-Hong Kong and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect.
Chinese investors have shown their keen interest to invest in Ethiopia, said Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) head Fitsum Arega on Thursday.

The African country in the past three months received 124 investors who have keen interest to invest, out of whom 71 were from China, said Arega.

Data from the EIC also show that the number of Chinese investors with keen interest to invest in the country is larger than other countries combined.

Arega also expressed his regret and sadness over "the appalling damages, indiscriminate looting and destruction sustained by national and foreign investment projects operating in some parts of Ethiopia and the short-lived state of insecurity".

"The chain of unfortunate incidents last month have come at greater cost to business and had created a sense of insecurity and business uncertainty. Since, the government has taken decisive measures to restore peace and order and assuage the concerns leveled by various investors," he noted.

According to Arega, despite challenges such as drought and insecurity, the country's foreign direct investment has registered a 50-percent increase to reach 3 billion U.S. dollars in last budget year.
A man surnamed Huang in the southern Foshan city, received a package 13 minutes after he placed the order on Alibaba's shopping site, Tmall.com on early hours of November 11, 2016. [Photo: Tmall]

13 minutes, that is how fast delivery can be in China after you place your orders online.

A man surnamed Huang in the southern Foshan city, received a package 13 minutes after he placed the order on Alibaba's shopping site, Tmall.com.

According to system record, Mr Huang's order was submitted less than one second after midnight, at 00:00:09 on November 11, the day known as the biggest online shopping spree in China.

The item was then packed and shipped out of storage at precisely 00:06:51, according to records, and got delivered by an EMS delivery minivan to Mr. Huang's door.

Records show he signed for the package at 00:13:19, thirteen minutes and one second later.

Tmall says Mr. Huang was their first costumer to receive a package on the "Double 11" day.

Express delivery staff carring a package on November 11, 2016. [Photo: Tmall]

How did this happen?

You might wonder if Mr. Huang happens to live right next to the storage center, but the truth to the flash delivery is based on big data and the shipping experience of previous years.

An alliance named 'Cainiao network' launched by Alibaba and the three leading Chinese express delivery firms strengthen their logistics networks, including by sharing 128 warehouses nationwide. It can help its delivery partners offer same-day service in 12 cities across the country.

According to Tmall's statistics from last year, most parcels delivered to consumers within one day were large durable goods, such as appliances.

That is due to Tmall's one-step-ahead move to put hot items most favored by consumers several days ahead in warehouses and storage sites across the country.

When an order is placed on the online platform, the system will find the closest inventory site, backed by big data, and the online platform will then automatically transfer the order information to the closest warehouse for processing and shipping.

In 2015, Chinese e-commerce generated 20.6 billion parcels, up from 860 million a decade earlier.

With the double eleven ongoing and sales breaking records and in record time, the total number for this year's packages is expected to further grow.
President Xi Jinping has called for the building of strong and modern logistics forces that will guarantee the realization of the Chinese dream as well as the dream of a strong army.

Xi, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), made the remarks at a CMC meeting on logistics held from Wednesday to Thursday.

Xi praised the logistics forces' contributions to the country's revolution, construction and reform periods, urging logistics staff to strengthen a sense of responsibility to achieve "leapfrog development" and secure a foundation for the construction of a leading military.

"As the international military competition situation experiences profound changes, and national interests and military missions develop, logistical construction is becoming an increasingly crucial factor that affects wins or losses in battle... and occupies a key place in the development of the Party, the country and the military," Xi noted.

"We must build a logistics force in which everything exists for fighting a war. It must always remain true to the fundamental purpose of helping win a war," Xi said.

Stressing strategic planning and guidance, Xi called for more efforts to research logistics theories and innovation while solving problems that hold back logistics development.

The president urged Party committees and military commanders at all levels to attach great importance to military logistics work, with a focus on the reform of logistics policies and optimization of structures and distribution.

Xi called for scientific and economic management of logistics work, urging military funds and resources to be subjected to centralized and unified management, allocation and use.

According to Xi, more efforts should be made to use state-level resources and enlist the help of local governments as well as social groups and individuals to develop a series of innovation projects that cater to both military and civilian uses.

Since the CPC's 18th National Congress in late 2012, Xi has attached great importance to logistics work. Xi met with attendees of a PLA meeting on logistics in November 2013. In September 2016, Xi conferred flags to joint logistics units as the CMC established a joint logistics support force.

Xi asked logistics staff to push forward their work in line with the requirements of comprehensive and strict Party governance.

Xi also called for efforts to prioritize ideological and political construction and remain determined in fighting corruption in the army and clearing up the bad influence of Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou.

The president urged the military to stay clear-minded and safeguard the authority of the CPC Central Committee and the command of the CPC Central Committee and the CMC, asking them to strengthen intra-Party supervision.

Xi also urged efforts to build strong logistics forces by fostering high-quality talent.

CMC vice chairmen Fan Changlong and Xu Qiliang attended the meeting.
Beijing police are investigating the roles of around 100 suspects detained during operations against a large child pornography sharing network.

According to the police, the ring leader, a 19-year-old college student surnamed Sun, was arrested in Beijing earlier this year with 400 gigabytes of child porn on his computer. He was found to have posted 100 such videos online, attracting 20,000 hits and 7,000 replies.

Fluent in English, Sun stored the videos on an overseas server and posted them on foreign websites. He exchanged them for foreign pornography to share with domestic pedophiles, connected through QQ messenger, the police said.

Members of his QQ chat groups numbered in the thousands, but each group usually existed for less than ten days before re-grouping to avoid detection by police, said Zhang Min, in charge of the case.

Sun's network involved suspects in more than 25 provinces who regularly preyed on lone minors in remote villages or migrant workers' camps, he added.

"Few reported the abuse to police," said Zhang. "We are furious to find that so many children fell victim."

It was not until this March when his office was tipped off by American counterparts under the Department of Homeland Security that they knew the network existed.

"The ring used advanced technology to dodge China's cyberpolice. It is a signal that me must upgrade our skills and technology to meet the challenge," Zhang said.

Sun has been convicted of spreading pornography and sentenced to 18 months in prison while the investigation of the other suspects continues.
A plastic surgeon in China has successfully grown an artificial ear on a man's forearm in a cutting-edge medical procedure.

Doctor Guo Shuzhong inspected the patient after he carried out the pioneering precedure [Photo: Chinanews.com]

The patient identified only as Ji lost his right ear in an accident a year ago and has been hospitalized since then in Xi'an, north China's Shaanxi Province.

Ji received multiple surgical operations to restore his facial skins and cheeks. However he couldn't accept the loss of his right ear.

So he found Dr Shuzhong, who works at the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University.

Dr Guo, a renowned plastic surgeon, decided to use cartilage from the man's ribs and build the new ear. He expects to transplant the new organ to its rightful place.

According to the doctor, the reconstruction plan was divided into three steps.

In the first phase, doctors buried a skin expander in the patient's right forearm and regularly injected water to expand the skin.

In the second phase, doctors took part of the patient's rib cartilage and buried it under the expanded skin, this was successfully done on Tuesday.

In the third step, which is expected to be carried out in about four months, the doctors are set to move the fully grown ear from Mr Ji's arm to his head using the vascular anastomosis techniques.

According to Dr Guo, the most difficult part of the procedure is the second step which has turned out a success.

Dr Guo says they must wait for the ear to fully grow in order to make it perfect for the patient, so the transplantation is expected to take place in three to four months.

Ji looked at the ear growing on his right arm and said with a smile: "It looks exactly the same as my old ear."
SYDNEY - Asylum seekers and refugees housed at Australia's offshore immigration detention centers could soon be on their way to the United States, local media reported Friday, though government officials remain tight lipped.

While the number of asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat pales in comparison to those seeking refuge in Europe, the nation's harsh immigration policies adopted in 2013 dictate they will never reach the mainland.

Asylum seekers instead are turned back to their origin at sea, or shipped to one of two offshore processing centers on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island or the Pacific island state of Nauru.

Australia has been in negotiations with third countries to resettle refugees from Nauru and Manus Island, however they remain protracted. Local media has reported New Zealand and Costa Rica are possibilities.

The Australian Newspaper on Friday reported a deal that would see the some 1800 asylum seekers and refugees housed at its controversial processing centers resettled in the United States is poised to be announced.

Asked about the report at an Australian parliamentary committee hearing, Australian Customs and Border Protection Service chief Michael Pezzullo declined to confirm the US was the destination.

"We are working actively on those (third country settlement) arrangements ... today we are closer than what we were yesterday," Pezzullo said, declaring a public interest immunity on providing exact locations.

Third country resettlement has become a controversial topic in local politics after Australia made a 55 million Australian dollar (41.88 million US dollar) deal with Cambodia to resettle refugees from its controversial centers. That deal has all but failed after only six refugees took up the offer, with local media reporting four have decided to return to their home countries.

Australia in September signed an agreement with the United States to resettle a group of Costa Ricans, however officials denied it could amount to a people swap with those housed in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru.

Australia is also facing a renewed challenge in PNG's supreme court after refugee lawyer Ben Lomai re-filed applications for 302 refugees to be returned to Australia with monetary compensation after it was originally dismissed on technical grounds.

The application is designed to right a wrong after the nation's highest court in April ruled the original Memorandum of Understanding establishing the Manus Island centers as unconstitutional, Lomai said. The court ruled asylum seekers entering PNG were doing so against their will and having their freedom of movement hindered despite not breaking local laws.

PNG has become less enthusiastic to host the controversial Manus Island processing center over the past few years over attacks to its reputation and the fact it can ill-afford the cost of refugee resettlement.
A gathering to commemorate the 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen is held in Beijing on Friday. [Xinhua]

General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Xi Jinping said that the best tribute to Sun Yat-sen is to continue the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of.

Xi made the remarks at a gathering to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's birth on Friday.

"The best way we commemorate Sun Yat-sen is to learn and carry forward his invaluable spirit, to unite all that can be united and mobilize all that can be mobilized to carry on the pursuit for a rejuvenated China that he had dreamed of," Xi, who is also Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in a speech.

Born in 1866, Sun was the founder of the Kuomintang Party, and is a revered revolutionary leader who played a pivotal role in overthrowing imperial rule in China.

CPC members are the firmest supporters, most loyal collaborators and most faithful successors of Sun's revolutionary undertakings, Xi said.

"Today, we are closer, more confident and more able to achieve national rejuvenation than ever before," Xi said.

With lots of challenges and difficulties ahead, there is still a long way to go until we have truly modernized the country, revitalized the nation and realized the common prosperity of all Chinese, said Xi.

"I call on all Chinese who revere Mr. Sun Yat-sen, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as overseas Chinese, to unite, no matter their political affiliations," Xi said.

Xi called on the Chinese people to learn from Sun's noble patriotism and devotion to the motherland.

Sun's tough life and prolonged struggle for the country, said Xi, taught him that reforming China must be based on the nation's reality and it must follow a development path suitable for China's national conditions.

As it has been proven by the history of both China and other countries,the prosperous nations are the ones that have found development paths suitable for their reality, Xi continued.

Today, to revitalize the Chinese nation, we need to carry forward patriotism, Xi said.

To love the country, the Chinese people should uphold the leadership of the CPC, the socialist system in China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics developed by the Chinese people under the CPC's leadership, he noted.

Xi added that the fundamental principles of the CPC and the Chinese people -- respecting the Chinese reality, learning from the outstanding achievements of all cultures and the independent development of the country -- should also be firmly adhered to.

Xi urged the Chinese people to strengthen confidence in the path, theory, system and culture of the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
"There is much that the West can learn from China, as well as other non-Western approaches to philosophies," said Larry Temkin, a philosophy professor from Rutgers University, at the International Forum for the Chairs of Departments of Philosophy held at Renmin University of China (RUC) in Beijing on Friday.

Philosophy academics from China, US, UK, Germany and France attend the International Forum for the Chairs of Departments of Philosophy in Beijing on Friday. [Photo by Liu Qiang / China.org.cn]

"Tradition" and "innovation" are two keywords at this forum, where philosophers from China, UK, US, Germany and France gather to rethink philosophy's role in a rapidly changing and dangerous world.

In the age of science and technology, as Temkin reminded us, it is philosophy that helps us consider what the goals of mankind should be.

In academic circles, there are debates about whether it is still wise to look backwards to the ideas of ancient philosophers to seek answers for totally new challenges in the modern world.

For Temkin, it would be a huge waste of valuable resources to disregard traditional wisdom.

"It is incumbent upon us to scrutinize the great traditions and texts of the past, to carefully determine to what extent they still apply, and to what extent they should be revised or set aside," said Temkin.

It is true that philosophy helps people figure out how to live properly and in harmony with ourselves and others, but competing ideals exist in the world that more often than not cause confusion and conflict.

One of the dangers lies in taking the idea of the philosophical tradition "too narrowly," said Ron Bontekoe, a philosophy professor from the University of Hawaii.

Bontekoe warned that exclusionary attitudes are dangerous and should be resisted. "Many here will be familiar with the dangers of cultural exclusion  in particular with the longstanding tendency of most Western philosophers to reject out of hand the legitimacy of Chinese, Indian and Japanese philosophies on the grounds that these Asian modes of thinking do not appear to address the same problems that Western philosophers are interested in," said Bontekoe.

The toughest job facing philosophers in the contemporary world is to determine how to strike a balance between the many competing ideals.

Wu Genyou, a philosophy professor from Wuhan University, stressed the importance of seeking "shared values". Professor Wu took China as an example.

The development of philosophy in contemporary China can learn from three traditions, namely, Chinese traditional culture, modern Western culture and Marxism and Leninism, said Wu. The shared values of the three traditions should be a resource for seeking innovation in the development of contemporary Chinese philosophy.

Seeking shared values means there must be a strong willingness to cooperate and to compromise. As Bontekoe rightly put it, we must learn to cooperate even with those whose viewpoints we find foolish or incomprehensible.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in Beijing, capital of China, Nov. 3, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

Following the ground-breaking visit to China of new Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, there appears to have been an additional reorientation towards China, signaled by the visit of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in the first few days of November. Razak had earlier signalled an alignment of interests with the U.S. after taking office in 2009.

The background to the Sino-Malaysian rapprochement is not primarily political, but economic: the growing perception of China as the source of solutions to economic difficulties means that China absolutely cannot be ignored when a country considers repositioning its wider ties. China has already helped out when a Malaysian state investment fund, in which Prime Minister Razak was heavily involved, got into trouble, while the USA only raised embarrassing questions. China's biggest nuclear energy producer, China General Nuclear Power Corporation, purchased the Malaysian fund's power assets for $2.3bn in 2015.

During the Prime Minister's visit, the estimated value of bilateral deals signed was US$34 billion. Much of this will be deployed in infrastructure projects, in accordance with China's established policy of building relations on - literally - solid foundations in the framework of support which the AIIB was set up to create. (China is already the largest investor in Malaysia's infrastructure.)

One of the principal focuses of interest during Razak's visit was the situation in the South China Sea, where Malaysia and China have had differences in the past. It became clear during the visit that Malaysia will follow the Philippines in refusing to allow these differences to interfere with a strong and comprehensive relationship. Precise details have understandably not been released, but Malaysia is due to buy four Chinese naval vessels, and joint naval exercises are likely to be held shortly between the two countries in order to emphasize that cooperation has driven out confrontation.

China has always sought to maximize positive engagement with the ASEAN countries. Forty to fifty years ago, relations between China and Southeast Asian countries were tense to such an extent that long-existing Chinese communities within those countries were regarded with suspicion and often oppressed. A major Chinese diplomatic initiative in the 1980s and early 1990s reversed this situation, established a strong foundation for a network of relationships within the region and disarmed outdated suspicions of China.

Of course the Chinese leadership is not unaware of some of the internal strains under which some ASEAN countries operate. Like Indonesia - and, to a lesser extent, Singapore - Malaysia has a large and cohesive Islamic community which has to be kept happy. On his return to Malaysia Prime Minister Razak has had to defend himself against accusations that his rapprochement with China threatens unfairly to favor the Malaysian Chinese community, which plays a disproportional role in the domestic economy. It can be hoped that the concentration of Chinese finance on the infrastructural sector will convince the Malaysian population that this relationship benefits everyone, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

In terms of global security, some American analysts focus on the attraction exerted by China on countries that the USA has become accustomed to regard as allies, and seen a potential threat to U.S. global interests in this. The reality is that this is not a zero-sum game: a friend of China does not automatically become an enemy of the U.S., and vice versa. In the case of ASEAN countries, it is hardly surprising that they would wish to optimize their cooperation with the main regional power, and there is no reason why this should not be a win-win situation. In a strongly globalized economy it is perfectly legitimate to trade with, and derive economic support from, any country capable of doing so.

So, let us hope that Prime Minister Razak can convince his compatriots that improving relations with China can only help Malaysian citizens, whatever their ethnicity.

Tim Collard is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/timcollard.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
 Flash

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry on Thursday denied a statement by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) on the detention of Ukrainian saboteurs in Crimea.

"It is another story faked by Russian special services aimed at hiding their own intolerable actions against residents of the peninsula and at discrediting Ukraine in the eyes of the international community," said a statement on the ministry's website.

Earlier in the day, the FSB said in a statement that on Wednesday it has detained a group of armed saboteurs in the southwestern Crimean city of Sevastopol, who allegedly were members of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's intelligence forces.

The armed men, who were arrested with weapons and explosive devices, were plotting terror attacks on the peninsula's military infrastructure and utility facilities, the FSB said.

The incident marked another row between Kiev and Moscow over the detention of the alleged saboteurs.

In August, Russia said it had prevented several groups of Ukrainian intelligence officers from invading Crimea, a claim which Kiev denied.

The autonomous republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol were absorbed into Russia in March 2014 following a referendum, which was recognized by Moscow but rejected by Kiev.
You are here: Home

 Flash

At least 12 people were killed and two others were injured in an attack by rebel forces in Kaya, a busy South Sudanese commercial center on the border with Uganda, an official said on Thursday.

Stephen Lado Onisimo, Information Minister of Yei River State, told Xinhua by phone that rebel fighters attacked a police post Wednesday, leading to the killing of 12 people on both sides.

Onisimo said two police officers died and 10 rebels were also killed.

"Opposition forces attacked Kaya at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday and killed two police officers and injured two others," Onisimo said.

"Ten died on the rebel side. There are no civilian casualties because civilians have all crossed to the Ugandan side of the border," Onisimo said.

Kaya town, approximately 221 km from the capital Juba, was a busy commercial hub that attracted traders from Uganda, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo before the renewed fighting devastated the town in August.

Unknown gunmen last month ambushed a convoy of vehicles carrying civilians fleeing insecurity in the same region, killing over 20 people, including women and children.
 Flash

Turkey has started technical negotiations of a free trade agreement with Britain once it leaves the EU, Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci said Thursday, local media reported.

"We have decided to bring online a wide-range trade deal between the two countries once Britain leaves the EU," Zeybekci told the parliament's planning and budgetary commission in Ankara.

He said that the scope of the agreement will be at least as wide as that of the Customs Union Agreement between Turkey and the EU, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Turkish officials previously pledged that Brexit would not affect Turkey's exports to the EU and Britain.

Turkey's government vowed after Brexit vote that it would continue to take steps to maintain and strengthen investment, trade and financial relations with Britain.

Turkey's exports to Britain totalled 10.55 billion U.S. dollars, while its imports from the country stood at 5.6 billion dollars in 2015, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.

Turkey expects talks to resume in the first quarter of next year on updating its Customs Union Agreement with the EU, Zeybekci said.

The minister also announced the near completion of works for a special passport for Turkish exporters to expedite the visa process as part of new incentives.
 Flash

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday congratulated the United States elected president, Donald Trump, saying he believe the alliance between the two countries will grow stronger.

In a statement released by his office, Netanyahu referred to Trump as "a true friend of the State of Israel," saying he expect to bring the relations with the U.S. to "new heights" during Trump's governance.

"We will act together to advance the security, stability, and peace in our region," Netanyahu said, adding that the firm bond between Israel and the U.S. is based on "mutual interests."

Netanyahu refrained from endorsing either candidate during the recent presidential campaign. He held two separate meetings with both of them in New York.

During his campaign, Trump sided with Israel and vowed to acknowledge East Jerusalem as part of its capital. Israel occupied this predominantly Palestinian territory in 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community.
 Flash

Airstrikes by the U.S-led anti-terror coalition killed at least 16 people in Syria's northern province of al-Raqqa, a monitor group reported on Wednesday.

People fleeing clashes in Tweila'a village and Haydarat area ride a vehicle, north of Raqqa city, Syria, November 8, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

The airstrikes marked the first civilian killing by the coalition since the beginning of a new campaign supported by the coalition and led on ground by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) rebels against the Islamic State (IS) capital in al-Raqqa, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The SDF, a Kurdish opposition alliance that includes Arabs, Assyrians, and Turkmen fighters, announced Sunday the beginning of a military campaign against the IS "capital" of al-Raqqa.

"We, in the general command of the Syrian Democratic Forces, are breaking the good news to you about the beginning of our major military campaign to liberate the city of al-Raqqa and its countryside from the clutches of the forces of darkness represented by Daesh (IS)," an SDF statement read.

The military campaign, dubbed "The Wrath of Euphrates," started on Saturday evening in cooperation and coordination with the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition, it added.

The SDF, meanwhile, urged the regional and international powers that have been affected by the IS to take part in the "honor to eliminate the core of the international terrorism" by providing all kinds of support for the SDF.

The Observatory said 30,000 fighters with the SDF were taking part in the offensive on al-Raqqa, adding that the SDF captured 10 villages and farmlands in the northern countryside of al-Raqqa.

The UK-based watchdog group, which says it relies on a network of activists on ground, said the initial aim of the battle is to isolate the city of al-Raqqa from its northern and eastern countryside, as a prelude to strip the IS of the city itself.

The Syrian government has yet to comment on the SDF battle, but local analysts played down the recently-declaring offensive, saying it's no more than a media campaign.
 Flash

As many as 5,000 people gathered Wednesday night in front of Trump Tower in New York City to protest the billionaire's election as president.

People protest against Donald Trump's presidential election victory outside the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York, the United States, Nov. 9, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

The demonstration started at 4 p.m. (2100 GMT) with only a dozen protesters in front of the Trump Tower, residence and campaign headquarters of the president-elect.

In just a couple of hours, the small gathering snowballed into a massive demonstration that filled the Fifth Avenue stretching several blocks.

Holding such signs as "Not my president," "Our city does not support hate," and chanting "We reject the president-elect," the protesters, mostly young people, were visibly angry and upset.

"I felt agony, betrayed and despair," Sarah Curry described her feelings after learning that Trump has won the election.

"I don't know the future of our country and it terrifies me," Curry said.

Protesters had also raised many issues against Trump, including immigration, health care and women's rights. Many also questioned the country's electoral system that allowed Trump to snatch the presidency without winning the popular vote.

The city's police force was on high alert during the demonstration that dragged into the next morning. Traffic was cut off around the premises, and several street-cleaning trucks were deployed in front of the entrance of the building to prevent protesters from rushing in.

As a traditional Democratic stronghold, nearly 58 percent of voters in the State of New York cast ballots for Hillary Clinton, compared with 37 percent for Trump, according to official figures.

New York City leans blue in a more dramatic fashion. In New York County where the Trump Tower is located, an overwhelming 86 percent of the votes went to Clinton.
 Flash

South Korean President Park Geun-hye posted 5 percent in her approval rating, keeping the lowest for any of her predecessors over a scandal involving her longtime confidante and former aides, a local pollster survey showed on Friday.

According to a Gallup Korea poll of 1,003 adults conducted from Tuesday to Thursday, Park's support score was 5 percent this week, unchanged from last week. It was the lowest for any South Korean president.

Negative assessment on the embattled president was up 1 percentage point to 90 percent, the highest since her inauguration in February 2013. The remaining 4 percent declined to respond to the weekly poll.

Park's approval rating, which moved from 30 percent to 50 percent in the first three years of her presidency, turned downward this year and plummeted over the scandal surrounding Choi Soon-sil, Park's decades-long friend charged with peddling undue influence and meddling in government affairs from the shadows.

Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans are forecast to march in central Seoul this Saturday to demand Park's resignation. Organizers estimated at least 500,000 people would turn out, while police said 160,000-170,000 would take to the streets.

Traditional support base for Park turned their backs sharply. Support for Park in the North Gyeongsang province fell 1 percentage point to 9 percent this week, with the rating in southwestern region staying at zero.

Those aged 19-29 gave no support to Park, while the scandal-hit president's approval rating among those in their 30s and 40s recorded just 3 percent. Support scores among those in their 50s and 60s or older were 6 percent and 13 percent respectively.

Support for the ruling Saenuri Party sank with President Park at 17 percent, down 1 percentage point from the previous week.

The main opposition Minjoo Party posted 31 percent in its support rate, with the rating for the minor People's Party staying at 13 percent. Support for another minor Justice Party was up 1 percentage point to 6 percent.
Yesterday, Hillarys concession and Donalds victory speeches would be made only one mile apart at the Midtown Hilton at the Javits Center in New York City. As the night wore on, the Clinton party quickly soured in the ballroom while the Trump camp began uncorking the bubbly. The opposing sentiments set the two camps a world apart.

Clintons presidential campaign director John Podesta, with aplomb, delivered unwanted news: for now the Democrats dream had died and all those sobbing at the Javits Center should wipe dry the tears and call it a night. They would get some rest to renew their political fight.

The reaction, however, was far from noble among Clintons media adorables here in Italy. There was weeping to be sure, but also gnashing of teeth.

The obvious despair (normal) was one thing, but the visceral reaction (not normal) was quite another.

The ultra-liberal American political-economic experts appearing on Italys state-run television talk shows were vexed, to say the least. The best way to describe the talk show atmosphere is to imagine a reenactment of the Jerry Springer Show from the 1990s, where boiling points were quickly reached and little mercy granted. Like Springer, the Italian host often got wound up in the violent verbal crossfire, calling for order in the court of public opinion.

The expert commentators were cranky. After all, it is not tutti i giorni that they have to do the pizza-and-espresso-fueled graveyard shift on political punditry.

They bickered, talked over each other, and threatened to leave the studio. And yet they made valiant efforts to track poll data all night, offering due diligence on why the results shifted literally every 3 minutes (often not in the direction they had wanted) during the neck-and-neck ballot results.

They would make hair-splitting projections for all 50 U.S. states, and with no commercial breaks in between and no Oracle of Delphi to call upon to change Providence.

The homegrown Italian television hosts, likewise, were especially worn thin on sleep and patience. They had to suffer through translating for their night owl audience all the politilingo thrust on them by American commentators who, while quite fluent in Italian, weighed in with unbearably heavy accents: YOH pensOH kAY OHraH il nostrOH preZIdentAY ObamHA deBORAH eSSeRAY vIRAamentAY anZIoSOH. Hillary, ancORAH peJOE! (I believe our President Obama must be very uneasy right now. Hillary even worse so! ).

Ripete, per favore (Say that again, please!), the pale-faced hosts would beg, cringing, as if they just heard nails grinding on a chalkboard.

As the morning fog cleared in Italys financial capital of Milan, a victorious Trump made a V-sign (also a nasty take a hike hand jester in Italy). The television protocol now was to roll historical clips on Trumps American political miracle, but I sensed the producers had not quite planned for this. They surely had placed all their bets on Hillarys success story, a vision they profoundly admired.

Nevertheless, after a few minutes of scrambling for the Trump b-roll, a pre-taped story line on Trump aired. It was textbook robber baron imagery of a topped-hatted, hardball-playing business executive strong arming his way to success on 5th Avenue. A top-model in one hand as he appeared to vainfully fix his hair in a Trump Tower glass pane with the other.

I am somewhat exaggerating, but you get the picture. A dashing, daring, and debonair crook.

Then naturally came a barrage of nasty images of the President-elect firing the young and innocent, like a hunter shooting frightened deer in the forest, and a bizarre exploit of him pushing someone over a desk.

Then they sung moribund financial funeral hymns of the European stock exchanges plunging in Milan, rocking Paris, a spiraling in London and a diving further on the Frankfurt index. There were the two refrains  the Italian daily double obsessions of the German bund Italian titolo spread spiking and U.S. Dollar trading much lower against the Euro at such an early hour. Surely financial penance for the American political mortal sin newly committed!

It was clever, but tired propaganda. The Italian viewers, nevertheless, read the writing (that is, the graffiti) on the wall: Here we go again: Silvio Berlusoni Reincarnate. Forza America! We invented this political animal.

And just like pizza we exported, they said one-upping their cultural cousins, the americani will devour our political fast food to grow even more obese. God bless (and good luck) America!
 Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping's upcoming tour to Latin America is expected to promote friendship and cooperation between China and the region and accelerate integration in the Asia-Pacific.

Xi will visit Ecuador, Peru and Chile from Nov. 17 to 23 and attend the 24th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting from Nov. 19 to 20 in Lima, Peru.

Experts say Xi's trip will inject dynamism into the development and prosperity of China, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific.

DEEPENING FRIENDSHIP WITH LATIN AMERICA

Xi's trip to Latin America, which will be the third since he took office in March 2013, is expected to deepen traditional friendship between China and the continent and consolidate the public opinion basis of China-Latin America relations.

Xi's visit to Ecuador is the first by a Chinese president since the two countries forged diplomatic ties 36 years ago.

In Ecuador, Xi will exchange views with President Rafael Correa on bilateral ties. The two presidents will also witness the signing of a series of deals, meet with the press and attend a launch ceremony of an assistance program.

The two heads of state will blueprint the future of bilateral relations from strategic perspectives, which will promote the China-Ecuador strategic partnership to a new height.

In January 2015 in Beijing, Xi and Correa decided to establish a strategic partnership between their countries. Since then, bilateral ties have entered a new phase of all-round rapid development.

Now, China is Ecuador's third-largest trading partner and Ecuador is one of the main destinations for Chinese investment and financing in Latin America.

Ecuadoran Foreign Minister Guillaume Long said that all sectors of the Ecuadoran society are looking forward to Xi's visit and that the historic visit will further deepen the brotherly friendship between the two peoples.

Peru is the second leg of Xi's visit. China and Peru, both with ancient civilizations, have enjoyed deep friendship. More than 400 years ago, maritime routes between China and Peru were explored, starting trans-oceanic exchanges.

Peru's close ties with China gives the country a pivotal role in promoting China-Latin America ties.

China has become Peru's largest trading partner and largest export market, while Peru is one of the first countries with which China conducted international cooperation in production capacity.

During his stay in Peru, Xi is expected to hold talks with President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and deliver a speech at the Peruvian Congress.

Chile, the last leg of Xi's visit, has always led in developing relations with China. It is the first South American nation that forged diplomatic ties with China, the first Latin American country that signed a bilateral accord with China on China's joining the World Trade Organization and signed a free trade agreement with China.

Last year, the first clearing bank for transactions in renminbi in South America was opened in Chile's capital, Santiago.

Xi's visit is expected to upgrade the China-Chile strategic partnership.During his stay in Chile, he is scheduled to hold talks with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, attend a signing ceremony for agreements and meet with the press.

In the eyes of Liu Yuqin, former Chinese ambassador to Ecuador and Chile, Xi's Latin America tour has fully reflected that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core holds a perspective of the overall situation in China's diplomatic strategy.

"China-Latin America relations have made a great stride since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012. Elevating the strategic position of policies toward Latin America and including Latin America in China's diplomatic strategy priorities accord with the common interests and realistic demand of both parties," Liu said.

FURTHERING CHINA-LATIN AMERICA ALL-ROUND COOPERATION

Ernesto Samper, secretary-general of the Union of South American Nations, said Latin American countries eagerly anticipated Xi's visit. He believed that the visit would greatly promote economic and trade cooperation between China and Latin America and strengthen bilateral all-around cooperation.

In fact, China and Latin America have made great progress in furthering their all-round cooperation in recent years.

In July 2014, Xi and leaders of Latin American and Caribbean countries held a summit in Brasilia, during which both sides decided to establish the China-Latin America comprehensive cooperative partnership of equality, mutual benefit and common development.

In January 2015, the first ministerial meeting of the forum of China and the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States was held in Beijing. Xi attended the meeting and made an important speech.

In 2016, China-Latin America relations have moved forward with the setup of new platforms such as the China-Latin America cultural exchange year and the forum of China-Latin America cooperation between local governments.

Official statistics show that the trade volume between China and Latin America rose more than twentyfold during the past decade to reach 236.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.

Currently, China is the second-largest trade partner and third-largest investment source country of Latin-America, while Latin America is China's seventh-largest trade partner.

Although bilateral trade has been affected by a sluggish global economy and the fall in commodity prices, both parties have been optimizing trade structure, diversifying areas for investment and transforming the model of economic and trade relations from one that used to be led only by trade to one driven by trade, investment and finance.

Now, China and Latin America are facing a new task of comprehensively upgrading their cooperation. Meanwhile, the development of bilateral ties has attracted much attention amid some changes in Latin America.

Against such backdrop, Xi's Latin America trip will deliver China's confidence in the stable development of the continent and send a signal of the bright prospects for bilateral cooperation.

"During Xi's visit, China will put forward a blueprint to enhance China-Latin America economic and trade cooperation. Latin America, which is under the pressure of economic transformation, needs China's market, production capacity, capital and experience in construction. China's proposal will be welcome," said Chen Fengying, an economist with China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

ACCELERATING ASIA-PACIFIC INTEGRATION

Under the theme of "Quality Growth and Human Development," the 21 APEC members will seek to make decisions to facilitate trade and investment as well as consolidate liberalization policies at the Peru summit.

Xi is expected to deliver a speech to the APEC CEO summit, meet representatives of the APEC business advisory council, attend two phases of the economic leaders' meeting and have meetings with some leaders.

China has grown into an important leader in Asia-Pacific cooperation.

During the 2014 APEC summit in Beijing, APEC member economies pushed forward the process of the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) by sketching out a historic roadmap for FTAAP.

The meeting also adopted important documents for an integrated, innovative and interconnected Asia-Pacific.

Now, the Beijing consensus is becoming reality, with the FTAAP process being carried forward orderly. A collective strategic study on issues related to the realization of FTAAP has been completed and the final version of the study along with recommendations will be presented to leaders at the Peru summit.

"I believe that Xi's attendance at the meeting will greatly promote the implementation of the fruits yielded at the Beijing summit and push forward FTAAP and connectivity from the highest level to make vision come true," said Chen, the Chinese economist.
The 3rd China-Vietnam Youth Festival concluded in a grand gala in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, on Nov. 9. [Photo by Mi Xingang/China.org.cn]

The 3rd China-Vietnam Youth Festival concluded with a grand art performance in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, on Nov. 9. During the three-day event, some 1,000 Chinese delegates visited six northern provinces in Vietnam and witnessed how its burgeoning economy has benefited from reform over the past 30 years. The Vietnamese people showed great hospitality and warmth and the bilateral friendship was greatly enhanced through visits, forums, art performances and various activities.

At the grand performance attended by 5,000 young people from both countries, Qin Yizhi, first secretary of the Central Committee of Communist Youth League of China, quoted Chinese President Xi Jinping's words urging youths in both countries to make contributions to building up a Chinese-Vietnamese community with a common future, and hand down the friendship generation after generation.

Young people from both countries waved flags, beat bamboos and sang together in an extremely warm atmosphere during the performance. The Chinese art troupe presented A Moonlit Night on the Spring River, Jasmine Flower and other classic cultural products, which roused great enthusiasm among Vietnamese young people.

Forums themed with sustainable development and cultural inheritance resonated in the hearts of the young people from both countries. "As we drink water from the same river, we need to take actions hand in hand to protect our environment," said Yang Zhiling, the secretary of the Chongzuo Municipal Committee of Communist Youth League in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, during a forum on sustainability held in Lang Son on Nov. 8. Her speech won rounds of applause as she spoke fluent Chinese and Vietnamese.

Mi Nguyen, a Vietnamese college student majoring in Chinese language, expressed that learning Chinese is now popular among young people. Many students choose to learn Chinese as they see China's prosperity and they are eager to go to China's metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, she said. Chinese communication applications like QQ and WeChat are popular among these students and they all have many Chinese friends, she added. Wei Yandan, a Vietnamese teacher and translator from a college in Guangxi, also noted that more Vietnamese students come to learn Chinese in her college and their parents support them to a great extent to do so.

During their daily talks, young people from both countries shared common concerns about the high living pressures in large cities. Apart from house prices, a Vietnamese youth mentioned that if they want to buy motorbikes in cities, they should have registered permanent residences, just like China's hukou, or household registration. College students from the countryside in Vietnam are also envious of those from large cities due to the high housing prices. Discussing worries can help us release pressure, said a Chinese delegate.

A farewell ceremony was held at the railway station in Hanoi on Nov. 10. Delegates from both sides were reluctant to part, hugging and weeping together. "As a Chinese saying goes: If there is a bond between them, the two will meet across a thousand miles," said Nguyen at the station.
 Flash

Business leaders in London have proposed a plan for a London-only visa system for foreign workers to use after the UK's exit from the European Union (EU).

The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), London's largest independent networking and business support organization, called on Thursday for the city to have its own Capital Work Permits, which would be visas allowing EU nationals and other foreign workers to work in the city.

According to LCCI's proposals, the permits would be administered by the London Work Permit Sponsorship Body newly formed by the Office of Mayor and the established main London Business Organizations, and they would allow workers to work anywhere within the city's 33 boroughs.

More than 771,000 EU nationals work in London, whose status over the coming years has been unclear since the UK voted to leave the EU in the June 23 referendum.

As EU citizens, they are currently able to work throughout the UK without the need for a work visa. However, the British government has talked of restricting access for foreigners to the UK labor market once Brexit becomes reality.

The largest presence of EU nationals in the London workforce is in construction, where they make up 30 percent of the total workers, but they also have a significant presence in hospitality and distribution (20 percent) as well as in finance (14 percent).

It is estimated that 160,000 of these workers would not meet visa requirements under existing immigration rules.

This would cost the London economy seven billion pounds in lost economic output and two billion pounds in lost tax revenue up to 2020, according to the LCCI.

The call for special London visas was made in a LCCI report, which was supported by academic research from the Center for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).

The CEBR research found that London relied more on non-UK workers than any other UK region, with migrants making up a quarter of the capital's workforce. For the rest of the UK, the average was 8 percent of the workforce.

In addition, for more than two years the LCCI's quarterly economic surveys have found that London businesses have difficulty finding sufficiently skilled applicants for job vacancies.

"In the approaching post-Brexit scenario, for London to remain competitive, we need to not only recruit the very best but also to be able to identify where we have skills shortages and act swiftly to address these." LCCI chief executive Colin Stanbridge said.

"Given the role and input (of foreign workers), it is vital to London's future that a degree of flexibility is applied if the government amends the UK immigration system," he added.
 Flash

After the long and grinding process of vote counting that went into 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, the result was finally out and put much of the U.S. mainstream media, many experts and the general public in a state of disbelief.

The New York real estate mogul and reality show star turned politician, Donald Trump, who was embroiled in controversy for the most of the overextended presidential campaign period, won the U.S. presidency against all odds.

Virtually none of the polls before the vote were in his favor. Most of the media did not expect his victory. There was only an extreme narrow path for him to win, which included winning all of the battleground states and at least one or two of the democratic-leaning states.

Yet he was able to pull one of the biggest upsets in recent history, and in its aftermath has rippled throughout U.S. society.

SHOCKED MEDIA

The U.S. mainstream media did not try to disguise their surprise, and the shock was apparent in the headlines. "Outside mogul captures the presidency, stunning Clinton in battleground states," wrote the New York Times. "Stunning Trump win," at the Los Angeles Times. "House of Horrors," was the headline following Trump's win at the New York Daily News.

"The surprise outcome," wrote the New York Times in its front page story, "threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world."

A series of adjectives used by the Wall Street Journal story also clearly expressed disbelief. "The election, an unedifying, raucous and unpredictable contest, the strangest in the modern era, defied all the predictions," wrote Michael C. Bender and Peter Nicholas.

Most of the mainstream media in the U.S. had been labeled "biased" by Trump and his supporters. In a recent poll released by Suffolk University/USA Today, 75.9 percent of the 1,000 adults surveyed believed that the media wanted the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win, and only 7.9 percent said Trump was the one that media supports.

But when Fox News, considered by many as the only media outlet that represents right-wing values, called the result a "stunner" and "historic upset," it was clear the shock was universal.

"There is just utter shock," said Maggie Hagerman in a recent broadcast.

Hagerman is a political correspondent for The New York Times and had been covering both Trump and Clinton "in some form or another for 20 years".

"Donald Trump did everything short of cutting off his own ears try to hurt himself over and over again and dared voters to reject him, and they just wouldn't do it," Hagerman said.

BAFFLED EXPERTS

"Although I didn't have 100 percent confidence that Clinton would win, I'm still surprised by the result, even baffled," said Jingsi Wu, assistant professor of journalism, media studies and public relations at Hofstra University in New York.

The Trump win has shown how the U.S. media and society vastly underestimated his appeal to voters, especially whites without a college degree, said Wu.

"It was a great surprise. Every single major polling prediction was frustrated by the vote count on Tuesday," said David Birdsell, Dean of the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College.

Birdsell said it was clear that Clinton had underperformed Barack Obama by failing to motivate her base.

"She lost every one of the demographics that Democrats need to go into office," Birdsell added.

"Trump had challenged and questioned the mainstream media time and time again during his presidential campaign, and even showed inclination to shut some outlets off," said Wu.

"This indicates that the operation of the media will face difficult challenges when he's in office, and they also have to reflect on how they can win back the trust lost by the public," she added.

CONCERNED PUBLIC

Worrying about the prospect of a Trump presidency, thousands of people took to the streets in protest in major cities across the U.S.

In New York City, a crowd of as many as 5,000 young people gathered in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue chanting "We reject the president-elect."

"I think that I can say that pretty unanimously in New York that we are completely devastated," said Briana Berry.

"We've introduced volatility, chance and randomness into the government," said Vassar College student Lorenzo, who didn't disclose his last name.

"Anything can happen in the next two years, and it's a scary thought," said Lorenzo.

"I'm scared that since the Republicans have control of the House and Senate, they are going to take away all the hard work that we have put into the country," said Viena Hoffmann, a New York University Student.

Many protesters complained about the Electoral College system, which they claimed had helped to put Trump on top.

"There's a massive problem with the electoral process, because it's not actually a democratic vote," said protester Sarah Curry.

"Hillary won the popular vote. Technically she should have been the president. But because of the Electoral College, we wound up with 'Mr. Cheetos'," she added.

"Why does a small state like Wyoming have such a powerful opinion? Why does the popular vote not matter? These are important questions that need to be addressed," said Lorenzo.

"It's an outdated system," he said.
Lawyer He Junren (left) and Grace

Geng (right) introduce her fathers book.

(Photo: China Aid)

China Aid

Reported in Chinese by Qiao Nong. Translated by Carolyn Song. Written in English by Brynne Lawrence.





(Hong KongJune 16, 2016) A book by a repeatedly imprisoned and tortured Christian human rights lawyer became available for purchase in Taiwan and Hong Kong on Tuesday. Written in secret, it describes the atrocities he experienced while incarcerated and outlines predictions for the fall of the Communist Party.

Grace Geng, daughter of Gao Zhisheng, a human rights lawyer known for his defense of religious practitioners, presented her fathers newly-released book at a book launch organized by China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group on June 14. The book, titled Stand Up China 2017  Chinas Hope: What I Learned During Five Years as a Political Prisoner, is in three parts, focusing on the details of Gaos torture, predictions for the downfall of the Communist Party and speculations about the future of China, respectively.

He hopes that the book can provide more insight and suggestions for those who are interested in the future developments of China, Geng said. He also hopes that everyone will plan for our future after reading the book. He said that a great nation will at last stand up. At that time, we will all become a civilized and harmonious force.

Stand Up China 2017  Chinas Hope: What I

Learned During Five Years as a Political

Prisoner, written by Gao Zhisheng, details

torture he experienced at the hands of the

government and predicts the fall of the

Communist Party.

(Photo: China Aid)

Local police kidnapped and illegally held Gao in Nov. 2004 for writing letters to government officials denouncing the persecution of practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that combines exercises with a set of moral tenets. He was charged with inciting subversion of state power, given a three-year prison sentence and released on a five-year probation on Dec. 22, 2006.

Authorities began torturing him after he was taken into police custody again on Sept. 21, 2007. After his release 50 days later, he penned Dark Night, Dark Hood and Kidnapping by Dark Mafia, for which The American Board of Trial Advocates awarded him the Courageous Advocacy Award. In this article, he documented the various ways authorities mistreated him, which included shoving needles into his genitals and beating him with electric batons.

Government personnel abducted him once more on Feb. 4, 2009. He resurfaced on March 27, 2010, only to disappear into police custody again on April 20 of the same year, after he spread news of his torture. As a result, authorities sentenced him to three years in Shaya Prison, located in Xinjiang. His family had no contact with him for 21 months.

Gao was released on Aug. 7, 2014, although he says that released should be in quotation marks, because he has been subjected to constant supervision. Additionally, he has been repeatedly denied dental care as officials claim that a trip to the dentist would endanger national securitydespite having lost several teeth due to an undiagnosed condition. According to Geng, he is currently in Yulin, Shanxi province under the watch of 10 government officials.

His mental condition is very good, Geng said. His physical condition is not good, but he is slowly recovering. We are hopeful that he will be able go to the city to do a comprehensive physical examination.

Speaking of the possibility that her father will face retribution for publishing this work, she said, He is brave enough to face the consequences. He can take any consequences if he thinks what hes doing is right  I greatly respect his conduct and deeds; I also feel proud of him and his achievements. If he thinks what hes doing is necessary, the whole family will fully support him.

China Aid reports on cases such as the publishing of Gao Zhishengs book in order to promote human rights and rule of law in China.

China Aid Media Team

Cell: (432) 553-1080 | Office: 1+ (888) 889-7757 | Other: (432) 689-6985

Email: [email protected]

For more information, click here
By Lena Ge, China Aviation Daily | Nov. 11, 2016

China's startup cargo carrier Longhao Airlines has unveiled its very first aircraft in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province.

A Boeing 737-300 aircraft, Registration B-2986, had served for China Eastern Yunnan Airlines before its retirement on December 17, 2015.

Now, the aircraft has been painted in Longhao Airlines' brand new livery, which is now underway at passenger-to- freighter conversion.

The Guangzhou-based carrier has purchased three 737-300 freighters. In this July, the airline signed a passenger-to-freighter conversion agreement with PEMCO World Air Services and Taikoo (Shandong) Aircraft Engineering Company Limited for the passenger-to-freighter conversions. The rest two aircraft will subsequently be repainted and converted in Jinan.

The new venture, which is wholly owned by Guangdong Longhao Group, has a registered capital of 400 million yuan.

Based at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, Longhao Airlines plans to fly domestic and international cargo & mail services (including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau), using a fleet of Boeing 737F jets.

Related News:

New Cargo Airline to Launch in Guangzhou, China

Photos: Bidding Farewell to China's First Boeing 737-300 Fleet
Xinhua | Nov. 11, 2016

Cambodia's national flag carrier Cambodia Angkor Air (CAA) will launch direct flights between northwest Cambodia's Siem Reap province and China's Beijing, starting from Dec. 16 onwards, said a CAA's press release on Friday.

The airline will operate thrice-weekly flight service by using an Airbus A320 aircraft, which is capable to seat 180 passengers, the press release said.

"This is a new regular flight connecting Cambodia and China in addition to the existing flights to Guangzhou and Shanghai," it said.

According to the press release, the new flight is to respond to the rapid growth of Chinese tourists to Cambodia and will be easy for tourists in Beijing to travel to Siem Reap province, the home of famed Angkor Wat Temple.

Also, it will be easy for Cambodian people to fly to Beijing for leisure or business purposes, it added.

"The five-hour flight between the two destinations will make Chinese tourists easier to travel to Siem Reap-Angkor," said CAA's chairman Tekreth Samrach.

China ranked the second largest source of tourists to Cambodia after Vietnam. According to a tourism data, some 700,000 Chinese tourists visited Cambodia in 2015, up 24 percent year-on-year.

Established in 2009, CAA is using seven aircrafts--three ATR72-turboprop planes and four Airbuses--to operate two domestic routes and 10 regular international routes.
A China Vanke Co stand at a real estate fair in Beijing. Provided to China Daily

China Evergrande Group, the country's largest property developer, increased its stake in rival China Vanke Co, renewing concerns about a potential battle for control.

The Guangzhou-based developer bought 161.9 million Shenzhen-listed Vanke shares from Aug 16 to Nov 9, Evergrande said in a filing to Hong Kong's stock exchange after the close of trading on Wednesday, boosting its stake to 8.3 percent. Evergrande has spent about 18.8 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) buying shares in Vanke, it said.

Evergrande, controlled by Chinese billionaire chairman Hui Ka Yan, has been on a debt-funded buying spree in the past year. It built up its land bank in China and plans to inject assets into Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Real Estate & Properties Group Co, a property company listed on the Chinese mainland.

Vanke shares jumped 8.6 percent in Shenzhen on Wednesday, the most in more than six weeks, after Caixin magazine reported Evergrande and other investors may have further boosted their holdings in the Chinese real estate developer.

Little-known Baoneng Group emerged as Vanke's largest shareholder late last year, prompting an outcry from the property developer's management.

Bloomberg
A Chinese worker processes steel at a factory in Qingdao city, East China's Shandong province, July 1, 2016. [Photo/IC]

China will probably achieve an annual GDP growth of 6 to 7 percent in the coming decade, Lawrence Lau, senior economist of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said on Thursday.

The world's second-largest economy managed to grow 6.7 percent year-on-year in the first three quarters, but the growth challenge will become ever more severe in the coming years as its restructuring reforms continue.

"I'm optimistic that China's economy can grow by 6 percent to 7 percent for the next five to 10 years," Lau told a symposium held by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to commemorate the 30th anniversary of its partnership with China.

China has set a target for its GDP and per capita income to double from 2010 to 2020. It means its annual GDP growth should be about 6.5 percent to meet that target. But as it carries out economic restructuring reforms amid the unstable global economic situation, which has already driven down its industrial and export growth, some analysts have doubted whether China can achieve its economic goals by 2020.

Lau said the Chinese government has done a fairly good job in maintaining the growth momentum. "Although growth rate has dropped, it has maintained it at above 6 percent," he said.

He said China should pay close attention to the problem of inadequate demand. "It is a big problem and policymakers can make policies to stimulate demand."

But he said China has an advantage in stimulating aggregate demand through government policies. For example, he said, as it tries to lower the PM2.5 (very small particles able to enter the lungs and bloodstream to seriously damage health) levels in big cities, China can increase demand for environmental protection-related products and services.

Lau also praised China's economic achievements in the past more than three decades. China has maintained a GDP growth of about 10 percent on average since the early 1980s, which is a "miracle" and a "spectacular success", Lau said.

Chinese officials participating in the ADB symposium said the ADB has played an important role in helping China achieve that success.

"The ADB has provided resources, techniques, and policy suggestions to support and promote China learning from other countries and more closely cooperating with Asia and other countries," said Chen Shixin, a senior official at the Ministry of Finance.

China and the ADB will continue to engage in close cooperation as China restructures its economy, participants said.

"The ADB aims to increase its lending to China along with our total lending capacity," said Takehiko Nakao, president of the ADB. Priority will be put in areas such as environmental protection and climate change, regional cooperation and integration, reduction of poverty and inequality, promotion of innovation, and institutional reforms, he said.

"With the ADB's corporate target to double its climate financing from $3 billion a year to $6 billion by 2020, we will help China 'green' its economy." China became an ADB member in 1986 and received $34 billion in loan assistance from the ADB from 1986 to 2015.
Pedestrians walk past a store of Marks & Spencer in Beijing, Nov 10, 2016. WANG ZHUANGFEI / CHINA DAILY

The 130-year-old English store Marks & Spencer has been unable to resist the cold snap of the retail industry and earlier said it will shut all of its 10 stores in the Chinese mainland.

In fact, it has been unable to acclimatize to the China market since its launch eight years ago, and so far, not many Chinese consumers know about the brand.

The UK home, food and clothing store announced this week its store closure plans, as the company has continued to post heavy losses in its international business.

The high street seller will consult with the 441 affected staff members about their jobs, and hopes that the both sides can reach a consensus on the termination of contracts. In terms of when the closures will take place, the company said it still needs several months, and didn't disclose any further details, mainland fashion news website Nofashion.cn reported.

Nevertheless, the rapid growth of e-commerce in the Chinese mainland was the last straw for Marks & Spencer.

The company said it will temporarily keep its online stores on Tmall.com and JD.com, two of the largest online shopping websites in China, and considers online shopping will be the best option for Chinese consumers to buy its products.

"The market reaction of foreign department stores is not sharp enough. The local stores usually listen to their global headquarters, but most headquarters are not familiar with the commercial culture and spending mentality in China, therefore their business strategies often can't match the market trends," said Zhao Ping, deputy director of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, which is under the Ministry of Commerce.

The menswear section of a Marks & Spencer store in Beijing. WANG ZHUANGFEI/CHINA DAILY

Cathy Chen, a shopper in her 30s, is familiar with the brand, as she lived in the UK before. She knows the retailer is about to shut down its Chinese mainland stores, and came to see if there was anything worth buying.

"I often shop at the Marks & Spencer store at The Place in Beijing, which was opened last year. But I mainly buy food and rarely buy any clothes, as the designs are a bit old-fashioned," she said.

Adam Colton, managing director of Marks & Spencer Greater China, said the group can't continue local operations in the Chinese mainland, as it has been suffering losses.

Nevertheless, he said the group saw a booming business in Hong Kong and Macao, and Hong Kong has always been one of the major overseas markets for the brand.

In its latest corporate restructuring that will axe 53 overseas stores, the UK retailer will maintain its operations in Hong Kong, as the international franchises and stores in Hong Kong have been profitable with strong brand awareness, the company said in a statement.

"In Hong Kong, we have an established presence with 26 stores, and our customers have embraced our quality, innovative clothing and food products," Colton said.

Wang Zhuoqiong and Qian Hui contributed to this story.
Leung Chun-ying, Chief Executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), speaks during a forum on Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect in Hong Kong, South China, Nov 10, 2016.[Photo/Xinhua]

HONG KONG - Hong Kong's top official said on Thursday that the upcoming Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect will strengthen Hong Kong's role as an international financial center, opening a new chapter for interconnectivity of capital markets between China's mainland and Hong Kong.

Leung Chun-ying, chief executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), made the remarks when addressing a forum on the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect and capital markets of the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong.

Leung said the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect launched two years ago has been of groundbreaking significance for promoting the two-way openness of mainland's financial industry and internationalization of the Chinese renminbi (RMB).

Hong Kong has dual advantages of "One Country" and "Two Systems" which means the region is both an international financial center in China and a financial hub for the world that enables Hong Kong to be a "super connector" for cross-boundary financial markets, Leung said.

The Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect has been operating smoothly since its launch, which has accumulated many experiences for the upcoming Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, the chief executive said.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission has signed a joint announcement with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission on approving the establishment of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect mechanism.

The Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect will provide a new channel for the interconnectivity of stock markets between China's mainland and Hong Kong, further promote the RMB's cross-boundary flow and therefore strengthen Hong Kong's role as an international financial center and offshore RMB hub, Leung said.

Charles Li, Chief Executive of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, said at the forum that Hong Kong has made enormous contribution in the past 30 years to China's mainland in transshipment trade, direct investment and capital market. In the next 20 years, Hong Kong will become a major overseas center for the mainland people to allocate their wealth by channels such as Shanghai-Hong Kong and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect.

Li believed that thanks to a unique trading and clearing model of the two programs, mainland people could invest in many overseas projects and markets at home, and people outside Chinese mainland could also invest in China through the Shanghai-Hong Kong and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect.
ADDIS ABABA - Chinese investors have shown their keen interest to invest in Ethiopia, said Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) head Fitsum Arega on Thursday.

The African country in the past three months received 124 investors who have keen interest to invest, out of whom 71 were from China, said Arega.

Data from the EIC also show that the number of Chinese investors with keen interest to invest in the country is larger than other countries combined.

Arega also expressed his regret and sadness over "the appalling damages, indiscriminate looting and destruction sustained by national and foreign investment projects operating in some parts of Ethiopia and the short-lived state of insecurity".

"The chain of unfortunate incidents last month have come at greater cost to business and had created a sense of insecurity and business uncertainty. Since, the government has taken decisive measures to restore peace and order and assuage the concerns leveled by various investors," he noted.

According to Arega, despite challenges such as drought and insecurity, the country's foreign direct investment has registered a 50-percent increase to reach $3 billion in last budget year.
President of Asian Development Bank (ADB) Takehiko Nakao talks to media during the press conference about his visit to Myanmar, in Yangon, Myanmar, June 15, 2016. [Photo / IC]

SHANGHAI - Asian Development Bank (ADB) has provided $34 billion in loans to China since the country became an ADB member in 1986, bank president Takehiko Nakao said Thursday.

The loans comprised $31 billion for the public sector and $3 billion for the private sector, Nakao said at a symposium in Shanghai to commemorate the 30 years of China's ADB membership.

ADB also supported China with 430 million dollars in technical assistance grants.

"China has made an example of how an economy can achieve very rapid growth drawing on market systems and open trade and investment relations with partner countries," Nakao said.

Chen Shixin, director-general of the department of international economic and financial cooperation at the Ministry of Finance, said China has an all-round mutually beneficial cooperative partnership with ADB, and ADB has played an important role in poverty-reduction, economic and social development.

Chen said under the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development, multilateral organizations need to work with the developing members, especially by investing in infrastructure.

"ADB is ready to help China's further transformation and address economic, social and demographic challenges through our finance and knowledge work," Nakao promised.

He stressed ADB's readiness to support China in reducing CO2 emissions.
A university student stays up late for Singles Day promotion at her dormitory in Beijing, Nov 11, 2016. [Photo/IC]

BANGKOK - Thai companies, after setting up their own online stores on Chinese e-commerce platforms, are joining in the Singles Day promotion on Friday, an annual 24-hour online shopping spree.

Products from Thailand, a country visited by millions of Chinese tourists yearly, have gained popularity among Chinese customers in recent years, which encouraged the Thai businesses to set up their flagship stores on Chinese e-commerce platforms.

"We set up the online store on Alibaba's Tmall about a year ago and our sales reached an amount of 1.84 million yuan ($295,000) on Singles Day last year," said Li Jin, chief of Namu Life's flagship store on Tmall.

The company's cosmetic brand Snail White has become popular as its advertisements in Thai language can often be seen on social media, especially an adaptation of the fairy tale Snow White to publicize their products, which was watched over 1 million times on Youtube and over 6 million times on China's Weibo.

"Thanks to the e-commerce platform, we can talk with our customers directly and understand them better and thus to provide them with better products and services," Li said.

Another Thai cosmetic brand Thann sees their online store as a showcase to attract more buyers to their offline stores in China.

"We set up our online store on Tmall a few years ago as a showcase of our products, because these e-commerce platforms are so powerful and they did help us in attracting more customers to our offline stores," said Ren Li, general manager of Thann China.

She added that their online store offered discounts on some products that they want to popularize during the 24-hour promotion this year.

Moreover, the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP), the largest private company in Thailand, is setting up online shops on these e-commerce platforms and expressed their willing to join in the Singles Day event.

The group is now working together with a team of Chinese youths who started their entrepreneurship recently, to set up an online store on Tmall to sell Thai Hom mali rice.

"We plan to sell our Hom mali rice online to Chinese customers directly, which make it more convenient and efficient in the selling process and also will probable lower our cost," said Vivat Ausavanop, associate vice president of CP.

Vivat added that CP is ready to learn more about the Singles Day shopping festival and will be part of it when the time is ripe.

"We started our entrepreneurship here to encourage Thai enterprises to set up store on e-commerce platforms, because we think those 'cheap and fine' products of Thailand may win popularity with Chinese customers," said Pang Jingyuan, a member of Nebula Technology & Commerce, or the company cooperating with CP in establishing the online rice store.

Pang believe that Singles Day promotion has become more and more influential in China and around the world, so their team advised their partners to join in the trend.

Jack Ma, founder and chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba, said during his visit to Thailand in October that his company was going to work with the Thai government to help small business in the country to develop and boost e-payment, so that more Thai products may be sold on their e-commerce platforms in the future.

Alibaba's sales amount of the Singles Day promotion reached 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in just 6 minutes and 58 seconds after Friday came to China, compared with 12 minutes and 28 seconds in 2015.

The total sales amount of Alibaba reached 91.2 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) during the 24-hour event last year.
Sixty-six Chinese universities now have at least two alumni on the 2016 Hurun Rich List, according to the latest alumni report.

Only people whose wealth reaches 2 billion yuan can qualify for the Hurun Rich List this year.

Zhejiang University, located in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, leads in the rich alumni list, beating the country's two biggest names, Peking University and Tsinghua University, thanks to its 38 wealthy alumni.

The report's survey was restricted to full-time undergraduate and graduate degrees, excluding doctoral degree, EMBA, business school, short programs and other academic qualifications.

"What impressed [me] most is Chinese business people have attached great importance on education that almost every entrepreneur I know has been to business school," Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, said in the report.

He said although around half of the people on the Hurun Rich List do not have full-time undergraduate or graduate degrees, most of them have been to business school to continue studying.

Let's have a look at the top 10 Chinese universities with the most alumni on the Hurun Rich List 2016.

No 10

Harbin Institute of Technology

Number of alumni on Hurun Rich List 2016: 9
Severin Schwan, chief executive officer of Roche Group. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

Roche Group looks to grow and change with the country's ever-evolving healthcare industry

Global biotechnology company Roche Group is committed to driving innovation forward in China, which offers a market of 1.3 billion people. With its research and development capabilities in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, the company has positioned itself to promote personalized healthcare and contribute to China's precision medicine initiatives. Roche's CEO Severin Schwan shared his insights with China Daily reporter Wang Hongyi.

Could you describe Roche's R&D capacity, both globally and in China? What partnerships has Roche already built here?

As a world-leading biotechnology company, we are very much led by science and driven by innovation. We lead the industry with advances in personalized healthcare and our strong oncology portfolio.

R&D receives a greater share of our spending than marketing. On the group level, we spent 9.3 billion Swiss francs ($9.5 billion) on R&D in 2015, which was 19 percent of our turnover. We have consistently been among the top five R&D spenders worldwide, in any industry, since 2009.

Today, we have more than 330 employees in R&D in China. Over the past decades, we've trained a group of outstanding interdisciplinary researchers, leading to highly promising results through collaborations with Chinese companies and academic institutions.

What are your expectations for the new innovation center in Shanghai, which had its groundbreaking ceremony last week?

Last year, we invested 860 million yuan ($126.7 million) in constructing the new laboratory building for the innovation center in Shanghai. The new facility will provide 220 modular workspaces in 14,000 square meters of floor space. We expect it to be completed in 2018.

The focus of our innovation center is very much aligned with the diseases that have a high unmet medical need in China, such as Hepatitis B, which is one of the most prominent diseases in the country.

We hope the new innovation center will spur collaboration between Roche and local research institutions, helping to attract top research talents from both China and overseas.

Our aim is to develop outstanding new drugs for patients in Asia and around the world, and address the currently unmet needs of patients with infectious diseases and those related to immunology and inflammation, thus enhancing our long-term commitment to driving innovation in China.

What is Roche's position on personalized healthcare?

Personalized healthcare is about providing the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. With our combined strength in diagnostics and pharmaceuticals, we are uniquely positioned to further advance personalized healthcare.

In 2006, we made personalized healthcare central to our Roche Group Strategy. This focuses on integrating the knowledge in our pharmaceuticals and diagnostics divisions, and drawing on this knowledge throughout the R&D process, from early research to approval of new diagnostic tests and medicines, as well as their use by patients.

So far, we are the top player in oncology and in vitro diagnostics, drawing from decades of experience in molecular biology.

Today, we are developing two-thirds of our R&D projects with companion diagnostics, which greatly increases efficiency.

In 2015, Roche entered a broad strategic collaboration with Foundation Medicine, a leader in the field of molecular information in oncology, and began to use the latter's innovative genomic sequencing technology to accurately detect the oncogenic mutations in different patients and more effectively help oncologists to find highly-targeted therapies for cancer patients.

In January 2016, Roche announced its cooperation with Flatiron Health in integrating the immense "real world data" and using high-quality healthcare data and advanced analytics to improve both the development of medicines and the quality of treatment decisions.

The cooperation with Foundation Medicine in genomic data and the alliance with Flatiron Health in real world data strengthen Roche's access to innovation and new technologies and drive its commitment to more targeted treatments that, ultimately, make personalized healthcare a reality.

How will Roche promote personalized healthcare in China? What are the difficulties or challenges ahead?

Our diagnostics and pharmaceuticals teams are driving personalized healthcare in China. Roche China Biomarker Team is the first dedicated group in the industry to conduct biomarker studies, focusing on promoting cutting-edge science and technology. The team is mainly engaged in detecting biomarkers and using these techniques in product R&D.

We also provide training on personalized diagnosis and treatment for over 8,000 pathologists and over 4,000 pathology technicians in more than 600 hospitals, laying a solid foundation to improve personalized healthcare in China in the future.

Today, China already has leading companies in genome sequencing and a strong science community. I believe that China has full potential to realize personalized healthcare.

To turn personalized healthcare from a vision to reality is a long journey. The need to improve diagnosis and genetic testing, and the current lack of good quality patient data are problems that should be addressed. We are committed to supporting the Chinese government in overcoming these challenges.

How do you view China's rapid economic growth and its recent slowdown? Will this affect Roche's development in this market?

As one of the first multinational companies to enter China 20 years ago, we've witnessed the country's fastgrowth economy and its booming healthcare market.

The recent slowdown is a sign of China's transition to a new normal, toward building a more sustainable economy based on the consumption and service industries. A high value-added sector such as healthcare can be a new pillar of economic growth in this model.

With the slowing of economic growth, cost containment measures on off-patent drugs and the delayed launch of new drugs, 2015 is the first year since 2005 that the Chinese pharmaceutical industry is facing single-digit growth.

Despite short-term challenges, I am optimistic about the market's growth potential. With an aging population, China's demand for high-end healthcare and treatment for chronic diseases has increased rapidly over the past few years, in response to elderly patients' healthcare needs.

As part of its healthcare reform, the Chinese government is increasing overall spending on healthcare to broaden reimbursement coverage, especially for critical illnesses, and accelerating new drug approvals.

In the short term, we will benefit from expanded healthcare and reimbursement coverage for critical illnesses. In the mid-to-long term, we anticipate our business to grow more quickly, benefiting from the launch of new drugs.

How would you evaluate China's performance globally? Will Roche increase its investment in China?

China remains one of our most important markets globally. We have invested considerably to build a full value chain in China from R&D and manufacturing through to commercialization.

In diagnostics, China is already the second-largest country for us. In pharmaceuticals, China is our third-largest national market.

We recognize that China's pharmaceutical market environment is facing a challenging phase in the short term. However with our strong pipeline and dedicated people, we are confident about our long-term growth prospects by bringing more innovative products to China to benefit more patients.

What do you think of the opportunities and challenges facing your company amid recent healthcare reform? How does Roche fit into the national strategy of "building a healthy China"?

Since 2009, China's healthcare reforms have had far-reaching implications for the industry's long-term development.

The positive moves toward a more transparent and effective review process and capability building at the China Food and Drug Administration are promising for Chinese patients, as well as for innovation-driven companies like us.

We are very encouraged about the update to the National Reimbursed Drug List and hope that national reimbursement coverage can be broadened to critical illnesses.

There remain affordability challenges in China, but we are optimistic that with joint efforts from multiple stakeholders, including the Chinese government and companies like us, more and more patients will have the opportunity to access high-quality treatment.

Roche has been actively working together with different stakeholders, such as local governments, charity foundations, NGOs and insurance companies. We are looking to address unmet patient needs through reimbursement listings on the provincial and city level, patient access programs and private insurance offerings.

How do you motivate international teams?

I think people should be given more space and chances to increase their creativity.

In an organization, people should not be told what to do or what not to do. They should be given opportunities to make full use of their potential.

During this process, a leader should work to encourage them to achieve greater innovation rather than allocate them more tasks.
Visitor walks at the headquarters of Alibaba Group in Hangzhou city, East China's Zhejiang province, Sept 21, 2014. [Photo/IC]

Chinese internet companies face a new reality after Donald Trump's surprise victory as US president-electand Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has the most to lose.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to upend global trade, saying that China is " killing us" on trade policy and proposing tariffs on Chinese goods of as much as 45 percent. If implemented, his ideas could lead to "devastating" results, from global trade wars to higher costs of living, and "spell the end of globalization," according to Darrell West, a vice-president at the Brookings Institution.

"He was very critical of Chinese trade agreements and has threatened to rip them up," West said. "If he did that, the consequences for Chinese companies would be enormous."

Of China's web giantsincluding Baidu Inc, Alibaba and Tencent Holdings LtdTrump's trade policies, if implemented, are likely to pose the biggest threat to e-commerce operator Alibaba. While Baidu and Tencent focus on the domestic Chinese market, Alibaba has a significant part of its business tied to trade with the US. Higher tariffs on Chinese goods would depress demand for its AliExpress site, where Chinese retailers sell to US consumers. Ensuing trade disputes could hurt sales on its Tmall platform, where US and international brands sell to Chinese consumers.

"Given the direct and indirect risks, the election probably will have the greatest impact on Alibaba, more than any other Chinese internet business," said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. "If there are disruptions in trade, it would impact the willingness and likelihood of US brands and retailers to take an active part on Tmall."

Alibaba's management has said that its primary short-term focus isn't consumers in the US, and that it is trying to gain share in developing markets first. Trump's presidency will probably solidify Alibaba's decision to target US consumers in the longer-term, according to Luria.

Yet Trump's policies could upset Alibaba's plan to act as the gateway for international retailers to reach Chinese consumers. If new policies caused China to retaliate and raise tariffs on US goods, that could hurt Alibaba's Tmall sales in China, Luria said.

"A positive relationship between the US and China is important for the world," an Alibaba representative said in a statement. "We believe Alibaba is doing its part by enabling US businesses, large and small, to access the China market, creating American jobs and economic opportunity."

Bloomberg
Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), speaks at a CMC meeting on logistics, in Beijing, capital of China. The meeting was held from Wednesday to Thursday in Beijing. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - President Xi Jinping has called for the building of strong and modern logistics forces that will guarantee the realization of the Chinese dream as well as the dream of a strong army.

Xi, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), made the remarks at a CMC meeting on logistics held from Wednesday to Thursday.

Xi praised the logistics forces' contributions to the country's revolution, construction and reform periods, urging logistics staff to strengthen a sense of responsibility to achieve "leapfrog development" and secure a foundation for the construction of a leading military.

"As the international military competition situation experiences profound changes, and national interests and military missions develop, logistical construction is becoming an increasingly crucial factor that affects wins or losses in battle... and occupies a key place in the development of the Party, the country and the military," Xi noted.

"We must build a logistics force in which everything exists for fighting a war. It must always remain true to the fundamental purpose of helping win a war," Xi said.

Stressing strategic planning and guidance, Xi called for more efforts to research logistics theories and innovation while solving problems that hold back logistics development.

The president urged Party committees and military commanders at all levels to attach great importance to military logistics work, with a focus on the reform of logistics policies and optimization of structures and distribution.

Xi called for scientific and economic management of logistics work, urging military funds and resources to be subjected to centralized and unified management, allocation and use.

According to Xi, more efforts should be made to use state-level resources and enlist the help of local governments as well as social groups and individuals to develop a series of innovation projects that cater to both military and civilian uses.

Since the CPC's 18th National Congress in late 2012, Xi has attached great importance to logistics work. Xi met with attendees of a PLA meeting on logistics in November 2013. In September 2016, Xi conferred flags to joint logistics units as the CMC established a joint logistics support force.

Xi asked logistics staff to push forward their work in line with the requirements of comprehensive and strict Party governance.

Xi also called for efforts to prioritize ideological and political construction and remain determined in fighting corruption in the army and clearing up the bad influence of Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou.

The president urged the military to stay clear-minded and safeguard the authority of the CPC Central Committee and the command of the CPC Central Committee and the CMC, asking them to strengthen intra-Party supervision.

Xi also urged efforts to build strong logistics forces by fostering high-quality talent.

CMC vice chairmen Fan Changlong and Xu Qiliang attended the meeting.
Members of a SWAT team of Beijing police attend a drill with a police dog on Nov 5, 2016. The police dog division of Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau was founded in 1952. Up to 2015, there have been more than 1,000 police dogs serving in criminal investigation, SWAT, public transportation, firefighting and some other departments of Beijing police.[Photo/Xinhua]
Chinese negotiators vowed not to waver despite doubts over US position after election of Trump

Top Chinese climate officials have pledged to negotiate the implementation of the historic United Nations Paris climate agreement based on a consensus at the Marrakech Climate Change Conference taking place in Morocco.

They also brushed aside concerns about Tuesday's election of Donald Trump as the next US president - Trump has called climate change science a "hoax" and pledged to renegotiate last year's landmark Paris accords.

"China will not change its stance on climate change while negotiating details on how to better implement the Paris pact during the two-week conference," said Gou Haibo, deputy chief of the Chinese delegation, on Wednesday, in response to questions about Trump.

The Marrakech meeting, from Nov 7 to 18, is meant to agree on how signatories to the Paris accords will carry out pledges to limit greenhouse gases.

A quorum of nations ratified last year's accord on Nov 4, giving it the force of international law.

More than 80 Chinese negotiators entered discussions on the first day on more than 50 issues regarding the implementation of the Paris agreement, according to Gou.

"Although we are not sure whether the pendulum will change the US stance, China will not (change). We will only refine details of implementing the agreement without either changing nationally determined contributions or positions," Gou said.

Nationally determined contributions state how each country would help control climate change and vary, depending in part on developmental level.

"China will continue to shoulder common but differentiated responsibilities," Gou said.

China is well on its way to achieving its NDCs, according to Gou, in which the nation pledged to reduce carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 60 to 65 percent below 2005 levels by the end of 2030. China also is striving to reach its emissions peak as soon as possible.

Lu Xinming, deputy director of the Department of Climate Change with the National Development and Reform Commission, said China is willing to forge ahead on collaboration with the United States on climate change. The US delegation declined to comment.

Kimberly Hill Knott, director of policy with Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, an NGO, said she expects the talks would reach consensus on as many issues as possible to fend off uncertainties associated with the incoming US administration.

Huang Haoming, head of the China Association for NGO Cooperation, said that it is too early to worry. "There have been achievements made in the United States on low-carbon development, and between our two countries, we have established collaborative programs with the US," he said.

"People should not be too worried at this point. I'm expecting positive results at the end of the climate talks."
The global epicenter of climate change talks moved this year from Paris, the city of sweet macarons, to Marrakech, a place scented with the mild aroma of mint tea.

Leaving French patisseries may seem a hardship, especially for those feeling pessimistic about the Marrakech Climate Change Conference, in which nations are working out the details of how they would keep their Parisian promises.

But a landmark event just a day after the conference opened, the election of Donald Trump on Tuesday as the next US president, changed things. A sense of urgency picked up, given Trump's vow to unravel the Paris accords.

A group of young environmental activists protested outside the meeting pavilion soon after the election results came in, urging Trump to pursue climate justice. There was a sense that it would be difficult for Trump to reverse the gains made.

Even if prospects for the Marrakech meeting to produce binding agreements are unclear, delegates are busy refining implementation road maps and trying to unlock private investment.

When I stepped out of the pavilion late one night, a senior official told me that there should not be too much to worry about.

"You just need some sweets at the end of the day," she said, "and then I will continue my negotiations and you continue to do your interviews tomorrow."
Sun Hongzhi, former vice-minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, stood trial on Thurs-day for taking bribes, embezzlement of public funds and holding a huge amount of property with unidentified sources.

Sun was accused of taking advantage of his various official posts from 2002 to 2014 to seek benefits for 25 entities and individuals in obtaining contracts and promotions. Sun accepted bribes of more than 14.2 million yuan ($2.1 million), either him-self or through his wife, according to the indictment from the Taian people's procuratorate in Shandong province.

When he served as mayor of Songyuan, Jilin province, from 2009 to November 2014, Sun abused his power to embezzle public funds of over 1.64 million yuan, according to the indictment.

He is also accused of holding property worth more than 9.53 million yuan with unidentified sources.

The procuratorate filed the charges with the Taian Intermediate People's Court.

Sun confessed to the crimes and expressed remorse in court. The ruling will be announced at a later date.

More than 80 people, including journalists and members of the public, attended Thursday's hearing.
Sir Rod Patterson.jpg

Sir Rod Patterson brought his company to Escatawpa Elementary School on Thursday to teach kids about bullying through music, dance, and skits. (Tyler Carter/tcarter@al.com)

MOSS POINT, Miss. - People often don't find their purpose in life until an event happens that makes them rethink what are they living for and what is their ultimate purpose. Sir Rod Patterson had such a defining moment.

The Moss Point chapter of Parents for Public Schools, along with the East Biloxi Community Collaborative, allowed Patterson to visit Escatawpa Elementary School as well as the Mississippi Gulf Coast through a partnership that features music as a way to convey his anti-bullying message to engage kids.

"What we do is go into elementary, middle, and high schools, to get students' attention," Patterson said. "Once we capture that attention, what we do is hit them with anti-bullying, anti-drugs positive messages that have prevented kids from preventing suicide. So not only is it a good thing, it's my passion."

Gail Smith, President of the Moss Point Chapter of Parents for Public Schools, said bringing Patterson into the schools is important to address at a crucial point in children's lives.

"It's important to us that children learn to make good choices, and this is a presentation that addresses that in fun yet effective, informative way," Smith said. "It's important that we reach children now so that they can know what exactly bullying is and they can learn if they are the ones who are doing the bullying and how to stop doing it."

Mississippi Press correspondent and Parents for Public Schools member Myya Robinson concurs with Smith's statement.

"We find that children will go home and talk to their families about what they have learned, so these types of discussions and presentations become a great school-to-home tool," Robinson said. "Bullying is an issue nationwide, and it is best to be proactive instead of reactive when addressing these types of issues."

Patterson said students who are bullied then begin to participate in what he called "self-bullying" which in turn causes students to take their frustrations to the next level, citing school shootings and suicide as a way to unleash the anger and bottled up frustrations they may be feeling.

According to Patterson, his company, Sounds of Knowledge, has been around about 20 years and the last 10 years specifically, he has worked alone. Patterson says students have reached out to him via Facebook expressing guilt and anguish felt and even contemplating the thought of suicide, but certain trigger words and phrases such as "I have been thinking about cutting myself" or "things just won't get better" makes him then call the school counselor to get students the help that they need.

As part owner of his first company, Patterson was in charge of checking the company email, but the one day that he didn't, a life-altering email came through that he did not get the opportunity to read and the results was devastating.

"At first when we started, we were getting around 20 emails a day, but as we grew, we began to get 100 emails a day," Patterson said. "I couldn't check all of them, but one of those emails were from a girl who was contemplating suicide, and come to find out later on, she did end her life. That has always remained in my mind because I always felt that was my responsibility and so I have just been on a quest. I just know about the one that I lost, I don't know how many I have saved and that fuels me to keep going."

The remaining school tours include:
Three police officers were sentenced to prison on Thursday for causing the death of a woman after a dispute on a construction site in Taiyuan, Shanxi province.

The Taiyuan Intermediate People's Court sentenced Wang Wenjun to five years in prison for intentional injury and abuse of power; Guo Tiewei to 26 months in prison with a reprieve of three years for abuse of power; and Ren Haibo to 23 months in prison for intentional injury with a reprieve of two years.

According to the court, on Dec 13, 2014, four construction workers clashed with guards at the construction site where they worked after they were refused entry without ID and safety helmets.

When police arrived and tried to take the workers to their vehicle, they were confronted by Zhou Xiuyun, the victim and mother of one of the workers.

Wang grabbed Zhou's hair and forced her to sit and then lie on the ground, standing on her hair for 23 minutes, the court said.

After backup arrived, Zhou and the four construction workers were taken to the police station, where Guo and Ren beat the four male workers in rooms without cameras, the court said.

Paramedics were called to the police station to treat Zhou, but found she was already dead. Legal medical experts said the cause of her death was due to respiratory failure.

The case attracted wide attention after pictures circulated online appearing to show Wang stamping on her as she lay on the ground motionless.

(China Daily 11/11/2016 page4)
The XPNAV-1 carries two detectors, which help determine the location of spacecraft in deep space

China launched an X-ray pulsar navigation satellite on Thursday morning, according to the China Satellite Navigation Office.

The XPNAV-1, developed by the China Academy of Space Technology, was sent skyward at 7:42 am atop a Long March 11 solid-fueled rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China, the office said in a statement.

The satellite operates in a sun-synchronous orbit and will conduct in-orbit experiments using pulsar detectors to demonstrate new technologies, the statement said.

It weighs more than 200 kilograms and carries two detectors, according to the academy.

Shuai Ping, a chief designer of the satellite at the academy, said that X-ray pulsar navigation is an innovative technology in which periodic X-ray signals emitted from pulsars are used to determine the location of a spacecraft in deep space.

During its mission, the satellite will test the detectors' functions in responding to the background noise of the universe, outline pulsar contours and create a database for pulsar navigation, the academy said.

It added that X-ray pulsar navigation will help reduce the spacecraft's reliance on ground-based navigation methods and is expected to achieve autonomous spacecraft navigation in the future.

Current ground-based navigation methods are limited by the time delay between spacecraft and Earth. However, for certain types of pulsars, called "millisecond pulsars", pulses of radiation occur with the regularity and precision of an atomic clock. As a result, in some scenarios, pulsar X-rays can take less time to estimate a location. This leads to more precise measurements of a spacecraft's location.

Because X-rays from pulsars are absorbed by the atmosphere, scientists have to launch satellites to continue research into the new technology, according to the academy.

The launch of the XPNAV-1 is the latest move in China's efforts to build a large space network of scientific satellites.

China has previously launched three scientific satellites, including the world's first quantum experiment satellite and a dark-matter particle explorer satellite.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are also developing four space-based scientific projects: the Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer; the Water Cycle Observation Satellite; the Einstein Probe; and the Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Thermosphere Program.

In Thursday's launch, the Long March 11 rocket also lifted a Lishui-1 commercial remote-sensing satellite, which was developed by the privately owned Zhejiang Liya Electronic Technology Co Ltd.

The company plans to build a constellation of up to 120 commercial satellites to obtain images of Earth and data to serve business purposes, said Zhang Liling, chairwoman of the company. She did not elaborate on the project, citing the firm's commercial confidentiality policy.

Wang Jianmeng, a satellite expert in Beijing, who worked for the space authorities for many years, said that the government should encourage more participation from private sectors in commercial space business to ensure the sustainable growth of the nation's space industry.
Wang Chunhua, a traffic police officer in Chongqing municipality, has become an Internet celebrity after photos of him directing traffic were posted online.

At 9:20 a.m. on Nov.9, several intersections along Xinnan Road in the municipality'sYubei district became extremely congested due to non-functioning traffic lights. Observingthe situation, Wang got out of his patrol car. By supporting himself on a crutch, Wangwalked toward a wayward cable and tried to pull it back into position. In the meantime, hecalled other colleagues for help.

"The power supply was back to normal within 10 minutes, but the congestion did not ease.I saw that I needed to direct traffic on site," he said.

Gao Qian, an auxiliary police officer, saw Wang holding the crutch with one hand and directing traffic with his other. He also offered instructions to various drivers stuck in traffic.

"If it were not for him, normal traffic conditions would have taken a long time to resume.The officer holding a crutch directed traffic while standing in the middle of the road. Ithought he was very dedicated. He moved me and also other passersby," said WangChangxu, a volunteer.

When a reporter noticed Wang that afternoon, he was working from his patrol car onXinnan Road, with the crutch lying beside him.

I walked too much this morning," Wang said sheepishly. "And now the leg is swelling.

Wang broke his left ankle at work six months ago. He was only discharged from thehospital recently. The doctor told him to rest at home for one month. Despite the doctorsadvice, Wang returned to work soon after his discharge.
A gathering to commemorate the 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen is held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 11, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

People from both Chinese mainland and Taiwan should make joint efforts to fight separatists and safeguard unity of the country, President Xi Jinping said on Friday in a ceremony to mark a late statesman that is widely respected by both sides across the Taiwan Straits.

"We would never allow any people, organization or political party, in any time, with any form, to separate any piece of Chinese land from the nation," Xi said in a solemn tone, which won long-lasting applauses from the listeners at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

The president's remarks are made to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen, who led a revolution in 1911 to end the imperialism rule of the Qing Dynasty and founded the Republic of China.

Sun is also the founder of Kuomintang (KMT), which governed Taiwan for decades from 1940s to 1990s and from 2008 to 2015. Mentioning that Sun is a national hero and compatriot, Xi said that the late revolutionary leader is a firm supporter of national unity.

For all Taiwan political parties, organizations and personals, as long as they acknowledge that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, the mainland side would like to communicate with them, Xi said.
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.

0108263 License for publishing multimedia online



Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349
Cross-Straits forum held to commemorate Sun Yat-sen

Xinhua | Updated: 2016-11-11 11:59

BEIJING - A cross-Straits forum to commemorate the 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen was held in Beijing Thursday.



The forum, jointly sponsored by the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang and the Alumni Association of the Huangpu Military Academy, was attended by 180 people including Huangpu alumni and their relatives from all over the world.



Participants at the forum called on Huangpu alumni and their families to carry forward the spirit of Sun and jointly contribute to the peaceful development of cross-Straits ties and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.



The Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy opened in south China's Guangzhou in 1924. The first lessons were delivered on June 16 of that year by Dr. Sun, founder of the Kuomintang Party, and a revered revolutionary leader who played a pivotal role in overthrowing imperial rule in China.
Zhao Liping, former police chief and senior political adviser in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, has been sentenced to death by a court in Shanxi for murder.

The 65-year-old former deputy chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Inner Mongolia Committee was also stripped of his political rights for life, and fined 2 million yuan ($294,000), according to Taiyuan city Intermediate People's Court in Shanxi province.

He is the first person to be sentenced to death with no reprieve since late 2012, when the new leadership was elected and President Xi Jinping began a sweeping drive to fight corruption.

Zhao was also accused of illegally possessing explosives, firearms and ammunition, as well as taking bribes.

In March last year, Zhao shot and killed a 28-year-old woman in Chifeng city.

Upon arriving at the scene, police found two guns and 49 bullets, as well as 91 explosives detonators Zhao kept in his office.

The court said between 2008 and 2010, while serving as director of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region's public security bureau, Zhao accepted 23.68 million yuan ($3.48 million) in bribes, in return for securing promotions and authorizing business deals.

He was given the death sentence, instead of a more lenient punishment, due to the nature of his crimes and his refusal to admit to them, "which resulted in great social harm and bad influence", the court said.

Since November 2012, anti-corruption has become a top priority for the country and more than 140 high-ranking officials have been sentenced or placed under investigation for alleged graft, including Zhou Yongkang, former top security chief, who was jailed for life in June 2015.

Sentencing Zhao Liping to death reflects the Party's "resolute determination to combat corruption," said Li Wei, a lawyer from Beijing Lawyers' Association.

"No matter who is involved or how powerful they are, they will receive their punishment according to the law."
Zhu Mingguo, a former top political adviser from South China's Guangdong province, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for accepting bribes valued at more than 141 million yuan ($21 million).

Zhu also was found to own more than 91 million yuan worth of properties and that he failed to reveal their sources, according to the court verdict.

The verdict was passed by Liuzhou Intermediate People's Court in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region after a public hearing on Friday.

Zhu's hair has turned grey and he looks much older since he was placed under investigation about 2 years ago. The 59-year-old former senior official was domineering while in office.

Zhu's punishment was reduced due to his good attitude regarding his crimes and because he actively refunded the bribe money after he was detained and put under investigation, according to the verdict.

All the properties Zhu illegally gained were confiscated and Zhu was deprived of his rights for life.

Zhu was investigated on suspicion of accepting large bribes between 2002 an 2014, when he was in power, through helping others bid on construction projects and land development and facilitating officials' promotions.

Zhu was put under investigation in November 2014 for serious violations of Party discipline and taking large bribes. He was removed from his post in December that same year.

Zhu, born in the city of Wuzishan in Hainan province in May 1957, is a member of the Li ethnic group.

Zhu is the second top political adviser in Guangdong province who has been sentenced to death with a 2-year-reprieve.

Chen Shaoji, former chairman of Guangdong Provincial Committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, was sentenced to death with a 2-year reprieve for accepting large bribes in July of 2010.

Zhu's case raised great concern at home and abroad and rocked the political arena in prosperous Guangdong province, China's window of reform and opening to the outside world.

Zhu, a ministerial official, is the highest ranking official investigated in Guangdong in recent years.

Zhu was once deputy Party chief of Guangdong province and secretary of the Guangdong Party Commission for Discipline Inspection before he took office as the province's top political advisor in 2013.

Before Zhu transferred to Guangdong in 2006, he was a member of the standing committee of Chongqing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China and director-general of the Chongqing municipal Bureau of Public Security from 2001-06.

Zhu was deputy governor of Hainan province from 1998-2001.
The 2016 Global Education Technology Conference got underway in Beijing on Friday.

Hundreds of business leaders in the sector from China and abroad gathered for the three-day event, including representatives from New Oriental Education & Technology Group; iFlytek Co Ltd, a Chinese enterprise dedicated to intelligent speech and language technologies; and Youdao, a popular online dictionary and translation brand from leading Chinese IT company NetEase Inc.

The main themes that will be discussed are exploring new opportunities, improving education quality and connecting technology and the internet.

Sun Chang, CEO of koolearn, an online education brand of New Oriental Education & Technology Group, said New Oriental was eyeing opportunities in elite international schools and private kindergartens as it looks toward its future development.

"We are looking at these opportunities because anxious Chinese parents are never content with the diversity or the quality of education in China, not to mention that China's universal second-child policy is bringing more needs for educational resources," she said.

Bai Yunfeng, president of TAL Education Group, a leading K-12 after-school tutoring services provider in China, said his company will continue to focus on improving education quality.

"High-quality education has been and will always be a rare resource, so for education enterprises, the pursuit of quality will never end," he said, adding that TAL is also building connections between technology and the internet to expand its reach.
SHIJIAZHUANG - The death of a boy who fell into an abandoned well in northern China has sparked public concerns across the country.

The boy, surnamed Zhao, was found dead on Thursday night in Lixian County, Hebei's Baoding City, after search and rescue teams had been looking for him for over 100 hours, according to Wu Sujie, Lixian's vice county head.

The boy, 6, fell down the 80-meter-deep dry well on Sunday morning when helping harvest vegetables with his father, rescuers said.

The accident generated attention home and abroad, after the boy's father put out a call for help on social media platform Wechat.

"May the boy be found and safe," said a Facebook comment by Stanley Lim from Malaysia as rescue efforts were ongoing.

It took so long to find the boy, the public raised questions about the rescue efforts, while others were concerned about the dangers of disused wells in China.

RESCUE EFFORTS IN QUESTION

It took over 500 rescuers and 100 excavators more than 100 hours to find the boy's body, according to the local government, leaving many to wonder why it took so long.

After the boy disappeared, rescuers used life-detecting devices, infrared cameras and mechanic rescue arms to try to find him, but all efforts were in vain, Wu said.

As the 30 centimeter-diameter well was too narrow for an adult to enter, rescuers had to dig a 120-meter diameter, funnel-shaped area to try to find the boy, said Pang Zhi, head of a rescue team at the site.

"On four occasions the ground nearly caved-in," he said.

The rescue was hampered by the soft sandy soil, which is prone to collapse, Pang said. Measures were taken to support the shaft during the excavation.

Ma Xiaochun, an associate professor with the faculty of engineering at China University of Geoscience, said that when such accidents happen, rescuers usually contact the victim first, while providing oxygen, lights and food.

"In this case, it was difficult to do so because they were unable to detect the boy, not to mention his physical condition," Ma told Beijing News.

"HUMAN-EATING WELLS"

The case left many worried about China's dry wells, with many netizens coining the phrase "human-eating wells" on Weibo, a Twitter-like service.

According to the boy's grandfather, the well was once used for irrigation but has been out of service for five years, and the well had not been refilled or covered. "There was no warning sign around," he said.

Wu said that the well was dug in the late 1990s, and that there had initially been a cover, but it was somehow removed.

The county government has launched an investigation into all dry wells in Lixian, Wu said.

Thirty-one people have fallen into dry wells in China since 2015, with 80 percent children, according to Beijing News. Forty percent of the victims lost their lives, the newspaper reported.

Northern and eastern regions of China have long experienced water supply issues amid rapid urbanization and growing demand, with underground water dropping to alarming levels in many areas.

As a result, many wells have been abandoned as residents have dug deeper wells searching for more underground water.

In Hebei, about 100,000 wells dried up or had insufficient water as of 2012, according to government figures.

"In China, a lot of rural land has been appropriated for commercial uses, and many farmers have left their wells abandoned," said Zhang Yong, head of China's Blue Sky Rescue, a non-governmental rescue organization.

Zhang said it was urgent to take measures to guard such wells, suggesting a comprehensive inspection of dry wells across the country was needed.

"Abandoned wells should be refilled," he said. "Fences should be established to prevent accidents."
GAUTIER, Mississippi -- "Freedom isn't free, folks. It's bought and paid for with a hell of a price."

Retired U.S. Navy Cmdr. Robert Hardy offered those words during the annual Laying of the Wreath Veterans Day ceremony at the Veterans Tribute Tower in Gautier Friday morning. They were among the many reminders of the sacrifices made by so many who have kept the nation free.

Sponsored by the City of Gautier and American Legion Post 1992, the annual ceremony salutes all those who have served, including those who have given the ultimate sacrifice.

The event featured several speakers, including Hardy, American Legion 9th District Commander Flo Hendrickson, State Sen. Michael Watson and Gautier City Councilwoman Mary Martin.

Students from Gautier Elementary performed three patriotic songs as numerous veterans, ranging from World War II vets to those who have served during campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, looked on.

Hendrickson noted the struggles faced by many veterans returning from combat, including the roughly 50,000 homeless veterans, the 20 who commit suicide each day, and those dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"We want to pray for those veterans who are struggling to find a piece of mind," she said, and then encouraged legislators to enact "meaningful" legislation to help the nation's veterans.

Hardy recounted most of the American wars which have kept the nation free, including the Civil War, which he said "brought the nation together."

He recalled a fraternity brother from his days at Mississippi State, Bobby Cochran, who enlisted in the Marine Corps, was sent to Vietnam and was "shot between the eyes by a sniper" the first time he was being deployed into combat by helicopter.

"Many of you have friends and loved ones with stories of those who paid the ultimate price," he said, adding that it is the "American spirit" which has allowed the United States to maintain its cherished freedoms.

"God help us if this country ever loses that spirit," he said.
China will sign agreements with Ecuador, Peru and Chile in areas including trade, investment, finance and nuclear power during President Xi Jinping's third trip to Latin America next week, according to the Foreign Ministry.

China attaches great importance to the development potential of Latin America despite the region's slow economic growth in recent years amid global sluggishness, Vice-Foreign Minister Wang Chao told a news conference on Thursday.

Xi will make state visits to the three countries beginning Nov 17. He will also attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders meetings in Lima, Peru, as part of the weeklong trip.
Shot from 2003 animation film The Butterfly Lovers:Leon and Jo, directed by Cai Mingqin from Taiwan. [Photo/Mtime]

Today is another Single's Day, if you have found your sweetheart or Mr Right, congratulations! If you are still single, please also enjoy the day. Since every coin has two sides, being single can have many advantages. And as we say, life is short, be happy and never waste your time wallowing in misery, believe that only happiness lies before you.

Compared to ancient people, we should feel grateful for having more freedom to find the person we want to be with. In ancient China, marriage was often decided by parents or even the government. And during some periods, like the Jin Dynasty (265-420), marriage policies could go to extremes. Single women must get married by a certain age. If a female was still single at 17, there would be a forced marriage with local administrators' involvement.

Extreme policies to force people to get married were rare. Ancient Chinese had milder ways to encourage people to find a spouse.
Models present Exception's 2017 spring/summer collection and its signature pieces from the past. CHINA DAILY

Few local brands have survived the ups and downs of the Chinese fashion world over the past two decades. Among them is Exception de Mixmind, one of the country's most famed indigenous fashion labels. It celebrated its 20th anniversary with a runway show during China Fashion Week in Beijing in October.

The show both launched the brand's 2017 spring/summer collection and presented its signature pieces from the past.

The new collection, which is a tribute to the Song Dynasty (960-1279), features shirts, dresses and coats highlighting natural materials, fluid lines and relaxed shapes.

Also in October, the brand opened a new store at Beijing's China Central Place mall, a major luxury shopping destination.

Even as the Chinese luxury industry continues to decline due to the anti-corruption campaign and economic downturn, Exception isn't hesitant to move forward.

Mao Jihong, founder of the brand, sees the store opening as a statement of the brand's intent. It is among few domestic brands to secure such an important commercial location.

"As businesspeople, we have to think more than money. Japan has Omotesando Hills, Paris has Avenue Montaigne and London has Oxford Streets. But we don't have a place for our own brands in China," he says.

Founded in 1996, Exception has grown alongside Chinese consumers all these years.

"They have evolved from followers to individuals with their own judgement and sense of aesthetics. Even for the newly rich, they have become more rational with their consumption," Mao says, adding that the maturing consumers are putting pressure on the whole industry to perform better.

"We want to be a good influence for the consumers and become a way for them to express themselves."

With its core values rooted in individuality and free spirit, Exception is known for its restrained, simplistic and unadorned style. At the same time, it has also evolved to cater to modern tastes.

"Our life is changing vastly. We have to maintain our original emphasis on culture and art while adapting more to a modern lifestyle," he says.

Earlier, the brand had clothes that weren't really suitable for travel or business meetings, he says.

"So we tried to change them."

While numerous Chinese brands have sought to become listed companies, Mao says he has no such plans. Instead of business, he prefers to talk about art and culture.

"I don't really talk about finance. I have professionals taking care of that. I only focus on things that I'm good atthings that can touch people's hearts."
Lao Zheng Xing restaurant in Shanghai is known for its signature dishes like 18-second shrimp and red-braised pig intestine. It's the only State-owned eatery in the city to be honored by the Michelin Guide. The restaurant has been packed to capacity since the award. GAO ERQIANG/CHINA DAILY

They didn't even know they'd won.

At the Michelin Guide's star-awarding ceremony for restaurants that appear in its 2017 guide for Shanghai, the crowd of nervous chefs in white jackets and formidable hats did not include anyone from Lao Zheng Xing.

A representative of the restaurant, the only State-owned eatery to be honored by the prestigious French guide, later explained to China Daily that they had not been informed of their one-star award.

The star designates "high quality cooking worth a stop", such as the wok-fried river shrimps turned out in the Shanghainese restaurant by 27-year-old Wang Hui, who has mastered the art of cooking them since he first set foot in the kitchen at the age of 17.

Every day, Wang supervises hundreds of plates of thumbnail-sized shrimpswhich emerge crimson orange after a strictly timed 18-second dive in 200 C oil. The dish has been passed down through 10 generations of chefs at the most historical restaurant in the city.
Colagreco's king crab and grapefruit roll at Azur. CHINA DAILY

Dabs of bright green parsley foam represent moss. A landscape takes shape with carefully placed mushrooms. The white sauce signifies the first snowfall of the year.

Watching chef Mauro Colagreco putting A Walk in the Forest together on an elegant plate, it's easy to close your eyes and imagine a classical painter at work. So it's no surprise to learn that the artistic chef really does paint in his free time.

Not that he has much time to spare.

Colagreco has been in Beijing for the just-ended Shangri-La International Festival of Gastronomy, the hotel chain's two-week celebration of its Michelin-star winners in cities around the world. After presenting a couple of special dinners at his blue-hued restaurant Azur and the master class he hosted for media, he's headed back to the French Riviera. That's where, in the city of Menton, his Mirazur restaurant earned its first Michelin star less than one year after it opened in 2006. In 2015 the restaurant was ranked the 11th-best restaurant in the world and No 1 in France by S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants.

A long list of awards came in between, as well as the opening of restaurants that bear his imprint in Paris and Nanjing.

Like at his flagship restaurant in France, his menu at Azur is inspired by the entire Mediterranean. His heritage is Argentine-Italian, and since Mirazur is located very near the Italian border, he says he cooks "without baggage" and with a lot of culinary freedom.

"People think of French food as very saucy and heavy," he says, "but at its best the food of the region is fresh and subtle."

Born in Argentina, he has lived in France for the past 17 years, working with celebrated chefs like the late Bernard Loiseau, Alain Passard at l'Arpege in Paris, Alain Ducasse at Hotel Plaza Athenee and finally spending a year at Le Grand Vefour.

But the inspiration he prizes most came from his grandmother, who impressed him with the joy of sharing food and wine with guests.

"I have found that appreciation of food is something our culture shares with the Chinese," he says. "I want people to come together, to break bread with our hands."

Twenty years ago, going out to a restaurant was a special occasion, he notes. "Now we do it all the timeit's not such a rigid thing. But now needs to be an escape from our busy livespeople need fraternity."
Peter Quiatkowski. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Peter Quiatkowski is proud to have made his mark on China's deep-sea oil exploration industry in the past decade.

"When I arrived, the oil business in China was picking up very fast. We were lucky enough to be on the move and were carried along with this," says Quiatkowski, 67, an oil expert from Britain.

Since 2007, Quiatkowski has played a pioneer role in the industry as general manager of Cosl-Expro Testing Services (Tianjin) Company, a joint venture established by China Oilfield Services Limited and the oilfield services provider Expro Group of Britain.

Quiatkowski, who has been in the industry for more than 40 years and has worked in many places, including Africa and South America, says he did not know what to expect before he arrived in China.

He soon found the new environment encouraging. The country was busy preparing for the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008, and there was "a general enthusiasm for change in the country", he says.

Although Chinese companies were entering new fields and needed overseas help, he was happy to see his Chinese team was well educated and was keen to learn.

"So we had the right ingredient," he says. "They just needed some leadership to get everybody to pull in the right direction."

Early on Quiatkowski put a great deal of emphasis on policies and procedures. It took some time for his Chinese colleagues to understand his approach and get used to new ways of doing things.

"It was a practical challenge to let everybody understand we had to behave in an international way if we wanted to enter the international market," he says.

Drawing on his international experience, Quiatkowski made training a key part of his long-term strategy.

The joint venture frequently sends groups of employees, 99 percent of whom are Chinese, to Britain for training.

"No matter how good the captain is, the ship still would not sail without a good crew," he says.

The company has put in bids against the strongest international competitors and won the contract for a deep-water well testing project of a major Canadian energy company in 2008, marking the first successful step for Chinese oilfield services companies to go international.

Since then the company has provided oil testing services to more than 10 leading international oil companies.

Quiatkowski's team provided the advanced technology and highly trained Chinese crew that carried out well testing services on the sixth-generation semi-submersible oil rig CNOOC HY 981, which went into service in 2012.

It was the first independent deep-water oil drilling operation by a Chinese company, making China one of the few countries that can explore for deep-water oil and gas.

The team also introduced innovative methods to significantly reduce the time required for similar tasks.

This exemplified the Chinese team coming a long way toward becoming top-level players in the field, he says.

"They are stretching the boundaries."

Quiatkowski's work has been recognized by the Chinese authorities. In 2014 he received the Friendship Award, the highest honor given by the Chinese government to foreigners who have made significant contributions to the country's social and economic development.

"It means so much to me. I feel like I should give back more."
US President-elect Donald Trump speaks at election night rally in Manhattan, New York, US, November 9, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

Tuesday was a tragic day for all lovers of peace worldwide and for Hillary Clinton in particular. Tuesday marked the death of her dream of becoming the first female president of the US.

Trumps victory shocked the whole world beyond belief. No one, not even his own party members, expected him to even come close to winning.

Despite accusations of despicable sexual exploits and his divisive statements that insulted every race and women in the US, he decisively won the election.

Until Tuesday morning, most media venues, motivated by the consecutive polls that indicated a sure victory for Clinton, were certain she would triumph and become the 45th president of the US. They were anticipating she would make history by breaking the gender barrier to become the first female leader of the US.

One of the most important lessons that must be learned from examining the results of the American election is the fact that Trumps win proved beyond any doubt there is a feeling of white supremacy in America.

By going through the numerous analyses of the results of the American election, one can see clearly that most young white American citizens voted for Trump.

Did Clintons confidence prompt her to pay less attention to the young, educated white members of both genders? Did her association with the Obamas administration diminish her chances of winning the presidency? Were Americans too tired and fed up with the establishment to the degree that geared them to look for someone new who was not afraid to defy the political machine?

Despite it being hard to admit, one may wonder about the possibility that American men are too chauvinistic to accept being led by a female president.

For certain, Trumps victory puts into question every conceivable wisdom and principle of the accuracy of the election polls. One might ask about the possibility that portraying Trump as the underdog in most polls prompted people to rebel against the influence of the media to vote for him.

Examining the reactions of the world to Trumps win, it is clear that it shattered the expectations of people everywhere. Most people are afraid that the USA is divided beyond repair and may face a period of chaos and uncertainty. The stock market reacted swiftly to Trumps victory. It became enveloped in a shadow of uncertainty

Going through Chinese media, one can conclude that the majority of Chinese expected Trump to win. They hoped that under Trump, the collaboration between the two major powers would change for the better.

Discussing the American election with some of my Chinese students, I discovered that females supported Hilary Clinton while most males hoped that Trump would win.

Would Chinas relations with the USA improve during Trumps presidency? Most Chinese hope so. However, one can never be certain. Only time will tell.

As for me, a Canadian who resides in China, I felt grave disappointment upon discovering that Trump, despite all his divisive attitude and demeaning treatment of women by regarding them as sex objects, won the presidency.

Nevertheless, my optimism leads me to hold onto a shred of hope that he may acquire the courage to alter his conduct and attitudes after his inauguration.

Sava Hassan is a Canadian Egyptian educator.

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and don't represent views of China Daily website.
US President-elect Donald Trump speaks at election night rally in Manhattan, New York, US, November 9, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

The Trump victory was a "stunning surprise" to Washington and mainstream media. But it was very much in line with voter distrust in both the Clinton and Washington ruling class.

Politically, Americans are fed up. In cooperation with the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign had far too cozy ties with Wall Street, neoconservatives and Pentagon contractors, as well as mainstream media organizations; from CNN and New York Times to Huffington Post and Google.

In turn, House Republicans demand a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton Foundation, which former New York City mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani has called a racketeering enterprise that should be prosecuted as such. Indeed, Republicans have promised to investigate the role of the State Department, the Department of Justice and the FBI. In turn, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has promised aggressive oversight work of a quid pro quo deal between the FBI and the State Department over emails, while chair of the House Oversight Committee Jason Chaffetz has been pushing for new hearings.

It will be interesting to see whether Republicans will walk the talk - unless, of course, the idea of post-election healing is understood as a license for collective amnesia.

The demise of US-EU cooperation - and NATO?

The Trump triumph is a belated acknowledgment of Americas malaise. However, as he vows immediate action on executive orders, it is not entirely clear, whether the Trump medication will alleviate or worsen Americas economic angst. His campaign promises have potential to add to rather than reduce Americas $20 trillion sovereign debt burden.

What is certain is that, economically, most Americans' wages have stagnated since the 1980s. Politically, the Congress enjoys credibility only among 10-20 per cent of Americans. In security matters, most Americans do not believe that US should play the role of "world police" internationally.

Since the postwar Marshall Plan and the creation of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), US-EU relations have been characterized by extraordinarily close economic, political and security cooperation. Nevertheless, the eclipse of the Cold War has given rise to a set of bilateral conflicts in trade and investment that go beyond longstanding economic disagreements.

Typically, President Obama was able to achieve the Trans-Pacific Trade agreement (TPP) in Asia, whereas the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) with Europe has proved far more complicated. Hillary Clinton supported the new Cold War against Russia, which has contributed to Europes economic stagnation. In contrast, Trump believes he can handle President Putin. He prefers international stability to imperial democracy promotion.

Bilateral US-EU friction is most evident in Trumps NATO criticism. As far as Trump is concerned, NATO members have failed to meet the 2% spending target of their GDP on defense. When he has criticized NATO for being obsolete, he has simply posed questions that many US leaders - including nations top military chiefs - ask behind the facade.

As Trump puts it, Either they pay up, including for past deficiencies, or they have to get out. And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO.
John Finn trials.jpg

The Ingalls-built destroyer John Finn (DDG 113) has completed its third and final round of sea trials. The Arleigh-Burke class destroyer is on track for delivery to the U.S. Navy in December.

(Ingalls Shipbuilding)

PASCAGOULA, Mississippi -- The guided missile destroyer John Finn (DDG 113), built at Ingalls Shipbuilding, has completed its third and final round of sea trials, the company announced Friday.

"The success of DDG 113 acceptance trials moves us one step closer to delivering a quality, state-of-the-art surface combatant to the U.S. Navy," said Ingalls president Brian Cuccias. "For nearly three decades, the DDG 51 program has served as the backbone of our shipyard, and today we are proud to continue that legacy.

"Our shipbuilders are eager to show our U.S. Navy customer the positive impact of a skilled workforce and a hot production line can have on the DDG 51 program."

John Finn is one of 33 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers either delivered or under construction by Ingalls. The ship spent two days in the Gulf of Mexico as the sea trial crew tested the ship's various systems.

The U.S. Navy's Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV) was onboard evaluating the John Finn's performance. The Navy requires three sea trials as part of its restart of the DDG 51 program.

Once Ingalls shipbuilders put the "final touches" on the John Finn, it will be delivered to the Navy in December.

"The shipbuilders are ready to get back to work on DDG 113," said George Nungesser, Ingalls' DDG program manager. "They know acceptance trials are a vital part of the process, but it's not the end of the road.

"Our shipbuilders take pride in what they do every day because they know how important these ships are to the defense of the nation and to the safety of sailors serving aboard them."

DDG 113 is named in honor of John Finn, the Navy's first Congressional Medal of Honor winner during World War II. Despite being shot in the foot and shoulder and suffering from multiple shrapnel wounds, Finn continued to fire his machine gun at Japanese war planes for over two hours during the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec.. 7, 1941.

Finn retired a lieutenant after 30 years in the Navy. He died in 2010 at the age of 100.

Other destroyers currently under construction at Ingalls include Ralph Johnson (DDG 114), Paul Ignatius (DDG 117), Delbert D. Black (DDG 119) and Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121). Construction of Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG 123) is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2017.
US President-elect Donald Trump speaks at election night rally in Manhattan, New York, US, November 9, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

How will Donald Trump's presidency-after he assumes office on Jan 20, 2017-affect China-US relations? This question is uppermost on many people's minds a day after Republican Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election.

Many have taken seriously Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trail over the past 16 months, such as imposing a 45 percent punitive tariff on Chinese imports and calling China a currency manipulator. This could be misleading. Trump had only talked about tariff in the early period of the campaign and not repeated it for a long while. Besides, the US business community and the Congress are not likely to approve of such mutually destructive measures. And the US Treasury Department has repeatedly said in the past year that China is not manipulating its currency.

But how seriously should we take Trump's campaign rhetoric is a problem. Past US presidential candidates have made crazy vows vis-a-vis China during their campaigns, but they forgot them quickly once elected.

Of far more importance will be Trump's words and deeds after he enters the White House. His victory speech has sent positive messages. For example, he said: "We will deal fairly with everyoneAll people and all other nations" and "we will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict."

His speech reflects the spirit of President Xi Jinping's congratulatory message on Wednesday to Trump about no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation.

During the campaign, Trump also said that he was willing to meet Democratic People's Republic of Korea leader Kim Jong-un and improve ties with Russia. Such a tone is welcome given the US government has intervened excessively in other nations' internal affairs in the past and US leaders like to lecture others.

President Barack Obama has been regarded by some as being less interventionist. Yet his drastic increase of drone strikes and intervention in Libya have created more problems in countries and regions.

The Obama administration is also partly responsible for triggering a bad action/reaction cycle with China in East Asia and the South China Sea with its "rebalancing to Asia-Pacific" strategy, widely perceived to contain China's rise.

Indeed, as secretary of state, Clinton made some contributions to US-China relations, but her hawkish instinct could have further raised tensions between Beijing and Washington if elected president.

Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said last week that Clinton, if elected, has to unlearn many of her past instincts and develop new ones.

Trump's victory speech does contain encouraging messages, but he has not made a foreign policy speech, especially regarding China. It is still unknown who will become his secretary of state and national security advisor, and who will be the members of his foreign policy team.

The growing interdependence between the two largest economies and the huge potential for mutual cooperationare compelling reasons for the two countries to expand cooperation and better manage their differences.

The US needs to show more confidence in Asia-Pacific countries' wisdom and ability to solve their maritime territorial disputes through bilateral negotiations.

Many Washington pundits I talked to seem to have little confidence in Trump's ability in foreign policy, including US-China relations. I hope Trump upsets them too by demonstrating his ability to keep the relationship on a more stable and healthy track for the benefit of both countries, as well as the region and beyond.

The author is deputy editor of China Daily USA. chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com
The China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters is obscured by severe smog in Beijing on Tuesday. [Photo/IC]

Facing widespread public anger over the heavy smog swathing much of North and Northeast China in early November, Heilongjiang and Hebei provinces, which were the two major sources of the air pollution, made different responses.

In Heilongjiang province, where the air quality index readings in Daqing were 500 for 24 hours and severe air pollution lasted for about 37 hours, only one day of heavy pollution was registered by the government, which issued an orange alert instead of a red one. In stark contrast, the government in Hebei province took iron-handed measures and held accountable a total of 487 officials and company heads.

Due to the unclear divisions of responsibilities and the lack of effective supervision in the past, some enterprises have turned a blind eye to their responsibilities for environmental protection in the pursuit of their economic interests, which has taken its toll on the environment and damaged people's health. This has also resulted in the phenomenon of "enterprises pollute, people suffer and the government pays the bill".

Under the country's new law on environmental protection, which puts in place an explicit responsibility and accountability mechanism, the responsibility for local enterprises refusing to fulfill their environmental protection duties now mainly lies with the local government.

Past practices indicate that serious pollution always involves dereliction of duty or misuse of power by government officials.

A good environment depends on clearly defining the responsibilities among the different government departments concerned, their effective implementation of responsibilities and duties, and an effective supervisory and accountability mechanism. Otherwise, no matter how well-contrived the measures for environmental protection are they will be to no avail.

There is no shortcut to environmental protection. Government departments have to effectively play their supervisory role and punish any enterprises that dare to cross the red line.
Police officers hold the buckets stuck with road safety slogans.[Photo from Sina Weibo]

ON NOV 8 AND 9, a national police conference on urban traffic management was held in Shanghai, according to which the police will put traffic violations, especially serious illegal conducts and accidents, in the credit records of the drivers. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

The drivers that cause major accidents, such as those involving casualties, face criminal charges or other deserved punishments, but the penalties for illegal behavior that is potentially dangerous but has not caused an accident, such as running a red light, are far from enough as drivers only get a fine and decreasing points on their license, which fails to curb their bad driving habits.

That's why the new measure, namely listing illegal driving conducts into drivers' credit records, is a welcome move. It will help effectively discourage people from breaking the law. With the introduction of this new measure, people are expected to be more careful when driving.

Some cities have already adopted a similar policy, namely raising the insurance for those who have been caught breaking the rules of the road. That has proved successful because the data show a decrease in the number of drivers caught running red lights and breaking the traffic rules.

Of course, citizens' rights must be taken into consideration when implementing the policy of including driving offenses on their credit records. Drivers should be able to appeal and the power to edit people's credit records should be transparent to ensure it is not abused.

Only the rule of law can govern modern society well, and credit records best serve that purpose. The new measure is therefore welcome and we hope it can be implemented smoothly and effectively.
Computers analyze medical imagery at a precise medical laboratory at the Guizhou Provincial Peoples Hospital. [Photo/news.gog.cn]

Costly misdiagnoses might soon be a thing of the past at Guizhou Provincial Peoples Hospital thanks to its newest recruit  an AI doctor.

The AI program is part of the hospitals precise medical laboratory set up with the help of Guizhou University and the Chinese Academy of Science.

It allows fresh medical scans such as X-rays and CT scans to be compared to thousands of previously-diagnosed scans stored in a central database. The ultimate aim of the project is to offer suggestions to radiographers and other medical professionals and increase the accuracy of diagnoses.

For now most of the medical images are analyzed by senior doctors at the hospital, making it a costly and time-consuming process. The new system will not only free up doctors time, it will reduce human error by picking up minor clues that might have been missed, such as a small shadow. By trawling through an extensive patient database the system can point out anomalies and speed up diagnosis.

The hospitals radiology department has formed a vivid database by collecting scans taken from advanced medical imaging equipment. With the help of experienced doctors, new scans are put through the AI systems data modeling analysis to isolate features and determine therapeutic treatment for each disease.

Director of Radiology Department, Wang Rongpin, explained that the hospital wants to set up a healthcare system that allows artificial intelligence to perform immediate diagnosis as patients are scanned.

I believe the day wont be long away, said Wang.

Zhang Xiangyan, Party secretary of Guizhou Provincial Peoples Hospital, tries on VR glasses at the VR medical hall at the Guizhou Provincial Peoples Hospital. [Photo/news.gog.cn]

Edited by Jacob Hooson
A large-scale underground storage cellar is part of the liquor culture park. [Photo by Zhang Xingjian/chinadaily.com.cn]

In the wake of China's crackdown on officials' lavish spending, most liquor makers have tightened their belts and anxiously weighed up future prospects.

However, one Baijiu maker has wisely adapted its liquor production to Chinese drinking culture.

A visit to Yanghe Distillery's headquarters, distillery and production plant in Suqian in East China's Jiangsu province shows the different approach is paying off.

The company is filled with construction sites where huge buildings are taking shape.

The building work is evidence of the liquor producer's confidence in its plans to grow bigger.

The Chinese government's anti-corruption campaign has effectively banned Baijiu, or white spirit, from the tables of officials hosting dinner parties, hitting the industry hard.
Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto (2nd L) and Chinese Ambassador to Hungary Duan Jielong (4th R) attend a ceremony of Chinese-Hungarian Friendship awards in Budapest, Hungary on Nov 10, 2016. The annual Chinese-Hungarian Friendship awards were presented in a ceremony at Budapest's Chinese-Hungarian Bilingual Primary and Secondary School on Thursday. [Photo/Xinhua]

BUDAPEST - The annual Chinese-Hungarian Friendship awards were presented in a ceremony at Budapest's Chinese-Hungarian Bilingual Primary and Secondary School on Thursday.

The ceremony was held with the presence of Chinese Ambassador to Hungary Duan Jielong and Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto.

This year's winners were Yan Jianshu, general manager of Air China's Hungarian arm, and five Hungarian wineries: the Fritz Winery, the Wunderlich Winery, the Meszaros Winery, the Korona Winery and the Takler Winery.

Yan and representatives from the wineries received the awards from Szijjarto, Duan, and MP Lajos Olah who heads the Great Wall Hungarian-Chinese Friendship Association.

Szijjarto said that with the assistance of Yan Jianshu, Air China opened Budapest-Beijing direct flights in May last year, and the number of visitors from China increased by 40 percent in the past year.

In the first eight months of this year, more than 108,000 Chinese tourists visited Hungary, he added.

Szijjarto said that wine is one of the most famous Hungarian products. In the first eight months this year, Hungarian wine exports to China rose by 37 percent to $2.5 million, he added.

Yan voiced her thanks, saying that Beijing-Budapest direct flights set up an air bridge for the Chinese-Hungarian friendship, and have facilitated business and tourism. Air China will strive to provide safer and more quality services in the future, she added.

The awards were established by the Great Wall Hungarian-Chinese Friendship Association and 11 other organizations.

They are granted to persons or organizations who have done an outstanding job of boosting the ties between Hungary and China.
Tibetan dancer Zewangluo performs Dancing Bells at Asia Society Texas Center.[Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

If Texans can't go to the mountains, then why not bring the mountains to Texas?

A delegation from Tibet shared their history, life and culture through discussions, a photo exhibition, film, dance and music performance with Houston residents on Wednesday, at the University of Houston, University of St. Thomas and the Asia Society Texas Center (ASTC).

Titled Experience China: US Tour of West Region Culture, the exchange was a collaboration between China's state council's information office, the Consulate General of China in Houston and the ASTC.

At the University of Houston, five speakers from the delegation presented various topics related to Tibet. The panel consisted of professors, officials responsible for economic development in Tibet and a Tibetan living Buddha.

Topics ranged from Tibet's natural wonders available for tourism and Buddhist monks day-to-day life in the temple to the current economic state of the region.

The Third Pole, a film showcasing Tibet and the Tibetan Plateau, was screened for students and faculty.

At University of St. Thomas, political science scholars and members of the US-China Friendship Association exchanged information with members of the delegation, touching on topics such as the potential for healthcare collaborations and the diversity of Tibet's religions.

"All religions are regarded equal in Tibet," said Dawaciren, a Tibetan living Buddha. "There are Christian churches and Islamic temples in Tibet, and there is interaction between them and Tibetan Buddhism."

The photo exhibition at ASTC drew a large crowd.

Charles Foster, a member of ASTC's board, said, "The exhibition is very colorful and impressive. I have been to Lhasa and it was a special trip of a lifetime. We enjoyed it thoroughly. A picture is worth a thousand words and they really showed the grandeur of that part of the world."

Lu Guangjin, director of the state council's information office and head of the delegation, said that the exchange was a result of an agreement reached by the heads of China and US.

"We came when the US was electing a new president, which made this a more special occasion," Lu said. "It's has been a few decades since Deng Xiaoping put on a cowboy hat in Texas. The US-China relationship has experience rainy days and sunshine, but there has been more sunshine. Today we bring part of west region's culture to our friends here. We hope this helps them better understand China's culture."

Consul General of China in Houston Li Qiangmin welcomed the audience, saying he had visited China's west region many times.

"It shares similarities with Texas with its vast open spaces, different ethnicities working together and fast economic growth," Li said. "You get a sense of its immense beauty from the performances, the photos and film."

After the photo exhibition reception, the audience watched a performance by Tibetans Zewangluo and Zuoni and the film The Third Pole.

Experience China is a program presented by the information office of the State Council. Since it started in 1999, it has visited more than 40 countries.

Tibet Living Buddha Dawaciren (right) presents a hada to Hans Stockton, director of the Center of International Studies at University of St. Thomas, while Lu Guangjin (left), director from the Information Office of the State Council, looks on.[Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

Tiffany Wang in Houston contributed to the story.
BEIJING - The 21 members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) are expected to renew their endeavors to advance economic growth and integration at the upcoming Economic Leaders' Meeting in Lima, Peru.

Maintaining continuity in the APEC agenda while seeking greater consensus, leaders will gather this month to discuss regional economic integration, the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), connectivity and service sector cooperation.

"In the long term, the Lima meeting should push forward economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region," said Wu Hongying, director of the Latin America office of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.

China, always committed to the APEC mechanism and the cooperation that continues to grow under it, is expected to contribute further at the upcoming event.

"China has, at various international meetings, injected vitality to the regional cooperation agenda," said Liu Chenyang, director of the APEC research center at Nankai University.
wash biz.JPG

WBID Executive Director John Monteverde, left, delivers an items-for-the-troops collection box to Jessica Pistilli and Hernan Valverde of Allie's Cupcakery & Cafe in Washington.

(Special to Lehighvalleylive.com)

The business community in Washington Borough launched a community effort to collect items for care packages for servicemen and women stationed abroad.

Spearheaded by the Washington Borough Business Improvement District and in partnership with Operation Jersey Cares, businesses and organizations throughout downtown Washington are collecting donations of non-perishable food items and miscellaneous goods.

For John Monteverde, executive director of the Washington Borough Business Improvement District, the collection drive evokes strong memories of his experience as a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

"When I was overseas, care packages from home were always appreciated, as they supplemented C and K rations and LRP food" said Monteverde. "That's why I'm so proud to help lead this effort in our community to show our servicemen and women that we love them, care for them, and appreciate their sacrifice."

From today through Christmas, individuals can donate items in collection boxes at participating locations across Washington Borough. The link to a full list of collection locations and requested items can be found on the Washington Borough Business Improvement District website.

Do you have community news to share? To see it posted here and possibly in The Express-Times and Warren Reporter, send me an email.
According to a new Sputnik.Polls survey, the majority of Americans (60%) want to change the electoral system in the United States. Moreover, almost half of Americans (45%) believe that they should change to a "one man - one vote" system. The survey was conducted by research company TNS UK for Sputnik News Agency and Radio.

When asked, "Do you agree with the current voting system in the United States?", 15% of Americans said that they want to move to a new voting process, which would include the principles of the current system with a "one man - one vote" element. Only 22% of Americans said that they believe the system should remain unchanged, 16% answered "dont know", and 2% suggested other options.

The US president is elected by the Electoral College, consisting of 538 electors. The number of electors each state has corresponds to the number of Senators and Congressmen and women from each state. This number also includes three electors from the District of Columbia. To win, a presidential candidate must receive 270 electoral votes.

The survey was commissioned by Sputnik News Agency and Radio and conducted by TNS UK research company from 3 to 7 November 2016 in the United States. A total of 1012 respondents aged 18 to 64 years took a the survey. The results were weighted to reflect the population in terms of sex, age, and geography. The maximum sampling error for the data in the whole country is was +/- 3.1% at a confidence level of 95 percent.
A Union flag flies in the wind in front of the Big Ben clock face and the Elizabeth Tower at the Houses of Parliament in central London on November 3, 2016. [Photo/VCG]

LONDON - Business leaders in London have proposed a plan for a London-only visa system for foreign workers to use after the UK's exit from the European Union (EU).

The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), London's largest independent networking and business support organization, called on Thursday for the city to have its own Capital Work Permits, which would be visas allowing EU nationals and other foreign workers to work in the city.

According to LCCI's proposals, the permits would be administered by the London Work Permit Sponsorship Body newly formed by the Office of Mayor and the established main London Business Organizations, and they would allow workers to work anywhere within the city's 33 boroughs.

More than 771,000 EU nationals work in London, whose status over the coming years has been unclear since the UK voted to leave the EU in the June 23 referendum.

As EU citizens, they are currently able to work throughout the UK without the need for a work visa. However, the British government has talked of restricting access for foreigners to the UK labor market once Brexit becomes reality.

The largest presence of EU nationals in the London workforce is in construction, where they make up 30 percent of the total workers, but they also have a significant presence in hospitality and distribution (20 percent) as well as in finance (14 percent).

It is estimated that 160,000 of these workers would not meet visa requirements under existing immigration rules.

This would cost the London economy seven billion pounds in lost economic output and two billion pounds in lost tax revenue up to 2020, according to the LCCI.

The call for special London visas was made in a LCCI report, which was supported by academic research from the Center for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).

The CEBR research found that London relied more on non-UK workers than any other UK region, with migrants making up a quarter of the capital's workforce. For the rest of the UK, the average was 8 percent of the workforce.

In addition, for more than two years the LCCI's quarterly economic surveys have found that London businesses have difficulty finding sufficiently skilled applicants for job vacancies.

"In the approaching post-Brexit scenario, for London to remain competitive, we need to not only recruit the very best but also to be able to identify where we have skills shortages and act swiftly to address these." LCCI chief executive Colin Stanbridge said.

"Given the role and input (of foreign workers), it is vital to London's future that a degree of flexibility is applied if the government amends the UK immigration system," he added.
BEIJING - China and the United States will hold their annual talks on commerce and trade in Washington D.C., a Foreign Ministry spokesperson announced on Friday.

The 27th Session of the China-US Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT)is slated for Nov 21 to 23, spokesperson Lu Kang said at a routine press briefing.

Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang, US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and Trade Representative Michael Froman will co-chair the talks. US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack will also attend.

In the last high-level economic dialogue between China and the US this year, the two sides will exchange ideas of important economic and trade issues, as well as ways to expand cooperation.

On the sidelines of the JCCT, the two sides will also hold a CEO roundtable conference, and conferences on the digital economy and agriculture and food.

In 2015, US was China's second largest trade partner, biggest export market and the fourth largest source of imports. China was the largest trade partner and import source, and the third export market of the US. The bilateral trade volume of goods stood at 558.4 billion US dollars, with more than 160 billion US dollars of mutual investment.

Launched in 1983, the JCCT was the first high-level economic dialogue mechanism between China and the US, and plays an important role in China-US economic cooperation and addressing economic and trade frictions.
BEIJING - A Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson said on Friday that China is willing to work with the Philippines to expand friendly cooperation.

"Through the joint efforts of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including the Philippines, the South China Sea situation had been easing off and is back on the right track of seeking solution and managing differences through negotiations by parties directly involved in the issue," said spokesperson Lu Kang at a regular briefing.

He was commenting on some remarks by the Philippines' incoming ambassador to China Jose Santiago Sta. Romana, in which Romana voiced optimism over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Lu urged other parties and the media to respect the progress, make objective and responsible remarks, and contribute more to regional peace and stability.

Noting that China has border treaties with 12 out of its 14 land neighbors, Lu said that as long as nations are sincere and patient, most differences can be handled through consultation and negotiation.

Lu reiterated that China and the Philippines reached consensus during Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte' recent visit to China, and both agreed to focus on cooperation, put aside their differences and bring the South China Sea issue back to the correct track of bilateral negotiation and consultation.
Events and stories coming up in the next few days

Private education provider hosting session

New Oriental, China's largest provider of private education services, will be on campus at the University of Manchester on Monday to talk about the courses it offers and opportunities for both students and teachers. The education company, which has its headquarters in the Haidian district of Beijing, is a significant private provider of primary and secondary school education in China and also specializes in language training. The event will be held in Theatre 3 of the Stopford Building at the University of Manchester.

Southampton celebrates Xiamen Uni links

Southampton University will celebrate its partnership with China's Xiamen University on Wednesday. Xiamen University Day will offer an opportunity for students, staff and local residents to learn more about the close ties with the institution, which is based in Fujian province on China's southeastern coast. To mark the event, Southampton University will award an honorary doctorate to Professor Zhu Chongshi, president of Xiamen University, at a ceremony on the Highfield Campus. There will also be a performance by the Xiamen University Student Art Troupe, which is sponsored by Southampton's Confucius Institute. The performance will feature elements of traditional Chinese culture and classical Chinese music and dance.
WASHINGTON -- US President-elect Donald Trump has tapped his running mate Mike Pence to head his transition team, removing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie from the post, local media reported Friday.

The replacement was aimed to tap into Pence's resources and contacts in Washington to speed up the process, the New York Times cited sources in the transition team as saying.

Pence, who has served six terms in the House of Representatives, was seen to have a better understanding of the Washington political landscape than Christie, whose political life was mainly limited to the state of New Jersey.

Christie, who has led the team since May, will serve along side former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and retired general Michael Flynn as vice chairs of the team, according to the report.

The news came as Trump tweeted earlier Friday "Busy day planned in New York. Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!"

Speculation on Trump's picks for his new government has circulated since his election Wednesday, with the media connecting inner members of his campaign team with important government jobs.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Trump's campaign chief Steve Bannon are also popular guesses to fill in top slots.

Trump has met with President Barack Obama in the White House on Thursday to discuss the transition, and both men vowed to facilitate a smooth handover.
WASHINGTON -- US President-elect Donald Trump has softened on his tough words against the Affordable Care Act Friday, opting to amend the law rather than to appeal it.

Trump made the remarks as he unveiled his policy priorities in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

The decision to leave in place parts of the Act, also known as Obamacare, was made after conferring with U.S. President Barack Obama, according to the report.

Before elected president, Trump has been fiercely critical of the signature legislature pushed forward by Obama, vowing to quickly repeal it after taking the helm.

The softened tone is viewed as a compromise after Trump ran a campaign that promised policy u-turns from the current administration.

The Obamacare was a hotly debated topic during the election, with voters' views on the 2010 health law highly polarized. Anger over soaring health costs may have pushed some traditionally pro-Democrat regions toward Trump's direction, according to media reports.

Other plans prioritized by Trump included deregulating financial institutions to allow "banks to lend again" and securing the border against drugs and illegal immigrants.

Addressing the anti-Trump protests that erupted in multiple cities after the election, Trump said he wanted "a country that loves each other," adding that the best way to ease tension would be to create jobs.

Earlier today the New York Times reported that Trump had tapped his running mate Mike Pence to head his transition team, in a bid to use Pence's resources and contacts in Washington to speed up the process.
China and Ecuador reach an agreement on visa exemption, as the smallest OPEC member works to attract more Chinese tourists and investors in an effort to diversify its energy-reliant economy amid deep oil price plunge.

Under the agreement, Chinese passport holders will be able to visit the Andean country of abundant tourism attractions without applying for a visa in advance, said Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa at a meeting with Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing on Thursday.

Correa, on a visit to attend the first ministerial meeting of the Forum of China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, said, hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists will come to Ecuador after the procedures are simplified, and he hopes that direct flight from Quito to Beijing will start soon.

Correa promoted Ecuadors highly diversified cultures, landscapes and species at a Wednesday address at Beijing-based Tsinghua University, saying he hopes the number of Chinese tourists will jump from the current 15,000 to 150,000 in a few years.

The Latin American country, known for its diversified species, is the place where Charles Darwin got inspired for his masterpiece The Origin of Species.

China and Ecuador upgraded their 35-year-old ties to a strategic partnership on Wednesday after Correa met Chinese President Xi Jinping.

China has granted a $5.3 billion credit line to Ecuador, and the country will utilize the loan on social projects, transport and infrastructure, Ecuador's official media said.

The two agreed to extend the timeline of two loans and boost cooperation in the financing, education and technology sector.

The deep oil price plunge has compelled Ecuadorian government to cut its 2015 budget by 4 percent.
A delegation from Ecuador led by President Rafael Correa Delgado visited the Zhongguancun Exhibition Center in Beijing on Jan 6.

Accompanied by Zeng Xiaodong, international business director of the Zhongguancun Administrative Committee and representatives of Zhongguancun enterprises, the delegation visited exhibition areas covering 3D printing technology, information communication, biological medicine and new energy.

Zeng introduced the overall development of Zhongguancun Science Park. The Ecuadorian President spoke highly of Zhongguancun's innovation ability and great achievements.

At the new energy exhibition area, representatives of Hanergy Holding Group, the world's largest thin-film photovoltaic solar panel manufacturer, gave a brief outline of the company. They explained their strategy in South America and showed great interest in Ecuador's photovoltaic, hydropower, and construction projects.

Ecuadorian friends said they'd like to see leading high-tech enterprises like Hanergy invest in Ecuador and they will support their investment in the country.

At the modern agriculture exhibition area, Beijing Leili Group introduced their business in Ecuador. As a high-tech company that produces seaweed biological products, Leili began to open up the Ecuadorian market in 2004. In Ecuador, its products are widely used in planting bananas, rice, cocoa and other crops. The Ecuadorian President hoped the company could enhance cooperation with Ecuador and promote the development of sustainable agriculture in the country.

Other companies, including Huawei and Beijing Zhongke Construction Investment Co, also outlined their cooperation with Ecuador and showed their latest high-tech products to the delegation.

The Ecuadorian President thanked the Zhongguancun Administrative Committee and enterprises in Zhongguancun for their warm reception. He said the tour gave him a comprehensive understanding of Zhongguancun.

He hopes China and Ecuador can strengthen exchanges and cooperation in the field of science and technological innovation in the future, especially the cooperation between Zhongguancun Science Park and Yachay, which is Ecuador's science and technology innovation center.

Edited by Brian Salter
QUITO - A Chinese-owned consortium has signed two contracts with the Ecuadorian government to explore two oil blocks in the southern province of Pastaza.

The contracts with Andes Petroleum marked the start of oil exploration in Ecuador's southeastern region and showed foreign investors' trust in the Ecuadorian government, Ecuadoran Minister of Hydrocarbons Carlos Pareja said on Tuesday.

"It sends a message that our country is building up confidence and that companies want to come and invest here despite the low international oil prices," said Pareja.

Andes Petroleum was set up in 2006 with shareholder capital from China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SINOPEC).

Zhao Xinjun, president of Andes Petroleum Ecuador, said the consortium has invested around $3.5 billion in the South American country to date, with cutting-edge technologies and full respect for the country's environmental regulations.

With oil as its main export, Ecuador currently produces around 540,000 barrels of oil per day.
Trade between Peru and China has grown fourfold since diplomatic relations were established in 1971, and Peruvian business leaders say they are confident it will keep growing.

Trade was spurred by the bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) signed in 2009 and the strengthening of ties with a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2013. Two-way trade is expected to total more than $16 billion for 2015.

China has overtaken the United States to become the South American country's largest trading partner, and while it is the leading buyer of Peruvian commodities, such as copper, iron and fishmeal, it is also purchasing nontraditional exports, especially agro-industrial products.

China is a new topic for us, said Julio Varilias, CEO of the Gandules Agro-Export Corporation. Since the signing and ratification of the FTA, China has become an important market for Peruvian exports, because of its size and large number of consumers. And Chinas domestic policies are changing.

Gandules, named after a type of pea, is recognized as a leader by the most important agro-industrial companies in Peru and supplies more than 40 countries. The privately owned company has been in the agribusiness for many years, and has an extensive production chain, including green pigeon peas, jalapenos, peppers, chilies, asparagus, sweet corn, beets, pineapples and table grapes.

How did the company gain access to the Chinese market?

We have been attending various trade shows in China, with the intention of seeking out a market, said Varilias. China is a very competitive country, producing and processing many foods, so to enter the Chinese market, you have to be very competitive.

The company is still expanding its market there, especially for fruits and peppers (brown pepper and chili), and Varilias recommends that Latin American countries really look to the Asian-Pacific nations, with China being a priority destination, for their exports.

Now we only export processed peppers and table grapes. But the national food industry is inspired to (export) other types of fruit, such as mangoes, citrus, avocado and asparagus, said Varilias. Everyone can succeed. Peruvian products are renowned for their high quality and taste, so I think thats something Peru has to exploit a lot.

Were there difficulties in accessing the Chinese market?

I think the requirements are quite similar in all countries ... food is very sensitive, very delicate; each country looks after its citizens and is therefore very demanding, Varilias said.

Perus National Agrarian Health Service (Senasa) obtained phytosanitary permits from Chinas General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) through direct discussions for shipments of food.

Interest in buying Perus agricultural and seafood products is evident from Chinese delegations that regularly attend Perus food-trade show Expoalimentaria, organized annually by the Association of Exporters (Adex).

But Varilias said there is a financial problem. There is no Chinese commercial bank in Peru to facilitate trade, so you have to go through foreign bank intermediaries that have direct transactions with China, Varilias said. The subsidiary of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in Lima is doing notable work, but it still hasnt gotten the approval of the National Superintendency of Banking and Insurance (SBS) to operate as a commercial bank.

Perus imports from China are increasing annually, as demonstrated in store windows featuring everything from computers and communications technology to textiles and clothing, televisions, footwear, motor vehicles and many other items.

Executive Director Oscar Zevallos of Grupo Deltron, the countrys largest importers of Chinese goods, said: Our relationship with China dates back several years (and) we have a 25-year history in the national market.

Initially, we imported (electronic) components from the US, but as import volume grew, we began a direct relationship with China. We have direct Chinese suppliers, like Lenovo, said Zevallos.

Deltron imports laptops, tablets, accessories, motherboards, smartphones and other components from China. The company has its own brand, Advance, which is made in China with special requirements, and receives an average of 10 shipping containers weekly.

Zevallos said business diversified last year. We are bringing drones, smart-watches and scooters from China, and we are increasing other product lines, electronic toys, Zevallos said.

China is the main source of world production for goods, including high-tech products, he said. And thanks to fluid bilateral trade, underpinned by the FTA and the strategic partnership, tariffs are gradually coming down. In addition, items his company handles are exempt from tariffs, and as shipping volumes increase, freight rates decrease, it has become easier to send and receive goods.

Take the Lenovo brand, for example. We placed about 5,000 computers a month in the Peruvian market last year, said Zevallos.

The company has an office in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Shenzhen, in South Chinas Guangdong province, which makes it much easier to do business without intermediaries.

Deltron, he said, recently had about 400,000 500-page coloring books printed in China, as requested by the Ministry of Education for an online course in English taught at public schools. The company used Chinese publisher Best & Well, which completed the task in 45 days, explained Zevallos. It showed the publishers ability to stick to a schedule and provide high print quality at a favorable price.

Trade with China presents no problems, he said, because it is a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and Chinas efforts to expand its free trade have generated new opportunities.

Varilias and Zevallos agree that, with China being a strategic partner for Peru and Latin America in general, the region should make the most of Chinese technology to promote innovation and productivity, boost trade and investment to strengthen competitiveness, and join regional chains by partnering with China in projects and joint ventures.
SANTIAGO - China now is Chile's leading trade partner, with their bilateral trade volume having grown fourfold in the past decade, local media reported on Monday.

"In 2015, Chilean exports to China amounted to $16.671 billion, while imports totaled $14.8 billion," El Mercurio, a Chilean local daily, said.

In 10 years, "the trade volume between the two countries has grown fourfold from $8.122 billion in 2005 -- the year before a free trade agreement (FTA) went into effect -- to $31.471 billion in 2015," it said, adding that "this figure represents 25 percent of Chile's foreign trade."

The average trade balance over this period has been about $4.234 billion.

Juan Esteban Musalem, president of the Chile-China Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, told the daily that the FTA between Chile and China has been one of the "great milestones" in their bilateral ties.

"Thanks to the FTA, China is playing an increasingly larger role as a destination market for Chilean food products. Fruits, seafood and wine, among other products, have gained great popularity among consumers in the Asian country," said Musalem.

While copper, Chile's main raw material export, represents 79 percent of the country's exports to China, the Asian giant is also Chile's second-largest trade partner for non-copper goods.

In 2014, Chile's non-copper exports to China -- including fruits, foodstuffs and wine -- amounted to $3.579 billion, accounting for 21 percent of its total exports to the Asian country.

Over the past 10 years, the number of Chilean companies that exported to China has more than doubled, increasing from 477 in 2006 to 1,084 in 2015.

According to the General Directorate of International Economic Relations (DIRECON), "97.2 percent of Chilean merchandise enters the Chinese market duty free." The figure represents some 7,336 products.

The bilateral trade agreement has also helped boost Chile's industrial exports to China, the daily said.

"The performance of industrial exports to China has stood out since the FTA went into effect, growing at an average annual rate of 12 percent between 2005 and 2015, which translates into $2.151 billion," it said.

Among the industrial exports, "cellulose leads the list, with an export value three times higher than in 2005, followed by food products, which have registered an average annual increase of 6 percent in the same period," it added.

"Today national foods have significantly penetrated the Chinese market," it said, adding that Chile was China's top supplier of fresh cranberries and cherries last year, while 77 percent of China's whole salmon and fresh plum imports come from Chile.

In addition to the cherries and cranberries, the food items that have driven growth of export to this area also include beef and lamb.

"China is now one of the three main destinations for Chilean foods and beverages, along with the United States and Japan," Andres Rebolledo, director of economic relations at the Chilean Foreign Ministry, said, adding that "in 10 years, food shipments to China will grow tenfold."
The Atlantic salmon gleamed from the platter through a dry-ice fog. There was king crab. Snow crab. Black cod. Blue mussels.

In Beijing, where seafood fans often fret about the quality and safety of fish and shellfish, the loaded buffet at the Chilean embassy last week looked like heaven.

The goodies from the deep were on show as the embassy and Sunfka, a major importers of Chilean seafood in China, celebrated a milestone in the free-trade agreement between Chile and China that was inked in 2005.

Tariffs on many food products were reduced in increments over the past decade, and Chilean cherries, grapes and wines have become market favorites in China.

The country's seafood has been less established, but in 2015 the final stage of tariff reduction occurred for seafood, meaning the import tax was zero percent. Over the preceding five years, the value of Chile's seafood exports to China had soared from $1.4 billion to $8.7 billion, led by Atlantic salmon.

"Last year Chile was No. 8 in seafood exports to China," says Chile's ambassador, Jorge Heine. "We want to be in the top three by 2020."

In fact, more fish, shellfish and seaweed in Chinese markets and restaurants already comes from Chile than most people realize. Thanks to a 4,400-kilometer coastline and southern fisheries in clean, cold water, Chile has been able to develop a thriving seafood industry for export in the last 15 years, particularly its salmon industry. Today the country is the No. 2 exporter of salmon in the world, says Andreas Pierotic, Chile's minister counselor for economic and commercial affairs in China, and the No. 1 provider of frozen Atlantic salmon in China. With demand climbing, especially for fresh fish, importers are working with airlines to establish routine charter flights that will shorten delivery time from Chile to China to four days. That means fish would arrive in cold storage but not freezing, he says.

Besides ample production, Ambassador Heine notes, Chile boasts one of the strictest food-safety regimens in the world. Citing the recognized health benefits of salmon - noting that 80 grams of salmon fillet has an average of 2.9 g of omega-3 fatty acids, he boasts that "salmon is medicine" as well as delicious.

Other seafood items rode the wave stimulated by the tariff reduction: King crab exports to China were up 96 percent ($20.8 million) while mussels climbed nearly eightfold ($1.2 million). Chilean mussels are similar in shape to Chinese mussels, Pierotic says, "but much tastier" thanks to cold-water cultivation.

His country's increased attention toward China, he adds, is reflected in its presence at the Chinese Fisheries & Seafood Expo, held annually in the fall in Qingdao. "We had the biggest country pavilion in 2015, with 30 companies represented," Pierotic says.

"In 2010, there were only nine Chilean companies at the fair, which is the biggest in Asia."

michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 04/12/2016 page19)
QUITO - Ecuador's largest hydroelectric plant, built by a Chinese consortium, was inaugurated on Wednesday.

Ecuador's Vice-President Jorge Glas started the first four of the eight turbines in total at the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, built by Sinohydro Corporation at a meeting point of the Napo and Sucumbios provinces in the Amazon in northeast Ecuador.

"This project represents a lot. It will begin to deliver energy to the national grid and will provide the country with ample renewable energy," said Glas at the inauguration ceremony.

The project, which is now 95 percent ready, aims to convert Ecuador into a clean energy exporter in the medium term.

The four turbines, if full activated, are capable of producing 750 megawatts of electricity, with some of its power possibly made available to neighboring Colombia.

"The same energy will arrive at our brother nation, Colombia, as Ecuador is changing into an exporter of energy," said Glas.

The project, once fully operational, will generate 1,500 megawatts of energy and meet 30 percent of Ecuador's demand.

Ecuador's Electricity and Renewable Energy Minister Esteban Albornoz said at the ceremony that the first phase of the project will be ready once hydraulic, mechanical and electrical tests are completed.

Expected to be fully operational in August, the project will save Ecuador $600 million a year for importing fuel.

The project began construction in July 2010 at a cost of $2.24 billion. It will create 7,739 direct jobs and benefit the nearby communities through sustainable development programs.

Coca Codo Sinclair is one of seven hydroelectric plants being built in Ecuador, most of them by Chinese companies.
BEIJING - China will provide humanitarian aid worth 60 million yuan ($9.2 million) to earthquake-hit Ecuador, the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said on Monday, following cash support of 2 million dollars announced on Thursday.

The latest batch of aid will be in the form of disaster relief facilities and materials, which will be sent to Ecuador by chartered flight, the MOC said.

The Red Cross Society of China will send teams to Ecuador to assist the distribution and installation of these materials and facilities.

The Chinese government will continue to provide support according to the development of the situation and Ecuador's needs, the MOC said.

Ecuador was hit by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake on April 16. The death toll has risen to more than 650.
Chinese companies are deploying more manpower and resources for post-earthquake relief efforts in Ecuador to help the country recover, the Ministry of Commerce said on Wednesday.

China National Petroleum Corp and Huawei Technologies have not only purchased a large amount of lifesaving goods, but also encouraged their employees to donate personal belongings to people who have suffered heavy casualties and financial losses.

Wang Haijing, vice-president of the Red Cross Society of China, said three Chinese rescue teams with 330 kilograms of goods have arrived in Ecuador since Sunday. They recruited 15 translators, medical and construction professionals, for the mission.

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit coastal Ecuador on April 16, killing more than 500 people and injuring thousands.

Powerchina International Group, the international arm of Power Construction Corp of China, said power generating equipment in Ecuador's Coca Codo Sinclair project - China's largest hydropower project in South America - were working normally after the earthquake.

"This equipment has been tested many times under many different circumstances including extreme hot and cool weather, as well as under earthquake conditions," the company said.

Power Construction Corp of China has increased its generating capacity every day following the earthquake, and has sent medical equipment and supplies to Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city.

China also sent its first round of humanitarian aid including medicine, water-purification products, tents and lifesaving equipment to Ecuador on Tuesday night, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
Anartist performs the Lion Dance to celebrate the Chinese lunar New Year in Chinatown in Lima, Peru, Feb 6, 2016. [Xinhua/Luis Camacho]

LIMA - China's current investment of $22.7 billion in Peru has boosted the Latin American country's gross domestic product (GDP), Peruvian Prime Minister Pedro Cateriano said.

"Chinese investment in Peru has considerably increased our mining production," Cateriano said in a recent interview with Xinhua, citing the Las Bambas and Toromocho copper mine projects as two examples.

"The Las Bambas copper mine, which may be one of the largest such projects in the world, has seen an investment of over $10 billion. The Toromocho project has also seen much success, with an announced expansion costing $1.5 billion," said Cateriano.

"This has made China the foremost investor in our mining sector," said Cateriano.

Besides the two cooper mine projects, a Chinese company is currently exploiting iron deposits in Peru's coastal region of Ica. Mining has become an important pillar of China-Peru trade, which reached $15.5 billion in 2015, despite the international financial crisis.

Bilateral ties between China and Peru are going very well, said Cateriano, adding that a joint commission by the two countries to examine a number of matters is progressing apace.

The exchange of visits by leaders of the two countries have contributed to bilateral relations, "leading to the creation of a mechanism of permanent dialogue to evaluate political, diplomatic, economic and cultural matters," he said.

Cateriano emphasized that China has "not only benefited Peru but all of Latin America. The Chinese economy is so strong that it has an affect on the entire world."

"In my experience as Defense Minister and now as Prime Minister, I have seen (cooperation in) the areas of politics, diplomacy, economy, trade and culture all make significant progress," he said.

"Peru must be grateful for the role that China plays in the economic sphere. However, it is true that some fear a slowdown in China's economy will have a negative impact on all sides," he added.

In terms of future progress, the prime minister said that "there are other fields where I would like to see improved cooperation, such as in the transfer of technology," said Cateriano.

"We have progressed greatly in this area in recent years but I would like China to not just sell us equipment but manufacture them jointly in Peru," he said.

On the upcoming summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which is to take place in Lima in November, Cateriano said that "the government of President Humala has paid great attention to the importance of APEC and our policies have followed the priorities set within the bloc."

"Our administration will end its mandate on July 28 and we are seeking to ensure this international meeting will be successful, which most Peruvians also want," the prime minister said.
LIMA - Representatives from the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC) met Saturday to outline the agenda for an upcoming high-level meeting in Peru.

The second meeting of top APEC officials is set to take place on May 15 in the southern region of Arequipa.

Subjects they outlined for debate include food security, fishing, free-trade agreements, global value chains in trade and human resources development for people with disabilities.

The APEC delegations also toured a fair designed to offer small- and medium-sized companies a guide to registration, so that they can pay taxes and expand through loans and credits otherwise not available to smaller firms.

Policies to be mooted at the meeting will be studied by leaders of APEC economies at their November meeting in Lima.
SANTIAGO -- Chile's banking regulator on Wednesday gave the China Construction Bank Corporation (CCB) the go-ahead to begin operation as part of the national banking sector.

The Superintendency of Banks and Financial Institutions (SBIF) issued a statement saying that "in keeping with articles 31 and 32 of the General Bank Law, (it is) granting permission to the banking company based in Beijing to establish a branch in the country."

Chile will be home to the first Latin American branch of the CCB.

The authorization concludes the bank's licensing process in Chile, the SBIF said.

The CCB was first granted provisional authorization in July 2014, followed by permission to set up a branch, granted in April 2015, before the latest and final authorization was approved for its full operation in Brazil.
A contemporary Chinese play about the corrosive effects of revenge is having a successful run in Peru's capital Lima.

The Crowd, written by celebrated young Chinese playwright Yu Rongjun, opened on May 12 at the city's Peruvian-Chinese Friendship Theater, marking many firsts.

It was the first time a contemporary Chinese play has been staged in Lima; the first time Yu's work has been presented in Spanish; and the first production ever staged at the new theater, which is part of the Confucius Institute at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

The Crowd tells a story in China of a young boy who sees his mother accidentally shot and killed. He ends up dedicating the rest of his life to exacting revenge on the shooter.

According to Columbia University Press' introduction, the play was inspired by Gustave Le Bon's prophetic 1894 study of crowd psychology The Crowd: A Study of Popular Mind and Henri Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, and it investigates one man's struggle to seek justice at all costs  will revenge settle old scores or open new wounds?

The Spanish-language monthly magazine Oh! Asia covered the play's opening in Lima and described it as "a voyage through different cities and through the decades of major change in China, from 1967 to the present".

The story begins in the late 1960s in Southwest China's Chongqing city, when a stray bullet claims the life of 13-year-old Wang Guoqing's mother, condemning the young boy to a life consumed by hate and driven by an obsession to take the law into his own hands, especially after learning the killer got off with a light sentence.

"It's a very interesting play that really leads to reflection on human beings as individuals, but also on human beings as crowds, on what a human being is capable of when, en masse, how your identity can be distorted or your actions can be swept along by what the crowd does," said the play's director, Marissa Bejar.

How did she come to stage a modern Chinese work of literature in Peru?

It's a project that began at the Confucius Institute quite a long time ago, said Bejar, adding that the end result has been "a great event for Peru and the region".

"In 2014, I visited Shanghai, and the director of the Confucius Institute at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Ruben Tang, asked me to look into contemporary Chinese playwriting, because he was also very keen to spread Chinese culture through the arts, and specifically through theater," recalled Bejar.

With support from the Confucius institutes, they were able to contact several contemporary Chinese writers.

"Actually, we chose the playwright more than the play," said Bejar, adding that Yu is one of the best authors in China and "so we contacted him".

Yu is one of the most prolific playwrights in China today, and the vice-president of the Shanghai Performing Arts Group. Since 2000, he has authored more than 50 works for stages in China and other countries.

"The playwright (Yu) was kind enough to give us his latest work, the last play he wrote last year. Although I didn't have a chance to see a staging of the play, he gave us the text for our consideration, and the work is very beautiful," said Bejar.

"It's quite different from other plays Yu wrote and with many interesting elements. This play, I believe, has a lot in common with (works by German playwright) Bertolt Brecht. That's why we wanted to stage this play," Bejar said.

The Confucius Institute translated the text from Chinese to Spanish. Work on the play started in November 2015 with a casting call for actors. By March, a rigorous rehearsal schedule began, with the troupe gathering four times a week and then five prior to the opening.

From the beginning, recalled Bejar, the six-member cast, all of whom play several characters, would get into discussions about the meaning of The Crowd.

"Theater is an art ... where the public enters into a conversation with the actor or the play. That's the traditional concept, but then there have emerged many other (playwrights) that have proposed something new and different on the nature of theater," Bejar said.

"It's very nice to understand China as a country that can put forward human situations similar to that of any other country on the planet. We find ourselves in situations that are unrelated to other countries. Though the play speaks volumes about China in particular, the situation it describes and relates can occur in any era or any country," Bejar added.

The play will run through May 27 at Lima's Peruvian-Chinese Friendship Theater.
Incoming Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski attends a Catholic mass at a church in Manchay on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, June 12, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

LIMA - Peruvian President-elect Pedro Pablo Kuczynski will visit China on his first foreign trip after taking office next month.

Speaking to Channel 2 television recently, Kuczynski said his first official trip will be to China, prior to the Asia-Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) summit Lima is set to host on Nov 19 and 20.

"It's necessary to go to China before the APEC, because it is our No. 1 trade partner," said Kuczynski, who just won the presidential election.

Kuczynski's decision shows his determination to boost ties with Peru's biggest trade partner, said Carlos Aquino, director of the Economic Research Institute at the National University of San Marcos in Lima.

"China is our leading trade partner, the top investor in Peru, especially in the area of mining, and we have a great (joint) project of bicoastal train with Brazil that will hopefully become a reality," Aquino told Xinhua.

Reciprocal high-level visits between China and its trade partners in Latin America are getting more frequent in recent years. Leaders of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Chile have all made China their first foreign trip destinations in recognition of China's growing importance in the economy of the region, said Aquino.

The president-elect's first agenda on the trip will be to boost trade, especially to increase the share of products with more added value that Peru exports to China, said Aquino.

Peru is also seeking to attract more Chinese investment in mining, fishing and infrastructure and more Chinese visitors, he said.

The total value of bilateral trade now stands at some 15 billion US dollars, thanks to the free-trade agreement that went into effect on March 1, 2010.
SANTIAGO - Chile hopes China will soon become the No 1 destination for its food exports, Chilean Agriculture Minister Carlos Furche said Friday.

"We already have a complete free trade zone and in terms of food and forest products, the FTA has had extraordinary results," said Furche two weeks ahead of a major food product promotion event in China.

When the free trade agreement (FTA) was signed in 2005, Chilean exports of forest and agricultural products to China were worth $400 million and, in 2015, this figure rose to $2.4 billion.

"What is going to happen is that, in the next decade, China will become the first destination for Chilean food exports, a position that the United States currently occupies," said Furche.

Cherries, grapes, pork and wine are among the main Chilean food exports to China while China exports textiles, shoes, and furniture to Chile.
QUITO - Ecuador's Vice President Jorge Glas has inaugurated Ecuador's first fiber-optic cable, built with Chinese assistance, in the southern province of Guayas.

The plant, named Latamfiberhome, is the result of a joint venture by Ecuador's Holding Telconet and China's Fiberhome Technologies.

"With the infrastructure ready, we only need to begin using the plan to set up the brilliant future which awaits us," said Holding Telconet's Executive President Tomislav Topic, at the plant's opening ceremony Tuesday.

Glas said this plant "strengthens cooperation between China and Ecuador," helping to change the country's production matrix.

"Starting from today, we will be able to export fiber-optic cables made in Ecuador, with Ecuadorian talent and manpower as well as Chinese technology," added Glas.

Wang Yulin, China's ambassador to Ecuador, and leading Ecuadorian government figures were also in attendance.

The plant is projected to manufacture 1 million kilometers of fiber-optic cable a year once it is fully operational in 2019.

Ecuador, which currently imports cables worth around $15 million a year, estimates that it will export cables worth $20 million a year.
SANTIAGO - Chile is looking to boost its cranberry exports to China, according to the country's ambassador to Beijing, Jorge Heine.

"Cranberries have been one of the great successes of our fruit exports," Heine wrote in a recent article headlined "Betting on our Super Fruit in China."

While "Chile has only cultivated the fruit since the 1980s, it is already the leading exporter of the fruit in the Southern Hemisphere, said Heine.

"With its counter-season production, Chile is the major supplier of the US and European markets (and) since 2012, it has also been exporting to China," said the diplomat.

"In China, the cranberry is something new. Nevertheless, large Chinese conglomerates, such as Legend Holdings, envisioning its great potential, are betting on this fruit, to the extent of even investing in it in Chile," said Heine.

Heine said the peak season for buying fresh fruit in China is during the main holidays, such as the Lunar New Year celebrations and National Day in October, since the Chinese traditionally present each other with gifts of fruit.

"Per capita consumption of cranberries in China is still low, but it's growing. The Chinese consumer values its nutritional value, health benefits and status as an 'exotic' fruit," said Heine.

Considered a "super fruit," the tart red berry is packed with vitamins A and C, and phytonutrients that have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

Cranberries were brought over to Chile from New Zealand in the 80s, said Heine, adding that today the South American country plants some 30,000 hectares of the fruit to produce 90,000 tons a year.

Since Chile and China signed a free-trade agreement in 2005, Chile's agricultural and forestry exports to the Asian giant have grown 471 percent to reach $2.439 billion in 2015, according to an August 2016 report from the Ministry of Agriculture.
Roberto Vargas, sales director of Agricola Norsur, a fruit supplier in Peru, made his first visit to the Chinese mainland in the hope of increasing the export of mandarins and blueberries to China.

"Currently, our company exports around 100 tons of mandarins to China a year, and we hope to increase the amount to up to 1,000 metric tons next year. I'm also looking forward to exporting 1.5 to 2 million kilograms of blueberries to China in the next three to four years," he said.

As a member of 25 Peruvian companies, associations and chambers of commerce, his firm attended a face-to-face meeting with 50 Chinese companies in Beijing on Tuesday, which was organized by the Chinese government and Bank of China Ltd, to discuss opportunities for business cooperation and investment.

During his meeting with Chinese companies, the vice-chairman of China Crop Protection Industry Association expressed her interest in selling pesticide to Peru. Vargas said his company is a huge consumer of pesticide, so it is highly possible for him to increase business with Chinese companies that produce quality pesticide.

Olivio Huancaruna Perales, president of Lambayeque Chamber of Commerce and Production, said his top priority during the visit was to seek Chinese companies' investment in port construction in Peru due to their great advantages in financing, construction and technologies, and to promote e-commerce transactions between the two countries.

Xiao Lijun, general manager of the preparatory team of the BOC's Peru Representative Office, said Chinese investment in Peru exceeded $14 billion by the end of 2015, and the number of Chinese companies in the Latin American nation reached more than 170.

"Apart from traditional sectors such as energy and mining, a growing number of Chinese companies have shown a great interest in other Peruvian industries, such as railway construction, agriculture, real estate and finance. We're trying to help Chinese companies explore the Peruvian market and help China import more superior products from Peru," he said.

Tian Guoli, chairman of BOC, said the bank has devoted great efforts to support international trade and investment cooperation. Ever since 2014, the BOC has organized 23 cross-border business matchmaking events for more than 8,000 Chinese and foreign companies from 52 countries and regions.

Tian said the Chinese banking regulator has given BOC permission to set up a representative office in Peru, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, president of Peru, said he will rapidly push forward the upgrading of the bank's representative office to that of a branch.

Peru is looking to promote its industrialization through infrastructure construction and investment. Kuczynski said his country is seeking cooperation with Chinese companies to import mining technologies in high altitude areas from China and to build a main railway line that will increase the population of Lima, Peru's capital, to 20 million people in a few years.

jiangxueqing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/14/2016 page13)
President says nations should continue to improve energy, mining cooperation

China and Peru have renewed their commitment to strengthening trade links as the Latin American nation's leader seeks further investment opportunities in the world's second-largest economy.

Meeting with his Peruvian counterpart Pedro Pablo Kuczynski on Tuesday, President Xi Jinping said the two nations should continue to enhance cooperation in energy, mining and infrastructure construction and bolster a free trade agreement that was implemented in 2010.

Kuczynski, the 78-year-old former minister of minerals and economy, chose China as his first overseas trip after winning June's presidential election.

He told Xi the reason for this is that he admires China's efforts to make itself the largest industrial country and a key player in international affairs. He also wants to open the minerals and infrastructure markets wider to Chinese investors and encourage more Chinese tourists to visit Peru.

Kuczynski also invited Xi to attend the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Informal Leaders' meeting in Lima in November. Peruvian media reports said Kuczynski believes that a personal invitation - following Asian tradition - is courteous and more appropriate.

Kuczynski told Peru's RPP radio station, "The trip to China is highly important for both symbolic and economic reasons."

Accompanied by four ministers and more than a dozen business leaders, Kuczynski is scheduled to hold a series of meetings with major Chinese entrepreneurs to seek more opportunities for cooperation.

After their meeting, Xi and Kuczynski oversaw the signing of three agreements that included cooperation on broadcasting and establishing a cultural center in each country.

Xu Shicheng, a senior researcher of Latin American studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Kuczynski's visit underscores China's growing ties with Peru.

"Bilateral trade and investment have made rapid progress in recent years, especially investment from China," he said, adding that the trip shows the importance of China in Peru's economic development.

China is Peru's largest trading partner and major investor in the mining sector. Last year, bilateral trade exceeded $16 billion and Chinese investment in mineral industries reached $19 billion, according to the Peruvian Foreign Ministry.

Wang Zhen, a researcher of Latin American studies at the China Foundation for International Studies, said the APEC invitation shows that both the president and the new Peruvian government highly value China's participation in this meeting and the important role China plays in APEC.

Kuczynski's five-day visit will end on Friday in Shanghai, after which he will head to the United States to attend the 71st session of the UN General Assembly.

Contact the writers at qinjize@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/14/2016 page3)
The economic, political and cultural exchanges between China and Peru during the past two months, especially the meeting between presidents Xi Jinping and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, signal a promising future for bilateral ties, according to Peruvian experts.

"I think the outcome of the visit has an impact on two different levels: The first is strategic, and the second, more concrete one is bilateral ties," said Rosario Santa Gadea, director of the Peru-China Studies Center at the University of the Pacific (UP).

Santa Gadea said she expected the strategic aspect of the Sept 12-16 visit, Kuczynski's first trip abroad since taking office, to have a trickle-down effect on the broader relationship.

In a strategic sense, "direct contact between the presidents, between the leadership at the highest level, promotes ties at other governmental levels and contributes to mutual knowledge, so from that point of view, the visit is key", said Santa Gadea.

In the joint interview, the vice-rector of research at UP, Cynthia Sanborn, said she believed the visit served to acknowledge China's significance to Peru as a trade partner.

"The president's trip to China is an important gesture of recognition of the importance of the relationship between the two countries," said Sanborn, adding that "polls also show the Peruvian public is very pleased by the visit".

To strengthen the relationship, Peru's "outlook on its future with China (centers on) diversification. That, say, is the outlook's keyword, because we need to leave behind the model of relationship in which we export raw materials and receive investment in extractive resources," said Santa Gadea.

To diversify its China-related production, Peru needs to industrialize its mining sector, she said.

"The idea is to be able to rise through the production chain by refining minerals in Peru," before exporting them to China, said Santa Gadea.

"One of the directions the visit took was to encourage Chinese investors to establish foundries and refineries that would lead to higher added-value exports. One way to do that would be to industrialize mining. Another way would be to diversify sectors in which there is Chinese investment, which seems to me presents an entire field to explore," said Santa Gadea.

Eduardo Ferreyros, Peru's minister of foreign commerce and tourism, who accompanied the president to Beijing, told reporters on Monday that this trip helped lay the groundwork for expanding ties in trade, tourism and investment.

In Beijing, Ferreyros met with his Chinese counterpart to discuss expanding a customs cooperation agreement designed to prevent smuggling; and Chinese investment in agriculture, agroindustry and tourism in Peru.

"We are encouraging Chinese hotel chains to establish themselves in Peru, to invest in hotels that have the particular features to attend to their citizens," said Ferreyrosadding that they will hold events in China to promote Peru.

To attract more Chinese tourism, Peru has changed its visa restrictions to allow Chinese leisure and business travelers to stay in the country for up to 150 days, he said.

In trade, China Eastern Airlines will likely be the carrier in charge of transporting Peru's first shipment of cranberries and prawns destined for the Chinese market, as well as other non-traditional exports, said the minister.

In October, officials from both countries expect to conclude a phytosanitary agreement to be signed in November at an upcoming summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

During the trip, Kuczynski expressed an interest in having Peru join the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a move both academics support because an alternative lending institution, such as the AIIB, implies access to funding with better terms than those traditionally provided by the International Monetary Fund or World Bank.

In addition, Peru has recognized a need to invest in building up its infrastructure.

Kuczynski said the railway project linking Peru's Pacific port and Brazil's Atlantic coast is of great significance, and he hopes the two sides can conduct a feasibility study.

The project, if completed, will make it easier for exports from Latin America to reach China's Tianjin port city.

Driving the bilateral relationship is also an awareness that Peru can learn from China's experience in development, Peruvian experts said.

"The significant leap that (China) has made from being a poor country to being the power it is today ... is an inspiration" for Peru to "maintain strong and sustained growth that will allow us to make that development leap", said Santa Gadea.

"I think there is one experience that China can learn from us," said Sanborn. "Peru is a leader in South America in regulating extractive industries, mining and hydrocarbons.

"Peru has made great headway in transparency when it comes to oil companies, in terms of how much they contribute to the state and how much the state invests. It is also a leader in South America in first consulting with the indigenous communities" before launching mining or energy projects, she said.
Chinese artist Bao Lin's painting. [Photo/art.china.cn]

The Summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 2016 will be held in Lima, Peru this month.

As the theme for the 2016 summit is Quality Growth and Human Development", an art exhibition, "Human and Nature" will be held at the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru from Nov 16 to Dec 8.

The showcase features works from 31 painters around the world. The artists pictured thought and sentiment in these colorful paintings that are their own explorations of the relationship between nature and humans in the era of globalization.
LIMA - Peru is set to be the focus of global attention for the week starting Nov 14, when the 2016 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders' Meeting gets underway.

Under the theme of "Quality growth and human development," the 21 member economies of APEC will seek to make decisions to facilitate trade and investment as well as consolidate liberalization policies.

During the week, APEC leaders and government officials will focus on the modernization of micro, small and medium-sized companies within the territory and their inclusion into global value chains, the strengthening of regional food market and food security, human capital development and regional economic integration.

The APEC members also aim to coordinate their stances on the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) during the meeting.

Meanwhile, in the APEC CEO Summit, a parallel business forum, a number of high-profile business leaders are set to make relevant advice and recommendations to the participating world leaders.

There will also be an informal dialogue between APEC leaders and presidents of the countries within the Pacific Alliance (Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru). The first such a meeting was held during the 2015 APEC Week in the Philippines.

The 21 members of APEC account for 39 percent of world population, 57 percent of global GDP and 49 percent of global trade.
President Xi Jinping will pay state visits to Ecuador, Peru and Chile later this month.

The president will attend APEC leaders meetings in Lima, Peru as part of the week-long trip starting Nov 17, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Wednesday.

The Foreign Ministry will hold a news conference on Thursday morning to detail the president's trip to Latin America, Lu said.

After becoming the Chinese president in March 2013, Xi has already visited Latin America twice, after going to Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico in 2013, and to Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba in July the following year.

China is a strong supporter of Latin American stability, unity and development.

Last month, Xi said China was ready to work with Latin American countries to forge a community with a shared future, when he met with Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez in Beijing.

China and Uruguay would maintain high-level exchanges and enhance communication at all levels to promote mutual understanding and trust, he said during the meeting.
BEIJING -- Bilateral ties between China and Ecuador will be strengthened by Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit next week, Jose Maria Borja, the Ecuadorian Ambassador to China, said in an interview with Xinhua.

Xi will be the first Chinese President to visit Ecuador since diplomatic relations were established in 1980.

"It's a historic visit, which will further cement bilateral ties," Borja said.

Cooperation on technology, investment and infrastructure construction has grown rapidly in recent years. China's non-financial investment in Ecuador reached 6 billion U.S. dollars at the end of March. Ecuador invested in 42 projects in China, with combined investment of 8.63 million dollars.

Borja spoke highly of China's contribution to Ecuador's development. Like many Latin American nations, Ecuador used to be faced with power shortages. Nine hydropower stations have been built or are under construction since President Rafael Correa took office in 2007. Of them, eight were built by Chinese companies. Ecuador now not only meets its domestic electricity demand, but has surplus power to export.

Borja said China's Belt and Road Initiative will bring great opportunities for Latin American nations to build trade and economic ties with Central Asia.

China's presence in Ecuador is palpable and useful, Borja said, speaking of China's humanitarian aid to the country in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated towns along the northern coast in April, leaving over 600 people dead and nearly 30,000 homeless.

Personal exchanges between China and Ecuador go back a long way, he said. In the 19th century, Chinese laborers went to Latin America for work. Currently, around 70,000 ethnic Chinese live in Ecuador, while 500 Ecuadorian students study in China.

Borja also hoped more Chinese would visit his home country to experience its variety of climates, biodiversity and breathtaking landscape.

He expects the number of Chinese tourists to exceed 18,000 this year, up from 16,000 in 2015.
China and Ecuador, Peru and Chile will sign a number of agreements covering areas including trade, investment, finance and nuclear power during President Xi Jinping's third trip to Latin America next week, according to China's Foreign Ministry.

China has attached great importance to the development potential in Latin America despite the region's economic growth slowed down in recent years under the background of global sluggishness, Vice-Foreign Minister Wang Chao told a news conference on Thursday.

Xi will visit the three countries from next Thursday. He will also attend APEC leaders meetings in Lima, Peru as part of the week-long trip.

While in Ecuador, Xi will talk with Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, meet reporters, attend the launch ceremony of Chinese-aided projects and witness the signing of agreements, Wang said. It would be the first time that a Chinese president visits Ecuador since the diplomatic ties established 36 years ago.

Zhang Xiangchen, a Ministry of Commerce senior official, said that China will announce assistance plans and issue loans to Ecuador during the president's visit.

China will offer help for the rebuilding works including the construction of hospitals, houses and roads in Ecuador, which was hit by a strong earthquake in April, he said, adding that China has already provided Ecuador $2 million cash and $60 million in materials for earthquake rescue efforts.

Xi will speak at Peru's parliament to describe China's policies toward the Latin American region. He will also have bilateral talks with some leaders of the APEC members during the summit, according to Wang, the vice-foreign minister.

China will also initiate negotiations with Chile over the deepening of the free trade agreement that was signed 11 years ago, he said.

After becoming the Chinese president in March 2013, Xi has already visited Latin America twice, after going to Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico in 2013, and to Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba in July the following year.

China is Peru and Chile's largest trade partner, and the third largest for Ecuador. China is also the main investment source for the three countries. Last year, China's direct investment to the Latin America region reached $126.3 billion, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
BEIJING -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's scheduled attendance at the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economic leaders' meeting will boost regional economic integration, senior officials said on Thursday.

Xi will attend the APEC meeting with the theme "Quality growth and human development," in Lima Peru from Nov. 19 to 20, vice foreign minister Li Baodong told a press briefing.

Li said Xi's attendance at the Lima meeting shows the importance China has attached to regional cooperation.

"China has been an APEC contributor and supporter since it joined the mechanism 25 years ago and has played a significant role in building the Asian Pacific family," Li said.

During the meeting, Xi is expected to deliver a speech to the APEC CEO summit, meet representatives of the APEC business advisory council, attend two phases of the economic leaders' meeting and have meetings with some leaders.

China expects positive outcomes of the meeting, said Zhang Xiangchen, deputy China international trade representative, at the briefing.

He said the first should be completing collective strategic research on the Asian-Pacific free-trade zone on schedule.

China also hopes for implementation of the Beijing APEC meeting outcomes, Zhang said.

He added that China expects that the Lima meeting to support inclusive growth in the Asian Pacific region and new cooperation in service industries and small and medium-sized enterprises.
Walking into Englewoods newest boutique, the Peace Cellar, is like walking into a familiar yoga studio. With The Lumineers playing in the background and a warm welcome from the owner, Carrie Moore, the store feels like the epitome of its name  peaceful.

This 3,000-square-foot boutique offers everything from cozy clothes to energy enriching classes. You can stop by to shop or attend one of the many classes including yoga, mediation, psychic readings, chakra spray workshops, angel/tarot card readings, mala making and more. Classes range from $12 for yoga, $25 for 20-minute readings, $45 for chakra spray and $65 for mala making with all the supplies included.

We promote more peace in the world, Moore said. When I made this it was important that when people walked in it felt good like good energy and a place they would like to be.

All photography by Meg ONeill.

In order to radiate the good energy Moores shop offers items that can promote peace and balance at an affordable price. Just about everything in the store is for sale. Whether it be a $3.50 journal or a $2,000 couch, you can find almost anything at the Peace Cellar. Clothing and T-shirts are around $30, dresses and pants are $70 and handmade bags from Indonesia range from $100 to $175.

Our products help bring more peace and serenity to your life, Moore said. They make you happy and feel good or give back in a meaningful way because all of our products are made in America, eco-friendly or they give back to the people making them by creating wages.

Moore decided to open the Peace Cellar after realizing it was what she was meant to do.

I was in real estate and we had a woman come do a group meditation for our yearly retreat and I knew in my heart real estate wasnt the place I was supposed to be, she said. Ive done retail before and I had kind of a growth year finding myself and after using these cool tools I wanted to share them with people in a more mainstream way.

Now the woman that taught the meditation class offers a weekly yoga class at the Peace Cellar to continue helping people. Another class called yoga/brain gym is also offered and it creates new neurons in your brain to help let go of trauma.

We have some great tools and I wanted to introduce them in a way that doesnt have the stigma behind it, she said. I just want to spread the word of peace and these classes to help people live their best lives and buy something that makes them feel better.

Moore hopes to bring in customers that are looking to find intention and peace behind her many products, and if not that then they are welcome to just stop in to chat and have a cup of tea.

I love chatting with people and I want everyone that walks in here to feel like a VIP, she said. Theres a reason youre here, even if its just to sit down, have a cup of tea and feel peaceful.

Everything in Moores store offers an intention  whether her store brings you peace, health, mindfulness or fashion its worth stopping in for a visit.

pink bridesmaid dresses | navy bridesmaid dresses
(Photo : Getty Images) A farmer feeding pigs that are to be slaughtered.

Advertisement

Danish food processing company Danish Crown is on the verge of creating a factory base in China. According to a statement released by the co-operative slaughterhouse on Wednesday, the company is looking to build a processing and retail production plant in Shanghai.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement





The company's CEO Jais Valuer believes that the beef and pork exporting company has the potential to succeed in China.







"Danish Crown is already a big and successful exporter of fresh pork and other products such as the animal's ears and tails among others," he said.



The plant in Shanghai is part of the company's plan towards 2021. Valuer admitted that this is a necessary risk for the company.



"Is this a chance we are taking? Yes, it is, but this is one of the chance we should take as a big company and try to see if we can get closer to the market and consumers," he said.



The company plans to invest nearly 300 million Danish kroner ($44 million) in the construction of the whole company.



"Consumption is moving into foodservice or restaurants similar to Europe or The US. We also see a vast increase of e-Commerce where groceries are brought and delivered at home," said Valuer. "Consumers there have also started buying retail packed products just like in Denmark."



Danish Crown was established in 1887. It slaughters an average of 22 million pigs and 700,000 cattle which are sold worldwide to over 130 countries. The company has employed over 20,000 people.



Advertisement

Tagschina, Danish, Danish Crown, Pork and Beef
(Photo : Getty Images) U.S army troops advance a position in combat.

Advertisement

US military scientists have used electrical brain stimulators to enhance the mental skills of staff.



Their research aims to improve the performance of air crews, drone operators, and others in the most demanding roles in the armed forces.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

The successful test of the devices will pave the way for servicemen and women to be fully alert at critical times on duty.



Electrical pulses will be beamed into their brains to improve their effectiveness in high pressure situations.



Scientists at the Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio said "within the air force, various operations such as remotely piloted and manned aircraft operations require a human operator to monitor and respond to multiple events simultaneously over a long period of time."



Writing in a new report, the scientists added that the operator's performance may decline shortly after their work shift commences. These are the issues that the new devices are trying to combat.



In a series of experiments at the air force base, the researchers found that electrical brain stimulation can improve people's multitasking skill.



This can help to combat the drop in performance that comes with information overload.



To conduct the study, the scientists had participants take a test developed by NASA to assess multitasking skills.



The participants were required to keep a crosshair inside a moving circle on a computer, while constantly monitoring and reacting to three other tasks on the screen.



According to the report, the brain stimulation group started to perform better than the control group four minutes into the test.



However, some experts have not bought into brain stimulation, saying that its long term safety is unknown. They have also raised concerns that staff could be forced to utilise use the equipment if it is approved for military operations.



Advertisement

Tagsus millitary, Science, brain stimulators
(Photo : DARPA) ALIAS program from DARPA (concept).

Advertisement

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) reports significant progress in a program to develop smart robotic co-pilots that will eventually pilot a host of U.S. military aircraft in the future.



DARPA said it's made notable progress on two different concepts for robotic copilots that are part of its program called ALIAS (Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System) that will autonomously operate aircraft and also offer advice to a human pilot.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

ALIAS envisions a custom, drop-in, removable kit that will promote the addition of high levels of automation into existing aircraft, enabling operation with reduced onboard crew.



The program intends to exploit the considerable advances made in aircraft automation systems over the past 50 years, and similar advances in remotely piloted aircraft automation, to help reduce pilot workload, augment mission performance and improve aircraft safety.



As an automation system, ALIAS aims to support execution of an entire mission from takeoff to landing, even in the face of contingency events such as aircraft system failures.



ALIAS system attributes such as persistent-state monitoring and rapid recall of flight procedures will further enhance flight safety. Easy-to-use touch and voice interfaces will facilitate supervisor-ALIAS interaction.



ALIAS will also provide a platform for integrating additional automation or autonomy capabilities tailored for specific missions.



The two defense contractors developing these robotic co-piloting systems, Aurora Flight Sciences and Sikorksy, conducted a series of flight demonstrations in October ahead of a federal government decision to select a single vendor for the program's third and final phase.



The impetus behind the ALIAS program is to develop a system that can reduce the number of crew onboard manned aircraft, going "from two pilots down to one, and then possibly down to zero," explained Jean Charles-Lede, program manager of DARPA's tactical technology program office, during a recent briefing.



The companies were challenged to develop an ALIAS system that can be integrated with at least 80 percent of Department of Defense aircraft, including older models that lack the all-digital cockpits and fly-by-wire technology of modern planes and helicopters, said Jessica Duda, Aurora's ALIAS program manager.



Advertisement

TagsDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, alias, Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System
(Photo : Getty images) The boy fell into the well on Sunday when he was playing with his younger sister while his father was harvesting at their farm.

Advertisement

After over four days of rescue operations, a 6-year-old boy who fell into an 80-metre-deep (260 foot) well in Hebei Province on Sunday has finally been found dead.



Confirming the incident, Wu Sujie, a rescue official who had been on location since the incident transpired, said "the boy was found without life."



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

Further investigations are yet to be conducted to determine whether he died from the fall or other factors like suffocation or starvation led to his demise.



The boy fell into the well on Sunday when he was playing with his younger sister while his father was harvesting at their farm.



The father had used the social networking app "WeChat" to ask for assistance.



The incident occurred in Lixian County, Baoding City at around 11 a.m. Many people turned up in the area to assist in the resue operation.



Rescuers had used every possible method available to speed up the operations.



Hundreds of rescuers with excavators worked around the clock to find the child.



Despite the fact that on the third day of the search there were still no signs of life, rescuers continued to pump oxygen into the well in hopes of finding him alive.



The rescuers have warned that this is not the only abandoned well in the region. They also added that there was no warning sign around it or any of the other wells.



"This is one incident, but if it doesn't get taken care of we fear that such incidents will appear again in the future," an unnamed official said.



Advertisement

Tagschina, search and rescue operations, Hebei Province
(Photo : Getty Images ) Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet his Japanese counterfeit Shinzo Abe on Friday.

Advertisement

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Japan has raised eyebrows in Beijing as India has been trying to assert its role in the South China Sea.



China's foreign ministry on Thursday warned India and Japan to respect China's "legitimate concerns" regarding the South China Sea dispute. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said that China is happy to see India and Japan develop normal bilateral relations and hopes that as the two powerful Asian nations build strong bilateral partnership, they also respect the legitimate concerns of other countries.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

"We have noted Prime Minister Modi's visit to Japan today. You asked about issues that Prime Minister Modi is likely to discuss with his Japanese counterpart, as we said before, we are happy to see neighboring countries develop normal bilateral relations," Lu said on Friday. "We hope that while doing this, they can also respect the legitimate concerns of other countries especially those in the region and do more things conducive to regional peace and stability."



Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Tokyo on for an annual India-Japan bilateral summit.



"Looking forward to fruitful deliberations that will boost economic and cultural ties between India and Japan," Modi tweeted.



Modi will meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during his visit. Two leaders are expected to sign nearly a dozen agreements including a civil nuclear deal on Friday.



In July, an international tribunal ruled for the Philippines in a long-standing territorial dispute with China over the South China Sea. China has since rejected the ruling, but Japan and India have urged Beijing to respect the verdict.



Advertisement

TagsIndia, china, Japan, South China Sea Dispute, Narendra Modi
The election of Donald Trump to the White House could be a major curve ball for implementation of the nearly year-old Every Student Succeeds Act. ESSA, which was passed in December, wont be fully in place until the 2017-18 school year.

The Obama administration has already proposed regulations to set the course for the laws implementation, which could look very different from here on out.

Here are five questions were eager to get answers to:

1. What happens with regulations? So far the Obama administration has put out four sets of draft regulations on the law, none of them final. Its hard to see big, initial changes to the regulations governing assessments because those were successfully negotiated by a group of educators and advocates. But parts of the accountability regulations have been controversial, including a requirement that states come up with an overall rating for each of their schools. Its possibleand in fact, likelythat Trump and Company may tweak or toss those proposed regulations. Ditto the departments proposed rules on supplement-not-supplant, a wonky funding provision in the law. And when it comes to supplement-not-supplant, the new administration may simply decide not to re-regulate, since the law doesnt require them to. One big downside? Less certainty for states, which are slated to start handing in their plans this spring.

2. Whats the bar for approving state plans? ESSA allows the education secretary to give the final yea or nay on state accountability plans, after a group of peer reviewers examines them. The Trump administration will get to name and instruct those peer reviewers, which may sound like an in-the-weeds task, but could have real policy implications. The issues on the table are wonky, sure. (What constitutes much greater weight when it comes to academic vs. school quality indicators? What should fly when it comes to state interventions for opt-outs?) But they matter.

Gerard Robinson, a fellow at the American Enterprise told us that, This is a great time to be a state chief. At the same time, he added, I dont want state chiefs to think that when they turn those [plans] in that, Oh, well, these will just get approved.

3. What actually gets enforced? There were a lot of things under the No Child Left Behind Act, ESSAs predecessor, that were part of the law but that the Bush and/or Obama administrations didnt really enforce much. A couple of examples: the requirement that highly qualified teachers be distributed fairly between poor and less-poor schools, or that districts offer free tutoring to students in schools that werent making progress under the law.

There could certainly be similar examples of things that are on the books in ESSA, or the Obama administrations regulations for the law, said Vic Klatt, a one-time aide to House Republicans who is now a principal at Penn Hill Group. And since the Trump administration will be the first to enforce ESSA, it could be easier and less disruptive for it to simply ignore parts of the law than it would be for another administration down the line, he said.

That doesnt mean there wont be pushback. Liz King, the director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said that advocates for historically disadvantaged kids fought for guardrails in ESSA, and want Trumps administration to take them seriously.

We expect the incoming administration to meaningfully enforce the law, she said.

4. What happens with those pilot programs? Remember the Innovative Assessment pilot and the Weighted Student Funding formula pilots? The Trump administration gets to decide when to open those up and monitor them. Both pilots, especially the assessment pilot, could lead to big changes when it comes to teaching and learning. Its unclear how seriously a Trump administration would take the guardrails in the testing pilot, such as the requirement that the district assessments be comparable to the state assessment, and what, if anything would happen if Trumps team was pretty lax about them.

5. Is there more to be done through legislation? Congressional conservatives had a lot of priorities that didnt make it into ESSA, which is, after all, a bipartisan compromise. High on the list, according to Lindsey Burke, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation? Pushing through Title I portability, which would allow federal dollars to follow students to the public, or potentially private, school of their choice. A provision along those lines was initially in the House version of ESSA, but it got scrapped in a conference committee, in part because the Obama administration wasnt enthusiastic about it. Trump, by contrast, has pitched taking $20 billion in federal money and directing it to school choice programs, including private school choice. He hasnt said where that money would come from, but Title I portability would make sense as a starting point.

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
(Photo : Getty Images) Zhao Liping has been sentenced to death.

Advertisement

A court in Taiyuan City, Shanxi Province has sentences a retired police chief to death after he was found guilty of bribery, possession of explosives, and first-degree murder.



The former police chief of the northern region of Inner Mongolia, Zhao Liping, 64, was handed the death sentence by the Intermediate People's Court on Friday.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

A court said that Zhao was given a death sentence on account of the "facts, nature, circumstance and the degree of the damage to society."



Zhao reportedly shot and murdered his 28-year-old mistress, only identified as "Li," three times. She had managed to survive first two shots, but a final shot to the head killed her. He later burned her body and buried it in a bid to cover his tracks.



The motives for the murder, which occurred in March last year, were not mentioned by the court. There are speculations that Li was set to report Zhao's criminal activities.



"The nature of Zhao Liping's murder was sinful, the plot especially vile, the means especially cruel, the danger to society grave," the court said. "He refused to plead guilty and should be severely punished."



According to Xinhua News Agency, while he was still working as a police chief, Zhao took not less than two million yuan ($290,000) in bribes. He also stored 91 detonators in his office.



Zhao was taken into custody on suspicion of murder last year. He was officially accused of murder in February this year.



He will, however, be allowed to appeal the ruling at the nation's highest court.



China's President Xi Jinping has stressed the need for public officials lead by example in the fight against corruption.



Advertisement

Tagschina, China Law, Death Sentence, Zhao Liping
(Photo : Cochin Shipyard) INS Vishal (concept drawing).

Advertisement

The guessing game is over. INS Vishal, India's first supercarrier that should see service with the Indian Navy (IN) in the early 2030s, will be nuclear powered.



She will be the first nuclear powered surface warship in the navy and the second in the navy as a whole. The navy's first nuclear powered warship is the Akula II-class nuclear attack submarine INS Chakra (S71). Unlike the INS Vishal, which will be made in India, the Chakra was leased from Russia for a period of 10 years starting in 2012.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

The navy will also lease a second Akula-class submarine from Russia. The Akula I-class submarine expected to arrive in India in 2018 has been identified as the K-322 Kashalot (Sperm Whale), one of only three operational Akula I-class subs in the Russian Navy.



Indian media said sources in the IN revealed important details about INS Vishal, chief among which is will be powered by a nuclear reactor. The INS Vishal will also use a catapult assisted take-off but arrested recovery (CATOBAR) electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) similar to the system the U.S. Navy plans to deploy on its new Gerald R. Ford-class nuclear powered supercarriers.



The Gerald R. Ford-class is a class of supercarriers being built to replace some of the Navy's existing Nimitz-class carriers.



The decision to use nuclear propulsion, however, will set back the Vishal's entry into IN service from the early 2020s to the early 2030s. IN has no experience in operating a nuclear powered surface warship and will undoubtedly seek assistance from either the United States or France.



The U.S. Navy operates 10 Nimitz-class nuclear powered supercarriers. On the other hand, the French Navy operates the carrier Charles de Gaulle, the only nuclear-powered carrier outside the U.S. Navy. The Charles de Gaulle is the flagship of the French Navy (Marine Nationale).



With a displacement of 65,000 metric tons, INS Vishal is the second ship of the Vikrant-class and the first supercarrier to be built in India.



Her EMALS CATOBAR system will allow her to launch heavier aircraft like larger fighters; unmanned air combat vehicles (UCAVs); turbo-prop airborne early-warning aircraft and aerial refueling tankers. INS Vishal remains under development, however, and it is unclear when her construction will begin.



She will be built by state-owned Cochin Shipyard Limited in Kerala. Vishal is Sanskrit for "immense."



Advertisement

TagsINS Vishal, supercarrier, Indian Navy, Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, EMALS, CATOBAR
(Photo : Getty images) A collapsing building in China has claimed the lives of four people.

Advertisement

Officials at Henan Province in Central China have confirmed the death of four individuals after a building, which was still under construction, collapsed on Thursday. Two people also sustained serious injuries from the incident.



State officials are still investigating what might have caused the building to fall.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

According to Shanghai Daily, the six victims of the incident had been trapped under the rubble of the building. They were later rescued and rushed to the hospital.



They arrived at the hospital, but four succumbed to death with the remaining two in critical conditions.



Officials are yet to give a full report on what might have triggered the whole incident in the economic and technological development zone in Zhangxingzhuang Village.



Advertisement

Tagschina, Henan Province, Building Collapse
(Photo : VCG/GettyImages) India may choose Japan over China to develop new high speed railway routes in the country.

Advertisement

India and Japan are looking to boost the cooperation between two countries. It is likely that authorities from the two countries may discuss India's second high-speed rail contract during Prime Minister Narendra Modi ongoing two-day visit to Japan.



China is one of the leading contenders for the high-speed rail projects in India. However, its candidacy may be challenged by Japan, which is interested in developing rail infrastructure in India. If the negotiations between two countries are fruitful, it will be second such project for Japan in the country.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

India has a speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad which is based on Japanese Shinkansen bull train train technology. The second project is likely to be located in central or southern India.



The Indian government has identified five corridors for the development of the second project. These corridors are Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Nagpur, Delhi-Kolkata, Mumbai-Nagpur, and Mumbai-Chennai. The high-speed rail project will see trains running at 300 kmph or higher. The government is currently carrying out feasibility studies on the projects.



The engineering work for the first project signed with Japan is expected to start in December. The phase will also include planning for bridges and tunnels. The project is likely to be completed by 2023-2024. The tariffs on the route will be lower than corresponding airfare.



Indian Prime Minster Modi will meet Japanese Emperor Akihito and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In a statement, India's foreign ministry stated that it is "an occasion for the two leaders to have in-depth exchanges on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest."



Advertisement

TagsIndia, Japan, china
(Photo : AlexWong/GettyImages) Chinese state newspapers have called on US President-elect Donald Trump to maintain the ties between both nations.

Advertisement

China's state-sponsored media has cautioned the newly-anointed president-elect of the US against the policies of interventionism and isolationism. Donald Trump was encouraged to actively engage with China to maintain the status quo.



Following Trump's surprise win in the US presidential elections, the world is waiting to see whether he will follow through on his electoral promises. Trump frequently targeted China throughout his campaign. Among other things, he accused China of taking away US jobs. He also accused China of currency manipulation.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

Xinhua, China's official news agency, ran a commentary stating that US isolationist policies "accelerated the country's economic crisis" during the Great Depression. The publication also expressed hope that "election talk is just election talk."



The commentary also highlighted that risks of intervention. China has criticized the US and west for mishandling various international crisis. The Xinhua commentary states that "History has proven that U.S. overseas military interventionism causes them to pay disastrous political and economic costs."



Despite its cautious stance, China is looking to increase its cooperation with the new US government. In another commentary, Xinhua stated that the countries should work together to "build a new model of major power relations."



The US elections attracted much interest in China. On the election day, the country's prominent microblog service Weibo revealed that the tag 'Trump has won' was its most-searched term. Many people in China have stated that Trump may bring about change in the US. The Global Times, a state-run publication, noted that "In an elite-controlled U.S., most of those holding power don't support Trump."



Advertisement

Tagsdonald trump, Xinhua, china, USA
(Photo : Getty Images) President Xi's comment comes a few days after China's top legislative body delivered a landmark ruling that effectively barred the two pro-independent legislators from assuming office.

Advertisement

China will not allow any group or political entity to split the country, President Xi Jinping said on Friday, giving a stern message to pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. The semi-autonomous city has been on the edge following a controversy at an oath taking ceremony on October 12.



Like Us on Facebook

Advertisement

"We will never allow any person, any group, any political party, at any time, in any way, to split from China any part of its territory," Xi said in a speech at China's famous Great Hall of the People. "To uphold our national sovereignty and territorial integrity, to never let our country split again and to never let history repeat itself - these are our solemn promises to our people and to our history."



President Xi's comment comes a few days after China's top legislative body delivered a landmark ruling that effectively barred the two pro-independent legislators from assuming office. The judgment, seen as China's most direct intervention in Hong Kong's affair, added more tension to the situation.



At heart of the oath-taking controversy are two recently elected legislators - Wai-ching and Sixtus Leung. Both legislators allegedly used derogatory words and unfurled anti-Chinese banners during an oath taking ceremony. Subsequently, officials overruled their oath as invalid.



Meanwhile, President Xi also took aim at Taiwan during his speech, reiterating the importance of recognizing the "1992 consensus" or "One China" principle.



"Any Taiwanese political party, organization or individual - regardless of what they have advocated for in the past - as long as they recognize the '1992 consensus,' as long as they recognize the mainland and Taiwan are one China, we are willing to associate with them," Xi said.



President Xi's critical remarks come after Taiwan's ruling party Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) threw its weight behind the movement in Hong Kong, urging the Chinese government to listen to the aspirations of the Hong Kong people.



Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tibet assume special importance for the Chinese government, considering that they are all prone to separatist movements. While China refuses to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, Hong Kong, and Tibet became part of China under special circumstances.



Westerns countries have never been shy in expressing concern over China's so-called forceful intervention in these regions. The Chinese government, however, chooses to overlook these concerns on the pretext that they are internal matters of the country.



China has been more stubborn on the issue of Taiwan, with the island-nation electing pro-independent leader Tsai Ing-wen as president earlier this year. Tsai left the Chinese leadership miffed immediately after taking office after she refused to recognize the One China principle.



Advertisement

TagsXi Jinping, Hong Kong, China and Hong Kong, china, China and Taiwan
4 States Pass Recreational Marijuana Laws

While many heads across the country are still spinning after Tuesday's results, voters in four states will be able to slow their roll with some legal marijuana. California, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Maine all legalized marijuana for recreational use by adults, but there are some limits to be aware of. For example, it will still be illegal for minors to use recreational marijuana and it will be illegal to drive with under the influence. And the penalties violating these rules won't just be a slap on the wrist, either.

California

California legalized marijuana for adults 21 and over. However, the legislature has until 2018 to set up regulations for the retail sale. This means that while it is legal for adults to buy marijuana, selling it is still illegal. Even sales between private parties is illegal. However, the law allows people to give marijuana away. Additionally, while it was legalized, smoking marijuana in public and while driving or riding in a vehicle is prohibited.

The California law allows adults to possess, in public, up to one ounce of marijuana, or 8 grams of concentrated cannabis, and grow up to six plants in their homes.

While California had medical marijuana in place already, the medical marijuana dispensaries are still required to ensure that their customers have valid doctor recommendations, and cannot sell marijuana to anyone without a valid recommendation.

Nevada

Like California, Nevada legalized the use, sale, and possession of up to one ounce of marijuana or about 4 grams of concentrated cannabis for adults 21 and over. Additionally, as retail sales have not been set up yet, though Nevada has a clear plan that starts with medical dispensaries and liquor distributors, all sales are regulated and taxed, and therefore illegal between private parties. However, people are free to give each other marijuana so long as there is no compensation. Nevada will allow each person to grow up to six plants, with the caveat that no household can have more than 12 plants.

Massachusetts

Like California and Nevada, Massachusetts legalized marijuana for adults 21 and over. Starting on December 15, adults in Massachusetts will be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana, or five grams of concentrated cannabis, in public, ten ounces in their homes, and grow up to six plants. While retail sales will likely not begin until 2018 due to the licensing structure the new law put in place, in a few weeks, pot will be legal. Like everywhere else though, driving under the influence and providing it to minors is still illegal.

Maine

Maine also joined California, Nevada, and Massachusetts in legalizing marijuana for all adults over 21 years old. Similarly, driving under the influence, giving it to a minor and private party sales are still illegal. Notably, Maine will allow adults to possess up to 2.5 ounces in public, and like other states, Maine prohibits its use in public.

While the new marijuana laws do have some restrictions, being arrested for simple marijuana use is likely to become a thing of the past. These states all provide that violations are civil penalties and infractions. While driving under the influence or providing a minor with marijuana are more serious charges that could be misdemeanors or felonies depending on the situations, just possessing too much, or smoking it in public, will likely result in a simple slap on the wrist and fine in states where marijuana is now legal.

Related Resources:
ACLU, abortion lobby, atheist and 'religious freedom' groups jump on Trump 11 November, 2016 by Gregory Tomlin , |

WASHINGTON (Christian Examiner)  Republican Donald Trump had only just won the 2016 presidential election when the ACLU and a broad coalition of pro-abortion, atheist, and 'religious liberty' activists fired the opening salvos of what is sure to be a long war with the Trump presidency.

Trump campaigned on the idea of repealing the 1954 Johnson Amendment to the Internal Revenue Code, which prohibits pastors from making political endorsements from the pulpit, and also touted his pro-life stance. He also made promises to protect Christianity from the Left and enhance U.S. border security, even if that meant cutting off the flow of Syrian refugees entering the country.

Trump also called for a complete and total ban of all Muslims entering the U.S., but later modified that stance to refer to Muslims coming from countries where radical Islamists had a foothold.

ABORTION MILLS FEARFUL

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the country's largest abortion provider, said in a statement the organization would continue to fight for women  especially "immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ community, [and] people of faith"  to "have access to the care they need."

"Health care should not be political. Every morning, Planned Parenthood health center staff across the country wake up and open their doors, as they have this morning, to care for anyone who needs them, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, income, or country of origin. They will do so today, they will do so tomorrow; they will do so every day as they have for 100 years," Richards said.

Health care should not be political. Every morning, Planned Parenthood health center staff across the country wake up and open their doors, as they have this morning, to care for anyone who needs them, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, income, or country of origin. They will do so today, they will do so tomorrow; they will do so every day as they have for 100 years.

The National Abortion Rights League (NARAL Pro-Choice America) cast the political fortunes of Trump in darker, more ominous tones for women. Its president, Ilyse Hogue, called Trump "a clear and present danger to women, our bodies, and our freedoms" and pledged to work against the president-elect every day.

Hogue expressed disappointment that Hillary Clinton  who, she said, shares the organization's values  lost the election. She said, however, that Clinton had won in the minds of pro-abortion advocates for standing up for their principles.

"All Americans can be proud of the campaign she ran and the principles she stands for," Hogue said. "Just like Hillary, we believe that America's diversity is part of our strength and that we as a nation are always stronger together."

ATHEISTS TROUBLED

Several groups also expressed concern about what they called Trump's troubling positions on religious liberty, LGBT rights, and separation of church and state.

American Atheists, founded in the wake of the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case that ended public school prayer and Bible-reading, said in a statement that Trump's statements on religion  and Christianity in particular  are cause for "a great deal of concern."

"From promising to end the prohibition on churches engaging in political activity to pledging to appoint Supreme Court justices who would allow religious liberty to be used as a weapon, Mr. Trump's rhetoric on these issues is at odds with the majority of Americans," David Silverman, president of the group, said.

Silverman said he hoped Trump would recognize his constitutional obligations to keep religion out of government and set aside his "divisive religious rhetoric" and, if he won't, Silverman called on the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to "reject the use of religion to divide us as a nation or as a way to decide public policy."

"We reject the false version of 'religious liberty' peddled by those who seek to use their religion as an excuse to ignore the law and discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community, women, and religious minorities," Silverman said.

Silverman was addressing proposed legislation that would allow those with strongly held religious beliefs in the service industries, such as bakers, photographers and wedding chapel owners, from using their labor to support same-sex marriage celebrations.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation, which claimed it isn't partisan in spite of its repeated attacks on Christian organizations, said it was concerned about "religion's continuing grip on social policy in the United States." It called Trump's election a "game-changer," but not a positive one for separation of church and state.

The organization's co-presidents, Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, pointed to Trump's promise to overturn the Johnson Amendment as evidence that Trump is "a bona fide threat."

"If 'stained glass money' turns into 'dark money,' political churches could function as unaccountable political money laundering machines and religious denominations would become PACs. Our secular republic would be imperiled," they wrote.

They also lamented the lost chance to swing the U.S. Supreme Court toward the secular (liberal) side.

"It's not just that the next president will choose Scalia's replacement and break the 4-4 tie, but potentially will be given the opportunity to replace sympathetic justices, including the Divine RBG [Ruth Bader Ginsburg], age 83, Stephen Breyer, 78, and the reputed "swinger," Anthony Kennedy, age 80," Barker and Gaylor wrote.

'WATCHDOGS' BARKING

Barry Lynn, executive director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, expressed concern about Trump's pledge to repeal the Johnson Amendment, but he also focused on other issues, including school vouchers, a religious freedom bill that would  in his estimation  allow religious people, including government employees, to discriminate against same-sex couples," and Trump's call to block Muslim immigrants from entering the U.S.

"Donald Trump's rhetoric shows a shocking disregard for core principles of religious liberty," Lynn said. "Religious freedom is far too valuable for us to lose and far too fragile for us to leave unguarded. Americans United stands at the ready to fight back against any and all of Trump's dangerous initiatives."

AU opposes the school voucher idea because it claims federal dollars will go to fund private schools, many of which are "sectarian in nature."

Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which claims to have been "inundated" with requests for support from service members following Trump's election, also claimed military service members are equally fearful about the "unbridled fundamentalist Christian oppression" Trump will impose as commander-in-chief.

"Nearly 70% of [the requests] are from practitioners of the Christian faith itself," Weinstein said. "Their fears are not without significant merit."

"There is not a single fundamentalist Christian individual, nor similarly situated fundamentalist Christian extremist organization, with whom MRFF has battled mightily over the last almost 11 years which is not either (1) ideologically fully aligned with Trump and his allies on church-state separation or, (2) is already inextricably intertwined within Trump's advisory/consulting staffs and close colleagues. MRFF can surely see where all of this is heading," Weinstein said.

He added his organization would defend the U.S. Armed Forces against "religious tyranny and persecution" irrespective of who is occupying the Oval Office and acting as commander-in-chief  "especially Donald Trump."

There is no way of knowing if the volume of complaints coming into MRFF is accurate since the group does not disclose its actual number of clients.

ACLU FRETTING

The ACLU, the organization with the most leverage in the courts, also issued a statement, but it was unique in its approach. It actually addressed the president-elect.

"President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation's highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made," Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director, wrote.

"These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation's libel laws and restrict freedom of expression."

Romero called the proposals "un-American and wrong-headed," as well as "unlawful and unconstitutional."

"If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality, you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step. Our staff of litigators and activists in every state, thousands of volunteers, and millions of card-carrying supporters are ready to fight against any encroachment on our cherished freedoms and rights," Romero said.

He concluded by warning President-elect Trump of the ACLU's "eternally vigilant" defense against what it called threats to liberty.
Florida pastors share rationale for rank & file prolife vote despite some SBC leaders Editorial Staff | 11 November, 2016 by Joni B. Hannigan

SOUTH BISCAYNE, Fla. (Christian Examiner)  Evangelicals at the precipice of reaching their communities for Christ "may or may not be the moral majority in America" anymore, but still their leaders should respect their voices.

John Cross, 26-year pastor of the 3,000-member South Biscayne Church near Tampa, Florida, told Christian Examiner this election may have exposed the "elephant in the room" when it comes a divide between some Southern Baptist leaders and rank and file members and their voting priorities.

Once the president of the Florida Baptist State Convention, Cross said it never crossed his mind to discourage his congregants, and those whom he influences through social media, from voting for the candidate who supports a pro-life, "from the womb to the tomb" position.

Traditionally the weekend prior to elections, Cross said he has addressed the issues at stake to challenge his church family to make "biblically informed decisions."

"I believe the issues that I feel strongly about are not political with all my heart; I believe they are biblical," he said.

Contrarily, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, went on a full court press before the election  even before the primaries  first slamming Republican President-elect Donald J. Trump  and finally appearing to promote a "Never Trump" or no-vote position.

Cross said while it is the right and responsibility of every Southern Baptist and every church within the denomination freely to exercise its conscience, it does seem incongruous that a leader  whose salary is paid for with funds from the offering plates passed within the denomination's churches  would take such an open stance against what appears to be the majority of churchgoers.

"I believe as a pastor that it is my responsibility to call God's people to stand for what is right," Cross said. "If we are not careful, we can be too concerned that we can speak up and speak out."

A believer that the church can be "thriving" even in a hostile environment prognosticators warn will be the result of voting for a flawed candidate, Cross said he is concerned that if the church draws back in order to fit in, it may give in to the fatalism that Richard Land, president emeritus of the ERLC, spoke of in a recent column, "Why so many Calvinists in the 'Never Trump' Movement?"

Land, in his rational for why many outspoken Christian Calvinist leaders supported a no vote or third party vote  said the posture stemmed from a reliance on a belief system which touts that since "everything has already been decreed and preordained by God," than "the decision about who is going to win, for example, the presidential election, has also always been preordained by God in eternity past."

Not voting was never an option for Cross, he insisted. Nor was it an option for his wife or three daughters.

"We all abhor Mr. Trump's comments; there is no way to defend them," Cross said. "But thankfully he did acknowledge they are out of line."

SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE OVERRIDES OTHER CONCERNS

Still, the number one most important issue for Cross and his family in this election was the sanctity of human life, he said. The power of the president to appoint U.S. Supreme Court justices, circuit court judges "by the hundreds," and thousands in a new administration who will likely share a similar worldview on moral issues, drove their vote.

In denominational life, Cross mused that like an entertainer pointed out about the two million people between Los Angeles and New York who could have swayed the election, it could be easy for some religious leaders to forget "those who brought you to the dance."

"Everyone who serves in the governmental world and in the denominational world has to be careful that they stay in touch with the people they are serving," Cross said.

Cross told Christian Examiner he read an article in The New Yorker magazine which describes Russell Moore as being out of touch with many in the Southern Baptist Convention. And though some point to Moore, 45, as a sort of millennial with young children, he is closer in age to the 52-year-old Cross.

Committed to teaching his own family, church and the wider community the importance of voting for a pro-life candidate, Cross admits being concerned about a denominational leader like Moore who the pastor said is probably aptly described in the magazine article:

During this election season, Moore has sometimes appeared out of place in his own denominationa Trump detractor leading a church largely peopled by Trump supporters. But he seemed comfortable in this uncomfortable position, perhaps because he has learned to accept the limits of his ability to change the world, or even to understand it.

PROLIFE PLATFORM VOTING IS 'LIFE AND DEATH ISSUE'

Another Southern Baptist pastor in Florida who supported a staunchly pro-life platform, Stephen Rummage, pastor of the 3,700-member Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon, said he didn't want to address issues related to the ERLC or Russell Moore, but most definitely "doesn't understand" how such a "life and death issue" is not paramount in the choice to vote or who to vote for.

Still, Rummage, past chairman of the SBC Resolutions Committee, said he believes it is important to direct people to vote as a responsibility of Christian citizenship  something he has regularly done as pastor of the church.

With the choices regarding the sanctity of human life and other positions so clear in this election, "and Hillary being so clear," Rummage said, he couldn't understand how a Christian could "advocate something that could wind up helping her get into office."

To clarify, Rummage said, "I respect the people who have those opinions but don't understand why they would wind up with those positions."

As for the future, Rummage said he is comfortable in maintaining a posture of prayer towards President-elect Trump, a position he has long advocated towards President Obama, as well.

He also prays and hopes Trump will continue to listen to godly counsel, like those on his Religious Advisory Counsel, and that the president-elect and those around him will come to know and follow Christ.

Naming Southern Baptists Jack Graham and Ronnie Floyd, two past presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention who openly shared about Trump and their interactions with him in the past few weeks, Rummage said it gives him confidence to know those men will have opportunities to share their opinions with the new president.
NOT SURPRISING: It turns out values Trumps everything Guest Columnist | 11 November, 2016 by Todd Starnes / Fox News

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Christian Examiner) 

Click here for a free subscription to Todd's newsletter: a must-read for Conservatives!

Nearly 6 in 10 Trump voters were impacted by the pro-life, pro-religious liberty planks of the Republican Party, according to a post-election poll commissioned by Family Research Council.

It was the party platform that brokered the deal between Trump and Christian Conservatives  a deal that was sealed in the final debate when Trump vividly described a partial-birth abortion and pledged to appoint pro-life justices.

"The Republican Party's platform positions on unborn human life and religious liberty were the bridge between Donald Trump and Christian conservatives," FRC President Tony Perkins told me.

Nearly 60 percent of Trump voters were more likely to vote for him because the platform is very clear on life and religious liberty, he said.

"It was the party platform that brokered the deal between Trump and Christian Conservatives  a deal that was sealed in the final debate when Trump vividly described a partial-birth abortion and pledged to appoint pro-life justices," Perkins reiterated.

White Evangelicals turned out in massive numbers on Election Day for Trump - 81 percent to 16 percent, according to exit polls.

They obliterated a narrative perpetrated by the Mainstream Media and "Never Trump" religious leaders that Evangelicals were divided over the Republican nominee. In reality - the only divisions were among a small, but vocal group of Evangelical leaders -- not the rank and file.

Values voters wanted a president who would defend the unborn as well as the rights of Christians to practice their faith in the public marketplace.

There was also considerable interest in Trump's promise to repeal the Johnson Amendment.

The amendment in essence bars advocacy organizations from mentioning elected officials, or pastor and churches on commenting on candidates.

Yet for decades a provision of the tax code referred to as the Johnson Amendment has prevented these organizations from providing such information.

"Indeed, under current IRS guidance, it prevents a whole host of nonprofit organizations, religious and otherwise, from informing their followers in ways relevant to their own duty to vote," Perkins wrote in a posting on the FRC website.

But perhaps the most crucial issue on Election Day was the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court.

One of President-elect Trump's first decisions will be to nominate a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. It could be a defining moment for his presidency as well as his future relationship with the Christian Conservatives who put him in the Oval Office.

"The Republican Party platform played a key role in bringing Christian conservatives and Trump together," Perkins said.

Only time will tell whether the Trump Administration actually values those kinds of voters.

Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. Sign up for his American Dispatch newsletter, be sure to join his Facebook page, and follow him on Twitter. His latest book is "God Less America." This article published at toddstarnes.com and used with permission.
Two Pakistani Christians have been refused visas to visit the UK because they were deemed not wealthy enough by the UK government.

According to ChristianToday.com, the two Pakistani men were getting ready to make a trip to visit a church in Glasgow, Scotland. Two men from the Glasgow church had visited their congregation in Hyderabad, so the two Pakistanis were going to return the visit.

The Scottish church was going to pay for all their expenses.

However, the two men received notification from the UK government that "Immigration officials refused the applicants visas on the basis they could not prove they were wealthy enough to be allowed into the UK, according to the Glasgow church.

"We remain committed to our twinning link with the diocese of Hyderabad, with whom we enjoyed tremendous hospitality when members of our presbytery visited Pakistan last year, stated Rev. Graham Blount, upon hearing the news that the men were refused entry into the UK.

"We are deeply concerned at the refusal of the UK Government to grant visas to two of our invited partners, despite the Church of Scotland guaranteeing their travel arrangements as well as their accommodation and subsistence while they are here, the refusal seems grounded in their personal financial circumstances, he continued.

Blount added that the church is writing to the UK government to voice their concerns.

Wilson Choudhry of the British Pakistani Christian Association also voiced his condemnation of the UKs decision:

"This latest refusal is a poor indictment of the UK Home Office process which clearly is not free of bias. I will be praying for the family and will register concerns with the Home Office and Foreign Affairs Select Committee over the obvious maladministration and request a review of the decision. I hope something can be done to revoke the decision which flies in the face of common sense."

Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com

Publication date: November 11, 2016
Churches destroyed a year ago by Islamic extremists and police in Aceh Singkil  a rural regency in Indonesias only Sharia-ruled province  have still not been rebuilt because of discrimination against Christians by local authorities, say church leaders. However, despite the troubles, church membership is climbing.

Hardliners started destroying Aceh Singkil churches in October 2015 following clashes between Muslims and Christians in another part of the country. Some churches were razed by extremists and others demolished by police following demands from residents that all unlicensed churches be pulled down.

Video from Oct. 2015 shows an angry mob marching and setting fire to the Indonesian Christian Church in Sukamakmur village, Aceh Singkil. Officials in uniform seem unable to stop the attack on the church which had been a place of Christian worship since 1968.

11 churches demolished last year, the members of six continue to meet in tents. The rest have joined other churches, but many live in fear of further violence. The perpetrators live in the neighbourhood and they always watch my church members activities, said Noldi,* whose church meets in two sites 25km apart - to cater for its growing numbers.

Boru Manik, a local church member, added: Im sad that we have to worship in tents in the middle of a palm-oil plantation. But were keeping our spirits high.

The heavy rain in largely tropical Indonesia can be a problem in temporary structures. [Rain] has happened many times, but we still continue the service. Even if the tents are leaking and rainwater or mud is splashing in from the outside, no-one ever leaves the service! said a member of the Indonesian Christian Church.

The authorities allow Christians to meet in these temporary structures, but church leaders say they are nevertheless playing politics with plans for new buildings. Churches fear that these authorities are reluctant to grant them planning permission because it would not be popular with Acehs largely Muslim voters in the run-up to local elections in February 2017.

Alongside this, all local churches that were not destroyed must become licensed, but the registration process is slow and churches fear it will not be prioritised during election campaigning.

Lamhot*, a Christian activist, told World Watch Monitor that it is already too late to expect building permits to be issued by the authorities now that candidates have started registering for the election. Lamhots church was burned down last year and services are now held in tents in the nearby woods. Even this also requires a permit, denied by the government to many hundreds more on security grounds.

Another setback is the formula planners insist is used to estimate the size of a new church. They stipulate that estimates must be based on the number of church members with local identity cards, multiplied by 0.8 metres. Outsiders without local ID cards may not be counted, so new churches are in danger of being granted too small a plot if most of their members are not local.

Berutu, a member of Pakpak Dairi Christian Church in the village of Pertabas, is disappointed by the lack of progress. The government is afraid of pressures from Muslim clerics and extremists, she said. When they gave instructions to knock down our church, they were no longer our protectors.

Local politicians are putting added pressure on the Church in the lead-up to elections. The regency chief who instigated last years demolition of unlicensed churches  a move agreed by Christians following last years religious clashes  wants each church to appoint five people to his election campaign team. Christians believe it is a bribe to win him their backing, but understand that other candidates are less tolerant of Christianity. Vote wisely for your leaders  our fate for the next five years depends on it, Berutu told her congregation.

Conviction for a Muslims murder 'without reliable evidence'

Progress has been slow on another front too. Natanael Wahed Tumangger was convicted of killing a Muslim in last years clashes. But the legal process that saw him sentenced to six years in jail was flawed, according to Christians who say he was not accompanied by a lawyer during police interrogation and that no proper evidence was shown during his trial. Later, the Council of Churches in Indonesia sent a team of lawyers to represent him. They said that the prosecutor mentioned a projectile and a gun, but failed to present any reliable evidence at the next hearing. The prosecutors statement on the colour of Tumanggers clothes during the clash was the only proof used against him.

Local Christians say Tumanggers sentence was passed to satisfy the Muslim community.

In jail, news had spread among inmates that a Christian had killed a Muslim, so Tumangger was beaten regularly during his first weeks behind bars. His first few months were spent in a room only 6x4 metres, with 26 other inmates.

The prison guard didnt let us out even for a few minutes. Those were miserable times, he said of his experience. His wife remembered him being as pale as a corpse when he finally got out of that cell.

Tumangger has been transferred to a better room  the same size, but with no more than six people. Prisoners normally rent the room for an equivalent of US$300 per year for the rest of their time behind bars. However, Tumangger is an electrician and the head of the prison employs him as payment for the better room.

Theres nothing to worry about me here. But what about my wife and our four children? he said. How are they going to survive in my absence?

The Indonesian constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but by-laws in provinces such as Aceh can prevent these rights from being upheld.

The Open Doors World Watch List 2016 cites Islamic extremism as the main source of persecution in Indonesia, which has the worlds largest population of Muslims. Its ranked 43 among the 50 countries in which its most difficult to live as a Christian. In strictly Islamic regions like Aceh, Muslims converting to Christianity face pressure from family and friends to deny their new faith.

*Names changed for security reasons

Courtesy: World Watch Monitor

Photo: Indonesian Christian Church burning down in Aceh Singkil after a mob attack, Oct. 2015

Photo courtesy: World Watch Monitor

Publication date: November 11, 2016
With the craziest presidential election of all time ending earlier this week, its easy to forgive someone for forgetting that today is Veterans Day.

Sad to say, at least until President-Elect Trumps brief but important mention of vets during his victory speech, our nations veterans have been mostly forgotten during the election campaign. As National Public Radio reported, of the 28,500 words spoken by the presidential candidates during the debates, veterans were mentioned only twice.

This is amazing. The nation and our leaders owe veterans much more.

Lets look at the figures. The Census Bureau reports that there are 18.6 million American veterans of military service. Since the first Gulf War, 5.6 million Americans have served.

And while most of them are doing just fine, thank you, many are in dire straits. One in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or PTSD.

Although veterans represent only 9 percent of the U. S. population, they account for nearly 20 percent of the nations suicides. Vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have four times the suicide rate of other veterans.

Homelessness is also an issue. There are nearly 50,000 homeless vets in this countryhalf of whom are Vietnam vets, although the number of younger homeless vets is on the rise.

Then theres the scandal of the Veterans Administration hospitalshorrendous waiting lists for medical care, officials falsifying data to cover their tracks. Its a further scandal that the Administration and Congress havent done a whole lot about it. The Washington Post awarded President Obama four Pinocchios for his assurances to military families that a whole bunch of people have been fired at the VA as a result of the scandals. The fact is that very few VA officials have been held accountable.

Finally, theres the ongoing mess regarding war-time re-enlistment bonuses given to members of the California National Guard. These men and women used the money for things like education and mortgagesonly to find out that a) they might have been given the money fraudulently because their recruiting officers were trying to meet quotas, and b) the government wants the money back. Thats a fine thank you to the men and women who placed their lives on the line for their country.

Lets hope the Pentagon and Congress do something about this and the other issues facing veterans.

Actually, this Veterans Day, lets do more than hope. Call or write our new President and our newly elected Congress the moment they take their oath of office. Let them know you want veterans issues back on the national agenda.

But beyond waiting on our elected officials to address veterans concerns, there are things that we ourselves can do to honor those who have served our country. Here are some suggestions from Military.com.

First, show up. Attend a Veterans Day event in your area. Second, donate. There are many organizations that help veterans. Come to BreakPoint.org and well link you to worthy charities. Other suggestions include just getting to know a veteran in your neighborhood and asking about his or her service; visiting or volunteering at a VA hospital; or simply writing a veteran you know offering words of thanks and encouragement. And of course, pray for our veterans and our active duty military personnel.

Yes, our veterans deserve the thanks and support of our government. Lets go to bat for them, and also do what we can do to acknowledge their service on our behalf.

BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life. Begun by Chuck Colson in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on todays news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print. Today BreakPoint commentaries, co-hosted by Eric Metaxas and John Stonestreet, air daily on more than 1,200 outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Feel free to contact us at BreakPoint.org where you can read and search answers to common questions.

Eric Metaxas is a co-host of BreakPoint Radio and a best-selling author whose biographies, children's books, and popular apologetics have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com

Publication date: November 11, 2016
A Christian couple was barred from adopting their two foster children because they suggested that a child needs both mother and father for a stable upbringing, and were apprehensive of children being adopted by gay parents.

The council officials became "concerned" over the views of the Christian couple, whose names have been withheld from media for legal reasons.

The couple, who themselves have children, had been fostering two pre-school kids since January, and were told in October that a same-sex couple wants to adopt the two children.

The Christian father was noted to have responded by asking, "You're joking?"

They have appealed against the decision, and released a statement saying that they had not expressed any homophobic views and were not against individuals, but thought that a child needs both mother and father.

The couple had expressed their desire to adopt the children before but the social worker had said that their house was too small. Later, they were told that keeping the children with them would bring them under "emotional stress."

"We are Christians and we expressed the view that a child needs a mother and a father. We expressed our views in modest, temperate terms based on our Christian convictions," they were quoted as saying by Christian Today.

"We love everyone (regardless of sexual orientation) and we love the children and believe that they would benefit from the foundation offered by a mother and a father," the couple said.

"The decision ... appears discriminatory to us and not related to the children's needs," the couple continued. "The children love us: we love them. All the reports show that we are a loving, caring and stable family. What more could a child need?"

Christian Legal Centre director Andrea Williams, who is supporting their appeal, said that the couple's "viewpoint is lawful and mainstream."

Williams reiterated that children need traditional families when asked by the Independent why gay parenting might not be in the best interest of the children. "They believe that the children, who have had a very difficult start in life, need a mother and father," she replied.

"They are thriving under a complimentary relationship where a mother and father bring different elements to a family dynamic and provide distinctive roles in a family unit."

The council said that their discriminatory views rendered them "unfit to be adoptive parents." They were told in a letter by the council their perspective was "detrimental to the long-term needs of the children".

In September, the couple was complimented by social workers for their "care and warmth" of the pre-schoolers, and their association with the church was well appreciated for providing a supporting community.
What does the future of the Asian American church look like?

Some 200 Asian American ministry leaders gathered in Southern California to learn and dialogue on the question during the third annual Asian American Ministry Conference. The event, hosted by Biola Universitys Talbot School of Theology, had previously focused on themes such as mentorship and leadership. This year, the conference focused on the theme of envisioning the future of the Asian American church.

What does the future hold for the Asian American church? I believe that there is a bright future ahead as we look at all of the talent, resources, and people involved in building towards the future, said Dr. Benjamin Shin, the director of the Asian American Doctor of Ministry cohort at Talbot, and one of the organizers of the conference. This conference hopes to provide a small glimpse of that future today.

Among the diverse range of topics discussed during the conference, which took place from 9 AM to 5 PM on Saturday, was the way that Asian Americans could serve to be witnesses for the gospel in this generation. Dr. Peter Cha, professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School who spoke during the morning and evening plenary sessions of the conference, emphasized the need to develop our authentic witness in the modern day, as non-Christians express increasingly disillusioned sentiments toward the Christian community.

Being a "witness" is not only about sharing the gospel in distant countries, but also doing so in America, within the societies in which we live, he explained.

One of those ways to develop authentic witness as Asian Americans is to express the Asian American Christian voice, Cha said. Despite the diverse population of Christians in the U.S., Cha noted that there still exists a tendency for some to think of Christianity as white mans religion, and to think of white people when thinking of the church in America.

I think it will be our homework to figure out, what voice do we bring to the table? said Cha. I hope younger generation pastors will collaborate to form that voice.

Cha also mentioned the potential role that Asian Americans have in racial reconciliation. In the aftermath of the L.A. Riots, Cha said that many Korean Americans responded and collaborated with members of the African American community.

Today, Asian Americans still can serve to be a bridge among the different ethnic groups, he said.

This racial distrust will linger, Cha said, encouraging those at the conference to focus on the gospel in the process of racial reconciliation. The gospel is a more profound way than tolerance to racial reconciliation.

Cha also alluded to the idea that though some Asian Americans may have a passion to be more involved in the greater community, Asian American churches may not be giving enough room for ministers and members to be active in those arenas. Cha said that among 18,000 attendees to the Urbana Conference in 2015, about 6,000 of them were Asian Americans, which showed a great deal of interest and passion in our community to make an impact with the gospel.

Are local churches presenting the opportunities for them to do so? he added.

I hope that we will be able to say that all the gifts that he gave us  including our Asian American identity  we did not bury it in the ground, but stewarded it faithfully for his glory and kingdom, Cha said.

Meanwhile, the conference also featured three sessions of seminars on about a dozen topics on specific ministries, including church planting, college ministry, childrens ministry, global missions, worship, organizing special events, conflict resolution across generations, family ministry, and multi-ethnic church.

Seventeen Asian American leaders in those respective areas were featured as speakers, including John M. Kim, church planter and current pastor of Lighthouse Bible Church Los Angeles; Steve Bang Lee, college and teaching ministries director at Living Hope Community Church; Margaret Yu, national executive director of Epic Movement; Gloria S. Lee from Menlo Church; and Angela Yee, director of mission and ministry at Saddleback Church, Irvine South campus; among others.

The Asian American Ministry Conference is set to take place for the fourth time next year on November 4.
Walgreens Files Secret Lawsuit Against Theranos

Theranos, the once revolutionary laboratory testing company, may be facing a new secret lawsuit from their former partner Walgreens. In a filing on Tuesday, Walgreens asked the Federal District Court in Delaware to permit the company to file a lawsuit "under seal" against Theranos that is based on the contracts that the two companies held with each other.

The motion filed by Walgreens explains that the two companies signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) relating to Theranos's business and technology. As a result of the NDA, Walgreens explained to the court that the allegations in the complaint, if disclosed in a public filing, would likely violate the terms of the NDA exposing them to liability.

What's This Case About?

While the case's specific details and allegations may remain unknown, it doesn't take much investigation to figure out what this case is about. Back in 2010, Theranos and Walgreens embarked on a partnership that had potential to revolutionize the blood-testing industry. Theranos had represented to Walgreens, and the world, that they had developed, and were still further actively researching and developing, methods to test blood that were fully automated and required no more than a single drop of blood.

As it turns out, Theranos was unable to actually do the testing as they claimed, and their products and services did not perform as promised. The proprietary blood testing machine and much of company's processes were not approved by the FDA. After Walgreens saw that Theranos was struggling, failing, and not recovering, they pulled out of the partnership and removed Theranos testing services from many of their retail locations. During Theranos's spiral to the bottom, countless customers had to be informed that their blood test results, which they received at Walgreens, were likely wrong.



Secret Lawsuits

Although it may seem like the grievance between Walgreens and Theranos is already out in the public, the filing by Walgreens indicates that the lawsuit would divulge confidential trade secret information relating to Theranos's testing process, machines, business practices, and more. As a result of the way most NDAs work, any divulging of information covered under the NDA could result in contractual penalties for Walgreens.

Courts will accept filings under seal if they would divulge confidential or private information. However, generally, before filing a document with the court under seal, the court must provide permission to do so, and usually wants a good reason as to why they should. While the lawsuit itself may not be a secret, the contents of any document filed under seal, and often the in court proceedings, will be until the court or the parties agree otherwise.

Related Resources:
California became the fifth state to legalize recreational marijuana on November 8 after rejecting a similar measure six years ago.

Californias Proposition 64 passed by a 56 to 44 vote and allows adults over the age of 21 to buy and possess up to one ounce of marijuana for personal use and to grow up to six plants per household.

However, recreational marijuana cannot be legally sold until licenses are issued, which will take about two years under the newly formed Bureau of Marijuana Control.

California has the largest economy in the United States and has the 6th largest in the world. The expected tax revenue from marijuana sales are projected to be about $22 billion by 2020, according to the New York Times.

The new measure will also decriminalize possession of marijuana for which minorities had been disproportionately arrested and convicted for drug crimes. This will reduce the number of people convicted for possession and is estimated to save over $100 million per year, according to the Department of Finance. Revenue will go toward research and looking into the environmental consequences of cultivation as well as drug education programs for youth.

The new law focuses on undoing the most egregious harms of marijuana prohibition, which have disproportionately impacted communities of color, says Lynne Lyman from the Drug Policy Alliance, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Opponents say that the measure received its funding from investments made by marijuana companies who would profit greatly should the measure pass and pointed to the potential negative consequences such as drug abuse among youth and driving while impaired.

We are, of course, disappointed that the self-serving moneyed interests behind this marijuana business plan prevailed at the cost of public health, safety, and the wellbeing of our communities, Chief Ken Corney, president of the California Police Chiefs Association said, according to the Los Angeles Times. We will take a thorough look at the flaws in Proposition 64 that will negatively impact public health and safety, such as the initiatives substandard advertising restrictions and lack of prosecutorial tools for driving under the influence of marijuana, and begin to develop legislative solutions.

According to a Gallup poll, support for the legalization of marijuana is at an all-time high in the U.S. at 60 percent. Support was found across all age groups except those over 65 years old, according to a Field poll. Across party lines, 65 percent of Republicans are against legalization, while 72 percent of Democrats are in support.

California was the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1996. Massachusetts and Nevada passed similar measures in legalizing recreational marijuana while medical marijuana was legalized in Florida, North Dakota and Arkansas.
Colorado residents have voted to allow terminally ill patients to opt for assisted suicide.

The ballot for Proposition 106 was cast after the bill to legalize assisted suicide was defeated in the state legislature.

Colorado became the sixth state to approve the "right-to-die" law, after Oregon, California, Vermont, Montana, and Washington.

The new law will permit Colorado residents over the age of 18 to request medically-assisted suicide if they are terminally ill and have fewer than six months to live.

The law requires them to be competent to make the decision. They must get approval from two doctors and request voluntarily for the lethal medicine.

The proposal has not mandated psychological evaluation of patients seeking to end their lives, and does not require medical oversight to prevent incorrect dosage at the time of administration.

"It's incredibly broad, and there's inadequate safeguards to protect Coloradans from abuse and mistakes and coercion," Carrie Ann Lucas, who suffers from progressive neuromuscular disease and is on ventilator, told LifeNews.

Supporters of the so-called "death-with-dignity" act say that allowing terminally ill patients to die respects their autonomy, and relieves them of physical suffering.

"Today is bittersweet for our family," said Melissa Hollis Brenkert, whose sister died painfully from a brain tumor. "Passage of Prop 106 means that Coloradans will now have options when facing pain and suffering at the end of their lives."

Several disability rights and religious groups have protested the ballot result. They say that ending life is not ethical, and express concern that such a law may push more elderly and the poor to take this option.

"If this legislation becomes law, it will place the lives of the vulnerable in the hands of an insurance and health care industry whose profit-driven culture would incentivize doctors to prescribe death," said Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver.

Many among the medical community are opposing the law for its implications on the sanctity of life.

"What this bill asks me as a physician is to look at my patients with sympathy rather than empathy," said Dr. Robert Jotte, an oncologist at Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers. "We can't as a medical profession give up on these patients."
In the wake of the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. President, activists and advocates urged members of the immigrant community to make preparations ahead of Trumps inauguration.

According to advocates, many in the immigrant community have expressed concern and even panic after Trump had won the election, particularly due to Trumps remarks regarding immigration throughout his campaign. Trump has said he would build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, deport undocumented individuals with criminal records, increase vetting of those entering the U.S., and limit funding to sanctuary cities throughout the country which offer protection from prosecution to undocumented immigrants, among other remarks.

President-elect Trump has also said during his campaign that he would cancel President Obamas executive order which established Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. DACA allows eligible undocumented individuals who came to the U.S. as children to receive two-year work permits and temporary exemption from deportation. Since DACA was established in 2012, over 1.5 million individuals have submitted requests to receive DACA benefits as of June 2016, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

If Trump cancels DACA, it is unclear what kind of effect it would have to current DACA recipients, and when exactly during his term he would cancel the executive order.

At the end of the day, we dont know specifically what he will do, Kamal Essaheb, director of policy and advocacy of the National Immigrant Law Center, said in a press call on Thursday. Hes thrown out a lot of ideas, but its not clear that they are practically or even politically feasible, or which ones he will prioritize.

There are ways the immigrant community can prepare themselves before Trump becomes inaugurated as president however, advocates said.

First, individuals can prepare by knowing and remembering their rights, Essaheb said, including the right to ask border patrol officers to show ID, and the right to call an attorney. Sally Kinoshita, deputy director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, added that individuals have the right to remain silent, and the right to ask for a warrant when officers want to come in and search their homes.

Donald Trump cannot take away the Constitution, said Essaheb. He cannot take away your rights.

Kinoshita also encouraged individuals to prepare assuming the worst case scenario that Trump would take away DACA soon after his inauguration in January. In that case, those who wanted to apply for DACA now should not assume that they will be able to receive it, as requests take several months to approve. Requests for DACA submitted today would not be processed until February or March, and may result in no benefit and expose [individuals] to DHS, the ILRC stated.

Meanwhile, those who are current recipients of DACA but need to renew have a greater possibility of having renewed permits before Trump is inaugurated, as it takes about 8 weeks for renewal requests to be processed. Those who seek to renew should know that the filing fee increases to $495 on December 23.

Undocumented individuals should also seek legal professionals to see if they are eligible for protections or programs other than DACA, Kinoshita added. There are certain state-wide protections for immigrants in several states, such as Californias AB 60 which allows undocumented individuals to receive drivers licenses.

We have seen that as many as 15 percent or more of DACA recipients are eligible for something more permanent than DACA, said Kinoshita.
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.
home World Aleppo pastor continues to serve Muslims and Christians as war continues

A Christian pastor in Aleppo refuses to leave the war-torn city and wants to continue serving Muslims and Christians in need.

A large number of Christians have fled Aleppo since the war in Syria started but a pastor, who goes by the pseudonym Alim, has chosen to stay even as his brothers in Germany are compelling him to leave, World Watch Monitor reports.

Alim currently resides in a part of the city controlled by the Syrian government. His congregation helps about 2,000 families, both Christians and Muslims, every month with the help of motivated people. The church provides food and other necessities such as medicine, clean drinking water and even money to pay for rent.

Bombs constantly explode in the area where Alim lives. "The other day, as we finished our meeting on Friday, a bomb exploded next to the church, killing a young girl and her brother. On Sunday, when we were getting ready for church, bombs exploded around our house," he said.

One of Alim's relatives died after a shrapnel from a rocket broke through the walls of his parents' house. He said that he receives news of someone's death everyday but he still wants to make a difference and help those who are still alive.

The pastor said that the church is now building bridges with non-Christians and they have visited displaced people who are staying in schools, mosques and unfinished buildings. He has observed that the attitude of Muslims toward Christians have changed since the war.

"What we see and hear is often heart-breaking. Yet these people now see what the Church does. There is now a greater appreciation for its role. Before, people reacted differently towards the church. Before, as we were distributing food, we heard people saying: 'Here come the infidels': now people are different," he said.

Alim noted that his church had 150 to 200 members before the war. He said that number stays the same today but most of the members are new. The church baptizes 15 to 20 people each year and an equal number has chosen not to be baptized because of community pressure.

The pastor estimated that only 30,000 Christians remain in Aleppo. He believes that the city would not remain the same if all the Christians left. "Christians maintain a balance in society, it is essential for us to stay," he said.

The Christian advocacy group Open Doors has started the One Million Voices petition to call on the U.N. to improve the living conditions of Christians in Syria and Iraq, and to ensure the protection of their rights.
home US Hillary Clinton's 'disregard' for evangelicals contributed to loss, says Obama faith adviser

The former faith adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama said that Hillary Clinton's lack of engagement with faith communities contributed to her loss in the 2016 presidential election.

"The high Christian support for Trump is the result of many factors, but certainly one has to be her [Hillary Clinton] campaign's almost complete disregard for showing empathy or earnestly engaging faith communities a particularly white Catholics and evangelicals," Michael Wear, the "head of faith outreach" for Obama, told Christian Today.

"This must be part of the discussion of where the [Democrat] Party goes from here," he added.

The exit polls have shown that white evangelicals preferred Donald Trump over Clinton by a margin of 81 to 16 percent. The business mogul spent much of the campaign period directly courting evangelical voters while the former first lady largely ignored the religious demographic.

A majority of Catholics voted for Obama in the two previous elections but Trump gained back 52 percent of the Catholic vote for the Republican party in this election. Trump was also favored by Americans who attended church weekly by 56 to 40 percent.

Wear said that he would pray for the incoming president and he hoped that there would be healing and unity in the church.

In his Sept. 30 interview with Christian Today, he criticized Trump for being "the most secular, least prepared, least qualified and most dangerous nominee either party has nominated in the modern era."

He expressed his great admiration for Obama and he believed the outgoing president would continue to play a prominent public role.

Wear was brought up as a Catholic in Buffalo, New York. He became "antagonistic" towards faith but he turned to Christ when someone gave him Paul's Letters to the Romans. During Obama's first term, he led evangelical outreaches and assisted in managing the White House's engagement on religious and values issues such as adoption and anti-human trafficking efforts.

He described Clinton's liberal position on abortion as "morally reprehensible" but he denied that the former secretary of state has kept quiet about her Methodist-faith during the campaign.
home World ISIS displays five crucified bodies to convey its hold on Mosul

The Islamic State has put five crucified bodies on display at a road junction in Mosul on Tuesday to send the message that it is still in control of Iraq's second largest city.

Residents told Reuters that the terror group has killed at least 20 people who were suspected of passing information to the "enemy" and are now patrolling the streets to enforce its restrictions on the length of men's beards.

Many parts of the city have been reported to be relatively calmer than in the past few days, allowing people to seek food outside.

"I went out in my car for the first time since the start of the clashes in the eastern districts. I saw some of the Hisba elements of Daesh (Islamic State) checking people's beards and clothes and looking for smokers," a Mosul resident said.

The Hisba force is the morality police unit that enforces the terror group's interpretation of Islamic behavior. The unit forbids smoking and Western style clothing such as dresses and logos. The women are required to wear a veil as well as gloves. The Hisba units use specially marked vehicles while patrolling the city.

"It looks like they want to prove their presence after they disappeared for the last 10 days, especially on the eastern bank," the resident added.

The displayed crucified bodies are believed to be a warning against other potential informers.

"I saw five corpses of young men which had been crucified at a road junction in east Mosul," another resident recounted.

"The Daesh people hung the bodies out and said that these were agents passing news to the infidel forces and apostates," he added, referring to the Western allies aiding the campaign and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's Shiite-led government.

There are also signs that Islamic State officials are trying to prevent communication with the outside world. A 65-year-old retired policeman who identified himself as Abu Ali said that he was ordered to surrender his SIM card when he went to get his pension.

Meanwhile, a human rights group has accused Iraqi forces of torturing and killing villagers. Amnesty International stated that up to six people from the Shura and Qayyarah sub-districts were shot dead after they were suspected of having links to ISIS.

The group also obtained information that 10 men and a 16-year-old boy who escaped from ISIS were tortured by a small group of men wearing police uniforms on Oct. 21.

The Command of the Federal Police Forces released a statement denying that its officers had killed the villagers.
home US Media didn't understand 'God-factor' in Trump's unexpected win, says Franklin Graham

Samaritan's Purse CEO Franklin Graham said that election analysts in the media cannot explain the victory of Republican Donald Trump because they do not understand the "God-factor."

In a Facebook post on Thursday, Graham noted the reaction of the media about the outcome of the election.

"Did God show up? In watching the news after the election, the secular media keep asking 'How did this happen?' 'What went wrong?' 'How did we miss this?' Some are in shock. Political pundits are stunned. Many thought the Trump/Pence ticket didn't have a chance. None of them understand the God-factor," he wrote.

He expressed his belief that Trump's victory is the result of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of Christians across the nation.

"While the media scratches their heads and tries to understand how this happened, I believe that God's hand intervened Tuesday night to stop the godless, atheistic progressive agenda from taking control of our country," Graham added.

Graham had been rallying Christians to vote and pray for the future of America in the Decision America tour, which concluded on Oct. 13 in his home state of North Carolina. While he did not endorse any particular candidate, he urged Christians to vote for politicians who stand for biblical principles.

The evangelist hoped that Trump would continue to "surround himself with godly men and women to help advise and counsel him as he leads the nation."

The exit poll results indicated that white evangelical voters overwhelmingly voted for Trump at a margin of 81 to 16 percent. It is seen as the widest margin for a Republican candidate since 2004, according to FiveThirtyEight.

In Georgia, Trump garnered 88 percent of the votes from white evangelicals while Hillary Clinton got only 6 percent. They make up about a third of the voters in the state. In Florida, it is estimated that 20 percent of its voters are white evangelicals.

A 2014 survey revealed that 76 percent of white evangelicals lean toward the Republican party. They make up one-fifth of all registered voters and around a third of voters who identify with the GOP.
home World Muslim preacher says Jesus brought him back to life just before his burial

A former Imam who hated Christians shared his astonishing testimony about how he converted to Christianity after Jesus Christ rescued him from demons and raised him from the dead just as he was being prepared for his burial.

One day, the former Muslim preacher, who now uses the pseudonym Munaf Ali, encountered Bibles for Mideast, an underground ministry which distributes Bibles and establishes underground churches in the region.

Ali and the group had a discussion about Christ and the Bible but he was dismissive of their claims. The former Imam was offered a copy of the Gospel but he refused and cursed the pastor.

According to the report from Bibles for Mideast, a mob came to attack the team but they were able to move just before the attackers arrived.

A few days after the encounter, Ali was on his way home when he suddenly felt dizzy and fell unconscious. He realized that he was dying and he saw demons coming to take his soul away.

Ali told the demons that they cannot take his soul but they replied, "No. It's our right to take your life. And you will be with us." Just as he was about to be taken away, Jesus appeared with a multitude of angels which caused the demons to flee.

Jesus told Ali about Adam's disobedience to God and how the gates of heaven were closed to man because of sin.

"I was born of virgin Mary as a sinless Son of Man to redeem first Adam and all of his kinship including yourself from sin and death. And I was crucified and died as a ransom for all for your sins to make you the children of God and citizens of heaven," Jesus said to Ali.

"I was risen from the dead and opened the gates of heaven to bring you back to the eternal glory. Have faith in me and be my witness. I give your life back, for I am the authority of giving life," he continued.

When Ali opened his eyes, he was surrounded by his relatives who were laying his body on a table to be washed and shrouded before his burial. A crowd was also present to witness his burial. The people were startled when they saw him stand up from the table.

Ali told them about how he was saved by the Messiah when the demons tried to take him. However, the crowd thought that Ali just lost his mind when he fell while others believed that he was possessed. He was eventually dismissed from the mosque where he was preaching.

The former Imam's family believed his testimony about Jesus but the community began to persecute them. Ali and his family have since fled their native country as a result of the persecution.
home US Pro-life movement in 'strongest position' since Roe v. Wade, says SBA List president

Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser said that the pro-life movement is currently in its best political position since abortion was legalized nationally in 1973 due to Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election.

Dannenfelser told reporters at the National Press Club (NPC) on Wednesday that the victory means that there will be a "perfect lineup" in place to pass common-sense abortion legislation as well as measures to defund Planned Parenthood without worrying that it would be vetoed by the president, The Christian Post reported.

"We are poised to make the biggest legislative advances for the protection of unborn children since Roe vs. Wade. What do I mean? We are teed up to defund Planned Parenthood," she said.

"The House, Senate last time made it to the president's office but had the wrong president. So of course, he didn't sign it. We have all that we need now because we have got the perfect lineup," she continued.

During his campaign, Trump penned a letter to pro-life leaders vowing that he would sign the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," which would outlaw late-term abortions nationwide. He also promised to make the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal taxpayer money from funding abortions, into a permanent law.

Evangelical conservative activist Richard Viguerie told reporters at the NPC that there is "no excuse" now for Republicans not to pass conservative bills because of Trump's election as well as the fact that the GOP is still in control of the House and the Senate.

Dannenfelser revealed that the movement had employed its largest grassroots ground effort to encourage over 1.2 million voters in key battleground states such as Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Missouri to vote for Trump and other pro-life candidates.

"The power of the pro-life movement on the ground has been the big sleeping giant over the last four years and it culminated in enormous win in the battleground states and states with tight Senate races," she said.

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins told the media on Wednesday that Trump got the attention of evangelicals during the last debate when he gave a concise definition of late-term abortion. He added that the president-elect's promise to appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court also played a factor in gaining the support of evangelicals.
Glenn Hughes is known as the voice of rock. This month, Hughes released his first solo album in eight years with Resonate. Blues Rock Review Editor-in-Chief Pete Francis caught up with Hughes to discuss the new album, shed light on the upcoming Black Country Communion record and more.

Resonate is your first solo album in eight years. What were you looking to accomplishment with this album?

I had two knee replacements, the left one in December, the right one in January, so knowing that I would be home recovering and doing physical therapy amongst other things, doing the Hall of Fame in April. So, I was home recovering and I couldnt obviously work. I have a studio in my house and what Ive been doing for 20 years when youve got a studio in your house thats where you hang out. So, due to the fact that I couldnt really do anything but physical therapy I found myself writing some songs that started to have a focus, a very sort of dark, heavier, more for the rock community. And as I started to write five songs, four, five, and six Im going, it would appear to me Im making a solo album. Its been eight years since First Underground Nuclear Kitchen and due to the fact that Black Country Communion had taken four years from my life, etc, etc. I figured it was a good opportunity. I didnt even tell my record company I was doing it. Of course, they were very happy when I went into the studio. This album by songs four and five I knew I was going to focus in on what a Glenn Hughes album should sound like today. And lets be clear, its a rock band. I just wanted to make a record for my rock fans.

Was the entire songwriting for this album done in that time period then?

It was done between February and mid-May completely fresh. There was only one song, Steady, which was written for California Breed. I didnt finish Steady, so I didnt record it. What I like to do, Pete, if Im gonna make a record I want to have the newest, freshest material. I knew four or five songs in I was into making a solo album. I love to record, dont get me wrong, but I like to do projects where its going to be out there.

Is there a memory or moment that sticks out to you as particularly memorable from this process?

It was all real special because I was kind of directing the traffic as well as writing the album. This was the first time I actually stood in the middle of the room and produced a record knowing full well what I wrote and knowing full well what I needed to get it over the finish line. I have worked with producers that have been very good, but they didnt have the vision to complete the song, so for me, I wanted this album to be something where I could say this is really a Glenn album. I should have done this 20 years ago, but I didnt. And when I completed the album I said to myself now you know who is going to produce your next record.

How often do you stumble across that situation where you have a vision in your head for what you want that sound to be, but then you come across a stumbling block where you arent getting the sound thats in your head?

I know when something is wrong. When Im writing a song I can hear what kind of instrument I want. When we recorded, as I counted Steady off, if you listen to Steady youll notice Lachy (Doley) the keyboard player played this Hammond intro and as Im counting the song off I yelled to him play an intro in G! And it was that simple that he had no preconceived notion of what he was going to do. I just said in G alone and it worked out. And the start of Long Time Gone I quickly changed it from being a band production to being me on the acoustic guitar. It was something that happened on the spot. I think spontaneity in the studio I dont know if you know this, but I only record songs once or twice both musically and vocally. Ive worked with people who are, like, take 44! That is like kiss of the death! Theres no freshness, theres no vibrancy, theres no rawness, its not really organic. Its not the world I like to live in.

Youve been a pretty prolific writer for a longtime. How would you say your songwriting has changed from your early days with bands like Trapeze and Deep Purple to now?

Its just insane. I say this to you, this is not a joke, but it kind of is funny. When someone is 18 and between 18 and 25 and theyve had no life experience, after we listen back to the records from the late 60s, and early 70s, unless youre, like, King Crimson or youre playing something really out there, psychedelic, the lyrics were pretty impotent (laughs). So, when I look back at the lyrics I wrote when I was a child they dont hold up today. I would consider myself to be a lyricist now, someone that really enjoys telling a story, and with the way I write songs and the chord changes I like to do, and I dont really have any fear of the next indicated note both vocally or when Im writing something. When fear gets in the way in any art form, trouble is lurking. So I like to avoid it.

Did you write with fear in your earlier days?

Oh, of course. As humans we are driven by a hundred forms of fear. Most of us wake up in the morning fear based. You get up in the morning and youre like what is going to happen today? Then you kind of wake up and it goes away, but with writing I just think being completely clean and sober and having an open mind has really helped me to become a better songwriter and most definitely a better human being.

Black Country Communion split, but now the group is returning with a new album. What was the turning point there?

When the band broke up because there wasnt any work, there was not going to be any touring in 12, so I thought it would be best for me to break away as Joe was very busy. There was no falling out and I just said Ive got to go do something else. I formed California Breed with Jason (Bonham). Over the course of the last four years, Joe (Bonamassa) and I have spoken. Weve had dinner a few times, so we thought maybe the window was good to do a Black Country Communion record. The first three records were interesting and we just thought the time might be right for another one.

And youve starting writing for the new BCC record. How is that going?

Weve done the music. Now Im doing lyrics. Ive got five titles and Im going to set about writing lyrics over the weekend. Weve got 14 or 15 songs, so Im going to take my time getting the lyrics done before Christmas. We go in January the 3rd and the album comes out May 20. Its a very important record for us and rock fans. I dont think we would have gone in the studio, I dont think we would have booked the time if we didnt have the appropriate songs. The caliber of musicianship within the band and the writing has been really great from record one. Joe and I have spent a lot of time together at my house in the last six weeks and now hes in Canada right now. He gets back December 17, hes going to Australia for Christmas, and we get back together on the 28th of December. With Resonate now out and Black Country coming out I have two albums out in a year, so that will be cool.

You mentioned with Resonate the songs coming together very organically and in the moment. Has this been the case with the new Black Country Communion album, too?

Yeah, it was meant to happen. As soon as I knew we were going to do this Ive been so bloody busy this year I started to think in my headspace of what we could do. Im sure Jason and Joe will come in with ideas, but Joe and I have been at my studio working tirelessly to get what we consider to be the right composure of songs. Theres some faster songs on this record, of course theres some blues stuff, but it sounds like Black Country Communion. Were not trying to sound like anyone else.

Having such a busy year, what would you consider to be the highlight of your year?

Being inducted into the Hall of Fame this year. The only thing with the Hall of Fame was my father died the same day, so it was a bit of a struggle for me because I was in New York on Wednesday, the Hall of Fame was on Friday and we knew on Wednesday that my dad wasnt going to make it and he died the day of. I didnt discuss this with anybody except my wife. I told David Coverdale the day after, so it was really difficult. The key moment was accepting an award with my father watching me from above and being graced on the stage with my band Deep Purple.

Interview by Pete Francis
home US Trump won the election because of Christians, says Johnnie Moore

Prominent author Johnnie Moore said that President-elect Donald Trump won the election because of conservative Christians who were concerned about religious liberty and the sanctity of life.

Moore, former senior vice president at Liberty University, spoke with The Christian Post about the impact of My Faith Votes, a non-profit organization that encouraged evangelical voters who did not vote in the past two elections to participate in the democratic process this year.

In the past eight months, My Faith Votes actively produced television and radio announcements that were broadcast in 100 million households across the U.S. to urge Christians to vote. The group also made videos featuring prominent Christians who talked about why and how they voted.

The exit polls revealed that white evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump by a wide margin of 81 to 16 percent. Moore, a spokesman for My Faith Votes, said that the organization undoubtedly played an "indispensable role" in the election.

"I think My Faith Votes was one of the three most significant organizations that affected the outcome of this election because they focused on just one thing," Moore told The Christian Post.

"At My Faith Votes, we focused on getting registered Christians to fulfill their moral and patriotic responsibility of showing up at the polls. We didn't just do that in the last 48 hours. We did that over the last eight months," he continued.

Moore believed the exit polls did not accurately represent the evangelical turnout.

"I don't think they are reflective because you have self-identifying evangelicals and then you have those who identify themselves as Christians a the conservative Catholic vote and everything else," he said.

Moore noted that Trump received 30 percent of the Latino vote despite the campaign rhetoric against illegal immigration. He believed that those should be counted among the evangelical votes. The exit polls, however, counted only white evangelicals.

The author pointed out that Trump received more Latino votes than 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The president-elect also did better than Romney and John McCain among Catholics.

He asserted that the Catholic support for Trump was driven by concern for religious liberty, the sanctity of life and the plight of Christians in the Middle East.

Moore believed that Trump's efforts to reach out to conservative evangelical leaders made a significant impact in uniting the skeptical evangelicals to vote for him. The president-elect met with over 900 evangelical leaders in June when he announced the addition of an evangelical advisory board to his campaign.
After Months Of Political Division, What Now For The Church?

America has its new President, but its safe to say America is pretty divided. The vitriol and anger that so defined the presidential campaign has only continued post-election day: some cheer for Trump, while others lambast the half of the country that voted for him as racist and ignorant. Many groups express deep fear of the future, while friends and families find themselves torn apart, with little hope of reconciliation.

The picture is much the same in the church. Although an overwhelming number of white evangelicals voted for Trump, many from other Christian groups did not, particularly those in minority communities. As Emma Green wrote for The Atlantic: "Vote counts conceal deep, painful fractures among the huge, diverse group of Americans who identify as evangelical Christians." As soon as one major evangelical leader endorses Trump, another condemns him.

Christians are used to holding different positions, and 'agreeing to disagree', but the division that has been wrought, or perhaps just revealed, by this presidential election is a huge problem for a church that claims to be one in Jesus. After more than a year of violent politicking, with an uncertain future ahead, what now for the church?

Can it tread the line between passive endorsement and self-righteous fury? Can it heal its own divisions and rediscover its call to be salt and light to a broken world?

Addressing what matters

There is a time be silent, and there is a time to speak. On the issue of race and sexism, this is surely a time for the church to speak. Labelling one voting group as racist or sexist does no good, but addressing the issue of attitudes toward women and minorities can be done well. During his campaign Trump made numerous disparaging comments about minority groups and footage was revealed in which he boasted about sexual assault. Trump's rhetoric, unprecedented for a presidential candidate, was called out by founder and editor of Sojourners Jim Wallis, who insisted that pastors must condemn such attitudes as profoundly anti-gospel. Though many Christians would disavow Trump's language, the fact that they still overwhelmingly supported him is seen by many as a tacit endorsement of his attitude, and reveals the inability of those of the racial majority to understand just how real and serious racism is.

For women, it is much the same: the fact that Christians could so easily forgive Trump for his misogynistic comments was seen as betraying how pervasive sexist double-standards are. Influential Christian writer Beth Moore put it thus:

Try to absorb how acceptable the disesteem and objectifying of women has been when some Christian leaders don't think it's that big a deal.  Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) October 9, 2016

Debating whether Trump is truly racist or not is now besides the point. The issue is the church, and the fractures that Trump has revealed. True healing cannot mean ignoring issues of race and gender, as if they were somehow tertiary distractions to what it means for human beings to live in society together. As Christians, we are defined ultimately by identity in Christ, but that doesn't somehow override other essential aspects of our humanity, or eradicate the need to discuss our differences.

What's at stake here is the question of whether the church can transcend the predictable and destructive divides that humanity constructs for itself. If it does wish to, it will take time, sacrifice, and much listening. Does the church believe that racial discrimination and violence against women are serious issues, and that when part of the body suffers, that all suffer? If it does, then it needs to talk about it.

Finding peace beyond politics

To be fully human however, Christians must also learn about when not to speak, or when to at least attempt calm, to lay down our weapons and remember that politics  though important  was never meant to consume our lives.

Comedian and Catholic TV personality Stephen Colbert made this point when he signed off his election night coverage as the final results came in. He suggested that the intense, mutual fear and disdain that so many have of those from the opposite side, has come because we "overdosed" on politics, and it became poisonous.

He said: "I think the people who designed our democracy didn't want us in it all the time. Informed? Yes. Politicking all the time? I don't think so. Not divided that way... now politics is everywhere."

The church would do well to heed Colbert's wisdom. We must never simply withdraw from politics because it can be difficult and people disagree. But we don't have to buy into the 24/7 "politicking" either. Perhaps some of us need to take some time away from Facebook, Twitter, or any social-political platform that has the danger of consuming us. If we can learn to step away from argument and anger then we can remind ourselves of the truth that the world does not depend on us. We do not need to talk all the time.

Consider Paul's advice to the church in Rome: "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." (Romans 12:18) Following that call may mean giving up on some of our battles, knowing when to let go, or even accepting that we might be wrong. How else can the church minister peace to a world at war?

Knowing when to speak up and when to speak less isn't easy, it requires wisdom and thoughtful judgement. Some of us need to remember that being a follower of Jesus means we need to clearly, publicly address some issues, especially within the church. For others, for our own good and out of love for others, we may need to take some time away from the political fray.

Jesus was full of grace and truth. As his followers, and for the sake of the world, can the church seek to be the same?
Choosing Hope After Trump's Election Is Easy... If You're White

For the left, the unthinkable has just happened. That thing we were joking about a year ago; the cartoonish idea (once illustrated in a famous TV cartoon series) has become a living, breathing, real-life reality. Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States.

In the hours and days following Hillary Clinton's concession, half the world has had its say. Social media has become our modern venting system; millions upon millions of us standing on our microscopic soapboxes and bleating about what this event means to us (even and especially those of us who live thousands of miles from the nation that Trump is about to govern). So while it feels indelicate and anecdotal, looking at sites like Twitter and Facebook can give us a fairly good barometer of international public opinion.

Those first few hours saw the predictable contrast between desperate Clinton-supporters, tearing their clothes and shouting at the sky, and crowing Trump-backers telling their own echo-chambers that America is about to be Made Great Again. There have been a number of marches against and rallies for Trump, but mainly, people have expressed their political affiliations and strongly-worded emotional responses online.

Now, something interesting has started to happen. People in the political middle-ground, the centre-left area which includes most 'progressive' Christians, have started to change their tone from desolation to consolation. Articles have begun to appear on news sites which had decried Trump as a monster, essentially promoting the message that he might not be that bad after all. Trump's victory speech, which unexpectedly included a note of kindness towards Hillary, fuelled both. The narrative among many is already changing to one of 'choosing hope', and it feels awfully soon.

However, it seems to be that this trend is only really observable within a particular segment of the population. There's a whole other group who are still in deep mourning, still asking how this could possibly happen: how Obama could be followed by Trump. Their narrative is not about to switch to one of 'choosing hope' any time soon. And from what I can see, the difference between these two groups is simply the colour of their skin.

A caveat at this point. I make a point of rarely writing about race; there are many, many gifted writers of colour who are better and more authoritatively-placed to do so. We must listen to prophetic non-white voices such as Bryan Stevenson, C Walker-Barnes, Broderick Greer and Rozella White, and also here in the UK people like Chine McDonald and Krish Kandiah. I totally appreciate that as a white person, it's problematic that I am writing about, rather than to, non-white people.

However, it seems important to recognise that while many of us who are white are already talking about the difficult path of political reconciliation and somehow finding the strength to believe in a good President Trump, the black community remains in total despair. I believe white people (like me) have to realise our privilege at this point, stop, and ask if we're in danger of being compelled by a dangerously-alluring new story.

Do not mistake this as white guilt. Just a couple of days after the election, I see two very distinct groups emerging, and the worrying thing is that the group which is finding comfort in daring to trust the man they until-recently abhorred, also happens to be the group to which he offers least threat.

If you're black, you have just watched America's first black President replaced by a candidate who was backed by racists in America (no, not all Trump supporters are racist). You've seen a man who talked about building a wall to stop immigration from Central America; who polarised religious divides and defined a dream which captured the imaginations of millions of white men, elected to govern your nation. You've watched as the Black Lives Matter movement has arisen and somehow been forcibly contested. As a white person, I simply cannot understand how that feels (the same is absolutely true for women, who've just seen an alleged sex offender rewarded with the Presidency, but that's another point entirely).

So of course the black community is still in mourning. Of course the millions of legal immigrants in the USA who help to make up its rich diversity are still devastated, and desperately fearful about what the future holds. White people simply cannot ignore this; we can't just make grand and sweeping statements about how love and hope conquer all, even if we feel like our religious beliefs give us licence to do so. We have to remember what this moment means for non-white people who've just spent the last year asking the same "he couldn't, could he?" questions with a much greater investment of fear.

It is right to concede that Trump won a democratic election. It is also right to aim, long-term for an America, and an implicated Western World which is truly reconciled to itself; where the trajectory of equality and justice is re-established. We must not however mistake concession for reconciliation. If those of us who are white do that, we risk simply embracing the dysfunction of our race; jumping on to the lifeboat of our historic privilege when the progressive approach didn't work out.

All Christians must hold on at this time to Paul's famous words in Galatians 3:28, that "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus". We're all in this together, and the desperate concerns of the black community (and those felt by women) must, must also become the genuine concerns of whites  not least in the church. We have to look beyond our own experience and skin colour; past what this means for me (answer: it probably doesn't look so bad after all), and remain utterly committed to equal rights and treatment for all people. For the non-white communities, this doesn't currently look like the projected picture under a President Trump.

So while our Bible calls us clearly to glorious, unflinching hope, even in the darkest moments, let's not choose some cheap version of it which allows us to begin conveniently ignoring the desolation of others. Instead, it's time to "mourn with those who mourn," (Romans 12:15), for people of all colours and races to jointly recognise the potential challenges of a Trump presidency, and face them down together. Let's build bridges, both within the church and outside it, rather than retreating to all-too-literal ivory towers. Just imagine if this election birthed a new level of urgent racial unity, exactly at the moment when greater disunity was most likely. That would truly be an act of prophetic defiance, one that's within the church's power to inspire. Right now every church, and every Christian must ask: how can I make the divisions in my society smaller, even as they threaten to open wide?

Martin Saunders is a Contributing Editor for Christian Today and the Deputy CEO of Youthscape. Follow him on Twitter@martinsaunders.
Christian And Muslim Leaders Condemn Use Of Holy Books To Justify Terror

Christians and Muslims have joined in condemning the abuse of the Koran and the Bible to "justify and facilitate acts of hatred hatred, discrimination, exclusion, violence and terrorism toward others."

Anglican and Catholic bishops together with Sunni and Shia Muslims also condemned the abduction and "forced conversion" of young girls by older men.

In addition, they attacked the "manipulation of blasphemy laws to excuse criminal behaviour."

The religious leaders from the Anglican and Catholic traditions and Shia and Sunni scholars issued their strongly-worded statement, hosted by the Anglican Communion, during the fourth session of the Christian-Muslim summit in Tehran, Iran.

They noted that women, children, religious and ethnic minorities are the first targets of "erroneous interpretation of the texts" which can lead to various forms of "hatred, humiliation or persecution".

People should not be persecuted because they have a different religion from the majority or the state religion, they said.

"The concepts of believer/nonbeliever (Mumin/Kafir), should not affect citizens' rights and social relationships, but practical behaviour in the context of those who want peace and those who want war and violence should be given priority," the statement said. "Life is God's greatest gift to humanity, and no one has a right to take this life."

Such behaviour offends God, discredits religions, their leaders and all believers, they said.

They criticised "aggressive tendencies" and criminal acts against nations, groups, and individuals.

Religous leaders should avoid calling people of other faiths "non-believers", they added.

People of no faith at all should also be treated with "respect" and not denied of rights or dignity.

And religious leaders must also learn to reflect on and be critical where necessary of their own religious texts. "The willingness to be self-critical can constitute a significant way to counteract fanaticism," says the Summit statement.

No person of faith should fall prey to the temptaton to boast or claim superiority for their religion because this can lead to an attitude of exclusion and rejection.

Religious leaders should also live and behave according to their teachings of their religion.

"Religion should not be compromised by political or economic gain or the desire to amass power or other self-interest," the statement says.

The religious leaders also pledged to work together to counter "phobia" of any religion and persecution. They will cooperate to "prevent insults, defacement, or destruction of religious symbols, art, buildings, and texts."

The four Christian-Muslim Summits that have been held between 2010 and 2016 will now be developed into a "network" of dialogue around the world.

The signatories are Ayatollah Professor Sayyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, director of Islamic studies at Iran Academy of Sciences, Shaikh Dr Mahdi Al-Sumaidaei, Grand Mufti of Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Episcopal Bishop of Washington John Bryson Chane and Cardinal John Onaiyekan, Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria.
Christian Ashers Bakery Looks To Supreme Court Over 'Gay Cake' Case

The Christian bakery at the heart of the "gay cake" case wants to take their case to the UK's highest court.

Ashers Baking Co. were found to have discriminated against an LGBT customer by refusing to bake a cake with the slogan "support gay marriage". The initial ruling by a County Court was upheld by Northern Ireland's Court of Appeal in October but now the family-run company want to take their case to the Supreme Court in the London.

The legal team behind the Christian family believe the route to the UK's top court may be blocked but have written to Northern Ireland's judges for clarification.

If that option is not available, the family will consider taking the issue to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

Simon Calvert, spokesman for the Christian Institute who are supporting Ashers, said: "Under the complex rules regarding appeals in civil cases, such as the Ashers case, the Court of Appeal decision seems to be final, according to the terms of the Judicature Act 1978."

But because of "wider public importance" and "complexity of these issues", the lawyers asked the Court of Appeal "to consider giving a short ruling on the question of whether appeal to the United Kingdom Supreme Court is available".

The appeal comes after judges in Belfast ruled Ashers had discriminated against customer Gareth Lee, an LGBT campaigner, for declining his order based on their Christian beliefs.

Ashers argued their refusal was not due to Lee's sexual orientation but because of the message on the cake - "support gay marriage" - which contradicted their religious beliefs.

But the court found "this was direct discrimination" because they would not have objected to a slogan that supported heterosexual marriage.

Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan added: "The fact that a baker provides a cake for a particular team or portrays witches on a Halloween cake does not indicate any support for either."

After the judgement Michael Wardlow from the Equality Commission of Northern Ireland (ECNI) said the "freedom to express religious or political beliefs have to be balanced with laws to protect the most vulnerable".

He added when "people of faith enter commerce they should decide how they limit what they offer".

Daniel McArthur, general manager of Ashers, said he was "disappointed" with the verdict. "This ruling undermines democratic freedom. It undermines religious freedom. It undermines free speech.

"We had served Mr Lee before and would be happy to serve him again. The judges accepted that we did not know Mr Lee was gay and that was not the reason we declined the order. We have always said it was never about the customer, it was about the message. The court accepted that. But now we are being told we have to promote the message even though it's against our conscience."

The family have not confirmed whether they will take the matter to the ECHR if the Supreme Court is not an option.
Christians From Pakistan Refused Visas To Visit UK Church  Because They Are Too Poor

Two Christians from Pakistan are "shocked and depressed" after being refused visas to visit the United Kingdom because they are "not wealthy enough".

Their visit was to have been paid for by the Church of Scotland.

The Church's Glasgow presbytery sent a delegation last year to a congregation in Hyderabad and wanted to reciprocate by inviting the two Christians back to Glasgow this year.

The Church said: "Immigration officials refused the applicants visas on the basis they could not prove they were wealthy enough to be allowed into the UK."

The visits were intended to be part of the Church's attempts to develop a formal "twinning" link with the Hyderabad diocese.

Rev Graham Blount, clerk of the Glasgow presbytery, said they will not let the set back get in the way of forging links with Pakistan.

"We remain committed to our twinning link with the diocese of Hyderabad, with whom we enjoyed tremendous hospitality when members of our presbytery visited Pakistan last year.

"The Church of Scotland has spoken of its concern for Christians in Pakistan who, like other minority faith groups in that country, face growing threats in practising their religion.

"We are deeply concerned at the refusal of the UK Government to grant visas to two of our invited partners, despite the Church of Scotland guaranteeing their travel arrangements as well as their accommodation and subsistence while they are here, the refusal seems grounded in their personal financial circumstances."

The visa refusal document acknowledged that the Church of Scotland would have paid all costs of the visit, but nevertheless stated that the Pakistani Christians did not satisfy immigration rules.

It stated: "In brief I am not satisfied the bank statement is an accurate reflection of your financial circumstances. Given the above, I am not satisfied you are genuinely seeking entry as a general visitor for a limited period as stated by you not exceeding six months.

"Unless financial circumstances change future applications are likely to be refused. The refusal is not subject to appeal or administrative review."

Blount said: "The two individuals are very depressed and shocked at the way the applications have been handled. We have now rearranged the visit for a third time to take place next February, when we expect the two remaining members of the delegation who have dual nationality will finally be able to visit our city.

"We are now writing to the UK Government and local MPs to make our concerns known, and we are encouraging our members and anyone else who shares our concern to do the same.

"We are particularly worried that the UK Borders Agency's stance that this refusal threatens to frustrate not only our twinning link but also other major international events  like the World Council of Churches General Assembly for which a bid is currently being  in the future if only those whose personal finances meet the criteria are likely to be granted visas."

Wilson Choudhry of the British Pakistani Christian Association told Christian Today: "Fewer then 150 Pakistani Christian asylum seekers apply for refugee status in the UK every year. Despite this low risk, Pak-Christians applying to the UK through established churches and Christian groups for ministry work are often declined a UK visa even when organisations and individuals meet all government guidelines. Sadly the same level of scrutiny fails when hate preachers often enter our shores.

"This latest refusal is a poor indictment of the UK Home Office process which clearly is not free of bias. I will be praying for the family and will register concerns with the Home Office and Foreign Affairs Select Committee over the obvious maladministration and request a review of the decision. I hope something can be done to revoke the decision which flies in the face of common sense."

The Church of Scotland's World Mission Council faithshare visitors programme was to have paid for the visit and will still do so when if it goes ahead as planned with the two dual-nationality members next year. Faithshare finances about 150 similar visits each year, often from some of the poorest countries in the world and the poorest communities within these countries, the Church of Scotland said.

A Home Office spokesman said: "It is the responsibility of the applicant to ensure they submit the required evidence to show they meet the financial requirements for the visa category they have applied for. Where this evidence is not provided, applications will be refused."

The immigration rules state that an applicant wishing to enter the UK as a visitor needs to provide evidence that they are a genuine visitor and have a genuine intention to leave the UK at the end of their proposed visit. They must also be able to maintain and accommodate themselves during their visit without working or having recourse to public funds.
Former Christian Believer Jailed in U.K. for Trying to Join ISIS

A former Christian who converted to Islam has been sentenced to imprisonment in the United Kingdom after he attempted to join the terror group Islamic State (ISIS).

Thirty-year-old Gabriel Rasmus, who comes from a Christian family from Chain Walk, Lozells, Birmingham before converting to Islam in 2008, is facing a jail term of four years and three months, after he admitted to preparing for terrorist acts.

He also admitted that he had the "option" of launching a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom if he stayed longer in the country. He told the court if he had to "stay in this country he would commit some terrorist attack here."

"I think I've been portrayed as some crazy jihadi evil guy," Rasmus was quoted by the Premier website as saying.

He also expressed admiration towards the brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who conducted the bloody attack on the offices of French satirical newspaper "Charlie Hebdo" in Paris, which killed 12 people and injured 11 others. Rasmus said the brothers "did a good job."

Rasmus also planned to travel to Syria and "join forces with Islamic State to offer their services together with their lives if need be," prosecutor Karen Robinson said.

According to a separate report from Kent Online, Rasmus purchased several outdoor equipment in preparation for his flight to the Middle East to join the ISIS  including walking boots, a night scope telescope, compass, head torch, a route planner, vitamins and a thermal flask.

"As part of this investigation, extensive surveillance and undercover activity was used. They were unknowingly being monitored by our officers who swooped as they attempted to leave the port," acting chief constable Marcus Beale, counter terrorism lead for West Midlands Police, told Kent Online.

"We will use every lawful technique and power available to us to prevent people from travelling to Syria," he added.

The Christian convert to Islam was arrested with two other men while hiding inside a truck at the Kent port of Dover in April 2015. These are Anas Abdalla, who was sentenced to five years in jail, and Mahamuud Diini, who was found not guilty earlier this year.
'Game of Thrones' season 7 spoilers, news: next season sees new location, one previous character returning

It may still take a while before HBO releases the premiere episode of "Game of Thrones" season 7, but new location news seems to drop hints about the plot of the upcoming season.

A fan reportedly sent a photo of a rumored "Game of Thrones" set taken in the town called Stangarvegur in Iceland's Gjain valley to Watchers on the Wall.

A Possible New Location in Iceland; Another Game of Thrones Actor Returns for Season 7! - https://t.co/9VEBdk4Tum pic.twitter.com/MXdXbhUVGh  Watchers on the Wall (@WatchersOTWall) November 9, 2016

According to the fan, the set can be seen close to a hydroelectric dam which is reportedly under construction. But the fan noticed that only a small part of the dam is currently being constructed. The fan also mentioned that he got the idea that the set is for "Game of Thrones" based on a local shopkeeper staying near the rumored site.

The epic series based on George R.R. Martin's hit book saga "A Song of Ice and Fire" also spent time in Iceland to shoot several important scenes. It took advantage of the area's snow-capped landscapes to film the scenes happening around the vicinity of the Wall.

While the images could not provide any specific details about the possible plot of "Game of Thrones" season 7, it can be speculated that there could be an epic battle waiting to happen outside the Wall.

Other reports also claimed that Samwell Tarly's father Randyll will return in "Game of Thrones" season 7 after actor James Faulkner was spotted near the show's filming locations in Spain. This could mean that Sam (John Bradly-West) could have another face-off with his father, especially since he stole the family sword heirloom called the Heartsbane.

Cinema Blend also noted that filming for the seventh season of "Game of Thrones" had to be put on hold in order to wait for the colder season because winter officially came for Westeros, meaning the environment for the upcoming season should be covered in snow. This explains why HBO had to delay the release of "Game of Thrones" season 7 later than its usual spring debut in 2017.

More spoilers about "Game of Thrones" season 7 are expected to be released in the coming days.
Girls As Young As 11 In War-Torn Syria Forced To Marry In Exchange For Money

Syrian girls as young as 11 are being married off by their families in exchange for money, and children as young as seven recruited to fight in the war that has been raging since 2011, according to Christian persecution charity Open Doors.

A field worker in Syria said: "Very young children are being used in child labour and girls as young as eleven are being married off, sometimes in exchange for rent and other necessities."

"Many children have been directly impacted by the violence, suffering from physical and psychological trauma and being forced to leave their homes," he added.

"Children as young as seven are being recruited into the armed conflict, many suffer from increased levels of physical abuse at home, and young girls are at particular risk of sexual abuse, abduction, and exploitation."

Children in the Syrian province of Homs are now being offered respite in a centre funded by Open Doors and run by a partner organisation in Syria.

Some 320 youngsters aged 3-14 play and participate in activities at the centre, which is described by Open Doors as "a safe space where children can develop and grow and have access to critical psychosocial support".

Many Syrian schools have been closed during the war and Open Doors estimates that in 2015 some 40 schools were attacked by one of the fighting factions. A large number of Syrian children are not attending school because of the security situation.

The 'Child Friendly Space' is located in an area close to Homs that is home to many displaced Syrians, and is open from Thursdays to Sundays. "The activities are designed specifically for each specific age group to promote child development, psychosocial well-being, and coping skills," Open Doors said. "Activities include games, arts and crafts, music, drama, sports, free play, emergency education, and child protection awareness."

The field worker explained that children benefit from a renewed sense of routine. "By providing a safe place to learn and play, the space also reduces children's risk of becoming involved in child labour and early marriage or sexual exploitation, and it significantly improves children's psychosocial well-being as they regain a sense of routine and normalcy, and are able to process difficult experiences," he said.

He added that the play area has made the children feel better. "Playing is essential for their emotional and psychological development. Because of their lack of opportunity to play, children felt isolated and stressed; this even led to an increased violence amongst them. Now they have their own space, they slowly start to feel better. The informal education they receive is essential to them as they can't go to school."

The centre is also benefiting the wider community. "The Child Friendly Space engages members of the community, so it is also strengthening the ties between the church and its surrounding community as they respond together to the needs of children," the field worker said.

Homs remains in government control but has been hit by sporadic violence, as recently as this week, between Syrian forces and ISIS.

Last week, ISIS militants took responsibility for shooting down a Russian warplane over the city.

In late 2015, rebels began evacuating the last district they held in Homs, a city of strategic importance situated roughly halfway between Damascus and Aleppo, and close to Lebanon.

The history of Homs stretches back to the 1st Millennium BC.

Syria is number five on Open Doors' 'World Watch List' which ranks the severity of persecution faced by Christians in countries around the world.
Leonard Cohen Obituary: The Life And Faith Of A Musical Legend

Leonard Cohen, who has died at 82, was one of the most spiritually attuned artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1934, Cohen became a poet and author, to limited success. By the mid 1960s and struggling for recognition, he turned to music  a decision which would bear the fruit of 14 albums, sell out tours and a place in the hearts of music fans across the globe.

His debut album Songs Of Leonard Cohen set the tone for a singular career. His music, which often seemed at first listen to be downbeat and bleak, contained gems of hope strewn throughout. From the outset, Cohen's work contained plentiful religious imagery and the exploration of spiritual themes.

In Suzanne, one of his most celebrated early works, Cohen sang of Jesus: "But he himself was broken long before the sky would open... Forsaken, almost human he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone."

This deeply spiritual dimension to Cohen's music no doubt came from his upbringing in a Jewish home. He said: "The Bible was not forced on me, I received it like honey, and I found all the stories equally beautiful, from the Creation to the Apocalypse."

This foundation never left him, whether he was writing more secular music in the mid 1970s and even while he retreated to a Buddhist monastery in the 1990s. In fact, his later work draws on Jewish and Christian scripture even more than the earlier work does. Cohen said last month: "This is a vocabulary that I grew up with  this biblical landscape is very familiar to me and it's natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them. That's no longer the case today but it's still my landscape, I try to make sure that they're not too obscure."

His deep grounding in the Hebrew Bible as well as the Christian scriptures shone through time and again  not least in arguably his most famous song, Hallelujah. Virtually ignored upon release in 1984, it slowly grew in stature and was covered by everyone from John Cale to X Factor contestants. The most famous version was by Jeff Buckley, whose own untimely death lent it an extra layer of mystique.

The biblical imagery of the first few verses spills over into a more personal section which sees Cohen imagining himself face to face with God. "And even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah..."

Even his late 80s and early 90s experimentation with synthesizers reaped significant spirituality in the words. One of Cohen's most celebrated lyrics comes from Anthem  a track on 1992's The Future. "Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." It's the quote being shared on social media around the world today.

After his hiatus in the 90s, Cohen returned with Ten New Songs and Dear Heather in the early 2000s. Both were decent records, but didn't hit previous heights. It would have been fair to assume that, now in his 70s, Cohen's creative peak was behind him. How wrong that presumption would have been.

His late period in fact produced a trilogy of stunning albums, which explored mortality without being morose  in fact, there was a seam of humour running through them all. The first of these records was 2012's Old Ideas. Cohen's rich baritone was cracking, but that actually added another level of pathos to the music. In Show Me The Place, he conjoured images of Jesus' burial. "Show me the place, help me roll away the stone, show me the place, I can't move this thing alone. Show me the place where the Word became a man, show me the place where the suffering began."

2014's Popular Problems was another triumph. Again, Cohen was exploring death and faith. On Almost Like The Blues he growled: "There is no God in Heaven, and there is no Hell below, So says the great professor, of all there is to know, But I've had the invitation, that a sinner can't refuse, And it's almost like salvation, it's almost like the blues."

Finally, in the weeks before his death, he released You Want It Darker. Further steeped in the Jewish scriptures, it seemed Cohen was ready to die  even if it would be a while. In the end, it was only a matter of days after its release that we learned of his demise. On the title track he sang, "Magnified, sanctified be Thy Holy Name. Vilified, crucified in the human frame." The Christian Today review described the record as, "the best Christian album by a non-Christian I have heard."

Cohen, whose faith has never been orthodox, remained beloved of many Christians. A recent New Yorker profile gave a flavour of his continuing spiritual quest: "To this day, Cohen reads deeply in a multivolume edition of the Zohar, the principal text of Jewish mysticism; the Hebrew Bible; and Buddhist texts.

Yet Cohen never saw himself as any kind of authority. He told an audience in LA last month, "I've never thought of myself as a religious person, I don't have any spiritual strategy... I limp along like so many of us do in these relams, occasionally, I've felt the grace of another presence in my life, but I can't build any kind of spiritual structure on that."

Leonard Cohen leaves behind two children, two grandchildren and 14 albums.

Follow Andy Walton on Twitter @waltonandy
Gold Fields extends operations of its Ghana mine by eight years

Gold Fields, a South African mining company has said it intends to extend the life of its Damang mine in Ghana by eight years, investing $1.4 billion to facilitate this.

When releasing its quarterly output update, the company also said it expects to produce 1,56 million ounces of gold.



Gold Fields signed an agreement with Ghana's government in March, linking royalties payments to the bullion price and lowering the corporate tax rate to 32,5 per cent from 35 per cent.



Damang reinvestment was planned at a gold price of US$1 200 an ounce, so we have some headroom and, importantly, the breakeven price at Damang is US$1 050 an ounce, so we have a US$200 ounce cushion before the project starts becoming uneconomic, chief executive Nick Holland said.



Gold was trading at around US$1 265 per ounce when the company released the results.



Since 1997, the Damang mine has produced more than 4 million ounces from multiple open pits, but production has declined since 2013 as ore grades have been lower than expected.



The firm started a strategic review of the mine last year and mulled mothballing or even closing it, but ultimately decided to invest to deepen the main pit to get access to the full ore body.



Gold Fields also retains the option of expanding the operation at Damang, should the gold price strengthen sustainably to above US$1 400 per ounce, it said in a statement.



The company yesterday reported its total gold production in the three months to 30 September was 537 000 ounces, 4% lower than in the corresponding period a year earlier.



Gold Fields maintained its guidance for attributable equivalent gold production for 2016 at between 2,10 million and 2,15 million ounces.
Genres : Opera

Plot Synopsis

El Publico is Lorcas most difficult and mysterious play, one of the great classics of modern Spanish theatre. Lorca wrote it in Cuba, just after his trip to New York, at a time of intense experimentation in art and life. Homosexuality is addressed openly in El Publico, and the play is a cry of defiance against bourgeois hypocrisy and a plea for sexual and artistic freedom. It has been transformed into an opera thanks to Gerard Mortier. He commissioned the composer Mauricio Sotelo to create an opera for the Spanish repertoire of the 21st century. This production from Teatro Real de Madrid is the world premiere recording of El Publico as an opera. Pablo-Heras Casado conducts the Klangforum Wien and the Chorus of the Teatro Real.
'My Abu Sayyaf Kidnappers Have Come to Know Jesus as Their Saviour,' Says U.S. Missionary Gracia Burnham

"God writes really good stories."

The remark came from Gracia Burnham, an American missionary who, together with her husband Martin and 18 others, endured horrific condition at the hands of the notorious Abu Sayyaf jihadist terrorist group in the Philippines who kidnapped them in 2001 and held them captive for a year in the jungle of Mindanao island. They were eventually rescued by the Philippine military in June 2002. However, the rescue attempt resulted in the killing of her husband Martin.

Speaking to Mission Network News (MNN), Burnham said there have been miraculous developments since she regained her freedom from the Abu Sayyaf 14 years ago.

"God writes really good stories. All of that could be happening in the Philippines and I wouldn't even know about it, but the Lord let me even be in on some of it, and I'm just very grateful to Him," she said.

Visiting the Philippines recently, she said she learned that some of the Abu Sayyaf militants who held them captive are still locked up in a maximum security prison in Manila.

A missionary couple who work in the prison then told Burnham that four of the Abu Sayyaf prisoners "have come to know Jesus as their Saviour."

For her part, Burnham said her harrowing experience changed her life. "I think if you were to ask my children, they would say a different mother came out of the jungle than I went in," she said.

"I was always a real black-and-white person ... Then all of a sudden the bottom dropped out from me, and I saw myself at my lowest and I saw my sin and my hatred for those guys [our captors], and it was shocking. So when I saw myself for what I really was, then I learned God's grace in a whole new way," she elaborated.

MNN asked her how her life experience has influenced her thoughts on missions.

"I think my philosophy on missions is you just love people and you invite them into your circumstances. You tell them your story and what God did for you  and how God can work in their hearts and lives as well," Burnham said.

She said she has her own prayer for Christians working in dangerous missions abroad.

"I pray they'll have a place to sleep tonight, they'll have a pillow for their head, a blanket so they don't freeze, a cup of hot coffee with sugar in it  something that will bless them, some encouragement from God's Word.... They need the basic things, so my prayers for them are very simple: God, give them what they need today, their daily bread, and give them something to hang onto from you today to encourage their hearts and let them know, 'God is here with me.'"
Priest Says Christians Are The Salt Of Iraq  And Are Praying For God To Have Mercy On ISIS

An Iraqi priest has described Christians as the "salt" which his country needs.

Father Martin, who has family in America but has decided to remain in Iraq, spoke to CBN news. He said, "like a salt give a taste for the food... we can give a taste for this country." He's a Chaldean Catholic priest  one of the ancient denominations of the country.

Since the US-led invasion in 2003, the number of Christians in Iraq has plummeted. That situation has only worsened as believers have found themselves targeted by Islamic State, and caught in battles between the warring militia factions fighting for control.

"We're called to don't escape from the problem  to face the problem and solve it if it will take a long time," Father Martin said. "That's my principle and that's what Jesus told us. He changed the whole world from  from Jerusalem. So we can here make a change from Iraq to the whole world."

Father Martin also pointed out that Iraqi Christians are following Jesus' words and praying for those who've persecuted them. '"They are  every time they are praying  every time. They are also praying for ISIS to  to God have mercy on them, to make them a good people. They are praying for their  for their enemies."
The Temple In Jerusalem: What Does It Teach Us About Jesus?

With so much of this week's news coverage being based on the White House, we've seen endless footage of the famous old building itself. When the TV pictures show an aerial shot of the building, I'm always taken aback by quite how small it is. Various grand executive buildings around the world would dwarf the relatively humble home of the President  who remains the world's most powerful person.

The stature of the building, then, doesn't match its importance. Which got me thinking about the most important building in Jesus' day. Unlike today, it wasn't the home of the Roman governor or the local King (Herod). Instead, it was the Temple.

The Temple in Jerusalem was a focus of political power, as well as commerce, civic life, and of course worship. It was the centre of life for first century Jews in a way that we can hardly understand because there is no contemporary equivalent. In fact, the importance of the Temple is illustrated by the number of Jews who still pray to this day at the Western Wall  the only remaining section of the Second Temple.

The First Temple had been built by the great King Solomon and then destroyed by the Babylonians. The Second Temple was built in the 6th Century BC and then redeveloped under Herod. This was the Temple that formed the backdrop to many of Jesus' most radical acts.

He "cleansed the temple" by clearing out the traders who had turned it into "a den of thieves." As a child he disappeared from his parents' sight and was later found among the teachers in the Temple courts  "Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers." (Luke 2:47)

Then, in Luke 21:5-19, we read of Jesus' prediction about the Temple. "When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, 'As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.'"

His audience would have been incredulous about this prediction. How could the Temple be "thrown down?" It was where the presence of God rested among the people. Though there had been difficult times and the Temple had come close to destruction, it sounded as though Jesus was predicting an imminent existential threat. Though the Romans were harsh occupiers, there had been little sign of what was to come.

Yet within a generation, Jesus' prediction had been shown to be correct. In AD 70, truly catastrophic devastation visited Jerusalem  including the Temple. The whole city was besieged and then sacked. Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore described the scene in his excellent Jerusalem: The Biography. "The inferno rose around the Holy of Holies" he writes, "The cracking of vast stones and wooden beams made a sound like thunder."

Jewish contemporary historian Josephus watched the destruction. "You would have thought the Temple hill was boiling over from its base, being everywhere one mass of flame."

The Temple had been destroyed and would never be rebuilt. With it, the fortunes of Jerusalem waned and wouldn't recover for hundreds of generations.

As well as having predicted its demise, Jesus had also spoken about the Temple in relation to himself. In John 2, he said, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." They replied, 'It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?' But the temple he had spoken of was his body."

In this moment, it is revealed that in the New Covenent, the building itself wasn't going to be the most important thing. Instead, it was the person of Jesus. He was the sacrifice that was being made for our salvation  fulfilling the old system of animal sacrifice which had been an integral part of Temple worship.

Though politics, commerce and civic life are all important, and should be given due care and attention by Christians, they are not the entirety of life. The central role of the Temple in first century Jerusalem isn't just replaced by the role of our church building for 21st century Christians. In fact, Jesus himself takes on that role.
Trump May Soon Be In The White House, But God Is On The Throne

Donald Trump is on the throne! He won the election to become President of the most powerful nation on earth. To some this means that the devil incarnate has ascended and humanity is doomed. To others it's like the return of the Messiah  we have been saved from the evil Hillary and all is well with the world.

But Christians should be looking to a different seat of power: the throne of God in heaven  described in this week's Revelation portion (chapter four). The Christian church was being battered, blamed by the Roman Emperor for every ill of the Empire, riven by heresies within, and the last apostle exiled on the island of Patmos. What was Christ doing? Why was this happening? Didn't God know? Didn't God care? What about all the promises of the New Kingdom and the gates of hell not prevailing? Why not give up? Why not despair?

John is told in his vision by Christ: "Come up here and I will show you what must take place after this." Imagine if amid all the speculation, pontification and crystal ball-gazing about Brexit/ISIS/Trump, the Lord came to us and said: "You don't need to rely on the BBC, CNN or Sky News... I'll tell you what's going to happen." Is that what is occurring here? I think where a lot of people go wrong with Revelation is that they regard it like one of these YouTube videos of world history where the Lord shows us in a few minutes what is happening over hundreds of years. That is to misunderstand what is said. John is showing us eternity to come and how our history fits into that. It is His Story, not ours.

The multicolour throne surrounded by the emerald rainbow is the first image that John is shown. John is kind of interested in thrones  he mentions them 47 times in the book and in almost every chapter. Why? The meaning is very simple. The believers were greatly concerned about Caesar's throne. John is telling them there is a throne over that throne. The God who is in heaven has absolute authority over the whole universe. He does have the whole world in his hands. And that's why the rainbow is so important  because after the Flood it became the symbol of God's covenant. A covenant that will never be broken.

The 24 elders, the lightening and thunder, the lights of the Holy Spirit and the sea of glass are all meant to teach us about the glory and grandeur of God. Remember again this is a picture of what God is  not a literal description of heaven. The "what looked like a throne of glass" is fascinating. In modern times, when we picture glass we think of it as clear. In the 1st century it was normally dark and clear glass was incredibly expensive. This is therefore just another way of setting up the beauty and glory of God to which all the wealth of this world is like a small piece of glitter in a sea of diamonds.

The four living creatures comes from Ezekiel 1:5-21. Their never-ending worship represents the coming of all creation to worship God their creator.

They sing the song of Isaiah 6:3, and the repetition is important. John's readers lived in a world like ours, where evil seemed to be rampant. It appears that goodness is weak and ineffectual. But this is the real vision. God is separate, pure, holy and good  and his goodness ultimately reigns. Goodness is on the throne even though it appears at times as if evil reigns.

So let's stop there. Because that raises an enormous question. Is God sovereign over everything, including the election of Donald Trump? Some want to question that. They regard the election of Donald Trump as an obvious evil (as others would have regarded the election of Hillary Clinton) and therefore conclude that if God is sovereign over this, he could then have prevented it, and indeed could prevent all evil. So the fact that he does not do so means that either he cannot or he is not good. And thus we are back to the age-old problem of evil, which I've written about before.

But the trouble is that those who want to deny the sovereignty of God frequently misunderstand it. It does not mean that God directly intervenes in everything and directly prevents anything bad happening. If he did, it would create a world of robots incapable of evil, but also incapable of love. So does that leave us to the free will argument? God gave the American people free will, he may or may not have known what they would do, but there was nothing he could do about it. They made the choice, rightly or wrongly. If the latter, then the only thing Christians can do is either despair or seek to change it.

Hearing this kind of reasoning would drive John crazy! He is teaching precisely the opposite. God does give us free will. But our will is not on the throne. God is not sitting nervously on the throne wondering whether people are going to make the right choice. He doesn't think: "Oh no, they made the wrong choice, now on to plan B!" There is a higher throne and he is on that throne. He rules over all the thrones of this earth  whether Caesar, Trump, Merkel, May or Putin. That doesn't mean that they bear no responsibility for what they do as his servants, but it does mean that nothing is out of his will. As Augustine argued: "Our God is so great that he can even make good come out of that which is evil". He created all things. But he does not create evil because evil is not a created thing. It is the absence of good that he permits. He is the one who was, and who is and who is to come. How can time-bound, weak creatures such as ourselves dare to make the Creator dependent on his creatures? His will, will be done!

The problem with such a weak view of God, often presented with the best of intentions, (to try and solve a moral conundrum, make God seem nicer and prevent us from reverting into an inactive fatalism), is that it is just no use to the persecuted church, or the despondent believer. It is a kind of theological moralism that tells us to pull up our bootstraps, step up to the mark and do better next time. But God comes to his weak, frightened and powerless people and says: "I am on the throne. I am the good, holy and eternal one". There will come a day when all wrong is put right and all your suffering rewarded.

This doesn't mean that we don't care. It doesn't mean that we don't feel anger or despair. It doesn't mean that we don't experience bad things or that we are to be inactive. Indeed it is the very opposite. But it does mean that in the midst of the pain and the puzzlement, we worship. We remember that God's will, not man's, is the supreme and ultimate power in the universe and that his will will be done. The vision of Revelation four, indeed all the visions of Revelation, are given to us to teach that truth and impress it on our minds and hearts. Maybe the greatest need of the church in the West today is to grasp this central truth of this marvelous book. Our God reigns!

David Robertson is minister of St Peter's Free Church, Dundee and associate director of Solas CPC. Follow him on Twitter @theweeflea.
Vatican's Christmas Display To Highlight Plight Of Refugees

The traditional Christmas Nativity scene that adorns St Peter's Square, Vatican City will this year be dedicated to issues such as the environment, the refugee crisis, and those who are sick.

The display will feature a 25 metre-high spruce tree, and the whole scene will light up for its official inauguration on December 9, Vatican Radio reports.

The announcement came in a communique from the Vatican City's governing office, which explained the various details of the festive display.

As a tribute to the young and unwell, the Christmas tree will feature handmade ornaments with drawings by children currently being treated for cancer and other illnesses in various Italian hospitals. Promoting care of creation, the tree, which was sourced from Trentino in northern Italy, will be replaced by nearly 40 new spruce and larch seedlings in a nearby area.

Meanwhile, the expansive 19-metre wide Nativity scene will host 17 statues dressed in traditional Maltese vesture, and a replica of a traditional "Luzzu" Maltese boat. As well as referring to traditional images of fish and life, the communique said this boat points to the realities of life for migrants and refugees who cross treacherous waters on makeshift boats to Italy.

On December 9, shortly before the tree-lighting ceremony, Pope Francis will receive in audience artist Manwel Grech, who designed the scene, representatives from Trent and Malta and several of the children who made the Christmas tree decorations.

The tree will remain lit up in St Peter's Square through the Christmas season, until the feast of the Lord's Baptism on 8 January 2017.
'We're Keeping Our Spirits High': Indonesian Christians Still Worshiping A Year After Churches Destroyed By Islamic Extremists

Christians are still gathering for worship in Aceh Singkil  an Indonesian province ruled under Sharia law  more than a year after churches there were destroyed by Islamic extremists and police, according to World Watch Monitor (WWM).

The churches  which have still not been rebuilt because of what WWM said was "discrimination against Christians"  were razed in October 2015 following clashes between Muslims and Christians in a separate part of Indonesia.

Some churches were destroyed by extremists and others demolished by police following demands from residents that all unregistered churches be destroyed. Imams have reportedly ordered the torching of churches, and Christians have been targeted by mob violence.

WWM said that of 11 churches demolished last year, the members of six continue to meet in tents, while the rest have joined other churches.

However, many Christians live in fear of violence, according to the organisation. "The perpetrators live in the neighbourhood and they always watch my church members' activities," said one local Christian whose church is experiencing rapid growth.

Another local church member added: "I'm sad that we have to worship in tents in the middle of a palm-oil plantation. But we're keeping our spirits high."

Members of the churches fear that the authorities  who allow them to meet in the temporary structures  are reluctant to grant them planning permission because it would not be popular with Aceh's mainly Muslim voters in the run-up to local elections in February 2017.

WWM said that all local churches that were not destroyed must become licensed using a slow registration process that churches fear will not be prioritised during election campaigning.

A law was implemented in Indonesia about a decade ago, supposedly with the aim of promoting religious harmony. However, in practice it requires non-Muslims to obtain 60 signatures from people of a different faith as well as permission from the local authority before they can build a place of worship.

One local Christian activist told World Watch Monitor that it is already too late to expect building permits to be issued by the authorities now that candidates have started registering for the election. The activist's church was burned down last year and services are now held in tents in the nearby woods. "Even this also requires a permit, denied by the government to many hundreds more on security grounds," WWM said.

Berutu, a member of Pakpak Dairi Christian Church in the village of Pertabas, said: "The government is afraid of pressures from Muslim clerics and extremists. When they gave instructions to knock down our church, they were no longer our protectors."
What Are the 5 Things that Pastors Need to Stop Doing?

It's not an easy feat to serve as an evangelical leader since such a leader is regarded as spiritual "game changer" who has answered a calling to bring people closer to God.

This was pointed out by Pastor Shane Idleman of Westside Christian Fellowship even as he noticed that America's churches have drifted off course and lost their compass of truth.

Nowadays, spiritual leaders care more about wine tasting and craft beers than truly seeking the heart of God, he said.

"Pastors, and Christian leaders alike, must take responsibility for the spiritual health of today's church, and the nation. We don't need more marketing plans, demographic studies, or giving campaigns; we need men filled with the Spirit of God," he stressed.

Idleman shared with The Christian Post five things that pastors must stop doing in other to navigate back to their right track.

The first thing Idleman noted is for pastors to stop watering down the gospel. "The truth is often watered-down in the hope of not offending members and building a large audience," he observed. "Judgment is never mentioned and repentance is rarely sought. We want to build a church rather than break a heart; be politically correct rather than biblically correct; coddle and comfort rather than stir and convict."

The second thing Idleman shared is to stop focusing only on encouragement. Sure, everybody needs encouragement, but Idleman said most people feel weighed down because they are not hearing enough about repentance. In order for pastors to truly help people, they must preach an equal dose of "difficult truths" and joyful ones.

Next, Idleman said pastors must stop getting their message from pop-psychology or the latest fad. "All of us must return to the prayer closet where brokenness, humility, and full surrender take place," he said. "God prepares the messenger before we prepare the message."

Fourth, Idleman said pastors must stop trying to be like the world. It's simply not possible for a pastor to fill his mind with worldly things and still be able to let the Spirit of God speak boldly through him. He suggested that pastors "unplug the TV, turn off Facebook, and get back into the Word, prayer, and worship."

Lastly, Idleman wants pastors to stop second-guessing their topics if it will offend their audience or not. Instead of caring more about audience perception, Idleman said pastors must bravely ask, "Will my silence offend God?"
10 things to know about Alexander Calder

An introduction to the American great who made drawings in space and changed our world with his invention of the mobile

1

The term drawing in space was first used to describe Calders wire sculpture It is commonly believed that artist Julio Gonzalez coined the term drawing in space in 1932, when he wrote about Pablo Picassos iron sculptures of 1928, which Picasso had adapted from some of his earlier line drawings. Yet in 1929 in one of his first solo exhibitions, held at Galerie Billiet-Pierre Vorms in Paris, Alexander Calder had shown a number of his wire sculptures, which he had begun making in 1926. These were lighter and more ethereal than Picassos constructions, and in the French newspaper Paris-Midi an art critic referred to Calders objects as drawings in space. Paul Fierens, writing in the newspaper Journal des Debats, repeated the term shortly afterwards, again in reference to Calders wire sculpture.

2

He invented the mobile The idea of a mobile is now so ingrained in the collective imagination that it is difficult to believe there was a time when it did not exist. But before Calder, it didnt. In 1930, his sculpture evolved from the more figurative into the purely abstract. Intrigued by these newest works, he had the idea of setting them in motion. In 1931, his first mobile was born  an abstract tabletop sculpture whose movement was driven by a motor. Marcel Duchamp christened it a mobile, which means both motion and motive in French. Shortly afterwards Calder developed the mobile as we understand it today: an object that moves on its own, propelled by air currents.

Open a larger version of this image Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Cantilever, 1973. Standing mobilesheet metal, wire and paint. 34 x 60 x 11 in (86.3 x 152.4 x 28.4 cm). Estimate: $1,800,000-$2,500,000. Offered in Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale on 18 November at Christies New York

3

Duchamp wasnt the only artist to name Calders objects After he heard that Duchamp had dubbed Calders moving objects mobiles, their mutual friend, the abstract artist Jean Arp, sardonically asked Calder, Well, what were those things you did last year  stabiles? The question, which he asked in reference to the earlier, stationary abstract works that preceded the mobiles, amused Calder, who always enjoyed puns and other plays on words. The name stuck.

4

In 1943 he was the youngest artist ever to receive a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York In 1929 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was the first of its kind in the United States, and by the 1940s had become one of the countrys most esteemed institutions dedicated to the visual arts. In September 1943, when Calder was just 45 years old, MoMA presented Alexander Calder: Sculptures and Constructions, a career survey of the artists work which made him the youngest artist at that point to have been given a retrospective. The show, curated by Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney, proved so popular with audiences that it was extended into 1944, nearly two months after the original scheduled closing date.

Open a larger version of this image Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Uprooted Whip, 1940. Stabilesheet metal and paint. 73 x 39 x 32 in (185.4 x 99.1 x 81.3 cm). Estimate: $3,000,000-$5,000,000. Offered in 20th Century Evening Sale on 17 November at Christies New York

5

His public sculpture La Grande Vitesse was the first ever to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts In an effort to bring art to a wider population in an accessible way, the N.E.A. began its Art in Public Places programme in the late 1960s. It offered grants to American cities that provided funding for the realisation of public art works. In 1969 the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, formally dedicated Calders monumental stabile La Grande Vitesse, the first public work ever to be subsidised in this manner.

6

His true birthdate is a mystery Calder was born in Lawnton, a suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on 22 August 1898  or so he and his family believed. When he was 44 years old, he wrote to Philadelphia City Hall requesting a copy of his birth certificate and was surprised to learn that his birthdate had been recorded in the annals as 22 July 1898. He appealed to the municipality once again, only to receive the same answer. His mother, father and sister, however, remained adamant that Calders August birthdate was the correct one.

Open a larger version of this image Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Untitled, 1954. Standing mobilesheet metal, brass, wire and paint. 4 x 4 x 1 in (10.8 x 11.4 x 4.4 cm). Estimate: $200,000$300,000. Offered in Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale on 18 November at Christies in New York

7

He came from a long line of artists

Calder was from a proud lineage of painters and sculptors. His grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, was a classical sculptor who was responsible for the famous William Penn statue atop Philadelphia City Hall. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, created the Swann Memorial Fountain, also in Philadelphia, as well as the relief sculpture George Washington at Peace on the Washington Square Arch in Washington Square Park, New York. Calders mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a feisty painter who paid her own way through art classes against her familys will, before meeting and marrying Stirling Calder.

8

He abandoned the idea of becoming a mechanical engineer

From a young age Calder showed a proclivity for art, even making two small sculptures, Dog and Duck, from brass sheeting as gifts to his parents in 1909 at the age of 11. The family, who moved frequently throughout Calders childhood, always provided him a workshop of his own wherever they were living. Although his becoming an artist might have seemed preordained, as Calder approached high-school graduation his parents discouraged him from an artistic career. They knew what the struggles of an artists life entailed, and wished for their son greater comfort and security. Without much forethought, Calder enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology, graduating in 1919 with a degree in mechanical engineering. But after several years toiling in a slew of jobs nominally related to his major, he returned to his calling. With the exception of the monumental works of his later years, Calder never again relied on his technical training. All of his sculpture was made through intuitive processes.

Open a larger version of this image Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Untitled, 1959. Sheet metal and paint. 12 x 17 x 16 in (32.2 x 43.1 x 40.6 cm). Estimate: $150,000$200,000. Offered in Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale on 18 November at Christies in New York

9

He was politically aware During the Second World War Calder worked on behalf of artist friends trapped in Europe, writing letters to the U.S. government in order that they might secure entry into America. He also spent time with returning injured and traumatised soldiers, holding art-making workshops at military hospitals. Later on, Calder and his wife Louisa were vehement protestors against the Vietnam War, attending marches and even taking out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on 2 January 1966. Reason is not treason, it proclaimed.

10

He never wanted to be associated with any particular group of artists Aside from being briefly associated with the Abstraction-Creation group in 1931, early in his career, Calder preferred to remain an individualist. He distanced himself from the declarations and manifestoes others made, insisting his work should not be boxed in. He once reminded the curator James Thrall Soby not to confuse him with the Surrealistes, the neo-romanticists, the concretionists, the automobilistes, or the garagistes. The tone was amusing, but his message was serious. For an artist whose work defied categorisation, his singularity was most fitting.
Southeast Texas will be full of Veterans Day celebrations this weekend. Towns across the region will pay their respects to men and women who served in the U.S. Armed Forces by hosting ceremonies and festivals dressed in red white and blue.

For an evening outing, you can catch Buddy at Lutcher Theater in "Elf the Musical," or Beaumont Ballet Theatre's, "Fall Premier" at the Jefferson Theatre.
Hi Kid,

On Election Night, you went to bed crying, and this time, I couldn't fix it. Like half the country, you thought you would be going to bed with your candidate as the president-elect. I wiped away a big, globby tear from the end of your nose, proud of you for caring so deeply about your country. I said it was going to be OK. I explained that, "politics goes back and forth, and this year it just wasn't our turn. Remember when I was for Obama and you were for Hillary, and she lost the primary, but you ended up liking Obama?" Your thirteen year-old defiance broke through your tears, as you declared, "No, this is different!"

You then spouted off a litany of things I didn't know you thought much about:

"It's different because Donald Trump doesn't have the basic morals of everything our country stands for. He doesn't even have the morals of a normal Republican. It's not that the other side won. It's that the person who won is literally against half of the people in the country. He doesn't like Muslims, Mexicans, anyone who is LGBT, he definitely doesn't like women, or people of color. He doesn't like ME. It seems like he only likes people like himself  white males. How can he be our president?"

He's our president because people voted for him and he won the election. I will be raising you under a Donald Trump presidency until you go to college in four years. But you're right, it is different. I admit I don't know how to talk to you about racism and sexism sometimes, because we haven't had to face it too much so far.

For most of your life, your president was an exemplary family man who treated his wife and daughters with love and respect and never talked about women in degrading ways. For the past eight years, your president had the same skin color as you, and he was raised by a single mom, just like you. His mother was white, and his father was black, just like you. Your skin color is a ridiculous things to even mention, except in our country, it matters.

As your mom, I find it so hard to teach you that something doesn't matter but at the same time matters so much. How do I tell you that Black Lives Matter when you can see on YouTube that they don't seem to? You will be driving in two years. I will need to teach you how to be arrested without getting hurt or even killed. As a white person, how do I tell you what to do when you are treated differently because of how you look? My parents never had to teach me that. I only have until you're eighteen to get this right  when you're old enough to cast your own vote.

It's important to me that you know without a doubt that voting is not the only voice we have in our democracy. You asked about joining debate team at school the other day  I say go for it. You should know how to defend the ideas you feel strongly about. It's also important to learn how to challenge the opinions of others with intelligence, calm, and respect. I know this is not what you see on TV these days.

Racist and sexist people may now feel empowered to express themselves more often and more angrily, now that they have a president they feel represents the same ideas. Racist and sexist things may happen in your life more often. You will hear things on the news, at school, and see things online that I can't shield you from. I have felt the hate from Trump supporters because of who I voted for. It scares me that so many of them will judge you because you are black, or think less of you because you are a woman.

You were three years old the first time you experienced racism, when I picked you up from preschool and you told me a girl said you were the wrong color. You wanted to know what the right color was. I awkwardly tried to explain a horrible truth to your sweet, innocent self, that some people hate others because of what color their skin is. I told you that there is no right or wrong color, but I didn't tell you that in America, that isn't really true. I was so upset driving home I could barely see. I spoke to your school after that incident. I didn't know what else to do.

I read to you a lot, and you loved to read. As you grew up, sometimes teachers and other parents would say how well-spoken and well-mannered you were, or how well you read. But there were times that it was not a compliment, but an expression of shock. They did not expect that from a black girl. I didn't say anything in those instances and I regret it. I didn't know how to confront that kind of racism. But we both need to learn.

I won't always be there when something happens, but I promise to protect you and stand up for you, no matter what, as best I can. I promise to listen when you tell me that you didn't get the apartment, the date, or the chance, because you are black, or that you didn't get the job, the promotion, or the salary, because you are a woman. I promise I will comfort you, but I also promise to teach you how to confront and change injustices effectively  we will be learning as we go along, you and I.

I am sorry the world is like this. I couldn't change the result of the election, or fix the country with my vote. But I can control how I live my life. I will write, share my story and experiences, to help others understand the things I have learned and seen: that being homeless doesn't make you bad; being poor doesn't make you lazy; being black doesn't make you violent; having mental illness doesn't make you an outcast; being sexually assaulted doesn't mean you did anything wrong. We are people. Sometimes we are in crisis or pain, alone and lost, sometimes we need help, but we are all capable of coming through even the most hopeless of circumstances. I know because I did.

I've always been honest with you about my past, my mistakes and challenges, and some people think it is inappropriate. They think that I should hide it from you and be ashamed. I won't. It is one thing I am sure I did right so far as your mom. What I hear most often about you from teachers, parents, and friends  going back to kindergarten  is that you have so much empathy for others, that you will stand up to a bully, or befriend the new kid. That means you can put yourself in someone else's shoes, that you can see another side to things, that you can look at someone different from you with love in your heart. I am touched every time I witness it in you. I saw this when our Chicago Cubs won the World Series. I was so touched at your expression of empathy for the Cleveland Indians team and fans, because of how it must have felt to lose after coming so far. You made me so proud to be your mom.

Having empathy is empowering, because it means you can vote with your life, every day. It is what I love about the Democratic Party. That is why I have been honest with you about who I am all your life  because I wanted to show you that people can change, no matter who you are, that your life can change, no matter how bad it seems. Hiding reality from you would not prepare you for life, and your empathy tells me it was the right choice. It has broadened the vocabulary of your heart, to know the truth.

You know that homeless people are struggling people, not bad, because I told you about the time I was homeless. When you see a homeless person begging, you always ask if we can help. Sometimes we can't. You know that many homeless people have mental health conditions, because we talked about it when I told you I had depression, and what it was. You know I speak very openly about mental health to encourage those that are suffering to ask for help, because I suffered so needlessly for decades, not seeking treatment, because I was ashamed. You have seen me help others by speaking and writing about it.

You know I am a recovering alcoholic and addict, because you have seen me go to meetings all your life. You have seen me work for prison reform. You understand that I do it to help people like me get help instead of given jail time. Now, you even know that I was sexually assaulted, because you asked how I got pregnant with you. That was a tough conversation, but we got through it, didn't we? It is not something to be ashamed of  ever  for either of us. I was amazed that you were able to see it from another perspective, too. You said that if that happened to you, you don't think you would make the same choice I did.

You have an absolute right to make that choice, and always will, even if the law in our country changes, because of who Donald Trump will appoint to the Supreme Court. I will always work like hell to make sure you have that choice, because I know that no one can make that decision for you  and never should. It was so hard I almost didn't survive it, and I only did because I had extraordinary support from family, and from the very government programs Republicans want so badly to cut. Standing up for these things are ways to vote with my life, with my passion, with my work, with what I do for others, what I stand up for, stand up to, and why. I have found that this is the most important way to make a difference, because there are problems, there are things to worry about, there is work to do.

So, when I said there was nothing to worry about, that's not really how I felt. I didn't tell you that I felt like Donald Trump and his supporters just came along and kicked over the sand castle that Obama and people like me had spent eight years building. I didn't tell you I felt upset, scared, hopeless, deflated, and unsure, or that I was afraid of what Donald Trump has brought into our homes and our lives that could hurt us. I didn't tell you I'm not sure I can protect us both from everything. I didn't want you to feel unsafe. I didn't want that happy-go-lucky anything-is-possible quality about you that I love so much to go away.

I'm writing this to keep telling you the truth, and to tell you that no matter how nervous I might get about things, I never give up, because again and again I have seen my life transform from the worst possible circumstances to ones beyond my greatest dreams. Sometimes the most terrible of things happens and we suffer. But I have found so many times, that out of these dark times, so often for me comes something amazing  better than I'd ever dreamed. Sometimes I have to wait for it, and I always have to work for it. But when I look back, I find myself being grateful for times when it all seemed so hopeless, because that's when I found my passion, my purpose, and gave it my all.

Still, I must remind you that things do not always go our way. My job is to teach you to win with honor and grace, which is not what we are seeing from Trump voters right now, and how to lose with dignity and character. I remember when you helped me fill out my mail-in ballot a few weeks ago, looking up all the candidates and propositions together. It was the first time we really talked about politics like that, and we both felt very strongly about many things. We get one vote  an equal say. We have a voice that contributes to the whole  the whole city, state, and country. But if more people decide they feel differently than we do, we go along with it. If we can't go along with it, we need to help people understand why. There are other ways to be heard, to contribute, to change things.

Before you went to bed on Election Night, I told you one person can't change the entire country so easily. Apparently, you're getting a good civics education, because you rolled your thirteen year old eyes at me and said, "Mom, the House and Senate are red, too. Duh." Impossibility and diversity. Defeat and despair. That's where change comes from, that's where seeds of greatness are born  you see it in your history class.

That's why you are doing a project on Rosa Parks and not on the people who told her to move or called her names. She stood up against something that was wrong even though almost everyone else was saying it was right. It was probably the worst day of her life at the time, and look what came of it  her legacy, her greatness, and all that it did to help so many after her. It's the same reason why we celebrated the Suffragettes this week, who fought so hard for a woman's right to vote. History is not kind to those who try to block progress. Their names are not celebrated and rarely remembered.

You want to be a surgeon someday. I hope that you not only realize your dream, but accomplish things you haven't thought of yet. My job is to give your life room to pursue your dreams, even during the times we struggle. That is the great promise of our country and it is still true no matter who is president. But it is also my job to teach you that we are not just what we do for a living, that our greatness is not measured by how much money we have. You are magnificent and worthy just as you are, no matter what anyone else says or calls you. Character is defined by how you treat others  especially those who are different from you, who you disagree with, or who hate you. We do not yell at them, or call them names. I want the experience of having Donald Trump as your president to make you a better person, not angry, resentful, or mean. Those are the things you don't like about him, remember?

I promise to work to keep you safe, to keep you whole. You will see so many others, including Hillary Clinton, and others who lost, doing the same. You will see that people like us, we rise from defeat, we are nourished and inspired by it. We transform it into a unifying power. We always have. Now grab my hand. Let's go.

Love,

Mom

Maureen Herman, author and musician, is currently writing her first book, It's a Memoir, Motherfucker on Macmillan's Flatiron Books imprint, due in 2017. She was the bassist of Babes in Toyland from 1992 until 1996 and from 2014-August 2015. She lives in Los Angeles with her amazing daughter. She's also known to be activist-y.
Live birds in stadiums or warehouses are pretty common sights, but how about a live deer in a store?

Shoppers in Stillwater, Oklahoma got the surprise of a lifetime when a deer somehow managed to break into an American Eagle store.
An Alabama man is facing animal cruelty charges after Dothan police reportedly saw him setting a rare tortoise on fire on Facebook.

James Allen, 19, is accused of pouring alcohol on a gopher tortoise and lighting it on fire. Allen reportedly said, "give me 100 views and I'll light it." Police said Allen upped his threat and said, "give me 200 views or this (expletive) is gonna die."
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

A few weeks back Chron.com celebrated Chicken-Fried Steak Day, that most Texan of foodie holidays, by listing the best places to get the belly-busting dish in the Houston area.

One of the most popular places on the list and among Facebook commenters was Houston institution Hickory Hollow, which has two locations  one off Washington Avenue (101 Heights) and another off of Fallbrook (8038 Fallbrook)  for your Texas comfort food needs.

HOUSPEAK: Things all Houstonians have said at one time or another

Now Playing: In this new episode of Bring The Heat, executive chef David Walzog teaches us how he cooks his delicious and famous 40oz double cut ribeye steak. Video: Esquire

I bought the original Hickory Hollow from a family in 1979. They had opened it on a lark , owner Tony Riedel said one morning while getting prep work done for the Heights location.

That couple  a nuclear physicist and his nurse wife  had opened the Fallbrook location in 1977. By the time Ohio-born, Florida-bred Riedel came along after stints in the restaurant management industry around the country, they were tired and ready to hand over the reins to someone else.

BEST IN TEXAS: Where to get delicious chicken-fried steak around Texas

With the original Hickory Hollow came that famous chicken-fried steak and gravy recipe, which keeps bringing customers around all these years later. According to Reidel the dish we all know and love was a copy of one served at the long-running Goodsons Cafe.

Hes tweaked it here and there since the early 1980s. The Texas River Bottom Gravy still comes from a chicken-based roux made each morning.

OLD SCHOOL FOOD: Vintage menus show what foods Americans used to love

Around August 1987 Riedel opened up the location at the corner of Heights Boulevard and Washington Avenue, then a sleepy, industrial area that came to life during the evenings when the area rock clubs began throbbing with music.

Rockefellers, just across Heights, brought touring acts and their handlers into Hickory Hollow for pre-show dinners or carry-out. Riedel said that the likes of B.B. King, Joe Ely, an early incarnation of the Dixie Chicks, Bo Diddley, Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris all visited at one point in time. Some of their photos are on the wall of Hickory Hollow for all to see.

If they didnt come in themselves, they would send someone over for food, Riedel said.

Somewhere along the line they started hosting live music in the back corner where picking parties still pop up. Wednesdays are for bluegrass, first Thursdays the ukuleles come out, and Fridays and Saturdays could be western swing or acoustic folk. Check the schedule to get your music and food fix.

HOUSTON MUSTS: Things every 'True' Houstonian has done or should do

People cant get enough of his restaurants chicken-fried steak, but according to Riedel that isn't even the best-selling item on the menu. That would be barbecue.

"When we started serving barbecue alongside chicken-fried steak it was nearly unheard of. It was one or the other. I'd like to think we kicked down that door," Riedel said. "Jim Goode was the only barbecue guy in town."

J.C. Reid

Hes seen more decadent foods like chicken-fried steak trending down with changing health trends. Of course, he said, nothing will ever endanger the Large Rancher, the Medium Hired Hand or the Small Plowman, the three sizes they offer.

HOUSTON CFS TIPS: Readers recommend these Houston places for chicken fried steak

"Most people think chicken-fried steak is unhealthy for some reason," he joked.

There is also a somewhat-secret Wagon Master  two of the Large Ranchers put together  available. That comes with salad and your choice of four sides. Its not meant for one person but hey, its your cholesterol.

A few years back Riedel was featured on an episode of Food Network's "Outrageous Food" showing off the Large Rancher. Riedel is about to burst some bubbles.

"I can't cook a chicken-fried steak really well so I had a stunt double," he laughed. "We had an employee who is much better at it than me wear an identical denim shirt to cheat it out."

REST IN PEACE: Departed businesses in Houston we miss the most

While the Fallbrook location  the one with the helicopter landing area  holds fast on the northwest side, the Heights spot is the busiest Hickory Hollow, due in part to the prime location.

Its grown with the Heights, Riedel said. We survived the sleepy doldrums of the Heights so to speak.

Time was, Riedel told Chron.com, the Heights location was empty at night but slammed during the lunch hour. Now theyre less busy in the afternoons and packed after sundown.

The clientele changed with the neighborhood, Riedel explained. We used to be just a lunch place."

During the day, lawyers, bankers and blue collar workers chowed down next to each other. Now at night its large parties and families sharing baskets of Hot Tots, Hickory Hollows popular deep-fried baked potato puffs.

BABY PICS: Vintage construction pics of Houston's favorite landmarks

Riedel said that as the years have gone by the brand has embraced the quirkier, funkier side of the Heights. A recent revival of the area with Pi Pizza a few blocks north and new management at Rockefeller's bringing back live music has only brought more eyes on Hickory Hollow.

"What we want to create at the Heights location is a sort of funky cowboy hangout, more in line with the neighborhood," Riedel said. "The younger demographic enjoys the art on the walls and the fact that we haven't changed too much over the years."

In other words, they don't fall for foodie trends. In a city that becomes enamored with a new food fad every few months, Riedel's is reliably old-school.

Hickory Hollow in most respects is the same as when Houstonians first had it in the '80s, a rare thing in the Houston area.

Whats the key to Hickory Hollow's success all these years on?

Keep your eye on the guest and not on the money, Riedel said.

Craig Hlavaty is a reporter for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. He's an intolerable native Texan with too much ink in his skin and too much brisket stuck in his teeth. He can eat a whole Large Rancher from Hickory Hollow in one sitting, but he might need to be driven home afterwards.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

This month one of Houstons favorite privately-owned brands, Shipley Do-Nuts, turns 80 years old.

Founded in 1936 by Lawrence Shipley, Sr. and Lillie Shipley, the first doughnuts they created were cut by hand and served hot the whole day. Back then they were only a nickel for a dozen.

Imagine if they were that cheap today. Some of us wouldnt be able to fit into our own cars.

TUNA ON RYE: Learn all about the humble beginnings of Texas' own Jason's Deli

Over time the taste of the Shipley familys sweet creations would create lifelong fans out of many Houstonians who couldnt start a day without a hot cup of coffee and a glazed doughnut.

The company is still based in a building that Shipley and his wife Lillie bought more than 70 years ago off North Main.

Our first shop was not the North Main location like most people think. It was actually in a building where Revival Market is now at 550 Heights Boulevard, says company representative Stacey Michel.

Now Playing: Video Courtesy: Houston Police Department Video: FoxM9NJ

He (Shipley) wasnt doing as well as he thought, so he sold the shop in 1942, name and all. He perfected his recipe and re-opened in 1945 at Michaux and Euclid. The North Main store wasnt opened until 1950, says Michel.

The company began life as Shipley Cream Glazed Do-Nuts. The spelling was Shipleys idea, looking to make his business stand out from the pack. Its now just known as Shipley Do-Nuts, though some people still refer to it as Shipleys out of habit.

HOUSTON BABY PHOTOS: See Houston's booming growth in photos

It makes me laugh anytime I see us called Shipley's on social media and another fan will reply back with the correction, says Michel.

Generations of Houstonians probably have a Shipley story, be it getting a carton of chocolate milk and a bag of Shipley doughnut holes on the way to grade school, or looking forward to doughnut Fridays at the office.

Hint, hint to our Chron.com coworkers.

These days Shipley Do-Nuts has over 300 locations in six states, selling some 60 varieties of doughnuts.

By 2020 the company hopes to open its 400th location.

Craig Hlavaty is a reporter for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. He's an intolerable native Texan with too much ink in his skin and too much brisket stuck in his teeth.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

There's a special operation underway that will transform empty shoeboxes into gifts filled with toys, school supplies, hygiene items, notes of encouragement, and toys.

Volunteers in Houston are opening several sites in the area to serve as drop-off locations for gift-filled shoeboxes. The gifts, which will be delivered around the world by the Samaritan's Purse project Operation Christmas Child, will be gifted to children who are living in poverty, war, disease, or natural disaster.

"My favorite part about Operation Christmas Child is that anybody can participate regardless of age, everyone can pack a shoe box," Sarah Metraus said, Samaritan's Purse media relations coordinator. "Also, another favorite part about the project is that church groups, community groups, and families can all get involved, and it is a really fun thing to do together."

This year the organization has a goal for Houston and surrounding cities residents to contribute more than 13,731 shoebox gifts toward the 2016 global goal of reaching 12 million children.

The local goal for Houston area's she box gifts is over 48,000.

In addition to be collected in the U.S., the shoebox gifts are collected in Australia, Finland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, Spain and the U.K. Also, more than 500,000 volunteers worldwide, which includes 150,000 U.S. volunteers, are involved in collecting, shipping and distributing shoebox gifts.

"I love that Operation Christmas Child connects our children here with children in other areas and it expands our borders. It allows our children to see more than just what right around them," Tabitha Glass said, Houston volunteer leader. "It gives them a tangible way of helping. Participating in Operation Christmas Child is something we can do to help. It is a tangible way to help and one way to actively do something to help a child."

Operation Christmas Child, a project of Samaritan's Purse, an international Christian relief and evangelism organization, has a mission to demonstrate God's love to children in need around the world, while partnering with local churches around the world, all while sharing the goodness of Jesus Christ.

Samaritan's Purse, a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization, has a mission to provide spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. While helping others, members of the large international relief organization serve the church worldwide to promote the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

"Samaritan's Purse is so wonderful about showing those testimonials of kids who have received shoe boxes and you can hear their stories and see lives changed," Glass said. "You have a chance to witness what is being done with your box and what a change this little gift filled box can make."

For more information on how to participate in Operation Christmas Child, call 817-595-2230

For a complete list of drop-off locations, searchable by ZIP code, visit samaritanspurse.org/occ

Samaritan's Purse: www.samaritanspurse.org

Drop-Off Sites

Houston, TX - Epiphany Lutheran Church

14423 West Road

Houston, TX 77041

Houston, TX - Bammel Church of Christ

2700 Cypress Creek Parkway

Houston, TX 77068

Cypress, TX - Cypress Fellowship

16620 Cypress Rose Hill Road

Cypress, TX 77429

Houston, TX - Houston Northwest Church

19911 TX-249

Houston, TX 77070

Cypress, TX - Fairfield Baptist Church

27240 Hwy 290

Cypress, TX 77433

Houston, TX - Windwood Presbyterian Church

10555 Spring Cypress Road

Houston, TX 77070
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Ramen Tatsu-ya, the Austin-based ramen restaurant that is recognized nationally for its delectable bowls of brothy noodles, announced Friday it is expanding into the Houston market.

While there were well-founded rumors floating for months of a Houston branch, the restaurant officially announced it was setting up shop at 1722 California near Westheimer in Montrose. No opening date was given but a vague "slated for this winter" promise.

That's good enough news for Houston ramen fans who are enjoying a definite ramen moment as evidenced by the growing ramen presence in H-town.

Earlier this month the Hawaii-based Agu Ramen announced it would open three casual ramen shops in Houston: the first at 1809 Eldridge Parkway (scheduled to open before Thanksgiving), followed immediately by 9310 Westheimer, and a third at 7340 Washington slated to open Christmas week. Owner Hisahi Uehara said he also has plans for another four stores in the area.

In October, former Tarakaan owner Piran Esfahani announced he was opening Nao Ramen House in Rice Village as a prototype for expanding the Nao brand in multiple locations throughout Houston.

In May Jinya Ramen Bar announced plans for new stores in Sugar Land and Champions Village, adding to its stores in Webster, NASA, and in Midtown Houston.

The arrival of Ramen Tatsu-ya adds to popular ramen options in Houston including Samurai Noodle (Heights and the Conservatory food hall), Tiger Den, Soma Sushi, Ramen Jin, Fat Bao, and Cafe Kubo's to name a few.

Ramen Tatsu-ya also bring something of a rock star vibe to town via its colorful leaders, owner and co-executive chef Tatsu Aikawa and his partner and co-executive chef Takuya "Tako" Matsumoto. The pair, both former hip-hop DJs, opened Ramen Tatsu-ya in Austin in 2012 and immediately drew fans and long lines for its ramen bowls featuring a thick, creamy pork bone broth (tonkotsu) and thin noodles. A second Austin store came later, and so did adulations. Time Out magazine put the restaurant at the top of its list of the 15 Best Ramen Restaurants in America. Bon Appetit magazine including the restaurant in a short list of best ramen in the country, praising its bowl of "Mi-So-Hot" ramen as a fiery, porky spice bomb. The Austin American-Statesman also wrote that Ramen Tatsu-ya is "ground zero for Austin's nascent ramen craze."

The Houston store, which will be the brand's third restaurant, is currently under construction and is designed by McCray & Co., the Austin-based design studio responsible for the look of the two existing restaurants.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

After sacrificing time apart, and training in different cities, Kathryn and John Holler are celebrating the debut of their longtime goal this weekend: opening Holler Brewing Co. to the public at 2206 Edwards.

The couple, who lived abroad in Qatar because of John's job, returned to the States in 2015 with the goal of launching a brewery, the Houston Beer Guide's Cody Lee reports.

That would be an ambitious undertaking.

While the pair was away, the Houston beer scene was expanding at a rapid rate, with microbreweries cropping up from the Heights to the suburbs. The two would have to set themselves apart if they were going to install a new brewhouse in a a city already awash in hops.

More Information Holler Brewing Co. Where: 2206 Edwards St., Ste. A More info: hollerbeer.com, 832-781-0555 See More Collapse

BIG BUZZ: Houston beer fans react to news that Anheuser-BuschInBev will be acquiring Karbach

To that end, John began studying brewing at Chicago-based Siebel Institute of Technology and Kathryn gained on-the-job skills at Two Henrys Brewing Company in Plant City, Fla. The pair reportedly have ties to Florida, however, they told Lee, they wanted to return to Houston because it's "where their adult lives began" and where they learned how to homebrew.

Now, after nearly a year readying the site of the brewery, the pair will open Holler Brewing Co.'s home to the public with a weekend-long celebration.

ON THE ISLAND: Two Houston bartenders helping to transform Galveston's former 'red-light district'

Holler Berwing Co., situated near the Silver Street Studios in the Washington Avenue Arts District, will be open from 4 to 10 p.m. Friday, and from noon to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. To sample brews, guests can pay $5 per token.

Six beers will occupy some of the 19 taps they've already installed in the tap room. Among those is the Dolla Pils Y'all, Looyah Milk Stout and a Belgian IPA  it packs a heavy, 8.2 percent ABV punch.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

A Fort Bend County district court judge has recommended a new trial for a 43-year-old man convicted of capital murder, finding that the prosecutor used false testimony and did not properly disclose deals with witnesses.

In letters dated Wednesday, the defense attorney for the case also requested that the district attorneys of Fort Bend and Harris counties investigate and sanction the prosecutor.

Judge James Shoemake, of the 434th District Court, on Monday filed a court document outlining 139 findings of fact and 25 conclusions of law related to the trial of Edward George McGregor, whom a jury sentenced six years ago to life in prison. Shoemake recommended to the appeals court that he get a new trial.

"I think it was the correct decision by a courageous judge," defense attorney Randy Schaffer said, adding that the evidence in favor of a new trial was "overwhelming."

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will decide whether to grant the new trial.

The judge's findings relate primarily to problems with critical testimony given by three witnesses in the case: Dolores Gable, Marvin Paxton and Adam Osani. Their statements dealt with a crime that occurred 20 years before the trial.

On April 17, 1990, Missouri City police officers arrived to a home to find a bloody pillow on the walkway and the front door ajar, court records show. Inside, a woman named Kim Wildman had suffered multiple stab wounds. She told officers "a black man," whom she didn't know, had attacked her. She later died.

McGregor, who lived on the same street, was not initially the prime suspect. But DNA evidence later connected him to the scene, as well as to the alleged murder of a prostitute he knew in Harris County, Nina Barnum.

Prosecutor Beth Shipley, whose name is now Beth Exley, took the Harris County case. Shipley teamed up with Fort Bend County prosecutor Jeff Strange to try the Wildman case first.

It is Shipley who has now come under the microscope for the extent of her dealings with the three witnesses. Her co-counsel, Strange, and McGregor's defense attorney at the time, Donald Bankston, said they did not know fully - if at all - about any deals that may have been negotiated.

The issues, as outlined in the judge's findings, were detailed as follows:

At the trial in 2010, Gable testified that McGregor confessed to her husband, Brian Gable, after the crime. But Gable's mother testified in later proceedings that her daughter never married that man. Her daughter's name was actually Delores Lee.

Dolores Gable had also said McGregor's lip was cut, and that his father was also present when he made the confession. Hospital records showed McGregor received the lip injury at a different time. His father was in prison when the murder occurred, according to testimony from his mother.

At the trial, Dolores Gable testified she did not receive a benefit for her statements, but wanted to "clear her conscious because she was suffering from cancer." Her mother said she never had cancer. Shipley sent a letter about Gable to the parole board five days after the trial ended.

Paxton and Osani testified that they and McGregor had gotten into a fight in jail, where they said McGregor threatened he would kill Paxton like he'd killed the "two bitches."

Like Gable, Paxton and Osani said they were not promised anything. But an attorney familiar with Paxton's case, Ryan Mitchell, testified that his plea agreement was altered from up to 40 years in prison to seven.

Osani's attorney, who represented him on a felony charge of assault, said Osani's charge was lowered to a misdemeanor after he testified a the grand jury, and he was released days later, the attorney said.

Shipley's involvement was sprinkled throughout. She said she was not required to disclose an intent to reduce Paxton's sentence, if there was one. She said if the jury was told of a witness' pending case, she did not have to disclose plans to tell a prosecutor that the witness cooperated, as was found she did in Osani's case.

In his letter to Fort Bend District Attorney John Healey, Schaffer asked, "[W]ill you prosecute her for aggravated perjury?"

Of the Harris County District Attorney, Devon Anderson, he asked additionally, "[W]ill you continue to employ her?"

Schaffer said prosecutorial misconduct will continue if it goes unpunished.

"I'm tired of seeing this happen over and over and over again," he said. "The process needs to change."

Healey declined to comment.

Schaffer said he expects it could be months before the court of criminal appeals makes a decision in the case.
Historically, American politicians have downplayed their wealth.

Former presidential candidate John McCain tried to re-connect with his supporters after being mocked for not remembering how many homes he owns. Billionaire Ross Perot emphasized his Texarkana, Texas roots, delivering speeches with a heavy Texas drawl and sharing his preferred "folksy" aesthetic. Mike Huckabee spoke of his small-town roots without mentioning the $3 million mansion he bought in his hometown of Hope, Ark.

Donald Trump, however, will tell you that he's "very rich," in fact, that's "the beauty" of him.

WHITE HOUSE, Y'ALL: Texas has its own White House replica, and it's heading to the auction block

And Trump's homes will tell you the exact same thing. They'll even scream it out loud.

A look inside his Palm Beach resort The Mar-a-Lago Club reveals a gaudy, Versailles-inspired interior outfitted with gilded moldings, massive crystal chandeliers and tall marble columns.

His three-story Manhattan penthouse  take a look around in the gallery above  mimics that decor. It's the design motif that's echoed in every home he's shown to the public. And he's welcomed the press inside many of his residences. (Remember, he's "very, very rich.")

That's leading some to wonder, will he convert the neo-classical Federal-style house at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. into a 24-karat-filled palace?

(Story continues below.)

"If I were elected I would probably look at the White House, and maybe touch it up a little bit," Trump told People Magazine in 2015. Although it's not clear what "a little bit" means to a man who plates almost everything with gold.

STATEMENT FASHION: Melania Trump sends message with $4,000 white jumpsuit

To cover the costs of updating the White House's interior, the incoming president and first lady can dip into funds provided by Congress, which typically allocates $100,000 for transition expenses. First families have significant say over renovations made to the living quarters, but they must consult with the Committee for the Preservation of the White House before altering any of the historic guest suites.

The White House Historical Association, an agency that assists first families when they move into the White House, is responsible for state room renovations every decade. This organization also offers some guidelines for restoration.

"The President can decide on changes to furniture, artwork, coverings for walls and floors and more," a spokeswoman for the organization told the Daily News, adding that the president and first lady have "tremendous decorating discretion."

That could mean some "bigly"  or even "big-league"  changes are coming to the Oval Office. Or at least the living spaces.
The eighth annual Houston Cinema Arts Festival celebrated all things Texan beginning with a dance hall-themed kick off celebrating "Honky Tonk Heaven: Legend of the Broken Spoke" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Thursday night.

Red carpet arrivals including Lynn Wyatt, Diane Lokey Farb, Neal Hamil, and more savored Brennan's of Houston's shrimp and grits, turtle soup and a "Galveston Off the Boat" crudo plate complete with the restaurant's famous banana foster.
Seems there are an awful lot of people making unsavory jokes these days.

VIA KRCR News 7:

A Shasta High School student handed out 'deportation' letters to students of different ethnicities, according to Jim Cloney the Shasta High School Unified School District Superintendent.

Cloney noted the student recorded himself handing out letters with with word 'deportation' on it. The video was then posted onto Twitter.

The student was contacted and told administrators it was done as a joke.

The video has since been taken down, Cloney said.

Cloney added the school will not tolerate this behavior. However it was not clear what actions the school has taken, if any, to discipline the student.
Aaron Mendoza served in the Navy and the Air Force Reserves in both WWII and the Korean War, put himself through college while working full-time and sold super computers to NASA in the 1960s.

These days the 92-year-old veteran walks three to five miles per day, is the moderator for the men's club where he brings in speakers for his senior community at Parkway Place near Highway 6 and Briar Forest Drive, is on the board for the woodworkers club, attends Catholic services every week and recently bowled 33 perfect games on the Wii video game system at his community.

When Mendoza talks about his wife who passed seven years ago after 62 years of marriage, his three grown children, his nine grandchildren and the nine great-grandchildren they gave him, the warmth in his voice is palpable.

"My family exploded, I just love them," he said.

Mendoza is one of a reaming few WWII veterans around to tell the tale first-hand of that pivotal time in world history.

According to Veterans Affairs estimates, there are just under one million WWII vets alive of the roughly 16 million who served in the war, and they estimate that around 400 of those vets die every day.

People like Mendoza have a unique perspective to share as attitudes about the military, soldiers and veterans have shifted over the decades.

"Pearl Harbor had a tremendous impact on all my peers. It was unbelievable how the spirit was to get in the service and do our part," he said. "Later on I didn't see that spirit in other conflicts."

He says the military taught him how to be disciplined, to be by himself and to be organized.

He always wanted to be a pilot, and after graduating high school in San Antonio, he first tried to enlist in the Air Force. But in 1943, he said, they really needed men to work on the ships, so he was assigned to the Navy.

He told them he didn't how to swim, they told him he would learn.

After basic training in San Diego, he went to torpedo school where he learned to handle the infamous Mark 14 torpedo.

"We got on the ship, it took eight days from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor. At that time they were zig-zagging a lot, for eight days I saw nothing but water," he said. "We'd go in the Pacific and drop it (torpedoes) off and make sure it ran at a certain depth. We'd shoot it against the island and retrieve it on the boats and bring it back."

The reason for all the testing is because the Mark 14 was notorious for either being a dud and not exploding at all, or as Mendoza recalls, exploding on you.

After WWII ended, Mendoza quickly volunteered for the Air Force Reserves and was stationed at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio for the duration of the Korean conflict, he supported logistics as a Technical Sergeant.

When he got out of the military, he found himself experiencing so many of the same feelings that vets today are expressing.

"It was a very positive part of my life, it was depressing when I came back," he said. "You come back and you're a civilian, it's a little tough."

One thing that made it tougher for Mendoza was his lack of education after being discharged. By the time he was released from service all of his former military buddies had moved on and had good jobs. He felt a little left behind.

Research on post traumatic stress disorder among vets of later wars is more robust than it is for those who fought prior to the Vietnam War, according to The National Center For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the research arm of the VA.

But researchers are trying to catch up.

In a 1991 PTSD Quarterly study published by the center they said, "Inpatients hospitalized for medical illness,...found the prevalence of current PTSD in WWII and Korean conflict veterans who had never sought psychiatric treatment to be 9% and 7%, respectively."

Mendoza guesses it was the military training kicking in that allowed him to accomplish so much later in life.

He took advantage of the G.I. Bill and attended night classes at St. Mary's University in San Antonio while he worked during the day in systems procedures at Kelly Air Force Base.

He graduated with a bachelors in business administration and a minor in marketing.

"I would say the main thing is to get an education. Nowadays you can get an education sponsored by he government," he said. "You become more useful if you have an education."

He ended up selling the Skylab database to NASA and super computers to companies like Texaco in the oil patch.

After all the progress he's seen in technology  he likes to points out that when he was selling super computers one gigabyte was the size of a washing machine  changes to the military and changes even in his own life, he feels strongly about encouraging those just starting out, or returning from military service.

"It was so important after my wife passed in 2009, after that I moved over here (the senior community). That was an excellent choice, I get to socialize," he said, "What I try to do is keep very active, my mind active, my physical body and my spirit," he said.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Five anti-Trump demonstrators in downtown Houston were arrested Thursday as a raucous mass of more than 100 wound through the streets around City Hall and squared off with mounted police.

Jittery horses came dangerously close to trampling unruly protesters who surged out into the street at the corner of Travis and Preston early on in the more than two hour drum-banging, sign-waving march.

Angry chants echoed down McKinney Street as the protesters gathered outside City Hall at 7 p.m., shouting, "F- Trump," and, "Hey Trump, you liar, we're here to say you're fired."

Speakers revved up the crowd before heading out for a rowdy march.

NATIONWIDE UNREST: Anti-Trump protests continue for a second night

"You know what won on November 8th? Not Donald Trump. White supremacy won," said Black Lives Matter leader Ashton Woods, 31.

Bryan Sweeney, another speaker, launched into a bilingual speech slamming Trump's immigration policies.

"It will be a cold day in hell before Donald Trump removes one Latino from Harris County," he said.

Some activists recounted stories they say show an uptick in racist outbursts just since Tuesday's election.

"My 13-year-old daughter was told by white boy to go back to Africa. She is biracial. She is innocent in all of this and throughout the nation I am seeing a flood of information of people being targeted," activist Sheree Dore told the Chronicle.

As the crowd grew, protesters began marching through the city, followed closely by a throng of mounted police and officers on foot.

As they reached Travis and Preston, some marchers advocated disobeying the officers' orders and spilling out into the street.

TRUMP BACK ON TWITTER: President-elect responds to protesters

Mounted police pushed against the crowd, nearly stepping on some protesters who didn't keep to the curb. Over the course of the evening, five protesters were arrested but the charges were not immediately clear.

After a few minutes of chaos and shouting in the intersection, the marchers moved on.

"F--- that Cheeto," chanted one angry protester, as they marched down the street.

Some bystanders clapped and high-fived the crowd, while one decidedly nervous-looking woman shouted at the marchers, "Just accept it!"

Eventually, the protest settled outside of Houston police headquarters, where speakers addressed the crowd, denouncing everything from racism to student debt to police brutality.

As the evening wound down, the scent of smoke wafted into the air when an indigenous woman made her way through the crowd, smudging as she walked.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The high-pitched choir of youngsters filled the expansive Grace Presbyterian Church sanctuary Friday with the anthems of the five military branches. With each tune, including the Navy's "Anchors Aweigh" and the Air Force's "Wild Blue Yonder," veterans from respective branches stood with honor.

With the start of "The Marine's Hymn," James Moriarty rose. A uniformed student from the Grace School shook his hand and passed along an envelope filled with letters of gratitude.

For Moriarty, a prominent Houston lawyer who served in Vietnam, Veteran's Day will never be the same.

Just days ago, his son, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Moriarty, 27, was shot and killed during a training mission in a Jordanian safe zone. Two other soldiers were killed in the Nov. 4 incident.

Moriarty was memorialized alongside a number of veterans with videos, poetry and song from students at the Christian private school.

Ushers distributed plastic red "buddy" poppies, the official memorial flower of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, to arriving attendees as a piano player solemnly played "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

More for you Houston man among 3 dead in Jordan military base attack

Following a presentation of colors by the school's Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, a crowd of pre-kindergarten students led the congregation in a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, barely squeaking out the word "indivisible."

In a tribute video, students from the lower school paired veteran traits like honor, perseverance and compassion with Bible verses. For courage, students read Romans 12:10, "Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves."

Erick Kirby, who served in the Army Reserves from 2004 to 2014, gave a testimonial about finding God while deployed in Iraq from 2009 to 2009.

"I picked up my guitar and my machine gun and found my way to the chapel," said Kirby, who works with the church's high school group.

Two middle school students read poems inspired by Veteran's Day, respectively titled "Freedom" and "Three Sides," and a trumpeter played the traditional Taps in remembrance of veterans.

"Students, we hope you have a better understanding of the sacrifices our veterans have made, so next time you see them you thank them," said Josh Caldwell, an eighth-grade student at the school, in dismissing the ceremony.

A memorial service for Moriarty will be held 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Annunciation Orthodox School.
To most Americans, Veterans Day means honoring those who served in the United States Armed Forces, but its origins stretch back to the end of World War I, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.

Around the world, this day of commemoration is also known as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, and all of them mark the end of the Great War on Nov. 11, 1918.
It was early Wednesday morning when President-elect Donald Trump gave his acceptance speech. Among the excited cheers of his supporters and a drowsy Barron Trump, the real-estate mogul made one thing clear: He was going to build.

"We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals," Trump said. "We're going to rebuild our infrastructure  which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it."
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The Battleship Texas, the last surviving dreadnought class battleship, is currently closed for repairs as a marine salvage team works to patch holes in its hull. Visitors to San Jacinto Battleground State Park who were turned away today said the bow was down noticeably.

The closure comes at an unfortunate time as America celebrates Veterans Day on Friday. The battleship is a veteran of both world wars and was decommissioned after World War II concluded. The battleship arrived in La Porte in 1948.

Along the way it was a witness to history. Sailors observed the famous flag-raising at Iwo Jima from the ship's decks in 1945, and it ferried a young Walter Cronkite over to the North African theater to fight.

She spent most of June 1944 providing gun support for soldiers at Omaha Beach and nearby Pointe du Hoc. After D-Day, the battleship went to the south of France, the Mediterranean and ultimately made it into the Pacific theater.

D-DAY VET: The Battleship Texas played a big, booming part at D-Day

This isnt the first time shes begun to take on water. Every so often the battleship deals with leaks and has to close so crews can remove old patches and place new ones.

Bill Irwin, the Complex Superintendent of San Jacinto State Historic Site Complex, said Friday that the leaks are on the starboard side of the battleship. Patches here and there have gotten the job done as the battleship continues to age.

T&T Marine Salvage is handling the repairs, which entails removing the old patches and replacing them with new ones. To completely fix the hull wed have to take the battleship out of the water, draining the area around it, Irwin says.

The hole that's currently being fixed is estimated to be three feet in size.

A dry-berth for the Battleship Texas been something thats been talked about for some time, but the funding isnt quite there. In 1988, the Texas was towed to Todd Shipyards in Galveston for a $14 million restoration. The deck was replaced and the ships hull was repaired during the two-year project.

KIDS INC.: How students saved Battleship Texas in 1987

When asked when the battleship will be back open, Irwin said he is hopeful that guests can once again visit within a week or so.

It all depends on repairs, Irwin says.

The Battleship Texas, launched first in 1912, was the most complex machine of its time when it was commissioned as a naval warship in 1914. She had the largest guns on any ship in the world at that time. It was the first American warship to launch an aircraft and to mount anti-aircraft guns.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

THE WOODLANDS -- Thousands of schoolchildren from Montgomery County and the Houston area went on the "Ultimate Field Trip" Thursday.

The Museum of Natural Science and Houston Zoo teamed up with ExxonMobil engineers and others to provide the students with activities including experiments with ExxonMobil "Science Ambassadors," brain teasers, rocket launching with Janet's Planet, an interactive digital experience with Microsoft and learning re-diculous ways to reduce and reuse with Richard Renner's Recycle Cycle. The events Thursday and Friday at The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion reward students while kicking off the 21st Annual Children's Festival, which is open to the public Saturday and Sunday.

Coming up this weekend will be the "Licensed to Move" interactive live music act, a one-day-only Erth's Dinosaur Zoo Saturday with life-like dinosaur puppets, the CB&I STEAM Zone, Anadarko Adventure Zone, Texas Children's Hospital Healthy KidZone and Sky Zone on the hill. Rockets will blast off to the moon in the South Plaza, and children can dive into the world of art in the Activity Center featuring Arts Alley.

On Thursday, entertained students participated in the "Pirate School: The Science of Pirates," "MatheMagic," featuring one of the world's fastest human calculators who turns math into magic, and an electrifying performance by Alex & the Kaleidoscope Band.

During the Pirate School, children turned to each other laughing like "jaunty buccaneers" as they began poking each other in a sword fight with their fingers. The interactive show's Pirate, Professor Billy Jones, taught the children to become "good pirates" as he swore them in repeating a promise to be great at school, helpful at home, and brush their teeth every year.

One of the Spring ISD students, 8-year-old Estrella Castillo, joined in the fun.

"It was good," Castillo said. "He was funny. I learned about S-T-E-M (referring to the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).

At Janet's Planet, children learned about flight from a female pilot in a red jumpsuit who flew around the world in a jet last year.

"It's huge (for children to have events like this)," Captain Judy Rice, 63, of Florida, said. "The tiny, little exposure, capturing the glimmer of a dream that's down in a child-whether it be an astronaut, pilot, whatever, engineering and the arts - so just capturing that brief moment that usually a child is not exposed to."

"Kuddos to the local area for doing this," she said. "I've flown to 55 countries and America; and Houston is very fortunate."

Magnolia ISD's Bear Branch Elementary school teacher Kim Culberson has attended for 15 years. She said her son attended and is now studying his engineering degree. She has observed a transition in the event from carnival-like to hands-on science.

"The children got to touch dino fossils, set up computers ," she said. "I tell my kids all the time that math and science is number one. They love it."

Over the weekend, the festival will feature performers on multiple stages, meet-and-greets with popular characters, and other interactive activities. The fun runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $8 in advance and $10 at the door.

For more information about Children's Festival, visit www.woodlandscenter.org or call 281-364-3010.
Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has published a heartfelt and defiant statement about the EFF's plans for the coming four years under a president who has demanded back-doors in crypto, promised mass surveillance and roundups of millions of people, and threatened the freedom of the press.

Though I work with EFF, they don't pay me (my work is paid for through a grant from the MIT Media Lab as part of my work as "Activist in Residence"). Quite the contrary, I am a regular and frequent donor to the organization  it's precisely because I'm so closely involved with it and privy to its internal workings that I have so much confidence that my money is well-spent to defend the future I want to bequeath to my daughter.





In the coming four years, EFF and its allies around the country have their work cut out for them. This week, I've made many donations to activist groups from Planned Parenthood to the Southern Poverty Law Center, but my first port of call was EFF.



Many have contacted us with concerns about yesterday's election results. At this critical moment, we want digital civil liberties supporters worldwide to feel confident that EFF remains steadfast in its mission and method: to use law and technology to champion civil liberties and provide a potent check against overreach. EFF has worked for 26 years to build a free and fair future. When civil liberties come under threat, we challenge the powerfulfrom those in high office to perpetrators of common maliceto establish limits and protect people. We know that freedom and justice don't just materialize. They aren't automatic or made inevitable by technology. If we want our technologieswhich today are woven throughout our communities, our laws, our culture, and our very livesto support freedom and justice, we have to work for it. Hard. We have to fight. EFF fought in the 90s when the government came after Steve Jackson Games. We fought when we recognized that freeing encryption was key to building a just future. We fought after 9/11 heralded a flurry of incursions on our rights. We fought in 2005 when Mark Klein walked into our front door with the first solid evidence of mass surveillance. We fought in 2013 when Edward Snowden's disclosures ignited a movement to stop mass surveillance by governments. We'll fight today. We'll fight tomorrow. In 2017, we will fight for encryption, challenge the reckless deployment of state-sponsored malware, oppose mass surveillance of our digital communications, defend the freedom of the press, and prevent surveillance and censorship of social media. Attorneys will bring lawsuits, technologists will encrypt the web, and activists will organize, share, and engage. EFF will be there. We want you to join us. This has always been work that we do together. Donate to EFF and take a stand for digital civil liberties.

Protecting Tomorrow

[Cindy Cohn/EFF]
If you're a Hamilton fan, you know that the Burr-Jefferson race of 1800 was such a shitshow that it ended up with the Vice President-elect murdering his most vocal critic after assuming office.

Both the 1796 and 1800 races were characterized by extreme, divisive rhetoric. In 1796, the Federalists spreading racist fear by claiming that Jefferson was mixed-race and would free enslaved people if elected, leading to "a civil war and a national orgy of rape, incest, and adultery." The Democratic-Republicans countered that John Adams was secretly in the thrall of the King of England, and also mocked him for being fat.





1800 was even worse, though, with Democratic Republicans saying that Adams had a "hideous hermaphroditical character" and Federalists calling Jefferson the "son of a half-breed Indian squaw sired by a Virginia mulatto father." While they were insulting each other, they were also both energetically trying to rig the ballot to the other side's detriment.

Then there was 1828, which saw Andrew "Genocidal Maniac" Jackson promoted to the Oval Office after losing in 1824 (despite winning the popular and electoral votes!).



In the popular press, the rhetorical attacks reached a level of cruelty and misrepresentation not seen since the election of 1800. Jackson was accused of multiple murders, of extreme personal violence [he did kill a guy in a duel], and of having lived in sin with his wife, Rachel, who herself was attacked as a bigamist. Adams, on the other hand, was attacked for his legalistic attitudes, for his foreign-born wife, and for reportedly having procured young American virgins for the Russian czar as the primary achievement of his diplomatic career. Adams's critics referred to him as "His Excellency" while Jackson came under attack as an ill-mannered, barely civilized, backwoods killer of Indians.

The Worst Presidential Race in American History

[Kevin Underhill/Lowering the Bar]
KGW Portland surveyed 86 Oregon inmates serving time for burglary to see what they looked for when casing a house that is safe to break into and likely to contain valuables. One important lesson: "NRA sticker on car bumper = Lots of guns to steal."



Inmates also said that they'd steer clear of houses with large dogs and with audible radio/TVs. They preferred to break in between 12:30 and 2:30 PM ("when anyone that was home for lunch should be gone by then and most kids should all still be in school"). Noisy security alarms scared burglars off, but signs warning of them didn't necessarily work. CCTVs were a mild deterrent, but also an enticement (they "also likely signaled there were valuables inside the home").

Houses with cheap wooden doors were a favorite, especially if they were isolated from their neighbors (tall shrubs make good cover).

Most burglars started by searching the master bedroom for valuables, then moved through the rest of the house. "Everywhere! From the stove and freezer, to the fish tank and toilet tank, book shelves and in boxes of cereal," said an inmate.

We asked 86 burglars how they broke into homes

[Kyle Iboshi/KGW Portland]





(via Kottke)
After a campaign characterized by vagueness and tiny hand-waving, Donald Trump finally released a semi-detailed plan for his first 100 days in office yesterday, including "a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated" and "cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama."

Today, NPR fact-checks Trump's plans, investigating whether they would pass Congress, pass Constitutional muster, or in any other way intersect with reality. Most of them, unsurprisingly, are doomed. Some, scarily, are not: Trump is likely to gut both environmental rules, net neutrality, and finance regulations that serve as a curb on reboot of the 2008 crisis. Of course, Mexico is not paying for that fucking wall.

He will probably be able to kill Obamacare, which could signal the end of my US residence. I live with a chronic, debilitating medical condition, am self-employed and am uninsurable without the Affordable Care Act. I'm holding out hope that California's proposal to replace the federal health-care law with a state one will rescue me and the millions of others who depend on ACA.



5. Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act. Fully repeals Obamacare and replaces it with Health Savings Accounts, the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines, and let states manage Medicaid funds. Reforms will also include cutting the red tape at the FDA: there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, and we especially want to speed the approval of life-saving medications. The GOP Congress has already demonstrated its willingness to repeal the insurance tax subsidies and Medicaid expansion portions of the Affordable Care Act, along with the requirement that all Americans have health insurance, using a fast-track legislative maneuver known as "reconciliation" that prevents a Democratic filibuster. President Obama vetoed that measure, but President-elect Trump would presumably sign it. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that could strip health insurance coverage from more than 20 million people  although the change would most likely be phased in over a couple of years. Trump's replacement plan is less clear. Health savings accounts would allow more people to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars, and selling insurance across state lines might increase competition and reduce prices. But coverage will very likely remain out of reach for many. The requirement that insurance companies provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions cannot be repealed through reconciliation. But preserving that requirement without the individual mandate to purchase insurance could create a costly situation in which people wait until they're sick to buy coverage.

FACT CHECK: Donald Trump's First 100 Days Action Plan

[NPR]
Alma Joy Newsom, a trailblazing news reporter who was among the first black women to anchor a Houston television broadcast, died Nov. 2 of unknown causes at her home. She was 70.

Passionate about diversity in media, Newsom relentlessly mentored countless Houston journalists over 14 years at KHOU (Channel 11) and later sought to educate reporters on how to accurately cover minority communities.

"She launched the careers of hundreds of broadcasters," said Carolyn Campbell, who worked for Newsom at KHOU. "She really had a special passion that women and people of color were represented in the industry."

Born in Simonton in 1945, Newsom was a prolific speaker and community activist. She graduated from Jack Yates High School, in Houston's Third Ward, and later attended Texas Southern University.

She began working at KHOU in 1971 and was one of only a handful of black employees at the largely white, male station. Before leaving in 1984, Newsom worked in a number of positions, including community affairs director, program manager, talk show host, reporter and news anchor.

Unflappable in the face of adversity, Newsom was regarded by colleagues as a source of guidance and inspiration, offering encouragement while remaining firm about her standards.

"Excellence was what she demanded, and that's what you always wanted to deliver," Campbell said. "She made me believe in myself when I didn't even believe in myself."

The sixth of 16 children, Newsom, who had no children of her own, emphasized the importance of perseverance to her many nieces and nephews.

"Even if we stumbled, she helped us pick ourselves up," said Altheria Goevel, Newsom's niece, adding that her aunt was lovingly referred to as a "drill sergeant" by family members.

"She could snap you to it. You were not allowed to wallow in self-pity," Goevel said.

After leaving KHOU, she served as communications director for U.S. Rep. Mickey Leland. Newsom updated a concerned nation in a 1989 televised news conference following the plane crash in which the Houston congressman died.

Following her stint in Washington, Newsom returned to Houston in 1990 and started the Newsom Communications Group. Newsom sought to bridge the divide between diverse communities and media organizations.

"She wanted to make sure there was integrity in reporting," Goevel said, adding that Newsom sought to teach accuracy over sensationalism.

With a commitment to mentoring and education, Newsom later returned to TSU as an assistant telecommunications professor, teaching courses in business communication, broadcast practices and production.

"A talented writer, eloquent speaker and trailblazing executive, Alma Newsom left a memorable footprint in Houston media," Houston Association of Black Journalist President Jerome Solomon said in a news release. "She is the definition of a difference-maker. Some of the finest journalists in Houston count her as a mentor and friend, as she taught some, hired many and advised countless others."

Newsom is survived by eight siblings, Ethel Jackson, Mildred Newsom, Vernice Shelton, Jacquelyn Newsom, Barbara Booker, Beverly Newsom, Lee Newsom and Richard Newsom, as well as a host of nieces and nephews.

Visititation will begin at 10 a.m Friday at Abiding Faith Baptist Church at 15376 Fondren Road in Missouri City. A celebration will begin at 11 a.m.
One man died and two others were wounded in a shooting Thursday night outside at a gasoline station in southwest Houston.

The shooting happened about 8 p.m. at an Exxon station at 6610 South Sam Houston Parkway West near Rockwell, said M. Arrington, a homicide investigator with the Houston Police Department.

Arrington said several men pulled into the station in a car. Two of them went inside the store while the others remained outside. The men who stayed outside apparently had an altercation with two of the victims, who were in the parking lot and the man who was driving the car opened fire on them.

After the shots were fired, the two men who had arrived in the car with the gunman ran outside of the store, Arrington said. The gunman and some of the men who had driven to the station with him sped away. A short time later, they returned to the scene and the driver fired more gunshots. Then the men drove away again.

One of the wounded men was shot in the back of the head and died at the scene. His name has not been released. Another victim was shot in the face and was rushed to Ben Taub General Hospital. His condition was not released.

The third victim was an innocent bystander. He was wounded slightly in the leg from a shotgun blast, which also peppered his pickup that was parked outside at the gas station. He was not taken to a hospital for treatment and is expected to survive.

Arrington said investigators are trying to determine what led to the altercation and sparked the gunfire. They are reviewing surveillance video from the scene as well as interviewing one of the men who had driven to the station with the gunman.

The suspect fired a pistol and a shotgun during the shooting.

The gunman drove away in a four-door gray or light brown car.

Anyone with information about the case is urged to contact Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS or the HPD Homicide Division at 713-308-3600
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Donald Trump's election has breathed fresh air into the nation's anti-immigration faction.

Although perhaps more a case of adolescent rabble-rousing than a sincere belief, a group of students at Royal Oak Middle School in suburban Royal Oak, Mich., were caught Wednesday on video chanting, "Build the wall," according to The Detroit News.

BIG PLANS: What Donald Trump says he's going to do during his first 100 days in office

As a candidate, Trump repeatedly promised to build a wall along the nation's southern border and to make Mexico pay for it. Now, the Mexican government is reportedly apprehensive that the president-elect intends to make good on the campaign rhetoric.

Pieces of a wall in various materials have existed for some time, and there are now fences along 700 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile border.

Worldwide, construction of border walls has risen dramatically since Sept. 1, 2011, bringing to 63 the number of places where two countries are separated by barriers, according to The Washington Post. More were started last year than at any other time since the end of World War II in 1945, the Post reported.

TRUMP ON TEXAS: Here's what Donald Trump's election means for Texas

Trump has also threatened to do away with U.S.-Mexico trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which he has called the "worst deal in history."
By Alex Samuels, The Texas Tribune

Though by a small margin, a Republican Travis County Commissioner whose engaging campaign ad drew international attention won re-election Tuesday, a sliver of GOP success in an otherwise blue Texas county.

Voters returned Gerald Daugherty to his Precinct 3 commissioner's seat  a large feat for a candidate trying to distance himself from the impact President-elect Donald Trump had on down-ballot races.

Daugherty and his wife, Charlyn, starred in a viral campaign ad released last month. The ad broke 9 million views as of Wednesday night, was featured on almost every major cable network and was covered on all but one continent, according to Daugherty's campaign consultants.

And according to Daugherty, the ad may have been a driving force in helping him win the election with about 52 percent of the vote.

"Let's put it this way," Daugherty said in an interview with The Texas Tribune Thursday. "The ad certainly didn't hurt."

Daugherty's precinct is typically a toss-up. In 2002 and 2004, Daugherty won by a small margin, but he lost the seat in 2008 after an influx of Democratic voters in Travis County voted for Barack Obama. In 2012, Daugherty won the seat back, and then easily won this year's Republican primary in March with 71 percent of the vote.

Prior to Tuesday's election, many Texas Republicans were worried about Trump's impact on down-ballot races, especially in Democratic strongholds like Travis County, home of Austin.

"The factor in this [election] was Trump," Daugherty said. "Charlyn and I talked about it and I said, 'Honey, if I get beat, I'm going to get beat not by something that I haven't done but by something I had nothing to do with, and that is if we have a controversial figure at the top of the ticket.'"

His victory came from ticket splitters in a county where about 150,000 people usually vote along straight-party lines. Daugherty won the non-straight-party vote over his opponent by more than 12,000 votes.

In Travis County, Trump lost to Clinton by almost 18 percent, meaning Daugherty outpolled the top of the Republican ticket by more than 21 percent.

"It is almost unheard of for a bottom-of-the-ballot candidate to overcome landslide defeats of the top of the ticket in their party," said Chad Crow, Daugherty's campaign consultant who helped produce the ad. "Occasionally, you will see a congressman or a senator do it by a few percentage points, but almost never a courthouse-level candidate and certainly not those kinds of margins."

Even David Holmes, Daugherty's Democratic challenger, said the ad was refreshing during a contentious time.

"When you look at how close the race was, I think [the ad] had to have a pretty powerful effect," Holmes said. "With the ad, combined with ... Gerald having been in office for 10 years and the greater amount of money he raised, [Gerald] had every advantage." Holmes acknowledged, however, that "it's really hard to know if there are people who voted for him just because of that ad."

Despite the ad's popularity, Daugherty maintained that what ultimately helped him get re-elected was his familiarity with his county and constituents.

"I've been in this community, and longtime relationships, most of the time, are more important than party affiliation," Daugherty said.

Crow said he agreed, and added that Daugherty's reputation among voters was a major factor behind the win.

"I think it took everything that Gerald has ever done in his adult life in Travis County, both in and out of office, to make [the win] happen," Crow said. "Because on paper we should have lost, plain and simple, and any other Republican certainly would have."

Read more of The Texas Tribune's election coverage:

His campaign ad has been watched millions of times, but Republican Gerald Daugherty's re-election bid was anything but certain.

As he went on to win the presidency Tuesday night, Republican Donald Trump beat Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in Texas. Trump was on track to notch the smallest margin of victory for a GOP nominee in the Lone Star State in two decades.

Endangered Republican lawmakers in Texas have strengthened their financial footing with just over a week until Election Day, according to campaign finance reports released Monday.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2016/11/10/despite-trump-effect-star-best-campaign-ad-ever-wi/

The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans - and engages with them - about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
If there's anyone qualified to recognize a genocidal strongman when they see one, it's the far-right Serbian and Macedonian ultra-nationalists who celebrate the Milosevic legacy of rape-camps, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and those guys love Donald Trump.

The reaction is mixed with a widespread generalized loathing for the Clintons thanks to the perception that Bill Clinton bears the blame for the civilian deaths and the privation during the Nato interventions in the former Yugoslavia.

The morning after the US elections, the editor of Informer, a pro-government tabloid in Serbia, announced they'd put up a billboard congratulating Trump in Belgrade reading, "We congratulate! Trump, you the Serb!". Informer is considered very close to the government of Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, and had been involved in 'media lynchings'  smear campaigns and issuing threats against investigative journalists who had revealed cases of high-level corruption.



Nationalists and Populists in Serbia and Macedonia Celebrate Trump's Victory

[Marko Angelov/Global Voices]
The internet has sunk its teeth into yet another viral trend called the "#MannequinChallenge," where groups of people pose as if they are frozen in time.

On Thursday, NASA took the challenge to a new level after students at the Johnson Space Center pretended to celebrate the historic Apollo moon landing by striking a pose inside mission control.
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.
We attempted to send a notification to your email address but we were unable to verify that you provided a valid email address. Please click here to update your email address if you wish to receive notifications. Otherwise, you may click here to disable notifications and hide this message.
Cherokee Skate Park awaits FEMA okay As opposed to speedy skate board wheels, the wheels of progress grind slowly regarding the citys proposed new skate park...

City ordinance offers guidance for replacing ash trees As Cherokee residents and property owners scramble to identify and remove diseased ash trees dead and dying from the Emerald...

River Valley board president explains discipline controversy Theres more to the story regarding the recent resignation of a River Valley school secretary over alleged violation of school...
Some conservatives blamed Donald Trumps rise on liberals who cried wolf over previous Republican presidential candidates allegedly authoritarian impulses. In an episode of Real Time that aired four days before the election, comedian Bill Maher fessed up to taking things a bit too far with his attacks on George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. But in order to understand how the Left gave us Trump, one must look to the Progressive-with-a-capital-P era. Donald Trump would never have become our president-elect if not for the party-reform program launched by Woodrow Wilson and his allies.

Traditionally, party organizations existed to broker political conflict peacefully, facilitate ordinary citizens participation in political life, and distribute the spoils of electoral success. By the early twentieth century, however, many Americans were outraged at the corrupt and incompetent nature of the nations political class. Both the Democratic and Republican parties pursued graft with an openness almost unimaginable today. Party bosses themselves were generally not top officeholders; they preferred to put up easily controlled candidates for mayor, senator, and president, while reserving their right to direct matters from behind the scenes. From a good-government perspective, though, a great nation deserved better than William McKinley and Warren G. Harding.

Progressives therefore launched a sweeping program of party reform. Some proposals, such as civil-service reform, ballot initiatives, nonpartisan elections, and council-manager government, were aimed at weakening parties role in the political process. Others sought to recast parties as vehicles for the delivery of a particular policy agenda. Hence, the century-long purge of liberals from the Republican Party and conservatives from the Democratic Party.

Direct primaries, which the Democrats and Republicans didn't fully embrace until the 1970s, would be the most important change. It is now understood that the people, not horse-trading by party bosses at national conventions, should determine who gets to be a candidate for high office.

Party reform was an overcorrection. Like every other plank in the Progressive platform, it has led to a host of unintended consequences. For all their faults, the party bosses would never have nominated someone as volatile as Donald Trump. As Reihan Salaam points out, Trump will come into office feeling totally unrestrained by any sense of obligation to his political allies. If youre concerned about that prospect, then you should reconsider whether you think direct primaries are a good idea.

Where the people rule, someone still has to be in charge. The principle behind a strong party system is that someone should also be in charge over who gets a shot at being in charge. No healthy republic has ever been a pure democracy. Aristotle recommended a mixed regime, composed of democratic and oligarchic elements, and thats arguably what America had during the golden age of the party system. The party system was undemocratic, but no more so than federalism, the Bill of Rights, and checks and balances.

The solution to democracys defects is almost never more democracy.

Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
EVERYONE WAS WRONG! blared the New York Post Thursday about Wednesday mornings election result. Not everyone; the people who voted for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday figured he had a fair chance. And the signs were there all along. Culturally, politically, and policy-wise, the country had a fair chance of choosing Trump, and not just in retrospect.

Consider the culture. In June 2015, the latest Jurassic Park film came out, just as Trump was announcing his candidacy and the conventional wisdom held that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton were the presidential favorites. But there was a big difference between the Jurassic sequel and the original, which had come out a quarter-century earlierthe last time a Bush and Clinton had faced each other. In the original movie, corporations and the government were on the side of the public as they fled out-of-control dinosaurs. Rich people were incompetent but affable. In the 2015 version, corporations, the government, and rich people were all evil and incompetent. The supposed front-runners might have noted this vast change in Americans perception of the world.

Four months later, another movie came out: The Walk, about a 1970s-era tightrope walk across the old Twin Towers. People went to the movie not to see the circus performance but the movies digital recreation of the old towers. A decade earlier, Donald Trump had held a press conference, presenting an elegant plan for new Twin Towers, and lambasting the city, state, and federal governments for failing to rebuild them. Even then, Trump was tapping into a frustration and anxiety that the pols couldnt see.

As 2016 dawned, the November election began looking a lot like 2008people wanted change more than anything else. This time, though, it was Hillary Clinton who represented the status quo. She had taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from the financial industry when people were still struggling to recover from the financial crisis. Clinton could have lessened the damage by giving back the money she had taken from large banks for giving speeches, and releasing the speech transcripts. But she didnt understand that this would be an enduring problem. She and her staff seemed to think that Bernie Sanders had created his movement, not that his movement had created him.

Another issue was trade. People made fun of Trump for giving simplistic answers on policy issues, but Trump made a sophisticated point in the primary debates: not all global trade is free trade; nations like China (and the U.S., sometimes, for that matter) can and do engage in unfair trade practices such as state support of industries and companies, dumping of excess products, and currency manipulation. Supporting trade means that you support enforcement of trade rules, too. Free-trade supporters ought to have noticed that failing to acknowledge these realities undermined free trade with the public.

Clinton also said that she wanted to put her husband in charge of the economy a tone-deaf remark, when people have begun to realize that bipartisan economic policies over the past 30 years, including ever-more reliance on consumer debt to mask wage stagnation, have not worked out well for much of the population. Clinton had little standing to be a credible candidate on tougher trade rules after Trump had already run a year-long campaign on the issue, before she won her partys nomination.

A related issue was the countrys slow recovery from 2008. Part of that slow recovery has to do with Americans high levels of debt. As spring turned to summer, Clinton began attacking Trump on his multiple bankruptcies. Not a good idea: millions of Americans had gone through bankruptcies and foreclosures after 2008, and the experience changed the way they saw debt and bankruptcy. The biggest states for debt defaults? Florida, Nevada, and Ohioimportant electoral players all.

Trump devoted a whole night of the Republican Convention to the economy. One of his three sons, Donald Jr., gave the strongest speech. Trump the younger noted that Dodd-Frank, President Obamas financial-regulation law, was consumer protection for billionaires. This was a brilliant line, cutting through most Republicans inconsistent rhetoric on the financial industry. Donald Jr. concluded by saying that it was too risky for Americans not to change the status quo. For people who hadnt seen real income gains in decades, this critique resonated.

Finally, events matterand one fall event, in particular, did not help Clinton. In September, Wells Fargo admitted that its employees had opened up millions of fake new accounts for existing customers so that those employees could appear to be performing well under the banks incentive programs for its workers. This mass-scale identity theft and fraud wasnt just employee wrongdoing; the bank should have had procedures in place to prevent it. The banks colossal misdeed, which made national headlines and news stories, reminded Americans of the unfair way in which government protects the financial industry. The story broke just as early voting was about to begin.

Those who missed the signs of Trumps likely victory did so because they also largely missed what has been going on with the nations culture, politics, and economy for yearsespecially since the 2008 financial and ensuing economic crisis. Trumps victory, like the 2008 financial disaster that helped precipitate it, wasnt unforeseeable, for those who knew where to look. Americans ought not to be surprised, though, that their democratic system worked; for years, voters have been saying that they want change from the bipartisan consensus. The elites didnt listen. Enter Donald Trump.

Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images
Namibia and Belarus partner in advancing technology, science and finance

Namibia and Belarus have entered into an agreement to share information of financial, technological, training, educational and scientific capabilities.

The agreement was signed by the minister of international relations and cooperation, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, and Belarus foreign minister Vladimir Makei signed the agreement at a meeting in Belarus.

A joint statement issued said the two ministers agreed to explore the possibilities of Belarus supplying fertilisers and agricultural equipment, and setting up a manufacturing or assembly plant for such equipment, through joint ventures with Namibian partners. They further agreed to exchange expertise in different areas.

In the field of education, the two countries agreed to facilitate direct cooperation between the Namibian Ministry of Higher Education, Training and Innovation and the Belarus Ministry of Education as well as institutions of higher education.

In the area of mining, the two ministers agreed to encourage JSC ''BelAZ'' to establish direct contact with the Namibia Chamber of Mines. BelAZ is a Belarusian manufacturer of haulage and earthmoving equipment.

The Belarusian side informed on the financial mechanisms in supporting international trade and investment and undertook to provide detailed information on this issue through diplomatic channels, said the statement.

The two ministers also signed an agreement on political consultations between the ministries.

www.mfa.gov.na
Caritas Cehia in cautarea unui expert/unei experte sau unei echipe de experti in prestarea serviciilor de consiliere psihologica (pe segmentul burnout) pentru echipa mobila de prestare a serviciilor psiho-sociale pentru refugiatii ucraineni
Journalism matters because people around the world need timely news and analysis to make informed decisions about their lives.

This is a maxim that drives the work of many reporters. At the Committee to Protect Journalists, its why we advocate for the rights of persecuted journalists working in repressive and dangerous environments.

But the assumption that timely news leads to informed decisions is being challenged not only by the shocking Trump victory, but also by the Brexit vote and the recent referendum that rejected a peace deal in Colombia.

In all three instances, the media failed to anticipate the dynamic of the vote and failed to reflect to the full range of views. But the widely expressed opinion that the media failed to provide critical coverage is not justified. If there was a kink in the system it was not the coverage, but the delivery system.

Related: Journalisms moment of reckoning has arrived.

Let me make this point through an analogy. A trial usually consists two competing legal arguments, both grounded in facts, otherwise known as evidence. What if technology suddenly allowed 50 different lawyers to present competing narratives to the jury? And what if evidence requirements were eliminated, such that some of the lawyers presented their arguments based on traditional evidentiary standards, while others felt liberated to make things up. Would we blame the jury members if they were unable to render an informed verdict?

Sign up for CJR 's daily email

This is the world we live in today. There are no longer common narratives that unite large segments of the population. Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter have segmented and fractured the media, and a good deal of the information that comes through feeds is tendentious and false, according to an analysis by Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton.

The notion of balanceso meticulously tracked by the Shorenstein Centeris quaint. People dont read web sites, much less newspapers. Instead, they get their news through social media feeds. The Washington Post or The New York Times may be perfectly balanced in terms of their coverage of each candidate, but such efforts make no difference when readers are more likely to access individual stories affirming their political biases through their Facebook feeds.

The same reality exists in many parts of the world. In Colombia, for example, the establishment dailies El Tiempo and El Espectador have been eclipsed by a more complex, diverse, and fragmented media, that operates largely online and is amplified through local radio. At a global level, propaganda networks like Russia Today are part of the mix, as are unfiltered dumps of stolen data.

Of course, there are many, many benefits to our current media environment. There is more news and information available more easily than at any time in human history. But there are downsides as well. Not only is it impossible to analyze and process the information, but trying to do so produces collective stress. Scientists studying human behavior artificially create high-stress situations by bombarding their subjects with information. This environment is now replicated in our daily lives.

Related: Facebook can no longer be I didnt do it boy of global media

In the aftermath of the Trump victory, there is a lot of finger pointing going on. There is plenty to criticize in the medias coverage of Trump, including its uncritical amplification of Trumps message, at least initially. But there was also plenty of investigative and accountability journalism that presented a complete and critical picture of Trump as a candidate. But power of each individual media outlet is much diminished, so this kind of journalism has considerably less impact.

What this all means is that journalisms maximthat we do what we do in the belief that informed societies make informed decisionsis harder to demonstrate. As the editors in news site Mic (which targets millennials) wrote in a note to their staff, [We] have spent every waking moment of the past five years working toward the mission of informing, inspiring and empowering our generation to change the world  We failed.

Still, journalists must continue to believe that by doing our jobs as journalistsand by the defending the rights of journalists who work in conditions of extraordinary riskwe make a positive contribution. In other words, we must do all we can to make sure truth is out there, even if its harder and harder to find.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Joel Simon is a fellow at Tow Center for Digital Journalism. His next book is The Infodemic: How Censorship Made the World Sicker and Less Free co-authored with Robert Mahoney.
Criminal damaging, North Rocky River Drive: Police cited a North Rocky River woman, 36, who harassed a neighbor Nov. 1 outside and inside an apartment building.

The victim said she was outside talking to other apartment tenants at about 5:30 p.m. when the woman approached and - for some unknown reason - started an argument. The victim retreated to her apartment, where the woman called her three times. The woman also sent the victim a text message that read, "Boo Devil gunna get you."

The next day, the victim noticed that someone had damaged one of her lawn ornaments. The victim's surveillance video recording showed the woman hitting the ornament with an unknown object. The woman, regardless of the video, denied any wrongdoing.

Felonious assault, West Bagley Road: A Berea man, 47, was arrested at about 12:45 a.m. Nov. 3 after hitting a bar patron with a beer bottle inside Suds Maguire's Bar & Grill, 1270 West Bagley.

Also arrested was a 28-year-old Middleburg Heights man, who allegedly roughed up another man inside the men's room.

Witnesses said the Middleburg Heights man and a Cleveland man, 28, had taunted bar customers throughout the night. They followed the Berea man's son, 21, into the bathroom, where the Middleburg Heights man beat him up. The Berea man's son reportedly started the bathroom fight.

When the Berea man learned that his son had been assaulted, he grabbed a beer bottle and hit the Cleveland man over the head. The Cleveland man, bleeding from the head, was taken to Southwest General Health Center in Middleburg Heights. The Berea man's son declined medical attention.

Grand theft auto, Fourth Avenue: A 2004 Buick Rendezvous was stolen between late Nov. 2 and early Nov. 3 from a driveway. The victim had locked the car but didn't lock her house, where she left the keys before traveling to downtown Cleveland with a friend. When she returned, the car and the keys were missing.

Breaking & entering, East Bagley Road: Someone broke into St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 50 East Bagley, between 2:30 p.m. Nov. 2 and 9:20 a.m. Nov. 3.

Nothing was missing from the church, but a window was damaged, a door kicked in and a desk pried open.

Aggravated burglary, East Bagley Road: About $10 in coins and a key were stolen late Nov. 2 from Baldwin Wallace University's Kleist Center for Art and Drama, 95 East Bagley Road.

Security video showed a male walk into the building and take coins from a cash drawer behind a concession stand. He then removed pins from the hinges of an office door. In the office, he pried open several locked desk drawers and cabinets. He took a key labeled "Open all doors" from an envelope in one of the desk drawers.

Shoplifting, West Bridge Street: A Berea woman, 36, was arrested at about 6 p.m. Nov. 3 after she tried to steal a package of steaks from Giant Eagle, 50 West Bridge.

A Giant Eagle customer alerted store workers after seeing the woman slip the steaks into her purse. The woman left the store without paying. Store workers followed her on foot while calling police.

Petty theft, Front Street: Statues of a dog and a turtle were reported stolen at about 11:30 a.m. Nov. 7 from the front of Bazah Home Arts, 154 Front Street.

Security video showed a male wearing a hoodie move a large statue on Bazah property at the corner of Front and East Grand Street. The male then walked east on East Grand, stepped over a fence and grabbed the two statues. He walked away eastbound on East Grand.

To comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page.
Construction has begun on Unit DX, a new lab space and science incubator in central Bristol, 10 minutes walk from Bristol Temple Meads and the Engine Shed.

This brings much needed facilities and support to the growing number of entrepreneurs in the city, adding a new scientific dimension to the already thriving Bristol tech scene. Unit DX is announced in partnership with the University of Bristol's SETsquared Centre, which was named as the best university business incubator in the world last year and is also supporting a record number of businesses.

Monika Radclyffe, Centre Director at SETsquared Bristol said: "I am very excited that SETsquared will be working with Unit DX to increase access to laboratory space and to provide tailored support for scientific enterprise. We look forward to supporting innovative technologies in the life sciences sector and help Unit DX companies scale their businesses with our proven incubation model."

Of the 183,000 life sciences jobs in the UK, over half of these are located in the 'golden triangle' of London, Cambridge and Oxford. Unit DX will help to translate Bristols scientific research into commercial business opportunities.

Nishan Canagarajah, Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Bristol, said: "We are very pleased to be working with Unit DX to augment Bristol's scientific facilities which will significantly enhance the city's attractiveness as a location for start-ups and spin-outs."

The facility will provide entrepreneurs with 10,000 sq. ft. of high end laboratory space and another 5000 sq. ft. of office facilities to support cutting edge technologies. Unit DX will also provide access to mentoring and business support, as well as links to investors and industry networks through its partnerships.

Jack Allan, Economic Development Manager, Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone said: "Incubator facilities have a key role to play in helping business ideas take off and stimulating and supporting entrepreneurship."

Unit DX will open its doors in early 2017. Further information can be found at www.unitdx.com
ORANGE, Ohio -- Criminal damaging, warrant; Orange Place: A Beachwood man, 23, reported on the night of Nov. 6, his ex-girlfriend came to retrieve money from him at the restaurant where he worked.

But when he had none to give her, she retaliated by scratching the rear lift gate of his father's 2014 Kia Sorento, according to a witness who told him.

The victim was then turned over to North Randall police on an outstanding warrant, with another one active out of Westlake as well.

Fraudulent misrepresentation, Jackson Road: A resident, 74, reported that someone had attempted to obtain a phony loan through the Navy Federal Credit Union using his personal information.

It did not go through and he was not out any money, but he planned to contact all of his lending institutions and and the major credit reporting agencies.

Domestic violence, Lander Road: Police arrested a man, 57, believed to be heavily intoxicated and the primary aggressor in a domestic incident on the evening of Nov. 7, after which his wife filed for a Temporary Protection Order. He was taken to the Beachwood Jail.

Traffic complaint, Harvard, Brainard roads: A caller reported that cars were driving the wrong way where the roadway had been closed south of Chagrin Boulevard. Pepper Pike police were also advised.

Assist (general), Orange Place: Police received a report about 7:45 p.m. on Nov. 8 that a confused woman was parking in the handicapped space at the Courtyard Marriott and flagging down cars and staff concerning a sleep study that was actually being conducted at the nearby Fairfield Inn, police learned.

Welfare check, Orange Meadow Lane: Police were looking for a depressed woman and former resident who was reportedly driving around with a mix of blood pressure meds and Benadryl in her system on Nov. 9 shortly after midnight. Now believed to reside in Shaker Heights, she was located and agreed to go to South Pointe Hospital in Warrensville Heights.

If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page.
She's on television with Michael Symon five days a week, and goes off her healthy eating regimen every time "the king of pork" makes a meat dish on "The Chew." So what inside scoop can Daphne Oz dish on Cleveland's most famous chef?

Don't hold your breath.

"He's got great friends who do some crazy things," Oz said to a fan on Friday at the opening of this weekend's Fabulous Food Show at the I-X Center in Cleveland. "But, without libeling anybody, I don't think I can tell those stories."

(Symon, passing Oz during a later interview, explained, 'That's because I know all her secrets.")

Instead, the cheerful Oz, a cookbook author, co-host of "The Chew" and daughter of the more famous Dr. (Mehmet) Oz, supplied a "healthy brownie" recipe made with black beans and sweet potato - in addition to coffee, chocolate and a bit of brown sugar.

It was just the ticket. A sample of the gluten-free sweet had a member of the audience swooning.

Like her TV physician dad, Oz is a proponent of healthy eating. But she's happy if people just get moving in that direction. Have a protein smoothie for breakfast, she told her audience. Replace half your pasta with beans. And make salad the biggest portion of your meal, mac and cheese the smallest.

An occasional indulgence, she told her crowd, "can fuel your resolve" in long-term healthier eating, rather than defeating it.

Oz is planning indulgence Friday night with Symon, touring his Cleveland restaurants. "I'm going to stuff my face at Mabel's (BBQ)," she said.

Her words on healthy eating resonated with Diane and Stan Woodruff of Westlake.

"I love her. She did a great job," said Diane. "Her recipes are simple and healthy." Diane has been on the hunt for healthy ideas while Stan, a medical nurse, has been losing 150 pounds.

"It was a great show," he said.

Symon appears on the main stage at 4:30 p.m. today, 11:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. Other foodie celebrities appearing include "Cake Boss" Buddy Valastro, Aaron Sanchez and a long list of regional food figures including Catherine St. John of Western Reserve School of Cooking, Matt Mytro of Flour, Pete Joyce of Barrio Tacos, Joe Horvath of Toast, Dante Boccuzzi, Brian Doyle of Cafe Avalaun and Michael Nowak of The Black Pig. Home cooks signed up for a hands-on cake-sculpting class and home bartenders for a cocktail workshop.

While local food producers were among the dozens handing out samples to attendees, many said they see the show as a trade show for regional foods.

"It costs too much for us to make it a sales event," said Clark Pope, founder of Pope's Kitchen, makers of salsas, seasonings and cocktail mixes. But being in "a community of owners," he said, allows for an exchange of ideas that lifts all boats.

Several local vendors shared news of their own growth. Aaron Powell, co-founder of Bearded Buch kombucha, a fermented tea, talked about his move this year into an Old Brooklyn facility at 4464 Broadview Road, where he's now joined by The Fermentation Girl, Red Lotus and Crunchy Kitchen.

Cleveland Jam owner Jim Conti gave out samples of his Beer Jam made in a partnership with Great Lakes Brewing Company while he talked about opening a storefront soon at 1300 Schaaf Road, where he'll have and wine and beer making supply store. With grants from the City of Cleveland and ECDI, he's taking over an old greenhouse to grow some of his own fruit and vegetables for his products. Elm Run Farms of Orrville, which sells at the Frostville Farmers Market in North Olmsted, is planning a delivery system for its non-GMO beef, pork, chicken and turkey. Ed Gordos of Western Reserve Foods, distributor of Middlefield Original Cheese House's Amish-owned products, said to expect a web site soon for the cheese company. "The farmers have been afraid of the Internet for years," he said, "but they finally said I should do it."

Jenn Thomas, who grew up in Brimfield, east of Akron, emceed the Vitamix stage at the show, happy to be in her home territory again. Thomas landed in the professional food world years ago when she won a national cooking contest on a Rachel Ray show. Today she's a graduate of Culinary Institute of America and on an internship at the Boca restaurant group in Chicago through the James Beard Foundation and the Women in Culinary Leadership Group. She said he hopes to empower women in the field to be not only cooks but great leaders in the kitchen. The Fabulous Food Show is a good place for it.

"I love the excitement of people who come here, their eagerness to learn. And I love the culinary professionals who leave their egos at the door to teach people their tricks of the kitchen."
Donald Trump

In this Aug. 18 file photo, Republican president-elect Donald Trump speaks to retired and active law enforcement personnel at a Fraternal Order of Police lodge during a campaign stop in Statesville, North Carolina.

(The Associated Press)

Steve Loomis

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Police-reform efforts such as the one underway in Cleveland likely won't be a priority of Donald Trump's administration, and while observers agree that a new Justice Department would have a difficult time upending an agreement with city police, the course of the reform efforts here and nationwide could still change.

The Republican president-elect has made it clear that he will not use the types of federal intervention President Barack Obama's Justice Department favored for troubled police departments, civil-rights lawyers and experts say.

That could have a major impact on the police-department investigations that are already underway and whether new ones are initiated.

Trump's repeated comments about strong police and his surrogates' backing of controversial policies like stop-and-frisk policing won him an unusual endorsement from the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, the union that represents the city's rank-and-file officers, and the same union whose president sits on a board responsible for making reform recommendations. The endorsement -- in a city where residents voted overwhelmingly Tuesday for Democrat Hillary Clinton -- created a rift between the union and a separate group that represents black officers on the force.

It would be difficult for the Justice Department to dissolve Cleveland's settlement, known as a consent decree, in large part because there is a federal judge overseeing the case, observers say.

That doesn't mean some, including the police union, won't try.

"I'm not sure what to expect about how it might be," said Matthew Barge, who heads a team monitoring the city's progress under the consent decree. "Ultimately, the most important participants remain the city and the police department."

Cleveland's consent decree came after an 18-month-long Justice Department investigation that found police officers too often used excessive force and that the city did not hold wrongdoers accountable. It was signed in May 2015 but the required work did not begin in earnest until later that year, after Barge and his monitoring team were hired.

Now, the city is at the end of the first year of what is, at minimum, a five-year reform process. The city is behind a schedule that it agreed to, partly because of preparations for the Republican National Convention in July. Certain deadlines were recently pushed back.

Trump has said police have faced too much adversity and need more support.

His campaign responded to a question from the International Association of Chiefs of Police in October about tensions between police and certain communities by saying that "most law enforcement is local in nature and should be dealt with accordingly.

"If the federal government can provide assistance in facilitating stronger community relationships, then the Trump administration will be there to assist," the response continues. "Otherwise, state and local authorities must answer to their own constituencies."

Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani shake hands with Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association President Steve Loomis at the Donald Trump endorsement announcement by the CPPA on Oct. 4.

This would be a shift from the philosophy employed by Obama's Justice Department, which expanded its civil-rights division and took a keen interest in how many departments were administered and whether they constitutionally policed their residents. Attorney General Eric Holder and his successor, Loretta Lynch, brought more investigations into local law-enforcement agencies than the previous two administrations.

Trump surrogate and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said during an October appearance in Cleveland that police reforms are another example of how the Justice Department under Obama became "politicized."

Cleveland police union President Steve Loomis appeared emboldened Thursday by Trump's victory and what it could mean for the department. He's also currently under investigation for wearing his official police uniform during a Trump campaign event.

Loomis, a loud critic of the police-reform effort, said the union's attorneys "are looking at the possibilities, if there are any possibilities, for some kind of change to the consent decree."

The union is not a party to the city's agreement with the Justice Department, and a federal judge denied a previous attempt by an outside group to make changes to the consent decree.

The union president said he thinks Trump's pledge to support officers will translate into federal grants to hire more police, conduct training and purchase equipment. Those tenants are required under Cleveland's consent decree.

Loomis also said he expects a Trump Justice Department to give different types of technical advice as it pertains to shaping new Cleveland police department policies. The Trump administration will be "cognizant of the false narrative that's out there and be hesitant to make major decisions based on false narratives" he said, adding that the current Justice Department works under an assumption that all police-involved shootings are unjustified.

However, Loomis offered this comment with no evidence and criminal indictments are still rare in most police-involved shootings.

Still, changes to the actual settlement would be difficult to make, said Samuel Walker, an expert on policing and criminal justice issues and an emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Chief U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. has approved and is overseeing the case and would have to sign off on any changes to the consent decree, Walker said.

"If there's an existing court order that stands, there's no getting around that," Walker said.

The city would also likely have to agree to changes, and it doesn't appear it will do so. City spokesman Dan Williams said the consent decree "wouldn't be changing from their end."

Terry Gilbert, a local civil-rights attorney, said it would be an extraordinary undertaking to alter or get rid of the Cleveland consent decree.

"It's in writing. They have to do certain things or they will pay a price," Gilbert said of the city and the Justice Department. "The city has a Democratic administration. They have poured a lot of money into a monitor. The Justice Department of the United States of America is bound by that court proceeding."

James Hardiman, a longtime Cleveland civil-rights lawyer who is active with the Cleveland NAACP, is not as optimistic. He said he fears a Trump Justice Department will stop actively pursuing reforms and giving input to the city as it develops new policies and training.

"If that should occur, then we're back to where we started from," Hardiman said.

U.S. Attorney Carole Rendon

U.S. Attorney Carole Rendon, an Obama appointee who is expected to step down before Trump takes office in January, said in a statement through a spokesman that "we have a signed and approved agreement that has been entered as an order of the United States District Court" that is being overseen by a judge and a monitor.

"I have no doubt that the agreement will be implemented in a timely and effective manner and that the Cleveland Division of Police will be a model of reform for the nation," Rendon said.

Still, the impact of Trump's election on the Justice Department will be "huge," Walker said. He said he anticipates a move away from consent decrees.

A similar shift occurred during George W. Bush's presidency. The Justice Department under President Bill Clinton used consent decrees to enforce constitutional policing. Bush instead relied on "technical assistance letters" that told a police department what it was doing wrong, but did not mandate fixes, Walker said.

Cleveland received one of these letters in 2004.

Barge said he was hired as monitor to enforce the consent decree, regardless of who was elected to any local, state or federal office. He said he told the parties early on what he expected and how to get everything done efficiently and in a timely manner.

"That works really well when everyone, including the Department of Justice, is participating," Barge said.

If you would like to comment on this story, please visit Friday's crime and courts comments section.
News / National

by Staff Reporter

A Filabusi married woman, Faith Mguni accused of being promiscuous was tied to her bed with no clothes on and whipped by her husband.Her crime was attending a funeral against her husband Delano Ndlovu's instruction not to go.Ndlovu told a magistrate that he feared his wife will spend a night at her boyfriend's place.Mguni is said to have at one point slept at her lover's place under the guise of attending a funeral."I told her not to go to a funeral because I feared that she would not go there but to her lover's place" said Ndlovu."The last time she said she was going to a funeral she went to sleep at a boyfriend's place" he added.Ndlovu added that in October, Mguni left thier home saying she was going on a shopping trip to South Africa only to be spotted galavanting at a nightclub with a married man.Magistrate Mzingaye Moyo remanded Ndlovu out of custody on $200 bail to November 14.
Simon Dawson | Bloomberg | Getty Images

If there's a big-ticket, must-have gift on your shopping list, put down the plastic and try this instead. Layaway, a program in which you put down a deposit on a costly item and make a series of installment payments toward it, is back for the holiday season. Walmart 's program, which runs from Sept. 12 to Dec. 12, is in full swing.

You can also put gifts on layaway at GameStop, Toys R Us, Sears and other retailers. Some airlines, including Delta and United, offer programs that will allow you to pay for your vacations under an installment plan.

Layaway might make sense if you're calling dibs on an item that's in high demand, like an Xbox One S, or if you're plunking down a large amount of cash for a pricey 65-inch Ultra HD TV. These items retail for $299.99 and $1,697.99, respectively. Consider that the average indebted U.S. household owes $15,675 on their credit cards, according to NerdWallet. It just might be better to make manageable payments in cash. Take the time to read up on your retailer's specific policy. Even if you aren't paying full price upfront, you can still have plenty of money on the line. You may be subject to fees for starting and cancelling the plan. At the end of the day, you don't get your item until you've completed your payments. "We recommend looking into a program and reading the fine print and details before you sign up," said Courtney Jespersen, a retail analyst at NerdWallet.



Check store policy first

Here are the key areas where you're likely to see some differences between retailers.

Availability: Most major retailers allow you to buy your items online, but those who offer layaway might have different terms for purchases made in-store versus the web. Sears and Kmart, for instance, offer 12-week payment plans for items you buy in person. If you're buying on the web at these two retailers, you may use the eight-week plan. Layaway is available in-store only at Burlington Coat Factory and Walmart. Eligibility: You may be disappointed if you're looking for a hot toy, as retailers can limit which items are eligible for installment payments. For instance, last month Sony unveiled its PlayStation VR, a virtual reality gaming headset. Unfortunately, it's not among the layaway-eligible items available at GameStop.

Down payments: Be ready to put something down upfront. Some stores will allow you to put down as little as $10, which is generally the case with Kmart. However, through Nov. 26, the retailer is hosting its No Money Down layaway program, which allows shoppers to put nothing down for in-store purchases and one-cent down for purchases online. The store will revert to its regular program after that date. Fees: Be on the lookout for additional costs in the form of service and cancellation fees. For instance, Sears charges a service fee of up to $10. If you decide you no longer want your item, it will cost $25 to cancel the payment plan.

"If you start making payments and then realize you don't want the product, you might get a refund minus the cancellation fee," said Jespersen of NerdWallet. Service fees are critical because you when account for them, you could be paying well over the purchase price by the time you're done with your installments.

Planners' perspectives

Financial planners warn consumers to proceed with caution. Understand that your layaway plan may be subject to state and local regulation, as well as the Truth in Lending Act under certain circumstances. Know the fine print before you apply. "You're giving your credit card a break," said Pamela Capalad, a certified financial planner in Brooklyn, New York. "Store cards' '12 months with zero percent financing' deals get people into the trap of taking a year to pay things off," she said. At the same time, you should consider whether it's really worthwhile to buy that big-ticket item in the first place. "The practical side of me wants to say, 'Don't buy stuff you can't afford,'" said Katie Brewer, founder of Your Richest Life in Garland, Texas. "I've seen instances where layaway is the lesser of two evils: It's better than accumulating debt and dealing with it over the next couple of months," she said.
News / Press Release

by Iphithule KaMaphosa

The Zimbabwe African Peoples' Union learns with regret and sadness the passing on of Nationalist Arthur Chadzingwa. Cde Chadzingwa passed on in Harare yesterday the 10th November 2016.Cde Arthur Chadzingwa was born in Mutare, then Umtali on 5 August 1944. His father was a messenger with the Rhodesian Railways while his mother was a worker at St Augustine's Orphanage.He obtained his primary education at Mutanda Government School in Mutare and St Faith Mission in Rusape.Arthur would go to Sakubva Secondary School in Mutare, Chikore School in Chipinge and Fletcher School in Gwelo for his secondary education which he finished in 1966.He then went to University College of Rhodesia where he graduated in 1969 with a B.Sc in Economics. He was Vice President of the Students Union in the last year of his studies.After failing to find employment, cde Chadzingwa joined and worked at Cold Comfort keeping books and doing farm work until January 1971.As a young man, Arthur Chadzingwa had been an active member of NDP, ZAPU and the PCC. He served the liberation movements and rose through the ranks from being Deputy National Secretary to National Organizing Secretary of the ANC. He later became London Representative of the Joshua Nkomo led liberation and nationalist movement.From 1973 to 1976, cde Chadzingwa was detained by the colonial system first at Kwekwe Prison and later at Hwahwa Restriction Camp. At the request of Joshua Nkomo, he was released in 1976 and he was deployed as a member of the negotiating team that was in talks with the government of the time. In September 1976, Arthur was to be nominated Secretary in charge of Secretaries for the nationalist liberation movement delegation to the Geneva Conference.Cde Athur Chadzingwa leaves a gap in the nationalist movement and struggle for a democratic Zimbabwe as fought for by ZAPU since 1980. This is after he contributed immensely to the struggle for independence and freedom which we together with him achieved in 1980. The Mother Party is saddened with his departure even at the time the struggle for democracy and fairness needed him most.We however take comfort in the contribution he made to the freedom of his fellow Zimbabwean countrymen and ZAPU will forever cherish the sacrifices and expertise he gave to the nation.The nation has lost a gallant fighter. ZAPU expresses heartfelt condolences to Cde Arthur Chadzingwa's family and nation at large.May His Soul Rest In Eternal Peace!
watch now

Jim Cramer says the rally in the stock market over the last two days is a textbook example of why no one ever made a dime panicking. On election night, Cramer heard several calls from commentators who told investors to sell everything several times. Investors that thought the market was on the verge of a financial collapse may have been inspired to sell everything. "My job is to say that when you hear sell everything, that comment is, one, most likely wrong, and two, most likely meant for someone with no memory or who can accept a buy everything back pitch the very next day," the "Mad Money" host said. For Cramer, it was the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater. Investors that focused on the hype and not the substance were kept away from an amazing opportunity as the market roared higher in the next two days.



Alex Gorsky on Mad Money. Adam Jeffery | CNBC

One of those opportunities was Expedia, which Cramer thinks deserves to run much higher. This is especially apparent considering that its competitor Priceline is up 23 percent for the year, while Expedia has barely moved. Investors were thrilled when Priceline reported a strong quarter recently that allowed the stock to skyrocket higher. "I think everyone is ignoring the other big online travel play, Expedia, which isn't getting the credit it deserves for its smaller businesses," Cramer said. However, Cramer was suspicious of how quickly but things have changed on the market in the last 48 hours. "I think this rally could be getting out of hand. There is no way that the velocity of these moves, both up and down, can last beyond a few days past the election," Cramer said. It was the companies that make tangible goods that had their stocks soar on Thursday. So did the stocks of companies that cater to people that feel optimistic enough to go out and eat and shop, rather than sitting at home or playing video games. Suddenly the companies that were weighed down by regulation, like the banks, have led the charge to all-time highs, too. These rotations told Cramer that the investors putting their money to work in the market were betting that the country is about to grow at a much faster pace. And while Cramer was skeptical of the fast rotation, similar moves in the past have had staying power.

Howard Schultz on Mad Money. Adam Jeffery | CNBC
With anti-Trump demonstrations in several cities for a second day, the president-elect lashed out on Twitter at "professional protesters" and the media.



But apparently after sleeping on it, Donald Trump had second thoughts.



In a tweet Friday morning, Trump said he loved the fact that "small groups of protesters have passion for our great country."

Donald Trump tweet

Demonstrators protest in several cities around the United States, including in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Denver, on Thursday to protest Trump's surprise election victory. Protesters smashed window, set fires, and battled with police in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday night in what police called a "riot."

Police on Thursday erected security barricades around two Trump properties that have been focal points for protesters  the president-elect's newly opened Pennsylvania Avenue hotel in Washington and the high-rise Trump Tower, where he lives in Manhattan.



After remaining apparently unprovoked by the protests on Wednesday, Trump, a prolific tweeter throughout his campaign, broke his silence on Thursday.



Tweet 1
The company that redefined what a modern work space should look like is adding to its portfolio with the official opening of its new Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore.

When Google set up shop in Singapore in 2007, it had just 24 employees. Today, it has more than 1,000.

Its new space -- which will also house employees from a number of its portfolio products such as YouTube --- is a blend between a campus and an office building, with high ceilings, open lounges and an abundance of natural lighting.

In addition to its main cafeteria which offers free food, the office boasts various coffee and snack bars where employees are encouraged to gather and as one person said, have plenty of bump-in encounters with others from different departments.
President-elect Donald Trump's world is about to get a lot bigger.

The Trump presidential transition effort was a hypothetical exercise until Wednesday, but now is the epicenter of an enormous effort to staff and manage a new administration from the Cabinet level all the way down. That makes the relatively obscure officials who have been toiling away on policy and governance issues during the campaign key gatekeepers in Trump's new Washington.

For many Republicans in Washington  especially those looking for jobs in the new administration  it hasn't been clear exactly who to call to get on board with the new team. On Thursday, CNBC obtained an organizational chart being used by members of the Trump transition team detailing officials and volunteers handling each policy issue area.



Entitled "Current Agency Action Team," the chart lists the Boston Consulting Group's Ron Nicol as director of agency action. Nicol's biography on the Boston Consulting Group website says he has worked on major business transformations for Fortune 50 companies, and that he "specializes in strategy development, organization transformation and delayering, customer discovery, merger and acquisition advice, and the development of major cost-reduction programs." According to the chart, Nicol oversees six key issue areas: defense, national security, economic issues, domestic issues, management/budget, and "Agency Transform. & Innovation."



Each of those issue areas has its own head, who will be key policy gatekeepers in Washington and who will be tasked with connecting with their current Obama administration counterparts to find out what's going on inside each agency. Defense, for example, is led by Keith Kellogg, a former vice president at Cubic Corporation who earlier served as assistant Army chief of staff for operations.



The economic team is headed by Bill Walton, according to the document, apparently the same Walton who is chairman of Rappahannock Ventures, and David Malpass, an economist and former Reagan administration treasury official.



The economic team is divided into seven key areas, each with its own Trump team member. Treasury is run by Malpass and commerce is run by Ray Washburne, a Trump campaign fundraiser with ties to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. United States Trade Representative  an area of heightened importance given the prominence of Trump's pledge to overhaul the U.S. approach to trade negotiations  is handled by Dan DiMicco, the former Nucor CEO.



Handling "Independent Financial Agencies," presumably including the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as other financial regulators, is former SEC commissioner Paul Atkins, who is now the CEO of Patomak Global Partners.



Other key issue areas include national security, which is being led by former congressman Mike Rogers, and domestic issues, led by former Ohio official Ken Blackwell. Management/budget is being jointly handled by former Attorney General Ed Meese and Kay Coles James, a former director of the Office of Personnel Management.



Heading up the "Agency Transform. & Innovation" category are Beth Kaufman and Jonathan Beck.



The full chart is below:


In Indonesia, rising backlash against a local politician may provide terror organisation Islamic State a fresh opportunity to deepen its grip on Southeast Asia's largest economy. The nation's capital city is facing gubernatorial election in February and current Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, commonly known as Ahok, is running to keep his seat. The 50-year old was promoted from deputy governor to governor after his predecessor Joko Widodo won the 2014 presidential election. If elected next year, Ahoka Christian of Chinese ethnicitywould become Jakarta's first elected non-Muslim governor in a country with the world's largest Muslim population.

Governor of Jakarta Basuki Tjahaja 'Ahok' Purnama (C) speaks to journalists after a police investigation in Jakarta on Nov 7, 2016. Wawan Kurniawan / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

However, Ahok's election campaign has antagonized the country's conservative base, with some religious groups preaching that Muslims shouldn't vote for "non-believers." Anti-Ahok sentiment is now at a boiling point after the politician cited a Koranic verse during a September 27 speech. The religious verse suggests Muslims should not take Jews or Christian as their allies or leaders and in his remarks, Ahok said Indonesians should not be deceived by his opponents who use the verse to influence the election. The Indonesia Ulema Council (MUI), a circle of the religious elite, insists that he committed blasphemy by insulting the Muslim holy book. But the governor has apologized and said he never meant to offend the religion. Still, the public has pounced on Ahok. 10,000 demonstrators took to Jakarta's streets last month and as many as 50,000 people protested last Friday, demanding that the governor be prosecuted for alleged hate speech.

Implications

The rallies won't dent Ahok's chances of victory next year because of the bulk of the Jakarta electorate maintains a more liberal stance, Eurasia's Indonesia analyst Achmad Sukarsono said in a recent note.

The bigger concern is what the protests mean for fundamentalism in Indonesia after Islamic State (IS) fighters publicly supported Friday's protest via social media. "The issue has gone beyond elections to become a rallying cry for Islamists pushing for Islamization," Sukarsono explained. "With Ahok in the race, these rallies will continue through the campaign period, with a risk of Islamic State supporters seeking to leverage them for their own gains." The country's national police chief Tito Karnavian has also warned that sympathizers of the international network are likely to "take advantage" of the volatile environment.

Nov 4, 2016: Thousands protested against Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama's alleged hate speech at the Presidential Palace. Radical religious group the Islamic Defender Front (FPI) has urged the government to arrest Purnama for religious defamation. Anton Raharjo - NurPhoto - Getty Images

"Over Telegram and other messaging services, they [IS supporters] have been encouraging each other to use the November 4 rally to fan the flames of jihad across the country," Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, wrote in a recent note published on think tank The Lowy Institute's website.


"For me, dinner for eight people with an 18- to 20-pound turkey, I'm spending $25 to $30," said Jill Cataldo, founder of SuperCouponing.com.

That estimate  which works out to $5 per person  already sounds like a bargain, but avid couponers say they can easily trim costs further.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has yet to release its annual estimate of Thanksgiving costs, but last year, the group pegged the typical family's spending at $50.11. That meal, they said, includes "turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a relish tray of carrots and celery, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and beverages of coffee and milk, all in quantities sufficient to serve a family of 10. There is also plenty for leftovers."

Focusing on finding a cheaper turkey can drop meal costs quickly. The average hen runs $1.45 per pound and the average tom, $1.47, according to the turkey Market News Report from the Department of Agriculture  putting a 16-pound bird at roughly $23.

Deals vary by supermarket chain and region, but it's common this time of year to see offers for a free or deeply discounted bird when you spend a set amount, said Cataldo. Some offers are easier to snag than others: In northern New Jersey, for example, ShopRite's deal offered a free bird with $400 in spending, while Acme required just $100.

Advance planning and flexibility can help you pull together the rest of the meal on the cheap, said grocery expert Teri Gault. Monitor store circulars and coupon offers between now and Thanksgiving, she said, and you're bound to find stackable deals on ingredients that were already on your list, like baking supplies for pies, stuffing mix and rolls.

"Use whatever produce is on sale for your side dishes," said Gault. "All those things are going to come together, so, so inexpensively."

If you don't want to cook, compare options for prepared meals from supermarkets that you can reheat and serve at home. They're not cheap  per-person prices can easily top $10, said Cataldo. But that's still cheaper than dining out, and you can supplement that base meal with other sides and desserts.
"We feel very good about our numbers," Alibaba president Michael Evans told CNBC's " Squawk on the Street " on Friday. "Politics, we can't control. The quality of what we disclose, we can. And our ability to work cooperatively with government and regulatory agencies around the world is a hallmark of building this business for the global markets."

Alibaba 's president responded on Friday to the idea that president-elect Donald Trump might drum up more regulatory scrutiny of the Chinese technology giant.

Michael Evans, co-president of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., gestures as he speaks at a news conference during the company's annual November 11 Singles' Day online shopping event in Shenzhen, China, on Friday, Nov. 11, 2016.

Earlier this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation into whether Alibaba's accounting practices violated federal laws. The investigation came just a year after an unrelated high-profile fight between regulators and accounting firms about the disclosure of Chinese companies.

Trump, elected to the U.S. presidency this week, was critical of China during his campaign, proposing increased tariffs on trade with the world's second biggest economy.

"I have the largest bank in the world as a tenant of mine. I have very big relationships with China, but the fact is China is the great abuser of the United States economically and we do nothing about it, and it would be very easy to stop," Trump said in August.



At the time, Alibaba's vice chairman Joe Tsai said that the Chinese sentiment was to "make sure there is no animosity." Evans reiterated his confidence in Alibaba's "carefully prescribed" accounting procedures on Friday.

"We're very comfortable with the accuracy of our reporting, and in the quality of our numbers," Evans said. "The SEC sent us a request for information on a variety of things. We've responded to that and we're working in full cooperation with the SEC. And we're not concerned about both what they're looking at, and also what we're disclosing."

It comes amid one of the company's biggest shopping days of the year, Single's Day. It's about five times bigger than Cyber Monday, and sales hit $17.8 billion. Alibaba's founder, Jack Ma, estimates that Alibaba's business would be the 20th-largest economy in the world if it were a country.



Evans said the single biggest beneficiaries of Single's Day are U.S. brands. Macy's, Victoria's Secret and Crayola are among the brands participating.



"United States: great country. China: great country," Evans said. "The two biggest economies in the world. If those two countries work together .... then both of those countries will do extremely well. But most importantly, the rest of the world will do well. The rest of the world is relying on the United States and China to figure it out. I have a high expectation that that's going to be the case."

 CNBC's Ari Levy and Reuters contributed to this report.
If all politics is local, that should provide some encouragement to Democrats. The Republican Party will now control every branch of the federal government  and extended its existing statehouse dominance on Election Day  but not U.S. cities. Two-thirds of America's 100 largest cities are controlled by Democratic Party mayors. (67 Democrats, 28 Republicans and 5 mayors with an Independent Party or no party affiliation). "Historically, we've seen a shift over the last 30 years to more Democrats in urban areas and Republicans in rural areas. It just reflects the cultural shifts we've seen in our country," said Brooks Rainwater, senior executive at the National League of Cities (NLC). The shift has big implications in two major policy areas for a Trump administration, and in the federal government's relationship with local jurisdictions: infrastructure and immigration. And these are areas in which tension between cities and the federal government already exist.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City speaks at a press conference October 24, 2014 in New York City. Getty Images

The dominant role of Democratic mayors in America's largest cities is a focus of policy planners on the right.

"Cities are heavily Democratic. It seems unlikely that GOP statehouses or Congress will favor many of their leftist ideas on social and economic policy," said Aaron Renn, a senior fellow and urban policy specialist at conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute. "Leftist mayors and urban residents, for their part, need to rethink their unrelenting hostility to those who don't share their agenda."

'Fixing' inner cities

The first policy pronouncement in President-Elect Trump's victory speech was, "We are going to fix our inner cities." "Just as it was a mistake for Democrats to demonize and ignore suburban and rural Republican voters, it would be a terrible mistake for Republicans to neglect urban interests. Like it or not, the economic heart of our country is in major metropolitan areas," Renn said.

Renn said the great economic divide is also present in cities, though playing out in different ways, such as debates around gentrification. "Fully integrating black Americans, who still have a major presence in our cities, into middle-class American economic success remains an urgent task I hope Republicans will engage with," he said.

But some urban policy experts bristle at the way Trump and the alt-right movement portrayed inner cities during the campaign. "We are sort of concerned about how [inner cities] were portrayed during the campaign, said Michael Wallace, acting director of federal advocacy at the NLC. "We just push back against the narrative that cities are run down," Wallace said. "Cities don't need 'fixing.' ... Campaign rhetoric used a lot of stereotypical thinking about cities. We want to make sure it doesn't have an undo influence on governing of cities." More from CNBC Metro 20:

The 20 worst places in America to start a business

The 20 best places in America to start a business

2 ideas, $200,00 and a plan to revive Rust Belt cities City economies have driven the economic recovery. Ninety percent of U.S. GDP comes from metro regions. The 30 largest metro areas are responsible for half of national GDP. At The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City(ICIC), the Roxbury, Massachusetts-based economic development nonprofit founded by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, officials were pleased that inner cities became part of the debate over the future of our country, "although the term may not always have been used appropriately," said Kim Zeuli, senior v.p. "The types of infrastructure investment that need to be prioritized depend on the city and inner city, but I think it is safe to say that all inner cities need some infrastructure improvements to support business growth," she said. In contrast to stereotypes of inner cities that persist, ICIC uses a quantitative definition to identify these areas, and Zeuli noted that for close to two decades already well-known firms have been taking advantage of business opportunities in inner cities. "There is broad agreement on infrastructure, but when we say 'fixing inner cities,' mayors are best-situated to make decisions about funding coming from the federal government," Wallace said.

The National League of Cities anticipates some fiscal pressure as a result of one party rule in Washington, D.C., but he said the Senate remains closely divided and has the filibuster option. "The writing is on the wall that there will be greater fiscal pressure. We will be making the case about local priority programs. All we can do is make the case for why funding is important," Wallace said.



Urban immigration battlegrounds

No issue has created greater tension between local government and the federal government than immigration. If the Trump administration follows through on the immigration rhetoric of its candidate, hostility between cities and the federal government over immigration could escalate. It has already been tense under the Obama administration, especially in its first years, when local leaders butted heads with the federal government over immigration policies that compelled cities to share information on unauthorized immigrants that came to the notice of the law. Cities that resisted and implemented policies to block federal requests for information have been referred to as "sanctuary cities," a controversial term that goes back decades to an earlier wave of refugees from Central America who found safe harbor in some urban areas across the country. Federal policies that require more sharing of information with the federal government any time an unauthorized immigrant entered the criminal justice system started under the Bush administration and were continued by the President Obama, who was at one point called by immigration critics "the deporter-in-chief." Ultimately, the Obama administration scaled back a major program to only require sharing of information once an unauthorized immigrant was sentenced, not any time they entered the criminal justice system. Michelle Mittelstadt, spokeswoman for the Migration Policy Institute, said the inescapable fact is that the federal government wields by far the largest power in immigration policy. "To the extent that cities and states have the ability to act, it is against the backdrop of a limited role for them." In recent years, some cities have made decisions to offer drivers licenses and municipal ID cards to unauthorized immigrants.

"One might see more efforts viewed as helping unauthorized immigrants against a rising levels of deportations," Mittelstadt said. But she stressed that Trump has had any number of proposals, and immigration policy makers will have to wait and see what the reality is. "I imagine it will be a very dynamic area both for the federal government and cities and states, and can anticipate there will be more efforts by cities and other local jurisdictions to blunt, to the extent they can, any significant rise in immigration enforcement."

I imagine it will be a very dynamic area both for the federal government and cities and states, and can anticipate there will be more efforts by cities and other local jurisdictions to blunt, to the extent they can, any significant rise in immigration enforcement. Michelle Mittelstadt Migration Policy Institute spokeswoman

Trump said on the campaign trail he would withhold federal funding from cities who did not comply with federal immigration policy. He also said in a 60 Minutes interview of Sunday night that he would immediately deport two to three million unauthorized immigrants who are criminals, but referred to unauthorized immigrants as "terrific people" more broadly, and said broader immigration policy decisions will take time. The mayors of New York and San Francisco have already voiced their concerns about Trump's immigration plans since his election and said they will remain "sanctuary" cities. Already there are at least five bills in the Senate and eight in the house trying to target "sanctuary cities" and the noncompliance policies. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced Kate's Law  referring to a San Francisco woman murdered by an unauthorized immigrant  that would bar jurisdictions that resist cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement from getting federal grants. Other legislative efforts make non-cooperation policies illegal in full. "One would imagine it's an area where Congress and the Trump administration would look in the future," Mittelstadt said. Wallace at the National League of Cities said "horsetrading" of federal money over social issues would be a real problem. And it has already shown up in the "sanctuary cities" issue. "We're very opposed to the idea that the federal government could label a city as a sanctuary city and threaten to withhold important social funding that would hurt the most vulnerable people," Wallace said. "It's a very dangerous path."
Donald Trump's Election Is A Brutal Wake-Up Call

Wednesday night, I marched from Union Square to Trump Tower with thousands of other angry New Yorkers. We screamed for the world to hear that Donald Trump is not my president, and revived old classics like the people, united, will never be defeated. As we blocked traffic, the people whose commutes we were delaying honked their horns and cheered in support. It felt, for the first time since the election was called for Trump, like maybe we were going to be okay.

It was my first protest since I was disillusioned by the inability of millions of angry voices from around the world to stop the war in Iraq.

ADVERTISEMENT

I was a freshman in high school the year the United States invaded Iraq. I was fourteen years old, just coming into political consciousness, and I thought the power of the people could prevent the bombing of innocents in the name of oil. I went to every walk-out, every rally, every march. I chanted and screamed up and down Fifth Avenue, laid down for a die-in in Union Square, and took buses to Washington D.C. to scream right at Bushs house.

I thought I was seeing the birth of a powerful movement, that this was my generations moment to come alive and make a difference. A student of the 60s, I braced for Vietnam-level resistance.

But as the bombs fell, and continued to fall, I learned the hard lesson that the powers that be dont care how many people are in the streets. Theyve already factored our anger into their decisions, and consider it a minor cost of doing business. While we chanted outside of the White House, Bush and Cheney blocked out the sounds of our cries as easily as if they were a light rain falling on their closed windows.

I was crestfallen, disillusioned, jaded. I threw away my cardboard signs and resigned myself to a world where the government isnt affected by the anger of the people. Years later, when that anger bubbled up again in the form of Occupy Wall Street, I sat it out. I agreed with everything they stood for, but I didnt see the point of sleeping in a park when nobody in power cared whether I was cold or tired or pissed off.

Like so many, I retreated to the internet to spread information and opinions. I tweeted and wrote op-eds, my friends and I congratulating each others wit and wokeness with likes, thickening the walls of the bubble wed built around ourselves  the bubble that would eventually prevent us from seeing just how real the threat of Trump was, and would leave us stunned when it popped on election night.

But two days ago, I received a brutal wake-up call. The fire that I thought had been squelched in me years ago began to rage, along with the fear, heartbreak, regret, and anger. As I joined the chants of not my president! in Union Square last night, I had an important realization about the value of protesting: There may be nothing we can do at this point to prevent a Trump presidency, but that doesnt make it okay to do nothing. Even if all we can do is rail and cry, then lets rail and cry.

ADVERTISEMENT

The only way this can be anything but a complete catastrophe is if it invigorates people to resist, to engage, to organize. Its important for the rest of the world to see that the majority of Americans did not pick Trump. We would be a global laughing stock right now, if this huge mistake weve just made wasnt going to affect everyone around the world.

And even more important than making a statement to the world, we must make a statement to the people right here in America who are afraid for their lives under a Trump presidency. As a white woman  the demographic that shamefully handed the presidency to Trump, choosing white supremacy over equality, selling out the world for their race because the risks to women under Trump will harm them less than women of color  I feel immense shame and guilt over the election results. But instead of shaking my head, Im taking this as a call to do better. Now that my comfortable liberal bubble has been popped, I am going to get off of Facebook, get off of my ass and try my best to make this right. I dont know how yet, other than writing these words, marching in the streets, donating to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, and speaking up against every instance of casual racism and sexism I see. Im going to be an abortion clinic escort, and Im going to show up at protests, in person, to express my anger and grief, and my solidarity with those who are in more danger than I am.

I didnt do enough to prevent Trump from being elected. None of us did. But now we have to clean up our own mess, and memes and witty tweets are not going to cut it.

I know Im not the only one that feels like this right now, because last night I marched in the streets with thousands of others. This is my pledge to stay as pissed off as I am right now, to fight complacency as hard as I fight the ugliness that I know is ahead. I hope everyone who screamed at Trump Tower last night will hold onto their anger, too, and use it to do much-needed good over the next four dark years.



Lilly O'Donnell is a freelance writer from New York City. She's also Deputy Editor of Narratively, and a former BUST intern. Follow her on Twitter @lillyodonnell.

Top photo via Twitter

More from BUST

19 Photos From Anti-Trump Protests To Inspire You To Take To The Streets

All The Sexist, Racist, Homophobic Shit That Went Down The First Day After Trump

More White Women Voted For Trump Than Hillary Clinton And We Need To Talk About It
Richard Branson, founder of The Virgin Group, struggled for words when asked to weigh in on the results of the U.S. election.



"I mean look, it's very sad, very frightening, very worrying," Branson said at an event held by Quartz.



The billionaire lives on Necker Island, which is part of the British Virgin Islands. He said that he has received hundreds of emails from worried employees, some of whom are asking how they can join him.

They aren't kidding, he added.



"It's pretty terrifying when you throw out the list of all these issues," he said. "Global warming could be set back almost irreparably. And universal healthcare, that could be set back almost irreparably  help with refugees, all these issues, gay rights."
U.S. Army field artillery captain Jon Deng will end his active duty in about a month. His stint included a deployment last year to Iraq, where in between marshaling military duties, he learned on his own how to become a software developer, or coder in geek-talk. He's eager to transition into a promising career as a website developer  with some help from a couple of organizations that smooth veterans' often bumpy about-face into civilian life.



Andy Katz | Pacific Press | LightRocket | Getty Images

Deng, 27, graduated magna cum laude in 2011 from Washington University in St. Louis' Olin Business School with a degree in finance. He spent a year at Harvard Law School before deciding "that being a lawyer wasn't what I wanted to do with my life," he recalled. So in January 2013, aiming for a new direction, Deng joined the U.S. Army. While stationed in Baghdad, his full-time job involved manually entering data into Excel spreadsheets, a tedious task that didn't exactly thrill him, either. Fortuitously, he met another GI, a computer engineer by trade, "who turned me on to the idea of coding," Deng said. For months he spent nights and weekends taking free online coding classes, primarily through Codecademy, and eventually became what's called a full-stack JavaScript web developer. Currently stationed at Fort Drum in upstate New York, Deng is immersed in a coding boot camp, Hack Reactor, toiling remotely to hone his talents.

He'll be going to battle in a crowded field, loaded with scores of other young, bright coders clamoring to earn six-figure starting salaries at Facebook, Twitter, Google and other tech giants, as well as myriad start-ups and smaller companies, where software developers are in high demand. Beyond normal competition, though, Deng's soon-to-be status as a veteran can make his path even more daunting. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that nearly 250,000 men and women will leave the military this year and during each of the next three. Their changeover from uniforms to civvies includes a one-week transition-assistance program, presented by the Department of Labor and its subcontractors. The goal is to match the credentialed skills veterans have mastered in a branch of the service to jobs in the civilian realm. Yet with their nontraditional backgrounds, compared to non-military peers, it can be a challenge for vets. "What you get is a one-size-fits-all solution to one of the most diverse workforces in America," stated Mike Slagh, co-founder and CEO of VetTechTrek, a nonprofit company based in San Francisco that links veterans to tech companies. Slagh and his partner, Steve Weiner, know the drill, as they're both vets turned tech entrepreneurs.



U.S. Army field artillery captain Jon Deng Source: Jon Deng

During his transition after two years in the Navy, Slagh said, "I realized there weren't any pathways into entrepreneurship for vets to join early- or growth-stage companies." He and Weiner figured that vets were as capable as non-military counterparts looking to start businesses. But because of their training, "vets can add a different perspective, a different set of experiences," Slagh added. "Vets can see through a chaotic environment and make sense of it." Launched last year, VetTechTrek has hosted a half-dozen experiential "treks," two-day sessions that where tech-savvy veterans meet with fellow vets who work at more than 60 technology start-ups in New York, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, among them Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook and Y Combinator. VetTechTrek is about to announce a rebranding tweak of the company to add longer, immersive internship and work-trial programs matching vets with potential employers. Deng hasn't been on trek, but will be working with Slagh on a software-development project once he leaves the Army. In the meantime, Deng continues to sharpen his coding acumen and improve his marketability on HackerRank, a website where nearly 2 million coders from around the world virtually gather to show off their skills to would-be employers. The coders undertake challenges, test projects provided by companies looking to hire, and HackerRank grades their performance and assigns them a rank.



Vets can add a different perspective, a different set of experiences. Mike Slagh co-founder and CEO of VetTechTrek
Republican Donald Trump's astonishing victory over heavy favorite Hillary Clinton was met with a mostly warm reception by the U.S. business community.

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said Trump's economic plan has "unlimited" opportunities, while hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman said he is "extremely bullish" on the president-elect.

Maris Ogg, president at Tower Bridge Advisors, an asset management firm based in Pennsylvania, said the business community's bullishness on Trump revolves around the fact that the GOP also controls both the House and the Senate.

"Even without doing anything too radical, the U.S. could see significant improvement" on a number of levels for businesses, including infrastructure and health care, she said. "Obamacare has stopped so many businesses from hiring people. Fix it."
After the vote in the U.K. and President-elect 's win at the ballot box, the results of conventional polling seem increasingly further from the actual outcome.

According to the founder of an artificial intelligence system, who said Donald Trump would the presidential election, polling can be described as a "statistics of convenience" subject to many human biases.

"There is obviously a big difference between polling and how machines could look at a wide base of data all across the internet through the internet engagement of people because of various reasons that might not show in polling," Sanjiv Rai, founder of Genic.AI, an artificial intelligence system, told CNBC on Friday.
Growth concerns have options traders doubting the outlook for Alibaba , China's flagship e-commerce giant.

Despite shattering records for the e-commerce giant's annual Singles Day shopping extravaganza, shares of Alibaba were down 2 percent on Friday and had fallen 3 percent in the previous two sessions. One trader was able to cash in on the sell-off.

On Thursday, someone bought 2,000 of the same weekly 97-puts for $3.60. By Friday morning, those puts were worth more than $5 per contract, meaning that trader made a cool $320,000 in 24 hours.

"Obviously, those who were following the stock probably observed that it was trading relatively weak, so they didn't digest what otherwise looked like an impressive growth number very well," Optimize Advisors strategist Mike Khouw said Thursday on CNBC's "Fast Money."

Alibaba is up 14 percent this year, but has been struggling to make highs since the summer.

The Nov. 11 Singles Day is the world's biggest shopping event, with sales drawing even Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States.


Since January 2016, Starbucks has been featuring cookies from Michel et Augustin in all of their US stores.

How did a baked-goods company that started out of a Paris apartment land a deal with one of the largest coffee chains in the world?

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told the story Thursday at the DealBook Conference, hosted by CNBC anchor and New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin.

"Two people show up at the front desk of Starbucks from France. They came from France!" he said. The CEO recalled that the young Michel et Augustin employees arrived at the Seattle headquarters with a fresh batch of cookies.


Tuesday's stunning election results underscored the deep economic uncertainty and scarring felt by voters across America. Frustration with the status quo reached the boiling point, and where people had a chance to vote for what they thought was change  they took it. That's as true of voter support for Donald Trump as it is of voters crossing party lines to approve four state ballot initiatives that raised the minimum wage for 2.3 million working Americans.

Make no mistake: Donald Trump won by dividing Americans and appealing to the worst impulses in people. His ugly campaign will have far-reaching consequences for the nation that we can't even begin to tally. But many working-class voters were drawn to Trump because of their well-founded belief that the rules of our economy are rigged against them. Americans are working too hard for too little. They know that they should be sharing more in the profits of their employers, and they are frustrated that the economic recovery is not translating into better jobs.

There's no better sign of that frustration than the minimum wage. Congress hasn't raised the federal minimum wage since 2009, and so this year voters in four states took matters into their own hands. The decisive wins demonstrated the breadth and depth of national support for action on wages. In Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington State, voters decisively backed minimum wage increases of $12 to $13.50 an hour. In red Arizona, voters in the City of Flagstaff also approved a $15 minimum wage, making it the first city outside of the coasts to join the Fight for $15.

In Maine and Flagstaff, voters also approved a gradual phase-out of the outdated and unfair subminimum wage for tipped workers  a give-away to the restaurant industry whose staying power is a testament to the lobbying clout of the "other NRA," the National Restaurant Association. As the first state and city to get rid of the tipped wage in 30 years, these historic votes create momentum for the "One Fair Wage" movement calling for national action to eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers.
President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Nov. 10, 2016.

A daily morning look at the financial stories you need to know to start the day.

STOCKS/ECONOMY

-Stock futures are down after the Dow rallied to a record high Thursday. The consumer sentiment report is the key data point this morning.



Bond yields are rising on expectations the Fed will be quicker to raise rates under President Trump and there will be more economic growth.



TRUMP TRANSITION

-The anti-Trump protest in Portland, Oregon was officially declared a riot last night. President-elect Trump is denouncing the violence.


Why Electoral College Reform Won't Happen Any Time Soon

Trending News: Nice Try Democrats, But The Electoral College Isn't Going Anywhere

Long Story Short

A petition has gone viral since the election asking for members of the electoral college to make the unprecedented decision to back Clinton instead of Donald Trump when they go to symbolically vote for the president. The electoral college may be ancient and arcane, but there's no chance in hell it's going to change. Not for this election anyway.

Long Story

If this isn't the Trumpacolypse, you've got me fooled. Riots have flared up across the country, including a protest last night in Portland where police launched stun grenades and rubber bullets at angry protesters.

VIDEO: Police use stun grenades against anti-Trump protesters in Portland. - @itsmikebivins pic.twitter.com/dXd9M30gUJ  Conflict News (@Conflicts) November 11, 2016

All over the country, unbelievable acts of racism have also been documented, many of which have been documented by journalist Shaun King on his Twitter account.

But fear not America, there's a reprieve from this chaos and a way to change the result. We could go back to life before November 8th, with the slight difference that instead of Barack Obama we'd have fellow democrat Hillary Clinton sitting in the White House.

Sound good to you? That's a future that those who published a Change.org petition would have you believe. The petition is calling on members of the electoral college to storm out on the job they were tasked to do by the Republican Party and make a u-turn in the other direction. Over 2 million people who signed the petition want members of the electoral college to vote Hillary in a sort of "f*ck you, f*ck you, f*ck you, you're cool, f*ck you, I'm out" of electoral politics.

via GIPHY

Getting rid of the electoral college altogether makes a lot of sense. If we truly believe in democracy  a vote by the people, for the people  it would be reasonable to consider that the president should be the person the majority of the population voted for. Like, duh.

It has also has been argued on Twitter and in columns such as this New York Times article, it's an arcane practice brought in to give old whites in the south a bigger say on who gets elected president.

You might be surprised to hear that ending the electoral college is actually something Hillary and Donald agree on (and here you thought they were opposite on everything). Following Al Gore's loss in 2000  even after winning the popular vote  Clinton said: I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people," according to the NYT, "and to me that means its time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.

Trump himself tweeted back in 2012 that the electoral college needs to go.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012



But despite bipartisan criticism of the electoral college, there's no chance in hell it's going to put Hillary in the Oval Office instead of Trump.

First off, the individuals in the electoral college tasked with the job of voting for the president are primed and vetted specifically to not rebel, as explained by Vox. Plus, even if the electors don't like Trump, voting for Hillary is a completely different beast altogether. Top Republicans like Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush may have voiced their discontent with Trump, but they wouldn't go so far as to say they'd vote Democrat.

Plus, Hillary herself accepted the loss. She may be known for her flip-flopping, but supporting this last ditch effort would just be embarrassing.

And then there's the follies of going to a popular vote. Larger cities and suburban areas, like those in New York and California, would essentially have control over who gets elected president and the candidates would spend all their time campaigning there. States like Wisconsin, which actually made a big difference this election by surprisingly voting red instead of blue, would be ignored. Then again, there are some who argue that America's big cities won't have all the power mathematically.

Another problem with getting rid of the electoral college is the fact that the Constitution would need to be amended, which is far from easy to do. Three-fourths of the states would have to vote in favor, and I don't see the smaller states giving up their power so easily. Also, have you heard a fellow American talk about the Constitution? Nobody is touching that thing.

'Screw it, I'll just move to Canada,' you say? Sorry (as Canadians say), but Canada has just about the same problem with its first past the post system. There's no popular vote there either and it has had serious electoral headaches in the past, including that time a separatist party was the opposition party due to vote distribution.

And you know your boy Justin Trudeau that everyone loves? He won a majority mandate with 54.4% of the seats, but just 39.5% of the popular vote. Hardly much better than Clinton's narrow 47.7%-47.5% popular vote lead, according to the latest count.

Speaking of Trudeau, like Trump and Clinton, he's down with electoral reform, but that was before getting elected. Now that he's in power, he's unsurprisingly not as eager to change the system that he got elected on. Go figure.

Power does that sort of thing to leaders  and I wouldn't bet on Trump doing anything different.

So sit tight Democrats. Trump is your commander in chief, whether you like it or not.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

Why don't people just move on and stop being sore losers?

Drop This Fact

Most Americans (62%) said they'd trash the electoral college in favor of a popular vote, according to a 2011 Gallup poll.
An employee prepares to stitch backtabs on a pair of New Balance shoes in Skowhegan, Maine.

Shoe company New Balance got a taste of the sharp division surrounding U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's surprise win this week after its comments about his impending presidency sparked both backlash and pledges of support.

"The Obama administration turned a deaf ear to us and frankly, with President-elect Trump, we feel things are going to move in the right direction," Matthew LeBretton, New Balance's vice president of public affairs, told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Some customers took to social media to express their unhappiness with the company's stance and announced their plans to protest the move by boycotting or throwing out their New Balance shoes.

Tweet: Besides New Balance, what other corporation endorsed Trump? Let me know so I can boycott them for life

Other customers took the opposite reaction and said the move would lead them to buy more shoes from the company.



Tweet: Time for me to buy New Balance shoes: The only major company that still makes athletic shoes in the US praised Trump



LeBretton's decision to support Trump had been, in part, because of Trump's opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which would phase out some tariffs on shoes made in Vietnam and thus benefit companies that import shoes, such as Nike and Adidas, NPR reported.

However, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mirror newspaper, New Balance's vice president has since attempted to cool the Trump rhetoricm insisting his remarks were taken out of context. New Balance was not immediately available for comment.
One of the main aftershocks could well be trade. The U.S. president does have a relatively large amount of discretion in trade. New agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), are likely to be halted.



However, these agreements were essentially political constructs that were primarily designed to benefit the U.S. and those nations that allied themselves to the U.S. at the expense of others. The TPP has already started to divide Asia into those who benefit most from TPP (e.g. Vietnam) and those who don't (e.g. China and Thailand). Trump is basically moving those battle lines but I don't see these fractures as being worse. In fact, a better outcome for China may even delay global and regional instability. Similarly, Trump will no doubt cut the TTIP.



A Trump trade war with China is likely to be no more damaging and arguably less damaging and less effective (but much clumsier, more visible and playing to the gallery) than the TPP would have been for China. Ultimately this may be a zero-sum game but a zero-sum game where China can't afford to lose without there being potentially serious consequences for the Chinese and global economy. For this reason, Trump barging noisily through the front door may prove less of an immediate trigger to a Chinese depression than TPP more subtly attacking China via the backdoor, like a stealthy cat burglar.



Trump has stated that he would renegotiate NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and potentially withdraw the U.S. from the agreement if consensus with other members could not been found. He would not need congressional approval to do this; although this is not saying he would. Trump will likely come under pressure to give details of his plans, particularly as the Mexican peso drops significantly in value.
Now that Donald Trump has been elected, tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel looks forward to a president who will pick his battles wisely.

"There are certainty a lot of things that Trump said that I would not have said or done," Thiel conceded in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "I do think Trump is a fighter."



That characteristic serves him well in a combative Washington climate. Thiel compared Trump's feisty persona to Mitt Romney, who failed in his bid for presidency in the 2012 election.

"[I]n a way I could understand why Trump was doing this," he said. "Romney tried the opposite strategy where he was extremely nice to everybody and just got rolled."

Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and pioneer in many other major tech ventures, has taken considerable heat for his support for Trump.
Republicans in Congress have a straightforward path to eliminating key pieces of the Affordable Care Act: They can block the planned insurance expansion in 2017, dismantle Medicaid expansion, and eliminate new insurance marketplaces. That could add up to an incredible blow  possibly causing 22 million people to lose their insurance coverage. But getting rid of the rest of the law wholesale is a lot trickier. More from Vox:

Donald Trump will be the only US president ever with no political or military experience

Peter Thiel thought about the election like a venture capitalist

Donald Trump has the power to rip Barack Obama's legacy out by its roots

Rolling back provisions  including one allowing young adults to stay on their parents' health plans and another banning lifetime coverage limits or one banning the rejection of people with pre-existing conditions  would be harder under Senate rules. This is good news for people who get insurance at work and who benefit from these insurance rules. But it's little comfort for anyone who buys their own insurance, like a contractor, freelancer, or anyone who isn't part of a group plan through their employer.

THEY HAVE A DEATH BLOW TO THE OBAMACARE HEALTH COVERAGE EXPANSION. John McDonough, Harvard University professor

These people could face huge disruptions in their coverage. If Obamacare repeal moves forward without any replacement, they could find themselves facing much higher premiums  or no health insurance plans that want to sell them coverage. "They have a death blow to the Obamacare health coverage expansion," says John McDonough, a Harvard University professor who worked in the Senate on the passage of the Affordable Care Act. We don't know what, exactly, the future of Obamacare looks like right now or what approach Congressional Republicans will take toward dismantling the law. But after talking to a half-dozen experts over the past few days, it seems likely to me that one of these four scenarios  or some combination of them  will play out. Which one moves forward matters: Some scenarios allow Republicans to repeal the insurance expansion, but would keep Obamacare rules for the employer market (again, the coverage to age 26 provision and ban on lifetime limits). Some will get rid of everything. The stakes are different depending on what direction Republicans head, and this is a guide to where they most likely will go.

Scenario 1: Trump and a Republican House dismantle major parts of Obamacare via reconciliation, leading to 22 million Americans losing insurance This is arguably the most plausible outcome at the moments. Republicans unravel Obamacare's insurance expansion  both the Medicaid expansion and private health insurance marketplaces  which would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, lead to 22 million losing coverage. Senate Republicans only need 51 votes to get this done. They'd use what is known as the "reconciliation process," which would allow them to make changes to anything that affects the federal budget. Parts of the law that don't affect the budget can't be changed using this process. Last winter, Republicans drafted a bill that would fit the parameters of the reconciliation process. HR 3762 was introduced into the House on October 16, 2015, by Rep. Tom Price (R-GA). Abbe Gluck, a law professor at Yale University, describes it as "a blueprint for how you might pull the guts out of the Affordable Care Act." This bill would do a lot to dismantle Obamacare. It would repeal Obamacare's tax credits for low- and middle-income Americans to purchase insurance at the end of 2017. It would end the individual mandate penalties for not buying coverage. And it would end the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion at the same time, essentially creating a two-year transition period in which Republicans would presumably consider Obamacare replacement plans.

The bill doesn't abolish Obamacare entirely through reconciliation. It doesn't, for example, repeal the provision that allows young adults to stay on their parents' health plans  that doesn't cost the federal government anything. Congress also couldn't repeal the ban on annual or lifetime limits for coverage. Republicans actually don't bring back pre-existing conditions through this option either  insurance plans would still be required to offer coverage to anyone who wants it. That being said, this would not be a good situation for people who buy their own insurance. Quite the opposite, experts expect that the individual market would collapse if this repeal bill passed without a replacement plan. Here's why: The repeal bill gets rid of the health care law's key tools to get people to sign up coverage, insurance subsidies to make plans affordable, and the individual mandate to make carrying coverage the law. Without those, premiums would near certainly spike as only the sickest people buy coverage  and health plans would likely flee the market, no longer finding the population an appealing one to cover. "I think the market self-destructs if you don't have the premium tax credits or don't have the mandate," says Tim Jost, emeritus professor at William and Mary College of Law. "The private market would collapse, and might no longer exist," says Nicholas Bagley, an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan who focuses on health policy. One other thing to keep in mind about the 2015 reconciliation bill: It's not the final word on what Republicans could repeal through reconciliation. It is what Republicans came up with in December, when they knew it would be vetoed by President Obama. But now that it has a decent chance at passing, legislators might try and tack on the repeal ofother Obamacare provisions  and try to convince the Senate parliamentarian that these pieces also relate to the federal budget. "The 2015 bill is a floor, but it doesn't tell us about other sections they might try to include," says Gluck. "It's unpredictable what will be judged to have budgetary implications. In 2015, they didn't need to be careful. They knew their bill wouldn't pass. Now, they might want to think more carefully about what to include."

Scenario 2: Trump and the Republican House dismantle major parts of Obamacare through reconciliation  and replace it with something else Repeal, at this point, feels like political certainty. Republicans have spent six years calling for the end of Obamacare. Now that they have a clear path to make that happen, most experts expect them to follow it. The remaining question is whether they're able to follow up with a replacement plan. "It will be really easy for the GOP to defund the Affordable Care Act and take it away," says Robert Laszewski, a health care consultant. "The second half of what they need to do is much more difficult. It will be well into fall 2017 at the earliest before a replacement plan might be in effect." The clearest outline of what a Republican replacement plan might look like is Speaker Paul Ryan's Better Way proposal. It includes a refundable tax credit to make individual insurance more affordable and allows insurance plans to sell across state lines. Better Way would maintain the ban on pre-existing conditions but it would not maintain Obamacare provisions that bar insurers from charging sicker Americans higher rates. So under Better Way, insurance plans would be required to provide coverage, for example, to cancer patients  but could also charge them higher rates. Better Way does maintain the ban on pre-existing conditions and the provision that allows young adults to stay on their parents' insurance through age 26. The Better Way plan is thorough, with a clear vision of what health care might look like under a Trump administration. At the same time, it is still very much an outline  a 37-page document that has broad policy proposals that would need to be hammered out into actual legislation. "Better Way isn't in legislative form, and the Senate hasn't weighed in," says Chris Condeluci, who worked as tax and benefits counsel for the Senate Finance Committee's Republicans during the Affordable Care Act debate. This is why most observers expect it would take at least a year for Republicans to draft and pass an Obamacare replacement plan  and even more than that to write out the regulations and set up the infrastructure in order to implement it. "The Trump administration, if they like it or not, they're going to have to run Obamacare for two years," says Laszewski.

Scenario 3: The Senate eliminates the filibuster and repeals Obamacare outright Right now, the big thing holding Republicans back from repealing Obamacare outright is the need for 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. This pushes them to use the wonky reconciliation process where they can only get rid of the parts that touch the federal budget. The easy way out of this problem is, of course, to end the filibuster. Democrats already took steps to weaken the filibuster in 2013, and Republicans could decide to eliminate it entirely. "The 'right' to filibuster is fragile: It has never been affirmed in the rules of the Senate, it has always been subject to limitation by precedent, and the 2013 precedent highlighted how easy it is to restrict or eliminate the right," writes political scientist Gregory Koger. Without the filibuster, Republicans could pursue complete repeal and replace. Under this scenario, they would be able to end parts of Obamacare that don't touch the federal budget, like free preventive benefits or the requirement that all people get charged the same premium, regardless of whether they're healthy or sick. What comes after repeal, once again, would still be in question  and this scenario, if it does happen, would likely lead to the second scenario in this piece, where Republicans begin to figure out what their replacement plan looks like, and there are questions of whether they pass a replacement at all.
There is no doubt that immigration reform is good for all Americans. Over 1.3 million jobs would be created with immigration reform, according to the Social Security Administration. Trump's supporters believe immigrants should "do it the right way," and "get in the back of the line" without realizing that the line for undocumented immigrants doesn't exist. Under the current system million of people are left with no path to legalization. Let's join forces to create a path to citizenship for those who have waited for decades as undocumented immigrants. Join us to bring back our parents and veterans who have been deported. Join us to create a more fair and inclusive system.

Yes, we feel beset by the election results. But let's turn our worry and anger into action and remind Congress and the next president that we are part of the American story and they have to represent us too. We are here and we are not going anywhere. We are not moving to Canada, we are not going back to "where we came from," as some of the ill-informed like to say.

We will fight for our futures and those of the communities we serve. We are resilient, strong, and intelligent, and we will not let the results of this election distract us from the task at hand. We have come too far to give up now.

Commentary by Diane Guerrero and Julissa Arce.

Guerrero, a New Jersey native, is best known for her roles on the award winning, Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black," (for which she received two Screen Actors Guild awards), and on CW's break-out hit, "Jane the Virgin." She recently published her memoir, "In the Country We Love." Guerrero is also a White House Ambassador for Citizenship and Naturalization and volunteers with Latino civic engagement and immigrants' rights groups. Follow her on Twitter @dianneguerrero_.

Julissa Arce is author of the book, "My (Underground) American Dream." Arce made national and international headlines when she revealed that she had achieved the American Dream of wealth and status working her way up to vice president at Goldman Sachs by age 27 while being an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. She currently works with the Ascend Educational Fund, a scholarship program for immigrant students in New York City. Follow her on Twitter @julissaarce.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.
Hillary Clinton didn't quite break that glass ceiling by winning the White House. But President-elect Donald Trump has a chance to use a crucial cabinet position to put a woman in charge of the greatest military fighting force in the history of the world. That would be Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, who would make an excellent choice as the first woman Secretary of Defense.

Ernst knows about breaking barriers in the military for women. She served as the commanding officer of the 185th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion in the Iowa Army National Guard. She even spent 12 months in Kuwait during the Iraq War as the company commander of the 1168th Transportation Company. As the military continues to evolve to include more women in combat positions and as Trump vows to expand the armed forces overall, Ernst has a unique background to achieve both goals. And the political capital Trump would get by appointing a woman to lead the world's greatest military could be immeasurable. Ernst earned Trump's gratitude during the election when she stuck by him, even during the depths of the "Access Hollywood" tape scandal. It's almost a slam dunk choice.

And that's also true because perhaps the most interesting thing you learn from looking at the electoral map is that the Midwest was the reason Donald Trump got elected. He basically swept every Midwestern state a non-Democrat could ever hope to win. He took Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and came close to winning Minnesota. He even surprised the experts by winning the heavily-Midwestern flavored Pennsylvania. So before Trump finalizes his cabinet choices, he needs to look beyond just experience and qualifications and make sure there's a decidedly Midwestern flavor to his team. Ernst checks that box too.

The next choice from the region should be Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to head the Office of Management and Budget. Walker is already in the final two years of his term in Madison and may be looking for some cabinet experience to burnish his own presidential resume. More importantly, Walker's very hard-earned reputation as a politician who can take on government unions and reduce the state workforce.

That's crucial because the OMB Director has the power to reduce the size of the federal workforce as he or she works with the president to prepare the budget. OMB is technically not a cabinet-level position, but in the Trump White House it will have elevated importance considering Trump's promises to get government finances in order.

Walker came through a trial by fire in Wisconsin doing just that, surviving a union-organized recall election in 2012 and getting re-elected in 2014. The usually dicey OMB job will probably not be so tough for him to handle, at least politically. But Walker could also do a good job as Secretary of the Interior, where he could oversee a number of the energy regulations and drilling curbs Trump supports. And Interior is preferable to heading up the Department of Energy, which most conservatives want to shut down altogether.



Finally, let's not forget the state of Michigan and Trump already has a Michigan native he reportedly is looking try to put into the cabinet. That would be Dr. Ben Carson, who happens to have grown up in Detroit and graduated from University of Michigan Medical School. It was Carson who escorted Trump throug the streets of Detroit and during a visit to a black church earlier this year.

Carson's name has been floated as a possible Surgeon General, but also for the more serious job of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. The latter position would keenly test Carson as being a point man in the Trump efforts to replace Obamacare, but Carson has expressed an eagerness for that job. And as an African-American who endorsed Trump very early in the campaign, Carson has more than a few chits to cash in.

President-elect Trump may be the consummate New Yorker, but he owes the middle of the country a major debt for getting to the White House. Ernst, Walker, and Carson are three people who could help him pay that debt back and then some.
Companies which have publicly supported President-elect Donald Trump since his stunning election victory have witnessed a backlash from consumers.

Sports apparel brand New Balance has offered Trump his first sneaker endorsement following his election win, but consumers have reacted angrily by trashing and burning their shoes.

Matt LeBretton, vice president of public affairs for the company, told the Wall Street Journal, "The Obama administration turned a deaf ear to us and frankly with President-elect Trump we feel things are going to move in the right direction."

As a consequence of the endorsement, hundreds of people dismayed by Trump's election victory took to social media and shared videos of New Balance shoes being burned.

TWEET 1

LeBretton's decision to support Trump had been, in part, because of Trump's opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

However, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mirror newspaper, New Balance's vice president has since attempted to cool links with Trump and insisted his remarks were taken out of context. New Balance was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
Donald Trump said he may impose tariffs on the products of U.S. companies that relocate operations overseas, according to The Wall Street Journal.



Putting a tax on goods produced overseas, even if the manufacturer is a U.S. company, would likely prompt those firms to keep plants in the United States. That would help Trump achieve his goal of keeping American jobs, according to the newspaper's report, which followed the president-elect's first interview since the election.

He also said in the article that the best way to ease domestic tension in the United States would be to "bring in jobs."



"I want a country that loves each other," Trump said in the report. "I want to stress that."



The president-elect also said he would create jobs through national infrastructure projects and improved trade deals with other countries, the newspaper said.

Trump has previously called for a 45-percent tariff on imports from China.

Read the full story on WSJ.com.
Member 12336044 wrote: For Skype they have mentioned that APIs are not public and same for whatsapp, So I can't login to skype and whatsapp. If you have solution please guide. And exactly how do you think we can provide a solution to that?



C# perhaps this is also very difficult to learn



HTML < input id =" rdo1" type =" radio" name =" rdoTest" value =" Hello" / > < input id =" rdo2" type =" radio" name =" rdoTest" value =" World" / > < var id =" test1" onchange =" alert('2');" > Test Value < /var >



JavaScript $( document ).ready( function () { $( ' [name=rdoTest]' ).change( function () { $( ' #test1' ).text($( ' [name=rdoTest]:checked' ).val()); }); $( ' #test1' ).change( function () { alert($( ' #test1' ).text()); }); });





My code here but nothing happened





<script> $(document).ready(function () { $( ' [name=rdoTest]' ).change(function () { $( ' #test1' ).text($( ' [name=rdoTest]:checked' ).val()); $( " #test1" ).trigger( " change" ); }); $( ' #test1' ).change(function () { alert($( ' #test1' ).text()); }); }); </script>

Peter Leow

https://www.amazon.com/author/peterleow



Hello, I am modifying a web page with a lot of CSS code. There are many div tags. Mid-way on the page are div tags that enable a button to appear. I wish for this particular button to automatically click when the page loads. I have tried many combinations of JavaScript and JQuery but nothing so far works.



The button is defined by div tags comparable to this:

<div class="Btn-info">

<div class="Btn-btn active">

<strong>THE BUTTON</strong> <span></span>

</div>

...

</div>





I haven't yet figured out if the second div name is "Btn-btn active", or whether it is named "Btn-btn" and active is an attribute.



My efforts at coding either a JavaScript or JQuery way to automatically click the button I see on the page have not worked. I have tried these variations:



<script type="text/javascript">

jQuery(function () {

jQuery('.div.Btn-btn').click();

})

</script>



OR





<script type="text/javascript">

jQuery(function () {

jQuery('.Btn-btn').click();

});

</script>



OR



<script type="text/javascript">

jQuery(function () {

jQuery('.Btn-info.Btn-btn').click();

});

</script>



OR



<script type="text/javascript">

jQuery(function () {

jQuery('.Btn-btn active').click();

});

</script>



So far nothing works. Does anyone out there have an idea about how to make this work? Many thanks if you do.





$("div.Btn-btn active").click();

});







Keep in mind - hopefully there is a onclick defined for that "button" somewhere (click handler)





div.Btn-btn.active").click()



...And it works! Thanks so much for the help!!!



Hi all

i am creating gps tracking system

i have to do two things with the marker

1- create context menu with some functions on the marker

2- add car number as label on the marker

the first thing is finished

Map With Context Menu



when i tried to do the second issue a conflict (i think) happened

i included a JS library

Map Label Library

both are working alone but when combined no thin work

code after combine

Map With Labels and Context Menu



some details

both depend on overlay

errors

TypeError: a.lng is not a function

...b=b||new _.G(0,0);var c=this.b;b.x=c.x+a.lng()*this.j;a=_.Za(Math.sin(_.Sb(a.lat...



InvalidValueError: not a LatLng or LatLngLiteral: in property lat: not a number



TypeError: c.lat is not a function

...,c=d.b.search(_.vi)):(c=a.ca,c=new _.G(c.lat(),c.lng()),a.da=c,_.uJ(d.j,{da:c,ye...



InvalidValueError: not a LatLng or LatLngLiteral: in property lat: not a number



Thank You



Hey guys, I know the title is simple but I'm new to javascript and would appreciate if you could help me out



here's the deal,

I ve got some records that i read from database, and I want to add the to top of my table this is run every 20 seconds



JavaScript var interval = setInterval( function () { loadTableData(selectedOption); }, 20000 );



here's what's happening inside loadTableData function



JavaScript function loadTableData(dataType) { $.get( " /JsonResultlink" , null , function (result) { var itemAdd; $.each(result, function (i, item) { loadRecordTimeOut = setTimeout( function () { if (result[i].VEHICLEPLATE !== undefined ) { itemToAdd = generateRow(result[i], dataType); $( ' .tto-violation-tablebody' ).prepend(itemToAdd); checkRowCount(); } }, 1000 * i); }); clearTimeout(loadRecordTimeOut); }); }



loadTableData is called in document ready and then every 2 seconds



Now I got 3 buttons that when each is clicked i call loadTableData with new dataType and show the result



now the problem is that in the middle of data being added to table i click one button I want the table to clear and the new data be displayed but what i get is that data loading becomes faster and i get both data from previous load and this load,



Please help me out and I'd like to learn clean coding so if you have any suggestions please let me know, appreciate it.



modified 5-Nov-16 6:59am.



here[^]

Cheers,

Peter

Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012



I am new to the JavaScript ,I know how to pass data from one html page to another html page but i don't know how to pass data from one html page to multiple pages.. Can anyone help me









"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."

- Homer









I had passed the values from one page to another page.But i don't know how to pass the values from one page to multiple pages.







What you haven't told us is what you mean by passing to multiple pages.



It obviously means something to you, but the rest of us have no idea what you're talking about.





"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."

- Homer









Below is my first page pass1.html

<html>

<head>

<script type="text/javascript">

function getParams()

{

var idx = document.URL.indexOf('?');

var params = new Array();

if (idx !=-1)

{

var pairs = document.URL.substring(idx+1, document.URL.length).split('&');

for (var i=0; i<pairs.length; i++)

="" {

="" console.log(pairs.length);

="" nameval="pairs[i].split('=');

" params[nameval[0]]="nameVal[1];

" }

="" return="" params;

="" }

params="getParams();

firstname" =="" unescape(params["firstname"]);

lastname="unescape(params["lastname"]);

age" unescape(params["age"]);

document.write("firstname=" + firstname + " <br="">");

document.write("lastname = " + lastname + "

");

document.write("age = " + age + "

");

</script>

</head>

</html>



Below is my second page pass.html

<html>

<form type=get action="pass1.html">



First Name: <input type=text name=firstname size=10> Last Name: <input type=text name=lastname size=10> Age: <input type=number name=age> <input type=submit value="Submit">



</form>

</html>







If you don't tell us what you want to do, we can't help you.





"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."

- Homer









There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.


Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

.

..Commentary Magazine..11 November '16..Nothing about Donald Trumps campaign leads one to believe that he pays much attention to his advisors, and his stunning electoral victoryachieved largely by ignoring expert advicewill doubtless reinforce this tendency. Nevertheless, I hope hell end up adopting the policy proposed one of his advisors on Israel four months ago. Like Trumps campaign, its a policy that flies in the face of the expert consensus on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And for that very reason, it may well work better than this consensus, which has an unbroken track record of failure over the last 20 years.In an interview with thein July, Trump advisor David Friedman began by stating an obvious but widely ignored fact: West Bank settlements are neither illegal nor the real obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace. The impediment to peace is very clear in both of our minds and that is the failure of the Palestinians to renounce hatred and renounce violence, Friedman said. Everything else is barely important.Then he started dropping bombshells. First, he said, if Palestinian intransigence continues, Israeli annexation of some of the settlements is certainly a legitimate possibility. Second, given that the two-state solution has repeatedly failed in the past, theres no reason to remain wedded to it: I think its reasonable to consider any other alternatives people of good faith may propose.Both those proposals go straight to the heart of the reason why the two-state solution has repeatedly failed: Not only have the Palestinians never suffered any consequences for intransigence, but they have actually been rewarded for it. Every time theyve rejected an Israeli or American peace proposalin 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2013theyve been rewarded by international pressure on Israel to sweeten the deal. Every time theyve indulged in a new outbreak of violence, theyve been rewarded by international pressure on Israel to make concessions to calm the situation and bring the Palestinians back to the table. And as long as saying no keeps producing diplomatic gains, why would any sane negotiator ever say yes?Moreover, the international communitys behavior has merely fed the Palestinians fantasy that if they keep saying no long enough, Israel will eventually disappear. Ive written before about last years Fikra Forum poll, which found that only a quarter of Palestinian respondents expected Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state in 30 to 40 years, while a plurality believed that even their short-term goal should be reclaiming all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea. That option beat out both the two-state and the one-state solutions. In reality, no matter how much pressure the international community puts on it, Israel remains an independent actor thats unlikely to acquiesce in its own demise. But if you ignore that fact for a moment and look only at the actions of said international community, the Palestinians belief in Israels eventual disappearance actually isnt so illogical.After all, by any standard, two decades of consistently saying no interspersed with periodic bouts of violence have produced Palestinian gains. Two decades ago, for instance, almost nobody expected Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines. Today, that demand is accepted by the entire world. Two decades ago, nobody was talking about sanctioning settlement products. Today, thats the default position in Europe. Two decades ago, Israel enjoyed solid bipartisan support in America. Today, that support is fraying in a non-negligible section of the Democratic Party.Two decades ago, nobody was talking about boycotting Israel. Today, the BDS movement is gaining popularity on college campuses worldwideand those college students will be leading their countries in another two decades. So if you look at all that, while ignoring some recent developments in the opposite direction, its not unreasonable for Palestinians to conclude that continuing the same tactics for another 30 or 40 years will eventually produce so much international pressure on Israel that it will either collapse or be forced to agree to suicidal concessions. And in that case, why on earth should they agree to a deal now?What Friedmans proposal would do, for the first time, is put a real price on Palestinian intransigence. You want to keep saying no? Then the U.S. will support settlement annexation, reducing the amount of territory left to negotiate over. You still want to keep saying no? Then the U.S. will consider withdrawing support for the two-state solution entirely, in favor of some alternative you might like less.To be clear, that still wouldnt produce a two-state solution anytime soon. After decades of educating their children to believe that Israelis are thieves who stole their land and have no rights to any part of it , that murdering Israelis is the highest good conceivable , and that death is preferable to compromising on, say, the right of return (aka flooding Israel with millions of Palestinian refugees), Palestinians simply arent ready for an agreement right now.But by persuading Palestinians that time actually isnt on their side, Friedmans policy might finally force them to do some rethinking about the benefits of accepting half a loaf rather than holding out for the whole thing and risking being left with none. And until that long, painful process of rethinking begins, any talk of a two-state solution will assuredly be a pipe dream.
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

.

..11 November '16..Mahmoud Abbas released a statement on the anniversary of Yasir Arafat's death.He said that the Palestinian investigation into the cause of his death, twelve year later, were going to be released "soon."But besides that, Abbas repeated something he has said many times before, something that demolishes his reputation in the West as being a "moderate" and a peacemaker.
Mandatory testing of deer on opening weekend

Hunters who kill a deer on opening weekend of firearms season Saturday and Sunday will be required to:

Bring the entire carcass, or the head plus at least 6 inches of the neck in a bag, to one of the department's sampling stations, which are open from 7:30 a.m. to t least 8 pm Saturday and Sunday.

In Boone County, deer can be taken to the Ashland Optimist Club, 511 Optimist Drive, in Ashland; the Department of Conservation's regional office at 3500 E. Gans Road in Columbia; or the Hallsville Primary School at 6401 Highway 124 in Hallsville.

Deer must be taken to the stations by the hunter who killed it.

Other important information:

Results of tests will be posted online, but are expected to take two to three weeks.

If you plan to take your deer to a taxidermist, be sure to inform staff at a sampling station and your deer will not be cut. You'll still need to fill out paperwork.

Hunters can have their deer tested at any time during the season by taking their kills to participating taxidermists or one of these regional Department of Conservation offices: the Central Region office in Columbia, 573-815-7900; the Northeast Region office at Kirksville, 660-785-2420 or the St. Louis Region office, 636-441-4554.

Hunters wanting to save time can prepare for sampling by doing the following beforehand:
Foundation adds another $25M to Kinder Institute

The Kinder Foundation is giving the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy another $25 million, bringing its total to $60 million.
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..

Read More
Do you "like"? Do you "tweet"? Do you tube? Does your business do any or all of these things and, if so, does it really ...
There are reservations within the University of California system about a plan to move IT work offshore and lay off employees.

After Computerworld wrote in September about the layoff plan at the university's San Francisco campus, Larry Conrad, the associate vice chancellor for IT and CIO at the Berkeley campus, wrote a memo to IT staff about it.

He noted that some on his IT staff had seen the story and he wanted to respond.

"The UCSF effort is indeed an ambitious undertaking," wrote Conrad in a memo obtained by Computerworld. "Candidly, I am not aware of any major university in the country which has successfully implemented such a substantive IT outsourcing initiative."

The San Francisco campus, which includes a medical center, has hired India-based HCL under a five-year contract valued at $50 million. As part the move, the university is laying off 49 permanent IT employees and cutting about 30 contractors. Some of the IT workers say they expect to be training H-1B-visa-holding foreign replacements.

A protest outside UCSF IT offices in San Francisco is set for Nov. 15, and is being organized by Sara Blackwell, a Florida attorney representing Disney workers who lost their jobs after Disney offshored some IT work.

The University of California is a public institution and its offshoring plan has drawn protest from a number of lawmakers, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It is clear that the university is seeking to replace American workers with lower-cost foreign workers abroad and potentially also in the United States," wrote Grassley, in a letter to Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of California system.

The contract that UCSF negotiated with HCL can be used by any of the campuses in the massive University of California system.

"We have no plans to follow UCSF's path," wrote Conrad, who said he's aware of UCSF contract and "will look at the results."

"The IT business is constantly changing. What made sense 20 years ago doesn't make sense today. What makes sense today likely won't make sense in another 20 years," wrote Conrad. "Business applications are a good example: 20 years ago we wrote most of our major systems. Today those are mostly purchased systems, with the integration of cloud-based solutions a growing trend.

"It's difficult to overstate the changes I've seen in technology and management over the span of my career," he said in the memo. "But the one thing that hasn't changed is the need to provide excellent, informed, and responsive service to our customers. The value-add local IT has always had is the ability to understand the business, understand our customers, and help them solve their problems and transform their business."

Still, Conrad didn't completely rule out outsourcing, and said it "does need to be considered as part of the overall portfolio of services we or any other university (or any other business) provides."

In a follow-up email in response to questions, Conrad said the school does do some outsourcing and "will continue to look at those options on a case-by-case basis. But we do not presently have plans to outsource big chunks of our IT operations."

Computerworld also asked Conrad whether the use of "use of offshore workers -- often on temporary visas -- is appropriate in an academic environment? Particularly one that is training people for occupations in IT?"

"In regards to offshore workers, UC Berkeley, like many other institutions, has been hit very hard by the systemic disinvestment in public higher education by state governments," Conrad replied. "Historically, public higher education was viewed as a public good ... and in places like the Bay area that 'bargain' has paid off over decades in dramatic ways that have literally transformed our world. However, today that bargain with state government -- that investing in the education of state students benefits the state economy and society -- seems to be fundamentally broken and replaced with a prevailing belief in state governments across the country that higher education is a private good, benefitting the individual, and should not be a priority for state investment. That certainly seems to have become the case here in California."

Conrad said that the "central IT budget here at Berkeley has been cut to the bone to a point where all we can do is keep the metaphorical lights on and nothing else. No resources for innovation or even extending existing services."

"Consequently, we will continue to look at options to reduce our expenses while not jeopardizing our ability to support the campus. In some cases, that does involve offshore workers and we will continue to assess the efficacy of that on a case-by-case basis," he wrote.
These have been a dreadful couple of years for the left. The Coalition was succeeded by the first majority Conservative Government in over 20 years, the Labour Party continues to tank in the polls under the incapable but persistent Corbyn, the EU referendum went against them thanks in no small part to millions of traditional Labour voters, and now Trump has not only defeated Clinton but appears to have attracted more than a few former Democrats in doing so.

Its easy in retrospect to nod and say it was all inevitable, but its worth remembering that it wasnt supposed to be like this.

Back when the financial crisis struck, we were told that the centre right was doomed by association with the failures of capitalism. The left would win the arguments and scoop up the support of aggrieved voters. At the same time, generational change was supposedly working its magic  the high water mark for Euroscepticism was 1975, opposition to Brussels would dwindle as older voters died out, the woeful Tory polling numbers among young people would march up the age chart, Thatchers children would spend their lives in rebellion against Toryism and so on. The Tories, the Eurosceptics, the Republicans and anyone else deemed distasteful would never, ever win again.

These arguments were evidently flawed. Rather than voters reacting to an economic squeeze by turning to the magic money tree, they hardened their fiscal attitudes with the same resolve that they took to their own finances. Fiscal conservatism became more popular, not less  it turned out that people might tolerate costly green policies and a wasteful welfare system when they had money to spare, but were less keen on them when their own budgets became tight.

The demographic assumptions also turned out to be a fantasy. We might call this the Peter Pan Fallacy  the mistaken idea that young people will never change as they grow older, but instead will hold tight to all the left-wing mantras of the student union even when they become businesspeople, taxpayers and parents.

Its understandable why the idea appeals  its easier to blame the old for being stubborn than to acknowledge you might have failed to convince people, and more comfortable to view eventual victory as a demographic inevitability than to face the changes and hard work that might be required to actually win in future. But it has proved to be a dangerous dead end for the left, lulling them into false confidence about their future and leading them to indulge in disastrous expressions of contempt for voters whose support they need.

This error is observable from outside their movement, but within it it seems to still be treated as heresy. Those who suggest that maybe deriding voters as ignorant, bigoted bedblockers is counter-productive are howled at as neoliberals, Blairites and traitors. The flow of hatred and blame towards the electorate continues and intensifies  it could be seen in the student riots, in the spitting thugs outside the Conservative Party Conference last year, in the collective meltdown on Facebook after the referendum and in the rioting and fury weve seen this week.

No-one expects happiness in defeat. None of us feel it when we experience defeat ourselves. But it is reasonable to ask that people accept outcomes they dislike under rules they accept when they win and that they dont take defeat as license to lash out at those they blame for being to ignorant or unpleasant to recognise their moral superiority. Not only is it harmful to our democracy for one side to try to undermine its legitimacy when things dont go their way, but the feedback loop of left-wing failure, left-wing contempt for voters and then more left-wing failure only serves to produce ever more ineffective opposition. To borrow Boris Johnsons term, the whinge-o-rama brings no benefit and only does damage.

To better serve its own ideals, and to stop harming the cohesion of society, the left needs to face a very uncomfortable fact: all the things that they rage against have only been possible because of their own actions. Some of those  like the Tory majority and leaving the EU  Im glad about. We were lucky in our opponents and the nation will benefit as a result of their failings. Others  namely the election of a Putin sympathiser and NATO opponent to the White House  worry me. But in each circumstance, those who are most angry have only their own mistakes to blame. The depth of their anger hints that they are dimly aware of this already in the deepest regions of their hearts.

The temptation to scream rather than think currently appears too great, however. The echo chambers of social media reinforce that temptation, as the outraged rack up retweets and likes from people who already agree with them, without considering the impact on those they actually need to persuade in order to move things in their direction in future. The result will simply be more of the same; people tend not to forget being characterised as idiots and racists, even if the speaker comes to regret the words shortly after saying them. Just as harmful is that words can be rinsed of meaning over time  smear reasonable people as extremists simply for disagreeing with you, and you will soon find that no-one listens to your warnings when real extremists come along.

Two roads diverged in a wood, as Robert Frost wrote. The one most travelled at the moment  the path of fury at voters, denial of democratic verdicts and questioning democracy itself  is inviting and familiar, but only leads the left deeper and deeper into a wasteland. The other  which the path of tough reflection and self-scrutiny  might be rougher for the first few miles, but ultimately offers a far better view and a viable future. Their error can be corrected; they strayed towards the former in the 1980s but dragged themselves onto the latter eventually. Let us hope they manage to repeat the feat.
Roger Evans is a former member of the London Assembly.

Last week marked the six month anniversary of Sadiq Khans election to office as the mayor of London, with the largest mandate any candidate for the job has ever received. Traditionally new mayors spend this honeymoon period putting together their own plans for the capital. Although the Summer recess has intervened, the nature of this new administration is now becoming clear.

It is rapidly becoming a story of broken promises and disappointments. To secure such a huge mandate, the mayor spent his campaign agreeing to the demands of myriad pressure groups and making pledges that he must have known could not be delivered.

The most high profile of his election pledges was a freeze on all public transport fares. Before the election there was a robust debate about what this would actually cost Transport for London and how the books would be balanced. Hard pressed commuters looked forward to seeing ticket prices held down, but after the election the promise turned out to be full of loopholes. Only single fares were frozen and holders of weekly, monthly and annual travelcards saw prices rise yet again.

Sadiq promised to reduce strikes on the transport network. In an effort to prevent industrial action he would roll up his sleeves and talk to everyone. The many commuters who struggle to use Southern Trains are still suffering regular strikes over plans to remove train guards. The unions have even scheduled strike days just before Christmas. Whilst Sadiq has been quick to criticise the government and the train operator, he has avoided raising the issue with the rail unions. He may have rolled up his sleeves but he is certainly not speaking to everyone. The irony is that London Underground trains have been running quite safely without guards for over 25 years and proposals have been made for the introduction of driverless trains in future.

The new mayor promised he would reinstate the ward based neighbourhood policing model with one sergeant, two constables and three PCSOs based in every council ward in London. It was a popular pledge but the promised teams of police have now shrunk to two constables and one PCSO.

A promise not to interfere in operational policing has also been broken. Plans to introduce spit guards to protect officers from diseases such as hepatitis were halted by the mayor, pending a second consultation exercise. Policing London is a demanding task and our officers deserve the proper equipment for the job.

Perhaps the biggest issue during the election was housing. Soaring property prices have pushed home ownership out of reach for Londoners so more homes need to be built. Sadiq pledged 80,000 new homes per year but he now describes this as an aspiration and refuses to commit to the number as a target, despite pressure from Conservative London Assembly Members.

He also promised that he would safeguard the green belt, but when pressed by the Members for Croydon and Redbridge he refused to rule out green belt housing schemes in those outer London boroughs.

Then there was the promise to plant 2 million new trees by 2020, which he made in a bid to outflank Goldsmiths environmental credentials. This target has now been reduced to five per cent of current tree cover, which is around 400,000 new trees by 2020.

Politicians are known for breaking promises and unpredictable events mean that there will always be some disappointments which is why it is wise to ensure that election pledges can be delivered. In London it takes a strong character to say no to the noisy pressure groups that make demands before elections, but we expect our mayor to have that strength. The used car approach to campaigning, promising anything to get votes, harms the reputation of the mayor and the wider reputation of politicians.
Last night the members of the Sleaford and North Hykeham Conservative Association met to select their candidate to succeed Stephen Phillips.

The three finalists in the selection were notably all local  Kelly Smith, a former Lincolnshire County Councillor who is the Partys Regional Chairman for the East Midlands; Lindsay Cawrey, a serving North Kesteven District Councillor and former Lincolnshire County Councillor who defected from Labour back in 2008; and Dr Caroline Johnson, a Consultant Paediatrician who lives just outside Sleaford and stood in Scunthorpe in 2010.

That local focus is notable. There were various suggestions that CCHQ might try to parachute in a well-known candidate from elsewhere, but that was evidently unfounded. In the event, any of the three had a strong local pitch to make.

The winner of the proceedings was Dr Johnson  our congratulations to her. Heres her official statement on the result:

I am delighted to be selected as the Conservative candidate for Sleaford and North Hykeham by local party members in Lincolnshire. I am looking forward to speaking to many local residents across Sleaford and North Hykeham in the coming weeks to discuss the issues that matter most to them and their families. As your Conservative candidate I am the only person who can support the Prime Minister and the Government to deliver Brexit. I am completely behind the Governments plans for Brexit and to deliver on the decision made by the British people. Our area deserves a strong voice in Parliament and if I am elected the Member of Parliament I will always make sure residents are heard loud and clear in Westminster.

We dont yet know how she voted in the referendum, but its clear that getting on with Brexit is now the Partys most pressing policy and that she supports it. As we noted immediately after Phillipss resignation, the constituency voted strongly for Leave and UKIP ran Labour close for second place in 2015.
Iain Dale is Presenter of LBC Drive, Managing Director of Biteback Publishing, a columnist and broadcaster and a former Conservative Parliamentary candidate.

In political terms, 2016 is turning out to be every bit as important, in historical terms, as 1968. In Britain and America, a revolution has happened  and it is one that few saw coming.

Yet again, it wasnt just a political party or cause that was defeated in the United States: it was the political classes themselves, especially the pollsters and pundits. Yet again they got it catastrophically wrong. Even the betting markets called it wrong, and William Hill is now saying it may pull out of political betting because it is too risky.

I wonder if some polling firms may also decide to stop political polling. They make no money out of it, and in normal times they do it to get their names in the newspapers. As they did this time  for all the wrong reasons.

So how did we get it so wrong  and I include myself in that. From my own point of view, I just couldnt take Trump seriously as a candidate. With every passing day, hed make an even more ludicrous and extreme speech. Hed make a fool of himself. Hed say something hateful, nasty and divisive.

But what we all failed to see was that his message wasnt just one of hate; it was a message of hope to a group of Americans who have become economically disenfranchised. To white, working class, blue collar Americans, many of whom had lost their jobs or seen their wages depressed over the last 20 years, he represents hope. Somehow, they dont see him as part of the establishment, even though he patently is.

He has never held office and has never been part of the Washington establishment, and that was good enough for many voters. They lapped up Trumps xenophobia because it reflected their own. They blame Mexicans for taking their jobs. Even Trumps grab pussy comments were discounted as just the sort of locker-room banter that is part of everyday banter on the factory floor.

Trump was immune to infections that kill of other politicians careers, and the media classes failed to understand why. He got more black votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012. He got more Latino voters. He got more young voters. Whod have thought. Among whites with no degree Clinton only got 28 per cent. Trump got 67 per cent, and thats why he won many of the swing states, especially in the so-called Rust Belt.

So, what should we in Britain make of it? Many will see Trump as a threat, not an opportunity. They are wrong. To quote Alastair Campbells comments to Sir Christopher Meyer in 2000, when the UK Ambassador asked what his role should be vis-a-vis the then new President, George W Bush, he was told: Get up the arse of the White House and stay there.

The Germans and French have been very lukewarm in their welcome for President-Elect Trump  Theresa May, the opposite. Shes right to embrace him. He will move Britain to the front of the queue in terms of a free trade agreement. He may be a protectionist, but it is clear that he is an admirer of this country and a huge fan of Brexit. I suspect Liam Fox is already planning his next visit to Washington DC.

William Dartmouth, the UKIP MEP, has suggested Nigel Farage be appointed to Washington. I suspect that might be one step too far  though there are claims today that he will be an unofficial emissary  but it wouldnt at all surprise me if Trump appointed Farage to some sort of advisory role. On my LBC election night show, he suggested he might like to be Trumps Envoy to Brussels. And I suspect he was only half joking.

Mario Cuomo once said that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. In Trumps case, he is now no more than the Apprentice. Lets hope he can learn on the job.

         

Over 27 hours on Tuesday to Wednesday, I presented 13 hours of programming. I admit that by the time I came off air at 7pm on Wednesday my brain could hardly string a sentence together  but if you cant enjoy yourself and cope with the pressures in these circumstances, you shouldnt be doing the job.

Obviously I didnt listen to the competition on the BBC, as I was behind the microphone, but Ive been told that we did a brilliant job in explaining what was going on and informing our audience in an accessible way. Clearly, we dont have the resources of the BBC, but sometimes its precisely because youve got those resources you tend to overcomplicate things. This is especially true on TV, where some of the graphics and computer wizardry can look incredibly impressive, but to the viewer can be incomprehensible none the less. On radio, we felt that we just needed to tell our audience what was happening and why. And hopefully we achieved that.

         

Quite what Trumps election will mean for the rest of the world is anyones guess. The fear is that he will play to the isolationist gallery and withdraw from Americas traditional role in world politics. We can take as read that NATO will change. American funding is likely to decrease, which will mean that European members will have to contribute more.

Meanwhile, policy towards Russia will be very different to Obamas. Dont bet against Putin being one of the first world leaders to meet Trump. The big unknown is how he will change Americas policy in the Middle East. The Israelis will be cheering Trump to the rafters, having finally seen the back of Obama, a man Netanyahu doesnt get along with. But what Trump will do about ISIS, who knows?

         

Many of us look upon Trump with undisguised horror and contempt. But for those of us in the media world, we ought to be very excited. Trump is going to give us four years of wonderful copy. God Bless America.
Lewis Baston is author of Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling and several books about British general elections. He is a consultant on politics, elections and constituencies.

It is probably, a waste of my time and energy  in these days in which facts and evidence trade at so heavy a discount  to delve into the origins of a Twitter meme. But this one has always bothered me, since it is an abuse of history and a political libel. Although no Tory, I shall spring to the defence of the Conservative Partys reputation. Every now and then, when there is a public argument about immigration or race, people take to Twitter and broadcast an image of a Tory leaflet from 1964 to try to show that the Conservative Party is, and always has been, ineradicably racist. The image is reproduced here.

It is a curious leaflet in many ways. There is no doubt that it was published during the mid-1960s, and its crudely racist nature is obvious. But it is also notable for its illiteracy: this particular white man could not spell burden, let alone construct a grammatical sentence. If it does date from 1964, it is strange to talk about the Conservatives once in Office, as the Conservatives were already in office, at least until October. Nor did the Conservatives bring up to date (?) the Ministry of Repatriation  creating such a ministry was never Conservative Party policy.

But where, when and by whom was it distributed?

There is no imprint on the leaflet, as required by election law, although it is possible that the imprint is on the reverse side of it, as the scanned image looks as if there is more text there. Hayes Peoples History attributes it to Lambeth in 1964, presumably in connection with either the local government elections in April and May, or the general election in October. But there seems to be a connection with Smethwick in the West Midlands, where the racist slogan If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour was doing the rounds in 1962-64. John Bean, a BNP leader, later credited a Birmingham organiser of the Union Movement for coining the phrase.

In the October 1964 general election (not, contra mythology, a by-election), the Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, gained the hitherto safe Smethwick seat from Labour despite Labours national victory, on a wave of racist and anti-immigrant opinion.

The Labour neighbour slogan did not feature on any official Conservative campaign literature, although it was often uttered on the streets of Smethwick, and sometimes chanted by children, allegedly with the encouragement of local Tories. No doubt some Conservative canvassers used it on the doorstep in the Smethwick campaign. Griffiths himself, discreditably, did not condemn the slogan. His response, quoted in the Times in March 1964, was: I should think that is a manifestation of the popular feeling. I would not condemn anyone who said that. I would say that is how people see the situation in Smethwick. I fully understand the feelings of the people that say it. I would say it is exasperation, not fascism. (From the edition of 9 March 1964, as quoted in Hatful of History.)

It seems likely that a number of unpleasant little slogans were going around by word of mouth. The Labour neighbour slogan was nationally known by March 1964, having been used in Smethwick as early as 1962. Racist rhymes also featured in Oswald Mosleys Union Movement campaign in North Kensington in 1959, where Mosley demeaned himself by quoting the saying: Lassie for dogs, Kitty Kat for wogs on an election platform. Mosley, coincidentally, had himself been MP for Smethwick from 1926 to 1931 for Labour and then the New Party, the precursor to the British Union of Fascists.

After the election, speaking in the Commons, Griffiths denied any responsibility for the neighbour slogan  a claim that would have been completely unsustainable had the Tories in fact distributed any leaflets bearing it. The real culprits for putting it on an illiterate leaflet are to be found elsewhere.

Racist political organisations of various kinds gave assistance to the 1964 Conservative campaign in Smethwick; as is often the case, the extreme right in 1964 was fragmented between a number of small parties and ostensibly non-party groups. The BNP and the openly Nazi National Socialist Movement, under the noted jackboot enthusiast and underwear thief Colin Jordan, sent members to Smethwick with the intention of raising the national political profile of race and immigration, as did the Mosleyite Union Movement. In the authoritative Nuffield election study of 1964, A.W. Singham wrote that the situation began to get out of hand when supporters of Mr Colin Jordan arrived to distribute crude anti-immigrants literature.

The Nuffield study notes that much of the new blood brought in by the campaign was not strongly partisan; it somewhat resembled citizens organisations in the United States, tactfully not mentioning that the model was the menacing Citizens Councils that sprang up to resist desegregation in the South. It was a dangerous model. The exploitation of local racism and the central role in the official campaign for anti-immigration activists, such as Donald Finney of the Birmingham Immigration Control Association, were bad enough. The official campaign did not seem to care that gutter language was used on the street and by Conservative canvassers (the coloureds breed faster than the whites and we must put a stop to this), and only belatedly dissociated themselves from outside fascist activists coming to help. The Guardian reported in October that Tories disown anti-Negro posters. Conservative Party agents in Smethwick have denied all knowledge.

From all of this evidence, it would appear that the latterly infamous leaflet was a generic leaflet produced centrally by a far right party, probably the National Socialist Movement or the Union Movement, and distributed in several areas including Smethwick and Lambeth in support of right wing Tory candidates. It cannot legitimately be described as a Tory leaflet, and to do so is being careless with evidence and cheapening political and historical debate.

Although this particular leaflet is not a Conservative one, this does not mean that the Smethwick campaign was not deeply unsavoury, by contemporary standards as well as those of hindsight. The local Tories made no attempt to damp down popular racism, instead exploiting it and channelling it for political gain. A campaign that is attractive to BNP and National Socialist Movement activists has to stand condemned. The Conservative-controlled Smethwick borough council had some extreme policies, to the extent of trying to take over houses to stop them being let out to immigrants, and operating an official policy of housing segregation. Malcolm X came to Smethwick on a fact-finding mission shortly before his assassination in 1965.

What happened at Smethwick should not be used to condemn the Tories as a whole. Many in the Conservative Party nationally were uncomfortable about the Smethwick campaign; liberal Tories such as Edward Boyle and  ironically  Enoch Powell refused to speak in Smethwick. Nationally, Young Conservatives coming of age during the 1960s found much more to admire in Iain Macleod, who had spoken of his belief in racial equality and the brotherhood of man than in Griffiths or the post-1968 version of Enoch Powell. When the Conservatives won a landslide victory in the 1968 Lambeth council elections, there were 11 Powellites and 46 liberals (including John Major) in their group, and they were arguably more progressive on race issues than the previous Labour administration. Griffiths was an isolated figure as an MP, though not quite the parliamentary leper sent to Coventry as Harold Wilson urged. He seemed to mellow somewhat in the company of fellow MPs. In the 1966 election, the Smethwick campaign was much less dominated by immigration, and the BNP expressed its displeasure by standing a candidate against him.

The Labour Partys response, in Smethwick and nationally, to mid-1960s racism was not always resolute either. One Smethwick Labour councillor was in charge of a youth club that operated a colour bar where BNP members would meet, and black and Asian workers sometimes found the local trade unions hostile and unwelcoming despite the movements national-level ethos of equality. Labour in Birmingham avoided overtly racist housing policies, but tried to write the rules to exclude immigrants and ended up housing most black tenants in poorer quality housing based on different standards of housekeeping. In Southall, the Labour MP called for a complete halt on immigration to Southall. The defeated Labour MP for Smethwick, Patrick Gordon Walker, said this is a British country, with British standards of behaviour. The British must come first.

There was a particularly bitter flavour of overt racism in the West Midlands in the mid-1960s which has declined in the region since the 1970s, and the Smethwick campaign was more about this local peculiarity than the national political environment. The local Tories exploited the climate, while Labour sometimes bent to accommodate it. But a line was drawn in the 1966 election when Labour bounced back with a new candidate, Andrew Faulds, who was outspokenly liberal about race and immigration. Faulds comfortably regained the seat, the BNP polled a humiliating 1.5 per cent of the vote and, for a brief time after the 1966 election, the politics of immigration looked dead.

But the politics of race, and its concentration in the west Midlands, burst back into life in 1968 when Powell made his Rivers of Blood speech in Birmingham and was sacked from Heaths Shadow Cabinet as a result. Powellism contributed to a large Black Country swing to the Conservatives in 1970. It was this episode of racial demagoguery, more than Smethwick, that changed politics. By its ambiguity over Powell and Powellism, the Conservative Party prospered in 1970, but also mobilised ethnic minority voters for Labour, which cast a long shadow over the Tories relationship with minority communities that took over 30 years to clear. The Conservatives did have another story they could have told: Robert Carrs principled acceptance of Britains obligation to Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin in 1972 contrasted with Jim Callaghans restrictions on Kenyan Asians in 1968. The 1972 Conservative conference specifically supported Carr on the matter, but he was marginalised after Margaret Thatcher became leader and his achievement was not celebrated.

Griffiths returned to parliament in 1979 as MP for Portsmouth North and represented the seat until electoral defeat in 1997. He had a lower profile in his second spell in the Commons, although he sometimes seemed a little preoccupied with immigration.

The 1961-66 period in Smethwick politics was a discreditable chapter, but it is hardly relevant to contemporary politics. Fifty years on, it is an unconvincing stick with which to assail the Tories: it would be a bit like saying in 1966 that people should not vote for Jo Grimond because of the racist overtones of the Liberals 1906 election campaign on Chinese labour.

Times and societies move on. The behaviour of the Conservative council and MP were deplorable, but were worse in degree rather than intent than things that the local Labour movement tolerated or supported. There is no way the Conservatives of today would allow a local campaign to degenerate in the way that the Tories of 1964 did in Smethwick. The party has more central control over local campaigns than it did, and while there is some loss of creativity and local initiative, it does usually maintain standards, although the 2016 London mayoral campaign raised more than a few eyebrows. But a party with 17 BME MPs, two of whom are Cabinet Ministers, obviously does not have trouble as an institution with the prospect of a neighbour of a different ethnicity. Its time to bin the neighbour leaflet for good.
That's where Blade Runners come in. They hunt and "retire" (kill) replicants so that humans have no choice but to fuck other humans and create tinier ones, maintaining the species. There are subtle hints to this throughout the movie. Replicant Zhora is working as a stripper when she is retired -- and her pet is a snake, the most dick-shaped of animals.

Warner Bros.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement



Guess a rooster was too obvious.

Pris, meanwhile, is pretending to be a hooker when Sebastian finds her. Finally, we have Rachael, who is different from the other replicants in that she thinks she's human, complete with implanted memories. Her creator explains that this is an "emotional cushion," but why do that? The most logical explanation is to make a more effective sex doll -- one you could fall in love with. Which is exactly what the protagonist does. In the end, innocent Rachael is the most dangerous of the whole bunch.

Warner Bros.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement



Probably why they cast Sean Young.

You know all those facts you've learned about psychology from movies and that one guy at the party who says, "Actually ..." a lot? Please forget them. Chances are none of them are true. Take the Stanford Prison Experiment, the one famous psychology study people can name. It was complete bullshit. Funny story actually, it turns out that when you post flyers that say, "Hey, do you wanna be a prison guard for the weekend? Free food and nightsticks," you might not get the most stable group of young men. So join Jack O'Brien, Cracked staff members Dan O'Brien and Michael Swaim, and Psychology Professor Martie G. Haselton of UCLA as they debunk Rorschach tests, the Mozart effec,t and middle child syndrome, so soon you can be that person at the party who says, "Actually ..." Get your tickets here!

Also check out 5 Famously Dumb Movies With Mind-Blowing Hidden Meanings and 7 Films With Symbolism You Didn't Notice (And Can't Unsee).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 4 Movies That Are Horrifying From Another Character's POV, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.
Channel programs News

Accenture Takes Aim At Canadian SaaS Opportunity With ServiceNow Partner Acquisition

Jimmy Sheridan

Share this

Accenture is ramping up its ServiceNow capabilities in North America, scooping up Alberta consulting firm Nashco in response to the emerging prominence of the "as-a-service" model in Canada.

Accenture offers ServiceNow, the cloud-based workflow and automation platform, as a managed service to help companies automate their businesses and become more efficient. Terms of the Nashco deal were not disclosed.

We are seeing the market growing quite quickly in Canada  we are finding that customers in that geography are starting to embrace that as-a-service model and ServiceNow is a significant and relevant tool in that journey, Jason Wojahn, Managing Director and Global ServiceNow Lead for Accenture said in an interview with CRN.

[Related: Accenture Buys International Consultancy To Help Banks Build Digital Capabilities]

"Companies are always looking for more ways to be efficient and companies in Canada are no exception  This was just the right time, the right partner, and the right market conditions to be a complimentary mix," he said.

The acquisition brings 25 certified ServiceNow specialists into Accentures team of 800 certified specialists and 1,500 practitioners dedicated to the ServiceNow platform, further strengthening Accentures position as one of the top partners in the ServiceNow ecosystem.

Following the acquisition, which closed Wednesday morning, Nashco was tucked into Accentures global ServiceNow practice. "We are already working through the integration plans and expect to have the integration completed by February," Wojahn said, noting that the acquisition is "purely additive," to Accentures North American ServiceNow operations.

Nashco was founded in 1993 and has been exclusively focused on ServiceNow's IT service management suite since 2008. That focus has allowed it to become the leading ServiceNow partner in the Canadian market, the company said.

"This moves us to the top position in Canada  and that is part of our mission across the globe, to provide the highest quality services in ServiceNow possible to embrace the emerging as-a-service economy across every geography we occupy," Wojahn said.

This acquisition builds on top of Accentures October 2015 purchase of Cloud Sherpas, Accentures largest ServiceNow acquisition to date.

At that time, Dublin-based Accenture, No. 2 on the 2016 CRN SP500, added than 1,100 of Cloud Sherpas employees to its Cloud First Applications team. The CloudFirst team is now Accenture's ServiceNow practice.

Several of Accenture's this year have targeted security, vertical practices and growing the company's capabilities around its ability to deliver cloud applications and support "as-a-service" business model for its customers.
Channel programs News

HPE CEO Whitman: 'It is Obligation Of Every Citizen To Support Our President'

Steven Burke

Share this

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman, a Republican and a "vocal" supporter of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, is urging all citizens to step up and support President-elect Donald Trump.

"While the results of the election are not what I had hoped for, I believe that once the debate is over and the votes have been counted, it is the obligation of every citizen to support our president," wrote Whitman in a Facebook post Thursday. "So, I for one intend to give President-elect Trump the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to demonstrate that he can lead our diverse nation."

[Related: 10 Tech Leaders Chime In On 2016 Presidential Election Results]

Whitman's public support for Trump comes with protests over the election erupting in a number of cities including Portland, Ore.; Columbus, Ohio; and Minneapolis.

"After such a hard-fought election, it is important that every American take a moment to reflect on the results and to understand the message that our citizens have sent," said Whitman "Then we must bring the country together and move forward, stronger than ever."

Whitman, who made an unsuccessful run for governor of California as the Republican nominee in 2010, campaigned for Clinton and was front and center supporting her at the last debate between the two candidates.

A CRN poll of 1,300 solution providers that ran from Oct. 6 through Nov. 4 showed 46 percent of respondents felt Trump would be the better candidate for business, with 44 percent saying Clinton would be the better candidate.

Joe Balsarotti, owner and president of Software To Go, a top solution provider in the St Louis metropolitan market, applauded Whitman for moving to "bring the country together" in the midst of the current divisiveness in the nation.

"*It's a classy move," said Balsarotti. "Emotions run high during campaigns and when the campaign is over those of us who understand the process realize that you are never going to get 100 percent of what you want."

Balsarotti said Whitman, like most Fortune 500 CEOs, are pragmatists that realize that the political "winds are always changing, markets change and customers change."I don't think you can get to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company without being a pragmatist," he said.

Balsarotti, who voted for Trump, said he is hopeful the president-elect will improve the climate for small businesses. "I am hoping there is going to be a change in attitude toward small businesses," he said. "One of the things that bothered me about the election is that there were so many people demonizing businesses."
Something went wrong, please try again later.

Invalid email Something went wrong, please try again later.

The whole of Croydon has been hit hard by the tram disaster which has cruelly claimed seven lives - but perhaps nowhere is the suffering being felt more painfully than in New Addington.

It appears likely that the majority of the victims, if not all of them, will either be from the estate or have strong connections to it.

The ill-fated service is believed to have left New Addington tram stop at 5.53am on Wednesday morning.

More passengers will have got on at the estate's other stop, King Henry's Drive and Fieldway, before being joined by others at Addington Village, Gravel Hill, Coombe Lane and Lloyd Park.

Even at that early hour we know from the 51 people who suffered injuries that the tram must have been reasonably crowded.

The fact it was so busy at such a time shows how important the trams are to everyone who lives in New Addington.

Residents know they can rely on the trams, whether it is to get them to work, get them to school or get them to Croydon for all manner of other reasons.

The other thing the estate's residents have always known they can rely on is New Addington's community spirit.

Everyone there rallies round each other in difficult times - helping strangers as they would their nearest and dearest, with these strangers soon becoming lifelong friends.

What is already clear is that New Addington residents are again doing what they do best - and supporting each other through an unbearable, unthinkable, unimaginable tragedy.

Ken Burgess, owner of Burgess Boys Pet Care, on Central Parade, says many of his customers have been hit hard by the crash.

He said: "We know the people [who have been affected by the crash] and they are our customers. It is tragic. You will probably find virtually everyone in New Addington has been touched by somebody that has been in that tram.

"I was actually with a lady on a training course that day and her husband was on that tram.

"It has affected and hit everybody in New Addington. We are a very close-knit community here and you get to know the people who live in the area.

"We all know that bend and we even know the drivers and some people that work on the trams. Everybody is affected by it."

(Image: Croydon Advertiser)

Mr Burgess, who is also chairman of Central Parade Business Partnership, has been part of the community for 38 years and is still coming to terms with the tragedy.

He also revealed that he found out that a recent customer who only bought a pet a few weeks ago was involved in the crash and has since passed away.

Mr Burgess did not want to reveal the victim's name.

He said: "It is difficult to put into words how we feel. It is slowly sinking in what has happened, so it is going to be with us for quite some time I believe.

"It is very personal. I have been up here for 38 years serving the community so I watch people grow up from babies through to adulthood.

"When a person passes away we notice and we feel it. For somebody to go in such circumstances is tragic."

New Addington councillor Oliver Lewis told the Advertiser that plentiful support is being offered by community groups and welfare centres.

He said: "It is, of course, important that we pull together at times like this and support those affected by this week's tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with those grieving and struggling to come to terms with events.

"I have been pleased to see the response so far from community groups in New Addington.

"The council has set up welfare centres and phone lines, and as councillors for the estate we will hold an additional surgery on Saturday for anyone who wants to discuss this tragedy or anything else. We will all do what we can to wrap those who need it in love and support."

Julie Bales, a staff member at Meat Express in Central Parade, described the sombre atmosphere that unsurprisingly hangs over the estate at present.

Ms Bales, 61, said: "Everyone's in shock. It's so hard to get your head around. It's a close-knit community up here, very close knit.

"I think the mood will be solemn up here over the next few days. I think everybody wants answers, this is the problem."

Mick Watts, who has lived in New Addington for 61 years, explained that it has had a "big impact on the community".

(Image: Samantha Booth)

Mr Watts, who knows somebody whose husband is at St George's Hospital receiving treatment, said: "It's just so sad. New Addington is New Addington, it's a close community and it always has been.

"It's taken a big impact on the community. I expect there will be more news over the coming days about people from the area."

Mr Watts, who organises the Christmas lights on Central Parade, said a minute's silence will be held when they are switched on, on Saturday, November 26.

Susana Gaiao, who lives on Applegarth, in New Addington was personally affected by the tram crash as her husband, Rui de Sa, was hospitalised as a result of the crash.

He was sent to St George's Hospital, in Tooting, with an injured shoulder along with back and neck pain and muscle strain but Mrs Gaiao feels that the survivors of the crash can help each other, given how "very close" everyone in the local community is.

She said: "It is very important that everyone supports each other. New Addington is a very close community and everyone has always supported each other in the past as I am sure they will do now.

"We are able to reach out our support across the whole borough to those affected as shown by the St Edward's Church who will open their doors on Saturday for anyone affected by the events of [Wednesday].

"Addington community centre and the Salvation Army have opened up their doors to anyone in need of help to deal with what happened, this among other things is what needs to be put in place to help all those involved heal from their pain."

That pain is not going to go away.

But what we can be sure of is that relatives of victims, survivors and anyone else left devastated by this week's events will be able to rely on the fact that everyone in New Addington will do whatever they can to try and make that pain just a little more bearable.
Something went wrong, please try again later.

Invalid email Something went wrong, please try again later.

Police investigating the tragic tram crash are examining reports from passengers that a tram nearly derailed at the same sharp bend near Sandilands last week.

Seven people died in Wednesday's tragedy, with about 50 victims taken to hospital with a range of injuries.

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) has already said initial indications are that the tram was travelling at a "significantly higher" speed than the 12mph maximum it should have been when rounding a tight left-hand bend coming out of a tunnel on the New Addington to Wimbledon service.

As part of the investigation into the overturned tram crash, British Transport Police are now looking into reports that surfaced on Facebook after the crash, describing how an early-morning tram had taken the bend too fast on October 31 and braked hard.

Andy Nias wrote on that date: "30 of us on the tram this morning and we all thought our time was up  tram driver took the hard corner to Sandilands at 40mph!! I swear the tram lifted on to one side. Everyone still shaking  it's mad."

Another passenger, James Tofield, shared a text message he had sent to his wife at the same time, describing how the tram driver had braked and narrowly managed to stay on the track, adding: "It was like a ride from Alton Towers".

Speaking to the BBC, Andy Smith said he made a complaint to Transport for London (TFL) in July and warned about excessive speeds on the bend.

The Croydon Advertiser has contacted TFL for comment on these reports. We have also asked the body which runs Tramlink why trams are not fitted with speed limiters and for comment on reports from former drivers that the timetable is "unachievable" in peak hours in particular.

The driver of the tram is alleged to have told a passenger immediately after the derailment that he thought he had blacked out at the controls.

The 42-year-old from Beckenham was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and released on bail until May.

Injured survivor Martin Bamford told the Croydon Advertiser that he spoke to the driver to check he was OK.

He said: "I asked him what happened and he said he thinks he blacked out."

It is understood that whether the driver did indeed black out will form a crucial part of the investigation into the crash.

Ian Rowe, a tram expert from Tram Pro, has said the trams are fitted within emergency brake systems which are operated if the driver releases the controls for about three seconds.
BRIDGEPORT - A jurors sudden case of amnesia is no reason to forget about the jurys verdict, a judge ruled Friday, upholding a $225,000 award for a local truck driver in his wrongful termination lawsuit against an Arkansas trucking company.

Dwight Daley was ready to cheer when a Superior Court jury deliberated only a few hours before agreeing Daley was wrongly fired by the J.B. Hunt trucking company.

But his celebration was short lived when, a day after the verdict, one of the jurors came back to the courtroom and announced, Im ready to resume deliberations.

The fact that, after the lengthy deliberations and the process rendering and acceptance of the verdict, a juror does not remember those events does not mean that they did not take place in accordance with our laws, Judge William Rush ruled.

The judge made the appropriate ruling, said Daleys lawyer, Francis Burke.

Christopher Hodgson, the lawyer for the trucking company, could not be reached for comment. Trucking company officials did not return calls for comment.

A defendant has a due process right to a trial by jurors who are mentally competent, Hodgson previously stated.

Daley, 46, of Bridgeport, had been employed by Hunt as a driver at Bushwick Steel since March 2011. In June 2011 he was injured in an accident while riding his motorcycle, according to court documents.

In July 2011, the documents state, he returned to work with a doctors note but was told by his supervisors he couldnt return to work without authorizations from all his treating doctors. When he couldnt get an appointment with one of the doctors he was fired, he claims.

Daley sued J.B. Hunt for misrepresentation and just after a few hours of deliberation the six-member jury on Aug. 11 of this year found in Daleys favor and ordered the trucking company to pay him $200,000 in economic damages and $25,000 in non-economic damages.

The female juror, who was identified as Juror X, became upset after being told the jury had announced its verdict the previous day and said she had no recollection of the end of deliberations or the announcement of the verdict.

In a letter to the court she stated: I came in today to finish deliberation and found to my surprise that a verdict had been reached. I do not remember end of deliberations/verdict from yesterday. I dont have a history of memory gaps that I am aware of.

The jurors letter continues that she disagrees with the verdict and will be getting an evaluation for dementia/Alzheimer which had been recommended by a care giver because the jurors mother had early onset of Alzheimers disease.

In his ruling, Judge Rush pointed out that Juror X signed in as present on the morning the verdict was rendered and when the roll call was taken and the verdict read all the jurors, including Juror X, responded that it was their verdict.

If the juror cannot recall the deliberations and the rendition of the verdict it is doubtful that Juror X could reliably recall the state of her competency during the trial itself and any further inquiry would involve the court directly in the process of the deliberations, the judge stated.
ORANGESen. Richard Blumenthal will deliver remarks this week to honor a late World War II veteran credited with saving lives of his Jewish comrades.

The ceremony will also commemorate the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht or night of broken glass, the wave of attacks on German Jews widely regarded as the beginning of the Holocaust.

What we do is flip a day of sadness into a day of goodness, said Rabbi Alvin Wainhaus, who is organizing the tenth-annual Kristallnacht commemoration at Congregation Or-Shalom in Orange.

Each year, the congregation selects a person to honor for helping others. Past years included a founding member of the Greensboro sit-ins, a series of 1960s protests that galvanized the desegregation movement.

They are beacons of light, he said. They defied the darkness.

The Sunday, Nov. 20, celebration will recognize the Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds heroism in a German POW camp that reportedly saved as many as 200 Jewish-American soldiers. Wainhaus bills the event as a mix of history, celebration and fun.

Edmonds son Roddie, a Christian pastor in Tennessee received Israels Yad Vashem award on behalf of his father in January in a ceremony with Barrack Obama.

Former prisoners of war who remembered Edmond will recount the story of how German Nazi guards ordered the captured soldiers to separate into Jewish and non-Jewish groups.

We are all Jews here, Edmond told the guards, according to accounts gathered by Wainhaus, and commanded his men to stay together. He also threatened the guards, who were grossly in violation of the Geneva conventions concerning the treatment of prisoners of war.

We know who you are; and when we win this war, you'll be tried for war crimes, he reportedly said.

Wainhaus called the commemorations at Congregation Or-Shalom his labor of love, a passion to share stories of goodness, like the one that saved his family.

As Nazi genocides of Jewish, Roma, and other peoples raged in Europe, he explained, his father was one of thousands granted fraudulent travel visas out of Lithuania by rogue Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara.

My father was rescued, he said. Thats why Im here.

If you go: The event is free and open to the public. Early remarks begin at 9 a.m. and the main ceremony begins at 10:30 a.m. Dress business casual.

Guest Speakers: Ron Meier, Executive Director, Yad Vashem; Senator Richard Blumenthal: Pastor Chris Edmonds, Piney Grove Baptist Church, Maryville, TN

10th Annual Kristallnacht Commemoration

Sunday, November 20, 2016 - 9am

Congregation Or Shalom205 Old Grassy Hill Road, Orange, CT
Cuban president sends congratulations message to Donald Trump

Cuban President Raul Castro sent a message to US President-elect Donald Trump this November 9 congratulating him for his victory at the elections.

On the occasion of your election as President of the United States, I convey my congratulations, reads the message, as published by the website of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

According to Granma newspaper, heads of State and Government from all over the world sent congratulations messages to Trump after the results of the election were known.

Also several international organizations, like the United Nations, Unasur, and the European Union congratulated the Republican candidate on this occasion.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says one vehicle in eight still needs to be checked for defective Takata air bags. NHTSA recommends owners check for recall information, and if their vehicle is part of the recall, contact a local dealer for a free repair.

Just in case you havent heard, the City of Chicago is in deep trouble with their employee pension costs. Chicago will pay about $1 billion next year into four separate pension funds. To cover that in part, their city council increased telephone surcharges in 2014, adding about $35 million a year in revenues. A 2015 property tax increase will raise taxes by $543 million over the next four years. On September 14, 2016 their city council voted to raise water and sewer taxes to generate an additional $240 million annually by 2020.

A new study could reassure men with early prostate cancer that whether they opt for radiation, surgery or no treatment, their risk of dying of the disease in ten years is very low, less than one percent. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said new studies add to mounting evidence that men with localized prostate cancer can safely opt to postpone treatment.

Our State Senator Holly Mitchells sponsored bill, SB629, has been signed by Governor Brown and goes into effect on January 1, 2017. The Senators bill does not alter the penalties, but simply removes the inflammatory and misused term from the penal code as it relates to lynching.

The number of federal inmates who are serving time for drug offenses, among them thousands of nonviolent offenders sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, is 100,000.

If I lived in McKinney, Texas and wanted that city to furnish public documents under the Texas Public Information Act relating to a white police officer pointing his gun at black youths, it would require 2,231 hours of programmer time at a cost approaching $80,000. This figure is so high, it effectively keeps information hidden that the city is legally obligated to provide.

United Airlines found Boeings new plane, the 787-9, has such a range that it flies nonstop between San Francisco and Tel Aviv and Singapore and Auckland. Yes, folks, the 787-9 will carry 252 passengers 8,786 miles.

My, oh my, have things changed. Recently Vietnam bought commercial aircraft worth $11 billion.

For travelers, Holiday Inn Express was ranked number 1 in customer service and #1 in trust.

My former employer, the Boeing Aircraft Company, is a proving ground for the robotizing of the production assembly line for the 777 jet. As these robots displace workers, the companies are hiring a highly trained group of human workers to fix robots when they break down or need maintenance.

Recently Boeing projected airlines would need 617,000 pilots in the next 20 years worldwide and an additional 20,000 pilots over the next 10 years here in the United States.

Can it be true, folks? According to disclosure reports filed Thursday, June 30 with the Florida State Commission on Ethics, for the period January 1, 2015 to December 15, 2015 the Florida Attorney General, Pam Bondi, last year earned $128,872. To put it in perspective, the top super-duper Culver City City Attorney, Carol Schwab, made over $100,000 more than Bondi. Thats right. Carol, representing 40, 000 residents, made more than Bondi, representing millions of people in the Sunshine State.

Did you read the Reno, Nevada Gazette  Journal recently? Well, partner, it seems their city attorney was involved in settling a lawsuit against a police officer accused of assaulting a man during a traffic stop. I bet you are wondering about the cost. Well, it was a $23,000 settlement.

As of June 1 the good people of Idaho are able to carry a concealed gun without needing a license or training.

Now that the United States made Cuba our friend again, Cousin Neil was looking forward to restocking his shelves with rum and cigars, but, alas, the only product that was removed from the list of items barred from being imported from Cuba was coffee, and that will probably be on your favorite supermarket shelf around the first of December. I will try it, but the coffee will have to be marvelous to keep me away from my Yuban.

For those who missed an article, all my commentaries can be found at http://www.culvercityobserver.com by placing Rubenstein in the websites search box.
ATLANTIC SKIES: Stellar asterisms  eye-catching pretenders to the constellation throne and just part of the bigger picture

Most everyone, or at least most amateur astronomers, are familiar with the constellations in the night sky to some degree. Many, however, may not be familiar with the numerous asterisms in the night sky. What is the difference between a constellation ...
11 Kasm 2016 Cuma, 13:12

Dear Murat,



You are not allowed to write and receive letters. How different things are from the time Erdem and I were in the very same jail and were writing and receiving vast numbers of letters this month last year.

That being the case, I will send my letter here.



Nobody knows better than the prisoners in Silivri that human communications can never be blocked.

You saw your wife the day before yesterday. I can picture your smiling face from behind the window of yearning.



You have moved from one side of that window to the other in the space of a year. It is like passing on the baton.



You were expecting it  that is what you told me in letters.



You knew the history of the paper, you knew the tyranny of those in power and you knew your own stubbornness.



The grounds cited in the remand order were, The defences and behaviour observed during interrogation and the attitude of denial.



Well, this is why we love you.



This resistance gives solace to us, our paper, our family and our readers.



You immediately inquired after the paper. Do not worry. Everybody is working with even greater enthusiasm and commitment.



Cumhuriyet appears every day bringing tidings of hope. It ripens with resistance. It is turning into a historic shout in the vast silence.



And  if you see Onder, pass on the good news  the readers are rallying around the paper with great determination in the hour of need. It is selling out everywhere.



The front of the building is like Gezi Park every day and every night: Poems, speeches, concerts. Young people keeping watch at the entry level. An endless stream of visitors.



We tell everyone about you. About the hatred for the Republic of those in power, the ludicrous nature of the accusations and your defences that fill us all with pride.



And about those who, just like those who with every coup ready themselves to move into ministerial office, view the Cumhuriyet coup as an opportunity to turn informer and eye up the posts they expect to be vacated saying this is the mother of all opportunities.



***

I have become the papers Foreign affairs volunteer for the time being.

I am crying out to the world about the assault on the press in Turkey. I speak of you, the remanded writers, the closed newspapers and TV and radio stations, the proprietors forced into submission and our colleagues who have been left unemployed.

The world sees, Murat!



It sees both tyranny and resistance.



Our colleagues in all countries ask about you and write about you.



Not only they, but Western governments, complicit in this tyranny with their support or silence, are beginning to see this despotism more clearly and are raising their voices.



I spoke with German President Joachim Gauck on Monday. He himself stems from an oppressive regime; he is no stranger to tyranny. He asked me to convey special greetings to my colleagues. I hope for the opportunity to do so.



Our struggle was given a standing ovation at the Association of German Magazine Publishers award ceremony and in the historic chambers of Paris Municipality.



In the space of the past three days, I have spoken with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, French European Affairs Minister Harlem Desir, European Parliament President Martin Schulz and the mayors of Paris and Strasbourg. I spoke about you. And about the disappointment inflicted on us by the dirty negotiations conducted over refugees.



You are giving a lesson in courage to a Europe that has succumbed to fear. You are showing them how human rights, press freedom and the supremacy of the law are to be defended.



Your cell mates are Bulent and Mustafa Kemal. You have more or less enrolled on a course in legal studies. Count yourself lucky. If you were in the next cell, you would be doing gymnastics every morning along with Guray and Onder with Hakan as trainer.



If Musa were your cell mate you would be in stitches together over the whole affair. I bet there is more fun in that cell. You would have had entertaining conversations with Turhan about the way he has joined the ranks of the imprisoned writers whose names adorned the book supplement cover. You would have chattered away with Kadri about those who find there to be something coup-provoking in an article about giving up smoking.



Look, Akn is coming. May he make them swallow their false words, friend and enemy alike.

They will be sorry they brought you in, Murat. For, as you say, We hold our heads high. We have engaged in nothing but journalism.



So that we might look our children in the eye without shame.



***

Did you get Muratcans letter?



He addresses those who would stay in power for ever.



He says:



Those you have tried to sully with false accusations and lies will most probably not make amends with you in the next world. Even so, I swear on my behalf and that of like-minded people among us that, should the injustice we have suffered as a country one day come to trial, we will not impose the same unfair treatment on the authors of this injustice. Come what may, we will uphold their rights with our honour.



While they strive to raise hate-filled generations, the offspring we have raised are free from hate. We will not buckle under any pressure.



Keep yourself warm.



Pass on my greetings to the friends.



Rest assured this will not last long.





Can Dundar
Democrats saw a surge in new voters in Pennsylvania as midterms near
Amid the geopolitical aftershocks of Donald Trump's election and the prophecies of a Third World War, readers can always rely on this column to address the really serious issues of the week.

So it is that I turn my pen to the matter of Jeremy Paxman's remark about a knitted doll, uttered more than 18 months ago during a break in filming of a round of University Challenge between teams from Reading and Imperial College, London.

Was Paxo guilty, as Reading's student union insisted this week, of 'undermining and oppressing individuals due to their gender?'

If so, was the offence grave enough to justify the students wreaking terrible retribution  a boycott of all future series of the BBC Two quiz show? (Forget the end of the world. Imagine University Challenge without Reading! The very thought turns the blood to ice!)

More than 18 months ago, during a break in filming of a round of University Challenge, Jeremy Paxman made a remark about a knitted doll. So, was Paxo guilty, as Reading's student union insisted this week, of 'undermining and oppressing individuals due to their gender?'

Which brings us to the nub of the matter. Was the union's education officer, Niall Hamilton, right to proclaim: 'These forms of oppression should not be taken lightly'?

On balance, I'm inclined to think he was wrong and that, yes, lightly is exactly how they should be taken.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For the benefit of those who may have been distracted by lesser matters across the Atlantic, in Europe or the Middle East, these are the facts as I understand them.

The knitted doll in question, about six inches tall, was the mascot of the Reading team, and it was supposed to represent Mr Paxman himself. If you ask me, its likeness to the great quizmaster is not very exact, but that is by the by. Those with internet access will be able to judge for themselves.

Over to the accused for his side of the story  and I make no apology for recording his evidence at some length.

'I have racked my brains to discover what on earth the Reading students' union is on about,' says Paxo. 'I think they're referring to a recording of University Challenge which took place in February 2015, though I am baffled at why it has become an issue a year-and-a-half later.

'There was a technical fault which meant we had to interrupt the recording, leaving all of us sitting at our desks in the studio while the problem was sorted out in the control gallery.'

Now we get to the nitty-gritty. Mr Paxman continues: 'In the conversation to fill the void  in a brightly lit studio, in front of all eight contestants, a full studio crew and an audience of several hundred spectators  I asked the Reading team about the mascot sitting on their desk.

'One of them said it was a hand-knitted Jeremy Paxman doll. Across the several yards separating the chairman's desk from the teams, I asked the whole team whether they took it to bed with them. Though no complaint was made at the time, this, apparently, is what has upset them.'

At this point, I must stress that Reading's captain, a 27-year-old PhD student and the only woman on the team of four, has a slightly different version of events. In a post on her Twitter feed, Sammie Buzzard says Paxo didn't ask 'whether' anyone took the doll to bed, but said: 'Please tell me you do.'

This, as fair-minded readers must agree, puts a subtly different complexion on the remark. Ms Buzzard also makes the point: 'The fact it was in front of the whole audience is surely worse?' (I love that question-mark after her assertion, with its suggestion of the Californian interrogative inflection  the rising note at the end of sentences so much favoured by the young.)

She adds: 'So many people heard it in the context, which was just plain creepy.'

Meanwhile, a spokesman for University Challenge defends Paxo, saying: 'A comment made during a conversation with the whole team would appear to have been misinterpreted.'

Well, there we have both sides of this earth-shaking dispute.

Now for my observations  although others are free to disagree, as with all my opinions, without risk of being accused of subverting the British constitution. I am not a High Court judge, after all, and am happy for the world to say what it thinks.

Meanwhile, Aleppo burned, the UK voted for Brexit, Cameron fell, May rose, Putin flexed his military muscles, the biggest peacetime migrations in history engulfed Europe, Labour elected an antediluvian Trot as its leader and an eccentric billionaire braggart staked his claim to the U.S. presidency

First, I am inclined to sympathise with Paxo when he says he is baffled that his remark has become a talking-point all these months after he made it.

We were given a hint of the controversy back in July (though most of us missed it), when Reading posted a picture online of Paxo posing with their team, captioned: 'Coming soon to a screen near you: creepy man photobombs student quiz team.'

I can only assume that this week's vote for a boycott, with 120 students in favour and 105 against, was delayed for so long to give campaigners on both sides ample time to make their case and solicit support before the momentous Mascotgate debate. Thus, I imagine the students of Reading arguing about it, day and night, for 18 months.

Meanwhile, Aleppo burned, the UK voted for Brexit, Cameron fell, May rose, Putin flexed his military muscles, Ukip imploded, the biggest peacetime migrations in history engulfed Europe, Labour elected an antediluvian Trot as its leader and an eccentric billionaire braggart staked his claim to the U.S. presidency.

But who cared about any of that, while the great question of our time needed answering: was Paxo, or was he not, guilty of sexism when he asked about that wretched knitted doll?

For what it's worth, I reckon his remark was indeed a little creepy and off-colour. For one thing, the fact that he professes to remember it word-for-word, after all these months, suggests it wasn't quite as innocent as he claims.

Speaking for myself, I find it increasingly hard to recall anything I did or said before lunchtime yesterday. It would have to be something quite out of the ordinary to stick in my mind for 18 months. And at 63 this month, I'm three years younger than Paxo.

This is why I'm inclined to believe Ms Buzzard's claim that he pleaded with her to say that she took the Paxman doll to bed with her.

As for his claim that he was addressing the question to the whole team, he must surely have realised that it was likely to be answered by the captain. I suspect that's exactly what he had in mind when he asked it, though this is just a guess.

No, in my book the remark was distinctly flirtatious  and perhaps not a very appropriate thing for a super-confident, dominant male in his mid-60s to say to a nervous student in her late 20s.

A quizmaster, after all, is akin to an examiner, and I reckon we'd all take a pretty dim view of any male teacher who went around asking female exam candidates if they took his effigy to bed with them.

That said, I am in no position to preach to Paxo. Like many of our generation, I have often been guilty of making sexist remarks myself.

Indeed, only the other day in the pub (though I stress we were in all-male company), one of my old cronies told me he greatly admired the leading actress's breasts in a production he had seen of Antony And Cleopatra  hardly Shakespearean criticism of the most elevated order.

I regret to report that I chipped in: 'Did she have a nice asp, too?'  a pun that lost some of its edge and spontaneity when I had to repeat it three times to my friend, increasingly loudly, since he is slightly deaf. Like flirting with pretty girls, it's a generational thing, I fear.

Of course, Donald Trump would call this 'locker-room talk'. But I'm afraid that the students of Reading would identify it for what it was  a horrendous crime against political correctness. It is even possible that 18 months from now, if the human race survives that long, they will pass a portentous motion, boycotting this column for the rest of time.
Another day and another perverse ruling from our unelected and unaccountable judges.

The Court of Appeal yesterday ordered the cash-strapped NHS to consider paying for an expensive treatment called PrEP which prevents the transmission of HIV among high-risk groups, including otherwise completely healthy gay men.

What business it is of the courts how the NHS prioritises its spending is far from clear. But the consequences are: trusts, many of which already ration life-changing cataract operations, will have to cut other crucial treatments.

The Court of Appeal yesterday ordered the cash-strapped NHS to consider paying for an expensive treatment called PrEP which prevents the transmission of HIV among high-risk groups, including otherwise completely healthy gay men

Among the 13 immediately put in doubt because of the 330 per-person per-month cost of PrEP are hearing implants for deaf children, bionic knees for the disabled, drugs for children with cystic fibrosis and a pill which allows cancer patients to undergo chemotherapy.

The Mail must stress: this is in no way an argument about individual sexual preference, or about treating people  gay or straight  who already have HIV and who deserve our every sympathy.

It is simply about where best to allocate scarce funds.

Charities which back PrEP say issuing it free would stop the spread of HIV, and so cut the eventual cost to the taxpayer.

But they fail to address the other highly effective and inexpensive method of protection: condoms, which stop a raft of sexually transmitted diseases.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: some patients will lose out on essential treatments for conditions they can't prevent  while funds go on a lifestyle drug for others who can.

Advantage Mrs May

Just two days after the election of Donald Trump, it is clear that outside the US, it is Europe where the shockwaves of this political earthquake will be felt most profoundly.

Take defence. During the campaign Mr Trump questioned why America should foot the bill for nearly three quarters of Nato military spending, while European countries  with the notable exception of Britain  fail to pull their weight.

He has a point. For too long, Europe has prioritised bloated welfare states while relying on the US to pay for security.

At a time when that opportunist thug Vladimir Putin is in the Kremlin, Mr Trump's words should have been a wake-up call for Europe's elites, who now need more than ever to reinforce this historic alliance. Instead, they reacted with horror and, from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, outright bitterness.

For Brexit Britain, the arrival of Mr Trump is a great opportunity. Theresa May can leverage our military might and unrivalled intelligence and security apparatus to assert her influence and  with the likely death of the US/EU trade deal, secure one for Britain

She, and the rest of the continent's blinkered leaders  who are reeling from a refugee crisis of their own making  clearly see in Trump's victory the spectre of their own political mortality.

They rightly fear a similar maelstrom of anti-establishment feeling engulfing Europe in upcoming elections, where far-Right groups are waiting in the wings.

Meanwhile, for Brexit Britain, the arrival of Mr Trump is a great opportunity. Theresa May can leverage our military might and unrivalled intelligence and security apparatus to assert her influence and  with the likely death of the US/EU trade deal, secure one for Britain.

Yesterday, in a reassuring start, the two leaders endorsed the 'very special' relationship. In a ten-minute phone call the president-elect pointed to the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher alliance  which did so much to win the Cold War  as his model for US-UK relations.

While Europe's leaders gnash their teeth and wail, Mrs May can make hay.
Are we heading for a war with Russia? I no longer believe it is absurd to contemplate such a nightmare. After all, Vladimir Putin has already seized the Crimea and intervened in Ukraine. He is calling the shots in Syria.

But until now  until the election of Donald Trump  we have had the assurance of American protection. Not any more. Trump does not merely regard Putin with a high degree of respect.

Even more to the point, he also believes America pays too much towards the defence of Europe. During the presidential campaign, he declared that Nato  the Western military alliance which has safeguarded Europeans for nearly 70 years  was obsolete and costs America too much.

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech in Moscow

I dont believe he is right to say Nato is obsolete. With Russia having roughly doubled its military budget over the past decade, and with Putin becoming ever more aggressive, Nato is more relevant than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

But Trump is undoubtedly correct to argue that Europe is too dependent on Uncle Sam for its protection, and that European countries should contribute more to their own defence.

America is responsible for more than 70 per cent of all the military expenditure of the 28 Nato countries. This is grossly inequitable, since the combined Gross National Product (GDP) of the European allies exceeds that of the United States.

It is no exaggeration to say that European leaders are acting like children. They like to patronise America, and were in some cases supercilious or lecturing (step forward Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande) after Trumps election triumph. Yet they wont pay to defend their countries properly.

Nato expects every member to contribute at least 2 per cent of its GDP towards defence. Only five countries out of 28 meet this target. The United States stumps up 3.6 per cent of its enormous GDP. Greece pays nearly 2.5 per cent. Tiny Estonia (to which the UK is sending 800 troops and some tanks) spends just over the 2 per cent threshold, while Poland hits its exactly.

As for Britain, although our defence budget was recklessly hacked back by nearly 10 per cent by the Coalition government in 2010  and the Army reduced to its smallest size since the mid-19th century  we just manage to meet the 2 per cent target.

But thats it. Germany, which has the fourth largest economy in the world, contributes just 1.2 per cent of its GDP to defence. Italy, whose economy ranks seventh or eighth, stumps up just over 1 per cent. Spain pays less than 1 per cent.

France, which likes to cut a global figure, and is forever despatching troops to Africa to take part in some post-colonial skirmish, pays just 1.8 per cent of its GDP towards defence.

Perhaps even more inexcusably, countries which would be in the front line against Russian aggression, such as Latvia and Lithuania, pay a minuscule amount towards their own defence, and rely on others to protect them.

After years of peace, the leaders of these countries appear to regard the idea of war as a distant possibility. Insofar as there is thought to be a tiny risk, the ever obliging Americans are expected to cover it. This was always a narrow and selfish viewpoint. After Wednesday morning, it is practically suicidal.

For it is surely obvious that if the United States drastically reduces its contribution, which is what Donald Trump has indicated he wants to do, Europe will be unable to defend itself against a Russian invasion unless it significantly increases its defence expenditure.

Indeed, that is exactly the fear raised by a number of British former military chiefs since Trumps election. For example, Sir Michael Graydon, an ex-head of the RAF, said that Nato without the US would not be strong enough to defend Eastern Europe.

And yesterday, a former Nato chief warned that Mr Trump must act in the face of Russian aggression within 100 days of taking office or it would mark the beginning of the end of the US-led system.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato secretary general 2009-2014, said the American president-elect must show strength

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato secretary general from 2009 until 2014, said the American president-elect must show strength towards Moscow since Vladimir Putin only respects a firm and steady hand.

Of course, we can have no idea what Trump will do once he is installed in the White House and surrounded by American generals who believe in Nato. It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that he will withdraw all US troops and every piece of American military hardware from Europe.

His most extreme statement came earlier this year when he said that the US might not come to the aid of a Nato ally, which it is obliged to do. Under Article 5, an attack on one member is supposed to be treated as an attack on all. If this undertaking is revoked, Nato is finished as an alliance.

More likely, Trump will try to reduce Americas disproportionately large contribution. But that would leave a hole which would endanger the defence of Europe unless it were filled by the European allies.

Here I believe that Britain could be absolutely pivotal. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Trumps election means that Britain will be asked to play an enhanced role within Nato as Europes leading military power. This in turn is likely to have a positive effect on our relations with our EU partners, and negotiations over Brexit.

For the countries which are planning to give the UK a hard time over Brexit are in many cases the same countries which need us to play a leading part in a differently configured Western alliance confronted by a resurgent Russia.

The fact is that, despite successive cutbacks, Britain remains a formidable military power, even though she is dwarfed by America and dangerously outclassed by Putins Russia.

Her intelligence capabilities are second only to Americas, and at GCHQ in Cheltenham the UK possesses a surveillance facility which is unparalleled in the rest of Europe, as well as greatly valued by the United States.

Britains special forces are considered highly effective, not least in Washington. And as one of Europes two nuclear powers (along with France), the UK occupies a special place in Nato, and is taken seriously by Russia. Though depleted, our Army, Navy and the RAF remain forces to be reckoned with.

President Barack Obama shakes hands with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington

One of Theresa Mays main tasks will be to capitalise on all the goodwill which Donald Trump plainly feels for this country, and do her utmost to limit American disengagement from Europe.

But there is bound to be a reassessment of Americas role. Why should it continue to subsidise rich European countries capable of looking after themselves? Isnt it time their leaders faced up to their responsibilities in a grown-up way, and stopped always relying on the superpower across the Atlantic? In this new world, all European countries, not excluding Britain, will have to spend more defending themselves.

We can set aside for now any genuine prospect of an EU army since it is inconceivable that our allies on the Continent will go it alone without Britain. They need us in the most important way imaginable  the defence of Europe.

Ive lost count of the number of articles Ive read which suggest that Britain is becoming an introverted little island forsaking Europe. The opposite is the case. I suggest that a Europe threatened by Russia, and with America in retreat, needs us more than it has done for a long time.
A woman quit her job and gave up her flat to go on 50 dates in 12 different cities around the world.

Yvonne Eisenring was 27 when she decided to pack up her life in Zurich, where she was working as a TV reporter, to spend a year meeting men on a journey that took her to New York, Cuba, Rome, Tel Aviv and more.

Swiss Yvonne - who reveals her least successful encounter was with a man who told her 'red heads are cursed' - says the men in New York and Tel Aviv are the most forward, unlike Hamburg in Germany, where she had to use Tinder to find a date.

Sabbatical: Swiss TV reporter Yvonne, seen in Rome, has written a book about her adventure

Tropical adventure: Yvonne's dating odyssey took her to far-flung destinations like Cuba

Yvonne says her dramatic decision was nothing to do with frustration at being single.

'I think it was the opposite,' she said. 'I was happy.

'But it got to a point where I realised I hadn't fallen in love for a while, and I thought - maybe something is going wrong.

'Maybe I'm spending too much time and energy on other things in my life, like my career or how I look. Maybe I have to change everything.'

Finding love: Yvonne, now 29, says the men in Tel Aviv (pictured) are quick to ask women out

Yvonne's first port of call was New York, where she stayed with friends and discovered the local dating scene was a far cry from that of her native Switzerland.

'Guys would talk to me in the street,' she says.

'I was jogging across the Williamsburg Bridge one day and a guy stopped me to ask me out. That would never happen in Switzerland.'

Welcome to New York: The redhead said men in Manhattan automatically pick up the tab

Colourful tales: Yvonne, who packed her bags when she was 27, is seen here in South Africa

But not every city was as successful on the romance front.

'In Hamburg I used Tinder,' she says, adding that in other cities she'd met men through introductions from friends or immersing herself in different activities - like Italian lessons in Rome.

Some of Yvonne's most memorable dates included a New Yorker who tried to impress her with his singing skills by belting out opera in a cafe at 3pm.

'In Italy a guy told me that redheads were cursed, and that they can put a curse on other people,' she adds.

'That was a short date.'

International love: Swiss TV reporter Yvonne Eisenring has written a book about her adventure

The redhead's route, which eventually took her to 12 different countries, evolved over the course of her year-long sabbatical, who says if she was enjoying herself or met someone she'd like to see again in a particular destination, she'd stay longer.

Yvonne has published a book about her trip

Yvonne is now back in Switzerland and has published a book about her journey, but don't expect her to draw any broad conclusions about which men in which countries are the best to date.

'I went on 50 dates, but not with 50 different men,' she explains.

She does say that men in New York and Tel Aviv are 'not shy', and adds that she met some very charming Londoners during her year of travelling.

'I was so excited about dating life when I first got to New York, it wasn't necessarily that I wanted to find a partner,' Yvonne says.

But the writer says she'd be lying if she said the prospect of falling in love hadn't crossed her mind.

'Of course, I think we all want to love someone,' she says.

As for whether her dating adventure does have a fairy-tale ending, Yvonne isn't giving anything away.

'I'm not giving away the end of the book,' she says.

But she will say this: 'I am very happy right now.'
They debate over when children should be given sex change hormones - which can cause infertility

Experts investigating why there's an increase in gender confused children believe it could be due to pressure to 'fit in'

to specialist Tavistock clinic in London have gone up 100 percent in the past year

Ash was just three years old when she came to her mother sobbing, not over a cut knee or a broken toy, but because she couldn't understand why everyone thought she was a boy.

'It is your fault you gave me a boy's name, that is why I am a boy,' she said. 'When are you going to take me to a doctor to have it taken off?".'

Now aged eight, Ash from Ramsgate lives as a girl, but experts warn she faces an uncertain future as the long-term implications of drug treatments - which are known to cause infertility - and surgery are still unknown.

Ash was born a boy but now lives as a girl. She said being a boy felt like she was 'telling a lie'

Ash is one of a growing number of children who have been referred to The Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London, the only such service in the UK for children that is NHS-funded.

The service has seen a 100 per cent increase in referrals in the last year. A decade ago, they received 40 referrals a year, now that figure is up to 1,400.

The trust has trained 30 new staff since the summer to cope with the increasing number of cases.

A new Channel 4 documentary airing next week, Kids On The Edge, has been given unprecedented access to the service to meet the growing number of children referred there, and hear from the doctors and experts who help them.

Dr Polly Carmichael, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist Director at Tavistock, said a key part of the treatment process is understanding why the numbers asking for a sex change are rising.

She believes i t could be down to the fact society is more accepting of transgender people today so there is no longer a fear or stigma attached to seeking help.

Or she wonders, if, for some, it could be a misplaced sense of self, a belief that their unhappiness or ability to fit in is solely down to their gender, and if that was changed, their lives would be transformed.

Dr Carmichael said this is something they always explore as, just with anyone undertaking plastic surgery, a change of appearance will not automatically make someone happier and more popular.

Ash would like to have 'blockers' to stop her entering male puberty. She won't be allowed sex hormones on the NHS till she is 16, in case she changes her mind about wanting to become a girl - she is adamant she won't

She explains: 'If we create a narrative which is it is the end of the world if you can't fully be seen to be a particular gender, or if there are things that don't quite fit, I wonder if that is the right sort of message we are giving.

'How far are the physical changes one seeks motivated more around feeling that you fit in and are accepted by others?'

She added: 'There isn't a right and wrong and no one has the answers, it is an evolving picture with many voices contributing.

'All we can go on is the young people who have taken this route and feel it has been the right thing for them to do.'

Dr Carmichael said everyone at Tavistock works hard to assess a child's mental health and wellbeing before recommending they are given sex hormones to change their gender.

How far are the physical changes one seeks motivated more around feeling that you fit in and are accepted by others? Dr Polly Carmichael

The fact a child may later decide they would prefer to remain the sex they were born weighs on their mind, as does the long-term effects of taking such drugs.

In the last few years it has become more common to prescribe hormones to young people but there is no information about the consequences down the line.

For instance, by taking the hormones, some of the children become infertile, taking away their chance to become a biological parent when they are too young to decide if that is something they will want later in life.

The children, like Ash, are in turmoil over their gender and a feeling that they don't fit in, with some sinking so low they consider suicide.

Describing how she often never feels 'right', Ash explained: 'I feel like a regular girl but I am not. There is something inside me that is saying to come out.

'I was born a male and my name was Ashton but I say he was an older brother that died and fell off a cliff. Living as a boy felt like telling a lie.'

I was born a male and my name was Ashton but I say he was an older brother that died and fell off a cliff Ash, aged eight

When Ash was seven, she told her mother she wanted to end it all as she was being bullied at school because of her desire to be a girl.

Recalling the terrible conversation, Terri said: 'She said she wants to be in heaven, she doesn't fit into this world. She is scared she is going to die and loves me and doesn't want to leave me.'

Terri, who is separated from Ash's father, Richard, a builder from Ilford who is still closely involved in her life, moved Ash and her younger siblings to Brighton.

Ash was enrolled at her new school as a girl but they found anxiety over when her 'secret' would be uncovered too stressful, and Terri decided they would be better off back in Ramsgate after all.

Ash is one of a rising number of children referred to The Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London. Experts there investigate why children feel so strongly about changing sex and assess the best course of action

Now Ash, along with her parents, is seeking information from experts at Tavistock on whether she could have 'blockers' to prevent her going through male puberty, as she is terrified of getting facial hair and a deeper voice.

'Blockers' can be given to Tavistock patients at the age of 11 (along with their parent's consent), essentially to buy time in case a child changes their mind about a sex change as they age.

It is the only drug that would be currently available to Ash on the NHS, as protocol at Tavistock states that sex hormones cannot be prescribed until a child is at least 16. Then at 18 they can be considered for surgery.

It is really important to be checking with people their expectations of physical interventions as it is obviously true they are not the panacea to all things Dr Polly Carmichael

Ash is confident she won't change her mind about being a girl as she gets older. She is so feminine, her mother had to check with doctors whether it was possible she could have naturally developed some female hormones.

Such is Ash's belief that she is a girl, she tells her mother she can feel her breasts growing and she can't wait till the day she will give birth to her own child.

Terri has tried to tell her daughter this may never happen because of the way she was born, but Ash replied she could have a womb transplant after reading about the recent pioneering operation in Sweden.

Dr Carmichael said part of their involvement with gender confused children and their parents is managing such expectations.

Dr Polly Carmichael works with children who want to change gender to assess the best form of treatment, but she admits even the experts don't know all the answers

'Young people can see the information available online and on social media, they can form an idea of where they want to be, yet they don't really have a full understanding of the implications of some of these decisions,' she said.

'It is really important to be checking with people their expectations of physical interventions as it is obviously true they are not the panacea to all things.'

She added that many children and their parents are desperate for a quick fix but there are no simple solutions.

'We don't really know if this is the right treatment for everyone or whether there are long term implications for this treatment but for families and young people if can be very difficult,' she said of those they help change sex.

'They are seeking certainty, but the reality is at the moment we don't have certainty.'

Kids On The Edge is on Channel 4 Wednesdays at 10pm
Earlier this month, heartbroken mother-of-six, Kristen Layne (a pen name), penned an emotional blog post after nobody turned up to her son Mahlon's ninth birthday party.

The post went viral, with the pictures of the little boy sitting alone at his party table proving to be too heart wrenching to handle for thousands around the world.

And now, the optimistic little boy has been showered with gifts and letters from all corners of the globe... and was even invited to spend the day at a fire station in Oregon.

Heartbreaking: Earlier this month, heartbroken mother-of-six, Kristen Layne, penned an emotional blog post after nobody turned up to her son Mahlon's ninth birthday party

All smiles: Now, the adorable and optimistic little boy has been showered by gifts and letters from all corners of the globe... and was even invited to spend the day at a fire station (pictured)

Overjoyed: Mahlon is pictured holding up one of many heartfelt cards sent to him

'I'm crying big ugly tears right now. I'm going through letters and received a very sweet heartfelt letter from a mom of two boys with Autism and Sensory Processing Disorder,' Ms Layne wrote after reading one of the letters.

'It's never been about the gifts and fame as my haters claim (still laughing over that as anyone who really knows me knows I'm very shy and would much rather hide under a blanket eating chocolate than have to talk to people).

'This is what it's all about. People reaching out and offering a kind word to make someone else feel better.'

Overjoyed: 'This is what it's all about. People reaching out and offering a kind word to make someone else feel better,' Ms Layne said

Touched: 'I'm going through letters and received a very sweet heartfelt letter from a mom of two boys with Autism and Sensory Processing Disorder. Her boys drew these pictures for M and I'm sobbing,' Ms Layne wrote next to this picture

She also shared snaps of her little boy looking overjoyed as he was given a private tour of the fire station by firefighters.

'An extra special thank you to the Bend Firefighters for giving Mahlon one of the best days ever! Last Sunday we were invited for a private tour of the station and the kids were mesmerized by all the bright shiny red objects,' Ms Layne wrote.

'They had such a good time and didn't want to leave. The crew was so patient and awesome with the kids. They let them take a ride on one of the fire trucks and Mahlon got to spray the hose.

'Both boys are saying they want to be firefighters now when they grow up, and they have already decided they will be firemen for Halloween next year. Thank you so much for a truly unforgettable day! It was so much fun!!'

Having a ball: 'The crew was so patient and awesome with the kids. They let them take a ride on one of the fire trucks and Mahlon got to spray the hose,' she wrote

The doting mother also penned a blog post addressing a number of the accusations she has had from 'haters' after sharing her story with the world.

Ms Layne shared the original post on her website, Life on Peanut Layne, describing her son Mahlon as 'bright, sensitive and caring'.

She added that the young boy is also 'naturally funny, easy to please and looks at life with hope and optimism... the kid who would give the shirt off of his back to a stranger, hand over a beloved toy to make another child smile.'

But despite this, not one single child from school or Mahlon's taekwondo class came to his birthday party.

Heart wrenching: Ms Layne, penned the emotional post after nobody turned up to Mahlon's ninth birthday party

Excited: The mother-of-six shared the post on her blog, Life on Peanut Layne, describing her son as 'bright, sensitive and caring'

After Mahlon spent his first year attending a public school, after being home schooled for much of his life, Ms Layne, from Oregon, was sure that plenty of other children would turn up to his party.

'This ninth birthday was supposed to be his year. His special day. His first real party with friends,' Ms Layne wrote.

The doting mother chose a 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' theme because it is Mahlon's favorite book series, and ordered him custom invitations on Etsy, an edible cake topper, and even planned some fun Diary of a Wimpy Kid-themed games.

All ready to go: Ms Layne shared pictures of their planned Diary of a Wimpy Kid-themed party games and snacks

'He handed out multiple invitations to his friends at school, and one [friend] from taekwondo, and eagerly counted down the days, hours, and minutes until his birthday,' she wrote.

'When his birthday finally arrived yesterday, he was up before the sun. He hung streamers, blew up balloons, cleaned his room, took a bath, picked out his outfit, set the table, and carefully assembled the treat bags for his friends.

'"Only three more hours until my friends arrive," he yelled. "This is the happiest day of my life, Momma. I can't wait until my friends get here!"'

Ms Layne shared pictures of her son posing by the party decorations all smiles as he waited for his friends to arrive.

Waiting for guests to arrive: Mahlon waited patiently for his party guests to arrive

Photos also showed the planned games, lolly bags and place settings for everyone.

But when the party start time came and passed, Ms Layne started to worry.

No one came Dad. I guess I'm not very popular at school

'I had asked parents to RSVP on the invitation, but hadn't received a single reply.

'Since we're new in town (and school just started a little over a month ago here), I didn't have phone numbers for any of the parents,' she wrote.

Ms Layne considered cancelling the party but her son had assured her that five of his friends were definitely coming.

'No one came': Ms Layne watched as her little boy ran up and down the street anxiously waiting for his party guests

'I guess I'm not very popular at school': Despite having enough pizza to 'feed a small army', party games and a large cake, only Mahlon's family and family friends turned up

Ms Layne watched as her little boy ran up and down the street anxiously waiting for his party guests.

'But no one came. Not a single child,' Ms Layne added.

She explained that, despite having ordered enough pizza to 'feed a small army', planned plenty of party games and ordered a large cake, only Mahlon's family members turned up to celebrate with him.

'No one came Dad. I guess I'm not very popular at school,' Ms Layne described her son as saying, adding that he later started sobbing when he realized nobody was going to turn up.

'Words cannot describe the utter and complete devastation that washed over me... seeing my heartbroken little boy sitting all alone at his brightly decorated, empty party table was more than I could take,' Ms Layne said.

Making the most of it: Mahlon's family took him bowling that afternoon

Kindness of strangers: Since posting about the experience, little Mahlon has been sent a flood of gifts and words of support

Although Mahlon was joined by his family members, and a few family friends, who all enjoyed the cake and pizza together, Ms Layne admitted that she and her husband were devastated by the fact that none of Mahlon's school friends turned up - even though the little boy ended the day with a smile on his face.

It could've all been avoided by a simple RSVP, via phone call, text, email, whatever

Ms Layne added that she is 'too devastated to be angry' at the parents of the children who were invited; but while she doesn't blame the kids for not turning up, she urged parents to make sure that they RSVP to all birthday party invites in future.

'M will likely never forget his ninth birthday. It will forever be etched in his memory bank as that one year when no one came to his party,' she said.

'And that kills me as a parent. And it could've all been avoided by a simple RSVP, via phone call, text, email, whatever, etc.
Charles and Duchess of Cornwall are on a tour of the Middle East

Prince Charles honoured fallen soldiers at a Remembrance Day service in Bahrain today as he continued his tour of the Middle East.

The Duke of Cornwall wore full military dress to attend the service in Manama where he laid a wreath at the war memorial.

Charles was seen greeting senior military officers and UK veterans before taking his seat for the service.

Scroll down for video

Remembrance Day: Prince Charles met with UK veterans ahead of the service in Bahrain on Friday morning

The British veterans attending the sombre service are currently working in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Charles, who has been accompanied on his tour of the Gulf by his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, attended the ceremony alone.

Last night the couple were photographed together greeting well wishers at a reception at the British Embassy, held to celebrate the 200th anniversary of bilateral relationships between the United Kingdom and Bahrain.

Paying respects: The Prince wore full military uniform to attend the service today

Middle East tour: The Prince, who has been touring with his wife, paid respects to the fallen soldiers on Friday

On Thursday, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall shared a giggle as they visited the Krishna Temple in Bahrain.

The couple, who are currently on a tour of the Gulf on behalf of the British government, popped into the temple on what was a busy day of engagements after picking up some bargains at a local souk (market) in the country's capital, Manama.

Manama Souq in the old bazaar area of the city is home to shops teeming with local souvenirs, gold jewellery, rugs and textiles.

The couple were also introduced to craft makers displaying their wares including model dhows and pottery.

Fallen heroes: Prince Charles laid a wreath of poppies at the war memorial in Manama

Earlier they visited the Post Office Museum, which displayed stamps commemorating historic moments in the history of the kingdoms of Bahrain and the UK.

The Duchess of Cornwall wore dusky pink kaftan on the latest leg of her tour of the Middle East, pairing the garment with a woven clutch, taffeta scarf and white pumps.

Later in the day Camilla visited St. Christopher's School, a not for profit British-style school that has more than 2,200 pupils from more than 70 countries.

Meanwhile, Charles attended a private audience with Prince Khalifa bin Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the prime minister of Bahrain.
I can just imagine excitement in the boardroom when some creative toy genius unveiled their vision for this years Christmas must-have  the SelfieMic!

This is a selfie stick with a microphone attached to the handle - giving pre-teen girls the opportunity to record themselves pretending to be sexy pop-stars, then scrutinize themselves in their video before posting it on the SelfieMic app.

Naomi Greenaway, 37, says the stick of vanity is inappropriate

Could a toy possibly be any more on trend? those execs must have thought. Selfies, celebrity, vanity, social mediaits all there for the eight-to-11 year old girls its aimed at to hook into.

Its no surprise that the 19.99 contraption by Worlds Apart is every retailer's dream, but when I heard it had made it to this Christmass annual Dream Toy, compiled by the Toy Retailers Association, I couldnt help give an involuntary shudder.

In my head, I pictured my eight-year-old daughter, a target consumer for the stick of vanity, recording herself strutting to Ariana Grande. (Like the girl in the advert, she had changed into a crop top and added a slick of lippie.)

Its certainly not an unusual occurrence for my daughter and her friends to dress up, dance and perform. In fact, hardly a play-date goes by that doesnt culminate in some type of spectator event.

But the enormous and disturbing difference between girls dressing up and dancing, and girls recording themselves dressing up and dancing, is the scrutiny that ensues.

This is a selfie stick with a microphone attached to the handle - giving pre-teen girls the opportunity to record themselves before posting it on the SelfieMic app

Its almost predictable that their thoughts will stray to I didnt realise my face looked like that from that angle or I look a bit funny when I laugh like that or, worse, My arm looks a bit fat in that shot or ,worse still, My arm looks a bit fatter than hers in that shot.

And thats before they have shared the video on the SelfieMic app and been voted for by fellow users.

Despite the toy being pitched at eight to 11-year-olds by retailers, if you actively search through the small print on the accompanying app (which any young girl will almost certainly not), there is a warning that children in the US must be over the age of 13 to use it.

Those in the rest of the world are free to post away and judge others to their hearts content.

On what planet  other than the one where Toys R Us, Amazon and Argos stash their Christmas profits - can that possibly be healthy?

Mum Naomi claims: 'he enormous and disturbing difference between girls dressing up and dancing, and girls recording themselves dressing up and dancing, is the scrutiny that ensues'

All the more puzzling are the various accolades it has attracted. I can understand the Toy Retailers Association including it in their Dream List  it has kerching written all over it - but last month the SelfieMic won Best Toy for 8-11 years at the Mums Choice Awards - and Gold Winner of Best Music Toy and Best Electronic Toy in the six plus category by Loved By Parents.

How can we expect retailers to be more responsible when parents are not savvy enough to know a smart toy from what parent counsellor Rosalie Ajzensztejn, founder of parentcounselling.co.uk, believes is a seriously unhealthy one.

It feeds into encouraging children to become overly concerned with their body image and those of their friends, she says.

Pre-teens are often concerned with their perceived imperfections, she says, something a selfie toy can only exacerbate.

Dressing up, having fun and singing with friends are all positive ways to develop friendship and communication, Rosalie explains, but when the focus shifts to the video clip rather than the fun of throwing some moves on the bedroom floor, something different starts to happen.

Parent counsellor Rosalie Ajzensztejn has branded the toy 'unhealthy'

The emphasis then becomes how they appear to others, she says. It becomes all about the external.

I have braced myself for the challenges my children will face in their teenage years as their online lives will no doubt play an important role in their overall contentment.

But for that self-obsessed culture to be seeping down into the pre-teen generation  and onto the shelves of our toy shops - is a much more depressing thought.

Would my daughter like to be the proud owner of a SelfieMic? Almost definitely. Would her friends love playing with it? No doubt.

But is her pleasure on receiving it worth the risk of those first sparks of self-criticism creeping into her head?

For me, as I am sure for many other parents, the answer is most certainly not.

So next time my daughter empties every single felt-tip in the house onto the kitchen table or makes the whole house thud as she practices cartwheels in her bedroom, I shall remember she could be posting videos of herself pretending to be Ariana Grande.
Now Amelia is an Urban Outfitters model and aims to walk at Fashion Week

Amelia Kearney from Leicestershire, was diagnosed with scoliosis in 2013

A girl who suffered from a condition that left her spine so twisted she couldn't even bend over to put on her own shoes is now in line to be a top catwalk model.

Amelia Kearney, 16, from Leicestershire, made the tough decision to have metal rods inserted in her back to straighten it, after crippling back pain began to make everyday tasks 'impossible'.

The surgery left the 5ft9in teenager with a scar running the length of her back, but now her modelling dreams are coming true after she posed for Urban Outfitters and was snapped up by Kate Moss' modelling agency.

Bright future: The pretty teenager has now been snapped up by a top modelling agency

Surgery: Doctors inserted two metal rods into Amelia's spine to straighten her back

Amelia had been forced to delay her modelling dream after finding out she had scoliosis - meaning she had a curved spine.

Amelia's mum, Diane, took her to the doctors in 2013 after she complained her hips weren't straight.

It was then she received the devastating news she had scoliosis, but she was too young for corrective surgery as she hadn't finished growing.

Amelia said: 'I always used to walk funny so my mum took me to the doctors as we thought I just needed some insoles.

'The doctor asked me to bend over and that's when he said I had scoliosis.

'I grew so much when I hit puberty, my spine couldn't keep up so it curved.

'When the doctor told me my heart just sank, I'd never heard of it before and it sounded like such a big thing.'

Then and now: Amelia's spine was painfully curved (left) before she underwent life changing surgery to straighten it

Corrective surgery: Amelia, who was just 13 when she was diagnosed, had to wait until she had finished growing to undergo the operation

Still smiling: Amelia struggled to tie her own shoes, and even lying down was painful

Mum Diane, 53, added: 'It was such a shock, we thought we had a perfectly healthy child.

'They couldn't really do anything though as she hadn't stopped growing at that point, she was only 13.'

As she got older, her back pain increased to the point where she couldn't even lie down without any pain.

The beauty said: 'It got to the point where I couldn't really do anything.

'I'd bend over to tie my shoes and just be in agony.

'Getting changed and every day things were becoming impossible.'

Shock: Amelia's mum Diane, 53, seen here with the model, says her daughter used to hate being in front of the camera

Support: Mum Diane, seen with Amelia as a child, took her daughter to the doctors after noticing she was walking strangely

Potential: Now 16, Amelia, who idolises Cara Delevingne, is 'confident and killing London'

Mum-of-two Diane added: 'She was in an awful lot of pain with her back and we were in and out of hospital at various appointments.'

Just months later, Amelia was at a Beyonce concert in Birmingham with her family when she was scouted by Daniel Cooke of Daniel Model Management.

She said: 'He approached my sister first, then he approached me.

'I was really shocked, I thought it was a scam - I just couldn't believe it..'

It wasn't until 2014 - nearly a year later - that Amelia followed up Dan's offer and visited him in London for an initial meeting.

In January 2015, Amelia took the difficult decision to have her spine operated on to help ease her pain - especially as a modelling contract was now on the cards.

She had two metal rods inserted into her back to straighten her spine which has left a scar down her back.

Life changing: Amelia Kearney, 16, used to suffer with back pain even while lying down

Going places: The gorgeous teenager has already appeared in an Urban Outfitters campaign

Amelia said: 'It was a very difficult decision to have surgery, but it's made such a big impact on my life.

'I'm a lot better now and I'm glad I've had it done, it means I can do so much more than I could before.

'I still get a bit of pain but I can play more sport and every day things like standing up for a long time are more comfortable.'

Four months later, in April 2015, Amelia had her first shoot for Elite Model Management - the same company which looks after Kendall Jenner.

Since then she has gone from strength to strength and posed for Urban Outfitters and BOY London - with shoots for fashion empire Chanel in the not too distant future.

Amelia said: 'Recently I've been doing more modelling jobs and travel down to London a couple of times a week.'

Dreaming big: The technical theatre student wants to follow in the footsteps of her idol, supermodel Cara Delevingne

The technical theatre student added: 'I've always been a shy person but this has really helped with my confidence.

'I really enjoy it and love doing shoots where there's all these people who are just there for me.

'It's such a surreal experience.'

Mum Diane revealed Amelia hasn't always been a fan of the camera, though.

She said: 'When she was younger people always said to her that she could be a model but she just laughed it off.

'She used to hate having her photograph taken, she never liked being in the spotlight.'

Amelia now plans on taking a year out after college to focus on her modelling, and dreams of being a catwalk model.

She said: 'I love Cara Delevingne, she's done everything I want to do.

'I'd love to be at Fashion Week, catwalk modelling is my dream.'

Dan Cooke, director at Daniel Model Management, said: 'I am so excited by and for Amelia, she's going to be a superstar.
Eight sisters are crowdfunding to raise 50,000 so their mother can have cancer treatment abroad - after the NHS gave her six months to live.

Angela Newton, 52, has been battling cancer for 16 years and was recently told there was no further treatment options available in the UK.

But her devoted brood of eight daughters are now hoping to raise 50,000 in order to get her pioneering treatment in Germany.

Eight sisters are crowdfunding to raise 50,000 so their mum can have cancer treatment abroad. Angela Newton, 52, centre, has been battling cancer for 16 years. Front row L-R - Roxanne Newton, Lisa Newton. Back row L-R - Zowye Mooney, Jade Newton, Angela Newton, Lulu Newton, Carley Newton, Danielle Mawson, Jodene Newton

Daughter Danni, 27, said: 'You wouldn't believe our mum has been fighting all these years.

'She really is an amazing woman and we just can't imagine life without her.'

Angela, of Burnley, Lancs., was first diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2000 but went into remission after a radical hysterectomy.

In 2011 she was taken to hospital again where medics discovered a shadow over her lung, and was again diagnosed with cancer.

Most of her left lung was removed and she battled on, adapting to life with only half the organ.

Danni said: 'Never once have we heard her complain, have self pity, want to give up or ever even consider letting this despicable disease beat her.'

The brood of eight daughters are now hoping to raise 50,000 in order to get her pioneering treatment in Germany and say they can't raise it alone

Angela, of Burnley, Lancs., was first diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2000 but went into remission after a radical hysterectomy

The sisters, who are uniting for their mother, say that after three agonising, terrifying, exhausting fights, they are not prepared to sit back and give in

Angela was forced to give up her job as a hairdresser after her first bout of cancer and her husband Karl, 46, gave up his job as an aerial engineer to become her carer.

Following her lung surgery, doctors were confident that the entirety of the tumour was removed, but sadly in 2014 she was again diagnosed with cancer.

After countless procedures, and nearly losing her life to heart problems, Angela has battled on.

But this year, the family were rocked by the news that the NHS had done everything it could, and said she was terminal with just six months to live.

Danni said: 'This year we were told there wasn't a lot more that could be offered to mum and we was clearly expected to just accept that this disease would take over.

'Well after three agonising, terrifying, exhausting fights we are not prepared to sit back and give in.'

After countless procedures, and nearly losing her life to heart problems, Angela has battled on but has been told she has six months to live

But Danni and her sisters, Zowie, 36, Charlene, 32, Lisa, 30, Roxanne, 26, Jade and Jodene, both 24, and Carley, 22, are refusing to give up hope.

They believe their only option is to get her to the Hallwag private oncology clinic in south-west Germany.

The clinic specialise in lung cancer and have said it will cost 50,000 for the treatment she needs.

Danni said: 'We're doing everything we possibly can to get her this treatment. I would give her everything I have if I could, but that alone is not enough.

'We can't do this alone and would be so grateful for any donations we can get.'
Suggest to Jeremy Clarkson that his new car show  the one that isnt called Top Gear and is nothing like Top Gear, particularly if the lawyers are reading  sounds even more macho than the original one, and he gets all, well, Jeremy Clarkson.

I dont think it was ever macho, he says, with typical bombast. I mean, look at us. Nobody ever looks at James May shuffling down the street and says, Is that Jean-Claude Van Damme? Oh no, its James May.

No, granted, but didnt a Commons Select Committee, as far back as 1999, accuse the show of macho posturing?

James May, Richard Hammon and Jeremy Clarkson are back starring in a new 160 million show The Grand Tour

Yeah, but the Select Committee is just a bunch of halfwits. Its just noises politicians make, he says.

Is Last Of The Summer Wine macho?  because what weve made is a remake of that. It couldnt be less macho if it tried.

Oh, how weve missed him. Only Jeremy Clarkson could compare the shiny new Top Gear replacement  a show with a rumoured 160 million budget; which works out at almost 4.5 million for each show in the three-series deal  to Last Of The Summer Wine and the classic sitcoms three geriatric thrill-seekers.

Is he claiming to be Compo, then? It seems so. He jokes that he and his Top Gear sidekicks (yes, the team is the same) did consider getting very white teeth and plum-coloured jackets for their glossy paid-for-on-Amazon debut, but decided against it.

Each of the twelve episodes in the series sees them visit a new destination, here they are pictured airborne in Jordan

Instead they embarked on their expensive new TV journey in typical crumpled fashion.

Richard Hammond says the sky-high new budget doesnt stretch to a wardrobe department. Or even an iron.

We like to give ordinary people hope, says Clarkson. Most people on telly have really white teeth, beautiful hair and expensive clothes, and people think, I dont look like that and I dont dress like that.

'Where else on television are you going to think, Were better than them? I suppose its nice in that respect.

A camel is one of the more unlikely modes of transport that the trio tries

Clarkson road tests an apocalypse-proof vehicle, which appears to have an impressive speed

The new show is perhaps the most eagerly awaited TV debut in history, as well as the most expensive  one scene, featuring acrobats, 2,000 extras and six jet aircraft  cost close to 2.5 million.

Rather grandly called The Grand Tour, it deliberately has an international feel. Each of the 12 episodes in series one sees the show move to a different global location  one week Dubai, the next, Jordan, the next... Whitby.

Instead of being filmed in a hangar, as the original Top Gear was, the action takes place in a tent. But not a boy scout tent, explains Clarkson.

Its a super-tent, weighing 50 tons, with a floor an army of cameras can roll on and a roof strong enough for some of the biggest lighting rigs in tellyland. Shifting it round the world goes some way to explaining the vast budget.

HOW TO GET AMAZON PRIME The Grand Tour is available on Amazon Prime Video, which costs 5.99 a month. You can watch on a smart TV via an Amazon Video app, or on a tablet, PC, smart phone or other internet-enabled device. Otherwise, theres the option to buy a 32.99 Amazon Fire TV Stick  a small gadget that plugs into your TVs HDMI socket and turns it into a smart TV. Prime Video is available at no extra cost to Amazon Prime members (7.99 a month or 79 a year). For full details visit amazon.co.uk/prime Advertisement

The Top Gear escapees are curiously keen to challenge observations that the gung-ho preview seems more like a Hollywood movie than an advert for a show about cars. It troubles me, actually, admits Clarkson.

I lie awake at night going, Its just a car show, because theres been a lot of talk of massive budgets, and everybody is expecting the first programme to come from Jupiter, and for us all to have Iron Man suits and for it to be The Avengers. It isnt. Its three middle-aged men falling over.

But there are tanks in the first episode. And jet skis. He says himself theres actually one episode where they whizzed off to Jordan to train with special-forces soldiers and (slight problem) forgot to put any cars in the film.

Jet skis? You can hire them for 20, he points out. So it isnt really Avengers Assemble.

Of course, hes being deliberately stubborn, but you can understand why Clarkson is concerned not to come across as the man with the biggest swagger on television.

For its because of Clarksons giant ego that the Top Gear story, or at least the BBC version, ended in tears. Infamously fired after punching producer Oisin Tymon after that row over a hot dinner, it looked (for a minute) as though Clarksons TV career could be toast.

What happened next was extraordinary. Rather than watch as Clarkson, who made a grovelling apology to Tymon, was flung into the wilderness, his two co-presenters quit the BBC show  and all three were promptly signed up by Amazon to make another supersonic version of Top Gear.

The stakes couldnt be higher, though. This show is only available to subscribers of Amazon Prime Video. Are fans of the show loyal enough to fork out for a subscription?

To complicate things further, the BBC retained the Top Gear title, and format, with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc at the helm  with not entirely successful results. Evans resigned in July after one series during which viewing figures plummeted to under 2 million, from highs of over 7 million in the Clarkson era.

Richard Hammond serves up the sandwiches to Jeremy Clarkson in Jordan

You might expect some glee today, but there seems to be a lot of biting-the-lip going on.

Weve nothing to add to the debate on that, says Hammond, when asked what he thought of the new BBC Top Gear. James May makes conciliatory noises. I think a bit of competition is healthy.

What of Clarkson? He makes a reference to his old mate David Cameron stepping down because he didnt want to interfere with Theresa Mays new Government. So its not for me to say what the Beeb did.

He cant resist a pop at his old employers, though. He quips he suggested holding their launch party at BBC Television Centre  surely the ultimate rubbing-their-nose-in-it gesture?

Commenting on their replacements Matt LeBlanc and Chris Evans James May said I think a bit of competition is healthy

Throughout this interview there are little blasts at the Corporation too. The good thing about Amazon, he says, is that they never meddle editorially. I mean, the BBC didnt until Cohen got there, which is a clear swipe at the Beebs former Director of Television, Danny Cohen, who sacked him.

Clarkson admits that, initially, he had no idea that Hammond and May, with whom he has a famously cantankerous relationship, would accompany him for pastures new.

Well, initially no. I had no idea what I was going to do for the first week or two, and then it became obvious wed all just... carry on making a car programme.

Was it touching that his colleagues wanted to come with him, however much they may all gripe about hating each other?

Yeah. Oh s***, I thought. Ive done everything to get away from them and now theyre back, he says, before conceding that, no, he couldnt have done the new show on his own, and he shudders at the idea of starting with a new team.

Jeremy Clarkson was fired from his Top Gear post for punching a producer Oisin Tymon

Youd have to spend years building up a rapport, and you might not have it.

Can he explain the chemistry between them? Its probably mutual hatred. I dont know, but its a joy to work with them.

'Well, it isnt. Its awful to work with them, but the joyous part is that if I walk up to Richard Hammond and say something to him, I know what hes going to say back.

Do they all find each other deeply irritating? Apparently so. When asked about the rumour theyve been known to share the same hotel room, James May looks as though he might be sick. No! Christ Almighty! Id rather hang myself.

Did the new show need all three presenters to make it work?

It needed all four of us, actually, says Hammond, explaining that producer Andy Wilman  always credited as the brains behind Top Gear  is a more vital component of the show than any of the presenters. Without him we simply couldnt exist.

So its business as normal. Theres certainly no sign that Clarkson is chastened by the Oisin Tymon experience. Has he mellowed, by any chance?

No, hes still appalling, says Hammond. Is that a good thing? Well, people seem to like him.

Was Clarkson himself aware of any nervousness from the crew, at the idea of working with him again? God, no! he says.

I dont think they would have come if they were nervous, and they all came over. But youll have to ask everybody else because I dont know. I mean, I boing around. Its like working with Tigger. With us three youve got Tigger, youve got Eeyore and youve got Piglet.

No guesses as to who is who, then.

Clarkson is keen to point out that the move to Amazon has led to a very welcome revamp of the programme.

While the team may be gutted to have had to relinquish iconic components such as The Stig and the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car (which, for legal reasons, have to remain with the BBC), it also means that theyve had to overhaul the format. Terrifying? Yes, but healthy, says Clarkson.

We like to give ordinary people hope - Jeremy Clarkson

If wed stayed on Top Gear we would have been petrified to change it because we always assumed, every year, that viewing figures would start to dip and they never did  they just climbed and climbed.

'So we would never have changed it, because why fix something thats not broken? Eventually we would have piloted it gently into a hillside and thered be a dull crump and everyone would have said, Is that lot dead? Yeah, alright.

So, apart from the tent, there are new celebrity slots and more derring-do adventuring than youd find in a Boys Own annual.

Clarksons favourite moment of the series came, he says, when he was being dangled out of a helicopter. It turns out I cant fast-rope [a technique for descending at speed] out of a helicopter. Who knew?

The striking thing about Clarksons account of his new job is how much like a little boy he sounds when he talks about being the new teachers pet  and liking it.

The best thing is when youve made a film and you send it over  the Americans [Amazon executives in charge of the show] say, Oh My God, this is brilliant, and they up the marketing spend and say, Bigger billboards! and Were going to rent the whole of Nevada! because theyre so enthusiastic about the show.

'You never, ever got anything from the Beeb. They never ever once said, Thats good, or Thats bad. Nothing. Just silence.

So he feels more appreciated at Amazon? Much more. When our paymasters say, We like that, you feel brilliant.

What matters now, of course, is whether viewers say, We like that, and believe it strongly enough to subscribe to Amazon Prime Video.

If their venture is a success, theres no limit to where they can go from here. Richard Hammonds dream is for the show to go into space (though they might have to ditch the pretence of being only a car show for that one).

If they fail, though, the fall to earth will be brutal  and costly.
When it comes to fashion, we are all inspired by what we see; whether it be a well-dressed celebrity, a blow-your-mind catwalk presentation or even a super stylish every-day passerby.

As fashion editors, we're moved by all of the above, and then some. We're exposed to under the radar labels; we get a first hand look at collections months before they hit stores; we're tapped into brands with chic-yet-cheap offerings and we shop - a lot.

To share our knowledge, FEMAIL brings you Style Swoon, an insider's view of the latest, greatest and on the verge. We hope this weekly Friday series will serve as a buying guide and point of inspiration for the clotheshorses and fashion fanatics alike.

RACHEL ZOE'S NEW NECKLACE COLLABORATION

Style star: Rachel Zoe has teamed up with jewelry brand Dylanlex to design this chic choker

Hollywood's favorite stylist Rachel Zoe has teamed up with jewelry brand Dylanlex to create the ultimate necklace for the holiday season.

The crystal-adorned choker is so stylish it will be the perfect addition to both your casual and formal looks.

While the brand's necklaces typically retail for over $600, you can snag this bauble for only $100, as it will be sold exclusively in Rachel's 'Holiday Box of Style' (along with lots of other chic goodies handpicked by the fashionista.) Happy holidays, indeed!

Shop it: The Zoe Report's Holiday Box of Style, $100, thezoereport.com

SUKI WATERHOUSE'S COOL ACCESSORY LINE

Besties: Poppy Jamie, 26, (left) and Suki Waterhouse, 24, (right) launched their new accessory line Pop & Suki recently

Chic carryalls: Left: Camera bag, $195, popandsuki.com. Right: Shopper Tote, $255, popandsuki.com

Last week marked the launch of Pop & Suki, a new accessory brand designed by actress Suki Waterhouse, 24, and her best friend Poppy Jamie, 26.

The line (which was inspired by the girls' friendship) includes customizable handbags, 'Best Friend' key chains, and dainty necklaces that are so pretty all your BFF's will want one.

In order to keep prices affordable, the brand is sold direct to consumers via their website popandsuki.com. Prices range from $25 - $700.

Stylish add-ons: Left: BFF heart keychain, $45, popandsuki.com. Right: Short tassel, $25, popandsuki.com

Pretty jewels: Left: Gold Bar charm, $40, popandsuki.com. Center: Amethyst charm, $55, popandsuki.com. Right: Karana Mudra charm, $45, popandsuki.com

CHIC NEW HANDBAG LAUNCH

Timeless silhouettes: Left: Gioia bag, $550, taylorcatherwood.com. Right: Bella bag, $550, taylorcatherwood.com

Designer Taylor Catherwood recently launched her eponymous handbag line with the goal of producing impeccably designed and crafted carryalls that offer a timeless silhouette with a modern flare.

While Taylor and the brand are based in Napa Valley, Calif., each bag is produced in Milan at a factory that has also manufactured pieces for high-end designers such as Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Gucci.

Every piece is given an Italian name like 'Dolce', 'Carina' and 'Allegra' as a fun nod to the country where they are made. Bellisima!
The Duchess of Cornwall has spoken passionately about the issue of women's rights in the Middle East.

Talking exclusively to MailOnline, Camilla, 69, praised the 'remarkable, incredible and clever' women she has met on her week-long tour of the Gulf with her husband, Prince Charles.

Tackling tough and decidedly un-royal issues such as rape and sexual abuse, as well as domestic violence, the heir to the throne's wife has become an unlikely champion of women's issues since she became a member of the Royal Family just over ten years ago.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with MailOnline, Camilla praises the 'remarkable, incredible and clever' women she's met on her week-long tour of the Gulf

Many of her engagements over the past week have focused on the issue of 'female empowerment' in a region not known for its progressive attitude to women.

But speaking at a reception in the British Embassy in the Bahranian capital of Manama, Camilla spoke of the seismic changes she had seen in the region since she first visited nine years ago. 'I have seen a huge change since then, especially here and in the UAE [United Arab Emirates] , you can see how they have really progressed,' she said.

'They [the women] have got a lot of the top jobs now, they are highly respected and they are working alongside the men.' Camilla highlighted female fighter pilot Major Mariam Almansoori, whom she met at a power lunch on Monday in Dubai.

The 38-year-old became the first woman F16 pilot in the UAE air force in 2006 and has since then clocked up more than 1,000 flying hours - but still hasn't eschewed her make-up and wears a hijab under her helmet.

She told Camilla that 'there was no barrier to women in the UAE', saying: 'The doors are already open to you when you are ready for them.' Even nine years ago there wasn't [those opportunities],' the duchess said.

The Duchess of Cornwall met volunteers and staff at Dal Al Aman Woman's Refuge Centre on day four of a Royal tour of Bahrain. Many of her engagements over the past week have focused on the issue of 'female empowerment' in a region not known for its progressive attitude to women

Talking about being cared for by the women, Camilla said: 'It's fascinating. It is quite extraordinary to have them. I have never had four women looking after me [and] they are the most incredible women'

Camilla laughs after being presented with a mug by Minister of Labour and Social Development Jameel Bin Mohammed Ali Humaidan and Shaikha Hessa bint Khalifa Al-Khalifa as she visits Dal Al Aman Woman's Refuge Centre

'Perhaps not in all the countries, but here... and that wonderful purple lipstick!' The Duchess also chatted animatedly about her 'angels' - the eight female bodyguards assigned to her while in the UAE, featured exclusively in the Daily Mail this week.

It is the first time that any member of the British Royal Family has been given an all-women security detail. Aged between 29 and 30, each member of the eight-strong team, a source close to them revealed, was trained in martial arts and close quarters fighting techniques as well as defensive and evasive manoeuvres.

Despite their picture-perfect make-up and fashionable 'flatform' shoes, the ladies' flowing black hijabs and abayas concealed weapons ready to use at close proximity in case of an attack.

Camilla said: 'It's fascinating. It is quite extraordinary to have them. I have never had four women looking after me [and] they are the most incredible women. The first one had climbed Everest. I said 'how long did it take?' and she said 16 days! It's quite remarkable.'

On the penultimate day of her tour of the Gulf, the Duchess even made a trip to the Supreme Council for Women where she net some of the most high-powered women in Bahraini society today and said she was 'lost for words' at how 'impressive' their achievements were.

Duchess also chatted animatedly about her 'angels' - the eight female bodyguards assigned to her while in the UAE, featured exclusively in the Daily Mail this week

The Duchess raised the issues of domestic violence and women's rights during her visit to the Dar Al Amam Women's Refuge in Bahrain

The Duchess of Cornwall was unable to hide her delight as she was presented with a hamper full of goods during a visit to the Dal Al Aman Woman's Refuge Centre in Bahrain

The Duchess, who conducted her engagement alone, looked dignified this morning in a sand coloured kaftan and which she had coordinated with a matching scarf

Camilla was presented with her gift by the Minister of Labour and Social Development Jameel Bin Mohammed Ali Humaidan (pictured)

The Supreme Council for Women consists of sixteen women from a wide range of backgrounds who work with the Bahraini government and ensure that the status of women is given due prominence. Government ministries are required to consult with the Council before taking any decisions that might impact on women and since its creation in 2001 Bahraini women have obtained the right to vote and participate in elections.

Accompanied, in a rare public appearance, by first of the King of Bahrain's four wives, Her Royal Highness Princess Sabeeka Bint Ibrahim Al-Khalifa, who is president of the Council, Camilla chatted to dozens of women from fields as diverse as the judiciary, the media, aviation and engineering, academics and medicine - and the country's first ever Paralympic medalist, Fatima Nizam, who won gold in the shotput at Rio.

Speaking about the impression the visit had left on her, the Duchess said: 'They have caught up with everything here. I remember saying before how clever the ladies out here were but they are so well educated and such clever people. They are happy and have very high powered jobs. And they juggle four or five children as well.

'I don't know how they do it. '

Today the Duchess raised the issues of domestic violence and women's rights during her visit to the Dar Al Amam Women's Refuge in Bahrain.

The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall bid a final farewelll to Bahrain today at the very end of their four day royal tour

Camilla also spoke to workers involved in helping women who have suffered abuse in the home.

Earlier in the week she met child victims of physical abuse and trafficking during a visit to The Dubai Foundation for Women and Children.

The duchess has a keen interest in raising awareness of domestic violence and has visited many refuges, hearing the stories of survivors.

During the visit to the refuge in Bahrain, Camilla was told about the challenges faced due to social norms in the country.

'Can I ask if there have been many convictions in court?' she asked staff at the centre during a round table discussion.

She was told that some cases are referred to the court but women are encouraged to try mediation.

'What if there has been a great deal of violence or indeed death, which happens in the UK,' the duchess added.

'I think we have as many as two deaths per week as a result of domestic violence.'

The couple were given the royal treatment at the airport where a red carpet before their departure

Huda Ebrahim Al Mahmood, director of the refuge, replied: 'Here the level of violence is not as violent as we see not just in the world but in our region.'

'Have you got a helpline?' Camilla asked.

Police in Bahrain now take women who complain of domestic violence to hospital immediately so their injuries can be proven, which is difficult in the courts.

Women who divorce without proof lose their rights, while those who do have proof are able to divorce their husband and keep their rights, the duchess was told.

Mrs Al Mahmood added: 'It is a political issue.

'Here we have some interpretations of Islam. For example, women having to ask their husbands before she leaves the house, they are also allowed to beat her for punishment.'

The duchess was told that in Bahrain, family cases go to the main judicial court in Manama but plans are in place to create a family court.

'I hope it happens quickly,' Camilla replied.

'These women, victims of domestic abuse, are they able to tell their story so it can be published in the media because the more people that read about it, the more others come out of the shadows and talk about it themselves.'

Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Deputy King, Crown Prince of Bahrain was on hand to see Charles and Camilla off this afternoon

Ceremonial guards stood either side of the red carpet in honour of the royal departure

She was told that the issue of domestic violence is a highly sensitive one given the small population of Bahrain.

Mrs Al Mahmood added: 'Now we are encouraging women to hide their identity to tell their story.'

Following the discussion, the duchess was presented with a hamper made by women at the centre.

Survivors are encouraged to find employment and become independent by staff.

'Well, I shall treasure that,' Camilla said.

Speaking after the visit, Mrs Al Mahmood praised Camilla for her work in raising awareness of domestic violence across the world.

Before boarding the plane Camilla was presented with a luscious bouquet of pink roses fastened with a gold ribbon

'I was really impressed by her interest,' she said.

'She is really keen to know about experiences. Her comments and questions were very interesting and encouraging.

'It makes us more open. The UK are advanced in this and they have a lot of experience.

'I am impressed by her humbleness. She made us feel open and able to talk, she is such a nice person.'

Mrs Al Mahmood said the refuge and those associated with it would continue to push for better support for survivors.

'We are not giving up - us women never give up,' she added.

'We are trying and trying hard to help people as much as we can.

'As Her Royal Highness said, it is a world issue, it is not just Bahrain cultural or religious issues.'

Camilla was then treated to a very special private ballet performance at the National Theatre earlier on

The Duchess was all smiles as she met with ballet dancers Anna Nikulina, principle dancer, and Artem Ovcharenko Principle of the Bolshoi Theatre Moscow

She spent time chatting to the talented pair about their impressive performance following the private show

Camilla was given a tour of the impressive theatre by members of staff ahead of the show

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall dressed up to attend an exhibition and reception in Bahrain on Thursday night

The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall were met by an army of fans waving Union Jack flags

The majority of the crowd were of school age so the Duchess had to duck a little in order to speak to them

Charles and Camilla have bid their farewells to the people of Bahrain on their final leg of their royal tour today.

The Duchess of Cornwall and the Prince of Wales were given a fond farewell from state officials this afternoon as they boarded a plane back to London.

The couple were escorted to their royal plane by Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Deputy King, Crown Prince of Bahrain this afternoon.

The pair were given the royal treatment as they were lead down a red carpeted runway where ceremonial guards stood in place.

Before boarding the plane Camilla was presented with a luscious bouquet of pink roses fastened with a gold ribbon to take home with her.

Before boarding the plane Charles and Camilla turned back in order to give their new found friends a royal wave one last time.

The pair paused to shake the hands of young fans who awaited their arrival this evening

On Thursday the royal climbed aboard the HMS Middleton which shares the name of the Duchess of Cambridge

Charles could be seen chatting to naval officers aboard the vessel on Thursday

The ship detects, investigates, and destroys sea-bed threats with high-powered sonar

Charles looked to be in good spirits following a busy day of engagements on Thursday

Charles and Camilla share a giggle at the Krishna Temple, in Manama, the capital city of Bahrain, on Thursday. The pair are visiting the country on behalf of the British government
At the beginning of July this year, a flurry of events marked the centenary of the start of the Somme  the bloodiest battle in British military history  but then, after about a week, they petered out.

It is therefore chilling to think that 100 years ago  in the same length of time in which we have been on our summer holidays and back at work for several weeks, and schoolchildren are already on the other side of half-term  the Somme continued to rage, with around 7,000 men being killed or seriously wounded every day.

It would not be until the middle of November in 1916 that the battle would end, partly as a result of a big British offensive launched on 13 November, and which would become known as the Battle of the Ancre.

A new documentary hears moving accounts from the descendants of those who fought during the last days of the Somme

Because commemorations are relatively short-lived, we usually tend to hear only the stories of those who fought at the beginning of such battles.

But how about those men who took part in the latter days of the Somme, who fought just as bravely, and whose sacrifices were equally great?

Thanks to a new Channel 4 documentary, we now have the chance to hear the stories of those often-forgotten heroes who were there towards the end of the battle.

Called Last Heroes Of The Somme, the hour-long programme features several soldiers and officers, who came to fight from all parts of Britain and her Empire, and from all stations of society.

Vere Harmsworth fought in the Hawke Battalion of the Royal Naval Division

Among them were young men from Jamaica, a Coventry window cleaner, working men from Hull, and the son of Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail.

But what raises this programme above the more run-of-the-mill military documentaries is that these voices are presented by the mens very descendants, and as a result, we can see the emotional impact that the slaughter on the Somme continues to inflict even today  upon daughters and sons, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren  an entire century later.

Among those telling the story of their ancestors is Frank Stockdale, whose great-uncle, Bert Sewell, was a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery.

Thanks to the discovery of a bundle of letters that Bert wrote to his sister Victoria, the Stockdale family can share the thoughts of this brave young man on the eve of the Sommes last days.

Dont imagine on receipt of these letters that Im engaged in hand-to-hand melees with the Boche, Bert wrote in one letter, or that we are galloping into action under heavy shellfire.

Of course, Bert was sugaring a very bitter pill. As Franks wife, Lou, observes, men like Bert had no wish to scare their families, or to reveal their innermost fears. They were a different generation, she says. They didnt want to discuss emotions.

Dear Vic, Bert wrote in another letter, Just to let you know that I am still keeping A1, despite all the troubles of this most horrid of wars. Theres nothing further to report. Well, cheerio Vic, write soon, with love to all, from Bert.

Norman Manley was one of the survivors from the Somme. Here he meets JFK while Premier of Jamaica in 1961

Tragically, that short letter would be his last, as Bert would be killed at the start of the final offensive.

As his body was never found, for many years the family were unsure of Berts exact fate.

However, thanks to some excellent archival digging by the historian Paul Reed, the circumstances of his death can finally be revealed, and it is a moving moment indeed when we see the Stockdale family learn the truth  although it would be a spoiler to give it away here.

While Bert Sewell kept his emotions to himself, some of his fellow officers were more effusive in their letters back home.

Among them was the 21-year-old Lieutenant Vere Harmsworth, who fought in the Hawke Battalion of the Royal Naval Division. In the programme his letters are read by Vyvyan Harmsworth, the great-nephew of Veres father, the 1st Viscount Rothermere.

I may have been born just to live my twenty-one years and then fade away, Vere wrote to his family. It may have been my mission in life.

'My future has always been rather vague. I dont know what I am going to do after the war. The future seems far away and unreal.

Bert Sewell was a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery

As it happened, Vere Harmsworths future would be short-lived and all too savagely real. In the wake of a creeping artillery barrage, the young officer led his men to their first objective, but he was wounded in the throat.

Despite the injury, under murderous enemy fire, he continued to press on, and halfway towards the Germans trenches, he was hit in the shoulder.

Even that did not stop him. He got up, Vyvyan Harmsworth says, and going forward, he reached the next line of trenches where he was hit by a shell and killed instantly.

One of the very few small comforts, if any, the family might have been able to draw upon after Veres death were his words in one of his final letters: If I fall, do not mourn, but be glad and proud. It is not a life wasted, but gloriously fulfilled.

Veres death proved that the Somme was no respecter of class, as both the gilded and the humble alike were obliterated on those blood-drenched fields.

Among those born into less privileged circumstances was the 33-year-old Private Wilfred Farmery from Hull, who, despite having a wife and five children, volunteered to join the Hull Pals battalions of the East Yorkshire Regiment.

As his granddaughter Shirley recounts, Wilfreds wife was livid when she found out.

He came in, told her what hed done, and she hit him! She slapped him, and said, You idiot! You fool! Why have you gone and done this? Youre going to leave me with the children all on my own. How am I going to cope?

On 13 November 1916, just as she expected, Wilfreds wife would indeed be widowed. His body was never found, and there is no grave.

Nevertheless, in a graveyard in the Somme, Shirley finds herself particularly drawn to a gravestone which bears Wilfreds regimental badge, but no name. She feels strangely certain that his remains are buried there.

He might have been taken away from me, says Shirley, but hes my granddad and hes still there.

But not all those involved in the final days of the Battle of the Somme would be killed. Among those who survived was Corporal Norman Manley from Jamaica, who endured not only the horrors of battle, but also appalling racism.

Corporals and sergeants resented my sharing status with them, he would later recall. They were more spiteful and later conspired to get me into trouble.

It was only the officer class that I could expect to behave with ordinary decency. Along with his brother Roy, Norman served on a gun battery during that fateful November.

In Last Heroes Of The Somme, his granddaughter Rachel Manley visits the battlefield, where she reads out some of Normans words, which fully capture the intensity of combat:

It has to be imagined to realise how the world can dissolve into one vast sound, so that nothing exists except the continuous unbroken rhythm of sound, like a great wave drowning every feeling and every emotion.

Although Norman survived the war, Roy was killed the following year. Norman was obviously saved for higher things, because in August 1959 he was to become the first Premier of Jamaica.

Thanks to his efforts, and those of tens of thousands of others, the final offensive of the Somme did help slowly to turn the tide of the war against the Germans.

If one comes through, Vere Harmsworth wrote, one will emerge out into the new world rather dazed and it will take some time to settle down.

Although Vere was never to see that new world, it was thanks to the sacrifices of young men like him that it did eventually come into being.
Michelle Obama has revealed that she is ready to leave the White House and continue her life in public service as she stars in a stunning new spread for Vogue.

The 52-year-old First Lady is the epitome of elegance in a white Carolina Herrera dress on the cover of the magazine's December issue. When Mrs. Obama spoke with the publication in September, months before she learned Donald Trump would be her husband's successor, she said she believes 'it's time' for her and President Barack Obama to move on.

'I think our democracy has it exactly right: two terms, eight years. Its enough,' she said. 'Because its important to have one foot in reality when you have access to this kind of power. The nature of living in the White House is isolating.'

Scroll down for video

First Lady: Michelle Obama wears an elegant, white Carolina Herrera dress on the December cover of Vogue

Ready to go: The First Lady said she believes eight years in the White House is enough time because it is important for the country's leaders to have 'one foot in reality'

Although Mrs. Obama said she and her husband have been able to maintain 'some normalcy' because of the age of their daughters Malia, 18, and Sasha, 15, they still aren't able to run everyday errands like walking into CVS.

'When youre not engaged in the day-to-day struggles that everybody feels, you slowly start losing touch,' she admitted. 'And I think its important for the people in the White House to have a finger on the pulse.'

As for what will happen in January when she and the President leave the White House for good, Mrs. Obama said she won't know until she gets there. However, she insisted she will always be engaged in public service and public life in some way.

'Ive always felt very alive using my gifts and talents to help other people. I sleep better at night. Im happier,' she said. 'So well look at the issues that Ive been working on. The question is: How do I engage in those issues from a new platform?'

Crowd-pleaser: Mrs. Obama, who is pictured speaking in Philadelphia the night before the presidential election, spoke with Vogue about her future plans in September

Family time: Mrs. Obama said she and her husband, President Barack Obama, have been able to keep 'some normalcy' because of the age of their daughters Malia, 18, and Sasha, 15

Mrs. Obama, who used her family motto, 'When they go low, we go high,'in her speech at the Democratic National Convention in July, claimed she did not watch the fiery presidential debates.

'Thats part of staying hopeful and positive  be able to go high ... Sometimes that means just not engaging,' she said. 'And thats not just with these debates. If I didnt have to be at my husbands debates, I wouldnt have watched those, either.'

People from around the world will be sad to see Mrs. Obama leave the White House, but President Obama noted in his email to Vogue writer Jonathan Van Meter that 'Michelle never asked to be First Lady'.

Philanthropist: Mrs. Obama recently traveled to several countries to promote education rights for girls as part of her government initiative, Let Girls Learn

'Like a lot of political spouses, the role was thrust upon her. But I always knew shed be incredible at it, and put her own unique stamp on he job,' he said. 'Thats because who you see is who she is  the brilliant, funny, generous woman who, for whatever reason, agreed to marry me.

'I think people gravitate to her because they see themselves in her a dedicated mom, a good friend, and someone whos not afraid to poke a little fun at herself from time to time.'

Mrs. Obama met with her successor on Thursday afternoon, greeting the president-elect's wife Melania Trump at the White House when she arrived and hosting her for tea. However, press were barred from covering the visit that coincided with their husbands' 90-minute meeting in the Oval Office.

During her interview, Mrs. Obama told Vogue she could have spent the past two terms doing anything she wanted as First Lady, whether it was focusing on flowers or entertainment.

Passing the torch: Mrs. Obama met with her successor on Thursday afternoon, greeting the president-elect's wife Melania Trump at the White House when she arrived

Loving husband: President Obama told the publication that he always knew his wife would be an 'incredible' First Lady

'Any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role,' she said. 'Theres no legislative authority; youre not elected. And thats a wonderful gift of freedom.'

In addition to her public service, which includes two education initiatives, Reach Higher and Let Girls Learn, Mrs. Obama is leaving the White House as a style icon, but she doesn't see her fashion choices as being brave.

When choosing an outfit, she said she isn't overly concerned by who made something, but rather how it looks when she tries it on.

Mrs. Obama also takes into account the designers' personalities, questioning whether they are good people and if she can help boost their careers if they are just starting out.
, and they soon learned that her little brother Preston also needed a home

A family who celebrated the adoption of the two newest additions to their family on election day have become online stars after photos of the heartwarming moment were shared on Twitter.

While the rest of the country anxiously awaited the results of the presidential election, the Scudder family from Murrieta, California, spent Tuesday afternoon finalizing the adoption of Veronica, three, and Preston, one.

Kylie, who is now the siblings' older sister, proudly took to Twitter after the adoption was made official to share photos of Veronica and Preston beaming for the camera.

Growing family: Kylie Scudder from Murrieta, California, took to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon to share photos of her new brother and sister, Preston, one, and Veronica, three

Something to celebrate: Veronica and Preston, who were previously in foster care, had their adoption finalized on election day

'Today, we officially adopted my little brother and sister. I'm so emotional right now!' she wrote. 'Welcome to the family, Veronica and Preston.'

Kylie takes turns holding each of her new siblings in the photos, but one of the most touching pictures is one that sees Veronica happily holding a sign revealing that she was just adopted.

The little girl is decked out in a white and red dress as she poses with the sign that reads: 'I spent 1171 days in foster care and today November 8, 2016 I was adopted.'

Preston was also given a similar sign, which revealed that he spent a total of 459 days in foster care.

Special moment: Kylie and her sisters Emma and Natalie are pictured posing with their parents and their new siblings after the adoption was finalized

Kylie's joyous tweet has been shared more than 14,000 times and liked by over 40,000 Twitter users, many of whom congratulated the family in the comments section of the post.

'I'm adopted from a rough life!' Hannah Tysonn wrote. 'I can't imagine how happy those kids are. You guys are amazing! Good Luck with everything.'

Another Twitter user named Samantha said it was 'the one good thing that happened' on election day.

Kylie's mom Autumn told BuzzFeed that she and her husband wanted to have more children but were unable to do so biologically because of health reasons.

Double the love! The family expressed interest in adopting Veronica last year, and they soon learned that her little brother Preston also needed a home

Happy as can be: The family had a party after Veronica and Preston were officially adopted

The couple, who have three biological daughters, had expressed interest in adopting Veronica in 2015 and soon learned that she also had a baby brother who was in foster care.

'I had always wished we had been able to have a son, too,' the mom said. 'So when we found out Veronica and her new brother needed a home, there was no hesitation in our emphatic yes.'

Veronica and Preston moved in with the Scudders last December, and the family was overwhelmed by the community outreach they had received.

People gave them donations, gifts, and even a welcome home party for the growing family.

Melting hearts: Kylie's tweet has been liked more than 40,000 times since it was posted on Tuesday afternoon

Kind words: Hannah Tysonn wished Kylie and her family good luck after she revealed that she was adopted as well

On Tuesday Kylie also took to Facebook to discuss what it was like to go from having three kids in the house to five, admitting that it was really hard when Veronica and Preston moved in.

'No matter how hard the adjustment was, I now have a little brother and sister, who I adore and love so much... And I know they love me too,' she wrote. 'I hope that because we adopted them, they can have an amazing life that they probably wouldn't have been able to have otherwise.

'This is a beautiful thing, and we all know and feel that. Today went great. There was tears all around in the court room when the judge officially announced the adoption of Veronica Isabella Scudder, and Preston James Scudder.'
But Gary Lee, head chef at The Ivy in London, told Femail Wareing is right

Many fans disagreed, and said a Yorkshire pudding 'goes with anything'

Michelin-starred chef made the remarks on Masterchef: The Professionals

Marcus Wareing, 46, was criticised for his controversial views on roasts

He may be a two Michelin-starred chef, but Marcus Wareing has just been schooled in cooking by the Great British public.

The 46-year-old was lambasted after questioning a Masterchef contestant's decision to add Yorkshire puddings to a chicken roast dinner.

The veteran chef revealed that he didn't think the batter-based side dish went well with the meat after competitor Matt, 33, made them for the roast chicken challenge on last night's Masterchef: The Professionals.

Scroll down for video

Michelin-starred chef Marcus Wareing (pictured) said he doesn't think Yorkshire puddings go with roast chicken dinners on last night's Masterchef

Contestant Matt, 33, made Yorkshire puddings to go with his chicken dinner (pictured), but they were questioned by Wareing

Head chef Gary Lee, of the world-renowned The Ivy restaurant in London, agreed with Wareing's views and told Femail Food&Drink that Yorkshire puddings have 'no place' with roast chicken.

But Wareing's remarks came under fire on Twitter, with the majority blasting the veteran chef for his views.

'Yorkshire pudding goes with everything,' wrote Chris Foster, and another jokingly asked if Wareing 'was high'.

And Airion pondered: 'How can Marcus Wareing say that Yorkshire puddings don't go with chicken?! He can be denationalised for that.'

The chef made the controversial remark during the first quarter-final of the new series of Masterchef: The Professionals on BBC Two.

It was Yorkshire man Matt who decided to represent his county by including the classic side dish on his plate after the contestants were instructed to make a roast chicken dinner.

Matt's decision to serve up Yorkshire puddings with his roast chicken meal prompted Marcus to question if the batter-based side dish belongs with the traditional dinner

He was brimming with confidence after being told of the challenge, and said: 'Without cursing myself, I don't think I could have wished for a better challenge. Coming from Yorkshire, we live on Yorkshire puddings and roast dinners so I think it could be quite good for me.'

But though co-judge Monica Galetti cried out 'Yes!' and revealed she 'loves a Yorkshire pudding' after Matt told the judges of his side dish plans, Wareing stayed silent.

He then later told the camera: 'Personally I don't think a Yorkshire pudding goes with a roast chicken dinner  but I'm intrigued to see how it works together.'

But the comments sparked a debate on social media, with most disagreeing with the renowned chef.

Wareing's remarks came under fire on Twitter, with the majority blasting the veteran chef for his views

DMW tweeted: 'Lay off the holy Yorkshire puddings Marcus,' and Stuart Horn added: 'Just when I thought I was getting to like Marcus Wareing, he says he doesn't think a Yorkshire pudding goes with roast chicken!'

Yorkshire Life magazine waded in and wrote: 'Behave, they go with anything...' while Katie was flabbergasted at the mere suggestion, and questioned: 'Did he just say a Yorkshire pudding DOESN'T go with a roast chicken dinner?!'

Rebecca added: 'I think you'll find Marcus that a Yorkshire pudding goes with every type of roast dinner.'

But not everyone thought Wareing was wrong.

Gary Lee, who is head chef at the world-famous The Ivy restaurant, told Femail: 'I have to say I side with Marcus Wareing on this one - Yorkshire puddings have no place with roast chicken in my book.

'This isn't so much to do with tradition as personal preference however.

'Essentially, I think food is to be enjoyed, so if a Yorkshire pudding with roast chicken makes you happy, then by all means have it - my children always do, much to my bafflement!'

And a handful on Twitter agreed. One user said: 'Masterchef serving some HORRORS today. 1) Yorkshire pudding w/ a chicken roast dinner.'

And Cat added: 'As a purist, and connoisseur of roast chicken dinners, I tend to agree Yorkshire Puddings don't really belong.'

Wareing's comments sparkled a debate on social media, with most disagreeing with the renowned chef

But they were in a distinct minority.

AndrewInTheKitchen said the Great British Bake Off has taught us that Yorkshire puddings go with anything and tweeted: 'Yorkshires go with anything, we saw that on #GBBO.'

Jamie Lancaster added: 'Yorkshire puddings don't go with a roast chicken dinner!?! Most ridiculously thing you've ever said @marcuswareing.'

Lara wrote: 'Someone on masterchef just said that Yorkshire puddings don't go with a roast chicken dinner??? Are they okay???'

In the end, Matt received a passing grade for his roast chicken meal after his Yorkshire pudding had a hole in the bottom and his meat was 'almost dry'.

It's not the first time a professional chef has landed themselves in hot water for messing with a Great British food tradition.
Antonio Carluccio isnt a flashy man. Take the kitchen table were sitting at: pine, second-hand.

It cost him 50. He has a small fortune in the bank after selling his swish Italian restaurant chain a decade ago but cant tell you exactly how much it is right now.

Its not important to me. Some people, if they dont have two or three cars or two houses, theyre not happy. He shrugs. Im happy here, in my modest house.

Antonio Carluccio reveals how he has finally found happiness with his latest love

Its an unremarkable post-war bungalow in south-west London. In fact, its so ordinary you might think the satnav had misdirected you were it not for the name Carluccio picked out in mosaic tiles on the doorstep.

After he sold his share in the Carluccios chain for 5 million in 2005, Antonio was wealthy, but not very happy.

He wrote in his 2012 autobiography, A Recipe For Life, how he sought relief from misery in whisky, gambling and suicide attempts as his 28-year marriage to designer Sir Terence Conrans sister Priscilla collapsed.

I got married  many times  because I didnt want to be alone, but then you decide perfection doesnt exist so you say, okay, enough now, he says in an accent thats still as thick and creamy as tiramisu after more than four decades in England.

For the past six years, Antonio, 79, has shared his life with an archaeologist, Sabine, whos more than 20 years his junior

Antonios been married three times. Before Priscilla, there was the wonderful Gerda whom he followed to Vienna from Italy in 1962.

Blue eyes, blonde hair. He gasps theatrically. Juicy, lovely. They divorced in 1975, but hes too fond of her to say why.

Wife number two was the not-so-wonderful Francesca. Pah. He screws up his face as if chewing on a lemon.

The marriage soured almost immediately after a row on a ferry from England to France.

I discovered the day after the wedding she was not the right one, he says. Wed taken the overnight boat to Cherbourg on our honeymoon and, when we arrived, I went out on the deck and saw we were the last ones on board.

'I went back to our first-class cabin and said, Francesca, we have to get out. She said, Do not be so stupid. I know how to travel first class. They wake you up in the morning.

She said that to me, who had always travelled first class with Papa [Antonios father was a station master]. He looks aghast. From that moment I knew this was not for me. We separated after six or seven months.

Antonio whips up a Swiss chard and artichoke tart from his new cookbook

For the past six years, Antonio, 79, has shared his life with an archaeologist, Sabine, whos more than 20 years his junior. She has a place in Hampshire. He has this cottage.

They live apart but come together at weekends and in the week when we have something to go out to together. Judging by the way his face lights up when he talks about her, it suits him well.

After Id been alone for a while somebody wanted to match me, he says. I went to a party and saw the person I was supposed to have been matched with and thought, No way.

Then I started talking to people and met Sabine. We talked about mushrooms. Along with his passion for women, Antonio is famously mad about mushrooms.

A porcini mushroom he discovered while foraging is drying on the far-from-fancy but functional kitchen table, giving out a warm, musty scent that perfumes the room.

She loves mushrooms too so we discovered bits and pieces we loved together. Shes important to me because finally I can dedicate myself to someone without expecting anything. We give each other what we can, and thats wonderful. We have liberty but dont abuse it. We get on with our lives.

Antonio bought this house after a spell at The Priory clinic in 2008 after his last suicide attempt. In his autobiography he writes about locking himself in the bathroom and plunging a kitchen knife into his chest.

Today, he cant put his finger on what drove him to do it. There are many reasons for depression. You never know which it is. Its a sum of all of them. I had various reasons not to feel fantastic.

'I didnt know which one it was, but I didnt analyse it either. Gradually, everything came back. I took medicine and spoke to people twice a week. He continues to take a little medication today.

At the time of the suicide attempt, his relationship with Priscilla was rocky. Afterwards, she visited Antonio once in hospital  or so he wrote in A Recipe For Life  to tell him hed never be able to return home, the marriage was over.

My happiness is in making other people happy

She sold their home in Hampshire and he hasnt seen her since. She doesnt want to see me so I dont want to see her. Thats fine.

These days, Antonio has learned to be more accepting of life. In 2011 when he returned to Italy to film Two Greedy Italians with his former protege Gennaro Contaldo, he found himself sobbing at a family dinner because he had no children.

Now he shrugs: My first wife couldnt have children. The second marriage was too short and then Priscilla already had three children and was a certain age so... Does he regret not having been a father?

I dont know, he says. Thats the only creature I took responsibility for. He gestures at a photo of his dog Jan who died, aged 14, in 1985.

Id have liked a child but it should be the ultimate union of love, which never happened to me.

Jan was four when Antonio arrived in England in 1975. That chap took care of me in the worst years of my life, he says.

Eventually he went blind and was banging into things. I took him in my arms and said goodbye. I took him to the vet with a box of chocolates for the ladies there, and that was it.

Antonio, you see, is a generous man. My happiness is in making other people happy, he says.

A second, smarter, dining room table is overflowing with copies of his latest recipe book Vegetables, which hes signing as a thank you to those who have helped him compile it.

The book celebrates gorgeous produce on its own and as part of mouthwatering meat, pasta and fish dishes and is being serialised in Weekend, starting today on page 71.

Cooking vegetables is part of the fabric of Antonios life. One of seven children born into a poor family, much of his childhood was spent foraging for wild rocket and mushrooms in the countryside around Piedmont.

Life isnt about being special money-wise but about being special in other things: in languages [he speaks five], in relationships, in having value to others.

This cottage is practical and modest. I could afford to show off more  as many of my colleagues do.
Hearty sausages and beans, seafood stew and a savoury Swiss chard tart  scrumptious yet simple dishes from Antonio Carluccios new book

A super easy and delicious midweek dinner that you won't regret making

Bigoli is a handmade Venetian pasta which resembles very large spaghetti. As it cant be found all that easily in Britain, I suggest using bucatini instead, which is spaghetti with a hole in the centre.

Although bigoli is Venetian and the sauce is called Genovese because it originally came from the city of Genoa in Liguria, the dish is now most associated with Naples.

Serves 4

350g (12oz) bucatini pasta (from supermarkets)

50g (1oz) Parmesan cheese, freshly grated

For the Genovese sauce

4tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

200g (7oz) onions, peeled and sliced

1 x 400g (14oz) tin chopped tomatoes

2 large eggs, beaten

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

First, make the sauce. Heat the olive oil in a large pan and fry the onions gently until soft, about 10 minutes.

Add the chopped tomatoes and cook gently for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Bring a separate large pan of salted water to the boil. Add the pasta and simmer for about 10 minutes until al dente. Drain well.

Add the beaten eggs to the tomato sauce, then stir quickly to thicken the sauce. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Mix the sauce with the pasta and scatter the grated Parmesan on top.

Vegetables by Antonio Carluccio is published by Quadrille, priced 25.

To order a copy for 18.75 (25% discount) visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over 15. Offer valid until 26 November 2016.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has temporarily categorized a synthetic opioid nicknamed 'pink' as a dangerous drug.

It comes after officials received at least 46 reports of deaths associated with its use in quick succession.

The ban will last for two years, effective as of Monday November 14, while the agency investigates it.

'Pink', known to chemists as U-47700, (pictured by the DEA) comes from a family of deadly synthetic opioids that are far more potent than heroin. After killing 46, it is now banned

The abuse of opioids  a class of drugs that includes heroin and prescription painkillers  has reached epidemic proportions in the United States.

According to the CDC, 78 Americans die every day from opioid overdose.

'Pink', known to chemists as U-47700, comes from a family of deadly synthetic opioids that are far more potent than heroin.

It is usually imported to the United States mainly from China.

The drug typically appears as a white powder in bags labelled 'not for human consumption'.

It gets its name from the pink-purple hue that comes from the way it is cut or processed.

WHAT IS 'PINK'? 'Pink', known to chemists as U-47700, comes from a family of deadly synthetic opioids that are far more potent than heroin. It is usually imported to the United States mainly from China. The drug typically appears as a white powder in bags labelled 'not for human consumption'. It gets its name from the pink-purple hue that comes from the way it is cut or processed. It can also come in liquid form, consumed via dropper bottles or nasal inhalers, and is available online. Pink can cause feelings of euphoria, but also has potentially fatal side effects such as respiratory depression. Advertisement

It can also come in liquid form, consumed via dropper bottles or nasal inhalers, and is available online.

Pink can cause feelings of euphoria, but also has potentially fatal side effects such as respiratory depression.

Europe, Sweden and Finland have already banned it.

The DEA said it had temporarily categorized U-47700 as a 'Schedule 1' substance, effective November 14, classifying it as a dangerous addictive drug with no medicinal use, placing it on par with heroin, cannabis and LSD.

The scheduling will last for two years, with a possible one-year extension if the DEA requires more data to determine whether it should be permanently scheduled, the agency said.

Of the 46 fatalities, 31 occurred in New York and 10 in North Carolina, the DEA said, from reports it received between October 2015 and September 2016.

Law enforcement agencies have seized the drug in powder form and counterfeit tablets that mimic prescription opioid painkillers, the agency said.

Since substances like U-47700 are often made in illicit labs overseas, their identity, purity, and quantity are unknown, creating a 'Russian roulette' scenario for users, the DEA said.
Kayleigh Gilbert, 31, thought her cancer had returned but was actually five months pregnant - despite being told she was infertile

A mother who thought her cancer had returned was actually five months pregnant - despite being told she was infertile.

Kayleigh Gilbert, 31, who has two daughters, underwent eight months of aggressive chemotherapy to battle her leukaemia after being diagnosed two years ago.

Doctors warned her she had less than a one per cent chance of conceiving naturally, crushing her hopes of ever having a son.

Despite treatment being a success and her entering remission, she was left worried her cancer had returned when she began to feel sick and tired.

But after seeking medical help, tests revealed she was four-and-a-half months pregnant - with the little boy she always longed for.

Ms Gilbert, from Mildenhall, Suffolk, said: 'I love my girls, but I've always longed for a son.

'When I was told I was more or less infertile, I kept saying, "But what about my little boy?"

'I felt like I'd already battled cancer, and now I was having something else taken away from me. It was so unfair.'

But speaking about giving birth, she said: 'I can't describe how it felt to hold my son for the first time. It was like all my prayers had been answered.'

Ms Gilbert, mother to Lyla, seven, and Aoife, five, first began to suffer from flu-like symptoms around three years ago.

Her GP initially told her that she had just contracted a virus, but over the next five months her condition worsened.

It became so had that she was sleeping for up to 18 hours a day because her body was so run down.

She said it began to interfere with her job so much that her bosses would usually send her straight home because she looked so unwell.

She was told she had less than a one per cent chance of conceiving naturally, crushing her hopes of ever having a son. But in June this year she gave birth to Eilon

Her legs also began to develop a painful ache, leaving her struggling to walk.

After her boss urged her to return to the doctor, she was transferred to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge for a blood test in June 2014.

Within 15 minutes of leaving her appointment she was called back and told a team of medics were waiting for her in accident and emergency.

They revealed she had acute myeloid leukaemia - a cancer of the white blood cells.

Ms Gilbert added: 'I just went completely numb. You never think it's going to happen to you, so I was in complete shock.

'I vaguely remember thinking how I'd read about a lot of children having leukaemia, so part of me thought, "Thank God it's me going through this and not my children".'

Doctors told her that she would need to immediately start chemotherapy or she would die within 72 hours.

Ms Gilbert, from Mildenhall, Suffolk, said: 'I love my girls, but I've always longed for a son (pictured with seven-year-old Lyla when she was younger)

Despite her eight months of aggressive chemotherapy being a success and her entering remission, she was left worried her cancer had returned when she began to feel sick and tired

Her eight months of treatment was so aggressive, she was warned that she had just a one per cent chance of ever having another child.

In addition, she had to have surgery to untwist her bowel because of chemotherapy complications.

While surgeons also accidentally left a stitch in her stomach which became infected.

WHAT IS ACUTE MYELOID LEUKAEMIA? Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) is a type of blood cancer that starts from young white blood cells called granulocytes or monocytes in the bone marrow. The bone marrow is the soft inner part of the bones, where new blood cells are made. The word acute means that the leukaemia can develop fairly quickly. The bone marrow produces white blood cells called granulocytes or monocytes too quickly because they grow and divide too fast. These abnormal cells build up in the blood and bone marrow. The leukaemic cells can eventually spread to other parts of the body including the lymph nodes and the spleen. If it wasn't treated the leukaemia would cause death within a few weeks or months. But treatments work very well for most people with AML. Acute myeloid leukaemia is rare. In the UK, around 2,900 people are diagnosed each year with acute myeloid leukaemia. It can occur in adults or children. It is most often diagnosed in older people, and is most common in people over 65 years old. Source: Cancer Research UK Advertisement

And in June last year, she was informed the infection had further reduced her chances of conceiving.

Because she already had two children, egg freezing was not offered to her as an option.

She entered remission and began to turn her attention to Lyla and Aoife, determined to give them the best life possible.

But then in October 2015, she started feeling unwell again. And when she started vomiting again she feared the cancer had returned.

Ms Gilbert said that her partner Ben Richardson, 31, kept saying to her that she could be pregnant - but she didn't take him seriously.

She added: 'I told him I wanted to go back to the GP, in case my cancer was back, and he asked me to take a pregnancy test beforehand, just in case.

'I did and it was positive. We both sat in silence staring at it, waiting for a, "Just kidding" to flash up.'

Her pregnancy was soon confirmed by hospital blood tests and a scan revealed she was already four-and-a-half months pregnant.

Doctors reassured her that the cancer treatment hadn't affected her unborn child, and she gave birth to Eilon, who weighed 7lb 6oz, in June this year.

Ms Gilbert, who is still in remission, returns to hospital every six months for a check-up.

She added: ' The first night I spent in hospital, a lady in the bed next to me said, 'You won't know what you've gone through until it's over.

'I didn't know what she meant at the time, but now I realise she was right.

'I spent so long on autopilot, completely focused on beating cancer, I just did what I was told by doctors  went to whatever appointment, took whatever medications.
An identical twin who was born with a rare condition that caused her brain to grow outside of her skull has defied doctors by surviving.

Aniyah Todd, had only 10 per cent of her brain and was diagnosed with encephalocele - and her family were warned she would likely die.

Surgeons were forced to remove the majority of her brain tissue during a life-saving operation when she was just a day old.

But her parents Charlotte Youds, 20, and Will, 20, from Liverpool, were told to plan palliative care to prepare for her death.

However, Aniyah refused to give up. Just six days after she was born, she was discharged and reunited with her twin sister Sophia.

And last week she turned four-months-old, defying all medical odds to make it this far.

Aniyah Todd was diagnosed with encephalocele - and her family were warned she would likely die as she was born without 90 per cent of her brain. But last week she turned four-months-old, defying all medical odds

Miss Youds said: ' The journey has been very tough. It was horrific when they told us that our babys brain was missing and theres no way that she was going to live.

'It was hard to buy baby clothes, and prepare for birth.

'However, after she was born and struggled to breath and as she turned cold in our arms we finally accepted what we thought was going to happen and said goodbye.'

She added: 'After around an hour she was still with us and doctors kept coming in to check what was going on and looked shocked that she was still alive.

'And then from there she just turned around and got strong and stronger, she came home a week after the surgery.

'Now Aniyah is doing a lot better than anyone could ever have predicted.'

During the 13-week scan the midwife first noticed something was wrong with Aniyah's head.

She was transferred to a specialist hospital where medics revealed it was unlikely she would survive if she was born.

Surgeons were forced to remove the majority of her brain tissue during a life-saving operation when she was just a day old. But just six days after she was born, she was discharged and reunited with her identical twin sister Sophia

Consultants took the family aside and warned that because of the large amount of her brain missing, she would be unable to function.

They were even warned that she would likely need oxygen to help her breathe and keep her comfortable until she passed.

The hospital had even booked a spare room in the building for the family so they could spend her last moments with her.

But instead of giving up on their daughter, the family decided to keep hope and let Aniyah decide her own fate.

Miss Youds said it felt that sometimes 'everybody wanted to just give up' on her daughter.

Doctors didn't expect the surgery to be a success and her parents Charlotte Youds, 20, and Will, 20, from Liverpool, were told to prepare for her death

Ms Youds said: ' The journey has been very tough. It was horrific when they told us that our babys brain was missing and theres no way that she was going to live'

The twins were eventually born in July this year. Just a day later, Aniyah was rushed for life-saving neurosurgery.

After five days after her surgery she appeared to be healthy and doctors tried to take her off of her ventilator.

But she stopped breathing and needed to be hooked back up to the machine straight away.

The following day, doctors told the family that it would be cruel to hook her back up to a ventilator if she was unable to breathe again.

'We were both broken. They unplugged all the machines and put her in our arms to say goodbye,' Miss Youds added.

'We talked to her and promised her that we would always look after her if she just fought for us.'

She can breathe on her own - despite doctors thinking she would be unable to - and her only medication is for her reflux (pictured with Sophia)

Consultants took the family aside during pregnancy and warned that because of the large amount of Aniyah's brain missing, she would be unable to function

But after returning home the same day, Aniyah pulled out her own feeding tube and began drinking.

She can breathe on her own - despite doctors thinking she would be unable to - and her only medication is for her reflux.

The family have visited the neurosurgeon once since her surgery and will continue to have regular check-ups.

Doctors have said the best way to see the extent of her brain damage is to let Aniyah try things to see how well she can do them.

'She has done everything that doctors said she wouldnt so far,' Miss Youds added.

'She can lift her head up and look around. Shes so alert, she smiles and laughs, and she loves music, shell have a little dance.'
Scientists are advising that parents should not use car seats for very young babies for more than 30 minutes  as they could be at risk of suffocating.

Manufacturers advise that babies should not be left in the seats for more than two hours.

Fitting a car seat for the first trip home is a rite of passage for many new mums and dads  as Prince William showed when he picked up baby George and drove himself and Kate away in a Range Rover.

But doctors warn that very young babies whose neck muscles are not strong enough to stop their heads flopping forward could stop breathing.

This increases the risk they will be unable to breathe  with potentially fatal results.

Parents should not use car seats for very young babies for more than 30 minutes, experts warn

Doctors and charities are calling for all car seat makers to provide consistent information to parents to warn them of the dangers of long car journeys with very young babies.

Dr Peter Fleming, a paediatrician at Bristol University, carried out research previously highlighted by the Daily Mail, that shows newborn babies may be at risk in car seats.

He said yesterday that there should be separate advice for very young babies.

He said: 'If you can avoid a journey, it's probably better to do so, restricted to no more than half an hour or so.

'But try to avoid unnecessary car journeys with young babies.'

Research carried out by Dr Fleming and colleagues used a laboratory in a laboratory to replicate the effects of sleeping in a car seat during a car journey at 30mph.

After half an hour in the seat the amounts of oxygen in the blood of babies under two months old were found to have dropped 'significantly' while their heart rates increased.

The authors said their findings still mean babies should travel in a properly secured child seat during car journeys - as is required by law.

But they advise that an adult should sit next to the baby to make sure the infant is breathing properly.

The authors warn: 'There have been reports of deaths of infants who have been left in a sitting position, including in car seats - both on journeys, and when parents have used it as an alternative to a pushchair or cot for the infant to sleep in.

Doctors warn very young babies neck muscles are not strong enough to stop their heads flopping forward on a car journey - which could stop them breathing

The Lullaby Trust's chief executive Francine Bates, speaking at a seminar on car seat safety, said: 'We believe that parents should be given informed and evidence based advice when they purchase car seats.

'There is a tendency to focus on how best to fit a car seat and strap a baby in, but information on the potential health risks associated with driving long distances is not usually offered.

'We advise parents that they should avoid travelling in cars with pre-term and very young babies for long periods of time.

'Ideally, a second adult should travel in the back of the car with the baby and a mirror should be used so the driver can keep an eye on the baby at all times.

There have been reports of deaths of infants who have been left in a sitting position, including in car seats - both on journeys, and when parents have used it as an alternative to a pushchair or cot for the infant to sleep in Bristol University researchers

'If a baby changes its position and slumps forward, then parents should immediately stop and take the baby out of the car seat.

'We are delighted that infant car seat manufacturers working with ourselves and the Baby Product Association have committed to producing stronger guidelines with us.'

Most UK hospitals require premature babies to complete a 'car seat challenge' before they are discharged from hospital.

Infants are observed for breathing difficulties or changes in heart rate while in a car seat.

But test does not take into account the more upright position in a car, or the vibration of the seat when the car is moving.

The NHS advises that young babies sit in rear facing car seats. They also advise parents only to take the baby in and out of the seat on the pavement  not in the road.
Google searches for IUD coils, a contraceptive device that lasts up to 10 years, rocketed to an all-time high after Donald Trump won the election on Tuesday.

Trump and his running mate Mike Pence have vowed sweeping changes that critics say would make it insurmountably difficult for women to acquire contraception and abortions.

Their proposals include de-funding Planned Parenthood, dismantling the Affordable Care Act, and overturning Roe vs Wade which bans states from criminalizing abortions.

And leading figures in the Republican party, which now holds a majority in the House and Senate, have applauded the policies, promising to push through the changes as early as possible.

Reacting to the result on Wednesday, thousands of people took to Twitter urging women to get a long-lasting IUD coil before the new administration is sworn in, in case prescriptions for the Pill are no longer covered on insurance.

And according to Google Trends, the tweets had an effect.

Last 7 days: This graph shows how searches spiked for IUD coils the day after the election

Last 30 days: Looking back at Google Trends shows how significant an increase it was

Last 90 days: Many warn Donald Trump's healthcare reforms may remove contraception from the medications that are free under the Affordable Care Act. An IUD coil lasts up to 10 years

Last 5 years: There has been growing interest in IUD coils as previous fears over a defunct hormonal version decades ago finally fade. But Tuesday's election sparked a peak in interest

WHAT IS AN IUD COIL? The IUD, a small, T-shaped copper device that is inserted in the uterus, creates a hostile environment for sperm, preventing pregnancy. It can be used as emergency contraception up to five days after intercourse - a move which is particularly recommended when a woman is ovulating (14 days between her periods) since the morning after pill ('Plan B' in America) is less effective at that time. It also provides long-term contraception which can last for up to 10 years. There are two kinds: the hormonal (Mirena) coil, and the non-hormonal (copper) coil. The hormonal coil can stay in the uterus for 10-15 years, and is associated with lighter periods. Though the non-hormonal coil is sometimes associated with heavier periods, it has gained popularity as one of the few forms of contraception that sidestep the side effects of hormonal contraception in women, such as mood swings and skin problems. Advertisement

Searches for the devices on Google rocketed to their highest point in the search engine's history on Wednesday morning.

The climb began at 11am, peaking at 9pm.

As of Friday morning, the number of searches remained above average.

Planned Parenthood, one of the key targets in Trump's campaign, is the leading provider of clinics for abortions, contraception, and sexually-transmitted disease tests across the US.

The Affordable Care Act covers all FDA-approved birth control without cost to those who have insurance.

Though Trump has yet to outline the details of his plans for the ACA, many fear contraception prescriptions may lose coverage.

The IUD, a small, T-shaped copper device that is inserted in the uterus, creates a hostile environment for sperm, preventing pregnancy.

It can be used as emergency contraception up to five days after intercourse - a move which is particularly recommended when a woman is ovulating (14 days between her periods) since the morning after pill ('Plan B' in America) is less effective at that time.

It also provides long-term contraception which can last for up to 10 years.

There are two kinds: the hormonal (Mirena) coil, and the non-hormonal (copper) coil.

The hormonal coil can stay in the uterus for 10-15 years, and is associated with lighter periods.

Though the non-hormonal coil is sometimes associated with heavier periods, it has gained popularity as one of the few forms of contraception that sidestep the side effects of hormonal contraception in women, such as mood swings and skin problems.

There has been growing interest in IUD coils as previous fears over a defunct hormonal version decades ago finally fade.

But Tuesday's result sparked a peak in interest.

The device is overwhelmingly the preferred method among medics, given its more than 99 percent effectiveness rate.

And a study released in September found rising numbers of women getting the IUD coil has coincided with a dramatic drop in teen pregnancies across America.

Between 2007 and 2012, the number of new mothers aged 15 to 19 years old dropped 5.6 percent.

According to the authors of the study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, the latest data unequivocally shows contraception is the root cause of today's lower figures, rather than a drop in sexual activity.

The IUD, a small, T-shaped copper device that is inserted in the uterus, creates a hostile environment for sperm, preventing pregnancy

There was a notable climb in use of 'effective' contraception methods, like the IUD coil, the Pill and the injection, rather than condoms.

In 2012, 3 percent of teens were using the IUD coil or implant, up from one per cent in 2007.

Rates of teens getting the injection went up from six per cent in 2007 to seven per cent in 2012, and the Pill went from being used by 26 percent of sexually-active teens to 35 percent.
A mother-of-three has died just weeks after being told her cancer wasn't 'exceptional enough' for a life-prolonging drug.

Sarah Summers, 31, was diagnosed with breast cancer in May last year after finding a lump.

She underwent 18 weeks of chemotherapy and had began to recover - but was told at the start of this year that she had a genetic mutation leaving her at high risk of further tumours.

In April, doctors confirmed the worst and revealed her cancer had returned and had even spread to her lungs.

Experts advised her to seek funding for a drug called Kadcyla but her local health board rejected her appeal.

Her health continued to deteriorate and she developed fluid on her lungs and pneumonia before losing her battle at the start of September.

Sarah Summers, 31, from Treherbert in the Rhondda, died just weeks after being denied funding for a life-saving breast cancer drug due to not being 'exceptional enough'

Her husband Michael Poole, 31, from Treherbert in the Rhondda, said: 'We were lost for words. Sarah's oncologist herself could not understand how she was not judged to be clinically exceptional.

'She told us that she had never had a patient like Sarah and believes she never will again.'

He added that her oncologist believed her case was exceptional - particularly given her mutated gene meant she was at high risk of developing cancer again.

'It was a fight that proved too difficult but her family are left not knowing if her life could have been prolonged had she been granted the funding for Kadcyla,' he said.

'It played on my mind for weeks after her death and still does. I cannot understand why she wasn't clinically exceptional.

'I do not know if Kadcyla would have helped Sarah but I believe that for a few thousand pounds then a gamble should have been taken.'

Miss Summers noticed a lump in her left breast in May 2015 - leading her to seek medical advice.

She immediately went for tests at hospital where she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Her husband Michael Poole, 31, said: 'We were lost for words. Sarah's oncologist herself could not understand how she was not judged to be clinically exceptional'

After 18 weeks of chemotherapy, a mastectomy and three weeks of radiotherapy, she began to recover.

But by the start of 2016, she was informed that she had a mutation in her p53 gene and was told she had Li-Fraumeni Syndrome.

The rare inherited cancer disorder that greatly increases someone's risk of developing cancer during their life time.

Mr Poole said: 'As Sarah was young when she developed breast cancer and both her mother and grandmother died of cancer there was a reason to suspect a genetic link.

'Although it was a bad result especially given all she had endured the previous year, it did give answers as to why cancer was a problem within her family.'

In April, her doctors found another lump in her neck and she was told her cancer had returned and spread to her lungs.

After a few weeks her breathing became strained and she was sent to hospital with a suspected blood clot.

But a CT scan showed that the cancer was instead progressing.

She was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in May last year after finding a lump. She underwent 18 weeks of chemotherapy and had began to recover - but was told at the start of this year that she had a genetic mutation leaving her at high risk of further tumours

Following consultations with oncologists and specialists nurses, she was advised that the best treatment for her would be a drug called Kadcyla.

However, due to the cost of the drug and because it was not approved by NICE, she was told they would have to apply for funding from their local health board.

In August, they were finally told that the funding from Cwm Taf Health Board had not been approved as her condition was 'not exceptional enough'.

Her health continued to deteriorate and as well as battling cancer, she developed fluid on the lung and pneumonia. She died at the start of September.

Ca binet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and Sport, Vaughan Gething, announced in July that a new Treatments Fund was to be established in Wales.

He said 80m would be set aside to provide funding for new and innovative drugs that have been determined to be cost-effective by experts.

'With a new treatment fund coming into place, it makes me think that if Sarah had cancer a little later in life then treatment may have been given,' Mr Poole said.

In April, doctors confirmed the worst and revealed her cancer had returned and had even spread to her lungs (pictured with her son Jackson, four, and daughter Naomi, seven)

'This is a heart-wrenching situation but even more so is the price that was put on her life.'

THE BATTLE FOR KADCYLA Kadcyla - believed to be a life-extending breast cancer drug - was rejected by NHS rationing officials last year. It has been found to extend the lives of women dying from aggressive breast cancer by months or even years. But its manufacturer Roche was criticised for the high cost of the drug, which is priced at an average of 70,800 a year. The Swiss firm offered an undisclosed discount on the price, but NHS drugs rationing watchdog NICE said the drug was still too expensive and refused to recommend that English and Welsh hospitals supply the treatment. It was the eighth consecutive treatment for advanced breast cancer that NICE has rejected, with none approved since 2007. Advertisement

Mr Poole has been working closely alongside Rhondda AM Leanne Wood, who has raised the issue of individual patient funding with the Cabinet Secretary.

Ms Wood said: 'This tragic case highlights the need for reform in the way people can access treatments and drugs in Wales.

'As I've said in correspondence to Cwm Taf University Health Board, on behalf of the family, the barriers to success through an individual patient funding request are unfair.

'It also adds to families' sorrows and can make it harder to accept that a loved one has a terminal illness when you believe more can be done.

'The bureaucratic process is frustrating and seems to make no sense.'

Lynda Williams, director of Nursing, Midwifery and Patient Services at Cwm Taf University Health Board said: 'We are unable to comment on individual patient cases or the outcome of individual patient funding requests.

'Like all health boards and trusts in Wales, Cwm Taf University Health Board follows the All Wales policy for making decisions on Individual Patient Funding Requests (IPFR).

'The health board has an IPFR panel to consider each request on its merits, using clinical evidence available, and the criteria set out within the All Wales policy.
On the eve of elections in India, political parties routinely accuse each other of politicising and polarising certain issues of public interest to gain political advantage.

But in the US, polarisation and divisive factors seldom decisively tilt the result of the Presidential race.

The 2016 election is the exception to this rule and it will go down in American history as the most divisive.

Awkward: President Barack Obama shakes hands President-elect Donald Trump

For the first time, election result has been greeted with protest marches in over two dozen American cities; protesters chanting that Trump isnt their President!

Statspeak

Fifty four per cent women voted for Hillary while 53 per cent men preferred Trump.

Sixty three per cent of the white men; 52 per cent white women and 33 per cent of Latinos voted for Trump while nearly 80 per cent African Americans & 66 per cent Latinos preferred Hilary.

Interestingly, 94 per cent African women voted for Hillary whereas the figure for Trump was embarrassingly low: 4 per cent.

Trump: Great for India?

Fifty five per cent of voters in the age group of 18-29 chose Hillary while 53 per cent of those aged 45 years and above voted for Trump.

Fifty nine per cent urban population supported Hillary, while 62 per cent rural voters preferred Trump.

Fifty two per cent College degree holders voted for Hillary against 52 per cent non degree holders voting for Trump.

Fifty eight per cent Protestants and 52 per cent Catholics preferred Trump against 39 per cent Protestants and 45 per cent Catholics who chose Hillary.

At the end of the day, the angry ageing white men and women, frustrated, uneducated white collar workers, rural and semi-urban residents feeling excluded, Protestants and Catholics and high earning upper Middle Class Americans formed the Trump Support base that outnumbered the educated, urban, liberal, blue collar workers and anxious non whites including the Hispanic and African Americans and other immigrants.

During his campaign, Trump unabashedly played on the fears of the Upper Middle class about higher taxes and millions of immigrants pouring in USA if Hillary moved in to the white House.

Yes, 20 million Americans benefited from Obama Health Care but millions were angered by higher insurance premiums.

Polls projected that he was better suited than Hillary to handle the economy and create jobs.

He also exploited the sentiments of millions of Americans who felt that the US was losing its international clout and was being pushed around; it wasnt Great any more.

While his outrageous remarks about the Muslims and the Mexicans might have horrified liberal Democrats, they resonated with right-wing Republicans.

Disclosures

Resurfacing of media reports about Bill Clintons sexual misdemeanours and controversial acceptance of donations for his foundation didnt help Hillarys cause either.

Not until the very end of her campaign, her team didnt take Trump seriously.

If they had mobilised more Latino and women voters, the White house race could have ended differently.

The entry in the Oval Office of a rank outsider billionaire businessman mired in endless controversies who has never held any elected post has proved Pollsters and political pundits totally wrong like their counterparts in India who had predicted electoral defeat of Arvind Kejriwal!

Trumps had asked white collar workers to give him a Brexit like verdict and they evidently delivered. 51 per cent voters had decided much before the last month whom to vote for.

So, disclosures by several women of Trumps sexual misbehaviour, revelations about his non-payment of taxes for years, his threat to ban Muslims from entering the US and building a wall across the border with Mexico, derogatory remarks about immigrants, his reported loss in the Presidential debates didnt seem to matter to his die-hard supporters.

Immigration

Expression of their disapproval by senior Republican leaders including the war veteran John McCain of many of Trump utterances and reluctance of the Speaker Paul Ryan to endorse him didnt impede Trump's Bulldozer.

Many thought Trump was imploding the Republican Party. But come the election result, he not only won the Presidential race but helped the Republican Party regain control of both the Houses!

Apparently, he isnt just a successful Business Tycoon; he is an adventurous political gambler!

Conventional wisdom suggests that the Oval office and the Presidential Chair will transform him; he will try to unite the bitterly divided nation.

America, the nation of immigrants cant be anti-immigrant. Just because most of the terrorists happened to be Muslims, he cant antagonise 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.

While some NAFTA provision might warrant a relook, building walls cant be a good neighbourly policy.

He will soon learn that ruffling feathers in the European capitals and precipitating tensions in relations with China and dumping TPP in the dustbin wont serve American national interests.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends the Republican Hindu Coalition's Humanity United Against Terror Charity event

Above all, he will realise that running a company is easier than running a nation; profit making isnt the driving force.

There is bipartisan support for closer relations with India in the US Congress and the Senate.

Trump is likely to continue the positive momentum in relations with India generated by his predecessors in spite of differences about BIT, totalisation, IPR, visa fee, H1B visa, solar panel etc.

So long as, Modi ensure healthy growth of Indias economy and improves the ease of doing business and pursues business/investment friendly policies, Trump will have no problem in doing business with him.
India and Japan signed the landmark civil nuclear agreement during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Tokyo.

The External Affairs Ministry confirmed the deal in a move that will boost bilateral economic and security ties and facilitate US-based players to set up atomic plants in India.

The signing of the deal, witnessed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe, opens the door for Tokyo to supply New Delhi with fuel, equipment and technologies for nuclear power production, as India looks to atomic energy to sustain its rapid economic growth.

The External Affairs Ministry has confirmed that India and Japan have signed the landmark civil nuclear agreement during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Tokyo

PM Narendra Modi said: I wish to thank Prime Minister Abe for the support extended for India's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

"We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism.

It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has concluded such a pact with a country that is not signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The two countries had reached a broad agreement for cooperation in civil nuclear energy sector during Abes visit to India in December last year, but the deal was yet to be signed as some issues were yet to be worked out.

A landmark deal for a cleaner, greener world! PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo witness exchange of the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement, External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted on Friday.

The deal would allow Japan to export nuclear technology to India, making it the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo.

It would also cement the bilateral economic and security ties as the two countries warm up to counter an assertive China.

The accord stipulates nuclear fuel and equipment provided can only be used for peaceful purposes, and a separate document signed alongside the nuclear agreement has a clause allowing Japan to terminate the pact if India conducts a nuclear test.

Cheers! It was the first time Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, has concluded such a pact with a country that is not signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty

There was political resistance in Japan - the only country to suffer atomic bombings during World War II - against a nuclear deal with India, particularly after the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

Japan is a major player in the nuclear energy market and an atomic deal with it will make it easier for US-based nuclear plant makers Westinghouse Electric Corporation and GE Energy Inc to set up atomic plants in India as both these conglomerates have Japanese investments.
Sainsburys Bank has once again trimmed its personal loan rate to a new historic low rate of 3 per cent.

The new offer beats previous best-buy deal from Swedish challenger, Ikano Bank, by 0.1 percentage point, saving 15.44 in interest on a 10,000 loan repaid over 3 years.

The supermarket bank is offering the rate on mid-sized loans of between 7,500 and 19,999 repaid over one to three years - but the deal is reserved for Nectar card holders.

It pays to shop: Sainsbury's customers with a Nectar card can bag the new market-leading loan

Over recent years lenders have chipped away at their personal loan rates, frequently with cuts of just 0.1 per cent.

While this shaves just pounds of amount of interest paid by borrowers each time the cuts are just enough to push loan providers ahead of rivals in the best-buy tables.

The Bank of England decision to keep the base rate at 0.25 per cent will likely do nothing to stop the flow of cheap loan rates - good news for borrowers looking to take out a personal loan to fund expensive home improvements or buy a car.

Amounts between 7,500 and 15,000

Sainsbury's Bank charges Nectar card holders the market-beating 3 per cent rate for repayment terms of one to three years.

Borrowing 10,000 over three years would cost a total 10,462.81, with monthly repayments of 290.63.

Anyone without the supermarket loyalty card would pay just 15.44 more for the same loan with a rate of 3.1 per cent.

Lending over a longer term will cost more whether you are a Sainsbury's shopper or not. The bank charges 3.1 per cent on terms up to five years and 5.1 per cent for up to seven years.

Remember, it costs nothing to apply for the Nectar card so it could be worth getting one to make the most of the discount on rates particularly if you need a larger loan.

You can apply online and once you have the Nectar card, holders must simply swipe it in store or use it online within six months of applying for the loan, to qualify for the deal.

Amounts up to 19,000

Again borrowers with a Nectar card get the best deal, paying the same rock-bottom 3 per cent rate as long as they can repay within three years.

Borrowers without a loyalty card pay 3.1 per cent for the same term, plus it charges the same rate for anyone wanting up to seven years to repay whether they have a Nectar card or not.

TOP RATES FOR BORROWING BETWEEN 7,500 AND 15,000 Lender Rate Extra Info Sainsbury's Bank 3% Nectar card holders borrowing between one and three years Ikano Bank 3.1% Sainsbury's Bank 3.1% Rate open to anyone borrowing between one and five years AA Loans 3.2% Cahoot 3.2% TSB 3.2% HSBC 3.3% Amounts between 7,000 and 15,000 M&S Bank 3.3% Tesco Bank 3.3%



Clubcard holders only



Nationwide 3.4% The building society also pledges to knock 0.5 per cent off the rate if you can prove you have been offered a cheaper like-for-like loan. Source: This is Money. Correct as of November 3 2016.
If you think of a typical Wall Street trader, you've probably got an image in your mind of someone wearing a multi-coloured blazer screaming down the phone to buy pork belly stocks, or make a bet on the next orange crop in Florida.

Trading in these commodities has long been the domain of city slickers.

But in recent years, increasing numbers of ordinary savers have been taking bets on everything from gold to more obscure metals such as palladium.

Many commodities have risen sharply this week on the hopes that US president-elect Donald Trump would lead to a resurgence in American manufacturing and a return to the use of fossil fuels.

Trumped: Many commodities have risen this week on the hopes that Donald Trump will spark a resurgence in American manufacturing and a return to the use of fossil fuels

The way ordinary investors can tap in to this market is through an ultra-cheap tracker called an exchange traded fund.

These are becoming so popular they are even leading to a slump in hedge funds, which have had more than 22billion taken out of them in the past three months.

In contrast to expensive and slow-moving hedge funds, exchange traded funds are nimble ways of getting in and out of the market.

They can track a chosen stock market such as the FTSE 100 or asset just as tracker funds do, but their stock market listing means investors can move money in and out of them whenever they want.

Typically you buy ETFs through a fund supermarket such as Hargreaves Lansdown or Bestinvest, where you pay a one-off trading charge just as you would to buy company shares.

The speed of the investment means you can hold these funds for the long term but also use them to take shorter-term strategic positions.

Over the past month about 400million has flowed into Source Physical Gold ETF.

Investors used gold as a short-term insurance policy, a safe place to store their cash while they waited to see how things panned out across the pond.

BlackRock's ETF arm, iShares, reported a 561 per cent increase in trading in gold trackers on election day.

Its iShares S&P500 ETF, which tracks the US stock market, saw trading levels 627 per cent higher than usual.

The Latin America tracker saw 1376 per cent more trading than usual as fearful investors worried about the implication of a Mexican wall and high import tariffs.

The way ordinary investors can tap in to this market is through an ultra-cheap tracker called an exchange traded fund

In this way trackers can empower investors to make their own decisions. It's easy to take a bet on the price of coffee beans, orange juice or the latest avocado crop.

Coal and copper has been popular in the past week because of Trump's promise of policies that would see a return to more fossil fuel use and an infrastructure boom.

EFTs are not for everyone though. Some can be incredibly complicated, with currency hedging (essentially a bet on currency movements) and leveraging which can magnify losses.

Most savers would be better suited to a fund run by a manager.

Ordinary funds are costly, however, and even their managers don't get everything right.

Hedge-fund manager Crispin Odey saw the assets of his flagship fund plunge around 60% in the first nine months of the year

Renowned hedge-fund manager Crispin Odey saw the assets of his flagship fund plunge around 60 per cent in the first nine months of the year as he was wrong-footed by the market.

And investors in that fund will have paid through the nose for a very bumpy ride, as hedge funds often charge around 2 per cent a year as well as hefty performance fees.

It's a lot to pay to get it wrong.

Even a bog-standard investment fund charges around 0.8 per cent a year  and often, in volatile times, the manager will hold extra money in cash, which means he can't generate a return on it.

Meanwhile, the annual fee for investing in an ETF can be as little as 0.06 per cent.

That can mean serious savings over the long term.

If you invested 10,000 in a fund which grew at 5 per cent a year but charged 1 per cent, after a decade you would have 32,014.

But if the charge was just 0.1 per cent, you would have 41,942.

So while many proponents of so-called active funds (those with a manager at the helm) highlight their ability to produce superior returns, those returns have to be good enough to offset their charges.
Javed Ahmed and his wife Talat have bought 30,000 shares in Tate & Lyle at 660p each, spending a total of 198,000.

Shares in the ingredients firm fell heavily on Wednesday as Donald Trump won the US election.

Fears about the company's exposure to Mexico  where Trump plans to build a wall  saw the stock fall more than 12 per cent.
Deliveroo boss William Shu was paid 102,135 in the year to December 2015

Deliveroo's boss nearly doubled his pay last year, despite his workers fighting for better wages.

William Shu, chief executive of the takeaway delivery firm, was paid 102,135 in the year to December 2015, compared to 53,333 he earned in 2014.

Losses widened to 18.1million, up from 1.4million a year before following its expansion into Europe, Hong Kong and the US.

Earlier this week the food couriers at Deliveroo joined forces with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain to demand more rights.

The drivers said they should be classed as employees and entitled to paid holiday, minimum wage and trade union recognition.
PANIC PREVENTION Regulators are considering changing the rules governing commercial property funds to prevent a repeat of the investor panic that followed the UK's vote to leave the European Union.

Major funds worth around 18billion in total were forced to suspend their activities after running out of ready cash when investors demanded their money, fearing that property prices would collapse.

The Financial Conduct Authority is expected to focus on how the industry and its investors can be better protected during periods of market stress.

SHELL INVESTMENT Royal Dutch Shell will invest 8billion in Brazil over five years now that the country has opened up its oil industry to foreign companies.

Shell is a major player as a Petrobras partner in Brazil's massive Libra oil field, and acquired more assets through its merger with BG Group.

NOTES MAYHEM Indian financial shares dived as customers struggled to get hold of new high-denomination bank notes introduced on Thursday.

It follows the government's decision to withdraw 500 and 1,000 rupee notes and replace them with new 2,000 rupee bills. The move is designed to tackle fraud.

BA STRIKE British Airways cabin crew will vote on strike action in a dispute over pay.

Members of Unite will start voting next week, with the result due in mid December. Unite said crew had rejected a 2 per cent pay offer.

DAM FINE BHP Billiton, Vale and their joint venture Samarco have been ordered by a court to pay 289million damages for the collapse of a dam in Brazil that claimed 19 lives.

The dam disaster in November 2015 caused a deadly mudslide and polluted a river.

COPPER TOP Copper prices are set for their best week in 30 years as expectation grows that US president-elect Donald Trump will unleash a massive infrastructure programme.

Trump has previously pledged to create 'millions' of jobs through public works projects.

OPERATIONS DITCHED Barclays has sold its consumer payments businesses in Spain and Portugal.
Mike Baughman holds a 1971 photo of himself in his U.S. Army uniform at his home in Danville, California

Mike Baughman considered himself one of the lucky ones, returning from Vietnam without any major injuries or psychological scars.

But after falling ill nearly a half-century later, he found out he did not escape the war after all.

The 64-year-old is among hundreds of veterans who have been diagnosed with a rare bile duct cancer that may be linked to their time in the service and an unexpected source: parasites in raw or poorly cooked river fish.

The worms infect an estimated 25million people, mostly in Asia, but are less known in America. They can easily be wiped out with a few pills early on.

Left untreated, a cancer known as cholangiocarcinoma can develop, often killing patients just a few months after symptoms appear.

The U.S. government acknowledges that liver flukes, endemic in the steamy jungles of Vietnam, are likely killing some former soldiers.

Ralph Erickson, who heads post-deployment health services at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said about 700 cholangiocarcinoma patients have passed through the agency's medical system in the past 15 years.

Less than half of those submitted claims for benefits, in part because they were unaware of a potential link to time in service.

Of the claims submitted, 3 out of 4 have been rejected, according to data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

This 1970s photo provided by Mike Baughman shows him, center, with colleagues while serving in the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War

The VA requires veterans to show medical conditions are at least 'as likely as not' related to their time in service to receive financial help, but doctors note that often isn't easy with bile duct cancer caused by liver flukes.

The parasites typically go undetected, sometimes living for more than 25 years without making their hosts sick. The body reacts by trying to wall off the organisms.

This causes inflammation and scarring and, over time, can lead to cancer. The first symptoms are often jaundice, itchy skin and rapid weight loss. By then, the disease is usually advanced.

If American doctors better understood bile duct cancer and the potential risks to those who served in Vietnam, they could use ultrasounds to check veterans for inflammation, and then surgery might be possible for some of them, said Jeff Bethony, a liver fluke expert at George Washington University.

'Early is key,' he said, adding he regularly receives desperate letters from veterans' family members. 'The VA should be testing for this.'

Once diagnosed, most men don't realize there may be a connection to their service in Vietnam.

The few who figure it out often spend their final months fighting for recognition and benefits, leaving them feeling angry and abandoned, as many did when they first came home from the war.

A display of preserved liver fluke parasites is seen here at at the Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand. Cholangiocarcinoma, a rare form of bile duct cancer, is linked to liver fluke parasites in raw or poorly cooked river fish

'Hard to believe,' Baughman said in his living room, flipping through a photo album from his war days. 'I dodged all those bullets, then get killed by a fish.'

Baughman had just turned 19 when his draft number came up in late 1970. He was soon deployed to central Vietnam near Hue to do reconnaissance in the mountains.

Although he was the youngest in his Army unit, he quickly became one of its most valuable members.

'The Vietnamese like to shoot the first guy in line, and last guy,' Baughman said. 'And so that's what I trained to do: Be the first guy in.'

He would walk point clearing thick jungle with a machete and, thanks partly to growing up hunting in the hills of West Virginia, he proved gifted at noticing the smallest twig or leaf brushed out of place by the enemy.

It was his job to spot booby traps and potential ambushes.

Often on long missions, sometimes forced to sleep outside with sheets of monsoon rain pelting down, his unit would run out of rations and go fishing for dinner near the border with Laos.

'We would throw a grenade in the water, and then scoop them off the river floor,' Baughman said. 'We called it 'fish on a stick."'

The men would use a helmet and a tiny blue smokeless flame to cook the fish as best they could, but it never really got done.

Years later, when he returned home, those makeshift meals became just another story he would tell about roughing it in Vietnam.

He went on to earn a master's degree and became a successful engineer in Silicon Valley working for Atari, Apple and others.

In October 2013, he was about to remarry and decided to get a long-overdue physical. He felt fine, but his blood work indicated there might be a problem with his liver. Further testing revealed he had bile duct cancer.

After researching the condition, Baughman discovered that worms ingested decades ago in that raw 'fish on a stick' could be killing him.

He turned to the VA for help, and his private physician wrote a letter highlighting the potential connection between the worms and the disease.

He went to a VA doctor as well, who also acknowledged liver flukes were one of the main risk factors for the cancer but concluded there was 'no evidence of infection' from Baughman's service time.

Photos show some of the hundreds of U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War who suffered from cholangiocarcinoma. Top row from left are Andrew G. Breczewski, Arthur R. Duhon Sr., Clarence E. Sauer, Dennis Anthony Reinhold, Donald Edward Fiechter, George Jardine, Horst Alexander Koslowsky, Hugo Rocha and James Robert Zimmerman. Second row from left are James Vincent Kondreck, John J. Skahill Jr., Johnny Herald, Leonard H. Chubb, Louis A. DiPietro, Mario Petitti, Mark M. Lipman, Marvin H. Edwards and Michael Kimmons. Third row from left are Mike Brown, Paul Smith, Pete Harrison, Peter D. Antoine, Ralph E. Black, Ricardo Ortiz Jr., Richard Anthony Munoz, Robert J. Fossett Jr. and Robert L. Boring. Fourth row from left are Robert Lee Phelps, Ronald Lee Whitman, Thomas F. Brock, Thomas Michael Cambron, Thomas R. Kitchen Jr., W. Roy Leuenberger, Wayne Lagimoniere, William Boleslaw Klimek and William Francis Hanlon Jr.

He was twice denied benefits in 2015, and is waiting for the results of his latest appeal.

Liver flukes are found mainly in parts of Southeast Asia, China and South Korea, where residents and tourists alike risk infection from specific types of freshwater fish such as tilapia and carp.

In one location in Laos, researchers found liver flukes  which can survive pickling and fermentation  in about 60 per cent of villagers, and in some parts of Vietnam, up to 40 per cent were infected.

Experts say it's hard to know how many people in the region may be dying from cholangiocarcinoma caused by the parasites because there are few cancer registries.

In northeastern Thailand, where many villagers have a taste for the sour fish dish pla som, new bile duct cancers affect about 84 in 100,000 people, the world's highest recorded rate.

Little research has been conducted outside of Thailand, where mobile clinics routinely perform bile duct ultrasound screenings in hard-hit areas.

Once cancer is detected, surgery is sometimes an option, depending on the tumor's location. Liver transplants typically aren't performed due to organ shortages and poor prognosis.

Michael L. Brown is seen during his service in Vietnam. Department of Veterans Affairs officials say it's up to the men to prove that liver flukes from Vietnam are killing them

In the United States, cholangiocarcinoma is extremely rare, with roughly 5,000 people diagnosed each year, including some Asian immigrants who ate infected fish in their native countries.

Liver flukes aren't the only risk factor for the disease; others include hepatitis B and C, cirrhosis and bile duct stones.

But some physicians say for Vietnam veterans diagnosed decades after U.S.-backed Saigon fell to communist forces in 1975, the cancer is 'as likely as not' tied to their service time. And by VA standards, that should be enough to receive benefits.

Asked if it was likely men were infected on the battlefield, Dr. Banchob Sripa, a leading expert on the disease at Khon Kaen University in Thailand, said 'it is the only way to explain it'.

He said doctors in the U.S. and Australia, which also sent troops to the war, have contacted him for help in determining whether the parasites are to blame for veterans' cancer.

More than 100 appeals for cholangiocarcinoma dating back to the early 1990s are on the VA's website.

Though Erickson said there have been no significant case increases among veterans in recent years, data collected following an AP inquiry showed the number of benefit claims has increased sixfold since 2003.

Claims hit a high of 60 last year, with nearly 80 percent denied. Decisions appear to be haphazard. Some are approved automatically. Others, presented with the same evidence, are denied.

For instance, some rejections were based on the fact that parasites were not found in stool samples, but those tests were conducted years after the worms would have died.

Other claims were dismissed because the veteran did not report his illness within a year of leaving Vietnam, yet symptoms typically don't appear until decades later.

Mike Baughman is among hundreds of veterans who have been diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma

VA officials say while they're sympathetic, it's up to the men to prove that liver flukes from Vietnam are killing them.

They say because the cancer remains rare, it would be unrealistic and onerous to carry out regular screenings.

'This is still a legal process that both the VA and the veteran have to go through, and we will look at each case and all the evidence that is presented to us and make a determination at that point,' said Steve Westerfeld, a spokesman for the VA's Veterans Benefits Administration.

'Certainly any veteran has an opportunity to appeal.'

Many do, sometimes two or three times before either getting approved or giving up.

'It's discouraging to fight for something that you think should probably be available for people who actually went over and served,' Mike Brown of Valencia, California, said earlier this year after learning he had bile duct cancer.

He died last month at age 68, just days after finding out the VA had approved his claim.

Often, it's the widows who are left fighting.

'It's bad enough,' said Anne Petitti, whose husband, Mario, died from the disease in 2010, just a few months after being diagnosed.

'They shouldn't be put through the wringer or have to go through all the red tape.'

She eventually won her fight with the VA, and set up a Facebook page to help other veterans navigate the system while also cataloging new cases.

How much veterans, or their families, are compensated depends on many factors, including to what degree the illness is affecting their ability to have productive lives.

An unmarried veteran can get nearly $3,000 a month, but some spouses said they get about half that amount. For many, it's not about the money.

It's about raising awareness, both among veterans and the VA, and receiving recognition for their service.

A section of a preserved liver with cholangiocarcinoma is pictured on display at the Siriraj Hospital

"Most vets understand very quickly it's a terminal disease and that they don't have much time," Petitti said.

Baughman talks about his own future with caution, even though he's already beaten the odds: He was supposed to have died last November.

The illness forced him to stop working, and his medical bills have skyrocketed from all the tests, radiation and chemotherapy. He's luckier than some because he has good insurance.

He's not in touch with most of the guys from his old unit, but he worries about them too. Unlike today's troops, those who served in Vietnam were shunned when they came home.

It's one more reason having this medical condition recognized by the VA matters so much to him.
One woman told a reporter that it would be a pity to waste the water

Passersby washed their faces, boiled eggs and cleaned their vehicles

They flock to use the

Residents in a Chinese city saw a silver lining when a heat pipe suddenly burst, causing the street to be flooded with hot water.

They flocked to boil eggs, wash their faces and clean vehicles in the streams.

The bizarre scene, which took place at 6am on November 9, was captured in a video, shared by CCTV news on YouTube.

A Chinese woman, squatting at the side of the road, said it would be a pity to waste the water

She soaked a towel in hot streams before using it to wash her tricycle in Zhengzhou, China

The incident occurred at the crossroads of Duling Jie and Xili Road in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan Province.

In the video, a woman can be seen squatting at the side of the road, wringing a towel in the hot water.

A reporter from CCTV asked her: 'Is it a pity for the hot water to flow away?'

The woman replied: 'Yes.'

Then she added: 'it scalds my hands.'

The woman then used the hot towel to clean her bike.

She said the temperature of the water was about 40 to 50 degree Celsius.

Then the video shows a man in uniform putting an egg into the bubbling water emerging from the ground.

As he touched the hot water, he quickly pulled away his hands.

Then he went on to push the egg towards the burst point.

After a while, he can be seen peeling the hard boiled egg.

Some other residents were keen to use the hot water to wash their faces, according to Huanqiu, affiliated with People's Daily Online.

Some people also took the opportunity to boil their breakfast during the morning rush hour

A man in uniform can be seen peeling a hard boiled egg after cooking it in the water

An hour later, upon seeing the scene, street patrollers informed the local thermal power company before blocking off the road.

Staff from the thermal power company later arrived to fix the broken pipe.

Some Chinese web users discussed the incident on popular web portal 163.com.

One of them, apparently a resident of Zhengzhou, said: 'I have got use to it. Every year, heat pipes in Zhengzhou will burst before the heat is turned on.'

Another joked: 'Is there always people prepared to boil egg on the street around this time every year?'

A third one said: 'Why didn't the thermal company check these pipes?'

The problem of aging pipelines has troubled the capital city of Henan province for years.
Footage has captured the incredible moment around 80 riot police packed into a tiny takeaway and off-licence.

Scotland Yard had four warrants to storm properties in the area including Hornsey Kebab House and Hornsey Supermarket in Hornsey Road, Islington, in inner London.

These remarkable scenes unfolded during the evening rush hour last Tuesday when the kebab shop and off-licence were searched for drugs and stolen goods.

Footage has captured the incredible moment around 80 riot police packed into a tiny takeaway in Islington

Officer continued to swamp in to the shock of the owner, staff and customers

The slightly comical footage shows more officers continue to appear and flood in from outside

As the video quite comically shows, officers continued to flood in for what seems like ages, even manoeuvring themselves between the takeaways outdoor benches.

According to the Islington Gazette, kebab shop owner Cesur Demirkiran admitted he thought that they were here to kill him and it has affected business.

Speaking to the local paper he said: I was thinking, these are here to kill me.

They were saying this is our day and put us outside to humiliate us in front of thousands of people on a busy junction.

There were diners and awaiting customers in the kebab shop at 5.42pm when the police streamed in as part of an intelligence-led operation.

Mr Demirkiran, 24, said he, his dad, his brother and fiancee were all handcuffed and made to sit on benches outside for hours before being released.

Kebab shop owner Cesur Demirkiran admitted he feared they were about the kill him

Speaking to the Islington Gazette he said his business had suffered by 45 per cent in the week since.

I have never seen anything like it, he added, this is a family run business, my dad has owned the property for 30 years.

Now people wont come in because they dont know what happened. Children would come in here to get milk for their parents but now they dont.

Continuing to flood inside: Scotland Yard had four warrants to storm properties in the area including Hornsey Kebab House and Hornsey Supermarket in Hornsey Road, Islington

Even some of the officers were saying theyd never seen a raid like this in 15 years.

During the area operation Scotland Yard took cash and jewellery which has now been returned, as well as suspected drugs and a stolen motorbike. Three people were arrested on suspicion of handling stolen goods and bailed.

Detective Superintendent Stuart Ryan said: The reason for the number of officers involved was the risk assessment prior to attending had indicated there could be a risk on attendance.
A homeless man convicted of trespassing outside Kendall Jenner's home has been sentenced to time served in a Los Angeles jail.

Shavaughn McKenzie was sentenced Thursday to 178 days in a county jail which, after credits for good behavior, allowed for his release the same day.

Los Angeles city attorney's spokesman Frank Mateljan says the sentence was the maximum that could have been imposed.

McKenzie was convicted last month of trespassing at Jenner's Hollywood Hills home in August.

Scroll down for video

A transient convicted of trespassing outside model and reality television star Kendall Jenner's home has been sentenced to time served in a Los Angeles jail. Jenner is pictured in April

Shavaughn McKenzie was sentenced Thursday to 178 days in a county jail, which after credits for good behavior will allow him to be released later in the day

Jurors acquitted the 26-year-old of the more serious charge of misdemeanor stalking.

Jenner testified during the trial that she was frightened when McKenzie followed her car into her driveway.

McKenzie was convicted last month of trespassing at Jenner's Hollywood Hills home in August

'I've never been so scared in my life,' Jenner had said in Los Angeles County court to a jury.

She explained that she came home and found McKenzie sitting in front of her driveway, with his head tucked between his knees.

She drove around him and watched the gate as it closed behind her.

The model didn't think that he had made it in until she saw him in her driver side mirror.

The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star said she screamed, 'Who are you?' as he just stared at her.

She said on the stand that she then rolled her window down slightly and told him that she wanted him to leave.

That's when she claimed in the courtroom that he freaked out and started hitting her car windows.

The model said she was able to pull out of the driveway and call family friend, Shelli Azoff.

Jenner also said she recognized McKenzie as the same person who had accosted her twice while she was driving outside a condo she owned in Westwood.

Jenner kept her composure through nearly an hour of testimony about McKenzie and said that even after he was arrested, she was 'literally traumatized'.

Azoff had testified that she and her husband raced to the model's house to try to help.

'I thought she was in danger,' Azoff said.

The model said she came back to her million dollar home (above) and allegedly found McKenzie sitting in front of her driveway, with his head tucked between his knees

Jenner said that when she asked him who he was, McKenzie allegedly started freaking out and hitting her car window. Jenner said she drove out of her driveway of the home (above) and called police

She was visibly shaken for days and stayed with the Azoffs for several nights, Azoff testified.

At the time of the incident, Jenner got a temporary restraining order against McKenzie, but on October 13 a judge extended it for the next five years.

McKenzie will have to stay 100 yards away from the superstar, her home, her car and her workplace.

McKenzie's lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Taylor J. Shramo, has said the Florida native's mother plans to move him back east.
A Taliban attack has killed six and injured at least 120 people after a truck packed with explosives was driven into the German consulate in Afghanistan.

The bombing, which tore a massive crater in the road and flipped cars, was claimed by the terror group in 'revenge' for U.S. air strikes in Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead.

But the attack late on Thursday in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif killed Afghan residents as all German staff from the consulate were unharmed.

A security official inspects the site of a bomb attack targeting the German consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, on November 11, 2016

The blast site at the German consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif Attack on German Consulate in Mazar-E-Sharif, Afghanistan

The bombing, which tore a massive crater in the road and flipped cars, was claimed by the terror group in 'revenge' for U.S. air strikes in Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead

The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

'The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate,' local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat said.

Six people, including the attacker, died in the blast and two motorcyclists were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop, said deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri.

Seven of those killed were Afghan civilians.

A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added.

At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries.

A damaged car is seen in a crater left from a powerful truck bomb that targeted the German consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, on November 11, 2016

The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover

Afghan special forces have cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area after the explosion

'The consulate building has been heavily damaged,' the German foreign ministry said in a statement.

'Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families.'

A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting.

'There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate,' a ministry spokesman said.

'Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene.'

Afghan special forces have cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area after the explosion.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the 'martyrdom attack' on the consulate had left 'tens of invaders' dead.

The insurgents routinely exaggerate battlefield claims.

Posting a Google Earth image of the consulate on Twitter, Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.

US forces conceded last week that its air strikes 'very likely' resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims' relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

Map of Afghanistan locating Mazar-i-Sharif, where Taliban attacked the German consulate with a powerful truck bomb on November 10, 2016 - (AFP Graphic)

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign - even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president

Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

The country's worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up air strikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign - even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.
President Barack Obama and Donald Trump put on a united front and vowed to work together in what appeared to be a friendly meeting at the White House Thursday.

Trump said he was 'looking forward to dealing with the president in the future', while Obama claimed he was 'very encouraged by the interest in President-elect Trump to work with my team'.

But even to the untrained eye it was clear there was some tension, and body language expert Patti Wood has analyzed the first meeting between the most powerful man in America and the person chosen to replace him.

Obama was 'extremely fatigued, resigned and not hopeful', while Trump was 'tentative, serious and perhaps fearful', Wood told DailyMail.com.

Scroll down for video

Uncomfortable? Donald Trump and President Barack Obama sit together in the Oval Office following Tuesday's shock election

Obama and Trump, whose election win sent shockwaves around the world on Wednesday, talked for more than 90 minutes in the Oval Office before addressing the media.

It was a public display intended to help the country digest the results of Tuesday's presidential election after violent protests broke out across the country Wednesday night.

The president-elect called Obama a 'very good man'.

'If you look at the seating position - their lower legs,' Wood explains, 'they are both in the male, alpha position saying "I am a man".'

'Tentative': Patti Wood says Trump's hand position, which she calls 'downward prayer position', is not typical of the President-elect

Fearful? Wood says his hand position suggests he has learned something he didn't know before

However, she adds that Obama's legs are much further apart, which demonstrates strength and reveals he is subconsciously saying, 'I'm still on top'.

But it was Trump's hands that caught Wood's attention - he put them in a 'downward prayer position'.

'The thing that is very significant is Trump's hand position,' Wood told DailyMail.com, describing it as the 'downward prayer position', which is not typical for the President-elect.

'My read is that he has learned something he didn't know before. It's a tentative hand position.'

Alpha males: Wood points out that Obama's legs are far wider than Trump's, revealing he is subconsciously saying, 'I'm still on top'

Response: Trump later brushed off any claims of awkwardness between the pair, insisting they had great 'chemistry'

'Trump holds his own hands as he begins speaking which is an indication he needs to comfort himself,' she added.

Wood pointed out that as Obama gestures, he rests his arms on his legs. 'That's not typical Obama which tells me he is weary.'

The sitting president stressed during the meeting that his top priority was top 'ensure our president-elect is successful.'

'I have been very encouraged by the interest in President-elect Trump to work with my team around many of the issues that this great country faces and I believe that it is important for all regardless of party and regardless of political preferences to now come together, work together to deal with the many challenges we face,' he said.

But Wood isn't convinced. 'There is a part where he says he has been encouraged,' she said. 'As he says it he closes his eyes. I call that an eye block. That tells me he doesn't feel totally encouraged.'

President-elect Donald Trump and current President Barack Obama had an hour-long meeting at the White House on Wednesday morning

The pair shook hands during a photo-op following their one-on-one meeting in which they discussed policies

However, she does think Obama believes they have to 'work together' to face the challenges. And Trump was serious and sincere in his statements, she said.

Wood, author of Snap: Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language, and Charisma, added: 'Obama was extremely fatigued, resigned and not hopeful but very presidential.

'Trump was serious and showed indications he heard information that made him fearful.'

Trump and the first lady in waiting, Melania arrived at the White House on Thursday morning through a back entrance that opens up to the White House's South Lawn.

The private drive is inaccessible to media, and reporters were disallowed from covering the historic greeting between the incoming and outgoing first families.

A Wall Street Journal report says the White House cancelled the photo-op. The president's spokesman forcefully pushed back on the assertion in his daily briefing.

'That's not true,' he said.

Obama and Trump were surrounded by dozens of photographers and press members following their meeting in the Oval Office

The White House official angrily told reporters that they were given more access to events at the White House than they were in 2008, when the Oval Office last changed hands.

Then, journalists were allowed to photograph the Obamas arrival at the White House.

President George W Bush and his wife Laura gave the future first couple a warm welcome when they came to the White House on November 11, 2008 for a post-election briefing.

The Bushes made a show of it, posing for portraits with the president-elect and his wife in front of the White House's private entrance. Bush lined up photographers to shoot he and Obama walking down the colonnade that leads to the Oval Office.

That did not happen today. No official photos have been released of the Trumps' arrival or departure.
Keith Wisakowsky, a volunteer firefighter accused of sexually assaulting a new recruit in a 'rite of initiation' which involved a chorizo sausage, has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault.

A volunteer firefighter has admitted hazing a new recruit by sexually assaulting them with a chorizo sausage.

Prosecutors say Keith Edward Wisakowsky pleaded guilty to the bizarre act in the Dallas suburb of Waxahachie on Thursday, and received a suspended one-year jail sentence.

The Ellis County & District Attorney said in a Thursday release: 'Wisakowsky was sentenced to 365 days in the county jail.

'The sentence was suspended, and he was placed on community supervision for two years.

'He was also ordered to pay a fine of $2,000.

'Among the conditions of community supervision, Wisakowsky is ordered to have no contact with the victim of the offense, and to refrain from viewing or accessing pornography.'

Cases against seven others cases are going to be dismissed, the release announcing the plea offer said.

The attack happened in January 2015. Wisakowsky was arrested in April of that year and had faced an aggravated sexual assault charge, the Star-Telegram reported.

Fellow firefighters Alec Miller, Preston Peyrot, Casey Stafford, and Blake Tucker had faced aggravated sexual assault charges, the report said, before prosecutors decided to drop their cases.

Fellow firefighters Alec Miller (left) and Preston Peyrot (right) faced aggravated sexual assault charges. Their cases are going to be dismissed

Firefighters Casey Stafford (left) and Blake Tucker (right) also faced aggravated sexual assault charges. Their cases are going to be dismissed, as well

Gavin Satterfield and William Getzendaner, the chief and assistant chief, respectively, of the Emergency Services District 6 Volunteer Fire Department, had faced witness tampering charges. Their cases will be dismissed, the release said.

Brittany Parten, who was Wisakowsky's girlfriend, was arrested and allegedly filmed the attack, the Star-Telegram reported. Her case will be dismissed, too.

Victim Jason Waldeck told KXAS-TV last year: 'I want to try and stay strong but it still gets to me. Two or three of them grabbed me from the chair and took me over to the couch and they got on top of me.

Brittany Parten, who was Wisakowsky's girlfriend, had been arrested and allegedly filmed the attack. Her case will be dismissed, too

'[Then] somebody in the room said "I've got a broomstick" and that's when it crossed my mind what they were about to do.'

Investigators said Miller, Peyrot, Stafford, Tucker, and Wisakowsky decided to use a chorizo sausage instead.

Waldeck went on: 'I hit the ground and I threw up. I was just sickened. They didn't think I would ever turn them in.'

Afterwards he had a shower and the men stole his clothes and forced him to run outside naked to fetch a pair of shorts from his car.

Ellis County District Attorney Patrick Wilson said Waldeck agreed to the plea deal.

He said in a statement Thursday: 'This agreement was made with the full knowledge and consent of the victim, Jason Waldeck.

'My prosecutors and investigators met with him many times.

Victim Jason Waldeck, pictured, has said: 'I want to try and stay strong but it still gets to me. Two or three of them grabbed me from the chair and took me over to the couch and they got on top of me'

Ellis County District Attorney Patrick Wilson said: 'Jason is a young man with his entire life ahead of him. We wish him well as he pursues his dream to become a professional firefighter'

Above, the Emergency Services District No. 6 Volunteer Fire Department in Waxahachie, Texas

'Through those meetings, Jason and my staff had the opportunity to discuss and consider many possible outcomes if these cases continued to trial.

'I am confident that this outcome satisfies our legal and moral obligation not to convict, but to see that justice is done.
Convicted paedophiles will be banned from travelling overseas following a crackdown by the Australian Government.

About 800 child sex offenders have traveled abroad in the last year, with more than 300 travelling to South East Asia, Australian Federal Police say.

To stop convicted child sex offenders from travelling overseas, the federal government will work with crossbench senator Derryn Hinch, who was elected following a campaign to name and shame convicted child sex offenders,The Daily Telegraph reports.



Convicted child sex offenders will be banned from travelling overseas. Australian paedophile Robert Ellis, 70, (pictured ) was sentenced to 15 years jail in Bali after he traveled to the country on a single entry visa

Accused paedophile Peter Scully, 53, (pictured) is alleged to have carried out crimes so heinous the Philippines wants to bring back the death penalty

Australian paedophile Robert Ellis, 70, could spend the rest of his life behind bars after being sentenced to 15 years jail in Bali.

The 70-year-old from Melbourne, was on trial for abusing 11 young girls aged between seven and 17 over a two-year period from 2014.

He allegedly lured his victims with money and presents and before taking them to his Bali home where he bathed and sexually assaulted them.

He came to Bali in 2013 on a single entry visa for retired people or senior citizens.

Accused Australian paedophile Peter Scully, 53, who traveled to the Philippines in 2011, is alleged to have carried out some of the most horrific sex crimes against children.

The crimes he is accused of are so heinous, authorities in the Philippines wants to bring back the death penalty.

He allegedly directed a video called 'Daisy's Destruction' where an 18-month-old baby girl was tortured by a masked and naked woman.

He has plead not guilty to charges of rape and trafficking.

To stop child sex offenders from travelling overseas, the federal government will work with crossbench senator Derryn Hinch (left) while Julie Bishop (right) announced she will work on more measures

Currently, the foreign minister can cancel the passports of sex offenders or refuse to issue passports

Currently, the foreign minister can cancel the passports of sex offenders or refuse to issue passports.

Julie Bishop and Justice Minister Michael Keenan have announced they will work on more measures.

'Children must be protected and perpetrators brought to justice, whether a crime occurs in Australia or is committed or facilitated by an Australian overseas,' they said in a statement on Friday.

Passports for a number of offenders have already been refused or cancelled.

Australian paedophile Robert Ellis, 70, (left) could spend the rest of his life behind bars after being sentenced to 15 years jail. Peter Scully (right) is accused of shocking child sex crimes

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured) said the Australian Government would work with states and territories to identify individuals convicted of serious offences

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the Australian Government would work with states and territories to identify individuals convicted of serious offences.

'What we're talking about are some of the worst grubs you can imagine,' the Prime Minister told 3AW.

'They're a disgrace to Australia.

'We believe that by further co-operation with the States and Territories, once we identify people who have been convicted of serious offences of this kind, then of course the Foreign Minister can revoke their passports.
A top ABC TV star says he has more respect than ever for breakfast host Virginia Trioli after she was caught out commenting on Donald Trump.

Ms Trioli thought she was off-air when she said:

'Do you know there are people on Twitter this morning, and they're deadly serious, who believe that I am formally spruiking here for Donald Trump to win? I mean you want to subject them to an IQ test don't you  And they're serious.'

While Ms Trioli hasn't responded to the controversy, her occasional ABC stablemate Todd Sampson weighed in with a tweet on Friday.

'I have always respected (Virginia Trioli) and her comments on Trump has lifted that to another level,' said Mr Sampson, co-host of marketing show Gruen.

'We are what we do when nobody's looking. Funny.'

Scroll down for video

A top ABC TV star says he has more respect than ever for breakfast host Virginia Trioli after she was caught out commenting on Donald Trump

Gruen Planet co-host Todd Sampson, seen here in one of his distinctive T-shirts, said her remarks were 'funny' and he had more respect for her as a result of her remarks

Pictures of Donald Trump staring at his wife's ballot paper as she cast her vote in Manhattan went viral on Wednesday. Trioli told viewers he was more likely 'looking at Melania's t**s'

Social media users responded to Ms Trioli's gaffe with a deluge of criticism - including branding her 'embarrassingly biased' and 'non-deserving of her $235,664 taxpayer funded salary'.

It is not the first time the presenter has had an awkward on-air slip up.

She was forced to apologise to now-Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce after making a gesture to indicate he was crazy in 2009.

She told the Herald Sun the senator was 'very gracious in accepting my apology. Lesson learned'.

Mr Joyce laughed off the incident saying that he might in fact be 'crazy' and believed Trioli was 'frustrated with [his] approach'.

Ms Trioli has not commented on the gaffe since her remarks were accidentally broadcast.

An ABC spokeswoman, Sally Jackson, said they would not be commenting on the stuff-up earlier this week.

'There was nothing to add to what's been said at this point'.

The national broadcaster did not respond to further queries on Thursday and Friday.

Many said it was the Donald Trump comment were a 'second strike' for Trioli after she was forced to apologise to Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce in 2009 after making an hand gesture to indicate he was crazy during a live cross (pictured)

The journalist has remained quiet since her comments about Donald Trump's wife and his supporters

Social media users were not impressed and called the breakfast presenter 'arrogant', 'embarrassingly biased', a 'hypocrite' and 'non-deserving of her $235,664 taxpayer-funded salary'

Ms Trioli had apparently assumed the feed had crossed to an advertisement when she had the 'honest' chat with her team about 10am Wednesday.

Twitter users tried to alert the veteran Australian journalist the feed was still live, tweeting: 'We can hear you!'

Overnight, Twitter launched into a tirade against the presenter and dozens called on her to be sacked by the ABC.

'Time for Trioli to go. She is so embarrassingly biased. How can she be a political commentator. Goodnight Virginia,' One man wrote.

'Dear ABC News, after her performance today and her actions in the past, please sack Trioli,' another said.

Some Twitter users also made mention to the journalist's six-figure salary, after the details of top ABC stars' wages were leaked in November 2013.

According to The Australian's report, Trioli was revealed to earn $235,664 yearly - almost $84,000 more than her News Breakfast co-host Michael Rowland.

Earlier in the day, Trioli tweeted the image of Mr Trump staring toward Melania's voting booth and asked her followers to 'caption it'

Overnight, Twitter launched into a tirade against the presenter and dozens called on her to be sacked by the ABC

In 2013, Trioli (far right) was revealed to earn $235,664 yearly - almost $84,000 more than her News Breakfast co-host Michael Rowland (centre)

A member of the crew brought a glass of water to Trioli's desk and it is believed she had no idea the live US election feed was still going

'ABC News, you are going to have to cut her loose, one is enough - twice is a kick in the guts to taxpayers,' one woman wrote.

In the accidental video, a member of the crew could be seen bringing a glass of water to Trioli's desk and it is believed she had no idea the live feed was still rolling on the website.

'Careful what you say,' one Twitter user urged the breakfast presenter.

'Your audio is coming through the web feed,' another said.

Other viewers agreed with her comments, saying it was the journalist's 'best work'.

Earlier in the day, Trioli tweeted the image of Mr Trump staring toward Melania's voting booth and asked her followers to 'caption it'.

'Happy US election day! Caption suggestions please for this priceless pic. Winner gets coffee,' she wrote.

A member of the crew brought a glass of water to Trioli's desk and it is believed she had no idea the live feed had continued through the website. Donald and Melania Trump are pictured
A family have captured on video what it's like living with an adorable baby wallaby.

The female joey, named Munji, can be seen bouncing along eagerly behind her older human sisters as they go on adventures around the picturesque backdrop of Cape York in northern Queensland.

Munji's mother was hit and killed by a car near Cooktown which is where the Smith family rescued the cute joey from her pouch.

Xanthe and Harriet cuddle up to baby girl wallaby, Munji, who they helped hand-rear

Sisters Xanthe and Harriet and their veterinarian father, Duncan, hand-reared the wallaby - which Duncan said was fun but not always easy.

'She was hand reared largely by my daughter and myself but we have close relationships with a couple of wildlife carer's here and so its often a bit of a joint effort!

'They need to be fed every two to four hours, so it's kind of like having a baby only worse!' said Duncan Smith from Seadog vets in Cooktown.

The video shows baby Munji arriving by backpack at a beach in Northern Queensland before the trio set of, running through beautiful parks and beaches across Northern Queensland.

The girls run ahead along a beach in northern Queensland as Munji struggles to keep up

Adorable baby Munji arrives at the beach in a backpack carried by vet, Duncan Smith

The baby joey was named Munji, which means lightning in the local Aboriginal language, Guugu Yimithirr. She was given the name after being found during a storm.

Munji, now two-years-old, has now been released into the wild at Sheaoak Ridge and has a joey of her own.

The Smith family often create videos to show what they get to see everyday living in northern Queensland.

The video shows the families adventures around Queensland with Munji in tow

In vision captured by a drone, Munji can only just be seen, trailing behind her big human sisters

'The reality of life in Cooktown is crocodiles, taipans, the reef and The Daintree Rainforest, theres no lack of weird creatures coming through the door every day!' said Duncan.

The family arrived in Bundaberg by yacht from New Zealand and have spent the past few years exploring Australia's scenery and wildlife with their two young daughters.

'Theyve certainly seen and done some stuff, theyve been exposed to a lot!' said Mr Smith.
A photojournalist who spent years covering conflicts in the Middle East was brutally attacked while covering an anti-Trump protest in Oakland, California.

Kyle Ludowitz was left with a fractured cheekbone and abrasions when four men attacked him on Wednesday night as he took photos of protesters wreaking havoc across the city.

The 27-year-old was hospitalized and had both his cameras, which were worth $5,000, destroyed in the violent attack.

'I was mostly being punched in the face until I fell to the ground. I tried to protect my gear and they started kicking,' Mr Ludowitz told Dailymail.com.

Scroll down for video

Kyle Ludowitz, 27, was hospitalized with a fractured cheekbone and abrasions when he was brutally attacked by four people at an anti-Trump protest in Oakland, California on Wednesday

A camera he had been holding in his hand was torn from him and stolen, while another hanging around his neck was smashed into pieces.

Mr Ludowitz said his attackers, who were anarchists wearing masks, assaulted him as he was taking photos of them looting businesses and smashing windows with rocks.

He added that he had never really experienced anything like it.

'I went to the ER, I didn't have a concussion but had a fractured cheekbone and a few cuts and abrasions, swelling and a fat lip,' he said.

'I definitely wasn't expecting this to happen.

'I was expecting a stronger stand off between police and protesters. Definitely not the level of destruction to the city as a whole.'

More than 6,000 protesters - some masked - were seen on the streets of Oakland on Wednesday night when an initially peaceful march down a cop-lined street turned nasty

Kyle, who has covered conflicts in the Middle East (pictured in Israel), said he has never really experienced anything like what happened in Oakland on Wednesday

Police officers clear a path into a burning building during an anti-Trump protest in Oakland

Mr Ludowitz, a graduate student studying photojournalism at UC Berkeley, was released from hospital at 1am on Thursday and is planning to head straight back out to continue shooting the protests.

More than 6,000 protesters - some masked - were seen on the streets of Oakland on Wednesday night when an initially peaceful march down a cop-lined street turned nasty.

Some protesters threw bottles at officers and torched a police car, while an office block was also attacked, smeared with 'f*** Trump' and 'kill Trump' graffiti.

Police launched tear gas and protesters lit fires, in what became by some distance the most violent of the many protests against the election of Donald Trump.

A protester throws a bottle at police officers as violence boiled over after a tumultuous 24 hours

Planks of wood, cones and other detritus is set alight in the city, close to San Francisco

Trump's poll-defying win has sparked a wave of similar rallies across the country.

Thousands more filled streets in Los Angeles before taking over the 110 Freeway while other protesters gathered outside City Hall, lighting fires and waving Trump heads on sticks.

In New York, home of the President-elect, at least 30 people were arrested when police cracked down on twin demonstrations in Columbus Circle and at Trump Tower.

As many as 7,500 demonstrators were believed to have been split between the two locations, chanting 'Black Lives Matter' and 'Donald Trump, go away, racist, sexist, anti-gay.'

Protesters also smashed up this police cruiser during the riot on Wednesday evening
A senior al-Qaeda figure responsible for raising millions for the terrorist group and recruiting 3,000 child soldiers to fight in Syria has celebrated Donald Trump's election win.

Abdallah al-Muhaysini is a prominent member of the al-Nusrah Front's inner leadership circle, which is al-Qaeda's group in Syria.

In a series of tweets, translated by SITE Intelligence Group, al-Muhaysini called Trump's election win an 'important step' for the terror group.

Abdallah al-Muhaysini (pictured), a prominent member of the al-Nusrah Front's inner leadership circle, has called Donald Trump's election win an 'important step' towards victory for al-Qaeda

'A brief comment on the on the winning of Trump against Clinton, the Presidential America's elections,' the first roughly translated tweet read.

'From my point of view, the victory of Trump is an important step toward the victory of Alah al-Sunnah [Sunnis]!.'

Al-Muhaysini then went on to explain that he does not think American policy will change all that much, but he said the US' 'method of war tactics' have changed from 'the secret to the declared'.

'This is good... Obama depended on the idea of zeroing in on the battles and targeting the headquarters, and Trump depends on gaining from the wars and countries based on the principle... the victory of Trump may be an initiative towards bloody battles and a huge mess.

'From my point of view, the victory of Trump is an important step toward the victory of Alah al-Sunnah [Sunnis]!' al-Muhaysini tweeted

New York Times Middle East correspondent Rukmini Callimachi spoke about what the comments went in a series of tweets

'The biggest loser will not be Ahal al-Sunnah, because they've reached to the bottom, so they don't have anything to lose.'

The terrorist continued in his tweets to point out perhaps the biggest advantage to the extremist group of a Trump presidency.

'Obama depends on the harmonization and the containment in America's internal affairs, and Trump depends on the exclusion and the abolition of his violators... May Allah increase their separation.'

New York Times Middle East correspondent Rukmini Callimachi elaborated on the terrorist's comments in a series of tweets.

'Like ISIS, al-Qaeda has long argued that America's incursions in the Middle East is not a war on terrorism, but rather a war on Islam,' she wrote.

'It's in part for that reason that Obama administration has gone out of its way to say this is not a war against a religion.

Abdallah al-Muhaysini said Trump's victory is a win for extremist groups in the Middle East, such as al-Qaeda and ISIS

Al-Muhaysini's tweets about Donald Trump's win were roughly translated into English and posted online

'Both al-Qaeda and ISIS feed off of narrative that only "they" are true protectors of Sunnis. They want Sunni Muslims to feel unsafe in West.

'Trump's rhetoric plays into their worldview... In both the posts by ISIS supporters and now by an al-Qaeda leader, the message is clear: "Muslims are not safe in West; join us".'

The US Department of Treasury officially declared al-Muhaysini a terrorist on Thursday.

'Abdallah Muhammad Bin-Sulayman al-Muhaysini was designated for acting for or on behalf of, and providing support and services to or in support of, al-Nusrah Front,' a statement read.
The father of a 20-year-old woman allegedly raped and murdered while travelling in Africa wants the 'b*****ds' responsible brought to justice.

Elly Warren, from Melbourne, was on a volunteer and diving holiday in Mozambique when she was found dead near a toilet block in Tofo Beach, on Wednesday.

Struggling for answers about exactly what happened, Ms Warren's father Paul is planning to head overseas to the 'dangerous' nation to bring his daughter's body home.

A distraught Mr Warren said his daughter was killed just days before she was due to return home to Australia, and has urged the Australian Federal Police to get involved in the search for answers about her death.

'They think that it was pretty bad, sexual assault,' he said.

'We are absolutely shocked and devastated with what happened. I just hope they catch the b*****ds.'

Just days before she set off for Africa, Ms Warren told her father: 'It's dangerous Dad, I don't know if I should be going over there.'

Daily Mail Australia understands the young traveller was last seen dropping off her bag at a beachside hostel before being heading off to meet friends at a party.

Scroll down for video

Elly Warren, from Melbourne, was travelling Africa before she tragically died on Wednesday

Paul Warren (right) has called for the 'b*****ds' who killed his daughter Elly (left) to be brought to justice

The 20-year-old had been holidaying and doing a volunteer stint in Mozambique and had booked two nights at the Wuyani Pariango backpackers in Tofo Bay (pictured)

It's believed she was tragically killed while walking home alone from the night out, with her body dumped near the toilets in a prominent market place on Tofo Beach.

The volunteer had booked two nights at the beachfront Wuyani Pariango backpackers in the picturesque Tofo Bay but she failed to return to her room.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, the hostel manager, who wished to remain anonymous, said staff members had seen the woman before she went missing.

'She came in alone to drop off her bag and then left to meet a friend,' the hostel manager revealed.

'She had pre-booked her accommodation but never stayed here.'

Daily Mail Australia understands Ms Warren's body is currently being transported from Tofo Beach to the country's capital Maputo, some 500 kilometres away where a post-mortem will be performed.

On Thursday, Mr Warren revealed his heartbreak over his daughter's terrible death.

A tearful Mr Warren told 7News: 'She even told me, "It's dangerous dad, I don't know if I should be going over there".

'And I said to her: "Yes it is, very dangerous".'

On Thursday evening, hours after paying a moving Facebook tribute to his daughter, Mr Warren also revealed on social media an autopsy would be conducted to determine her cause of death.

'I would just like everyone to pray for our Elly right now,' he wrote on Facebook.

'She is at peace with Sam, our dog, who she grew up with and loved dearly. Thank you all for your thoughts and well wishes Elly touched us all in some special way.

'The funeral is going to take some time as Elly was in a remote fishing village called Pemba.

The hostel manager said staff saw Ms Warren drop her bag off before heading out to see a friend but she failed to return to her room (pictured is one of the rooms at the hostel)

The young traveller had booked two nights at the Wuyani Pariango backpackers in Tofo Bay

Staff members at the hostel claimed they saw Ms Warren drop her bag off before heading back out to meet a friend

'There is going to be an investigation and autopsy, which I have been informed can take up to two weeks.

'I will be going over there in a few day to bring my baby back home. God bless you Elly Rose Warren.'

Her family, who found out about the young traveller's death in a heartbreaking late-night phone call from another backpacker, believe she became separated from her group before her body was later found in a toilet cubicle, The Age reported.

The revelation comes after her sister Kristy Warren took to Facebook to warn backpackers to be 'careful who they go [travelling] with'.

'My sister was in Africa whilst my mum got a phone call from one of the backpackers saying to her that her daughter has been murdered,' Ms Warren posted to Facebook.

'As I heard that my heart dropped. It is a parent's nightmare to get a phone call like this.'

Describing her sister as 'maybe too ambitious', she urged travellers to be vigilant when overseas.

'I want to say if you are thinking of going travelling or going overseas please be careful who you go with,' she wrote.

Ms Warren had been in the country since late September as part of Underwater Africa, a conservation program that 'helps protect the oceans'.

The volunteer tour's booking manager Graeme Warrack told Daily Mail Australia the young traveller had left their group the day before she was killed.

A room at the backpackers Ms Warren was last seen before her death

Ms Warren (pictured) has been killed while on a volunteer holiday to Mozambique, Africa

The 20-year-old from Mordialloc, in Melbourne's south-east suburbs, was also reportedly sexually assaulted before her death

'Elly arrived with us on the 27th of September and left our program on the November 8,' he said.

'We dropped her at her new accommodation at 5pm, to hear the news the next day has left us as broken as anyone can be, she was our friend and colleague.

'We're trying to find out where exactly she went once she left us, that's something we cant answer.'

Mr Warrack described Ms Warren as 'the life of the party' and said her death had taken a large toll on her fellow volunteers and scientists.

'Elly was an incredible volunteer who was doubtlessly the life and soul of any activity,' he said.

Ms Warren's mother, Nicole Cafarella told The Age her daughter was 'just one of those girls that wanted to travel the world and see everything she could before she was 30'.

Just days earlier Ms Warren had posted a video to Facebook of herself swimming with whale sharks off the Mozambique coast.

Her father Paul also shared a tribute on social media and even passed on his condolences to her boyfriend (right) in the midst of his own grief

Tributes flowed online from Ms Warren's friends and family following news of her death

Ms Warren's sister Kristy took to Facebook to share a tribute to her sister and to tell how her mother had received a call from a fellow backpacker telling her of the terrible news

Just days before her death Ms Warren (third from left) posted a video to Facebook of her diving with whale sharks

Dozens of online tributes flowed from Ms Warren's friends from Wednesday evening when news broke of her death.

'Taken way too soon, a gorgeous girl who had an amazing life ahead,' one girl wrote on Facebook.

'I feel like this is all just a f***ed up dream... It can't be true. Rip Elly Warren I'll never forget your huge infectious smile and crazy stories. I love you,' another posted.
Every fisherman has a story about the one that got away - but for this guy it's all about the one that didn't.

Craig Buxton, from Perth, found a novel way to propose to girlfriend Caitlin Baptiste while they were out fishing in Western Australia.

Rather than pop the question on one knee, Buxton instead attached a ring box to the end of the line and got Baptiste to reel it in.

Craig Buxton, from Perth, found a novel way to propose to his fishing-mad girlfriend Caitlin Baptiste by attaching a ring box to the end of a fishing line before having her reel it in

Buxton captured the unusual proposal and Baptiste's reaction on camera, including the moment she said yes.

The romantic told Daily Mail ustralia that he met Baptiste while they were both recovering from injuries in hospital back in 2013.

Buxton said while he told Baptiste's family of his plan six months before, she was completely in the dark about the proposal

He had suffered an injury while in a motocross race, while she had fallen while riding a horse.

The pair bonded while completing hydro-rehabilitation together before Buxton asked her to dinner, and have been dating ever since.

Both Buxton and Baptiste have a love of the sea, and so spend a lot of their time fishing - making it the perfect place to propose.

Buxton said he booked a trip to Cocos Island with Baptiste around April this year, when the idea for the proposal came to him.

He asked Baptiste's family for their permission, which they happily gave, but said he kept the idea a secret from her.

Buxton hand-crafted a metal canister for the ring box to sit in, but said he decided to keep the ring itself in his pocket for fear of a fish swallowing it as she was reeling it in.

Buxton said he met Baptiste three years ago while in hospital as he was recovering from a motocross injury and she was being treated after falling from a horse

Pair completed hydro-therapy together and began dating, and have been a couple ever since

He said: 'With the help of my friends Zac Mokta, Ozzie Hajat and Aslieazima Woren who are local Cocos Island boys , we loaded up the boat and headed out to the Bluewater to troll some lures.

'I then had to attach a canister I made to the end of the line without Caitlin seeing and noticing it wasn't a lure.

'After a while I sneakily bumped the drag back on the reel so it screamed the same as it would when a fish striked.

'I then had Caitlin reel it in and put the ring in the box after.'

Despite Baptiste having no idea of what was happening, Buxton said he wasn't nervous as he was 'pretty sure she'd say yes'.

Video shows the moment Buxton pretended to get a snag on the line, telling Baptiste to come and reel it in.

Video shows Buxton encouraging Baptiste to take the line before she pulls a strange looking metal container from the water

Buxton opens it up to reveal a ring box before popping the ring back inside - saying he took it out in case a shark ate it

At first she protests, but after he insists she steps up to take the reel.

Baptiste can be heard wondering what's attached to the end of the line, to which Buxton fibs: 'I have no idea.'

Meanwhile his friend, at the helm of the boat, can be seen smiling in the background as the stunt appears to be working.

Eventually a small metal canister emerges from the water, with Buxton still pretending not to know what's going on.

He takes the canister, unscrews the lid, and pops a ring into the box inside before swiveling around on one knee.

He then pops the question, to which Baptiste responds: 'Are you f***ing serious?'

Moments later though she gathers herself, saying: 'No way! Yes. Thank you!'

But despite now having a wedding to plan, Buxton said the couple have other priorities to save for: 'First a boat, then the wedding,' he said.
A deli manager who changed the use-by date on chicken has been awarded $10,000 for unfair dismissal.

Mary-Anne Graham had instructed a staff member to cook chickens at the end of their use-by date and mark the labels to state they would expire a day later.

The Pak 'N Save deli manager was sacked from the Hamilton supermarket in New Zealand's North Island days later, in November last year.

The Employment Relations Authority (ERA) agreed she had breached her duties in what could have amounted to serious misconduct, but awarded Ms Graham a total of $9,983.75 in lost wages and compensation.

Pak 'N Save deli manager Mary-Anne Graham has been awarded $10,000 for her unfair dismissal

In its decision, released on Friday, the ERA found Pak 'N Save owner Gladstone Retail Limited (GRL) had failed to give her adequate opportunity to respond to the allegations before sacking her.

Ms Graham had looked at and sniffed the delivery of chickens which were meant for sale the day prior, and ordered a staff member to cook them but write down November 9 instead of November 8 as their expiry date on the labels.

The staff member followed the instruction but complained to a fellow employee, who immediately told the store manager.

The chickens never made it to the shelves.

At a disciplinary meeting, Ms Graham and her husband explained to GRL staff she had felt stressed and under pressure to cut wastage.

During an investigation by the company that day, Ms Graham was also accused of putting cheese past its use-by date on pizza.

She had instructed a staff member to cook chickens due to expire and change their use-by dates

She went home on sick leave with a medical certificate for stress, but a second disciplinary meeting went on the following day without her and a letter of dismissal was sent to her home that day.

The ERA found Ms Graham had not been 'dealt with fairly'.

'The insistence on proceeding with a disciplinary meeting despite Ms Graham's medical certificate which said she was unfit for work  disclosed a level of haste that was not consistent with giving her a reasonable opportunity to respond to all the employer's concerns or with genuinely considering any explanation she could provide that was relevant to the question of whether or not to dismiss her for serious misconduct,' the ERA said in its judgement on Friday.

Because Ms Graham had admitted to serious misconduct, dismissal was likely 'but not necessarily inevitable'.

'Ms Graham had the right to be heard in person by whoever was making the final decision, not just about whether she had committed serious misconduct but also about whether the disciplinary sanction for that misconduct should be dismissal.'
Hundreds of people with rare diseases could miss out on vital treatments after the NHS was ordered to consider bankrolling a controversial HIV pill.

Toddlers with cystic fibrosis, deaf children and amputees may now be denied a range of new medical devices and breakthrough drugs.

NHS England has a budget of 25million a year for specialised new treatments and equipment for rare diseases.

But yesterdays Court of Appeal ruling means up to 20million may be diverted to provide pills for those at risk of HIV infection due to their high-risk sex lives, including up to 5,000 gay men. Critics fear it will encourage sexual risk-taking.

Up to 20million may be diverted to provide pills for those at risk of HIV infection due to their high-risk sex lives

The decision puts patients at the centre of a price war between a US drugs giant and the NHS, which warns that excessively high pricing of the 4,000-a-year pill could put funding for 13 other treatments in doubt.

NHS England had argued it should not have to even consider funding the PrEP treatment, because HIV prevention is not in its remit  insisting local councils should bear responsibility.

But ending a case brought by the National Aids Trust and the Local Government Association, judges yesterday ruled the NHS must at least consider the drug. Many experts favour the treatment, which reduces transmission risk by 92 per cent.

But others have warned that it encourages men to play Russian roulette. Health officials must now give PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, due consideration alongside 13 other treatments. The NHS was due to announce decisions on those 13 in August, but put them off pending the court case.

The Court of Appeal today said NHS England - which is run by Simon Stevens (pictured) did have the power to commission PrEP treatments, which can cut HIV contraction rates by 90 per cent among high risk groups

Officials had already earmarked nine for approval  including a bionic knee, a revolutionary drug for children as young as two with cystic fibrosis, and hearing implants for children. But the NHS Clinical Priorities Advisory Group must now reassess treatments alongside PrEP, and decide which to fund.

They may still decide not to pay for PrEP  but the case has delayed a decision on the other treatments by months. Aids charities welcomed the ruling and said PrEP was proven to cut HIV rates and would save the NHS millions in the future. But critics stressed the drug is not 100 per cent effective.

The average HIV prevalence in the UK is 2.3 per 1,000 population. However, for gay men the rate jumps to 48.7 per 1,000.

NHS Englands specialist services commissioning committee decided earlier this year not to commission the drug, sold under the brand name Truvada, saying local authorities should take responsibility.

The Court of Appeal, however, yesterday ruled that NHS England does hold responsibility. Lord Justice Longmore, sitting with Lord Justice Underhill and Lady Justice King, said the drug could save the NHS cash by reducing the numbers contracting HIV, adding that it costs 360,000 to treating a single person over their lifetime.

Mr Longmore described the case as bureaucratic squabbles and called for an internal mechanism to sort out such disputes.

NHS England last night accepted the decision, but asked US pharma giant Gilead to bring down its price. It offers the NHS a secret discount on the 4,000-a-year commercial price, but officials said this was insufficient. Earlier this year all firms with products on the list were asked to submit new prices. But Gilead has not budged. An NHS England spokesman said: We will immediately ask the manufacturer to reconsider its excessively high pricing.

The Court of Appeal (file picture) rejected NHS England's argument that it could not legally commission PrEP because local authorities have the responsibility to arrange services

Deborah Gold, chief executive of the National Aids Trust, said: PrEP works, it saves money, and most importantly it has the power to prevent HIV acquisition for thousands of people.

Ian Green, chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust, added: PrEP is nothing short of a game-changer.

But other charities warned NHS England not to use yesterdays ruling as an excuse to ration drugs for rare diseases. James Barrow, of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, said: With each day that passes the likelihood of irreversible lung damage and reduced life expectancy increases.

And Jo Campion, of the National Deaf Childrens Society, said life-changing auditory brain stem implants can often be the only option for deaf children. Other treatments at risk include stem cell transplants for lymphoma.

Diana Jupp, of the cancer charity Bloodwise, said they can be the difference between life and death.

Meanwhile, the Christian Medical Fellowship said: Those who rely on PrEP for protection against HIV are playing Russian roulette.

MY TODDLER NEEDS CYSTIC FIBROSIS CURE Aged just 22 months, William Foord, pictured with his mother, has been in hospital more than many have in a lifetime. The drug Ivacaftor, also known as Kalydeco, could dramatically improve the life of William and other toddlers with cystic fibrosis  but under current criteria children under five are not entitled to it. Aged just 22 months, William Foord (pictured with his mother Emma) has been in hospital more than many have in a lifetime The treatment is on a list to be considered for funding  but if the NHS funds HIV drug PrEP, it is unlikely there will be money left for cystic fibrosis. His mother Emma, 29, a nurse from Southwick, Wiltshire, said yesterday: This drug could have a huge impact on my sons health at such a crucial stage. If they lived in Scotland, William would be entitled to Ivacaftor and the Foords may be left with no choice but to move there. The mother-of-one told of the shocking number of times William has been to hospital. She said: I have watched him fight for his life on three occasions. I have also seen him go to an operating theatre on four occasions, two of which were life-saving. After Augusts High Court ruling, she said: Like any mother, all I want is a cure for my child or, failing that, medication that will improve his quality of life and its expectancy, allowing him to live a normal life. Advertisement

The suffering patients left in limbo

Yesterday's ruling that HIV drug PrEP must be considered for use by NHS England means a decision on the following treatments is on hold  with more than 700 potential patients left in limbo.

Ear implants for deaf children:

Auditory brain stem implants, costing around 60,000, can let young deaf children hear. The NHS estimates nine children in England could benefit every year.

Children's Cystic fibrosis drug:

Ivacaftor is the first precision medicine for cystic fibrosis, helping young children breathe properly for the first time. The drug, which costs 182,625 a year, is available to children over five, but the 45 youngsters aged two to five affected each year are waiting to find out whether they could also receive it.

Bionic knee replacements:

Hi-tech bionic knees costing up to 60,000 offer a vast improvement on the ability to walk for people who have lost a leg. The artificial joint, which benefits 102 people every year, reduces falls and speeds recovery.

Lymphoma Stem cell treatment:

Lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma is a rare form of blood cancer that affects white blood cells. Stem cell transplants, which are given to 32 patients a year and cost up to 80,000, replace the white blood cells.

Pill to allow chemotherapy:

Low salt levels are a major risk for cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy, substantially increasing their risk of seizures. Tolvaptan temporarily treats this problem in 40 patients a year, allowing chemotherapy to go ahead, and costs 2,000 for an average two-week treatment.

Growth hormone disorder drug:

Agromegaly is a rare condition affecting 150 people a year who grow abnormally big because their pituitary gland produces too much growth hormone. Pegvisomant, costing 30,482 a year, halts its effects.

Teenage narcolepsy treatment: Narcolepsy is a rare condition that causes sufferers to stay awake for days, then sleep for days. Sodium oxybate, or Xyrem, treats narcolepsy and cataplexy, in which laughter causes physical collapse, and costs up to 13,000 a year. It is given to adults, but a decision is awaited on aiding 22 teenagers a year.

Cushings Disease drug:

Hormone disorder Cushings disease is caused by a pituitary gland tumour sparking high levels of the stress hormone cortisol and increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Pasireotide, a new drug under assessment, costs 47,000 a year and blocks cortisol. It would help ten people a year.

Dangerous immune disease drug:

A newly-discovered disease known as IgG4-RD hits 100 people a year. Their immune systems produce harmful antibodies that attack their bodies own organs. Untreated, it can lead to organ failure or death. Drug Rituximab costs 40,000 for six months.
New Balance shoe owners are throwing away their sneakers or lighting them on fire to protest after the company reportedly voiced support for President-elect Donald Trump.

After Trump's stunning victory, a spokesman for the company told Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: 'Frankly w/ Pres-Elect Trump we feel things are going to move in the right direction.'

The brief statement was picked up by popular sneaker site, Sole Collector, and was met with outrage by countless fans of the brand.

Scroll down for video

New Balance shoe owners are throwing away their sneakers or lighting them on fire (above) in protest after the company reportedly voiced support for President-elect Donald Trump

After Trump's (leftt) stunning victory, a spokesman for the company told Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: 'Frankly w/ Pres-Elect Trump we feel things are going to move in the right direction.' Many sneaker owners reacted against the brand by getting rid of their shoes (right)

A Twitter user posted a quick video of their shoes engulfed in flames while on a sidewalk and wrote, 'good to know. I made a little bonfire tonight...'

Other users on social media opted to post videos of them either throwing their shoes in trash cans or tossing them forcefully out of the window.

Numerous users pointed out Trump's history of sexist, xenophobic and racist statements that he's made throughout the years.

As the outrage was brewing among New Balance sneaker owners, the Boston-based corporation released another statement saying, 'we believe in community. We believe in humanity.

As the outrage was brewing among New Balance sneaker owners, the Boston-based corporation released another statement saying, 'we believe in community. We believe in humanity, but it was too late for some show owners

'From the people who make our shoes to the people who wear them, we believe in acting with the utmost integrity and we welcome all walks of life.'

The company told Buzzfeed on Thursday that the 'right direction' quote was only in reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, and not any other policies Trump stands by.

Their support of Trump originated from the billionaire businessman's opposition to the TPP trade deal that was promoted by President Obama, as a company spokesman said he 'turned a deaf ear.'
An investigation has been launched into allegations that online gambling firms are bombarding millions of people with nuisance texts.

There are concerns that hundreds of the firms are using private numbers and personal details illegally to encourage people to gamble.

Online gambling has become a huge social problem, provoking alarming tales of debt, misery and family break-up.

Some of the firms have been accused of conning punters with misleading betting promotions and complex smallprint.

Online gambling has become a huge social problem and there are concerns that hundreds of firms are using private numbers to illegally encourage people to gamble. File photo

Any firms which target people with texts without getting permission are breaking the law and liable to fines of up to 500,000.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has written to 400 companies demanding details on how they target people with texts.

The regulator wants to know where the companies got people's private information from and how many texts they have sent.

The campaign is part of an investigation by the ICO into large numbers of spam texts linked to the gambling sector.

Last year, it emerged that a retired vicar from Scotland had been hit with a bill for more than 200 from a service linked to gambling.

Retired vicar George MacIntosh, 73, received 'TextPlayWin' text messages on his mobile phone which were costing him 4.50 a week. It appears the messages were triggered after he inadvertently responded to an unsolicited text from the company involved.

Online gambling companies appear to be buying lists of names and numbers from partner marketing firms. They also use these partner firms, so-called affiliates, to send out texts and then channel business to them.

The concern is that the neither the gambling firms nor their partners have carried out the necessary checks to ensure their targets have agreed to accept the texts.

The ICO's anti-spam investigations manager, David Clancy, said: 'Companies must comply with the law when using people's personal information. Not knowing the law or trying to pass the buck to another company in the chain is no excuse.

'The public expect firms to be accountable for how they obtain and use personal data when marketing by phone, email or text.

'Fail to be accountable and you could be breaking the law, risking ICO enforcement action and the future of your business.'

The gambling industry has moved online and the ICO now has become aware of particular problems around affiliate marketing. File photo

The gambling sector is an area where the ICO has become aware of particular problems around affiliate marketing.

Mr Clancy said: 'It is thanks to consumers who've reported spam texts to us, as well as intelligence from other sources, that we've been able to progress our investigations to this stage.'

If businesses do not respond to the request for information, the ICO can use its powers to demand the information to be provided.

The ICO's website has an online tool where people can report spam texts.

A new code of practice has been launched by the ICO this month which sets out how organisations should explain to people how they're using their personal information.

Just last month, another Government watchdog, the Competition & Markets Authority, announced its own investigation into the online gambling giants behind a 4billion a year gaming industry.

It is concerned the firms are misleading punters with offers that are too good to be true and impenetrable small print rules.

The CMA's Senior Director for Consumer Enforcement, Nisha Arora, said: 'Gambling inevitably involves taking a risk, but it shouldn't be a con.

'We're worried players are losing out because gambling sites are making it too difficult for them to understand the terms on which they're playing, and may not be giving them a fair deal.

'We are now investigating to see whether firms are breaking the law.

'Around 5.5 million Britons gamble online and they must be treated fairly. We' ve heard worrying complaints suggesting people may be lured into signing up for promotions with little chance of winning because of unfair and complex conditions.'

The Remote Gambling Association, which speaks for the firms, said: 'It's clearly right, irrespective of whether the affiliate marketing is related to gambling or any other product, that the ICO should take action if it believes there has been misuse of personal information.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato secretary-general 2009-2014, said the US president-elect must show 'strength' against Russia

Donald Trump must act against Russian aggression within 100 days of taking office or face the 'beginning of the end' of Nato, a former chief of the US-led alliance warned last night.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was Nato secretary-general from 2009 to 2014, said the US president-elect must show 'strength' because Russian president Vladimir Putin 'only respects a firm hand'.

He urged the US to increase support for Nato, set up military bases to counter Russian aggression against Nato states and protect Ukraine.

Mr Rasmussen said the Baltic states and Ukraine were 'close friends of the US', adding: 'Neglecting them will have far-reaching consequences and mark the beginning of the end of the US-led system.'

His advice on how to deal with President Putin came as British former defence chiefs warned Mr Trump not to abandon Nato.

The US president-elect has cast doubt on the alliance's mutual defence pact and wants other members to increase their military spending.

Yesterday, top brass and Nato's current chief called on him to clarify his position on Nato, which has been the cornerstone of Western security since 1949.

Former Danish prime minister Mr Rasmussen, is now a special adviser to Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko  an appointment criticised as a 'hostile gesture' by Russian MPs.

He set out his advice for Mr Trump on how to deal with Moscow in an email circulated by his consultancy firm, Rasmussen Global.

Amid fears of a shift in US policy to soften its stance on the Ukraine crisis, he said: 'As Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump must display strength towards Russia. Putin only respects a firm and steady hand.'

The former Nato secretery general urged Trump (pictured today meeting Obama for the first time) to increase support for Nato and set up military bases to counter Russian aggression

He also wants the US to build its security policy on the transatlantic relationship that has led to 'unprecedented peace and prosperity for the US and Europe'.

Mr Rasmussen added: 'The US must increase support for Nato's eastern flank, set up military bases wherever Russia is threatening the freedom and livelihood of US allies, and whole-heartedly protect Ukraine against future Russian aggression.'

He advised Mr Trump to lead a new global trade and economic security pact and called for a bolder approach to the Syrian crisis.

He added: 'The US President must initiate a no-fly zone to impose and maintain a credible and durable ceasefire in Syria. The US must force the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, to the negotiating table and find a political solution to the devastating conflict.'

His advice on how to deal with President Putin (pictured) came as British former defence chiefs warned Mr Trump not to abandon Nato

However, Western politicians have said a no-fly zone carried the risk of shooting down Russian jets, which could spark a world war.

Former RAF chief Sir Michael Graydon urged Mr Trump to back the alliance, adding: 'A strong statement saying he supports Nato, but 'you've got to pay your fair share' would be a more helpful approach.'

His comments echoed those of General Richard Shirreff, Nato's deputy supreme allied commander for Europe until 2014, who called for a 'very sober and serious' statement from the US president-elect reaffirming his commitment.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said: 'We would like to know what intentions he has regarding the alliance.'

He also made fresh calls for an EU army, saying members could not rely on US security guarantees.

Mr Rasmussen (pictured with David Cameron in 2010) said the Baltic states and Ukraine were 'close friends of the US' and warned that neglecting them will have 'consequences'

Mr Juncker added: 'We have to do it ourselves. Americans will not see to Europe's security for ever.' But his comments were rebuffed by General Lord Dannatt, former head of the Army, who said: 'Nato binds Europe together, not the EU.'

Mr Trump, who will take over as president in January, alarmed some EU leaders by insisting he wants a 'good relationship' with Russia.

The EU is likely to extend economic sanctions against Russia next month for its support of rebels in Ukraine, but could find this difficult if Mr Trump improves relations with Mr Putin. Sergei Glazyev, an aide to Mr Putin, said: 'Trump will lift sanctions on Russia that are harmful to US business.'
The Ku Klux Klan is planning a victory march in North Carolina to celebrate Donald Trump's presidential success.

The parade is being organised by the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and is set to take place on December 3 in Pelham - a city at the North Carolina and Virginia border.

Plans for the 'klavalkade Klan parade' were revealed on the infamous white nationalist group's website on Thursday alongside a photo of Trump.

The Ku Klux Klan have revealed plans on its website to stage a victory parade in North Carolina in December to celebrate Donald Trump's stunning presidential success

Part of the announcement read: 'Trump = Trump's race united my people'.

It is not yet known where exactly the rally will take place.

It comes after former KKK grand wizard David Duke claimed credit for Trump's presidential success, claiming his people played a 'huge role' in the shock victory.

Duke, who failed to win a Senate seat in Louisiana, tweeted support for the billionaire businessman as it emerged he was set to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Trump's campaign also received a strong endorsement from the KKK's newspaper The Crusader - but his staff described the publication as 'repulsive'.

Plans for the 'klavalkade Klan parade' were revealed on the infamous white nationalist group's website on Thursday alongside a photo of Trump

Trump's campaign received strong endorsement of the KKK's newspaper The Crusader ahead of the election - but his staff described the publication as 'repulsive'

Former KKK grand wizard David Duke claimed credit for Trump's presidential success, claiming his people played a 'huge role' in the shock victory

Speaking to his fans following this morning's shock announcement, Duke told his followers on Twitter: 'This is one of the most exciting nights of my life. Make no mistake about it, our people have played a huge role in electing Trump.

'Donald J Trump now has the chance to become one of the greatest Americans to have ever lived. We have the moral high ground.

'Make no mistake about it. Donald J Trump owes his victory to The South.'

Trump received the support of The Crusader in its last edition before polling day.

The newspaper bills itself as 'The Premier Voice of the White Resistance'.

Trump's campaign attempted to distance himself from the extreme right wing 'views do not represent the tens of millions of Americans who are uniting behind our campaign'.
Advertisement

Leaders have gathered in Canberra to remember the moment the guns fell silent across the Western Front at the end of World War I, 98 years ago.

Malcolm Turnbull, Julie Bishop, Bill Shorten, and Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove are attending the national Remembrance Day ceremony at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

In Sydney at the Cenotaph at Martin Place, Tanya Plibersek, Mike Baird, NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore commemorated Remembrance Day.

The leaders, and Australians across the country, had a minute of silence at 11am on 11 November to remember those who have lost their lives in war.

Scroll down for video

Malcolm Turnbull is pictured arriving at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra

Mr Turnbull greets Bill Shorten at the ceremony on Friday, 11 November

Mr Turnbull is pictured laying a wreath to pay his respects at the Australian War Memorial

More than 102,000 Australian servicemen and women have been killed in a range of conflicts since before federation, and the RSL is urging everyone across the country to honour their sacrifice.

Friday also has special significance for the memorial, marking 75 years since it opened in 1941.

The sails of the Sydney Opera House will be lit up with red poppies on Friday as part of the commemoration.

The iconic Flanders poppies symbolise the bravery, sacrifice and loss of Australians past and present, NSW Deputy Premier Troy Grant said.

The Prime Minister solemnly lays a wreath at the commemoration on Friday, 11 November

The leaders, and Australians across the country, had a minute of silence at 11am on 11 November to remember those who have lost their lives in war

'I hope all those who see the spectacular sight of the illuminated sails will take the time to pause and remember the contribution of all our servicemen and women,' he said.

In Darwin, about 300 Australian soldiers will be formally farewelled ahead of their six-month deployment to Iraq.

The parade at Darwin's Robertson Barracks on Friday comes as the troops prepare for Task Group Taji, under under Operation Okra, in the fight against the Islamic State extremist group.

Mr Turnbull and Australian leaders are pictured at the ceremony in Canberra

The iconic Flanders poppies symbolise the bravery, sacrifice and loss of Australians past and present, NSW Deputy Premier Troy Grant said (Mr Turnbull pictured with poppy pin)

Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion honoured Australia's Aboriginal soldiers who served their country despite suffering discrimination at home.

Around 1000 Indigenous servicemen and women fought for Australia in that war, and some were at Gallipoli.

'They served their country, despite not having the right to vote,' Mr Scullion said.

'We are also saddened by the stories of the treatment received by those who returned.'

It's estimated 20 per cent of the Northern Territory's Indigenous population joined the army effort during WWII.

'Many left family and community to serve overseas, some travelling vast distances for the chance to enlist,' the Northern Territory senator said.

NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley, Federal Deputy Leader of the Opposition Tanya Plibersek and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore are pictured at the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph in Sydney

Attendees watch on during the service at the Cenotaph in Sydney on Friday, 11 November

French Consul General in Sydney Nicolas Croizer (right) lays a wreath at the Cenotaph commemoration

Attendees watch on during the Remembrance Day commemoration in Sydney

Former British paratroopers lay wreaths at the service in Sydney

Veterans chat at the service in Martin's Place on Friday, 11 November - 98 years after the guns fell silent across the Western Front at the end of World War I

French Counsul General in Sydney, Nicolas Croizer (right) lays a wreath

Croizer stands to attention after placing the wreath as the officer next to him salutes

Representatives of the Australian Defence Forces salute during the service at Martin Place

A member of the catafalque party stands at attention as representatives of the ADF salute

Ex-Servicemen salute after laying a wreath during the Remembrance Day service

A representative of French Veterans NSW pays his respects after laying a wreath at Martin Place

NSW Premier Mike Baird and wife Kerryn at the service at the Cenotaph at Sydney's Martin Place

NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley and Federal Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek are pictured prior to the service

Mr Baird greets an attendee as he arrives at the Remembrance Day service

Representatives of the ADF salute after laying wreaths in Martin Place

Mr Foley, Ms Plibersek and Ms Moore pay their respects on Friday, 11 November

Mike Baird pays his respects alongside colleagues at the ceremony

Premier Mike Baird lays a wreath during the service in Sydney

A member of the cataflaque party stands at attention during the Remembrance Day service in Martin Place

Australian war veterans listen to a bugler during a Remembrance Day commemoration at Martin Place

Attendees watch on during the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph in Sydney

French and Australian war veterans sing La Marseillaise, the French national anthem

Australian war veterans gather for a picture in front of the Cenotaph in Sydney

The Honour Guard march at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on Friday

The ceremony at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra is pictured

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra is pictured on Remembrance Day

Wreaths are pictured at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on Friday

A canon fires at the Shrine of Remembrance in Canberra to commemorate the day of respect

Mourners are seen at the Shrine of Remembrance on Remembrance Day in Melbourne

Fighter jets fly over the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne

They were The Roulettes, from the Royal Australian Air Force's formation aerobatic display team

Poppies grow in front of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne

Players and staff observe one-minute silence at the training session at Bellerive Oval in Hobart before Australia plays South Africa on Saturday
A group of Australia's best doctors have said a sugar tax is imperative if we're serious about tackling the obesity epidemic.

Professor Nick Talley, head of the Committee of Presidents of Medical Colleges told the ABC that we can't handle obesity like we handled the rise of smoking and tobacco use.

'With smoking and tobacco control, we took risks and it had a dramatic effect,' Mr Talley said.

Australia's best doctors says we need to handle the obesity epidemic better than we did the rise of smoking

The Committee of Presidents of Medical Colleges represent a number of medical bodies and have devised a plan to improve the growing health issues among Australians.

The points include introducing a levy on sweetened drinks, redefining obesity as a chronic disease and not simply a lifestyle choice, making weight loss surgeries more accessible and increasing prevention strategies for prenatal and early childhood obesity.

Another point in the plan is to ensure medical and health professionals are focused on encouraging their patients to eat well and exercise.

'We need to live by the advice we are giving to our patients' Professor Talley said.

The group believe if we make sugary drinks more expensive it will deter people from consuming them regularly

The group of doctors say a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages will help stop the growth of obesity

Sydney based obesity physician Dr Georgia Rigas told the ABC that if the medication exists to help obese people then it should be easily accessible.

'There are three medications approved for obesity, but none are on the pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Why is that?' she said.

The group want to increase prevention strategies for prenatal and early childhood obesity.

Mr Talley has said that Australia needs to work hard to manage the growing rates of obesity in Australian adults and children.

'Australia has an obesity crisis with 75% of the total population overweight or obese. These people are at higher risk of cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other life-threatening illnesses,' he said in a statement.
A Royal Marine sniper blasted a speedboat carrying 40million of cocaine after a dramatic six-hour chase across the Caribbean.

Navy ship Wave Knight launched a Lynx helicopter to fire shots at the traffickers during a daring operation in the middle of the sea.

They ignored the shots, forcing a sniper in the back of the helicopter to shoot out the engines of the speedboat and stopping the cocaine reaching its destination.

The dramatic mission was captured on camera. Photographs showed the marine firing the shot from the sky as the traffickers watched from below.

Navy ship Wave Knight launched a Lynx helicopter to fire shots at drug traffickers in a speedboat in the Caribbean

Wave Knight is currently preparing to host Prince Harry during his planned tour of Caribbean later this month.

The Prince will be given a cabin on the ship as he travels around the islands representing his grandmother, The Queen.

A Ministry of Defence statement said: Royal Fleet Auxiliary Wave Knight concluded a dramatic six hour chase across the Caribbean, by shooting out the engines of a go-fast speedboat.

More than 40m of cocaine never reached its destination. The successful bust was sparked by a maritime patrol aircraft sighting the go-fast and directing RFA Wave Knight to intercept.

She responded by bearing down on the speedboat  and launching her helicopter, which no boat could outrun.

A spokesman said the sniper in the back a Lynx helicopter from 815 Naval Air Squadron first fired warning shots ahead of the go-fast calling on the traffickers to stop and then.

A sniper took out the boats engines and brought it to a halt, before a specialist team of US coast guards boarded the craft and recovered 14 bales of illegal narcotics

The five crew of the go-fast plus the haul of drugs were later transferred to the US Coast Guard cutter and handed over to authorities in Miami Beach

When they ignored those shots, took out the boats engines bringing it to a halt, he said.

Once the boats engines brought it to a halt, a specialist team of US coast guards boarded the craft and recovered 14 bales of illegal narcotics.

Tests revealed it to be 350kg of cocaine with a wholesale value on the streets of more than 14million had those drugs reached the UK.

Before the boarding team reached the vessel, the traffickers threw several bales overboard. US authorities assessed 650kg of cocaine worth around 26million was abandoned. The go-fast itself subsequently sank.

In 2008, the Royal Navy's Iron Duke was hosting Prince William when it stopped a drug-running speedboat in the Atlantic. The ship's crew found 900kg of cocaine on the small vessel.

The helicopter was launched from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker, Wave Knight

The ship is due to host Prince Harry later this month during his tour of the Caribbean

In total, fourteen bales of illegal drugs were captured in a combined operation by the Royal Navy, Royal Fleet Auxiliary and US Coast Guard in waters between Venezuela and Puerto Rico.

The five crew of the go-fast plus the haul of drugs were later transferred to the US Coast Guard cutter Richard Etheridge and handed over to authorities in Miami Beach.

Mike Penning MP, Minister of State for the Armed Forces, said: This high-speed intervention shows how the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and Royal Navy are making a difference around the world to tackle threats wherever they occur.
The teacher and her year four students had emotional reaction to US election

A nine-year-old Muslim girl has written a manifesto called 'Bad Donald Trump' about the 'really mean, racist person'.

The girl gave the handwritten, one-page letter to her unnamed teacher on Thursday, after she had cried as the results of the presidential elections tricked in.

The teacher said she had been speaking with her year four class in Dandenong, Melbourne, and many of the students had been overwhelmed with emotion, The Advertiser reported.

A nine-year-old Muslim girl has written an essay called 'Bad Donald Trump'

'BAD DONALD TRUMP' BY MELBOURNE GIRL, NINE Donald Trump is a really bad person. He is racist and he made my teacher cry. He is the president in America. He wants to make a wall so no Mexican people come, also Muslim people. It makes me sad because I am Muslim myself and he does not respect us and women. He does not think about family he just think about himself. People that voted made a really big mistake because now America have to stick up with him as president. Donald Trump is a really mean, racist person. Well I can describe him in many ways but don't worry, I want all America people to come to have a better life. Hillary Clinton that was supposed to win. She is not racist, a very good person. She would include both men and women, which is fair. She will welcome people to America which is the right thing. I wish Hillary Clinton was president and my teacher would have cried tears of joy. Advertisement

'We were talking about the election  because a lot of the kids in the school, a lot of them are Muslim, and they are quite tuned in to what's going on,' the teacher who wishes to remain nameless said.

'Afterwards we were doing some writing and this one girl seemed to be concentrating really hard on what she was doing. Then she brought that up to me, and I was just amazed by what she had written.'

The nine-year-old girl expressed her fears President-elect Trump would block Mexican and Muslim people from emigrating to the U.S.

'It makes me sad because I am Muslim myself and he does not respect us and women. He does not think about family, he just thinks about himself.'

'Donald Trump is a really mean, racist person.'

The teacher said another student had asked her: 'Does this mean I'm not allowed to go to America now?'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the teacher.
Thousands took to the streets across the country to protest over President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday.

As demonstrators flooded the streets in Los Angeles, prisoners inside the Metropolitan Detention Center expressed solidarity with the group chanting outside.

A video shared on Twitter shows how inmates inside the federal prison reacted to the thousands of people outside protesting by turning their cell lights on and off repeatedly.

The protesters responded to prisoners with cheers before chanting, 'We see you' and 'Not my president'.

Scroll down for video

Los Angeles: Prisoners at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles expressed solidarity by flicking the lights inside their cells (above) with a massive group of protesters chanting outside against the new president

A video shared on Twitter shows how inmates inside the prison flashed their lights on and off for the crowd gathered below. The protesters responded to prisoners with cheers before chanting, 'We see you' (above)

Under California state law, the inmates are not eligible to vote as part of any election.

As hundreds of protesters made their way through the streets in Los Angeles overnight, 28 people were arrested by LAPD for impeding traffic on the 101 Freeway downtown, the Los Angeles Times reported.

For a second day, protests broke out again across the country over Trump's shocking election win.

Thousands are demonstrating to express their outrage at the selection of the President-elect and many institutions staged walk-outs and rallies, including protests on New York's bustling Fifth Avenue and outside the White House.

New York: A second day of protests got under way in New York as New School students took their anti-Trump demonstration to Fifth Avenue on Thursday. Protests had taken place in multiple cities the previous night

New York: Several students gathered under anti-Trump placards to share their dismay at the election result on Thursday

Students at New York's famously progressive New School staged a protest today, demonstrating on Fifth Avenue.

Dozens of students armed with placards chanted against Trump outside the main campus building. Their action came as the school set up a 'space for support' after the election.

Students are being encouraged to meet on campus and discuss the results and counselors have even been arranged for those unhappy with Trump's selection.

Outside the White House, protesters held up signs reading 'Donald Trump is a Racist' and 'Undocumented and here to stay!'

Hundreds met in Milwaukee, where a speaker talked of 'the system that gave Trump power' even though he did not win the popular vote, and called on supporters to organize against Trump.

New York: The student rally was peaceful in Manhattan Thursday. On Wednesday night, scenes turned uglier with at least 30 arrests taking place in the city

The White House: Some protesters took their anger to the seat of power, holding up signs calling Trump a racist

The crowd cheered as he told them they were on the 'right side of history' and they entered a chant of 'Not my President.'

In Texas, protests took place at Texas State University in San Marcos. One black protester held up a sign reading 'We matter #NotMyPresident.'

Other signs read 'Hell Toupee' and 'Rather have NO Pres. than a rapist 4 President!!' - the latter a reference to sexual assault allegations directed at Trump, all of which he has denied.

In Emory & Henry College in Emory, Virginia, a group of students held a largely LGBT-themed protest walk through the grounds.

Emory: Students at Emory & Henry College in Virginia walked in protest (left), with gay rights a dominant theme. Right: Two students hold each other while displaying a 'Love Not Hate' sign

San Marcos: Protesters at Texas State University press their objection to Donald Trump's presidency

Hundreds more gathered in the center of Philadelphia, where Clinton held her final rally, holding signs saying 'Reject hate' and 'P***y strikes back!'

In San Francisco, high school students marched to express their dismay. Many gathered outside San Francisco' City Hall, where they held a sit-in, holding signs decrying Trump as a racist and misogynist.

Several identified themselves on clothing and signs as 'nasty women' - a reference an insult Trump directed at Clinton in their final televised debate.

More demonstrations are expected across the city tonight and across the country.

Much of Wednesday's activity centered around Trump skyscrapers.

Jeffrey Lord, former Reagan adviser and pro-Trump pundit, wrote off the protesters as 'professional protesters' on CNN Thursday.

San Francisco: High school and college students gather outside San Francisco's City Hall for a protest

San Francisco: The San Francisco city Hall protesters held a massive sit-in

San Francisco: Students marched through the streets of San Francisco in outrage at Trump's election on Thursday

On Wednesday night in New York, home of the President-elect, 65 people were arrested when cops cracked down on twin demonstrations in Columbus Circle and at Trump Tower.

As many as 7,500 demonstrators were believed to have been split between the two locations, chanting 'Black Lives Matter' and 'Donald Trump, go away, racist, sexist, anti-gay.'

Cher and Madonna were among the NYC protesters, with Cher telling one supporter they needed to 'fight.'

Madonna posted footage of crowds chanting 'Not my President!' on her Instagram feed.

Protests also stopped traffic in Chicago, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; and San Francisco among many others.

Outside the White House, a candlelit vigil was held in protest. But even peaceful protests in that city went awry, with at least one protester being bundled into the back of a van by the Secret Service.

In Oakland, thousands marched in demonstrations that turned violent with the crowd throwing bottles at police.

Security operation: Police officers help to install concrete barriers around Trump Tower, the home of President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday

Threats: A row of sand-filled sanitation trucks have been parked in a barricade in front of the skyscraper to try and insure against car bomb attacks

On Guard: Members of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Bureau stand watch outside Trump Tower earlier this week

Videos and images showed flags being set alight and swarms of armed cops marching on protesters.

Traffic was also stopped on an LA freeway by angry crowds.

Security measures have been stepped up in New York in the wake of the contentious election result and Tuesday night's marches.

Police officers have helped to install concrete barriers around Trump Tower which is home to Donald Trump, his wife Melania and their son Barron.

A row of sanitation trucks filled with sand have also been acting as barricades along Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets since Monday in order to protect the tower against car bombs.

Sources said one lane of traffic that passes the Tower is expected to remain closed to prevent attacks until he moves to the White House.

Gathering: Outside Trump Tower on protesters gathered with signs reading 'Dump Trump' and 'Not My President'

Chants: Thousands of anti-Trump protesters hit the streets in NYC chanting 'Not My President' Wednesday

March: Tens of thousands of people across the country marched against the President-elect before angry mobs in a few cities attacked police, started fires and shut down highways Wednesday

An NYPD checkpoint is also in operation outside the building while 56th street between Fifth and Madison is closed to traffic.

On Thursday, heavily-armed officers could be seen around the president-elect's home while Trump himself visited the White House.

A no-fly zone has also been imposed over the 58-story tower.

The flight ban will re-route many helicopter tours of the city, limit the work of media helicopters as well as re-routing commercial aircraft. Drones are also banned

Handing over: On Thursday President-elect Donald Trump met with President Barack Obama to discuss the transition

Police investigate a fire lit by protesters inside a building during an anti-Trump protest in Oakland, California on Wednesday

People march and shout during an anti-Trump protest in Oakland, California on Wednesday

Military, police emergency and secret service flights are exempt from the ban.

Mashable reports that the change could cause flight delays out of LaGuardia Airport.

Flights are also limited over Vice President Mike Pence's Indianapolis home.

The no-fly zone will be in play until Trump's inauguration on Friday 20 January, 2017.

People who work and live inside Trump Tower will also now be vetted by the Secret Service, the New York Daily News reports.
A Muslim woman has publicly outlined why she chose to vote for Donald Trump at the US Election, saying it was incredibly his strong stance against Islamic extremism that won her over.

Asra Nomani from Fairfax County, Virginia, says she isn't a 'white supremacist', but is in fact a 'woman of colour' who silently supported the Republican candidate.

In an extraordinary opinion article published in the Washington Post, Ms Nomani told how she found herself leaning towards supporting the divisive billionaire, but was forced to keep her beliefs quiet in the face of outrage.

The single-mother said that eight years ago she was an Obama supporter, but this year snuck into her local polling booth before it closed and cast her vote for Trump.

Muslim woman Asra Nomani (pictured) has publicly outlined why she chose to vote for Donald Trump at the US Election despite his anti-Muslim stance

Ms Nomani wrote that as a single-mother, she had seen 'Obamacare' fail her and many others in her community.

'[Everyday] I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.'

She told how after Clinton conceded the election, friends of hers had posted on social media that they were 'ashamed' of those who voted for Trump.

Ms Nomani said that she supported same-sex marriage and didn't share his views on immigrants, and obviously Muslims.

As a result many would've assumed she fell into the anti-Trump camp, but that wasn't the case.

Despite Trump's 'rhetoric', one of the biggest things that led her to vote Republican on Tuesday was his strong stance on Islamic extremism.

Ms Nomani said while she didn't agree with Trump's views on same-sex marriage, deporting immigrants or building a wall to Mexico, his strong stance on Islamic extremism won her over

Despite his divisive policies and behaviour, Donald Trump was elected to be the next president of the United States on Tuesday

She said after what she described as soft stances taken by Obama and Clinton, the promises made by Trump, despite being 'indelicate', were necessary.

'As a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Barack Obama... to tap dance around the "Islam" in Islamic State,' she wrote.

'Yes, I want equal pay. No, I reject Trump's "locker room" banter, the idea of a "wall" between the United States and Mexico and a plan to "ban" Muslims.

'We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims, so that everyone can live with sukhun, or peace of mind.'

Since her story was posted online Ms Nomani has received an influx of support from fellow Trump supporters who she says were also forced to stay silent.

'I am getting direct messages, emails and Facebook messages from decent folks living their vote in secret,' she wrote on Twitter on Friday.

However despite the positive messages from many, Ms Nomani also said she'd been bombarded by hate from anti-Trump.
Billionaire Richard Branson's healthcare group has been awarded a 700million contract to run NHS services - the first time a for-profit firm will deliver a council's social care for adults.

Health bosses on the board of the NHS Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) for Bath and North East Somerset yesterday voted unanimously in favour of the deal with Virgin Care.

Councillors on Bath and North East Somerset Council then cemented their decision by approving the proposal in a vote yesterday evening.

The private company is now set to run or oversee more than 200 health care and social care services in the area.

The deal marks the first time a council's core adult social work services will be delivered by a for-profit private firm.

Billionaire Richard Branson's healthcare group Virgin Care has been awarded a 700million contract to run NHS services

Earlier this year Virgin Care was awarded a 126million contract to take over services at hospitals in Kent.

However, the new seven-year contract is thought to be the financially-largest deal the company has ever won from a single authority.

But it is understood Virgin Care would reinvest any profit it makes.

Dr Ian Orpen, clinical chair of the CCG said: 'Following extensive consultation with local people and a very rigorous procurement process, the board is assured that Virgin Care is the right organisation to deliver the personalised and preventative care that local people have asked for.

'The board would like to thank all of the service users, carers and subject matter experts who dedicated so much of their time and experience to assessing the bids.

'We fully endorse their recommendation and we sincerely hope the elected members of the council will do the same when they meet this evening.'

Since 2006 Virgin Care has treated more than five million people via more than 250 NHS and social care services that it runs or oversees.

Virgin Care will run three statutory services - adult social care, continuing healthcare and children's community health - from April 2017 onwards.

Unlike in children's services, there are no laws preventing councils from delegating statutory adult social work functions to profit-making providers.

The private company is set to run or oversee more than 200 health care and social care services in the Bath and North East Somerset area

Bath's adult social care services are currently run by Sirona Care, a not-for-profit social enterprise, which spun out of the council's social services in 2011.

Virgin Care was selected over a rival bid from a consortium of local services led by Sirona Care.

Unions, social work leaders and staff affected have all raised concerns over the move.

Lewis Carson from Unison said the union's members were opposed to a profit-making firm taking over services.

He said: 'We're fighting to oppose the contract. We have concerns about what this means for staff conditions and service delivery.

'From past experience we know staff terms and conditions can be targeted for savings.

'Our members are passionate about the care they deliver and there are a lot of unanswered questions about what this will mean in terms of teams, workloads and day-to-day work.
Typically retirement parties involve a cake, a card and a pat on the back from your former colleagues.

But they do things slightly differently in New Zealand - where these schoolchildren were filmed performing a hall-shaking haka for their departing guidance counsellor.

Hundreds of students at Palmerston North Boy's School, around two hours north of Wellington, performed the dance in honour of John Adams.

This is the emotional moment hundreds of schoolboys from New Zealand performed a farewell haka for retiring guidance counsellor John Adams

A spokesman for the school told Daily Mail Australia that Mr Adams had been a physics teacher at the school for about 20 years, before swapping to guidance counselling.

He worked in the position for 10 years before deciding to retire in April, when the video was filmed.

However, it has since been posted online where it has gone viral, notching up millions of views.

The spokesman described him as a 'beloved' figure at the school, who is sorely missed by students and staff.

Mr Adams had been a physics teacher at the school for around 20 years before becoming a guidance counsellor until his retirement back in April

The schoolboys have been filmed performing a haka before, this time for a teacher's funeral, back in July of last year

While the school official said the boys were asked to do the haka, the spirit with which they performed it shows their reverence for him.

The spokesman said: 'Mr Adams has a real affinity for young men and has worked tirelessly in all of his roles to remove obstacles to student learning and to help ensure that our young men are able to achieve the best possible academic results.

'In his role as counsellor, Mr Adams has assisted countless young men and families in some very trying circumstances.

'Each of these situations has been approached with empathy, genuine care and concern, and with the best interests of the young men concerned at its core.'

The last time the boys performed the Maori dance was at the funeral of another well-like teacher last year.

That video also went viral, and was shared millions of times across the globe.
Mr Klan said he would buy his girlfriend a ring with some of the windfall

He claimed to predict the GFC in 2002 and saw the same trends this year

said Trump being expected to lose spurred him on

A Queensland investor won $100,000 betting on Donald Trump to win the U.S. Presidential election, despite most of his friends thinking he was crazy.

Matthew Klan, 39, staked $27,000 on six bets over five months for the underdog candidate, the first before he even won the Republican nomination.

The former physiotherapist who is now a full-time investor said the expert consensus the Trump had no chance of winning only spurred him on.

'It was like finding a gem that everyone else was overlooking. The polls and the betting markets were massively underestimating Trump's chances,' he said.

Matthew Klan (pictured) won $100,000 betting on Donald Trump to win the U.S. Presidential election, despite most of his friends thinking he was crazy

Mr Klan said he was confident of winning because he saw the anti-establishment feelings in the U.S. electorate and 'Trump noticed the same trends i did'.

He became even more convinced after Britain voted to leave the European Union, which was also not predicted by pollsters and experts.

Mr Klan claimed to have predicted the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in 2002, and said the same markers were there for a Trump victory.

'A lot of people were talking about it, I wasn't the only one by far to notice that, but strangely everyone seemed in denial that anything would happen,' he said.

He staked $27,000 on six bets over five months for underdog candidate Trump (pictured), the first before he even won the Republican nomination

'Brexit made me realise that I was seeing the same thing all over again. There were trends developing in Europe that once again everyone was in denial about.

'I didn't place a bet on Brexit, but when Trump came out and identified some of the same things I was seeing, I made sure I placed a bet.'

Mr Klan said he had made bigger investments in the stock market and property, but this was his biggest bet and most emotional punt.

'I usually don't care when I've got money out that I might 'lose'. When you buy a property or stocks you know you are taking a calculated risk,' he said.

'But you don't have every pundit, pollster and professional in the world trying to convince you that you're an idiot and you can't possibly win.'

He said he only bets on elections - making a tidy sum predicting Tony Abbott would win in 2013.

Trump won the U.S. election on Tuesday and met with President Barack Obama the next day

Mr Klan said he would spend some of the money buying something special for his other half Michelle Haddon.

'I've got a long-suffering girlfriend who I'll probably buy something for. Maybe some jewelry perhaps a ring? I got lucky, it's only fair she does too right?' he said.

Mr Klan told his parents about his windfall on Thursday night and had tried to convince his father to make a bet of his own.

'I told him if he ponied up $100,000 I'd match him and we could make $1 million in a week. I was kind of joking. I wish I wasn't,' he said.

'My friends - the ones who didn't think I was mad - were stoked. I actually encouraged a few of them to have a punt  one guy won about $25,000 I think.'

Mr Klan wasn't the only Australian punter to collect for backing the billionaire - Sportsbet paid out $11 million, TAB $4 million and William Hill $3 million.

'The punters beat us, with more than 25,000 Aussies successfully predicting the outcome of the election despite the weight of public opinion suggesting Trump was no chance. Well played,' Sportsbet spokesman Ben Bulmer said.

Three bettors laid the $100,000 bet Mr Klan wishes he had, winning $500,000, $450,000 and $380,000 each.

The biggest loser was was thought to be a Sportsbet punter who bet $250,000 on a Hillary Clinton victory, despite the small payout.
Bellfield, 48, is serving two whole life terms for the murders of Milly Dowler, Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange.

Scotland Yard said that after an exhaustive 10-month inquiry the claims were without foundation as no evidence had been found to link Bellfield to any case.

The decision will come as a huge disappointment to the grieving relatives of several high-profile unsolved cases, including murders, rapes and violent attacks.

But it will also finally draw a line under the torment the murderer was causing even from behind the bars of his high security prison.

The Metropolitan Police has been co-ordinating inquiries by 10 forces into startling comments he made during interviews in prison in 2015.

One senior detective said Bellfield was singing like a canary as he prepared to try and overturn his whole life sentence under human rights laws.

But Colin Sutton, the retired officer who caught him in 2008, said: 'You cant believe a word he says. He likes this kind of attention and to inflict pain on other people,' reports The Mirror.

In a statement last night, the force said all lines of inquiry have been exhausted and the investigation will be closed.

A spokesman said there is no evidence to link the individual to any case for which he has not already been convicted.

He added: We have remained in close liaison with a number of families throughout the course of our inquiries, and have made them aware of this outcome.

Bellfield, 48, is serving two whole life terms for the murders of Milly Dowler, Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange.

Death: Milly (pictured) was snatched from the street while on her way from school to her home in March 2002

Now known as Yusuf Rahim after converting to Islam, he caused outrage by finally admitting raping and murdering Milly during a prison interview in May 2015.

In February, Scotland Yard confirmed it was co-ordinating investigations into these claims which affected the London force and nine others.

These were Surrey, Kent, Avon and Somerset, Essex, British Transport Police, Thames Valley Police, Bedfordshire, Sussex and Norfolk.

The public announcement was only made amid fears of a leak as the authorities prepared to release an inmate who once shared a cell with Bellfield.

Millys family spoke of their torment and pain after he gave harrowing details, including that the 13-year-old was kept alive for 14 hours before being strangled.

But in a callous move just weeks later, Bellfield then instructed his lawyer to write to Surrey Police denying he had ever confessed.

Other potential crimes included the murders of Lin and Megan Russell (pictured, left, together in 1996, while other daughter Josie (right) suffered serious head injuries

At the time of his conviction in June 2011, detectives said they believed Bellfield may have been responsible for 20 unsolved attacks on women.

It has been long suspected that his appalling crimes may have begun in 1980 when he was just 12.

His school sweetheart, Patsy Morris, 14, was found strangled on Hounslow Heath and no-one has been convicted.

Other potential crimes included the murders of Judith Silver in London in 1990 and Lin and Megan Russell in a Kent village in 1996.

Bellfield was also accused of raping and sexually assaulting numerous women and girls over more than a decade, often after drugging them with spiked drinks.

However, detectives urged caution and said the pathological liar had a history of attempting to manipulate the authorities.

They believe he may be trying to win privileges by appearing to co-operate or even to mount a challenge under human rights laws to his whole life tariff.

The Metropolitan Police spokesman said Bellfield has been informed of the outcome. He declined to say how many cases were involved.
A photo of one of the men with skinned roadkill - a hare - went viral

Two eighteen-year-old boys have had their names and reputations dragged through the mud by online bullies who claimed they had skinned a dog alive and posted the images online.

Connor Galea and his best mate. Lanty Ryan. received online threats after mis-informed animal rights activists from America claimed they had been involved in the horrific acts on animal cruelty.

I woke up the next morning and had message requests on FB bunch of people from America saying I am disgusting, Lanty told Daily Mail Australia.

A viral petition made by someone in America claimed Lanty Ryan, pictured right, skinned and posed with a dog - however the animal pictured right is a hare and held by Connor Galea

Connor, pictured left, and Lanty, right, were wrongly accused of animal cruelty online

Cruel messages directed at Lanty and Connor threatened their lives - and came from people in their home town as well as overseas

The hate-filled messages were graphic in detail, with many of the senders threatening to inflict pain on Lanty.

I woukd (sic) skin him alive, said one hater. Pour salt all over him and alcohol and set then set the c**t on fire, he continued.

A direct message to Lantys phone called him a repugnant f**k.

C***s like you should be f***ing hung, the message read. The skinned dog Lanty was accused of holding in a confronting image included in the viral petition was actually a hare  held by Connor.

The animal had been killed after it darted in front of the young self-confessed animal lovers ute.

I took it home because I thought I could feed it to my dog, Arri, and Lanty took the photo because I had never skinned anything before.

But this innocent scene was soon taken out of context after the photo was taken from Snapchat, posted online, and picked up by the petition website that then accused Lanty of animal cruelty and called for him to be prosecuted.

I woke up on Thursday morning to messages from Lanty saying he was in deep s**t because he was getting so many nasty messages online and the petition was being shared, Connor told Daily Mail Australia.

Connor pictured with his dog Arri. He skinned the hare, which was road kill, for the husky

Lanty, left, and Connor, right, have just finished their HSC and were concerned links to animal cruelty could hurt their future prospects

He wasnt even in the photo  and you can actually see my dog Arri in the photo of me with the hare.

The petition went viral before it was taken down. People who recognised Connor as the person holding the hare began tagging him in the posts which also made him a target for animal lovers who believed the information on the petition.

The young men are speaking out following the horrific cyber bullying because they were so shocked at how quickly thing deteriorated  and how people made threats on their life.

People shouldnt be so quick to judge others based on lack of information. Dont jump to assumptions  dont bring people down if you dont know the whole story, Connor said.

Connors mother Sam Galea told Daily Mail Australia when she saw people sending her son and his friend messages like, your days are numbered, she became angry, then emotional, then angry again.

Connor Galea pictured with his mother Sam and younger sister Alaska - his mother says he would never hurt a dog

Lanty says he is an animal lover, he is pictured above with two kelpies

The woman who lives in Canberra defended her son and  more so his friend who had only taken the photo and wasnt involved in skinning the hare but copped the brunt of the abuse for skinning a dog.

What if those kids had been in a bad place or unstable? They could kill themselves or hurt themselves over this bullying. It is so serious because this kind of thing can impact their entire lives,  she said.

Her key concern is for the boys futures as they had both recently completed the HSC and are looking to build careers  which she says could be hard if their perspective employers Google them and find they were linked to the animal abuse claims.

You know what - a skinned rabbit can be confronting to see - so are cows and sheep and pigs hanging in the back of trucks being delivered to butchers for our enjoyment, she said.

But for someone to make up that they would skin a live dog is beyond evil.

She went on to say her son was sensitive and had always adored dogs  and even needed help from social workers when his family pets had died previously.

We always had a no dogs in the house policy but there would always be one in bed with Connor in the morning,she said.

He loves dogs, his dog is in the corner of that photo  alive and well.

The swarm of viral abuse died down after the petition was removed from the petition website.
A Brisbane woman who set up an online fundraiser to help support her baby's recovery from injury has been charged with torture, grievous bodily harm and fraud offences after she allegedly failed to feed the infant properly.

In July police were told that a ten-month-old baby girl had been taken to hospital a number of times with 'symptoms of malnourishment', and later found out the mother had set up an online fundraiser to 'support its recovery'.

Officers immediately launched an investigation and will allege the baby was 'not given adequate nutrition or fed properly'.

A Brisbane woman has been charged with torture, grievous bodily harm and fraud offences after she allegedly failed to feed a 10-month-old baby girl (pictured) properly

The baby girl (pictured) had been taken to hospital a number of times with 'symptoms of malnourishment'

Police also claimed that the 27-year-old woman set up an online fundraiser to support the baby's recovery and generate income from the situation.

The woman was arrested on Thursday, and has been charged with one count each of torture, grievous bodily harm and fraud.

She appeared at Brisbane Magistrates Court on Friday and was granted bail to reappear on December 20.

The GoFundMe page set up in February has raised more than $15,000.

Police confirmed that the woman was taken into custody following a protracted investigation by detectives from Morningside CPIU and State Crime Command's Child Trauma Taskforce.

'A 27-year-old woman has been charged with one count each of torture, grievous bodily harm and fraud and is due to appear court,' a police statement said.
Advertisement

Pete Souza, the Chief Official White House photographer, has taken approximately two million pictures of President Barack Obama.

He has captured the Commander-in-Chief in all situations - whether it is relaxing with his family or sitting in the situation room, waiting to hear the outcome of the May 2011 mission to kill Osama Bin Laden.

As Obama nears the end of his time in the White House, take a look at 55 shots of the president.

The photos show the Leader of the Free World longingly gazing into the mirror before his second inauguration, walking across a bridge in Selma with the first family, and joking with Bill Clinton and George Bush.

Other images show him taking a splash in Hawaii and making a funny face with gymnast McKayla Maroney.

Many of the snaps include him interacting with children, or in romantic situations with his wife Michelle.

Souza's 'Year in Photos' albums on the White House Flickr account show his favorites and go back to 2009. Fifty-five images of the president, seen here, were compiled by Twisted Sifter.

Souza told NPR in an interview: 'There's a certain daily grind to my job, but I'd say, once, twice, three, four, ten times a week, you realize that you are an eyewitness to history. And I always try to keep that forefront in my mind.'

He said: 'I think this administration will go down in history  he'll go down in history as a great president. And just to have been there, to watch this from up close with a camera, has just been a remarkable opportunity.'

Bristol, Virginia - July 29, 2009. President Barack Obama eats a nectarine following a town hall meeting at Kroger's Supermarket

May 8, 2009. Obama bends over so the son of a White House staff member can pat his head during a visit to the Oval Office

April 13, 2009.Obama runs down a corridor with the family's new dog, Bo, a six-month old portuguese water dog, in the White House in Washington, DC. Bo is a gift from Senator Ted Kennedy and his wife Victoria to the President's daughters, Sasha and Malia

January 20, 2009. 'We were on a freight elevator headed to one of the Inaugural Balls. It was quite chilly, so the President removed his tuxedo jacket and put it over the shoulders of his wife. Then they had a semi-private moment as staff member and Secret Service agents tried not to look'

August 9, 2010. Obama puts his toe on the scale as Trip Director Marvin Nicholson tries to weigh himself during a hold in the volleyball locker room at the University of Texas in Austin

July 14, 2012. 'The President delivers remarks in the pouring rain at a campaign event in Glen Allen, Va. He was supposed to do a series of press interviews inside before his speech, but since people had been waiting for hours in the rain he did his remarks as soon as he arrived at the site so people could go home to dry off'

September 28, 2012. 'A candid portrait of the President during a meeting, juxtaposed with the paintings of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, busts of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Abraham Lincoln, and the Emancipation Proclamation. It's a difficult angle to get because I had to sit in front of the closed Oval Office door and hope that no one would open the door and knock me over'

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011

January 16, 2010. 'President Obama had called on the two former Presidents to help. During their public remarks in the Rose Garden, President Clinton had said about President Bush, "I've already figured out how I can get him to do some things that he didn't sign on for." Later, back in the Oval, President Bush is jokingly asking President Clinton what were those things he had in mind'

June 9, 2011. Bethesda, MarylandObama greets children at a day care facility adjacent to his daughter Sasha's school. Obama was attending following Sasha's fourth grade closing ceremony

President Barack Obama shares his strawberry pie with a boy during a lunch stop at Kozy Corners restaurant in Oak Harbor, Ohio, July 5, 2012

October 26, 2012. Obama pretends to be caught in Spider-Man's web as he greets Nicholas Tamarin, 3, just outside the Oval Office. Spider-Man had been trick-or-treating for an early Halloween with his father, White House aide Nate Tamarin

May 25, 2012. 'The President was welcoming service members and their families to a screening of Men in Black 3 in the White House Family Theater. The movie was being presented in 3D, so the President jokingly asked them to try on their 3D glasses while he was speaking to them'

U.S. President Barack Obama joins B.B. King singing Sweet Home Chicago during the 'In Performance at the White House: Red, White and Blues' concert in the East Room on February 21, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Participants include, from left: Troy 'Trombone Shorty' Andrews, Jeff Beck, Derek Trucks, B.B. King, and Gary Clark, Jr.

February 2009. Barack Obama and Michelle Obama dance while the band Earth, Wind and Fire performs at the Governors' Ball

President Barack Obama shares a pizza dinner with individuals who wrote letters to him, at the Wazee Supper Club in Denver, Coloorado, July 8, 2014

President Barack Obama plays with a football in the Oval Office on August 23, 2009

January 20, 2009. 'President-elect Barack Obama was about to walk out to take the oath of office. Backstage at the U.S. Capitol, he took one last look at his appearance in the mirror'

U.S. President Barack Obama (center) meets in the Situation Room with his national security advisors to discuss strategy in Syria of the White House August 31, 2013 in Washington, DC

President Barack Obama, Eric Holder and US officers attends a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, October 29, 2009, for the dignified transfer of 18 U.S. personnel who died in Afghanistan

Visiting the Christ the Redeemer Statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 20, 2011

May 31, 2010. 'The skies opened up on Memorial Day outside of Chicago. When the lightning began, the Secret Service told the President that it was too dangerous to proceed. He took the stage by himself and informed the audience that his speech was canceled and that for everyone's safety, they should return to their busses. Later, he boarded a few of the busses to thank them for attending and apologized for not being able to speak'

June 4, 2015. 'At the President's insistence, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes brought his daughter Ella by for a visit. As she was crawling around the Oval Office, the President got down on his hands and knees to look her in the eye'

December 4, 2015. 'The President acquiesced to a selfie with 11-year-old Jacob Haynes and four-year-old James Haynes after taking a family photograph with departing White House staffer Heather Foster'

President Barack Obama has lunch with Rebekah Erler at Matt's Bar in Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 26, 2014. Erler, then a 36-year-old working wife and mother of two pre-school aged boys, had written the President a letter about economic difficulties

President Obama rides to the family quarters at the end of Inauguration Day 2009 in this photograph

November 15, 2012. 'The President had just met with the U.S. Olympics gymnastics team, who because of a previous commitment had missed the ceremony earlier in the year with the entire U.S. Olympic team. The President suggested to McKayla Maroney that they recreate her "not impressed" photograph before they departed'

April 24, 2012. Obama and Jimmy Fallon are briefed on the Slow Jam the News segment backstage before taping at the University of North Carolina Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

January 1, 2012. 'A nice way to celebrate the New Year for the President was to jump in the ocean in his native state of Hawaii. He was on his annual Christmas vacation with family and friends, and went swimming at Pyramid Rock Beach in Kaneohe Bay'

February 14, 2013. 'The President genuinely enjoys being with kids. Here, he played a magnifying glass game with children during a visit to a pre-kindergarten classroom at the College Heights Early Childhood Learning Center in Decatur, Georgia'

President Barack Obama, joined by Chief of Staff Denis McDonough's daughter, carries a birthday cake to surprise McDonough in his West Wing office, on December 2, 2013

United States President Barack and Michelle Obama board Air Force One in moonlight at the end of their visit to Germany on 19 June 2013

May 26, 2013. The President and members of the White House staff look out the window of Air Force One to view tornado damage over Moore, Oklahoma. After landing at Tinker Air Base, the President did a walking tour of the damage and met with those affected'

US President Barack Obama and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough walk as they hold their daily end-of-the-day meeting on the South Lawn of the White House on June 3, 2013

August 28, 2013. 'Chuck Kennedy worked with the National Park Service to be able to photograph from this angle at the Lincoln Memorial as the President, First Lady, and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter walked to the stage during the ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom'

President Barack Obama reads briefing material before the Presidential Daily Briefing in the Oval Office, August 29, 2014

March 7, 2015. 'iI was moving around trying to capture different scenes away from the stage during the event to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches. When I glanced back towards the stage, I noticed the President and First Lady holding hands as they listened to the remarks of Rep. John Lewis. I managed to squeeze off a couple of frames before they began to applaud, and the moment was gone'

March 7, 2015. 'For Presidential trips, I usually have another White House photographer accompany me so he or she can preset with the press and obtain angles that I can't, as I usually stay close to the President. Lawrence Jackson made this iconic image from the camera truck as the First Family joined others in beginning the walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge'

April 16, 2015. 'The President was about to sign H.R. 2 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 in the Rose Garden of the White House so we had Lawrence Jackson pre-position on the roof of the Colonnade and he captured this picturesque scene of the President walking to the signing table'

March 4, 2014. 'The President was visiting a classroom at Powell Elementary School in Washington, D.C. A young boy was using a stethoscope during the class, and as the President was about to leave the room, the President asked him to check his heartbeat'

June 14, 2013. Obama with a young boy who had fallen asleep during the Father's Day ice cream social in the State Dining Room of the White House

President Barack Obama visits with a departing United States Secret Service agent and his wife as their son dives into a couch in the Oval Office, June 23, 2014

President Obama appears in deep thought as he and senior adviser David Axelrod listen during a climate change meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. A moment later, he was 'laughing at a humorous exchange'.

U.S. President Barack Obama works on his Newtown speech at The Music Center at Strathmore auditorium on December 16, 2012 in Bethesda, Maryland. Obama later visited Newtown, Connecticut to speak at an interfaith vigil for the shooting victims from Sandy Hook Elementary School

August 15, 2012. 'The President hugs the First Lady after she had introduced him at a campaign event in Davenport, Iowa. The campaign tweeted a similar photo from the campaign photographer on election night and a lot of people thought it was taken on election day'

December 7, 2015. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld knocks on the Oval Office window to begin a segment for his series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

November 24, 2015. 'With the U.S. Marine Band playing the score from the movie, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the President feigns riding a bicycle in the sky as happened in the 1982 movie directed by Steven Spielberg, who had just been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom'

June 17, 2015. The President carries the twin boys of Katie Beirne Fallon, Director of Legislative Affairs, into the Oval Office just a few months after they were born

October 1, 2015. 'I focused on the detail of the Resolute Desk as the president was talking with two aides in the Oval Office'

Oct. 30, 2015. 'This is the first time the same child has made two appearances in the Year in Photos. But it was difficult to not again include Ella Rhodes, daughter of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, after the President lifted her in her elephant costume that she was wearing for a Halloween event at the White House'

February 11, 2014. 'Ever the gentleman, the President helps the First Lady off the stage after she thanked the White House chefs during the State Dinner for President Francois Hollande of France on the South Lawn of the White House'

December 3, 2009. Obama fist-bumps custodian Lawrence Lipscomb in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building following the opening session of the White House Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth

March 30, 2012. 'We had just arrived aboard the Marine One helicopter on the South Lawn and the President was walking into the White House. I had seen this scene several times but had never been able to quite capture it the way I wanted. Here, finally, arriving at night, I was able to frame him walking into the light of the Diplomatic Reception Room, with the added bonus of his shadow being cast from the television lights off to the left'

April 9, 2015. The President's wave aligns with a rainbow as he boards Air Force One at Norman Manley International Airport prior to departure from Kingston, Jamaica
Advertisement

The two young sisters who drowned in a backyard swimming pool have been farewelled at a heartbreaking funeral service in Queensland.

The service for Taya and Patricia Young, aged three and four, was held at the Tudor Park Community Recreation Centre in Loganholme, south of Brisbane, on Friday morning and dozens of mourners arrived wearing a touch of blue and purple - the girls' favourite colours.

Their parents, Renise and Troy, were seen holding each other in devastation and their son Aige, five, kissed the tiny white and blue coffins as they were loaded into the hearse.

Scroll down for video

The two young sisters who drowned in a backyard swimming pool have been farewelled at a heartbreaking funeral service in Queensland

Their parents, Renise and Troy, were seen holding each other in devastation as the tiny blue and white coffins were loaded into the hearse

Renise and Troy Young with their children Zhja'qlin, 19 months, Emeilia, 5 months, and Aige, five arriving at the funeral home

About 100 mourners attended the service and released dozens of balloons after the hearse had left.

The opening song for the service was 'When you believe' by Whitney Housten and Mariah Carey and the mourners had a minute silence for Remembrance Day.

As the coffins were carried to the hearse, My Superstar by Jessie J was played and Mrs Young broke down in her husband's arms.

Earlier this month, the little girls were pulled from the backyard pool by their mother - who tried CPR on them alongside their father Troy.

They were unable to be revived, despite the desperate attempt by paramedics to save them.

Taya and Patricia's brothers carried the coffins to the hearse and also wore a touch of purple to remember the girls

Tony Young gave a heartfelt speech for his little girls and Disney's Frozen balloons lined the stage

Earlier this month, the little girls were pulled from the pool by their mother - who tried CPR on them alongside their father Troy (both pictured)

The heartbroken family let off blue and pink balloons at the end of the service

The opening song for the service was 'When you believe' by Whitney Housten and Mariah Carey and the mourners had a minute silence for Remembrance Day

Dozens of mourners were seen staring at the tiny coffins as balloons were released in honour of the young children

Mrs Young said Taya would have started school next year and loved to paint, along with her younger sister.

'They used to love drawing pictures, every time they drew a picture they had to show mummy and daddy,' Mrs Young said, The Courier Mail reported.

'[Taya] did a painting last week and that's one of the last things we've got of her'.

Mrs Young said the family can no longer bear to go into the backyard and have avoided the pool since the tragedy.

Family members, including father Tony, carried the purple and white coffins from the Tudor Park Community Recreation Centre

Mrs Young took a moment alone with Taya's coffin, which was surrounded by Frozen flower vases and balloons

The couple stared into the sky after releasing the dozens of balloons

Clutching a bouquet of flowers, Mrs Young was comforted by her husband as she said goodbye to her girls

The girl's older brother Aige has been receiving ongoing counselling from the Logan House Fire Support Network

He kissed the coffins to say goodbye to his younger sisters as his parents watched over

The girl's older brother Aige has been receiving ongoing counselling from the Logan House Fire Support Network.

'We'll make some investigations into relocating them to another premises, and we'll make sure that happens within the next week,' Founder Louie Naumovski said.

'They've got a very nice home here, but sadly, a few bad memories. We need to make sure once we've relocated them, they have all the food they need and all the furniture they need. We'll assist them in any possible way.'

At the funeral service, Aige was seen touching a photo of his younger sister and his parents quickly walked over to offer him support.

At the funeral service, Aige was seen touching a photo of his younger sister and his parents quickly walked over to offer him support

Mourners offered their condolences to Mrs Young at the devastating funeral service on Friday

Mrs Young clutched two tiny jewelled tiaras for her little girls as she cried into her husband's shoulder

Taya's tiny coffin was white and was surrounded by flowers wrapped in Disney's Frozen holders

Patricia's coffin was purple and had two stunning flower bouquets laid across with a photo of the little girl

The mourners, including Tony and Renise, supported each other as the balloons were released into the sky

Mrs Young said Taya (left) would have started school next year and loved to paint, along with her sister

Father Tony carried the end of Taya's coffin as it was loaded into the hearse on Friday morning

Father Tony gave an emotional speech at the service with his devastated wife by his side

As Mrs Young gave a tearful address to the crowd, her husband offered his support and held her arm

Funeral guests were invited to wear blue or purple as the little girls loved the Disney princess film Frozen.

Last week, Mrs Young said in their last moments, Taya and Patricia 'hugged each other at the bottom of the pool' and Aige was a 'hero' for trying to help save his sisters, according to The Australian.

'He tried to pull them from the pool but he had to let them go,' Ms Young said.

Family and Queensland Health Minister Cameron Dick was a guest at the funeral service.

Last week, Mrs Young said in their last moments, Taya and Patricia 'hugged each other at the bottom of the pool' and Aige was a 'hero' for trying to help save his sisters

Renise and Troy Young with their children Zhja'qlin, 19 months, Emeilia, 5 months, and Aige, five arriving at the funeral home

One mourner clutched Mrs Young as she broke down near the hearse holding a bouquet of flowers and the photographs of her daughter that were placed next to their coffins

Renise and Tony Young released two connected balloons at the same time for their daughters

Renise Young clutched two tiny jewelled tiaras for her daughters as she broke down after the service

Mrs Young was sombre as she walked out of the funeral service arm-in-arm with a loved one

Last week, Mrs Young said in their last moments, Taya and Patricia 'hugged each other at the bottom of the pool'

Family and Queensland Health Minister Cameron Dick was a guest at the funeral service

Funeral guests were invited to wear blue or purple as the little girls loved the Disney princess film Frozen

A young guest was amazed by the hundreds of bubbles let off during the service
A cat in search of her furever home has received some added exposure after a video of her chasing a mouse screensaver went viral.

The video posted by RSPCA Queensland shows the playful feline, Missy, making several failed attempts to chase and catch a virtual mouse across two computer screens.

The RSPCA captioned the video: 'This is what happens when you have an RSPCA cat in the office!'

Missy makes a valiant attempt to catch a non-existent mouse on the computer screen

The 12-year-old black and white cat is looking for a permanent home and with the video now being seen by more than seven thousand people, the extra publicity certainly can't hurt.

Staff at the RSPCA promised to continue providing lots of love, pats, treats and interactive screensavers while they wait for her new owner to come along.

'She was originally brought in to us as an owner surrender, a change of circumstances in a household. And then she was adopted and then returned back to us so she's had a bit of a hard knock life,' said a spokesperson for the RSPCA.

Missy arrived back at the Brisbane RSPCA in late August and since then staff at the call centre have been entertained by Missy's antics.

Missy desperately raced between the two screen in an attempt to catch the 'mouse'

'She is a bit of a character! When she started in the call centre she was quite shy but she showed a real interest in chasing mice.

'Being a call centre we have lots of computer screens so we took advantage of that, we put up videos of flying birds and the mouse running around and she'll watch it for hours!'

Missy also enjoys watching virtual birds fly across the computer screens

The domestic short-hair has also been used for some comic relief for workers that deal with some extremely distressing phone calls.

'The workers are obviously dealing with cruelty complaints the whole time so it's a great break and a good laugh for the operators,' said the spokesperson.

Missy is still available for adoption. She is desexed and vaccinated and described as being a 'gentle older lady who loves cuddles and sitting on laps'.

12-year-old Missy is still available for adoption, she is desexed and vaccinated
A kayaker who uploaded a video of himself hitting sharks with his paddle has been slammed as an 'idiot' by furious online commentors.

Max Miranov, who is originally from St Petersburg but now lives in California, was on holiday on Ascension Island in the South Pacific when he captured the footage.

Mr Miranov said he had been free-diving with the animals earlier in the day before they followed his boat back to shore.

Max Miranov, a California native on holiday to Ascension Island, filmed himself hitting sharks with a kayak paddle as they swam around him in the ocean

In the short clip he can be seen floating close to shore while surrounded by fish swimming in the shallow water.

However, chasing the fish around are several sharks who are occasionally bob to the surface in order to investigate Mr Miranov and his craft.

The Russian then records himself hitting several of them with his paddle in an attempt to drive them away.

Mr Miranov strikes the sharks on the back with sharp blows, though the creatures do not appear to be injured.

Commentors have branded Mr Miranov an 'idiot' online, saying he should have just moved away from the sharks rather than lashing out

However, those who saw the videos on Instagram were still furious, saying he could have paddled back to shore or out to sea.

Instead, Mr Miranov appears content to float in the middle of the school of bait hitting the animals instead.

One user, under the name 'thetiburontigre' wrote: 'So instead of leaving them alone, you paddle into them and start hitting them?

'You're a d***. Hopefully your canoe flips next time.'

Mr Miranov (pictured on another trip) said he had been free-diving with the sharks earlier in the day and they followed his boat to shore

Kokopelliwoodworks added: 'You sir are a moron! The sharks aren't even interested in you!'

Taking a rather more blunt tact, Barneyct wrote: 'You're a c***. How dare you hit them with your paddle when you aren't even mildly on danger? Proper f***ing idiot.'

Multiple species of sharks are common around Ascension Island, and it is not clear which ones feature in the video.

Daily Mail Australia contacted My Miranov for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
He said: 'Equality is not a value that a lot of states hold. There is bigotry out there against minorities, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ community'

They claim values held by Oregonians are not same as values held by rest of the country, as shown by the election outcome

Two days following Donald Trump's stunning election victory, a petition for a ballot initiative in Oregon has been filed to have the state secede from the United States.

Attorney Jennifer Rollins and writer Christian Trejbal filed the Oregon Secession Act on Thursday morning.

'Part of it is a response to the election and part of it is we wanted to move quickly while there is passion out there and people are willing to entertain this idea,' Trejbal told KATU.

He claims that values held by Oregonians are not the same as the values held by the rest of the United States, as shown by the outcome of the election.

'Equality is not a value that a lot of states hold,' Trejbal said. 'There is bigotry out there against minorities, people of color, against immigrants, against the LGBTQ community.'

Attorney Jennifer Rollins and writer Christian Trejbal (above) filed the Oregon Secession Act on Thursday morning and want their state to leave the union following Trump's election win

The Oregon Secession Act (above) lists several reasons as to why Trejbal and Rollins feel the state should leave the union including the claim that 'irreconcilable differences exist between Oregon and many other states'

He also told The Oregonian that 'life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness' are other values he and Rollins believe the rest of the country do not value.

Trejbal said he and Rollins are hoping to start a 'serious conversation about what it would mean to peacefully leave the United States.'

In giving fellow Oregonians time to think about what it would mean for the state to leave the union, he said they opted for 2018.

Trejbal added that a 'viable way to go forward' is if Oregon joined with other states like Washington, Nevada and California.

'(These states) could all get together and form a nation that uphold the values that we share,' he said.

In order for the ballot title drafting process to begin, the Oregon Secession Act has to receive 1,000 signatures.

Rollins and Trejbal said they would begin collecting signatures in Portland, where they're from, on Thursday evening outside of the Pioneer Courthouse Square.

The pair's idea about having the state secede from the union comes just one day after a Silicon Valley guru proposed Calexit for California, as the state topped the list on Wednesday for people searching 'secession' from the United States following Donald Trump's victory.

Venture Capitalist and co-founder of Hyperloop One, Shervin Pishevar produced a 25-page document outlining the exit process, which promises to create a nation with the sixth-largest economy in the world.

On Tuesday night as the election unfolded, Pishevar tweeted that if the billionaire won the race, he would be 'announcing and funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation.'

California residents have topped internet searches for the world 'secession' following Donald Trump's victory which has even led to calls for a Calexit referendum to leave the union

Searches for 'secession' on Google have rocketed since Donald Trump was declared President Elect, with California topping the list, followed by Vermont, Oregon and Washington

Calexit?: Venture capitalist and Hyperloop One co-founder Shervin Pishevar (left) proposed that California should secede from the union to escape a Donald Trump (right) presidency

Pishevar tweeted (above that if the billionaire won the race, he would be 'announcing and funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation.'

Pishevar, 42, explained (above) that he loves the country and is doing this 'as a patriot'

After Hillary Clinton conceded the election to Trump, Pishevar said that he is 100 per cent serious about the proposal and already has a name for the potential sovereign body.

'It's the most patriotic thing I can do,' he told CNBC on Wednesday. 'The country is at serious crossroads. ... Calling it New California.'

Pishevar, 42, explained how his plan for the state would become a catalyst for a 'national dialogue as the country has reached a tipping point.'

'We can re-enter the union after California becomes a nation,' Pishevar, who is not married, said.

'As the sixth largest economy in the world, the economic engine of the nation and provider of a large percentage of the federal budget, California carries a lot of weight.'

Hours after Trump's victory was announced a 25-page manifesto for Calexit was produced which claims the new country would be the sixth-largest economy in the world

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2015 California had the sixth largest economy in the world with a gross state product of $2.496trillion.

In addition, the state is a key stronghold for Democrats and is more politically progressive than other states in the country.

In taking steps towards making this happen, Pishevar (above) resigned from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board

With a population of more than 38.8million people as of 2014, California is the most populated state and has the largest populations of four major ethnic groups making it one of the most diverse states in the country, according to the Census Bureau.

Pishevar, who was listed at number 86 on Forbes' annual 'The Midas List', added that the United States needs to 'confront the systemic problems that this election has exposed.'

In taking steps towards making this happen, Pishevar resigned from the prestigious J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

He sent a letter to President Obama saying he 'cannot serve with a good conscious a President Trump in any capacity' on Wednesday.

Pishevar also tweeted a mock-up of what he would envision the new flag for the 'New California Republic' to be featuring the state's signature bear.

Pishevar, who is an influential Uber investor, is not the only person in the Silicon Valley who wants California to secede from the U.S., as he has garnered support from people like Cheezburger founder Ben Huh, Design, Inc. CEO Marc Hemeon and Path founder David Morin.

Searches for secession rocketed as soon as in appeared Donald Trump was going to win the White House, with the largest figures coming from California, followed by Vermont, Oregon and Washington.

Pishevar also tweeted (above) a mock-up of what he would envision the new flag for the 'New California Republic' to be featuring the state's signature bear.

Angel investor Jason Calacanis said that it would be simple in the wake of both Trump's White House win and Brexit on Twitter (above)

Fellow angel investor Dave Morin said (above) that he's willing to support Pishevar

Angel investor Jason Calacanis said that it would be simple in the wake of both Trump's White House win and Brexit.

On Twitter, Calacanis said: 'If Trump can win, & after the #brexit, California succession would be a layup. CA is increasingly more distinct from America.'

Evan Low, a Democrat currently serving in the California state assembly, chimed in saying he'd support introducing the bill to start the process.

'In the disastrous case that @realdonaldtrump is elected, I will explore intro of a bill to have CA secede from the union. #kiddingnotkidding,' Low tweeted.

Back during the summer, roughly 100 tech leaders signed an open letter that warned about how a Trump presidency would be 'a disaster for innovation'.

Pishevar's recent actions echo a similar movement that started in 2015 when the Yes California campaign was launched by political activist Louis Marinelli, as he called to create a free and independent California Republic.

He's now proposing a 2019 referendum that follows the model being adopted by Catalonia to gain independence from Spain, The Guardian reported.

Evan Low, a Democrat currently serving in the California state assembly, chimed in on Twitter (above) saying he'd support introducing the bill to start the process

The Yes California campaign was launched by political activist Louis Marinelli, as he called to create a free and independent California Republic in 2015. They group tweeted the above message following the election

There is no clear path as to how the state could appeal to the federal government so it may leave the United States.

The Constitution includes procedures as to how a new state can enter the union, but it does not say how one can exit.

Some have proposed to amend the Constitution to allow states who want to secede from America to do so under that amendment.

However, proving to amend the Constitution is extremely difficult, as it requires either two-thirds of each branch of Congress or two-thirds of states at a specially-formed constitutional convention with the said amendment being then ratified by three-quarters of the states.

In the 227 year history of the Constitution, it has only been amended 17 times and no state has ever seceded from the union in American history.

Eric McDaniel, associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, told Business Insider that 'the legality of seceding is problematic.'

'The Civil War played a very big role in establishing the power of the federal government and cementing that the federal government has the final say in these issues,' he said.
of State has now visited all seven continents while in office

He will hear from scientists about the impact of climate change in the area

became the highest-ranking US official to visit Antarctica

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry became the highest-ranking American official to visit Antarctica on Friday when he landed for a two-day trip.

On the trip the Democrat will visit a US research station to hear from scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent.

Kerry left from New Zealand after being held up for about a day by bad weather. But Kerry and his entourage left the Christchurch airport at 6 a m. on Friday aboard a C-17 Globemaster military cargo plane and landed in Antarctica about 11 a.m.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, center, disembarks from a U.S. Air Force C17 Globemaster with National Science Foundation's Scott Borg

Kerry and members of his delegation hike towards the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station

Kerry hikes in front of Mount Erebus after visiting the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station

Kerry, an experienced pilot, spent much of the flight in the cockpit of the huge jet, chatting with the pilots. After a smooth trip of about five hours, the group landed on the Pegasus Ice Runway, the strip of ice that serves McMurdo. The large base is the hub for U.S. operations.

Kerry made no public remarks on the initial leg of the trip. In Christchurch a day earlier, he congratulated President-elect Donald Trump for winning a 'momentous election' and said he had reminded State Department staff of the 'time-honored tradition of a very peaceful and constructive transfer of power.'

In Antarctica, Kerry's plans called for his entourage to transfer immediately at the airstrip to a smaller military transport plane for a three-hour flight to the research station the U.S. government operates near the South Pole. Kerry planned to visit that station for about two hours before returning to McMurdo for the night.

Kerry made no public remarks on the initial leg of the trip but did congratulate president-elect Donald Trump on his election victory

Kerry visits the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station in Antarctica on Friday. Ernest Shackleton was a polar explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic

Kerry visited the Blood Falls and the Taylor Glacier on his first day in the continent

Kerry's aides described the trip as a learning opportunity for the secretary of state. He planned to receive briefings from scientists working to understand the effects of climate change on Antarctica. Kerry has made climate change an intensive focus of American diplomacy during his term, and had previously spent decades working on the issue as a U.S. senator.

He planned to return to New Zealand on Saturday for meetings with Prime Minister John Key. He plans to fly next week to the Middle East for talks, and then onward to a global climate conference in Morocco, where he will give a major speech.

Kerry is now the first secretary of state to visit all seven continents. According to the US State Department and has traveled more than 1.3 million miles and spent the equivalent of 118 days in the air.

Kerry and Kelly Falkner pose outside the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station. Kerry is travelling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and will attend the APEC summit in Peru later in the month

Kerry is now the first secretary of state to visit all seven continents. According to the US State Department and has traveled more than 1.3 million miles and spent the equivalent of 118 days in the air
The 23-year-old is in a serious condition with a leg injury

A 23-year-old woman has been rushed to hospital in serious condition after getting trapped under a train at Flinders St Station in Melbourne.

Emergency crews performed a rescue operation at 2.30pm and paramedics were waiting nearby to take the injured person on a stretcher.

The woman attempted to self-harm and was taken to Royal Melbourne hospital with a leg injury, an Ambulance Victoria spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia.

A woman, 23, who attempted to self-harm was trapped under a train at Flinders St Station in Melbourne

The Metropolitan Fire Brigade reported a 'very serious accident' had occurred at the station as ambulances, police and fire fighters attended the scene.

Commuters have been told to expect delays and to avoid Platform 1 and 2 which are currently closed.

Services are slowly resuming after 'major delays' were caused.

'Alamein and Glen Waverley lines, normal services resuming but some services delayed while we recover after person was hit earlier by a train,' Metro Trains said.

If you are thinking about suicide or experiencing a personal crisis help is available. Contact Lifeline Australia 13 11 14
The distraught fiancee of a man gunned down in front of her has abused the 'hitman' who carried out the killing.

Lyndal Archbold called Daniel Haile 'evil' in court on Friday over the 2013 murder of Raymond Pasnin, in Sydney's west, which he was allegedly paid $4,000 to carry out.

As she left the New South Wales Supreme Court after providing a victim impact statement, Ms Archbold pointed to her cheek to seemingly showcase her sadness.

'You stole our dreams, our happiness, our life,' she yelled at Haile inside the sentencing hearing.

Scroll down for video

Lyndal Archbold (pictured) called Daniel Haile 'evil' over the murder of her fiancee Raymond Pasnin in 2013. She pointed to her cheek to show her sadness as she left court

Ms Archbold appeared in the New South Wales Supreme Court on Friday to provide a victim impact statement at the sentencing hearing of Haile

Crown prosecutor David Patch said 'the execution-style' killing was at the top or near-top of the range of criminality.

Mr Patch urged the judge to consider imposing a life sentence on Haile over the death of Mr Pasnin.

The 27-year-old as gunned down close to midnight when he and Ms Archbold were leaving his mother's home, in a block of units in Pendle Hill.

Two former lovers of Mr Pasnin are accused of arranging the hit and will face court next year.

Ms Archbold, who cradled Mr Pasnin as he died in her arms, was one of five people to read a victim impact statement at the sentence hearing.

She told the court he was the love of her life and she lived to make him happy.

A visibly upset Ms Archbold glared and yelled at his killer while reading her statement.

She referred to the lies he told at trial, his 'evil, sinister gun', her daily panic attacks and Mr Pasnin's decency.

Mr Pasnin, 27, was gunned down in his front yard by Haile, who is believed to have been paid $4,000 to carry out the hit by an ex-lover of Mr Pasnin

His mother, Salima Eid, described how she told her son she loved him and gave her a kiss as he left her home that night, before just moments later he was taking his last breath downstairs.

'I was telling him, "Hold on son, hold on for mum",' she said.
East coast of Australia will be drenched by onslaught of rain on Saturday

The east coast of Australia will be drenched as stormy, humid conditions are washed up by low pressure systems.

Sydney is expected to be hit with 20 millimetres of rain on Saturday with possible morning and afternoon storms as it swelters through a top of 30 degrees.

Temperatures in the western suburbs are expected to push into the mid-30s, with 34 degrees expected in Penrith.

Scroll down for video

Pictured: Rainfall predicted for 10am on Saturday across the country

Sydney Harbour is pictured on Friday ahead of possible storms and rain

A 'wall of cloud' is seen as storm pass over Kangaroo Island in South Australia

35 degrees with a chance of golf balls: Hail fell in Adelaide on Friday afternoon

Hail fell from the sky as a storm pummeled Adelaide on Friday

Adelaide was hit with a severe storm to end the working week

Rain and storms are forecast across all of NSW by Saturday morning as the low pressure system brings potentially severe weather to the Lower Western and Upper Western districts.

Most of the wet weather is expected to clear across the state by Sunday, with Sydney forecast to be sunny and 28 degrees.

Victoria will see showers and thunderstorm overnight and into Saturday morning.

The storms are not expected to be severe but Bureau of Meteorology has issued a minor flood warning for the Murray and Edward Rivers.

Melbourne is expected to be a top of 24 degrees on Saturday with storms and easing showers, which will increase on Sunday when temperatures drop to a high of 17 ahead of a cold front.

Adelaide (hail pictured) was forecast to hit 35 degrees on Friday, with a cooler 20 degrees and 20 millimetres of showers anticipated for Saturday

Northern areas of South Australia could peak at 42 degrees with possible dust storms

Much of the state's west and northern areas will be in the high 20s and low 30s under humid conditions.

Thunderstorms will strike Brisbane with a top of 30 degrees on Saturday. Sunday is expected to reach 35 degrees with possible thunderstorms.

The weather follows a warm week, after Brisbane hit 38 degrees on Thursday.

All of Queensland can expect possible thunderstorms which could produce damaging winds, hail and heavy rainfall.

Adelaide was forecast to hit 35 degrees on Friday, with a cooler 20 degrees and 20 millimetres of showers anticipated for Saturday.

Showers are expected to continue for the rest of the weekend with a high of 18 degrees on Sunday.

Bucketing down: Rain and hail hit Adelaide on Friday

Sydney is expected to be hit with 20 millimetres of rain on Saturday with possible morning and afternoon storms

Rainfall forecast for Saturday across the country

The Bureau of Meteorology issued a severe thunderstorm warning for parts of the state. The storms could produce damaging wind gusts up to 90 km/h and heavy rainfall with flash flooding on Friday.

Areas affected include Whyalla, Port Augusta, Cleve, Clare, Leigh Creek and Moomba.

The State Emergency Service (SES) also advised that rainfall has increased flows in the River Murray and could cause minor flooding.

Northern areas of South Australia could peak at 42 degrees with possible dust storms, News.com.au reported.

In Tasmania, up to 70mm of rain is forecast over Saturday and Sunday, while Hobart can expect 30mm.

Emergency workers received more than 200 calls as wild thunderstorms battered far north west Victoria on Friday night.

A woman in Mildura had to be rescued when a tree fell on her tent in wild winds, the ABC reported.

Need some ice in your drink? Hail was seen in the Adelaide Hills on Friday

WEATHER FORECAST ACROSS MAJOR CITIES Sydney Saturday: Max 30 and rain with possible storms Sunday: Max 28 and sunny Monday: Max 23 and mostly sunny Tuesday: Max 23 and mostly sunny Brisbane Saturday: Max 30 and thunderstorms Sunday: Max 35 and possible storms Monday: Max 32 and mostly sunny Tuesday: Max 28 and possible shower Melbourne Saturday: Max 24 and showers easing Sunday: Max 17 and showers increasing Monday: Max 17 and possible showers Tuesday: Max 19 and possible showers Adelaide Saturday: Max 20 and showers increasing Sunday: Max 18 and showers Monday: Max 19 and possible showers Tuesday: Max 23 and mostly sunny Source: Weatherzone Advertisement
and Australian travelers should take advantage of it

Flight Centre CEO says the cheap airfares are

This is not a drill - flights to Thailand are going for as little as $149.

Air Asia have announced they will hold a flash sale for the next 72 hours where travelers will be able to snatch up bargains to get them to a tropical oasis.

Escape reported that fares from Perth to Bangkok will be starting at $149 and fares from Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast will be $189 one-way.

A flash sale by Air Asia has flights going from Perth to Bangkok for as little as $149

Air Asia are offering the unprecedented cheap flights and Flight Centre's CEO says we should take advantage of it

While flights are consistently becoming more affordable, Flight Centre CEO Graham Turner believes this is unusually cheap.

'While we have become accustomed to international fares becoming more affordable every year  they have typically held their price as average wages have increased  in recent times we have seen significant decreases in ticket prices, as airlines seek to fill their planes,' Turner told Escape.

Mr Turner also told Australians that they shouldn't waste time taking advantage of the sale.

'This unprecedented discounting by airlines has delivered incredible value to travellers in the form of some of the cheapest fares we have ever advertised in Australia,' he said.

There are some additional costs for baggage, meals and in-flight services.
The uniform change has divided parents as some believe it's

Parents at an elite grammar school have been left outraged after a decision to allow girls to wear pants as part of the uniform.

Carey Grammar, a co-educational school in Melbourne, Victoria, has moved away from girls only wearing skirts or dresses after a push by the school's 'gender equity team'.

However the choice has divided parents, with some supporting it while others claim it's a case of political correctness gone mad, the Herald Sun reports.

'Whats next? Unisex toilets? Boys in dresses?' one parent at the school questioned.

A change in the uniform policy at Carey Grammar school allowing girls to wear pants (pictured) has divided parents, with some calling it a 'progressive' move and others saying it's unnecessary

Elise Elliott, the wife of broadcaster Tom Elliott and a parent at the school, said she supported the move because it 'eradicates division'.

The decision to change the long-standing traditions of the school's uniform were first announced in a newsletter on the Carey Grammar website.

In her letter, deputy principal Leanne Guillon said the decision was a step forward.

'Students who were interested in gender issues and gender equity were invited to discuss their opinions and experiences inside and outside the Carey gates,' Ms Guillon wrote.

'Among the topics discussed was the uniform for girls at Carey.'

Ms Guillon said that from those discussions came talk that dresses, skirts and tunics 'restricted' the freedom with which they could move around during breaks.

The decision to change the uniform for girls at the elite school was made by the 'gender equity team'

She said that the move to allowing girls to wear pants was a 'progressive' one.

'Others felt that in a progressive school, we should be striving to break down some of the stereotypes we see in society,' she said.
Thousands of tourists flock to Freshwater West Beach in Wales each year to leave tributes, including socks, to the mischievous but loyal character (pictured inset left). The mock grave (pictured left and right) sits above the Pembrokeshire beach where Dobby's death was filmed (pictured inset right: Dobby being buried by Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, played by Rupert Grint and Emma Watson), but concerns about high visitor numbers and pollution led to a survey on its possible relocation. Some locals had branded the attraction an 'eyesore' and compared it to a landfill site, while fans of the show said it 'brings happiness to so many children', labelling 'haters' of the memorial as 'killjoys'. The National Trust had considered removing the tribute, which is constructed from hundreds of painted pebbles, stones and socks, but ultimately ruled it can remain in place on the protected beach for the time being. Dobby was a key character in the Harry Potter films in the struggle against he-who-must-not-be-named, aka Lord Voldemort, and died at the hands of Bellatrix Lestrange after rescuing Harry and friends from Malfoy Manor in the Deathly Hallows film. A sculpture was engraved with the words 'Dobby is a free elf in Pembrokeshire' at the spot, however it became the subject of a consultation due to the high number of visitors flocking to Freshwater West Beach to see the 'grave'.
The boss of online food delivery service Grubhub sent a company wide email to employees suggesting those who agreed with Donald Trump's views should resign.

Matt Maloney has faced backlash ever since he sent the strongly-worded email to his 1,000 employees on Wednesday in response to past controversial statements made by Trump.

He said he rejected the 'nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics' of Trump and would work to shield the community from it as best he could.

Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney sent a company wide email to employees suggesting those who agreed with Donald Trump's views should resign

'While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior - and these views, have no place at Grubhub,' Mr Maloney wrote.

'Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination.

'As we all try to understand what this vote means to us, I want to affirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and everyone else here at Grubhub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States.

Maloney said he rejected the 'nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics' of Donald Trump and would work to shield the community from it as best he could

Maloney has faced backlash ever since he sent the strongly-worded email to his 1,000 employees on Wednesday in response to past controversial statements made by Trump

'If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here.'

Mr Maloney, who is a Democratic supporter, was forced to backtrack from the comments on Thursday after thousands started tweeting the hashtag #BoycottGrubHub.

Mr Maloney issued a statement saying the comments in his email had been misconstrued.

'I want to clarify that I did not ask for anyone to resign if they voted for Trump. I would never make such a demand,' he said.

'To the contrary, the message of the email is that we do not tolerate discriminatory activity or hateful commentary in the workplace, and that we will stand up for our employees.'

Some of the tweets directed his way accused him of being racist and a bigot.

'I deleted my @Grubhub app because they retaliated against their employees for their political views,' one Twitter user wrote.

'So GrubHub CEO is talking about how hateful and intolerant someone is, by being hateful and intolerant of different views?'
This is the dramatic moment a notorious Brothers 4 Life member turns on his co-accused and stabs him with a pen in the middle of a courtroom.

The CCTV footage from August 1 in Sydney's NSW Supreme Court shows Mumtaz Qaumi - the brother of the gang's notorious kingpin Farhad Qaumi  lashing out at Mohammed Kalal as corrective services pry them apart ,The Daily Telegraph reported.

It is unclear what sparked the explosive attack, which can be released now after senior members of feared gang were found guilty of a wave of executions and shootings.

The trial saw Farhad, the 34-year-old 'Brothers 4 Life' Blackstown leader, along with brothers Mumtaz, 31, and Jamil Qaumi, 24, found guilty of conspiring to murder B4L Bankstown leader Mohammed Hamzy in 2013, among a string of other charges.

A notorious Brothers 4 life kingpin's sibling unleashes an explosive attack in the middle of a courtroom

Mumtaz Qaumi - the brother of notorious kingpin Farhad Qaumi  stabbed his co-accused Mohammed Kalal with a pen

The shooting resulted in the death of Mohammed's cousin Mahmoud Hamzy, who was fatally gunned down in the hail of bullets fired at their Revesby Heights home.

The shooting took place while B4L was taking root as one of Sydney's most ruthless gangs, waging a bloody war to seize control of a multi-million dollar drug empire.

Farhad, also known as 'The Afghan', was found not guilty of the higher charge of murder, the only not guilty verdict in a trial that resulted in over a dozen guilty verdicts.

He has previously eluded convictions in three separate murder charges, two of which used pleas of self-defence.

His barrister, John Stratton SC, told jurors his client had ordered the shooting of Hamzy over the firm belief that he was plotting to kill him first.

The trial wore on for seven months, involving a litany of suspects and gangland murders.

Farhad, 'Brothers 4 Life' Blacktown leader, was found guilty of the manslaughter of rival Mahmoud Hamzy in 2013
The mother of a convicted sex offender and suspected serial killer who allegedly murdered seven people has said a group of her son's alleged victims set him off by laughing at him.

Todd Kohlhepp, 45, was arrested in South Carolina last week after a missing woman was found chained up like a dog in a metal container on his property.

He later confessed to killing four people at a motor bike shop in 2003.

The alleged serial killer fessed up the quadruple murder over the weekend, after police allowed him to see his mother first.

Speaking to reporters after being told the story of what happened by her son, Regina Kohlhepp suggested the people killed were at fault for what happened.

Scroll down for video

Alleged serial killer Todd Kohlhepp (pictured) was set off before he murdered four people in 2003 because they were bullying him in a motor bike store, his mother has claimed

'He wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle and they laughed at him when he fell over on the bike,' Ms Kohlhepp said, according to Fox 6.

'You know, this is all why people tell kids not to bully. This is what can happen.

'Todd was bullied and embarrassed and I think he just held it in long enough.'

However, the widow of the shop owner who was killed by Kohlhepp, said she was told the incident played out very differently.

'I was told he was a disgruntled customer. He bought a motorcycle from Scott previously. His motorcycle was stolen, he went to get another one,' Melissa Brackman said.

'My husband and the service manager were poking fun at him saying, "Hey, is the second motorcycle going to get stolen, too? Didnt you have enough already?" They were kidding  and he said that made him angry.

'That is the kind of thing that a normal everyday person wouldnt go crazy over.'

POLICE SPEAK OF KALA BROWN'S EMOTIONAL DISCOVERY Todd Kohlhepp, a registered sex offender who has confessed to killing seven people, has been charged with kidnapping Brown, who was 'chained inside the container like a dog' by neck for two months. Both Ezell and Whitfield described their difficulty trying to find the missing couple, and expressed how emotional it was to finally rescue Brown last week. Brown, who had been hired to clean the homes Kohlhepp was selling, went to Koelhepp's property with her boyfriend Charlie Carver when the alleged serial killer pulled out a gun and took them hostage, CBS reported. The shipping container used by by the serial killer was removed by police for further forensic examination on Wednesday Brown later said she witnessed Koelhepp kill Carver, whose body was found on his property. Both Detectives Charlynn Ezell and Bradley Whitfield described their difficulty trying to find the missing couple, and expressed how emotional it was to finally rescue Brown. Ezell told ABC: 'She just looked at me and said thank you so much for finding me.' 'When you finally get answers, it's very emotional. I didn't know if I would ever see this girl alive,' she told the Independent Mail. 'When I saw Kala, that was an amazing sight. I told her mother later that it was almost as beautiful as if I were seeing my own child. To me, she was beautiful. I had cold chills.' Detective Whitfield broke down and added: 'I think we all saw a lot of things that day that are going to stay with us. 'It could be anybodys child, anybodys wife or husband. I wish we could have done more.' Advertisement

Kohlhepp was arrested after a missing woman was found chained up in a metal container on his property. He has since confessed to killing four people in 2003, and other bodies have been found on his land

Scott Ponder (right) and his mother Beverly (left) were found dead at the bike shop in 2003

Service manager Brian Lucas (left) and mechanic Chris Sherbert (right) also died in the 2003 massacre

Kohlhepp hid the container away from public view on his 95-acre farmland at Woodruff, South Carolina and painted it green to ensure it blended into the foliage. The container is 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and 10 to 12 feet high and a few steps from a shed (seen left) where the kidnapper is thought to have stored food supplies for his captive

A police dig site on Kohlhepp's property. It was at one of these digs that police found the shallow graves with the couple's bodies. Their tattoos and dental records were used to identify them

Kohlhepp has been charged with the murder of Brian Lucas, Scott Ponder, Beverly Guy and Chris Sherbert at the motorcycle shop in Chesnee on Nov. 6, 2003.

He also faces a charged of kidnapping Kala Brown and is set to be charged with three more murders.

Brown, 30, was found chained by the neck and feet inside a rusty-colored container by officers who entered the land with a warrant last Thursday.

Local sheriff Chuck Wright told Daily Mail Online: 'I'm going to be honest with you. I don't chain my dogs up and I wouldn't treat my dogs the way this lady was treated.'

Further postings by Kohlhepp on Facebook have also been included as part of the investigation.

Meagan and Johnny Coxie, aged 25 and 29, were also gunned down and buried on Kohlhepp's farmland, close to the metal container where he is accused of kidnapping Kala Brown and keeping her captive for two months.

Meagan was shot once in the head and her husband suffered several bullet wounds to the torso.

Latest victims: Meagan and Johnny Joe Coxie vanished last December and their bodies were found and identified this week

Charlie Carver was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds on Friday on South Carolina realtor Todd Kohlhepp's property

Her mother reported her daughter and son-in-law missing on December 22 last year and police are working to establish when they met their deaths.

It was just four months after they had posted pictures of a new baby on social media.

Spartanburg coroner Rusty Clavenger said that he believed the victims had been buried around eleven months ago, shortly after they disappeared.

He said both bodies had been discovered in shallow graves and fully clothed. They had been identified through their 'extensive' number of tattoos and dental records. Kohlhepp had led officers to the two graves and that of his third alleged victim Charles Carver, 32, who was exhumed from a nearby grave at the weekend.

Officers said they did not yet know the motive as to why the married couple were shot dead or the type of gun or bullets used.

But Clavenger added: 'There were some parts of the bodies we were not able to recover. But I really don't want to get into that because there is an open investigation.
President-elect Donald Trump appears to have taken control back of his personal Twitter account days after being taunted by President Obama for not being responsible enough to tweet and for scuppering his campaign.

After touring the White House and meeting with the 44th president and first lady Michelle Obama on Thursday, Trump seemingly took to Twitter to share about his experience in the nation's capital.

The billionaire businessman apparently wrote: 'A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!'

Scroll down for video

He's back?: President-elect Donald Trump (pictured above on election night) appears to have taken control back of his Twitter account days after being taunted by President Obama for not being responsible enough to tweet

Aftermeeting with the 44th president and first lady Michelle Obama on Thursday, Trump seemingly took to Twitter to share (above) about his experience in the nation's capital

He apparently followed the first friendly message up with another tweet (above) suggesting how protests across the country are being 'incited by the media' and how it's 'unfair'

The GOP presidential nominee followed the first friendly message up with another tweet suggesting how protests across the country are being 'incited by the media' and how it's 'unfair'.

He apparently wrote: 'Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!'

On November 9, Trump also seemingly took to his Twitter and wrote: 'Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before'.

According to Gawker's Real Real Donald Trump bot, which filters out only those tweets that have come from Trump's Samsung Galaxy phone, his final day of tweeting before winning the election was on October 20.

Trump started tweeting through a human filter due to his history of going off-message and undercutting his own allies.

In addition, it probably didn't help that Obama told a crowd during a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton on Sunday in Kissimmee, Florida that the Republican's time-out was allegedly enforced by his campaign aides.

'In the last two days, they had so little confidence in his self-control, they said: 'We're just going to take away his Twitter,'' Obama joked on stage at the rally.

On November 9, Trump also took to his Twitter and seemingly wrote the above message

Joker: In a Florida push for Hillary Clinton on Sunday, Obama (above) joked about Trump having had his Twitter privileges taken away by staff who were scared he would damage his campaign

Under control: Trump's firey rhetoric on Twitter made him appeal to voters tired of slick Washington patter. But since October 20, his tweets appear to have been edited and filtered

'Now, if somebody can't handle a Twitter account, they can't handle the nuclear codes.

'If somebody starts tweeting at three in the morning because 'SNL' made fun of you, then you can't handle the nuclear codes.'

The 'SNL' remark referenced Trump's early-morning Tweet in mid-October, in which he complained about Alec Baldwin's depiction of him and complained that the show was part of a negative, media-wide campaign to discredit him.

'Watched 'Saturday Night Live' hit job on me,' he wrote at the time. 'Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!'

Obama was referring in his speech to a report published in The New York Times on Sunday, in which it was claimed that Trump's campaign staff had forced him to tweet through an editor.

Making the cut: Spokeswoman Hope Hicks (pictured) is one of the people who had taken Trump's tweets in dictation, then edit them before posting them to his official account

The President also said that Trump had been relieved of his Twitter privileges two days prior before he hit the stage at the Florida campaign, but it is believed that he actually made his last independent tweet on October 20.

That's when he posted: 'Why didn't Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions - she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary.'

Trump's outlandish, unfiltered stream-of-consciousness tweets were a reliable reminder to his supporters that the firebrand was not part of a slick political machine like arch-rival Hillary Clinton.

But leaving him to his own devices - literally - had backfired for the campaign during several points, as Trump had ended up running interference for his own party.

On the morning of October 16, Mike Pence said on multiple TV channels that Trump's claims about the election being 'rigged' were only in reference to a supposed anti-Trump bias in the media, not actual vote-rigging.

A final word: This appears to be the last unedited tweet sent by Trump, according to a Gawker robot that filters out posts not made from Trump's preferred phone, his Samsung Galaxy

War of words: This Oct 16 post, in which Trump said the election was 'being rigged... at many polling places,' was made hours after Pence said Trump didn't believe in vote rigging

Edits: Some of the edits are minor - such as this one in which Hicks added 'for the American people!' to the tweet that Trump dictated to her

Hours later, Trump tweeted: 'The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD.'

Four days after that, it would appear, The Donald made his last solo tweet, until Thursday when he seemingly started tweeting again.

During the filtering phase of his tweets, the ones posted to his account appeared to have come from other phones - and according to The New York Times, had been either written by others or filtered by staff.

One tweet, made on November 3 was edited by Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks from the Miami International Airport.

While on board his private campaign jet the disgruntled candidate saw Air Force One across the tarmac and dictated a tweet to her: 'Why is he campaigning instead of creating jobs and fixing Obamacare? Get back to work.'

Hicks added '...for the American people' to the end.

Throttling Trump's famously aggressive tweets and tying him down to the teleprompter had been major tactics in the last two weeks of the campaign to stop the motor-mouthed candidate from scuppering his own race, the Times had reported.
A man has allegedly kidnapped and tried to murder his former fiancee by deliberately driving his car into a pole, with her in the passenger seat.

Paul Moore, 47, is accused of plowing into the power pole in western Sydney on purpose before fleeing the scene.

Shocking CCTV footage shows a black car smashing into a pole at high speed before a man jumps out of the car and dashes out of shot.

Paul Moore (right) allegedly kidnapped and tried to murder his former fiancee Kelly Willingham (left) by deliberately driving his car into a pole, with her in the passenger seat

Moments later, the footage obtained by 9 News shows a woman hobbling out of the car as she tries to find help.

Mr Moore's former partner Kelly Willingham, 42, was taken to hospital with serious injuries on Thursday, but will survive.

Describing the crash from her hospital bed, she told 7 News: 'I was just shocked. I was glad it was over in a way even though I was really quite injured.'

She said her ear was 'hanging off' after the crash and she also has severe bruises all over her body.

After the smash, she said she was 'crawling up the street' until she was eventually found by a motorist, who called an ambulance.

Ms Willingham said she had earlier tried to escape from the car while it was waiting at some traffic lights, but was unable to get away.

Ms Willingham, who is a nurse, claims her Moore had been stalking her for a month. Pictured is the moment the car drives along the street before hitting a pole

Shocking CCTV footage shows a black car smashing into a pole at high speed

A man (in a black shirt, right) was seen fleeing the scene on foot moments after the crash

Former lovers: The pair had been together for two years after meeting on dating website eHarmony, but broke up earlier this year

The mother, who is a nurse, claims her ex-partner had been stalking her for a month.

The pair had been together for two years after meeting on dating website eHarmony, but broke up earlier this year.

Ms Willingham had been planning to move to Queensland, but said she was now too traumatised to go outside alone.

'I haven't been out of the hospital yet so I think I'm going to be quite scared and I don't think I'll do much on my own,' she said.

Ms Willingham had been planning to move to Queensland, but says she will now be too traumatised to go outside alone

After the smash, Ms Willingham (pictured in hospital) said she was 'crawling up the street' until she was eventually found by a motorist, who called an ambulance

Ms Willingham said her ear was 'hanging off' after the crash and she also has severe bruises all over her body

Police claim Moore, from Sydney, kidnapped a woman before trying to kill her by crashing into the power pole.

He has been charged with attempted murder and taking a person with the intention to cause domestic violence-related actual bodily harm.

Court documents claim Moore has a history of violence, and he could face further charges.
Jeremy Clarkson jumps from a helicopter to rescue the 'Queen' in a breathless stunt in his new testosterone-pumped car show The Grand Tour, MailOnline can reveal.

The ex-Top Gear host, 56, launches a daring special forces-style mission to save a lookalike of the monarch in what a show source describes as one of the series' most thrilling scenes.

In Hollywood-style footage shot at a secret desert military training camp in Jordan, Clarkson frees 'Her Majesty' then 'obliterates' an old Mercedes in a hail of live ammunition fire to celebrate.

In keeping with the volatile formula that won Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May a global audience of 350 million on Top Gear, the testosterone-fuelled action of their new show is replete with the same sense of shock and awe.

Big budget stunt: Jeremy Clarkson, centre with co-stars Richard Hammond, left, and James May, right, jumps from a helicopter to rescue a Queen lookalike in new show The Grand Tour

Action packed: In high octane scenes shot at a military training camp in Jordan, Clarkson rescues Her Majesty by 'obliterating' an old Mercedes. Pictured: Hammond, left, wearing the tiara worn by the Queen lookalike and Clarkson, right, covered in blood

Sinking cars in the sea: The new high powered show was filmed in 15 countries with 80 crew and has cost a reported 160 million to produce. Ex Top Gear host Clarkson, pictured with Hammond, is reportedly earning a 10 million salary, compared to his 1.5 million with the BBC

In the scene filmed at an army base base deep in Jordan, called Operation Desert Stumble, a burly Clarkson, swathed in camouflage combat gear, heroically abseiled from the chopper.

Unfortunately, he aborted the drop 'when his trousers fell down in mid air' - weighed down by the hand grenades and ammunition hanging from his belt.

The action-packed sequence, shown to 350 audience members at a live filming of the show in Johannesburg, South Africa, showed the motley trio battling it out with the deadliest elite fighters in the world in a string of desert challenges.

Hammond was later pictured wearing the tiara worn by the 'plummy voiced lookalike' Queen and and Clarkson was pictured covered in blood and dust.

Despite the very real danger the troupe appear to be putting themselves in to convince their fans to shell out 79 for an Amazon Prime membership, a show source said the result is 'absolutely hysterical'.

They described the stunt as an 'original and cheeky way of paying tribute to the Queen in her 90th birthday year, which is exactly what we have come to expect from the boys'.

The source said: 'Perhaps the funniest moment is when Richard and James dive through an open window at a camp, followed by Jeremy whose bulk and height means he gets absolutely stuck and can't make it.

Rescue mission: The breathless scene in which Clarkson, pictured, jumps out of a chopper, was filmed in the Jordan desert and shown to a live audience in Johannesburg, South Africa

Daredevils: The ex-Top Gear trio pull out all the stops, putting themselves in real danger, like the high-speed car chase above, to convince fans to pay 79 for Amazon Prime membership

Big draw: The 12-episode series, starring Clarkson, pictured, sees its massive branded tent moving between 15 locations including Barbados, Jordan, Dubai, Namibia, Italy, Germany, California, Morocco, Tennessee, Finland, Holland - and Whitby in Yorkshire

'So he has to give up and walk around the building instead. He looks pretty humiliated and it is good to see him bearing the brunt of the joke for a change.

'After the Queen is rescued, the guys talk about whether their ammo is real or not.

'May or maybe Richard says, "No of course it wasn't, they were dummy bullets".

Jeremy decided to check it out, aimed his gun at a very old Mercedes and just completely obliterated it with bullets pumped from his automatic weapon A source from The Grand Tour

'So Jeremy decides to check it out, aims his gun at a very old Mercedes and just completely obliterates it with bullets pumped from his automatic weapon.

'That went down well with the live audience who found it unexpected, pretty shocking and extremely funny.'

The 12-episode series to be aired on Amazon Prime next Friday (Nov 18) sees its massive branded tent and crew travel to 15 locations including Barbados, Jordan, Dubai, Namibia, Italy, Germany, California, Morocco, Tennessee, Finland, Holland - and Whitby in Yorkshire.

Amazon is reported to have paid for 36 episodes of The Grand Tour across three years, at an estimated 4.5 million a show, about ten times more than the cost of a Top Gear episode.

The series' six-minute long opening sequence features 150 custom cars and six jet planes, as well as acrobats and stilt-walkers. The cars include a Bugatti Veyron (1.4 million) and a Rolls-Royce Phantom (750,000).

The entire Mad Max-style segment, filmed in the Californian desert with 2,000 extras, cost 2.5 million to make.

Chemistry: The series' six-minute long opening sequence features 150 custom cars and six jet planes, as well as acrobats and stilt-walkers. The cars include a Bugatti Veyron (1.4 million) and a Rolls-Royce Phantom (750,000). Pictured from left to right: Hammond, Clarkson and May during filming in the desert

Revved up: Stunts from the show were filmed all over the world including Barbados, Jordan, Dubai, Namibia, Italy, Germany, California, Morocco, Tennessee, Finland, Holland - and Whitby in Yorkshire

Clarkson's reported 10 million salary for fronting the new show  around 830,000 per episode  makes him Britain's highest paid TV star. Pictured: Filming in Morocco

Filmed on location: Episodes were recorded in a massive tent in front of a studio audience of 350 people like the one pictured where the audience was shown Charlize Theron being 'killed by a lion' in a spoof sketch and James May doing 'doughnuts' in Soweto

One shoot was aborted after the weight of the hand grenades and ammo attached to Clarkson's belt pulled down his trousers mid-air. Pictured: Clarkson, 56, filming an action scene for The Grand Tour

In a coup, the series persuaded Hollywood names such as Charlize Theron (above) to risk humiliation and appear as guests

Another show stunt was filmed in the iconic South African township Soweto where May, 52, was dispatched to probe the illegal, underground motorsport of 'spinning' - an outlawed craze which sees drivers dragging their cars at high speed until their tyres are shredded.

Soweto alone is said to have 10,000 regular spinners whose skill behind the wheel makes them local celebrities. Members of the spinning gangs were invited to join the live studio audience.

'May wanted to throw up after being one of the spinner's passengers,' source revealed. 'He clearly didn't enjoy the experience and appeared to have drawn the short straw.'

The popular trio are making their much-hyped return to TV after Clarkson was sacked from Top Gear and the BBC for punching a producer in a row over a cold meal.

In a massive coup, the adrenaline-fuelled series has persuaded Hollywood names to risk humiliation and appear as guests.

They include Oscar winning actress Charlize Theron who was seen by the South African audience being 'hunted by a lion'.

The source explained: 'The tent has a massive gauze window which overlooked the bare valley behind the guys and Jeremy announced that he was going to have the crowd's favourite local celebrity fed to a lion.

'They saw a guy dressed as a lion chasing a blonde woman, who looked like Charlize Theron, and then bring her down as a lion would in a kill in the wild.

The popular trio are making their much-hyped return to TV after Clarkson was sacked from Top Gear and the BBC for punching a producer in a row over a cold meal. Pictured: Hammond with an armoured car

Other features of the show included the testing of an 800 horsepower Aston Martin Vulcan and a quiz called 'Bruce' in which members of the on-set audience faced 'humiliating punishments' for failing to answer correctly

'It was all over very quickly, and it was funny and shocking at the same time because Charlize is such a big star. Jeremy just said to the crowd: "Oh sorry, she's dead."

'Then the show moved on as if nothing had happened. It was typically Jeremy  a very cruel, deadpan sort of humour.'

The South African set was given an 'Out of Africa' feel with the tent adorned with colonial-era furniture, antique maps and leather travelling trunks.

Other features of the show included the testing of an 800 horsepower Aston Martin Vulcan and a quiz called 'Bruce' in which members of the on-set audience faced 'humiliating punishments' for failing to answer correctly.

The source said: 'One poor guy who had a lovely mane of fair hair had a runway shaved down the middle of it by James May with an electric razor for not knowing how to answer a really impossible question.

During live filming in Johannesburg, a man dressed in a lion suit, pictured, chased down and pretended to kill Oscar winning actress Theron

'He was apparently going to a wedding the following day, so I am not sure how he felt about that.

'Another woman had her mobile phone microwaved - she was literally begging Jeremy for her SIM card to be saved, but he wouldn't let her have it.

'It was really dreadful and funny and uncomfortable to watch it happening and then she was handed this little piece of melted plastic. The smell was horrendous and everyone felt very sorry for her.'

Clarkson's reported 10 million salary for fronting the new show  around 830,000 per episode  makes him Britain's highest paid TV star.

His pay is more than six times more than his 1.5million-a-year salary at the BBC. Hammond, 46, and May are reportedly being paid 600,000 per episode.

It was believed said to cost 36,000 to ensure each presenter had a steak dinner waiting for them at the end of each day. Pictured: Hammond, May and Clarkson in Africa

The Amazon Prime show, had a crew of 80 at a cost of 3.2million. They took production to 15 countries, staying in a total of 1,500 hotel rooms, and spending 270,000 on bed and breakfast alone.

But despite the massive budget, Clarkson is confident Amazon will turn a profit. He said: 'Do the maths. Look at our previous audience around the world - 350million.

'If just one per cent of that previous audience thinks 'I want to watch those three' and spends 79, that's 276m.'
A retail expert has rubbished Australian businessman Dick Smith's claims that Aldi's low prices would spell to the end of Coles and Woolworths.

Associate Professor Gary Mortimer, from the Queensland University of Technology, said Aldi was helping shoppers by giving them more product options.

He also said a large part of Aldi's food and grocery range is being sourced from Australian suppliers, supporting different local providers.

'Whereas once, Australian suppliers hoping to drive volume were forced to deal with Coles and Woolworths, Aldi is now a viable option,' Assoc Prof Mortimer said.

Assoc Prof Gary Mortimer said the presence of German supermarket Aldi gives Australian customers and suppliers greater choices

Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith (left) claims the German supermarket will dominate over Australia's biggest supermarkets. However, Assoc Prof Mortimer (right) said Aldi gives customers and suppliers greater choice

Dick Smith defended Woolworths in a letter after they announced its deal with Australian tinned fruit and vegetable company SPC Ardmona would be called off.

In a letter defending Woolworths, entrepreneur Dick Smith claimed the deal SPC Ardmona and the supermarket was a result of reducing product selection to match Aldi's low prices.

'[Aldi's] greed is unlimited. Aldi Australia is now one-third the size of Coles and they haven't opened in Australia for charitable reasons. They are here to eventually take hundreds of millions of dollars out of our country and repatriate this money to Germany,' he told News.com.au.

'[Coles and Woolworths have] either got to get their costs down or match Aldi by substantially reducing staff and their product range,' he told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Mr Smith also said that forecasts about Aldi's rapid expansion, made by Moody's Investors Service could 'send one or both of our Aussie shareholder-owned food retailers out of business'.

But Assoc Prof Mortimer refuted the veteran retailer's claim that it was one-third the size of Coles.

'Latest Ibisworld research shows Aldi's projected revenue is $8 billion by December 2016, and Coles' is just over $31 billion  Aldi is about a quarter the size of Coles,' he said.

Mr Smith Aldi's rapid expansion could 'send one or both of our Aussie shareholder-owned food retailers out of business'

Assoc Prof Mortimer said both Coles and Woolworths have made cuts to staff before and it was unlikely they would cut 18,000 products from their shelves any time soon in order to compete.

'Coles and Woolworths run very different operations from discounter Aldi. Staffing at a discounter is very much related to operational needs,' he said.

He added: 'An Aldi store is significantly smaller than a Coles or Woolworths. They don't have in-store bakeries, delicatessens or butcheries.'

Assoc Prof Mortimer said Roy Morgan research shows eight percent of shoppers said they only shop at Aldi, while 92 percent shop around at other supermarkets

Assoc Prof Mortimer also dismissed Mr Smith's claim lower food prices would led to higher levels of obesity, saying it lacked evidence.

'In fact, Aldi has worked closely with suppliers to ensure all of their food items are free of artificial food colours,' he said.

Assoc Prof Mortimer also added research from Roy Morgan only shows eight percent of shoppers surveyed, only exclusively shopped at Aldi.
Rivera's lawyer wrote a motion to dismiss the charges, claiming he never had custody or care of the 3-year-old and 5-month-old

The house, which has since been razed, contained dead animals, was infested with rodents and insects and was piled high with dirty diapers

Prosecutors are seeking to uphold child abuse charges against a Massachusetts man after the skeletal remains of three babies believed to be his were found in a filthy home where he lived with his girlfriend two years ago.

The infants' corpses were discovered along with two severely neglected children in a Blackstone home filled with piles of garbage and soiled diapers in September 2014.

Erika Murray, the children's mother, has been charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of two of the babies, along with two counts of assault and battery on a child causing substantial bodily injury and two counts of reckless endangerment of a child.

Father prosecuted: Ramon Rivera, 39, (left), has been charged with assault and battery on a child causing substantial bodily injury, as well as child endangerment. His girlfriend, Erika Murray (right), has been charged with two counts of murder

The parents were arrested after police acting on a tip entered Murray's Blackstone, Massachusetts, home (picture) in 2014 and found inside the skeletal remains of three babies and two children living in squalor

No place to raise a child: Mounds of trash mixed in with old furniture, discarded electronic equipment, empty soda cans and food wrappings were found inside the family home

The rooms contained dead animals, were infested with rodents and insects and were piled high with dirty diapers

Authorities say the children's father, 39-year-old Ramon Rivera, faces several charges that also include two counts of assault and battery on a child causing substantial bodily injury, as well as child endangerment.

Rivera's lawyer wrote a motion in August to dismiss the charges, claiming Rivera never had custody or care of the 3-year-old and 5-month-old.

The MetroWest Daily News reported that prosecutors have opposed the motion, arguing that Rivera had allegedly told police he believed the children were his.

Prosecutors asserted that Rivera 'did nothing to alleviate the dangerous conditions' the children lived in with Murray in a home crawling with pests, and crammed with refuse, dirty diapers and dead animals.

According to the prosecution, Murray, a mother-of-seven, gave birth to the five youngest children in the house's only bathroom, attempting to hide their existence from their father because he did not want to have more children. She appears to have kept them almost entirely in upstairs bedrooms strewn with trash.

In February of this year, a judge ruled that murder charges will stand agaisnt Murray, pictured in court in September 2014

The two murder charges agaisnt the mother relate to two of the dead infants, who were found wearing diapers and one-piece infant outfits. The other set of remains were of a fetus with the placenta and umbilical cord still attached, authorities have said. All three were found in bedroom closets.

The surviving 3-year-old could neither talk nor walk, was severely malnourished and had maggots in her ears; and a nearly 6-month-old appeared to have spent much of her young life on her back. There were no birth records for the two girls.

State police entered Murray's Blackstone home on September 10, 2014, after a neighbor had discovered the older children severely neglected.

Police found the house contained dead animals, was infested with rodents and insects and was piled high with dirty diapers and trash. Workers in hazmat suits spent days cleaning out the house, which was eventually condemned and torn down.

Murray's four living children, who ranged in age from 5 months to 13 years when they were removed from the home, were in the custody of state child welfare officials.

Razed to the ground: Workers in hazmat suits spent days cleaning out the house, which was eventually condemned and torn down

Ramon Rivera, Murray's then-boyfriend, claimed he lived in the basement and was unaware of the conditions in the rest of the house, let alone with existence of two of the children - an argument that prosecutors have contested

Grand Jury testimony included in the prosecution's 24-page court filing claimed that Rivera saw one of the children in August and asked Murray if he was the father, but she said no.

'Although he claimed that she said no, when police interviewed him, he said that he believed (the children) were his children,' the prosecution stated.

Rivera's attorney, Nicole Longton, argued in her motion to dismiss that the prosecution failed to offer any evidence to the Grand Jury that her client was aware the children were in the house, and that there was no probable cause to indict him.

In February of this year, a judge ruled that murder charges will stand agaisnt Murray after her attorney filed a motion to dismiss, calling the allegations agaisnt her 'pure speculation.'
Vladimir Putin is considering quitting as Russian President, a Kremlin expert has claimed.

The 64-year-old may stand down due to 'certain circumstances' that mean he will need to be out of the spotlight next year, it is suggested.

Russian political analyst Valery Solovey hinted that Putin, who welcomed the election of Donald Trump as US President, may be forced to step aside due to illness.

Mr Solovey, professor at Moscow State Institute of Foreign Affairs, said the president might need to 'avoid publicity in 2017 for several months or will appear very rarely'.

Standing down? Vladimir Putin, pictured on Tuesday, is considering quitting the Russian presidency amid speculation about his health, according to an explosive story on a Kremlin-friendly website Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK)

Possible successor: Citing political expert Valery Solovey, who is seen as having an inside track at the Kremlin, it said early presidential elections are being considered for 2017. Ex-Putin bodyguard and former deputy defence minister Alexei Dyumin (above) is among those tipped as possible replacement

Current premier Dmitry Medvedev (pictured with Putin last week), who has already served a four year term as president ending in 2012, is another potential successor

He stated: 'As you see, this hypothetical situation is very nervy from the point of view of Russian policy.'

He was asked if Putin had 'health problems' he answered cryptically: 'Let me not say more, I have said enough.

'And let me stress once again: this information is not absolutely reliable. Still, it should be considered.'

The president might need to avoid publicity in 2017 for several months or will appear very rarely. Valery Solovey, professor at Moscow State Institute of Foreign Affairs

The explosive story appeared on major Kremlin-friendly news website Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK) and was then deleted within hours.

However, Mr Solovey insisted on social media that all he had said was true.

'Before the end of the year, the respected audience will get confirmation of everything mentioned in the much talked-about interview.'

The report hinted at health problems but also said that the strongman could stand aside to allow a successor to take charge who had better relations with the West.

The story appeared under the headline: 'Thunderstorm 2017: maybe Putin will be replaced by a successor in several months'.

Two names were mentioned as potential replacements in the 'censored' article: current premier Dmitry Medvedev, who has already served a four year term as president ending in 2012; and Alexei Dyumin, 44, ex-Putin bodyguard and former deputy defence minister, who is seen as being groomed for a top role.

It hinted at a bitter power struggle involving Putin's influential security apparatchiks who oppose Medvedev.

Mr Solovey, who is seen as having an inside track at the Kremlin, said early presidential elections are being considered for 2017, up to a year ahead of the end of Putin's current six year term.

Action man Dyumin (above), who was fast tracked into a political career by Putin and appointed governor of Tula region, has been tipped as a potential successor. He personally escorted toppled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych out of his country after the 2014 revolution, and played a key role in the Russian seizure of Crimea

The deletion of the article by MK was reported in Russia today by Gazprom-owned but editorially independent Ekho Moscow radio what said: 'There will be clarity in December - MK deleted political analyst's interview about Putin's successor.'

Let me not say more, I have said enough. Valery Solovey, when asked about Putin's health

One comment asked: 'Why did the editor freak out? What was so special in what this guy said? Or we can't speak about anything at all now?'

The interview was read by more than 50,000 users before it was deleted, according to MedeaLeaks.ru.

Mr Solovey, 56, graduated from Moscow State Lomonosov Institute, and worked for the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Mikhail Gorbachev Foundation, as well as spending a year at the London School of Economics.

He has been a member of the expert council of respected Geopolitics magazine since 2009.

He said it was 'logical' to hold early elections but the 'most incredible idea was being discussed', namely that Putin would not be a candidate.

Asked why, he said: 'Party because of these circumstances, partly because of geo-strategic considerations.

'Putin is convinced that as long as he is the president, it would not be possible to improve relations with the West.

'So in order to change this situation it is necessary that Russia is represented at the negotiations by a different person.

When asked by Russian news website MK if Putin (pictured with Dyumin earlier this year) had 'health problems', Mr Solovey answered cryptically: 'Let me not say more, I have said enough'

Ekho Moscow radio, which is Gazprom-owned but editorially independent, reported the mysterious article and added: 'There will be clarity in December - MK deleted political analyst's interview about Putin's successor,' Pictured: Dyumin attends meeting with Putin

Professor Valery Solovey, 56, worked for the Russian Academy of Sciences and spent a year at the London School of Economics

'If we suppose that improvement of relations with the West is considered by Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) to be a national necessity, it is easy to predict who his successor will be.'

He named 'liberal' Medvedev but said 'he is not liked by many people' including the powerful security lobby.

An alternative was action man Dyumin, fast tracked into a political career by Putin who this year appointed him governor of Tula region.

He personally escorted toppled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych out of his country after the 2014 revolution, and played a key role in the Russian seizure of Crimea.

But Mr Solovey said Putin has lost faith with the security lobby although ex-defence minister and Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Ivanov - a former KGB spy who was recently sidelined - could be drafted in.

The timing of the story appeared strange because it was posted the day after the election of Donald Trump.

Putin sees Trump as a rare Western leader he 'can do business with'.

The reason the story was removed are not clear. On social media there were claims of 'censorship'.
Authorities in Germany say a bogus Syrian asylum seeker arrested in March this year was plotting a bomb attack at the Brandenburg Gate - the biggest tourist draw in the capital Berlin.

He had marked down the number of tourist buses at several places to maximise death and injury to innocents, said prosecutors.

The 19-year-old Isis supporter was also allegedly considering bombing the nearby Reichstag, the seat of German government, and the Alexanderplatz shopping precinct in East Berlin.

The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) released the information about the man identified only as Shaas al-M. on Thursday.

Authorities say a bogus Syrian asylum seeker arrested in March this year was plotting a bomb attack at the Brandenburg Gate (file photo)

It said he scouted these sites out for the terrorist group in February before passing the information on - including crowd sizes and numbers of tourist buses parked near the targets at different times - to an Isis contact in Syria.

Officials say he also acted as a recruiter for Isis and a contact for other would-be terrorists before he was arrested in March.

He allegedly recruited at least one person who left the country to fight with the terrorists.

He faces a multitude of criminal charges. Authorities also said he was prepared 'to commit an attack in the name of Islamic State together with two unknown people.'

Officials said he joined Islamic State in his Syrian home village in 2013, underwent military training, and performed guard duties for the terrorist group before travelling to Germany, claiming to be an asylum seeker in summer 2015.

Brandenburg Gate, located at the Paris Square in Berlin, is one of the German capital's busiest tourist hotspots (file photo)

Last month he was charged with being a member of the terrorist organization and breaking arms control laws. More charges are expected to follow and his trial is not expected to take place before the spring of next year.

News of his plans came two days after the arrest of five suspected Islamic State recruiters, including the alleged mastermind of the entire recruiting network, in Germany.

Another 'highly dangerous' terrorist suspect and Isis member was arrested by Berlin police on November 3, but prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to charge him with terrorism offences, but he remains on remand accused of falsifying documents.
Advertisement

Curled up in the corner with hands bound and eyes blindfolded, captured ISIS suspects cower in fear.

The men were seized by Iraqi forces who found them hiding in a kitchen as they swept through the Arbagiah neighbourhood of Mosul on Friday.

They must be screened before release as the advancing Iraqi troops take no chances, determined to prevent any terrorists from escaping their clutches.

Two suspected ISIS fighters were found hiding in a house as soldiers were pushing through the eastern Samah area and into the Arbagiah neighbourhood of Mosul

An Iraqi soldier guards two suspected ISIS fighters found hiding in a house as they were pushing through the eastern Samah area and into the Arbagiah neighbourhood of Mosul

The men must be screened before release as the advancing Iraqi troops take no chances, determined to prevent any terrorists from escaping their clutches

The suspects were captured by a soldier from the Iraqi Special Forces 2nd division as the crack troops swept through houses in the last remaining ISIS stronghold in Iraq.

It comes after ISIS released a video purporting to show Iraqi soldiers throw a young man under a tank over suspicions he was an ISIS terrorist.

Horrific images captured on a mobile phone show men in military clothing bearing the Iraqi flag dragging a man across the ground near Mosul.

He is then placed under the tracks of a tank before the men open fire and watch the prisoner being crushed.

The brutal 90-second video emerged online today as human rights group Amnesty claimed Iraqi government forces were killing and torturing civilians south of the city.

Soldiers from the Iraqi Special Forces 2nd division run to take up positions as forces engage Islamic State fighters

This is the gruesome moment men dressed as Iraqi soldiers throw a young man under a tank amid suspicions he was an ISIS terrorist

Horrific images captured on a mobile phone show men in military clothing bearing the Iraqi flag dragging a man across the ground near Mosul

ISLAMIC STATE JUSTICE: TERRORISTS CRUCIFY 'SPIES' ON ELECTRICITY POLES Islamic State fighters have killed some 70 civilians in Mosul this week, accusing them of collaborating with Iraqi forces, the United Nations has said. ISIS reportedly shot and killed 40 people on Tuesday after accusing them of 'treason and collaboration', dressing them in orange jumpsuits and hanging their bodies from electrical poles. The extremists reportedly shot to death 20 civilians in the Ghabat Military Base on charges of leaking information. Those bodies were hung at various traffic lights in Mosul, with notes stating that they had used mobile phones to leak information. The reports were the latest evidence of IS exactions on civilians as it retreats into dense urban quarters of Iraq's second largest city. Islamic State fighters have killed some 70 civilians in Mosul this week, accusing them of collaborating with Iraqi forces Advertisement

It is not yet clear when the footage was taken and the identity and allegiance of the victim and those filming has not been confirmed.

Amnesty International described several incidents on or around October 21 in which separate groups of men were beaten with cables and rifle butts before being shot to death.

Meanwhile, the UN has claimed that ISIS have been stockpiling ammonia to make chemical weapons and ordering children to act as suicide bombers.

Militants have executed scores more people around Mosul this week and are reportedly building up supplies of chemicals in civilian areas.

A mass grave with over 100 bodies found in the town of Hammam al-Alil was one of several Islamic State killing grounds, U.N. human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said.

Public executions were being carried out for 'treason and collaboration' with Iraqi forces trying to recapture the city, or for the use of banned mobile phones or desertion.

People with explosive belts, possibly teenagers or young boys, were being deployed in the alleys of Old Mosul, while abducted women were being 'distributed' to fighters or told they would be used to accompany Islamic State convoys, she said.

Soldiers from the Iraqi Special Forces 2nd division stand behind a wall waiting to move forward while engaging Islamic State fighters

Iraqi forces have been accused of killing and torturing civilians south of Mosul (file photo)

An Iraqi soldier fires a RPG in Karamah as troops move in on the ISIS stronghold of Mosul

Iraqi special forces policemen dance while holding up weapons outside Karamah, south of Mosul

A soldier from the Iraqi Special Forces 2nd division takes a well-earned bread as forces engage IS fighters

A soldier from the Iraqi Special Forces 2nd division fire his weapon as forces engage Islamic State group fighters in Mosul

A soldier from the Iraqi Special Forces 2nd division looks for hostiles as they engage Islamic State group fighters

A soldier from the Iraqi Special Forces 2nd division runs to change firing position

As the siege continued, Amnesty International reported allegations against security forces of arbitrary detention, forced disappearances and ill-treatment of prisoners, including an account that up to six people were 'extrajudicially executed' in late October over suspected ties to ISIS.

In one case, a man's head had been severed from his body, it said. Another man's beard was set on fire and others had shots fired between their legs, the report claims.

These are the first such reports of alleged abuse in the British and U.S.-backed campaign to retake the city of Mosul from Islamic State.

Amnesty said up to six people were found dead last month in recaptured villages who security forces suspected of ties to ISIS which seized a third of Iraqi territory in 2014.

Iraq's federal police has issued a statement denying its forces had been involved in extrajudicial killings.

'Men in federal police uniform have carried out multiple unlawful killings, apprehending and then deliberately killing in cold blood residents in villages south of Mosul,' said Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty's Beirut office.

Men pull with a rope the body of an Islamic State fighter before burying him near Karamah, south of Mosul

Iraqi special forces police pull the body of an Islamic State fighter with a rope before handing the body over to villagers for burial

A man stands in front of the bodies of Islamic State fighters before burying them near Karamah

Iraqi special forces policemen rest outside Karamah, south of Mosul

The policemen keep a guitar with them for some musical company as they rest next to a disused train track

Iraqi special forces policemen rest next to fire outside Karamah, south of Mosul, Iraq

A family flees fighting between the Islamic State and Iraqi army in Intisar disrict of eastern Mosul on November 8 (file photo)

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi denied the Amnesty report, saying local residents, not government forces, had killed Islamic State members.

He also said the rights group was spreading fear among Iraqis with its reports and would bear responsibility for displacement of people who might flee the city as a result.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said at least 37 men suspected of being affiliated with Islamic State had been detained by Iraqi and Kurdish forces from checkpoints, villages, screening centres and camps for displaced people around Mosul and Hawija, further south.

ELITE IRAQI TROOPS TO RESUME MOSUL PUSH Troops of Iraq's elite Counter-Terrorism Service will resume their offensive against the Islamic State group in east Mosul on Friday after several days of relative quiet, an officer said. The battle to retake the city, the jihadists' last major bastion in Iraq, is now in its fourth week, and while troops have pushed into the built-up area, there are weeks, if not months, of fighting still to go. 'After a few days of quiet, we will start a new attack this afternoon on the Karkukli neighbourhood,' Lieutenant Colonel Muntadhar Salem said, referring to an eastern district of Mosul. Smoke and a flaming tornado are seen at a burning oil facility set alight by ISIS in the town of Qayyarah, near Mosul 'We'll start this attack from our positions in the Al-Samah neighbourhood,' he added. Iraqi forces launched a huge operation to retake Mosul on October 17, with federal and Kurdish regional forces closing in on the city from three sides. Pro-government paramilitaries later began an advance on the town of Tal Afar, which commands the city's western approaches, with the goal of cutting the jihadists off from territory they control in neighbouring Syria. ISIS overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in June 2014, but Iraqi forces backed by US-led air strikes have since regained significant ground. Advertisement

Relatives said they did not know where most of the men were being held and had not been able to contact any of them while in detention, according to the report.

HRW said such conduct 'significantly increases the risk of other violations', including torture.

An Interior Ministry spokesman denied there had been any violations and said Iraqi forces respected human rights and international law.

A spokesman for the Kurdish regional government denied the HRW report, saying any delays in informing families were limited due to a shortage of resources.

'Nobody has been kept in unknown facilities. They are kept in identified facilities,' said Dindar Zebari.

The Mosul operation, involving a 100,000-strong alliance of troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga and Shi'ite Muslim militias and backed by U.S.-led air strikes, has entered its fourth week but has so far gained just a small foothold in the city.

Amnesty said that, without accountability, the alleged abuses risked being repeated in other towns and villages as the Mosul offensive continues.
ISIS savages have crucified spies, hacked a thief's hand off with a meat cleaver and hurled a man of a roof for being gay in a brutal new wave of punishments.

Shocking new pictures show extremists carrying out gruesome public executions in town squares in northern Iraq.

In one set of images, a man is thrown to his death from an industrial building for the 'crime' of being homosexual.

ISIS savages have crucified spies (pictured), hacked a thief's hand off with a meat cleaver and hurled a man of a roof for being gay in a brutal new wave of punishments

Brutal: One man was launched from the top of an industrial building for the 'crime' of being gay

In one set of images, a man is thrown to his death after being accused of being homosexual

Another picture shows a man accused of being a thief being held down while his right hand is chopped off in front of a baying crowd

Another picture shows a man accused of being a thief being held down while his right hand is chopped off in front of a baying crowd.

Separate pictures show blindfolded men being tied up in public and shot in the head.

A report accompanying the grim ISIS photo reel is said to read: 'Implementing the Hadd and establishing the Sharia of Allah the Exalted.'

The punishments are carried out in 'Wilayat al-Jazirah' north of Mosul.

Separate pictures show blindfolded men being tied up in public and shot in the head

A report accompanying the grim ISIS photo reel is said to read: 'Implementing the Hadd and establishing the Sharia of Allah the Exalted'

It comes a day after militants were revealed to have electrocuted dozens of civilians in Mosul in a desperate bid to maintain control in the besieged city.

Dozens have been killed in the last two days alone after being accused of passing information to 'the enemy' while fanatics are back on the city streets policing the length of men's beards, according to local reports.

As Iraqi and Kurdish troops continued to move in on Mosul, depraved extremists electrocuted 30 prisoners who had been accused of 'collaboration with security forces'.

Dozens have been killed in the last two days alone after being accused of passing information to 'the enemy'

A condemned prisoner is pictured in a town square in northern Iraq with an executioner standing close by

Punishment: The gruesome public executions often draw large crowds of men and boys

And on Tuesday, five crucified bodies were put on display at a road junction, a clear message to the city's remaining 1.5 million residents that the ultra-hardline Islamists are still in charge, despite losing territory to the east of the city.

Others were seen hanging from electricity poles and traffic signals around the city, residents said on Wednesday.
Three firefighters were taken to hospital after tackling the blaze

Footage shows bystanders fleeing as fireworks shot out of warehouse

Firefighters battled to get blaze under control in Blagoveshchensk, Russia

A fireworks warehouse became engulfed in flames after explosives went off inside the building.

Firefighters battled to get the blaze under control in the city of Blagoveshchensk, eastern Russia.

Footage shows bystanders fleeing as the fireworks shot out of the warehouse.

A fireworks warehouse became engulfed in flames after explosives went off inside the building in the city of Blagoveshchensk, eastern Russia

More than 130 firefighters and around 40 fire trucks were sent to put out the massive blaze. Three were taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries.

It is not yet clear what caused the explosion.

A clip shows a firefighter retreating down a ladder as the explosion of fireworks continued.

The dramatic footage shows a huge plume of smoke sent into the sky over the warehouse.

Footage shows bystanders fleeing as the fireworks shot out of the warehouse

Firefighters battled to get the blaze under control, with one being forced to retreat

Locals who rushed outside after hearing the explosion said they did not know that fireworks were being stored in the nearby warehouse.

Nina Shcherbakova said: 'I heard explosions, then I looked through the window and saw fire trucks. It was pretty scary.

'There are lots of old wooden houses around and we did not know anyone was keeping fireworks here.'

More than 130 firefighters and around 40 fire trucks were sent to put out the massive blaze

Three firefighters were taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries
No 10 branded Nigel Farage 'irrelevant' today as it dismissed out of hand claims the Ukip leader would be Britain's link to Donald Trump.

Mr Farage has been unable to contain his glee at Mr Trump's election as US president and shocked Westminster yesterday with claims he would chaperone Theresa May at her first meeting with the President-elect so she was not groped.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, who has Republican contacts in Washington DC, was reported today to have been tasked with reaching out to the Trump team - including a call with the Ukip leader.

But idea of Mr Farage acting in any official or unofficial capacity was immediately rejected by Downing Street.

Scroll down for video

Liam Fox, pictured left with Theresa May as they arrived in India for a trade visit last weekend, is set to reach out to Donald Trump as the Government scrambles to build ties with the President-elect after his surprise White House win

Nigel Farage, pictured in Barcelona this week, has told Theresa May he can be her link to Donald Trump as the UK Government scrambles to smooth relations with the President-elect - but No 10 described him as an 'irrelevance' to their diplomatic efforts

Downing Street is scrambling to smooth relations with the President-elect after being forced to change their tune towards the Republican.

Last year Mrs May and other senior ministers publicly criticised Mr Trump over his plan to ban Muslims from America and Britain's ambassador in Washington Sir Kim Darroch had advised No 10 a Hillary Clinton victory was most likely.

The Telegraph reported Dr Fox planned to talk to Mr Farage first to plan the approach. Boris Johnson has also ordered his Foreign Office officials to reach out.

But sources close to Mrs May branded Mr Farage an 'irrelevance' and a Government spokesman confirmed: 'Dr Fox has no plans to talk to Mr Farage.'

Mrs May and Mr Trump spoke for the first time yesterday, in a call described as 'professional' and in which the President-elect said Britain was 'special' to him.

He invited Mrs May to visit the United States as soon as possible after his inauguration as the 45th President in January.

Mr Farage, who has claimed he will meet Mr Trump at the weekend, said yesterday it was vital Mrs May form a close partnership with the President-elect.

The Ukip figurehead told his ally Mr Trump to 'come and schmooze Theresa', but added: 'Don't touch her, for goodness sake'.

Continuing the quip, he said he could 'be there as the responsible adult to make sure everything is OK'.

The distasteful joke was in reference to last month's revelations that Mr Trump had boasted that stars like him can 'do anything' to women, including grabbing them 'by the p***y'.

Mr Farage also risked causing further controversy by referring to the current President as 'that Obama creature - a loathsome individual who couldn't stand our country'.

He told Talk Radio he now wanted to 'become a diplomat' and offered to be Mrs May's link to Mr Trump as he prepares to hand over leadership of Ukip to his replacement later this month.

Offering his help to build bridges with the Republican's team, Mr Farage said: 'If I can do anything  anything  to help that relationship between the UK and America via Donald Trump, I will do so.'

Nigel Farage is planning to meet President-elect Donald Trump in New York on Saturday and deliver a speech in Florida, the key state that helped send him to the White House. Pictured, Mr Trump addresses his supporters in New York after being elected the 45th President yesterday

Mr Farage, nicknamed 'Mr Brexit' by Mr Trump, is due to fly to the US at the end of the week.

The interim-Ukip leader is planning to meet the President-elect in New York on Saturday and deliver a speech in Florida, the key state that helped send Mr Trump to the White House.

Mr Farage, who appeared on stage alongside the Republican during the campaign, boasted that he had spoken to Mr Trump's team minutes after their man was declared the 45th US President.

He said Mr Trump's team were just as surprised as everybody else when the votes came in.

Asked whether Mr Trump truly believed he would be elected President, Mr Farage told the BBC: 'It's rather like asking me 'Did I think Brexit was going to happen' - I wanted it to but I was quite surprised when it did.

'Late last night, when I phoned into Trump Tower, to the party and spoke to some friends who were in there, yes they were celebrating but I think they were almost as bewildered as the Democrats.

TRUMP VICTORY GIVES US THE CHANCE TO REPAIR THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP - IDS Donald Trump's election as US President gives Britain the chance to repair the 'special relationship,' former Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith said today. He urged ministers not to 'indulge in an orgy of complaint' that has characterised many UK responses to the Republican's triumph yesterday. Instead Theresa May should 'engage with the new administration in a positive way' and 'reinvigorate' our relationship with America, the former Tory leader wrote in an article on the ConservativeHome website. Mr Duncan Smith, who served as Work and Pensions Secretary in David Cameron's government, said the 'special relationship' had come under strain with President Obama in the White House but said of Mr Trump's victory: 'This is where an opportunity opens up for the UK. 'Notwithstanding the fact that we are bound on a course that takes us out of the EU, we should seize this opportunity to engage the new administration and remind them of our enduring friendship in good times and in bad. 'A positive tone of support and assistance will reinvigorate a relationship which has the potential to help us both.' Advertisement

'You can want something to happen but when it does, sometimes, it's a bit of a surprise.'

Mr Farage admitted Mr Trump was 'pretty brash' during the campaign bu insisted that in private the billionaire is 'amenable and he will listen'.

His success as president will depend on who he surrounds himself with, the Ukip leader added.

But he remained tight-lipped as to whether he thinks he'll be offered a role in Mr Trump's new team.

'I think all of this is somewhat premature. Ideas that I'm going to become ambassador to the European Union  I think it's all a bit premature.

'What I would say is this though: I do have a relationship with Trump and his team, it's very important that the British government gets on with this guy , that we crack on, start talking about trade deals, start talking about Nato and its future and how it's going to work together.'

Mr Farage's advice for Mrs May was echoed by former Tory leader and ex-Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith, who said Mr Trump's election gives the UK the chance to repair its 'special relationship' with the US.

He said the UK faced a choice of joining in the 'orgy of complaint about the result' or 'to engage with the new administration in a positive way'.

Mr Duncan Smith, who served as Work and Pensions Secretary in David Cameron's government, said the 'special relationship' had come under strain with President Obama in the White House but said of Mr Trump's victory: 'This is where an opportunity opens up for the UK.

'Notwithstanding the fact that we are bound on a course that takes us out of the EU, we should seize this opportunity to engage the new administration and remind them of our enduring friendship in good times and in bad.

'A positive tone of support and assistance will reinvigorate a relationship which has the potential to help us both.'

Nigel Farage has helped Donald Trump in his campaign to win the presidency, joining him on stage in Jackson, Mississippi in August, pictured, where the Republican introduced the interim Ukip leader as 'Mr Brexit'

Brexit supporter Iain Duncan Smith, pictured during the EU referendum campaign earlier this year, urged Theresa May to approach Donald Trump's election as President in a 'positive way'
An attempted murderer who escaped from Pentonville prison broke his leg in the jail break before dying his ginger hair to disguise himself, a court has heard.

Matthew Baker and James Whitlock broke out of the north London jail on Monday after reportedly using pillows to make their beds look occupied and cutting through bars with diamond-tipped cutting equipment.

Baker, 28, was arrested on Wednesday after reportedly breaking his leg in two places during the escape. Whitlock, 31, is still at large.

Baker's sister Kelly appeared in court today accused of helping him evade capture following the audacious escape on Sunday.

Matthew Baker (left) and James Whitlock (right) fled Pentonville on Monday. Baker was later caught by police after dying his hair, a court heard. Whitlock is still at large.

Baker's sister Kelly (pictured outside court) has been charged with assisting her brother

Magistrates in Highbury heard Baker was found hiding under a bed at his sister's house in Ilford by police earlier this week with his ginger hair dyed black.

Kelly Baker, 21, appeared in court wearing a grey hoodie and blue jeans and spoke only to confirm her name, date or birth and address.

Meanwhile, another woman, aged 24, has been arrested at an address in Bow, east London on suspicion of assisting an offender in relation to the escape.

A 33-year-old man, who was arrested over the alleged plot at the same time as Kelly Baker, has been bailed.

The two inmates broke out on Sunday after apparently fooling guards by packing their beds with pillows and clothes to make it look like sleeping bodies.

Baker, who is convicted of attempted murder, posted a frightening warning to his enemies to 'be ready' for him and 'we'll meet again' just before he fled.

The men are believed to have cut through the bars with a diamond cutter flown in by drone

District judge Jill Allison bailed Kelly Baker to appear at Blackfriars Crown Court on December 9.

She must report to Ilford police station three times a week and was banned from contacting Matthew Baker.

Baker, wearing a grey hoodie and jeans, thanked the district judge as she left the dock.

Officers from Islington Borough are continuing to investigate, supported by the Met's Flying Squad and Homicide and Major Crime Command.

Police have renewed appeals for information to trace Whitlock.

Two weeks after his conviction, Baker posted a series of photos flexing his biceps on Facebook and warned: 'People wonna talk **** yeah when they wasn't even there, so you know what I know all your names and when the day comes be ready for me.' Above, Pentonville prison

The 31-year-old was on remand having been charged with conspiracy to burgle in relation to 19 offences of theft from ATMs between December 2015 and August 2016.

He is described as a white man of slim build. He has the word 'Tracy' tattooed on his torso.
This last photograph of British holidaymaker Amarna Carthy shows her wearing 'the helmet that killed her' ahead of a fatal quad bike accident in Turkey.

The 21-year-old, from Nottingham, died from a head injury after she fell from the bike she and her aunt, Jakadi Clarke, 24, had hired while on a week-long holiday.

Nottingham Coroner's Court heard the headgear she had been provided with offered inadequate protection.

The helmets the pair wore offered little protection and the family have since campaigned for a change in Turkish law to improve safety

Amarna Carthy, 21, from Nottingham, died from a head injury after she fell from this quad bike

Miss Carthy (pictured) was already unconscious when medics arrived and was pronounced dead at the scene

Since Miss Carthy's death, her family have campaigned to warn other holidaymakers about the dangers of hiring bikes abroad.

They are trying to persuade Turkish lawmakers to improve helmet safety to prevent other families suffering the same heartbreak.

Detective Sergeant James Greely, of the East Midlands Serious Collision Investigation Unit, told the inquest: 'From my analysis of the evidence, the issue wasn't so much if there was any apparent problem with the quad bike, it was more to do with the quality of the helmet.

'What Amarna needed was protection when she came off that bike.'

They had pulled onto what they thought was the hard shoulder to let 'agitated' drivers behind past them, but careered down the steep verge by a roadside in Fethiye (file picture)

The 21-year-old wedding planner had been a passenger on the bike her aunt had been driving on May 24.

They had hired the bike two days before they were due to fly home.

The pair were travelling behind a lorry with impatient motorists waiting behind them.

Ms Clarke moved to the near side of the road to allow them to pass but their path quickly narrowed.

They ended up running out of road and plunged down a verge.

Miss Carthy suffered a head injury and was pronounced dead at the scene, while her aunt was left with a fractured pelvis.

Miss Carthy lived in Turkey for six months when she was 18, where she worked as a wedding planner

The pair only had provisional licences, but this had not prevented them from hiring a quad bike.

Detective Sergeant Greely said tourists only required a provisional licence to ride.

He added: 'At the end of the day, if [hire firms] can get away with being able to supply less quality helmets or machines that are not maintained as they could be, that's going to increase their profits.'

Nottinghamshire's coroner Mairin Casey said: 'This is a tragic accident. There's nothing that I have read or been made aware of in the manner of driving that caused or contributed to this event.

'But the safety precautions, which would have been taken in this country, were not applied in the same way in Turkey.

'If anything good is to come of this, the message goes out to the public that they need to be very vigilant of the safety standards abroad when hiring any vehicle of this type, both in terms of the vehicle and safety equipment.'

Miss Carthy, who has four sisters, Kyanne, 12, six-year-old Madison and two-year-old twins Ada and Lylah  lived in Turkey for six months when she was 18, working as a wedding planner.

She had just set up a health business with her mother, Tashaka, 40.

In the wake of the tragedy, her mother set up a petition calling for stricter safety laws in Turkey.

She said: 'Whether it helps one or two people or a whole country full of people, something has to come of it. So long as I have breath in me I will push for her cause and try to save lives.

'Both Amarna and Jakadi had helmets on, as you can see in the picture taken of them on the day our beautiful Amarna died.

Miss Carthy, who was wearing a helmet at the time, died instantly after hitting her head

'You can also see that the legally acceptable helmets issued, are totally inadequate. Amarna died from catastrophic head injuries and her helmet was collected from the scene, in pieces.

'We would like to change this, so another family doesn't have to suffer this awful loss and fly their loved one home the way we did.

'Compulsory crash helmet laws with possible journey distance limitations when renting quads, need to be in place so no more lives are wasted like our beautiful girl.

'And we would also like to push for a full drivers licence requirement when renting a quad, rather than the provisional that is now in place, reflecting the seriousness and power of these vehicles.
Disabled Neil Boffey (right) was carried down the aisle of a Ryanair flight. His wife May (left) described the incident as 'degrading'

A disabled father is carried like a corpse down the aisle of a busy Ryanair plane while gobsmacked passengers look on in this video filmed by his shocked daughter.

Neil Boffey, 48, requested special boarding assistance on the flight from Barcelona to Manchester - but was not allowed on to the plane until after everyone else had taken their seats.

The video shows two men struggling to carry the father-of-two, who uses a wheelchair after suffering a stroke 11 years ago, the length of the crowded aircraft as he lies back on a small seat with arms folded across his chest.

Mr Boffey's wife May described the incident as 'degrading' and said her husband, a former travel agent, had been left 'embarrassed' by the ordeal.

His daughter, Emily-Jane Boffey, 24, filmed the incident on her phone and complained to the budget airline - but claimed they refused to apologise to the family.

Ryanair have denied responsibility and insisted that wheelchair services at Barcelona Airport are operated by UTE on behalf of the airport authority.

However the airport said it is not responsible for the location of passengers on the flight.

Mrs Boffey, 51, from Denton, Manchester, said: 'It was really undignified for him. To bring him on like that with everyone else already there and watching was degrading.

'Usually what happens is they allow those who need assistance to board first, but for whatever reason this time we went lost.

Footage shows two men struggling to carry the father-of-two (pictured), who uses a wheelchair after suffering a stroke 11 years ago, down the packed flight

Mr Boffey (left) was returning from a week-long holiday in Spain with wife May (centre), daughter Emily-Jane (right) and three other family members who each paid 150 for their flights

'We did tell the airline when we booked and the people at the check-in desk that we would need assistance.

'When we got to the gate we asked if Neil could go on first. He's a big guy and he's paralysed down his right-hand side.

'He also has epilepsy and dysphasia, which means he struggles to speak, and is registered blind. We were surprised when everyone else went on ahead of him.

'They used an Ambulift to get him to the door but for some reason his seat was at the back of the plane and he went on the front.

'People were trying to put their luggage away and it's a narrow aisle. You could tell people were looking at him and it was embarrassing for Neil.

'All we're asking from Ryanair is an apology and a commitment that they'll improve things for disabled customers. Something has to change.'

Mr Boffey had been in Spain for a week with five family members. Each paid about 150 for their flights.

The family said there were no issues on the outbound flight from Manchester, when Neil boarded at the rear of the plane and took a seat on the back row.

The wheelchair Mr Boffey usually uses was too wide to fit down the aisle and assistance staff put him in a wheel-less chair of their own

His daughter said that because his wheelchair was too wide to fit down the aisle, assistance staff on the return flight put Mr Boffey in a wheel-less chair of their own and tipped him back as they lifted him to the rear of the plane.

Miss Boffey, a financial adviser, said: 'It wasn't safe whatsoever. My dad suffers from epilepsy, so imagine if he would have had a fit while they were carrying him on the plane.

'He would have not only hurt himself but also who ever was near him.

'Ryanair were the ones that decided it would be best for him to sit at the back of the plane, knowing full well he couldn't walk as we told them this before we booked our holiday.

'It's bad enough that people with disabilities get looked at without having to be humiliated by being carried on to a plane full of people.

The family (pictured) complained to Ryanair but the company refused to apologise

'I put a complaint in with Ryanair and their reply was it's not their fault and they did this for the safety of their passengers. I don't accept that whatsoever.

'The safe way would be for them to put all disabled passengers on the plane first so that they don't have to be embarrassed about having to go past everyone on the plane to get to their seats.'

A spokesman for Ryanair said: 'While we regret any inconvenience caused, wheelchair services at Barcelona Airport are operated by UTE on behalf of the airport authority - at great expense to the airlines - and UTE are responsible for this service and any problems with it.'

A spokesperson for Barcelona Airport said: 'Barcelona-El Prat Airport offers assistance to passengers who requires it. This service is coordinated with the companies, which are responsible for the location of the passengers inside the plane and the flight boarding.

'In this case, the shipment was initiated before agents and Mr Boffey could reach the plane, if it hadn't been done in this way the flight would have been delayed.
A heartbroken father who shared a photograph showing his four-year-old daughter's agonising cancer battle has revealed her condition is deteriorating.

Andy Whelan, 30, posted a distressing black and white image of his daughter Jessica grimacing in pain as she battled the terminal disease.

The youngster, from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma in September last year and is no longer receiving treatment.

A fundraising campaign was set up to give the little girl a chance to enjoy her last few weeks and it raised almost 100,000.

Andy Whelan, 30, posted the photograph of his daughter online to show the 'true face of cancer'

Mr Whelan (pictured with Jessica) wrote online that his daughter's time 'remaining with us is sadly limited'

But her father has now closed the GoFundMe page and has written online that his daughter's 'time remaining with us is sadly limited'.

Mr Whelan was overwhelmed with the support the family received and thanked people for their 'comments, messages and fundraising attempts'.

More than 4,000 people donated money and the original target of 20,000 was quickly raised in less than one month.

But Jessica is no longer receiving treatment and Mr Whelan added that the family will be 'temporarily stepping back' from all social media so they can comfort their daughter during the time she has left.

The huge amount of cash raised by generous people who read Jessica's story will now go a charity 'close to the family's hearts'.

People started to donate after seeing the photograph of Jessica - which her father described as the 'true face of cancer'.

Mr Whelan also wrote on Jessica's blog that the youngster had been diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma in September last year.

The youngster had been diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma in September last year

Jessica's heartbroken father wrote online that his daughter's time left is sadly limited

But this week, Mr Whelan updated supporters with a new post - which has been 'liked' on Facebook almost 10,000 times - to reveal the sad news that his daughter's condition is deteriorating.

He wrote: 'Jessica's blood levels have deteriorated quite significantly over this last couple of days.

'Because of this we now know her time remaining with us is sadly limited.

'We as a family have been overwhelmed by the recent comments and messages we have received, so many in fact from all over the world that we have been unable to read many of them as we care for Jessica.

'We will now be completely but temporarily stepping back from all social media so as to have no distractions as we comfort Jessica during whatever time she has left.

'We are all understandably heartbroken that our attempts to give her additional extra time combined with the quality of life that she deserves have not worked and I thank you all for the various suggestions to manage this disease recently.

'Once more I thank you for your comments, messages and fundraising attempts.

'As and when time allows we will choose a charity close to ours and Jessica's hearts to assist in to research of this disease so hopefully in future fewer children and families have to suffer this same fate.'

Jessica (left and right) was diagnosed with high risk stage 4 Neuroblastoma in September 2015

Mr Whelan thanks supporters for their kind words and informed them that his daughter's condition has 'deteriorated quite significantly'

Two days after writing that Jessica's condition has deteriorated, Mr Whelan posted another update about his daughter and shared a link to a petition asking the government to make more funding available in the fight against child cancer.

Speaking earlier this month, after he set up the GoFundMe page, Mr Whelan told MailOnline: 'It has been absolutely overwhelming. It is quite hard for us to comprehend what is being donated.

Mr Whelan said he received more than 3,000 emails - along with Facebook messages and texts - from all over the world since the photograph was published.

Well-wishers have got in touch from the like of Colombia and Russia as Jessica's story has spread on the internet.

Among those who have been moved by the cause is Harry Styles, who got in touch with Mr Whelan.

He said the phone call was 'surreal' and that the One Direction heartthrob's agent had promised a video or message would be sent to Jessica.

Speaking about his decision to post the photo, Mr Whelan added: 'I took that photo - not to share with the public - but as more of a momento.

'To remind us, when we look back and worry about everything, that we had done the right thing by stopping her treatment. That image just shows how bad it was, if we ever questioned our decision.

Mr Whelan, 30, (pictured with his daughter) is now looking to donate the money to charity

A fundraising campaign was set up to give Jessica (pictured) a chance to enjoy her last few weeks raised almost 100,000

'But, once I uploaded that onto the computer, I instantly realised how powerful that image actually was. We speak about photos that change people's perceptions - and I knew this one would.'

Mr Whelan said he and his partner Nicki Prendergast - Jessica's mother - have decided to give their daughter's organs and tissues to scientific research when she dies.

When he uploaded the picture of his daughter online, Mr Whelan wrote: 'This is the hardest photograph I have ever made.

Jessica (pictured) from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, was diagnosed with cancer in 2015

'A few days ago she was given what is most likely a few weeks to live.

'This was taken at a moment where we as parents could offer no comfort - Jessica pushing us away as she rode out her searing pain in solitude. This is the true face of cancer.'

Jessica was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma on September 23 last year.

Initially, after suffering pains in her arms and shoulders, doctors diagnosed Jessica with a bone infection.

But just as she was about to be discharged, after ten weeks in hospital, doctors decided to examine her one more time.
Opposition MPs are plotting to try and block Brexit in Parliament if Theresa May does not promise a second EU referendum on her final deal.

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron launched the rearguard action today which is likely to win support from some other MPs, including Labour front bencher Catherine West.

The SNP are likely to back the idea, as would Labour MP David Lammy and Tory Ken Clarke.

But the effort is likely doomed to fail as an overwhelming majority of MPs are expected to vote in favour of Theresa May triggering Article 50 of the EU treaties to formally start the Brexit process.

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, pictured at the US Embassy's Election Night party on Tuesday, is leading the rearguard effort against Brexit in the Commons

Battle will commence in the Commons if the Supreme Court next month upholds a High Court ruling Mrs May can only act on the referendum result with the support of Parliament.

The Prime Minister had planned to use her executive powers to trigger Article 50 and start the talks at a point of her choosing. The court ruling could mean she is unable to do so by the end of March as promised at the Tory conference.

Announcing his 'red lines' today, Mr Farron said: 'Millions of people are deeply worried by the government's handling of Brexit.

'So my position is very clear: the Liberal Democrats believe that the people are sovereign. They must decide whether or not they agree with the deal that the government reaches with Brussels, which means a referendum at the end of the negotiations where people can either vote for the deal or to remain in Europe.

'We will vote against Article 50 unless it allows the people a vote on the deal, because the will of the people must prevail - both on departure and destination.'

Mr Farron denied he was being 'anti democratic', telling the BBC a second referendum was the 'only democratic option on the table'.

But Brexit minister David Jones dismissed Mr Farron's efforts.

He said: 'Parliament voted by a margin of six to one to put the decision on whether to remain in or leave the EU in the hands of the British people.

Theresa May, pictured outside No 10 on Wednesday, can be confident of getting any Article 50 legislation through the Commons as Mr Farron's rebellion is isolated to a handful of MPs

Mr Farron's attempt to frustrate Article 50 looks doomed to failure based on an analysis of the Commons, which suggests only around 73 MPs might back him

'Now, because they didn't like the first answer, Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs seek to put the question all over again in hope of a different answer.

'They are attempting to thwart and reverse the decision that was taken on June 23.

'Only the Conservatives can be trusted to respect the outcome of the referendum and make a success of Brexit.'

There is a small but significant coalition of support bitterly opposed to Brexit in the House of Commons.

It includes Mr Farron's eight MPs, the three Northern Irish SDLP, and probably the 54 SNP members.

The attempt is likely to be supported by Labour's David Lammy (file picture left) and Tory grandee Ken Clarke (file picture right)

The 54 SNP MPs, led from Scotland by Nicola Sturgeon, pictured centre the week after the 2015 election when they entered the Commons for the first time, may also vote against Article 50 in the Commons

Some on the Labour benches are also likely to vote against orders from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Earlier this month, Ms West wrote on Facebook: 'As I have said before, I stand with the people of Hornsey & Wood Green, and I will vote against Brexit in Parliament.'

Labour whip Thangnam Debbonaire has also indicated she would vote against in an early vote on Article 50 while Owen Smith, the former leadership contender to Mr Corbyn, has stood by his campaign promise for a second poll.

Tory grandee Mr Clarke has also said he could not be 'hypocritical' and vote for Brexit in Parliament after decades of support for the EU.

The opposition is unlikely to total more than 100 of Parliament's 650 MPs.
Advertisement

These are the satellite images that show how bitter North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un destroyed a multi-million dollar model village because it reminded him of his executed uncle who masterminded the project.

The communist enclave's tyrannical leader first ordered the closure of the Pyongyang Folklore Park, which features miniature versions of the capital's buildings, in June this year.

Now structures inside the park - once proudly exhibited to the world - have been smashed up.

The centre piece of the park was a miniature replica of the Juche Tower, a monument representing self-independence topped with the torch of revolution.

The replica was surrounded by lush green grass that brightened up the model village and acted as the perfect photo opportunity for tourists. Photos show how the garden has now died out and turned murky brown.

Scroll down for video

Pyongyang Folklore Park features miniature versions of the North Korean capital's buildings. It was proudly unveiled to the world in 2012 as a tourist attraction but satellite images (pictured) show how much of it has now been destroyed

North Koreans are pictured in front of a miniature replica of the Juche Tower at Pyongyang Folklore Park after it was unveiled in 2012

The 500-acre model village features scaled versions of propaganda monuments and buildings in Pyongyang and Mount Paektu (right), an active volcano on the border between North Korea and China

The West Sea barrage, a huge eight-kilometer-long system of dams located 15 km west of the city of Nampho is one of North Korea's proudest engineering accomplishments. A replica of the barrage was built inside the Folklore Park but satellite images show it has now been drained of water.

Folklore Park was completed in 2012, with Kim describing it as the brainchild of his deceased father Kim Jong-Il.

However, its construction was overseen by Jang Song-Thaek, once the second most powerful man in North Korea who was convicted of treason and executed in late 2013.

Jang was described as a 'traitor' to the nation and derided as 'despicable human scum... worse than a dog' in the announcement of his death by the official KCNA news agency.

In June South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted sources as saying that Kim ordered 'Mini Pyongyang' to be dismantled as it reminded him of Jang.

'Whenever Kim passed by Pyongyang Folk Village, he often complained it brought Jang back to his mind,' one source was quoted as saying.

A second source said the ruling communist party had withdrawn and shredded brochures promoting the village.

A replica of the West Sea barrage (left) built inside the Folklore Park has now been drained of water. Other buildings appear to have been smashed up (right)

There was a sparkling replica (pictured) of The Ryugyong Hotel inside the model village. The hotel in Pyongyang is an unfinished 105-story pyramid-shaped skyscraper

Kim Jong-Un is seen here with his executed uncle Jang Song-Thaek. In December 2013, Jang was abruptly accused of being a counter-revolutionary and was expelled from the Workers' Party of Korea

Jang Song Thaek, with his hands tied with a rope, is dragged into the court by uniformed personnel in December 2013 before he was convicted of treason and executed

The Folklore Park is pictured here when it was under construction. It contains replicas of palaces that existed at the time of the Koryo dynasty, which ruled from the 10th to the 14th centuries

Nick Bonner, Director of Koryo Tours, a China-based travel agency that specialises in tours to North Korea, said the country's tourism authority told the company the closure was temporary.

'We were told last week it's closed for renovation,' he told AFP at the time.

Tourist trips to the site are rare, he said, adding that visitors prefer to see the real Pyongyang rather than its model replica.

The 200-hectare (500-acre) model village features scaled versions of propaganda monuments and buildings in Pyongyang.

There is a replica of The Ryugyong Hotel, Mt. Paektu, Sosan handball gymnasium, the Arch of Triumph and Pyongyang ice-skating rink.

It also contains replicas of palaces that existed at the time of the Koryo dynasty, which ruled from the 10th to the 14th centuries.

According to estimates in South Korean media, the village cost millions of dollars to build.

Recent pictures from inside North Korea this week showed how, during a recent visit to an island bordering South Korea, Kim called for an impromptu firing drill.

The 'supreme leader' described his 'great joy' after watching North Korean soldiers fire at targets from Mahap islet, Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Friday.

The island is just 18 kilometres from South Korea's northernmost Baengnyeong Island in the West Sea.

The dictator travelled to the Islet to inspect a defence detachment but he seemingly couldn't resist the chance to test the readiness of his troops and effectiveness of his guns.

North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un reportedly decided to call a surprise firing drill on his recent visit to an island just 18 kilometres from South Korea's northernmost island

Kim Jong Un smilled as he travelled on a boat to inspect the defence detachment on Mahap Islet in the western sector of the front

The KCNA agency reported: 'Noting that the soldiers on forefront like those of the detachment should be stronger than anyone in their revolutionary faith, he underlined the need to train the soldiers of the detachment as indomitable fighters steadfast in the spirit of defending the socialist country by conducting the political and ideological education among them in a unique manner.'

North Korea on Thursday warned the incoming Donald Trump administration will have to acknowledge it as a nuclear state, as the South said the maverick billionaire had pledged to protect it.

The United States maintains it cannot accept North Korea as a nuclear power, despite it conducting five nuclear tests - including two in 2016 - and has pushed harsh international sanctions against the Pyongyang regime.

Soldiers helped Kim Jong Un walk over the pebbles on the beach at Mahap Islet

North Korea's supreme leader smiled for the cameras as he checked out a map with his soldiers

North Korea on Thursday warned the incoming Donald Trump administration will have to acknowledge it as a nuclear state

'If there is anything the Obama administration has done... it has put the security of the US mainland in the greatest danger,' said an editorial carried by North Korea's ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun.

'It has burdened the new administration with the difficulty of facing the Juche nuclear state,' it said, referring to the North Korean ideology usually translated as 'self-reliance'.

The editorial, which did not mention Trump by name, follows growing calls for the United States to change tack on North Korea, with US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper last month labelling attempts to denuclearise the North a lost cause.

President Barack Obama has made talks with the North conditional on Pyongyang first making some tangible commitment towards denuclearisation, but Thursday's editorial called the goal an 'outdated illusion'.

Although Trump has not laid out a clear direction for his policy on North Korea, he has indicated that he would be open to negotiations with its leader Kim Jong-Un in the US to talk him out of his nuclear ambitions.

Soldiers appear to cry and yell as the dictator walks past them as he inspects the defence detachment

Eggs, fish and salad appear to be on the menu as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspects a sub-unit in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency

Trump caused consternation during his campaign when he threatened to withdraw the troops unless Seoul paid more for their upkeep, and suggested South Korea and Japan develop their own nuclear weapons to counter threats from Pyongyang.

But in a phone call with South Korean President Park Geun-Hye on Thursday, Trump vowed that US commitment on protecting its ally against the North 'will not waver'.

'We are going to be with you 100 percent,' Trump said, according to a statement from South Korea's Blue House.

'We will be steadfast and strong with respect to working with you to protect against the instability in North Korea,' Seoul quoted him as saying.

North Korea has been hit by five sets of UN sanctions since it first tested a nuclear device in 2006.

After Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test in January, the Security Council adopted the toughest sanctions resolution to date, targeting North Korea's trade in minerals and tightening banking restrictions.

Council members are currently debating a fresh resolution after the North's fifth nuclear test in September.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad believes Donald Trump's election win has saved them from a Hillary Clinton administration which would have sought to stop Russia backing the regime's campaign in Aleppo.

A senior pro-Assad official told Reuters they had planned to capture the rebel-held east of the city before January because they expected Mrs Clinton to cause them problems after her inauguration.

If Trump's pre-election comments on Syria crystallize into policy, it might mean Washington, Moscow and Damascus cooperating against ISIS, whose stronghold is Raqqa in eastern Syria.

Bashir al-Assad (pictured, left) has welcomed the election of Donald Trump, as he knows it is likely to mean less interference in his regime's war on rebels in Aleppo (right)

One complicating factor could be Trump's tough stance on Iran, Assad's other main military backer.

Trump has threatened to rip up the nuclear deal with Iran and heaped criticism on the sanctions relief it brought.

Analysts also say long-standing aversion to Assad among Republicans in Congress may thwart a big policy shift.

Yet Trump has struck a different tone to current U.S. policy on some aspects of the multi-sided Syrian conflict, where the United States with allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia has backed some of the insurgents who have been fighting to topple Assad for more than five years.

Trump has questioned the wisdom of backing rebels, played down the U.S. goal of getting Assad to leave power, and noted that while he didn't like him, 'Assad is killing ISIS' with Iran and Russia.

A volunteer with the Syrian White Helmets group (left), and a Syrian Arab Red Crescent member (right) run from a government air strike in Douma, near Damascus

'This is very comforting for us and our allies in Syria,' said the senior official in the military alliance fighting in support of Assad, who is backed by the Russian air force, Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Lebanon's Hezbollah, and other militias.

'The wave is currently with us, serving our interests, and we must benefit from it as fully as possible,' said the official, who declined to be identified by nationality or affiliation so he could give a frank assessment.

The war has shattered Syria into a patchwork of areas controlled by Assad's state, rebels battling to topple him, a powerful Kurdish militia, and the Islamic State.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and the conflict has created the world's worst refugee crisis for years.

Trump has been adamant he will not let Syrian refugees come to the United States, playing on fears that any of them could potentially be suicide bombers.

While Washington has provided significant support to the opposition, it has never matched the backing given to Assad by Russia and Iran.

The rebels have seen U.S. policy as a betrayal of their revolt, with Washington focusing mostly on the fight against IS in the last two years.

The ground war between Assad and the rebellion has this year focused largely on Aleppo, in the north west of Syria.

The government is trying to recapture the rebel-held east of the city, the opposition's most important urban stronghold.

Expectations of a Hillary Clinton win have been shaping military planning in the Aleppo campaign for some time, and the aim had been to conclude the campaign before the new U.S. president took office, the senior official said.

Abdullah al-Muhaysini, a prominent Saudi cleric and jihadist figure in Syria, said Donald Trump's election as president of the United States was the 'first step toward victory'

While that is still the plan, the official said Trump's victory was a 'new factor'.

Russian President Vladimir Putin would 'certainly have a different approach towards the entire Syrian crisis based on what will happen with Trump'.

The Syrian newspaper al-Watan said most Syrians had felt 'joy' at the result, and that many had spent the night up following the U.S. election.

Trump had no designs in Syria, or the region, it declared.

While some in the opposition expressed concern about Trump's statements and views on Putin, others still hold out hope for a U.S. policy that serves their cause.

A Syrian teacher explains basic math to a class in a barn which has been converted into a makeshift school classroom in a rebel-held area of Daraa, in southern Syria

A senior rebel leader noted Trump's views on Iran were 'positive' for the Syrian opposition.

'Today, the role of the United States remains active and essential in Syria, regardless of whether he tries to distance himself from it, he won't be able to,' said the rebel, who declined to be identified so he could talk freely.

A build-up of Russian forces has fuelled speculation of an imminent escalation in the campaign for eastern Aleppo, where hundreds of people were reported killed in air strikes before Russia declared a pause on Oct. 18.

Rebels say they are well-entrenched in eastern Aleppo, a besieged area the United Nations says is home to 270,000 people. The rebels say it will be impossible for government forces to take the area.

Russian firepower has in recent weeks focused on rebel-held areas to the west of the city, from where insurgents recently launched their own offensive on government-held parts of Aleppo. Rebel shelling has killed dozens of people in western Aleppo.

Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster but the city had 'basically' fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favour of rebels without knowing who they were.

The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed programme, and jihadists such as the group formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.

Rather than focusing on fighting Assad, Islamic State, has prioritised the expansion and defence of its self-declared 'caliphate' in eastern and central Syria.

Damascus had hoped that it could win back international legitimacy as part of the international fight against Islamic State, but the United States has rejected that idea, viewing Assad as part of the problem.

The U.S.-led fight against Islamic State in Syria is fraught with complications. The United States has built its strategy around a powerful Kurdish militia that has carved out a self-governing areas across much of northern Syria.

If it were not for the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) Bashar al-Assad (left) would have been ousted like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi

But its alliance with that militia, the YPG, has angered Turkey, a U.S. ally worried that Kurdish influence in northern Syria will fuel separatism among its own Kurdish minority.

The YPG has in turn fought FSA rebels backed by Turkey, which is itself waging a major operation in northern Syria.

One senior adviser who Trump will inherit is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine General Joseph Dunford.

Dunford told Congress in September he thought it would not be a good idea for the military to share intelligence with Russia on Syria, something Moscow has long sought. Republican stalwarts who might join Trump's cabinet or become advisers are unlikely to want close relations with Putin.

Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, forecast that Trump would start out by sounding out Russia on options for a political transition or agreement to end the war.

Failing that, he may decide to leave western Syria as a Russian zone of influence, with the United States and its allies fighting Islamic State in the east.
A Scottish man was 'on top of the world' after managing to clamber to the top of a very dangerous cliff face.

Dave MacLeod, from Glasgow, was rewarded with stunning views across the Scottish coast when he braved treacherous conditions to climb the Old Man of Storr.

The famous landmark is a rocky hill on the Trotternish peninsula of the Isle of Skye, in Scotland.

Amazingly, it took the professional rock climber less than two hours to get to the top of the gravely cliff face.

Dave MacLeod (circled) braved treacherous conditions to climb the Old Man of Storr on the Isle of Skye

It took the professional climber less than two hours to get to the top of the gravelly cliff face

When the daredevil managed to make it to the top of the famous landmark he was photographed by friend Dave Cuthbertson

The steep rocky cliff face is full of loose gravel, and one foot out of place can see climbers tumbling to their death.

When the daredevil managed to make it to the top he was photographed by friend Dave Cuthbertson.

Mr MacLeod, 38, said: 'This is the only time I've climbed the Storr - the rock is very loose so it's quite a dangerous route, and has not had many ascents.

'I climbed it with a rope and harness, although the rock is not really sold enough for any standard climbing protection to hold - so it's critical not to fall on this climb!

'It only an hour or two to climb.

'At the top it was extremely windy and very difficult to stand up on the summit of the pinnacle.

Those brave enough to make it to the top of the Storr are rewarded with stunning views across the Scottish coast

'The Isle of Skye is famous for its dramatic rock formations, and I've climbed most of them now - rock features like the Storr are a magnet for climbers.

'As well as the great cliffs, the isles are the most beautiful place I've visited anywhere in the world - there is nothing quite like the wildness, the colours and the different landscapes.
When Donald Trump flew from New York to Washington this week to discuss the transition of power with outgoing President Barack Obama, he used his own luxuriously fitted out plane, which he affectionately calls 'the T-Bird'.

But after his inauguration as the 45th President in January he will have to give up his own plane - with its cinema and gold-plated bathroom and seatbelts - and fly around the country and abroad on Air Force One.

That is because the aircraft is specially kitted out with equipment which allow the Commander-in-Chief to use it as a mobile command center in the event of conflict or natural disaster.

Donald Trump bought this Boeing 757 in 2011 and spent millions converting it into a penthouse in the sky, long before he decided to run for president

Amanda Miller, the Trump Organization's Vice President of Marketing, is pictured on board Mr Trump's plane. She gave a video tour of the plane in 2011, after it was refitted

HOW DO THEY MEASURE UP? Air Force One Obama boarding Air Force One in London A customized Boeing 747-200B, bearing the words 'United States of America' and the President's seal Top speed of 563mph and room for an entire West Wing of presidential advisers A mobile command center, 4,000 square feet of floor space on three levels, a medical suite/operating room, two food preparation galleys which can feed 100 people Trump's plane Trump boards his plane in North Carolina A Boeing 757-200, which was bought in 2011 and kitted out at a cost of $100m, it is embossed with the legend 'Trump' Top speed of 500mph and space for 43 passengers Marble and gold bathroom, 24-carat gold-plated seatblets, a video lounge with 57-inch screen and sound system similar to a 'top Hollywood screening room' Advertisement

In fact there are two Air Force One planes. They are identical Boeing 747s which are rotated every few months.

Air Force One are customized Boeing 747-200B aircraft, which carry the tail codes 28000 and 29000.

They are given the special designation VC-25A and fly under the strictest security.

White House in the sky: One of the two Air Force One jumbos is seen flying President Bill Clinton to Italy in 1999. Hillary only ever flew on it as a First Lady

Air Force One is emblazoned with the words United States of America, a flag on the tail and the Seal of the President.

It can be refueled in midair, giving it an unlimited range and can stay in the hour for many hours if required to by an extraordinary crisis.

Air Force One's onboard electronics are designed to withstand an electromagnetic pulse, and it is equipped with advanced secure communications equipment, allowing it to function in the event of an attack on the White House.

Trump's plane dwarfed Hillary Clinton's campaign plane at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas last month when the pair were in Sin City for the third presidential debate

The plane, sometimes known as Trump Force One, is kitted out with bling bling bathrooms made of marble and gold

The Trump Organization's Amanda Miller shows off the kitchen on board Trump Force One

President Trump will be protected on board by Secret Service officers but can also invite onto the plane political advisers, journalists and other guests, including of course his wife Melania and other members of his family.

But it will be a far cry from the luxury of Trump's own plane, sometimes known as Trump Force One, which has wood panelling and 'yards and yards of elegant silk', silk pillows embroidered with his family crest and gold and marble bathrooms.

Air Force One usually flies in convoy with several cargo planes, containing surplus stores, and fighter jets.

President Barack Obama wears an Air Force One jacket on his first flight aboard the famous plane from Andrews Air Force Base to Newport News, Virginia in February 2009

President Obama and many of his predecessors have often opted to use a helicopter, known as Marine One, for short flights from Washington for example to New York or to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland countryside.

The presidential air fleet is operated by the 89th Airlift Wing at Andrews Field, Maryland.

The Presidential Airlift Group, part of the White House Military Office, is in charge of Air Force One.

On the campaign trial: Trump gives a thumbs up to the crowd after a rally in Vandailia, Ohio way back in March 2016. He was able to sleep in his bed on board while flitting between campaign stops

Trump Force One, or the 'T-Bird' as the tycoon refers to it, is luxuriously fitted out (pictured)

The bedroom on Trump's plane, where he often napped while flying between cities on the campaign trial, is complete with silk pillows containing his family crest (pictured)

Trump and his campaign organizers would have sat around this conference table discussing speeches and tactics over the last few months

Amanda Miller (pictured) graduated from the University of Rhode Island and worked as the receptionist on the 2008 season of Celebrity Apprentice. She was hired by Trump after working as a 15-year-old waitress at his golf course in Westchester, New York

Amanda Miller shows off the bathroom on board Trump Force One (left) but security is much tighter on board Air Force One (pictured, right, during a trip to Baghdad in 2006)

In May 2009 Louis Caldera resigned as director of the White House Military Office after an embarrassing incident - New Yorkers panicked when they saw Air Force One flying low around the city.

It turned out to be a photo opportunity but many people thought the U.S. was under attack again like on 9/11.

In 1974 the Air Force One pilot took dramatic evasive action, including a dive, when, on its approach to Damascus for an official visit, President Richard Nixon's plane was approached by Syrian fighter jets.

Trump was able to travel in extreme comfort on his plane (pictured) while keeping in contact with his staff on the ground. It is not clear what will become of the plane in January

Amanda Miller, who was hired by Trump after he spotted her working as a 15-year-old waitress, is pictured showing off the tycoon's $100m plane

Goodbye, Mr President: A rainbow in Kingston, Jamaica, frames Obama as he boards Air Force One at Norman Manley International Airport after a trip to the Caribbean

President Hafez al-Assad - father of the current dictator, Bashir - a former air force officer himself, had sent the planes up to escort Nixon's plane but they had failed to notify the crew of Air Force One.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence, by the way, will have his own Boeing C-32, which is also fitted out to be a mobile command center in the event of the President's sudden death. It is known as Air Force Two.

Although Hillary Clinton lost the election this week she can at least tell her grandchildren she flew on Air Force One...all be it only as a First Lady.
May's No 10 is now working on the 'partnership' with the United States after Trump's shock victory in the race for the White House

Nick Timothy is current joint chief of staff and a long-term adviser to May

One of Theresa May's chiefs of staff appeared to react to Donald Trump's election by sticking her tongue out at Downing Street photographers today.

Fiona Hill was pictured arriving at work alongside her co chief of staff Nick Timothy today as No 10 scrambled to build ties with the President-elect.

The pair arrived hours after it emerged Mr Timothy warned against anyone 'reaching out' to Donald Trump when he seized the Republican nomination.

Nick Timothy also bemoaned the wider state of US politics before the rise of Mr Trump in the spring as his unlikely surge through the primaries laid the groundwork for his shock White House win this week.

At the time, Mr Timothy was out of Government between his roles working for Mrs May as Home Secretary and his current post at the heart of Downing Street.

Meanwhile it also emerged today that Mrs Hill also tweeted derogatory remarks about the Republican last year.

Fiona Hill, one of Theresa May's two chiefs of staff, was spotted by photographers arriving for work in Downing Street as efforts continued to build links with Donald Trump. It emerged today Nick Timothy, the other chief of staff pictured right with Ms Hill, warned in May against anyone 'reaching out' to Mr Trump when he seized the Republican nomination

A Twitter account understood to be owned by Mrs Hill wrote in December: 'Donald Trump is a chump'.

In March, as Mr Trump closed in on the nomination, Mr Timothy said 'American politics was depressing enough before Trump took off', in a conversation about Chris Christie's endorsement of the tycoon.

Later in the spring, in May, responding to a newspaper column on the rise of Mr Trump, he said: 'Urgh... as a Tory I don't want any ''reaching out'' to Trump.'

Together with Fiona Hill, Mrs May's other's chief of staff, Mr Timothy is a central policy advisor to the Prime Minister and his public statements have been pored over for indications of the thinking in No 10.

The remarks may cause embarrassment to Mrs May as Downing Street scrambles to forge a relationship with the President-elect after his unexpected victory.

The Prime Minister herself was critical of Mr Trump's primary season intervention on Muslims, warning Mr Trump as a candidate was 'divisive and wrong'.

Ties between Mr Trump and Westminster are virtually non-existent and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox is reportedly set to use his connections in the Republican Party to reach out.

In March, Mr Timothy complained the state of American politics was 'depressing' before Mr Trump's extraordinary rise even began

When Mr Trump secured the Republican nomination in May, Mr Timothy said he didn't want 'any reaching out' to Mr Trump

A Twitter account understood to be owned by Theresa May's joint-chief of staff Fiona Hill wrote in December: 'Donald Trump is a chump' in response to Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson's derogatory tweet about the Republican

After the tweets were uncovered by Politico, sources in No 10 pointed to Mrs May's congratulations to the President-elect and the positive call with Mr Trump yesterday.

Downing Street said the two leaders described the UK-US relationship as 'very important and very special'.

A spokesman added: 'President-elect Trump set out his close and personal connections with, and warmth for, the UK. He said he was confident the special relationship would go from strength to strength.'

Mrs May 'highlighted her wish to strengthen bilateral trade and investment with the US as we leave the EU'.

She also urged Mr Trump to follow through on his pledge to work to heal the divisions that poisoned a brutal presidential elections campaign.

The remarks may cause embarrassment to Mrs May, pictured outside No 10 on Wednesday, as Downing Street scrambles to forge a relationship with the President-elect

The pair are not the only senior government figures to face embarrassment over past comments. In March, Boris Johnson said Mr Trump was 'clearly out of his mind', and that his call for a ban on Muslims entering the US showed 'stupefying ignorance'.

On Thursday night, however, the Foreign Secretary tried to build bridges in a phone call to the new US vice president about how the two countries can deepen their 'close relationship'. It was the first call Mike Pence had made to any overseas politician.

Mr Johnson said that during their ten-minute conversation, the pair had agreed on the 'importance of the special relationship and need to tackle global challenges'.

But while the Foreign Secretary is socially liberal, the vice president-elect is anti-abortion and has spoken out against gay rights.

The call came after Mr Johnson said critics of Mr Trump's victory should end the 'collective whinge-arama' and be positive.

A spokesman for Mr Johnson said Mr Pence had been 'very effusive' about Britain, and that their conversation was 'very warm'.
Letter sent home to parents described the incident as an 'accident'

stabbed in the neck as classmates

A teenager has been stabbed and police are questioning a 14-year-old boy over the incident at a school in Perth.

A 16-year-old boy was stabbed at Swan View Senior High School about 1.30pm on Friday and was rushed to Midland Health Campus.

A 14-year-old boy is assisting with police inquiries, Perth Now reported.

Scroll down for video

A teenager has been stabbed and police are questioning a 14-year-old boy over the incident at a school in Perth (police pictured at Swan View Senior High School)

A 16-year-old boy was stabbed at Swan View Senior High School (pictured) at about 1.30pm Friday

The teenager was stabbed in the neck and chest, possibly with a knife as classmates watched on during lunchtime, 7 News reported.

It is believed the boys may have been 'play fighting' when the injuries occurred.

The teenager's injuries are not believed to be life threatening.

A letter sent home to parents by the school described the incident as an 'accident'.

'I am writing to inform you that an accident occurred at school this afternoon between two students during which a student was injured,' principal Melesha Sands said in the letter.

A weapon was allegedly concealed in the 14-year-old's backpack.

Police said if charges are laid it will be in regards to concealment and possession of a weapon, not a stabbing offence, Nine News reported.

A Department of Education spokesperson said the department was aware of the matter.

A letter sent home to parents by the school described the incident as an 'accident'.
Haswell, 44, admitted that he was carrying a pornographic film with him

But when he tried to meet the girl in Newcastle he found out it was a sting

This is the moment a man who thought he was about to meet an underage girl was confronted by paedophile hunters.

Jonathan Haswell believed he had been sending graphic messages and pictures of his private parts to a 15-year-old girl online.

But the 44-year-old had been snared by Dark Justice, a two-man organisation set up to catch men looking for sex with underage girls.

This is the moment Jonathan Haswell, who thought he was about to meet an underage girl, was confronted by paedophile hunters

Haswell had told the schoolgirl online they could watch pornographic films together and copy what was happening on screen

The 44-year-old had been snared by Dark Justice, a two-man organisation set up to catch men looking for sex with underage girls

Haswell had told the schoolgirl online they could watch pornographic films together and copy what was happening on screen.

He asked the schoolgirl, who told him she was only 15 and had never had a boyfriend, for pictures in her underwear.

When Haswell turned up to a pre-arranged meeting in Newcastle city centre he confessed he was carrying a pornographic movie.

At Newcastle Crown Court Haswell pleaded guilty to attempting to incite a child to engage in sexual activity.

When Haswell turned up to a pre-arranged meeting in Newcastle city centre he confessed he was carrying a pornographic movie

Haswell, of Birtley, Gateshead, now has to abide by a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for life

He was sentenced to two years imprisonment, suspended for two years, with sex offenders registration for ten years.

Haswell, of Birtley, Gateshead, now has to abide by a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for life.
Advertisement

More than 700,000 British soldiers lost their lives in the First World War but the level of loss was significantly higher in some areas than others.

New research shows that while the big cities lost men in their tens of thousands, it was the smaller northern English and Scottish towns that saw entire generations completely wiped out.

Some of these towns lost a huge chunk of their population in the four-year conflict and historians believe it was because of the 'uniquely British phenomenon' of 'Pals Battalions'.

These were groups of friends and brothers from the same towns who joined up together. Many saw their first day of action during the bloodiest battle in Britain's history - the Somme offensive.

A map shows the ten places that saw the most men die in battle. While it was the big cities that lost the highest numbers of men, it was the smaller northern England and Scottish towns that saw entire generations completely wiped out

A British soldier carries a wounded comrade back from the front line during the Battle of the Somme. The battle was the bloodiest in British history and wiped out many Pals Battalions- the groups of friends and brothers from the same towns who joined up together

In terms of sheer numbers of war dead the UKs most populous cities predictably suffered the most losses.

In London 41,833 men never returned home. Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool also saw their war dead numbers reach the tens of thousands.

But it was the northern and Scottish towns that saw their populations hardest hit. In Durham 6,300 men lost their lives. This was equivalent to almost two in ten men in the city and nearly eight per cent of the total population.

Another Country Durham town, Bishop Auckland, was also it hard losing more than six per cent of just 13,600 people, all of them men between 18 and 50-years-old.

Derby lost almost six per cent of its population and Dumfries five per cent, according to genealogy company Ancestry.

Nine of the 10 towns and cities that lost the highest proportion of their population are in Northern England and Scotland.

In part, historians have put the heavy loses these towns saw down to the formation of the 'Pals Battalions'.

When war broke out in 1914 it quickly became clear that Britain's well-trained but small army was not going to be large enough to handle the scale of the conflict.

Men advancing during the Somme. Many Pals Battalions did not see their first action until the first day of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. The offensive lasted almost five months and more than one million men died

A horse-drawn limber takes ammunition to the forward guns along the Lesboeufs Road, outside Flers, in November 1916 during the final stages of the Somme offensive

A recruitment drive began and men volunteered for service in droves in the summer and autumn on 1914. Many signed up in groups with friends and family members forming 'Pals Battalions'.

Imperial War Museum historian Matt Brosnan told MailOnline: 'Pal Battalions were a uniquely British phenomenon. We didn't have this huge army or conscription like the French did and we needed men to sign up quickly.

'The main attraction of Pals Battalions was that men were more likely to join up in large numbers if they could serve together with their friends, brothers and other relatives. Men were particularity recruited from urban and working class areas.

'The element of camaraderie was really important, not just for the men that joined up but also for the wider local communities.

'Unfortunately the downsides became apparent when the units were committed to battle and the huge loses they saw had massive impacts on the communities.'

Nine of the 10 towns and cities that lost the highest proportion of their population during the First World War are in Northern England and Scotland

Troops from the 10th Battalion , East Yorkshire Regiment marching to the trenches near Doullens, on June 28, 1916.

Heavy recruitment of these young and untrained men took place all over the country but was particularly prevalent in the North and Scotland.

Many Pals Battalions did not see their first action until the first day of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. The offensive lasted almost five months and more than one million men died.

'Proportionally, the north was thoroughly represented by Pals Battalions,' said Mr Brosnan.

In terms of sheer numbers of war dead the the UKs most populous cities suffered the most losses. In London 41,833 men never returned home

More than 700,000 British men died during First World War. Some 20,000 of these soldiers were killed on July 1, 2016 - during the first day of the Battle of the Somme

'The loses many suffered was in part down to an element of bad luck. Quite a lot of Pals' first experience of war was the first day of the Somme,the bloodiest day in British history.

'There were almost 60,000 casualties on the first day and just under 20,000 died - a good portion of that number were Pals Battalions.

The heavy losses experienced during the battle were catastrophic for the Pals Battalions and the towns they were formed in, especially those with smaller populations.

Troops coming back from the front line in a photograph taken near Bronfay Farm, Bray, on September 23, 1916

Britain did not have a large or constrcripted ary at the beginning of WWI. Heavy recruitment of young and untrained men took place all over the country but was particularly prevalent in the North and Scotland

The heavy losses experienced during the Battle of the Somme were catastrophic for the Pals Battalions and the towns they were formed in, especially those with smaller populations

Durham had six Pals Battalions, and Derby had two, which go some way towards accounting for the higher than average mortality rates.

Due to the volume of deceased and injured soldiers the government was forced to bring in conscription in 1916and men were no longer as likely to be grouped together with brothers and friends.

Mr Brosnan added: 'The army is all based on volunteers until the middle of March 1916 and then the conscripts take effect. After that point the army doesn't actually tend to group men together in the same way.'

Scotland was very badly affected by the First World War and many men did not return to their towns. Large Scottish towns like Dumfries and Perth suffered but so too did smaller towns like Lanark, which had a population of just 5,900 in 1911 and had lost four per cent of that when the war came to an end in 1918.

People across the world came together today to remember those who died fighting in World War One and other conflicts

Trafalgar Square: Two minutes' silence was observed impeccably at 11am next to the square's fountains and below Nelson's Column
Iraqi Kurdish fighters are building a berm in the desert near Mosul that could demarcate a boundary of the state they hope to establish after the Islamic State group is defeated.

They have been working methodically, like in a factory line, packing dirt into sacks, sealing them and then stacking them firmly atop the berm cutting across the sands near the battleground city.

Armed with bulldozers and shovels, the Kurdish forces are fortifying the barrier, about 60 kilometres (40 miles) west of the Kurds' regional capital Arbil, that separated them from Iraqi federal forces.

Scroll down for video

Iraqi Kurdish fighters are pictured building a berm in the desert near Mosul that could demarcate a boundary of the state they hope to establish

This line in the sand may ultimately delineate some of the territory that the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq aims to keep after the end of the war against IS jihadists -- a goal that could increase tensions with Baghdad.

Before the joint offensive to take on the terror group, the U.S.-backed coalition including the Iraqi federal forces and Kurdish fighters, are not thought to have discussed what would happen to the land after ISIS was defeated.

While federal forces still have weeks if not months of fighting ahead in the Mosul area, Kurdish peshmerga fighters say their objectives have been completed less than a month into the operation.

'If the peshmerga enters an area and liberates it, it will stay with the peshmerga,' said a local Kurdish chief, Major General Jamal Weis.

Kurdish forces have gained or solidified control over swathes of northern territory that is also claimed by Baghdad in the course of the war against IS.

Starting from near the village of Shaqouli, AFP correspondents drove along the sand berm for at least 20 kilometres (14 miles), and the barrier still extends to the northwest.

After chasing IS out of the town of Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul, the peshmerga forces say they have fulfilled their side of the deal in the battle for Iraq's second city.

Kurdish forces are fortifying the sand barrier that separated them from Iraqi federal forces

A Yazidi woman who joined the Kurdish Peshmerga forces sits next to rifles in the town of Bashiqa, after it was recaptured from the Islamic State, east of Mosul

'According to the plan we set with the unity government, the peshmerga has now accomplished all the goals set for it,' said Jabbar Yawar, secretary general of the Kurds' peshmerga ministry.

Peshmerga commander Major General Aziz Weis agreed: 'All the areas that had been set as targets for us are finished.'

Asked about the newly-erected sand barrier, Yawar said it was meant to protect Kurdish forces against potential IS car bombings or suicide attacks.

'We are not redrawing geographic borders. This sand berm is to protect the peshmerga from future operations by Daesh,' he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

But analysts say the barrier -- as well as the peshmerga's presence in territory like Bashiqa and oil-rich Kirkuk province to the east -- indicated more long-term objectives.

'The peshmerga's defensive lines may be justified rhetorically as defences against IS attacks,' said Patrick Martin from the US-based Institute for the Study of War.

'But they also are indicators of a new reality in Iraq that the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government) has de-facto extended its control over a significantly larger portion of Iraq than previously held,' he said.

This graphic shows how the different groups have carved up territory in the battle for Mosul. The Kurdish troops are attacking the city from the northwest

A Peshmerga soldier mans a fortified position along a sand berm north of the Iraqi Kurdish checkpoint village of Shaqouli, some 35 kilometres east of Mosul, on November 10

Going forward, the KRG will focus 'on ensuring that they retain control over the terrain that the peshmerga presently occupy and work to integrate these areas into the Iraqi Kurdistan region,' said Martin.

Nate Rosenblatt, a researcher at the University of Oxford, said the berm was 'the product of years of informal influence in these areas by the KRG'.

He expected the peshmerga to 'impose strict controls for those who can travel to Mosul from Bashiqa and the surrounding areas in the future'.

A new peshmerga checkpoint has already been set up on the main road from Arbil towards Mosul.

The first Iraqi army checkpoint stands a few hundred metres (yards) away, with the two positions already operating like border crossings.

The peshmerga search truckloads of displaced Iraqis fleeing IS-held Mosul towards camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, and they also examine papers authorising displaced civilians in Kurdish-controlled territory to travel west to check on their homes in villages held by Iraqi forces.

'As military personnel, we are responsible for holding this border,' said Brigadier General Kamal Majid Fakhri, a local peshmerga official visiting the checkpoint.

'The peshmerga will stay in control of this area in coordination with the asayish (Kurdish internal security) to keep it stable. This is all in service of the residents of this region.'

A Yazidi woman who joined the Kurdish Peshmerga forces inspects a temple destroyed by the Islamic State militants in the town of Bashiqa
Call to arms is echoed by EU's head of diplomacy, who called for the EU to act as the 'principal global security provider'

Juncker says Trump 's isolationist foreign policy gives Europe no choice but to

Donald Trump's election as US President makes an EU army even more necessary, Eurocrats have said.

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, said Mr Trump's pledge to cut spending on Nato and his isolationist approach to foreign policy gives Europe no choice but to strengthen its commons security and defence structures.

His call to arms was echoed by the EU's head of diplomacy, who called for the bloc to become a 'superpower' and act as the 'principal global security provider'.

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, pictured on Wednesday in Berlin, said Mr Trump's pledge to cut spending on Nato and his isolationist approach to foreign policy gives Europe no choice but to strengthen its commons security and defence structures to build an EU army

It has sent alarm bells ringing in Britain as MPs fear that an EU army and a disengaged America will leave the UK isolated on the global stage.

Setting out his plans to press ahead with building an EU army, Mr Juncker said: 'The Americans, to whom we owe much ... will not ensure the security of the Europeans in the long term. We have to do this ourselves.

'That is why we need a new start in the field of European defence, up to the goal of setting up a European army.'

Federica Mogherini, the EU high representative who represents the bloc on the global stage - published extensive plans for an EU army in the summer, deliberately waiting until after Britain's EU referendum.

Yesterday she said the EU must strengthen militarily in response to Mr Trump's election to the White House.

'In a changing global landscape, Europe will be more and more an indispensable power,' she said.

'This is the time to take on our responsibilities and to respond to that call and we can do this only as a true union.'

Trump's pledge to cut spending on Nato and his isolationist approach to foreign policy gives Europe no choice but to strengthen its commons security and defence structures, Jean-Claude Juncker said. Pictured, Donald Trump is pictured addressing his supporters after his shock election victory on Wednesday

Julian Brazier, Tory MP and former Armed Forces, said: 'We [the UK] will have to revisit our level of defence spending because of the rising threat to our security and the Trump victory.'

Reaction to Mr Trump's shock victory on Wednesday was much colder in tone on the continent than Theresa May's warm congratulations.

French President Francois Hollande said his election 'opens a period of uncertainty' that must be met by a united Europe, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticised Mr Trump's confrontational campaign and offered only grudging congratulations.

EU Council boss Donald Tusk urged Trump to commit to strengthening relations with Brussels, including on Russia's actions and the future of the US-EU trade deal

She said her offer of 'close cooperation' was dependent with Mr Trump was dependent on him respecting liberal values.

EU chiefs were sent into a state of panic by the Republican's emphatic victory, amid fears he will prefer to deal with a post-Brexit Britain than the overly bureaucratic and notoriously cumbersome EU bloc.

European Parliament president Martin Schulz immediately warned that it had been 'another Brexit night' and said it was clear that a 'wave of protest' was engulfing established politics.

France's ambassador to the US, Gerard Araud, tweeted: 'After Brexit and this election, everything is now possible. A world is collapsing before our eyes.'

Eurosceptics in Austria, France and the Netherlands lined up to claim they would be next to cause upsets in elections planned for the coming months.

EU Council chief Donald Tusk, who publicly opposed Mr Trump during the campaign, urged the President-elect to commit to strengthening relations with Brussels, including on Russia's actions in the Ukraine and the future of the troubled US-EU trade deal.

He and Mr Juncker have invited Mr Trump to visit Europe for a summit meeting with the EU.

They offered their 'sincere congratulations' to the new US president-elect and stressed it was 'more important than ever' to work together to tackle problems including Islamic State, also known as Daesh.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pictured on Wednesday in Berlin, criticised Mr Trump's confrontational campaign and offered only grudging congratulations

French President Francois Hollande, pictured last month in Paris, said Donald Trump's election 'opens a period of uncertainty' that must be met by a united Europe while

The two leaders said on Wednesday: 'The strategic partnership between the European Union and the United States is rooted in our shared values of freedom, human rights, democracy and a belief in the market economy.

'Over the years, the European Union and the United States have worked together to ensure peace and prosperity for our citizens and for people around the world.

'Today, it is more important than ever to strengthen transatlantic relations. Only by co-operating closely can the EU and the US continue to make a difference when dealing with unprecedented challenges such as Daesh, the threats to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, climate change and migration.

'Fortunately, the EU-US strategic partnership is broad and deep: from our joint efforts to enhance energy security and address climate change, through EU-US collaboration on facing threats to security in Europe's eastern and southern neighbourhoods, and to the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership - we should spare no effort to ensure that the ties that bind us remain strong and durable.

'We should consolidate the bridges we have been building across the Atlantic. Europeans trust that America, whose democratic ideals have always been a beacon of hope around the globe, will continue to invest in its partnerships with friends and allies, to help make our citizens and the people of the world more secure and more prosperous.
Tesco refused to allow Laura Leeks, 34, free parking as she bought formula milk

Tesco has come under fire for refusing to allow a young mother a free parking voucher because she had only bought formula milk for her baby.

Laura Leeks, 34, was left shocked when a checkout worker at the Braintree store said they would not issue her with free parking because it does not offer any rewards for customers on buying infant formula milk.

She cannot breastfeed because her five-month-old son cannot tolerate the high fat content of breast milk after having lifesaving heart surgery.

Tesco cited a public health law banning promotions on the product, saying discounts were also banned on cigarettes.

Many stores offer free parking, or a parking refund, to customers who spend a minimum amount.

If Mrs Leeks had bought another item (such as bread or milk), then she would have been entitled to a refunded parking voucher.

Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons and Waitrose have similar policies and purchases of baby milk do not count toward reward schemes such as Clubcard or Nectar.

It is not allowed under the 2007 Infant Formula and Follow-on Formula Regulations.

The rules were brought in by the Department of Health which last night blamed Brussels. 'The rules are in place because of EU regulations,' said a spokesman. 'We have voted to leave the EU, and it may well be that the law can be changed.'

The incident took place at the store in Essex last Friday and she shared her experience on Tesco's Facebook page in an impassioned post.

She said: 'I cannot accept Tesco's policies lead to staff shaming women who for whatever reason are using baby formula.'

She wrote: 'I visited your Braintree town centre store today. I was advised by your customer service team that they could not issue me a parking voucher as I had only bought baby formula.

'On further questioning I was advised that Tesco 'supports breast feeding' and cannot 'endorse formula feeding by rewarding customers' (with discount off parking).

'I am delighted that you as a company support breast feeding.

'However I cannot accept that your policies lead to your staff shaming women who for whatever reason are using baby formula.'

Tesco also do not issue parking vouchers for customers buying tobacco.

Mrs Leeks said she 'could not accept the comparison of formula feeding with the harmful effects of smoking.'

The young mother was refused a parking voucher at Tesco as she had bought formula milk

Breast milk is regarded as hugely beneficial, with proven advantages for children including a stronger immune system, stronger digestive system and lower risk of obesity.

The NHS suggests that women should feed their babies exclusively with breast milk until they are at least six months old, and then continue breastfeeding for as long as possible while gradually introducing other food.

But not all mothers can breastfeed and those who rely on formula milk include women who take certain medications, or are being treated for cancer, or those whose children simply struggle to breastfeed.

In her post Mrs Leeks shared the moving story as to why she uses infant formula milk.

'When my baby boy was 15 days old he stopped breathing at home', she explained.

'My husband and I were able to resuscitate him and thanks to the amazing NHS he was stabilised, diagnosed with a congenital heart defect and urgently transferred to a specialist heart and lung hospital.

'For the next two weeks he remained in a critical condition on life support machines and at four weeks old he underwent life saving open heart surgery.

Ms Leeks said she 'guilt-tripped' by Tesco staff following the incident at the Braintree store

WHAT THE RULES SAY ABOUT INFANT FORMULA MILK Under 2007 government regulations created in response to world health guidelines, UK shops are barred from discounting infant formula milk. The law prohibits 'special sales' to promote the sale of an infant formula or 'any other special activity' by a retailer to induce the sale of an infant formula. Examples given include multi packs (bulk packs), loyalty/reward card schemes, free formula, price reductions, discounts or mark downs and buy one get one free offers. Advertisement

'Following the surgery he was unable to tolerate the high fat content of breast milk and was fed a specialist low fat feed via a feeding tube.

'During this whole time I continued to express my milk and when he was able to tolerate fat, we attempted to re-establish breast feeding.

'Unfortunately as he was still in recovery from this major surgery, the effort needed to breast feed was too much stress for him and we had to resort to bottle feeding.

'Inevitably despite my best attempt my milk production could not meet his demand and I had no choice but to supplement with formula feed.

'My baby is now nearly five months old and fighting fit. I remain sad that I could not solely breast feed him however I am reassured that due to the nutritious formula he is happy, healthy and growing well.

'I do not however need to be guilt-tripped by a Tesco employee who has absolutely no knowledge of my circumstances.'

She added: 'I hope you are able to give your staff the training they clearly require in order to treat women in this situation with more compassion in the future.'

Tesco policy means it does not provide rewards for infant breast milk, as well as cigarettes, lottery products, or prescription medicines

WHAT THE OTHER SUPERMARKETS SAY Sainsbury's: 'Due to government legislation, we're unable to include infant formula in any of our instore or online promotions.' Morrisons: 'We do not offer points on the following limited range of products or services: single-use carrier bags, cash back, fireworks, lottery, online games and instant tickets, tobacco, tobacco related products, prescription medicines and pharmacy services, infant milk or formula, gift vouchers, gift cards, mobile phone cards, mobile phone vouchers, e top-ups, bonus stamps, postage stamps, saver stamps, car park tickets, online delivery charges and vending machines.' Waitrose: 'Items we offer no discount on include infant formula, single use carrier bags, tobacco, stamps, mobile top ups, e-Top up vouchers, lottery tickets, gift vouchers, cash back, car park charges, fuel and delivery charges.' Advertisement

She won support from her Facebook post with people calling Tesco's decision 'disgusting' and 'ridiculous'.

Tara Hanmer wrote: 'That's appalling. It's great Tesco support breastfeeding but they don't need to demonise formula feeding to do it.'

Nicola Fleury wrote: 'The fact that baby milk means you cannot redeem a parking voucher is disgusting.

'A fed baby is a happy baby, no one has the right whatsoever to pass judgement on how you decide to feed your child.'

A spokesman for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service said: 'It's really shocking that this could happen.

'Infant milk is subject to stringent advertising restrictions not dissimilar to those on tobacco, and shops are not allowed to offer promotions - so you can't get loyalty points for example on the purchase of formula milk, and this particularly absurd case - a free parking space.

'To put it bluntly, formula milk is not the same as fags. We really need to challenge some of the stigma around formula milk, which is enforced by these kind of regulations.

'Women are not stupid, and are unlikely to ditch breastfeeding and switch to formula on the basis of loyalty points or the offer of free parking.'

Mike Brady from Baby Milk Action said: 'The law doesn't stop companies selling formula or mothers buying it, just the promotion of it.

'There should be no promotion of infant formula and it cannot be included in reward schemes, which would include offering free parking specifically for purchasing infant formula.

'Just like a mother buying infant formula, a mother who is breastfeeding would also have to buy qualifying products to benefit from free parking at Tesco.

'Tesco should perhaps review its parking policy and how it communicates this in the rare cases where a mother is buying only infant formula.'

A spokesman for Tesco said: 'We always strive to provide the best possible service for our customers and we understand Mrs Leek's request.

'However, due to UK law we cannot promote baby formula in any way, including the offering of a parking voucher.'
The tragic death of Elly Warren has local police baffled after the 20-year-old was found dead in a toilet cubicle in Africa.

Mozambique police are searching for answers, with no suspects, after the Melbourne woman was last seen dropping her bag off at a beachside hostel.

Ms Warren's family were told she was raped and attacked as she made her way back to the hostel alone after attending a party on Wednesday.

But police say she died a sudden death with no signs of bruising or a struggle, according to The Age.

Scroll down for video

Elly Warren, from Melbourne, was travelling Africa before she tragically died on Wednesday

The 20-year-old had been holidaying and doing a volunteer stint in Mozambique

'It looks like a sudden death,' Inhamabane province Detective Juma Dauto told the publication.

'We are in doubt as to what could have happened.'

Detective Dauto also said there were no suspects, and witnesses allege they saw her go into the toilet for '20 or 30 minutes'.

As investigations continue, an autopsy will be held in Mozambique capital Maputo.

Tragically, Ms Warren was expected to return to Australia on Monday before heading to New Zealand with her boyfriend for a holiday.

Days before she set off for Africa, the 20-year-old told her father: 'It's dangerous Dad, I don't know if I should be going over there.'

The young woman had booked two nights at the Wuyani Pariango backpackers in Tofo Bay

The young traveller had booked two nights at the beachfront Wuyani Pariango backpackers in the picturesque Tofo Bay but she failed to return to her room.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, the hostel manager, who wished to remain anonymous, said staff members had seen the woman before she went missing.

'She came in alone to drop off her bag and then left to meet a friend,' the hostel manager revealed.

'She had pre-booked her accommodation but never stayed here.'

Daily Mail Australia understands Ms Warren's body is currently being transported from Tofo Beach to the country's capital Maputo, some 500 kilometres away where a post-mortem will be performed.

Paul Warren, the distraught father of the avid traveller, is currently travelling to Mozambique in an effort to bring his daughter's body home.

On Thursday he revealed his heartbreak over his daughter's terrible death.

A tearful Mr Warren told 7News: 'She even told me, 'It's dangerous dad, I don't know if I should be going over there'.

The hostel manager said staff saw Ms Warren drop her bag off before heading out to see a friend but she failed to return to her room (pictured is one of the rooms at the hostel)

'And I said to her: 'Yes it is, very dangerous'.'

On Thursday evening, hours after paying a moving Facebook tribute to his daughter, Mr Warren also revealed on social media an autopsy would be conducted to determine her cause of death.

'I would just like everyone to pray for our Elly right now,' he wrote on Facebook.

'She is at peace with Sam, our dog, who she grew up with and loved dearly. Thank you all for your thoughts and well wishes Elly touched us all in some special way.

'The funeral is going to take some time as Elly was in a remote fishing village called Pemba.

'There is going to be an investigation and autopsy, which I have been informed can take up to two weeks.

'I will be going over there in a few day to bring my baby back home. God bless you Elly Rose Warren.'

The young traveller had booked two nights at the Wuyani Pariango backpackers in Tofo Bay

Staff members at the hostel claimed they saw Ms Warren drop her bag off before heading back out to meet a friend

Her family, who found out about the young traveller's death in a heartbreaking late-night phone call from another backpacker, believe she became separated from her group before her body was later found in a toilet cubicle, The Age reported.

The revelation comes after her sister Kristy Warren took to Facebook to warn backpackers to be 'careful who they go [travelling] with'.

'My sister was in Africa whilst my mum got a phone call from one of the backpackers saying to her that her daughter has been murdered,' Ms Warren posted to Facebook.

'As I heard that my heart dropped. It is a parent's nightmare to get a phone call like this.'

Describing her sister as 'maybe too ambitious', she urged travellers to be vigilant when overseas.

'I want to say if you are thinking of going travelling or going overseas please be careful who you go with,' she wrote.

Ms Warren had been in the country since late September as part of Underwater Africa, a conservation program that 'helps protect the oceans'.

The volunteer tour's booking manager Graeme Warrack told Daily Mail Australia the young traveller had left their group the day before she was killed.

A room at the backpackers Ms Warren was last seen before her death

Ms Warren (pictured) has been killed while on a volunteer holiday to Mozambique, Africa

The 20-year-old from Mordialloc, in Melbourne's south-east suburbs, pictured with her boyfriend

'Elly arrived with us on the 27th of September and left our program on the November 8,' he said.

'We dropped her at her new accommodation at 5pm, to hear the news the next day has left us as broken as anyone can be, she was our friend and colleague.

'We're trying to find out where exactly she went once she left us, that's something we can't answer.'

Mr Warrack described Ms Warren as 'the life of the party' and said her death had taken a large toll on her fellow volunteers and scientists.

'Elly was an incredible volunteer who was doubtlessly the life and soul of any activity,' he said.

Ms Warren's mother, Nicole Cafarella told The Age her daughter was 'just one of those girls that wanted to travel the world and see everything she could before she was 30'.

Just days earlier Ms Warren had posted a video to Facebook of herself swimming with whale sharks off the Mozambique coast.

Her father Paul also shared a tribute on social media and even passed on his condolences to her boyfriend (right) in the midst of his own grief

Tributes flowed online from Ms Warren's friends and family following news of her death

Ms Warren's sister Kristy took to Facebook to share a tribute to her sister and to tell how her mother had received a call from a fellow backpacker telling her of the terrible news

Just days before her death Ms Warren (third from left) posted a video to Facebook of her diving with whale sharks

Dozens of online tributes flowed from Ms Warren's friends from Wednesday evening when news broke of her death.

'Taken way too soon, a gorgeous girl who had an amazing life ahead,' one girl wrote on Facebook.

'I feel like this is all just a f***ed up dream... It can't be true. Rip Elly Warren I'll never forget your huge infectious smile and crazy stories. I love you,' another posted.
The alleged abduction of a 14-year-old girl in Oxford did not take place, police have said.

The girl reported she had been taken from the street while walking to school in the Summertown area of the city in September and later raped.

Police said today that they are continuing to investigate the girl's rape claim, but do not believe she was kidnapped from the street.

The Thames Valley force said they have carried out a 'through examination' of CCTV, dashcam footage and witness statements.

A spokesman said: 'We can confirm that the evidence gathered indicates that the reported abduction did not take place.'

Police officers stood guard near City schools in the days after the girl made her claims

Forensic experts spent hours at the wooded area where the girl said she was raped

Despite ruling out the abduction, the spokesman added: 'Thames Valley Police continue to investigate an offence of rape against the victim and are following all lines of enquiries to establish what has taken place.

'Specially trained officers and staff from the police, Oxfordshire County Council Children's Services, Health and other agencies continue to work with the victim, at her pace.'

The schoolgirl told police she was walking to school when she was snatched from the street before being driven away and raped in the car by two men on Wednesday, September 28.

The alleged victim said she was grabbed near a busy crossroads by a man who pushed her into the car where an accomplice waited, detectives said. She said her ordeal lasted around four hours.

She raised the alarm by knocking on doors in a housing estate. Later, based on her descriptions, police released e-fits on the suspects they were looking for but did not find them.

In the aftermath of the claims, schools urged their pupils to walk in groups as police stepped up patrols.

Descriptions of two white men in their late teens or early 20s, one with a Northern accent, followed on October 1.

But it was not until ten days after the incident that e-fits of two suspects were issued.

Police released these two e-fits of the men alleged to have carried out the offences

The manhunt came just three days after a 19-year-old woman was sexually assaulted by two men in the early hours as she walked home from a night out in nearby Headington.

Thames Valley Police investigated possible links between the attacks and said a 'small silver hatchback' - possibly a Volkswagen - held the key to finding the two white men who carried out the rape.

Forensic teams also spent days combing a wooded area close to the housing estate where she was found at Marston village, looking for clues and forensic evidence.

The girl, who was described as 'extremely traumatised', said she stumbled through the woods - where triple killer Jed Allen was found hanged after murdering three members of his family in Didcot last year - after escaping from her attackers.

The girl said she was snatched near a doctor's surgery before being driven to a quiet spot where she was raped by both men in the car.

The girl claimed she was found after knocking on doors in this street in Oxford in September

Announcing the development, a police spokesman said officers were no longer looking for the small silver hatchback vehicle.

Local Police Commander for Oxford City, Supt Joe Kidman said today: 'This incident has understandably caused a great deal of community concern.

'Attacks such as initially reported are mercifully rare and will always be treated extremely seriously and thoroughly investigated.

'In the weeks after the incident higher visibility patrols were in place to provide reassurance and gather information. We have worked with schools in the area on their security plans and are ready to respond to concerns raised.

'Working with vulnerable and young victims is an extremely complex and lengthy process and it is paramount that they are protected appropriately.'

On October 12, a rape survivor waived her anonymity and read an open letter on camera, offering support to the girl.
Eve Magiera argues that her millionaire husband Edward has left her with 'absolutely no capital' after their split

A wife is battling her high-earning ex in court after he got a court order barring her from their 2 million home.

Globetrotting millionaire Edward Magiera told his wife Eve that she deserved just 10% of their wealth when they split, despite a 27-year marriage and three children.

Mr Magiera, 58, an international diplomat and businessman, also obtained an injunction banning his ex-wife from entering their 2 million house in Chiswick.

But she now says she has been 'left with absolutely no capital' whilst he continues to earn 'a very high income.'

She is asking the divorce courts to hand her a 1million payout, by ordering the London house be sold and the proceeds split 50/50.

But Mr Magiera is challenging the move in the Court of Appeal, insisting the English courts have no business getting involved in the financial wrangling.

The court heard that Mrs Magiera and her husband married in London in 1985 and separated in 2001. Their children are now adults.

Whilst married, the couple built up an international property portfolio, including a house in the south of France, a flat in Warsaw and the Chiswick house.

But, after they split, the animosity between the pair became so intense that in 2004 the husband was granted a High Court injunction 'to stop her from coming to the London house', which is still in force.

The pair were finally divorced in France in 2013 and the house in well-heeled Chiswick, is now occupied by the warring couple's children.

Mrs Magiera insists that the house should be sold, and the proceeds split down the middle, to give her enough capital to live on.

The ex-couple are already engaged to the hilt in court action in Poland, with Mr Magiera claiming that fully 90% of the marital assets should be his.

But his ex-wife's barrister, Timothy Amos QC, claimed he was mounting a relentless legal 'filibuster' in a bid to stop her getting a fair share of the family wealth.

Mrs Magiera wants to sell the couple's 2million home (pictured) in Chiswick, west London, and split the profits between them

Michael Horton, for Mr Magiera, in turn accused his ex-wife of 'forum shopping' in the hope of getting a better deal in England.

'The parties have already been through protracted divorce proceedings in France', he said, and are 'part way through proceedings in Poland'.

And Mr Magiera says his objection to the involvement of the English courts lies in his 'desire not to have to litigate in a third country'.

A 1million payout to Mrs Magiera would be 'incompatible' with the order he hopes to obtain in Poland for a 90/10 split of the total marital assets.

Mr Horton said the couple are both British citizens, as well as Polish nationals, and they were married in the UK.

Their children are also British, but Mr Magiera is 'domiciled' in Poland and that is where the battle with his ex-wife should be fought, he argued.

Mr Amos said Mrs Magiera was joint owner of the Chiswick house, with her ex, and reasonably wanted to sell it.

Her ex-husband still 'earns a very high income' but she has struggled to make ends meet since the split.

The barrister added: 'The wife needs the court's protection. She can ill afford this litigation.'

The court case in Poland 'would be likely to take more than 12 years,' he told the court.

'The husband's present application is a filibuster aimed at stymying the wife's legitimate request to sell their joint London property,' he claimed.

Mr Magiera is challenging a divorce judge's ruling last year that the English courts have jurisdiction to resolve the dispute over the Chiswick house.
Advertisement

These dramatic before and after pictures show how the jungle migrant camp in Calais has now been bulldozed into a barren wasteland.

The vast shanty town which was home to more than 10,000 migrants hoping to reach Britain just weeks ago is now unrecognisable.

Displaced refugees are now being temporarily housed at more than 160 Welcome and Orientation Centres (CAOs) across France until they are relocated.

Dramatic before and after pictures show how the jungle migrant camp in Calais has now been bulldozed into a barren wasteland

The vast shanty town which was home to more than 10,000 migrants hoping to reach Britain just weeks ago is now unrecognisable

Displaced refugees are now being temporarily housed at more than 160 Welcome and Orientation Centres (CAOs) across France until they are relocated

Where shacks, tents and caravans once stood is now a barren sandy scrubland following the mass clear-out ordered by French president Francois Hollande in October.

Riot police clashed with migrants refusing to leave the camp in the middle of an industrial site close to the Calais ferry port.

And a few illegal camps sprang up nearby but police have now razed them to the ground.

French authorities say there were an estimated 6,500 migrants camped in Calais but Charity Help Refugees said the final population ahead of its demolition was 8,143.

Where shacks, tents and caravans once stood is now a barren sandy scrubland following the mass clear-out ordered by French president Francois Hollande

French authorities say there were an estimated 6,500 migrants camped in Calais but Charity Help Refugees said the final population ahead of its demolition was 8,143

Last month, authorities demolished the notorious Jungle shantytown in the northern port of Calais - the main launchpad for attempts to smuggle across the Channel to Britain

France's Socialist government is anxious to show it has a handle on migration in the run-up to presidential and parliamentary elections next year

Thousands of Calais migrants were transferred to temporary reception centres, but some fled to Paris after the Jungle was closed

The sound of refugees singing songs round the campfires and chatter in the vibrant jungle library and community centre is now a distance memory.

Help Refugees field manager Philli Boyle, 32, remembers the camp's squalid conditions where she had been since September 2015.

He said the camp was 'not worthy of human inhabitation' and had a rat infestation.

She said: 'The conditions got a lot worse because there was twice as many people living in half the space when the southern part of the camp closed in March.

The last buses out of the Calais Jungle left the French camp last Thursday, carrying 291 migrants, mostly couples and women with children, to shelters around the country

The transfers ended a 10-day operation to clear the camp on France's north coast, where more than 6,000 migrants - mostly Afghans, Sudanese and Eritreans - had been living in miserable conditions

Pictures show how the area was crowded with tents and caravans just weeks ago (left). Today, it is a barren patch of wasteland

Riot police clashed with migrants refusing to leave the camp in the middle of an industrial site close to the Calais ferry port

Fire broke out in the camp as migrants were being cleared from the are last month. Today, the area has been cleared

'There are no refugees left in the camp and since I've been here there have been probably between 7,000 and 10,000 most of the time.

'It's quite eerie to see a place that's had so much life and so many stories and there has been such a community to suddenly not exist anymore.

'Especially for those who have been here for such a long time, have seen it develop and worked in the camp it's very surreal.

'We had a lot of really vibrant community spaces. Over the year we had a jungle books library and school. It provided respite, education, lessons. That was an important community hub.

Squalor: The camp was often flooded and aid workers said there was a rat infestation. Pictures show how it has been totally cleared

Up in smoke: The Jungle camp site has been completely cleared after a major ten-day operation at the end of October

Comparison photographs show life in the last days of the Calais 'Jungle' refugee camp at the end of October, alongside the current scene

Conditions were described as 'inhumane' inside the makeshift camp which has now been bulldozed by French authorities

'We had people like the info bus who brought high-speed internet and gave information around asylum so that was another important part of the community for people living there to be able to be connected to friends and family.

'Other amazing community spaces included the women's centre and the youth centre who built up a movement of volunteers who saw that there was a need for support, education and safeguarding that was not been provided by the Government.

'There were a lot of beautiful initiatives built by refugee communities and by volunteers together. Those were not humane conditions for people to live in.'

Migrants are shown (left) in the Jungle camp days before its closure in October. The shanty town has now bee demolished (right)

Refugees have now been transported to new accommodation around France after their Calais home was bulldozed

Clean-up: The site was once home to thousands of refugees but has since been destroyed by French authorities

Migrants sit in the Jungle camp as tents and shacks burn in the background (left). The same spot is pictured as it appears today (right)

French authorities launched a ten-day operation to close the camp and transported thousands to new accommodation

She described how the clear out of adults ran surprising smoothly, even though a small number missed their chance to get on provided buses to CAOs.

But she heavily criticised officials for leaving the safety of thousands of children 'until the last minute'.
Police in Spain have arrested two Brits suspected of blowing up more than a dozen cash machines in the Costa del Sol area

Police in Spain have arrested two Brits suspected of blowing up more than a dozen cash machines in the Costa del Sol area.

The pair were held during a 4am raid on Wednesday in the resort of Calahonda between Marbella and Fuengirola and were jailed pending an investigation.

Detectives discovered hand grenades during a search as well as cash believed to have come from the raids, electrical cables, gas cylinders and other tools.

Officers in Malaga province had made catching the gang one of their priorities after 15 ATM attacks in just over three months along the Costa del Sol as well as in towns inland.

Two Spaniards were also arrested and one of them has also been sent to jail pending an ongoing judicial probe.

Court sources said the trio were being probed on suspicion of a string of crimes including theft, possession of weapons of war, drugs offences and membership of a criminal gang.

Officers in Malaga province had made catching the gang one of their priorities after 13 ATM attacks in just over three months along the Costa del Sol as well as in towns inland

Four attacks took place in the two weekends prior to the arrests.

In most cases the robbers used explosives to blow up the cash machines and in others acetylene gas to produce the blasts.

The amount of cash taken during the daring raids has not been revealed, although police are understood to be probing the possibility it was reinvested in other activities linked to organised crime.

Unspecified amounts of cocaine and cannabis resin are also said to have been found in the property where the unnamed Brits were arrested.

The Spanish men were held on suspicion of supplying the Brits with the acetylene gas and acting as intermediaries.

The bank attacks began in July when two Santander Bank ATMs were blown up over a three-week period, two in Malaga and another in nearby Cala del Moral where the bank itself was destroyed because of the amount of explosive used.

Most of the attacks took place at weekends or just before Bank Holidays when traditionally ATMs are loaded with more cash.

The bank attacks began in July when two Santander Bank ATMs were blown up over a three-week period, two in Malaga and another in nearby Cala del Moral where the bank itself was destroyed because of the amount of explosive used

An ongoing police and judicial investigation will now seek to establish whether there is enough evidence to charge the suspects with all 13 attacks they are suspected of at this stage, or if another gang responsible for at least some of the assaults is still at large.
Two teenage boys risked their lives by lying on tracks as a train thundered over them - all to show off to internet viewers.

The horrifying film, now deleted after having been posted on social media, shows the young lads running onto a railway track and lying down on the sleepers between the rails.

Seconds later, a train speeds over them, the driver blaring his horn as he is unable to stop in time.

Two careless teenagers risked their lives by playing on a train track in the Czech Republic

The horrifying film, now deleted after having been posted on social media, shows the young lads running onto a railway track and lying down

The teenagers survive the reckless stunt in the Czech Republic, leaping up and running off as soon as the train has passed.

According to Czech Railways, the video was probably filmed in the north-western city of Usti nad Labem.

Martin Drapal from the Railway Inspection told Television Prima that the boys did not realise how dangerous their behaviour was.

Explaining how narrowly they survived, he said: 'Theres a danger that the wind created by the coming train can raise the clothes. The clothes can catch underneath the train. If the train goes at 60 to 70 kph (37 to 43 mph) it can be fatal.'

After lying down between the sleepers the driver beeped his horn in vain before the train passed over them

The teenagers survive the reckless stunt in the Czech Republic, leaping up and running off as soon as the train has passed, but investigators are looking for them

Czech Railways is now searching for the pair who risked their lives for likes.

Marek Ilias, spokesman for the Railway Infrastructure Administration, told TV Prima that was the first to show the video: 'They broke the law and may be fined.'
A worker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been accused of trying to break into a couple's home while impersonating an FBI agent, prosecutors said during his arraignment on Thursday.

Gannon LeBlanc had a loaded handgun, a stun gun and restraints hidden away. He also had a backpack that contained the names of employees at a federal defense research laboratory in Lexington when he asked to use the toilet at the Arlington, New Hampshire home on Wednesday.

The 23-year-old was wearing a black suit, black tie and 'black hat with white FBI lettering' and carrying a bag of weapons when he knocked at the door of the unnamed couple.

Gannon LeBlanc in court on Thursday. The 23-year-old was lost on his way home, according to his attorney

The finance worker was dressed as an FBI agent and was quickly tracked down by police

Arlington cops said they were made aware of suspicious person dressed like an FBI agent in the area and officers quickly located LeBlanc standing at a bus stop near the house.

Arlington Police Chief Frederick Ryan said in a statement: 'I commend the homeowners for having the presence of mind to refuse entry and immediately call the real police.

'Thankfully, our officers responded quickly and were able to locate this individual and restore safety to the neighborhood,' he added.

LeBlanc's attorney, Jonathan Spirn, said in court that LeBlanc works for the finance department at MIT and that he got lost on his way home.

'He happened to be wearing a hat that said FBI. But he didn't try to pose that he was an FBI agent or anything of that nature,' attorney Jonathan Spirn told the judge.

LeBlanc was carrying a loaded handgun, a stun gun and restraints when he knocked at the couple's door

Prosecutors said his backpack also contained four sticky notes with four people's names, addresses and salary information.

Assistant District Attorney Raquel Frisardi told the judge the four people, including the woman who lives at the house LeBlanc had knocked on, all work at the same US Department of Defense research center.

'All of these individuals were subsequently confirmed to be employed by the Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington or by MIT,' Frisardi said.

Police Chief Ryan said investigators are working with federal authorities in a bid to establish a motive.

'This had the potential to be a violent episode,' he said. 'We need to speak with everyone on that list ... to try and figure out what his motive was.'
Australian company took legal action when replaced with cheap look-alike

Woolworths said new pricing proposal forced them to discontinue product

The retailer abruptly ended its relationship with G and M Australian Cosmetics

Woolworths has replaced a popular brand of Australian-made cosmetics with a cheaper overseas product.

The supermarket's decade-long relationship with G and M Australian Cosmetics ended abruptly when the Australian company reportedly raised its wholesale price.

While Woolworths said the new pricing proposal forced them to take the product off its shelves, it was what the retailer did afterwards that prompted the cosmetics company to fight back.

The company founder and managing director of G and M Australian Cosmetics, Zvonko Jordanov, said that Woolworths replaced its line of skincare products.

Products such as Emu Oil moisturising cream, were replaced with a cheaper look-alike brand, claims the ABC.

Woolworths has replaced a popular brand of Australian-made cosmetics with a cheaper overseas product

Mr Jordanov said the lookalike product, which cannot be named for legal reasons, boasted almost identical containers and labels to the Australian product.

He claimed this was what prompted the company to take legal action against Woolworths.

Since action was taken, Mr Jordanov said he could not comment on the issue but said it was settled in a 'nice manner for us'.

The lookalike product was also removed from Woolworths' shelves shortly after.

A Woolworths spokesperson said the decision to switch out the popular Australian brand with a cheaper replacement came down to costing, the ABC reported.

G and M Australian Cosmetics sold Australian made skincare products such as Emu Oil moisturising cream (pictured)

A Woolworths spokesperson said the decision to switch out the popular Australian brand with a cheaper replacement came down to costing

When G and M Australian Cosmetics floated new prices, Woolworths said it did not accept them and was committed to delivering the lowest prices for its customers.

While Woolworths was entitled to its decision to discontinue selling the skin care product based on pricing, it was the supermarket's decision to replace it with a similar-looking product that raised a red flag.

The Australian company, based in New South Wales, was not the only one disappointed by Woolworths' decision to drop the product.

Customer Kim Seagrim expressed her anger with the retailer online, claiming it didn't do the right thing by home-grown Australian businesses.

'Shame on you, Woolworths. Ripping off an Australian company like G&M Cosmetics with some Chinese knock-off,' Ms Seagrim said.

'Let your consumers decide what their price point is. We want quality products and a reasonable profit returned to Australian companies. Not cheap, crap imports so you can line your shareholders' pockets.

'Final straw. Never shopping in your stores again. Ever.'
The Republican push to repeal Obamacare is going on a fast track under a procedure that would make minority Democrats powerless to stop it, the first Republican congressman to endorse President-elect Donald Trump said Friday.

Republicans who now have unified control of Congress plan to move to repeal Obamacare during the first 100 days of the incoming Trump administration, said Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY).

They would do this under a budget procedure called 'reconciliation,' which requires a simple majority vote to approve tax and spending changes.

Scroll down for video

President-elect Donald Trump met with congressional leaders Thursday. The first congressman to back him says GOP leaders will use budget 'reconciliation' to repeal Obamacare  which would deny Democrats the chance to filibuster it

Democrats, who hold a strong minority in the Senate, would be unable to stop it unless they won some Republicans over to their side.

Collins said the first thing on Trump's plate was a repeal of Obama's executive actions. 'That can be done extraordinarily quickly,' he said.

'Repealing Obamacare I believe can be done in the first 100 days. You can repeal sections of it using reconciliation. I dont think the Democrats are going to allow us if you will to just repeal it. They would filibuster that.'

Representative Chris Collins said Republicans would move to repeal Obamacare in Donald Trump's first 100 days, and Democrats won't get to filibuster the change

President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Health Care for America Act during a ceremony with fellow Democrats in the East Room of the White House March 23, 2010 in Washington

Collins spoke just a day after Trump held his first meetings separately with House speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Those two leaders, together with their committee chairman and budget leaders, would decide what kind of procedures get set up for repealing Obamcare.

Collins wasn't as clear about what Obamacare would get replaced with.

'The replacing piece, we have replacement ideas. Were going to have to make sure we run that through the administration. Thats going to take longer. Lets face it itll be a transition. You dont cut it off on a Tuesday and on Wednesday say heres the new plan,' he said.

'Insurance companies have to put out their plans for 2018 in many cases by April. So we do have a timeline that we have to adhere to,' Collins continued. 'For the year of 2017, were not going to be pulling the rug out from anyone.'

Among those provisions Collins said would get repealed were a tax on medical devices that helps pay for the plan, a provision requiring employers to provide Obamacare to employees who work 30 hours or more, the mandate for employers to provide coverage, and a mandate for employees to obtain some type of coverage.

The provisions, if enacted, would gut President Obama's signature achievement. The plan has added about 20 million people to the rolls, in part through an expansion of Medicaid.

Some parts of the bill are extremely unpopular with Republicans and have been a rallying cry for years. In the weeks before the election, rate spikes were announced in numerous states where competition went down and insurance companies bailed out. Some state health exchanges were left with just a single provider.

After meeting with congressional leaders, Trump listed three priorities: 'We're going to move very strongly on immigration. We will move very strongly on health care. And we're looking at jobs. Big league jobs,' Trump said.

Collins acknowledged that some provisions might need to be dealt with other ways, including a part of Obamacare that prevents people from being denied coverage for having a preexisting condition.
Seven University of Albany students have been charged with hazing after they allegedly blindfolded sorority recruits, made them eat mud and doused them in rotten eggs and spoiled milk, sending one person to the hospital.

Albany police made the arrests early Thursday and seven female students were arraigned on charges of misdemeanor hazing.

The suspects have been identified as Katrina Bergvoy and Heaven Guanco, both 19 of Albany; Monica Vitagliano, 19, of Copiague, New York; Chinazo Ezekwem, Nicole Johnson and Jessica Raynor, all three aged 21, of Albany, and 20-year-old Tereyza Martin, of Albany.

Scroll down for video

Sisters charged: Seven University of Albany students have been charged with hazing, among them (L to R) Heaven Guanco, Katrina Bergvoy and Monica Vitagliano, all three 19

Chinazo Ezekwem (left), Jessica Raynor (center) and Nicole Johnson (right), all three aged 21, of Albany, were among the sorority sisters who were arrested Thursday

Tereyza Martin, 20, of Albany, was also arraigned on charges of misdemeanor hazing stemming from a disgusting initiation ritual

According to the Albany Police Department, officers were dispatched at 1am Thursday to a home in the 400 block of Hamilton Street for a loud noise complaint.

Upon arrival, the responding officers observed four victims being subjected to what appeared to be an initiation ritual for the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority.

One of the victims required immediate medical attention and she was later transported to Albany Medical Center to be treated for a severe allergic reaction, which left her with shortness of breath, redness to her face, chest burning and swelling to her eyes, reported the Albany Times Union.

After her release from the hospital, the woman told police the sorority sisters told her to get on the ground and forced her to eat what appeared to be mud while pouring rotten milk and eggs, mold-covered food and the liquid that smelled like urine onto her face.

Police responding to this home at 468 Hamilton Street in Albany for a noise complaint came upon a stomach-turning initiation ritual involving rotten eggs, spoiled milk and possibly urine

One of the pledges landed in the hospital with an allergic reaction, telling police the sisters, among them (L to R) Chinazo Ezekwem, Heaven Guanco and Katrina Bergvoy, told her to get on the ground and forced her to eat mud while duusing her with rotten food

All seven suspects were arraigned in Albany Criminal Court Thursday and were released on their own recognizance, reported the station WNYT. If convicted of hazing, the women could face up to a year in jail.

A spokesman for the university said Alpha Omicron Pi is not a recognized sorority at the school, and it has not had a chapter there since 2014.
Author Ian Fleming used the same codename in his

William Melville (pictured) was head of the Secret Service Bureau

A former police detective who became the head of the Secret Service Bureau was the first British spy to be codenamed 'M' - 50 years before James Bond made it famous.

William Melville signed top secret documents with the first letter of his surname - 'M' while working for the forerunners of intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6.

He then used the legendary cryptonym while reporting back to the War Office in the early 1900s.

The story can finally be revealed after eight of Melville's service medals emerged for sale.

Since then the head of the secret service has been referred to by the codename M in a nod to Melville's groundbreaking career in espionage.

Ian Fleming famously used the same codename in his James Bond novels, with the character M most recently being played by Dame Judy Dench in the 007 films.

Melville, who once hunted Jack the Ripper and was a bodyguard to Queen Victoria before becoming a spy, was highly decorated throughout his illustrious career.

(Top L to R) The Royal Victorian Order, Member's Badge, M.B.E., Royal Victorian Medal, Coronation Police medal 1902 and Metropolitan Police medal, (bottom L to R) Order of St. Sava, Neck Badge of the Commander of the Order of Isabel la Catolica, Officer de la Legion d-Honneur and Order of Saint Sylvester 1905

Ian Fleming famously used the same codename in his James Bond novels, with the character M most recently being played by Dame Judy Dench in the 007 films (pictured)

Also included in the sale is four testimonials by the mayor of Westminster (pictured)

The medals along with his police whistle and a typewritten account of his career, have now been put up for sale.

Melville was born in 1850 in County Kerry, Ireland, but moved to London in the early 1870s and joined the Metropolitan Police.

By 1883 he had been recruited to the Special Irish Branch, a small unit of the Met tasked with tracking down Irish republican renegades, during which time he foiled a plot to bomb Queen Victoria at her golden jubilee.

In 1888 Melville tracked down an American called Francis Tumbelty, who was suspected of being Jack the Ripper, and attempted to arrest him but the suspect escaped.

When French bomber Theodule Meunier was arrested by Melville at London Victoria station in April 1894 he tried to drag his captor under the wheels of a train, before shouting 'To fall into your hands, Melville! You the only man I feared and whose description was engraved on my mind'.

Melville claimed to have 'retired' in 1900 - but in fact he had taken up a top secret role as general controller of the War Office, undertaking covert missions using the pseudonym William Morgan.

Reporting to Captain Francis Davies under alias of 'M', Melville undertook many assignments from hunting German spies in Britain, foiling a plot against the Kaiser and uncovering Boer terrorist suspects.

(L to R) Order of St. Sava, The Royal Victorian Order; Member's Badge, Order of Saint Sylvester 1905 and Officer de la Legion d-Honneur

(L to R) M.B.E., Royal Victorian Medal and Coronation Police medal 1902

The Neck Badge of the Commander of the Order of Isabel la Catolica is up for sale at the auction

In 1909 Melville was made chief of the new Secret Service Bureau, a role he kept until his death from kidney failure in 1918 aged 67.

His exploits are credited with inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle to create the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Chris Elmy, from auctioneers Lockdales of Ipswich, Suffolk, which is selling the medals, said: 'Superintendent William Melville is one of the most historically interesting persons whose medals we have had the privilege to offer at auction.

'Reading through his exploits I am reminded of the tales of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and especially The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, the events of which are quite likely inspired by the real incidents that William Melville and his contemporaries were involved with.

'It seems like his life and work could be the subject matter for a drama series himself, such as his attempts to foil the man who could very well have been 'Jack the Ripper', and especially his confrontation with the anarchist Meunier, who tried to throw Melville under a train at Victoria Station.

'Looking at the international orders he was awarded by various nations one can only imagine what kind of adventures he must have taken part in.

'It would be very intriguing for the buyer to look into further research after purchase, although much scholarly work has been done already and is available to those who seek it.

This is one of the original testimonials issued by the Mayor of the City of Westminster

'It is believed that the head of the British Secret Service in real life and in James Bond films is called 'M' because the original, William Melville, simply signed his name 'M' on classified documents.

'The medals come with an original memoranda, personally typed by him at the end of his career, covering between the years 1903 to 1917.'

The set comprises of the Royal Victorian Medal, Royal Victorian Order, MBE, Coronation Police medal, Neck Badge of the Commander of the Order of Isabel la Catolica (Spain), Officier de la Legion d-Honneur (France), Order of St. Sava 1883 (Serbia) and the Order of Saint Sylvester 1905 (Vatican).

Also included in the sale is Melville's police whistle and four testimonials by the mayor of Westminster.

A typewritten account of his career with MI5 and an 1887 Police Jubilee Medal Metropolitan Police medal awarded to his second wife's first husband PC W Foy are also up for grabs.
This is the moment British aristocrat's son came face to face with the huge 4.5million cocaine haul he is accused of smuggling.

Jack Marrian, 31, the grandson of the sixth Earl Cawdor, was arrested in July after the alleged discovery of 220lbs of cocaine hidden in bags of sugar being shipped from Brazil to Uganda, via the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

The slabs of the class A drugs were laid out in front of him as they were presented as evidence at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) headquarters in Nairobi.

As the cases were opened in a packed, small room in the Kenyan capital, he was visibly distressed, rocking back in his chair and clutching his face

Bitish national Jack Alexander Wolf Marrian (pictured, right), who faces charges of trafficking 100kg of cocaine from Brazil to the port of Mombasa, reacts as a slab of cocaine is presented as evidence at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) headquarters, Nairobi

Jack Marrian, 31, the grandson of the sixth Earl Cawdor, was arrested in July after the alleged discovery of 220lbs of cocaine hidden in bags of sugar being shipped from Brazil to Uganda, via the Kenyan port of Mombasa

Mr Marrian covered his mouth with a mask as the drugs were pulled out of their individual cases and presented to the crowd

One of the slabs of cocaine was pressed with the logo of French clothing giant Lacoste

Last month, it was reported the appeared close to collapse yesterday as prosecutors were accused of 'clutching at straws'

Kenya's top narcotics officer sliced open the slabs one kilogram at a time as the second day of the trial moved to a dingy third-storey conference room in Nairobi.

As the cases were opened in a packed, small room in the Kenyan capital, he was visibly distressed, rocking back in his chair and clutching his face.

One of the slabs of cocaine was pressed with the logo of French clothing giant Lacoste.

Mr Marrian covered his mouth with a mask as the drugs were pulled out of their individual cases and presented to the crowd.

The officer, Hamisi Massa, was exhibiting evidence in the trial which entered its second day on Friday as the court relocated to the Department of Criminal Investigations in order to witness all 90 packages of seized cocaine.

Each one was the same weight and size as a hardback bible.

The packages were found on a Wednesday in late July stashed in seven sacks hidden inside a container of Brazilian sugar at Mombasa port.

Marrian, the 31-year old managing director of the company that had imported the sugar, was charged eight days later along with his clearing agent Roy Mwanthi.

Both men deny the charges.

The case has attracted attention partly because the cocaine seizure was large by Kenyan standards - with an estimated street value of 4.5million - and partly because Marrian is the son of a British aristocrat whose family owns Cawdor Castle, the legendary home of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Mr Marrian was also at school with the Duchess of Cambridge, who was three years younger than her at 30,000-a-year Marlborough College.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) -- which worked with Spanish police to track and seize the shipment in late July -- believe Marrian and his co-accused, Kenyan clearing agent Roy Mwanthi, knew nothing of the drugs concealed in a sugar consignment from Brazil

Defence lawyer Andrew Wandabwa on Friday picked holes in the prosecution's allegation that Marrian was the owner of the cocaine, as well as the sugar.

While cross-examining prosecution witness Massa, the defence lawyer drew the court's attention to the presence of a duplicate seal found inside the shipping container along with the cocaine.

Wandabwa said this was 'the hallmark' of a style of smuggling known as 'rip-on, rip-off', whereby cartels place their illicit cargo inside a legal consignment shipped by an unwitting owner.

'Would you agree the smoking gun, as far as the owner of the drugs is concerned, is that unused seal?' Wandabwa asked.

'Probably, yes,' Massa replied.

'People could be using the transactions of others to transact illegal business without the knowledge of the owner.'

The sugar and cocaine were packed at Port of Santos in Brazil then shipped to Kenya via Valencia, Spain.

Spanish police and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which tipped-off Kenyan authorities, believe the drugs were destined for the European market but something went wrong and they were not off-loaded in Spain as planned.

Nevertheless, Marrian and Mwanthi were arrested and charged after their names were seen on shipping documents.

Each brick of cocaine seized was about the size and heft of a hardback Bible.

Wearing surgical gloves and using a carpet cutter knife Massa cut open a series of the packages removing an outer layer of shrink-wrap to reveal a strip of coloured nylon and a Lacoste clothing brand sticker, complete with crocodile logo.

Beneath the wrapping the densely packed kilo blocks of cocaine were embossed with the same Lacoste stamp, believed to be the signature of whichever cartel made the drugs.

Investigators say similar blocks of Lacoste-stamped cocaine have been found on the US market.

As the final layer was cut away the chemical smell of cocaine drifted towards the magistrate, lawyers and police officers.

After the thrid brick was opened Mwanthi, who was sitting closest by, asked to leave the room because the fumes were making him feel 'a bit funny' while Marrian was handed a dust mask.

Once the cocaine was resealed and packed back into a series of seven metal boxes of the kind that can be bought on the roadside for a few dollars, the haul was carried away, back to the CID armoury.

Magistrate Derrick Kuto later adjourned the case until January 19 when it will resume at Kibera law courts.

Jack Marrian, 31, the grandson of the sixth Earl Cawdor, was arrested in July after the alleged discovery of 220lbs of cocaine hidden in bags of sugar (pictured in court in August)

Last month, it was reported the case appeared close to collapse as prosecutors were accused of 'clutching at straws'.

The Marlborough College-educated trader, who is the son of Lady Emma Campbell, was due to go on trial at the Kibera Law Courts in Nairobi.

But amid farcical scenes it emerged that the authorities had only tested a small portion of the alleged drugs haul.

Prosecutor James Warui, revealed that the Kenyan government's drugs laboratory had been unable to confirm that the shipment was cocaine, having only tested a sample.

He told a magistrate sitting at the Kibera law courts: 'Due to the volume of the substance that is involved he (the government's drugs analyst) has not yet finalised his report, which we would want to start with.'

He added: 'I don't want to start with a case when we still have holes in exhibits.'

The trial was adjourned pending further drugs test results to the fury of Mr Marrian's family who accused the Kenyan authorities of 'clutching at straws'.

Prosecutor James Warui, revealed that the Kenyan government's drugs laboratory had been unable to confirm that the shipment was cocaine, having only tested a sample

The Marlborough College-educated trader, who is the son of Lady Emma Campbell, was due to go on trial at the Kibera Law Courts in Nairobi

His father David said: 'The prosecution don't seem to have presented any evidence to any of the lawyers in court that could in any way work as a case for them.

'The prosecution are clutching at straws. They do not know what they are going to do so it's easier for them to ask for an adjournment.

'Jack is disappointed today because he hoped that the case would be dropped. He knows there is no evidence against him.

'We have faith that he will be found not guilty in the end.'

Mr Marrian, who has repeatedly protested his innocence, had to fight to be released on bail ahead of the trial after prosecutors argued that he could flee to the UK.

But a High Court judge decided he posed no flight risk and released him from custody in August on a 529,000 bail surety.

Mr Marrian, who has repeatedly protested his innocence, had to fight to be released on bail ahead of the trial after prosecutors argued that he could flee to the UK

Born in Britain, the defendant- whose ancestral home is Cawdor Castle in Scotland, the setting for Shakespeare's play Macbeth has lived in Kenya since the age of four.

He was raised in an affluent part of Nairobi and educated at a prestigious international prep school with three-time Tour de France winner, Chris Froome, before going on to study at the elite Marlborough College, where the Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Eugenie were students, and later the University of Bristol.

Clutching at straws

For the last eight years he was worked in Africa running a string of sugar and commodity companies.

Police arrested Mr Marrian and his co-accused, Roy Francis Mwanthi, a clearing agent based in Kenya, in dawn raids on their homes in July after discovering 220lbs of suspected cocaine in a sugar shipment that arrived at the port of Mombasa.

The shipment was destined for Mr Marrian's employer, Uganda-based Mshale Commodities.

The American Drug Enforcement Authority and Spanish officials at the port of Valencia, where the drugs and sugar shipment passed through in transit, have reportedly said they too believe Mr Marrian was innocent of involvement.

Jack Marrian flanked by a police officer in court in Nairobi on August

They point to a common method of drug smuggling known as 'rip-on, rip-off', which involves smugglers stowing their drugs in cargo belonging to others and recovering it on arrival at its destination.

Both said they had tipped the Kenyan authorities off about the drugs but had made clear they viewed Mr Marrian as 'innocent'.

Former DEA agent Anthony Coulson, who was in Nairobi at the time of Mr Marrian' s arrest has said: 'They have made public the fact that an innocent man has been falsely accused of a crime.

'The Kenyan police and prosecutors are fully aware but are pressing ahead with the charges against him.'

Andrew Wandabwa, defending Mr Marrian, said: 'I read from the prosecution an admission that these charges were initially brought prematurely, that their investigations have not been completed.

'As we speak, on their part, it is not certain that the accused persons are accused of trafficking cocaine.'

He said his client and his co-defendant's lives had been 'ground to a halt' by the charges.

Gordon Ogado, Mr Mwanthi's lawyer, said the case, if delayed further, risked infringing the defendants' rights.

He said both men had suffered the loss of business and potentially could lose their jobs.

'Either there is an offense that has been committed, for which the parties have to face a charge and face a trial, or there is no offence that has been committed and the parties must be set free,' he said.

Speaking outside court, Mr Marrian's solicitor Sheetal Kapila said that prosecution did not want to 'lose face'.
A teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School wrote an article about how he was having difficulty

at Greenwich Village's Little Red School House sent out a letter to parents, reading: 'Love will prevail'

Teachers at some of New York City's most exclusive schools have been coddling their students in the wake of Tuesday's election results.

The election of Donald Trump has been greeted with protests in large cities nation wide, and New York City was no exception.

So perhaps it was unsurprising that the children of many New Yorkers - a state which went to Clinton - were moved by the outcome.

At the Beacon School, an exclusive public high school in Hell's Kitchen, students were given free periods and counselling to help them deal with the news.

Teachers at elite schools in New York City have been coddling their students in the wake of Tuesday's election. At the Beacon School (pictured) students were given free periods and counselling to process the news

At Avenues: The World School, a $43,000-a-year private school attended by Suri Cruise, teachers were instructed to remain 'calm' and 'objective' for their students

'With current events eliciting emotional responses among our students, The Beacon School faculty has decided to dedicate time and space for our community to process,' an email sent out to parents, obtained by the New York Post, reads.

Teachers at Avenues: The World School, a $43,000-a-year private school in Chelsea attended by Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' daughter Suri, teachers were instructed to remain 'calm' and 'objective', according to a letter written by Principal Hamilton Clark.

'Our students brought a great deal of emotion, anxiety and strong feelings into the building with them this morning that we made every effort to acknowledge and respect,' Clark wrote, before linking parents to a Huffington Post article on how to break the news to children.

Parents of students at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, a $20,000-a-year private school, were also sent a message from administrators who remained positive, saying 'love will prevail'

A teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, where tuition for a single year costs around $47,000, wrote an article about the struggles of explaining the election results

Parents of students at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, a $20,000-a-year private school, were also sent a message from administrators who remained positive, saying 'love will prevail'.

'This weeks election results have hit many of us hard,' the email read. 'So, lets gather and talk about the kids feelings and our feelings. Regardless of who you voted for, we as a country have work to do.'

The school is attended by the children of former supermodel Christy Turlington.

A teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, where tuition for a single year costs around $47,000, wrote an article in the Hechinger Report about the struggles of explaining the election results.

Jim Cullen writes that 'necessity requires' him to set aside his 'own unease and confusion' to explain the election to his students.

'My role is to help them feel better as a matter of trying to alleviate despair, anxiety or indignation,' Cullen writes, 'but also to feel better in the sense of thinking more clearly, to bring their hearts and their heads into greater alignment (or, at least, greater consciousness of each other).'

However, he says Trump's lack of experience doesn't help him in finding ways to calm his students.

'Donald J. Trump is notably lacking in government experience,' the history teacher said. 'And this may be where we come up against the limits of my capacity to provide reassurance.'
The RSPCA said there were further

A pregnant cat has been set alight in a string of horrific animal cruelty attacks.

Milly the cat suffered burns to her neck and back after she is thought to have been deliberately set on fire at the hands of an abuser in Bridgewater, north of Hobart.

The cat was handed over to the RSPCA on October 29 and incredibly gave birth to kittens on the same day.

Milly the cat suffered burns to her neck and back after she is thought to have been deliberately set alight

Milly had been under the care of the animal welfare organisation for no more than an hour when she gave birth to her litter.

While the feline is healing, RSPCA chief vet Andrew Byrne said she nearly lost an ear because of the extent of her horrific injuries.

The RSPCA are now working with local police into further allegations other animals have been the target of similar violence, according to The Mercury.

RSPCA chief executive Peter West was concerned over the severity of the animal cruelty.

Milly had been under the care of the animal welfare organisation for no more than an hour when she gave birth to her litter

'My biggest concern is that this may be a case, or even cases, where children or young people are the perpetrators of the cruelty,' he said.

Mr West called for the community to help solve the case to make sure the offenders can be stopped.

Anyone with information can call the 24-hour animal cruelty hotline on 1300 139 947 or go to the RSPCAs website and fill out a complaint form.
Bill Clinton called President-elect Donald Trump this morning to congratulate him on his electoral college victory, extending an olive branch to the Republican two days after he watched his wife Hillary formally concede.

Trump branded Clinton a rapist in the general election. His aides plotted to make the former president as reviled as Bill Cosby. The Oval Office contender kicked off the second presidential debate with a news conference alongside Bill Clinton's accusers.

Today, Clinton put aside their bad blood and phoned Trump to wish him well, ABC News reports.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

Bill Clinton called President-elect Donald Trump this morning to congratulate him on his electoral college victory, extending an olive branch to the Republican two days after he watched his wife Hillary formally concede

Wednesday morning Bill stayed silent as Hillary thanked her supporters and said she hoped her opponent would be 'a successful president for all Americans'

Bill stood behind his wife, looking somber, with their daughter Chelsea. He did not deliver remarks at the event and has not spoken publicly

In September, Trump punched back at the Clintons by drudging up sex abuse allegations against Bill.

Leaked audio from a 2005 taping of Access Hollywood had emerged two days before and Trump was desperate to change the conversation from his boasts that he could commit sexual assault without recourse.

He surprised the Clintons, and the press, at a pre-debate media avail when he brought out Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey.

'Actions speak louder than words,' Broaddrick told reporters hounding Trump .'Mr. Trump may have said some bad words, but Bill Clinton raped me. And Hillary Clinton threatened me. I don't think there is any comparison.'

At a Pennsylvania rally Trump accused Bill of sexual misconduct directly.

'Bill Clinton sexually assaulted innocent women,' Trump said. 'And Hillary Clinton attacked those women viciously.'

Early Wednesday morning, when the race was called for Trump, Broaddrick said on Twitter that she was crying 'tears of joy.'

'Vindication after 38 years of pain & suffering. Thanks to Mr Trump & all of you. It does go away,' she wrote.

Broaddrick says Bill raped her in an Arkansas hotel room in 1978 when he was attorney general of the state. He was never charged with a crime, but the lingering allegations cast a shadow over his wife's campaign.

Trump branded Clinton a rapist in the general election. His aides plotted to make the former president as reviled as Bill Cosby. He kicked off the second presidential debate with a news conference alongside Bill Clinton's accusers

Egged on by Infowars' Alex Jones, who promised payouts of $1,000 or more to anyone who wore the site's 'Bill Clinton Rape' t-shirt to a rally and appeared on television for five second or more, critics of the Clintons bombarded their rallies.

'Bill Clinton is a rapist,' they shouted at the top of their lungs, trying to get the attention of TV cameras.

Wednesday morning Bill stayed silent as Hillary thanked her supporters and said she hoped her opponent would be 'a successful president for all Americans.'

'I know how disappointed you feel, because I feel it, too,' the losing presidential candidate said. 'This is painful, and it will be for a long time.'

Clinton implored her backers to give Trump a chance.

From from the ballroom of a mid-range Manhattan hotel she said, 'Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.'

Bill stood behind his wife, looking somber, with their daughter Chelsea. He did not deliver remarks at the event and has not spoken publicly.

It is unknown what the former president will do next. He planned to leave his family charity if Hillary won the White House and put Chelsea in charge.
Two detectives who rescued a woman after she was chained inside a metal container for two months by a suspected serial killer recounted the shocking discovery.

Detective Charlynn Ezell, who found Kala Brown on a 95-acre property in Woodruff, South Carolina, told ABC: 'She just looked at me and said thank you so much for finding me.'

Detective Bradley Whitfield broke down and added: 'I think we all saw a lot of things that day that are going to stay with us.'

Todd Kohlhepp, a registered sex offender who has confessed to killing seven people, has been charged with kidnapping Brown, who was 'chained inside the container like a dog' by the neck.

Scroll down for video

Detective Charlynn Ezell, who found Kala Brown (left) on alleged serial killer Todd Kohlhepp's (right) property told ABC : 'She just looked at me and said thank you so much for finding me'

The shipping container used by by the serial killer was removed by police for further forensic examination on Wednesday

Brown had gone missing with her 32-year-old boyfriend Charlie Carver after they were last seen together leaving a friend's home on August 30.

Brown, who had been hired to clean the homes Kohlhepp was selling, went to Koelhepp's property with her boyfriend when the alleged serial killer pulled out a gun, CBS reported.

After her rescue, Brown told police she witnessed Kohlhepp gun down her boyfriend, whose body was found on the property.

Brown told police after her rescue that she witnessed Kohlhepp kill her 32-year-old boyfriend, Charlie Carver (pictured)

Kohlhepp kept Brown captive by chaining her neck and feet in the green shipping container, which blended into the foliage and was hidden away from public view on his farmland.

Both Ezell and Whitfield described their difficulty trying to find the missing couple, and expressed how emotional it was to finally rescue Brown.

Ezell told the Independent Mail: 'When you finally get answers, it's very emotional. I didn't know if I would ever see this girl alive.'

She added: 'When I saw Kala, that was an amazing sight. I told her mother later that it was almost as beautiful as if I were seeing my own child. To me, she was beautiful. I had cold chills.'

Whitfield cried and told ABC: 'It could be anybodys child, anybodys wife or husband. I wish we could have done more.'

Kohlhepp, who was arrested after Brown was found, confessed to killing a total of seven people, including Carver, four at a motor bike shop in 2003, and a couple who had gone missing in 2015.

Kohlhepp hid the container away from public view on his 95-acre farmland at Woodruff, South Carolina and painted it green to ensure it blended into the foliage. The container is 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and 10 to 12 feet high and a few steps from a shed (seen left) where the kidnapper is thought to have stored food supplies for his captive

Melissa Brackman, the widow of the shop owner who was killed by Kohlhepp said: 'I was told he was a disgruntled customer. He bought a motorcycle from Scott previously. His motorcycle was stolen, he went to get another one.

'My husband and the service manager were poking fun at him saying, "Hey, is the second motorcycle going to get stolen, too? Didnt you have enough already?" They were kidding  and he said that made him angry.

'That is the kind of thing that a normal everyday person wouldnt go crazy over.'

Kohlhepp has been charged with the murder of Brian Lucas, Scott Ponder, Beverly Guy and Chris Sherbert at the motorcycle shop in Chesnee on November 6, 2003.

He also faces a charged of kidnapping Brown and is set to be charged with Carver's murder, along with another couple who sent missing in 2015.

Scott Ponder (right) and his mother Beverly (left) were found dead at the bike shop in 2003

Service manager Brian Lucas (left) and mechanic Chris Sherbert (right) also died in the 2003 massacre

Meagan and Johnny Coxie, aged 25 and 29, were also gunned down and buried on Kohlhepp's farmland, close to the metal container where he is accused of kidnapping Kala Brown and keeping her captive for two months.

Meagan was shot once in the head and her husband suffered several bullet wounds to the torso.

Her mother reported her daughter and son-in-law missing on December 22 last year and police are working to establish when they met their deaths.

It was just four months after they had posted pictures of a new baby on social media.

Spartanburg coroner Rusty Clavenger said that he believed the victims had been buried around eleven months ago, shortly after they disappeared.

Meagan and Johnny Coxie, aged 25 and 29, (pictured) were also gunned down and buried on Kohlhepp's farmland

It was at one of these digs that police found the shallow graves with the bodies of another couple who disappeared in 2015. Their tattoos and dental records were used to identify them

He said both bodies had been discovered in shallow graves and fully clothed. They had been identified through their 'extensive' number of tattoos and dental records. Kohlhepp had led officers to the two graves and that of his third alleged victim Charles Carver, 32, who was exhumed from a nearby grave at the weekend.

Officers said they did not yet know the motive as to why the married couple were shot dead or the type of gun or bullets used.

But Clavenger added: 'There were some parts of the bodies we were not able to recover. But I really don't want to get into that because there is an open investigation.

Police refused to reveal how the suspect mass murderer came into contact with the couple or how they came to be on Kohlhepp's 95-acre land in Woodruff.

Kohlhepp, was jailed from 1987 to 2001 for the kidnapping and sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl in 1986, when he was 15. .
Some wealthy residents of Trump Tower are planning to move out of their apartments in the luxury skyscraper because theyre annoyed with the protesters and heightened security, a real estate broker has claimed.

In the wake of Donald Trumps shock victory in the presidential election, crowds of protesters  as well as his supporters and security guards  have swarmed the building on Manhattans Fifth Avenue.

The chaos has brought traffic in the area to a standstill and left stores in the vicinity deserted. It means that the towers residents have had difficulty getting in and out of the building and have had to show ID before being allowed entry into their own homes, the New York Post reports.

As a result, some of the buildings affluent residents have decided they no longer want to live there.

Scroll down for video

New York City Police adjust barricades across the street from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue on Friday

Some wealthy residents of Trump Tower are planning to move out of their apartments in the luxury skyscraper because theyre annoyed with the protesters outside. Above, protesters outside the Manhattan skyscraper on Thursday

These are wealthy people, they dont need this, and they cant take it any longer, a top real estate broker, who says hes received calls from residents intending to move out, told the Post.

Some of them are already planning on moving out, and theyll decide later whether or not they want to sell.

He added: They cant get into their own homes without being stopped and frisked and having to show ID.

The extreme security measures began going up around the landmark Fifth Avenue skyscraper on Election Day, when authorities brought in a fleet of heavy Sanitation Department trucks filled with sand to wall off the front of the glittering, 664-foot glass tower and protect it from a potential car bomb attack.

Those trucks were gone by Friday, replaced by concrete barriers stamped with the NYPD logo. But the stepped-up security  a team effort by the Secret Service, the New York Police Department and Trump's private security personnel  isn't going away.

The Secret Service and NYPD wouldn't detail what lies ahead. That will depend largely on how Trump decides to divide his time between Washington and New York and on an assessment of the vulnerabilities of Trump Tower, where the president-elect lives in a penthouse condo and his Trump Organization is headquartered.

'It's going to take a lot of planning, and it's going to take a lot of creativity,' said NYPD Deputy Commissioner Steve Davis.

The cost is uncertain, too, though the city might seek reimbursement from the Homeland Security Department for some of its expenses.

The heightened security has already become a concern for some high-end retailers in one of the city's busiest shopping districts, especially with the holiday season ramping up.

A worker washes the windows at Trump Tower in New York City on Friday

People stop to look at the front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York following Trump's election victory

Police officers manning metal barricades asked visitors and shoppers where they were going before they could get onto the block Friday.

People who said they were headed for Trump Tower or the flagship Tiffany & Co. store next door were being let through, but the jewelry shop canceled the unveiling next week of its annual Christmas light display.

Tiffany spokesman Nathan Strauss said the store has been in frequent contact with the Secret Service and NYPD on the issue. 'It's obviously an important time of year for us,' he said.

Metal barricades also restricted access to a Gucci store on the ground floor of Trump Tower. Gucci declined to comment.

In the weeks leading up to the election, visitors at Trump Tower were subjected to bag checks and other screening but otherwise had free access to a five-story atrium that has shops and restaurants, including Trump Grill and a Starbucks.

Under a zoning deal Trump made with the city in the late 1970s, he is required to keep the atrium open to the public between 8am and 10pm.

By late last week, though, access was restricted and occasionally cut off completely.

Inside the atrium, law enforcement was everywhere, visitors were few and business was slow for the Starbucks and Trump gift shops and restaurants.

Police also closed off the block south of the high-rise and set up guard towers on either end. And they have gotten stricter about diverting delivery trucks away from tower.

This week, the Federal Aviation Administration barred aircraft from flying below 2,999 feet over Trump Tower, saying the airspace restrictions are needed until late January because of 'VIP movement'.

Trump blasted the protests against his election victory as very unfair and blamed the media for deploying professional protesters

Hours later, the president-elect backtracked to commend the protesters for being passionate

More permanent safeguards will take into account the effect on businesses and residents, Secret Service spokesman Martin Mulholland said.

'People think we shut stuff down because we can, but we pay close attention to what happens when we close a street or a sidewalk,' he said. 'We look for the best solution.'

The president-elect took to Twitter to complain about the protests that have erupted across the country after he won the White House.

Trump blasted the protests as very unfair and blamed the media for inciting professional protesters.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election, Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday evening.

Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair! he moaned.

Hours later, he backtracked, commending protesters for being passionate.

Current residents of Trump Tower include art dealer Helly Nahmad (left) and Trumps former campaign manager Paul Manafort (right)

'Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!' he wrote.

Current residents of Trump Tower include Trumps former campaign manager Paul Manafort and art dealer Helly Nahmad, who was jailed for his part in a $100 million international gambling ring that attracted celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio.

Trump himself lives in the skyscrapers gold-encrusted penthouse triplex  which is estimated to be worth $90million.
Former chancellor George Osborne has said Britain will have to make its relationship with Donald Trump's administration 'work' despite fears over plans.

Mr Osborne said the United States was a vital ally for Britain and advised Theresa May the relationship was crucial enough to 'make a deal' with the tycoon-turned-President.

The architect of Project Fear in the EU referendum spoke out as he received a prestigious honour from Prince William recognising his political and public service.

Mr Osborne has been made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for a national political career spanning 15 years, an award granted by David Cameron in his controversial 'resignation honours' for cronies and allies.

A clearly delighted Mr Osborne received the award from the Duke of Cambridge during a Buckingham Palace investiture ceremony before posing for press pictures with his medal.

Former Chancellor George Osborne warned Britain had to make its relationship with Donald Trump work as he collected a top gong in London today, pictured

Mr Osborne, who was brutally sacked by Theresa May in July, was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour by David Cameron in the resignation honours

Mr Trump was installed as US President-elect in a shock election victory on Tuesday.

The former Chancellor, speaking after the ceremony, said: 'He is now going to become president of the United States and it's in everyone's interests that we make the relationship with the new administration work, because America is such an important ally and friend of ours.'

He went on to sound an upbeat tone about Prime Minister Theresa May's relationship with the tycoon: 'And in the end, Donald Trump's a deal maker - so let's do some deals.'

In further comments in a Sun column, Mr Osborne - who backed Hillary Clinton - said the Democrats appeared 'tired and boring' compared to Mr Trump.

He said: 'I was at college when Bill Clinton burst onto the political scene twenty five years ago, and he was fresh and exciting.

'A quarter of a century later, Hillary Clinton was tired and boring'.

Mr Osborne said the former Secretary of State was 'the 'worst possible candidate' for the Democrats.

He said: 'A lot of people hate her. They think she's corrupt and dishonest, and epitomises a system that is stacked against them.

'I don't think that's particular fair, but she was the worst possible candidate to articulate the cry for change that you hear across America'.

Mr Osborne went on to warn that Britain must work to curb Mr Trump's 'disastrous' ideas, and that the tycoon threatens 'prosperity, security and peace'.

Mr Osborne proudly showed off his gong to press photographers outside Buckingham Palace today after the investiture by the Duke of Cambridge

Mr Osborne served as chancellor for six years, first during the coalition government headed by Mr Cameron and later when the Tory leader won an outright majority following last year's general election.

George Osborne was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour at Buckingham Palace today, pictured

But he was brutally sacked by Mrs May when she took office in July and established her own cabinet, declaring him surplus to requirements.

Mr Cameron was slammed for cronyism after his resignation honours list recognised a string of political supporters, Conservative Party donors, Downing Street staff and some leading figures from his Government, like Mr Osborne.

The former Chancellor said about his award: 'I'm deeply touched and honoured to receive this, it's a very special award and for all the challenges, as six years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, I really enjoyed it and hopefully never lost sight of trying to do the right thing for the public - although others will judge.'

Osborne witnessed first-hand the anger at the election of Donald Trump after getting caught up in the middle of a protest in New York last night.

He tweeted a picture of a group of youngsters carrying placards voicing their opposition to the controversial Republican, who shocked the world by beating Democrat Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's election.

Donald Trump, pictured yesterday in Washington, was installed as US President-elect in a shock election victory on Tuesday

The picture, taken in Manhattan on Wednesday night, shows one protester holding a sign showing Mr Trump's face next to Adolf Hitler's along with the words: 'History is about to repeat'.

WHAT IS THE ORDER OF THE COMPANIONS OF HONOUR? The Order of the Companions of Honour was founded in June 1917 by King George V as a reward for outstanding achievements. It is 'conferred upon a limited number of persons for whom this special distinction seems to be the most appropriate form of recognition, constituting an honour disassociated either from the acceptance of title or the classification of merit.' Founded on the same date as the Order of the British Empire (OBE), it is sometimes regarded as the junior order to the Order of Merit. The first recipients, were all decorated for 'services in connection with the war' and were listed in the London Gazette in August 1917 with the award taking effect from 4 June 1917. Other current members of the order include singer Dame Vera Lynn and diplomat Baroness Valerie Amos. Advertisement

Mr Osborne tweeted: 'Came across this anti-Trump protest here in New York last night - can't help wondering how many of them voted.'

Since being sacked as Chancellor by Theresa May in the summer Mr Osborne has joined the lucrative after-dinner speaking circuit, charging up to 70,000 per appearance and has made several trips to the US.

New entries in Mr Osborne's parliamentary register of interests last week revealed he was expecting to receive 69,992 from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association in Washington for speeches totalling one-and-a-half hours on September 27 and October 18.

And he was also due to be paid 28,454.40 for a speech on October 17 to the Hoover Institution at California's Stanford University.

Travel and accommodation expenses were also being covered by Mr Osborne's hosts.

In his final days as Chancellor in May he defied the convention that British politicians do not express their preferences on elections abroad by revealing his support for Mrs Clinton.

Asked who he wanted to win the presidential race, Mr Osborne said: 'We look forward to working with whoever the next president is, whoever she may be.'
After Donald Trump won Tuesday's presidential election, Americans thought they were done with seeing Clintons in politics. That might not be true.

Though some say that the Clinton political dynasty has ended, others have suggested that Chelsea Clinton is being groomed for Congress.

The seat she could potentially take is that of Rep Nita Lowey, in New York's 17th Congressional District, sources have told the New York Post.

Chelsea Clinton (pictured with her parents, Hillary and Bill Clinton, on Wednesday) could take the seat of Rep Nita Lowey, in New York's 17th Congressional District

The seat Chelsea could potentially take is that of Rep Nita Lowey (right), in New York's 17th Congressional District. Lowey, 79, has held a seat in the US House of representatives since 1989

She could run for the seat once Lowey, 79, retires from office. Lowey has held a seat in the US House of representatives since 1989.

A source told the Post that the Clintons 'will not give up' and want to continue their brand in politics.

'While it is true the Clintons need some time to regroup after Hillary's crushing loss, they will not give up. Chelsea would be the next extension of the Clinton brand,' the source said.

The source added: 'In the past few years, she has taken a very visible role in the Clinton Foundation and on the campaign trail.

'While politics isn't the life Hillary wanted for Chelsea, she chose to go on the campaign trail for her mother and has turned out to be very poised, articulate and comfortable with the visibility.'

The 17th Congressional District includes parts of Rockland and Westchester counties, as well as Chappaqua, where the Clinton family home is located

Bill and Hillary Clinton purchased a Chappaqua, New York, home (right, with gray roof) in August for $1.6million, next to their own home (left). It was intended for Chelsea, her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and their two children, Charlotte and Aiden

While Chelsea and her family currently live in Manhattan, she could use the Chappaqua home (pictured) as her legal residence if she decides to run

The 17th Congressional District includes parts of Rockland and Westchester counties, as well as Chappaqua, where the Clinton family home is located.

Chelsea currently lives and votes in Manhattan, but in August Hillary and Bill Clinton purchased the home next to theirs in Chappaqua for $1.6million.

The second home was purchased with the intention of Chelsea, her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and their two children, Charlotte and Aiden, moving in.

The Clinton had earlier bought the $10 million home in lower Manhattan where the couple live. Mezvinsky runs a hedge fund but had to shut down one aspect of it when it lost 90 per cent if its value by betting on Greece.

If she is to run for the Congress seat when Lowey retires, Chelsea could make the Chappaqua address her legal residence.

Lowey is currently serving her 14th term in Congress. A spokesperson for the Rep did not comment.

The home sits just next door to Bill and Hillary Clinton's Chappaqua home, which they purchased in 1999

As well as following her parents into elected office, Chelsea would be following her father-in-law and mother-in-law into Congress.

Edward Mezvinsky, her father-in-law, served from 1973 to 1977, while his wife Marjorie Margolie-Mezvinsky, served from 1993 to 1995.

But both their careers ended when Edwards was convicted of a string of frauds and jailed for give years in 2001.

He tried to escape conviction for his $10 million crime spree by claiming mental illness, which a judge disallowed. It is unclear how much he has paid back of the fortune he defrauded.

The couple declared bankruptcy and divorced, ending her attempt to become Pennsylvania's lieutenant-governor.

Chelsea Clinton's own finances were questioned in the Wikileaks leak of emails from the account of John Podesta, her mother's campaign chair.

In them Doug Band, her father's right-hand man with whom she fought a bitter war over the Clinton Foundation, accused her of paying for part of her wedding and taxes on money given to her by her parents with charity funds.
Russia has claimed chemical weapons have been used by Syrian militants in the northern area of Aleppo where government forces are trying to regain control of areas they recently lost to insurgents.

The accusations come as the U.N. warned the last food rations for besieged Syrians living in eastern Aleppo will run out by next week after the organisation was blocked from sending aid.

Aid workers distributed the last available supplies on Thursday as the quarter of a million people living in rebel-held areas of the Syrian city entered what is expected to be a cruel winter, U.N. humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said.

Some families in eastern Aleppo have not had food distributions for several weeks and food prices are skyrocketing, he said.

Around 300 sick and wounded require medical evacuation, he added.

Speaking in Geneva, Egeland said he was hopeful of a deal on a four-part humanitarian plan the United Nations sent to all parties to the conflict several days ago.

Scroll down for video

A man eats food that was distributed as aid in a rebel-held besieged area in Aleppo on November 6

A member of the Syrian pro-government forces stands amid heavily damaged buildings in Aleppo's 1070 district on November 8 after troops seized it from rebel fighters

The plan covers delivery of food and medical supplies, medical evacuations and access for health workers.

'I do believe we will be able to avert mass hunger this winter,' Egeland told reporters in Geneva, noting that east Aleppo last received relief supplies in early July.

'I don't think anybody wants a quarter of a million people to be starving in east Aleppo,' he said.

Syria's government rejected a U.N. request to send aid to east Aleppo during November, but Egeland said he was confident that Damascus would give its permission if the new U.N. humanitarian initiative was accepted by all sides.

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said a survey based on nearly 400 interviews in eastern Aleppo between Oct 24 and Oct 26 found 44 percent of respondents wanted to leave if a secure exit route was available, while 40 percent wanted to stay.

'Those who wish to stay either didn't know of any safe place to go, wanted to remain with family members, couldn't afford the cost of moving, or feared they would not be able to return to their homes,' UNHCR said in a report.

Syrian children wait to receive treatment after war crafts belonging to the Russian Army carried out airstrikes on the Ibin village of Aleppo on November 05

In this September photo a UN World Food Programme (WFP) convoy, carrying humanitarian aid to Syria's Aleppo, cross to the Syrian side of Turkey's border

Egeland, asked about expectations from the administration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, said: 'Syria is the worst war, the worst humanitarian crisis, the worst displacement crisis, the worst refugee crisis in a generation. So we expect there to be continued, uninterrupted U.S. help and engagement in the coming months.'

The Russian military claimed on Friday its officers have found evidence of chemical weapons use by Syrian militants in the northern area of Aleppo where government forces are trying to regain control of areas they recently lost to insurgents.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said that ministry experts have found unexploded ordnance and fragments of munitions containing chlorine and white phosphorus on Aleppo's southwestern outskirts. Konashenkov said the discovery proves the militants have used chemical weapons against civilians and Syrian army soldiers.

The announcement comes as the Syrian government and Russia appear to be preparing for an all-out offensive on the besieged eastern parts of Aleppo that are held by opposition fighters. Pro-Syrian media outlets in Lebanon have been reporting that heavy reinforcements have been arriving in Aleppo over the past weeks in preparation for the attack.

A Syrian civil defense team member carries a wounded girl after warcrafts belonging to Russian army carried out airstrikes over Urum al-Kubra region in Aleppo on November 6

Syrians sell a few items at a market in the rebel-held area of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on September 19 after humanitarian relief failed to enter the city under siege

Syrians walk past empty stalls at a market in the rebel-held area of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on September 19

The Interfax news agency reported Friday that jets from the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov have been flying over Syria over the past few days to survey the area in preparation for future combat missions. It said that preparations are underway for the carrier and escorting ships to launch strikes against militants.

The U.S. and its allies have pushed for sanctions on the Syrian government for using chemical weapons. Russia has questioned international investigators' conclusions linking chemical weapons use to the Syrian government and pointed at evidence of their use by the militants.

The U.N. Security Council has voted to extend the mandate of inspectors working to determine those responsible for chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city and once commercial capital, has been the center of violence in recent months where government forces have besieged eastern rebel-held neighborhoods.

The insurgents had seized a couple of strategic areas in western Aleppo since they launched an offensive on government-held parts of Aleppo on Oct. 28 in an attempt to break the siege imposed on areas they have controlled since July. The siege on eastern Aleppo was coupled with a punishing bombing campaign by Syrian aircraft and supported by Russia, which has been backing the government of President Bashar Assad. Since late October, Russia said it would halt the airstrikes, amid rising civilian casualties, urging rebels to leave the territory.

Syrian troops launched a counteroffensive capturing much of the southwestern areas they lost as well as parts of Al-Assad district west of the city.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said warplanes carried out dozens of airstrikes on the western edge of Aleppo and nearby villages. It added that government forces are trying to regain control of the remaining parts of Al-Assad district that are still under rebel control.

The Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, also reported intense airstrikes on Al-Assad district as well as an airstrike on the nearby village of Kfar Dael, saying it left dozens of people killed or wounded.
The original email was an invitation to a party, where girls were urged to 'please wear something tight'

Some students plastered the email across campus, with the message 'this is what rape culture looks like' printed over it

from students, who called for action after a sexist party invitation surfaced earlier this school year

The taskforce is in response to

University of Pennsylvania announced on Friday their plan to start a taskforce to weed out underground

The University of Pennsylvania is forming a taskforce to look into 'underground' fraternities after one group sent out a party invitation to freshmen women which has been blasted as sexist and inappropriate.

University officials tell Philly.com that some students on campus were upset by the invitation and posted copies of it around campus, prompting the school's response.

The flyers were a copy of the email, with the words 'This is what rape culture looks like' stamped over it.

The University of Pennsylvania has convened a task force to hunt down underground fraternities at the school, after this sexist party invitation surfaced earlier this year

The letters reads: 'Ladies, The year is now upon us. May we have your attention please. We're looking for the fun ones, and say f*** off to a tease.

'Wednesday nights will get you going, with bankers flowing all night. Tonight is your first showing. So please wear something tight

'204 is where you'll join us. Bring friends and maybe more. Natty light is your delight. so get hype, for what's in store.'

When the email surfaced, some students typed the words 'this is what rape culture looks like' and plastered the flyers around the school's Philadelphia campus

Underground fraternities and sororities aren't affiliated with the school or its Greek system, though their members are students.

The groups are sometimes formed by members of groups that have been banned from campus for violating school or fraternity rules.

School spokesman Stephen McCarthy says the scope and duration of the taskforce review isn't clear, but the group will include faculty, administrators and students.

'There have been problems on campus related to underground groups, and we think it's important to take a look at it,' MacCarthy said.

The school says the groups engage in 'high-risk' behaviors

'Let us be clear: These unstructured groups have made a calculated decision to bypass the traditional Greek system and operate without administrative oversight or liability insurance, and without regard for the safety measures required of recognized organizations' a letter from Maureen Rush, vice president for public safety, and Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum, vice provost for university life, reads.
After a whirlwind tour of Washington, D.C. where he met with President Obama for the first time, President-elect Donald Trump began Friday inside Trump tower, where he said he had a 'busy day' planned hiring his team.

At the top of the agenda is hiring a chief of staff who would oversee Trump's effort to 'Make America Great Again' with swift action being contemplated on health care, immigration, and economic policy.

'Busy day planned in New York. Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!' Trump tweeted.

It was the only official guidance provided to members of the media keeping track of Trump's schedule. The only information provided Thursday night was that Trump was headed back to New York.

Donald Trump remarked on his 'busy day' in a tweet

Reporters camped out inside Trump tower outside a Starbucks revealed that Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon entered the building, as did advisor David Bossie, who got brought in to aide Trump's campaign effort.

Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was also spotted.

New York Rep. Chris Collins, who was the first lawmaker to endorse Trump, told CNN Friday the decision on a chief of staff could come by this weekend.

One leading candidate, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' Friday morning.

Bannon, who joined Trump's effort after leading conservative web site Breitbart.com, is a leading contender, the New York Times reported Thursday. He is considered a leading force behind some of the brash tactics that Trump employed in the final weeks of the campaign, including bringing Bill Clinton accusers to a presidential debate. He was frequently spotted at Trump's side during appearances.

Trump is spending Friday inside Trump Tower, with no further guidance about his schedule

Trump is spending Friday weighing staff decisions

The president-elect fired up his Twitter account to bash 'professional protesters'

Later, he hailed 'small groups of protesters'

Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus is under consideration for chief of staff

Campaign CEO Stephen Bannon is also under consideration for the top job

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is leading Trump's transition and is a close advisor, has also been mentioned. Two top Christie aides got convicted last week in connection with the Bridgegate scandal, which could harm his chances.

Also mentioned is Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump's husband, who accompanied Trump to his meeting with President Obama. Kushner met with Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough on Thursday.

Collins said a choice on the top job could come as soon as this weekend.
The husband of a missing California woman has been ruled out as a suspect in her disappearance after he passed a polygraph exam, authorities said.

Sherri Papini was last seen jogging in Redding, California (in the Oregon Trail area), on November 2 and investigators have since found long strands of blonde hair and a pair of earbuds along her jogging route.

Detectives had been talking to partner Keith Papini as the investigation into his wife's disappearance intensified but a polygraph or lie detector test has ruled out his involvement in her disappearance.

Scroll down for video

Sherri and Keith Papini seen enjoying each other's company. Before her routine jog she texted her husband Keith (pictured), and asked him if he was coming home for lunch. He responded no and when he came home from work, he found an empty home

'The results of the polygraph examination indicate he has no involvement with the disappearance of his wife,' Anthony Bertain, a spokesman for Shasta County Sheriff's Office, said in a statement on Thursday.

'Sheriff's Office detectives have confirmed his whereabouts on the day in question, and there is no physical evidence at this time suggesting he had any involvement.'

The statement comes a few days after a family member denied reports that Sherri had walked out on her family.

Sherri went missing on November 2 after going for a jog in Redding, California. Her husband contacted police after she failed to pick up her children from play school

'Unfortunately, there are random, ignorant people on the internet that are casting aspersions on both Sherri and Keith,' said family member Rod Rodriguez III on Redding Crime 2.0 on Facebook, a group with thousands of members.

Rodriguez described the couple as having a loving relationship and Keith had been fully cooperative with the investigation.

He also said Keith hadn't hired an attorney for his talks with the police.

'In regard to the hurtful rumors regarding Keith, everyone that actually knows him knows of his and Sherri's wonderful loving relationship and devotion to their family and knows he had nothing to do with Sherri's disappearance,' Rodriguez said.

'That is why everyone of them was out searching last weekend, one notable family rented search helicopters and another couple cut their vacation short and flew home across the Atlantic while another flew down from Idaho.'

Rodriguez said he has had a number of vacations with the couple and celebrated their wedding anniversary with them, which was in early October.

'We recognize that in 80% of the disappearance cases the spouse is responsible,' he said. 'But conversely, that means in 20% of the cases the spouse is not involved. This case falls into the latter category.'

Keith Papini (pictured with his wife and children) said his wife who vanished while out jogging must have been abducted because she would never not pick up their children from daycare

He also said the 34-year-old mother-of-two went trick-or-treating with with her days before she went missing and had started planning for Thanksgiving even listing what she was going to cook.

'As to her devotion to her kids it is the stuff of legend to all that know her,' Rodriguez said.

Sherri was reported missing at around 6pm on November 2 after she failed to return home from her run and didn't pick up her children from daycare.

'She was definitely taken against her will,' her husband Keith told ABC News.

'Everybody who knows my wife knows that there's no reason for her to leave.'

He added: 'Knowing that she didn't pick up our kids - there is no way that ever happens.'

He said that he'd traced his wife's cell phone using Apple's 'Find My iPhone' locator app and found it on the side of a road.

'She could drop her phone but she would never in a million years not pick up our children on a time that she normally would have,' he said.

Detectives are now in the process of sorting through 150 tips that have come in so far and reviewing surveillance footage from homes and businesses along Sherri Papini's jogging route.
A senior police officer has been charged with dozens of child exploitation offences after he was caught distributing child pornography.

The Victorian constable has been charged on summons with offences relating to the alleged transmission of child exploitation material.

He was charged on Friday and will appear in court next month.

A senior Victorian police officer has been was caught distributing child pornography

The officer, from the state's Eastern Region, will front Melbourne Magistrates Court on December 2.

He is facing 57 child exploitation offences.

The officer was arrested at the culmination of a Professional Standards Command investigation.

He has been suspended without pay while the investigation is underway.
Despite not filling armed forces role, Corbyn HAS had time to appoint a shadow minister for 'peace and disarmament'

Jeremy Corbyn, pictured at the Cenotaph in Manchester today, has failed to appoint a shadow armed forces minister for over four months

Jeremy Corbyn has failed to appoint a shadow armed forces minister for over four months, in an Armistice Day snub for serving soldiers and veterans.

The revelation is particularly poignant today, when the world commemorates the signing of the truce between the Allied forces and Germans to end the first World War.

It also comes ahead of Remembrance Sunday this weekend.

The last person to fill the post was Toby Perkins until June 27. He was one of more than 60 MPs to quit Mr Corbyns top team over the summer, calling for a change in leadership.

While the Labour leader has not had time to pick an MP to speak up for the armed forces since the summer, he has managed to find time to fill a post for a shadow minister for peace and disarmament.

Normally, shadow minister portfolios mirror actual government jobs, to keep the ministers and their departments accountable. But the shadow peace role does not actually reflect any existing government post.

Mr Corbyn also has two shadow ministers in his shadow cabinet who do not reflect any government function.

Dawn Butler, the MP for Brent Central, is the shadow minister for diverse communities while Andrew Gwynne is a shadow minister without portfolio.

The Labour leader had a drawn-out reshuffle of his frontbench in September, after he successfully fought off a challenge to his leadership.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, pictured centre at an Armistice Day event at the Cenotaph in Manchester today, has not had time to pick an MP to speak up for the armed forces but has managed to find time to fill a post for a shadow minister for peace and disarmament

The revelation is particularly poignant today, when the world commemorates the signing of the truce between the Allied forces and Germans to end the first World War. Pictured, Prince Harry salutes along with other VIPs on Armistice Day at the National Memorial Arboretum to remember war dead

He has also failed to appoint a shadow disability minister, despite the Labour party constantly attacking the government over benefits and disability rights.

Sir Gerald Howarth, a former Tory defence minister, told the Mail: Corbyns disregard for defence of the realm at a critical time of international tension is demonstrated by his failure to appoint a shadow defence minister.

Sir Gerald Howarth, a former Tory defence minister, pictured, told the Mail: Corbyns disregard for defence of the realm at a critical time of international tension is demonstrated by his failure to appoint a shadow defence minister

'It says a lot about Labours priorities when he manages to appoint a shadow peace minister. It was only because of our strong defence under Margaret Thatcher that we ended the Cold War. One of the reasons we have problems today is that our defence has been weakened.

One Labour MP told the Mail: This is insulting to our serving soldiers and to the memories of those who have died for our freedom.

'How can Jeremy have the time to appoint shadow ministers for non-jobs such as peace and disarmament yet fail to fill this vacancy since just after the referendum? It is a particularly bad snub today of all days.

David Cameron was mocked by Labour for failing to immediately appoint an armed forces minister during his reshuffle in 2013.

At the time, Vernon Coaker, the then shadow defence secretary, said it was an outrageous snub to our armed forces and their families.

Labour admonished the government for not putting our brave servicemen and women at the forefront of his mind all of the time and accused the then Prime Minister for being out of touch.

Labour did not respond to requests for comment. Jeremy Corbyn HAS appointed a 'minister for peace' with a brief to end 'violence and conflict' around the world
Ailes stepped down as CEO of Fox News two weeks after Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment suit against him and the network

'I could ensure that the owners of Fox News Channel ... understood they might actually have a predator running their company,' writes Kelly

Kelly then made the decision to speak with the Murdochs about the alleged harassment she had

Megyn Kelly details the final weeks of Roger Ailes' two-decade career at Fox News in her new memoir Settle For More, and reveals just how strained her relationship had become with her boss towards the end.

The popular host of The Kelly File claims that after Gretchen Carlson filed her sexual harassment suit against Ailes in July, the then-CEO asked Kelly to speak out publicly in support of him, just like every other Fox News personality was doing at the time.

Kelly refused to do this however, and writes in her book that as a result Ailes 'engineered hit pieces' about her online.

That is when Kelly realized she had to make a decision she writes, and determine whether she would stay quiet or finally speak out.

She chose the latter, and while the rest of her co-workers were praising Ailes, she went and spoke to his bosses, specifically News Corp executive co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch.

'I could ensure that the owners of Fox News Channel - Rupert Murdoch and his sons - understood they might actually have a predator running their company,' writes Kelly in a passage from her book that was published in the The New York Times.

Scroll down for video

End of the road: Megyn Kelly writes about Roger Ailes final days at Fox News in her new memoir Settle For More

It was previously revealed that Kelly's memoir would feature a section detailing the harassment she experienced when she first began working for Ailes at Fox News.

Kelly's decision to go back and add a section about Ailes' harassment was made after her book had already been completed and sent off to her publisher.

The book is being released by HarperCollins, which is owned by Fox News' parent company News Corp.

She writes in the book that at the time of the alleged harassment she spoke with a lawyer, but decided to keep quiet in the end.

'If I caused a stink, my career would likely be over,' writes Kelly.

Radar Online was the first to obtain the section of the memoir in which Kelly details Ailes' alleged offenses and misconduct, two weeks ahead of the book's November 15 release.

Rumors first began to circulate back in July that Kelly was one of the women who had allegedly been sexually harassed by Ailes while working at Fox News.

These claims came after it was reported that Kelly had agreed to speaking with lawyers investigating claims of sexual harassment at the network after Carlson filed her lawsuit.

Claim: The Fox News host writes that Ailes (above) 'engineered hit pieces' about her

Carlson ultimately settled that suit for a reported $20million, a little less than half of the $42million that Ailes is said to have walked out the door with as part of his severance package.

Ailes has also denied the sexual harassment claims that Carlson made in her lawsuit.

Some of the offenses detailed in Carlson's complaint, including Ailes' offensive and lewd comments, the suggestion of a sexual relationship with his employee and remarks about the clothing and body shape of Fox News' female talent, are remarkably similar to the incidents Kelly writes about in her memoir.

'There was a pattern to his behavior. I would be called into Roger's office, he would shut the door, and over the next hour or two, he would engage in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with me - veering between obviously inappropriate sexually charged comments (e.g. about the 'very sexy bras' I must have and how he'd like to see me in them) and legitimate professional advice,'' writes Kelly in one passage.

She also writes that Ailes crossed a line in early 2006 when he began 'trying to grab me repeatedly and kiss me on the lips.'

Kelly does on to claim in the passage that when she shoved Ailes off her and rebuffed his advances, he 'ominously' asked her: 'When is your contract up?'

He then went in for another kiss writes Kelly.

Reaching out: Kelly writes that she spoke with Lachlan Murdoch (above with wife Sarah at his father Rupert's March wedding) about Ailes

The misconduct and harassment only lasted for six months according to Kelly, with the host explaining that after she spoke with a supervisor and reported Ailes the two began a decade-long relationship that was strictly professional.

Ten years after her final encounter with Ailes however, Kelly was once again forced to speak up when she witnessed firsthand the 'intense campaign' launched by her former boss to get the network's talent to publicly praise him in the wake of Carlson's lawsuit.

Almost here: Kelly's book will be released next week

'I was approached several times, and several times I refused,' writes Kelly.

She then adds: 'There was no way I was going to lie to protect him.'

It is unlikely that Kelly will speak publicly about Ailes' alleged harassment beyond what she details in the book though, as the host tends to avoid getting caught up in public feuds.

Ailes and his lawyer Susan Estrich swiftly released a response to Kelly's bombshell claims last week, stating: 'Mr. Ailes denies her allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct of any kind.'

Estrich's statement also detailed some of the praise that Kelly had lavished on her boss in a recent interview with Charlie Rose.

Unfortunately, Estrich and Ailes incorrectly claimed that Kelly's comments were made 'on the Charlie Rose program' just 'one year ago.'

The comments were actually made when Kelly was profiled by Rose for an episode of CBS Sunday Morning that aired in April.
Timothy Mardon, 51, was shot in the leg through his bedroom door in the raid on his Georgian mansion in Sible Hedingham, Essex in the early hours of February 6 this year

A man accused of burgling a millionaire's mansion told a jury he was 'scared' of his co-defendant who was wielding a shotgun.

High-flying insurance worker Timothy Mardon, 51, was shot in the leg through his bedroom door in the raid on his Georgian mansion in Sible Hedingham, Essex in the early hours of February 6 this year.

He woke up and called 999 before hiding behind his bedroom door as the raiders - who mistakenly believed he was a drug dealer - went from room to room.

The father-of-two was still on the line to the police when he was shot and screamed 'I'm going to die' telephone operators.

He had reportedly told the shouting gunman who asked for the 'weed money': 'I don't deal weed. I work for an insurance company.'

Christopher Bergin, 27, told Chelmsford Crown Court he was at his grandmother's house with a girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, when his co-defendant Charlie Simms, 23, turned up unannounced.

He said Simms 'was very drunk', had a shotgun with him and let off two gunshots outside the house called the 'Old Rectory'.

The two men and the girl then went into a bedroom and were drinking together, the court heard.

Bergin claimed Simms asked if the girl wanted to have sex with them both and she refused.

He said the 'mood changed' and Simms began waving the gun around.

'He didn't seem happy he didn't get his way,' said Bergin. 'He asked me again to go to the Old Rectory.'

He said Simms fired a round into the stairs as they left the property together.

He told the court: 'I just wanted to get him out of my property...I just wanted him to go home.'

Bergin said Simms 'was very drunk', had a shotgun with him and let off two gunshots outside the house called the 'Old Rectory' (pictured)

He said Simms was convinced the Old Rectory was connected with drug dealing.

'I was saying "it's not what you think it is",' said Bergin. 'He's got it in his head he knows it's a drug grow.'

He said Simms held the shotgun as they walked together.

Bergin told the court: 'He was threatening me. 'I was scared. I was scared of getting myself shot, scared of trouble coming back to my house.'

He said they scaled the wall of the Old Rectory and he pretended he had seen someone in the hope of deterring Simms.

Simms climbed on to a balcony and told Bergin to climb up too, the court heard.

Bergin said Simms smashed a window with the butt of the gun and the pair climbed in to the house.

Simms reportedly then told him to 'find the weed'.

Three men reportedly broke into the Grade II listed mansion in Sible Hedingham, Essex

They 'rattled doors' before Simms called Bergin up the stairs, which he did before leaving through a downstairs window, Bergin said.

'The last I saw of him was when he was at the top of the stairs,' said Bergin. 'When I was at the window running I heard a bang.

'I thought it was a kick to be honest. It didn't sound like a proper loud bang.

'It sounded like the door was being kicked or something.'

He said he ran straight home.

'I didn't want to be in the situation in the first place,' he said. 'All I wanted to do the whole night was spend time with (the girl).'

Simms, from Halstead, Essex, Bergin, from Sible Hedingham and Kalebh Shreeve, 24, of Halstead, all deny offences including aggravated burglary and possession of a firearm.

Simms also denies attempted murder.
Billie suffered 23 broken bones and had bleeding to her brain

to say her 'lucky little star Billie is awake'

She woke up on Friday after laying

A 15-year-old girl who lay unresponsive in a hospital bed following a horrific car crash has miraculously woken up after almost three weeks.

Billie Lea Harris was a passenger in an unregistered 1995 Holden Commodore when the driver slammed into a tree in Sunshine West, about 15km from Melbourne's city centre, on October 24.

Her mother took to Facebook on Friday with an emotional post to let the world know her 'lucky little star Billie [was] awake'.

Scroll down for video

Billie Lea Harris (pictured) who lay unresponsive in a hospital bed following a horrific car crash has miraculously woken up after almost three weeks.

'Hey, we have some good news our lucky little star Billie is awake. She is little bit groggy but that's yet to wear off,' mother Kristy Penrose wrote in the group, Billie Lea Harris Wishes and Love.

'She remembers us all so everyone can stop stressing over that it's going to take time for the grogginess to wear off for a few days she's going to be moved to the ward area tomorrow.

'Thank you God, Amen.'

The driver of the car, Luke Lee, was killed on impact and Billie was rushed to hospital, where she lay unresponsive until today.

Billie Lea Harris was a passenger an unregistered 1995 Holden Commodore, when the driver slammed into a tree in Sunshine West on October 24

The driver of the car, Luke Lee, was killed on impact and Billie was rushed to hospital, where she lay unresponsive until today

While friends of the 15-year-old girl comforted and supported each other, Billie's family (pictured) have used the page to update them on her well-being

Another girl and two boys who were also passengers were taken to hospital following the crash.

The Facebook page, Billie Lea Harris Wishes and Love, was created shortly after the accident and soon filled with prayers for the girl's speedy recovery.

Her father, Brett Penrose, said Billie had suffered 23 broken bones, eight fractures to her face, is missing part of her skull and has bleeding on the brain.
Karen Danczuk's new Spanish toyboy has moved into her house - and brought a joint of ham with him.

The selfie queen, 33, kissed her new waiter boyfriend, David, as she helped him bring items into her home in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.

Her 26-year-old partner carried a suitcase, boxes, chairs - and a leg of cured pork - from Karen's white Range Rover to the front door.

The mother-of-two split from her MP husband Simon Danczuk, 50, earlier this year after the pair were involved in an argument at a Spanish villa in August.

Karen Danczuk's new boyfriend David moved into her home in Rochdale (right). He brought and huge joint of ham and gave it to his girlfriend (left)

The loved-up couple each carried a chair into Karen's home in Rochdale, Greater Manchester

She was wearing a brown tracksuit and smiled when he passed her the joint of iberico ham.

He was wearing a grey Adidas tracksuit and was photographed moving his items from Karen's white Range Rover which she parked close to her home.

David moved in after the couple were spotted kissing at a dinner table and on a restaurant balcony while the couple enjoyed a trip to Costa Blanca.

A source told MailOnline: 'It's early days with David, but they really enjoy each other's company.

David was wearing a grey Adidas tracksuit and carried a box of his items from her car

'It's her first relationship since Simon, with whom she is still friends, but she is just out there having fun.'

The loved-up pair in the streets of Spain this month as they headed for a night-out near her holiday property.

It was the couple's latest steamy rendezvous on the Costa Blanca. Karen was spotted wrapped around the Spanish waiter amid the waves earlier this month.

David had a small box of items in the back of Karen's white Range Rover and he was photographed carrying it into her home

She parked her white Range Rover near her home and David went to the boot to get his items
Donald Trump must keep his short temper out of global affairs or there is a risk of nuclear war, the former head of MI6 has said.

Sir John Sawers said the United States president-elect's 'fierce' reactions when he perceives he has been insulted could have dangerous consequences unless he keeps a cooler head.

He said he feared a nuclear clash between the US and China or the US and Russia, which would cause 'widespread devastation'.

Sir John Sawers (file picture) said the United States president-elect's 'fierce' reactions when he perceives he has been insulted could have dangerous consequences

Sir John told BBC Radio 4's World At One: 'We're getting back into a world which is quite dangerous, and I think that is the biggest threat.

'It's got worse over the last five or six years partly because, frankly, one of the failures of President Obama's administration is managing its relationships with Russia.'

Mr Trump's biggest test will be forming good relationships with Russian president Vladimir Putin and particularly Chinese premier Xi Jinping, in order to deal with the potential North Korean nuclear threat.

The 'worse case scenario' would be those relationships turning more confrontational, either through Moscow or Beijing misreading a situation or if the Trump administration 'overreacts'.

'I don't think Donald Trump quite yet knows what the pressures will be on him when he becomes president,' Sir John said.

'We've seen that when he feels slighted, when he feels criticised, he reacts quite fiercely.

'If you translate that into global affairs it could have consequences which are dangerous for everyone.'

Three former British generals and an admiral warned this week that Mr Trump risked war with Russia if he abandoned Nato. The billionaire tycoon has cast doubt on the alliance, accusing European members of not pulling their weight.

Donald Trump's short temper risks exploding dangerous rows with the likes of Vladimir Putin, the former MI6 chief warned today

Before he took over as chief of the Special Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, Sir John was the UKs representative at the United Nations.

He stepped down from MI6 in 2014, and now chairs Macro Advisory Partners, which provides strategic advice and insights to investors and governments. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, last night said Mr Trumps victory posed risks to EU-US relations.

The consequences on security policy and Nato may be pernicious, he said. On Wednesday, the former head of the RAF said a Nato without the US would not be strong enough to defend Eastern Europe.

Sir Michael Graydon said: This may be the wake-up call Europe needs. We can expect Mr Trump to be quite serious on this one, he will not forget it. If European nations do not raise their game then there are real concerns over the future of Nato.
A self-styled rehab mogul who founded 19 sober living facilities in California has been arrested after being accused of sexually assaulting numerous former female patients.

Christopher Bathum, 55, operates the Community Recovery of Los Angeles (CRLA)  which has 13 treatment centers in Los Angeles and Orange Counties as well as six in Colorado.

Bathum was arrested at his home in Agoura Hills and booked on several counts of sexual assault, the Los Angeles Times reports.

He is also accused of being involved in an elaborate scheme that conspired to defraud patients and insurers out of more than $176million.

Christopher Bathum (left) and his companys chief executive Kirsten Wallace (right) were arrested for allegedly conspiring to defraud insurers out of more than $176million. Bathum is also accused of sexually assaulting dozens of former patients of his treatment centers

Authorities began investigating Bathum in May after a patient filed a sexual assault complaint against him.

Lt. Todd Deeds of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Departments Major Crime Bureau told the Times that more than a dozen former patients have accused Bathum of sexual assault.

The incidents reportedly occurred at his treatment centers between 2012 and 2016.

Deeds added that police suspect there could be more victims and urged them to come forward.

After police began investigating, one of the women who filed a lawsuit against Bathum  Amanda Jester  told ABCs 20/20 that Bathum sexually assaulted her in a sweat lodge at his Malibu facility.

I have no credit card, no money, no cellphone, she told the program. I felt like I had no choice.

Authorities began investigating Bathum (above) in May after a patient filed a sexual assault complaint against him

Bathum denied the allegations  saying people say all kinds of crazy things.

Formal charges regarding the sexual assault allegations have yet to be filed against Bathum.

But on Thursday, Bathum was taken into custody during a massive raid on his home as well as 14 other locations in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

Detectives from the California Department of Insurance arrested Bathum and the companys chief executive Kirsten Wallace on multiple felony counts of grand theft and identity theft.

They are accused of luring vulnerable addicts to CRLA using a variety of marketing schemes and stealing the identities of patients to buy health policies without their permission.

Bathum was taken into custody during a massive raid on his home as well as 14 other locations in Los Angeles and Orange Counties

One of the women who filed a lawsuit against Bathum said that Bathum sexually assaulted her in a sweat lodge at his Malibu facility

In a statement, the department said that after the patients completed treatment, Bathum continued to bill insurance companies for treatment services.

Bathum and Wallace billed insurance companies more than $176million in fraudulent claims, the department said.

The insurers  including Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Cigna, Health Net and Humana  paid around $44million in total before discovering the suspected fraud and stopping the payments.

Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said: Bathum and Wallaces conspiracy victimized hundreds of people addicted to drugs and alcohol by keeping them in a never-ending cycle of treatment, addiction, and fraud  all the while lining their pockets with millions of dollars from allegedly fraudulent insurance claims.

If convicted on all counts, Bathum and Wallace face more than 35 years in prison.
It was designed by architect Oliver Hill who was originally

Advertisement

A Spanish-style mansion modelled on a royal palace and hidden in the English countryside has gone on sale for6.5million.

The unique property, named Marylands, was inspired by Granada's world-famous Alhambra fortress.

It was designed by architect Oliver Hill who veered away from the owner's instruction to build a traditional Tudor-style home and instead erected a luxurious Spanish sandstone mansion.

Marylands (pictured), a luxurious Spanish-style mansion modelled on a royal palace and hidden in the Surrey Hills, has gone on sale for 6.5million

The house was designed by architect Oliver Hill who was originally comissioned to build a Tudor-style home but instead based his work on Granada's world-famous Alhambra fortress

The flamboyant mansion has been used in numerous film and television productions, including an ITV episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot (pictured left). On the approach a private drive passes through an elegant sandstone arch (pictured right) leading into a large courtyard with space for 30 cars

Luxury aspects of the unusual U-shaped property include a heated swimming pool and a cinema room

Built in 1930, the striking 10 bedroom property has a green roof and takes an unusual U-shape form.

It sits in the Surrey Hills' Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and boasts expansive views across the South Downs.

The flamboyant property has been used in numerous film and television productions, including ITV murder-mystery Agatha Christie's Poirot.

Mark Wheeler, from estate agents Hamptons, which is selling the property, said: 'Marylands is a genuine one-of-a-kind, nothing else on the market comes close to it.

'Oliver Hill was clearly an experimental architect with unusual and interesting ideas.

'As you walk around you see little nuances that you would never see anywhere else, every time you go you notice something you'd not seen the last time.

'The feel when you're there is very authentic, as if you are actually in southern Spain.'

The real Alhambra in Granada, Spain, was originally constructed as a small fortress on the remains of Roman fortifications in AD 889 but was converted into a dramatic palace in the 13th century

The master bedroom of the Surrey Hills mansion takes advantage of the home's amazing views and has a sitting room (pictured) at an increased elevation

Built from sandstone in 1930, the Mediterranean-style 10-bedroom property has a striking green roof and acres of gardens

The hidden property boast amazing views of the quiet English countryside and the home is located in a highly exclusive area with a smattering of similarly priced houses dotted around it

The house was designed to be 'very authentic' to make residents and visitors believe they are actually in southern Spain

He added: 'The home is located in a highly exclusive area with a smattering of similarly priced houses dotted around.

'The current owners have done a massive amount of work to modernise the home, bringing it right into the 21st century.'

Marylands has retained all of its original features, such as beamed ceilings, sandstone arches, Arts and Crafts fireplaces and oak flooring.

On the approach a private drive passes through an elegant sandstone arch leading into a large courtyard with space for 30 cars.

The house was built in 1930 but the current owners have done a massive amount of work to modernise it and bring it right into the 21st century

Marylands' has retained all of its original features, such as beamed ceilings, sandstone arches, Arts and Crafts fireplaces and oak flooring

All seven reception rooms take full advantage of the views, including the 'tower room' at the end top of the house

All seven reception rooms take full advantage of the views, including the 'tower room' at the end top of the house.

The master bedroom also takes advantage of the view, with a sitting room at an increased elevation.

Other luxury aspects include a heated swimming pool and a cinema room.
Advisors to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign who believe victory was snatched away from the former secretary of state have begun airing their grievances, pointing the finger at FBI Director James Comey for releasing a bombshell letter about Clinton's emails just 11 days before the election.

'We know that in the midst of the heartbreak and sadness everyone feels, were starting to look for some answers as to what happened,' wrote Navin Nayak, head of Clinton's opinion research division in the first insider printed analysis to see daylight.

'We believe that we lost this election in the last week. Comeys letter in the last 11 days of the election both helped depress our turnout and also drove away some of our critical support among college-educated white votersparticularly in the suburbs,' he wrote in a letter obtained by Politico.

The head of Hillary Clinton's campaign research devision believes the election was lost in the last week, and blames FBI Director James Comey

'We also think Comeys 2nd letter, which was intended to absolve Sec. Clinton, actually helped to bolster Trumps turnout,' he wrote. That helps explain why when Comey released the second letter effectively letting Clinton off the hook, the campaign didn't want to talk about it, and instead dropped news of an upcoming Bruce Springsteen performance at a final campaign event.

Nayak observed: 'It will certainly take more time to unpack everything but we do have some early signals as to what happened and wanted to share this initial thinking with everyone.'

He noted some of Clinton's challenges  running for a third Democratic term, the 'unprecedented task' of electing a woman as president, and anger at institutions.

The memo also points the finger at third-party candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party.

'There is no question that a week from Election Day, Sec. Clinton was poised for a historic win. In the end, less than 110K votes out of tens of millions cast on Election Day made the difference in this race,' Nayak wrote.

'It is worth noting that Jill Stein alone got 130K votes in those three states---and though her votes don't distribute perfectly to cover the margin across the three states, it is an important reminder of the influence of 3rd party votes. In the end, late breaking developments in the race proved one hurdle too many for us to overcome.'

The memo had mentioned a drop in election day turnout in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

Clinton campaign chair John Podesta referred to Comey as someone 'who we think may have cost us the election' with his last-minute bombshell announcement about Clinton's emails

Navin Nayak also singled out Green Party candidate Jill Stein

Clinton and her team showed little evidence they thought they could lose at one of her final campaign events in North Carolina, where young supporters cheered and got a performance from Lady Gaga

Clinton spoke in New York after her stunning loss to Donald Trump

In a Thursday private conference call other campaign members, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta also fingered Comey as a culprit of the surprise loss, identifying him as someone 'who we think may have cost us the election,' a Clinton surrogate told The Hill newspaper.

An unidentified aide said: 'We saw turnout down and didn't do nearly as well as we thought. Something happened and it happened in a pretty steady way late in the race,' according to the campaign surrogate who quoted the aide.

'The media always covered her as the person who would be president and therefore tried to eviscerate her before the election, but covered Trump who was someone who was entertaining and sort of gave him a pass,' said Podesta. He added: 'We need to reflect and analyze that and put our voices forward.'

Added Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri: 'That last week, it was just one too many things.'

Podesta vented about 'the dominance of the way [the media] covered the email.' He made the case there was a false equivalency between email and the the conflicts of Trump's businesses, the Russian contacts we are now learning to be true, the failure of the press following the 3-page leak to the New York Times to really dig into the income tax question.

'We need to be mindful of the fact that they're going to continue, they won't quit, they're going to continue to throw mud.'

Whether or not Clinton got a raw deal on the email  as well as on emails hacked from Podesta's personal account  there was extensive media reporting on Trump business conflicts, suggested Russian interference, Trump charity promises that didn't materialize, not to mention his infamous 'p****' tape.

Neither post-mortem mentioned issues that were under Clinton's control, such as her decision to set up and use a private email server, her decision to give paid speeches up until she announced her candidacy, or her involvement with the Clinton foundation while serving as secretary of state.
Two people are still trapped in a cottage that has been destroyed by a fire in the grounds of Blenheim Palace.

Residents in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, woke on Wednesday morning to find the cottage in the grounds of one of Britain's most popular tourist attractions ablaze.

Police believe two people living at the property are still trapped inside and now feared dead, but rescue teams are still clearing the site and have not yet gained access.

Residents in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, woke on Wednesday morning to find a house situated in the grounds of one of Britain's most stunning tourist attractions (pictured) ablaze

Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service were called out to reports of a house fire at 7.50am on Wednesday morning and three fire engines arrived on scene.

The incident at the 2,000-acre Unesco World Heritage Site, which has caused severe damage to the property, is not being treated as suspicious.

The fire service is assisting Thames Valley Police in a multi-agency investigation into the cause of the fire, and the next of kin have been informed.

Investigating Officer, DS Robert Platt, of Thames Valley Police Force CID said: 'Sadly at this stage we strongly believe that two occupants living at the property are still inside.

'We are working with the next of kin of the occupants and giving them regular updates, as our multi-agency team continues to search the property.

'At this stage we believe that there are no suspicious circumstances, and along with Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue we continue to investigate the cause of the fire.'

Police believe two people living at the property were trapped inside but rescue teams are still clearing the site and have not yet gained access. Pictured, Blenheim Palace

Kerry Blair, fire risk manager for Cherwell and West Oxfordshire, said: 'Due to the structural instability of the building following the fire, Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue and Thames Valley Police have worked with structural engineers to secure the stability of the premises to enable a safe investigation to be undertaken.'
Vilma Ahtiainen (pictured) admitted disclosing private sexual photographs

A jealous rollerskater sent X-rated photographs of her former lover and copies of their sex texts to his girlfriend after he ended their affair, a court heard.

Vilma Ahtiainen, 26, had been with the man for one year despite the fact he was in a six-year relationship with another woman.

When he broke up with Ahtiainen, she wrote his girlfriend a letter, complete with images of his manhood and copies of their sexual messages.

Ahtiainen, from Leytonstone, east London, is a keen rollerskater after starting the hobby in her native Finland and admitted disclosing private sexual photographs.

Julian Becker, prosecuting, told Thames Magistrates' Court in London: 'The defendant and the victim had an affair that started in 2014 and ended in October 2015.

'During that time there were frequent communications between the victim and the defendant.

'There were some sexual photographs that were exchanged between them. These offences occurred after that relationship.

'On July 13 this year the defendant wrote to the victim's current partner with whom he had been in a relationship for six years.

'She printed photographs of the victims penis as well as copies of explicit messages and texts. This was upsetting to the victim as well as his partner.'

Ahtiainen, who claims to work as a publishing assistant at Springer Nature, told the court: 'I have nothing to say, other than some of the things the victim said aren't true.'

Judge Robin Hamilton handed her a 12 month community order, with an unpaid work requirement of 100 hours.

Ahtiainen, from Leytonstone, east London, is a keen rollerskater after starting the hobby in her native Finland

He said: 'You pleaded guilty to this offence and I will give you credit for that early guilty plea.

'This was an upsetting offence which caused distress to your ex-partner and his current partner.

'A community order is the correct penalty.'
Nineteen-year-old Franziska was killed in the car crash in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia on August 16 when her vehicle hit the tree

A grieving mother has received a final demand to pay up for the damage to a tree caused when her daughter died after colliding into it.

Nineteen-year-old Franziska was killed in the car crash in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia on August 16 when her vehicle hit the tree.

But German authorities have invoiced her mother 548 for a 50cm by 35cm 'wound' in the tree.

The girl, who was studying to become a zookeeper in a nearby town, was on her way home in the afternoon when the accident happened.

She was between the towns of Stokkem and Jakobwuellesheim, when for unknown reasons her Volkswagen Polo swung off the carriageway and crashed into the tree.

Authorities never determined out the cause of the accident.

Yet the German authorities have blamed her for damaging the tree in the accident.

Local media report that the 'wound' of the tree is merely 50 by 35 centimetres big, which resulted in a 20 percent loss of functionality.

The authorities sent an invoice of 548 to Franziska's shocked mother to pay for the costs.

She said: 'The wounds of the tree will heal. Ours will not.'

But according to the the German bureaucrats, the case was clear and they have refused to back down.

Gerhard Decker, the manager of the state company for road construction, said: 'If there is damage to a tree or crash barrier caused by a car, we will charge the person that caused it and their insurer. It is always like that.
The father of one of the police officers slain in the Dallas sniper attack has filed a lawsuit against Black Lives Matter asking for $550million in damages.

Enrique Zamarripa filed the federal lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas on Monday, the Fort-Worth Star Telegram reports.

His son Patrick Zamarripa was killed by a gunman who ambushed officers during a Black Lives Matter protest on July 7.

Four other officers - Brent Thompson, Michael Krol, Michael Smith and Lorne Ahrens - were also killed as they guarded the march in protest of the shootings of two unarmed men by police.

In the lawsuit, Zamarripa claims Black Lives Matter incited a 'war on police' that led to the death of his son.

Scroll down for video

The father of Patrick Zamarripa (pictured), one of the police officers slain in the Dallas sniper attack, has filed a lawsuit against Black Lives Matter for $550 million in damages

The lawsuit calls the movement a 'violent and revolutionary criminal gang.'

'While Defendant Black Lives Matter claims to combat anti-black racism, the movement has in fact incited and committed further violence, severe bodily injury and death against police officers of all races and ethnicities, Jews, and Caucasians,' the lawsuit says, according to the Telegram.

Father-of-two Zamarripa, 32, was working on bicycle patrol when hundreds of people marched through downtown Dallas, protesting the recent shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two black men who had been shot dead by police.

Towards the end of the march, gunman Micah Johnson opened fire - killing five officers and wounding nine others along with two civilians.

In the lawsuit, Enrique Zamarripa (above, with his son) claims Black Lives Matter incited a 'war on police' that led to the death of his son

Police officers stand guard at a barricade following the sniper attack in Dallas on July 7

Four of the slain officers were from the Dallas Police Department, including Zamarripa, and one was from the DART Police Department.

Johnson was killed by police with a robot-delivered bomb after negotiations failed.

Authorities said Johnson, who was black, told negotiators he wanted to kill as many white police officers as he could.
She began working for the family in 2012 when they had just one son, and through 2015 when the couple welcomed twins

Alaseri also claims that Shahi spoke of the affair she was having with an A-list actor and forced her to look at photos of the man's penis

She claims the verbal abuse got so bad she had to stop praying in the home, though Shahi is a Muslim too of Iranian and

One of the stars of the Showtime series Shameless and his actress wife are being sued by their nanny, who claims in court papers that she was subjected to verbal abuse and sexual harassment while she worked for the family

TMZ reports that Sarah Alaseri is suing Steve Howey and Sarah Shahi for back wages, harassment and wrongful termination, claiming that she was forced to quit after three years working for the family due to the constant abuse.

Alaseri, who is Muslim, claims that Howey would chide and berate her when she practiced Islamic customs in his presence. She also alleges that this verbal abuse got so bad that she no longer did her daily prayers inside the home.

Shahi, who was born Aahoo Jahansouz Shahi, is also Muslim, and her father was born in Iran while her maternal grandfather is Persian.

A rep for Howey did not respond to a request for comment.

Scroll down for video

Court case: Sarah Alaseri is suing Shamless star Steve Howey and his wife Sarah Shahi (above in 2014)

Allegation: Alesari claims that Shahi (above) spoke of the affair she was having with an A-list actor and forced her to look at photos of the man's penis

Alaseri began working for the couple back in July 2012 according to court papers, when they had only one son, William.

Howey and Shahi, who were married in 2009, then welcomed twins in 2015, daughter Violet and son Knox.

Shahi, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who had featured roles on Person of Interest and The L Word, gave birth to all three children at home in a water bath.

Alaseri claims in her court filing that she was sexually harassed by Shahi, claiming that the 36-year-old actress joked that the nanny should get in shape so she could 'run off' with Howey.

She also claims in court documents that Shahi detailed the affair she was having with an A-list movie actor.

Alaseri goes on to claim in court papers that in addition to hearing stories about how 'sore' Shahi allegedly was because of her famed paramour, she was also made to look at photos of the man's penis.

Shahi also allegedly told Alaseri during one of the conversations that she was ready to 'move on with her life' and leave Howey.

Kids: Alesari began working for the family in 2012 when they had just one son, and through 2015 when the couple welcomed twins (Howey and Shahi with Violet, Wolf and Knox above)

Critical darling: Howey can currently be seen on the seventh season of the acclaimed Showtime series Shameless (above)

And while Howey has not responded to his former nanny's lawsuit, things do appear to be going well with the family's new child-care provider.

The actor tweeted on Tuesday: 'Waiting for my nanny to get here so I can vote while listening to Eye of the Tiger.'

Howey has been a constant fixture on television for the past 15 years, appearing on six seasons of the popular comedy Reba starting in 2001, which is where he first met Shahi.

Then, in 2010, he landed the role of Kevin in the critically acclaimed series Shameless, which was based off of the British series of the same name.
A 36-year-old career criminal accused of pushing a stranger to his death in front of a moving New York City subway train has been sentenced to 18 years in jail.

Kevin Darden was sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the November 2014 death of 61-year-old Wai Kuen Kwok.

Kwok was standing with his wife while waiting for the D train at the 167th street subway stop in the Bronx when Darden shoved him in front of an approaching train.

Darden, who has a history of arrests for assault and robbery, did not know the victim who died at the scene, police said.

Scroll down for video

Kevin Darden, 36, (left) was sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the November 2014 death of 61-year-old Wai Kuen Kwok (right)

Kwok was with his wife Yow Ho Lee on November 16, 2014 when he was pushed to his death. The couple is pictured above with one of their children

During the sentencing, Darden reportedly did not say anything and the victim's family was not there because they could not relive the tragedy, prosecutors said.

He had been facing 25 years to life if he was convicted of murder, but received the 18-year deal after 'careful consideration of all the facts and evidence', and after discussing it with the victim's family, according to the New York Daily News.

Darden will serve 18 years in prison followed by five years of state supervision.

Relatives had told authorities Kwok, a father of two, worked for a kitchen supply company and that he and his wife, Yow Ho Lee, were planning to have breakfast and do grocery shopping in Chinatown the day he was killed.

Police had released a video of a suspect pushing Kwok from the platform just as a train arrived in the station on November 16.

Kwok was with his wife waiting for the D train at the 167th street subway stop platform (file photo above) when he was shoved onto the tracks

Darden was arrested three days after he was caught on CCTV shoving Kwok in front of the oncoming train

Kwok's horrified wife watched helplessly.

The train's motorman, James Muriel, told CBS New York at the time that he hit the brakes while the victim was still airborne, but it was no use.

'We could feel the bumps underneath the train,' he said at the time.

Muriel said he was crying when he went to check on the victim and needed help getting out of his cab because his legs were numb.

'The victim's wife, she threw herself on me and she began to cry hysterically,' Muriel told NBC New York.

'Everybody just began to cry... Women, grown men, just everybody.'

Darden fled the station and two minutes later hopped on a bus with other people who had been on the platform at the time of the push and unknowingly discussed it while he was nearby, police said.

After the incident, Darden was later caught on camera leaving the scene, boarding a bus, then smoking on the street after stopping in a bodega

Surveillance footage shows him walking calmly from the subway station.

Later footage shows him getting off a bus 10 blocks away, heading into a convenience store and then emerging smoking a cigarette.

The victim's wife was taken to a hospital for observation and was not injured.

Darden has more than 30 prior arrests on his record including charges for robbery, assault, drugs and allegedly trying to set fire to his brother's home.

In a separate incident, he was also suspected of assaulting a 51-year-old man on a Manhattan subway platform on November 6, 2014, police said.

Darden's sentencing comes just days after a former home health aide was charged with shoving a woman to her death in front of an oncoming subway train in Times Square.
A civil war broke out Friday within the Democratic Party as the left-wing blamed the establishment for Hillary Clinton's devastating defeat and a prospective party head gave a competitor a verbal thrashing.

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee when President Barack Obama was elected, offensively attacked Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison.

Dean is asking party leaders to choose him to restructure their dysfunctional national operation.

Progressive activist organizations and the lawmakers they look to as compasses are getting behind Ellison, who is African-American and Muslim.

Dean told MSNBC Friday that Ellison is 'a very good guy' but 'theres one problem: you cannot do this job and sit in a political office at the same time. Its not possible.'

That's how Democrats got themselves in this mess in the first place, he assessed.

Democrats are racing to move on from Hillary Clinton's devastating defeat and elect a new party head to restructure their dysfunctional national operation. Howard Dean, right, is asking party leaders to put their trust in him. Keith Ellison, left, is also looking at a bid

Dean, a former governor of Vermont, said Thursday that he will run for DNC chair, a position he held when Barack Obama was elected

Former Maryland Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley says he's interested in the job, too

He pointed to ex-DNC chair and House Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as an example of a failed leader who had two day jobs.

'Weve seen what happens,' he said. 'It does not work. This is more than a full-time job.'

Dean said the party is in 'turmoil' and 'must rebuild from what has been a tragedy not only for the Democratic Party, but perhaps for the country.'

Former Maryland Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley said after the broadcast he's interested in the position, too.

O'Malley dropped out of the 2016 race in February. He doesn't hold elected office right now, either.

Clinton would have pushed one of her allies for party chair had she been elected.

Instead, she found herself delivering her concession speech to Donald Trump two days ago, leaving Democrats in a lurch.

A spokesman for Bernie Sanders told Politico the senator and 2016 White House contender is backing the Ellison for party chair.

Democrats' leader-in-waiting in the upper chamber, Sen. Chuck Schumer, also endorsed Ellison, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and chief deputy whip to House Democrats, the Washington Post reported.

Elizabeth Warren, a progressive senator from Massachusetts, said Ellison would make a 'terrific DNC chair' on MSNBC.

MoveOn.org and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee have said they like Ellison for the position, too.

The five-term congressman, elected this week to a sixth term, 'would be an excellent chair,' MoveOn's executive director Ilya Sheyman said in a statement.

'The DNC must clean house and the new chair must stand up to all efforts by Trump and Republicans to move their harmful and bigoted agenda, which lost the national popular vote,' Sheyman said.

Dean told MSNBC Friday that Ellison is 'a very good guy' but 'theres one problem: you cannot do this job and sit in a political office at the same time. Its not possible.' That's how Democrats got themselves in this mess in the first place, he assessed

'At the same time, the DNC must connect with the grassroots of the party base that wants the party to reject corporate influence and advance an inclusive, progressive agenda that will energize voters and grow our base.'

PCCC co-founder Stephanie Taylor said the establishment blew it in 2016.

'The Democratic establishment had their chance with this election. Its time for new leadership of the Democratic Party -- younger, more diverse, and more ideological -- that is hungry to do things differently, like leading a movement instead of dragging people to the polls,' Taylor argued.

'Democrats will lose, over and over, until they have a willingness to take on corporate power and other entrenched power in a very real and authentic way.'

The PCCC representative added, 'Keith Ellison is one many good people who could lead the DNC in a new and more winning direction.'

Democracy for America, a grassroots organization that rose from the ashes of Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, suggested in a Thursday evening call with its members that it was remaining neutral for now.

On Friday, Dean suddenly resigned from his leadership position at the organization, which has been run by his brother Jim since 2005.

'Founding DFA was one of the greatest honors of my life and, while Im stepping back from my role with Democracy for America today, I could not be more proud of the grassroots movement weve created together and what they will do going forward,' Dean said in a statement.

The evening before DFA Executive Director Charles Chamberlain told the organization's membership, 'Here at DFA we believe that the Democratic party is at its best when its leaders have the courage to compete for the best ideas, the best practices, and the best people.

Chamberlain blamed 'party insiders' for Democrats' spectacular defeat at all levels of federal government on Tuesday.

'Democratic party insiders got together around conference tables in Washington DC and more or less decided who the presidential nominee would be, without listening to the partys grassroots base. Thats wrong and thats part of the reason why we lost,' he said.

ALL YOUR FAULT: At a staff meeting Thursday interim DNC chair Donna Brazile was assailed by an aide for her conduct during the campaign. The angry staffer said Brazile and her cronies were responsible for Donald Trump's election

The DFA official said, 'We here at DFA hope that there will be a vigorous, forward-looking competition for the leadership of the Democratic Party and we strongly believe that the partys grassroots base -- not party insiders and political elites -- should play the decisive role in choosing who our partys next leader should be. Period.'

DFA's guest on the call: Ellison.

'I will announce that I'm going to make an announcement on Monday. So, there you go,' he said.

Dean, a former governor of Vermont, said Thursday that he will seek the position.

'The dems need organization and focus on the young. Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman again,' he said on Twitter.

The MSNBC contributor said Friday on the network, 'My plan is to reach out to young people...I think they now understand that politics matters.

'Weve got to rebuild this party, and I know how to do that,' he said, pointing out that when he was in charge, Democrats won the House, Senate and the White House.

O'Malley said Friday morning that he is considering a bid of his own.

'Since the election, I have been approached by many Democrats who believe our party needs new leadership,' he said in written statement.

'I'm taking a hard look at DNC Chair because I know how badly we need to reform our nominating process, articulate a bold progressive vision, recommit ourselves to higher wages and a stronger middle class, and return to our roots as a nationwide, grassroots party.'

DYSFUNCTION JUNCTION: Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her top aides stepped down as Democrats gathered in Philadelphia to officially name Hillary Clinton their White House candidate in July. Vice Chair Brazile was asked to step in as party until the end of the election

The highest-ranking Democrat, President Obama remains the party's guiding light until he leaves office in January. The title of party leader will shift to the DNC chair after that.

Republicans swept the House and Senate, in addition to the executive branch, in the last election.

'When theres one party thats in the White House and that same party controls Congress, it elevates the position of the chair of the DNC. So its an important decision,' Obama's spokesman, Josh Earnest, said Thursday.

The White House official told reporters, 'I dont know to what extent President Obama will weigh in on it.'

Earnest predicted a 'hotly contested and closely covered' race to lead to national party.

'I would anticipate that candidates for that position will covet the endorsement of the outgoing President. I dont know to what extent hell have one to offer, but well keep you posted on all of it.'

Since July, when then-DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned the day before the party's week-long presidential nominating convention began, progressives have told DailyMail.com they favor Ellison for the job.

Defeated Congresswoman Donna Edwards, Rep. Raul Grijalva and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez received several nods, as well.

'I think it should probably be somebody in charge who supported Bernie,' one high-level progressive activist said.

The highest-ranking Democrat, President Barack Obama remains the party's guiding light until he leaves office in January. The title of party leader will shift to the DNC chair after that

Ellison was hailed in conversations as a 'bridge builder' who holds a leadership post as deputy whip and endorsed Sanders. And, he's Muslim, they pointed out, a nod to the party's efforts to promote diversity.

Wasserman Schultz was elected chair in May of 2011, succeeding Tim Kaine, now a U.S. Senator representing Virginia. Kaine was part of this year's losing ticket - he was Clinton's running mate.

Holding the dual titles of DNC chair and Florida congresswoman, Wasserman Schultz lead the party for five years, despite complaints from Democrats that she came across as too partisan on television.

It was hacked emails, revealing a bias within the DNC against Sanders, that did her in.

Wasserman Schultz said Sanders, a life-long independent who changed his affiliation to Democrat to run for president, didn't understand Democrats' apparatus because he wasn't one.

Egg on their faces, Wasserman Schultz and her top aides stepped down as Democrats gathered in Philadelphia to officially name Hillary Clinton their White House candidate.

Vice Chair Donna Brazile was asked to step in as party chief until the end of the election.

Progressives are blaming party insiders for Clinton's nomination and defeat. The failed candidate is seen her on Thursday in Chappaqua, NY

Her short tenure would soon be marred by an email scandal, too. Wikileaks would go on to publish more than 50,000 emails it obtained from internet thieves who infiltrated Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's account.

Emails, at least one of which Brazile suggested was faked, showed the CNN contributor giving Clinton's team a heads up about questions she and Sanders would be asked at a forum hosted by the network and a primary debate.

CNN and Brazile have since parted ways.

At a staff meeting Thursday in Washington, D.C. Brazile was assailed by an aide, the Huffington Post says, for her conduct during the campaign.

'Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?' he shouted, two of his peers say. 'You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself.'

The staffer named 'Zach' ripped Brazile for the outcome of Tuesday's election - President-elect Trump - and screamed at her: 'You are part of the problem.'

'You and your friends will die of old age, and Im going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy,' he said.

Brazile confirmed the outburst but declined to characterize it in an email to the Huffington Post.

'As you can imagine, the individual involved is a member of the staff and I personally do not wish to discuss our internal meetings,' she said in an email.

The DNC has not said when it will hold elections for its leadership positions. A spokesman for the organization did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

A source with knowledge of the preparations told DailyMail.com the election would most likely be held in March.

The Association of State Democratic Chairs and the DNC Executive Committee will meet in Denver, Colorado, Dec. 1-3.
Joanna Maynard, 44, was attempting a three point turn and thought she ran over and killed Elsie Sprague, 87,

A woman who ran over a pensioner after taking a cocktail of prescription drugs has been spared jail.

Joanna Maynard, 44, was attempting a three point turn and thought she had just hit the kerb when she ran over and killed Elsie Sprague, 87, in Leytonstone, east London.

The driver tested positive for cocaine but was under the prescribed limit, the Old Bailey heard.

Maynard had reversed 40 yards down the road to find a space to perform the turn with one of her wing mirrors folded against the car.

She struck Mrs Sprague in her Land Rover Freelander but drove over her body thinking she had bumped up against the pavement.

Maynard drove over her a second time when she moved forward to complete the manoeuvre, the court heard.

Maynard eventually realised what had happened and called an ambulance, but Mrs Sprague was pronounced dead at the scene.

Maynard, from Walthamstow, admitted causing death by careless driving and sobbed as she was sentenced to six months in prison, suspended for two years.

The driver tested positive for cocaine but was under the prescribed limit at the time of the crash, the court heard.

Maynard had been visiting a friend, Deborah Smith, who was a passenger in the car at the time of the collision.

It was only as she was preparing to drive forward to leave that Maynard realised Mrs Sprague was on the ground.

At a previous hearing, prosecutor Robert Chamber said: The defendant was tested at the time and came back positive for cocaine to the amount of not less than 7mg. This is below the specified limit of 10mg per litre.

She also tested positive for benzoylecgonine [BZE, a cocaine metabolite] and this was for 200mg per litre, which is greater than the 50mg per litre limit.

Maynard denies ever taking cocaine in her life and it was agreed the BZE was probably a byproduct of her medication for bipolar disorder and depression.

Her previous sentencing hearing in September was adjourned because she was so distressed, and the court heard that a week after the accident Maynard tried to take her own life.

Maynard sobbed loudly in the corridor before the hearing and was allowed to sit in the well of the court with her mother rather than in the dock.

In a victim impact statement read to the court, John Sprague said: My mother was fiercely independent and she enjoyed going on the bus to the shops in Ilford and Woodford.

She was always immaculately turned out - she visited the hairdresser every week and she never left the house without her hair up or without makeup or lipstick.

She would pop in for a cup of tea often and Mothers Day and her birthday were particularly difficult - Christmas will also be hard.

I am finding it very hard to come to terms with the way my mother died - I feel guilty that I wasnt there when it happened and helpless that there was nothing I could do.

Going to the morgue to identify her body was horrific and I keep getting flashbacks.

Mum was in great health and I thought there were a number of Christmases that we could still enjoy together.

Sentencing, Judge Peter Rook QC said: Its clear that the victims family have been profoundly affected by her loss, you reversed in the cul de sac in order to be able to drive out forward.

Probably Mrs Sprague thought the driver had seen her and would wait.

It was your responsibility to take note of the limitations of your visions through the rear window, you reversed without a wing mirror for some distance, about 30 metres.

He continued: Effectively you took a chance when you knew there was a risk - you reversed over her causing the car to go up then drove over her again..

Ive no doubt you felt devastated at the time and still feel devastated and Ive no doubt your remorse and your apology to the family are genuine.

Maynard was also banned from driving for eight years, but she had vowed never to get behind the wheel again.

In interview, Maynard said she had checked her mirrors and saw no one.

She said she was aware there might have been a blind spot but didnt open her wing mirrors.

Bruce Clark, defending said: One off-side wing mirror was pushed down. She looked over her shoulder.

She clearly reversed down the road, but not in a dangerous fashion.

The elderly lady did not look and stepped out into the street.

Mr Clark had been taking a large number of different medications for her bipolar disorder at the time of the incident, including oxycodone, a powerful painkiller.

He added: She swears to me that she has never taken cocaine in her life.

She alleges that some of the medication [she was taking] was cocaine-based.

She has a letter from her GP which says she was fit to drive.

If the doctor thinks someone should not be driving, then they can always contact the DVLA and say so.

As to the cocaine, she is under the limit by a good half.

Mrs Sprague didnt look and she [Maynard] didnt have a wing mirror open, they are the two contributing factors in this case.

Ms Maynard caused the ambulance to be caused immediately, she covered her with blankets and she stayed with her.
A Florida man has been arrested for murdering his girlfriend after walking into a sheriff's office and telling deputies he killed her, authorities said.

Jeremy Stigler, 44, went to the Plantation Key Sheriffs Office substation on Monday morning and told deputies his girlfriend Jade Dixon, 47, was dead, deputies said.

He then reportedly informed them that he was a suspect in her death before deputies drove to the home the couple shared in Tavernier and found her body.

Stigler was taken into custody on Thursday after recounting the ordeal to a friend who drove him to the sheriff's office, deputies said in a news release.

Jeremy Stigler, 44, was arrested on Thursday (center). He went into the Monroe County Sheriff's Office on Monday and told detectives he was a suspect in his girlfriend's death

At this time, the timeline of Dixon's death is not entirely clear.

Dixon, whose cause of death was listed as manual strangulation following an autopsy, was found lying face down on her bed, according to the Miami Herald.

In the events leading to her death, Stigler told detectives Dixon had a knife and was holding it to her stomach when she lunged at him with it.

He punched her in the face and she fell to the ground, becoming disoriented, he said.

She continued reaching for the knife so he told detectives he stepped on her chest to keep her from grabbing it.

Following the struggle, he later helped walk her to the bedroom where he put her to bed before falling asleep himself.

He told detectives when he woke up, Dixon, who is reportedly also known as Jade Green locally, was dead.

Just days before, deputies had responded to the home on Saturday at 11pm to a domestic dispute.

During that incident, Dixon was transported to the hospital for unrelated medical issues, authorities said.

Stigler's 47-year-old girlfriend Jade Stigler was found dead on Monday morning inside the home the couple shared in Tavernier (shown above)

A neighbor told the Miami Herald that a lot of law enforcement officers responded to the home and that there was 'a lot of yelling.'

She was last seen alive during the early hours on Sunday when she was released from the hospital, according to deputies.

Later that day, deputies said they responded to a crash around 4pm involving Dixon's 2004 Cadillac SRX, but neighbors told deputies Stigler was the driver.

By the time deputies arrived at the scene, Stigler had left, the vehicle was towed and deputies said they did not make contact with Stigler that day.

Stigler later told detectives that after he had found Dixon dead, he took 'a large number of valium and Xanax pills and slept,' according to the sheriff's office.
Soiled diapers, rotten food, spoiled milk and trash were scattered about the vehicle

, one of which punctured a pacifier, as well as heroin

A Florida mother-of-two has been arrested on charges of grand theft auto, child neglect and drug possession after deputies say they found her passed out in a car strewn with heroin and syringes with her baby in her lap.

Amanda Ray, of Jacksonville, was taken into custody on Tuesday and booked into the St Johns County Jail on $11,000 bond.

According to the local sheriff's office, deputies came upon Ray sitting in the driver's seat of a car parked at a Ponte Verde gas station on Settlement Drive in Nocatee Tuesday night.

Mom charged: Amanda Ray, 29, pictured left in her mugshot and right, has been arrested after being found passed out in a car with her baby in her lap

Crime scene: Deputies came upon Ray asleep behind the wheel of a stolen car at this gas station in Nocatee, Florida

Video courtesy WJXT

An arrest report stated that the woman was asleep and had an infant in her lap.

When the deputies awakened her and ran the vehicle's license plate through their compute system, they discovered it had been reported stolen out of Kentucky, and Ray was the suspect.

According to the report, a search of the car yielded a substance that later tested positive for heroin, numerous used, unused and uncapped syringes, along with other drug paraphernalia, reported the Palm Beach Post.

One of the syringes was puncturing a blue pacifier, the document stated.

Troubled: Ray, 29, pictured here with her son while pregnant with her daughter, has been charged with grand theft auto, child neglect and drug possession

The stolen vehicle was littered with soiled diapers, garbage, rotten food and spoiled milk.

The Florida Department of Children and Families has been notified of the incident and Amanda Ray's baby was released into the custody of a relative.

Ray has a past criminal record that included two arrests in 2014, one of them for petty theft.

The woman's grandfather, Pete Decker, told the station Fox 30 his granddaughter had been to rehab but has gone back to using drugs.

Her Facebook page reveals that Ray has two children, an infant daughter and an older son.

The car Ray (left and right) was in with her infant contained used and unused syringes, heroin, spoiled food and soiled diapers

There has been a rash of news reports in recent months about addicts overdosing on heroin and opioids while caring for children.
Lucky to be alive: Jeral Bornstein, 40, was resuscitated by police in Florida

Police in Florida jumped into a canal and rescued a man who was drowning while evading a traffic stop - and then resuscitated him.

Jeral Bornstein, 40, was spotted driving a blue Jeep that had been linked to a retail theft at a Walgreens in Port Richey.

He was seen around 10pm Wednesday but, when cops tried to pull him over, he fled, starting a chase that reached speeds of 70mph on U.S. 19.

Bornstein then pulled over at Westport and Seabreeze drives in Port Richey and fled on foot.

Officials say it is unclear whether he jumped or fell into a nearby canal, however Bornstein started to swim out, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

Dramatic rescue: This is the moment two officers jumped into the water to save a man who had fled a traffic stop and gave chase

The officers are seen here dragging Jeral Bornstein - whose head is under the water - back to the shore, where they determined he did not have a pulse

He swam about 50 feet and then had trouble keeping his head above water, footage from body cameras worn by deputies shows. Two deputies went in after Bornstein and pulled him out.

Part of the footage shows that Bornstein's head is underwater as he was dragged out. Once on land, the officers discerned he didn't have a pulse.

Deputies administered CPR until he choked up water. They attached defibrillator pads to his torso, though Bornstein started breathing before they needed to use the machine.

Pasco County Fire Rescue crews arrived soon after and took him to a hospital.

The dramatic body camera footage show the officers desperately trying to resuscitate Bornstein. He is seen lying lifeless on the grass

Police said that Bornstein later acknowledged that he would not be alive if not for the officers that administered CPR

The newspaper reported that, once Bornstein regained consciousness, he told police that he had fled because he was driving without a license. He was also cleared as the suspect in the Walgreens theft.

Bornstein thanked deputies at the hospital and apologized.

'He was very grateful when we were at the hospital,' Deputy John Riyad, one of the deputies who jumped into the canal after Bornstein, told the Tampa Times.

'He acknowledged that had we not done what we did, he wouldn't have lived.'

Bornstein had been arrested 10 other times in Pasco County since 2006, mostly on petty theft and other minor charges.

He now faces charges of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer for swerving toward the cruiser, driving without a license, fleeing to elude law enforcement and resisting arrest. He also will be cited for speeding.




Advertisement

With glittering ball gowns and gleaming gold trophies, this beauty pageant looks much like any other.

But the glamorous contestants of Miss Transgender Indonesia are risking their lives by even taking part.

In a bid to protect them from unwanted attention from Muslim hardliners, it was held in a theatre in Jakarta, almost entirely in secret.

Glamorous: Contestants in the Miss Transgender Indonesia beauty pageant pose on stage in Jakarta, on Friday

Waiting in the wings: Three of the models take a seat backstage before stepping out in front of the cheering crowd

Persecution: The transgender community is facing increasing intolerance in the Muslim-majority country

Proud relatives were told not to post any photos on social media and just a handful of media outlets were invited.

The transgender community is facing increasing persecution in the Muslim-majority country, the AFP reported. Fringe ultra-conservative groups have sprung up over recent years, targeting minority groups.

The authorities' unwillingness to tackle them for fear of being labelled anti-Islamic has fuelled a dangerous rise in intolerance.

Hardliners have halted a festival focusing on women's issues and have targeted the Christian minority, seeking to close down churches and stop their community work.

Crowning moment: Qie Nabh Tappii, 28, took home the trophy, the title and a cash prize after beating 18 other contestants

Social media embargo: Cheering supporters were told not to post pictures online for fear of attracting unwanted attention

Taking the stage: Sashes draped elegantly across their ball gowns, two of the contestants wait to step across the stage

But for the contestants of Miss Transgender Indonesia, the pageant lets them escape and celebrate their beauty - at least for a few hours.

Winner Pie Nabh Tappii, 28, beat 18 other contestants to take home the crown. She also won 10 million rupiah (600) and a six-and-a-half foot trophy.
Dr. Randall Wade was arrested in October and indicted on drug distribution charges

A family doctor accused of prescribing highly addictive painkillers to patients who didn't need them has been linked to the deaths of eight patients, according to court records and federal prosecutors.

Dr. Randall Wade, 65, who has practiced medicine for three decades, was indicted on drug distribution charges after Lowell Haynes' family sued the doctor for wrongful death.

The 54-year-old went to see Wade for a thorn in his hand on April 3, 2015, and overdosed the next day from the opiod hydrocodone and alprazolam (more commonly known as Xanax), News8 reported.

After several warnings from authorities ranging from the DEA to the coroner's office, Wade was sued for Haynes' wrongful death and accused by prosecutors of running a 'pill mill'.

Court records cited by News 8 show Wade has been linked to the deaths of six patients, and the DEA is now investigating two more.

On Thursday, Herkert told the court that Wade prescribed hydrocodone more than anyone else in Collin County, Texas in 2015.

Of all the prescriptions he issued, the vast majority consisted of the opiod hydrocodone, alprazolam (commonly known as Xanax), and the muscle relaxer carisoprodal, according to Herkert.

The DEA agent testified: 'This is highly unusual to see a family doctor prescribing these three drugs, three of the most abused controlled substances.'

Wade, who was arrested in mid-October, appeared in federal court in shackles on Thursday with his attorney, Brady Wyatt, who said the doctor would surrender both his medical license and his license to prescribe controlled substances.

Both the families of Lowell Haynes (left) and Brittany Hogan (right) accused Dr. Randall Wade of prescribing drugs that led to their deaths. Haynes' family sued Wade for wrongful death

But Haynes' family shared their anguish, telling KHOU: '[Wade] took a part of our lives that cant be replaced, someone who meant more to us than it did him.

'He didnt think it would ever fall back on him, but hes gonna find out that it is going to fall back on him.'

According to Haynes' mother Barbara Haynes, the 54-year-old had gotten hooked on prescription pain killers after he was prescribed some in the wake of a car crash.

Wade had gained a reputation for prescribing drugs, and Haynes went to see him for a thorn in his hand, News8 reported.

Barbara and his niece Rachel found Haynes, cold and blue on his knees the next day, and an autopsy concluded he died from an overdose.

'There was pills everywhere. Crushed up pills. Whole pills,' Rachel said.

The DEA found there was no documentation as to why Haynes was given 'high risk medication', according to court documents cited by News8.

Just before he was indicted, Netoche Fair also died on a park bench, with pill bottles that had Wade's name on them in her car, News8 reported

Brittany Hogan's mother also shared her heartbreak after the 26-year-old died from a heroin overdose. She also tested positive for Xanax.

Wade prescribed her hydrocodone and Xanax before she turned to heroin, her family members said, and they tried but failed to convince her to stop.

Another family told the DEA Wade prescribed a man drugs even after he found out his patient had forged a prescription, KHOU reported.

A woman who died of an overdose in March 2016, had also been prescribed hydrocodone and alprazolam by Wade for four months, the local news station reported.

Netoche Fair's autopsy is still pending, but she was found dead on a park bench with pill bottles that had Wade's name on them in her car, News8 reported.

But one of Wade's patients defended the doctor in court, and his daughter later called him 'a wonderful man.'
The niqab is a veil which covers the head and face leaving the eyes. File photo

A woman has been fined 30,000 for wearing a niqab in her town hall in Italy.

According to Messaggero Veneto, the 40-year-old woman was wearing the Islamic full-body veil during the youth parliament meeting in Pordenone, northeast Italy at the end of last month.

The paper reports that she refused to remove the veil despite the town's mayor repeatedly asking her to do so.

The removal was intended to help identify her as she watched her son take part.

She is said to have been removed from the meeting by a police officer before she returned, causing the event to be paused again.

In an initial tribunal, the woman was sentenced to four months' detention and a 600 fine, but the penalty was converted by Rossi into a 30,600 fine but no jail time.

The woman is an Italian citizen who has lived in the country for 16 years.

Italy does not have a Burqa Ban law but it does not allow people to keep their faces covered in public for long periods of time.
An Italian university professor who allegedly demanded sex from a female student in exchange for giving her high marks has been arrested.

The 47-year-old academic from Turin University, named by Italian press as Luca Sgarbi, also allegedly told her to send him 'intimate photos' via her mobile phone.

Sgarbi, an associate professor in the department of jurisprudence, was suspended by the university several weeks ago.

An Italian university professor who allegedly demanded sex from a female student in exchange for giving her high marks has been arrested. The academic from Turin University, named by Italian press as Luca Sgarbi, 47, works in the department of jurisprudence (pictured)

Police are investigating whether other female students also fell victim to the alleged demands, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Sgarbi, who lectures in labour relations, is currently under house arrest at his home in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna.

Prosecutors said they hoped 'other similar cases, which at the moment remain unknown, will be divulged'.
the girl, says the pictures she sent aren't even nude and that they should be protected by free speech

But the ACLU, which is

The parents of a 14-year-old Iowa girl are trying to stop Marion County Attorney Ed Bull from prosecuting their daughter for sending suggestive pictures to a boy

The parents of a 14-year-old Iowa girl are suing a county prosecutor to try to stop him from filing criminal charges against the teen after she sent two suggestive photos of herself to a boy.

The photos were discovered by school officials, who turned them over to police as possible evidence.

Marion County Attorney Ed Bull has threatened to charge the Knoxville girl with sexual exploitation of a minor or child pornography.

Bull has said she can avoid the charge if she signs an admission of guilt, performs community service and temporarily gives up her laptop and cellphone.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa says it filed the lawsuit Thursday to protect the girl's rights to free speech and freedom of expression. The ACLU says the photos don't show nudity and are not obscene.

'Since there is no basis to prosecute the girl for posing in photographs that plainly are not child pornography, in terms of content or production, Bulls threat to prosecute the girl must be considered retaliation against the plaintiffs for asserting their constitutional rights  the parents right to direct their childrens upbringing and the girls rights both to free expression and against compelled speech  in refusing Bulls demands,' the ACLU writes in their filing on Wednesday.

The girl's name, and those of her parents, are protected in the lawsuit.

The Associated Press left a message for Bull seeking comment Friday.

He released a statement on Wednesday thought, defending his decision.

'This lawsuit is the result of efforts made by my office to respond to a situation where numerous juveniles had exchanged sexually explicit photographs.
An alleged rapist went to extreme lengths to avoid being arrested - by hiding in the ceiling of an apartment.

Officers arrived at a flat in Thailand after neighbours heard two Vietnamese women calling for help when one was assaulted by the man.

According to police, suspect Seksan Parinyaseri, 21, had knocked on the women's door and forced his way inside when one stepped outside to speak on her mobile phone around at 3am on Friday morning.

Officers arrived at a flat in Thailand after neighbours heard two Vietnamese women calling for help when one was assaulted by the man

When police arrived at the Bangkok residence he was spotted inside the roof but refused to come down - and kept scampering to different areas above the room. Here his legs can be seen protruding from the ceiling

He then alleged to have locked the door from inside and assaulted the second woman.

When she called for help, Parinyaseri - fearing capture but unable to unlock the door - climbed inside the ceiling through one of the loose panels.

When police arrived at the Bangkok residence he was spotted inside the roof but refused to come down - and kept scampering to different areas above the room.

Cops had to poke different square ceiling tiles with a stick until he was eventually cornered and fell through the ceiling.

Video taken by officers show the suspect's legs hanging from the ceiling before they grab him by the ankles and pull him down.

Cops had to poke different square ceiling tiles with a stick until he was eventually cornered and fell through the ceiling

Video taken by officers show the suspect's legs hanging from the ceiling before they grab him by the ankles and pull him down

Police arrested the drunk man and said he would be charged with attempted rape, evading arrest and breaking into a private home

Police arrested the drunk man and said he would be charged with attempted rape, evading arrest and breaking into a private home.
Angel Jackson, 52, swindled the taxpayer out of 191,000

A benefits cheat who swindled the taxpayer out of 191,000 and acquired a 1million property portfolio without 'ever working a single day' has been jailed for seven years.

Ghanaian-born Angel Jackson, 52, established a complex web of lies to claim housing benefit, income support and compensation between 2002 and 2012.

She claimed she was confined to a wheelchair but was spotted on CCTV using the treadmill at her luxury block's private gym.

Jackson claimed for properties she didn't live in, in the names of people who didn't exist, and for accidents that didn't happen.

The prosecution at Croydon Crown Court even admitted that they didn't know her real name or date of birth.

This afternoon, Jackson was jailed after being found guilty of 32 charges relating to her ten-year fraud campaign.

Locking her up, Judge Adam Hiddleston described her as a 'vain and self-important person' with a 'staggering contempt for the court'.

He added: 'You are a thoroughly dishonest person. You are a professional fraudster. It is your life's work.

'You have taken and taken and taken and it would appear, you have never given anything back.

'How many school places or hospital beds could have been provided by the local authorities with the money you took?'

Jackson, who already owned a house in Mitcham, south London, bought two swanky flats in the same block, complete with its own gym, in Croydon in 2005 for more than 300,000, and fraudulently claimed housing benefit for each of them.

She also tried to wring every penny in compensation from two car accidents using invented passengers, only to be caught when doctors spotted two separate x-rays on two separate claims were almost identical.

Prosecutor Francesca Levett told Croydon Crown Court Jackson had lied to the local authorities and the DWP for more than a decade and defrauded the authorities out of 191,414.

Angel Jackson appeared at Croydon Crown Court for the trial in her wheelchair

She said: 'Far from being an honest claimant, who turned to the authorities because she was genuinely in need, she manipulated the system, told countless lies, hijacked identities and defrauded her way into becoming an affluent property owner without ever working a single day.

Although the authhorities believe she is Ghanaian, Ms Levett told the jury: 'We do not actually know the true identity of the defendant, nor do we know her true date of birth.'

When her home was raided in September 2012, officers found 22,000 in 50 notes hidden in a wardrobe, reams of counterfeit paperwork and 12 mobile phones.

Jackson lured her soon-to-be husband, Irish-born Thomas Duffy, by telling him she was a 'lady of traditional values', before buying a house with him in August 2002 - while still claiming housing benefit - and going behind his back to obtain his UK residency to support her own.

The pair had married on Valentines Day 2002, but she stopped him from telling his family and yet she didn't even allow him to live with her.

Ms Levett said: 'This was very far from a happy, new marriage, as not only did Mr Duffy not live with his wife, but the marriage wasn't ever consummated.'

The court heard that 'whenever he needed to sign something presented to him by his wife, his glasses would disappear'.

Ms Levett said: 'It appears that Mr Duffy was used by his wife to purchase a property she had no intention of sharing with him.'

In July 2005, Jackson bought another property, a 150,000 flat in south London, in her husband's name, without him knowing - and two months later bought another flat in the same building, this time in her own name, for 152,500.

Ms Levett said: 'Not only did she fail to notify the authorities that she had purchased yet another property, but she then applied for housing benefit, claiming that she lived there and did not own her own property.'

She lied to her husband that home they owned together was being repossessed and that he had to move out - all to support a claim she had made on a housing benefit form.

Ms Levett said: 'Mr Duffy describes himself as so confused and afraid. He had lost everything, yet still the defendant collected his wages every week.

'He was depressed and fragile, frightened to open his door.'

Benefits fraudster Angel Jackson

Jackson rented out one of the flats she had bought and in March 2011, a couple agreed to move into one of Jackson's properties after meeting her.

However, Jackson told them her name was Jules and that the landlord was her husband 'Alan Davies'.

She prohibited her new tenants from claiming benefits or contacting the council for any reason and charged them 880 per month.

But unbeknownst to the couple, Jackson was also claiming 600 a month in housing benefit on the flat, using the name Angel Jackson.

Ms Levett said: 'So, once the mortgage was paid, the defendant was doing very well financially, by getting two lots of rent for one property.'

A few months later, in July, the new tenants complained about broken appliances and revealed to Jackson that they had contacted the Citizen's Advice Bureau about the matter.

Ms Levett said: 'The defendant became very angry. She threatened to throw them out straight away.

'The following day, just six days after their full month's rent had been paid, the defendant attended at their home address with a number of big men, and proceeded to remove all of their belongings from the flat.'

In June 2007, an 'Angel Duffy' claimed for an apparent car accident in which she had suffered whiplash and a burned ankle while her husband was driving.

She claimed that her friend, 'Angel Jackson', her daughter Latoya and another friend named Fifi were also injured in the crash.

Jackson said she had employed a carer called Hannah, Ms Levett said, adding: 'Hannah apparently provided care for Angel and Latoya for an impossible 27 hours a day.

'Their total claim for care and assistance was over 53,000 for a ten month period.'

Jackson also claimed 24,000 for an osteopath, falsified evidence of which was found on her computer.

You are a thoroughly dishonest person. You are a professional fraudster

Ms Levett added: 'The fact that she had invoices purportedly from Hanna on her computer, together with letters from Angel Jackson, Latoya Jackson, Fifi and Angel Duffy, wholeheartedly indicates that the defendant hijacked identities, and did so comfortably.'

'Her deception came to light when the x-rays of Angela Duffy and the x-rays of Angel Jackson revealed the same degenerative changes in the spine that were beyond coincidence.'

Both Duffy and Jackson also said they were dance instructors and each claimed for flat shoes at a cost of more than 600.

Appearing via video link from HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, and wearing a tan-coloured coat, Jackson made no reaction as Judge Adam Hiddleston called her a 'vain and self-important person'.

He called called the evidence against her 'totally overwhelming' and said she had shown a 'remarkably staggering contempt for the court'.

He added: 'You created numerous personalities, changed your name, created false documentation, you even deceived your own ex-husband, taking everything he had, including his dignity.'
Donald Trump has organized his first staff-shakeup before he even takes office - and put his children firmly in charge.

He ousted New Jersey governor Chris Christie as head of his presidential transition and appointing running mate Mike Pence to chair the effort, with all his adult children and his son-in-law also on board.

Ivanka, Donald Jr and Eric Trump, and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law are all on the team.

So too is Silocon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder who brought down gossip website Gawker by funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit.

'Together this outstanding group of advisors, led by Vice President-elect Mike Pence, will build on the initial work done under the leadership of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to help prepare a transformative government ready to lead from day one,' Trump said in a statement announcing the change.

Christie is to stay on as a vice chair. He is joined by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, defeated rival Dr. Ben Carson, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who traveled with Trump and advises on national security, and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

Happy at the top: Ivanka Trump becomes a vice-president of his transition team

Confident: Eric Trump heads up to his father's offices and offers the president-elect's trademark thumbs up sign

Family affair: Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, Ivanka's husband, (right) are both vice-presidents of the transition team

Stalwart: Donald Trump Jr, seen on the campaign trail before his father's victory, is another vice-president

He's in charge: Vice-president in waiting Mike Pence will lead the transition. He was at a Veterans Day ceremony in Edinburgh, Indiana, with his mom, Nancy Pence

Tribute: Mike Pence took part in a Veterans Day ceremony while the transition team was being reorganized with him in charge

In charge again: Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, the former boss of Breitbart, was in Trump Tower when he was named vice-president of the transition team

Headed for the top: Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, is a vice-president of the transition team

Advising: Rudi Giuliani is not on the transition team but was in Trump Tower to 'advise' the president-elect he said

Donald Trump remarked on his 'busy day' in a tweet - and was appointing his transition team

Kushner, also fills a role. He accompanied Trump to Washington when he met with President Obama and congressional leaders on Thursday.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who became a story during the campaign after it was revealed Trump's foundation had accidentally given her a campaign contribution around the time she decided not to join a lawsuit against Trump University, also is part of the effort.

Also on the transition advisory list is venture capitalist Thiel, who spoke at the GOP convention and bet against the liveral Silicon Valley consensus.

Trump campaign CEO Steven Bannon is a member, as are several lawmakers, including Rep. Chris Collins of New York, the first to endorse Trump.

SkyBridge Capital founder and Trump-backer Anthony Scaramucci is part of the effort. So is Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus.

Early Trump backers Rep. Lou Barletta and Tom Marino are on the list, along with California Rep. Devin Nunes, who hosted Trump for a California fundraiser that banked $1.3 million.

Marino called his decision to endorse (he was the fifth national lawmaker to do so) 'one of my life-changing moments.''

Donald has been my friend for 28 years, all my work on behalf of him is done out of great loyalty and friendship to him,' said Giuliani at Trump Tower Friday. 'I can see already, how he is going to be a great president. And Im glad I can play a small role.'

Christie was still running the effort as of Thursday. On Wednesday, he chaired a meeting about the transition in New York. He also appeared on the 'Today' show Thursday to talk transition steps, notwithstanding the convictions of two senior Christie aides in the Bridgegate scandal just days before the election.

Christie has also been reported to be in the running for several senior jobs.

Two former Christie aides, Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly, were found guilty last week after a 7-week trial over their role in the Bridgegate scandal over lane closures to the George Washington Bridge. Another pled guilty. Former Christie associate and port authority executive head David Wildstein pled guilty to his role.

After a whirlwind tour of Washington, D.C. where he met with President Obama for the first time, President-elect Donald Trump began Friday inside Trump tower, where he said he had a 'busy day' planned hiring his team.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had been heading Donald Trump's transition efforts. He is pictured at Trump's election night victory party. He now will serve as a vice chair of the effort

Gun guard: Heavily-armed police were outside Trump Tower as the president-elect rearranged his transition team

Seat of power: The midtown Manhattan tower is now the de factor center of American political power

ARE FAMILY'S JOBS LEGAL? 1967 LAW BANS 'NEPOTISM' President-elect Trump's decision to appoint his family to the transition is a matter for himself. But once sworn in, could he appoint his family to government jobs? Such a move appear on the face of it to be a breach of a 1967 Act, the Nepotism Statute, which says that presidents and other executive office holders cannot appoint their relatives to positions under them. Before that, there had been plenty of examples of presidents with relatives in their government, perhaps most notably Bobby Kennedy serving as his brother's attorney-general. The 1967 bill has been widely seen as an attempt to stop a similar scenario, although the Congressman who sponsored it, Neal Smith, said that was not in fact the case, making it one of Washington DC's longer-running urban myths. But lawyers have pointed out that the statute is both untested, and potentially unconstitutional - and in any case, has probably been breached already. The suggestion that the law is unconstitutional raised by Richard Wulwick and Frank Macchiarola, who wrote in an academic paper that the constitution does not allow such restrictions on the president's executive power. Only the incompatibility clause, which forbids an executive appointee serving in Congress limits the president's power to appoint as he sees fit, they argued. They wrote in the wake of the first prima facie breach of the law, one which Trump might find would be an uncomfortable one to raise if a court challenge to Trump appointments was raised: it was when Bill Clinton appointed his wife to lead his Presidential Health Care Reform Task Force. Incidentally, the first president to say that a president should not advance his relatives was John Adams. He later appointed his son, John Quincy Adams, as minister to Prussia. Advertisement

At the top of the agenda is hiring a chief of staff who would oversee Trump's effort to 'Make America Great Again' with swift action being contemplated on health care, immigration, and economic policy.

'Busy day planned in New York. Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!' Trump tweeted.

It was the only official guidance provided to members of the media keeping track of Trump's schedule. The only information provided Thursday night was that Trump was headed back to New York.

Reporters camped out inside Trump tower outside a Starbucks revealed that Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon entered the building, as did advisor David Bossie, who got brought in to aide Trump's campaign effort.

Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was also spotted.

New York Rep. Chris Collins, who was the first lawmaker to endorse Trump, told CNN Friday the decision on a chief of staff could come by this weekend.

One leading candidate, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' Friday morning.

Bannon, who joined Trump's effort after leading conservative web site Breitbart.com, is a leading contender, the New York Times reported Thursday. He is considered a leading force behind some of the brash tactics that Trump employed in the final weeks of the campaign, including bringing Bill Clinton accusers to a presidential debate.

He was frequently spotted at Trump's side during appearances.

Christie appears out given his demotion from leading the transition team.

Also mentioned is Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump's husband, who accompanied Trump to his meeting with President Obama. Kushner met with Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough on Thursday.

Collins said a choice on the top job could come as soon as this weekend.

According to an organizational chart obtained by Politico, the transition team includes lobbyists for tobacco giant Altria, the American Council of Life Insurers, General Electric, the Pharmaceutical industry, Dow Chemical, and energy giant Southern Company.

Trump is spending Friday inside Trump Tower, with no further guidance about his schedule

Trump is spending Friday weighing staff decisions

The president-elect fired up his Twitter account to bash 'professional protesters'

Later, he hailed 'small groups of protesters'
No visible signs of trauma were found on boy's body

-stricken infant reportedly had been coughing and vomiting for several days

An ailing 4-month-old baby boy has been found unconscious at a day care center in The Bronx and later passed away.

Police say staff at Lil Star Daycare on Prentiss Avenue in the Throggs Neck section of The Bronx called 911 for help after discovering the child, identified as Cameron Willingham, unresponsive at around 5.30pm on Thursday.

Paramedics who responded to the scene attempted to revive the boy and rushed him to Jacobi Medical Center, where he was later pronounced dead.

Staff at Lil Star Daycare, housed in this apartment building on Prentiss Avenue in The Bronx, called 911 for help Thursday after discovering Cameron Willingham unresponsive

Sources tell the New York Daily News little Cameron had contracted pneumonia and had been coughing and vomiting for several days leading up to his death. The infant lived with his family in the Pelham Bay part of The Bronx.

Police say the infant's body showed no visible signs of trauma and no foul play is suspected.
Dash camera video has emerged showing a police officer was seemingly unaware he had shot a man while they struggled during a traffic stop.

Footage of the Haddon Township officer pulling over 38-year-old Edmond Brown on October 29 for having a visible handicap placard - which by law should be taken down while driving - was obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The recording shows Brown drive off with the officer clinging to the driver's-side window. The vehicle slammed into a parked car and Brown attempted to flee on foot.

Runaway traffic stop: Edmond Brown, 38, was pulled over about 10am on October 29 in Haddon Township, New Jersey, when he suddenly took off, taking the officer with him

After crashing into a nearby parked car, Brown exits his vehicle with his hands in the air

Fleeing again: However he soons run away from the cop, who chases him down the street

This is the moment the officer's gun discharges. An investigation is underway to determine whether the shot was accidental or excessive

The officer grabbed Brown and shot him once in the leg. He then put his gun away and tried to restrain Brown.

Brown told the officer, 'You shot me!'

The office then replied, 'No, I didn't.'

The footage shows the officer wrestling Brown on a grass spot by the road, before finally arresting him.

Brown was treated for a gunshot wound and charged with aggravated assault, eluding, hindering apprehension and unlawful possession of a weapon.

Philly.com reported the officer told investigators the gun in his hand went off while the two fought.

Brown was arrested on the grass after a struggle. He was treated for a gunshot wound to the leg and later charged with multiple offenses

Officers found a loaded gun - a .357 Magnum - in Brown's damaged truck, authorities said.

Brown told police the truck belonged to someone he knew.

Officials are investigating whether the shooting was justified.

Kenneth Aita, Brown's attorney, said his firm will be conducting its own investigation and is seeking any possible witnesses.

'I just ask that nobody rushes to judgment based on a short video clip alone,' Aita said.

The last shooting involving police in Camden County occurred in November 2015.
Andrew Anglin, the publisher of The Daily Stormer, told followers to drive Clinton fans to suicide

A neo-Nazi website is encouraging readers to troll frightened Clinton voters into suicide.

The Daily Stormer is an American white supremacist website which publishes right-ring rhetoric under sections including 'The Jewish Problem'.

Its creator, Andrew Anglin, penned a fear-mongering post on Wednesday after Trump's victory under the title 'I'm So Scared'.

In it, he listed the tweets of Hillary Clinton supporters who said they had become afraid for their safety in the wake of the election result.

Addressing his fellow neo-Nazis, Anglin said: 'You can troll these people and definitely get some of them to kill themselves.'

The post was published on Wednesday within hours of Trump's election victory.

' Remember when we told you now is not the time for fear? Yeah, well.

'You should probably go ahead and be afraid now. Because its happening,' he wrote, before listing the social media posts of anti-Trump users.

Among them were Clinton voters who said they felt scared for 'people of color' and the LGBT community.

Anglin gave the order in an alarming post to fans written on Wednesday after Trump's victory

He introduced the order by telling Democrats they should 'be afraid now'

'I'm so scared for the LGBT community, POC and women. Please stay safe but stay strong,' said one.

'I'm from Macedonia and I'm so scared for black people and women,' another said while one woman went as far as to say: 'I've never wanted to be a white man as badly as I do now.'

After publishing a string of their comments, Anglin told his own fans: 'You can troll these people and definitely get some of them to kill themselves.

'Just be like its the only way you can prove to the racists that Hillary was right all along.

"Mass Suicides After Trump Victory would be a headline the media would play up, but all it would do would demoralize the left even further,' he said.

Anglin celebrated Trump's victory alongside other right-wing activists who have spray painted Nazi graffiti across towns in America since his win

Anglin did not respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment on Friday.

Social media has bee abuzz with frightening reports of swastika sightings and Nazi flags since Trump was elected on Wednesday.

The Ku Klux Klan has organized a victory rally to celebrate his win, claiming they had a 'big role' in winning him the vote.

In San Francisco, a man's attempt to ironically protest against the election result with a Nazi flag backfired spectacularly.

Frederick Rober, 48, erected the flag at his home to illustrate his view that a Trump victory signaled a return of white supremacy and not to support the fascist group.

He removed it after the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors told him how his gesture had offended her.

In Philadelphia, a swastika was spray painted in black across an empty store front.
He was acquitted however in 1994 and died in 1998

The identity of the person who brutally murdered actor Bob Crane 38 years ago will finally be revealed this Monday night - on live television.

Fox 10 Phoenix anchor John Hook began investigating the case in Arizona last year, and managed to convince the Maricopa County Attorney's Office to release enough blood samples from the murder weapon to conduct new DNA tests that were not available at the time.

With those tests complete Hook has now determined who the murderer is, and will be sharing it with the world on Monday at 9pm.

Crane was found lying in a pool of blood inside his Scottsdale apartment on June 29, 1978 at the age of 49.

The popular star of Hogan's Heroes had been bludgeoned to death with part of a camera tripod, and had an electric cord wrapped around his neck.

Case closed: The person responsible for the murder of Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane (above) will be revealed on live television Monday night at 9pm

Tragic end: Crane was found lying in a pool of blood (above) inside his Scottsdale apartment on June 29, 1978 at the age of 49

It was soon after Crane's death that police investigating the case stumbled upon his enormous library of video tapes, many of which contained footage of him engaging in sexual acts with women.

Some of the tapes also featured Crane's friend John Carpenter, a roving video equipment salesman for Sony and Akai, who soon became a person of interest in the case.

Carpenter had flown down to visit Crane at the time and police impounded his rental car, wand discovered blood stains inside the vehicle.

DNA testing at the time was not advanced enough however to conclusively determine whose blood was in the car though, and no charges were filed against Carpenter.

Authorities suspected Carpenter was gay and had been spurned by his one-time close friend. Video tapes revealed Carpenter making love simultaneously to the same woman as Crane.

Twelve years later the case was reopened though after a detective argued that an evidence photograph of the vehicle clearly showed a piece of brain tissue, and in 1992 Carpenter was arrested and charged with murder.

The trial began two years later, and Crane's son testified under oath that his father had expressed his wishes to severe all ties with Carpenter shortly before his death.

Robert Crane also said that the night before he was found dead, his father had called Carpenter and ended their relationship for good.

Evidence: At the time police suspected that Crane's close friend John Carpenter was responsible, and found blood stains inside his car (above)

Off the hook: Carpenter was acquitted however in 1994 (above) and died in 1998

The defense however was able to point to the sex tapes that Crane had filmed and argue that the number of possible suspects was endless, from angry women to their boyfriends, fathers and even friends who might have been outraged that Crane taped these intimate acts.

In the end Carpenter was acquitted, and in 1998 he passed away.
Two college students have been kicked out of their fraternity after they were accused of harassing students at Hillary Clinton's alma mater a day after the elections.

Edward Tomasso and Parker Rand-Ricciardi, of Babson College, drove through the women's college Wellesley on Wednesday in a pickup truck with a Trump flag in the back.

Wellesley's Honor Code Council called for the two to be expelled, alleging they parked in front of Harambee House, a center for students of African descent, shouting profanities before spitting on a student who told them to leave.

Babson said their conduct was 'racially offensive and gender demeaning', and the two have since been kicked out of their fraternity Sigma Phi Epsilon for their 'abusive, misogynistic behavior'.

Edward Tomasso (left) and Parker Rand-Ricciardi (right), of Babson College are accused of driving through Wellesley College and harassing students outside the center for students of African descent

The men posted a Snapchat video from inside a vehicle, during which Tomasso (left) announced they were banned from campus and Rand-Ricciardi laughed. Right, another Snapchat video of the truck driving away

In a letter to Babson officials, Wellesley's Honor Code Council alleged the men parked in front of Harambee House, shouted profanities and spat on a student.

Wellesley student Sydney Robertson wrote a public Facebook post about the incident that has been shared more than 10,000 times.

'Edward Tomasso and Parker Rander-Ricciardi, two students at Babson College, decided to drive around our beautiful campus with a Trump flag in a pick up truck,' she wrote.

'They laughed, screamed and sped around campus. Then, they parked in front of the house for students of African decent, and jeered at them, screaming Trump and Make America Great Again.

Wellesley student Sydney Robertson wrote a public Facebook post about the incident that has been shared more than 10,000 times

An investigation with Babsons Public Safety personnel and the Wellesley College Police Department is ongoing. Pictured, the truck with the Trump flag

'When one student asked them to leave, they spit in her direction.

'This is not my America, this is Trumps America filled with hatred and bigotry. This is what he has provoked. Please help us get these faces out there, they cannot get away with this.'

A petition on Change.org with more than 1,000 signatures also claimed slurs like 'Wellesley d***' were directed at students.

The men also posted a Snapchat video from inside a vehicle, during which Tomasso said: 'We are officially banned from Wellesley College. If we're caught there, we'll get arrested and subject to trespassing.'

Rand-Ricciardi, could be seen throwing his head back and laughing in response.

But Tomasso has since apologized on his Facebook, denying that he had used profanity, spat on anyone, or intentionally targeted Harambee house.

He also wrote, 'I'm not a racist. I'm not a bigot. I'm not homophobic,' explaining his actions as 'poor judgement'.

He added: 'I have perpetuated the fear that exists throughout the world today.

'That was not my intention and I am deeply sorry that this has happened. Although I do not support prejudice or discrimination of any kind, I've trivialized the suffering by the hands of those who do.'

Tomasso has since apologized and denied that he had used profanity, spat on anyone, or intentionally targeted Harambee house

Rand-Ricciardi's online accounts like his LinkedIn profile appear to have been deleted.

Babson President Kerry Healey issued an apology to the neighboring school about two miles away, calling the incident 'at a minimum, insensitive, unacceptable, and contrary to our core values'.

Their fraternity Sigma Phi Epsilon issued a statement on Thursday, stating: 'This type of abusive, misogynistic behavior has no place in our society, and were proud of our chapter swiftly removing these men from our organization.'

The incident came just hours after thousands of students and alumnae gathered on campus in the hopes of witnessing the first female president. Clinton graduated in 1969.
Trump won the state with 52 percent of the vote late on Tuesday night

Austin is in Travis County, one of the few Texas precincts to elect Clinton

'Love is love and love trumps hate!' she declared to the applause of adults

A little girl stole the hearts of anti-Trump protesters as she shared her reaction to his shock election victory despite being too young to vote.

The child proudly said her piece at a rally in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday night as hundreds of people across the country took to the street in protest against his win.

Boldly, she shouted: 'I am a child and I cannot vote. But love is love and love trumps hate!' to the cheers of watching adults.

The girl has not been identified but her well-spoken speech has swept the internet since a video, taken by other protesters, was released.

Scroll down for video

A little girl won over protesters at an anti-Trump rally in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday

Holding up a sign which read 'Love Trumps Hate #notmypresident', she stood in the middle of swarms of adult protesters to deliver her words of wisdom, every one of which was shouted back to her in unison by her approving audience.

'I am a female. I am mixed race. I am a child and I cannot vote.

'But that will not stop me from getting heard. Love is love and love trumps hate!' she said.

To rapturous applause from the crowds, the girl then leaped into the arms of a male adult proudly watching on.

It is not known if the man was the girl's father. Her speech was shared in a video by Storyful.

The girl looked to her minder for encouragement as crowds cheered her on half-way through

Texas voted in favour of Trump overall, but Travis County, which takes in Austin, was pro-Clinton. Above, Democrats mourn the defeat on election night in New York at Clinton HQ

Austin falls into Travis County where voters elected Hillary Clinton with 66 per cent of the vote.

Surrounding counties were unanimously Republican. Trump won Texas with 52 percent.

Protests in Austin were among dozens which have been unfolding across the country since his victory was announced in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

In Oakland, California, activists burned flags and spray painted news crew vans while vandals smashed shop fronts in Portland, Oregon.

More than 180 people were arrested in Los Angeles on Thursday night in a third night of uproar.
He may have made his billions from investing in social media, but when it came to his support for Donald Trump, Peter Thiel found himself isolated among the Silicon Valley glitterati.

Throughout Trump's campaign Thiel, 49, was a lone voice of support for the Republican candidate. They both had fortunes running into the billions of dollars, but otherwise there were few similarities between the two.

German-born Thiel is a secretive, libertarian, gay member of the tech elite; New Yorker Trump is a conservative real estate mogul who doesn't even use email. He has opposed the legalization of gay marriage, although he has attended a same-sex wedding.

Still, Thiel - the first outside investor in Facebook - became an unlikely spokesperson for the Republican candidate.

That loyalty is set to pay off big league after Trump on Friday named him as a member of his 16-strong transition team executive committee - alongside other trusted supporters and three of Trump's own children as well as his son-in-law.

Scroll down for video

Thiel, 49, was a lone voice of support for the Republican candidate

Thiel's loyalty is set to pay off big league after President Elect Trump on Friday named him as a member of his 16-strong transition team executive committee. Trump was at the White House Thursday to meet with Obama, pictured

While major tech names such as Apple's Tim Cook and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg fawned over Hillary Clinton's doomed presidential run, Thiel donated $1.25 million to Trump's campaign.

He became the first openly gay speaker at a Republican convention. And he defended his candidate to the media, saying the real estate mogul was 'misunderstood'.

'I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take him seriously but not literally,' Thiel said at a Washington news conference in October.

'What Trump represents isn't crazy, and it isn't going away...We are voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed.'

Thiel was punished by the Silicon Valley elite for his support. Former Reddit chief Ellen Pao severed ties between Project Include - devoted to promoting diversity in the tech industry - and Y Combinator, a startup incubator with which Thiel is involved.

Some called, unsuccessfully, for entrepreneurs to shun Y Combinator and for him to be booted from the Facebook board.

As other tech pioneers signed an open letter denouncing Trump for campaigning on what they called 'bigotry', Thiel walked toward him with open arms.

But his bet has been rewarded and he will now hold serious sway in the new Trump administration.

Thiel says John F Kennedy is his favorite president. But his support of Trump shows that, when it comes to his personal politics, he can be as unpredictable as the president-elect - perhaps one of the reasons he endorsed him.

Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and is worth nearly $3 billion, believes in a radical form of Libertarianism, whose followers traditionally believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press and free trade.

Yet those beliefs do not square with his decision to secretly finance the lawsuit by Hulk Hogan against news website Gawker, which he says outed him as gay in 2007. The website said his sexuality was not a secret at the time.

Thiel financed the lawsuit by Hulk Hogan (pictured) against news website Gawker, which he says outed him as gay in 2007

Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and is worth nearly $3 billion, believes in a radical form of Libertarianism, whose followers traditionally believe in free trade, freedom of speech and freedom of the press

The wrestler won the jury trial and Gawker has been ordered to pay $140 million. The website filed for bankruptcy, and earlier this month it was agreed Hogan would receive $31 million in cash plus a share of the proceeds from the sale of Gawker.

At the same time Thiel, who was Facebook's first outside investor, claims he supports the press and has contributed to the Committee to Protect Journalists and has financed activist journalist James O'Keefe.

Libertarians support free trade; Trump wants to hit countries like Mexico and China with sanctions if they do not give America a better deal.

Trump wants to build a wall along the border with Mexico, but Libertarians believe in free movement of labor. As an immigrant - he was born in Germany and moved to the U.S. aged one - Thiel could even fall into Trump's criteria for deportation.

Where Thiel and Trump do crossover is a hatred of political correctness that goes back to his days at Stanford University and led to him writing The Diversity Myth, a critique of multiculturalism.

Trump made speaking bluntly one of his main campaign strategies, castigating Clinton for not using the term 'radical Islamic terrorism'.

In some ways, Thiel's beliefs out-Trump Trump: In his 2009 essay for the Cato Institute he wrote that left wing votes from recipients of welfare are threatening the very fabric of America.

He wrote: 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible'.

Thiel is also known for his belief that technology could allow humans to live far longer than currently possible, funding projects which are looking into beating aging.

'I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute,' he told the Washington Post.

He thinks college is a waste of time and just gets you into debt.

In July he cancelled a scheduled appearance at the annual meeting of the ultra-libertarian Property and Freedom Society in Turkey, which some critics characterized as supporters of white supremacy.

The founder of the group is former Nevada University professor Hans Hermann-Hoppe whose book 'Democracy: The God That Failed' has passages that advocate getting rid of gay people and anyone who believes in democracy in a quest for a 'libertarian order'.

Hoppe wrote that gay people are on a par with 'advocates of parasitism' and should be 'physically separated and expelled from society'.

According to hate-watch group The Southern Poverty Law Center, the group hosts racist speakers who believe immigration is 'forced integration'.

And despite backing Trump for president of the United States, he also has funded a radical proposal to set up new cities floating in the sea on oil-rig like structures which would be libertarian utopias not subject to the laws of any existing nation-state.

He gave $500,000 to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit organization which is looking into building independent cities in international waters in the event of the end of civilization.

Thiel was the first RNC speaker to publicly acknowledge his or her homosexuality - a potentially awkward position given that Trump's soon-to-be vice president signed into law the Religious Freedom Bill, which was criticized by gay activists for allowing people to discriminate against them.

Thiel has tried to square the contradictions in his beliefs by donating to conservative-libertarian organizations - that are also pro-gay.

Another fault line with the Republican party is Thiels' support for legalization of marijuana, something which Republicans have long opposed.

Still, writer Jeff Bercovici said that Thiel could see Trump's candidacy as a 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to weaken America's attachment to democratic government'.

An analysis by Bloomberg said that Thiel could regard Trump as a 'disrupter' in a similar way that he has disrupted the tech industry.
At just 14-years-old, Ashleigh Harris was left paralysed and confined to a wheelchair

For a pony-mad teenager it should have been a perfect day out  a picnic in the countryside with her boyfriends family and the opportunity to see their new horse.

But for Ashleigh Harris, who was just 14 years old at the time, the events of September 22, 2012, rapidly descended into tragedy and changed her life for ever.

Having been encouraged to have a ride on Polly Perks, a powerful thoroughbred ex-racehorse which belonged to her boyfriend Kierans mother, she broke her back after falling in a field near Chepstow, and is now paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.

That catastrophic accident four years ago set in motion a chain of events which culminated in an extraordinary 3 million legal battle at the High Court in London, one which lawyers and the British Horse Society say has far-reaching implications for unwary horse owners across the country.

Last week, a judge decided that Ashleigh, who is now 18, is entitled to full compensation from 43-year-old mother-of-three Rachel Miller, the owner of badly trained Polly Perks.

It is a decision which could leave the Miller family financially destitute.

Ashleigh was riding Polly Perks, a powerful thoroughbred ex-racehorse, which belonged to her boyfriend Kierans mother

While Ashleigh, who is paralysed from the waist down, has faced accusations of being a money grabber on social media, her family  speaking for the first time today to the Mail  insist she will need the money for a lifetime of care.

The Millers, who have refused to comment on the case, argued in court that it was Ashleighs decision to ride the horse in the first place and that they should not be held to account for what happened to her.

The case has been described by one lawyer as a wake-up call for horse owners across Britain. Its going to make anyone who owns a horse think twice before allowing friends or family members to ride them, says equine law expert Caroline Bowler, of Actons in Nottingham.

She points out that many owners do not have specialist horse insurance and rely instead on the third-party liability insurance included under their household policy, which may not, as in the case of the Millers, cover the full compensation amount claimed.

It has set a precedent and I think people will be more minded to pursue claims, adds Ms Bowler.

The accident also brought about an abrupt and bitter end to Ashleighs fledgling romance with her first boyfriend, Kieran Miller, as he stepped in to give evidence against her and the former childhood sweethearts faced each other across a courtroom.

Indeed, as we shall see, accounts of what happened on that fateful day vary wildly, as does opinion on whether Mrs Miller, who had very little experience of horses before buying Polly Perks, was responsible for what happened to Ashleigh.

The teenager, from Woolaston, near Lydney, Gloucestershire, woke on the morning of September 22, 2012, full of excitement about spending the day with her boyfriend and his family.

The competent novice rider, as she was described in court, had met Kieran Miller at Wyedean secondary school, where he was two years above her, and they had begun dating six months earlier.

We got on really well, she says. We saw each other at school each day and when I wasnt riding my pony Id hang out at his house or hed come to mine.

Last week, a judge decided that Ashleigh is entitled to full compensation from 43-year-old mother-of-three Rachel Miller, pictured, the owner of badly trained Polly Perks

On the day of the accident, we were going to have a picnic and see the new horse.

That horse was Polly Perks, a thoroughbred mare who had been bought for just 500 a week earlier from the Abergavenny farmer who had broken her in.

He described her as a delightful ride, although he wanted to get rid of her because she had proved to be too temperamental for point-to-point riding.

In court, it became clear that the feisty mare was an eminently unsuitable animal for a woman like Rachel Miller, a recruitment consultant who had only recently taken up riding. The horse, described as strong, potentially wilful and difficult to control, was not used to being ridden.

Ashleigh, who had owned her own gentle pony for just a year but had never previously ridden a horse, had already met Polly because she had accompanied Kieran and his family on the trip to Wales to buy the horse on September 15, 2012.

On that occasion both she and Mrs Miller briefly rode her, but only with the owner walking closely alongside at all times.

She was much bigger and stronger than my pony Beauty, says Ashleigh today. She was much more difficult to control.

A week later, on the day of the picnic, no plan had been made for Ashleigh to ride Polly, but with Mrs Miller somewhat nervous about getting on her, the teenager agreed to try her out.

There was, said the judge last week, a positive encouragement by Mrs Miller, who handed over her body armour  a padded, shock absorbent jacket designed to protect the spine in case of collision  to Ashleigh. The 14-year-old then climbed on to the back of a trailer so she could get herself high enough to mount the horse.

Right from that moment, remembers Ashleigh, she didnt feel right in the saddle.

I didnt feel safe, she says.

When she expressed her doubts, Mrs Miller told her: Youll be fine.

At first Mrs Miller, Kieran and his sister Sammy accompanied Ashleigh as she rode into a neighbouring field. Once inside, Ashleigh put the horse into a trot while the other members of the family waited by the gate. But that trot rapidly turned into an uncontrollable canter, which resulted in Ashleigh being unseated. I still have nightmares about that moment, she says.

I can remember the feel of her ears as I went over her head. It was as if it was in slow motion. I knew I was about to hit the ground. Dazed and confused, she did not realise at first how seriously she was injured.

It took 45 minutes for the paralysis to set in, she says.

Ashleigh, now 18-years-old, has been left with no movement beneath her chest

My toes went dead and then the numbness ran slowly up my body. Everyone was telling me that everything would be all right, but I knew then that something really bad had happened.

In the aftermath of the accident, Kieran raced to her side and cradled her. Mrs Miller telephoned Ashleighs mother Jacqui, who arrived at the scene half an hour later  before an ambulance arrived.

I could see Ashleigh in the distance, says Jacqui, a 49-year-old former bank manager.

But her body was sort of bent double beneath her with her legs splayed out to the side. At first I thought shed broken her pelvis. Kieran was holding her up by the head and chest and she was saying that she couldnt feel her legs.

P aramedics strapped Ashleigh to a spinal board and took her to hospital in Newport by ambulance accompanied by her mother and Kieran. Her 51-year-old father Geoff, a quality controller, met them at hospital.

There, Ashleighs parents were warned that she had a life-threatening condition common to paraplegics called autonomic dysreflexia, which can cause strokes and heart attacks.

But after being transferred to the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, she was stabilised during a five-hour operation to insert two metal rods into her back.

A month later, after being taken out of intensive care, she was transferred to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, which specialises in spinal injuries.

Ashleigh finally returned home in March 2013, six months after the accident. At first, she struggled to come to terms with her life-changing injury, which left her with no movement beneath her chest. Her relationship with Kieran also ended.

We messaged each other for a while, she says, but, gradually, it petered out.

Ashleigh Harris rides a horse for the first time after the fall. She is now in line for a huge 3million payout

Unable to get up and down the stairs, the living room at the family home had to be turned into a bedroom and she washed in the kitchen sink until her parents built a downstairs extension, paid for with a disability living grant as well as her familys own finances and fundraising.

It was a very difficult time, says her mother. She was angry at the whole world.

Ashleigh continues to suffer ongoing health problems, including a compromised immune system. Although she is still able to have children, any future pregnancy would be deemed high risk.

Ashleigh returned to her school in May 2013, but as she says: I found it very difficult being disabled in an environment where I had previously been able-bodied.

She transferred to Dene Magna secondary school and passed five GCSEs and three AS-levels.

As well as coping with sudden disability at such a young age, she also had to face her former boyfriend in court last month when he gave evidence claiming Ashleigh had jumped into the saddle without his mothers permission. That evidence was rejected by the court.

Even so, Ashleigh insists she has no hard feelings towards him or his family.

It was awkward in court, she says. We didnt speak or even look at each other. It felt strange seeing him because we used to get along so well. I could see how nervous he was.

Im sure it was hard for him. I dont harbour any bad feelings towards his mum or his family. They would never have wanted this to happen to me. But it has happened and I have to deal with that.

She is all too aware of negative attitudes towards no-win, no fee legal claims. But she argues: If your car was damaged in an accident because of someone else, you would want compensation. I have a lifetime of this ahead of me. If anything happens to my parents, Ill be on my own.

She points out that she offered to settle her case out of court for the maximum amount that Mrs Millers insurance company would pay under the terms of their personal liability cover. Had that offer been accepted, then the Millers would not have had to pay a penny of their own money.

But the offer was turned down and following last weeks ruling Ashleigh may now be entitled to up to 3 million  potentially forcing the Millers to pay the extra out of their own pocket.

Ashleigh says that these figures are in the hands of lawyers, but that her intention was never to punish the family, only to make provision for herself.

Ultimately, Judge Graham Wood QC ruled that Mrs Miller made a serious error of judgment in acquiring an unsuitable horse at the early stages of her riding hobby. There was a breach in duty of care in allowing Ashleigh to ride such a horse. This breach was the cause of her accident.

The exact amount of compensation Ashleigh will receive will be decided at a later date.

In the wake of the case, the British Horse Society says it has been inundated with calls from owners concerned about insurance. This is a tragic accident and it highlights some key elements that all riders should be reminded of, says the charitys membership director Emma Day.

We would always advise that when you lend your horse to other riders that they are both competent and have the right insurance in order to protect both the owner and the rider.

Guy Prest, managing director of specialist equine insurers KBIS, said he would be reviewing the level of cover his company offers in light of the case. Its very rare to have a claim of this type, he said.

Ashleigh Harris with mother Jacqui. Ashleigh believes that the money she receives will help her move on with her life

The vast majority are people claiming their car was kicked by a horse, for example.

But these things are very sad when they happen and you need to be as covered as possible.

Theres been a change in the way these kind of claims are settled, too. Often there isnt just one payment, but if the needs of someone disabled in an accident change later on in life, they may even come back for more.

Its vital that people make sure they are adequately insured and people need to think very carefully about letting other people ride their horse.

Ashleigh believes that the money she receives will help her move on with her life.

She is already an ambassador for the spinal cord charity Back Up after training to teach disabled youngsters how to use wheelchairs, and this year participated in a fashion show that raised over 50,000.

She appeared on Children In Need in 2015 and won the Inspirational Achievement for Young People Award at the 2016 Spinal Injuries Association Awards.

She briefly rode a horse again a couple of years after her accident when her uncle lifted her into the saddle, although she is no longer able to ride regularly. Her pony Beauty is now cared for by her family at nearby stables.

Its not the riding I miss so much as being part of a community, she says. I liked feeling that I belonged to that.

Poignantly, her new purpose-built downstairs bedroom looks out over stables, a constant reminder of what she has lost.

I wish it hadnt happened, but it did happen, she says.

Im sure the Millers wished it hadnt happened as well. I hope they understand why I had to do this. I am going to have to live with this for the rest of my life.
Advertisement

Light-hearted and ironic in tone they often are, but these colourful postcards chronicle real life in the trenches, too.

And for the Tommies of World War I, they were one way of reassuring their loved ones back at home that they were all right, while sparing them the terror of what fighting on the Western Front was really like.

They were drawn by Private Fergus Mackain, an advertising artist who enlisted in 1915 and served in France with the Royal Fusiliers.

The postcards were drawn by Private Fergus Mackain, who enlisted in 1915 to do his bit, serving in France when the fighting was at its fiercest

After being wounded on the Somme and taken out of front line duty in 1917, he turned to designing humorous postcards

The funny postcards were designed for soldiers to send back to their families at home

Then aged 29, Mackain, a married father-of-two who was born in America to a British father from Gosport, Hampshire, travelled by sea from his home in New York to join up, working his passage by feeding livestock on the two-week voyage on board the SS Lancastrian.

After being wounded in the Somme and taken out of front-line duty in 1917, he was transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps and began producing his postcards for soldiers.

All the surviving cards Mackain drew, the majority of which are from a series called Sketches Of Tommys Life, were recently collected together for the first time and published in a book ahead of Remembrance Sunday.

The colour postcards reflected a light-hearted and ironic fashion the reality of life in the trenches for the ordinary Tommy

All the surviving cards Mackain drew were recently collected together for the first time and published in a book ahead of Remembrance Sunday

The majority of Mackain's postcards are from a series called Sketches Of Tommys Life

Like the better-known Bruce Bairnsfather, another serving soldier who created a curmudgeonly British Tommy called Old Bill, Mackain uses gentle humour to underscore a grim reality.

His postcards light-heartedly follow the experiences of a soldier from training to the front line, but there is incredible poignancy, too. One shows a Tommy trudging across duckboards towards the trenches in a gloomy, forbidding landscape.

Then there are the pitfalls of life on the front line. A weeping soldier holds his head in his hands after dropping the rifle hed spent two hours cleaning into a waterlogged trench.

The pictures light-heartedly follow the experiences of a soldier from training to the front line

Before enlisting in 1915, Mackain was an advertising artist. He served in France with the Royal Fusiliers

Mackain began producing the postcards after he was taken out of front-line duty in 1917, and transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps

Yet the determination to keep smiling never fades from Mackains work.

One card, part of a series called The Cheerful Tommy, depicts a soldier crouching for cover as enemy shells explode around him along with the ironically hearty messages Compliments from France and Good morning! Everythings as right as rain!.

In Britain, postcards that contained military or war material were censored by the Press Bureau for Censorship from September 1916. But this did not affect Mackains cards as they were published in France.

In Britain, postcards that contained military or war material were censored by the Press Bureau for Censorship from September 1916

Mackains postcards escaped censorship by UK authorities, as they were published in France

He was discharged from the Army, aged 32, in 1918 on medical grounds. Returning to New York, he resumed his work as an illustrator, divorced his wife and remarried in 1922.

He died at the age of 37, in 1924, from pulmonary tuberculosis, believed to have been caused by gas attacks or the general conditions of life on the front line.
Wagar's attorney this week asked alleged victim whether size of client's manhood drew her to him, to which she said, 'No'

A judicial panel is currently deciding whether to remove Camp from the bench

the world with his victim-blaming comments during the trial

Wagar was acquitted by Judge Robin Camp in 2014, but that verdict was

Retrial: Canadian Judge Robin Camp made international headlines when he asked an alleged rape victim during a trial why she didn't just 'keep her knees together.' Now the suspect is on trial for a second time

A lawyer for a Canadian man on trial for the second time in a controversial rape case has sparked outrage by asking the alleged victim on cross-examination whether his client's penis size may have swayed her to have consensual sex with him.

Alexander Scott Wagar, 29, is being retried in Calgary for an alleged sexual assault of a woman, then aged 19, which took place at a house party in 2011.

Justice Robin Camp acquitted Wagar in 2014, but that verdict was overturned on appeal and a new trial was ordered after it has emerged that the judge asked the alleged victim, 'why couldn't you just keep your knees together?'

According to the Globe and Mail, Camp also said: 'Some sex and pain sometimes go togetherthats not necessarily a bad thing.'

During the woman's cross-examination this week, Alexander Wagar's defense attorney, Pat Flynn, asked her if she was drawn to his client after he flashed his manhood to a room full of guests at the party and she saw that 'he was larger than most men,' reported The Canadian Press via Huffington Post Canada.

The 24-year-old woman, who has repeatedly testified that she was attracted to women, responded to Flynn, 'No.'

The lawyer also argued that the sexual encounter was consensual because Wagar and his accuser had engaged in 'aggressive foreplay' - to which she again said 'No' - and that she had concocted the rape story because she was angry that his client had sex with another woman at the party later that evening.

The complainant testified during the original trial that she was at the house party in Calgary in December 2011 when Wagar entered the bathroom, locked the door behind him, ripped off her clothes, then bent her over the sink and sexually assaulted her for 15-20 minutes.

But Judge Camp, who presided over Wagars first trial, demanded to know 'why she allowed the sex to happen if she didn't want it?'

'Why didn't you just sink your bottom down into the basin so he couldn't penetrate you,' he asked the homeless woman. 'Why couldn't you just keep your knees together?'

He also noted that the alleged victim, whom he repeatedly called 'the accused,' had asked Wagar if he had a condom - a question which he perceived to have 'an inescapable conclusion [that] if you have one I'm happy to have sex with you'.

This fall, a Canadian Judicial Council launched an inquiry into Camp's professional conduct, and the panel is currently in the process of determining whether he should be removed from the bench.

In September, the alleged victim tearfully told the Council that Camp, 64, made her feel like a slut with his line of questioning.

In hot water: A Canadian Judicial Council launched an inquiry into Camp's professional conduct, and the panel is currently in the process of determining whether he should be removed from the bench

Camp, who was a provincial judge during the original trial and is now a federal justice, apologized for being 'rude a facetious.

He also said his questions were 'offensive' and 'carried with them the implication that the complainant should have done something', the Huffington Post reported.'

In court this week, Alexander Wagar again insisted that his encounter with his accuser was consensual, staunchly denying that he would ever force himself on anyone.

'I am not a f***ing rapist,' he protested. 'If she would have made any sort of objection, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, swear on the Bible, I am a Christian.

'My mother put it in my mind since I was a kid that if a woman says no, it means no.'

Presenting his version of events in graphic detail, Wagar said, referring to the accuser: 'She grabbed my penis and complimented the size of it,' reported The Guardian.
More than 500 rescuers and 165 heavy-duty vehicles worked around the clock in hope of saving the child

He was confirmed dead last night when his body was discovered at the bottom of the 130-foot-deep chute

Advertisement

A young boy who had fallen down a deep well in rural China was found dead yesterday after more than four days.

The five-year-old, named Zhao Zicong, plummeted into the 40-metre-deep (130 feet) well while playing on a farm in the Lixian county on November 6, according to a statement released by the local authority to People's Daily Online.

Zicong's body was recovered at around 11:10pm Beijing time on Thursday after the officials had sent hundreds of rescuers to search for the child for some 107 hours.

Scroll down for video

Rescuers carry out the dead body of the boy who fell into the deep well last Sunday at around 11:10pm yesterday in China

The officials have sent hundreds of heavy-duty vehicles and 500 rescuers to search for the child in the past four days or so

Five-year-old Zhao Zicong, from a small village in central China, fell into a deserted well on Sunday while playing on a farm

After the family alerted the authority, a large team of rescuers have been sent to save the five-year-old child

More than 500 rescuers, including firefighter, policemen, paramedics and volunteers, took part in the rescue operation

People around China donated over 170,000 Yuan (19,800) during the course of the four days to fund the rescue

The accident took place in the Zhongmengchang village in Lixian county, near Baoding city in central China's Hebei Province.

The well measured just 30 centimetres wide (11.8 inches) and had no warning signs nearby.

According to the statement, during the four-day-long rescue operation, 165 machines, including dozens of diggers, forklift trucks, bulldozers and transport trucks, worked around the clock in hope of saving Zicong.

Police officers, firefighters, paramedics and volunteers worked around the clock with the hope that the boy would survive

The rescue effort has left a massive hole in the ground around the dry well, which measured about 390 feet in diameter

Zicong's grandfather said the well was about 40 metres deep (131 feet) and had been abandoned for around five years

The accident took place in the Zhongmengchang village in Lixian county, near Baoding city in central China's Hebei Province

The rescue effort has left a massive hole in the ground around the dry well, which measured about 120 metres (393 feet) in diameter and 30 metres (131 feet) in depth.

More than 500 rescuers, including firefighter, policemen, paramedics and volunteers, took part in the operation.

People around China donated over 170,000 Yuan (19,800) during the course of four days to fund the rescue.

Excavators work at the rescue site in Zhongmengchang Village of Lixian County in Baoding taken on November 8

Rescuers worked on the site in Zhongmengchang Village, central China's Hebei Province, on November 8

The well on the farm (pictured) measured just 30 centimetres wide (11.8 inches) and had no warning signs nearby

After the family alerted the local police, police officers and firefighters immediately arrived at the scene of the accident

According to the statement, Zhao Zicong's father, Zhao Xiangyang, was harvesting cabbages on the farm and he took Zicong and Zicong's sister with him. Zicong fell down the well by accident as he was playing in the fields.

The boy had previously been reported to be six years old, but more updated reports said he was five years old.

The boy's grandfather told a reporter from The Beijing News on an earlier occasion that the well was located near their house and had been used to irrigate the crops.

The man also said that the well was about 40 metres deep (131 feet) and had been abandoned for around five years.

After the family alerted the local police, police officers and firefighters immediately arrived at the scene of the accident.

Rescuers used life detectors on November 8, but they failed to find any signs of life, according to local reports.

The boy's uncle, Song Jiandang, told a reporter from The Paper yesterday that the boy was not in the well

The man said he only saw a pile of dry mud at the bottom of the well as he carried out excavations in the morning on Thursday

When the body of Zicong was finally discovered at the bottom of the well yesterday, many people expressed their sorrow

165 machines, including dozens of diggers, forklift trucks, bulldozers and transport trucks, took part in the rescue operation

An aerial video posted by QQ.com on November 8 showed the heavy-duty vehicles sparing no effort digging into the earth in hope of save Zhao Zicong.

The boy's uncle, Song Jiandang, told a reporter from The Paper yesterday that the boy was not in the well. The man said he only saw a pile of dry mud at the bottom of the well as he carried out excavations in the morning.

This created a sense of mystery and shock in the Chinese media and many readers started wondering whether or not the boy had really fallen into the well.

However, when the body of Zicong was finally discovered yesterday, many people expressed their sorrow on social media.

One person wrote on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform: 'No precautions had been taken around the deserted well, someone must be held responsible.'

Another Weibo user said: 'I want to cry. It's hard to imagine how the child had endured the last moments of his life.'

A third person shared personal experience: 'Wells like this are deathtraps... When my brother was three years old, he stood by a well just like this, luckily a family member dragged him away. Recalling this crept me out.'

In a more heart-breaking manner, Zicong's elderly grandfather, who had endured the hardest week of his life due to the missing of his grandson, knelt down in front of the rescue team last night to thank them - after he saw the dead body of the child being carried out of the well.
Advertisement

Keepers at a zoo in eastern China had a long day yesterday.

They carried out the annual physical examinations for all of its 5,000 animals, including its star reptile - a giant golden python.

Remarkable pictures have emerged showing two animal carers at the Qingdao Forest Wild Animal World trying to measure the length of the huge snake, which refused to straighten its body, reported People's Daily.

Zookeepers at the Qingdao Forest Wild Animal World carried the golden python in a large bowl during the physical check

The huge animal measured 92 pounds in weight and 15 feet in length and was deemed healthy by the zoo's vet

Two zookeepers had to team up to carry and exam the golden python, a first-class protected animal in China.

To weight the slithering snake, the two staff members put it in a metal bowl, waited for it to curl up before transporting it to a scale.

The python weighed 42kg (92 pounds) after spending two years at the zoo in Shandong province.

The next task appeared to be more challenging: to measure the snake's length.

It took the pair some time and effort to finish the procedure as the reptile insisted on staying coiled. One keeper had to grab the head of the snake while the other took the tail to straighten up the lengthy animal.

The golden python had grown from 1.6 meters long (5.3 feet) to 4.6 meters long (15 feet) in the past two years.

An adult golden python, a variation of Burmese python, can grow up to 7 meters long (23 feet).

A zoo keeper tried to straighten the golden python as he tried to measure its length yesterday in Qingdao, eastern China

The golden python had grown from 1.6 meters long (5.3 feet) to 4.6 meters long (15 feet) in the past two years

It took the two zookeepers some time and effort to finish the procedure as the reptile insisted on staying coiled

After measuring the snake's length and weight, the veterinary physician checked the condition of its skin and scales, according to the zoo.

An unnamed zoo keeper said the python is still growing, so old skin still came monthly.

Each year, zookeepers at the Qingdao Forest Wild Animal World conduct a series of physical exams to monitor the health of over 5,000 animals, according to the zoo's official website.

Other than the golden python, the zoo keeps a variety of reptiles, including Burmese pythons, blue-tongued lizards and gold tegus, according to China News.
You could never call her a shrinking violet. She is a tangerine dream, an orange blossom, a hibiscus flower. Her creator called her Flaming June, a drowsy vision in a summer dress of clementine colour.

Clementine dream: Wonderful, Flaming June, by Frederic, Lord Leighton is now back in London

She is the most famous of the society artist Frederic, Lord Leightons paintings, reproduced countless times since she was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895 in prints, on silk scarves and on many fridge magnets.

Her pose was gorgeously recreated by the flame-haired actress Jessica Chastain, and photographed by Annie Leibovitz, for the cover of Vogue.

She has become a summer day talisman for this grey and drizzly country. But she did not stay in Britain long. By 1962, she had been sold to a Puerto Rican industrialist Luis A Ferre and has since basked in Caribbean heat in the Museo de Arte de Ponce.

Now, for the first time in 120 years, she is reunited with the five other paintings Leighton exhibited that year in his studio at his curious Moorish palace house in London. It is very much the moment for her return. The tide is turning away from the greys and neutral colours that have so dominated the catwalks and interiors trends for the last few seasons.

Ravishing rust: Pentreath and Hall's treasure-filled shop in Bloomsbury, London celebrates vivid colours

The austere, steely greys popularised by the hotel chain Soho House and the whites and sheepskin-colours of Scandinavian fashion are being chased out by wonderful, tropical, citrus and flamenco-skirt colours.

Anna Starmer, creative director of Luminary  a colour consultancy (luminarycolour.com)  and author of The Colour Scheme Bible (16.99, Firefly Books) says: We long to pour saturated and exciting colour in to our neutral, cool living environments. In the long winter months when we spend many hours indoors, these rich, decadent shades offer warmth, and a touch of splendour.

She predicts that fuchsia will be a popular colour next spring. Look out for berry and poppy colours. Okas pink Trellis cushion (195, oka.com) or a Pomegranate cushion from Fine Cell Work, a charity that teaches prisoners to do tapestry, (135, finecellwork.co.uk) would give a pink blush to a sitting room.

Hot grapefruit, mango and lychee colours do take more daring than cream and beige. Bridie Hall, decorative artist and co-owner of interiors shop Pentreath & Hall, says she understands our wariness.

I wouldnt say were timid, perhaps a little unsure, is her verdict. Orange and red can say a lot and can totally dominate a space. It is easy to get wrong.

How many statement red dining rooms have we seen that accidentally look like the inside of a bordello? Neutrals are popular for a reason: they dont put up a fight and are usually relaxing to live within.

Flamboyant flourish: Marianna Kennedy's phoenix-red resin table lamp from Pentreath & Hall

Hall is a fan of colour introduced through objects. I like my eyes to travel from one thing to another in a room, from left to right, the same way you read a book: cushions, lamps, small pieces of furniture, artworks and objects, books, on the dinner table colourful candles and, in the bedroom, a bright quilt.

Try one of Marianna Kennedys phoenix-red resin table lamps (495, pentreath-hall.com) or an orange aurora lamp from Pooky (30, pooky.com). Habitat, too, is having an orange flush. Its Tangelo bubble glass vase (25) is invigorating, while for the bold there is the orange velvet Hendricks sofa (1,400, habitat.co.uk).

Deep oranges look great in velvet for upholstery, or used as an accent colour on a single chair, says Anna Starmer. She recommends Russell Pinchs orange velvet sofa (5,787, pinchdesign.com).

Statement sofa: Russell Pinch's orange velvet sofa will add a warming touch to your home

An orange Bialetti coffeepot (29.99, wayfair.co.uk) will give you both a caffeine and a colour kick in the morning. In the run up to Christmas, fill the house with mandarin candles (6, marksandspencer.com).

Hall says to start with bright Flaming June flowers or a big bowl of clementines to see if these colours make you happy. Such colours, along with good lighting, she says, can do much to cheer up and make a house cosy in winter.

In the kitchen, Le Creuset have long been known for their signature orange  they call the colour Volcanic  stoneware dishes. Mix and match Volcanic and Cerise pots and pans on open kitchen shelves if you dont feel brave enough for flaming kitchen units (from 17, lecreuset.co.uk).

Wonder walls: Feeling daring? Enliven your walls with Charlotte's Locks paint by Farrow & Ball

If you are feeling brave, Charlotte Cosby, of Farrow & Ball, says that their orange Charlottes Locks paint is a buoyant and highly dramatic colour particularly in full gloss and would be fabulous for a front door.

Babouche, an intense yellow, can be paired with the softer Hay for depth and gentleness in a room, and Radicchio, a defiant red, would warm up a chilly kitchen in winter. For the true Flaming June fan, a fridge magnet is the finishing touch.

n Flaming June is on display at Leighton House until April 2 (leightonhouse.co.uk).
More than 200 species of bird in six rapidly developing regions of the world are at risk of extinction, according to new research.

A new study from Duke University used remote-sensing technology to map out changes in land usage that are gradually restricting the habitats of more than 600 species of bird.

The regions affected are in the Atlantic forest of Brazil, Central America, the western Andes of Colombia, Sumatra, Madagascar and Southeast Asia.

A new study used remote-sensing technology to map out changes in land usage that are gradually restricting the habitats of over 600 species of bird. (Pictured: A Velvet-purple coronet, one of the species featured on the new list, feeding on a flower in Ecuador)

WHAT IS THE IUCN RED LIST? Founded in 1964, the IUCN Red List is arguably the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global status of biological species The list is set upon precise criteria to evaluate the risk of thousands of species and subspecies across the globe It aims to convey the urgency of conservation issues to the public and policymakers, and to help the international community protect endangered species from extinction The IUCN re-evaluates the categories of each species on the list every five years Advertisement

The finding was particularly surprising because these species do not feature on the globally-recognised International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

This is worlds most respected database of endangered species and scientists say it is underestimating the risk of extinction to many animals around the world.

'The places and birds we selected are some of the most biodiverse and threatened places on Earth,' the study's lead-author, Dr Natalia Ocampo-Penuela, told MailOnline.

'These are birds that are endemic and threatened, which means they are not found anywhere else in the World, and are in danger of going extinct.'

The Duke researchers hope that by reclassifying the 200+ species as endangered, policymakers can begin to make moves towards protecting them from extinction.

Of the 600 species the scientists studied, 108 are currently listed as at risk of extinction on the IUCN's endangered species Red List.

The new analysis from Duke, however, reveals that 210 of the species could face accelerated risks of extinction as a result of rapidly changing habitats.

The scientists concluded that 189 of the 600 species analysed should be reclassified as officially threatened based on the alarming rate at which their habitats are vanishing.

'Good as it is, the Red List assessment process dates back 25 years and does not make use of advances in geospatial technologies,' Stuart Pimm, Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, told Phys.org.

'We now have powerful new tools at our fingertips, including vastly improved digital maps, regular global assessments of land use changes from satellite images, and maps showing which areas of the planet are protected by national parks.'

210 species of bird were found by the researchers to be at risk, even though many of these species do not feature on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. (Pictured: The purplish-mantled tanager should now be considered 'vulnerable' due to habitat loss)

The Red List - arguably the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global status of biological species - does not currently include this modern geospatial data directly into its assessments of species' relative risk.

'We were surprised at how little protection these species have,' Dr Ocampo-Penuela told MailOnline.

'About half of the birds we studied have less than 10 per cent of their range within protected areas.'

By failing to employ this data, the Red List is in danger of underestimating the numbers of species at risk.

This could mean that policymakers and scientists are inadvertently overlooking areas of conservation that need to be prioritised.

'The Red List employs rigorously objective criteria, is transparent, and democratic in soliciting comments on species decisions,' Professor Pimm said.

'That said, its methods are seriously outdated.'

Dr Ocampo-Penuela agrees: 'The IUCN should take advantage of the information and tools that exist to improve species' risk assessments,' she told MailOnline.

'We have shown one way in which this information can be used, by refining the species' range to its suitable habitat, and seeing how much of it is protected.

'The next step would be to determine the vulnerability of those populations due to fragmentation and habitat degradation.'

As an example: the Red List currently looks at the geographical range of a species when assessing its relative population risk.

While this remains an effective way to assess species' risk, it is now outdated - new geospatial technology allows scientists to measure how much preferred habitat remains in that range, a more accurate tool for analysing habitat decline.

The researchers hope that their findings may encourage better data analysis on species' risks, helping to save species that may have otherwise been neglected. (Pictured: The munchique wood-wren is critically endangered and affected by deforestation in its small range)

'Some bird species prefer forests at mid-elevations, while others inhabit moist lowland forests,' Dr Ocampo-Penuela told Phys.org.

'Knowing how much of this preferred habitat remains - and how much of it has been destroyed or degraded - is vital for accurately assessing extinction risks, especially for species that have small geographical ranges to begin with.

'But it's ignored in the current Red List assessment process.'

Study co-author Dr Clinton Jenkins added: 'When these factors are accounted for, some species that are not currently considered at risk of extinction likely have ranges that are smaller than those that the Red List otherwise quite sensibly decides are at risk.'

The researchers hope that their findings may encourage better data analysis on species' risks, potentially helping to save species that may have otherwise been neglected.

'Natural habitats in the most biodiverse places on Earth are disappearing, pushing species toward extinction a thousand times faster than their natural rates,' added Dr Ocampo-Penuela.

'Preventing these extinctions requires knowing what species are at risk and where they live.
Mars has been experiencing a super-drought that may well have lasted millions of years

This suggests that Mars doesn't have liquid water and couldn't support life

Estimations suggest it takes up to 10,000 times longer on Mars to reach the same levels of rust formation than in the driest deserts on Earth

Iron rusts when it comes into contact with water and oxygen

The researchers examined iron in a cluster of meteorites on Mars

While many people have speculated about the possibility of life on Mars, a lack of liquid water on the surface would make it very difficult.

New research has demonstrated this lack of water in the form of meteorites on the red planet.

The meteorites were found to lack rust, indicating that Mars is incredibly dry, and has been experiencing a 'super-drought' for millions of years.

Using data from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, the researchers examined a cluster of meteorites at Meridiani Planum  a plain just south of the planet's equator

WHAT DID THEY FIND? Using data from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, the researchers examined a cluster of meteorites at Meridiani Planum  a plain just south of the planet's equator. For the first time, the team calculated a chemical weathering rate for Mars, which estimates how long it takes for rust to form from the iron present in the meteorites. Iron rusts when it comes into contact with water and oxygen, which are both necessary for the process to occur. The calculations suggest it takes at least 10 and possibly up to 10,000 time longer on Mars to reach the same levels of rust formation than in the driest deserts on Earth. Advertisement

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Stirling in Scotland, say that their findings provide vital insights into Mars' current environment.

Mars is one of the primary targets in the search for alien life, and liquid water is the most vital pre-requisite for life.

Dr Christian Schroder, who led the study, said: 'Evidence shows that more than three billion years ago Mars was wet and habitable.

'However, this latest research reaffirms just how dry the environment is today.

'For life to exist in the areas we investigated, it would need to find pockets far beneath the surface, located away from the dryness and radiation present on the ground.'

Last year, a study which used data collected from the Curiosity Rover, suggested that salty water might be able to condense in the top layers of Mars' soil at night.

New research has demonstrated this lack of water, in the form of meteorites on the red planet. The meteorites were found to lack rust, indicating that Mars is incredibly dry, and has been that way for millions of years (stock image)

But Dr Schroder said: 'As our data show, this moisture is much less than the moisture present even in the driest places on Earth.'

Using data from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, the researchers examined a cluster of meteorites at Meridiani Planum  a plain just south of the planet's equator.

For the first time, the team calculated a chemical weathering rate for Mars, which estimates how long it takes for rust to form from the iron present in the meteorites.

Iron rusts when it comes into contact with water and oxygen, which are both necessary for the process to occur.

The calculations suggest it takes at least 10 and possibly up to 10,000 time longer on Mars to reach the same levels of rust formation than in the driest deserts on Earth.

The discovery, published in Nature Communications, provides vital insight into the planet's current environment and shows how difficult it would be for life to exist on Mars today.
Advertisement

Hyperloop One, which is developing a futuristic high-speed transport system, aims to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of fresh capital next year after a first full-scale test that could secure firm orders from clients, its founders said.

The founders of Hyperloop One, which uses magnets to levitate pods inside huge airless tubes at speeds up to 750 mph (1,100 kmh) to transport people and cargo, said they have also now signed agreements on feasibility studies with the Dutch and Finnish governments.

Earlier this week, the company said it agreed to jointly evaluate a Hyperloop One transport system in Dubai.

Early next year the company will carry out its first full-scale test of the system at a facility in Nevada, which could demonstrate the system's viability.

Scroll down for video

The futuristic city-state of Dubai announced a deal with Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One, to study the potential for building a line linking it to the Emirati capital of Abu Dhabi. Artist's impression of the Hyperloop with Dubai in the background, pictured

So far the company has raised $160 million to finance its growth, including $50 million last month in a financing round led by Dubai port operator DP World

'Basically, we are looking to do a big raise next year,' Josh Giegel, co-founder and head of engineering at Hyperloop One, told Reuters at the Web Summit, a tech conference held in Lisbon this week. 'If we can have a customer on the hook, it will be all that much easier.'

He said the size of the funding round would 'be something in the hundreds of millions, but not high hundreds of millions,' and that it would depend on the potential of the projects under consideration by countries.

The concept behind Hyperloop One originated in a paper by Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc, in 2013.

Josh Giegel of Hyperloop One (L) and Shervin Pishevar fo Sherva Capital (R) during the fourth and last day of the Web Summit in Lisbon

Skeptics still wonder if the technology can move from science fiction to reality.

But Hyperloop One's increasing number of agreements on feasibility studies with countries suggests growing optimism.

Giegel said he has no doubts that the test will work.

'There is no doubt about it working at this point, it's just that how quickly can you go through the regulatory process, the customer process and to basically get the funding situation in place?' Giegel said.

Building networks of the huge tubes being built by Hyperloop One, either above or under ground, would cost billions.

Hyperloop One co-founder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar said he expected governments to embrace the technology once they understand the huge time savings the system can offer, for transporting people and cargo.

Pods would also be able to operate autonomously away from the pressurized tubes, meaning they could travel on regular roads.

'Once governments see what the potential is, they will basically accelerate the regulatory process,' Pishevar said, adding that regulation may not be that cumbersome as it would start from a blank sheet as the system is completely new.

The feasibility study for Finland includes a possible transport link between Helsinki and Stockholm in Sweden, a trip which would take about half an hour in a Hyperloop rather than overnight on a ferry through the Baltic.

Earlier this week we got a a first look at what travelling on a Hyperloop will really be like.

Stunning new concepts for the first commercial use of Elon Musk's radical transport system were revealed today.

They show small levitating Hyperloop pods that hurtle through tunnels at 760 mph (1,220 km/h), and then driving on normal roads to complete journeys to and from stunning stations.

The city recently hosted a competition for designs related to the high-speed system first proposed by Tesla co-founder Elon Musk in 2013, and today announced a deal with Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One, to study the potential for building a line linking it to the Emirati capital of Abu Dhabi within the next five years.

The announcement of the deal took place atop the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, with the panorama view of the skyline of this futuristic city-state serving as both a backdrop and a sign of Dubai's desire to be the first to rush toward the future.

Organisers suggest the Dubai-Abu to Dhabi travel time by Hyperloop would be only 12 minutes - significantly down from the hour-plus journey it now takes by car between the two cities.

The system could later be expanded to link the UAE with neighbouring Gulf countries so that a trip between Dubai and Saudi capital Riyadh -- currently two hours by plane -- could be completed in under 50 minutes.

A spokesman from Hyperloop One told MailOnline the company plans to build the system within five years.

'Technology is evolving and transforming how we live, yet we lack real innovation in mass transportation and the current system has stagnated,' said Shervin Pishevar, Executive Chairman of Hyperloop One.

'Hyperloop One is focused on transport that's far more efficient, fast and clean. It will change the dynamics of how we move goods and people.

Inside a pod: Different interior environments and seating arrangements offer passengers a travel experience tailored to their needs, whether travelling solo or in groups, for business meetings or casual trips

'Dubai makes perfect sense for Hyperloop One because this is the 21st century's global transport hub and its leaders understand that Hyperloop One is ushering in the next era of transportation.'

Hyperloop One will now work with McKinsey & Co. and the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) on a detailed feasibility study.

According to BIG, the design of the scheme is based on a study of 'how an urban and inter-city transport network should integrate with existing infrastructure.'

They describe it as autonomous, point-to-point and able to vastly simplify the experience of 'getting from front-door to final destination.'

HOW DUBAI'S HYPERLOOP WILL WORK The stations are called portals. All departure gates are immediately visible upon entering the portal, and a simple numbering system allows passengers to quickly identify them. Passengers will travel in pods that have room for 6 people. Hyperloop's control room: The study revealed how the system would work and be controlled from a central location The pods are contained within a transporter, a pressure vessel attached to a chassis for levitation and propulsion that can accelerate the transporter to 1,100km/h.' 'Passengers board the next pod that is available, which moves onto a transporter to their final destination. All departure gates are immediately visible upon entering the portal, and a simple numbering system allows passengers to quickly identify them. The relatively small unit-size of the pods paired with a high arrival and departure-rate allows for on-demand travel. Different interior environments and seating arrangements offer passengers a travel experience tailored to their needs, whether travelling solo or in groups, for business meetings or casual trips.' Passengers will travel in pods that have room for 6 people. The pods are contained within a transporter, a pressure vessel attached to a chassis for levitation and propulsion that can accelerate the transporter to 1,100km/h. Different interior environments and seating arrangements offer passengers a travel experience tailored to their needs, whether travelling solo or in groups, for business meetings or casual trips. Advertisement

The locations of the initial route in the UAE have been selected by passenger density and proximity to existing or planned transportation hubs.

The designers said that 'all of the portals have been designed as individual answers to different contexts, yet appear similar and easily recognizable.'

According to the designers, 'all elements of the travel experience are designed to increase convenience and reduce interruptions.

The main objective of the design is to eliminate waiting from the passenger experience.

Hence, the stations are called portals.

All departure gates are immediately visible upon entering the portal, and a simple numbering system allows passengers to quickly identify them.

The announcement of the deal took place atop the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, with the panorama view of the skyline of this futuristic city-state serving as both a backdrop and a sign of Dubai's desire to be the first to rush toward the future.

Rob Lloyd, the CEO of Hyperloop One, left, shows a model to Emirati officials including Mattar al-Tayer, the director-general and chairman of Dubai's Roads & Transport Authority, third left, in Dubai.

Passengers will travel in pods that have room for 6 people.

The pods are contained within a transporter, a pressure vessel attached to a chassis for levitation and propulsion that can accelerate the transporter to 1,100km/h.'

'Passengers board the next pod that is available, which moves onto a transporter to their final destination.

The relatively small unit-size of the pods paired with a high arrival and departure-rate allows for on-demand travel.

Different interior environments and seating arrangements offer passengers a travel experience tailored to their needs, whether travelling solo or in groups, for business meetings or casual trips.'

The Hyperloop station design for the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.

The two designs will fit into the existing city infrastructure, the designers claim

'The pods operate autonomously from the transporter, which means they are not limited to the portal area and can move on regular roads and pick up passengers at any point.

'At portals, pods are loaded onto the transporter and hyperjump to another portal, where they merge onto the street and drop passengers off at their final destination.'

No financial terms were immediately discussed and the technology itself remains under testing.

'This is an opportunity to help transform the UAE from a technology consumer to a technology creator, incubating expertise for a new global industry, in line with the UAE's Vision 2021,' Chairman of the RTA, His Excellency Mattar Al Tayer, commented on the agreement.

There would be several stations throughout Dubai connecting the hyperloop system to Abu Dhabi. The amin station there is pictured here.

At portals, pods are loaded onto the transporter and hyperjump to another portal, where they merge onto the street and drop passengers off at their final destination.

'With Hyperloop One, we will create a new means of transportation, keeping our region at the forefront of transportation technology and innovation.'

The deal announced today would be far simpler.

There would be several stations throughout Dubai connecting the hyperloop system to Abu Dhabi.

The pods would then be able to carry passengers and cargo between the cities.

 Slide me  How the tubes will work: Two two tubes will be used to allow trains to travel both ways on the system

Already, government-backed port operator DP World has signed an agreement with Hyperloop One to explore the feasibility of the using the technology at Dubai's sprawling, man-made Jebel Ali Port.

'With Hyperloop One we have given form to a mobility ecosystem of pods and portals, where the waiting hall has vanished along with waiting itself,' says Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG.

An Emirati takes a photograph of the Hyperloop One logo with his mobile phone in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016. The futuristic city-state of Dubai announced a deal on Tuesday with Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One to study the potential for building a line linking it to the Emirati capital of Abu Dhabi.

'Collective commuting with individual freedom at near supersonic speed.

'We are heading for a future where our mental map of the city is completely reconfigured, as our habitual understanding of distance and proximity  time and space  is warped by this virgin form of travel.'

Hyperloop One will work with McKinsey & Co. and the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) on a detailed feasibility study

'The momentum is global and accelerating,' adds Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd.

'The world will see the test of the first full-scale Hyperloop system in early 2017 at our Test and Safety Site in Nevada and we will have multiple operational Hyperloop systems within five years.'

HYPERLOOP IN EUROPE 'The world will see the test of the first full-scale Hyperloop system in early 2017 at our Test and Safety Site in Nevada and we will have multiple operational Hyperloop systems within five years,' said Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) met with Slovakian government officials earlier this year to finalise and sign an agreement. They are looking to build a local Hyperloop system, with the vision of creating future routes connecting Bratislava with Vienna, Austria and Budapest, Hungary. They wants the first stage to be complete by 2020. But the company has not secured funding yet, and the project is expected to cost $200-300 million (141  211 million). Meanwhile Hyperloop One is working with FS-Links AB on a Hyperloop system that will operate between Finland, Sweden and Estonia. Advertisement

In October, Dubai hosted a competition to design a Hyperloop track.

In that 48-hour project, designers presented ideas for a possible track between Al Maktoum International Airport at Dubai World Central, Dubai International Airport and Fujairah International Airport.

Under their plans, the Hyperloop trip of some 90 miles (145 km) over a mountain range would be 10 minutes or less, compared to the current hour and 20 minutes by road.

There would be several stations throughout Dubai connecting the hyperloop system to Abu Dhabi. The pods would then be able to carry passengers and cargo between the cities. Artist's impression of the pods pictured

The hyperloop is essentially a long tube that has had the air removed to create a vacuum. The tube is suspended off the ground to protect against weather and earthquakes
A large metal cylinder thought to be from a Chinese satellite or aircraft fell from the sky and slammed into the ground in northern Myanmar.

The barrel-shaped object crashed onto property owned by a jade mining company in Kachin State's Hpakant township on Thursday.

Another smaller piece of metal bearing Chinese writing tore through the roof of a house in the nearby village of Hmaw His Zar, at the same time, but fortunately no one was injured.

A large metal cylinder thought to be from a Chinese satellite or aircraft fell from the sky and slammed into the ground in northern Myanmar

CHINA'S MISSION TO MARS China has its sights set firmly on Mars and is aiming to launch its own rover to the red planet by 2020. Images released in August provided the first glimpse of what this rover might look like when it launches at the end of the decade. A Long March-5 carrier rocket will be dispatched from the Wenchang space launch centre in the southern island province of Hainan, Xinhua said, citing Ye Peijian, a mission consultant. The lander will separate from the orbiter at the end of a journey of around seven months and touch down near the Martian equator, where the rover will explore the surface. The 441 pounds (200 kg) rover has six wheels and four solar panels, and will operate for around 92 days. It will carry 13 sets of equipment including a remote sensing camera and a ground-penetrating radar. Advertisement

The huge object measured 4.5 metres (15 foot) long and just over a metre in diameter.

Global New Light wrote: 'The metal objects are assumed to be part of a satellite or the engine parts of a plane or missile,' adding that authorities were still trying to confirm their origin.

Pictures circulated on social media showed what appeared to be pieces of technological equipment and wiring attached to the inside of the vast cylinder.

Local residents reported hearing a loud bang before the hunk of metal landed and then proceeded to bounce some 50 metres across the mining area before coming to rest in the mud.

'We were all afraid of that explosion,' villager Ko Maung Myo told the Myanmar Times.

'Initially, we thought it was a battle.

'The explosion made our houses shake. We saw the smoke from our village.'

The bizarre events came the same day Chinese state media reported Beijing had recently launched a satellite into space.

The barrel-shaped object crashed onto property owned by a jade mining company in Kachin State's Hpakant township on Thursday

Another smaller piece of metal bearing Chinese writing tore through the roof of a house in the nearby village of Hmaw His Zar, at the same time, but fortunately no one was injured

Last week, China successfully blasted off in front of thousands of spectators, carrying the Shijian-17 ion propulsion technology experiment satellite towards a geosynchronous orbit.

The 187-foot (57-metre) two-stage rocket is China's largest, capable of carrying 25 tons of payload into low-earth orbit and 14 tons to the more distant geostationary transfer orbit, in which a satellite orbits constantly above a fixed position on the earth's surface.

'It could not be confirmed whether the launch of the satellite and the metal objects found in Kachin state were related,' the Global New Light said.
Advertisement

The moon doesn't get much bigger and brighter than this.

On Monday, sky gazers across the world will be treated to a so-called supermoon  the closest full moon of the year.

It will be closer to the planet than it has been since 1948, and this month's full moon is set to be the biggest supermoon in living memory.

The once-in-a-lifetime sight takes place on the 14th of the month when the full moon will appear 14 per cent larger and 30 per cent brighter than normal.

It will be closer to the planet than it has been since 1948, and this month's full moon is set to be the biggest supermoon in living memory. People will be treated to the once-in-a-lifetime sight on the 14th of the month, when the full moon will appear 14 per cent larger and 30 per cent brighter than normal

WHAT IS A SUPERMOON? Supermoons are new or full moons that occur when the orbit of the moon brings it particularly close to Earth. For this reason, it appears to be bigger than normal - by about 10 per cent. We usually get between four and six supermoons a year, but this November is special because the moon will be closer to Earth than at any time this century, and we won't get as near again until 2034. Advertisement

WHY WILL THE MOON APPEAR LARGER?

The moons orbit is elliptical rather than perfectly circular, so as the moon moves around the Earth it is sometimes a little bit closer and sometimes a bit further away from us.

'If a full moon happens to occur when the Moon is also at its closest point then it will look slightly larger and brighter than usual  this is what is popularly known as a "supermoon",' Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich told MailOnline.

'Its a natural part of the moons cycle and happens around once a year.

'The differences in apparent size and brightness amount to few percent but they can enhance the already beautiful sight of the full moon, making a supermoon worth looking up for.'

For this reason, it appears to be bigger than normal - by about 10 per cent.

We usually get between four and six supermoons a year, but this November is special because the moon will be closer to Earth than at any time this century, and we won't get as near again until 2034.

During the event, it will appear up to 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter than an average full moon.

A winter supermoon is supersized, because the Earth is closest to the sun in December each year, which means its gravity pulls the moon closer to the planet making it appear brighter and larger than those that occur during the rest of the year.

The best time to view a super moon is when the moon is low on the horizon where 'an illusion will occur that makes it look unnaturally larger,' according to AccuWeather.

Since the moon's orbit is elliptical, one side (perigee) is about 30,000 miles (48, 280 km) closer to Earth than the other (apogee).

Supermoons are new or full moons that occur when the orbit of the moon brings it particularly close to Earth. For this reason, it appears to be bigger than normal - by about 10 per cent

On November 14th, the Moon will be the closest to Earth it's been since January 1948. During the event, it will appear up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than an average full moon.

FIVE SUPERMOON FACTS It was not until 1979 that Astrologer Richard Nolle first defined the supermoon, which is now a widely-used term, as 'a new or full moon which occurs with the moon at or near (within 90 per cent of) its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit'. The moon has to be 226,000 miles (363,711 km) away from the Earth to be considered 'super' which normally happens only once every 14 months. However, there will be no supermoons in 2017. Because of its close proximity to the Earth, the moon's surface appears a lot bigger when a supermoon occurs, which makes for stunning photography. A winter supermoon is supersized, as the Earth is closest to the sun in December each year, which means its gravity pulls the moon closer to the planet making it appear brighter and larger than those that occur during the rest of the year. Supermoons will get smaller in the future as the moon is slowly propelling itself out of Earth's orbit, moving 1.5 inches (3.8cm) further from the Earth each year. Advertisement

WHEN CAN YOU SEE IT?

The supermoon will arrive next Monday, on November 14.

As long as the sky is clear, it should be an excellent night to gaze upon the lunar spectacle.

It will be the second supermoon of the year, the first having already happened on October 16, and the third expected on December 14.

At 8.09 PM GMT (3.09 PM ET) the moon will be the closest it has been to the Earth since 1948, at a distance of around 217,000 miles (350,000 km).

This will be when the moon is at its biggest and brightest during the day.

'I've been telling people to go out at night on either Sunday or Monday night to see the supermoon,' said Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission.

'The difference in distance from one night to the next will be very subtle, so if it's cloudy on Sunday, go out on Monday. Any time after sunset should be fine.

'Since the moon is full, it'll rise at nearly the same time as sunset, so I'd suggest that you head outside after sunset, or once it's dark and the moon is a bit higher in the sky.

'You don't have to stay up all night to see it, unless you really want to!'

WHERE IS THE BEST PLACE TO VIEW IT?

Experts suggest that, provided that the sky is clear and you have a view to the South, the moon will be clearly visible.

'Like any full moon it will rise above the ground in the East at sunset and reach its highest point in the sky at midnight before descending to set with the rising sun,' Colin Stuart, astronomy author, told MailOnline.

'This is the same for everyone on Earth.'

For an even better view, try viewing from a spot with as little light pollution as possible.

The extraordinary visual effect of the moon is more pronounced when viewed near the horizon.

'The moon will look particularly big when seen close to the ground. It isn't actually bigger, but due to an effect called the moon Illusion it appears like it is,' Mr Stuart said.

'So if you can view it rising from a location with an unobstructed Eastern horizon free from trees and buildings you're more likely to see it at its "biggest".'

'You dont need any special equipment to see it the supermoon  just your eyes and a clear, cloud-free view of the sky,' Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich told MailOnline.

'The moon usually appears most impressive when its close to the horizon, so look out for it as it rises in the eastern sky around 6pm on the evenings of November 13th and 14th.'

If you want to watch it without even moving out of the house, Slooh Observatory will be doing a live broadcast.

'Many people these days don't have a connection with the night sky because light pollution ruins our view of space from built up areas,' Mr Stuart said.

'Something as easy to see as an unusually bright full moon is a great way to spark people's interest in astronomy and think about how our solar system works.

'Hopefully that will make them curious about seeing more of the wonders of the universe for themselves.'

Experts suggest that, provided that the sky is clear and you have a view to the south, the moon will be clearly visible. For an even better view, try viewing from a spot with as little light pollution as possible. Image of the supermoon by Albert Dros taken using Sonys 70-200 G Master lens

DOES A SUPERMOON AFFECT OUR HEALTH? THE 'LUNATIC' EFFECT Always surrounded by an aura of mystery, the moon and its possible influence over human behaviour has been object of ancestral fascination and mythical speculation for centuries. While the full moon can't turn people into werewolves, some people do accuse it of causing a bad night's sleep or creating physical and mental alterations. Dr Niall McCrae, a mental health researcher at King's College London, has spent years studying the phenomenon. He told MailOnline he was first inspired to write his book 'The Moon and Madness' because looking back through archives he found a lack of research into the link between a full moon and mental health issues in the early 19th century. It appeared people were trying to distance themselves from the folklore, he said. But, in stark contrast to this, mental health nurses Dr McCrae spoke to told of strong beliefs that at the time of a full moon, patients were more restless and agitated. He said years ago, when mental health hospitals were buildings far away from cities placed on hills, with no curtains, the idea of a full moon affecting their sleep is very plausible. Once one patient was woken by the light from the moon, they could become anxious or agitated and disturb other patients, causing a scene. 'In this environment, it's not unbelievable that moonlight can be a disturbing factor,' he said. In the Bible, people described as 'lunatics' who fell to the ground, shaking, during a full moon might have been suffering from epileptic fits, he added. Nowadays, he says, mental health care has changed and with different treatment, along with medication and artificial lighting, patients are less likely to be affected by the light from the moon. To establish if lunar phases affect humans, an international group of researchers studied children in to see if their sleeping patterns changed or if there were any differences in their daily activities. The research studied a total of 5,812 children from five continents, and the results were published in May this year. The researchers found, in general, nocturnal sleep duration around full moon compared to new moon reported an average decrease of five minutes (or a one per cent variant). Another study found healthy adults slept for 20 minutes less time during a full moon, Dr McCrae told MailOnline. Advertisement

DOES THE MOON AFFECT THE WEATHER?

Some argue the moon has an impact on the weather, but the evidence shows this is not significant.

'The weather isnt affected by the moon,' Dr Marek Kukula told MailOnline.

'However the moon does affect the tides and, because the moon will be at its closest point to the Earth, high and low tides may be slightly more extreme than usual around the date of the supermoon - but only by a few centimetres.

Dr David Harland, space historian and author, said: 'It's possible that the moon may be a kilometre or two closer to Earth than normal at a perigee, but it's an utterly insignificant event. '

Previous supermoons took place in 1955, 1974, 1992 and 2005 - all years that had extreme weather events, conspiracy theorists say.

The tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia happened two weeks before the January 2005 supermoon. And on Christmas Day 1974, Cyclone Tracy laid waste to Darwin, Australia.

But Pete Wheeler of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy greeted warnings of an impending apocalypse with scepticism before the supermoon in 2011.

'There will be no earthquakes or volcanoes erupting, unless they are to happen anyway,' he told news.com.au at the time.

'Earth will experience just a lower than usual low tide and a higher than usual high tide around the time of the event, but nothing to get excited about.'

During a full moon, the sun and the moon are pulling on Earth from opposite sides - making the chances of any dramatic tidal events unlikely.

While the full moon can't turn people into werewolves, some people do accuse it of causing a bad night's sleep or creating physical and mental alterations. Image of the supermoon by Albert Dros taken with Sonys 70-200 G Master lens

Supermoons are new or full moons that occur when the orbit of the moon brings it particularly close to Earth. For this reason, it appears to be bigger than normal - by about 10 per cent. The supermoon will arrive next Monday on November 14. As long as the sky is clear, it should be an excellent night to gaze upon the lunar spectacle

'WEREWOLF' BIRDS HUNT USING LUNAR TIDES Myth and folklore feature tales of werewolves being affected by phases of the moon, and it appears this behaviour isn't as far-fetched as it may seem. Coastal wading birds shape their lives around the tides and new research shows different species follow prey cycles tied to our lunar satellite. Experts now plan to study how their prey responds to such tidal forces to learn more about this behaviour. Advertisement

DOES A SUPERMOON CAUSE MOOD SWINGS OR LACK OF SLEEP?

While the full moon can't turn people into werewolves, some people do accuse it of causing a bad night's sleep or creating physical and mental alterations.

To establish if lunar phases affect humans, an international group of researchers studied children in May this year to see if their sleeping patterns changed or if there were any differences in their daily activities.

The research studied a total of 5,812 children from five continents.

The children came from a wide range of economic and sociocultural levels, and variables such as age, sex, highest parental education, day of measurement, body mass index score, nocturnal sleep duration, level of physical activity and total sedentary time were considered.

Data collection took place over 28 months, which is equivalent to the same number of lunar cycles.

These were then subdivided into three lunar phases: full moon, half-moon and new moon.

The findings obtained in the study revealed that in general, nocturnal sleep duration around full moon compared to new moon reported an average decrease of five minutes (or a one per cent variant).

No other activity behaviours were substantially modified.

'Our study provides compelling evidence that the moon does not seem to influence people's behaviour,' said Dr Jean-Philippe Chaput, from the Eastern Ontario Research Institute.

Another study found healthy adults slept for 20 minutes less time during a full moon.

Historically, full moons have been linked to a lack of sleep because of the bright light that shines from them.

WHY ARE WE SO FASCINATED BY THE SUPERMOON?

Always surrounded by an aura of mystery, the moon and its possible influence over human behaviour has been object of ancestral fascination and mythical speculation for centuries.

Myth and folklore feature tales of werewolves being affected by phases of the moon.

'Folklore and even certain instances of occupational lore suggest that mental health issues or behaviours of humans and animals are affected by lunar phases,' Dr Chaput said.

'Whether there is science behind the myth or not, the moon mystery will continue to fascinate civilisations in the years to come,' he added.

One study found healthy adults slept for 20 minutes less time during a full moon. Historically, full moons have been linked to a lack of sleep because of the bright light that shines from them. Image of the supermoon by Albert Dros
By manipulating virtual building blocks in a simulation it could work out hidden properties, learning like a child

AI learned through a series of experiments where it 'played' with objects

Children learn through play, so why shouldn't machines?

For humans, the easiest way to learn about an objects properties  whether it is hot or cold, light or heavy, sharp or blunt  is to pick it up and explore it with their hands.

Now AI engineers at Googles DeepMind are training machines to learn the same way, by exploring the physical properties of virtual blocks in order to compare them.

Googles DeepMind is teaching machines to learn through play, by exploring objects through simulations to work out their properties

LEARNING THROUGH PLAY Through a series of experiments in a virtual environment, a team from Google's DeepMind was able to train an AI to explore like a child, by 'playing' with virtual objects and exploring their properties. In one experiment, the AI compared virtual blocks to find which one was heaviest, by poking them. A second test tasked the AI with working out the number of components used to make up a tower. Advertisement

Explaining the work, the group said: 'In the past few years deep learning has gotten really good at understanding the world through passive observation, but a lot of human understanding as pointed out above comes through interaction as well.'

Using simulations, they enabled machines to work out hidden properties of the virtual objects by manipulating them.

If a child were presented with two blocks painted black, one made of wood and one made of lead, he or she could work out the blocks' basic properties through playing with them.

The shape and colour of the blocks is obvious at a glance, but the weight of the blocks is a hidden property, which can be worked out by picking up the blocks and comparing them.

Through a series of experiments in a virtual environment, a team from Google's DeepMind was able to train an AI to explore like a child, by 'playing' with virtual objects and exploring their properties.

In the first experiment, they used a which is heavier test for their AI to compare hidden masses of blocks, by poking all of them before making a decision on which had the greatest mass.

They found the harder the task was, the longer the AI spent collecting data  spending more time poking blocks to explore their properties before making up its mind.

A second trial was set up in a block building simulation, where the AI was tasked with working out the building blocks which made up a rigid tower.

In the trial, the machine learned by poking the virtual tower, knocking it over and exploring the way the blocks landed to work out their properties.

If a child were presented with two blocks painted black, one made of wood and one made of lead, they could work out their basic properties through playing with them. So why can't machines learn the same way?

Earlier this week, researchers in Italy launched a new project to develop robots which learn by themselves, using a form of open open-ended machine learning. Pictured is the iCub robot, an open source platform used to test AI and cognition

ROBOTS CAN LEARN LIKE CHILDREN Earlier this week, researchers in Italy launched a new project to develop robots which learn by themselves, using a form of open open-ended machine learning. Called goal-based open-ended autonomous learning (GOAL), the project aims to make independent robots which set their own targets and would be a breakthrough for artificial intelligence. The 3million ($3.7m) project will see researchers develop robots which can learn like a child. They will expand on previous work which looked at intrinsic motivations (IMs) in learning and iCub robots as hardware. Initially, a team in Paris will focus on how children set learning goals, to dig into how humans motivate themselves to learn. Two other groups in Germany will tackle the hardware for the project  with a Frankfurt team developing new visual systems and a brain, while robotics experts in Darmstadt will build a prototype. The project expects a prototype to be in action by the end of the project, in 2020. Advertisement

Some of the blocks in the tower were stuck together, so the only way for the AI to find out how many separate blocks made up the virtual structure was to poke it and see what arrangement the components made when they were apart.

Using a trial and error approach, the machines learned they had to knock the towers over to solve the puzzle.

Writing in an as yet unpublished paper, posted on the online ArXiv server, the researchers explain: By letting our agents conduct physical experiments in an interactive simulated environment, they learn to manipulate objects and observe the consequences to infer hidden object properties.

They add: We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on two important physical understanding tasks  inferring mass and counting the number of objects under strong visual ambiguities.

Commenting on the potential applications of the work, DeepMind's Misha Denil said: 'I think right now concrete applications are still a long way off, but in theory any application where machines need an understanding of the world that goes beyond passive perception could benefit from this work.

'This might include machines that can manipulate complex materials, or machines that can navigate precarious terrains for things such as disaster response.'

Developing machines that learn through play could prove to be a fruitful avenue for pushing AI forward.

Earlier this week, researchers in Italy launched a new project to develop robots which learn by themselves, using a form of open open-ended machine learning.

Called goal-based open-ended autonomous learning (GOAL), the project aims to make independent robots which set their own targets and would be a breakthrough for artificial intelligence.
A new pair of Russian robots has been developed that can track and attack humans from more than four miles away.

The devices are designed for use on the Russian border, and claim to accurately detect and attack ground and aerial threats long before they reach Russian soil.

Key technology at the robots' disposal include radar, HD and thermal video imaging, and multiple long-range grenade launchers.

Scroll down for video

Weapons experts have also been working on a high-tech explosives system, labelled the 'Alpha Device,' to work in tandem with the Flight surveillance robots. The Device boasts several grenade launchers with an impressive range of almost 400m

The first of the two new robots will act as a pair of scrupulous eyes for Russian border guards.

The 'Flight' robot is armed with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance tools to spot potential intruders, such as low-flying drones and other vehicles, from over six miles away.

Russian engineers claim it could be used to pick out targets for long-range explosive weaponry.

But the impressive device will mostly be used for general surveillance.

The Flight robot can not only monitor the precise location of incoming drones, but also find information on their origin and even track the arc of their movement through the sky.

It will help Russian authorities catch out the increasing numbers of surveillance flights made into Russian airspace by Western spy agencies, as tensions between Moscow and the West continue to escalate.

'In its structure there is a radar unit that detects a target: humans to about 7km distance, a car up to 10km,' chief project engineer Dmitry Perminov told Russian news media.

The 'Flight' robot is armed with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance tools to spot potential intruders

'After detection, the target is engaged using an optical system.'

Executive Director of 'Flight' Leo Nosenko went on to confirm that the team have already held discussions with Moscow on rolling out operational tests with several Russian military departments.

In particular, interest lies in its combination with long-range missile or artillery systems, where the Flight robot could pick out bombing targets from miles away with unprecedented accuracy.

Perminov claims that the device is constantly being refined and upgraded, and that future models could one day operate at full capacity without human supervision.

The final product aims to accurately distinguish between enemy and allied troops with total autonomy.

Weapons experts have also been working on a high-tech explosives system to work in tandem with the Flight surveillance robots.

'It is not only interesting for us to detect an incoming drone, but also to shoot it down,' Perminov told Russian news media.

'This is a job for the future.'

WHAT CAN THE FLIGHT ROBOT DO? The 'Flight' robot is armed with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance tools to spot potential intruders, such as low-flying drones and other vehicles, from over six miles away. Russian engineers claim it could be used to pick out targets for long-range explosive weaponry. But the impressive device will mostly be used for general surveillance. The Flight robot can not only monitor the precise location of incoming drones, but also find information on their origin and even track the arc of their movement through the sky. 'In its structure there is a radar unit that detects a target: humans to about 7km distance, a car up to 10km,' chief project engineer Dmitry Perminov told Russian news media. 'After detection, the target is engaged using an optical system.' Advertisement

But Perminov's idea may not be so far-fetched.

A remote-controlled grenade launcher known as the 'Alpha Device' has been developed by Russians engineers, with an impressive firing range of almost 400m.

The multi-barreled battle module can be placed on the security towers that dot the very edges of the Russian border.

A single control-room operator can command as many as 16 of the launchers at a time.

Thermal imaging software on board the battle robot can pick out targets for destruction at distances of up to 250m, though currently a human operator must first confirm a foe before any explosive volley is fired

Thermal imaging software on board the battle robot can pick out targets for destruction at distances of up to 250m.

Currently a human operator must first confirm a foe before any explosive volley is fired.

The hope is that the Russian military can one day combine the Flight imaging robot with the Alpha Device to form one of the most formidable border protection systems on the planet.


From 'it wasn't me', to 'Dad said I could do it', children begin pushing their luck with lies from a young age.

But parents have very different ways of dealing with these lies, with some proving more successful than others.

Dr Victoria Talwar, a developmental psychology expert at McGill University, explains some of the biggest mistakes parents make when dealing with their children lying.

Scroll down for video

From 'it wasn't me', to 'Dad said I could do it', children begin pushing their luck with lies from a young age. But parents have very different ways of dealing with these lies, with some proving more successful than others (stock image)

THE THEORY OF MIND The understanding that people don't share the same thoughts and feelings as you do develops during childhood, and is called the Theory of Mind. Another way to think about it is a child's ability to 'tune-in' to other peoples' perspectives. This ability doesn't emerge overnight, and it develops in a predictable order. During infancy and early childhood, children learn the early skills that they'll need to develop their theory of mind later on. Between ages 4-5, children really start to think about others' thoughts and feelings, and this is when true theory of mind emerges. For the next several years children learn to predict what one person thinks or feels about what another person is thinking or feeling. They also begin to understand complex language that relies on theory of mind, such as lies, sarcasm, and figurative language. Advertisement

In a recent article with Science News, Dr Talwar explained that lies begin to emerge in a child's preschool years, around the age of three, often to escape getting in trouble.

Dr Talwar told MailOnline: 'Very young children may not be intentionally lying at first, and may just be trying to answer the question in a way they think will please the adult.

'But soon they develop that ability to intentionally create a false belief in another.'

While this might sound simple, it actually shows that a child is developing the 'theory of mind'  the ability to understand the perspectives of others.

But telling lies does not necessarily mean the child is on course to being badly behaved.

She said: 'Knowing that this is a normal part of development is important for parents to know so they can keep this behaviour in context and can effectively deal with it.'

The tactics taken by parents range from over-reacting, to ignoring the lie completely  both of which Dr Talwar said are mistakes.

'We need to communicate to children the value of honesty,' she said.

'It is important to have conversations about it that are appropriate for the age of the child.'

Because lying can be perceived so negatively and as a violation of trust, it can be easy to focus on the lie, and forget about what caused the child to lie in the first place.

Dr Talwar said: 'Recognising the motives and causes behind the lies are important.

Because lying can be perceived so negatively and as a violation of trust, it can be easy to focus on the lie, and foget about what casued the child to lie in the first place (stock image)

'Perhaps your child is lying about eating their lunch, you discover they are not eating their lunch.

'If you stop there you may not discover the real reason they are not eating their lunch - another child is bullying your child and taking the lunch.'

When it comes to encouraging children to tell the truth, Dr Talwar recommends that parents should talk about the importance of honesty, running though various situations where honesty is vital.
With death-defying iguanas running from packs of snakes to a lemur's eye view of the jungle, the first episode of BBC's Planet Earth 2 was a heart-stopping journey of survival.

But the broadcaster has something even better up its sleeve for the second instalment.

The latest trailer from the BBC shows a bear twerking against a tree in the woods along to the Pussycat Dolls' dance floor filler 'Don't cha'.

Scroll down for video

The latest advert for BBC's Planet Earth 2 shows a pole-dancing bear twerking against a tree in the woods along to the Pussycat Dolls' dance floor filler 'Don't cha'

The Planet Earth team introduce the clip with: 'We set up remote cameras in the Canadian Rockies hoping to film grizzly bears.

'We got more than we bargained for.'

In a masterly display of video editing, the bear bumps and grinds against the tree in time to the music, and is sure to elicit a giggle from even the sternest of viewers.

The huge grizzly bear has an itch that needs scratching, and the rough bark of a tree is its scratching post of choice.

The footage, which appears in the next episode, was shot with camera traps in the Canadian Rockies and shows adult bears rubbing their backs and heads against the bark.

Wildlife experts believe bears rub up against trees in this way for a number of reasons.

The huge brown bear has an itch that needs scratching, but the music helps

BEARS WITH AN ITCH? Bear experts believe grizzly bears scratch against trees for a number of reasons. Previous theories included scratching an itch and covering themselves in sap to repel clouds of biting insects in the warmer months. But a 2007 study from Canadian researchers found that by rubbing their thick fur against a tree, Alaskan bears can scent mark an area, leaving their calling card for other bears. Other times, however, the bears may be just scratching an itch from carrying all that thick, warm winter fur in the summer forest. Advertisement

By rubbing their thick fur against a tree, grizzly bears in Canada can scent mark an area, leaving their calling card for other bears.

Other times, the bears may be just scratching an itch from carrying all that thick, warm winter fur in the summer forest.

Animal fans won't have to wait long for nonagenarian and British instituion Sir David Attenborough to explain the behaviour in his dulcet tones, with the show airing on BBC One this Sunday at 8pm GMT.

Episode two will focus on mountains, following the lives of animals perfectly adapted to their high altitude environments.

Along with the pole dancing ursid in the new comic advert, viewers will see golden eagles battling over territory.

By rubbing their thick fur against a tree, grizzly bears in Canada can scent mark an area, leaving their calling card for other bears

Other times, the bears may be just scratching an itch from carrying all that thick, warm winter fur in the summer forest

The first episode of the new series mesmerised viewers with the island perils facing newly hatched iguanas.

Within moments of emerging from the sand, the lizards had to head for the safety of the rocks, running the gauntlet between hundreds of lightning fast snakes, hungry for a meal.

The series is off to a winning start, with more than 9 million viewers tuning in last Sunday to watch the opener.

The dancing bear will feature in episode two, which will focus on mountains, following the lives of animals perfectly adapted to their high altitude environments
It is home to beautiful mountains, breathtaking historical buildings and priceless artwork  but it's also the subject of strongly worded U.S. State Department warnings.

For Americans, Iran may not be the first place that comes to mind when planning a vacation, even decades after the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover following the country's Islamic Revolution. 'Death to America!' can still be heard at hard-line mosques and protests, and Iranians with Western ties can face arbitrary arrest.

However, one luxury tour company in the U.S. is promoting a new trip to the country for those willing to take the risk, describing it as the first opportunity to see an Iran opening up to the West after last year's nuclear deal.

Canadian tourist David Froud, left, and his Iranian wife Mahnaz, sight-see at the Jomeh mosque, which is now a historical monument, in the city of Isfahan

'We feel that Iran is one of the most exciting places that someone can travel to at this point in time, given the current climate in the country and what sort of changes have been taking place recently,' said Stefanie Schmudde, product manager of Americas and Middle East for the Downers Grove, Illinois-based tour company Abercrombie & Kent.

On paper, there's a lot to interest travelers. The United Nations culture agency lists 21 World Heritage sites in Iran. They include the ruins of Persepolis and Pasargadae, the mosques and palace at Meidan Emam of Isfahan, and other sites included on the Illinois company's 12-day tour from $5,600 .

Iran has long drawn Shiite pilgrims to its holy sites, but local skiers and snowboarders also boast of its slopes, and the capital, Tehran, enjoys a growing modern art scene. Iran says around five million tourists visit each year  most coming from Iraq and other neighboring countries.

Europeans have been coming to Iran, but Americans represent far less than one per cent of all tourists.

Many are doubtless staying away because they associate Iran with Middle East conflicts and anti-American rhetoric. But the Iranian government, which is deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions, has also made it difficult for Americans to secure tourism visas.

Schmudde, who recently returned from a trip to Iran, compares the current opening to what is taking place in Cuba, which unlike Iran has restored full diplomatic relations with the U.S.

'There's so few places that don't have a strong American influence, and Iran is one of those places,' she said. 'You do get the sense you're stepping into another world, and that makes it completely fascinating to a traveler.'

The State Department has a very different perspective.

'Iranian authorities continue to unjustly detain and imprison U.S. citizens, particularly Iranian-Americans, including students, journalists, business travelers and academics, on charges including espionage and posing a threat to national security,' its August travel warning reads . 'U.S. citizens traveling to Iran should very carefully weigh the risks of travel and consider postponing.'

While American diplomatic posts overseas tend to see security as a glass half-empty, or even shattered on the floor, their concern in this case is reasonable. Iran and the U.S. haven't had formal diplomatic relations since 1979, and a new round of arrests by hard-line factions within Iran's security services is targeting those with Western ties in the wake of the nuclear accord.

Iranian women wear the 'chador', a head-to-toe garment, as they pass a tourist in Isfahan some 400km (240 miles) south of Tehran

Schmudde acknowledged those concerns and said any journalists, people associated with the U.S. government and military personnel asking about the trip would be warned in advance. Alcohol is illegal and women are required by law to cover their hair.

Gays and lesbians can face the death penalty in Iran. However, that didn't stop Utah state Sen. Jim Dabakis and his husband from traveling to Iran this summer at the invitation of the country's tourism industry. His visit set off a firestorm in Iran among hard-liners, who constantly warn of 'Western infiltration.'

In the time since, one hopeful U.S. tourist and a tour company in Iran have told The Associated Press that it has become even more difficult for Americans to get a visa. However, the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, which handles issuing visas for Iran, says nothing has changed.

Iranian officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Abercrombie & Kent has planned its first Iran trip in early May, leaving just ahead of the country's presidential election. They say that interchange between American tourists and the Iranian people will help bridge the gap between the two nations.
Euro Disney, which owns Disneyland Paris, on Thursday posted record annual losses in the wake of the jihadist attacks on Paris, which weighed heavily on tourist bookings.

During its financial year, which ended in September, group turnover fell 6.91 per cent to 1.27billion euros following a 10 per cent drop in visitor numbers, a statement said.

'Disneyland Paris had an exceptionally challenging year. We have been impacted by various external factors that have significantly affected the tourism business in the Paris region,' said Euro Disney president Catherine Powell in the statement.

Euro Disney, which owns Disneyland Paris, on Thursday posted record annual losses in the wake of the jihadist attacks on Paris

'In this adverse environment, revenue decreased seven per cent. This, together with the increase in costs driven by our future growth strategy of continually improving the guest experience plus the costs of additional security measures, resulted in a significant decrease in our operating performance for the fiscal year.'

The statement was issued as France prepares to mark the year anniversary of the deadly attacks on the French capital, which claimed 130 lives.

Over the period, the group registered a net loss attributable to shareholders of 705million euros, compared with 84.2million the previous year.

Euro Disney registered a net loss attributable to shareholders of 705million euros, compared with 84.2million the previous year

Overall net loss stood at 858million euros for the year, which included a 565million euro impairment charge.

'As a result of the adverse economic conditions of the tourism industry in Paris... the group performed an impairment test of all its long-lived assets and determined its assets were impaired,' it said.

'The impairment charge had no impact on the group's cash position or cash flows.'

Research by price comparison site icelolly.com revealed that the Paris tourism market saw a 65 per cent decline in the past 12 months.

The market was affected by the attacks in the capital and subsequently by the attacks in Brussels and Nice.
Passengers have also revealed instances in which they've spotted them

Air marshals aim to go unnoticed and are tasked with preventing crime

Pilots and flight attendants have taken to an online forum to reveal hints

Part of an air marshal's job is to remain undetected - but if you know what you're looking for, you might just be able to spot one aboard your next plane journey.

Pilots, flight attendants and passengers have taken to an online forum to deliver their tips on identifying the mysterious agents, whose job it is to handle dangerous situations and counter hijackings aboard commercial flights.

According to several of the contributors, indicators include unaccompanied passengers who board at the last moment, take an aisle seat and never sleep, even on long haul-flights.

Part of an air marshal's job is to remain undetected - but if you know what you're looking for, you might just be able to spot one (stock image)

One contributor to the Quora thread wrote: 'They always travel alone, they rarely travel with a suitcase - usually just with a backpack.

'They're usually male and burly, they usually are in an aisle seat and they're not allowed to sleep at all, even on long flights.'

Another, describing himself as a pilot, wrote: 'Look for someone in an aisle seat, in one of the last few rows, and unaccompanied.

'They have likely bumped a scheduled passenger, so ask any angry bumped passenger what their seat assignment was.'

And a flight attendant added: 'The standard answer is its the guy wearing a coat on a flight to Hawaii, while everyone else is in shirts and shorts.'

As to whether cabin crew are always aware when they have an air marshal on board, the answer is yes.

Indicators include unaccompanied passengers who board at the last moment, take an aisle seat and never sleep, even on long haul-flights (stock image)

One wrote: 'We always kept two seats available until the last moment, in case Air Marshals decided to board the flight.

'We never knew which one they would decide to board.'

According to another flight attendant, they aren't particularly common unless the US President has recently departed the city you've taken off from.

Look for someone in an aisle seat, in one of the last few rows, and unaccompanied

Speaking previously to USA Today, the President of the Air Marshal Association explained: 'FAMs cover a very small percentage of commercial flights.

'Which flight air marshals get on is determined by a computer program that assesses the probability of threat based on the aircraft, departure and destination cities, as well as the amount of fuel on board.'

A few writers on the thread shared anecdotes about flights they've shared with air marshals.

'It was a overseas flights coming from Turkey to New York,' one stated. 'I do not recall the exact year but it was September 11th. One passenger was pacing during the flight for few hours and he barged in the business class section.

'[The] air marshal got up and basically cuffed him. And because his identity was revealed we had to return mid-Atlantic and go back to UK. The passenger turned out to be a psychiatric case.'

As fans of the 2011 hit movie Bridesmaids will recall, Melissa McCarthy's character goes to hilarious lengths in order to discover whether her neighbouring passenger is an air marshal

Another wrote: 'I was going through security in the US and saw a guy with no bag walking around the X-Ray and the TSA people just nodded to him. I found that odd.

'When I boarded the plane this guy was sitting behind me in First Class. I got somewhat freaked out as he didn't look like a friendly person. The flight attendant said that she was not supposed to tell me this but said the guy was an air marshal.

'When I landed at Heathrow everybody was getting their bags, eager to get out, except the guy behind me. He just sat there. Probably staying in the same plane back to the US.'

As he leaned over I could see his gun under his jacket

Another passenger suggested looking out for lone passengers who are particularly friendly with cabin crew - and for those with surprisingly poor plane etiquette.

'I was on a flight from Newark to Lima, Peru and the guy who sat next to me was the last to board and immediately reclined his chair, much to the annoyance of the person behind,' they revealed.

'I was flying back the same way two months later when I was boarding at Lima. I saw the same guy and this time he was making jokes with the cabin crew and greeting them with kisses. As he leaned over to hug one I could see his gun under his jacket.'
Her family celebrated the birth of Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna's first daughter on Thursday.

However, it appeared as if it was just another day for Caitlyn Jenner as she grabbed her daily fix of Starbucks coffee in Malibu, California.

The 67-year-old stepmother of Rob, 29, opted for a deep red sweater and light denim cropped jeans as she went for a solo caffeine run.

Nothing new here! Caitlyn Jenner was spotted making her daily coffee run on Thursday in Malibu as the rest of her family rushed to see the birth of Rob Kardashian's daughter

With the arrival of Dream Renee Kardashian, who was born 9.18am PT in a c section weighing 7 lbs and 5 oz, the newborn's surrounding family rushed to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills to join Rob and Blac.

However, it appeared the Olympian was taking her own time.

The I Am Cait star - who is a supporter of Donald Trump - showed off her long and slender legs in faded denim jeans, cut off before the ankle, which she paired with a red sweater and black sandal flip-flops.

Wearing her camel-brown tresses down by the sides of her face, Caitlyn matched it with brown sunglasses and donned a black purse over her shoulder.

Strolling right along: The 67-year-old star opted for a deep red sweater, fitted denim jeans and black sandal flip flops

Her own time? Yet to hear from the I Am Cait Star, meanwhile, her family has already gathered at Cedars-Sinai to welcome Dream Renee Kardashian

Yet to hear from the reality personality herself, in the meantime, Rob's supportive sisters, Kourtney, Khloe and Kendall have been spotted rushing to the hospital.

The 37-year-old star rolled up in front of the hospital with her baby daddy Scott Disick, 33, as well as Kendall, 21, who drove to the medical center in a red Mustang.

Khloe, 32, - who landed just in time after visiting her boyfriend Tristan Thompson in Cleveland - headed to see her niece as she tweeted: 'My new niece is absolutely stunning!!! So thankful I was able to land in time to witness this miracle happen! Praise God!'

Just landed: Khloe Kardashian landed just in time after she was away visiting Tristan Thompson to see her niece

Congrats! Rob's sister, Kylie Jenner, 19, also weighed in on the congratulations

Supportive siblings: Kourtney Kardashian, who donned a serious expression in the car, was also seen on Thursday rolling up to the hospital

Arriving in style: Kendall Jenner drove in a flashy red Mustang to see her baby niece

The ex-wife of Caitlyn, Kris Jenner, had also been in the delivery room since the morning with her beau Corey Gamble.

Telling E! News about her sixth grandchild, she said: 'I got to watch [the] delivery. It was so beautiful and I'm so excited and happy to have another grandchild! It was one of the most precious moments of my life.'

Rob and Blac dated in Janurary 2016 and became engaged in April of this year. Blac already has four-year-old son King Cairo with her ex, Tyga, and now beau of Kylie.

Proud father! This is Rob's first daughter with his fiancee Blac Chyna, who arrived in a c section weighing 7 pounds and 5 ounces
Over the summer, FX's The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story received rave reviews and enjoyed massive popularity.

And now the man behind that series, Anthony Hemingway, has just struck a deal with USA Network to tell some more high-profile crime stories, according to Deadline Hollywood.

The new series, titled Unsolved, is based off the book Murder Rap: The Untold Story of Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations, which was penned by Greg Kading.

Lucky man: Anthony Hemingway has just struck a deal with the USA Network to tell some more high-profile crime stories

Kading used to be an LAPD detective in charge of task forces which investigated both of the rappers' murders.

Reportedly the series will draw on experiences during his time on the force as well.

Hemingway will direct the pilot episode, and Suits vet Kyle Long will pen the script.

Success: Over the summer, FX's The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story received rave revues and enjoyed massive popularity

Impressive track record: Hemingway is also responsible for WGN hit show Underground, about a group of slaves who strive to escape the South via the famous Underground Railroad

The helmer is also responsible for WGN hit show Underground, about a group of slaves who strive to escape the South via the famous Underground Railroad.

Unsolved promises to be just as riveting as the O.J. Simpson series, as both Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls' cases were never solved.

Shakur died from multiple gunshots after a somewhat mysterious drive by shooting in Las Vegas in 1996. He was only 25-years-old.

Source material: The new series, titled Unsolved, is based off the book Murder Rap: The Untold Story of Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations, which was penned by Greg Kading

Still unsolved: Shakur died from multiple gunshots after a somewhat mysterious drive by shooting in Las Vegas in 1996 (pictured, right, with Snoop Dogg)

Recording artist Biggie Smalls, also known as The Notorious B.I.G., also died from gunshots wounds received during a drive by shooting only a year later in Los Angeles.

Again, the killer was never found; Biggie was 24-year-old at the time of his death.

Both rappers were participants in the famous coastal feud that rocked the hip hop world in the mid nineties, and have since gained an almost mythical status among fans.
She made a name for herself as one of Hollywood's sexiest screen sirens.

And Salma Hayek was the star attraction yet again as she attended the Stella McCartney's resort and menswear collection launch, sponsored by CIroc Vodka, in London on Thursday.

The 50-year-old Mexican beauty flaunted her age-defying physique in a sexy all-black ensemble as she cosied up to her husband Francois-Henri Pinault, 54.

Scroll down for video

Glam arrival: Salma Hayek, 50, attended the Stella McCartney's resort and menswear collection launch in London on Thursday with her husband Francois-Henri Pinault, 54

The Grown-Ups star clad her curvaceous frame in a figure-hugging black dress which cinched in her waist with a thick black belt.

She wrapped up warm with a cropped black jacket which boasted an exposed gold zipper.

Adding a funky touch to her ensemble, she opted for a pair of heavily-fringed knee-high boots.

And while she worked a studded black handbag on one arm, her hubby of seven years on her other arm proved to be the best accessory.

All eyes on her! The Mexican beauty flaunted her age-defying physique in a sexy all-black ensemble

Stylish: The Grown-Ups star clad her curvaceous frame in a figure-hugging black dress which cinched in her waist with a thick black belt

Details: She wrapped up warm with a cropped black jacket which boasted an exposed gold zipper

Funky: She opted for a pair of heavily-fringed knee-high boots

Loved-up: While she worked a studded black handbag on one arm, her hubby of seven years on her other arm proved to be the best accessory

Handsome: Dressed in a slick navy tartan suit and matching blue top, the fashion executive looked incredibly dapper as he kept his woman close

Happy family: The loved-up duo are also proud parents to daughter Valentina Paloma Pinault, 9

Dressed in a slick navy tartan suit and matching blue top, the fashion executive looked incredibly dapper as he kept his woman close.

The loved-up duo are also proud parents to daughter Valentina Paloma Pinault, 9.

And while Francois-Henri is keeping himself busy in the fashion realm as president of Groupe Artemis' executive board, Salma has been wrapped up in filming duties for two films set for release next year.

Careers: While Francois-Henri is keeping himself busy in the fashion realm as president of Groupe Artemis' executive board, Salma has been wrapped up in filming duties for two films set for release next year

High profile pals: The pair looked in high spirits as they posed alongside actor Orlando Bloom and Stella McCartney

Standing out: Orlando stepped out in style for the event and matched his bright yellow top to his blonde locks

Popular as ever: Iconic fashionista Kate Moss arrived at her friend Stella McCartney's latest clothing launch fresh from another shindig across town

She will star in action comedy The Hitman's Bodyguard alongside Ryan Reynolds, as well as Beatriz at Dinner alongside Chloe Sevigny.

Meanwhile, Kate Moss flashed her supermodel stats for the event in a chic suit and sparkly sheer blouse.

Orlando Bloom also stepped out in style for the event and matched his bright yellow top to his blonde locks.

In good company: (L to R) Kate, Francois-Henri Pinault, Salma Hayek and Orlando Bloom all enjoyed the festivities




Dead Funny (Vaudeville Theatre): Engaging adult farce

Rating:

An Inspector Calls (Playhouse Theatre): Bossy Brechtian sermonising

Rating:

As you enter the auditorium of the Vaudeville Theatre, the ushers say: Welcome to 1992  the year comedy lost Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd within days.

It was also the year of that other comedian, John Major, but he goes unmentioned in Terry Johnsons engaging and daring adult comedy. Another snub!

Eleanor yearns for a baby. She is married to Richard, who recoils from her touch. Richard is chairman of the local comedy-appreciation club. When he and his camp friend Brian learn that Benny Hill has died, they organise a bit of a do to mourn their heros passing. Johnsons skill in this thoroughly watchable farce (first performed in 1994) is to combine low-brow worship of Seventies TV acts with the story of Eleanors gnawing desire for a child.

Dead Funny performed at the Vaudeville Theatre: Katherine Parkinson as Eleanor, Steve Pemberton as Brian, Emily Berrington as Lisa, Rufus Jones as Richard and Ralf Little as Nick

Along the way, we have some Ayckbourn-style observations about marital relations, a few moments of slapstick and a now dated sideline about boring old Brian sweetly declaring his gayness.

Mr Johnson, who also directs, is well served by a cast in which Katherine Parkinson excels as a sardonic, flat-smiled Eleanor. She has the deadpan manner of Prunella Scales and impeccable timing.

With Rufus Jones stripping to his ankle socks quite early on, some girlfriend parties behind me were soon cackling away  in recognition, I fear, of Eleanors unfulfilled lustings.

Katherine Parkinson (Eleanor), Steve Pemberton (Brian), Rufus Jones (Richard), Emily Berrington (Lisa) and Ralf Little (Nick) in Dead Funny, Written and Directed by Terry Johnson

Enter another couple, played by Ralf Little and Emily Berrington, and the relationships become more tangled. Brian (Steve Pemberton) would see more of the risque goings-on were he not wearing a pair of Coke-bottle spectacles in tribute to Benny Hill.

Old routines from Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Harry Worth and others are played out, while poor Eleanor quietly despairs that all the little taps inside me are turning themselves off. Amid all the celebration of dead comedians is a craving for new life.

Sophisticates will baulk at some of the lines, but grown-up couples looking for an uncomplicated yet thoughtful farce may well like it. And it has a nicely rueful British ending.

Director Stephen Daldry has had his moneys worth out of the classic An Inspector Calls. This production, newly revived on the West End, dates back to 1992.

Liam Brennan (Inspector Goole) in An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley. This production dates back to 1992

J. B. Priestleys play is normally seen as a warning to the bourgeoisie of Forties Britain to behave with more consideration to the working class. That is surely what Mr Daldry intended with his rather bossy and Brechtian take.

The play opens with a dinner party in the genteel home of mill-owner Arthur Birling. All seems normal until trilby-hatted Inspector Goole arrives to ask about a young woman who has committed suicide, and it emerges that they all, in their own selfish way, damaged the poverty-stricken lass.

Goole can be done with subtlety, luring the truth out of the Birlings with a collaborative charm. Not here. In Liam Brennans hands, he is a sharp invader of the scene.

Carmela Corbett (Sheila Birling), Liam Brennan (Inspector Goole), Matthew Douglas (Gerald Croft) and Hamish Riddle (Eric Birling) in An Inspector Calls

Hamish Riddle (Eric Birling) and Clive Francis (Mr Birling) in one of the final scenes of the play

The towns poor hover on the fringes, mute, to ram home the point that we live in a society. Gloomy lighting and highly strung music tells us what to jolly well feel.
She hinted at a new romance with a mystery man in a recent cosy Instagram snap.

Yet Zara Holland happily cut a solo figure as she arrived at Fubar radio station for Lizzie Cundy's Hot Gossip Radio show in London on Thursday.

The disgraced beauty queen, 21, showed off her impressive curves in a stylish maroon jumper dress and racy thigh-high boots.

Scroll down for video

Fashionista: Zara Holland, 21, looked sensational as she arrived at Fubar radio station for Lizzie Cundy's Hot Gossip Radio show in London on Thursday

The figure-hugging number boasted sheer sleeves and fell at a thigh-skimming finish after lining her enviable stats.

Flaunting a peek of her toned, tanned legs, she opted to sex up the outfit with her racy suede footwear.

The former Miss.Great Britain's chestnut locks were side parted and complemented her pretty features.

Her cheeks were chiselled to perfection, eyes lined and coated in mascara and her lips were stamped in mauve lipstick.

Stylish: The disgraced beauty queen showed off her impressive curves in a stylish maroon jumper dress

Sartorially savvy: The figure-hugging number boasted sheer sleeves and fell at a thigh-skimming finish after lining her enviable stats

Walking the walk: Flaunting a peek of her toned, tanned legs, she opted to sex up the outfit with her racy suede footwear

The Love Island star was joined at her radio appearance by her mum, Cheryl Hakeney who looked half her age in a sexy all-black ensemble.

Afterwards, the pair were spotted strutting their stuff to Chloe Meadows' Boho B Collection launch party in Shoreditch.

However was no sign of Zara's Instagram companion from earlier this month during her night out on the town.

Taking to the social network, she shared a snap alongside a mystery man, seeming to confirm the end of her single status.

Like mother, like daughter: The Love Island star was joined at her radio appearance by her mum, Cheryl Hakeney

Mane attraction: The former Miss.Great Britain's chestnut locks were side parted and complemented her pretty features

Stunner! Her cheeks were chiselled to perfection, eyes lined and coated in mascara and her lips were stamped in mauve lipstick

She captioned the photo with three love heart emojis and the words: 'Happiest girl alive'.

The post suggested that she has found love after a turbulent summer, which saw her lose her Miss Great Britain crown after having a televised romp on ITV2.

The disgraced beauty queen branded told MailOnline she does not actually regret having sex with Love Island hunk Alex Bowen, despite thousands of viewers seeing her escapades live on TV.

She told MailOnline: 'Women like to have sex. I just personally have never had a one night stand before and a lot of women have one night stands and there's nothing wrong with sex and if you wake up in the morning and it makes you feel good.

'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of. We're all women but I just don't regret my actions, I just regret doing it on TV.'

Eternal: Her mum looked half her age in a sexy all-black ensemble

Next stop: Zara was later spotted strutting their stuff to Chloe Meadows' Boho B Collection launch party in Shoreditch

Disgraced: This summer she lost her Miss Great Britain crown after having a televised romp on ITV2's Love Island with Alex Bowen

'Yes I did it on national TV, yes it's a different story to if it was behind closed doors but it was in the hideaway it wasn't in the communal bedroom. I'm not making it right or any better but you didn't see anything.'

Many have accused viewers and critics of 'slut-shaming' - yet Zara is adamant this is not the case: 'I don't feel like it's (slut-shaming).

'I think everybody makes a mistake and if you learn from it every one deserves a second chance in life. I made a mistake.'
Strindbergs Women (Jermyn Street Theatre, London)

Rating:

Even great dramatists can sometimes write rotten plays. Here are two from August Strindberg, the 19th-century Swedish laureate of misogynistic paranoia.

One is a 12-minute diatribe in which a middle-aged lady rages at her husbands silent lover. The other is about an old man kidding himself he was right to leave his young wife and child, so he could fester in self-loathing in his retirement.

Paul Herzberg (The Gentleman) and Sara Griffiths (Gerda) in Storm part of Strindberg's Women

You might think a paranoid misogynist would be incapable of writing a good play, but it can be done  if the plays are sufficiently fiery and contested. For Strindberg that meant The Father and Miss Julie.

In The Stronger, the morsel which opens this evening, Alice Frankham as the husbands lover should be given an Olivier Award for patiently sitting it out while Sara Griffiths, as the wife, gets only mildly cross, barely threatening her own corsetry.

Far from offering what the programme calls a complex understanding of women, the play is complete fantasy. Who among us would not fluff our shots when faced with the open goal of our submissive enemy?

Both plays belong in a bottom drawer with lousy roles for women and men hogging most of the lines, says Patrick Marmion

Pictured left: Sara Griffiths (Madame X) and Alice Frankam (Mlle Y) and pictured right: Sara Griffiths (Madame X) in The Stronger part of Strindberg's Women

Tirades always come off better in your head than in reality which is why this rant should have been fired at an empty chair before the younger woman arrives in person.

In the second play, a 55-minute muddle called Storm, we are in a sultry coastal resort where a curmudgeonly old gent reminisces with his stodgy brother about his failed marriage. Irritation is provided by noisy neighbours, the ex-wife makes vague overtures of reconciliation and our hero recaps on some of these non-events to persons unknown on a telephone.

There is one good line (time flies when its past; and crawls while its with you) in a sea of bad ones (So its you, my former sister-in-law!).

At one point, Paul Herzberg as our jaundiced hero starts a game of chess with his maid, breaks it off to write a letter and resumes the same game with his brother. Rhyme and reason are utterly forsaken, leading to confusion and disengagement.

Why, you might ask, did director Jake Murray take these plays on? Perhaps because Strindberg is believed to be a father or at least co-parent of modern drama.

Or perhaps it was in the hope of securing politically correct bragging rights by providing good roles for women.
She's been a busy bee after spending the summer finding her Mr. Right in the Love Island villa.

And Olivia Buckland showed no signs of slowing down with her workload as she launched her new clothing line with a party at Tropicana, London, on Thursday.

Donning one of her own creations from her collaboration with Quiz, the 22-year-old ensured that her creations and herself were firmly in the limelight.

Scroll down for video

Turning them green with envy? Olivia Buckland showed no signs of slowing down with her workload as she launched her new clothing line with a party in London on Thursday

Wearing the thigh-skimming green and gold sequined mini dress from her eponymous collection, Olivia put her incredible figure and killer legs firmly on display.

Slipping into the glittering dress, which features gold palm-leaf details in a green sequined bottom layer, the model and reality star certainly dazzled.

Thanks to the form-fitting fit of the mini, Olivia was able to showcase her slender curves to the max.

All that glitters: Donning one of her own creations from her collaboration with Quiz, the 22-year-old ensured that her creations and herself were firmly in the limelight

Adding a pair of gold skyscraper heels to the mix, the blonde beauty ensured her lithe legs were proudly on parade - as were some of her tattoos.

Careful not to draw any attention away from her dress, the Love Island favourite accessorised sparingly.

Wearing her long blonde locks tied back into a ponytail, Olivia ensured her pretty features were unobscured by any stray locks.

Figure-flaunting fashion: Slipping into the glittering dress, which features gold palm-leaf details in a green sequined bottom layer, the model and reality star certainly dazzled

Slinky style: Thanks to the form-fitting fit of the mini, Olivia was able to showcase her slender curves to the max

Killer heels: Adding a pair of gold skyscraper heels to the mix, the blonde beauty ensured her lithe legs were proudly on parade - as were some of her tattoos

Adding a bold berry lipstick to her pale make-up palette, Olivia injected a bit of Gothic glamour to her look.

Joining her at the launch of the line were fellow Love Islanders Katie Salmon and Tina Stinnes.

Both girls were sporting designs from Olivia's debut clothing line with Quiz.

Supporting in style: Joining her at the launch of the line were fellow Love Islanders Katie Salmon, also wearing a dress form Olivia's debut colection
Eddie Redmayne and wife Hannah welcomed their newborn daughter Iris just five months ago.

The 34-year-old actor attended the premiere of his upcoming fantasy film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them with his wife of nearly two years.

The PR executive showed off her svelte post-pregnancy bod in a long flowing blush gown.

Perfect pair: Eddie Redmayne and his wife Hannah attended the premiere of his upcoming fantasy film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in New York City on Thursday

The Academy Award-winning actor was clearly smitten with his wife of nearly two years as he hit the red carpet.

Her full-length rosy frock included three sheer black bows that were adorned along the front.

Eddie looked dapper in a fitted double breasted suit with crisp white dress shirt and matching pocket square.

Hot mama! The 34-year-old actor's wife showed off her svelte post-pregnancy bod just five months after giving birth

Crazy in love! The Oscar winner was clearly smitten with his PR executive wife of nearly two years

A black necktie completed his look and he stepped out in brown leather brogues.

Eddie stars as Newt Scamander in the prequel to the Harry Potter series.

The talented author, JK Rowling, wrote the film which focuses on Newt's life in New York.

The film is set in the 1920s, 70 years before the events that occur in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Polished to perfection! Eddie looked dapper in a fitted double breasted suit with crisp white dress shirt and matching pocket square

Bow-tiful! The new mother looked lovely in a long flowing blush gown

Newt is the author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a textbook Harry has to read while attending Hogwarts.

The book is required on the syllabus for students of Hogwarts and contains descriptions of 85 magical creatures.

Rowling looked fantastic in a black floor-length wrap-around dress with a plunging neckline.

Stunning! JK Rowling looked fantastic in a black floor-length wrap-around dress with a plunging neckline

Details: The Harry Potter franchise writer had her blonde hair up and accessorised with dangling earrings

Good company! The film features an all-star lineup including (L-R) Ezra Miller, Katherine Waterston, Faith Wood-Blagrove, Redmayne, Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler, Carmen Ejogo, Ron Perlman and Jon Voight

The Harry Potter franchise writer had her blonde hair up and accessorised with dangling earrings.

JK's long-sleeved dress featured an image of a small salamander embroidered on her left hip.

Eddie reunited with co-star Katherine Waterston, 36, who plays Porpentina Goldstein in the film.

The daughter of Oscar nominee Sam Waterston and former model Lynn Louisa Woodruff looked chic in a couture white number.

Dream team: Eddie reunited with co-star Katherine Waterston, 36, who plays Porpentina Goldstein in the film

White hot! The daughter of Oscar nominee Sam Waterston and former model Lynn Louisa Woodruff looked chic in a couture garb

Head turner! Alison Sudol, 31 - who plays Queenie Goldstein - made a showstopping appearance at the premiere

Pretty as a petal! The beauty donned a white floral gown with jewelled embellishments and a long, flowing train

Also in attendance at the premiere was Zoe Kravitz, 27, who flashed a glimpse of her shapely derriere in a semi-sheer black dress.

She made sure to turn heads in her off-the-shoulder which showcased her phenomenal figure.

Harry Potter actress Evanna Lynch, 25, smouldered in a figure-hugging deep burgundy gown.

Cheeky! Zoe Kravitz, 27, flashed a glimpse of her shapely derriere in a semi-sheer black dress

Showstopper! She made sure to turn heads in her off-the-shoulder which showcased her phenomenal figure

Beauties in black: Bonnie Wright, 25, and Erin Richards, 30, looked stunning in their dark dresses

Her silky golden tresses were swept to one side and fell in soft coiled tendrils.

British beauty Carmen Ejogo, 43, flashed a glimpse of her lean limbs in a semi-sheer purple lace gown.

Her lavender dress included several layers of ruffles which added a romantic quality to the feminine frock.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is set to hit theatres on November 18.

Red hot! Harry Potter actress Evanna Lynch, 25, smouldered in a figure-hugging deep burgundy gown

Lovely in lavender! British beauty Carmen Ejogo, 43, flashed a glimpse of her lean limbs in a semi-sheer purple lace gown
The Innocents (15)

Verdict: Harrowing but memorable

Rating:

Set in Poland in the months after World War II, The Innocents tells an incredibly harrowing story but with tremendous sensitivity.

Directed by Anne Fontaine in colours so muted that it looks almost monochrome, entirely fitting the mood, it is never exactly a pleasure to sit through, yet I was extremely glad to have watched it.

It relates, in Polish and French, the real-life experiences of Madeleine Pauliac (beautifully played by Lou de Laage), a junior doctor who has arrived in Warsaw with the Red Cross.

The Innocents relates, in Polish and French, the real-life experiences of Madeleine Pauliac (beautifully played by Lou de Laage), a junior doctor who has arrived in Warsaw with the Red Cross

When her help is sought by a young Benedictine nun, she visits the convent and there finds, to her horror, that a number of the sisters are pregnant and about to give birth, having been repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers supposedly liberating Poland from the Nazis.

The mother superior (Agata Kulesza), who was herself among those raped, recalls the episode as an indescribable nightmare and undertakes to have the babies adopted by local families, to avoid the shame.

Not all the nuns feel shame; one of the films great strengths is the way it imbues them with different personalities.

One offers Madeleine as good a definition as I have ever heard of religious faith when it is truly put to the test. Faith is 24 hours of doubt, she says, and one minute of hope.

When her help is sought by a young Benedictine nun, she visits the convent and there finds, to her horror, that a number of the sisters are pregnant and about to give birth, having been repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers supposedly liberating Poland from the Nazis

Madeleines own childhood faith is Communism, imbibed from her parents back in France. She allows her lover, a Jewish doctor (Vincent Macaigne), to assume that the reason she keeps disappearing from the Red Cross hospital is to attend Party meetings.
The way Jeremy Clarkson tells it, The Grand Tour, the new high-testosterone supercar show hes hosting with Richard Hammond and James May, has all the ingredients that made Top Gear a world-wide success.

It is full of middle-aged men falling over with the occasional car sticking its nose into the frame, he says.

For legal reasons, they are being careful not to actually copy any Top Gear features, but Clarkson says the constant will be Hammond and May, whom I hate.

He adds: But that is really what is at the core of The Grand Tour; our relentless and unending need to belittle and humiliate one another.

The way Jeremy Clarkson tells it, The Grand Tour has all the ingredients that made Top Gear a world-wide success

The new show is launched next Friday via Amazons online Prime Video service. Top Gear fans mourned when Clarkson was fired by the BBC after punching a producer following an argument over a cold buffet, and although May and Hammond were not involved in the fracas, they also left the show.

Their new roost has the biggest budget ever for a streaming internet TV series. So how have the trio, with their obsession for supercars, spent all that money?

With the help of the shows producer, Andy Wilman, Mail TV critic Christopher Stevens crunches the numbers . . .

160 million

Total sum Amazon is reported to have paid for 36 episodes of The Grand Tour across three years. Thats nearly 4.5 million a show, about ten times more than the cost of a Top Gear episode.

10 million

Clarksons reported annual salary is 10million, making him Britains highest paid TV star

Clarksons reported annual salary, making him Britains highest paid TV star.

That works out at about 833,000 an episode.

At the BBC, he was said to be paid 1.5 million a year.

His replacement on Top Gear, Matt LeBlanc, is likely to be paid 2 million a year by the BBC, as lead host of the next series  a considerable increase on the 500,000 the former Friends star earned for his work on this summers shows, co-starring with Chris Evans, who has now stepped down.

7.2 million

Reported annual salary for each of the co-presenters Hammond and May, which works out at 600,000 an episode  a distinct improvement on the 500,000 a year they were each said to earn on Top Gear.

Co-presenters Hammond and May will both net 7.2million salaries, a distinct improvement on the 500,000 a year they were each said to earn on Top Gear

20 million

Value of the cars in the six-minute opening sequence of the first episode, which features 150 custom cars and six jet planes, as well as acrobats and stilt-walkers. The cars include a Bugatti Veyron (1.4 million) and a Rolls-Royce Phantom (750,000).

The entire Mad Max-style segment, filmed in the Californian desert with 2,000 extras, cost a flabbergasting 2.5 million to make.

210 mph

Thats the top speed of the three hypercars in a race-off in Portugal  the 1,150,000 Ferrari LaFerrari driven by May, Hammonds 712,000 Porsche 918 Spyder and Clarksons 866,000 McLaren P1 are among the fastest cars on the planet.

Grand Tour producer Andy Wilman, who had worked on Top Gear with old schoolchum Jeremy Clarkson since 2002, says: Making that film was a joy. It was the first thing wed done since leaving the BBC, and it has a real attitude.

It hits you in the face like hearing a Clash album for the first time. It doesnt matter whether you like cars or not, that film just has such a chemistry. Theres a massive air of refreshment, were all going at it like crazy.

The 1,150,000 Ferrari LaFerrari (pictured left) driven by May, Hammonds 712,000 Porsche 918 Spyder (middle) and Clarksons 866,000 McLaren P1 (right) are among the fastest cars on the planet

Partly, its because everyone was rested, and its because we were fresher than we had been for 15 years, getting back to a time when we were left alone to make the show the way we wanted.

We had that at the BBC in the beginning, but as the show became more successful, Broadcasting House got more involved in the everyday running. By the end, it had become a treadmill. Amazon have given us no notes, no directions, theyve just given us a platform to make and broadcast a show. Thats lovely.

The timetable has been horrendously tight, but we handled it because weve suddenly got so much more vim and vigour. Those three are banging off the walls like kids on sugar.

200,000

Cost of destroying 20 G-Wiz electric cars in a gigantic game of Battleships. The 20 cars were used as missiles. Thats the Christmas show, says Wilman, and we wanted to give the traditional board-game market a boost. So we used cars as torpedoes. It was gratuitously big-budget, I admit.

3.2 million

Total salaries for 80 crew, who flew a combined distance of 5.1 million miles (at an estimated cost of more than 750,000), taking the production to 15 countries and staying in a total of 1,500 hotel rooms  spending 270,000 on bed and breakfast alone.

The first show is based in California, for the second episode they are in Johannesburg, and the next two are in Britain, including one in the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire.

After that, its Holland, and Finland for Christmas, before they go to Namibia for an African special. That one rang alarm bells in the legal department: the new show has to be demonstrably different from the old Top Gear, for contractual reasons, and in 2010 the team had shot one of their most celebrated specials in Botswana.

That episode had featured some of the most beautiful landscape on earth, and naturally the three presenters commented on it. This time, they were asked by wary lawyers not to do that. So they stood and looked across the Skeleton Coast in Namibia at sunset, says Wilman, and went, What a rubbish view! 

Editing is not yet completed on the final shows, but they go to Germany, then Nashville, Tennessee, and Scotland, before finishing in the United Arab Emirates.

1,350

Price of 6,000 rounds of automatic rifle ammunition fired in a madcap remake of the Tom Cruise movie Edge Of Tomorrow, filmed at a Middle Eastern special forces training centre in Jordan.

Were constantly aware of our previous form, our legacy, says Wilman. We have to plan things, we cant always just let them happen, even though my favourite moments are often the spontaneous ones.

6,000 rounds of automatic rifle ammunition were fired in a madcap remake of the Tom Cruise movie Edge Of Tomorrow

So with our tongues well and truly in our cheeks, we set about reinventing this action movie, where life is like a video game: if you die, you go back to the beginning. Our version is, ummm . . . a pastiche!

350 people

The size of the on-set audience in a marquee set up in different places for each show, compared with the 900 who used to fill Top Gears studio  an aerodrome at Dunsfold, Surrey  for each edition.

The scaled-down production is a matter of sheer logistics: its hard enough to transport a marquee big enough to display the cars and set it up in a dozen countries, never mind cramming in almost a thousand fans.

The smaller audience changes the dynamic of the show. The old Top Gear used to have the feel almost of a stadium rock event. The Grand Tour promises to be more intimate.

Because the tent is much smaller, it alters the dynamic immediately, says Wilman. Theres a different atmosphere, an interaction that creates energy, with the audience really filling the space.

A bigger difference is the loss of the aerodromes racetrack, on a converted runway, and its tame racing driver, the Stig. Forced to leave Dunsfold behind, the team also had to abandon the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car feature, where celebrities raced to beat each others lap records.

Wilman insists this gave them a boot up the backside, spurring them to come up with new challenges.

Some of these are outlandish. In Barbados, the presenters build an underwater reef from wrecked cars bought for next to nothing at a breakers yard.

That wasnt exactly a big-budget segment, concedes Wilman.

5,950 hours

The total time of film shot by the crew and whittled down to 12 episodes. All of it is recorded in high-definition 4k format, the same standard used by the BBC wildlife unit to make Sir David Attenboroughs spectacular Planet Earth II series. Some of the Grand Tour footage is slightly less, well, gorgeous.

Weve got thousands of hours of the guys in their cars, explains Wilman. And these cameras are a nightmare to operate  the pictures look fabulous, but they are a huge step backwards in terms of user-friendliness.

The presenters used to be able to switch the cameras off in their cars when they were not talking, or wanted a cigarette or whatever. They cant do that now.

That means they leave them on all day, and Ive been wading through countless hours of James May picking his nose.

36,000

Cost of ensuring the three presenters all had a steak dinner waiting for them at the end of each day, perhaps to ensure there was no likelihood of a repeat of the 2015 Top Gear incident when a producer was punched for not providing a hot meal for Clarkson at the end of a days filming.

36,000 was spent on ensuring the three presenters all had a steak dinner waiting for them at the end of each day

This led to Clarksons contract not being renewed . . . and the move to Amazon.

0

Amount spent on cold buffets for Jeremy Clarkson.

16,800

Cost of the 12,000 bags of crisps and tubes of Pringles consumed by the presenters and crew. James May notes: They say that on the London Tube you are never more than 10ft away from a rat. On our shoots, you are never more than 10ft away from a Pringle.

One

Number of limbs broken by the presenters during filming. The injury wasnt sustained on set: James fell over, coming out of a pub, the evening before the team was due to travel to France.

He rang me from the Eurostar the next morning, says Wilman, and told me his broken arm neednt affect the schedule, since he was driving an automatic. His arm was in a sling, which gave everything a huge lift because the other two thought it was so funny.

They were merciless. They kept buying him presents that he couldnt use. Richard went into a petrol station and came out with a set of chest expanders.

James looked at him, really fed up because his arm was agony, and said: Youre not funny any more. You used to be funny . . . That banter just rolls along, the blather pours forth.

Priceless

Wilman reckons the best moments often come from the cheapest humour. In Germany, the three overgrown schoolboys take a roadtrip through a series of suggestively named towns, describing a one-night stand. They start in Kissing, Bavaria, then motor on to Petting on the shore of the Waginger lake.

After that, the names become ruder. Richard, Jeremy and James have satellite navigation consoles to help them . . . but these have to be programmed by voice. Which means saying the names aloud on camera. Cue for much sniggering.
Zoe Kravitz looked stunning as she hit the red carpet for the New York world premiere of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them at Alice Tully Hall.

The actress wowed in a see-through, floor length, black lace gown.

The beautiful detailing of the dress showed off her very impressive and taut physique.

Beauty: Zoe Kravitz looked stunning as she hit the red carpet for the New York world premiere of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them at Alice Tully Hall

The normally brunette actress showed off her amazing platinum blonde braids, which she styled in a sleek low bun.

She wore very elaborate and dramatic earrings as she showed off her small tattoos on her wrist and arms.

Gorgeous: The actress wowed in a see-through, floor length, black lace gown

Zoe posed up a storm on the red carpet and was also joined by her actor boyfriend Karl Glusman who looked dapper in a black suit and white shirt.

Fans of the Harry Potter franchise are eagerly awaiting the release of the prequel, which it hits cinemas next week.

Eddie Redmayne plays the lead, writer and magizoologist Newt Scamander.

New look: The normally brunette actress showed off her amazing platinum blonde braids, which she styled in a sleek low bun

Dashing couple: Zoe posed up a storm on the red carpet and was also joined by her actor boyfriend Karl Glusman

The story follows the adventures of Newt in New York's secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before Harry Potter reads his book in school.

The talented cast also includes Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jon Voight.

The franchise will consist of five films in total, something that surprised David Heyman, the producer of Fantastic Beasts.

Cheeky: The mesh dress showed off her curvaceous figure from behind

'Like all of us she's ambitious,' Heyman said.

'But at the same time she had to learn the way to give out exposition in a screenplay differently from a book, or the nature of internal narrative that you can get across in a book but can't in a film.

But I knew she was a really good screenwriter because she has great humility.'
Josh Altman and fiancee Heather Bilyeu mixed business with pleasure on Wednesday's wedding episode of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.

The reality stars exchanged real estate counter offers as they tried to seal a deal before their nuptials.

Josh, 37, was trying to close a sale with Heather's client offering $3.2 million for a home.

Just married: Josh Altman and Heather Bilyeu were married on Wednesday's episode of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles

His client countered with a sale price of $3,690,000 as the couple negotiated while taking pre-wedding pictures in Aspen, Colorado.

Heather's client countered again and offered $3,375,000 or nearly $950 a square foot for the house.

Josh's client Patricia countered again and sought $3.5 million.

To keep the negotiations from dragging on into his wedding, Josh decided to throw in one point of his commission to make the $3.5 million sale happen.

Done deal: The real estate agent was negotiating with his fiancee before their wedding

Traditional ceremony: Heather converted to Judaism ahead of their wedding

Husband and wife: Josh and Heather were excited to finally be married

Big smiles: The groom and his bride beamed after the ceremony

'I won,' Heather, 31, said as she would make $875,000 commission on the sale.

'No, I won because I got you,' Josh replied.

The negotiating made for cute pictures as the patient photographers captured Josh and Heather celebrating the deal.

Pre-wedding pictures: Josh and Heather talked business while photographers snapped away

On the phone: Heather checked her phone for a deal update

So romantic: Josh discussed the deal as the photographers waited

Holding hands: Heather and Josh held hands while being photographed after the deal was struck

Josh and Heather spent time with his parents Alan and Judi in Aspen in the days leading up to the wedding.

Alan advised Josh to 'circle the wagons' in their marriage and surround themselves with love.

The episode showed Josh and Heather on their first date and also hitting a rough patch during wedding planning.

Sage advice: Josh's father Alan offered his son some marriage advice

They took a break from wedding planning as Heather openly questioned if they were doing the right thing.

'I'm glad we stopped working on the wedding and started working on us,' Josh told her.

The wedding ceremony in Aspen included friends Daymond John of Shark Tank and actress Julie Benz.

Social media: Heather and Josh shared wedding pics on Thursday on Bravo's Instagram page

The dress: Heather shared a photo of her wedding dress and its long train

Good times: Josh and Heather celebrated on chairs during their wedding party

Josh said his love for Heather has grown 'more and more each day'.

Heather called Josh her 'best friend' for the past six years and said she couldn't imagine life without him.

'With your love I can do anything,' she added.

Tender moments: Heather and Josh talked about their love for each other during the ceremony

Heather converted to Judaism and performed the ceremonial walk around the groom during the Jewish wedding.

'I am so lucky that I found someone who loves me and my family as much as he loves his own,' Heather said.

Josh crushed glass before they kissed for the first time as husband and wife.

Standing ovation: Josh was pumped after getting married to Heather

Encore kiss: Heather and Josh were shown during their encore kiss

In the air: Josh looked over at his bride as she was lifted in the air on a chair

'There you go. I'm a married man. I'm married,' Josh said.

'Now I gotta get her pregnant,' he added laughing.

Josh and Heather were married in April and they announced in September that they were expecting their first child together.

Cloud nine: Heather and Josh are shown at the top of Aspen Mountain on their wedding day

James and David during the episode sold a house in Culver City for a record $3,625,000.

They stood to share a $90,625 commission.

Josh Flagg also sold a large lot Beverly Hills home destined for tear down for $7.5 million in cash.

He was set to make a commission of $187,500 on the sale.

Drink to that: James and David persevered and sold a house in Culver City for a record $3,625,000
Former Neighbours star Caitlin Stasey has revealed on social media she had an abortion at the age of 22.

The Australian actress made the revelation in the wake of Republican Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has previously declared himself 'pro-life' and in March said women should face 'some sort of punishment' after having an abortion in the event the practice was outlawed.

In an effort to protect women's rights, Caitlin, who is based in America and hasn't been shy in voicing her support for Hillary Clinton, shared her own experience of having an abortion on Instagram.

Scroll down for video

'It was trying but I never regretted my decision': Neighbours star Caitlin Stasey has revealed she had an abortion at the age of 22

'When I was 22 I fell pregnant. I was terrified and alone in a city without my family, or a partner to support me,' Caitlin began in her post.

'Luckily I was in California, one of the remaining states that allows a woman to have agency over her own body. It was scary, it was sad, it was eye opening, but above all it was made easy for me.'

'My story is one of a state's successful relationship with family planning and reproductive rights. So many women are nowhere near as fortunate.'

Support: Caitlin posted about her experience on Instagram, and her husband Lucas Neff (R) also shared the details on his own social media account

'My incredible friend and partner': Lucas, an American actor, offered his support to his partner

'Now more than ever women need you, #plannedparenthoodneeds you,' Caitlin continued, referring to the non-profit organisation that offers abortion services and other sexual and reproductive health care.

'I think about that day often and while it was trying and heavy I never regretted my decision. Thank you @plannedparenthood from the bottom of my heart,' the actress concluded.

Caitlin hasn't been shy in voicing her support for Hillary Clinton as president, throughout the campaign trail.

Numerous snaps on the star's Instagram have made reference to the democrat, who despite losing to Donald Trump, held the popular vote.

'Heartbroken': Numerous snaps on the star's Instagram have made reference to the Democrat candidate, who despite losing to Donald Trump, held the popular vote

Democrat supporter: Another post saw her simply posting a picture of Hillary, with the caption #imwithher

Just one day ago, Caitlin posted a screen grab from Hillary's Twitter, which read: 'To all the little girls watching...never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world.'

Another post saw her simply posting a picture of Hillary, with the caption #imwithher.

Current law in California allows legal abortion.

During his campaign, Trump said abortion should be largely banned, that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v Wade legalising abortion should be overturned and that he would appoint an anti-abortion justice to the nation's highest court.

He said women who had abortions should be punished, but later retracted this, saying that doctors who perform abortions should be punished.

'My story is one of a state's successful relationship with family planning and reproductive rights. So many women are nowhere near as fortunate': Caitlin urged the public to protect women's rights
When news broke that Johnny Depp was going to play Grindelwald in the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, there was an outcry on social media.

Fans suggested that Depp wasn't the right choice in the light of the domestic abuse claims leveled against him by his now ex-wife Amber Heard during their messy divorce this summer.

But director David Yates is defending the decision, saying he and producer David Heyman simply went 'for the most inspired, interesting, right fit for that character.'

Brilliant actor: Johnny Depp was absolutely 'the right fit' to play Grindelwald in the Harry Potter prequels Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find them, filmmakers said Thursday

Director David Yates, pictured right with producer David Heyman in NYC, defended Depp's casting, saying the actor will take the character in 'an interesting direction'

Speaking to the media during publicity for the latest J.K. Rowling big screen adaptation, Yates explained: 'As we started to approach Grindelwald, we thought, Whos going to take this in an interesting direction?

'In this business youre a star one week, people are saying odd things the next, but no one takes away your pure talent.'

Depp shot his cameo for the Fantastic Beasts movie over two days in January.

Still has tales to tell: Author J.K. Rowling came up with a story that explores the secret world of wizardry long before Harry Potter went to Hogwarts

Her world: Rowling joined the film's stars on the red carpet at the New York premiere of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them on Thursday night. Four more films are set to follow

The Hollywood star is set to play a much bigger role in the sequel that is expected to chart the riser of the wizard Grindelwald to power in Europe, and will be filmed in the UK and in Paris.

'Hes a really brilliant, brilliant actor and we were excited about seeing what he would do with this kind of character,' Yates said.

'Hes fearless, hes imaginative, hes ambitious. We thought hed do something fun and special. So we went for him purely on that selfish basis, we dont care if hes famous or not famous, we just know hes interesting.'

It was also revealed this week that Harry Potter's Dumbledore will be back for Fantastic Beasts 2.

Meanwhile, the first movie in the series of five premiered in New York on Thursday night with Rowling joining the film's stars Eddie Redmayne, Colin Farrell and Zoe Kravitz.

Set in New York in the early 20th century, the film follows Redmayne's Newt Scamander as he explores the secret world of wizardry and magic that existed long before harry Potter went to Hogwarts.
Paris Hilton warmly greeted youngsters on Thursday at a children's hospital in Mexico.

The 35-year-old socialite hugged kids while supporting the Teleton Foundation in Tlalnepantla de Baz.

Paris looked dreamy in a long flowing pleated red dress with plunging neckline

Scroll down for video

Big hug: Paris Hilton received a warm welcome on Thursday while visiting a children's hospital in Mexico

The celebutante had her long blonde hair down in wavy curls and accessorised with large pink sunglasses.

Paris was embraced by a group of girls who beamed as they met the reality star.

She held her arms wide open for one boy who came up and gave her a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

Paris earlier this week presented her new shoe line in Mexico City.

Blonde beauty: The reality star wore a long red pleated dress with plunging neckline

Guest book: Paris signed the guest book at the children's hospital

Good times: Patients at the children's hospital were thrilled to meet the celebutante

The blonde beauty showcased her new Spring/Summer 2017 Shoe Collection on Monday at Cipriani restaurant.

Her shoe line is just one of her many business ventures, according to Dujour.com.

She also has a perfume line with 18 fragrances and 56 branded stores in the Middle East and Asia that sell her handbags, clothes and accessories.

Open arms: Paris greeted a boy with open arms as photographers lined up

Tender moment: The boy wrapped his arms around Paris as they hugged

Showing support: Paris was visiting the Teleton Foundation that benefits children

On the cheek: The boy gave Paris a peck on the cheek during her visit

Paris also has become a successful DJ with gigs around the world.

She was hosting a Gold Rush Party on Friday in Mexico City.

Paris took to social media on Monday to wish her little brother Barron a happy 27th birthday.

Annual fundraiser: The annual Teleton raises money for children's rehabilitation centers
She revealed in September that she's expecting her first child with insurance broker husband Charlie Thomson.

And Alex Jones looked every inch the glowing mother-to-be as she arrived at The One Show studios in London on Thursday evening.

The Welsh presenter, 39, beamed as she hid her growing baby bump in a pretty pastel pink coat and star-print scarf.

Scroll down for video

Mother-to-be! Alex Jones, who is pregnant with her first child, was glowing as she arrived at The One Show studios in London on Thursday evening

The brunette beauty wrapped up against the November chill with her textured, cosy coat, which hid a black maternity dress underneath.

Sticking to an understated all-black palette, the TV personality rocked black tights and black Chelsea boots.

The One Show host's tresses were styled in glossy waves that framed her face, which she accentuated with a slick of fuchsia lipstick.

Natural beauty: The Welsh TV presenter, 39, plumped her pout with a fuchsia lipstick that offset her baby pink coat

Wrapping up: The TV personality kept warm with a star-print scarf as she headed inside

The TV host announced her pregnancy in September on Twitter, posting: 'Charlie & I are very happy to confirm that we're expecting a baby in the new year. Feel so lucky that we're about to become parents. Xx.'

Alex met her New Zealander husband at a party in 2011, and they went on to wed at Cardiff Castle on New Years Eve last year.

Meanwhile, Alex had an awkward onscreen chat with her One Show guest Cliff Richard on the BBC show on Thursday night.

Pals! Alex and her The One Show co-host and Strictly contestant, Ore Oduba, shared a cheeky selfie before the show began

Give us a cuddle! The One Show host greeted music legend Cliff Richard, who appeared on the show on Thursday night

Warm embrace: The pair exchanged a friendly kiss, despite the awkward nature of their chat on the live show

The music legend is currently suing the BBC for 1.5 million following his investigation during Operation Yewtree.

The investigation - dropped after two years - was launched after allegations made against Cliff by four men.

Cliff is claiming aggravated damages and says the BBC acted unlawfully, but on Thursday insisted his relationship with the Beeb is 'fine'.

Tension? Cliff is suing the BBC after Operation Yewtree after four men made allegations against him - a two-year case that was later dropped

All good? The musician is claiming aggravated damages and says the BBC acted unlawfully, but when Alex asked what his relationship with the Beeb was, he insisted it was 'fine'

Alex ventured: 'This is all a little bit awkward, because we've never had a guest on the sofa who is suing the BBC.

'And some people watching the show will be thinking how come he's on the sofa? So what is your relationship with the BBC like at the minute?'

Cliff replied: 'I'm here, the BBC to me is The One Show, the radio shows I listen to

'I listen to it all over the world, the Today programme, The Archers, when I can catch up with it.

'My relationship with the BBC is fine.'

Tense times: On the show, Alex ventured: 'This is all a little bit awkward, because we've never had a guest on the sofa who is suing the BBC'
BRIAN VINER: Philippa lives in Edinburgh, where she works in a dreary sales job and is passed over for promotion. 'You are at the right level for you,' says her condescending boss.
She plays aspiring actress Mia in the hotly-anticipated musical comedy-drama movie, La La Land.

And Emma Stone proved she's the ultimate A-lister as she dazzled at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and InStyle's Celebration of the Golden Globe Awards Season in Los Angeles on Thursday night.

The actress, 28, showed off her sartorial skills as she made her way into the star-studded bash in a bedazzled navy blue dress.

Scroll down for video

La La Lady! Emma Stone dazzled at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and InStyle's Celebration of the Golden Globe Awards Season in Los Angeles on Thursday night

Featuring a waist-cinching belt and frilly pocket details, the Easy A star looked every inch the old Hollywood screen siren.

Emma added height to her small frame with sky-high strappy stilettos, while keeping her accessories simple with a pair of stud earrings.

Completing her glamorous look, Emma's famous fiery tresses were styled into loosely curled waves, swept to the side of her face.

The starlet accentuated her striking features with natural make-up as she worked her magic on the red carpet.

Dressed to impress: The actress, 28, showed off her sartorial skills as she made her way into the star-studded bash in a bedazzled navy blue dress and killer heels

Also in attendance were the likes of British beauty Kate Beckinsale, pregnant actress Marion Cotillard, Hailee Steinfeld and Jenna Dewan-Tatum.

Emma is the star of the highly anticipated movie, La La Land, which is already being touted as a 2017 Oscar Best Film contender.

The actress will soon begin a promotional trail for her new film, which also stars Ryan Gosling and John Legend, ahead of its release in December.

The star has several other projects in the works, and next year can be seen portraying Billie Jean King in Battle Of The Sexes.

New movie: Emma is the star of the highly anticipated movie, La La Land, which is already being touted as a 2017 Oscar Best Film contender

Dance queen: The actress will soon begin a promotional trail for her new film, which also stars Ryan Gosling and John Legend, ahead of its release in December

She will soon start work on The Favourite, in which she plays Abigail Masham, and Disney's live-action Cruella movie, in which she will channel the iconic villain.

Emma revealed in her recent cover interview with Vogue magazine that she has had a difficult 2016 after splitting from boyfriend of four years Andrew Garfield.

The beauty described her ex as 'someone I still love very much', adding: 'It's been interesting. It's been a good year. And sad. Pros and cons.'
They fell in love on the ITV2's Love Island in June.

But it seems there is more than trouble in paradise for Tom Powell and Sophie Gradon, who endured an explosive breakup on Thursday.

The 24-year-old fitness instructor and the former Miss Great Britain, 30, took to social media to document their dramatic split in an array of scathing posts - which saw both parties accuse each other of infidelity.

Scroll down for video

It's over: Love Island's Sophie Gradon, 30, and Tom Powell, 24, endured a dramatic breakup on Thursday - documenting the whole saga on social media

Sophie first hinted at a breakup on Thursday night when she took to Instagram to post a quote that read: 'Some people are meant to fall in love with each other, but not be together.'

However the Geordie beauty later deleted the post, causing more of a stir among fans regarding the status of their relationship.

With things between them evidently progressing from bad to worse, the brunette then posted on Instagram again - this time uploading an exposing Twitter message of Tom's, which he had sent to another girl.

Dirty move: The beauty posted an exposing Twitter message of Tom's, which saw him ask for another girl's number, on her Instagram

In the screen grab of the Direct Message thread, Tom was seen asking for a girl's mobile number.

Then, in a second message, he was seen desperately backtracking on his actions, writing: 'Hey Soph found out I got your number and kicked off shes prob gonna message you, please dont reply to her or this message please.'

Clearly heartbroken, Sophie captioned the shot: 'When I didn't do anything wrong'.

Fighting talk: Not backing down, Tom then took to his Twitter to post a photo of Sophie cosying up with another man

Not one to back down however, it was not long before Tom retaliated to his ex-girlfriend's bold move with an exposing snap of his own.

Taking to his Twitter page, the fitness guru wrote to his 230,000 followers: '2 can play at that game.. here's a picture of Sophie cheating on my the week she got out of the villa...,' followed by a photo of his former love cosying up to another man.

Showing his rage further, Tom continued with his Twitter rant by describing the photo as: 'Only a few days after her promising to make it up to me for cheating on me in the villa.'

Fuming: The star then embarked on a scathing Twitter rant, revealing the kiss was only 'a few days' after she promised to be faithful

'Got sent the photo from the guy telling me about it...', he continued, before mocking her with: 'Don't piss into the wind sweetheart.'

Firing one last blow, he added: 'And FYI I tried to speak to her personally and leave it off social media.. but nope.. she was adamant about being a child.'

The stream of Tweets has since been hit by criticism from fans, who pen him as equally childish for splashing their personal drama all over social media.

While it has since been deleted, Sophie then reportedly replied to the post with: 'A misconceived picture vs actual words. Go figure.'

At loggerheads: While it has since been deleted, Sophie then reportedly replied to the post with: 'A misconceived picture vs actual words. Go figure'

She later added to the fray with further dramatic Tweets, such as: 'Fall in love, learn, then let go. The chapter may be over but the story isn't' and 'When shit goes from 0 - Jeremy Kyle in 2.7 seconds.'

In light of her witty Tweet, Tom then hinted that the pair will actually appear on the ITV problem-solving show Jermey Kyle on Friday morning - to work out their issues once and for all.

The troubled lovers first met in the villa on ITV2's Love Island, where they were initially coupled off.

However Tom was one of the first voted off after audiences watched their tempestuous relationship play out.

Happier times: The troubled pair first met in the villa on ITV2's Love Island, where they were initially coupled off - and have embarked on a romance since returning to the UK

After his departure, Sophie then became involved in a short yet steamy fling with Liverpudlian finalist Katie - with the ladies even sharing a controversial and passionate kiss.

However, Sophie soon called things quits with Katie as she realised her true feelings for Tom, leading to her shock decision to leave the villa.

Tom was left furious upon discovery of the steamy smooch in his absence - but they worked through their issues to give the romance another try when they returned to the UK.

The gym fanatic even went to stay with her in her native Newcastle recently, to be introduced to the parents - proving things were hotting up before the drama kicked off.

Joking about meeting her mum and dad on Twitter, he explained: 'Just got home from meeting @sophiegradon s parents No black eyes or thick lips Think it went pretty well!'
She is known for her glamourous style as the co-host of Channel Seven's Sunrise.

But Samantha Armytage, 40, swapped her designer frocks for a casual ensemble as she visited a Double Bay nail salon on Friday.

Shielding her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses, the TV blonde dressed casually in a grey T-shirt and baggy trousers.

Scroll down for video

Everyday chic: Samantha Armytage, 40, swapped her designer frocks for a casual ensemble as she grabbed coffee and visited a Double Bay nail salon on Friday

She also proudly wore a Remembrance Day poppy on her chest as she strode towards her parked car.

Samantha looked fresh faced and confident and styled her hair into a no-frills updo.

Just hours earlier, she encouraged her fans to wear a poppy to pay tribute to fallen Australian soldiers.

Keeping it simple: Shielding her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses, the TV blonde dressed casually in a grey T-shirt and baggy trousers

Samantha wrote on Instagram: '#LestWeForget at 11am, don't forget to pause & reflect on our brave, selfless, wonderful servicemen & women'.

It comes after the TV host boasted about her recent gambling win after placing a bet that Donald Trump would win the US election.

On Wednesday, Samantha claimed on Twitter that she put money on Trump's victory six months ago when the odds were 100-1.

Respect: Samantha also proudly wore a Remembrance Day poppy on her chest as she strode towards her parked car

'Don't forget to pause & reflect': Just hours earlier, the Sunrise co-host encouraged her fans to wear a poppy to pay tribute to fallen Australian soldiers

Comedian Scott Dooley responded to the tweet by referencing the Sunrise 'Cash Cow' segment, writing: 'The real cash cow?'

'It was a bet I was happy to lose,' Samantha responded, hinting she was more of Hillary Clinton sympathiser.

Another Twitter user joked: 'Maybe you could set up a fund for those citizens who want to move out of the US!!'
She recently ended her relationship with ex-NRL star Eric Grothe Jr ended following reports he sent flirty messages to a young woman on social media.

And on Friday, Sophie Monk appeared to be having a rather tense phone call as she stepped out in Sydney's Bondi Beach wearing a mesh shirt and blue jeans.

Whether the conversation related to her recent heartbreak is unknown, but the 36-year-old TV personality did not seem to be in positive spirits.

Scroll down for video

Post-split drama? Sophie Monk appeared to be having a rather tense phone call in in Sydney's Bondi Beach a week after her break-up from ex-NRL star Eric Grothe Jr amid 'sexting' claims

The blonde beauty styled her hair in a messy bun as engaged in what appeared to be a heated conversation.

She wore lashings of mascara and a hint of eye shadow for the outing and also sported a slick of pink lipstick.

Sophie paired her ripped blue jeans with a white tank top and longsleeve mesh shirt.

She finished off her look with beige wedged boots and a grey handbag which she slung over her shoulder.

Tense? The 36-year-old TV and radio personality styled her hair in a messy bun as engaged in what appeared to be a heated conversation

Earlier this month, Sophie told KIIS FM's The Kyle and Jackie O Show she had been dating Eric on-and-off for two years.

But the former Australia's Got Talent judge confirmed the relationship was over, saying: 'I don't have a boyfriend.'

Explaining why she kept the details of their romance secret, Sophie said: 'When you become public it only creates drama. We wanted to keep it private and special.

Don't want to know! Sophie (L) claimed she refused to read the Woman's Day article claiming her ex-boyfriend Eric (R) had sent explicit messages to 'young woman on social media'

'But now it's off again,' She concluded, before adding: 'It's all good!'

Sophie claimed she refused to read the Woman's Day article claiming the former Parramatta Eels player sent explicit messages to 'young woman on social media'.

'I don't read anything that may hurt my ego or self-esteem,' she confessed.

'I only read things that make me feel good. I live in a delusional bubble, it's great.'
They've been rumoured to have had a rocky relationship of late - but supermodel Kate Moss and her man Count Nikolai Von Bismarck seem back on track.

The couple were enjoyed a spot of lunch at a Japanese restaurant in North London before heading out for a walk together over the weekend.

Kate, 42, and her man, 29, appeared in high spirits with the catwalk queen wearing a statement black and white coat.

Scroll down for video

She can Count on him: Kate Moss, 42, wore a statement coat as she headed out for lunch with her on-off beau Nikolai Von Bismarck, 29 over the weekend

She teamed the knockout number with a pair of black skinny jeans and ankle boots which had a rock chick edge.

Her man looked rather debonair in a blue long coat worn over a suit and with brown suede Chelsea boots.

Last month, Kate was thought to have split up with her toyboy lover and booted him out of her home for his riotous behaviour.

Keeping warm: She wore a statement black and white coat with some buckled ankle boots for the outing

Holding her hand: Kate was glued to her phone, while her man carried a shopping bag from a nearby vintage store

But at the start of the month, the couple were seen smooching in the street in London.

Meanwhile, on Thursday night, iconic fashionista Kate attended her friend Stella McCartney's latest clothing launch fresh from another shindig across town along with a special guest.

The model arrived with her lookalike mother Linda Rosina Shepherd, who she linked arms with on her way into the party, which was sponsored by CIROC vodka.

They both settled for dark colours, with Kate choosing a black trouser suit, flashing her bra in a sheer blouse underneath.

Like mother, like daughter! Kate and her mother Linda Rosina Shepherd looked very alike as they headed to Stella McCartney's menswear launch at Abbey Road on Thursday night

Family affair! The catwalk queen held onto her incredibly youthful mother Linda Shepherd as they went to the luxury restaurant China Tang afterwards

Opting to go for a modern twist on evening wear, the Vogue cover regular donned a baggy black tuxedo style jacket and trousers.

Wearing her jacket open the model ensured her outfit retained a suitably racy edge, thanks to her sheer black blouse.

The gold lined see-through top allowed the catwalk queen to flash a hint of skin, though her modesty was preserved by a black bra.

Bonding time: They were both sporting tousled blonde locks as they kept close to one another, with both ladies opting for dark ensembles

Keeping her cool: The 42-year-old model looked anything but flustered as she sashayed into the event in a black trouser suit, flashing her bra in a sheer blouse underneath

Back in black: Opting to go for a modern twist on evening wear, the Vogue cover regular donned a baggy black tuxedo style jacket and trousers

Popular as ever: Iconic fashionista Kate looked great as she arrived at her friend Stella McCartney's latest clothing launch fresh from another shindig across town

The woman of the moment: Stella McCartney was pictured looking leggy in one of her own creations

She rounded off her look with a pair of towering black stilettos, which complemented her low-key yet chic vibe.

Keeping her accessories in-keeping with the rest of her outfit, the model only wore a cursory few gold items alongside a black-leather handbag.

Wearing her blonde locks in an off-centre parting, Kate let her locks tumble to her shoulders and frame her famous features.

A touch of Frost: The ladies were joined by another on of their close friends, Sadie, who wore a peach coloured velvet suit

Girl talk: Actress Anna Friel wore a tiered blue dress which had a cowgirl theme (left), while Strictly host Claudia Winkleman flashed her legs in a black mini dress (right)

Blonde ambition: Orlando Bloom matched his T-shirt to his new hair colour

Her mother wore a navy suit and high heels, mirroring her daughter's ensemble.

There were a host of big names who joined them on the night including the designer herself, who looked leggy in a minidress from her own collection.

Kate and Stella's good pal Sadie Frost was also present and wore a peach velvet suit to the bash.

Skyscraper stilettos: Kate (pictured with Rosemary Ferguson) also wore a pair of towering black stilettos, which complemented her low-key yet chic vibe

A hint of raciness: Wearing her jacket open the model ensured her outfit retained a suitably racy edge, thanks to her sheer black blouse

Dynamic duo: Keeping her accessories in-keeping with the rest of her outfit, Kate (pictured with Pam Hogg) only wore a cursory few gold items alongside a black-leather handbag

In good company: (L to R) Kate, Francois-Henri Pinault, Salma Hayek and Orlando Bloom all enjoying the festivities

Other celebrity attendees including Anna Friel, Claudia Winkleman and Orlando Bloom.

Earlier on in the evening Kate had been tucked away in Richard Caring's Annabelle's for David Tang's Rules for Modern Life launch party.

The model had been in regal company at the event, as she was seen smiling and chatting away with the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson.

Ready for her close-up! She highlighted her features with minimal make-up, including a rose lipstick and a sweep of mascara

Chic exit: Kate looked every inch the supermodel as she left the party, showing off her flowing blonde locks

Fashion and royalty: The model had been in regal company at the event, as she was seen smiling and chatting away with the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson

Stars: (L-R) Rosemary Ferguson, Kate Moss, David Tang, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York and Eva Herzigova at the 'Rules for Modern Life' by David Tang Book Launch Party at Annabel's
He was booted off Celebrity Big Brother back in August for making offensive remarks but later cleared by Ofcom.

And Christopher Biggins, 67, made his TV return to Good Morning Britain on Friday to talk about the new series of I'm A Celebrity.

The reality star, who was crowned Jungle King back in 2007 said: 'It's lovely to be back' as he talked to Richard Arnold about the new line-up.

'It's lovely to be back': Christopher Biggins returned to television on Good Morning Britain on Friday, following his controversial appearance on CBB in August

While on the show, he reminisced about his former fellow campmate Janice Dickinson, adding that she didn't do much to help.

He said: 'I did a three day trial with the awful Janice. She was quite nice but she did nothing to help. I heard her screaming before I saw her.'

He said each contestant should give the tasks their all to make sure no one goes hungry.

Moving on? The reality star, who was crowned Jungle King back in 2007 talked to Richard Arnold (right) about the new I'm A Celebrity line-up

'If Gillian McKeith was on the show the same year as me, I would have found a way to murder her and bury the body.

'I think Carol Vorderman will be amazing.'

Richard Arnold said he had been talking to the presenter earlier in the week and she said she has been buying some bikinis.

Nervous? He looked a little apprehensive as he posed backstage in his smart suit

Controversial: Biggins' comments about bisexuality while on the Channel 5 show, were found to not be in breach of broadcasting rules after 44 people had complained - pictured on CBB

'I went in wearing my Marks and Spencer's boxers and they were thrilled,' Biggins said.

'They were thrilled, although I don't know how they knew they were theirs.'

According to the BBC, Biggins' comments about bisexuality while on the Channel 5 show, were found to not be in breach of broadcasting rules after 44 people had complained.

He had said: 'The worst type though is, I'm afraid to say, the bisexuals... what it is is people not wanting to admit they are gay.'

BBC report that Ofcom said the comments could cause offence but were likely to be within the audience's expectations.

Despite being a favourite to win, a statement circulated by the Channel 5 show producers announced the presenter had left the house, just a few hours after the first live eviction.

Following his departure from the show, news broke that the actor had been removed due to 'insensitive' comments he made which upset Jewish housemate Katie Waissel.

And having reassured fans that he did not intentionally mean to offend and had already apologised to his housemate, Christopher announced he would be visiting the concentration camp which is now a museum and memorial.
For months The Bachelor's Megan Marx and Tiffany Scanlon have dropped hints they are in a same-sex relationship.

And the busty girlfriends officially CONFIRMED their romance at the Maxim Hot 100 party at The Star, Sydney on Friday night.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia at the event, Tiffany told how they confessed their love for each other on holiday in Bali, Indonesia in June.

Scroll down for video

It's official! Megan Marx and Tiffany Scanlon confirmed they began their romantic relationship while on holiday in Bail, Indonesia in June - after forming a 'strong connection' on The Bachelor

'While we were in the show, it was just a friendship. It probably wasn't until we were in Bali together that it was like ''Oh, this is more'',' said Tiffany.

Her partner Megan also confessed she wasn't expecting to fall for another woman while filming the TV dating series, starring Richie Strahan.

'We had very different experiences when we were on the show. Obviously I found Tiffany very attractive but I was there to get to know Richie,' she said.

'While we were in the show, it was just a friendship': The girlfriends revealed it wasn't until months after filming The Bachelor that they became romantically involved

'But instantly we knew there was a very strong connection. I was so excited to meet her in Bali,' Megan added.

The couple revealed 'no one seemed to notice' they had become more than friends during that fateful holiday - and it took 'months' for anyone to find out.

'It started in June and it wasn't until October that people noticed! So it was quite a long time,' Tiffany revealed.

'No one seemed to notice': The blonde TV stars said they were surprised their relationship was kept under wraps for so long

'They just knew something was going on': Megan revealed their fellow Bachelor contestants could sense the pair were more than just friends

The pair admitted their fellow contestants had a feeling something was going on between them during filming.

'It's been interesting talking to other girls on the show, because they just knew something was going on,' Megan said.

Tiffany added: 'We were on our own wavelengths. We found each other hilarious but other people didn't kind of get us.

'Like we'd do weird things and thought it was funny, but nobody else did.

Confirmed: It has been rumoured for months the pair were in a same-sex relationship

'We were on our own wavelengths. We found each other hilarious but other people didn't kind of get us': Tiffany revealed their formed a close bond on the show, which confused the others
Actor Johnny Depp took some time to celebrate his other passion, rock music, in Japan on Friday.

The Hollywood star took to the red carpet in full rock regalia to attend the Classic Rock Awards in Tokyo, sporting a typically edgy ensemble.

Grinning at photographers and waving to the crowd, the Alice Through The Looking Glass star wore a mostly black outfit featuring an inky-coloured shirt, jet-black jeans and dark buckled leather boots.

Scroll down for video

Lads in leather: Johnny Depp and Hollywood Vampires band mate Joe Perry work the edgy look at the Classic Rock Awards in Tokyo

Rocking it: Grinning at photographers and waving to the crowd, the Alice Through The Looking Glass star wore a mostly black outfit featuring an inky-coloured shirt, jet-black jeans and dark buckled leather boots

Over his shirt he wore a black leather jacket and on his head a pin-stripe baker boy hat.

The 53-year-old star embellished the look with a series of rocky accents including a multitude of chain links dangling from his jeans and a variety of necklaces draped around his neck.

Featured in this tangled mass, Johnny sported a crucifix pendant, a padlock and a series of miniature dice on a string.

He added a splash of colour to the look with rusty-coloured scarves and purple shades, but kept things metallic on his head with a silvery bandana and three safety pin earrings dangling from his left ear - almost channeling his infamous alter-ego Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise.

Rock stars: Johnny was joined by Joe Perry - guitarist of Aerosmith and fellow member of supergroup Hollywood Vampires

Guys night out: Joe sported a shiny black jacket as well as trousers, but opted for a white shirt underneath in a threadbare style

Edgy: He added a splash of colour to the look with rusty-coloured scarves and purple shades, but kept things metallic on his head with a silvery bandanna and three safety pin earrings dangling from his left ear

He was joined by Joe Perry - guitarist of Aerosmith and fellow member of supergroup Hollywood Vampires.

Joe was even more leather-clad, wearing a shiny black jacket as well as trousers, but opted for a white shirt underneath in a threadbare style.

The only one missing from the band was Alice Cooper, who didn't attend the awards.

Hollywood Vampires formed last year, and was formed in honour of rock legends of the past.

All good: Johnny has hit the headlines in the past couple of weeks when it emerged he has a cameo role in the forthcoming Harry Potter spin-off film Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

From Willy Wonka to Harry Potter: Some fans have suggested that Depp wasn't the right choice in the light of the domestic abuse claims leveled against him by his now ex-wife Amber Heard during their messy divorce this summer

The group have released one album to date and embarked on a tour over the summer.

Things ground to a brief halt however in July when 66-year-old Joe collapsed on stage mid-performance and had to sit out of the next 11 days' worth of shows.

He returned to the tour at the end of July, however, having rested - his collapse blamed on exhaustion and dehydration.

At the time, Joe's longtime Aerosmith band mate Steven Tyler said of Hollywood Vampire's tour: 'Theyre doing like eight or nine shows in a row, or five in a row. I think theyre all a little burnt. I think they may need to look at that. Not young anymore, you know?'

But Joe was fighting fit for his Classic Rock Awards appearance, looking rejuvinated and in perfect health.

Rock chic: The 53-year-old star embellished his look with a series of rocky accents including a multitude of chain links dangling from his jeans and a variety of necklaces draped around his neck

Meanwhile, Johnny has hit the headlines in the past couple of weeks when it emerged he has a cameo role in the forthcoming Harry Potter spin-off film Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.

Following this, it came out that he plays the character of Grindelwald prequel - leading to an outcry on social media.

Fans suggested that Depp wasn't the right choice in the light of the domestic abuse claims leveled against him by his now ex-wife Amber Heard during their messy divorce this summer.

But director David Yates is defending the decision, saying he and producer David Heyman simply went 'for the most inspired, interesting, right fit for that character.'

Shock casting: David Yates is defending the decision to cast Johnny in the Fantastic Beasts sequel, saying he simply went 'for the most inspired, interesting, right fit for that character'

Speaking to the media during publicity for the latest J.K. Rowling big screen adaptation, Yates explained: 'As we started to approach Grindelwald, we thought, "Whos going to take this in an interesting direction?"

'In this business youre a star one week, people are saying odd things the next, but no one takes away your pure talent.'

The Hollywood star is set to play a much bigger role in the sequel that is expected to chart the rise of the wizard Grindelwald to power in Europe, and will be filmed in the UK and in Paris.

Red carpet rockers: Other stars at the Classic Rock Awards included US musician Richie Sambora and German guitarist Rudolf Schenke, as well as Jimmy Page (L), Phil Collen and Filipino pop star Sarah Geronimo (R)

'Hes a really brilliant, brilliant actor and we were excited about seeing what he would do with this kind of character,' Yates said.

'Hes fearless, hes imaginative, hes ambitious. We thought hed do something fun and special. So we went for him purely on that selfish basis, we dont care if hes famous or not famous, we just know hes interesting.'

Other stars at the Classic Rock Awards included US musician Richie Sambora and German guitarist Rudolf Schenke, as well as Jimmy Page, Phil Collen and Filipino pop star Sarah Geronimo.
She recently celebrated her 40th birthday.

But Lady Victoria Hervey looked half her age as she showed off her incredible figure in sheer silver lingerie at the Palms Springs Fashion Show in California on Thursday.

Walking in Julia Clancey's show at the runway event, the daughter of the late 6th Marquess of Bristol ensured all eyes would be on her in the racy ensemble.

Scroll down for video

Forever young: Lady Victoria Hervey, 40, looked half her age as she showed off her incredible figure in sheer silver lingerie at the Palms Springs Fashion Show in California on Thursday

Showing off her perky assets, the socialite certainly wasn't shy as she flaunted her phenomenal physique backstage.

Teaming her silver bra with matching briefs, the blonde beauty also showed off her enviably pert posterior.

In keeping with the metallic-theme she added some extra height to her frame in a pair of caged silver heels.

Impossible to miss: Walking in Julia Clancey's show at the runway event, the daughter of the late 6th Marquess of Bristol ensured all eyes would be on her in the racy ensemble

Silver siren: Showing off her perky assets, the socialite certainly wasn't shy as she flaunted her phenomenal physique backstage

Going for gold! Aiding her as she scrabbled to get ready backstage, the star's assistant helped her slip into a little gold dress

Spoilt for choice: The star was surrounded by metallic garments to slip into

Caped crusader: Covering up slightly, she sheathed her enviable frame in a floor length silver cape before hitting the runway

Painting her lips a rich glossy red, the model also highlighted her eyes with a sweep of glittering gold eye shadow, whilst her eyebrows were bleached an eye-catching silver hue.

Wearing her golden locks in loose curls, she also donned a metallic turban which glimmered brightly under the stage lights.

Covering up slightly, she sheathed her enviable frame in a floor length silver cape before hitting the runway.

Blonde bombshell: Wearing her golden locks in loose curls, she also donned a metallic turban which glimmered brightly under the stage lights

Golden girl: Painting her lips a rich glossy red, the model also highlighted her eyes with a sweep of glittering gold eye shadow, whilst her eyebrows were bleached silver

Aiding her as she scrabbled to get ready backstage, the star's assistant helped her slip into a little gold dress.

But it was an eye-catching mint gown that she donned for her second runway appearance.

Keeping her same turban, the star also wore a strip of the gown as a choker which was adorned in gold thread.

Rolling on the floor laughing: Lady Victoria joined the other models on the runway

Surprising: One of the models seemed to be having great fun open-legged on the floor

Strike a pose: The star was surrounded by models clad in gold and silver gowns

Runway ready: The star seemed in great spirits on the outing

Lady Victoria, who is known for her glamorous sense of style, recently told the Daily Mail's Sebastian Shakespeare that English women struggle to be sexy.

'Women in London are too conservative and dont have the courage to wear sexy outfits. Its an English thing,' she said.

'I grew up in the South of France so I have a much more international approach.'

Gorgeous in green: Victoria donned an eye-catching mint gown for her second appearance

Victoria added that she still leads by example, sporting an array of sheer ensembles at parties recently.

'Its empowering to dress provocatively,' she said.

Her body confidence put her in good stead during her modelling career, which saw her work for the likes of Christian Dior.
With just 42 shopping days to Christmas, youd think everyone would have started to think about the big day (my mum usually starts mid-June).

Certainly, the kiddies should already be nagging about what they want Santa to bring them. Still, if other years are anything to go by, Santa has run out of goodies long before he reaches Weatherfield, Walford or Emmerdale.

Children there are lucky if they get a tangerine and three walnuts in the bottom of a sock that hasnt been washed since December the year before.

Gary is furious to realise Anna is scarred for life and David is to blame seeing fists fly in Coronation Street

Its time to start predicting what the big Christmas storylines are going to be. In Coronation Street, I suspect Michelle will discover that Leanne is carrying Steves baby; EastEnders might bump off Phil when he hits the cooking sherry; and Emmerdale will doubtless bring us lots of illicit sex and a few deaths along the way (although Ive been assured the local florists are taking a well-earned rest).

We can also rely on the usual laughs  Corries Rita in her traditional Christmas sweater and Liz in another sequined belt that she tries to pass off as a skirt. I cant wait.

CORONATION STREET: GARY SEES RED  AND NOT JUST IN THE MIRROR

The more they give Mikey North to do, the better he gets. As his character Gary has developed, its been a joy to see the young actor working on his craft. Anger, love, sensitivity  he can do the lot.

Gary storms into the salon and rails at David, telling him Anna can barely walk because of him

The anger resurfaces now, when, realising Anna is scarred for life, Gary lashes out at David. Sarah and Gary have only just declared their love for one another, so is the relationship already doomed? And how will it affect love-struck Bethany, who Gary wrongly believes set him and Sarah up?

The comedy cops have been out in force as the case against Maria strengthens (well, only if youve been to the Trumpton school of policing), and shes charged with murder. Right. Theres no body, a disappearance of just a couple of weeks and no real motive. Heres a question for Maria though: why didnt you change the locks when Caz moved out?

Eileen notices Phelans secrecy and Michael is keen to expose his wrongdoing. When Michael finds Phelans fake passport and ticket to Mexico, what will Phelan do to shut him up? Is Gail about to add another husband to her list of casualties? Why not erect a tent in the graveyard? Shes there often enough.

EASTENDERS: HONEYMOON? HORRORMOON, MORE LIKE

Even by Walfords standards, Lee and Whitneys honeymoon period has been extremely short-lived.

Just over a week after the couple tied the knot, Lee looks as miserable as he did on his wedding day, when Whitneys name had him floored.

At least shes excavated herself from under the false eyelashes that entered the registry office three feet in front of her.

But Lees money worries continue because he needs to get the deposit together for one of Jacks flats. Determined not to let Whitney down, how far will he go to get the funds?

Lee pretends to Whitney that the flat had gone by the time he tried to place the deposit in EastEnders this week

Id suggest selling Whitneys wedding tiara but suspect Lee would have to pay a broker to take the monstrosity off his hands. Ive seen less frightening frontal lobotomies.

Talking of Jack and his flats, he finds another building ripe for conversion. Where does he get all this money? And why does this great developer still live in that tiny flat barely big enough to spin a hamster wheel?

Ive been waxing lyrical about Masood, but my joy might be extinguished when he makes a big decision that would mean his having to leave Walford (again. Make your mind up!). Carmel and Denise try to talk him out of it, and he snaps at Denise when she says she doesnt want him to make a fool of himself (Pot. Kettle. Black. Its never stopped her).

On Masoods final day, can Denise make him stay, or will another argument put paid to any romance for good?

EMMERDALE: AIMING FOR THE TOP

For a small village, the ratio of guns to people is alarmingly high. Does anyone even have a firearms licence?

Lawrence has left his shotgun out, and Diane seems to think Chrissie would be good for target practice in Emmerdale

This week, Dianes still furious about Andy being framed, so she heads to Home Farm to confront Chrissie.

But Lawrence has left his shotgun out, and Diane seems to think Chrissie would be good for target practice (pictured)  not a moment too soon. Will Lachlan confess, and whos responsible for the police turning up at Home Farm?
Evan Rachel Wood and Chris Evans were both naked when they first met ahead of shooting their Gucci Guilty campaign.

The 29-year-old actress - who was previously married to British actor Jamie Bell - came face-to-face with Captain America when they were both in their birthday suits on the set for the fragrance advertising campaign shoot.

However, Evan insists being in the buff in front of the 35-year-old Hollywood hunk wasn't as embarrassing as she thought it would be.

Baring it all: Evan Rachel Woods first met Chris Evans on the set of an all-nude campaign for Gucci Guilty

Speaking to People about the campaign, the face of Gucci Guilty shared, 'We were both naked and we had just met. It was like, 'OK, so, you're going to be wearing Chris Evans at this photo shoot.'

'And, um, that was my wardrobe.'

'He was so respectful and cool and it made it all so much easier,' the Hollywood vet said of her Gucci partner, 'All we did was listen to Motown and laugh a lot. That was the vibe on set, we were both humbled by the experience.'

The 'Into The Forest' star also revealed that all credit for the sensual shots is due to the creative team who were able to make the pair look as though they were in the throes of passion, even though the poses were very clinical.

Blossoming friendship: Evan and Chris got on really well on the shoot and she felt privileged to have got to work with him

'In those shots it looks like we're in the throes and rolling around on a sexy beach or something,' the Westworld actress revealed.

'But we were being very strategically positioned and quite awkwardly so, having to hold these poses,' she continued.

'I think I remember being pretty sore at the end of the day actually. So it looked natural, but it can be silly and fun doing it.'

Evan and Chris got on really well on the shoot and she felt privileged to have got to work with him.

'He's a really great guy so I was very fortunate to be paired up with him because it made the whole experience that much better,' said the Across the Universe starlet.

'I love Gucci, they are so good to me. I still wear the fragrance, but I wear the men's.'
Russell Crowe is ready for a move as his divorce to Danielle Spencer will soon be finalised.

The Hollywood star quietly listed his Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf apartment a month, and is said to be hoping to sell it swiftly.

Russell and Danielle bought the apartment - that includes the entire third floor of the Wharf building - for $14.35 million, which previously held the record for Australia's highest apartment purchase.

Sale time: Russell Crowe has quietly listed the lavish apartment he shared with estranged wife Danielle Spencer

The current record is $25 million, though the Daily Telegraph report that the actor is being 'realistic' about his asking price and just wants to get rid of it.

The newspaper also say that Russell's school mate, estate agent John McGrath, has organised for the apartment to be viewed by potential buyers over the last few weeks.

The Gladiator star and is estranged wife moved into the property back in 2003 after buying it from Nutrimetics founder Imelda Roche and her property developer husband Bill Roche.

Realistic: Russell is hoping to sell the Finger Wharf apartment quickly so isn't expecting to break any apartment sale records

Big space: The apartment covers the entirety of the third floor

Over: The actor and estranged wife separated in 2012 and are now finalising their divorce

The Roches were the first people to live in the apartment having bought it for $9.8 million in 1998.

Russell and Danielle's divorce is close to being finalised after years of separation.

The couple - who have two children Charles, 12, and Tennyson, nine - separated in 2012 after nine years of marriage, though he was reluctant for it to end in divorce.

Speaking in 2015, Russell said: 'To this day everything I do is still connected to that.

'We haven't done the deal yet. I'm a very persistent person, you never know.
Peter Thiel wins with bet against Silicon Valley

The improbable triumph of Donald Trump is a victory for tech sector investor Peter Thiel, who unabashedly backed the Republican candidate despite overwhelming opposition from his Silicon Valley peers.

The 49-year-old Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and active tech sector figure, was a contrarian in a land of entrepreneurs and internet stars that saw Trump as looking to the past instead of the future.

A co-founder of online payments firm PayPal and big-data analytics company Palantir known for secretive work with counter-intelligence agencies, Thiel is a board member of Facebook and has a fortune estimated at $2.7 billion.

PayPal's co-founder Peter Thiel bucked the trend in Silicon Valley by donating $1.25 million to Trump's campaign Saul Loeb (AFP/File)

Thiel bucked the trend in Silicon Valley by donating $1.25 million to Trump's campaign, and became the first openly gay speaker at a Republican convention.

He received applause for his speech, in which he said he was proud to be gay, Republican, and American.

While Silicon Valley has seen some Republican support, Thiel appeared an oddity in a race where Hewlett Packard Enterprise chief executive Meg Whitman, who once ran as a Republican for governor of California, endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Thiel said during his speech that he didn't "agree with every plank" of a party platform that has long been at odds with rights and issues important to the gay and transgender community that is important in California.

After reports about Trump's alleged sexual misconduct to women, Thiel referred to them as "clearly offensive and inappropriate."

- 'Not crazy' -

Still, his support for the candidate was unwavering.

"I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take him seriously but not literally," Thiel said at a Washington news conference in October.

"What Trump represents isn't crazy, and it isn't going away," he contended. "We are voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed."

Thiel funded conservative political candidates in the past, but backing a candidate seen as anathema to Silicon Valley values went too far for some.

Former Reddit chief Ellen Pao severed ties between Project Include, which is devoted to promoting diversity in the tech industry, and Y Combinator, a startup incubator Thiel is involved with.

Some called, unsuccessfully, for entrepreneurs to shun Y Combinator and for him to be booted from the Facebook board.

Thiel, like Trump, has portrayed the media as villainous.

In May, Thiel acknowledged funding a legal battle against the gossip website Gawker that outed him as a homosexual.

"It's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence," Thiel said in an interview at the time.

Thiel backed former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, who agreed this month to accept at least $31 million from Gawker Media to settle his lawsuit over publication of a sex tape.

While Gawker made enemies for its no-holds-barred approach to celebrity coverage, the case raised questions about whether powerful interests can use their resources to silence media for unfavorable coverage.

- Chess and Mordor -

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Thiel was a year old when his parents brought him to the United States.

The chess enthusiast and fan of author JRR Tolkien (even taking inspiration for fund names from Lord of the Rings books) studied at Stanford University in Silicon Valley.

His first tech startup win came with PayPal, which he co-founded in 1998 and was bought four years later by eBay.

Thiel's influence in Silicon Valley is due largely to investments, his biggest hit being an early stake in Facebook.

He spent $500,000 in exchange for about 10 percent of the social networking startup in 2004, essentially selling it after Facebook went public with a stock offering in 2012.

The billionaire also funds initiatives in artificial intelligence and research into thwarting the aging process. He is a candidate for cryogenics, signing on to have his body frozen after death in the hope medical advances will restore him to life one day.

Thiel has a charitable foundation which offers scholarships to young people who drop out of school to start businesses.

He also sits on the steering committee of a mysterious Bilderberg group, an annual and secretive gathering of political and economic elite that has inspired conspiracy theories.

Palantir, where Thiel presides over the board of directors, in September was accused by the US Department of Labor of discriminating against Asians when it came to hiring workers.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel became the first openly gay speaker at a Republican convention Jim Watson (AFP/File)
Muslim students targeted in California campus attacks

Authorities at two universities in California said Thursday police were investigating attacks against female Muslim students, one of which was described as a hate crime.

Both attacks came on Wednesday, the day after Donald Trump was elected president at the end of a campaign during which the Republican was criticized for divisive and inflammatory language against Muslims.

In one of the incidents, two assailants confronted their victim at San Diego State University and "made comments about President-elect Trump and the Muslim community," according to campus police.

In one of the incidents, two assailants confronted their victim at San Diego State University and "made comments about President-elect Trump and the Muslim community," according to campus police Spencer Platt (Getty/AFP/File)

The woman had her purse, backpack and car keys stolen. She went to get help and returned to the scene with police officers, only to find her car had been stolen, police spokesman Ronald Broussard said.

The case was being investigated as a suspected hate crime as well as a strong-arm robbery and auto theft, Broussard said.

"Comments made to the student indicate she was targeted because of her Muslim faith, including her wearing of a traditional garment and hijab," university president Elliot Hirshman and interim police chief Josh Mays said in a joint statement.

San Jose State University police said in a statement they were investigating a similar attack against a female student at a campus parking garage.

A male assailant approached the victim from behind, pulling at the victim's head scarf, choking and throwing her off balance, according to the statement circulated to students on Wednesday.

"Campus officials are closely monitoring the situation as the investigation continues. No arrests have been made," university spokeswoman Pat Harris said in an emailed statement to AFP.

"We are, of course, very concerned that this has occurred on our campus. No one should experience this kind of behavior at San Jose State," she added.

New York University's Muslim Students Association issued a statement on Wednesday saying engineering undergraduates had arrived that morning to find "Trump" scrawled on the door of their prayer room.

The organization said members were "realizing that our campus is not immune to the bigotry that grips America."

A Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette told police on Wednesday that she was attacked by two men, one of whom was wearing a white hat emblazoned with "Trump."

Local media reported a police statement on Thursday however alleging that the girl had made up the attack.
Spike in illegal border crossings from Mexico: US

The number of migrants illegally entering the United States from Mexico jumped more than 16 percent in October, US officials said on Thursday.

The US Department of Homeland Security said it detained 46,195 people in October, up from 39,501 in September and 37,048 in August.

"There are currently about 41,000 individuals in our immigration detention facilities -- typically, the number in immigration detention fluctuates between 31,000 and 34,000," DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement.

Immigration officials have said that most of the new arrivals from Mexico are actually Central Americans making the arduous journey to seek work and safety in the United States -- amid poverty and a surge in gang-related violence at home Frederic J. BROWN (AFP/File)

"I have authorized US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to acquire additional detention space for single adults so that those apprehended at the border can be returned to their home countries as soon as possible," he said.

Immigration officials have said that most of the undocumented arrivals are actually Central Americans making the arduous journey through Mexico to seek work and safety in the United States -- amid poverty and a surge in gang-related violence at home.

US officials have "engaged with a number of countries to repatriate their citizens more quickly, and they have agreed to do so," Johnson said, noting that many of the new arrivals have been asylum seekers and young children.

"Our borders cannot be open to illegal migration. We must, therefore, enforce the immigration laws consistent with our priorities," he added.

"We prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants who are convicted of serious crimes and those apprehended at the border attempting to enter the country illegally."

The latest immigration figures come two days after the November 8 presidential election that closed a campaign in which immigration has loomed large.

The immigration issue has been central in the candidacy of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to build a wall along the southwestern border and make Mexico pay for it.

Trump met for an hour Thursday with the head of the US Senate Mitch McConnell, and again stressed his plans to highlight immigration during his presidency which starts in January
Palau's president defeats brother-in-law in election

Palau's President Tommy Remengesau has claimed victory in the Pacific nation's elections but labelled the win "bittersweet" as he defeated his own brother-in-law.

Remengesau scraped home by just 264 votes against his challenger Surangel Whipps, notching 5,124 votes to 4,860 in the November 1 election to win a fourth term.

"I thank you for your support, faith and trust in having me continue to serve you as your president," he said in a statement released late Thursday.

Palau's President Tommy Remengesau has claimed victory in the Pacific nation's elections but labelled the win "bittersweet" as he defeated his own brother-in-law Jacques Demarthon (AFP/File)

The 60-year-old said the campaign had been the most difficult he had experienced because his opponent is married to his sister.

"Family should not run against a family... it's a bittersweet victory," he told AFP.

"I wish that my brother-in-law and my sister were celebrating the victory with me. Its something nobody should go through, It's been the toughest and most emotional election."

Whipps campaigned on a platform of change, pointing to social problems in the nation of 22,000, which lies about 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) east of the Philippines.
Pena Nieto's Trump meeting: A 'visionary' move?

Mexicans lambasted President Enrique Pena Nieto in August when he hosted Donald Trump despite his slurs against migrants and his vow to build a massive border wall.

Fast forward to November: Trump defeats Democrat Hillary Clinton in the US election and now Pena Nieto's gambit doesn't look so bad after all.

"Crises open opportunities. President Pena, you were right and a visionary," former president Vicente Fox, one of Trump's most strident Mexican critics, tweeted on Wednesday.

US president-elect Donald Trump delivers a joint press conference with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico City on August 31, 2016 Yuri Cortez (AFP/File)

That may be a bit of stretch, considering Pena Nieto also extended an invitation to Clinton, who declined.

But analysts say the first meeting, while awkward, enabled them to build a relationship and set the stage for the next get-together, which they plan to have before Trump's inauguration in January.

This time, they could hold more substantive talks on controversial issues such as Trump's demand that Mexico pay billions of dollars for the wall and vow to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

"Maybe he will confirm and say 'yes, there will be a wall and yes you will pay,'" said Jose Antonio Crespo, political expert at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching.

"Or if Trump was not taking all these threats seriously, maybe he will say that 'it was part the campaign, there won't be a wall.'"

- Hasty first meeting -

The first meeting caused a backlash against Pena Nieto, with one poll showing that many saw it as the biggest mistake of his presidency.

They slammed the president for not publically condemning Trump during a joint news conference.

The Republican candidate had infuriated Mexicans by threatening to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and calling them rapists and drug runners.

Analysts said the visit also allowed the New York billionaire to look presidential during a tough moment in his campaign.

Pena Nieto later acknowledged the invitation to be somewhat hasty, saying he had not expected Trump to come or anticipated such public anger.

But he always maintained he was right to open a dialogue with the potential next president of the United States.

The ruckus led to the resignation of Pena Nieto's close confidant and finance minister, Luis Videgaray, after it emerged that he had orchestrated the get-together.

"The legacy of Donald Trump's campaign visit to Mexico will continue to be a controversial one," said Christopher Wilson, an expert at the Washington-based Mexico Institute of the Wilson Center think-tank.

"But the alternative explanation that he began a relationship with Donald Trump off to a good start is increasingly compelling given the fact that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States."

There was some discord after the meeting when Trump said the wall had not been discussed and Pena Nieto countered on Twitter that he had told his visitor that he would never pay for it.

Despite that episode, Wilson said, "a visit, the beginnings of a personal relationship, these things are unequivocally positive in the context of a relationship that matters so much to the United States and Mexico."

- 'Friendly' talks -

Pena Nieto has enjoyed a good relationship with President Barack Obama and it remains to be seen if he can find the same chemistry with Trump.

The Mexican leader voiced optimism Wednesday about the "new phase" in relations with Washington, stating that he had a "cordial, friendly and respectful" phone conversation with Trump.

Mexico's economic health -- with $531 billion dollars in two-way trade in goods last year -- is closely tied to the United States, and the government is keen to appease markets after Trump's victory caused the peso to sink to record lows this week.

Fox, who has called Trump "crazy" and dropped the F-bomb saying he wouldn't pay for the wall, put it this way: "Even though (Trump) is not the prettiest gal in the room, we still have to dance with her and find a way to work together."

As the Republican candidate Donald Trump infuriated Mexicans by threatening to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and calling them rapists and drug runners Yuri Cortez (AFP/File)
Indian garment factory fire kills 13 workers

Thirteen workers died in a fire at a suspected illegal garment factory on the outskirts of the Indian capital early Friday as they slept in the workshop.

The blaze started in the early hours of the morning on the ground floor of the narrow residential building, which was being used to make fake leather jackets, on the eastern edge of New Delhi.

Residents rushed to the factory after they heard screams from those trapped inside as the fire quickly spread to the first floor where most of the workers were sleeping, eyewitness Shahabudin Ali said.

Residents gather near a gutted workshop in Ghaziabad, some 20 km east of New Delhi, on November 11, 2016 Chandan Khanna (AFP)

"We started dousing the fire ourselves with buckets and garden pipes," he said.

"The fire department officials reached only two hours after the fire."

The police confirmed that 13 people died, adding that the fire was likely caused either by a short circuit or a cigarette.

"The fire broke out at a factory in a residential area of Sahibabad around 4:30 am in the morning. Thirteen people, who were sleeping there have died and another two or three people are getting treated at the hospital," Bhagwat Singh, local police spokesman told AFP.

Police superintendent Salman Taj said that three of the dead were burnt to death while the others died of smoke inhalation.

Residents and a local fire officer said that two of the workers survived by jumping from the building's balcony.

"The two of them woke up by chance and say they screamed for others to wake up while running towards the terrace but others didn't wake up, perhaps it was already late," local fire officer Abbas Hussain said.

Hussain described piles of leather stacked in the building's narrow staircase and cramped workshop, adding that the factory was most likely illegal.

"From what we see, there was nothing proper and the factory must surely not have been a legal one but we can say for sure only after a proper investigation," Hussain said.

Police superintendent Taj confirmed that the two building owners had been detained.

The fire is yet another blight on India's poor record for workplace safety where deadly accidents are commonplace.

- 'Inhuman conditions' -

Residents described the neighbourhood with its maze of narrow streets as being dotted with illegal factories, which mostly employ underpaid migrant workers.

Either side of the charred factory were residential buildings with shops on the ground floor.

The front of the workshop had been shuttered with a metal grill similar to the neighbouring shop fronts, residents said, which had prevented the workers from escaping when the blaze began.

Nawaz Alam, a migrant worker at nearby jeans workshop, said he had little choice but to work in an illegal factory.

"We are not paid well and have to live in inhuman conditions in the factories to save money," Alam said.

"I would prefer to work in a proper factory but can't get a job."

Eight workers were killed last month in a huge explosion at a fireworks factory in the southern state of Tamil Nadu while a massive blaze in a firecracker workshop killed 15 people in May 2014 in central Madhya Pradesh.

A fire at a factory where leather bags were being stitched killed six workers in November 2013 in New Delhi. Some of the victims were trapped inside the building and burnt beyond recognition.

South Asia's lucrative garment industry has a particularly alarming safety record, with watchdogs saying safety rules are routinely flouted.

A huge fire triggered by a boiler explosion at a packaging factory just north of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka left 25 people dead in September.

In November 2012, at least 111 workers were killed when a devastating fire engulfed a nine-storey garment factory outside Dhaka.

The accident was followed by an even bigger disaster six months later when 1,138 people died after a clothing factory complex collapsed, trapping more than 3,000 workers.

The Rana Plaza tragedy triggered international outrage and put pressure on European and US clothing brands to improve pay and conditions at the factories that supply them.

Map of India locating Sahibabad, where at least 13 people were killed in a fire at a suspected illegal garment factory on November 11, 2016 - (AFP Graphic)
How Trump bypassed hostile media to deliver his message

With the mainstream media almost uniformly hostile toward him, Donald Trump rallied supporters during the presidential campaign by delivering his message on Twitter and a loose network of alternative news sites.

The President-elect's ability to circumvent the main news channels to reach and energize his audience became a key factor in his victory, analysts say.

"Trump had a way of taking to Twitter and could literally change the narrative because he had such a large following," said Alan Rosenblatt, a digital consultant and strategist at Lake Research Partners and Turner4D who opposed Trump.

Donald Trump's ability to circumvent the main news channels to reach and energize his audience through social media was a key factor in his victory, analysts say Dominick Reuter (AFP/File)

The real estate billionaire kept momentum even as major news organizations unearthed embarrassing episodes about his past, including on his finances and sexual conduct.

As mainstream media stepped up their investigations, going so far as to call him a "liar," Trump was able to sustain a counter-narrative on social media used by conservative, or "alt-right," news sites friendly to the Republican candidate.

A network of social media supporters amplified the Trump message, not only reinforcing his vision but also actively seeking to counter and quash messages from anti-Trump forces.

"It's organized digital bullying," Rosenblatt said.

"They would focus in on progressive Democratic tweeters and barrage them and abuse them to try to incite an inappropriate response."

- 'Alternate reality' -

The onslaught of pro-Trump messages on those platforms allowed him to survive the negative coverage, said Gabriel Kahn of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School and a former newspaper correspondent.

"It became possible for him to construct an alternate narrative, I would say an alternate reality," he said.

"In this way, you have untruths and falsehoods that transit through our media ecosystem and become a tidal wave."

Trump's message echoed through the alt-right media that supported his agenda, including Breitbart News, whose chairman Stephen Bannon served as chairman of the candidate's campaign organization.

As a result, fact-checking by traditional media -- which revealed Trump's massive penchant for exaggeration and falsehood -- had less impact than might have been expected.

As online media outlets on both the left and right grow increasingly ideologically driven, the social discourse democracies require becomes limited, Rosenblatt said.

"The health of democracy depends on people being exposed to both sides of an issue," he said.

"These 'filter bubbles' and the idea of customized home pages and news feeds I think hurts democracy. It means people are not debating ideas to arrive at a consensus."

The mainstream media, important for promoting that discourse, has also been seen as failing, Rosenblatt said.

A Gallup survey this year found just 32 percent had confidence in the media's ability "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly."

There is a growing sentiment among conservatives that "the mainstream press is left-of-center and that the conservatives should have their own platforms," Rosenblatt said.

- Faking on Facebook -

Many Trump supporters and conservatives turned to Twitter, Facebook and other social media to spread their messages and counter the news in traditional outlets.

But much of the news on Facebook was fake, media watchers pointed out, compromising the platform as well as confidence in the media.

One local official shared news on Facebook with headlines such as "Hillary Clinton Calling for Civil War If Trump Is Elected" and "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President," said Joshua Benton, director of Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab.

"These are not legit anti-Hillary stories," he wrote in a blog post. "These are imaginary, made up, frauds. And yet Facebook has built a platform for the active dispersal of these lies -- in part because these lies travel really, really well."

The dissemination of such fake news was a key factor in Trump's win, New York Magazine editor Max Read argued.

"The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news," he wrote.

"Of course, lies and exaggerations have always been central to real political campaigns; Facebook has simply made them easier to spread."

Critics say Facebook should act like a media company and actively screen news, something the social media company acknowledged this week.

"We understand there's so much more we need to do, and that is why it's important that we keep improving our ability to detect misinformation," a Facebook statement to the website TechCrunch said.

"We're committed to continuing to work on this issue and improve the experiences on our platform."

A network of social media supporters amplified the Trump message, not only reinforcing his vision but also actively seeking to counter anti-Trump forces Molly Riley (AFP)

Even as news organizations unearthed embarrassing episodes about Donald Trump's past, including sexual conduct, he sustained a counter-narrative on social media Timothy A. Clary (AFP/File)
Former top Chinese cop gets death for murder

A former regional police chief in China was condemned to death on Friday for murder and multiple other offences, a court said, with reports describing his victim as a lover more than three decades his junior.

The woman reportedly survived the first two rounds Zhao Liping fired and fled, before he chased her down in a car and shot her in the head.

Zhao, 64, was found guilty of murder, bribery and possession of firearms and explosives, a court in Taiyuan, the capital of the northern province of Shanxi, said in a statement on its website.

A policeman is seen patrolling a street in Taiyuan, northern China's Shanxi province - (AFP/File)

He was sentenced to death because of the "facts, nature, circumstances and degree of damage to society" of his crimes, it added. He will have an opportunity to appeal the sentence.

Zhao headed the police in Inner Mongolia for seven years until he retired in 2012, and was also a deputy head of the regional People's Political Consultative Conference, a Communist-controlled debating chamber.

He was detained last year in Chifeng on suspicion of killing a 28-year-old woman with whom he "had an intimate relationship" because she wanted to expose his wrongdoings, Chinese media said earlier.
Crew of Vietnam ship abducted off Philippines: govt

Gunmen abducted at least five crewmen of a Vietnamese cargo vessel in southern Philippine waters on Friday, authorities said, an area where Islamic militants are on a kidnapping-for-ransom spree.

The attack brings to at least eight the number of people abducted from vessels in the region over the past week, including an elderly German sailor, raising fears authorities are unable to control the worsening piracy problem.

The MV Royal 16 was sailing less than 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Basilan island, a stronghold of Abu Sayyaf militants, when it was attacked on Friday morning.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (C) presides at a command conference at the Western Mindanao Command (WESMINCOM) headquarters in Zamboanga City , in southern island of Mindanao, after visiting nearby province of Basilan, in July 2016 Kiwi Bulaclac (Presidential Photographers Division/AFP/File)

Two crew members, one of whom was wounded, escaped and were rescued by a local cargo ship in the area, authorities added.

"Sea and naval assets (were) already deployed to search and rescue the said kidnap victims," said regional military spokesman Filemon Tan.

The nationalities of the five crewmen and the identity of the kidnappers were still unknown.

In recent months, the Abu Sayyaf has been accused of kidnapping dozens of Indonesian and Malaysian sailors in waters off the southern Philippines.

On the weekend an Abu Sayyaf commander claimed responsibility for abducting a 70-year-old German sailor and murdering his wife.

In what maritime experts described as a landmark incident, the captain of a South Korean cargo ship and a Filipino crewman were abducted off their vessel, the first such attack on large merchant vessel.

Abu Sayyaf militants this year beheaded two Canadian hostages after demands for millions of dollars were not met. Most of the Indonesian and Malaysian sailors were released after ransoms were reportedly paid.

However two more Indonesian sailors were abducted on November 5.

The Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of militants formed in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, and has earned millions of dollars from kidnappings-for-ransom.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has launched a military offensive to "destroy" the Abu Sayyaf.

But the militants have defied more than a decade of US-backed similar offensives, surviving in their mountainous and jungle-clad southern island strongholds where they have support from local Muslim communities.

The Abu Sayyaf is not the only threat with those near-lawless islands home to other armed gangs and people whose families have been involved in piracy for generations, according to security analysts.
Russia accuses Syria rebels of using chemical weapons in Aleppo

The Russian military said Friday it has evidence of the use of chemical weapons by rebels in Syria's besieged eastern city of Aleppo.

"Experts from the Russian defence ministry have found unexploded artillery ammunition belonging to terrorists which contains toxic substances," the military said in a statement.

"After rapid analysis in a mobile laboratory, we have determined that the toxic substances in the rebels' ammunition are highly likely to be chlorine gas and white phosphorous."

Syrian state media late last month accused rebel groups of having fired shells containing toxic gas into government-held parts of Aleppo Georges Ourfalian (AFP/File)

The ammunition was discovered in the 1070 district on the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo, the statement said.

The Russian news agency Interfax said this zone was recaptured from the rebels by Syrian government troops a few days ago.

A more thorough analysis will be carried out by a Russian military laboratory accredited to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPWC), the Russian defence ministry said.

Syrian state media late last month accused rebel groups of having fired shells containing toxic gas into government-held parts of Aleppo, leaving dozens of people including civilians in need of treatment.

Last month, a joint OPWC panel concluded that Syrian government forces carried out three chlorine gas attacks on villages in 2014 and 2015.

Russia, however, has dismissed the findings of the joint investigative mechanism (JIM) as "unconvincing" and said no sanctions should be imposed on Syria for the chlorine gas attacks.

Using chlorine as a weapon is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in 2013 under pressure from its ally Russia.

Aleppo, Syria's former economic capital, has been divided since 2012 between the western districts held by the regime and those in the east controlled by the rebels.

Russia has conducted a bombing campaign in support of the government of President Bashar al-Assad for more than a year.

But Moscow has suspended its air strikes on rebel-held eastern Aleppo since October 18, after international condemnation over its ferocious bombardment of the city.
Thailand's Crown Prince returns to kingdom: sources

Thailand's Crown Prince flew back to the kingdom on Friday after a fortnight overseas, palace sources confirmed, although there is still no date for when he will officially succeed his father.

Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, 64, left Thailand last month, some two weeks after his father King Bhumibol Adulyadej died ending a seven-decade reign.

His death has sparked mass displays of grief and left the politically-divided nation without a rare pillar of unity.

Thailand's Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn taking part in a ceremony to pay respects to his late father King Bhumibol Adulyadej in Bangkok on October 23, 2016

Although Vajiralongkorn is the named successor, he surprised many and veered from tradition by asking to delay his proclamation as king in order to grieve with the nation, according to the junta that currently runs the country.

The prince, who has yet to attain his father's widespread popularity, spends much of his time overseas, especially in southern Germany.

Two palace sources told AFP the prince flew back to Thailand on Friday morning and would attend a military function in the evening and preside over a graduation ceremony at Bangkok's Thammasat University this weekend.

On Monday he is slated to attend an annual cultural event in Pattani, a Muslim-majority province in Thailand's insurgent-torn far south, according to an official schedule seen by AFP.

The government has not provided a timeline for when he will formally ascend the throne.

But they have sought to tamp down any doubts over succession, suggesting the Crown Prince will be named king in the near future.

Under Thai law, a successor is initially proclaimed king by parliament. He is then coronated once the previous monarch is cremated, often months later.

A strict royal defamation law and layers of official opacity make it difficult to confirm facts about Thailand's monarchy and all but impossible to openly debate its role.

All media based in Thailand must self-censor to avoid falling foul of the lese majeste law, which punishes criticism of the monarchy with up to 15 years in prison per infringement.

Thailand's arch-royalist military government has ramped up use of the law, with a particular focus on online dissent, since coming to power in its 2014 coup.

Authorities and ultra-royalist vigilante groups have further stepped up enforcement since Bhumibol's death.

An initial 30-day mourning period for King Bhumibol ends on November 14, although civil servants and many more will mourn for a year until Bhumibol is cremated.
Six dead, dozens wounded as Afghan Taliban strike German consulate

The death toll from a powerful Taliban truck bombing at the German consulate in Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif city rose to at least six Friday, with more than 100 others wounded in a major militant assault.

The Taliban said the bombing late Thursday, which tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars, was a "revenge attack" for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead.

The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, shearing off the facades of nearby buildings and blowing out windows several miles away.

NATO soldiers walk past the site of an attack targeting the German consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan on November 11, 2016 Farshad Usyan (AFP)

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

NATO said its quick reaction force helped evacuate all 21 staff members of the consulate to Camp Marmal, a German base in Mazar-i-Sharif.

The city's hospitals received bodies of six civilians, including two killed by bullets, said local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez. At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries, he added.

Deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri gave a death toll of seven, including two motorcyclists who were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop. A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added.

"The consulate building has been heavily damaged," the German foreign ministry said in a statement. "Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families."

A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting soon after the attack.

Afghan special forces cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, after the explosion as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations.

President Ashraf Ghani condemned the "barbaric" attack, calling it a crime against humanity.

- America's longest war -

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents routinely exaggerate battlefield claims.

Posting a Google Earth image of the consulate on Twitter, Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.

US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children and triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims' relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

They came after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

The country's worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up air strikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign -- even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.

Map of Afghanistan locating Mazar-i-Sharif, where Taliban attacked the German consulate with a powerful truck bomb on November 10, 2016 - (AFP Graphic)

Afghan special forces cordoned off the German consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, after it was attacked by the Taliban Farshad Usyan (AFP)
Zimbabwe drops charges against dentist who killed Cecil the lion

A Zimbabwean high court has dropped charges against the professional hunter, Theo Bronkhorst, who led the expedition that killed prized lion Cecil last year, his lawyer said Friday.

"The high court has said the charges were flawed and, therefore, should be set aside," lawyer Perpetua Dube told AFP.

She said the judge had ruled Thursday that the charges "did not constitute an offence.

Hunter Theo Bronkhorst leaves the Magistrate's Court in Hwange on July 29, 2015, after proceedings on poaching charges Zinyange Auntony (AFP/File)

"It's a great relief for Mr Bronkhorst," said Dube.

The high court ruling followed an application by Bronkhorst's lawyer for a review of a previous decision by a magistrate's court to have him tried over the 2015 hunt which led to the death of the iconic lion renowned for its distinctive black mane.

The hunt provoked worldwide outrage after it emerged that Cecil not only was a popular attraction for visitors to famed Hwange National Park, but that he wore a collar as part of an Oxford University research project.

Bronkhorst, 53, had been charged with "failing to prevent an illegal hunt" when American trophy hunter, dentist Walter Palmer, paid $55,000 to shoot the lion with a bow and arrow in July last year.

Zimbabwe decided not to charge Palmer after it emerged he had legal papers allowing him to hunt.
Eskom chief resigns over S. Africa graft scandal

The head of South Africa's state-owned power company Eskom announced his resignation on Friday in a corruption scandal that has embroiled President Jacob Zuma.

Brian Molefe became the first person to step down after a report released last week raised allegations of corrupt links between Zuma, ministers, top officials and the Guptas, a wealthy business family.

"I have, in the interest of good corporate governance, decided to leave my employ at Eskom," said Molefe in a statement, adding he would depart at the end of the year.

The head of South Africa's state-owned power company Eskom announced his resignation in a corruption scandal Gianluigi Guercia (AFP/File)

Molefe broke down in tears last week at a press conference where he denied any wrongdoing over accusations in the report, which was drawn up the Public Protector, the country's top watchdog.

The report included allegations that Zuma ensured the Gupta family won huge preferential contracts with state companies such as Eskom.

Cellphone records obtained by investigators showed that Molefe was at or around the Guptas' home in Johannesburg 19 times between August and November 2015, and made scores of phone calls to Ajay Gupta.

The timing of Molefe's contact with the Guptas raised eyebrows as it coincided with a Gupta-owned firm negotiating the purchase of a mine that supplies Eskom with coal.

"This act is not an admission of wrongdoing on my part," Molefe said in his resignation statement.

He said he hoped to prove his innocence and that his name would eventually be cleared.

- Zuma under pressure? -

Economist Peter Montalto, from Nomura International, said Molefe had "no credibility left" after being named in the watchdog's report.

"The rot in Eskom goes much deeper, the whole board needs to be replaced and there are many others there also implicated," Montalto said.

Molefe was appointed Eskom CEO in August 2015, following the suspension of his predecessor Tshediso Matona.

The firm has had a series of leadership changes in the past five years, while the country suffered months of regular blackouts last year.

The main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomed Molefe's resignation, adding it would lay charges against him over alleged corruption.

"He has resigned after we began the process of getting him to come clean under oath in parliament," the party said.

Growing numbers of anti-apartheid veterans, ANC activists, trade unions, civil groups and business leaders have called for President Zuma to resign in recent months.

On Thursday, he easily survived a no-confidence vote in parliament as ruling ANC lawmakers ignored calls for him to be ousted from office.

South Africa's highest court this year found him guilty of violating the constitution after he refused to repay taxpayers' money used to refurbish his private rural house.
UN fears 'ethnic war' in South Sudan, EU boosts refugee funding

The UN's special advisor on preventing genocide, Adama Dieng, said he feared escalating ethnic violence in South Sudan, as the EU offered emergency aid for the swelling number of refugees on Friday.

Speaking in Yumbe in neighbouring Uganda, the EU 's humanitarian aid commissioner offered 78 million euros ($85.2 million) to help the refugees, with 30 million earmarked for Uganda.

"I am truly alarmed by what I saw today," said Christos Stylianides. "I think that the crisis is largely underestimated. The needs are huge and they continue to grow."

South Sudan descended into war in December 2013 after President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup Charles Atiki Lomodong (AFP/File)

Uganda, one of the world's poorest countries, currently hosts 530,000 South Sudanese refugees, 330,000 of whom fled fighting in the world's newest country this year alone.

The UN's Dieng meanwhile warned of "extreme polarisation among some tribal groups, which has increased in certain places" since July's fierce fighting in Juba between President Salva Kiir's largely Dinka soldiers, and his arch-foe Riek Machar's mostly Nuer rebels.

"Inflammatory stereotyping and name-calling have been accompanied by targeted killings and rape of members of particular groups, by violent attacks against individuals or communities on the basis of their perceived political affiliation," the UN advisor said at the close of a week-long visit.

Dieng said that "what began as political conflict has transformed into what could become an outright ethnic war".

"There is a strong risk of violence escalating along ethnic lines with potential for genocide," he added.

"With the stalling of the implementation of the peace agreement, the current humanitarian crisis, stagnating economic and proliferation of arms, all the ingredients are there for escalation of violence."

South Sudan, the world's newest country, gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but plunged into civil war in December 2013, leaving tens of thousands dead and displacing more than 2.5 million people.

A peace deal between Kiir and Machar in August last year had raised hopes of peace, until clashes erupted once again in July in the capital.

Dieng said that in Yei, in the southwest, he had "heard reports of violence that included targeted killings, assault... mutilation and rape by armed men, some in uniform and others not.

"There are cases of barbarous use of machetes which reminds (us) of Rwanda," he added, referring to the 1994 genocide there.

"Genocide is a process, it doesnt happen overnight. And because it is a process and one that takes time... it can be prevented," he added.

"I urge the people of South Sudan to reconcile."

Stylianides urged donors to step up aid while thanking Uganda for its help to the rapidly increasing numbers of people seeking shelter from conflict.

Touring Bidibidi refugee settlement which, since its establishment in August, has swollen to become the third biggest refugee camp in the world, Stylianides said: I promise to continue assistance as long as it takes. You are not alone.

Bidibidi is home to more than 215,000 refugees who each receive a plot of land to cultivate and materials to build a basic shelter. An average of about 2,400 new refuges arrive each day.
Canada eyes Africa deployment for troops

Canada is planning to send 600 troops on a UN peacekeeping mission to Africa for three years, a spokesperson for the defense minister told AFP Friday.

However, the plan still requires cabinet approval, said Jordan Owens, the spokeswoman for Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan.

In a Remembrance Day statement, Sajjan hinted at an imminent start to the mission, saying: "The government is about to ask up to 600 Canadian Armed Forces members to deploy in aid of UN peace-support operations."

A Canadian soldier on HMCS Fredericton docked in Constanta, Romania, on March 13, 2015 Daniel Mihailescu (AFP/File)

The minister recently returned from visiting trouble spots in Africa, most recently Mali, as he mulls where to send soldiers.

He has also traveled to Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In an interview with the Toronto Star newspaper, Sajjan said Canadian troops could be spread among several African countries, where they would help train local troops and support host nations' de-radicalization efforts.

The aim is to have an "enduring" impact, he told the Star.

"These missions, all of them, have the level of risk where peacekeepers have been hurt, they have been killed. And we've been looking at the risk factor in a very serious way," Sajjan said.
For US comedians, Trumpland is no laughing matter

US presidential elections are a gift for comedians -- they offer a seemingly endless stream of material, for months on end.

America's kings of late night regularly pepper their opening monologues with swipes at the candidates, and "Saturday Night Live" becomes must-see TV.

Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin was nothing short of career-defining and Alec Baldwin's take on Donald Trump earned praise -- and quite a few guffaws.

Stephen Colbert learned the 2016 election results on-air, admitting that he "can't put on a happy face on that" Timothy A. Clary (AFP/File)

But after Trump's shock win this week over Hillary Clinton, even the late-night hosts are somber and the laughs are few and far between.

During Trump's run, the jokes practically wrote themselves -- at times, the bombastic Republican almost seemed a caricature of himself, embracing his own inconsistencies and tics.

On Tuesday night, the reality came crashing home.

Stephen Colbert, who built his career on satirizing conservatives during the George W. Bush years and took the place of legend David Letterman at CBS, learned on-air that Trump would likely be the 45th president of the United States.

"I can't put a happy face on that, and that's my job," Colbert admitted bluntly during his special live Election Night broadcast.

The next day, Colbert told viewers: "I'm not sure what to believe about anything anymore."

"This is what it feels like when America is made great again," he said. "I was really hoping it would feel better, because this sucks."

Chelsea Handler -- usually known for her foul-mouthed sex talk -- broke down in tears during her Netflix talk show that aired Wednesday night as she discussed Clinton's loss.

"Like a lot of people in this country, I'm sad, I'm disappointed and I'm confused," the 41-year-old said.

"But if Hillary can make it through a concession speech, then I can make it through a stupid television show."

- Taking it personally -

In his ultimately successful bid for president, Trump hurled near constant criticism at the mainstream media -- and grew increasingly thin-skinned about the jokes made at his expense.

When Jimmy Fallon asked to muss Trump's legendary shock of blond hair earlier in the campaign, he obliged. But when Baldwin started lampooning him weekly on "Saturday Night Live," Trump got fed up.

"Watched Saturday Night Live hit job on me," he wrote on Twitter. "Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!"

It was indeed true that most major networks -- and the late-night hosts on those networks -- expected the veteran Democrat Clinton to win.

Wednesday was something of a rude awakening.

That night, Trevor Noah, a biracial South African comedian who hosts "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, wasted few words on humor.

"I genuinely cannot believe that this happened," he said. "Even the Trumps can't believe this happened."

"Look at his face. Look at that man," Noah said, brandishing a photo the winning Republican had posted on Twitter. "That is the face of a man whose bluff has been called.

"And now that face will be the face that represents America to the world," said Noah, a relative newcomer to the United States. "That is the face that will address the nation after a tragedy.

"That is the face that will command the most powerful military in the world."

- Comic relief -

Amid the overall apocalyptic tone, Fallon -- who appears on NBC -- took a stab at humor: "Republicans hope he'll keep his promise to build a wall, and Democrats hope he'll keep his promise not to accept the election results."

"I know today was a crazy day," he continued in a more somber voice. "Some people are sad. Some people are scared and nervous. Some people are happy.

"This morning I was walking around New York City and this guy came up to me and he said, 'Hey, we're going to need some laughs tonight.'"

Fallon vowed to muster his comedic strength and try do just that.

"My job is to come out here every night and try to make you laugh; take your mind off things for a while."

Over at "Saturday Night Live," Baldwin expected his cameo appearances on the late night variety sketch show would be a temporary gig, and that his run would end following a Clinton win.

Now, Baldwin could end up with a lot more work.

Comedian and host of "Chelsea", Chelsea Handler, broke down in tears following the election, as she discussed Secretary Hillary Clinton's loss Rob Kim (Getty/AFP/File)
Spain king to visit Saudi with sale of warships on agenda

Spain's king will begin his first state visit to Saudi Arabia on Saturday, with the possible sale of five warships to the oil-rich kingdom on top of the agenda, sparking protests from rights groups.

Felipe VI will be accompanied during his three-day visit by Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis and Public Works Minister Inigo de la Serna.

He was invited to visit by Saudi Arabia's King Salman, who acceded to the Saudi throne in January 2015 following the death of his half-brother Abdullah.

Spain's King Felipe VI will visit Saudi Arabis and discuss the signing of a contract with Spanish ship builder Navantia to build five Avante 2200 corvette patrol vessels for the Saudi navy for over two billion euros Raul Arboleda (AFP/File)

Top-selling Spanish daily newspaper El Pais reported this week that "one of the imperatives of the visit" is the signing of a contract with Spanish ship builder Navantia to build five Avante 2200 corvette patrol vessels for the Saudi navy for over two billion euros ($2.2 billion).

This would be "the biggest contract every signed" by the state-owned firm and would likely guarantee jobs for 2,000 people for five years, the newspaper added.

Contacted by AFP, the royal palace declined to comment on the report.

The ongoing sale of military hardware to Saudi Arabia by Western states has been vociferously criticised by rights groups, who have pointed to the use of such equipment in deadly attacks on civilians in Saudi-led Arab coalition airstrikes in Yemen.

Amnesty International on Friday called on Spain's king to block the sale of the warships to the Saudi navy, arguing they could be used in Yemen to carry out "serious violations of international humanitarian law".

"They are bombing hospitals, public schools, health centres, among other infrastructure full of people," the group's director for Spain, Esteban Beltran, said in a video posted on Twitter.

He called on Felipe to use his influence with King Salman "to stop air attacks on civilians in Yemen".

In January other groups including Greenpeace and Oxfam sent an open letter to the Spanish government opposing the possible sale of the warships to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 to support the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi after Huthi rebels overran much of the impoverished country.
Buffett willing to help Trump, says US will move forward

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Friday the US would move forward after a bruising presidential campaign and that he would be happy to advise President-elect Donald Trump if asked.

"I would do that with any president," Buffett, a strong supporter of Trump rival Hillary Clinton, told CNN. "If any president asked me for help in any way, that's part of being a citizen."

Buffett said he was "100 percent" confident in the US, believing the country would ultimately move beyond the vitriolic campaign.

Warren Buffett said he was "100 percent" confident in the US, believing the country would ultimately move beyond the vitriolic presidential campaign that saw Donald Trump emerge as winner Yuri Gripas (AFP/File)

Buffett picked Clinton over Trump because he thought she had better "temperament and judgment," calling the risks of weapons of mass destruction "by far the most important thing."

"It's important that he does" have a good temperament, he said. "And nobody know for sure what does happen if you get a call in the middle of the night."

Buffett, the head of the massive Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate and the world's third wealthiest person, said he was not bothered that Trump's business record includes "some major failures" -- a reference to his multiple casino and hotel bankruptcies.

"Harry Truman went broke in a Haberdashery store near Kansas City or in Kansas City," he said. "He wasn't much of a businessman. He turned out to be a terrific president."

Buffett expressed skepticism that Trump will push forward with some controversial campaign proposals.

Talk of imposing a 35 percent tariff on imports from Mexico or China is "a very bad idea, but I'm not going to say it will cause a recession," Buffett said.

"Any time you start playing with retaliatory type trade things, it's very likely you're going to have the other side play too."

Buffett called Trump's pledge of four percent annual growth a pipe dream, saying "there may be a given year where that happens, but the math is just too extraordinary."
The Trump effect: Wary climate diplomats 'wait and see'

The world expects the United States to uphold commitments under the landmark Paris climate treaty despite Donald Trump's vow to pull out, the incoming head of its UN implementing body told AFP Friday.

"The Paris Agreement is here," Moroccan foreign minister Salaheddine Mezouar, who took over stewardship of the 196-nation UN climate forum from France earlier this week, said in an interview.

"It's entry into force means that governments must face up to their responsibilities."

COP22 president Salaheddine Mezouar delivering a speech during the opening session of the COP22 climate talks in Marrakesh Fadel Senna (AFP/File)

"It would be, I think, extremely difficult to retreat -- there's no turning back," he added.

At UN headquarters in New York, meanwhile, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed confidence that US president-elect Trump will come to understand the "seriousness and urgency" of the deal.

The news that an avowed climate change denier had captured the US White House stunned participants arriving Wednesday at the 12-day talks in Marrakesh, which run from November 7 to 18.

"There are two types of reaction: worry and determination to forge ahead," said Segolene Royal, France's foreign minister.

Delegates from several countries have taken a "wait-and-see" attitude after the victory by the New York real estate developer, who has said that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

"We need to assess the situation when the new government comes into office," in January 2017, said Chen Zhihua, a delegate from China's National Development and Reform Commission. "There are too many uncertainties ahead."

- 'Wait and see' -

Shigeru Ushio, a negotiator from Japan's foreign ministry, also said his country would "wait and see" whether Trump's climate policies will differ from his campaign rhetoric.

But if the United States reneges on a committment to give poor countries 2.5 billion dollars (2.3 billion euros) to help them cope with climate impacts, he added, "that would cause difficulties."

Under the Paris pact, rich countries have pledged at least 100 billion dollars a year starting in 2020.

In annex to the treaty, nations have also submitted voluntary pledges to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that cause dangerous global warming.

The agreement commits nations to collectively capping Earth's average temperature increase at under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

With 1.0C (1.8F) of warming to date, the world has already seen an uptick in deadly storms, droughts, heatwaves and flooding.

Mezouar has not yet reached out to Trump or his team, he told AFP.

"As the president of COP22" -- the acronym for the 22nd meeting of the Conference of the Parties -- "I am waiting with impatience to encounter the new American administration," he told AFP.

"I have absolutely no doubt ... that the United States will pursue its commitments alongside the rest of the international community."

- More ambitious pledges -

A report Thursday by three research groups, however, said the US was likely to miss its emissions reduction targets without new climate policies -- which Trump has promised he would not put in place.

Experts and diplomats here insist that the global market-based transition from a fossil fuels to clean energy is too far advanced to peel back.

But Trump's ascension has shaken hard-won political unity at the UN forum.

This uncertainty makes Mezouar's role even more crucial, said Liz Gallagher, an analyst at London-based thinktank E3G.

"The Moroccans need to be more proactive in driving the process, using all the diplomatic tools at their disposal, to make sure we get a clear outcome," she told AFP.

On Friday, ministers from a dozen nations and negotiating blocs -- including France, Germany, Mexico, Bangladesh, the European Union, and the group of Least Developed Countries -- issued a joint statement affirming their resolve.

"Our commitment to be climate leaders remains steadfast, as is our commitment to work with the whole international community, including the United States," they said.

National carbon-cutting plans submitted under the Paris Agreement go into effect in 2020.

Some ministers arriving next week for a high-level session will announce more ambitious pledges, which still fall far short of what is needed to stave off devastating climate impacts.
Racial tension flares in mostly white Chicago neighborhood

CHICAGO (AP)  A largely white Chicago neighborhood that many police officers and firefighters call home took center stage this week in the city's tensions over gun violence, race and policing as protests erupted following the fatal police shooting of a black man.

Some residents used racial slurs, revved motorcycle engines and yelled "go home" Tuesday night as protesters with the Black Lives Matter movement demanded an investigation into the death of 25-year-old Joshua Beal. It was the second confrontation in Mount Greenwood since Beal, who police say was armed, was shot Saturday in what police said was a road rage incident following a funeral.

When the latest protest erupted, as Donald Trump was being elected president, residents of the southwest Chicago neighborhood expressed the same kind of fears  often using racially charged and profanity-laced language  that the country saw voiced among the white working class audiences that clamored to Trump's rallies in recent months.

Black Lives Matter activist Jedidah Brown, right, confers with Father Michael Pfleger Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, before a march in the wake of the fatal shooting of Joshua Beal in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood of Chicago. The predominantly white neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side has been rocked by confrontations between protesters and police supporters for the second time since the fatal shooting of a black man by police over the weekend. (E. Jason Wambsgans//Chicago Tribune via AP)

When protesters tried to conduct a prayer, some residents shouted "CPD, CPD" in support of the Chicago Police Department.

"I think there is a concern about protecting the neighborhood. But the larger concern from some people is protecting the neighborhood from people who don't look like them," said John Lyons, who is white and lives in Mount Greenwood with his wife and two young daughters.

"It is a very ugly side to our neighborhood and our community," Lyons said.

Unlike some of the largely black neighborhoods that have borne the brunt of the city's violence that has left hundreds dead and thousands injured this year, Mount Greenwood has very little crime. A quiet community on the outer edge of Chicago, it's a neighborhood of neat homes and small family businesses.

There have been just 14 robberies and not a single homicide in the last year in the neighborhood, according to statistics compiled by the Chicago Tribune. The police district responsible for Mount Greenwood has seen fewer than half the number of homicides this year than the district to the immediate northeast.

Over the years, Mount Greenwood has attracted residents looking for a safe atmosphere to raise their families in the city. Many are firefighters, police officers and other city employees.

That feeling of safety was shattered when an off-duty police officer fatally shot Beal, residents said. Investigators said Beal was armed with a handgun during a melee sparked by a road rage incident involving Beal and others who had just left a funeral in their car.

The incident also led authorities to arrest the dead man's brother on allegations that he attacked a police officer, tried to disarm him and threatened to kill him.

"Who brings a gun to a funeral?" asked an incredulous Peggy Hederman, who has owned a Lindy's Chili & Gertie's Ice Cream franchise in the neighborhood for a quarter century.

When protesters arrived demanding an investigation and the release of any video of the shooting  a common request since the city was forced last year to release video of a white officer fatally shooting a black teenager 14 times in 2014  residents confronted them.

"I think they just feel they had to stand up for the policemen that are in the community and serve the community," Hederman said. "You do feel around here a connection to the police (because) they're your neighbors."

Ja'Mal Green, a black activist who took part in the Tuesday protest, said what unfolded that night reminded him of watching Martin Luther King Jr. marching across his television screen.

"To see them so openly be racist to our faces, to tell us to go back home to the ghetto," he said, "felt like we were back in those '60s videos."

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a white Roman Catholic priest who joined Green and others at the Tuesday night protest, said he had not felt "that kind of hatred" since a protest march decades ago in Chicago in which King was struck in the head with a rock.

"A police officer said, 'We've got to get you out of here. They hate you and I don't think we can protect you,'" Pfleger said.

Black Lives Matter demonstrators and supporters of Joshua Beal, who was shot to death by an off duty Chicago police officer, and a group supporting Blue Lives Matter gather Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood of Chicago. The predominantly white neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side has been rocked by confrontations between protesters and police supporters for the second time since the fatal shooting of a black man by police over the weekend. (E. Jason Wambsgans//Chicago Tribune via AP)

A group supporting Blue Lives Matter gathers in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood, in Chicago, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016 where Joshua Beal, who was shot to death by an off duty Chicago police officer on Saturday. The predominantly white neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side has been rocked by confrontations between protesters and police supporters for the second time since the fatal shooting of a black man by police over the weekend. (E. Jason Wambsgans//Chicago Tribune via AP)

Police move activist Quovadis Green from the crowd during a rally Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, in the wake of an altercation that led to the fatal shooting of Joshua Beal in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood of Chicago. The predominantly white neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side has been rocked by confrontations between protesters and police supporters for the second time since the fatal shooting of a black man by police over the weekend. (E. Jason Wambsgans//Chicago Tribune via AP)
UK police bail driver in tram derailment that killed 7

LONDON (AP)  British police say the driver of a tram that derailed in London, killing seven people, has been released on bail.

The 42-year-old man, who has not been publicly named, was arrested after the crash on suspicion of manslaughter. British Transport Police said Thursday he had been bailed until May while the investigation continues.

The tram came off the rails while rounding a tight curve in south London's Croydon area early Wednesday. Seven people were killed and more than 50 injured.

Work continues at the scene where tram derailed killing a number of people in Croydon south London Thursday Nov. 10, 2016 . The tram derailed while rounding a tight curve in a rainstorm in south London Wednesday, police said. (Steve Parsons/PA via AP)

Emergency workers labored for hours to free several people trapped in the wreckage.

Accident investigators say the tram appears to have been "traveling at a significantly higher speed" than the permitted 12 miles per hour (20 kph). One theory under investigation is whether the driver fell asleep.

A photo issued by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch of the tram which derailed near the Sandilands stop in Croydon, London, Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016. Several people were killed and more than 50 injured when a tram derailed in south London during a heavy rainstorm before dawn Wednesday, police said. Emergency workers worked for hours to free five people trapped in the wreckage of the two-carriage tram that tipped on its side next to an underpass. (RAIB via AP)
The Latest: Coast Guard pilot honored for Pacific rescue

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  The Latest on a Coast Guard pilot being honored for helping rescue nine colleagues whose cargo plane crashed in 1982 (all times local):

6:40 p.m.

A Coast Guard pilot has been honored for helping rescue nine colleagues whose cargo plane crashed on a hillside on the western Aleutian (uh-LOO'-shun) Island of Attu off Alaska in 1982.

This Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016 selfie photo provided by retired U.S. Coast Guard Capt. William Peterson shows Peterson in Mystic, Conn. Peterson will be inducted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, into the Wall of Gallantry at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. Now living in Richland, Wash., Peterson will be honored for helping rescue nine colleagues whose cargo plane crashed on a hillside on the western Aleutian Island of Attu off Alaska in 1982. He previously received the military's Distinguished Flying Cross. (William Peterson via AP)

Capt. William Peterson was inducted Thursday into the Wall of Gallantry at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. He previously received the military's Distinguished Flying Cross.

The now-retired resident of Richland, Washington, flew a rescue helicopter in heavy fog and high winds to get to the crew of the Coast Guard plane that crashed while trying to land at a base on Attu.

Peterson and his crew rescued five victims by trekking a mile up the hill and carrying them back down on stretchers to the helicopter.

The nine people who were rescued all survived. Two other crew members died.

___

12:34 a.m.

A Coast Guard pilot is being honored for helping rescue nine colleagues whose cargo plane crashed on a hillside on the western Aleutian (uh-LOO'-shun) Island of Attu off Alaska in 1982.

Capt. William Peterson will be inducted Thursday into the Wall of Gallantry at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. He previously received the military's Distinguished Flying Cross.

The now-retired resident of Richland, Washington, flew a rescue helicopter in heavy fog and high winds to get to the crew of the Coast Guard plane that crashed while trying to land at a base on Attu.

Peterson and his crew rescued five victims by trekking a mile up the hill and carrying them back down on stretchers to the helicopter.
Couple who hired Irish nanny awarded $4M over baby's death

WOBURN, Mass. (AP)  A Boston couple who say their Irish nanny killed their 1-year-old daughter have been awarded $4 million in damages in their wrongful-death lawsuit against her.

The Boston Globe reports (http://bit.ly/2fBlxMM ) a judge awarded the damages Thursday to Sameer Sabir (suh-BEHR') and Nada Siddiqui (sihd-EE'-kee), whose daughter died in their Harvard Square apartment in 2013.

A murder charge against nanny Aisling (ASH'-ling) Brady McCarthy was dropped last year after a medical examiner revised the original homicide ruling and said baby Rehma Sabir's (REM'-uh suh-BEHRZ') manner of death was "undetermined."

McCarthy was deported to Ireland afterward. Her lawyer called the prosecution a "disgrace."

The parents' lawyer is Democratic former state Attorney General Martha Coakley. She says McCarthy doesn't have $4 million but the parents want to prevent her from profiting from a movie or book deal.

___
Shoeless, shirtless, breathless, Aussie lawmakers still vote

BRISBANE, Australia (AP)  Half-dressed, panting and disheveled, the lawmakers jolted awake by a middle-of-the-night vote were applauded by colleagues as they raced into an Australian state Parliament.

The Queensland lawmakers were quite the sight as they ran onto the floor of Parliament in Brisbane in bare feet, shorts and T-shirts on Thursday. One lawmaker managed to throw on a jacket but lacked a shirt.

The vote was called suddenly about 2:30 a.m. because opposition lawmaker Jeff Seeney was refused permission to give an unscheduled speech.

In this image made from Nov. 10, 2016, video provided by Queensland State Parliament, lawmakers arrive at the Australian state Parliament in Brisbane, Australia. Half-dressed, panting and disheveled, the lawmakers jolted awake by a middle-of-the-night vote were applauded by colleagues as they raced into an Australian state Parliament. Lawmakers ran onto the chamber floor in bare feet and shorts. (Queensland State Parliament via AP)

Several lawmakers caught unaware rushed back to the chamber from a nearby accommodation block in various stages of undress.

Lawmakers who were not caught napping laughed and applauded their panting colleagues while a government minister questioned Speaker Peter Wellington whether the shirtless man in a jacket complied with dress regulations.

Wellington allowed the irregular attire and advised lawmakers to get to the chamber to vote as quickly as possible.
10 Things to Know for Friday - 11 November 2016

Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Friday:

1. TRUMP GOES ON WASHINGTON VICTORY TOUR

The president-elect called President Obama a "very good man" during a cordial White House meeting, and huddled with Republican leaders.

Assistant Chief Brent Masey, of the Highway 58 Fire Department in Harrison, Tenn., looks up as a helicopter carrying fire retardant flies over as Masey keeps watch on a wildfire Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, in Soddy-Daisy, Tenn. Federal authorities say warmer-than-average temperatures and no rainfall are deepening a drought that's sparking forest fires across the Southeastern U.S. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

2. TRUMP BUCKS PROTOCOL OF ALLOWING PRESS POOL TO TRAIL HIM

He kept America in the dark about his earliest conversations and decisions about his incoming government.

3. WHAT OFF-MARK POLLING AHEAD OF ELECTION DAY MEANS FOR PREDICTIONS

It has forced many to question not just political polling, but other facets of life that are being informed and directed by data.

4. IRAQI TROOPS SLOW MOSUL ADVANCE TO REGROUP, CLEAR NEIGHBORHOODS

Soldiers are searching for any IS militants trying to sneak out among the more than fleeing 34,000 civilians.

5. FIREFIGHTERS FROM ACROSS US BATTLE APPALACHIAN WILFIRES

The blazes burned amid a relentless drought that has turned pine trees into torches and forced evacuations in dozens of communities.

6. WHO THE TRUMP VICTORY TRAIN MAY HAVE LEFT BEHIND

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory trailed in a still too-close-to-call race that played out amid anger over the state's transgender bathroom law.

7. WHAT A CALIFORNIA TEEN IS DOING FOR AGING WWII COMBAT VETS

Rishi Sharma, 19, is on a mission to interview a World War II combat vet every day to ensure their legacy is not forgotten.

8. POLICE SAY LOUISIANA COLLEGE STUDENT ADMITS FABRICATING ASSAULT REPORT

She had claimed she was assaulted and robbed of her Muslim headscarf by two men, one of whom she described as wearing a white "Trump" hat.

9. GUNMAN FATALLY SHOOTS PENNSYLVANIA POLICE OFFCER, WOUNDS ANOTHER

The gunman, who had a history of domestic abuse, and a woman were later found dead.

10. GRAND JURY INDICTS AARON SCHOCK ON WIRE FRAUD, THEFT

The former Illinois congressman had resigned amid scrutiny of lavish spending  including a "Downton Abbey"-style redecorating of his office.

President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands following their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Oregon is epicenter as Trump protests surge across nation

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  Another night of nationwide protests against Donald Trump's election came to a head in Portland, where thousands marched and some smashed store windows, lit firecrackers and sparked a dumpster blaze. Police termed the protest a riot and used "less lethal munitions" to help clear the streets.

Some 4,000 protesters surged into the downtown area late Thursday night with chants like "we reject the president-elect!"

Officers began physically pushing back against the crowd that at times threw objects at them as midnight approached, arresting several people and using flash-bang devices and types of smoke or tear gas to force people to disperse.

A driver's windshield was damaged after she drove in the area with protesters demonstrating against Tuesday's U.S. presidential election results, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, in Portland, Ore. President-elect Donald Trump fired back on social media after demonstrators in both red and blue states hit the streets for another round of protests, showing outrage over the Republican's unexpected win. (Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP)

After several orders to leave, police said officers used "less lethal munitions," such as pepper spray and rubber projectiles. Live video footage showed officers firing what appeared to be the non-lethal items. It wasn't immediately clear if anyone was hit.

Protest number continued to dwindle through the night and as the early morning hours wore on, police announced to remaining clusters of protesters to immediately disperse or be "subject to arrest and the use of riot-control agents." Police said they made 26 arrests.

Around the country from New York to Chicago to California, in red states as well as blue, hundreds of demonstrators marched through streets, many for the third straight night though in somewhat smaller numbers.

Trump himself fired back late Thursday, tweeting: "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!"

In Denver, protesters managed to shut down Interstate 25 near downtown Denver briefly Thursday night. Police said demonstrators made their way onto the freeway and traffic was halted in the northbound and southbound lanes for about a half-hour. Protesters also briefly shut down interstate highways in Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

In San Francisco's downtown, high-spirited high school students marched through, chanting "not my president" and holding signs urging a Donald Trump eviction. They waved rainbow banners and Mexican flags, as bystanders in the heavily Democratic city high-fived the marchers from the sidelines.

"As a white, queer person, we need unity with people of color, we need to stand up," said Claire Bye, a 15-year-old sophomore at Academy High School. "I'm fighting for my rights as an LGBTQ person. I'm fighting for the rights of brown people, black people, Muslim people."

In New York City, a large group of demonstrators once again gathered outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue Thursday night. They chanted angry slogans and waved banners bearing anti-Trump messages.

"You got everything straight up and down the line," demonstrator David Thomas said. "You got climate change, you got the Iran deal. You got gay rights, you got mass deportations. Just everything, straight up and down the line, the guy is wrong on every issue."

In Philadelphia, protesters near City Hall held signs bearing slogans like "Not Our President," ''Trans Against Trump" and "Make America Safe For All."

About 500 people turned out at a protest in Louisville, Kentucky and in Baltimore, hundreds of people marched to the stadium where the Ravens were playing a football game.

Hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside Trump Tower in Chicago and a growing group was getting into some shoving matches with police in Oakland, California.

Mostly peaceful protests also surged again in Los Angles. City News Service reported that dozens of protesters were arrested around midnight when they refused to budge from an area.

As expected, the demonstrations prompted some social media blowback from Trump supporters accusing protesters of sour grapes or worse, though there were no significant counter-protests.

Trump supporters said the protesters were not respecting the democratic process.

As of Thursday, Democrat Hillary Clinton was leading Trump in votes nationwide 47.7 percent to 47.5 percent, but Trump secured victory in the Electoral College.

___

Jablon reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Deepti Hajela in New York, Janie Har in San Francisco and Lisa Baumann in Seattle contributed to this report.

Protesters march on their way to Waterfront Park in Portland, Ore., on the third day of protests over the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. President-elect Donald Trump fired back on social media after demonstrators in both red and blue states hit the streets for another round of protests, showing outrage over the Republican's unexpected win. (Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP)

A protester holds up a sign in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016 at Jefferson Square Park in Louisville Ky. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

Protesters holds up signs in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory as they march from Jefferson Square Park, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016 in Louisville Ky. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

A protesters unhappy with the presidential election blocks traffic on JFK Blvd. as they march between cars on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, in Philadelphia. (Charles Fox/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP)

Protest organizer Mallie Feltner speaks to the crowd gathered in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016 At Jefferson Square Park in Louisville Ky. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

A protester holds up a sign in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016 at Jefferson Square Park in Louisville Ky. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

A protester holds up an upside down flag, an international symbol of distress, in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016 at Jefferson Square Park in Louisville Ky. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

Protesters gather in downtown Chicago as they protest the election of President-elect Donald Trump, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. Two days after Trump's election as president, the divisions he exposed only showed signs of widening as many thousands of protesters flooded streets across the country to condemn him. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Protesters gather in downtown Chicago as they protest the election of President-elect Donald Trump, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. Two days after Trump's election as president, the divisions he exposed only showed signs of widening as many thousands of protesters flooded streets across the country to condemn him. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Protesters march in front of Trump Tower in downtown Chicago as they protest the election of President-elect Donald Trump, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. Two days after Trump's election as president, the divisions he exposed only showed signs of widening as many thousands of protesters flooded streets across the country to condemn him. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Protesters gather in downtown Chicago as they protest the election of President-elect Donald Trump, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. Two days after Trump's election as president, the divisions he exposed only showed signs of widening as many thousands of protesters flooded streets across the country to condemn him. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Protesters march in front of Trump Tower in downtown Chicago as they protest the election of President-elect Donald Trump, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. Two days after Trump's election as president, the divisions he exposed only showed signs of widening as many thousands of protesters flooded streets across the country to condemn him. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

A protester holds a sign during a protest against the election of President-elect Donald Trump in Chicago, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. Two days after Trump's election as president, the divisions he exposed only showed signs of widening as many thousands of protesters flooded streets across the country to condemn him. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Mission High School students Hope Robertson, right, yells as she protests with other high school students in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory in front of City Hall in San Francisco, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

A protester holds up a sign in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016 at Jefferson Square Park in Louisville Ky. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

Protesters gather at Rosa Parks Circle in Grand Rapids, Mich., Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory. (Cory Morse/The Grand Rapids Press via AP)

Ashley Aviles takes part in a protest at Rosa Parks Circle in Grand Rapids, Mich., Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory. "I'm sad for America that the majority ignores the sexist bullying," she said. (Cory Morse/The Grand Rapids Press via AP)

Donald J. Trump supporters, Mark Bowman, center, and Mike Bush, right, argue with protesters in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory at Rosa Parks Circle in Grand Rapids, Mich., Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (Cory Morse/The Grand Rapids Press via AP)

Protesters gather in Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Ore., the third night of protests over the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. President-elect Donald Trump fired back on social media after demonstrators in both red and blue states hit the streets for another round of protests, showing outrage over the Republican's unexpected win. (Mark Graves/The Oregonian/OregonLive.com via AP)

Protesters cross the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, Ore., on the third day of protests over the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. President-elect Donald Trump fired back on social media after demonstrators in both red and blue states hit the streets for another round of protests, showing outrage over the Republican's unexpected win. (Jim Ryan/The Oregonian via AP)
At least 13 workers die in garment factory fire in India

NEW DELHI (AP)  A fire that broke out in the basement of a garment factory trapped and killed at least 13 workers as they slept early Friday in the building just outside New Delhi, a government official said.

Nine other workers were injured, four of them seriously, Uttar Pradesh state official Naresh Mathur said.

The factory was in a converted house in the industrial town of Sahibabad, and had a narrow stairway into the basement where the workers slept.

Locals crowd outside a residential building used as a garment factory, which was gutted in a fire in the outskirts of New Delhi, India

A dozen fire engines doused the flames after battling them for several hours. The cause of the fire is being investigated.

Factory fires are common in India, where safety enforcement is lax.

Locals crowd outside a residential building used as a garment factory, which was gutted in a fire in the outskirts of New Delhi, India, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The fire, that broke out at the garment factory basement, trapped and killed more than a dozen workers as they slept in the building. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

Locals alleged that there was a long delay in response time of the emergency services
Trump likely to try to reverse Obama environment initiatives

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP)  President-elect Donald Trump has not minced words about his approach to environment and energy policy: He loathes regulation and wants to increase the use of coal, offshore drilling and fracking.

Trump has said he believes climate change is a hoax and that he would "cancel" U.S. involvement in the landmark Paris Agreement on global warming.

While he has been vague about precise policies, Trump's election likely means trouble for some of President Barack Obama's signature environmental initiatives, environmentalists and policy analysts say.

FILE- In this May 5, 2016 photo, Coal miners wave signs as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Charleston, W.Va. Trump's election could signal the end of many of President Barack Obama's signature environmental initiatives. Trump has said he loathes regulation and wants to use more coal and expand offshore drilling and hydraulic fracturing. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

They say it's probable that Trump's administration will seek to weaken or kill the Clean Power Plan, a cornerstone Obama policy meant to reduce carbon pollution from the nation's power plants as part of an effort to combat climate change.

The Clean Power Plan is being challenged in federal court, and if it survives, Trump could move to scuttle it. But not without a fight.

"We don't consider the CPP dead. We have many tools to help preserve it," said David Goldston, director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "He can't just snap his fingers and wish away regulations. There'd be a backlash, which would make Congress think twice."

Any move to back out of the Clean Power Plan or the Paris Agreement could be extremely unpopular moves, environmentalists argue. Polls have shown a majority of voters in at least two states believe global warming is a serious problem.

An exit poll conducted for The Associated Press and television networks found that about half of Trump voters in Florida, a state he carried, agreed that climate change was a serious problem. In Maine, just over half of Trump supporters also agreed, while about four in 10 disagreed.

Trump also has vowed to tap into America's coal reserves in an effort to put the shrinking energy sector back to work. In a speech in the Bakken shale fields of North Dakota, he also said he would increase hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the nation's shale and natural gas reserves to further remove any dependence on foreign energy sources.

Industry advocates are buoyed by the possibilities presented by Trump's win.

"We look forward to working with the new administration" on issues such as opening more public land and offshore areas to oil and gas drilling, building more energy infrastructure and reducing environmental regulations, American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard said Thursday. He would not say whether he supported a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

Likewise, the coal industry believes Trump "understands the urgent need to rein in the Washington bureaucracy and sweeping, excessive regulations" to protect coal jobs in an industry where sharply falling demand for coal has led to permanent plant closures, the American Coal Council said.

"The coal sector has been devastated by lower demand and job loss in recent years due to the mounting impact of regulations pointed squarely at our industry," American Coal Council CEO Betsy Monseu said.

Some question whether it would make economic sense for the U.S. to attempt to increase the use of coal, a fuel being phased out of the energy picture due to its pollution and falling prices of renewables such as solar and wind.

"Coal is not coming back," said Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director. "Ask investors on Wall Street, or regulators at the state and local level who are choosing solar and wind because of basic economics."

As for offshore drilling, Trump could target the Atlantic and Arctic: two areas the Obama administration had made off-limits for oil leases in the immediate future. While the Obama administration has moved to restrict drilling in waters off the Eastern Seaboard and Alaska, Trump has been vague on whether he would support reopening these areas to drilling, saying he backs it when it "can be done responsibly."

Environmentalists said Wednesday they hope Trump concludes opening the Atlantic and Arctic to offshore drilling is a bad business decision.

"In the Atlantic, we hope he will recognize the strong opposition from the business community, which has mounted a concerted campaign to protect its fishing and tourism industries against the interest of the oil industry," said Jacqueline Savitz of Oceana, a group opposed to offshore drilling. "In the Arctic, it's impossible to respond to an oil spill, with extreme cold, floating ice, darkness much of the year and no response facilities."

Concerns over the incoming administration's environmental approach were not confined to policy.

Some climate scientists expressed concern that the Trump administration could reduce government's efforts to study climate change. For example, some Republicans have long wanted to stop NASA's role in studying earth science and climate change  a key contribution to scientific understanding of the issue that helps drive policy decisions.

Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist, said in an email that the agency's contributions are extremely important to the nation's success.

"Part of this investment includes trying to better understand how and why our environment is changing and the implications for the American people, as well as people all over the world," Abdalati wrote. "No one can argue that there is tremendous value in knowing what tomorrow will bring."

___

Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein in Oklahoma City and Tammy Webber in Chicago contributed to this report.
IMF approves $12 billion loan to salvage Egypt's economy

CAIRO (AP)  The International Monetary Fund said on Friday that its executive board has approved a three-year bailout totaling $12 billion to Egypt, to support the country's ailing economy  a move intended to restore investor confidence and raise the country's foreign reserves. Even with the loan, economic challenges remain ahead.

The approval comes almost a week after the Egyptian government floated its currency and raised fuel prices in order to qualify for the loan. These painful measures earned praise from the IMF and the international business community, but caused price hikes for an already frustrated cash-strapped population, with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi now risking a serious political backlash.

The IMF made the announcement on Friday and said the loan aims to help Egypt "restore macroeconomic stability and promote inclusive growth." It added that Egypt will receive a first installment of $2.75 billion immediately.

Days earlier, Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief, described Egypt's reform program as "ambitious" and said it will put the country on a "sustainable path and achieve job-rich growth."

Tarek Amer, the head of Egypt's Central Bank, was quoted by the state-run MENA news agency as saying that the first installment has arrived at the bank and increased foreign reserves to $23.5 billion. Egypt had $36 billion in reserves before the 2011 uprising. The government announced earlier that it's targeting an additional $7 billion loan annually from other lenders in order to secure over 30 billion of funds needed in the coming three years.

Years of unrest following the ouster of longtime autocratic President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 left Egypt's economy in shambles. The vital tourism sector dried up over fears of terrorism, overseas remittances dropped because of low oil prices, and Suez Canal revenues diminished because of a decline in global trade. Investment and business activity also stalled, with inflation hitting 14 percent and unemployment 13 percent while the percentage of the unemployed youth is around 30 percent. Nearly half of the population is below poverty line; the budget deficit currently stands at nearly 12 percent of gross domestic product while the current account deficit is at almost 7 percent.

A country with at least 90 million people, Egypt is heavily dependent on imports, not just of staple food items, but industrial components and raw materials to keep the manufacturing sector going. Much of the imports needed by the private sector are financed by dollars bought on the black market.

Before devaluation, a thriving black market led the dollar to surge to a rate of 19 Egyptian pounds  compared to 8.8 in the banks. Egyptians witnessed some tough scenes as a result: like mothers holding crying babies and angry men blocking a Cairo main street over a shortage of subsided baby formula. Basic commodities like sugar all but disappeared from shops, and international airlines such as the Royal Dutch Airlines suspended operations over heavy restrictions imposed by the Central Bank on the transfer of foreign currency out of Egypt.

When the Central Bank devalued the pound to 13 to the dollar, and then floated it completely last week, the pound traded at around 16 to the dollar on Friday.

For decades, Egyptian leaders have balked from sealing IMF loans for fear of the social unrest. In preparation for the painful measures, the government launched a public campaign on TV and with billboards and street signs. The campaign's main slogan is: "Oh, Egypt, with bold reforms, we shorten the road."

However, the public campaign has failed to quell public rage caused by prices hikes. El-Sissi faced serious criticism for failing to live up to his promises, foremost that of improving living conditions. The army chief-turned-president led the military ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi followed by a heavy security crackdown on large protests.

Some of the criticism was also directed at el-Sissi's mega projects for wasting millions of dollars . These included expansion of the Suez Canal, building a new administrative capital, reclaiming 1.5 million acres in the desert, a nationwide network of roads, and the construction of cheap housing.

A call for mass protests dubbed "the revolution of the poor" against the latest economic measures faltered on Friday as Egyptian security forces heavily deployed on the streets of Cairo and across the country. Authorities have banned all unauthorized demonstrations and have routinely responded to protests with lethal force.

Political parties for the most part distanced themselves from the Friday protest call, and authorities have accused Islamist groups like the banned Muslim Brotherhood of engineering the protests to cause chaos.

In a set of Q&As posted on the IMF website, the organization said that it hasn't demanded that Egypt cut food subsidies, and that the government is planning to increase expenditure on food and cash given to the poor and low-income families.

"The IMF supports the authorities in looking to reprioritize within the budget to protect vulnerable and poor households from the impact of food inflation," it said. "Social protection is a cornerstone in the government's reform program."

The latest measures, the IMF said, will cause short-term inflation.

"The move to a flexible exchange rate could increase inflation as imports will become more expensive," it said, but added that the impact will be limited and that the Central Bank is working to keep inflation "under control."

Cairo called on the U.S.-based global lender as a last resort, after having exhausted billions of dollars in aid from wealthy Gulf Arab nations recently humbled by declining oil prices  and now turned off by persistent bureaucratic hurdles to investing in Egypt.
Cyprus expects approval for first casino resort

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP)  A Cypriot government official says he expects the Melco-Hard Rock Resorts Cyprus consortium to be issued a license to build the east Mediterranean island's first integrated casino resort before the end of the year.

Deputy Minister Constantinos Petrides told The Associated Press on Friday that a final assessment of the consortium's successful bid has to be completed before the license is issued.

The consortium, made up of Melco International Developmment Ltd, Seminole HR Holdings LLC (Hard Rock) and CNS Group, was selected over two other bidders that were short-listed for the final phase of the tender process.

Petrides said the investment will be a boon for the economy of Cyprus which successfully concluded a three-year, multibillion euro rescue program in March.
South Korean police book 15 over animal smuggling

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Korean police have booked 15 people for allegedly smuggling endangered animals from Thailand and showing them at small zoos or to children at kindergartens and daycare centers, officials said Friday.

Police in the port city of Busan seized 22 animals including Siamese crocodiles and slow loris monkeys, according to a city police department official who didn't want to be named, citing office rules.

The official said most of the animals were bought from Thailand in 2014 by a 38-year-old man identified only by his surname, Kim.
Iran's FM in Prague to discuss business, nuclear cooperation

PRAGUE (AP)  Iran's foreign minister visited the Czech capital of Prague to talk business Friday, including the development of a nuclear program after the sanctions against his country were lifted.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif's visit comes just six months after the head of Iran's nuclear program met Czech leaders in May to discuss developing bilateral nuclear cooperation.

Iran is seeking help from European nations to improve its civilian nuclear program. The Czechs heavily rely on nuclear energy and plan to build more reactors.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif addresses media during a press conference in Prague, Czech Republic, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Zarif and Czech counterpart Lubomir Zaoralek gave no details after their meeting.

"It's a promising field," Zaoralek said about the nuclear cooperation. "There's an interest on both sides to cooperate."

Accompanied by a delegation of Iranian business leaders, Zarif was also to meet Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka and the speaker of Parliament's lower house, Jan Hamacek.

Last year's landmark nuclear deal between Iran and world powers lifted painful international sanctions in exchange for Iran curbing its nuclear activities. Iran has denied ever seeking atomic weapons, insisting its nuclear program is for purely civilian purposes.

"Iran has been implementing its part of the bargain," Zarif said. He claimed the United States has not fully implemented its part.

Zarif called it "a reasonable agreement, good for everybody. That's our preference... (but it) doesn't mean we do not have other options."
Pro-Russian candidate faces anti-graft rival in Moldova vote

CHISINAU, Moldova (AP)  Moldovans directly elect their president on Sunday for the first time in 20 years. Both candidates in the presidential runoff are economists in their 40s, but the similarities end there. Here's a look at them and the issues:

WHERE IN THE WORLD?

Moldova is a landlocked, agricultural nation of 3.5 million, bordering Ukraine and European Union member Romania. In politics, there's widespread public anger over high-level official corruption in one of Europe's poorest states  particularly about $1 billion that was looted from Moldovan banks just before the 2014 election. More than 30 mainly junior officials are being investigated over the heist but many say the probe is too slow and hasn't targeted senior figures.

FILE - This is a Sunday, Oct. 30, 2016 file photo of the leader of Socialists Party Igor Dodon as he casts his ballot, holding his son Nikolai while his wife Galina watches, at a polling station during the presidential elections in Chisinau, Moldova. Moldovans will directly elect their president on Sunday Nov. 13, 2016 for the first time in 20 years. The favorite is Socialist Igor Dodon who wants the ex-Soviet republic to return to the Russian orbit. Rival Maia Sandu believes the agricultural nation of 3.5 million, bordering Ukraine and European Union member Romania, would secure a more prosperous future in Europe. (AP Photo/Roveliu Buga, File)

___

WHICH WAY TO GO?

Igor Dodon, the favorite in the presidential race, wants the ex-Soviet republic to return to the Russian orbit, while rival Maia Sandu believes the country would secure a more prosperous, predictable future in Europe.

___

WHAT IS DODON'S PLAN?

Dodon is trying to channel Donald Trump's U.S. victory into Moldova's runoff. The 41-year-old who paints himself as a traditional family man is harnessing anger with the pro-European government that has been in office since 2009. Socialist Dodon plans to cozy up to Russia, which has punished Moldova with a trade ban on Moldovan wine, fruit and vegetables for signing an association agreement with the EU.

Dodon says Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, is Russian territory, a comment that didn't go down well in Ukraine. But he's hedged his bets recently, saying he also seeks good relations with the EU and Ukraine.

Dodon is backed by the pro-Moscow branch of the Moldovan Orthodox Church. Despite Trump's three marriages and two divorces, Dodon calls Trump "a supporter of Christian values."

___

WHAT DOES SANDU WANT?

Ex-World Bank economist Sandu is running on an anti-corruption ticket, which resonates with many after $1 billion bank heist. Supported by young voters and Moldovans working in Western Europe, Sandu, 44, has been criticized by an Orthodox cleric for being unmarried and childless.

Sandu is known for her uncompromising approach to corruption, which cost her the nomination to be prime minister in July 2015. She was education minister from 2012 to 2015, winning praise for reforms, such as updating textbooks and introducing cameras into exam rooms to stamp out rampant cheating.

Sandu says a crackdown on graft will lead to improved living standards, decent wages and pensions above subsistence level.

___

HIGH TURNOUT HELPS WHO?

Sandu's best chance of a victory is a high voter turnout. Some 800,000 Moldovans work abroad and send remittances back home. They can vote if they go to their local embassies or other special voting stations.

___

WHAT DOES THE PRESIDENT DO?

The Moldovan president represents the country abroad, sets foreign policy and appoints judges, but needs parliamentary approval for major decisions. The change in the way the president is being elected, however, is expected to bring the post more authority.

___

Alison Mutler in Bucharest, Romania contributed to this report.
French president, Britain's Prince Harry mark Armistice Day

PARIS (AP)  French President Francois Hollande and Britain's Prince Harry paid their respects Friday to the fallen of World War I, marking 98 years since the Allies claimed victory in the enormously bloody conflict.

Hollande attended a solemn and chilly Armistice Day ceremony at the famed Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Harry, who served with the British Armed Forces in Afghanistan, attended a service at the national Armed Forces Memorial in Staffordshire, England.

The Great War  one of the deadliest conflicts of the modern era  claimed the lives of 5 million Allied troops and over 3 million Central Powers soldiers.

A child pushes a wreath in the water after poppies are thrown into the fountain in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. A commemoration service and two minute silence was held in the Square to mark a national day of remembrance. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Decorated French veterans stood in silence as Hollande laid a large floral wreath at the foot of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in remembrance of the millions who gave their lives during the 1914-18 conflict that ended on Nov. 11.

Inspired by prehistoric monuments, the Armed Forces Memorial where Harry led Britain in remembering the dead is aligned so the sun's rays stream through the door on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The light illuminates a wreath at the heart of the memorial.

As veterans bearing flags looked on, the 32-year-old prince read aloud "The Soldier," the Rupert Brooke poem that tugs on the twin issues of sacrifice and love of country.

Poppies float in the water after they are thrown into the fountain in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. A commemoration service and two minute silence was held in the Square to mark a national day of remembrance. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

French President Francois Hollande attends a commemoration ceremony for Armistice day at Clemenceau statue, 98 years after the end of the First World War, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov 11, 2016. (Philippe Wojazer/ Pool Photo via AP)

The French President's car arrives on the Champs Elysee Avenue prior to the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, Pool)

France's President Francois Hollande arrives to lay a wreath of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe during the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, Pool)

School children throw poppies into the fountain in Trafalgar Square after a service to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. A commemoration service and two minute silence was held in the Square to mark a national day of remembrance. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Poppies are thrown into the fountain in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. A commemoration service and two minute silence was held in the Square to mark a national day of remembrance. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

An England soccer fan attends a service in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. England will play Scotland in a World Cup qualifying soccer match at Wembley Stadium later Friday. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

France's President Francois Hollande, left, shakes hand with a veteran during the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Etienne Laurent/ Pool photo via AP)

France's President Francois Hollande, right shakes hand with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy during the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Etienne Laurent/ Pool photo via AP)

France's Prime Minister Manuel Valls attends the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Etienne Laurent/ Pool photo via AP)

France's President Francois Hollande reviews troops during the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Etienne Laurent/ Pool photo via AP)

France's President Francois Hollande shakes hand with people during the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Etienne Laurent/ Pool photo via AP)

A female Scotland soccer fan attends a service in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. England will play Scotland in a World Cup qualifying soccer match at Wembley Stadium later Friday. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

People look at a Scottish soccer flag covered in poppies after a service in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. England will play Scotland in a World Cup qualifying soccer match at Wembley Stadium later Friday. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

France's President Francois Hollande, pays respect in front of the Tomb of the Unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe during the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Stephane de Sakutin/ Pool photo via AP)

People listen to the service next to a giant poppy displayed, in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. A commemoration service and two minute silence was held in the Square to mark a national day of remembrance. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Poppies are thrown into the fountain in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. A commemoration service and two minute silence was held in the Square to mark a national day of remembrance. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Poppies are thrown into the fountain in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. A commemoration service and two minute silence was held in the Square to mark a national day of remembrance. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Francesca Shaw, from Leeds, England, right, holds the arm of a soldier after placing a poppy wreath during an Armistice Day ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium on Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The Menin Gate Memorial bears the names of more than 54,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient of World War I and whose graves are not known. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

France's President Francois Hollande lays a wreath of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe during the Armistice Day ceremonies marking the end of World War I, in Paris, France, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Stephane de Sakutin/ Pool photo via AP)

Poppies are thrown into the fountain in Trafalgar Square to mark Armistice Day in London, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. A commemoration service and two minute silence was held in the Square to mark a national day of remembrance. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
Myanmar official sues media mogul over bribery insinuation

YANGON, Myanmar (AP)  The head of a major Myanmar media group and a top editor were arrested Friday on criminal charges of defaming a senior official, news reports said.

The Frontier Myanmar news website reported that Eleven Media Group CEO Than Htut Aung and chief editor Wai Phyo were sent to Insein Prison after surrendering to police. They were charged under an article in the Telecommunications Law covering online defamation, punishable by up to three years' imprisonment and a fine.

Phyo Min Thein, governor of Yangon, the country's biggest city, is the first senior official in Aung San Suu Kyi's government to sue a member of the media, although there have been other cases at lower levels since she took power at the end of March. He had his office sue the Eleven Media Group officials over an article and online posting that he said suggested he accepted a $100,000 watch as a bribe from a property developer in exchange for approving a development project.

The article and posting contained no specific names but the details made the references clear. The developer, Maung Weik, also denied the bribery allegation, Frontier Myanmar reported.

Suu Kyi's government came to power after five decades of military rule which saw severe repression of the media. It has liberalized the media sector and dropped a harsh censorship law, but still has pressured the media through lawsuits.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of Myanmar said it was deeply concerned by the journalists' arrests. It said the law under which they were charged "poses an impermissibly severe impediment to the exercise of freedom of expression."

"The FCCM is concerned that arresting and charging of journalists is an attempt to intimidate the media from doing its job and set an alarming precedent for media freedom," the group said in a statement.
'Downton's Dockery is great being bad in 'Good Behavior'

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP)  "Good Behavior" is replete with bad behavior.

This new TNT drama series stars Michelle Dockery as a con artist and petty thief who, after gaining early release from prison (for good behavior, ironically) resumes her life of chaos and flimflammery on the outside. In Letty Raines' future are newly brazen scams, more drug and alcohol abuse, and a desperate campaign to win back custody of her 10-year-old son (raised by her mother, who has lodged a restraining order against her).

And all this, before Letty's life becomes ensnared with Javier Pereira, a charismatic hit man who conscripts her to assist him in his contract-killing business. Played by sexy co-star Juan Diego Botto, Javier could signal Letty's ultimate downfall, or, instead, he with his no-nonsense style could maybe save her from her grifter, junkie ways.

This image released by TNT shows Michelle Dockeryin a scene from the TNT drama series, "Good Behavior," premiering on Tuesday. (Brownie Harris/TNT via AP)

"He kind of rescues her but he also holds her captive." Dockery laughs. "It's just so messed up!"

Premiering Tuesday at 9 p.m. EST (with its first hour available now for streaming ), the series is as sly at drawing viewers into this combustible arrangement as Javier and Letty are in targeting the victims he's been hired to kill.

In the process, two things become clear:

 In her portrayal of Letty, Dockery instantly abrogates any ties to the role for which she now is best known: the proper, prissy Lady Mary Crawley of the British costume drama "Downton Abbey."

 As Letty, whose scams call for endless accents and disguises, Dockery demonstrates she is an actress of rare versatility.

"Acting within the acting, the roles within the role, is really fun," she says. "And we have fun with wigs. There's a lot of wigs on this show!"

Interviewed at a Beverly Hills, California, hotel, Dockery as herself is wispy and fetching in a pastel sundress  quite a contrast to the wounded survivor in a series she describes as "poetic noir. This isn't a procedural. Each episode (there will be 10 this season) is like a film in itself.

"It's liberating," she adds, "that I've been able to break free from Lady Mary and do something different."

But that wasn't the point in signing up for "Good Behavior."

"I never think it's a good idea to do something different just because you want to impress people that you can do it," she says. "And I would never disrespect Mary and 'Downton Abbey' in that sense. I loved playing her. Then this role came out of nowhere. It was the perfect move."

"Downton," of course, was the global TV sensation that transported viewers to the lush estate of the aristocratic Crawleys during a span between 1912 and 1925. Its sixth season ended last winter with Mary, tragically widowed years before as a new mother, finding happiness in a second marriage and learning she is pregnant again.

Fine. But as Dockery gathered adorers, critical praise and three Emmy nominations for "Downton," did she worry she would be forever typecast as Mary?

No, she declares: "I'm a great believer that if you fixate and worry about things, then maybe you'll create them."

She says during her "Downton" run she had options to take her leave, but decided each time to remain.

"I thought, if I was going to be stereotyped, it was already done. It wouldn't have mattered how much longer I had gone on. People were invested in those characters, and we became them. So I was like, 'Well, I may as well do a few more glorious years on this show. What's the difference?'"

Clearly, it was no trap. Along with "Good Behavior," Dockery, 34, has a film coming out next year: "The Sense of an Ending," also starring Emily Mortimer, Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling. She also has the forthcoming limited series "Godless," a Netflix western whose ensemble also includes Jeff Daniels and Sam Waterston.

But she never wants to leave "Downton Abbey" behind.

"I hope it's something that will always stay in people's minds, like 'The Forsyte Saga' was to me when I was younger. Those shows go on forever, really."

Goodness knows, it's all the better to highlight her bad behavior as raw, defiant Letty Raines.

"It might upset you people," Dockery warns her "Downton" followers, then mock-apologizes: "Sorry."

_____

EDITOR'S NOTE  Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore@ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier. Past stories are available at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/frazier-moore

_____

Online:

http://www.tntdrama.com/shows/good-behavior.html
The Latest: Portland protest organizer decries vandalism

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  The Latest on Trump protests nationwide (all times local):

9:20 a.m.

An organizer of Portland, Oregon's anti-Donald Trump protest distanced himself from the demonstration that left downtown scrawled with graffiti and shattered glass.

Protesters gather in Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Ore., the third night of protests over the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. President-elect Donald Trump fired back on social media after demonstrators in both red and blue states hit the streets for another round of protests, showing outrage over the Republican's unexpected win. (Mark Graves/The Oregonian/OregonLive.com via AP)

Portland Resistance spokesman Gregory McKelvey says the activist group hoped to provide a constructive outlet for the shared fear, anger and frustration that followed Tuesday's election. He says the vandalism late Thursday had nothing to do with his group.

Video shows it was largely committed by young men with masks partially covering their faces.

Police described them as anarchists who ignored the calls of peaceful protesters to stop destroying property. More than two dozen people were arrested.

McKelvey apologized to businesses that were damaged. He said the group planned to help clean up and raise money for repairs. A rally for healing has been scheduled for Friday afternoon.

___

8:30 a.m.

Police arrested at least 11 people during anti-Donald Trump protests that spilled into the streets of downtown Oakland for a third straight night.

Police say protesters lit fires on streets and in trash cans, smashed windows and sprayed graffiti on at least seven businesses Thursday night.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports (http://bit.ly/2fVFPoj ) that officers in riot gear stood across sections of a street, trying to limit the crowd's access to the city's central business district.

By 11 p.m., most protesters had returned to the plaza in front of City Hall, where they chanted against Trump's election and police. They numbered a few hundred, down from about 1,000 who attended an initial rally earlier in the day.

___

8:30 a.m.

Los Angeles police say they arrested about 185 people protesting Donald Trump's election, mostly for blocking streets.

Thursday night's protest was mostly peaceful, but some demonstrators briefly shut down highways and caused property damage.

Officer Norma Eisenman said the only serious incident involved an injury to an officer near police headquarters. A person was arrested for that, but Eisenman had no details. The officer was treated and released.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, condemned what he called a "very, very small group of people" that damaged property or blocked traffic but said he was proud of the thousands more that peacefully protested.

Juveniles were cited for curfew violations.

Anti-Trump protesters make their way to M&T Bank Stadium during the Baltimore Ravens vs. Cleveland Browns football game Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, in Baltimore. Scattered protests around the country continue to follow the unexpected election of Donald Trump as president, with hundreds marching in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Grand Rapids, Mich. (Lloyd Fox/The Baltimore Sun via AP)

Two of a few thousand protesters march up State Street from UW-Madison's Bascom Hall to the State Capitol, protesting President-elect Donald Trump Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, in Madison, Wis. (Michael P. King/Wisconsin State Journal via AP)

A protesters unhappy with the presidential election blocks traffic on JFK Blvd. as they march between cars on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, in Philadelphia. (Charles Fox/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP)
EU urges Kosovo to pass border deal with Montenegro

PRISTINA, Kosovo (AP)  A senior European Union official said Friday that unless Kosovo approves a border demarcation deal with neighboring Montenegro, it can't enjoy EU visa liberalization.

Opposition lawmakers, who are against the deal, have disrupted parliamentary work by using tear gas canisters, blowing whistles and throwing water bottles. Street rallies by opposition supporters routinely turn into violent clashes with police.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn visited Kosovo on Friday, saying that its political polarization is negatively affecting its integration path into the 28-nation bloc.

EU's Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn, gestures during a press conference while on his one day official visit to Kosovo Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

"I urge all the players to understand that the political debate should be held at the parliament, naturally without tear gas or other such tools, but with competition for the best argument," Hahn told a news conference.

In May, the European Commission recommended a visa-free regime for Kosovo, but first Pristina has to ratify the border agreement with Montenegro.

"We should be clear that is a condition without flexibility," Hahn said. "We are at the last kilometer, which is a very long kilometer, crawling like a snake."

Last year, Kosovo signed a stabilization and association agreement with the EU, the first step toward membership.

Hahn said that Brussels would continuously assist Kosovo in its reforms.

"The implementation of the European agenda asks for much work ... and for political will to carry out tough reforms," he said.

Prime Minister Isa Mustafa said that strengthening the rule of law, competition and improving education and employment were the main priorities for the next 18 months.

In 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. That is recognized by 112 countries, but not by Belgrade. Five EU members that don't recognize Kosovo haven't blocked its integration steps.

EU's Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn, gestures during a press conference while on his one day official visit to Kosovo Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

EU's Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn, gestures during a press conference while on his one day official visit to Kosovo Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Kosovo prime minister Isa Mustafa, right, is joined by EU's Commissioner for Enlargement Johannes Hahn on his one day official visit to Kosovo on Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Kosovo Prime Minister Isa Mustafa, right, meets with EU's Commissioner for Enlargement Johannes Hahn during one day official visit on Friday, Nov.11, 2016. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)
Dozens of pipeline protesters arrested in latest skirmish

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP)  Law officers arrested about three dozen Dakota Access oil pipeline protesters in a confrontation Friday that also shut down a state highway.

The midday incident began after about 100 protesters confronted crews doing dirt work along the pipeline route where pipe had already been laid. Workers were safety evacuated, but protesters threw rocks, vandalized equipment, slashed tires on law enforcement vehicles, and used themselves and vehicles to block a county road and state Highway 6, according to Morton County sheriff's spokeswoman Donnell Hushka.

Authorities shut down a 10-mile stretch of the highway for public safety reasons for about two hours before the skirmish died down early in the afternoon.

Law enforcement try to move Dakota Access Pipeline protesters further down during a protest at a pipeline construction site south of St. Anthony, N.D. Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. (Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune via AP)

Law officers closed the state highway for a second time after protesters created an additional roadblock, but the Highway Patrol said the highway south of Mandan reopened late Friday afternoon.

There were no immediate reports of injuries. Highway Patrol Lt. Tom Iverson said six vehicles belonging to various law agencies were damaged.

The clash happened about 20 miles to the northwest of a protest camp where hundreds of pipeline opponents have gathered for months. More than 470 people have now been arrested since August. Cody Hall, a spokesman for the protest camp, said he couldn't comment on Friday's clash because he wasn't present and didn't have details.

The 1,200-mile pipeline that's to deliver oil from North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to a shipping point in Illinois is complete except for under the Missouri River in North Dakota. Work on that stretch has been delayed while the Army Corps of Engineers reviews its permitting. The Standing Rock Sioux and other opponents say the pipeline threatens drinking water and cultural sites. The company insists it's safe.

Energy Transfer Partners issued a statement Friday saying that it would agree to a Corps request to suspend work in the area to defuse tension, "if we can agree on a date certain upon which we can complete construction." The Corps didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday, which was a federal holiday.

The company also said it's made an offer to the state to help pay law enforcement costs related to the protests "but it has not moved beyond that at this time." A spokesman for Gov. Jack Dalrymple said the governor's office hadn't seen the offer yet and wouldn't speculate on whether the state would accept.

___

Associated Press writer James MacPherson in Bismarck contributed to this story.
Chemical weapons watchdog condemns their use in Syria

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on Friday condemned the use of the banned weapons in Syria and called on the government to allow inspections of sites of concern.

In a statement, the OPCW's Executive Council called on all parties identified in a joint investigation with the United Nations to immediately stop using chemical weapons.

A joint investigation by the U.N. and OPCW found that the Syrian government and the Islamic State group have both used chemical weapons and toxic chemicals as weapons in violation of international law.

The OPCW expressed its sympathy for the victims of the attacks and stressed that "every actor involved in these chemical weapons attacks should be held responsible."

The Syrian government has denied using chemical weapons. Syria's close ally Russia, which holds a veto on the U.N. Security Council, has said they were not convinced by the evidence turned up by the joint investigation and will not allow for the Mideast nation to be sanctioned.

The joint investigation between the OPCW and the U.N. was developed to determine who exactly has been responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Syria's five-year-long civil war.

The investigation's mandate is set to expire next week and diplomats say Russia will likely block an extension.
Computer outage briefly grounds flights on several airlines

DALLAS (AP)  Travelers on several airlines had trouble checking in for flights and waited out delays Friday after a computer outage at a company that runs airline technology systems.

American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Alaska Airlines and Virgin America confirmed that a technology glitch briefly interrupted their operations. The problems seemed to have been fixed by midday, and airlines reported that flights had resumed.

The airlines blamed their difficulties on a breakdown in systems operated by Sabre Corp., a Texas company that provides software and other technology services to airlines and hotels.

A Sabre spokeswoman said the systems were running again by early Friday afternoon. She said she did not know the cause of the breakdown.

Passengers at several big airports went on social media to complain about flight delays.

American said that the outage caused scattered delays but no canceled flights. Alaska said that 15 flights were delayed by up to 15 minutes. Southwest said the outage briefly prevented bookings, ticket changes and use of mobile boarding passes.

United Airlines said its flights were not affected, and Delta Air Lines said it does not use Sabre.

On Oct. 17, a problem at Sabre prevented travelers from booking trips on Southwest, JetBlue and Virgin America.

Technology outages have struck almost all the airlines at one point or another over the past two years. Airlines rely heavily on overlapping computer programs to handle everything from selling tickets to checking weight calculations before takeoff. When outages occur, they often lead to cascading delays that can linger for hours.

Friday's glitch didn't affect airline stocks  most gained ground. Sabre shares rose 39 cents to $24.94, but they have still lost 15 percent in the last year.

___
John Kerry talks climate change but not Trump in Antarctica

McMURDO STATION, Antarctica (AP)  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry didn't comment on Donald Trump's election victory while visiting Antarctica, but did say that citizens who care about limiting emissions might have to march in the streets to push for more aggressive action.

Kerry became the highest-ranking American official to visit Antarctica when he landed for a two-day trip on Friday. He's been hearing from scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent.

Trump has called climate change a hoax and said he would "cancel" U.S. involvement in the landmark Paris Agreement on global warming.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and members of his delegation hike towards the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station, Antarctica on Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and will attend APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

"We need to get more of a movement going," Kerry said when addressing several hundred scientists and staff at an evening event at McMurdo Station, the large base which is the hub for U.S. operations. "We need to get more people to engage."

Kerry said there was a risk that much of Antarctica's ice will eventually flow into the ocean, raising sea levels worldwide.

Despite the Paris agreement to cut the fossil-fuel emissions causing the planet to warm, "we haven't won the battle yet," Kerry said to the audience that included many young people involved in climate research.

Earlier, a planned visit to the South Pole was scrapped because of bad weather. Instead, Kerry and members of his entourage were taken on a helicopter tour of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, one of the few parts of Antarctica that are largely free of ice year-round.

Kerry left from New Zealand early Friday aboard a C-17 Globemaster military cargo plane after being held up for about a day by bad weather. An experienced pilot, Kerry spent much of the flight in the cockpit of the huge jet, chatting with the pilots.

After a smooth trip of about five hours, the group landed on the Pegasus Ice Runway, the strip of ice that serves McMurdo.

Kerry's aides described the trip as a learning opportunity for the secretary of state. He has been receiving briefings from scientists working to understand the effects of climate change on Antarctica.

Kerry has made climate change an intensive focus of American diplomacy during his term, and had previously spent decades working on the issue as a U.S. senator.

He planned to return to New Zealand on Saturday for a meeting with Prime Minister John Key. Kerry plans to fly next week to the Middle East for talks, and then onward to a global climate conference in Morocco, where he will give a major speech.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stands inside the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and attending APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, and scientist Kelly Falkner outside the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and attending APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

US Secretary of State John Kerry, center, disembarks from a U.S. Air Force C17 Globemaster with National Science Foundation's Scott Borg, right, at the Pegasus ice runway near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, disembarks from a U.S. Air Force C17 Globemaster with the National Science Foundation's Scott Borg, right, at the Pegasus ice runway near McMurdo Station, Antarctica on Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and attending APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flies over the Taylor Valley area near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flies over the Taylor Valley area near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and attending APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hikes in front of Mount Erebus after visiting the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station, Antarctica on Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and attending APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flies over Blood Falls and the Taylor Glacier near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and attending APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flies over Blood Falls and the Taylor Glacier near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and attending APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, third left, prepares to board U.S. Air Force C-17 flight to Antarctica at Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The State Department said Friday that Kerry would travel from Nov. 10 to Nov. 12 to the McMurdo research station on Antarctica's Ross Island and the South Pole. Kerry will be the first secretary of state and highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Antarctica. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, third right, prepares to board U.S. Air Force C-17 flight to Antarctica at Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The State Department said Friday that Kerry would travel from Nov. 10 to Nov. 12 to the McMurdo research station on Antarctica's Ross Island and the South Pole. Kerry will be the first secretary of state and highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Antarctica. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, prepares to board U.S. Air Force C-17 flight to Antarctica at Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The State Department said Friday that Kerry would travel from Nov. 10 to Nov. 12 to the McMurdo research station on Antarctica's Ross Island and the South Pole. Kerry will be the first secretary of state and highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Antarctica. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, third left, prepares to board U.S. Air Force C-17 flight to Antarctica at Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The State Department said Friday that Kerry would travel from Nov. 10 to Nov. 12 to the McMurdo research station on Antarctica's Ross Island and the South Pole. Kerry will be the first secretary of state and highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Antarctica. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, sits in the cockpit of his U.S. Air Force C-17 flight to Antarctica at Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The State Department said Friday that Kerry would travel from Nov. 10 to Nov. 12 to the McMurdo research station on Antarctica's Ross Island and the South Pole. Kerry will be the first secretary of state and highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Antarctica. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to board his U.S. Air Force C-17 flight to Antarctica at Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The State Department said Friday that Kerry would travel from Nov. 10 to Nov. 12 to the McMurdo research station on Antarctica's Ross Island and the South Pole. Kerry will be the first secretary of state and highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Antarctica. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sits in the cockpit of his U.S. Air Force C-17 flight to Antarctica at Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The State Department said Friday that Kerry would travel from Nov. 10 to Nov. 12 to the McMurdo research station on Antarctica's Ross Island and the South Pole. Kerry will be the first secretary of state and highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Antarctica. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, listens to Scott Borg, the head of the Polar Program for the National Science Foundation, as he visits the historic Shackleton hut during Kerry's visit to McMurdo Station in Antarctica Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Kerry became the highest-ranking American official to visit Antarctica on Friday when he landed for a two-day trip during which he'll hear from scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his delegation visit the historic Shackleton hut near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and attending APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

An aerial view of the Blood Falls and the Taylor Glacier near McMurdo Station, Antarctica on November 11, 2016. Secretary Kerry who visited the site is traveling to Antarctica, New Zealand, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and APEC in Peru on his 9 day trip. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, front, listens to Scott Borg, the head of the Polar Program for the National Science Foundation, as they visit the historic Shackleton hut during Kerry's visit to McMurdo Station in Antarctica Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Kerry became the highest-ranking American official to visit Antarctica on Friday when he landed for a two-day trip during which he'll hear from scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, listens to Scott Borg, the head of the Polar Program for the National Science Foundation, as he visits the historic Shackleton hut during Kerry's visit to McMurdo Station in Antarctica Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. Kerry became the highest-ranking American official to visit Antarctica on Friday when he landed for a two-day trip during which he'll hear from scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent. (Mark Ralston/Pool Photo via AP)
Mexico's peso continues free-fall, sinking to 21 to $1

MEXICO CITY (AP)  Mexico's peso continued its steep decline against the U.S. dollar, falling to a record low of 21 to $1 on Friday, as Mexican officials prepared for a possible wave of Mexicans returning from the United States.

The peso had already broken the psychological barrier of 20 to $1 earlier this week, following the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential elections.

The Mexican currency fell by almost 13 percent this week, its steepest one-week drop in at least a decade.

Men leave a currency exchange business displaying rates of the Mexican peso Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, in Tijuana, Mexico. The rising prospect of a Trump presidency jolted markets around the world Wednesday, sending Dow futures and Asian stock prices sharply lower as investors panicked over uncertainties on trade, immigration and geopolitical tensions. The Mexican peso likewise tumbled and investors looking for safe assets bid up the price of gold. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

The peso traded as low as 21.26, before recovering slightly to an interbank rate of 20.95.

Authorities say the drop is due to global uncertainty following the U.S. election.

But Mexico has been hit particularly hard. Trump has criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Mexico depends on.

He also promised to build a wall between the two nations and suggested high tariffs on Mexican goods, and suggested that people who entered the United States illegally will be deported.

On Friday, Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong signed an agreement with a leading business chamber to help find work for Mexicans who return to their country.

"We are broadening the alternatives for our countrymen who return, so that they can put their talent and characteristic effort to work on behalf of the communities and the development of their country," Osorio Chong said.

Some Mexicans who are deported or return voluntarily don't have valid identification documents in their home country, like voter registration cards.
Police, troops raid Bolivian village to seize contraband

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP)  Customs officials backed by hundreds of Bolivian police and soldiers raided a remote highlands town near the Chilean border on Friday as part of a national crackdown on what's estimated to be a $1 billion industry in smuggled clothing, shoes and electronics.

Security forces had encircled the village of Sabaya for more than a week, even using helicopters to monitor it, and finally moved in after officials accused the town's residents of failing to hand over all of the contraband. Customs officials said there were 50 truckloads of goods worth millions of dollars stockpiled in the town, which is on the main smuggling route to the neighboring South American nation.

With the town surrounded and villagers subject to searches as they entered and left, Mayor Pablo Villca had promised to turn over the contraband, leaving it along the highway. But customs chief Marlene Ardaya said villagers gave up only about five truckloads worth.

"They only handed over used clothes, televisions in a bad state. And we have found places where they burned merchandise," she told reporters.

The Aymara village of about 100 people sits on a 13,000-foot (4,000-meter) desert plain about 20 miles (30 kilometers) miles from the Chilean border. Smugglers bringing in untaxed goods have used uninhabited houses in the town to store goods destined for the capital of La Paz, some 175 miles (280 kilometers) to the northwest.
A former patient armed with knives and a gun stabbed five people at a mental health facility Friday after what was described as a hostage situation, authorities have said.

Dustin Johnson, 38, walked into the building in Homestead, Pennsylvania and started chatting with employees before pulling out a gun and turning violent, employee CJ Fulton told WTAE.

He complained that employees at the facility had 'ruined' his life when he was a patient there, Fulton said.

Johnson, according to Fulton, stabbed several people inside the Turtle Creek Valley Mental Health offices.

A man stabbed five people at a mental health facility Friday in Homestead, Pennsylvania, authorities have said. Responders are pictured carrying a person to an ambulance

Police officers shot him after he stabbed several people and put down his knife but refused to drop his gun while his victims were bleeding badly, authorities said.

Six people, including Johnson, were taken to the hospital. Johnson had surgery on Friday evening and authorities were preparing to file charges against him.

Two people were residents at the mental health facility. One was listed in critical condition and had surgery to treat stab wounds to the neck. Another had stab wounds to the upper chest and neck and was in stable condition.

The three others were employees. All three were listed in stable condition on Friday. One had stab wounds to the neck and face, one had stab wounds on the back, and one had surgery due to stab wounds on the head and neck.

Resident adviser Cherrell Fulton (center), 28, of Wilkinsburg, is pictured receiving a hug from her aunt, Elena Lawson, left, 51, of Swissvale, after Fulton's safe exit from her workplace

Police implored Johnson to drop his gun or be shot based on texts from inside that the victims were bleeding profusely and needed help, Allegheny County spokeswoman Amie Downs said.

Johnson dropped his knife but not the gun before he was shot, she said.

His pistol turned out to be a BB gun but police said they had no way of knowing at the time.

'The pistol was a BB gun. However, it had no markings and it had a flashlight mounted on it. From the distance the SWAT operators were from him at the time, it certainly looked like a handgun,' County police Superintendent Coleman McDonough told WTAE.

Johnson apparently gained entry to the secure facility before attacking people on the fifth floor, authorities said.

'He started talking to us regularly,' Fulton told the TV station. 'Next thing you know he pulled a gun.'

Fulton said Johnson was angry from something that happened when he was staying at the facility.

'He just started saying, "You ruined my life," then he proceeded to stab individuals and assault individuals,' Fulton said.

The center says it provides care and support for people and communities dealing with behavioral, mental health, substance abuse and developmental issues.

Its executive director, Fran Sheedy Bost, described Friday's incident as a 'hostage situation'.
UN calls on Myanmar to investigate sex assault allegations

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  A U.N. official is calling on Myanmar to investigate allegations of sexual assault in northern Rakhine state following recent border attacks.

In a statement issued Friday, Zainab Hawa Bangura, the U.N.'s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, said she was gravely concerned by the reports and said it was essential for the government to allow humanitarian access to the area to provide support for the survivors.

"The recent escalation of violence may lead to more incidents of sexual assault, and therefore I call upon the government of Myanmar to take measures to stop this spiral of violence, particularly against women and girls," she said.
13 red, purple state Dems face re-election in age of Trump

WASHINGTON (AP)  A long list of Senate Democrats who face re-election in 2018 are from states Donald Trump won or nearly won on Election Day. That could mean a politically excruciating next two years for many of them and for party leaders trying to chart a legislative path as the new age of Trump begins.

The election two years from now had already looked difficult for Senate Democrats, who must defend 25 seats compared to just eight held by Republicans. The Democrats' list includes two independents, Vermont's Bernie Sanders and Maine's Angus King, who align with them.

Of those 25 senators, 13 are from states Trump captured or nearly won. Among those are Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which hadn't backed a GOP presidential candidate since the 1980s, leaving both parties trying to discern how much Tuesday may have reordered the lineup of blue, red and swing states.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., speaks at University of Louisville, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016, in Louisville, Ky. McConnell told reporters on Friday that he asked President-elect Donald Trump to move swiftly in approving construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. (Alton Strupp/The Courier-Journal via AP)

Five Democrats are from states Trump easily carried, by 19 percentage points or more  Indiana, North Dakota, West Virginia, Missouri and Montana.

"They should be terrified," Ward Baker, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate GOP's political organization, said of the Democrats.

Republicans are expected to control the Senate next year 52-48, including a Louisiana runoff in December the GOP is expected to win. With Democrats able to use filibusters to force the GOP to secure 60 votes on major issues, likely new Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., should often be able to block Republicans, especially on issues Democrats broadly support such as consumer protection and curbs on Wall Street.

But it will probably be harder for Schumer to keep Democrats together on issues crucial to conservative voters including the Supreme Court, abortion, guns and weakening the Environmental Protection Agency. Some Democratic senators could also be drawn to Trump's efforts to revamp portions of President Barack Obama's health care law and tighten curbs on immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters in Louisville on Friday that he believes Democratic senators from deeply Republican states are "going to want to be cooperative with us on a variety of things."

Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democratic leader, said that as his party's vote counter he's long listened to concerns of senators from Republican-leaning states.

"I know a half-dozen people, I think that list will get a little longer now, that I go to first to find out where senators are on issues," he said.

At the same time, Schumer must try to satisfy his party's liberals, who include Sanders and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

On some issues, perhaps efforts to expand coal use, Schumer could see up to seven Democrats defect to the GOP and still keep Republicans short of the 60 votes needed to prevail.

"I'd probably line up more with Donald Trump's economic package," said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, seeking re-election next year from West Virginia. "I sure don't adhere to his social rhetoric."

In some ways, Clinton's defeat made political decisions easier for senators facing 2018 re-election.

That's because midterm elections, when a president is not on the ballot, are often cruel to the president's party in Congress. Democrats lost nine Senate seats in 2014 and six others in 2010 under Obama, and presidents' parties have gained Senate seats just once in the past eight midterm contests.

Democrats had already been privately fretting over how to persuade some of their senators to back Clinton initiatives that could have been unpopular in GOP-leaning states. The Trump victory and retention of congressional control makes it easier for Democrats to blame the GOP for problems.

"The onus is on Donald Trump and Republicans, who now own all of the federal government," said Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., whose term is up in 2018. Her state's presidential vote remained too close to call Friday.

All of that  plus voters' disgust with the Washington establishment  could put pressure on congressional Republicans for achievements, which may require them to cut deals with Schumer or with Democrats they hope to pick off from Trump states.

"I think everybody is saying, 'We have to put something on the board here to restore some of our credibility,'" said Patrick Griffin, a former Senate Democrat aide and White House official under President Bill Clinton.

But in the 2018 campaigns, Republicans are sure to come after Democrats from states Trump won, using votes they take over these next two years that might displease conservative voters.
First of 18 Australian casino employees released in China

CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  One of 18 employees of Australia's largest casino operator detained in China a month ago for suspected gambling crimes has been released on bail, the company said on Saturday.

A Chinese national who was a junior Crown Resorts Ltd. employee was the first of the staff to be released, the company said in a statement. Crown did not identify the employee.

Jenny Chiang, a 33-year-old Shanghai-based Chinese citizen who had worked for Crown for more than five years as an executive assistant, was released on Friday, The Australian newspaper reported.

The head of Crown's VIP International team, Jason O'Connor, was among three Australian and 15 Chinese employees detained on Oct. 13 and 14 in raids across China. They had been caught up in an apparent crackdown on overseas tours for high rollers.

The Chinese foreign ministry said the employees had been detained for suspected involvement in gambling crimes, but did not provide further details.

Casino gambling is illegal on the mainland and Chinese law prohibits agents from organizing groups of more than 10 Chinese citizens to gamble abroad. The crime is punishable by up to three years' imprisonment. The industry has been known to skirt the ban by touting destination packages.

Casino operators have sought to lure Chinese high-rollers who have avoided Macau since President Xi Jinping's ongoing corruption crackdown deters visits to the offshore enclave that is the only place in China where casinos are legal.
Delayed Trump call to PM 'may be due to Cabinet ministers' insults': Farage

Donald Trump could have waited so long to place a call to Theresa May after his election because of the insulting things senior Tory Cabinet ministers have said about him, Nigel Farage has suggested.

Speaking from the US where he plans to meet members of the president-elect's team, the interim Ukip leader singled out Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for criticism.

Asked if Mrs May being so far down Mr Trump's list of calls to foreign leaders should cause concern for the future of the Anglo-American relationship, Mr Farage told the Press Association: "Well, you have to face the facts that there are some very senior members of this administration who have said some very rude things about him."

President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House (AP)

Pressed if Mr Trump calling nine other presidents and prime ministers before Mrs May was payback for the criticism levelled at him by some Tories, Mr Farage said: "You'd have to draw your own conclusions on that. But this president is instinctively Anglophile."

Mr Farage criticised the strong attacks levelled at Mr Trump in the past by Mr Johnson.

As London mayor, Mr Johnson reacted angrily to comments by Mr Trump on Muslims, and his claims that some parts of London were "no go areas" for the police, saying: "I think Donald Trump is clearly out of his mind if he thinks that's a sensible way to proceed, to ban people going to the United States in that way, or to any country.

"What he's doing is playing the game of the terrorists and those who seek to divide us. That's exactly the kind of reaction they hope to produce.

"I think he's betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of President of the United States."

Mr Farage said he had no plans to meet Mr Trump personally, but would use his visit to underline the importance of the Anglo-American alliance on the US media.

After the shock election result, the interim Ukip leader appeared to make light of a now infamous 2005 videotape of Mr Trump in which he boasted about being able to grope women because of his celebrity.

"I will be encouraging him to make the UK his priority. I am now going to become a diplomat - 'Come and schmooze Theresa, don't touch her for goodness' sake'. If it comes to it I could be the responsible adult and make sure everything's okay," he told TalkRadio.

When Mr Trump did eventually speak to Mrs May after calling a number of other leaders, including Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny, Mr Trump invited the PM to visit him in Washington "as soon as possible" after his inauguration on January 20.

Ministers played down the delay, insisting the "special relationship" between the US and the UK remained intact.

A No 10 spokesman said Mr Trump had set out his "close and personal connections with, and warmth for, the UK" and expressed confidence the special relationship would go "from strength to strength".

Mrs May had then referred to the two countries' "long history of shared values" saying they had "always stood together as close allies when it counts the most".

Number 10 and Ukip have flatly denied a report suggesting that Nigel Farage - an ally of Mr Trump who appeared alongside him during the bitter election campaign - could act as a go-between as the UK seeks to build relations with the 45th president.

The Daily Telegraph reported that Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary who has his own close links to the Republican Party, intends to speak to Mr Farage before attempting to hold talks with senior Trump advisers.

But the suggestion was rejected by both Tory and Ukip sources and a Government spokesman said: "Dr Fox has no plans to talk to Mr Farage."
Harry pays respects in Armistice Day remembrance service

Prince Harry has led the country in remembering the fallen on Armistice Day, laying a wreath at the National Memorial Arboretum.

Harry, 32, attended a remembrance service at the Armed Forces Memorial alongside veterans and representatives of the Army, Royal Navy and RAF.

After paying his respects, he read aloud the words of The Soldier by First World War poet Rupert Brooke.

Prince Harry attends a Service of Remembrance at the Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum

Harry served for 10 years in the Army and was twice deployed to Afghanistan.

The prince was joined by hundreds of old soldiers and the loved ones left behind to mourn the dead, observing the silence in the chill autumn sunshine, in a mirror of services held across the country.

Lieutenant Colonel David Whimpenny, chairman of the National Memorial Arboretum and trustee of its parent charity The Royal British Legion, said: "Today, led by Prince Harry, we paid tribute to the servicemen and women that have sacrificed their lives for their country, from the First World War to the current day."

Afterwards, Harry was shown some of the 16,000 names carved into the Portland Stone of the cream-coloured memorial commemorating those who have fallen on active service since 1948.

He took his time as he walked past the rows upon rows of names, pausing by those who had died in 2015 and during the Falklands War in 1982.

Later, the crowd applauded as Harry took the salute from a parade of serving and former servicemen and servicewomen.

Afterwards, he noticed a group of schoolchildren standing opposite the parade dais, who had made the trip from Herefordshire, and went across to say hello.

The 23 children, from Ashperton Primary School near Ledbury, chatted away with the smiling prince, who asked them "who sat on the back seat of the coach?"

Harry then bid them farewell, adding: "Enjoy it, make the most of the sunshine."

Teacher Caroline Bullock, who said the youngsters had been studying battles in class, said: "He's so lovely, he makes the royal family normal, and he's so approachable."

The school group were also supportive of the prince's relationship with US actress Meghan Markle, with teaching assistant Emma Shelley, saying: "If he's happy, then what's the problem?"

Ms Markle, who stars in the hit series Suits, recently travelled to London to see the prince, according to The Sun.

Later, he spoke to a 98-year-old Second World War veteran who the Prince observed had earlier decided to "ditch the wheelchair" for the parade when he marched proudly alongside other veterans.

He told the old soldier: "It's a privilege to meet you."

Elsewhere, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn paid his respects along with hundreds of other people at the Cenotaph in central Manchester.

In Eastbourne, East Sussex, shoppers broke out into a spontaneous round of applause after observing the two-minute silence at the Arndale Centre.

Meanwhile, in Belfast, up to 1,000 people gathered for a two-minute silence in the Garden of Remembrance at the City Hall.

Democratic Unionist Lord Mayor Brian Kingston and Sinn Fein Deputy Lord Mayor Mary Ellen Campbell were among those who took part in the low-key event.

First Minister Arlene Foster had paused to reflect at the war memorial in Enniskillen during a separate service.

In Edinburgh, a cannon was fired at the castle to signal the start of the two-minute silence while in Glasgow a service was held at the cenotaph in George Square.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon did not attend an event but marked the two-minute silence in private and will take part in a Remembrance Sunday service.

In Leeds, hundreds also gathered for a service at the city's Cenotaph.

Laura Wright throws poppies in the fountain at London's Trafalgar Square

Tribute was paid at the Cenotaph in Croydon

The Prince of Wales lays a wreath during an Armistice Day service at the British Embassy in Manama, Bahrain

The England squad observing a two minute silence at The Grove, Hertfordshire (FA/Getty Images/PA)

Wales football manager Chris Coleman lays a wreaths at the Cardiff City stadium

Some of the hundreds of hand-painted pebbles at the foot of the Tommy Statue in Seaham, Co Durham

Harry read aloud a poem, The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke

Prince Harry lays a wreath at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire

Prince Harry salutes

Prince Harry spoke at the service in Staffordshire

Tribute was paid at Lloyd's of London

Poppies were scattered by hand in Trafalgar Square

Pupils from Eden Girls' School in Waltham Forest pay their respects in Trafalgar Square

People look at the remembrance garden outside Belfast City Hall

Two minutes' silence is observed at the Tommy Statue in Seaham, Co Durham

Veterans at Birmingham's Hall of Memory

Veterans and the public observe a two-minute silence at the Arndale Centre in Eastbourne

A two-minute silence is observed in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh

Veterans are joined by family, staff and friends during a service at Erskine Home in Bishopton, Scotland
George Osborne to be made Companion of Honour at Buckingham Palace

Former chancellor George Osborne will be made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour today by the Duke of Cambridge.

Mr Osborne, recognised in former prime minister David Cameron's resignation honours list, will receive the award during a Buckingham Palace investiture ceremony, for political and public service.

The politician served as chancellor for six years, first during the coalition government headed by Mr Cameron and later when the Tory leader won an outright majority following last year's general election.

George Osborne before delivering his final budget

Mr Cameron was criticised for cronyism after his resignation honours list recognised a string of political supporters, Conservative Party donors and Downing Street staff.

Also being recognised during the Buckingham Palace investiture ceremony are three figures from the worlds of acting, television and broadcasting.

Dame Penelope Wilton, famed for her roles in Downton Abbey and the popular movies Shaun Of The Dead and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, will be made a Dame Commander for services to drama.

The actress and former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis will be awarded an MBE for services to charities and theatre.

Since 2008 Ellis has been honorary patron of Maggie's - the charity which provides free practical, emotional and social support to people with cancer and their family and friends - and plays an important role in raising awareness about its work.
Sentencing of associate of hate preacher Anjem Choudary postponed

The sentencing of a known associate of hate preacher Anjem Choudary has been postponed.

Michael Coe, 35, was due to be sentenced for assault occasioning actual bodily harm when he appeared at Southwark Crown Court on Friday.

He had been convicted in August of knocking a schoolboy unconscious because the married father of two took exception to the 16-year-old cuddling his teenage girlfriend in the street.

Michael Coe is facing a substantial jail term after knocking a schoolboy unconscious for cuddling his girlfriend

Coe, wearing a polo shirt and jogging bottoms, arrived in custody from Belmarsh prison for sentencing following the incident, in Newham, east London, in April.

But Judge Michael Gledhill QC agreed to delay the hearing until November 30 after a clerical mix-up meant reports were not ready.

He said he did so "with extreme reluctance".

Muslim convert Coe has a long record of violent offences starting when he was 16, including assaults, burglary, robbery and violent disorder.

He was radicalised in prison by al Qaida terrorist Dhiren Barot in 2007, while serving an eight-year term for firing a shotgun at police during an arrest.

Coe, since known as Mikaeel Ibrahim, has attended a number of extremist demonstrations, including protests over the banning of niqabs in France and the values of Sharia law.
Nursery worker in court to face 15 charges of child sex abuse

A nursery worker has been charged with a number of child sex offences including the rape of a boy.

Jamie Chapman, 28, is due before Birmingham Magistrates' Court on Friday to face 15 charges after being arrested on Wednesday at his home in Tamar Drive, Smiths Wood.

Police said the charges include four counts of causing/inciting a boy aged 13 to 15 to engage in sexual activity, two counts of causing/inciting the sexual exploitation of a child aged 13 to 17, and one count of rape of a boy aged 13 to 15.

The case was investigated by West Midlands Police.

Chapman was further charged with taking an indecent photograph/pseudo photograph of a child, distributing an indecent photograph/pseudo photograph of a child and six counts of making an indecent photograph/pseudo photograph of a child, West Midlands Police said.
Tributes to passengers killed in Croydon tram derailment

A tram which crashed, killing seven people, is expected to be removed from the scene on Friday as police investigate claims that another almost derailed near the same location last week.

Six men and one woman died when the carriages came off the track in Croydon, south London, as they sped round a sharp bend on Wednesday morning.

More than 50 people were also injured.

People lay floral tributes at the scene

An extra minute's silence was held to remember the victims during the town's Armistice Day ceremony - held for those who have lost their lives in conflict.

As the investigation into the deadly crash continues, fresh tributes have been paid to those killed.

Friends and family of Philip Seary, 57, who was named online as one of the dead, left messages of condolence to a "lovely gentle giant of a man".

In a statement his family said: "We as a family are in shock, completely heartbroken and utterly devastated. We have lost a much loved wonderful son, faithful husband and a loving and doting father and grandfather.

"Everyone that knew him he was a gentle giant with a heart to match. He was a devoted Crystal Palace fan and well known locally. He will be immensely missed by all that had the great fortune to know him."

The Crystal Palace fan from New Addington, who was known as "Tank", was reported to have been killed in Wednesday morning's crash, along with five other men and a woman.

Another victim has been named by friends and family on Facebook.

Mark Smith, a young father from Croydon who had a fiancee, could "make everyone laugh", according to a tribute posted by his cousin Tom Smith.

Mr Smith wrote on Facebook: "Still cannot believe this is true, the last couple of days have just felt like a nightmare that I'm gonna wake up from.

"Not only were you my cousin but literally my best friend. The thought that we are all never gonna see you or hear from you again makes me feel sick.

"We are all in bits and I just wish you could walk back into your home with that smile on your face and make everyone laugh."

Another friend, Rich Padley, wrote on Facebook: "Trying to find the right words to say in light of the tragic events that happened on Wednesday morning, Marky was one of the nicest guys I've ever met in the car scene, and always made time for anyone.

"RIP dude, the world's a sadder place without you that's for sure, my heart goes out to your loved ones that you've left behind."

Dane Chinnery, a 19-year-old Crystal Palace fan described as a "friendly, genuine lad", was the first victim to be identified following the crash.

The only woman to have been killed in the crash was named in reports as 35-year-old Dorota Rynkiewicz from New Addington.

Simon Smith, chief executive of SSP UK where she worked, told the BBC the company "offered our heartfelt condolences to her family and we are doing all we can to support them at this difficult time".

The tram driver, a 42-year-old man from Beckenham, was released on bail after being arrested on suspicion of manslaughter over the crash on a sharp bend as the vehicle travelled from New Addington to Wimbledon at 6.10am.

Detectives are examining a report that a tram "lifted onto one side" at 40mph in the same area on October 31.

Andy Nias wrote on Facebook that he and 29 fellow travellers "all thought our time was up".

BTP said the claim "will now form one of our lines of inquiry".

Councillor Tony Newman, the leader of Croydon Borough Council, said it is "entirely fitting" that the Armistice Day ceremony was extended to allow for reflection of the awful events and the victims remembered".

Investigators said the tram was travelling at a "significantly higher speed than is permitted" and are probing whether the driver had fallen asleep.

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) has launched a witness appeal, with anyone who was on the tram or has information relevant to the accident being asked to complete an incident form on the organisation's website.

An interim report into what happened will be published by the RAIB next week, with a final report, including any safety recommendations, coming at the conclusion of the investigation.

Croydon MP Gavin Barwell spoke to relatives near the scene where floral tributes and football scarves have been placed.

Authorities are still working on formally identifying the victims, Mr Barwell said.

He said: "I'm sure the coroner doesn't have an easy job to do at all. It's quite right that the authorities absolutely want to make sure when they give a formal identification that they've got that 100% right.

"It's prolonging the agony, but I think if you're doing my job part of the responsibility is to understand their (relatives') frustration and to go back to the authorities and explain how they're feeling but also to explain to them (families) why it's a difficult job and why it's not something that can be done overnight."

Croydon Council has created an online fundraising page - https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/croydon-council-tram-incident-fund - to help people affected by the derailment.

It states: "Many of those involved will require long-term emotional and financial support in the difficult months ahead. This is the official fund to raise money to enable those directly affected by this tragedy, their families, and where appropriate, the wider community, to have access to ongoing care and support. "

Tribute was paid at the cenotaph in Croydon
Daredevil grandmother prepares for Eden Project zipwire challenge

A daredevil grandmother is taking on England's longest and fastest zipwire for charity.

Alison Midwood, 87, who is known as Granny Bin, will fly over Cornwall's Eden Project to raise money for ShelterBox.

She will be suspended on a 660-metre (2,165ft) zipwire above the famous biomes and travel at up to 60mph - despite never having been on one before and not being in the best of health

Alison Midwood, 87, who will fly over Cornwall's Eden Project to raise money for charity (ShelterBox/PA)

Mrs Midwood, who was called Binnie as a youngster after a great aunt Albinia, has a family connection with the Cornwall-based international disaster relief agency ShelterBox.

Her granddaughter Alice Jefferson is a member of the charity's operations team and has just returned from deployment in Iraq preparing to help the people of Mosul.

Ms Jefferson said: "Granny Bin is a bit of legend and is on a fundraising mission for ShelterBox.

"I'm still not fully sure of how she came up with the idea, but I think it's pretty epic, especially given that she's never been on a zipwire - not even a little one - and she's not in the best of health.

"After a cancer operation, and diagnosis of a chronic auto-immune disease, she's now more determined than ever to live life to the full.

"We had time to squeeze in a visit to Eden to check how the big day will work. Granny Bin has been given the all-clear by the medical powers that be, and wasn't put off by seeing others hurtling 660 metres over the biomes.

"All is looking good, so please dig deep and help to motivate Granny Bin to complete this challenge. Who knows what her next target will be? Go Granny go."
Man From U.N.C.L.E's Robert Vaughn 'set the standard we all tried to match'

The Man From U.N.C.L.E star Robert Vaughn has died of leukaemia at the age of 83.

Vaughn played suave spy Napoleon Solo in the 1960s TV series and was also well known for portraying the skittish gunman Lee in the original The Magnificent Seven film.

He died after a brief battle with acute leukaemia after being treated in hospitals in New York and Connecticut, his spokesman confirmed to the Press Association.

Robert Vaughn has died of leukaemia at the age of 83

Manager Matthew Sullivan, who represented him for 30 years, said Vaughn was "the most wonderful human being" and confirmed he died with his family around him.

Vaughn was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar and Golden Globe for his early role in The Young Philadelphians and in 2012 he became the first major American star to feature on Coronation Street.

He played Milton Fanshaw, a wealthy American who met Sylvia Goodwin, played by Stephanie Cole, on a cruise.

He became a familiar face on British television with his role in the BBC show Hustle where he played conman Albert Stroller from 2004 to 2012.

Mr Sullivan added: "He had a blast doing Hustle for the BBC, he loved that show and him and Linda loved living in London, it was one of his greatest joys doing that show.

"Even at 83, women would still come up to the table to talk to him."

His Hustle co-star Adrian Lester called Vaughn a "real gent" and revealed he used to tell tales on set about film stars including Marilyn Monroe and Steve McQueen.

Lester said: "Old school charm in a three piece suit. He did everything on set and off with a twinkle in his eye and never once pulled rank or status or claimed he was too tired or just forgot. He set the standard that we all tried to match.

"I'm going to miss his stories, about Monroe, McQueen, (Charles) Bronson, (James) Coburn ... and his jokes. His very silly, very funny jokes.

"A generous, kind, example of statesman like skill. We were all blessed to have known and worked with him. The last 'Magnificent' to leave us.

"They really don't make them like him any more.

"Marc Warren called him 'The Legend'. The rest of us just called him 'Sir'.

"All our thoughts now are with Linda and the family."

The Man From U.N.C.L.E saw Vaughn's Solo paired with David McCallum's blond Russian Illya Kuryakin, in roles that were revived by Superman actor Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer for Guy Ritchie's big screen reboot in 2015.

Mr Sullivan said Vaughn enjoyed seeing a new version of the spy story that made him famous. He said: "He and Linda were living in Connecticut and the studio hired out an entire cinema for them to watch the movie.

"He did enjoy it. He loved passing on what was next."

The actor is survived by wife Linda, son Cassidy and daughter Caitlin.

Vaughn, who was the last surviving member of The Magnificent Seven, also had a starring role in Bullitt, again opposite McQueen and appeared in TV series Columbo.

A spokesman from Coronation Street said: "Everyone at Coronation Street is deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Robert Vaughn and we offer our condolences to his family.

"Robert was a terrific actor. We were privileged to have him join us on the cobbles."

He carried on working well into his 80s, playing a dying father in Gold Star and starring opposite Matthew Broderick and Camilla Belle in The American Star, which were both released this year.

Gavin Free, who worked with him on Hustle said: "Aw.RIP Robert Vaughn. I got to work with him on Hustle 5 years ago. He did his own slow mo stunts that day while in his late 70s."
87-year-old driver admits killing woman in Christmas Eve coffee shop crash

An elderly motorist has pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving after his car crashed into a coffee shop on Christmas Eve, killing a customer.

David Lord, 87, lost control of his Audi A4 and careered into a Costa Coffee shop where Valerie Deakin, 74, was enjoying a drink with her eldest daughter and best friend.

Mother-of-two Mrs Deakin, who lived in the village of Udimore, near Rye, East Sussex, died at the scene in High Street, Westerham, Kent, following the crash at around 10.30am.

David Lord admitted causing death by dangerous driving after his car crashed into a coffee shop on Christmas Eve

Two men and two women who were injured in the crash were taken to hospitals in London and Farnborough. Another woman was taken to Pembury Hospital with minor injuries.

Lord, of Croydon Road, Westerham, previously pleaded not guilty to causing death by dangerous driving but changed his plea at Maidstone Crown Court on Friday, Kent Police said.

He will be sentenced on January 23.

Following the hearing, the family of Mrs Deakin, who had been married for 50 years, said Lord's change of plea had been a "great relief".

They said in a statement: "Nothing is going to bring Val back and my family will forever grieve for the loss of a wonderful wife, mother and grandmother.

"We are aware that it is not only our family who face up to this tragedy and I can empathise with the Lord's family tribulations.

"Mr Lord's change of plea to guilty has been a great relief to my family and, although the adage 'forgive and forget' cannot yet be applied, we hope that in time we can forget and forgive.

"Val, however, will never be forgotten."

Sergeant Glyn Walker, of Kent Police, said: "David Lord's car was rigorously checked by experts for any defects, but there were none.
Boris Johnson backs condemnation of 'heinous' chemical bombs in Syria

Boris Johnson has welcomed the decision of an international watchdog to condemn the use of banned chemical weapons by Syria's Assad regime and Islamic State (IS).

The Foreign Secretary said it amounts to confirmation that government forces and IS - also known as Daesh - militants are responsible for using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.

A United States-tabled motion was carried in a vote by t he Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), with roughly two-thirds of its 41 members backing it.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson supports the international condemnation.

It follows a 13 month-long international investigation by the OPCW and the United Nations, which concluded that Syrian government forces have used chlorine barrel bombs against civilians, while IS terrorists have used sulphur mustard gas.

The motion was opposed by Russia, despite Moscow in 2013 agreeing to work with the US to rid the country of chemical weapons.

The OPCW said chemical weapons are still being used by Assad, whose regime alongside Russia has bombarded the northern city of Aleppo with air strikes for months.

Mr Johnson said: "This decision confirms that the Assad regime and Daesh are responsible for using abhorrent chemical weapons against civilians. I welcome the OPCW's conclusion following the UN mandated investigation.

"There is a clear determination across the international community to hold those who have used these heinous weapons to account.

"The UK will continue to work with international partners to secure justice for victims, and to prevent the use of chemical weapons by anyone, anywhere."

Meanwhile, International Development Secretary Priti Patel expressed concern over reports that food is running out in Aleppo.

"Warnings that food is running out in Aleppo are desperately worrying, but inevitable while Assad's regime and its backers continue to besiege the city using access to food as a means to wage war.

"The onset of winter will only add to the pressures on those trapped inside the city. Families who have survived years of conflict and bombing face the threat of malnutrition and starvation.

"It is imperative that sustained access is put in place for aid workers and for the delivery of food and medical supplies and that urgent medical evacuations go ahead.
EXPERT VIEWS - What will be the impact of the Trump presidency on women's rights?

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK, Nov 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president raises questions about how his administration will affect women's rights, abortion and gender equality, experts say.

During his campaign, Republican Trump was criticised for his views on women. On tape, he was heard talking about grabbing women by their genitalia, and he insulted female reporters and a female political rival over their looks.

He also said abortion should be largely banned, that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v Wade legalising abortion should be overturned and that he would appoint an anti-abortion justice to the nation's highest court.

He said women who had abortions should be punished, but later retracted this, saying that doctors who perform abortions should be punished.

Here are some expert views on what lies ahead:

MARCIA GREENBERGER, CO-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL WOMEN'S LAW CENTER

"We take with deadly seriousness the promise of President-elect Donald Trump to reshape the Supreme Court to overturn key protections for women like Roe v. Wade. We take with deadly seriousness his commitment to withdraw all Executive Orders issued by President Obama, like stronger equal pay protections and a higher minimum wage for millions of women and men working for federal contractors. And we take with deadly seriousness his vow to enact tax changes that will create huge windfalls for the richest among us and deepen inequality in America.

"We have fought these kinds of dangerous threats before - and won. We will again."

ILYSE HOGUE, PRESIDENT, NARAL PRO-CHOICE AMERICA

"Donald Trump's vision for America and the policies he has proposed are a clear and present danger to women, our bodies, and our freedoms. Our charge every day is to work to ensure President-elect Trump cannot strip away our freedoms, our rights, and our ability to chart our own destiny.

We know the fight for our values isn't won or lost in a single election ... seven in 10 Americans believe in legal abortion, and we'll continue to be their voice and advocates."

JULIE SUK, PROFESSOR OF LAW, CARDOZO LAW, YESHIVA UNIVERSITY

"Our nation has just elected a man who has notoriously groped, belittled, and disparaged women. Our compatriots chose him over the opportunity to inaugurate our first woman president. The Trump presidency will thus begin in a climate that feels misogynistic and hostile to gender equality.

"Candidate Trump did support six weeks of paid maternity leave for new mothers. This would be a step towards economic justice for women. It could open a path toward paid leave for parents of all genders, which is what true gender equality requires. Trump said: 'Nobody respects women more than I do.' If he delivers on paid maternity leave, we might start to believe him.

YAMANI HERNANDEZ, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL NETWORK OF ABORTION FUNDS

"We always knew racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, and other forms of hate were on the ballot ... The destructive nature of this cultural and political moment is undeniable and heart-breaking.

"Our work to remove financial and logistical barriers to abortion has never been more critical. Our work to organise in larger numbers around a shared agenda has never been more necessary. We must be the ones who make abortion more than legal - but truly possible.

"We know that the fight for reproductive justice is more than access to abortion. Our struggle must ensure that people across the nation, and around the world, are able to raise their children without fear of violence."

LYNN PALTROW, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ADVOCATES FOR PREGNANT WOMEN

"...the United States elected a president who suggested during the campaign that women who have abortions should be punished. We also elected as vice president the current governor of Indiana, a state where Purvi Patel was arrested, tried, and convicted of feticide for attempting to have an abortion. Fortunately, that conviction was recently overturned, but only after Ms. Patel was incarcerated for more than a year.

"We hope that our country will reject punishment and instead come together to ensure the health and human rights of all people, including pregnant women."

SONIA OSSORIO, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN, NEW YORK CITY

"Watching our country choose an inexperienced, unprepared man who incites sexism and racism over a deeply qualified and highly prepared woman, has been a painful shock for me. I am committed to not letting disillusionment sent in.

"As a dear friend and NOW colleague said to our team today: the grief you feel today is a direct reflection of the goodness that is in your heart, of the fact that you reject sexism, bigotry, intolerance and hate and you embrace inclusivity, integrity and empathy. All those who hold those values have just been dealt a blow.

"History has faced even darker moments than this, and good people have rallied to turn things back in the right direction. We will do that."

CECILE RICHARDS, PRESIDENT, PLANNED PARENTHOOD FEDERATION OF AMERICA

"We will never back down and we will never stop fighting to ensure that Planned Parenthood patients have access to the care they need, people who come from communities that need our continued support in this new reality - immigrants, people of colour, the LGBTQ community, people of faith, and more.

Healthcare should not be political. Every morning, Planned Parenthood health centre staff across the country wake up and open their doors, as they have this morning, to care for anyone who needs them, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, income, or country of origin. They will do so today, they will do so tomorrow, they will do so every day as they have for 100 years."

LAURIE ADAMS, PRESIDENT, WOMEN FOR WOMEN INTERNATIONAL

"Since 1993, Women for Women International has helped more than 447,000 marginalised women in countries affected by war and conflict ... to move from crisis and poverty to stability and economic self-sufficiency.

"We connect people across cultures to increase understanding and common ground. The elections brought forth fear of 'the other' and our work strives to build bridges and common understanding. Whereas Hillary Clinton has been a champion of women's rights since Beijing, we look forward to learning more about the Trump administration's plans to assist the most vulnerable women in line with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals."

NANCY DUFF CAMPBELL, CO-PRESIDENT, NATIONAL WOMEN'S LAW CENTER
Trump outreach to Dimon for Treasury job may fall on deaf ears

By Dan Freed and David Henry

Nov 10 (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon did not support Republican Donald Trump's presidential campaign, yet some Trump advisers want America's most famous banker to become Treasury Secretary to calm nerves on Wall Street.

A member of Trump's transition team contacted Dimon recently to see if he would be interested in the role, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.

It was not clear whether Dimon had responded, though he has said emphatically multiple times that he was not interested in the role. JPMorgan spokesman Andrew Gray declined to comment, and Dimon, who is traveling outside the United States, could not be reached.

Trump's close circle of advisers includes several with Wall Street ties. His campaign finance manager, Steven Mnuchin, is a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc banker. Fundraiser Anthony Scaramucci is a hedge fund executive.

A person familiar with Trump's personnel efforts said the transition team's list included Dimon, Mnuchin and Rep. Jeb Hensarling. The person said that Mnuchin was a more likely choice given his proximity to Trump.

Trump's controversial rhetoric and behavior during the campaign concerning immigrants, women, minorities, the disabled, Muslims and China, among other things, were offensive to many senior Wall Street executives who have tried to embrace inclusion, diversity and globalization.

Trump also criticized Wall Street on the trail, saying the industry "got away with murder" and would not be let off the hook.

Since being elected on Tuesday, Trump has softened his tone and tried to bridge gaps by meeting with President Obama and taking calls from foreign officials. Bringing Dimon on board could help him mend fences with the financial industry, which appears to be coming around to the idea of Trump in the White House.

At an event on Thursday, Goldman Sachs Group Inc CEO Lloyd Blankfein said Trump could be good for the economy and Dimon would be an excellent choice for Treasury Secretary, while hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said Trump's advisers would get "the best and brightest" to run the economy.

Hensarling's office indicated in a statement that he did not want the job.

"Serving in his Cabinet is not something I've indicated an interest in and it's not something I am pursuing," the statement said. He said he looked forward to working in Congress to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act which tightened regulations on Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis.

Dimon, a lifelong Democrat, has been floated as a possible candidate for roles like Treasury Secretary in the past. However, resentment toward bankers following the 2007-2009 financial crisis made his candidacy much less likely, as did JPMorgan-specific scandals related to a costly derivatives trade and bad mortgages.

A $13 billion mortgage settlement JPMorgan reached with the federal government in 2013 prompted Trump then to call Dimon "the worst banker in the United States."

However, Dimon has managed to retain a reputation within the banking industry as a distinguished leader, in part by the way he handled those scandals and the way he talks about JPMorgan's role in society as the largest U.S. bank.

For instance, Dimon decided to have JPMorgan make big investments in Detroit, calling it a civic duty to turn around an economically challenged city. His memos, speeches and letters to shareholders are often sprinkled with patriotic language.

"America is best when we come together with clear leadership, expertise and the political will to take on difficult challenges and get things done," the 60-year-old chairman and CEO said in a memo to JPMorgan Chase employees following Tuesday's election. "No one should ever doubt the strength and resilience of our country and our democracy."

However, Dimon has said as recently as September that he would not want a role as Treasury Secretary. If he holds to that, it could put him and JPMorgan in an awkward position.

Saying "no" to a presidential request to join the cabinet is unusual, and the bank would then be overseen by appointees from an administration Dimon rejected.

Even so, his associates do not expect Dimon to say "yes."

Dimon has said his determination to act would make it hard to make political compromises. Talking before an audience in September, he said the only job in government he would want is the one Trump is about to get.
2-Civil rights a major concern on second day of anti-Trump protests

By Ian Simpson and Gina Cherelus

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, Nov 10 (Reuters) - Demonstrators took to the streets across the United States for a second day on Thursday to protest against Donald Trump's presidential election victory, voicing fears that the real estate mogul's triumph would deal a blow to civil rights.

On the East Coast, protests took place in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, while on the West Coast demonstrators rallied in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland in California, and Portland, Oregon.

The protests were for the most part peaceful and orderly, although there were scattered acts of civil disobedience and damage to property.

Protesters threw objects at police in Portland and damaged cars in a dealership lot, the Portland Police Department said on Twitter. Some protesters sprayed graffiti on cars and buildings and smashed store front windows, media in Portland said.

"Many in crowd trying to get anarchist groups to stop destroying property, anarchists refusing. Others encouraged to leave area", the department tweeted after declaring the demonstration a riot.

The demonstration continued into Friday morning as Portland police arrested a handful of protesters and used pepper spray and rubber bullets to try to disperse the crowd, the department said.

At least 35 were arrested in a protest in downtown Los Angeles, where demonstrators blocked traffic and sat in the street, local media reported.

Dozens in Minneapolis marched onto Interstate 94, blocking traffic in both directions for at least an hour as police stood by. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles freeway before police cleared them.

BALTIMORE, DENVER

Baltimore police reported that about 600 people marched through the downtown Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street. Two people were arrested.

In Denver, a crowd that media estimated to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through downtown in one of the largest of Thursday's events. Hundreds demonstrated through Dallas.

Thursday's gatherings were generally smaller in scale and less intense than Wednesday's, and teenagers and young adults again dominated the racially mixed crowds.

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Trump tweeted on Thursday night.

Police pitched security barricades around two Trump marquee properties that have become focal points of the protests - his newly opened Pennsylvania Avenue hotel in Washington and the high-rise Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he lives.

About 100 protesters marched from the White House, where Trump had his first transition meeting with President Barack Obama on Thursday, to the Trump International Hotel several blocks away.

At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many chanting "No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!" and carrying signs with such slogans as "Impeach Trump" and "Not my president."

"I can't support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It's heart-breaking," said Joe Daniels, 25, of suburban Alexandria, Virginia.

'GIVE TRUMP A CHANCE'

Two Trump supporters stood off to the side carrying signs reading: "All We are Saying is Give Trump a Chance".

Trump's critics worry that his often-inflammatory campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, women and others - combined with support from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists - could spark a wave of intolerance against minorities.

Taking a far more conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech early Wednesday than he had at many of his campaign events, Trump vowed to be a president for all Americans.

His campaign rejected a Klan newspaper endorsement this month, saying Trump "denounces hate in any form."

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a high-profile Trump supporter, called the demonstrators "a bunch of spoiled cry-babies" in an interview with Fox News.

Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer urged the protesters to give Trump a chance once he is sworn in to office in January.

"I hope that people get it out of their systems ... but then they give this man that was just elected very historically and his new vice president an opportunity to govern," Spicer told MSNBC.

In San Francisco, more than 1,000 high school students walked out of classes Thursday morning to march through the financial district carrying rainbow flags representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, Mexican flags, and signs decrying Trump.

Civil rights groups and police reported an uptick in attacks on members of minority groups, some by people claiming to support Trump. There were also reports of Trump opponents lashing out at people carrying signs supporting him.

More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend.
Trump accelerates Republican Party's sharp swerve right

By Harold Meyerson

Nov 10 (Reuters) - At first glance, it may seem like we've been here before. Come January, the Republicans will control the White House, both houses of Congress and, soon enough, the Supreme Court - just as they did for the four years following the 2002 election. How different could it be?

Plenty. It's not that the all-GOP government of that time covered itself in glory: its chief contributions were the war in Iraq, lax financial regulations and tax cuts so skewed to the wealthy that the level of inequality approached the all-time high that immediately preceded the crash of 1929. And, of course, the lax regulation and economic inequality of the Bush years also precipitated the worst crash since the Great Depression and the most cataclysmic recession since the 1930s.

But the Republican government now waiting eagerly in the wings may soon make Americans feel nostalgic for the good old Bush years. For all of President George W. Bush's shortcomings, he did not issue dog whistles to white nationalists, nor did he seek to promote that doctrine within Republican ranks, as his support for immigration reform made clear. President-elect Donald Trump, by contrast, rose to power sounding white nationalist themes we hadn't heard from a presidential candidate since George Wallace.

Nor is Trump that much of an outlier among Republican elites. Well before he declared his candidacy, a raft of Republican governors and legislators were doing their damnedest to suppress minority voting through purges of the voting roles, new laws requiring specific kinds of voter IDs, and curtailing opportunities for early, more convenient voting.

Bush failed to persuade his fellow Republicans a decade ago to legalize the nation's undocumented immigrants. As a matter of policy, then, the Republicans were already committed to keeping the nation and the electorate as white as possible. What Trump has done is to have taken the racist, xenophobic - and misogynistic and anti-Semitic - beliefs that were voiced on the party's fringes and brought them into the Republican mainstream.

Indeed, Trump has chiefly put on fast forward the long-established rightward movement of the GOP. Just as the takeover of the party's congressional delegation in 1995 by House Speaker Newt Gingrich signaled the end of moderate Republicanism on Capitol Hill, so the ascent of the Tea Party, the screeds of Fox News commentators, the rise of the Breitbart alt-right and now Trump's success signal that even the die-hard conservatives of a decade ago have been marginalized.

For an illustration of how that dynamic plays out, just look at the Midwestern states - where the new breed of Republicans have controlled both the legislature and the governor's office since the 2010 elections. In Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan - once union strongholds - those governments have enacted so-called right-to-work laws, significantly weakening workers' organizations. Previously, such laws were confined mainly to Southern states.

In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback and his Republican legislative colleagues cut taxes on the wealthy to the point that they could no longer adequately fund public schools. The anti-government, anti-worker ethos previously centered in the white South has now spread to any part of the nation where Republicans control the levers of power.

So it will be in Washington under the new regime. Trump wants to cut taxes on the rich, which the Republican Congress will gladly do - effectively jumpstarting a new round of economic inequality. Obamacare will be repealed, with possibly as many as 20 million Americans losing their health insurance in consequence.

Trump's appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court will create a court majority likely to further gut the Voting Rights Act, curtail reproductive rights and cripple the nation's few remaining powerful unions. Don't count on the Democrats being able to block Trump appointees via the filibuster - today's radicalized Republicans will scrap the supermajority requirement in a nano-second to push through their appointments and legislation.

Like the white nationalist party leaders in Europe, Trump doesn't favor slashing the welfare state for elderly whites - the GOP's base. So he's likely to resist a push from more conventional small-government GOP legislators to go after Social Security and Medicare.

They will differ on foreign policy as well, since Trump's division of the world into good guys and bad seems chiefly based on whether world leaders are sufficiently authoritarian and pay him sufficient respect.

But I suspect few congressional Republicans will stand in his way if his Justice Department and FBI crack down on his political enemies and if deportations of undocumented immigrants soar. Even without Trump, the Republican Party has been growing steadily whiter, older, more rural, less educated, more prey to fictitious facts and seething biases. The policies of the incoming government will surely express the values of that Republican base.

Beyond that base, nostalgia for Bush may already be growing.
SunEdison's "yieldcos" delay filing quarterly reports again

Nov 10 (Reuters) - TerraForm Power Inc and TerraForm Global Inc, the "yieldcos" of bankrupt solar company SunEdison Inc, said on Thursday they would delay filing their third-quarter earnings reports.

Both companies are yet to file their annual reports for the year ended Dec. 31, their first-quarter and second-quarter reports. (http://bit.ly/2fBakf6) (http://bit.ly/2fB8oDq)

TerraForm Power and TerraForm Global have said they had identified "material weaknesses" in their internal controls over financial reporting and that they would have to implement more controls and procedures to finalize financial statements for the 2015 annual report.

SunEdison has also delayed its annual, first-quarter and second-quarter filings after identifying "material weaknesses" in its financial reporting, primarily related to problems with a newly implemented IT system.

The company has also said it was conducting an internal investigation into its financial position.

TerraForm Power and TerraForm Global said in September they were exploring strategic alternatives, including a sale of their entire business.

Brookfield Asset Management, which in June expressed interest in acquiring SunEdison's stake in TerraForm, said in regulatory filing earlier in the day that it had met with the companies and their advisers to discuss possible deals.

One option discussed was Brookfield replacing SunEdison as sponsor of the units, purchasing Class A and Class B from stockholders and the yieldcos remaining listed entities.

Alternately, Brookfield would purchase 100 percent of the companies for cash.

However, Brookfield said nothing was agreed and no specific prices were discussed at the meeting.
Trump may not be able to save U.S. coal miners: Kemp

By John Kemp

LONDON, Nov 10 (Reuters) - Donald Trump's election has thrown an apparent lifeline to beleaguered coal producers but he may not be able to do much to revive the fortunes of the industry.

The U.S. coal industry has been a victim of the shale revolution and the enormous quantities of cheap gas that have been unleashed by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.

There is not much a future Trump administration can do to protect coal producers, who have mostly been the victim of economic forces rather than politics and the Obama administration's "war on coal".

U.S. coal production has fallen by almost a quarter from 1,171 million short tons in 2008 to just 897 million short tons in 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Electricity produced from coal declined by nearly 32 percent between 2008 and 2015 and coal's share of total power generation has sunk from almost 50 percent to just one-third.

Record warmth during the winter of 2015/16 cut coal consumption even further and proved the final straw for many mining companies ("U.S. coal industry hopes for respite after perfect storm", Reuters, Oct. 18 ).

Coal consumption by power producers during the winter of 2015/16 fell by another 20 percent compared with the winter of 2014/15.

Many coal mining companies were forced to seek protection from the bankruptcy courts during 2015 and 2016 as they tried to reorganise their businesses and negotiate with creditors.

OBAMA'S WAR ON COAL

Coal companies have long complained that they have been disadvantaged by what they perceive as the Obama administration's war on coal to achieve its climate objectives.

The administration has made no secret of its preference for cleaner burning natural gas and renewables like wind and solar.

Emissions regulations for new and existing power plants for greenhouse gases and toxic air pollutants including mercury have been tightened in ways that favour electricity production from gas.

Regulatory permitting and mineral leasing policies have also been reviewed and altered to make coal production much more difficult and expensive.

The Clinton campaign made clear it would continue and intensify these policies because "we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels".

The Clinton campaign was dogged by the candidate's comment back in March 2016 that "we're going to put a lot of coal miners and companies out of business".

The comment was actually made in the context of a discussion about how to help miners but it cemented perceptions that Clinton was hostile to coal interests ("Clinton's comments about coal jobs", Politifact, May 2016).

INTER-FUEL COMPETITION

Domestic gas production and electricity generation from gas have surged and seized markets from the coal industry.

Inter-fuel competition is nothing new and has adversely affected the coal industry before ("Energy policy in America since 1945", Vietor, 1984).

Coal was hit during the 1950s and 1960s by cheap oil and gas which displaced much of the former use of coal in home heating and power generation.

"By 1956, coal was a sick industry in more ways than one. Coal production had declined by 39 percent from its peak in 1947; three thousand mines had closed and the number of mine workers fell by nearly half. Coal's share of the energy market had fallen by 18 percent with no end in sight", according to Vietor.

"The coal industry was losing share to imported residual oil in the electric utility market; to natural gas in commercial, industrial and residential markets; and to diesel fuel in its railroad and shipping markets."

Coal miners were eventually saved by the energy crisis of the 1970s, which made both gas and oil much more expensive and shifted the power generation mix back to coal.

But now the coal industry is being pummelled once again by the enormous quantity of cheap natural gas which has been unlocked by the shale revolution.

SUPERIOR GAS OPERATION

Gas-fired power plants are cheaper and faster to build, more efficient to run, and offer important operational flexibility which coal-fired power plants cannot match.

A combined-cycle gas-fired plant can be started up in around 15 minutes and reach full power output within somewhere between 40 minutes and 5 hours depending on whether it is started from hot, warm or cold.

By a contrast, a coal plant takes anywhere from 1.5 to 7.0 hours to start up and from 2 to 12 hours to reach full output ("Technical assessment of the operation of coal and gas fired plants", Parsons Brinckerhoff, 2014).

Starting a coal-fired power plant is a lengthy and expensive process which consumes enormous quantities of coal and lighting-up oil as well as electricity from the grid before it generates any usable electricity.

Coal's only advantage as a fuel has been its relative cheapness compared with alternatives such as natural gas or distillate fuel oil.

But as a result of the shale revolution, the cost of gas has fallen close to parity with coal on an energy-equivalent basis, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (http://tmsnrt.rs/2fF8tqr).

Even that understates the competitive threat given the superior operational efficiency and flexibility of modern combined-cycle plants.

COAL TO GAS TRANSITION

Power producers are retiring older, less efficient and less flexible coal-fired plants built between the 1950s and 1970s and replacing them with more efficient and more flexible gas-fired units.

The average capacity-weighted coal-fired power plant in the United States dates from 1974 while the average gas-fired plant was built in about 2002 ("Age of electric power generators varies widely", EIA, 2011).

The shift from coal to gas began long before the Obama administration. Since the early 1990s, almost no new coal-fired power plants have been built, and most new units have been designed to burn gas.

As coal units built in the 1960s and 1970s reach the end of their design lives, the alternative is between expensive refits and upgrades or retiring them and replacing them with more profitable gas units.

Given the low cost of gas, it is not surprising plant operators are rapidly switching their fleet away from coal to gas (http://tmsnrt.rs/2g16xuY).

For much of the post-1945 period, growing electricity demand ameliorated inter-fuel competition and helped accommodate increasing consumption of both coal and gas.

But in the past decade there has been almost zero growth in electricity demand, ensuring gas could only grow at the direct expense of coal (http://tmsnrt.rs/2fhgq6D).

HOLDING BACK THE TIDE

Trump has promised to ease the regulatory burden on all fossil fuel producers, including coal, gas and oil and unlock more investment in domestic energy production.

Regulatory changes could help coal producers at the margin. But if they also help natural gas producers and keep gas prices low, they will actually intensify the inter-fuel competition.

Only a large and sustained rise in gas prices would help coal miners, and even then it would probably slow the rate of retirements rather than lead to new coal-fired power plants being built.

Coal-fired plants take up to 4 years to build and have an expected life of around 40 years so anyone constructing a new plant must take a very long-term view about energy policy.

The Trump administration will last for either 4 or 8 years and there is no guarantee the following administration would be as friendly towards coal.

The balance of costs and risks will therefore continue to favour the construction of gas-fired power plants over coal-fired ones, which will keep the industry under pressure.

There may be an option to increase the amount of thermal coal exported to power producers in emerging markets including India and China.

Exporting to Asia might help coal companies in Wyoming but is less likely to help mines in the eastern United States.

But U.S. coal would be competing with rival producers in Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa and Australia as well as domestic production in India and China.

President-elect Donald Trump can help the U.S. coal mining industry at the margin, but he probably cannot save it, unless gas prices rise significantly.
A group of penguins have had their own special underpass built to protect them from tourists and traffic.

The small blue penguins are often a draw for people wanting to take pictures of the smallest of its kind.

But now the private passage created in Oamaru Harbour, Otago, on New Zealand's southeast coast, will help the bird's commute between their nests and the sea.

Little Blue Penguins runs towards the sea after being released by wild life workers and school children at Mount Maunganui beach in Tauranga, New Zealand

The colony can now use their underpass in Oamaru, New Zealand and will no longer need to rely on these road signs

The one foot tall (30cm) penguins, only weigh around one kilogram (2Ib) and their colony reside in Oamaru Harbour, which is also well known for its elephant rocks.

General manger of Tourism Waitaki Limited, Jason Gaskill, told Reuters on Thursday: 'The project was supported by the local Waitaki District Council, as well as a number of private businesses who offered labour, materials, and advice.'

Power and water supply lines were moved so the 80 feet tunnel could be positioned along the penguins' usual route, New Zealand media said.

Blue penguins, which are also found along the coastlines of southern Australia, usually live up to 10 years and walk on land with a distinct forward stoop.

The penguins will use their new safe route to get both to the sea and their nests
Thailand's crown prince returns from abroad for official duties: sources

BANGKOK, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Thailand's Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn returned to Bangkok on Friday, just weeks before he is due to ascend the throne, four senior military sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Fresh questions about the succession arose when the prince flew to Germany last month to attend to personal business.

Thailand is making preparations for the prince to ascend the throne on Dec. 1, though a formal coronation will be at least one year from now.

The country has been without a monarch since revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej died on Oct. 13 and has been ruled by regent Prem Tinsulanonda, the 96-year-old former head of the royal advisory council.

Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said last month that the prince had asked to delay his ascension to the throne while he mourns his father.

"His Highness has arrived back in Thailand from Germany and will attend an event this evening at the 1st Infantry Regiment, King's Own Guards. This is confirmed," said a senior military source who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The prince's return to Thailand, will likely ease any concerns about the succession, said Bangkok-based lecturer and analyst Gothom Arya.

"His return will likely stop any lingering rumours that the ascension process, when it happens, will not proceed smoothly," he told Reuters.

The prince has spent much of his adult life abroad, and has a home in Germany where his son, Prince Dipangkorn, is enrolled at a private school.

Thailand's military government submitted a new constitution for royal endorsement on Tuesday. Prayuth Chan-ocha has said that only the new monarch can approve the charter.
Slovak Republic - Factors To Watch on Nov 11

BRATISLAVA, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Here are news stories, press reports and events to watch which may affect Slovak financial markets on Friday. ALL TIMES GMT (Slovak Republic: GMT + 2 hours) =========================ECONOMIC DATA======================== Real-time economic data releases.................. Summary of economic data and forecasts......... Recently released economic data................ Previous stories on Slovak data.......... **For a schedule of corporate and economic events: http://emea1.apps.cp.thomsonreuters.com/Apps/CountryWeb/#/1C/events-overview ====================NEWS====================================== BREXIT: The European Union's approach to negotiations on Britain's departure from the bloc will be "neither aggressive nor naive", the union's chief negotiator Michel Barnier said on Thursday. Story: Related stories: IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL: Iran wants all parties to stick to an international nuclear deal but has options if that does not happen, its foreign minister said on Thursday after the U.S. election victory of Donald Trump, who has vowed to pull out of the pact. Story: Related stories: GRAVEDIGGING: Two brothers from Slovakia won a grave-digging competition at an international exhibition of funeral, burial and cremation services on Thursday. Story: Related stories: ====================PRESS DIGEST================================ E-CARS: Slovakia's economy ministry and the Association of automotive industry will allocate 5.2 million euros ($5.67 million) by the end of 2017 to subsidise sale of electric and hybrid cars, the ministry said. http://spravy.pravda.sk/ekonomika/clanok/410521-stat-podpori-kupu-elektromobilu-ci-hybridu-pattisic-eurami/ (Reuters has not verified the stories, nor does it vouch for their accuracy.) For real-time stock market index quotes click in brackets: Warsaw WIG20 Budapest BUX Prague PX Main currency report TOP NEWS -- Emerging markets News editor of the day: Jason Hovet on +420 224 190 476 E-mail: prague.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com ($1 = 0.9168 euros) (Reporting by Prague Newsroom)
Iraqi special forces seize Mosul district in fresh push

By Stephen Kalin and Saif Hameed

KOKJALI/BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Iraqi special forces said they pushed deeper into Mosul on Friday despite heavy resistance from Islamic State militants using civilians as cover, and were holding half a dozen city neighbourhoods seized in the last 10 days.

The elite Counter Terrorism Service troops broke through Islamic State defence lines to enter the city early last week and have since been embroiled in a brutal, close-quarter combat with waves of suicide bombers and snipers.

The special forces are the spearhead of a wider coalition of 100,000 fighters seeking to crush a few thousand Islamic State jihadists who have ruled Mosul, the biggest city of their cross-border "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria, for the last two years.

The campaign, nearly four weeks old, is the most complex military operation in Iraq in the 13 years of turmoil since the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Security forces and army infantry divisions, backed by a U.S.-led air force, are preparing to move on southern and northern districts of Mosul in coming days, to step up pressure on the militants.

Kurdish peshmerga and Shi'ite paramilitary forces are holding territory to the northeast and to the west.

On the eastern front, special forces pushed into the Qadisiya al-Thaniya district, on the northern edge of the small pocket of neighbourhoods they control so far, Sabah al-Numani, spokesman for the Counter Terrorism Service, told Reuters.

"We have encountered heavy resistance from the enemy," he said, with what he called "obstructive patrols" of militant forces trying to hold up the advance.

"We are facing the most difficult form of urban warfare, fighting with the presence of civilians, but our forces are trained for this sort of combat."

Military officers have told Reuters that the fighting is some of the most lethal they have seen, with small groups of militants using a vast network of tunnels and narrow streets to launch an apparently endless sequence of attacks against troops.

A Reuters correspondent in Kokjali, on the eastern edge of the city, saw U.S. Apache helicopters overhead. Explosions, either from air strikes or suicide car bombs which the jihadists have deployed in the hundreds since the campaign started on Oct. 17, could be heard against a backdrop of artillery fire.

As smoke rose above the city, hundreds of civilians were on the streets of Kokjali, some of them local residents but others fleeing the fighting in Mosul itself.

The International Organization for Migration says nearly 48,000 people have been displaced by the fighting, still a relatively low figure compared to a United Nations warning before the campaign of a possible exodus of up to 800,000.

Numani said the army had told civilians to stay indoors for their safety, adding that the counter terrorism unit aimed to hand over neighbourhoods which it had secured to other forces. In other cities retaken from Islamic State, local police forces have moved in after the special forces have cleared territory.

KILLINGS AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Islamic State's two-year reign of fear in northern and western Iraq threatened the country with disintegration, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi says it has cost Iraq $35 billion in economic damage.

On Friday, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani praised the forces battling Islamic State, including thousands of Shi'ite fighters in the Popular Mobilisation paramilitary forces, for their sacrifices.

Without "the blood of these dear ones and their continuous steadfastness, only God would know what fate would await Iraq and others", said Seyyid Ahmed al-Safi, who delivered the Friday sermon in the holy city of Kerbala on behalf of the aged and reclusive Shi'ite religious leader.

Inside Mosul, a city which is still home to up to 1.5 million people, residents said this week that the militants had killed at least 20 people and displayed their bodies - five of them crucified - as a warning against acting as informants for Iraqi forces.

The U.N. human rights office said a total of 40 people were reportedly shot on Tuesday for "treason and collaboration" with Iraqi security forces, and a 27-year-old man was shot for using a mobile phone.

Spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani also said the jihadists were reportedly stockpiling ammonia and sulphur in civilian areas, possibly for use as chemical weapons.

A source in the city contacted by Reuters said the militants were allowing some relatives of Islamic State supporters to evacuate and head west to Syria.

Routes out of Mosul to Islamic State's Syrian stronghold of Raqqa appear still to be open, despite efforts by the mainly Shi'ite Hashid Shaabi forces to cut them off.

The source said he had seen five families leaving Mosul. One departing person said they had permission from Islamic State and "no one will stop us on the road from Mosul to Raqqa".

In the eastern district of Karama, where fighting continued, one resident said militants were riding around on motorbikes. "We can bear the bombardment and the clashes to get rid of Daesh (Islamic State). We want to be liberated and despite all this fear we are staying in our houses," he said.

In nearby Qadisiya al-Thania, stormed by special forces on Friday, a woman said the clashes were so fierce she was too scared to go into the kitchen to cook, so she fed her family dates.

"The sound of clashes grew more distant, and then fighters reached us and raised the Iraqi flag and told us they had pushed out Daesh and liberated us," she said by phone.

"We never thought we'd be free of Daesh. We can still hear clashes and we hope they don't come back again".
Russia calls on chemical weapons watchdog to visit Syria's Aleppo

MOSCOW, Nov 11 (Reuters) - The Russian Defence Ministry said on Friday it wanted the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to urgently send a mission to Aleppo, saying it had evidence Syrian opposition rebels had used chemical weapons there.

The ministry said earlier on Friday it had found evidence that there was a high probability that the rebels had used chlorine gas and white phosphorous on the south-west edge of Aleppo in district 1070.

It said it was basing its information on a study of soil samples, unexploded shells, and shrapnel.

Major-General Igor Konashenkov said Russia would now hand over the evidence to the OPCW and wanted The Hague-based body to urgently send a team to Aleppo to gather its own evidence.
Invoking Trump, ex-Georgian leader launches new party in Ukraine

By Natalia Zinets

KIEV, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Citing past praise by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump for his reforms, former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili launched a new political party in Ukraine on Friday to fight corruption, just days after resigning bitterly as a regional governor.

Saakashvili, who is widely credited with cracking down on graft when he led Georgia from 2004 till 2013, quit as governor of the coastal Odessa region last Monday, accusing his erstwhile patron, President Petro Poroshenko, of blocking his reforms there.

His political allies said his repeated criticism of authorities in Kiev had made him a target of political infighting.

At a news conference in Kiev, Saakashvili played an old video of a meeting with Trump in which the New York real estate tycoon praised the Georgian as a model reformer.

Saakashvili, who assumed Ukrainian citizenship to be eligible for the post in Odessa, went on to say he would look to bring about a snap election as soon as possible and by peaceful means.

"Our goal is to change the current so-called political elite," he said. "The main goal is to bring in people who are ready to work for the country, not for their clan, pocket or oligarchic group."

Saakashvili, a bitter opponent of Russia, was among several foreign politicians and technocrats to be given key posts by the pro-Western leadership in Kiev after the Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovich fled in the face of mass street protests.

They were brought in as part of a drive to eliminate entrenched corruption and improve transparency in a country riven by cronyism, economic mismanagement and a separatist war in eastern Ukraine.

Since then, many have resigned or been dismissed, amid growing disillusion with the pace of reforms. Saakashvili took more swipes at Poroshenko, one of Ukraine's wealthiest businessmen, on Friday.

"He had a chance to use me for implementing real reforms in this country, but it turned out that the real reforms and his wealth are opposite things," he said.

Saakashvili said his new party would not have ties to big business and would not accept politicians or officials who had been in public life for a long time.

"We will win only when we get rid of the so-called Ukrainian political elite, in reality - the dregs of society, those who are identical to the Russian ruling class," he said.
Factory blaze kills at least 13 Indian garment workers as they slept

By Nita Bhalla

NEW DELHI, Nov 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - At least 13 garment workers were killed after a fire broke out in a factory on the outskirts of the Indian capital, police and witnesses said on Friday.

The blaze, which started in the early hours of Friday as the workers slept inside the leather factory workshop in Uttar Pradesh state, also critically injured eight more people.

Police investigating the cause of the fire in Ghaziabad district said preliminary findings suggested it may have been sparked by an electrical short circuit.

"We are reason to believe that it may be linked to an electrical short circuit, but we are still looking into it," Deepak Kumar, Ghaziabad's Senior Superintendent of Police, told reporters.

"Everyone worked together to rescue the people inside the building. These included local residents, police, fire and ambulance services."

Police said they were also investigating the possibility the factory, was illegal and did not have a license to operate in the congested residential area.

Television pictures showed large crowds outside the gutted three-storey building, located in a narrowed-laned area lined cheek-by-jowl with similar structures in Sahibabad.

The fire, which started at around 4 a.m. local time, spread from the ground floor housing the stitching unit to the upper two storeys, where the labourers were sleeping, said witnesses.

Fire engines were rushed to area and managed to rescue 16 workers, said witnesses, many of whom were taken to a nearby hospital suffering from burns and respiratory problems.

Activists say the incident is one in a series illustrating the neglect of workplace safety in South Asia's industrial sector, even in the wake of Bangladesh's 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, in which more than 1,100 garment workers were killed.

The Rana Plaza tragedy, where an eight-storey building housing several garment factories supplying global brands collapsed on the outskirts of Dhaka, was one of the world's most deadly industrial accidents.

In India, as well as Bangladesh, such accidents are common.

Eight people were killed in October in an explosion at a firework factory in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, while in May 2014, 15 others were killed in a similar accident in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

Campaigners advocating for better living and working conditions in the textile and garment sector said the incident showed the plight of workers were still being ignored.

"Despite the many disasters we have seen before, and the great amount of attention to the dangerous working conditions in the South Asian garment industry, factories there largely remain unsafe. These workers were killed because they were sleeping in the factory," said Carin Leffler of the Clean Clothes Campaign.
Hungary govt proposes big private sector wage hikes, payroll tax cut

BUDAPEST, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Hungary's government is proposing a six-year programme of private sector wage hikes and payroll tax cuts to boost competitiveness and lift local salaries closer to those in richer European Union members, Economy Minister Mihaly Varga said on Friday.

Following years of heavy emigration to western Europe, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government is grappling with a record labour shortage that is making it hard for all types of companies to recruit, driving up wages across the economy.

One analyst said the proposed measures could cost the government revenues worth up to 1.3 percent of gross domestic product but would not destabilise the budget as in the election-year spending binges seen over the past decade.

"The government's view is that a situation has occurred in the Hungarian economy, when we can plan a bit more boldly," Varga told a news conference after a meeting with private sector employers and workers' representatives.

Varga said wages should rise by about 40 percent in real terms over the next six years as a result of the programme, which also foresees several rounds of cuts in payroll tax payable by employers.

"This should not jeopardise the resilience of the economy. Therefore we have made a proposal that would link the wage hike cycles with further improvements in efficiency and competitiveness," Varga said.

In the World Economic Forum's 2015-2016 Global Competitiveness Report, Hungary ranked 63rd behind nearby Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania.

Hungary has the fourth-highest tax wedge - the total employer and employee tax burden as a share of pay - of the 34 member countries of the OECD.

To bring that closer to levels elsewhere in central Europe, Hungary's government is proposing a 4 percentage point cut in the payroll tax next year and another 2 percentage points in 2018 - when the government will be seeking re-election.

Varga said that would be followed by cuts worth 2 percentage points per year over the following four years if real wages grow by at least 6 percent year-on-year.

The government has also proposed lifting the minimum wage by 15 percent next year from a monthly 111,000 forints ($390) in 2016, he said, while the minimum wage for jobs requiring at least a secondary education would rise by 25 percent.

In 2018 the two wage types would rise further, Varga said, adding that talks would continue over the coming days.

"The 6 percentage point cut in the next two years can lead to a revenue shortfall of about 350 to 400 billion forints," said analyst Peter Virovacz at ING Bank in Budapest.
Trump may already have a plan ready to revamp Dodd-Frank

By Lisa Lambert and Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON, Nov 11 (Reuters) - When Jeb Hensarling, the Republican chair of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, released legislation this summer to weaken the major financial law known as Dodd-Frank, many said it was a pret-a-porter plan that his party's nominee, Donald Trump, could easily adopt.

Now that Trump is president-elect, he appears to be doing just that.

Language about financial services posted on the Trump transition website, www.greatagain.gov, echoes the tone of Hensarling's bill, known as the CHOICE Act.

It calls Dodd-Frank, passed in the wake of the 2007-09 financial crisis and recession, as "a sprawling and complex piece of legislation that has unleashed hundreds of new rules and several new bureaucratic agencies" and promises to dismantle and replace it with "new policies to encourage economic growth and job creation."

Hensarling's legislation, which his committee approved in September, also takes a replacement approach.

The Texas Republican had unveiled his proposal in Trump's hometown of New York in June, and then met with the businessman later in the day. At the same time, Hensarling was mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary by Trump's team. He has said he is not pursuing a Cabinet position.

"The CHOICE Act accurately reflects the priorities that President Trump has placed on the Dodd-Frank problem," said J.W. Verret, an associate professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School and financial regulation expert. Verret regularly meets with and briefs members of Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission on financial regulation.

I think it is a great blueprint for everything that he has promised," said Verret, a former Republican congressional staffer.

The Hensarling blueprint would primarily allow banks to choose between complying with Dodd-Frank or meeting tougher capital requirements - primarily to maintain a ratio of tangible equity to leverage exposure of 10 percent.

It would also reorganize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, throw out the Volcker Rule restricting banks from making speculative investments and eliminate the authority of the Financial Stability Oversight Council to designate non-banks as "systemically important."

It also differs from the Dodd-Frank legislation in the way it treats insolvent banks. Hensarling says his approach will prevent taxpayer dollars from being used to bail out failed institutions.

Alongside Obamacare, Dodd-Frank is considered one of Democratic President Barack Obama's signature domestic policies.

The most senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown, has been a vocal defender of it, as has liberal firebrand Senator Elizabeth Warren. That means a Dodd-Frank revamp could stall in one chamber of Congress. Senate rules allow a single member to block a bill from proceeding to a vote.

Trump said last May that he would dismantle Dodd-Frank, primarily because the law makes it hard for banks to loan money.

But few have called for total demolition of it, with bank industry sources privately saying they would like to see an easing of Dodd-Frank rules.

Trump campaign adviser Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street financier, said this week that the administration will review the law and "the worst anti-business parts of it will be gutted."

Verret said he believes some components of the CHOICE Act will appeal to the populist anger felt by Tea Party members and Trump supporters toward big banks.

One such provision, he said, would place limits on how central banks can lend to financial institutions in times of crisis, an in effort to prevent future bailouts.
Many local celebrities are no doubt enamoured by the unique, nostalgic taste of EGB (Elephant House Ginger Beer).



However, recently, the worlds newest holder of the coveted title of Miss Intercontinental title, Heilymar Rosario Velazquez of Puerto Rico, the 2016 winner out of more than 70 international beauty queens, also professed her undying love for what has arguably become Sri Lankas most globally-recognized export.



All contestants of Miss Intercontinental 2016 were additionally given the chance to enjoy the unique and refreshing taste of EGB, which is a truly original Sri Lankan experience.

Made to an authentic recipe, with 100 percent natural ginger extract sourced only from local ginger farmers, EGB was well received by contestants like Miss China, Miss England, Miss India, Miss Italy, Miss Portugal and Miss Sri Lanka, all of whom expressed their love for the spicy, tangy, sweet taste of EGB. This popular beverage is not only a representation of the real roots of Sri Lanka but also the embodiment, and the ambassador, for our islands culture both locally and abroad.

The first time in 20 years that a pageant of its size has been held in South Asia, the 45th Miss Intercontinental 2016 was conceptualised by Cinnamon Hotels and Resorts, and powered by EGB. Apart from a sensational Grand Finale, headlined by global musical act Apache Indian, the pageant also encompassed a multitude of activities during its final round in Sri Lanka, including a visit to the cultural landmarks of historic Sigiriya and a safari in Minneriya.
President Maithripala Sirisena said he was satisfied with his performance as the President where he succeeded in getting the 19th Amendment to the Constitution passed in parliament and getting independent commissions established.

In an interview with the Hindu newspaper, President Sirisena said he had ensured human rights, democratic rights, fundamental rights and the freedom of the people and given the maximum possible media freedom as the President.

When the people made me the President, they did not ask for food, water or clothes. They wanted a society where they could live freely and happily. I have given that to the people, he said.

Excerpts from the interview:

In November 2014, you left the ruling party to join the common opposition. At that time, you spoke of grave personal risks associated with the defection that proved historic, leading to a regime change in Sri Lanka. When you look back now, how does it feel? What do you consider your biggest success as President?

Now 22 months have passed since I became the President. I am satisfied with my performance during this time.

There are reasons for that. Firstly, I succeeded in getting the 19th Amendment to the Constitution (clipping the powers of the executive presidency and enabling the setting up of independent commissions) passed in parliament. We actually proposed that the executive powers of the President be reduced immediately. The Supreme Court said major clauses cannot be deleted without a referendum. Furthermore, the Supreme Court told us what could be done with two-thirds majority in parliament. So we have changed clauses to the maximum extent possible with two-thirds majority in parliament.

Earlier the President could dissolve the parliament after completion of one year of parliament, but now under the provisions of the 19th Amendment, it has been extended to four and a half years.

Establishment of independent commissions is another reason. It was essential for the country to ensure [protection of] human rights, democratic rights, fundamental rights and the freedom of the people. I have ensured that people get these rights, I have succeeded in doing that as President. I have given the maximum possible media freedom. There are no killings, abductions or cases of intimidation of media persons. They dont have to leave the country any more. Those who had fled the country earlier have now returned. That is what people expected from me.

When the people made me the President, they did not ask for food, water or clothes. They wanted a society where they could live freely and happily. I have given that to the people.

But these things should be given to a developed society, where educated, intelligent people live. Only those who are intelligent enough will use these freedoms and rights responsibly. People without a righteous mind will not realise the value of these. They are not happy about these [rights]. They might use this freedom to mislead the society. When these rights are given to the Western societies, they enjoy those rights because of their intellectual capacities.

In our ancient times, we were far ahead of the Western people in our intellectual capacities. Our history is an extraordinary one, dating back thousands of years. I do hope that people use the rights we have given them now  like human rights, fundamental rights, democratic rights and freedom  intelligently.

I said I am satisfied with what I have done in a short period of time. Before I came to power there was a fear that those who had given commands during the war could be taken to international courts of justice, that they may even face execution, and that they may have to sit on the electric chair.

The international community is so satisfied with my performance that they have completely changed their impression of the country. Now there is no threat of international courts, now we dont have to talk about electric chairs, there is no problem [of foreign judges investigating alleged violation of human rights]; I have told the international community that I cannot accept any proposal that allows foreign judges to probe our domestic matters. This is another great victory I was able to achieve in this time.

The former President Mahinda Rajapaksa called snap polls even though he had two more years in power left. There are two reasons why he called for fresh elections. Even today, he doesnt give the reasons for his decision to go for early elections.

There were two problems he could not solve as President. One was the UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council) proposals against our country. The second was that the country was heavily indebted at that time. We had a national debt of 9,000 billion [Sri Lankan] rupees. That was a major economic crisis for our country.

I am now dealing with the UNHRC proposals while protecting the respect and dignity of my country.

In order to solve this major economic crisis, we have been formulating a new economic plan. I believe in a mixed economy. One is the increase of foreign and local investments. We have now opened our doors to welcome investors, we provide them with tax holidays and various other concessions. Second problem was that the export market was declining, and our production for the export market was also rapidly declining. So now my second step is to strengthen the export production market and increase our exports.

My country is an agricultural nation. We are implementing a plan to develop our economy based on our indigenous production. With this vision, I have started four new projects. One is a campaign to improve national indigenous food production. Second is sustainable development, taking into consideration climate change and global warming. Third is a campaign against illicit drugs, and also gradual reduction and elimination of tobacco and alcohol usage. Fourth is addressing the chronic kidney disease affecting many. Every year, about 5,000 new cases of kidney ailments are diagnosed. Our population is 20 million and 5,000 new patients every year is a huge figure.

The new programme for national reconciliation is being implemented. It is a major initiative for reconciliation among Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Malay, Burgher and other communities to ensure coexistence and harmony. It is essential to strengthen reconciliation in order to prevent occurrence of another war in the country.

With all these successful efforts I am quite satisfied with my performance.

Those who have been in power and have lost power are trying to sabotage all these activities. They have sufficient funds and they use those funds to create chaos among the people and mislead people. They are abusing and misusing the democratic freedoms that I have restored in this country. They are making use of those freedoms to sabotage our efforts. I am closely monitoring these activities.

I am confident that I can face all these challenges and make our country better. The experience I have from my 50 years in politics gives me enough strength to meet all these challenges successfully.

You spoke about the economy. As someone with a Leftist background  I have read that you still have a Karl Marx picture in your living room  now in coalition with the United National Party known for its right-wing economic policies, how do you think your government can promote economic growth while safeguarding living standards and social welfare of farmers and workers?

We have a consensual government of the two major parties. There are similarities as well as differences in the vision and policies of these two parties. The problems we face today are not the ones we faced 50 years ago. The world is changing rapidly. I have already told you that what is suitable for us is a mixed economy. My vision is social democracy.

Your question is how compatible is liberal democracy with social democracy. The two major parties have agreed on a consensual formula, a common plan of action has been agreed upon to continue and implement that programme. There is a broad agreement between the parties on this. We need large-scale investments. We cannot come out of the economic crisis without such investments. At the same time, enhancing social welfare and subsidies is also essential. The poor man is the one badly affected by a market economy. We have to protect the welfare and economy of the ordinary man. For that purpose, there is an agreement between the two parties in the consensual government. When there are differences in opinion, the major parties sit together, discuss them and solve them. Through discussion we solve those problems easily. We have a strong government. Some people believe that it is about to be toppled. That is a pipe dream. With perfect understanding we can take the country forward, while we solve those differences you mentioned.

You have been a frequent visitor to the Tamil-majority Northern Province  releasing some of the private land held by the army and inaugurating newly built homes for the displaced. How do you respond to the Tamil political leaderships concern over the pace of reconciliation, with unresolved issues like militarisation, political prisoners and the call to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA)?

Reconciliation is not something that can be done in a few days. We got independence from colonial rule in 1948. We had the first parliamentary election in 1947. When a state leader visited Jaffna in the early days, it was almost a miracle. Very rarely did a leader go to Jaffna or the north. In the last 22 months I have been to Jaffna as President 11 times. Prior to that no leader went to the north [as often].

I feel very happy to interact  not just with the Tamil politicians in the north, but also with the people and obtain their ideas directly.

A vast majority  about 90 per cent of the people  in the north voted for me. They have confidence in me that I will solve their problems. So it is not only my responsibility, but also my obligation to solve their problems.

We are building houses for them in large numbers. We received assistance from India and many other countries for the housing projects. At the same time, we are giving back the land acquired by the military during the conflict to the original owners gradually.

In drafting the new Constitution, we are looking at a Constitution that will strengthen the reconciliation between the communities.

These things will have to be done keeping the southern Sinhala-Buddhist masses also satisfied. If the southern people are opposed to certain things, we cannot have a successful reconciliation process. Hence our endeavour towards reconciliation must also be acceptable to the Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and other communities. That is not an easy task. But we have to do this challenging job. We should not allow any possibility of a conflict recurring in our country.

Earlier you spoke of foreign judges. Can reconciliation proceed without accountability? How will you convince the Tamils  who have little confidence in domestic judicial mechanisms  that an internal probe will be fair?

When we came to power, our judiciary was very weak. One of the reasons we appointed a Chief Justice from the minority community was to enhance confidence in the judicial system among the minorities.

The leaders who were in power before I assumed office used to telephone and dictate terms to the judges, on how they should give verdicts. Major criminal charges against some people were withdrawn.

Now we dont interfere with the judiciary, we do not try to influence [the] judiciary. We improve the quality of the judiciary and its independence and impartial nature. We can obtain advice from foreign judicial experts. As per our constitutional provisions, there is no possibility of foreign judges participating in our judicial process or conducting cases. Only a citizen of our country can attend court proceedings. I dont have any mandate to act against constitutional provisions.

We have to create a judicial mechanism that has the fullest confidence of the people in the north.

We can also seek advice from expat Sri Lankans, who are judicial experts, on this process.

We are trying to work out a procedure which is also acceptable to those people speaking about getting foreign judges. We cannot satisfy everybody 100 per cent when we try to solve a problem of this nature. We can do something that is acceptable to and satisfies the vast majority.

In the context of the ongoing constitutional reform, there is a call from the Tamils for federalism. Do you think the new Constitution can meet that aspiration? Some political actors in the south want a unitary Constitution, while constitutional experts seem to suggest that a compromise might be not terming the Constitution either unitary or federal.

People of the south are scared of the word federal. People of the north are scared of the word unitary. What we should do is not fight over these two words. We should come up with a formula that is acceptable to all.

It takes maturity to understand devolution. We cannot satisfy the extremist elements either in the north or in the south. We have to do what is good for, and acceptable to, the majority of the people.

As the leader of the SLFP, how will you hold the party together given the political pressure from the pro-Rajapaksa faction, even as you work with the UNP in Sri Lankas first national unity government?

This is the first time in history that the two parties have come together in a consensual government. We were always used to governing separately, within the political party lines. We should not act in a backward, tribalistic manner. Separation and division are backward ideas. Those are qualities of a backward society.

The confidence in the SLFP as a party among the people is something lasting ages. People have recognised and accepted these two major parties  SLFP and the UNP. Therefore, in these circumstances, there is no possibility of new political forces coming up.

As a political party we have the ability to solve any problem.

What about pressure within the SLFP?

There is no such pressure or influence within the party that I cannot withstand. The sole intention of the opponents is to disrupt and sabotage our programmes. When this governments programmes succeed, it becomes a defeat for the opponents. We can solve those internal issues.

Given the enhanced ties between India and Sri Lanka, do you think there is reason to expedite signing of the ETCA (Economic and Technological Cooperation Agreement), which has drawn considerable local resistance?

Since ancient times we have very close relations with India. There are many similarities between the two countries. We have similar cultures. This relationship has been built on Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. We expect to sign trade agreements with quite a number of countries. These agreements are aimed at benefitting both the signatory countries and we dont intend signing any agreement that could be detrimental to any one country.

The proposal for India and Sri Lanka to sign a fresh [trade] agreement has been there for the last 10-15 years. Deliberations and discussions continued under different names. We will enter into an agreement which is not harmful to either party. The agreement will be signed after the approval of the Cabinet and will also be submitted to parliament. We cannot do anything in secrecy, we are transparent and accountable to the people.

Do you see a need for expediting it, or do you think it could take some more time for further negotiations?

Well discuss it in the Cabinet, and after that it will also be produced in parliament. If there are any unsuitable clauses, we will have further discussions and finalise the agreement.

Work on Chinas port city project has resumed under your government amid local opposition. How is your governments policy towards China different from former President Rajapaksas?

The port city agreement, when it was signed during President Rajapaksas time, was contradictory to the constitutional provisions. No government in the past had signed such an agreement. We amended certain clauses of that agreement as the new government. In such an agreement, the importance of national security as well as regional security should be taken into consideration.

Both China and India are our good friends. Our relations with both these countries go back to ancient times. Hence such agreements have to be dealt with perfect understanding. Such agreements should not interfere with the sovereignty of our nation.

The new government was able to discuss this with the Chinese government and remove unsuitable clauses in the agreement and make it good for both parties. The previous government entered such agreements in secrecy, but we are working in a transparent manner.

In a recent interview, you have said that investigation into some high-profile cases allegedly involving the former first family has not proceeded swiftly. Why do you think that is the case?

In carrying out these investigations, what we expect is to fulfil the promise given to our people during the last election campaign. People gave me a mandate to govern this country by defeating an absolutely corrupt regime. There is something that people expected when they voted me into power. They expected corruption-free, good governance.

Good governance does not mean let go of the big, powerful people and punish the ordinary people. That is why I had to tell the investigation agencies, Do not act with political agenda.

Members of these commissions are excellent people, they act independently and impartially. The lower ranks supporting these commissions should also act similarly. I had to come out with that statement because there were such issues. Some of the media published my speech out of context. I believe that through that action I could get them back on the right track. I do not have a personal agenda, my agenda is for the country.

You had spoken specifically of money deposited in a bank in Dubai, the Avant Garde investigations and Wasim Thajudeen murder case involving President Rajapaksas family.

It pains my heart to see such investigations being suppressed or delayed. I do have doubts as to the reasons for this suppression. Hence I speak frankly and openly. But some people misinterpret my speeches.

Anything else you want to say?

Our government has turned a new page in our international relations. Prior to my assuming office, Sri Lanka was an unaccepted country in the international community. I believe that all the countries in the world are our friends now. The manner in which I obtained the support of the international community  I feel it is a victory for me. Not just a victory for our country and people, but also a personal victory for me. In todays circumstances, no country can develop by making enemies in the international community.

At the time we came to power, even the ties with India  whose relationship we were proud of for years  was dented. Now all these have improved.
n interesting question is what would happen to American foreign policy if President Barack Obama were allowed to have another four-year term in office?

It would be a less interventionist presidency than what is about to become. This is not to say that I think the way Obama has handled the war in Afghanistan has been successful. Nor do I believe the attack on Libya was a sensible idea. Nor do I think the way he dealt with Russia and Ukraine during the past four years has been anything but counter-productive.

But I do believe the world would be an even messier place if he had not been president. Syria would have been invaded with ground troops. Iraq would have

been replicated.

I think confrontation with China over the ownership of the contested islands in the South China and East China seas would have been more serious than it

has been.

There would have been no bringing back Cuba in from the cold. (Cuba was the home of the missile crisis of 1962 when the world came terrifyingly close to a nuclear war.)

Most important, there would have been no nuclear deal with Iran. Irans research which could have led to the making of a nuclear bomb (not that I think it had any intention of going that far) would have continued. At some point Israel would have bombed Irans reactors leading to outrage in many parts of the Muslim world, especially among Irans neighbours. Even Saudi Arabia would have been angry and would have given up its role as a would-be interlocutor between Israel and Palestine. The US, for its part, would have been implicated since it would be assumed it had given Israel the green light. Russia, a de facto part of the team of Western mediators, would have been furious.



All Obamas military conflict problems except Libya -- Syria, ISIS, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq -- he inherited from George W. Bush. Indeed, according to Bushs Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his administration had a plan that after subduing Iraq and Afghanistan the US would do the same with Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen.

Obama has not gone to war elsewhere. He has drawn a line under further interventionism. He has always believed that interventionism is a crude instrument. On the other hand Obama has continued the fight against terrorism using drones, targeted assassinations and Special Forces.

Obama believes that US military power must be used sparingly and that in many situations, if not most, it will be counter-productive. He refused to consider a plan to push the Russians out of Crimea following its invasion. According to his long interview in the Atlantic magazine in April, he believes the Middle East is of declining importance.

He does not believe, as his opponents do, that the US must always seem credible. Thats why, when he had a last minute change of mind about going into Syria, he was not influenced by that calculation. His critics suggest that having once drawn a red line he should not have crossed it as it undermined American credibility. But that he considers nonsense, not surprisingly when one considers that the combined resources of the US military are more than all the other nations of the world combined.



So if Obama were president for another four years what would happen? I think, as usually occurs in civil wars, Syria would burn itself out, but with a chastened President Bashar Al-Assad still on top. ISIS would be defeated by the militaries of the US, Russia and other NATO members combined. The islands disputes with China would remain frozen, just as the China/Taiwan one has long been. Negotiations with North Korea over its growing nuclear armoury would be given new vigour, winning over China to put increasing pressure on its regime. The Israel/Palestine dispute would probably remain impervious to progress.

Obama would become cooler in his dealings with the corrupt government of Ukraine, having been belatedly convinced that his earlier confrontational stance in support of Ukraines attempt to break away from the Russian orbit and enter the European Unions had been mistaken and misplayed. He would also make amends with President Vladimir Putin about his decision to expand Nato up to Russias borders, and for planning to deploy missiles that, meant to be a defence against an Iranian attack, could be switched to hit Moscow.

Making it up with Putin would be his number one priority. This would not be easy as so much bad blood has been spilt. But if successive presidents could forge a working relationship with Khrushchev and Brezhnev during the depths of the Cold War, surely Obama could reach out to Putin. Ending the trade embargo and making peace over Ukraine would be the way to start.

Now the US has a new president cut from a different tree. We move from the uncertainly known to the totally unknown.
Union Minister of State Shipping Pon Radhakrishnan on Thursday said the Centre would secure the release of 115 boats of Tamil Nadu fishermen.

Addressing media in Tamil Nadu, after inspecting the newly laid Danushkodi road, he said the ministerial-level meeting between India and Sri Lanka, scheduled for January 2, 2017, would discuss the contentious issue and secure the release of the boats.

On the outcome of the recent fishermen and ministerial-level talks in New Delhi, Mr. Radhakrishnan, who was part of the Indian delegation, said it was a good beginning and the first step towards finding a sustainable solution.

Mr. Radhakrishnan was confident that the Joint Working Group (JWG) on fisheries would protect the interest of Tamil Nadu fishermen when they venture into the sea. For the first time in all these years, it had been decided that officials from the two countries would meet once in three months and Ministers once in six months to address the issues, he said.

Mr. Radhakrishnan said pilgrims who visit the island had been facing problem in reaching the holy place ever since Danushkodi was destroyed in the 1964 cyclonic storm.

When the newly laid road was about to be inaugurated, high tidal waves hit the edges of the road on some stretch and caused breaches.

The National Highways Authority of India has been asked to repair the damaged part after which the road would be thrown open for traffic, he said.

On the proposed bridge between Danushkodi and Talaimannar, he said, We are ready and once the Sri Lankan government agrees to the project, the dream of Bharati will come true, he said referring to the revolutionary poets song we will build a bridge to Sinhalese island. The Minister called on APJM Maraikayar, brother of late President APJ Abdul Kalam. (The Hindu)
With the election of Republican Candidate Donald Trump as the President of the US, US Ambassador for Sri Lanka Atul Keshap said he hoped the admiration of the new administration towards Sri Lanka would remain the same.

In a comment to a local radio channel, Mr. Keshap said I cant speak for the new administration but I think that the sense of admiration for Sri Lanka will long continue because of the leadership your people have shown, he said.

He said the diplomats, security officers and civil servants of the US would continue to follow the lawfully elected authority of the country. We look forward to what our president-elect will determine and how he will decide as administration goes, he said.
The first lady of the US, Michelle Obama hosted the soon-to-be first lady Melania Trump for tea and a tour of the White House. A photo released by the White House showed the two sitting next to each other in gold chairs speaking in the Yellow Oval Room. (CNN)
Colombo Chief Magistrate Gihan Pilapitiya today directed probation officers to monitor the behaviour of the Kadugannawa schoolboy who had hacked the Presidents website.

The CID told court that it had sent the data retrieved from the computers taken into custody to be examined and the report, when received, would be submitted to Court.

The inquiry postponed for March 8, next year. (T. Farook Thajudeen)
REUTERS: Budget proposals presented in Sri Lanka on Thursday included revisions to corporate and withholding taxes to boost revenue and cut the 2017 fiscal deficit to 4.6 percent of GDP from this years 5.4 percent.



The government aims to boost its 2017 tax revenue by 27 percent to Rs.1.82 trillion ($12.35 billion) year on year, to meet a commitment given to the International Monetary Fund in return for a $1.5 billion loan in May.

Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake said corporate income tax will have three slabs of 14 percent, 28 percent and 40 percent, instead of the current single rate of 28 percent. It is expected to bring Rs.32 billion out of the total 140 billion rupees of new revenue the government is budgeting to raise.

The withholding tax increase from 2.5 percent to 5 percent is expected to raise an additional Rs.26 billion, the budget document showed.

Tax efficiency in the country is low relative to its peer countries. Tax administration is negatively impacted by the complex tax structure and the large number of exemptions and tax holidays, leading to a narrow tax base, Karunanayake told the parliament in his more than three-hour speech.

The coalition government of President Maithripala Sirisenas centre-left party and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghes centre-right party struggled to implement key 2016 budget proposals as they disagreed on raising the Value Added Tax (VAT) until early this month.

The governments medium-term economic strategy foresees cutting the deficit to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2020 while increasing the direct taxes.

Karunanayake expects revenue to improve through a more streamlined and simplified automated tax collection system.

He also said a 10 percent capital gain tax will be introduced from April 1, 2017 without much elaborating. The move is expected to add Rs.5 billion into the government coffer.

The government has more than doubled personal tax files to 1.4 million this year from the last years 599,000 in a move to raise Sri Lankas low tax compliance rate.

The $82 billion economys tax-to-GDP ratio is forecast to rise to 13.5 percent in 2017, from this years 11.6 percent.



This budget shows we are progressing more in the direction of more direct taxation, Anushka Wijesinghe, chief economist of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce told Reuters.

On the expenditure side, Karunanayake announced a raft of proposals to boost the education sector.

The government faced a debt and balance-of-payments crisis earlier this year before the IMF came to the rescue. The Central Bank expects the $82 billion economy to grow between 5-5.5 percent this year, higher than last years 4.8 percent.
Minister Rishad Bathiudeen said yesterday the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Miroslav Jenca had requested the Sri Lankan Muslim community to work closely with the countrys peace process.

Mr. Jenca is aware about the plight of the Muslim Community, in particular about those who have been directly or indirectly affected by the conflict. During his recent visit to Sri Lanka, he met government officials, parliamentarians, religious leaders, youth and civil society groups to take stock of the peace process, including transitional justice and constitutional reform with a view to achieving reconciliation and sustainable peace for all Sri Lankans, the minister said.

He said Mr. Jenca endorsed Sri Lankas peace building plan which has provided a framework on areas of transitional justice, accountability, reconciliation, good governance and resettlement.
time-tested lesson of history is that if we sow the wind we will reap the whirlwind. In the aftermath of the Donald Trump hurricane in the United States -- where the billionaire businessman without political or government experience swept to an unexpected electoral college victory in the US presidential election -- tens of thousands of Americans in about 25 cities were yesterday planning further protests and acts of dissent against the election of Mr. Trump.

The tough-talking billionaire had during the long and stormy election campaign made threats or comments that were widely condemned as being sexist, racist and venomously bigoted. He repeatedly warned on television and social media that he would immediately deport millions of undocumented emigrants, ban the entry of Muslims, get a wall built across the border with Mexico and tear up bilateral or multi-lateral trade agreements.

On Wednesday afternoon soon after his Democratic party rival and widely predicted front-runner Hilary Clinton conceded defeat, Mr. Trump made an unexpectedly gracious exceptance speech. He praised Ms. Clinton for her hard-fought campaign and called for national unity, assuring he would be the President of all Americans. This was after he almost daily, blasted Ms. Clinton as the Crooked Hillary and claimed her candidacy was illegal because of her private email scandal.



On Thursday, Mr. Trump was even more conciliatory and gracious when he went to the White House for the first time for a 90-minute one-on-one meeting with the outgoing President Barack Obama. During the campaign, Mr. Trump had blasted Mr. Obama as the worst President in US history, while Mr. Obama himself had attacked Mr. Trump as being dangerously reckless and unfit for this powerful post. After the two met for the first time on Thursday night, they were full of praise for each other. Mr. Trump described the President as a very good man from whom he would continue to seek counselling on how to run the Presidency. President Obama in turn said he wished all success to Mr. Trump because a successful President Trump would mean success for the US. On Wednesday night, Ms. Clinton also wished Mr. Trump all success saying America should give him a chance.

But though political leaders appear to patch up largely for political reasons, the common people are apparently not ready to accept a potential demagogue who is sometimes compared to someone like Hitler.The Guardian newspaper said yesterday tens of thousands of Americans were planning more demonstrations yesterday after they protested on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Some of the big protests were in the biggest state of California which voted overwhelmingly for Ms. Clinton with some demonstrators carrying placards saying Calexit, meaning that California should separate from the US just as Britain pulled out of the European Union earlier this year in what was called Brexit. Hundreds took to the streets on Thursday in Denver, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Portland, Oakland, and dozens more US cities, as well as Vancouver in Canada. The protests  smaller and more muted than Wednesdays actions  were for the most part peaceful and orderly, though there were scattered acts of civil disobedience and damage to property.



On Friday Mr. Trump reacted again. He said the protests were unjustified and accused the media of provoking them. During the campaign, Mr. Trump had said he would call upon millions of people to stage a revolution in Washington if he won the popular vote and Ms. Clinton was elected by a majority vote in the electoral college. Now it has turned upside down. Mr. Trump was elected by a majority in the Electoral College but Ms. Clinton won the popular vote by a majority of about 300,000. Are we seeing a people power revolution and is the powerful and selfish US being taught the biggest lesson of its life?
Ever since the comparison between Indian and Israeli military forces by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a public function in Himachal Pradesh in October 2016, following the "surgical strikes" by the Indian Army across the border to destroy terrorist launchpads in Pakistani territory, there has been a plethora of talk on emulation by India of Israeli strategic culture and "fighting" spirit.

The comparison, however, seems erroneous due to a variety of factors, including huge difference in civil-military relations prevailing in India and Israel.

The democratic model of civil-military relations requires the armed forces to accept the legitimacy of the democratically-elected government, comply with guidance from civilian leadership, and narrowly apply soldierly skills to conflict management and resolution.

The militarys obedience in democracies includes respect for democratic processes, whatever the outcome. This demands legal and professional loyalty, not to a particular political ideology or political party but to the Constitution.

Both India and Israel are democratic nations. The contrasting difference between them is that the foundations of the two countries were laid down under different principles.

The creation of the state of Israel was made possible by the use of armed force. The maintenance of the Jewish state amid hostile neighbours continues to be sustained by a technologically superior military supported by the covert existence of nuclear deterrent capability.

Even before the proclamation of the state in 1948, many prominent Jewish leaders firmly held the view that military power was the key factor in their statehood. It is still Israels only guardian.

In contrast to Israel, the moral force of Indias founding fathers, among several other factors, contributed immensely to the independence of the nation.

The Nazi-inspired Holocaust, which stands as one of the largest mass annihilation of humans in modern history, has left deep scars upon the state of Israel, strengthening the resolve of the Israeli fighting force. The need for security has thus become a fundamental component of Israels DNA.

Israeli soldiers detain wounded Palestinian protesters during clashes near Ramallah. (Photo: Reuters)

Indians do not suffer from a deep-seated sense of besiegement and insecurity, both psychological as well as historical, as they have never been subjected to a Holocaust-like extermination. This factor has greatly affected Indias civil-military relationship.

Israel is a typical example of a "nation-in-arms", whose highly militarised culture permeates society and indoctrinates its armed forces. The very foundation of the concept of "nation-in-arms" or "citizens' army" is rooted in almost universal conscription policy which was implemented due to Israels early quantitative inferiority relative to its Arab neighbours.

This policy continues to foster a strong bond between society and the military in Israel. While undergoing compulsory military service, the shared experiences of Israeli men and women become part of the fabric of Israeli national identity.

Even after becoming civilians, the Israelis continue to remain "soldiers on 11 months annual leave", as remarked by Israels second Chief of Staff, Yigael Yadin.

Because of the dominance of the military establishment in Israel, the distinction between civilian and military leaders is hard to determine.

Military leaders, both retired and serving, continue to exert substantial influence on several aspects of the politics, society, economy and culture of Israel. Upon the conclusion of their military career, military leaders often seek second careers in the civilian sector.

Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin, all top former military leaders, eventually became the prime minister.

The preponderance of Israels security establishment has often made it easier for top generals and spymasters to challenge the policies of some prime ministers.

On the other hand, Indias civil-military framework is heavily tilted in favour of the civilian leadership. The military is invariably discouraged from participating in political process and is largely isolated from the civil society.

There is a near complete domination of the security processes and key positions in the national security apparatus by Indias civilian bureaucracy. The military leadership usually follows the "golden rule" of not communicating to the media and the public its differences of opinion with the political leadership.

The contours of civil-military interface in independent India were formed during the tenure of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, when his controversial defence minister, VK Krishna Menon, set in motion a number of organisational changes that were vehemently opposed by the armed forces.

The manner in which Indias political leadership handled the operational planning before and after the disastrous 1962 War with China, it left nobody in doubt that purely operational matters must be left to the militarys discretion.

Since then, a tradition seems to have been established where broad operational directives are laid down by the political leadership, and the actual planning of operations is left to the military leadership.

Thus, for example, the military has continued to exercise its veto on operational issues such as withdrawal from the Siachen glacier and revoking the AFSPA.

Retired military leaders in India have been appointed as ambassadors and governors of states. But unlike Israel, they have rarely entered active politics. Whenever they have, no significant role has been played by them. Former Army chief General VK Singh is a Minister of State in the Narendra Modi government, but not of the ministry of defence.

Those advocating an enhanced role for the military strongly criticise Indias dysfunctional civil-military relations and lack of initiative in reforming defence acquisition processes.

They argue that though Indian democracy has been successful in maintaining a system of strong civilian control over the military, it has also adversely affected the quality of Indias strategic decision-making and power projection.

There is no doubt that only a handful of nations face the kind of security challenges that confront both India and Israel, but their response trajectories have moved in contrasting directions.

The assertiveness with which Israel tackles its security threats, perceived or real, is in total contrast to Indias tradition of "strategic restraint". The use of force and the aggressive military strategy of Israel have not been able to assuage the feeling of insecurity among Israeli citizens.

The founding figures of Israel, particularly Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, had neither much sympathy with the Palestinians nor much faith in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with them. Contrast this with the Gandhian approach.

Most of Israeli militarys intellectual vigour seems concentrated on technological, tactical and logistical issues that give solutions to specific problems, at the expense of a comprehensive inquiry into the nature of their conflict with Palestinians.

Irregular or asymmetrical warfare goes beyond military matters and even beyond the national security system. It is hazardous to reduce it to military-level alone.

There is a limit to the extent the military can be used to solve political problems. The one country with which Israel has made peace is Egypt and that was done through political compromise.

It is often argued that the cost of unprecedented civilian control of the military in India has resulted in military inefficiency because India has failed to strike the optimum balance between control and competence. However, striking a balance in civil-military relations is easier said than done.

It seems unlikely that Modis public admiration of the Israeli army would herald a turning point in Indias strategic orientation, turning the civil-military balance in favour of the military.

Without abandoning the Nehruvian legacy of civilian supremacy, Modi is attempting to accord a respectable position to the military in matters of national security.
The last two weeks in Pakistan had spectators experiencing a sense of deja vu and disappointment. Once again, a sitting prime minister has been accused of robbing the nation for personal gain by his political opponents as the nation continues to experience threats from militants and grapples with a divided society. The current government and the political parties vying for control continue to engage in activities that are ultimately pointless at the expense of the state and its people.

This sense of deja vu is exacerbated by the fact that the prime minister being accused of corruption is none other than Nawaz Sharif. Sharif, who has been haunted by allegations of corruption since the early 1990s, was overthrown as a result of them by the 1999 coup orchestrated by the then Army General Pervez Musharraf. The latest set of corruption allegations stemmed from the release of the Panama papers, earlier this year, that revealed that Sharifs children possessed offshore companies and assets that had not been made public previously raising questions of morality, legitimacy, and sources of revenue.

The recent set of allegations and surrounding controversy has been spearheaded by Sharifs most ardent critic, Imran Khan. Khan has made the issue of corruption the central tenet of his political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). The name of the party, translated as Pakistans Movement for Justice, has called for the removal of Nawaz Sharif from his post as prime minister in order to provide justice to the people. Khans PTI and four other petitioners approached the Supreme Court to investigate Sharif in light of the Panama papers.

After months of political bickering, tensions regarding the new allegations came to a boil in the aftermath of a terrorist attack and days before the Supreme Court was to hold an investigation into the prime minister and his familys assets. In response to perceived inaction by the judiciary, Khans party planned to hold a march that would be reminiscent of his previous Tsunami March.

Khan and his party would attempt to shut down the capital, Islamabad, until Nawaz Sharif stepped down from his post as prime minister or faced charges of corruption. In light of security concerns and the threat of shutting down the federal capital, Nawaz Sharif responded through a show of force.

Sharif ignored adhering to democratic principles and defied the judiciary, which had given the PTI permission to hold the march in a designated location. It should be noted that Khan refused to adhere to the location provided by the Islamabad High Court (IHC) and insisted that he would appeal the decision, taking his argument to the Supreme Court. The Sharif government found this to be both an illegal action and a threat, in light of security concerns and the instability that may occur to future governance stemming from the precedent set by Khans actions.

Sharif and his political party, the Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N), responded by arresting senior members of PTI, placing barricades and shipping containers to prevent access to Islamabad from the North-West province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and deployed riot police that were armed with rubber bullets and tear gas to stop the protesters, among whom was Pervez Khattak (chief minister of KP). Furthermore, roads to the residence of Imran Khan were barricaded and heavily secured in order to prevent him from joining the march. Amnesty International condemned the actions of the authorities and stated that there [was] no justification for this repressive crackdown and that the constitution of Pakistan guarantees people the rights to freedom of assembly, expression, and movement.

This episode in Pakistans young democracy ultimately displays the misplaced priorities of the ruling elite and the disconnect that these players face from the general population. A few days before the march and the resulting clashes between the protesters and police, a police academy in Quetta was attacked by militants that resulted in the deaths of 61 individuals and over 100 injured. This terrorist attack, like the many others before it, has been dismissed as an unavoidable tragic event and ultimately forgotten.

Neither Khans "march on the capital" and its associated rhetoric nor the actions of Sharif addressed the need for improving the security situation in Pakistan or eliminating militant groups. The existence of these groups and their alleged activities cripple both economic progress and the strength of state institutions. Incredulously, these obvious concerns were dismissed/ignored and the opposite took place in the realm of Pakistani politics.

The Diplomat reported that both the ruling government and the PTI are actively engaged in gaining support from banned religious parties that should be eliminated under Pakistans National Action Plan against terrorism. What is even more astonishing is the fact that while the ruling government was attempting to stop the progress of Khans march, it allowed the Ahle Sunnat-Wal-Jamaat (ASWJ), an organisation that actively incites hatred against Pakistans Shia community, to hold a gathering in Islamabad with security from the Capitol Police.

Pakistans governing elite continue to instill disappointment, if not anger, to those who view it externally. The elites have misplaced their priorities, either consciously or inadvertently, to matters of the state that should be given a lower priority. Imran Khans political message and allegations of corruption, in light of the Panama papers, should and must be addressed by Nawaz Sharif.
British Prime Minister Theresa May arrived in India on November 6 on her first bilateral visit outside Europe to reinvigorate the India-UK strategic partnership.

She has suggested that her three-day maiden visit to India shows the importance of the UK and India bilateral ties which will be a true celebration of relations and shared ambition for the future.

May's visit to India comes at a crucial time for the UK. She intends to start formal negotiations on leaving the European Union (EU) by the end of March 2017, putting Britain on course to exit the bloc - and potentially the European single market - by early 2019.

As the UK struggles to redefine its global role post-Brexit, May has often mentioned India among the priority countries for a free trade agreement to boost the UK's ties outside the EU.

Immigration

At the Conservative Party conference last month, she asserted: "Countries including Canada, China, India, Mexico, Singapore and South Korea have already told us they would welcome talks on future free trade agreements. And we have already agreed to start scoping discussions on trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand."

For May, Brexit means Brexit and she fully intends to make a success of it.

As home secretary in the cabinet of David Cameron for six years, May was a hardliner on immigration though her policies, more often than not, failed to have the desired results.

The Home Office, under her leadership, often resorted to unseemly gimmicks such as hiring vans to tour Indian-dominated areas of London with big "Go Home" signs apparently aimed at illegal immigrants.

But as Prime Minister May has hailed the contribution of British-Indians, suggesting that she would highlight their success during her first official visit to India.

PM Narendra Modi with former UK PM David Cameron. (Photo credit: AP)

In her Diwali message, she said that "in Britain's Indian communities, we can see the good that can be done when people's talents are unleashed. I think of all those running their own businesses, taking risks and working hard so that they can provide for their families and take on staff."

She has also made it clear that the UK's stand on Kashmir remains unchanged and it is a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan to address, underlining that Kashmir was unlikely to be on the agenda during her bilateral talks with PM Modi.

On Kashmir as well as on the broader trajectory of India-UK ties, May will be building on the legacy of her predecessor, David Cameron.

He had championed Indian interests like few British prime ministers in recent years. India and Britain had forged a "strategic partnership" during former British PM Tony Blair's visit to India in 2005, but it remained a partnership only in name.

The Conservatives were keen on imparting it a new momentum. But the Labour government's legacy on India was very complex and Cameron's government needed great diplomatic finesse to manage the challenges.

Terrorism

Cameron's government has made a serious effort to jettison the traditional British approach towards the subcontinent in so far as it has decided to deal with India as a rising power, not merely as a South Asian entity that needs to be seen through the prism of Pakistan.

Cameron himself made all the right noises when it came to India. He warned Pakistan against promoting any "export of terror", whether to India or elsewhere, and said it must not be allowed to "look both ways".

He proposed a close security partnership with India and underlined that Britain like India was determined that groups like the Taliban, the Haqqani Network or Lakshar-e-Taiba should not be allowed to launch attacks on Indian and British citizens in India or in Britain.

More significantly, the British PM has also rejected any role for his country in the India-Pakistan dispute.

PM Modi's successful trip to the UK last year was a reflection of the transformation in India-British ties under Cameron.

Investment

Where the UK has failed so far is in articulating a broader strategic vision for its ties with India and this is related to its failure to view Asia beyond economics and trade.

In the first speech by a serving Indian prime minister to the British Parliament, Modi said the UK and India were "two strong economies and two innovative societies" but their relationship "must set higher ambitions".

Though the rise of India as an economic power is transforming British attitudes towards India across the political spectrum, the opposition Labour Party continues to see it through the lens of human rights and the impact of its Pakistani immigrant support base remains strong.

The UK is the largest European investor in India and Delhi is the second largest investor in London.

Indian students are the second largest group in Britain. There are significant historical, linguistic and cultural ties that remain untapped.

So a robust partnership with the Tory government is a good idea for India.

Modi's visit to the UK last year managed to change the course of the India-UK ties considerably. It will be now up to May to build on that momentum.
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.

Read More
Regions Financial Corporation, a financial holding company, provides banking and bank-related services to individual and corporate customers. It operates through three segments: Corporate Bank, Consumer Bank, and Wealth Management. The Corporate Bank segment offers commercial banking services, such as commercial and industrial, commercial real estate, and investor real estate lending; equipment lease financing; deposit products; and securities underwriting and placement, loan syndication and placement, foreign exchange, derivatives, merger and acquisition, and other advisory services. It serves corporate, middle market, and commercial real estate developers and investors. The Consumer Bank segment provides consumer banking products and services related to residential first mortgages, home equity lines and loans, consumer credit cards, and other consumer loans, as well as deposits. The Wealth Management segment offers credit related products, and retirement and savings solutions; and trust and investment management, asset management, and estate planning services to individuals, businesses, governmental institutions, and non-profit entities. The company also provides investment and insurance products; low-income housing tax credit corporate fund syndication services; and other specialty financing services. As of March 01, 2022, it operated through a network of 1,300 banking offices and 2,000 automated teller machines across the South, Midwest, and Texas. Regions Financial Corporation was founded in 1971 and is headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama.
KAR Auction Services, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides used vehicle auctions and related vehicle remarketing services for the automotive industry in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The company operates through two segments, ADESA Auctions and AFC. The ADESA Auctions segment offers whole car auctions and related services to the vehicle remarketing industry through online auctions and auction facilities. It also provides value-added services, such as auction related, transportation, reconditioning, inspection, title and repossession administration and remarketing, vehicle research, and analytical services, as well as data as a service. This segment sells its products and services through vehicle manufacturers, fleet companies, rental car companies, finance companies, and others. As of December 31, 2021, this segment had a network of approximately 70 vehicle logistics center locations in North America. The AFC segment offers floorplan financing, a short-term inventory-secured financing to independent used vehicle dealers; and sells vehicle service contracts. The company provides wheel repair and hail catastrophe response services. It serves vehicle manufacturers, vehicle rental companies, financial institutions, commercial fleets and fleet management companies, and dealer customers. The company was formerly known as KAR Holdings, Inc. and changed its name to KAR Auction Services, Inc. in November 2009. KAR Auction Services, Inc. was incorporated in 2006 and is headquartered in Carmel, Indiana.
First American Financial Corporation, through its subsidiaries, provides financial services. It operates through Title Insurance and Services, and Specialty Insurance segments. The Title Insurance and Services segment issues title insurance policies on residential and commercial property, as well as offers related products and services. This segment also provides closing and/or escrow services; products, services, and solutions to mitigate risk or otherwise facilitate real estate transactions; and appraisals and other valuation-related products and services, lien release and document custodial services, warehouse lending services, default-related products and services, mortgage subservicing, and related products and services, as well as banking, trust, and wealth management services. In addition, it accommodates tax-deferred exchanges of real estate; and maintains, manages, and provides access to title plant data and records. This segment offers its products through a network of direct operations and agents in 49 states and in the District of Columbia, as well as in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, and internationally. The Specialty Insurance segment provides property and casualty insurance comprising coverage to residential homeowners and renters for liability losses and typical hazards, such as fire, theft, vandalism, and other types of property damage. It also offers residential service contracts that cover residential systems, such as heating and air conditioning systems, and appliances against failures that occur as the result of normal usage during the coverage period. First American Financial Corporation was founded in 1889 and is headquartered in Santa Ana, California.
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.
Aetna Inc. operates as a health care benefits company in the United States. It operates through three segments: Health Care, Group Insurance, and Large Case Pensions. The Health Care segment offers medical, pharmacy benefit management service, dental, behavioral health, and vision plans on an insured and employer-funded basis. It also provides point-of-service, preferred provider organization, health maintenance organization, and indemnity benefit plans, as well as health savings accounts and consumer-directed health plans. In addition, this segment offers Medicare and Medicaid products and services, as well as other medical products, such as medical management and data analytics services, medical stop loss insurance, workers' compensation administrative services, and products that provide access to its provider networks in select geographies. The Group Insurance segment offers life insurance products, including group term life insurance, voluntary spouse and dependent term life insurance, group universal life insurance, and accidental death and dismemberment insurance; disability insurance products; and long-term care insurance products, which provide the benefits to cover the cost of care in private home settings, adult day care, assisted living, or nursing facilities. The Large Case Pensions segment manages various retirement products comprising pension and annuity products primarily for tax-qualified pension plans. The company provides its products and services to employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans, health care providers, governmental units, government-sponsored plans, labor groups, and expatriates. Aetna Inc. was founded in 1853 and is based in Hartford, Connecticut.
Equifax Inc. provides information solutions and human resources business process automation outsourcing services for businesses, governments, and consumers. The company operates through three segments: Workforce Solutions, U.S. Information Solutions (USIS), and International. The Workforce Solutions segment offers employment, income, criminal history, and social security number verification services, as well as payroll-based transaction, employment tax management, and identity theft protection products. The USIS segment provides consumer and commercial information services, such as credit information and credit scoring, credit modeling and portfolio analytics, locate, fraud detection and prevention, identity verification, and other consulting; mortgage services; financial marketing services; identity management services; credit monitoring products; and online information, decisioning technology solutions, as well as portfolio management, mortgage reporting, and consumer credit information services. The International segment offers information service products, which include consumer and commercial services, such as credit and financial information, and credit scoring and modeling; and credit and other marketing products and services, as well as offers information, technology, and other services to support debt collections and recovery management. The company serves customers in financial services, mortgage, employers, consumer, commercial, telecommunication, retail, automotive, utility, brokerage, healthcare, and insurance industries, as well as state, federal, and local governments. It operates in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, the Republic of Ireland, Russia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. The company was founded in 1899 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
The following companies are subsidiares of MetLife: 10700 WILSHIRE LLC, 1201 TAB MANAGER LLC, 1350 EYE STREET MANAGER LLC, 1350 EYE STREET OWNER LLC, 150 NORTH RIVERSIDE PE MEMBER LLC, 1925 WJC OWNER LLC, 23RD STREET INVESTMENTS INC., 500 GRANT STREET ASSOCIATES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, 500 GRANT STREET GP LLC, 6104 HOLLYWOOD LLC, AFP GENESIS ADMINISTRADORA DE FONDOS Y FIDECOMISOS S.A., AGENVITA S.R.L., ALICO HELLAS SINGLE MEMBER LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY, ALICO OPERATIONS LLC, American Life Insurance Company, BEST MARKET S.A., BLOCK VISION HOLDINGS CORPORATION, BLOCK VISION OF TEXAS INC., BORDERLAND INVESTMENTS LIMITED, BOULEVARD RESIDENTIAL LLC, BUFORD LOGISTICS CENTER LLC, CC HOLDCO MANAGER LLC, CHESTNUT FLATS WIND LLC, CLOSED JOINT-STOCK COMPANY MASTER-D, COMPANIA INVERSORA METLIFE S.A., CORPORATE REAL ESTATE HOLDINGS LLC, COVA LIFE MANAGEMENT COMPANY, DAVIS VISION INC., DAVISVISION IPA INC., DELAWARE AMERICAN LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, EURO CL INVESTMENTS LLC, EXCELENCIA OPERATIVA Y TECNOLOGICA S.A de C.V., FORTISSIMO CO. LTD, FUNDACION METLIFE MEXICO A.C., GLOBAL PROPERTIES INC., General American Life Insurance Company, Grand Bank N.A., HASKELL EAST VILLAGE LLC, HOUSING FUND MANAGER LLC, INTERNATIONAL TECHNICAL AND ADVISORY SERVICES LIMITED, INVERSIONES METLIFE HOLDCO DOS LIMITADA, INVERSIONES METLIFE HOLDCO TRES LIMITADA, LHC HOLDINGS LLC, LHCW HOLDINGS LLC, LHCW HOTEL HOLDING 2002 LLC, LHCW HOTEL HOLDING LLC, LHCW HOTEL OPERATING COMPANY 2002 LLC, LUMENLAB MALAYSIA SDN. BHD., Logan Circle Partners, MARKETPLACE RESIDENCES LLC, MC PORTFOLIO JV MEMBER LLC, MCJV LLC, MCPP OWNERS LLC, MCRE BLOCK 40 LP, MEC HEALTH CARE INC., MET 1065 HOTEL LLC, MET CANADA SOLAR ULC, METLIFE 1007 STEWART LLC, METLIFE 1201 TAB MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 425 MKT MANAGER LLC, METLIFE 425 MKT MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 555 12TH MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 8280 MEMBER LLC, METLIFE ACOMA OWNER LLC, METLIFE ADMINISTRADORA DE FUNDOS MULTIPATROCINADOS LTDA., METLIFE ALTERNATIVES GP LLC, METLIFE ASHTON AUSTIN OWNER LLC, METLIFE ASIA HOLDING COMPANY PTE. LTD., METLIFE ASIA LIMITED, METLIFE ASIA SERVICES SDN. BHD, METLIFE ASSET MANAGEMENT CORP., METLIFE ASSIGNMENT COMPANY INC., METLIFE BORO STATION MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CAMINO RAMON MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CAMPUS AT SGV MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CAPITAL CREDIT L.P., METLIFE CAPITAL LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, METLIFE CAPITAL TRUST IV, METLIFE CB W/A LLC, METLIFE CC MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CHILE ADMINISTRADORA DE MUTUOS HIPOTECARIOS S.A., METLIFE CHILE INVERSIONES LIMITADA, METLIFE CHILE SEGUROS DE VIDA S.A., METLIFE CHILE SEGUROS GENERALES S.A., METLIFE CHINO MEMBER LLC, METLIFE COLOMBIA SEGUROS de VIDA S.A., METLIFE COMMERCIAL MORTGAGE INCOME FUND GP LLC, METLIFE CONSQUARE MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CONSUMER SERVICES INC., METLIFE CORE PROPERTY FUND GP LLC, METLIFE CREDIT CORP., METLIFE DIGITAL VENTURES INC., METLIFE ENHANCED CORE PROPERTY FUND GP LLC, METLIFE EU HOLDING COMPANY LIMITED, METLIFE EUROPE INSURANCE d.a.c., METLIFE EUROPE SERVICES LIMITED, METLIFE EUROPE d.a.c., METLIFE EUROPEAN HOLDINGS LLC., METLIFE FINANCIAL SERVICES CO. LTD, METLIFE FM HOTEL MEMBER LLC, METLIFE FUNDING INC., METLIFE GENERAL INSURANCE LIMITED, METLIFE GLOBAL BENEFITS LTD., METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDING COMPANY I GMBH, METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDING COMPANY II GMBH, METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDINGS CORPORATION S.A. De C.V., METLIFE GLOBAL INC., METLIFE GLOBAL OPERATIONS SUPPORT CENTER PRIVATE LIMITED, METLIFE GROUP INC., METLIFE HCMJV 1 GP LLC, METLIFE HCMJV 1 LP LLC, METLIFE HEALTH PLANS INC., METLIFE HOLDINGS INC., METLIFE HOME LOANS LLC, METLIFE INNOVATION CENTRE LIMITED, METLIFE INNOVATION CENTRE PTE. LTD., METLIFE INSURANCE AND INVESTMENT TRUST, METLIFE INSURANCE BROKERAGE INC., METLIFE INSURANCE COMPANY OF KOREA LTD., METLIFE INSURANCE K.K., METLIFE INSURANCE LIMITED, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL HF PARTNERS LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL LIMITED LLC, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND I LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND II LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND III LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND IV LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND V LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND VI LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND VII LP, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT EUROPE LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT HOLDINGS LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT LLC, METLIFE INVESTMENTS ASIA LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS PTY LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS SECURITIES LLC, METLIFE INVESTORS DISTRIBUTION COMPANY, METLIFE INVESTORS GROUP LLC, METLIFE IRELAND TREASURY D.A.C., METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY FUND GP LLC, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY FUND LP, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY OWNERS BLOCKER LLC, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY OWNERS LLC, METLIFE LATIN AMERICA ASESORIAS E INVERSIONES LIMITADA, METLIFE LEGAL PLANS INC., METLIFE LEGAL PLANS OF FLORIDA INC., METLIFE LHH MEMBER LLC, METLIFE LIFE INSURANCE S.A., METLIFE LOAN ASSET MANAGEMENT LLC, METLIFE LONG SHORT CREDIT FUND LP, METLIFE LONG SHORT CREDIT MASTER FUND LP, METLIFE LONG SHORT CREDIT PARALLEL FUND LP, METLIFE MAS S.A. DE C.V., METLIFE MEXICO HOLDINGS S. DE R.L. DE C.V., METLIFE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., METLIFE MEXICO SERVICIOS S.A. DE C.V., METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT FUND II LP, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT GP II LLC, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT GP LLC, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT II RATED FUND LP, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT PARALLEL FUND LP, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT PARALLEL GP LLC, METLIFE MMPD II SPECIAL LLC, METLIFE MULTI-FAMILY PARTNERS III LLC, METLIFE OBS MEMBER LLC, METLIFE OFC MEMBER LLC, METLIFE ONTARIO STREET MEMBR LLC, METLIFE PARK TOWER MEMBER LLC, METLIFE PENSION TRUSTEES LIMITED, METLIFE PENSIONES MEXICO S.A., METLIFE PET INSURANCE SOLUTIONS LLC, METLIFE PLANOS ODONTOLOGICOS LTDA., METLIFE POWSZECHNE TOWARTZYSTWO EMERYTALNE S.A., METLIFE PRIVATE EQUITY HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE PROPERTIES VENTURES LLC, METLIFE RC SF MEMBER LLC, METLIFE REAL ESTATE LENDING LLC, METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF BERMUDA LTD., METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF CHARLESTON, METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF VERMONT, METLIFE RETIREMENT SERVICES LLC, METLIFE SECURITIZATION DEPOSITOR LLC, METLIFE SEGUROS S.A., METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING FINCO LLC, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING FUND LP, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING GP LLC, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING HOLDINGS LP, METLIFE SERVICES AND SOLUTIONS LLC, METLIFE SERVICES CYPRUS LTD., METLIFE SERVICES EAST PRIVATE LIMITED, METLIFE SERVICES EEIG, METLIFE SERVICES EOOD, METLIFE SERVICES SOCIEDAD LIMITADA, METLIFE SERVICES SP Z.O.O, METLIFE SERVICIOS S.A., METLIFE SINGLE FAMILY RENTAL FUND GP LLC, METLIFE SINGLE FAMILY RENTAL FUND LP, METLIFE SOLUTIONS PTE. LTD., METLIFE SOLUTIONS S.A.S., METLIFE SP HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE STRATEGIC HOTEL DEBT FUND GP LLC, METLIFE SYNDICATED BANK LOAN LUX GP S.A.R.L., METLIFE THR INVESTOR LLC, METLIFE TOWARZYSTWO FUNDUSZY INWESTYCYJNYCH S.A., METLIFE TOWARZYSTWO UBEZPIECZEN NA ZYCIE I REASEKURACJI S.A., METLIFE TOWER RESOURCES GROUP INC., METLIFE TREAT TOWERS MEMBER LLC, METLIFE WORLDWIDE HOLDINGS LLC, METROPOLITAN GENERAL INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN GLOBAL MANAGEMENT LLC, METROPOLITAN LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN LIFE SEGUROS E PREVIDENCIA PRIVADA S.A., METROPOLITAN LIFE SOCIETATE de ADMINISTRARE a UNUI FOND de PENSII ADMINISTRAT PRIVAT S.A., METROPOLITAN TOWER LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN TOWER REALTY COMPANY INC., MEX DF PROPERTIES LLC, MFA FINANCING VEHICLE CTR1 LLC, MIDTOWN HEIGHTS LLC, MIM CAMPUS AT SGV MANAGER LLC, MIM CLAL GENERAL PARTNER LLC, MIM CM SYNDICATOR LLC, MIM EMD GP LLC, MIM I LLC, MIM LS GP LLC, MIM METWEST INTERNATIONAL MANAGER LLC, MIM ML-AI VENTURE 5 MANAGER LLC, MIM OMD MANAGER LLC, MIM PROPERTY MANAGEMENT LLC, MIM PROPERTY MANAGEMENT OF GEORGIA 1 LLC, MIM SPOKANE INDUSTRIAL MANAGER LLC, MIM THIRD ARMY INDUSTRIAL MANAGER LLC, MISSOURI REINSURANCE INC., ML 300 THIRD MEMBER LLC, ML ARMATURE MEMBER LLC, ML BELLEVUE MANAGER LLC, ML BELLEVUE MEMBER LLC, ML CAPACITACION COMERCIAL S.A. DE C.V., ML CERRITOS TC MEMBER LLC, ML CLAL MEMBER LLC, ML CORNER 63 MEMBER LLC, ML DOLPHIN GP LLC, ML DOLPHIN MEZZ LLC, ML HUDSON MEMBER LLC, ML MATSON MILLS MEMBER LLC, ML MILILANI MEMBER LLC, ML OMD MEMBER LLC, ML ONE BEDMINSTER LLC, ML PORT CHESTER SC MEMBER LLC, ML SENTINEL SQUARE MEMBER LLC, ML SLOANS LAKE MEMEBR LLC, ML SOUTHLANDS MEMBER LLC, ML SOUTHMORE LLC, ML SPOKANE INDUSTRIAL MEMBER LLC, ML SWAN GP LLC, ML SWAN MEZZ LLC, ML TERRACES LLC, ML THIRD ARMY INDUSTRIAL MEMBER LLC, ML VENTURE 1 MANAGER S. DE R. L. DE C.V., ML VENTURE 1 SERVICER LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 1 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 2 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 3 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 4 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 5 LLC, ML-URS PORT CHESTER SC MANAGER LLC, MLIA MANAGER I LLC, MLIA PARK TOWER MANAGER LLC, MLIA SBAF COLONY MANAGER LLC, MLIA SBAF MANAGER LLC, MLIC ASSET HOLDINGS II LLC, MLIC ASSET HOLDINGS LLC, MLIC CB HOLDINGS LLC, MLJ US FEEDER LLC, MM GLOBAL OPERATIONS SUPPORT CENTER S.A. DE C.V., MMP CEDAR STREET OWNER LLC, MMP CEDAR STREET REIT LLC, MMP HOLDINGS III LLC, MMP OLIVIAN OWNER LLC, MMP OLIVIAN REIT LLC, MMP OWNERS III LLC, MMP OWNERS LLC, MMP SOUTH PARK OWNER LLC, MMP SOUTH PARK REIT LLC, MNQM TRUST 2020, MREF 425 MKT LLC, MSHDF HOLDCO I LLC, MSV IRVINE PROPERTY LLC, MTL LEASING LLC, MTU HOTEL OWNER LLC, NATILOPORTEM HOLDINGS LLC, NEWBURY INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED, OCONEE GOLF COMPANY LLC, OCONEE HOTEL COMPANY LLC, OCONEE LAND COMPANY LLC, OCONEE LAND DEVELOPMENT COMPANY LLC, OCONEE MARINA COMPANY LLC, OMI MLIC INVESTMENTS LIMITED, PACIFIC LOGISTICS INDUSTRIAL NORTH LLC, PACIFIC LOGISTICS INDUSTRIAL SOUTH LLC, PARK TOWER JV MEMBER LLC, PARK TOWER REIT INC., PJSC METLIFE, PLAZA DRIVE PROPERTIES LLC, PREFCO FOURTEEN LLC, PREFCO XIV HOLDINGS LLC, PROVIDA INTERNACIONAL S.A., SAFEGUARD HEALTH ENTERPRISES INC., SAFEGUARD HEALTH PLANS INC., SAFEHEALTH LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, SOUTHCREEK INDUSTRIAL HOLDINGS LLC, ST. JAMES FLEET INVESTMENTS TWO LIMITED, SUPERIOR PROCUREMENT INC., SUPERIOR VISION BENEFIT MANAGEMENT INC., SUPERIOR VISION HOLDINGS INC., SUPERIOR VISION INSURANCE INC., SUPERIOR VISION INSURANCE PLAN OF WISCONSIN INC., SUPERIOR VISION OF NEW JERSEY INC., SUPERIOR VISION SERVICES INC., Safeguard Health Enterprises, Security First Group Inc., THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH AVENUE MEZZANINE LLC, THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH RETAIL HOLDING LLC, THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH RETAIL OWNER, THE DIRECT CALL CENTRE PTY LIMITED, TRANSMOUNTAIN LAND & LIVESTOCK COMPANY, UVC INDEPENDENT PRACTICE ASSOCIATION INC., VERSANT HEALTH CONSOLIDATIONS CORP., VERSANT HEALTH HOLDCO INC., VERSANT HEALTH INC., VERSANT HEALTH LAB LLC, VIRIDIAN MIRACLE MILE LLC, VISION 21 MANAGED EYE CARE OF TAMPA BAY INC., VISION 21 PHYSICIAN PRACTICE MANAGEMENT COMPANY, VISION TWENTY-ONE MANAGED EYE CARE IPA INC., Versant Health, WDV ACQUISITION CORP., WFP 1000 HOLDING COMPANY GP LLC, WHITE OAK ROYALTY COMPANY, WHITE TRACT II LLC, and Willing.

Read More
The following companies are subsidiares of Vodafone Group Public: 360 Connect S.A., 3@ Telecom, A-ccelerator B.V., A-ccelerator Holding B.V, AAA (Euro) Limited, AAA (MCR) Limited, AAA (UK) Limited, Acorn Communications Limited, Africonnect (Zambia) Limited, Ag Mercantile Company Private Limited, Al-Amin Investments Limited, Amsterdamse Beheer- en Consultingmaatschappij B.V., Apollo Submarine Cable System Limited, Array Holdings Limited, Asian Telecommunication Investments (Mauritius) Limited, Aspective Limited, Astec Communications Limited, Autoconnex Limited, Aztec Limited, BelCompany BV, Bluefish Apac Communications Pte. Ltd, Bluefish Communications, Bluefish Communications Limited, Business Serve Limited, C&W Worldwide Nigeria Limited, C.S.P. Solutions Limited, CCII (Mauritius) Inc., CGP India Investments Ltd., CGP Investments (Holdings) Limited, COOP Mobil s.r.o, CT Networks Limited, CWGNL S.A., CWW Operations Limited, Cable & Wireless Access Limited, Cable & Wireless Americas Systems Inc., Cable & Wireless Aspac Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless CIS Services Limited, Cable & Wireless CIS Svyaz LLC, Cable & Wireless Capital Limited , Cable & Wireless Communications Data Network Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Communications Starclass Limited, Cable & Wireless Communications Technical Service (Shanghai) Co. Ltd (Beijing Branch), Cable & Wireless Europe Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless GN Limited, Cable & Wireless Global (India) Private Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Business Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Holding Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Telecommunication Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Holdco Limited, Cable & Wireless Networks India Private Limited, Cable & Wireless Trade Mark Management Limited, Cable & Wireless UK Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless UK Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Waterside Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Pension Trustee Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Voice Messaging Limited, Cable & Wireless a-Services Inc, Cable & Wireless a-Services Limited, Cable and Wireless (India) Limited, Cable and Wireless (India) Limited Indian Branch Office, Cable and Wireless Nominee Limited, Cable and Wireless Worldwide South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Cavalry Holdings Ltd, Celfocus  Solucoes Informaticas Para Telecomunicacoes S.A, Cellops Limited, Cellular Operations Limited, Central Communications Group Limited, Central Telecom (Northern) Limited, Centurion GSM Limited, Chelys Limited, City Cable (Holdings) Limited, Cobra do Brasil Servicos de Telematica ltda., Commnet Cellular Inc., Complete Network Technology, Connect (India) Mobile Technologies Private Limited, Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure Limited, Dataroam Limited , Device Insight, Digital Island (UK) Ltd, Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited, East Africa Investment (Mauritius) Limited, Emtel Europe Limited, Energis (Ireland) Limited, Energis Communications Limited, Energis Holdings Limited, Energis Local Access Limited, Energis Management Limited, Energis Squared Limited, Erudite Systems Limited, Esprit Telecom B.V., Eudokia Limited, Euro Pacific Securities Ltd., Eurocall Holdings Limited, Europolitan Holdings AB (now Europolitan Vodafone AB), FB Holdings Limited, FM Associates (UK) Limited, FinCo Partner 1 B.V., FireFly Networks Limited, Flexphone Limited, GS Telecom (Pty) Limited, Gateway Communications Africa (UK) Limited, Gateway Communications Tanzania Limited, General Mobile Corporation, Generation Telecom Limited, Ghana Telecommunications, Ghana Telecommunications Company Limited, Global Cellular Rental Limited, Globe Limited, GrandCentrix GmbH, Grupo Corporativo ONO S.A.U., H3ga Properties (No 3) Pty Limited, HBO Nederland Cooperatief U.A., HBO Netherlands Channels sro, HBO Netherlands Distribution B.V., Hellas Online, How2 Telecom Limited, Hutchison Essar Ltd, Indus Towers Limited, Intercell Communications Limited, Internet Network Services Limited, Invitation Digital Limited, Ipergy Communications NV, Isis Telecommunications Management Limited, Jaguar Communications Limited, Jaykay Finholding (India) Private Limited, Jupicol (Proprietary) Limited, KABELCOM Braunschweig Gesellschaft Fur BreitbandkabelKommunikation Mit Beschrankter Haftung, KABELCOM Wolfsburg Gesellschaft Fur BreitbandkabelKommunikation Mit Beschrankter Haftung, Kabel Deutschland, Kabel Deutschland Holding, Kabel Deutschland Holding Erste Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Holding Zweite Beteilgungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Neunte Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Siebte Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabelfernsehen Munchen Servicenter GmbH & Co. KG, LG Financing Partnership, LGE HoldCo V B.V., LGE HoldCo VI B.V., LGE HoldCo VIII B.V., LGE Holdco VII B.V., LLC Vodafone Enterprise Ukraine, Le Bunt Holdings Limited, Legend Communications Limited, Liberty Global, Liberty Global Content Netherlands B.V., London Hydraulic Power Company, M-PESA Foundation, M-PESA Holding Co. Limited, ML Integration Group Limited, ML Integration Limited, ML Integration Services Limited, MV Healthcare Services Private Limited, Mannesmann AG, MetroHoldings Limited, Mezzanine Ware Proprietary Limited (RF), Mirambo Limited, Misrfone Trading Company LLC, MobiFon S.A., Mobile Commerce Solutions Limited, Mobile Phone Centre Limited, Mobile Wallet VM1, Mobile Wallet VM2, Mobile by Sainsburys Limited, Mobiles 4 Business.com Limited, Mobileworld Communications Pty Limited, Mobileworld Operating Pty Ltd, Mobilvest, Motifpros 1 (Proprietary) Limited, Multi Risk Indemnity Company Limited, Multi Risk Limited, ND Callus Info Services Private Limited, Nadal Trading Company Private Limited, Nat Comm Air Limited, National Communications Backbone Company Limited, Navtrak Ltd, Netforce Group Limited, Netgrid Telecom SRL, Number Portability Company (Proprietary) Limited, ONO, Omega Telecom Holdings Private Limited, Oni Way  Infocomunicacoes S.A, Oskar Mobil S.R.O., Oxygen Solutions Limited, P.C.P. (North West) Limited, PPL Pty Limited, PT Network Services Limited, PTI Telecom Limited, Peoples Phone Limited, Pinnacle Cellular Group Limited, Pinnacle Cellular Limited, Plex Limited, Plustech Mercantile Company Private Limited, Prime Metals Ltd., Project Telecom Holdings Limited, Quickcomm Software Solutions, Radio Opt GmbH, Rian Mobile Limited, SBC SMART CITY 1517 B.V., SMMS Investments Pvt Limited, Safaricom Limited, Safenet N.P A., Sarmady Communications, Scarlet Ibis Investments 23 (Pty) Limited, Scorpios Beverages Pvt. Ltd, Silver Stream Investments Limited, Singlepoint (4U) Limited, Singlepoint (4U) Ltd., Singlepoint Payment Services Limited, Siro Limited, Spar Aerospace (Nigeria) Limited, Sport TV Portugal S.A, Starnet, Stentor Communications Limited, Stentor Limited, Storage Technology Services (Pty) Limited, T.W. Telecom Limited, T3 Telecommunications Limited, TKS Telepost Kabel-Service Kaiserslautern Beteiligungs GmbH, TKS Telepost Kabel-Service Kaiserslautern GmbH & Co. KG, TNAS Limited, TSM NZ Limited, Talkland Airtime Services Limited, Talkland Australia Pty Limited, Talkland Communications Limited, Talkland International Limited, Talkland Midlands Limited, Talkmobile Limited, Tele2 Italia SPA, Tele2 Spain, Telecom Investments India Private Limited, Telecommunications Europe Limited, Ternhill Communications Limited, The Cobra Group, The Eastern Leasing Company Limited, The Old Telecom Sales Co. Limited, Thus Group Holdings Limited, Thus Group Limited, Thus Limited, Thus Profit Sharing Trustees Limited, TnT Expense Management LLC, Tomorrow Street GP S.a r.l., Tomorrow Street SCA, Torenspits II B.V., Townley Communications Limited, Trans Crystal Ltd., UMT Investments Limited, UPC Nederland Holding I B.V., UPC Nederland Holding II B.V., UPC Nederland Holding III B.V., Unified Communications, Uniqueair Limited, Urbana Teleunion Rostock GmbH & Co.KG, Usha Martin Telematics Limited, VAPL No. 2 Pty Limited, VBA (Mauritius) Limited, VBA Holdings Limited, VBA International (SL) Limited, VBA International Limited, VEI S.r.l., VM SA, VND S.p.A, VSSB Vodafone Shared Services Budapest Private Limited Company, Verwaltung Urbana Teleunion Rostock GmbH, Victus Networks S.A., Vizzavi Finance Limited, Vizzavi Limited, Voda Limited, Vodacall Limited, Vodacash s.p.r.l., Vodacom (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Business (Angola) Limitada, Vodacom Business (Ghana) Limited, Vodacom Business (Kenya) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa (Nigeria) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa Group (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa Group Services Limited, Vodacom Business Cameroon SA, Vodacom Business Cote Divoire S.A.R.L., Vodacom Congo (RDC) SA, Vodacom Financial Services (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Group Limited, Vodacom Insurance Administration Company (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Insurance Company (RF) Limited, Vodacom International Holdings (Pty) Limited, Vodacom International Limited, Vodacom Lesotho (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Life Assurance Company (RF) Limited, Vodacom Payment Services (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Properties No 1 (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Properties No.2 (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Tanzania Limited Zanzibar, Vodacom Tanzania Public Limited Company, Vodacom UK Limited, Vodafone (NI) Limited, Vodafone (New Zealand) Hedging Limited, Vodafone (Scotland) Limited, Vodafone 2, Vodafone 4 UK, Vodafone 5 Limited, Vodafone 5 UK, Vodafone 6 UK, Vodafone Albania Sh.A, Vodafone Alternatif Telekom Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Americas 4, Vodafone Americas Virginia Inc., Vodafone And Qatar Foundation L.L.C, Vodafone Asset Management Services S.a r.l., Vodafone Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Automotive Deutschland GmbH, Vodafone Automotive Electronic Systems S.r.L, Vodafone Automotive France S.A.S, Vodafone Automotive Iberia S.L, Vodafone Automotive Italia S.p.A, Vodafone Automotive Japan K.K, Vodafone Automotive Korea Limited, Vodafone Automotive SpA, Vodafone Automotive Technologies (Beijing) Co Ltd, Vodafone Automotive Telematics Development S.A.S, Vodafone Automotive Telematics S.A, Vodafone Automotive UK Limited, Vodafone Belgium SA/NV, Vodafone Benelux Limited, Vodafone Bilgi Ve Iletisim Hizmetleri AS, Vodafone Business Services Limited, Vodafone Business Solutions Limited, Vodafone Canada Inc, Vodafone Cellular Limited, Vodafone Central Services Limited, Vodafone China Limited (China), Vodafone China Limited (Hong Kong), Vodafone Connect 2 Limited, Vodafone Connect Limited, Vodafone Consolidated Holdings Limited, Vodafone Corporate Limited, Vodafone Corporate Secretaries Limited, Vodafone Czech Republic A.S., Vodafone DC Pension Trustee Company Limited, Vodafone Dagitim Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Data, Vodafone Distribution Holdings Limited, Vodafone Egypt Telecommunications S.A.E., Vodafone Elektronik Para Ve Odeme Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Empresa Brasil Telecomunicacoes Ltda, Vodafone Empresa Mexico S.de R.L. de C.V., Vodafone Enabler Espana S.L., Vodafone Enterprise Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Austria GmbH, Vodafone Enterprise Bahrain W.L.L., Vodafone Enterprise Bulgaria EOOD, Vodafone Enterprise Chile SA, Vodafone Enterprise Communications Technical Services (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Corporate Secretaries Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Denmark A/S, Vodafone Enterprise Equipment Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited  Czech Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited  DubaiI Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Finland OY, Vodafone Enterprise France SAS, Vodafone Enterprise Germany GmbH, Vodafone Enterprise Global Businesses S.a r.l., Vodafone Enterprise Global Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Global Network HK Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Global Network Pte. Ltd., Vodafone Enterprise Hong Kong Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Italy S.r.L, Vodafone Enterprise Korea Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Luxembourg S.A., Vodafone Enterprise Netherlands BV, Vodafone Enterprise Norway AS, Vodafone Enterprise Regional Business Singapore Pte.Ltd., Vodafone Enterprise Singapore Pte.Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Spain S.L.U.  Portugal Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Spain SLU, Vodafone Enterprise Sweden AB, Vodafone Enterprise Switzerland AG, Vodafone Erste Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Vodafone Espana S.A.U., Vodafone Euro Hedging Limited, Vodafone Euro Hedging Two, Vodafone Europe B.V., Vodafone Europe UK, Vodafone European Investments, Vodafone European Portal Limited, Vodafone Finance Limited, Vodafone Finance Luxembourg Limited, Vodafone Finance Sweden, Vodafone Finance UK Limited, Vodafone Financial Operations, Vodafone Financial Services B.V., Vodafone Fixed Ltd, Vodafone Foundation, Vodafone Foundation Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Gestioni S.p.A, Vodafone Ghana Mobile Financial Services Limited, Vodafone Global Content Services Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise (Hong Kong) Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise (Italy) S.R.L., Vodafone Global Enterprise (Japan) K.K., Vodafone Global Enterprise (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Vodafone Global Enterprise Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise Russia LLC, Vodafone Global Enterprise Taiwan Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise Telecommunications (Hellas) A.E., Vodafone Global Network Limited, Vodafone Global Network Limited  Slovakia Branch, Vodafone Global Services Private Limited, Vodafone GmbH, Vodafone Group (Directors) Trustee Limited, Vodafone Group Pension Trustee Limited, Vodafone Group Services GmbH, Vodafone Group Services Ireland Limited, Vodafone Group Services Limited, Vodafone Group Services No.2 Limited, Vodafone Group Share Trustee Limited, Vodafone Hire Limited, Vodafone Holding A.S., Vodafone Holdings (Jersey) Limited, Vodafone Holdings (SA) Proprietary Limited, Vodafone Holdings Europe S.L.U., Vodafone Holdings Luxembourg Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Finance Pty Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Receivables Pty Limited, Vodafone IP Licensing Limited, Vodafone India Digital Limited, Vodafone India Limited, Vodafone India Services Private Limited, Vodafone India Ventures Limited, Vodafone Institut fur Gesellschaft und Kommunikation GmbH, Vodafone Intermediate Enterprises Limited, Vodafone International 1 S.a.r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone International 1 S.a r.l., Vodafone International 2 Limited, Vodafone International Holdings B.V., Vodafone International Holdings Limited, Vodafone International M S.a r.l., Vodafone International Operations Limited, Vodafone International Services LLC, Vodafone Investment UK, Vodafone Investments (SA) Proprietary Limited, Vodafone Investments Australia Limited, Vodafone Investments Limited, Vodafone Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Vodafone Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone Ireland Distribution Limited, Vodafone Ireland Ltd., Vodafone Ireland Marketing Limited, Vodafone Ireland Property Holdings Limited, Vodafone Ireland Retail Limited, Vodafone Italia S.p.A., Vodafone Jersey Dollar Holdings Limited, Vodafone Jersey Finance, Vodafone Jersey Yen Holdings Unlimited, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland Field Services GmbH, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland GmbH, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland Kundenbetreuung GmbH, Vodafone Kenya Limited, Vodafone Leasing Limited, Vodafone Libertel B.V., Vodafone Limited, Vodafone Luxembourg 5 S.a r.l., Vodafone Luxembourg 5 S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone Luxembourg S.a r.l., Vodafone Luxembourg S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone M-PESA SH.P.K., Vodafone M-Pesa S.A, Vodafone M.C. Mobile Services Limited , Vodafone Magyarorszag Mobile Tavkozlesi Zartkoruen Mukodo Reszvenytarsasag, Vodafone Malta Limited, Vodafone Marketing UK , Vodafone Maroc SARL, Vodafone Mauritius Ltd., Vodafone Mobile Commerce Limited, Vodafone Mobile Communications Limited, Vodafone Mobile Enterprises Limited, Vodafone Mobile NZ Limited, Vodafone Mobile Network Limited, Vodafone Mobile Operations Limited, Vodafone Mobile Services Limited, Vodafone Multimedia Limited, Vodafone Nederland Holding I B.V., Vodafone Nederland Holding II B.V., Vodafone Nederland Holding III B.V., Vodafone Net Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Network Pty Limited, Vodafone New Zealand Foundation Limited, Vodafone New Zealand Limited, Vodafone Next Generation Services Limited, Vodafone Nominees Limited1, Vodafone ONO S.A.U., Vodafone Oceania Limited, Vodafone Old Show Ground Site Management Limited, Vodafone Overseas Finance Limited, Vodafone Overseas Holdings Limited, Vodafone Panafon International Holdings B.V., Vodafone Panafon UK, Vodafone Partner Services Limited, Vodafone Payment Solutions S.a r.l., Vodafone Portugal  Comunicacoes Pessoais S.A., Vodafone Procurement Company S.a r.l., Vodafone Property Investments Limited, Vodafone Pty Limited, Vodafone Qatar Q.S.C., Vodafone Retail (Holdings) Limited , Vodafone Retail Limited, Vodafone Roaming Services S.a r.l., Vodafone Romania S.A, Vodafone Romania M - Payments SRL, Vodafone Romania Technologies SRL, Vodafone Sales & Services Limited, Vodafone Satellite Services Limited, Vodafone Servicios SL.U, Vodafone Servizi E Tecnologie S.R.L, Vodafone Servicos Empresariais Brasil Ltda., Vodafone Shared Services Romania SRL, Vodafone Specialist Communications Limited, Vodafone Stiftung Deutschland Gemeinnutzige GmbH, Vodafone Technology Solutions Limited, Vodafone Teknoloji Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Tele-Services (India) Holdings Limited, Vodafone Telecel-Comunicates Pessoais S.A., Vodafone Telecommunications (India) Limited, Vodafone Telekomunikasyon A.S, Vodafone Towers Limited, Vodafone UK Content Services Limited, Vodafone UK Investments Limited , Vodafone UK Limited1 , Vodafone US Inc, Vodafone Ventures Limited1 , Vodafone Vierte Verwaltungs AG, Vodafone Worldwide Holdings Limited, Vodafone Yen Finance Limited , Vodafone m-pesa Limited, Vodafone-Central Limited Vodaphone Limited, Vodafone-Panafon Hellenic Telecommunications Company S.A., VodafoneZiggo Group Holding B.V, Vodata Limited , Vouchercloud SA (Pty) Ltd, Wataneya Telecommunications S.A.E, Waterberg Lodge (Proprietary) Limited, Wayfinder, Wheatfields Investments 276 (Proprietary) Limited, Wireless Interactions & NFC Accelerator 2013 B.V., Woodend Cellular Limited, Woodend Communications Limited, Woodend Group Limited, Woodend Holdings Limited, XB Facilities B.V, XLink Communications (Proprietary) Limited, Your Communications Group Limited, ZUM B.V., ZYB, Zelitron S.A., Zesko B.V., Ziggo B.V., Ziggo Bond Company B.V., Ziggo Deelnemingen B.V., Ziggo Finance 2 B.V., Ziggo Financing Partnership, Ziggo Holding B.V., Ziggo Netwerk B.V., Ziggo Netwerk II B.V., Ziggo Services B.V., Ziggo Services Employment B.V., Ziggo Services Netwerk 2 B.V., Ziggo Zakelijk Services B.V., and Zoranet Connectivity Services B.V..

Read More
Business owners, especially in the beginning stages, often avoid getting good advice from professionals because it can be expensive, Stephen Davis, CIC president, said in a news release. CIC is excited to offer an opportunity to meet with these professionals free of charge to help entrepreneurs get the advice they need to grow their businesses.
After recently deciding in a 6-3 vote that it will recommend that the Charlottesville City Council choose to let the statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson stay in place, a citizen panel that some feared would see to their removal presented to the public Thursday a draft of its final report on the matter.

In addition to recommending that the statues remain in place  on the condition that the city rename and redesign the parks to transform the statues meaning  the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces report includes a handful of other recommendations aimed to help tell the full story of Charlottesvilles history of race.

This is a history that few people know. But if we want to understand segregation, black poverty and the over-policing of the African-American community in our city, we have to understand this history, commission member John Mason said.

We have to teach this history to Charlottesville, said Mason, who voted to keep the statues in place. We have to teach the central themes in Charlottesville history in a central place, he said.

Mason reiterated that itll be difficult to contextualize a statue that essentially glorifies the Confederacy and white supremacy, which is contrarian to the narrative of freedom, which he said is the legacy that African-Americans and many others today and in the past, assign to the Civil War.

According to the draft of the report, the commission believes the city could transform the meaning of the statues by initiating a design competition or standard project-bidding process. Another prospective option for the parks is the commissioning of new public art.

Per the report, A new name, new design and new interpretive material for the park[s] and sculpture[s] may transform the landscape and situate the Lee [and Jackson] sculpture[s] in a new, more complete historical context that better reflects the communitys current values and understanding of the past.

More than a dozen other recommendations are included in the 19-page draft of its report. Those recommendations include:

 Replace the existing Court Square Slave Auction Block marker and commission a new memorial on or near Court Square;

 Support conservation of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery and applaud the Bridge Builders Committees work to improve the visibility and appearance of the Drewary J. Brown Memorial Bridge;

 Provide financial assistance for the proposed Vinegar Hill Park and Vinegar Hill Monument, as well as funding for historic resource surveys of African-American, Native American and local labor neighborhoods and sites;

 Sponsor local history research by the local institutions, such as the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and Albemarle-Charlottesville Historical Society;

 Find opportunities to name new roads, bridges and other infrastructure after ideas and people who represent the city but reject building new monuments to individuals;

 Designate March 3 as Liberation Day or Freedom Day to commemorate when the Union Army marched into Charlottesville in 1865;

 Urge the city to participate in the Equal Justice Initiatives Memorial to Peace and Justice by displaying a memorial marking the lynching of John Henry James to confront the truth and terror of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era, and

 Encourage and support the development of class curricula and teach the history of slavery and racism that inform coursework for African-American and Native American history classes that would be taught in local public schools on a continual basis.

In Thursdays forum, about 60 people signed up to speak about the draft of the commissions report.

An organized mass of about three or four dozen people attended the forum to protest the commissions tentative recommendation to keep the statues in the park.

Of all the speakers Thursday, an apparent majority asked the commission to consider voting again on whether they want to recommend moving the statue.

Among the organized speakers advocating for the statues removal was University of Virginia professor Jalane Schmidt, who said its unconscionable to have monuments that represent people who fought to dissolve our nation, maintain slavery and withhold citizenship for black Americans.

Saying that 52 percent of the population in Albemarle County and the city was enslaved at the time of the Civil War, Schmidt said new monuments should be made to recognize the size of their population and the magnitude of their struggle.

The Confederate statues need to be moved so that history can be publicly retold and physically represented so that we can change our historys narrative around race.

Zyahna Bryant, the Charlottesville High School student who earlier this year started a petition to have the statues moved, thus spurring the creation of the commission, predicted that acrimonious feelings about the statue wont vanish if they remain.

Recommending the council take stock in what young people think about the statues, she said, If you dont, well be right back here in 15 to 20 years having the same discussion ... .

While many speakers Thursday asked the commission to reconsider its recommendations for the statues, some thanked them for choosing to keep the statues in place while committing to the goal of presenting a broader picture of history.

I know this has not been an easy vote for any of you to take, but I want to thank for helping us preserve our history and our monuments, Scott Wawner said. I feel that many of the decisions made by this commission will enhance the story of all the people that have had an important impact on the Charlottesville area.

A few others were not so optimistic about the tentative recommendations, however, arguing that the recent victory of President-elect Donald Trump has emboldened racists and bigots.

If we think white supremacy is gone, you need to look on the internet and see whats happening in our world right now, said Lisa Green, a member of the citys planning commission.

I ask you to reconsider your vote and think about what this does to our children who are getting bullied in our schools today.  [T]hink about that when you make these choices, she said.

* * *

Earlier in the day at a City Council retreat meeting at Morven Farm in Albemarle County, councilors briefly discussed the commissions work and how they will move forward with it  although, only vaguely.

Developing a new three-year strategic plan, the council agreed to include intentionally address issues of race and equity as one of its initiatives.

In an interview, Councilor Kristin Szakos declined to talk about the commissions tentative recommendations.

Ultimately, she said, what happens with the statues and the other recommendations is a decision that has to be made by the council.

The commission will hold its final meeting on Nov. 28 at CitySpace.
Three University of Virginia police officers are on paid administrative leave, accused of yelling Make America Great Again! into the intercom system of their vehicles early Wednesday morning.

The officers allegedly yelled the slogan  used by President-elect Donald J. Trump during his campaign  at student passersby not long after Trumps electoral victory had become apparent.

UVa Police Chief Michael Gibson sent out a statement on the matter Thursday afternoon. Gibson wrote that he was disappointed by the reports and that the department is investigating the matter.

Please be assured that UPD remains committed to the highest professional standards in law enforcement and will work tirelessly to enhance the safety of our living and learning environment, he wrote.

The incident was one of the issues that prompted a protest of Friday afternoons scheduled Board of Visitors meeting at the Rotunda, which was supposed to cover issues related to financial aid and affordability.

The protesters called for the officers to be fired. Some also demanded the university defund the police force.

After Rector William H. Goodwin asked them to leave  to keep from filling the building to capacity, he said  the students stood outside and chanted No justice, no peace, no racist police!

Most of the board members were unaware of the incident. UVa President Teresa A. Sullivan and the universitys chief operating officer, Pat Hogan, filled them in.

Sullivan said a couple of students were walking back to their dorms on Election Night and they were unhappy about the direction the elections had taken.

According to reports, thats when the officers began the MAGA taunt.

After the meeting, Hogan said the alleged behavior by the officers was unprofessional and inappropriate.

Word of the incident may have undermined student trust in the entire 125-member police force, he said.

We have certain values at our university, Hogan said. The last thing we want to do is undermine the confidence of our students.

See the protest in the tweets below:

Happening now outside the #UVA BOV meeting pic.twitter.com/0Blqm2nMAk  Derek Quizon (@DPHigherEd) November 11, 2016

UVa student protesters naming demands outside BOV meeting pic.twitter.com/mR5WKYEoml  Derek Quizon (@DPHigherEd) November 11, 2016
United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. DESRICK GORDON, a.k.a. Desrick Devon Gordon, Defendant-Appellant. No. 16-11141 Decided: November 10, 2016

Before ED CARNES, Chief Judge, JORDAN, and JULIE CARNES, Circuit Judges.

After a jury trial Desrick Gordon was convicted of (1) conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine in violation of 21 U.S.C.  841(a)(1), 841(b)(1)(A)(ii), and 846; and (2) possession with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine in violation of 21 U.S.C.  841(a)(1), 841(b)(1)(A)(ii) and 18 U.S.C.  2. He contends that there was insufficient evidence to support the jury's verdict.

I.

This case is one of several arising out of a drug smuggling operation involving crew members of the Norwegian Sun, a cruise ship. In late 2014, the Norwegian Sun made a scheduled stop in Honduras. Jason Carmichael, a member of the ship's crew, used this opportunity to visit a club in Roatan. According to Carmichael, a man at the club approached him and offered him an opportunity to earn money by smuggling cocaine into the United States. The plan was simple. Carmichael would carry the drugs on and off the Norwegian Sun in specially-designed underwear with a pouch between the legs. He would wear tights over the underwear to keep the drugs in place. And he would wear his pants slightly lower than usual so that security would not find the drugs if he was subjected to a pat-down. Carmichael would be paid two thousand dollars for each package he successfully delivered to Tampa, Florida. He agreed to participate and carried drugs into the country several times using this method.

Carmichael was not the only crew member who smuggled cocaine into the United States on board the Norwegian Sun. Indeed, Carmichael himself recruited several of his shipmates to participate in the smuggling operation. By March 2014 Arkine John, Teffan Delice, Alfred Ince, Jason Cherubin, and several others had joined the operation.

At Gordon's trial, Carmichael testified that Gordon had approached him and said he wanted to start running drugs, too. According to Carmichael, Gordon needed the money for his son, who has asthma. He agreed to let Gordon join the operation. But because Gordon was on duty, he was unable to leave the ship when Carmichael left to collect a shipment of drugs.

Carmichael testified that Gordon was upset that he was left behind because he needed the money for his sick child. Seeking to solve two problems at once, Carmichael arranged for Gordon to offload one of the two packages Arkine John had brought on board, because John had trouble walking with both packages between his legs. Another coconspirator, Cherubin, testified that a package had almost fallen out of John's pants on the way onto the ship, causing Carmichael to be concerned that John would get them all caught if he tried to take two packages off the ship in Tampa. Carmichael testified that it was agreed that Gordon would receive one thousand dollars for transporting the package off the Norwegian Sun.

Carmichael testified that, upon arriving in Tampa and successfully disembarking with the drugs on March 8, 2015, the conspirators called two contacts to pick them up near the Hooters restaurant at the port. Because everyone could not fit in the car, Gordon, Ince, and John removed their packages in a public restroom near the restaurant and gave them to Carmichael. After that, Carmichael, Delice, and Cherubin went with the contacts in their vehicle.

What the conspirators did not know is that the Department of Homeland Security was already surveilling the contacts. Agents followed the vehicle to a Residence Inn. Carmichael testified that the contacts took them to a room at the hotel where the three conspirators handed over the drugs and received their payment. The contacts also gave Carmichael some money to take back to the boss in Honduras. After that, the contacts drove the conspirators back to the Hooters, dropped them off there, drove back to the hotel to shower, and headed on their way. The contacts were soon stopped by law enforcement officers, who found the cocaine in their vehicle. Most of the other conspirators were quickly arrested trying to board the ship or in their cabins. Gordon managed to make it back onto the Norwegian Sun and was not identified and arrested until some time later.

Ince and Delice also testified at Gordon's trial and their testimony largely matched Carmichael's account of these events, though there were some minor inconsistencies. For instance, Carmichael testified that he was given drugs by the boss and his son in Honduras, but none of the other conspirators knew anything about the boss having a son. While Carmichael testified that he talked to John about giving Gordon one of his packages, Cherubin testified that Carmichael was arguing with John after John almost dropped a package coming on board. Cherubin claimed he was the one who suggested giving one of the packages to Gordon, not Carmichael. And so on.

Gordon moved for a judgment of acquittal at the close of the government's case. After the district court denied the motion, Gordon took the stand to testify in his own defense. He testified that, although Carmichael had approached him about joining the conspiracy, he had rejected the invitation. According to Gordon, John owed him six hundred dollars. Gordon testified that he left the ship with the others on March 8 because John had promised to pay him the money that day and he wanted to send it to the mother of his sick child. He claims he was only loitering around the Hooters because it offers free wireless internet access to its patrons.

In rebuttal, the government called Jonathan Vasquez, who had shared a jail cell with Gordon. Vasquez testified that Gordon had confessed to transporting the drugs and giving them to Carmichael in a public restroom. He also asserted that Gordon said he was going to track down the families of the coconspirators who testified against him.

At the close of all evidence, the district court denied Gordon's renewed motion for a judgment of acquittal. The jury deliberated and found Gordon guilty of both charges against him: conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine and possession with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine.

II.

Gordon raises only one issue on appeal. He contends that there is insufficient evidence to support his convictions and that, as a result, the district court erred by denying his motion for a judgment of acquittal.

We review both a challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence and the denial of a [Federal] Rule [of Criminal Procedure] 29 motion for judgment of acquittal de novo. United States v. Gamory, 635 F.3d 480, 497 (11th Cir. 2011). In so doing, [we view] the evidence in the light most favorable to the Government and resolve[ ] all reasonable inferences and credibility evaluations in favor of the verdict. United States v. Isnadin, 742 F.3d 1278, 1303 (11th Cir. 2014). We must affirm [Gordon's] convictions unless, under no reasonable construction of the evidence, could the jury have found [him] guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. United States v. Garcia, 405 F.3d 1260, 1269 (11th Cir. 2005).

To sustain a conviction for conspiracy to distribute drugs in violation of 21 U.S.C.  846, the government must prove that 1) an agreement existed between two or more people to distribute the drugs; 2) that the defendant  knew of the conspiratorial goal; and 3) that he knowingly joined or participated in the illegal venture. United States v. Reeves, 742 F.3d 487, 497 (11th Cir. 2014) (quotation marks omitted). The government proved all of that in this case. The testimony of several witnesses at trial established that Carmichael and several others agreed to transport drugs for a boss in Honduras; that Gordon not only knew of the conspiracy but asked to join it; and that he met with the other conspirators, took possession of a package containing cocaine, and carried it to a delivery point.

To sustain a conviction for possession with intent to distribute drugs the government [must] establish three elements: (1) knowledge; (2) possession; and (3) intent to distribute. United States v. Mercer, 541 F.3d 1070, 1076 (11th Cir. 2008). The government proved that. The testimony of the government's witnesses was sufficient to show that Gordon knew the packages the conspirators were transporting contained drugs, that he took possession of one of those packages, and that the purpose of the venture was to deliver the drugs to the boss' contacts in Tampa.

Gordon contends that the evidence is insufficient because the jury should not have believed the testimony of his coconspirators and Vasquez. He relies on Anderson v. City of Bessemer City, 470 U.S. 564, 575, 105 S. Ct. 1504, 1512 (1985), for the proposition that:

Documents or objective evidence may contradict the witness' story; or the story itself may be so internally inconsistent or implausible on its face that a reasonable factfinder would not credit it. Where such factors are present, the court of appeals may well find clear error even in a finding purportedly based on a credibility determination.

But his reliance on that case is misplaced. Unlike the Anderson case, this is not a civil case and it was tried before a jury, not a judge, so the clear error standard does not apply.

As this Court explained in United States v. Flores, 572 F.3d 1254, 1263 (11th Cir. 2009), in a criminal case tried before a jury [c]redibility determinations are left to the jury and the jury's verdict will not be disturbed on appeal unless the testimony is incredible as a matter of law. (Quotation marks omitted). And [t]estimony is only incredible if it relates to facts that the witness could not have possibly observed or events that could not have occurred under the laws of nature. Id. (quotation marks omitted).

None of the testimony in this case was incredible as a matter of law. The witnesses' accounts of the conspiracy and Gordon's participation in it differed from one another as to some details. But none of the witnesses testified about events they could not have possibly observed. Id. Nor did they testify to events that defied the laws of nature. As a result, it was up to the jury to resolve the inconsistencies in the witnesses' testimony. Whether we would have resolved those inconsistencies in the same way if we were in the jury's place is irrelevant. See United States v. Ellisor, 522 F.3d 1255, 1271 (11th Cir. 2008) ([T]he question is whether reasonable minds could have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, not whether reasonable minds must have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.)

That the witnesses against Gordon were, as Gordon protests in his brief, admitted liars and drug dealers who had worked together in the past is beside the point. [T]estimony is not incredible solely because it is proffered by an array of scoundrels, liars and brigands. Flores, 572 F.3d at 1263 (quotation marks omitted). The witnesses' pasts and motivation to lie based on their plea bargains with the government were made known to the jury, and the jury was entitled to weigh their testimonies accordingly. id.

Moreover, there was other evidence in this case that supports the jury's verdict. For one thing, the jurors could have believed Vasquez's account of Gordon's jailhouse confession. For another, Gordon himself took the stand and a statement by a defendant, if disbelieved by the jury, may be considered as substantive evidence of the defendant's guilt. United States v. Brown, 53 F.3d 312, 314 (11th Cir. 1995). Having seen and heard [Gordon's] testimony [denying his involvement in the conspiracy], the jury was free to discredit [his] explanation, to infer that the opposite of what [he] said was true, and to consider that inference as substantive evidence of [his] guilt. United States v. Hough, 803 F.3d 1181, 1188 (11th Cir. 2015). Finally, video surveillance from outside the Hooters restaurant and DHS's investigation corroborated some aspects of the conspirators' testimony.

In short, [t]he evidence [in a criminal case] need not be inconsistent with every reasonable hypothesis other than guilt in order to be sufficient to support a jury's guilty verdict. Gamory, 635 F.3d at 497 (quotation marks omitted). Instead, we allow the jury to choose among several reasonable conclusions to be drawn from the evidence. Id. (quotation marks omitted). In this case, the jury could have decided that neither the conspirators nor Vasquez were telling the truth, believed Gordon, and acquitted him. Instead, it found the conspirators and Vasquez  or some of them, or one of them  credible, disbelieved Gordon, and found him guilty. We cannot say that choice was unreasonable.

AFFIRMED.

FOOTNOTES

. Carmichael was later called as a government witness as Gordon's trial.

PER CURIAM:
The results of Tuesdays presidential election have some University of Virginia students looking for a safe space.

The universitys Student Council has opened the doors of the auditorium in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library to those feeling distraught over the results of the election. Since Wednesday, the auditorium has served as a safe space for discussion about the election, offering students and staff a place to ponder the future of the country under President-elect Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, the council called on the universitys faculty to be understanding of students who have trouble focusing on their work due to the election and to host dialogues in the classroom.

To those struggling, please reach out for support, reads the letter. It is okay to feel sad, angry, frustrated, scared.

Emily Lodge, president of the Student Council, said the council did not intend to ask professors to excuse absences or cancel classes but to recognize that students are responding to the election in many different ways.

Students also are dealing with midterm exam season, and the stress could be overwhelming, she said.

We encouraged faculty to adjust their expectations in the classroom as they saw fit because caring for mental and emotional health should be top among our priorities, Lodge said in an email Thursday afternoon.

The results of the election  a surprise victory for Trump  has sparked protests across the country, with detractors of the president-elect saying hes racist and sexist, among other things.

Neither Lodge nor the councils letter mention President-elect Trump by name, but the letter says immigrants, LGBT people, those with disabilities, women  anyone who has felt disparaged by the language of this election  may now be dealing with what is to come.

Lodge said the council does not condone alienating students based on who they are or their political views. The council, she said, was prepared to help with the process of healing divisions on Grounds regardless of the elections outcome.

We have all seen how divisive the rhetoric during campaigning has been, and we knew that these feelings of division would not be resolved so simply with a final vote count, Lodge said. Student Councils primary concern is always to represent the student voice and to promote a stronger, unified student body.

Some students have blamed the heated rhetoric in the election for a series of hate-speech incidents on Grounds.

There has been an unusually high volume of reports of racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and anti-Islamic graffiti on and around UVa this semester. Late last month, for example, students reported finding the word terrorist written across the wall near a room occupied by two Muslim students.

A star with the word Juden  an apparent reference to the Holocaust  was found spray-painted on the side of a building in the Grand Marc apartment complex near the university.

The incidents have prompted many of the universitys social organizations to start a new campaign, titled Eliminate the Hate.

A post on the organizations Facebook page laments that an individual who ran a campaign of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia and authoritarianism was elected president of our country.

The students in the campaign are planning a series of events next week, including a protest march to the Rotunda.

UVa President Teresa A. Sullivan sent a statement out to students, telling them not to lose faith in the democratic process.

James Madison, a former UVa rector and one of the chief architects of the Constitution, ensured the American system of government would have checks and balances that limit political power and protect everyones rights, Sullivan wrote.

Our faith in democracy has sustained our country for more than two centuries and will continue to do so for centuries to come.
United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. AGO GJONAJ, ZANA AGRAJA-GJONAJ, Petitioners, v. LORETTA E. LYNCH, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY GENERAL, Respondent. 15-2359 Decided: November 09, 2016

PRESENT: DENNIS JACOBS, PIERRE N. LEVAL, RAYMOND J. LOHIER, JR., Circuit Judges. FOR PETITIONERS: James A. Lombardi, New York, N.Y. FOR RESPONDENT: Benjamin C. Mizer, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General; Holly M. Smith, Senior Litigation Counsel; Juria L. Jones, Trial Attorney, Office of Immigration Litigation, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.

UPON DUE CONSIDERATION of this petition for review of a Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) decision, it is hereby ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED that the petition for review is DENIED.

Petitioners Ago Gjonaj and Zana Agraja-Gjonaj, natives and citizens of Albania, seek review of a June 30, 2015, decision of the BIA, affirming a February 20, 2014, decision of an Immigration Judge (IJ) denying Gjonaj's application for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). In re Ago Gjonaj, et al., No. A099 000 574/575 (B.I.A. June 30, 2015), aff'g No. A099 000 574/575 (Immigr. Ct. N.Y.C. Feb. 20, 2014). We assume the parties' familiarity with the underlying facts and procedural history in this case.

Under the circumstances of this case, we have reviewed the IJ's decision as modified by the BIA. Xue Hong Yang v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, 426 F.3d 520, 522 (2d Cir. 2005). The applicable standards of review are well established. 8 U.S.C.  1252(b)(4)(B); Xiu Xia Lin v. Mukasey, 534 F.3d 162, 165-66 (2d Cir. 2008).

The REAL ID Act credibility standard provides that the agency may, [c]onsidering the totality of the circumstances, base a credibility finding on an asylum applicant's demeanor, candor, or responsiveness, the plausibility of his account, and inconsistencies in his statements and evidence without regard to whether those inconsistencies go to the heart of the applicant's claim. 8 U.S.C.  1158(b)(1)(B)(iii); Xiu Xia Lin, 534 F.3d at 163-64. We defer  to an IJ's credibility determination unless  it is plain that no reasonable fact-finder could make such an adverse credibility ruling. Xiu Xia Lin, 534 F.3d at 167. Further, [a] petitioner must do more than offer a plausible explanation for his inconsistent statements to secure relief; he must demonstrate that a reasonable fact-finder would be compelled to credit his testimony. Majidi v. Gonzales, 430 F.3d 77, 80 (2d Cir. 2005) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Substantial evidence supports the agency's determination that Gjonaj was not credible.

The agency reasonably relied on inconsistencies regarding Gjonaj's medical record. See Xiu Xia Lin, 534 F.3d at 166-67. Gjonaj testified that he was attacked twice -- in October 2000 outside a polling station and in September 2001 while detained -- and that he had submitted medical records for each attack. Gjonaj, however, submitted only one medical certificate from 2007 documenting treatment in October 2001a date which matched neither of his alleged beatings. Gjonaj gave a series of inconsistent explanations: the first attack actually occurred in October 2001, not October 2000; the record pertained to the first attack in October 2000; the record referred to the second attack in September 2001. The agency was not required to credit these explanations, which were not compelling and created further inconsistencies that support the credibility determination. See Majidi, 430 F.3d at 80; Xiu Xia Lin, 534 F.3d at 166-67.

On appeal to the BIA, Gjonaj maintained that his testimony was consistent. In his brief to this Court, however, Gjonaj argues that any inconsistency was the result of the confusing phrasing of questions on cross-examination. We decline to consider this argument because it is unexhausted. See Lin Zhong v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, 480 F.3d 104, 123 (2d Cir. 2007).

The credibility determination was also reasonably based on the absence of certain corroborating evidence. An applicant's failure to corroborate testimony may bear on credibility, either because the absence of particular evidence is viewed as suspicious, or because the absence of corroboration in general makes an applicant unable to rehabilitate testimony already called into question. See Biao Yang v. Gonzales, 496 F.3d 268, 273 (2d Cir. 2007). Beyond the problems with Gjonaj's medical documentation, the IJ noted that Gjonaj failed to provide any letters of support from his brother (who was allegedly detained with him for three nights and beaten) or either of his parents (who were both present when he and his brother were arrested, and who have allegedly been visited by police searching for Gjonaj).

Given the foregoing inconsistencies and lack of corroboration, the totality of the circumstances supports the agency's adverse credibility determination. See Xiu Xia Lin, 534 F.3d at 167. That finding is dispositive of asylum, withholding of removal, and CAT relief because all three claims are based on the same factual predicate. See Paul v. Gonzales, 444 F.3d 148, 156-57 (2d Cir. 2006).

For the foregoing reasons, the petition for review is DENIED.

FOR THE COURT:

Catherine O'Hagan Wolfe, Clerk

FOOTNOTES

. The IJ also denied Zana Agraja-Gjonaj's separate application for asylum and related relief. She did not appeal that decision to the BIA and does not challenge it in this Court. Agraja-Gjonaj, Gjonaj's wife, was however included as a derivative beneficiary in Gjonaj's application.

. Gjonaj's challenges to the IJ's finding regarding his fraudulent passport are not before us because the BIA explicitly excluded that finding from its decision. See Xue Hong Yang, 426 F.3d at 522.
The first time veteran Harlow Reynolds heard of Desmond T. Doss, he was sitting with a group of friends at the Stadium Inn on Fort Avenue in 2005, discussing famous people from Lynchburg.

Reynolds joked he was the most famous Lynchburger from Easley Avenue, a street off Campbell Avenue in the Fairview Heights neighborhood, said his friend Paul Manly.

Another friend piped in to tell Reynolds that he, in fact, was not. That honor went to the late Desmond Doss.

Harlow said, Well who is Desmond Doss? Manly recalled.

Born in Lynchburg, Cpl. Desmond T. Doss became the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor for his heroics during the Battle of Okinawa, which many consider the bloodiest battle in the Pacific.

His story now is reaching millions of Americans in the new Mel Gibson film, Hacksaw Ridge, which opened in theaters nationwide Friday.

Its an opportunity for other people to know that Lynchburg had a hero, said Manly, a former veteran himself. The entire story as I know it, its a movie plot right from the start.

The son of William and Bertha Dossa carpenter and a factory worker at Craddock-Terry Shoe Corporations West End plant, respectivelyDoss grew up in Fairview Heights, a then-rural area just outside Lynchburg.

The Dosses and their three children, of which Desmond was the middle child, attended the Park Avenue Seventh-day Adventist Church, now located on George Street as Lynchburg Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Doss never went to public school, instead attending the churchs small school through eighth grade, after which he got his first job at the Lynchburg Lumber Company, according to his memoir, which was written by his second wife, Frances.

A year later, he started work for the city, she wrote, and eventually took a job as a joiner at the Newport News Naval shipyard.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Doss voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Armythough his job at the shipyard could have secured him a deferment, a decision that left him to reconcile his desire to serve his country with his religious beliefs.

Doss, who believed strongly in the Gospel and especially the Sixth Commandment, refused to carry, or even touch, a weapon and was therefore labeled a conscientious objector, a title with which he strenuously disagreed.

Unlike most conscientious objectors, who refused to wear the uniform or salute the flag, Doss simply would not hold a weapon and would not work on the Sabbath.

I felt like it was an honor to serve God and country. We were fighting for our religious liberty and freedom, Doss said in The Conscientious Objector, the award-winning 2004 documentary chronicling his heroism. I tried to explain I was not that type of conscientious objector. I tried to explain I was a conscientious cooperator.

His superiors originally placed Doss in a rifle company for the purpose of breaking him, according to the documentary. There, he faced numerous hardships and abuse from both his commanders and fellow recruits.

Through verbal and physical attacks, the worst personnel assignments, threats of court marshal and attempts to have him removed from the Army under Section 8mental instabilityDoss refused to yield on his commitment to not touch a weapon and was eventually made a medic for the 77th Infantry and deployed to Guam, Leyte and eventually Okinawa.

I knew if I ever once compromised, I was going to be in trouble, Doss said in the documentary. Because if you can compromise once, you can compromise again.

Once in Okinawa, Doss and the 77th faced their greatest challenge yet: capturing Hacksaw Ridge, the highest point of the Maeda Escarpment, a 400-foot fortified slope topped by a 40-foot cliff, which ran along the southern part of the island.

This ridge served as a strategic military position for the Japanese with multiple defensive and attack points against the American troops. Overtaking it would change the tide of the war.

Thousands lost their lives taking the ridge, including many men in Dosss unit. It would have been more save for Dosss efforts.

During a particularly brutal assault on the escarpment, the medic singlehandedly saved 75 of the wounded soldiers by lowering them down the cliff to safety with a rope he tied to a tree stump and a knot he had mistakenly created during basic trainingthe double bowline. His version of the military-taught bowline knot doubled over the rope, which created two loops instead of one.

As little kids, we thought [the story] was the coolest thing ever, said Iraq veteran Joshua Wright, who met Doss during his time as a student at Lynchburgs Desmond T. Doss Christian Academy.

Mr. Doss was really small and even as a small kid  I remember how small he was, the veteran said. Purely from his human form and size, it would have been impossible without God to do what he did. He was frail. I probably could have wrapped by fingers around his bicep and touched my fingers together as an adult.

For hours on that day in May of 1945, Doss dragged men to the edgemany of the same men who tormented him in basicand lowered them down to safety all while facing a barrage of enemy fire.

It amazed me that he was never shot [that day] because he was out there by himself, recalled Wright. I asked him one time, I said, How did you get so lucky? And I will never forget his response. He said, true to who Mr. Doss was, It wasnt luck. It was God who took care of me.

About two weeks after his most famous act, Doss was injured while aiding soldiers during a night mission when he tried to kick a live grenade away from him and three other men. The blast left numerous pieces of shrapnel imbedded in his legs. While being carried away from the battlefield, Doss saw a man with worse injuries than his own, so he rolled off the litter and told the medics to take the other soldier instead.

While waiting for their return, Doss was shot by a Japanese sniper. The bullet entered his arm in two places, leaving broken bones and severe nerve damage, and Doss used a broken rifle barrel as a makeshift splint. This was the only time he ever touched a gun during the entire war.

On Oct. 12, 1945, President Harry Truman presented Doss, along with 14 other soldiers, the Medal of Honor at a ceremony on the White House lawn.

He whispered to me, You really deserve this, Doss said in the documentary of when Truman placed presented him with the honor, and said, I consider this a greater honor than being the President of the United States.

Doss also received the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts with Oak Leaf clusters, though not at the same ceremony.

Thirteen days after the Medal of Honor ceremony, he and his first wife, Dorothy, returned to Lynchburg and were greeted by a welcoming party that included the mayor and the E.C. Glass High School marching band. The following afternoon, locals lined the streets downtown for a parade in Dosss honor, which was followed by a dinner at the Lynchburg Armory.

As the parade moved down Main Street back to the Armory, the crowds along the length of the thoroughfare cheered as Cpl. Doss passed by, an article in The News described. Torn paper and confetti rained down from the upper floors of office buildings and stores along the street.

In interviews at the time, the ever-modest Doss referred to this moment as the most embarrassing of his life.

Because of the damage to his arm, Doss was unable to return to his career in carpentry. He had plans to learn a new profession, but those dreams were put on hold when he developed tuberculosis from his time on the battlefield and spent more than five years in VA hospitals.

The infection led to the loss of a lung and five ribs. While treating his tuberculosis, doctors accidently gave him an overdose of antibiotics that left him mostly deaf, according to the documentary,though cochlear implants aided his hearing for a time.

After returning home, he found himself on permanent disability. Soon after, his wife suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress of his illness, wrote Frances Doss in the memoir, which led Doss to move the family, which now included his son Desmond Jr., to Georgia, closer to her relatives. She eventually died in a car crash on her way to chemotherapy in 1991. He met and married Frances, his second wife, two years later.

Despite the tribulations, Doss remained faithful to his belief in the Gospel for the rest of his days.

Books have been published about Dosss deeds; highways in Georgia and Alabama, where he spent his adult life, have been named after him. The Seventh-day Adventists named a now-defunct Army-sponsored medic training camp in Michigan for him, and the Walter Reed Medical Army Center renamed a guesthouse after him in 2008.

But, aside from the parade, the city of Lynchburg had not memorialized its greatest hero until 2007.

When I was just a kid, I remember people talking about him when this actually came about, said the 77-year-old Manly. I couldnt have been over 7, 8 years old. Back in those days, people talked about it for several years, but nobody had ever actually done something. In fact, some time passed before the school ended up being named after him.

One warm morning on the last full week in October, Reynolds, retired U.S. Marine and veteran activist Steve Bozeman and former Lynchburg City Council member Joe Seiffert stood on the side of the Lynchburg Expressway bypass that runs from Old Forest Road to Boonsboro Road.

Looking at the dense pile of overgrown leaves and brush, they dug into the soil through the plastic matting and into soft soil.

Well have to get the lawn mower, Reynolds said.

They did not.

Tossing brush aside, they cleared a section of dirt into which they planted mums in varying shades of purple, doused them with water and finally placed a Star Spangled wreath next to the green highway marker that reads Pfc. Desmond T. Doss Memorial Expressway.

This strip of road became the first way the city of Lynchburg honored its hero since the parade in 45, an effort brought about by the trio along with longtime News & Advance columnist Darrell Laurant.

We have named several things, like Jerry Falwell Parkway. Theres highway markers for Douglas Southall Freeman, where he was raised right there in front of the Texas Inn on Main Street, said Seifert. You have that in mind and then you find out Desmond was raised here, what he did.  We only have one Medal of Honor recipient and its a big deal. Every time people go by that, they see that name. For Desmond to do what he did, its incredible. Its the least I could do to get him recognized.

Though only 3.1 miles, this distance in many ways holds extra significance as it harkens to a moment of selflessness in Dosss childhood, a trait that followed him into adulthood and onto the battlefield.

It was announced on the radio there was an accident on Route 29 and they needed some blood right away to save this womans life, Dosss sister Audrey Millner said in the documentary. He walked three miles to that hospital and walked three more miles back home after he gave blood. Two days later, the call came back over the radio they needed more blood, there he goes again. He walks his three miles then walks his three miles back.

After hearing of Doss from the conversation in the Stadium Inn, Reynolds spent months learning everything he could about the Medal of Honor recipient who grew up on his street. He pored over newspaper articles in the library, bought biographies on his life and, eventually, reached out to Dosss second wife, with whom he started a correspondence.

By this time, Doss could barely speak or hear, but his wife took Reynolds interest to heart, sending him some of Dosss belongings, including framed photos, ties and military name tags, and sharing stories from her husbands life.

I was talking to her one day after the road was named in his honor and I asked her, I said, Do you reckon that Desmond knows were [getting] the road named for him? Reynolds said. And she said that she whispered in his ear and told him all about it and said he flinched. She said knowing how close he was to God, she said you can take it from there. And a chill went over me.

Doss died March 23, 2006, in Alabama at the age of 87, 10 months before the dedication. But a group of locals still gathered on that bitterly cold day in January the following year to honor him. Among them were students from the Desmond T. Doss Christian Academy.

Originally called the Lynchburg Seventh-day Adventist School, the Desmond T. Doss Christian Academy, which changed its name in 1983, saw Doss visit several times before his death.

During those visits, the soft-spoken elderly man would tell students about his time in Okinawa, demonstrating for them the knot he created and even showing where bullets entered his body, while also sharing his faith. When the school built its church in 1996, the Medal of Honor recipient came by and helped nail some of the walls, recalled principal Stephen Doss (who is not related to Desmond Doss).

These visits touched the lives of many students who attended the Seventh-day Adventist school, among them Joshua Wright, who now serves as a commander for an infantry company in the Texas Army National Guard.

I dont know if [joining the military] was directly related [to Doss], but it may have seeded something in my brain where I thought that was a very honorable profession, Wright said during a phone call from where he is stationed in Austin. I definitely remember some of the older students, who were teenagers at the school; they were very influenced by it.  I dont know if I can pinpoint a place at that young age I said, Yeah, I want to follow in Dosss footsteps, but it definitely was a kind of unconscious influence.

Ten years after his death, Dosss story has finally joined the likes of others in the lexicon of movies surrounding World War II, something many have felt it always deserved.

Both the Conscientious Objector and the 1967 book The Unlikeliest Hero, The Story of Desmond T. Doss will be rereleased in the coming months, the latter with a new title and more photos and the documentary in high definition.

Though Lynchburg has honored him with an expressway marker, Bozeman, Reynolds and Seiffert feel more should be done to ensure this local hero is never forgotten.

Bozeman has started working on plans to have a plaque honoring Doss added to the World War II section of Monument Terrace. He would also like to see the addition of a historical marker downtown by the Lynchburg Armory where Doss enlisted.

I think we ought to do it any way we can, Reynolds said. Desmond Doss [did] so much for the country and he didnt ask [anything] in return. He was just an exceptional man and he needs for everyone in Lynchburg to know who he was.
Donald Trump visited the White House today to meet with outgoing president Barack Hussein Obama on plans for the transference of power. To say the meeting was edgy and cold would be an understatement.

Trumps landslide victory at the recent U.S. elections caught many off guard, and liberals are all still in deep shock that their delegate Hillary Clinton was not elected.

After the meeting at the White House, when asked about Muslims, Trump was at first hesitant about revealing his plans, but then answered emphatically that Muslims are a danger to the national security of the nation.

No Sharia

I have already spoken in depth about Muslims. Our solution will be humane and just. Their religion is abhorrent and cannot be trusted. We cannot trust Muslims in our cities, our streets, our jobs. Look what happened in the San Bernardino shooting or the Orlando massacre? These atrocities were all committed by Muslims on U.S. citizens going about their daily lives. We cant have this savagery amongst us. Thats why Im calling for every Muslim to be registered in a database. We need to find out who the devout ones are, who the others are. We need to know if they own guns, and we need to stop their permits. We need to know and watch every Muslim in this country, and when the time comes I will make the final decision. We need to detain them until all the attacks stop. Detain or deport. Well give them a choice. Lets not forget their mosques either, shut them down, we can and will do that. They have no place in America, a Christian God loving country.

Another reporter asked about Muslims who wish to visit the United States.

Its common sense. We have no choice. There is already a no-fly list in place for known terrorists and criminals. Our policy in the name of Homeland Security will be that all Muslims are potential terrorists. Until the war of terror is over, this will be our policy. They can go and visit some other country, but Muslims will not be welcome in America while I am president.

As reporters rushed to ask further questions, Trump halted them and moved on with his entourage.

There are fears for many Muslims in America today, as attacks on their person have risen by 25% already since Trumps election victory. Many are now making plans to leave of their own volition.
Some Tennessee big game hunters, especially those pursuing deer this time of year, are being encouraged by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency to check in their harvested animals either on a mobile device or a personal computer.

While there are still many brick-and-mortar businesses that provide traditional check station service, an estimated quarter of those establishments have discontinued this service in recent years.

We want to make hunters aware that there are still many places where you can physically have your deer checked in, but in some areas of the state you may be looking at a longer drive than you previously had, noted Mark Gudlin, the chief of TWRAs wildlife and forestry division.

The alternative to a long drive is using a cell phone or other mobile device to check in big game through TWRAs On The Go app. Or, checking in an animal using TWRAs website on any personal computer.

If you arent comfortable with computers, try getting a friend to help you, noted Gudlin. You can check in deer on someone elses mobile app or computer as long as you identify yourself using the ID number printed on your personal hunting license.

If hunters want to check in deer the traditional way, and need to locate a business, the TWRA has listed them on its website in an interactive map.

The agencys website address is www.tnwildlife.org. A map icon is posted on the sites homepage.

However, this is the direct link: http://twra.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Viewer/index.html?appid=6246f7bec0774094ac2375ba4221c686
Previous Next

The Conservation Fund and The Land Trust for Tennessee, in partnership with the State of Tennessee, announced the protection of 4,061 acres of forestland in the South Cumberland region. With funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF)through both the U.S. Forest Services Forest Legacy Program and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fundmore than eight miles of streams in the Crow Creek Valley and vital habitat for more than one-third of all the federally threatened painted snake coiled forest snails known to exist have been conserved.

Located an hour west of Chattanooga and adjacent to Franklin State Forest and Carter State Natural Area, the surface of the property will be managed by the State for public access and recreation, drinking water quality for the downstream community of Sherwood, wildlife habitat protection and sustainable forest management. The Tennessee Department of Agricultures Division of Forestry will manage a portion of the newly protected land as part of Franklin State Forest, expanding future hunting access. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation will manage the rest as part of Carter State Natural Area and South Cumberland State Park.



By providing protection of threatened species and preserving one of Tennessees most scenic lands, Tennessee State Parks will preserve and protect this wild place forever, said Brock Hill, Deputy Commissioner for Parks and Conservation. The South Cumberland State Park area is unique in many ways. We look forward to managing this land for public recreation and the benefit of all state park guests.



The Conservation Fund, with transactional support from The Land Trust for Tennessee, purchased 3,893 acres earlier this year from a private mining company, which retained the rights to mine limestone underneath the property for the next 50 years. This will allow the company to continue operations and maintain local mining jobs. In agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the company donated an additional 168 acres to mitigate for impacts to the painted snake coiled forest snail habitat.

This innovative conservation effort was made possible with funding from the LWCFa bipartisan, federal program that uses a percentage of proceeds from offshore oil and gas royalties, not taxpayer dollarswhich was provided through the merit-based Forest Legacy Program and was implemented in partnership with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. LWCF funding has leveraged significant public and private funding from the Tennessee State Lands Acquisition Fund, the Open Space Institutes Resilient Landscapes Initiative and South Cumberland Landscape Fund and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Recovery Land Acquisition Grants program, provided through Section 6 of the Endangered Species Act. LWCF is annually funded by the U.S. Congress, including Tennessees U.S. delegation representing Franklin and Marion Counties: U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, U.S. Senator Bob Corker and U.S. Representative Scott DesJarlais.



Preservation of Sherwood Forest in Franklin County will help provide future generations with opportunities for hunting, hiking and recreation in a beautiful area of our state, said Senator Lamar Alexander. The State of Tennessee, The Conservation Fund and The Land Trust for Tennessee deserve our appreciation for their hard work and dedication to permanently protect Tennessees most diverse and important lands.



Millions of people visit Tennessee each year to experience our incredible God-given outdoor amenities, and this newly protected land in the Sherwood Forest will preserve rare and endangered species while also expanding recreational opportunities for Tennesseans and visitors, said Senator Bob Corker. It is important that this land is available for future generations, and I appreciate the hard work of all who are making that a priority.



The Sherwood Forest in Tennessees Fourth Congressional district provides multiple resources that sustain the local economy and help protect the sensitive wildlife in the area, said Representative DesJarlais. As an outdoorsman, I am pleased to learn that Sherwood Forest will also soon provide new opportunities for public recreation. Its protection will enable outdoor enthusiasts to come and discover the natural wonders that our great state has to offer. Thank you to all the contributors of the Sherwood Forest project and for their continued efforts to preserve the land for future generations.



The painted snake coiled forest snail is only found in Franklin County, Tennessee, with the entire known population inhabiting privately owned land prior to this conservation effort. In addition to the snail, this project protects habitat supporting the federally endangered Morefields leather flower as well as seven additional rare species of plants and animals. Identified as a hot spot for ecological resiliency, the land is also likely to support wildlife far into the future.



This land acquisition serves as a major milestone in forest and wildlife habitat conservation for Tennessee, said Ken Arney, deputy regional forester with the U.S. Forest Services Southern Region. Thanks to funding from the Forest Legacy Program, our state partners can now protect the habitat of many rare and vulnerable species while ensuring the Sherwood Forests economic benefits to local communities.



Protection of this site, made possible by the cooperation of many partners, is a significant accomplishment in efforts to recover the painted snake coiled forest snail, said Mary Jennings, Supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Tennessee Field Office. The recent discovery of a population of Morefields leather flower on the property further demonstrated its importance for maintaining diverse elements of Tennessees rich natural heritage.



The Sherwood Forest project exemplifies so much about the values and priorities of The Land Trust for Tennessee, said Liz McLaurin, President and CEO of The Land Trust. What a privilege it is to work with public and private conservation partners like The Conservation Fund, Open Space Institute, multiple state and federal agencies to protect a place for recreation, as habitat for rare and endangered species, for wildlife connectivity and for climate resiliency.



OSI is proud to have supported the protection of Sherwood Forest, whose unique landscapes and unusual limestone bedrock give it the critical ability to provide habitat to wildlife even in an uncertain climate, said Peter Howell, OSI's Executive Vice President of Conservation Capital & Research Programs. Sherwood Forest is now part of a landscape of thousands of protected acres that will prove to be a natural stronghold for wildlife for generations to come."



Nowadays, conservation cannot be an either-or choice. This private-public partnership demonstrates how we can work together to find solutions that protect the environment and natural resources, while supporting local economies and jobs, said Ralph Knoll, Tennessee Representative with The Conservation Fund. Were thankful to Senators Alexander and Corker and Representative DesJarlais for their continued support of LWCF, which is so critical to conservation in Tennessee, and to all the partners who made this conservation success possible.



The Sherwood Forest project was supported through the Open Space Institutes Resilient Landscapes Initiative and Southern Cumberland Land Protection Fund, which are made possible with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Lyndhurst Foundation, Benwood Foundation, and Merck Family Fund. These initiatives seek to build capacity of land trusts working to respond to climate change.
New Delhi: Taking estranged former chairman Cyrus P Mistry head on, Tata Sons today sought his removal as well as that of the group's friend-turned-foe Nusli N Wadia from the board of Tata Motors.

Tata Sons, which holds 26.51 per cent stake in Tata Motors, asked the manufacturer of Land Rover to convene an extra-ordinary general meeting of the company to consider its resolution seeking removal of Mistry and Wadia.

Mistry continues to be chairman of several listed companies of Tata Group even after he was removed as chairman of the holding company, Tata Sons. These companies include Tata Motors and Tata Chemicals.

The move comes a day after independent directors on board of Tata Chemicals reposed faith in leadership of Mistry. Wadia is on the board of Tata Chemicals as well and is said to have switched sides to join the Mistry camp.

In a regulatory filing, Tata Motors said: "The company has received a requisition and a special notice dated November 10, 2016... from Tata Sons Ltd, the company's promoter and shareholder representing 26.51% of the company's voting capital, for convening an extraordinary general meeting of the company for considering and passing resolutions for removal of Cyrus P Mistry and Nusli N Wadia, Directors of the Company under Section 169 of the said Act."
The company yesterday reported decline in consolidated net profit of Rs 17.02 crore for the second quarter of 2016-17 on account of dip in sales.

Mumbai: Shares of Drug firm Wockhardt today tumbled over 5 per cent after the company reported 81.59 per cent dip in consolidated net profit to Rs 17 crore for the September quarter of the current fiscal.

After a weak opening, the stock further fell 5.61 per cent to Rs 768.60 on BSE. On NSE, it plunged 5.68 per cent to Rs 767.55.

The company yesterday reported decline in consolidated net profit of Rs 17.02 crore for the second quarter of 2016-17 on account of dip in sales.

Net profit was Rs 92.45 crore in the July-September period of the last financial year, Wockhardt said in a BSE filing.

The firm's total income on consolidated basis was down 13.41 per cent during the quarter under review to Rs 1,064.69 crore as against Rs 1,229.59 crore in the year-ago period.

"International business contributed 59 per cent of the total revenues during the second quarter of 2016-17," the company said.

Wockhardt's total expenses came in at Rs 1,002.54 crore, down 5.93 per cent.
Under the Privacy Shield agreement that came into force in August, the United States agreed to limit the collection of and access to Europeans' data stored on U.S. servers because of EU concerns about data privacy and mass U.S. surveillance.

The European Commission has asked the United States about a secret court order Yahoo used to scan thousands of customer emails for possible terrorism links, following concerns that may have violated a new data transfer pact.

Under the Privacy Shield agreement that came into force in August, the United States agreed to limit the collection of and access to Europeans' data stored on U.S. servers because of EU concerns about data privacy and mass U.S. surveillance.

The previous deal was thrown out by the EU's top court in October 2015, leaving thousands of firms scrambling for legal ways to provide data on transactions ranging from credit cards to travel and e-commerce that underpin billions of dollars of transatlantic trade.

Reuters reported last month that Yahoo had scanned all incoming customer emails in 2015 for a digital signature linked to a foreign state sponsor of terrorism, at the behest of a secret court order. That raised fresh questions about the scope of U.S. spying.

"The Commission services have contacted the U.S. authorities to ask for a number of clarifications," Commission spokesman Christian Wigand said.

The United States had pledged not to engage in mass, indiscriminate espionage, assuaging Commission concerns about the privacy of Europeans' data stored on U.S. servers following disclosures of intrusive U.S. surveillance programmes in 2013 by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Two people familiar with the matter said the Commission had now asked the United States to explain how the Yahoo order fitted with its commitments, even if the programme ran before the Privacy Shield was in place.

The Commission was seeking clarifications on the nature of the court order itself and how targeted it was, said one person familiar with the matter. Another said it had also asked if the programme was continuing.

"The U.S. will be held accountable to these commitments both through review mechanisms and through redress possibilities, including the newly established Ombudsperson mechanism in the U.S. State Department," Wigand said.

Privacy Shield, which Yahoo has not signed up to, provides for a joint annual review to ensure the United States is respecting its commitment to limit the amount of data hoovered up by U.S. agents.

A senior U.S. government official said he could not confirm or deny the reports about Yahoo, but said if true the surveillance would have been targeted at identifying terrorists while protecting the privacy of others.

That would be "good intelligence work," he said.
One of the two pictures Amitabh Bachchan shared on his Twitter account.

Mumbai: Amitabh Bachchan, who is currently shooting for the third instalment of Sarkar franchise, has yet again shared some intriguing pictures from the set.

In a recent tweet, a humble Big B joins his hand and offers his prayers to the Almighty with a mammoth Ganesha idol at the backdrop. In another picture, he is seen gazing at the setting sun.

Amitabh captioned the pictures as: And the prayers continue for SARKAR 3 .. as does the setting sun ...

These pictures bring out his powerful persona and earnest devotion towards the Deity.

The actor will be seen reprising his role from the prequels in the film, helmed by Ram Gopal Verma.

The actor, who has been filming for his on-screen return as Subhash Nagre, the intimidating political bigshot from Ram Gopal Verma's 'Sarkar' franchise, has been dedicatedly filming for part three.

The film, which has Manoj Bajpayee, Jackie Shroff, Ronit Roy, Amit Sadh and Yami Gautam sharing screen-space with Big B, won't see Abhishek and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan returning to reprise their respective roles from the prequels.

Whiel the first look of the lead characters had been revealed, prviously, director Ram Gopal Verma, took to Twitter, to share a behind-the-scenes picture of him indulging in an intense conversation with his megastar protagonist.

And the pictures have the actor looking intimidatingly sinister, much in sync with his much acclaimed character from the franchise.

In the film, Yami Gautam plays the role of Annu Karkare, who wants to take revenge on 'Sarkar' for killing her father, whereas Manoj Bajpayee plays Govind Deshpande, a very cranky and slightly violent version of Arvind Kejriwal.

Ronit Roy plays Gokul Satam, whereas Amit Sadh plays the role of Shivaji alias Cheeku.

The film, slated for a 2017 release, will see Jackie Shroff as the main antagonist.

Expectations are sky high from this film, and fans are sure a back-on-home-turf Ram Gopal Verma won't disappoint.
Mumbai: Those who have followed or even know a little about Sridevis journey in the Indian cinema are aware about the fact that she is pretty old school when it comes to making decisions.

The former actress has always consulted her mother for every little matter and guess what? She expects the same from her daughters, especially Jhanvi Kapoor, who will be following her mothers footsteps and making her Bollywood debut very soon.

According to Mumbai Mirror, the strict mom Sridevi isnt happy with several private pictures of Jhanvi making rounds on the internet and has imposed the no boyfriend clause on her. Yes, if reports are to be believed, forget dating boys, Jhanvi is not even allowed to have male friends.

This decision was taken after pictures of Jhanvi kissing her boyfriend Shikhar Pahariya, grandson of Sushil Kumar Shinde, found its way on the internet. Reports further reveal that furious over these pictures of Jhanvi, who is already a sensation on the social media, Sridevi immediately asked her to call her relationship with Shikhar off.

At the moment, Sridevi wants her daughter to focus on her career. Earlier it was believed that Jhanvi was set to step in Bollywood with Karan Johars Student of the Year sequel. Later there were reports of her preparing to make her on-screen debut with South film Ok Kanmani. However, no confirmation has yet been made.
Mumbai: Sidharth Malhotra sure is a multi-tasker not only with his choice of films but also when hes on a holiday. During his latest trip to New Zealand, Sidharth was not only sightseeing but he also stopped at a local cafe to learn a few tricks to make a perfect flat white coffee.

The actor visited the barista with his new Christchurch buddies, Stephen Fleming and Brendon McCullum. Sidharth's visit to Christchurch was a memorable one with different activities. Christchurch has such an exciting vibe to it, there are so many cool places to hang out, or eat at, I feel very spoiled for choice. expressed Sidharth.

Well, we hope that Sidharth remembers all his coffee tricks when he returns to Mumbai as his friends are going to want to try it.
Shahid said that Anurag Kashyap should join politics too but he had a good reason to back up his answer. According to Shahid, Kashyap had fought hard for the release of 'Udta Punjab' and that's why he thinks he deserves to be a politician. Kapoor had appeared in the show with his good friend designer Kunal Rawal.

Mumbai: After a very public, ongoing (legal & verbal) tussle with Hrithik Roshan, Kangana Ranaut is back in news. In a recent chat show, actor Shahid Kapoor said that Kangana will make for a good politician.

Shahid, who was on a 5-month paternity break, appeared on Kamal Sidhus chat show Vogue Bffs with his fashion designer friend Kunal Rawal. Just like other celebrity chat shows, Kamal threw some industry-related tricky questions at Shahid. When asked which alternate career will Kangana. The Udta Punjab star was quick to reply politician with a devilish smile.

Now, the thing is all is not well between Shahid Kapoor and Kangana Ranaut. Recently Kangana called herself the third hero of Vishal bharadwajs period drama Rangoon which irked the Haider star who co-stars in the movie.

In response to Ranauts comment, Shahid reportedly said, Why doesnt she say there are three heroines in the film? Is there anything less in being a heroine? There are three protagonists in the film and for me, being a hero or a heroine doesnt make any difference. So, if saying that you being a hero makes you a bigger person, I dont agree with that thought process.

Kangana plays the role of Mary Ann Evans, his love interest in the movie.
Rather than patients finding a train under their tree this holiday season, The Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum will present a train to Childrens Hospital at Erlanger. The museum announced it will loan one of its treasured and historic locomotives to be displayed at the new Childrens Hospital at Erlanger.

The public is welcome to attend a special unwrapping ceremony of the locomotive which will take place at The Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum Grand Junction on Saturday, November 19 at 11 a.m. Childrens Hospital Miracle Children will help with the unveiling and representatives from both the Museum and Childrens Hospital will be available to answer questions about the loan and the new Childrens Hospital.

Built by Baldwin Locomotive Works for the Central of Georgia Railroad, Engine 349 was chosen for display at the new childrens outpatient center because it was built in 1891, the same year Erlanger was founded.

Engine 349, once a wood fired engine and later converted to coal-burning, is an important part of southern railroad history. The engine ran regular freight service throughout Georgia for much of its time on the Central of Georgia Railroad. Later, it ran on two short-lines, the Talbotton Railroad and the Bowdon Railway, before ending its operating years in the 1950s.

The engine is currently non-operational but can serve the community by preserving the history of Chattanooga in a new location, said Tim Andrews, President, TVRM. The Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum is pleased to provide this loan in hopes it will brighten the day of thousands of children and their families who visit Childrens Hospital.

The new Childrens Hospital at Erlanger is designed to engage a childs imagination and to improve and enhance the experience for the children visiting the hospital, said Bruce Komiske, VP, New Hospital Design and Construction. We are thrilled the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum is playing an important role in the healing process by opening the imagination of both children and adults to the history of trains in Chattanooga.

For more information about the new Childrens Hospital Believe Campaign, visit www.webelieve.build.
Produced by Karan Johar, the rom-com is all set to release on March 10, 2017.

Mumbai: Many find Indian cinema intriguing, especially the business of producing a film. People find it extremely colourful how actors get to travel the work and shoot at beautiful places as they bring an interesting story to live while earning their bread. What's there not to like, right?

But well, it's not always play and little work. At times, there are hardly any breaks and the actors have to shoot for hours, even days, at times.

Take our Varun Dhawan for example. The actor, who is currently in Singapore shooting for 'Badrinath Ki Dulhania', shot for the film without a break for 15 hours straight.

Varun took to his official Instagram to share his 'joy' with fans where he posted a picture of himself. Looking tired and sleepy, the caption on the picture read, "shot for 15 hours non-stop and it's still not over #badrinathkidulhania".

In another picture shared by the actor, we see him eating an apple alongside film's director Shashank Kaitan.

The film also stars Alia Bhatt and recently the makers released few exclusive first looks from the film.

Apart from this, we also got our hands on a new still from the film. In the picture, we see Alia staring at Varun with dazzled look while the actor walks on carrying shopping bags.

Produced by Karan Johar, the rom-com is all set to release on March 10, 2017.
Mumbai: The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to Bollywood actor Salman Khan in `Chinkara poaching cases in which he was acquitted by the Rajasthan High Court, reversing the trial courts order awarding five years sentence for the offence.

A Bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and N..V. Ramana issued notice to Salman Khan while admitting an appeal filed by Rajasthan government seeking to quash the High Court judgment and seeking a direction to the actor to surrender in the court to serve the sentence of five years. The Bench without staying the High Court judgment said hearing in the appeal will be expedited.

On July 25 the High Court acquitted Salman Khan in the killing of two chinkaras in separate incidents. One of the animals was killed at Bhawad on Jodhpur's outskirts on September 26, 1998, and the other at Ghoda Farms on September 28, 1998. Shooting for the film 'Hum Saath Sath Hain' was taking place at the time in the desert state. The trial court had awarded five year imprisonment after holding him guilty of the poaching charges. However, Salman moved the Jodhpur bench of the High Court against his conviction. The state government also challenged the trial courts order on different grounds. On July 25, the HC, while allowing Salman's appeal, acquitted him of all charges and also dismissed the state government appeal for enhancing the sentence.

In the present SLP, Rajasthan government said the High Court had erred in acquitting the accused despite the fact that there was ample evidence for his prosecution and for awarding enhanced punishment. His acquittal had resulted in miscarriage of justice, warranting interference by the apex court, the SLP said and prayed for quashing the HC verdict and to award enhanced punishment to the actor.

Rajasthan government pointed out that minor discrepancies in trial shall never dilute the entire prosecution case and the High Court had failed to see the entire circumstances which are proved beyond doubt against Salman Khan by prosecution. Salman Khan's conviction was based on material evidence which HC has turned down on hyper technical issues which is unsustainable, it said and prayed for quashing the judgment and an interim stay of its operation.
After Salaam Namaste (2005), Saif Ali Khan is all set to wear the chefs hat again in the remake of 2014 Hollywood film Chef. The work for the film is on in full swing. After wrapping up Rangoon, Saif suffered an injury and had to take a short break from work. Now that he is back on his feet, Bollywoods nawab is shooting for the film, which is being directed by Raja Krishna Menon, in Goa.

A close source reveals, Yes, Saif ohas started working on the film, but its only night schedules at the moment. Saif will be travelling a lot for the film, as it will be shot across India  in places such as Delhi, Rajasthan and Punjab apart from Kerala and Goa. Chef, the American comedy drama, which starred Jon Favreau as the central protagonist, was about a chef who loses his job and starts a food truck to feed his creativity, while reconnecting with his estranged family.
In the new song from Gauri Shindes Dear Zindagi, we get a glimpse of all the people who matter in the films protagonist, Alia Bhatts life. This includes her best friend (played by Ira Dubey) her love guru (Shah Rukh Khan) apart from the man who has broken her heart (Kunal Kapoor). But there is no sign of Ali Zafar anywhere. Is this due to the fear of backlash from the anti-Pakistan brigade in the country? Perhaps.

The ordeal of team Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is still fresh in the minds of the industry and the audience, so Gauri and her crew are probably just avoiding the hullabaloo by keeping Ali far from the screen space, until the film actually releases in the theatres.

According to sources, Ali plays an important part in the life of Alias character. You cant take him out of the plot, asserts the source. The track, Just Go To Hell, is about heartbreak sung by Sunidhi Chauhan. Amit Trivedi has composed it.
Washington: In the days following Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential elections, Jennifer Lawrence reflects on turning the citizen's anger and fear into hope.

The 26-year-old Oscar-winning actress penned an essay for Broadly, an American website and digital video channel devoted to representing women's experiences, where she urges the citizens to "think strongly and clearly" about what to do next because the past cannot be changed.

"I want to be positive; I want to support our democracy, but what can we take away from this? It's a genuine question that we all need to ask ourselves. We shouldn't blame anyone, we shouldn't riot in the streets," she continued.

Perhaps channeling her inner Katniss Everdeen from 'The Hunger Games,' Lawrence encouraged people who are disappointed by the outcome of the election to take action.

"Like Hillary, you can still be an inspiration and get important things done. Do not let this defeat you-let this enrage you! Let it motivate you! Let this be the fire you didn't have before. If you are an immigrant, if you are a person of color, if you are LGBTQ+, if you are a woman-don't be afraid, be loud!"

The 'Silver Linings Playbook' actress' support for Clinton and her disdain for Trump grew apparent when she on a talk show that she actually tried to send the Republican candidate a message in person.

"I was at a concert that I heard he was attending," she shared, "I had my full security, I was like, 'Find Donald Trump!' I was adamant on finding him and making a video of me going, 'Hey, Trump. F**k you!'"

However, Lawrence never got the chance to give him a piece of her mind.

"I think he knew I was looking for him," she said in fun.
When the news of Arvind Swami and Trisha coming together for a popular sequel broke, KTown was in a state of surprise. The duo stars in Sathuranga Vettai 2, directed by Nirmal Kumar and produced by actor Manobala.

The pooja of this sequel was held in the city yesterday and the film will start rolling from November 14. A source reveals, Sathuranga Vettai dealt with a lot of sub-plots, while the story-line of the second part will be linear and will focus on only one core storyline.

Currently, the team is scouting for locations in Chennai as majority of the portions is expected to be shot in and around the city. Earlier this month, the lead pair of Sathuranga Vettai 2 came together for a photoshoot.

The technical team of the movie includes H Vinoth (who helmed the original) as the screenplay and dialogue writer, KG Venkatesh as cinematographer and SP Raja Sethupathi as editor.
The filming of the highly anticipated sequel is currently underway.

Mumbai: The producers of the SS Rajamoulis global hit, Baahubali, were raided in their respective homes in Hyderabad, on Friday. The film, which had grossed over rupees 600 crores at the box-office, had been released in all major Indian languages.

The producers, Shobu Yarlagadda and Prasad Devineni were raided, allegedly for possession of the discontinued 500 and 1000 rupee notes, believed to have been hoarded up in their houses, as per a report in NDTV.

The two denominations had been declared illegal for transactions, in an unprecedented move by prime minister Narendra Modi, being seen as a revolutionary initiation in curbing black money.

Raids have been held across all major cities, including Delhi and Mumbai, with prime targets being jewellers and private operators, known to launder money and exchange the rupee for foreign currencies, illicitly.

Further information regarding the raid on the producers of the film are awaited. The filming of its highly anticipated sequel, starring Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty, Tamannaah Bhatia and Satyaraj, is currently underway.
Naga Chaitanya previously expressed his interest in the Telugu remake of Hindi hit film Two States. Venkat Reddy, who earlier worked with VV Vinayak, is all set to direct the film and according to a source, met Naga Chaitanya as well. Venkat narrated the story with a few changes, which Chaitanya praised, while expressing his desire to do the film, says the source.

The actor is presently in Malaysia as the brand ambassador of the Celebrity Badminton League. Once he is back, he will take a decision about this film, adds the source. The actors next film is with director Kalyan Krishna of Soggade Chinni Nayane fame, after which he may do this remake.

The makers are keen to rope in Chaitanyas real-life love, Samantha for this film, but it remains to be seen if she agrees to act in it. Though she agreed initially, she is busy with her Tamil films and also the remake of Kannada film U Turn, so she may not able to do the film, says the source. However, if she does agree to the project, Samantha and Chaitanyas real-life love story will be a big boost to the film.
Several Tollywood celebrities are going to attend the wedding of Gali Janardhan Reddys daughter on November 16. According to a source, actresses Rakul Preet Singh and Priyamani are going to perform at the wedding. Rakul is presently abroad for the shoot of Dhruva and it all depends on whether she reaches India on time. If she does, she will perform at the wedding, says a source.

Priyamani is also slated to perform, while Tollywood comedian actors Brahmanandam and Ali are attending the wedding. Its not sure whether these comedians will perform a skit or just attend the event, says a source.

It seems that Janardhan Reddys team had already approached a number of top actors and actresses.

The mining businessman threw a party for Tollywood stars, and some of the actors told Gali that they would all come to the wedding for free. They also assured him that they would bring top actors to the wedding. This irked many actors and they decided not to go, says a source. Stars like Rana Daggubati and Ravi Teja were approached, but now they are not going.

Alia Bhatt and Varun Dhawan are also going to perform at the wedding, adds the source.

All these stars are saying that they are going to the wedding on Galis invitation, when in fact, he has paid all of them, reveals the source.
The top 15 countries contributing to the global burden of child pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths were unchanged between 2015 and 2016 (Photo: AFP)

New Delhi: India has the highest number of pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths among children in the world with nearly three lakh children dying in 2016, a new report released ahead of World Pneumonia Day on November 12 said.

The Pneumonia and Diarrhoea Progress Report for 2016 which was released by International Vaccine Access Centre(IVAC), Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that the top five countries with highest global burden of child pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths are India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola.

The top 15 countries contributing to the global burden of child pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths were unchanged between 2015 and 2016. These 15 highest burden countries consist of India, Nigeria, Pakistan, DRC, Angola, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Chad, Afghanistan, Niger, China, Sudan, Bangladesh, Somalia, and United Republic of Tanzania, it said.

The report said that only six of the highest-burden countries (Angola, Ethiopia, India, Niger, Sudan and Tanzania) have introduced rotavirus vaccines in their routine immunisation program to help prevent a substantial portion of diarrhoea deaths and hospitalisation. India introduced rotavirus vaccines in four states in 2015, it said.

Fifteen years after pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCV) first introduction globally in 2000 (the United States was first to implement the vaccine), five of the highest pneumonia burden countries (India, Indonesia, Chad, China and Somalia) are still not using the vaccine in their routine immunisation programs, the report said.

The health ministry recently announced that the PCV that combats pneumonia, will be rolled out as part of the Universal Immunisation Programme in a phased manner in Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Some progress has been made in combating pneumonia and diarrhoea among young children in the nations most severely impacted by the two diseases, the report found, but they remain responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths around the world.

In 2015, pneumonia and diarrhoea together led to one of every four deaths globally that occurred in children under five years old.
BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee will host its 2016 Veterans Recognition event on Friday, at 1:30 p.m. on Cameron Hill in Chattanooga. The event is designed to honor the companys 200 employee veterans and all those who served in the armed forces.

This years event will feature special guest Lieutenant Commander Tim White, commander of the Navy Operational Support Center in Chattanooga.

On July 16, 2015, he was involved in the response to the terrorist attack on the center. Lt. Cmdr. White has served in numerous deployments and has earned multiple decorations, including commendation and achievement medals from the Navy and Marine Corps, as well as various campaign, unit, and service honors.
Without this commitment, children will continue to die from a disease that is easy and cheap to prevent (Photo: AFP)

London: The number of deaths from measles has fallen by 79 percent worldwide since 2000, thanks mainly to mass vaccination campaigns, but nearly 400 children still die from the disease every day, global health experts said on Thursday.

In a report on global efforts to "make measles history", the United Nations children's fund, the World Health Organization and other bodies said fight was being hampered not by a lack of tools or knowledge, but a lack of political will to get every child immunised against the highly infectious disease.

"Without this commitment, children will continue to die from a disease that is easy and cheap to prevent," said Robin Nandy, UNICEF's head of immunisation.

Mass measles vaccination campaigns and a global increase in routine vaccine coverage saved an estimated 20.3 million young lives between 2000 and 2015, the report said.

But coverage is patchy, and in some countries the majority of children are not vaccinated. In 2015, around 20 million babies missed their measles shots and an estimated 134,000 children died from the disease.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan account for half of the unvaccinated babies and 75 percent of the measles deaths.

Measles is a highly contagious virus that spreads through direct contact and through the air. It is one of the biggest killers of children worldwide, but can be prevented with two doses of a widely available and inexpensive vaccine.

According to the report, published by UNICEF, the WHO, the GAVI vaccines alliance and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, outbreaks of measles in various countries  caused by gaps in immunisation  are still a major problem.

Seth Berkley, GAVI's chief executive, urged governments to recognise the threat of "one of the world's most deadly vaccine-preventable childhood killers" and act to contain it.

"We need strong commitments from countries and partners to boost routine immunization coverage and to strengthen surveillance systems," he said.

In 2015, large outbreaks were reported in Egypt, Ethiopia, Germany, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, the report said. The epidemics in Germany and Mongolia affected older people, highlighting the need to vaccinate young adults who missed out on measles jabs.

Measles also tends to flare up during conflicts or humanitarian emergencies when vaccination schedules are disrupted. Last year, outbreaks were reported in Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan.
Adult women in Puerto Rico were significantly more likely to develop Zika than men, researchers said on Thursday, raising new questions about the potential role of sexual transmission of the virus from males to females.

The study, published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly report on death and disease, evaluated more than 29,000 laboratory-confirmed cases of Zika since the outbreak began in Puerto Rico in November 2015.

The data show that of all Zika cases with laboratory evidence of infection, 62 percent were female. The results pattern similar observations from Brazil and El Salvador, the authors said. One obvious explanation might be that pregnant women are more likely than men to seek treatment for Zika because of the potential risk of birth defects.

To account for that, the researchers excluded all pregnant women who tested positive for the virus. Of the remaining 28,219 non-pregnant women and men testing positive for Zika, 61 percent of these cases occurred in women over the age of 20.

The Zika findings differ from prior outbreaks in Puerto Rico of arboviruses transmitted by the same mosquitoes as Zika. For example, in the 2010 dengue outbreak and the 2014 chikungunya outbreak, infections were equally distributed among men and women.

"It is possible that male-to-female sexual transmission is a contributing factor to this skewing of the burden of disease toward women," the CDC said in a statement summarizing the findings.

However, the contribution of sexual transmission to overall Zika rates is just beginning to be explored, the CDC said. It could be that women are more likely than men to seek care if they are sick, or that women are more likely to develop Zika symptoms if they become infected.

The CDC is conducting blood tests of individuals living near people with confirmed Zika to try to answer some of these questions. Zika infections in pregnant women have been shown to cause microcephaly - a severe birth defect in which the head and brain are undersized - as well as other brain abnormalities. The connection between Zika and microcephaly first came to light last year in Brazil, which has since confirmed more than 2,000 cases of microcephaly.
Chennai: A 25-year-old woman software professional, who was on her way back home from her office, walked into a 16-storied apartment complex on Pallavaram  Thuraipakkam Radial road and committed suicide by jumping from the top of the building on Thursday. The deceased was identified P Pandeeswari, working in the office of CTS located in MEPZ in Tambaram. A native of Madurai, she was staying in rented premises in Madipakkam.

Police said that her family in Madurai had been forcing her to get married while she was opposed to it saying she wanted to support the family for some more time. She was the daughter of a daily-wage worker whose elder brother Yuvaraj is working in Chennai. When Pandeeswari went to her native place for Deepavali, her parents told her to get ready for marriage. Though she resisted and asked for her brother to get married first, the family strongly told her she should get married. She was asked to come to Madurai over the weekend to finalise a marriage proposal, police said after talking to her brother on Thursday.

On Thursday afternoon she went to Skypark apartment complex. When the security guard blocked her, she gave her name, address and phone number saying she was going to meet a resident on the 14th floor of the housing complex. The guard allowed her inside. Twenty minutes later she had jumped to death from the buildings terrace. Pandeeswari died on the spot and police tracked her background after calling up numbers from the contact list in her mobile phone.

It was her brother who gave us the details. We informed him that she had an accident and asked him to rush to the Chromepet GH. Only after he reached GH we told him what had happened, police said.
Raipur: A police jawan, who was also the nephew of a former Congress district President, was hacked to death by suspected Naxals in Chhattisgarh's insurgency-hit Bijapur district, police said on Friday.

Assistant constable Rahul Raidu (27), posted at Bhairamgarh Police Station, was attacked by suspected Naxals late last night close to his workplace, Bijapur Superintendent of Police K L Dhruv said.

Raidu, who joined the police force in 2011, was the nephew of former Congress (Bijapur) district president Ajay Singh, a native of Bhairamgarh, police said.

As per preliminary information, Raidu was reportedly playing cards with some villagers in Sanjay Para area, located on the outskirts of Bhairmagarh town, about 450 kms from here.

Meanwhile, a group of men armed with axes and knives arrived there and after an altercation with the jawan, they attacked him several times leaving him critically injured. The assailants fled into the forest after committing the crime, the SP said.

Soon after being informed about the incident, police rushed to the spot and admitted the injured jawan to a local hospital. He was later shifted to Jagdalpur hospital where he succumbed during treatment in the wee hours today, he said.

"Prima facie, it appears to be the handiwork of Maoists. Although, everything will be clear after the investigation," Dhruv said.

A combing operation has been launched in the interiors of Bhairamgarh region to trace the assailants, he added.
New Delhi: A woman was allegedly raped by a man on the pretext of marriage in outer Delhi's Mangolpuri area.



The accused, identified as Virendra, works as a security personnel at Sanjay Gandhi hospital.



The woman in a complaint alleged that the accused befriended her during the course of her visits to the hospital for treatment.



Virendra got intimate with the woman after promising that he would marry her. The woman later found out that he was already married, police said quoting the complaint.



A case under Section 376 (rape) of IPC was registered against him. He was arrested on November 8, police said.
The government also apprised the bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur that as of now no file with regard to the recommendations for appointment as judges is pending with it. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: The Centre on Friday told the Supreme Court that it has cleared 34 names out of the 77 recommended by the collegium for appointment as judges in various high courts in the country.

The government also apprised the bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur that as of now no file with regard to the recommendations for appointment as judges is pending with it.

"Out of total 77 names, 34 names have been cleared for the appointment and rest 43 recommendations have been sent back to the apex court collegium for reconsideration,"

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, told the bench which also comprised justices Shiva Kirti Singh and L Nageswara Rao.

Rohatgi said the Centre has already sent the fresh draft Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) for consideration of the collegium on August 3, this year, but so far no response has been received by the government.

The bench then said that it would convene a meeting of the collegium, which comprises four senior judges besides CJI, on November 15.

It has now fixed the PIL filed by 1971 war veteran Lieutenant Colonel Anil Kabotra, a former Army official, on the issue for further hearing on November 19.

The apex court had earlier rapped the government for delay in appointments to higher judiciary despite recommendations made by the collegium in this regard and had said the entire institution cannot be brought to a grinding halt.

Maintaining that the appointment process "cannot be stalled" due to non-finalisation of the MoP, the court had criticised the tardy progress in processing files pertaining to judges' appointment and even warned that it may summon the Secretaries of the PMO and the Ministry of Law and Justice to ascertain the factual position.

The Attorney General had said that non-finalisation of the MoP was one of the issues and had assured the bench that more progress will be seen in the near future on the appointment of judges.

The Centre had on September 14 told the apex court that there was "no blame game" or "logjam" in appointments and transfer of judges for higher judiciary but blamed the high courts for "pretty much delaying" in starting the process.

Earlier, the apex court had said it would not tolerate "logjam in judges' appointment" and would intervene to "fasten accountability as the justice delivery system is collapsing".

The bench had said that if the government had reservation about any name, it could always come back to the collegium. The Attorney General had also pleaded that no notice should be issued for the time being on the PIL saying he would get back with the facts and figures.

The PIL has referred to the huge backlog of cases and vacancies in the judiciary and sought a direction to the authorities in this regard.

Kabotra, in his PIL, has sought a direction to Ministry of Law and Justice to take "immediate steps" to facilitate filling up of existing vacancies in the judiciary across the country.

He has also sought a direction to consider and implement 245th report of the Law Commission on reforms in judiciary and to increase the judges' strength and infrastructural facilities in courts in the country.

The plea has further said "the respondent (Centre) is duty-bound to facilitate filling up of existing judges strength across the country and to consider increasing the same substantially in terms of the Law Commission's report."
New Delhi: Airfares are set to rise with the government deciding to levy up to Rs 8,500 per flight on major routes to fund the regional air connectivity scheme.

The levy amount would be for an entire flight and the price of each ticket could go up depending on the number of seats in that particular flight.

Civil Aviation Secretary R N Choubey today said the levy would be up to Rs 8,500 per flight depending on distance.

The ambitious scheme -- UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik) -- seeks to connect small cities by air as well as make flying more affordable for the masses.

To provide viability gap funding for the flights operated under the regional connectivity scheme, the Ministry would impose a levy on every departure on major air routes such as the national capital, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata.

"The levy for an up to 1,000 kilometre length of scheduled flight will be Rs 7,500 per flight, Rs 8,000 for a 1,000 to 1,500 kilometre flight and Rs 8,500 for flights above 1,500 kilometre," Choubey said here.

For UDAN, the government would be creating the Regional Connectivity Fund (RCF).

With the levy, the government estimates to have Rs 400 crore for RCF, Choubey said. "In addition to this, another 20 per cent (funding) will come from state governments. We are roughly looking at around Rs 500 crore per year available in the kitty," he noted.

The move would push airfares slightly higher as airlines are expected to pass on the burden to fliers.

The funding is being provided since the fares of half of the seats operated in a particular flight under UDAN would be capped at Rs 2,500 for one-hour duration. This cap would be applicable for distance of 476-500 kilometres.

The limit of RCS airfare would vary from Rs 1,420 to Rs 3,500 for fixed-wing aircraft. For helicopters, half-an-hour ride under the scheme would cost Rs 2,500 and for over one-hour duration, the cap would be Rs 5,000.

RCF is to be funded by the Centre and respective state government participating in UDAN.
Lucknow: With the aim of ensuring medical facilities to poor, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Friday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance minister Arun Jaitley to allow Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 invalid notes at private hospitals and medicine shops till November 30.

This will ensure medical facilities to poor, who are facing a lot of problems after ban of high denomination notes, he said in separate letters to Modi and Jaitley.

"As Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 were banned in haste, those undergoing treatment at hospitals and nursing homes are facing a lot of problems. I, therefore, request you to intervene and allow private hospitals, nursing homes and medicine shops to accept these notes till at least November 30," Yadav said.

"Due to the ban, those going to avail medical facilities in hospital are a harried lot. It is proving fatal for them.

Allowing (Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes) currency will help people get medical treatment," he said.

As foreign tourists were facing difficulties due to demonetisation of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, Yadav had yesterday directed the state Chief Secretary to ensure opening of extra counters for them to exchange currencies.

"The Chief Secretary should coordinate with banks and ensure opening of extra counters for foreign tourists in Agra and Varanasi. This will help them in exchanging their notes easily," Yadav in his directive.

As the Centre's move caught people by surprise, especially with wedding season round the corner, SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav demanded a roll back of demonetisation decision for a few days in view of the wedding season.

He suggested that people be given a week's time by the government.

BSP chief Mayawati has also said poor people and farmers have been badly hit by high denomination rupee ban decision, which reminded people of the dark days of Emergency imposed by then Congress government.
Lucknow: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday said the decision to demonetise high denomination currency notes was a well-planned move and not taken in haste as he maintained it will go a long way in checking corruption in politics.

"Recently a decision to demonetise currency notes in the denomination of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 has been taken, it surprised people not only in the country but the world over. This will bridge the gulf between the poor and rich," he said at the 69th annual meeting of Indian Commerce Association here.

Read: Don't panic, your hard earned money safe: Finance Ministry assures people

"People said the government has acted in haste and more time should have been given. I want to say that there had been no haste, it was a well-planned move, it has been taken after enough consideration about the future," he said.

He claimed any economist will welcome the move.

"If you ask any economist, he will welcome this move. The economists of the country and world have hailed this brave move...it will go a long way in checking corruption not only in politics but also in government and administration," Singh said, adding it will make politics clean to a large extent.

He said that soon after coming to power, the BJP government had started working against black money. Singh said the government formed an SIT and initiated effective steps for checking benami properties and transactions carried out through wrong means.

The Home Minister said a parallel economy was being run with the money earned through "wrong means" and the poor and the honest were forced to bear its brunt.

"Those having black money must have gone bankrupt because of the government move...this was a necessary move and also in national interest. This will help end disparity in income and economy," he said.

He said though no claims can be made on how far this step would help end disparity but it will definitely lessen it.

"During elections money is used in a big way...money is given for getting votes...our government is also concerned about how to check corruption in politics...politics should not be done only for forming government but also for building society," he stressed.
New Delhi: Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said demonetisation of Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes will ensure the upcoming elections to some state assemblies are more free and fair, besides neutralising terror funding.

"A lot of politicians are already worrying," Parrikar said, apparently referring to opposition's criticism of the government's action.

He also said he came to know about the move to do away with the higher denomination notes only at the Cabinet meeting when the Prime Minister's speech was aired.

Parrikar said the next morning he realised he was the richest in the defence ministry as he had Rs 220 (in smaller change) in his pocket. The Rs 7,000 he also had did not matter then.

"This is an excellent step by the Prime Minister. Black money was used in elections. That black money has become null and void. So obviously, it will ensure more free and fair election," he said speaking at the launch of the book "The New Arthashastra - A Security Strategy of India," edited by Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal (Retd).

He said there are "substantial counterfeit notes" which India's enemies are using for terror funding. "As a Defence Minister I am very happy. In one strike it has all vanished," he said.
Eastern National, a partner to the National Park Service, invites the public to meet author Dr. Lawrence Krumenaker, Saturday, November 26, 2016 inside the Visitor Center at Chickamauga Battlefield. Dr. Krumenaker will be available to sign his book, Walking the Line: Rediscovering and Touring the Civil War Defenses on Modern Atlantas Landscapes from 10 a.m.-4 p.m.



Dr. Krumenaker's book leads readers through the 36 fort sites and the defense line, with maps and photographs, on modern Atlanta's landscape. He begins his journey after Chattanooga with William T. Sherman moving his Union troops south.



"To learn about this title more, come join us. Meet the author and support Americas National Parks," officials said.

About the author:

Dr. Lawrence Krumenaker is a history and science book writer, following a career as an astronomer and as a science and education teacher. He has a special interest in "landscape archeology," that can be seen in the landscape of historical events. Originally a Revolutionary War buff in New Jersey, when he moved to Kennesaw, Ga., he found his home was likely part of a campsite by Confederate Cavalry. Finding historical markers nearby for a battle he had never learned about in school, he began his quest to find out how the Union was kept out of downtown Atlanta. Mr. Krumenaker currently alternates between Atlanta and Germany as residence. His next books will be "The Colonia Tour Book," a walking tour guide to the Roman city that became Cologne (December), and "Federation Space," a guide to the real stars in our skies found in the Star Trek universe and our real one, and what they can teach us about astronomy and the United Federation of Planets (April).
New Delhi: Assuring people that their hard-earned money is safe, the Finance Ministry on Friday said there is no need to panic and depositing junked Rs 500/1,000 notes of up to Rs 2.50 lakh in bank accounts will not be reported to the tax department.

It also cautioned people against depositing the money of unknown people in their own accounts or falling prey to cheats, thugs and rumour mongers.

Besides, the ministry said, farm income continues to remain tax free and can be easily deposited in bank. Small businessmen, housewives, artisans, workers can also deposit cash in their accounts without any apprehensions, it added.

"Deposits up to Rs 2.50 lakh will not be reported to the Income Tax department. There will be no harassment or investigation. All honest citizens need not worry. Farmers' income is tax free and can be easily deposited in bank," the ministry said in newspaper ads.

In its biggest crackdown ever on black money, the government on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and asked people holding such notes to deposit in bank accounts.

Since yesterday people have been thronging banks amid concerns among people over exchanging and depositing the scrapped high denomination currency.

People can deposit old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in their accounts till December 30, 2016, without any limit.

Restrictions have been imposed on withdrawal limit and people can withdraw up to Rs 10,000 per day or Rs 20,000 per week. This limit will be reviewed after few days.

Besides, old notes up to Rs 4,000 can be exchanged at any bank or post office till November 24, 2016, by showing photo ID proof.

ATMs can be used to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day per card till November 18 and Rs 4,000 from November 19 onwards.

This limit too will be reviewed subsequently. The ministry also advised people to make payments using cheques, demand drafts, debit or credit cards and electronic fund transfers and there is no restriction on such transactions.
New Delhi: The Centre has asked all states to ensure proper security to all banks, ATMs and vehicles transporting cash in the wake of demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes.

The Home Ministry has deputed three officials to be in touch with state governments to ensure security of banks, ATMs and cash transporting vehicles.

Read: Don't panic, your hard earned money safe: Finance Ministry assures people

The three officials are taking regular feedbacks from the Directors General of Police and the situation in respective states, a Home Ministry official said.

So far no report of any violence or untoward incident has come from anywhere in the country.

"We have conveyed to the states that if they require any assistance, we will provide immediately," the official said.

The central government is expecting the financial situation to be normal in the next four-five days. Two separate advisories were sent to all states in this regard, the official said.

Chaos and confusion reigned at most banks across the country with harried customers having to stand in winding queues for hours on end for withdrawing or exchanging demonetised notes. Their problems have been compounded with a large number of ATMs being non-functional or getting emptied soon after being replenished.
Old notes will be accepted in petrol pumps till November 14. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Government on Friday extended use of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes for paying household utility bills, fuel, taxes and fees as well as purchases from co-operative stores by another 72 hours to November 14 as it struggles to make available alternative currency.

While withdrawing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes from the night of November 8-9, the government had allowed use of the old currency at government hospitals, railway ticketing, public transport, airline ticketing at airports, milk booths, crematoria/burial grounds and petrol pumps for 72 hours.

This list was later expanded to include payments for metro rail tickets, highway and road toll, purchase of medicines on doctor prescription from the government and private pharmacies, LPG gas cylinders, railway catering, electricity and water bills and ASI monument entry tickets.

The time limit set was to expire mid-night tonight, but it has now been extended by another 72 hours, top government officials said.

The government has allowed use of the old currency to make payments at co-operative stores subject to valid identity proofs being provided.

Public utility bills include only household bills. Court fee will also be allowed to be paid in old 500 and 1,000 rupee notes.

Old Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes will be accepted for payment of fees, charges, taxes, penalty to central and state governments, including municipalities and local bodies.

Such old notes will also be accepted for payment of utility charges like water and electricity.

The official said while the old notes were allowed to be accepted for highway toll payment, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has freed national highways of any toll charges till November 14.
New Delhi: The government has decided to ease the "annual renewal" norms for TV channels and existing broadcasters can continue operations by simply paying annual permission fee 60 days before the due date, Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said on Friday.

"As part of the government's initiative of ease of doing business, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has completely done away with the process of obtaining an annual renewal for TV channels in the current form," he said.

Naidu said that "broadcasters who have been given the permission for uplinking or downlinking can continue their operations by simply paying the annual permission fee upto 60 days before the due date, which by itself will be treated as permission for continuation of a channel for a further period of one year."

This decision, the minister emphasised, would benefit a total of 963 channels and teleports.

The I&B ministry, Naidu said, is committed to the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to promote ease of doing business and will continue to take more steps in consultation with stakeholders.

The minister, who was addressing the Economic Editors' Conference here, also lauded the government's decision to demonetise Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes, saying the Prime Minister wants to realise 'Swachh Bharat' (Clean India), in terms of 'tan', 'man' and 'dhan' (body, mind and wealth).

Naidu said that while some people maintain the government has taken a sudden step of demonetising the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, the government has been taking steps related to curbing the black money menace ever since it came to power.

He said that soon after coming to power, the government, at its first Cabinet meeting, had set up an SIT to bring back large amounts of money stashed abroad.

"Some people are saying it was done all of a sudden, people should have been given advance notice...Advance notice for what? I am not able to understand," Naidu said.

He said that the historic step has been hailed by all except "some vested interests" who were trying to create panic.

He emphasised that common people can exchange their hard-earned money with new notes and that genuine problems are being addressed.

Naidu also said that the media while highlighting the inconveniences, should also show the larger picture on the benefits of the move for the country.

He said some people were calling it an "emergency", but those who are worried are people like unscruplous arms dealers, drug dealers.

The latest decision was not taken in isolation but is a part of series of steps, Naidu said, noting that these steps include setting up of SIT, agreements with countries like Mauritius and Cyprus and income declaration scheme.

He said that the economy was in a bad shape when the Modi government came to power but the macroeconomic indicators are better now and common people will benefit.
New Delhi: India on Thursday night took strong exception to the World Bank's "inexplicable" decision to set up a Court of Arbitration and appoint a Neutral Expert to go into Pakistan's complaint against it over Kishenganga and Ratle hydroelectric projects in Jammu and Kashmir.

Surprised at the World Bank's decision to appoint a Neutral Expert, as sought by the Indian government and at the same time establish a Court of Arbitration as wanted by Pakistan, India said proceeding with both the steps simultaneously "legally untenable".

"Inexplicably, the World Bank has decided to continue to proceed with these two parallel mechanisms simultaneously. India cannot be party to actions which are not in accordance with the Indus Waters Treaty.

"The government will examine further options and take steps accordingly," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

Under the Indus Waters Treaty, signed between India and Pakistan and also the World Bank in 1960, the World Bank has a specified role in the process of resolution of differences and disputes.

Swarup said on the issue of differences between India and Pakistan on Kishenganga and Ratle hydroelectric projects under the Indus Waters Treaty, India had asked the World Bank to appoint a Neutral Expert to resolve the differences of a technical nature which are within the domain of a neutral technical expert.

Pakistan had sought the establishment of a Court of Arbitration, which is normally the logical next step in the process of resolution in the Treaty. The Neutral Expert can also determine that there are issues beyond mere technical differences, he noted.

Pakistan has raised objections over the design of the hydel project in J&K, saying it is not in line with the criteria laid down under the Indus Water Treaty between the two countries.

"The World Bank has decided to proceed with both steps simultaneously. It was pointed by the government to the World Bank that the pursuit of two parallel difference/ dispute resolution mechanisms - appointment of a Neutral Expert and establishment of a Court of Arbitration - at the same time is legally untenable," Swarup asserted.

Noting that despite India's clear advice not to proceed with both together, the World Bank has decided otherwise, thereby, raising questions over the "viability and workability" of the 56-year-old Treaty.

Indus Waters Treaty provides for a hierarchy to resolve differences and disputes vide article IX.

First, the bilateral Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) can addresses technical 'questions' and if PIC can't resolve the matter, the question becomes a "difference", which is addressed by a Neutral Expert (NE) appointed on request by either party.

If the Neutral Expert decides so, he can refer a part of a difference or the whole of it for resolution by a Court of Arbitration (COA). COA has 7 members, 2 arbitrators to be appointed by India and Pakistan, and 3 'Umpires' nominated by certain global dignitaries.

If parties can't agree on who will nominate the 'umpires', a draw of lots decides which three of these global dignitaries will nominate one umpire each.

Pakistan had lost its case in a COA in 2013 when its objection that Kishenganga project can't be built in a tributary diversion was overruled.

Nevertheless, Pakistan persisted in its flawed and obstructive approach to object in technical design parameters such as pondage (volume of water used for running turbines), etc.

It first itself suggested Neutral Expert even in 2015, which it rescinded later. It notified its intention to India to move for COA. India didn't agree to this because there are design matters, preferably addressed by PIC, or at the most by NE.

In violation of Treaty provision and procedure, Pakistan approached the World Bank in August 2016 for COA.

Since PIC was unable to agree on resolving these differences, India notified Pakistan in august 2016 at the Commission level that the differences should be addressed by NE. This was after a meeting of water secretaries of the two countries, which India offered out of good will, in July did not address the matter due to Pakistan's intransigence as it had already decided to go for Court of Arbitration.

IWT clearly states that while NE is dealing with a difference, other mechanisms for settlement of differences and disputes will not address the same matter.
Minister for Primary and Secondary Education and Raichur in-charge Tanveer Sait addressing the media in Raichur on Thursday (Photo: DC)

MYSURU: As leaders of Opposition parties bayed for the blood of primary and secondary education minister Tanvir Sait, CM Siddaramaiah said he has sought an explanation from his cabinet colleague, and would initiate action based on it.

When asked if he would seek the resignation of Mr Tanvir Sair in view of such a demand aired by BJP MLAs as the minister was caught on camera flipping through sleazy images on his cell phone, Mr Siddaramaiah said: BJP leaders had watched porn inside the Legislative Assembly, so we had demanded their resignation. I have asked him (Mr Sait) to submit an explanation immediately. Based on it, I will decide on further course of action.

In Bengaluru, leader of Opposition in the Assembly, Jagadish Shettar, demanded Mr Sait's resignation for watching porn clippings on his cell phone during Tipu Jayanthi celebrations in Raichur. "He should own moral responsibility and resign from the ministry," he added.

Mr Shettar charged that Mr Sait had brought disrepute and lowered the dignity and decorum of education department. What could teachers, parents and students expect from this tainted minister, he asked.

Minister has forgotten his responsibility, in government program he watched porn clips, his attitude brings shock to everyone, thus he has no moral right to continue in the ministry. Owing moral responsibility, minister should resign from the ministry, Mr. Shettar demanded.

Tanveer Sait episode indicated that Siddramaiah government is heading towards bankruptcy, Chief Minister is always questioning the morality of the BJP, now he should exhibit his morality by dropping tainted minister from the Cabinet, Mr. Shettar said.

If Chief Minister not dropped the tainted minister from the Cabinet, BJP will raise the issue in the coming session in Belagavi, he warned. Shobha Karandlaje, MP, demanded the resignation of Mr. Sait from the Cabinet. Former CM H.D. Kumaraswamy demanded the resignation of Mr. Sait.
Thane: Thane District Collectorate on Friday issued a show-cause notice to a private hospital at Kalyan in the district for not accepting scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes from patients.



District Collector Mahendra Kalyankar issued the notice based on the complaints made by several patients and has asked the hospital to file a reply by tomorrow.



The hospital's refusal came to light after a patient, Ratilal Shah, reported the matter to the Collector office.



According to Shah, at the time of his discharge from the hospital, he tried to settle his medical bill using Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. However, the staff at the payment counter squarely refused to accept these notes.



Shah then made a complaint to the District Collectorate, following which a Sub Divisional Officer visited the hospital and told its staff that as per the circular issued by the Directorate of Health Services two days back, it is mandatory for the hospitals to accept the old currency notes from patients.



Thereafter, Shah was discharged from the hospital.



The notice, however, says that even after Shah's discharge, several other patients called up the Collectorate to complain that the hospital staff was insisting on payment through new notes.



"This (refusal to accept demonetised notes) will create law and order problem...Therefore, why action should not not be taken against the hospital under section 188 of the IPC and also Bombay Nursing Home Registration Act of 1949," the notice said.



The notice has asked the hospital to reply till tomorrow, failing which action would be taken it.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's much-awaited visit to Israel may take place in the first half of next year coinciding with celebration of 25 years of diplomatic engagement between the two countries.

There was an indication to this effect days ahead of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin's eight-day visit next week to bolster ties in range of areas.

The announcement of Modi's visit to Israel, the first by an Indian Prime Minister, was made by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in May last year but no dates have yet been finalised.

When asked about Modi's proposed visit to Tel Aviv, Israeli Ambassador Daniel Carmon today said it will happen for sure and that it will be a very important trip.

When pressed further, he said Modi's visit will take place in "relevant period", indicating it may take place soon as he talked about plans to celebrate 25 years of full diplomatic relations in early next year. The envoy said dates for the trip was being decided by the two governments.

India had established "full" diplomatic relationship with Israel in 1992 though it had recognised the country in 1950.

No Indian Prime Minister has ever visited that country. In June, an official of the Jewish state had hinted that Modi may visit Israel early next year.

President Pranab Mukherjee had gone to Israel in October last year and Rivlin is arriving here next week to reciprocate Mukherjee's trip.
New Delhi: Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday said no religion teaches violence but much of the violence in the world now take place in the name of religion.

Addressing the 17th conference of World Chief Justices here, Singh said those who believe in God and religion and also those who are atheists and believe in humanism must keep themselves away from any kind of crime or violence.

"However, today much of the violence is surprisingly being created in the name of religion and against the principles of the religion," he said.

Singh said the world is currently facing different kinds of threat and terrorism and separatism are the biggest ones. Singh said no one cannot remain oblivious to different kinds of threats, organised conflicts and serious disturbances that the world is currently facing.

"Terrorism, extremism and separatism are the biggest threats the world has to deal with," he said.

The Home Minister said with the advancement of technology, terrorism poses even bigger threats all over the world. "Thousands of innocent people are becoming victims of violence. Since terrorism has engulfed different parts of the world, therefore, there is a need for the world leaders to unite and fight this menace, which is a danger to the humanity," he said.

Singh said India is a victim of various kinds of terrorist activities including cross-border terrorism.

He said since the wings of terror are spreading all over, therefore, it has to be firmly and unitedly dealt with. "As I have been saying, a terrorist is a terrorist and there cannot be two different definitions of terrorist like a 'good terrorist' and a 'bad terrorist'. All terrorists are to be dealt with in the strictest possible terms by all the nations of the world," he said.

The Home Minister said cyber crime is another cause of concern which is posing bigger threats with the advancement in information technology.

"International disputes of various kinds and dimensions coupled with the everyday increasing stocks of armaments of mass destruction including nuclear weapons are yet other forms of hazards that the world is facing today," he said.
Mumbai: Amid the woes of customers hit by cash crunch, Vishwanath Vartak (73), a retired Public Works Department (PWD) employee, who was standing in a serpentine queue to exchange his old currency notes outside a bank in Mulund (east), collapsed and died on Friday afternoon.

The incident took place around 1.30 pm outside State Bank of Indias Navghar branch, Mulund (east). Vartak was standing in the long queue outside the bank along with hundreds of others distressed citizens to exchange his old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

Mr Nitin Bhoir, a former Maharashtra Navnirman Sena worker, who was present at the spot when Vartak breathed his last, said that Vartak was standing in the queue along with others.

He was inquiring about the process and suddenly he collapsed. When he fell down, people thought he suffered from a stroke, so they splashed some water on his face, Mr Bhoir said. A local doctor rushed to the spot, who examined Vartak and declared him dead.

Vishwanath Vartak, a resident of Hariom Nagar, Mulund (E) died while he was standing in a queue outside an SBI bank in Mulund. (Photo: Deepak Kurkunde)

After the untoward incident, the SBI manager informed Vartaks two sons about his demise. Vartaks sons rushed him to the nearby Savarkar Hospital, where the doctors pronounced him dead on arrival.

After conducting a preliminary investigation, officials from the Mulund police station said that Vartak died a natural death. Hence, no FIR was registered in the case. Police said that as per initial reports, Vartak died of a heart attack.

Vartaks death is likely to kick up a political storm, with Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray making a scathing attack on the BJP-led government saying its betrayal of peoples trust.

Mr Thackeray said, The move has caused tremendous inconvenience to the people, who had elected the BJP government with trust. But the decision has been implemented without taking people into confidence. While it was taken for the benefit of common people, it is now proving to be a torture for them.

Vartak, lived with his son and daughter-in-law at Hariom Nagar in Mulund East. When The Asian Age paid a visit to Vartak home, the bereaved family refused to meet. A police officer privy to the investigation said that Vartak suffered from high blood pressure and asthma.

Vartaks body was sent to Rajawadi hospital, Ghatkopar (east) for autopsy. Sources from the forensic lab said that the primary cause of death is heart attack. We have sent the blood samples and viscera for forensic analysis, said a source adding, The final cause of death will be know only after the Kalina FSL issues a report.
Hyderabad: Telangana IT Minister K T Rama Rao on Friday said State Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao is "concerned" about the implications of the Centres decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes.

"It is not that he is not happy (with the Centre's decision). It is just that the impact we see in terms of State's revenues, in terms of how the State is going to shape up right after this. As the gentleman running the State, it is something that is obviously, he is little concerned about. It is absolutely untrue that he is unhappy," KTR son of KCR said.

Sources had said that the Chief Minister, who met the Governor on Thursday understood to have expressed his "unhappiness" over the likely negative impact of the decision to demonetise high-currency notes.

The demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes is likely to cause about Rs 2,000 crore loss to Telangana per month, Rao told the Governor, according to sources.

The Centre's decision would adversely affect the real estate sector in Telangana and also transactions in motor vehicles, sources said quoting the CM.

He said the State Government is in the process of trying to minimise the impact.

"We are still assessing the impact and the fallout of this decision. In the long run, we all agree, that it is a great thing for the country and State as well. But I think the short term and medium term implications are something that we are concerned. This is what the Chief Minister had shared with the Governor," the IT minister said.

He said the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had agreed to his proposal to collect the some of utility charges such as power and municipal tax in older denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 for a limited period.

The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and the Hyderabad Metro Water Board yesterday announced separately that they will accept payments with demonetised notes till Friday.

He suggested that the common man of this country should not suffer as result of the decisions of the Government.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre and Chhattisgarh government to find a peaceful solution to the Naxal problem in the state and adopt a "pragmatic" approach towards life.

A bench of Justices M B Lokur and Adarsh Goel said there has to be some peaceful solution to this problem, after Chhattisgarh government gave an oral assurance that no coercive action will be taken against social activist Nandini Sundar and others till November 15.

On November 7, Delhi University Professor Sundar, JNU professor Archana Prasad and others were booked on charges of murder of a tribal villager in the insurgency-hit Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

"We are trying to help you (Centre and Chhattisgarh), but you are not taking it seriously. You have to find a peaceful solution to the problem. We are not blaming you or them or anybody. You have to take a pragmatic view of life," the bench said.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said there were "authentic and contemporaneous" records which could be placed before the court against all the accused including Sundar.

Mehta's submission came after the bench said it will stay the FIR till the next date of hearing.

He urged the apex court not to form any opinion unless the record was produced before the court in a sealed cover, saying it was a "state of panic" for the country.

t that after the last hearing, an FIR was lodged against the two professors and the activists.

"This is the most astonishing thing which has ever happened, as the activists who went to the state in May were booked for the murder in November," Desai said.

Countering him, Mehta said there was "more than what meets the eye" and they will file the records in a sealed cover before the court on November 15, the next date.

Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, appearing for CBI, said political activist Manish Kunjam who was directed by the court to be provided with security has no threat perception and two Personal Security Officers have been provided by the state.

He said the Centre was not in a position to provide him security and if the court wanted, the state could upgrade it.

ASG said that in the last hearing of the case, the state government had suggested providing them with security but they refused the offer saying "they don't want to be under the eyes of police".
Mumbai/Thalassery: The scramble by millions of panicked consumers to exchange banned currency or deposit them turned tragic on Friday when two people died in separate incidents in Maharashtra and Kerala amid chaos and confusion for the second straight day with poor cash flow.

As banks across the country struggled to contain serpentine queues since early morning, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi took people by surprise when he visited SBI's Parliament Street branch in Delhi to exchange banned notes with new ones, in a show of solidarity with increasingly impatient people.

There were no signs of immediate relief even as several cash-strapped people were told to go back after bank servers at several branches reportedly collapsed while several ATMs went dry in a few hours. People who were able to exchange the old currency could get hold of the new notes only after waiting for several hours.

Vishwanath Vartak, 73, who was standing in the queue before an SBI branch for exchanging currency, collapsed and died on the spot at Navghar in Mulund in eastern suburbs, police said.

Vartak had been standing for hours in the queue to exchange Rs.1000 and Rs.500 denomination notes. Though he was rushed to hospital by some people who saw him collapse, he was declared dead before admission, police said.

In another incident, a 48-year old man, who came to deposit Rs five lakh worth scrapped high denomination notes in a bank in Thalassery in Kerala, died after he fell down from the second floor of a building.

Unni, a Kerala State Electricity Board employee, was filling the necessary forms to deposit the amount in the State Bank of Travancore's branch, located in the first floor, when the mishap occurred, they said quoting preliminary information.

He had unsuccessfully tried to deposit the notes yesterday and came to the bank again this morning. Running out of money for the last two days, men and women across the country had thronged the ATMs since early morning while in many places, to their disappointment, they found the machines not working.

Police was also called in to help banks control the angry depositors whose patience wore thin after standing in long queues.

"People are facing hardships. That's why I have come to join them. I am here to exchange my Rs 4,000 with new notes," Rahul Gandhi told reporters.

"Neither will you (reporters) nor your crorepati owners nor the Prime Minister understand the problems faced by people, he said.

The Congress leader, who reached the SBI's Parliament Street branch at around 4.25 PM, waited for his turn in queue to exchange his old notes.

"I waited for an hour in the queue and minutes before my turn the ATM was already down. My biggest problem is buying groceries and paying for other petty expenses," said 35-year-old housewife Aditi Saha in Kolkata.

Even the bank employees are facing tough time dealing with customers in view of people rushing to the banks to exchange their old money.

"We (employees) could not get time to have our lunch during the day as the branch was flooded by people," S K Shrivastava, Manager, Bank of India, S K Nagar branch in Patna said.
Mumbai: Continous efforts are being made for the safe return of 22-year-old Indian soldier Chandu Chavan from Pakistan but the process will take more time, according to Minister of State for Defence Subhash Bhamre.

Bhamre, who was in the city to attend a function, said that Pakistan government's admission that jawan Chavan is in their custody is significant in view of the strained relations between the two nations.

"Though there is an official agreement between India and Pakistan over handing over of such jawans, in the current scenario it will take more time to get him back," Mr Bhamre said.

"We have referred to the agreement and communicated with Pakistan government. It is true that relations between the two governments are a bit tense after the incident (cross-LoC surgical strikes). But, we will continue our efforts and bring him back," he said.

Earlier, the Pakistani Army had denied that it had captured the jawan, who had inadvertently crossed the Line of Control after the surgical strikes in September.

On September 30, jawan Chavan from 37 Rashtriya Rifles had inadvertently crossed over to the other side of the Line of Control following which Pakistan had been informed by the DGMO (Director General of Military Operations) on the hotline.

Soon after the news broke, jawan Chavan's aged grandmother Lila Chindha Patil died of shock.

The Army jawan was planning to get married around Diwali. His parents died when he was small and his grandmother had raised him.
Anantapur: In a major breakthrough, Kadapa police nabbed Singapore-based international Red sanders smuggler Subramanyam alias Surbam and his five key aides on Friday.

He was the close associate of Sahul Hameed alias Sahul Bhai of Dubai and K.D. Davod Jagir alias Jakeer of China. It was the first ever case of detaining Singapore-based international smuggler by the local police.

The international smuggler admitted that he smuggled more than 1,000 tonnes of red sander logs till now. He was the kingpin to smuggle red sander logs and marketing in Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Dubai and Malasia, Kadapa Superintendent of Police P.H.D. Ramakrishna said.

Police also seized 3.5 tonnes of logs, a car and Rs 3.40 lakh Indian currency and 100 US dollar notes from him.

CK Dinne police during a vehicle checking nabbed Subramanyam at Kamballi checkpost on Kadapa-Rayachoti road in CK Dinne mandal.

A total of 18 cases were registered against the international smugger for his role in smuggling and violation of wind life protection in the forests.

Superintendent of Police Ramakrishna said Subramanyam was the native of Namakkal in Tamil Nadu and his fore fathers migrated to Malasyia and settled there.

He studied diploma in mechanical engineering and worked at private company as engineer in Singapore. During his visits to Tamil Nadu he acquainted with smuggling activities.
New Delhi: The Centre on Friday informed the Supreme Court that it had returned to the collegium, for its reconsideration, 43 of the 77 names recommended for appointment of judges at various High Courts and the remaining 34 had been appointed as judges.

Giving this information before a Bench of Chief Justice T.S. Thakur and Justice Shiva Kirti Singh, the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said not a single file is pending with the government regarding appointment of judges to High Courts. It is for the collegium to decide, he said.

The AG also told a bench that finalisation of the memorandum of procedure (MoP) on appointment of judges was also pending with the Supreme Court collegium since August 3 as it had not sent back its views. Since February this year, the Supreme Court collegium had cleared 311 names for appointments, but the Centre had approved only around 80 names.

On October 28, the apex court had slammed NDA government for failing to appoint various High Court judges despite the collegium clearing some of the names more than nine months ago. An angry CJI told Attorney General You can as well close down the courts. Close down justice.

The Bench is hearing a batch of petitions for a direction to the Centre to fill up vacancies at various High Courts pending for a long time resulting in mounting arrears of cases. When one lawyer Nedumpara Mathews asked the CJI not to hear this case as he was heading the collegium, the CJI said the Court will pass an order in this regard. The matter was posted for further hearing by the CJI on November 18.
Stuntmen Raghav Uday and Anil take a selfie just before jumping into the helicopter for the shoot that ended in the tragedy, at Thippagondanahalli Reservoir on Monday (Photo: KPN)

Bengaluru: The four accused, including film director Nagashekhar and stunt choreographer Ravi Varma, in the Maasthigudi tragedy case have gone absconding fearing arrest. Meanwhile, the IO (Investigation Officer) in the case has been changed by the top officials of the Ramanagar district police.

Sources said that soon after the FIR was registered against five people - producer Sundar P. Gowda, director Nagashekhar, assistant director Siddu, stunt choreographer Ravi Varma and Unit Manager S. Bharath - the producer was arrested. As we arrested the producer on day one, the other accused have been absconding. All the four, who left the spot some time after the tragedy, never returned to the accident spot nor did they appear before the police to provide explanation, an official said.

As the sections invoked against the accused people - 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) for violating the conditions set by the BWSSB, 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the IPC - amount to criminal offence, the four accused have gone absconding.

The accused clearly know they will be arrested. That is why they did not even turn up at the houses of Anil and Uday, whose bodies were taken there after the bodies were retrieved. However, efforts are on to trace them. Our teams have camped in Bengaluru as all the accused are residents of the city. Besides, teams have been sent to other places as well, the official added.

Officer changed

Meanwhile, the investigating officer in the case Circle Police Inspector H. L. Nandish of Magadi police station has been changed and Anil, an inspector with the District Crime Branch (DCB) will further investigate the case.
New Delhi: The Chhattisgarh government on Friday assured the Supreme Court that human rights activist and JNU professor, Nandini Sundar, and three others accused in a murder case will not be arrested till November 15.

Additional solicitor general Tuhsar Mehta appearing for Chhattisgarh government gave this assurance before a Bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and A.K. Goel after senior counsel Ashok Desai appearing for Nandini alleged that an FIR had been registered for an offence said to have been committed in 2015. When he pressed for stay of the FIR, the court was inclined to grant stay.

However, Mr Mehta said there is some serious developments in this case and will give the documents to the court in a sealed cover on November 15 and till then they wont be arrested.

The Bench observed that there is an aggravation of Maoist situation and the government should take a pragmatic view of life and find a peaceful solution. The Bench told ASG You are not taking the situation seriously. The whole thing is being aggravated. You have to find a peaceful situation.

Mr Desai alleged that the activists have become enemies now. The Bench was hearing an application filed by Ms Sundar for a stay and quashing of an FIR filed against her and three others, a DU professor and two activists, for the murder of a tribal in the insurgency-hit Sukma district of Chhattisgarh. The police claim that the FIR was filed on the basis of a complaint allegedly filed by Baghels wife, he informed the Bench.
According to RBI sources, while several banks are detecting suspicious transactions by systems that run into lakhs, only a few are being reported. (Representational image)

Hyderabad: Reporting of suspicious banking transactions by banks to the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Reserve Bank of India to detect financial crimes has come to focus again after demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

Banks which are using the software and system to analyse the huge number of transactions and customer data are approaching data companies for a foolproof analysis and for improvising detection post demonetisation.

Banks which are not using the transactions data analytics system are seeking information about the same. Though banks are not regulators and cant stop transactions of customers, they have to monitor suspicious transactions under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act or face a penalty.

Section 13 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, empowers the RBIs Financial Intelligence Unit to impose fines on any banking company, financial institution or intermediary for failure to comply with the obligations of maintenance of records, furnishing information and verifying the identity of clients. Sanctions include both administrative action and monetary fine, which may vary between Rs 10,000 and Rs 1 lakh for each failure.

Mr Satya Prakash Mishra of Quantam Data Engines of Hyderabad, which serves several banks like Kotak Mahindra Bank, Saraswat Bank, Bank of Ceylon, May Bank, Mahindra Finance, Amana Bank of Sri Lanka said, Banks are obligated under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act to monitor transactions of a suspicious nature for the purpose of reporting it to FIU.

It is humanly not possible with the naked eye. We have built a software solution on the Java platform which processes customer data and transaction data. Tax evasion, money laundering, terror financing and all financial crimes can be detected, he added.

According to RBI sources, while several banks are detecting suspicious transactions by systems that run into lakhs, only a few are being reported.

For instance in 2011-12, the ICICI Bank system generated 5.4 lakh alerts about suspicious transactions, but only 3,677 were reported to the FIU. Around 11 lakh suspected transactions were detected by HDFC but only 932 were reported; Axis Bank system generated 29.6 lakh alerts but only 764 were reported, he said.

At least four banks have been penalised in 2016 so far, as per a Cobra Post sting operation.
Hyderabad: The Hyderabad High Court on Friday admitted a contempt petition initiated by Mauritius Commercial Bank against various bankers of Sujana Universal Industries Ltd.

Mauritius Commercial Bank moved the contempt petition against Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, IDBI, Central Bank of India, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Indian Overseas Bank and UCO Bank, seeking action against these banks under the Contempt of Courts Act for their alleged violation of an order passed by the High Court in a civil revision petition.

Sanjeev Kumar, counsel appearing for Mauritius Bank before Justice M. Satyanarayana Murthy, submitted that the High Court had on September 14, 2016 passed an order directing the banks to disclose the bank account details of Sujana Industries Limited within a week from the date of the order by way of an affidavit before a Civil Court in Hyderabad where the execution petition of the Mauritius Bank is pending.

He said that Mauritius Bank moved execution petition based on a decree passed by the UK High Court for recovery of `100 crore loan from Sujana Industries.

Mr Kumar said despite the High Court order, the banks failed to disclose the details till date and urged the court to punish them for contempt. While admitting the case, the judge adjourned the hearing.

The Hyderabad High Court on Friday reserved orders on an appeal moved by the TS government challenging an order granted by a single judge staying all proceedings in criminal cases pending against former billiards champion Michael Ferreira and four of his associates and also directing the trial court to release them on bail, besides setting aside the transit warrant against him.

A division bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Ramesh Ranganathan and Justice A. Shankar Narayana, after hearing the appeal by the government, reserved its orders.

H. Venugopal, counsel for the TS home department, opposing the singe judge order contended that the single judge shouldnt have granted bail by invoking writ jurisdiction under Article 226 of the Constitution.

Counsels for the accused, supporting the order of the single judge, cited a judgment of the Supreme Court wherein the Apex Court upheld the power of the courts to grant bail under Article 226.

It may be recalled that the police in AP, TS and Maharashtra booked cases against Malcolm N. Desai, Michael Joseph Ferreira, Srinivasa Rao Vanka, Magaral V. Balaji and Nozer K. Desai, for their alleged involvement in Rs 400-crore alleged fraud involving the multi-level marketing company QNet.
Neil Larives sisters Jennifer Larive and Naheeda Khan enjoy the reunion with their brother at the Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad on Friday. (Photo: DC)

Hyderabad: Hyderabad became the place of reunion for the family of Neil Larive, an Anglo Indian from Mumbai, who got lost in Kerala and 11 days later ended up lying by the roadside in Panjagutta, starving and in poor health. He had a serious injury on one of his legs and all his belongings were stolen. Neil had gone to Kerala along with a group of 17.

Neil went missing on October 28, when he left Kerala. His friends said that he consumed alcohol before the journey, and got down at a station on the way where he got lost.

Since then there was no word about him. On Wednesday night Neil was found by 108 emergency personnel at Panjagutta and they brought him to Gandhi Hospital. Neil was admitted in the emergency ward.

One of the senior nurses at the emergency ward said, He was in a very bad state and could not remember how he ended up in Hyderabad, but he remembered his wifes phone number and told us to inform her that he had been found.

Neils wife was informed. However, she could not immediately come to Hyderabad but his two sisters Jennifer Larive and Naheeda Khan reached on Friday morning.

Jennifer said, We were worried but we kept praying and did not lose hope. We called as many people as we could and had decided that we will go to Kerala and search for him ourselves, Naheeda said, Hopefully this will open his eyes and he will stop consuming alcohol.

Although Neil is still weak and does not remember how he came to Hyderabad he said, "I am happy to have been found. I want to go home now."
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to Bollywood actor Salman Khan in Chinkara poaching cases in which he was acquitted by the Rajasthan High Court, reversing the trial courts order awarding five years sentence for the offence.

A Bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and N.V. Ramana issued notice to Salman Khan while admitting an appeal filed by Rajasthan government seeking to quash the High Court judgment and seeking a direction to the actor to surrender in the Court to serve the sentence of five years. The Bench without staying the High Court judgment said hearing in the appeal will be expedited.

On July 25 the High Court acquitted Salman Khan in the killing of two Chinkaras in separate incidents. One of the animals was killed at Bhawad on Jodhpurs outskirts on September 26, 1998.
People queue up outside a State Bank of India branch to exchange their old Rs 500 and `1,000 notes in Beawar on Friday. (Photo: PTI)

Mumbai/Thalassery (Kerala): The scramble by millions of panicked consumers to exchange banned currency or deposit them turned tragic on Friday when three people died in separate incidents in Maharashtra and Kerala amid chaos for the second straight day with poor cash flow.

As banks across the country struggled to contain serpentine queues, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi also took people by surprise when he visited SBIs Parliament Street branch in Delhi to exchange banned notes with new ones,.

There were no signs of relief even as several people were told to go back after bank servers at several branches reportedly collapsed while several ATMs went dry in a few hours. People who were able to exchange the old currency could get hold of the new notes only after waiting for hours.

Vishwanath Vartak, 73, who was standing in the queue before an SBI branch for exchanging currency, collapsed and died on the spot at Navghar in Mulund in eastern suburbs, police said. Vartak had been standing for hours in the queue to exchange Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 denomination notes.

Though he was rushed to hospital by some people who saw him collapse, he was declared dead before admission, police said. In Kerala, an elderly man standing in queue collapsed and died, while another fell to death while filling forms to deposit over Rs five lakh worth high denomination notes.

Police said 75-year-old Karthikeyan from Kumarapuram in Haripad in Alappuzha district was standing in a queue at a branch of the State Bank of Travancore, when he collapsed and died.

In the other incident, Unni (48), working as an overseer in the Kerala State Electricity Board fell to his death while he was filling the necessary forms to deposit Rs 5.50 lakh he had with him. Initial reports say it was an accident, police said.

Police said the man had taken the loan from his PF account and had come to deposit it in the bank when he fell from the second floor of the building, housing the bank. He had stood in the queue for some time, police said. A case of unnatural death has been registered.

States told to ensure security to banks

The Centre has asked all states to ensure proper security to all banks, ATMs and vehicles transporting cash in the wake of demonetisation of `500 and `1,000 currency notes.

The home ministry has deputed three officials to be in touch with state governments to ensure security of banks, ATMs and cash transporting vehicles. The three officials are taking regular feedbacks from the directors general of police and the situation in respective states, a home ministry official said.

So far no report of any violence or untoward incident has come from anywhere in the country. We have conveyed to the states that if they require any assistance, we will provide immediately, the official said.

The central government is expecting the financial situation to be normal in the next four-five days. Two separate advisories were sent to all states in this regard, the official said.

Chaos and confusion reigned at most banks across the country with harried customers having to stand in winding queues for hours on end for withdrawing or exchanging demonetised notes. Their problems have been compounded with a large number of ATMs being non-functional or getting emptied soon after being replenished.
Bengaluru: A day after Karnataka minister Tanvir Sait was allegedly caught looking at sleazy videos on his mobile at a public function, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Friday said he would seek a report on the incident, even as the Opposition staged protests demanding Sait's resignation.

"I will seek the report and then will see whether it needs to be inquired, after inquiry I will take action,"? Siddaramaiah told reporters in Mysuru.

He rubbished media reports which quoted him as describing the incident as false.

"Did I say media reports are false? Some channels are saying so. What I have said is let the report come, I will examine the veracity," the Chief Minister said.

Minister for Primary and Secondary Education Tanvir Sait had on Thursday found himself in the midst of a huge controversy after video footage emerged showing him purportedly watching pictures of skimpily clad girls on his mobile on dais at a public function to mark Tipu Jayanti celebrations in Raichur district.

Opposition parties and organisations on Friday held protests in various parts of the state, including Yadgiri, Madikeri,

Mysuru, Dharwad and Chitradurga, demanding sacking of Sait.

A protest was also held under the leadership of JD(S) MLC Puttanna, in front of the minister's office at Vidhana Soudha, the state secretariat, in Bengaluru.

Speaking to reporters at Belagavi, Siddaramaiah said, "A mistake is a mistake whether it is committed by BJP or anyone else. I have spoken to Tanvir Sait over phone, he is in Raichur, he will return tomorrow and give an explanation."?

"He (Sait) has said that he was not watching obscene pictures but was only scrolling messages received on Whatsapp in his phone," adding, "the minister told me that he was ready for any inquiry."

Meanwhile, state veteran Congress leader Janardhan Poojary also demanded that Sait be sacked.

"If we still sleep, a situation may arise where we will have to sleep during the upcoming elections. So Mr Chief Minister to safeguard the prestige of the people of your district Mysuru, please take action," he told reporters at Mangaluru.

Sait, who represents Narasimharaja constituency in Mysuru, was inducted into the cabinet in June.

The minister has denied any wrongdoing on his part, saying he was only browsing Whatsapp messages on Tipu Jayanti celebrations held across the state on Thursday.
Kochi: The Kerala High Court on Friday asked the state to take a positive decision on banning of all types of plastic carry bags. The court opined that a ban, irrespective of the size, is essential to free the state from the menace of plastic waste. The High Court, in an interim order on July 25, had raised concern on the manner in which the public at large abuse plastic covers for indiscriminate disposal of waste, including by packing the waste into the carry bags and tying them and throwing it wherever they want leading to health and environmental concerns.

The court observed that a time has come consider restricting the use of plastic carry bags and consequently the sale of free delivery of plastic carry bags that are primary sources of plastic bags for the people. The state submitted that the chief secretary has already convened two meetings subsequent to the order of the court. Suchitwa Mission will launch a detailed training programme for officials of Local Self Governments, elected representatives and general public so as to make them responsible for their role as per Waste Management Rules, 2016 by using their own fund.

The state submitted that it took earnest efforts for implementation of the order of the court. It submitted that the goal can be achieved by strictly following the rules and taking steps for successful implementation of the rules by all authorities as already directed and making awareness among the citizens of Kerala through media. According to the government the state is committed to pragmatic and scientific waste management including plastic waste management through enforcement of rules, ensuring the responsibilities of all the stake holders in the Plastic Waste management Rules 2016.
Thrissur: The non-functioning of almost all the ATMs of the major public sector banks and private banks on Friday put the public in a tight spot in Thrissur and Palakkad. Though there were more than 120 ATMs of SBI in Thrissur region only a few including those at e-lobby at Naduvila functioned in the morning but were emptied within a few hours. The ATM of Thrissur District Co-operative Bank on Kurupam Road functioned and some of the ATMs of Axis Bank were also available to withdraw money on Friday morning.

Sources close to SBI Administrative office in Thrissur told DC that most of its ATMs in the district would start vending Rs 100 and Rs 500 on Saturday. SBI sources said that almost all of their ATMs have been out sourced and the private agencies need to get enough notes from their branches to fill them at the money vending machines. Private sector banks in Thrissur told DC that due to shortage of notes most of their ATMs did not function on Friday, but assured that all of them will start functioning by Saturday.

As the ATMs were not filled with money, the customers rushed to banks for withdrawals and compared to Thursday there was more rush in banks for exchange of old notes on Friday. Public sector banks provided notes of Rs 100 and Rs 500 denominations during exchange and for those withdrawing from their accounts, Rs 2,000 notes were given.

YC Protest in Palakkad

Youth congressmen in Palakkad on Friday took out a protest rally against the alleged lack of proper arrangements to provide currency notes to public. It is learnt that some of the mega textile showrooms in Palakkad were accepting Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 old notes from customers who did bulk purchase for weddings.

Some of the jewellers were also receiving money through online fund transfer from customers by which a sum below `50,000 can be transferred a day.
Panaji: Days after Congress Working Committee (CWC) expressed "strong sentiment" for Rahul Gandhi's elevation as party president, senior leader Digvijaya Singh on Thursday said the call on the issue will be taken by incumbent chief Sonia Gandhi at "right time".

"No one wants to sort of see that Sonia Gandhi is replaced in her absence. No one has criticised the decision to elevate Rahul Gandhi. Unanimously, CWC has said that it's high time that Rahul Gandhi should take up the leadership," the AICC general secretary said.

At its meeting held in Delhi earlier this week, the highest decision-making body of the Congress had unanimously voiced "strong sentiment" for the elevation of the Congress vice-president as party chief. Sonia couldn't attend that meeting apparently on health grounds.

"...Now the issue is Sonia Gandhi is president of Congress so she has to take a call. No one wants to sort of see that Sonia is replaced in her absence. She could not attend the meeting because she was unwell," Mr Singh said.

He further said, "The decision is with her. Whenever she feels the timing is right she will take a decision. Sonia is undisputed leader of the Congress party."
Vijayawada: AP housing board chairman and TD official spokesperson Varla Ramaiah on Friday said if Jana Sena chief Pawan Kalyan contests in next election, he would be treated as TD opponent.

Speaking to media persons here, he welcomed the comments made by Pawan Kalyan on special category status (SCS) to AP and said the TD also shared the same view regarding SCS.

He said accepting the special assistance package did not mean that the TD had compromised on the SCS. Even after agreeing for the package, which is needed for the development of the state, we will continue to press for the SCS, he added. He suggested Pawan Kalyan to tour all the villages of Andhra Pradesh to know the problems of the poor.

Taking about YSRC chief Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, he asked why Jagan was silent on demonetisation of big currency notes. We are hearing reports that Mr Jagan is unwell since the Union governments decision to scrap the existing high denomination currency notes, he said and added that Jagan should come out and tell his stand over the issue.

He alleged that Jagan was still holding huge amounts of black money at his residences and demanded the authorities concerned to keep a tight vigil on Jagans properties and his associates as they might try to move the huge stash of cash to convert them to legal notes.
Hyderabad: TPCC president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy on Friday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of pushing the entire nation into chaos by demonetising Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in a hasty manner.

Poor and middle class have literally been pushed to starvation. While daily wage workers were not hired by anyone during the last two days, the middle class population is not left with smaller denomination currency to meet their daily expenses, Mr Reddy said, addressing a public meeting at Nereducherla in Palakidu mandal of Suryapet district.

Accusing the PM of acting like a dictator, he said, Modi has created this crisis in everyone's life just to display his authority.

He said that the Centres decision infringed upon citizens right to life and trade, among others.

While the Congress supports any crackdown on black money, the Prime Minister's hasty move has only hit the poor, middle class, farmers, daily wage earners, small traders, students, the self-employed and housewives who are standing in lengthy queues in front of banks and post offices since the past two days, Mr Reddy said.

He demanded limitation for exchange of old notes with new ones and withdrawal limits from ATMs be relaxed. People have fallen victim to this economic calamity, the TPCC chief said.

Mr Reddy also questioned the logic behind introduction of Rs 2,000 notes in helping prevent generation of black money. He feared the currency might be used to hide black money in future.

The Prime Minister promised to put Rs 15 lakh in each account by bringing back the black money stashed in foreign country. What happened to that promise? he asked.

Mr Reddy also demanded immediate release of water from Nagarjunasagar Left Canal for the Rabi season, clearance of entire crop loan dues at one go, release of fee reimbursement dues of nearly 14 lakh students, clearances of salaries of lecturers of junior colleges pending for the last six months and clearance of pending bills of Indiramma Housing projects.
It is a pity that in India we are seeing water wars between states, with territories that are upper riparian intent on denying water to lower riparian states. We saw this in the case of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu recently, and now we have the case of Punjab and Haryana. In both, the Supreme Court is being sought to be flagrantly disregarded. On Thursday, the river waters dispute between Punjab and Haryana burst into the public domain yet again, with the top court effectively upholding Haryanas demand for waters of Ravi and Beas. This immediately led to a flurry of political activity. Congress MLAs resigned from Punjab Assembly. Pradesh Congress president Captain Amarinder Singh, who is likely to be the chief minister if his party wins the Assembly election next year, resigned his Lok Sabha seat. Not to be outdone, the ruling Akali Dal, through the means of an Assembly resolution, has sought to tell all concerned that Punjab has no water to spare.

In short, the Congress and the Akali Dal are not really thinking water for Punjab farmers, but votes in the poll-bound state for which water is being turned into an emotive issue. Based on earlier agreements, Punjab was to share Ravi and Beas waters with not only Haryana but also Rajasthan, Chandigarh and Delhi through the building of the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal. This was also part of the accord signed in 1985 between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sant Harcharan Singh Longowal, the stalwart Akali leader who was killed by terrorists within a month of the signing of the accord. At one point, the Punjab government even began to acquire land for the construction of the SYL canal. In 2003, a judgment of the Supreme Court also gave its sanction to water-sharing, but the following year, when Captain Singh was the CM, Punjab Assembly enacted a legislation denying water to other states.

In the wake of this, the President made a reference to the Supreme Court under Article 143 of the Constitution to ascertain the legal viability and constitutionality of the Punjab enactment. It was this which was answered on Thursday by a five-judge bench, which held that the 2004 Punjab law breached constitutionality. Besides, it was also in disregard of principles of federalism. In the ordinary course, a state government would have been required to uphold the apex court verdict with alacrity. But the Akali Dal regime fears being politically outflanked by the Congress shortly before the state polls. Can the BJP at the Centre play a constructive role by counselling the Punjab government, in which it is an ally, not to engage in competitive populism and to honour the SC verdict?
Here is the weekly road construction report for Hamilton County:

U.S. 27 (I-124) widening from I-24/U.S. 27 interchange to north of the Olgiati Bridge over the Tennessee River, including widening the Olgiati Bridge: Work on this project continues. The speed limit on U.S. 27 in the construction zone has been lowered to 45 MPH. The contractor may have temporary lane or shoulder closures on U.S. 27 between 7 p.m.-6 a.m. On the evening of Thursday between 7 p.m.-6 a.m.

temporary lane closures will be in place for U.S. 27 North and South throughout the project limits to allow the contractor to sweep up debris from the shoulders. The temporary lane closures will shift from side to side during the night so that both shoulders can be swept. This will also include all ramps and city streets within the limits of the project. TDOT contract crews have closed the on ramp from eastbound MLK Boulevard to U.S. 27 North until December. A temporary left turn lane on eastbound MLK Boulevard has been constructed to allow traffic to access the alternate on-ramp to U.S. 27 North. As the project progresses, there may be short term temporary lane closures for the safety of the traveling public on city streets within the project area. Flaggers will assist with these closures and they will be properly signed in accordance with the Federal Highway Administrations Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. During Phase 1 of the U.S. 27 project, the contractor will be working on the northbound side of U.S. 27 on the bridges. Work will consist of demolishing and reconstructing the outside sections of the bridges along U.S. 27 North. Also on U.S. 27 South, they will be constructing a large retaining wall between the Olgiati Bridge and 6th Street. At least one lane will remain open in each direction on U.S. 27. THP will assist with traffic control on the project as necessary. Estimated project completion date is July 2019. For more info, visit the project website http://www.tn.gov/tdot/topic/US27-reconstruction-chattanooga . [Dement Construction Co., LLC/JM/CNP230]

SR 317 (Apison Pike) the grading, drainage and paving on from Old Lee Highway (LM 5.58) to SR-321 (Ooltewah-Ringgold Road) (LM 7.84): Work on this project continues. During this report period the contractor may have intermittent lane closures throughout the project from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Flaggers will assist with traffic control as needed. Estimated project completion date is May. [Wright Brothers Const. Co. /Pruett/CNN279]

SR-320 (East Brainerd Road) grading, drainage, installation of signals, construction of seven retaining walls and paving from east of Graysville Road to east of Bel-Air Road: Work on this project continues. During this report period, the contractor will have intermittent lane closures between 9 a.m.-2 p.m. This work may affect either direction of East Brainerd Road or side streets from Graysville Road to Hamlett Drive as the contractor installs road crossings and borings. Also during this report period, the contractor will be closing Grays Road and detouring traffic onto Givens Road. The detour route will be clearly marked. The contractor may have short-term lane closures to perform various operations on an as-needed basis. Flaggers will assist with traffic control as needed. Estimated project completion is June. [Mountain State Contractors, LLC /Pruett/CNN383]

Shepherd Road over SR-153 construction of a rolled steel girder bridge from West Shepherd Rd. to Shaw Avenue in Chattanooga, including grading, drainage and paving: This project is complete and awaiting final inspection. Estimated project completion is November. [Jones Brothers Contractors, Inc./Micka/CNP105]

SR-153 resurfacing from the SR-319 underpass (LM 8.89) to north of Grubb Road (LM 10.85): Work on this project continues. During this report period, the contractor will conduct milling and paving operations between 9 p.m.-6 a.m. the following morning. At least one travel lane will remain open to traffic at all times. THP will assist with traffic control as needed. Motorists should use caution and be alert to construction equipment and vehicles within the work zone. Estimated project completion date is November. [Wright Brothers Construction Co., Inc./Micka/CNQ193]

The tunnel cleaning of the McCallie Tunnel on U.S. 11 (US 64, SR-2), the Stringers Ridge Tunnel on U.S. 127 (SR-8), and the Bachman Tubes on U.S. 41 (U.S. 76, SR-8): The nighttime cleaning operation of McCallie Tunnels, Stringers Ridge Tunnel, and Bachman Tubes occurs normally on Wednesday and Thursday nights during the week with the 3rd Tuesday of the month. Work hours are between 8 p.m.-6 a.m. Tunnels will be closed during cleaning, and detours will be marked accordingly as each tunnel is cleaned. Contract completion date is June. [Diamond Specialized, Inc./Micka/CNQ174]

SR-60, resurfacing along various portions of SR-60. In Hamilton County from the Meigs County line (L.M. 0.00) to the Meigs County line. In Meigs County from the Bradley County line (L.M. 0.00) to the Hamilton County line (L.M. 1.02) and from the Hamilton County line (L.M. 0.00) to north of Horner Hollow Road (L.M. 2.10): Work on this project continues. During this report period, the contractor may have lane closures between 7 a.m.-7 p.m. At least one travel lane will remain open to traffic at all times. Flaggers will assist with traffic control as needed. Estimated project completion date is November. [Talley Construction/Pruett/CNQ192]






Welcome to the changed world order: From Pussy Grabber to President of the United States of America, Donald Trump sure has come a long way. His victory is a pretty accurate reflection of who we are, rather than who we pretend to be. Mr Trump is the Average Joe  same-same but different. Mr Trump is a tangerine coloured billionaire with a bizarre comb over. Yet, under it all, he remains depressingly ornery. While India was dealing with a well-timed dhamaka (note-crisis), Mr Trump was making an uncharacteristically sober acceptance speech, reading carefully from a teleprompter, and making nice. While a section of America went into collective and very public mourning (#notmypresident), European leaders chose their congratulatory words with undisguised caution, almost choking during the strained delivery. Only Angela Merkel said it like it is  and no wonder. She had been at the receiving end of Mr Trumps taunts during the refugee crisis and wasnt about to mince words. Back home, Bharatwasis were more concerned about paying for their dal chawal to spend time on an Amreekan President-elect. Eventually, nobody gives a damn  its only about self-interest.

And megalomaniac Mr Trump plugged into precisely that trait when he launched his ambitious Me, me, me campaign. Since all the experts got it wrong, and only a clever fish (yup! A fish-fish) called Chanakya in Chennai had it figured, the lofty world of analysts and experts is still wondering how such a despicable man won the hearts of his countrymen (and surprisingly, several women, too). Ask Nobel Laureate and fellow American Bob Dylan, and he will say, The answer, my friend, is blowin in the wind... the answer is blowin in the wind. Academics will provide all kinds of bogus arguments in hindsight, but the simple truth is Mr Trump wisely ignored the power elite, the self-styled intellectuals, the high-brows, the wealthy and the snooty, the liberals and progressive thinkers. He proved they no longer counted. And as was astutely pointed out by an international columnist, the Davos party was finally declared over. All that schmoozing and networking with the Davos Darlings (the Clintons), came to nought in this seminal election. Mr Trump shrewdly ignored brains and went for the gut. He took his message to the angry majority  the white, uneducated, jobless, frustrated man, who pinned his personal failures on others  immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, terrorists... and women, of course. When Mr Trump promised to Make America great again, what he was pledging was to get rid of the old elite. The same people who refused him a place at the high table. Out! he bellowed.

Now comes the real test: Can he? Will he? Going by his conciliatory tone during the acceptance speech, he has vowed to embrace all Americans. Of course, in his mind, these other people may not qualify as true-blue Americans in the first place. Does he care? The world is watching. Does he care about the world? Who knows? He sure cares for himself  thats obvious. After his White House visit, supporters were stumped by the Boy Scout version of the Raging Bull. Is the same man they voted for? There must be a real Donald Trump hiding somewhere. The man Melania Trump wakes up next to. The man who has fathered five children with three wives. Is he as big a monster when the cameras are off? Melania, a top model in her time, dated him for seven long years before tying the knot. Of course, his bank balance must have been the sexiest thing about him, but hey  Melania (the second First Lady of foreign origin in America), is no dumb blond. She is smart, confident, speaks five languages and is very much her own woman. Her first public appearance as the wife of the President-elect was restrained, sophisticated and calm. It must have been pre-decided, but the Trumps exchanged chaste kisses on the cheek  disappointingly, no lip-to-lip smooches. As historic photo-ops go, this one was seriously blah.

Mr Trumps win says so much about men and power. He symbolises universal traits, which are as old as the hills  he shows scant respect for the less entitled, and he is an incorrigible chest thumper. No man in public life displays the mine is bigger than yours complex as blatantly as this loudmouth. We know about his sperm count... soon he may reveal his penile size, too. If people find his boasting and bad mouthing offensive, we must ask  which people? Not his supporters, who roared their approval each time he abused someone. Mr Trump scores on being a badass. Mr Trumps basic instincts are base, vile and crude. But try chatting with a few guys at a bar in Ohio, for instance. They are all closet Trumps  misogynistic, arrogant and obnoxious. Mr Trump is their voice. He has legitimised a certain kind of ugh behaviour, which the more civilised world finds revolting. For that matter, try chatting with Mr Anonymous at any dhaba in Uttar Pradesh  you will find a desi version of Mr Trump. Hatred, contempt and aversion for women is what propelled Mr Trump to victory.

The very thought of a woman  particularly a tough and brilliant woman  occupying the White House and calling the shots, made a huge swath of Americans distinctly uncomfortable (What is America coming to... a Black President, then a woman...? No way!). So, the worlds stuck with a real life version of Donald Duck  albeit, a nasty duck, unlike the loveable cartoon character. In the land of Mickey Mouse, a man like Mr Trump has triumphed over logic, good sense and reason. Its a victory for perversity. We shouldnt be too shocked. In India, we have endured several Trumps without collapsing or crumbling. Our burgeoning middle-class is no different from the men and women who voted for Mr Trump. We share similar anxieties, fears and insecurities  we just have different names for them. And yes... the writing is on the wall, all you desi Davos-wallas. Hold the Dom. Times are likely to get increasingly mushkil on those slopes. The current notes ka jhamela is just the beginning.
While some companies such as online reservations site Booking.com have said they will transfer the necessary data to Russian servers, it is unclear whether others, including Facebook and Alphabet unit Google, will comply with the law.

A Russian court on Thursday upheld a decision to block the website of social networking company LinkedIn Corp., Interfax news agency reported, setting a precedent for the way foreign internet firms operate in the country.

Russia's Roskomnadzor communications watchdog has said LinkedIn, which has more than 6 million registered users in Russia, was violating a law requiring websites which store the personal data of Russian citizens to do so on Russian servers.

Moscow has said the law, introduced in 2014 but never previously enforced, is aimed at protecting Russians' personal data. Critics see it as an attack on social networks in a country which has increasingly tightened control over the Internet in recent years. Moscow's Tagansky District Court ruled in August that LinkedIn's site should be blocked, but the decision had not yet come into force pending a company appeal.

"The decision of the Tagansky District Court has been upheld, the appeal by LinkedIn Corporation is unsatisfactory," Interfax quoted a court decision as saying.

Russia will take action to block LinkedIn's website within the next week, RIA news agency cited a Roskomnadzor spokesman as saying.

"LinkedIn's vision is to create economic opportunity for the entire global workforce. The Russian court's decision has the potential to deny access to LinkedIn for the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses," a LinkedIn's spokesman told Reuters.

"We remain interested in a meeting with Roskomnadzor to discuss their data localization request." Roskomnadzor did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

While some companies such as online reservations site Booking.com have said they will transfer the necessary data to Russian servers, it is unclear whether others, including Facebook and Alphabet unit Google, will comply with the law.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
OnePlus 3 smartphones will receive Googles newest Android operating system Nougat 7.0 by the end of November.

OnePlus 3 smartphones will receive Googles newest Android operating system Nougat 7.0 by the end of November, confirmed Brian Yoon, the startups head of software, to Engadget.

According to the report, Android Nougat update will be pushed out via over-the-air (OTA) to all OnePlus 3s and OnePlus 2 smartphones by the end of the year.

Also, last month OnePlus One was spotted on GFXbench, a benchmark website, running Android Nougat. In addition, another benchmark website called Geekbench revealed testing of Android Nougat versions on various OnePlus models, including OnePlus One, OnePlus 2 and OnePlus 3.

In fact, the performance tests spotted on Geekbench revealed that only OnePlus 3 models performed best with Nougat 7.1 version, while OnePlus One and OnePlus 2 performed well with Android 7.0, hinting these two years older models to get only Android 7.0 in update.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
A protester dressed up as Charlie Chaplin and holding a picture of the South African constitution demonstrates outside the South African parliament before a no-confidence debate against President Jacob Zuma in Cape Town on November 10, 2016. (Photo: AFP)

Johannesburg: After weathering scandals that would have ended most political careers, South Africas President Jacob Zuma secured a resounding victory on Thursday in a no-confidence vote against him in parliament.

The 214-126 result means Zuma has survived six votes of no-confidence since 2010 thanks to the ANC partys large parliamentary majority.

But the heated debate before the vote drew further attention to his mounting troubles after a year of setbacks and humiliating court rulings.

Homestead scandal

The multi-million dollar graft scandal stands out as one of the biggest blights on Zumas presidency after he was found to have benefitted from taxpayer-funded upgrades to Nkandla, his private rural homestead.

A probe by the public watchdog revealed that the upgrades included a litany of non-security renovations, including a swimming pool and chicken coop.

On March 31 this year, the scandal came to a dramatic climax when the Constitutional Court found the president guilty of violating his oath of office by refusing to pay back the money.

Defeated in court and facing mounting public criticism, he relented and paid $542,000 (500,000 euros), a sum set by the treasury.

783 fraud charges

A high court ruling on June 24 dealt Zuma another heavy blow when it rejected his application to appeal against a decision to reinstate nearly 800 corruption charges that were dropped in 2009.

The 783 criminal charges relate to allegations of corruption, racketeering and money laundering over a multi-billion dollar arms procurement deal by the government in the late 1990s.

The dropping of the charges paved the way for him to become president of the ANC and, soon afterwards, to take power nationally following elections.

The main opposition Democratic Alliance party has pushed for the charges to be reinstated, with more court hearings expected soon.

Election setback

Under Zumas leadership, the ANC suffered a major election humiliation in municipal elections on August 3, losing control of three cities, including the administrative capital Pretoria and the economic hub Johannesburg.

The ANC, in power nationally since 1994, recorded 53 percent of the votes -- still easily the biggest party -- as opposition parties made significant gains.

Factionalism under Zuma was blamed for the poor showing at the polls, which could point to deeper trouble at the next general election in 2019.

The ANC has been accused of losing touch with the masses, with the government failing to tackle high unemployment, corruption and slowing economic growth.

Bought by a family?

On November 2, a much-awaited report was released probing links between Zuma and the politically-connected Gupta business family. It detailed damaging allegations of their influence over his government.

Zuma was quizzed by the watchdog over the accusations and he then went to court to try to block the reports release.

His lawyers abandoned his legal fight in a dramatic U-turn, and the report was unveiled. It ordered a judicial investigation into alleged graft and possible criminal activity.

The report -- including accounts of bribes and suggestions that Zuma had broken the executive ethics law -- led to unprecedented calls from within the ANC for him to resign.
Cecil not only was a popular attraction for visitors to famed Hwange National Park, but that he wore a collar as part of an Oxford University research project. (Photo: AFP)

Harare: A Zimbabwean high court has dropped charges against the professional hunter, Theo Bronkhorst, who led the expedition that killed prized lion Cecil last year, his lawyer said Friday.

"The high court has said the charges were flawed and, therefore, should be set aside," lawyer Perpetua Dube told AFP.

She said the judge had ruled Thursday that the charges "did not constitute an offence.

"It's a great relief for Mr Bronkhorst," said Dube.

The high court ruling followed an application by Bronkhorst's lawyer for a review of a previous decision by a magistrate's court to have him tried over the 2015 hunt which led to the death of the iconic lion renowned for its distinctive black mane.

The hunt provoked worldwide outrage after it emerged that Cecil not only was a popular attraction for visitors to famed Hwange National Park, but that he wore a collar as part of an Oxford University research project.

Bronkhorst, 53, had been charged with "failing to prevent an illegal hunt" when American trophy hunter, dentist Walter Palmer, paid $55,000 to shoot the lion with a bow and arrow in July last year.

Zimbabwe decided not to charge Palmer after it emerged he had legal papers allowing him to hunt.

Bronkhorst denied any wrongdoing, saying he had the required permits to kill an elderly lion that was outside the national park boundaries. Cecil, who was 13 years old, was killed outside the reserve, which is not fenced.
US President Barack Obama and Republican President-elect Donald Trump shake hands during a transition planning meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on November 10, 2016 in Washington,DC. (Photo: AFP)

Washington: Barack Obama and Donald Trump on Thursday put past animosity aside during a 90-minute White House meeting designed to quell fears about the health of the world's pre-eminent democracy.

As protests against the Republican property mogul's shock election rumbled across US cities and world capitals contended with a suddenly uncertain world order, Obama and Trump vowed to carry out a smooth transition of power.

After a nasty campaign that culminated in the election of a 70-year-old billionaire who has never held public office and who gained power on a far-right platform, the message was: this is business as usual in a democracy.

The outgoing Democratic president and his successor huddled one-on-one in the Oval Office, for what Obama characterized as an "excellent conversation" and then put on a remarkably civil joint public appearance.

"It is important for all of us, regardless of party and regardless of political preferences, to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face," Obama said.

Trump appeared more subdued than usual, and was unusually cautious and deferential in his remarks.

"Mr President, it was a great honor being with you," Trump said, calling Obama a "very good man."

Cordial

The meeting, which came less than 36 hours after Trump's shock election victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, had the potential to be awkward.

After all, Trump championed the so-called "birther movement" challenging that Obama was actually born in the United States -- a suggestion laden with deep racial overtones -- only dropping the position recently.

And if the president-elect fulfills his campaign promises, he will unravel almost all of Obama's signature achievements.

Trump -- who previously called Obama the "most ignorant president in our history" -- said he looked forward to receiving the president's counsel.

Obama -- who previously said Trump was a whiner and "uniquely unqualified" to be commander-in-chief -- vowed his support.

He told Trump that his administration would "do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds."

The two men ended the improbable and historic White House encounter with a handshake and refused to take questions, appearing to find common cause in their opinion of the press.

"Here's a good rule. Don't answer questions when they just start yelling," Obama told Trump.

Current, future first ladies

While their husbands were getting acquainted, First Lady Michelle Obama also had a sit-down at the White House with her soon-to-be successor, Melania Trump.

Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, met in his West Wing office with Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, the new vice-president-elect.

White House officials said that Obama and Trump discussed a range of issues including global hotspots and the president's meetings next week abroad with leaders from Germany, Greece and across the Asia-Pacific.

On that trip, Obama is likely to be inundated with panicked questions about America's role in world affairs.

The White House hopes that by rolling out the red carpet for Trump, they can bind him to some of the conventions of the office.

Trump then traveled to Capitol Hill to meet Republican leaders who had been at best cool to him winning their party's nomination.

The president-elect proclaimed that health care, border security and jobs will be his top three priorities when he moves to the White House next January.

He held talks with House Speaker Paul Ryan and then with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"We had a very detailed meeting," Trump told reporters. "As you know, health care -- we're going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on health care," he said.

Trump made repealing Obamacare, and building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, pillars of his presidential campaign.

Trump said he and the Republican majority in Congress were going to accomplish "absolutely spectacular things for the American people," adding he was eager to get started.

Afterwards, following an hour-long meeting with McConnell on the other side of the Capitol, Trump stood at the Senate majority leader's side and stressed that "we have a lot to do."

"We're going to look very strongly at immigration," he said.

"We're going to look very strongly at health care, and we're looking at jobs -- big league jobs."

Trump did not elaborate.

Team Trump unveiled a transition website -- www.greatagain.gov -- that highlights the colossal human resources challenge facing the incoming administration under the headline "Help wanted: 4,000 presidential appointees."

During a bitter campaign that tugged at America's democratic fabric, the tycoon pledged to deport illegal immigrants, ban Muslims from the country and tear up free-trade deals.

Those campaign messages were embraced by a large section of America, grown increasingly disgruntled by the scope of social and economic change under Obama.

But they were passionately rejected by Clinton supporters.

Protesters turned out for a second day in cities across America from New York to Los Angeles to express continued opposition to the incoming leader they accuse of racism, sexism and xenophobia. Thousands had rallied on Wednesday.
New York: Stars including Mark Ruffalo, Jamie Lee Curtis and Josh Hutcherson joined thousands of Americans protesting Donald Trump's presidential victory. Ruffalo shared footage on Instagram which showed him surrounded by thousands of people in New York holding placards chanting "hands too small, can't build a wall" to protest against Trump, who was declared the 45th US President in Tuesday's election, reported USA Today.

Ruffalo, who does not appear in the video, zoomed in on signs which read, "Liberty of all Americans" and "Donald Trump's victory does not speak for me" and various people stood outside the Trump Tower, the home of the new President and his Trump Organisation.

"Love Trumps Hate love fest NYC Thousands in the Street," he wrote in the caption. One Twitter user shared an image of a gay man being attacked and Ruffalo retweeted the message and replied, "This is what we were out protesting tonight. It's the hate Trump elicits from his followers. #TrumpProtest" He also retweeted a video from the protest in which the demonstrators chant, "No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!"

Jamie Lee Curtis shared footage of a march taking place in Chicago, Illinois although it was not clear if she was present herself. She tweeted, "It begins. Protest and more protest. My niece in Chicago is already voicing what we all are feeling! #notmypresident"

"The Hunger Games" star Josh told his fans to "come join in a peaceful march through downtown LA to show the world how many of us feel! #notmypresident" and later showed video of protesters yelling Donald Trump!"
Demonstrators gather to protest a day after President-elect Donald Trump's victory at a rally outside Los Angeles City Hall in Los Angeles, California, on Wednesday. (Photo: AFP)

Baton Rouge, Louisiana: A Louisiana college student was assaulted and robbed of her wallet and Muslim headscarf by two men, one of whom was wearing a white Trump hat, authorities said on Thursday.

The 18-year-old woman told investigators she was walking near the University of Louisiana at Lafayettes campus Wednesday morning  hours after Donald Trumps presidential victory  when she was accosted by two white men who drove up in a gray sedan, Lafayette police said in a statement.

The student said the men struck her with a metal object, knocking her down, and stole her wallet and the headscarf, known as a hijab. She also said the men shouted racial obscenities as they struck her several times in the back.

Police havent identified any suspects. The student declined medical treatment.

Lafayette police department spokesperson Cpl. Karl Ratcliff said investigators havent found witnesses or surveillance video to assist them.

Basically, all we have is her statement, Ratcliff said. At this point, theres not really much else we can do with it.

The universitys police department issued a statement notifying staff and students about the students reported attack. In a separate statement that didnt mention the incident, university president E. Joseph Savoie called for unity after a long, contentious presidential campaign.

With the election behind us, we must now concentrate on trying to find common ground that will enable us to move forward - together - as a nation, Savoie said.

Kareem Attia, a 23-year-old graduate student who is president of the universitys Muslim Student Association, said he didnt want to jump to any conclusions about whether the election results inspired the alleged attack.

I dont think thats proper, he said. But I will say a hate crime is a hate crime. Its not within our religion to accept it. Its not within our species of humans to accept that, either.
Demonstrators in both red and blue states hit the streets for another day Thursday to express their outrage over Donald Trump's unexpected win. (Photo: AP)

Washington: Thousands of protesters angry over Donald Trump's election win took to the streets for a second straight night, with at least one demonstration degenerating into a riot against the tycoon turned president-elect.

Accusing Trump of racism, sexism and xenophobia, protesters from New York to Los Angeles blocked traffic and chanted slogans like "Not my president" and "We reject the president-elect."

The worst violence was in the northwestern city of Portland, where protesters hurled projectiles at officers, vandalized businesses, smashed car windows and attacked drivers.

Police said they were treating the protests as a "riot" due to what they said was "extensive criminal and dangerous behavior."

In his first comments on the unrest, Trump blamed the media.

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" tweeted Trump.

Hours later he seemed to change tack, writing "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!"

The violence stood in contrast to an apparently harmonious meeting between Trump and President Barack Obama designed to heal divisions after the most acrimonious election campaign in recent memory.

Obama and Trump put past animosity aside during the 90-minute White House meeting designed to quell fears about the health of the world's pre-eminent democracy, and vowed to carry out a smooth transfer of power.

After a nasty campaign that culminated in the election of a 70-year-old billionaire and former reality TV star who has never held public office and who gained power on a populist platform, the message was: this is business as usual in a democracy.

The outgoing Democratic president and his successor huddled one-on-one in the Oval Office, for what Obama characterized as an "excellent conversation" and then put on a remarkably civil joint public appearance.

"It is important for all of us, regardless of party and regardless of political preferences, to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face," Obama said.

Trump appeared more subdued than usual, and was unusually cautious and deferential in his remarks.

"Mr President, it was a great honour being with you," Trump said, calling Obama a "very good man."

Don't answer questions

The meeting, which came less than 36 hours after Trump's shock election victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, had the potential to be awkward.

After all, Trump championed the so-called "birther movement" challenging that Obama was actually born in the United States, a suggestion laden with deep racial overtones only dropping the position recently.

And if the president-elect fulfils his campaign promises, he will unravel almost all of Obama's signature achievements.

Trump who previously called Obama the "most ignorant president in our history" said he looked forward to receiving the president's counsel.

Obama who has cast Trump as a whiner and "uniquely unqualified" to be commander-in-chief vowed his support.

He told Trump his administration would "do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds."

The two men ended the improbable and historic White House encounter with a handshake and refused to take questions, appearing to find common cause in their opinion of the press.

"Here's a good rule. Don't answer questions when they just start yelling," Obama told Trump.

Current, future first ladies

While their husbands were getting acquainted, First Lady Michelle Obama met soon-to-be successor Melania Trump while Vice President Joe Biden held West Wing talks with Trump's running mate Mike Pence.

In the evening, Trump tweeted: "A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!"

White House officials said Obama and Trump discussed a range of issues including global hotspots and the president's meetings next week with leaders from Germany, Greece and across the Asia-Pacific.

On that trip, Obama is likely to be inundated with panicked questions about America's role in world affairs.

The White House hopes that by rolling out the red carpet for Trump, they can bind him to some of the conventions of the office.

'Real job' on health care

Trump then travelled to Capitol Hill to meet Republican leaders who had been at best cool to him winning their party's nomination.

The president-elect proclaimed health care, border security and jobs as his top three priorities in the White House.

"We had a very detailed meeting," Trump told reporters. "As you know, health care -- we're going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on health care," he said.

Trump made repealing Obamacare, and building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, pillars of his presidential campaign.

During a bitter campaign that tugged at America's democratic fabric, the tycoon also pledged to deport illegal immigrants, ban Muslims from the country and tear up free-trade deals.

Trump said he and the Republican majority in Congress were going to accomplish "absolutely spectacular things for the American people," adding he was eager to get started.

Team Trump unveiled a transition website, www.greatagain.gov that highlights the colossal human resources challenge facing the incoming administration under the headline "Help wanted: 4,000 presidential appointees."
Tokyo: India will agree on Monday to purchase 12 amphibious rescue aircraft from Japanese manufacturer ShinMaywa Industries worth $1.5 billion-$1.6 billion, a Japanese daily reported on Sunday.

Japan and India have been holding talks on the purchase for more than two years. It would one of Japan's first sales of military equipment since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lifted a 50-year ban on arms exports and it reflects growing defence ties between the two countries.

The Defence Ministry will approve the purchase of 12 US-2 aircraft at a Defense Acquisitions Council meeting scheduled for Monday, Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported, citing senior ministry officials it did not name.

The deal will be included in a memorandum of understanding to be signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Japan from Thursday to Saturday, the Nikkei said, citing the officials.

During the visit, Mr Abe will also urge PM Modi to expand its usage of Japan's high-speed train technology, the Nikkei reported.
Its been an active year for home sales in the Chattanooga area, and if youre celebrating an accepted offer on your dream home, then the reality of the home-buying process has probably just set in. As you consider the long list of items to complete before closing day, at the top of your to-do list should be scheduling a home inspection.

Although not required by law, many lenders do require a home inspection, which helps protect the large investment you are about to make. Youll want to learn as much as you can about the physical condition of the home before you buy it, to ensure its a sound investment. And while an inspection cannot guarantee the condition of a home, the inspector can alert you to items that need repair or any safety concerns.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about the home inspection process.

1) Schedule the Inspection Quickly

It is the buyers responsibility to schedule and pay for the inspection. You should schedule the home inspection as soon as you can after your offer has been accepted. This ensures youll have enough time to requests repairs or to get out of the contract if the inspector discovers a deal-breaker for you.

When choosing an inspector, your realtor may have a recommendation or you can find one through the American Society of Home Inspectors (www.homeinspector.org)

2) Inspection Describes the Basic Physical Condition of a Home

An inspectors job is examine the current condition of a house. This includes pointing out what components and systems may need major repair or replacement. The inspector will examine the home's exterior, including steps, porches, decks, chimneys, roof, windows and doors.

Inspectors also look inside the home to examine the attics electrical components, plumbing, central heating and air conditioning, basement/crawlspaces and garages. A home inspection will not include cosmetic issues that do not impact the working condition of the home.

3) Buyers Should Be Present for the Inspection

As the buyer, its important for you to be at the home for the inspection. Ask the inspector if you can follow him around to better understand what he is examining and to ask questions if needed. This is a great way for you to get to know your new home and become familiar with areas that may need attention.

After the inspection, the inspector will provide you with a report. You can then determine if you will ask the seller to make any repairs or give you a credit to make the repairs on your own. Its important to keep in mind that no home is perfect. But the inspection report should help you determine if its the perfect home for you.

To learn more about the home inspections in the Chattanooga area, contact Home Builders Association of Greater Chattanooga at 624-9992 or www.hbagc.net.






Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during his ceremonial welcome in Tokyo on Friday. (Photo: PTI)

Tokyo: Making an exception, Japan on Friday signed a historic civil nuclear cooperation deal with India, opening the door for collaboration between their industries in the field even as the countries signed nine other agreements in various areas to bolster bilateral ties.

The agreements, including the one for cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy, marks a historic step in their engagement to build a clean energy partnership, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after wide-ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries and Abe said at the joint media interaction with Modi that he was delighted over the signing of agreement on peaceful use of nuclear energy.

"This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in Non-Proliferation regime even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT," he said.

"It (the agreement) is in line with Japan's ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons," said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II.

He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said.

"Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of Climate Change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan," he said and thanked Abe, Japanese government and Parliament for their support to this agreement.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.

In his remarks, Prime Minister Modi said as democracies, the two countries "support openness, transparency and the rule of law".

"We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he said.
Ahead of the talks, Modi was accorded a guard of honour at Kantei, the Japanese Prime Minister's official residence. (Photo: MEA/Twitter)

Tokyo: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday held wide-ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe in Tokyo, aimed at giving a fillip to the bilateral strategic relations.

"Reviewing the strength of a Special Strategic and Global Partnership. PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo lead delegation level talks," External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted along with a picture of the meeting.

Ahead of the talks, Modi was accorded a guard of honour at Kantei, the Japanese Prime Minister's official residence. "The ceremonies that strengthen a time tested friendship. PM @narendramodi receives formal honours at Kantei," Swarup tweeted along with some photographs of the occasion.

After his arrival in Japan yesterday, Modi tweeted that he was looking forward to fruitful deliberations that will boost economic and cultural ties between India and Japan.

At their annual Summit, Modi and Abe will discuss ways to enhance ties in a broad range of areas, including security, trade and investment, skill development and infrastructure development.

After the Summit talks, about 12 pacts will be signed by the two sides, sources said, adding these would cover areas like skill development, cultural exchanges and infrastructure.

Also, a civil nuclear deal is likely to be signed today. The two sides had sealed a broad agreement during Abe's visit to India last December but the final deal was yet to be signed as certain technical and legal issues were to be thrashed out.

Both the countries have completed the internal procedures including legal and technical aspects of the text of the pact, Swarup said last week. When specifically asked whether the pact will be signed during Modi's visit, he only said, "I cannot pre-judge outcome of the talks."

Negotiations for the nuclear deal between the two sides have been going on for a number of years but the progress on these was halted because of political resistance in Japan after the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover. (Photo: Representational Image/AFP)

Mazar-I-Sharif: The death toll from a powerful Taliban truck bombing at the German consulate in Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif city rose to at least six Friday, with more than 100 others wounded in a major militant assault.

The Taliban said the bombing late Thursday, which tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars, was a "revenge attack" for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead.

The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

All German staff from the consulate were unharmed, according to the foreign ministry in Berlin.

But seven Afghan civilians were killed, including two motorcyclists who were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop, said deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri.

A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added.

Local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez said the city hospitals received six dead bodies, including two killed by bullets.

At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries, he added.

"The consulate building has been heavily damaged," the German foreign ministry said in a statement. "Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families."

A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting.

"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."

Afghan special forces have cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area after the explosion.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations.

America's longest war

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents routinely exaggerate battlefield claims.

Posting a Google Earth image of the consulate on Twitter, Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.

US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims' relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

The country's worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up air strikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign -- even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.
Refugees arrive at the Kokkinotrimithia refugee camp, some 20 kilometres outside the Cypriot capital Nicosia, on Thursday, after they were rescued by police off the northwestern coast of the island. (Photo: AFP)

Nicosia, Cyprus: Cyprus police say a Syrian woman claims she gave birth aboard a boat loaded with 128 other migrants as they made their way from Turkey to the eastern Mediterranean island.

Police spokesperson Andreas Angelides said Thursday the woman told authorities the birth took place a day into the two-day trip that began in Mersin, Turkey, and ended when rescue crews towed the boat to Cyprus northwestern coast.

Angelides said the captain had abandoned the boat before rescuers reached it late Wednesday. Most of the migrants, including 48 children, were taken to a reception center near the capital, Nicosia. Five of the children were unaccompanied.

Angelides said the migrants paid traffickers $2,000 each for the journey. Nine men were detained after they were found to have been previously deported from Cyprus.
Maureen Travis, one of the oldest employees of the Indian High Commission in the UK. (Photo: Facebook)

London: One of the oldest employees of the Indian High Commission in the UK passed away in London on Thursday.

Maureen Travis, who took on secretarial work at India House in 1948 and went on to take charge of the library under 25 high commissioners over the years, had carried on working well into her 90s.

"It's hard to imagine India House without Maureen. She has been part of the history of India House from its very inception, and her passing away will leave a vacuum that can never be filled," said Dinesh Patnaik, acting high commissioner of India to the UK.

Ms Travis described the High Commission's library, stocked with over 20,000 books and journals, as "love's labour".

She began by dividing time between her work in the education department and the library until 1956, when she shifted entirely to the latter.

"India came to me through its people and the books," she was quoted as saying.

Ms Travis, among the few local British staff employed at the mission, served under all Indian high commissioners to the UK - starting with VK Krishna Menon, the first Indian envoy posted to the UK after independence.

"I was young then and quote nervous. Krishna Menon was a very kind and soft spoken person," the librarian had said a few years ago.

Ms Travis was much loved by the staff of India House over her 68 years of employment in the historic building. While she was to never visit India, it was clear she knew all about the country having read every book in the India House library.
The UN human rights office has raised alarm over hundreds of grotesque atrocities allegedly committed by IS as Iraqi forces have pushed their nearly month-long offensive to retake Mosul, the last jihadist bastion in Iraq. (Photo: Representational Image)

Geneva: Islamic State group fighters reportedly shot dead more than 60 people this week and hung some of their bodies from poles after alleging they had collaborated with Iraqi troops, the United Nations said on Friday.

The UN human rights office has raised alarm over hundreds of grotesque atrocities allegedly committed by IS as Iraqi forces have pushed their nearly month-long offensive to retake Mosul, the last jihadist bastion in Iraq.

"On Tuesday, ISIL reportedly shot and killed 40 civilians in Mosul city after accusing them of 'treason and collaboration' with the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)," rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said in a statement, using another acronym for the Islamic State.

"The victims were dressed in orange clothes marked in red with the words: 'traitors and agents of the ISF'. Their bodies were then hung on electrical poles in several areas in Mosul city," she added.

Abu Saif, a resident of eastern Mosul, told AFP by telephone that he had seen bodies strung up in the city along with signs that read "agent" and "traitor".

He did not have an exact count of the total number of bodies, but said he saw between 30 and 40.

"The Daesh organisation gathered people in some of the streets of Mosul and publicly executed a number of people of various ages, some of them by gunfire and others by beheading," he said, using an Arabic name for IS.

According to the UN, a 27-year-old man was reportedly killed in public in central Mosul Tuesday for using a mobile phone, which IS has banned in areas it controls.

And on Wednesday, IS slaughtered another 20 people at the Ghabat Military Base in northern Mosul after accusing them of "leaking information," the UN statement said.

"Their bodies were also hung at various intersections in Mosul, with notes stating: 'decision of execution' and 'used cellphones to leak information to the ISF'", the statement added.

All of the killings apparently followed rulings by the so-called "courts" established by IS.

Conclusively verifying the details of massacres allegedly perpetrated by the jihadists since the US-backed Mosul offensive began, has been a challenge for UN investigators amid the chaos of the fighting and the threat of reprisals against sources.

Shamdasani said Friday that one recent source was a man who pretended to be dead during a massacre and contacted UN staffers after escaping. She did not specify which incident the man had survived.
Pakistan expressed grave concern over the increased frequency and duration of indiscriminate firing from the Indian side, deliberate targeting of villages and civilian populated areas. (Photo: Representational Image/PTI)

Islamabad: Pakistan on Friday briefed Head of Missions of P5 countries on the alleged Indian aggression on the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, saying the use of "heavy weaponry" by the Indian Army threatens peace and stability and may lead to a "strategic miscalculation".

Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry provided details to the ambassadors of China, France, Russian, UK and USA, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, about unprovoked firing and ceasefire violations by the "Indian occupation Forces" in the past two months, the Foreign Office (FO) said.

Chaudhry expressed grave concern over the increased frequency and duration of indiscriminate firing from the Indian side, deliberate targeting of villages and civilian populated areas, resulting in the death of 26 civilians and injuring 107 others, said FO.

The Foreign Secretary also alleged that the Indian side was resorting to such heavy weaponry use after a gap of 13 years.

"Pakistan has been compelled to respond but with maximum restraint. The Armed Forces of Pakistan gave a befitting response," FO quoted Chaudhry as saying.

He expressed apprehension that Indian actions, which constituted a threat for the maintenance of peace and security, may lead to a "strategic miscalculation".

He said India was also not cooperating with the United Nations Military Observers Group (UNMOGIP).

The Heads of Missions assured that they would convey Pakistan's concern to their respective capitals, the FO statement said.
In an interview in earlier this year, Trump had dubbed Pakistan as a vital problem for the United States because they have a thing called nuclear weapons. (Photo: AFP/Representational Image)

Islamabad: The incoming Trump administration is expected to put pressure on Pakistan to limit its nuclear and strategic missile programme, claims Pakistan journalist Ansar Abbasi in an opinion piece.

According to Abbasi, the Obama administration tried to achieve the target but failed because of Islamabad's plain and unambiguous state of denial.

Trump while campaigning for the elections had made negative references to Pakistan.

In an interview in earlier this year, Trump had dubbed Pakistan as a vital problem for the United States because they have a thing called nuclear weapons, and at the same time hinting at seeking help from India and other nations to address the problem of a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

According to reports, during Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's official visit to the United States last year, President Obama had urged him to limit its strategic defence programme.

Sharif was told that if Pakistan limits its strategic programme, Washington would consider recognizing Islamabad as a nuclear-weapon state. But the proposal was rejected by Islamabad.
Kathmandu: Nepali Congress (NC) on Friday refuted reports that the party chief and former premier Sher Bahadur Deuba met a representatives of Tibetan Spiritual leader the Dalai Lama during his recent India trip, underlining that it is "firm" on the "one-China" policy.

In a statement Nepali Congress has refuted the media reports and claimed that the picture showing Deuba sitting next to Lobsang Sangay, the Prime Minister of the Tibetan government in exile, during a conference in Goa last week was morphed.

The party said there was no truth in Deuba holding informal meeting with the Tibetan representative as reported by some media.

Some of the national dailies in Nepal published reports and pictures showing Deuba sitting next to Lobsang in the audience seat after the inaugural session of a conference on 'Democracy, Development and Dissent', organised by India Foundation in Goa last week.

NC has dismissed the reports, saying "Deuba hasn't met any representative of the Dalai Lama while in Goa."

The party said that is was always firm on one-China policy and will continue to be committed towards it.

A picture released by NC's headquarters on Friday showed Deuba along with BJP president Amit Shah, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu and Swami Tejomayananda, global head of Chinmaya Mission, on the dais.

"Deuba was not aware of who was seated where in the audience, neither did he take note of it," the party said in the statement. Deuba, who was seated in the dais, had left the conference hall soon after the inaugural session," read the statement.

The picture of Deuba, which went viral on social media, was not of the dais but of the participants' side. In the picture Deuba was shown sitting next to the Tibetan representative.

Beijing views the Dalai Lama as separatist and aiming to split Tibet from China. It is opposed to any foreign leaders meeting the Dalai Lama or his representatives.
Pak PM Sharif has already sacked his information minister Pervaiz Rashid for failing to stop the publication of the story that appeared just days after India conducted surgical strikes across the LoC. (Photo: AP)

Lahore: A Pakistani court on Friday accepted a petition seeking investigation by a judicial commission of the source, who leaked information on a reported rift between the government and the country's powerful army in the aftermath of India's surgical strikes on the LoC, to a leading daily.

Dismissing the objections on the petition filed by Pakistan Awami Tahreek, the Lahore High Court accepted it for regular hearing from November 14.

The petitioner has raised objections on Justice (R) Amer Raza, head of the seven-member committee appointed to investigate the 'Newsgate Scandal', saying he (Raza) has close association with Sharif and therefore his investigation will not be impartial.

He requested the court to dissolve this committee and constitute a judicial commission headed by a serving judge to investigate the security leaks matter.

Since the publication of the 'anti-military' story on October 6 'Civilians tell military, act against militants or face international isolation', there has been immense pressure on the Nawaz government to probe the matter and fix the responsibility as who leaked the sensitive information to Dawn's reporter Cyril Almeida.

Sharif has already sacked his information minister Pervaiz Rashid for "failing to stop the publication of the story" that appeared just days after India conducted surgical strikes across the LoC in September end, inflicting significant casualties on the Pakistani side.

According to the story, in the national security meeting Sharif directed the military that "fresh attempts be made to conclude the Pathankot investigation and restart the stalled Mumbai attacks-related trials in a Rawalpindi anti-terrorism court".

Besides, the military-led intelligence agencies will not interfere if law enforcement agencies act against militant groups like Jammat-ud-Dawah and Jaish-e-Mohammad, the prime minister was quoted as saying. The military said Dawn's story was a breach of national security.

Meanwhile, the country's print media watchdog, the Press Council of Pakistan (PCP) has asked the government's committee not to proceed against the newspaper (Dawn) or insist it to disclose its source.

The PCP said such matters fall within the council's jurisdiction and should have been brought before it in the event of any grievance, as envisaged in the PCP Ordinance, adding that it is "unfortunate that neither the government nor any of its departments has referred this matter to it".
Lee Universitys musical ensemble Advent Now! will present a concert titled, Advent Now! Christmas in November, on Tuesday at 6 p.m. in Squires Recital Hall. All donations from this event will go toward the ensembles musical missions trip to Japan.

Advent Now! will visit Japan from Dec. 6-24, sharing the love and story of Christ through a series of concerts.

Many people in Japan are interested in American Christmas traditions and like to try them out, even though they do not understand the origins of the celebration, according to Advent Now! ensemble director Dr. Austin Patty.

They know about Santa, Christmas trees, and so on, but they do not know about Jesus, says Dr. Patty. They get to hear about Him for the first time at our concerts.

This years ensemble is composed of a group of students from the School of Music, including a vocal quintet, a string quartet, a pianist, a bassist, and a percussionist.

The concert will feature a diverse program of vocal and instrumental Christmas music, including classical, jazz, and black gospel music.

This concert is free and open to the public, but donations are welcome. Donations may be made at the door or online for their December trip. To donate online or for more information, visit https://www.givesendgo.com/adventnow/.
The huge explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil city yesterday, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover. (Photo: Representational Image/AP)

Mazar-i-Sharif: A powerful Taliban truck bomb struck the German consulate in Afghanistan's northern Mazar-i-Sharif city, killing at least four people and wounding more than 100 in a major militant assault in the war-torn country.

The Taliban called it a "revenge attack" for US airstrikes in the volatile province of Kunduz earlier this month that left up to 32 civilians dead.

The huge explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil city yesterday, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of German consulate in the city," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat said.

German officials in Kabul declined to comment when contacted by AFP. A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting at his ministry.

"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."

Afghan Special Forces cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel. Helicopters were heard flying over the diplomatic mission early Friday as ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area, according to an AFP reporter near the scene.

At least two dead bodies and more than 100 wounded people -- including at least 10 children -- had so far been brought to two city hospitals, said local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez.

Some of the wounded are in a critical condition, he added. The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jumpstart stalled peace negotiations.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the German consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents are routinely known to exaggerate battlefield claims.
Kathmandu: Nepal's Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal pledged Friday that amendments to the country's divisive constitution would be presented to parliament within a month as he attempted to stave off fresh political turmoil in the quake-hit nation.

The Himalayan nation was rocked by months-long protests and a border blockade by demonstrators unhappy with the terms of the constitution adopted in September last year.

Marking his first 100 days in office, Maoist leader Dahal, who is better known by his nom de guerre Prachanda or "the fierce one", said that addressing the demands of the protesting parties was his top priority.

"The constitutional amendment proposal has been prepared and we are trying to garner agreement on it," Dahal told reporters.

"The amendment proposal will be registered at the parliament within a month."

Failure to make progress on the changes to charter felled previous Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli who resigned minutes before facing a no-confidence vote in parliament in July.

Kathmandu has shuffled through three prime ministers since it adopted the new constitution and Oli's rule came to an abrupt end after former Maoist rebels deserted his fractious coalition, accusing him of reneging on past deals.

"The recent talks have been positive, but we want to see results," said Rajendra Shrestha of the Federal Socialist Forum, part of an alliance that represents the protesting parties.

"If the government keeps missing deadlines, we will be compelled to take to the streets again," he said.

The new charter, the first drawn up by elected representatives, was meant to bolster Nepal's transformation to a democratic republic after decades of political instability.

But ongoing discussions between the government and protesters over the charter particularly over the rights of different ethnic groups have failed to yield agreement.

More than 50 people have died in clashes between police and protesters, who say the constitution has left them marginalised.
The Delhi governments excise department arrested 122 people since Monday as part of its crackdown on illegal consumption of liquor in open and public places.





On Wednesday, 45 people were arrested, which brought the total number of violators to 122. The violators were handed over to the Delhi Police, which booked them under section 40 of the Delhi Excise Act.



The violators were mostly arrested from areas of Seelampur and Anand Vihar in east Delhi; Chanakyapuri, Defence Colony and Kalkaji in south Delhi; Mayapuri and Khyala in west Delhi; and Mangol Puri and Rani Bagh area in north Delhi.



Delhis Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia reiterated that the government does not want to lock people up in prison and that their intention is reformatory. He added, though, that violation of law will not be tolerated.



On Wednesday, the Deputy CM said that the consumption of liquor in the open and in vehicles is not just a safety hazard but is also a risk to womens safety in the national capital.



He added that illegal liquor consumption in the open gives rise to mushrooming of illegal shops, adds to pollution and promotes social evils. The Delhi government launched a weeklong awareness drive in this regard and the excise department is likely to make more arrests.



The Delhi government had earlier announced that anyone caught drinking in public will have to pay a fine of Rs 5,000 whereas anyone caught causing a nuisance will pay a fine of Rs 10,000 and will be arrested.
Presenting India as a land of "incredible" opportunities, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today invited Japanese companies to invest, saying substantial finances are needed for development of the country and reforms were underway to make it the world's "most open" economy.

Addressing top Japanese business leaders here, he said India wants "greater influx of Japanese investments" and "for this, we will be proactive in addressing your concerns".

He said his government was committed to "further refine our policies and procedures" to boost 'Make in India' and was putting in place a "stable, predictable and transparent" regulatory mechanisms.

He mentioned progress on GST and talked about other "decisive steps" to usher in reforms in policies and laws to make India an attractive destination for foreign investment.

"Today, India is on the path of several major transformations. We have taken decisive steps and built a governance system that will help India realise its potential. The results are already visible," the Prime Minister told the luncheon session organised by Japanese business chambers  Keidanren, Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Japan-India Business Forum.

Noting that India's development needs are "huge and substantial", he said there are unprecedented opportunities for Japanese companies in the country.

Explaining why the Japanese companies should invest in India, he said: "Even against a weak international economic scenario, the news from India is of strong growth and abundant opportunities. It is of incredible opportunities, and about India's credible policies."

Modi, who is on his second visit here since becoming the Prime Minister in May 2014, said that in 2015, the Indian economy "grew faster than other major economies" and "the World Bank and IMF assess this trend to continue".

He said lower labour costs, large domestic market and macro-economic stability combine to make India a very attractive investment destination.

Modi, who is on a three-day visit of Japan aimed at pushing the bilateral relations, said, "to those who are exploring (opportunities), I promise you that we are committed to further refine our policies and procedures to boost Make in India".





The Prime Minister said India's prowess in software is complemented by Japan's strength in hardware. "Want to assure you that we will provide a level-playing field," he told the Japanese companies.





"India's development needs are huge and substantial. We seek rapid achievement of our developmental priorities, but in a manner that is environment friendly. We want to build roads and railways in a faster way; we want to explore minerals and hydrocarbons in a greener way; we want to build homes and civic amenities in a smarter way; and we want to produce energy in a cleaner way," he said.





In addition, Modi said, there are futuristic infrastructure projects of second generation which include the Dedicated Freight Corridor, the Industrial Corridors, High Speed Railways, Smart Cities, Coastal Zones and Metro Rail projects.





"All of these offer unprecedented opportunities for Japanese industry. 'Made in India' and 'Made by Japan' combination has already started to work and converge wonderfully," he said.





He congratulated the Japanese companies which are already in India and pointed out that cars made in India by a Japanese carmaker are already selling in Japan.





"The very word 'Japan' in India is a benchmark of quality, excellence, honesty and integrity," Modi said and noted that Japanese people have led the world in sustainable development with a deep sense of social responsibility and ethical behaviour. He said India and Japan are best suited to work together.





"India's core values are rooted in our civilizational heritage. It gets inspiration through the teachings of 'Truth' from Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. It gets its wings from our democratic traditions, emphasis on both wealth and value creation, a robust sense of enterprise and quest to modernize and prosper its economy.





"Our past has desired us to stand together. Our present is encouraging us to work together," Modi said.









"I have long maintained that India needs scale, speed and skill. Japan has a very important role to play in all three," the Prime Minister said.



"Creating an enabling environment for business and attracting investments remains my top priority. Stable, predictable and transparent regulations are redefining the nature of doing business in India," he said, adding: "We will further strengthen the special mechanisms including Japanese Industrial Townships."



Modi said in the last two financial years, India received about USD 55 billion as foreign direct investment, which is "not only the highest ever FDI but also highest growth in FDI in India".



"Today, every global company has an India strategy. And, Japanese companies are no exception. It is no surprise that today Japan is India's fourth largest source of FDI," he said.



Japanese investments, he said, extend to both green-field and brown-field projects, manufacturing and services, infrastructure and insurance, and e-commerce and equity.



Japan's involvement in India's mega projects like Dedicated Freight Corridors, Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor, Metro Rail and High Speed Rail "signifies scale and speed", he said.



He asked the Japanese companies to make use of the 10-year business visa, the e-Tourist Visa, and the Visa-On-Arrival facility that is being offered by India to Japanese travellers.



The Social Security Agreement with Japan has also been implemented, he noted, adding it was good news E-governance is no longer just a fancy buzzword, but a basic facility.



Talking about the changes in rules and laws in India, Modi said, "we have successfully enacted a new legislation regarding Goods and Services Tax (GST)."



The Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code passed recently will make it easier for investors to have an exit, he said, adding India is also setting up commercial courts and commercial divisions to ensure speedy disposal of commercial matters.



The arbitration proceedings will now become faster as the Arbitration law has been amended, Modi said.



"In June this year, we have further relaxed our FDI regime. We have also announced a new Intellectual Property Rights policy," he said while mentioning the specific reforms undertaken.



"All of these point to the new direction of economic reforms that India is pursuing. My resolve is to make India the most open economy in the world. The impact of our efforts is being felt and recognised globally," he said.



Modi said FDI equity inflows have gone up by 52 per cent in the last two years and India has gone up 19 spots on the World Logistics Performance Index 2016 brought out by the World Bank.



"We have done substantial improvement on Ease of doing business. Our ranking has improved considerably," he said, adding in the last two years, India has gone up by 32 places on the Global Competitiveness Index of World Economic Forum.



Citing the World Investment Report of 2015, he said India is first among the top 10 FDI destinations of the world.



Underlining that India and Japan will have to continue to play a major role in Asia's emergence, the Prime Minister said the growing convergence of views between the two countries under the 'Special Strategic and Global Partnership' has the capacity to drive the regional economy and development and stimulate the global growth.



"Strong India, Strong Japan will not only enrich our two nations, it will also be a stabilising factor in Asia and the world," he said.



Modi said India and Japan has a number of skill development initiatives already underway and "our partnership now extends to this crucial area of our priority".



He said "the captains of Japanese business and industry sitting here will agree with me that a combination of Japan's technologies and India's human resources will create a win-win situation."



He said he had mentioned it earlier also that the combination of Japanese hardware and India's software is a "fantastic combination" which will benefit both the countries.



"Let us join hands even more closely and strongly. Let us march forward and explore bigger potentials and brighter prospects," he concluded in his address to the gathering that also included some Indian business leaders.



After the CII-Keidanren Business Luncheon, Modi tweeted: "Had very good discussions with business leaders on ways to boost India-Japan economic ties." "I have been saying that this 21st Century is Asia's Century. Asia has emerged as the new centre of global growth. It is competitive in manufacturing and services, is becoming a hub for global innovation, is home to large talented workforce, and as home to 60 per cent of global population, it is an ever expanding market," he said.

Emphasising that his government is "pursuing a new direction of economic reforms", the Prime Minister said his "resolve is to make India the most open economy in the world".
Donald Trump should begin work to kick-starting the economy, enforcing immigration laws and tackling terrorism in Asia, a US-India political action committee has said, as it expressed confidence that the US will have "greater relations" with India under his presidency.





The US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) congratulated Trump on winning the 2016 Presidential race and commended efforts of all Indian-American supporters who canvassed and fund raised for this successful campaign.



USINPAC Indiana Chair and Chair for Asians for Trump- Pence Campaign Raju Chinthala described Trump's election win as "historical" in American history, saying "he has changed major political system in USA. He will be a great president and will build greater relations with India."



Assuring the support of Indian-Americans to a Trump administration, USINPAC Chairman Sanjay Puri said Trump "must work on kick starting the economy, tackling ISIS and terrorism in Asia. The Indian-American community congratulates President Trump on such a decisive win and pledges to work with the new administration."



RNC National Committee woman from California Harmeet Kaur Dhillon said Trumps "stunning" victory "heralds a new era of opportunity and promise" for all Americans, which will naturally benefit Indian-Americans.



With Trump's penchant for hiring the best talent, Dhillon expressed confidence that many prominent Indian-Americans will be inducted into the new administration.



"As a diverse community, Indian-Americans can expect the new President to focus on lowering regulatory burdens, reducing taxes on individuals and corporations, focusing on jobs and growth for America before other countries, enforce the laws of the United States, including its immigration laws, and keep our nation safe from harm," Dhillon said.



Dhillon added that the countrys leaders have failed to put the nation first, enabling foreign nations to perceive America as weak.



The committee said foreign policy challenges for Trump will include eliminating ISIS, renegotiating the NATO treaty, reconfiguring US relations with Russia and the war in Syria and illegal immigration.



"President Trump now has the mandate to navigate the party to the future with a mix of conservatism and populism," it said.



The political action committee focuses on the over 3.2 million Indian-Americans and works on issues that concern the community. It supports candidates for local, state and federal office and encourages political participation by the Indian- American community.




"As part of the government's initiative of ease of doing business, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has completely done away with the process of obtaining an annual renewal for TV channels in the current form," he said.





Naidu said that "broadcasters who have been given the permission for uplinking or downlinking can continue their operations by simply paying the annual permission fee upto 60 days before the due date, which by itself will be treated as permission for continuation of a channel for a further period of one year."





This decision, the minister emphasised, would benefit a total of 963 channels and teleports. The I&B ministry, Naidu said, is committed to the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to promote ease of doing business and will continue to take more steps in consultation with stakeholders.





The minister, who was addressing the Economic Editors' Conference here, also lauded the government's decision to demonetise Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes, saying the Prime Minister wants to realise 'Swachh Bharat' (Clean India), in terms of 'tan', 'man' and 'dhan' (body, mind and wealth).





Naidu said that while some people maintain the government has taken a sudden step of demonetising the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, the government has been taking steps related to curbing the black money menace ever since it came to power.



He said that soon after coming to power, the government, at its first Cabinet meeting, had set up an SIT to bring back large amounts of money stashed abroad.



"Some people are saying it was done all of a sudden, people should have been given advance notice...Advance notice for what? I am not able to understand," Naidu said.



He said that the historic step has been hailed by all except "some vested interests" who were trying to create panic. He emphasised that common people can exchange their hard- earned money with new notes and that genuine problems are being addressed.





Naidu also said that the media while highlighting the inconveniences, should also show the larger picture on the benefits of the move for the country. He said some people were calling it an "emergency", but those who are worried are people like unscruplous arms dealers, drug dealers.





The latest decision was not taken in isolation but is a part of series of steps, Naidu said, noting that these steps include setting up of SIT, agreements with countries like Mauritius and Cyprus and income declaration scheme.



He said that the economy was in a bad shape when the Modi government came to power but the macroeconomic indicators are better now and common people will benefit.

The government has decided to ease the "annual renewal" norms for TV channels and existing broadcasters can continue operations by simply paying annual permission fee 60 days before the due date, Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said today.
The Supreme Court today asked the Centre and Chhattisgarh government to find a peaceful solution to the Naxal problem in the state and adopt a "pragmatic" approach towards life.





A bench of Justices M B Lokur and Adarsh Goel said there has to be some peaceful solution to this problem, after Chhattisgarh government gave an oral assurance that no coercive action will be taken against social activist Nandini Sundar and others till November 15.



On November 7, Delhi University Professor Sundar, JNU professor Archana Prasad and others were booked on charges of murder of a tribal villager in the insurgency-hit Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.



"We are trying to help you (Centre and Chhattisgarh), but you are not taking it seriously. You have to find a peaceful solution to the problem. We are not blaming you or them or anybody. You have to take a pragmatic view of life," the bench said.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said there were "authentic and contemporaneous" records which could be placed before the court against all the accused including Sundar.



Mehta's submission came after the bench said it will stay the FIR till the next date of hearing.



He urged the apex court not to form any opinion unless the record was produced before the court in a sealed cover, saying it was a "state of panic" for the country.

t that after the last hearing, an FIR was lodged against the two professors and the activists.



"This is the most astonishing thing which has ever happened, as the activists who went to the state in May were booked for the murder in November," Desai said.



Countering him, Mehta said there was "more than what meets the eye" and they will file the records in a sealed cover before the court on November 15, the next date.



Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, appearing for CBI, said political activist Manish Kunjam who was directed by the court to be provided with security has no threat perception and two Personal Security Officers have been provided by the state.



He said the Centre was not in a position to provide him security and if the court wanted, the state could upgrade it.



ASG said that in the last hearing of the case, the state government had suggested providing them with security but they refused the offer saying "they don't want to be under the eyes of police".


Dr. Lenena Brezna, assistant professor of music at Lee University, has earned her Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Memphis.

Her dissertation, titled The Night Dances: An Analysis of Juliana Halls Night Dances, is based on the six-movement song cycle about the night by female poets, including Emily Dickenson, Emily Bronte, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Juliana Hall has captured every nuance of the night in this song cycle taking the listener on a musical journey that spans dusk till dawn, said Dr. Brezna. She is one of the most important composers of song in the 21st century and is poised to be remembered in future history books alongside Schubert, Wolf, and her mentor, Dominick Argento.

Dr. Brezna began teaching at Lee in 2014 as a lecturer in voice. She previously taught music appreciation as an adjunct instructor at the University of Memphis. She was also an adjunct voice instructor at Northeast Mississippi Community College and has taught voice and piano privately to students of all ages.

She has received acclaim in a variety of operatic roles, along with solo and concert presentations. Dr. Brezna continues to perform and loves finding new teaching applications that benefit her students.



Dr. Brezna earned her Master of Fine Arts degree at Louisiana State University and her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Mississippi.

The Lee University School of Music hosted a reception in honor of Dr. Brezna and her accomplishment.
US Ambassador to India Richard Verma today reiterated that convergence of views was the "new normal" in Indo-US ties which is "based on results" and not on "rhetoric", seeking to assuage nerves in New Delhi on Donald Trump's election as President.





Verma said the next administration in Washington will consider strengthening ties with India as one of its top priorities as the the two countries are "natural partners" at a time when the post World War-II order and its institutions are "under assault".



He was speaking on the future of India-US relations under the new administration, two days after Republican Party nominee Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States, clinching a stunning victory against Hillary Clinton.



"Even on issues that have divided us on recent years, climate change for example...there is convergence. Who would have thought that the US and India would lead the world to a global climate agreement? This is the new normal - strategic, political and economic convergence," Verma said.



In his nearly 20-minute speech, Verma, who is of India- origin, did not refer to Trump even once.



Recently, speaking at Jamia Millia University, he had reached out to Muslims, denouncing the "unacceptable rhetoric" against the community during the election campaigns in the US.



He listed four reasons as to why further building and strengthening of the US-India relationship will be one of the top priorities of Trump administration, including "a strong bipartisan consensus" in Washington in this regard.



"At a time of deep political polarisation in our country, enhancing the US India partnership is something that is refreshingly unifying across the political divide. We have greater convergence on the big issues of the day. We have made it clear that we support India's rise as a global power.



"We see the impact in our counter-terror declarations and the condemnation of terrorism of all forms including cross- border terrorism, our renewed convergence on issues related to Afghanistan, our trilateral cooperation with Japan," he said.



Verma, who took over as the US' top envoy in New Delhi in 2014, said shared values and systems including constitutional democracies, inclusive societies, protection of minority rights, free speech, assembly and religion are among the other major reasons that hold the two countries together.



"Our relationship is not just based on rhetoric but results. In this era of doubts about the benefits of globalisation, this is a shining example of success that stands out in the crowd," he said.



Speaking at the event, organised by trade chamber FICCI, Verma said the number of Indian students studying in the US, which is at its highest now, has seen a substantial jump and the new figures will be announced next week.



Verma said nearly 1.1 million visas were issued for Indian visitors to the US last year which is "three times greater" than it was 10 years ago.



On the day of Trump's election, Verma had said the Indo- US ties, built on shared democratic values, "go beyond" the friendship of the American President and the Indian Prime Minister.



Ambassador Arun Singh, who was until recently India's envoy to US, was present on the occasion. He said India will have to continue pushing the argument that Indian skilled workforce is contributing to the US economy to counter Trump's anti-immigrants stance.



Touching on the same subject, Rajan Bharti Mittal of Bharti enterprises said although there is no problem with the argument that "jobs has to be brought back", there has to be a "give and take" relationship.



Later, Verma said amid declining exports across the world, two-way trade between India and the US has actually increased. The vision of India as outsourcing destination is somehow an "outdated view", he said.



"Not every country in the world has chosen the systems that we have and in today's world where the post World War II order and its institutions are increasingly under assault, US and India are such natural partners or natural allies as the Prime Minister likes to say," he said.



Appearing to strike a farewell note, Verma thanked the US embassy team here and officials across the two administrations for taking bilateral ties to new heights in the past two years.



"I am quite bullish about our future and confident our strong relationship would continue into the next administration and we are committed to make this relationship even stronger in the years to come," Verma said.


Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has urged people to work together to protect themselves from intrusive government surveillance as Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House.





"If we want to have a better world, we cannot hope for an Obama and we should not fear a Donald Trump. Rather we should build it ourselves," Snowden said late yesterday, addressing an audience in the Netherlands in a live video chat from Russia.



While he said Trump's victory in Tuesday's US presidential elections was "a dark moment" in American history, he insisted the bigger question was "how do we defend the rights of everyone, everywhere, without regard to borders?"



Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents in 2013 revealing the vast US surveillance of private data put in place after the September 11, 2001 attacks.



After fleeing from his home in Hawaii, he currently lives as a fugitive in Russia where he has been given shelter.



Snowden appeared yesterday via an encrypted live video stream at a cinema in Amsterdam ahead of the Dutch premiere of director Oliver Stone's new movie about his life.



"I try not to look at this as a question of a single election or a single president or even a single government, because we see these threats coming across borders," Snowden said.



He highlighted Moscow's "Big Brother" law passed earlier this year forcing online companies to store users' data and pass it to government agencies if requested, as well as China's new mass surveillance law.



"This is a dark moment in our nation's history, but it is not the end of history," Snowden said,



"If we work together we can build something better and we can enjoy a more free and a more liberal society that benefits everyone."



Snowden, 33, is wanted in the United States to face trial on charges brought under the tough Espionage Act. But he said he was unconcerned about the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin could send him back once Trump is sworn in.



Although it would "be crazy to dismiss" the idea that Putin could strike a deal to extradite him, Snowden said he would have remained in Hawaii if he had been concerned about his own safety.



"While I obviously care about what happens to me, I am the least important part of any of this. This is not about me, this is about us," he said.



It was more important to focus on resisting the "civic dangers to everyone" rather than on individual cases.



Snowden has repeatedly said he would be prepared to return to the US if he is allowed to address a jury and tell them why he did what he did, saying he remained "proud" of his actions. But that is denied to him under the restrictions of the Espionage Act.
A day after Karnataka minister Tanvir Sait was allegedly caught looking at sleazy pictures on his mobile at a public function, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah today said he would seek a report on the incident, even as the Opposition staged protests demanding Sait's resignation.





"...I will seek the report and then will see whether it needs to be inquired, after inquiry I will take action," Siddaramaiah told reporters in Mysuru.



He rubbished media reports which quoted him as describing the incident as false.

"....did I say media reports are false? Some channels are saying so. What I have said is let the report come, I will examine the veracity," the Chief Minister said.



Minister for Primary and Secondary Education Tanvir Sait had yesterday waded into a controversy after video footage emerged showing him purportedly watching pictures of skimpily clad girls on his mobile on dais at a public function to mark Tipu Jayanti celebrations in Raichur district.



Opposition parties and organisations today held protests in various parts of the state, including Yadgiri, Madikeri, Mysuru, Dharwad and Chitradurga, demanding sacking of Sait.



A protest was also held under the leadership of JD(S) MLC Puttanna, in front of the minister's office at Vidhana Soudha, the state secretariat, in Bengaluru.



Speaking to reporters at Belagavi, Siddaramaiah said, "A mistake is a mistake whether it is committed by BJP or anyone else. I have spoken to Tanvir Sait over phone, he is in Raichur, he will return tomorrow and give an explanation."



"He (Sait) has said that he was not watching obscene pictures but was only scrolling messages received on Whatsapp in his phone," adding, "the minister told me that he was ready for any inquiry."



Meanwhile, state veteran Congress leader Janardhan Poojary also demanded that Sait be sacked.



"If we still sleep, a situation may arise where we will have to sleep during the upcoming elections. So Mr Chief Minister to safeguard the prestige of the people of your district Mysuru, please take action," he told reporters at Mangaluru.



Sait, who represents Narasimharaja constituency in Mysuru, was inducted into the cabinet in June.



The minister has denied any wrongdoing on his part, saying he was only browsing Whatsapp messages on Tipu Jayanti celebrations held across the state yesterday.
India and Japan today sought a peaceful solution to the territorial disputes in the strategic South China Sea, saying parties involved in the matter must not resort to "threat or use of force", in remarks that could anger China which is opposed to any outside interference.





After their comprehensive talks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe also reiterated their commitment to respect freedom of navigation and overflight, and unimpeded lawful commerce, based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.



"In this context, they urged all parties to resolve disputes through peaceful means without resorting to threat or use of force and exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities, and avoid unilateral actions that raise tensions," according to a joint statement issued after their talks.



"Regarding the South China Sea, the two prime ministers stressed the importance of resolving the disputes by peaceful means, in accordance with universally recognised principles of international law including the UNCLOS," it said.



The remarks may not go down well with China, which has been asking countries to refrain from "interfering" in the disputed South China Sea.



Ahead of Modi's visit, a Chinese state media report on Wednesday warned India it may suffer "great losses" in bilateral trade if it joins Japan in asking China to abide by an international tribunal's ruling quashing Beijing's claims over the SCS dispute.



As the leaders of the state parties to the UNCLOS, Modi and Abe "reiterated their view that all parties should show utmost respect to the UNCLOS, which establishes the international legal order of the seas and oceans".



This assumes significance given that China had rejected a verdict given by an international tribunal striking down Chinese claims over the SCS.



China has been making aggressive advances in the strategic region - parts of which are also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei - by rapidly building artificial islets that experts fear could be potentially used as military posts.



China claims by far the largest portion of territory - an area defined by the "nine-dash line" which stretches hundreds of miles south and east from its most southerly province of Hainan.



China has also objected in the past to India's Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) undertaking exploration at the invitation of Vietnam in the SCS, which is believed to be rich in undersea deposits of oil and gas.



India and the US have been calling for freedom of passage in the international waters, much to the discomfort to China.



Modi and Abe asked North Korea, which in September claimed to have conducted its fifth and potentially most powerful nuclear test, to comply with its international obligations towards the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.



India and Japan's interest have been converging on strategic issues like the dispute in the South China Sea, through which USD 5 trillion of trade passes annually, and on the threat Japan perceive from a nuclear-armed North Korea.



"The two prime ministers reaffirmed their determination to cooperate against proliferation activities posing a threat to the region," the joint statement said.



India and Japan also called for "expeditious reforms of the UN including the UNSC to make it more legitimate, effective and representative, taking into account the contemporary realities of the 21st century and reiterated their resolve to work closely with like-minded partners to realise this goal."



"The two Prime Ministers reiterated their support for each other's candidature, based on the firmly shared recognition that India and Japan are legitimate candidates for permanent membership in an expanded UNSC," the statement said.



India and Japan along with Germany and Brazil are part of G4 nations, who support each other's bids for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council.



"Prime Minister Abe briefed Prime Minister Modi on Japan's efforts to further contribute to peace, stability and prosperity of the region including through initiatives such as 'Proactive Contribution to Peace,' the statement said.

It said Modi acknowledged Japan's positive contribution to regional and global stability and prosperity.



"Recognising India as the largest democracy and a fast growing large economy in the Asia-Pacific region, Japan firmly supports India's membership in the APEC. The two Prime Ministers decided to work towards liberalisation and facilitation of trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region," the statement added.



On clean energy cooperation, "they further desired to strengthen bilateral energy cooperation as it will contribute not only to the energy development of both countries, but also to worldwide energy security, energy access and climate change issue."



The two prime ministers welcomed the early entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and reaffirmed their commitment to work together in developing the rules for successful implementation of the agreement.
After Brexit, could there be a Calexit? For some liberal Californians incensed by Donald Trump's election to the presidency over Democrat Hillary Clinton, secession from the United States is the only way forward.



Although observers say the Golden State has little to no chance to ever become a separate country, the idea is appealing for many who are disenchanted with the shock outcome of the vote and say they feel like strangers in a foreign land.



The election result marks a "real division" for California, said Kevin Klowden of the Milken Institute think tank.

"The presidential candidate who lost won California dramatically."



The state is known for its progressive politics on the environment, gun laws and gay rights. On Tuesday, it voted to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.



On the other hand, Trump's anti-immigrant platform, his pro-gun stance and his skepticism about climate change couldn't be further away from the views of most Californians.



Shortly after Trump was declared the winner, protesters took to the streets in the state capital Sacramento, Los Angeles and other towns to express their dismay.



The hashtag #Calexit also began trending on social media with many Twitter users pairing it with #notmypresident.



"I cannot identify with bigotry, sexism, xenophobia," one Twitter user wrote. "I'm no longer American, I am Californian."



Said another: "We'll just take our avocados and legal weed and go."



Silicon Valley venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, who is Iranian-American, said he was willing to bankroll a secessionist campaign.



"If Trump wins, I am announcing and funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation," he tweeted on Tuesday as the unexpected election outcome sunk in.



He said the new nation would be called New California.



Mark Baldassare, head of the Public Policy Institute of California, said although the idea of seceding is unrealistic, it reflects the state's long history of thinking outside the box.



With a population of nearly 40 million, California is one of the most diverse states in America, with whites outnumbered by Hispanics and members of other ethnic groups,

In 2015, it also had the sixth largest economy in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund -- ahead of France and India.
Controversial former Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju was the cynosure of all eyes as he appeared before the apex court today to justify his statement in his blog that its judgement in the Soumya rape-cum-murder case suffered from "gross error".





As lensmen kept waiting for Justice Katju, he arrived at the court premises much before the scheduled 2 pm hearing and was escorted to the judges' library.



Later, in a security cordon he was escorted to court number 6, the doors of which were closed as there was a large gathering of lawyers and media persons.



Many of the lawyers were seen greeting him as securitymen made way for him with the crowd of people jostling with each other to enter the packed courtroom.



As he took seat at 1.45 pm in the front row, a guard stood behind him, which provoked some lawyers to shout at the securityman asking the latter to get out of the courtroom.



"He is not a contemnor. He is a former Supreme Court Judge. Don't stand like this," a senior advocate from the Allahabad High Court, who is also practising in the apex court, shouted.



However, at the intervention of some other lawyers, order prevailed and sharp at 2 pm the three judges started the proceedings on the review pleas in the case.



No sooner the bench commenced hearing on the Soumya rape -cum-murder case, one of the advocates stood up and said, "please note who all wants to assist this court as the court order (to summon Katju) was not as per the law of the land".

At this, the bench asked the lawyer whether he was suggesting that "an open notice should be there to assist us".



"At this moment we need the help of Justice Katju," the bench said and asked the former judge to make his points in 30 minutes.



Justice Katju said "I would request for an hour as you requested me to come and help."



He began by saying "it is not that judges are born not to commit mistakes. Nobody is infallible. I have also committed grave mistakes. I have committed mistakes in some of my judgements which have been pointed to me and similarly, you have also committed mistakes."



At this, Justice Gogoi said "Justice Katju, please do not remind us ... we know that we are also not infallible. You point out where we have committed mistakes."



Katju then commenced his submissions and the focal point of his contention was that judges have not applied "common sense" in appreciating the evidences by relying on hearsay statements of a middle-aged person, who was never traced during the trial, though his version was recorded by prosecution as witness number 4 and 40.



Two prosecution witnesses had stated that this person, who restrained others including the two witnesses from pulling the chain, had told them that the victim had jumped out of the slow-moving train and was alive.



Katju said the apex court was wrong in not attributing that the victim, who was in a semi-conscious state, was driven to jump out of the train as she was under horrible fear that she would be killed by her tormentor.



The former judge was supported by Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the Kerala government, who said the first injury suffered by the victim inside the train and the second when she was found on the rail track, should be considered as sequence of event of the same transaction.



However, the bench was not satisfied and dismissed the review pleas while appreciating the assistance of Justice Katju in the hearing.



After this came the turning point, as Justice Gogoi, heading the three-judge bench, gave a copy of Katju's blog to Rohatgi for his opinion saying "now your (AG's) job as the counsel for Kerala is over. You read this."



The bench then referred to the underlined portion of the copy of the blog to Rohatgi. "This is scandalous", the Attorney General responded.



Within moments, the bench started dictating the order issuing contempt notice to Justice Katju who was taken off guard and protested by saying "I am not scared of it. Don't give me threat. This is not the way you treat a former judge."

"Don't provoke us, Justice Katju," the bench said.



Not only Justice Katju, but Rohatgi too was taken off guard by sudden initiation of the contempt proceedings and told the bench that he wanted to change his view on the remarks referred to in the facebook post of the former judge.



"This (referred portion) is intemperate," Rohatgi said.

Defiant Justice Katju got furious and said, "Don't try to be funny with me. I came under your request, don't treat me like this...Mr (Justice) Gogoi, don't threaten me. Do what you want. I am not scared."



Soon thereafter, the bench called for security saying, "is there anyone to escort Justice Katju out of court?"



Some lawyers present in the already packed courtroom also opposed the unprecedented and historic decision of the apex court against its own former judge.

As the bench retired for the day little after its normal working hour of 4 pm, an upset Justice Katju, surrounded by some of the lawyers, was seen murmuring in utter shock.
In a stifling office on the second floor of an anonymous building along a dusty lane in Lado Sarai  the new hub for young artists in a corner of the southwestern part of this capital city  a 38-year-old menswear designer Vogue.com has called a global fashion superstar in the making sat in semi-darkness.



India is a paradoxical country. And Suket Dhir is a paradoxical guy. Born in Banga, India, he is an unshorn and unshaven Punjabi Hindu who styles himself a wannabe Sikh; a self-described former slacker now blissfully married to a Russian-Indian woman, Svetlana

Dhir, who manages the business; a creative talent eager to compete on the global stage, and yet one who shares his small studio office with his elderly father.

International recognition



He is also an expert craftsman whose subtle tailoring was recognised last January with one of the most prestigious honours in fashion, the International Woolmark Prize, an award that has also gone to Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. The judges who selected Suket as the latest recipient focused their praise on the romantic and internationalised vision of the designer, whose last foray outside India (before traveling to Florence, Italy, to collect the $75,000 in prize money) was a brief trip to Dubai two decades earlier.



Perhaps most appealing of Sukets contradictions is how his restrained tailoring honours and deftly makes use of a range of the varied craft traditions that remain among the wonders of India while simultaneously mining a design vocabulary partly formed by his habit of binge-watching Seinfeld. Almost a year after winning the Woolmark prize, he was scrambling to complete and deliver a collection, his first to be sold outside India, to department stores in Tokyo; Sydney, Australia; Seoul, South Korea; and New York. (Saks Fifth Avenue will feature elements from Sukets label, called Sukhetdhir, starting in December.)



At the time of my visit, the deadline for the first shipments was just over a week away. Tailors in a back room sat patiently at their silent machines. A cutter scissored through layers of denim methodically in the dimly lit room. A power cut coinciding with crunch time may induce at the very least a tantrum for some designers. Yet with the cool of a sannyasi or a stoner, Suket suggested a coffee run.



The spot he chose was Blue Tokai, a hipster joint that is part coffee bar and part industrial grindery. There, amid a clatter of trays and a general conversational din, the soft-spoken chatterbox sketched out the unlikely path he had taken from being an aimless and indifferent student, to that obnoxious voice consumers across the world hear when call centre dialers manage to entrap them (I sold mobile phones for AT&T), to the great hope for Indian design.



Starting out clueless



When he was in his 20s, Suket came to the realisation that he had no five-year, or even five-minute, plan. A friend said, Do you know what you want to do with your life?' he said. And I didnt.



That same friend then pointed to Sukets habitual doodling, his knack for dressing differently from his friends (in LA Gear tracksuits and Fila sneakers) and his near-obsession with FTV, a fashion-focused satellite video channel.He said, Have you ever thought of fashion? Suket said. To be honest, I never had. Suket applied to the elite National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi, was accepted and quickly gravitated toward menswear.



While in design school, Suket developed elements of his vision: silhouettes cultivated by his father and grandfather  pocketed Nehru jackets, natty blazers worn over flowing trousers  and a magpie assortment of nostalgic motifs picked up from the Western films and television reruns that first appeared regularly in India with the arrival of satellite TV.



Not every designer cites, with Sukets catholicity of taste, inspirations as disparate as Clark Gables swallowtail coats from Gone With the Wind and Paul Hogans groovy buccaneer drag from Crocodile Dundee.



For the panel awarding the Woolmark prize  it included the fashion critic Suzy Menkes; Nick Sullivan, the menswear director at Esquire; Masafumi Suzuki, the editor of GQ Japan; and Raffaello Raffaello, director of the Pitti Uomo menswear fair in Florence  the clincher was the way Sukets designs update traditional Indian garments while relying on ancient techniques.



We appreciated the strong creativity but also the work on the fabrics and materials, so the choice of Suket was very natural, Raffaello wrote by email, referring to tie-and-dyed ikat yarn, hand-block printing, arduous spinning and weaving methods that give a silk-like texture to fibrous wool. There were two camps, said Eric Jennings, a vice president and menswear fashion director for Saks Fifth Avenue. One was looking for something more trend-relevant, and one was more interested in the emotional side of the story.



If emotion won the day, trend relevance did not come off too badly, since one of the first things Saks ordered from Sukets new collection was an indigo bomber jacket covered with pin-tucked pleats so minutely hand-stitched that they resemble trompe loeil.



Being Indian



Suket chalks up his first few rocky years in business to his commitment to steer clear of both the pitfalls of India-for-export and, equally, a domestic wedding market that drives the bottom line for most of his design compatriots. Even now, his annual sales of roughly $100,000 (mostly from stores in India like the stylish Good Earth chain) amount to little more than what an American designer like Todd Snyder spends on a single runway show. I dont do wedding gear, which is where the money is, Suket said.



Of course, there is a certain Indian-ness about me, the humanism, and an ability to approach the business in a holistic manner, he added, although holism may be a euphemistic way of describing the managed chaos entailed in creating a line of menswear whose elements of traditional crafts are incorporated so subtly that a wearer registers them only slowly. A hand-blocked umbrella print lines a jacket. A band of ikat hides inside a collar. Different coloured thread is used to affix each button to a shirt. When Im designing, I think about the final look of the product, of course, but also about the practical execution, Suket said.



How will I get that dyed? How will I reach the weavers village? Where will I stay? Will there be a toilet there? As a designer, these things become part of your everyday life.



Pulling his long hair into a ponytail, Suket said with a laugh that, while he always felt the need to be a global person, there has never been a question of abandoning his roots. Its not elephants and camels anymore, he said. But its still India.


Residents of Valley View neighborhood will be collecting donations for Patriot Paws Service Dogs at 2228 Haven Crest Drive, on Friday, from 8 a.m.-9 p.m.

Patriot Paws is a not-for-profit organization that trains and provides service dogs at no cost to disabled veterans. Service dogs help veterans heal from trauma and assist them with various tasks, such as picking up and retrieving items, opening doors and cabinets, pulling wheelchairs, and helping with chores.

For more information about Patriot Paws, see: www.patriotpaws.org.
While the public may jostle to exchange the obsolete high denomination notes in banks and post offices with legitimate ones, miscreants in Bihar could not care less.





This at least seems like the case in the two robbery incidents in Muzaffarpur and Katihar, where criminals grabbed Rs 1.5 lakh and Rs 2 lakh respectively from a businessman and a woman on their way to the bank to deposit the money.



Santosh Kumar, owner of a cement store on Muzaffarpur-Sitamarhi road, was robbed of Rs 1.5 lakh in broad daylight. While being robbed at gunpoint, he told the robbers that the notes are Rs 500 and Rs 1000 and are of no value.



My arguments fell on deaf ears, Santosh, robbed for the first time in his two decades as a cement trader, said. They said they would exchange the notes on their own.



Santosh, who lodged an FIR at Ahiyapur police station, wondered why police werent deployed around banks where people visit in large numbers to deposit the redundant notes. Based on Santoshs statement, the police have lodged an FIR at Ahiyapur. Efforts are on to ascertain the criminals identity, Muzaffarpur city SP Anand Kumar.


After Arvind Kejriwals charge, the Congress on Friday accused the Modi government of selectively leaking information about its demonetisation plans to help a select few who deposited their old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes with banks before the surprise announcement on Tuesday night.





The Congress also hit out at the government for unleashing financial chaos and anarchy in the country and inconveniencing the common man by making it difficult to access his own hard-earned money.



Kolkata incident

The Opposition party cited reports about BJP units in West Bengal and Gujarat making huge deposits in banks in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the sudden announcement of demonetisation.



Who are the people who purchased huge quantity of gold, foreign exchange security bonds between October 20 and November 8? The government should issue a list. It would tell who are the hoarders of black money, senior AICC spokesman Anand Sharma said.



Sharma said that the prime minister should understand ground realities before the situation goes out of control.



Raise issue in House

The issue will be raised prominently by the Opposition, including the Congress, in winter session of Parliament commencing next week, he said when asked of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjees plea for all opposition parties to come together on the issue.



This is a government which is insensitive, a government which is arrogant, which has created a myth and carried away by its own propaganda. They have created a financial chaos and anarchy like situation in India, Sharma said.



The Congress also dug out a January 23, 2014 press statement of the BJP which had criticised the UPA governments decision to withdraw currency notes printed before 2005.

Has Shri Amit Shah forgotten his own partys words? Does the BJP have courage of conviction to comment on their statement two years ago? Or did they support black money then, Sharma asked.




Eight Indian civil society organisations involved with internet governance have called for complete delinking of ICANN from US jurisdiction, saying an important global public infrastructure being subject to a single countrys control is unacceptable.





The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable.



The demand from Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society and IT for Change as well as Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Centre among others came against the backdrop of ICANNs meeting in Hyderabad that ended on Wednesday.



The other organisations involved in the campaign are Free Software Movement of India (Hyderabad), Society for Knowledge Commons, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Delhi Science Forum and Third World Network (all in New Delhi).



Urgent steps (should) be taken to transit ICANN from its current US jurisdiction. Only then can ICANN become a truly global organisation . We would like to make it clear that our objection is not directed particularly against the US, we are simply against an important global public infrastructure being subject to a single countrys jurisdiction, a joint statement said.



Though the US has given up its role of signing entries to the Internets root zone file, which represents the addressing system for the global Internet, the groups said, the organisation that manages ICANN continues to be under US jurisdiction and hence subject to its courts, legislature and executive agencies.



Keeping such an important global public infrastructure under US jurisdiction is expected to become a very problematic means of extending US laws and policies across the world, the statement said.



Explaining the issue, it said country domain names like .br and .ph remain subject to US jurisdiction.



Irans .ir was recently sought to be seized by some US private parties because of alleged Iranian support to terrorism. Although the plea was turned down, another court in another case may decide otherwise. Other countries cannot feel comfortable to have at the core of the Internets addressing system an organisation that can be dictated by one government, the statement said.


The Supreme Court on Friday issued a notice to actor Salman Khan on the Rajasthan governments appeal challenging his acquittal for killing two chinkaras (black buck) in Jodhpur in 1998.





A bench of Justices A K Sikri and R Banumathi decided to hear the appeal expeditiously after admitting it for consideration.



Plea

In its plea, the state government has urged the court to direct Khan to surrender to serve his five-year jail term for killing the animals.



It contended that the high court has relied upon hyper-technical issues to overturn erroneously the conviction of 50-year-old Khan.



The high court has erroneously exercised its revisional powers to set aside concurrent findings of both the lower courts, which convicted Salman Khan for five years, the state government had stated.



It urged the apex court to restore the 2006 trial court judgements and direct him to surrender to serve the remaining period of his sentence.



HC acquittal

The Jodhpur bench of the high court had on July 25 acquitted the actor in two cases of chinkara poaching in Jodhpur.



It noted that the statement of a key witness could not be considered as he had disappeared and the defence could not cross-examine him during the trial.



Khan had spent a week in jail in Jodhpur in connection with the cases.



However, a third case with regard to Khan reportedly poaching the endangered black buck is yet to be decided.



The incident dates back to 1998 when Salman Khan along with his co-actors were shooting for the film Hum Saath Saath Hain in Jodhpur.
Despite the exploitation of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) by the UPA and NDA regimes to promote political security rather than energy security, the public sector unit has miraculously been able to maintain its maharatna status, so far.



Elsewhere too, public sector oil companies like Pemex in Mexico, Pertamina in Indonesia, Petrobras in Brazil, PDVSA in Venezuela, Nigerian National Oil Company, KazMunayGas in Kazakhstan etc, have been used by their governments to promote the interests of ruling parties or powerful interests rather than public interests.



Though public sector companies have proved less productive than private sector companies, governments all over the world have argued to own and operate petroleum companies to promote energy security. The reality has not been the case.



When UPA was in power, it favoured some private oil companies at the cost of ONGC. To gain popularity, UPA forced ONGC to pay for petroleum subsidies, which mostly helped the middle class and rich families. When oil prices were high, UPA forced public sector marketing companies to sell petrol and diesel below cost and forced ONGC to subsidise them. From 2011 to 2015, UPA forced ONGC to pay Rs 1.9 lakhs crore to support diesel under-recoveries to the tune of Rs 2.4 lakh crores.



To its credit, NDA adapted its policies to reduce petroleum subsidies and stopped tapping ONGC to pay for subsidising LPG and kerosene. The NDA was able to adapt such progressive policies with the help of lower oil prices. However, in recent months, NDA has been less kind to ONGC, putting pressure on it to buy into the hugely unprofitable Krishna Godavari basin block of Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC).



Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has tried to justify it by claiming that it is strictly a commercial decision. Will government be happy if ONGC pays a price suggested in this article?



Soon after the Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation discovered gas in its KG block in 2005, called Deen Dayal, Narendra Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, announced with justifiable pride that this will contribute to Indias energy security. Initial estimated discovery was 20 TCF and later downgraded to 2 TCF.



The Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) should have started production in August 2014. They have spent close to Rs 20,000 ($3 billion) and are yet to reach commercial production of even 2 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year. Instead of forcing GSPC into bankruptcy, NDA is forcing an unwilling ONGC to buy a stake in GSPC and rescue it from bankruptcy.



The GSPCs KG basin discovery followed a similar path by Reliance in 2002. Like GSPC, RIL originally claimed that the discovery was huge: 14 TCF and later downgraded to 2.4 TCF. The RIL was able to produce 20 BCM per year soon after operations started, while GSPC was aiming for only 2 BCM. The ONGC had discovered gas reserves adjacent to RILfirst estimated it to be 10 TCF and later downgraded to 1.7 TCF. This background information is useful to study the economic viability of ONGC buying into GSPCs Deen Dayal field.



Saving from bankruptcy



While many have blamed ONGC, RIL and GSPC for their over-estimations, these might have been honest mistakes on the part of oil companies. Even large multinational oil companies in the industry face similar problems. When oil and gas reserves are discovered in virgin territory, there is always the risk of over or under-estimation by large margins.



What is different in the context of India is the unusual step taken by NDA to force ONGC to buy into GSPC reserves, apparently to save it from bankruptcy. After spending more than Rs 20,000 crore in the KG basin to develop its reserves, GSPC failed to produce any significant quantity of gas. To estimate what ONGC can buy into these reserves, a computer simulation model was developed that incorporated four variables: reserves, depletion rate, price of gas, and cost to produce gas.



Based on this model, GSPC may not be able to achieve any returns on its investment of Rs 20,000 crore in most likely cases. Why then should ONGC buy into GSPCs Deen Dayal field? Looking at the profitability of adjacent blocks where Reliance has invested provides some perspective.



When Reliance started production from its KG-D2 field in 2010, there was optimism that it would reach 80 million standard cubic metres per day (MMSCMD). Attracted by the potential huge returns, and finding new reserves in yet-to-be-explored KG blocks, BP paid Reli-ance $7.2 billion in 2011 for a 30% interest. However production has fallen to about 10 MMSCMD. The BP expected that with its rich experience of operations in different complex gas fields around the world, it should be able to discover and produce more gas in the KG basin. Unfortunately, BP has not succeeded so far.



All three operators in the KG basin have faced similar technical challenges: low permeability, low porosity, high pressure, and high temperature. In a press release, GSPC claimed it has been able to overcome low permeability by hydrofrackinga technique that has revolutionised the shale industry in the US. The GSPC claims to be the first company to achieve such a feat in India. If this is true, ONGC should wait to see the result before making any bid.



However, if the ONGC board takes into consideration the bitter experience of BP, it is unlikely to buy into GSPC KG blocks. For that matter, ONGC has discoveries similar to that of Reliance and GSPC. The ONGC wisely did not take a plunge into investing. Some have been critical of it for being slow in developing its reserves. However, in hindsight, based on the experience of Reliance and GSPC, ONGC made the right decision. Will it be able to make the right decision now  offering a low price to buy into GSPC (definitely not taking any debt of GSPC) or walking away from GSPC KG block?
The Magadi Road police have arrested five men and recovered stolen gold chains worth

Rs 2.8 lakh from them.





The suspects are Prashanth (19), a resident of Cholurpalya, Vinod Rao (22), from KP Agrahara, Karthik (23) from Hennur Cross, Arun Raj (22) from Magadi Road, and Uday Kumar (30), from KP Agrahara. They are accused of robbing women of their gold chains in Mahalakshmi Layout, Ramamurthy Nagar and Vijayanagar.



Karthik had lent his bike to Prashanth and Raj for chain-snatching. The other suspects helped the two pawn the stolen gold ornaments, police said.



Police had arrested Prashanth and Raj who had been jailed for similar offences in the past. There were cases against Prashanth and Raj at Kamakshipalya police station.



They went back to snatching chains after coming out on bail. Police constituted a team as chain snatchings had gone up in the western parts of Bengaluru. The two confessed during interrogation and told the police about other suspects.


The Congress high command is learnt to have directed the partys state unit to submit a report on the issue of Primary and Secondary Education Minister Tanveer Sait watching pornography at a public function.



Sources in the state unit of the Congress said that AICC general secretary in charge of Karnataka, Digvijaya Singh, has asked Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee president G Parameshwara to send the report at the earliest. A private Kannada news channel had caught on camera Sait watching pornography on his mobile phone at a Tipu Jayanti function in Raichur on Thursday.



The Opposition parties, the BJP and the JD(S), have been demanding that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah immediately drop Sait from the Cabinet.



Siddaramaiah on Friday said that action would be taken against Sait after conducting an enquiry. Speaking to reporters at Sambra airport in Belagavi, Siddaramaiah said a wrong committed by anybody will not be ignored, but a due enquiry needs to be conducted.



Primarily it appears that the minister was scrolling messages received on WhatsApp and the picture appeared. An enquiry would reveal the facts, he added.



Siddaramaiah may not hesitate to take action against Sait if it is established that he was watching pornography on his mobile phone. Sources close to Siddaramaiah said in Bengaluru that he would be seeking an explanation from the minister either on Saturday or Sunday. The two have not met after the incident. In case action has to be initiated, the chief minister might ask Sait to put in his papers. But if Sait convinces Siddaramaiah that he watched the sleaze accidentally, then he may be asked to express his regret.



The sources said that as the incident has caused embarrassment to the government, Siddaramaiah is under pressure to initiate action against Sait. The BJP and the JD (S) are set to raise the issue in the forthcoming legislature session in Belagavi. Besides, Siddaramaiah who is readying the party for by-election to the Assembly from Nanjangud, is hesitant to lose the services of Sait who hails from Mysuru district, the sources said.


Expressing unhappiness over steps taken to protect biodiversity of Western Ghats at Yettinahole project site by government agencies, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Friday asked the Centre and Karnataka governments to submit details of the project.





The Tribunal headed by Justice Swatanter Kumar, which is hearing a petition against the project, also questioned the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) for granting permission to cut trees in the project area without proper assessment of the damage caused to the Western Ghats.



The state government claimed that totally 4,995 trees would be cut on 13.90 hectares area to execute the project and so far 2,700 trees had been felled in accordance with law. The bench questioned the state government how many saplings had been planted to compensate the loss.



Wondering how the MoEF could have a soft view about the project, the bench ordered the state government to grow more than 10 times the trees cut, as compensation.



Eight reservoirs

Advocates representing petitioner K N Somshekar said, Yettinahole project was nothing but diversion of tributaries of the River Netravati and the state government planned to build eight reservoirs. The project would not only hit inflow of water to Netravati river from its origin, it would also harm the biodiversity of Western Ghats. The next hearing has been posted to December 2.



Yettinahole project will come up near Sakleshpur, from where the state government intends to lift water to provide drinking water to parched areas, including Chikkaballapur, Bengaluru Rural and Kolar districts.


The Supreme Court on Friday asked real estate developer Mantri Techzone Pvt Ltd to approach the National Green Tribunal (NGT) for resuming construction on its projects in Bengaluru.





A bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justice Shiva Kirti Singh clarified that its order of May 12, 2016, on maintaining the status quo would not come in the way of resuming construction if the tribunal was satisfied with the developers request. Back then, the court had stayed the Rs 117-crore penalty imposed on Mantri by the NGT for encroaching on water bodies in Bengaluru. The court had also directed all builders to comply with the NGTs order of May 4, 2016, that prohibits construction within 75 metres of lakes and 50 metres of storm water drains in Bengaluru.



Senior advocate Gopal Subramanium, appearing for the developer, stated that the company was ready to comply with all the directions. Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, representing the nonprofit Forward Foundation and others, opposed the submission, saying that the company had not complied with the NGTs order for seeking fresh environmental clearance, maintaining the buffer zone and removing debris.

Subramanium argued that the environmental clearance already issued to the company was sufficient. The bench, however, asked the company to convince the NGT.



The court agreed to examine other petitions that argue that the NGT order had set aside the state statutory mechanism by putting in more stringent conditions for construction. The court issued notice to the Karnataka government and the NGO whose petition had resulted in the NGT order.


The High Court on Friday refused to hear a PIL seeking directions to the Union government to withdraw the decision of declaring Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes invalid.





The petitioner, Mohammed Haroon Rasheed, challenging the governments decision, said the sudden decision by the government to eradicate black money and fake currency in the market has affected the common man. He contended that people are waiting in front of banks everyday unable to attend to their work and affecting their daily life.



A division bench, comprising Chief Justice S K Mukherjee and Justice R B Budihal, rejecting the petitioners contentions, appreciated the Union governments decision on demonetisation. The Union government has done a good job in enforcing it with immediate effect, the bench observed.


Shedding its reservations, Japan on Friday made an exception to sign a landmark civil nuclear deal with India.





This will open the door for export of its atomic technology and reactors after adding features like safety and security keeping in mind its sensitivities on the issue.



The nuclear deal, described historic by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was part of the 10 agreements signed between the two countries in various areas after he held talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe on the second day of his three-day visit.



They held wide-ranging talks that covered aspects like trade and investment, security, terrorism, cooperation in skill development, aerospace and people-to-people contacts.

The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries.



Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar said the nuclear deal was similar to the ones signed with the US and other countries with added features on safety and security in keeping with Japans sensitivities.



The two leaders, despite objections from China, also discussed the South China Sea issue and agreed on the need for respecting freedom of navigation and overflight in tune with the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.



The nuclear agreement will also push implementation of the Indo-US atomic cooperation agreement since the major American companies in this sector have alliances with Japanese companies like GE-Hitachi and Toshiba-Westinghouse Electric Company.



The deal will come into effect as soon as the Japanese Parliament approves it.

Abe, while noting that his country was the only one to have suffered atom bomb attacks, said he was delighted over the signing of the agreement with India, despite it not being a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).



At the same time, Abe, with Modi standing next to him, appeared to remind India about NPT, saying his country wishes to see universalisation of the treaty, which New Delhi terms flawed.



This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in the non-proliferation regime, even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT, he said at a joint press interaction with Modi.





It (the agreement) is in line with Japans ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons, said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II.

He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests.



Todays (Friday) signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership...Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of climate change, Modi said.

Apparently with Japans sensitivity in mind, he added, I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan.



He thanked Abe, the Japanese government and Parliament for their support to the agreement.



Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia. In his remarks, Modi said as democracies, the two countries support openness, transparency and the rule of law.



We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism, he said.



The landmark Indo-Japan nuclear agreement is strikingly similar to atomic agreements India inked with the US and most of the other countries, having provisions like termination clause, Jaishankar said. However, he added that this pact has some added features like on safety and security reflecting Japans concerns.



Also, the four steps  123 agreement (2007), NSG waiver (2008), Reprocessing pact (2010) and Administrative mechanisms (2013)  that were part of the Indo-US deal have been compressed and captured in the deal with Japan, he added.






Flower Child, the healthy, happy, fast-casual restaurant by Sam Fox, will debut its first San Diego location at Del Mars Flower Hill Promenade in early December 2016. Inspired by the fundamental desire to deliver healthy food for a happy world, Flower Child offers conveniently nutritious food in a setting reminiscent of a modern bohemian abode, according to a press release.

The Flower Child menu is designed to offer a healthy and balanced dining experience with a selection of organic, gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan items for lunch and dinner seven days a week and breakfast on weekends.

All-natural chicken, sustainable salmon, grass-fed steak and organic non-GMO tofu star in bowls, wraps and salads. The eatery will serve up hummus, soups and veggie dishes like roasted butternut squash with black kale and dried pomegranate, simple sauteed broccoli and Indian spiced cauliflower with turmeric, date and almond.

Flower Child Del Mar will be located at the Flower Hill Promenade, 2690 Via De La Valle, Del Mar, 92014. For more information, please visit the Flower Child website at www.iamaflowerchild.com.
How To Mobilize Your Election Fear & Anger Into Action In Chicago

By Stephen Gossett in News on Nov 10, 2016 9:48PM



Photo by Tyler LaRiviere/Chicagoist

By Stephen Gossett, Aaron Cynic and Rachel Cromidas

If you're among the 90 percent of Chicago voters who cast his or her ballot against (*gulp*) President-elect Donald Trump, the rollercoaster emotions you've experienced over the last few days have been countless and deep and raw. But even before the acceptance stage arrived (if it ever really can), a strong countervailing wind of activism, volunteerism, donations and all manner of civic outreach has offered hope. That impulse must continue if we're to prosper through the next four years. Luckily, the infrastructure for a better, more just future right here in Chicago is firm. We've rounded up just a small snapshot of some our city's best organizations.

Racial, Ethnic and Religious Justice



Hispanic Rights and Immigration

Only Trump and his inner circle know for certain which platforms he championed during the campaign simply as cynical political gesture and which he intends to truly actualize. But given the lynchpin prominence of his anti-immigration policy, his voters will more or less obligate he pursue some legislative and executive action here. This could mean the as-promised termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which could thrust thousands of immigrants in the dark, costing them jobs and benefits, expansion of raids and detention centers, and of course, the wall. Many Hispanic communities in Chicago already feel the struggle in affordable housing, workplace rights and more.

Grassroots Illinois Action (Humboldt Park)

Pilsen Alliance (Pilsen)

Mujeres Latinas En Accion (Pilsen)

Brighton Park Neighborhood Council (Brighton Park)

Enlace Chicago (Little Village)

Somos Logan Square (Logan Square)

Centro de Trabajadores Unidos (Southeast Side)

Muslim Rights and Immigration

Generations of historians may pass before we conclusively pinpoint the moment at which Trumps campaign went from dismissible sideshow to oh-fuck-its-real viability, but one of the contenders would be the aftermath of the San Bernardino attack. Trumps anti-Muslim rhetoric seemed to find more purchase with some voters in the wake, and that message remains scarily integral to his political character. Hes called for a suspension of Syrian refugees (the vast majority to arrive in America are Sunni Muslims), what amounts to an unconstitutional religious test and even registration for Muslim citizens.

CAIR Chicago

Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago

Muslim Women Resource Center

African-American Support and Police Abuse

Time after time, in debate and in soundbite, Donald Trump seemed to go out of his way to caricature Chicago as a crime-ridden "third world nation." In a city still reeling from the Laquan McDonald (and Paul Oneal and Joshua Beal) fallout, where a disproportionate number of victims of Chicago police violence are black, it was hard not hear his Chicago-centric re-embrace of stop-and-frisk without also hearing the dog whistle. Below you can find information on organizations doing yeoman's work to counteract the kind of police misconduct to which Trump is so blind, and collectives that epitomize Michelle Obama's graceful, unforgettable rebuke to Donald's jaundiced vision of Chicago's prominently black neighborhoods and what really happens in parts of the South Side.

Action Now (Englewood, Auburn Gresham, North Lawndale, Austin)

Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (Kenwood, Oakland, Bronzeville)

The Black Youth Project / BYP100

Assata's Daughters

#LetUsBreathe Collective

Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression

Lucy Parsons Labs

Of course, the fact that Donald Trump so willingly marginalizes historically oppressed groups means the concept of intersectionality will be lost on him as well. Not so with Chicago. Below find some worthwhile social-justice advocacy organizations that resist simpler slotting:

Southside Anti Racist Action

Black Rose/Rosa Negra

Southside Together Organizing for Power - STOP

Lifted Voices

Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Chicago Chapter

Chicago Community Bond Fund

Environment/Climate Change

Forgive the sadly familiar construction but, in an infamous Tweet delivered by Donald Trump, the president-elect wrote that the concept of global warming was cooked up by the Chinese, in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. But the anti-green hostility extends so much further. One of Trumps earliest actions is rumored to be a withdrawal from the emissions-reduction Paris Agreement and a potential re-exploration of the Keystone pipeline. Perhaps even more than most issues, environmental protection needs large-scale, collective action, but there are local avenues by which to do your part.

National Resources Defense Council - Midwest

Chicago Climate Action Plan

Illinois Green Business Association

Chicagoland Environmental Network

LGBTQI

Another of the many minority groups in Chicago feeling the immediate worry of a Trump presidency is the LGBTQI community, which now faces a president with a poor-to-hostile record on marriage equality, trans rights, federal protection against gender-identity and sexual-orientation discrimination, et al.

Chicago Black and Pink

TransLife Center

Center on Halsted

Howard Brown Health Center

Equality Illinois

Chicago House

Reproductive Justice



It's unclear exactly where Trump truly stands on reproductive rights and abortion access, but the same can't be said for VP-elect Pence. With this in mind, Here are some organizations you can support right now, and in the future, to protect the reproductive rights of women and other people in Chicago and beyond:



Midwest Access Coalition

Planned Parenthood Of Illinois

Sexual Assault

And if you were as shaken as we were hearing the president-elect's "grab 'em by the pussy" recorded comments, you might consider helping one of our local non-profits that help people in the wake of rape or sexual abuse:

Rape Victim Advocates

Porchlight Counseling Services

The Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault

Sarah's Inn

Further Recommendations:

Logan Square Neighborhood Association

Mental Health Movement

Chicago Action Medical

Illinois Raise Your Hand

Chicago Light Brigade

Midwest Books to Prisoners

City Bureau

The Night Ministry

Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law

Legal Representation and Tenants' Rights:

National Lawyers Guild Chicago

Peoples Law Office

Uptown Peoples Law Center

ACLU of Illinois

Loevy and Loevy

Autonomous Tenants Union

Metropolitan Tenants Rights



Did we miss an organization you know and love? Please let us know in the comments or email tips@chicagoist.com!
Vodafone India is aiming to extend its 4G service to a further eight service areas by March 2017.

The operator, which takes second place with a 19% share of the market, currently provides 4G in nine of Indias 22 telecom circles, covering major metropolitan areas including Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai.

Vodafone is looking to increase its 4G user base to over a million by the end of the year, which would mean 4G subscribers constituted around a fifth of its total base.

Last months spectrum auctions saw Vodafone spend more than any other Indian operator, shelling out INR203 billion (around $3 billion) to catch up to its rivals by establishing a 4G presence in 17 regions. It obtained spectrum in the 1.8, 2.1 and 2.5GHz bands, of both FDD and TDD strands. Market leader Bharti Airtel and newcomer Reliance Jio both hold 4G spectrum in all 22 telecom circles.

Sunil Sood, Vodafone India MD & CEO, said that the firms newly-acquired spectrum would allow it to launch SuperNet 4G services across the eight new service area, reaching 2,400 towns by the end of the fiscal year  substantially more than the 1,000 towns previously announced.

September saw Vodafone funnel over $7 billion into its Indian unit in order to slash its debt by over 50% and ready it for Octobers spectrum auction.
Mt. Greenwood Protests & Marist Classes Canceled Amid Threats, Safety Concerns

By Stephen Gossett in News on Nov 11, 2016 4:13PM



Protersters demonstrate in Mt. Greenwood on November 8 / Photo: Tyler LaRiviere

Young activists on Thursday canceled a protest planned for Friday, which was to include a demonstration near Marist High School, in Mt. Greenwood, after threats were made to their safety, the group said. Marist, meanwhile, canceled scheduled classes for Friday, also citing safety concerns.

The group Black Lives Matter Youth will instead meet on Friday afternoon with local officialsincluding Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie Johnson; Ald. Matt OShea (19th), who represents Mt. Greenwood; and Marist Principal Larry Tuckerto discuss productive changes in the city and in Mt. Greenwood for the betterment of the Black community. The sides will meet at Police Headquarters downtown. BLM Youth plans to march to Wrigley Square in Millennium Park after the meeting.

BLM Youth reached out to supporters for questions to pose to the officials. Some CPS students feared posing questions via social media for fear of more threats, BLM Youth organizers said.

There are students afraid to tweet questions bc they are concerned for their safety. You can DM us and we will keep your identity anonymous.  BLM Youth (@BLMYouth) November 11, 2016

The group on Thursday shared examples of hate speech and terrifying reports of racially-motivated threats.

This morning CPS officials contacted our parents, white supremacist groups were threatening to kill unarmed students on site. Outrageous.  BLM Youth (@BLMYouth) November 11, 2016

Here are some more direct screenshots under this anonymous blogpost from potential Mt. Greenwood residents and other internet trolls pic.twitter.com/9R1UpyAZdJ  BLM Youth (@BLMYouth) November 11, 2016

Five Marist students were expelled after their racist text-message conversation was posted on social media. It followed tense, concurrent protests on Tuesday night in the predominantly white Mt. Greenwood neighborhood between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements. Protesters countered each other over the weekend, also. Some members of the Blue Lives Matter-sympathetic crowd were heard shouting racial slurs and wielding racist signs. The actions followed the fatal, police-involved shooting of Joshua Beal.

Marist on Thursday posted the following statement on their website, notifying of the Friday class cancellations:



"After communicating with local officials and assessing the situation internally, we feel it is in the best interest of our school community to not be in session tomorrow. Not only is safety our first concern, but limiting disruptions to the learning process is vital to our students success. Additionally, we have learned that an approximate five block stretch of 115th Street in front of Marist will be blocked off starting at noon tomorrow, making entering and exiting nearly impossible. We encourage everyone in the Marist community to use this day as opportunity to reflect and pray that our school, city, and nation come together in peace and mutual respect."
In a letter to all employees, Apple CEO also emphasised the companys commitment to diversity

In the wake of Donald Trumps victory in the US presidential election, Apple CEO, Tim Cook has sent a letter to employees urging them to move forward together. The letter, which of obtained by BuzzFeed, doesnt mention Trump by name, but talks about the reaction of employees to the result and emphasises the companys commitment to diversity.

We have a very diverse team of employees, including supporters of each of the candidates. Regardless of which candidate each of us supported as individuals, the only way to move forward is to move forward together, Cook writes.

Cook also emphasised that result will not have any impact on the direction the company is going. you can be confident that Apple's North Star hasn't changed. Our products connect people everywhere, and they provide the tools for our customers to do great things to improve their lives and the world at large. Our company is open to all, and we celebrate the diversity of our team here in the United States and around the worldregardless of what they look like, where they come from, how they worship or who they love, he said.

Tim Cook isnt the only one who has expressed his views on the recently concluded presidential election. Many other Silicon Valley executives have also spoken up and most are critical of the stance taken by Trump. Shervin Pishevar, co-founder of Hyperloop One has even suggested that California should secede from the United States.
The move is aimed at at making convenient for users to pay bills after the demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes

Vodafone and Airtel have announced that it will be extending the bill payment date for postpaid customers by three days. The companies say that this move is aimed at making it convenient for users after the demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes and the difficulty in obtaining cash. Vodafone will also offer small credits on talktime and data for prepaid customers.



Apoorva Mehrotra, Business Head, Delhi & NCR, Vodafone India stated, as Delhis most preferred telecom services provider, ensuring a seamless VOICE and DATA experience for our valued customers, has always been a priority. To help our customers tide over the demonetization period, Vodafone has extended post paid bill payment deadline by 3 days. Pre-paid Vodafone customers can opt for small credits on both talktime and data, allowing them to stay confidently connected. Vodafone Chhota Credit enables consumers to make a call even if they do not have sufficient balance in their prepaid account and I-Credit provides seamless data experience.



Prepaid customers can avail a Chhota Credit of Rs. 10 for talktime by SMSing Credit to 144. This comes with a service charge of Rs. 3 per transaction and a validity of seven days. The amount will be adjusted in the next recharge. For data, Vodafone customers can avail 30MB of data with a validity of 30 days. This can be used across its 2G/3G/4G networks and can be accessed by SMSing ICredit to 144.
Resource exploration and development company GCM Resources announced on Friday that a memorandum of understanding has been agreed with China Gezhouba Group International Engineering Company .

The AIM-traded firm said the MoU provides for the parties to engage and mutually investigate the feasibility of a joint venture with respect to the development of mine-mouth coal fired power plants generating up to 2,000MW in total at the Phulbari Coal and Power Project site.

CGGCINTL is a subsidiary of China Gezhouba Group Corporation, GCMs board said, which in turn is a core member of China Energy Engineering Group Company, a super central state-owned enterprise of the People's Republic of China.

CGGC's businesses cover the design, construction, investment and operation in power, water conservancy, highways, railways, bridges, municipal works, airports, ports, waterways, industrial and civil buildings, as well as real estate and coal mining amongst others.

We are delighted to have established this relationship with China Gezhouba Group International Engineering Co. Ltd, one of the largest and most respected engineering companies in the region and look forward to working with them for the mutual benefit of both parties, said GCM executive chairman Datuk Michael Tang.
AIM-listed Goldstone Resource' s recent drilling program at its mine in Ghana found gold enrichment in saprolite.

The AIM-listed miners recent drilling programme comprised 3,000 metres of auger and some 1,500 metres of reverse circulation drilling of the AK02 prospect within the Akrokerri licence.

The reverse circulation drilling of a 750 metre-long gold enriched saprolite zone found confirmed mineralisation at depth and returned significant intersections of 14 metres at 1.18 grams per tonne of gold and 8 metres at 1.88 grams per tonne of gold.

A 120 hole auger programme defined a new zone of gold enrichment in saprolite about 100 to 200 metres east of last years auger anomaly.

Chairman Neil Gardyne said: "This phase of exploration, focused on the Akrokerri licence that straddles the linking structural zone between the Homase resource and the world-class Obuasi mine, has demonstrated significant potential in terms of the deeper reverse circulation drilling of the target area identified in 2015 and also the identification of parallel zones of gold enrichment in saprolite resulting from the 2016 programme.

These results and the juxtaposition of Akrokerri with Obuasi provide considerable encouragement to undertake further exploration in this area.

He said that the company has started a commenced a preliminary programme of diamond drilling to probe the strike extensions of some of the deeper and higher-grade sulphide ore shoots previously identified within the known Homase 602,000 ounces of gold at the Australasian Joint Ore Reserves Committee Code (JORC) compliant resource.

By focusing on adding to the oxide resource and also evaluating the deeper sulphide resource, the company is looking to upgrade the total resource base and provide various options for exploiting both oxide and sulphide ores, a key corporate objective given the recovering gold price.

Geological interpretation of the auger and reverse circulation drilling indicated that the complex structural zone between the Homase deposit and AngloGold Ashanti's Obuasi mine is prospective.

Reverse circulation drilling of the southern part of the previously identified Homase-Akrokerri resource zone confirmed continuity of the zone, but has limited potential for identifying additional oxide resource.

Diamond drilling, targeting vertical depths of 200 to 300 metres, started to find high-grade ore shoots beneath the known Homase oxide resource.

Shares in Goldstone Resources were up 4% to 1.95p at 0800 GMT.
Ascent Resources announced on Friday that it has been informed by the Environment Agency in Slovenia that the partners in the Petisovci project will not be required to carry out a full environmental impact assessment prior to the award of an IPPC Permit to install a new processing facility at Petisovci.

The AIM-traded company said that in May 2016, the Administrative Court ruled that despite there being no valid objections to the granting of the permit based on environmental issues, the court believed the process adopted by the government agency in reviewing the permit application was inconsistent with EU regulations.

As a result, the partners were invited to recommence the permit application from the start of the process by carrying out a preliminary screening exercise, the purpose of which was to determine whether a full EIA is needed before awarding the permit.

Throughout the process the company said it has maintained that the original decision was flawed and the additional process of no value.

An objection to the decision has been lodged by a non-government organisation, which Ascent says has consistently appealed against the construction of the processing facility at each stage of the process.

The Environment Agency and the government departments have consistently ruled in favour of the development, the board said.

The Administrative Court decision which revoked the permit was made on procedural grounds and did not endorse any of the issues raised by the NGO, it added, with the objections raised by the NGO in their latest appeal consistently found to be without merit.

Ascent said it is firmly of the view that the new processing facility, which will allow Slovenian gas to be treated in Slovenia and sold into the Slovenian National Grid system, is in the best interests of the country and asserted the actions of the NGO are damaging the national interest.

The board said it is encouraged by the efforts made by the authorities to address the problems created by the unexpected decision of the Administrative Court in May 2016.

If the Environment Agency had requested a full EIA, it is likely that the final award of the permit would have been delayed for at least an additional year, but the decision now means the company and its partners can expect the permit being fully awarded sometime in 2017, it explained.

I am pleased with this decision which paves the way for an early reinstatement of the permit, said CEO Colin Hutchinson.

This not only provides the long-term solution for the field but also underlines the support which the project enjoys amongst its partners and the authorities.
The Liberal Democrats will vote against triggering Article 50 in Parliament, unless the party is promised a second referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.

Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, told BBC Radio 4s Today programme on Friday that the party would vote against Article 50 if its red-line is not met, for there to be a provision in the bill for a second referendum on the terms of Brexit.

"Article 50 would proceed but only if there is a referendum on the terms of the deal and if the British people are not respected then, yes, that is a red line and we would vote against the government."

He said that the party wants to respect the will of the people, and that means that they must have their say in a referendum on the terms of the deal.

It is the only logical, and the only democratic option on the table. There will be a referendum on the end of this process so no one will have imposed upon them something they did not vote for.

On 3 November, the High Court ruled that the government does not have the power to trigger Article 50 without parliamentary consent and the government said it would appeal the decision.

Farron pointed to the recent resignation of Conservative MP Stephen Phillips, who criticised the government over its handling of Brexit and its ambiguity regarding the single market. Philips voted to leave the EU, but is in favour of remaining in the single market.

He added that the process to leave the EU started with democracy and should not end with a stitch-up.

Parliament is likely to pass the bill as there are enough Conservative and Labour MPs to vote for it, but it could be held up in the House of Lords, where the Liberal Democrats have over 100 peers.

The Liberal Democrats eight MPs, the SDLPs three and several Labour MPs have indicated that they would vote against triggering the clause, which starts a two-year clock to leave the EU.

The SNP has also suggested that they would vote against Article 50 as Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, said she would not vote for anything that goes against the will of the Scottish people, who overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU.

So far Labour MPs Owen Smith, David Lammy, Helen Hayes and Daniel Zeichner have said they would vote against it if amendments were not made.
Tullow Oils shares were under the cosh on Friday as Canaccord Genuity downgraded its rating to sell from hold but raised its target price to 230p from 220p.

Canaccord said the issues Tullow highlighted in its 9 November trading update on the Tweneboa, Enyenra, Ntomme (TEN) fields offshore Ghana, raise a hint of concern and the scale of projected net debt was substantially more than it had expected.

More generally, we remain concerned about the concentration of cashflow generation in Ghana, Canaccord said.

Over the next two years we expect over 70% of the company's production to come from Ghana, where operating costs are relatively low, derived from less than 20 production wells in Jubilee and TEN.

In its trading update for the period 27 July to 9 November, Tullow said the production ramp-up at TEN to end-October was hurt by issues with water injection systems. The annualised gross production for TEN in 2016 is now expected to be 15,000 barrels of oil per day.

The business expects to exit the year with net debt at around $4.9bn.

Canaccord said the scale of net debt and the outlook for the oil price provides the greatest hurdle to investment in our view.

We anticipate net debt reducing to around $4.5bn at year end 2017 at our current $60 per barrel assumption, and under that scenario we expect the planned refinancing in '17 to go relatively smoothly, the broker said.

But at $50 per barrel our projected net debt would be $4.65bn and under those conditions we believe that the lenders would be inclined to extract more value from the company and equity holders.

Canaccord said despite its concerns on oil prices and debt, Tullow appears more robust than some of its highly leveraged peers. However, the broker concluded that it is not enough to be an attractive investment, short of significant sustained OPEC production cuts.

Jefferies downgraded SIG to hold from buy and slashed the price target to 90p from 140p after the company issued a profit warning and announced the surprise departure of its chief executive officer Stuart Mitchell.

SIG said on Friday that it now expects underlying pre-tax profit for the year ending 31 December to be between 75m and 80m, which is down from 87.4m last year and below consensus estimates of 90m. It attributed the expected decline in part to weaker-than-expected trading conditions since the EU referendum.

Jefferies said the new guidance range is 12% to 18% below its previous estimate and cut its full-year 2016 pre-tax profit estimate by 18% to 75.3m.

With the announcement of a change of CEO and CFO in the space of one month, uncertainty around the start date of the incoming CFO and the search for a new CEO starting today, there is no current guidance for FY2017. We have therefore cut our FY2017 estimates to match the existing board's guidance for FY2016, a cut of 26% from 101.7m to 76m.

Jefferies said that in the face of such uncertainty, it can no longer recommend that investors buy the shares.

Whether wishing to buy or sell shares, we advise waiting until the dust has settled in order to more accurately appraise the future cashflows on which the valuation is ultimately based.

JPMorgan Cazenove downgraded Dairy Crest to neutral from overweight as the stock has surpassed its 600p price target.

The bank said Dairy Crests results on Thursday showed the group achieved positive volume growth in its key brands in the first half, despite a decline in the flagship Cathedral City cheese brand.

This was achieved against a deflationary backdrop and with some operational teething problems in functional ingredients, JPM said.

It cut its pre-tax profit estimate for full-year 2017 by 2% to 61.5m to reflect a reduced contribution from functional ingredients. However, it lifted its forecast for FY18 by 1% to 68.4m to reflect increased margin expectations.

Dairy Crest said on Thursday that adjusted pre-tax profit in the first half rose 19% to 19.1m as the group underwent a restructuring.

Revenue fell 7% to 190m in the six months ended 30 September, reflecting deflationary pressures in its markets.
Tell us more

You are seeing these quotes based on previous browsing related to sectors such as
Tullow Oils shares were under the cosh on Friday as Canaccord Genuity downgraded its rating to sell from hold but raised its target price to 230p from 220p.

Canaccord said the issues Tullow highlighted in its 9 November trading update on the Tweneboa, Enyenra, Ntomme (TEN) fields offshore Ghana, raise a hint of concern and the scale of projected net debt was substantially more than it had expected.

More generally, we remain concerned about the concentration of cashflow generation in Ghana, Canaccord said.

Over the next two years we expect over 70% of the company's production to come from Ghana, where operating costs are relatively low, derived from less than 20 production wells in Jubilee and TEN.

In its trading update for the period 27 July to 9 November, Tullow said the production ramp-up at TEN to end-October was hurt by issues with water injection systems. The annualised gross production for TEN in 2016 is now expected to be 15,000 barrels of oil per day.

The business expects to exit the year with net debt at around $4.9bn.

Canaccord said the scale of net debt and the outlook for the oil price provides the greatest hurdle to investment in our view.

We anticipate net debt reducing to around $4.5bn at year end 2017 at our current $60 per barrel assumption, and under that scenario we expect the planned refinancing in '17 to go relatively smoothly, the broker said.

But at $50 per barrel our projected net debt would be $4.65bn and under those conditions we believe that the lenders would be inclined to extract more value from the company and equity holders.

Canaccord said despite its concerns on oil prices and debt, Tullow appears more robust than some of its highly leveraged peers. However, the broker concluded that it is not enough to be an attractive investment, short of significant sustained OPEC production cuts.

Shares fell 3.05% to 254.60p at 1006 GMT.
Ryanair has been given a slap on the wrists by the European Commission, ruling that the low-budget carrier must repay over 2m in illegal aid given to it by an Austrian airport.

German travel company TUI's unit TUIfly was also sanctioned to the tune of 1.1m in the ruling on Friday, the state aid regulators in Brussels said.

"Certain airport services and marketing agreements concluded between the airport operator and airlines Ryanair, HLX and TUIfly gave the latter an undue advantage, which cannot be justified under EU state aid rules, the European Commission said on Friday.

"The amounts of incompatible state aid are estimated at around 2 million euros for Ryanair, 1.1 million for TUIfly and 9.6 million for HLX," the statement added.

Ryanair said it would dispute the EU ruling, which is related to Klagenfurt Airport in the southernly region of Austria.

"We note the Klagenfurt decision, where we stopped flying in 2013. We disagree with the findings and have instructed our lawyers to appeal," a spokesperson for the Irish carrier said.
Free Pizza And Nostalgia At Pizza Museum Event Tonight

By Anthony Todd in Food on Nov 11, 2016 4:22PM



Fasanos. Photo by Jennifer Olvera/Chicagoist.

We've been following the U.S. Pizza Museum pretty closely ever since it burst onto the scene back in March. The museum, which doesn't yet have a permanent physical home (but has a great online home and a huge collection of artifacts) has hosted several events and a window gallery at the Whistler. Friday night, at Paulie Gee's in Logan Square, many of Chicago's best pizza places are coming together to offer free snacks and celebrate pizza history.

The event is a debut for the new Pizza Museum exhibit at Paulie Gee's, which runs from November 11-January 15, 2017. You should definitely check out the exhibit, which includes historical objects from pizza places all over Chicago. But tonight is when you get the free stuff! From 6-8 p.m. (while supplies last) several local pizzerias are handing out free slices at Paulie Gee's to celebrate the opening - no purchase or ticket required.

Participating restaurants include:
The worlds largest oil producers of ramped up their output in October, hitting hopes for a joint -agreement to prop up prices.

In its monthly report for November, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said production by its fourteen members increased by 240,000 barrels a day in October, reaching an average of 33.64m b/d.

News arrived as energy ministers from OPECs member countries were scheduled to meet in Vienna, Austria on 30 November to marginally reduce their combined output levels.

Several countries including Iran, Libya and Nigeria had already been exempted from the requirement that they contribute to a cut, but over recent weeks Iraq had also asked to be exempted and Russias, who is outside OPEC, appeared to be dragging to its feet.

OPEC stuck to its forecast for world oil demand to grow by 1.15m b/d in 2017 and to average 95.55m b/d.

As of 1249 GMT front month Brent crude oil futures were down by 1.43% to $44.03 per barrel on the ICE.
The European Union is reportedly considering suspending talks with Turkey over its application for membership in the bloc amid the turmoil in the nation.

EU foreign ministers are expected to suggest shelving the talks at a meeting in Brussels on Monday following calls from Austria, Luxembourg and some European lawmakers, due to the scale of Turkeys post-coup security crackdown.

Such a move would mark a complete U-turn for the EU after it told Ankara eights months ago the process would be sped up in exchange for helping to curb migration to Europe and fighting Islamist militants in the Middle East.

EU diplomats have said they must keep talking to President Tayyip Erdogan to retain his support is reducing migration from its territory.

"Suspending membership talks with Turkey is not formally on the agenda but we expect some ministers to bring this up," an EU official told Reuters of the meeting on Monday.

"It is true some deeply troubling things are happening in Turkey. But you have to ask yourself the question what exactly would we achieve by suspending the process now? How would that help? We need to keep communication channels open."

The news comes after an EU report this week accused Turkey of straying off the path in its efforts to join the bloc following a coup in July.

The coup was attempted against state institutions, including the government and President Erdogan. Ankara has since suspended, dismissed or arrested over 110,000 people including soldiers, judges, teachers, journalists and Kurdish leaders over alleged support of the rebellion.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has come out in defence of his company after allegations that the social network contributed to the rise of Donald Trump .

Data produced by various critics highlighted that a vast number of fake news stories were being shared via the site with a lack of follow-up stories to negate the fabricated claims.

Zuckerberg was speaking at a technology conference in California known as Techonomy, rubbishing claims that Facebook had aided Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton on Thursday.

"The idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," he said.

"If you believe that then I don't think you have internalised the message Trump supporters are trying to send in this election," Zuckerberg added.

Many commentators have asserted that Facebook is having a growing influence on the outcome of political campaigning, as a high percentage of those in the developed world gather their news via the social network.

Zuckerberg also rejected the idea of the "filter bubble", where users' online environments are so tailored towards their personal preferences that opposing views no longer appear.

"Even if 90% of your friends are Democrats, probably 10% are Republicans. Even if you live in some state or country you will know some people in another state, another country."

"Our job, our goal is to help people see the content that's going to be the most meaningful and interesting to them," he added.
Smith-Njigba's dad says return for Michigan game is best-case scenario

The best-case scenario is to play against Michigan on Nov. 26. Otherwise, his return would likely be for a College Football Playoff semifinal.
16 Of Our Favorite Events In Chicago This Weekend



NEWCITY'S Tree Lighting Ceremony is Saturday. Photo courtesy of NEWCITY.

It's been a rough week in our little corner of the world. Let's shift our focus to happier things, like a weekend filled with music, films, kittens and Santa (already?!).

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 11: VETERANS DAY

TOAST A VETERAN: Dog Tag Brewing and Binnys Lincoln Park hold a special sampling in honor of Veterans Day this Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. The brewery, founded by U.S. combat veterans, runs a foundation that supports building projects with Gold Star Families. Try the brewerys Legacy Lager and enjoy Pequods pizza and giveaways. Free.



Festival of Barrel Aged Beer. Photo via FOBAB's website.

FESTIVAL OF BARREL AGED BEERS: FOBAB is a celebration of wood and barrel-aged brews that has expanded to two days at the UIC Forum for 2016. Youve got three sessions to choose from where youll be able to enjoy 15 samples, some of which are rare beers not commercially available in our area. Tickets are $55.

VONNEGUT ART: The National Veterans Art Museum presents a new exhibit featuring artwork from famed author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. A WWII veteran himself, Vonneguts service and capture influenced his work, and not just as a writer. Vonneguts Odyssey explores the complex transition veterans face when returning home from war. The museum will be open extended hours on Veterans Day (10 a.m. to 9 p.m.) and the exhibit runs through May 6, 2017.



Photo Credit Heather Scholl: Heather Scholl Photography

DIE HARD THE MUSICAL: Its Bruce McClane live on stage in the holiday classic "Yippee Ki-Yay Merry Christmas: A DIE HARD Christmas Musical." The ol' tale of the Nakatomi Christmas Eve Party gets a comical musical treatment as Hans Solo and his group of German terrorists take everyone at the party hostage, except McClane. Performances run Fridays and Saturdays through Jan. 14, 2017 at MCL Chicago. Tickets are $20.

77 BEATS CONCERT: Join the Old Town School of Folk Music for the culmination of the 77 Beats Series at 7:30 p.m. at the University of Chicagos Logan Center for the Arts. The series explored all 77 of Chicagos diverse neighborhoods and the final concert is a celebration of the endeavor featuring performances from Chicago Children's Choir, University of Chicago Middle East Ensemble and Greater House of Prayer Gospel Choir. There will be local food trucks for nosh. Free.

POWER POP FROM THE NORTH: We have long been fans of Halifax's Sloan, and the group is currently touring behind the 20th anniversary of One Chord to Another, the album that brought the band back from the brink of break-up and broke them into the college rock '90s scene. Since then the group has accomplished the seemingly impossible; releasing a string of solid, hook-laden albums with not a single a dud amidst the bunch. Expect to hear One Chord to Another in its entirety along with a slew of the other bands hits during Friday's set at Bottom Lounge. Tickets are $20.

WOMAN MADE BENEFIT: Join your fellow Nasty Women at Woman Made Gallery for their Beyond The Dinner Party Fall Benefit from 7 to 10 p.m. Current exhibitions The Pretty Nasty Imagination of Adele Supreme by Adele Supreme and Tacky Pallazzo by Caroline Jacobson will be on display, plus live art performance from Liz Baker, BYOG (bring your own games) and drinks and hors doeurves. Tickets are $25.



SATURDAY NOVEMBER 12



Image via Harmony House's website.

MERRY MEOWS HOLIDAY BAZAAR: Find beer, jewelry, crafts, and of course cute kitties at Harmony Houses Merry Meows Holiday Bazaar & Open House from 1 to 4 p.m. Pick up the perfect holiday gift and meet the cats of the eco-friendly cageless no-kill adoption center. All funds raised will go to the care of their cats. Free.

AMERICAS GOT TALENT AUDITIONS: Have you got the talent it takes to impress Simon, Heidi, Mel and Howie? Then youve got to be at McCormick Place this Saturday to audition for NBCs America's Got Talent. The open call begins at 9 a.m. and anyone whos watched the competition knows that theyre open to any age and any talent. Check out their audition website for additional details, requirements or to submit a video if you cant make it in person.

NEWCITY TREE LIGHTING: NEWCITY Lincoln Park will light the centers 30-foot tree on Saturday with a celebration from 6 to 8 p.m. Look for performances from British International School of Chicago, Apollo Chorus, and DePaul Mens a Cappella. Theyll also have hot cocoa, cookies and train rides for the little ones. Free.



Carliecraft Designs via Handmade Market's Facebook page.

HANDMADE MARKET: Handmade Market is back at the Empty Bottle for some early Christmas shopping. There will be more than 30 sellers at the market from noon to 4 p.m. with handmade handbags, candles, clothing and more. Free.

LIVE POP-UP MAGAZINE: Check out an evening of stories, films, photography and radio live on stage as Pop-Up Magazine comes to the Harris Theater stage at 7:30 p.m. The show mixes touring stories with local talent including writers and journalists Alex Kotlowitz, Jessica Hopper, Britt Julious, and Gwen Macsai. Tickets start at $29.75.



SUNDAY NOVEMBER 13





2016 Adventure Film Fest Trailer from Adventure Film Festival on Vimeo.

ADVENTURE FILM FESTIVAL: See the years best independent adventure films at the Adventure Film Festival at Music Box Theatre. The festival comes directly from its home city of Boulder, bringing with it award-winning films in climbing, riding, sliding and flying. 5 p.m. Tickets are $20.

WINE + VINYL: Hit up Appellation for a happy hour with two of our favorite things: Wine & Vinyl. As always, the monthly event is BYOV (Bring Your Own Vinyl) and host and DJ Kevin Hsia will mix them. 5 to 8 p.m. Entry is free, but RSVP in advance for $5 and get a complimentary glass of wine when you get there.



Image via Lyric Opera's website.

THE TROJANS: Five hours, 225 cast members and only five performances. Thats the midwest premiere of The Trojans at Lyric Opera. From French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), the epic opera gives a sense of the drama behind the Trojan War with love, death and ghosts. And since its a long one, theyre offering pre-packed meals for purchase. Tickets start at $34.

SAND UP COMEDY: Sand Up Comedy brings us comedians from a far away land: Saudi Arabia. The comedy tour hosted by Ahmed Ahmed (Comedy Central, MTVs Punkd), features a special local guest on its Chicago stop at The Comedy Bar. 8 p.m. Admission is free, reserve tickets here.
Ministry probing ONGC, DGH role in KG gas migration issue

The petroleum ministry has launched a probe into the role played by officials at ONGC and the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons for their alleged inaction on information about the state-owned firm's natural gas flowing into adjoining fields of Reliance Industries Ltd in the Krishna-Godavari basin.

Confirming sending notice to RIL and its partners BP plc of UK and Canada's Niko Resources for "unfairly enriching" themselves by producing natural gas belonging to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said his ministry is probing the role played by "those in office" in the ministry, ONGC as well as DGH in the entire issue.

"All stakeholders are being looked into as to what role they had played in those days," he told reporters in New Delhi.

Oil secretary K D Tripathi is overseeing the probe to find if there were any errors of omission or commission in not taking timely action on the information provided by the seismic data that ONGC's natural gas was seeping into KG-D6.

"This is an internal mechanism (of investigation). Whosoever is found responsible (for lapses) will be disclosed publicly," Pradhan said.

ONGC has had two chairmen, R S Sharma and Sudhir Vasudeva, after seismic data is believed to have thrown up leads about its blocks being connected with RIL fields. The DGH first had S K Srivastava and then R N Choubey as its head.

It is alleged that while ONGC initially refused to act on the information, DGH did not take cognizance of the issue when the state-owned firm finally acted and brought the issue to its notice in 2013.

"It is not just ONGC, but also (petroleum) ministry and DGH which is being investigated," Pradhan said.

His ministry had on 3 November issued a notice to RIL, Niko and BP plc seeking $1.47 billion for producing in the seven years ended 31 March 2016 about 338.332 million British thermal unit of gas that had seeped or migrated from state- owned ONGC blocks into adjoining KG-D6.

After deducting $71.71 million royalty paid on the gas produced and adding an interest at the rate of Libor plus 2 per cent, totalling $149.86 million, a total demand of $1.55 billion was made on RIL, BP and Niko.

ONGC had in 2014 moved the Delhi High Court seeking Rs11,000 crore in compensation for its gas that RIL had produced. Under the court's direction, an independent consultant D&M was appointed to establish connectivity across reservoirs.

After D&M quantified the gas that had migrated from ONGC blocks to KG-D6, the ministry appointed a one-man panel headed by Justice (Retd) A P Shah to recommend compensation RIL and partners should pay. It however stated that the compensation should be paid to the government and not to ONGC.

Pradhan said the Supreme Court has clearly established that all natural resources belong to the State and using that premise the government is claiming compensation from RIL.

The Shah panel had in its 29 August report stated that natural gas had indeed migrated from ONGC's KG basin blocks to adjoining fields of RIL but opined that the compensation for the same should be paid to government as the natural resource belonged to the state.

It further stated that the gas migration issue needs to be resolved within the parameters and provisions of the Production Sharing Contract (PSC) instead of any other method like bilateral agreement.

This premise has led to RIL stating that it will challenge the compensation in arbitration.

RIL contests any claim of compensation on the premise that it drilled all wells within its own block boundaries and only after explicit permission from the government.

Also, migration is a natural phenomenon and contractor cannot be held liable for unfair enrichment for migrated gas that has been extracted from wells drilled within its own block

Continuity and extension of reservoirs between ONGC blocks and KG-D6 was established by independent expert D&M in late 2015 which said as much as 11.122 billion cubic metres of ONGC gas had migrated from its Godavari-PML and KG-DWN-98/2 blocks to adjoining KG-D6 of RIL between 1 April 2009 and 31 March 2015. Justice AP Shah was then asked to go into the D&M report.

Shah in his report has stated that ONGC doesn't have any claim on the migrated gas. It agreed with government's (represented by the DGH) oral submissions (that was contrary to its written submissions) that gas belongs to the government and RIL has been unfairly enriched, liable to pay compensation on the migrated gas.
A powerful Taliban truck bomb struck the German consulate in Afghanistan's northern Mazar-i-Sharif city, killing four people and wounding more than 100 in a major militant assault in the strife-torn country.

Four dead - two civilians and two unidentified bodies - were brought to the Balkh hospital and around 115 people were wounded, Dr Noor Mohammad Faiz told AP.

"The blast was loud and powerful, which shattered windows, and many civilians were wounded inside their homes," he said.

The Taliban called it a "revenge attack" for recent US airstrikes in the volatile province of Kunduz earlier this month that left up to 32 civilians dead.

Sporadic gunfire rattled the usually tranquil city after the huge explosion on Thursday, which smashed windows of nearby shops and left terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

German officials in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif were not immediately reachable for comment.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of German consulate in the city," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

Afghan special forces cordoned off the area as helicopters were seen flying over the consulate and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jumpstart stalled peace negotiations.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the German consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents are routinely known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.

Meanwhile, US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims' relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

Afghanistan's worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up airstrikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign - even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.
Ireland West Airport enjoyed a 14% increase in passenger numbers during the summer period with over 360,000 passengers using the airport between June and October. The airport is on track to record the busiest year in the airports 30 year history with annual passenger numbers set to exceed 720,000 for the first time in 2016.

Passenger numbers using the airports 9 UK services increased by 14% thanks mainly to new year round services added by Flybe to both Birmingham and Edinburgh, which added an additional 25,000 passengers through the airport during the summer months. The airport now has the biggest selection of UK services from the West and North West of Ireland with access to 9 UK markets including direct flights to Birmingham, Bristol, London (Gatwick, Luton & Stansted), East Midlands, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Manchester.

Services to and from European Sun and city break destinations continued to grow with the airport now offering flights to a choice of ten different destinations across Europe to the likes of Croatia, Italy, Portugal and Spain. A new service introduced by Falcon and Thomson Holidays to Salou in June proved particularly popular with holidaymakers from across the region.

The Airport now serves 22 International destinations and is served by three of Europe's major International airlines, Aer Lingus, Flybe and Ryanair.

This year has proven a particularly busy year for events at the airport as we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the official opening of the airport back in May. Notable milestones this year also included the airport welcoming its 10 millionth passenger, holding our first ever runway run for the public and welcoming a very special visit from the Vice President of the United States. All these special events were filmed and form part of a six part series called The Airport up in Knock currently being aired on UTV Ireland every Monday night at 8pm.

In addition in summer 2016 the airport welcomed an investment by seven Local Authorities for an equity shareholding into the airport which has seen the formation of a unique and positive collaboration with local government in the areas of tourism, economic development and Diaspora engagement.

Commenting on a busy summer season, Joe Gilmore, Managing Director Ireland West Airport, said These latest passenger figures are a direct result of the growth in passenger services offering an increased selection of routes to and from the West of Ireland. This growth benefits the local economies in both the West and North West regions particularly given the choice and range of flights to the UK which is a key driver for inbound tourism."
The committee behind Amharclann Ghaoth Dobhair wants to open the storied theatre early next year, following major refurbishment and expansion.

The project will see an additional storey on the Gaeltacht theatre and a new and expanded foyer with space for a small cafe and tourist information centre.

Pol Mac Cumhaill, chairperson of the amharclann committee and a member of Aisteoiri Ghaoth Dobhair, said they hope the theatre will open in January or February of 2017. The theatre has been closed since 2007.

We have a lot of the work done, but theres a lot to do as well, he said.

The refurbished theatre will have a completely new heating system and plumbing system and new restrooms. A second storey will raise the height of the stage for lighting and other accessories.

Seating capacity will be about 300, including bays for wheelchair access. The original seating has been restored as new, Pol said, calling the seating, quality you could not buy.

He said, We wanted to keep the auditorium just as it was, but in a totally modern setting.

The award-winning Irish-language theatre company Aisteoiri Ghaoth Dobhair was formed in 1932, and the amharclann became their home when actress Siobhan McKenna opened the theatre in 1961.

Pol said they hope the refurbished theatre will be used year-round.

It has to be run as a business, he said. It has to be able to stand on its own two feet. The committee are working on an agreement with Comharchumann Forbartha Ghaoth Dobhair to see the comharchumann take over management and programming for the theatre.

Because we would be seen to have a management structure in place, it seems a good fit, but its certainly a big challenge for us with the resources available, Cathal O Gallchoir, manager of the comharchumann, said.

He said, Its a challenge, but its exciting times.

The comharchumann, based in An Crannog, Derrybeg, runs the Gaoth Dobhair Winter School for trad music. Cathal said An Crannogs focus on Irish music, drama and storytelling, dovetails nicely with the aims of the amharclann: The main ambition is to have as regular a programme as possible.

Pol said the Irish language will always be central to the theatre, and added, that doesnt mean we are going to close it down to a German play or a French play.

We have to run it as a business, really, so it has to be multifunctional, he said.

Pol said the theatre could also be used by area schools and serve as a venue for conferences and talks. It will be a facility for all the community and we hope it is used by all the community, he said.

The total project cost is more than 800,000. Funding has come from Leader, Donegal County Council and FIontar na Cuinge, and included 485,000 from the Department of the Gaeltacht. Pol said the committee was grateful to former Minister of State for the Gaeltacht, Joe McHugh.

The committee continue to raise money for the work. For example, individuals or groups can sponsor a seat in the theatre for 120, with sponsors names appearing in the foyer. Pol said more than half of the seats are already sponsored, but there are still seats available for sponsorship.
Don't Be Afraid To Talk About Voter Suppression

By Stephen Gossett in News on Nov 11, 2016 6:20PM



Getty Images / Photo: Darren Hauck

Massive waves of anti-Trump protesters have taken to the streets in cities across America in the wake of Tuesdays surprise (to most) election results. Thousands marched right here in Chicago on Wednesday, flooding the Loop and Lake Shore Drive. Chants of Not my president and We reject the president are a common refrain. Meanwhile, a widely circulated petition calling for the Electoral College to vote instead for Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, on Dec. 19 has gathered millions of supporters. Some Trump supporters view all this as anti-democratic, the very kind of rigged system that they preemptively described before the election.

The grey shades of protest cries do not equate to a systematic rejection, wed argue, but we can play ball; and the popular-vote-as-mandate argument isnt airtight, however understandable. But one liberal complaint must absolutely not be allowed to be cast as sour grapes: voter suppression.

Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes. For perspective, 300,000 registered voters in WI lacked strict voter ID https://t.co/zVbojQvh2E pic.twitter.com/AFtNjI5Ima  Ari Berman (@AriBerman) November 9, 2016

Those startling examples come from Ari Berman, who has been covering voter suppression extensively for The Nation, including our immediate neighbors to the north, Wisconsin.

This was the first presidential election in five decades without the Voting Rights Act, Berman noted. But Wisconsins state Voter ID law appears to have had distinct disenfranchising effects. Although some of the lower-than-usual turnout mentioned above by Berman owes to an enthusiasm gap, Neil Albrecht, executive director of the city's Election Commission, saw several red flags.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes:

(Albrecht) said that four districts of the city with the most "transient, high poverty" residents experienced trouble with people struggling to meet the photo identification requirement. Previously, those voters were able to have "corroborating witnesses" vouch for them at the polls.

Andrea Kaminski, of League of Women Voters, told the paper she saw voters turned away without being given provisional ballots. We definitely saw real people leaving. They were not offered a provision ballot and they should be, she said. Probably it was happening a lot more than we saw.

A federal judge in October criticized state officials for not properly explaining to citizens the laws requirements, although he said he did not think he had the authority to suspend the law, according to CNN.

The problem, however, was far more widespread than just Wisconsin, Berman notes:



"On Election Day, there were 868 fewer polling places in states with a long history of voting discrimination, like Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina. These changes impacted hundreds of thousands of voters, yet received almost no coverage. In North Carolina, as my colleague Joan Walsh reported, black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because in 40 heavily black counties, there were 158 fewer early polling places. Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, its fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy."

That final point remains instructive. It will take some time to fully comprehend the degree to which voter suppression persisted on Tuesday. Asking that vital question should not be painted as tantamount to sore losing.
Home Four wheelers Renault Unveils First Ever Kwid Art Car In Mumbai oi-Abijith Vilangil

Renault's first Kwid Art Car painted by the French artist of Indian origin, Shombit Sengupta, was unveiled by Yves Perrin, Consul General of France, in Mumbai, on Thursday.

The car will be on display at ICIA Gallery, Kala Ghodathe, Mumbai until November 14 as part of "Desordre" exhibition by Sen.

{photo-feature}
Dundalk lad Cillian Lambe, a recent computer applications graduate from DCU, was the director of Irelands largest anime and manga convention at Croke Park last weekend.

Eirtakon, which is organised by volunteers, was held in Croke Park last weekend on the 4th to the 5th to celebrate its 12th year. The three day convention saw over 5000 people from all over Ireland will come together for the weekend to celebrate anime, manga and Japanese culture.

Attendees got to meet their favourite voice actors, cosplayers, watch their favourite anime films, play Pokemon Go, and show off their cosplay outfits. Some of the highlights from the weekend included:

Panels from guests of honour and voice actors Luci Christian best known for voicing Nami in One Piece and John Swasey best known for voicing Salvador in Borderlands 2 and Sgt Hauser in Halo.

Cillian said: Eirtakon is a convention that just gets better as the years go by and I am delighted to be involved in such a large and growing event. It is the perfect place for those who are interested in anime, manga or gaming with a gaming area, anime showings, panels, and much more. As there was plenty of activities and brilliant international guests and cosplayers, I feel that this year was a wonderful weekend which everyone enjoyed.

The Irish Video Game Orchestra performed songs from video games such as Pokemon and Taiseiyo Taiko Drummers Ensemble ended the closing night on Sunday with a bang.

Attendees also got to play the video game DOOM against its creator John Romero and meet Dungeons & Dragons artist Brenda Romero. A difficult to catch Pokemon - A 6ft Pikachu made completely from balloons by Mr Balloonatic.
Local businessman Martin Naughton, founder of Glen Dimplex, was awarded the highest French national honour at a special ceremony from H.E. Ambassador to Ireland, Jean-Pierre Thebault on Thursday 10 November 2016 at the French residence in Dublin.

The Orde National de la Legion dHonneur is the highest French order for military and civil merits bestowed in the name of the President of the Republic, first established in 1802 by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte. Mr. Martin Naughton will receive distinction of Officier and follow other Irish recipients such as Pat Cox, Albert Manifold(CRH) , Eamon Gilmore, John Mullins (CEO Port of Cork) and Paul Hewson aka Bono.

Speaking at the ceremony, Mr. Martin Naughton said I am honoured and humbled to receive this Award especially as I have always had a love affair with France, its wines, its food and its people. Glen Dimplex has significant and successful investments in France.I believe in the pre-Brexit world. Ireland and the Irish people need to form the strongest links possible with France and our other EU partners, while maintaining our closest links with Britain, our largest trading partner, and neighbour.

Commenting on the award from H.E. Ambassador , Jean-Pierre Thebault said

With this honour, France recognises an outstanding career and an exceptional individual. Martin Naughton embodies the best of Irish inventiveness and sense of entrepreneurship. He is an inspiration for both Irish and French young generations. Thanks to his vision, Glen Dimplex has become a world leader in sustainable energy use so contributing to the international fight against climate change. His dedication to the community, his deep friendship for France and the active promotion of France-Ireland new initiatives are unique. This evening, we honour an exceptional friend.
Fine Gael TD for Louth, Fergus ODowd, has called for the legalisation of medical cannabis and welcomed Minister Simon Harris commitment to examine this issue in January.

The legalisation of cannabis for medical use is something that has already been legislated for in a number of other jurisdictions, including Australia, Canada, 25 US States, Croatia and the Czech Republic.

Meanwhile in the UK, a cross-party campaign is underway to legalise cannabis for medicinal use and to allow sick people to grow their own cannabis under licence. A study conducted by neurologist Professor Mike Barnes reviewed 20,000 studies going back to the 1960s and concluded that medical cannabis helps alleviate chronic pain, anxiety and muscle problems, particularly linked to multiple sclerosis and the side effects of chemotherapy.

Here in Ireland it is something that a number of people are campaigning for, especially the parents of sick young children, who believe that it can reduce pain and help combat symptoms such as seizures.

I welcome the fact that the Minister for Health Simon Harris has asked the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) to provide expert advice on this issue. The Minister has asked the HPRA to provide advice on:

- recent developments in the use of cannabis for medical purposes; in particular this should include: an overview of products that have been authorised in other jurisdictions; an overview of the wider on-going and emerging clinical research in new indications and evidence of efficacy

- an overview of the different regulatory regimes in place in countries which allow cannabis to be used for medicinal purposes

- legislative changes that would be required to allow use of cannabis for medicinal purposes in Ireland.

The Oireachtas Health Committee is also due to examine the issue of cannabis for medical purposes later this month and Minister Harris has said he hopes to receive the report from the HPRA and the output from the Oireachtas Health Committee in January. I welcome the fact that Minister Harris has confirmed he will then be in a position to move forward with any legislative changes that may be recommended.
Zhao Liping [file photo]

Former senior political advisor and police chief of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Zhao Liping was sentenced Friday to death for murder, bribery, and possession of fire arms and explosives.

Zhao was also stripped of his political rights and had personal property worth two million yuan (293,535 U.S. dollars) confiscated, according to a statement from Taiyuan City Intermediate People's Court in the central province of Shanxi.

The former vice chairman of the Inner Mongolia regional committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), was found to have shot dead a victim, identified only as Li, in Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia, in March, 2015.

Over the course of the investigation, police found guns, bullets and a number of detonators that led back to Zhao.

Zhao had also taken advantage of his post to help others secure business contracts and official positions, and accepted bribes totaling 23.68 million yuan from 2008 to 2010, during his tenure as the chief of the Public Security Department of Inner Mongolia, according to the statement.
Over the years I have acquired this skill of shopping for what I need in a short period of time. I also believe I have this talent of chancing on wise sale price of items I want.

At the recent opening of Shopwise Manila located inside the Harrison Plaza , I got head-over-heels with the items I saw insde the store.

Mountain bikes for as low as Php1,999.00



Cabin size luggages for Php999.00



7 foot Christmas Tree for Php799.00

Masflex Stonewear (Induction cooker friendly) for as low as Php319.00

Masflex Cookwear set (Induction cooker friendly) for as low as Php999.00



Baking Accessories and Pans for Php49.00



Gas Range 4 burner with Manual Baking for Php10,495.00

White Westinghouse Gas Raneg for Php9,999,00

Hanabishi Electric Grill for Php1,599.00



LED TV for Php5,990.00



Of course there are food items that are sold at whole sale prices.

Aside from the wise sale finds I saw at the store, Shopwise Manila introduces the fresh shopping experience for Manilenos who love to shop and dine at the same time. After grocery, everyone can dine in at the selection of ready to eat food in their food market. They have Mongolian and Asian favorites, Fresh bar and salad bar. They also have deli sandwiches and their very own home made pizza Pizzayolo.

The wise sale prices I mentioned above can only be found at the redesigned Shopwise Manila and will be made available until November 30, 2016 only!

Shopwise Manila is located inside the Harrison Plaza Mall along A.Mabini and M. Adriatico Street in Malate Manila.

Stay gorgeous everyone!
Google on Thursday fired back at the European Commissions charges that it violated antitrust law by imposing coercive rules on mobile operators and developers who use or write applications for its Android operating system.

The EC this spring charged that Googles requirements to use its search engine and its Chrome browser on mobile devices running Android were coercive tactics.

The EC also charged that Google prevented manufacturers from offering smart devices using rival operating systems based on the Android open source code.

Google has not harmed competition through the way it offers the Android operating system, argued Kent Walker, general counsel for the company.

On the contrary, Google has expanded competition, he said.

Folly of Fragmentation

First, the commissions case is based on the idea that Android doesnt compete with Apples iOS, Walker noted. We dont see it that way.

Eighty-nine percent of respondents to the ECs own market survey considered Android and Apple as competitors, he pointed out.

The ECs charges ignore the dangers of fragmentation in a mobile ecosystem, Walker said, noting further that the 1.3 million developers active as of 2015 needed a stable and consistent framework to operate in.

Although developers can download and modify Android as they please, the fragmentation that creates has led to problems for operating systems like Unix and Symbian, he observed.

When anybody can modify your code, how do you ensure theres a common, consistent version of the operating system, so that developers dont have to go through the hassle and expense of building multiple versions of their apps? Walker asked.

Apple and Microsoft offer less choice of apps on their phones, he maintained.

Android usually accounts for only one-third of preloaded apps, he said. Consumers can download apps they want to use, and the average user downloads an additional 50 apps over the lifetime of a device. Consumers downloaded 65 billion apps from Google Play in 2015, an average of 175 million a day.

However, there are deep divisions within the tech industry and the open source community about the impact Android has left on competition.

Critics Abound

Android actually is a closed system, and any claim to the contrary is disingenuous, said Thomas Vinje, counsel to digital rights group Fair Search.

Google imposes severe sanctions on those who defy its insistence on conformity, he pointed out.

Phone makers that offer even a few phones that fail to comply with Googles straightjacket are cut off from all Google-branded products, according to Vinje.

The EU seems be taking a fairly aggressive stance toward Google on other issues as well, noted Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Google has the facts on its side, he acknowledged, but its questionable how much that will matter in the end.

Its hard to envision a scenario in which the company emerges completely unscathed, Castro told the E-Commerce Times.

One of the reasons apps have been concentrated on Google devices is that consumers want what they need in one place, argued Karol Severin, an analyst at Midia Research.

No matter how many searches or OSes are out there, the best ones are bound to rise to the top and start acting like chip leaders if they can, he told the E-Commerce Times.

The Google argument that Android competes with Apples iOS is almost the same argument that Microsoft gave when it argued that it competed against the Mac OS in a separate case involving Windows, recalled Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

Ironically, then Google was one of the firms pushing for the adverse Microsoft judgment, while Apple actually defended Microsoft, he told the E-Commerce Times.

The EC was in receipt of Googles response, spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso confirmed to the E-Commerce Times, and in keeping with its standard practice, it would give careful consideration to the companys arguments before deciding how to move forward.
Blog Archive June 2021 (1) May 2021 (77) April 2021 (77) March 2021 (82) February 2021 (68) January 2021 (64) December 2020 (67) November 2020 (66) October 2020 (66) September 2020 (67) August 2020 (74) July 2020 (83) June 2020 (92) May 2020 (86) April 2020 (104) March 2020 (105) February 2020 (74) January 2020 (75) December 2019 (75) November 2019 (70) October 2019 (89) September 2019 (69) August 2019 (81) July 2019 (77) June 2019 (73) May 2019 (110) April 2019 (110) March 2019 (102) February 2019 (85) January 2019 (123) December 2018 (116) November 2018 (112) October 2018 (121) September 2018 (107) August 2018 (150) July 2018 (163) June 2018 (190) May 2018 (145) April 2018 (112) March 2018 (124) February 2018 (113) January 2018 (164) December 2017 (150) November 2017 (144) October 2017 (169) September 2017 (171) August 2017 (135) July 2017 (131) June 2017 (147) May 2017 (160) April 2017 (138) March 2017 (156) February 2017 (143) January 2017 (203) December 2016 (208) November 2016 (185) October 2016 (173) September 2016 (194) August 2016 (232) July 2016 (225) June 2016 (238) May 2016 (231) April 2016 (215) March 2016 (246) February 2016 (226) January 2016 (252) December 2015 (230) November 2015 (250) October 2015 (234) September 2015 (222) August 2015 (253) July 2015 (275) June 2015 (279) May 2015 (223) April 2015 (226) March 2015 (243) February 2015 (258) January 2015 (281) December 2014 (292) November 2014 (296) October 2014 (413) September 2014 (472) August 2014 (506) July 2014 (483) June 2014 (488) May 2014 (512) April 2014 (497) March 2014 (531) February 2014 (482) January 2014 (535) December 2013 (482) November 2013 (441) October 2013 (416) September 2013 (491) August 2013 (521) July 2013 (491) June 2013 (470) May 2013 (457) April 2013 (426) March 2013 (420) February 2013 (414) January 2013 (489) December 2012 (433) November 2012 (504) October 2012 (469) September 2012 (430) August 2012 (427) July 2012 (360) June 2012 (336) May 2012 (362) April 2012 (322) March 2012 (263) February 2012 (224) January 2012 (291) December 2011 (295) November 2011 (325) October 2011 (330) September 2011 (319) August 2011 (333) July 2011 (318) June 2011 (387) May 2011 (373) April 2011 (389) March 2011 (375) February 2011 (335) January 2011 (400) December 2010 (445) November 2010 (395) October 2010 (312) September 2010 (262) August 2010 (277) July 2010 (323) June 2010 (386) May 2010 (360) April 2010 (333) March 2010 (351) February 2010 (336) January 2010 (384) December 2009 (353) November 2009 (300) October 2009 (308) September 2009 (350) August 2009 (298) July 2009 (255) June 2009 (203) May 2009 (193) April 2009 (186) March 2009 (197) February 2009 (173) January 2009 (148) December 2008 (181) November 2008 (197) October 2008 (236) September 2008 (304) August 2008 (314) July 2008 (273) June 2008 (27) May 2008 (1) April 2008 (6) October 2007 (1) May 2007 (1) April 2007 (6) March 2007 (2) February 2007 (1) October 2006 (1) September 2006 (1) August 2006 (4) July 2006 (4) June 2006 (1) July 2005 (1) May 2005 (2) March 2005 (1) June 2004 (2) May 2004 (1) April 2004 (4) March 2004 (2) February 2004 (2) July 2003 (2) June 2003 (5)
LONDON  The International Trade Committee of the European Parliament, the powerful EU trade body, has given the green light to a textile trade deal with Uzbekistan which had been vehemently opposed by anti-slavery activists who had claimed the deal would see the EU profiting from forced labour in Uzbekistan's cotton controversial industry. The deal revises a 2011 decision by the European Parliament to put on hold Uzbekistan cotton imports over allegations of child and forced labour in the Uzbek cotton industry.
SHANGHAI  Textile industry leaders from five Asian countries have signed a new declaration on regional economic cooperation that also includes specific aims on social and environmental responsibility in their textile supply chains. The declaration, which was revealed at the 2016 Annual Conference on Social Responsibility of Chinese Textile & Apparel Industry, was officially signed at the event by textile industry organisations from China, Myammar, Cambodia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As well as boosting cross-border trade and investment, the new agreement  said to be an industry first  also addresses labour standards, human rights, fair competition and environmental protection in all five countries textile and apparel sectors.
Donald Trumps surprise election win has encouraged Energy Transfer Partnerss Kelcy Warren, the CEO of the parent company of Dakota Access LLC, which is building the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). In an interview with CBS This Morning, Warren said he is 100 percent confident that the president-elect will help the company finish the project.

The Standing Rock Sioux and their allies have been trying to block the controversial project since spring. The planned route cuts through the Missouri River, and protestors fear that a potential spill will contaminate the tribes main source of drinking water and destroy sacred sites.

More than 80 percent of the pipeline has already been constructed. The final phase is an easement to build a tunnel beneath the federally protected river, but it first needs approval from the Obama administration.

We will get this easement and we will complete our project, Warren insisted in his CBS interview.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is mulling alternative routes and has requested a temporary halt to the $3.8 billion project but Dakota Access LLC is pushing ahead with construction. According to a Nov. 8 release, the company said it is currently mobilizing horizontal drilling equipment to the drill box site and will commence drilling activities upon completion of mobilization in about two weeks.

Yesterday, Army Corpss Omaha office said it was concerned that the company plans to continue building despite the Corpss request.

Trump has not spoken about the DAPL but holds stocks that are directly funding the Dakota Access Pipeline. According to Trumps financial disclosure forms, The Guardian reported that he has invested between $500,000 and $1 million in Energy Transfer Partners.

The ardent supporter of fossil fuels wants to bring back the Keystone XL and announced plans to undo President Obamas climate change and environmental policies.

Warren said he has never met Trump but has donated $103,000 to his presidential campaign. He believes the DAPL will result in cheaper oil and more jobs.

Warren, however, brushed off any leak concerns: Im not gonna win that argument with you because pipelines do leak. Its rare. I think the chances of this pipeline leaking is extremely remote.

The Texas businessman went on to say that the protestors will not stop our project, thats naive.

DAPL opponents have also responded to Trumps win. Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II told Yes! Magazine the day after the election he hopes that the new commander-in-chief will be sympathetic:

We have to be hopeful and mindful that the new president understands what were about. Were about protecting our future. And thats what he should be about. He should think, How can I protect my future so that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, theres something there? And that if we continue to do what were doing at the pace that were doing it, in 50 years were going to see mass destruction because Mother Earth cannot sustain herself with all the activity thats taking place.

So if theres an understanding of that, we can build relationships, and we can work together on how to make this place better and to salvage what is left.
Scientists are trying to understand why 70 giant freshwater stingrays, some as big as a car, have been found dead in Thailand over the past few weeks. The die-off has been taking place in the Mae Klong River.

The giant freshwater stingray is the largest freshwater fish in the world. Zeb Hogan

Thai officials have found the river to be slightly more acidic than normal, but arent sure if that could be the cause. Some speculate that the rays may have been poisoned by cyanide or succumbed to a recent spill from an ethanol plant.

One thing is clear: a reduction of pollution from surrounding factories is needed to improve the health of the river and save the stingrays in the long term, Zeb Hogan, host of the Monster Fish series on Nat Geo Wild, said.

The WWF says that these rays are being increasingly isolated into separate groups due to construction of large hydropower dams, reducing genetic diversity. They are vulnerable to siltation as they spend much of their time along the rivers sandy bottom. And they can be caught up in fishing activities such as longlines and gill nets, and may be killed as bycatch.

Freshwater rays are prized as pets by home aquarium hobbyists. A search for freshwater stingrays for sale on Google will retrieve more than 200,000 results.

Listed as Endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), giant freshwater stingrays inhabit rivers in Southeast Asia and northern Australia.

Hogan said that one ray recently found alive weighed between 700 and 800 pounds. It measured 14 feet in length and 7.9 feet across. They can grow to more than 1,000 pounds.

Much mystery surrounds the giant freshwater stingray. Cousins of the more numerous and widespread ocean stingrays, they were only identified by scientists in 1990. While the freshwater rays have been seen in brackish waters, its not known if they ever venture into the ocean. No one knows how many exist in the wild, but they appear to be in decline.

In September, a new conservation effort was launched to help ocean rays and sharks. Actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio, at the Our Ocean Conference, announced the Global Partnership for Sharks & Rays, a collaborative effort to halt the alarming decline and overexploitation of shark and ray populations due to market demand for shark fin, liver oil, cartilage, leather, meat and ray gill plates.

Sharks and rays are among the most threatened vertebrates on the planet, Cristina Mormorunni, Global Partnership for Sharks & Rays acting director, said. For many of these incredible animals, the future is uncertain. Unfortunately, the scale of current conservation efforts and investments dont match the level of urgency sharks and rays face.
Faith groups have stepped up their campaigning for earth care as international groups meet in Morocco to enter the Paris Agreement on climate change into force as doubts abound about how U.S. president elect, Donald Trump, a climate skeptic, prepares for office.

"This is the time to step forward and act as trustees to Mother Earth. Together, by supporting each other's progress we can go further and faster", reads the "COP22 Interfaith Statement."

The document was prepared by faith communities involved in advocacy work on climate change at the 22nd Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

Trump has selected a climate skeptic to lead his Environmental Protection Agency transition team, a man whose beliefs are distinctly at odds with President Barack Obama's environmental policies, CBS News reports.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's (CEI) Myron Ebell is also viewed by many as a top candidate to become the next head of the EPA said CBS.

Ebell's research focuses on questioning what he calls "global warming alarmism" and opposing energy rationing policies, according to his biography on CEI's website.

In 2012, Ebell, in a Frontline documentary entitled "Climate of Doubt," described former Vice President Al Gore as "the perfect proponent and leader of the global warming alarmist because he's very politically diverse and controversial."

Trump is set to become the world's only leader who does not believe human-caused global warming exists, wrote Andrew Freedman on Mashable.

China reiterated Nov. 11 that with or without the United States, it is firmly committed to continuing to reduce its emissions.

Meanwhile in Marrakesh, Morocco, the 7-18 November climate conference is taking place in an historic moment in which the Paris Agreement enters into force, some would say just in time.

The agreement is an unprecedented global consensus that has produced a universal framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to build greater resilience to climate impacts.

PARIS AGREEMENT

Faith communities continue to work hard to make the Paris Agreement a reality in many parts of the world.

Leaders from global faith groups, financial institutions and foundations called on sovereign wealth and pension funds to end trillions in investments related to fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy in line with the Paris Agreement.

The faith leaders met at Building the Divest Invest Movement with Faiths, Foundations and Finance, an official side event of the COP22 UN Convention on Climate Change, which began Nov. 7 in Marrakesh.

At theInterfaith Climate Statement was released, with from across faith traditions joining together in a powerful call to action.

Signer include the Dalai Lama; Msgr. Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences; Rev Olav Fykse Tveit, General Secretary, World Council of Churches; Sayyid M. Syeed, Islamic Society of North America; Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and more than 220 other faith leaders.

Other signatories include senior Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Unitarian Universalist, Indigenous and other spiritual leaders.

"We must deliberately turn away from investing in fossil fuels and we stand together, to call for a collective shift by sovereign wealth funds and public sector pension funds from fossil fuels towards climate solutions", reads the text.

Among other issues, faith groups at COP22 will be actively advocating for:

 States rapidly increasing pledges to reduce emissions, in line with the goal limiting global temperature rise to below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels;

 A collective shift by sovereign wealth funds and public sector pension funds away from fossil fuels into renewables and other climate solutions;

 An increase in global financial flows to end energy poverty with renewable energy and to provide for greater human and ecological adaptation, particularly to compensate for loss and damage, technology transfer and capacity building;

Stricter controls on the dispute mechanisms within trade agreements that utilize extrajudicial tribunals to challenge government policies.

A special social media action, through a Twitter thunderclap, or a social media message said at the same time, is taking place on 4 November, celebrating the Paris Agreement coming into force and also inviting people to sign the Interfaith statement.

Many people are already changing their priorities and their lifestyles to protect the globe, said the WCC's Tveit.

"So many are with us, physically or symbolically, on a pilgrimage of climate justice and peace," he said.

"We believe that we have the potential to do what is just for the poor, those who contribute the least to emissions yet suffer the most. We believe that we have been given by God, the Creator, this responsibility - but also the capacity to change."
(Reuters / Aaron P. Bernstein)Presidential candidate Donald Trump in Terre Haute, Indiana during one of his campaign events on May 15, 2016.

The pundits said they were baffled by them and believed they had turned against Donald Trump. But now his win in the U.S. presidential election is being ascribed to white evangelical Christians who helped clinch victory.

In analysis entitled, "The Evangelical Reckoning Over Donald Trump," The Atlantic said, "White, conservative Christians voted for the Republican candidate by a huge margin, but this election revealed deep fractures among leaders and churches - especially along racial lines."

The Atlantic noted that for months media stories spoke of the death of the religious rights alluding to "a new moral minority" asserting that the Christian cade for voting Trump was followed by that for not voting for him.

Yet now it's clear said the Atlantic, "They overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump."

Exit polls indicated that "Never Trump" was never a likely outcome for white evangelical voters, who showed up to support President-elect Donald Trump in their highest turnout since 2004 when George W. Bush won, reported Christianity Today.

It said despite reservations that many evangelical and Republican leaders had expressed, white born-again/evangelical Christians cast their ballots for Trump at an 81 percent to 16 percent margin over his rival Hillary Clinton.

At the same time, Christianity Today reported that Evangelicals of color, who account for 2 in 5 evangelicals, "but aren't segmented out in most national political polls" largely went for Clinton in the lead up to the election.

HISPANICS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS' TURNOUT

Yet Clinton was not able to compare to a low underperformance in voting by Hispanics and African Americans compared to elections contested by President Barack Obama before her.

Citing the U.S. Elections Project's count so far, only about 56.9 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot on Election Day, Vox reported.

The publication noted that only about one-fourth of Americans eligible to vote actually voted for the real estate mogul turned politician.

In effect 43.1 percent of people eligible to vote did not, said Vox while explain the U.S. voter turnout rate will increase over the next few days as the final votes are counted.

According to the tally Clinton, based on the latest estimates, received a little more than 27 percent of the voting-eligible population's vote, while Trump gleaned just 27 percent.

Although he won the Electoral College, which determines the presidency, Trump appears to have lost the popular vote to Clinton.

So a little more than a quarter of the voting-eligible population chose the next president of the United States.

The Atlantic said that the estimation of the white evangelical vote going to Trump might seem to affirm a long-standing coalition between evangelicals and the Republican party, and did so in many ways.

"But vote counts conceal deep, painful fractures among the huge, diverse group of Americans who identify as evangelical Christians," noted The Atlantic.

In-fighting among Christian leaders before the election showed many people in big, important positions staking their credibility on either supporting or opposing Trump.

Some leaders, such as Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., came out vocally for Trump. Others, like Russell Moore, who leads the Southern Baptist Convention's political arm  vocally opposed him, while other stayed out.

And many pastors didn't affirmatively support Trump.

"The story here continues to be continuity in the strength of evangelical support for GOP candidates, rather than greater intensity," Christianity Today quoted Kevin den Dulk, political science professor at Calvin College as saying.

"I suspect there's some underlying changes in polling responses that would make Trump's evangelical support seem greater than it has in the past," he noted.

Clinton's campaign largely ignored evangelical outreach, unlike that of Obama, said Christianity Today. That might have been a fatal error.

On the other hand Trump spent months leading up to Election Day directly courting evngelical support said Christianity Today.

After the result, The Atlantic said that for some evangelical leaders, and particularly women and people of color, the election "was never about power jockeying or compromise."

"To them, Trump represents a bigoted, misogynistic worldview and an existential threat....White, conservative Christians may have thought they were just casting a vote for president, but some of their brothers and sisters in the church see their choice as a direct and personal assault."
Republicans at the state level stockpiled more legislative, governors, and state schools superintendent seats in this weeks election, dealing a blow to teachers union hopes and strengthening the hand of GOP policymakers in state capitals as they write sweeping K-12 education agendas early next year under the umbrella of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

The winners include Gov.-elect Doug Burgum, in North Dakota, a Republican who during his campaign referred to public schools as government schools, expendable in that states looming budget cuts.

The losers include Superintendents Glenda Ritz in Indiana and June Atkinson of North Carolina, both Democrats who attempted to shield public school teachers from an onslaught of school accountability legislation passed by their Republican-controlled legislatures. Both lost in Republican-dominated states.

States will have plenty more say in the coming years over issues such as school accountability and teacher evaluations as ESSA goes into full effect in the 2017-18 school year, shrinking the federal governments regulatory role in K-12 and putting more flexibilityand responsibilityin the hands of state leaders.

And with the Republican Donald Trump now headed to the White House and both houses of Congress remaining in GOP hands, federal policymakers could begin dismantling the regulations crafted by President Barack Obamas Department of Education. That would give state leaders broader say in areas such as how they appropriate federal dollars and how they set about boosting academic outcomes.

State policymakers next year may decide to punt some of that power back to local school boards, widening testing options, loosening accountability systems, and more equitably redistributing federal dollars and close the achievement gap, or they may take on the politically volatile and increasingly complex task themselves.

Republicans will now hold at least 31 governors seats, and Democrats will hold at least 18. (North Carolinas race was still too close to call at weeks end.)

And in at least 32 states with partisan control, Republicans will have control of both legislative chambers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. (Democrats will have such control in at least 13 states, and three states are split. New York was still undecided as of the end of this week.)

In addition, four chambers will flip from Republican to Democratic control, and three chambers will flip from Republican to Democratic control.

That includes Kentuckys state Senate, where a blustery fight over charter schools has been long brewing. The state is one of only a few that hasnt allowed charter schools, though Matt Bevin, the states recently appointed Republican governor, has pledged to change that next session.

In a political environment where swaths of states are controlled by one party or another, states are likely to take very different approaches in areas such as standards, testing, and accountability, said Jeffrey Henig, a political science professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Such differences have been lessened in the past by a strong federal role. Thats not what youre going to see under ESSA and Trump, at least now, I predict.

Front and Center

K-12 education was front and center in a number of state-level elections this year, in contrast to its mostly muted profile in the presidential campaign. In several states, in fact, teachers unions attempted to bypass the state legislatures and take directly to the voters ballot measures that, if passed, would raise taxes to provide districts with plenty more money.

The results were mixed.

In Maine, voters approved Question 2, a ballot measure that will add a 3 percent surcharge to the portion of household income over $200,000 to provide for more school funding. The measure is estimated to boost annual education funding by $157 million a year. The state spends about $1 billion a year.

But in Oklahoma, voters rejected Question 779, a measure that would have given teachers raises of more than $5,000 in the coming year. The Sooner State has suffered from a series of dramatic budget cuts in recent years after oil prices tanked. The states teachers are some of the lowest paid in the country, and several districts there now hold classes only four days a week.

After an electrifying 2014 rally over education budget cuts at the state capitol, dozens of Oklahoma teachers decided to run in the 2016 race for legislative seats. The group, known by the local press as the teachers caucus, did not fare well, though. Only five of the 25 who made it onto this months ballot were elected.

A ballot measure in Oregon and two ballot measures in California both passed overwhelmingly and are set to bring millions of dollars to those states school districts in the coming years.

School choice advocates took blows in Georgia and Massachusetts, where two expensive campaigns to increase the presence of charter schools failed. Voters rejected a ballot measure in Massachusetts to lift a cap on that states charter school presence. And, in Georgia, voters rejected a measure to allow the state to take over its worst-performing schools and hand them over to charter operators.

Pre-K initiatives in several places had mixed results. Voters in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, approved tax increases to expand prekindergarten services. A quarter of a percent tax increase in Daton will raise an estimated $11 million for pre-K services over the next eight years. And Cincinnatis voters approved a measure to raise its property tax to serve 6,000 preschool students a year. A similar ballot measure in Missouri failed.

Showdown States

In the quest to add to their tally of governors seats, Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in Indiana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Vermont, and Utah, three of which were previously held by Democrats.

Democrats won gubernatorial mansions in Delaware, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, none of which was previously held by Republicans.

As of Nov. 11, North Carolinas governors race between Republican incumbent Pat McCrory and Democratic candidate Roy Cooper was too close to call. The governors there debated whether the Republican-controlled legislature had in fact raised teacher pay or if their accountability movement had run scores of teachers away from the profession. That debate mostly overshadowed the state superintendents race, which resulted in Atkinson, the nations longest-serving superintendent, losing her position.

In Indiana, where testing and school accountability have roiled its political body for years, that states already weakened Democratic Party took a double blow. Republican Lt. Gov. Eric Holcomb beat John Gregg, the Democrat, for governor, and Democratic incumbent Ritz was ousted by Republican Jennifer McCarthy.
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) meets with President-elect DonaldTrump to discuss transition plans in the White House Oval Office in Washington, U.S., November 10, 2016. (Xinhua/REUTERS)

Perhaps the greatest puzzle of Donald Trump's presidential election victory lies in the contrast between the technical, scientific and economic prowess of the United States and the narrow, simplistic and bigoted rhetoric of its newly chosen leader.

On the eve of the election the mainstream political experts solidly predicted a victory for Hillary Clinton. Indeed, the global polling industry, whose research charts the popular mood, has, once again, proven to be so much hocus-pocus.

The reason why the most expensive and technically sophisticated tools of political analysis utterly failed is rooted in the theoretical framework of the modelling systems employed. The core philosophy that guides modern political analysis rests on the assumption that the basic structure of society is built on solid and relatively unchangeable foundations.

In established representative democracies, the flexibility to change parties and personnel and to subject them to electoral forms of accountability and popular scrutiny acts as a safety valve. This prevents any challenge to the basic structure of the social system from getting out of hand. The "free press," the checks and balances of an independent judiciary, and the right of people to express discontent in protests, strikes and other forms of popular dissent are additional tools, which help to restore the social equilibrium in times of crisis.

The rise and fall of economies driven by private investment is determined by the rate of profit i.e. the return on investment. The accumulation of capital originates from the unpaid labor power of the working class. Private capitalist companies compete with each other in the marketplace on a world scale. Corporate operations are planned to ensure organizational efficiency and technological supremacy, but the planning system constitutes a secret terrain based on proprietary modelling systems designed to secure a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Government is supposed to help facilitate an environment in which private companies flourish. Therefore the political process tends to congeal into an instrument designed to reproduce the existing hierarchy of wealth and power in society. This means that the working classes must remain a subordinate and generally passive social force. Politics is primarily the concentrated expression of business interests. This is the theoretical framework, which Karl Marx developed. It helps us to understand the emergence of the system, its period of flowering and its periodic crises, which indicate that the system will eventually disappear.

What then can explain the phenomena of Donald Trump's victory? The deep economic crisis has been accompanied by an extraordinary rise in inequality. The impoverishment of large sections of the middle-class has stirred up a cauldron of social discontent. This produced a disgruntled and angry electorate, which found expression in the mass rallies in support of Bernie Sanders in the primaries, held to determine the Democratic Party nominee, as well as in Trump's final victory.

Whereas Sanders appealed to the brains of the working class and middle class with his critique of inequality and greed, Trump appealed to the most backward prejudices of these alienated constituencies. He spouted racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism. He appealed to the culture of a bygone age, where the mores of political correctness did not apply. His Mexican wall, his ban on Muslims, his lustful groping of women: all give expression to his crude mind-set that yearns to restore some status in the social hierarchy for the white male worker and the small businessman.

As for the subordinate classes, many of whom supported Trump rather than Clinton, disillusion will settle in quite quickly. Naturally, the person best placed to capitalize on this is Bernie Sanders. If he is able to develop a movement that unifies the working-class behind a party based on class rather than race, he will be knocking on an already open door. As the workers of the United States find their way towards solidarity - in the face of their real enemies, oppressors and exploiters, the giant companies and banks - the idea to create a party of the working class, a party of Labor, can spread like wildfire, conquer the minds of the masses and transform the nation.

Heiko Khoo is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/heikokhoo.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
You are here: Home

 Flash

China supports the work of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) and will do more to work with members to combat cross-border crimes.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang made the remark at a routine news briefing when commenting on Chinese vice minister for public security Meng Hongwei's election as new Interpol president.

Meng was elected on Thursday at the closing ceremony of Interpol's 85th General Assembly in Bali, Indonesia. He is the first Chinese official to hold the post.

Extending congratulations to Meng, Lu said China attaches great importance to Interpol's role, and is ready to take more responsibility and make a greater contribution to global law enforcement and security cooperation.

Lu promised joint efforts with various countries to create a sound and safety environment for prosperous development.

Meng takes over from Mireille Ballestrazzi of France for a four-year term.

Now headquartered in Lyon, France, Interpol is the second largest international organization after the United Nations with 190 members. China joined Interpol in 1984.
NATIONAL Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto will be thankful he rolled out the red carpet for Donald Trump when he invited him to visit in August. Tough negotiations - especially on trade between the neighbours and commercial partners - lie ahead. Ildefonso Guajardo, Mexico's seasoned economy minister and former North American Free Trade Agreement negotiator, will be in the eye of that storm. Faced with the prospect of a trade war if Mr Trump keeps his campaign pledge to slap tariffs on cars made by US companies in Mexico and exported to the US, for example, he admits "we cannot bet on anything".

But the government is, for now, politely overlooking the way Mr Trump branded Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals; how he has vowed to barricade the border and make Mexicans pay by threatening to stop the annual flow of $24bn in remittances; and his plans to deport immigrants.

"We trust the US. We trust its institutions and so we trust who is going to assume the leadership," Mr Guajardo said. Mr Pena Nieto, who attracted ridicule in August for failing to take Mr Trump to task in public, now hails a new chapter in US-Mexican relations under Mr Trump as "a big opportunity".

Congratulating the property magnate on his victory, he made no mention of Nafta but Jose Antonio Meade, finance minister, and Agustin Carstens, central bank governor, told bankers at a private meeting that was the government's main concern now.

Mexico hopes to find common ground now that Mr Trump is talking of renegotiating, not scrapping, the 22-year-old trade pact and some Nafta elements have already essentially been renegotiated under the Trans-Pacific Partnership, said one banker who was at the meeting.
You are here: Home

 Flash

Cambodia's national flag carrier Cambodia Angkor Air (CAA) will launch direct flights between northwest Cambodia's Siem Reap province and China's Beijing, starting from Dec. 16 onwards, said a CAA's press release on Friday.

The airline will operate thrice-weekly flight service by using an Airbus A320 aircraft, which is capable to seat 180 passengers, the press release said.

"This is a new regular flight connecting Cambodia and China in addition to the existing flights to Guangzhou and Shanghai," it said.

According to the press release, the new flight is to respond to the rapid growth of Chinese tourists to Cambodia and will be easy for tourists in Beijing to travel to Siem Reap province, the home of famed Angkor Wat Temple.

Also, it will be easy for Cambodian people to fly to Beijing for leisure or business purposes, it added.

"The five-hour flight between the two destinations will make Chinese tourists easier to travel to Siem Reap-Angkor," said CAA's chairman Tekreth Samrach.

China ranked the second largest source of tourists to Cambodia after Vietnam. According to a tourism data, some 700,000 Chinese tourists visited Cambodia in 2015, up 24 percent year-on-year.

Established in 2009, CAA is using seven aircrafts--three ATR72-turboprop planes and four Airbuses--to operate two domestic routes and 10 regular international routes.
 Flash

Top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un on Friday guided a shell firing drill when he inspected the army on the western front, the official news agency KCNA reported.

Kim, while inspecting the defense detachment on Mahap Islet in the western part of the front, gave a surprise order to the artillery to open fire and strike a designated naval target, according to the state media.

He was satisfied with the result of the firing drill and gifted the soldiers with a pair of binoculars, an automatic rifle and a machine gun.

Kim underscored the need to train the soldiers into "indomitable fighters" through political and ideological education and called for providing better cultural living conditions to them.

He also learned in detail about the supply to the army and education of children of military officers and instructed to place attention on the living conditions of service personnel and officers' families.

Senior military officials, including director of the General Political Bureau of the Korean People's Army Hwang Pyong So and chief of the General Staff of the army Ri Myong Su, accompanied Kim in the inspection.
The European Union released a report on Wednesday (9 November) criticizing Turkey for its crackdown on the opposition leaders and governments opponents following the failed July coup. The EU said that the prospects of Turkey becoming an EU member have become even more distant. The Wednesday report, which is essentially an annual summary of Turkeys progress towards the membership, slams the country very hard over the independence of judiciary, rule of law, fundamental democratic principles and freedom of expression.

The coup attempt of 15 July was an attack on democracy per se. Given the seriousness of the situation, a swift reaction to the threat was legitimate, the EUs top enlargement official, Johaness Hahn, said. However, the large scale and collective nature of measures taken over the last months raise very serious concerns, he added and continued by stressing that Turkey as a candidate country must fulfill the highest standards in the field of the rule of law and fundamental rights. In this years report we therefore stress Turkeys backsliding in the area of rule of law and fundamental rights.

Turkeys Minister for EU Affairs, Omer Celik, commented that the report was not constructive, suggesting that parts of it lacked objectivity. The report does not serve to benefit EU-Turkey ties, he said and urged both sides to build stronger bridges. Turkey has for long been losing patience when it comes to its EU membership application. Its current status is somewhere in a limbo between those EU states that support the countrys accession and those that have serious concerns mostly over how to integrate an almost 80-million Muslim society within the EU. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan therefore urged Brussels to make a final say on the application. Reassess it, but do not delay in reassessing it. Make your final decision.
Written by ACM



*Strasbourg/Angelo Marcopolo/- From the nevralgic Viewpoint of the PanEuropean CoE (47 Member States, Russia included) Headquarters City of Strasbourg, (a Democracy, Human Rights and Rule of Law Organization, based at the Franco-German border, and wished by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchil), the Most Important development in the Crucial US Presidential Election of 2016, was that, as it emerged clearly from its Final Results, for the 1st Time in History, it's a quite pro-European, in fact, President who was Elected now in North America, thanks mainly to a Surprising Win of the Voice of the People, particularly at the Internet, against almost All the Establishment and its Traditional Medias, Contrary to what had Claimed almost All mainstream Polling "Experts" Companies, (with Only 1 Exception) !



The Center-Right part of the American Political Spectrum, won, indeed, a Quadruple (X4) Absolute Majority at the Crucial Elections of Yesterday Evening (EU Time) : I.e. More than 51% of the Popular Votes, against Only a Minority of 48,5 % for the Center-Left, (47,5% the Republicans + 3,2% the Liberals +0,3% an Independent, versus 47,6% the Democrats + 1% the Greens). But also a clear Majority of 306 decisive Electors for the Frontrunner Republican Candidate, Don Trump, throughout all the Federated States, against Only 232 for the Candidate of the Dems, Hillary Clinton. Center-Right's Republicans also Kept a Majority both at the Senate and at the Congress, while they Dominated the Election of Governors for the 50 Federated States of USA's Federation : 33 Governors, against Only 15 for the Center-Left's Dems, (i.e. + 3 More than Before, for the Center-Right).



----------------------------

A New USA President with Many Links to Europe

------------------------------------------------------------



The main Political Leader of this Unexpected Brillant Winning Movement, (that 99% of Polls, astonishingly, had NOT Predicted at all, giving Hillary as Winning, until the Eve of the Vote, included, and even at the Morning of the Election's Day, with the Unique clear Exception of Only 1 Poll, that of "Los Angeles Times", which was generaly considered as Pro-Republican, and, therefore, did Not gather attention), is, Now, a Brand New American President, Donald Trump, who clearly seems to be, in Fact, much more "pro-European", than what is known :



- Indeed, Trump, is, First of all, Son of a Father whose Origins are located ...at the Proximity of the PanEuropean Capital of Strasbourg, in the Nearby German, small but Historic City of KallStadt, (Northwards from here, but also close to the Rhine River, at Southern Germany, in an Area from which several German People had Emigrated to the USA in the Past, as "Eurofora" Co-Founder was told, f.ex., by an American Lady of German origin from that Same Area, Back on 2005 at Chicago's International Airport, where we had gone to Visit close Family Members, just After UNO's Heads of State/Government Summit, and General Assembly, at New York : Comp. 2 FrontPage Articles that we Pubiihed then at "TCWeekly" from UNO('s Headquarters at N.Y.).



By another, Highly Symbolic GeoPolitical Coincidence, KallStadt had been Founded by, and took its Name from, a "Frank" King, (i.e. from those who Created and Headed, later-on, France itself !). It was even Occupied, later-on, by the French, who went as far as to even "Annexate" that area, for a moment, but it Returned, later-on, Back to Germany. So that it really has, Both by its own History, as well as by its Location, a pronounced Franco-German dimension, while being also situated almost at the Center of the EU...

+ In Addition, it's also by his Mother, that Don Trump, notoriously has even a 2nd European link personaly, since her Family originated from Scotland (UK), that he has Visited recently, inaugurating a Gulf play area, while still Campaigning as a Candidate for the US Presidency on June 2016.



++ Moreover, it's also his Wife, Melania, who comes from Europe, since she has been Born in EU Member Country Slovenia. (Even his 1st Wife, Ivana, with whom he had been maried 40 Years ago : 1977, also came from Europe : the Czech Republic).

But the Most Important point, concerning the New USA President-elect's relations to Europe, is naturaly "Hot" and Topical Politics :



- Trump is notoriously in favor of Good Relations ith Russia, almost as De Gaulle, the Historic long-time former President of France, had notoriously supported the Idea of "a Great Europen, from the Atlantic Ocean, up to the Urals Mountains", i.e. in close Cooperation also with a peaceful Russia. A Strategy also followed by Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist French President, f.ex. at the 1997 COE's Summit in Strasbourg, with Yeltsin, at the eve of Iraq War of 2003, with Putin, as well as at the Compiegne Castle on 2006, etc. His successor, Sarkozy, also pursued a Good Relations Policy with Russia, both in the Past, and Recently, with Medvedev and Putin, in Paris or Moscow, etc.



On the Contrary, the Clintons, Both Bill and Hillary, as well as US Presiident Obama now, have always faced Hard Tensions vis a vis Russia and its Allies, during Events which Inflicted Long-Term Wounds even Inside Europe, such as, f. ex., the Yugoslavia War, in the Past, and the Ukraine Conflict, Recently, while also, even the Syrian Conflict, nowadays, affect Europe mainly through Terrorist activities, (etc).



In such a Context, Donald Trump's notorious Claims that he Prefers, and Finds Possible, to Settle such Issues, via Diplomatic Negotiations with Russia, etc., instead of Bloody Conflicts, as well as, alleged fears that Moscow might, eventually, be incited, by that, to "Interfere" in the Electoral Process inside the US. There were, even, Acccusations against Trump, that he woud be, in fact, a ...Russian Agent, himself and/or Other Critics, to the point that World Famous Whistle-Blower Assange, (of "Wikileaks"), Denounced, these last Days, mainly Hillary for what he called as "Neo-Mccarthystic Hysteria" (sic !).



However, Trump's position on Russia was practicaly Endorsed also by anOther Center-Right Candidate, Johnson of the Liberal Party, who had notoriously been supported even by several Republicans, from Trump's own Party, (f.ex. its 2012 Failed Candidate, the controversial, pro-Establishment Millionaire, Romney, nicknamed : "Mr. Flip-Flop", for his Changing, Inconsistent and Opportunistic stance). Therefore, given the Fact that Johnson managed on 2016 to Triple his Votes, compared to what he had Before, (i.e. Instead of just 1% on 2012, now up to 3,2% for 2016), his Score, even if Small per se, nevertheless, Taken Together with that of Trump, represents a crystal-clear Absolute Majority of American Voters : i.e. 3,2% + 47,5% = almost 51%, (opposed to a Minority of Only around 48,4% for the Center-Left).



But, the Liberal Candidate (a former Governor of a US Federated State), had basically stressed that, in the Syrian Conflict, Western Countries should Join Forces, Together with Russia, in order to Bring Peace back in the Country, and Liberate it from ISIS' Islamic Terrorists. This Obviously stands very Close to the almost identical, in substance, Wider Stance of the Frontrunner Candidate of the Center-Right, Donald Trump himself.



In consequence, it's clear that this pro-Russia Peace Deal stance, is, in fact, Supported by a Net Majority of American People nowadays. This New Fact, flies in the face of the Opposite, almost Cold-War like stance, for which the Clintons and Obama have been recenty Criticized by a lot of People concerned by their War-Mongering stance, which was Felt as Dangerous, by a lot of US Voters, but also European People.



=> On the Contrary, Don Trump Anounced, in his 1st Post-Election Speech, at a special Address to "the World Comunity", that, "while we shall put our Country's Interest First", neverthless, the New US Administration "Will Deal Fairly with Everyone, All Peoples, All Other Nations", as he promissed.



>>> In particular, - "We'll Seek Common Ground, Not Hostility". And "Partnership, No Conflict !", significantly stressed earlier Today the New US President-elect.



Astonishingly, but, perhaps, very significantly, this Important point made now by Trump, was ...totaly Ommitted in the "full" Transcript of his Speech, made by the Official, Public Service TV Website of "C-Span.org", (usualy a quite Reliable Source for All Public Interest Anouncements concerning the Federal Administration, and the Political Life of the USA) ! It's also true, that this outlet is still Controlled by the Out-going Obama team...



------------------------------

People's Voice, via the Internent, OutPlayed Establishment's Traditional Media ! -----------------------------------------------------------------------------



But it's Not the 1st Time that Don Trump's 2016 US Presidential Electoral Campaign is Censored by the Establishment's, traditional Medias.



Assange, the co-Founder of "Wikileaks", a World-Famous Modern Whistle-Blower, who pays with his own Liberty, for almost 5 Years now, the Manifold Revelations that his NGO Team is making about the Ruling Elite's real way of Thinking and Speaking, had made a Stern Warning, right at the Eve of this Election :



- In an Exceptional, long Interview, he had Strongly Denounced the Fact that "All Parts of the Establishment" were "Against Trump", and, therefore, he did Not See how he might, eventually, "Win that Election", since that was made "Impossible", particularly by the Fact that it's also "All the Medias, both their Owners and their Journalists", who are, astonishingly, Opposed, as he found.



- "Except", perhaps, "the Evangelicals", "IF" you consider them as "an Establishment", Assange had ironically added...



Indeed, the Real Situation, concernig particularly the Traditional Medias and/or Journalists of the Establishment, already quite Bad before, became More and More Scandalous, Revolting, and even Unacceptable, as the Moment of these American Elections was Approaching, (particularly After the Beginning of this Autumn) :



In Addition to the Ommissions, gross Distorsions, outrageously UnBalanced Pseudo-"Debates", Partial or even Total Censorship, (See f.ex. a "Small" but Concrete Example, even After Don Trump Won that Election, cited Supra, and concerning even a Public Service Media, supported by the Federal Administration !),



>>> at the End, arrived Even several Astonishing Gross INSULTS, Personal Attacks "ad Hominem" full of blatant HATE, Totally UnBalanced Discriminations, Dogmatically and Arbitrarily Attacking designated Persons even without Any Proof, but Only Unsubstantiated Negative and/or Pejorative Claims, Full Only of Brutal Arbitrariness, Censorship, Vulgarity, Insults and Hate, Blatant Attempts to commit a quasi-Sadic and Shameless "Assassination of Personality"...



But the Most Surprising Fact, was all this didn't came just from InExperienced Journalists, but also and mainly, from some Very "Experienced" ones... Neither by some Poor, Weak, Discriminated, Censored, and/or Oppressed, Journalists, Frustrated by an InJustice, But mainly from Those who, on the Contrary, had Every Means at their Disposal, (Money, Offices, Hi-Tech Computers/SmartPhones, Collaborators, Transports, Accreditations, Invitations, Publicity, Promotion, Recognition, Fame, etc)... Not only by some, Free-Lance, more or less "Lone Wolfs", Independent, UnKnown, Isolated Writers, without Responsibilities, But mainly by well Established, Permanently Employed, Sociable, Well Acompagnied, Heads of Teams and/or Responsible of some Important Mission and/or Organisation that had been enTusted to them...



And that was, perhaps, the Worse : Suddenly, they astonishingly Droped the Masks, grossly Abused of the Trust that People used to give them until then, and Brutaly Attacked the Persons who Dared Resist to the Establishment, during that US Presidential Election, in such a Dirty, Stupid and UnEthical Way, that they Trampled underFeet all Elementary Press Deontology Rules : They Behaved No More as Real Journalists, but as Petty Slanderers...



It was a Sad and Revolting Spectacle, a fortiori when We Knew Personaly Some of them, and had Never Thought that they would Slyly Fall as Low as that, in the Mud...

But, "Scripta Manent", and now, the American People who, Despite all that, resolutely Voted for the New President of the United States, should seize an Historic Opportunity to, at last, Really Change our Society for the Better, and Free Citizens' Information and Public Debates from such Poisonous Mud :



- "Drain the Swamp !" It's Both a Popular Demand, and a Social Necessity, in line with the Wider, General Appeal recently (October 2016) Launched by Don Trump himself, in order to Wipe Out Corruption, War-Mongering, Slandering and Lies of a grossly Biaised Mediatic Establishment, Cronyism, etc., which Created a Big Echo among the People, Became a huge Internet and Press Attraction, and even a Public Meeting's Song...



>>> Significantly, at least in one among his most Recent and more Motivated Speeches, Trump took the Initiative to Promise that, If he were Elected, he would Start by "Changing our Broken Political System", as he had said, But, "First of all, Change our Media !"



=> If that Necessary -and also Possible, as a Majority of genuine American People has just Proved, by Winning that 2016 US Presidential race even Against almost all Establishment's Media - Change has Better to come Really "First", as Don Trump Stressed himself (Comp. Supra), then, it Could also be, eventualy, Associated, on the Occasion, also with an Imaginative, Decisive and Creative Idea, for the Developent of New, really Popular and more Democratic, Reliable, and Modern Media, for the foreseable Future.



Both as a Real Democracy, and as an Economic Growth and New Technologies' Development move, f.ex. in the Context of those "Big Programs", that the New US President-elect has just Anounced, and, for which, he Launched a Vibrant Call to the People, to : -"Dream Big, Bold, and Daring !"



------------------------------



Indeed, Many People Knew that, since almost All the Establishment's Traditional Media, (Radio-TV, Printed Newspapers, together with their simple Web Extensions, etc), were already committed, in an open or, most of the times, covert way, for Hillary Clinton, etc., and most among them, had really Targeted Don Trump, in an awful series of Systematic Attempts of Personality Assassination, (similar, but much Worse than that which had been abused, f.ex., back on September/October 2008, by Obama's fans and cronies against former Governor of Alaska, and then GOP Candidate for Vice-President, Sarah Pallin, etc), then,



>>> the Only immediately available, and practical Alternative was the Stuggle that Trumps' Supporters among the People, could Develop at the Internet, (through various "Social Media", the "Twitter" and Forums, Photos and Videos, Emails and SMS/Textos, etc, occasionaly Printed and Distributed also on Paper, Hand by Hand, f.ex. in various Meetings, et)...



Already, several Press Publications had clearly Observed the Fact that, while Hillary Clinton was Backed by almost all the Establishment's "Classic" Medias, on the Contrary, Don Trump had with him a Vibrant Internet Community, particularly at "the Social Media", as they said, in the World Wide Web.



But, there where, all those Commentators, were Finaly Proven to be Wrong, in these 2016 US Presidential Elections, was when they had Speculated about the Respective Force, Impact, and Efficiency of Each one among those 2, largely Different Ways of Communicating, Interacting, Announcing and Debating with the People :



- Indeed, they Believed that Web's Impact at the Society at large, would be Inferior to that of the Traditional Medias of the Establishment, and had already Prognosticated, that, for all those reasons, Trump's campaign would have been, already Undermined and compromised, almost Doomed, (as they were also, always Ready not to lose any opportunity to make more Intox)...



>>> But, all those "mainstream" Commentators, (obviously comming from the Establishment's Medias themselves), had Ommitted to Examine, and had Completely Missed, what Proved to be, almost the Most Essential point, in this 2016 Pre-Electoral Fight for the Vote of the New US President of the period 2017-2022, and the Potential Energy of its Impact :



=> I.e. the Original Socio-Political Strategy, that Don Trump, surprisingly but Spectacularly, adopted and Anounced, particularly at his Landmark, Historic Speech in Ohio, Cleveland, at the Conclusion of the GOP's National Convention, as Early as, already since July 2016, when he was Officialy Selected as the Republican Party's Candidate in order to become a New POTUS.



- Briefly speaking, to put it in a nutshell, (for a more Extensive Presentation, See "Eurofora"s original "DraftNews", as it had been send to Subscribers/Donors, then. A full, Final Version might be Published asap), Trump suddenly Chose to Focus, since Last Summer (i.e. when, most of the above mentioned "Commentators" would probably be lost somewhere near a Seaside, enjoying some Lazy Summer Holidays...), at an Earlier Unexpected main Target :



- He, "a Fortunate Son" (as a Famous, Classic Song of "Creedence ClearwaterRevival"'s Folk Group says), had, nevertheless, enough Conscience and/or Perspicacity in order to Focus, at this Exceptional event at Ohio, mainly, on those Poor People, Neglected by the Obama Administration pendant 8 to 9 Years, who Face a sharp Augmentation of InEqualities, UnEmployment, Factories closing down after Outsourcing overseas due to Dumping and inadequate Global Free Trade Deals, Degradation of their Neighborhood, Expensive and/or Inefficient Health Care, Bad Quality of Education, sky-rocketing Debts (including of Young Students), Discriminations, Cultural Ghettoes, Irregular Mass Migration, InSecurity, Riots, etc., in addition to Corruption, Arbitrariness, Cronyism, a Cold War ambiance, Spreading Conflicts, pushing Deadly Terrorism and Threatening Peace.

The Fact that it wasn't just a Superficial, Spontaneous Move, but, on the Contrary, a Well Thought and Prepared Decision, is revealed also by an Impressive Series of relevant Statistical Data, which accompagnies, clarifies and stresses almost all these Problems evoked then.



Today, it has become Obvious that this kind of Criticism, (naturaly Added to the well known, Most Favourite Issues of Don Trump's 2016 Campaign), did achieve to at least Start Reaching its Targets, in terms of Interested Social Groups, since, Surprisingly, the Conservative, White New Yorker Businessman, succeeded, according to the Results of the Vote, to Attract substantialy More Citizens than his predecessors of 2012 and/or 2008, even among ...Black People, Hispanos, Low Income and/or Education People, Workers, both Young and Elders, etc., (in Addition to an Intensified Mobilisation of White Americans, Middle-Age Working People, of the various "Middle-Classes", etc).



The Point, obviously, is, (as even the Wording used, and/or the Images evoked, also clearly indicate), that, in fact, Trump chose to Mark an U-Turn, already since July 2016, mainly towards those Categories of the Population, who had been, initially Attracted (with a quite impressive Enthousiasm) by Bernie Sanders, the main, but unfortunate, "Leftist" Competitor of Hillary Clinton, during the Primaries inside the "Democratic" Party, (whose Final Eviction provoked a Scandal, pushing also Top DP Officials to Resign, after "Wikileaks" revealed that, in fact, there was a Complot to slyly Undermine his Campaign, and get rid of him, to the Benefit of Hillaery Clinton)...



=> This Unexpected, by a Conservative and succesful New York Billionaire private Businessman of the GOP, but Highly Energizing "Cleveland Music", that Don Trump had the Good Idea to Start Playing at an Exceptionaly Important moment in Ohio, certainly Contributed a lot in an Immediate Slash of a Previously Big Difference at the Polls vis a vis Hillary, right since July 2016, and Continued Evolving further, all the way up to the Final Push for the Conclusion of the US Presidential Election, this November.



By Building that Image of a Real Conservative (f.ex. in Fiscal, Migration, National Identity, Family and other BioEthical, Security, etc., Issues), who has also a larger Social "Heart" (Comp. Supra), and Wants to Fight for Peace, but against InJustice, Oppression, Arbitrariness, Corruption, and versus the Domination by an omni-present "Establishment", full of various serious "Scandals", which seriously Undermines Democracy, (among the most Favorite Issues of Don Trump), succeeded to Bring Together and Concentrate in a Big and Growing River, the various Energies stemming from several Different Sources, Deep inside the Majority of the People of America (as also in some Other Countries, mutatis-mutandis) nowadays, Resulting in the progressive Emergence of a Strongly Motivated, Popular Base of Active Supporters.



>>> So that, When the Decisive Moment came to Face, at a Final Battle, all that Establishment's Media a.o. outrageous Hostility (Comp. Supra), around October-November 2016, Trump already had, Together with him, a Strongly Motivated Citizens' "Army", already constituted, well Aware and Conscious of the Last-Minute Obstacles, "Dirty-Tricks", "Rigged Elections", etc. of which a "Corrupted Establishment" might, eventualy, Abuse, in order to Desperately Attempt to Hide its Biggest "Scandals", and/or Hinder or Block the People's real Political Will to be Freely and Democraticaly formed and Expressed.



=> In Consequence, particularly After the 3rd and Final Public Debate between the 2 Front-runner Candidates, on October 19, when People saw, f.ex., Hillary ostensibly Avoid even to Reply to several "Hot" Critical Questions by the Press, (f.ex. about the alleged Payments to the "Clinton Foundation", including by several Foreign Governments, even those who Notoriously Funded and/or Armed illegaly various Islamic Terrorists, for "Pay to Play" contacts with the Secretary of State, etc); while, almost at the Same Time, a Series of Revelations (quite Well Documented, even by relevant and explicit Videos, Witnesses, etc) about several, quasi-Systematicaly operating Networks with Links between Hillary's Campaign Teams, and those who Paid and Send Thugs to Harass or even Violently Aggress Peaceful People gathering to Hear and See Don Trumps' Speeches in several Pre-Electoral Public Meetings accross many States ; Added to the 21 October 2016 Astonishing and Revolting Anouncement, that Dems' US Foreign Minister Kerry had Pressed the small Ecuador to even ...Cut any Access to the Internet, by Assange, the "Wikileaks" WhistleBlower and "Truth"-Seeker, notoriously involved in the Revelation of Many, even irregularly "Hidden" Emails, (in parallel due to be "Investigated" by the "FBI", in search of anOther probable Scandal, about State Department's Secrets Mishandling by a Clintons' private rooter), then, a Growing Number of various Polls clearly indicated an Evolving "U-Turn" of more and more Voters towards Don Trump., which arrived until the appearance of a more or less "Tie" between the 2 Candidates, making Any Final Result Possible.



Meanwhile, also the Fact that, Contrary to Trump's Focus on Real Issues affecting People's Lives and Society at large, especialy with his Anouncement, (Symbolicly made at the Historic Location of "Gettysbourg"'s Battle Speech by Abraham Lincoln), of a concrete and substantial "List of Measures" that will be Taken "during the 100 First Days" of his Presidency for the Benefit of the People and of the Country, IF he's elected, a Totaly Differend approach was adopted by Hillary, who practicaly didn't then do anything else really notable, except from Persisting to Slander her Competitor, by a Never-Ending Series of Repeated Gross Personal Attacks, (particularly about alleged ridiculous "Affairs", or Attempts reportedly made ...20, 30 or even 40 Years ago, at a remote Past, in his Pivate Life, one more grossly Unbelievable from the other), inevitably didn't settle things for Clinton...



=> Thus, when, at the Last Minute : Only 2 Days Before the Final Vote, an FBI Official aappointed by Obama, Suddenly Claimed that he would have thoroughly Investigated More than ...65.000 supplementary Hillary's Emails, which had been Discovered Just a Week or so Before (sic !), in a Computer shared by her Top AIde, Humma Mahmud Abdin, and her estranged Husband, Wiener, currently Jailed and separately Investigated for a "Sexting" Scandal with an Under Age Minor Girl, (and/or even Worse, according to some rumours), and that FBI's Conclusion would be to Simply Drop anew that Hillary affair, Definitively Stoping any Further Investigation Now, (Despite eventual Links even to the infamous "Benghazi" Terrorist Attacks scandal of 2012, probably related to illegal Arms Trafficking for ISIS+ through Turkey, etc., which Needed a Careful Examination),



>>> a Fast Growing Number of People became ... Furious ! They all Rushed, in a Hurry, to Seek any possible and legitimate way to React Efficiently against such a Last-Minute, Un-Explained, sudden Manoeuver, that they Felt as, Apparently Motivated mainly by an Attempt of some Bureaucrats to Hide the Tuth from the People, in order to, most probably, Cover up the wrong-doings of a Notoriously "Elite" Top Member, as Hillary Clinton, (instead of Playing Honestly, with all Cards on the Table, and full Transparency).



*** In such an Exceptionaly "Hot" Context, the various Accesible Internet Modern Tools, Naturally offered the Only, immediately Available and Democratic Means for all those, Strongly Motivated People, to Express in Public their Views and/or their Anger/Revolt, Urgently Alert and Inform All Other Interested Voters about the Main Points of Substance and what is Really at Stake; Freely Seek Yourself to Learn (in a Fast-enough and Simple way) about Various Other relevant Facts and/or Views, eventualy Presented by any Other People w<ith Differend and/or Similar Views to yours' ; Face, Criticize, Rectify, and Hopefuly Convince about what they Believed to be the Truth, in reaction to certain Attempts to Lie or Distord the Real Facts, as well as in order to Openly Discuss, organize and/or Participate in relevant Public Debates, from which could Emerge a Collective Intelligence on that Imminent, Crucial Final Vote, as well as, eventualy, Prepare, Together with Other Interested Web Users some Joint Initatives, (etc).



Obviously, Compared to All those Practical Possibilities, easily offered by the World Wide Web, just to ...Run to Find and Buy a Local, Regional, or National Newspaper, and afterwards seek a place to Simply Read it, or to ...Merely "click" a Radio-TV button, in order to Passively Hear//Look at what a Presentator would Claim to be the overall situation, according to his/her own view (or, rather, according to the Unique viewpoint of the Establishment which Owns or Controls one or another such Traditional Media, that 2nd Categorie of Moves, does NOT offer Anything more Interesting, But Only LESS...



=> The overall Energy and real Collective Strength of such an Amazing Popular Movement at the World Wide Web, (as that which occured, in the above mentioned, Exceptional Circumstances, at the Eve and During the Day of Voting for the 2016 US Presidential Election), iFast Evolving in Parallel Series of Steps, Exchanges, InterActions, etc., which Aim to Create one or another OverAll Result, would Need to Prepare and Write an entire Book, in order to Seek and Find, Analyse and Describe them All, or even, at least, the Most Important among them, without, naturaly, losing Sight on the Main Thrust...



>>> At any case, 1 thing is Sure : OverNight, and Advancing Further during even that Long Day of the Votes, (i.e. practicaly Extended for about + 6 Hours Longer than a Simple 24/24 Day, because of the Difference between the Various "Poll Closing Times", from New York up to Los Angeles, corresponding to almost from MidNight in EU's core, Strasbourg Time, until 5 o'clock in Early Morning, Next Day here), a HUGE CHANGE Appeared, Between All those Numerous POLLS which had been Made and Published during the Last Few Days until and Including the Eve of the Vote, (i.e. + November 7 included), and the Real, FINAL RESULTS, obtained at the End of that Voting Day of November 8 :



I.e., instead of a quasi-Total Dominance by Hillary's Center-Left, as Claimed almost ALL among the very Numerous those POLLS of November 7 (Eve of the Election Day), on the Contrary, Finally, at the End of the Date of the Vote, (November 8), we had an Absolute Majority of Votes for the Center-Right (Republicans, Liberals, Independent), and a Minority for the Center-Left (Democrats - Green), at about : 51% - 48,6%, and a clear Win for Don Trump, with 306 Electors throughout all the Federated States, against only 228 for Hillary Clinton.



- Therefore, all those Polls proved to be Either UNABLE TO FORESEE the Dynamics of that Popular Movement Evolving OveNight, OR were All FAKE - FALSIFIED, Right from the Start !



The Simplest (and, probably, what is Closer to the Reality), among those 2 Hypothesis, obviously is to consider that the Big Change occured essentialy OverNight, between the 7 and 8 November, (f.ex. between the Afternoons of these Days), so that almost all Polls could Not Register it on Time.



Indeed, During the very Day of the Vote, there are, at least 1,5 Polls showing Trump Winnining, out of 3,5, (the O,5 being Part of a Double Poll, with a Version including also the Small Candidates, and anOther Version withOut them, which Differ on the overall Result). While, on the Contrary, at the Eve of the Vote, ...almost ALL of the very Numerous Polls showed Hillary Winning, with the Only Exception of 1. So, it's Obvious that SOMETHING HAPPENED BETWEEN the 7 and the 8 November !



This seems Confirmed even by our Personal, subjective but real, Experience : While the 6 November appeared as a rather "Normal" Busy Day in relevant Publications at the Web, on the Contrary, (as it was, anyway, Foreseable), it's on the 7 November (Eve of that Vote) that we Started to be Impressed by the Number of such Web Publications, (and this, almost Continued through the Biggest Part of the very Day of that Vote, i.e. during November 8.



A Similar, and even More Clear-cut Phenomenon, again on US Presidential Elections, occured with anOther such Surprising, Last Minute U-Turn of Many Voters, Not Foreseen at all by Polls, already Back on 2004, "Eurofora"s co-Founder had Witnessed :



Almost All Polls, until the Day of the Vote, had givenn a "Tie", with 50% = 50%. But, according to converging sources and observation data, the Web was seriously used, at least 1,5 Days before the Poll Stations close. The Result was a Crystal-clear Difference of +3%, and about 3 Millions Votes more, with a clear Victory for one among the 2 Candidates !



>>> Such Results, so Astohishing Phenomena, a so "BIG CHANGE" as that which occured, f.ex., between the 7 and 8 November 2016, as we saw above, obviously couldNot be, and were not obtained, at all, by just ... buying a Paper Copy of "New York Times" out of a Coffee Shop, Neither by vainly trying to "Click" at NYT's Extension at the Web, where you ate Obliged to Stop, and Lose Precious Time into Searching in what way you could Pay some Money in order to become, at last able to simply Open and Passively read a Text prepared by an Agent of the Establishment which Owns thar Newspaper... (And : - "That's all Folks ! THE END")...



No ! What Really Happened was, in Brief : Free Research, Investigation, Analysis, Reasoning, Invention, Proof, Conclusion, at First. And, then, Writting, Editing, Publishing. Afterwards : Distibuting, Alerting, Warning. But Also : Participating to Public Discussions, Hearing, Responding, Holding a Dialogue, Making a Speech, Launcing a Call, Motivating People, Urging them, Pointing at the main Issue at Stake, Guiding, Organizing, and if Need be, even Playing one of the Leading roles in a Team or a Group of People. When Necessary, even Sacrificing your Health, by Deprivation of Sleep, in order to Find Precious Time... And, then, almost All the Way along : Exchanging, Explaining, Criticizing, Finding the Right Arguments, Denouncing, Fighting, and anew Fighting, and Fighting, until its Done !



- From the point of view of Technology, all this caN't be done withOut Modern Web Tools. (Which, in fact, are Not Costly : Less than a subscription in a Traditional Newspaper, or a "pay per view" at a Radio-TV of the Establishment)...



- But, from the point of view of Human Energy, you Do realy Need several Strongly Motivated People, Ready and Eager to Advance Forwards Resolutely to Fight for the Main Issues: And that belongs to the Essentials !



Don Trump succeeded to Find the Right Source for that, mainly Thanks to his landmark, Historic Ohio Speech (Comp. Supra) : His "Cleveland Music"...



For a Real "Conservative" Politician, to try to take with him, together with those "Middle Classes" who are threatened to be Impoverished, also the Poor and/or Oppressed People, Inviting them all to a Noble Fight against Corruption, Arbitrariness and the Establishment, but for Traditional Human Values and the Historic and Cultural Identity of their Country, proved to be the Right Move, and, probably, the Best thing he ever did, until now.



+ And, Naturaly, this is Timely Added, also, to All those Other Links that Trump has Now to Europe (Comp. Supra), where, in Addition to an already perceptible Popular Appeal, it's also, one after the other, several Key EU Political Leaders, who have just Started to Enthousiasticaly Welcome his Unexpected Victory, - such as, f.ex., the Prime Minister of Hungary, Victor Orban, and/or the Experienced former President of France, and Recently Elected Head of the main Opposition Party "the Republicans" (i.e., by a Timely "Coincidence", with the Same Name as Don Trump's "GOP" Party !), Nicolas Sarkozy, frontrunner Candidate in the Forthcoming, Crucial April/May 2017 Presidential Election, (etc).



--------------------



Controversial but Efficient British Politician Nigel Farage, co-President of EU Parliament's EFD Group of MEPs,



to whom "Eurofora"s co-Founder had already observed, as Early as Back on 2009, before the European Elections, in Strasbourg, (i.e. Long before our Latest Meeting, on the sidelines of the June 2016 EU Heads of State/Government Summit in Brussels -See, f.ex.: ...), that,



Despite our clear Disagreement as far as the real European Dream is concerned, nevertheless, it's also true that, IF he was, or Became later-on, a Genuine Pro-European, (i.e. on Substantial matters), he might be very Useful for a Citizen-Friendly European Integration, mainly thanks to his Strong Criticism against Anti-Democratic and Costly Bureaucracy, Turkey's controversial and unpopular EU - bid, to which was Added recently even a Threat to give a "VISA FREE" Status to 80 Millions of Turks to Enter and Stay inside the EU for 6 Month Each Year, (Something still Refused, however, to BieloRussians, Armenians, Ukranians, Russians, and Other Europeans !), the Unprecedented Mass influx of 1,5 Million of Asylum Seekers/Irregular Migrants through Turkish Smugglers, at the same time that he Supported also Natural Family, between a Man and a Woman, (against Recent, mainly Obama-inspired Attempts to Impose, Worldwide, the controversial "Same Sex Marriage" and the UnPopular abandon of Children under the Power of Homosexual Couples, under Pretext of "Adoption"), - (i.e. the main real Reasons for which Brittish People gave him 19 MEPs since 2009 and Voted a "BREXIT" Referendum on 2016, since they had No Other Means to Express their Disagreement on These Issues, which, IF they had been Adressed, then, they Would NOT Feel Obliged to "Leave" that kind of EU, at all, but would have Voted "Remain" or Abstained) -



said, recently, something Interesting on Trump: - "He may win, IF he gets his message to GENUINE PEOPLE", Nigel had prognosticated, during an Earlier Visit to the US, in a Conditionaly but Premonitary way...



-------------------------------------------------------------



The New US President-elect, clearly Revealed, immediately after his Unexpected Victory, that he is, Today, Well Aware of that very Important, Decisive point :

- "The Forgotten Man and Woman, will Never be Forgotten again !", Don Trump significantly wrote at his Personal "Twitter" account, in his 1st Public Announcement.



- Because, "I'll Never Let You Down !", as he Promissed, speaking in front of an Enthousiastic Popular Audience, but also Transmitted by Cable Networks almost everywhere, in his 1st Oral Statements



-------------------------





At any case, at least one main point has become absolutely Certain Today :





=> At this Exceptional and Symbolic November 9, the New Internet Tools for Direct Participation of Citizens in the Public Decision-Making process, succeeded to Spectacularly Bypass the Traditional Medias and Polls of an unpopular/undemocratic Establishment, (Comp. Supra),



and, at least for that, the present Historic Moment deserves to remain as a concrete Landmark Reference, Worldwide, for the Future.

(../..)


We use cookies and external services on our website. Some are necessary, others enhance your user experience or help us improve this website.

You can change your privacy settings any time by clicking privacy policy.
This weeks Royal Society meeting in London on New Trends in Evolutionary Biology has now concluded. An ID scientist in the audience offered his notes on Day 2. Note his succinct running commentary. Very helpful.

Following a brief introduction by Denis Noble, the first talk was by James Shapiro about natural genetic engineering (read-write genome innovations). Most interesting finding: Non-coding DNA elements correlate with organismal complexity (distinct cell types) and are not functionless junk.

Comment by Russell Lande: A large part of your list was well known since a long time and poses no threat to neo-Darwinism.

Shapiro mentions in response that he once asked Francisco Ayala at the centennial of Darwins death about transposable elements and Ayala considered them as unimportant.

My personal impression: None of the phenomena mentioned by Shapiro  such as symbiogenesis, endosymbiosis, hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, genome doubling, and mobile DNA elements  explains the origin of new complex information, but insead only represent reshuffling of pre-existing information.

The second talk was by Paul Griffiths about the paradox of biological information.

He suggests a simple and operational concept of biological information, but WITHOUT any analogy to communication or meaning or intentionality! Based on Cricks sequence hypothesis (specificity), he considers biological information as the precise determination of sequence (like Morse Code). Information is a way to talk about fine-grained causal control. Transfer of information is moving of causal specificity (as properties of objects) between molecules or cells.

He explained the limits of genetic causes and concluded that epigenetic information cannot be reduced to genetic information.

He considers previous concepts of biological information as not operational, especially if they refer to the history of the system rather than its physical state.

My comment: This was a very fundamental talk and his concept of biological information that combines reduction of alternatives with causal efficacy could prove to be useful for ID-related research, even though we would of course dispute the exclusion of intentionality.

Third was a talk of Eva Jablonka about epigenetic inheritance. The Modern Synthesis downplayed plasticity, group selection, etc., and explicitly excluded soft inheritance.

Karl Popper already recognized this mistake in one of his last lectures and anticipated core elements of the Extended Synthesis. We now know that phenomena like epigenetic inheritance are ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, Jablonkas talk suffered from the fact that she ran out of time. Only in the Q&A could she briefly address the crucial question of the relevance of epigenetic inheritance for macroevolution, which she defines as any evolution beyond the species level. It was not clear if this would help with major innovations.

The fourth talk was by Greg Hurst on holobionts (hosts with their microbial biome) as units of selection. The talk was interesting and had some funny points. (Hurst talked about apologizing for your microbiome when passing gas because we cannot produce methane ourselves, or talked right before lunch break about anal licking behavior for the transfer of microbes from mother to offspring.)

My comment: Completely irrelevant for the crucial problem of the origin of new complex and specific information.

The fifth talk was by Denis Noble about evolution from the viewpoint of other scientific disciplines.

He contrasted the reductive approach of the 20th century with the integrative approach of the 21st century. His main point was that organisms can harness stochasticity to generate functionality so that evolution can be directional. Noble emphasized that he has no quarrel with the Modern Synthesis, but that we simply know so much more now.

Comment by Russell Lande: This was long known since even before the Modern Synthesis, etc., etc., etc.

Response by Noble: No, it implies an integrative view. This is a CONCEPTUAL change caused by an accumulation of various new evidences.

Question by a computer scientist: Random changes cannot improve a suboptimal program, but will inevitably degrade it.

Response by Noble: This would be true if there were not three layers of error correction that reduce the error rate to one per copied genome.

My comment: This explains why random mutations do not quickly decay the genome, but it does not explain how they can create new information and function.

Sixth was a talk by Andy Gardner about anthropomorphism in evolutionary biology, finally mentioning intelligent design. He made the surprising statement that William Paley was one of the clearest writers on what adaptation is. It is not perfection or optimality, but contrivance for purpose, and relation of parts for the same purpose.

He claims that Darwin confronted the problem of apparent design and provided explanations while Paley did not. Gardner made the strange argument that from an ID perspective, gazelles should be designed to run towards cheetahs, and then presented a ridiculous slide in which he misrepresented ID as God did it.

Mainly based on works of Brian Charlesworth and Patrick Moran, Gardner claimed that population geneticists generally dislike the notion of adaptation in terms of fitness maximization (Russell Lande unsurprisingly disagreed strongly in the subsequent discussion).

The seventh talk was by Patrick Bateson about adaptability and evolution, mainly focusing on the related phenomena of the Baldwin effect (which Bateson prefers to call adaptability driver) and genetic assimilation. He quotes West-Eberhards dictum that genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution. In his conclusion he emphasized that we have to watch carefully our use of metaphors, as natural selection is not an agent. And he claimed that adaptability is important in generating evolutionary change, but he offered no explanation for the origin of complexity.

The talks were followed by a panel discussion with Cartwright, Futuyma, Uller, Feldman, and Gardner.

Cartwright gave a brief introduction and mentioned that she always thought that Darwinian evolution is a viable research program, and wondered, Do we have a viable evolutionary research program here?

Sonia Sultan remarked: There should be room for different ways of seeing without ditching one paradigm for the other, because this leads to asking different questions.

Eva Jablonka asked Futuyma: What would you consider a major extension and not just cosmetics, but NOT God?

Futuyma responded: There was a comfortable assimilation of new ideas (into the modern synthesis). Really new would be a mechanism for adaptation that is not based on selection. This would be really surprising.

My conclusion: All elements of the Extended Synthesis fail to offer adequate explanations for the crucial explanatory deficits of the Modern Synthesis (aka neo-Darwinism) that were explicitly highlighted in the first talk of the meeting by Gerd Muller: phenotypic complexity and phenotypic novelty.
A colleague walking the halls at Discovery Institute in Seattle offers a blunt assessment of the proceedings at the Royal Society in London: It sounds like it was a dud. Another comments by email, Except for an occasional outburst (such as [Eva Jablonkas] Not God  were excluding God), it sounds as though it was quite boring. Well, thats admittedly second-hand.

As I began receiving reports from friendly scientists in the crowd, I had been expecting news of orthodox neo-Darwinists and Extended Synthesis advocates throwing chairs at each other as the ID contingent ran for cover behind the sacred Isaac Newton relics. That didnt happen.

Maybe its the contrast with the unrelated excitement just outside our own doors, not to mention down the Interstate in Portland. But yes, I was a little underwhelmed myself.

Again lets turn to our confidential scientists on the scene. The RS meeting, examining New Trends in Evolutionary Biology, was supposed to be an opportunity for the high-placed Third Way of Evolution community to display their wares in direct competition with the standard Darwinist offering. Both crowds were on hand, along with the minority sympathetic to intelligent design. You could tell the ID folks because they were the ones not invited to speak.

A European scientist who participated writes:

This was a meeting filled with excellent science and fascinating biology. As an ID biologist, I welcome these great achievements on which my colleagues reported, whether they adhere to neo-Darwinism or to the Extended Theory of evolution. Actually, I believe that understanding all evolutionary mechanisms active in nature is fundamental for all biologists, irrespective of their personal or scientific background. This meeting has convinced me that we indeed need a substantial extension of the Modern Synthesis (neo-Darwinism) and that the Extended Synthesis helps to better understand the evolutionary process. In addition, the discussions convinced me that the resistance of some biologists to welcoming new ideas may be of a psychological rather than scientific nature. However, after listening to all these great lectures, I still do not see that one of the fundamental questions of evolutionary biology has been tackled: How do fundamental novelties arise during the evolutionary process? So far I cannot see whether the Extended Synthesis has the potential to solve this problem and I would wish that future conferences will go on to openly discuss this matter. If I could, I would suggest that the Royal Society organize a meeting on Unsolved Problems of Macroevolution.

Yes, that would be interesting. Macroevolution is the real problem evolutionary biology needs to turn to.

Back in the U.S., Discovery Institute biologist Jonathan Wells has been following the action, or lack of it, at the Royal Society. He zeroes in on the main point:

The bottom line is that everything being proposed by advocates of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) bears only on microevolution, which has never been what the real controversy is about. (Nobody, as far as I know, doubts that microevolution happens.) And the defenders of standard neo-Darwinism are right: Theres nothing fundamentally new in the EES; its just a matter of emphasis.

And so now our own focus shifts north in England, up the M11 to Cambridge University where the Beyond Materialism: Biology for the 21st Century conference opens at Hughes Hall on Saturday at 9 am.

This gathering will feature scientists and scholars from U.S., U.K., Israel, Germany, and Sweden, plus leading advocates of intelligent design well known to readers of Evolution News, including Stephen Meyer, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, and Paul Nelson. If you found the RS meeting less provocative than you might have expected, join us tomorrow morning for a full day of challenging and candid discussion. Find the full program here, along with registration information.

Photo: Cambridge ethologist Sir Patrick Bateson controversially argues that a rabbit in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Im on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.
Network security vendor Ixia announced a series of new product capabilities on Nov. 9 in a bid to help enterprises detect potential threats quicker and better manage a fleet of security appliances.

The newly enhanced Application and Threat Intelligence Processor (ATIP) is part of Ixias Vision One platform that was first announced in March 2016. The Vision One platform provides network visibility and is an evolution of technology that Ixia gained by way of its $160 million acquisition of BreakingPoint in 2012.

Steve McGregory, Senior Director, Application and Threat Intelligence at Ixia explained that the ATIP is able to look at network data packets at high rates of speed. McGregory noted that a key issue for many organizations is the time it takes to actually realize an intruder compromise of some sort has occurred. The 2016 IBM sponsored Ponemon Cost of a Data Breach study, for example, reported that the average time to identify a breach is 201 days.

We have now enabled ATIP to key in on Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), McGregory told eWEEK. Indicators of Compromise are not necessarily anomalies on a network, but they are things that are associated with data exfiltration, as well as techniques used by hackers to spread throughout a network.

The ATIP is not a physical piece of silicon, but rather is a software processing feature that is enabled on the Vision One appliance. McGregory explained that the Vision One has integrated physical processors including FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) and ATIP runs on the network processors.

Data from the Vision One, including ATIP can be sent by users to a supplementary system or tool, for further analysis. McGregory said that he expects that organizations will make use of a third-party Security Information and Event Manager (SIEM) platform to complement the Vision One.

Ixia is also introducing new cloud management capabilities for its ThreatArmor network appliance. The ThreatArmor appliance is a security gateway that benefits from Ixias threat intelligence services. The appliance is intended to be deployed in front of an enterprises existing firewall. With ThreatArmor, known malicious traffic is removed from an enterprise network, McGregory explained.

The new ThreatArmor Central is a cloud-management system for ThreatArmor, McGregory said. ThreatArmor has its own user interface, but when you deploy multiple devices, it became hard to manage.

McGregory noted that Ixia itself has a fleet of 27 ThreatArmor appliances deployed to protect its own infrastructure that was a management problem for the company. With ThreatArmor Central McGregory said its now a whole lot easier to manage Ixias own deployment as well. The back-end infrastructure for ThreatArmor Central is located on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

For ease-of-use, Ixia now is also introducing a mobile application for ThreatArmor, which provides an optimized user-interface for management. Looking forward, McGregory said that Ixia is now working on virtual editions of both the ATIP as well as ThreatArmor.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
The ad conceptualised by Leo Burnett highlights that a lot has happened in the last 20 years at McDonalds and is built on the insight that there are millions of moments which people have experienced at the store

McDonalds recently completed 20 years of its India operations and to celebrate this feat they have launched a new campaign titled A lot has changed. Nothing has changed.

The ad conceptualised by Leo Burnett highlights that a lot has happened in the last 20 years at McDonalds and is built on the insight that there are millions of moments which people have experienced at the store.

Speaking about the campaign, RajDeepak Das, Chief Creative Officer, Leo Burnett, South Asia said, It has been sheer joy partnering with an iconic brand like McDonalds for over half its journey in the country. Our new campaign A lot has changed. Nothing has changed articulates how the small, but important joys have remained the same, despite so much else changing. Even 20 years later, a child opening a Happy Meal box will have the same unparalleled joy on his face, like children did 20 years ago. While executing the campaign, we tried recreating the details from the past 20 years for the story to come alive  right from the staffs uniforms, the events that happened around the time, the whole hog. With Rams impeccable direction, I think this is film-making at its best.

Link:

Mediums

The campaign will run for three months and is mainly being led by television and digital. The brand is aiming to target the whole of West and south markets with this campaign.

Brand strategy

Commenting on how the communication of the brand has changed in the last 20 years, Kedar Teny, Director of Marketing & Digital at McDonalds India said, It can be divided in three phases- build, growth and accelerate. In 1996, there was a lot of curiosity in the minds of the consumers who were not familiar with the format of the store. The general perception which people had during that time was AC restaurants come with glass windows and non ACs are the ones without glass. So looking at a McDonalds store from outside, people used to think that it is very expensive. In order to break the inhibition, the brand decided to convey this message to the consumers about the affordability at that point of time.

He further added, With the brand gaining acceptance among the consumers, they started localising the food, based on the pallet of their consumers. The Mc Alu Tikki was at an unimaginable price point of Rs 20. The product was launched in 1997 and its first communication came out in the year 2000. The brand has ever since innovated and moved with the trend, like in 2010, it introduced breakfast in its menu and later went on to launch McCafe. Our recent innovation is- Share shakes which makes you question if you should eat it or drink it.

Speaking about the future marketing plans, Kedar elaborated, We have a pipeline process that uses consumer data information to understand potential trend and on what lies ahead. Based on this, we have a robust plan for marketing which will play out in the quarter.

Previous ads:

Read more news about (ad news, latest advertising news India, internet advertising, ad agencies updates, media advertising India)
Official immigration websites in Canada, Australia and New Zealand experienced a spike in users from the United States when it became clear that Donald Trump would be the next American President.It is thought that it was the result of a huge number of Americans not pleased at the prospect of continuing to work and live in the US under a Trump Presidency seeking information on moving abroad.  Indeed, the Citizenship Immigration Canada website crashed such was the volume of traffic. Data from Google revealed that searches for how can I move to Canada spiked violently when the Trump victory was declared.CIC users reported seeing an internal server error message when trying to access the website, which stated that there was a problem and the resource requested could not be displayed.CIC officials confirmed that the cause was a higher than normal level of traffic. The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship website became temporarily inaccessible to users as a result of a significant increase in the volume of traffic, said a spokesman.Earlier this year the island of Cape Breton on Canada's Atlantic coast marketed itself as a tranquil refuge for Americans seeking to escape should Trump capture the White House.The number of Americans searching for jobs in Canada surged, according to data released by the world's biggest jobs site Indeed.For many Americans, the election result was such a shock that many are imagining a way out. In the hours just after Trump's victory was called, Americans were searching for jobs in Canada at ten times the rate of previous nights, said Jed Kolko, Indeed chief economist.Of course, it's far too soon to guess how many of these searchers will make a move after the shock wears off. But the jump in searches shows how many Americans were surprised by Trump's victory and are thinking about their options elsewhere, he added.New Zealand also experienced a surge in online searches for information on immigration recently from people located in the US. The New Zealand Now website, which deals with residency and student visas, has received 1,593 registrations from US citizens since the beginning of November, more than 50% of a typical month's registrations in just seven days.The data shows that visits to New Zealand Now from the US were up almost 80% to 41,000 in the past month, compared with the same period last year, with the largest number of searchers located in Oregon, Colorado, Washington, Missouri and Virginia.The Move to Australia website also experienced a surge with inquiries coming from Colorado, Kentucky, Tennessee, Washington and Virginia while Australia immigration' and 'New Zealand immigration' were some of the most searched terms on Google.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

CPS Energy wont need to raise electricity rates to help pay for its new $122 million headquarters, choosing to shed some of its assets to help offset the costs.

The new 430,000-square-foot property, previously owned by AT&T, will be big enough to house all 1,200 of CPS Energys employees and much of the utilitys operations, said John Benedict, a vice president who oversees the companys real estate portfolio.

Having them all in one building  is going to help us from a productivity standpoint and also give us the ability in a changing economic market to be able to pull teams together at the workspace and enable them to efficiently establish good products and services, Benedict said.

The current headquarters  at 145 Navarro St.  is a 1920s-era building that can only accommodate 800 employees. It also needed a complete renovation that would have interfered with the utilitys operations, Benedict said.

Since the Navarro headquarters was purchased in 1954, the company has had to add offices across the street and two stories to the building to accommodate its workforce.

The building for the new headquarters, on Avenue B and McCullough Avenue, cost $25.3 million, he said. CPS has set aside roughly $11 million for Dallas-based architecture firm Corgan for the three-year project. The board recently allocated another $3 million to hire Houston-based Patrinely Group to assist in the design and review process.

Other expenses, including new fixtures and furniture, will be spread out during the three-year construction process. CPS Energy will also save on maintenance costs after it moves into the new headquarters.

While some customers have voiced concern that spending on the new headquarters will lead to rate increases, Benedict said that the costs will be offset by multiple property sales as the company consolidates operations into the new headquarters.

Purchasing and renovating the property was also the cheapest option CPS considered. Renovating its existing headquarters would have cost roughly $142 million, he said.

Voter Guide: What to know for the midterm election Your guide to the Texas and San Antonio races and candidates on the Nov. 8 ballot.

One of CPS Energys goals was to maintain a downtown presence while helping spur further development and creating a space conducive to recruiting a new generation of employees. A preliminary sketch shows a glass-and-metal exterior and a multistory parking garage.

Were bringing another 400 employees down to the downtown area, so just in that area you might see restaurants and gas stations and other service providers that might come in because theres going to be a need, said Paul Flaningan, senior director of corporate communications and marketing. Even to that micro-level of development that were looking to spur down there  that whole area is probably set for some revitalization.

CPS Energys operations wont be impacted during the construction of its new headquarters, Benedict said.

CPS is including retail space in its new parking garage for employees and the public, Benedict said. He defended the utilitys role as a developer by saying its important for CPS to make a strong commitment to downtown development rather than building a new headquarters in the suburbs.

rdruzin@express-news.net

@druz_journo
Actress and musician Sylvia Milo was in Vienna visiting the Mozart House, a museum dedicated to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, when she noticed a small family portrait near the exit.

I saw a woman at a keyboard seated next to Wolfgang, their hands intertwined, looking like equals, said Milo, who noted that the womans enormous hairdo drew her attention initially. They were already in their 20s. I wondered, who is the woman next to Wolfgang?

It turns out that its his sister, Maria Anna, who went by the nickname Nannerl. And Milo, a classically trained pianist and violinist with a deep knowledge of Mozart, had never heard of her.

It really shocked me, she said. We know so much about him  more than any other classical composer. And she has been completely ignored. I was really floored by that and actually quite angry.

She channeled her anger into telling Nannerls story. After researching the womans life, Milo wrote, produced and stars in The Other Mozart, which she will perform at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts.

Milo has been performing the show for three years. Shes done it off Broadway, as well as across the United States. Shes performed in several places in Europe, as well, including a few places where the Mozart family lived.

More Information 'The Other Mozart' When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday and 8 p.m. Nov. 18-19 Where: Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, 100 Auditorium Circle. Tickets: $29.20 to $36.50, at the box office, by calling 210-223-8624 or online at tobi.tobincenter.org. See More Collapse

Critics have praised the precision of her performance. An Albuquerque Journal review described the show as a brilliant, unified piece of theatrical art.

Since there are few references to Nannerl in biographies and other writings about Mozart, Milo relied heavily on the familys letters for her piece. Almost all of the correspondence between father and son is intact, she noted.

There are some missing because the men didnt keep all of the letters of the women, she said.

Nannerl, like her brother, was a child prodigy and a composer. The Mozart siblings received the same training and the same performance opportunities, Milo said, right up to the moment that she turned 18.

There was no difference between them until she officially became a woman, and that world closed to her completely, she said. That happened for her, and she was a Mozart.

The letters reference her composing, and in one, her brother encourages her to continue with it. All that remains of her work, though, is a few bars from a practice exercise. That snippet is included in the show, along with some of her brothers work and some contemporary classical pieces designed to add some dimension to Milos portrait of the lives of women at that time. One includes the sounds of fans and teacups, for example.

Throughout the show, Milo is dressed in an elaborate white dress that is 18 feet in diameter.

It is stunning, she said. It feels amazing. Its fluffy and its cozy and its luscious and lavish and its light and heavy at the same time.

The dress is a metaphor for the limited options for women in the 18th century.

I feel the constraints, Milo said. Its really heavy and hard to move in.

Milo hopes audiences leave the show eager to know more about Nannerl and other female composers.

Her story is incredible, she said. Its such a shame she wasnt able to flourish.

dlmartin@express-news.net

Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The Korean War, known as a forgotten conflict, involved approximately 5.72 million American service members through the years. The veterans of that war are now disappearing.

There were 1,592,188 Korean veterans remaining in 2016, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. This is down almost a million from a total of 2.5 million in 2000. In five years, this number is expected to drop below the million mark, to 875,703.

The war, which began in 1950, reached a ceasefire in 1953. It was a time that left indelible marks on San Antonio veterans like Fred Ragusa.

On the day before the end of the fighting, Ragusa and his artillery battery fired one last barrage against Chinese forces in the Heartbreak Ridge sector in Korea. The mission did not go as planned. His artillery piece exploded in a cloud of white smoke. Then, he and his men laughed when realized they were alive.

To read more, click here for Fred Ragusas story.

The Express-News asked Ragusa and other Korea veterans to describe their experiences. They are stories of mistakes, heroism, and wonder.

When Guy Huskerson, 85, was on a ship to Korea, his fellow troops took him to task for being a hard-charging young Army officer, for waking them up, for sticking to the rules and for being a Texan. He has a letter from that time: You are further charged with being a second lieutenant in the Army, a refugee from Texas, a merrymaider, a globalglumper, a clobberpumpkin, a hellpredator, and one hundred and eighty seven other things too horrible to be mentioned

To read more, click here for Guy Huskersons story.

Thomas Fajardo, 85, recalled the moments before his first battle, when troops began firing white flares that lit up the sky. He said he could see figures illuminated by the flares, figures that would drop down when they saw the light, and he could see an entire river valley as well.

To read more, click here for Thomas Fajardos story.

Donald Barlett, 86, told of his unit being completely lost in Korea while looking for a halftrack that had become separated from them. They didnt realize they were headed south, away from the front, until a military policeman stopped them; everyone else in their unit had gone north, toward the battle lines.

To read more, click here for Donald Barletts story.

Harry Carpenter, 88, had an odd role as his units scrounge officer. He was told to go out and search for things the unit needed. You dont come back until you have something in the truck (thats) worthwhile, Carpenter said.

To read more, click here for Harry Carpenters story.

Luis Pruneda, 78, was one of eight men manning an anti-aircraft gun near Inchon. He said he would fire his weapon into the sky at spy planes, but never knew if he hit anything.

To read more, click here for Luis Prunedas story.

Bill Wilkins, 85, remembered how North Korea looked at night, from the seat of his reconnaissance plane. His job included dropping phosphorus bombs to provide light for the planes camera. He could see runways and buildings below. The Earth is beautiful, Wilkins said. Less beautiful when its been bombed.

To read more, click here for Bill Wilkins story.

Many Korean War veterans retain mementos from their time there.

Ernest Samusson, 98, has a Japanese kimono. He said he was in Korea shortly after the end of World War II, when the Americans occupied the country from the surrendering Japanese. Here we were, he recalled. They had been the enemy.

To read more, click here for Ernest Samussons story.

Silver Crim, 85, has a flight jacket and cap from his brother, a B-29 pilot who died in the closing days of WWII. Crim joined the Air Force because of his brother, and was sent to Korea.

To read more, click here for Silver Crims war story.

The average age of a Korean War veteran is 85. In 2011, Jongwoo Han, a professor at Syracuse University, began interviewing the veterans to create a digital archive.

When children skim through their history books, little attention goes to the Korean War, Han said. It was one of the most vicious and dreadful of the 20th century, but stayed in the shadow of World War II and the Vietnam War.

Hans interviews with Korea veterans inform programs to teach children about the war. In the past five years, he said, hes done 800 interviews and uploaded more than 9,000 historical articles.

The troops sent to the peninsula were young, innocent, American men and women, Han said, who risked their lives to save a people they never met, a culture they did not understand, in a place they could not even locate on the map until their ships docked at the ports of Pusan and Inchon.

Han said he wanted to collect these stories to prevent the Korean War from becoming a truly forgotten war.
At a special meeting Wednesday evening, the Edgewood Independent School Districts board of managers named a sole finalist for superintendent: Emilio Castro, deputy superintendent of administration and leadership at San Antonio ISD.

Its a new day for Edgewood, said Roy Richard Soto, president of Edgewoods board of managers, who were appointed by the Texas Education Agency.

By law, the board cant officially hire the future superintendent until a 21-day waiting period has passed. Castro will not be giving interviews about his new position until that time, said Keyhla Calderon-Lugo, spokeswoman for Edgewood.

The board hired the Texas Association of School Boards Executive Search Services to look for a new superintendent in April while Sylvester Perez served as the state-appointed interim superintendent. TEA took over the board earlier this year after months of paralysis on it that prevented the hiring of a new superintendent and two principals. The previous superintendent, Jose Cervantes, was given a $400,000 buyout last year, a decision that was later penalized by TEA.

We wanted to make sure we had someone in our facility who understands our community, our children and also understands the circumstances with all of our stakeholders, Soto said. Our socioeconomic situation presents challenges in the classroom, and the superintendent needs to be in tune with that.

Castro was the first of 11 in his family to attend college. After graduating from the University of Texas, he was a bilingual teacher in Dallas and was soon selected as Teacher of the Year in Dallas ISD  he was the first Hispanic and youngest teacher to receive the award. From there, he made his way up, becoming a principal of several schools in Dallas and then superintendent of Kingsville ISD.

He grew up in very modest circumstances, very humble. He has continued to nurture his roots. He understands what it is to do without and to aspire for more, Soto added.

Castro took the deputy superintendent position at SAISD in 2013.

We also looked for somebody that had outstanding outcomes from their body of work, someone that had been successful at all levels of education, Soto said. Not just someone who will tell us what they will do, but someone that has a record that demonstrates what theyve done.

While he believes that Castro is an excellent fit for his district, Soto said the position will not be without its fair share of challenges.

Obviously the district has struggled in the past with its leadership. Were in the healing process, he said. So hes certainly going to have to come in and assist in the healing process with every level of Edgewood.

Castro will also be entering his Edgewood position in the middle of a school year, which means he will have to hit the ground running in terms of recruiting and hiring for next year and methods of teacher and student assessment, Soto said.

At the core of all of this, student outcomes will change. Were believers that student outcomes do not change until adult behavior changes. And we are expecting significant adult behavior changes, Soto said. Dr. Castro knows how to identify excellence and how to inspire excellence. So the possibilities for Edgewood are greater than they have ever been.

sfosterfrau@express-news.net
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The City Council on Thursday narrowly defeated a plan pushed by Councilman Rey Saldana that would have begun ramping up supplemental funding for VIA Metropolitan Transit, allowing the agency to increase the frequency of bus stops on key routes across San Antonio.

Opponents of the measure supported the concept, acknowledging that VIA is significantly underfunded, but balked at the plan, saying they want to delay acting on it until after the 2017 legislative session in Austin.

For more than a year, Saldana has been pushing for supplemental funding from the city to help VIA improve its services.

The proposed funding, which would start at about $2.2 million in 2018 and rise to $6.4 million and $9.9 million in the ensuing two years, would allow VIA to increase the frequency of stops on key routes across the city. The frequency on nine routes would go from 60 minutes to 30, and it would go from 30 minutes to 20 on a 10th route. The funding would also improve travel times and capacity on seven major corridors, according to a VIA presentation.

Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran sought the delay, a tactic sometimes used to quietly kill an initiative. She argued against voting for the measure Thursday, citing a changing political landscape in Washington and a likely emboldened Legislature in Austin.

Officials are expecting state lawmakers to push for property-tax revenue caps on Texas cities.

But insisted that delaying the VIA funding vote would help the city capture more leveraged dollars from Austin and Washington in the future.

This goes back to my question about why were doing this now instead of waiting a few months to talk with our partners in Washington and Austin, she said. We have established there is no impact on the timeline if we delay this vote. The only impact if we delayed it and had more of a conversation would be actually getting more money and utilizing more money for this investment.

Viagran said she is afraid we would be leaving money on the table by voting Thursday to begin supplementing VIA funding in fiscal year 2018.

Mayor Ivy Taylor and council members Alan Warrick, Cris Medina, Joe Krier and Mike Gallagher sided with Viagran.

Saldana, who raised concerns about inadequate funding for VIA more than a year ago, was deeply bothered by the councils decision to wait.

Unless you hire a lobbyist or you know some people on City Council, your issue is not going to move forward. And its especially easy to ignore you if youre a poor, blue-collar, working-class bus rider, because we couldnt be your voice today, he said. I would say I was disappointed because it tells me this council didnt have the spine to act at a time when it is absolutely necessary for us to step up.

Noting, too, that times are uncertain in Austin and Washington, Saldana argued that San Antonio should control its own destiny. He called the councils delay dereliction of duty.

Ive been on the council long enough to know that when you are delaying something, you are trying to kill it, he said. If they are trying to kill it today, they are going to try to kill it then, and at least now we have enough folks who believe its a good idea. I heard that from everyone. So if its a good idea in June, its a good idea today. We control our future.

Jeff Arndt, VIAs president and CEO, said he was glad that city leaders dug deeply into the issue. There was general consensus, he said, that VIA is underfunded and a desire to remedy that.

Avoiding the political side of the debate, Arndt said the delay would not harm the agencys timeline to improve services. Had the council voted Thursday to approve the future funding, VIA would have sold bonds in early 2017 to purchase additional buses. The next time the agency would do so is in mid-2017.

Its not clear, however, whether the council will take up the issue again before VIAs midyear bus order.

Councilman Ron Nirenberg said that even if the state implements a cap on revenue, the minimal effect on the city would not take away from the need for supplemental funding for VIA. Nirenberg sided with Saldana.

The city spends less than others on funding for its bus system. VIA receives revenue from a half-cent sales tax, while Austin, Houston and Dallas dedicate a full penny to their transit agencies.

But weve identified our shortcoming for the city, particularly with a population that really doesnt have a choice in the debate or a voice in the debate. So I think that this vote, for me, is about putting a stake in the ground, Nirenberg said.

Taylor, who voted in favor of delaying the decision, said she is encouraged by the conversation about VIA funding because it is one as a community we have been missing for quite some time.

A robust transit system is a hallmark of any great city, Taylor said, and San Antonio has been lacking. She blamed the current inadequate funding structure on prior public policy.

The importance of the urgency of this is not lost on me, she said.

Taylor said her vision of San Antonios transit system is one that isnt merely a measure of last resort for San Antonians and that council members and others would have something that is attractive to nondependent transit riders.

But most of you know I tend to be a cautious person, and I am influenced by the environment were in right now, she said.

jbaugh@express-news.net

Twitter: @jbaugh
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

WASHINGTON  Latino leaders fearful of Donald Trump and worried about a new rash of bullied Hispanic children want a meeting with the president-elect to hear if he plans to follow through with draconian campaign promises.

Concerns expressed Thursday by leaders of major Latino groups cast a shadow over significant election victories by Hispanic candidates, including Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Mastos history-making win to become the first Latina in the U.S. Senate.

In addition, five Latinos defeated non-Latinos to win seats in Congress and Hispanics from across the country took part in the Arizona election unseating Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, notorious for his tent-city concentration camps in border control.

Hispanics also pointed success in legislative races coast-to-coast and statewide in Illinois, where Susan Mendoza won election as State Comptroller, a high-profile job in the fifth most populous state.

But the Latino leaders of nonpartisan organizations say they have yet to take a deep breath because of uncertainty about Trump.

Following the election, we are deeply concerned for the safety and security of Latinos in this nation, said Hector Sanchez, executive director of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement.

We call upon on president elect Donald Trump to change the course on campaign promises and we hope the president-elect will make a sincere and concerted effort to promote tolerance and respect for all Americans.

Janet Murguia, CEO of the National Council of La Raza, said that Trumps harsh and divisive rhetoric, his extreme proposals and the fact that his outreach to our community during his campaign was non-existent have fostered legitimate and significant concerns.

She added: There is real anxiety and even fear in our community today.

The leaders spoke at a news conference before a conference call with members seeking counsel in dealing with incidents of harassment since the election.

They described bullying and racial insults in the aftermath of Trump's victory and said they encourage text reporting to the number 73179. They suggest that teachers consult the tolerance.com website of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Some of the taunts and remarks aimed at Hispanics, African Americans and Muslims are being logged at Twitter sites, among them an account called Day 1 in Trumps America.

Roger Rocha, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said hed received a phone call before the news conference about a student at the University of Texas being harassed with the words, were going to ship your brown (behind) home.

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund, said he and others had reached out to Trump repeatedly before the election but every single overture that we made to the campaign of Donald Trump was ignored.

We look forward to him helping turn down the temperature, said Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of VotoLatino,

The leaders say they especially need to hear from Trump on the future of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Trump has promised to rescind the four year program begun under the Obama administration enabling hundreds of thousands of undocumented young people to receive work permits.

Trump has not recently emphasized his earlier vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, referring instead to kicking out "criminal aliens." Leaders say clarity is needed.

At the news conference, leaders pointedly rejected exit polling suggesting Trump did even better than Mitt Romney four years ago among Latinos. The surveys by New Jersey-based Edison Media Research for a consortium of news organizations found that Clinton outpolled Trump 65-29 percent among Hispanic voters.

Four years ago, Edisons research showed Barack Obama defeating Mitt Romney 71-27 in a Hispanic vote count.

The issue is important to Latinos because of intense mobilization amid Trumps insults and news reports this week that Latinos helped elected Trump. Latino organizations point to polling by Seattle-based Latino Decisions, which they describe as the gold standard for Hispanic research, which concluded that Hispanics supported Clinton over Trump 79-18 percent (and 80-16 percent in Texas) based on 5,600 pre-election interviews.

Latino Decisions and defenders say the discrepancy results because Edison does not sample sufficient high-density Latino precincts.

There is no excuse to continue getting these numbers incorrect, said the National Council of La Razas Clarissa Martinez-de-Castro.

Edison Executive Vice President Joe Lensky defended his companys methods.

You have to wonder what their agenda is that makes them so threatened by these numbers, he said.

bill.lambrecht@hearstdc.com
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Veterans Day is a major event in San Antonio, a city often called Military City, U.S.A. because of its long ties to the Army and Air Force, and the fact its been home to some of the nations greatest commanders.

That thought was high in mind for retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, one of three living Medal of Honor recipients in the San Antonio area, as a solemn ceremony honoring veterans neared at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

Many of the really, truly great military leaders beyond Teddy Roosevelt, (Dwight) Eisenhower, Jimmy Doolittle, some of the people that we read about in history, a good many of them trained here at Randolph, Fort Sam, Brady, 80, of New Braunfels, a recipient of the nations highest honor for gallantry as a Vietnam War helicopter pilot, said Thursday.

Charles Kelly, of course, was my own personal hero who founded Dustoff, he trained here, he added, referring to the helicopter-borne medical evacuation system honed in Vietnam. And so many Medal of Honor recipients, too, have trained here and been associated with the city. So its just as friendly to the military as any city in America.

Hundreds and in some cases thousands of people over the years have converged on the national cemetery next to Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston to observe Veterans Day. Todays ceremony will begin at 10 a.m. with Vietnam veteran Allen B. Clarke, a West Point graduate and author of the book, Valor in Vietnam, taking the podium as keynote speaker.

Unlike in many communities, events in San Antonio run for an entire week. Veterans Day started as Armistice Day, declared by the United States, Great Britain and France to mark the cease-fire that ended World War I at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Congress redesignated the day in 1954 to honor all U.S. war veterans.

The salute to veterans, including the almost 22 million who are alive today, goes beyond Fort Sam in a city where the military is the single largest sector of the regional economy.

One ceremony will celebrate the contributions of the Buffalo Soldiers  African Americans who protected settlers in the post-Civil War American West. Rear Admiral Rebecca McCormick-Boyle, head of the Navy Medicine Education and Training Command, will keynote the event, which starts at 1:30 p.m. in San Antonio National Cemetery, 517 Paso Hondo.

Elsewhere today:

University Hospital will honor veterans, including physicians and staff members, with an address by Dr. Andrew Muck, an Air Force emergency medicine physician who served on a critical care air transport team in Iraq and Afghanistan. It begins at 10 a.m. at the hospital at 4502 Medical Drive.

At Fort Sams Center for the Intrepid, Gov. Greg Abbott will be on hand at 11 a.m. for the presentation of a $50,000 check from AT&T to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. The contribution, to be made in a ceremony at the CFIs lobby, will support the centers rehabilitation efforts.

San Antonio Colleges veterans affairs office and VetSuccess on Campus will host a ceremony at 11 a.m. in the SAC Mall area. SACs president, Robert Vela, will open the event. Parking will be available in Lots 20, 21, and 22, accessible from San Pedro by West Park Avenue, where it intersects with Maverick Street.

On Saturday, the 17th annual Veterans Parade begins with a 10 a.m. wreath ceremony at the Alamo featuring Army Secretary Eric Fanning and Maj. Gen. Brian Lein, commander of the U.S. Army Medical Department Center and School. Others will include Richard Perez, president of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, the 323rd Army Band, and at least one Tuskegee airman.

The parade itself will assemble next to the San Antonio Express-News on Avenue E at Third Street, just north of the Alamo, and starts at noon. Honorary grand marshal Susano Ortiz, 92, a Navy veteran of World War II, will lead about 120 floats, marching bands and motorcyclists to Commerce Street on a 1.6-mile route that ends at Milam Park.

For Brady, a Dustoff pilot who rescued 51 men by helicopter in a single day in Vietnam, thats San Antonio, a city rich in military history and forever grateful to its veterans.

Ive been honored to death and I dont really get a big kick out of that, he said. But I think we should honor the values that the veterans represent and I think thats what they would like to have America honor, is their values, and the values are simply courage, sacrifice and patriotism.

sigc@express-news.net
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Federal authorities this week arrested a developer from the Rio Grande Valley as part of an investigation into allegations that businessmen and politicians from the Mexican state of Coahuila laundered millions of dollars of stolen public funds in South Texas.

Luis Carlos Castillo Cervantes, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Mexico, was arrested Tuesday and had his initial appearance Wednesday in a McAllen federal courtroom on charges of money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to commit fraud. His lawyers did not respond to phone calls and an email requesting comment Friday.

Federal prosecutors released little information about their case against Castillo. They accuse him of conspiring to use U.S. banks to launder the proceeds of fraud, stolen funds, bribes paid to an official in a foreign country and embezzlement in a foreign country. The country is not named in court documents.

As part of the indictment, prosecutors are seeking to seize a Learjet and asking for a $36 million money judgment.

Documents filed in a 2012 San Antonio civil lawsuit indicate investigators here have been looking into Castillo, whos connected to a network of companies in the Valley that own a number of pieces of real estate, for years. Among them is a 36-acre tract near Mission that Castillo bought in 2002, property records show.

That same year, he transferred it to the L.C. Castillo Corporation, a company that lists Castillo as its president in state business filings. In 2004, he built a 25,000-square-foot house with a pool and a separate 8,000-square-foot entertainment facility, tax records show. The property is appraised at $3 million.

L.C. Castillo Corporation also owns nine other properties in Hidalgo County, including several in the well-regarded Sharyland area that straddles Mission and McAllen.

Castillo made campaign contributions ranging from $500 to $2,300 to U.S. Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, D-McAllen; U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, and former U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, a San Antonio Democrat who is now a justice of the peace. Rodriguez said he couldnt remember Castillo. Hinojosa didnt respond to requests for comment and Cornyns office wouldnt comment.

Despite his political involvement and wealth, Castillo has largely avoided media attention in the United States. That has not been the case in Mexico, where news organizations have reported that he hosted politicians from both sides of the border at his home and benefited from government contracts.

Castillos name previously came up in the investigation of Hector Javier Villarreal, the former treasurer of Coahuila. Villarreal has admitted in a San Antonio federal court to committing financial crimes in the U.S. and has turned over to the federal government real estate and bank accounts in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley worth $40 million. Prosecutors allege he laundered $30 million in the United States stolen from Coahuilas public coffers.

As part of a civil lawsuit by the Bexar County District Attorneys Office against a $6.5 million bank account Villarreal controlled, investigators asked about Castillo during a 2013 deposition, court records show. They also asked about Imperial Air LP, a company controlled by Castillo which owns the Learjet federal prosecutors are now trying to seize. Imperial Air lists another company, L&M Castillo LLC, as its president. L&M Castillo LLC lists Luis Carlos Castillo as its president.

Villarreal and Castillo are caught up in a larger investigation into allegations that officials under former Coahuila governor Humberto Moreira stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the state and laundered the money in San Antonio and the Valley. Moreira has denied committing any crimes.

jbuch@express-news.net

Twitter: @jlbuch

Rio Grande Valley bureau reporter Aaron Nelsen contributed from McAllen.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

When dozens of Vietnam veterans answered the call recently to gather at a West Side ceremony in their honor, bands played, dignitaries lauded them and strangers gave them rounds of applause.

For many, it was a reception they never received when they returned home from the war.

They traveled with family and friends from local neighborhoods, and as far away as Harlingen, Killeen and Laredo, to 1500 West Commerce St. last Saturday, Nov. 5, where they marked the occasion with a group photo in front of a mural titled, You Are Not Forgotten.

Vietnam-era veteran Naomi Hicks-Turner saw a poster for the event in a Corpus Christi medical outpatient clinic. She took up the invitation and drove 143 miles the day before the event with her friend, Connie Gonzalez. The pair was overwhelmed by the welcome from people theyd never met.

I had tears and I didnt care, I shed my tears, said Turner, 60. It was a show of unity for our country and it didnt matter the gender, race, nor what service you were in, it was worth the travel.

Jaime Macias, property manager/event coordinator for Macias Enterprise and several veteran groups, sponsored the community event to honor those who sacrificed their lives and those who are still living.

The event included state Sen. Jose Menendez and District 5 Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales.

Crowds viewed an illustrated wooden altar and paintings by Vietnam veteran Roberto Sifuentes that filled a two-story yellow house near the wall painting.

One day, Macias stopped in front of the mural and felt he had missed an opportunity to pay tribute to the service of Sifuentes, family members and friends who served in Vietnam. With help from his wife Dorothy, he spread the word about a group photo at the mural to organizations including the Purple Heart Association and Veterans of Foreign Wars groups.

Joe Dillard, 65, saw the picture of a fallen friend, Trino Benavidez upon Sifuentes altar.

It brings back a lot of memories and heart ache, Dillard said, looking at his friends image.

Sifuentes, who grew up on the West Side, served in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and received a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. He referenced photographs from the library, sometimes finding that the research brought back rough memories.

I was proud and honored to use my art in this fashion, Sifuentes said.

At one point, the veterans stood side by side in front of the mural that depicted scenes from the Vietnam War.

Artist Michael Roman, 40, and his father, Antonio Tony Roman, 68, took photos with visitors and gave the backstory of the mural.

Ten years ago, San Anto Culture Arts approached Macias brother, Alejandro J. Macias, also a Vietnam veteran, about putting up a mural on the space. Roman took up the task, inspired by his father, who served four years in the Marines, and brother, Mark Anthony, who died at the age of 27.

With input from his father and other veterans, Roman painted intimate details through the artwork. Explosions that smelled of gunfire and blood. A line of empty boots. A propaganda leaflet. In the right corner, he painted his father, holding his mothers graduation picture from Marshall High School.

They said go, his father said, and we went.

As the crowd broke up, Macias said the event was a success because the veterans put the word out.

It was a band of brothers, he said. I wanted this day to be their day.

vtdavis@express-news.net
Are you a farmer looking for energetic and motivated staff?

Are you an Ag student or recent college grad seeking hands-on farming experience?

Are you an aspiring farmer seeking apprentice training?

An internship might be for you.

What is an internship?

An internship is a temporary employment situation. Farm internships typically span May through September, during the growing season.

Farmers appreciate extra help during the busiest time of year, but warn: needing farm labor is not a good reason to host interns. One farmer put it this way, If you are looking for laborers hire laborers, not interns.

The goal of a farm internship is to cultivate individuals into the next generation of farmers and agricultural advocates. The most successful internships are those in which the farmer works alongside interns, teaching and mentoring during daily tasks. Internships provide practical skills and working knowledge one cant gain by reading a book.

How internships benefit farmers

Internships are an opportunity for farmers to pass their skills and experience to the next generation.

Interns bring youthful energy and new ideas to the farm. One farmer explained how a tech savvy intern taught her to navigate social media. I didnt know the market I was missing, she said. An intern got my farm on Facebook. Since then, several customers have found the farm online.

How internships benefit interns

Internships introduce college Ag students and recent grads to the agricultural industry. Aspiring farmers utilize internships to map out methodology and form a farm philosophy. Individuals without agricultural backgrounds find meaningful work on a farm.

Compensation

Internships may be paid or unpaid. Interns may receive a compensatory share of food crops, lodging, stipends or incentive plans.

Profit-sharing based on crop yield or production level is a common wage incentive plan. Some farmers set aside a portion of property for an intern-run operation, such as specialty crops or laying hens. Providing raw agricultural materials for an intern-run value-added operation is another way to work incentive plans into a farm internship.

What to expect

A good internship is not a job, its a program. Experience, training and communication are critical components of an internship. A farm internship program should include education in production, finance and marketing.

Introducing interns to a network of fellow farmers and agricultural associations provides them with powerful connections for starting their own operation, or gaining employment in the agricultural industry.

Program structure starts with a formal application, followed by an interview. Outline expectations, rules and policies. Agree on a start and stop employment date, and discuss time-off from the farm.

Host farmers are mentors, managers, employers and educators. They should be able to clearly communicate tasks and delegate responsibilities. Feedback, including occasional correction and discipline, must remain professional.

Hosting interns requires complete transparency; farming methods and finances should be included in curriculum. Farmers with a high need for privacy should think twice before hosting interns.

Farmers are required to comply with state and federal labor and employment laws including taxes, workers compensation, insurance and wages. Contact your state labor office for current laws.

Online internship listings
The Prairie Doc: Men, you can thank women for your good health
Farm support payments worth 246million have been deposited in the bank accounts of 12,000 Scottish farmers.

The first 2016 direct loan payments will be deposited in farmers bank accounts today, Rural Economy Secretary Fergus Ewing has confirmed.

Almost 12,000 farmers and crofters have today had their payments authorised under the National Basic Payment Support Scheme (NBPSS), which will see just under 246 million go into the rural economy.

Mr Ewing said: I can confirm the first direct loan payments for 2016 will arrive in farmers bank accounts today, which is injecting nearly a quarter of a billion pounds into the rural economy.

Cabinet Secretary for the Rural Economy Fergus Ewing

The funding will give our rural communities the security and certainty they need to plan for the year ahead while driving forward the rural economy.

We have had a great response from farmers to the 2016 scheme and will be writing to each recipient confirming their individual loan shortly. In the meantime, we continue to progress the remaining applications received after the 19 October deadline and further offer letters will be issued as eligibility is clarified.

We would encourage the 5,000 farmers who received a loan offer but havent yet replied to decide if they want to apply and return the application slip as soon as possible.

NFU Scotland director of policy Jonnie Hall welcomed the announcement and said the funds were a hugely welcome and sizeable boost to our rural economy as we head into winter.

He added: Given ongoing concerns over the IT payment system, we were very supportive of the Cabinet Secretary opting for the loan scheme approach and he is now delivering on his commitment to put precious funds into accounts in early November.

That delivers stability and certainty to farmers and crofters but will also very quickly filter out to all those businesses who provide them with goods and services.
The Northern Ireland agri-food industry has gained prominence after a government visit to China to discuss prominent agricultural trade between the two countries.

Food and Farming Minister Michelle McIlveen reinforced that message as she completed an agri-food trade mission to China during which she visited the cities of Beijing, Yangling, Xian and Shanghai.

The Minister fulfilled a schedule of engagements during the week-long mission, including attending the major Food Hotel China exhibition and meetings with the Chinese government and international trade representatives.

Minister meets Director General Jia Jingdun, Ministry of Science and Technology (central Government, Beijing)

Speaking as she began the journey back to Northern Ireland, Miss McIlveen said: The trade and cultural links between Northern Ireland and the Peoples Republic of China are strong and growing, and this has been evident throughout my visit.

Food Hotel China, held in Shanghai for the 20th time, is the proven platform for international food producers to gain a foothold in the Chinese market and the Northern Ireland companies attending and exhibiting certainly made a positive impression. With support from Invest Northern Ireland, local producers covering areas such as beverages, bakery, potatoes and rapeseed oil made high value initial contacts with potential Chinese buyers.

There is no doubt that the Chinese market represents a major opportunity for local producers, many of whom are already doing significant business in China. I am committed to doing whatever I can to help boost existing trade links and establish new ones for Northern Ireland companies.

The Minister concluded: It has been clear to me from the formal and informal meetings I have had over the past week that the Chinese regard our produce, with its traceability and unique provenance, very highly. I am confident that my visit has helped to boost Northern Irelands image in China and I look forward to the local agri-food sector continuing to build on its success here to date.

Asian buyers are increasingly looking towards British produce, with British-reared pork and Jersey dairy just some of the recent interests that has galvanised the Asian markets.
The farming industry has made fresh calls to dairy processors to explain why they are not increasing prices to farmers, despite a new surge in global markets and the continuing weakness of sterling.

What I am saying is a twist on the old adage to put up or shut up," Ulster Farmers Union president, Barclay Bell explained.

In this case, if they continue not to put up, in terms of higher prices, there is no justification for shutting up. They need to explain to farmers, whether they are members of a cooperative or not, why they are refusing to increase prices to reflect the better returns they are receiving, said Mr Bell

Farming unions across the UK have said farmers had 'every right to be angry' about the situation

Farming unions have said the case for an increase was put beyond question this week by the big increase in the Fonterra auction price in New Zealand.

It rose by over eleven per cent, with whole milk powder, a key product for the UK, leading the auction upwards.

This is the best barometer of world trade and it is pointing upwards. So too is the Milk Market Observatory in Brussels. No arguments can be put forward by processors here against a substantial and immediate price increase," Mr Bell explained.

'Processors interested in their own profits'

Mr Bell said if processors continue holding back, the only conclusion farmers' will have is that processors are more interested in their own profits than in ensuring farmers have the prices and profitability they need to remain in business.

And at the end of the day, without farmers willing to maintain supplies processors will not have a business, said the UFU president.

Farming unions across the UK have said farmers had 'every right to be angry' about the situation, and that there would be serious consequences for the entire industry in they continued to lose faith in processors.

If they are reluctant to tell farmers why they are not paying more, this suggests they do not have a credible explanation, Mr Bell said.

Mr Bell added that, in the case of Northern Ireland, some businesses with ownership south of the border had increased prices there, despite the weakness of sterling having a negative impact in the eurozone.

This is because they are responding to pressure from farmers for higher prices. They need to understand that farmers here have even better arguments for higher prices and can no longer be ignored, concluded Mr Bell.
European Union farmers will receive an increased budget of 133 million in 2017 to promote agricultural products outside and inside the EU and to continue finding new markets.

EU promotion policy supports producers to sell their products in an increasingly competitive world, ensuring jobs and growth within Europe.

The European Commission adopted the 2017 promotion strategy for agricultural products with a total budget of 133 million compared to the 111 million available for 2016. This amount will co-finance several programmes, most of which will target third countries and regions, including China, Middle East, North America, South-East Asia and Japan.

This orientation supports the momentum launched earlier this year by Commissioner Hogan's diplomatic offensive to find new markets and support consumption of EU products abroad.

EU promotion policy supports producers to sell their products in an increasingly competitive world

'Stimulate growth and jobs in agri-food sector'

Returning from his business mission to Vietnam and Indonesia, EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development Phil Hogan said: "I was just now travelling in Asia as part of our efforts to boost agri-food exports, and I am struck by the interest being shown by importers and consumers in this part of the world. The further expansion of our promotion programmes next year is also particularly important as this will also help to stimulate growth and jobs in the agri-food sector. EU wide, we see that an increase in exports of 1 billion supports roughly 14 000 jobs. I am particularly pleased that this includes a new initiative to boost products from sustainable agriculture."

A call for proposals to benefit from the 2017 promotion budget will be launched in January 2017. Proposing organisations can apply and their campaigns, usually rolling over three years, will be co-financed by the European Commission at rates of 70-85%.

The 2017 budget represents an increase compared with the 111 million from this year, outlining the support provided to EU agri-food producers. The 2016 promotion campaign is successfully following its course as the final beneficiaries were selected and will be in a position to get their campaigns started early next year. The selected campaigns, 60 of them being single programmes and 6 multi programmes show a more diverse and broader outreach.

Indeed, they cover 32 third countries, compared with 23 last year, and within the two major destinations, the USA and China, they go well beyond the most targeted areas of New York and Beijing. The products which will be the most advertised in the campaigns are fruits and vegetables (30% of the programmes), followed by meat (17%) and dairy products (15%).
The Welsh government is currently consulting on proposals to take forward the implementation of the Nitrates Directive in Wales.

Proposals could see the designation of specific areas including a significant area in Pembrokeshire and a number of smaller designations in Anglesey and Carmarthenshire, together with an extension to the NVZ area in Clwyd. Alternatively a Whole Territory approach for the whole of Wales is put forward for consideration.

Regulations require farmers in NVZ designated areas to follow an Action Programme of statutory measures.

Welsh Government has opted not to publish a Regulatory Impact Assessment alongside the consultation. NFU Cymru is, therefore, gathering information through an online survey to present to Welsh Government in relation to the cost and impacts of farming within NVZ areas.
Brexit is offering the British farming industry a fantastic opportunity to build a new agricultural policy, defra minister George Eustice told 200 delegates at a farming conference.

He told the Northern Farming Conference that the UK needed to develop sharper regulations and less bureaucracy to tailor the needs of the agriculture industry.

"We need to remove the blinkers of EU membership and work together to build a policy that a decade from now the world will want to emulate. I am confident we can do that," the farming minister told gatherers at the Hexham Auction Mart.

Under the theme 'Farming: Where I see my future', leading farmers from across the country met to examine what the future may hold for farmers.

"I think this is a fantastic opportunity for our industry going forwards. It is the chance of a lifetime and I am looking forward to building a brand new agricultural policy that works for us. The EU got it wrong because it attempted to codify every single feature of the landscape and every single thing a farmer does with his land, which made it hopelessly bureaucratic. The weakness of the EU schemes is that if they get it wrong it takes seven years to sort it out. We need to be much sharper," Mr Eustice said.

Sir Peter Kendall, Chair of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board and former NFU President

'Light at the end of the tunnel'

Sir Peter Kendall, Chair of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board and former NFU President said he wanted to build a future for our rural community and make the challenges presented by Brexit 'work for us.'

"I would stake my farm on the fact there is not going to be more money. We need to plan for less support and more competition. Trade is fundamental to our future. It is a massively important issue and we must make sure the government is listening to us every step of the way. Brexit is not just about the city of London."

"Think about your farm business very carefully See where you sit among your peers, and your global competitors. Make plans. Go to your MPs surgery and talk to them; make sure that farming is at the front of their minds. It is vital we get this right."

Northumberland potato farmer Anthony Carroll told farmers not to panic: "Are you going to come in the farm door or are you just going to hover at the entrance? We have to change. We have to listen to what the market wants but if we can pull together we can make UK agriculture great again."

'Energy and progressive ideas'

CLA President Ross Murray said: "The serious point is that ownership and, in particular, farming is hard work and needs energy and progressive ideas, and the secret is, if at all possible within family businesses, to hand on earlier rather than later, with plenty of warning, training and management of expectations.

"What we all should recognise is that change is a constant. It is to be welcomed and embraced, not run away from. That route spells disaster. Farming as an industry has a queue of bright and hungry youngsters wanting to kick on, frustrated by the lack of opportunity. There are plenty of bed blockers and we all know who we are. Retirement is never an easy subject for a proud community of farmers, and somehow it must happen."

Chairman and Strutt & Parker farm business consultant Robert Sullivan said: "What is remarkable about some of the stories we have heard is the success that can and does lie in farming. At a time when many farms are unprofitable without farm payment support it is clear that there are some trailblazing farmers who are demonstrating that agriculture can be profitable without subsidy. They are a huge inspiration."

A Partner at Armstrong Watson, Andrew Robinson said Brexit has created a huge amount of uncertainty but felt like there was 'light at the end of the tunnel.'
Pembrokeshire resident Carys Jones has been announced as the winner of NFU Cymrus #Buy5 competition championing Welsh produce.

The competition, which ran during September and part of October, asked shoppers to send in pictures of Welsh produce they had purchased from their local market, butcher, supermarket or farmers market.

NFU Cymru was inundated with entries over the course of the competition, with shoppers from across the UK sharing their #Buy5 photographs.

NFU Cymru says 'It's time to back Welsh farming' with the #Buy5 initiative

The winner of the #Buy5 competition, selected at random, was Carys Jones from Llangwm, who had purchased Llaeth y Llan yoghurts, Calon Wen milk, Colliers cheese, Rachels organic butter and Welsh free range eggs as part of her weekly shop.

Carys made the short trip to Nash Farm Shop in Pembroke Dock to collect her prize, a crate filled with delicious Welsh meats and treats. NFU Cymru President Stephen James, also based in Pembrokeshire, visited the shop to congratulate Carys and present her with her prize.

#Buy5 winner Carys, said: I saw #Buy5 on Twitter and thought it was a great drive by NFU Cymru to highlight the importance of buying Welsh produce. I was emptying my shopping out, had a look at what I had bought, took a photo and sent it in  I didnt realise it was a competition at the time. Im both shocked and delighted to have won.

I do buy a lot of Welsh produce, mainly from a principle point of view. Im from a farming background myself so I think its very important to support farmers and growers, but at the same time the quality and the taste has to be there. Were very lucky to have such fantastic producers in Wales, but especially here in Pembrokeshire.

NFU Cymru President Stephen James, said: It was great to be able to come along and present Carys with this delicious range of locally produced Welsh food and drink. NFU Cymrus #Buy5 competition was a roaring success and Im pleased that the competition has also been able to raise the profile of farm shops, like Nash Farm Shop, who are true Welsh food and drink champions.

Carys Jones is a trustee of the DPJ Foundation, a charity set-up in July 2016 to support people living with mental health issues, particularly men in rural Pembrokeshire.
Convert 10% of arable land to agroforestry, Woodland Trust says
Proving that you don't have to be born and raised on a farm to have a thriving career in agriculture, Emma is now making waves and impressing industry professionals in the role of executive officer at the Association for Sheep Husbandry, Excellence, Evaluation and Production (ASHEEP), a step up from joining the group as a part-time project manager.
Two 14-year-old boys have been charged in connection with having a gun at Unity Reed High School in Manassas this week. The gun was not brandished toward other students and was not part of an
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visits troops at Fort Bragg

The commander of Fort Bragg and the 18th Airborne Corps said, "Welcome Home," to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin when he arrived on post Tuesday.
Global mining giant Rio Tinto said it suspended the chief executive of its energy and minerals division while it investigates more than $10.5 million paid to a consultant for the Simandou iron ore project in Guinea.

Alan Davies was in charge of Simandou in 2011 when the payments for advisory services were allegedly made, according to a U.S. securities filing.

London-based Rio Tinto said it learned about the payments in August this year from email correspondence.

Legal & Regulatory Affairs group executive Debra Valentine stepped down, Rio Tinto said. She previously notified the company of her intention to retire on May 1, 2017.

On Tuesday, Rio Tinto notified authorities in the UK and the United States. It said it is in the process of contacting the Australian authorities.

Rio Tinto intends to co-operate fully with any subsequent inquiries from all of the relevant authorities, the company said. Further comment at this time is therefore not appropriate.

Davies took over Rio Tintos energy and mineral group in July.



Rio Tinto canceled the $20 billion Simandou project because of low iron ore prices.

Last month Rio Tinto sold its 46.6 percent interest in Simandou for about $1.3 billion to Chinalco, a Chinese company listed in Hong Kong.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that internal Rio Tinto emails it saw showed that high-level executives, including then CEO Tom Albanese, approved the payments in 2011 to a consultant.

The WSJ said the consultant was Francois de Combret, a former Lazard Freres managing director with ties to senior government officials in Guinea.

The government of Guinea stripped Rio Tinto of half the Simandou project in 2008 for alleged non-performance.

The rights then went to BSG Resources Ltd., owned by Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz. BSG teamed up with Brazils Vale SA to acquire control of Simandou.

But Rio won the rights back in 2011 after the Guinea government stripped them from BSG and Vale, alleging the companies had acquired them illegally.

BSG and Vale have denied any wrongdoing.

This week Steinmetz said the Rio Tinto disclosure revealed a long-running scheme against BSG.

Its a big conspiracy against us, huge, Steinmetz told Bloomberg. They tried to paint themselves as nice and clean but they never wanted to develop one ton of iron ore. We are the good guys.

* * *

Heres the disclosure from Rio Tintos Form 6-K (Report of Foreign Private Issuer) filed November 8, 2016 with the SEC:

On 29 August 2016, Rio Tinto became aware of email correspondence from 2011 relating to contractual payments totalling US$10.5 million made to a consultant providing advisory services on the Simandou project in Guinea.



The company launched an investigation into the matter led by external counsel. Based on the investigation to date, Rio Tinto has today notified the relevant authorities in the United Kingdom and United States and is in the process of contacting the Australian authorities.



Energy & Minerals chief executive Alan Davies, who had accountability for the Simandou project in 2011, has been suspended with immediate effect.



Legal & Regulatory Affairs group executive Debra Valentine, having previously notified the company of her intention to retire on 1 May 2017, has stepped down from her role.



Rio Tinto intends to co-operate fully with any subsequent inquiries from all of the relevant authorities. Further comment at this time is therefore not appropriate.

____

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog.
Rosario Dawson is to portray women's rights activist Donna Hylton in new film 'A Little Piece Of Light'.

Rosario Dawson

The 'Seven Pounds' actress has been cast in the lead role and will play Donna when she is an adult in the harrowing true life story.

The movie - base on the biography of the same name - will focus on Donna's upbringing in Jamaica before she was sold by her mother to an American couple living in New York when she was seven.

Her adoptive father was a paedophile and he sexually abused her over a number of years and Donna would hide in closets to escape him but when she saw a chink of light come into her room she knew he had entered to assault her.

When she was a 19 year old track and field star Donna was arrested for her part in the kidnapping and murder of a Rikers Island real estate agent and she was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, spending the majority of her incarceration in solitary confinement, however, after her release in 2012 she became a prominent women's rights campaigner.

Rosario, 37, announced her new role on Twitter, posting: "Thank you so much love! Proud to represent my dear friend and incredibly inspiring activist and advocate @DonnaHylton! #ALittlePieceOfLight (sic)"

Although Rosario has been cast in the movie, no director or screenwriter are in place yet, but both jobs are set to go to women.

Dan Pearson, who is responsible for the rights to Hylton's life story through through his D4 Entertainement company and will be getting the project to the big screen, told Deadline: "We are all looking for the right female screenwriter and director for 'A Little Piece Of Light'. This is a project for women, by women, of women."
Queen Elizabeth has asked Prince Harry to tour the Caribbean on her behalf.

Queen Elizabeth

The 90-year-old monarch had been invited to mark the 35th anniversary of

the independence of Antigua and Barbuda the 50th anniversary of independence in Barbados and Guyana later this month, but as she no longer undertakes gruelling long-haul trips, her 32-year-old grandson will instead visit seven countries between November 20 and December 4.

The queen's Assistant Private Secretary Samantha Cohen said: "The queen asked Prince Harry to visit the Caribbean on her behalf...

"As you know The queen does not undertake long-haul visits any more age 90."

And it was confirmed there are currently "no plans" for the queen to mark the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation next year, despite speculation she would make the trip to Canada.

Ms. Cohen added: "We have said on the record that in her 90th year it is more difficult for her to travel.

"And there are no plans at the moment for The Queen to go to Canada.

"That's not to say that Canada's 150th anniversary won't be marked in some way by her here.

"But she's 90. It's a long trip. It's difficult. So there aren't any plans for her to go at the moment."

Harry had been chosen to go to the Caribbean because he "did very well" during the 2012 diamond jubilee tour, because of his availability and because he is young and able to cope with a gruelling multi-destination schedule.

Ms. Cohen added: "The Queen has always visited all her realms regularly...

"There is always an objective to visit all the realms wherever possible and Prince Harry will be representing the queen.

"The queen is passing on the visits she would ordinarily do.

"We have only a limited number of members of the royal family who can execute those visits."

During his Caribbean tour, Harry will spend six nights on board Navy ship Royal Fleet Auxiliary Wave Knight - which is usually used in drugs raids or disaster relief - as he visits the Realms of Antigua & Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada and Barbados, as well as Guyana on behalf of the Foreign Office.

A likely highlight of his visit will be watching Rihanna perform at the Golden Anniversary Spectacular Mega Concert in Barbados on November 30.

The queen has only taken undertaken a handful of foreign visits since November 2013, when it was announced Buckingham Palace would be "reviewing" the amount of long-haul travel she undertook.

Her most recent overseas visit was to Malta last November.
Rav Wilding's new series 'British Police Murdered on Duty' was created to show how "unpredictable and dangerous" life as a police officer is.

Rav Wilding

The 39-year-old television personality and former police officer has admitted the upcoming three-part series, which commemorates brave officers including Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone who were murdered in the line of duty, was created to reveal how "very very scary" life in the forces can be.

Speaking exclusively to BANG Showbiz about the series, the dark-haired hunk said: "It is a three parter. It's obviously about registered police officers that were murdered whilst at work.

"What I want to get across in the series is how unpredictable and dangerous the world for the police is. And all three of these cases are people who were ambushed and then it completely changed a seemingly mundane situation to a murder in every one of these cases, and it is a very very potentially scary job."

And the former 'Crimewatch' presenter has described the first episode, which will detail the Shepherds Bush murders in 1966, as "historical".

He explained: "The first episode is almost historical, it's 1966, which is the first murder, which is the murder of three officers and it's known as the Shepherds Bush murders. It's quite a famous one, especially in London. The main effector was a guy called Harry Roberts who ambushed three unarmed police officers. The other episodes we have the murder of two unarmed female police officers Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes and that was up in Manchester, by a guy called Dale Cregan. And then there was one that happened in Leeds where PC Broadhurst was shot and killed by a guy called David Bieber."

'British Police Murdered On Duty' is set to hit our screens on Friday (11.11.16) at 10pm on a number of broadcasting networks including Investigation Discovery, Sky 522, Virgin 253 and BT 324.
Rita Simons has landed her first musical theatre role.

Rita Simons as Roxy Mitchell

The 'EastEnders' star is set to portray Paulette, the beautiful manicurist looking for love, in the theatrical version of the hit film 'Legally Blonde' for seven months from next September.

The production will kick off in Bromley towards the end of 2017 and will tour the UK, stopping off at theatres in High Wycombe, Bristol and Woking among other major venues until April 2018.

The 39-year-old actress' new musical theatre role comes just weeks after she announced she was leaving the BBC long-running soap after nine years playing feisty Roxy Mitchell.

A spokesperson for the show said at the time: "We can confirm that Rita Simons will be leaving 'EastEnders'."

The talented star's decision to turn her back on the programme came just days after Samantha Womack - who plays her on-screen serial killer sister Ronnie Mitchell - announced she was also leaving to pursue other projects.

The spokesperson said: "Having joined the show in 2007, Rita immediately won the hearts of the audience in the role of Roxy Mitchell and between her and Samantha Womack they created one of the most iconic duos 'EastEnders' has ever seen.

"Alongside Samantha, Rita was recently offered to take part in the same big storyline that will see the Mitchell sisters depart Walford, but we will not be releasing any further details at this time. We wish Rita all the best for the future."

Details on the siblings' departure are being kept tightly under wraps for the time being but it's believed they will be killed off.

It's thought the troublesome twosome will meet their grisly end together in the new year when they drown in a swimming pool.
Robert Vaughn has died at the age of 83.

Robert Vaughn

The 'Man From U.N.C.L.E' star passed away "surrounded by his family" in New York after a short battle with acute leukaemia.

His manager Matthew Sullivan told Deadline: "Mr. Vaughn passed away with his family around him."

And Matthew added to BBC News: "He was a great human being. I enjoyed every day of working with him."

The beloved actor was best known for his role as Napoleon Solo in the NBC television series 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E' and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his part in 1959's 'Young Philadelphians'.

Robert was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1998 and requested it was put at the end near where he lived with his mother when they first moved to the big city.

It was his starring role in BBC's 'Hustle' that added to his fame in the United Kingdom, with the British public falling in love with his charming character Albert Stroller. Robert also made an extended appearance in 'Coronation Street' in 2012, where he played Milton Fanshaw, a love interest of Roy's mother Sylvia for a dozen episodes.

Since news of his death surfaced, celebrities including Stephen Fry have taken to Twitter to pay their respects to the well-loved actor.

Stephen wrote: "Oh no. Robert Vaughn, such a fine actor, one of the best Columbo villains (no higher praise than that) & an utterly charming man, has died. (sic)"

Whilst Sir Roger Moore shared: "Sorry to hear the news about Robert Vaughn."

Actress Lorelei King shared on the social media site: "RIP #RobertVaughn. Loved you in The Man From Uncle, but seeing you in #corrie was such a treat. (sic)"

Robert is survived by his wife Linda Staab and their children Caitlin and Cassidy.
HanesBrands is offering odour protection technology across the line of men's underwear, socks, tshirts and fleece products, in its flagship brand, Hanes, while additional products will be introduced with odour control technology through fall of 2017. The marketer has chosen FreshIQ Advanced Odour Protection Technology for this new initiative.According to HanesBrands, textiles naturally aid in the growth of bacteria by providing nutrients, while also adding that odour is a by product of bacterial growth during the time period in which the product is worn.

HanesBrands is offering odour protection technology across the line of men's underwear, socks, tshirts and fleece products, in its flagship brand, Hanes, while additional products will be introduced with odour control technology through fall of 2017. The marketer has chosen FreshIQ Advanced Odour Protection Technology for this new initiative.#

The company has already made these products available at major retailers and its website and also its own stores.HanesBrands also debuted a marketing campaign titled 'End the Smellfie' on October 31 through television commercials and coordinated digital advertising. (AR)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Applied DNA Sciences, Inc., provider of DNA-based supply chain and anti-theft technologies, has reported on its progress in penetrating the American cotton industry with its botanical DNA-based supply chain solutions during the 2016 ginning season. In 2016, Applied DNA shipped orders for its SigNature T DNA concentrate to tag 93 million pounds of cotton.The total cotton tagged consists of previously announced orders to tag 50 million pounds of HomeGrown Lonestar, 10 million pounds of Acala cotton, and a previously undisclosed order to tag 33 million pounds of Pima cotton. Due to extended payment terms under its current contract, Applied DNA does not always recognise all of the revenues in the fiscal quarter in which orders are shipped. In these instances, the balance is recorded as deferred revenue that converts to revenue within 12 months.

Applied DNA Sciences, Inc., provider of DNA-based supply chain and anti-theft technologies, has reported on its progress in penetrating the American cotton industry with its botanical DNA-based supply chain solutions during the 2016 ginning season. In 2016, Applied DNA shipped orders for its SigNature T DNA concentrate to tag 93 million pounds of cotton.#

The company anticipates total market usage of marked cotton in the 2016 ginning season to be approximately 150 million pounds, which includes the usage of the excess SigNature T DNA from the 2015 ginning season that the company recognised as revenue during fiscal 2015. This compares to total market usage of marked cotton in the 2015 ginning season of approximately 40 million pounds, an expected increase of approximately 275 per cent year-over-year.Dr. James Hayward, president and CEO of Applied DNA said, The expected usage of SigNature T DNA to tag cotton in the current ginning season relative to the last is clear evidence that demand for marked cotton is growing. Not only is the market absorbing last ginning season's remaining taggant, but we are seeing absolute growth in market demand. Recent news of mislabelled Egyptian cotton, the growing awareness of the use of 'conflict cotton' in everyday products, and a greater focus on supply chain security by brands and retailers are driving momentum. SigNature T DNA is a proven, patented and incontestable solution that stands at the intersection of technology, market opportunity and the ability to transform our daily lives.Given the nascence of the market, we cannot eliminate the possibility of taggant oversupply recurring in future ginning periods. However, we expect purchase orders placed by our partners to service the increasing needs of brand owners and retailers, and, for the first time in the company's history, interest from international cotton markets, to mitigate this possibility, he added. (GK)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
At a conference of the British Wool Marketing Board (BWMB), attendees were told that there are several future opportunities for British wool, but collaboration and cooperation between wool sector segments was also essential. They were also informed that innovation in the form of collaboration had driven resurgence in Harris Tweed, an iconic wool product.In wool we have a truly unique product which has a great future. It can be used at all levels in the fashion industry with great effect and can be used to create an immense variety of garments. We have to get the message out to promote wool as a modern fabric, Mark Hogarth, creative director at Harris Tweed Hebrides said.

At a conference of the British Wool Marketing Board (BWMB), attendees were told that there are several future opportunities for British wool, but collaboration and cooperation between wool sector segments was also essential. They were also informed that innovation in the form of collaboration had driven resurgence in Harris Tweed, an iconic wool product.#

We have seen a huge resurgence in Harris Tweed in recent years and this is largely due to a number of positive associations with leading fashion brands across the world, he added.Capitalising on these relationships and collaborating with partners, such as Topman, which wouldn't historically have been a natural fit for Harris Tweed will be key to maximising demand for woollen products going forward, he observed. (AR)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Union textiles minister Smriti Irani has called for capacity enhancement in production of textile machinery in the country and asked state governments to provide their support for expanding manufacturing and employment generation capacities. She said that only this would address the challenges of industry such as cost of power and labour.

In her address at the concluding session of the one-day Annual Conference of State Textiles Ministers in New Delhi, Irani stressed on the importance of a well-coordinated cohesive governance approach for more effective programme implementation and sectoral outcomes. Noting that many states do not have dedicated textiles ministers, she expressed the need for more dialogue and convergence at intra-state, inter-state and Centre-state levels.

Accordingly, in line with the spirit of cooperative federalism, the minister has ensured that the views and contribution of all states would be reflected in the new textile policy, so that India becomes the textile destination of the world.

Union textiles minister Smriti Irani has called for capacity enhancement in production of textile machinery in the country and asked state governments to provide their support for expanding manufacturing and employment generation capacities. She said that only this would address the challenges of industry such as cost of power and labour.#

Speaking on the importance of branding in textile sector, Irani mentioned that India's positioning in international market depends upon branding of Indian textile products. She recalled how branding of handloom products by involving top designers and retail giants in the country, has led to a paradigm shift in the handloom sector. Irani also proposed branding of eri silk as 'peace silk from the land of the mahatma'.

Textiles secretary Rashmi Verma highlighted the challenges faced by the textile sector, especially in the export market, due to uneven tariff and non-tariff barriers and expressed the hope that GST will bring down input costs, give a boost to textile exports and bring in greater capital investment in the sector.

Minister of state for textiles Ajay Tamta highlighted various measures taken by the Central government to boost the growth and remove bottlenecks and challenges facing the sector in his key note address at the conference.

Irani also noted that education of children is the primary concern of weavers and artisans and spoke of the memorandum of understanding between Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) to provide free, anytime and anywhere education to children. She sought support of state governments for the success of the programme, specifically in identifying artisans and weavers who need such support.

The conference gave a platform to the states to exchange their views on various policies and programmes implemented by the Indian government and specific challenges faced by the state governments in their implementation. Ministers and senior officials of textile departments of 18 states participated in the conference. (KD)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Groz-Beckert, Germany's leading provider of industrial machine needles, precision parts and fine tools, as well as systems and services for the production and joining of textile fabrics, is set to show new products and solutions, at the international textile machinery, India ITME 2016, in Mumbai, from December 3 to 8, 2016, in booth A23, hall 6.In the knitting sector, Groz-Beckert will highlight the areas of round and flat knitting, as well as warp and sock fabrics. The transparent exhibits - detailed replicas of real knitting machines  will provide visitors with insights into the interplay of knitting machine needles and system parts. Another highlight will be the presentation of the litespeed plus needle. In the area of warp knitting, the visitors can look at compound needles and warp modules from Groz-Beckert.

Groz-Beckert, Germany's leading provider of industrial machine needles, precision parts and fine tools, as well as systems and services for the production and joining of textile fabrics, is set to show new products and solutions, at the international textile machinery, India ITME 2016, in Mumbai, from December 3 to 8, 2016, in booth A23, hall 6.#

Groz-Beckert is presenting the KnotMaster warp-tying machine, whose modular system sets standards in service and ease of maintenance. Despite a multitude of functions  four knot types, simple and double knots, short knot ends and yarn-break detector  the modern touch-screen control is especially easy to operate.With its variety and full range of products, Groz-Beckert will provide the ideal needle solution for every application in felting area. This product area focuses on felting and structuring needles for flat-needled and structured nonwovens. Visitors can learn everything about the features and benefits of these needles from oversized needle models and with the help of informative product brochures and the well-trained fair crew.Groz-Beckert's will present its carding product area with a comprehensive range of products that encompasses the industry branches short staple and long staple spinning, as well as the nonwovens industry.In the product area of sewing, Groz-Beckert will highlight its special application needle SAN 5, a proven performer for working with technical textiles. Another sewing highlight of the fair will be the Groz-Beckert Customer Portal. This continuously expanding knowledge platform makes available comprehensive information on sewing technology and many details on sewing products from Groz-Beckert  round the clock and round the world.Groz-Beckert will also be presenting its new quality management Ideal Needle Handling (INH), for the sewing industry. It involves a patented process that allows trouble-free and time-saving handling of broken and damaged sewing machine needles in running operation. (GK)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Prices of Indian Shankar-6 cotton recorded a decline in the month of October, witnessing a drop from 85 cents/lb in the previous month to 72 cents/lb. In local terms, the movement was from 44,700 to 37,700 INR/candy, says a recent report . The China Cotton (CC 3128B) index was generally steady over the past month, maintaining levels around 103 cents/lb.

The movement in Indian prices over the past several months has been significant. Back in the spring, spot prices for Shankar-6 reached a low of 62 cents/lb. Shortly after, values began rising steadily as it became increasingly apparent that there was not enough cotton in storage in Indian warehouses to meet the needs of Indian mills. Compounding the effect of immediate needs on Indian prices this summer was the outlook for the 2016/17 harvest, says the monthly economic report by Cotton Incorporated.

Due to more attractive prices for food crops and low yields in certain regions last season, Indian acreage dropped 10-15 per cent for the current crop year. In addition, the monsoon was late, casting doubts on yields and suggesting a small Indian crop for the 2016/17 harvest. All of this fed gains in Indian prices, which rose 50 per cent between their springtime low and their summertime high (92 cents/lb on July 19th).

Prices of Indian Shankar-6 cotton recorded a decline in the month of October, witnessing a drop from 85 cents/lb in the previous month to 72 cents/lb. In local terms, the movement was from 44,700 to 37,700 INR/candy, says a recent report. The China Cotton (CC 3128B) index was generally steady over the past month, maintaining levels around 103 cents/lb.#

However, monsoon arrived in early August and it proved to be exceptional in terms of both the volume and distribution of its rainfall. This generated increasingly optimistic estimates for Indian yields. Despite the 10 per cent reduction in planted acreage, Indian production is projected to be 2 per cent higher than a year ago, according to the report.

Pakistan was the largest importer for India in the last crop year, but India will have to look to the international market to make up for the decline in shipments to Pakistan this year. Export offers from India are now the cheapest among the 15 offers published by Cotlook that are eligible for inclusion in the average that is the A Index. From a competition standpoint, this has an influence on prices from other exporting countries.

As the 2016/17 crop year progresses, competition for exports may increase. This is because India is not the only exporting country projected to have an increase in exportable supply this crop year. Many other exporters are predicted to have meaningful increases in production, including the US (25 per cent), Australia (54 per cent), Brazil (20 per cent), and West Africa (16 per cent).

India, which is expected to have larger harvest than a month ago, is likely to both import and export 300,000 more bales (current import figure is 1.8 million and current export figure is 4.2 million). No other country had an import or export revision of more than 100,000 bales.

The harvest figure rose 586,000 bales (from 102.7 to 103.3 million). The only important country-level increases to crop numbers were for India (500,000 bales, to 27.0 million) and the US (128,000, to 16.2 million), according to the report. (KD)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Prime Minister Bainimarama's talks with Prime Minister Hariri were a part of a three-day visit to Lebanon. He will go on to attend the 2016 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP22) in Marrakesh, Morocco.

A trade delegation from Lebanon will be visiting Fiji in September 2017 to explore opportunities to deepen economic cooperation between the two countries.The announcement followed a meeting in Beirut between Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama and his Lebanese counterpart, Prime Minister H.E. Saad Hariri.The two men discussed the ongoing efforts of Fijian UN Peacekeepers to maintain stability in the region, and Prime Minister Bainimarama reaffirmed Fijis commitment to UN Peacekeeping operations.Prime Minister Bainimarama is also in Lebanon to meet Fijian UN Peacekeepers stationed in various parts of the country serving in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.
Dulquer Salmaan As Tony Kurishingal

Well, it is pretty difficult to find a replacement for Mohanlal. He was in top form as Tony Kurishingal and the role features among one of his best. In the present generation, the actor who could be considered to do the role of Tony Kurishingal is none other than Dulquer Salmaan. He has that energy to portray this iconic character, which he showed us with his performance in Charlie.

Prithviraj As The Superstar

Mammootty appeared as himself in the movie. At present, Prithviraj would be the right choice to reprise this character. Moreover, think about the combination scenes featuring Dulquer Salmaan and Prithviraj, exciting isn't it?

Vinay Forrt As Sunil/Suresh

Asokan had played a character named Sunil, who is the lover of Devi. Vinay Forrt, with his decent looks is the best possible option to play the role of this well-mannered guy in this film.

Namitha Pramod As Devi

Yesteryear actress Suchitra portrayed the role of Devi in the film. Devi just appears in the first half of the film, but the story of the movie revolves around her. From the present generation actresses, Namitha Pramod would bean apt choice to do this role.

Soubin Shahir As Hitchcock Kanjikkuzhi

Hitchcock Kanjikuzhi, portrayed by Maniyanpilla Raju in the film, adds the required humour element in the first half of the film. Actor Soubin Shahir with his witty numbers would fit in perfectly to this character, who is a self-proclaimed writer.

Aju Varghese As Kumbalam Hari

Kumbalam Hari, played by Jagadish is one such character, which despite being funny, is a bit matured one. Aju Varghese with years of experience under his sleeves would be the perfect choice to play Kumbalam Hari. The combo of Dulquer Salmaan, Soubin Shair and Aju Varghese, is sure to entertain the audiences.

Renji Panicker As R K Nair

In the original version, actor M G Soman played the role of R K Nair, the stepfather of Devi. The character that appears to be a positive one initially, takes a turn in the second half. From the present lot of character actors, Renji Panicker would be the best choice, which would help to maintain that necessary suspense element.

Innocent As Nadar

Innocent is still at his witty best and age is not a barrier for the character of Nadar, in this film. Having said that, we feel that he is still the best to portray this character, which has some witty one-liners in the movie.
TV Czarina Ekta Kapoor's Pardes Mein Hai Mera Dil starring Arjun Bijlani and Drashti Dhami in the lead roles premiered on 7th November, 2016 on Star Plus at 8 pm. The show is touted to be a refreshing love story of two mature individuals who are brought together by coincidences.

While Drashti plays the role of present-day independent and confident girl Naina Batra in the show, Arjun plays the role of Raghav Mehra, a kind-hearted guy whose sense of humour lightens up any situation.

The show is being showered with praises in its maiden week for its unique story line and performances of the lead actors. In the show so far, Naina has arrived in Innsbruck to marry Amit. She lands in trouble on her very first day in 'pardes' and runs into Raghav, who helps her.

Since Raghav is a man who is light-hearted and witty by nature, Arjun is leaving no stones unturned to do justice to his role. The actor has been doing his bit to contribute to the script by assisting his scriptwriter to include some of the quintessential one-liners and witty punchlines in the dialogues.

He adds, "While I do enjoy the role of a romantic, charming hero in the show, I want to make my audience enjoy a good humor when they watch my character. I am able to bring this to Raghav on screen and I am thoroughly enjoying my new role as a one-liner expert for my scriptwriter."

Way to go, Arjun!
WEST JORDAN, UT--(Marketwired - November 10, 2016) - Mountain America Credit Union is partnering with Traverse Mountain Outlets for special on-location holiday events, kicking off with a tree-lighting ceremony on Saturday, November 12, 2016. The event will include lighting of Utah's tallest tree, Santa Claus, and a free holiday concert featuring performances from Brigham Young University's Noteworthy and headliners Before You Exit. The concerts begin at 6 p.m., and Santa's tree lighting-countdown begins promptly at 7 p.m. Mountain America representatives will be present with giveaways and prizes for attendees.

"We are excited to be a part of the holiday events at Traverse Mountain," says Sharon Cook, chief marketing officer of Mountain America. "There will be many opportunities for families to make cherished holiday memories."

Mountain America representatives will also be available at the following events:

---------------------------------------------------------------------- November 24, 2016 Moonlight Madness All Night Shopping Party 9:00 p.m. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- December 3, 2016 Pajamas and Pancakes with Santa 9:00 a.m. ----------------------------------------------------------------------

The outlets are located at 3700 North Cabela's Blvd., Lehi, UT 84043. For more information, visit http://www.outletsattraversemountain.com/events.

Mountain America Credit Union has more than $5.9 billion in assets and serves more than 600,000 members, wherever they are, through online and mobile banking, 86 branches in five states and access to more than 50,000 surcharge-free ATMs and 5,000 shared-branching locations nationwide. With roots dating back to the 1930s, Mountain America offers a variety of financial products and services for consumers and businesses, including savings accounts, auto loans, checking accounts, mortgage loans, business checking, student loans, SBA loans and retirement options. Visit www.macu.com for more information.

Media Contact:

Bryan Packer

801-325-6439

Email contact


LAS VEGAS, NV -- (Marketwired) -- 11/10/16 -- Roxborough Fund I, an affiliate of San Francisco-based real estate investment firm The Roxborough Group, LLC, in partnership with Continental Realty Advisors, Ltd. ("CRA"), a Denver-based multifamily investment and management firm, have completed the acquisition of three apartment complexes totaling 1,194 units, located in the north and east suburbs of Las Vegas. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

The portfolio includes the 402-unit Loma Vista Apartments in North Las Vegas, as well as the 440-unit Stonegate Apartments and 352-units Stonegate West Apartments located on the eastside of Las Vegas. The properties are close to primary employment centers in Las Vegas such as the Strip, the expanding Las Vegas Medical District and Union Village development, and the northern industrial and manufacturing hubs. Las Vegas is currently experiencing pent-up demand for rental housing due to historic lows in new development, and both the North and East Las Vegas submarkets currently have no active or planned new development.

"We are excited for the opportunity to acquire a portfolio with scale at a significant discount to replacement cost," said Senior Vice President of The Roxborough Group, Matt McCormick. "The Las Vegas market is experiencing a significant recovery in employment, wage and population growth, yet the growth in new rental housing remains below peak levels and significantly behind most major cities throughout the country. We see significant room for rent increases in this sector."

The portfolio is the second acquisition for the partnership in Las Vegas, which acquired Turtle Creek Apartments in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson in November of 2015. This property was recently rebranded as "Tesoro Ranch" and has experienced significant rental growth upon completion of its common area upgrades. The business plan for the portfolio calls for a light renovation of a subset of the individual units and a full upgrade of common areas to capitalize on the rent growth in the market. The renovation will bring the properties in line with their competition in each submarket.

"The opportunity to acquire this portfolio and add another 1,200 apartment units to our holdings in Las Vegas is the result of a strategic effort between CRA and Roxborough," said David Snyder, chairman of Continental Realty Advisors. "We intend to grow our southwest portfolio and welcome the opportunity to offer quality, renovated apartment lifestyles to the region. We want to embrace the Las Vegas community and hope it will appreciate a conscientious owner that values its residents and their living needs. We are excited to be part of their lives."

About The Roxborough Group

The Roxborough Group is a private real estate investment firm founded in 2013. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the firm has a broad mandate to invest in all real estate asset classes, both directly and with operating partners. Roxborough focuses on opportunistic, value-add and transitional real estate assets, high-yielding real estate debt, real estate-related operating businesses, as well as high quality, lower risk and longer duration real estate investments. For more information, please visit www.theroxboroughgroup.com.

About Continental Realty Advisors

Continental Realty Advisors ("CRA"), an owner, asset manager, and institutional fund sponsor, was founded in 1981 and has solely focused on investment in the multi-family segment of real estate. The company is an institutional fund investor and expects to acquire over $1 billion in assets over the next several years. CRA is currently acquiring multi-family assets on a nationwide basis. CRA has the ability to close on an all-cash basis within very quick time limitations. For more information on the company's market focus and acquisition criteria, please visit our website at www.continentalrealtyadvisors.com

Roxborough Group

Vanessa Showalter

vshowalter@antonpr.com

Genevieve Anton

ganton@antonpr.com



Continental Realty Advisors

Mark Fightmaster

mfightmaster@crapartners.com

Jason Rosa

jrosa@crapartners.com




LEVALLOIS-PERRET, France, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Keyrus, an international consultancy in Data Intelligence, Digital Transformation and Enterprise Management, is helpingTheLuxer.com to improve its customer experience and extend its presence by setting up a multi-marketplace platform to boost its online sales in China.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160707/387171LOGO )



Owned by Italiantouch, TheLuxer.com operates the e-commerce for the brands of the TOD'S Group (TOD'S, Roger Vivier & Hogan) through THELUXER.COM, a global multi-brand e-commerce platform dedicated to luxury shoes, bags, ready-to-wear, accessories and exclusive capsule collections. Already present in China, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Holland, Spain and the United States, TheLuxer.com aims to provide an unprecedented online buying experience to its consumers.

In early 2016, Keyrus was selected as a business and technical partner to support TheLuxer.com e-commerce vision and implementation in Greater China. The goal of the project has been to launch a new multi-partner solution, based on the SAP hybris solution, and onboarding several key features providing the ability to:

manage several marketplaces from a single point and distribute content to, as well as collect orders from several online channels (JD and Tmall since June 2016 , Xiu and Meici since September 2016 )

, Xiu and Meici since ) automate manual back-office processes, such as photo publishing, product exchanges, order collection, etc.

become autonomous in running its marketplace sales activity in China

The first marketplaces connected to the solution were live just two months after the kick-off of the project. Unlike JD, where TheLuxer.com already had a presence, Tmall was a new channel for TheLuxer.com. The implementation involved the configuration, design, and roll-out of TheLuxer.com store on Tmall, and this was done in record time.

In Autumn 2016, Keyrus has helped TheLuxer.com extend its online presence further via two new vertical marketplaces, Xiu.com and Meici.com, dedicated to fashion and luxury products. Next in line is to launch TheLuxer.com on a fifth marketplace, by the end of 2016.

The multichannel platform now operates all marketplaces in a unified and harmonized manner and provides full insight on the entire product catalog and stock availability.

"With the new solution deployed, we can now focus on added-value activities and manage our e-Commerce operations without the need of a third-party intermediary," explains Fabienne Pellegrin, Country Manager Greater China for Italiantouch. "We wanted to become more autonomous and have more direct control in order to develop our internal market expertise, in addition to optimizing our costs. Keyrus has worked hand- in-hand with us on the entire marketplace project to help us make it a reality," adds Fabienne Pellegrin.

"This multi-marketplace customer-centric solution, that we implemented for Italiantouch, owner of TheLuxer.com brand, is another example of our ability to develop agile and relevant digital platforms for our clients. TheLuxer.com Project relies on Keyrus RapidStore for hybris, our high-performance solution tailored to provide optimal conditions for the implementation of omni-channel commerce strategies on the Chinese market, and already deployed for several local and international retailers in China. Hosted in the cloud on Aliyun, the Cloud Computing platform of e-Commerce giant Alibaba, the platform deployed for Italiantouch provides the flexibility it requires to scale up tomorrow," explains Thomas Alix, Head of e-commerce and digital at Keyrus China.

With Italiantouch as a client, Keyrus China strengthens its foothold in the Luxury sector, on top of its established presence in the fashion, automotive, department store, services and food industries.

ABOUT KEYRUS

Keyrus, creator of value in the era of Data and Digital

An international player in consulting and technologies and a specialist in Data and Digital, Keyrus is dedicated to helping enterprises take advantage of the Data and Digital paradigm to enhance their performance, facilitate and accelerate their transformation, and generate new drivers of growth, competitiveness, and sustainability.

Placing innovation at the heart of its strategy, Keyrus is developing a value proposition that is unique in the market and centred around an innovative offering founded upon a combination of three major and convergent areas of expertise:

Data Intelligence

Data Science - Big Data Analytics - Business Intelligence - EIM - CPM/EPM

Digital Experience

Innovation & Digital Strategy - Digital Marketing & CRM - Digital Commerce - Digital Performance - User Experience

Management & Transformation Consulting

Strategy & Innovation - Digital Transformation - Performance Management - Project Support

Present in 15 countries on 4 continents, the Keyrus Group has 2,500 employees.

Keyrus is quoted in compartment C of the Eurolist of Euronext Paris (Compartment C/Small caps - ISIN Code: FR0004029411 - Reuters: KEYR.PA - Bloomberg: KEY:FP)

Further information at: http://www.keyrus.com

ABOUT THELUXER.COM

TheLuxer.com-the official e-commerce partner of Tod's, Roger Vivier, Hogan -is an online boutique that specializes in limited edition products. TheLuxer.com is a window to the "Made in Italy" mindset, where taste and elegance are the paradigms.

TheLuxer.com is the new destination for those seeking the finest details and service tailored to their personal needs. It is geared towards a fashion-savvy crowd-those who are particular about the way the products they purchase are made. The boutique is therefore much more than an online store: It is an inspiring place to have an unprecedented shopping experience.

http://www.theluxer.com
CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/10/16 -- Steve Haysom, a 7G founder, lead geologist and Senior Vice President at Seven Generations, has retired from the company in order to be closer to his extended family in the Maritimes. Steve and his family have relocated to his home province of Nova Scotia.

Steve joined 7G in 2008, the company's first year, and has led the geoscience discovery of the liquids-rich natural gas Kakwa River Project. Steve has played a vital leadership role in the science, geology and stakeholder relations at 7G, establishing foundational and long-lasting relationships with many of the company's stakeholders, particularly in the First Nations, the community of Grande Prairie and the provincial regulators.

"As a co-founder, Steve contributed enormously to 7G's success. From positioning Seven Generations in our prolific, low-cost, high-growth natural gas assets to establishing strong relationships with numerous stakeholders in Calgary and the Grande Prairie region, Steve has contributed his creative gifts to 7G and its mission. All of us at 7G and our stakeholders are grateful for his contributions and we wish Steve success in his future," said Pat Carlson, 7G's Chief Executive Officer.

"On my last day at Seven Generations, I was privileged to help deliver winter jackets to the children at Horse Lake and partake in a BBQ with many 7G colleagues. The relationships we built with First Nations as a company and as individuals has had a profound impact on me. I am confident that Seven Generations will achieve great things, and I look forward to the next stage of my career and family life in Nova Scotia," Haysom said.

Seven Generations Energy

Seven Generations is a low-cost, high-growth Canadian natural gas developer generating long-life value from its liquids-rich Kakwa River Project, located about 100 kilometres south of its operations headquarters in Grande Prairie, Alberta. 7G's corporate headquarters are in Calgary and its shares trade on the TSX under the symbol VII.

Seven Generations Energy Ltd. is also referred to as Seven Generations, 7G or the company.

Further information on Seven Generations is available on the company's website: www.7genergy.com.

Contacts:

Investor Relations

Chris Law, Chief Financial Officer

Brian Newmarch, Vice President, Capital Markets

403-718-0700

investors@7genergy.com



Media Relations

Alan Boras

Director, Communications and Stakeholder Relations

403-767-0772

aboras@7genergy.com



Seven Generations Energy Ltd.

Suite 300, 140 - 8th Avenue SW

Calgary, AB T2P 1B3

www.7genergy.com




HONG KONG, CHINA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/10/16 -- TriBeluga, the cross-border business innovation platform connecting global startups with China, hosted its third year anniversary at the Grand Hyatt Sanya on China's tropical Hainan Island on October 16th.

The event, dubbed The Third Wave, celebrated Tribeluga's accomplishments over the past three years, showcased its portfolio startups, and provided insight into its exciting plans for the future.

The star-studded event gathered the Tribeluga team from its various locations in Silicon Valley, China and around the world as well as renowned dignitaries such as Patrick Burt (Mayor of Palo Alto) and US Senator Jim Brulte. Many individuals from the highest echelons of technology and business in China also attended the event, along with respected journalists from around the world.

"In just three years, TriBeluga has developed a global, cross-border platform to help high-growth technology companies enter the Chinese market," said Lili Luo, President and Creator of TriBeluga. "We're proud to share our partnerships at every level of the Chinese business ecosystem with our portfolio companies. Our Third Wave celebration demonstrated Tribeluga's powerful global network and commitment to helping game-changing technology companies scale up to the next level. We're truly excited to build on our past successes in the coming year."

In an interview with Patrick Burt, Mayor of Palo Alto, he explained Tribeluga's vital position connecting the US to China: "The business cultures of Silicon Valley and ZGC, the Chinese Silicon Valley, each have their distinct practices, styles and successes. Tribeluga's understanding of both cultures bridges these differences to provide high value for US/Chinese collaboration."

TriBeluga's portfolio companies, including VTouch and nThing, have benefitted hugely from the expertise of Tribeluga's in-house team of experts as well as their extensive network of global mentors. Ms. Luo commented, "We have handpicked a large team of mentors from around the world to support the rapid and sustainable growth of our portfolio in China. They are experts in technology and start-ups or run large operations in the country and have deep insights and connections in the Chinese market."

Beyond mentorship, TriBeluga provides funding and a range of other exclusive resources including marketing, branding, legal and business development in the Chinese market.

Operating primarily in the healthcare, environmental and educational sectors, TriBeluga collaborates with its portfolio companies to establish partnerships in China. Selection of portfolio companies primarily focuses on those that are developing disruptive technologies. Above all, they must demonstrate a clear path towards large-scale economic and social impact in China.

"At Tribeluga we believe that doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive and we will continue to partner with high potential technology companies that are developing the most sustainable, high-impact technologies and promise positive change for society." - Lili Luo, President and Creator.

As a clear demonstration of Tribeluga's dedication to bettering society, the event also featured a charity auction that raised a very impressive RMB240,000 for Beam International, a medical charity that provides free surgeries for underprivileged children with cleft lips/palates in China.

Tribeluga's portfolio company, VTouch, has developed gesture recognition technology, with current applications in the automotive, IoT and smart home sectors. Thanks in part to support from Tribeluga, VTouch has brokered deals with seven Korean companies and are on the cusp of major success in the Chinese market.

Another of its companies, nThing, has developed a range of IoT solutions for the promising 'smart agriculture' industry. It is currently working with a number of major players in the Korean market and the company is further developing its unique agri-management services for commercial use, prior to China market entry.

Interest from event attendees in Tribeluga's portfolio companies was impressive. It was the first time the companies had showcased in China and they received a hearty reception, with several leading to promising opportunities, including potential partnerships for both distribution and technology integration.

Looking to the future, Tribeluga also announced at the event that it will be opening a new branch office in Chengdu, marking a huge step forward in its capacity to support partner companies on the ground in China. The facility will feature exhibition space where potential Chinese partners can experience for themselves the groundbreaking technologies. It will also serve as a hub in China from which Tribeluga's portfolio companies can work.

To mark its anniversary, Tribeluga rebranded its website (tribeluga.com) and put a greater emphasis on its TB Circle, an exclusive network that connects industry leaders, entrepreneurial elites, investors and experts from around the world to share insights and create opportunities for collaboration.

As Tribeluga embarks on its fourth year of operations, there is no question that the company will continue to act as a vital bridge between the USA and the rest of the world with China.

Company Logo

http://release.media-outreach.com/i/Download/5783

Media Contact:

Angel Chow

Bv&Bv

+852 3119 3300

Email Contact




CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The Australian dollar weakened against the other major currencies in the Asian session on Friday. The Australian dollar fell to a 2-week low of 0.7560 against the U.S. dollar and a 9-day low of 1.0210 against the Canadian dollar, from yesterday's closing quotes of 0.7611 and 1.0251, respectively. Against the euro and the yen, the aussie dropped to 2-day lows of 1.4430 and 80.37 from yesterday's closing quotes of 1.4303 and 81.29, respectively. The aussie edged down to 1.0506 against the NZ dollar, from yesterday's closing value of 1.0552. If the aussie extends its downtrend, it is likely to find support around 0.74 against the greenback, 1.00 against the loonie, 1.50 against the euro, 76.00 against the yen and 1.03 against the kiwi. 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.




JINAN, China, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Inspur Group and Cisco today announced the official inauguration of their joint-venture company, Inspur - Cisco Networking Technology Co. Ltd. Inspur Chairman & CEO Peter Sun, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, and Cisco Greater China's Chairman & CEO Owen Chan attended the inauguration ceremony.

In September 2015, Inspur and Cisco signed a framework agreement for strategic cooperation for setting up the joint venture. According to the contract and the Articles of Association of joint venture, the headquarters of the joint-venture company will be located in Jinan, Shandong, with Inspur having a 51 percent ownership in the joint venture and Cisco 49 percent. The amount of registered capital is US$100 million. The joint venture will develop and manufacture a range of products potentially including high-end products meeting the needs of customers based on the advanced and well-positioned technologies of both Cisco and Inspur.

In a booming Internet and big-data economy, the integration between IT and CT becomes the inevitable trend. This has created new opportunities for the networking industry, and has also provided a solid foundation for the Inspur-Cisco partnership. The two parent companies have reached agreement regarding their cooperation in product, technology, and service. The two sides will seize the opportunity provided by the new generation networking technologies represented by SDN to gear up the development of networking products and technologies, and to deliver advanced technologies related to IT infrastructure, cloud, data center, smart city, big data and so forth to the marketplace. The phase one of the go-to-market plan is already kicked off, and the first products are expected to be officially launched next year.

The joint-venture project will become an important part of Inspur's "cloud strategy". It will further enrich Inspur's data center portfolio and improve Inspur's ability to build complete cloud data centers. Meanwhile, it is also a major move under Cisco's long-term, sustainable development strategy in China, and will become an important addition to Cisco's operations in China.

The partnership between two leading technology companies from China and theU.S. is in line with the interests of both countries and also provides a new model for the cooperation between companies from the two countries. The Inspur-Cisco joint venture will provide a benchmark for local IT companies to bring in advanced technologies from abroad and drive the independent and secure development of information technologies in China.










LONDON (dpa-AFX) - SIG Plc (SHI.L), a distributor of specialist building products, reported Friday that group revenues for the four months July to October increased 10.6% from last year, benefited from movements in foreign exchange rates and acquisitions. On a like-for-like basis, Group sales declined 0.8% in the period. In the UK & Ireland reported revenues grew 2.7 percent, while, LFL revenues decreased 1.1%, with SIG Distribution and SIG Exteriors recording LFL sales declines of 1.2% and 1.7% respectively The company noted that trading conditions in the UK have continued to soften and competition in the market has intensified following a slowing of activity around the time of the EU referendum. In Mainland Europe, reported revenues climbed 20.8 percent, while Group's LFL sales declined 0.5%. Looking ahead for fiscal 2016, the company now expects underlying profit before tax to be in the range of 75 million pounds to 80 million pounds, reflecting the weaker than anticipated trading conditions and intensified competition in the UK. Separately, SIG announced that Stuart Mitchell has stepped down as Group Chief Executive by mutual agreement with immediate effect. Mel Ewell, a Non-Executive Director, has been appointed Interim Group Chief Executive on a full time basis whilst the Board conducts an external search for a new Group Chief Executive. Leslie Van de Walle, Chairman of SIG plc, said, 'Stuart brought together a loose federation of independent businesses; developed a new strategy and plans to improve our procurement and supply chain functions; and identified new areas of organic growth opportunities in Air Handling and Offsite.' 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.
Company targets strategic partnerships and organic growth to increase its market reach

NEW YORK, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --Abel Noser announced today it has finalized the previously announced management-led buyout of the firm along with private equity fund Estancia Capital Partners, L.P. The transition of the business to the second generation of senior management after the retirement of its founding partners will empower Abel Noser to continue to grow its existing businesses, including trade analytics services, transaction compliance, and agency-only brokerage inclusive of transition management services. Using current and new technologies, Abel Noser plans an expansion of its core businesses, as well as investment in additional services the firm has been developing such as fixed income transaction cost analysis (TCA) and additional trade surveillance products.

As part of its growth initiatives, the firm announced it has made two key hires in an effort to further strengthen its European analytics practice and TM services. Gregor Paterson joins the London based team in the analytics group coming over from Aberdeen Asset Management where he focused on TCA as a buy-side trader. Additionally, Tom Mackell III, who has over 20 years' experience working with asset owners including large Taft Hartley funds, joined Abel Noser as a Senior Vice President of Sales in New York.

The firm's origins date back to 1975, when Abel Noser was launched as a brokerage offering institutional investors low-cost, high-quality trading. In 2007, the firm launched Abel Noser Solutions, an independent, broker-neutral provider of transaction analysis products and services. Today, Abel Noser continues to pioneer new methods and tools to help over 400 clients measure their trading results using the firm's secure industry-leading universe of annual trade data consisting of over $7.5 trillion dollars in traded principal in global equities in addition to global foreign currency and Futures.

"Our product solutions are built on innovative and scalable technology serviced by experienced and customer centric professionals across all of our measurement and agency execution products," said Ted Morgan, the new CEO of Abel Noser Holdings, LLC. "Our immediate growth areas will be in multi-asset and fixed income TCA and trade surveillance. I look forward to spending time in the coming months with our clients and listening to their evolving needs and partnering with them as we enhance our products to best serve the institutional community."

"The market for trading oversight and cost containment is expanding globally and across asset classes," said Peter Weiler, President of Abel Noser Solutions, LLC, the firm's wholly-owned financial technology subsidiary. "As a firm with superior technology offerings, we are uniquely positioned to benefit from this sea change in our industry."

Anthony Conroy, President of the firm's brokerage arm, commented that "as an execution broker, Abel Noser has always been and will continue to be the ultimate client advocate. We possess trading relationships with institutions across the globe and we leverage our expertise and understanding of trading behavior and costs to help clients receive measurably superior executions."

"We are delighted to partner with Abel Noser, who is a perfect complement to our portfolio of institutional investment management firms and related financial services companies. We invest in organizations with secular tailwinds, industry recognized brands and growth-oriented management teams, and firmly believe this company possesses all three," stated Takashi Moriuchi, a founding partner of Estancia.

About Abel Noser

Abel Noser is an industry-leading business services company providing equity, FX, fixed income and futures Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA) services, asset Transition Management Services services, and agency-only brokerage services to over 400 large institutional investment managers, asset owners, hedge funds, consultants and broker-dealer and is headquartered in New York City www.abelnoser.com

About Estancia

Estancia is a private equity firm focused on small to lower middle market investments in Institutional Quality Asset Management, Wealth Management and related Business Services companies. The Principals - Messrs. Mendez, Moriuchi, Kang, Jeffries and Kurttila - have a history of partnering with management and investment teams in providing equity, growth and working capital to facilitate strategic and opportunistic development of portfolio companies including management buy-outs from larger financial firms, private ownership/succession transitions and growth initiatives. Estancia is currently investing Estancia Capital Partners, L.P. on behalf of a diversified base of over 40 institutional Limited Partners. www.EstanciaPartners.com

PLEASE CONTACT:

Ted Morgan

CEO, Abel Noser Holdings, LLC

646.432.4000

001.646.432.4000. (Intl.)

info@abelnoser.com

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/abel-noser-launches-ambitious-expansion-program-300361111.html
Lahti, Finland, 2016-11-11 09:30 CET (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Raute and York Timbers to strengthen cooperation towards a strategic partnership



Raute Corporation, a leading technology and service company in the plywood industry, and York Timbers (Pty), the largest manufacturer of plywood products in Southern Africa, have signed a Cooperative Agreement in order to strengthen the level of cooperation towards a strategic partnership.



The parties' mutual goal is to enhance the profitability of York Timbers via its plywood division with the aim of becoming an international player in the plywood business. The Cooperative Agreement will be executed in various forms such as production process and capacity development, service delivery, competence development, and sharing of technology upgrades on Raute and other equipment.



"York Timbers and Raute have already cooperated for years. The agreement is a major step forward in strengthening our cooperation in the future", says Mr. Pieter van Zyl, Chief Executive Officer, York Timbers.



"Raute will be the main technology, service and development partner to York Timbers. This agreement allows us to commit to York Timbers and to develop our operations in Africa in the future", says Mr. Antti Laulainen, Group Vice President of Raute Corporation.



Raute is a technology and service company that operates worldwide. Raute's customers are companies operating in the wood products industry that manufacture veneer, plywood and LVL (Laminated Veneer Lumber). The technology offering covers machinery and equipment for the customer's entire production process. As a supplier of mill-scale projects, Raute is a global market leader both in the plywood and LVL industries. Additionally, Raute's full-service concept includes technology services ranging from spare parts deliveries to regular maintenance and equipment modernizations. Raute's head office is located in the Nastola area of Lahti, Finland. Its other production plants are in Kajaani, Finland, the Vancouver area of Canada and in the Shanghai area of China. Raute's net sales in 2015 were EUR 127.3 million. The Group's headcount at the end of 2015 was 646. More information about the company can be found at www.raute.com.



York Timbers is an integrated forestry company, operating through its wholly-owned subsidiaries, York Timbers Proprietary Limited, that owns plantations and processing plants, and Agentimber Proprietary Limited, that runs a wholesale distribution network. York has the largest market share of the South African timber and plywood market. This share in the market is a result of York's sustainable biological assets, integrated operations of primary and value-added processes. York's revenue was R 1 771 million (approximately EUR 120 million) and total asset value was R 4 561 million (approximately EUR 310 million) in 2016. The company's headcount is 5 238 (includes employees and contractors). York Timbers is listed on the JSE in the Forestry and Paper Index sector under the share code YRK. This year, York is celebrating100 years since incorporation and 70 years of being listed on the JSE - milestones few companies have achieved. More information about the company can be found at www.york.co.za.



FURTHER INFORMATION: Mr. Antti Laulainen, Group Vice President, Technology services and Sales management, Raute Corporation (antti.laulainen@raute.com, tel. +358 (0)3 829 11)

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de




Media Enquiries (Thailand): Please contact FleishmanHillard (Thailand): Yaninee Kasitaranon Tel: +66 2 207 9263; +66 85 842 3330 Email: yaninee.kasitaranon@fleishman.com Media Enquiries (Vietnam): Please contact Galaxy Communications: To Thi Minh Hong Tel: +84 4 3974 6116 Email: hongttm@galaxy.com.vn Media Enquiries (Hong Kong): Please contact the HKTDC's Communication and Public Affairs Department: Joe Kainz Tel: +852 2584 4216 Email: joe.kainz@hktdc.org

HONG KONG, May 12, 2017 - (ACN Newswire) - A Hong Kong-Shanghai joint infrastructure investment delegation visited Thailand and Vietnam this week to discuss cooperation and investment opportunities driven by growing intra-regional cooperation in Asia, especially under the Belt and Road Initiative.The delegation, organised by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) in association with the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the Shanghai Municipal People's Government, comprised some 40 investors and services professionals from Hong Kong and Shanghai. The delegates included those with interest and expertise in finance, consultancy, architecture, energy, waste and water treatment, engineering and construction, legal and accounting, transportation as well as other sectors.- High-level discussions on infrastructure collaborationDuring the 8-9 May Bangkok visit, the delegation was received by Thai Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha at the Government House, met with Thai Minister of Finance Apisak Tantivorawong, and participated in the "Thailand-Hong Kong-Shanghai Strategic Partnership on One Belt One Road" seminar organised by the Thai government. Senior Thai government officials including Deputy Prime Minister Dr Somkid Jatusripitakand and Minister of Industry Dr Uttama Savanayana spoke on topics such as Thailand's Eastern Economic Corridor development and the advantages of public-private partnerships. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between the Office of the Eastern Economic Corridor Development and the HKTDC.On 10-12 May, the delegation went to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to meet with Prime Minster Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and had a series of meetings with senior government leaders including Nguyen Chi Dung, Minister of Planning and Investment, Nguyen Hong Truong, Deputy Minister of Transport, and Nguyen Duc Chung, Chairman of Hanoi's Peoples Committee to promote closer partnership between Hong Kong, Shanghai and Vietnam in infrastructure development.- The Hong Kong-Shanghai advantageSpeaking at the "Hong Kong and Shanghai: Your Infrastructure Investment Partner" seminars, held in Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City on 9 and 11 May respectively, HKTDC Chairman Vincent HS Lo said: "Infrastructure is a priority not only in the Belt and Road Initiative, but also in the development plans of many countries in the Asia region. To facilitate investment opportunities for these large, long-term projects, we have joined forces with Chinese enterprises from Shanghai and the mainland to combine our talent and resources to explore opportunities in Thailand and Vietnam.""The high-level meetings with the Prime Ministers of both countries gave us the opportunity to demonstrate the powerful proposition of this partnership to bring benefits to projects," added Mr Lo. "I am also excited to know that some of our delegates already have new leads to develop, while others made new contacts and acquired valuable information.""Thailand and Vietnam are important participants in the Belt and Road Initiative, which offers business opportunities we have not seen before," said Zhou Yajun, Deputy Director General, Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the Shanghai Municipal People's Government and an advisor to the delegation."Shanghai has many enterprises with strong experience in infrastructure, especially in the design, construction and management of overseas projects. These enterprises have also played a pivotal role in Shanghai's urban development. Hong Kong has an advanced financial system and a wealth of international professional talent," said Mr Zhou. "We are delighted that our complementary strengths can provide a rich platform that can open up an even wider scope of opportunities in infrastructure and related areas. I hope this is the beginning of long-term partnerships and rewarding business opportunities."During the seminars, Hong Kong and Shanghai delegates representing the investment, financial and professional services sectors had in-depth discussions with Thai and Vietnamese project owners including the Industrial Estate Authority of Thailand (IEAT), the Thai Contractors Association (TCA), VTP Investment Group and Sunny World Property to exchange views and identify areas for cooperation in infrastructure investment.Photo download: http://bit.ly/2pqoichMedia Registration:Media representatives wishing to cover the event may register on-site with their business cards and/or media identification.To view press releases in Chinese, please visit http://mediaroom.hktdc.com/tc(Photo:) On May 8, the Hong Kong-Shanghai joint infrastructure investment delegation was received by Thai Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha at the Government House.About HKTDCEstablished in 1966, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) is a statutory body dedicated to creating opportunities for Hong Kong's businesses. 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, Asia and the world. With 50 years of experience, the HKTDC organises international exhibitions, conferences and business missions to provide companies, particularly SMEs, with business opportunities on the mainland and in international 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 2017 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
MACAU, CHINA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- Interior Ministry Undersecretary of Nationality, Passport and Residence Affairs (NPRA), Shaikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, announced yesterday that as part of the directives of His Excellency Interior Ministry, Macau has been included in the list of countries covered in the new facilities of on arrival visas. This increases the number of countries to 114.

As per this announcement, the citizens of Macau can get on arrival visas at the Kingdom's various ports, logging into the e-visa website or by applying for visas through Bahrain Embassy in Beijing.

The Interior Ministry Undersecretary of Nationality, Passport and Residence Affairs highlighted that the NPRA continues to develop and improve facilities to meet the inspirations of the Kingdom's leadership of making Bahrain the center of attraction for investors and tourists and the creation of an appropriate environment for economic activities for local and foreign companies.

Company logo

http://release.media-outreach.com/i/Download/4504

About The Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB)

The Bahrain EDB is a dynamic public agency with an overall responsibility for attracting inward investment into Bahrain, and is focusing on target economic sectors in which the Kingdom offers significant strengths.

Key areas of focus include tourism, ICT, manufacturing and logistics and transport services as well as other sub-sectors. The Financial Services sector in Bahrain is particularly strong and the EDB supports the continuing growth of the banking industry and key sub-sectors, including Islamic Finance, Asset Management, Insurance and Re-Insurance.

For more information on the Bahrain EDB visit www.bahrainedb.com; for information about Bahrain visit www.bahrain.com

Further information:

Naseem Fekri

Bahrain Economic Development Board

Tel: +973 1758 9968

Email: Email Contact




LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Shares of Inmarsat (ISAT.L) were gaining around 3 percent in the morning trading in London after the provider of mobile satellite communications announced Friday a new contract with Austrian Airlines. Under the deal, Inmarsat agreed to provide its advanced new GX for Aviation in-flight broadband solution to Austrian Airlines' continental aircraft fleet. More than 30 Airbus A320 family aircraft from Austrian Airlines' fleet will be equipped with GX for Aviation, the world's first in-flight connectivity solution. The company noted that the advanced new service will allow the airline's passengers to browse the internet, stream videos, check social media and more. The first installation and testing onboard Austrian Airlines aircraft is currently underway. The Austrian Airlines contract is part of a 10-year strategic agreement announced last year between Inmarsat and the Lufthansa Group, which included the selection of GX for Aviation for Lufthansa's European continental fleet of over 150 aircraft. In London, Inmarsat shares were trading at 747.50 pence, up 3.39% 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.
NEW YORK CITY (dpa-AFX) - Drug major Pfizer Inc. (PFE) announced Friday that Prevenar 13 Vaccine will be available at lowest price for humanitarian emergencies. In a major expansion of its humanitarian assistance program, the company enabled broader access to its vaccine, by offering its new multi-dose vial or MDV at what will be the lowest prevailing global price, currently $3.10 per dose. Pfizer will also donate all sales proceeds for the first year of this program to humanitarian groups supporting the refugee crisis. In the immediate term, Pfizer will meet humanitarian emergency needs through a short-term donation of the single-dose vial of Prevenar 13, which is available for expedited delivery. Starting in 2017, refugees can receive the newest version of Prevenar 13, the MDV. This presentation is scheduled to be introduced early next year and contains four doses of Prevenar 13 in the same-sized vial that currently contains a single dose. This four-in-one vial is specially designed for helping health workers in humanitarian emergencies. 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.
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

TheKazakhstan-KoreanCenter established with the support from the business community and the Embassyof the Republic of Kazakhstan in South Korea begins to promotethe International Specialized Exhibition EXPO 2017.

TheMemorandum of Cooperation was signed in Seoul at the official ceremony to mark the opening of the Center with the participation of AkhmetzhanYessimov,BoardChairmanof National Company Astana EXPO-2017,and Jong Hui Wu, Director of theKazakhstan-KoreanCooperation Promotion Center.

"We expect guests from South Korea during EXPO 2017. We are preparing carefully for the exhibition so that tourists can feel comfortable in Kazakhstan, in particular, in Astana," said Mr. Yessimov before signing the Memorandum.

Zhenis Kassymbek, the Minister of Investments and Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, said that "the President of KazakhstanNursultan Nazarbayevhas had a meeting with the representatives of South Korean business community just now. Almost all major Korean companies have a presence in Kazakhstan, and many of them operate in the energy market," he emphasized.

The Minister also reiterated that, starting from 1 January 2017, Kazakhstan would introduce a visa-free regime (up to 30 days) for visitors from OECD countries, including South Korea. Today, there are around ten regular flights, both by Kazakh and Korean airlines, which connect Kazakhstan with theRepublicofKorea.

The purpose of theKazakhstan-Korean Center is to promote EXPO 2017 by organizing special events for various target audiences. Apart from the promotion of EXPO 2017, priorities include the implementation of a ticketing program as part ofpackagetours of Kazakhstan.

In addition, memoranda of cooperation were signed with South Korean tour operators such as Korailand Kim's Travel.

At EXPO 2017, South Korea will have a pavilion of 1,125.47 square meters next to exhibition pavilions of Singapore and Israel, and the Pacific Plaza. The agency responsible for the participation of South Korea in the exhibition is the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA).

South Korean companies such as SIGONGtech and Samsung have been actively involved in the preparation for EXPO 2017.

Astana EXPO 2017

The International Specialized Exhibition Astana EXPO 2017 dedicated to Future Energyis an expositional and recreational eventthat will take place between 10 June and 10 September 2017 in Astana.

National Company Astana EXPO-2017

For more information, please contact:

Elvina Bulatova

Expo2017@m-p.ru


BROOKFIELD, NEWS -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (NYSE: BAM)(TSX: BAM.A)(EURONEXT: BAMA), a leading global alternative asset manager, today announced financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2016.

Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield, stated, "Real assets continue to be the asset class of choice for institutional investors and as a result, we are seeing strong inflows across our strategies. Our scale and global reach have enabled us to deploy $20 billion of capital over the last twelve months, and we continue to see opportunities to put capital to work in high quality businesses across our real asset strategies."

Operating Results

Unaudited For the periods ended September 30 (US$ millions, except per share amounts) Three Months Ended Last Twelve Months Ended ------------------------ ------------------------ 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net income(1) $ 2,021 $ 845 $ 4,428 $ 5,181 Per Brookfield share(2) 1.03 0.26 2.07 2.67 Funds from operations(2,3) $ 883 $ 501 $ 3,204 $ 2,113 Per Brookfield share(2,3) 0.87 0.48 3.15 2.05 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Consolidated basis - includes amounts attributable to non-controlling interests 2. Excludes amounts attributable to non-controlling interests 3. See Basis of Presentation on page 3

Net income for the third quarter of 2016 totalled $2.0 billion or $1.03 per share, and was $4.4 billion on a last twelve month basis. Net income increased over the same quarter of the prior year due to earnings on new investments, a reduction in deferred tax provisions and operational improvements, which included rent commencements on new leases, the commissioning of assets in our infrastructure business and increased pricing and volumes in certain of our private equity operations.

Funds from operations ("FFO") for the third quarter of 2016 was $883 million or $0.87 per share, and was $3.2 billion on a last twelve month basis. Fee related earnings for the quarter increased 37% to $173 million, as a result of the 23% increase in fee bearing capital over the last twelve months. FFO from invested capital increased by 17% as a result of the contribution from acquisitions across our portfolio and operating improvements noted in the preceding paragraph, which were partially offset by the absence of FFO from assets sold. We sold interests in office and retail properties, generating $392 million of disposition gains, compared to $88 million in the prior period.

Dividend Declaration

The Board declared a quarterly dividend of US$0.13 per share (representing US$0.52 per annum), payable on December 31, 2016 to shareholders of record as at the close of business on November 30, 2016. The Board also declared all of the regular monthly and quarterly dividends on its preferred shares.

Operating Highlights

Fee bearing capital increased by 23% to $111 billion over the last twelve months, including over $2 billion in the third quarter.

Strong capital inflows to our private funds, as well as the higher market capitalization of our listed issuers, increased our annualized fee revenues to $1.2 billion representing a 27% growth over the past twelve months. Our recently completed fundraising also substantially increased the amount of capital from which we are entitled to earn carried interest. As a result, our annualized combined run rate of fee revenues and target carry is now $2.0 billion based on current funds under management, up from $1.4 billion at the end of the third quarter of last year.

We continue to deploy private fund capital and execute significant transactions across our real asset strategies. Our second flagship real estate opportunity fund, BSREP II, is now 67% committed or invested, which should enable us to launch a successor fund in 2017. Our most recent flagship funds in infrastructure (BIF III) and private equity (BCP IV), closed earlier this year, are both advancing well at over 30% and 45% invested or committed, respectively.

We are currently raising capital for four additional funds, including an open-ended real estate fund, a real estate finance fund and two niche funds, targeting $4.6 billion of third-party commitments.

Over the last twelve months we announced or completed acquisitions that will deploy $20 billion of capital, including $10 billion in the current quarter.

In our property group, we completed the privatization of our U.S. regional mall business, and continued to build-out our self-storage, manufactured housing and student housing operations with strategic add-on acquisitions. We also agreed to buy a 4.2 million square foot office portfolio in Mumbai and committed to acquire a mixed-use office, retail and hospitality complex in South Korea.

Our renewable power business completed the take private transaction for our 3,000 megawatt Colombian hydroelectric portfolio, increasing our ownership interest to 99.6%. In addition, we continued to advance our development pipeline, including wind projects in Europe and hydroelectric projects in Brazil.

Our infrastructure group announced the purchase of a 90% interest in a system of natural gas transmission assets in Brazil for over $5 billion. We also closed the previously announced acquisitions of an Australian logistics business and a North American gas storage business.

In our private equity operations, we entered into a definitive agreement to acquire a 70% stake in Brazil's largest private water distribution, collection and treatment business. Our facilities management operations benefitted from expansion through follow-on acquisitions.

We raised approximately $4 billion of capital through the sale of mature assets over the last twelve months.

In the third quarter, we sold several assets in our property business including an office asset in Sydney, an interest in four U.S. malls, and a hotel portfolio in Germany. We also sold utility assets in our infrastructure business at attractive multiples to rate base. We continue to identify further disposition opportunities across asset classes that we expect to realize over the balance of 2016 and 2017.

Finally, we have substantial financial resources with which to pursue future transactions.

Dry powder in our private funds at the end of the quarter was $19 billion. In addition to this we have core liquidity of over $7 billion, of which $3 billion is at the corporate level with the balance within our listed partnerships.

Basis of Presentation

This news release and accompanying financial statements are based on International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS"), as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board ("IASB"), unless otherwise noted and make reference to Funds From Operations ("FFO").

We define FFO as net income attributable to shareholders prior to fair value changes, depreciation and amortization, and deferred income taxes, and include realized disposition gains that are not recorded in net income as determined under IFRS. FFO also includes the company's share of equity accounted investments' FFO on a fully diluted basis. FFO consists of the following components:

-- FFO from Operating Activities represents the company's share of revenues less direct costs and interest expenses; excludes realized carried interest and disposition gains, fair value changes, depreciation and amortization and deferred income taxes; and includes our proportionate share of FFO from operating activities recorded by equity accounted investments on a fully diluted basis. We present this measure as we believe it assists in describing our results and variances within FFO. -- Realized Carried Interest represents our contractual share of investment gains generated within a private fund after considering our clients minimum return requirements. Realized carried interest is determined on third party capital that is no longer subject to future investment performance. -- Realized Disposition Gains are included in FFO because we consider the purchase and sale of assets to be a normal part of the company's business. Realized disposition gains include gains and losses recorded in net income and equity in the current period, and are adjusted to include fair value changes and revaluation surplus balances recorded in prior periods which were not included in prior period FFO.

We use FFO to assess our operating results and the value of Brookfield's business and believe that many shareholders and analysts also find this measure of value to them.

We note that FFO, its components, and its per share equivalent are non-IFRS measures which do not have any standard meaning prescribed by IFRS and therefore may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies.

We provide additional information on the determination of FFO and reconciliation between FFO and net income attributable to Brookfield shareholders in our quarterly Supplemental Information and filings available at www.brookfield.com.

Additional Information

The Letter to Shareholders and the company's Supplemental Information for the three months ended September 30, 2016 contain further information on the company's strategy, operations and financial results. Shareholders are encouraged to read these documents, which are available on the company's website.

The attached statements are based primarily on information that has been extracted from our interim financial statements for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2016, which have been prepared using IFRS, as issued by the IASB. The amounts have not been audited by Brookfield's external auditor.

Information on our dividends can be found on our website under Stock & Distributions/Distribution History.

Quarterly Earnings Call Details

Investors, analysts and other interested parties can access Brookfield Asset Management's 2016 Third Quarter Results as well as the Shareholders' Letter and Supplemental Information on Brookfield's website under the Reports & Filings section at www.brookfield.com.

The conference call can be accessed via webcast on November 11, 2016 at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time at www.brookfield.com or via teleconference at 1-800-319-4610 toll free in North America. For overseas calls please dial 1-604-638-5340, at approximately 11:20 a.m. Eastern Time. A recording of the teleconference can be accessed at 1-800-319-6413 or 1-604-638-9010 (Password 0883#).

Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is a leading global alternative asset manager with approximately $250 billion in assets under management. The company has more than a 100-year history of owning and operating assets with a focus on property, renewable power, infrastructure and private equity. Brookfield offers a range of public and private investment products and services, and is co-listed on the New York, Toronto and Euronext stock exchanges under the symbol BAM, BAM.A and BAMA, respectively. For more information, please visit our website at www.brookfield.com.

Please note that Brookfield's previous audited annual and unaudited quarterly reports have been filed on EDGAR and SEDAR and can also be found in the shareholders section of its website at www.brookfield.com. Hard copies of the annual and quarterly reports can be obtained free of charge upon request.

For more information, please visit our website at www.brookfield.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Note: This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian provincial securities laws and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, Section 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, "safe harbor" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and in any applicable Canadian securities regulations. Forward-looking statements include statements that are predictive in nature, depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, include statements regarding the operations, business, financial condition, expected financial results, performance, prospects, opportunities, priorities, targets, goals, ongoing objectives, strategies and outlook of Brookfield and its subsidiaries, as well as the outlook for North American and international economies for the current fiscal year and subsequent periods, and include words such as "expects," "anticipates," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "seeks," "intends," "targets," "projects," "forecasts" or negative versions thereof and other similar expressions, or future or conditional verbs such as "may," "will," "should," "would" and "could."

Although we believe that our anticipated future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements and information are based upon reasonable assumptions and expectations, the reader should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and information because they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Brookfield to differ materially from anticipated future results, performance or achievement expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and information.

Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated or implied by forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to: the impact or unanticipated impact of general economic, political and market factors in the countries in which we do business; the behavior of financial markets, including fluctuations in interest and foreign exchange rates; global equity and capital markets and the availability of equity and debt financing and refinancing within these markets; strategic actions including dispositions; the ability to complete and effectively integrate acquisitions into existing operations and the ability to attain expected benefits; changes in accounting policies and methods used to report financial condition (including uncertainties associated with critical accounting assumptions and estimates); the ability to appropriately manage human capital; the effect of applying future accounting changes; business competition; operational and reputational risks; technological change; changes in government regulation and legislation within the countries in which we operate; governmental investigations; litigation; changes in tax laws; ability to collect amounts owed; catastrophic events, such as earthquakes and hurricanes; the possible impact of international conflicts and other developments including terrorist acts and cyber terrorism; and other risks and factors detailed from time to time in our documents filed with the securities regulators in Canada and the United States.

We caution that the foregoing list of important factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. When relying on our forward-looking statements, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. Except as required by law, Brookfield undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether written or oral, that may be as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This release does not constitute an offer of any Brookfield fund.

CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS Unaudited September 30 December 31 (US$ millions) 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Assets Cash and cash equivalents $ 4,372 $ 2,774 Other financial assets 5,096 6,156 Accounts receivable and other 8,882 7,044 Inventory 5,869 5,281 Assets classified as held for sale 3,760 1,397 Equity accounted investments 24,453 23,216 Investment properties 50,374 47,164 Property, plant and equipment 45,203 37,273 Intangible assets 6,294 5,170 Goodwill 3,932 2,543 Deferred income tax assets 1,602 1,496 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Assets $ 159,837 $ 139,514 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Liabilities and Equity Accounts payable and other $ 12,478 $ 11,366 Liabilities associated with assets classified as held for sale 1,985 522 Corporate borrowings 4,674 3,936 Non-recourse borrowings Property-specific mortgages 50,910 46,044 Subsidiary borrowings 9,663 8,303 Deferred income tax liabilities 9,465 8,785 Subsidiary equity obligations 3,543 3,331 Equity Preferred equity 3,732 3,739 Non-controlling interests in net assets 40,955 31,920 Common equity 22,432 21,568 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Equity 67,119 57,227 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Liabilities and Equity $ 159,837 $ 139,514 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS Unaudited Three Months Ended Nine Months Ended -------------------- -------------------- For the periods ended September 30 (US$ millions, except per share amounts) 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenues $ 6,285 $ 5,056 $ 17,476 $ 14,375 Direct costs (4,590) (3,740) (12,568) (10,341) Other income and gains 325 133 391 145 Equity accounted income 454 304 1,041 1,174 Expenses Interest (825) (691) (2,407) (2,117) Corporate costs (20) (25) (68) (83) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1,629 1,037 3,865 3,153 Fair value changes (59) 389 358 1,572 Depreciation and amortization (541) (436) (1,538) (1,265) Income tax 992 (145) 556 22 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net income $ 2,021 $ 845 $ 3,241 $ 3,482 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net income attributable to: Brookfield shareholders $ 1,036 $ 289 $ 1,478 $ 1,663 Non-controlling interests 985 556 1,763 1,819 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- $ 2,021 $ 845 $ 3,241 $ 3,482 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net income per share Diluted $ 1.03 $ 0.26 $ 1.41 $ 1.60 Basic 1.05 0.27 1.44 1.65 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARIZED FINANCIAL RESULTS

The following financial results include non-IFRS measures. See Basis of Presentation on page 3.

Funds From Operations(1,2) ---------------------------------------- Last Twelve Months Unaudited Three Months Ended Ended -------------------- ------------------ For the periods ended September 30 (US$ millions, except per share amounts) 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- FFO from operating activities $ 491 $ 398 $ 2,056 $ 1,545 Realized carried interest(3) - 15 - 32 Realized disposition gains(4) 392 88 1,148 536 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Funds from operations(1,2) $ 883 $ 501 $ 3,204 $ 2,113 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Per share $ 0.87 $ 0.48 $ 3.15 $ 2.05 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unaudited Last Twelve Months Three Months Ended Ended -------------------- ------------------ For the periods ended September 30 (US$ millions) 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Asset management $ 178 $ 141 $ 712 $ 496 Property 545 214 1,759 1,080 Renewable power 49 48 192 233 Infrastructure 89 71 334 244 Private equity and other 107 125 512 353 Cash and financial assets 8 (17) 63 54 Interest expense and operating costs (93) (81) (368) (347) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Funds from operations(1,2) $ 883 $ 501 $ 3,204 $ 2,113 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Twelve Months Unaudited Three Months Ended Ended -------------------- ------------------ For the periods ended September 30 (US$ millions, except per share amounts) 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- FFO from operating activities $ 491 $ 398 $ 2,056 $ 1,545 Realized carried interest(3) - 15 - 32 Realized disposition gains(4) 161 20 476 4 Fair value changes (104) 120 80 2,078 Depreciation and amortization (222) (188) (868) (740) Income tax 710 (76) 412 (206) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net income attributable to shareholders $ 1,036 $ 289 $ 2,156 $ 2,713 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Per share $ 1.03 $ 0.26 $ 2.07 $ 2.67 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes:

1. Non-IFRS measure - see Basis of Presentation on page 3 2. Excludes amounts attributable to non-controlling interests 3. Excludes carried interest generated that is subject to future investment performance 4. FFO includes gains recorded in net income, directly in equity as well as the realization of appraisal gains recorded in prior years

RECONCILIATION OF NET INCOME TO FUNDS FROM OPERATIONS

Last Twelve Months Unaudited Three Months Ended Ended -------------------- ------------------ For the periods ended September 30 (US$ millions) 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net income prior to fair value changes, depreciation and amortization and income tax (see page 6) $ 1,629 $ 1,037 $ 5,106 $ 4,341 Adjust for: Equity accounted fair value changes and other(1) (18) 77 159 (433) Current income taxes (38) (38) (165) (130) Realized disposition gains(2) 235 68 996 532 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1,808 1,144 6,096 4,310 Non-controlling interest (925) (643) (2,892) (2,197) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Funds from operations(3,4) $ 883 $ 501 $ 3,204 $ 2,113 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes:

1. Equity accounted other items include depreciation and amortization and deferred income taxes 2. Includes only the portion of disposition gains recognized within fair value changes and prior periods 3. Non-IFRS measure - see Basis of Presentation on page 3 4. Excludes amounts attributable to non-controlling interests

Contacts:

Claire Holland

Communications & Media

Tel: (416) 369-8236

Email: claire.holland@brookfield.com



Linda Northwood

Investor Relations

Tel: (416) 359-8647

Email: linda.northwood@brookfield.com




VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwired - November 11, 2016) - Luna Gold Corp. (TSX: LGC) ("Luna Gold" or "the Company") has released results for its third quarter ended September 30, 2016, and provided an update on the Company's activities at its 100%-owned Aurizona Gold Mine ("Aurizona") in Brazil. All amounts are in United States dollars except per share and per ounce amounts, and where otherwise noted.

Highlights

Completed pre-feasibility study After-tax NPV 5% of $201 million and 34% IRR at $1,250 per ounce gold After-tax NPV 5% of $256 million and 41% IRR at $1,350 per ounce gold Initial $146 million capex, including new mine fleet Proven and probable mineral reserves of 969,000 gold ounces contained in 18.6 million tonnes at an average grade of 1.62 g/t gold Average production of approximately 150,000 ounces of gold per year in years 1 to 5

Feasibility study underway with completion targeted for around the end of Q1 2017

Appointed new senior management team

Raised $10.3 million through private placement and warrant exercise

Filed a preliminary base shelf prospectus to raise up to $200 million

Completed a ten for one consolidation of the Company's share capital

"Luna Gold has made great progress over the last few months," said Christian Milau, Chief Executive Officer of Luna Gold. "With the updated mine plan and pre-feasibility study complete, we have been actively marketing the company in both North America and Europe to ensure the market is fully informed of the positive steps forward at Luna Gold and our plans for the Aurizona project. We have also taken the first steps to prepare for construction financing, with the ten to one share consolidation and filing of a base shelf prospectus.

"We are focused on advancing the feasibility study to achieve our target of pouring gold in late 2018. Concurrently, we have commenced exploration with the objective of extending the Aurizona mine life and demonstrating the true potential of what we consider to be a very exciting exploration opportunity. We look forward to reporting progress to shareholders over the coming months as our exploration program unfolds."

Recent Developments

On September 12, 2016, the Company released the results of a National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") compliant pre-feasibility study (the "Pre-feasibility Study") for the Aurizona Project. The Pre-feasibility Study is based on a new mine plan and mineral reserve estimate and outlines the design of an open-pit gold mine producing an average of 150,000 ounces of gold per year for the first five years, with an initial 6.5-year mine life. Using a base case gold price of $1,250 per ounce, the project demonstrates strong financial returns with an after-tax internal rate of return ("IRR") of 34% ($1,350 per ounce: 41%) and a net present value ("NPV") using a 5% discount rate of $201 million ($1,350 per ounce: $256 million), which does not include conversion of ounces beyond proven and probable or new discoveries. Initial capital costs are estimated at $146 million, including a new mining fleet, due to the Company's ability to leverage significant existing infrastructure, with life-of-mine sustaining capital estimated at $47 million. All-in sustaining costs are estimated at $708 per ounce of gold produced. The Company expects to finalize a feasibility study for the project around the end of Q1 2017 followed by an 18-month construction period, with the objective of restarting operations in late 2018.

During Q3 2016, the Company raised $10.3 million through the exercise of warrants and completion of a private placement financing. Class A Warrants and Class B Warrants were exercised into 1,200,000 common shares and 5,000,000 common shares respectively, for total proceeds of $4.9 million, resulting in the issuance of 6.2 million common shares of the Company. The Company also completed a private placement of 3,500,000 units at C$2.00 per unit for gross proceeds of $5.4 million. Each unit consisted of one common share and 10 common share purchase warrants, entitling the holder to purchase one common share of the Company at a price of C$2.50 until August 29, 2021. The new management team participated in the private placement, purchasing 1,150,000 of the units.

On October 31, 2016, the Company's shareholders approved a ten for one consolidation of the Company's common shares. As a result of the Consolidation, the Company's share capital currently consists of 39,037,429 common shares, 1,694,300 options with an average exercise price of C$2.94 and expiry dates ranging from December 2016 to December 2020, warrants exercisable into 26,270,000 common shares at an average exercise price of C$1.11 expiring on June 30, 2020, and warrants exercisable into 3,500,000 common shares at an exercise price of C$2.50 expiring on August 29, 2021, for a total of 70,501,729 common shares outstanding on a fully-diluted basis.

On November 3, 2016, the Company filed a preliminary short form base shelf prospectus with the securities commissions or similar regulatory authorities in each of the provinces of Canada, except Quebec. The base shelf prospectus will allow the Company to offer up to $200,000,000 (or the equivalent thereof in Canadian dollars) of common shares, debt securities, subscription receipts, units, warrants and share purchase contracts from time to time over the 25-month period after Canadian securities regulatory authorities have issued a receipt for the final short form base shelf prospectus.

Financial Snapshot

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Three months ended Nine months ended September 30, September 30, ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (expressed in millions of US dollars, except per share amounts and ounces of gold) 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gold sales, including Sandstorm (ounces) - 10,560 - 50,310 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenue $ - $ 10.2 $ - $ 53.5 Production costs - (9.8) - (41.6) Depreciation and amortization - (0.7) - (3.3) Aurizona Mine care and maintenance costs (3.0) - (7.3) - Exploration and evaluation (0.3) (1.3) (1.8) (2.0) General and administration (2.3) (1.7) (4.1) (5.4) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Operating (loss) profit (5.8) (3.3) (13.5) 1.3 Financial instruments (loss) gain, net (20.1) 4.8 (49.2) 1.3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net loss $ (27.9) $ (0.2) $ (68.3) $ (6.3) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Basic/diluted loss per share $ (0.89) $ (0.01) $ (2.30) $ (0.35) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total assets $ 96.1 $ 103.7 $ 96.1 $ 103.7 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total non-current liabilities $ 103.4 $ 51.9 $ 103.4 $ 51.9 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Additional information regarding the Company's financial results is available in the unaudited condensed consolidated interim financial statements and Management's Discussion and Analysis, which are available for download on the Company's website at www.lunagold.com and on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Project Review and Outlook

Luna Gold is engaged in the exploration and development of its wholly-owned, past-producing Aurizona Gold Mine located in Maranhao state in northeastern Brazil. A pre-feasibility study for the Aurizona Project was completed in September 2016. The Company expects to finalize a feasibility study for the project around the end of Q1 2017 followed by an 18-month construction period, with the objective of restarting operations in late 2018.

While the Company is focused on restarting operations at the Aurizona Mine, Luna Gold's large 241,400 hectare land package provides significant exploration upside potential. The brownfields exploration potential at Aurizona includes more than 10 drill-ready near-mine targets that the Company plans to prioritize with the intention of extending the mine life. In addition, surface mapping and sampling and limited drilling has identified more than 50 kilometres of cumulative strike of structures with anomalous to high-grade soil and rock geochemistry, which provide exploration opportunities longer term.

To expedite exploration on the Company's 191,400 hectares of greenfields exploration licenses, in May 2016 Luna Gold entered into a joint venture agreement ("JV Agreement") with AngloGold Ashanti Holdings plc ("AngloGold"). As part of its minimum $2.0 million commitment in year one, AngloGold commenced exploration in August 2016 and is planning extensive airborne surveys over the entire land package, including Luna Gold's brownfields properties and the Aurizona Mine, which when combined with surface geochemistry will define targets for an extensive drilling program in the JV greenfields. The airborne survey data will be shared with Luna Gold and will help to focus the Company's exploration program. As per the JV Agreement, AngloGold can earn a 70% interest in the greenfields properties by spending $14.0 million on exploration expenditures over four years. Should AngloGold earn and decide to sell its interest in the joint venture, Luna Gold can purchase AngloGold's interest in any NI 43-101 compliant resources for $10.00 per ounce.

On behalf of the Company

"Christian Milau"

Christian Milau, Chief Executive Officer and Director

About Luna Gold Corp.

Luna Gold is engaged in the exploration and development of its past producing Aurizona Gold Mine in Brazil, which was placed on care and maintenance in 2015. A pre-feasibility study for the project completed in September 2016 outlined the design of an open-pit mine producing on average 150,000 ounces of gold annually for the first five years (see the "Pre-feasibility Study on Aurizona Mine Project, Maranhao, Brazil, NI 43-101 Technical Report" completed by Lycopodium Minerals Canada Ltd.). A feasibility study for the Aurizona project is underway, with the objective of pouring gold at the Aurizona Gold Mine in late 2018. Further information is available at www.lunagold.com or by email at ir@lunagold.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements

This document contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively "forward-looking statements"). The use of the word "will", "targeted", "objective", "expects", "potential", "intends", "intention", "plan", "planning" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Although Luna Gold believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements and/or information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements since Luna Gold can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements, including assumptions made with regard to approval of the Company's base shelf prospectus, the anticipated results of the feasibility study for the Aurizona Project, Luna Gold's ability to raise the capital required to finance construction of the Aurizona Gold Mine, Luna Gold's ability to restart production of the Aurizona Gold Mine, the timing of the anticipated restart of production, and Luna Gold's ability to achieve the gold production rates outlined in the pre-feasibility study. Furthermore, the forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as at the date of this news release and the Company does not undertake any obligations to publicly update and/or revise any of the included forward-looking statements, whether as a result of additional information, future events and/or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable securities laws.

Luna Gold Contact

Rhylin Bailie

Vice President Investor Relations

Phone: +1 604-260-0516

Email: ir@lunagold.com
MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- Orbite Technologies Inc. (TSX: ORT)(OTCQX: EORBF) ("Orbite", or the "Company") yesterday filed its financial statements for the third quarter ended September 30, 2016 and today announced that, further to its press release of October 25, 2016, production activities continue to progress well at its high purity alumina ("HPA") plant.

HPA Production Update

-- As reported on October 25, feedstock digestion is now operating automatically and smoothly with batch production times having decreased to below 4 hours, well within design parameters. So far, 24 digestion batches have been completed. -- The digestion liquors continue to be transferred to the crystallisation circuit for the production of aluminum chloride hexahydrate ("ACH") crystals, the precursor to HPA. To date, about 55 tonnes of ACH crystals have been produced, corresponding to approximately 14 tonnes of HPA, once calcined. -- Nucleation and growth of ACH crystals is now also operating automatically. Crystal sizes and morphology, two critical parameters in achieving high purities, are optimal. Accordingly, purity levels of ACH crystals have reached 5N8, corresponding to 5N+ HPA. -- Partial decomposition of ACH crystals, to produce amorphous HPA, has commenced utilizing the Company's Harper equipment. This amorphous HPA will be used to build the initial 'bed' in the fluidized bed decomposer and calciner. Once the bed is constituted, ACH crystals will be fed directly into the decomposer and calciner to produce Gamma and Alpha HPA. -- The company continues to produce ACH crystals for production of HPA.

Financial Highlights

-- The Company reported a loss before net finance expense of $2.6 million for the quarter, a marginal increase from a loss of $2.5 million for the comparable quarter in the prior year. -- As at September 30, 2016, the Company had an aggregate cash and short- term investments balance of $3.7 million, and positive working capital (current assets less current liabilities) of $1.6 million. Subsequent to the quarter, the Company completed a bought deal financing, and benefited from the exercise of warrants leading to, on a pro-forma basis, cash and short-term investment balance of $9.2 million and pro- forma working capital of $6.6 million. -- During the quarter, the Company achieved net cash flow from financing activities of $9.6 million. The funds raised enabled the Company to materially complete the construction of the Company's HPA plant.

Management commentary

"With the commencement of production, we have achieved a significant milestone in the development of Orbite", stated Glenn Kelly, CEO of Orbite. "Crystal size and morphology of the ACH crystals produced at the plant are very good and have allowed us to reach our target 5N8 purity level. Having achieved this in only a little over one month following our first production run is, we believe, a strong validation of the strength of our process and technology. Consequently, we have now commenced the sequence of converting these ACH crystals into high purity alumina, first by the partial decomposition of the ACH to produce amorphous HPA. This HPA is then injected into the decomposer to build the fluidized bed, which will function as an equalization bed to adsorb the initial impact of the substantial amounts of hydrochloric acid present in the ACH. This requires careful staging, but once the bed is fully constituted, production of HPA will speed up significantly. Subsequent to achieving the successful end-to-end operation of the plant, focus will be on the switch to automated and continuous operation of the plant. Additionally, we will start delivering HPA samples from the plant to prospective customers, including commercial samples, the final step prior to contractual engagement. We are proud of our achievements, and look forward to reporting on our continued progress."

THIRD QUARTER HIGHLIGHTS

HPA Plant Construction

-- At the end of the second quarter, the Company awarded, on a fixed price basis, the contracts for the remaining construction work related to piping and mechanical, and electrical and instrumentation to Fjordtech Industries Inc., and Electro Kingsey, respectively. -- During the quarter, Orbite, together with its partners, materially completed the construction of the HPA facility, successfully completed hot commissioning, and commenced production, as detailed below.

Commissioning, Start-up & Production sequence

-- At the beginning of September, the Company commenced hot start-up activities of the decomposer and calciner ovens and related support systems. -- Hot start-up activities continued successfully throughout the month of September and the first production of ACH crystals, the precursor to HPA, commenced. -- The Company subsequently produced in October, 35 tonnes of ACH crystals (corresponding to close to 10 tonnes of HPA once calcined) with initial purity levels exceeding expectations and approaching the levels corresponding to 5N HPA.

Samples

-- 3 commercial samples were shipped during the quarter with 1 remaining to be shipped. To date, 31 samples have been shipped to 19 prospective customers. -- Feedback has been positive and the Company anticipates engaging in contract discussions upon commissioning of the plant's product treatment section. -- The Company will be producing 18 more samples to fill requests from 14 new prospective customers.

Intellectual Property

During the last quarter, the Company was awarded 12 patents in 6 countries (Australia, Japan, Canada, United States, Russia, and China) and 4 notices of allowance were received:

-- Processes for Treating Red Mud - United States (2nd patent) and Japan -- Processes for Treating Fly Ash - Australia -- Processes for Treating Various Materials - Canada

Summary of Q3 2016 Financial Results

Revenues and earnings

The Company is a development stage company and has no revenues.

Net loss for Q3 2016 increased by $2.7 million to $4.8 million, as compared to the same period in the prior year. The increase in net loss during the quarter is principally due to an increase in net finance expense (income) related to the 2016-2018 ITC Debentures transaction costs and an increase in general and administrative charges related to share-based payments for advisory services.

HPA plant operations

HPA plant operation expenses remained relatively stable at $1.1 million during the quarter ended September 30, 2016 compared to the third quarter in 2015.

General and administrative charges

General and administrative charges increased by $0.2 million during the quarter compared to the same period in 2015. This increase is due mainly to an increase in share-based payments and discontinuation of patent applications.

Financial position

Cash and short-term investments and working capital

As at September 30, 2016, the Company had aggregate cash and short-term investments balance of $3.7 million, and positive working capital (current assets less current liabilities) of $1.6 million.

Subsequent to September 30, 2016, the Company completed a public offering on a bought deal basis for an aggregate amount of $5.5 million under the short form base shelf prospectus and prospectus supplement, dated March 18, 2015 and October 27, 2016, respectively, and received $4.6 million, net of commission and estimated fees. Additionally, warrants and share options were exercised; as a result, the Company has, on a pro-forma basis, cash and short-term investment balance of $9.2 million and pro-forma working capital of $6.6 million.

Financing activities

During the quarter, and subsequently in the month of October, the Company completed three financings which closed on August 10, September 28, and October 31, 2016.

For further details about each financing, please refer to the various continuous disclosure documents available on the Company's website www.orbitetech.com or at www.sedar.com.

Property, plant, and equipment

During the nine-month period ending September 30, 2016, the Company recorded a net increase in Property, plant, and equipment ("PP&E") of $19.4 million, mainly attributable to investments in the HPA plant.

Cash Flow Statement

Cash Flows from Operating Activities

Cash flows used in operating activities for the third quarter was $3.5 million compared to $0.9 million for the same quarter a year ago. The increase is attributable mainly to non-cash working capital items namely decrease in accounts payable and an increase in sales taxes and other receivables.

Cash Flows from Financing Activities

Cash flows from financing activities in the third quarter increased by $3.6 million to $8.6 million, as compared to the same period in the prior year. This increase is due mainly to higher proceeds received from the issuance of Convertible Debentures and the issuance of shares, warrants and exercise of options, partially offset by the repayment of bridge loans with Investissement Quebec.

Cash Flows used in Investing Activities

Cash flows used in investing activities increased by $1.7 million to $7 million compared to the same period a year ago, is attributable to higher investment in the HPA plant and the changes in investment tax credits receivables, offset partially by changes in restricted cash.

Conference call

Orbite management will hold a conference call and provide a live audio webcast today, November 11, 2016 at 10:00 a.m. (ET) to discuss the Company's financials and provide an update on the Company's HPA plant.

The call will be held in English. The Q&A session will be in English and French.

CONFERENCE CALL DETAILS: Date: November 11, 2016 Time: 10:00 a.m. (ET) Dial in number: +1 888 231-8191 +1 647 427-7450 Webcast: http://bit.ly/2frUU0G Taped replay: +1 855 859-2056 +1 514 807-9274 +1 416 849-0833 Encore password: 12595568 12:00 midnight (ET), Friday, November Available until: 18, 2016

Notice to Reader

The information provided in this press release is entirely qualified by the disclosures in the Company's Consolidated Interim Financial Statements and Management Discussion & Analysis (MD&A) for the quarter ended September 30, 2016, which are available at www.orbitetech.com and under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.

About Orbite

Orbite Technologies Inc. is a Canadian cleantech company whose innovative and proprietary processes are expected to produce alumina and other high-value products, such as rare earth and rare metal oxides, at one of the lowest costs in the industry, and in a sustainable fashion, using feedstocks that include aluminous clay, kaolin, nepheline, bauxite, red mud, fly ash as well as serpentine residues from chrysotile processing sites. Orbite is currently in the process of finalizing its first commercial high-purity alumina (HPA) production plant in Cap-Chat, Quebec and has completed the basic engineering for a proposed smelter-grade alumina (SGA) production plant, which would use clay mined from its Grande-Vallee deposit. The Company's portfolio contains 16 intellectual property families, including 45 patents and 71 pending patent applications in 11 different countries and regions. The first intellectual property family is patented in Canada, USA, Australia, China, Japan and Russia. The Company also operates a state of the art technology development center in Laval, Quebec, where its technologies are developed and validated.

Forward-looking statements

Certain information contained in this document may include "forward-looking information". Without limiting the foregoing, the information and any forward-looking information may include statements regarding projects, costs, objectives and future returns of the Company or hypotheses underlying these items. In this document, words such as "may", "would", "could", "will", "likely", "believe", "expect", "anticipate", "intend", "plan", "estimate" and similar words and the negative form thereof are used to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results, and will not necessarily be accurate indications of whether, or the times at or by which, such future performance will be achieved. Forward-looking statements and information are based on information available at the time and/or the Company management's good-faith beliefs with respect to future events and are subject to known or unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other unpredictable factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. These risks uncertainties and assumptions include, but are not limited to, those described in the section of the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) entitled "Risk and Uncertainties" as filed on March 30, 2016 on SEDAR, including those under the headings "Recent increase in budgeted capital costs will require additional financing and may adversely impact our prospects", "We will need to raise capital to continue our growth" and "Development Goals and Time Frames".

The Company does not intend, nor does it undertake, any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information or statements contained in this document to reflect subsequent information, events or circumstances or otherwise, except as required by applicable laws.

Contacts:

NATIONAL Equicom

Marc Lakmaaker

External Investor Relations Consultant

416-848-1397

mlakmaaker@national.ca



For Media Inquiries:

NATIONAL Equicom

Scott Anderson

External Media Relations Consultant

416-586-1954

sanderson@national.ca




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- Reliq Health Technologies Inc. (TSX VENTURE: RHT)(OTCQB: RQHTF) ("Reliq" or the "Company"), a technology company focused on developing innovative mobile health (mHealth) and telemedicine solutions for Community-Based Healthcare, is pleased to announce that Mr. Brian Storseth has been appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors effective immediately.

Mr. Storseth is a businessman and was a Member of Parliament (MP) in Canada for 9 years from 2006 to 2015 - he did not seek re-election in 2016. During his tenure as an MP he served on committees for Aboriginal affairs, agriculture and agri-food. He joined the Reliq Health Board in July 2016 and has been invaluable in helping the company to communicate the value of Reliq's technology to stakeholders in the Provincial healthcare systems.

"I am pleased to welcome Mr. Storseth as our Chairman. He is an experienced and proven public policy expert and seasoned entrepreneur. His familiarity with the issues that are of primary concern to Canadian healthcare decision makers has been a tremendous asset to the Company over the past few months. We look forward to further leveraging his network and understanding of the key drivers in healthcare in Canada to expand Reliq's footprint across the country," said Dr. Lisa Crossley, CEO of Reliq Health.

"I am excited to be taking an expanded, hands on role at Reliq. Since I joined the Board in July I have been able to witness firsthand the direct positive impact the Company's technology can have on the healthcare system and patient care. Using technology like Reliq's to improve efficiencies, reduce costs and improve the quality of care is the future of healthcare for both publicly and privately funded systems. I am particularly enthusiastic about Reliq's ability to provide high quality virtual healthcare to rural and remote communities, which have historically been under-served," said Mr. Brian Storseth.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Dr. Lisa Crossley, CEO and Director

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward Looking Information

Certain statements in this press release constitute forward-looking statements, within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements that are not historical facts, including without limitation, statements regarding future estimates, plans, programs, forecasts, projections, objectives, assumptions, expectations or beliefs of future performance, are "forward-looking statements".

We caution you that such "forward-looking statements" involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual and future events to differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to commercial operations, including technology development, anticipated revenues, projected size of market, and other information that is based on forecasts of future results, estimates of amounts not yet determinable and assumptions of management.

Reliq Health Technologies Inc. (the "Company") does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties relating to, among other things, technology development and marketing activities, the Company's historical experience with technology development, uninsured risks. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

SOURCE: Reliq Health Technologies Inc.

Contacts:

CORE Capital Partners

604-566-9233

investors@ccpartnersinc.com




MONCTON, NEW BRUNSWICK -- (Marketwired) -- 03/14/17 -- Licensed medical marijuana producer Organigram Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Organigram Holdings Inc. (TSX VENTURE: OGI)(OTCQB: OGRMF), recorded single-week sales of over $250,000 for the first time in its history for the period March 5-11, 2017, the company reported today.

The record-setting sales follow the release of Organigram's newly harvested and tested marijuana. The crops were grown under the company's new operating protocols which includes testing all harvested product to ensure the product's purity. Those new procedures were implemented when traces of unapproved pesticides were detected in some of its dried and oil-based products harvested last year. That product was voluntarily recalled by the company.

"We believe we are regaining the trust of our clients and the sales record is indicative of the faith they have in our new protocols and in the quality of the new products," said Ray Gracewood, Organigram's Chief Commercial Officer. "The positive response we've received from these clients, both in their feedback to us, as well as in their willingness to purchase new product, has been gratifying." Gracewood said Organigram has gone to great lengths to communicate openly and regularly with its clients about the issues surrounding the recalls. Additionally, the company recently improved its compensation offer to those who had purchased recalled product. All un-insured clients have received an account credit equal to 100 per cent of all purchases that were subject to the recalls.

"We see this as a step in the right direction," said Gracewood. "Our clients have remained supportive and based on the relationships our client team has developed with them, we're pleased to see clients have responded positively to the changes we've made."

The company will also be making test results of future batches publicly available in the near future as part of Organigram's commitment to patient health. "Full transparency is the goal. We want our clients to be completely comfortable and confident in ordering Organigram product going forward, and posting results online gets us one step closer." Gracewood added Organigram is focused on responding to client feedback and the company will continue to make operational adjustments when necessary to ensure transparency of its operations.

Following the recalls, Organigram implemented seven new company-wide initiatives to ensure product quality. These initiatives, along with testing all products before sale to customers and posting the results on the company website, will help rebuild confidence in Organigram and its products, said the company.

About Organigram Holdings Inc.

Organigram Holdings Inc. is a TSX Venture Exchange listed company whose wholly owned subsidiary, Organigram Inc., is a licensed producer of medical marijuana in Canada. Organigram is focused on producing the highest quality, condition specific medical marijuana for patients in Canada. Organigram's facility is located in Moncton, New Brunswick and the Company is regulated by the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations ("ACMPR").

In February 2017, Organigram was ranked in the top ten Clean Technology & Life Sciences Sector on the TSX Venture Exchange 50.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains forward-looking information which involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual events to differ materially from current expectation. Important factors - including the availability of funds, the results of financing efforts, crop yields - that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations are disclosed in the Company's documents filed from time to time on SEDAR (see www.sedar.com). Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update or revise any forward looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contacts:

Organigram Holdings Inc.

Ray Gracewood

Chief Commercial Officer

rgracewood@Organigram.ca



Organigram Holdings Inc.

Giselle Doiron

Director of Investor and Media Relations

(506) 801-8986




ST. ALBERT, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- Enterprise Group, Inc. ("Enterprise," or "the Company") (TSX: E) is pleased to announce its financial results for the three and nine month periods ended September 30, 2016 (the "third quarter").

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Three months Three months Nine months Nine months Consolidated: September 30, September 30, September 30, September 30, 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenue $6,551,285 $10,392,253 $20,396,939 $32,826,358 Gross margin $1,458,761 $2,890,956 $4,413,305 $8,764,059 Gross margin % 22% 28% 22% 27% EBITDA(1) $726,833 $1,890,542 $2,024,134 $5,621,210 Net Income (loss) and comprehensive income (loss) $581,816 $(602,764) $(3,244,576) $(1,898,859) EPS(2) $0.01 $(0.01) $(0.06) $(0.04) Total Assets $98,519,762 $149,604,357 $98,519,762 $149,604,357 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (1) Identified and defined under "Non-IFRS Measures". (2) The Company completed a 3 for 1 consolidation of outstanding shares on June 24, 2015.

On July 7, 2016, Enterprise Group Inc., closed a transaction to divest substantially all of the assets of T.C. Backhoe & Directional Drilling Ltd. Gross cash proceeds from the transaction was $16,890,400 plus $2,948,026 of working capital for a total of $19,838,426. Working capital is being paid out over three payments with the last payment due January 15, 2017. All proceeds from the transaction will be deployed towards reducing the Company's debt.

Revenue declined 37% to $6,551,285 for the three months ended September 30, 2016. Revenue declined 38% to $20,396,939 for the nine months ended September 30, 2016. The decrease was due to:

-- Severe decline in activity of the energy industry, triggered by the reduction in oil prices over the last 27 months; -- Pricing reductions; and -- Numerous project delays due to economic uncertainty.

EBITDA declined to $726,833 and $2,024,134 for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2016 as a result of the same factors that drove revenue decreases. While Enterprise has taken numerous measures to reduce the Company's cost structure, it remains committed to the highest service levels.

Pricing pressure and workflow reductions continued in the third quarter of 2016. Visibility remains limited for the remainder of 2016 and into 2017, and its customers remain cautious. To address these challenges, the Company is streamlining costs where appropriate, however, the Company is committed to certain service standards for its existing clients which management believes to be critical for fostering the Company's longer-term growth. As the Company better understands the economic outlook for the remainder of 2016 and into 2017, and the likely level of demand for its services, it will adjust its internal infrastructure accordingly.

"Considering the economic landscape, we're satisfied with Enterprise's results for the third quarter," stated Leonard Jaroszuk, the Company's President, Chairman, and CEO. "These results illustrate how Enterprise's focus on client service has allowed our business to successfully combat a challenging operating environment."

"These challenges persist, and we are maintaining a cautious outlook. However, we are beginning to achieve some meaningful successes along the way. We have added several new clients to our roster, we have streamlined our business through the divestiture of non-core assets, and we enjoy a secure financial position. Furthermore, during the third quarter the Company renewed its loan facility with PNC Bank for another 3 years under terms and conditions that better reflect the current economic environment. This renewal provides us with the critical flexibility necessary to consider any opportunities that may arise, either organically or externally. All of these factors give me great confidence in Enterprise's prospects for growth, and our ability to deliver value to our loyal shareholders as we move forward."

About Enterprise Group, Inc.

Enterprise Group, Inc. is a consolidator of construction services companies operating in the energy, utility and transportation infrastructure industries. The Company's focus is primarily construction services and specialized equipment rental. The Company's strategy is to acquire complementary service companies in Western Canada, consolidating capital, management, and human resources to support continued growth. Enterprise acquired of Artic Therm International Ltd. in September 2012, Calgary Tunnelling & Horizontal Augering Ltd. in June 2013, Hart Oilfield Rentals in January 2014, and Westar Oilfield Rentals Inc. in October 2014. More information is available at the Company's website, www.enterprisegrp.ca. Also, today's filings can be found on www.sedar.com

Forward Looking Information

Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or the Company's future performance. The use of any of the words "could", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "estimated" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Company's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. The Company's Annual Information Form and other documents filed with securities regulatory authorities (accessible through the SEDAR website www.sedar.com) describe the risks, material assumptions and other factors that could influence actual results and which are incorporated herein by reference. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be expressly required by applicable securities laws.

Non-IFRS Measures

The Company uses International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS"). EBITDAS is not a measure that has any standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS and is therefore referred to as a non-IFRS measure. This news release contains references to EBITDAS. This non-IFRS measure used by the Company may not be comparable to a similar measure used by other companies. Management believes that in addition to net income, EBITDAS is a useful supplemental measure as it provides an indication of the results generated by the Company's principal business activities prior to consideration of how those activities are financed or how the results are taxed. EBITDAS is calculated as net income excluding depreciation, amortization, interest, taxes and stock based compensation.

Contacts:

Enterprise Group, Inc.

Leonard Jaroszuk

President & CEO

780-418-4400



Enterprise Group, Inc.

Desmond O'Kell

Senior Vice-President

780-418-4400

contact@enterprisegrp.ca




Regulatory News:

Continued strong profitability growth in the third quarter of 2016

Third quarter, July-September 2016

Net sales totalled SEK 708 million (689), an increase of 3 per cent compared with the same period in 2015

The third quarter showed continued good growth in the Nordics and Europe segments, while the Other Markets and Resilient Global segments were somewhat weaker. Organic sales growth was 4 per cent, including a currency impact (net) of SEK -9 million

Operating profit before depreciation, amortisation and non-recurring items (adjusted EBITDA) was SEK 81 million (78), corresponding to an operating margin of 11.4 per cent (11.3)

Operating profit before non-recurring items (adjusted EBIT) for the third quarter increased by 7 per cent to SEK 59 million (55), corresponding to 8.3 per cent (8.0)

Consolidated profit for the quarter was SEK 21 million (-15) and was primarily affected by an increase in operating profit and lower financing costs compared with the same period in 2015

President and CEO Christer Persson comments:

"Kahrs Group continued to develop positively in the third quarter, with sales and profitability growth of 3 and 7 percent respectively. Most of our core markets, including Sweden, Norway, the US and several large markets in Europe performed well, and provided good balance for the markets that currently have a less favourable market situation. The Group's product strategy is working well and our assessment is that we are gaining market share in several core markets.

The implementation of our new business plan is ongoing and initiatives relating to digitalization are of high priority. The transformation, in accordance with our digitalization strategy, is progressing as planned and offer significant opportunities to strengthen our relations with customers and end consumers."

About Kahrs Holding AB (publ)

Kahrs Holding AB (publ) is a world-leading flooring manufacturer in hardwood and resilient flooring with a number of strong brands in its product portfolio, including Kahrs, Karelia and Upofloor. The Company's innovations have shaped the industry throughout history and Kahrs Group is dedicated to providing the market with innovative new flooring solutions. Kahrs Group, which delivers products to more than 70 countries, is the market leader in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia and holds a strong position in other key markets, such as the UK and Germany. The Group has approximately 1,600 employees and annual sales of EUR 300 million. www.kahrsgroup.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161111005353/en/

Contacts:

Kahrs Group

Christer Persson, President and CEO

tel: +46 70 271 20 14

or

Helen Johansson, Corporate Communication

tel: +46 70 364 60 30
CONYERS, GA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- GeckoSystems Intl. Corp. (OTC PINK: GOSY) (http://www.GeckoSystems.com/ ) announced today that the company continues to gain traction in the consumer, professional healthcare and commercial security markets. For over nineteen years, GeckoSystems has dedicated itself to development of "AI Mobile Robot Solutions for Safety, Security and Service."

In the last few months, GeckoSystems has:

Returned to Current Information status on OTC Markets. "Many stock brokers decline to trade OTC Pink stocks except when designated Current Information. With our return to Current Information, it is reasonable to expect that with more brokers now trading GOSY shares, given that larger market, stock price appreciation may be expected.





Effectuated an NDA, MOU, and LOI agreements with an NYC AI firm, and now executed a joint venture agreement. "We are very pleased to announce our first US JV. We will jointly coordinate our advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) R&D to achieve higher levels of human safety and sentient verbal interaction for the professional healthcare markets. We expect not only near term licensing revenues, but also an initial AI+ CareBot sale.





Signed the linchpin Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), on path to form their first joint venture with a prominent, international commercial security firm. "Last month, in response to their unsolicited, but gracious and complimentary inquiry, we indicated our sincere interest in working with this commercial security company, but if and only if, they agreed to our required Safety Clause NDA. To that end, they immediately signed our Safety Clause NDA such that our discussions became of sufficient substance for us to effectuate our second agreement, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), clearly revealing that both parties believe significant manufacturing and distribution synergies appropriate for the commercial security markets would be garnered by each firm, stated Martin Spencer, CEO, GeckoSystems Intl. Corp.





Continued to attain substantive progress against the parties responsible for naked short selling of GOSY stock for some years now. This week, a GA court order was secured to access all phone records for the last five years from one of the defendants. Management continues to be surprised regarding Brown Brothers, Harriman and Company (BBH) present indifference to their inability to determine where 50,000,000 shares (~24.1% of all freely traded shares) owned by a long time GOSY shareholder, went.

Artificial intelligence technologies and applications span Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Statistics, Mobile Robots, Service Robotics, Drones, Self-driving Cars, Driverless Cars, Driver Assisted Cars, Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Homes, UGVs, UAVs, USVs, AGVs, Forward and/or Backward Chaining Expert Systems, Savants, AI Assistants, Sensor Fusion, Subsumption, etc.

"One of our primary software and hardware architecture design goals has been for our MSR platforms to be extensible such that obsolescence of the primary cost drivers, the mechanicals, would be as much as five or more years (or when actually worn out from use). Consequently, our hardware architecture is x86 CPU centric and all our AI savants communicate over a LAN using TCP/IP protocols with relatively simple messaging. This means all systems on the Company's MSRs are truly Internet of Things (IoT) due to each having a unique IP address. It is due to our high level of pre-existing, linchpin, 3-legged milk stool basic functionalities that make our AI+ CareBot so desirable by being readily easy to upgrade, not only by GeckoSystems, but also third party developers, such as our NYC AI JV. This is the strategic hardware development path that IBM used in setting PC standards that have enabled cost effective use of complex, but upgradeable, personal computers for over thirty years now," observed Spencer.

In the US, GeckoSystems projects the available market size in dollars for cost effective, utilitarian, multitasking eldercare social mobile robots in 2017 to be $74.0B, in 2018 to be $77B, in 2019 to be $80B, in 2020 to be $83.3B, and in 2021 to be $86.6B. With market penetrations of 0.03% in 2017, 0.06% in 2018, 0.22% in 2019, 0.53% in 2020, and 0.81% in 2021, we anticipate CareBot social robot sales from the consumer market alone at levels of $22.0M, $44.0M, $176M, $440.2M, and $704.3M, respectively. The company is presently securing funding for manufacturing, marketing and final beta testing of their CareBot.

"We continue to have numerous ongoing joint venture and/or licensing discussions with those who share the same interest in using mobile service robots to help others. I am also pleased that as the Service Robotics industry begins to offer real products to eager markets our capabilities are being recognized. We remain completely committed to providing our 1300+ shareholders the ROI they deserve. They can continue to be confident that we expect to be signing numerous multi-million-dollar licensing agreements to further substantiate and delineate the reality that GeckoSystems will enjoy additional licensing revenues to further increase shareholder value," concluded Spencer.

About GeckoSystems:

GeckoSystems has been developing innovative robotic technologies for nineteen years. It is CEO Martin Spencer's dream to make people's lives better through AI robotic technologies.

In order for any companion robot to be utilitarian for family care, it must be a "three-legged milk stool."

(1) Human quick reflex time to avoid moving and/or unmapped obstacles, (GeckoNav: http://tinyurl.com/le8a39r)

(2) Verbal interaction (GeckoChat: http://tinyurl.com/nnupuw7) with a sense of date and time (GeckoScheduler: http://tinyurl.com/kojzgbx), and

(3) Ability to automatically find and follow designated parties (GeckoTrak: http://tinyurl.com/mton9uh) such that verbal interaction can occur routinely with video and audio monitoring of the care receiver is uninterrupted.

The safety requirement for human quick WCET reflex time in all forms of mobile robots:

In order to understand the importance of GeckoSystems' breakthrough, proprietary, and exclusive AI software and why another Japanese robotics company desires a business relationship with GeckoSystems, its key to acknowledge some basic realities for all forms of automatic, non-human intervention, vehicular locomotion and steering.

1. Laws of Physics such as Conservation of Energy, inertia, and momentum, limit a vehicles ability to stop or maneuver. If, for instance, a cars braking system design cannot generate enough friction for a given road surface to stop the car in 100 feet after brake application, that's a real limitation. If a car cannot corner at more than .9g due to a combination of suspension design and road conditions, that, also, is reality. Regardless how talented a NASCAR driver may be, if his race car is inadequate, he's not going to win races.

2. At the same time, if a car driver (or pilot) is tired, drugged, distracted, etc. their reflex time becomes too slow to react in a timely fashion to unexpected direction changes of moving obstacles, or the sudden appearance of fixed obstacles. Many car "accidents" result from drunk driving due to reflex time and/or judgment impairment. Average reflex time takes between 150 & 300ms. http://tinyurl.com/nsrx75n

3. In robotic systems, "human reflex time" is known as Worst Case Execution Time (WCET). Historically, in computer systems engineering, WCET of a computational task is the maximum length of time the task could take to execute on a specific hardware platform. In big data, this is the time to load up the data to be processed, processed, and then outputted into useful distillations, summaries, or common sense insights. GeckoSystems' basic AI self-guidance navigation system processes 147 megabytes of data per second using low cost, Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) Single Board Computers (SBC's).

4. Highly trained and skilled jet fighter pilots have a reflex time (WCET) of less than 120ms. Their "eye to hand" coordination time is a fundamental criterion for them to be successful jet fighter pilots. The same holds true for all high-performance forms of transportation that are sufficiently pushing the limits of the Laws of Physics to require the quickest possible reaction time for safe human control and/or usage.

5. GeckoSystems' WCET is less than 100ms, or as quick, or quicker than most gifted jet fighter pilots, NASCAR race car drivers, etc. while using low cost COTS and SBC's

6. In mobile robotic guidance systems, WCET has 3 fundamental components.

a. Sufficient Field of View (FOV) with appropriate granularity, accuracy, and update rate.

b. Rapid processing of that contextual data such that common sense responses are generated.

c. Timely physical execution of those common sense responses.

An earlier third party verification of GeckoSystems AI centric, human quick sense and avoidance of moving and/or unmapped obstacles by one of their mobile robots can be viewed here: http://t.co/NqqM22TbKN

An overview of GeckoSystems' progress containing over 700 pictures and 120 videos can be found at http://www.geckosystems.com/timeline/.

These videos illustrate the development of the technology that makes GeckoSystems a world leader in Service Robotics development. Early CareBot prototypes were slower and frequently pivoted in order to avoid a static or dynamic obstacle; later prototypes avoided obstacles without pivoting. Current CareBots avoid obstacles with a graceful bicycle smooth motion. The latest videos also depict the CareBot's ability to automatically go faster or slower depending on the amount of clutter (number of obstacles) within its field of view. This is especially important when avoiding moving obstacles in loose crowd situations like a mall or an exhibit area.

In addition to the timeline videos, GeckoSystems has numerous YouTube videos. The most popular of which are the ones showing room-to-room automatic self-navigation of the CareBot through narrow doorways and a hallway of an old 1954 home. You will see the CareBot slow down when going through the doorways because of their narrow width and then speed up as it goes across the relatively open kitchen area. There are also videos of the SafePath wheelchair, which is a migration of the CareBot AI centric navigation system to a standard power wheelchair, and recently developed cost effective depth cameras were used in this recent configuration. SafePath navigation is now available to OEM licensees and these videos show the versatility of GeckoSystems' fully autonomous navigation solution.

GeckoSystems, Star Wars Technology

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYwQBUXXc3g

The company has successfully completed an Alpha trial of its CareBot personal assistance robot for the elderly. It was tested in a home care setting and received enthusiastic support from both caregivers and care receivers. The company believes that the CareBot will increase the safety and well-being of its elderly charges while decreasing stress on the caregiver and the family.

GeckoSystems is preparing for Beta testing of the CareBot prior to full-scale production and marketing. CareBot has recently incorporated Microsoft Kinect depth cameras that result in a significant cost reduction.

Kinect Enabled Personal Robot video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn93BS44Das

Above, the CareBot demonstrates static and dynamic obstacle avoidance as it backs in and out of a narrow and cluttered alley. There is no joystick control or programmed path; movements are smoother that those achieved using a joystick control. GeckoNav creates three low levels of obstacle avoidance: reactive, proactive, and contemplative. Subsumptive AI behavior within GeckoNav enables the CareBot to reach its target destination after engaging in obstacle avoidance.

More information on the CareBot personal assistance robot:

http://www.geckosystems.com/markets/CareBot.php

GeckoSystems stock is quoted in the U.S. over-the-counter (OTC) markets under the ticker symbol GOSY. http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GOSY/quote

Here is Spencer's LinkedIn.com profile:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/martin-spencer/11/b2a/580

Safe Harbor:

Statements regarding financial matters in this press release other than historical facts are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The Company intends that such statements about the Company's future expectations, including future revenues and earnings, technology efficacy and all other forward-looking statements be subject to the Safe Harbors created thereby. The Company is a development stage firm that continues to be dependent upon outside capital to sustain its existence. Since these statements (future operational results and sales) involve risks and uncertainties and are subject to change at any time, the Company's actual results may differ materially from expected results.

GeckoSystems Intl. Corp.

Main number: +1 678-413-9236

Fax: +1 678-413-9247

Website: http://www.geckosystems.com/




SVI's Q3 Sales Up on Acquisitions Published: 11 November 2016 by Mike Buetow by Mike Buetow

PAKKRED, NONTHABURI, THAILAND -- SVI Public Co. reported third quarter consolidated revenue of 2.81 billion baht ($79.5 million), up 19% year-over-year on the acquisition of Seidel Electronics.

Sales were down 4% sequentially. The European operations -- formerly Seidel -- contributed 661 million baht during the quarter. SVI acquired Seidel last January.

The EMS firm saw strength in the industrial sector during the period.

The consolidated net profit was 795 million bath, up 650 million bath from a year ago. The difference was entirely attributable to insurance payouts for fire damage to its plant two years ago in the Banghkadi Industrial Park in Bangkok. Consolidated gross profit was up 8.6% sequentially to 266 million baht.

1 THB = $0.0282792


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Women's clothing retailer Nasty Gal has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.



Founded in 2006 by Sophia Amoruso, the Los Angeles-based company said it expects to attract a new equity partner or sponsor to take the company forward with a healthy balance sheet.



The retailer added that it plans to emerge from Chapter 11 and continue operations with or without such a partner.



Chief Executive Officer Sheree Waterson, a former executive of Lululemon, said the move is expected to help Nasty Gal address immediate liquidity issues, restructure its balance sheet and correct structural issues, including high occupancy costs.



In its bankruptcy filing Wednesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, Nasty Gal estimated both its assets and liabilities at between $10 million and $50 million.



After the company was founded, Amoruso began selling vintage clothes from her eBay account and later switched to selling the company's own label of clothes on its own website. The company also expanded by adding two brick-and-mortar retail stores in Los Angeles.



Amoruso grew the online business to $100 million in sales in 2012. However, the brand's growth appeared to have stalled in recent years amid stiff competition.



The company laid off 10 percent of its staff in a company-wide restructuring in February, and was hit with lawsuits from its former employees. Amoruso stepped down from the CEO role in January 2015, with Waterson succeeding her in that position.



Amoruso has published a book 'Girlboss', which is part memoir and also describes her business philosophy. The book became a New York Times best-seller in 2014. Following the book's release, Amoruso launched the GIRLBOSS Foundation to inspire women to take their careers into their own hands.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- How do I find a job in the U.S. when I earned my degree in another country? How do I adjust to the American education system? Millions of international students and skilled immigrants grapple with these questions and more as they navigate life in a new country.

In response, World Education Services (WES) will host a free event for international students and internationally educated immigrants in New York City on Monday, November 14 at the Queens Library in Flushing beginning at 9:30 A.M. The event, taking place during International Education Week, will also be live-streamed on YouTube. The seminar, Creating Educational and Employment Opportunities with a Credential Evaluation, features guest speakers Omanjana Goswami, a doctoral student at Rutgers University-Newark, Senay Gebremedhin, Program Coordinator with WES Global Talent Bridge, Maxime Konate, a skilled immigrant employed with World Education Services, and Dina Jaffary, Community Outreach and Engagement Associate with Upwardly Global. The panel will discuss a range of topics, including:

The importance of having international credentials evaluated

Job search skills for the U.S. job market

Skilled immigrant and international student perspectives

"Our goal is to help individuals who studied internationally to fully use their education and skills in the United States," said Senay Gebremedhin of WES Global Talent Bridge. "There is a pressing need to help individuals gain recognition for their international education as immigration to the U.S. and international enrollment at colleges and universities grows."

In addition to seminars, WES also provides international students with free tools and advice through WES Advisor and WES Global Talent Bridge offers resources for skilled immigrants in the U.S. and Canada.

For more information about this event or any WES program, email media@wes.org.

About WES

World Education Services (WES) is a non-profit organization founded in 1974 dedicated to helping individuals achieve their higher education and professional goals. WES evaluates and advocates for the recognition of international education qualifications in the U.S. and Canada. WES delivers credential evaluations recognized by 2,500 academic, business, and governmental institutions to more than one million people worldwide.

Contact:

World Education Services

Communications Department

media@wes.org

(646) 779-0384




LONDON, February 27, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

It is with much sadness we report the untimely death of Irvine Sellar 82 who passed away Sunday morning after a short illness.

Irvine will always be remembered for his determination "against all odds" to create and develop The Shard, a building that changed London's skyline forever.

His career in both retailing and property stretches back more than 60 years. He was one of the fashion retailers at the heart of the Carnaby Street revolution and "swinging London" of the 1960's.

The unparalleled success of "Mates by Irvine Sellars", the UK's second largest fashion chain catering for both men and women that was a feature of High Streets up and down the country, was borne out of the street markets which once dominated many British towns.

"Mates by Irvine Sellars" was the first fashion retailer to sell men's and women's clothing from the same store.

Having sold the retailing business in the early 1980's Irvine moved into property and within a few short years headed up the Stock Exchange quoted Ford Sellar Morris which at its peak generated annual pre-tax profits of 25m and held a widely spread investment and development portfolio,

Along with other companies in the sector the 1991-3 collapse in the property market adversely affected Irvine's fortunes. But with his usual grit and determination, he picked himself up and started again.

The turning point came in November 1998 when he and two partners acquired accountants PWC's headquarters at London Bridge. Following a Government White Paper which recommended that planners should look favourably at tall buildings close to major transport hubs, Southwark Towers became the kernel for The Shard and London Bridge Quarter.

Plans for a near 1,400ft tall building were released in April 2000. A few months later the internationally renowned architect Renzo Piano was appointed to design a multi-use building that would not only be commercially successful but would also enable visitors to see London "as it had never been seen before".

The scheme was finally given the go-ahead in November 2003 following an intensive public enquiry. Construction got underway in 2008 and The Shard was inaugurated in July 2012 with a light show that brought London's traffic to a standstill.

The Shard, together with the wider London Bridge Quarter, was developed in partnership with the State of Qatar, of which Irvine was immensely proud. A partnership which continues today as construction of the third building, Shard Place, at LBQ gets underway.

Irvine was not a traditional property developer - he had no formal training in the industry, just a sharp business sense and the ability to see the wider picture. He would often remark that he was the conductor of an orchestra of professionals.

Few, if any, in the property world ever believed The Shard would be built. They thought he would never get planning consent and when he did they thought he would never be able to finance development which he did after securing two major pre-lets. It was then thought that he would never build it - but, of course he did. And then no-one thought it would be a commercial success.

Today The Shard is an incredibly popular tourist venue for those wishing to visit The View From The Shard, the Shangri-La hotel runs at near capacity, the restaurants serve thousands of covers every week, and the office space is virtually fully let at rents that have established a new level for the area.

The property industry has lost an immense and irreplaceable character whose sheer grit and determination will leave a huge void in a sector known for big characters.

Irvine leaves a wife, three children and five grandchildren.

His son James, who has worked alongside Irvine for the past 20 years, will take over running of the Sellar Group.
CSI and Boston College highlight crisis facing Lebanon's Christian Community in series of talks on The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East

BOSTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- "Without Christians, there would be no Lebanon," Professor Marius Deeb argued at a lecture at Boston College on Wednesday. In Lebanon, he said, "Christian leaders have fought to preserve a democratic polity in which all the religious groups would be equal and represented at all levels of government, and in which all basic freedoms would be protected." In the election of General Michel Aoun as Lebanon's president last month, ending two years of deadlock in which the office went unfilled, Deeb saw positive signs of a "new dialogue among Lebanese," and expected that Aoun "will accomplish a lot."

In his lecture, Professor Deeb traced in detail the history of Christian leadership in Lebanon, from the establishment of Mount Lebanon as an autonomous zone after the massacres of Christians in 1860 to the 1975-1990 Civil War. Deeb argued that the Christians' desire for a "free and open society" helped preserve Lebanese society despite the horrific violence of the war.

Deeb described President Aoun as a "remarkable man." He is a Christian who began his career fighting against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and later aligned himself with Syria's Shi'ite Muslim ally Hezbollah. In Deeb's view, the conditions for the election of Aoun as President were made possible by the declining influence in Lebanon of both Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. The energy of Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, is being absorbed in Syria, while Saudi Arabia is bogged down in Yemen.

Deeb expects that Aoun can make progress on a number of issues in Lebanon, from reintegrating the exiled South Lebanon Army, to improving relations between Israel, Syria and Lebanon, to fighting corruption and improving basic services. Despite Deeb's description of Hezbollah as "villains," he believes Aoun's relationship with them will help "prevent conflict." "Christians in the West should be supportive of Lebanon," Deeb concluded, "and of Michel Aoun in particular."

Deeb also argued that efforts should be made to restore nationality to Lebanese living abroad, most of whom are Christian. While Christians made up the majority in Lebanon at the time of independence in 1943, their proportion of the population has sharply fallen due to emigration and higher birth rates among Lebanese Muslims. If the diaspora is counted, Deeb noted, "they are at least on par with their Muslim counterparts. To count only the Christians who reside in Lebanon is totally unacceptable." The Lebanese diaspora, Deeb explained, remains an organic part of Lebanese society.

"Despite the wars and the conflicts that have ravaged their homeland," Deeb concluded, "the Christians have always rebuilt their country and continue to have faith in a better future. The religious freedom they enjoy is a model for all the Christians of the Levant and Egypt. They ring the bells of their church loudly, and show their symbols in public without fear." Deeb drew a marked contrast between Lebanon and other states in the region like Egypt, where Christians "are harassed all the time, and their churches are burned," Qatar, where the only churches were built under diplomatic pressure and have no bells or crosses, and Turkey, where nearly all the Christians were wiped out decades ago.

Marius Deeb is a retired professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and the author of Syria's Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process. The full video of Deeb's talk can be seen online at www.middle-east-minorities.com, and was part of a lecture series on The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East being held at Boston College, and sponsored by Christian Solidarity International in cooperation with the Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages & Literatures, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and the Department of Political Science, Islamic Civilization and Societies.

Contact: Alexandra Campana

alexandra.campana@csi-int.org
ST. PETER PORT, GUERNSEY -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- Avnel Gold Mining Limited ("Avnel" or the "Company") (TSX: AVK) is reporting that it has filed its unaudited Condensed Interim Consolidated Financial Statements and the related Management Discussion & Analysis ("MD&A") for the three-month and nine month periods ended September 30, 2016 on SEDAR.

Third Quarter 2016 Highlights

-- Discussions advance with banks and financial institutions on financing the Kalana Main Project -- Repairs to bridge at the Bale River completed, enabling safe delivery of heavy loads of project equipment in 2017 -- Detailed design of Tailings Dam Storage Facility ("TSF") completed and tender document for construction ready to be issued -- Tender for Engineering, Procurement and Construction Management ("EPC") for the gold plant and infrastructure issued and proposals received -- Project optimisation shows potential for project construction to be completed in 19 months, a 3 month shorter timeframe than set out in the Definitive Feasibility Study ("DFS") -- Optimisation identified potential engineering improvements to reduce cost and operation risk -- Development of Environmental Social Management Plan ("ESMP") and International Finance Corporation Performance standards advanced

Subsequent to September 30, 2016:

-- Announced infill and extension drilling programme on the Kalanako deposit and regional exploration activity in Q4 2016 and Q1 2017 -- Appointed Anne-Severine Le Doare to the Board of Directors -- Base shelf prospectus filed on SEDAR -- Appointed DRA Mineral Services and Group 5 Joint Venture to execute the EPC for the Kalana Project, subject to final contractual documentation

Outlook

A positive feasibility study for the Kalana Main Project (the "Feasibility Study") has been completed and the related Environmental and Social Impact Assessment ("ESIA") and associated Environmental and Social Management Plan ("ESMP") have been approved by the Malian authorities. The approval of the ESIA was the key government approval required to advance the Kalana Main Project towards construction as the Kalana Exploitation Permit was awarded to Avnel in 2003 with an initial term of 30 years plus two ten year extentions. The only significant government approval required to develop new mines on the permit is an ESIA and the associated ESMP. The ESIA has been prepared to conform to the requirements of the International Finance Corporation's Performance Standards, the World Bank Group's Environmental, Health, and Safety guidelines, and other financial institutions that are signatories to the Equator Principles.

The Company continues to advance the Kalana Main Project towards a construction decision through its 80% ownership in Societe d'Exploitation des Mines d'Or de Kalana, S.A. ("SOMIKA"). Discussions are progressing with banks and other financial institutions to provide financing for the development of the Kalana Main Project. Cost optimisation analysis continued in the period on the construction costs of the Kalana Main Project. The Company anticipates that the Kalana Main Project will be sufficiently advanced to consider a construction decision in 2017, subject to the availability of adequate financing on a timely basis.

With respect to operations at the small, Soviet-era, underground Kalana Mine, gold production in the nine months to September 30, 2016 was 7,181 ounces. The Company forecasts gold production of 9,000 ounces for the full year of 2016. The Company continues to sustain operations to partially offset the cost of providing underground access to facilitate due diligence activities necessary to secure mine development financing. The continued operation of the mine also helps to maintain socio-economic stability in the local community in compliance with World Bank Equatorial principles and Malian laws. The continued operation of the underground mine also helps to maintain socio-economic stability in the local community as the workforce prepares to transition to activities related to the construction and operation of the proposed Kalana Main Mine. The Company intends to sustain operations for as long as economically feasible and safe to do so, without incurring any significant capital expenditures, until such a time as the Company is able to evaluate development options for the Kalana Main Project.

Kalana Main Project Update

In preparation for the approval to commence construction of the Kalana Main Project, a number of activities have progressed during the third quarter 2016.

1. The existing road bridge across the Bale River is located on the National Route between Yanfolila and Kalana. Following an updated engineering inspection of the bridge by a South African Engineering Consultant, the company initiated a repair project with the National Roads Department. The repair work was completed in Q3 when the water level in the river allows access to bridge foundations and steelwork. The Engineering Consultant confirms the load capacity of the bridge is 100 tonnes following the repair work. This is sufficient for the maximum loads required for the project and will be safe for transport during 2017. The project cost of US$180,000 was funded by SOMIKA and two mining companies who also require this bridge for access to their projects. 2. EPOCH Resources (Pty.) Ltd., a specialist tailings storage consultant, was appointed in June 2016 to commence the final design for the TSF (Tailings Storage Facility), SWCD (Storm Water Control Dam) and WRD (Waste Rock Dump). In 2015/2016 EPOCH completed DFS design and cost estimate. EPOCH completed the detailed design for this work package, including detailed engineering drawings, a revised bill of quantities, construction specifications and complete tender document. The tender package was put out to tender in November 2016 with award of the contract expected to be in early 2017. 3. Avnel issued a tender for the EPC services for the Kalana Gold Plant and associated infrastructure. Two international Engineering Companies were selected and have submitted bids for the EPC and the company is evaluating the proposals. 4. Based on the EPC tender proposals, the project construction time table will be reduced by 3 months. On completion of Phase 1 existing tailings will be processed using the CIL and gold recovery circuits. The Feasibility Study assumed Phase 1 would be complete in month 17 and the optimized schedule is 15 months. On completion of Phase 2, the mill will be commissioned to process saprolite ore. The Feasibility Study assumed Phase 2 would be complete in month 22 and the optimized schedule is 19 months. 5. As part of the optimisation process, Avnel is in advanced discussions with an international Power Provider to the mining industry to provide an "over the fence" power supply based on a hybrid plant utilizing fossil fuel and solar energy sources. The Power Provider will fund the project capital and charge the company a rate per KwH. If implemented the capital cost in the Feasibility Study will be significantly reduced. For the first 5 years operating cost per KwH will be impacted by the recovery of capital investment. The project predicts that 20% of the power requirements will be generated from the solar plant, leading to significant cost reductions and lower environmental impact. Project risk is reduced by the power provider being contracted for the operation and maintenance of the power plant, plus the risk of any higher fossil fuel prices. 6. The process flow sheet was reviewed and a strategic decision made to incur additional capital expenditure in the up-front crushing circuits. When processing saprolite material there is potential risk that increased moisture content can lead the sticky material that can cause delays in production. Whilst the risk is considered low for Kalana saprolites, there is potential to identify additional ore resources close to Kalana, such as Kalanako, where sticky ore may be a higher risk. The engineering solution is to install a mineral sizer through which saprolite will pass directly to the mill. Mineral sizers are used in some mines in West Africa, particularly where the saprolite is stickier than Kalana saprolites. The Feasibility Study proposed saprolite would pass through a jaw crusher prior to milling. Fresh ore would also pass through the jaw crusher and then be crushed in a secondary crushing circuit. As fresh ore will not be milled until month 30 of the project, the capital expenditure for the ROM bin, jaw crusher and secondary crusher will be postponed for one year. In addition the second standby secondary crusher will be removed from the flow sheet. The impact on capital expenditure is estimated as $1.4 million for the mineral sizer circuit with a reduction of $800,000 in the secondary crushing circuit. The benefit is a strategic related to other sources of saprolite, reducing risk during the initial two years of production with saprolite being the major ore source and deferred capital. 7. SOMIKA has appointed ABS Africa, a South African Environmental Consultant, to assist in the drafting of the action plans required to comply with the ESIA and IFC Performance standards. ABS Africa prepared the ESIA completed in Q1 2016 and approved by the Malian Authorities. During Q3 significant progress has been made and the ESMS (Environmental and Social Management System) and Actions Plans will be completed Q4. ESDCO, a leading Malian Environmental Consultancy, has been appointed to provide external consultant expertise for the implementation of the approved Resettlement Action Plan ("RAP") in line with Malian legislation and IFC Performance Standards. The RAP will be implemented by a Steering Committee headed by the Prefet of Yanfolila. The Committee members include local government administration officials, representatives of Technical Agencies (environment/forestry/land usage, health and education), the Mayor of the Commune, village chiefs, associations representing youth/women/disadvantaged individuals/hunters, artisanal miners, transport companies. Recently an Association has been formed to represent the interests of impacted persons and has been formally recognised and will participate in the Committee. ESDCO completed the RAP and socio-economic study as part of the ESIA. ESDCO has a major role to play as an independent expert within the Committee. The Committee will formally commence in December 2016 after the local government elections in Mali in November. 8. An ESIA is being prepared for the 5.5 Km public road diversion around the new mine infrastructure. This will replace the existing public road to Kalana Town. The ESIA will be submitted in Q4 and approval is expected in Q1, 2017. 9. The site for the relocation of impacted persons was identified by the Community in Q1 2016. During Q3 2016 SOMIKA has completed a geotechnical survey of the site and the results provided to ESDCO urban development specialists and the Administration Authorities. The Mayor has submitted a letter to the Governor of Sikasso providing a request to allow development of an urban area south of Kalana Town for the Resettlement Action Plan. This is the first step in the formal process of approval for the new urban area.

Exploration Upside

Kalana Main Project Reserves per development stages

Although the lateral near-surface extents of the Kalana Main deposit seem to have been fairly well defined, the company believes that the deposit could be improved in grade and quality in the deepest part of both the reserve and resource pits. Indeed the drop in ore grade (from 3.1 to 2.5g/t Au) and the strong increasing of the strip ratio observed in the DFS stage 12 (reserve pit) as well as in the deep resource (not yet included into reserve), are both interpreted as being the result of 1) the less dense drilling pattern at depth; 2) the decreasing of the average DDH core diameter and subsequent sample size and 3) the lack of large RCH sample alternating with cored samples. These 3 factors cannot be entirely managed from surface and an in-pit infill exploration drilling campaign has been designed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Waste Total Reserve Tonnes Strip Tonnes Grade Ounces (Mt) Ratio (Mt) (g/t Au) (Moz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tailings - - 0.7 1.8 0.044 Stages 1 to 11 112.1 8.9 12.6 3.1 1.25 Stage 12 95.7 11.4 8.4 2.5 0.67 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total 207.8 9.9 21.7 2.8 1.964

There is also significant regional exploration potential. Avnel's exploration team has dedicated significant resources to the evaluation of regional exploration prospects outside of the Kalana Main area. This initial work is based upon historical data carried out by others, regional work conducted by Avnel and the IAMGOLD Corporation, and the Company's field surveys of active and historical orpaillage. This work, which is still ongoing, is used to prioritise targets for future exploration. An advanced geochemical survey, started in October 2016, has been designed to improve the knowledge on 3 to 5 high priority prospects, which are at the grassroots level in our exploration pipeline.

A high-priority exploration project for the Company is the Kalanako deposit. The deep weathering profile at Kalanako displays a potential free digging high-grade ore satellite located less than 3 km northeast of the Kalana Main Project proposed mill site. The Kalanako deposit currently has an Inferred in-situ resource of 0.38 Mt grading 5.55 g/t Au, containing 0.07 Moz of gold. The March 2015 Kalanako Mineral Resource Statement was completed by Denny Jones Pty Ltd, at a cut-off grade of 0.9 g/t Au based upon information from 46 diamond drill holes (9,661m) and 232 RC drill holes (24,952m); no local estimates for internal or external dilution. The current Kalanako maiden mineral resource is based on a wide drill spacing (75m x 25m). Several mineralized trends have been established from RC and diamond drilling at Kalanako, resulting in a single northwest-southeast corridor of 1,500 meters by 250 meters. These mineralized zones are less than 10 meters thick and appear to be steeply dipping, often contain high-grade intercepts near surface.

Kalanako Drilling and Regional Exploration

New drilling is expected to start mid-November 2016. This RC infill drilling campaign of 7,000m to 9,000m has been designed to improve grade continuity infilling the in-pit resource to upgrade resource classification and, using historical data as a guide, to increase the total amount of resources drilling the mineralised zones between these resource pits. The infill drilling programme will be focused on saprolite and saprock weathered domains, a depth considerably deeper than observed at Kalana Main (drillhole depth of 75-175 meters). Please refer to the press release dated October 17, 2016 for further details.

Selected Financial Information (In thousands of U.S. dollars except per share amounts) Three months ended Nine months ended September 30 September 30 --------------------------- --------------------------- 2016 2015 2016 2015 ------------- ------------- ------------- ------------- Total Revenue 2,714 2,280 8,925 8,746 Total Expenses (3,573) (3,953) (11,949) (12,034) Other income 3,747 2,498 2,304 1,707 Net profit/(loss) 2,888 825 (720) (1,581) Net profit/(loss) from continuing operations attributable to parent 3,278 1,352 533 (422) Net profit/(loss) per share attributable to parent $0.011 $0.004 $0.002 ($0.001) Weighted average shares outstanding 307,994,100 304,330,124 305,596,044 284,372,981 Balance Sheet Sept 30, 2016 Sept 30, 2015 Dec 31, 2015 --------------- --------------- --------------- Working capital surplus 6,861 10,953 8,803 Total assets 25,710 30,166 27,958 Total non-current liabilities 3,495 8,316 8,062 Shareholders' equity 34,798 34,149 32,738

Results of Operations, Nine Months Ended September 30, 2016

Total revenue increased to $8,925,000 in the nine months to September 30, 2016, from $8,746,000 in the nine months to September 30, 2015. The increase in revenue is a result of a 6% increase in the realised average sales price of gold from $1,183 per ounce in the nine months to September 30, 2015, to $1,258 per ounce in the nine months to September 30, 2016. The increase in revenue was partly offset by a 4% decrease ounces sold from 7,376 ounces in the nine months to September 30, 2015 to 7,079 ounces in the nine months to September 30, 2016.

Total expenses reduced slightly from $12,034,000 in the nine months to September 30, 2015 to $11,949,000 in the nine months to September 30, 2015. Exploration costs expensed was $392,000 in the nine months to September 2016, compared to nil in the nine months to September 2015. Operating costs per ounce of gold sold for the nine months to September 30, 2016 reduced from $1,092 per ounce to $1,053 per ounce, which is attributable to lower operating costs in the current period relative to the comparative period.

Avnel recorded a net loss of $720,000 ($0.002 attributable profit per share to parent) for the nine months ended September 30, 2016, compared to a net loss of $1,581,000 ($0.001 attributable loss per share to parent) in the nine months to September 30, 2015. Included in the nine months to September 30, 2016 is a profit on the fair value of derivative financial instruments of $2,428,000, compared to a profit of $1,897,000 in the nine months of 2015, arising from a change in the fair value of warrants outstanding and exercised. The fair value accounting gains and losses reported have no cash effect on the Company.

As compared to the interim consolidated statement of financial position as at December 31, 2015, Avnel's cash and cash equivalents as at September 30, 2016 decreased by $2,798,000, from $7,211,000 to $4,413,000. The decrease was the result of cash provided in operations of $2,621,000 and cash used in investing activities of $1,056,000, that was partly offset by the exercise of warrants and options $873,000. The Company had working capital of $6,861,000 as at September 30, 2016, compared to working capital of $8,803,000 as at December 31, 2015. Total assets decreased from $27,958,000 as at December 31, 2015 to $25,710,000 at September 30, 2016.

Total non-current liabilities reduced from $8,062,000 as at December 31, 2015 to $3,495,000 at September 30, 2016, mainly due to value of the outstanding warrants moving from a non-current liability to a current liability. The fair value of these derivative financial instruments has no cash effect on the Company.

Total stockholders' equity increased to $34,798,000 as at September 30, 2016 from $32,738,000 as at December 31, 2015.

ABOUT AVNEL GOLD

Avnel Gold is a TSX-listed gold mining, exploration and development company with operations in south-western Mali in West Africa. The Company's strategic objective is to develop the Kalana Main Project into an open-pit mining operation through its 80% ownership in SOMIKA. A secondary objective of the Company is to explore the remainder of the 387 km2 Kalana Exploitation Permit to discover new mineral deposits.

No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained in this news release.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENTS

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements". All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included in this release, including the future plans and objectives of Avnel Gold, are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from Avnel Gold's expectations include, among others, risks related to international operations, the actual results of current exploration activities, conclusions of economic evaluations and changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined as well as future prices of gold and silver, as well as those factors discussed in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in Avnel Gold's most recently completed Annual Information Form, which is available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com). Although Avnel Gold 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 or intended. 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.

Technical Information

Except where indicated, the disclosure contained or incorporated into this news release of an economic, scientific or technical nature, has been summarised or extracted from the National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") compliant technical report titled "NI43-101 Technical Report on Kalana Main Project", dated effective 1 April 2016 (the "Kalana Technical Report"), prepared by Snowden Mining Industry Consultants (Pty) Ltd. ("Snowden"), Denny Jones Ltd ("Denny Jones"), DRA Projects SA (Pty) Ltd ("DRA") and Epoch Resources (Pty) Ltd ("Epoch Resources"). The Kalana Technical Report was prepared under the supervision of Mr. Allan Earl (Executive Consultant - Mining Engineering of Snowden), Mr. Ivor Jones (Executive Consultant - Applied Geosciences of Denny Jones), Mr. Glenn Bezuidenhout (Principal Process Engineer of DRA), Mr. Sybrand van der Spuy (Civil Engineer of DRA), Mr. Guy Wiid (Principal Consultant - Tailings and Waste Rock Facilities of Epoch Resources), and Mr. Stephanus (Fanie) Coetzee (Principal Consultant - Environmental and Social of Epoch Resources), all of whom are independent "Qualified Persons" as such term is defined in NI 43-101. Readers should consult the Kalana Technical Report to obtain further particulars regarding the Kalana Project, which contains the Kalana Main Project, the Kalana Mine, plus a number of mineral exploration prospects. The Company filed the Kalana Technical Report in support of the Feasibility Study and the ESIA on SEDAR on May 6, 2016.

Non-IFRS Measures

Avnel's condensed interim consolidated financial statements have been prepared in accordance with IFRS as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board ("IASB") and the accounting policies adopted in accordance with IFRS. Management uses both IFRS and non-IFRS measures to monitor and assess the operating performance of the Company's operations. Management uses certain non-IFRS performance measures to provide additional information, as the Company believes that certain investors use these measures to assess gold mining companies. These non-IFRS performance measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. Non-IFRS performance measures do not have standardised definition under IFRS and therefore may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other organizations:

"Cost per Tonne Milled" is calculated by dividing the relevant mining and processing costs and total costs by the tonnes of ore processed in the period. Management uses this measure as a possible indication of the mining and processing efficiency of the mine.

"Cash Operating Cost" is calculated as reported production costs, which includes costs such as mining, processing, administration, non-site costs (transport and refining of metals, and community and environmental), less royalties paid. These costs are then divided by the number of ounces produced to arrive at "Cash Operating Cost per Ounce Produced" and are divided by the number of ounces sold to arrive at "Cash Operating Cost per Ounce Sold", after taking into account certain inventory movements. These terms are commonly used by gold mining companies to assess the level of gross margin available to the company, typically by subtracting Cash Operating per Ounce Sold from the average per ounce price realised during the period. These terms are also often used as an indication of a mining company's ability to generate cash flow from operations.

"On-site All-in Sustaining Cost" is defined in the PEA by Snowden as mine site cash operating costs, which includes costs such as mining, processing, administration, but excludes non-site costs (transport and refining of metals and royalties), plus sustaining capital costs, which includes community, environmental, and closure costs. These costs are then divided by the number of ounces of expected production to arrive at "On-site All-in Sustaining Cost per Ounce".

Contacts:

Avnel Gold Mining Limited

Howard Miller

Chairman and CEO

+44 207 589 9082 or UK Mobile: +44 07768 696129

Canadian Mobile: +1 416 726 8174

howard@hbmiller.co.uk



Avnel Gold Mining Limited

Ian McDonald

Vice-President, Corporate Development

+1 647 407 2515

imcdonald@avnelgold.com

www.avnelgold.com




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/11/16 -- Editors Note: There are two photos associated with this press release.

Cannabix Technologies Inc. (CSE: BLO)(CSE: BLO.CN)(CNSX: BLO)(OTC PINK: BLOZF) (the "Company or Cannabix"), developer of the Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer for law enforcement and the workplace, is pleased to release images of its Beta 2.0 Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer. New images of the device can be viewed at www.cannabixtechnologies.com.

Cannabix has been using a methodical iterative product development process to develop its marijuana breathalyzer. Using this method, the product is developed in several prototype stages with each stage used to advance the product to subsequent stages. Cannabix has systematically moved the development of the Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer from a concept stage to its Beta 2.0 prototype. The following is a chronology of development highlights:

-- August 2015 - Cannabix entered into a research and option agreement to develop a cutting-edge breath detection sensor based upon high-field ion mobility coupled with mass spectrometry in collaboration with the Yost Research Group at the University of Florida. The Yost Research Group, a world leader and pioneer in the development of high-field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry, known as FAIMS. Cannabix and The Yost Research Group began working together to identify Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC - the psychoactive component of marijuana that causes intoxication) in ultra low ranges using highly a sensitive FAIMS- mass spectrometer benchtop system. The Company entered into a definitive license agreement with the University of Florida for US Patent 8,237,118 in the summer of 2016 which provided the Company exclusive worldwide rights in the area of breath analysis of controlled substances. -- June 2016 - Cannabix Scientists and Dr. Rick Yost at the University of Florida developed a standalone desktop-sized "Beta 1.0" FAIMS based device with a proprietary configurable high voltage power supply which operated with conventional power sources. The FAIMS cell employed in "Beta 1.0" device was 4X smaller than the prior benchtop version and had achieved a 10X reduction in power supply size, which allowed for a drastically smaller footprint. The Beta 1.0 included a power supply that was readily configurable for ongoing testing and was designed to integrate with a non-radioactive ionization source. -- October 19, 2016 - Cannabix developed its "Beta 2.0" Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer with major advances in the design and size of the device, including: greater sensitivity, improved performance by the square waveform generator and a much smaller size for all components. The Beta 2.0 design included features to allow for the addition of a rechargeable battery and touch screen and the device is approximately 10 times smaller than the Beta 1.0 device. Preliminary lab tests of the FAIMS device coupled with quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometry have shown lower levels of detection for THC standards than were achieved in past testing. -- November 11, 2016 - Cannabix provides the first images of the Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer "Beta 2.0" device. Images show components housed in a durable compact black box which has been reduced in size to be a portable device. The device encompasses the latest chip technology to improve speed performance, FAIMS detection technology, conventional battery and updated square wave generator. Cannabix believes that the Beta 2.0 Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer which utilizes FAIMS detection technology is the most sensitive and scientifically proven method of detection of volatile compounds found at trace levels in exhaled breath.

The Beta 2.0 prototype encompasses a robust detection system and components platform that will be used in an eventual finalized product for manufacturing. The Beta 2.0 prototype has provided excellent sensitivity in lab testing and will be utilized to conduct scientific studies with live marijuana users (smokers and edible consumers) to test the device for its accuracy and sensitivity using a controlled scientific testing protocol. The results of the scientific test will be used to prepare submissions for approval of the Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer as a court-approved device by the Minister of Justice in Canada and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the United States. In addition, law enforcement officials and regulators for the Minister of Justice and the NHTSA will be consulted regarding additional features, roadside protocol, ease of use, and to define a final housing design for a finished product.

The scientific testing protocol will be designed by the Cannabix's Dr. Raj Attariwala, with input from the Company's team of exceptional Scientific Advisors. Additional input on the trial testing will be sought from consultants who are familiar with obtaining regulatory approvals for court certified device from the Minister of Justice in Canada and the NHTSA in the USA.

Professor Richard Yost, Head of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Florida and Scientific Advisor on the FAIMS Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer states:

"When Cannabix first approached our lab with the goal of building a device that could detect trace amounts of THC through exhaled breath, we were excited to face the challenge. We have been able to use our expertise and patent in FAIMS technology and build a device that achieves the required sensitivity and specificity but also will be a handheld portable device, similar to alcohol breathalyzers. We are extremely pleased and proud to be working on the design of a portable Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer that will be used by Law Enforcement to collect evidence of impaired driving and ensure safety on our roads as marijuana use becomes accepted in society and its use continues to grow."

About Cannabix Technologies Inc.

Cannabix Technologies Inc. is a leader in marijuana breathalyzer development for law enforcement and the workplace. Cannabix has established breath testing technologies in the pursuit of bringing durable, portable hand-held tools to market to enhance detection of marijuana impaired driving offences on roads at a time when marijuana is becoming legal in many global jurisdictions. Cannabix is working to develop drug-testing devices that will detect THC - the psychoactive component of marijuana that causes intoxication - using breath samples. In particular, Cannabix is focused on developing breath testing devices for detection of recent use of THC, in contrast to urine testing for THC metabolite that requires an invasive collection and reflects use days or even weeks earlier. The devices will also be useful for other practical applications such as testing employees in the workplace where intoxication by THC can be hazardous.

We seek Safe Harbor.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

Rav Mlait, CEO, Cannabix Technologies Inc.

The CSE has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking information that involves various risks and uncertainties regarding future events. Such forward-looking information can include without limitation statements based on current expectations involving a number of risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance of the Company, such as final development of a commercial or prototype product(s), successful trial or pilot of company technologies, no assurance that commercial sales of any kind actually materialize; no assurance the Company will have sufficient funds to complete product development. 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, including: (i) adverse market conditions; (ii) risks regarding protection of proprietary technology; (iii) the ability of the Company to complete financings; (v) the ability of the Company to develop and market its future product; and (vi) risks regarding government regulation, managing and maintaining growth, the effect of adverse publicity, litigation, competition and other factors which may be identified from time to time in the Company's public announcements and filings. There is no assurance that the marijuana breathalyzer business will provide any benefit to the Company, and no assurance that any proposed new products will be built or proceed. There is no assurance that existing "patent pending" technologies licensed by the Company will receive patent status by regulatory authorities. The Company is not currently selling commercial breathalyzers. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. These and all subsequent written and oral forward-looking information are based on estimates and opinions of management on the dates they are made and are expressly qualified in their entirety by this notice. Except as required by law, the Company does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.

To view the photos associated with this release, please visit the following links:

www.marketwire.com/library/20161111-cannabix1111photo1px800.jpg

www.marketwire.com/library/20161111-cannabix1111photo2px800.jpg

Contacts:

Cannabix Technologies Inc.

(604) 551-7831

info@cannabixtechnologies.com

www.cannabixtechnologies.com




Immusoft, a Seattle, Wash.-based gene therapy company, closed on $2.74m of a $3m funding round.

The round, which was oversubscribed and expected to be closed soon, was led by Founders Funds FF Science and Technium Partners.

The company intends to use the funds to submit its Investigational New Drug application and expand business operations.

Founded in 2009 by Matthew Scholz, CEO, Immusoft has developed the Immune System Programming (ISP) technology, which reprograms patient B cells to treat diseases to produce gene-encoded medicines (biologics).

FinSMEs

11/11/2016
Imax Corporation (NYSE: IMAX) and Imax China Holding, Inc. (HKSE: 1970) have completed the first phase of a $50m virtual reality fund.

The fund will finance the creation of at least 25 interactive VR content experiences over the next three years for use across all VR platforms including in IMAX VR centres.

Subscribers, including Imax, Acer, Creative Artists Agency, China Media Capital, Enlight Media, The Raine Group, Studio City, and WPP, will focus on financing the creation of premium, event-style productions with its Hollywood studio and filmmaker partners that complement IMAXs film slate, as well as gaming publishers and other content developers.

The launch of the fund is also related to Imax efforts to provide its upcoming Imax VR centres an ongoing array of interactive content experiences that let users see, feel, move and play in new worlds in an immersive and realistic way.

The company, which is already in advanced discussions with numerous content developers  including Hollywood studios and gaming publishers  intends to utilize the cinema-grade virtual reality camera that it is currently developing in partnership with Google for several of the projects.

Imax is in the process of launching its first pilot Imax VR centres in Los Angeles and at ODEON & UCI Cinemas Groups Printworks multiplex location in Manchester, England. The company is also targeting additional test facilities in China, Japan, the U.S., the Middle East and Western Europe in the coming months.

FinSMEs

10/11/2016
Kinematix, a Porto, Portugal-based wearable device for runners, closed a 2M funding round.

Portugal Ventures made the investment.

The company, which has raised 9.6m in total funding, intends to use the funds to launch TUNE in Brazil.

Expand Wearable Market Leadership in US and European Union to Helps Runners Unlock Their Full Potential to Run Smart.

Led by Paulo dos Santos, CEO, Kinematix provides TUNE, a wearable device for runners that measures basic GPS stats such as pace or speed as well as each foots behaviour on the ground via sensors in-shoe (stance dynamics, stance time, strides, and symmetry) to allow users to improve their form and fitness. The data collected from the insoles is automatically synced with the TUNE app on a smartphone or smartwatch and combined with each runners personal profile. All this information is then processed in the cloud to build and deliver personalized exercise plans.

FinSMEs

11/11/2016
Morgenthaler Private Equity (MPE), a Cleveland, OH and Boston, MA-based lower middle market private equity firm, closed its oversubscribed second fund, at $250m.

MPE Partners II was subscribed by more than 30 investors including global asset management firms, insurance companies, family offices, foundations, and high net worth individuals.

Led by Karen Tuleta, Peter Taft and Joe Machado, Morgenthaler Private Equity invests in lower middle market leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, and build-ups in high-value manufacturing and industrial services. It targets North American companies with transaction values of up to $150m as platform investments and seeks strategic add-on acquisitions globally.

MPE has invested in companies such as:

 dlhBOWLES, a designer and manufacturer of engineered plastics and fluid flow solutions for the automotive, consumer, and industrial markets;

 Trachte, a manufacturer of pre-assembled control buildings;

 B&E Group, a manufacturer of complex, precision machined aerospace and defense components and provider of overhaul and repair services for commercial aviation;

 Polytek, a manufacturer of specialty chemicals for industrial and consumer applications; and

 United Pipe & Steel, an independent master distributor of steel pipe, copper tubing, plastic pipe, electrical conduit, and related products.

FinSMEs

11/11/2016
SentiOne, a Warsaw, Poland-based online monitoring platform for teams and enterprises, raised $3.5m in funding.

Backers included Venture TFI and Trigon TFI Group.

The company is using the funds to expand operations.

Led by Bartosz Bazinski, Michal Brzezicki, and Kamil Bargiel, SentiOne provides over 2000 brands with a social listening and engagement software platform covering 26 European markets.

The platform enables clients to collect real-time consumer insights, boost online sales by finding hot social leads, measure reach of online campaigns, control online reputation, improve webcare, identify brand ambassadors and track social media KPIs.

FinSMEs

11/11/2
Utegration LLC, a Houston, TX-based provider of consulting, customization, and implementation solutions to the utility industry, received an investment from Riordan, Lewis & Haden | Equity Partners (RLH).

The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

Led by Bin Yu, President and CEO, Utegration is a full service SAP consulting company focused on the Utilities industry. It specializes in implementing, and supporting, SAP solutions such as CR&B, BI, AMI and mobility applications for customer centric Utilities.

provides its clients with consulting, customization, and implementation solutions to upgrade their systems for customer billing and service and to improve the software infrastructure that manages the network of advanced meters at customer locations.

The company, which has an office in Karnataka, India, partners with SAP and was listed as a Vendor to Watch in a November 2015 Gartner report, Market Trends: How Service Providers Can Differentiate for Business Process Optimization Services.

FinSMEs

11/11/2016
New Delhi: With the Rs 100 currency note performing a Houdini act, rumour, panic, and unexplained fear hit the city on Thursday leading to a maddening rush at branches of banks and post office counters across Delhi as banks reopened after a day-long closure following the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

Amidst the hullabaloo, the worst-hit were the senior citizens and women, who were found waiting patiently in queues outside banks. The long serpentine queues that spilled over the main roads of the city caused severe traffic jams, leading to chaos on prominent arteries of the city. The chaos began early as hundreds of citizens had started queueing up outside banks and post offices from as early as 7 am, to be among the earliest ones to have their old currency notes exchanged.

The trouble was compounded as the new Rs 2,000 notes were dispensed in greater numbers when compared to the humble Rs 100 notes, which made it difficult for the service class and small vendors to buy items of daily need. That coloured the mood of the people who have supported Prime Minister Narendra Modi's war against black money but wished it didn't come with the attendant troubles of having little ready cash in hand to make essential purchases.

I have only one Rs 1,000 and two Rs 500 notes in my pocket, but I couldnt buy any vegetables or groceries. I had to borrow Rs 5 to get photocopies of my identity-proofs so that I could exchange my currency today. It has been so difficult as no one was ready to accept these notes and refund the amount, said Rajkumar Singh, a security guard, who was waiting in a queue for his turn to come.

Also, the Reserve Bank of India, public and private-sector bank branches, and post offices witnessed a huge rush all through Thursday. At many bank branches, cash ran out within the first three hours causing chaos.

And at every location visited by the Firstpost team, immense frustration was palpable among the public.

Modijis step to curb black money is appreciated, but what have I to do with it? I dont have any black money. I have been standing in this queue for the last three hours to exchange the Rs 2,000 I have with me. No one in the market is ready to refund even Rs 50. If I dont get new currency notes today, I wont be able to buy my groceries. Rs 100 notes have vanished entirely. The government should have thought about the aam aadmi while making this announcement, said Shailender Kumar, who was in a queue at the Delhi GPO (Gol Dak Khana).

A large number of people complained that waiting for hours didnt result in much as they received Rs 2,000 currency notes  which would be difficult for them to use while making payments.

Due to the shortage of Rs 100 notes, no one is giving change. If you go to petrol pump, you have to buy petrol worth Rs 500 or Rs 1,000. Even at Metro stations, commuters are compelled to get a recharge of Rs 500, complained Sarita Ahuja, a homemaker.

According to a few traders, rumour and panic have led to a situation where hoarding of Rs 100 currency notes has begun.

However, the RBI and other bank officials clarified that people need not panic as sufficient Rs 100 currency notes are available.

BS Shekhawat, general manager (Delhi zone), Central Bank of India told Firstpost, Banks are not holding back any currency notes. In exchange for banned currency notes, we are disbursing a mix of Rs 2,000 and Rs 100 notes. Weve received Rs 100 notes from the RBI in large number for public distribution. Since, today is the first day, theres a panic amongst public, but itll be normal by the weekend. Weve opened extra counters and diverted extra staff members from administrative offices to deal with the situation on war-footing, so that customers dont have any problem. From Friday, ATMs will be operational as well.
Auto refresh feeds

Rs 500 and Rs 1000 denominations are equal to piece of paper from tonight midnight (8 November 2016).

"You have 50 days to return the old notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 to your respective bank from 10 November 2016 to 30 December 2016. The banks, however, will have a cap on how much cash can be withdrawn  Rs 10,000 daily and Rs 20,000 weekly."

New Rs 2,000 note that will be soon issued

New Rs 2,000 note that will be soon issued

"And no one should blame me if I take tough decisions after the 30th. This money belongs to the countrys poor. No one has the right to loot this. This is my commitment. I am working with full force and will continue the effort," he had said.

Apparently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had given a fair warning to all the black money hoarders in this interview with CNN-News18 in September this year. Replying to a question on if he intended to carry forward his tough line on curbing black money, Modi had urged those with undeclared wealth to take advantage of the disclosure scheme before the deadline of September 30 and return to into the mainstream.

A lawyer by profession, Kamboj said that he understands the legal consequences of doing any such thing. "I know I can land up in big trouble if I do something so foolish. What Kejriwal is doing is nothing more than dirty politics. He will see what will happen to him in Punjab."

There were various news reports about the probable introduction of new notes. What was new in that? Kamboj added.

Rubbishing Kejriwal's claims, Kejriwal said: I had only written that new notes would soon be introduced. But nowhere I had talked about or even mentioned banning of the old notes.

Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday alleged that BJP had informed its 'friends' beforehand about its decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes, to help them fix their black money.

Firstpost reporter Amitesh Singh spoke to Sanjeev Kamboj, co-convener of BJP's law and legal affairs department in Punjab, who had tweeted the picture of Rs 2,000 notes on 6 November.

Only tweeted about new notes, not ban on Rs 500, Rs 1,000: BJP leader Sanjeev Kamboj tells Firstpost

The step is being taken after it was observed that same people have been withdrawing money, again and again, misusing the facility and not giving a chance to others to exchange their money. 

The government has decided to use indelible ink to mark people who exchange cash over the counter in the banks.

Indelible ink to be used to mark people who exchange cash in the banks: Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das

Are you willing to give PM Modi 50 days to make good on his promise?

"Government should allow old Rs 500 notes to remain in circulation along with the new notes. Also, Rs 100/50/10 notes must be made easily available. Rs 1,000 notes may be withdrawn when circulation improves by 30 December, or at your discretion. No need for anymore faltu, action-less announcements. Sometimes blunders lead to more more blunders," says the West Bengal Chief Minister.

In a series of tweets on Friday, Mamata Banerjee said that there are ways that the government can restore normalcy and help people.

"Such tax evasion activities can be made subject to income tax and penalty," ANI reported. The ministry added that thos who allow their accounts to be misused will be prosecuted."However, genuine people having their own household savings in cash and depositing the same will not be questioned," the ministry was quoted as saying by ANI.

Announcing that small deposits made in banks of artisans, workers, housewives will not be questioned by Income Tax Department, the finance ministry said that there are reports that a few people were "using other's accounts to convert their black money into new denomination notes."

The Opposition parties are not wrong  this could have been planned better and the government is not giving us all the facts. The truth is the government did have a plan. Not for recalibration  for which it has come under severe attack  but for the preemptive calibration of ATMs. If this plan had run its course, it could have considerably smoothened the currency exchange at ATMs. But the plan ground to a halt even before it took off. But more on that later.

And the answer is yes and no.

An entire population of 1.25 billion is living in misery, craving something they already have: A strange contradiction of shortage in abundance. The only question that everyone is asking is: Did Prime Minister Narendra Modi send a country into war against black money without planning?

"What is the difficulty? " the bench asked Rohatgi. The AG explained the situation by stating that after printing, the currency has to be moved to thousands of centres across the country and ATMs have to be re-calibrated. "There is no shortage of funds," he said.

At the outset, the bench questioned the relief measures undertaken by the Centre by saying, "Last time you said there will be relief for people in the coming days but you have squeezed the exchange limit to Rs 2,000 only."

"It's a political attempt in the court. I have seen your (Sibal's) press conference also. You are not appearing for a political party, but for an advocate. You are turning the apex court into a political platform," Rohatgi said.

The Attorney General (AG) Mukul Rohatgi in his response, said there is no dispute, but the queues are getting shorter and even suggested that the Chief Justice of India can go out during lunch and himself look at the queue. "Kindly go in the lunch time," the AG told the bench and took objection to senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for a private party, for allegedly exaggerating the situation.

"We have also come to know that corruption through new notes has already started. Such reports are surfacing in newspapers and especially on the social media," he said, claiming the goal of unearthing black money and weeding out fake currency notes will not be achieved.

On the Centre's stand that demonetisation will check corruption, Akhilesh said cases of graft involving new currency notes are already making news in some parts of the country.

Talking to reporters in Lucknow on Friday after presiding over a Cabinet meeting, Akhilesh Yadav said, "The meeting was of the opinion that farmers should get relaxation in use of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes...cooperative banks to which farmers are directly linked should get relaxation as money is not promptly reaching bank branches."

SC made the remarks as Attorney General (AG) Mukul Rohatgi submitted that any matter relating to challenge to the demonetisation issue be heard by the apex court only.

"Some measures are required. See the kind of problems people are facing. People have to go to the high court. If we shut them from going to the high court, how can we know the magnitude of the problem. People going to different courts indicates the magnitude of the problem," the bench said.

"It is a serious issue which requires consideration," a bench comprising Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justice A R Dave said, while asking the parties to be ready with data and other issues in writing. The apex court also refused Centre's request to put on hold petitions pending in various high courts challenging the decision to demonetise.

Coming down heavily on the Narendra Modi government for not taking the issue seriously, the Supreme Court on Friday questioned the move to reduce the exchange limit of old notes from Rs 4,500 to Rs 2,000. The apex court added that the situation was serious and there are possibilities of riots breaking out.

"We are not against demonetisation. We are against the hardships being faced by poor people due to mismanagement in implementing this scheme," Ravat said, when he was detained and taken away by police.

Those who have been detained include Vadodara Congress president Prashant Patel and General Secretary of Gujarat Congress Narendra Ravat.

In Vadodara, at least 100 Congress workers were detained from different parts for trying to block the roads. While two Congress workers were detained for setting fire to tyres on Ahmedabad-Vadodara highway on the city outskirts, around 100 have been detained for blocking an internal city road at Dandiya Bazar area.

Slamming the Centre over faulty implementation of the demonetisation drive, Mayawati said that the government has unleashed an Economic Emergency on the nation and the party does not care how people of the nation are suffering.

Just like Samajwadi Party, BJP is digging its own grave before Uttar Pradesh elections: Mayawati

He then said that India trusts its citizens who will make the country emerge successful after "this test of fire".

"But I see your support. Despite so many attempts to dissuade you, you have understood this move for the welfare of this nation," said the Prime Minister. "The entire world is watching this move. Every economist is analysing this move. The world is watching whether 1.25 crore Indians, despite difficulties, will achieve success."

"But for 70 years, we have been tolerating the disease of corruption and black money. The cure to that disease cannot be simple," he said.

"When I had taken this decision, I had said that this is full of difficulties. And the implementation of this decision was also bound to be difficult. I knew about the kind of difficulties people would have to face," Modi said. "I knew that it will definitely take 50 days to come out of the effect [of demonetisation]," he added.

"A lot of people have asked me to talk more about the currency ban," said the Prime Minister, as he began talking about demonetisation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday talked about the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on the radio programme 'Mann Ki Baat' and appealed to the people of India to help him create a "less-cash society".

Sources have told CNN-News18 that the central government has stepped up the printing of the new Rs 500 notes. The news channel also reported that the shortage in Rs 500 notes will be over by the end of December.

Old Rs 500 notes at petrol pumps and for airline tickets will be accepted till 2 December as against 15 December announced earlier, reports PTI.

Exactly a month ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced scrapping of high denomination notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000. On Thursday, Opposition parties and Members of Parliament protested outside the Parliament House.

Modi said, "The government's decision has several gains for farmers, traders, labourers, who are the economic backbone of our nation. I always said that the government's measure will bring a degree of inconvenience but this short term pain will pave way for long term gains. No longer will the progress and prosperity of rural India be curtailed by corruption and black money. Our villages must get their due. We also have a historic opportunity to embrace increased cashless payments and integrate latest technology in economic transactions."

In a series of tweets, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the government never denied that the demonetisation drive will not be inconvenient, but "this short term pain will pave way for long term gains."

I always said that the Government's measure will bring a degree of inconvenience: Modi

Slamming the government, West Bengal Chief Minister on her Facebook page slammed the move and said, "One month of harassment, pain, hopelessness, financial insecurity and utter chaos."

Leading members of Opposition took to social media to speak on demonetisation. 8 December marks one month since the Modi government scrapped high-denomination notes and introduced the new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes.

The Opposition parties will meet with BJP leaders as well at around 12 pm on Thursday to discuss demonetisation.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has announced that it will hold a party meet at 9.30 am on Thursday. According to CNN-News18, the party meet will discuss demonetisation and will be broadcast live. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be addressing the nation as well, the news channel said.

PM said Congress had chance to clean the system in 1971, but it didnt | ANI

'It's a pity that this opposition party, who fought against the Congres both inside the Congress and outside the Congress are ready to work with Congress. Trinamool Congress, CPI (M) are with Congress. Even DMK who had taken talaq from Congress are rallying behind it. They don't even know what their leader is going to talk about. The congress regime was filled with scams. They will have to explain it to the people," he added.

'It's ironic to see that government is fighting corruption, and the opposition is opposing it. Many people are shaken because vested interests are shaken. They are trying to create panic in the public. And therefore, they are trying to tarnish Prime Minster's image,' Venkaiah Naidu said.

It's ironic that parties which opposed Congress are now supporting it: Venkaiah Naidu

Unlike Gandhi, who in a letter dated 24 August, 1974, to all chief ministers, sought selective action against bigger people that could be publicised to counter the perception in the public mind and in Parliament, Modi and his officers were well prepared in advance to scrutinise the shades of unaccounted stash in the country, even if that meant severe criticism of his government.

Modi is not Indira Gandhi and 2016 is not 1974 when TA Pai, the then Union Minister for heavy industry told Gandhi: "Currency has no complexion and it is neither white nor black." (Declassified black money files of prime ministers office, no 37 (465)/74 PMS).

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a televised address on 8 November, told the nation that the existing Rs 500 and 1,000 notes can no longer be used for transactions and they are now mere pieces of papers, he very well knew that a huge number of zero-balance accounts were going to witness sudden activity from the very next morning.

Narendra Modi did what Indira suggested was not for her to do

This means that these notes will not be acceptable for transactions from midnight onwards. The 500 and 1,000 rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements will become just worthless pieces of paper.

To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the 500 rupee and 1,000 rupee currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight, that is 8th November 2016.

As (Narendra) Modi gets ready to address the nation on 31 December in a stock-taking speech, sober watchers of the game may find no nail-biting finish or clear winner. We might need to use something resembling the Duckworth-Lewis method that cricket scorers use when rains or disruptions mar a match.

As time to submit demonetised notes comes to a close today, people queue up outside RBI offices across India

The government is also planning to come out with an Ordinance making possession of old Rs 500/1,000 notes beyond a specified limit for numismatic purposes illegal and punishable.

People, however, will still have time to exchange the currency notes at designated RBI counters till 31 March after giving valid reasons for not depositing defunct notes in their accounts by 30 December.

The 50-day deadline to deposit the old Rs 500/1,000 notes in banks comes to an end today, but the cash crunch and queues before ATMs are likely to continue for some more time as currency printing presses have failed to meet the huge demand for new bills.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to address the nation on Saturday after his self-imposed deadline of 50-days for the situation to return to normal ends. While some people are hoping for an extension in the deadline, the government maintained it had no plans to do so.

The deadline to deposit old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in banks ends today. From next week onward, those still holding the scrapped currency can deposit it only with the Reserve Bank of India till 31 March, 2017. After 31 March, holding demonetised notes would be illegal and could invite hefty fines and even jail, according to an ordinance passed by the Union Cabinet on Wednesday.

Post #DeMonetisation Govt. to roll out massive campaign. PM's address to the nation on Dec 31st will be beginning of this campaign: Sources

PM Modi could launch massive campaign in his address on New Year

Meanwhile, the RBI's image seems to have been dented significantly during the period. Post the announcement, the action mostly happened in Delhi and the central bank was relegated to the background. Moreover, the frequent rule changes, mostly dictated by the political bosses in Delhi, unfairly affected the central bank's image.

The man who is complaining the most is the one who is affected and that is not the common man, believes Bijoor. He places Modis popularity on a ratio of 80:20 with 80 percent having welcomed the bold move of the PM.

The common man is in the mood to forgive the prime minister as he realises that demonetisation is a big task that irritants like more than 60 policy flip-flops after the announcement of the scheme can be tolerated, says Harish Bijoor, chief executive officer of brand and business strategy firm Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

The brand Modi might have received a good boost after the demonetisation drive, however, the brand RBI, the monetary authority in charge of the Indian currency, may have taken a huge drubbing, brand experts told Firstpost's Sulekha Nair .

The cash crunch in cities seems to be easing. Just for a lark i went to 5-10 different ATMs on diff days and all yielded cash Queues shorter

(Cont) to deposit the same in any Issue Office of Reserve Bank or a currency chest on December 31, 2016 itself: RBI

SBNs (Specified bank notes) cannot form part of banks cash balances from the close of business as on December 31, 2016: RBI

Specified bank notes (SBNs) cannot form part of banks' cash balances from the close of business as on 31 December, 2016 to deposit the same in any Issue Office of Reserve Bank or a currency chest on 31 December, 2016 itself, RBI said.

Bihar: Tattered demonetised notes of Rs 500 found by locals in Gopalganj. Police on the spot for further investigation #DeMonetisation pic.twitter.com/QmYMDbFRsF

As time to submit demonetised notes comes to a close today, people queue up outside Reserve Bank of India's Kolkata branch #DeMonetisation pic.twitter.com/Ct3HHxhoMP

Delhi: Today being the last day to submit demonetised notes, people seen queuing up outside RBI #DeMonetisation pic.twitter.com/LjhkeRdacC

As time to submit demonetised notes comes to a close today, people queue up outside RBI offices across India

Fearing a jump in footfalls to deposit or withdraw cash following the demonetisation of Rs 500 and 1,000 banknotes, banks will remain open this Saturday and Sunday and its staff will do overtime till 9 pm for the next three days to clear the rush.

Banks also announced a slew of measures, including extension of banking hours, doing away with ATM charges and expanding credit limits to handle the expected huge rush to tender now defunct Rs 500 and 1000 notes.

Bankers have also been advised not to take additional leaves for the next one month, during which the government has asked holders of over 22 billion currency notes that are no longer legal tender, to deposit them in bank accounts.

For public convenience, banks will remain open on coming Saturday and Sunday, Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das tweeted.

The Reserve Bank also came out with an order instructing all the banks to be open for business on the coming weekend, including Sunday. RBI also said ATMs will remain shut tomorrow as well.

The nation's largest lender State Bank of India was among the first to announce an extension in banking hours, till 6 pm tomorrow and also said each of its branches will be having a dedicated 'exchange counter' to change the currency notes.

ICICI Bank Managing Director and CEO Chanda Kochhar said the bank's branches will be open till 8 pm on Thursday and Friday. The bank also introduced a slew of relaxations on the electronic payments or withdrawals front.

All charges pertaining to cash deposit into one's accounts will be waived till 30 November and the fees for

transacting at ATMs will also be scrapped till 31 December, ICICI Bank said in a statement.

It has also doubled the daily usage limit of debit cards for use at merchant ends as well as online transactions.

Axis Bank has also waived cash handling charges, and done away with the five free transactions a month limit on its own ATMs and extended banking hours, its president Rajiv Anand told PTI.

While making the announcement to discontinue Rs 500 and 1,000 banknotes yesterday, the government had also announced closure of bank branches and ATMs today. It also announced the launch of newer notes of Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 from 10 November.

People holding to the older notes will be very keen to do away with them and also get the newer series banknotes of higher denomination when the bank branches reopen tomorrow. ICICI Bank said it is ensuring that Rs 2000 and the existing notes of Rs 100 notes are available at its 'main branches' from tomorrow.

It also announced an expansion of up to 20 per cent in the credit limits for 'worthy' customers using its credit cards.

Anand said there is no need for the customers to panic and appealed them to defer their visits to branches, pointing out that there is a 50-day limit to change the older notes.

Anand said the bank also expects a significant jump in alternate channels like the newly introduced UPI, points of sale terminals and mobile and online banking because of the RBI moves.

Kotak Mahindra Bank joint managing director Dipak Gupta said apart from the cultural change in adopting digital faster, we should also see a surge in activation of new bank accounts.

In the biggest-ever move to curb black money, and crime funding Prime Minister Narendra Modi had last night announced that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bank notes would become illegal tenders from last midnight and massively curbed cash withdrawals through ATMs and from bank counters.

"In order to meet the anticipated heavy demand from members of the public to conduct their banking transactions, it has been decided that banks shall remain open for public transactions on Saturday, 12 November, and Sunday, 13 November, 2016," RBI said in a statement.

Banks are advised to keep all their branches open on 12 and 13 November, 2016, as regular working days for

transacting all business, it said.

RBI also asked banks to give due publicity to the availability of banking services on these days.

As per the normal schedule, the coming Saturday being the second would have been an holiday, but keeping in view the expected rush at the branches, it was decided otherwise. It is, however, not clear whether post offices would be open or not on the weekend. There are about 1.25 lakh post offices across the country.

At the same time, the government and RBI are yet to take a call on keeping banks open on Monday, 14 November, which is a holiday.

There are about 149 scheduled commercial banks, including 56 regional rural banks, with branch network of about 1.30 lakh across the country. Besides, the cooperative banks have also been asked to take deposit and exchange the old with the new one.

The first demonetisation happened under the British rule in 1946 and the first one after the Independence on 16-17 January, 1978 when the Morarji Desai government demonetised bank notes of Rs 1000, 5000 and 10,000 notes.

The news triggered panic and people started queueing up at all ATMs or CDMs to either withdraw money or deposit Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

The banned Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes account for over 86 per cent of the total Rs 16.42 lakh crore value of bank notes in circulation as of 31 March, 2016, according to Reserve Bank's latest annual report.

For convenience of customers, Financial Services Secretary Anjuly Chib Duggal said banks will be working extra hours.

Meanwhile, SBI said all branches will remain open tomorrow with extended business hours up to 6 pm.

Kochhar said branch timings will be extended by two hours on 10-11 November and branches at prominent locations will remain open from 8 am to 8 pm.

Many other banks like HSBC and PNB has also announced extension of working hours.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the entire nation by surprise with his announcement of announcement of phasing out of the existing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. A stunned nation admired the initiative as a landmark step for effacing the scourge of black money. I too joined the ranks of those who marvelled at the sheer audacity of the measure. But now that the initial euphoria is behind us, the massive chaos the move has spawned more clearly perceptible and being wiser from a more nuanced analysis, I feel obligated to make amends for my initial cheerleading of the move.

So here are important problems with the move that should make us all reconsider our exuberant celebration of it:

Poor bleeding

The abrupt phasing-out has led to widespread panic as people are running helter-skelter to get rid of their stock of such notes. The worst victims of such panic are the poor and the marginalised.

First, taking advantage of their panic and information asymmetry, many unscrupulous elements are shortchanging them. Reports are pouring in how people are being fooled into exchanging Rs 1,000 notes for Rs 100 notes worth a much lower value as the demand of Rs 100 notes outstrips supply. I myself came across many such poor vendors in the market who had agreed to bad deals due to the panic.

Second, there are long lines at the banks with workers and daily labourers  who are losing out on their day's wage  just waiting in these long lines to have their turn. Such an inconvenience is being faced most by those who are poor and lack any connections to avoid the queue whereas the powerful just have to tap into their connections. Since my father is a civil servant, I can tell from personal knowledge that in this circle, getting the notes changed is just a phone call's work.

Third, those who live in remote places with no access to banking facilities and no bank accounts, have been the worst hit. Many of these places are so remote and disconnected that their residents will have to spend days worrying about getting rid of these notes.

Fourth, many poor people who have saved large amounts in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes for events such as marriages are feeling trapped. Since the government has imposed restriction on amounts that can be changed in a day, they will now be forced to make multiple trips or be burdened with producing proofs of income (most people in informal employment have no income documentation).

Finally, the poorest of the poor, the most marginalised, who have no ID proof, will pay the highest price as they can't exchange their lifelong savings in these notes through banks and thus are left high and dry.

The fact that the move was painful was also foreseen by Modi when he implored the public to bear the pain for the greater good.

But even the prime minister could not have predicted it would be this painful and part of the blame lies with him as he could have made the system better equipped to deal with the load and taken steps to address impact on financially excluded sections on the margins of the society.

But a number of shopkeepers, vegetables vendors and traders with whom I interacted, even while making the above observations, were actually appreciative of the step as they hoped that the hardships that they faced were worth it as the move may benefit the nation.

But even if the selfless poor of our nation are ready to bleed in the cause of common good, it does disconcert me that it is always the poor who are asked to suffer for the greater good.

Besides, even the belief that it serves the common good merits greater scrutiny.

Economic activity disrupted

The sensational style  characteristic of Modi  in which the announcement was made and then legends spun around it has had the adverse effect of generating chaos that has disrupted economic activity.

First, the workforce, that is frittering its time in long ques at the banks, is an economic loss, as so many productive hours are lost and production adversely affected.

Secondly, the withdrawal of the the larger denominations has made transactions in the markets more difficult and adversely affected economic activity there.

Finally, it is a chapter from Economics 101 that stability, continuity and predictability in public policy facilitate economic growth. But when there is already so much uncertainty due to a fragile global environment, the government has injected more uncertainty through its decision. The prices of gold, commodities and real estate are swinging like crazy. Such wild fluctuations are detrimental to investment and growth, and will depress investments when we need them most.

Black money will be unaffected, may even prosper

Despite the economic cost as well as the burden falling most on the poor, the policy will fall far short in its touted aim of handing a deadly blow to black money due to multiple reasons.

First, most of the black money is with the top quartile of the population. They keep it in non-cash assets such as property, stock markets and real estate. Also the big fish have a substantial portion of their black money in foreign accounts which again won't be affected by this.

Second, the small portion of black money that is in cash in these denominations can easily be converted to smaller denominations. For example, under the conditions imposed say one person converts Rs 2 lakh with a simple ID proof, to convert Rs 2 crore of black money, only 100 employees are needed.

Thirdly, many bureaucrats in the railways, postal services and other government departments, where the denotified currencies are allowed in their public dealings, are getting their currency changed from these offices without even requiring IDs.

Fourth, the panic that has spread is, in fact, allowing many of the bank employees to earn black money. For instance, they can simply adjust who is exchanging above the specified limit against others who have exchanged below the limit specified and demand a cut for doing so, thereby increasing black money generation.

Finally, the claim of the move reducing black money in the political economy suffers from serious flaw. Political parties don't declare donations below Rs 20,000. So all they have to do to convert their larger denominations to show them as donations from smaller anonymous donors and then they can convert as much as they like, as it will become their legal money.

Lessons from the past

As a sum of all that has been discussed above, India's three experiments with demonetisation in the past were giant failures. They had no significant impact on black money which continued to thrive.

It's said those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it and thus our amnesia is making us embrace the same measure that has failed in the past.

The wise are not so forgetful. This is why former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has not joined the chorus of celebration around the move.

It is human nature to believe that things are improving and so, we are hoping that this chaotic move  which gives the appearance that at least something is being done to curb black money  will prove to be the panacea. But make-believe theatrical actions cannot become a substitute for real meaningful steps that tackle the root problem of black money generation.

The sooner we realise it, the faster we will attain the aim, that we are falsely assuming to be achieved through this decision.
By Aditi Shah and Abhirup Roy

| MUMBAI

MUMBAI Tata Sons has called shareholder meetings at group companies including Tata Motors and Tata Steel in an attempt to drive out former chairman Cyrus Mistry from the operating businesses of the $100 billion steel-to-software conglomerate. Tata Motors Ltd, which owns luxury brand Jaguar Land Rover, said on Friday Tata Sons had called an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to vote on ousting Mistry as a director on the board of the automaker.Tata Sons has a 26.51 percent stake in Tata Motors.Holding company Tata Sons has also called EGMs at Indian Hotels CO, a Tata company that owns the Taj chain of hotels; Tata Consultancy Services (TCS); Tata Chemicals Ltd, and Tata Steel Ltd in a bid to vote Mistry off the boards of those businesses.Tata Sons ousted Mistry as its chairman last month. While no immediate reasons were given, it was widely reported the holding company was unhappy with some of Mistry's actions, such as the sale of assets across group companies. This led to a bitter war of words between the two camps.Infrastructure company Shapporji Pallonji, owned by Mistry's family, is a minority shareholder in Tata Sons and he remains a director on the board of the holding company.STEEL LOSSES

On Thursday, Tata Sons removed Mistry as chairman of its main cash cow, TCS, where the holding company has a stake of more than 70 percent. Mistry remains, however, a director on the board of TCS.Tata Sons has faced setbacks in its campaign against Mistry. The boards of both Indian Hotels and Tata Chemicals have both backed him to remain as chairman of those group companies.Tata Sons is also seeking to remove Nusli Wadia, chairman of textile-to-aviation conglomerate the Wadia Group and a long-time independent director at several Tata group companies, from the boards of Tata Motors, Tata Chemicals and Tata Steel.Wadia was reported to have voted in favour of retaining Mistry as the chairman of Tata Chemicals on Thursday.

On Friday, television news reports said a board meeting at Tata Steel to discuss second-quarter results had not taken a stance on the possible removals of Mistry and Wadia.Tata Steel posted a consolidated net loss of 493.8 million rupees ($7.34 million), mainly due to a weak performance in its UK steel making business. It has been in talks since July over potentially merging its European steel business, which also includes a steel mill in the Netherlands, with Germany's ThyssenKrupp.Lawyers have said removing Mistry as director of Tata group companies will be a bigger challenge than ousting him as Tata Sons chairman because he will have the right to be heard at an EGM and can also ask for an injunction.

All shareholders are invited to the EGMs and the decision will be made by a simple majority. "This sort of a move is very unprecedented. I don't know why the Tatas are doing it this way. They should be settling this instead of dragging this in public. Mistry has a lot of insider information," a senior lawyer at a top corporate law firm in India said on condition of anonymity. Details of EGMs are yet to be finalised.Mistry's office did not respond to a request for comment. ($1 = 67.2705 Indian rupees) (Additional reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Rafael Nam and Mark Potter)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
At Nandi Hills, one of the popular tourist spots in Karnataka about 60 km from Bengaluru, people often flock to see Tipu's Drop. This is the spot from where the Tiger of Mysore apparently used to get condemned prisoners thrown to their death.

Is Tanveer Sait, Karnataka's education minister, likely to be a Tipu's Drop? During Tipu Jayanti celebrations in Raichur, Sait was caught on camera flipping through some sleazy images on his mobile phone. The images captured by a local TV channel camera went viral. The minister has now been summoned by boss Siddaramaiah to give an explanation and if it is found unsatisfactory, Sait's political career may die a temporary death.

The fact that he is the state's education minister makes his position that much more untenable. As a witty comment on Facebook noted, Sait had no business to 'porntificate'.

The BJP, in tit-for-tat mode, is baying for Sait's blood, asking the Congress to take a leaf out of its book. In February 2012, three BJP ministers in Sadananda Gowda's Cabinet, were found surfing porn inside the Karnataka Legislative Assembly. The BJP came under attack for the disgraceful conduct of the ministers, which included CC Patil, who held the portfolio of women and child welfare. All three were forced to resign under pressure from both the Opposition and the public.

Among those who had demanded the immediate resignation of the three ministers was Siddaramaiah, then the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. That makes it even more difficult for the CM now to adopt a different set of standards on Sait's sleazegate.

Sait has pleaded innocence claiming it was a forward he received on WhatsApp that he happened to glance at. "My entire concentration was on the Tipu celebration. I hardly looked at the WhatsApp message,'' said Sait. On his part, Siddaramaiah has sought to draw a distinction between ministers watching porn inside the Assembly and at a public function. The problem is only the CM seems to be in a position to see the difference.

At the end of the day, whether Siddaramaiah will show Sait the door has to be a political decision. The Muslim leader is an important cog in the CM's wheel in Mysuru district, where he hails from. Sait's late father was a political heavyweight from the district.

Already the district has lost veteran Dalit leader Srinivas Prasad, who quit the party after he was dropped from the ministry. Prasad was miffed at Siddaramaiah, and in the manner he removed Prasad as minister, and humiliated him. Now dropping Sait too will be seen as a humiliation and it would mean taking a chance with the Dalit and Muslim community votes.

Another factor is that a by-election will soon be held in Nanjangud, Prasad's reserved constituency. Prasad will contest on the BJP ticket and Siddaramaiah cannot afford to lose a by-poll in his backyard. Sait's exit and resultant sulking could affect the party candidate's chances.

There is also the possibility that Siddaramaiah is looking at two constituencies to contest from in 2018. He could vacate Varuna for his son Dr Yathindra and move back to Chamundeswari, both in Mysuru district. He will have to make all these calculations before taking a call on Sait.

But beyond the outrage on social media, does a porn scandal impact a politician's career? The jury is out on that one. Of the three BJP ministers, only Savadi returned to the Karnataka Assembly in the 2013 state election. But it is difficult to say if the porn issue played a part. The anti-incumbency against the then BJP government was seen as the reason why the party slipped to 40 seats in the Assembly.

Another school of thought argues that the smartphone era and the success of Donald Trump, in the light of the misogynistic things he said during the American presidential campaign, has made people more accepting of such transgressions. While Sait's conduct does not behove an elected representative in a public space, the counter argument is that in the common man's perception, bad is perhaps the new good. Trump is an example of that and stretching the same argument, so perhaps is Laxman Savadi.

The Congress is unlikely to break into a sweat over the commentary of morality that is heard in Karnataka now. If pressed, it will only highlight that the scorecard in the 'porn match' still reads BJP 3, Congress 1.
The report filed by a high-profile delegation led by former Union minister Yashwant Sinha hasnt really offered any fresh roadmap for resolving the prevailing political crisis in Kashmir. However, the report talks frequently about diverse voices calling for finding a political solution to the crisis, but is New Delhi willing to listen to the voices on ground, acknowledge the reality and address the issues of ordinary people living in this landlocked Valley?

The delegation, comprising of respectable Kashmir observers like Wajahat Habibullah and Sushoba Bharve, came visiting at a time when the Valley was in the midst of one of the most lethal crackdowns on freedom protests. Nearly hundred people have been killed in retaliatory action against protesters by government forces, over 12,000 protesters have been wounded  many of them blinded for life, and around 7,000 are either behind bars or detained in their homes.

Although the visit was clouded by the unceremonious binning of the report of the three-member Kashmir interlocutor group headed by Dilip Padgaonkar, which was sent by the UPA government to provide a roadmap following the civilian uprising in 2010, the fact that there wasn't much hope in the new delegation provided the members an opportunity to meet with the cross-sections of society.

After a failed attempt by the all-party parliamentary delegation, the Sinha-led team managed to break the ice with the Hurriyat that is spearheading the agitation in the Valley, and held two meetings on as many days with the separatist leaders, Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq; the latter was shifted overnight from a sub-jail to his Nigeen home in order to facilitate the meeting. They also met the mainstream politicians, business leaders, civil society and ordinary people on the streets.

In a curt six-page report, the group has written to the Central government that people of Kashmir believe that "Indian politics has taken such a turn (today) that there is no willingness to listen to even demands for autonomy... In terms of the agenda of alliance (between PDP and BJP), a dialogue process must be initiated with all stakeholders so that peace can be restored," the report says.

The thrust of the report is on the need of initiating a dialogue process with the stakeholders in Kashmir, including the separatists, which was also explained by Sinha, the senior BJP leader, in New Delhi on Thursday. "In our report we registered grievances of people in Jammu and Kashmir, based on that we have also given a few suggestions to the government," Sinha told ANI in New Delhi.

The delegation has written that across the political spectrum, the Kashmiris we met spoke to virtually the same script about the history of the Kashmir issue. They made the point that this is the fifth generation of Kashmiris which was protesting but to no avail. Clearly, there is anger and dejection among the people. Kashmiris have been historically betrayed. It is time to fulfil some of the promises made to them.

The human and economic toll taken by the prevailing crisis, the excessive use of force by the security forces, the wanton use of pellet guns, the reluctance to engage with the people and sort out their problems, once and for all, is pointed out repeatedly in the report. Similar recommendations have been made in previous committees and interlocutor reports but to no avail.

While dialogue is the only way out, it seems that the governments in the state and at the Centre are not ready yet. After a brief spell of freedom, all the Hurriyat leaders in Kashmir have been either detained in their homes or sent to jail. With the crisis far from over and relations with Pakistan at an all-time low, dialogue seems like a far-fetched option for now.

However, confusing the semblance of calm in Kashmir these days with the return of normalcy would be suicidal. The policymakers in Delhi should listen to their horses.

It is time to act, lest Kashmir slips into the chaos which may tear apart whatever connection India has with Kashmir.
"I had to borrow money from my dad to come to work. It is an inconvenience," said 24-year-old Sumeet Malhotra, an office-goer. Malhotra visited the SBI ATM at Nariman Point in Mumbai, which was not operational. So he went to the next ATM which was of Bank of Baroda and found it shut.

"When the government announced the ban of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes, I was happy as I felt it would weed out black money from the system. I thought it was a brilliant move by PM Modi. But now I have doubts," he said pointing out to newspaper reports of an 8-year-old who died due to the delay in getting medicines from the pharmacy as her father could not get petrol as the petrol pump refused to take Rs 1,000 note he had.

Rohit Kulkarni, an executive in an IT firm, wanted to check out if the ATMs were giving money as was announced by the banks. Kulkarni checked out two ATMs in his vicinity in Juhu. "I went to Indus Ind and Yes Bank ATMs in Juhu and also in Parel. Some of them were shut and had a board outside stating that the 'ATM is closed' and the ones that were opened did not have cash. I requested for amounts below Rs 2,000 and yet the ATMs did not have the cash," he said.

Kulkarni said that he was not in need of money but was 'checking out' to see if the ATMs had the money to dispense as banks had promised that ATMs would be functional from today in media reports and repeated text messages to its account holders.

Most people had similar experiences to share. "It is the middle class who are being affected," said Rupa Vikram, an office-goer who was moving from one ATM to the other only to be met with boards that said it was shut and finding no cash in the ATMs that were open. "I am unable to go to work as I have two Rs 500 notes which are useless now. I have called my office to say I would be late as I am at an ATM. But I don't think I will be able to attend office today at all," she said.

Twitter is replete with people who are sharing their angst at not being able to access money from ATMs.

In 2 km radius have checked all ATMs, none of them are working, don't know what to do: Bhopal resident #DeMonetisation pic.twitter.com/mnB7ggaS5o  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

No cash yet in ATMs. We can adjust for 2-3 days as its a good step,just hope everything will be sorted out soon: Abhijit,Kolkata resident pic.twitter.com/F7srmjGU1s  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Prasanna Jayaprakash who works in Marine Lines went to the Dena Bank ATM at New Marine Lines early before going to office. "I reached the ATM around 8.45 AM and found three to four people standing in queue. However, the ATM was shut. I had some money in hand and so decided to go to office as there was no information when the ATM would be open," she said. She lauds the PM's move to ban the currencies and hopes black money will be flushed out. "But now the ban of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes has become a common man's problem. I hope the government is able to address this situation soon," she said.

Aidan R, a 42-year-old who works in Ballard Estate, was leaving for work from Andheri and visited an ATM as he had exhausted whatever money he had. "I went to the Axis Bank yesterday and got a Rs 2,000 note as the smaller denomination notes were over. So I decided to go to an ATM to withdraw cash. But I found the ATMs were shut. What is this government doing? What is PM Modi doing? I thought this government would be more sympathetic to people like me. We are the ones who are affected and not the black money hoarders," he said. According to him, the black money hoarders are still moving around in their private vehicles and are able to use digital money to get by. "I am disappointed," he said.

The public has no choice but to believe in the government, said a financial analyst. "When the government and the banks have said that the ATMs will be open and functional today, I am sure it will be. However, our banking system is not geared to fulfill demands in huge proportions like it is happening now with almost every consumer going to banks to withdraw money. Also, there is the security aspect to it. It is not an easy job to remove banned currency notes and replenish them in ATMs and cater to such huge demand as can be seen across the country. People will have to be patient. There is no other way out," he said.
New Delhi: The government on Friday extended use of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes for paying household utility bills, fuel, taxes and fees as well as purchases from co-operative stores by another 72 hours to 14 November as it struggles to make available alternative currency.

While withdrawing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes from the night of 8-9 November, the government had allowed use of the old currency at government hospitals, railway ticketing, public transport, airline ticketing at airports, milk booths, crematoria/burial grounds and petrol pumps for 72 hours.

This list was later expanded to include payments for metro rail tickets, highway and road toll, purchase of medicines on doctor prescription from the government and private pharmacies, LPG gas cylinders, railway catering, electricity and water bills and ASI monument entry tickets.

The time limit set was to expire Friday midnight, but it has now been extended by another 72 hours, top government officials said.

The government has allowed use of the old currency to make payments at co-operative stores subject to valid identity proofs being provided.

Public utility bills include only household bills. Court fee will also be allowed to be paid in old 500 and 1,000 rupee notes.

Old Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes will be accepted for payment of fees, charges, taxes, penalty to central and state governments, including municipalities and local bodies.

Such old notes will also be accepted for payment of utility charges like water and electricity.

The official said while the old notes were allowed to be accepted for highway toll payment, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has freed national highways of any toll charges till 14 November.
The Reserve Bank of India has said in a statement today that theres enough cash available with banks and all arrangements have been made to reach the currency notes all over the country. The apex bank urged public to exercise patience and exchange notes at convenience.

The central bank said it may take a while for the banks to recalibrate their ATMs; once the ATMs are functional, members of public will be able to withdraw cash from ATMs. Until 18 November, customers can withdraw a maximum of Rs 2,000 per card per day and after that up to Rs 4,000 per day per card.

The RBI says that several ATMs have started functioning from this morning as the banks could complete recalibration of these machines to allow withdrawals up to Rs 2000 to begin with.

However, we visited 12 ATMs so far in Byculla and Mazgaon area in South Mumbai. None of the ATMs, especially the stand alone ATMs had any money in it. Even ATMs at bank branches, the ATM section had shuttered down along with loads of people trying to get into the bank. Some ATMs even had a shutters down and some didnt even have security guards. People were constantly getting disappointed.

One ATM security guard said he has pulled the shutter down since there isnt any cash. Watch the video to see the whole story.
Following the Modi government's move to demonetise the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on Tuesday, the nation has been struggling to come to terms with the sudden clamp-down on cash transactions. Heated exchanges are a common sight at several banks across the country, as people try to exchange their old currency. One such scene broke the peace outside the Connaught Place branch of an ICICI Bank, when three persons engaged in an argument.

"Look at him. He is educated but he shamefully lacks the ability to understand the need for the new currency, said one amongst the three, to an onlooker.

The person he was referring to was a well dressed middle-aged man, who was trying to raise a counter-argument against the new currency policy by stating that the black money garnered from the Indian economy no longer existed in the country  as it had been clandestinely stashed into foreign accounts.

But hardly anyone heeded to his argument. Rather his opponents silenced him by stating that the country needed the support and co-operation of the common man, to eradicate black money within the economy.

This incident, and many more like it, speak of the nationalistic mood prevalent in the country.

When people came in hoards to banks on Thursday, having faced almost two days of hardship due to lack of liquidity, the experience was rather counter-intuitive. Very few among them appeared to be fatigued or angered and rather looked eager to embrace the move by the government.

We have definitely suffered a lot in the last two days, said Majid Islam, while standing in the queue outside the ICICI bank. I had two Rs 1,000 notes. But no one I approached was ready to accept it. I faced serious problems in purchasing food for my family.

Many in the queue revealed that they were forced to sell their Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination notes for as little as Rs 300.

In this regard, it was not difficult to assume that the struggle faced by the common man during the currency transition will make him unhappy with the governments move.

But it was surprising to see that hardly anyone looked annoyed. Most faced the hardship with a conviction that it was for the nation and the welfare of its people.

Anuj Pandey, another person who came to collect the new currency notes, was rather emotional in expressing his belief in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's move. He believed that Modi had made a master stroke with his move to curb black money.

A bank official claimed that they had faced no problem in exchanging the currency as per the stipulated guidelines.

All banks in India have been directed to exchange up to a maximum of Rs 4,000 per person per day and dispense up to Rs 10,000 per person per day in withdrawal, with the total weekly allowance limited to Rs 20,000 per week per person. The customers are also required to present identification at the time of transaction. The only problem faced by the bank, the official said, was the 'mad' crowds that had rushed to collect their money.
Four days after Prime Minister Narendra announced the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, the rush to exchange old notes claimed two lives on Friday. Two men have reportedly died in separate instances across the country due to the difficulties posed by the sudden demonetisation of high currency notes on Tuesday.

According to reports, a 73-year-old man died of heart attack in Mulund, whereas a 48-year-old man fell off from the second floor of a bank in Kerala while trying to deposit old notes.

As reported in Zee News and Maharashtra Times, 73- year old Vishwas Vartak was standing in a queue outside a bank in Hari Om Nagar in Mulund when he was seized by a heart attack that caused his death. The elderly man had been standing in the queue for 30 minutes to exchange the currency notes when the incident took place, the report said.

Though he was rushed to hospital by some people who saw him collapse, he was declared dead before admission, police said.

Allegedly, ATMs of various banks in south Mumbai, Lalbaugh, Parel, Dadar, Andheri, Ghatkopar and Mulund were found to be out of service and not dispensing money, forcing people to return empty-handed.

A report by PTI stated that a 48-year-old man, who came to deposit Rs five lakh worth of scrapped high denomination notes in a bank in Thalassery, Kerala, died after he fell down from the second floor of the building on Friday.

Unni, a Kerala State Electricity Board employee, was filling the necessary forms to deposit the amount in a State Bank of Travancore's branch, located in the first floor when the mishap occurred, the Police told PTI, quoting preliminary information.

He had unsuccessfully tried to deposit the notes on Thursday and had come to the bank again in the morning.

Meanwhile, there have been reports of bank branches and post offices all over Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh that have witnessed serpentine queues of customers for the second successive day on Friday, waiting to get the new denomination currency.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced demonetisation of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on Tuesday night in order to curb black money, counterfeit currency, corruption and terror financing. The banks had remained on Wednesday, and opened on Thursday allowing people to exchange notes of old denominations and deposit it in their accounts.

All ATMs were shut on Wednesday and Thursday to help banks re-fill them reload cash, and were supposed to open on Friday. Despite that a large number of ATMs continued to remain closed due to non-availability of cash. And the cash in few ATMs, which were filled up on Friday, exhausted soon due to hordes of people trying to get cash, PTI reported.

People could withdraw only up to Rs 2000 from the ATMs which worked.

Those who had got exchange of Rs 4,000 on Thursday, in the denomination of Rs 2,000 currency notes also faced harassment as the notes were not being accepted by vendors, traders and shopkeepers in the absence of small denomination notes with them for the return of balance. On Friday, several banks were offering only Rs 2,000 currency notes due to unavailability of notes of lower denominations.

Some banks, however, distributed only Rs 100 denomination notes and the queues outside such banks got significantly longer due to easy exchangeability of Rs 100 notes at various shops and commercial establishments.

The customers, including women, started reaching bank branches and ATMs early in the morning as they were facing problems in purchasing day to day items, including vegetables and milk.

Heated exchanges were on at various branches with people stopping those trying to jump the queue.

Additional counters opened by various banks also failed to mitigate the sufferings of the people.

With inputs from PTI
Mumbai: The ensuing elections to municipal councils and nagar panchayats across Maharashtra will be a major test for the two-year-old Devendra Fadnavis government, in the backdrop of caste polarisation triggered by campaigns of different communities, including influential Marathas in pursuance of their various demands.

Political observers here are of the view that all parties may feel the heat of the Maratha campaign, pressing for reservations in jobs and education, and the counter movements by Dalits, OBCs and Muslims in the state.

Even though these campaigns have so far refrained from targeting each other, undercurrents of caste tensions have been palpable, they point out.

Some of them feel that the BJP-led government has not taken these morchas seriously and made efforts to defuse the caste tensions slowly building up.

There is a distinct possibility that voters around the state, especially in rural areas, will take the civic polls as a referendum on the performance of the Fadnavis regime, they said.

Law and order issue, spurt in crime against women and farmers' distress and suicides are also to figure prominently in the elections, they said.

The government is yet to declare Minimum Support Price for soyabean, cotton, paddy, sugarcane and has not taken a decision on starting procurement centres, they observed.

While ruling partners BJP and Shiv Sena have struck a deal to contest the polls together, the Congress and NCP, who control the majority of municipal bodies, have left the decision of alliance to their local leadership.

NCP has 1,300 seats while Congress 1,293. BJP has 437, Sena 454 and MNS 61. There are over 400 independents as well. Dismissing suggestion that the Maratha campaign could hit the BJP, party spokesman Madhav Bhandari said Congress and

Dismissing suggestion that the Maratha campaign could hit the BJP, party spokesman Madhav Bhandari said Congress and NCP are to be blamed for the caste polarisation.

"Maratha leadership of both these parties have ruled the state throughout. They did nothing for the upliftment of the community. It is only after Devendra Fadnavis became CM, the community feels it is backward," he said.

"If large morchas are taken out by the dominant community, naturally the non-Marathas will get insecure and the marches organised by them are a result of this insecurity," Bhandari said.

The Congress and NCP have accused the BJP of inducting people with criminal background in different parts of the state to use muscle power ahead of the polls, which the saffron party rejected as totally baseless.

"Never before muscle power was used in Maharashtra politics," NCP spokesman Nawab Malik said.

Congress spokesman Ratnakar Mahajan said local issues of towns at talukas and big villages on the outskirts will be the key in deciding voters' preferences.

"BJP should not think that it can win at municipal level since it is in power at the Centre and the state. This will have no bearing on the voting at taluka level," he said.

Earlier, not all seats in local bodies were contested on party symbol. Congress used to align with local outfits for the municipal council and nagar panchayat polls. But with BJP taking the lead in ensuring that its party symbol reaches every nook and corner, all parties are likely to follow suit.

Much to the dismay of others, BJP and Shiv Sena have clinched a pact well ahead of the polls. In contrast, the Congress and NCP are yet to work out a broad arrangement to fight the polls together and still blame each other for it.

"NCP cannot dictate terms for seat adjustments and alliance," Mahajan said, even as he did not rule out an informal alliance between the two parties at the local level.

He said social polarisation may result in the increase in caste-based voting.

"One will have to wait and watch who would benefit and be at loss," Mahajan added.

The polls to 212 municipal councils and nagar panchayats in Maharashtra will be held in four phases from 27 November to 8 January.
Government notables led by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley are arguing that the decision, spearheaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was aimed at making India a cashless society. But unless the government is successful in ensuring adequate cash flow in banks and ATM machines over the next few days, the country will truly become cashless.

For the past three days, conversations in families and offices have often begun and ended with the amount of money in physical wallets, not e-wallets. Unless adequate currency notes are re-introduced and made available to people without having to spend hours standing in serpentine queues, we may soon be witnessing cash riots. Already, reports from different parts of major cities are trickling that police is being called frequently to manage crowds milling inside and outside banks and ensuring that frayed tempers do into spill over into bloody battles.

In the past two days, I'm not alone whose inbox has been flooded with offers from banks and other agencies for credit cards and advisories on how to make optimum use of electronic transactions. Since Modis announcement that government has demonetised existing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, several newspapers have published full-page advertisements of companies offering e-wallet facilities. Ola and Uber have also sent emails and placed adverts announcing payments for services can be made now by credit card.

These developments, coupled with statements like Jaitleys that the logical step was India has to move towards the cashless society has made it appear that the demise of currency notes and transactions made by them is imminent. But is this possible in a country where a report, sourced to the banking division of the finance ministry revealed that just an estimated 28-32 percent of Indians have easy access to financial institutions?

Publicists of the government, however, will cite that after the success of Jan Dhan Yojna every Indian family has bank accounts and today almost everyone who wants, has a bank account unless somebody voluntarily opts out and this is proof that in less than two and a half years, the government has ensured that systems for transiting to cashless transactions have been put in place. It is pointed out that an advisory has been issued for government departments and other official agencies, both Central and at the State-level, to make payments in a cashless manner.

Credit card data is also cited to argue that Indians are increasingly opting for plastic money. Adherers of this viewpoint cite the fact that by March this year, a total of 24.51 million credit cards and 661.8 million debit cards had been issued. But, given the fact that most credit card holders, use more than one and that even after several years, the majority of users do not use debit cards except to withdraw cash from ATM machines, the use of currency continues to be the preferred route for making purchases and clearing bills.

There is no doubt that one part of India, especially the middle-middle classes and above, is increasingly opting for electronic forms of transaction and using their information and knowledge for their benefit. But this section does not comprise the majority which is still made up of people are either hovering below or around the poverty line and those who are marginally above them. As the controversy over zero-balance JDY has shown, having bank accounts is no guarantee that people are using banks regularly. Banking department figures also demonstrate that location of bank branches are skewed in favour of 60 Tier I and Tier II cities with branches in these two categories accounting for almost one-third of total banks in the country.

If one tallies the total population of these cities, one will realise how lopsided Indian banking system is. Besides, giving greater emphasis to banking in big urban centres, disconcertingly, economically less-developed and areas away from the national mainstream  both in terms of geographical location and national consciousness  are neglected by the banking industry. There are 38 districts in the country  mainly in the northeastern states  where there are less than 10 branches and it would be foolhardy to expect people here to transit from not approaching banks to going cashless.

The majority of Indians are no longer illiterate but that does not mean that the majority is technologically competent to conduct cashless transactions. Often, Indias vast mobile network and the number of mobile phones and connections used by people is cited to argue that people are using smartphones to access information related to their profession  be it weather forecast or commodity prices. Yet, the fact remains that for the majority of Indians, mobile phones, far from holders of e-wallet, remain just a simple device to make and receive calls, listen to some music and, of course, read SMSs sent by Modi jis department!

The government is trying to leapfrog Indias transactional practise by several decades. There are cultural reasons for people to stick to physical currency and this is not restricted to any class. The poignant tale about the matriarch of rural household who hid two Rs 500 rupee notes from others in the family by stitching these into the quilt with which she covers herself, is symbolic of the importance of paper currency in the Indian currency.

Bank notes provide security and comfort which the system denies to most. Some weeks ago, there had been an alarm all over the country when news spread that lakhs of debit cards had been compromised. India has several lines that divide the people into several sections. By presenting the ability to make a transition to cashless transactions a virtue, we will create a new group of deprived citizens and India could best avoid another category of have-nots.

India does not require an avatar Marie Antoinette. It is not the time for the government to say that if people have no cash, let them go cashless.

The author is a Delhi-based writer and journalist. He authored - Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times and Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984. Tweets @NilanjanUdwin
Mazar-i-Sharif: A powerful Taliban truck bomb struck the German consulate in Afghanistan's northern Mazar-i-Sharif city, killing four people and wounding more than 100 in a major militant assault in the war-torn country.

Four dead, two civilians and two unidentified bodies, were brought to the Balkh hospital and around 115 people were wounded, said Dr Noor Mohammad Faiz told AP.

"The blast was too loud and powerful, which shattered windows, and many civilians were wounded inside their homes," he said.

The Taliban called it a "revenge attack" for recent US airstrikes in the volatile province of Kunduz earlier this month that left up to 32 civilians dead.

Sporadic gunfire rattled the usually tranquil city after the huge explosion on Thursday, which smashed windows of nearby shops and left terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

German officials in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif were not immediately reachable for comment.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of German consulate in the city," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

Afghan special forces cordoned off the area as helicopters were seen flying over the consulate and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jumpstart stalled peace negotiations.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the German consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents are routinely known to exaggerate battlefield claims.

Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.

US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims' relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

Civilian casualties caused by Nato forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

Afghanistan's worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up airstrikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign  even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.

With inputs from agencies
By Yeganeh Torbati and Phil Stewart

| WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON U.S. President Barack Obama's foreign policy legacy rests in part on a foundation of unilateral actions that his successor Donald Trump could reverse with the stroke of a pen.Due to take office on Jan. 20, Trump, the winner in Tuesday's election, campaigned at times to dismantle Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and to reimpose sanctions Obama eased on Cuba. Trump also disagreed with foreign policy decisions that included the way Obama has deployed troops abroad to combat Islamist militant groups.In his most notable foreign policy achievements, Obama, a Democrat, used executive authorities that offered a convenient legal path around a Republican-controlled Congress committed to blocking his agenda.The U.S. Constitution gives a president broad executive powers to enact foreign policy. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have sought to exercise those powers by issuing executive orders, presidential memoranda and what are called findings."He (Obama) relied on executive authority to build a foreign policy legacy," said Thomas Wright, director of the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. "That is all vulnerable to countervailing executive authority by a Trump administration," Wright said.Obama had hoped to pass his legacy on to Democrat Hillary Clinton, his former secretary of state, but she lost the presidential election to Trump, a Republican businessman who has never held public office or served in the military. TRUMP PLANS UNCLEAR

Often contradicting himself during the campaign, Trump made it difficult to know for sure what policies he would pursue. Major constraints include budget caps, laws he cannot reverse without Congress, and the pressure that will emerge to replace policies he chooses to abandon.Trump said in an October speech that he would "cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama" on his first day in office, without saying who would determine their constitutionality.A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday on his latest plans.

EXECUTIVE ORDERS, ENACTED & RESCINDED

Perhaps nowhere has Obama faced more congressional opposition than in his pursuit of the 2015 deal with Iran, which Republicans and some Democrats said put too few restrictions on Iran's nuclear program in return for too much sanctions relief. Trump has vowed to dismantle it, although his statements on the deal have been contradictory. A president may tighten and relax economic sanctions by executive order."Anything enacted by executive order can be rescinded by executive order," said Zachary Goldman, a former U.S. Treasury official now at New York University.Obama drew enough support from Democrats to block a Republican-led resolution rejecting the Iran deal, achieving a political victory but falling short of a consensus. Trump will have the added advantage of working with a U.S. Senate and a House of Representatives controlled by fellow Republicans.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday he hoped Trump would "see how much he can undo the unilateral actions the president took all by himself, which would not require us."CUBA, DRONES

Breaking with longstanding U.S. policy on another issue, Obama restored diplomatic ties with Cuba in 2015. But facing opposition in Congress to lifting a broad economic embargo, especially from Republicans, he used executive actions to ease some U.S. sanctions.Obama capped his Cuba efforts last month with a sweeping "presidential policy directive," which also is reversible and sets forth mandates for government engagement, people-to-people exchanges, and greater U.S. business ties.Trump has taken contradictory positions on whether he supports the embargo or not.

Obama's aides said the easing of restrictions was aimed at securing enough benefits for U.S. businesses and travellers that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for any Republican president to reverse the opening to Cuba.Trump could roll back Obama's efforts to create greater transparency about drone strikes. Obama issued an executive order in July requiring annual disclosures about such strikes.MILITARY POWER

As commander-in-chief, Trump will wield the power to mobilize the U.S. military on short notice and without first seeking approval from Congress.Obama deployed U.S. troops to Iraq, Syria and Libya to help fight the Islamic State militant group by relying on the authority Congress granted President George W. Bush to battle al Qaeda. That same authority would allow Trump to ramp up U.S. deployments in fights against Islamist militants if he chose to do so.One former U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the president can approve covert action and needs only to brief relevant leaders in Congress once the operation is under way.Trump's powers, however, are limited.He pledged to expand the Army, grow the Marine Corps, boost the Navy from 276 to 350 ships and submarines, and raise the number of Air Force tactical aircraft from 1,100 to 1,200. For starters, that would require that Congress scrap government spending caps under the Budget Control Act.Trump's support for water-boarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, also would meet opposition. Congress last year passed legislation barring the use of waterboarding and other "extreme interrogation techniques" widely considered torture. Obama signed the measure into law last November. (Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle, Jonathan Landay and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Yara Bayoumy and Howard Goller)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
By Ian Simpson and Gina Cherelus

| WASHINGTON/NEW YORK

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK Demonstrators took to the streets across the United States for a second day on Thursday to protest against Donald Trump's presidential election victory, voicing fears that the real estate mogul's triumph would deal a blow to civil rights.On the East Coast, protests took place in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, while on the West Coast demonstrators rallied in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland in California, and Portland, Oregon.The protests were for the most part peaceful and orderly, although there were scattered acts of civil disobedience and damage to property.Protesters threw objects at police in Portland and damaged cars in a dealership lot, the Portland Police Department said on Twitter. Some protesters sprayed graffiti on cars and buildings and smashed store front windows, media in Portland said. "Many in crowd trying to get anarchist groups to stop destroying property, anarchists refusing. Others encouraged to leave area", the department tweeted after declaring the demonstration a riot.The demonstration continued into Friday morning as Portland police arrested a handful of protesters and used pepper spray and rubber bullets to try to disperse the crowd, the department said. At least 35 were arrested in a protest in downtown Los Angeles, where demonstrators blocked traffic and sat in the street, local media reported. Dozens in Minneapolis marched onto Interstate 94, blocking traffic in both directions for at least an hour as police stood by. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles freeway before police cleared them.BALTIMORE, DENVER

Baltimore police reported that about 600 people marched through the downtown Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street. Two people were arrested.

In Denver, a crowd that media estimated to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through downtown in one of the largest of Thursday's events. Hundreds demonstrated through Dallas.Thursday's gatherings were generally smaller in scale and less intense than Wednesday's, and teenagers and young adults again dominated the racially mixed crowds. "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Trump tweeted on Thursday night. Police pitched security barricades around two Trump marquee properties that have become focal points of the protests - his newly opened Pennsylvania Avenue hotel in Washington and the high-rise Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he lives.About 100 protesters marched from the White House, where Trump had his first transition meeting with President Barack Obama on Thursday, to the Trump International Hotel several blocks away.

At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many chanting "No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!" and carrying signs with such slogans as "Impeach Trump" and "Not my president.""I can't support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It's heart-breaking," said Joe Daniels, 25, of suburban Alexandria, Virginia.'GIVE TRUMP A CHANCE'

Two Trump supporters stood off to the side carrying signs reading: "All We are Saying is Give Trump a Chance".Trump's critics worry that his often-inflammatory campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, women and others - combined with support from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists - could spark a wave of intolerance against minorities.

Taking a far more conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech early Wednesday than he had at many of his campaign events, Trump vowed to be a president for all Americans.His campaign rejected a Klan newspaper endorsement this month, saying Trump "denounces hate in any form." Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a high-profile Trump supporter, called the demonstrators "a bunch of spoiled cry-babies" in an interview with Fox News.Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer urged the protesters to give Trump a chance once he is sworn in to office in January."I hope that people get it out of their systems ... but then they give this man that was just elected very historically and his new vice president an opportunity to govern," Spicer told MSNBC. In San Francisco, more than 1,000 high school students walked out of classes Thursday morning to march through the financial district carrying rainbow flags representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, Mexican flags, and signs decrying Trump.Civil rights groups and police reported an uptick in attacks on members of minority groups, some by people claiming to support Trump. There were also reports of Trump opponents lashing out at people carrying signs supporting him.More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend. (Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York and Ian Simpson in Washington; Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, Curtis Skinner in San Francisco, Steve Dipaola in Portland and Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Scott Malone and Steve Gorman; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Kevin Liffey)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Washington: Howard Dean has announced a bid to head up the Democratic Party, a post he held during the Bush administration, in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in Tuesday's election.

"The dems need organization and focus on the young," Dean tweeted Thursday. "Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman again."

The party's liberal wing has begun jockeying for power since Hillary Clinton's defeat, arguing that her loss could be attributed to her reluctance to fully focus on economic inequality and tougher Wall Street regulations.

The Vermont governor mounted an insurgent primary challenge in 2004, running on a more liberal platform than eventual nominee Senator John Kerry.

He served as Democratic National Committee chairman from 2005 to 2009. Interim chairwoman Donna Brazile is supposed to end her position early next year. Without a Democratic president to pick her successor, the committee will hold open elections for the post.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced his support for liberal Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison in an Associated Press interview Thursday morning.

Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley and Representative Xavier Becerra of California are also rumored to be considering running for the position.
By Stephen Kalin and Saif Hameed

| KOKJALI/BAGHDAD, Iraq

KOKJALI/BAGHDAD, Iraq Iraqi special forces said they pushed deeper into Mosul on Friday despite heavy resistance from Islamic State militants using civilians as cover, and were holding half a dozen city neighbourhoods seized in the last 10 days.The elite Counter Terrorism Service troops broke through Islamic State defence lines to enter the city early last week and have since been embroiled in a brutal, close-quarter combat with waves of suicide bombers and snipers.The special forces are the spearhead of a wider coalition of 100,000 fighters seeking to crush a few thousand Islamic State jihadists who have ruled Mosul, the biggest city of their cross-border "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria, for the last two years.The campaign, nearly four weeks old, is the most complex military operation in Iraq in the 13 years of turmoil since the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.Security forces and army infantry divisions, backed by a U.S.-led air force, are preparing to move on southern and northern districts of Mosul in coming days, to step up pressure on the militants. Kurdish peshmerga and Shi'ite paramilitary forces are holding territory to the northeast and to the west.On the eastern front, special forces pushed into the Qadisiya al-Thaniya district, on the northern edge of the small pocket of neighbourhoods they control so far, Sabah al-Numani, spokesman for the Counter Terrorism Service, told Reuters."We have encountered heavy resistance from the enemy," he said, describing what he called "obstructive patrols" of militant forces trying to hold up the advance."We are facing the most difficult form of urban warfare, fighting with the presence of civilians, but our forces are trained for this sort of combat."Military officers have told Reuters that the fighting is some of the most lethal they have seen, with small groups of militants using a vast network of tunnels and narrow streets to launch an apparently endless sequence of attacks against troops.

A Reuters correspondent in Kokjali, on the eastern edge of the city, saw U.S. Apache helicopters overhead. Explosions, either from air strikes or suicide car bombs which the jihadists have deployed in the hundreds since the campaign started on Oct. 17, could be heard against a backdrop of artillery fire.As smoke rose above the city, hundreds of civilians were on the streets of Kokjali, some of them local residents but others fleeing the fighting in Mosul itself.The International Organization for Migration says nearly 48,000 people have been displaced by the fighting, still a relatively low figure compared to a United Nations warning before the campaign of a possible exodus of up to 800,000.Numani said the army had told civilians to stay indoors for their safety, adding that the counter terrorism unit aimed to hand over neighbourhoods which it had secured to other forces. In other cities retaken from Islamic State, local police forces have moved in after the special forces have cleared territory.

KILLINGS AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Islamic State's two-year reign of fear in northern and western Iraq threatened the country with disintegration, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi says it has cost Iraq $35 billion in economic damage.On Friday Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani praised the forces battling Islamic State, including thousands of Shi'ite fighters in the Popular Mobilisation paramilitary forces, for their sacrifices. Without "the blood of these dear ones and their continuous steadfastness, only God would know what fate would await Iraq and others", said Seyyid Ahmed al-Safi, who delivered the Friday sermon in the holy city of Kerbala on behalf of the aged and reclusive Shi'ite religious leader.Inside Mosul, a city of up to 1.5 million people, residents said this week that the militants had killed at least 20 people and displayed their bodies - five of them crucified - as a warning against acting as informants for Iraqi forces.

The U.N. human rights office said a total of 40 people were reportedly shot on Tuesday for "treason and collaboration" with Iraqi security forces, and a 27-year-old man was shot for using a mobile phone.A mass grave with more than 100 bodies found in the town of Hammam al-Alil south of Mosul was one of several Islamic State killing grounds, spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said. She cited testimony from sources including a man who escaped after playing dead during the execution of 50 former Iraqi soldiers.She also said the jihadists were reportedly stockpiling ammonia and sulphur in civilian areas, possibly for use as chemical weapons.On Thursday, Iraqi soldiers advancing on the eastern side of the Tigris targeted two villages close to the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, a military statement said.Troops from the Ninth Armoured Division took control of one of the villages, Abbas Rajab, four km east of Nimrud, and raised the Iraqi flag, it said.The Iraqi government says Nimrud was bulldozed last year as part of Islamic State's campaign to destroy symbols which the Sunni Muslim zealots consider idolatrous. It would be the first such site to be recaptured from Islamic State. (Additional reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Giles Elgood)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
By Abdul Matin and Sabine Siebold

| MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan/BERLIN

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan/BERLIN Taliban militants stormed the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, ramming its outer wall with a truck bomb before battling security forces in a late-night attack that killed at least four people, officials said.The explosion, triggered by a suicide bomber, caused extensive damage to the building and shattered windows as far as 5 km (3 miles) away, a NATO spokesman said. A local doctor said the blast and subsequent firefight also wounded 120 people. No consular staff were among the victims, but Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germany would review its lead role in the international mission in northern Afghanistan, where violence has escalated sharply during 2016.Thursday's attack also underlines one of the tougher foreign policy challenges facing U.S. President-elect Donald Trump when he takes office in January. U.S. combat operations against the Taliban largely ended in 2014, but thousands of its soldiers remain in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.The Taliban said the attack was in retaliation for NATO air strikes against a village near the northern city of Kunduz last week in which more than 30 people, many of them children, were killed.Heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent "with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there", the Islamist militant movement's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone.Taliban forces came close to over-running Kunduz last month, a year after briefly capturing it in their biggest success in Afghanistan's 15-year-long war.HUGE BLAST

The NATO spokesman said at least one vehicle packed with explosives was rammed into the high outer wall surrounding the consulate, but authorities were investigating if a second car had been involved.

"The extent of damage to the city is huge," said Abdul Razaq Qaderi, deputy police chief of Balkh province. "This kind of an attack, bringing a truck full of explosives and blowing it up in the city, had never happened before."The city is still recovering from the shock."Noor Mohammad Faiz, the head doctor in Mazar-i-Sharif hospital, said four bodies and 120 wounded, most hurt by flying glass, had been brought to the hospital. Qaderi said German troops had shot two men on motorcycles who did not comply with orders to stop. German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said that incident was being investigated. Foreign Minister Steinmeier said six people were killed. All German consular employees were safe and uninjured, he added.

After coordinating the response on Thursday, the government's crisis task force was meeting again Friday and would review Germany's role in the Afghan mission."It was only possible to defeat the attackers and beat them back after fighting that occurred at the compound and in the building," Steinmeier said. Germany, which heads Resolute Support in northern Afghanistan, has about 850 soldiers at a base on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, with another 1,000 troops coming from 20 partner countries.INTO THE EARLY HOURS

The explosion occurred about an hour before midnight local time, a spokesman for the German military joint forces command in Potsdam said.Witnesses reported sporadic gunfire from around the consulate and said the blast had shattered windows in a wide area around the compound."It was a prepared attack for which we made all arrangements," the Taliban's Mujahid said. "First a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden vehicle rammed the main building of the consulate and that enabled other fighters to move in and kill all the foreigners there."He said dozens of German soldiers and intelligence personnel were killed in the attack. The Taliban often exaggerate casualties caused by its operations.After Afghan special forces, German security personnel and NATO's quick reaction protection force intervened, fighting was over by the early hours of the morning, said Sayed Kamal Sadat, police chief of Balkh.At least one suspect was arrested from the area of explosion, officials said.The heavily protected consulate is in a large building close to the Blue Mosque in the centre of Mazar-i-Sharif, where the Indian consulate was also attacked by militant gunmen earlier this year. (Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in BERLIN, James Mackenzie, Mirwais Harooni and Hamid Shalizi in KABUL, and Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR; Writing by Andrea Shalal; Editing by John Stonestreet)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
By Ian Simpson and Gina Cherelus

| WASHINGTON/NEW YORK

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Friday praised demonstrators for being passionate about their country, just hours after he accused them of being "professional protesters" incited by the media."Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!" Trump tweeted early on Friday. On Thursday night, the president-elect had posted: "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!"Mostly peaceful and orderly protests took place in at least eight cities following the Republican businessman's defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's election. Demonstrators have voiced concern Trump would harm Americans' civil rights.Trump's critics worry that his often-inflammatory campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, women and others - combined with support from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists - could spark a wave of intolerance against minorities. East Coast protests took place on Thursday in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, while on the West Coast, demonstrators rallied in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland in California, and Portland, Oregon. After Clinton conceded defeat early on Wednesday, Trump took a far more conciliatory tone than he had often displayed during his campaign, promising to be a president for all Americans. His campaign rejected a Klan newspaper endorsement days before the election, saying Trump "denounces hate in any form." But civil rights groups and police reported an uptick in attacks on minority groups, some by people claiming to support Trump.More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend. Trump takes office on Jan. 20, succeeding President Barack Obama. Thursday's gatherings were generally smaller in scale and less intense than Wednesday's, and teenagers and young adults again dominated the racially mixed crowds.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Friday acknowledged the tight race with Clinton, but said anti-Trump protesters had to accept the election results. He pointed to Trump's call for unity and meeting with Obama and Republican leaders as reasons for reassurance."Everyone needs to just take a deep breath, take the weekend ... count our blessings, and let's come back on Monday," Priebus said.MARCH FROM THE WHITE HOUSEPolice set up security barricades around two Trump marquee properties that have become focal points of protests - his newly opened Pennsylvania Avenue hotel near the White House and the high-rise Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he lives.About 100 protesters marched from the White House, where Trump had his first transition meeting with Obama on Thursday, to the new Trump International Hotel several blocks away.

At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many chanting, "No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!" and carrying signs with such slogans as "Impeach Trump" and "Not my president.""I can't support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It's heart-breaking," said Joe Daniels, 25, of suburban Alexandria, Virginia.Two Trump supporters stood off to the side carrying signs reading: "All We are Saying is Give Trump a Chance". Protesters in Portland threw objects at police and damaged cars in a dealership lot, police said, while local media reported graffiti on cars and buildings along with smashed storefront windows. Portland police on Friday said they had arrested at least 26 people after using pepper spray and rubber bullets to try to disperse the crowd. They declared the protest, lasting into Friday morning, a riot."Many in crowd trying to get anarchist groups to stop destroying property, anarchists refusing. Others encouraged to leave area," the Portland Police Department said on Twitter.

ARRESTS, MARCHES

At least 35 protesters were arrested in downtown Los Angeles after blocking traffic and sitting in the street, local media said. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles freeway before police cleared them.In San Francisco, more than 1,000 high school students walked out of classes on Thursday morning to march through the financial district carrying rainbow flags representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, Mexican flags, and signs decrying Trump.Dozens in Minneapolis marched onto Interstate 94, blocking traffic for at least an hour as police stood by. In Baltimore, about 600 people marched through the downtown Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street, police said. Two people were arrested.In Denver, a crowd that media estimated to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through downtown in one of the largest of Thursday's events. Hundreds demonstrated through Dallas. (Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York and Ian Simpson in Washington; Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, Donna Owens in Baltimore, Curtis Skinner in San Francisco, Steve Dipaola in Portland, Susan Heavey in Washington and Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Scott Malone and Steve Gorman; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Howard Goller)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Narendra Modi is not India's Donald Trump. Nor is Trump the American version of Modi. As their personalities go, both are the polar opposite of each other. While Modi whispers, Trump bugles across oceans. And unlike Modi who packs in subtle metaphors to make a point, Trump has no qualms about mouthing vulgar words (f**k and p***y). While Trump was an electoral greenhorn and a businessman, Modi had seen and won elections before and had been an ideologue, even though his ideology raises the hackles of many.

But there were many commonalities  I see at least eight  during the run-up to their respective campaigns for the office of the prime minister of India and the White House.

Both had a message

Unlike their rivals, both Narendra Modi in 2014 and Donald Trump in 2016 had a message to deliver and an agenda to unravel to the voters. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was so busy rebutting Trump that she forgot to offer a meaningful to-do list of her own for the Americans. Likewise, the leaders of the Congress and Modis other rivals spent most of their time painting him as a communalist who could only divide the nation. But undaunted, both Modi and Trump dished out what mattered to the voters: jobs for instance. They persuaded voters to give them a chance.

Both hated status quo

Thats what the voters adored about them. The Indian voters had no doubt that the Congress, if elected again, would offer them nothing more than the status quo as prevailed during UPA-1 and UPA-2 which, to them, largely meant scams. And Hillary looked to be no more than the continuation of the Barack Obama legacy which left large sections craving for more. Trump and Modi vowed to shake up the status quo, promising a change and a better tomorrow, which was what voters in both countries wanted.

Even their victory tweets stuck to this theme of change:

India has won!          Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 16, 2014

Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2016

They spoke against corruption

During the 2014 poll campaign, one of Narendra Modis main chants was corruption, which he described as a termite that was eating away the Indian system. He said the BJP "is for a mission and the Congress is for a commission". By repatriating black money stashed abroad, by simplifying tax regime and by expanding e-governance, Modi promised to reduce corruption. This seemed to make sense to many voters. Now they know they werent wrong.

As for Trump, he thundered at a rally: Real change also means draining the swamp of corruption in Washington... If we want to make America great again, we must clean up this corruption.

For the blue-collar white workers who think of the Washington-driven system as an epitome of corruption and wheeling-dealing, Trump seemed to be the man with a large broom to tidy up things.

Both are considered "outsiders"

A billionaire property tycoon who had never held an office, Trump is deemed to be an "outsider" to the system. So was Dwight Eisenhower who became the President in 1953. Washington Post writer EJ Dionne Jr said: "...Insiderism is unpopular this year. But, because of who Trump really is, his phoney outsider-ism is a far bigger threat to our country."

Considering that Trump's own financial reputation was not lily-white, many wonder whether he really is an "outsider" to the corruption that oils the American political machine. But the voters  at least half of them  thought he was. Better still for Trump, they thought he was an "anti-establishment rebel".

Modi too is an outsider, at least to Lutyens Delhi. In an interview to Network18 Group Editor Rahul Joshi on 2 September, Modi said: "In Delhis power corridors, theres an active group of people, which is dedicated to only a few. It could be because of their own reasons or personal gains..."

Dividers and disrupters

Modi was accused of having an agenda against minorities which his rivals said would divide India horribly. All that Modi spoke up against was the appeasement of minorities which, of course, was interpreted by rivals as the rattling of the communal sabre.

On the other hand, Trump openly spoke not only against Muslims but also included in his sweep of razor-sharp comments the immigrants, the LGBT community and even women in a way that stunned the US and the world. Trump also promised to be a disrupter when he raved against trade and other agreements starting with NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Whatever the reason why each was called a disrupter and a divider, both Modi and Trump picked up votes.

Media didn't get along with both

The media didn't get along with both Trump and Modi in their respective countries. Forget the "liberals" who populate the American media, the press there has a lot against the President-elect: Xenophobia, misogyny, gropings, cuss words, tax evasion, financial wrongdoing in his real-estate business. But the Indian media hadn't proven any allegations against Modi, at least as yet.

If Modi got away with the Indian media, its also partly because the hostility is more or less confined to some English newspapers and channels. And Trump got away with a bad press because voters apparently didnt care much for it.

Branding of voters

All those who voted for Modi were branded as communal. Similarly, all those who plumped for Trump are being called racist. The American liberals, be they in media or politics, are making the mistake of not investigating the real reasons why Trump got votes.

In the case of Modi, Indias liberals never asked themselves why so many people voted for a man whom they had portrayed as the personification of evil.

The ticking of doomsday clock

Trump-baiters were quick to announce after his election that the doomsday clock was ticking, as did the anti-Modi lobbies. Well, Modi is halfway into his term, and India is still in one piece. Though the man himself maintains a sphinx-like silence, the Hindu voice, both of the sane and insane kinds, is louder now, but India is not doing badly. He has just scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

As for Trump, wait and watch.

Views are personal. The author tweets @sprasadindia
The US has questioned India at the WTO on its move to increase minimum support prices (MSPs) for kharif crops in the current year and asked India to confirm whether one of its objectives is to limit imports of pulses.

In a Committee on Agriculture meeting held on 9 November, the US questioned India on its 1 June decision to increase MSPs for 14 kharif crops and the farmer-friendly initiative of a bonus over and above the MSP for 2015-16 kharif crops and 2016-17 rabi crops.

The US asked India to confirm whether one of the main objectives of further increasing the MSP for pulses and oilseeds is to limit imports of the goods, whether India has set procurement targets for pulses and oilseeds in 2016, whether it expects to procure any pulses and oilseeds, and what its procurement targets were for the 14 commodities.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had given its nod for the increased MSPs for kharif crops, which has been effective from October, based on recommendations of Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP).

The CACP is an expert group that recommends prices of agricultural commodities after considering variables such as the cost of production, overall demand and supply of the commodity, domestic and international prices, among other considerations.

The increased MSP is intended to narrow the gap between demand and domestic supply of pulses and oil seeds  resulting in soaring dal prices due to scanty rainfall  by spurring investment and production through guaranteed remunerative prices to farmers.

The CCEA also gave a bonus to some kharif crops of the 2015-16 season and some rabi crops of the 2016-17 season. Kharif crops, which are grown during the monsoon in South Asia, include paddy, maize, millet and cotton crops.

India said that its main objective for increasing MSP for pulses and oilseeds was to cover the increasing gap between the demand for, and domestic supply of, these crops. Also, leguminous pulses have salutary environmental benefits consuming less water and reducing soil degradation. MSPs are intended to reduce distress sales by poor farmers, and that most of the commodities covered by MSPs have a market price much above the fixed MSP, and so the government is not required to make any procurement or set any targets, India argued.

The US, in turn, said that given India doesn't expect government procurement of pulses or oilseeds as a result of the announced MSP for 2016, how does India justify not notifying support of commodities with the MSP and no procurement when the CCEA statement and others clearly indicate that the June announcement is intended to give "strong signals" to producers to grow the covered crops.

The EU said that it had the same concerns as the US on the matter, while Canada said it had an interest in the issue given that it was a large exporter of pulses and oilseeds.

In the same meeting, the EU questioned the Maharashtra governments attempts to control the free fall of onion prices  due to excess supply and unsold stocks that had led to protests by farmers.

We also have proposed to pay Rs 10 per kg for onion exports and want to export out 25 lakh tons from the country, Minister of Cooperation of Maharashtra Subhash Deshmukh had said in August.

The EU had asked India to confirm whether it had proposed to put in place an export subsidy program for onions and to provide more information  like duration, total amount of subsidy, subsidy rate per ton, etc  on the announcement.

It also asked India for an explanation of how this conforms to Article 20 of the Nairobi Decision on Export Competition since exports of onions are subject to state trading through the state agricultural marketing board.

Article 20 through a decision of 19 December 2015 taken during the WTO ministerial conference in Nairobi states members shall ensure that agricultural exporting state trading enterprises do not operate in a manner that circumvents any other disciplines contained in this Decision.

The EU asked India to explain the state of preparations for the MSP-for-onions program that India is believed to be working on.

India said that the information is being collected and will be shared in due course. The EU, the US, Canada, Ukraine and New Zealand said that they look forward to India's reply.

Additionally, the EU questioned India on its export restrictions on sugar and its new crop insurance scheme, New Zealand questioned India on its importation of apples and Australia questioned Indias sugar export subsidies. These issues, however, have been raised in previous meetings as well.

The Committee on Agriculture chairperson, Canadian diplomat Garth Ehrhardt, also said during the meeting that members had not provided any information in the context of the monitoring foreseen under the Bali decisions on public stockholding for food security purposes and tariff-rate quota administration.
Beijing: China's President Xi Jinping made a strong call for unity among all people of Chinese descent on Friday, amid political turmoil in Hong Kong and rising independence sentiment in self-governing Taiwan.

Xi spoke on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen, China's first president and the godfather of Chinese nationalism, who continues to command broad respect within China and the Chinese diaspora.

Speaking to an audience of officials and military officers at the colossal Great Hall of the People in central Beijing, Xi called on Taiwan's leaders to endorse the principle that the island and mainland China are parts of a single Chinese nation.

"Any party, organisation or individual in Taiwan, no matter what they proposed in the past, as long as they acknowledge the '92 consensus and that the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, we would like to make exchanges with them," Xi said, referring to a 1992 agreement that laid the foundation for talks between the two long-time antagonists.

China, Xi said, would "never allow anyone, any organisation, any party to split out any piece of land of China at any time and in any way."

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has refused to endorse the '92 consensus, prompting Beijing to cut contacts with her government and broaden its outreach to the opposition Nationalist Party that formally backs eventual unification.

Tsai scored a decisive win in January's presidential election, while her pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party gained a majority in the legislature representing the island of 23 million people that split from the mainland amid civil war in 1949.

Beijing has also registered alarm over anti-China sentiment in Hong Kong among newly elected members of its legislative council.

China's top legislature this week took the rare step of intervening directly in a local Hong Kong political dispute by effectively barring two legally elected separatist lawmakers from taking office, setting the stage for further turmoil in the semi-autonomous city.
The Hasselblad TrueZoom Camera Mod for Moto Z phones is marketed as being the ultimate tool for professionals and enthusiasts who want to take the highest quality picture possible while being able to readily edit and share it on their social platforms. Lets find out how it does in the real world.

What is a Mod?

A Mod is a modular add on that Lenovo have come up for their Moto device platform. As of now, the Moto Z as well as the Moto Z Play support the modular platform and there are various mods to choose from. Each mod can be attached to the back of the device to enhance the functionality of the devices. As of now, the current Moto Z and Z Play as well as the Mods are based on Platform 1.0 of the modular system and Lenovo has promised forward compatibility of devices that release in the future.

However, they havent promised that the existing Moto Z and Z Play devices will be able to support the future Mods released by Lenovo which maybe based on a later version of the modular platform i.e higher than 1.0. But at least, forward compatibility of the mods itself is a huge bonus and the lack of which was one of the many reasons why the LG G5 modular system failed.

Design and Build Quality

The Hasselblad TrueZoom Mod features a magnetic design that latches onto the back of your Moto Z device and connects itself to the 16 pin connector at the bottom rear of your device. The magnet is strong enough to attach itself without needing for much effort however, it can also on some occasions go out of alignment and youll have to make sure that the Mod is fitted properly for it to work.

The Mod adds a much needed camera grip which enhances the ergonomics and makes photo capturing much more intuitive as well as stable. This is true especially on the Moto Z which can be too thin for stable shots. It does add quite a bit of bulk and weight to it but that is the entire point of the design. The grip and most of the surface is rubberized for more grip but the central portion that houses the lens module has a bluish violet colour with a soft touch finish.

On the inner side, there is a foam padding as well as a cutout for the phones camera since the Hasselblad mod has a camera of its own. The Mods camera is quite large and protrudes quite a bit from the casing. In fact, it protrudes even more than the grip and we feel that Moto couldve made the depth of the grip same as the height of the modular protrusion to provide an even better feel and handling. It would also have been good if they had fitted tiny rubber or plastic stubs to the lens module since that wouldve prevented the device from sliding about and also protected the module from wear and tear.

You have a Hasselblad branding on the side, a Hasselblad H logo to the bottom right, a Xenon flash at the upper right corner as well as a focus assist light to the left of the lens. Adjacent to the Hasselblad branding on the side, you can also find the power button and zoom lever which also houses the two stage camera shutter key. The power button as well as the zoom level are quite nice and give good feedback. However, the shutter button gives too soft a feedback and you often end up clicking the photo instead of just focusing on an object.

Since the Mod adds quite a bit of bulk and a camera mod isnt necessary all the time, Moto also bundle a carrying case for the Mod that allows you to store the Mod safely without causing harm to it. The case is made of fabric but has metal plates at the top and bottom as well as a magnetic flap, a Hasselblad H logo and a lanyard.

The lens has a mechanical shutter and protrudes out once you turn it on. Zooming in further pushes the lens further out from the body as well. The weirdest thing is that despite marketing it as a camera tool for Pros or Prosumers, there is no tripod mount for the Mod.

The photo at the top is at the widest focal length while the photo at the bottom is with 10x optical zoom fully extended.

Imaging

The main purpose of the Hasselblad mod is to provide a much better image quality than the built in cameras that the Z Play and Z provides. While the camera quality of the Z Play is still acceptable at the given price range, one would not expect Moto to have such an inferior built-in camera on a device such as the Moto Z. However, the primary purpose for this could be to sell the Mod itself.

The Hasselblad Mod is pretty big in size but apart from the 10X optical zoom, the rest of the camera specifications are rather underwhelming. The sensor size is just 1/2.3 inches with a pixel size of 1.55 micron which is also what you would find on the Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. However, considering the bulky design of the Hasselblad Mod, one would expect a 1 inch sensor inside of it. Sure, the optical zoom mechanism will definitely take up space but it is hard to believe that they couldnt pack a better sensor inside it.

Either way, the sensor has a resolution of 12 Megapixels as well as a Xenon flash, 10x optical zoom (25-250mm in 35 mm equivalent), OIS and a red AF assist light. The aperture isnt fixed but has a variable aperture of f3.5-f6.5 which again is surprising considering that many cameras out there come with a constant aperture throughout the zoom range. Moto couldve at least had a fairly larger aperture at the widest focal length of around f1.8 or so.

Here is a low light photo captured by the TrueZoom Mod.

The first two photos were taken with the Hasselblad while the third photo was taken with the stock Z Play camera.

This really comes into play when you take images in low light. Although the sensor is small for something of its size, it still isnt bad. In fact, it can be really good as proven by the Pixel smartphones. However, it is let down by the really narrow aperture. Low light shots on the TrueZoom are painfully underexposed and/or noisy. There really isnt much to say about the low light performance other than the fact that it is really disappointing.

The photo below is a Panorama taken with the mod.

You would think that the Mod would perform wonders in good lighting conditions at least but you would be wrong. There again, the quality is decent but not enough of a jump to warrant you spending the kind of amount that Moto and Hasselblad are charging you for it. The shutter speed too is really laggy and the focus fails most of the time and even when it does latch on correctly, it is dead slow. There is a manual mode where you can choose the focus, White Balance, shutter speed as well as ISO manually but the story about the quality remains the same.

The first photo shows the default Moto Z Play camera UI while the second photo shows the camera UI with the Hasselblad Mod.

The only real salvation is the 10x optical zoom which can provide a new perspective and allow people to capture and compose photos in a way that they never imagined with a smartphone before.

Below is a photo taken using the widest focal length and then at the 10x optical zoom limit. Had we used digital zoom, the third picture is what we wouldve gotten. This just shows how much of a difference optical zoom makes in the quality of photos.

The Mod also enables RAW capture which is not a feature that is found on the Moto phones by default. You also have a Black and White capture mode but it just desaturates the photo and isnt really a Monochrome mode with a Monochrome sensor like on the Huawei P9.

OIS does help to keep things steady a bit but the slow shutter most often ruins the shot unless you are careful especially at the longer end of the focal length. The flash is really powerful and is enough to capture group photos in low lit places but even then it doesnt really look very pleasing. The main thing missing in the camera UI is the lack of an HDR mode.

Video

Video is yet again a disappointment since it maxes out at 1080p. The video is quite soft and lacks sharpness and detailing. The only good thing is that it still has EIS even though it doesnt help much. However, that also becomes useless if you zoom in and is mainly usable only at the widest zoom range. 4K video might not be available due to limitations of transmitting such high bandwidth of data through the 16 pin connector. The videos also have issues with rolling shutter as is apparent in the videos below.

The first video is with EIS turned on and the second is with EIS turned off.

Battery Life

The TrueZoom Mod doesnt have a built in battery and hence the battery life of the Mod and your phone is dependent on the phone itself. In our use case, we paired it with the Moto Z Play and since the phone already has amazing battery life, it didnt really create even a minor dent in the battery life. However, it may be a totally different story for those who use it with their Moto Z.

The Mod also requires power to push the lens out or in so you will need to turn off the module or exit the camera app first before removing the Mod or else the lens will remain extended and you will have to reconnect it to draw it back into the casing. So since it requires external power, it is quite difficult to calculate just how long the Mod and phone will last you. Either way, it would be advisable to remove the Mod from the back of the phone when not needed.

Conclusion

The Hasselblad TrueZoom Camera Mod from Moto might sound like one hell of a accessory for your smartphone. However, it is far from it. The image quality is decent but far from breathtaking or revolutionary and that wouldve stayed my verdict even if it was a built in camera.

However, when it is an accessory that costs almost as much as a Moto Z Play and costlier than several point and shoot cameras out there which itself is a dying breed, you expect much much more but it fails to deliver. The zoom is the only good thing in this Mod but is not enough to tempt me into getting one nor would I recommend any of you to get it. Hopefully, we get a V2 of this mod that actually focuses more on the actual device rather than just on the branding.

The Hasselblad TrueZoom Moto Mod retails at Rs 19,999 but you can get a 5000 rupee discount on it if you buy it along with your Moto Z or Moto Z Play. my advice, just get the smartphones alone or maybe one of the other mods but stay away from this.

Pros

Good Build Quality

Great Zoom Range

Powerful Xenon Flash

Cons

Mediocre Image Quality

Noisy Lowlight Performance

No 4K Video Recording

Overpriced

No Built-in Battery

No Tripod Mount

No HDR Mode
In the past few years, many pundits have predicted the death of department stores. However, most department store chains posted better-than-expected results in Q2, sparking a relief rally for department store stocks.

On Thursday morning, the two top department store chains -- Macy's (M -0.19%) and Kohl's (KSS -3.77%) -- provided more good news for the sector. To be sure, department stores continue to suffer from weak customer traffic. But they are finding ways to get customers to spend more on each visit and making other improvements to their operational performance.

Kohl's recovery gains steam

Kohl's started off the day with a handy earnings beat. Adjusted earnings per share reached $0.80, up from $0.75 a year earlier. This was the second straight quarterly increase.

Comparable store sales did fall again, sinking 1.7% year over year. However, that was slightly better than the 1.8% decrease recorded in Q2 and significantly better than the first quarter's 3.9% decline.

Three months ago, Kohl's reported strong back-to-school sales near the end of Q2, and this trend continued into the beginning of Q3. September was weak, but sales trends accelerated again in October, with comp sales nearly flat during the month. This could be a good sign for the upcoming high-volume holiday shopping season.

Cost performance was equally strong. Kohl's reduced its selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses by 1.7% in the quarter. Some of that improvement was due to the timing of various costs, but some of it reflects more efficient spending.

Finally, Kohl's cash flow was particularly impressive. The company is working hard to reduce its inventory without impacting sales. As a result, Kohl's has generated nearly $700 million of free cash flow year to date, compared to negative free cash flow in the first nine months of fiscal 2015. Investors applauded, sending the stock up as much as 15% on Thursday morning, to a new 52-week high.

Macy's turnaround continues, but costs rise

Macy's also reported that sales trends are improving. For Q3, comparable store sales (including licensed departments) decreased 2.7% year over year. That was roughly in line with the Q2 decline of 2.6% and much better than Q1's 5.6% comp sales slump.

However, unlike Kohl's, costs increased significantly at Macy's in Q3. SG&A was up 5.2% year over year, driven by a combination of strategic investments to drive a return to sales growth, lower credit card income, and lower asset sale gains compared to Q3 2015.

As a result, Macy's adjusted EPS plunged to just $0.12 last quarter, down from $0.56 a year earlier, falling far short of analysts' estimates. Nevertheless, Macy's maintained its full-year guidance for adjusted EPS of $3.15-$3.40, due to its improving sales trends. The company expects comp sales to fall just 0.5%-2% in Q4.

Macy's made up for its mixed operating results by making a lot of progress on monetizing its real estate. During Q3, the company signed contracts to sell its men's store in San Francisco and its downtown store in Portland, Oregon, for combined proceeds of about $300 million. It also formed a strategic alliance with Brookfield Asset Management to explore development options for about 50 properties that Macy's owns.

Investors were pleased enough about the real estate progress and stabilizing sales trend to send Macy's stock up more than 8% on Thursday morning.

Comparisons get easier

Department stores will face very easy year-over-year comparisons for the next two quarters. Having two extra days between Thanksgiving and Christmas could also boost sales in Q4.

Both Kohl's and Macy's still trade at reasonable valuations -- as do most of their department store peers. If they can continue to execute on their efforts to reverse the recent declines in their earnings and cash flow, both stocks could rise even further in the next year or two.
Professional networker LinkedIn (LNKD.DL) is very much still in growth mode, particularly in regions outside of the U.S., so it could potentially be bad news that the company is staring down a possible ban in Russia. A local court has upheld a court decision against the company, saying that LinkedIn was not in compliance with the country's data protection rules that require any personal user data regarding Russian citizens to be stored on Russian servers. LinkedIn had appealed a prior court decision, which is now being upheld.

Despite being around for two years, the law has never really been enforced. The goal is to protect Russian user data by physically storing it within the country, although the skeptical view is that the Russian government could also more easily get its hands on that data itself if it's stored locally.

The ban could be implemented within the next week or so. LinkedIn says it is still interested in meeting with regulators to resolve the concerns around data localization.

How important is Russia to LinkedIn?

LinkedIn reportedly has approximately 6 million registered users in Russia, which only represents about 1% of the 467 million registered members that the network had as of the end of September. Of that total, about 106 million members are in Asia-Pacific (APAC), which is the fastest-growing region for LinkedIn memberships.

Members by Region Q3 2015 Q3 2016 Growth (YOY) U.S. 122.3 million 133.8 million 9% Other Americas 67.8 million 79.1 million 17% EMEA 127.4 million 148.2 million 16% APAC 78.8 million 105.8 million 34% Total 396.3 million 466.9 million 18%

APAC is also quite modest in terms of revenue relative to other regions.

Revenue by Region Q3 2016 Percent of Total U.S. $588.2 million 61% Other Americas $50.6 million 5% EMEA $235.2 million 25% APAC $85.8 million 9% Total $959.8 million 100%

This makes sense since LinkedIn's actual business lags user growth, since the majority of sales come from monetizing user data with products like LinkedIn Recruiter. It all starts by building the member base, and monetization comes later. So while Russia is small, it is growing and remains an important market for the company.

While LinkedIn does not disclose further detail within these segments, it's quite likely that China is a much more important part of APAC revenue. There are now an estimated 20 million registered members in China, which is pretty solid progress considering LinkedIn only entered China officially about two-and-a-half years ago.

The bigger picture

Beyond LinkedIn, Russia's crackdown on tech companies potentially has implications throughout social media as well as a broader group of U.S.-based tech companies. Particularly regarding companies that collect user data, they may have trouble entering the Russian market unless they're willing to comply with local regulations. It's a somewhat expected issue, much like how LinkedIn had to navigate censorship concerns in China, but that won't make it easier if companies disagree with the spirit of the law.
Tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PM -0.14%) has thrived since its birth as an independent company by taking full advantage of world-known cigarette brands like Marlboro to drive tobacco sales. Yet despite its success with traditional cigarettes, Philip Morris has been quite forward-thinking in acknowledging the key role that reduced-risk products will have in its long-term strategic plan for the future, and the early results of its iQOS heat-not-burn tobacco technology have been quite encouraging. In particular, Japan has been a key market for Philip Morris and iQOS, and now, rival British American Tobacco (BTI 0.18%) is looking to introduce its answer to the cigarette alternative in the island nation.

British American introduces Glo

Earlier this week, British American issued a press release introducing its new Glo product. The company described Glo as a "new-to-world Tobacco Heating Product" that heats tobacco rather than burning it. As British American argues, the "unique next generation tobacco product provides a new-to-world experience" that is "similar to that of a cigarette, but with reduced risk potential" and that "delivers a cleaner experience with around 90% less toxicants than a standard cigarette."

Specifically, British American intends to introduce proprietary tobacco in the form of what it is calling Neostiks, carrying the well-known Kent brand name. Glo will initially launch offering three different flavors, including what it calls Intensely Fresh, Fresh Mix, and Bright Tobacco. The company admits that the reduced presence of toxic materials doesn't necessarily mean the product's impact on health will be less than other tobacco products, but British American did note that the safety standards for the product are strong, with safeguards built in to prevent overheating.

In a thinly veiled attack on Philip Morris, British American announced that it had chosen Japan to be its first market for Glo, characterizing the nation as "a global leader for innovation." Certainly, that has been Philip Morris International's experience, and British American hopes it can compete effectively in Japan.

Why Japan is important

The reason British American is introducing Glo in Japan likely has to do with Philip Morris' early success there. Philip Morris introduced iQOS to the island nation in November 2014, targeting the pilot market of Nagoya. In less than two years, availability of iQOS within Japan has expanded dramatically, and when Philip Morris announced its third-quarter financial results last month, it said market share for iQOS in Japan had jumped to 4.3% by the end of September, accelerating dramatically and nearly doubling just since the second quarter of 2016. Even more impressive is the fact that those gains came despite Philip Morris having to limit sales based on a lack of supply.

British American is hoping to use typical competitive tactics to eat into Philip Morris' first-mover advantage. Glo will come at a cheaper price than iQOS, potentially driving interest. In addition, prices of Neostiks will be in line with what regular Kent cigarettes cost, encouraging experimentation among Kent smokers.

Yet Philip Morris will inevitably fight back. The company opened a new production plant in Italy recently, looking to expand supply and meet the huge demand for iQOS in Japan and worldwide. Even though Philip Morris is looking at expansion in other markets, especially in Europe, Japan will remain a key place for the company to prove itself as the furthest along in terms of widespread acceptance of iQOS and its HeatSticks products.

Looking forward, Japan will be a proving ground for iQOS, Glo, and other competitive entrants in the cigarette alternative industry. How Japanese consumers respond could say a lot about how successful Philip Morris will be in the long run in its strategy to move toward reduced risk products.
McLaren McLaren looked reasonable in FP1, and had pace for the top 10 in FP2, but Buttons day ended prematurely when three red warning lights illuminated on his dashboard to indicate a problem in the exhaust region, just as Alonso was rolling to a halt in Turn 3 with ERS water pressure problems. Fernando Alonso - FP1: 1:14.296, P14; FP2: 1:13.572, P11 We saw today that we seem to be a little bit more competitive here than at some of the previous races, and I believe theres a chance for us to make it into Q3 tomorrow. In the second session, I had to stop the car due to the fact that we saw an anomaly in ERS water pressure data. Were going to change the engine anyway for tomorrow, so this issue wont affect me at all for the rest of my weekend. With the high temperatures we had today, I think everyone suffered a lack of grip and degradation, but it looks like the weather is going to change, with some lower temperatures, cloud and rain. That would help us, as it would help reshuffle the deck a little. Tomorrow we need to have a good qualifying session  thats very important as overtaking around here can be quite difficult. Jenson Button - FP1: 1:14.252, P13; FP2: 1:13.440, P10 On low fuel, the car didnt feel too bad, it was relatively fun to drive. The balance still needs a bit of work on high fuel, but we didnt get much running done because we had an issue with the exhaust temperatures and had to stop. Neither car did much long-running today, which is a pity because we need that information, particularly for our understanding of the Option tyres performance. Fortunately, the problem on my car should be very easy to solve; its just hurt todays running. Hopefully, we can get plenty of running in tomorrow  we need it. With the anticipated lower temperatures, qualifying should be fun  getting into Q3 will be tough, but that should be our aim. For the race itself, Id like the weather to sort itself out and rain! Eric Boullier, McLaren-Honda Racing Director It was frustrating to see both cars stop in quick succession of each other, particularly as it meant that we werent able to complete our proposed long-run plan at the end of FP2. Looking at it pragmatically, its better that these issues occur during free practice rather than during qualifying or the race, and Im sure well be able to quickly resolve the problems before tomorrows sessions. In addition, with mixed and rainy conditions forecast for the remainder of the weekend, todays lack of running may not prove too consequential at the end of Sundays race. On a more positive note, we were able to complete a fairly comprehensive test programme this morning, running through a number of correlation exercises and test-item evaluations, all of which should prove useful to our knowledge and understanding of next years car. Well have a little bit more work to do during FP3 tomorrow, but weve nonetheless made a positive start to the race weekend.

Enlarge Jenson Button (GBR) McLaren MP4-31 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Manor Ocon had a completely different FP1 to the one hed had in Mexico, to his relief. He said that he could start attacking a new track straight away, and was positive about how his day had evolved. Wehrlein had the opposite experience, with handling problems on his car which significantly compromised his FP2 and left him on his back foot. Pascal Wehrlein - FP1: 1:14.948, P20; FP2: 1:14.958, P22 Ive been struggling with some car issues today. We looked at it between FP1 and FP2, but FP2 ended up being massively compromised. I had to stay in the garage for most of the session. Its not ideal, but Fridays can be like that, and now we just need to get to the bottom of the problem and fix it before tomorrow. Challenges are there to be overcome and they simply make you fight harder. I was able to get out on track for the end of the session and even though I had half the laps of some people out there, I was pleased with where we ended up, considering. Ill come back tomorrow and see what weve got for qualifying. Esteban Ocon - FP1: 1:14.827, P18; FP2: 1:14.317, P18 Im loving the track; its a circuit that has a lot of character and is short but really interesting. With the car, it feels like a much better start to the weekend than Mexico and I think weve done a good job to get up to speed quite quickly. Theres more to come as we build towards qualifying and the race, but with how things look so far, I think we can have a nice fight with the cars around us. I think we found the problem and my car feels back to normal after the problems we had in Mexico. Im much happier with the way the car is handling and the pace looks good - ahead of a Renault and a Sauber. So far so good. Dave Ryan, Racing director Not the best start to the weekend on Pascals side of the garage. Weve experienced a few problems in both sessions, some of which we identified and got on top of and some of which require further investigation. That lost him quite a bit of time confined to the garage and his programme was significantly impacted. However, he did a good job to come back from that and had a positive end to what has been a pretty poor couple of sessions. We need to sort those problems out for him. With Esteban, he had a straightforward day and was able to demonstrate that our one-lap pace is looking good versus our immediate competitors, but theres still a lot of work to do to prepare for the race.

Enlarge Pascal Wehrlein (GER) Manor Racing MRT05 locks up at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Haas Grosjean had an ambitious FP1 programme, testing the halo during his installation lap before focusing on comparing brake packages from Brembo and Carbone Industrie. He tried the former for nine laps, then switched to the latter for the remaining 15 that he did on mediums. He liked the Carbone Industrie wares and suggested that he would retain them for the rest of the weekend. Gutierrez said he didnt the get the balance perfect on his VF-16, which Leclerc had again driven well in FP1. Romain Grosjean - FP1: 1:14.507, P15; FP2: 1:14.074, P15 The main item of the day was trying the new brakes. Im pretty happy with them. I think Im going to stick with them all weekend long. Were still not perfect in terms of maps, balance and usage and so on, but the feeling was pretty good. Weve been struggling a bit with the heat and the temperature of the track, and our afternoon was a little more difficult than our morning. There are a few items here and there to work on to get the car to go faster, but at least we have some direction in where to go and what to do. Esteban Gutierrez - FP2: 1:14.558, P20 It was nice to get back driving after sitting out FP1. I think it was important just to do our program. It was a little compact fitting it all into FP2, but it went reasonably well in terms of evaluating the car. Now we can improve a lot. I was not very happy with the balance, so we have some work to do tonight to try to put that together. We need to try to optimize everything for tomorrow. Charles Leclerc - FP1: 1:15.391, P21 It was great to get back into the car. I love the Interlagos track. Its my first time here. I love the second sector, especially. Its very interesting. Its been a long time since Ive driven a racecar because were on a bit of a break in GP3 at the moment, and its been even longer since I drove the Formula One car. It was a bit of an adaptation in my first runs this morning, but in the end it all went well. We ran through our program and the team gave me the feedback that I was helpful to them, so thats all good. Guenther Steiner, Team principal I would say we had an abnormally good Friday, as Fridays lately havent been very good to us. Today we had a problem-free FP1 and FP2. In FP1, Charles drove Estebans car and Romain his. It went pretty well. We did our program and made progress. In FP2, Esteban was back in his car and we got through our whole program. It seems like as soon as temperatures go up, our car goes slower and we lose grip. I think we know now how to cure this. We still have work to do, but fortunately the forecast has it getting cooler, so that may help us. But we cannot rely on fortune, so everybodys working hard to see that we get the performance in the car for tomorrow. We also tested different brakes on Romains car. They seem to be working fine. We had no issues. Well now review if we continue to use them or not.

Enlarge Romain Grosjean (FRA) Haas VF-16 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Red Bull Red Bull got off to a strong start to their weekend, with both drivers looking decent on single-lap pace against the Mercedes in FP1, and showing pretty competitive race pace in FP2, though Verstappen felt that some lunchtime changes had not been for the better. Neither driver believes that they are on Mercedes' pace, however, and both are praying for rain on Sunday. Daniel Ricciardo - FP1: 1:12.371, P4; FP2: 1:12.828, P5 Today it was really hot and you could feel the tyres were having a hard time, and it means we were not as quick as wed like. On the long run today I didnt feel we were that strong towards the end of it but I feel that once the track cools its going to be completely different. We are a bit closer to Mercedes than we probably expected, and theres still a bit more to come from the car, but to really have a chance to win then I think we need some rain to help us. The rain would be fun just to change it up a little bit but even if its just cooler tomorrow and on Sunday as forecast it will be better on the tyres. Of course we will try and improve what we have done today but I think tomorrow will be another story. Max Verstappen - FP1: 1:11.991, P2; FP2: 1:12.928, P6 First practice was really good this morning, we then made some changes for second practice which meant my short run pace wasnt fantastic, along with the increase in track temperature. We went back on some of those changes and the long run in FP2 looked quite positive. I think we are happy with the pace over that distance, we just need to make some modifications for tomorrow to get the short distance pace back. Using both the soft and medium compound today meant we got a good understanding of how they will react around here, no real surprises to be honest. Mercedes are still too far ahead in my opinion but after them we are up there and competitive. I am hoping it will rain on Sunday as this will close the gap, give us a good shot at winning and add to the excitement. If conditions are like this then it will be a bit tougher for us to be up front.

Enlarge Max Verstappen (NED) Red Bull Racing RB12 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Renault Palmer ran the halo in FP1, when he also tried the medium and soft tyres. Sirotkin only used the mediums in his second run for the team but that was truncated by a wiring problem. In FP2 Magnussen and Palmer both used the mediums and softs. The Dane was happier with his RS16s balance than was the newly re-signed Briton. Jolyon Palmer - FP1: 1:14.908, P19; FP2: 1:14.436, P19 Despite the fact that we did a decent amount of laps today, I think that there is still some work to be done as I havent felt completely happy with the car. I want to make a jump forward tomorrow. The positive is that we have gathered a lot of data with all the running done in FP1 and in FP2. I tried the halo for the first time early on this morning and my first impression is that it felt a bit like I had a roof over my head. Kevin Magnussen - FP2: 1:14.109, P16 We did a good afternoons work and I felt comfortable pretty much straight away. I was able to get some good laps under my belt including a respectable long run. Im happy with the way today went and look forward to preparing for the rest of the weekend with all the data weve gathered. Sergey Sirotkin - FP1: 1:15.800, P22 It was very nice to be back at the wheel of the R.S.16 this morning as its been a while. Interlagos is a legendary circuit so it was great to drive around this historic track behind the wheel of an F1 car. Unfortunately we didnt do as many laps as we would have liked due to a problem with the car after Id completed 10 laps. These things happen and thats what practice is for. Of course, it was frustrating not to get more time driving, however Im still really looking forward to my next opportunity for an outing with the team. Bob Bell, Chief Technical Officer Despite the issue encountered this morning, it has been a reasonably positive day. Sergey was unfortunate to lose laps because of a wiring loom glitch, however we were able to complete a normal Friday morning programme with Jo. In the afternoon we completed our full programme so have plenty of data to work on. Kevin was happier with his car than Jo so we know theres work to be done. We hope to be able to improve on both sides of the garage ahead of qualifying.

Enlarge Kevin Magnussen (DEN) Renault Sport F1 Team RS16 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Ferrari Vettel said he wasnt happy with his fast-lap pace and that it was generally a tricky day regarding the heat and getting the tyres dialled in. He had a spin at Mergulho at the end of FP1, but said he was optimistic for tomorrow. Raikkonen said he hadnt got the car fully balanced yet, and lost time in FP2 when a discarded visor blocked a duct and caused his brakes to overheat. Sebastian Vettel - FP1: 1:13.567, P9; FP2: 1:13.002, P7 "I think it was a tricky day. The track was very slippery, the temperature hot, and I think everybody was struggling with the tires. It was a bit difficult to find the rhythm. The long run was a bit better for us: I haven't seen what the others were doing, but I felt a bit more confident with more time and more laps in the car. So in total we tried a lot of things, and now we need to go and see what actually was best. Towards the end of the day it seemed to calm down a bit more, finding the rhythm, which wasn't the case for the short run, for the fast lap, where I wasn't very happy. The good news today are that the gaps were very close. Mercedes for sure, as expected, is a bit up front: but other than that, if it stays like this, it bodes well for tomorrow." Kimi Raikkonen - FP1: 1:13.569, P10; FP2: 1:13.047, P8 "It was a pretty normal Friday: we tried different things to make it better for tomorrow. It was a bit tricky to find the balance, the set-up is not ideal yet, but we are going in the right direction. I only did a few laps with the Soft, it felt pretty ok and obviously it has the best grip. Unfortunately at the end of the second session we had an issue with one visor which obstructed the cooling duct: the brakes overheated and I had to stop."

Next Previous Enlarge 1 / 2 Kevin Magnussen (DEN) Renault Sport F1 Team RS16 and Sebastian Vettel (GER) Ferrari SF16-H at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Kimi Raikkonen (FIN) Ferrari SF16-H at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Force India Hulkenberg said hed had a good start and that he generally feels like Force India can have another strong weekend. Perez aid his cars balance need more work, and that he never got a clear lap in FP2 and that there was thus more to come his side of the garage. Nico Hulkenberg - FP1: 1:13.293, P7; FP2: 1:13.299, P9 "It was a good Friday - just what you want from a day like this. We had two dry sessions and collected some very useful tyre information with two long runs. The car feels ok, but there is still a lot that can be done to improve the balance overnight. Its a good starting point. Its still too early to know just how competitive we are, but it feels like we have the potential for a strong weekend." Sergio Perez - FP1: 1:13.289, P6; FP2: 1:13.918, P14 "A very hot day, but things went to plan and I feel positive. This afternoon I didnt get a clear lap for my first run on the soft tyres so I feel there is more potential to come. We tried a few set-up adjustments that did not really work, but weve learned some things which will give us a better direction for tomorrow. We expect the weather to be slightly cooler over the weekend, but I still think the work weve done today is representative and we just need to adjust if the track temperatures drop. Overall I feel happy with what weve done today and we have a good idea of where we need to improve overnight." Robert Fernley, Deputy Team Principal "As the forecast indicated, we had a very hot day with high temperatures, up to 50 degrees on track, in both FP1 and FP2. This allowed us to learn a lot about the set-up of the car and the performance of the tyres in these conditions. However, we are aware that cooler weather is expected for the rest of the weekend, with a realistic chance of rain, so we need to keep that in mind when looking at a qualifying and race set-up. Overall, it was a fairly standard Friday in which we were able to complete our programme with no issues. Both drivers were quite happy with the car by the time we got to the long runs at the end of the day, but there is still some work to do in regard to our low-fuel performance. It will be our focus tonight as we prepare for the weekend."

Next Previous Enlarge 1 / 2 Nico Hulkenberg (GER) Force India VJM09 with halo at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Sergio Perez (MEX) Force India VJM09 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Williams Williams were pleasantly surprised that their set-up was quick, after plenty of simulator work beforehand. They had a strong and very fruitful day and their best performance in a while. The only problem was a flat-spotted tyre that hurt Massas pace slightly. Valtteri Bottas - FP1: 1:13.129, P5; FP2: 1:12.761, P3 "For a Friday, it was good. The balance was quite good in the first run, so it has just been fine tuning after that. The long runs were consistent, the car feels ok and the pace seems promising. But its only Friday so, like every weekend, we will need to find a lot more for tomorrow because everyone else will improve as well. Im happy with today, but its tomorrow and Sunday that count. I think we can be more competitive than we were in the last race, but its difficult to say in detail after practice because everyone is trying different things." Felipe Massa - FP1: 1:13.318, P8; FP2: 1:12.789, P4 "Its definitely been a good day. Its always nice to see your name near the top of the leaderboard. Im really looking for that competitiveness tomorrow and especially on Sunday. This is a track that I love and the people here really support me, which gives me so much more confidence. I hope we can stay up there this weekend. It wont be easy but I will definitely try!" Rob Smedley, Head of Performance Engineering "We are pleasantly surprised at how good our pace was today. Weve done a lot of set-up and development work in the simulator, and then subsequently on the track here, and the drivers are happy with the results. We knew we had to take a slightly different approach for a track like this, with the low-speed corners, so thats what weve been concentrating on. Both the low and high fuel runs looked good, we could run the soft tyre easily as long as we need to, and it was good on the medium tyre as well. There was a lot of degradation on the high fuel, but the degradation was high today so the aim is to have relatively less than other people. Felipe suffered a flat spot on his long run that knocked his pace back a little bit, but overall were in good shape."

Next Previous Enlarge 1 / 2 Valtteri Bottas (FIN) Williams FW38 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Felipe Massa (BRA) Williams FW38 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Toro Rosso Sainz said he had a scrappy day, with some cooling problems in the morning. Kvyat had a right rear puncture then that cost him time, but said that otherwise his day had ticked all the boxes. Daniil Kvyat - FP1: 1:14.090, P12; FP2: 1:13.689, P12 "It was a decent day. Even if we missed a bit of track time this morning, weve completed a good amount of laps today, as we were able to catch-up well in FP2. Weve ticked all the boxes and it therefore was a useful Friday. It will be an interesting race on Sunday because its quite hot here as we saw today, but the conditions can quickly change and we will need to be fast reacting to them." Carlos Sainz - FP1: 1:13.711, P11; FP2: 1:13.801, P13 "It was a bit of a scrappy Friday if we compare it to the last two, but it still hasnt been a bad day. During this mornings FP1 we were not able to run as much as we wanted due to some cooling issues, but these were solved for FP2. We had some catch-up to do this afternoon but in the end we were able to complete our programme, and thats what counts. This is a challenging track, particularly the last sector, which is flat-out and up-hill and where we lose a bit of time. Despite this, we are still in the fight and I feel comfortable in the car." Jody Egginton, Head of Vehicle Performance "Dry weather here at Interlagos today has allowed us to complete our run planned programme, although we had a bit of catching-up to do following a few issues disrupting both sides of the garage in FP1. Focusing on the soft and medium compounds and opposing tyre usage at specific points in the FP2 programme has provided us with a large and useful amount of data to optimise our long and short run pace further. We feel that, although today was reasonable, there is still lap time to be found from short runs and we can also make similar gains on long runs. This is why this will remain a focus for tomorrow, when we expect to see lower track and ambient conditions. However, looking at the weather forecast for Saturday and Sunday, we could well also be switching our focus to wet-running at some points, so we will be working hard to cover all scenarios tonight."

Next Previous Enlarge 1 / 2 Daniil Kvyat (RUS) Scuderia Toro Rosso STR11 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Carlos Sainz jr (ESP) Scuderia Toro Rosso STR11 locks up at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Sauber Nasr had a positive day in front of his home crowd, but Ericsson admitted that his spin at the start of FP2 flat-spotted his medium tyres so badly that they couldnt be used again, and that that indiscretion meant he didnt get the balance fully dialled in. Marcus Ericsson - FP1: 1:14.654, P17; FP2: 1:14.695, P21 "In FP1 it was interesting to test the halo system. For me it was positive, I did not have any issues with it in terms of visibility. The rest of FP1 was ok. In the afternoon session, it was unfortunate that I spun on my first lap in FP2, which flat spotted my medium tyres. We could not use them anymore for the rest of the session. On the soft tyres we have a bit of work to do in order to get them to work better. I am not fully satisfied with the balance of the car, so we need to improve that for tomorrow as well. But thats what Fridays are there for. We know what we need to do in order to be stronger for the rest of the weekend." Felipe Nasr - FP1: 1:14.631, P16; FP2: 1:14.309, P17 "First of all, it is great to be back in Brazil and to be driving in front of my home crowd. In terms of the practice sessions, it was a positive Friday. We were able to work through our programme today. I feel that we can improve the balance of the car, although we already made improvements for the afternoon session. We were able to make the right adjustments on the car for the warmer conditions in FP2. Tomorrow we have to anticipate the weather change to get the best out of the car."

Next Previous Enlarge 1 / 2 Marcus Ericsson (SWE) Sauber C35 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Felipe Nasr (BRA) Sauber C35 at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Mercedes Hamilton was very happy with the way things went, but like many said how hot it was out on the track. Rosberg reported high degradation on the softs that led to blistered rears, and that the medium gave up grip quite quickly too, but both drivers were happy with their short- and their long-run pace with the caveat that Red Bull looked strong in both, too. Lewis Hamilton - FP1: 1:11.895, P1; FP2: 1:12.271, P1 "It's been a good day. We got through all of our run programmes and the car is feeling really good. It's pretty tough out here physically right now with the heat as high as it is. Not just in the car but for the guys in the garage too. Finding the right balance isn't easy either in these conditions as the tyres are getting really hot. But our long run pace seems to be strong so we can be happy with the start we've made today." Nico Rosberg - FP1: 1:12.125, P3; FP2: 1:12.301, P2 "It's been very hot out there today - more so than we expect it to be for the rest of the weekend. As a result, that makes it difficult to fully prepare for qualifying and the race. Other than that, it was a pretty normal Friday. Our car looks quick but Red Bull are definitely close. The Soft tyre is degrading quite a lot on the long runs, with blistering on the rears. There's a surprising amount of degradation on the Medium tyre too - but I think overall we've got decent pace on the long runs. Strategy-wise it won't be straightforward for the race. But, again, it's meant to get quite a lot colder so we could see something completely different on Sunday. It's great to be back in Brazil. It's a proper race track and it always feels special driving somewhere with so much history and tradition." Paddy Lowe, Executive Director (Technical) "Great weather here at Interlagos today - although the risk of sudden rain has already proven itself to be a threat since we arrived earlier this week. Our programme so far has run exactly as planned, with no problems to report on either car. We worked exclusively with the Soft and Medium tyres and our pace on both compounds at low and high fuel looks relatively encouraging. We are, however, a long way from the conditions we expect to see in qualifying and the race. We have a lot more work to do before then, with the potential for a very close competition. This is a circuit renowned for throwing jokers into the pack, so we take nothing for granted heading into the weekend."

Next Previous Enlarge 1 / 2 Lewis Hamilton (GBR) Mercedes-Benz F1 W07 Hybrid at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Nico Rosberg (GER) Mercedes-Benz F1 W07 Hybrid at Formula One World Championship, Rd20, Brazilian Grand Prix, Practice, Interlagos, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday 11 November 2016.  Sutton Images Info Close

Pirelli Paul Hembery, motorsport director "A busy day at Interlagos today, but well see how useful it turns out to be over the rest of the weekend. The teams got a good initial read on the wear and degradation rates here, which seem reasonably high on the soft tyre in particular, with the right-rear tyre doing the most work over a lap of Interlagos. Whether its wet or dry were likely to see a multi-stop race, but the weather will be the key determining factor of both qualifying and the grand prix itself."
Coal country is fired up over President-elect Donald Trumps historic win. Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, joined the FOX Business Networks Maria Bartiromo to discuss what he hopes it means for his industry.

What we need to do is have an all-of-the-above policy, and Im willing to compete with gas, nuclear and the other low-cost means for generating electricity with our coal -- as long as the government stays out of it and allows the marketplace to make the decisions, he said.

Since President Obama took office in 2008, U.S. coal production has dropped 36 percent, according to FactCheck.org. In 2015, employment at U.S. coal mines fell 12%, to the lowest level since 1978, according to EIA data.

Murray, who has been outspoken about the Obama administrations energy policy, discussed why he believes Donald Trump will follow through on his pledge to make America great again.

He has the passion, he has the commitment and he has the mandate to do it, and he will follow through and he must be very bold and not be distracted . and cleaning up the destruction of the Obama Administration the place he needs to start is in the Justice Department, because there are more criminals supporting Obamas outlaws activity department than anywhere in the government, he said.
After struggling for a long time, the retail industry has benefited from some signs of an imminent rebound. High-end department store Nordstrom (NYSE: JWN) gave investors solid performance last quarter, and coming into Thursday's third-quarter financial report, Nordstrom investors wanted to see continued progress in boosting the company's top line and increasing its efficiency to produce greater profits. Nordstrom dramatically exceeded investor expectations, and despite a sizable charge related to its Trunk Club business, Nordstrom's performance led to greater optimism among shareholders. Let's look more closely at Nordstrom's results to see how it's doing as it moves into its key holiday season.

Image source: Nordstrom.

Nordstrom keeps building momentum

Nordstrom's third-quarter results were extremely strong. Revenue of $3.54 billion was up more than 6% from year-earlier figures, finishing ahead of the $3.48 billion consensus forecast among those following the stock. On a GAAP basis, Nordstrom posted a loss of $10 million, but after taking one-time items into account, adjusted net income of $148 million produced per-share adjusted earnings of $0.84, topping the $0.51 per share that investors had expected to see.

Looking more closely at the report, Nordstrom made an even stronger recovery than it did last quarter. Comparable sales rose, climbing 2.4%. Admittedly, a sizable portion of this gain was from having the key Anniversary Sale at Nordstrom in this year's third quarter rather than last year's second quarter. But Nordstrom said that combining the second and third quarters, comps were still up slightly by 0.4%.

Growth in comps for the quarter were up 0.9% in the full-line Nordstrom stores and website, combined with Trunk Club. Nordstrom said that women's and men's apparel were the two best performing segments, and geographically, the western U.S. stood out as the dominant region from a performance standpoint.

As we've seen in past quarters, the Nordstrom Rack discount concept outpaced its namesake counterpart. Net sales were up more than 10%, and comparable sales climbed almost 4% in incorporating both Nordstrom Rack store locations and the brand's associated websites. For the discount arena, the eastern U.S. was the best performing region.

More good news came from the operational front. Nordstrom managed to cut the ratio of its overhead expenses to total revenue by more than two percentage points to 29.6%. The retailer attributed the savings to costs associated with last year's sale of its credit card portfolio, and the later Anniversary Sale also helped. Nordstrom's rewards program also continued to gain in popularities, with 45% of sales coming from customers who are part of the program and 40% more customers enrolled than were part of the program a year ago.

What's ahead for Nordstrom?

Nordstrom co-president Blake Nordstrom expressed his happiness at the retailer's performance. "We've made considerable changes in the way we operate," Nordstrom said, "to improve the customer experience while increasing our productivity." The co-president also noted that efforts to be more efficient and to manage inventory more effectively have paid off in better results.

Investors were also glad to see that Nordstrom once again boosted its guidance for the fiscal year. On the sales front, Nordstrom didn't make a major change, narrowing its previous range to project flat comparable sales. However, after adjusting for its impairment charge, Nordstrom boosted its earnings guidance by between $0.20 and $0.25 per share, setting a new range of $2.85 to $2.95 per share on an adjusted basis.

Nordstrom also continued to expand aggressively. Three new full-line Nordstrom stores opened during the quarter, including one in Austin and two in Toronto. Nordstrom Rack saw even more dramatic expansion, with 17 different locations opening between August and October. That made the quarter the busiest so far in the fiscal year.

Nordstrom investors were ecstatic about the results, sending the stock up by 9% in after-hours trading following the announcement. Combined with 7% gains during the regular session before the results were released, that's a huge move for the stock. Yet the strong sales and earnings performance was also exactly what investors wanted to see going into the key holiday season for the high-end retailer.

10 stocks we like better than Nordstrom When investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*

David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Nordstrom wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.

Click here to learn about these picks!

*Stock Advisor returns as of November 7, 2016

Dan Caplinger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Nordstrom. 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.
Investors have watched the biggest publicly traded U.S. manufacturing stocks notably outperform the S&P 500index so far in 2016. This comes as industrial production growth remains negative and indices of manufacturing sentiment continue to be subdued. Clearly, the market believes there could be some sort of recovery coming. What's going on, and which are the best manufacturing stocks to buy?

Image source: Getty Images.

The players

What does the market look like for manufacturers today?

As you can see in the chart below, it's been a difficult year or so for U.S. manufacturing companies. Industrial production growth has turned negative, and a widely followed barometer of manufacturing, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) Purchasing Managers Index, has been below 50 in 2016 -- a reading below 50 indicates contraction.

ISM Purchasing Managers Index data by YCharts

That said, industrial conditions are far from uniform. In fact, the brunt of the slowdown has been felt by heavy machinery industries exposed to oil and gas, and metals and mining spending. Meanwhile, other industries such as aerospace and construction have fared relatively better.

How to play the sector

One wayis to buy cheaply rated stocks ahead of an anticipated stabilization in spending conditions in the kinds of industries (oil and gas, metals and mining, heavy machinery) that have been hit in the last year or so. With this approach, you will be buying companies set to significantly increase earnings given an eventual pickup in commodities-related capital expenditures (capex).

The good news is that following a sharp slump in recent years, prices of oil, metals, and minerals are actually up in the mid teens year to date.

WTI Crude Oil Spot Price data by YCharts

The bad news is that the increase hasn't fed through into spending yet. Because of that, company after company from thecommodity-related sectorhas disappointed with its earnings, and has been left with reduced near-term earnings potential as a result.

To recap, in this line of thought you are looking for a company with a good forward valuation, but also with upside from recovering commodity and general industrial conditions.

The best manufacturing stocks to buy

The following table shows a common valuation metric, namely enterprise value (market cap plus net debt) divided by EBITDA. The final column describes commodity capex exposure and how it hit earnings in 2016 -- remember that the harder a company is hit, the more likely that it has exposure to the upside of increasing commodity capex spending.

Data source: Analyst estimates. EV = Enterprise value. EBITDA = Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. YTD = Year to date.

United Technologies appears cheap, but its upside really relates to the successful execution of its plans to ramp up production of its geared turbofan engine. Meanwhile, Emerson Electric would surely benefit from increased process industry spending, but the company is in the midst of a reorganization, and so also has execution risk.

Ingersoll-Rand is a very attractive stock -- not least from the margin-expansion opportunity in its all-important climate segment -- but it's not really a play within the theme of recovering commodity spending.Similarly, Honeywell International is an attractive stock in its own right but doesn't offer significant upside in the context of the current theme.

3M Company and Illinois Tool Works have both had great runs and now look fully valued, particularly 3M, given its loweringof full-year sales guidance. However, Illinois Tool Works continues with itsmargin expansion.Meanwhile, General Electric Company's CEO, Jeff Immelt,recently guidedinvestors toward the low end of the full-year sales guidance range.

The short list

All of which leaves a short list of MSC Industrial Direct Co.(NYSE: MSM), Dover Corporation (NYSE: DOV),and Rockwell Automation Inc. (NYSE: ROK).All are attractive for three reasons.

First, they sport prodigious free cash flow (FCF), and a look at FCF-based valuations shows how cheap they are.

MSM EV to Free Cash Flow (TTM) data by YCharts

Second, all have significant upside potential in the event of a recovery in commodity spending.MSC Industrial's machinery and metal-cutting customers have been hit by lower energy-related spending,while Rockwell Automation and Dover Corporation have both cut guidance this year.

Third, they all have long-term growth drivers. Rockwell Automation's sensors, controls, and software architecture are akey part of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Meanwhile, MSC Industrial Direct is actively investing in order to consolidate a highly fragmented industrial supply industry, and Dover Corporation is in the process of expanding its international sales while seeking new industry verticals for its engineered systems products.

All told, all three manufacturingstocks offer a compelling combination of attractive valuation, near-term earnings catalyst (exposure to eventual recovery in energy-related capex spending), and long-term growth potential.

10 stocks we like better than MSC Industrial Direct When investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*

David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now and MSC Industrial Direct wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.

Click here to learn about these picks!

*Stock Advisor returns as of November 7, 2016

Lee Samaha has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends MSC Industrial Direct. The Motley Fool owns shares of General Electric. The Motley Fool recommends Emerson Electric and Illinois Tool Works. 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.
As the end of the year approaches, people are beginning to think about the tax consequences of their investment holdings.

With the oil trade gaining momentum after hitting a low earlier this year, many have looked to exchange traded funds as a way to play market moves, and one recently launched oil ETF stands out for investors seeking to simplify tax headaches.

The relatively new ProShares K-1 Free Crude Oil Strategy ETF (BATS: OILK) is an actively managed fund that provides exposure to the West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures market.

However, unlike other oil futures-backed ETFs, OILK will gain exposure to WTI crude oil futures through its ProShares Cayman Crude Oil Strategy Portfolio, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fund. Since OILK is not structured as a commodities partnership that directly utilizes futures contracts, the new active ETF will not require investors to fill out the troublesome K-1 form.

Many investors want to invest in crude oil with the convenience of an ETF, but all other crude oil ETFs involve complicated tax reporting, Michael L. Sapir, co-founder and CEO of ProShares Advisors, said. OILK is the only U.S. ETF that lets investors get crude oil exposure but skip the K-1 tax form.

While it may be fun to play these types of market moves in commodities, investors will have to deal with the slightly different taxes associated with the investments.

Commodities ETFs and other funds that use futures contracts to gain exposure to a market are structured as limited partnerships. Consequently, investors have to fill out a Schedule K-1 instead of Form 1099, and they may incur Unrelated Business Taxable Income (UBTI), which could be taxable in an IRA. However, most ETFs provide K-1s in a timely manner and typically do not generate UBTIs.

SEE MORE: An Active Oil ETF Without the Hassle of K-1s

WTI crude oil prices have strengthened since the $26.21 per barrel low in February to $43.22 per barrel. However, oil futures remain depressed on concerns over the ongoing high output from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which hit another record.

OPEC said output rose to 33.64 million barrels per day last month, or up 240,000 barrels per day from September, reports Ethan Lou for Reuters.

For more information on ETFs, visit our ETF 101 category.

This article was provided by our partners at ETFTrends.
Has it only been nine months since I last wrote about Donald Trump and his defense policy ... should he ever become president ... which didn't seem at all likely at the time?

It has.

But now that the speculation has become fact, it's time to get specific. What do we actuallyknowabout President-elect Donald Trump? What has he said forcertainabout defense policy? And what does all of this mean for defense stocks?

Image source: Donald J. Trump for President.

Defining moment

A lot of these questions got answered on Sept. 7, when then-candidate Trump made perhaps his defining public statement on defense matters at the Union League of Philadelphia. In three words, Trump summed up his policy as "peace through strength."

Harking back to President Reagan (and before that to Emperor Hadrian), this concept argues that by building a strong enough military, America can ensure it need not fight wars at all -- or that, if pressed to fight, it will win. But how exactly will President-elect Trump achieve said "strength" in the first place, and what does this imply for investors?

I've identified three key themes.

More money

First and foremost, the overarching theme of President-elect Trump's administration will be one of more military spending. In Philadelphia, Trump blasted Congress and the Obama administration for cutting 10% from the defense budget "even though it makes up only one-sixth of the budget."

That "only" suggests Trump thinks one-sixth of the budget is a proportion that should be bigger. As for how much bigger, well, as a first step, Trump says he will "ask Congress to fully eliminate the defense sequester," which implies increasing defense spending by roughly 10% right off the bat.

More efficiency

At the same time, this money will not come with strings unattached. Trump has gone on record blasting Lockheed Martin's (NYSE: LMT) F-35 stealth fighter jet as "not very good," suggesting that if the plane "cannot perform as well as the planes we already have," then he might not buy it at all.

This and similar "common-sense reforms," as he calls them, suggest that despite spending more money on defense in aggregate, individual defense programs that benefit specific defense stocks might still suffer as Trump moves to "eliminate government waste."

More troops and equipment

Citing statistics that he says show the U.S. has (a) "the smallest Army since 1940," (b) the smallest Navy "since 1915," and (c) "the smallest Air Force since 1947," President-elect Trump promised to grow the Air Force roughly 8% in size, to "at least 1,200 fighter aircraft," the Army 10% in size, to "around 540,000" troops, and the Navy 27%, to a fleet of "350 surface ships and submarines." Such moves promise to be heavily hardware intensive and lucrative to companies such as Boeing (NYSE: BA), which build F-15 and F/A-18 fighter jets for the Air Force; to General Dynamics (NYSE: GD) and Huntington Ingalls (NYSE: HII), the nation's largest builders of military warships; and to Lockheed Martin, which builds both fighter jets and warships.

The U.S. Marine Corps, and companies such as General Dynamics that supply it, could benefit most of all from a Trump administration. The President-elect says he will grow it by more than 50% to "36 battalions."

At the same time, lower-profile branches of the Defense Department, such as the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and its key contractors, Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) and Lockheed, stand to benefit from Trump promises "to rebuild the key tools of missile defense." Thus, while Lockheed Martin might lose business if the President-elect decides to cut the F-35 program short (and even that is not certain), there's still the potential for Lockheed to make up such revenues in other programs such as missile defense, as defense spending continues to grow in the aggregate.

The upshot for investors

Incidentally, this latter promise also offers the potential to benefit naval shipbuilders General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls, as Trump singled out these companies'Ticonderoga-class cruisersas key elements of the U.S. missile defense system. At a cost of $220 million to modernize each cruiser, and there are 22 of them, Trump admits this single project could cost taxpayers nearly $5 billion. And it's just one element of one program that Trump aims to expand. So to sum up, there's going to be a lot of military investment on the table under a Trump administration, and a lot of money to be made by investors who buy these stocks early enough.

Will the investment be worth it? Ultimately, Trump says his goal is to "make our military so big, so strong, and so great, so powerful that we're never going to have to use it." So maybe, just maybe, it really will be worth it.

10 stocks we like better than Lockheed Martin When investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*

David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Lockheed Martin wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.

Click here to learn about these picks!

*Stock Advisor returns as of November 7, 2016

Fool contributorRich Smithdoes not own shares of, nor is he short, any company named above. You can find him onMotley Fool CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handleTMFDitty, where he's currently ranked No. 336 out of more than 75,000 rated members.

The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Oil prices tumbled more than 3 percent on Friday after OPEC said October output reached another record, casting doubt on whether its plan to limit production is achievable or enough to ease persisting oversupply in the market.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said Friday that its output rose to 33.64 million barrels per day (bpd) last month, up 240,000 bpd from September.

Crude futures have wiped out gains made since the end of September when OPEC said it would agree to cut oil production to shore up persistently low prices.

While investors have been skeptical that a deal to cut or freeze oil output levels will be reached at an OPEC meeting on Nov. 30, an increasing amount of data has underscored a global skew towards oversupply.

Following its latest data, the cartel would have to trim up to a million barrels per day of output to make good on its promise to reduce production to between 32.50 million bpd and 33.0 million bpd.

"The next couple of weeks, even if they get a deal done, there's so much oil coming to the market," said Tariq Zahir, trader at Tyche Capital Advisors in New York.

"Prices deserve to be here, maybe even a little lower."

Adding to bearish sentiment was U.S. rig count data by oil services company Baker Hugh, expected at 1 p.m. EST, which have shown an increase in 20 weeks out of the last 23.

International Brent crude futures traded at $44.34 per barrel at 11:13 a.m., down $1.50, or 3.27 percent, its lowest since August.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were down by $1.51, or 3.4 percent, to $43.14 per barrel.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said the supply overhang could run into a third year in 2017, should OPEC fail to act.

In its monthly oil market report on Thursday, the IEA said global supply rose by 800,000 bpd in October to 97.8 million bpd, led by record OPEC output and rising production from non-OPEC members such as Russia, Brazil, Canada and Kazakhstan.

Beyond oversupply, a surging dollar following the initial shock of Donald Trump's U.S. presidential election win also put pressure on prices, traders said.

(Additional reporting by Sabina Zawadzki in London and Henning Gloystein in Singapore; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
Demonstrators took to the streets across the country for a second day on Thursday to protest the Republican presidential election victory of real estate mogul Donald Trump, voicing fears that his triumph would strike a blow against civil rights.

Beefing up protection for two of Trump's marquee properties that have become protest rallying points, police erected security fences around his newly opened Pennsylvania Avenue hotel in Washington and placed concrete blocks in front of the high-rise Trump Tower in Manhattan.

Protesters crowded against security lines across the street from the Trump Tower in New York, chanting, "my body, my choice" and "not my president."

About 100 protesters marched from the White House, where Trump had his first transition meeting with President Barack Obama on Thursday, to the Trump International Hotel blocks away, chanting "love trumps hate."

Crowds of protesters also marched down streets in Baltimore and Denver, temporarily blocking traffic. Also in Los Angeles, crowds marched down a freeway near downtown, blocking traffic until police cleared them away.

Trump's critics have expressed concern that his often-inflammatory campaign rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, women and others - combined with support he has drawn from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists - could spark a wave of intolerance against various minorities.

Anti-Trump rallies were held in more than a dozen major U.S. cities on Wednesday, with thousands turning out for each of the biggest gatherings - in New York, Los Angeles and Oakland, California. In Oakland, unruly protesters smashed windows, set fires and clashed with riot police.

A Trump campaign representative did not respond to requests for comment on the protests. Taking a far more conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech early Wednesday than he had at many of his campaign events, Trump vowed to be a president for all Americans.

More anti-Trump demonstrations were planned for the weekend.
JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon did not support Republican Donald Trump's presidential campaign, yet some Trump advisers want America's most famous banker to become Treasury Secretary to calm nerves on Wall Street.

A member of Trump's transition team contacted Dimon recently to see if he would be interested in the role, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.

It was not clear whether Dimon had responded, though he has said emphatically multiple times that he was not interested in the role. JPMorgan spokesman Andrew Gray declined to comment, and Dimon, who is traveling outside the United States, could not be reached.

Trump's close circle of advisers includes several with Wall Street ties. His campaign finance manager, Steven Mnuchin, is a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc banker. Fundraiser Anthony Scaramucci is a hedge fund executive.

A person familiar with Trump's personnel efforts said the transition team's list included Dimon, Mnuchin and Rep. Jeb Hensarling. The person said that Mnuchin was a more likely choice given his proximity to Trump.

Trump's controversial rhetoric and behavior during the campaign concerning immigrants, women, minorities, the disabled, Muslims and China, among other things, were offensive to many senior Wall Street executives who have tried to embrace inclusion, diversity and globalization.

Trump also criticized Wall Street on the trail, saying the industry "got away with murder" and would not be let off the hook.

Since being elected on Tuesday, Trump has softened his tone and tried to bridge gaps by meeting with President Obama and taking calls from foreign officials. Bringing Dimon on board could help him mend fences with the financial industry, which appears to be coming around to the idea of Trump in the White House.

At an event on Thursday, Goldman Sachs Group Inc CEO Lloyd Blankfein said Trump could be good for the economy and Dimon would be an excellent choice for Treasury Secretary, while hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said Trump's advisers would get "the best and brightest" to run the economy.

Hensarling's office indicated in a statement that he did not want the job.

Serving in his Cabinet is not something Ive indicated an interest in and its not something I am pursuing," the statement said. He said he looked forward to working in Congress to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act which tightened regulations on Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis.

Dimon, a lifelong Democrat, has been floated as a possible candidate for roles like Treasury Secretary in the past. However, resentment toward bankers following the 2007-2009 financial crisis made his candidacy much less likely, as did JPMorgan-specific scandals related to a costly derivatives trade and bad mortgages.

A $13 billion mortgage settlement JPMorgan reached with the federal government in 2013 prompted Trump then to call Dimon "the worst banker in the United States."

However, Dimon has managed to retain a reputation within the banking industry as a distinguished leader, in part by the way he handled those scandals and the way he talks about JPMorgan's role in society as the largest U.S. bank.

For instance, Dimon decided to have JPMorgan make big investments in Detroit, calling it a civic duty to turn around an economically challenged city. His memos, speeches and letters to shareholders are often sprinkled with patriotic language.

"America is best when we come together with clear leadership, expertise and the political will to take on difficult challenges and get things done," the 60-year-old chairman and CEO said in a memo to JPMorgan Chase employees following Tuesday's election. "No one should ever doubt the strength and resilience of our country and our democracy."

However, Dimon has said as recently as September that he would not want a role as Treasury Secretary. If he holds to that, it could put him and JPMorgan in an awkward position.

Saying "no" to a presidential request to join the cabinet is unusual, and the bank would then be overseen by appointees from an administration Dimon rejected.

Even so, his associates do not expect Dimon to say "yes."

Dimon has said his determination to act would make it hard to make political compromises. Talking before an audience in September, he said the only job in government he would want is the one Trump is about to get.

"I would love to be president of the United States of America," Dimon told the Economic Club of Washington. "Until Donald Trump got to where he was, they said you'll never see a rich businessman who's never been in politics be president. I clearly was wrong about that."

(Reporting by Dan Freed and David Henry in New York; Additional reporting by Nikhil Subba in Bengaluru and David Shepardson and Emily Stephenson in Washington; Writing by Lauren Tara LaCapra; Editing by Bill Trott and David Gregorio)
Donald Trump was an unconventional candidate, but now that hes been elected president hes assembling a fairly conventional Cabinet of key economic advisers plucked right from the Republican mainstream, the Fox Business Network has learned.

People inside the Trump camp say the President-elect has signaled he wants to select billionaire financier Wilbur Ross as his Commerce Secretary, and continues to favor, as first reported by Fox Business, his campaign finance chief Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary.

Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner and hedge fund executive, remains the odds-on favorite to be Treasury, these people say. They denied a report from the business network CNBC that the campaign is actively considering JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon for the post.

A source close to Dimon inside JP Morgan also said Dimon, a long-time Democrat, has indicated that he isnt interested in a government position in either party and has no plans to leave the big bank. A spokesman for JP Morgan had no comment.

Ross, who made his fortune, estimated at $3 billion, specializing in distressed investments, was a senior adviser to Trump during his campaign. He is considered a top choice as a Commerce Secretary because of his close ties to the business community, which is essential for the job.

Even though Trump has waged war against Wall Street and the establishment donor base on the campaign trail, he has privately grown close to Mnuchin who used his contacts in the financial community to raise money against difficult odds.

Though heavily outspent by Clinton, Trump managed to wage an effective campaign thanks in part to Mnuchins ability to raise enough money to keep Trump competitive, albeit with a bare-bone ground game and far fewer attack ads than his ultimately vanquished Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Another mainstream business name likely to find a place in the Trump administration is former Bear Stearns economist David Malpass, a Trump economic adviser throughout the campaign cycle. During his long career in business and government, Malpass served in economic policy related posts in both the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. He is currently running an economic forecasting firm, Encima Global.

A spokeswoman for Trump didnt return calls for comment. Ross, Mnuchin and Malpass also didnt return calls for comment.

People inside the Trump transition team say the list is fluid and Trump himself has been known to make last-minute decisions. Trump wavered on his selection of Governor Mike Pence (R-IN) for Vice President, and almost opted for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Still, the Trump short list of possible Cabinet choices reflects a group of people who the President-elect feels comfortable with inside the White House when he takes over. Other possible Cabinet choices include former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; Trump himself would like Giuliani to be his Attorney General or Homeland Security chief, while Giuliani has indicated he would also like to be considered for Secretary of State or Defense.

Giuliani didnt return a call for comment.

Sources lay low odds, at least for now, that Giuliani will get either post. The Defense post is likely to go to Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), and the top Secretary of State contenders are John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and Senator Robert Corker (R-TN), who is also chairman on the Senator Committee on Foreign Relations.

Sessions and Bolton couldnt be reached for comment.

The top choices for Trumps Chief of Staff include his campaign chief Steve Bannon, a media executive who left his leadership post at Breitbart.com to join the campaign, and Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus. Neither Bannon nor Priebus returned calls for comment.

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska Governor and running mate of Senator John McCain (R-AZ) during his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, is likely to receive some role in a Trump administration as an undersecretary, possibly in the Department of the Interior. Richard Grenell, a former adviser to Bolton, is now among the top choices to get his old bosss job as UN Ambassador.

Grenell had no comment and Palin couldnt be reached for comment.

One large unknown: Whether Christie will have any Cabinet position that needs a Senate confirmation following the conviction of two of his top aides on federal fraud charges in the so-called BridgeGate scandal. Christie wasnt charged in the matter, but several witnesses during the trial said Christie had some knowledge of the closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge that was allegedly designed to cause the traffic jam in the town of Fort Lee, where the mayor refused to endorse the governor for re-election.

Christie had no comment.
Donald Trump's election to the White House has consigned EU/U.S. trade talks to the deep freeze and they are unlikely to resume for some time, the European Union said on Friday.

A pause in negotiations towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was always expected with the end of Barack Obama's presidency, but Trump's win brings in a leader hostile to international trade pacts.

Trump has said he will withdraw from the unfinalized 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"For quite some time TTIP will probably be in the freezer and then what happens when it is defrosted, we will have to wait and see," EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told a news conference after a meeting of EU ministers responsible for trade.

"I think we should be realistic. I don't see the resumption of any TTIP negotiation for quite a long time."

EU officials have said it is not clear what Trump's stance is on TTIP, but that NAFTA and TPP would likely take priority.

The EU has faced a wave of criticism from protest groups over TTIP, who say it and other such pacts are done only for big business.

One high-level critic, French trade minister Matthias Fekl, said Britain's vote to leave the EU and Trump's election victory were signs of crisis in countries traditionally attached to free trade.

"We need to rethink the way the global economy functions or does not function... Nothing would be worse now than to think we can simply go on with business as usual," he said.

'GETTING TOUGH' WITH CHINA

Mirroring talk from Trump of 'getting tough' with China, EU ministers also sought on Friday to bolster the bloc's trade defences to floods of cheap imports.

They are weighing measures designed to shorten investigations into alleged dumping and to permit higher duties than normal in cases of foreign state interference

Proposals were made in 2013, but the 28 EU members have failed to agree, with a group of countries including Britain opposed. That blocking minority appears to be getting smaller.

"I think ...we have moved a step closer to a possible agreement by the end of the year," said Peter Ziga, economy minister of Slovakia, which holds the six-month rotating EU presidency.

The EU has had a tough time with trade policy in recent years, also struggling to pass a deal with Canada.

On Friday, it scored a minor success, adding Ecuador to an existing pact with Colombia and Peru.

(Additional reporting by Stever Scherer in Rome; editing by John Stonestreet)
next Image 1 of 3

prev next Image 2 of 3

prev Image 3 of 3

Upon its sale, this 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO will become the most expensive car ever traded. It was just listed for sale at 45 Million (roughly $56.4 Million), in Britain and has already received at least one offer.

This GTO, #3387GT, is the second one of 39 GTOs ever built and the first to race, debuting and finishing second overall at the 1962 Sebring 12 Hours in the hands of Phil Hill and Olivier Gendebien. It was sold shortly thereafter and promptly entered in the 24 Hours of Le Mans by its new owner, Robert Grossman. The car finished in sixth place there, when Grossman teamed with Edward Fireball Roberts. In all, the car raced 27 times and earned 17 class podiums.

Its extraordinary asking price is tied to its scarcity, provenance and performance (still fast after more than fifty years  0-60 mph in about six seconds and capable of more than 170 mph). A British newspaper, The Telegraph, quotes John Collins, who runs Ascot-based Ferrari specialist Talacrest (the seller), It is a beautiful Ferrari, the Holy Grail of classic cars and it has a great racing history.

More classic car stories from Hagerty

According to Hagertys Vice President of Valuation Services, Brian Rabold, The 250 GTO is absolutely one of the most collectible cars in the world and they rarely trade in the public eye. This particular example shows good history with a realistic asking price of $56 Million, which would set a new bar for any car. While much of the collector car market has been leveling out over the past 18 months, this illustrates that best of the best examples remain in high demand. With only 39 built, there just arent enough available for all who want one.

While other Ferrari GTOs pop up occasionally, the last public sale of a GTO was in August 2014 when Bonhams sold #3851GT for $38 Million and change, it is uncommon for them to sell publicly. Bloomberg says that GTO #5111GT sold for $52 Million in 2013, making it the current record holder for most expensive car ever sold.

Bernie Carl of Washington state has owned this car since 1997 and used it on tours with some frequency. Talacrests website says that as such the car has had visibility with the collector Ferrari community throughout its [sic] life.

And, if you need any further motivation, It will get you on the Ferrari 70th anniversary tour next year Collins says.

Return of the Shelby Daytona:
Bill Cosby expects to be cleared of a criminal sexual assault charge and restart his show business career.

That's according to Cosby's lawyer in a defamation lawsuit filed in Massachusetts against Cosby by seven women.

Attorney Angela Agrusa is urging a judge to seal documents that contain information about Cosby's negotiated compensation for his performances and other personal financial information.

The women suing Cosby argue that he has no future in show business and won't be hurt by disclosing that information.

Agrusa says, "When Mr. Cosby is cleared," he "expects to resume his career, and there is no reason to believe otherwise."

In Pennsylvania, Cosby has pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting a former university employee.

Approximately 50 women have claimed Cosby forced unwanted sexual contact on them decades ago.
Johnny Depp was all smiles on the red carpet of the Classic Rock Roll of Honor awards in Japan as he prepares to join the "Harry Potter" world in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them."

The 53-year-old actor appeared to ignore the troubles surrounding his casting in the "Harry Potter" universe as dark wizard Gellert Grindlewald as he posed alongside Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry at the Tokyo event.

Johnny, who is also a guitarist in rock group Hollywood Vampires, saluted to the cameras as he joined his friends at the event.

Meanwhile, over in New York, author J.K. Rowling was forced to defend the choice of casting of Johnny after he was accused of domestic abuse by his ex-wife, Amber Heard.

The "Harry Potter" author, real name Joanne, said that she was delighted at the choice of actor for the role and gushed that he had done incredible things with the character.

Director David Yates also jumped to the defense of the actor and told The Mirror: You have to trust us and see what he does in this movie.

The director added that while we wont see much of the star in this movie, he will become a more significant role in the four movies that will follow the upcoming films release.

He added: What you have to remember about Johnny is that extraordinary talent and that talent never goes away.

Johnnys casting in the film comes after Amber, 30, accused him of abusing her throughout their four-year relationship.

Fans have slammed J.K. and the production team for the decision in the wake of the scandal.

Click here for the full report in The Sun.
Five years after losing their premature newborn to a rare genetic disease just minutes after she was born, a U.S. Army Reserve chaplain and his wife keep their daughters spirit alive by gifting teddy bears to women whove lost a baby.

Cindy and Bob Baima, of Dunwoody, Georgia, created the Reagan Marie Teddy Bear Fund at Northside Hospital in Atlanta in honor of their late daughter, who was born on May 3, 2010, Fox 5 reported.

The couple learned that Reagan Marie had Trisomy 18, a rare genetic disease that causes birth defects, halfway through the pregnancy. They had tried for two years before conceiving.

"We decided that no matter what, we would be with Reagan until the end of her natural life, Bob told Fox 5.

Cindys water broke 10 weeks early and she brought a teddy bear with her to Northside Hospital, thinking it would comfort her during the difficult delivery.

"We had the bear with Reagan, Cindy told Fox 5. Kind of how a child will snuggle up with a stuffed animal. And we had pictures taken of her with the bear. And then when I left the hospital, I was holding the bear."

The family had 21 minutes together before Reagan died.

Now parents to a 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, the Baimas created their fund to offer a teddy bear to each woman losing a baby.

"We realized how painful it is for a mother to leave the hospital with nothing in her arms, watching all these other moms leaving with babies in their arms and balloons and all these celebrations, Bob said.

It's certainly a great way for moms and parents to know that they're not alone in this, Cindy said.
A Minnesota army veteran and father-of-five who suffered silently from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has a life line in his service dog, Jed.

Carl Ringberg returned from a tour in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2013, Fox9 reported. In his transition to civilian life, he began suffering anger issues, emotional numbness, flashbacks, nightmares, he told the news channel.

Initially, the Burnsville man tried medications to relieve his symptoms, but nothing worked so he decided to look for another tool to treat his PTSD. After researching service dog programs, he found Helping Paws and his golden retriever, Jed. Six-year-old Jed was having trouble being placed for separation anxiety issues, which made the bond between the pair even more meaningful.

Jed wasnt going to get placed with Helping Paws, Ringberg told Fox 9. When I found him it was kind of a perfect fit because I needed that constant attention, that constant touch and so did he.

Jed has become an honorary member at Waste Management, where Ringberg is a senior district fleet manager.

I oversee the shop so theres a lot of noises, loud noises, but him not being startled or being afraid allows me to stay calm and not be afraid, he told the news channel.

Ringberg joined the Helping Paws board to help others with PTSD connect with the organization.

To the veterans out there, theres help out there, get the help you deserve, he said.

For more information about Helping Paws click here. If you are interested in applying for a service dog through the organization, click here.
Talk to any twins you know, and you will likely find the one who popped out first thinks he or she is entitled to the bragging rights of being the eldest. But for a pair of Massachusetts twins born early Sunday, that usually obvious fact was thrown into question when one boy was born before the start of daylight saving time and the other after, technically making the latter twin the older brother.

Emily Peterson gave birth to the first baby, Samuel, at 1:39 a.m., before clocks turned back at 2 a.m., Cape Cod Healthcare shared on their Facebook page. Then, 31 minutes later, she delivered Ronan. Because Ronans birth came after the time change, his official birth time was 1:10 a.m., not 2:10 a.m.

The West Barnstable couple thought the time change could be an issue when they headed to the hospital.

I said earlier that night that they were either going to be born on two different days or the time change was going to come into play, Seth Peterson, a trooper with the Massachusetts State Police, said, according to the hopsital's Facebook page.

Deb Totten, a maternity nurse at Cape Cod Hospital, said the Peterson twins birth is the first such instance shes seen in more than 40 years of nursing.
Veterans across the country are using creative expression to ease their symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and are getting more support from Congress.

In 2016 an additional $1.98 million in funding was added to the National Endowment for the Arts budget to support the Creative Forces NEA Military Healing Arts program. In 2017 it will expand and five art therapy sites will be added to the seven currently scattered across the country. The program is a partnership between the NEA and the Department of Defense and it puts creative arts therapy at the center of the patient-focused treatment for veterans, military members and their families.

The program has had positive feedback from veterans through surveys and evaluations by the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) Walter Reed Bethesda. Of the military patients involved, 85 percent said the therapy has been helpful to their healing.

Wally Kollmann served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He has spent the last 45 years battling PTSD and has turned to art therapy to cope. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 26 percent of Vietnam veterans have suffered symptoms of PTSD or signs of impairment related to the condition throughout their lives.

Ive had nightmares throughout the last 45 years of being forced into a cage, Kollmann told FoxNews.com.

His work was recently featured at a national creative arts festival in Jackson, Mississippi. The exhibit gives veterans an opportunity to express their creativity.

Im hoping that by doing and seeing what Ive got here I can help release that and what Im finding is, its releasing some pressure, Kollmann said.

More than one hundred of the thousands veterans who applied were chosen to showcase their work. Elizabeth Mackey is the director of the annual event.

Its a great form of therapy for the veterans with PTSD and other mental health challenges, Elizabeth Mackey, director of the annual event, told FoxNews.com.

Michael Rogan also served in Vietnam and was diagnosed with PTSD after returning home to California. He is relies on art therapy as an outlet of expression.

I start drawing and I get right into that emotion, Rogan told FoxNews.com. "I get in touch with myself. Because I could sit here and talk to you all day and never feel that stuff.

Although art therapy shows promise in treating veterans with PTSD, some say more research is needed.

Dr. Charles Marmar, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the NYU Langone Medical Center. He is also the director of the PTSD research program at the NYU Langone Cohen Veterans Center.

I dont know that creative arts treatments will reach the level of primary or gold standard treatments, Dr. Charles Marmar, chair of the department of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center told FoxNews.com. I think they are minimally important adjunctive treatments.

Marmar, who is also the director of the PTSD research program at the NYU Langone Cohen Veterans Center, said that if more conclusive research is completed on art therapy, he would recommend it as one of the main treatments for those suffering from PTSD.

As for Kollmann, hes hoping that expressing trauma through art will help him overcome the nightmares hes endured.

This is creative arts, its a wonderful program, Kollmann said. Its great therapy for all of us that are coming back from Vietnam or any war. It really has helped me in that.
next Image 1 of 2

prev Image 2 of 2

A wheelchair-bound teen who went viral after his photographer uncle shared a photo of him standing for the flag is in the news again, as a veteran-owned company who saw the photo has stepped forward to gift him with a standing wheelchair.

Arek Trenholm, of Lake County, Florida, was born with spina bifida, a birth defect that causes incomplete closing of the backbone and membranes around the spinal cord. The 16-year-old has only stood from his chair two times in the last seven years, Fox 35 Orlando reported, with one of those occasions occurring when headlines were dominated by athletes choosing to kneel during the playing of the national anthem. Trenholm was commended nationwide for his efforts to stand during his towns homecoming parade as the flag passed him.

Veteran Scott Liesch came across the photo of Trenholm and presented it to his employers at The Standing Company, who are also fellow veterans. The Michigan-based group decided to surprise Trenholm with a standing wheelchair to help him gain more independence and be able to stand upright more easily, Fox 35 reported.

All of us at The Standing Company are thrilled to help Arek and we genuinely thank him for taking a stand regarding his beliefs, David Maczik, company founder and president, said in a statement. Arek, I am certain, has a fine future in front of him.

Liesch met Trenholm on Thursday and spent time with him to help him navigate the new chair.

Im going to be right alongside you to help you along, Liesch told Trenholm at their meeting, Fox 35 Orlando reported. You just joined the ranks of the standing.

Liesch is a paraplegic who also uses a chair, Myron Leggett, Trenholms photographer uncle, said.

It was very impressive the fact that Arek wants to honor the flag in the best way he could at the time just by standing up, Liesch told Fox 35 Orlando.
Editor's note: The following column originally appeared on AEIdeas, the blog of the American Enterprise Institute.



President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the so-called Iran nuclear deal, the worst deal ever negotiated and a disaster.

Hes right. Far from creating the most robust monitoring regime, Secretary of State John Kerrys deal set a new precedent for lax inspection standards. Not only did it fall short of the bar President Obama had established, it also fell short of past international precedent established with the dismantlement of South Africas and Libyas nuclear program. Rather than ratify the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)s Additional Protocol, Iranian negotiators promised only to abide by it. The last time that happened, the Iranian government walked away from its restrictions as soon as they had achieved what they wanted, and bragged about it.

Inspections remain spotty and the snapback sanctions mechanism practically non-existent. Nor does the agreement address the problem of off-shore nuclear work, for example, conducted by Iranian scientists in North Korea. Kerry allowed Iran to keep its underground nuclear facility, and more centrifuges than Pakistan used to create its nuclear arsenal. Should Trump serve a second term, the sunset clause to which Kerry acquiesced will put Iran on the verge of having its few remaining controls lifted by time Trumps presidency ends.

So can Trump walk away from the deal? Legally, yes. President Obama passed the deal through convoluted legal maneuvering rather than by presenting it for ratification by the Senate. Much of the deal was also enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 2231 and so this would be harder to simply dismiss but, as with all UN resolutions, there is significant wiggle room, much of which Iran has already exploited (for example, with regard to justifying its ballistic missile work).

But would it be wise to walk away from the deal? The answer to this is no. Kerry crafted the deal to give Iran its rewards upfront. A savvier diplomat might have insisted on calibrating sanctions relief and the return of frozen assets to Iran over the course of the deals duration, but Kerry was so desperate for a deal that he frontloaded Irans rewards. It was the diplomatic equivalent of giving a toddler dessert first and then demanding he eat his spinach. If Trump were to walk away from the deal, it wouldnt hurt the Iranians one bit; they already received a reward equivalent perhaps to their entire investment in the nuclear program in the first place.

So what might Trump do instead? JCPOA implementation has been handicapped by Kerrys ego and his fear that it might unravel if he is not obsequious to the Islamic Republic. Weakness seldom wins, however. The Iranian regime understands Kerrys naivete and ego and has guided him down a path to the loosening of the JCPOAs already weak restrictions. On any number of issuesIrans illicit ballistic missile work, tolerance for Iran exceeding limits on its heavy water, interpretations of banking regulations, and Irans refusal to allow inspections of military basesKerry has deferred to Iran, often acting as its business agent and lawyer.

As flawed as the deal is, Trump should simply implement it as if his concern were putting American interests first rather than deferring to Iranian interests. Iran doesnt want a military base inspected? Tough. Let Iran walk away from the deal if it objects. Iran is upset that its economy isnt meeting its own expectations? Well, perhaps they should tackle their own corruption and lack of commercial law rather than expect a Western bailout. Iran violates restrictions on ballistic missile development and heavy water production? Then it is in violation and should suffer the full consequences. Flexibility is not an entitlement. Iran complains that sanctions leveled by individual US states on pension fund investments hurt its economy? Not only does agreeing to Tehrans interpretation betray US democracy, but Tehrans interpretation is tendentious.

Trump is right: The JCPOA is flawed and does little to restrain or prevent Irans military nuclear ambitions. But that does not mean he should walk away. Rather, he can interpret the deal with such inflexibility as to force Iran to walk away. He can be ready with sanctions and, if necessary, other elements of coercion to punish Iran for its noncompliance. And, if he truly wishes to put America first, he will call out every European and Asian firm that seeks for its own short term gain to pump resources into Irans infrastructure of terrorism by doing business with Revolutionary Guards-affiliated companies.

At the same time, he can move to undercut Irans ability to conduct terrorism by seizing accounts, restricting dollar access by reversing Obamas tendentious Treasury Department interpretations, and ordering the US Navy to hold its ground rather than depressurize the Persian Gulf, as former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sought.
So how did Donald Trump seal the deal with Conservative Christians?

Well, it turned out to do more with the Republican Party platform and less about President-elect Trump.

Click here for a free subscription to Todds newsletter: a must-read for Conservatives!

Nearly 6 in 10 Trump voters were impacted by the pro-life, pro-religious liberty planks of the Republican Party, according to a post-election poll commissioned by Family Research Council.

The Republican Partys platform positions on unborn human life and religious liberty were the bridge between Donald Trump and Christian conservatives, FRC President Tony Perkins told me.

Nearly 60 percent of Trump voters were more likely to vote for him because the platform is very clear on life and religious liberty, he said.

To continue reading Todd Starnes column, click here.
Today, on November 11, America pauses to thank our veterans for their service to our nation. The freedoms we enjoy in this countrywhich are the exception to the rule in human historywere literally purchased by men and women of all generations who have courageously worn the uniformed cloth of our country.

We live free because warriorsand then veteranshave selflessly served our nation in dangerous places.

THE FOUR THINGS PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP SHOULD FOCUS ON FIRST



At the very least, make sure to use this Veterans Day to honor and thank a veteran in your life.

Veterans Day is about honoring veterans, not politics. But we also cannot ignore that our nations policies impact the way we empower, and care for, our veterans. We have failed our military and veterans too often over the past eight years.

That said, the current state of our country for military members, and our veterans, is disappointing at best, and dangerous at worst.

At the Defense Departmentthe governments largest departmentdeep spending cuts, failure to modernize our weapons, and utter strategic drift have created a readiness and morale crisis that makes America far too vulnerable.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)the second largest federal departmenta waiting list scandal exposed a corrosive, bloated, and unaccountable bureaucracy that is very good at serving itselfbut not good at serving veterans.

On both fronts, thankfully, I believe a new era dawns. On the campaign trail, candidate Donald Trump made both rebuilding our military and fixing the VA two of his signature issues.

President-elect Trump is poised to do the same. President-elect Trump has pledged to get rid of the disastrous defense sequester, invest in long-overdue future military technologies, grow the ranks and numbers of ships and aircraft, and repeal stifling rules of engagement that handcuff our troops.

In just a few years, the posture of our military could look much differentensuring America both deters aggression and can swiftly defeat enemies.

At the VA, President-elect Trump has pledged to clean housean aggressive mandate veterans have been clamoring for. He has vowed to choose an aggressive VA secretary, and empower that leader to swiftly fire VA employees who have failed veterans. This will mean confronting the VA unions, as well as the VA bureaucracy; something Trump has unapologetically said he would do. Moreover, President-elect Trump has vowed to empower veterans to choose their healthcareeither from VA facilities or from a private physician. When veterans can choose, then VA must compete and is incentivized to treat veterans like customers, not numbers. Its about time.

Veterans Day is about honoring veterans, not politics. But we also cannot ignore that our nations policies impact the way we empower, and care for, our veterans. We have failed our military and veterans too often over the past eight years.

My sincere believe is that President-elect Trump will muster the courage, leadership, and clarity of purpose to ensure America brings back peace through strength with our military posture and the enacts real reform at the VA.

Its the least we can do for our warfighters.
Maine residents have voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use in their state.

The final results of the referendum were tabulated on Thursday. The count took nearly two days because of how close the race was, within a fraction of a percentage point, and The Associated Press made the call Thursday afternoon.

Supporters had already declared themselves the winners and had predicted home cultivation of marijuana would be legal by around Christmas.

"The Maine people have passed it, and we should work on implementing it," said Republican state Sen. Eric Brakey, of Auburn, who supported the ballot issue.

Medical marijuana was already legal in Maine.

People 21 or older will now be allowed to use up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana, and retail marijuana shops and social clubs could open around the state. Some municipalities have balked at allowing such businesses to open in their communities.

Opponents who had vowed to request a recount said on Thursday that they would meet to decide what to do next.

"We need to look at the numbers," said Scott Gagnon, an organizer of a campaign against legalization that portrayed legalization as a threat to the health and safety of children.

The campaign that pushed for legalization turned immediately toward the implementation process on Thursday. They said they hope marijuana will be available in retail establishments by 2018.

Marijuana won't become available at the retail level until after a state rulemaking process that could be slow and arduous. David Boyer, campaign manager for Yes On 1, said the people who advocated for legal marijuana will also play a role in its implementation.

All of the marijuana sold in Maine will also be grown in Maine, he said.

"We're excited that Maine is going to join many other states that have decided to have a smarter marijuana policy  a policy that no longer punishes adults for smoking marijuana," Boyer said.

Gov. Paul LePage, who opposed legalization, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Pending the possibility of a recount, Maine joins California, Nevada and Massachusetts, which passed similar measures this week. Arizona rejected a similar measure. Recreational marijuana was already legal in Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

In Maine, the proposal allows people to cultivate, distribute and sell marijuana and marijuana products. Marijuana is set to be taxed at 10 percent and subject to local restrictions.

Parents' groups and some law enforcement organizations opposed the proposal. The proposal also received scrutiny from members of the medical marijuana community, who say they fear it could replace the state's medical program.

The secretary of state's office said Thursday that the largest bloc of uncounted votes that remained were from more than 4,000 overseas absentee voters. Those were counted and failed to make the difference for those who opposed legalization.
House Speaker Paul Ryan described his meeting Thursday with President-elect Donald Trump on Capitol Hill as "exciting" in an interview on "Special Report with Bret Baier," while also elaborating on what the two discussed about the GOP legislative agenda.

After first visiting the White House, Ryan, R-Wis., took Trump on a tour of the Speakers Balcony overlooking the National Mall, the scene of Trump's upcoming inauguration before the two went into a meeting.

"I can tell you, what I got out of Donald Trump today is that this is a man of action," he said.

When Trump emerged from the meeting, he sketched out an initial list of priorities for his presidency.

"We're going to move very strongly on immigration," Trump said. "We will move very strongly on health care. And we're looking at jobs. Big league jobs."

Ryan told Fox News that he and Trump "are on the same page" on securing the border. When asked in regards to building Trump's long-proposed border wall, Ryan said he will "defer to the experts" on the right way to secure the nation's border.

He also said the two discussed replacing ObamaCare, and the fixing parts of Medicare and Medicaid that were affected by the law.

Ryan pointed to the current state of the Republican party as a major strength for Trump going forward, saying members of the party are "excited" to work with the president-elect. He contrasted that with the current state of the Democratic party in the wake of Hillary Clinton's defeat on Tuesday, which he described as "in turmoil."

The GOP holding both houses of Congress for Trump will be a major difference compared to during the Obama presidency, according to Ryan, who described the previous situation as "extremely frustrating."

"With a unified Republican government we can actually get things done for people in this country," he said.

The upcoming debt ceiling in March will provide "an opportunity" for Republicans, according to Ryan

"Thankfully we're doing it with a Republican president and Republican Congress," he said.
President-elect Donald Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said Thursday night that her candidate was a "unique, compelling messanger who took his message directly to the people."

"I feel like my Republican party was veering dangerously close to becoming the party of the elites for a number of years," Conway told Fox News' Megyn Kelly on "The Kelly File," "and Im just glad its the party of the forgotten man and forgotten woman."

Earlier Thursday, Conway disclosed on Twitter that she had been offered a job in the incoming Trump administration in response to a report by New York Magazine's Gabriel Sherman that she was reluctant to give up her business.

False. Could it be those "sources" want the WH job I've been offered? https://t.co/ZXJGUZm5Zz  Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 10, 2016

On "The Kelly File," Conway called Sherman's report "ridiculous" and said "people shouldnt say that without checking with THE source."

"But thats a conversation Ill have with Mr. Trump when its appropriate," she added, "and Ive already told him that Im willing to serve."

Conway also said that Trump campaign stalwarts like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Dr. Ben Carson and Steve Bannon are "incredibly capable and qualified" to take positions in a Trump administration, but added, "This is Donald Trumps presidency and its his Cabinet and his senior team to name. I just think the major criteria will be loyalty to him."

On a second night of protests against Trump's election, his former campaign manager implored his opponents to "take your cues" from the cordial meeting between Trump and President Obama at the White House earlier Thursday.
Nancy Pelosi spoke with President-elect Donald Trump by phone to congratulate him on his victory. Hillary Clinton graciously conceded. President Obama called for a peaceful transfer of power.

Harry Reid, not so much.

The pugilistic Senate Democratic leader who is retiring this term issued a 473-word statement Friday railing against Trumps election, saying it has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry as the country is overcome by tears and fear.

"White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trump's victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear - especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America, the retiring Nevada senator said.

Speaking out as protests have sprung up in cities across the country, Reid cited accounts of African Americans being heckled and Hispanic Americans fearful their families will be torn apart.

"We as a nation must find a way to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows. Their fear is entirely rational, because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them, he said. Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African Americans.

Trump indeed has raised deep concerns among Hispanic-Americans over his calls to build a wall along the Southern border and step up deportations, and among Muslims over his widely criticized plan to suspend Muslim immigration  a plan he since backed away from.

But in the hours and days since the election, the candidate who riled up rally crowds and engaged regularly in rhetorical battle with his political foes has struck a more conciliatory tone, as those protesting his election have in some places resorted to violence.

Even his biggest critics  namely President Obama and Hillary Clinton  have urged the country to respect the election results and come together.

Clinton, in her concession speech, said: We must accept this result, and then look to the future. ... Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.

House Democratic Leader Pelosi, D-Calif., spoke with Trump by phone and echoed Obama and Clinton, saying in a statement that the country needs to come together.

The peaceful transfer of power is the cornerstone of our democracy, she said, even noting that Congress could work with Trump on an infrastructure bill.

I congratulate President-elect Trump and his family, and pray for his success, she said.

Reid ended his statement on a different note. He called Trump a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate.

He said: Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try. If Trump wants to roll back tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately."
The Democratic National Committee is gearing up for what could be a heated leadership battle, as tensions flare in the ranks after Republican Donald Trump won the presidency and Democrats were unable to take control of the House or Senate.

With the party relegated to the Washington wilderness, tempers reportedly flared on Thursday at DNC officials' first meeting since the election. Interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile, whom WikiLeaks-released emails reveal had been privately aiding Hillary Clinton since the primaries, apparently was confronted by one DNC staffer.

You are part of the problem. You and your friends will die of old age and Im going to die from climate change, the staffer told Brazile, according to The Huffington Post. He reportedly asked why they should trust her to lead, saying, "You backed a flawed candidate."

Brazile has not publicly announced any intention to seek the full-time position, saying only it's the responsibility of the interim chair to "complete the work of this cycle."

Perhaps indicating she plans to step back, Brazile tweeted that the "next Chair" must earn support and confidence and teased that she'd make several important and vital announcements next week.

Already, several Democratic figures -- some controversial in their own right -- have put their names in the running for chairman. With no obvious heir to the leadership role inhabited by President Obama, the race for the DNC top slot is shaping up to be a battle within the left wing of the party.

Former presidential candidate and ex-Maryland governor Martin OMalley said Friday he is taking a hard look at running because the party needs to articulate a bold progressive vision.

He joins another former presidential candidate, one-time Vermont governor and former DNC boss Howard Dean, who announced after the election he'll run for his old job.

Expected to jump in soon is Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison. Fox News has confirmed he plans to announce his bid for DNC chairman on Monday -- and the congressman already is being backed by high-powered support.

"We need a Democratic National Committee led by a progressive who understands the dire need to listen to working families, not the political establishment or the billionaire class. That is why I support Keith Ellison to be the next Chair of the Democratic National Committee, and why I hope you'll join me in advocating for him to lead the DNC, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who lost the hard-fought Democratic primaries to Clinton and continues to enjoy widespread support among voters, said in a statement.

Another popular figure on the left, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, tipped her hat toward Ellison.

"I really, really like Keith," Warren told MSNBCs Rachel Maddow. "I think he's terrific and I think he would make a terrific DNC chair."

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is in line to be Senate Minority Leader, also reportedly backed the first Muslim to be elected to Congress.

The election of any of these candidates to helm the DNC would signal the party plans to double down on the liberal vision espoused by Sanders during the primaries -- and adopted to a degree by Clinton during the general election.

Ellison, who co-sponsored a bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney, could be a controversial choice.

Shortly after his election in 2007, he compared President George W. Bush to Hitler and has been linked to the radical Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Brazile, meanwhile, is slated to remain as interim chair until March 2017. However, a MoveOn.org campaign has been launched to hold the leadership vote earlier.

Brazile was the DNCs vice chair for civic engagement and voter participation and a paid CNN contributor before she was tapped on July 24 to replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The Florida congresswoman resigned after WikiLeaks exposed her apparent bias in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Brazile was no less a controversial figure.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Wikileaks released a series of emails that showed Al Gores former campaign manager allegedly provided the Clinton campaign with questions in advance of primary debates and town halls with Sanders.
President-elect Donald Trump will now have access to the most authoritative and highly classified intelligence produced by the U.S. government, Fox News has learned.

Two intelligence sources confirmed that the Presidents Daily Brief, or PDB, is now available to Trump  after the White House, before Tuesdays election, had directed that the winner have full access to the material, to ensure a smooth transition.

The sources told Fox News they do not anticipate the briefings will begin until next week at the earliest.

The PDB is like a highly classified newspaper for the president, and now the president-elect. It is significantly different than the information provided in briefings for candidates; those briefings act as primers to help bring candidates up to speed on topics like China, Iran and the Islamic State.

Candidates have been free to request additional briefs on topics of personal interest, and those supplemental briefings were made available to the other candidate.

The PDB is a focused intelligence product, and has a very high threshold for intelligence to be included.

Fox News has also learned that, because the briefing itself must be done in a secure facility, the White House has a dedicated transition space nearby that can be used by the president-elect to receive the PDB.

If Trump were to receive the brief in New York City, the president-elect would need to travel to a secure federal facility, such as the FBI office.

While Trump prepares to be read in on top U.S. intelligence, he and his transition team are busy assembling potential candidates for key roles in the Trump administration. He tweeted Friday that he had a busy day planned in New York and would soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government.
Donald Trump ran his winning presidential campaign with the help of a tight-knit circle of close advisers. He wont have that luxury once he takes control of the federal government.

Instead of an intimate cadre of family members and loyal aides, Trump will need to expand his circle  choosing over a dozen Cabinet secretaries, filling out a team of senior strategists to run his White House and making thousands of other lesser appointments.

The speculation over who will compose that team heated up the moment Trump was declared the victor in Tuesdays election. Prospects for key posts have given maddeningly mixed messages, some expressing interest and others disavowing it.

Trump and his transition team, meanwhile, already are hard at work. Trump, after meeting with President Obama in Washington, tweeted Friday:

So how much different will the Trump administration really be?

Trump campaign aides are suggesting the Cabinet would be a mix of outsiders and more traditional choices.

Keep in mind, this campaign was an outsider campaign, so it would be foolish to go ahead place a bunch of Washington, D.C., insiders into D.C. roles, a senior aide told reporters on VP-elect Mike Pences flight from New York to D.C. on Thursday.

The following is a cheat sheet of possible considerations so far for Trumps Cabinet and White House positions:

Secretary of State

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker are at the center of speculation as to who would lead world affairs in a Trump administration.

Bolton, who served as U.N. ambassador under George W. Bush and is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is reportedly one of the top candidates. Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt back in August that Bolton would be under consideration, saying, "He was very good in defending me in some of my views, and very, very strong."

Gingrich, who was on the short-list for Trumps VP spot, is almost certain to serve in the administration in some capacity. The question is where.

Speaking with the Sean Hannity Show, Gingrich voiced more interest in a non-Cabinet role.

"I would like to be sort of a senior planner, trying to think through how we fundamentally, at the most basic levels, restructure the federal government," Gingrich said. Gingrich suggested a Cabinet post would preclude him from playing such a role, saying, "I don't think it's possible to do one of the major jobs -- you know, running one of the departments -- and think strategically."

Corker, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, endorsed Trump over the summer and has expressed interest in the secretary of state post.

Foreign Relations Richard Haass is another name floating around for the lead diplomat position.

Secretary of Defense

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions is one top official speculated to be in consideration for the lead spot at the Pentagon. Sessions, who was the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump in the primaries, serves on the Senate Committee on Armed Services and chairs the Strategic Forces subcommittee.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, an important figure in giving Trumps military strategy legitimacy throughout his campaign, is also being floated for the position. However, his nomination would require a congressional waiver as law stipulates retired military personnel must wait seven years before taking the defense secretary position.

Attorney General

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, has expressed interest in the position and is being touted as a leading candidate for the job. Prior to his tenure as mayor, Giuliani was a U.S. associate attorney general and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York under President Reagan.

Speaking Thursday on Fox & Friends, Giuliani left the door open.

I thought I was finished, but then I got involved in the Trump campaign, he said. When you talk to the president of the United States and he wants you to do a job, I certainly would not go into that conversation with a firm 'no' in my mind. But Id want to talk about maybe three or four other people that might be better for it. If there arent, then maybe I would do it.

Giuliani said he would be interested in focusing on cybersecurity, and talked up another possible AG prospect, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

While Christie has been hurt politically by the Bridge-gate scandal, Giuliani said that was blown out of proportion and Christie would be good for any position.

Secretary of the Treasury

Steven Mnuchin, Trumps finance chairman and former Goldman Sachs banker, could be a top pick for Treasury secretary. Trump indicated late in the campaign that he would seriously consider Mnuchin for the position. Brokers and bankers on Wall Street reportedly looked to Mnuchin for insight on Trumps finance policy.

Carl Icahn, chairman of Icahn Enterprises, also is speculated to be in the running.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimons name has come up, too.

In a memo to staff obtained by FoxNews.com, Dimon said Trumps election and other developments in the world signal widespread frustration with the lack of economic opportunity.

We need to listen to those voices, he said in the memo.

Chief of Staff

At least three big names have been bandied about most frequently for the coveted and powerful chief of staff role: RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, campaign CEO Steve Bannon and Christie.

Priebus, who presided over the GOPs 2014 midterm takeover of the Senate and now the 2016 takeover of Washington, was tasked with building the virtually non-existent bridges between the national Republican Party and Trumps campaign as he closed in on the nomination, as well as smoothing over disagreements over Trumps bid among congressional Republicans. When asked about the speculation, Priebus told Fox News: I dont know. This is up to President-elect Trump. He will make all of these decisions. He will surround himself with great people.

Bannon, the Breitbart News executive who came on as the Trump campaign CEO, also reportedly is in the running for the position.

Christie, who is leading Trumps transition team, was the first GOP presidential candidate to endorse Trump and was on the final short-list for Trumps VP spot, only to be passed over for Mike Pence.

Other Cabinet positions

Though lower-profile positions have not yet received as much attention, some names have been floated.

Dr. Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate, has been mentioned for Secretary of Education and is virtually the only name being floated for Secretary of Health and Human Services after Florida Gov. Rick Scott signaled he was not interested in the position. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been mentioned in reports for Secretary of the Interior. Politico also reported that Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, an outspoken Trump supporter whose law-and-order message dovetails with the president-elects, is a potential candidate for Homeland Security secretary. Retiring Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida, chairman of the Veterans Affairs committee, is possibly being considered for Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

FoxNews.com's Danny Jativa and Fox News' Dan Gallo contributed to this report.
Talk about seeing the forest for the trees: an ecologist said that he has found the worlds 50 tallest tropical trees.

Located on the island of Borneo, the tallest of the very big trees stands at almost 309 feet tall impressively, thats taller than the Statue of Liberty by just a few feet, measured from the bottom of her pedestal to the top of the torch.

The find was made by Gregory Asner, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institute of Science, reported Mongabay, a science and conservation news site. The other 49 trees, all also located on the Bornean state of Sabah (a part of Malaysia), are all taller than 295 feet.

"The 94 meter [nearly 309 ft] tree was standing quietly in a part of the Bornean terrain that rarely, if ever, gets visited by scientists," Asner told FoxNews.com in an email. "This made me think about how much of the tropics remains unexplored and unknown to science, even in areas undergoing and near to clearing for agriculture, mining, and other destructive uses."

The huge tree's crown spans about 132 feet in diameter.

WORLD SUFFERS 'CATASTROPHIC' WILDERNESS LOSS, STUDY SAYS

Asner also said that some of the trees he found are susceptible to threats from people.

"Many are in protected areas, but about 10 of the 50 are actually in landscapes that could be cleared in the future," he wrote. "So there is a need to protect these amazing and majestic, long-lived species."

The Carnegie Institute of Sciences Airborne Observatory, a plane that uses lasers to make measurements, was used to find the Lady Liberty-sized tree.

Asner said he'll keep looking for taller trees.

"Over the years, the rate at which the record has been broken [has] naturally decreased because finding progressively taller trees gets less and less likely," he wrote. "However, we also think there is a physiological limit to how tall trees will grown, and 94 m is certainly pushing that limit. That said, I hope to find the absolute tallest tropical tree sometime in my career via my airborne observatory and our extensive field program."

Follow Rob Verger on Twitter: @robverger
Facebooks struggles with fake news underscore the urgent need for a new social media legal framework, experts warn.

Its an enormous problem, Keith Altman, a lawyer at 1-800 Law Firm, told FoxNews.com. Its the distribution, the infrastructure of these sites that allow the misinformation to be disseminated.

Earlier this week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the social media networks news algorithm against allegations that the company allowed fake news to tilt the election.

FACEBOOK BLOCKS CAR INSURER FROM PROFILING USERS

"Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebookof which its a very small amount of the contentinfluenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea, Zuckerberg said at conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Facebooks Trending Topics fell prey to some high-profile fake stories after the social network implemented an algorithmic feed this summer. These included a false article that Fox News had fired anchor Megyn Kelly and a hoax article about the Sept.11 attacks. On another occasion a seemingly innocent hashtag that appeared in Trending Topics linked to an inappropriate video.

While these incidents were clearly embarrassing for Facebook, social media companies are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

FACEBOOK EMPLOYEES FUME AFTER PUSH TO CENSOR TRUMP POSTS REBUFFED

This means that online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a number of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Altman, however, says the unfettered nature of social media sites such as Facebook, where content can be shared with vast numbers of people, necessitates a new legal framework.

I think that [Section] 230 needs to be looked at and maybe more clearly defined, Altman told FoxNews.com. A better framework and accountability needs to be implemented to cause these companies to act responsibly.

FACEBOOK, TWITTER CUT OFF SURVEILLANCE TOOL USED BY POLICE TO MONITOR PROTESTERS

Altman is also representing the family of Naomi Gonzalez, who was killed in the Paris terror attacks in a lawsuit claiming that Google, Facebook and Twitter provided material support to Islamic State.

Eric Feinberg, a founding partner of deep web analysis company GIPEC, says that his firm has developed technology that can anticipate where the likes of fake news stories are lurking on the Internet.

We deep dive into the web looking for bad patterns, Feinberg told FoxNews.com. We can anticipate what is bad, nefarious, on the web.

SINGLE MOM FACES JAIL FOR SELLING FOOD ON FACEBOOK

Like Altman, Feinberg also cited the shortcomings of Section 230. All of this is a huge problem, he said.

With more than 1.7 billion monthly active users, Facebooks role in society continues to be closely scrutinized. Last month, for example, civil rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and Black Lives Matter signed a letter to the companys CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging him to clarify Facebooks policy on content removal.

Earlier this month Facebook said that it will block a British car insurer from profiling users of the social network to decide whether they deserve a discount on their insurance.

Facebook declined to provide additional comment for this story when contacted by FoxNews.com.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
A Texas grand jury has decided against criminal charges for a white police officer who attracted national attention by throwing a black motorist to the ground after a traffic stop.

Austin police officer Bryan Richter won't face indictment over the arrest of Breaion King. It occurred last year, but sparked outcry upon the release of the patrol car video in July.

Richter is seen throwing King to the ground. Another officer eventually suggests to her that blacks have "violent tendencies." King filed suit against the city and Richter in federal court.

The district attorney's office said Thursday that the grand jury heard 13 hours of testimony from eight witnesses. Her attorney, Erica Grigg, said King testified.

Grigg said her client is "disappointed" but "remains focused on her civil case."
If you voted for Donald Trump, you may not feel welcomed at Grubhub.

The CEO of Grubhub, an online food delivery service, sent a company wide email Wednesday suggesting employees who agree with President-elect Donald Trumps behaviors and his campaign rhetoric should resign.

If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here, wrote Matt Maloney, Co-Founder of Grubhub. We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team."

Maloney, a Hillary Clinton supporter, sent the email Wednesday afternoon with the subject line, Sothat happenedwhats next? He made it clear in the email statement that he is personally stunned and deeply concerned with the results of Tuesdays election.

We stand for tolerance. Always. Please read the official statement about our CEO, @m3aloney's, post-election email https://t.co/tQU3Db0IbY  Grubhub (@Grubhub) November 10, 2016

I absolutely reject the nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics of Donald Trump and will work to shield our community from this movement as best as I can, Maloney wrote about Trumps supporters.

I want to reaffirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and everyone else here at Grubhub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States.

The CEO made it clear hes particularly concerned Trumps victory will empower others in his workplace to act out against marginalized groups.

While demeaning, insulting, and ridiculing minorities, immigrants, and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr. Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior -- and these views -- have no place at Grubhub, Maloney explained.

Adding, if it were up to him, Trump would have been fired a long time ago.

"Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination.

Maloney tells Fox News that "almost 20 percent of his employees have personally thanked him for the note. I am not embarrassed by it, he said.

The CEO said that he deeply respects the right of people to vote for whoever they decide, but that he simply wanted to reassure our employees that our company will actively support diversity and inclusion -- regardless of national politics.

This letter is noteworthy because it underscores the fine-line between the intersection of politics and business, especially given the divisive presidential campaign of the past year and a half.

Bruce Tulgan, Author of Its OK to be the Boss, calls the letter extraordinary because while a CEO has a right to build the kind of corporate culture he or she wants -- Tulgan advises business leaders to stay away from politics.

Much of that message could have been communicated without making direct reference to the election, Tulgan said of Maloneys email. "Anytime you are talking about things that are not work at work youre risking potentially alienating people, making people feel uncomfortable or un-welcomed at work."

Mark Horstman, co-founder of Manager Tools, says if he were advising Mr. Maloney -- he would have recommended he not send the note particularly because he's the CEO of a public company.

"That note could be construed by his employees that someone who voted for Trump could be fired," said Horstman, who suspects other CEOs have sent similar notes. "It has a chilling effect on people's perception of their rights."

While Maloney seemingly calls out Trump supporters at his company on the one hand, the young CEO boasted about the companys supportive and inclusive culture on the other, saying he firmly believes that we must bring together different perspectives.

Evoking Clintons campaign slogan, Maloney says we are stronger together, and he ends his letter to his employees by echoing Clintons concession speech, saying Trumps administration deserves our open minds and a chance to lead.

He ends the letter imploring his employees to stay strong."
A California man once known as the nation's worst serial killer was denied parole again for murdering and mutilating more than two-dozen farmworkers 45 years ago, officials said Thursday.

Juan Vallejo Corona, 82, was denied parole for another five years and will keep serving his life sentence in Corcoran State Prison, corrections department spokesman Luis Patino said.

Corona, a farm labor contractor with a history of mental illness, was convicted of killing and mutilating 25 men with a meat cleaver, machete, double-bladed ax and wooden club that investigators found in his home, all stained with blood. The bodies were found all at once, but he said in 2011 that the slayings occurred over a year.

It was the nation's deadliest rampage until John Wayne Gacy Jr. was convicted in 1980 of killing 33 young men and boys in Chicago. Gacy was executed in 1994 in Illinois.

Corona was convicted of stabbing 24 of the men, hacking open their heads and burying their remains on two ranches where he once worked near Yuba City, 40 miles north of Sacramento.

"It was a gruesome manner of killing. He hacked these people to death," said Sutter County District Attorney Amanda Hopper, who attended Wednesday's hearing to argue against Corona's release.

He shot the 25th victim in the head, something he could do again if he were released from prison despite his age and use of a wheelchair, Hopper said.

Investigators found a ledger book at Corona's home containing the names of seven victims. Four of the bodies have never been identified, and the remains of 14 victims were never claimed by family members after they were discovered in 1971.

Prosecutors previously said Corona sought victims who had few relatives and likely would not be missed. No family members of his victims attended the hearing.

Corona, a Mexican national and native of Jalisco, Mexico, acknowledged his guilt for the first time during a 2011 parole hearing, prosecutors said at the time. He justified the killings because he said the men were "winos" who were trespassing in the orchards north of Sacramento.

But he backtracked this time.

"When it had anything to do with killing the 25 people or his mental state, he conveniently could no longer remember," Hopper said of Corona's comments at this week's hearing. "He specifically said that, 'I don't remember that I killed anyone, I don't remember that I did anything.'"

However, Corona was otherwise lucid despite being previously diagnosed with dementia and mental illness, the prosecutor said.

Corona was first convicted in 1973 of 25 counts of first-degree murder. It was overturned on appeal, but he was convicted again in 1982 and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He was not eligible for the death penalty because California's capital punishment law had been ruled unconstitutional at the time.

This is the eighth time he has been denied parole.
Searchers found the body of a missing Houston-area 16-year-old Thursday afternoon not far from the bar where her boyfriend was arrested days earlier.

The Baytown Police Department said a volunteer on an ATV discovered the remains of Kirsten Fritch in a wooded area just north of the Shenanigan's bar in Texas City.

Fritch's boyfriend, 21-year-old Jesse Dobbs, had been arrested by police Tuesday night after he walked into the bar barefoot and requested a glass of water.

Authorities had issued an Amber Alert for Fritch after her mother, 37-year-old Cynthia Morris, and Morris' 13-year-old daughter Breanna Pavlicek were found shot to death in their Baytown home Monday morning.

Dobbs was initially charged with resisting arrest. However, Baytown police spokesman Lt. Steven Dorris said murder charges would likely be brought against him in Fritch's death.

Authorities are investigating the death of the teen's two relatives, in which Dobbs is described as a "person of interest."

It was not immediately clear how Fritch died, though Dobbs said investigators would be "looking for a gun."

Fritch's grandmother told KHOU that her granddaughter and Dobbs started dating after they met online.

He just seemed like a lowlife," Barbara DeRamus told the station. "I thought what was Kirsten doing with this idiot."

KTRK reported that Dobbs has two children from a previous relationship. He was charged earlier this year with domestic violence against the children's mother, who said he was known to use methamphetamine.
A Louisiana college student has acknowledged she fabricated a report that she was assaulted and robbed of her wallet and Muslim headscarf by two men, one of whom she described as wearing a white "Trump" hat, police said Thursday.

The Lafayette Police Department said in a statement that it is no longer investigating the 18-year-old woman's claims, which were made within hours of Donald Trump's presidential victory.

Police said the student told investigators she was walking near the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's campus Wednesday morning when she was accosted by two white men who drove up in a gray sedan. Police added the student had claimed the men shouted racial obscenities as they knocked her down and stole her wallet and the headscarf, known as a hijab.

Charlie Bier, a spokesman for the university, said a federal privacy law prohibits him from saying whether the student could be disciplined.

In California, meanwhile, authorities at San Diego State University said they were investigating a reported attack on a Muslim student on campus as a hate crime. The university's police department said two suspects who assaulted the student on campus Wednesday had targeted her because of her faith and made comments about Trump's election.

The woman was not hurt. Authorities said the assault occurred in a parking complex while the woman was wearing a hijab. The suspects stole her car keys, and the vehicle was later reported missing, authorities said.

In a statement, SDSU President Elliot Hirshman denounced the attack, calling hate crimes destructive to the spirit of the campus.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Thursday issued an information bulletin to law enforcement agencies, outlining laws that prohibit hate crimes.
A 23-year-old woman who became an outspoken anti-bullying advocate after a brutal beating in high school is facing assault charges after cops say she shoved a 74-year-old man to the ground during a second night of anti-Trump protests in New York City.

Cops say Clinton supporter Shacara McLaurin, who had once auditioned for American Idol, and the man got into a heated dispute about who should have won the election that boiled over as demonstrators gathered outside President-elect Donald Trumps skyscraper in midtown Manhattan Thursday night.

She was yelling Black lives matter and he started yelling All lives matter and it went from there, a police source told the Daily News.

Cops said the victim suffered a cut to his head after he was knocked to the ground and complained of severe pain, according to the New York Post. He was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

McLaurin, of Brooklyn, was charged with two counts of assault, a felon and a misdemeanor, the paper reported.

She was the only one arrested at Trump Tower Thursday. On Wednesday cops made 65 arrests.

McLaurin became an ambassador for a group that fights bullying after five girls beat her with a padlock inside a sock to prevent her from competing in a high school talent show, FoxNews.com reported in 2011.

She suffered a bruised jaw and partial loss of hearing in her left ear after the attack, which made national headlines.

She testified at a New York City Council that bullying in high schools was an epidemic that needed to be addressed, according to the News.

I just hope that through my speaking out, that my story becomes an example to others, she told the lawmakers.
Whether its in the rain, snow or sweltering heat, no matter what branch of Americas armed services is being honored at Arlington National Cemetery, there is one thing that remains constant  they will never be buried alone.

The fallen servicemen and womens funerals are attended daily by the Arlington Ladies, a group of volunteers who cover all Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard burials at the historic cemetery in Virginia.

Some veterans or their families learn about the Arlington Ladies and think that they need to schedule us, and that is never the case, Air Force Arlington Lady Sandra Griffin said in an AARP video released this week in honor of Veterans Day. Regardless of the situation whether there is family or not, well always be there, she said.

The group started in 1948, when then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and his wife, Gladys, noticed that there were burials that were being attended at Arlington only by the military chaplain and buglers.

The two agreed that someone from the Air Force family should always be there to pay their respects, and they started recruiting friends at the Officers Wives Club, according to AARP Bulletin.

The group expanded in 1973 to include the Army, the Navy in 1985 and the Coast Guard in 2006. Today, its ranks are around 200 strong. For Marines, a representative of that branchs commandants office attends every Marine funeral at Arlington.

The number one thing that an Arlington lady must have is composure, Griffin said. We always have to remember that this is a ceremony that is so honored and hallowed. And there is nothing like it in the world.

VETERANS GIFT DISABLED TEEN FEATURED IN FLAG PHOTO WITH STANDING WHEELCHAIR

On any given weekday at Arlington, as many as 30 war dead and veterans are laid to rest, according to AARP Bulletin.

In addition to the funeral rituals of a honor guard, rifle volley, the playing of taps and the presentation of a folded American flag, the Arlington Ladies speak to the families of the fallen and hand over envelopes to their next of kin.

Inside the envelopes? A condolence card from the armed services chief of staff and a handwritten note from the Arlington Lady, usually written after researching the service members life online.

VETERANS BATTLE THE INVISIBLE SCARS OF WAR WITH ART



A military funeral is very precise, Margaret Mensch, chairman of the Army Arlington Ladies, told AARP Bulletin. We give the personal touch.

It is not clear how many funerals the group has attended overall, but since 2000, the Army version of the group has witnessed nearly 30,000 burials.

Each Arlington Lady has some kind of special connection to their respective service, whether they are a current for former military member or the spouse of one.

In Griffins case, she served in the Air Force for 23 years, while her husband is currently serving his 28th year and their daughter is in her 5th year.

For her, representing the Air Force family is a tradition she wants to help keep alive.

We are the wives, the husbands, or active duty in my case and we know firsthand what it will be like because one day that may be us sitting there in that chair, she said.
next Image 1 of 2

prev Image 2 of 2

Newly unsealed court documents in the federal death penalty trial of Dylann Roof indicate the judge believes it's possible the white man charged with gunning down nine black parishioners in Charleston may not be mentally competent to stand trial.

According to a defense motion unsealed Friday, U.S. Judge Richard Gergel has found "reasonable cause to believe" Roof may be "suffering from a mental disease or defect."

Gergel ordered another competency exam for Roof this week, one day after halting jury selection because of the defense motion. He will hold a hearing Wednesday. Gergel plans to rule within days whether Roof is competent and, if so, begin jury selection for Roof's trial Nov. 21.

While the defense motion was unsealed, much of it is redacted.

Roof's attorneys want the hearing closed.
The father of one of the five police officers killed July 7 in a sniper attack in Dallas charges in a federal lawsuit that Black Lives Matter incited a war on police that led to his sons death.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that the Enrique Zamarripas lawsuit was filed Monday in the Northern District of Texas and seeks $550 million in damages on behalf of his son, Dallas Police Officer Patrict Zamarripa.

While Defendant Black Lives Matter claims to combat anti-black racism, the movement has in fact incited and committed further violence, severe bodily injury and death against police officers of all races and ethnicities, Jews, and Caucasians, the lawsuit says, according to the paper, adding that defendant Black Lives Matter is in fact a violent and revolutionary criminal gang, the lawsuit says, according to the paper.

Patrick Zamarripa, 32, and the other officers--Brent Thompson, Michael Krol, Mike Smith and Lorne Ahrens--were killed as they guarded a march protesting recent shootings of blacks by police officers.

OFFICER SUES BLACK LIVES MATTER ACTIVIST OVER PROTEST INJURY

Authorities said the gunman Micah Johnson wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.

I want justice for my son, Zamarripa told the paper. He served three tours in Iraq, he protected his country, and he protected everybody. And he gave up his life doing that. When people were running away from the gunshots, he was running toward them.

The lawsuit does not name Next Generation Action Network, the group that organized the July 7 march, as a defendant, but names other activists: Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam; Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network; Black Lives Matter organizers Rashad Turner, Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie; Malik Zulu Shabazz, leader of the New Black Panthers Party; and George Soros, a supporter of Black Lives Matter.

Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch is representing Zamarripa. Klayman sued Hillary Clinton earlier in the year on behalf of two men who were killed in the Benghazi, Libya, attack in 2012, the Star-Telegram reported.

NGAN founder Dominique Alexander told the paper the protest was organized in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, but it wasnt arranged by the official BLM organization.

DALLAS COP FILES LAWSUIT AGAINST BLACK LIVES MATTER, OBAMA

Youre suing somebody who had nothing to do with this rally, Alexander said. The only thing this [lawsuit] has done is continue to feed the rhetoric. There is a problem in America, and we have to come together to address it.

On Tuesday, the mother of Officer Zamarripa issued a statement distancing herself from her ex-husbands lawsuit, the paper reported.

The lawsuit does not reflect the views and beliefs of Ms. Valerie Zamarripa or the The Patrick Zamarripa Foundation.
Firefighters battled a fire that broke out in New Jersey at a mansion Thursday night that was once owned by the late engineer and philanthropist Henry Rowan.

Flames were seen shooting from the roof at the historic mansion Westampton Township.

No injuries were reported. It's unclear what sparked the fire.

The amount of damage was not immediately known. However, a previous fire in June left smoke damage.

Henry Rowan died at the age of 92 last year. He gave $100 million to what is now Rowan University, making the gift the largest ever to a public institution of higher education.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.


Authorities in Florida rescued an injured eagle that was trapped inside a storm drain Thursday.

Orange County Fire Rescue was alerted after two eagles were spotted on the ground in Orlando.

One of the eagles appeared to be injured while the other appeared health and was perched nearby, according to Fox 35 Orlando.

Firefighters cleared the area and partially blocked traffic in order for Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission rescuers helped the birds.

The injured eagle was taken to the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey in Maitland. The other eagle had flown away.

Click for more from Fox 35 Orlando.
next Image 1 of 3

prev next Image 2 of 3

prev Image 3 of 3

The latest on world reaction to the U.S. presidential election (all times local):

12:00 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on winning the U.S. election and offer her country's cooperation.

Merkel's spokesman says the German leader spoke to Trump by telephone late Thursday.

Spokesman Georg Streiter told reporters in Berlin that Merkel stressed the common values of Germany and the United States.

Immediately following Trump's election victory, Merkel had offered the new U.S. administration "a close partnership" on the basis of "democracy, freedom, respect for the law and the dignity of human beings regardless of their origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation and political opinion."

Her comments were widely seen in Germany as a rebuke to Trump's rhetoric during the election campaign.

___

11:25 a.m.

A powerful Iraqi cleric whose followers once fought U.S. troops says Donald Trump's election victory is a sign of American decline.

Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite who brought thousands of anti-government protesters into the streets of Baghdad earlier this year, urged Americans in a Friday statement to resist Trump's intolerant views.

He says: "We advise the American people not to be affected by the radicalism of their president, and they should not allow him to impose his influence."

Al-Sadr's militia, known as the Peace Brigades, is among the largest of several government-sanctioned Shiite armed groups battling Islamic State forces. He says his group considers America "as the founder of terrorism, by its acts and behavior."

He added: "Peace be upon the American people, those who like moderation and who want peace and peaceful coexistence between religions and ethnicities."

___

10:30 a.m.

Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami says that President-elect Donald Trump should apologize to the Iranian people for calling them terrorists during his campaign.

The senior religious scholar, in a Friday sermon broadcast live on state radio, said Trump should "respectfully apologize to the nation."

Khatami warned Trump about confronting Iran, saying he should know better than to play with "the tail of the lion."

The cleric said that Tehran had successfully foiled and frustrated several of Trump's White House predecessors.

He said Iran's stance on the U.S. election is to avoid intervention or involvement in another country's internal affairs.

He said, "We respect the people of other countries and we respect their elections."

___

6:30 a.m.

Japan's defense minister says his country already pays enough for U.S. troops based there, a response to repeated demands by President-elect Donald Trump that countries hosting American forces should pay more.

Trump's remarks during the election campaign have raised concern in Japan about a possibility his administration may seek Japan's increased spending for American forces.

Defense Minister Tomomi Inada stressed that the presence of U.S. troops in Japan serves as a key deterrence in the Asia-Pacific region and they should stay.

Japan pays about 200 billion yen ($1.9 billion) a year  or about 70 percent  in so-called host-nation support for 50,000 U.S. troops.

Inada said Friday: "I believe it's enough. We pay what we are supposed to cover."
A Louisiana student admitted Thursday that she fabricated a reported attack by two men, one she said was wearing a Trump hat.

The Lafayette Police Department said in a statement that it was no longer investigating the 18-year-old womans claims, which were made within hours of Donald Trumps election.

The student claimed she was walking near the University of Louisiana at Lafayette campus Wednesday morning when she was accosted by two men who drove up in a gray sedan.

Police added that the student claimed the men shouted racial obscenities as the knocked her down and stole her wallet and her headscarf.

Charlie Bier, a spokesman for the university, said a federal privacy law prohibits him from saying whether the student could be disciplined.

Lafayette Police spokesman told The Advocate that the woman offered no explanation for lying. He said the woman might now face charged herself for filing a false police report.

"We don't take this lightly, and it's made national headlines now," he said. "There will be consequences."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A man accused of killing two 17-year-olds behind an Atlanta-area supermarket has pleaded not guilty.

News outlets report that 20-year-old Jeffrey Hazelwood entered his plea in a Fulton County court Thursday, more than a week after he was indicted on 15 counts, including charges of murder, aggravated assault and aggravated sexual battery.

Prosecutors say Hazelwood fatally shot Carter Davis and Natalie Henderson Aug. 1 in Roswell. A medical examiner's report said Henderson was found naked in a "sexually suggestive position," while Davis was wearing only shorts with his arms outstretched on each side.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (http://on-ajc.com/2fGO1HE ) reports Hazelwood was in court for three minutes, during which time he was calm and still, unlike the shaking man who appeared in court in the days after his August arrest.

___

Information from: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, http://www.ajc.com
Opening statements have begun in the trial of a Vietnam native charged with murdering two brothers and dumping their bodies into a Philadelphia river.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports (http://bit.ly/2fi7Jss ) prosecutors on Thursday said 44-year-old Tam Minh Le had a business relationship with 31-year-old Vu "Kevin" Huynh and his 28-year-old brother Viet. Prosecutors say the brothers sold large amounts of marijuana.

Prosecutors say Le and his associates in August 2014 tortured and stabbed the brothers along with another man who tried to deliver some of the $100,000 they owed Le.

All three were dumped into the Schuylkill (SKOO'-kul) River. Their faces covered with duct tape and their legs were weighted down with cement. One man survived.

Defense attorney Daniel Conner told jurors Le works in construction and wasn't involved.

___

Information from: The Philadelphia Inquirer, http://www.inquirer.com
In normal times, the large town of Bashiqa, some 10 miles north of Mosul, has a population of 150,000 people. But these are not normal times. For the past two and a half years the town and the few residents who hadn't fled had been run by a couple hundred blood-thirsty ISIS militants.

But no more. Beginning Monday, crack waves of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have been driving the militants out. Some 130 terrorists have been killed or captured in this week alone. Twenty suicide bombers and fighters tried to make a break Thursday. They either blew themselves up or were killed by Kurdish fighters.

They were desperate, Peshmerga Operations Officer Farhang Afandi told us. They were encircled in a vast area. Were happy none of them got away.

In the background, as we conducted our interview high above the town at a Peshmerga fighting position, there was the sound of explosions. Not more fighting. That job is nearly done. But they were controlled detonations of bombs, booby traps and IEDs left by the terrorists and found by the Kurds.

They were also finding and sealing up a network of tunnels constructed by ISIS and dug, we learned, often by forced labor from the town. The underground network was used as ambush locations for the militants, even into this week.

The fight was necessary because Bashiqa was the last major town the Kurdish forces needed to take back in their phase of the anti-ISIS battle. The seizing of the town cuts off an important transport route in and out of Mosul. While there have been casualties on the Kurdish side, they have been low in recent days.

Even in this far- flung location, though, the Washington changing of the guard is on the fighters minds here.

The Kurds believe the Obama administration did not get their fighting men and women enough weaponry and equipment. They are hoping the future Donald Trump administration will.

I really hope he is going to be a little different, Peshmerga officer Afandi told me, and hes going to support the cause.

The residents of Bashiqa are not expected to be able to return to the savaged town for a long time to come. The challenge for this region will remain as well - for the people here, for the tough Kurdish defendersand the President-elect himself.
Albanian police say one person has died and five others were injured in an explosion at an oil refinery.

A statement Friday said that an explosion the previous evening at the oil refinery in Ballsh, 140 kilometers (85 miles) south of the capital, Tirana, caused by the failure of a hydrogen pump sparked a fire that killed a 40-year old man and injured five other people, one seriously.

Firefighters managed to get the fire under control.

The refinery, with a capacity of one million tons per year, is managed by an offshore company registered in Virgin Islands. After a one-year halt due to business problems it resumed operation earlier this month.
In anticipation of protests against economic austerity measures, Egyptian security forces are heavily deployed on the streets of Cairo and across the country.

The government has floated the local currency and raised fuel prices in order to qualify for a $12 billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund. That loan is now scheduled to be approved by the IMF on Friday.

The reforms have earned praise from the IMF and the international business community, but they have also spawned rising prices and costs of living for an already frustrated Egyptian population.

Political parties have distanced themselves from the call for protests, dubbed the "revolution of the poor" and authorities have accused Islamist groups like the banned Muslim Brotherhood of engineering the protests to cause chaos.
next Image 1 of 3

prev next Image 2 of 3

prev Image 3 of 3

Pope Francis has asked for a pardon from homeless people for all the Christians who turn away from the poor.

In a moving ceremony Friday in a Vatican auditorium, Francis stood silently with his head bowed as he let several homeless persons place their hands on his shoulders or clutch his cassock.

Some 4,000 people from 22 countries who either are now homeless or who spent years living on the streets filled the auditorium in one of Francis' final moves in the Catholic church's Holy Year of Mercy.

"I ask pardon," the pope said, on behalf of Christians who, "faced with a poor person or a situation of poverty, look the other way."

After some of the homeless recounted their difficult lives, Francis praised the poor for holding fast to their dignity.
A newspaper reports that one of 18 employees of Australia's largest casino operator detained in China a month ago for suspected gambling crimes has been released on bail.

Crown Resorts Ltd. told The Australian newspaper that a junior employee had on Friday become the first of the staff to be released.

Crown did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

The newspaper reports on Saturday the released employee is Jenny Chiang, a 33-year-old Shanghai-based Chinese citizen who has worked for Crown for more than five years as an executive assistant.

The head of Crown's VIP International team, Jason O'Connor, is among three Australian and 15 Chinese employees detained on Oct. 13 and 14. They had been caught in an apparent crackdown on overseas tours for high rollers.
South Korean police have booked 15 people for allegedly smuggling endangered animals from Thailand and showing them at small zoos or to children at kindergartens and daycare centers.

A police official in the port city of Busan said Friday that they seized 22 animals including Siamese crocodiles and slow loris monkeys.

The official said most of the animals were bought from Thailand in 2014 by a 38-year-old man, identified only by his surname, Kim. He said Kim sold the animals to other suspects, some of whom earned money by touring kindergartens and daycare centers for petting classes, putting the health of children at risk as the animals weren't properly quarantined.
Turkey's prime minister says he hopes his government can achieve constitutional reforms to usher in a presidential system with the support of the nationalist party.

Binali Yildirim's comments on Friday came a day after he discussed with Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, plans for a presidential system that would give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's largely ceremonial presidency executive powers.

Until now opposition parties had opposed a presidential system, saying that would allow Erdogan to rule unchecked. But Bahceli said on Twitter late Thursday that Yildirim's proposals were "positive and reasonable."

Yildirim said: "God willing with the MHP we will change the constitution and accomplish a presidential system."

Party officials have said parliament could debate reforms early next year and hold a referendum on the issue in April.
For local builder Dan Spear, building new houses is just the half of it. The other half is rebuilding old onessalvaged cabins and barns that are reconstructed, updated with modern conveniences and eclectically decorated for use by overnight guests and at Stevenson Ridge, his wedding and corporate event venue located along State Route 208 in Spotsylvania County.

As of last week, structure No. 10 was completed on the property, a cabin that dates to about 1830 and was built by Swiss immigrants in Bedford, Pa. The standing-seam metal roof, brick and stone chimney, and stainless-steel gutterswith dangling rain chainare new.

Like other structures at Stevenson Ridge, the Bedford cabin was rescued by Craig Jacobs of Salvagewrights Ltd. in Orange County, where he maintains barns full of salvaged buildings and vintage parts. As he has done before, Jacobs alerts Spear to particularly interesting finds.

When Jacobs learns of such a historic structure, he may need to rush to the site to beat a bulldozer poised to demolish it and push it into a pile of rubble. Jacobs and his crew will then carefully deconstruct the building, numbering and labeling the parts so it can be reconstructed exactly as it was built. Often some wood will be rotten or damaged by termites, in which case similar salvaged wood or replicated pieces are used as a replacements.

This cabin is typical in that regard, but Spear said Jacobs was especially excited about this structure because the construction method combines log cabin and timber frame-style construction with logs being mortise and tenon in vertical posts and secured with wooden pegs.

Spear said Jacobs described the construction as very rare, one of perhaps a handful of examples of it anywhere in the country. The posts and beams help date the structure, Spear said. The front porch has examples of hand-hewn lumber, while some of the interior planks were created by pit sawing, narrowing the construction window to the first half of the 19th century.

Construction methods show how communities developed early on, said Spear, who owns Spear Builders of Virginia. Hand hewing would give way to pit sawing as a way to speed up construction and lend some uniformity to building materials.

Spears challenge, one that hes met many times now, is to preserve the historic integrity of the buildings while adding creature comforts. These buildings werent meant to have plumbing and electricity, and they must be added unobtrusively.

Its important that we dont rob it of its soul, said Spear of restoring the structures. He invested a year in rebuilding the cabin properly.

DESIGNER AT WORK

As he has done with all the reclaimed buildings at Stevenson Ridge, Spear called on Scott Kidd of Atlanta-based J. Scott Kidd Designs to decorate this latest addition to the collection.

I provide the blood and the sweat, said Spear, and he provides the magic.

The small cabin is a simple two-over-two design with a center staircase that is original to the cabin. The living area with a fireplace is to one side of the lower level, and the kitchen and dining area is on the other. Theres a full bathroom behind the stairs.

Upstairs, the two bedrooms share a powder room that was added as a guest convenience.

TRANSITIONAL DECOR

Kidds work is evident throughout, from the transitional buttery yellow walls, to the comfortable seating, to mid-century touches such as the 1950s-era console radio and apricot-color kitchen cabinets, to the blend of period and contemporary lighting fixtures. Kidd also selected a variety of art, all of it local, to dress up the space.

Reached by phone in Atlanta, Kidd said his task, starting with the rustic walls and floor, is to combine modern with the old. The shower in the main-level bathroom may have modern ceramic and mosaic tile walls, but the bathrooms walls are salvaged beadboard.

Its a small space but we want it to feel comfortable, he said. I like organic colors and natural wood that reflect the light. The mid-century look works well with rustic.

Some features, such as pocket and barn-style doors, were added as space-saving measures, but the doors themselves are among Kidds salvaged finds and contribute their own rustic appearance.

People ask me why I dont use drapes, but I prefer to leave as much wood exposed as possible, he said. Kidd also said it was his choice to paint the exterior window frames in aqua, an off-the-wall choice that that didnt gain immediate consensus. But in the end all agree they like the result.

THE GROWING LIST

The Bedford cabin now joins nine other historic structures at Stevenson Ridge in which visitors can enjoy a bygone-era experience. Others include the Civil War House, the Log Home, the Spy Hill House, the Adrian Cabin, the Corn Crib, the Servants Quarters, the Post Office and the recently completed Tobacco Barn.

The flagship of the collection is the Riddick House, a large 1812 plantation house that Jacobs discovered in 2004 in a cotton field in eastern North Carolina. It was then deconstructed and shipped in several tractortrailer loads to Spears Spotsylvania property, then reconstructed there over the next couple of years.

That was followed by the Lodge, built in 2008, which is the main venue for weddings and corporate events. Though primarily new construction, the Lodges interior is enhanced with the use of reclaimed wood and other vintage materials.
After seven of 11 speakers at a public hearing on making the King George County Landfill larger complained about current odors at the facilityoften describing a stench they believe causes health problems and a reduced quality of lifestate officials said they want those issues addressed before an expansion permit is granted.

Richard Doucette, land protection and revitalization program manager at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, said Wednesday night that he and other officials had received enough comments to make sure Waste Management deals with odor problems.

This is in their odor management plan, he said.

DEQ held the mandatory meeting Wednesday at King George High School. About 40 people attended, including every member of the King George Board of Supervisors. Chairwoman Ruby Brabo read a statement, saying the board fully supports the vertical expansion, which would raise the height of the landfill from 275 feet to 375 feet.

The expansion also would extend the life of the landfill through 2045, according to estimates. Without it, the landfill is expected to reach capacity in 14 years.

Brabo was one of four speakers who supported the measure. She cited the annual revenueabout $7.4 millionthe county gets from the landfill and its gas-to-energy plant. She also listed the various capital projects that have been built with landfill funds, including schools, fire and rescue stations, an expanded library, sheriffs office and animal pound.

If an expansion were not approved and the county had to close the current facility, it would have to face two obstacles: building a new landfill and raising the tax rate by about 30 cents to replace the revenue stream the landfill provides, Brabo said.

Elizabeth Taylor, director of the King George YMCA, praised Waste Management for supporting the community through summer reading programs and swim classes for all county second-graders.

Resident Dorian Adams agreed that the landfill is good for the county. Stephanie Trainor, who rents a 30-acre farm in Passapatanzy, also touted its financial benefits and said shed like to see residents receive even more tax breaks.

Do I notice the odor occasionally? she asked. Yes, I do, but we made a conscious decision to live there and have our future retirement home on the farm.

Others said they made a decision to live near the landfill but didnt expect their quality of life to degrade to the degree that it has. Kathy Carrer, who regularly complains, along with her husband, Gary, about odors, said her family has lived near landfills before, especially in populated areas, and never experienced such a level of discomfort.

Sometimes, the odors are every single night, she said, describing the horrible stench that she believes causes headaches, nausea and nose burns. I am very much against the landfill expansion.

Fred Salo cited several issues, including the number of buzzards, which he believes has increased since he moved to the county in 2004. Theyre drawn to the landfill and often congregate on water towers or roofs of homes closest to the landfill.

Its appalling to see them there, Salo said.

Jasmin Wisniewski said that since 2010, shes sent 650 emails complaining about the toxic smell that saturates her home and is more than a nuisance problem. Her husband, Dan, said he wished Waste Management officials would communicate more with residents. For instance, if workers warned them theyd be opening a certain cell or doing something that would cause more odors, they would accept it.

Instead, his wife said, Were made out to look like were crazy people, like we dont know what were doing when registering complaints.

Five Waste Management officials attended the hearing and spoke with residents afterward, but none gave formal statements as part of the meeting. Lisa Kardell, the companys director of public affairs, said in written comments that a vertical expansion is the safest and most environmentally responsible solution for King George.

Doucette said DEQ will accept written comments about the expansion through Nov. 30. Then, he and co-workers have 90 days to make a decision, though he hopes to finalize DEQs response by the end of December before presenting it to Waste Management for further negotiation.

He said his department regulates 20 to 30 landfills in the region, and that complaints about odor are nothing new. Issues cited by King George residents were not much different than what he hears elsewhere.

It goes with the operation of a landfill, Doucette said.

DEQ will accept comments by email, fax or mail through Nov. 30. All comments must include the persons name, address and phone number.

Send comments to: Yurek Aurelson, Northern Regional Office, 13901 Crown Court, Woodbridge, VA 22193. Phone: 703/583-3844. Email: yurek.aurelson@deq.virginia.gov.
COLUMBUS  Pride in her military service is evident throughout Sarah Woehls office.

Splashes of red, white and blue decorate her room at Central Community College-Columbus, where she serves as the outreach coordinator in the veterans and military services office.

For the past year and a-half, Woehl has been helping those who served in the military secure benefits for their college education.

Woehl, a Schuyler Central High School graduate and Columbus resident, used her military benefits to earn a degree in applied science from CCC.

The 33-year-old married mother of three is a staff sergeant in the United States Army Reserve who served in a supply and maintenance company in Iraq.

I love working with veterans and military personnel. We just bond better. Thats with anybody in the military. You can just talk to someone in the military and you are instantly connected, she said.

Woehl was a stay-at-home mom who ran her own in-house day care before taking over the position at the college where she works part time helping veterans looking to further their education by navigating through the resources available.

Woehl did much of that work herself when she made the decision to attend college. She went to the University of Nebraska at Kearney after high school, but put her post-secondary career on hold when she joined the military.

There are about 20 veteran students, military students and dependents of military members who attend school at the Columbus campus.

Marc Hilger and Dillon Greenlee are two veterans furthering their education there.

Hilger served as a combat engineer in the United States Marines from 1996-2003. The Bellwood man was deployed multiple times to Yugoslavia, Albania, South Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan.

After the military, he did contracting work overseas but wanted to attend college when he moved back to the U.S.

College wasnt ever really in my plans, but I realized I needed a backup plan, he said.

Using benefits from the Post-9/11 GI Bill, Hilger is enrolled at CCC-Columbus studying agriculture business.

Greenlee, 27, is a graduate of Columbus High School and currently in the Air National Guard after serving eight years in the United States Air Force.

After high school, Greenlee said he decided to follow in the footsteps of some of his family members who served in the military. During his time on active duty, he was stationed in Minot, North Dakota, and Gehdi, Italy, as part of a nuclear security mission.

Though college wasnt for him after high school, he eventually changed course.

I got to a point where I felt like I did enough active duty and I wanted to try something different. So I thought Id go to school, get an education and work toward a new career, he said.

Greenlee worked for animal control for a couple of months, but is now a full-time student using benefits from the GI Bill and thinking of pursuing a career as an electrician.

CCC has a reputation of being a top two-year college for veterans.

For the fourth year in a row, it was ranked first in the nation as the Best for Vets by Military Times, the main news source for the military community.

CCC received the honor based on a survey of more than 500 colleges and universities across the country. The survey asked about a wide array of services, special rules, accommodations and financial incentives offered to students with military ties and a description of aspects of veteran culture on campus.

The college opened veterans resource and military centers in 2011. The centers have grown to include a Student Veterans of America chapter on each campus, having a VITAL (Veterans Integration To Academic Leadership) program and working with the Veterans Community Task Force that connects veterans to resources across the state.
COLUMBUS  A 23-year-old Columbus man pleaded no contest to sexual assault of a minor during a relationship authorities were informed about when a 14-year-old girl learned she was pregnant while seeking treatment for an unrelated medical issue at the local hospital.

Platte County District Court Judge Robert Steinke scheduled Francisco Batz-Chicaj for sentencing Thursday on the charge of first-degree sexual assault in connection with the 15-month relationship with the teenager that was discovered in late March.

The sexual assault charge is a Class 2A felony, punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment.

In exchange for Batz-Chicajs plea, the Platte County Attorneys Office agreed to dismiss a charge of identity theft-$5,000 or more in the case. That charge is also a 2A felony.

The defendant has been free from jail on bond since early April.

Court documents in the case describe a Columbus Police investigation that got underway March 25 with the report of the girls pregnancy.

Investigator Jaymee Levander wrote in her probable cause arrest statement that the victim reported having sex with the defendant in a city park about two months earlier.

During an interview with police, the defendant admitted the sexual contact and time frame and said he had been dating the victim for about 15 months, the investigator wrote in her statement.

Levander said the defendant was aware the victim was pregnant and said he had plans to marry her when she turned 18. The victim believed the defendant was 20 years old, the investigator said.

Batz-Chicaj was in possession of several pieces of false identification when arrested, including a Missouri ID card, Visa debit card, work ID card for a local manufacturing plant, Pinnacle Bank Visa card, Guatemala Department of Transit card and Consular ID card.

Levander said the defendant reported he got the identification cards from a friend who died, and the cards were for the purposes of employment and banking.
IN the wake of one of the most divisive political campaigns in our nations history, this Veterans Day, more than any before, has drawn me to focus on the true meaning of service.

Last fall, I patrolled through a village in southern Niger alongside a small U.S. military team and their Nigerien partners. Just before we had arrived, members of the extremist group Boko Haram had swept through the village, looting food supplies and burning women and children alive in their huts. The carnage was evident all around usin the smoldering wreckage of homes and in the haunted eyes of the community. We were there to speak with the village elders, to identify ways to improve security and to meet the needs of the local population.

As I walked along, my mind went back to patrols years before in Iraq, when I had been in uniform, leading young men on the dangerous roads around Baghdad and Anbar Province. This time, although I walked next to U.S. troops, I was a civilian, working for a charitable organization that supports the safety and success of deployed U.S. troops. The connection between the two experiences was a simple one: a commitment to serve.

Service is the core trait we honor this holiday. To be sure, this trait includes the incredible commitment and sacrifice of my brothers and sisters who have worn the uniform. But, in these tumultuous times, it also should reflect the notion of service as a key component of the American identity, and it should motivate us all to redouble our service to one another, our country and the world.

In my civilian capacity, I have the privilege of working with an incredible group of veteransmen and women who volunteered to defend this country and the values it represents in the chaotic and uncertain conflicts of the 21st century. They fought for it, some bled for it and all endured immense hardships because they believed in America. Moreover, they have chosen to continue serving after they shed the uniform, willingly returning to familiar battlefields to support their former comrades in arms, advance the ideals of freedom and democracy, and ease the suffering of those most affected by conflict.

I also have the honor of working with an immensely dedicated group of people who never wore the uniform but are nevertheless driven to serve their country. Hailing everywhere from California to Pennsylvania, with backgrounds and beliefs as diverse as any in our country, they are united by a common causea desire to serve this country, represent what is best about its values and ideals, and ease suffering around the world.

In my mind, both groups are deserving of our respect and admiration, and both offer an example of how we can all serve.

But before focusing on that point, a question. What drives this desire to serve?

I cannot presume to speak on both groups behalf, but I can offer as a proxy my motivation. I spent some of my formative years in Iraq, first just after the invasion, when initial hopes for peace sputtered, and then during the height of the surge, when success was not a foregone conclusion but we owed it to our country and the people of Iraq to give it all we had. My service was in no way extraordinarysome had it easier, some far harderbut those experiences cemented the importance of service in my mind. What I learned during those years in the desert made me believe in service more than ever before.

Why? Because of what America represents, even in these uncertain times. As a nation, we often lose sight of the advantages we enjoy and take for granted the very framework upon which our country is based. An inclusive society, a messy yet functioning democracy, a dynamic economy and great security based upon geographic isolation. And yet, in my work, both in the military and now, I am reminded again and again by people all over the worldfrom Syria and Iraq to Niger to Ukrainehow much these ideas matter and what a source of inspiration they are to those struggling for peace and opportunity. In the worlds toughest places, my colleagues and I have witnessed the power of the American idea, and we feel compelled to safeguard that idea. Not solely for our nation, but also to do our small part in the betterment of humankind.

And, as we veterans strive to accomplish that task, we are joined by civilians who are equally as motivated, who have thought long and hard about what it means to serve and have taken up the mantle willingly.

This Veterans Day, as we both reflect upon the sacrifices made by those who have worn the uniform and recover from a bitter political campaign, let us ask ourselves if we have done our part to make the world a better place. That does not necessarily entail service in some foreign land like Niger or Iraq. Rather, it means that every one of us has done what we can to fully embody the values and ideals we as a country hold so dear and to which others around the world aspire.

Isaac Eagan, a former Army infantryman, now serves as vice president of operations for Spirit of America, a nonprofit that works alongside the U.S. military providing humanitarian assistance in conflict zones. Email him at isaac@spiritofamerica.org.
Amitriptyline Industry Analysis, Development, Chain Structure and Opportunities for 2021

The Amitriptyline Industry Research Report of 150 pages and providing rich tables and figures to support the Amitriptyline market analysis is now available.

--

For people who are keen on the Amitriptyline Market the Global and Chinese Amitriptyline Industry, 2010-2021 Market Research Report would be a useful report to refer to as it is an exhaustive study on the present market scenario of this industry. The report also gives a special insight into the growing Global & Chinese market of this industry. The report summarizes key statistics of the market and the overall status of the manufacturers in this industry. The report is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.

The report encapsulates all the latest news and developments in the industry along with the progress in the technology front. The information summary helps the reader of this report to be updated on all the activities of the industry. It mentions the recent trend in this market along with a market outlook both at the Global and Chinese market level. The report mentions top eight manufacturers of this market. The details covered in this portion include a detailed profiling of the company along with its products offerings, product information over the period of 2010-2016 along with the key contact person in the firm. So a person looking to diversify the business knows his competitors and also has a fair idea on the business offerings of its competitors. The Amitriptyline Market report covers the capacity of production of this industry along with production value, supply and consumption. It includes the level of competition in this market and the performance of the players in specific geography like USA, EU, Japan and China.

Order a copy of this report at http://www.market-research-reports.com/contacts/purchase.php?name=486962

The total market analysed in this report is divided by company, by country, and by application or type for the competitive landscape analysis. The report also estimates 2016-2021 market development trends of Amitriptyline industry. Analysis of upstream raw materials, downstream demand, and current market dynamics is also carried out. To end with the Amitriptyline Industry report includes ten proposals which cover the market entry strategies, suggestions on managing economic challenges and various marketing channels. This section of information is very useful for a prospective market player who is planning to startup something new in this industry. In order to prevent the new players in the market from any unpleasant experiences and safeguard against market giants there is a feasibility analysis of New Project Investment. The investment research gives a snapshot of all the pros and cons of this industry as well as speaks about the opportunities and threats. Overall, the report provides an in-depth insight of 2010-2021 Global and Chinese Amitriptyline market covering all important parameters.

Major Points from Table of Contents

Chapter One Introduction of Amitriptyline Industry

1.1 Brief Introduction of Amitriptyline

1.2 Development of Amitriptyline Industry

1.3 Status of Amitriptyline Industry

Chapter Two Manufacturing Technology of Amitriptyline

2.1 Development of Amitriptyline Manufacturing Technology

2.2 Analysis of Amitriptyline Manufacturing Technology

2.3 Trends of Amitriptyline Manufacturing Technology

Chapter Three Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers

Chapter Four 2010-2016 Global and Chinese Market of Amitriptyline

4.1 2010-2016 Global Capacity, Production and Production Value of Amitriptyline Industry

4.2 2010-2016 Global Cost and Profit of Amitriptyline Industry

4.3 Market Comparison of Global and Chinese Amitriptyline Industry

4.4 2010-2016 Global and Chinese Supply and Consumption of Amitriptyline

4.5 2010-2016 Chinese Import and Export of Amitriptyline

Chapter Five Market Status of Amitriptyline Industry

5.1 Market Competition of Amitriptyline Industry by Company

5.2 Market Competition of Amitriptyline Industry by Country (USA, EU, Japan, Chinese etc.)

5.3 Market Analysis of Amitriptyline Consumption by Application/Type

Chapter Six 2016-2021 Market Forecast of Global and Chinese Amitriptyline Industry

6.1 2016-2021 Global and Chinese Capacity, Production, and Production Value of Amitriptyline

6.2 2016-2021 Amitriptyline Industry Cost and Profit Estimation

6.3 2016-2021 Global and Chinese Market Share of Amitriptyline

6.4 2016-2021 Global and Chinese Supply and Consumption of Amitriptyline

6.5 2016-2021 Chinese Import and Export of Amitriptyline

Chapter Seven Analysis of Amitriptyline Industry Chain

7.1 Industry Chain Structure

7.2 Upstream Raw Materials

7.3 Downstream Industry

Explore More Reports on Life Science at http://www.market-research-reports.com/cat/life-sciences-market-research



About Us:

Market Research Reports is an aggregator of syndicated market research studies that offer current and future market intelligence across multiple industrial verticals through is high quality database. Additionally, with help of our sales and research experts focus, Market Research Reports aims to help you take business decisions accurately and on time, every time.

For more information, please visit http://www.market-research-reports.com/486962-amitriptyline-cas-50-48-6-industry

Contact Info:

Name: Ritesh Tiwari

Email: sales@market-research-reports.com

Organization: Market Research Reports

Address: UNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZ Magarpatta city, Hadapsar, Pune, Maharashtra 411013, India

Phone: + 1 888 391 5441

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/amitriptyline-industry-analysis-development-chain-structure-and-opportunities-for-2021/144000

Release ID: 144000

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Musician Charles Moorer Recounts Personal Hardships, Importance of Faith in New Book

Book signing to be held during benefit concert for Indiana Make-A-Wish Foundation

--

Featuring raw and honest accounts of personal hardships, an Indianapolis author hopes the release of his new book will help others find the light at the end of their own tunnels.

Pain, uncertainty and confusion are all normal feelings when times are tough. But when difficult situations continue for an extended period of time, faith can take a severe blow. It becomes easier to question ones faith when a string of bad luck never seems to end or when the right choices turn out to be wrong.

When there doesn't seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel, it can become even easier to stop believing.

Fortunately, difficult situations can be overcome bringing strength and a new lease on life, and more importantly, faith can be restored.

In Giving Up Is Not an Option, author Charles Moorer shares his family's inspirational story of how, even on the verge of losing everything, they kept their faith and pushed through the difficult circumstances in their life.

"My hope is that readers will be inspired, and encouraged to stand firm through the storms that life may unexpectedly bring their way realizing there is still comfort in holding onto their faith in our heavenly father," Moorer said.

Giving Up Is Not an Option is currently available at retailers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and through Moorer's website, www.charlesmoorerpraise.com.

Moorer is a dedicated father, husband, pastor, musician and leadership mentor currently based in Indianapolis. Together with his band The Faithful Few, he works diligently and faithfully to inspire people from all walks of life to live with purpose, love and the peace of Christ.

A book signing is planned in early 2017 during a benefit concert for the Indiana Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Moorer and his family received support from the Indiana Make-A-Wish Foundation when his then 16-year-old son Chadwin was battling renal sickle cell carcinoma, a form of cancer that gave him a 10 percent survival rate.

The wish the Foundation provided turned into a celebration of life when Chadwin was miraculously healed. A few years later, Moorer himself was healed of cancer.

"My goal is to use a portion of the proceeds to assist the Indiana Make-A-Wish Foundation with their goal of continuing to be a blessing to children and their families during the trying times they are facing," Moorer said. "I am very thankful, grateful and humbled to use what talent and skills my heavenly father has given me to assist them."

For more information, please visit http://www.charlesmoorerpraise.com/

Contact Info:

Name: Blue Artists

Email: info@blue-artists.com

Organization: Blue Artists

Phone: 877-978-2023

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/musician-charles-moorer-recounts-personal-hardships-importance-of-faith-in-new-book/144834

Release ID: 144834

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Luxury Bedding Shop, Bamboo For Life, Celebrates Its Fourth Online Anniversary

Bamboo For Life is celebrating its fourth year anniversary and shares some of the success' and challenges it faced getting this far. More information on the business can be found at http://bambooforlife.com/bamboo-sheets.

--

Bamboo For Life is celebrating their fourth anniversary, which commemorates 4 great years in business. This is a huge milestone for the on-line based retail bedding shop, which has provided bamboo sheets, towels and duvets to discerning customers since 2012.

Bamboo For Life got it's start when founder, Jim Morris, had a sleeping issue and bought several sets of luxury sheets before he found the quality that solved the problem. He found it in bed sheets made from bamboo. Figuring that the buying process could be way more efficient, he opened his own luxury bedding shop..

One of the earliest challenges Bamboo For Life faced was finding a dependable, quality bamboo rayon sheet manufacturer. The quality of the products had to be the best, for their discerning customers.

While every business, of course, faces challenges, some, like Bamboo For Life are fortunate enough to enjoy real successes, wins and victories too. One such breakthrough came when research and testing revealed the reliable manufacturer of organic, quality bamboo bedding.

The shop proprietor was also quoted when discussing another high point. "One of the milestones of Bamboo For Life's history was discovering the other fine bedding products, towels, duvet covers and pillows that we could offer customers, that are made from bamboo rayon."

Bamboo For Life's founder says "We're delighted to be celebrating our fourth year anniversary. I believe the secret to getting this far in business today is taking care of our customers. Our clients come back to further enhance their bedrooms with quality products. People who are looking for healthy bedding tend to be intelligent, aware individuals, my kind of people.".

Bamboo For Life has big plans for the upcoming year. One of their core objectives is to expand the service to supply luxury bamboo bedding to more people who may want to sleep luxuriously and sensuously. .

Bamboo For Life would also like to thank friends, customers and all its partners for their well wishes on this happy occasion.

More information on the business can be found at http://bambooforlife.com/bamboo-sheets

For more information, please visit http://bambooforlife.com

Contact Info:

Name: Jim Morris

Organization: Bamboo For Life

Address: PO Box 6400

Phone: (720) 204-8080

Release ID: 144458

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Therapeutic and Overview Pipeline Review H2

WiseGuyReports.com adds "Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - Product Pipeline Review - 2016" reports to its database.

--

The report provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development by Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 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 the dormant and discontinued projects.

Get Sample Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/619237-alnylam-pharmaceuticals-inc-product-pipeline-review-2016

Report features investigational drugs from across globe covering over 20 therapy areas and nearly 3,000 indications. 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 pipeline therapeutic landscape of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

- The report provides overview of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. including its business description, key facts, and locations and subsidiaries

- 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 covers pipeline products based on various stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stages

- The report assesses Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.'s pipeline therapeutics based on drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type

- The report features Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.'s out-licensed and partnered product portfolio and summarizes its dormant and discontinued projects

Reasons to buy

- Evaluate Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.'s strategic position with total access to detailed information on its product pipeline

- 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 Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

- Identify potential new clients or partners in the target demographic

- Plan mergers and acquisitions effectively by identifying key players and it's most promising pipeline therapeutics

- Devise corrective measures for pipeline projects by understanding Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc.'s pipeline depth and focus of pipeline 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

Table of Contents

Table of Contents 2

List of Tables 5

List of Figures 5

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Snapshot 6

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Overview 6

Key Information 6

Key Facts 6

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - Research and Development Overview 7

Key Therapeutic Areas 7

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - Pipeline Review 10

Pipeline Products by Stage of Development 10

Pipeline Products - Monotherapy 11

Pipeline Products - Partnered Products 12

Partnered Products/Combination Treatment Modalities 13

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - Pipeline Products Glance 14

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - Late Stage Pipeline Products 14

Phase III Products/Combination Treatment Modalities 14

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - Clinical Stage Pipeline Products 15

Phase II Products/Combination Treatment Modalities 15

Phase I Products/Combination Treatment Modalities 16

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - Early Stage Pipeline Products 17

Preclinical Products/Combination Treatment Modalities 17

Discovery Products/Combination Treatment Modalities 18

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - Drug Profiles 19

patisiran 19

Product Description 19

Mechanism of Action 19

R&D Progress 19

revusiran 20

Product Description 20

Mechanism of Action 20

R&D Progress 20

ALN-PCSsc 23

Product Description 23

Mechanism of Action 23

R&D Progress 23

fitusiran 25

Product Description 25

Mechanism of Action 25

R&D Progress 25

ALN-AAT 26

Product Description 26

Mechanism of Action 26

R&D Progress 26

ALN-CC5 27

Product Description 27

Mechanism of Action 27

R&D Progress 27

ALN-GO1 29

Product Description 29

Mechanism of Action 29

R&D Progress 29

ALN-HBV 31

Product Description 31

Mechanism of Action 31

R&D Progress 31

ALN-AS1 33

Product Description 33

Mechanism of Action 33

R&D Progress 33

ALN-TTRsc02 34

Product Description 34

Mechanism of Action 34

R&D Progress 34

ALN-VSP 35

Product Description 35

Mechanism of Action 35

R&D Progress 35

ALN-AC3 37

Product Description 37

Mechanism of Action 37

R&D Progress 37

ALN-AGT 38

Product Description 38

Mechanism of Action 38

R&D Progress 38

Access Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/619237-alnylam-pharmaceuticals-inc-product-pipeline-review-2016

Get in touch:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/4828928

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WiseGuyReports

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Wiseguyreports-1009007869213183/?fref=ts

For more information, please visit http://www.wiseguyreports.com

Contact Info:

Name: Norah Trent

Organization: WiseGuy Reports

Address: Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar Pune - 411028 Maharashtra, India

Phone: +1-646-845-9349

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/alnylam-pharmaceuticals-therapeutic-and-overview-pipeline-review-h2/144953

Release ID: 144953

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Robotic software Global Market Structure, Size, Trends, Analysis and Outlook 2022

WiseGuyReports.com adds "Global Industrial Robotic Software Market - Structure, Size, Trends, Analysis and Outlook 2016-2022" reports to its database.

--

Robotic software is an important component of industrial robotic system and plays a core role to enable industrial robots to do good operations and accurate functionalities. Global industrial robotic software market is expected to witness a strong growth despite slower than the growth rates of industrial robots market. The accelerating deployment of industrial robotic solutions in various manufacturing factories is driving the growth of industrial robotic software installation.

Get Sample Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/556555-global-industrial-robotic-software-outlook-2016-2022

Global Industrial Robotic Software Market - Structure, Size, Trends, Analysis and Outlook 2016-2022 examines the global industrial robotic software market through a comprehensive summary and in-depth analysis of premium information sources. On the basis of reviewing global economic environments, this report provides a detailed analysis of market structure, market trends, market forces, and market segments. The report quantifies the global industrial robotic software market from perspectives of robot type, robot application, human-robot collaboration, software type, vendor type, and geographic landscape. Global data is available for sales revenue generated from industrial robotic software platforms in each sub-market over the coverage of 2014-2022. Current competitive scenario and profiles of major vendors/players are also included in the report.

Qualitative market analyses include identification and discussion of market structure, market overview, growth drivers, restraints and challenges, emerging market trends/opportunities, Porter's Fiver Forces as well as M&A landscape and fundraising trend.

On basis of robot type, the market is segmented into articulated robots, SCARA robots, Cartesian robots, delta robots, and others, with articulated robots as the largest consumer of industrial robotic software. On basis of industrial robot application, the market is segmented into material handling, welding, assembly line, dispensing, and other sections. The global industrial robotic software market is also divided into collaborative robotic software and traditional robotic software by human-robot collaboration. On-site industrial robotic software and offline programming software are identified as two major software types of industrial robots. On basis of vendor type, the global market is composed of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) software and third-party industrial robotic software.

Geographically, the global market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and the rest of world (RoW). Specific analysis and forecast of annual shipment and hardware revenue over 2014-2022 have been covered for 11 important national markets including U.S., China, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Italy. APAC region leads the global assembling cobots market in terms of annual revenue, followed by Europe and North America. Strongest growth potential also exists in the vast APAC market in the future with China and Southeast Asian countries expected to be the main driving engines for the growth.

Highlighted with 3 tables and 64 figures, this 173-page report provides timely data and detailed analysis to help clients targeting the global market to identify business opportunities and execute an effective strategy.

Table of Content

1 Introduction

1.1 Industry Definition and Report Scope

1.2 Research Methodology

1.3 Executive Summary

2 Market Environment

2.1 Prospects for the World Economy in 2015-2016

2.2 Outlook of the World Economy to 2030

3 Market Overview and Qualitative Analysis

3.1 Market Structure

3.2 Market Overview

3.3 Major Growth Drivers

3.4 Market Restraints and Challenges

3.5 Emerging Opportunities and Market Trends

3.6 Porter's Fiver Forces Analysis

3.7 Key M&A Trends and Strategic Partnerships

3.8 IPO and VCI in Global Industrial Robot Market

4 Segmentation of Global Market by Robot Type

4.1 Market Overview by Robot Type

4.2 Software Market for Articulated Robots

4.3 Software Market for Cartesian Robots

4.4 Software Market for SCARA Robots

4.5 Software Market for Delta Robots

4.6 Software Market for Other Industrial Robots

5 Segmentation of Global Market by Robot Application

5.1 Market Overview by Robot Application

5.2 Robotics Software Market for Material Handling

5.3 Robotics Software Market for Welding

5.4 Robotics Software Market for Assembly

5.5 Robotics Software Market for Dispensing

5.6 Robotics Software Market for Other Industrial Applications

6 Segmentation of Global Market by Human-robot Collaboration

6.1 Market Overview by Human-robot Collaboration

6.2 Software Market for Traditional Industrial Robots

6.3 Software Market for Industrial Collaborative Robots

7 Segmentation of Global Market by Software Type

7.1 Market Overview by Software Type

7.2 On-site Software Market for Industrial Robots

7.3 Offline Programming Software Market for Industrial Robots

8 Segmentation of Global Market by Vendor Type

8.1 Market Overview by Vendor Type

8.2 OEM Robotics Software Market

8.3 Third-party Robotics Software Market

9 Segmentation of Global Market by Region

9.1 Geographic Market Overview by Region 2015-2022

9.2 North America Market 2014-2022

9.2.1 Overview of North America Market

9.2.2 U.S. Market

9.2.3 Canadian Market

9.3 European Market 2014-2022

9.3.1 Overview of European Market

9.3.2 Germany

9.3.3 Italy

9.3.4 Spain

9.3.5 UK

9.3.6 France

9.3.7 Rest of European Market

9.4 Asia-Pacific Market 2014-2022

9.4.1 Overview of Asia-Pacific Market

9.4.2 Japan

9.4.3 China

9.4.4 South Korea

9.4.5 Rest of APAC Region

9.5 Latin America Market 2014-2022

7.5.1 Overview of Latin America Market

9.5.2 Mexico

9.5.3 Brazil

9.5.4 Rest of Latin America

9.6 Rest of World Market 2014-2022

9.7 Relative Availability of Industrial Robots by Country 2013-2014

10 Supply Landscape

10.1 Overview of Global Supply

10.2 Company Profiles

RELATED REPORTS AND PRODUCTS

Table 1. Market Trend of Global Industrial Robotic Software, 2015-2022

Table 2. Average Annual Growth Rates of Global Real GDP, Outlook to 2030

Table 3. Major M&A Deals of Industrial Robot Industry in 2015

Access Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/556555-global-industrial-robotic-software-outlook-2016-2022

Get in touch:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/4828928

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WiseGuyReports

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Wiseguyreports-1009007869213183/?fref=ts

For more information, please visit http://www.wiseguyreports.com

Contact Info:

Name: Norah Trent

Organization: WiseGuy Reports

Address: Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar Pune - 411028 Maharashtra, India

Phone: +1-646-845-9349

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/robotic-software-global-market-structure-size-trends-analysis-and-outlook-2022/144941

Release ID: 144941

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Amyloidosis Therapeutic and Overview Pipeline Review H2

WiseGuyReports.com adds "Amyloidosis - Pipeline Review, H1 2016" reports to its database.

--

The report provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for Amyloidosis, 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 Amyloidosis and features dormant and discontinued projects.

Get Sample Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/383562-amyloidosis-pipeline-review-h1-2016

Report features investigational drugs from across globe covering over 20 therapy areas and nearly 3,000 indications. 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 Amyloidosis

- The report reviews pipeline therapeutics for Amyloidosis 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 Amyloidosis therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects

- The report assesses Amyloidosis 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 Amyloidosis

Reasons 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 Amyloidosis

- 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 it's most promising pipeline therapeutics

- Devise corrective measures for pipeline projects by understanding Amyloidosis 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 pipeline

Table of Contents

Table of Contents 2

List of Tables 7

List of Figures 8

Introduction 9

Amyloidosis Overview 10

Therapeutics Development 11

Pipeline Products for Amyloidosis - Overview 11

Pipeline Products for Amyloidosis - Comparative Analysis 12

Amyloidosis - Therapeutics under Development by Companies 13

Amyloidosis - Therapeutics under Investigation by Universities/Institutes 15

Amyloidosis - Pipeline Products Glance 16

Late Stage Products 16

Clinical Stage Products 17

Early Stage Products 18

Amyloidosis - Products under Development by Companies 19

Amyloidosis - Products under Investigation by Universities/Institutes 21

Amyloidosis - Companies Involved in Therapeutics Development 22

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. 22

Arcturus Therapeutics, Inc 23

Bellus Health Inc. 24

Bsim2 25

Celgene Corporation 26

GlaxoSmithKline Plc 27

Neurimmune Holding AG 28

NeuroPhage Pharmaceuticals, Inc. 29

Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Inc. 30

Pfizer Inc. 31

Prothena Corporation Plc 32

SOM Innovation Biotech SL 33

Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited 34

Amyloidosis - Therapeutics Assessment 35

Assessment by Monotherapy Products 35

Assessment by Combination Products 36

Assessment by Target 37

Assessment by Mechanism of Action 39

Assessment by Route of Administration 41

Assessment by Molecule Type 43

Drug Profiles 45

ALN-ANG - Drug Profile 45

Product Description 45

Mechanism of Action 45

R&D Progress 45

ALN-TTRsc02 - Drug Profile 46

Product Description 46

Mechanism of Action 46

R&D Progress 46

Antisense RNAi Oligonucleotides to Inhibit Amyloid Precursor Protein for Amyloidosis - Drug Profile 47

Product Description 47

Mechanism of Action 47

R&D Progress 47

carfilzomib - Drug Profile 48

Product Description 48

Mechanism of Action 48

R&D Progress 48

CLR-01 - Drug Profile 52

Product Description 52

Mechanism of Action 52

R&D Progress 52

eprodisate disodium - Drug Profile 54

Product Description 54

Mechanism of Action 54

R&D Progress 54

GSK-2315698 + GSK-2398852 - Drug Profile 57

Product Description 57

Mechanism of Action 57

R&D Progress 57

Access Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/383562-amyloidosis-pipeline-review-h1-2016

Get in touch:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/4828928

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WiseGuyReports

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Wiseguyreports-1009007869213183/?fref=ts

For more information, please visit http://www.wiseguyreports.com

Contact Info:

Name: Norah Trent

Organization: WiseGuy Reports

Address: Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar Pune - 411028 Maharashtra, India

Phone: +1-646-845-9349

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/amyloidosis-therapeutic-and-overview-pipeline-review-h2/144945

Release ID: 144945

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
IT Services Global Market Technology and Major Players Analysis 2022

WiseGuyReports.com adds "IT Services Global Industry Almanac_2016" reports to its database.

--

Summary

IT Services Global Industry Almanac_2016 is a comprehensive study outlaying the current market scenario, future prospective and detailed industry insights of IT Services market globally. The study pegs that the global IT services industry had total revenues of $724.9bn in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.2% between 2011 and 2015.

Get Sample Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/605606-it-services-global-industry-almanac_2016

As per the report, the IT services industry is valued as the combination of the business process outsourcing (BPO) services market, the application services market, and the infrastructure services market.

The infrastructure services segment contributed revenues of $261.8bn in 2015, equating to 36.1% of the industry's aggregate value. Further it provides, detailed industry analysis with help of Five Force Model at overall regional level and for 25 countries globally, analyzed within this report.

In order to have industry accepted standard comparative scenario - in this report, the BPO services market is valued as the revenues accrued from the provision of client relationship management BPO, finance & accounting BPO, human resource outsourcing, knowledge process outsourcing, procurement BPO, and vertical-specific BPO services. The application services market is valued as the revenues accrued from the provision of application development, integration, management, and testing services. The infrastructure services market is valued as the revenues accrued from the provision of the following service lines: application hosting and data center, colocation, desktop management, security & privacy, and storage.

Key Findings

Save time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the size, growth, major segments, and leading players in the global IT services market

Use the Five Forces analysis to determine the competitive intensity and therefore attractiveness of the global IT services market

Leading company profiles reveal details of key IT services market players' global operations and financial performance

Add weight to presentations and pitches by understanding the future growth prospects of the global IT services market with five year forecasts

Compares data from 25 countries globally, alongside individual chapters on each country.

Synopsis

Global IT services industry profile provides top-line qualitative and quantitative summary information including: market size (value 2011-2015, and forecast to 2020). The profile also contains descriptions of the leading players including key financial metrics and analysis of competitive pressures within the market.

Reasons to Buy

What was the size of the global IT services market by value in 2015?

What will be the size of the global IT services market in 2020?

What factors are affecting the strength of competition in the global IT services market?

How has the market performed over the last five years?

What are the main segments that make up the global IT services market?

Key Highlights

The global IT services industry had total revenues of $724.9bn in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.2% between 2011 and 2015.

The IT services industry is valued as the combination of the business process outsourcing (BPO) services market, the application services market, and the infrastructure services market. The BPO services market is valued as the revenues accrued from the provision of client relationship management BPO, finance & accounting BPO, human resource outsourcing, knowledge process outsourcing, procurement BPO, and vertical-specific BPO services. The application services market is valued as the revenues accrued from the provision of application development, integration, management, and testing services. The infrastructure services market is valued as the revenues accrued from the provision of the following service lines: application hosting and data center, colocation, desktop management, security & privacy, and storage. All currency conversions are at constant 2015 annual average exchange rates.

The application services segment was the industry's most lucrative in 2015, with total revenues of $321.0bn, equivalent to 44.3% of the industry's overall value.

Cloud computing systems are expected to achieve dynamic growth over the next few years as buyers expand the use of data centers and advanced analytics in order to manage the vast amounts of data being produced in the connected world. The positive impact of this transition on the IT services market could be balanced by a decline in outsourcing & processing services as many more tasks become automated through the use of artificial intelligence-based algorithms.

Table of Contents

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Market value

Market value forecast

Category segmentation

Geography segmentation

Introduction

What is this report about?

Who is the target reader?

How to use this report

Definitions

Global IT Services

Market Overview

Market Data

Market Segmentation

Market outlook

Five forces analysis

IT Services in Asia-Pacific

Market Overview

Market Data

Market Segmentation

Market outlook

Five forces analysis

IT Services in Europe

Market Overview

Market Data

Market Segmentation

Market outlook

Five forces analysis

IT Services in France

Market Overview

Market Data

Market Segmentation

Market outlook

Five forces analysis

Macroeconomic indicators

IT Services in Germany

Market Overview

Market Data

Market Segmentation

Market outlook

Five forces analysis

Macroeconomic indicators

IT Services in Australia

Market Overview

Market Data

Market Segmentation

Market outlook

Five forces analysis

Macroeconomic indicators

IT Services in Brazil

Market Overview

Market Data

Market Segmentation

Market outlook

Five forces analysis

Macroeconomic indicators

IT Services in Canada

Market Overview

Market Data

Market Segmentation

Market outlook

Five forces analysis

Macroeconomic indicators

Access Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/605606-it-services-global-industry-almanac_2016

Get in touch:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/4828928

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WiseGuyReports

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Wiseguyreports-1009007869213183/?fref=ts

For more information, please visit http://www.wiseguyreports.com

Contact Info:

Name: Norah Trent

Organization: WiseGuy Reports

Address: Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar Pune - 411028 Maharashtra, India

Phone: +1-646-845-9349

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/it-services-global-market-technology-and-major-players-analysis-2022/144975

Release ID: 144975

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
National Academy for Child Abduction Prevention Grand Opening

National Academy for Child Abduction Prevention releases information on the Grand Opening of their service to stop child kidnapping. Further information can be found at http://www.stopchildkidnapping.com.

--

The National Academy for Child Abduction Prevention (NACAPA) today announced the official launch date of its grand opening. This will circulate among attorneys and agencies within the child protective services world, as the date of the collaborative service for educating how to stop child kidnapping draws near. The National Academy for Child Abduction Prevention has also released three things the industry can expect from the upcoming launch.

The first thing folks should expect is a big improvement in the availability of local assistance through NACAPA advocates. A NACAPA Advocate is an Attorney licensed in the state of which they service who has joined the organization in an effort to educate, collaborate, and assist in the prevention of child kidnapping. The organization seeks to increase the number of Advocates it maintains throughout the United States to over 1,000 by the end of 2017. Roy Doppelt, President of NACAPA, says "Signing up with NACAPA allows both attorneys and interested supporters to assist in a noble cause, assisting to prevent child kidnapping." Whether a parent or not, this is of utmost importance to everyone. The increase in Advocates will allow NACAPA to offer assistance in virtually every major metropolitan area throughout the country. As more Attorneys join to become Advocates the availability of professional assistance options will increase.

In addition to increasing the availability of Advocates, NACAPA will heavily raise awareness of how to prevent child abduction as well as methods for recovery of children who have been abducted with information on the website. Articles will be published for public education at no charge and professional collaboration purposes. NACAPA will help raise awareness by allowing registered Advocates to publish their findings and recommendations developed to help prevent child abduction . This is to be expected from an organization who places this much value on educating the public in this sector of service.

As well as that, the National Academy for Child Abduction Prevention will be proactively reaching out to Attorneys and agencies. "There is no better time than now to get involved and help stop child kidnapping in your area, all across the United States and internationally. We need advocates to enroll now to see how they can help.", says Doppelt.

Finally, for the long term followers of this noble cause, they'll be interested to know what went into the creation of the collaborative organization to stop child kidnapping. It has taken 3 years to put it together, from start to finish, from the initial idea to fully implementing the service.

Roy Doppelt, President of NACAPA adds "This is a very serious issues both for family law attorneys and the general public. Raising awareness may be the first step."

Further information about joining as an Advocate at the National Academy for Child Abduction Prevention can be discovered at http://www.stopchildkidnapping.com.

For more information, please visit http://www.stopchildkidnapping.com

Contact Info:

Name: Roy Doppelt

Email: Info@stopchildkidnapping.com

Organization: National Academy for Child Abduction Prevention Advocates

Address: 16496 Bernardo Center Drive Suite 211



Release ID: 143674

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Civil Aerospace Simulation and Training Market is Estimated to Grow at a CAGR of Around 5% During 2016 to 2021

Global Civil Aerospace Simulation and Training Market by Simulator Type (Flight Training Devices (FTD), Full Flight Simulators (FFS), Flight Simulation Training Devices (FSTD)), Aircraft Type (Fixed Wing and Rotary Wing), and by Region - Forecast To 2021

--

Synopsis of Civil Aerospace Simulation and Training Market

Global Civil Aerospace Simulation and Training Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 5% during 2016-2021. The key driving factors are cost effective & ecofriendly simulation training, growing aircraft fleets, and high demand for simulator and type rated pilots.

As per the MRFR analysis, factors restraining the market growth are high installation/setup cost of simulator, and absence of qualified simulator instructors.

Key Players

Some of the key players in the Global Civil Aerospace Simulation and Training Market are:

o CAE

o FlightSafety International

o Rockwell Collins, L-3 Communications

o Lockheed Martin

o Thales Training

o Frasca, Indra Sistemas

o Diamond Visionics LLC

o Vector Training Systems

Get a Sample Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample-request/global-civil-aerospace-simulation-and-training-forecast-2016-2021

Market Segmentation:

o Segmentation by Simulator Type: Flight Training Devices (FTD), Full Flight Simulators (FFS), Flight Simulation Training Devices (FSTD) and others.

o Segmentation by Aircraft Type: Fixed Wing and Rotary Wing among others.

o Segmentation by Region: Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa

Access the market data and information presented through over 60 tables and figures spread 103 pages of the project report. Avail in-depth table of content (TOC) & market synopsis on "Global Civil Aerospace Simulation and Training Market Research Report - Forecast 2016-2021"

Browse Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/global-civil-aerospace-simulation-and-training-forecast-2016-2021

Table of Contents for Civil Aerospace Simulation and Training Market

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. REPORT DESCRIPTION

1.2. RESEARCH OBJECTIVE

2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

2.1 KEY FINDINGS / HIGHLIGHTS

2.1.1 INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

2.1.2 MARKET STARTEGIES

2.1.3 LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

3. SCOPE OF THE STUDY

3.1. MARKETS COVERED

3.2. YEARS CONSIDERED FOR THE STUDY (2016-2021)

3.3. GEOGRAPHIC SCOPE

3.4. KEY STAKEHOLDERS

4. ASSUMPTIONS AND LIMITATIONS

5. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

5.1 PRIMARY RESEARCH

5.2 SECONDARY RESEARCH

5.3 ECONOMETRIC AND FORECASTING MODEL

6. MARKET SIZE ESTIMATION

6.1 TOP DOWN APPROACH

6.2 BOTTOM UP APPROACH

7. MARKET FACTOR ANALYSIS

7.1 VALUE CHAIN ANALYSIS

7.2 SUPPLY CHAIN ANALYSIS

7.3 PORTER'S FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS

8. MARKET DYNAMICS

8.1 DRIVERS

8.2 RESTRAINTS

8.3 OPPORTUNITIES

8.4 TRENDS

9. MARKET SEGMENTATION

9.1 BY SIMULATOR TYPE

9.2 BY AIRCRAFT TYPE

9.4 BY REGION

Continued....

Make an Enquiry of your Interest @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/global-civil-aerospace-simulation-and-training-forecast-2016-2021

About Market Research Future:

At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.

MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.

In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.

For more information, please visit https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/

Contact Info:

Name: Akash Anand

Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com

Organization: Market Research Future (MRFR)



Source: http://marketersmedia.com/civil-aerospace-simulation-and-training-market-is-estimated-to-grow-at-a-cagr-of-around-5-during-2016-to-2021/145036

Release ID: 145036

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
E Cigarettes, Vapourizer, E Cigars Market Size, Share, Report, Analysis, Trends & Forecast to 2022

According to Stratistics MRC, the Global E-Cigarettes & Vapourizer Market accounted for $7.47 billion in 2015 and is anticipated to reach $28.57 billion by 2022 growing at a CAGR of 21.1% from 2015 to 2022.

--

Growing demand for distribution channels of e-cigarettes and accessories is the primary factor favouring the market growth. Furthermore, increasing number of brands, innovative product launches and product customizations are some of the drivers favouring the market growth. However, uncertain regulatory framework, increasing incidents of e-liquid poisoning and compatibility issues are some of the restraints hampering the market growth. New taxes on e-cigs in cities like Washington, D.C., are damping sales, as are new regulations, like measures passed this year in Indiana that require manufacturers to secure permits and list ingredients. The industry also is awaiting final rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which could require federal approval for nearly all flavored liquid nicotine juices and e-cig devices.

Access the complete report at:

http://www.strategymrc.com/report/e-cigarettes-vapourizer-market

Disposable E-Cigarette segment commanded the largest share in 2015, while Rechargeable E-Cigarettes is growing at the highest CAGR durig the forecast period. North America is expected to witness highest growth rate over the forecast period. Europe being one of the largest markets in the e-cigarette industry it is hub to provide conflicting regulatory regimes.

Some of the key players in this market include Japan Tobacco, Inc., First Union, International Vapor Group, Inc., Marlboro, Lorillard, Inc., Pacific Smoke International, British American Tobacco Plc (Bat), Cloudcig, Steamlite, Smokefree, Victory Electronic Cigarettes Corporation, Altria Group, Inc., Reynolds American Inc., Puff Ecig, Bull Smoke, Feellife Bioscience International Co. Ltd, Fontem Ventures, Philip Morris International, Inc., Ballantyne Brands, Llc and Nice Vapor.

Make an inquiry at:

http://www.strategymrc.com/report/e-cigarettes-vapourizer-market

Composition Covered:

o Flavors

o Nicotine

o Diluents

o E-Liquids

Products Covered:

o E-Go Electronic Cigarette and Tank

o E-Cigars

o Rechargeable E-Cigarette

o Disposable E-Cigarette

o Personal Vaporizers and Mods

o E-Pipes

o Other Products

Component Covered:

o Cartridge

o Clearomizer

o Battery

o Rebuildable Atomizer

o Atomizer

o Cartomizer

Distribution Channel Covered:

o Online

o Retail

o Pharmaceuticals

o Convenient stores

o Others

Regions Covered:

o North America

o US

o Canada

o Mexico

o Europe

o Germany

o France

o Italy

o UK

o Spain

o Rest of Europe

o Asia Pacific

o Japan

o China

o India

o Australia

o New Zealand

o Rest of Asia Pacific

o Rest of the World

o Middle East

o Brazil

o Argentina

o South Africa

o Egypt

What our report offers:

- Market share assessments for the regional and country level segments

- Market share analysis of the top industry players

- Strategic recommendations for the new entrants

- Market forecasts for a minimum of 7 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional markets

- Market Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)

- Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations

- Competitive landscaping mapping the key common trends

- Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developments

- Supply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancements

Follow us on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/StratisticsMRC

Follow us on LinkedIn at:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/stratistics-market-research-consulting-pvt-ltd?trk=mini-profile

About Stratistics MRC

We offer wide spectrum of research and consulting services with in-depth knowledge of different industries. We are known for customized research services, consulting services and Full Time Equivalent (FTE) services in the research world. We explore the market trends and draw our insights with valid assessments and analytical views. We use advanced techniques and tools among the quantitative and qualitative methodologies to identify the market trends.

Our research reports and publications are routed to help our clients to design their business models and enhance their business growth in the competitive market scenario. We have a strong team with hand-picked consultants including project managers, implementers, industry experts, researchers, research evaluators and analysts with years of experience in delivering the complex projects.

For more information, please visit http://www.strategymrc.com/

For more information, please visit http://www.strategymrc.com/

Contact Info:

Name: James Lamb

Email: info@strategymrc.com

Organization: Stratistics Market Research Consulting Pvt Ltd

Address: SMRC Sales Office, 17049 King James Way, Gaithersburg, MD, 20877, USA +1-301-202-5929

Phone: +1-301-202-5929

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/e-cigarettes-vapourizer-e-cigars-market-size-share-report-analysis-trends-forecast-to-2022/145011

Release ID: 145011

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Home Furnishings Retailer Wayfair's Latest Results Illustrate Shift to Online

Wayfair's Third Quarter Net Revenue Increased 45%. The Furniture Category Is One of the Fastest Growing in E-Commerce.

--

This week, Boston-based online home goods and furnishings retailer Wayfair reported that its third quarter 2016 net revenue increased 45% to $861.5 million, beating analysts' expectations by 1.8%. Direct retail revenue (i.e., sales generated primarily through the sites of the company's brands: Wayfair, Joss & Main, AllModern, DwellStudio and Birch Lane) climbed even faster, increasing 53% to $832.4 million, to account for nearly 97% of total net revenue.

Aside from reporting a mediocre gross profit margin (23.4% of net revenue) and a $60.9 million net loss for the quarter, Wayfair's sales growth metrics were encouraging. During the quarter, Wayfair managed both to retain existing customers and to attract new ones. Repeat customers accounted for almost six in ten orders, and total customer count expanded by 60% year over year. Another interesting data point is that shoppers using mobile devices accounted for 40% of all orders placed during third quarter, compared to 35% year ago.

Wayfair is a leader in the online retail furniture category, which ranks among the fastest growing in the e-commerce universe. In a recent news release Business Insider Intelligence estimated that U.S. consumers will spend about one quarter of their $38 billion total annual furniture outlay on online purchases. In a news release announcing quarterly results, Wayfair 's CEO, Niraj Shah, explained his company is "rapidly redefining the way people shop for their homes," intending "to make our e-commerce experience the preferred way to shop for furniture."

While Wayfair is at the forefront of the burgeoning online retail furniture market, its success is certainly not lost on its major competitiors. Notable among them are such furniture-focused retailers as Ikea, Ashley Furniture and Ethan Allen, plus mass merchandisers, including Wal-Mart and Target.

The information herein was compiled by Butcher Block Co. - a leading online seller of kitchen furniture, equipment and accessories. Butcher Block Co. sells wood countertops; kitchen islands, tables and carts; and such accessories as cutting boards, kitchen knives and knife blocks. They carry products made by industry leaders John Boos, Catskill Craftsmen and others.

For more information, please visit https://butcherblockco.com

Contact Info:

Name: Kathleen Grodsky

Organization: Butcher Block Co.

Address: 10448 N 21st Pl Phoenix, Arizona

Phone: (877) 845-5597

Release ID: 145267

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Direct Conservatories 4U Announces the Launch of its New Website for Self-Builders

Direct Conservatories 4U announces the launch of its new website to allow users to build DIY conservatories with cutting-edge designs as well as find resources and technical support.

--

Self-build conservatory specialist Direct Conservatories 4U this week announces the launch of a new website, designed to give customers the widest choice of quality products, design services and resources to help them successfully complete their DIY conservatory projects.

The newly designed website is intended to make it easier for self-builders to research and buy the best conservatory for their home improvement requirements. As such, it showcases the latest conservatory styles in a sleek, modern design which is extremely easy to use. This means that users can browse through the website, view the different conservatories available and select the one which best suits their needs.

The website currently has several conservatory types including Traditional, Edwardian, Victorian, P-Shaped, Bespoke and Gullwing conservatories. For each of these types, there is detailed information including design specifications, materials and pricing options. There is also technical support available for anyone who needs detailed information. This wealth of information makes it easier for visitors to find their ultimate DIY conservatory.

For those wanting something more bespoke, Direct Conservatories 4U offers a customised conservatory design service. This service is currently available free of charge via the website. Under this service, the company's expert designers can create a dream conservatory for anyone.

Mandy Johnson, from Direct Conservatories 4U, said: "Whether a customer wants a traditional design or something unique, our design service will help them plan the best solution to suit their lifestyle and size of plot they have available for the conservatory. We work it all for them, so all they have to do is put it together when the delivery arrives."

To mark the launch of the website, Direct Conservatories 4U is currently offering a 10-year guarantee for all orders placed through the site. This guarantee isn't just intended to attract customers; it is also intended to demonstrate the confidence that they have in the quality of its products.

Direct Conservatories 4U has cultivated a reputation for delivering top-quality DIY conservatories. All conservatories are designed to be strong, robust and durable. Despite this, their conservatories are extremely easy to build. This is because they come in pre-fabricated parts with detailed instructions on how to install them.

To further sweeten the deal, the company is currently offering up to a 50% discount on selected DIY conservatories available on its website. This discount is a limited-time offer. Therefore, those who want to take advantage of it need to place their orders as soon as possible.

Ultimately, Direct Conservatories 4U's website launch provides a great opportunity for anyone looking to build their own conservatory. The combination of conservatory types, a free custom design service, discounts of up to 50% and a 10-year guarantee makes the company's offering particularly attractive. Those who want to take advantage of this opportunity should visit the new website at http://www.directconservatories4u.co.uk.

About Direct Conservatories 4U

Direct Conservatories 4U is the UK's leading supplier of DIY conservatories. The company's forte is supplying top-quality conservatories at the most competitive prices on the market. The company specialises in building PVCu conservatories which are designed to suit a wide range of tastes and budgets. All the conservatories are delivered door-to-door, with detailed assembly instructions and 24-hour support available. See the full range of conservatories on the Direct Conservatories 4U website.

For more information, please visit http://www.directconservatories4u.co.uk

Contact Info:

Name: Mandy Johnson

Email: admin@directconservatories4u.co.uk

Organization: Direct Conservatories 4U

Address: Units 15 B&C, Cuxhaven Way, Longrock Ind Est, Penzance TR20 8HX

Phone: 0845 058 6001

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/direct-conservatories-4u-announces-the-launch-of-its-new-website-for-self-builders/145219

Release ID: 145219

For more information visit r



Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)

Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17)
Professor Ponzey and the Truth Potion Launches in the UK

The first book in the Ponzey Childrens book series is now available in the UK.

November 11, 2016 (FPRC) -- Professor Ponzey and the Truth Potion, the first children book in the Ponzey series, is now available in the United Kingdom. The 35-page, well-illustrated book was first launched in the U.S. by Mentalizer Education (an organization owned by mentalist Ehud Segev). The book is illustrated by Augustine Jude and written by mentalist Ehud Segev, a world popular mentalist. In each book in the series, Ehud will star as Professor Ponzey, an ingenious professor who comes up with fantastic experiments to decipher common problems in childrens life.



Ehud Segev uses his deep understanding of psychology, body language and mentalism to make each book valuable for kids. The goal of the Ponzey series is to make kids smarter and instill in them positive values that will play out to a successful future. Outside of writing childrens books, Ehud Segev is a famous entertainer and TV personality. He travels the world, entertaining high-profile guests at special events. Ehud Segev can read minds, make objects fly without touching them, decode body language, and do a lot of other things that border on the supernatural. He has been registered (not featured) by the Guinness Book of World Records for breaking a record by shooting a show with over 10,000 camera angles using his audiences cell phone camera capabilities live. He also appeared alongside the worlds best mystifiers and magicians on NBCs hit show Phenomenon.



Ehud Segev describes Professor Ponzey and the Truth Potion as the best childrens book about lying. Professor Ponzey addresses the importance of honesty, teaching kids the value of truthfulness, as well as showing them how to detect dishonesty in others. In this book, Professor Ponzey is demonstrated as a brilliant scientist who is honest and hates it when people lie. Thus, he comes up with a test to make everyone honest and true. He relies on non-verbal cues such as voice variation to tell whether individuals are being truthful. Kids reading this book are taken along Professor Ponzeys mission to make the world a truthful place.



The Ponzey childrens book series also recently launched a website thatll serve as its internet center. Ponzey.com will feature relevant materials on childrens learning, parenting tips, as well as information on the upcoming Ponzey book. Mentalizer Education also created a Facebook page where itll be publishing weekly parenting tips.



Hannah Tiram, a representative of Mentalizer Education, said, Our pilot childrens book, Professor Ponzey and the Truth Potion, is now available to our fans and customers in Great Britain. Originally, we published this book for the American audience, but UK customers can get it at Amazon.co.uk. We are in the final phases of a plan where customers in London and other major cities in the country will be able to purchase this fantastic parenting book at top local bookstores very soon. We are also working on a second book in the Ponzey series that will be available anytime from now. Thank you for following Ponzey, we have a lot more coming for you and your kids





Send an email to Hannah Tiram of r

(866-732-3696)

Recent Press Releases By The Same User

Kenyas First Business Directory for Service Providers, Nisort, Launches (Wed 8th Nov 17)

Mentalizer.com Introduces How to Become a Mentalist Program (Sat 14th Oct 17)

Thermalabs Glow2Go is Now Available in the German Market (Thu 12th Oct 17)

Thermalabs Gold Standard Tanner Available Back in the Market (Thu 12th Oct 17)

The Ultimitt Tan Applicator Mitt Now Available in France (Thu 12th Oct 17)

Supremasea Working on More Skincare Formulations (Thu 12th Oct 17)
Free Freightnet Membership

List your company in the Freightnet directory. It's Free, it's Easy and your company can be displayed in front of potential freight buyers within 24 hours.
Farmers should be paid a lump sum to prepare for the likely end of direct payments after the UK leaves the EU, a leading agricultural economist has suggested.

An exit bond would help ease the transition to a new system of farm support, said David Harvey, emeritus professor of agricultural economics at Newcastle University.

Direct-style payments currently paid under the CAP are likely to disappear post-Brexit  whether they are suddenly withdrawn or gradually phased out, said Prof Harvey.

See also: Eustice pledges continued support for farmers

It is pretty obvious that quite a lot of farms are going to be in quite a lot of serious trouble if those payments stop, he told the Northern Farming Conference at Hexham, Northumberland.

If you suddenly remove a major part of their income stream  which is the [basic] payment  a lot of those farms are going to be compromised beyond survival.

Prof Harvey said an alternative approach could see direct payments continue for another 5-10 years after Brexit at a declining rate  before they were eventually withdrawn altogether.

Phased withdrawal

But a phased withdrawal of direct payments as a new British agricultural policy (BAP) was introduced would not favour farm businesses either, he warned.

What businesses need is a bit more certainty about what the future is actually going to bring, said Prof Harvey. More importantly, farmers needed capital and investment to adjust.

There is  and has been around for some time now  a relatively easy way of easing the transition from a supported agriculture through direct payments to an unsupported agriculture.

An exit bond which consolidated any future stream of direct payments into a single lump sum would better enable farm businesses to adjust to life after Brexit, said Prof Harvey.

Clip the coupon

It would allow farmers to clip the coupon and carry on as before or cash in that lump sum and use the money to adjust their farm businesses to suit a potentially more certain future.

An exit bond  a BAP bond  is something I would be arguing for if I was still a farmer, Prof Harvey told conference delegates on Wednesday (9 November).

Nobody knew what would happen to British agriculture if direct payments were withdrawn but it was clear that farmers would struggle without some form of adjustment assistance.

Defra minister George Eustice has pledged that the government will continue supporting farmers post-Brexit  but it remains to be seen what form that support will take.
T-Mobile's Samsung S7 Buy One Get One Promo: What You Need To Know

T-Mobile has just announced that they are offering Samsung S7 on a buy one get one promo. The sale is going to happen this Friday, November 11 at 6:00 AM PT and finishes on Sunday, November 13 just before the clock strikes 12 midnight.

Anyone can avail the promo and interested buyers need not be an existing subscriber to be able to join the promo. Actually, better perks are offered for individuals switching lines as buyers can even be granted up to $650 in order for all the switching fees to be paid.

To avail the buy one get one promo, the buyer will need to purchase the first Samsung S7 on T-Mobile's EIP or Equipment Installment Plan and a secondary line for the second Samsung S7 free phone. And as if that's not enough, buyers are also given 24 monthly credits for the second unit of Galaxy S7.

Samsung Galaxy S7 is an android smartphone by Samsung Electronics. It is the new installment of Samsung to Galaxy S6 which was officially announced last February. It was scheduled for release in March of this year in North America and European countries. Just like its predecessors, it has a 5.1-inch display but this time also has IP certification, dust and water resistance and finally an expandable memory.

This smartphone has been positively reviewed by critics, particularly its micro SD card slot and resistance to water which is not found on any other Samsung smartphone. It is built with Exynos version which is said to perform better compared to Qualcomm Snapdragon version, especially when doing multitasks and switching between apps.

The only thing that disappointed the critics is its display requiring to be destroyed if the USB port needs to be replaced. In addition, the display is likely to be damaged when the glass is replaced so an insurance is recommended.
'Steven Universe' Season 4 Air Date, Spoilers, News & Update: Show Officially Renewed; Returning to Cartoon Network on November 17?

After months of will-they-won't-they question, Cartoon Network has finally confirmed the return of "Steven Universe" Season 4. The network took to Twitter to share the news that the show is returning to Cartoon Network in November with all new episodes.

Is this real life? All NEW episodes of #StevenUniverse and #AdventureTime are back later this November! pic.twitter.com/HktNUrITPe  Cartoon Network (@cartoonnetwork) November 1, 2016

Fans would be glad to know that the show officially renewed and that it's returning to Cartoon Network on a November date. The show has been highly acclaimed by viewers and critics alike because of its themes and issues that are openly discussed, that will be once again seen in "Steven Universe" Season 4.

As "Steven Universe" Season 4 draws closer, fans are curious to know what the titular character will be dealing with when he returns to television screens. The show, which debuted in 2013, is created by Rebecca Sugar. Since its inception, the show has tackled important societal issues such as sexuality and unconventional family dynamics.

Polygon praises "Steven Universe" for the way it presents the message of the story. In fact, the recent episode titled "Keeping It Together" tackled healthy sexual relationships. This is something that is lacking in today's TV landscape. Fans are now curious to know if "Steven Universe" Season 4 will also tackle important issues faced by the society today.

"Keeping It Together" shed light on consent even without mentioning the word or implying sex, which is a great way to teach the youth about such concept. Now, it's up to "Steven Universe" Season 4 to carry on what it has established and possibly even teach more young viewers the great lessons that they often miss out from school.

"Steven Universe" Season 4 is set to return on Cartoon Network this month. Make sure to check back on the latest in television news here at GamenGuide.
Longmire Season 6 Air Date, News & Update: Series Faces Cancellation Anew? Final Season Announced By Netflix! Is A Spinoff Really Possible?

Fans of Netflix's crime drama will definitely have mixed feelings about the latest developments regarding the series. While a "Longmire" Season 6 release date is assured, the upcoming season would also be the show's last.

Netflix Announces 'Longmire' Season 6 Renewal

Recently, Netflix announced the "Longmire" Season 6 renewal, assuring fans that they will be getting another season next year. However, the upcoming season would also be the show's last as the online streaming giant also officially announced that season 6 would be its final season reports The Hollywood Reporter.

At the moment, no official reason was given to explain why show has to shut down after "Longmire" Season 6. But the show is no stranger to cancellations. After all, "Longmire" started in A&E until the network decided to cancel it after the third season. It was then picked up by Netflix for the fourth and fifth seasons.

'Longmire' Spinoff After Season 6?

The announced "Longmire" Season 6 renewal as well as the fact that it would be the final season drew mixed reactions from its loyal fan base. On its Facebook page, there are those who expressed a little disappointment that the show would be finally ending.

However, there are also those who expressed that Netflix's decision to end the show properly is the best route. Apparently, some would prefer the well-loved series to end with a bang which, complete with rollercoaster plot twists, rather than it ending with a whimper after dragging it out for too many seasons.

But the more optimistic ones would rather prefer a "Longmire" spinoff more than anything. Only time will tell if Netflix would go the spinoff route, it is still too early to even speculate as "Longmire" Season 6 has not even started yet.

'Longmire' Season 6 Air Date

For now, Netflix has not yet announced a definite "Longmire" Season 6 release date but is confident that it would be out by 2017. Stay tuned to GamenGuide for update.
Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie Divorce News & Update: 'Allied' Actor Cleared From Child Abuse Allegations, Wins Joint Custody?

Brad Pitt has been cleared of child abuse allegations by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) on Wednesday. The most probable next step for Pitt and Angelina Jolie, following their divorce, is for the family court to decide the matter of custody of the children.

It can be recalled that Jolie filed for sole custody alongside her divorce filings. The investigation was launched after Pitt allegedly became "verbally abusive" and "physical" towards Maddox on September 14. This event, as several reports claim, resulted for Jolie to file for divorce a few days later.

"Angelina said from the beginning that she felt she had to take action for the health of the family and is relieved that after their 8-week involvement, the DCFS is now satisfied the safeguards are put in place that will allow the children to heal," commented a representative of Jolie, as quoted from PEOPLE. Pitt, on the other hand, has not released a statement on the matter yet.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt reached a permanent settlement?

Whereas Jolie previously claimed that a legal agreement has already been accepted and signed by both parties. As per an earlier report of PEOPLE, this agreement was determined by childcare professionals and gives Jolie the custody over their six children while Pitt can have therapeutic visits.

Sources of the publication, however, refute that the deal that Jolie was referring to is not meant as a permanent custody agreement. This is but an independent step taken by Pitt and Jolie in an attempt to determine a more permanent settlement as Pitt continues to push for a joint physical and legal custody of Maddox (15), Pax (12), Zahara (11), Shiloh (10), and twins Knox and Vivienne, (8).

What are the odds for Brad Pitt?

As per USA Today, the result of the investigation is a win for Pitt. The custody of his children with Jolie, however, remains to be decided by the court and also the children themselves. As it turns out, California law gives children, especially over 14, to decide between their mother and father.

"When a kid says 'I don't want to be with dad or mom,' that's what's going to happen. The court has to consider what the kid wants to do," Peter Walzer, a divorce attorney and a source of the publication says.

As of the moment, the children are currently living with Jolie in Malibu. Pitt, on the other hand, releases new film, "Allied." Stay tuned for more updates!
'Rise Of The Tomb Raider' Latest News & Update : On PlayStation 4 Pro: 1.05 Nixes Trophy Bug, Multiple Upgrades and Enhancements Explained

"Rise of the Tomb Raider" is incorporated into the rundown of playable games on the up and coming PlayStation 4 Pro. Players can take in more of it with the recent release footage and unveiled visual enhancements.

As indicated by Gamespresso, Crystal Dynamics has released the new footage of the "Rise of the Tomb Raider." In the new tech video, Crystal Dynamics boss innovation officer Gary Snethen clarified the three diverse visual choices for the "Rise of the Tomb Raider." These are ready to use to players on PlayStation 4 Pro with 4K resolution, enhanced visual and high casing rate modes.

Rise of the Tomb Raider | 4K PS4 Pro Enhancement Gameplay | PS4 Pro https://t.co/I7sWHrALaV pic.twitter.com/CUk34La1KU  Playstation World (@PlaystationWrld) November 8, 2016

"Rise of the Tomb Raider" execute at 4K resolution, PlayStation Universe clarifies. This upgrade keeps running at 30 casing for each second. It enhances surface, outlines, specular highlights and different impacts. The improved show or visuals play at 30 fps at 1080p.

Moreover, it uses additional power just to enhance the picture quality and rendering impacts. The high framerate permit "Rise of the Tomb Raider" players to play at 60 fps at 1080p resolution. This permits sleek animation and more tightly controls.

Numerous enhancements in the "Rise of the Tomb Raider" likewise incorporate equipment. It oversees information sets and permits detail to be included and subtracted from a 3D polygon work. This is an aggregation of edges, appearances, and vertices that characterize 3D items' shape in the PC representation.

Overhauls likewise incorporate anisotropic filtering that upgrades the picture quality and surface on surfaces of PC illustrations that are at diagonal review points. There are likewise extra foliage and expanded the level of detail, as indicated by Game N' Guide.

Sony will release more redesigns of its forthcoming PlayStation 4 Pro. This effective comfort will be accessible soon on November 10.
'Transformers 5' Release Date, Latest News & Updates: Premieres On June 23, 2017; New Actors To Join The Film?

There is no denying about how huge a success is the movie "Transformers." Now on its fifth installment, "Transformers" fans are very excited about what are yet in store for this American science-fiction action film that has become their favorite.

In a previous report by Parent Herald, there are a number of rumours that has been making rounds on the internet for a long time now regarding the casting of "Transformers 5." One rumour suggest that Vincent Jerome, a British actor, will be a new face in the fifth installment of "Transformers."

The fifth installment of the film "Transformers" is believed to be titled "Transformers: The Last Knight." The then rumour about his appearance in "Transformers 5" was confirmed by Vincent Jerome himself in a post in Instagram where he was apparently very proud to be a part of Michael Bay's "Transformers: The Last Knight."

Director Michael Bay has confirmed that there will be actors that are set to return in "Transformers: The Last Knight" aside from Vincent Jerome. According to Dark Horizons. Michael Bay said that these actors are John Goodman and John Turturo.

It is the first time for John Goodman and John Turturo to be working in the same film. John Goodman voiced Hound in "Transformers 4" and John Torturo played against Agent Simmons in the first three instalments of "Transformers." It will be exciting for these two actors and fans as well to be collaborating in "Transformers: The Last Knight."

"Transformers: The Last Knight" is welcoming a lot of returnees. Alongside John Torturo and John Goodman, Stanley Tucci, Tyrese Gibson, Mark Wahlberg, and Josh Duhamel is set to star in "Transformers 5."

This much-awaited fifth installment of "Tranformers" will premiere on June 23, 2017. It will surely be another blockbuster film that has stunning films that will surprise its fans.
'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales' Release Date, Will Salazar's Revenge Take Over?

After many postponements and delays, the "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" has been officially set to be released on the big screen on May 2017. The new chapter is about how Johnny Depp's character, Captain Jack Sparrow survive the threat of Captain Salazar, a deadly ghost pirate.

The "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" tells the story of revenge and survival. To kill all the pirates is Captain Salazar's only desire after he escaped from the Devil's Triangle while Captain Jack Sparrow's only chance of survival is the legendary Trident of Poseidon.

Salazar was an old nemesis of Captain Jack Sparrow. Both captains are looking for the Trident of Poseidon in the "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales." Salazar's interest in the trident is to orchestrate revenge while Jack Sparrow wants it to survive. The success of Captain Salazar's revenge depends if he finds the trident first.

The son of Elizabeth Swan-Turner and Will Turner, Henry Turner is on his way to search for his father Will. In the last movie of "Pirates of the Caribbean," fans know that Will Turner became the new captain of the Flying Dutchman, a legendary ghost ship in the movie. The "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" movie is expected to reveal what happened to Will Turner's life after he became the captain of the ghost ship.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales Cast

The producers and filmmakers revealed the cast of the "Pirates of the Caribbean 5; Dead Man Tell No Lies". New actresses, actors and cast members are expected to come in the for the new movie. Henry Turner, the newest character in the film, will be played by Brenton Thwaites. Orlando Bloom will reprise his role as Will Turner. Captain Salazar will be played by actor Javier Bardem. Keira Knightley's character, Elizabeth Swann, will not be part of the movie.

A major number of the characters from the previous installment confirmed that they are still in the "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" movie. Kaya Scodelario and Golshifteh Farahani are both officially confirmed as part of the cast members in the movie.
Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian News & Update: Will Ian Somerhalder Plays Christian Grey In 4th Movie Adaptation?

There are swirling rumors that Ian Somerhalder will take the place of Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey in the upcoming movies "Fifty Shades Darker" and "Fifty Shades Freed." Of course, this is quite impossible as "The Fall" actor and Dakota Johnson are now done filming the said films. Hence, it is strongly believed that "The Vampire Diaries" star might lead the movie adaptation of E.L. James fourth "Fifty Shades" book, "Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian."

It has been known that Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson are only obligated to film "Fifty Shades" trilogy, which are "Fifty Shades of Grey," "Fifty Shades Darker" and "Fifty Shades Freed." Now that they are up to the last two movies, will the husband of Amelia Warner continue portraying Christian Grey if "Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian" will be made into a film? Most likely not, thus the name of Ian Somerhalder emerges.

Jamie Dornan expressed before that he wants to leave the character of Christian Grey in the "Fifty Shades" trilogy and just finish his contract, MoviePilot reported. That's why; this might be the last time fans will see him as the BDSM baddie in "Fifty Shades Darker" and "Fifty Shades Freed." Hence, the crown of playing the billionaire entrepreneur in "Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian" might be passed to Ian Somerhalder.

Ian Somerhalder is the top picked for replacing Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of "Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian." Now that "The Vampire Diaries" will soon come to a close, the husband of Nikki Reed will now have a lot of time to make a movie. Also, the "Lost" actor claimed that he wants to focus on doing films after his long-running TV series ends.

Meanwhile, it looks like Jamie Dornan has an inkling that Ian Somerhalder will take the role of Christian Grey in "Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian." In an interview with Jimmy Kennel as he was promoting "Fifty Shades Darker," the on-screen partner of Dakota Johnson sent a message to the 37-year-old model saying, good luck and he knows "he'll be great" portraying the said character.
As we know, Griff may or may not be a right-on activist but he certainly has some seedy-looking friends who are all going to a gig. Peter h...
PlayStation 4 Pro is Now Available in Australia; Check Out PS4 Pro Specs and Price

Sony's newest console, the Playstation 4 Pro, is now available in Australia. The popular console from Sony was launched in Nov. 10.

The PlayStation 4 Pro can now be bought at a few different electronics stores in Australia, Gizmodo reported. This console is capable of 4K, HDR, and even Virtual Reality.

Currently, Sony's official partners, JB Hi-Fi and EB Games, are the ones are selling the consoles. The PS4 Pro is priced at $559. This is more expensive as compared to its cost when sold in the United States. However, other factors like shipping, currency conversion and taxes might make the difference lesser than expected.

For those who are looking for the best deals, Kotaku said for those who plan to get PlayStation 4 Pro, there is a chance that they would get "Skyrim: Special Edition," "Rise of the Tomb Raider," "Watch Dogs 2," or "Dishonored 2" for only $39. EB Games will also discount the aforementioned copies to $39, according to OZ Bargain.

Aside from the mentioned games, Playstation Blog revealed the full-list of the PS4 Pro supported games. They include "Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare", "FIFA 17", "Dishonored 2", "Battlefield 1", "Rise of the Tomb Raider", "Skyrim: Special Edition", "Black Ops 3" and "Watch Dogs 2".

The PlayStation 4 Pro, or the PS4 Pro, has minor hardware upgrades from its predecessor, the PlayStation 4. This console can't be considered a step-up console, but only as a slightly more powerful version. The upgrades include a faster CPU clockspeed, and a GPU that's twice as powerful as the PlayStation 4. This makes the PlayStation 4 Pro capable of delivering 4K video and better virtual reality graphics.

While the PS4 Pro supports 4K display for games, its optical drive does not support 4K Blu-Ray discs. Users can, however, stream 4K videos instead.
US Election Results 2016: Bulgarian Mystic Baba Vanga Has Some Chilling Insights About New President! Is Trump Going To Be Trumped?

But with a new conspiracy theory, it seems like Donald Trump won't be enjoying his presidential days for long. Baba Vanga, a Bulgarian mystic foreteller, had predicted something that indicates a not-so-good fortune for the new president.

People who are familiar with the clairvoyant named Baba Vanga from Bulgaria, should know that she made a prediction of Mr. Barrack Obama being the last US president. Now a group of conspiracy theorists believe on the fact that Donald Trump is going to be demised and something bad will happen before he takes his oath on January 20, 2017.

Surprisingly, Baba Vanga also predicted that the 44th American President would be Afro-American and that fact came true. She left some indications that Obama would be the last president because the 45th president would face enormous obstacle from the riots and economical crisis before serving his term. According to Mirror, her prediction states, "Everyone will put their hopes in him to end it, but the opposite will happen; he will bring the country down and conflicts between north and south states will escalate."

The predictions of Baba Vanga have set the entire world on frenzy before because most of her foretelling came true. For examples, she had predicted the 9/11 terrorism massacre and 2004 Tsunami. As per NEWS, her prophecies stated, "Cold regions will become warm... and volcanoes will awaken. A huge wave will cover a big coast covered with people and towns, and everything will disappear beneath the water. Everything will melt, just like ice." About the twin tower attack in 2001, she warned that the, "American Brethren will fall after being attacked by the steel birds. The wolves will be howling in a bush and innocent blood will gush."

Now what will happen to Mr. Donald Trump? Will he rise like a wildfire or have a great fall before even starting his term? It's only a matter of time! Meanwhile, you can take a look at his victory speech!
A second route, which will service downtown to Alamitos Beach, will launch on Nov. 10.
During his military career, Air Force Capt. Jonathan A. Hayes logged more than 2,000 flying hours in the cockpit of an F-4 Phantom fighter jet, including 356 combat missions during the Vietnam War.

Speaking at the Reserve Officers Training Corps pre-Veterans Day ceremony at Oregon State Universitys Memorial Union Quad on Thursday morning, Hayes talked about some of the lessons he learned along the way, laying particular stress on the importance of teamwork and discipline.

His audience included about 40 people seated on folding chairs in front of the Memorial Union, protected from a light drizzle by temporary canopies and flanked by cadets from OSUs ROTC programs. The event also included a flag presentation by an interservice color guard, a missing man ceremony to remember prisoners of war and service members deemed missing in action, and a 21-gun salute to honor fallen veterans.

Now retired and living in Corvallis, Hayes was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1964 after going through the ROTC program at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He addressed his remarks primarily to the cadre of Air Force cadets standing at parade rest on the MU steps.

You are only as good as your next mission, he told them. It will be expected that (your performance) will be the best you are capable of.

To illustrate the point, he related an example from his own career. He was stationed at Aviano Air Base in Italy and had been detailed to fly an aircraft to England for routine rotation. Just before takeoff, he received a call from a superior officer who instructed him to stop off on the way to pick up 500 pounds of charcoal.

I need you to change your flight plan, the officer said. The wing commanders having a barbecue this evening and theres no charcoal anywhere in England.

Hayes accepted the unusual assignment without batting an eye.

Thats discipline, he said, to chuckles from the audience.

The charcoal was there and I got back to England in plenty of time for the wing commanders barbecue, he added. Yeah, yeah  your tax dollars at work.

Turning serious, he told the cadets that while most of them would never see combat, some undoubtedly would. And while fear is a natural reaction to coming under enemy fire, Hayes called it a luxury they could not afford in battle.

You cannot take this stuff personally, he advised. Getting shot at is an occupational hazard. Treat it as such.

Life in the military carries grave responsibilities, Hayes added. For the future Air Force officers among them, that could very well involve taking charge of nuclear weapons.

As a 26-year-old Air Force pilot, he said, he was assigned to carry a payload that included a B61 bomb, a thermonuclear device with 23 times the killing power of the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. He had to sign a form taking custody of the bomb and agreeing to drop it if ordered to do so.

Now comes the $64 question, he said. If properly ordered, would you be willing to deliver that weapon to its assigned target? Thats about the most serious question you will ever be asked. Think long and hard about it.

But despite its many demands, Hayes said, the military life also comes with great rewards. In years to come, he told the cadets, they will look back on their service with pride and satisfaction.

You will have the honor and privilege of serving the United States of America, the greatest nation on Gods green earth  and dont ever let anybody tell you different, he said.

May the good Lord always be with you, may your takeoffs and landings always be equal in number, and God bless America.
 ROSE (roz) n. One of the most beautiful of all flowers, a symbol of fragrance and loveliness. Often given as a sign of appreciation.

 RASPBERRY (razbere) n. A sharp, scornful comment, criticism or rebuke; a derisive, splatting noise, often called the Bronx cheer.

We hereby deliver:

 ROSES, again, to Veterans Day, the veterans who served this nation with honor and the various tributes planned throughout the mid-valley.

None of those tributes is bigger than the Veterans Day parade in Albany, which always draws plenty of participation from Benton County. This year's spectacle, billed as the largest Veterans Day parade west of the Mississippi River, gets underway at 11 a.m.

It looks as if the weather plans to cooperate this year: Forecasts are calling for cloudy (but not rainy) skies and temperatures in the mid-50s.

 Speaking of veterans, ROSES to the Edward C. Allworth Veterans' Home in Lebanon, which recently marked its second anniversary. By all accounts, it's been a spectacular success; as we reported earlier this week, the facility reached its 154-bed capacity in September, a full year ahead of schedule.

The facility was designed from the start to have more of a homelike feel for its residents, a far cry from the dormitory feel of previous facilities built for veterans. (The thinking behind those earlier facilities must have been that veterans would want to live once again in settings reminiscent of barracks.)

In retrospect, it seems a little astonishing that it took us so long to recognize that veterans probably would prefer homestyle comforts, especially considering the sacrifices they made to defend our homes.

 RASPBERRIES to recent events suggesting that we still have a ways to go as a nation to make good on our commitment to take care of our veterans.

First, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, the Department of Defense aggressively sought repayment, with interest, of recruitment bonuses paid to about 10,000 California National Guard soldiers.

Most of the payments were made by mistake; some of them apparently involved fraud, but the government pursued all the cases with the same vigor, hounding the soldiers for repayment. It took the Secretary of Defense himself, Ash Carter, to call off the dogs. Carter ordered his staff to come up with a plan for dealing with the situation by next July.

In the mid-valley, we recently reported on a similar case, although it doesn't affect as many veterans: The Navy asked a Corvallis veteran, Christian Gross, to repay $10,186 because of a clerical error it made decades ago. Gross fought back, and the Navy eventually elected to waive the payment, although it did dock his retirement pay. In all, about 1,600 Navy veterans received requests for repayment because of this clerical error.

As we celebrate Veterans Day, it occurs to us that nickel-and-diming our veterans may not be the best way to honor their service. Surely the Pentagon has other ways to trim a buck or two from its budget.

 ROSES to voters in California, who approved on Tuesday a ballot initiative to provide greater transparency in the legislative process; Proposition 54 won with 64 percent of the vote.

The measure will require all state bills to be available for public viewing online for three days before legislators can vote on them. Under the measure, anyone attending the Legislature's public meetings can record and broadcast the sessions and the Legislature will have to make its own recordings, starting in 2018.

Open government groups, newspaper editorial boards and the California Republican Party backed the proposal. The Democratic Party was the primary opponent, and its curious argument against the proposition was that it would only benefit lobbyists.

Well, that, and members of the public who wanted to keep tabs on their Legislature.

 ROSES to Monday's "supermoon," which is a new or full moon that occurs when the moon is within 90 percent of its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit. The next such supermoon occurs on Monday morning, and astronomers say the moon will officially be full at 5:52 a.m. Pacific, when it will be visible on the West Coast (weather permitting).

Monday's full moon is expected to be closer than any other since 1948; the next time it will get this close is in November 2034.

Here's a brief summary of the science here: The moon's orbit around the Earth isn't circular but instead is in more of an elliptical shape. That means it has times when it's closer to Earth than others. The distance between Earth and the moon ranges from 221,208 miles to 252,898 miles. On Monday morning, the moon will be 221,524 miles from the Earth, so that's why astronomers of all sorts are drooling over Monday's supermoon  the closeness makes this one unusually super.

We know what you're thinking: The Cubs win the World Series. Monday's supermoon. This week's election. The total eclipse set for next August. Portents  or just coincidences? Discuss among yourselves.

 We'll have more, much more, to say about the election over the course of the next week or so, but in the meantime, before all the yard signs disappear, we wanted to give a bouquet of ROSES to whoever posted our favorite sign of the campaign. It's along Southwest 35th Street, across the street from Adams School. It reads: "No on Pi. It's just not rational."

Correction

An editorial in Thursday's Gazette-Times incorrectly noted that a measure to legalize recreational marijuana in Arizona had passed; in fact, the measure failed in that state. Recreational marijuana measures did pass in California, Massachusetts, Nevada and Maine.
Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021.
St. Martins tradition in Bonn : 1,800 light up the city with lanterns

BONN. A huge group of children and their parents marched in Bonns largest St. Martins procession on Thursday evening. Today, there are prayer services at the Munster Cathedral.

Teilen

Teilen Weiterleiten

Weiterleiten Tweeten

Tweeten Weiterleiten

Weiterleiten Drucken

Excitement and anticipation filled the Hofgarten at the University of Bonn. On Thursday evening, around 1,800 children and their parents gathered there for the St. Martins procession through the inner city of Bonn. It was a chance to light up the city and show off their home-made lanterns.

The kids were grouped into their schools for the procession, which seems to be a Rhineland tradition. Ulrike Tscherna-Bertoldi, who comes from an area near Hamburg says that in northern Germany, all the kids from the various schools mix together.

10-year-old Mia said, I think the St. Martins procession is cool because of all the lanterns in the darkness. Referring to the story of St. Martin sharing his warm coat with a beggar, 11-year-old Dunya commented, Its important that we share.
Beethoven Orchestra : Concert premiere in the World Conference Center Bonn

BONN Bonns Beethoven Orchestra will hold its first concert in the interim venue at the World Conference Center Bonn. The center will be used for concerts while the Beethoven Hall is being renovated.

Teilen

Teilen Weiterleiten

Weiterleiten Tweeten

Tweeten Weiterleiten

Weiterleiten Drucken

On Sunday, November 13, the Bonn Beethoven Orchestra will perform for the first time in the World Conference Center Bonn (WCCB). A room was retrofitted there to become an interim concert venue while the Beethoven Hall undergoes renovations. Costs to convert the space into a technically sound music venue were around 2.1 million euro.
Police raid : Drug crackdown in Tannenbusch

TANNENBUSCH A large contingency of police, supported by the city and customs officials conducted a major anti-crime initiative in Tannenbusch on Thursday. Police seized 200 grams of cocaine.

Teilen

Teilen Weiterleiten

Weiterleiten Tweeten

Tweeten Weiterleiten

Weiterleiten Drucken

The fight against drugs and criminality in Tannenbusch, in the northern part of Bonn continues. On Thursday afternoon, police raided two apartments and with the help of drug-sniffing dogs, located 200 grams of cocaine. The apartments were on Oppelner Strae and Kattowitzer Strae. Altogether, around 100 police were involved in the initiative, inspecting cars, busses and other vehicles, as well as conducting the raids. Searching long distance buses, they found a Pakistani who was illegally in Germany.

Tannenbusch has been the major focus of police crackdowns. Special forces unit leader Bernd Heller says, We have a difficult situation there. There has always been drug dealing but since the Tannenbusch Center was torn down in the last year, the drug scene has moved to the streets and apartment building hallways. Residents have complained. Add to that, the youth there are somewhat more brutal, aggressive and prone to violence than other 15-year-olds, says Heller. Radical Islam and Salafism is also part of the problem in this area.

Heller says police efforts are about showing presence but also about actively snuffing out crime. Stopping vehicles is how authorities can track how the drugs come in to Tannenbusch and how they leave again. A customs authority says with certainty, Anyone can be a smuggler. He talked about a family with a baby - when their vehicle was searched, officers found drugs hidden in a diaper.
Independent Bonn International School : IBIS Open Day

Heiderhof Saturday is Open Day for IBIS, the international school. On Saturday, the Independent Bonn International School (IBIS) will host an Open Day from 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. All interested parents and students are invited to attend.

Teilen

Teilen Weiterleiten

Weiterleiten Tweeten

Tweeten Weiterleiten

Weiterleiten Drucken
A strangely shaped depression on Mars could be a new place to look for signs of life on the Red Planet, according to a University of Texas at Austin-led study. The depression was probably formed by a volcano beneath a glacier and could have been a warm, chemical-rich environment well suited for microbial life.

The findings were published this month in Icarus, the International Journal of Solar System Studies.

We were drawn to this site because it looked like it could host some of the key ingredients for habitability  water, heat and nutrients, said lead author Joseph Levy, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, a research unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

The depression is inside a crater perched on the rim of the Hellas basin on Mars and surrounded by ancient glacial deposits. It first caught Levys attention in 2009, when he noticed crack-like features on pictures of depressions taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that looked similar to ice cauldrons on Earth, formations found in Iceland and Greenland made by volcanos erupting under an ice sheet. Another depression in the Galaxias Fossae region of Mars had a similar appearance.

These landforms caught our eye because theyre weird looking. Theyre concentrically fractured so they look like a bulls-eye. That can be a very diagnostic pattern you see in Earth materials, said Levy, who was a postdoctoral researcher at Portland State University when he first saw the photos of the depressions.

But it wasnt until this year that he and his research team were able to more thoroughly analyze the depressions using stereoscopic images to investigate whether the depressions were made by underground volcanic activity that melted away surface ice or by an impact from an asteroid. Study collaborator Timothy Goudge, a postdoctoral fellow at the institute, used pairs of high-resolution images to create digital elevation models of the depressions that enabled in-depth analysis of their shape and structure in 3-D. Researchers from Brown University and Mount Holyoke College also participated in the study.

The big contribution of the study was that we were able to measure not just their shape and appearance, but also how much material was lost to form the depressions. That 3-D view lets us test this idea of volcanic or impact, Levy said.

The analysis revealed that both depressions shared an unusual funnel shape, with a broad perimeter that gradually narrowed with depth.

That surprised us and led to a lot of thinking about whether it meant there was melting concentrated in the center that removed ice and allowed stuff to pour in from the sides. Or if you had an impact crater, did you start with a much smaller crater in the past, and by sublimating away ice, youve expanded the apparent size of the crater, Levy said.

After testing formation scenarios for the two depressions, researchers found that they probably formed in different ways. The debris spread around the Galaxias Fossae depression suggests that it was the result of an impact  but the known volcanic history of the area still doesnt rule out volcanic origins, Levy said. In contrast, the Hellas depression has many signs of volcanic origins. It lacks the surrounding debris of an impact and has a fracture pattern associated with concentrated removal of ice by melting or sublimation.

The interaction of lava and ice to form a depression would be an exciting find, Levy said, because it could create an environment with liquid water and chemical nutrients, both ingredients required for life on Earth. He said that the Hellas depression and, to a lesser extent, the Galaxias Fossae depression, should be kept in mind when looking for habitats on Mars.

Gro Pedersen, a volcanologist at the University of Iceland who was not involved with the study, agrees that the depressions are promising sites for future research.

These features do really resemble ice cauldrons known from Earth, and just from that perspective they should be of great interest, Pedersen said. Both because their existence may provide information on the properties of subsurface material  the potential existence of ice  and because of the potential for revealing ice-volcano interactions.

Reference:

Joseph S. Levy, Timothy A. Goudge, James W. Head, Caleb I. Fassett. Candidate volcanic and impact-induced ice depressions on Mars. Icarus, 2016; DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2016.10.021

Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin.
Hollow Earth concept is one that was born out of some musings in the past about whether the earth might contain pockets of life we don't know about on the surface, or perhaps an entire world within. There are legends of this from around the world which makes it an interesting subject to study.

Agartha













Hollow Earth is referred to as a land called Agartha. It is believed to be entered by points around the world and have an inner sun, a superior people who live long lives and have peace, and might be other-dimensional in qualities. And, more than a few believers think that it might be the origin of UFOs and alien people.













Cultures throughout time have spoken about the people of the underground from the Greeks and Buddhists to the Hopi of the American Southwest. This repeated theme is much like the flood theme that has run throughout religious texts and native legends. When something repeats itself that much, there must be some basis for this theme. It is usually worth looking at again to see if there is merit to the concept literally or just figuratively.









Is it possible?









The deepest we have drilled on the earth is in Russia where they drilled to 7.5 miles (deeper than the deepest ocean) but it became so hot at that depth (356F), they quit drilling. As the distance to the center of earth is approx 4000 miles, that 7-1/2 miles didn't cut it much. ( LINK





Many say that a hollow earth area around the core would be impossible; pressure would be too great, as well as temperatures. But, we also thought life could not exist in the arctic ices or the excruciatingly hot volcanic vents on the ocean's floor, and yet it does.





Still, knowing that we are still uncovering many mysteries to our own earth, the possibility that large caverns underground could exist and a people could have adapted to such a location isn't entirely ludicrous. After all, we only just learned in recent years that we Homo sapiens share Neanderthal, Denisovans and an unnamed other man's DNA. We have discovered jets and sprites above our atmosphere bursting when storms below are occurring. We have blow away some long-held theories about physics with new research. So, we must remain humble in considering long-held legends and if there is a grain of validity.





One thing we know about our Earth, it provides life and energy in such a wide variety of forms that it is wildly diverse by its very nature.





I will cover potential openings to Hollow Earth spoken of through time and we can entertain the scope of this subject. Even if you shake your head in disbelief at the notion of Hollow Earth, this is an interesting and animated discussion.





North and South Poles









Explorer Admiral Richard Byrd flew over the north and south poles and there has been much talk about his supposed diaries that revealed something extraordinary.





In his diary, Byrd allegedly tells of entering the hollow interior of the earth, along with others and traveling 17 miles over mountains, lakes, rivers, green vegetation, and animal life. He tells of seeing tremendous animals resembling the mammoths of antiquity moving through the brush. He eventually found cities and a thriving civilization. The external temperature was 74 degrees F.



His airplane was greeted by flying machines of a type he had never seen before. They escorted him to a safe landing area where he was graciously greeted by emissaries from Agartha. After resting, he and his crew, were taken to meet the king and queen of Agartha. They told him that he had been allowed to enter Agartha because of his high moral and ethical character. They went on to say that they worried about the safety of planet due to the bombs and other testing done above the surface by governments. After the visit, Byrd and his crew were guided back to the surface of the planet.



Byrd stated that the North and South Poles are only two of many openings into the center of the Earth. He also wrote about seeing a sun below the Earth.

Openings are most often named at the North Pole and the South Pole, yet there are some other intriguing locations cited around the world.





In 2007, there was a planned trek to the supposed opening in the area of the North Pole. This website ( LINK ) Voyage to Hollow Earth, was set up to discuss the planned excursion. The trip never came to fruition, although they had plans to bring paid customers along on the adventure. This would have been a pretty interesting project to follow.

















Hitler was said to be obsessed with finding the opening to Agartha in Antarctica.





...

Nazis explored the Southern regions of our planet and even creating secret bases in Neuschwabenland. Some also speak about Operation Highjump and Admiral Byrds journeys where extremely advanced airships were seen flying around and exploring new territories. Not long ago, we discovered a map of the third Reich in which there are several secret passages depicted which were used by German U-Boats to access mysterious underground regions, as well as a complete map of both hemispheres and the mysterious kingdom of Agartha.





Mt. Shasta, California













Few mountains have the mystique that Mt. Shasta has. It is part of a range that has seen great geological change and volcanic explosions in the past, but the mountain has become the focus for many of a lot of legends from UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, and underground cities. One such city is called Telos and its citizens are called Lemurians.





Telos is a large city about 1.5 million inhabitants. The city exists in a dome. Its size is two miles in depth and 1.5 miles in area. Telos means "communication with spirit." Its language is Solar Maru, the root language for Sanskrit and Hebrew. The average height of its people is 6.5 to 7.5 feet. The people of Telos live long lives. Many are thousands of years old but look thirty or forty. Telos has a King named Ra and a Queen called Ramu Mu. A council of twelve that is composed of six men and women governs the city. There is no money system as all the inhabitants basic needs are cared for. They use barter to exchange luxury goods. Their predominant spiritual activity is Ascension that involves visiting different dimensions, particularly moving from the third to the fifth dimension and is learned in temple training.





The entrance to Mt. Shastas inner sanctum was supposedly by a clear pool near a branch of the McCloud River on the mountains east side. This was the first published reference linking Mt. Shasta to Lemuria. Later, other books followed, all elaborating further on the ancient connection. There were also those who believed it was not the Lemurians living inside Mt. Shasta, but the Atlanteans.





Tibet









Tibetans speak of a place called Shambhala and the people believe that it is guarded by superhuman beings and within it is a kind of paradise.





In the Himalayas, a Tibet expedition in 1938 was intended to produce new findings relating to early Germanic history. The Nazis believed in a Nordic master race that was supposed to have survived the demise of the legendary Atlantis. In Tibet - so the theory goes - these people of Nordic origin are supposed to have constructed the underground realm of Shambalah, traces of which the expedition hoped to find.



Shambhala extraterrestrials refused to assist the Nazi expeditions with war but agreed to travel to Germany to help assist in spiritual developement. This involved the foundation of the Vril society.





Peru





There is mythology of the Inca that involves an opening to Hollow Earth in Cuzco, Peru.





LINK) According to South American mythology the belief of the Brazilian Indians, who live alongside the Parima River in Brazil, claim that their forefathers emerged in ancient times from an underground land, and that many of their ancestors still remained inside the earth. There are also legends that say the ancestors of the Inca Empire came from underground caves which are located east of Cuzco, Peru.



LINK) ... These ancient legends speak of vast networks of tunnels criss-crossing the entire length and breadth of the planet. Traditions of vaults, labyrinths and buried treasures of remote antiquity are found in Crete, Egypt, Tibet, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. Inca prophecy tells of the upper, middle, and lower worlds, other realities existing in both physical and astral/etheric form.



Several places in the Andes mountains are considered gateways to these realms and doorways, where emergence and entrance are possible. Included among this distinction are the famous sacred sites of Sacsayhuaman in the Peruvian Andes, and the ancient pre-Incan city of Tiwanaku near the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.






Article

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.
5 Easy Steps to Add Google Analytics Dashboard in WordPress Features oi -Rohit Google Analytics offers important insights about your website and heres how you can add it to your site

Creating a website is not a big deal but to make your online space a 'Brand' requires sheer hard work and consistency. One of the key aspect of managing an online space is to know your audience and keep a check on vital statistics such as audience reach, daily visitors, etc. on regular basis.

A stats program can help you track your website/blog traffic and analyze them in real-time basis to help you grow your online business.

SEE ALSO: Reliance Jio to Offer GigaFiber Broadband Service as Welcome Offer: Everything You Need to Know

That said, one of the most popular and widely used online tool is Google Analytics for WordPress dashboard. It offers the most useful insights and aggregates all information related to your website traffic at one place. You can also check Real-Time Analytics Report of visitors on your website.

SEE ALSO: Idea Revised it's 3G and 2G Data Plans to Take on Reliance Jio

If you are looking forward to add the tool on your WordPress dashboard, follow these simple steps.

Register on Google Analytics The first step to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site is to register with Google Analytics. Sign in with your Gmail id to create a Google Analytics account. If this is the first time you are signing up for Google Analytics, you will be asked to add your website details to get the tracking code. After entering the details, click on get Tracking Id' to generate the id. Add Plugin in WordPress Now when you have registered on Google Analytics and have created the tracking id, you need to add the Google Analytics on your WordPress site. The easiest way to do this is to add Google Analytics Plugin. Go to Plugins-> Add New Click Here for New Tablets Best Online Deals Look for Google Analytics Dashboard The Add New option will open a list of plugins that you can add to your WordPress site. Look for Google Analytical Dashboard for WordPress in the Plugins search area. Install and Activate Once it shows, install the plugin and activate it. Check real-time traffic and other details Once it's activated, you will see an option called Google Analytics on the left side of your WordPress dashboard. Click Here for New Smartphones Best Online Deals

Best Mobiles in India
'Feels Like Home Season 2' offers something real and tangible to think about; takes home a pertinent point - if your intentions are good, there is nothing in life that isn't achievable.
Centcom Officials Release Iraq, Syria Civilian Casualty Assessments

From a U.S. Central Command News Release

TAMPA, Fla., Nov. 9, 2016  After months of reviewing reports and databases to resolve cases in which coalition airstrikes may have resulted in civilian casualties, U.S. Central Command officials have determined that over the past year, 24 U.S. airstrikes targeting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant may have killed as many as 64 civilians and injured eight others in Iraq and Syria.

"We have teams who work full-time to prevent unintended civilian casualties," Centcom spokesman Air Force Col. John J. Thomas said.

A key tenet of the counter-ISIL air campaign is to avoid adding to the tragedy of the situation by inflicting additional suffering, the colonel said.

"Sometimes civilians bear the brunt of military action," he added, "but we do all we can to minimize those occurrences, even at the cost of sometimes missing the chance to strike valid targets in real time."

Thorough Review

Centcom thoroughly reviewed the facts and circumstances surrounding each report, officials said.

"The assessments determined that in each of these strikes, the right processes were followed," Thomas said. "Each complied with Law of Armed Conflict, and significant precautions were taken, despite the unfortunate outcome."

Centcom officials said the investigations were informed by the military's own records, combined with an exhaustive review of reports from outside sources from news media reports, nongovernmental organizations and other U.S. government departments and agencies.

Thomas said the numbers of casualties associated with each individual airstrike reflect the highest possible total possible, according to the assessment.

"In most every case, when we determined there may have been civilian casualties from one of our airstrikes, we are choosing to list the largest number of possible civilian casualties," he said. "In cases where we just don't have the investigative resources or evidence to determine precisely how many people may have died, we went with the worst-case number to ensure a full accounting."

List of Reviewed Airstrikes

Here are the 24 airstrikes officials reviewed, along with the casualty assessments:

-- In a Nov. 20, 2015, strike against an ISIL tactical unit near Dayr Az Zawr, Syria, officials assessed that five civilians were killed and three individuals were injured after the civilians entered the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a March 5, 2016, strike against an ISIL weapons production facility near Mosul, Iraq, it is assessed that 10 civilians were killed.

-- In a March 24, 2016, strike against an ISIL target near Qayyarah, Iraq, it is assessed that one civilian was killed.

-- In an April 1, 2016, strike against ISIL tactical unit near Raqqah, Syria, it is assessed that three civilians were killed after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In an April 9, 2016, strike against an ISIL tactical unit near Mosul, it is assessed that one civilian was killed after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In an April 30, 2016, strike against ISIL military leadership near Mosul, it is assessed that five civilians were killed after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a May 25, 2016, strike against an ISIL tactical unit near Mosul, it is assessed that one civilian was killed.

-- In a May 26, 2016, strike against ISIL fighters near Mosul, it is assessed that one civilian was killed after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a May 29, 2016, strike against an ISIL weapons system near Mosul, it is assessed that six civilians were killed.

-- In a June 15, 2016, strike against an ISIL weapons storage facility near Kisik, Iraq, it is assessed that six civilians were killed.

-- In a June 15, 2016, strike against ISIL targets near Mosul, it is assessed that two individuals were injured after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a June 21, 2016, strike targeting an ISIL headquarters building near Raqqah, it is assessed that three individuals were killed after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a June 23, 2016, strike against an ISIL-held building near Raqqah, it is assessed that four civilians were killed after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a June 26, 2016, strike against an ISIL target near Mosul, it is assessed that one individual was injured after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a June 26, 2016, strike against an ISIL target near Mosul, it is assessed that one individual was injured after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a July 3, 2016, strike against an ISIL fighting position near Manbij, Syria, it is assessed that four civilians were killed.

-- In a July 10, 2016, strike against an ISIL target near Manbij, it is assessed that two civilians were killed.

-- In a July 14, 2016, strike on an ISIL-held building near Qayyarah, it is assessed that one civilian was killed.

-- In a July 31, 2016, strike against ISIL fighters near Manbij, it is assessed that one civilian was injured after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In an Aug. 17, 2016, strike against an ISIL target near Raqqah, it is assessed that two civilians were killed.

-- In an Aug. 20, 2016, strike against an ISIL artillery firing position near Manbij, it is assessed that one civilian was killed after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In an Aug. 31, 2016, strike against an ISIL target near Ramadi, Iraq, it is assessed that two civilians were killed.

-- In a Sept. 7, 2016, strike against an ISIL oil collection point near Dayz Az Zawr, it is assessed that one civilian was killed after entering the target area after the aircraft released its weapon.

-- In a Sept. 10, 2016, strike against an ISIL target near Raqqah, it is assessed that five civilians were killed.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Coalition Targets ISIL Terrorists in Syria, Iraq

From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release

SOUTHWEST ASIA, Nov. 10, 2016  U.S. and coalition military forces continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Iraq yesterday, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.

Officials reported details of the latest strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.

Strikes in Syria

Attack, bomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 17 strikes in Syria:

-- Near Abu Kamal, a strike damaged an ISIL supply route.

-- Near Raqqah, three strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units and destroyed a fighting position and a vehicle.

-- Near Ayn Isa, 13 strikes engaged eight ISIL tactical units and destroyed seven fighting positions, a vehicle, a cave, a bridge and an improvised explosive device.

Strikes in Iraq

Attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 11 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq's government:

-- Near Baghdad, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit.

-- Near Mosul, seven strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units and destroyed five ISIL-held buildings, four vehicles, three mortar systems, three medium machine guns, four tunnels and two vehicle bombs; and damaged two supply routes, a solar panel, a rocket-propelled grenade, a vehicle bomb facility and a fighting position.

-- Near Rawah, two strikes engaged an ISIL tactical unit, destroyed an oil tanker and damaged a tunnel.

-- Near Tal Afar, a strike engaged an ISIL vehicle bomb facility

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target. Ground-based artillery fired in counterfire or in fire support to maneuver roles is not classified as a strike.

Part of Operation Inherent Resolve

The strikes were conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the operation to eliminate the ISIL terrorist group and the threat they pose to Iraq, Syria, and the wider international community. The destruction of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the terrorist group's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.

Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Syria include the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






"Darkhorse" trains for future during ITX

US Marine Corps News

By Cpl. Levi Schultz | November 10, 2016

Marines with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, are putting their own spin on Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center's Integrated Training Exercise. The 28-day exercise is currently the longest-lasting training evolution that occurs at the installation and involves a series of progressive live-fire exercises that assess the ability and adaptability of a force of more than 3,500 Marines and sailors.

Alongside 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, based out of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the unit makes up the ground combat element of Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 4 during Integrated Training Exercise 1-17, which began Oct. 21, 2016.

As announced in All Marine Corps Activities 024/16 Sea Dragon 2025, the 37th Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert B. Neller, has designated the battalion as the Marine Corps' experimental force. According to the ALMAR, the battalion is being reconfigured, re-equipped, and will receive additional training as it progresses through its preparation for deployment, which places a unique twist on this iteration of ITX.

"Overall, what we are trying to do is inform the future organization and equipping of the GCE, specifically the rifle battalion," said Lt. Col. Donald Wright, field testing branch head, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. "What's different about this ITX is that [the battalion is] organized a little bit differently, and they're using some emerging technology."

Traditionally, the Marine Corps rifle squad is composed of 12 Marines and a squad leader. According to Wright, the battalion's rifle companies are putting new standards to the test with one company experimenting with 10-Marine squads and another with 14, while the remaining company serves as the controlling factor with the original configuration. Tactical Training Exercise Control Group's Coyotes, the Combat Center's exercise controllers, are responsible for evaluating and providing feedback on each company's performance.

Emerging technology plays a large role in this ITX, with rifle squads having hands-on experimental vehicles as well as unmanned aerial surveillance and ground robotics systems. Marines are using one such vehicle, the Multi-Utility Tactical Transport, or MUTT, for both enhanced logistics capabilities, in transporting ammo and other supplies, and in a weaponized variant, with mounted heavy weapon systems.

"The Marines are adapting very well," said Wright. "Some of the technology they just received when they got out here, so they are not fully trained on it but it's very obvious they have the right attitude. 3/5 is doing everything they can to integrate this technology because they believe in it and they believe it will enhance their operability."

Wright described these experiments as an ongoing effort "to increase the infantry battalion's competitive advantage." Sea Dragon 2025 highlights a three-phase process consisting of exploration, refinement and validation prior to establishment of new Marine Corps-wide doctrine. This enables the unit to serve as the catalyst in testing emerging concepts and weeding them down to only the most practical applications in future warfighting.

"It's an ever-evolving process because the situation out there is very fluid," Wright said. "What we are trying to do is inform the future organization and equipment of the GCE which in turn will drive the future organization and equipment of the MAGTF."

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






South Africa's Zuma secures vote of confidence for third time

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 4:21PM

South African President Jacob Zuma has survived a no-confidence vote, the third in less than a year, over what the opposition called "reckless leadership."

"I think the no's have it," Deputy Speaker of Parliament Lechesa Tsenoli ruled on Thursday, after lawmakers of Zuma's African National Congress (ANC), which controls almost two-thirds of the assembly, voted against the motion.

After a heated debate, 214 lawmakers voted against the motion and 126 voted in favor.

The vote came despite opposition parties calling on ruling ANC lawmakers to remove Zuma.

Earlier on Thursday, Mmusi Maimane, leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), urged Zuma to quit power and called on ANC lawmakers to vote him out of office.

"To put it plainly, we can choose Jacob Zuma, or we can choose South Africa," Maimane told parliament, adding, "Many of you have been speaking out against him in recent weeks ... I know that there are men and women in these ANC benches who want to do the right thing."

The no-confidence motion was tabled by the DA, which argued that Zuma had wreaked havoc on South Africa's "infant democracy" by being involved in various corruption and influence-peddling scandals.

Zuma had managed to weather two previous no-confidence votes. The 74-year-old, who has been in office since 2009, enjoys strong loyalty among ANC lawmakers and many party activists, particularly in rural areas.

The vote came days after South Africa's top watchdog issued a report, detailing the president's relationship with the Guptas, an Indian business family accused of wielding undue political influence. The report raised fresh allegations of misconduct in Zuma's administration.

Zuma is already gripped in a series of corruption scandals. He was found guilty by South Africa's highest court in March, after he refused to repay taxpayers' money used to refurbish his private rural house.

A court has also ruled that Zuma should face almost 800 corruption charges over a multi-billion dollar arms deal in the 1990s. Zuma has appealed the ruling.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Interpol elects Chinese official as new president, Russian as deputy

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 8:51AM

The International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol, has appointed a senior Chinese security official as its new president and a Russian official as its vice president, the intergovernmental body says.

The Interpol elected Chinese Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei as its new president and Russian Alexander Prokopchuk, who is the head of the Interpol's National Central Bureau in Moscow, as its vice president during the organization's 85th General Assembly, which is being held from November 7-10 in Bali, Indonesia, the Lyon-based body said on its tweeter account on Thursday.

The appointment could boost Beijing's domestic anti-graft fight, which is considered as part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's widespread crackdown on corruption. The move also enables Xi's government to better hunt down fugitive officials who have fled China but are wanted for corruption.

Back in 2014, Beijing issued an Interpol "red notice," the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant, for its 100 most-wanted economic criminals, including corrupt former officials who are living abroad. Beijing says it has managed to net at least one-third of them so far.

The assembly's agenda this year included such issues as how to deal with threats posed by terrorists coming back to their countries of origin after participating in overseas militancy, as well as the increasing rise of the use of social media as a terrorist recruiting mechanism.

Founded in 1923, the Interpol now has 190 member states, making it the second largest international organization after the United Nations in terms of international representation. It has nearly 800 staff and its annual budget, some 80 million euros, is provided mostly by its member states.

The organization acts as a network linking the law enforcement agencies of its members, but it does not possess agents of its own with powers of arrest.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Yemeni demonstrators call for formation of government

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 7:32AM

Yemeni people have held a rally in the capital Sana'a to call for an immediate formation of a government in the face of a Saudi military campaign against the impoverished nation.

People converged on a main square on Wednesday to express support for the formation of a government to help put an end to the Saudi aerial, naval and ground attacks as well as its blockade of the country.

"Amid the brutal Saudi aggression, the formation of a government of technocrats to run the country during these difficult circumstances has become necessary," a demonstrator told Press TV.

The demonstrators also denounced a peace initiative put forward by US Secretary of State John Kerry, saying it amounted to a call for "surrender."

"The US and Saudi Arabia are complicit in the war and blockade against the Yemeni people. We do not trust them anymore," said another demonstrator.

In August, Kerry called on the Houthis to hand over their weapons including ballistic missiles and to pull back from the capital in return for a share in a future unity government.

Yemen has been under Saudi attacks since March 2015 in an attempt to bring back the former Yemeni government to power and undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement.

More than 10,000 Yemenis have been killed since the start of the military campaign, according to the UN.

On Wednesday, two civilians were killed and nine others injured in Saudi airstrikes in the Sana'a province. Warplanes carried out attacks against several areas, including a highway in the Manakhah district.

The impoverished Arab country is grappling with shortages of food and the outbreak of diseases. The UN children's fund (UNICEF) says 7.4 million Yemeni children are in dire need of medical help, and 370,000 run the risk of severe acute malnutrition.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Montenegro's PM accuses pro-Russia opposition of assassination attempt

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 7:9AM

Montenegro's outgoing Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic has accused a pro-Russia opposition alliance of being responsible for an alleged assassination attempt against him during the Balkan county's parliamentary elections less than a month ago.

The long serving 54-year-old Djukanovic said on Wednesday that the pro-Russia Democratic Front was "part of the plot" to seize parliament and the premier and later "execute" him on October 16, the day of the vote.

"I see this activity as participation in preparation of my murder," Djukanovic added.

Although the pro-Russia opposition bloc, composed of at least 10 parties, heavily criticizes Djukanovic's Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro (DPS) for its attempts to join the European Union (EU) and the NATO, it has repeatedly denied accusations that it sought to stage a coup last month.

According to Montenegro's Chief Special Prosecutor Milivoje Katnic, plotters, an alleged organized criminal group of at least 50 people from Montenegro, Serbia and "nationalists from Russia," had plans to break into the parliament, assassinate the premier, cause violence and bring a pro-Russia coalition government to power.

"The plan was to stop Montenegro on its Euro-Atlantic path, especially to prevent it from entering NATO," Katnic told reporters last Sunday.

On the eve of the election, security forces nabbed some 20 Serbian and Montenegrin citizens, 14 of whom remained in custody, including some who had allegedly fought for pro-Russia forces in eastern Ukraine.

Katnic said, however, that prosecutors "don't have any evidence" proving that Russia was involved "in any sense."

Moscow also strongly rejected accusations that it had a role in the alleged coup against the Montenegrin government.

Kremlin "categorically denies the possibility of official involvement in any attempts to commit any unlawful activities," Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a press conference on Monday.

He said Moscow had to date not received any official inquiries from Podgorica regarding the alleged coup.

Djukanovic has been Montenegro's latest prime minister since 2012, but he had also served in that position three more times: From 1991 to 1998, from 2003 to 2006, and from 2008 to 2010. Djukanovic has also served as the president of Montenegro from 1998 to 2002.

In the October parliamentary elections, Djukanovic's party topped but failed to achieve the overall majority.

The prime minister has recently announced his resignation, and President Filip Vujanovic on Wednesday designated deputy PM Dusko Markovic to take over soon.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Thousands Protest Trump's White House Win In Cities Across U.S.

RFE/RL November 10, 2016

Thousands of demonstrators have protested against Donald Trump's unexpected election as president in cities across the United States from Boston to Los Angeles.

The mostly peaceful protesters disrupted traffic, carried anti-Trump signs, and blasted the Republican real estate mogul on November 9 for his vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants as well as statements and actions that have offended Muslims, women, and others.

The demonstrations came despite Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who conceded defeat by saying the nation should give Trump a "chance to lead."

Clinton, who looks set to win the popular vote, conceded on November 9 that the election showed that "our nation is more deeply divided than we thought."

Trump will visit the White House on November 10 at the invitation of President Barack Obama.

In New York, thousands of protesters filled the streets of midtown Manhattan and made their way to Trump Tower, Trump's home on Fifth Avenue. Hundreds of others gathered at a Manhattan park and shouted, "Not my president."

In downtown Chicago, an estimated 1,800 people gathered outside the Trump International Hotel and Tower, chanting phrases like "No Trump! No KKK! No racist U.S.A."

In Boston, thousands of anti-Trump protesters streamed through downtown, chanting "Trump's a racist" and carrying signs that said "Impeach Trump" and "Abolish Electoral College."

In Seattle, police said they were responding to reports of a shooting with multiple victims near the scene of anti-Trump protests. Police said the shooting was unrelated to the demonstrations.

The protests were concentrated in coastal cities that voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, but also occurred in cities in the midwest and south like Richmond, Virginia; Omaha, Nebraska; and Kansas City.

In Austin, the Texas capital, about 400 people marched through the streets, police said.

Protesters railed against Trump's campaign pledge to build a wall along the border with Mexico to keep immigrants from entering the United States illegally.

Marchers chanted and carried signs in front of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Another group stood outside the White House. They held candles, listened to speeches, and sang songs.

Protesters at American University in Washington burned U.S. flags on campus.

Hundreds also gathered in Philadelphia, Boston, and Portland, Oregon, and organizers said they were planning rallies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland, California, on November 10.

Trump's campaign did not immediately respond. Trump said in his victory speech on November 9 that he would be president for all Americans. "It is time for us to come together as one united people," he said.

Earlier this month, his campaign rejected the support of a Ku Klux Klan newspaper and said that "Mr. Trump and his campaign denounces hate in any form."

Early on November 9, some 1,500 students and teachers rallied in the courtyard of Berkeley High School, and marched toward the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, a San Francisco area haven for liberals.

Hundreds of high school and college students also walked out in protest in Seattle, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and three other Bay Area cities -- Oakland, Richmond, and El Cerrito.

A predominantly Latino group of about 300 high-school students walked out of classes in Los Angeles and marched to the steps of City Hall, where they held a brief but boisterous rally.

Chanting in Spanish, "The people united will never be defeated," the group held signs with slogans such as "Not supporting racism, not my president" and "Immigrants make America great."

Many of those students were members of the "Dreamers" generation, children whose parents brought them into the United States illegally, and who fear deportation under a Trump administration, school officials said.

The demonstrations followed a night of protests in the San Francisco area and elsewhere in the country in response to Trump's victory against Clinton, who was heavily favored.

In the only major violence reported, demonstrators smashed storefront windows and set garbage and tires ablaze late on November 8 in downtown Oakland.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and dpa

Source: http://www.rferl.org/a/thousands- protest-trump-white-house-win-cities-across- united-states-/28107496.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






In Moldova, Smears, Orthodox Church Target Pro-EU Candidate Ahead Of Runoff

Charles Recknagel November 10, 2016

As Moldova's presidential election heads for a runoff vote on November 13, pro-EU candidate Maia Sandu has become the target of increasing smear attacks by supporters of rival pro-Moscow candidate, Igor Dodon.

The attacks include a high-ranking leader of the powerful Moldovan Orthodox Church casting doubts on Sandu's morality because the candidate, 44, is neither married nor a mother. The church is part of the Russian Orthodox Church seated in Moscow, which is a strong supporter of the Kremlin.

Bishop Marchel, who heads the Moldovan Orthodox Church in the country's second-largest city of Balti, issued a statement November 4 saying Sandu's "attitude toward Christian morality...seems to diverge from normal principles."

That sparked an angry response from the candidate, who has previously stated her support for family and traditional values.

"I have never thought being a single woman is a shame," she told the weekly Ziarul de Garda. "Maybe it is a sin even to be a woman?"

Some of Sandu's supporters have launched an online petition -- signed so far by nearly 10,000 activists -- hitting back at the church by asking authorities to collect taxes on its lucrative sale of religious items.

The statement by the bishop ramps up what has been clear support for Dodon from key leaders of the Moldovan Orthodox Church but which had not previously turned into personal attacks on Sandu's character.

On October 28, church head Metropolitan Vladimir publicly backed Dodon in a sermon. It marked the first time in years that the church had waded into electoral politics at this level.

Moldovans are overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, but the Moldovan Orthodox Church competes for influence in the country with the Bessarabian Orthodox Church, which is part of the Romanian Orthodox Church seated in Bucharest. Leaders of the Bessarabian Orthodox Church have not publicly commented on the election.

The bishop's remarks are far from the only personal attacks aimed at Sandu since she finished second in the October 30 election. The former economist and former education minister, who heads the Party for Action and Solidarity (PAS), took 38 percent of the vote. Dodon, head of the Socialist Party, received 48 percent of ballots, falling just short of a majority and sending the election into a second round.

One of the most visible smear attacks has been an anonymous campaign to discredit her through widely distributed leaflets stating that her pro-EU platform includes supporting homosexuality and mass immigration.

The flyers, which have been distributed in many Moldovan cities, declare "Maia Sandu will hand over a devastated country to the refugees, the homosexuals, and those who want to unite it with Romania." The leaflets reportedly have been printed in all of the languages most spoken in Moldova: Moldovan, Romanian, Russian, and Gagauz.

Dodon told reporters on November 6 that his party has nothing to do with the anonymous leaflet campaign. The leaflets do not bear an obligatory notice that they have been approved as campaign material by the Justice Ministry.

Sandu's party also says it has been targeted by a smear campaign in which a money transfer of "unclear origin" arrived in its accounts following an appeal for funds. The PAS said on November 8 that it returned the money as soon as it learned it had come from Ilan Shor, a Moldovan industrialist on trial for financial fraud.

The presidential contest in Moldova is widely seen as pitting those who support closer integration with the European Union against those who want to expand relations with Russia. Dodon, a former economy minister, has said Moldova must rebuild trade and economic ties with Moscow.

The smear tactics follow months of campaigning in a race that saw nine candidates compete in the election on October 30 but which is now down to just the two strongest contenders -- from the pro-Russia and pro-EU camps. Both have repeatedly launched harsh attacks on their rival's policies, accusing one another of lying, cheating, and political cowardice.

Sandu has questioned Dodon's integrity as he has said he will use his experience as a former trade and economics minister to rapidly lift Russia's crippling economic embargoes on many of Moldova's key exports. She has demanded to know why Dodon did not seek to lift the embargoes when he held the position of economics minister from 2006 to 2009.

The Russian embargoes have intermittently targeted Moldovan wines, vegetables, and fruit since 2006 and are widely viewed as pressure upon Chisinau to cast its lot with Russia and not to join NATO and the EU, as neighboring Romania has done.

The Moldovan presidency is a largely ceremonial position, with executive power in the hands of the prime minister and parliament. But if the new president takes office with a strong popular mandate, he or she could wield considerable influence in setting the course of a former Soviet republic, which remains deeply divided over whether its future lies East or West.

The president is being elected by direct popular vote -- a change from the past 16 years, in which the head of state was elected by parliament.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Moldovan Service

Source: http://www.rferl.org/a/moldova- sandu-smears-orthodox-church-pro-eu- candidate-russia/28108474.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






UK, Norway Agree to Cooperate on Maritime Patrols, Winter Training

Sputnik News

19:02 10.11.2016(updated 19:03 10.11.2016)

In particular, the defense ministries of the two countries agreed to cooperate on a maritime patrol aircraft (MPA) to reduce costs and increase operational effectiveness.

MOSCOW(Sputnik)  The UK and Norwegian defense ministers agreed Thursday their militaries would work closer together on defending their maritime borders, the UK defense secretary said.

"By stepping up cooperation with Norway on maritime patrol, we will help keep Britain safer and more secure," Michael Fallon announced.

Fallon is on a trip to Norway where he met his counterpart, Ine Marie Eriksen Soreide, at the country's top military headquarters and visited an air force station in the town of Bodo close to the Arctic Circle.

He signed a new agreement with the Nordic nation to stage UK exercises in Norway. Every year, UK troops conduct winter training there.

The ministers also agreed to cooperate on a maritime patrol aircraft (MPA) to reduce costs and increase operational effectiveness. The UK Defense Ministry said last year it would buy nine Boeing P8 MPAs as part of its $221.7 billion defense equipment program.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






China's Vice Minister of Public Security Hongwei Elected Interpol Head

Sputnik News

09:32 10.11.2016(updated 09:45 10.11.2016)

According to reports, Chinese Vice Minister of Public Security Hongwei Meng was elected the new president of the International Criminal Police Organization.

BEIJING (Sputnik)  Chinese Vice Minister of Public Security Hongwei Meng was elected on Thursday the new president of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), to replace France's Mireille Ballestrazzi, the international organization said.

"#China's Hongwei Meng, Vice Minister of Public Security elected #President of INTERPOL by #INTERPOLGA," the organization said on Twitter.

At the same time, Russia's Alexander Prokopchuk, head of the Interpol's National Central Bureau in Moscow, was elected Interpol Vice President in the first time a Russian citizen took this post in the international organization, according to Interpol's Twitter account.

Prokopchuk was elected to the position with an overwhelming 127 votes in favor with only 10 against, and eight abstentions, a source told RIA Novosti.

The International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) is holding its 85th General Assembly on November 7-10 in Bali, Indonesia. The agenda of the four-day meeting reportedly includes threats posed by terrorists returning to their countries of origins after taking part in combat, as well as the rise of the use of social media as a terrorist recruiting tool.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Update: air strikes against Daesh

10 November 2016

British forces have continued to conduct air operations in the fight against Daesh

Latest update

- Monday 7 November  Typhoons destroyed rocket and mortar equipment near Bayji, while Reaper engaged four terrorist targets near Mosul and one near Raqqah.

- Tuesday 8 November  Typhoons bombed seven Daesh positions north-east of Mosul, a Reaper attacked three further targets near the city.

- Wednesday 9 November  A Reaper destroyed an armoured vehicle as it fired on Iraqi forces advancing on Mosul.

Detail

Although support to the Iraqi efforts to liberate Mosul is the highest priority for the Royal Air Force aircraft operating against Daesh, patrols over Syria and other areas of Iraq are also being maintained, and on Monday 7 November, a Typhoon mission armed with Paveway IV guided bombs destroyed a stockpile of rocket and mortar equipment to the north of Bayji, and a Reaper conducting armed reconnaissance near Raqqah struck a Daesh vehicle with a Hellfire missile. Near Mosul, a Reaper provided close air support to Iraqi forces. Daesh fighters were observed firing a recoilless anti-tank gun at the Iraqi troops, then loading the weapon into a vehicle. As the vehicle pulled away, it was destroyed by a Hellfire. The Reaper's crew then used a further three Hellfires, which have a very low risk of collateral damage, in successful attacks on groups of extremists as they engaged in street fighting with the Iraqi troops.

Reaper operations in the area continued on Tuesday 8 November, with our aircraft conducting three further Hellfire attacks on terrorist fighters, as well as providing targeting support to a coalition air strike which destroyed a mortar team. To the north-east of Mosul, a pair of Typhoon FGR4s used Paveway IVs to destroy seven Daesh positions.

On Wednesday 9 November, a Reaper spotted an armoured vehicle firing on Iraqi troops on the outskirts of Mosul, and destroyed it with a Hellfire.

Previous air strikes

Saturday 1 October: A Reaper provided surveillance support to a coalition air strike north-west of Mosul. It then used one of its own Hellfires to attack a Daesh position.

Sunday 2 October: A Reaper was again active north of Mosul, near Tall Kayf. A Hellfire destroyed a digger which was being used by the terrorists to construct a defensive position. To the east of Mosul, Tornados used an Enhanced Paveway II bomb and a Paveway IV to attack a headquarters building and a group of Daesh extremists. The same day, to the south-east of Mosul, near Qaraqosh, Typhoons used Paveway IVs in a simultaneous attack on three Daesh-held buildings where a large group of fighters had assembled, including local commanders. A second Typhoon pair meanwhile operated over a large swathe of Iraqi territory. North of Ramadi, they destroyed a mortar team. They then headed north to the Bayji area where further Paveway attacks dealt with a terrorist strongpoint and transport vehicle.

Monday 3 October: Royal Air Force Typhoons provided close air support to Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), attacking Daesh positions in eastern Syria. A group of terrorists were identified holding a building in a rural area. The SDF held back while the Typhoons conducted a successful strike, demolishing the target with Paveway IV guided bombs. Across the border in northern Iraq, Tornados provided support to Iraqi forces clearing Daesh from the Tigris valley south of Mosul. The aircraft used another Paveway IV to destroy a terrorist communications installation north of Al Hawd.

Tuesday 4 October: A Reaper remotely piloted aircraft conducted armed reconnaissance north of Mosul. The Reaper's crew located a large fuel tanker dug-in as part of the defensive positions constructed by Daesh near Batnay. The tanker was burning oil to create a smoke screen in order to shield Daesh fighters against attacking ground forces. The Reaper scored a direct hit with a GBU-12 guided bomb. The Reaper then provided surveillance support to a coalition air strike against nearby positions.

Wednesday 5 October: Tornados were again in action south of Mosul, where they bombed an armed truck. In central Iraq, Typhoons attacked a small group of terrorists who had been spotted north of Taji. Working in close concert with a coalition surveillance aircraft, the Typhoons successfully killed the extremists with two Paveway IV attacks.

Thursday 6 October: With Iraqi operations to isolate Mosul continuing, Royal Air Force aircraft continued to provide close air support on. To the north and west of the city, a Reaper successfully engaged with Hellfire missiles both a mortar team and a group of terrorists caught in the open. The same day, a Tornado mission used an Enhanced Paveway II guided bomb against the entrance to a Daesh tunnel network. In eastern Syria, Typhoons used a Paveway IV guided bomb in a successful attack on a Daesh command post.

Friday 7 October: Typhoons patrolled over western Iraq, where they used Paveway IVs to destroy two trucks carrying Daesh extremists as they drove along a desert track. In the Tigris valley south of Mosul, two Tornado flights supported Iraqi troops near Al Hawd and Sharqat. A Brimstone missile attack from one Tornado pair eliminated a mortar position, while the second pair used two Paveway IVs and a Brimstone in three attacks which accounted for a large, dispersed group of terrorists on the river bank.

Sunday 9 October: Tornados continued their work over the Tigris, when they destroyed a mortar team and a nearby ammunition stockpile near Qayyarah, with a pair of Paveway IVs. North of Mosul, a Reaper worked alongside two Typhoons. The Reaper provided surveillance support to a highly effective artillery bombardment that destroyed a Daesh training camp. It then tracked two terrorists as they moved to a rocket launching position, where they were seen working under the cover of some trees. A Hellfire missile killed the terrorists and the Typhoons then followed up with a Paveway IV attack to destroy the rockets.

Coalition aircraft have been providing intensive air support to Iraqi ground forces as they work to isolate Daesh terrorists holding Mosul. The Royal Air Force has been heavily committed to this operation, with Tornado, Typhoon and Reaper aircraft providing close air support, and Airseeker and Sentinel strategic surveillance aircraft gathering intelligence. On the ground British military instructors are, with coalition colleagues, helping train, mentor and equip many of the forces engaged in the Mosul operation.

Welcoming the start of operations to liberate Mosul, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said:

Daesh are on the back foot. The beginning of the encirclement of Mosul today is a big moment in our efforts to rid Iraq of Daesh. Mosul is a large and complex city and operations there will be tough but with Coalition support Iraqi forces will prevail.

Alongside our Coalition partners, the UK will continue to play a leading role in the air and on the ground, including through our strike missions, specialised surveillance, humanitarian support and the mentoring and training of Iraqi forces.

Monday 10 October: A pair of Typhoons from RAF Akrotiri used two Paveway IV guided bombs to destroy the entrances to tunnels beneath an embankment near Qaraqosh. They then flew to the north-west of Mosul where they used another Paveway to silence a mortar team on the northern bank of the Tigris, which had been firing on the advancing Kurdish forces. To the north-east of the city, two Tornados used an Enhanced Paveway II to destroy a terrorist anti-tank missile position. They then followed up with a Paveway IV to ensure the destruction of an associated ammunition supply point.

Tuesday 11 October: Tornados conducted another successful attack north-west of Mosul on a tunnel, which had been identified as a weapons cache.

Wednesday 12 October: An intensive series of strikes in northern Iraq. North of Mosul, near Tall Kayf, a Reaper scored a direct hit with a Hellfire missile on an artillery piece hidden beneath a tarpaulin. A Tornado pair used a Brimstone missile to destroy a rocket-armed truck in the Qayyarah region, while Typhoons bombed a mortar team north-east of Mosul. The Tornado and Typhoon flights then combined for a joint attack near Qaraqosh on a set of workshops manufacturing explosives. Seven Enhanced Paveway II and Paveway IV bombs, plus a Brimstone, were used to destroy the facility and a number of Daesh vehicles at the site. A second combined Tornado and Typhoon flight meanwhile headed to the south-west of Kirkuk, where they destroyed a truck-bomb facility with Enhanced Paveway II and Paveway IV weapons.

Friday 14 October: North-west of Mosul, Paveway IV-armed Typhoons successfully bombed five rocket launchers. They then moved to support a Reaper which had located a terrorist mortar position and ammunition stockpile. The Reaper attacked the mortar with a GBU-12 guided bomb, and the Typhoons followed up with a strike on the munitions stockpile.

Sunday 16 October: A Reaper again patrolled to the north-west of Mosul, where it engaged an artillery piece with a Hellfire, then provided targeting support to three attacks by coalition fast jets on terrorist mortar positions. One flight of Typhoons operated to the west of Mosul, using Paveway IVs to destroy two Daesh-held buildings, while a second flight operated to the east, attacking four terrorist positions.

Monday 17 October: A Reaper kept close watch on Daesh positions near Qaraqosh to the south-east of Mosul. Our aircraft provided surveillance support to a coalition fast jet attack on a terrorist mortar team. The Reaper then conducted attacks using its own weapons on four targets. These attacks included a GBU-12 guided bomb, which accounted for a mortar. Hellfire missiles also destroyed an armed truck and two heavy weapons teams, including one armed with a recoilless anti-tank gun which had opened fire on the advancing Iraqis. To the south of the city, a Typhoon flight was able to use a Paveway IV guided bomb to dispose safely of a large truck-bomb before it could be used.

Tuesday 18 October: A Reaper was again in action south-east of Mosul on Tuesday 18 October. A Hellfire missile killed a group of terrorists engaged in combat with Iraqi troops. A second Hellfire also accounted for another group of extremists as they moved between positions, and a third destroyed an armed truck. North-east of the city, a pair of Typhoons used Paveway IVs to destroy a number of improvised explosive devices laid in a defensive belt, as well as a weapons stockpile and a Daesh strong-point.

Wednesday 19 October: A Reaper scouted ahead of Iraqi troops advancing to the south-east of the city. A terrorist rocket-propelled grenade team were identified and eliminated using a Hellfire missile. The Reaper then provided surveillance support to two successful attacks by coalition fast jets on larger groups of terrorists, before conducting a further Hellfire attack itself. The aircraft's surveillance sensors then spotted a large armoured truck-bomb emerging from cover and being driven at speed towards an Iraqi unit. An immediate attack with a Hellfire missile struck the vehicle, which crashed out of control, and the would-be suicide bomber abandoned the truck and fled. Another group of terrorists were later identified and attacked with a fourth Hellfire. Meanwhile, to the north of Mosul, Paveway IV-armed Typhoons destroyed two Daesh-held buildings.

Thursday 20 October: Reaper support to the south-east of Mosul continued. Hellfire missiles destroyed a truck-mounted heavy machine-gun and another vehicle which had been spotted being loaded with a mortar and ammunition. Two more Daesh mortar teams were destroyed with a further Hellfire and a GBU-12 guided bomb. In the Tigris valley south of Mosul, a Tornado flight intervened in a combat between Iraqi troops and a dispersed group of terrorists. Two Paveway IVs accounted for the extremists. Meanwhile, two flights of Typhoons patrolled the northern arc around Mosul, where they engaged seven terrorist targets with Paveway IVs. These included: a rocket-launcher north-west of the city, a sniper team and a Daesh-held building to the north, and to the north-east a pair of heavy machine-guns, a strongpoint, and a command post which was controlling truck-bomb attacks.

Friday 21 October: A Reaper remotely piloted aircraft patrolled north of Mosul, using a Hellfire missile to destroy a Daesh mortar that had opened fire on Kurdish troops. The Reaper then moved south-east to support operations around Qaraqosh, where a coalition aircraft had spotted a fortified tunnel entrance. The Reaper's crew were able to destroy this with a direct hit from a GBU-12 guided bomb. Meanwhile, Typhoons from RAF Akrotiri, operated to the north and east of the city. Near Khursabad, they worked in close cooperation with a coalition surveillance aircraft to destroy a second tunnel entrance, in which terrorists were known to be hiding. To the north of Mosul, they attacked two mortar teams and a heavy machine-gun, and, near Bartallah, they destroyed an armoured truck-bomb positioned in the path of the advancing Iraqi troops. Further south, in the Tigris valley, a pair of Tornados used a Brimstone missile to destroy an armed truck. They then used a second Brimstone to engage a group of terrorists operating amongst houses south-east of Mosul. No collateral damage was caused.

Saturday 22 October: a Reaper flew overwatch for the Iraqi troops in and around Qaraqosh as they cleared remaining Daesh positions. The Reaper's crew used a Hellfire missile against several terrorists engaged in a firefight with the Iraqis. A second Hellfire then destroyed an anti-aircraft gun positioned in the street. A terrorist mortar was reported firing on friendly forces, and the Reaper successfully hunted this down and eliminated the threat with a GBU-12 guided bomb. A van was spotted supplying terrorist positions and was destroyed with a Hellfire, and a fourth missile accounted for another group of extremists caught in the open.

Sunday 23 October: Reaper operations continued, where one of our aircraft conducted a Hellfire attack on a truck loaded with terrorists. A second Hellfire killed other terrorists as they attempted to hide from the aircraft beneath a staircase in a ruined building. The Reaper employed a GBU-12 bomb to destroy a heavy machine-gun that was firing on Iraqi troops, then used a third Hellfire to destroy a well dug-in mortar near Bartallah. North-east of Mosul, a pair of Typhoons used two Paveway IVs to destroy a pair of machine-gun positions, then carried out a simultaneous attack against a total of five Daesh positions  two sniper teams, two mortars and another machine-gun  spread across a couple of miles of the front line. All five targets were struck accurately by Paveway IVs. An eighth Paveway was then used to destroy another mortar team. A second Typhoon flight was also active in the area, working closely with coalition surveillance aircraft, and dropped Paveway IVs against two Daesh strongpoints. Tornados also patrolled north-east of Mosul. The aircraft delivered attacks with an Enhanced Paveway II and two Paveway IVs that destroyed a machine-gun team, a terrorist defensive position and an armed truck.

Monday 24 October: A Tornado armed reconnaissance mission north-east of Mosul was diverted to deal with a terrorist team which a coalition aircraft had spotted planting booby-traps and improvised explosive devices. The team were struck by a 1000 lb Enhanced Paveway II bomb. Typhoons flew in the same area, using a Paveway IV against terrorists engaged in close combat with friendly forces, then, through heavy cloud, delivering a simultaneous strike against four sniper positions. The Iraqi forces reported direct hits on all four targets. Meanwhile, a Reaper flew further support as the Iraqis pushed on from Qaraqosh and Bartallah, and in the course of its mission the aircraft delivered five attacks. Two Hellfire missiles accounted for a terrorist group and a dug-in mortar. The Reaper then observed a number of Daesh fighters travelling on motorcycles, and followed them until they joined forces with a number of other extremists. The group were then struck with a Hellfire as they gathered outside a building. On the outskirts of Mosul, a total of six rocket-launchers were spotted by the Reaper, ready for firing. Four were destroyed by a GBU-12 bomb, then the other two by a Hellfire.

Tuesday 25 October: A Reaper patrolled the area around the village of Ali Rash, home to the Shabak minority, and destroyed an armed truck using a GBU-12 guided bomb. The Reaper's crew then tracked a group of Daesh fighters on foot and attacked them with a Hellfire missile. Before returning to base, the Reaper also provided targeting support to a coalition strike on a further Daesh position.

Wednesday 26 October: Reaper operations around Ali Rash continued. Our aircraft successfully located three terrorist mortar teams which were firing on Iraqi forces. The Reaper directed coalition fast jets to two of the mortars, both of which were subsequently destroyed, and took care of the third itself using a Hellfire. The Reaper's crew then tracked a terrorist in a car, who led them to a large group of extremists manning a defensive position. The Reaper was again able to call in coalition jets which eliminated the group with a salvo of precision guided bombs. A second Hellfire attack by the Reaper accounted for a smaller group of terrorists spotted moving on foot. North-east of Mosul, Typhoons provided close air support to an Iraqi advance and successfully used Paveway IV guided bombs to destroy four buildings which Daesh had fortified as strong-points.

Thursday 27 October: A Reaper patrolled to the north of Mosul. It kept a sustained watch on the area around a known Daesh supply point and tunnel entrance, ensuring no civilians were present in the area before coalition jets delivered a successful attack on both targets. It then provided surveillance support to a further coalition strike which destroyed a large truck-bomb. The Reaper later observed and destroyed three armed terrorists moving on a pair of motorcycles, using a single Hellfire missile.

Friday 28 October: With Iraqi forces closing in on the eastern edge of Mosul, a pair of Royal Air Force Tornados and a Reaper remotely piloted aircraft targeted Daesh terrorists in the area. The Reaper identified an artillery piece which several extremists were loading onto a large flat-bed lorry. The Reaper provided targeting support which allowed the Paveway-armed Tornados to destroy both the gun and the vehicle. The Reaper also supported a follow-up attack by coalition aircraft which destroyed an ammunition truck nearby. It then delivered its own strike with a Hellfire missile, which safely detonated a large truck-bomb hidden in trees.

Saturday 29 October: A Reaper patrolled south of Mosul, along the Tigris valley. West of Guwayr, the Reaper spotted a group of terrorists with rocket-propelled grenades firing at Iraqi troops, and was able to deliver a successful attack with a Hellfire. A second Hellfire accounted for a Daesh heavy weapons team, and our aircraft was also able to provide targeting for a coalition aircraft which killed a number of terrorists manoeuvring through woodland.

Sunday 30 October: A Reaper was again in action east of Mosul. Its crew successfully hunted down a mortar which had been firing on Iraqi positions. The mortar was subsequently destroyed by coalition fast jets. The Reaper used Hellfire missiles against a pair of terrorists moving at high speed on a motorcycle and a team armed with a recoilless anti-tank gun. It then facilitated three further coalition attacks against groups of terrorists, including another recoilless anti-tank weapon crew.

Monday 31 October: Tornados joined coalition aircraft from a number of other countries in a major coordinated attack on a former Iraqi military depot near Haditha in western Iraq. Intelligence had established that Daesh had set up workshops manufacturing weapons in a number of the bunkers at the site. The Tornados used Storm Shadow missiles, chosen because of their enhanced penetrative capabilities, to target several of these bunkers. Initial reports indicate that this large-scale coalition attack was a success. Operations around Mosul were not neglected however, with a Reaper supporting Iraqi troops as they cleared the village of Bazwaya, just to the east of the city. A Hellfire missile destroyed an armed truck, and the Reaper was also able to assist coalition air attacks against a mortar team and another Daesh position.

Tuesday 1 November: Tornados patrolled north of Mosul where they supported advancing Kurdish forces. A Paveway IV guided bomb destroyed a Daesh heavy machine-gun position when it opened fire on the Peshmerga, while an Enhanced Paveway II demolished a building in which a light machine-gun was sited. Meanwhile, to the south-east of the city, a Reaper provided further close air support to Iraqi troops. It conducted Hellfire attacks on a mortar team who were spotted firing, and two groups of terrorists, including individuals with rocket-propelled grenades. The Reaper also directed a successful coalition air attack onto a number of terrorists defending a trench network.

Wednesday 2 November: A combination of Typhoon and Tornado aircraft patrolled to the east of the city. Some distance to the south-east, they used a Paveway IV guided bomb to destroy a building from which a terrorist mortar team was operating. They then flew north to eliminate a sniper position with a second Paveway.

Thursday 3 November: Tornados struck two further targets north-east of Mosul. A Paveway IV destroyed a building from which Daesh extremists were firing on advancing ground forces, while a Brimstone missile accounted for a terrorist vehicle. South-east of the city, a Reaper flew overwatch for Iraqi troops as they pressed forwards. The Reaper's crew used all four of its Hellfire missiles against a mortar team seen firing from amidst trees, and three groups of terrorists as they fired on the Iraqis with rocket-propelled grenades, as well as attempting to set fire to piles of tyres to create a smokescreen. The Reaper was also able to provide surveillance support to two air strikes by coalition aircraft which destroyed a fortified position and an armed truck.

Friday 4 November: Reaper operations continued south-east of Mosul, with our aircraft directing a successful coalition air attack onto its target, a weapons dump, and using one of its own Hellfires to engage a group of terrorists on foot. Two Tornados struck close air support targets inside eastern Mosul itself, using Brimstone missiles to destroy an armed vehicle and a large truck-bomb. A Paveway also hit a group of terrorists which another coalition aircraft had been carefully tracking as they manoeuvred towards Iraqi troops. A second Tornado flight supported Iraqi operations elsewhere in the country, and north-east of Mosul used Paveway IV and Enhanced Paveway II bombs to destroy a cave occupied by Daesh in the hills above Bayji, as well as a nearby stock of equipment.

Saturday 5 November: Three Hellfire attacks were launched by a Reaper near Mosul, against a truck-bomb, a mortar and a rocket-propelled grenade team. The Reaper also assisted in a coalition strike against a second mortar. On Sunday 6 November, Paveway IV-armed Typhoons bombed a terrorist group in the Tigris valley south of Mosul, while Tornados used a Brimstone missile to destroy an armoured personnel carrier inside the city. On the outskirts, a Reaper tracked a terrorist driving a truck-bomb towards Iraqi troops, but the truck exploded prematurely as it drove over rough ground, negating any need for the Reaper to fire at it. The Reaper instead used its Hellfires against a truck being loaded with spare weapons, a recoilless anti-tank gun, a rocket-propelled grenade team and an armed truck.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






UK and Norway agree new cooperation on Maritime Patrol Aircraft

10 November 2016

The UK and Norway stepped up their defence relationship today, as Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon announced new cooperation on Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) and exercises.

Sir Michael, who visited Norway's top military headquarters, close to the Arctic Circle on Thursday, announced that the UK and Norway would work closer on Maritime Patrol Aircraft cooperation, including in reducing costs and increasing operational effectiveness.

The UK announced that it would procure nine Boeing P8 MPA in last year's Strategic Defence and Security Review. The new capability, which will be based in Scotland, will allow for enhanced situational awareness in key areas such as the North Atlantic, and will also further increase the protection of the UK's nuclear deterrent and our two new aircraft carriers.

Sir Michael also visited Norway's Bod Main Air Station, home of two F-16 squadrons and a squadron of Search and Rescue Sea King helicopters, where he signed a new agreement on host nation support for UK exercises in the country, further increasing the UK and Norway's ability to exercise, train and operate together. Mr Fallon welcomed the fact that British armed forces undertake yearly winter training in Norway, particularly 3 Commando Brigade in Harstad and Evenes and elements of Joint Helicopter Command at Bardufoss.

Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said:

"Britain needs Maritime Patrol Aircraft to keep watch over the seas. As part of our 178 billion defence equipment programme, we've committed to new maritime patrol aircraft that are able to monitor threats to Britain and our armed forces."

"By stepping up cooperation with Norway on maritime patrol, we will help keep Britain safer and more secure."

The Defence Secretary arrived in Norway following meetings with the Northern Group countries on Wednesday in Copenhagen, where he reaffirmed the UK's commitment to European defence. As part of this, the Defence Secretary announced that 5 Battalion The Rifles would lead the UK's battalion in Estonia next year, part of NATO's Enhanced Forward Presence in the East.

Work on the UK's MPA programme is progressing well, including the investment on infrastructure in Lossiemouth in Scotland, where the planes will be based. Former armed forces personnel who previously served on UK Nimrod are also re-joining the RAF to help operate the future P-8s. 12 have recently re-joined and more will re-join in the future.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






US Says Its Airstrikes Killed 64 Civilians in Iraq, Syria

By VOA News November 10, 2016

The United States military said Wednesday its airstrike campaign targeting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria killed 64 civilians and injured 8 others during the past year.

The new numbers released by U.S. Central Command bring the official total number of civilians killed since the operation began in August 2014 to 119 with another 37 injured.

Rights groups and monitors say the real number is much higher. Amnesty International reported in October that airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition appeared to have killed more than 300 people in Syria alone during the past two years.

Pentagon data shows U.S. forces are responsible for about two-thirds of all coalition airstrikes.

Wednesday's new casualty figures do not include an airstrike in July in the northern Syrian city of Manbij, where residents and rights groups said more than 50 civilians were killed. The U.S. military is still investigating that attack.

Central Command spokesman Col. John Thomas said there are teams that work to prevent "unintended civilian casualties."

"Sometimes civilians bear the brunt of military action but we do all we can to minimize those occurrences even at the cost of sometimes missing the chance to strike valid targets in real time," he said in a statement.

Since the airstrikes began -- first in Iraq in August 2014, then in Syria a month later -- there have been more than 16,000 by the coalition at a cost of about $12 million per day. In October, the coalition reported an average of about 10 airstrikes each day in both Iraq and Syria.

Wednesday's announcement included dates and approximate locations of each airstrike the U.S. determined killed or injured civilians. The biggest cluster was located in the area around Mosul, Iraq, where Iraqi forces backed by coalition airstrikes are trying to regain control from the militants.

Between April 9 and June 15, Central Command reported that six airstrikes near Mosul killed 14 people and injured two.

In addition to the July strike in Manbij that is under investigation and not included on the list, there were four airstrikes in that area that killed eight people and injured one.

Overall deaths related to terrorism and armed conflict in Iraq have fallen since a spike in mid-2014 that coincided with the Islamic State group gaining control over large areas of northern and western Iraq and eastern Syria. But October was the deadliest month for civilians in two years, with more than 1,100 killed, according to United Nations data.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Afghanistan May Have to Accommodate 1.5 Million Refugees in 2016

By Hasib Danish Alikozai November 10, 2016

Afghanistan will reportedly take in more than 1.5 million Afghan refugees by the end of the year, challenging the government at a time when Kabul is already struggling against resurgent Taliban militants and an emerging Islamic State group (IS).

Based on figures compiled by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), some 20 percent of Afghanistan's population already are former refugees known as "returnees." Many of them, along with internally displaced Afghans and Afghans living in "refugee like" conditions, are part of a group of people the United Nations calls "people of concern." The U.N. says this group of people has grown by 33 percent in 2015, and numbers more than 1.7 million people who are in desperate need of assistance.

The new arrivals will only add to those numbers.

According to Afghan officials, the refugees now returning are traveling from Iran and Europe but a vast majority are from Pakistan.

"This year until November around 800,000 Afghanistan have returned from Pakistan and Iran and we anticipate that the number will rise to a million Afghans by the end of the year, mainly from Pakistan," said Hafizullah Miakhil, spokesperson for the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation.

"Our strategy in regards to the returning refugees to Afghanistan has always been about volunteer, dignified, manageable and gradual return of the Afghan refugees from neighboring countries as well as Europe," Miakhil said.

Miakhil confirmed that there will be a substantial increase in the number of Afghan refugees returning to Afghanistan in 2016, but he said "putting the number at 1.5 million refugees would be stretching it a bit too far".

Afghan government readiness

Managing the influx of over a million refugees to go along with the Afghan government's conservative statistics will still put the Afghan National Unity government in a difficult position as it tries to strike a balance between security needs and refugee resettlement programs. This at a time when the ongoing war with the Taliban and Islamic State has already displaced tens of thousands of Afghans across the country.

However, Hafizullah Miakhil of the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation told VOA that Afghan government is prepared for the influx to the extent that the process is in line with the government's overall policy and strategy at the ministry level.

"As far as our readiness to accommodate these returnees is concerned, Afghans who are returning from Pakistan, Iran and Europe and who are registered with UNHCR will be given around $400 per person along with some other resettlement assistance," Miakhil said. "Those who are not registered refugees, IOM will be providing them with help."

Miakhil said the Afghan government has allocated money for those returning to Afghanistan and based on a presidential decree, refugees will be provided with a piece of land as well.

Afghans returning to Afghanistan have been classified by the Afghan government and the United Nations into registered and non-registered refugees where the former category falls under the UNHCR's sphere of responsibility and the latter falls under the International Organization of Migrants (IOM).

IOM's Kabul office public relations officer Nasir Ahmad Haidarzai told VOA that his organization has helped or will help over half a million unregistered returnees from Iran and Pakistan.

"So far this year around five hundred and eighty thousand Afghans without refugee documents returned to Afghanistan of which over 200,000 are from Pakistan and the remaining are from Iran," Haidarzai said.

"We have regional offices in Kandahar, Nangarhar, Nimruz and Herat provinces where refugees returning to Afghanistan are provided with aid and assistance which comprise of food items provided by the WFP [World Food Program] and medicines provided by UNICEF," Haidarzai said.

Imposters' dilemma

Given the $400 aid per person, some are concerned that the financial aid will encourage genuine refugees to fake repatriation temporarily or allow others to impersonate refugees.

Alizai from southern Afghanistan's Helmand province who like many Afghans go by one name told VOA that people have already begun to take advantage of the lucrative journey between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"There are people in Waish [border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan] who are making fake refugee cards and taking $350 from UNHCR," Alizai said. "I have personally seen this. In fact people I know who are residents of Helmand and have not been refugees at all are claiming the refugee status to get the allocated assistance."

Alizai added that this problem makes it difficult for those who are genuine refugees to get the assistance that they deserve.

The refugees who have returned to Afghanistan are living in difficult conditions.

"We are in touch with them, those who left our camp are not happy at all. They have not been resettled in their home provinces in Afghanistan. They are either in Jalalabad or in Kabul and living in rental places," Kashmir Khan, an Afghan refugee living in Haripur refugee camp in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa area told VOA.

"The money they received from UNHCR has already been spent on rent and food and they are faced with financial difficulties now. It is not only about returning. It is about building a shelter and starting a new life which requires sustained support." Khan added.

400% increase in returnees from Europe

Before the Brussels international conference on Afghanistan last month, Kabul and the EU struck an agreement to return Afghan nationals who do not fulfill the conditions to stay in the European Union. The agreement states that those who choose not to voluntarily return will be forcibly returned once their administrative and judicial appeals have been exhausted.

Some media reports have linked continuing EU financial aid to Afghanistan's ability to accept those Europe returnees. That could number up to an estimated 80,000 Afghans who have immigrated to Europe in the last year or two.

An official at the Afghan presidential palace, speaking to VOA on condition of anonymity, confirmed the negotiations between the Afghan government and the European Union. However, he did not confirm the returnee number published in the media.

Nasir Ahmad Haidarzai, public relations officer at IOM in Kabul told VOA that his organization has recorded an increase of 400% in the number of Afghans returning from Europe.

"Since the beginning of the year until now we have processed 6,000 Afghans who returned from Europe voluntarily comparing to 1,400 Afghans who returned from Europe during the same period in 2015," Haidarzai said.

Gulwali Passarlay, a former refugee and author of the "Lightless Sky" who is a British-based refugee rights advocate told VOA the EU did sign an agreement with the Afghan government.

"I was in Brussels during the Brussels conference and we had a small protest as well against the deal where the EU has asked the Afghan government to accept those Afghan refugees whose asylum cases have been rejected by the European Union," Passarlay said. "There is even discussion that a new terminal will be built in Kabul airport which will be specifically used to transfer Afghans from Europe to Afghanistan."

Afghans trying to reach European shores not only risk their lives by embarking on the dangerous journey, they also spend thousands of dollars - often times borrowed from others or accumulated through the sale of land and property.

Mohammad Jaan Safi, who works as a mason in Kabul, earning about $6 a day, said the journey is not financially worth it, but some people are forced by circumstance to flee. He also blames the government for not doing more to improve people's circumstances.

"The main problem is the government itself. It has been 15 years and they [government] are yet to tackle corruption which has impact on all other sectors including the security."

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Trump's Challenge: The Powerful Women of NATO

By Luis Ramirez November 10, 2016

When he takes office as U.S. president, Donald Trump will work shoulder to shoulder with leaders of NATO's top member states, who happen to be women, and observers are expecting some awkward moments.

During the presidential campaign, Trump was accused of having a disrespectful attitude toward women. The concern adds to questions of whether he will sustain the U.S. commitment to defend members of the world's most powerful alliance.

Trump stunned NATO and defense analysts when he told The New York Times during his campaign that the United States would defend NATO members against Russian aggression only if they paid their bills and made fair contributions to the alliance.

"Donald Trump and what he represents with respect to NATO, in particular, is dangerous," said Christine Cheng, a professor in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. "He is going straight at the heart of the alliance and even the idea of calling that into dispute, I think, terrifies a lot of [countries], particularly the eastern European countries."

Analysts like Cheng say it is not only his stance on NATO that gets the president-elect off to a shaky start with alliance members. Distasteful remarks about women revealed during the campaign could present challenges when dealing with influential leaders, who include British Prime Minister Theresa May and Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"I think that Mrs. May and Mrs. Merkel will be extremely professional and cordial," Cheng said. "Having said that, it is difficult to imagine, as a woman, how one could overlook the things he has said and the things that he has done."

There is general agreement that Trump, May, and Merkel have one thing in common: They are all business when it matters.

"I think Mrs. Merkel, who in some ways I think is much more of a European than Theresa May is, I think she's going to regard Mr. Trump as a kind of United States phenomenon, in a way which just says this country, this extraordinarily rich and vital country, produces all kinds of ideas and people who are extraordinary in European terms," said Mary Evans, a professor at the London School of Economics' Gender Institute.

In congratulating Trump on his victory, Merkel, according to some observers, appeared to lay out a few conditions for her future interactions with him.

She said Germany and America are bound together by a long list of values that include respecting people's dignity regardless of gender.

"On the basis of these values," Merkel said, "I am offering to work closely with the future president of the United States, Donald Trump."

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Chinese Veteran Law Enforcement Official to Head Interpol

By Aline Barros November 10, 2016

A Chinese senior public security official is the new head of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol).

Interpol says delegates at its 85th General Assembly in Bali, Indonesia elected China's Vice Public Security Minister, Meng Hongwei, as president.

"We currently face some of the most serious global public security challenges since World War II.  Interpol should continue to adhere to these principles and strategies, while further innovating our work mechanisms, in order to adapt to the changing security situation we see today," Meng said.

China's official Xinhua news agency reports that Hongwei is the first Chinese to hold the position. He is taking over from Mireille Ballestrazzi of France for a four-year term.

Human rights groups raised concerns about the Chinese official holding the post.

"We have looked at cases in the past where it seems that China has abused Interpol's system to target particularly Uighur dissidents who, as far as we know, have committed no crime under international standards," William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International, told AFP.

Nee added that Meng's position as head of the organization could potentially boost China's campaign to capture alleged economic criminals, including officials living abroad who have been accused of corruption as part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-graft operation.

Since becoming president in 2012, Xi has launched an extensive anti-corruption drive and China filed a list of 100 most-wanted suspects with Interpol in 2014.

"We attach high importance to the important role Interpol played in international law enforcement cooperation and would like to promote global law enforcement security [cooperation]. In this field, China is willing to take more responsibilities and make a bigger contribution," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said.

Interpol's constitution says "it is strictly forbidden for the organization to undertake any intervention of a political, military, religious or racial character."

Meng is a veteran policeman and the agency said he has made "a significant contribution to promoting international police cooperation."

China joined Interpol in 1984.

The next general assembly is scheduled to take place in Beijing in 2017. In 2018 officials will meet in Kampala, Uganda.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






President-elect Trump Now Focusing on Filling Top Foreign Policy Posts

By Wayne Lee November 10, 2016

With a stunning presidential victory behind him, Donald Trump now turns his attention to filling Cabinet positions that will be instrumental in shaping America's foreign policy over the next four years.

Among the issues Trump's administration must address are global terrorism, instability in the Middle East, tension in eastern Europe along the Russian border, and China's growing global military and economic influence.

Immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump's campaign, is expected to be a high priority, as Trump has vowed to build an "impenetrable physical wall" along the border the United States shares with Mexico.

To effectively execute on the foreign policy front, the president-elect will need to surround himself with extremely knowledgeable people who can make reasonable proposals, according to Charles Stevenson at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

"The president-elect appears to have a short attention span," Stevenson said in an interview with VOA. "He's not into the ruminative seminar-type situations like President [Barack] Obama and former President [Bill] Clinton were. He wants to be decisive quickly, and that means those presentation skills would be very important."

The pool of experienced candidates from which Trump can draw may be smaller than usual for incoming presidents. In his first major foreign policy address in April, Trump promised to avoid experienced people "who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war."

Council of Foreign Relations Visiting Fellow Elizabeth Saunders told VOA the backlash resulting from Trump's position may force the president-elect to search outside the traditional pools of candidates.

"The problem is many of those people have signed pledges never to work for him  and it's partly because they may find him unacceptable, but it's also because he is really at odds on many issues with the Republican foreign policy establishment," she said.

If potential candidates changed their minds and would be willing to accept an administration position, Sanders questioned whether Trump would accept them.

"If he did have them, would he listen to them?" she asked.

Trump has generally remained mum on who will fill positions that play key roles in foreign policy issues, but here are some names that are being circulated:

Secretary of state

Former House Speaker and close Trump adviser Newt Gingrich is being widely mentioned for the position, one that Stevenson says may not be suited to Gingrich's strengths.

"Gingrich as Speaker of the House was a very skilled political tactician. I'm not really aware of any distinctive foreign policy views that he's expressed over the years," Stevenson said.

Also being mentioned as candidates are Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

Secretary of defense

Close Trump adviser and U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions could join the new administration in this capacity. Other names mentioned are former Senator Jim Talent and former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Homeland Security secretary

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's name is being circulated for this job. The conservative sheriff of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, David Clarke, has also been mentioned as a candidate.

Treasury secretary

Trump has publicly said he wants his campaign finance chairman, Goldman Sachs alumnus Steven Mnuchin, to fill this post.

Commerce secretary

Trump economic adviser and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross could fill this post. Other names being mentioned are former Texas Governor Rick Perry, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and former steelmaker executive and Trump trade adviser Dan DiMicco.

Attorney-General

The name most prominently mentioned for the nation's top law enforcement officer is former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The former U.S. attorney and assistant attorney general is apparently not shy about expressing his interest in the job.

"I certainly have the energy and nobody knows the Justice Department better than me," Giuliani said Thursday morning on CNN.

Other possibilities include New Jersey Governor Christie and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Women

As to whether Trump will consider women for Cabinet-level or other top positions, Stevenson of Johns Hopkins said, "I don't think Trump would play identity politics the way most Democrats would, where they want to be sure that the people in the Cabinet, the people around them, reflect the diversity of America."

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Russia Says Its Officials Were in Contact With Trump Campaign

By VOA News November 10, 2016

Russian government officials were in contact with members of Donald Trump's campaign prior to Tuesday's election, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Thursday.

"Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage," Ryabkov told the Interfax news agency. "Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions. I cannot say that all of them but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives."

Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks denied the claim, consistent with Trump's denial throughout the campaign that he had any contact with the Russian government.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Bloomberg News that Russian Embassy staff met with members of Trump's campaign, which she called "normal practice." She said that Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign, however, had refused similar requests.

During the election campaign, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin exchanged compliments and expressed interest in improving relations.

On the thorny issues of Russia's military actions in Ukraine and Syria, Trump leaned to Moscow's positions more than his own Republican Party.

Putin congratulated Trump on his election victory, news of which was met with applause in Russia's parliament Wednesday.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Trump Win Fuels Fears, Celebrations in Australia

By Phil Mercer November 10, 2016

Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has spoken with U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, who said the long-standing alliance between the two nations was of great importance to Washington.

"Barking mad" and "a revolting slug" were just some of the words Australian politicians used to describe Donald Trump in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election.

But now both sides of Australian politics are promising to work with President-elect Trump, and they have chosen to be pragmatic.

Military alliance

At stake is Australia's most important military alliance - that with the United States, which dates back to the early 1950s. It provides a security blanket that lies at the core of the Australian psyche.

Turnbull, who strongly criticized Trump's crass comments about women during the campaign, congratulated the American president-elect, reaffirming the importance of a strong bilateral relationship.

"Americans understand they have no stronger ally and no better friend than Australia. And the enduring national interests of our two countries are such that our relationship will continue to be strong. We'll continue to work together as we have done with many presidents in years past to take on the challenges of our time," Turnbull said.

Australia's former prime minister, Tony Abbott, also has congratulated Donald Trump, writing on Twitter that the United States has a new leader "who appreciates that middle America is sick of being taken for granted."

Pauline Hanson, head of the far right anti-immigration One Nation party, celebrated Trump's victory with champagne on the lawns outside parliament house in Canberra.

She sees the president-elect as a fellow outcast, and has savored his stunning victory.

"I am thrilled. I am thrilled with Donald Trump winning the presidency in America and I think they need a change. They are screaming out for change and that is evident in the polls," Hanson said.

Congratulating Trump on his victory, she tweeted that her "door will always be open" for him.

Australian share prices fell by almost four percent as news of Donald Trump's victory emerged, but has since recovered much of that lost ground.

Media commentary in Australia has been mixed. Some opinion columns have warned that a Trump presidency will fuel a trade war with China, Australia's most important commercial partner, as well as bigotry and xenophobia.

However, a Sydney tabloid told its readers that "the silent majority has roared. The underdog has triumphed. The outsiders have given a black eye to the Establishment."

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






4 Dead, 100 Wounded in Taliban Attack on German Consulate in Afghanistan

By Ayaz Gul November 11, 2016

Suicide bomb attacks late Thursday at the German consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif killed at least four people and left more than 100 wounded, mostly civilians.

Only unofficial casualty estimates were available early Friday, provided by a doctor at a hospital in Mazar-i-Sharif, one of Afghanistans major cities. Some of the wounded taken to the hospital were in serious condition.

Taliban fighters in northern Afghanistan heavily damaged the consulate after fighting their way into the building during an intense gun battle that lasted for hours. The initial blast outside the German compound came from a truck bomb explosion that blew apart a protective barrier around the consulate, shaking buildings and breaking windows over a wide area.

A spokesman for the Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan said several heavily armed Taliban suicide bombers stormed the German consulate moments after the initial explosion, which occurred after 11 p.m. local time. With a direct route to the consulate buildings cleared by the first blast, a local police official said another suicide attacker rammed his explosives-filled car into the front wall of the main building.

NATO troops and Afghan security forces said they were securing the building and preparing to evacuate consulate staff. The operation apparently was prolonged by concerns that more explosives may have been planted by the attackers.

Afghan authorities said they sealed off the area around the German diplomatic compound, a former hotel. Reports from the scene said NATO helicopters were monitoring the fighting from above.

The Taliban said their assault was a revenge attack to retaliate for an airstrike earlier this month in neighboring Kunduz province. The insurgents said a bombing run by U.S. warplanes killed 32 civilians, including a number of children.

The airstrikes have triggered impassioned demonstrations in nearby Kunduz city, with victims relatives displaying mutilated bodies of dead children in a parade of trucks through the streets.

U.S. authorities are investigating the circumstances of the airstrike, but they have said it very likely was carried out by American warplanes. The air raid came after a Taliban assault that killed two American soldiers and three members of Afghan special forces.

The German government convened a crisis meeting before dawn in Berlin to gather information about the consulate attack. Germany has 983 soldiers serving with NATO forces in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh province, whose capital is Mazar-i-Sharif.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






On North Korea, Trump Could Change Everything

By Brian Padden November 10, 2016

After winning the U.S. presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump has tried to reassure allies in Northeast Asia that are apprehensive at the possibility he may follow through on the radical policy changes he suggested during the campaign.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke to the president-elect to stress the need for close cooperation between their two nations to maintain peace and stability in Asia, according to an official in Tokyo. Abe is also planning to meet with Trump in November before traveling to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Peru.

During a phone call with South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Thursday, the U.S. president-elect said, "We are with you all the way, and we will not waver," according to a statement from the Seoul presidential office.

Burden sharing

During the presidential campaign, the Republican nominee refused to say if he would unconditionally support the longstanding U.S. extended deterrence policy to defend allies in Asia against a North Korean nuclear attack.

Instead, he voiced sharp criticism of South Korea and Japan for not bearing enough of the financial burden for American forces stationed in their countries. And Trump threatened to pull out troops and allow regional allies to acquire their own nuclear weapons if they could not come to better financial terms.

The South Korean Defense Ministry said Thursday the division of defense costs from their perspective is fair and has been determined by negotiations that included the current U.S. administration, the U.S. forces in Korea and Congress.

Nor is Seoul willing to pay for the U.S. missile defense system THAAD to be deployed in Korea, said Defense Ministry Spokesman Moon Sang-kyun.

"We already have expressed many times that we are not willing to purchase it. THAAD has been already decided between the administrations of South Korea and the U.S., and is proceeding normally, so we judge that there will be no such problem," he said.

North Korea

North Korean state media has urged Trump to help unify the Korean peninsula by withdrawing American forces from South Korea. During the campaign, Trump indicated he would consider this option if Washington and Seoul could not agree on a fairer burden-sharing agreement.

An editorial about Trump appeared in the DPRK Today state media outlet. It also called him a "wise politician" and "far-sighted presidential candidate."

The president-elect's perceived willingness to consider an unconventional approach to regional security in Asia may create new possibilities for negotiations that have stalled over the North's repeated nuclear and missile tests, the U.S.-led efforts to increase sanctions against Pyongyang, and China's reluctance to impose harsh measures that might cause instability at its border or the collapse of its ally.

But North Korea analyst Van Jackson says it also comes with risk, as the North could read any friction among U.S. allies as a lack of resolve.

"They see the lack of certainty about us coming to South Korea's aid, and that could translate into a window of opportunity in their minds," said Jackson, who is an associate professor at the U.S. Defense Department's Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, but his views do not represent the positions of the U.S. government.

Possible negative outcomes of a U.S. withdrawal from the region, Jackson says, would include North Korea staging an attack against the South, China increasing its power in Asia, and the U.S. suffering from reduced influence and trade in the region.

In January, Trump called North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a "maniac" but gave the young leader credit for ruthlessly seizing power. At the same time he emphasized that the U.S. must be tough in dealing with any provocations, saying, "This guy doesn't play games. And we can't play games with him."

But on how to deal with the growing North Korean threat, Trump has been vague other than to say he would be willing to meet with the North Korean leader over a hamburger.

While Trump has opened up the possibly for radical change with his comments, some leaders in his party, such as Senator John McCain, have tried to reassure allies in the region that the U.S. would fulfill its security commitment to Asia and maintain the current North Korea policy that focuses on deterrence, containment and increasing pressure on the Kim government to halt its nuclear program.

But on Thursday, the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling Workers' Party, reaffirmed Pyongyang's position that it will never give up its nuclear weapons saying, "Washington's hope for North Korea's denuclearization is an outdated illusion."

Human rights

President-elect Trump, who has expressed admiration for some authoritarian leaders, such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, has not yet addressed international efforts to hold North Korean leaders accountable for widespread and systematic human rights abuses.

In 2014, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea issued a report documenting a network of political prisons in the country holding 120,000 people and a list of atrocities that include "forced labor, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence."

Pyongyang's allies, China and Russia, have reportedly put on hold a U.N. Security Council measure to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director of the advocacy group Human Rights Watch says he is concerned that the president-elect will overlook rights abuses in the North to achieve some concession from Pyongyang on its nuclear program.

"We are going to have to work on Donald Trump. We are going to have to push him very hard on human rights issues" he said.

Youmi Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






German Parliament Backs Cabinet Bid to Prolong, Expand Anti-Daesh Operations

Sputnik News

22:12 10.11.2016

The German parliament backed the government proposal on Thursday to extend military deployment to a Turkish base and to provide personnel for NATO spy jets to monitor Daesh in Syria.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Bundestag lawmakers voted 445-139 in favor of the initiative with two abstentions, amid concerns from the opposition this could be interpreted as endorsement of Ankara's policies.

German military mandate abroad needs to be renewed every year. Last month, the cabinet also agreed to send German pilots to Turkey to fly NATO's Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) reconnaissance planes in Syria as part of an international effort to defeat Daesh.

Niels Annen, of the Social Democratic Party, a junior partner in the ruling coalition, rejected accusations from the leftist Linke faction that continued German military presence at the Incirlik airbase was against the law.

He said this mandate was not a sign of support of Turkey "and surely not of the Turkish government," but a contribution to the fight against Daesh "and therefore our own security."

Ties between Turkey and Germany have been strained after Ankara barred German lawmakers from visiting Bundeswehr troops at the southern airbase and, most recently, over its post-coup crackdown on opposition and dissidents.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Modi Quick to Hail Trump Win as India Sees Upturn in Ties

Sputnik News

17:09 10.11.2016(updated 19:11 10.11.2016)

In contrast to the Indian industry's cautious, the political class is laying down the red carpet for US President-elect Donald Trump. It is hoping the convergence between the Modi Government and Trump on identifying Pakistan as a nursery for terrorists will lead to an uptick in ties between India and the US.

New Delhi (Sputnik)  Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wasted no time in congratulating Donald Trump and hoped bilateral ties under his Presidency will reach new heights.

The cue for high expectations from Trump is because of his backing for India's stand on terrorism especially cross border terrorism emanating from across the border. India sees Trump as an important ally when the US sallies out to counter terrorism under his Presidency. Indian Governments have believed that previous US administrations have been soft on Pakistan despite its clear culpability in fomenting terrorism in Afghanistan and India.

"India and the US are already important allies. We visualize much closer Indo-US ties during Trump's Presidency because he will be tougher on terrorism, especially its haven in Pakistan. In fact, a India-US-Russia axis could emerge in Asia," K P Vijayalakshmi, Professor at the Centre of American Studies in the Jawaharlal Nehru University told Sputnik.

Joseph Kruzich, Spokesperson of the US Embassy in New Delhi also appeared optimistic. "We can see a further strengthening of bonds. I think the trajectory of the India-US relations will be upward as both the countries are cooperating in several areas," he told Sputnik.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Iraq: Fostering reconciliation should complement military victories against ISIL, Security Council told

9 November 2016  Alongside liberating the country's territory from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da'esh), it is essential that processes are undertaken to "capture the hearts and minds" of all Iraqis from all parts of Iraq for it to be peaceful and united, the United Nations envoy to the country told the Security Council today.

"The rebuilding of infrastructure, restoration of essential services, rule of law, schools and employment are ever more important to restore confidence in the Government," the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Iraq, Jan Kubis, told the Council.

"Returns of IDPs [internally displaced people] holds the key to rebuilding Iraq's solid societal fabric. It is part of the reconciliation and healing," he added, noting that in general, the pace of returns in the previously liberated despite the Government's and international community's efforts is rather slow.

Making special mention of the operation against ISIL in Mosul, Mr. Kubis said that the efforts of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), the Peshmerga, the Popular Mobilization Forces and allied tribal and local volunteers are making steady progress in liberating the city, while trying to avoid excessive risks to the civilian populations.

"This liberation operation marks the beginning of the end of the so-called 'Da'esh caliphate' in Iraq," he underscored.

He also called on local leaders to ensure that the grievances of the past are addressed and a way is found to live together "after ISIL in justice and equality for all."

"Reconciliation at both community and national level is the way to make military victories against ISIL sustainable, to make Iraq truly peaceful and united," he highlighted.

In his briefing, Mr. Kubis also informed the Council of credible reports of the group forcing tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children to relocate inside the city, effectively using them as human shields, as well as the killing civilians who refuse to comply with their instructions or those who previously belonged to the ISF, including 232 civilians who were reportedly shot dead on 26 October.

He added that as of yesterday, some 35,000 people have been displaced due to the fighting in Mosul, and Iraqi authorities have been providing them transport to emergency sites, where some 20,000 are presently being housed, while many others, he said, have found shelter in host communities.

The UN envoy further reported that humanitarian agencies continue their preparations for mass displacement as well as for the upcoming winter.

Mr. Kubis, also the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), noted that the Mission had referred a few sporadic reports, mostly of individuals committing "ad hoc acts of revenge" against captured ISIL fighters to the Iraqi Government for investigation and appropriate action.

"The Government must continue its efforts to prevent such incidents from occurring and to investigate and punish any such incidents should they occur," he reiterated.

Further in his briefing, the UN official also called on the Governments of Iraq and Turkey to "tone down" their rhetoric and accelerate bilateral efforts to find a mutually acceptable resolution to the presence of Turkish troops.

He also informed the Council of the activities of the UN in Iraq, including UNAMI's technical advice to Iraq on a number of laws, including one related to prevention of sexual and gender-based as well as the work of UN Development Programme (UNDP) and other UN entities.

Also, speaking on the issue of missing Kuwaiti and third-country nationals, as well as Kuwaiti property, including the National Archives, he said the Government of Iraq was injecting much-needed energy and momentum into bolstering efforts to find missing persons.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Pentagon Spokesman: Iraqi Troops Force Defensive Choices for ISIL

By Terri Moon Cronk DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10, 2016  Iraqi security forces continue to apply pressure on multiple fronts in the operation to retake the country's second-largest city of Mosul from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters today.

"The advances so far are forcing ISIL to choose where they want to try and defend the city," the press secretary said in an operational update on the counter-ISIL effort in Iraq and Syria.

Cook noted that to their credit, the Iraqi fighters are continuing to take steps to minimize civilian casualties, as is the U.S.-led coalition air campaign.

Advances From East, North, South

Iraqi counterterrorism forces continue to deliberately isolate and clear areas of Mosul's eastern districts, securing key neighborhoods, the press secretary said. To the north, he said "Bashiqa has been retaken, although some back clearing still continues, and there's more progress in clearing the towns of Bahweza and Sayyid, bringing the [Iraqi security forces] within 2 kilometers, approximately, of Mosul."

South of the city, he added, Iraqi forces consolidated control of Rashid and Sahyma and completed the clearance of Abbas Rejab.

In Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces also continue their drive toward Raqqa, and they continue to make progress against moderate ISIL resistance, Cook said.

ISIL in Syria Under Pressure

"ISIL forces in Syria are also under pressure from Turkish-supported Syrian opposition forces, which liberated a number of towns and villages southeast of Dabiq," he said. "The momentum in Iraq and Syria, has of course, been assisted by coalition support, including air power."

Yesterday, coalition forces conducted more than a dozen strikes employing 74 munitions in support of operations toward Raqqa, and seven strikes using air power and artillery. The coalition also employed 67 munitions supporting the Iraqi security forces and Kurdish peshmerga operations near Mosul, Cook added.

"The bottom line is across Iraq and Syria, ISIL remains under increasing pressure, and its problems are multiplying as we apply that pressure on the battlefield," the press secretary said.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Iraqi troops preparting for advance toward Mosul airport

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 5:25PM

Iraqi security forces are preparing to advance towards Mosul International Airport on the southern outskirts of the northern city, the last Daesh bastion in the country.

Iraqi Lieutenant-Colonel Dhiya Mizhir said on Thursday that the target of the fresh operations is an area overlooking the airport, which has been made unusable by Daesh terrorists.

"We need to put wider pressure on the enemy in different areas," said Iraqi police commander, Major-General Thamer al-Husseini, adding that the operations would resume within two days.

Mosul fell to Daesh in 2014, the year the terror outfit began its campaign of death and destruction in Iraq.

On October 17, the Iraqi army, volunteer Shia and Sunni fighters as well as Kurdish Peshmerga forces launched a long-awaited offensive to liberate Mosul.

Iraqi troops have so far entered several neighborhoods in eastern Mosul. They have announced plans to resume their advance from the north, up the western bank of the Tigris River.

Latest satellite images released by Texas-based intelligence company, Stratfor, showed foreign-backed terrorists had dug trenches in the runways and demolished buildings to have better sight and to prevent the advance of the Iraqi forces.

Separately on Thursday, a military statement said that the Iraqi soldiers had targeted two villages on the edge of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.

The army's 9th Armored Division recaptured the village of Abbas Rajab, situated four kilometers east of Nimrud, and raised the Iraqi national flag there.

Mosul residents reported militant fire in the Zahra district in eastern Mosul on Thursday. The area has been the scene of heavy clashes over the past week.

"They (Daesh terrorists) were bombarding the Zahra neighborhood where the Iraqi forces are. The warplanes hit back with small rockets and destroyed the mortar and killed three of them," a Zahra resident told Reuters.

A senior officer of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service said the area was fully under control.

"I'm very happy. I can't believe that we're over this terrible nightmare," said another Zahra resident, adding that although he had returned to the district, he was still "frightened that Daesh might return."

Iraqi forces are now involved in clean-up operations in the liberated areas.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Iraqi Army Liberates Several Districts of Mosul From Daesh

Sputnik News

19:26 10.11.2016(updated 19:31 10.11.2016)

The Iraqi Army and Kurdish fighters have liberated several districts in the eastern part of Mosul from Daesh terrorists.

After severe clashes, government troops entered four districts: Hayalkudus, Kerame, Hayalsalah, and Saddam. They pull down Daesh flags there and raised the national flag of Iraq, Sputnik Turkey reports.

According to reports, 76 terrorists were killed and 8 were captured in fighting that has been ongoing since yesterday.

Iraqi soldiers continue works on demining and defusing of bombs planted by terrorists. They are evacuating civilians who had been trapped in their houses because of the fighting.

Meanwhile, Mosul residents continue to leave the city. They are fleeing to Erbil with white flags on their cars.

According to Sputnik Turkey, as clashes become more intense, Iraqi command has sent armored vehicles and special units from Baghdad and Diyala province as reinforcements. The units previously took part in street battles against Daesh in El-Fallujah and other cities.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Iraqi Army Liberates Village Near Mosul From Daesh

Sputnik News

15:32 10.11.2016

Iraqi troops have retaken a village to the east of Mosul from Daesh.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Iraqi military liberated village Abbas Rajab to the east of Mosul from Daesh terrorists, Lt. Gen. Abdulamir Yaralla, commander of the operation, said on Thursday.

"The forces of the 35th and 37th brigades liberated Abbas Rajab village and raised Iraqi flags on the buildings," Yaralla was quoted as saying by Al-Sumaria TV channel.

On October 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi announced the start of the military operation to retake Mosul from Daesh terrorists.

According to local media, about 30,000 Iraqi soldiers and 4,000 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are taking part in the operation, backed by airstrikes carried out by the US-led international coalition.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Zahra District of Eastern Mosul Liberated by Iraqi Military

Sputnik News

10:05 10.11.2016(updated 10:13 10.11.2016)

According to media reports, the counterterrorist units of the Iraqi army liberated on Thursday Zahra quarter in eastern Mosul from the militants of the Daesh terrorist group.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The counterterrorist units of the Iraqi army liberated on Thursday Zahra quarter in eastern Mosul from the militants of the Daesh terrorist group, local media reported citing security sources.

"Anti-terrorist units have freed Zahra quarter in eastern Mosul," a source in the security forces of the Nineveh province told Al Sumaria TV channel.

During the last weeks, seven other quarters in Mosul were reported to be freed from the Daesh militants.

On October 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi announced the start of the operation to retake Mosul, which has been occupied by Daesh militants since 2014. The offensive has resulted in liberation of large territories and prompted many terrorists of the group outlawed in Russia to flee Iraq.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Revenge Looms in Mosul as IS Victims Seek Justice

By Jamie Dettmer November 10, 2016

The kids sitting in the battered car fleeing the besieged Iraqi city of Mosul were wide-eyed at the towering armored trucks and the hordes of soldiers from Iraq's Golden Division in their trademark black combat fatigues. Playing up for reporters and photographers at the checkpoint, they described the airstrikes they had endured with even wider-eyes.

Then one youngster  no older than five  pointed at his brother, a pre-teen also, giggled, and announced, "He's Daesh."

His veiled mother shook her head in horror.

A lighthearted moment maybe from one perspective, but finger pointing has already begun in earnest as the territory controlled by the Islamic State terror group in Iraq shrinks.

Risks of intra Sunni bloodbath

Iraq is no stranger to bloody cycles of revenge and the playing out of family, tribal as well as sectarian vendettas. As the Mosul offensive unfolds the danger of Shi'ite atrocities has been highlighted by rights groups, who have urged the Iraqi government not to allow Shi'ite militias to enter the city. But there are high risks also of an intra Sunni bloodbath as the Islamic State terror group is driven, albeit painfully slowly, from Iraq's second largest city.

Sunnis who suffered at the hands of the jihadists, who saw relatives butchered by militants or were forced and threatened to give up a daughter for marriage to an extremist, are likely to take out their anger on fellow Sunnis  even neighbors  who collaborated with the terror group, predict analysts.

And those seeking revenge may not be so discriminating in distinguishing between major IS members and supporters, lower-ranking members, sympathizers and those who went along just to survive.

"Most of the prominent members and most aggressive militants will be killed in the fighting or will get out and head to Syria," says political psychologist Maha Hassan Bukir, an academic at Salahaddin University in Irbil. "In that case, people won't be able to find those militants most responsible for their suffering and they will punish anyone they can find associated in anyway with Daesh," she worries.

Bukir observed the revenge cycle that built up after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

"People extracted revenge from Baathists, many of whom fled their homes and tried to hide themselves in other Iraqi cities or left the country and went to Syria," she says. And many of those Baathists later joined IS, bringing to the terror group their military expertise.

"In my opinion we will see a similar revenge cycle playing out in Mosul. Most likely it won't happen immediately, but sooner or later we will see it," she says.

Revenge

The scale of the revenge will depend, she reckons, on how quickly the Baghdad government establishes law and order in the city and rebuilds, reducing the general fury and dissipating the pent-up frustration with day-to-day challenges that could feed the urge for revenge.

While in smaller and more homogeneous Iraqi towns, tribal chiefs would have the clout to minimize retaliation and be able to oversee a rough-and-ready system of "transitional justice," including blood-money payments, in Mosul their power to do so is much less.

In Ramadi, 430 kilometers to the south of Mosul, following both the defeat of the jihadists there in 2006 and last year, the tribal chiefs were able to tamp down anger within the Sunni community and prevent a retaliation dynamic.

"When they tell people to fight, they do so; when they order a 'stop,' people stop," says Bukir. In any case, the tribes in Ramadi en masse supported IS at the start under instructions from the tribal chiefs, and then withdrew support subsequently and switched to backing the central government when told to do so.

Mosul, though, is home to many Sunni tribes and clans as well as a mixture of sectarian and ethnic groups, making it a much more complicated place where a handful of chiefs aren't able to put their heads together and solve problems by consensus.

On top of that, IS militants have upset fragile power balances not only between tribes but within them, disrupting hierarchies by marrying into them and by boosting the authority of a younger generation of leaders.

Money  either through the form of general subsidies to help tribes rebuild or even compensation from the central government for a loss of a family member  could help reduce widespread fury, says Bukir. She and other analysts say the Iraqi government needs to think carefully about transitional justice and how it manages post-IS Mosul, not only to cut down on violence on moral grounds but in order to stop it spinning out of control and sowing the seeds of a jihadist successor to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's terror group  an IS 3.0.

"They should prosecute only the most egregious IS members and collaborators," she argues. A truth-telling commission would also help, allowing grieving victims to vent their anger. That is not likely to happen though.

Kurdish journalist Nzar Zrar Gzali, director of Awene newspaper in Irbil, Iraqi Kurdistan's capital, suspects little can prevent retaliation and that it could be even bloodier than what has been seen before. "People will want to avenge sexual dishonor and shame," he says, "because of the Daesh forced marriages."

Feelings of guilt, he thinks, will drive some who went along with IS to be especially violent, using revenge as a vehicle for catharsis.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Netanyahu: Israel, Russia, US 'Need to Destroy Daesh'

Sputnik News

19:22 10.11.2016(updated 19:24 10.11.2016)

Russia, Israel and other partners should work together to fight global terrorism, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday.

JERUSALEM (Sputnik)  Following the meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Netanyahu told reporters:

"Together we are the partners in the fight against radical Islamic terror, Israel and Russia, and the United States, and many other countries. We all partners in achieving this task  we need to destroy Daesh. I believe that cooperation between all partners helps each of us and helps humankind."

Daesh, which is outlawed in Russia and many other countries, proclaimed an Islamic caliphate on vast territories in Syria and Iraq in 2014, later spreading its influence on the neighboring states and even in Europe, which resulted in a number of terrorist acts, both in the region and the European continent.

Netanyahu expressed concern about Iran's "support for terror on all 360 degrees around," and said that Israel would not tolerate nuclear-armed Tehran.

"We are determined to realize two things. Firstly, we are not willing to let Iran have nuclear weapons, and the second to prevent, no matter be agreement on Syria or not, the possibility of strengthening of Iran in Syria, whether on the ground or in the air," Netanyahu said.

He also condemned the Shia Hezbollah movement, speaking against its involvement in Syria.

Hezbollah, established in the 1980s, is a paramilitary and political organization originating in Lebanon's Shiite population. The group initially aimed to end Israel's occupation of Southern Lebanon. On May 25, 2000, Israel withdrew from Lebanon, which Hezbollah widely saw as its victory. The relations between the two parties have been strained, which was also fueled by Hezbollah's assistance to the Syrian government during the on gong civil war.

Since the beginning of the war in Syria, the United States and some of its allies, including Israel, have supported the moderate Syrian opposition and called for President Bashar Assad's resignation, while Russia and Iran recognized Assad as the only legitimate Syrian authority, and are making extensive efforts to support the government of the conflict-torn Syria in the fight against terrorism.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Trump May Require Increase in Japan's Expenditures Under Security Treaty

Sputnik News

13:55 10.11.2016(updated 13:56 10.11.2016)

Newly elected US President Donald Trump may demand an increase in Japanese military expenditures as well as equal terms in the Washington-Tokyo agreement on security, Trump's national security advisor Bert Mizusawa said Thursday.

TOKYO (Sputnik)  Donald Trump won the US presidency in Tuesday's election, having gained 289 Electoral College votes, or 19 more than the 270 needed to win.

"Trump is a businessman and regards agreements with every country as a contract and believes that there is a necessity to revise them to meet US people's interests. Trump insists on justice, observance of both parties', [namely] Japanese and US, interests," Mizusawa told NHK channel in an interview, stressing that Japan and US bear unequal financial burden, which may result in Trumps demand to increase Japanese military expenditures.

Mizusawa added that the "agreement must be legally equitable", however, according to the treaty on cooperation in the security sphere, the United States has unilateral commitment to defend Japan.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Myanmar army raid taking terrible toll on Muslim kids: UNICEF

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 11:24AM

The UN children's agency UNICEF says Myanmar's military crackdown on Muslim-majority Rakhine state is taking a "terrible toll" on children following earlier reports of rape and other atrocities.

Northern Rakhine has been under a military lockdown since an alleged attack on the country's border guards on October 9 left nine police officers dead, with the government accusing Rohingyas of being behind the assault.

In a statement, UNICEF called for "full resumption of essential services and the urgent lifting of all restrictions of movement of health and other professionals so they can safely reach children and families."

The Myanmar army has declared the area an "operation zone," blocking aid and barring foreign journalists and observers from visiting the area. Residents and human rights monitors have reported extra-judicial killings, rape and arbitrary arrests.

On Tuesday, the World Food Program (WFP) announced the start of first food deliveries to about 6,500 residents. Tens of thousands of people have not received food and other basic needs since the army began its offensive.

The limited delivery of food came after diplomats and the UN's top official in Myanmar visited the region last week and called for aid programs to be allowed to resume. They also demanded an independent investigation into alleged rights abuses.

Accounts of severe abuse by Myanmar troops - including sexual violence, summary executions and the torching of villages - have been widely reported on social media following the military raid in the Rakhine state.

Last month, dozens of Rohingya women told the Reuters news agency that government forces had committed acts of rape or sexual assault against them.

Rights groups say Myanmar troops have gone on a rampage, which has forced terrified civilians to flee their homes.

The Rakhine region, where Rohingya Muslims form the majority population, has been the scene of communal violence at the hands of Buddhist extremists since 2012. The UN says Rohingyas are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.

The government denies full citizenship to the members of community, and regards them as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh irrespective of the fact that they have lived in Myanmar for generations.

Hundreds of the Muslims have been killed, and tens of thousands others forced to flee their homes as a result of attacks by Buddhist extremists.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Trump 'pledges to defend South Korea' in departure from campaign rhetoric

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 6:20AM

South Korean diplomatic sources have reportedly said that US President-elect Donald Trump has pledged his commitment to an existing security alliance between Washington and Seoul, despite his campaign rhetoric that the US would potentially abandon its Asian ally.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency, citing diplomatic officials, said on Thursday that Trump had made the pledge during a phone call with South Korean President Park Geun-hye, saying he agreed "100 percent" that the two allies should further develop their ties and that the US would maintain a strong defense posture to protect the Asian country.

During the 10-minute telephone conversation, Park also reportedly congratulated the US president-elect on his victory and said the alliance between the two countries had grown and mutual trust deepened in the face of various challenges over the past decades.

Trump won the US presidency on Wednesday, defying most forecasts. While campaigning for the White House, he had repeatedly upset American allies by saying he would be seeking them to pay for US military help if he becomes president.

In an election campaign rally in January, he had said he would be willing to withdraw US troops deployed to South Korea unless Seoul paid a greater share of the cost of maintaining the US military presence there.

"We get paid nothing, we get paid peanuts... South Korea should pay us and pay us very substantially for protecting them," Trump had said at the time.

North Korea has been at odds with the South since the end of the Korean War of the early 1950s. An armistice ended all military hostilities between the two Koreas back then, but no peace deal ever ensued, meaning that, while the two countries are not at war, they are technically not at peace, either.

The US, which has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, is planning to deploy its Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in the Southeast Asian country to protect it against potential North Korean missile attacks.

Seoul and Washington claim the THAAD missile system is intended to counter threats posed by North Korea following its repeated missile and nuclear tests.

Pyongyang says the tests aim to protect itself from the US military, which occasionally deploys nuclear-powered warships and aircraft capable of carrying atomic weapons in the region.

The UN has adopted five rounds of crippling sanctions against Pyongyang since it first tested an atomic device in 2006.

Meanwhile, a North Korean daily has said in an editorial that the next US administration had to deal with Pyongyang as a "nuclear state," denouncing any push for the denuclearization of the Asian country.

"Washington's hope for North Korea's denuclearization is an outdated illusion," read an editorial by North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Thursday.

The United States has always maintained that it cannot accept North Korea as a nuclear state, however, Trump has indicated that he would be open to negotiations with its leader Kim Jong-un to talk him out of his nuclear ambitions.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






'Very Risky Period': Trump's Effect On U.S.-Russian Relations, As Seen In Moscow

Mikhail Sokolov November 10, 2016

Two days after the election of real-estate tycoon Donald Trump as the next president of the United States, independent Russian political analysts are wrestling with what it could mean for bilateral relations.

Despite indications that Trump might be less critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and more willing to make deals with Moscow than his predecessor, he remains an enigma.

RFE/RL's Russian Service asked independent Russian analysts about their sense of the potential opportunities and dangers of this new phase of international relations.

Ilya Yashin, opposition politician

"Russian propaganda and the American media definitely created [for Trump] a reputation as Putin's agent. Both [Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's] electorate and Putin's electorate are absolutely certain that this is Putin's victory, that the Kremlin got its president of the United States. And for Trump, this is an enormous problem, because now he must prove that he is not Putin's candidate.

"How, exactly, he will prove this, considering the specifics of his character, his temperament, and his unusual political experience, we can only guess."

Vladimir Lukin, former Russian ambassador to the U.S. and a former member of the State Duma's Foreign Affairs Committee

"Regarding Russia, we can only say that the cliche of Russia as a bugbear did not work with the [U.S.] electorate. Voters did not go for this -- this is already a clear signal from which the new administration will proceed.

"If I were in our administration, I would seriously be thinking about offering the new administration the chance to begin from a clean slate or, if you prefer, with a serious, major reset that does not concentrate on past offenses or lapses or who is right and who is to blame -- one that concentrates on the most important priorities, the most important issues of global politics and bilateral relations at the most pragmatic level. If that happens, there is a good chance that we can begin a dialogue. But where it will lead, who knows?"

Viktor Kuvaldin, professor at the Moscow School of Economics

"I also think the best thing for us to do is to try to begin from a clean slate, even though this is impossible. There is Ukraine. There is Syria. There is the main question: Do we accept the role of the United States as the only global superpower or don't we? And does the United States recognize our rightful interests as a regional power with multiregional interests from Northern Europe to East Asia? There is no way to avoid these issues.

"But what we can do in the realm of official policy is to end the propaganda war with its over-the-top anti-Americanism. This hasn't brought anything good to our country and it isn't going to. We shouldn't build up illusions. America is what it is and it isn't going to change. It will conduct policy first of all according to its interests. But our vital interest is in having with America the best possible relations at any given moment. In this sense, Trump's election opens a small window of opportunity."

Stanislav Belkovsky, political analyst and consultant

"The important thing isn't whether there will be a [Trump-Putin] summit, but what would be on the agenda and what might the results be. I agree that Donald Trump might make some specific concessions to Russia on local matters. I also agree with the supposition that Trump, as a businessman, is used to reaching agreements with everyone. He is more likely to be able to reach one with Vladimir Putin than Hillary Clinton, on a whole range of issues.

"But we cannot discount the factor of Trump's unpredictability. Trump does need to shed his unexpected reputation as a Russian agent. He needs to somehow get around it and that could bring Russia some pleasant or unpleasant surprises.

"[On Ukraine] I think that nothing fundamental will change. The sanctions will not be lifted. They might be eased to some extent, and, of course, for Vladimir Putin that will be a huge psychological victory -- for him personally. But it won't help Russia's future development because Russian now is strongly turning away from the tried-and-true road of civilization. It is trying to dig itself in to a world that does not exist -- the Yalta-Potsdam world that disappeared in 1989 but which is discussed today by the Russian establishment as if it still exists.

"Most of what Trump has said falls into the category of isolationism. Historically, isolationism -- unfortunately, if you are talking about Europe -- always ended with one thing: world war that sucked America in with large financial and human costs for itself as well as for Europe. Unfortunately, Trump's ideas are that Europe should look after itself, that East Asia should look after itself, that America will save money and become great and rich -- and this really worries me. I don't think it can lead to anything good.

"I think we are entering a very risky period, because it seems to me that in May 2014 Russia stopped with just two regions of eastern Ukraine and didn't complete its further project of Novorossia as a result of the Kremlin's understanding that further expansion could lead to a full-scale war. Only that, in my opinion, saved Ukraine at that time. If Washington sends another signal, unfortunately, that it is not prepared to defend the countries of Europe, especially Eastern Europe, that America does not intend to live up to its commitments to NATO, this will result in another spiral of Russian territorial expansion with all its consequences."

Selected and translated by RFE/RL correspondent Robert Coalson

Source: http://www.rferl.org/a/russia- experts-weigh-in-trump-effect-us- russia-relations/28108596.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Russian Diplomats Met With Trump, Clinton Teams During Campaign

November 10, 2016

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov says Russian diplomats spoke with the teams of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the U.S. presidential election campaign.

Ryabkov said on November 10 that the talks involved diplomats from the Russian Embassy in the United States and "contacts" with influential people in Trump's circle.

"I don't say that all of them, but a whole array of them, supported contacts with Russian representatives," Ryabkov added, saying talks "were on a sufficient, responsible level" as "part of routine everyday work."

President-elect Trump's spokeswoman Hope Hicks said she was "not aware" of any meetings by Trump's campaign representatives and Russian diplomats.

Trump's relations with Russia became a contentious issue of the election after he praised President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, and his call for Russian hackers to find and leak Clinton's e-mails.

Trump has said that he would welcome better ties with Russia and wants to cooperate with Putin to defeat Islamic State militants in Syria.

He also said he may consider recognizing the Kremlin's illegal annexation of Crimea.

Ryabkov said contact with Clinton's team by Russian diplomats was "sporadic" and "not always productive."

Based on reporting by AP, Interfax, and Bloomberg

Source: http://www.rferl.org/a/russia -diplomate-met-trump-clinton- teams/28108657.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Russia rejects UN plea to extend Aleppo ceasefires

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 6:44PM

Russia has rejected a UN request to prolong future humanitarian pauses in Syria's battered city of Aleppo, saying such a move would enable the foreign-backed militants operating there to regain strength.

In a statement released on Thursday, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov, said the UN Syria humanitarian advisor, Jan Egeland, had asked Moscow to make future Aleppo cessation of hostilities longer to allow in more aid supplies.

However, it is "counterproductive and against common sense" to extend the ceasefires "just for the sake of it, not to bring real help to peaceful civilians, but so that terrorists can better restore their battle worthiness," the statement read.

Aleppo has been divided over the past four years between government forces in the west and terrorists in the east, making it a frontline battleground.

Backed by Russian air cover, the Syrian army launched operations to reunite the divided city in September.

Russia has introduced a series of unilateral truces in Aleppo to allow civilian and terrorists to leave the city's eastern parts, including a 10-hour pause in fighting on November 4 and a three-day ceasefire in late October.

Konashenkov accused the UN of having failed to make use of the 10-hour pause to deliver aid to Aleppo residents despite receiving an advance notice.

He further noted that Russia had brought over 100,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid to the contested Syrian city in recent months "irrespective of any humanitarian pauses."

"Those who really want to help the residents of Aleppo are helping them," he concluded.

Also on Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, criticized Western media for being silent about what is happening in Syria.

"They don't cite any facts or evidence. Their objective is to whitewash the terrorists as much as possible and to show them off as 'moderates'," she added.

The diplomat further stressed that the Russian and Syrian jets have not conducted anti-terror airstrikes on the eastern districts of Aleppo since October 18.

Since March 2011, Syria has been hit by deadly militancy it blames on some Western states and their regional allies.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






UN Presents Plan for Saving Syrian Aleppo

Sputnik News

23:04 10.11.2016

The United Nations are proposing a plan consisting of four parts for saving Syrian city of Aleppo, Senior Adviser to UN Special Envoy for Syria Jan Egeland said Thursday.

GENEVA (Sputnik) The proposed plan consists of four parts, Egeland detailed:

"Why we have a UN initiative for east Aleppo that has four parts We are urging the following four things: medical supplies in to the kneeling medical facilities in east Aleppo; medical evacuations out of east Aleppo for the estimated 300 or so patients that are in urgent need of medical evacuation, together with their families; the third element is food and other urgent supplies, humanitarian relief in to east Aleppo, and the fourth element is more medical personnel in to provide medical relief in east Aleppo. None of the four elements are conditional on the other."

Over the recent months, Aleppo has been a major battleground in Syria, engaging government forces, jihadists, and numerous opposition groups. Militant-held eastern Aleppo is encircled by government forces and the fighting has affected thousands of civilians still trapped in the city.

Russia has recently backed a number of humanitarian pauses in Aleppo, with the latest one entering into force on Friday.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Syrian Army Destroys Jabhat Fatah al Sham Unit in Daraa Province

Sputnik News

14:58 10.11.2016

The clashes between Syrian armed forces and the Jabhat Fatah al Sham (formerly known as the Nusra Front) terror group occurred in the southwestern province of Daraa, resulting in at least 15 extremist either wounded or killed, according to local media.

DAMASCUS (Sputnik)  The Syrian government troops destroyed a unit of the Jabhat Fatah al Sham (formerly known as the Nusra Front) terror group in the southwestern province of Daraa, local media reported Thursday, citing sources.

The clashes between the army and the extremists occurred earlier on Thursday, resulting in at least 15 extremist either wounded or killed, according to the SANA news agency. The militants also reportedly lost most of their equipment and weapons.

In recent weeks, news reports have indicated that the Syrian army has made a considerable advance against the extremists in the Daraa province, which borders with Jordan, where the US troops were reportedly training a group of Syrian rebels.

Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with government forces fighting the Syrian opposition groups striving to overthrow President Assad. In parallel, Damascus has to counter numerous extremist groups, in particular, Jabhat Fatah al Sham, as well as the Islamic State (IS), outlawed in Russia and may other counties.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






UN: Eastern Aleppo Faces Mass Starvation This Winter

By Lisa Schlein November 10, 2016

The United Nations warns that besieged eastern Aleppo in northern Syria faces mass starvation this winter if U.N. aid agencies are blocked from distributing desperately needed food supplies to 250,000 trapped civilians.

The United Nations says it fears winter will be a killer in too many places throughout Syria. The international body says it has not been able to pre-position food and other relief supplies in besieged areas because of fighting and administrative hurdles.

U.N. special adviser Jan Egeland says there is particular concern about how one quarter of a million people in eastern Aleppo will survive the harsh winter months.

"The last time east Aleppo was reached with significant humanitarian supplies was in the beginning of July, in the middle of the summer. The report we have now from within east Aleppo is that the last food rations are being distributed as we speak."

Egeland says the United Nations has presented a new proposal for averting a humanitarian catastrophe this winter. The initiative calls for the Russian-Syrian side and opposition groups to allow food and other urgent relief supplies into eastern Aleppo.

It also calls for the medical evacuation out of Aleppo of some 300 wounded and sick patients with their families, while permitting medical supplies and medical personnel to enter the besieged city.

Bracing for escalation

A pause in Russian-Syrian airstrikes over eastern Aleppo continues, although ground fighting continues unabated; but, Russia has moved heavy weaponry, including cruise missiles, off the coast of Syria and says it plans to use these weapons in the battle for Aleppo.

Egeland tells VOA he is worried about the possibility of a dangerous escalation of the war.

"I do indeed fear it could become much, much worse. It is terrible as we speak. It could get much worse.... I am hopeful that we could get our U.N. initiative going again.... I cannot see anyone wishing to see... so many civilians bleed to death in both east and west Aleppo because of indiscriminate war."

Regarding the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, Egeland says he believes U.S.-Russian engagement and cooperation in tackling humanitarian and political issues in Syria will continue. He says progress has always been made in reaching besieged areas with humanitarian aid whenever the United States and Russia have pushed for this together.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Turkey seeks long jail terms, life sentences in pro-Kurdish daily trial: Media reports

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 5:15PM

Turkish prosecutors are seeking long jail terms or life sentences for nine staff of a now closed pro-Kurdish newspaper on charges of belonging to a terrorist group.

According to Turkish media reports, the staff, including prize-winning novelist Asli Erdogan, also face charges of harming national unity.

"In the indictment...life imprisonment and jail sentences of up 17-1/2 years were sought for the nine suspects," state-run news agency Anadolu said.

The nine suspects are prominent writers and executives from Ozgur Gundem newspaper, the report added.

Erdogan has been a member of the paper's advisory board. She was jailed pending trial in mid-August, after Turkish security forces detained her and two dozen more staff from the newspaper.

Most of the workers were detained during a raid on the Ozgur Gundem headquarters in Istanbul, according to the Turkish Journalists' Association.

This came after a court in Istanbul ordered the temporary closure of the pro-Kurdish daily, accusing it of spreading terrorist propaganda and "acting as the de facto news outlet" for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

More than 130 media outlets have been shut down since the July 15 abortive coup.

Ozgur Gundem has been the subject of court closures and raids in the past.

The paper has faced dozens of investigations, fines and arrest of correspondents since 2014.

Human Rights Foundation (HRF), a non-profit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, says Turkish journalists face "constant threats and retribution for their work, and are often harassed and prosecuted under criminal laws designed to stifle government criticism."

Southeastern Turkey has been the scene of deadly fighting between Kurdish militants and the army over the past months. The fighting escalated after Turkey declared the collapse of years-long peace negotiations with the Kurds last year and began imposing restrictions in Kurdish-dominated areas.

Ankara has also intensified attacks on alleged PKK positions in Iraq and Syria. The PKK has claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks in major Turkish cities over the past months.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Turkey violating UN judge's diplomatic immunity: UN court

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 12:18AM

Turkey has violated a UN judge's diplomatic immunity after arresting him as part of its post-coup crackdown, says a UN court.

The president of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), Theodor Meron, told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that Ankara has been ignoring requests to visit Judge Aydin Sedaf Akay since he was detained in September.

"The UN Office of Legal Affairs has requested his release from detention and the cessation of all legal proceedings against him," he added.

Meron noted that Akay's arrest violates both his diplomatic immunity and his judicial independence.

At the time of his detention, Akay was scheduled to preside over the appeal case of a Rwandan politician sentenced in 2012 to 35 years in prison over genocide charges.

"As a result of his detention, the proceedings have come to a standstill," said Meron.

In 2009, Akay, a former diplomat, was appointed as a judge on the UN tribunal trying Rwanda genocide perpetrators. He later became a judge on MICT, which succeeded the tribunal.

The July 15 coup in Turkey began when a faction of the military declared it was in control of the country and the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was no more in charge.

Tanks, helicopters, and soldiers clashed with police and people on the streets of Ankara and Istanbul. Between 200 and 300 people were killed on all sides in the attempted coup d'etat.

A state of emergency was first imposed a few days after the putsch bid. It was prolonged for another 12 weeks in October.

Emergency decrees have since extended the period of police detention without judicial review from four to 30 days and allowed the authorities to deny detainees access to lawyers for up to five days.

The government in Ankara has launched a sweeping crackdown on those believed to have played a role in the failed coup.

It has arrested over 35,000 people and sacked over 100,000 others over their suspected links with Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric blamed for orchestrating the coup attempt. Gulen rejects the accusation.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Erdogan Calls Trump, Proclaims 'New Era' In U.S.-Turkey Relations

November 10, 2016

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and discussed improving relations and cooperating in fighting terrorism, Turkish officials say.

Erdogan proclaimed in a speech in Ankara on November 9 that "a new era is beginning" as a result of Trump's election victory. Trump campaigned on reversing many of President Barack Obama's policies in the Middle East.

Erdogan's relations with Obama and Western Europe have been strained since he launched a broad crackdown on judges, journalists, teachers and other civilians in the aftermath of an aborted coup against him in July.

Erdogan has been particularly frustrated by Washington's reluctance to hand over Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive cleric living in Pennsylvania whom he accuses of masterminding the failed putsch.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said a quick handover of Gulen under Trump would "open a new page" in U.S.-Turkey relations.

Relations between the two NATO allies also have been strained as Ankara has sought to join the Iraqi government's campaign to oust the Islamic State (IS) militants from Mosul, despite protests from Baghdad.

Erdogan also has sought to discourage the United States from relying on Kurdish fighters to retake Raqqa from IS in Syria.

Based on reporting by AP and AFP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/a/erdogan- calls-trump-proclaims-new-era-us-turkey-relations- iraq-mosul-campaign-gulen/28107359.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Turkey to Renew Bid for Cleric Gulen Extradition After Trump Enters White House

Sputnik News

17:09 10.11.2016

Taha Ozhan, who heads the Tuskish parliament's foreign affairs commission, said that Ankara will ask the United States to extradite a Muslim cleric it blames for staging the July coup after Donald Trump is sworn in as US president.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Turkey will again ask the United States to extradite a Muslim cleric it blames for staging the July coup after Donald Trump is sworn in as US president, a senior Turkish lawmaker said Thursday.

Ankara has been pushing Washington to hand over Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of the Turkish president living in Pennsylvania, since the July 15 coup attempt. Gulen is accused of running a terrorist group in Turkey from abroad, but Washington said there was not enough evidence.

"After Trump assumes his duties, this file [on Gulen] should certainly be sent to him," Taha Ozhan, who heads the parliament's foreign affairs commission, told the Anadolu news agency.

The Republican nominee celebrated an unexpected victory over his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, early on Wednesday. He will succeed incumbent President Barack Obama on January 20. The Turkish lawmaker said Ankara could bring up Gulen's extradition in February.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Erdogan: Turkey's Influence Surpasses Territorial Borders

Sputnik News

14:02 10.11.2016(updated 14:03 10.11.2016)

The people of Syria, Iraq, the Balkans and Crimea live beyond Turkish geographical borders, but they remain important for Turkey at the spiritual level, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

ANKARA (Sputnik)  Turkey has no territorial claims to any country, but its influence goes beyond the geographical borders, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday at a meeting, devoted to the death anniversary of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

"We are not locked in the confined space inside our borders. Geographical borders are one thing, but spiritual [borders] are another thing  We do not claim other countries' territories, but the developments there directly affect Turkey," Erdogan said, adding that Ataturk repeatedly expressed the same idea in his speeches.

Erdogan noted, that despite the people of Syria, Iraq, the Balkans and Crimea lived beyond Turkish geographical borders, they remained important for the state at the spiritual level.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the First President of Turkey, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, who adopted Turkey's first constitution in 1921. Ataturk abolished the Sultanate and adopted principles of secularization and modernization.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Turkey Worried Occupation of Raqqa Too Big a Temptation for Kurds to Pass Up

Sputnik News

12:53 10.11.2016

Turkey remains at loggerheads with the US-backed Syrian Kurds over the Raqqa offensive. Turkish retired Brigadier General Haldun Solmazturk explained to Sputnik Turkiye that Ankara is worried that the Kurds will be too tempted to keep the city under their control and that the US will do nothing to prevent it.

On Tuesday, Turkey said that the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) leading an assault on the Daesh (ISS, Islamic State) stronghold of Raqqa should not enter the city itself but merely help encircle it.

The suggestion was dismissed by the Kurds, according to the Associated Press.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters that the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, told Turkish officials during a recent visit that Kurdish-led forces would only have a role in encircling Raqqa and would not enter the city itself.

However Turkish retired Brigadier General, Foreign Affairs Advisor to the Turkish Retired Officers Association (TESUD), Honorary Research Fellow in London Metropolitan University Haldun Solmazturk explained to Sputnik Turkiye what Ankara is so concerned about.

"It is hard to imagine that after a successful completion of the offensive to retake Raqqa from Daesh, the Syrian Kurds will simply walk away, refusing to take control of the city," he told Sputnik.

"That has never happened before in history," he added.

However, he further suggested, it does not necessarily mean that Raqqa will inevitably become part of the Rojava autonomous region, which now consists of three self-governing cantons in northern Syria.

However, Haldun Solmazturk explained, the fate and the status of the city will depend on the further developments in the north of the county.

"Under the pretext of the international coalition's fight against Daesh, the US has already temporarily deployed its officers in the north of Syria, and there are already a number of US military bases there," he said.

He further suggested that the Americans are considering making these bases permanent and there are likely certain agreements on the issue with the Syrian Kurds.

However Syria is so far an independent and sovereign state with explicit borders and there is no chance of setting up permanent US bases in the country without an agreement with Damascus.

The situation could still change, the Turkish retired Brigadier General suggested. There is a chance that the country might be split up. Hence Ankara should not believe Washington's promises that the Kurds will leave Raqqa right after the end of the operation.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Turkish Armed Forces Kill 19 PKK Members in Southeast of Country - General Staff

Sputnik News

10:09 10.11.2016(updated 10:17 10.11.2016)

According to the country's General Staff, Nineteen members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) outlawed in Turkey were killed in the southeastern province of Mardin by the Turkish Armed Forces.

ANKARA (Sputnik)  Nineteen members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) outlawed in Turkey were killed in the southeastern province of Mardin by the Turkish Armed Forces, the country's General Staff said in a statement on Thursday.

"The members of the separatist terrorist organization [PKK] were identified in the Bestler-Dereler area of the province of Mardin as part of an operation of the Turkish Armed Forces to prevent terrorist training for the winter period. The operations involved drones. Nineteen terrorists were killed, one was apprehended," the statement read.

Tensions between Ankara and Turkish Kurds escalated in July 2015 when a ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK collapsed over a series of terrorist attacks, allegedly committed by PKK members.

 Sputnik

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






UK inaugurates massive military base in Bahrain

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 4:45PM

The UK has officially opened a massive naval base in Bahrain, the first time in four decades that London is opening such a facility in the Persian Gulf region.

Britain's Prince Charles inaugurated the Naval Support Facility (NSF) in the Bahraini capital of Manama on Thursday, marking the 200th anniversary of mutual relations with the Arab kingdom.

London plans to make the NSF its second busiest center of operations for the Royal Navy after Portsmouth, allowing its warships to resupply and undergo repair in the region without having to return to the UK.

Over the past few months, the UK navy's advanced Type 45 warships deployed to the Persian Gulf have been forced to return home because of their inability to cope with the warm waters of the region.

The NSF will host around 600 military forces and warships tasked with patrolling the surrounding waters.

The UK's Royal Air Force (RAF), which has been using Bahraini air bases for over 90 years, is the UK military's other element of presence in the region.

In his visit to London last month, Bahrain's monarch King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifah called for closer ties between the two kingdoms as he met with Queen Elizabeth, Prime Minister Theresa May and other British officials.

He also invited May to the upcoming (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council summit, which would be held in Manama next month.

The UK's willingness to expand ties with Bahrain comes at a time when the repressive regime is under international pressure to end its years-long crackdown on a popular uprising.

Since 2011, the year that saw the eruption of peaceful anti-regime protests in Bahrain, the UK has sold 55 million dollars worth of arms to the Al Khalifah regime.

Scores of people have been killed and hundreds of others injured or arrested in the Bahraini crackdown on the anti-regime activists, who have been holding protests on an almost daily basis since February 14, 2011.

The UK has also provided training and intelligence to Bahraini security forces, who have been aided by their Saudi counterparts in their violent crackdown.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Ukrainian sabotage group detained in Crimea: Russia

Iran Press TV

Thu Nov 10, 2016 8:23AM

Russia says it has arrested a group of Ukrainian saboteurs suspected of planning attacks against military sites and vital infrastructure in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said it arrested "members of a diversionary and terrorist group of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry" in the Crimean city of Sevastopol on Thursday.

It seized explosive devices, weapons as well as maps of potential target sites from the secret subversive group, the FSB added.

In October, the Russian intelligence agency arrested a Ukrainian journalist accused of spying on armed forces in the country. Later, it arrested a Ukrainian officer allegedly trained by the US spy agency CIA.

Moscow and Kiev have been locked in a dispute since 2014, when Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and formally applied to become part of Russia.

A deadly conflict broke out when Kiev launched military operations to crack down on pro-Russia forces in eastern Ukraine.

More than 9,640 people have lost their lives and over 22,430 others been injured since then, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a report in October.

NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address






Danville police are investigating an armed robbery early Friday morning.

Officers were called to the 1300 block of Piney Forest Road at about 12:30 a.m. Friday. A 20-year-old Danville man and 18-year-old woman from Alton told police they were robbed at gunpoint by three men while at a local hotel, according to a news release from the Danville Police Department.

One suspect was a black male described as having a medium complexion wearing a red jacket with a hood on it and light to medium colored jeans, according to the news release. The other two suspects were of darker complexion one had on a black beanie and dark pants.

After taking an undisclosed amount of money, the suspects ran away.

No one was injured.

Anyone with information about this incident is encouraged to contact Danville Crime Stoppers at (434) 793-0000 or crimetips@danvilleva.gov. Information given will remain confidential. Residents who contact Crime Stoppers by telephone may be eligible for a cash reward of up to $1,000.
Two recent graduates from Danville Community Colleges information technology program are finding immediate success in the job market.

Todays data networks are more complicated than ever, which makes securing them much more difficult than it has been in the past, said DCC student David Payne of Dry Fork.

Before going to DCC, Payne had never worked in information technology. Computers had always been a passion, but he was worried a career with them might take away from his hobby.

I am one of the lucky generations that were able to witness the birth of the public internet, Payne said. I can remember dialing up modems and connecting to chat rooms with individuals across the globe. I always thought the internet was one of the greatest and most complicated telecommunications achievements we created as a society.

Payne said he eventually decided to go for it, and eventually joined up with DCCs cyber security program and director Steven Carrigan. Andre Fitzgerald of Keeling also joined the program at the same time.

Andre and David started in the networking [associate of applied science] degree program and did fantastic, but even before they finished, they were hired by a local IT company that saw the potential that both students possessed, said Carrigan said in a news release. They knew that cyber security should be their next big focus area, so they went straight in.

Fitzgerald said he wanted to pursue the field to help combat network security threats.

Both are currently enrolled in the cyber security program  a third-year studies certificate  and will graduate with their cyber credential in the spring.

With the proliferation of hacking increasing, I wanted to join the good guys and use my skills and knowledge to protect people and their data, Fitzgerald, 38, said.

Fitzgerald recently resigned from his position as a network technician and is preparing to transition to a data center job, where he is expected to make about $45,000 yearly.

Cyber security is an important field, Fitzgerald said in the release. The local networking and information technology circle is very tight-knit. With a few references and an interview, I was pretty much guaranteed the job.

DCCs cyber security programs are currently aligned with the Department of Homeland Securitys and the National Security Agencys standards. Additionally, DCC is waiting for final approval of its programs in the two organizations joint database, which is scheduled to take place later this semester.

There is a major need for cyber security experts in the U.S. and David and Andre realized that, Carrigan said. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said earlier this year that Virginia has more than 17,000 open cyber security jobs, with some starting salaries topping $80,000.

Payne is currently working with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise as a system operator, where he monitors activities in a data center environment. Additionally, he said his passion for computers hasnt diminished.

Its my life, Payne said. I love this stuff and I dont ever see it fading.

Payne said he planned to continue his education with a bachelors degree and even a masters degree in the near future.

The skys the limit, Payne said. I love to learn and I think everyone should continue to learn throughout their life. Im just getting started.
DENVER, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Newmont Mining Corp. (NYSE: NEM) ("Newmont" or the "Company") announced today the Reference Yield, the Tender Offer Consideration and the Total Consideration (each as defined below) for its offer (the "Tender Offer") to purchase for cash an aggregate combined principal amount of up to $500,000,000 (as such amount may be increased by the Company, the "Maximum Tender Amount") of its 3.500% Senior Notes due 2022 (the "2022 Notes") and 5.125% Senior Notes due 2019 (the "2019 Notes" and, together with the 2022 Notes, the "Notes"). The terms and conditions of the Tender Offer are described in an offer to purchase (the "Offer to Purchase"), dated October 27, 2016.

The Tender Offer commenced on October 27, 2016. The amount of each series of Notes that is purchased in the Tender Offer will be based on the order of priority (the "Acceptance Priority Level") for such series of Notes as set forth in the table below. If purchasing all of the tendered Notes of an applicable Acceptance Priority Level on the Settlement Date would cause the Maximum Tender Amount to be exceeded, the amount of such Notes purchased on the Settlement Date (as defined below) will be prorated based on the aggregate principal amount of such Notes tendered such that the Maximum Tender Amount will not be exceeded using the procedures more fully described in the Offer to Purchase.

The following table presents the applicable Tender Offer Consideration or Total Consideration to be paid to each holder of Notes accepted for purchase and the Reference Yield used in the calculation of such consideration.

Title of Security CUSIP Number Acceptance Priority Level Reference U.S. Treasury Security Reference Yield Fixed Spread (basis points) Tender Offer Consideration(1) Total Consideration(1)(2) 3.500%

Senior Notes

due 2022 651639 AN6 1 1.125% due September 30, 2021 1.515% 90 bps $1,021.26 $1,051.26 5.125%

Senior Notes due 2019 651639 AL0 2 1.00% due October 15, 2019 1.123% 55 bps $1,065.39 $1,095.39



(1) Per $1,000 principal amount of Notes tendered and accepted for purchase. (2) Inclusive of the Early Tender Premium (as defined below).

The Tender Offer will expire at 11:59 p.m., New York City time, on November 25, 2016, unless extended by the Company (such time and date, as the same may be extended, the "Expiration Date") or earlier terminated. Withdrawal rights with respect to Notes tendered in the Tender Offer expired at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on November 9, 2016. Holders of Notes that are validly tendered and not validly withdrawn at or prior to the Early Tender Date and accepted for purchase will receive the applicable "Total Consideration," which includes an early tender premium of $30.00 per $1,000 of principal amount of Notes tendered and accepted for purchase (the "Early Tender Premium"). Holders of Notes who tender their Notes after the Early Tender Date, but at or prior to the Expiration Date, will be eligible to receive only an amount equal to the applicable Total Consideration minus the Early Tender Premium (such amount, the applicable "Tender Offer Consideration"). The applicable Total Consideration or Tender Offer Consideration, as the case may be, will only be paid to holders of tendered Notes to the extent that the Company accepts such Notes for purchase.

The Total Consideration and the Tender Offer Consideration, as applicable, for each series of Notes per $1,000 principal amount of Notes validly tendered and accepted for purchase pursuant to the Tender Offer was determined in the manner described in the Offer to Purchase by reference to the applicable fixed spread (the "Fixed Spread") specified for such series of Notes over the applicable yield (the "Reference Yield") based on the bid side price of the applicable reference U.S. Treasury Security (the "Reference U.S. Treasury Security") specified for such series of Notes on the front page of the Offer to Purchase and in the table above, as calculated by the lead dealer managers for the Tender Offer at 11:00 a.m., New York City time, on November 10, 2016, in accordance with standard market practice. In addition to the Total Consideration or the Tender Offer Consideration, as applicable, accrued and unpaid interest on the Notes accepted for purchase will be paid from the last applicable interest payment date up to, but not including, the Settlement Date.

The settlement date for the Tender Offer will follow promptly after the Expiration Date (the "Settlement Date"). The Company expects that the Settlement Date will be November 28, 2016.

The Company's obligation to accept for payment, and pay for, Notes validly tendered pursuant to the Tender Offer is subject to the satisfaction or waiver of certain conditions set forth in the Offer to Purchase. If any of the conditions are not satisfied or waived by the Company, the Company will not be obligated to accept for purchase, or pay for, validly tendered Notes, subject to applicable law, and may terminate the Tender Offer. The Tender Offer is not conditioned on the tender of a minimum principal amount of Notes.

The lead dealer managers for the Tender Offer are Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated ("BofA Merrill Lynch") and BNP Paribas Securities Corp. ("BNP Paribas"), and BMO Capital Markets Corp. and MUFG Securities Americas Inc. are co-dealer managers. Questions regarding the Tender Offer may be directed to BofA Merrill Lynch at +1 (888) 292-0070 (toll-free) or +1 (980) 387-3907 (collect) or BNP Paribas at +1 (888) 210-4358 (toll-free) or +1 (212) 841-3059 (collect). Copies of the Offer to Purchase may be obtained from the Information Agent, D.F. King & Co., Inc., at +1 (800) 488-8095 (toll-free) or +1 (212) 269-5550 (collect), or in writing at 48 Wall Street, 22nd Floor, New York, NY 10005.

This press release is neither an offer to purchase, nor a solicitation of an offer to sell the Notes or any other securities. The Company is making the Tender Offer only by, and pursuant to, the terms of the Offer to Purchase. The Tender Offer is not being made in any jurisdiction in which the making of or acceptance thereof would not be in compliance with the securities laws, blue sky laws or other laws of such jurisdiction. None of the Company, its board of directors, the dealer managers for the Tender Offer, the Tender Agent and the Information Agent or the trustee for the Notes makes any recommendation as to whether holders should tender or refrain from tendering their Notes, and no one has been authorized by any of them to make such a recommendation. Holders must make their own decision as to whether to tender their Notes and, if so, the principal amount of Notes to tender.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements:

This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are intended to be covered by the safe harbor created by such sections and other applicable laws. Such forward-looking statements may include, without limitation: statements regarding debt repayment and financing. Where the Company expresses or implies an expectation or belief as to future events or results, such expectation or belief is expressed in good faith and believed to have a reasonable basis. However, such statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected or implied by the "forward-looking statements." Such risks include, but are not limited to, the price of gold, copper and other commodities, the cost of operations, currency fluctuations, geological and metallurgical assumptions, operating performance of equipment, processes and, labor relations and timing of receipt of necessary governmental permits or approvals. For a more detailed discussion of such risks relating to our business and other factors, see the Company's Form 10-K, filed on February 17, 2016, with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") under the headings "Risk Factors" and "Forward-Looking Statements," as well as the Company's other SEC filings. The Company does not undertake any obligation to release publicly revisions to any "forward-looking statement," including, without limitation, outlook, to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news release, or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. Investors should not assume that any lack of update to a previously issued "forward-looking statement" constitutes a reaffirmation of that statement. Continued reliance on "forward-looking statements" is at investors' own risk.

Investor Contact Meredith Bandy Telephone: 303-837-5143 meredith.bandy@newmont.com

Media Contact Omar Jabara Telephone: 303-837-5114 omar.jabara@newmont.com

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/newmont-announces-pricing-of-debt-tender-offer-300361066.html

SOURCE Newmont Mining Corp.
CALGARY, ALBERTA--(Marketwired - Nov 10, 2016) - Bacanora Minerals Ltd. ("Bacanora" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:BCN)(AIM:BCN), the Canadian and London listed lithium company developing the Sonora Lithium Project1 ("Project") in northern state of Sonora, Mexico, is pleased to provide an update on activities being undertaken as part of the Company's upcoming definitive Feasibility Study ("FS").

The FS is aimed at establishing the Company's production plan for a 35,000 ("tpa") lithium carbonate operation at the Project (production is contemplated to ramp up following an initial phase of producing 17,500 tpa). The Company's strategy is to position itself to satisfy continued growth for lithium carbonate in the fast growing sectors of electric vehicles and energy storage. The FS is targeted for completion in late Q1, 2017 and the Company is fully financed through this process.

Overview

Resource upgrade and mine planning work has commenced following completion of infill drilling programme

Preliminary reserve model and mine plan are being prepared by International Mining Consultants ("IMC")

Ausenco Limited is approximately 35% of the way through the FS process engineering: The initial process flow sheet has been finalised Quotations are being sought from international vendors for larger equipment and machinery Development and optimisation of preliminary operating cost models has commenced

The expanded Pilot Plant has been operating since May 2016, producing battery grade samples of lithium carbonate which has been supporting the following: Distribution of battery-grade lithium carbonate samples to potential off-takers in Asia and Europe Flow sheet development and optimisation of lithium recoveries and reagent consumption Operator training

The Company is working with the SignumBox Group in Santiago to develop long-term lithium pricing scenarios and supply-demand models.

1 The Sonora Lithium Project is comprised of the following lithium properties: La Ventana lithium concession, which is 100 percent owned by Bacanora, and the El Sauz and Fleur concessions, which are held by Mexilit S.A. de C.V. ("Mexilit"). The Megalit concession, which is held by Megalit S.A de C.V ("Megalit"), is not included in the Sonora Project Technical Reports at this time. Mexilit and Megalit are owned 70 percent by Bacanora and 30 percent by Rare Earth Minerals plc

Exploration and Resources

The infil drilling programme to upgrade the resource classifications has been completed. A total of 3,896 metres in 31 NQ-Core infill holes for resource estimations were drilled in the Ventana area. A total of 1,870 samples were collected from the drill core and analysed in ALS-Chemex for a multi-element suite. Duplicated samples, standards and blanks were intercalated with the samples for QA/QC analysis.

Intercepts of the Upper Clay range from 11 to 49 metres in length and those for the Lower Clay range from 7 to 26 metres; the average thickness, including all of the drilling in this zone is for the upper clay unit of 30.7 metres and for the lower clay 20.7 metres. This is consistent along the deposit within the first 20-years pit area.

Also, a total of 1,566 metres in 18 HQ-Geotechnical holes were drilled in the projected 20-years pit area, tailings and plant facilities locations. Rock mechanics, hydrology and pit slope stability studies are being conducted by Ausenco.

Analyses received for the recent infill drillholes indicate that lithium content in the Upper Clay Unit varies from 25 ppm to 6,900 ppm Li with a weighted average of 1,791 ppm Li; for the Lower Clay Unit lithium content varies from 172 ppm to 10,000 ppm with a weighted average of 4,345 ppm Li. As previously announced, the Company has retained SRK Consulting (UK) Limited to provide an updated independent lithium resource estimate.

Table 1. Drill intersections. Infill and geotechnical drillholes

Hole/Unit Capping Basalt Upper Sandstone Upper Clay Ignimbrite Lower Clay Basement Total Depth (m) LV-40 95 7.5 36.85 5.15 21 11.4 176.9 LV-41 106 25.5 16.9 25.6 5.05 179.05 LV-42 20.1 8.1 32.2 6.6 11.4 9.15 87.55 LV-43 59.5 11.95 40.95 18.25 18.25 6.1 155 LV-44 71.8 14.3 40.73 12.76 21.95 4.41 165.95 LV-45 14.94 21.52 13.95 50.41 LV-46 13.18 20.82 10.8 44.8 LV-47 15 22.8 7.1 44.9 LV-48 14 22.4 5.25 41.65 LV-49 14.14 15.51 14.07 1.18 44.9 LV-50 4.29 14.58 26.33 15.45 10.38 4.37 75.4 LV-51 12.35 22.7 9.85 44.9 LV-52 12.93 19.32 6.55 38.8 LV-53 126.8 1.15 38.83 16.89 20.88 4.85 209.4 LV-54 100.93 11.07 36.92 16.63 19.48 6.17 191.2 LV-55 32.25 19.83 30.22 15.8 24.2 8 130.3 LV-56 5.05 26.35 27.7 14.88 21.52 7.15 102.65 LV-57 2.6 6.7 6.5 19.8 9.15 44.75 LV-58 40.4 4.5 17.9 11.65 21.35 4 99.8 LV-59 45.86 25.49 12.6 15.8 11.25 111 LV-60 145.34 15.31 11 12.12 26.08 5.7 215.55 LV-61 96.67 22.16 35.03 12.2 20.72 10.47 197.25 LV-62 91.67 11.78 7.11 5.42 17.27 133.25 LV-63 2.41 5.59 21.57 12.28 41.85 LV-64 87 18.4 19.6 24.5 7.55 157.05 LV-65 128.45 21.7 7.65 14.3 172.1 LV-66 99.17 7.51 49.24 15.78 26.95 7.75 206.4 LV-67 141.24 4.11 11.72 12.2 24.63 11.8 205.7 LV-68 133.65 16.27 33.53 13.13 20.22 7.35 224.15 LV-69 154.25 16.15 32.9 15.95 22.08 13.92 255.25 LV-70 15.74 23.48 9.03 48.25 AUS-SL-16-01 136.10 7.75 26.40 12.20 182.45 AUS-SL-16-02 164.65 15.69 29.26 209.6 AUS-SL-16-03A 132.8 22.7 36.7 8.25 200.45 AUS-SL-16-03B 95.9 13.5 30.1 10.45 23.9 35.7 209.55 AUS-SL-16-04 26.65 32.15 53.30 112.1 BH-16-01 81.65 81.65 BH-16-02 99.90 99.9 BH-16-03 41.95 41.95 BH-16-04 61.95 4.60 28.80 95.35 BH-16-05 32.90 32.9 BH-16-06 32.80 32.8 BH-16-07 32.90 32.9 BH-16-08 32.80 32.8 BH-16-09 32.65 32.65 BH-16-10 32.80 32.8 BH-16-11 39.00 39 BH-16-14 51.10 51.1 BH-16-15 51.10 51.1

Lithium Pricing, Industry Operating Costs and Consumable Pricing

Over the past 12 months there has been a significant strengthening in the selling price of lithium products. Increasing demand from the vehicle electrification and the renewable energy industry has seen lithium prices rise above the pricing used by Bacanora in the Pre-Feasibility Study cashflows. Bacanora are currently working with SignumBox to develop long-term lithium pricing scenarios and supply-demand models.

In tandem with rising prices for lithium carbonate products, average operating costs ($/t Li 2 CO 3 ) have been increasing as a result of increasing operating costs. The recent HSBC Lithium Global Sector Playbook of October 2016 includes a comprehensive overview of the various operating costs of the major lithium producers.

To view the Lithium Production Operating Cost Comparison please click the following link: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/Bacanora910.pdf

This HSBC report indicates that brine production costs are now between $3,000/t and $4,500/t Li 2 CO 3 for the producers that were studied, with Australian hard rock conversion costs significantly higher.

Martin Vidal is the Qualified Person pursuant to National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and the AIM Note for Mining and Oil and Gas Companies who has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this announcement.

ABOUT BACANORA:

Bacanora is a Canadian and London listed minerals explorer (TSX VENTURE:BCN)(AIM:BCN). The Company explores and develops industrial mineral projects, with a primary focus on lithium. The Sonora Lithium Project, which consists of ten mining concession areas covering approximately 100 thousand hectares in the northeast of Sonora State. The Company, through drilling and exploration work to date, has established an Indicated Mineral Resource (in accordance with NI 43-101) of 4.5 million tonnes (lithium carbonate equivalent) and 2.7 million tonnes Inferred. A Pre-Feasibility Study completed in Q1 2016 demonstrated the positive economics associated with becoming a 35,000 tpa lithium carbonate and 50,000 tpa SOP producer in Mexico. The Company is led by a team with lithium expertise which have proven mine development, construction and operational experience.

Reader Advisory

Except for statements of historical fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance or achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information.

Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: commodity price volatility; general economic conditions in Canada, the United States, Mexico and globally; industry conditions, governmental regulation, including environmental regulation; unanticipated operating events or performance; failure to obtain industry partner and other third party consents and approvals, if and when required; the availability of capital on acceptable terms; the need to obtain required approvals from regulatory authorities; stock market volatility; competition for, among other things, capital, skilled personnel and supplies; changes in tax laws; and the other risk factors disclosed under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive.

The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCwire) - Prophecy Development Corp. (Prophecy or the Company) (TSX:PCY, OTC:PRPCD, Frankfurt:1P2N) is pleased to report that Bolivias Minister of Mining and Metallurgy, Cesar Navarro, met with Prophecy and representatives from other international mining companies operating in Bolivia on November 9, to coordinate and prepare for the Minister's upcoming participation at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention to be held in Toronto, Canada from March 5-8, 2017.

Minister Navarro stated: Both, public and private mining sectors will try to attract foreign investment disclosing and sharing their experience with investors from several parts of the world.

The other participants of the meeting were: the Presidents of Sinchi Wayra S.A. (Glencore plc) and Manquiri S.A. (Coeur Mining Inc.), plus representatives from Empresa Minera San Cristobal (Sumitomo Corp.), Pan American Silver Corp., Empresa Minera Paititi (Orvana Minerals Corp.) and Organismo Latinoamericano de Mineria (OLAMI).

This gathering follows Prophecy's meeting with Minister Navarro in La Paz on October 9, which was facilitated by the Embassy of Canada in Bolivia. During that meeting, Minister Navarro stated that the aim of the recent mining regulation is to support the investors and ensure the inclusion of cooperative labour in their projects".

Highlights and photos of both meetings can be accessed at: http://www.mineria.gob.bo/ and www.prophecydev.com.

The Company also announces that John Lee, of Suite 1301, 12 Harcourt Road, Central, Hong Kong, Executive Chairman of the Company, acquired 11,200 shares of Prophecy (the Acquisition) through trading in the secondary market (i.e. the Toronto Stock Exchange) today.

Prior to the Acquisition, Mr. Lee beneficially owned 1,087,853 shares, representing approximately 22.85% of the issued and outstanding shares of the Company.

As a result of the Acquisition, Mr. Lee now beneficially owns and exercises control over an aggregate of 1,099,053 shares representing an interest of approximately 23.09% of the Companys currently issued and outstanding shares, and 34.80% of the Companys shares on a fully diluted basis assuming exercise of all of the Companys outstanding share purchase warrants.

The securities were acquired by Mr. Lee for investment purposes only, and not for purposes of exercising control or direction over the Company.

Generally, Mr. Lee intends to evaluate his investment in the Company and to increase or decrease his shareholdings as circumstances require, depending on market conditions and other factors, through market transactions, private agreements or otherwise.

The information contained in this news release has been provided by Mr. Lee and the Company is not responsible for its accuracy.

A copy of the early warning report pursuant to National Instrument 62-103 required to be filed with the applicable securities commissions in connection with the acquisition of the shares described in this news release will be available for viewing under the Companys profile at www.sedar.com. A copy of the early warning report can also be obtained from the contact number for Investor Relations below.

About Prophecy



Prophecy Development Corp. is a Canadian public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that is engaged in developing mining and energy projects in Mongolia, Bolivia and Canada. Further information on Prophecy can be found at www.prophecydev.com.

Prophecy Development Corp.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

JOHN LEE

Executive Chairman

For more information about Prophecy, please contact Investor Relations:

+1.888.513.6286

ir@prophecydev.com

www.prophecydev.com

Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this news release, including statements which may contain words such as expects, anticipates, intends, plans, believes, estimates, or similar expressions, and statements related to matters which are not historical facts, are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect managements expectations regarding Prophecys future growth, results of operations, performance, business prospects and opportunities, are based on certain factors and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

These factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on the Prophecys forward-looking statements. Prophecy believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements contained in this news release and the documents incorporated by reference herein are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. In addition, although Prophecy has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Prophecy undertakes no obligation to release publicly any future revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as expressly required by law.

To view this press release as a PDF file, click onto the following link:public://news_release_pdf/prophecy11102016.pdfSource: Prophecy Development Corp. (TSX:PCY, OTC Pink:PRPCD, FWB:1P2N)

To follow Prophecy Development Corp. on your favorite social media platform or financial websites, please click on the icons below.

Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com

Copyright  2016 Filing Services Canada Inc.
Toronto, Ontario (FSCwire) - African Metals Corp. (the Company) (TSX:AFR; Frankfurt: OWW) hereby provides a status update to the Management Cease Trade Order (MCTO) issued by the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) on September 30, 2016. The MCTO prohibits all trading in and all acquisitions of the securities of the Company, whether direct or indirect, by Simeon Tshisangama, Chief Executive Officer, and Daniel Gregory, Chief Financial Officer, until two full business days following the receipt by the BCSC of the Companys audited annual consolidated financial statements as at and for the financial year ended May 31, 2016 (Annual Financial), related management discussion and analysis (MD&A) and applicable officer certifications (collectively, the Annual Financial Materials), or as further ordered by the BCSC.

The Company is currently attempting to arrange financing to enable it to continue the audit process of its Annual Financial statements. The Company expects to finalize and file its Annual Financial Materials along with its Interim Materials before the November 29, 2016 deadline imposed under the MCTO. The Company confirms that it intends to satisfy the provisions of the alternative information guidelines found in sections 4.3 and 4.4 of National Policy 12-203 Cease Trade Orders for Continuous Disclosure Defaults for so long as it is delayed in filing the Annual Financial Materials. The Company is not aware of any other material information concerning its affairs which has not been generally disclosed.

About African Metals Corporation African Metals Corp. is a Canadian listed company focused on the discovery and development of copper and cobalt deposits in the world renowned Africa Copper Belt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Company through its 100% owned BVI subsidiary, African Metals Holdings (BVI) Ltd (AFH), holds a 71.25% interest in the Congolese subsidiary, Luisha Mining Enterprises Sarl (LME). LME holds legal title to the 16.2 sq.km. large scale mining permit licence, PE 4881, called the Luisha South Project, located in the Katanga Province of the DRC. AFR holds an option to increase its equity interest to 90% in LME, upon a Qualified Person defining a certain minimum Indicated Resource tonnage for contained copper and cobalt. AFR must also make certain milestone payments in a mixture of cash and shares to reach the milestone of a 90% interest.

The Luisha South Project is located 75 kilometres northwest of Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga Province. Please see the Company's press release of August 16, 2016 for the Company's latest update on its business and affairs.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulatory Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

This press release includes certain forward-looking statements concerning the future performance of the Companys business and operations as well as managements objectives, strategies, beliefs and intentions. Forward-looking statements are often identifiable by the use of words such as may, will, might, would, plan, believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, scheduled, forecasts and similar expressions or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases. Such statements include the Companys anticipation that the audit will be completed before the November 29, 2016 deadline imposed under the MCTO. They also include the Company's intention to satisfy the provisions of the alternative information guidelines found in sections 4.3 and 4.4 of National Policy 12-203 Cease Trade Orders for Continuous Disclosure Defaults for so long as it is delayed in filing the annual financial statements, related MD&A, and CEO and CFO certificates.

Forward-looking statements are based on the current opinions and expectations of management, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those currently anticipated by such statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, the possibility that events will not be consistent with the Companys expectations, the availability of financing, and other risks identified in the Companys documents filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities at www.sedar.com. Any forward-looking statement speaks only of the date on which it is made, as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Company Contact:

Daniel Gregory

Chief Financial Officer

Office: (416) 955 0101

E-mail: dangregory811@gmail.com

To view this press release as a PDF file, click onto the following link:public://news_release_pdf/AfricanMetals.pdfSource: African Metals Corp. (TSX Venture:AFR, FWB:OWW)

To follow African Metals Corp. on your favorite social media platform or financial websites, please click on the icons below.

Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com

Copyright  2016 Filing Services Canada Inc.
Americas 100 biggest cities are electing mayors this month, and most of the winners will come floating into office on a tide of promises, some of them achievable and some so ambitious that the candidates themselves dont have a clue how to pull them off.Many will have vowed to be education mayors -- school reformers who will generate test results so much improved as to make their communities magnets for the affluent residents they are competing to attract. Candidates make these vows despite decades worth of evidence that there is little a mayor can do to produce dramatic educational improvement over the course of a term in office.But thats the way it is with political promises. To attract attention -- and votes -- youre better off promising to do something difficult. Nobody runs for mayor of a big city vowing to become the sanitation mayor. Picking up the garbage is something everyone expects you to do. Being exceptionally good at it scores no political points. Its a task that gets noticed only when its botched.The smartest political candidates understand this. They make promises that stand somewhere between the grandiose and the trivial. They look for challenges that, with the requisite amount of intelligence, energy and luck, might be met in a meaningful way. In the words of George Latimer, who was a highly effective three-term mayor of St. Paul, Minn., these candidates dont chase problems. They chase opportunities.For many candidates in 2016 who would like to be as successful as Latimer, the question of what to chase is fairly obvious: economic development. Promise to lure in the corporations that will provide massive numbers of new jobs and restore (or preserve) the citys economic vitality. Push through tax incentives and other economic subsidies that will make your city look more attractive than the other jurisdictions competing for the same prizes. Land a few big fish, and you will leave office with the satisfaction that you have done something important.Its an appealing strategy, and its one that, in much of urban America, is hard to resist. But how successful is it likely to be? How often does any set of public policies deserve credit for a citys economic revival? When a citys economic fortunes improve in a relatively short time, does that mean the mayor was smart -- or does it just mean that he or she was lucky?Richard Schragger, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has taken a look at mayors and economic development strategies in cities all over the country and has come up with a sobering but compelling conclusion: When the strategies work, its mostly luck. Any claim that a specific policy will foster growth or decline, Schragger says in his new book,, should be treated with a great deal of caution. ... Confident predictions that economic growth is attainable if city leaders would just get with the program are seriously oversold.Schraggers skepticism about economic development politics is grounded in a conviction that most political actors misunderstand what cities are fundamentally about. In his view, they subscribe to the market-driven ideology that envisions cities as products, vying with each other to present the most enticing offers and attract the most desirable collection of customers -- or corporations. Schragger, on the other hand, is a disciple of the late Jane Jacobs, and shares the renowned urbanists long-held conviction that a city is a bundle of organic processes interacting with each other in myriad ways and much too complex to be understood in simplistic free-market terms. We talk about cities as if they were businesses, he writes, when that is not what cities are at all.If cities were businesses or products in competition with each other for sales, Schragger points out, it would be reasonable to expect that over the past couple of decades the ones prospering most conspicuously would have been the ones offering customers the best deals -- specifically, the juiciest array of tax breaks. But as we all know, that isnt what happened. Boston, New York and Seattle are all high-tax cities, and they are all thriving. Meanwhile, dozens of struggling Rust Belt cities have thrown elaborate tax break bouquets at businesses and are worse off than they were in 1970.The most impressive economic development coup in the past couple of years is probably Bostons success at enticing General Electric Corp. to move its headquarters from suburban Connecticut to its downtown waterfront. Of course, this wasnt accomplished without subsidies. The city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts offered nearly $175 million in grants and property tax relief. But it was far from the best deal on the table. If GE had chosen a new location based only on the financial incentives being offered, it would have done better moving to the suburbs of New York, or perhaps even staying in Connecticut.to make of the resurgent big cities of the 21st century? What did they do to earn that distinction? If they didnt succeed through economic development bribery, maybe they did it by electing leaders who were simply better at management than the competition. Schragger acknowledges a grain of truth to this argument, but not much more than that. Looking back over the past generation, its certainly true that Pittsburgh has benefited from having more capable stewardship than Detroit has had. Pittsburghs mayors worked hard to nurture the citys combination of good universities and advanced medical research, rather than making foolish investment decisions and staying yoked to a declining industry. But when you add up all the factors that led to Detroits bankruptcy in 2013, its difficult to say that bad management -- or any particular set of policies -- was the primary culprit. The decline of Detroit was much more complicated and multifaceted than that. It was, in a certain sense, organic.Education might best be looked at in a similar way. Every mayor wants to talk about creating better school systems, but as Schragger points out, there hasnt been much of a detectable correlation in recent years between educational improvement and broader economic revival. Chicago and Philadelphia have been burdened for several decades now by dysfunctional school systems, but both have experienced central city comebacks that have spread beyond the immediate downtown area into an ever-expanding network of surrounding communities.Reduced crime is often cited as a fundamental ingredient of urban recovery, and I would assign it more importance than Schragger does in explaining the success of Boston, New York and, until the last couple of years, Chicago. The fact remains, however, that crime has declined significantly just about everywhere in America since the 1990s. If safe streets were the secret ingredient of comeback cities, there would be many more of them. Controlling crime may be a necessary condition for urban revival, but it clearly isnt a sufficient one.Its tempting at this point to invoke some sort of amenity thesis, such as Richard Floridas much-discussed argument that the successful cities are those that do best at attracting the creative class of highly educated young professionals. General Electric is, indeed, moving to Boston because of some combination of intangible amenities that young talent is looking for; the companys executives have made this very plain. There seems to exist a mixture of demographics, technology and culture that can constitute a winning formula for cities. But knowing this is not the same as knowing how to create it. In the 15 years since Florida first advanced his ideas, it is hard to think of a city that has set out purposefully to become a creative-class mecca and actually become one. Urban histories unfold for reasons that are very difficult to understand, as Jane Jacobs knew well and as Schragger argues persuasively.So what should this years crop of eager new mayors set out to achieve? Schragger has a simple answer to that question, although it is not one that all of them will wish to embrace. He believes, among other ideas, that they should set a goal of tempering the inequality that has become endemic to even the most fortunate American cities in recent years. He wants them to fight for a higher minimum wage, one that would rise in graduated steps to $15 an hour and then beyond it. Raising the minimum wage, he says, is a concrete step that most cities can take and then measure the consequences. In Schraggers view, the consequences will be overwhelmingly positive: If a small number of jobs are lost in the process, they will be more than compensated for by tangible gains for most of the workforce.That isnt a practical strategy everywhere. More than a dozen states now restrict the ability of their localities to raise the minimum wage. In those states, Schragger recommends the expanded use of community benefits agreements -- deals with developers that extract concessions on jobs, housing and community services in exchange for land use allowances over which the local government has control.By no means is this a comprehensive agenda. Its barely a beginning. But its built on a recognition that cities would be better off in the long run if mayors and other leaders looked at their capacities more realistically. Cities, Schragger says, should do less of what they cannot do  and more of what they can -- provide quality basic services to their residents.  Abandoning local economic development policies is almost politically impossible for local leaders. But it is the right thing to do.
ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Safe Republican (86 electoral votes)

Likely Republican (71 electoral votes)

Lean Republican (29 electoral votes)

Tossup (78 electoral votes)

Lean Democratic (91 electoral votes)

Safe Democratic (183 electoral votes)

GUBERNATORIAL RACES

Safe Republican

Tossup

Likely Democratic

Safe Democratic

ATTORNEYS GENERAL

Safe Republican

Likely Republican

Tossup

Lean Democratic

Safe Democratic

STATE LEGISLATURES

Republican Flips

Democratic Flips

GOP Ties

Politicians face voters on Election Day. In the succeeding days, political handicappers are the ones called to account.With the ballot-counting (mostly) complete, how did we do?First, some background.offered ratings periodically during the 2016 campaign cycle for four types of contests: states in the Electoral College, the gubernatorial races, the state attorney general races and control of the state legislatures.Ratings were based on interviews with political observers and a review of polling data. They were also based on experience: Ive been rating the legislatures since the 2002 cycle, gubernatorial races since the 2006 cycle, and the Electoral College and the attorney general races since the 2008 cycle.Each race and chamber was rated as either safe Republican, likely Republican, lean Republican, tossup, lean Democratic, likely Democratic or safe Democratic.For the Electoral College and the gubernatorial and AG races, we added an additional step: Within each rating category, the states were rank-ordered so they could be viewed as a continuum between the seats most likely to go Republican (at the top) and the states most likely to go Democratic (at the bottom). The idea is to draw a line and find all the states above that line won by a Republican and all the seats below that line won by a Democrat.What follows is a rundown of the accuracy of our final round of handicapping , published the day before the election.There has been much anger at how some political number crunchers wrongly considered Hillary Clinton to be a virtual lock to win the presidency.Well admit to being shocked at Donald Trumps victory, like so many others. But this column is fundamentally about state politics -- not national politics -- so we have long used a system that focuses on the state-by-state results, not on predicting the ultimate presidential winner. Our system accepts that one party will ultimately be stronger than the other in winning competitive states, but our aim is to be accurate, to the extent we can, about the comparative likelihood of any given state going Republican or Democratic.In 2008, our placement of states on the continuum was correct except for Missouri and one electoral vote for a congressional district in Nebraska. In 2012, we placed the line exactly right, with the one state in the tossup category that was ranked closest to lean Republican -- North Carolina -- going to Mitt Romney, and all other tossup states going to Barack Obama.This year, we failed to correctly place three states on the continuum: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania should have swapped places with New Hampshire, Nevada and Colorado. For the three cycles weve been handicapping the Electoral College, this is our biggest error yet. Like so many others, we underappreciated Trumps ability to draw Rust Belt voters to the polls.Heres the complete list, with misplaced states in bold.Alabama (9), Arkansas (6), Idaho (4), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (8), Mississippi (6), Montana (3), Nebraska (4 of 5 electoral votes), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), West Virginia (5) and Wyoming (3)Texas (38), Alaska (3), South Carolina (9), Missouri (10), Indiana (11)Utah (6), Nebraska (1 of 5 electoral votes), Georgia (16), Iowa (6)Ohio (Trump, 18), Arizona (Trump, 11), Maine (Trump, 1 of 4 electoral votes), Florida (Trump, 29), North Carolina (Trump, 15), New Hampshire (Clinton, 4)Nevada (Clinton, 6), Colorado (Clinton, 9),, Maine (Clinton, 2 of 4 electoral votes), Virginia ( Clinton, 13), Minnesota (Clinton, 10), New Mexico (Clinton, 5)California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (20), Maine (1 of 4 electoral votes), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), New Jersey (14), New York (29), Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3) and Washington state (12)Our continuum for gubernatorial races was slightly more accurate. Ultimately, two seats were on the wrong side of the dividing line. (This assumes that the current leader in the North Carolina gubernatorial race, Democrat Roy Cooper, prevails in a recount.)In our rankings, we placed two gubernatorial races that were won by Republicans -- Indiana and New Hampshire -- too far in the Democrats direction.This is an improvement from our 2014 rankings, when we placed four races on the wrong side of the dividing line. But its not quite as good as 2012, when our continuum was perfect, and 2010, when we were off by just one gubernatorial contest.Both 2014 and 2016 were notable for the large number of tossup races on the eve of the election: 12 in 2014 and seven in 2016. Having so many contests as tossup increases the likelihood of jumbled results when the election returns come in.Heres the complete list, with misplaced races in bold.Utah, North DakotaMissouri (Republican), Vermont (Republican), West Virginia (Democratic), Montana (Democratic),, North Carolina (Democratic),WashingtonOregon, DelawareFinally, a category we nailed: We correctly constructed our continuum of races for attorney general seats. It was the third straight cycle we have correctly ordered the AG contests.Utah, MontanaIndianaWest Virginia (Republican), Missouri (Republican), North Carolina (Democratic)PennsylvaniaVermont, Oregon, Washington stateBecause of the complexity of rating 98 chambers, we dont rank-order them within each rating category. Instead, we judge our success based on whether we failed to peg any chambers that ultimately flipped party control as competitive. (Competitive races are either lean Republican, lean Democratic or tossup.)We were quite accurate in this regard in 2016. The only chambers that changed partisan control that were not considered competitive had unusual quirks. In the formerly Republican-controlled Alaska House, a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans took control after the election. We didnt predict that the GOP would lose control in that chamber -- we rated it likely Republican -- although we did at least cite in our final analysis the pivotal role of the group of rural Democrats known as the "bush caucus."Similarly, our 2014 ratings were assailed by an unusual quirk: The West Virginia Senate flipped only due to post-election party switches.Meanwhile, in the Delaware Senate -- which we had rated safe Democratic -- theres a tie that should be short-lived. In the narrowly divided chamber, one Democrat lost a seat on Election Day, and another Democrat won the lieutenant governorship, creating a vacancy that left the chamber tied. But that deadlock is expected to disappear once a special election is held to fill the vacant seat -- and in any case, until then, the new Democratic lieutenant governor will be able to break ties in the chamber.Beyond this pair of quirky results, our handicapping was on target for the chambers that flipped. Each was considered competitive in our final rankings.Heres the rundown of flipped chambers, along with their pre-election rating:Kentucky House, Lean R; Iowa Senate, Tossup; Minnesota Senate, Lean DNevada Assembly, Lean D; Nevada Senate, Tossup; New Mexico House, TossupConnecticut Senate, Tossup
As most of America was still absorbing the news that Donald Trump had won the presidency, Republican Corey Stewart had already declared it rocket fuel for his 2017 bid for Virginia governor.Stewart, the one-time chairman of Trumps Virginia campaign, said that despite the fact that Clinton beat Trump by nearly five percentage points in Virginia, Republican primary voters will reward him for being Trumps biggest cheerleader in the state.And he figures the Trump administration will be in accord with his stance that illegal immigrants who have committed crimes be deported.If youre an illegal alien in Prince William County, Id get out, said Stewart, who chairs the countys board of supervisors. Its the very first thing Im going to do with a friendly Trump administration. Now were going to find out where each and every one of these guys is, and were going hunt them down and were going to deport them.Its a game changer, Stewart said of Trumps win. It just propelled me into front-runner status for governor.
Ending a streak of thin electoral margins, Harris County  the biggest battleground in ruby red Texas with a population larger than 25 other states  turned solidly blue on Tuesday with the largest presidential margin of victory in more than a decade.The blue wave was apparent up and down the ballot on a banner night for the county's Democrats.They swept up every single countywide seat, including the district attorney and sheriffs offices. They flipped a Texas House district in Pasadena. And with a presidential fight at the top of the ticket, Democrats shored up their lead in the fight for the typically purple county with Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by more than 160,000 votes  up from the 971 votes with which Obama took the county in 2012.Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday chalked up Republican losses in urban areas to increased turnout in presidential years, which tends to benefit Democrats.Remember in both 08 and 12, there were sweeps in Harris County and then during the gubernatorial election, we won em back, Abbott said in a phone interview. And so this was really just kind of an echo of what happened the last few presidential cycles and little more than that."But with an incredibly diverse population that only continues to grow in the states biggest county, it appears that  more than in previous elections  demographics determined the electoral outcome in Harris County.Despite little overall change in areas of the state with large Hispanic populations, it appears Hispanic voters were, in part, behind Democrats victories in Harris County.About 17 percent of in-person early voters in Harris County had a Hispanic-sounding surname  up from 11 percent in 2012, according to Hector de Leon, director of communications and voter outreach for the county clerk.Election Day voting numbers are still being crunched, but if turnout among Hispanic voters remained unchanged from the last election  and theres little reason to believe it worsened  it may have increased by about 34 percent on Tuesday, de Leon said.My sense is that they did outperform their Election Day turnout [in 2012], or they at least matched it, de Leon said, and if they matched it, there would be an increase.That possible increased turnout comes as Harris County becomes increasingly nonwhite.During the last open presidential election in 2008, 39 percent of Harris Countys then 3.9 million residents were Hispanic, according to census estimates, compared to 36 percent who were white.Census estimates for 2016 arent available, but state demographer projections indicate that Harris Countys share of white residents would fall to 28.5 percent this year, while the Hispanic population would increase to 44.7 percent, with more than half of the Hispanic population of voting age.But the electoral contours in Harris County arent simply attributed to a shrinking white population.In the short term, Trump was not a good candidate for many, many Texans, including some Republicans, and thats reflected in the turnout, said Bob Stein, a Rice University political scientist who has been crunching turnout numbers in Harris. But the county is also beginning to see the effects of Hispanics, who tend to lean Democratic, aging up and replacing older white voters who are literally dying off, he added.Democrats push back against the idea that theyre only winning because of demographic change. Lane Lewis, chairman of the countys Democratic Party, attributes it to the partys affinity to the priorities and needs of those varying demographics.They don't vote for us because theyre black, brown or gay, Lewis said. They vote for us because we speak in concert with things that are important to them.Harris County Republican chair Paul Simpson, who did not respond to a request for comment, previously said the party was working to fight the Democrats on their turf" but also acknowledged they were working against a motivation problem amid a lack of GOP enthusiasm after a presidential primary that left many disillusioned.But when the dust settled on a shocking Trump victory nationally, it was clear that enthusiasm in Harris County for the raucous billionaire didnt just come up short  it tumbled below the last three presidential elections. Not only did fewer Republicans cast a ballot for their partys presidential nominee but their total votes came close to 2000 levels.Trump won just 544,960 votes in Harris County. In 2000, President George Bush won 529,159. Meanwhile, total Democratic votes for the top of the ticket increased from 418,267 in 2000 to 706,471 this year.Demographics have an impact on elections, de Leon said. Harris County is an example of that.Republicans saw some success on Tuesday night, holding onto a second Texas House seat Democrats had targeted. And they maintained control of their seats on the county commissioner's court. But in the days following the election, theyve conceded they took a beating in Harris County.In emails to supporters, prominent local conservatives called it the worst defeat for Republicans in the 71-year history of the countys Republican party. Citing losses in Dallas and Houston, Abbott in a Thursday email to supporters said "the threats to the Lone Star State remain very real." And discussing a need to focus on down-ballot races after tough losses, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, whose son lost his judgeship in Harris, said Republicans must continue reaching out to Hispanic voters.
A federal judge has ordered state officials to deliver bottled water to Flint residents who can't easily go to distribution stations to pick up their own water and don't have properly installed and maintained water filters.In a preliminary injunction issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge David Lawson said the state and City of Flint must, effective immediately, deliver four cases of bottled water per resident per week to qualified Flint households.Essentially, Lawson ordered the state and city officials to deliver bottled water to all Flint homes, unless officials verify, on a regular basis, the home has a properly installed and functioning water filter, or the residents decline delivery."The court today affirmed that all people have the right to safe drinking water, including the people of Flint," said Dimple Chuadhary, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the plaintiffs that brought the lawsuit.State officials argued bottled water can be picked up as needed at distribution centers and those who can't pick it up can call 2-1-1 to arrange for delivery. They also argued the cost of delivering water to households would be $9 million per month.However, "the plaintiffs have offered credible anecdotal evidence that indicates that the distribution network is in flux and not completely effective in providing safe drinking water to several households," Lawson said."Despite the substantial efforts of Capt. (Chris) Kelenske (of the Michigan State Police) and others, it is clear that some residents, who are actively seeking safe drinking water, are encountering great difficulty ... "He said he heard testimony that some residents have stopped calling 2-1-1 because of frustrations with the response, and others don't know the service is available.'The harm in this case is not environmental; it concerns public health and safety," Lawson said. Also, "the defendants need not deliver water to homes that have properly installed and maintained faucet water filters, as long as the defendants can monitor and verify the effectiveness of the filters."That will reduce the cost of delivery, Lawson said, but "if the defendants cannot establish that a household is so equipped (with a working filter), then they must deliver the water by other means."Lawson ordered officials to "provide Flint residents with clear and current information about lead contamination in the drinking water" that states the potential risks and need for properly installed filters. The notices and instructions must be distributed in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Hmong, Lawson said."A safe water supply has always been critical to civilization," Flint said in granting the order sought in a lawsuit brought by Concerned Pastors for Social Change, Flint activist Melissa Mays, the ACLU, and the Natural Resources Defense Council Inc.Defendants in the lawsuit are state Treasurer Nick Khouri and state and members of the Receivership Transition Advisory Board overseeing Flint as it emerges from state-ordered emergency management.Lawson said state officials must file a progress report by Dec. 16 showing compliance with the order.
A third consecutive day of anti-Trump demonstrations turned violent Thursday night, as protesters began with a march and chanting but eventually smashed cars at a dealership and rampaged through the Pearl District shattering business windows.Police declared the demonstration a "riot" more than three hours after its 5 p.m. start, citing "extensive criminal and dangerous behavior." The bureau said it warned the crowd about the designation, then tweeted that rioting is a class C felony.The crowd -- at least on par with the 2,000 that gathered the night before and estimated as high as 4,000 -- started at Pioneer Courthouse Square in the early evening before taking off on a route that included a stop at the Portland waterfront and trip over the Hawthorne Bridge into Southeast Portland.It eventually moved into Northeast Portland, where at least 19 cars at Toyota of Portland were vandalized, according to a sales manager.Protesters then made their way west across the Broadway Bridge and into the Pearl District, where business windows along Northwest Lovejoy Street and elsewhere were smashed.About 9:45 p.m., police in riot gear confronted the crowd and shut down the North Park Blocks area. They warned that some protesters were preparing "gas and flares" and that participants should leave for their own safety.Police said protesters should return to Pioneer Courthouse Square to continue peaceful protest, and those remaining would be arrested.It was unclear if any arrests had been made by 10 p.m. Most protesters moved in the direction of Pioneer square; a few remained in the park blocks area.Marchers headed back south into downtown along Broadway. The crowd wound its way through streets, and riot police eventually stopped the protesters after 11:30 p.m. at Southwest 6th and Yamhill Street.Flash bangs and rubber bullets were reportedly being used in an attempt to clear protesters, and arrests are being made. Police report officers were "taking projectiles."As Thursday became Friday, the standoff continued, with Oregon State Police officers also being deployed at Southwest Yamhill Stree and 4th Avenue. Flash bang and less-than-lethal rounds were being deployed as officers advanced to clear the crowd.By 1 a.m. Friday, the crowd had thinned considerably, but police continued a standoff with about a dozen protesters a half-block away, and others farther back. Officers continued to advancing down the street until prosters gradually thinned out.The crowd by 1:30 a.m. had thinned to the point where one primary protest group appeared to exist. Small groups continued to move around downtown.Protesters stayed off freeways as of 11 p.m. -- a departure from the previous two nights' anti-Trump efforts.Early in the evening, authorities briefly closed freeways as a precaution, TriMet trains and buses were affected, and traffic was disrupted where protesters passed.Tensions flared at times between protesters and motorists, with police tweeting they received reports of "vandalism and aggressive behavior" in the protest crowd. Altercations included a motorist's windshield being cracked while she tried to navigate through protesters, saying she needed to tend to an emergency.Some observers reported that a woman apparently was injured after some demonstrators said she was throwing liquid Tide at protesters. A bottle of Tide lay on the ground nearby as demonstrators called for protest medics to tend to the woman, who stayed on the ground for a few minutes.Trump tweeted mid-Thursday night about the protests that have erupted across the country, calling them "unfair" and prompted by the media.Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016A new activist group galvanized by Trump's election promoted the protest, which was one of multiple demonstrations Thursday in Portland. Dubbed Portland's Resistance and composed of students and youth from protests that took over freeways Wednesday morning and night, spokesman Gregory McKelvey said the organization will use anti-Trump efforts to prop up local movements.Protest chants included the rallying call of "Not my president," in reference to the newly elected Trump. Some protesters carried signs, among them: "Oppression thrives off isolation. Stand united." "We reject the fascist agenda." "You're fired!"Halim Byron said he decided to join in the latest protest partly because he believes Trump flouts convention -- then flaunts it."He does what he wants to, and he's made that a cornerstone of his campaign," said Byron, a 60-year-old Portland resident.Kaden Burdick, a 20-year-old Portland resident, said he sees the election of Trump as a rise of white supremacy and wants to fight against racism, xenophobia and homophobia that Trump's comments appear to have unleashed.As the larger Waterfront rally gathered, a smaller, faith-based group remained back in the small, tiered space in Pioneer Courthouse Square's northwest corner. Leaders from Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and First Nations faiths spoke to the crowd that lingered long after the larger Trump protest embarked onto downtown Portland's streets.The leaders put together the event to coincide with the march, said Rev. Michael Ellick, senior minister of First Congregational United Church of Christ.A Twitter List by Oregonian Ellick, who served as emcee for a parade of speakers, said before the event in a news release: "For just about anybody who isn't white, for anybody who isn't in the top 1 percent and -- you know -- for all women everywhere -- there is a lot of fear right now. So it's more important than ever for the spiritual and moral adults on this planet to show up, speak clearly and get organized."The audience lingered at least an hour after the larger group departed, mostly listening to speakers and occasionally breaking into song, such as the spiritual, "We Shall Overcome."They were dwarfed by a 75-foot Douglas fir that had been set up just hours earlier in preparation for the city's annual holiday tree-lighting ceremony on the day after Thanksgiving.TriMet earlier had warned again that MAX lines and most buses would likely experience significant delays because of the protests -- in Pioneer Square, as well as elsewhere around the city, including Mt. Tabor Park and Holladay Park. Some stations and stops may close for safety reasons, the agency said.TriMet tweeted an appeal for protesters to not block public transit. The agency said it respects the right to peacefully demonstrate, but "if you're out there making your voice heard, please don't disrupt transit service. ... Similarly, we ask that you don't vandalize our equipment."While the smashing was going on across the river, a group of about 50 people sat on steps or stood waiting to take a microphone along the downtown waterfront as a scattering of votive candles flickered on the ground. They talked about losing a loved one to HIV, supporting Hillary Clinton and even laughed at ways to best challenge Trump.Two people sat side by side with a sign that said "We shall overcome." A woman with children listened intently.
Description

GIS  11 November 2016 : Government can continuously step up efforts to promote gender equality, but without a change in mindset from every single individual in this country, there can be no gender equality.

This call for a shift in the mindset of the population in favour of gender equality was made yesterday by the Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare, Mrs Marie-Aurore Perraud, at the end of a rally from Ebene to Rose-Hill on the theme Lets Walk the Talk for Gender Equality. The rally was organised by the Ministry of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare in the context of the United Nations Women campaign Planet 50-50 by 2030 - Step it Up for Gender Equality, which calls on governments to take national commitments that will bridge the gender equality gap.

The Minister pointed out that it is not enough to enact laws and implement innovative initiatives to empower women, if prejudices about womens inferiority and their places in society still exist.  Women do not have less rights than men; women are not less able than men; women have an equal right to participate fully in cultural, social, economic and political spheres of public life, she stressed.

Highlighting the benefits of gender equality for the community, Mrs Perraud reiterated the commitment of her Ministry in sustaining efforts to ensure that gender equality becomes a reality for the harmonious socio-economic development of Mauritian families. Together, let us build a society which does not tolerate violence against women and where their rights are respected and protected, said the Minister.

Lets Walk the Talk for Gender Equality

The European Union Ambassador to the Republic of Mauritius, Ms Marjaana Sall; the Australian High Commissioner, Ms Susan Coles; women in uniform; women associations, youth clubs; and representatives of various ministries and departments answered to the call of the Ministry of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare to rally and walk the talk for gender equality.

The objectives of the Walk were, among others, to raise awareness on gender equality amongst the public at large; bring forth that womens rights are human rights; enlist the commitment of all partners working for gender equality; and applaud gender advocates, including men, as Champions for Gender Equality.
Description

GIS - 11 November, 2016: The Prime Minister, Sir Anerood Jugnauth, left the country on 9 November 2016 for an official mission to India where he will participate as Chief Guest at the 17th International Conference of Chief Justices of the world on Article 51 of the Constitution of India currently being held at the City Montessori School in Lucknow, India. The Prime Minister, Sir Anerood Jugnauth,

Sir Anerood will deliver a speech at the Conference on the theme: Uniting the World for Children through Enforceable World Law and effective Global Governance.

The Prime Minister will also be the guest of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mr Akhilesh Yadav, as well as the Mayor of Lucknow City, Mr Dinesh Sharma, and is expected to attend civic receptions where several dignitaries of the State of Uttar Pradesh will be present. Some 250 000 persons from this State came to Mauritius as Indentured Labourers during the period 1834 and 1907.

During his mission, Sir Anerood Jugnauth, will visit the Udai Pratab Autonomous College in Vanarasi, a tertiary institution formerly known as the Hewett Kshatriya High School, before proceeding to Goa where several meetings are scheduled with namely, the Deputy Chief Minister, Mr Francisco DSouza, as well as with representatives of the Goa Shipyard Ltd. It will be recalled that Goa Shipyard Ltd has provided waterjet fast patrol vessels to the Mauritius National Coast Guard in March this year.

Is also scheduled, a meeting in Mumbai with the Minister of Finance, Planning and Forest, Mr Sudhir Mungantiwar, who has invited the Prime Minister for a working dinner with Captains of the Business industry. The event will serve as platform for Prime Minister Jugnauth to address potential investors so as to promote Mauritius as a destination for business and tourism.

Sir Anerood Jugnauth will discuss possibilities for Mauritian hotel operators to invest in Goa. As for the Indian side, the State of Maharashtra has solicited Mauritian expertise in the field of rehabilitation and embellishment of beaches. Furthermore, he will meet representatives of the All India Association of Industries.

A Global Citizen Festival is also scheduled on 19 November in Mumbai at the Bandra Kurla Complex during which the Prime Minister will address the audience. The event will also be attended by the Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi and other eminent personalities in a bid to reaffirm their commitment for the promotion of Quality Education as enunciated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.

The Prime Minister is expected back in Mauritius on 21 November 2016.
Facing a Trump administration, civic tech leaders confront uncertainty

U.S. CIO launches code.gov

Boston.gov goes open source

Creating a Docker container for Boston.gov so that more people can contribute quickly and easily to the website.

Building a mapping component.

Researching information architecture to help the website fit what citizens are looking for instead of being organized around the structure of the city.

Helping to find an open source catalog tool for historical artifacts and artwork from Boston.

Setting up a sample database that auto-generates content when developers are working on open source projects for the site.

Headed into Tuesday night, almost every major poll showed Hillary Clinton winning the presidency. Then, Donald Trump won instead.The shocking development has left many wondering what will change for the U.S. government starting in January  including the innovation and technology efforts that sprung from the administration of Barack Obama, a Democrat. Clinton had expressed explicit support for the federal digital consultancy 18F and the U.S. Digital Service, for example, while Trump said very little on tech policy.Following election night, leaders in the civic tech community spoke out online in favor of soldiering on through the uncertainty that now surrounds the federal government. Some, such as 18F Director of Delivery Architecture and Infrastructure Services Noah Kunin, were a simple assurance that they would continue working.This movement is not bound to the current administration, Kunin wrote in a Medium post . It is not an ideological movement meant to serve a particular Presidents agenda, or even a particular Congress agenda.David Eaves, a public policy lecturer at Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government, wrote on his blog that he is reaching out to Republican officials to try to get a sense of what might change.What Ive heard back is that the most plausible scenario is nothing happens, Eaves wrote. Tech policy sits pretty low on the priority list. There will be status quo for likely a year while the administration figures out what is next.Meanwhile, Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, embraced a message of stability and shared values.If you dont like the outcome of the election (or if you do), this is a good time to remind yourself that politics isnt government, and governing isnt someone elses problem, Pahlka wrote. Its ours.After enacting a pilot policy calling for all federal departments to make at least 20 percent of the code for custom-built projects open source, the federal government has launched a repository for all that script: code.gov The website acts as a portal for departments to access one anothers code, as well as for citizens to improve upon it. It began with around 50 open source projects from 10 agencies, but U.S. CIO Tony Scott promised future growth in a blog post as more departments comply with the 20 percent policy. The early code available includes 3-D modeling from NASA, the commerce.gov API and an app from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that lets work supervisors calculate the heat index in which their employees are working.Its a step we took to help federal agencies avoid duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and cross-agency collaboration, Scott wrote in the post. And its a step we took to enable the brightest minds inside and outside of government to work together to ensure that federal code is reliable and effective.Scotts office collaborated with 18F and the U.S. Digital Service on the project.The federal government isnt the only public entity going open source. Boston has launched its own Web portal as an open source project  its content management system is built on Drupal, which is itself open source  and the citys Digital Team promised that anything it builds going forward will be open by default.By making the portal open source, the team wrote in a blog post , it hopes to not only find help from the public but also to provide any code that might be useful to companies and organizations with similar projects.Theres a large, civic-minded ecosystem of software developers out there, especially in the Drupal community, and were hoping they will lend a hand to improve Boston.gov, the post reads. As an open source project, we can also more easily work with organizations (like our friends at Code for Boston) or academic institutions interested in helping city governments adapt to 21st-century needs.The city is asking for help on five specific projects related to its website:Already, several people have offered help to the city on GitHub.
(TNS) -- Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams said Thursday that there were limitations to an election system used in Pueblo County Tuesday that officials were not aware of at the time they purchased the equipment.Counting of all mail in-ballots was expected to be completed at about 10:30 p.m. on Election Day, but a computer server hit its capacity early that day, forcing Pueblo County Clerk and Recorder Gilbert Bo Ortiz to call the Colorado Secretary of States Office, which provided a larger server.During a Thursday press conference in Colorado Springs, Williams repeated what Ortiz has been saying since the problem began. He told reporters that the size of Pueblo Countys fourpage ballot caused large scan files to clog the server.Williams said the server software (Microsoft SQL Express) was insufficient to handle the size. The new (Pueblo County) system uses a scan of the entire ballot so judges quickly can adjudicate (ballots in) any race that might be in question, Williams said.The vendor has provided a new server and a back-up server that is a higher-capacity server and addresses the needs that Pueblo has, Williams said. He said the new servers were provided at no additional cost to Pueblo County.The upgraded server uses SQL as opposed to SQL Express, Williams said.Complications in transferring data to the new server put Ortizs office back about eight hours Tuesday, and his staff and elections judges have been working ballots since the system was back up and running at 11:20 p.m. later that night.Ortiz said workers have had to make up those eight hours.When the server was back up, we went until 3 oclock in the morning. Unfortunately, computers dont get tired, but judges do, Ortiz said.Ortiz said he had to send the judges home Wednesday to recharge so fatigue wouldnt cause inaccuracies.Williams said his office had to assure that every bit of data was correctly transferred to the new machine.Unfortunately, that took longer than the vendor had told us it was going to take because it is not a process that they have had to do before, Williams said.Williams said there were a series of layers of security that had to be gone through on a stepby- step basis, which took longer than anyone had anticipated.Political candidates, the media and concerned citizens continued to play the waiting game Thursday, all eager to see more complete results in this years election.Results for Pueblo Countys election were still being processed.We know that people are interested in whats going on. I have been a candidate before. I know very well how interested people are in getting quick results. But there is no circumstance in which speed trumps accuracy. Accuracy must be the paramount objective throughout the process, Williams said.Williams said Pueblo County now has a larger server much like the ones in larger Colorado counties.Pueblo bought an express server because they were not aware of the limitations in size caused by a four-page, 18-inch ballot, Williams said.When you scan that in, that obviously takes a lot of space.Williams said he and Ortiz regret the delay and understand the frustration.Its frustrating for the press. Its frustrating for the candidates. Surely for the public, Ortiz said.I can tell you that I dont think anybody was more frustrated on Election Day than I was.Ortiz said his office will learn from this situation and better plan in future elections if a server goes down.Over 80,000 people voted in Pueblo County. Thats a record for us, Ortiz said.Colorado had a record- high turnout this year with 2,852,268 ballots returned.We had twice as many people vote in this election as the last one, Williams said.Ortiz said 2,000 mail-in ballots and 4,000 in-person ballots were left to process Thursday.This (situation) did not affect or disenfranchise any voters in Pueblo County, Ortiz said.
Case studies

The City Resilience Index: 12 goals and 52 indicators

Safe and affordable housing

Adequate affordable energy supply

Inclusive access to safe drinking water

Effective sanitation

Sufficient affordable food supply

Inclusive labour policies

Relevant skills and training

Dynamic local business development and innovation

Supportive financing mechanisms

Diverse protection of livelihoods following a shock

Robust public health systems

Adequate access to quality healthcare

Emergency medical care

Effective emergency response services

Local community support

Cohesive communities

Strong city-wide identity and culture

Actively engaged citizens

Effective systems to deter crime

Proactive corruption prevention

Competent policing

Accessible criminal and civil justice

Well-managed public finances

Comprehensive business continuity planning

Diverse economic base

Attractive business environment

Strong integration with regional and global economies

Comprehensive hazard and exposure mapping

Appropriate codes, standards and enforcement

Effectively managed protective ecosystems

Robust protective infrastructure

Effective stewardship of ecosystems

Flexible infrastructure services

Retained spare capacity

Diligent maintenance and continuity

Adequate continuity for critical assets and services

Diverse and affordable transport networks

Effective transport operation & maintenance

Reliable communications technology

Secure technology networks

Appropriate government decision-making

Effective co-ordination with other government bodies

Proactive multi-stakeholder collaboration

Comprehensive hazard monitoring and risk assessment

Comprehensive government emergency management

Adequate education for all

Widespread community awareness and preparedness

Effective mechanisms for communities to engage with government

Comprehensive city monitoring and data management

Consultative planning process

Appropriate land use and zoning

Robust planning approval process

Building resilience in cities is a hot topic these days among city leaders. Yet even to many who agree with that goal, the concept of urban resilience remains vague and the act of creating more of it hard to measure.Thats why Arup International Development, a nonprofit arm of the global engineering and consultancy firm, developed something called the City Resilience Index . Its a tool that breaks resilience down into recognizable parts  and gives local leaders a way to assess where their city stands.The Index was launched in 2014 and is now used by at least 120 cities, including many from the Rockefeller Foundations 100 Resilient Cities program. It also was the subject of a session at last months Habitat III summit on cities in Quito, Ecuador. Arups Jo da Silva said the Index is meant to help make the concept of resilience tangible, practical and globally applicable.Da Silva defined resilience as the ability of people living and working in cities  particularly the poor and vulnerable  to survive, adapt and thrive whatever happens. To make that measurable, the Index breaks resilience down into 12 goals that cities can aim for. For example, theres a goal related to building comprehensive security and rule of law, another goal for building reliable mobility and communications, and another for creating effective leadership and management.Each goal comes with a set of indicators that allow cities to measure their progress. For example, the goal of achieving minimal human vulnerability comes with indicators related to the availability of adequate housing, energy, drinking water, sanitation and food. A full list of the 12 goals and 52 indicators from the Index is below. Cities using the Index essentially perform a self-assessment about their ability to withstand shocks and bounce back after. To aid in that self-assessment, each indicator comes with a set of questions probing different aspects of city operations. The questions are meant to evoke both qualitative and quantitative answers from a team composed of experts from various fields.These data points do not allow for meaningful comparisons between cities. But within a city, they can establish a baseline understanding of what a citys strengths and weaknesses are. They also can provide a framework to see how a citys resilience is improving or declining over time  without having to endure a disaster to find out.In Quito, local leaders described how they are using the City Resilience Index. One of them was Tikender Singh Panwar, deputy mayor of Shimla, a city of about 170,000 people in Northern India.Panwar noted that talking about resilience in India can be an especially difficult thing. How can a city measure its resilience if 90 percent of the population is poor? he said. According to him, using the Index helped Shimla to plan and create a single utility for water and sewerage management to address a hepatitis outbreak.The Index, he said, helped city officials to understand what they do and dont do well, as well as how to interact with other stakeholders. Specifically, they were able to identify that untreated sludge from toilets was contaminating drinking water, and drafted a plan to get toilets connected to the local sewerage network.Planning cities is about planning for the people, Panwar said. Not to discount the importance of infrastructure, but the sustainability of people is always the goal.Another example came from Santa Fe, a city of 450,000 on the Salado River in Argentina. The citys chief resilience officer, Andrea Valsagna, said the local government used the Index to bolster defenses against flooding like the one in 2003 that submerged one-third of the city and required 100,000 mostly low-income people to be evacuated.Valsagna called the Index an essential planning tool. It helped local officials see a holistic view of the citys disaster management structure. Since then, the city has improved its weather forecasting to include flood warnings, made more effort to keep drainages clear, and created a 24/7 hotline for citizens who need advice on evacuation.The City Resilience Index is available online and produces data visualizations that offer a snapshot of a citys current resilience capacities. At best, Da Silva said, the tool helps cities and civil-society groups to clearly define their resilience situation and to develop tangible strategies that are backed up by data.Panwar agreed. Building resilience, he said, requires sound and well-informed decision making using the best available data  and reconciling this with the realities of the city.
Bill Eggers new book, Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies That Are Transforming Government presents practitioners with an understanding of the critical components a public official needs to turn technology into results. Through case studies from around the world, Eggers describes the marriage of technological ambition and political will, where building software and building consensus demand equal levels of innovation. The results are not only a new suite of digital products to improve the lives of citizens, but also a collaborative, agile approach to problem solving that Eggers calls the digital mindset.When technologists meet with capable public servants, they not only engender new digital solutions to improve citizens lives, but also develop ways of operating government that are leaner, cheaper, and more responsive to civic demands. Eggers refers to the public sectors adoption of digital technology and culture as hacking bureaucracy. Now synonymous with digital espionage, hacking in the world of productive computing is more accurately defined as a quick, iterative, and communal approach to problem solving. To take advantage of the opportunities provided by digital networks, leaders in government must become hackers by breaking down departmental silos and engaging the communities they serve, both directly and through data analysis.Cities, in particular, have much to gain from hacking bureaucracy. In cities we find the large data sets and tech communities that allow for speedy innovation. By opening up the flow of information between departments and to the public, the potential for analysis and efficiency improvement is endless. Eggers cites New York Citys Mayors Office of Data Analytics (MODA) as a leader in this field, solving major problems both cheaply and quickly. Tasked with reducing the number of illegal apartment conversions, MODA aggregated data from the Department of Buildings and solicited firsthand insight from the citys two hundred building inspectors. By combining this information into a predictive data model, they were able to better direct building inspectors, increasing their vacate order hit rate from thirteen percent to seventy percent. The effects of this improvement have been far reaching. As Eggers notes, fires in illegal conversions are fifteen times more likely to result in firefighter injury or death. Last year, New York had the second lowest number of fire related deaths since the FDNY began keeping record in 1916, thanks in part to MODAs model.Whereas mayors used to have intermittent contact with their constituencies at town halls, informal meetings and the ballot box, they are now capable of constant communication via social media, cloud computing and data analysis. They can know about problems as they arise, acknowledge them, and update citizens when they are solved. Building on the thesis of the book we co-authored in 2004, Governing by Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector , Eggers envisions a government that not only collaborates with public, private, and nonprofit groups, but also treats citizens who were once viewed as customers to be passively served [as] active partners in designing more effective government. Citing examples from Boston and New York, he describes procuring citizen innovation through managed competitions and open access to development tools. My own project, Data-Smart City Solutions , is replete with similar case studies.More than an audit of what has and hasnt worked for governments trying to break into the digital realm, Eggers book also contains addenda to each chapter  playbooks with itemized strategies, tools, techniques, and resources  that provide public officials with critical information they may use in effecting change. Though legible and engaging to the casual reader,is indispensable for the political practitioner seeking to make more targeted technology and policy.Entering the digital realm isnt an option for governments anymore. It is a mandate.is an invaluable guide to meeting that demand.
SACRAMENTO, Calif.  Tech leaders face a new barrage of challenges and opportunities with every new development. Some technologies spur reactive action and force uncomfortable changes, while others can be shaped into positive outcomes that better services the business of governing.

Disruption for the Better

How those in command of state assets and operations react to new developments make all the difference. This was the topic of discussion for one group of panelists the TechWire California Industry Forum* Tuesday, Nov. 8.With no way to stop the flood of new technologies, government has turned to embracing them as a tool for positive change. Connected devices and the ability to analyze enormous amounts of data empowers agencies to tap into hidden opportunities and better tailor the services they provide.

From the perspective of CalCloud Project Director Scott McDonald, connected devices and the constant evolution of analytics capabilities put the state in front of a substantial opportunity, but the shift is also forcing cultural change.

The exponential growth of connectivity between people and devices, it really is changing the way we look at IT, he said. There is the expectation that we are going to move faster, really time-to-market per se. Were going to really streamline how we get these systems out a lot quicker. But at the same time, we really have to address  the security behind this thing too 

Data analytics, which has been largely accepted as a cant-live-without tool for government everywhere, also creates the need for qualified interpreters to digest the information. This inherently prompts cultural and organizational changes.

As Franchise Tax Board CIO Cathy Cleek contends, the transformation process is as much about people as it is about the technology. While she recognizes change can breed fear, she acknowledges that it also creates learning opportunities that should not be ignored.

We as leaders, when we are trying to transform, people want to put a bad news label on it, she said. Some of the situations that are hard at first, you learn your best lessons.

The key, she added, is leadership and the ability to direct despite the obstacles and opposition.

Emerging Challenges and Trends

Amid a sea of potential challenges, Scott Gregory, chief of the state's Office of Digital Innovation, said he prefers to view them through the lens of opportunity in different stripes, all while recognizing the end goal of serving the state and its citizens more effectively.

When I look at challenges  this may sound a little cliche, but  I look at them as opportunities in work boots, he joked. "I think that we always have to be recognizing [that] at the end of the day, the folks that pay our salaries, the people we serve  that we are all collectively working to make California better.

Though Gregory said he is cautious of the trends and buzzwords that fly around in the technology space, he is optimistic for advances being made in open data, data-driven decision-making, and hybrid and fully open source solutions.

Weve taken a monumental step forward in engendering a new sort of approach to leveraging open source technology in the state, he said. We released the very first-of-its-kind California Innovation Lab, so that is giving individuals and organizations an opportunity to leverage open source technology to solve real-world problems.

Cleek agreed and said data analytics holds the solutions to many of the problems facing agencies throughout the larger state enterprise. The ability to better target issues holds promise in areas like social services, fraud prevention and overall service delivery, she said.

She also looks toward artificial intelligence as a potential for government to capitalize on the rapidly advancing technology, especially as it relates to high volume citizen-to-government operations.

One potential application, Cleek said, is in call centers where incoming calls far outnumber the ability to answer them in a timely manner.

Every call center I have ever worked with gets more calls that they can answer," she noted, "and I just think it is really exciting what we may be able to use artificial intelligence to answer people's questions.

Empowering Initiatives and Collaborating

Regardless of the perceived barriers to innovation, the panel concurred on the importance of partnering throughout all levels of the enterprise. For Gregory, engaging beyond the executive levels of the organization is key to the success of any tech-centric initiative. While he said he engages at the top rungs of the ladder, he also said the production-level staff  or as he explained it, the people doing the heavy lifting  are almost more critical to any project.

Cleek said that at the Franchise Tax Board, she leverages three stages of on-boarding for stakeholders for her projects. The first is knowing key problems partners are facing, second is leveraging deputies to help convince decision-makers, and third is keeping the conversation based around tangibles.

One area where partnerships have been successful is the sharing of data between state and federal agencies. In her role at the Franchise Tax Board, data sharing between agencies like the IRS and Department of Motor Vehicles has helped the agency to improve operations, such as finding the correct information for citizens that owe the state money.

I think a lot of time in government  we all have the same customers," she said, "so lets share the data if we can use it to help each other."
(TNS) -- Ohio and 14 other states have settled with Adobe Sytems to resolve an investigation into the 2013 data breach of certain Adobe servers, which contained personal information of nearly 53,000 Ohio residents.Under the settlement, Adobe agrees to implement new policies and practices to prevent similar breaches in the future and pay $1 million to the 15 states. The Ohio Attorney Generals share of the total payment is $74,772.Were committed to protecting Ohios families, and this agreement will help safeguard consumers personal information, Attorney General DeWine said. in a release. This is one of many ways we help protect people from identity theft and similar threats.In September 2013, Adobe learned that an attacker was trying to decode encrypted customer payment card numbers maintained on one of its servers. Adobe stopped the decryption but found the attacker had compromised a Web server and used it to access other servers on Adobes network.According to complaints, an attacker stole encrypted payment card numbers and expiration dates, as well as names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and usernames from Adobe servers.A copy of the agreement is available on the Ohio Attorney Generals website.
Brazilian oil multinational Petrobras is leaving Williams at the end of 2016, local media source UOL claims.

The report said that after the British team's latest three-year deal with Petrobras, the Brazilian semi-public company will depart Williams along with retiring Brazilian driver Felipe Massa.

"Petrobras decided not to renew the agreement for 2017," the report claims.

UOL added that, in July, Petrobras officials met with Renault to discuss the potential supply of lubricants to new customer Toro Rosso in 2017.

(GMM)
Bernie Ecclestone detoured to the Brazilian capital Brasilia on his way to the Brazilian grand prix in Sao Paulo.

According to the local news source UOL, the F1 supremo met with new Brazilian president Michel Temer.

"UOL Esporte has found that the issue of discussion was the continuation of the grand prix of Brazil at Interlagos after 2016," the report claims.

Indeed, long-time F1 host Interlagos has been granted only provisional status on the 2017 race calendar, reportedly after organisers fell behind with promised circuit upgrades.

UOL claims Ecclestone and Temer spoke for more than 30 minutes, amid rumours F1's 86-year-old CEO considers Brasilia and Buenos Aires (Argentina) to be potential alternative South American hosts for the sport.

(GMM)
Carlos Sainz has rejected the notion that Charlie Whiting's unusual appearance during the drivers press conference in Brazil was good for clarity.

With confusion abounding after controversial manoeuvres and penalties in Mexico two weeks ago, the FIA broke protocol to have F1 race director Whiting sit in as the international press met with drivers on Thursday.

But Toro Rosso's Sainz told the Spanish media: "I'd prefer if Whiting was not at the press conference.

"Do you think my uncle or grandfather understood the great detail of why Verstappen was punished but not Hamilton?

"F1 is too complex today and to get the point of Whiting having to go to the press conference is not something we should have to reach," Sainz added.

Sainz's criticism of the complexity of F1 rules bureaucracy today came as Ferrari officially urged the Mexican grand prix stewards to "review their decision" of 11 days ago to take away Sebastian Vettel's podium.

"In light of its importance as a precedent for the future, and in order to provide clarity in the application of the rules in future events, Scuderia Ferrari believes that the decision should be reconsidered by the stewards," the team said.

However, while Whiting on Thursday addressed the Hamilton, Verstappen and Vettel incidents of Mexico, Fernando Alonso thinks the F1 official was there for a different reason.

"I do not think Charlie went to the press conference for what happened with Hamilton and Verstappen," said the Spaniard, "but for something much more serious that happened in Mexico.

"I have nothing to comment," Alonso added.

The Spanish press speculated that Alonso was referring to Vettel's verbal tirade against Whiting on the radio.

(GMM)
Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. (FHI), the manufacturer of Subaru automobiles, will debut its EyeSight driver assist technology in China. EyeSights launch on the Chinese market, following on from its introduction to the Japanese, Australian, North American and European markets, enables FHI to extend EyeSights deployment across markets globally. Cumulative sales of Subaru models equipped with EyeSight surpassed 900,000 units in the global market.

The EyeSight-equipped Outback and Legacy (Chinese specs.) will be exhibited at the 2016 Guangzhou International Auto Parts & Accessories Exhibition to be held in Guangzhou, China later this month.

The EyeSight is the first driver assist system to use only stereo cameras to detect the objects such as vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.

Features available on this system include pre-collision braking control and all-speed range adaptive cruise control tracking function.
Hyundai Motor will hand over 60 ix35 Fuel Cell cars to the Paris-based electric taxi start-up STEP (Societe du Taxi Electrique Parisien). A memorandum of understanding to that effect was signed at the opening of a public hydrogen fuel station operated by Air Liquide at Hyundai Motors European headquarters in Offenbach, Germany.

STEP currently serves the Greater Paris Area with five ix35 Fuel Cell cars that Hyundai Motor delivered in December 2015. The fleet is planned to increase up to several hundred vehicles within five years.

The 60 new ix35 Fuel Cell vehicles will not add to the 17,000 taxis already in circulation in and around Paris; they replacing gasoline and diesel-powered cars.

Currently there are more than 300 Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell cars on European roads in 12 countriesmore than all the FCEVs of other manufacturers combined.The ix35 Fuel Cells range is up to 594 kilometers (369 miles) on a full tank.

The ix35 Fuel Cell deployed are partially funded by the Hydrogen Mobility Europe Project. Hydrogen Mobility Europe is funded by the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU), a public private partnership supporting research, technological development and demonstration activities in fuel cell and hydrogen energy technologies in Europe.
The base regional unit for the study was the metropolitan statistical area (MSA). The authors defined regions as the Midwest, Mountain, Northeast, South, and West, based on the US Census (2016). Within the West region, they considered California separately because the states long-time focus on emissions regulations and electric vehicles makes it an outlier and benchmark for the rest of the country. In each region, the authors identified the four leading metropolitan areas with the highest electric vehicle share in each region. Only areas with populations of more than 50,000 were included in the study.

A new white paper from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) assesses which policy actions are behind the regional leading markets in the US for electric vehicles. The white paper identifies the areas with the highest shares of EVs and catalogues the actions that support EV uptake. The assessment includes promotion actions by state policy (e.g., regulation, purchasing incentives), local policy (e.g., parking and lane access incentives, building codes), utility actions (e.g., charging infrastructure incentives, preferential charging rates), and public charging availability.



Electric vehicle share of new vehicle registrations in 2015, highlighting leading metropolitan areas in each region (new vehicle registration data from IHS Automotive). The leaders in each region are labeled on the map. Source: The ICCT. Click to enlarge.

The ICCT authors found that many of the leading market share MSAs have more than 10 electric vehicle promotion actions in place. Four of the areasPortland, San Jose, San Francisco, and Santa Cruzhave 20 or more actions in place.

State consumer financial incentives play a prominent role. These typically range from $1,000 to $3,000 per battery electric vehicle in most states, and they are typically about half as much for plug-in hybrid vehicles due to their lesser all-electric driving capability. Colorado has the highest incentive: as much as $5,000 per vehicle.



Regional electric vehicle share and regionally leading metropolitan areas. Click to enlarge.

There are substantial purchase incentives in California, Colorado, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Washington. The Georgia rebate was revoked in July 2015, and a Texas incentive was limited in its availability throughout the year.

State regulations also play a key role. California and nine other states have adopted a Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) regulatory program requiring an increasing percentage of new vehicles sales from now through 2025 to be electric-drive. Of the 26 metropolitan areas in this study, the four in California, four in the Northeast, and two in Oregon are in ZEV states.

Twelve of the 26 metropolitan areas have six or more city-level actions in place to promote electric vehicles: Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Boulder, Fort Collins, Atlanta, Austin, Nashville, Seattle, Portland, San Jose, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. Eleven of the metropolitan areas in this study have four or more major utility actions in place: Holland, Bridgeport, Atlanta, Athens, Austin, Honolulu, Kahului, San Jose, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Eureka.

The white paper provides a table detailing all the actions across the MSAs.

Based on their findings, the authors made a number of conclusions:

Regulatory policy, in particular the Zero-Emission Vehicle program, is a key driver for the early market.

Most of the region-leading electric vehicle markets benefited from state-level financial incentives.

Offering local parking perks for electric vehicles, progressively integrating electric vehicles into municipal fleets, and implementing electric-vehicle-ready building codes are increasingly common among the leading metropolitan areas for electric vehicle penetration. Many of the leading areas for electric vehicle uptake around the country also implemented electric vehicle readiness plans and multi-stakeholder groups (e.g., city governments, regional governments, local businesses, utilities, nonprofits) that were working together on outreach, coordination on charging infrastructure, and other local measures.

The regional electric vehicle share leaders tended to have greater public charging infrastructure than their regional average.

Many regional electric vehicle share leaders had proactive electric power utilities supporting electric vehicles with outreach activities, preferential charging rates, and deployment of public charging infrastructure.

These growing electric vehicle markets across the United States might signal an increased awareness in these communities regarding the emerging electric vehicle technology. Further support for the new market will require continued re-examination as electric vehicle adoption expands from early adopters to fast-following consumers, especially with the coming next generation of electric vehicles. The leading electric vehicle markets identified here are a collection of larger high-technology cities, as well as smaller university towns. The exact underlying characteristics of these types of communities, whether they have more proactive governments, more nonprofit activities, more progressive dealer actions, or other demographic characteristics, warrant further investigation. From this analysis it seems clear that the electric vehicle market is emerging, albeit concentrated within pockets. Widespread adoption of actions like those in place in the leading electric vehicle markets will continue to encourage broader expansion of the market. Kwan et al.

Resources
Dominant Republican support in Wyoming resulted in wins for both Liz Cheney in her U.S. House bid and president-elect Donald Trump.

Democrat and Rock Springs resident Ryan Greene, was defeated by Cheney after she earned 156,040 votes statewide to his 75,419. Cheney received 62.2 percent of the vote statewide. In Sweetwater County, voters sided with Cheney over Greene. Cheney earned 9,233 votes to Greenes 6,536.

Sen. Mike Enzi, who faced Cheney in 2014 before she suspended her campaign, congratulated her on her victory in a media release.

Our state has long had a strong team in the delegation and I look forward to working with (Cheney) and Sen. John Barrasso to tackle the important issues ahead in Congress that matter to the people of Wyoming, he said.

For Wyomings three electoral votes, Trump was able to take a commanding lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton and other candidates in Wyoming. In Sweetwater County, Trump earned 12,153 votes while Clinton received 3,233.

Libertarian Gary Johnson earned 928 votes, Constitution Party candidate Darrell Castle received 130 votes, independent Rocky De La Fuente received 65 votes, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein earned 152.

Statewide, Trump earned 174,248 votes, Clinton received 55,949, Johnson received 13,285, Castle received 2,042, De La Fuente earned 742 and Stein received 2,482.

For the constitutional amendment seeking permission to invest state funds in equities, Sweetwater County residents supported the amendment 8,403 for and 6,912 against. Statewide, the amendment passed 132,714 for the amendment and 103,052 against.
Nearly 250 legal aid lawyers, staff and pro bono attorneys attended the 2016 N.C. Legal Services Conference, held Oct. 26-27 at the Greensboro Marriott.

An evening reception at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum was a highlight of the conference. At this reception, Legal Aid of North Carolina honored Kilpatrick Townsend and Stockton and Womble Carlyle Sandridge and Rice for the many hours of pro bono service the firms provided to Legal Aid clients.

Former Chief Justice Henry Frye, recently retired from practice with Brooks Pierce, highlighted the incredible history catalogued within the walls of the museum and shared the role he has seen advocates play in ensuring access to justice for all.

He also commended the legal services staff in attendance for their part in addressing the unmet legal needs of today.

Each year, staff and volunteers from legal aid organizations across the state represent nearly 50,000 indigent clients in civil legal matters impacting their basic needs.

On average, clients represented have annual household incomes of $12,875 before taxes. Without the help of a legal aid attorney or pro bono volunteer, these individuals would not have access to legal services.

Lawyers and advocates protect victims of violence by securing protective orders, save homes by stopping illegal evictions and foreclosures, and help veterans, seniors, and the disabled access benefits.

The conference was made possible by the sponsorship of a number of organizations including Justice Advocate sponsors John Vail Law PLLC and the NC Equal Access to Justice Commission.
Update, 4:10 p.m. Sunday: Elon University on Friday said that the student responsible for writing a note on a classroom whiteboard is Latino and intended it as a joke.

Elon News Network reported that the university has not publicly identified the student.

Smith Jackson, Elon's vice president for student life, sent out this statement to students Friday afternoon:

I am writing with some additional information about the report we received yesterday of an offensive message written on a classroom white board related to Latinos. While privacy laws prevent us from sharing the name of the student, I think it is important for the campus to know some key facts about the incident. The message was written by a Latino student who was upset about the results of the election and wrote the message as a satirical commentary. The student honorably stepped forward, accepted responsibility and has apologized for writing the message. The matter is being handled by the Office of Student Conduct.

Here's the story published Thursday afternoon at Greensboro.com:

ELON  An Elon University student took responsibility Thursday afternoon for writing a disparaging note about Latinos found in a classroom earlier that day.

Elon News Network, the universitys student-run media outlet, reported that a professor found the words Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista written on a whiteboard in Kivette Hall, a residence hall that also has classroom space.

The professor photographed the note, erased it and reported it to the university. Anoter professor posted the picture on Facebook, where it has been shared widely.

Late Thursday, the university said in a statement a student stepped forward, took responsibility for writing the message and is deeply remorseful.

Elon did not identify the student. The university has referred the case to Elons Office of Student Conduct.

Earlier Thursday, in a statement to the campus community, Elon President Leo Lambert called the incident reprehensible and directly in conflict with Elons values of inclusion and treating each other with dignity and respect. Lambert said the university is investigating the incident as a possible violation of Elons code of conduct.

It should be obvious to all that our nation is deeply divided at this time and we face great differences in our society, Lambert wrote. Now, more than ever, we need to show kindness and respect toward one another, especially to those members of our community who are feeling vulnerable.

Lambert also addressed Elons Latino students: Please know that this message does not represent our community. We stand with you and will do everything in our power to ensure your well-being, safety and security.

The message might have been a reaction to the victory of Republican candidate Donald J. Trump in Tuesdays election. During the campaign, Trump promised to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. More than half are from Mexico and Central America.

There have been multiple reports of student violence or unrest at U.S. universities since the election. Texas State University police are investigating pro-Trump fliers that promised vigilante squads would go arrest & torture  deviant university leaders who support Diversity Garbage.

At least three Muslim students at universities in California, Illinois and Louisiana reported they were accosted by Trump supporters. Police in Lafayette, La., said a student reportedly assaulted had fabricated the story.

Students at American University in Washington burned an American flag Wednesday at an anti-Trump protest. Closer to home, hundreds of UNC-Chapel Hill students gathered peacefully Wednesday outside the main administration building to register their disgust with Tuesdays results.

Voters between ages 18 and 29  a group that includes most college students  voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump by a margin of 55 percent to 37 percent.

Contact John Newsom at (336) 373-7312 and follow @JohnNewsomNR on Twitter.
Thanks to Paul Stutts for his Nov. 4 letter on economics. Mr. Stutts believes that any government involvement in the economy is bad and needs to be deleted. Let the market regulate itself.

He writes of Milton Friedmans trickle-down theory. Friedman, with U.S. taxpayer assistance, trained Chilean students with his theory and sent them back to Chile.

President Allende was overthrown in 1973 after Chile had enjoyed 160 years of peaceful democracy. The dictator Pinochet came to power and Friedmans Chicago Boys were in a position to prove the Chicago theory. By 1982, Chiles economy had crashed with 30 percent unemployment, 10 times greater than under Allende.

The Chicago Boys had done away with all regulations, bought up the countrys assets on borrowed money and ran up a $14 billion debt.

A nonpartisan study of Keynesian economics from 1929 to 2009 showed disposable income up six times more under Democratic presidents, GDP up seven times more, corporate profits up 16 percent more per year and the stock market up 18 times greater.

Finally, since 1950 there have been 100 months of recessions under Republican administrations and only 12 under Democratic ones, with six of those holdovers from Republican administrations.

I rest my case.

Jim Dye

Pleasant Garden
Democratic congressional candidates Pete Glidewell and Bruce Davis earned 57 percent of the vote in Guilford County  but Guilford County will be represented by Republicans Mark Walker and Ted Budd anyway.

That is exactly according to plan. The state legislature, controlled by Republicans, engineered congressional, legislative and in some cases even county districts to favor GOP candidates. The strategy worked brilliantly.

Guilford County illustrates the effectiveness of this gerrymandering. Its strongly Democratic but is split between two Republican-leaning congressional districts, the 6th and 13th. It is also governed by a majority-Republican Board of County Commissioners, thanks to gerrymandered county districts. Five out of nine of its state legislators are Republicans. It seems as if voters preferences dont matter.

Gerrymandering is the technique of grouping together certain kinds of voters through the manipulation of district lines. To give Republicans advantages, some districts are packed with large majorities of Democratic voters, while a greater number of districts are created with slimmer majorities of Republican voters. It enables Republicans to elect more candidates per vote.

North Carolinas congressional map illustrates the overall effect. In 13 races, Republican congressional candidates drew 53 percent of the total vote but won 10 seats. Winning 10 out of 13  78 percent of the seats  with 53 percent of the vote is quite a trick, but thats the sort of result gerrymandering is designed to achieve. Put another way, Republicans elected one congressman with every 242,322 votes. It took Democrats 706,096 votes to elect each of their congressmen.

This does more than stack the deck against one party. It eliminates competition. Somewhere in this country, voters might decide closely fought congressional contests  but not in North Carolina. Not one winner in a North Carolina congressional election Tuesday received less than 56 percent of the vote. The three Democratic winners  G.K. Butterfield, David Price and Alma Adams  achieved landslides of 69 percent, 68 percent and 67 percent, respectively. They have lots of spare voters who could provide balance to adjoining districts.

Much was said during this years campaign about rigged elections. Gerrymandering is one way of rigging elections because it determines outcomes before votes are cast.

Its ironic that this happens in North Carolina, which in statewide elections is perhaps the most competitive state in the country. It should have more competitive congressional and legislative races, too.

Competition is good for democracy, which is stronger when candidates engage in real debates about the issues. In the 13th congressional district, which covers about half of Guilford County, Republican Budd refused to debate Democrat Davis, even though Budd had never run for public office before and, living in Davie County, was little known to voters here. But he knew he didnt have to debate because any Republican was bound to win in the gerrymandered district.

At least voters did have a choice. Not so in many of Guilford Countys rigged legislative and county districts. When the next nine-member board of commissioners takes office next month, five of its members  a majority  will have been elected without opposition. Part of the blame will belong to parties that failed to put up a candidate in some districts, but its hard to find someone to run an uphill race.

Many legislators of both parties think its time to create a nonpartisan process for drawing fair, competitive districts. This weeks returns offer more evidence of why that would be the right thing to do.
GREENWICH  Red, white and blue flowed throughout the streets of Greenwich Friday morning as the town saluted its veterans with a boisterous parade and a solemn tribute to their courage and sacrifice.

The fourth annual Community Walk to Honor Veterans, organized by the Greenwich Military Covenant of Care, walked down Greenwich Avenue to the Havemeyer Building where the memorial for veterans killed in World War II, Korea and Vietnam was host to the Greenwich Veterans Council.

Close to 600 people either marched or cheered the veterans and their supporters. Both sides of Greenwich Avenue were lined with people holding flags and displaying the red, white and blue.

Greenwich couple Angela and Denis Ruane have tried not to miss the past marches; this was the first year they were able to bring their 15-month-old twins, Collins and Mackenzi, they said, adding it was important to show their support.

Denis Ruanes father served in Korea; Angela Ruanes grandfather was in World War II.

Especially after the election recently, we have a divided country and we need to teach these girls at an early age that its important no matter whos running our country that they be Americans and they support the country, Angela Ruane said.

Rico and Vera Soro were another pair who come out to salute Greenwichs veterans.

I enjoy when the people here say thank you, Vera Soro said. Thats really, really important. I think the veterans deserve a lot more.

Veterans attending the march walked or were driven down the Avenue and then afterwards were treated to a luncheon at the Redmen Home Association on East Elm Street.

Its great the way they honor us, said Peter Orrico, an Army veteran who served in Korea. I just came from Cos Cob School and those kids did a terrific job. They really appreciate it and this is all wonderful. I feel great today.

More Information Veterans Day Celebration Refer to the other story here XX See More Collapse

Bruce Winningham, founder of the covenant and leader of the march, estimated that about 60 percent of those turning out were veterans.

Today we are gathered to honor those who served our country, First Selectman Peter Tesei said. During the many wars and conflicts, these men and woman have served with bravery and honor. We are indebted to you for your dauntless efforts to protect our rights as a country and those of our allies.

The Covenant of Care chose to honor the disabled veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for this years march.

Winningham, a Navy veteran, urged those in attendance to help support veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, many recovering from wounds and injuries at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Disabled American Veterans provides gift cards to the veterans and their families to help pay for basic necessities over what can sometimes be a two-year recovery at Walter Reed. Winningham said he was looking for civilians to buy some of the gift cards and for Greenwich veterans to deliver them and visit with their fellow veterans.

Donations could be sent to Teseis office at Town Hall.

Keynote speaker at the ceremony U.S. Army Retired Capt. James Dudley, who won the Bronze Star and Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan.

Injured in a battle with the Taliban that claimed the life of his squad leader, Dudley nearly lost his leg. These days, he helps his fellow veterans through the Yellow Ribbon Fund, which helps servicemen women and their families readjust to life back home.

Everything in the news after this election looks pretty grim, but Ive got to say the Republic is just fine. Dudley said. It will be just fine. We are the nation that beat fascism in Europe. We beat fascism in Asia. We beat the communists. There is no election, not presidential or otherwise, that is going to undo us.

Dudley and Tesei placed wreaths at the towns memorial as part of the ceremony.

Master of Ceremonies Erf Porter, a veteran and member of American Legion Post 29, said Greenwich had close to 1,400 living veterans in the community of nearly 19 million nationwide.

The dedication of the volunteers of today leaves our security very much in their hands and they are extra special, Porter said. But that doesnt mean if you were drafted or you volunteered or were an ROTC student your service didnt count. On the contrary, it counted. We cant forget the World War I doughboys. We cant forget the World War II greatest generation and were not going to forget them.

Porter and State Rep. Livvy Floren (R-149th) gave out the Legions Young Persons of the Year award to Greenwich High School students Elizabeth Murray and Aaron Jaffe. They were honored for making positive contributions to their school, the community and their places of worship.

Both were part of the Legions Boys and Girls State program. Murray was elected governor at Girls State and Jaffe went to Boys Nation in Washington, D.C., where he served as president pro tempore.

Elizabeth Murray and Aaron Jaffe represent everything that is great about Greenwich, about Connecticut and about America, Floren said. They are products of our excellent public schools. They are academic superstars. They are respectful, energetic, patriotic and civic minded.

The ceremony was the first one for the Greenwich Veterans Council, which is made up of the American Legion Post 29, the Byram Veterans Association, Cos Cob VFW Post 10112, the Covenant of Care, the Greenwich Department of Social Services, the Ninth District Veterans and Vietnam Veterans of America.

On Friday evening, the Byram Veterans also held an annual ceremony at their headquarters at 300 Delavan Avenue.

kborsuk@scni.com
Maloney before he was forced to reconcile my own worldview with the election. Photo: Jin Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

GrubHub CEO and co-founder Matt Maloney is having a doubly bad week after dashing off a companywide anti-Trump email on Wednesday that minced few words. The antithesis of every modern presidential candidate won and will be our next president, he informed more than 1,000 employees. In light of this turn of events, he said he wanted several things about working for the food-delivery company to be crystal clear.

First off:

While demeaning, insulting, and ridiculing minorities, immigrants, and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr. Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior  and these views, have no place at GrubHub. Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination.



Also:

Further I absolutely reject the nationalist, anti-immigrant, and hateful politics of Donald Trump and will work to shield our community from this movement as best as I can  I want to affirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and everyone else here at GrubHub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States.

Then finally:



If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here.



The anger, once Fox News published the email, from the nations 59.9 million Trump voters was, as youd imagine, pretty much immediate, with many demanding boycotts on Twitter:



Just called a restaurant I order from frequently to tell them they lost a customer because they use Grubhub. Boycott Grubhub @Grubhub  Conservatism = Prosperity (@AmericasValues) November 10, 2016

Hey @Grubhub i just deleted your app. Your CEO is brilliant. Lol you are going out of business very soon. #boycottgrubhub  Basket of Winners (@pullheadfromass) November 10, 2016

I use #GrubHub regularly. I'm deleting app from my #iphone. Will not use service that only supports 1 worldview #BoycottGrubHub  Sylvan Rodriguez (@sylvanrodriguez) November 11, 2016

The CEO of @Grubhub is openly discriminating against employees who voted for Trump. Leave a review for them in app store & #boycottgrubhub  Mark Dice (@MarkDice) November 11, 2016

If any @Grubhub employees need help finding other employment, feel free to reach out & I am happy to try to help. #boycottgrubhub  Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) November 11, 2016

Maloney tells Fox News that almost 20 percent of GrubHubs employees personally thanked him for making that statement, so hes not embarrassed by it. A few people at the company may have felt differently though, because a press release posted by Maloney went up a short while later trying to clarify his remarks. I did not ask for anyone to resign if they voted for Trump, he explains in it. I would never make such a demand. Rather, that email was a message about discriminatory activity or hateful commentary in the workplace, and GrubHub welcomes and accepts employees with all political beliefs, no matter who they voted for in this or any election.
Get a baguette and get to work. Photo: Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images

When the years first shipment of Vacherin Mont dOr arrives each fall at Murrays, one of the countrys preeminent cheese shops, the entire office gathers around a small, single wheel. One person carefully slices off the top, and everyone sticks their spoons into the cheeses center, which is as soft as pudding. Then the group goes quiet in reverence until someone lets out the first happy moan.

Its no exaggeration to say that Vacherin Mont dOr is one of the worlds most-sought-after cheeses. The runny Swiss cheese is only in season from now until the end of winter, and eating it is the kind of funky, perfect experience that cheese nerds wait for all year. Its also the kind of cheese that can transform a first-timer into a true believer.

Eating it is akin to losing your virginity, says Adam Moskowitz, the president of Columbia Cheese, which imports cheese from Switzerland. The cheese hails from the Swiss-French border, near the mountain dOr. (The craggy mountains, when snow-capped, look straight out of Heidi.) Its made with winter milk that comes from the same cows that produce Gruyere in the summer. The cows produce less milk in the winter, but that which they do give is richer in fat, which is preferable for small, soft wheels like Vacherin. Its oozing, liquid center is also wrapped in spruce. It tastes better than the best campfire you have ever been to, Moskowitz says.

Anne Saxelby, of Saxelby Cheese, agrees. The cheese is pungent, but not overwhelmingly stinky, and, Saxelby says, breaking through that slightly thick rosy-colored rind to the gooey depths beneath is something that leaves an imprint on whatever part of your brain registers the mathematical outcome of taste multiplied by factors of beauty and pleasure. Saxelby suggests simply scooping out the interior with a spoon or baguette. Then, when you think its all gone, and the last creamy bits are clinging to the bark, boil some potatoes in salted water and then drop them in the rind and swirl them around to get all the creamy, bark-y goodness stuck to them.

Like all great delicacies, Vacherin Mont dOrs appeal is only amplified by its relative scarcity. The cheese is only available from around October to March, and the best stuff is made with raw milk, which makes it illegal to import (the U.S. bans the importation of cheese made with raw milk thats been aged less than 60 days). As of now, the cheese is on FDA import alert with automatic detention, which Moskowitz explains is the polite way of saying the cheese cannot enter the Unites States.

What does get into the country tends to move fast. Last year Murrays gave its regular customers advance notice on the shipment. Wheels sell at $50, and they quickly disappear. (That Vacherin was also made with thermalized milk, a sort of raw-milk compromise where the milk is heated more gently than during pasteurization.)

Brian Keyser, owner of Casellula Cheese and Wine Cafe and author of Composing the Cheese Plate, remembers a decade ago when there were only so many great cheeses to be had in the U.S., so when Vacherin Mont dOr came into season and some wheels of the raw cheese could be smuggled into the country, it was a true delicacy. I remember mongers talking about whether it was worth the risk of breaking the law to sell it.

Of course, this being America, anything this good, and this scarce, will inspire people to try their hand at making some here, and there are some very exciting alternatives: Uplands Cheese Co. on Pleasant Ridge in Wisconsin makes a killer cheese called Rush Creek Reserve. Like Vacherin, as the cows leave behind the fresh summer pastures and switch to the winters hay, they take advantage of the super-rich milk by transforming it into a spruce-bound, silky wheel. Rush Creek is made with raw milk and washed as it ripens, until it oozes with a flavor thats both meaty and woodsy. Winnimere is another Vacherin Mont dOresque option, made only during winter months when Jasper Hills Vermont Ayrshire cows give rich, hay-fed raw milk. Keyser is also particular to Dancing Fern from Sequatchie Cove Creamery in Tennessee, which he calls earthy, mushroomy, runny, and delicious.

Even still, its worth making friends with a well-connected cheese lover to try and find some of the real thing (or find a well-heeled friend who can smuggle some into the U.S. for you). Shops like Murrays, Bedford Cheese Shop, and Ideal Cheese tend to have a somewhat reliable supply this time of year, though Keyser warns that many cheesemongers long ago debated whether it was worth facing the consequences of carrying any raw-milk version they might come across. Most decided that it was not, he explains, perhaps selfishly, as they then had to take it home and eat it themselves.
Introduction

Sitting in a press room and listening to the presentation hosted by HTC, the first thing that came to mind as we learned about the new HTC Bolt was the Verizon-exclusive HTC Thunderbolt, a successful smartphone from 2011 (it was Verizon's first 4G LTE smartphone). HTC has now teamed up with another US carrier, Sprint, to release an exclusive device which introduces a new connectivity feature (though hardly as ground-breaking).

The HTC Bolt is the first smartphone on Sprint's network to launch with 3X20 MHz Carrier Aggregation which is supported on Qualcomm's X10 LTE modem. Sprint is calling the HTC Bolt: Sprint's fastest phone ever. Hence the endorsement of Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man.

The HTC Bolt has a large 5.5-inch screen and its design is very derivative of the HTC 10, down to the beveled edge on the back, and even with the same color finishes: Gunmetal and Glacial Silver (The HTC 10's was called Graphite, not Gunmetal). The Bolt is HTC's first fully submersible smartphone built with an aluminum body with an IP57 rating but HTC would not be happy if you "intentionally submerge HTC Bolt" but that goes for most manufacturers of waterproof phones these days.

HTC Bolt at a glance:

Body: Aluminum unibody, 8.09mm thick, design identical to HTC 10 but with IP57 water-resistance

Aluminum unibody, 8.09mm thick, design identical to HTC 10 but with IP57 water-resistance Screen: 5.5-inch QHD, Super LCD 3 with 2.5D Gorilla Glass 5

5.5-inch QHD, Super LCD 3 with 2.5D Gorilla Glass 5 Chipset: Snapdragon 810 - octa-core CPU up to 2.0GHz

Snapdragon 810 - octa-core CPU up to 2.0GHz Audio: Boom Sound Adaptive earbuds, Hi-Res audio certified, three microphones with noise cancelation

Boom Sound Adaptive earbuds, Hi-Res audio certified, three microphones with noise cancelation Memory: 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, expandable via microSD card tray

3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, expandable via microSD card tray OS: Android Nougat 7.0 with HTC Sense

Android Nougat 7.0 with HTC Sense Camera: 16MP, 4K video recording

16MP, 4K video recording Camera features: 29.3mm wide angle f/2.0 lens, PDAF, BSI sensor, Hi-res audio recording, OIS, Dual LED flash, Pro controls, RAW support

29.3mm wide angle f/2.0 lens, PDAF, BSI sensor, Hi-res audio recording, OIS, Dual LED flash, Pro controls, RAW support Selfie Cam: 8MP, 1080p video capable

8MP, 1080p video capable Battery: 3,200mAh battery, Quick Charge 2.0 via USB-C

3,200mAh battery, Quick Charge 2.0 via USB-C Security: Front fingerprint scanner, unlocks in 0.2 seconds

Front fingerprint scanner, unlocks in 0.2 seconds Connectivity: Cat 9 LTE with LTE band 41 (up to 450Mbps DL speed);Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac 2.5GHz or 5GHz; Bluetooth 4.1; NFC; USB-C.

The HTC Bolt will come with a pair of HTC's BoomSound Adaptive Audio earbuds which have a mic built-in. A sound is sent through the speaker and the ear canal reflects the sound back. The return signal is analyzed to create a custom listening profile. The profile will also check for ambient noise and uses this information to personalize the output even more.

Speaking of the headphones, the HTC Bolt lacks a 3.5mm headphone jack just like the iPhone 7 Plus. The supplied earbuds plug directly into the USB-C port of the phone. It's not the first time we see this, but it's certainly the first time where an adapter to 3.5mm jack is not included in the box. Funnily, HTC has pledged to send customers who need an adapter a free one.

The camera included is a 16MP shooter, and we are hoping the images it takes look as good as the HTC 10's photos. Likewise, we'd love to see what HTC's Hi-res audio recording sounds like. At the time of the HTC 10's release, we preferred the sound of the Galaxy S7's mono-audio recording taken on video.



HTC Bolt: Glacial Silver  Graphite

Addressing the elephant in the room, the specs of the phone are somewhat of a mixed bag: HTC is using last year's processor, with last year's 3GB of RAM, and last year's Adreno 430 GPU - in a 2016 body, with IP57 water-resistance, and no headphone jack.

We'll try to remain optimistic, though. HTC is really proud of what it's done with the Bolt. The phone will be available on Sprint starting today and customers can purchase it for $599 outright or $25 per month for 24 months.

We don't have to wait until then to learn more about it as we already have a unit in our hands. So let's take a look at what HTC has put out for Sprint shall we? We begin with a closer look at the hardware.




Haiti - News : Zapping politics...





Attention to information hijacking



The Embassy of the United States in Port-au-Prince reminds all applicants that the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince "[... wont call or email you asking for information from your immigrant visa petition such as your visa application number or bank account information, and notifies applicants "if you arent sure if a call you received is from the Embassy, take the name of the caller and offer to call the Embassy back: 2229-8000."



Elections: Minustah ready to intervene on request

Ariane Quentier, the spokesman for the Minustah confirmed that "Haitian authorities have the full support of Minustah in electoral security," recalling that the National Police of Haiti (PNH) remain the main force responsible for security on November 20th."



"Incompetence and cretinism"

Senator Andris Riche, a candidate for his own succession in the Senate, says that if the leaders of the CEP "[...] say that they can not organize the elections on November 20, it will not be inability, but of incompetence and cretinism."



FLASH: Embassy of France closed

The French Embassy in Haiti and its consular section will be closed to the public on Friday, November 11, the day of commemoration in France of the armistice of 1918.



D-2, evaluation of the rehabilitation of the voting centres

This Friday, a working session is planned with the de facto President Jocelerme Privert and the heads of the institutions in charge of the repair of the Voting Centres https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19105-haiti-elections-the-rehabilitation-of-the-voting-centres-will-begin.html in the Departments of Grand Anse, Nippes and the South, in order to assess the progress of the work within 48 hours of the deadline (ultimatum 13 November) fixed by the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19099-haiti-flash-the-election-date-becomes-uncertain.html



Maryse on tour

Wednesday, Maryse Narcisse, the presidential candidate under the Famni Lavalas banner, led her campaign in Lascahobas and Belladere (Center). Thursday, she was in Arcahaie and this Friday she will be in popular neighborhoods of the capital, she should go in the afternoon to the convocation of the CEP to explain the remarks made by former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19187-haiti-flash-maryse-narcisse-convened-at-the-cep-for-the-statements-of-aristide.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Interior Assistant Secretary Discusses Health Care Coverage Options with Representatives from the Freely Associated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau Living in Hawaii and U.S. Mainland

41,380 FAS Citizens Live in the 50 States; 19,830 in Guam and CNMI

News Release from US DOI, November 10, 2016

WASHINGTON, D.C. (November 10, 2016)  Assistant Secretary for Insular Areas Esther Kiaaina today held an outreach meeting with government representatives from the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the Republic of Palau, and community leaders from across the U.S. mainland to discuss health care coverage options and encourage citizens of the Freely Associated States (FAS) who live in the 50 U.S. States to enroll in health insurance plans available under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Todays meeting which addressed current law under the ACA and additional health care coverage options including Medicare and community health centers was focused on FAS communities on the U.S. mainland where greater outreach and educational awareness is needed. The U.S. territories are exempt from providing ACA-qualified health plans and Hawaii's state officials and community leaders have been actively engaged in their own outreach efforts.

Citizens of the FSM, RMI and Palau are legal nonimmigrants under the Compacts of Free Association with the United States, and are eligible to obtain insurance coverage under the ACA. Assistant Secretary Kiaaina encouraged these FAS citizens living in the U.S. to enroll for 2017 to ensure health care coverage and access to basic health services.

While the Compacts of Free Association allow for Micronesians, Marshallese and Palauans entry into the United Status as legal nonimmigrants for an indefinite period of time to live, work, and study, FAS citizens were stripped of eligibility for federal public benefits under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, otherwise known as the Welfare Reform Act, said Assistant Secretary Kiaaina. However, the ACA does provide FAS citizens the opportunity to obtain health care coverage in the absence of public health assistance programs. Health care access is critical to improving quality of life for these communities living in the United States.

In a recent U.S. Census Bureau estimate of 2010-2014 data, there are approximately 41,380 citizens from the FSM, RMI and Palau living in the 50 states, a number which does not include U.S. citizens from the FAS. The five states with the highest number of FAS citizens are Hawaii (17,205), Arkansas (3,625), Washington (3,430), Oregon (2,580), and Texas (2,090). Another 19,830 FAS nationals are estimated to be living in the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands according to a Census enumeration derived from the 2010 Census.

The recent estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau for FAS citizens living in the 50 states will be helpful to policy makers in federal agencies and the U.S. Congress who may be considering proposals and cost estimates to reinstate federal public benefits to these communities to alleviate financial costs on impacted jurisdictions, said Assistant Secretary Kiaaina.

---30---

The Secretary of the Interior is responsible for coordinating federal policy with respect to the territories of the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and administering and overseeing U.S. federal assistance provided to the freely associated states of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau under the Compacts of Free Association. On behalf of the Secretary, the Assistant Secretary for Insular Areas executes these responsibilities through the Office of Insular Affairs whose mission is to foster economic opportunities, promote government efficiency, and improve the quality of life for the people of the insular areas.

Reality: On day one of the Trump Administration, we will ask Congress to immediately deliver a full repeal of Obamacare
A Story of Great Courage

From www.Djou.com, November 11, 2016

As we digest the results of the 2016 election, I wanted to thank our nation's servicemembers and their families and share with you a memory from my time in Afghanistan. In the past, I've shared stories of American soldiers - true heroes - that I had the great privilege and honor of serving with, who gave their lives for our country. I think of them every day. Today, I've been thinking about an Afghan man who I had the privilege of knowing in Afghanistan.

In the photo at the top of this email, I am talking with Judge Saffi Ullah in late-2011. During my tour of duty in Afghanistan, I handled enemy prisoner of war matters for the Army and Judge Ullah was my Afghan counterpart. He was an Afghan judge who believed in the rule of law and loyally served his community. Judge Ullah believed cases should be decided by evidence without regard to family bonds; he believed women should have equal standing as men and all people should be treated the same regardless of tribal background. These views may be accepted as a given in our nation, but were radical concepts in Afghanistan.

In January of 2012, I met with Judge Ullah to discuss the hand over of captured enemy Taliban from American to Afghan detention supervision. Less than 24 hours after I last met with Judge Ullah, he went shopping for groceries at the local bazaar. In an attempted assassination, Taliban radicals sprayed Judge Ullah with automatic machine gun fire hitting him twice. Though he survived, Judge Ullah was severely crippled and local Afghans lost a courageous leader.

Judge Ullah and the soldiers I served with in Afghanistan remind me that there are causes worth fighting for -- that there are often setbacks - but that we must persevere. There will eventually come a day when we will have a two party democracy in Hawaii, where what you know matters more than who you know, and where government officials serve the people, rather than use their position to serve themselves.

Today, let's thank all of our nation's veterans who serve our country. We are the land of the free because of the brave.

Aloha,

Charles Djou
Mahalo Nui to our Vets

From Grassroot Institute, November 11, 2016

Hawaii is a small state, but one with a very special relationship with the military. That's not a surprise considering how central the military installations in our islands have become to our economy, history, and culture.

I can't think of a single local family that doesn't have multiple service members in it. We marry into the military or send our sons and daughters into service. And we are proud to do so.

And then there are the veterans who served in Hawaii, remember how much they loved our state, and return to make their home here once they get out.

Grassroot Institute owes its founding to a veteran, Richard Rowland, whose dedication to his country led him to ensure that Hawaii would have a steadfast voice for liberty.

It would be unfair to say that Hawaii loves its veterans more than other states...but I will say it anyway. Or rather, I will say that, on this Veterans Day, we understand the depth of sacrifice that the men and women of the military have made for our continued freedom.

In other places, the presence of the military can be subject to partisan political controversy, but not in the Aloha State. The people of Hawaii respect and appreciate the way that the military has contributed to their safety and freedom, and it shows.

Today, I want to extend our deepest thanks to all veterans. For your service, for your sacrifice, and for all you have done to preserve the blessings of liberty for us and our posterity, you have our most profound gratitude.

E hana kakou (Let's work together!),

Keli'i Akina, Ph.D.

President/CEO

Grassroot Institute
Charity workers in Melbourne who failed to meet their sales targets were allegedly forced to get down on their knees and 'peck' each other.



The footage has emerged after allegations of systemic bullying within the sales team of the marketing company Appco.



The mobile phone video shows office workers cheering and laughing as two men on their knees 'peck' each other to the ground while their hands are behind their back.



The cock fights took place often on Friday afternoons, according to The Age.



Moreover, around 500 former Appco employees have joined an $85 million class action against the company, with some claiming they were only paid as much as $2.50 an hour. Some were also allegeing that they were bullied when they questioned their workplace rights and were made to work 80-hour weeks.



The lead litigant in the class action, Jacob Bywater, said the cockfights also occurred if somebody made an error during the week or if they were late to a meeting.



Another recently released video showed Appco workers taking part in a "slug race" where staff were made to slither along the floor.



Appco said they have requested law firm Baker & McKenzie to conduct an independent investigation into bullying and harassment and will use all of the findings to inform its "robust action plan, elements of which are already in place".



Appco also said they will immediately terminate its contracts with any marketing company found to have tolerated this type of behaviour.



Appco has contracts with 64 independent marketing companies, which are responsible for engaging independent contractors to conduct face-to-face sales and fundraising for Appcos clients.



Appco CEO Martin Gaffney added that it is absolutely incorrect to suggest that Appco allowed or condoned the obscene behaviour described by the ABC.



These allegations describe outrageous and completely unacceptable behaviour, which would not be tolerated by Appco Group Australia, Gaffney said.



Appco would immediately sever ties with any marketing agency that encouraged bullying and harassment activities. And we would require marketing agencies to weed out any independent contractors who initiated such behaviour amongst fellow contractors.




We want to invite you to take part in a wonderful opportunity with Green Street Catering this Thanksgiving season. Please read below about our Family to Family program that allows your family to serve other families of our community during this Thanksgiving.

Green Street Catering is a non-profit organization that serves a free meal every Thursday evening out of the kitchen at Alliance Bible Fellowship church to anyone in the local community that can benefit from it. We have served over 50,000 meals since 2010. We work with many churches, community organizations/clubs/groups and social workers to provide and serve over 500 meals each week to the wonderful people of our community. We continue to grow in the number of churches and groups that we work with and the meals delivered or people served each year. Please see our website at www.greenstreetcatering.org for more information about what we are doing and how you can be a part of serving our community with us.



As we go into this years Thanksgiving holiday, Green Street Catering will be distributing food baskets through the area churches, social workers as well as community organizations for our fourth year. Last year, we distributed over 400 Thanksgiving food baskets and the need has continued to grow for this year. We expect to distribute over 400 food baskets again for the Thanksgiving holiday this year. We need your help please!

We would love your help in any ways that you can! Here are some ideas of ways you can help us serve our wonderful community with food baskets for Thanksgiving this year:

1.You may choose to shop or organize a canned/boxed food drive for the specific boxed and canned items listed below.

2.You may choose to shop or organize a turkey drive to provide the most expensive part of our baskets. You can either raise funds or ask others to donate turkeys. Have a turkey call at your next party or gathering!

3.You may choose to donate financially for the sponsorship of one or more turkey baskets ($75 each). Please note that any funds raised over the costs of the distributed baskets will go into the general operating funds of Green Street Catering to continue to provide weekly community meals for free throughout the year. Please make all checks payable to Green Street Catering  200 Sierra Vista, Boone, NC 28607. All donations receive a note of gratitude from Green Street Catering that includes our non-profit number so that it may serve as a tax-deductible receipt.

4.You may choose to organize your own basket(s) for distribution. You may also wish to add your own personal touch with homemade cards or other personal gifts to your basket. Each basket must include the following:

(1) frozen turkey of at least 10 lbs.

(2) boxed/bagged stuffing

(2) cans of corn

(2) cans of green beans

(2) cans of cranberry sauce

(2) boxes of instant mashed potatoes

(2) boxes of macaroni and cheese

(2) jars of turkey gravy

10-12 rolls from the bakery

(2) pies  pumpkin, pecan, apple

Please bring any of the canned/boxed items listed above to Alliance church to be used in food baskets. Label them Green Street Catering food baskets please. If you wish to donate any perishable items (turkeys, rolls, bread, etc), please contact us at [email protected] and we will coordinate pickups to keep foods fresh and safe. We need to have all of our foods and bags ready to start distributing on November 15.

Packing Party: Thursday, Nov. 17 and Saturday, Nov. 19

We would like to invite you and your family to come to a PACKING PARTY! We will pack up the food baskets to be distributed in our community, make cards to personalize them, pray over them and pack them up into the truck for distribution.

So, pick and come to any of the ones that work for you at the location and times listed. We will have dinner provided and even prizes and thank you gifts too. What fun we are going to have! Just let us know if you are able to come and when please so that we can plan space and food accordingly.

Thursday, Nov. 17 at noon: in the cafeteria at Alliance Bible Fellowship (1035 N.C. Highway 105 Bypass in Boone)

Saturday, Nov. 19 at 5 p.m.: at the home of Chastity Lesesne (contact by email and RSVP for address)

Please let us know at [email protected] om if you are able to come and help!

. If you cannot come and pack food baskets with us, consider giving online on Facebook, Instagram or our website at www.greenstreetcatering.org

Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind, for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. Psalm 107:8-9

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Reddit

Pocket


Personalised Health has turned into a buzzword and there are many parties interested in the subject, Professor Brand points out. However, there is considerable confusion about the terminology and tasks of public health and personalised medicine. I strongly recommend using the terms personalised health and care because that is what personalised medicine and the reorientation of public health are all about.

Orthodox medicine is coming of age

One feature that characterises personalised medicine is the use of tools and apps that work hand in hand and allow certain analyses. In the past, physicians treated their patients with therapies that were based on comprehensive studies but were not adjusted to the individual patient. This latter approach is entirely new, Professor Brand points out. While traditional medicine, with its thousands of years of experience, has always had a holistic view and an individual perspective, Western orthodox medicine focused on evidence-based medicine, with evidence culled from large populations. Today, we see a turn towards a higher degree of individuality, albeit in a different context and with adjusted methods, she underlines.

For the first time there seems to be a rapprochement of orthodox and traditional medicine. The advantage of these old, non-orthodox approaches is the fact they have always taken into account the dynamics of highly complex and interdependent environmental and genomic factors on the individual level, for example, when we are looking at cancer. In my opinion the highest hurdle is the integration of this dynamics into Western orthodox medicine. We need to answer the question what we will do when results cannot be reproduced across population-based clinical studies because of the individuality of the disease and the patient, Professor Brand urges.

Politics is prepared to move  physicians are stalling

Over the past two years a consortium of ministries and funding bodies, funded by the EU and headed by German experts, has been working on Shaping Europes Vision for Personalised Medicine*. The team developed a roadmap to define the five major challenges (see box). The role of the individual  patient and citizen  must take centre stage, particularly in view of Big Data and of information and communication technologies. Moreover, issues around access and sustainable healthcare systems have to be clarified, Brand stresses.

However, many physicians appear to be apprehensive. The implementation of a project in Malta, which was fully defined, failed because the GPs opposed it, as she explains: A discussion with the ministry in Malta quickly revealed that the health data cooperative was grounded because the physicians thought it created too much transparency.

Brand does not consider tightening the laws or EU rules to be a solution. Quite the contrary, we should try to decrease regulation and to offer guidance and support, so that we can think about how the challenges should be approached. Tightening the rules will have the exact opposite effect. For Brand issues such as drug development, reimbursement of prescription drugs, evaluations and health technology assessment, are but parts of the overall challenge. As physicians we have to deal with best available evidence, which might differ considerably from the results of the large randomised controlled studies. These issues have to be advanced.

Brand clearly states the shortcomings and demands; she has great confidence in the future: For physicians this is not about power games; its about how we define our role going forward. In the future the informed patients and citizens will be the master of their data in the cloud and they will be very careful whom they are going to trust. We should consider this an opportunity, not a threat. IBMs analysis tool Watson is quite controversial among physicians, Brand explains. Thats why we asked an IBM representative to join us on the consortium and help us to optimise the system. I am convinced that, in the future, we will have many more such support tools.

Identified challenges

1  Developing awareness and empowerment

2  Integrating big data and ICT solutions

3  Translating basic to clinical research and beyond

4  Bringing innovation to the market

5  Shaping sustainable healthcare



* PerMed: Shaping Europes Vision for Personalised Medicine. Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) www.permed2020.eu



PROFILE:

Having worked in clinics, at various academic institutions and in governmental bodies in the USA and Germany, today Angela Brand MD PhD MPH (USA) is Full Professor at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML) and Professorial Fellow at Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT), Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, Faculty of Humanities and Sciences (FHS), Maastricht University, The Netherlands. The professor is paediatrician, specialist in Public Health Medicine, holds a PhD in pathology, a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Johns Hopkins University, USA, and received her habilitation focusing on Health Technology Assessment. Brand also directs the European Centre for Public Health Genomics (ECPHG) and is the Dr T M Pai Endowed Chair on Public Health Genomics and Adjunct Professor at the School of Life Sciences at Manipal University, India.
(HedgeCo.Net) The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a former movie producer and self-proclaimed private equity executive with defrauding investors in hedge funds and using the money he stole to support his extravagant lifestyle.

According to the SECs complaint, David R. Bergstein of Hidden Hills, California, stole millions from investors in 2011 and 2012 and used the money for purchases with a firearms dealer, an antique watch and jewelry retailer, and a bonsai tree nursery. The SECs complaint alleges that the scheme relied on a series of intricate transactions by Weston Capital Asset Management, then a registered investment adviser, with two of its unregistered hedge funds, Weston Capital Partners Master Fund II Ltd. and the Wimbledon Fund SPC Class TT Segregated Portfolio.

In one transaction, the SEC alleges that Bergstein misappropriated at least $2.3 million of money that was purportedly meant for investments in medical-billing businesses and helped Weston Capital Asset Management conceal the true nature of the transaction from Weston investors. In a second allegedly fraudulent transaction, Bergstein stole more than $3.5 million of funds also purportedly meant, in part, for investments in medical-billing businesses.

The use of elaborate corporate transactions to mask old-fashioned theft of investor monies will not prevent the SEC from enforcing the federal securities laws and protecting investors, said Andrew M. Calamari, Director of the SECs New York Regional Office. Violators will be held to account no matter the artifice used to perpetrate their frauds.

In a parallel action, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York today announced criminal charges against Bergstein and Keith D. Wellner, who was formerly Weston Capital Asset Managements general counsel, chief compliance officer, and chief operating officer. Wellner previously settled SEC charges filed in federal district court in Florida and has been barred from working in the securities industry.

The SECs complaint charges Bergstein with violating Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act and Rules 10b-5(a) and (c) and aiding and abetting violations by Weston Capital Asset Management of Section 206 of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and Rule 206(4)-8. The SEC is seeking injunctions, the return of allegedly ill-gotten gains, and monetary penalties.
HHS graduate called to global trouble spots

David Tolbert, president of the International Center for Transitional Justice, is a 1974 graduate of Hendersonville High School.

If theres trouble in the world  of the intractable, decades long, genocidal magnitude David Tolbert gets the call.



He worked in the former Yugoslavia prosecuting war crimes. The United Nations called on him to pull the Khmer Rouge trial out of the ditch. He worked for years to push factions in Colombia to end the longest running civil war in the western hemisphere.

Tolbert traces the inspiration for his lifes work to family background and a challenging class at Hendersonville High School.

In my senior year I took a government class that was important and instrumental in my international career, he says in an interview from New York, where he heads a nonprofit agency that works for justice and human rights. I think its the kind of issues and the robust discussion we had that really triggered an interest in government and politics and more broadly in international affairs.

After he graduated from HHS in 1974 and spent a year in Europe, Tolbert enrolled at Furman University, where he graduated magna cum laude. He went on to earn a law degree at UNC at Chapel Hill.

Since 2010 hes been president of the International Center for Transitional Justice, a nongovernment agency that helps nations build judicial systems, conducts truth-seeking investigations and advocates for victims rights.

Thirteen years of work by ICTJ helped forge the historic peace agreement between the government of Colombia and the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Although voters later turned down the accord in a national referendum, the effort to settle the 50-year-old civil war earned Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos this years Nobel Peace Prize.

Its really quite a political morass in a way, Tolbert says. After Santos reached the agreement with FARC, a former president emerged to campaign against it in the national vote. Tolbert says his organization has a strong office there and continues to work on the accord. Where we end up I dont know, he says.

Except for a short stint in private practice in Charlotte, Tolbert has spent his law career trying to sort out the truth, expose corruption and bring bloody regimes to justice around the globe.

One of his most challenging assignments came in 2005, when the United Nations asked him to fix the war crimes process mired in corruption in Cambodia.

Tolbert, a tall, garrulous North Carolinian with a world-weary manner, was to bring his experiences in the heart of the worlds worst recent genocidal moments to Cambodia, where a past genocide was being litigated, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joel Brinkley wrote in World Affairs. The problems he found there were altogether different from the ones he had been dealing with (in Bosnia). The court had been trying to organize itself for several years, but Tolbert says that when he arrived, it had no administrative leadership, particularly with respect to court management, including translation and interpretation and the witness-protection program.

Civil rights activist

The son of Joe Tolbert, who worked at General Electric, and Rosemary Tolbert, a homemaker, David grew up on Glengary Drive in Flat Rock Forest with a brother, Richard.

My elementary school was segregated, so segregation was a very real experience for me, he told an interviewer when he was named among the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America last year. My paternal ancestors were from South Carolina. They had opposed secession in the Civil War period, had opposed slavery, and had tried to defend the rights of African Americans.

His grandfather, an attorney in South Carolina, had defended African Americans.

He was assaulted and crosses were burned in the yard and a number of other acts of violence were taken against him, Tolbert says. In what he described as a very Southern, almost Faulknerian type of story, the grandfather ended up committing suicide, I think, because of all the pressure. I feel this real identity with him and what the family tried to do during those times.

That will to fight for victims was also nurtured in Keith Dalbecs government class at HHS.

We did some debates about economic inequality, Tolbert says. He used to get us to take positions and argue back and forth, which stimulated a lot of interesting conversation. It really opened my mind to things that I had already felt and wasnt able to articulate.

Baptized at First Presbyterian Church, Tolbert received his Christian teaching in the church and in a household that he describes as conservative and religious. Later, his parents would join a group that left First Presbyterian (PC-USA) to form Covenant Presbyterian on Kanuga Road, which affiliated with the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America.

His family background and upbringing and stimulating discussions at HHS drove him very much on the side of victims, whether its oppression or war crimes, he says. My whole career has ended up being about that.

Rob Tolleson, Tolberts classmate at HHS, recalls the intensity of the classroom exercises.

In those classes we did these simulations and Dave and I would take it fairly seriously, Tolleson says.

Dalbec recalled setting up a simulation that had Tolberts rich country taking advantage of Tollesons poor nation  provoking a lively discussion between two bright seniors with strong political views.

I dont doubt it, Tolleson says of Dalbecs description. I cant imagine that Dave didnt somehow save the world. It seemed like there was a room set up for it and stuff was laid out on tables and I know were divided up into countries with alliances and resources. It was great fun.

In that tumultuous time, Tolleson and Tolbert, who was senior class president, were among the politically engaged activists challenging the establishment.

I think we were trying to get the school to write a letter in support of impeaching Nixon, Tolleson recalls with a chuckle. Really giving the principal a headache. We started the human relations council and got into locker privacy issues, once again giving the principal a big headache.

Dalbec and Tolleson have been surprised that his nomination of Tolbert to the HHS Alumni Association Hall of Fame has been twice passed over, given the 74 graduates achievements in reconciliation, truth-seeking and peace brokering around the globe for three decades.

Its laughable that the Alumni Association would pass over Tolbert, Tolleson says. The guys a personal friend of Kofi Annan. We knew that Dave was a special guy even back then. Theres nobody Ive been more proud of.

Dalbec, who went on to serve as HHS principal from 1992 to 1997, thinks Tolbert deserves recognition in his hometown and at his alma mater, which shaped a world view that has improved the world.

I wouldnt want to disparage the Hall of Fame committee, Dalbec says. Hes one of the most impressive students Ive had in my career and he seemed to be a solid and thoughtful person when he was a senior in high school. Im just really excited about what hes done with his life.
The First Stop premises in Coolock where the robbery took place on Wednesday

Two bungling criminals linked to a Traveller gang were arrested over an armed robbery in Dublin after becoming involved in an unrelated altercation with gardai.

The two men are being questioned by gardai over the robbery of a cash-in-transit van at Donaghmede Shopping Centre on Wednesday.

A lone male approached the security team as they were making a delivery to a premises at Donaghmede at 3.10pm.

"The staff member was threatened with an iron bar and the suspect made off with two bags of coins.

"He got into a waiting car which was found a short time later abandoned at Carndonagh Road, Donaghmede," a garda spokesman said.

Arrested

Around 4pm that day gardai from Coolock were on patrol when they became involved in an altercation with two men aged 28 and 33.

They were arrested and taken to Coolock Garda Station before being released.

"From enquiries carried out by investigating gardai, these two males were immediately re-arrested in relation to the investigation into the earlier robbery at Donaghmede Shopping Centre," the spokesman added.

Gardai raided a halting site at Moyne Park and found the proceeds of the robbery in a caravan. Sources say the two men have links to a Traveller gang well-known to gardai for its involvement in robberies, theft, burglaries and other offences.

Two men are due to appear before court today in relation to the incident.

Gardai are examining if there is any link between Wednesday's robbery and the attempted robbery of another cash-in-transit van collection in Clarehall Shopping Centre on Monday.

In that raid, a man armed with an iron bar hit a security guard while another man also tried to attack him.

However, the security guard managed to throw the cash back into the van and the raiders fled empty-handed.

The two men then made their way towards a northside halting site before escaping.

Meanwhile, in a separate incident, robbers also targeted a First Stop/Fast Fit garage premises nearby in Coolock on Monday evening.

Two men on a motorbike emerged from Newtown Avenue and sped up to the garage on Greencastle Parade in the Newtown Industrial Estate shortly before 6.30pm.

Two members of staff were locking up. One man approached the workers, threatening them with a firearm and demanding money.

No one was injured in the robbery, but it is understood that the shaken staff were given a day off from work.

The thief is understood to have escaped with his driver with close to 1,000 in cash.

Gardai have spoken to witnesses and there are also a number of CCTV cameras located around the garage.

Hidden

The suspect had his face hidden, using a scarf to conceal his mouth and most of his face, while also having a hood over his head.

Witnesses described him as being around 5ft 11in tall. He wore dark tracksuit bottoms and a dark hooded jumper, along with white trainers, and spoke with a Dublin accent.

There is no description of his accomplice, the motorcyclist, also a male.

However, gardai have been given a good indication of the type of motorcycle used as the getaway vehicle.

It has been described as a large scrambler bike with blue and white fairing.

It had no lights, despite it being dark at the time, and also had no registration plates.

No arrests have been made over the incident as of yet, with gardai appealing for further information.
A former lay worker with the Church of Ireland has been jailed for 13 years for the rape and molestation of 14 young boys over the course of 40 years.

Patrick O'Brien (76) pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to 48 sample counts of indecent assault and three of sexual assault of the boys.

O'Brien, of Knocklyon Road, Templeogue, Dublin, received a one-year suspended sentence in 1989 for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy, leaving him free to continue a litany of horror crimes for another 24 years.

The offending took place between 1974 and 2013 at numerous locations, including Kildare, Westmeath, and at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, where he worked as a volunteer.

He would abuse his victims in various locations, including:

Bringing boys to his yacht.

Taking them for driving lessons or to the office where he worked.

He abused one boy once a week in a car wash after they were hidden from view when the vehicle was covered in foam.

He organised games of hide and seek to be alone with a victim.

He abused a boy in a kitchen while the child's parents and grandmother were in the sitting room.

Another boy was abused in the electrical room of St Patrick's Cathedral while people were in the body of the church.

O'Brien would often drop the boys home and have dinner or drinks with their parents, having abused their child hours earlier. O'Brien regularly came up to the victims' bedroom to "kiss them goodnight and tuck them in" but would then sexually abuse them, usually touching their penis and then performing oral sex on them.

One victim, who was raped a number of times by O'Brien, was first raped by him on the child's parents' bed. He blocked the door with a chair before stripping the child and himself.

This victim also told gardai that O'Brien would put him and his younger brother to bed when their parents were downstairs.

He would read his brother a story while that child was lying in a top bunk and at the same time would force the victim, who was lying on the bottom bunk, to perform oral sex on him. When he had finished reading the story, O'Brien would sit on the boy's bed and "French kiss him".

Judge Melanie Greally said the ages of the victims ranged from seven to 16 years.

She noted one victim was abused on a single occasion, with the longest duration of abuse being seven years. Judge Greally said every one of the victims had suffered consequences as a result of the abuse in specific and individual ways.

Harrowing

In sentencing O'Brien, the judge said she was taking into account aggravating factors including the gravity of the sexual misconduct, the length of time involved, the ages of the victims, the nature of his grooming techniques and the breach of trust involved.

The judge added that in mitigation she was taking into account the guilty plea, O'Brien's co-operation with the investigation, his health issues and expression of remorse.

The judge imposed consecutive sentences totalling 13 years, which she backdated to July.

Speaking outside court, Detective Superintendent Declan Daly said he would like to commend the bravery and resilience of all the victims.

"I hope their bravery will send a message to all other victims who may come forward in historical cases and report their complaints to An Garda Siochana," he said.

The court heard O'Brien was first arrested in March 2014. A search was carried out of his home, during which photographs of some of the victims in normal social situations were discovered. In April 2014, he made a voluntary statement in which he agreed with the statements of his victims. He said he had been abused himself and told gardai: "I would like to say how sorry I am for causing these lads such distress and apologise to them all absolutely."

Sean Guerin, defending, said his client had written a letter in which he said he wanted to apologise "unreservedly" for the breach of trust and the suffering the victims.
A homeless woman who fears for her life sleeping on the streets has issued a plea for help, saying she just "needs a chance".

Sonia Eglington, from Ringsend, said she was forced to sleep rough for three consecutive weeks as a result of there being no available bed in any of the city's under-pressure homeless hostels.

"I sleep outside a church every night," she told the Herald.

Sonia said she was desperate and had not even been able to get a new sleeping bag after hers was stolen.

"I'm on edge every night trying to go to sleep because there's perverts going past me and you can't feel safe as a woman on the streets, the way some of them behave," she said.

Diseases

"I don't feel safe out here at all and there doesn't seem to be anywhere for me to go - there's just not enough help."

Sonia fears she may have pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining of the lungs, which causes pain when breathing.

"It's caused by pneumonia and other diseases of the chest or abdomen," she said.

"I had that the last time I was on the streets and I went to the hospital. A few people have pneumonia out on the streets and I hope it isn't that.

"I want a normal life - I want to do things, to be someone, but I have nowhere to live and I can't move forward without a home. I need a chance."

Sonia was speaking as it was revealed that there has been an increase in the number of young women sleeping rough on the streets of Dublin.

On one night alone, it was estimated there were more than 130 rough-sleepers on the city's streets, including 16 women under the age of 24.

Figures released by the Dublin Region Homeless Executive show that the number of homeless families living in Dublin has surpassed the 1,000 mark for the first time since the crisis was brought to national attention two years ago.

Sonia admitted she had been hooked on drugs in the past, but said she is "clean now".

"I was in care all my life and then when I left care I was shoved from hostel to hostel. There was no stability, no home to call my own, no way of building my life. I just needed a home," she said.

Sonia said she could not access rehab to get off drugs. This help only came, she said, when she ended up in Mountjoy Prison.

"After I got out of prison, they sent me to a house where people were using snow blow, crack, everything," she said.

"I relapsed because of that. I just needed a home. But I did well in prison on rehab because it was a service I needed that just didn't exist for me otherwise."

Concerns

Leading homelessness campaigners have raised serious concerns over the increase in homeless women sleeping rough on the capital's streets, with at least three pregnant women recorded last month.

Former Lord Mayor Christy Burke said the number of women with nowhere else to go has significantly increased over the past month.

"One woman we encountered on Dame Street was forced to sleep in a wet blanket, while two women in their late 20s are forced to move around at night because they're afraid of getting urinated on if they sleep in doorways," he said.

"We need action now, because it is a really desperate situation."
Liam Neeson got a break from being famous when he listened to young Syrian refugees speaking about the struggles of life in exile.

In his role as a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, the Ballymena actor sat on the ground in the courtyard of a community centre in Amman, Jordan, and heard the stories of two dozen teenagers who had no idea he is a Hollywood star.

A 15-year-old girl described how she was bullied at school, and a boy of the same age said he used to get into fights.

"They are all our children," Neeson (64) later told reporters. "They want peace, they want to be recognised."

Neeson's visit to Jordan was his first to the troubled Middle East on behalf of Unicef, one of a number of UN agencies and aid groups trying to ease the plight of displaced Syrians and their overburdened host communities.

Nearly five million Syrians, half of them children, have fled civil war at home since 2011 and settled in neighbouring countries, mainly in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Neeson, the star of the Taken franchise of films, and his son Micheal (21) visited a community centre in a working-class area of Jordan's capital.

At the centre, operated by the community development group Johud, Syrian and Jordanian teenagers get to know each other in after-school sessions. The programme is funded by Unicef and run by the Jordan-based group Generations For Peace.

After watching the youngsters compete in a relay race, Neeson sat in a circle with them on the tiled floor of the courtyard to hear their stories.

Ahmed, a 15-year-old Syrian, said he used to get into fights with a Jordanian boy from the neighbourhood. Now they are like brothers, he said.

Camp

Neeson later said in an interview that he was inspired by the Syrian girls, including those he met during a tour of Zaatari, Jordan's largest camp for Syrian refugees.

"I thought they would be more oppressed because of their culture, and of course because of the ordeals they have been going through, coming from Syria, the horrors there," he said.

"These girls I met, yesterday and again here today, they are so positive, so eager and keen to learn. I asked them what their goals were in life, in an ideal world what would they want to be."

He said the responses included mathematician, engineer, police inspector and teacher.

"To see these girls being empowered by education and the focus in their eyes was incredibly humbling and very moving."

Nevertheless, Unicef says about 700,000 school-age Syrian refugees across the region are missing out on education, either because there is no space for them in overcrowded local schools or because they have to work and support their families.

In Jordan and Lebanon, many schools are running double shifts to try to accommodate the refugee children.

Neeson said he grew up with violent conflict - between Protestants and Catholics - in his native Northern Ireland.

"I grew up cautious, very, very cautious," he said. "I have seen it in some of the kids here, in their eyes - but once you engage them and talk to them that rapidly disappears."

In Jordan, Neeson took his apparent lack of celebrity status among the local teenagers in his stride.

"I was appalled," he said, jokingly, when asked how he felt when he realised they really did not know who he was.

"It is kind of refreshing, the kids saying, OK, thanks for coming to our school, but who are you?"
Who were the top Washington County football performers in Week 9?

Big plays and turnovers were plenty as the winners overwhelmed the losers in the final week of Washington County's regular season.
Rabbi Capers Funnye is part of a coalition of Chicago faith leaders that helps combat gun violence by engaging with young men on the streets.

CHICAGO (JTA)-The same week Tamar Manasseh's African-American son was going to become a bar mitzvah, gang violence killed two 13-year-old black boys who were also from Chicago's South Side.

As she picked out the bar mitzvah suit for her son, Manasseh couldn't shake the image of the slain boys' mothers, who were likely also picking out suits-for their sons to be buried in.

Manasseh, a lifelong Chicagoan who attended Jewish day school and is now studying to be a rabbi, has always been proud to be Jewish and black. But gun violence, which has surrounded the 38-year-old since she was a kid, has accentuated both the tensions and connections between the two parts of her identity. While most South Side Jews lived in the relatively affluent neighborhood of Hyde Park, she grew up in nearby Englewood, an area that she described as "Afghanistan."

"I was always taught that Jews were survivors," Manasseh told JTA. "The Holocaust happened, and Jews survived that, right? Black people were never taught that we were survivors. If anything, we're pretty much taught that we were born to die. Being Jewish, I was never able to look at things like that."

Manasseh-a mother of two children, ages 18 and 20-has taken it upon herself to stop gun violence in Englewood. During the summer months, when programs to keep kids off the streets are scarce, she and several other parents-who she dubs an "Army of Moms"-spend hours sitting on the corner of 75th Street and South Stewart Avenue chatting to passers-by and offering them barbecue.

The food and talk, she said, has been enough to stop gun violence there. And the statistics back her up: The corner, in the middle of a violent neighborhood, has seen zero shootings this year.

"I felt like if I didn't do something, it would come for my kids eventually," said Manasseh, who sells real estate and studies for her ordination in her spare time. "So I'm more afraid of what happens if I don't get out there and do something than I am if I do. I'm more afraid of one of my kids being shot than I am of me being shot."

Chicago has become a hotbed of gun violence in recent years-especially on the South Side. Nearly 6,000 people have been shot since the beginning of 2015, and Chicago experienced 78 homicides in August alone, making it the deadliest month the city has seen in nearly two decades. Some residents have nicknamed the city "Chi-raq," a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, because it can feel like a war zone.

Manasseh, however, has found some success in curbing the violence, and she's looking to build upon it. She founded a nonprofit, Mothers Against Senseless Killings, which has raised approximately $20,000 to fund the street corner presence and support cash-strapped young men who might otherwise turn to crime.

Following a dispute with the landlord of the building next to their usual spot, the group, known as MASK, is raising more money to buy the vacant lot across the street, where they can set up a permanent play area for kids. MASK has spawned offshoots in Staten Island, New York, and Evansville, Indiana.

"When your parents are home watching every move you make, would you and your siblings set the house on fire? Probably not," she said. "All it took was people being there. Some of these kids, they've never had anybody there looking out for them."

Manasseh grew up attending Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, an African-American Hebrew Israelite congregation on the South Side, as well as Akiba-Schechter, a local Jewish day school that was affiliated with the Conservative movement at the time. Before Manasseh was born, her mother had "reverted," in Manasseh's words, to Judaism.

Although she was born and raised Jewish, at age 30 Manasseh decided to undergo a confirmation of her Judaism, which involved immersion in a ritual bath, supervised by Rabbi Capers Funnye, who leads Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken. Her children underwent similar processes at the time of their bat and bar mitzvahs.

Last year, Funnye was appointed head of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, an African Hebrew Israelite body. Although the Hebrew Israelite movement is usually considered outside the mainstream by Judaism's main denominations, Funnye has undergone a conversion by Conservative rabbis and is a member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.

Manasseh is pursuing her rabbinic ordination at the Israelite Academy, the Hebrew Israelite rabbinical school, where she's been studying part-time for seven years. Should she graduate next year, she will be the first woman to receive ordination from the academy. But though she was raised in the movement and is set to hold its rabbinic degree, she does not identify as a Hebrew Israelite. She identifies as a Jew-full stop.

"If you have to look a certain way to be a Jew, that's a bad thing," she said. "I think if you have to look a certain way to be a Hebrew Israelite, that's a bad thing. So no, I'm just a Jew, I'm just Jewish. Because even the Hebrew Israelite movement is born out of the black nationalist movement, and it has something to do with race. And you cannot have race and religion occupying the same space."

MASK isn't explicitly Jewish, but it is infused with Jewish themes and language. One of the group's projects, which has planted 10 Crimson King maple trees around Chicago in memory of gun victims, is inspired by the Jewish arboreal holiday of Tu b'Shvat, she said. The trees' leaves are red to symbolize the blood of the victims.

Last week, the group held a concluding service for Yom Kippur that along with traditional elements like the Amidah prayer and shofar blowing featured volunteers reading out names of shooting victims.

Manasseh isn't the only Jewish activist working to fight gun violence. Last year, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, a Chicago social justice group, joined a campaign to persuade the University of Chicago to build a trauma center on its medical campus to better serve shooting victims. The university broke ground on the center last month.

"One of the ways we could add value was we had access to people in positions of power," said Judy Levey, JCUA's executive director. "We're not there to target the Jews by any stretch, but in some campaigns, there are Jews in positions of leadership, and that helps."

In addition, Funnye is part of a coalition of faith leaders that helps combat gun violence by engaging with young men on the streets through local activist groups. While few black men on the South Side are Jewish, Funnye-who incidentally is a cousin of Michelle Obama- said his religion doesn't get in the way of connecting with them.

"Before they see me being a Jew, they see me as being a black man, and they see me as being a black man that's interested in them, and then they see that I'm a rabbi," Funnye said. "This is an individual they can interface with."

Funnye remembers Manasseh composing Jewish songs as a 14-year-old in his congregation, and isn't surprised that she has applied her Jewish learning to community organizing.

"Her pulpit is on the corner," Funnye said. "She is practicing her rabbinate. I think that she is sincere, and I think the people she approaches on the block feel the depths of her sincerity."

While more than two dozen Chicago Jewish clergy pledged to support the trauma center campaign, and some have spoken out against gun violence or attended events, Manasseh wants to see more of them on the street with her.

Tamar Manasseh, on the corner of 75th Street and Stewart Avenue on Chicago's South Side, gathers mothers at the intersection to prevent violence there

Last week, she met with JTA at a chic Hyde Park cafe surrounded by greenery, upscale shops and University of Chicago buildings. It's just four miles from her intersection, but psychologically a world away. It felt like an incongruous place to talk about gun violence in a poor neighborhood.

But if Manasseh also felt the conversation was out of context, she wasn't bothered by it. She wore a Chicago Cubs hat and sweatshirt-risky apparel on the South Side, which is White Sox country-and exuded confidence and focus. After a lifetime of sticking out-first by virtue of being a black Jewish woman, and then by becoming the first woman to try for ordination in her movement-she feels other Jews could benefit by leaving their comfort zone.

"It's all smoke and mirrors," she said, referring to some Jewish efforts against gun violence. "There are many Jewish social justice organizations that are able to do as much as they can to make themselves look good, but nothing that will have impact in the long run. I want to see them be the Jews they claim they are."
This collection of 34 stories takes a heartfelt look at modern life through a Jewish lens. In the essays you can read about the great shnecken vs. rugelach battle, the newly discovered Jewish summer holiday of Simchat Squash, and why yesterday's nebbish is today's millionaire tech nerd.

Joyce Eisenberg and Ellen Scolnic are the authors of "The Whole Spiel: Funny essays about digital nudniks, seder selfies and chicken soup memories," from which this excerpt is taken.

When you want another piece of that delicious noodle pudding, do you ask for kugel (COO-gul) or kigel (KEE-gul)? How you pronounce it is a clue to where your ancestors came from. Galitzianers called it kigel and preferred it sweet. They came from southeastern Poland and the western Ukraine, which included the cities of Chelm and Krakow. Litvaks called it kugel and preferred it savory. They came from Lithuania, northern Poland and northern Russia, which included Vilna, Minsk and Kiev.

Historically, these two groups of Ashkenazic Jews feuded over which one was smarter and higher class, but these distinctions are long gone. Today Jewish battle lines are more likely drawn over which sleep away camp your kids attend or which Chinese restaurant you call for Sunday night takeout.

But in South Africa, calling out "kugel" can still cause you trouble. That's because it's a derogatory term for a Jewish woman who is materialistic and pretentious. Why label someone a kugel? Because a kugel is a plain pudding that masquerades as a delicacy. Maybe this explains why when you search online for kugel, among all the photos of noodles, apples and cinnamon deliciousness you come across a photo of a sexy woman with the unfortunate name of Olivia Kugel.

Before a kugel was a kugel, it was a dumpling that was formed from a batter of bread and eggs and simmered in stew; later on, chefs would cook the dumpling in a kugeltopf. (In German kugel means ball; topf is a round earthenware jar.) On Friday afternoons, a Jewish woman would tuck her kugeltopf into her pot of cholent, a stew of meat, beans and potatoes, and shlep it to the village bakery so it could be placed in a bread oven that was still warm from baking loaves of challah. When the woman picked up her stew at the end of Shabbat, the steamy oven would have turned the dumpling into a pudding.

As time went on, cooks substituted noodles for the bread batter. Traditional Shabbat kugels were served as a side dish to a meat entree and had to be dairy free to conform to kashrut. These savory kugels were usually bound together with eggs and oil; onions sauteed in shmaltz were added for flavor. Polish cooks get credit for "inventing" sweet dairy kugels by adding raisins, cinnamon and farmer's cheese; these were a perfect accompaniment for a dairy brunch or lunch. The Ottomans brought rice kugels to Eastern Europe. And in the shtetl, where potatoes were eaten several times a day, potato kugel was a treat.

Kugel came to America with Eastern European Jews. In 1871, "Mrs. Esther Levy's Jewish Cookery Book," the first Jewish cookbook published in America, included a recipe for kugel. Her version was sweet, with raisins, sugar, eggs and homemade noodles.

Some 80 years earlier, when Hasidic Jews began moving from Eastern Europe to Jerusalem, they took their unique sweet and savory kugel recipe with them: It called for very thin noodles combined with eggs, caramelized sugar and lots of freshly ground pepper. The kugel, which was baked in a loaf or tube pan and cut like a cake, became known as Kugel Yerushalmi, or Jerusalem Kugel.

In the last 150 years, kugels have traveled from Vilna to the East Village. Designer three-layer kugels include sweet potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, or goat cheese, duck eggs and sour cherries. Instead of challah crumbs, chefs spread kosher Japanese panko on top. Kugels have broken out of square and rectangular molds; they are being baked in cookie cutters and in tiny Bundt pans.

If we served a sour cherry kugel baked in a tiny Bundt pan, there would be an uprising. Every family has its favorite kugel variation-and that's the best one. One camp likes its kugel savory with the thinnest of noodles, cottage cheese, cream cheese and a little vanilla. No fruit, no pineapple chunks, no strange foreign objects. Another contingent likes its kugel sweet with brown sugar, raisins and extra wide egg noodles.

No matter what they look like, kugels are one of the most ubiquitous Jewish comfort foods. They are on the table at holiday dinners and charity luncheons. We know people who wrap kugel in aluminum foil and shlep it to summer camp on visiting day at their children's request.

Kugels have found favor beyond the Jewish community. African-American chef Mildred Council owns Mama Dip's, a soul food restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her menu includes smothered pork chops, chitlins and kugel. After she was introduced to kugel at an interfaith community dinner, she created her own versions. One has dried cranberries in it; she serves it at Christmastime with cranberry sauce on top.

Farther afield, you can find the Lithuanian kugelis, a hot, crusty kugel that includes potatoes, eggs, onions, milk and-gasp!-bacon. A version of this migrated to Switzerland where what they call kugel comes with herring on top.

Illustration by Terry LaBan

Kugel expert Allan Nadler, a professor of Jewish Studies at Drew University, wants none of it. "No spinach or zucchini or sweet kugel for me," said Nadler, who grew up in Montreal. "Everything is a kugel these days. I grew up in a home where my grandparents were from Russia. We ate salt and pepper kugel and cut it up in the soup. Now that's kugel!"

Joyce Eisenberg was a longtime editor at the Jewish Exponent and Ellen Scolnic was a frequent contributor. They teamed up in 2006 and wrote the "Dictionary of Jewish Words" (Jewish Publication Society 2006) a best-seller for the Jewish Publication Society, and just released "The Whole Spiel: Funny Essays About Digital Nudniks, Seder Selfies and Chicken Soup Memories" (Incompra Press 2016). Ellen and Joyce, The Word Mavens, speak, write and tweet about all things Jewish. Visit their website, TheWordMavens.com.
Today is Veteran's Day...

I am the proud widow of a Korean War Army veteran who was buried with full military honors at the National Cemetery in Bushnell, Florida.

I am the proud mother of a Lt. Commander in the Navy who also served in the Army for many years, including a tour in Iraq during the worst of it.

I am also the proud mother of a psychologist who worked with Navy recruits at Great Lakes Naval Station, Illinois.

And I am the proud mother of a third son who served in the Navy on a minesweeper in the Persian Gulf.

(I never served in our country's military, yet I get to be buried with my spouse in Bushnell, one casket on top of the other. I will never forget that my spouse told me I had to die first because I weigh too much! He was kidding of course????)

The words of a great man...

"The Jewish people constitute only a fraction of the human family, yet we cannot recount the history of civilization without coming face to face with what the Jews have thought and felt and written and done. This is the story of a small people with a large place in the destiny of mankind."

(Whose wonderful, inspiring words were they? Abba Eban said them. He was a special Israeli Statesman who will never be forgotten!)

He always made me smile...

I'm referring to Phillip "Fyvush Finkel who died recently.

He was a beloved actor of the Yiddish theater and later Broadway and television. He was 93 years old.

Finkel was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn (so was I) the third of four sons. His career on the Yiddish stage began at the age of nine in New York's lower east side and continued into the 1960's. He made his Broadway debut in the original 1964 production of "Fiddler on the Roof" and participated in several productions of the show throughout his career. In 1992 he crossed over to television and eventually became an Emmy winner.

In 1997, Finkel was given a star on the Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame, on the sidewalk outside the Second Avenue Deli in Manhattan.

A Jewish Pavilion Mensch...

I received the following email from the Jewish Pavilion:

"MARTY GLICKSTEIN is the ideal board member. He has served on the Jewish Pavilion Board for the past six years and gotten involved in every aspect of the organization.

As a CPA with Glickstein, Laval, Carris, P.A., his expertise is sought for all financial matters from budgets to money collection at events.

Jewish Pavilion Board members are expected to participate in all events, garner support from friends and colleagues, sell raffle tickets, garner auction gifts, attend Jewish Pavilion holiday events for seniors, and he does it all and more.

Marty is warm, compassionate and understanding of the needs of our elders. You will find him at Horizon Bay each month helping his wife, EMILY, serve ice cream sundaes to residents attending musicales. 'He is the true definition of a mensch; the full package' says NANCY LUDIN, Executive Director."

Important interfaith dialogue...

I read this in a Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando email and pass it along:

Fyvush Finkel

"On Monday, Nov. 14, the Jewish Community Relations Council is pleased to host Nostra Aetate: Turning Points for Interfaith Dialogue in the Hillel Ballroom of the University of Central Florida NorthView building, 3925 Lockwood Blvd., Oviedo. The discussion begins at 6 pm.

Nostra Aetate (The Vatican's 1965 Declaration on Relations with Non-Christian Faiths) was notable for several reasons, especially the revocation of the charge that Jews were collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus. The declaration marked a major turning point in Jewish-Catholic relations."

One for the road...

A rabbi said to a precocious six-year-old boy, "So, you tell me that your mother says your prayers for you each night. That's very commendable. What does she actually say?"

The little boy replied, "Thank God he's in bed!"
One of the leaders in the fight against breast cancer is Dr. Tamar Peretz Yablonski, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, whose tenacity and determination to find a cure inspires her and countless others.

"My parents always taught me to fight, to look on the bright side," Yablonski, director of Hadassah Medical Center's Sharett Institute of Oncology in Israel, told JNS.org.

As Hadassah continues its important research work in finding a cure, the organization celebrates 20 years since its researchers discovered that the risk of carrying the BRCA1 gene mutation-which is tied to increased cancer risk-is 1 in 40 for Ashkenazi women, compared to 1 in 100 for the rest of the population.

Following this discovery, Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO) developed a simpler blood test to detect the presence of these genes, the organization reported.

Hadassah's findings have had a major impact on breast cancer management, according to Yablonski. "We now know this mutation in the BRCA gene predisposes to the development, not only of breast cancer, but also to the development of ovarian, colon, pancreatic, prostate in males and other diseases," she said.

Genetic testing has potentially saved the lives of an untold number of women whose examples are often highlighted in news accounts, such as Hollywood actress Angelia Jolie, who famously in 2013, touted the benefits of genetic testing and surgery to prevent hereditary breast cancer.

Potentially life saving

Breast cancer survivor, Maxx Schube, who lives in Atlanta, and her two grown daughters, Rochelle and Alana, all tested positive for the BRCA genetic mutation, which helped them individually decide their best course of action.

"After my sister's death from ovarian cancer and my breast cancer diagnosis, my doctors suggested I undergo genetic testing," Schube said. "I tested positive for the BRCA1 mutation. With the knowledge acquired from BRCA genetic research, we realized, I could have passed it on to my children. So, when they were in their 20s, it was suggested each one be tested. Both daughters tested BRCA1 positive, my son was spared. Hadassah developed the blood test that can detect if a healthy woman carries the BRCA mutation. When my 23-year-old daughter felt a lump in her breast, she wasn't taken seriously until she revealed she was BRCA positive. I shudder to think she might have been overlooked."

When Schube speaks at Hadassah's breast cancer awareness campaign events-including those in October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness month-she tells audiences that cancer doesn't discriminate based on a woman's age.

"We emphasize that even in college, when you are busy with school or focusing on your future, there is no future unless you keep up with your health, medical checkups or do a thorough breast self-examination," Schube said. "For us, genetics is our cure. Having the knowledge of our strong BRCA genetic family history saved my younger daughter's life. With that BRCA knowledge, my older daughter underwent a prophylactic mastectomy at age 28, so she does not have to wait for the ax to fall."

While detecting breast cancer early is part of the battle against the disease, more research is needed, Yablonski said, and the current testing model that detects the gene mutation needs to change.

Looking ahead

"There were many questions on how we should proceed since about half of the women diagnosed with breast cancer in Israel are non-Ashkenazi," Yablonski said. "The general thought was women of any ethnic origin should be aware of the possibility of developing breast cancer on the background of genetic predisposition. It was suggested the medical [insurance] coverage, as it exists today, will allow women from all ethnic groups to be tested for BRCA. There was also the question of whether other genes were involved, and this is one of the points of the research we are doing today."

New studies shows that other genes should not be ignored in the diagnosis of breast cancer.

"If we look at the prevalence of any mutations in women who develop breast cancer on a background of genetic predisposition only 40 percent-50 percent will have the BRCA," Yablonski said. "The rest will have other genes that are involved. It may be a mistake to test only for BRCA. In the last two years, we've researched other genes that are involved in the development of breast cancer. We identified specific mutations in the gene, called p53 [a tumor suppressor protein], which predisposes to the development of breast cancer at a very young age. We know there are at least 26 genes that are involved in the predisposition of breast cancer."

Renee Young, Hadassah Maxx Schube (center) with daughters Rochelle (l) and Alana.

Yablonski stressed treatment too. "How genetic predisposition affects treatment is important," she said. "Those with the BRCA1 and BRCA2 are more sensitive to a specific chemotherapy drug [platinum-based]. If a woman is suffering from breast cancer, we know this drug should be used and is effective."

While breast cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence, it remains a serious illness.

"We should be very cautious in deciding to give therapy or not and be very precise and personal on what kind of treatments to give, the dosage, the possibility of side effects, close follow-up and when to stop," Yablonski said. "Newly diagnosed patients and those carrying the mutated gene face a bewildering array of treatment options and opinions. This will change. Treatment will become increasingly personalized, structured according to the many factors involved, from genetic to emotional. Decisions will be easier and results will be better."
At every stage in life people are asking the same questions. What do I want to do for the rest of my life? And how do I get there?

Young adults in their 20s are looking for a career that will make them feel fulfilled. Those in their 30s to 50s may be unsatisfied with their current career or think they could do better. Those who are 60 or older are thinking about an encore career-something meaningful to do after they cut back or retire. At some point, people begin to realize that there is more to life than a good career.

Beginning this month, rabbis throughout Central Florida will offer a new six-session course from the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute (JLI) called How Success Thinks: Jewish Secrets for Leading a Productive Life.

"How Success Thinks is designed to help people get more of what they want in life, and less of what they don't," explained Rabbi Zalman Abraham of JLI's Brooklyn headquarters. "Throughout the course we explore ways to cultivate people's signature strengths, adopt a growth mind-set, access their inner creativity, deal with weaknesses, and overcome procrastination and other obstacles that get in the way of their success."

At the core of How Success Thinks are six key productivity concepts, from motivation and goal setting to creativity and relationship building, which explain why some people get so much done. Drawing on 3000 years of Jewish wisdom-as well as some of the latest findings and fascinating case studies from neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics-this eye-opening course explains that the most productive people on earth don't merely act differently; they view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.

"Most people don't have a clear picture of what they want to achieve in their lifetime," said Rabbi Yanky Majesky of Chabad North Orlando, one of the local JLI Instructors. "In the course, participants will have a chance to explore their own definition of success, and then create a road map to equip themselves with the tools they'll need to make that goal a reality."

"How Success Thinks is a unique offering that links success to sustainable outcomes for all our stakeholders in the community," said Andrew Kakabadse, professor of Governance and Leadership at Henley Business School (Reading, U.K.) and author of "The Success Formula: How Smart Leaders Deliver Outstanding Value," commenting on the course. "This course provides an empowerment of the mind, the heart and the sharing of experience across community: the very elements which make up a positive and flourishing society."

How Success Thinks is accredited for continuing education for medical and mental health professionals. Like all JLI programs, this course is designed to appeal to people at all levels of knowledge, including those without any prior experience or background in Jewish learning. All JLI courses are open to the public, and attendees need not be affiliated with a particular synagogue, temple, or other house of worship.

Interested students may visit http://www.myJLI.com or call 407-636-5994 to find the closest location, for registration and for other course-related information.
Eric Gutman, former star of 'Jersey Boys' now performs in his own musical 'From Broadway to Obscurity.'

In his first musical theater role, Eric Gutman's only lines were "Woof, woof."

He was in the second grade and had been cast as Dorothy's dog Toto in his elementary school's version of "The Wizard of Oz." That's when Gutman realized that he loved to perform.

After graduating from Western Michigan University with a degree in musical theater performance, Gutman began pursuing his dream-to perform on Broadway. And then, one day, while working a desk job, Gutman got the call: He would be part of the cast of "Jersey Boys"-the Broadway musical sensation that tells the story of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons-when it launched its first national tour in 2006. He immediately broke down and cried.

Gutman, a Detroit-area native, would go on to appear in six different roles in nearly 1,200 performances of "Jersey Boys" over the next three years, including one year on Broadway. So, why would he voluntarily leave the award-winning, record-breaking show to move back to Michigan?

That's the premise behind Gutman's exceptional one-man musical, "From Broadway to Obscurity," a high-energy, hilariously entertaining look at his transition from Broadway star to suburban dad. The show, one of the Orlando International Fringe Festival's smash hits this past May, returns on Saturday, Nov. 19, at The Roth Family Jewish Community Center of Greater Orlando in Maitland for a special "Evening to Benefit Theater at the J."

"I absolutely loved Orlando," said Gutman, 38, who received the Fringe's award for Best Solo Show-Musical. "So I was honored that the Fringe and Theater at the J wanted me to come back for this."

The 75-minute show begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 for general admission; $50 for VIP tickets, which include a reception with light hors d'oeuvres at 6:30 p.m., prime seating during the show, and an exclusive meet-and-great with Gutman after the show.

Amanda Giese, who runs Theater at the J with her husband, Kerry, was thrilled to partner with the Orlando Fringe to bring "From Broadway to Obscurity" back to Orlando.

"I'm so happy we were able to bring Eric back here, so more people can see him," Amanda said. "He's so talented and funny, and he's one of the nicest guys ever."

Gutman, who lives in suburban Detroit with wife Sarah and daughters Riley (7) and Sydney (6), left "Jersey Boys" on Broadway in 2009, while Sarah was pregnant with their first child. But three months after Riley was born, Gutman was asked to return to the Jersey Boys' production in Chicago for six months. He then left the Chicago cast to once again join the national tour, which just happened to be in his Detroit hometown, as a favor to a fellow actor who was expecting his first child. When the Detroit performances ended six weeks later, in January 2010, Gutman had sung "Walk Like a Man" for the last time.

Three years later, a friend-the managing director of a local performing arts center-asked Gutman if he would do a cabaret show for her theater. Gutman asked if, instead, he could write his own show, and 10 months later, "From Broadway to Obscurity" premiered at the Berman Center for the Performing Arts.

Since then, the show has had runs in Illinois, California, Texas, Minnesota, Florida, and Winnipeg, Canada. But, despite rave reviews, Gutman has no desire to perform off or on Broadway, and he has no regrets that he left the Great White Way for suburban Huntington Woods, Mich.

"I'd be a liar if I said I didn't miss it; the Broadway community is pretty special. " he said. "But I wouldn't give up my life now for that. There's nothing I'd rather be doing than raising my beautiful daughters with my beautiful wife."

Tickets for "From Broadway to Obscurity" are available for purchase at orlandojcc.org/broadway, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting Theater at the J. For more information, call The Roth Family JCC at 407-645-5933 x282.
There are more than 2,000 homeless families and individuals in the city of Gainesville, and just a few short weeks ago, UF Hillel in collaboration with Jewish Student Union, celebrated the Jewish holiday of Sukkot by making bagged meals to help feed the hungry and the homeless at Gainesville's local shelter, St. Francis House.

UF Hillel started off the holiday season by giving back to the community they call home with an event called 'Harvest For The Hungry'. With an influx of volunteers, students came together as a community to help those less fortunate.

Rachel Reindl, the nonprofit intern at UF Hillel said, "Food is a huge part of Sukkot and Jewish culture, so I think it is extremely fitting for us to provide meals to those who are in need. It was such a great opportunity for UF Hillel to partner with JSU and St. Francis House to strengthen our commitment and impact on the local community of Gainesville." Reindl went on to say, "We made about 200 bag lunches in one day. We owe our success to the 70 students from the University of Florida and Santa Fe who came out. We couldn't have done it without them!"

Rabbi Adam Grossman, CEO of UF Hillel said, "In Judaism we like to call it 'tikkun olam,' repairing the world. The Torah repeatedly expresses the obligation to help those who, for whatever reason, could not help themselves. The students at UF Hillel and Santa Fe have a passion for helping others. I am beyond proud of them for all of the work they have done and I am very satisfied with the outcome from the event."

Grossman further stated, "At UF Hillel we envision a world made better because of the impact of our future leaders. We believe the way to engage emerging leaders is through their interests in career, travel, and social good. In the end, we want our students to find a greater purpose in life, we want them to strive, and most importantly, we want them to experience."
My father, Haim Hendrick Roet, a Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands, addressed the United Nations General Assembly in January, during its annual Holocaust memorial ceremony with this poignant cri de coeur: Looking back 70 years, he said, it is heartbreaking that as a world, we did not learn enough from the Holocaust.

Eight months later, speaking from the same U.N. podium, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani embodied all that my father had decried, demonstrating once again that Iran failed to learn past lessons.

Zionist pressure groups, Rouhani claimed, have contaminated the U.S. Congress, forcing the highest American judicial institution to violate peremptory norms of international law.

The spectacle of an Iranian leader spewing centuries-old canards about Jewish control over foreign governments, financial institutions and the media is hardly new. Anti-Semitism is, after all, the most durable and pliable of all conspiracy theories known to humankind.

Whats deeply disappointing and dangerous, however, is the utter passivity and lack of condemnation that followed this statement. A few years ago, dozens of U.N. delegations took a principled stand against blatant Iranian anti-Semitism and walked out in protest when former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used the same forum to raise similar hateful accusations.

So, wheres the outrage now?

While many in the U.N. laud the Iran nuclear agreement, lift sanction on the worlds leading state sponsor of terrorism, reward the Mullahs with billions of dollars and lucrative trade deals, and welcome the new Iranian president as a so-called reformer, official Iranian anti-Semitic statements and Holocaust denial continues unabated and unchallenged. Meanwhile, the scourge of anti-Semitism, which not long ago many of us considered to be a thing of the past, has metastasized into a global social disease.

In too many places, Jews are again afraid to express their Judaism and be identified outside their homes and communities. Whether its in Brussels, where a man with a Kalashnikov opened fire and murdered four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, over the Internet, where unimaginable hate is spread through cyberspace at nanosecond speed, on university campuses or even in the halls of the U.N., we must take a stand against what one U.N. secretary-general called the oldest living hatred.

Anti-Semitism does not need a reason, only an excuse. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were hated for their race. Now they are hated for their nation. Acclaimed British philosopher Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that, The new anti-Semitism can always say it is not the old anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, it remains, Sacks says, essentially eliminationist. Whether in its old or new incarnation, anti-Semitism does not exist because of what Jews do, say or believe, or because of what the state of Israel does.

We must adopt a zero-tolerance policy to any sign of anti-Semitism or to any effort to excuse or rationalize it. New haters have been using technology and social media to disseminate their contemptible ideology. To confront them, the international community should agree on a clear definition of anti-Semitism so we can use advanced technology to stop online hate, while, at the same time, carefully preserve the important freedoms of speech and expression that we, as democracies, hold dear.

A few weeks before the Iranian presidents vile statements, the U.N. held an historic High-level Forum on Global anti-Semitism. Bringing the issue front and center at the U.N. is, regrettably, still fraught with roadblocks. Indeed, the years High-level Forum was a fruit of the joint efforts of the U.N. missions of Canada, the European Union, Israel and the United States, not the U.N. itself.

Unfortunately, there are those in the U.N. who fear that speaking out and working together to confront anti-Semitism is too political or risks antagonizing a certain group of countries, so they stay on the sidelines.

A recent study found that one quarter of the worlds population harbors anti-Semitic beliefs. If the U.N. is a mirror of the world, reflecting all that is good and bad, the rising plague of anti-Semitism requires a U.N. that leads the efforts to eradicate the resurgence of the worlds oldest hatred without excuses and fear.

U.N. leadership in the fight against anti-Semitism should not be done to appease Israel. As former Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared, it should be done for the sake of all nations and all people: a human rights agenda that fails to address anti-Semitism denies its own history... The fight against anti-Semitism must be our fight.

Its imperative for the U.N. to fight anti-Semitism with the same urgency it places on combating the other ills of the world.

For Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rightly reminds us, A United Nations that wants to be true to its founding aims and ideals has a duty to speak out against anti-Semitism.

Ambassador David Roet is Israels Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
In one of the immortal lines of Godfather 2, mafia boss Michael Corleone discusses the fate of his brother, who betrayed him, with his enforcer.

I dont want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive, Corleone said.

Message received.

The brother was murdered after their mothers funeral.

Last week it was reported that the Obama administration has delivered a message to the Palestinian Authority. The administration has warned the PA that the U.S. will veto any anti-Israel resolution brought before the UN Security Council before the U.S. presidential elections on Nov. 8.

Message received.

Open season on Israel at the Security Council will commence Nov. 9. The Palestinians are planning appropriately.

Israel needs to plan, too. Israels most urgent diplomatic mission today is to develop and implement a strategy that will outflank President Barack Obama in his final eight weeks in power.

Lobbying the administration is pointless. Obama has waited eight years to exact his revenge on Israel for not supporting his hostile, strategically irrational policies. And he has no interest in letting bygones be bygones.

Before turning to what Israel must do, first we need to understand what Israel can do.

A good place to begin is by considering what just transpired at UNESCO, where twice in a week, UNESCO bodies resolved to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

The fight that Israel waged at UNESCO is not the fight it needs to wage at the Security Council. The stakes at the Security Council are far higher.

Like the UN General Assembly, UNESCOs decisions are non-binding declarations that have no legal or operational significance. As such, there is no reason to expend great resources to fight them. For Israel, the goal of the fight at UNESCO is not to defeat anti-Israel initiatives. That is impossible given the Palestinians automatic majority.

The purpose of the fight at UNESCO is to humiliate European governments that side with anti-Semitic initiatives, and to weaken the congenitally anti-Israel body itself.

The government achieved both of these objectives. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzis disavowal of his own governments abstention from the vote on the first resolutionlike the similar position taken after the fact by the Mexican governmentwas a diplomatic victory for Israel.

So too, the fact that UNESCOs own Secretary-General Irina Bukova felt compelled to disavow her own agencys actions by rejecting the resolutions denial of the Jewish peoples ties to Jerusalem was a significant victory for Israel. Her statement was deeply damaging for UNESCO and its reputation.

Finally, the fact that Tanzania and the Philippines voted against the resolution was a testament to Israels capacity to convince other governments to abandon their traditional pro-Palestinian voting pattern.

The Palestinians won the vote at UNESCO because they are more powerful diplomatically than Israel. They have an automatic anti-Israel majority. But they werent empowered by their victory. To the contrary. They were bloodied by it.

In a sign of their weakening hold on member nations, the Palestinians and Jordanians felt compelled to send a threatening letter to the members of UNESCOs World Heritage Committee lest they dare to vote against the resolution. Powerful players dont make threats. They dont need to.

Israels experience at UNESCO teaches us that there are governments that are open to counteroffers. Israel doesnt need to hide in Americas shadow. It is capable of working on its own to blunt the impact of the Palestinians automatic majority. And it will need to use all of its resources to fend off a US-backed assault at the Security Council.

Unlike UNESCO, the Security Council can pass legally binding resolutions. Israel needs to be prepared to bring all of its resources to bear to prevent such a resolution from being adopted against it. Obamas intention to abandon Israel at the Security Council means that Israel comes to this battle severely hobbled.

But there is one advantage to the U.S.s betrayal.

Over the years, Israels ability to trust the U.S. to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the Security Council was been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the U.S. has secured Israel from diplomatic assaults. But on the other hand, our ability to trust Washington has made us diplomatically lazy and ineffective.

Safe in Washingtons shadow, we have behaved as through all diplomacy is public diplomacy. That is, we have pretended that statecraft begins and ends with making the moral or strategic case for our side against the other guys.

But public diplomacy is just one diplomatic tool.

The Syrian regime, for instance, has no moral case for securing international support. Bashar Assad didnt convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to support him by arguing that he is better than alternative regimes. He bought Putins support by offering him permanent air and naval bases in Syria.

Then there is Morocco, another weak state with no public diplomacy case to make. Last March, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon outraged Rabat when he acknowledged the plain fact that Western Sahara, which Morocco occupies, is occupied territory.

Morocco quickly secured the support of Spain and France and launched an all-out onslaught against Ban. How did Morocco manage?

Moroccos most powerful diplomatic resource is its control over migration flows from North Africa to Europe. Anytime it wishes, Rabat can open the migratory floodgates just as easily as it can keep them shut. And the French and Spanish know it.

In less than a month, Ban issued repeated abject apologies.

Game. Set. Match. Morocco.

From reports to date, it appears that shortly after the US elections on November 8, the Malaysians or Egyptians will submit a Palestinian-backed resolution that defines Israeli communities in united Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as illegal. If the resolution is brought to a vote, the US will fail to veto it.

Such a resolution, or a resolution obligating Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, would cause Israel grave harm.

So what resources does Israel have to prevent this from happening?

Of course, we have public diplomacy. And that might work with some friendly nations. But it wont get us over the top. We need to learn from the Syrian and Moroccan examples and consider what we have to offer Security Council members in exchange for their support in scuttling the approaching onslaught against us.

One such resource is the US Congress. Israels allies in Congress are sickened by the Obama administrations devastating Middle East policies. A solid majority of lawmakers can be trusted to support actions that will reinforce Israels position.

Israel has other resources as well that we can trade on. We have natural gas. And we have technologies that the governments of the world require to surmount the challenges of the 21 century. There is no reason to give these resources away when we can trade them for diplomatic support.

As for the Palestinians, as the UNESCO vote showed, they are less popular now than at any time in the past 40 years. All they have to offer is threats and antisemitism. Both are powerful weapons.

But they are no longer invincible.

Israels goal must be to use our resources at the Security Council in a manner that will make it impossible for Obama to enable an anti-Israel resolution to pass.

A method for achieving this goal has two components. The first component is to convince a friendly country on the Security Council to propose a balanced resolution that would counter the Palestinian-backed Israel-bashing one.

Such a resolution could include four points. First, it could deplore efforts to deny Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

Second, it can condemn the PA/PLO for their continued unlawful funding of terrorists.

Third, it can urge Israel to restrain settlement construction in areas that in previous negotiations have been identified as likely territory for a future Palestinian state.

Fourth, it can call on Israel and the PA to reinstate negotiations immediately without preconditions.

Israel has friendly ties with a few Security Council members, among them Uruguay and New Zealand. In the final weeks of the Obama era, it is possible that Israel will be able to convince one of them to submit a balanced resolution along these lines.

Obama would be hard-pressed to oppose such a resolution in favor of one that singles Israel out for rebuke.

But that still is insufficient. Obama can make Uruguay and New Zealand a better offer if he wishes.

And so we move to the second aspect of the plan.

If we learn nothing else from the Obama era, we must recognize that the time has come for Israel to stop sufficing with just one Security Council veto. Most states have several. And we need a few more.

Russia today is the best place to start our search for a second veto.

Putin is a dealmaker. As his agreement with Assad showed, he is willing to consider attractive offers. Obviously, Israel wont offer Russia bases. But we do have other things to offer Putin in exchange for a veto.

For instance, in exchange for a Russian veto at the Security Council, Israel can offer Putin to lobby the US Congress to cancel US sanctions against Russia over Russias annexation of Crimea.

Israel has no dog in that fight. And the sanctions are not getting the US anywhere.

Putin might go for the deal for two reasons. First, by stepping into the breach and defending Israel against Obama, he will humiliate Obama.

Second, if Israel succeeds with the Congress, he will reap economic rewards.

For his part, Putin wouldnt even have to openly side with Israel. All he would have to do is announce that in the interests of regional stability, Russia will not support an unbalanced resolution on Israel and the Palestinians.

If Putin supports a balanced resolution, Obama will be checkmated. His plan to take revenge on Israel for not following him off the strategic cliff will be foiled. Israel will have survived his presidency.

None of this will be easy. And success is far from assured. There are many more ways for Israel to fail than succeed. Our diplomatic weakness remains a millstone around our neck. But as the UNESCO resolutions showed, attacking Israel is no longer cost free. We are not powerless in the grip of circumstances. We have cards to play.

And now is the time to play them for all they are worth.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Caroline Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC, the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post and a contributor to the Jewish World Review.
You probably havent heard of Karlheinz Kopf. Hes one of three Austrian politicians currently sharing that countrys presidency following the departure of the previous incumbent in July.

Kopf just returned to Vienna from Iran, where he distinguished himself by calling on the United States to ditch those sanctions against the Tehran regime that have remained in place since the Iran nuclear deal was signed last year. And that wasnt the half of it.

Frankly, Kopfs statements during his visit might have been drafted by his Iranian hosts. Asked about trade with Iran, he waffled on about 140 years of friendship between the two nations before touting the growing trade between them, which includes a roadmap for the expansion of commercial ties over the next four years. He expressed regret that continuing U.S. restrictions on Iranian banks prevent investment in the Islamic Republic. When asked about the zealous imposition of the death penalty in Iran, he retorted that he had not come to Tehran to moralize. Since prisoners can face execution in the U.S., who are westerners to deliver lectures?

One can only imagine the delight with which the Iranians greeted these remarks, which sound more suited to someone like Noam Chomsky than a provincial Austrian politician in a gray suit. And you can hardly blame them. European leaders, like Kopf, are the gift that keeps on giving, all the way up to publicly admitting, while standing in Tehran, that there is no essential moral difference between America and Iranwhile Irans proxy in Syria, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, is pulverizing thousands of children in Aleppo with air strikes. In that regard, Kopf had nothing but praise for Irans regional role, describing it, according the regimes official mouth piece, Press TV, as helping to reduce conflicts and restore peace and stability to the Middle East.

And yes, you did read that correctly.

Were the Iranians as sensitive to Kopfs position as the representative of a parliamentary democracy? No, they werent. They probably didnt need to be. Kopf was treated to a full-on display of Iranian fanaticism. We can be quite certain he smiled politely through all of it, before turning the conversation back to the ways in which Austria can assist Iran with water management, waste disposal and tourism development.

Among the leaders Kopf met was the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani. During an election season with plenty of loose talk about nasty politicians, Americans who want to see a genuine example of this phenomenon could do much worse than examine Larijani.

In 2009, when he was Irans foreign minister, Larijani addressed an audience of top European political, military and business leaders at the annual Munich Security Conference. An incredulous audience heard him describe Iranian support for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organization, as an honor, before defending (on German soil!) the Holocaust denying statements of Irans then president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Since that time, Larijanis role in the regime has been shunted around. He served as a nuclear negotiator and in the parliament. But he remained a central figure and continues to meet with foreign politicians. During his encounter with Kopf, Larijani, apparently straight-faced, told the Austrian that Iran always stresses the importance of political dialogue and negotiations as the only solutions to the existing problems in the region instead of using military means. But that didnt prevent him, according to the Austrian activist group Stop the Bomb, from labeling Israel as the fabricated Zionist regime responsible for the terrorism plaguing the Middle East.

Of course, Larijani didnt say anything we hadnt heard from the mullahs before. Whats much harder to accept is even as these disgraceful slurs are uttered, European leaders, together with the Obama Administration, perpetuate the fiction that Iran has moderated under its current President Hasan Rouhani. And a big part of it is greed, plain and simple.

Austria is a particularly odious example of a state that cant stop publicly salivating at the prospect of lucrative Iranian business contracts. In 2015, right after the announcement of the nuclear deal, Kopfs predecessor, Heinz Fischer, became the first western leader to visit Iran in more than a decade. Accompanying him were 240 Austrian business executives, whose path to commercial success was considerably smoothed by Fischers ludicrous self-portrait. Austria is a land of dialogue. We reject violence, Fischer gushed. We want to build bridges and want to seize every opportunity to reduce tensions and promote a climate that promises a better future than if we remain stuck in confrontation.

Since the British are the only European nation with a proper grasp of irony, one shouldnt expect Austrians, like Fischer and Kopf, to reflect upon their antics in front of a regime that sponsors suicide bombings and terrorist outrages across the globe. Its clear their yardstick of success is the number of contracts secured for Austrian banks and businesses, like the OMV oil company and the Erste Bank; the gutter, conspiracy-laced political rhetoric of the mullahs is just part of the local scenery. Seeing things in this way eases any guilt that might arise when the representatives of a country that enthusiastically united with Nazi Germany in 1938 leave unchallenged the naked anti-Semitism of Irans leaders today.

On this side of the Atlantic, we need to ensure that our own politicians dont follow Kopfs wretched example. One of the first pieces of business that Congress will face in November is the renewal of the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA), which enables a range of sanctions targeting Irans nuclear program and ballistic missile tests. The vote is likely to pass in the House of Representatives, but may well face a tougher ride through the Senate, as well as the possibility that President Barack Obama wont sign it into law. Getting the ISA renewed is, in the current circumstances, the best message we can send to the Iranians that the United States isnt as easily fooled and seduced as their lackeys in the European Union.

Ben Cohen, senior editor of TheTower.org & The Tower Magazine, writes a weekly column for JNS.org on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is the author of Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism (Edition Critic, 2014).
We dont live in a world of clear contrasts, whether we call them blacks and whites, or good and evil. Israels relations with its neighbors have evolved over the course of 70 years to something that is far more subtle and nuanced than what is expressed by intense nationalists or far leftists here, Arabs or Palestinians of various shades, or by overseas friends and antagonists, each with their favorite solution.

We should start from the realization that there is no solution. Peace is not on our doorstep, no matter what we do. There is no chance that Israel will remove substantial numbers from the 800,000 or so Jews living over the lines of 1967, or that a Palestinian leadership will ratchet down significantly from demands dating to 1947, 1967, or the last meeting between Israel and Palestinian leaders.

Yet were getting along with our near neighbors. There are casualties, but nothing like what were experienced in the past, and even further from what other neighbors are doing to one another across the Middle East.

Living near Muslims has exposed us in recent years to a rate of casualties less than that of traffic accidents. We cant do away with our neighbors any more than we can avoid transportation. Benefits and casualties come from both. We seek to limit the casualties, but should not expect to eliminate them entirely.

Several items help to clarify and explain where we are.

One is a long item on one of the prominent Hebrew language news sites. It describes the work of an IDF unit charged with ferreting out sources and individuals likely to be troublesome. A clip associated with the item shows a Palestinian flag close to where a soldier is being interviewed, suggesting that the unit is working close to and most likely among the Palestinians.

If there is a systematic way they go about spotting terrorists, the item does not describe it. What it does indicate is a variety of ways in which the unit works, attuned to the Internet, schools, political movements, neighborhoods, and families. Participants describe the need to alert combat units to action when necessary, but realize that too much of a military presence is likely to provoke individuals to move from anger to the onset of violence that they had not been thinking about a few hours earlier. Members of the unit note cooperation with Palestinian security services, again without going too close to the details.

Another insight into our realities comes from a radio item presented by a Portuguese Jew who is a journalist with long residence in Israel and connections with Christian and Muslim sources. Henrique Cymerman reported conversations with Saudi, Qatari, and other Arabs prominent in their governments. They were respectful and even admiring of Israel, and wished that the various governments could deal appropriately with the Palestinian issue.

Their subtext was that if Israeli leaders took an initiative of offering something like the Saudi overture of 2002, there would be wide support throughout the Muslim world.

Maybe, but it is significant for the nuances in which we live that Cymerman did not report the names of these friendly Arabs.

A parallel insight comes from several conversations with intellectuals who are Israeli Arabs or Palestinians. With me they are open to discussion and reveal opinions or findings from their professional work indicating that there is considerable willingness among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians to be accommodating with Israel. The picture described differs from the acerbic rhetoric of Arab Members of Knesset and various leaders of West Bank and Gazan Palestinians. Like Cymermans sources who prefer that he doesnt mention their names, however, the Arab intellectuals who speak with me concede that there are few Arabs with whom they can have similar conversations. Moreover, they cannot bring themselves to publish findings that vary from the conventional Arab or Palestinian narratives.

Were also exposed to clips of Arabs and other Muslims who speak in public in a matter that is sharply critical of prevailing Muslim culture. Often they compare their own closed society to what they know about the open and noisy willingness of Israelis to debate just about everything. Such individuals are also likely to link such differences to the economic and technological successes of Israel and the backwardness of Muslim education, economics, and individual opportunity.

The most outspoken and nasty opponent of the Israeli establishment among the Arab MKs, Haneen Zoabi, has relatives who have been proud to serve the Israeli state, and call shame on the more prominent Zoabi.

Also important is some 40 percent of the Jerusalem population that is Arab, can vote in municipal elections even though most are not Israeli citizens, but who refuse to do so. I hear from Arab friends that they recognize their potential to get a lot for their community by having a balance between ultra-Orthodox and other Jews who are contenders for municipal control, but they say that pressures from Palestinian nationalists keep them from voting or showing any other support for Israels occupation.

How to function in this mix of pressures and opportunities is not a question for simpletons. Right- and left-wing Israelis find it easy to continue with their slogans that all the land should all be ours, and there is nothing to do with Arabs except to minimize contacts, or that its all our fault for not being more forthcoming. Somewhere between these polls is where the Israeli establishment tends to operate. That, too, may not be apparent to shrill critics who express themselves from near or far.

Among the guidelines that operate for military and governmental professionals, and politicians who reach the crucial offices are not to overreact to violence with excessive force in ways that make things worse, yet to react with impressive force when appropriate.

The purpose of occasional Israeli outbursts of significant violence is to counter upticks in the violence against us, and to remind the waverers among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians about what can happen to them yet again if they lose control over their nationalist sentiments.

It isnt easy, and there is nothing in the mix that promises a solution. What baffles Jews, even those who comprehend the problems, is the lack of symmetry between the cultures. Jews speak their minds, expect to hear contrary opinions from a variety of perspectives, and areat least occasionallyopen to persuasion.

Arabs are less likely to be candid, and avoid dispute among themselves, even at the expense of losing personal opportunities. Insofar as they do not trust one another, we ask ourselves if we can trust them. What you hear may bear little resemblance to what is in their hearts, minds, and intentions.

In such a situation, the ideal is to get along, without being sure, and without being able to articulate firm expectations about the present or near future.

If the Palestinians warrant some combination of kid gloves and an iron fist, with different proportions for West Bankers and Gazans, the subtleties relevant to Israeli Arabs are even more nuanced. There are differences between the cultures of Bedouin of the Negev and the Galilee, other Muslims and Christians, and the Arabs of East Jerusalem. Druze and Circassians are in a category of their own, with generations of their sons having served and died for the IDF.

Comments welcome. irashark@gmail.com.
And, you know, stay out of school, Bailey said. Then all I ever did the whole time in the Navy was go to school.

Bailey, 77, a native of Dayton, Ohio, has resided in Hickory for over twenty years, served in a number of different capacities in his two-decade naval career.

Bailey started out serving on minesweepers, moving on later to serve on submarines.

He served on the USS Sennet, a World War II-era submarine, and the USS Henry Clay, a nuclear submarine.

Back then, you had to be able to sit down and draw every system on board from memory, Bailey said.

Becoming qualified on the USS Henry Clay was a particular milestone for Bailey.

During his time on shore duty, Bailey taught engineering at the Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarine Training Center in Charleston, S.C.

Eager to get off shore duty, Bailey volunteered for duty in Vietnam.

Plus, I figured if youre in the service, you ought to go to war, Bailey said.

Bailey was the commanding officer of two Patrol Boats, River (PBRs)

During his time in Vietnam, Bailey earned a Purple Heart during an ambush on the PBRs.

On Nov. 9, 1969, at around 7:30 p.m., the PBRs were attacked with B40 rockets.

Bailey estimates around 14 rockets were fired, with three hitting the boats.

As the crew hit the throttles, the bows of the boats would go up and down, and that motion likely helped save them, Bailey said.

Baileys injuries included severe damage to his left eardrum, two concussions and some shrapnel.

I was lucky. It could have been worse, Bailey said.

Throughout his service, Bailey was sent on 150 combat missions, and he was involved in 13 major firefights.

Bailey retired from the Navy in 1975 with numerous decorations as an E-8 machinists mate.

After leaving the service, Bailey worked at the naval shipyard in Charleston, S.C for two decades.

Talking to people who arent veterans can be difficult, because those who havent experienced war cant understand it, Bailey said.

Now, Ill talk with other veterans about it, Bailey said. We used to get together all the time.

But you know, you sit there and you try to talk to somebody that wasnt there, and they dont comprehend and they just try to be nice and listen.

Nothing against them. Its just a different world.

For those who havent experienced military service, the best way to help veterans is just have sympathy and go along with them, Bailey said.
The demonetisation of currency notes of the denominations of 1,000 and 500 has rattled the nation. Experts are divided on whether the governments decision will curb corruption in the country. The actual impact will be seen after some time.

Meanwhile, I have been flooded with questions about the impact of this drastic step on elections, particularly in view of the impending polls in five states  Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Puducherry and Goa.

An electoral democracy cannot function without political finance. This includes expenditure on reaching out to voters and raising funds to meet this expenditure. To ensure a level playing field, the law prescribes a ceiling to be fixed periodically. The objective is to limit the pernicious influence of big money in controlling the democratic process. But violations have been rampant which made the redoubtable Justice JS Verma to comment that the prescription of ceiling on expenditure by a candidate is a mere eyewash.

Read | Why the currency switch is a political blunder by the BJP

Over the years, the role of money power has gone from bad to worse. All political parties have been expressing verbal concern without taking any action on the reforms proposed by the Election Commission of India (ECI). Instead, political parties and candidates have devised ingenious ways for distributing cash and liquor.

The ECI has been deeply concerned about the use of money to bribe voters ahead of polls. In my inaugural press conference on taking over as chief election commissioner (CEC), I had given myself two challenges  abuse of money and voter apathy. Two new divisions were created to addressing these issues seriously. Both met with tremendous success, one achieving the highest-ever voter turnouts ever since and the other unearthing crores of rupees and goods including liquor. Our proactive steps led to some landmark achievements including unseating and disqualifying a sitting MLA in UP and countermanding two Rajya Sabha elections in Jharkhand.

This year, in an unprecedented step, the ECI was forced to cancel elections to two Tamil Nadu assembly seats, Aravakurichi and Thanjavur, for the uncontrolled use of money. The poll panel then wrote to the government seeking permanent legal powers to countermand polls on credible evidence of the use of black money.

Read | Banks struggle to handle panicked customers, ATMs run dry within hours

Cash-for-votes notoriety as a regular feature in our elections was conveyed by US diplomatic cables, leaked by WikiLeaks. A cable quoted a confidante of a Union minister from Tamil Nadu distributing up to 5,000 per voter in a by-election in 2009. After his victory, the politician announced that his formula was a sure winner. This notorious Thirumangalam formula became our biggest challenge.

Around 300 crore of unaccounted cash was seized by the commission during the 2014 election. Cash seizure across all assembly elections since 2014 has been at an all-time high. Bihar, for instance, registered the highest seizure of cash (19 crore) during the assembly polls in 2015. In Tamil Nadu, the figure crossed 100 crore.

Money power and its pernicious effects on electoral outcomes universally affect all countries, and not just India. Several conferences in the last few of years have sought to address the issue. A conference of Saarc countries on Regulating Campaign Finance: Ensuring Free and Fair Elections was organised by FEMBoSA (Forum of Election Management Bodies of South Asia) in November, 2014, at Kathmandu, Nepal.

Read | Govt says deposits above 2.5 lakh to be taxed: Your 4 questions answered

The culmination of these deliberations was a regional conference on The Money in Politics and its effects on Peoples Representations, held jointly by the international IDEA and ECI in New Delhi in December, 2015. Based on the collective wisdom and shared experience, the conference unanimously adopted a resolution christened New Delhi Declaration on Political Finance Regulation laying down nine Overarching Principles and an equal number of implementation guidelines.

Ever since the ECI started coming down hard on black money in polls, candidates and parties have started distributing money early, much before the ECI enforces a model code of conduct.

The demonetisation has come at the right time, just ahead of five state elections. Parties and candidates who were ready with the bonanza will not know what to do with that money now. Even fake money from across the borders will be hit. However, politicians are ingenuous. In my book, I had documented 40 methods of illegal distribution of funds to seduce the voters. Many more have been invented since. Money may still be distributed  with some possible increment to compensate for the effort of each voter in getting it exchanged in the banks.

Read | ATMs functioning at 10% capacity, quick relief unlikely for customers

My fear is that a money-laundering industry will mushroom with the complicity of bank officials. The government must watch out for the omnipresent touts and colluding bank officials. This advice is based on experience. Once our IT vigilance team intercepted a vehicle carrying over 2 crore. We were told that the money was going to refill the ATM. So we let it off with an apology. The next day, another team caught a vehicle with double the amount, and a third vehicle was interrupted with 11 crore  in both cases the explanation was the same. We investigated and found that the van was not accompanied by an armed guard and did not follow other security protocols. I immediately spoke to RBI governor D Subba Rao who was shocked to hear of this mode of money laundering.

Money in elections is the mother of all corruption. The more they spend, the more they need to collect by all means, fair or foul. As much as 80% of political funds (in hundreds of crores) is from undisclosed sources. This opacity is not acceptable. I hope the time for long-pending electoral reforms has finally come.

SY Quraishi is former CEC and author of An Undocumented Wonder - The Making of the Great Indian Election

The views expressed are personal
The magnitude of the sanitation crisis in India cannot be over-stated; about half of the country still defecates in the open and many households remain unconnected to the sewage system. In India, there is an unprecedented buzz and energy around the issue, particularly since the government of India pledged to make India Open Defecation Free (ODF) by 2019. While the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) is gaining traction, a peoples movement is needed in order to achieve the speed, scale and sustainability to hit this ambitious target.

This includes those most directly benefiting from programmes like SBM as well as those who believe that they have neither a vested interest in nor are impacted by inadequate sanitation. The truth is that it impacts us all and we need to ensure that the entire sanitation value chain is addressed; from building toilets to ensure equitable access for every citizen, ensuring they are used and well maintained, and that the generated human waste is safely treated and disposed of.

The harmful effects of inadequate sanitation have a severe impact on a healthy population, education, a productive workforce, economic growth, and the path towards India becoming a truly developed country. In India, there are 1,600 deaths daily from diarrhoeal diseases  the same as if eight 200-person jumbo jets crashed to the ground each day. Poor sanitation and hygiene have also been closely linked to irreversible physical and cognitive damage. Further, an estimate of over 73% of all faecal sludge generated in the country is left untreated in the environment in India.

Read | Bhind woman vows to stay barefoot till village declared ODF

Such jarring statistics set us back on our overall agenda of an India that is vibrant and healthy. Ultimately, we need all hands on deck.

The media also has an important responsibility to recognise the consequences that unwarranted or negative reportage can have to the broader sanitation movement. We would like to see many more media and communication channels step up to this plate and become avid sanitation champions as they are a critical part of the amplification of any social movement.

Success must be achieved through a community-led process with local leaders such as panchayats and other community groups, supported by political and bureaucratic leaders. Change must be people-centric and designed with the end-user in mind. Global Citizen India is one such sterling example of creating a strong citizen engagement platform, and particularly working with youth communities  since the future leaders and champions of social change are the young and India must leverage its great demographic edge of a vibrant youth. Their strength in numbers and their energy and receptivity to new ideas should be harnessed for creating a strong on-ground movement.

Read | Sulabh founder is brand ambassador for Swachh Rail Mission

India Sanitation Coalition has partnered with Global Citizen India, a social action platform that comprises a distinctive mix of events, grassroots activism, media campaigning and online activation, to catalyse Indias 15-year journey towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and to bring about the end of extreme poverty. We need more such activities and platforms that believe that sanitation is the key to tackling extreme poverty.

Ultimately, it is each of our responsibility to move the sanitation agenda of the country forward. Whether it is stopping someone from littering, engaging with our local communities or politicians on the issue or providing adequate facilities to people in our own workspaces or homes, a small step can go a long way. Only collectively, through the creation of a peoples sanitation movement, can we achieve a truly Swachh India.

Naina Lal Kidwai, chair, India Sanitation Coalition

The views expressed are personal
Twelve o clock is early morning for a gallery, especially if its a new one. The sun is pushing in through its glass doors and windows. A few large-sized works of Krishen Khanna, who in his 92nd year is one of the living legends of the Progressive Artists Group, face the wall. They are yet to be unpacked; a worker mulls how to hang them for maximum effect. On the AV (audio-visual) mounted on a temporary structure, the painter talks of drawing-fundamentals during a video interview. A visitor stops in front of Khannas Captain Dentist and takes a few steps back to peer again at the details of another painting.

White walls, paintings in scale, soft-focus lights  whats not to like?

Delhis newest gallery, Saffronart at The Claridges hotel on APJ Abdul Kalam Road. A new gallery naturally means a new exhibition, and it was the gallerys intention to highlight senior artists, especially the leading modernists who set the course of the modern art movement in India (Sanjeev Verma/HT Photo)

Step into the citys newest art hub, the Saffronart gallery occupying a 3,000-square-foot-space in the heart of central Delhi right inside The Claridges hotel.

For the past five years, the 1,400-square-foot Saffronart gallery had been housed in the Oberoi hotel. The move to The Claridges, because of the Oberoi renovation, has been a boon of sorts. The newer and bigger space will be used to hold auction previews and viewings, exhibitions in collaboration with leading artists and a host of other exciting events, says Hugo Weihe, CEO, Saffronart.

A new gallery naturally means a new exhibition, and it was Weihes intention to highlight senior artists, especially the leading modernists who set the course of the modern art movement in India.

Painter Krishen Khanna, 92, is one of the living legends of the Progressive Artists Group. (Sanjeev Verma/HT Photo)

Krishen Khannas recent black-and-white works are a mix of monumental conte [works made by using stick/crayon comprising graphite, charcoal] on canvas as well as small paperworks. From his repertoire of recent works, we selected key works that not only showcased his artistic and personal concerns, but lent themselves wonderfully to the look and feel of our new space, adds Weihe.

So what do we have here? Varying in size and subject are, the Benediction on the Battlefield (Pandavas sitting around the doughty warrior and elder, Bhishma); the powerful Gaja Moksha acrylic and charcoal on canvas of an elephant foot being gnawed by a ferocious crocodile mounted on the gallerys sole exposed brick wall, and an entire series of men with beasts (Old Man with a Young Hawk, Falconer, Exodus 1947-Farmers leaving with their cattle, The Reluctant Cow).

Captain Dentist Pesikaka. One of the artists personal works. (Sanjeev Verma / HT Photo)

The showstopper: Benediction on the Battlefield. Photo courtesy: Saffronart

In the exhibition brochure, critic Gayatri Sinha observes that Khanna takes the traditional subjects of miniature paintings such as the elephant and the crocodile and frees them from their tradition. He places them against an undefined backdrop and opens them up for new interpretations.

Here there is no background in the accepted sense, just the bodies in space, and the compact of energy and combat on display, says Sinha.

But the show-stopper of the exhibition is undeniably Benediction on the Battlefield. It has been done by Khanna in different sizes. One version hangs on a saffron-coloured wall inside the gallery. The one with more details, hangs in the hotels lobby. A connecting door between the gallery and the main portion of the hotel, takes you there. Its behind a black piano -- you cant miss it  but you may have to go behind it to look at the details of the painting.

Visitors might also want to take a look at the artists sketches of his personal life. There is a portrait of Khannas dentist who has been drawn whiskered and cat-faced, as well as a portrait of Miss Emery, his mothers English teacher. Both are fine examples of oil on canvas and they almost keep the other company, hanging close to each other, in the gallery.

How has the artists experience in this new space been? Its after a long time that I am doing a black-and-white show and somebody asked me this morning  Do you only do black-and-white?, says Khanna, And I said no, I dont, but black-and-white is a good peg. And so in this show, when you are dealing with black-and-white, you are not sucked in or seduced by colour. From artists points of view, thats the interesting thing about galleries. You never know who you might meet each day. Somebody who knows all about you. Or somebody whos just beginning to.

At: The Claridges hotel, 12 Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road (earlier called Aurangzeb Road), till November 13. Open 10:30 am-7pm, all days.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
The MP high court has dismissed a petition demanding judicial probe into SIMI encounter after the state government informed the court that a judicial probe had already been ordered.

Eight SIMI members escaped from the high security central jail Bhopal and were later killed in the encounter near Bhopal on October 31.

A division bench comprising acting chief justice Rajendra Menon and justice Subash Kakade after hearing the State government counsel dismissed PIL. The court said the probe had already been ordered by the government.

Additional advocate general PK Kaurav, appearing for the State, submitted that the government has taken steps as per the guidelines of apex court in the Peoples Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) Vs State of Maharashtra by ordering the CID probe as well judicial probe. The State issued the order for the judicial probe on November 3.

Retired justice SK Pande will conduct the judicial probe into every aspects of the incident including how the SIMI activists escaped from the central jail and were killed in the encounter.

Awadhesh Bharagava, a Bhopal-based social worker and journalist, filed the PIL on basis of the information gathered from the reports of certain newspapers and television news channels.

The doubt was raised in the PIL as to why the SIMI activists would flee from the jail when the proceedings in the cases in the trial court at Bhopal in which they were made accused were in the final stage. The petitioner submitted the CD of the video clipping of the spot of incident displayed on the news channel where it is seen that a policeman is taking out a knife from the pocket of one of the deceased while other cop fires a shot on the body.
With eight suspected SIMI operatives escaping from Bhopal Central Jail, experts have said jailers must understand the psyche of the remaining incarcerated suspects to prevent any further such instance.

Twenty-nine suspected SIMI men were lodged at the jail.

Sources have revealed that all the 29 SIMI men had plans to escape. Maybe if all of them had escaped, the damage would have been worse. Thus, we need to deal with the remaining prisoners in an intelligent manner, senior psychologist Dr Vinay Mishra said.

To know about their organisation, the reason of their escape, and what keeps them going, the police and interrogating experts have to be very patient. There have been theories like Stockholm Syndrome in the past which have helped the police get into the minds of the suspects. So, the more friendly the officers get with these prisoners, the higher are the chances of knowing their intentions, he said.

Mishra, who has been researching criminal psychology for several years, suggested two tests that the authorities can conduct on the prisoners.

The 16 Personality Profile Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory will help know the psychology of these men in a pathological manner. We can understand their personalities through these tests which can be then followed by polygraph tests, he said.

Psychiatrist Dr Vaibhav Gupta said, Hardcore criminals can manipulate interrogators, therefore all their activities should be observed and assessed regularly, without letting them know.
Immediately after returning from his family holiday in South Africa, Akshay Kumar started shooting for his new film, Toilet  Ek Prem Katha, alongside a new co-star  Bhumi Pednekar. Interestingly, its not just Akshay, but a number of other top male stars are also set to work with younger heroines.

Fresh casting

Salman Khan is working with Chinese actor Zhu Zhu in his next project, Tubelight. Parineeti Chopra is also believed to have been finalised for the Ajay Devgn-starrer Golmaal 4, while Ileana DCruz will star alongside Ajay in Baadshaho. Moreover, even as rumours suggest that Alia has been approached to star alongside Aamir Khan in Thugs Of Hindostan, she will also be seen with Shah Rukh Khan in Dear Zindagi.

Shah Rukh Khan and Alia Bhatt will be seen together in Dear Zindagi. (HT Photo)

Alia says, For the kind of role and story it is, the casting is completely apt. Now, I am really excited that people are also excited to see both Shah Rukh and me together. They want to see the film, and theres an air of positivity. Right now, I dont think anyone can pinpoint as to what kind of a movie it is.

Watch: Love You Zindagi - Dear Zindagi

Novelty factor

Tubelight director Kabir Khan feels that Zhu Zhu is a fantastic actress with a strong screen presence, and she and Salman will make for an interesting on-screen couple. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to work with Salman. I have seen his films, and Im very much charmed by his talent, says Zhu Zhu.

Rumours are rife that Parineeti Chopra will be seen working alongside Ajay Devgn in Golmaal 4. (HT Photo)

Experts strongly believe that the novelty and surprise factor work for such castings. A new, never-seen-before pair leads to a lot of intrigue and freshness. It definitely increases peoples curiosity, simply due to the fact that they havent seen those two actors working together, says exhibitor-distributor Akshaye Rathi.

Salman Khans new heroine, in Tubelight, is Chinese actress, Zhu Zhu. (HT Photo)

Demand of the script

Interestingly, of late, a number of younger male actors, too, have worked with older female stars. So, if Arjun Kapoor worked with Kareena Kapoor Khan in Ki & Ka, Aditya Roy Kapoor starred opposite Katrina Kaif in Fitoor. Likewise, Ranveer Singh worked with Priyanka Chopra in Gunday (2014), while Ranbir Kapoor starred alongside Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil.

Reports suggest that Alia Bhatt has been approached to star in Aamir Khans Thugs of Hindostan. (HT Photo)

Rathi feels that a script influences the casting calls. Ultimately, it all boils down to the script and, more importantly, the demand of a storyline. So, a male actor can be younger or older than his female counterpart and vice versa, he says. Trade analyst Taran Adarsh adds, But such castings have to be done smartly, so that it doesnt look forced.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Actor Kriti Sanon is gearing up for next film which requires her to speak in UP dialect. The actor rehearsed so hard for her role that now she cant get it off her mind.

Its for the first time that I have tried to pick up a dialect for a role and I am actually enjoying it. Although we are not keeping a very strong accent but since it has been a long schedule here, even after pack up, I tend to talk to my parents and my sister in the same tone. My sister (Nupur) at times interrupts me and start laughing, says Sanon, who hails from Delhi and made her acting debut with Heropanti (2014) alongside actor Tiger Shroff.

The actor plays the role of a girl from Uttar Pradesh and is currently shooting in Lucknow. She was given strict instructions not to start the shoot, till she mastered her diction.

Before signing the film, she showed the script to her mother, who was all praise for the film.

Kritis mom has read the script of the film and totally loved it. This was the first time she read a script of her daughters film, and is very confident about her character. Her character is very bubbly and witty and this is what her mother liked the most about the film, says a source.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Many still remember Sushant Singh Rajput for his popular former television show, Pavitra Rishta. But people may not know that the actor was a student at celebrated Bollywood choreographer Shiamak Davars dance academy.

From being a background dancer, Sushant has now found his roots in Bollywood with films such as Kai Po Che (2013) and his recent hit M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story. The actor has shared the fate with the likes of Varun Dhawan and Shahid Kapoor, who too were mentored by Shiamak.

Watch: Trailer of MS Dhoni

Speaking of Sushant, the choreographer says, I am so proud of where he has reached. He is a natural actor and thats what I like about him. I knew somewhere that this boy had something. And he is a good dancer, which is so important in the industry nowadays.

This Diwali seems so long... It used to get over so quickly back in the day when I was a kid living with my family.. #happyDiwali to you:) A photo posted by Sushant Singh Rajput (@sushantsinghrajput) on Oct 30, 2016 at 5:35am PDT

Shiamak goes on to talk about how he encouraged Sushant to pursue acting. When Sushant wanted to take up engineering, I suggested that he take up acting. I told him he is fun and has a good understanding of the craft. I felt there was something special about him back then. He told me that education was important to him. I told him to try and not worry about failure. He listened to me and then he got a television role in Pavitra Rishta.

A DCE dropout discussing his journey in an IIT Campus. :-)) A photo posted by Sushant Singh Rajput (@sushantsinghrajput) on Oct 20, 2016 at 11:08pm PDT

The choreographer adds that more than anything, he is proud of the fact that Sushant hasnt forgotten the faith he (Shiamak) has in him. He has always, in every way, spoken about me as a teacher. It shows the kind of person he is, he says.
Borrowing from Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquezs notion of the human race, noted writer Nayantara Sahgal said India was home to many cultures, races and lifestyle, hence producing a civilisation from where their writing comes. It is this diversity that is under attack and not merely a group of writers, said the irrepressible Sahgal, who returned the Sahitya Akademi award last year.

During a panel discussion on Freedom and The Writer on the opening day of the Chandigarh Literature Festival 2016, at the Chandigarh Club, Sahgal, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, said there was an attempt to make writers a monochrome of sorts.

The panel included novelistplaywright and film critic Kiran Nagarkar; Mumbai Mirror editor Meenal Baghel and was moderated by Harper Collins chief editor VK Karthika.

Speaking against the mob rule against her clan, she cited an incident where students of Central University of Haryana, Mahendragarh, protested after two professors were reprimanded for staging play Drapaudi that focuses on the plight of an Adivasi woman who suffers at the hand of the state and the army.

This needs to stop happening in the name of nationalism, lamented Sahgal, to which Karthika asked where was everyone when painter MF Hussain was forced to go into exile and if the community continued to be as passive despite realising the implications.

Sahgal said at least there was an attempt to fight in todays time and the protest at the Haryana university was a great example. Nagarkar added that it was important for various forums like Lit fests to change this. I go out and speak to students about the freedom struggle even though they might later wonder yeh kya kitch kitch kar raha hai but if we wont, who will, said Nagarkar.

Sahgal summed it by saying that writers were doing this in the spirit of Bob Dylans antiwar song: How many years can some people exist before theyre allowed to be free?... how many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?

WRITING SUBMERGES IDENTITIES

For editor Meenal Baghel, complacency is a writers biggest enemy. Emphasising upon self-censorship at a time when writing about Islam or Hindutva politics may entail a price to pay, Baghel said, But it is important to remember that writing is a platform where you submerge identities. Its not about Muslim, Christian writer but simply a writer.

Adding to this, Nagarkar stated how a different point of view becomes a taboo today referring to how people refuse to see who the enemy is when talking of Pakistan. It is the army, the ISIS, Taliban that are responsible and not the people. How does it help to stop Fawad Khan from acting in our movies. Hes a great looking guy and terrific actor. Why must we do this, said Nagarkar, adding that the only sacred thing was the Constitution which didnt forbid any of this, lest someone was a real criminal.

KIRAN NAGARKAR GIVEN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

(Second from left) Kiran Nagarkar, novelist, playwright, critic and screenwriter, being given a lifetime achievement award at the Chandigarh Literature Festival by writer Nayanntara Sahgal. (Sanjeev Sharma/HT Photo)

The 5th Chandigarh Literature Festival 2016 was opened with a welcome address and theme introduction by Mitul Dikshit, chairman, Adab Foundation. The CLF 2016 is being organised by Adab Foundation  a not for profit registered society, that works to bring authors, poets, actors, scriptwriters and thespians together on a single platform, to initiate a meaningful exchange of ideas. Author Annie Zaidi, who is CLF 2016s festival director gave a formal introduction.

The highlight of the inaugural day of CLF 2016 was presentation of Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in literature to 74-year-old Kiran Nagarkar. The multifaceted Nagarkar who is a novelist, playwright, film and drama critic, screenwriter both in Marathi and English was presented with a citation and cash award of `1.5 lakh.

After receiving the award, Nagarkar said, I am overjoyed after receiving the honour from Adab Foundation. The Foundation has been doing yeomans service to further the cause of writers and artists by engaging them in fruitful literary events like the CLF. The festival has brought Chandigarh on the national literary map.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Those who possess bitcoins in India feel the governments drive against black money will help the paperless, bank-less, and state-less currency gain ground.

Queries for bitcoins have gone up by 20% to 30% in the past couple of days, according to ZebPay, the largest trader of the digital currency in the country, which is adding 25,000 new bitcoin customers every month.

ZebPay already has 200,000 of the 400,000 odd bitcoin owners in the country. People who never talked about bitcoins called me. Financial companies also want to invest in bitcoins ... thats a big change in a country where bitcoins have not taken off, said Saurabh Agrawal, CEO of the company.

Bitcoins are a digital currency, made by computers, whose prices are validated through a public ledger. Many in the US, UK and China invest in bitcoins to hedge against the share market risk. This money can, like any digital money, be used to pay for goods and services, such as buying coffee, a meal at a restaurant or even clothes.

Though not many merchants are accepting bitcoins in India, wallet holders (like a ZebPay customer) can buy Amazon or MakeMyTrip vouchers, or pay bills with the money.

In Unocoin, 2,000 merchants and vendors are accepting bitcoins. Sapna Book House, Indias largest bookstore chain before Amazon set up shop here, also accepts bitcoins. People are getting remittances in bitcoins, instead of Paypal. They are able to liquidate them by paying just 1% transaction fee, said Sathvik Vishwanath, CEO and co-founder, Unocoin.

He is also coming out with point-of-sale app to accept bitcoins. However, few are making transactions with the new form of digital money. People are just buying it and holding on to it  if they want to sell, they deposit the coins in their Unocoin wallet, and the money is transferred to their bank account in two hours, said Vishwanath.

As queries from India grew, the prices surged  bitcoins were 8% costlier than in the US. That is also because not many are developed in India. The market is also small  India does business of 5 crore every day (China 10,000 crore, the US 2,000 crore).

Agrawal hopes there will now be a surge in demand. Only when something like this happens (currency notes removed), the millennials think digital asset is the future.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Mumbai resident Aesha has been on the hunt for cash since early Friday morning but is still unsure if she will get her hands on any banknotes. She has been to three ATMs but found only one functional  with scores of people already queued up.

With this mad rush and 50 people ahead of me, I doubt I will be able to withdraw any cash, she told HT.

Read: Utility bills, fresh notes, ATM functioning: Whats new on demonetisation

But Aesha  and millions of customers like her across India  are unlikely to get any relief soon as ATM manufacturers and cash-management companies struggle to manage the surging demand and a crunch in supply of Rs 100 notes.

An out-of-service IndusInd Bank ATM at Bengali Market in New Delhi on Friday. (Arvind Yadav/HT Photo)

Many ATMs in big cities continue to be out of service as agencies say they are racing against time to keep filling up 220,000 ATMs with just 8,800 currency vans and a manpower of 35,000 people.

Usually, an ATM can store about 15-20 lakh worth cash but given the limitation of 100 rupee notes, it will be at most about Rs 2 lakh, said cash management firm Securitrans Indias business chief Anush Raghavan.

So, ATMs will be running at just about 10% capacity.

Read: Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes scrapped: 25 things RBI wants you to know

The queues and panic is the result of a surprise government move on Tuesday of pulling Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes out of circulation in a bid to drain illegal cash from the economy. Since then, people have rushed to banks and ATMs but delays, long queues and unexpected formalities have dogged the exchange of old currency.

The government has said ATMs will dispense up to Rs 2000 per day per card. The limit will be increased to Rs. 4000 from next Saturday.

Cash-management agencies have to evacuate, count and safely send cash to the banks and refill the ATMs. Moreover, given the rush, they say their work has increased threefold.

People wait to withdraw money from an SBI ATM at Mayur Vihar in New Delhi. (Sushil Kumar/HT Photo)

Our 3-fold plan is to pull out existing 500 and 1000 notes, refill 100 rupee notes from the banks, configure ATMs to limit the withdrawals at Rs 2,000. Typically, there are 15 visits in a month for each ATM and now it will be daily 2-3 times or maybe more, Raghavan said.

Read: Here are 21 ways to check if your new Rs 2000, Rs 500 notes are real

Rajiv Kaul, chief of CMS Info Systems that handles about 4,500 cash vans said their focus was on evacuation and replenishment of ATMs.

We not only need to replenish the machines with new notes but also ensure every ATM recognizes the new notes and manages multiple replenishments due to lower denominations. We are also planning for perceived uncertainties in the consumers mind that is likely to result in greater number of withdrawals.

AGS Transact Technologies, another ATM manufacturer and technology provider, said it has 1150 van fleet capacity and has been evacuating old notes since Wednesday midnight. A senior official said, We cannot even employ more people as these are trained staff and need trusted people. Our existing staff has been working from 5 am till late evening.

Dipak Gupta, Joint Managing Director with Kotak Bank said, We foresee some worry further due to the supply problem of 100 rupee notes at ATMs. In the north, there is still sufficient supply but in pockets of south and west there is some shortage.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Airfares are set to rise with the government deciding to levy up to Rs 8,500 per flight on major routes to fund the regional air connectivity scheme.

The levy amount would be for an entire flight and the price of each ticket could go up depending on the number of seats in that particular flight.

Civil aviation secretary RN Choubey said on Friday the levy would be up to Rs 8,500 per flight depending on distance.

The ambitious scheme -- UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik) -- seeks to connect small cities by air as well as make flying more affordable for the masses.

To provide viability gap funding for the flights operated under the regional connectivity scheme, the ministry would impose a levy on every departure on major air routes such as the national capital, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata.

The levy for an up to 1,000 kilometre length of scheduled flight will be Rs 7,500 per flight, Rs 8,000 for a 1,000 to 1,500 kilometre flight and Rs 8,500 for flights above 1,500 kilometre, Choubey said.

For UDAN, the government would be creating the Regional Connectivity Fund (RCF).

With the levy, the government estimates to have Rs 400 crore for RCF, Choubey said. In addition to this, another 20% (funding) will come from state governments. We are roughly looking at around Rs 500 crore per year available in the kitty, he noted.

The move would push airfares slightly higher as airlines are expected to pass on the burden to fliers.

The funding is being provided since the fares of half of the seats operated in a particular flight under UDAN would be capped at Rs 2,500 for one-hour duration. This cap would be applicable for distance of 476-500 kilometres.

The limit of RCS airfare would vary from Rs 1,420 to Rs 3,500 for fixed-wing aircraft. For helicopters, half-an-hour ride under the scheme would cost Rs 2,500 and for over one- hour duration, the cap would be Rs 5,000.

RCF is to be funded by the Centre and respective state government participating in UDAN.
A war of tweets broke-out between Delhis chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and Paytms founder and CEO, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, after advertisements surfaced where the latter congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi for demonetising Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes -- a move that will benefit Paytm as people would choose mobile wallets till fresh currency notes are issued.

Kejriwal tweeted, hinting at a probable prearrangement between the Modi government and Paytm: Paytm is the biggest beneficiary of PMs announcement. Next day PM appears in its ads. Whats the deal Mr. PM?

Pat came Sharmas reply. Dear Sir, the biggest beneficiary is our country. We are just a tech startup, trying to solve financial inclusion and make India proud, he tweeted.

In an interview to HT, on Wednesday night, Sharma had said, the removal of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes will help the company, as a lot of people will use Paytm.

After Sharmas tweet, Kejriwal deleted his comment.

But by then both the tweets had had their impact. Kejriwals tweeted was retweeted more than 10,000 times and liked by over 3,000 people. Sharmas got retweeted about 8,000 times and had similar number of likes.

Meanwhile, there was a surge in Paytms usage. According to data from the company, in the days after the demonetisation, Paytms traffic grew seven times, app downloads increased three times, people added 30% more money to their wallets on Thursday (the first day increase was 10 times over normal days), online transactions grew three times, and offline (payment to retailers) grew five times. Paytms transaction value continued to grow 200% every day for the past couple of days.

Some of the other Twitter users replied to Kejriwal, tweeting that there were companies which benefited from the odd-even drive. Uber was the biggest beneficiary of the odd-even scheme. Was there a deal there, too @ArvindKejriwal? read a tweet.

But Kejriwal did not stop at that. A while later, in reply to someones tweet with the picture of the ad, he tweeted, Utterly shameful. Do people want their PM to model for pvt cos? Tomo, if these companies do wrongdoings, who will act against them.

There is no reaction from Sharma on that one, yet.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
In the midst of the ongoing currency crisis, Google Analytics has found that many Indians are doing their first digital transaction on Paytm  some of them in the smallest towns or in the remotest villages  as it aims to offer financial inclusion to the poorest of the merchants and ease to the richest resident.

Knowingly or unknowingly, Prime Minister Narendra Modis plan to scrap 500 and 1,000 notes has helped Paytm, the countrys largest mobile payments firm.

In the last two days, since the news broke, traffic on the app grew by seven times, the Paytm app downloads have gone up by three times, 30% more cash has been added to the mobile wallets, offline transactions to merchants grew 10 times.

Paytm, before the announcement had 130 million mobile wallets. For the first time, the mobile wallet will be in the hands of the common man, said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the companys founder and CEO.

At this pace, Sharma said Paytm will easily have 500 million users (many of them will have digital bank accounts), while State Bank of India, today, has 202 million account holders apart from borrowers and corporate clients.

A large number of Indians, including cigarette vendors, autorickshaw drivers, small shopkeepers, and milk booth owners , who never used any form of digital money, accessed Paytm, symbolising a change wherein the internet is used not just for social media, instant messaging, etc.

Paytm is serving the lowest common denominator of the society  people who were not served by the banks, said Sharma.

Now, Sharma will step on the accelerator. Paytm will go on a hiring spree, increasing headcount by 600% to 12,000 employees. The merchant sign-up team, which had a vertical structure, was merged into one large team on Thursday, with a single aim  add every single merchant, on every single street in the country.

Paytm already has 8.5 lakh merchants. But Sharma is eyeing 10 million by 2018. It already has merchants, accepting Paytm in 6,000 towns. We will go to every town with a population of 100,000 people, Sharma said.

Simultaneously, he said the wallet business will be folded into the payments bank business (yet to start), where Sharma will hold 61% stake, rest owned by One97, making the direct shareholding of the payments bank business fully Indian.

By the end of this year, Paytm will have a million merchants. Then it will start the digital banking business  offer savings and current account to every merchant. Once the money is in the account it will push financial services such as fixed deposits, insurance and loans.

For consumers, it has launched a Nearby feature, which helps in discovering a Paytm merchant in the vicinity. And, the new Add Cash will allow them to find the nearest bank points to load the wallets with cash.

All these people deal in cash . We are hoping their behaviour will change after Modis perfect surgical strike, Sharma said.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
New Delhi Indias biggest boardroom battle has now found its way into the textbooks for management graduates.

The unexpected removal of the companys first non-Tata chairman, Cyrus Mistry, last month took everyone by surprise. Following Mistrys ouster, Tata Sons has become a part of the programme under the branch of family businesses and organisational complexities for leading business schools in India, including Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore and Calcutta), Indian School of Business, MDI Gurgaon and SP Jain Institute of Management and Research(SPJIMR).

Not just industry watchers, but business schools are also trying to decode the complexities involved behind such crucial organisational decisions, said Lata Dhir, professor for organisational behaviour and leadership, SPJIMR. The institute inaugurated a session on a case study -- Decoding of Organisational Complexities: The Unfolding of the TATA Saga -- at its college campus on Thursday.

We have introduced the case study on Tata Group as a part of subject called organisational behaviour, Dhir said.

While it is a normal practice for colleges to update textbooks with live case studies, popular corporate events such as the Satyam Computers scam, the division of the Reliance group between Mukesh and Anil Ambani, and the Vijay Mallya case, have been the big examples .

In the Tata-Mistry scuffle, the lesson will be on how strong governance principles and processes could be when some of the key stakeholders have fundamental differences on one or more areas.

Power and politics in the boardroom is another possibility. Succession management is a big challenge in both family and non-family businesses and Tata Sons seems to provide a great discussion platform, said Kavil Ramachandran, executive director, family enterprise, Indian School of Business. Another chapter could be on limits in roles of owners and managers in a multi-generational ,family controlled business.

MDI Gurgaon plans to incorporate the learnings from the Tata -Mistry row in its classroom teachings at both levels - post graduate programme and executive education. These will be covered under strategy area, dealing with issues of corporate governance, leadership, organisational vision and mission, succession planning, mergers, acquisitions and restructuring, said Veeresh Sharma, chairperson, strategic management area, MDI Gurgaon.

According to colleges, the teaching methodology will be divided into two parts. Initially it would consist of vignette analysis and discussion, informed commentary and critique. After some time once enough material is available, the same would be developed in a case, which can be used for classroom discussions and in the form of assignments to students, Sharma said.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
All eyes are on the Tata Steel board meeting to approve fiscal second quarter earnings. But financial performance of the steelmaker would be second priority.

The opinion of independent directors on the board of Tata Steel is crucial and it will be widely followed to see whether they too, as in the case of Tata Chemicals and Indian Hotels, will come out in support of ousted Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry. Mistry continues to be chairman of Tata Steel.

The independent directors of Tata Steel include industrialist Nusli Wadia, Eicher group chairman emeritus Subodh Bhargava, former SBI chairman O P Bhatt, TAFE chair Mallika Srinivasan, professional Andrew Robb and global steel industry veteran Jacobus Schraven.

Read more: Why Cyrus P Mistry is unlikely to go quickly or quietly

There are already reports that Tata Sons has sought the ouster of independent director and Bombay Dyeing chairman Nusli Wadia from the board of Tata Steel. This could not be however confirmed.

It will be important to see what Nusli has to say at the board meeting. He has always been a fearless professional and speaks his mind. In fact at most board meetings it is Nusli who does the talking. He also does his homework thoroughly, said a person who has worked with Wadia for a long time.

Incidentally, Wadia is also an independent director on Tata Chemicals and had participated in the statement of support issued in favour of Mistry.

Read more: Seeking shareholder support in Mistry spat may open can of worms for Tatas

Wadia is said to be close and enjoys a good rapport with Tata Steel group executive director (finance) Koushik Chatterjee. So it will probably be difficult for Nusli to go against the company as most issues that Tata Steel is currently facing, are purely finance in nature, said the person cited earlier.

Tata Steel Europe has been a big drag on the steelmakers consolidated financials and a plan to sell the European business has been in the works. Resolving a GBP 15 billion pension scheme in the UK, that has seen a deficit of GBP 700 million is priority for the company. International media reports suggest that Tata Steel UK is planning to close down the pension scheme. This too could not be confirmed.

The steelmaker has also been facing issues due to the slowdown in the steel industry globally and due to the fact that its overseas steel operations have to rely on market supply of iron ore, the key raw material. In India, Tata Steel has captive iron ore mines which has enabled it to weather fluctuations in ore prices and supplies.

Earlier, Tata Chemicals said Bhaskar Bhat, a non-executive and non-independent director of Tata Chemicals, has resigned from the company board citing differences of opinion. Bhat, who is also managing director of Tata group company Titan, stepped down from Tata Chemicals board with immediate effect.

Read more: Tatas replace Cyrus Mistry as TCS chairman, new battle begins

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday it supports Indias efforts to fight corruption through the currency control measures announced this week, but stressed taking care to minimize disruptions in the economy.

Banks reopened on Thursday after a one-day break following the governments decision to withdraw Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes from circulation in a shock move designed to tackle widespread corruption and tax evasion.

We support the measures to fight corruption and illicit financial flows in India, IMF spokesperson Gerry Rice told reporters.

Of course given the large role of cash in everyday transactions in Indias economy, the currency transition will have to be managed prudently to minimize possible disruptions.

Read: After demonetisation move, more tough steps in offing with eye on revenue

Some banks in New Delhi had received the new Rs 2,000 bill and a number of ATMs were working again Thursday, two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modis big announcement.

Economists and some businesses, especially those involved in cashless payments, have welcomed the demonetisation scheme as a vital step towards broadening the formal economy and improving tax compliance.

But it has disrupted the daily lives of hundreds of millions of Indians who live in the cash economy that is estimated to account for a fifth of Indias $2 trillion gross domestic product and who have low confidence in banks or plastic cards.

Read: Chaos reigns at banks, ATMs as people rush to ditch worthless banknotes

The eradication of the black money menace from the Indian economy is a big positive in the long-term, and the Indian economy will be on a very strong footing once the short-term teething problems are done, said Sachin Shah, fund manager at the Mumbai-based Emkay Global Financial Services.

Morgan Stanley hailed the demonetization as a bold move to curb black money and bring millions more Indians into the tax regime. As of now, only about 1.6% of Indias 1.25 billion people are paying income tax.

The surprise currency swap would have a debilitating impact on the parallel economy in the country, said Harshavardhan Neotia, the head of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, referring to business conducted using illicit cash.
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in several US cities for a second night of nationwide protests on Thursday over the stunning election of Donald Trump to the presidency.

Shouting Not my president! and carrying placards that read I did not elect hate for president, some 300 people marched in Baltimore.

Protests were also taking place in Chicago, Denver, Dallas and elsewhere.

We are just showing that this is going to be the next four years, itll be four years of resistance, Kaila Philo, a 21-year-old student, told The Baltimore Sun.

Hope Robertson, 17, of Mission High School, holds up a sign in front of City Hall in protest of the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States in San Francisco, California on Thursday. (Reuters)

She said she had created an event on Facebook for her friends that ended up attracting thousands.

Earlier on Thursday, demonstrators -- mostly students who skipped classes -- also marched in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities.

Some 1,000 students, most of them high-schoolers, marched through San Franciscos financial district toward City Hall chanting Not my president! and blocking traffic. Some also carried placards that read Trans Against Trump and Make America Safe For All.

We are protesting because we want to stand up for our rights and we deserve to be heard, Pamela Campos, 18, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Donald Trump is just racist. Hes attacking all the immigrants, all the Muslims. I saw all my classmates crying yesterday.

University of California Los Angeles students march through campus on Thursday in Los Angeles, California, during a "Love Trumps Hate" rally in reaction to President-elect Donald Trump's victory in the presidential elections. (AFP Photo)

Students held walkouts in several other northern California cities, including Napa and Hayward.

In Los Angeles, several hundred students marched at the University of California campus carrying placards that read Dump Trump and Love trumps hate.

Initially, I accepted his election but yesterday when I saw Hillarys concession speech, I couldnt avoid crying, Daisy Rivera, 24, told AFP of the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

I cant believe we have that racist, xenophobic, misogynist elected president.

- Traumatic election -

In New York, some 200 anti-Trump protesters gathered at Manhattans Washington Square Park.

Similar demonstrations that attracted tens of thousands of people took place in various cities on Wednesday

Protests are also planned over the weekend.

The demonstrations have been peaceful overall despite some arrests and police in riot gear deployed in heavy numbers in several cities.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti lauded the protests while urging the demonstrators to stay off freeways and not vandalize property.

A young man shouts slogans as he takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in front of Trump Tower in New York on November 10. (AFP Photo)

This was a traumatic election, he told a news conference. Theres plenty of division, and theres finger-pointing in both directions, but there were things that were said that were not partisan, about women, about our Muslim brothers and sisters, about immigrants.

Trumps rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims and refugees outraged many during the election campaign. Around a dozen women have also accused the real estate billionaire of sexual misconduct.

Professors at several universities across the country cancelled classes or delayed tests on Wednesday to allow students to cope with the election outcome.

At Cornell University in New York, where students held a cry in, one professor scrapped her lecture for fear she would break down before students.

A University of Michigan psychology professor postponed an exam saying his students appeared clearly upset.

Read more| Not my president: Protests against Trump sweep America
The war over water in Punjab is generally viewed from the Akali-Congress perspective. But the catch is in its legal nuancesand the Aam Aadmi Partys bid for equity in the emerging emotive space.

As AAP has no baggage from history in the State, it can draw no political advantage from the issue inherited from history, argued Chandigarh-based political scientist Pramod Kumar. In contrast, the two traditional rivals have enough arrows to draw from historys quiver; the water-sharing dispute between Punjab and Haryana having festered since the reorganization of states in 1966.

To identify with the popular rage water-sharing arouses in the agrarian State, the Congress has taken the path of renunciation and the Akalis of defiance. Capt Amarinder Singh resigned from the Amritsar seat he had in the Lok Sabha while his party legislators quit the state assembly. The Akalis under Chief Minister PS Badal refused to accept the view the Supreme Court tendered in response to the 2004 presidential reference.

Read | HT Explainer: Why SYL is a canal of controversy between Punjab and Haryana

Amarinder and Badal cancel each other out in terms of political dividend: the law declared unconstitutional was passed when Amarinder was CM; Badal refuses to accept the courts view on the law bequeathed by his predecessor and political rival.

Struggling for stakes in the ongoing tussle, AAP has chosen to replicate the Akali protests of yore at Kapoori in Patiala. The venue is significant. It was there that Indira Gandhi inaugurated the construction of the SYL canal in 1982, triggering the Akalis Kapoori Morcha against the canal thats still incomplete.

Theres intense speculation that the Akali defiance of the Court may push it to Presidents rule. But a central minister told me the CMs refusal to accept the courts advice to the President under Article 143 does not amount to its contempt.

To that, the Congresss Kapil Sibal averred: Badal might adopt a political stance, but the courts view holding the Punjab law unconstitutional is binding on the Centre. Wasnt it the Centre that made the reference to the Court, he asked.

The constitutional position, as explained by senior advocate K N Bhat is as follows: The Courts reply to a presidential reference isnt binding the way its judgments are. Theoretically, thats the position. In practice, it gets the primacy it deserves as a view expressed by the highest court, he said.

The remedy available to Haryana in the face of Punjabs intransigence was to have the dispute-- to which states like Rajasthan and Delhi are also a partyreferred to a tribunal set up under Article 262 of the Constitution. The said article mandates that inter-state water disputes cannot be settled by Courts and have to be referred to tribunals.

Theres scope therefore to further delay the protracted dispute to which there can be no easy resolutions in election time. Like it took the Court 12 years to respond to the reference made in 2004 ---after Punjab unilaterally blocked SYL construction and scrapped water agreements with other states.

Read | SC Sutlej verdict a moment for Badals belligerence, Captains martyr stroke
Tuesdays orange wave has left millions across the United States and the world with a sense of drowning in disbelief. This wasnt what was predicted. The consensus was that Republican nominee Donald Trump had a path to winning the electoral college math as narrow as some of the views he expressed while campaigning.

However, theres an even divide in America. Many among the over 50 million voters that supported Trump in his bid to occupy the Oval Office are recalling the late President Ronald Reagans Morning in America slogan, while a news website changed that to Mourning in its headline, reflecting another take.

Read | What Trump presidency would mean for India, the world: Shashi Tharoor explains

However, President-elect Trump, the New York billionaire, is certainly entitled to a grace period, thanks to a mandate thats pretty clear, despite Hillary Clintons popular vote lead. Theres certainly an example that was set by incumbent President Barack Obama, as he explained that despite pretty significant differences with his predecessor, George W Bush, the latters team could not have been more professional or more gracious in making sure we had a smooth transition so that we could hit the ground running. Civility of process was displayed at the White House on Thursday as Obama welcomed Trump, contrasting with the chaos of protests in multiple cities the evening before.

Trumps defeated opponent Hillary Clinton said in her concession speech: We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Trump himself packed away the bombast in his victory speech and after meeting Obama.

Both Obama and Clinton had enough reason to be churlish. Trump ran on a platform that attacked Obamas signature initiatives including the Affordable Care Act and the Paris climate change agreement, to mention just two, and to ignore the unmentionables lobbed at the President. Clinton, meanwhile, was described as crooked, a criminal, as Trump used insults liberally.

Read | How the Trump card played out at the US Embassy in Delhi

Not that Clinton did herself any favours. For those fortunate enough to have covered the 2008 Presidential race, there was an elevated level of inspiration around Obama that she wasnt able to capture eight years later, despite the historic nature of her candidacy. More than sexism, the problem was Clintonism, for the simple reason that the Clintons carry more baggage than a Dreamliners hold. Still, her supporters are devastated, and thats understandable.

But in going off the ledge you will head in the exact opposite direction required to shatter the glass ceiling. It may be time to develop some 2020 vision. Just in case no one noticed, theres a rich slate thats emerging. Among them are four leaders who could be powerful factors in the years ahead, even without gender driving the agenda. And curiously enough, each has an Indian connection. In California, Kamala Harris, daughter of a Tamilian mother and African-American father was elected to the United States Senate. Anyone who has met her (and Ive been lucky in that regard) has been impressed and this is just the beginning of her national journey. Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu ever elected to the US House of Representatives, was re-elected from Hawaii and is not just rising within Democratic ranks but is also an unabashed India booster. Meanwhile, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley remains a strong contender for a larger role within the GOP of the future. Finally, theres Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, often tipped as a 2016 candidate but who passed this time. Warrens son-in-law is Indian-American and her links to the states community are strong.

Read | Theres a serious problem with modern democracy, but what is the alternative?

Finding grace in defeat can be amazing and it doesnt have to be abnormal as it seems in these times of schism.

Its probably better to barter the anger and anxiety for anticipation of brighter days ahead. As Obama said on election morning, Regardless of which side you were on in the election, regardless of whether your candidate won or lost, the sun will come up in the morning. And even the force of a political tsunami dissipates, and as the waters recede, theres always the opportunity to return to firm ground. The present, though, has to be a time of acceptance rather than acrimony.

Anirudh Bhattacharyya is a Toronto-based commentator on American affairs

The views expressed are personal

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
The Supreme Court pulled up the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) for groping in the dark and failing to draw a plan to curb the deteriorating air quality in the Capital.

A bench headed by Chief Justice of India TS Thakur wondered whether the agency wants the people to die before devising a strategy.

Do you want to wait till people start dying... people are gasping for breath, said a bench, upset on learning that the Centre has not been able to come up with a roadmap to deal with the emergency situation despite its direction on November 8.

Unfortunately, no thought has been given to prepare a response to react to different levels of pollution, the bench noted, saying the petitions pertaining to bad air quality in Delhi is pending before it for several years now.

Why do you want to wait till people start dying? People are gasping for breath. Courts are passing orders, newspapers are writing, the NGT is passing orders, yet you dont even feel the need to plan a strategy? the CJI said when CPCB director, SPS Parihar, could not specify what measures need to be taken to tackle the problem.

The CPCB is a statutory body created by an Act of Parliament to recommend and take steps to combat pollution.

The bench did not appreciate solicitor general Ranjit Kumars submission that the situation worsened in Delhi due to stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana.

Read: Smoggy days may return to Delhi as wind slows down

Dont blame the neighbouring states. Look here (in Delhi). What about the dust, construction and enforcement in this city? Dont just stand here and make statements. Please do something, the bench said.

It even refused to accept the solicitors argument that the implementing agencies had failed to carry out their duties, though there are several directives and directions to them from various courts. We are not satisfied with this response, the court said.

Asking Parihar to convene a meeting on November 19 and take suggestions from all stakeholders, including those who have moved the SC for taking corrective measures, the bench said he must come up with a concrete plan by November 25, the next hearing.

We want you to take into consideration all the different inputs which are coming and draw a plan where you can have a proper system, a proper centralised control room, a graded level of air quality and also the response to it. You have to evolve a consensus. You must not allow the things to go out of your hands, the bench said.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
New Delhi:

Jitu Sinha, 48, had to break his sons piggy bank to pay for groceries since he was left with no money.

On Friday, he waited patiently for over four hours in an endless queue before the ATM at State Bank of Indias New Ashok Nagar branch to withdraw money. But before he could reach the ATM gate, the machine had run dry of notes.

It is going to be very difficult from now on. I have asked for money from relatives but dont know what to do now. I can manage grocery on credit but how do I manage my travel expenses, he asked.

Jitu was among thousands of people who joined serpentine queues before banks and ATMs across the city on Friday to exchange 500 and 1000 rupee notes, which have been demonetized, or withdraw money from the machines.

People from all age groups and walks of life were seen in the queues -- some blaming the government for the chaos, others cursing the banks for their inefficiency. The massive rush, however, ensured that all ATMs were sucked dry within a few hours of being stocked. The ATMs remained closed on Wednesday and Thursday after the demonetization plan was announced by the Prime Minister on Tuesday.

Six of the seven ATMs on a street in east Delhis New Ashok Nagar had stopped functioning by afternoon. Outside the only State Bank of Indias ATM that was dispensing cash, over two hundred people were waiting in the queue.

Gautam Kapoor, 54, said, We do not mind waiting in a long queue, but this could have been avoided if it was made mandatory for banks to open all their ATMs.

Delhis Uttam Nagar saw nearly 400 people queuing up at a bank, some of whom came in as early as 6 am. A security guard said there was chaos because the ATM was situated inside the branch.

People who waited on the first day of banks opening after Tuesday, i.e. Thursday, saw no respite on Friday. All banks were crowded since morning with people who came to exchange the scrapped 500 and 1,000 banknotes with fresh bills.

Read: Banks struggle to handle panicked customers, ATMs run dry within hours

Cashing in on the opportunity, photocopy shops in Jangpura was selling the forms needed to exchange the money.

Unable to stand for several hours at a stretch, 60-year old Anju Devi sat under a tree after booking her place in the long queue. What to do? My husband has gone to work. So, I had to come. I am standing here since 9 am and I havent got my money yet, she said.

Dwarka residents faced a tough time as many ATMs were shut in the area. The ATMs nearby are closed. Bank officials said cash would only come in by afternoon, said Manoj who returned home from one such facility.

In Mayur Vihars Samachar Apartment market, many ATMs had exhausted their cash by 12 noon.

Pranay Pandey, 86, a resident of Gulabi Bagh said, I am a diabetic and cant stand for long. All I have is Rs 100. I came late hoping that the queue would shorten. But all the ATMs have exhausted their cash.

It was a tough day for security guards as most people could be seen quarrelling with them after cash was over.

What can I do? I am not the manager of the bank nor did I make this new rule. People are questioning me for money being over, said a guard outside the HDFC bank branch in Saket.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
The usual hustle and bustle of Old Delhi was missing for the second consecutive day on Friday.

Markets remained deserted or closed because of low footfall. Reports of raid by the Income Tax department or VAT department also kept businessmen away from the shopping hub.

Traders in Chandni Chowk, Bhagirath Palace, Dariba, Chawri Bazaar, Khari Baoli, Kashmere Gate, and Sadar Bazar reached their shops on Friday morning but were largely occupied with accounting work. However, a few eateries in Jama Masjid and Chandni Chowk area did some business but their sale was down by 80%.

Mohammad Danish, owner of a Darya Ganj restaurant - Dilli Gate - said number of daily orders (including walk-in clients) have reduced to 20% of the regular sale.

Major chunk of the sale is coming from home delivery orders. We are receiving barely one or two customers in the day and if they have R500 or R1,000 notes, they return, he said.

Observing the situation in the market, traders of the Old Delhi area said business would further decline in the coming days due to shortage of notes of smaller denomination. New R 2,000 notes will not help much as we dont have sufficient R 100 or R 10 notes to give out change. The sudden demonetization has certainly affected the trade here. This is why a large number of businessmen in Chandni Chowk did not open shops on Friday, said Sanjay Bhargava, general secretary, Chandni Chowk Sarv Vypar Mandal.

He also said that the fear of raids by IT or VAT department is another reason for the market closure. Dinesh Chawla of Lahore Dry Fruit, the 60-year-old shop in Khari Baoli, said most shops were closed as no one wanted to take risk in view of the searches and survey being carried out by the tax officials.

Read: I-T sleuths at Old Delhi leave traders in panic

Deadline to use R 500 and R 1, 000 should have been till December instead of the two-three days window. There is almost no circulation of smaller denomination notes. Hence, only a few buyers are coming to the market, he said.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Friday evening tweeted that raids were not being conducted by the VAT department. Rumour that Del VAT dept doing raids. Completely false. No raids by VAT. If anyone claims to be from VAT, ask for his ID n report to polic (sic), he tweeted on Friday evening.

On Thursday, IT sleuths carried out search at a popular jewelery store in Dariba Kalan, which triggered panic among businessmen who shut shops to avoid any action.

H Rajesh Prasad, Delhi VAT Commissioner said, If any dealer being inspected or person needs to clarify the identity or authenticity of any VAT official, he may ask for his authorization letter and in case of any clarification may call on helpline numbers 155055 and 1800110066.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Shopping locally this holiday season wont just help your wallet  itll also help your streetscape.

Local business leaders and government officials gathered yesterday to begin promoting Small Business Saturday  which falls this year on Nov. 26  in Cumberland County.

Our downtowns are special places, county Commissioner Gary Eichelberger said. But theyre under a lot of pressure.  Small business is what keeps our downtown communities viable, and we certainly have downtowns bouncing back in this county.

Small Business Saturday is recognized in communities nationwide to promote holiday shopping at small storefronts. The first event was held in Roslindale, a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, in 2010.

The date is strategically sandwiched in between Black Friday, which is typically dominated by big-box stores, and Cyber Monday, the shopping event created by online retailers.

For as long as Ive been involved, our big push has been about getting the community to shop small, said Michelle Crowley, executive director of the Carlisle Area Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored this years Small Business Saturday promotion.

Crowley was joined by representatives from the Shippensburg, Mechanicsburg, and West Shore chambers of commerce.

Our downtown businesses need this capital to ride through the rough times, said Mechanicsburg chamber Executive Director Jeff Palm. Holidays are great for them, but theres always a lull, and its not easy to be a small business.

Older, comparatively inexpensive real estate in downtown areas often serves as an incubator for new businesses, officials noted. Although the Carlisle chamber counts a few large-scale employers in its ranks, Crowley said the average size of the chambers 700 member businesses is just under 20 employees.

The relationship between downtown districts and small business is mutually beneficial, said Pam Fleck, owner of the American Artisan Gallery in Carlisle. Vibrant streets with small businesses bring in new tourists and residents.

I have many customers who stay here for a weekend to shop in the fall, because they know we have low prices and they can get their Christmas shopping out of the way with a mini-vacation, Fleck said. Its also a major factor when Dickinson parents come to visit. They dont want their kids going to school in a town where the windows are dark and dilapidated.

State Rep. Stephen Bloom also read a resolution from the state Legislature recognizing November as Small Business and Shop Small Month in Pennsylvania.

The resolution noted that nearly 1 million companies in Pennsylvania are classified as small businesses, and they employ roughly 2.4 million workers.

However  in Pennsylvania as well as nationwide  startup businesses have been taking a smaller and smaller share of the economic pie over time.

Job gains from new businesses in Pennsylvania peaked in 1998, at 183,993 positions created by businesses less than a year old, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of 2015, that number had dropped to 85,089.

But BLS data also indicates that its not for lack of trying by entrepreneurs. Nationwide, 49.6 percent of firms opening in the 1993-1994 survey year lasted five years. Firms opening in the 2010-2011 year have seen a slightly improved five-year survival rate of 51.0 percent.

On Tuesday, Eichelberger also credited Cumberlands low unemployment rate to the efforts of small businesses. The countys rate as of August was 4.7 percent, compared to 6.0 percent statewide.

One of the big reasons for that is that we are a small-business friendly region, Eichelberger said. We want people to understand the importance of small business to this economy.
A sanitation worker was killed and another critically injured after they fell into a sewer and inhaled methane gas in south Delhis Vasant Kunj on Friday, police said.

Police identified the deceased as one Chandan and the injured as Israil. Both the workers are in their mid-twenties.

The incident occurred when the duo began cleaning a choked drain in front of the mall, police said. When Chandan went inside the sewer, he fainted. Israil panicked on seeing Chandans condition and jumped inside the sewer to rescue him. However, Israil also fainted due to the effect of the gas, said a police officer.

A beat constable saw Israil jumping inside the sewer and arranged for a rope. The constable then sought help from passerby to pull Israil and Chandan out of the drain.

After Israil and Chandan were pulled out, they were rushed to a nearby hospital where Chandan was declared brought dead.

Israil is currently undergoing treatment and his condition is stated to be critical. Chandan was a native of Bengal and lived in Bengali Basti in Jai Hind Camp with his family.

A case under relevant sections has been registered in Vasant Kunj (North) police station.
As New Delhi grappled with its worst smog in 17 years, the head of the countrys largest mobile payment firm got on a plane and left, one of thousands of professionals escaping pollution that could cost the capital and the broader economy dear.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of PayTM payment start-up, left last Sunday for a temporary stay in Mumbai, worried about the impact of hazardous clouds of dust, smoke and fumes that hang over Delhi during the winter months.

It became very visibly clear that it is going to be tough in Delhi, especially with young kids, Sharma said in Mumbai.

Read: All you need to know about Delhi air pollution

We were worried that it could create long-term (health) problems.

His company, which has considered moving from its base outside Delhi, has installed air purifiers, brought in plants and masks and offered extra health assistance.

Telecoms operator Idea Cellular and others have allowed more employees to work at home, and hired buses so that car traffic is reduced - all at their own expense.

Commuters could be seen wearing face masks after heavy smog engulfed Delhi earlier this month. (Sushil Kumar/HT Photo)

A few companies are thriving from the heavy smog hanging over the city earlier this month -- providers of face masks and air purifiers have seen sales soar.

Read: Come up with action plan to fight air pollution: SC to Centre, Delhi govt

But others, like the car manufacturers, are in the firing line of local and national politicians who want to reduce the deadly haze, while estate agents and tour operators have complained of a slowdown in business.

Delhi, home to around 17 million people, is among the fastest growing states in India. Its $84 billion economy has been expanding at more than 8% for the past two years, faster than the 7.4% national average.

Its air quality, meanwhile, has deteriorated, even by the standards of a country with some of the worlds most polluted cities. Conditions had improved by Friday, but the problem is perennial and has been particularly acute this winter.

Companies have yet to tot up the cost of a week of coughing, spluttering and watering eyes, but local industry lobby group Assocham estimates several billions of dollars of new investments are under threat.

A study by the World Bank shows Asias third-largest economy lost 8.5% of its GDP in 2013 due to air pollution.

WORST ON EARTH

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), a global real estate services firm serving large corporates, said some clients were reconsidering Delhi as a base, as costs of working there rise.

Read: Odd-even might not be back soon as Delhi weather has improved: Minister

This is increasing their operational costs as they are being made to spend more to provide a healthy workplace to their employees, said Santosh Kumar, a senior executive at the firm.

Delhis image is deteriorating more widely, a headache for tour promoters and a government touting Brand India.

Some local tour operators say they are already receiving requests from overseas partners to redraw the itinerary of foreign tourists to avoid even an overnight stay in Delhi. Business travellers say they are cancelling trips.

The ongoing tourism season, which is yet to pick up, could see a maximum hit, Assocham said.

Expatriates are also thinking twice about living in the Indian capital. JLLs Kumar said more smog could see foreigners packing their bags, a blow to real estate as well as employment.

Lisa Akerman, a Swedish national who lives in an affluent Delhi neighbourhood, said authorities needed to do much more than they were.

Akerman moved to the city two years ago with her family and has taken measures to ensure clean air in her apartment for her two small daughters. Still, the choking smog left her worried about their health.

Read: Delhis worst smog yet wakes up govt, emergency measures announced

Earlier this week, she decided to take them out of the city for a while.

The pollution level is too much for the children, she said by phone from Goa, where she is camping with her kids. While I love Delhi, its air quality will be a major consideration in deciding whether we want to extend our stay here.

NOT EVERYONE LOSES

The local government has taken steps to reduce traffic amid widespread public anger at pollution that has caused choking, wheezing and breathlessness.

Licences are being withdrawn for diesel-powered vehicles older than 15 years, and authorities are considering resuming an odd-even scheme, under which cars can only travel in the city on alternate days depending on their registration number.

Those steps, and the risk that Indias courts will impose stricter rules on emissions, are a potential blow to foreign and domestic carmakers, some of whom have asked for greater clarity.

But not everyone is complaining about the smog.

Japans Daikin has seen sales of air purifiers increase by up to three times since the Hindu Diwali festival, and its stock that had been expected to last until March is exhausted.

To meet growing orders, the Osaka-based air-conditioner maker increased shipments from its Thai factory by 50 percent.

Nirvana India, which distributes the Vogmask face mask in South Asia, reported soaring sales.

It sold 300 to 400 pieces a week around this time last year, but since Diwali at the end of October, it has sold 5,000-8,000 a week and is seeking emergency stocks from Singapore, China and Korea.

Earlier, only expats, patients and government departments would buy these masks, said chief executive Jaidhar Gupta. Now everyone is buying.
The DND Flyway connecting Delhi and neighbouring Noida will remain toll-free for commuters, with the Supreme Court refusing on Friday to stay a verdict by the Allahabad high court that restrained the Noida Toll Bridge Company Ltd from levying cess.

A bench of justice JS Khehar and justice L Nageswara Rao also asked the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to verify the cost of the DND Flyway project and submit a report before the apex court.

We have requested the CAG to verify the cost of the project..., the bench said, adding, We refuse to grant any relief.

The apex court had on October 28 refused to interfere with the HC order restraining the company, saying it will pass directions after Diwali vacations.

On the toll-collecting firms plea for interim stay on HC order, the apex court bench headed by the Chief Justice had said: You have only ten kms of highway and you claim that you have made a road to the moon... You have done well but not something (great).

The firm had said the HC did not take into account all aspects and submitted that factors such as interest on construction cost, depreciation and maintenance expenses, which come to around Rs 12.5 lakh per day, have not been duly considered.

The HC, on October 26, had brought cheers to millions of commuters, ruling that no toll will be collected henceforth from those using the 9.2km-long, eight-lane DND flyway. The order was passed as the high court allowed a PIL by the Federation of Noida Residents Welfare Association.

The PIL, filed in 2012, had challenged the levy and collection of toll in the name of user fee by the NTBCL.

In an over 100-page judgment, the high court had held the user fee which is being levied/realised is not supported by the legal provisions relied upon by the Concessionaire (Noida Toll Bridge Company), Infrastructure Leaning and Financial Services (promoter and developer of the project) and Noida Authority.
Delhiites are known for finding jugaads in trickiest situations. On the day when denizens found themselves in cash crunch, some of the local vendors came to their rescue by accepting Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes at a commission of Rs 50, Rs 100.

Panwadis, newspaper vendors and shared autowalahs are encashing and making the most of the situation yet it is a win-win situation for all the parties involved. At a time when everything is up in the air, at least these local vendors and autowalahs are still showing the Dilli dil waalon ki spirit but at a price.

Panwadi politics

The best watering holes for all political discussions have been the local paanwalahs. And now with the currency issue, some of these paan stalls have become a saviour for denizens of Delhi. Thank God for the paanwalah near my office, who is accepting Rs 500 notes. I thought what will I do without change? But I had my cigarette and tea from this stall and he accepted my Rs 500 note, but only after charging Rs 50 as commission, says Rohit Nagpal who works in a multinational company in Connaught Place. Inspite of demonitisation of all Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, some panwadis are still accepting them, to later get them exchanged from the banks. I know its illegal but I dont hoard black money and Im just trying to help people here and nothing else, says a local panwalah, who doesnt wish to be named.

Newspaper notions

Rs 500 ke Rs 400 milenge madam, says Ramlal, a local newspaper seller outside a metro station. Hume kaun pakdega, hamare bank main bas Rs 2,000 hain. Rs 400- Rs 500 aur extra kama bhi lenge to kuch nahi hoga, says unperturbed, Ramlal. People queued up in front of such stalls not for newspapers but to exchange their Rs 500 notes. Even though I already have a newspaper in my bag, I am still waiting here to get those four notes of Rs 100, says Rahul Sharma, a college student.

Friendly autowallah

Making travelling easier for those who are running short on change, the shared auto drivers have been accepting Rs 500 notes. But on one condition: Haan le lenge panch sau rupay par tees rupay extra lagenge, says an autowalah, adding, Isse to hum dono ka bhala ho raha hai na, savari bhi khush aur hum bhi! Even the passengers dont mind paying few extra bucks to these auto drivers. Its just a matter of Rs 30. If I am getting dropped at the desired location and can encash my Rs 500 note, then why not, asks Mohit Gupta, a resident of Rohini, while travelling to the metro station from his home.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Naina Rajat, a resident of Gurgaon, went to a nearby ATM at 11 am to withdraw cash. Rajat had to wait for over two hours for her turn to come.

I was, however, lucky as I could withdraw Rs 2,000 from the ATM, but by the time I left the place, I was exhausted, she said. Recounting her nightmarish experience, Rajat said the demonetization exercise should have been better handled.

The countrys banks struggled through the day to cope up with serpentine queues with most ATMs going dry, no adequate replenishment and disgruntled customers, even as they extended their working hours and opened up many temporary cash counters.

Sources said while banks had made arrangements to address this issue, the public sector lenderswhich have the largest network in the countryare short staffed by at least 25-30%.

Management of ATMs, on the other hand, has been outsourced. In most cases, delivery and replenishment of cash is done by cash logistics companies and not by the banks themselves.

Why this chaos?

On a normal day, Rs 10-15,000 crore is replenished in the countrys ATMs. On Friday, the rise in demand for cash was unprecedented. The 8,800 cash vans used to fill up ATMs were first used to flush out the old currency notes and only on completion of this exercise, the new currency notes could be filled up at the ATMs.

Besides, with the maximum currency notes now comprising smaller denominationsprimarily of Rs 50 and 100, the ATMs are getting filled while the value of cash stored in each of the machines is significantly lower.

Read: Banks struggle to handle panicked customers, ATMs run dry within hours

The average transaction per ATM is estimated at about 125 in a day. But more than about 800-1000 people queued up at ATMs at the metros to withdraw cash.

The cash logistics companies are doing their best, the staff have been working 24X7 but this kind of situation has never been experienced ever, we are monitoring the situation very closely...it needs to be highlighted that the surge in demand is unprecedented, Rituraj Sinha, president, Cash Logistics Association and co-chair, FICCI Private Security Sector Committee, told Hindustan Times.

There are over 2 lakh ATMs and over 1,31,000 branches across the country, of which 20,565 belong to the private lenders.

We have been saying there will be some problem in the first few days. There are complicated logistical issues involved in delivering such huge piles of cash at bank branches and ATMs across the country. It will take some time for the situation to come back to normal, a senior finance ministry official, who did not wish to be identified, said.

The official said the government and the Reserve Bank of India had capped the withdrawal limit from an ATM at Rs 2,000 keeping this in mind. To ensure that many people as possible manage to get cash, a restriction limit of Rs 2,000 was kept, the official said.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
This Childrens Day will be special for 14-year-old Shubhendu Kumar Sahu as he will walk down the ramparts of Rashtrapati Bhawan before being presented with a prestigious award by President Pranab Mukherjee.

Sahu, a Class 8 student of Somapur Project Upper Primary School in Ganjam districts Hinjili, has been selected for the National Child Award for Exceptional Achievement.

Sahu had taken part in several extra-curricular activities and received a number of awards at both state and national-level competitions.

While one of his science projects, Gift for Farmers, made it to the zonal-level science exhibition held in Kolkata, he had also ranked first at the state-level creative writing competition organised in Bhubaneswar last year. He also showcased his talent in many drawing competitions and debates.

Read more: 11-year-old football prodigy from Odisha slum selected for Bayern Munich academy

Developed by Sahu, Gift for Farmers, is an innovative device which helps in sowing, tilling of soil, sprinkling of pesticides, cutting and processing of the paddy crops.

I am feeling proud since receiving the news on Monday afternoon, Shubhendu said. His father also shared his joy. We are very much happy for such a rare achievement of our son, said Subhendus father, Shantanu Kumar Sahu.

We are proud for Subhendu to be selected for such an award from the President, said district education officer (DEO) Sanatan Panda. Hinjili block education officer (BEO) RL Nayak went to the school to interact with Subhendu.

The National Child Award for Exceptional Achievement recognises children, in the age group of 4 to 15 years, with exceptional abilities and who have achieved outstanding status in various fields including academics, arts, culture and sports. One gold medal and 35 silver medals are given to the children every year for their outstanding achievement.

The award carries cash prize of Rs 10,000, book vouchers worth Rs 3,000, a silver medal, a certificate and a citation, a letter received by Sahu from the Ministry of Woman and Child Development said.
Residents started queuing up outside banks across Gurgaon since early Thursday morning to exchange notes of Rs500 and Rs1,000 demonetized by the government on Tuesday evening. The move also had a considerable impact in the citys markets where most of the businesses were starved of customers.

To take stock of the situation, the district administration also a held a meeting with bankers in the evening to discuss measures with regard to exchange of Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes with new notes of Rs500 and Rs2,000, and to ensure that adequate steps were taken so that customers dont face any problems.

With Gurgaon being a corporate hub, bankers suggested that more currency be supplied to city branches by the Reserve Bank of India to meet the high demand.

Earlier, long queues started forming from 7am itself outside bank branches in Palam Vihar, Civil Lines, Sector 22, Sector 31 and in most upmarket areas including MG Road, DLF City, Sushant Lok and Sohna Road across the national highway. The numbers kept on rising throughout the day and large crowds persisted even at closing hours.

To manage the rush, Gurgaon police had deployed personnel at the branches and kept PCR vans on regular patrol.

Despite banks deploying extra staff and counters, customers had to wait for almost two to three hours in queues as it took a minimum of 10 to 15 minutes to complete a single transaction. There was also confusion with regard to the documents and forms to be submitted for exchange of notes. Most banks did not provide photo-copying facility.

To manage the crowd, the State Bank of India branch in Palam Vihar issued 20 tokens at a time. Meanwhile, at the Punjab National Bank branch in Civil Lines, notes could not be changed in the morning and bank officials only deposited cash from customers.

We came in the morning and had to return, but the notes were exchanged later in the afternoon, said Vijay Kumar, a trader from Sadar Bazar.

The Canara Bank branch on Gurudwara Road near Sohna Chowk had posted guards at the entrance besides setting up three counters to deposit cash and two additional counters to exchange notes. Deposit forms and other information were also made available.

Due to the rush, some branches ran out of cash within hours. A bank customer, Manoj Khera, tweeted, 11.27 am cash finished at HDFC_bank sector 51 Gurgaon.

At branches of Kotak Mahindra Bank and the SBI in Sector 31, new notes were exhausted by 2pm.

The bank has given me a token and asked to come back on Friday to complete the transaction, rued Sukhchain Kaur of Sector 31.

The lack of information and sheer numbers were also overwhelming. I am running a high fever, but still came to exchange notes as there is no cash to buy medicines and food, said Paramjeet Kour, complaining that the forms needed for the exchange were not available.

A majority of people HT spoke to in Gurgaon said the demonetization had inconvenienced them, but they supported the governments crackdown on black money.

This is the right decision at the right time. There will be some inconvenience for the common man, but it will help the country in the long run, said TN Wali, a senior citizen from Palam Vihar.

However, migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were left confused. I am a contractor and get paid only in notes of large denominations, which are now useless. What should I do? said Ram Chander, who is from Bareilly in UP. He also wondered how much money he could send home.

Meanwhile, in the city markets, vendors too approached cash transactions with caution. A dosa vendor in Sector 31 was seen asking customers whether they had change even before they ordered food. However, petrol pumps in the city did good business as they were allowed to accept the Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
With an eye on the 2017 assembly elections in Gujarat, the Aam Admi Party on Friday launched a 20-day programme aimed at the rural population, especially farmers, across more than 10,000 villages in the Western state.

Called AAP chali gaon ki ore (AAP goes to the villages) the outreach will pitch the party as a serious alternative to Gujaratis who will choose their next government in early 2017. Small teams of AAP volunteers have been asked to fan out to the villages in every Vidhan Sabha constituency. Each team will cover around five to seven villages every day and hold nukkad sabhas (village-level public meetings), AAPs Gujarat co-incharge Kapil Dhama told HT.

By the end of the programme, the party hopes to have touched over 10,000 villages spread across the 182 constituencies. Nearly three out of every five Gujaratis live in the villages.

After declaring its national convenor and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwals October 16 rally in Surat a success, the party has plunged itself into campaigning for the elections, which are expected to be held shortly after the Punjab and Goa polls -- the other two states where the party is trying to expand its political footprint.

AAP leaders involved in building and designing the partys campaign in the state said the AAP leadership is hoping to channelise the angst of the Patidars, Dalits and farmers against the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Gujarat. The state has seen agitations by the Patidars and Dalits this year. AAP is buoyed by the fact that Kejriwal was able to hold a rally in Surat last month whereas BJP president Amit Shahs public meeting on September 8 with the Patidar community saw commotion by their leader Hardik Patels followers.

Sources said the partys top leadership is in touch with Patel and Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani.

We have a team of researchers now based in different parts of Gujarat who will collect and collate information through November and December to identify peoples issues that will resonate in the coming elections, an AAP leader said. The village outreach programme will also throw up the list of issues that the central leadership will then fine-tune and prepare the final campaign pitch.

The BJP went back on its promise to double the minimum support price for cotton leading to severe distress among the farmers, there are wage issues concerning the labourers in diamond and textile industries. We will expose the shortcomings in the Gujarat model in the education and health sectors , Gulab Singh, AAPs in-charge of Gujarat said.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Moral of the story: Dont mess with a wrestler, even if you are an MLA.

And, now the story.

Rashtriya Janata Dal MLA Arun Yadav entered a wrestling pit in Ara on Thursday during a bout organised to celebrate the 45th foundation day of Bhojpur district.

Yadav, who once dabbled in wrestling and now represents Sandesh in the Bihar assembly, started giving tips to Rajkumar Paswan, a 19-year-old competitor. The young man didnt want any of it.

As Yadav kept at it, the wrestler grabbed the MLA from his legs, a popular wrestling manoeuvre, lifted him and threw him down in the pit as an amused crowd watched on.

Yadav had to literally bite the dust, with his pristine white clothes smudged with dirt  it was a traditional mud wrestling pit. One of the shoes also came off.

An embarrassed Yadav immediately got up and challenged Paswan as his bodyguard and supporters, too, got into the pit. Bhojpur district magistrate Birendra Prasad Yadav, who was there for the function, stepped in and prevented the situation from turning ugly.

Let sport remain a sport. We should learn to take it sportingly, the DM said when reached for comments, refusing to share the exchange between the wrestler and Yadav.

The MLA, however, was in denial and even defended his record.

I would not wrestle in shirt and trousers, though I have been a good wrestler in my time, between 1981 and 1990, he said. I was just showing him a few daon (wrestling moves). I was teaching him patt (a move to overthrow the opponent) that I turned and lost balance.

Television channels twisted the whole episode, he told HT over phone from Patna.

Whatever the MLAs view, the young wrestler hardly looks the eager pupil in the video. See it for yourself.
A police officer, who was also the nephew of a former Congress district president, was hacked to death by suspected Maoists in Chhattisgarhs insurgency-hit Bijapur district, police said on Friday.

Assistant constable Rahul Raidu, 27, who was posted at Bhairamgarh police station, was attacked late on Thursday night, Bijapur superintendent of police KL Dhruv told PTI.

Raidu, who joined the police force in 2011, was the nephew of former Congress (Bijapur) district president Ajay Singh, a native of Bhairamgarh, police said.

According to preliminary information, Raidu was at the time of the incident playing cards with some villagers in Sanjay Para area, on the outskirts of Bhairmagarh town about 450 km from here. A group of men armed with axes and knives reportedly had an altercation with Raidu before launching a vicious attack, leaving him critically injured.

The assailants fled into the forest after committing the crime, the SP said.

Police rushed to the spot on being informed and admitted the injured officer to a local hospital. He was later moved to Jagdalpur hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries in the early hours of Friday, he said.

Prima facie, it appears to be the handiwork of Maoists. Although everything will be clear after the investigation, Dhruv said.

A combing operation has been launched in the interiors of Bhairamgarh region to nab the assailants, he added.
Thirty-four men with Cumberland County ties died in Vietnam from May 1964 to May 1970.

The Cumberland County Historical Society years ago launched a special project to gather as much information as possible on these honored dead. The information below was taken from a roster summarizing the life and service of each of the fallen.

Twenty-three of the men served in the Army, nine served in the Marine Corps, and two served in the Navy. Five died in accidents while four were killed by mines or booby traps. Nine were listed as being married  of which four had children.

The men are listed by service branch in the order in which they died in Vietnam:

Army

Courtney Price Hollar Jr.  The oldest and first Cumberland County serviceman to die in Vietnam, Shippensburg native, 1937 Shippensburg High School graduate, World War II and Korean War veteran, recipient of Silver Star for gallantry, major in Vietnam with Advisory Team 95, killed in plane crash, May 5, 1964.

Myron McClelland Pfoutz  Mercersburg native, high school graduate, broadcast journalist turned helicopter pilot, killed in collision between two helicopters, May 28, 1965, age 33.

Derwood D. Steigleman Jr.  Carlisle resident, left high school to join military, earned diploma while in the service, served with the 101st Airborne Division, killed in action, June 10, 1966.

Robert Lee Adams Jr.Carlisle native, 1961 Carlisle High School graduate, platoon leader, killed in action, Nov. 4, 1966, age 23.

Dennis Ray Lehman  Newville native, 1964 Big Spring High School graduate, truck driver, killed when convoy was ambushed, Nov. 21, 1966.

Gary Lee Lininger  Shippensburg resident, attended Shippensburg High School, infantryman, killed by a land mine, Jan. 16, 1967, age 19. His twin brother Larry survived the war.

James Ralph Snyder  Lynchburg, Virginia, native, New Cumberland resident, infantryman, killed by a land mine, June 27, 1967, age 27.

Stephen Winfield Davis  Son of Brig. Gen. Franklin M. Davis, father served on Army War College faculty, 1961 Carlisle High School graduate, platoon leader, killed in action, Aug. 18, 1967.

Kenneth Lee Devor  Walnut Bottom native, 1966 Big Spring High School graduate, gunner on an armored cavalry vehicle, killed in a rocket attack, Feb. 10, 1968.

Harold Eugene BarrickCarlisle native, Newville resident, 1965 Big Spring High School graduate, ammunition handler, killed in action April 8, 1968, age 20.

Ricky Lee Null  Lemoyne resident, infantryman, died of fragmentation wounds, April 20, 1968, age 19.

David Warrington Casey  Carlisle native, 1965 Carlisle High School graduate, squad leader, died when unit was ambushed, May 18, 1968, age 21.

Thomas Thoma Sprinkle  Mechanicsburg native, 1964 Mechanicsburg High School graduate, infantryman, killed in action, July 7, 1968.

Gregory Brian Whitmore  Born in Germany, father was a career soldier, attended Camp Hill High School, soldier in a cavalry regiment, killed in action, Aug. 5, 1968, age 20.

Wayne Eugene Monismith  1965 Boiling Springs High School graduate, truck driver, killed in action while transporting much-needed ammunition, Sept. 17, 1968, age 20.

James Wallace Cramer  Tennessee native, Camp Hill resident, 1965 Cedar Cliff High School graduate, squad leader, killed by booby trap, Sept. 27, 1968, age 21.

Paul Earl Fought Jr.  Mechanicsburg resident, radio and telephone operator, died Oct. 20, 1968, age 19.

Richard Hause Sweger  1945 Lemoyne High School graduate, trained in chemical warfare, served with a headquarters company, died from injuries suffered in an air transport accident, Jan. 2, 1969.

John Ernest Marpo  Shippensburg native, Boiling Springs resident, medic, killed in action, Feb. 23, 1969.

Jerry Ray Langley  Camp Hill resident, vehicle mechanic, killed by the accidental discharge of a rifle, May 2, 1969.

Carl Frederick Lybrand  Gardners resident, 1967 Carlisle High School class member, construction equipment repairman, died of wounds from accidental grenade explosion, May 24, 1969, age 19.

William Henry Morris Jr.  Harrisburg native, 1963 Mechanicsburg High School graduate, captain in the 5th Special Forces Group, killed during an aerial reconnaissance mission, Oct. 9, 1969, age 24.

Wayne Leroy Yinger Jr.  Mechanicsburg native, 1967 Mechanicsburg High School graduate, infantryman, killed in action, May 27, 1970. Yinger was the last Cumberland County resident to die in Vietnam.

Marine

Edward Jay Rykoskey  Carlisle native, 1964 Carlisle High School graduate, radio man, struck by automatic weapons fire, Aug. 18, 1966, the only serviceman from Cumberland County whose remains are not accounted for.

Gary Lee Ream  1964 Carlisle High School graduate, classmate of Edward Rykoskey, rifleman, killed in action while acting as a point man on patrol, Nov. 3, 1966, age 20.

Jeffrey Jay David  Camp Hill resident, 1965 Cedar Cliff High School graduate, infantryman, killed by gunfire to chest, June 27, 1967, age 19.

Donald Leroy Thomas  Shippensburg native, attended local schools, rifleman, mortally wounded, Aug. 6, 1967.

John Leroy Carey  Gardners resident, 1966 Carlisle High School graduate, rifleman, killed on patrol, Feb. 13, 1968.

Carl Robert Leed  Lancaster native, West Fairview resident, Korean War veteran, member of a reconnaissance battalion, killed in mortar attack, Feb. 29, 1968, age 33.

Paul Vincent McHenry  Philadelphia native, grew up in Lower Allen Township, high school graduate, forward observer, died in a battle near Khe Sanh, June 15, 1968, age 21.

Larry Gordon Sandnes  New Cumberland native, 1966 Cedar Cliff High School graduate, shot and killed while on a mission, Dec. 8, 1968.

Joseph John Meyer Jr.  Somerset native, grew up in Mechancisburg, member of battalion landing team, killed in action in his first military operation, July 4, 1969, age 20.

Navy

Ralph David Hale II  New Cumberland native, 1963 Cedar Cliff High School graduate, corpsman, killed when boat was ambushed, Dec. 9, 1967.

Erik Niles Rudziak  Born in Germany, the son of a career military officer, 1966 Carlisle High School graduate, engineer fireman, died in sea mine explosion, Jan. 19, 1969, age 19.
In a fresh round of trouble for controversial liquor baron Vijay Mallya, a court in Mumbai has ordered seizure of assets worth Rs 1,620 crore that he held in the form of shares of various companies.

The court order came following an application by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which is probing money laundering charges against Mallya. The court also declared him a proclaimed offender.

The ED, in a statement, said Mallya held the shares in his group companies such as United Breweries (Holdings) Limited, United Breweries Limited and United Spirits Limited.

Earlier, the ED attached his properties worth `8,041 crore (market value) under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Following an attachment under the PMLA, the agency can take possession of properties only when a higher adjudicating authority confirms the order issued by an agency official. The process takes nearly six months.

However, the present round of seizure came under the criminal procedure code, wherein assets can be seized immediately. The officer added that the ED has now attached all known properties of Mallya.

Rest of them were taken over by banks when he defaulted on loans, said the official.

Mallya is facing charges of bank loan default worth Rs 9,000 crore.

The CBI and ED are simultaneously probing the cases of corruption and money laundering against him. Ever since the multi-agency probe was launched against the liquor baron, he went to the UK and has refused to return.

The ED wanted to attach Mallyas overseas assets as well, but the court declined to pass the order as of now, saying the agency doesnt have jurisdiction abroad.
Millions of panicked people lined up outside banks and ATMs across India on Friday to exchange scrapped banknotes but chaos ensued for the second straight day with poor cash flow and no signs of immediate relief.

The government extended by 72 hours a window for using the old notes for specified purposes, including paying utility bills and taxes, and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said it had enough cash to meet the demand.

But the announcements did little to assuage the increasingly-desperate people struggling to meet their daily needs with little money at hand following a shock decision by the government to scrap the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes in a bid to stamp out illegal cash.

Small business also appeared to suffer with street vendors selling ice cream, tea and snacks at iconic tourist locations such as India Gate disappearing overnight as people held on to their cash of smaller denomination.

ATMs reopened after two days but ran out of cash within hours. Banks struggled to handle the demand for exchanging withdrawn notes, raising tempers and sparking brawls with frustrated customers.

A couple from Italy said they walked more than three kilometres from their hotel in Paharganj in search of an ATM with cash.

Against an average of 125 daily transactions per ATM, about 800 to 1,000 people queued up at the kiosks on Friday, officials said.

Read | Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes scrapped: 25 things RBI wants you to know

(The) practical problems are that most ATMs have a configuration of just one cassette of `100 rupee notes and one cassette has just Rs 2,500 notes which get over soon. Hence more cassettes are required to be added, SBI chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya said. There are more than two lakh ATMs across the country.

The banks had initially promised a smooth transition to the new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes but on the ground, the process has been chaotic. In Chandigarh, police had to deploy additional personnel outside banks as tempers rose.

Long queues and confusion allegedly claimed two lives in Kerala.

In Kerala, a 48-year old man, Unni, who came to deposit Rs 5 lakh in the State Bank of Travancore, died after falling down from the second floor of the building.

In Mumbais suburb of Mulund, Vishwanath Vartak, 73, who was standing in the queue before an SBI branch to exchange currency, collapsed and died on the spot.

Archana Singh, a housewife in Noidas sector 120, said the queues are getting longer.

In Gurgaon, many returned empty handed as ATMs ran out of cash in a couple of hours.

Read | Toll tax suspension, use of old notes for utility bills extended till Nov 14

Many expressed their anger at what they called poor management of the currency shake-up.

Bhawani Shankar Tripathy, a Sector 23A resident of Gurgaon complained about a lack of preparation at bank branches across the city.

There should be more counters to deposit cash and to exchange notes, he said.

But some of the worst hit people are those in smaller towns, villages and daily-wage earners with little access to the formal banking system.

Those with marriages scheduled in their families are also aggrieved by the decision that comes in the middle of the wedding season. In Madhya Pradeshs Chhatarpur district, villagers looted a fair-price shop when the shop owner allegedly refused to accept old Rs 500 notes.

(With agency inputs)
The Chhattisgarh government on Friday assured the Supreme Court that it will not arrest Delhi University professor Nandini Sundar, who was named as an accused in the alleged murder of a tribal person in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

The assurance came as the bench of Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel indicated that they may put on hold the FIR in which Sundar and other civil society activists have been named as accused in the November 4 murder of Shamnath Baghel by Maoists.

Read | Chhattisgarh CID to probe tribal mans murder case involving DU, JNU professors

While telling the court that no coercive action would be taken against Sundar, additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta said the state would submit to the court its report in a sealed cover before the next date of hearing on November 15.

In an apparent reference to Sundar being booked in the murder case, the bench observed: You are aggravating the situation. You have to take a pragmatic view of the situation and find practical solutions.

Also Read | Murder charge is absurd, top cops attempt to harass us: DU professor Sundar
Defence minister Manohar Parrikars remarks about when and how nuclear weapons should be used came on the eve of a crucial meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in Vienna that is expected to take up Indias application to join the elite club.

They also came at a time when Indias Prime Minister was preparing for a landmark civil nuclear agreement with Japan, whose sensitivities about atomic weapons are no secret.

The point of having a credible minimum nuclear deterrent and a nuclear doctrine that is largely out in public is that there is no need to talk about the nukes, or what India intends to do with them.

Parrikar, of course, tried to pass off his remarks as a personal opinion. Why a lot of people say that India has (a) No First Use policyI should say I am a responsible nuclear power and I will not use it irresponsiblyas an individual, I get a feeling sometime why do I say that I am not going to use it first, he said on Thursday.

Experts, however, argued that the greater the ambiguity about a nuclear doctrine, the greater the deterrence. Some even contend that India erred by making public its draft nuclear doctrine in 1999, almost a year after the blasts in Pokhran, and by releasing parts of the doctrine on its adoption in 2003.

The more ambiguity and opacity there is about a nuclear doctrine, the more it adds to deterrence, Bharat Karnad, a national security expert at the Centre for Policy Research, told Hindustan Times.

Karnad, who was part of Indias first National Security Advisory Board that put together the draft doctrine, said the members of the body were aghast when the government of the day decided to make the document public.

Achin Vanaik, one of the founders of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, said it had become the norm for some Union ministers and chief ministers to make outrageous statements that were later rationalised.

No matter what the defence minister said, he was speaking in an official capacity and his comments cant be taken lightly, Vanaik said. This is part of a wider strategy to inject certain things into the public discourse that fits in with the belligerent, intolerant nationalism this government is pushing.

Vanaik also questioned the nuclear stance of India and China, saying both werent practising what they preach about No First Use. He said, No First Use implies these countries should have enough weapons only for a second strike but theyre both expanding their arsenals.

Observers have contended that Parrikars remarks were an apparent retort to recent sabre-rattling by Pakistan, but Karnad argued that the neighbouring country did not even pose a credible threat.

Referring to a countrys capacity to absorb a nuclear strike, he said the exchange ratio between destruction imposed and destruction absorbed would be far greater for Pakistan.
Defence minister Manohar Parikkar has done it again.

His latest off-the-cuff remark, this time on Indias nuclear doctrine, has again led to a controversy and possibly an embarrassment for the government at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has landed in Japan, the country which is the worst sufferer of nuclear weapons, to sign a nuclear deal.

Speaking at a book launch on Thursday speaking at a book launch the Union minister wondered why India bound itself to its no first use policy instead of saying we are a responsible nuclear power and will not use it irresponsibly.

Why should I bind myself? I should say I am a responsible nuclear power and I will not use it irresponsibly. This is my thinking, Parrikar said in response to a question about the unpredictability in warfare strategy. He further clarified that his remarks were his personal view on the matter.

But Parikkar is not new to controversial statements.

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modis attack on Pakistan for committing atrocities in Balochistan province, Parrikar upped the ante by comparing the neighbouring country to hell.

Going to Pakistan is the same as going to hell, he said at a Bharatiya Janata Party meet in Rewari, shortly after news broke that finance minister Arun Jaitley would skip the Saarc meet of ministers in Islamabad next week.

The defence minister said this in the context of a failed infiltration attempt on Monday in which Indian troops sent back five terrorists.

This is not the first time the defence minister has been overtly candid with his comments, many of which have attracted criticism from various quarters.

On May 21, 2015 at an event in New Delhi, he said, We have to neutralise terrorists through terrorists only. Why cant we do it? We should do it. Why does my soldier have to do it?... kaante se kaanta nikalta hai (you remove a thorn with the help of a thorn).

He claimed that terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir were being paid monthly salaries ranging from Rs 10,000 to 15,000.

When questioned about Pakistans reaction to his terrorist against terrorists comment a few days later, he responded: Pakistan ko mirchi lagi, woh bhi Andhra ki (A chilli, that too from Andhra Pradesh has hit them).

Bollywood stars have been unable to evade Parrikars attacks as well.

One actor had said that his wife wants to leave India. It was an arrogant statement. If I am poor and my house is small, I will still love my house and always dream to make a bungalow out of it, Parrikar said in a veiled attack on actor Aamir Khan at a book launch event in Pune on July 30.

In another faux pas, Parrikar seemingly crossed the line to distasteful while addressing a seminar on Design and Make in India-Electronics at Vivekananda International Foundation, on June 4, 2015.

Ive found that nowadays the eyes (of Ganesha idols) are becoming smaller and smaller. One day I turned it back and found Made in China, he said, referring to how Lord Ganesha idols too were being manufactured in China.

While refusing to disclose the source of his information on an Indian Coast Guard operation involving a boat from Pakistan last year, Parrikar said, You have to build deep assets. Deep assets are created over 20-30 years. Sadly, there were some prime ministers who compromised deep assets.

I am not going to disclose names. Many people know.

And inquisitive reporters often end up of the receiving end of his sharp retorts.

I will not speak to the media for six months, he shot back when a journalist in Goa last year sought his comments on defence-related issues. He flatly refused to take any questions related to his portfolio.

What is a reporters salary... How much does a news reader earn? Maybe 25,000 (rupees). They are mostly graduates. They are not great thinkers...intellectuals. They write news how they understand it, he said in February 2014 at a public function.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
An ultrasound test costs Rs 200-300 in a government hospital, but the charges at a private clinic could run up to Rs 30,000 and more for parents who want to know the sex of their unborn baby.

And there are many who pay up, making unscrupulous doctors involved in illegal sex determination rich beyond belief. India is missing more than 25 million girls since 1991  which is like losing the population of Australia in two decades  and unscrupulous doctors choosing money over lives are to blame.

Illegal abortion of unborn baby girls has brought down Indias child sex ratio  ratio of girls per 1,000 boys at age six  to 919 girls per 1,000 boys, down from 983 in 1951. Though the Pre-Conception & Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act (PC-PNDT Act) banned sex determination and pre-conception sex-selection in 1994, the high demand for services from parents desperate for a son has led to sex-determination services reaching villages where there are no toilets or safe drinking water.

Read | Supreme Court gives more teeth to law banning sex determination

India recorded its sharpest 18-point fall in child sex ratio between 2001, and 17 points in 1991, when prenatal diagnostic techniques such as ultrasounds and amniocentesis became widely available, marking the beginning of their misuse for sex determination. Apart from pre-conception procedures that help parents choose the gender of the baby, tests are now available that can determine the sex of the foetus in the seventh week of pregnancy. A blood test that analyses foetal DNA found in the would-be mother can determine a babys gender before eight weeks into pregnancy. The test, available in India, measures DNA fragments from the placenta circulating in the mothers blood to detect Down syndrome and two other chromosomal abnormalities in the foetus, but it is also being used to determine the gender of the unborn baby for sex-selective abortions.

Worrying drop

Im not so worried about these tests because they are highly specialised and not available everywhere, unlike the around 55,000 registered ultrasound clinics registered in India, which are being misused by unscrupulous profiteers to bring down child sex ratio in almost every district of India, says Sabu George, who is on Indias national inspection and monitoring committee PC&PNDT.

Im just back from Rajasthan, where ultrasound clinics are now found in every block in every district, unlike a decade ago when you just found them around urban hubs, adds George, who has been tracking Indias falling sex ratio for more than three decades.

Some people blame the lack of a central supervisory mechanism. The PC-PNDT Act is under the ministry of health, schemes for the girl child are under the ministry of women and child development, while birth registration is under the ministry of home affairs. It should be under one nodal agency for effective implementation, recommends the Asian Centre for Human Rightss report on The State of the PC&PNDT Act: Indias losing battle against female foeticide.

George disagrees: The PC-PNDT act is very clearly under the ministry of health and family welfare and if states choose to act against those who break the law, foeticide can be stopped.

Over the past two decades, the implementation of the PC-PNDT has been poor with some states showing spurts of activity. Haryana is on the right track, where the child sex ratio crossed 900 in two decades and even found mention by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Haryanas recent Swarna Jayanti Utsav.

For the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (scheme), I begged people of Haryana to protect the lives of daughters... Today, in the entire country, if anyone is bringing improvement in the gender ratio at a fast pace, it is Haryana, said Modi last week.

Rajasthan rising

Not quite. The state thats out-performed Haryana is Rajasthan, which is among nine states with a sex ratio of less than 900. The state conducted 17 raids over the past four months, with seven raids carried inter-state  three in Gujarat, three in Uttar Pradesh, and one in Haryana. All the cases are under trial, with the respective high courts rejecting bails in four cases.

Rajasthan made it possible by setting up a PC-PNDT Bureau of Investigation, which works under the state appropriate authority empowered by the PC-PNDT Act to implement the law. Set up in September 2012 by an Act, the bureau has jurisdiction over the PC-PNDT Acct, the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, and the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, which bans abortions after 20 weeks of gestation.

The bureau works closely with the chief medical and health officers team. The police have too many things to do, the idea is to have policemen dedicated to stopping the killing of the unborn girl child, says Raghubir Singh, project director, PC-PNDT and an additional superintendent of police. The bureau has 120 posts for Rajasthans 33 districts, including a police officer in every district to set up decoy operations and conduct raids, NGO representatives and health officials.

Read | New team to check prenatal sex determination in Gurgaon

Section 178 in code of criminal procedure has a provision for action against continuing offences in different local areas, which makes it possible for us to raid offenders in other states who have patients from Rajasthan, says Singh.

George says that no other state has taken the law as seriously and pushed convictions through like Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Haryana.

Sporadic convictions will not give results, you have to seal clinics and stop doctors from breaking the law. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, 30 clinics doing illegal ultrasounds were closed in Kushinagar district in March 2013, but that momentum was lost when the district collector was transferred, he says.

The pressure to not implement the law is immense. Doctors who make money, parents who dont want a girl, people who see it as a social and cultural issue, not a crime, all want the law to fail but that cannot be allowed to happen. India needs its daughters as much as it sons, Singh adds.

Also Read | Cash incentives for informers to stop foeticide in Delhi

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
India and Japan on Friday signed a landmark civil nuclear cooperation deal after talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his counterpart Shinzo Abe, a move that will boost bilateral economic and security ties and facilitate US-based players to set up atomic plants in India.

The two countries had reached a broad agreement for cooperation in civil nuclear energy sector during Abes visit to India in December last year, but the deal was yet to be signed as some issues were yet to be worked out.

Read | PM Modi calls on Japanese emperor ahead of bilateral talks with Abe

A landmark deal for a cleaner, greener world! PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo witness exchange of the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement, external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted on Friday.

A landmark deal for a cleaner, greener world! PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo witness exchange of the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement pic.twitter.com/1HPy72XJhi  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

The deal would allow Japan to export nuclear technology to India, making it the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo. It would also cement the bilateral economic and security ties as the two countries warm up to counter an assertive China.

There was political resistance in Japan - the only country to suffer atomic bombings during World War II - against a nuclear deal with India, particularly after the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

Read | India aims to be worlds most open economy: PM Modi in Japan

Japan is a major player in the nuclear energy market and an atomic deal with it will make it easier for US-based nuclear plant makers Westinghouse Electric Corporation and GE Energy Inc to set up atomic plants in India as both these conglomerates have Japanese investments.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mangolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.
Pakistan on Friday briefed Head of Missions of P5 countries on the alleged Indian aggression on the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, saying the use of heavy weaponry by the Indian Army threatens peace and stability and may lead to a strategic miscalculation.

Foreign secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry provided details to the ambassadors of China, France, Russian, UK and USA, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, about unprovoked firing and ceasefire violations by the Indian occupation Forces in the past two months, the Foreign Office (FO) said.

Chaudhry expressed grave concern over the increased frequency and duration of indiscriminate firing from the Indian side, deliberate targeting of villages and civilian populated areas, resulting in the death of 26 civilians and injuring 107 others, said FO.

The foreign secretary also alleged that the Indian side was resorting to such heavy weaponry use after a gap of 13 years.

Pakistan has been compelled to respond but with maximum restraint. The Armed Forces of Pakistan gave a befitting response, FO quoted Chaudhry as saying.

He expressed apprehension that Indian actions, which constituted a threat for the maintenance of peace and security, may lead to a strategic miscalculation.

He said India was also not cooperating with the United Nations Military Observers Group (UNMOGIP).

The Heads of Missions assured that they would convey Pakistans concern to their respective capitals, the FO statement said.
India and Pakistan are possibly headed for another showdown on water after New Delhi said on Thursday it wouldnt be party to a court of arbitration process on Kishenganga and Ratle hydroelectric projects  a demand by Islamabad that has been accepted by World Bank.

The World Bank had brokered the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960 and has a specific role in the resolution of differences.

Kishengaga is a tributary of the river Jhelum and the Rs 57.8 billion run-of-the-river project is coming up in Bandipora in Jammu and Kashmir.

The 850 MW Ratle project is on the Chenab in Doda district.

India sought for the neutral experts looking into the bilateral differences over the technical aspects of the projects, while Pakistan asked for a court of arbitration.

Read: Indus water tussle heats up between India and Pakistan

The World Bank decided to proceed with both steps, and India says the movie is not in accordance with the Indus water treaty.

Inexplicably, the World Bank has decided to continue to proceed with these two parallel mechanisms simultaneously. India cannot be party to actions which are not in accordance with the Indus Waters Treaty, external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

He said the government will examine further options and take steps accordingly. Indias grouse is that the World Bank hasnt followed the procedures laid out in the treaty.

India says Pakistans objections are technical in nature and the bilateral Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) can address these technical questions.

If PIC cant resolve the matter, it is termed difference, which is addressed by a neutral expert(NE) appointed on request by either Party to the World Bank.

If the neutral expert decides so, he or she can refer a part of a difference or the whole of it for resolution by a court of arbitration (COA).

The COA has seven members, two arbitrators each to be appointed by India and Pakistan, and three Umpires nominated by certain global dignitaries. If parties cant agree on who will nominate the umpires, a draw of lots decides which three of these global dignitaries will nominate one umpire each.

India points out Pakistan had lost its case in a COA in 2013 when it said the Kishenganga project couldnt be built in a way which would lead to diversion of water in tributary of the river. This objection was overruled.

Ninety-five % of the project is complete and it was due for commissioning this month.

Regarding Ratle, Pakistan wanted the planned storage capacity of the project to be reduced to eight million cubic metre from 24 million cubic metre.

Read: World Bank asks India, Pak to agree to mediation on Indus Waters Treaty

Pakistan argued the existing design would lead to reduction of 40% of water flow, which is against the Indus Water Treaty provisions. India found Pakistans charges unfounded and said it was in no way violating any provision of the treaty.

Nevertheless, Pakistan persisted and raised objection to the technical design parameters such as pondage (volume of water used for running turbines) again.

India points out Pakistan itself suggested a neutral expert even in 2015, which it rescinded later. It notified its intention to India to move for COA. India didnt agree to this because these design matters, preferably addressed by PIC, or at the most by NE.

Pakistan approached WB in August 2016 for COA, which India says was against the laid out procedures under the Indus Water Treaty.

Since the PIC was unable to agree on resolving these differences, India notified Pakistan in august 2016 at the Commission level that the differences should be addressed by NE.

This was after a meeting of water secretaries of the two countries, which India says it had offered out of good will, in July did not address the matter.
Pakistan has said US president-elect Donald Trump offered to mediate between Pakistan and India to resolve the Kashmir dispute when he spoke last month about the tension between the two countries.

The US president-elect had offered mediation between Pakistan and India on Kashmir dispute during his campaign and we had welcomed that offer, said foreign office spokesman Nafees Zakaria in Islamabad on Thursday.

Read: Donald Trump: If hes bad for the US, hes bad for us

PTI reports Trump had last month described the tension between India and Pakistan as a very, very hot tinderbox and offered to be the mediator or arbitrator if the two countries agreed.

Zakaria said Pakistan would sensitise the Trump administration about alleged human rights violations in Kashmir.

Read: New York says not my President: When a city marched against Donald Trump

He said Pakistan had very close relation and bilateral cooperation with the US. There are numerous areas where both countries have convergence of interests and have worked in partnership on several issues. We look forward to closely working with the new administration in pursuit of our common ideals of freedom, democracy and prosperity, he said.

It will remain our endeavour to promote and strengthen this relationship further and also to work closely on areas of common interest with the new administration, Zakaria was quoted by the Express Tribune as saying.
If youre considering setting off any Chinese sky lanterns in South Middleton Township, youd better think again. Its now illegal.

On Thursday night, South Middleton Township supervisors approved a new ordinance that prohibits the launch of sky lanterns, or skylighters in the township, as well as revising existing municipal regulations for firework displays.

Sky lanterns operate on the same principal as hot air balloons, but are much smaller and unmanned. Theyre propelled by burning wax and usually topped by shades made of paper and wire. Township officials see this as a burning issue thats a recipe for trouble.

Theres clearly a danger (with sky lanterns). What goes up could come down. Sometimes they come down the candle still lit. You can cause a fire unintentionally or dump up a neighbors yard with litter when they land, Supervisor Vice Chairman Tom Faley said.

In South Carolina, a sky lantern that remained lit after landing caused a fire that burned 80 acres of land. The shaded pyrotechnics already are illegal in 23 other states and several foreign countries, Faley noted.

Also, townships fireworks regulations now require anyone intending to host a fireworks display to make a reasonable attempt to provide proper notification to all impacted property owners.

In other words, if youre planning to set off fireworks this New Years Eve, youd better let your neighbors know beforehand. Faley said this provision was inspired by complaints from residents who didnt know about nearby fireworks displays until it happened.

Finally, anyone applying for a township fireworks permit now must show proof of liability insurance for $1 million. Previously, townships requirement for proof of insurance carried no specific dollar amount, Faley said.

Also on Thursday, township supervisors approved a final land development plan for F&M Trust on East First Street. The bank is installing an ATM and canopy at a drive-thru lane on the east side of the building. Construction will start as soon as possible after F&M obtains a building permit from the township, said engineer Scott R. Shildt of Martin and Martin Inc.

The ATM provides customers with an option of using an existing walk-up ATM located on the front of the building. Company representatives have expressed concerns about the safety of customers with handicaps who use that ATM.

In a related moved, township supervisors approved the transfer of a 0.0887-acre parcel of land between the South Middleton Township Municipal Authority and F&M Trust. The parcel already is the site of an F&M parking lot.

The parking lot was built on Municipal Authority property, but no one knew (at the time it was built), Shildt said.

No sale was involved in the property transfer, but the bank was responsible for the transfers processing costs, Shildt said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today called on Japanese Emperor Akihito ahead of key bilateral talks with counterpart Shinzo Abe during his three-day visit.

A rare audience that symbolises the unique warmth between India and Japan. PM Narendra Modi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan, external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Read | Modi leaves for Japan, nuke deal and stronger ties on the agenda

Speaking of civilisations. PM Modi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of India and Japan and the future of Asia, he said in another tweet.

The call on came ahead of wide-ranging talks between Modi and his counterpart Abe aimed at giving a fillip to the bilateral strategic relations.

After the annual Summit, about 12 pacts will be signed by the two sides, sources said, adding there were also high expectations about the civil nuclear deal being signed.

Also Read | PM Modi meets Indian community members in Japan
The Punjab government is likely to bring a new bill on the inter-state water dispute in a move that could complicate the legal tussle with Haryana over sharing of water from the Beas and Sutlej rivers, official sources said on Friday.

The SAD-BJP government led by Parkash Singh Badal asked President Pranab Mukherjee to ignore the Supreme Courts terming as unconstitutional a 2004 state law that scrapped all water-sharing arrangements between Punjab and its neighbouring states,including Haryana.

The dispute is likely to become a major issue with the opposition Congress turning the heat on the Badal government ahead of next years assembly polls.

On Friday, all 42 Congress legislators resigned from the assembly, a day after the partys state president Amarinder Singh quit as a Lok Sabha MP to protest the court ruling.

Singhs government had enacted Punjabs Termination of Agreements Act to stop work on the 212-km-long Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal. Haryana, which is banking on the canal to bring water from the rivers to the states dry and arid areas, had moved the top court opposing the law.

Punjab government sources said the fresh bill was likely to be introduced at a special session of the assembly, convened on November 16 to discuss the verdict.

The Badal government has vowed not to allow a single drop of water to be taken from Punjab.

Sources said the government has tasked advocate general Ashok Aggarwal and other top legal eagles to put in place a legal strategy to hit-back politically and stay ahead of the Congress, which has blamed the ruling alliance of failing to protect Punjabs interest in court.

The Supreme Courts judicial reference is not a binding on President who may accept, reject or send (it) back to Supreme Court for fresh opinion. Punjab government has set up a team of lawyers, including me, to examine the advisory. We will be able to give our viewpoint by Saturday, Aggarwal said.

Government sources say at the heart of the move to bring a fresh bill is to go beyond the 2004 law.

The Constitution clearly forbids the Centre from arrogating to itself the right to adjudicate on distribution of river waters among states. Grave injustice has been done to Punjab by the Centre, violating this Constitutional clause, CM Badal said in his letter to the President.

Earlier in the day, the Congress announced a statewide agitation from November 13, with a public rally at a village in south west Punjab.

This area would become a desert incase water flows into SYL, taking water from Punjab into Haryana, Amarinder Singh said.

With tension rising, Haryana suspended state-run buses to Punjab citing security reasons.

It is a precautionary measure in view of the prevailing situation, said Haryana additional chief secretary, transport, Sudeep Singh Dhillon.

Though the transport department claimed that only long-route operations have been temporarily stopped, some depots have stopped plying buses even on short routes.

Some Haryana leaders and khaps have threatened not to allow vehicles from Punjab to pass through the state if the Badal government does not accept the court verdict.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi stood in queue with hundreds of consumers looking to withdraw cash at a bank branch in Delhi, in an apparent show of solidarity with the common people.

Mere logon ko kasht hua hai, mai unke saath khada hoon yahan (My people have suffered. I am standing by them), Gandhi said, standing in queue at the State Bank of India branch on Parliament Street in Delhi. Gareeb vyakti ko kasht ho raha hai (The poor are suffering).

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Parliament Street in New Delhi, on Friday. (ANI)

Millions of panicked consumers have been lining up outside banks and ATMs across India since Thursday to exchange scrapped banknotes, but chaos ensued for the second straight day with poor cash flow. People have been struggling to deposit or exchange Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes  which the government abruptly put out of circulation on Tuesday in a bid to stamp out black money.

Mai yahan Rs 4000 badalne aaya hoon (Ive come here to exchange Rs 4,000), Gandhi said.

Opposition parties, including the Congress, have criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government for inconveniencing the public by abruptly demonetising the high-value currency notes, which account for 86% of the currency in circulation by value.

Read | Banks struggle to handle panicked customers, ATMs run dry within hours
Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar said on Friday people were now going for food such as milk, rasgulla, gulab jamun and peda after shunning liquor.

He backed his claim by reeling out figures.

Sale of peda has increased by 15.5%, gulab jamun by 15% and honey manufactured by state diary cooperative - Sudha by a whopping 380% in the past seven months since prohibition came into force in Bihar, he said addressing Chetna sabha as part of his Nishchay yatra.

He had earlier asserted sale of Rasgulla has increased by 16.25% during this period while milk saw a hike of 11% since Bihar became a complete dry state.

Muzaffarpur was the third stoppage of Kumars Nishchay yatra aimed at taking feedback from people on prohibition as well as on the seven resolves that have been adopted by the government as their policy of governance for next five years.

The seven resolves include civic amenities like drinking water, toilet, roads and electricity for every household.

Kumar invoked Swami Vivekananda to answer his critics on liquor ban. Swami Vivekananda had said that while doing any big work, one would face ridicule, then protest and ultimately people would extend support, he said.

Some say I have gone mad while some others say I am intoxicated (for the sake of power), he said.

The Bihar chief minister said there would be no compromise with the prohibition.

Kumar talked about smuggling of alcohol into the state after the ban.

I had asked chief secretary and DGP to go into details of illegal trade of liquor into Bihar from Haryana and after hard work, the trade has been busted, he said.

Kumar exhorted women in particular to be vigilant against those still consuming and trading in liquor.

As soon as you (women) spot anybody consuming alcohol, all the women of the village get together and dump the person in a de-addiction centre, he said.

Ministers Abdul Bari Siddiqui and Madan Mohan Jha, chief secretary Anjani Kumar Singh and state police chief P K Thakur were also present on the occasion.
The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a plea challenging actor Salman Khans acquittal in two deer poaching cases and issued a notice to the Bollywood star notorious for run-ins with the law, ANI reported.

The Rajasthan government had approached the top court last month against a high court verdict that cleared Khan of charges of killing Chinkaras or Indian gazelles 18 years ago.

The SC decision comes after an uproar over Khans acquittal in July when the Rajasthan high court said the prosecution failed to prove charges and the evidence was too thin for convicting the superstar.

Read: Rajasthan high court acquits Salman Khan in Chinkara poaching cases

The high court overturned two trial court verdicts that handed the actor one and five years imprisonment. Salman has spent 13 days behind bars.

A year ago, the Bombay high court cleared the actor of all charges in a controversial 2002 hit-and-run case, triggering outrage and questions about whether the actor had used his star power to subvert the judicial system.

Chinkaras are a protected species and hunting them is banned. The actor was accused of hunting two chinkaras on September 26, 1998 in Bhawad village area of Jodhpur and another one two days later at Ghora Farm. Seven other accused in the Bhawad case were let off.

The actor was shooting for the film Hum Saath Saath Hain at that time. Two cases against Salman  black-buck hunting and possessing illegal arms  are still being tried at trial courts in the state.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
An elderly man standing in queue collapsed and died, while another fell to his death while filling forms to deposit over Rs 5 lakh worth scrapped high denomination notes as banks in Kerala continued to witness huge surge of customers for the second day on Friday to exchange demonetised Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes.

Police said 75-year-old Karthikeyan from Kumarapuram in Haripad in Alappuzha district was standing in a queue at a branch of the State Bank of Travancore, when he collapsed and died.

In the other incident, Unni (48), working as an overseer in the Kerala State Electricity Board fell to his death while he was filling the necessary forms to deposit Rs 5.50 lakh he had with him. Initial reports say it was an accident, police said.

Police said the man had taken the loan from his PF account and had come to deposit it in the bank when he fell from the second floor of the building, housing the bank. He had stood in the queue for some time, police said.

A case of unnatural death has been registered.

Unni had come to the bank yesterday also but was unable to deposit the amount due to the heavy rush.

ATMs of various banks across the state failed to operate in the initial hours today causing much hardship to customers who had to rush to banks for exchanging the demonetised notes and depositing their money.

Despite various banks assuring people that ATMs, which had remained shut for two days, would begin functioning from today, only a few of them were open in the early hours, testing the patience of harried customers.

Unprecedented rush was witnessed at the ATMs which opened this morning. But within hours they went dry, following which customers were seen protesting at some places.
Banks opened on Thursday, their first day of business after the governments surprise move to ban Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, and there was chaos at the counters. A crush of people anxious to get rid of old currency bills forced some banks to call police and others to shut down within hours.

Citing inconvenience caused to the people, the opposition launched a fresh attack on the Narendra Modi government, calling the move economic emergency and demanded that the decision be overturned immediately.

The government remained firm and said all currency bills would be reintroduced, with new look and features. The Rs 2,000 note had quite a debut. It arguably would be the most selfie-d bill in the country.

The government also announced more steps to make the currency switch easier. Heres the latest:

Read: Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes scrapped: 25 things RBI wants you to know

Heres whats new:

Utility move

Old 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes can also be used to pay utility bills and taxes till Friday midnight. The government had earlier said rail, metro and air tickets could be bought with old notes. Old notes can be used for LPG cylinders as well. Government hospitals and pharmacies have been told to accept the old bills.

Read: More relief: Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes can be used for paying utility bills, tax

NEFT, cheque-clearing on Sat, Sun

Transfer of money electronically and through cheques will be allowed over the weekend as well. To meet the rush, banks will remain open on November 12 and 13 and work extended hours on Friday.

Non-refundable tickets

The government has asked air carriers to ensure that tickets bought using the old high-value notes at airports are non-refundable following an unusual surge in such bookings in the aftermath of the demonitisation decision.

The directive to airline operators came amid concerns that unscrupulous elements could use the tickets to legalise unaccounted for cash by cancelling the bookings and seeking a refund.

Read: Tickets sold at airport counters with Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes non-refundable

ATMs to normalise in two weeks

Cash management agencies that move billions of rupees in and out of more than 2.2 lakh ATMs across the country have started a major exercise that could see currency worth Rs 40,000 crore being transported and hope to normalise operations in two weeks.

We will put in three times the normal efforts to ensure the inconveniences end at the earliest, Rajiv Kaul, managing director and vice-chairman of CMS Info System, which owns over half of the cash-management market, said.

Generally, one among the 8,000 vans visits an ATM around 12-15 times a month. These visits would go up to at least two a day, the official said, adding even the unclean Rs 100 notes would be used.

Helping NRIs

The government was looking for ways to help non-resident Indians deposit the old bills in overseas branches of Indian banks, Indias acting high commissioner to the UK said.

Our endeavour is to help everybody. We have asked Delhi about it (banned notes with NRIs). I have a feeling we will work out something so that people who have carried certain amount of cash in their pocket should be able to deposit it in any Indian bank abroad, Dinesh Patnaik said.

Small depositors safe

Assuring people that the taxman will not hound those making small deposits in scrapped Rs 500, Rs 1,000 currency, finance minister Arun Jaitley advised them not to crowd banks as there was enough time to exchange the money. Those depositing large amounts of unaccounted for money would have to pay tax and a 200% penalty.

Cash deposits of Rs 2.5 lakh and above would be scrutinised by the tax department and in case of a mismatch with I-T returns, tax plus 200% penalty would be levied, revenue secretary Hasmukh Adhia said on Wednesday.

The RBI has cautioned people against agents offering to exchange old notes.

Read: Chaos reigns at banks, ATMs as people rush to ditch worthless banknotes

Samples of the new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 notes are displayed at the Reserve Bank of India headquarters in Mumbai on November 9. (AFP)

Against economic terrorism

The demonetisation move would go a long way in fighting economic terrorism by checking the use of black money for funding subversive activities. Sujata Mehta, secretary (west) of the ministry of external affairs, also said the scourge of cross-border terrorism had assumed highly destructive proportions and there was an urgent need to check safe havens and sanctuaries enjoyed by terrorists.

People who earned their money honestly had no reason to worry, Union minister M Venkaiah Naidu said.Do not panic. Your notes will not be invalid, if money is valid, he said.

Union minister of state for home Kiren Rijiju said Prime Minister Narendra Modis surgical strike on black money had dealt a blow to those supplying fake notes and those funding terror.

Rs 1,000 note will be back

Government would bring back Rs 1,000 note in a few months and also issue a new series of smaller bills with enhanced security features, economic affairs secretary Shaktikanta Das said. The smaller notes in circulation would continue to be the legal tender.

Banks started distributing new notes of Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 on Thursday. The Rs 500 banknote has a new colour, theme and size that clearly marks it out from the earlier bill. The Rs 2,000 note is in magenta colour with Mangalyaan, Indias Mars orbiter, printed on the reverse side.

Bank crush

Huge rush was seen at bank counters on Thursday. People had to wait for hours to change money or make withdrawals using pay-in slips or cheques. Post offices, too, are replacing currency notes.

All ATMs were to get operational Friday, though some did open on Thursday after a days break like the banks. The government should have stocked ATMs with new currency before announcing the decision, said some cash-starved customers.

Rivals up in arms

The opposition would have none of it. The Samajwadi Party dubbed the move as anarchist and hasty, while archrival Bahujan Samaj Party said the country was facing a financial emergency.

Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal challenged Modi to make public the names of 648 Indians with Swiss bank accounts whose details were shared with New Delhi during the United Progressive Alliance rule.

Social activist Anna Hazare lauded the Centre for its bold and revolutionary decision, saying it will curb black money.

(With agency inputs)

Read: Currency ban: Stand against Modi brings Kejriwal, Maya and Mulayam on same page
Amit Shah, the president of Indias ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, hit out at political rivals on Friday for opposing the central governments move to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes to fight corruption.

Why are they upset? asked Shah, daring opposition parties to make the demonetisation of currency notes a poll issue. He, however, clarified that the government did not take the step in view of the upcoming elections, including that in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.

His attack was directed at the Congress party, Arvind Kejriwals Aam Aadmi Party and Uttar Pradesh stalwarts Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, which have criticised the move on the grounds that people were facing problems.

People are closely watching the reaction of political parties...People should questions these four parties. They have exposed themselves, Shah said.

Read: Govt imposes up to Rs 8,500 levy per flight, airfares to rise

In a surprise move, the Narendra Modi government said earlier this week that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in circulation will not be considered legal from the midnight of November 8. Making his announcement, the Prime Minister said the move was aimed at rooting out corruption and wiping out counterfeit currency notes.

The government also said people can deposit the old notes at banks and post offices and take home new notes that were introduced on Thursday.

But long and chaotic queues were witnessed at banks and ATMs after they opened following a days break to cope with the new arrangement. Many citizens, especially those in rural areas, were confused about what to do next and how to exchange the currency bills. And many thought their money was now useless.

Read: ATMs functioning at 10% capacity, quick relief unlikely for customers

Shah admitted that people were initially facing difficulties, but some pain is inevitable when a historical decision is taken.

He said there was a lot of discussion before the notes were banned, and appealed to the countrymen to support the move, which he said was a big blow to terrorists, Naxalities (read Maoists), fake currency and hawala operators.

The Narendra Modi government has embarked on a campaign to end corruption, Shah said, The step which has been taken will greatly benefit the economy.

He reiterated the governments stand that the middle class, the poor and small traders will face no problems.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Punjab and Haryana are locked in a dispute over the sharing of the Ravi-Beas waters for decades. While Haryana wants its share, as was decided when the state was carved out of Punjab along with Himachal Pradesh 50 years ago, successive Punjab governments have refused to share water.

In 2004, Capt Amarinder Singh-led Congress government enacted a law scrapping all water-sharing agreements with Ravi and Beas waters with neighbouring states. The Centre sought the Supreme Courts opinion on the law.

Eight months ago, the SAD-BJP government passed another law to return the land acquired on its side for the Sutlej Yamuna link (SYL) canal, which was to carry Haryanas share of water, to its owners. When Haryana sought its intervention, the Supreme Court called for status quo. On Thursday, the court junked the 2004 law, terming it unconstitutional.

Read | Political upheaval in Punjab after SC tells it to share Sutlej water

The brief history of the river water dispute and SYL canal, which will make poll waves with Punjab due for assembly election in early 2017:

What is the river-water row?

After the erstwhile Punjab was reorganised into Punjab and Haryana on November 1, 1966, differences arose between the two states over their share of the surplus Ravi and Beas waters. While Haryana claimed 4.8 million acre feet (MAF) of water of the total 7.2 MAF (share of the erstwhile Punjab) on the principle of equitable distribution, the Punjab government did not agree. Haryana approached the Centre, which issued a notification on March 24, 1976, spelling out the rights and liabilities of the states. Haryana was allocated 3.5 MAF of waters.

Why is the SYL canal important?

The 212km-long SYL canal was to carry Haryanas share of water to its dry and arid southern part. While 121km of the canal was to run through Punjab, the remaining 91km through Haryana, which completed the work in June 1980. Around Rs 250 crore were spent on the canal system. Haryana also gave Rs 1 crore to Punjab in November 1976, the first instalment of the Rs 192 crore it would give the neighbour over the years for building the canal. However, Punjab did not start the work. Both the state filed separate petitions in the Supreme Court in 1979.

What made Punjab start construction?

Punjab began the work on the canal after a tripartite agreement. Though the petitions were pending in the court, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi met the chief ministers of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan on December 31, 1981. The three CMs signed an agreement that saw an increase in the available Ravi-Beas waters from 15.85 MAF to 17.17 MAF.

The agreement allowed Punjab the use of Rajasthans share till it could spare the water, allowing the state an additional 1.32 MAF. Punjab agreed to complete the canal work within two years and the two states withdrew the petitions from the Supreme Court. On April 8, 1982, Indira Gandhi led the ground-breaking ceremony near Kapuri village in Patiala district.

What was the Rajiv-Longowal accord?

Within weeks of the ground-breaking ceremony, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) launched an agitation against the canal under the leadership of Sant Harchand Singh Longowal. They followed it up with protests. In August 1982, the agitation was converted into a Dharam Yudh (holy war). The agitation took a violent turn, plunging the state into chaos. On July 24, 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Longowal signed the Punjab accord in New Delhi. The agreement called for completion of the canal by August 1986 and an SC judge-led tribunal to decide Punjab and Haryanas share of the remaining water. In its report submitted in January 1987, the tribunal increased the share of both the states but the award was not notified.

Read | Will not accept court verdict on sharing river water with Haryana: Badal

What did Punjab suspend construction?

The SS Barnala-led SAD government started the work and 90% of it was completed, costing around Rs 700 crore. But the construction was stopped when Sikh militants gunned down two senior engineers and 35 labourers working on the canal. On November 23, 1990, the Haryana CM asked the Centre to hand over the work to one of its agencies. A decision was taken to rope in the Border Roads Organisation, but not a brick has been laid since. In September 1996, Haryana filed a plea in the Supreme Court, seeking directions for Punjab to complete the canal.

When were the inter-state agreements annulled?

The court, in January 2002 and June 2004, ordered the remaining portion of the canal to be completed. The Centre was on June 4, 2004 told to ask one of it agencies to take control of the canal work. But a month later, the Punjab assembly enacted the Punjab termination of agreements act, annulling all inter-state agreements on sharing Ravi and Beas waters.

Where things stand today?

The Centre on July 22, 2004 sought the opinion of the apex court on the validity of the Punjab law through a presidential reference. The court heard the matter the next month without any outcome.

Haryana filed an application in February 2011 for the implementation of the 2002 and 2004 orders. Last year, Punjab filed a suit, seeking a new tribunal to decide the water share.

In March this year, Punjab came out with another law, de-notifying the land acquired for the canal and for it to be returned it to its owners. Haryana challenged the law in the Supreme Court, which ordered status quo. Punjab also returned to Haryana Rs 192 crore it had received for the SYL canal only for the cheque to be sent back.

The hearing on presidential reference resumed on February 29, 2016, and concluded May 12. The court struck down the law on Thursday.



Read | SC Sutlej verdict a moment for Badals belligerence, Captains martyr stroke

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
The World Bank on Friday asked India and Pakistan to agree to mediation in order to settle on a mechanism for how the Indus Waters Treaty should be used to resolve issues regarding two dams under construction along the Indus river system.

The World Banks move came as it told the two countries that it was responding to their separate proceedings initiated under the Indus Waters Treaty 1960.

Simultaneously, the World Bank held a draw of lots to determine who will appoint three umpires to sit on the Court of Arbitration that Pakistan has requested.

The draw of lots was held at the World Bank headquarters here.

The World Bank Group has a strictly procedural role under the Indus Waters Treaty and the treaty does not allow it to choose whether one procedure should take precedence over the other. This is why we drew the lots and proposed potential candidates for the Neutral Expert today, said senior vice president and World Bank group general counsel Anne-Marie Leroy.

What is clear, though, is that pursuing two concurrent processes under the treaty could make it unworkable over time and we therefore urge both parties to agree to mediation that the World Bank Group can help arrange.

The two countries can also agree to suspend the two processes during the mediation process or at any time until the processes are concluded, Leroy said.

The Bank said the Indus Waters Treaty 1960 is seen as one of the most successful international treaties and has withstood frequent tensions between India and Pakistan, including conflict.

The Bank is a signatory to the Treaty.

The Treaty sets out a mechanism for cooperation and information exchange between the two countries regarding their use of the rivers, known as the Permanent Indus Commission which includes a commissioner from each of the two countries.

It also sets out a process for resolving so-called questions, differences and disputes that may arise between the parties.

The current proceedings under the treaty concern the Kishenganga (330 megawatts) and Ratle (850 megawatts) hydroelectric power plants.

The power plants are being built by India on Kishenganga and Chenab Rivers.

Neither of the two plants are being financed by the World Bank Group.
Stories of service and sacrifice inspired a Carlisle area teen to go above and beyond for those who gave their utmost in gallantry.

Matt Kunkle, 17, of South Middleton Township, led the charge to erect a monument in salute of Medal of Honor recipients from Cumberland County.

A military history buff and Boy Scout, he mobilized an effort that raised $28,000 for a granite monument etched with the names of the honored dead and an illustration representing each service branch.

The memorial was unveiled Friday before a crowd of onlookers who had gathered in the courtyard on the Square in Carlisle for the annual Veterans Day program.

Growing up, Ive always had a huge respect for the military, said Kunkle, a homeschooled high school junior with aspirations to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.

He got the idea for the Eagle Scout project after attending a class three years ago at the Cumberland County Historical Society that profiled local men who had earned the militarys highest honor.

Its only awarded for voluntary action, Kunkle said of the Medal of Honor Friday. Thats whats amazing about these stories. These people volunteered to do this and they knew what they were getting themselves into. They knew the consequences of what could happen and were willing to do that to protect their comrades.

That knowledge motivated Kunkle to take action in ways that surprised Neal Delisanti, Cumberland County director of veterans affairs. The two first met in late November 2015.

Ive been involved in a bunch of these programs before, Delisanti told the crowd, referring to Eagle Scout projects. Normally, its mommy or daddy who is running the show for the scout. You always wonder if this is the scouts project or is this mommys or daddys project. Matt shows up in my office all alone. He has a three-ring binder in his hand. After a little introduction, he starts telling me about his project.

This was not a concept that he had, Delisanti said. This was a plan. Those of you veterans who have done any planning for the military can understand the difference between a concept and a plan. This was a plan that was ready to go. We came out here and picked a location and this young man ran with it. He worked diligently, never deterred to get this memorial where it is today.

It was his planning and attention to detail that enabled Kunkle to research the steps in erecting a monument, work with contractors, suppliers and bureaucrats and organize a fundraising effort that brought together local veterans groups, businesses and civic clubs.

Retired Army Lt. Col. Charlotte Kinney was among the many veterans who witnessed the unveiling and dedication of the monument in the Veterans Memorial Courtyard.

That young man put it all together, Kinney said. He got the money for it. I just think its wonderful what he did. He should be proud.

Jerry Smeltzer served 30 years in the Air Force Reserve, retiring in 2010 as a master sergeant. For much of his service, he was an avionics technician who worked on C-130 transport planes out of the Willow Grove air station.

Its a wonderful thing that he did, Smeltzer said of Kunkle and the Eagle Scout project. He thought it was great to have a young person take the kind of a vested interest in veterans that he would research the circumstances behind each local recipient of the Medal of Honor.

Veterans Day 2016 came three days after a pivotal election that saw Donald Trump become the president-elect. The victory has many supporters of Hillary Clinton struggling to come to grips with the change in political landscape.

It is our form of government that moves forward with the peaceful transition of power, Smeltzer said. There will be protests but in the end we will have a new president and a new cabinet and we will move on as we always have. The proceedings today just go to support that.

Smeltzer described the 2016 Veterans Day program as invigorating and hopeful considering the involvement of youth in saluting those who served. To him, it was a counterbalance to what he called so much doom and gloom on the TV news.

Kinney was equally optimistic. Im hopeful that we are all going to go forward and support the new president and trust that he will get the right people to guide him and to guide us, Kinney said.

Kenneth Wagner of Carlisle is a Korean War-era Army veteran who served in the infantry from 1953 to 1955. I am not here for myself.  I am here for all my ancestors and all the veterans who have given their lives. I appreciate their service and what they have done for our country in giving us our freedom that we have today.

Wagner spoke of a future America under Trump. Being a non-veteran president-elect, I hope that he embraces the military, the veterans and the country. I wish him well. God bless him.

Reuben Nace of Middlesex Township served in the Marine Corps from 1967 to 1993 in a career that included a tour in Vietnam where he endured the siege of Khe Sanh.

This is a great day for all veterans to get together and greet each other, Nace said. When asked about the election, he had no comment on the outcome but thought the anti-Trump riots were uncalled for and lack humanity.
Union agriculture and farmers welfare minister Radha Mohan Singh said on Friday that the Global Rajasthan Agritech Meet (GRAM), 2016, will prove to be a milestone in connecting farmers with technology.

Addressing the valedictory session of the meet, Singh said while other states were organizing investors meets, Rajasthan has taken the unique to organise the first of its kind initiative at an international level.

The Centre is committed for the welfare of farmers and was doing its utmost to double their income in view of the Prime Ministers mission, and connecting farmers with global technology, he said.

Talking on the Centres initiative on soil health management, he said more than 23 lakh soil health cards have been issued in the past two years.

The three-day meet ended on Friday with farmers, academicians, researchers, policy makers and industry stakeholders lauding the event for having achieved its prime objective of sharing knowledge with farmers.

Praising the state governments initiatives for innovative farming as well as water conservation, Singh said whether it was in the arena of olives, date palm, animal husbandry, dairy, fisheries, the state has become a model for others to emulate.

He further said that the manner in which the state was progressing in agriculture and allied sectors, very soon it will be comparable to Israel.

Speaking on the occasion, chief minister Vasundhara Raje said GRAM was a historic festival and has in it the origins of an agriculture revolution.

The meet was a success with participation of agri-scientists, specialists, entrepreneurs and ambassadors of different countries, she said.

She said she was happy to see participants from Israel, Iran, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Netherlands, Japan, Nigeria, Serbia and the World Bank.

Similar agri-tech meets will be organised at the divisional level in the state, she said.
In a move that could benefit lakhs of landless farmers in Rajasthan, the state government has decided to give farm land to agriculturists for better sustenance, chief minister Vasundhara Raje announced on Friday at a valedictory function of GRAM.

The decision is aimed to woo around 38% of 40 million people associated with agriculture in Rajasthan, who as per Socio-Economic Caste Survey of 2011 were landless. All states except Himachal and Jammu and Kashmir have more landless farmers than Rajasthan.

Raje said the agriculture land will be given to landless farmers as per the existing rules under which they are eligible to get pasture or grazing land. The disbursement of land to farmers under the existing rules has been slow and revenue officials expect disbursement to speed up after the chief ministers announcement.

Taken aback by the chief ministers sudden announcement, the officials said they will announce the modalities for giving land in the next few days. Directions would be issued to district-level officials, they said.

At the event, organised to give boost to agriculture in the state, the chief minister also announced that a centre of excellence for medicinal plants will be set up to encourage farmers to grow medicinal plants.

The Rajasthan agriculture department has an incentive scheme for alternate farming, which fetches good market price. We have different pilots to encourage farmers to opt for crops that have good market value. We also provide them facilities to sell their produce to consumers in metros, such as Delhi and Mumbai, states agriculture secretary Neel Kamal Darbari had told HT in October.

In a statement, the government said loans will be disbursed to farmers within 15 days in their bank accounts under Sahakar Kisan Kalyan Yojana. They can avail a maximum loan of `20 lakh for agriculture works and 2% interest subsidy will be given to farmers who repay the loan on time, the statement said, adding all necessary documents for loan will be provided along with the application under this scheme.

The government also decided to double personal insurance to farmers under Raj Sahakar Personal Insurance Scheme from present `5 lakh. A target to cover 25 lakh farmers under the scheme this year has also been set, the statement said.
Cash was once showered on them. Now, after the surgical strikes on Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, the rooms in Sonagachi, one of the countrys largest red light area are deserted.

The last time Sonagachi was deserted was in December 1992 when the then Left Front government had to impose curfew in the wake of Babri Mosque demolition.

Read: Mobile money finds its way into sex workers world

I dont remember such dull days. We had seen a similar situation after the Babri Masjid was demolished. However, then locals hopped in for a swinging time, said Lata, a 60 year old sex worker turned house owner in Sonagachi.

But this time even locals have vanished.

The streets and lanes of Sonagachi that are always teeming with people after sundown, wears a deserted look throughout the day since the currency crisis. (HT Photo)

We are asking sex workers to ask their clients to use online fund transfer or transfer money using their cell phones. This especially for grade A sex workers who charge Rs 3,000 upwards for around 30 minutes of intimacy, said Kajal Bose, secretary Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), the largest community based organisation working in the area.

The lanes and bylanes of Sonagachi wore a deserted look. Trouble started on Tuesday night as sex workers refused to accept Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. On Wednesday, clients suddenly disappeared, apart from a few people who are regulars in local hooch dens.

Read: Sex workers only puja falls silent

According to DMSC, there are around 11,000 sex workers in Sonagachi out of which 4,000 are grade A. However, local sources estimate the number of sex workers in the area to be around 20,000. Grade B sex workers who charge around Rs 500 per client are the worst sufferers.

It is a helpless situation. It is impossible to ask our clients for online money transfer, because it can be traced. What if his wives or family members get to know? We work on high valued loose cash and there is no credit system here. I turned away clients since Tuesday night since all of them had Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, said Rekha, one of the grade A sex workers.

Most sex workers dont have bank accounts and deal with large amount of loose cash in high denominations.

Read: Stunned over new Rs 1,000 rule woman dies of shock outside bank in Gorakhpur

The singing bars in and around Kolkata, Howrah and North 24-Parganas, too, wore a deserted look since Tuesday night. The bars which are generally dependent on loose cash and large denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1000, hardly got any customers.

Generally singing bars depend on loose cash. Customers shower money on girls who sing and sway with the music. Sometimes customers change Rs 1000 to Rs 100 notes from us. After we stopped accepting Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes we have few clients, said Ratan Dey (name changed), band master at a singing bar near Dum Dum.
Achcham Yenbadhu Madamaiyada

Director: Gautham Vasudev Menon

Cast: Silambarasan, Manjima Mohan, Baba Sehgal

Rating: 1.5/5

True to the title of his film, Achcham Yenbadhu Madamaiyada or Fear is Foolishness, lyrics from the popular MG Ramachandrans 1960 work, Mannadhi Mannan, Gautham Vasudev Menon turns his hero, Silambarasan, into a superman -- a fantasy figure that Tamil cinema celebrates so often. Never mind that such antics seem juvenile in contemporary cinematic lingo.

And our hero (his name is withheld till the end), an MBA graduate from an middleclass Chennai family, embarks on a road journey on his bike, and his pillion rider is Leela (Manjima Mohan), a budding screenwriter and friend of his sister (looks like a lift from the directors earlier work, Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa).

For what appeared like the most boring part of the narrative, the entire first half has the lead pair working on a preamble to a love story. An umpteen number of times the hero is caught glancing at the attractive Leela, but he looks away every time her eyes turn towards him. Felt like some 17th century love story. Come on, boys and girls can do better than this today.

Needless violence harms the narrative.

Post intermission, the bike veers into a dangerously dramatic lane -- which is full of chases and shootouts. And what a bloody mess it is. One loses count of the number of bodies that lies scattered in hospital wards, in police stations and in private houses -- with the hero toting a revolver which never runs out of bullets.

And the absurdity does not end here, and we see an abundance of it a couple of years later, when Mr Hero turns into a cop, donning crisp khaki and sporting dark glasses, to complete his unfinished mission.

The romance too is a long-drawn affair.

Interjecting into the plot is his sleuthing to find the criminals behind the ghastly attack on Leelas family early on in the film that actually pushes him to press the trigger. A one-man army -- Bond and Iron Man rolled into one -- he vanquishes his adversaries with a knock on the face or a kick on the belly or a karate twist of the arm or a gun shot. His battlegrounds vary from the inside of a train compartment to deserted highways to lonely hospital wards where even ghosts may fear to tread. But our hero, fired as he is by the celebrated MGR song, cannot be stopped as he marches on like a battering ram. Why let fear overpower and defeat you, he keeps muttering in an irritatingly large number of voiceovers -- which often impede the flow of imagery. There are other voiceovers as well -- a lazy way of telling a story on screen.

Even on the performance platform, both Silambarasan and Mohan are largely unimpressive, the chemistry between them soggy -- which Menon probably tries to pep up with some great visual shots of Kanyakumari and a few AR Rahman compositions.

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop
Chaar Sahibzaade 2

Narration: Om Puri

Director: Harry Baweja

Rating: 2.5/5

The Indian animation film business mostly thrives on mythological and religious content. Still the commercial success of Chaar Sahibzaade (2014), a documentation of the Sikh history, was a much desired shot in the arm for the local animation industry.

The choice of narrative technique was interesting. The film was in Punjabi, and it used a voiceover. Characters took shape only towards the latter half of the film. It was primarily an attempt to set the record straight on the origin and spread of Sikhism.

Despite some beating about the bush, it captured the imagination of filmgoers. Harry Baweja, the director, stuck to conversational Punjabi which worked well in centres such as Delhi and Chandigarh.

The 134-minute runtime does seem like a stretch, but if you sit through the initial scenes, youre in for a thrilling ride. (YouTube)

Now, Baweja is back with Chaar Sahibzaade sequel -- The Rise Of Banda Bahadur. He has employed all the old techniques to keep a similar tone and to give a sense of continuity.

The Rise Of Banda Bahadur begins with the transformation of Madho Das, from an ascetic to a military commander. Its believed that Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, met him on the banks of Godavari near Nanded (Maharashtra) and inspired him to take charge of the Sikh uprising against Delhis Muslim rulers.

The Mughal dynasty is well past its glory days as the 18th century dawns. Governor Wazir Khan, the ruler of Sirhind, the present day Fatehgarh Sahib district of Punjab, is a tyrant. In 1705, he orders Guru Gobind Singhs two sons to be killed, and it is up to Banda Bahadur to avenge the murders.

The good and the bad guys are clearly marked. As Banda Bahadur goes after Wazir Khan, we know what to expect. But, we want to see the military techniques, the warfare. Instead, a verbal duel between Khan and Banda Bahadur is unleashed upon us.

Voiceover artists have done their job but the same cant be said about the animators. Lack of funds can be blamed for the films TV-like feel. (YouTube)

The writers must be credited for keeping the heat up throughout the final Sirhind battle sequence, but they take good 45 minutes to get there. The build-up, in large parts, states the obvious.

The initial flashes into the life of Banda Bahadur dont add much to the drama and even slow down the pace. The film gains momentum only when he decides to cross the Yamuna and move further towards the Sutlej river.

Voiceover artists have done their job but the same cant be said about the animators. Lack of funds can be blamed for the films TV-like feel.

The 134-minute runtime does seem like a stretch, but if you sit through the initial scenes, youre in for a thrilling ride.

Interact with Rohit Vats at Twitter/@nawabjha

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Desierto

Director - Jonas Cuaron

Cast - Gael Garcia Bernal, Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Rating - 3.5/5

It feels odd to get back to talking about movies after the events that have transpired this week, but its almost serendipitous how, in this uncertain new world, the first film that has come along to ease us back into normalcy is one that couldnt have arrived at a more opportune moment.

Maybe its for the best that we begin again not with some loud, empty Adam Sandler vehicle or a naked excuse to sell toys disguised as an animated chuckle-fest (although even that wouldnt be such a bad idea right about now) but a quiet little thriller about illegal Mexican immigrants and a madman with a gun out to get them.

Desierto is by no stretch of the imagination a particularly great film. In all probability, it will soon be forgotten, lost in the desert, like the bodies of some of its characters. But through some unfathomable coincidence, it has washed up on our shores now, a full year after it was selected as Mexicos official entry to the 2015 Oscars, and 2 days after an event that would forever change how we view illegal immigration.

It has taken on a new life, one that it could never have anticipated. And suddenly, Desierto has become more than just a cat-and-mouse thriller. It has become a symbol of dissent.

They travel in this harsh desert, the desierto, with unknown dangers lurking behind every corner, and with no guarantee of a better life on the other side.

And it is through symbols that it tells its simple story, a story about poor Mexican immigrants, abandoned in the desert by their coyote, as a lunatic redneck picks them out one by one. Many of them have made this unforgiving journey before, often unsuccessfully, and something in their eyes tells us that they will keep making it, no matter how often they are sent back. Many of them have family in the United States, left behind, waiting for them to spend more money than they can afford on this Sisyphean nightmare.

They travel in this harsh desert, the desierto, with unknown dangers lurking behind every corner, and with no guarantee of a better life on the other side - and for what? To trim hedges and file toenails? To fill the tanks of the same people who would vote for a man who calls them criminals, drug dealers and rapists?

It doesnt matter that there have been other films made about illegal immigration, films like Sin Nombre and A Better Life; better films, films that deserve to be seen, especially now.

Gael Garcia Bernals character represents every poor Mexican who has ever been forced to abandon his homeland for an uncertain future in a country that is becoming more unwelcoming by the hour.

It doesnt matter that Desierto has little more to offer than a handful of tense sequences, usually variations of Jeffrey Dean Morgans vigilante gunman hunting down Gael Garcia Bernals character, a terrific ambient score by the always-interesting Woodkid, and some suitably bleak visuals of a lifeless desert. It doesnt matter, because Desierto isnt about one man versus the other. Its about an entire people.

Its characters arent characters. I watched it minutes ago and I couldnt name any of them. Im quite sure none of them were mentioned by name. And this isnt because of careless screenwriting. It has to be deliberate. The choice to begin (and end) the film as if 10 minutes from each side have been removed has to be a choice, and not a fluke. Because what director Jonas Cuaron, and his father Alfonso (the celebrated Oscar-winning director of films like Gravity and Children of Men), have done is to create a film that is about archetypes and not individuals.

Gael Garcia Bernals character represents every poor Mexican who has ever been forced to abandon his homeland for an uncertain future in a country that is becoming more unwelcoming by the hour.

And as for Jeffrey Dean Morgans character?

Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a madman with a gun, a wolf on the prowl, hungry for hungers sake. He is weak. He is cold. He is alone.

He does not belong to one of those armed militias that are silently being born along the US-Mexico border as we speak. He operates alone. He drives a truck along the highways, with a confederate flag flapping in the sharp summer air. He isnt governed by an ideology. He isnt given any backstory that might inadvertently humanise him. He is a monster. He is pathetic. He is a symbol of hatred, anger and xenophobia. He is a madman with a gun, a wolf on the prowl, hungry for hungers sake. He is weak. He is cold. He is alone.

He is a symbol of Donald Trumps America.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

The author tweets @NaaharRohan

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop
It was around 10.30 am on August 12, 1997 when Gulshan Kumar, owner of T-Series, reached a temple at Jeet Nagar slums in his red Opel car. The music baron was not accompanied by his carbine wielding bodyguard, provided by the Uttar Pradesh government.

It was the perfect opportunity for two teams of contract killers, who had been scouting the area and waiting for the right opportunity to kill Kumar.

Earlier, Kumar had refused to pay Rs10 crore to gangster Dawood Ibrahim.

In fact, little is known about the direct involvement of Dawood in the murder. However, investigating officials pointed fingers at his brother Anees Ibrahim, Qayyum and now estranged henchman Abu Salem.

According to the police, the plot to kill Gulshan Kumar was hatched at Anees office in Dubai in May 1997. Those present in the office included now convicted Abdul Rauf alias Daud Merchant, Abu Salem, Qayyum and Bollywood music composer Nadeem Saifee. Salem had promised Rauf money, men, arms and vehicles to carry out the killing, the police said. But the killing was carried out only after the D-gang had exhausted all its options to get the extortion money.

Despite receiving two threatening calls, on August 5 and August 8, 1997, Kumar refused to budge and his fearlessness further irked the killers.

Rauf was made to swear by the holy scriptures to kill Kumar. He and his friend Adil Mohammed Ali Khan would scout the area each morning at Jeet Nagar slums in Andheri (West) from 6am onwards.

The two gangs of hired killers, which included Rauf and Abdul Rashid, conducted reconnaissance for a month. However, they could not find an opportune time because of Kumars bodyguard armed with a carbine.

But August 12, 1997 was going to be different as Kumar stepped out alone. Adil walked up to Kumar, asked him to pray in heaven and pulled the trigger from close range. Rauf fired in the air to disperse the crowd. His accomplices pumped 16 bullets into a rather helpless Kumar.

The music baron was declared dead on admission. While his killers had silently escaped from the area, Rauf first went to Uttar Pradesh to hide, returned to Mumbai and escaped to Dubai via Bangladesh.

He was arrested in 2001 from Kolkata and was the only person to be convicted of the 19 arrested. He escaped once again only to be deported back to India from Bangladesh on Thursday.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Criticising the impact of Prime Minister Narendra Modis move to scrap Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray warned the Union government and said if its surgical strike on black money was going to put the public in trouble,people would also resort to surgical strikes of their own and it will cost the government heavily.

Maintaining that he was not against any move that recovered black money, Thackeray hit out at the government for the way it had implemented the demonetisation programme, causing droves of people to throng banks all day long in serpentine queues to get currency notes exchanged.

The Sena chief demanded that the government extend the December 30 deadline to exchange the decommissioned notes. He also demanded that the state government extend its November 11 limit.

Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had announced that all tolls plazas would let vehicles pass without tolls and that electricity bills, water bills and public taxes could be paid in the scrapped notes till November 11.

Modi usually does Mann ki baat. But this time, he did Dhan ki baat, and forgot Jan ki Baat, Thackeray said. After creating problems for the public, our Prime Minister has gone to Japan. He should have gone for Switzerland and condusted his surgical strike on Swiss bank accounts and transfer the money into the accounts of the commoners, Uddhav said.

He said that he was not an economist and had no clue when the advantages of the move could start showing, if at all. But, for now, one look at the queues in front of banks shows that the common man is the worst affected and has been suddenly robbed of his money, he said, adding that the government should have thought this through and implemented the move only once banks were adequately prepared.

The Sena chief also questioned the governments logic behind introducing a Rs 2,000 currency note after decommissioning notes of lower denominations. Does he (Modi) even understand what he is doing? There is no logic, he said.

In response to Bahujan Samaj Party (BJP) chief Mayawatis criticism that the move was triggered by the upcoming Uttar Pradesh elections, Thackeray said that everyone will be able to see who spends more money during elections. He hastily added that the Shiv Sena was not tensed about this as it had the goodwill of the Shiv Sainiks.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
A 72-year-old Mulund resident waiting in a queue outside a bank to deposit banned notes collapsed and died on Friday morning.

According to the local police, Vishwas Vartak, a retired public works department (PWD) employee suffered a massive heart attack and died on the spot.

The incident took place at Hari Om Nagar in Mulund outside the State Bank of India (SBI). Vartak, a local had reached the bank around 11.30 am to exchange demonetised currencies of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000. There was no crowd because the area isnt that populated. It had been barely 10 minutes after he came that he collapsed right in front of the door of the bank, a source from the police said.

While the bank officials and locals immediately contacted a general practitioner who runs a clinic in the vicinity, they also contacted Navghar police officials. The doctor, upon checking the Vartaks vitals, pronounced him dead. The primary cause of death was sighted as mayocardial infraction (MI).

Since it was an accidental death, we took the body to Rajawadi post-mortem centre to ascertain the cause of death, said an official from Navghar Police station. Forensic specialists from Rajawadi post-mortem centre said that according to the case details, they do not think that the senior citizen died of a heatstroke or exertion. The primary cause of death is heart attack but even then, we have sent the blood samples and viscera for forensic analysis. The final cause of death will be revealed once we get the report from Kalina forensic laboratory, said the forensic expert.
The Maharashtra government on Thursday appointed Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ministers Jayakumar Rawal and Sambahji Patil Nilangekar as guardian ministers of Nandurbar and Latur districts, respectively.

Both the districts did not have independent guardian ministers until now. Girish Mahajan, minister for medical education and water resources, had the additional charge for Nandurbar district along with Nashik. Similarly, Pankaja Munde, who holds the rural development portfolio, had an additional charge as guardian minister for Latur along with her home district Beed.

Both Rawal, the state tourism minister, and Nilangekar, minister for labour and skill development, are known to be close to chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. While Nilangekar hails from Nilanga in Latur, Rawals constituency, Sindkheda, is in Nandurbars neighbouring district, Dhule. Both ministers were inducted into the government during the cabinet expansion in July this year.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
To accept demonetised notes from patients, or not? Two days after a surprise announcement that demonetised Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes, private hospitals were confused if they must  like public hospital  also accept the notes till Friday.

Public hospitals were listed as essential services, which means patients were allowed to use the phased out notes for 72 hours to clear their bills. Maharashtras public health department said private hospitals were not accepting the notes, but advised the central government to give them the concession period too. The recommendation did not come into force.

But the confusion grew as a letter announcing the inclusion of private hospitals in the concession period, with a signature of Directorate of Health Services (DHS), started circulating on a popular messaging app among the heads of private hospitals on the morning of November 10.

Officials from the health ministry said the letter was shared on the app after an oral confirmation from the central finance ministry.

On Wednesday, we received an oral confirmation. We were expecting a written notification, but it failed to take legal form, said a top official from the public health department of the state. We did start collecting older denominations and will do so until midnight of November 11, based on the letter we received, said Dr Rajendra Patankar from the Nanavati Super Speciality Hospital.

We couldnt ascertain if the message was authentic; we decided not to accept the notes. Banks opened on Thursday, so our patients faced no inconvenience, said Parag Rindani, head of Wockhardt Hospital, Mumbai Central.
Friday mornings fire in Sahibabads Shaheed Nagar locality is one of the warning signs of a bigger disaster waiting to happen, say activists. According to them, there are over 250 unauthorised workshops still running in the congested bylanes of the locality alone.

On Friday, Ajay Anand, Inspector General of Police, Meerut range said that the administration is answerable for the fire incident which killed 13.

The administration department is partly responsible as they should have cracked down on such factories sooner. However, we will set up an inquiry and investigate the matter, said Anand, who also inspected the building which was gutted in the early morning fire.

In 2010, a public interest litigation (PIL) was filed in the Allahabad High Court asking the court to pass orders to the Ghaziabad administration to crackdown on all unauthorised workshops and factories.

In 2015, the Allahabad High Court passed orders to the Ghaziabad administration to form a committee consisting of gazetted officers of 12 different departments. This committee was supposed to identify all unauthorised workshops running in the district.

Between April 23, 2015 and July 24, 2016, the administration sealed almost 1,000 unauthorised units all over Ghaziabad, said Rajeev Kumar Sharma, RTI activist.

However, after factories in Shaheed Nagar that were sealed in August 2015, again became operational by November that year, said Sharma.

Read: Blaze at illegal garment factory in Ghaziabad kills 13 in sleep

Sharma then filed a contempt application in the court in February 2016 after which the district magistrate (DM) was ordered to answer. However, in July, the district magistrate changed after which the matter was put on the backburner.

Sharma alleged that if the administration had crackdowned on the factories earlier, Fridays incident could have been avoided.

Ghaziabad district magistrate Nidhi Kesarwani said that a committee had been constituted to take action against such illegal units in residential areas.

The committee will conduct a survey of areas where illegal units are being operated after which we will take required action, Kesarwani said.

Kesarwani, also, added that Fridays incident could have been avoided.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Post demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes, nearly 15 lakh migrant labourers working in different industries of Ludhiana are the worst hit.

As city industrialists and manufacturers face problem in paying salaries to their workers in cash, they fear the workers may flee to their home towns in case they are not paid their salaries in the next 10 days.

Cycle, hosiery, auto parts and construction business employs more than 15 lakh migrant labourers especially from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Orrisa and West Bengal, who come to the city to earn their living.

Most of the manufacturing units pay their staff on 7th or 10th of every month, but under the present circumstances, they are trying to persuade their workers not to demand salaries this month.

Badish Jindal, president of Federation of Punjab Small Industries Associations (FOPSIA), said that the entire system has collapsed due to the. There is 80% migrant workforce of the total labourers working in our factories, said Jindal.

He further said that a limit of withdrawing Rs 10,000 per day and Rs 20,000 per week has been fixed by the Government of India.

This is a major issue and the government should have thought about this before implementing any decision, he added.

Even the associations for workers have come out against the decision and have claimed that the migrant workers who rarely have a bank account have to suffer the most.

The industries have also highlighted that there was no money to be given for transportation of goods and to repair the wear and tear inside factories.

General secretary DP Maur, joint council of trade union, Ludhiana, stated that there are chances that migrant labourers, who work here and wont get paid due to new rules, may return to their home states.

Meanwhile, some industries have also devised a way to tackle the issue of lack of currency notes. Avtar Singh, Chamber of Commercial and Industrial Undertakings (CICU), said that cheques are being issued to the labourers who have bank accounts.

We are depositing salaries of workers who do not have bank account in the accounts of the workers who have it, said Avtar.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Holding both Congress and Akali Dal responsible for the adverse Supreme Court order on SYL Canal issue, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has declared to open an indefinite morcha (front) at Kapuri village (the origin of the canal) from Friday.

While the partys national convener and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal maintained a studied silence on the issue, the state leadership of the party addressed a press conference on Thursday, saying that AAP will not allow sharing of Punjab river waters.

They blamed Congress and SAD for keeping the interests of Punjab at stake to grab power. It was the Congress that laid the foundation stone of the canal and SAD started the construction, said the local leaders.

Terming the resignation of PPCC chief Captain Amarinder Singh as MP a political drama, AAP leaders demanded that if Captain was serious on the issue, he must resign from the Congress and even all Rajya Sabha MPs of Congress from Punjab should also submit their resignations on the issue.

Also read| SYL verdict: Amarinder quits as MP, all 42 Punjab Cong MLAs resign too

Akalis must end their political ties with the BJP and Union minister Harsimrat Badal should resign as the minister the Modi cabinet for Union governments anti-Punjab stand in the Supreme Court, AAP convener Gurpreet Singh Waraich said. Senior leader HS Phoolka said opinion of the SC was not binding on Punjab and the order didnt automatically invalidate the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004. Kanwar Sandhu said the situation that had emerged seemed to be tailor-made for creating trouble.

Farmers body to start stir on November 13

Amritsar: The Kisan Sangharsh Committee, which has a considerable hold in Majha region, on Thursday announced to launch a state-wide pucca morcha (indefinite protest) on November 13 in protest against the Supreme Court verdict on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal issue. The organisations state president Satnam Singh Pannu said the verdict was against the interests of Punjab, which had already been suffering from unprecedented water crisis.

Read| Wont give a drop: Punjab calls emergency session after SC Sutlej order

Verdict unacceptable, says Dal Khalsa

Terming the SC verdict completely unacceptable to Punjab, the Dal Khalsa on Thursday vowed not to allow the construction of the SYL canal at any cost.

Dal Khalsa leaders HS Dhami and Kanwar Pal Singh also criticised the role of Congress and Akali leaders with regard to the SYL issue during the 1980s and 90s, terming it dubious and detrimental to the interests of Punjab.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Friday opened a morcha for indefinite period at Kapuri village and vowed to go to any extent to save the interests of Punjab on the water-sharing issue.

The AAP leaders held both Akali Dal and Congress responsible for the controversy surrounding the SYL Canal, and claimed that the party will resolve the issue if it forms the next government in Punjab. However, there was no word how the party will achieve that. The party leaders also didnt answer queries regarding AAP convener Arvind Kerjiwals silence on the issue.

Also read | Caught in a bind, Kejriwal mum on Punjab-Haryana water dispute

Prominent leaders of the AAP who addressed the gathering, included state convener Gurpreet Singh Waraich, Punjab affairs in-charge Sanjay Singh, Jarnail Singh, HS Phoolka, Sukhpal Singh Khairaa, Kanwar Sandhu and others.

Waraich said Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder was responsible for the SYL Canal accord, and he was now shedding crocodile tears to get political mileage. If Captain Amarinder is serious on protecting the water of Punjab, he should resign from the Congress, Waraich said, adding that Captain should ask his boss Rahul Gandhi to clear his stand on the issue.

It is unfortunate that Rahul Gandhi has hailed the opinion of Supreme Court on the SYL issue, and on the other hand, his party MLAs have resigned from Punjab assembly. Doesnt that show the double standards of the Congress? he said.

The AAP leaders said chief minister Parkash Singh Badal must clarify the stand of the BJP on the issue as Modi-led central government took anti-Punjab stand in the Supreme Court. If Badal is serious, he should sever political ties with the BJP and instruct his daughter-in-law Harsimrat Kaur Badal to resign from the Modis cabinet, said Sanjay Singh.

The leaders said they launched the morcha to assure the farmers that the party was with them and wont allow the canal.

Supreme Court lawyer and AAP leader HS Phoolka said, Punjab is not bound to adhere to the opinion of the Apex Court. If Punjab is forced to give water to any other state, it will happen on the bodies of farmers and AAP leaders.
Municipal councillors, cutting across party lines, cornered mayor Balwant Rai Nath over poor maintenance of the sewerage and water supply system and unhygienic conditions in the city during the municipal corporations general house meeting on Thursday.

The councillors demanded a resolution against Triveni Private Limited company, which has been given the sewerage project worth Rs 288 crore, to withdraw the work from it. The company has already completed 50% of the work, but has been drawing flak as it had failed to resolve the issues related to water supply and sewerage.

It has been almost one year since the Triveni company was allotted the work, but it has completely failed to redress problem of sewerage and water supply, said Baljeet Singh Raju Sran, ward 9 councillor.

He said all councillors demanded the blacklisting of the company for developmental works in future.

The corporation has been spending crores on the sewerage project, but there has been no any result so far. There is total chaos on Bathinda roads as the company has failed to lay roads in the areas, where fresh sewer and water supply lines were laid, he said.

Another councillor Santosh Mahant said even officials of the company and the sewerage board either remained incommunicado or passed the buck to each other. Who should be considered responsible for such a mess, she said.

Meanwhile, defending the company, mayor Balwant Rai Nath, said the contract was signed at the government level as the corporation had little role in it.

There is no provision for withdrawing work from the allottee agency and get it executed from other agency. This may cause litigation problems and complications, said the mayor.

The councillors also raised the issue of illegal encroachment of public properties and sought stricter action against the defaulters.

Besides, the House also passed a resolution to set up an open gymnasium at the Joggers Park.
The silence of the otherwise vitriolic national convener of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on the contentious issue of the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal is deafening.

While his party leaders in Punjab have jumped into the fray launching an anti-SYL agitation at Kapuri village in Patiala on Friday afternoon, the AAP supremo, who belongs to Haryana, is fighting shy of taking a pro-Punjab stand on the water issue in which Delhi state is also a party.

No wonder Kejriwal, who is caught in a bind, has not expressed his own view on the matter, apart from a series of retweets on the subject on Thursday.

Having taken note of it, leaders of rival parties are taking potshots at him. State Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh, who resigned from the Lok Sabha within minutes of the Supreme Court verdict, has asked Kejriwal to make his stand clear on the issue.

SAD leaders mocked at AAP supremo for his shifting stand on the issue. He first spoke in favour of Punjab saying that the state has no water to spare for anyone. Then in April, the Delhi government, through its Jal Board, filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court favouring Haryana, opposing Punjabs claim on the river waters. To avoid a political backlash, Kejriwal later sent the Jal Board counsel packing while assuring Punjabis that his government would file a fresh affidavit in the court. The new affidavit, however, said that the Delhi government had nothing to do with the dispute between Punjab and Haryana, but supported Punjabs plea that the Supreme Court should refuse to give its opinion on the Presidential reference.

The clamour for Kejriwal to speak up is only sharpening. His partys former convener in Punjab Sucha Singh Chhotepur, who is now heading the Apna Punjab Party (APP), too wants an answer from Kejriwal.

Bains brothers, Independent MLAs from Ludhiana, who are part of the Navjot Singh Sidhu-led Awaaz-e-Punjab, also made it clear on Thursday that there will be no tie-up with Kejriwal till he supports Punjab on the canal issue.

Remaining in the background, Kejriwal, however, has asked his Punjab team to make the most of this opportunity in the run-up to the high-stakes polls.

AAP state leaders held a press conference on Thursday vehemently opposing any move to take up construction of the SYL canal.

Supreme Court lawyer HS Phoolka, AAP candidate from Dakha, even went to the extent of saying that the construction of the canal would begin over his dead body.

Later, Delhi MLA Jarnail Singh issued a video message urging people to gather at Kapuri village in Patiala, where the party launched an indefinite morcha against the construction of the canal on Friday.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Banks in Patiala had a tough day to handle the panicky crowd as unprecedented footfall was witnessed on Thursday, for exchanging and depositing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination notes after these were scrapped.

Queues came up even before the banks began operation. The situation was somewhat controllable in big branches with additional counters containing the pressure. But the rush was unmanageable in small branches with operation had to be suspended briefly at several places after the number of people swelled.

For instance, State Bank of Patiala (SBoP) branch in urban estate had to close the gates as the rush inside the branch became unmanageable. Similar situations were witnessed elsewhere too.

A number of banks branches stopped the exchanges as their stock of new currency exhausted in few hours. Even Rs 100 notes were not available in many branches.

It took me three hours to exchange the old currency, said, a harassed resident, Davinder Singh, in front of a private bank in Chotti Baradari.

Although banks had opened additional counters for increased footfall, there was a lot of teething problem. The situation was worse for senior citizens as they were exhausted due to long wait, said a banker.

Varinder Karwal, head of SBoP branch at Mall road, said the footfall was at least 40 times more than the usual operation and the situation would remain somewhat similar on Friday as well.

Confusion over withdrawal limit

The norms state that customers will have a Rs 20,000 weekly limits for cash withdrawals from their bank accounts. However, banks arent clear whether the week in the weekly limit ends this Sunday and Monday will be a fresh week.

On this, a branch head of HDFC bank said they would consider one week limit from Thursday onwards only until the time there are no directions from the RBI on this.

ATMs to start by Friday afternoon

The automated teller machines (ATM) will start operating from Friday afternoon with withdrawal limit at Rs 2,000 per day. The cap will increase to Rs 4,000 a day from November 18.

No Rs 2000 notes in Fatehgarh Sahib

Most of the banks in Sirhind and Fatehgarh Sahib area have not received new currency notes of Rs 2,000 that have already been introduced by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and they transacted only in Rs 100 denomination notes.

In that regard, situation was relatively better, even though long queues were witnessed outside the banks. Bank managers said they had sufficient Rs 100 notes and the process of exchanging and depositing went without any hitch.

Though people have to wait because of long queues but we have enough cash and we are making sure that no one faces problem in getting the currency deposited or exchanged, said, SS Kanwar, manager, SBoP.

While manager of another bank said they had enough Rs 100 notes for Thursday, they had sent their officers to Patiala for bringing more cash for Friday.
Chaos prevailed at private hospitals in in SAS Nagar on Thursday as they refused to accept Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. Some people even alleged that a few hospitals failed to provide the facility of payment through debit and credit cards.

Bimla Nehra (78), a resident of Sector 15, Chandigarh, had to return from a Sector-69 private hospital without being attended to by doctors as her attendants were unable to pay the consultancy fee of Rs 500 in valid currency notes.

It was sheer harassment. After the receptionist refused to accept Rs 500 note, I borrowed Rs 100 notes from my sister and driver. One Rs 100 note was old which the hospital refused to accept, said Bimlas son, Hittan Nehra, a lawyer.

The private hospitals have refused to accept the demonetised currency notes and asked the patients as well as their attendants to pay through card or through cheque with an undertaking.

Urge residents not to panic: Oil firms

In wake of the long queues at petrol stations owing to panic buying of the residents, the oil companies are saying that all currency notes would be accepted at the petrol pumps till November 11 midnight. The oil companies assured the people that every petrol/CNG station and LPG distributorship across the country would continue to accept Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes for all fuel and related product purchases.

In a joint statement, oil companies re-assured their customers regarding continuous and sustained availability of all petroleum products from their outlets while requesting the residents not to unnecessarily stock up petroleum products.
People standing in queues with wad of scrapped currency notes outside banks, waiting and infuriated over the delay that was being caused due to heavy rush, closed gates of banks leading to arguments between customers and security guards, depicted the Thursday scene outside most of the banks in the city.

The day was unusual as the banks opened on Thursday after remaining closed on Wednesday after the announcement of demonatisation of Rs 500 and Rs1,000 currency notes.

A migrant labourer receiving new currency notes of Rs 2000 from a bank in Jalandhar on Thursday. (Pardeep Pandit/HT Photo)

Bank gates closed

The gates of the banks were closed because of heavy rush and the security guards were asked to make people enter turn-wise resulting in hours of waiting for the customers.

Since it was a pay day on Thursday, workers working in factories in focal point, Gadaipur and Industrial area thronged the banks to get their money deposited.

Vijay Kumar, a worker who was standing in a queue outside Punjab National Bank branch at Focal point said, I had come here at 10 in the morning, I stood here for an hour. When the line was not moving, I went back to work as I didnt want my days salary to get cut. Now I have come, but the position is still the same.

Some also alleged that the banks were giving biased treatment and favouring some customers while they were standing in long queues and suffering.

Meanwhile, it was like a festival for those who got received the new `2,000 notes. Purushottam Lal, a shopkeeper who had come to exchange the currency was the first one at Bank of India branch to get two notes of `2,000 and was euphorically showing it to others. There was satisfaction on the faces of those who got rid of the scrapped notes.

No exchange of money in few banks

Meanwhile, a few banks did not receive cash, thus no exchange of currency took place but deposition of the money was going on. Amrit Lal, general secretary, All India Bank of Baroda employees said, The panic will subside in coming days, there is no need for people to worry or create any panic.

.
Parminder Singh Pinki, 57, Congress

Parminder Singh Pinki (HT Photo)

Constituency: Ferozepur city

Education: Graduate

Assets declared in last polls: Rs 4.38 cr

Electoral record

2012: Defeated Sukhpal Nannu (BJP) by 21,763 votes; Cong won here after 20 yrs

2007: Didnt contest; Cong nominee BM Sharma lost to BJPs Sukhpal Nannu

Assembly record

Questions asked: 20

Call attention moved: 0

Power punch Connected to party high command; got ticket despite opposition

What next Likely to get Congress ticket again

How he performed

He managed to get funds from various members of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) of the Congress party for development works. He got installed open gyms in public parks, installed solar lights in various areas, especially slum colonies, arranged benches for students of government schools in border areas. He claimed to have got approved four-laning of Ferozepur-Hussainiwala road, super-specialty eye hospital and a government college at the fag-end of second stint of the UPA government at the Centre. He remained vocal against the SAD-BJP government for not allowing the start of 100-bedded satellite centre of PGIMER approved by UPA in 2014. He also arranged grants for leprosy homes, homes for visually challenged and orphanages..

Voter speak

He remained accessible to public by and large and kept on raising voice for our issues. He also managed to rope in funds to facilitate development projects.

Gurinder Pal Kaur, 53, housewife

He raised issues of the town but being in opposition, state authorities did not pay heed to his demands. There is shortage of specialists at newly constructed eye hospital.

Munish Punj, 37, businessman.

By the way

Donates cash on the move on the street

Rana Gurmeet Singh Sodhi, 61, Congress

Rana Gurmeet Singh Sodhi (HT Photo)

Constituency: Guru Har Sahai

Education: Class 12

Assets declared in last polls: Rs 5 cr

Electoral record

2012: Defeated SADs Vardev Singh Mann by a margin of 3,249 votes

2007: Defeated SAD candidate Paramjit Singh by 18,750 votes

Assembly record

Questions asked: 36

Call attention moved: 0

Power punch Close to Amarinder; also has ties in other parties

What next No big fight for ticket; likely to get it again

How he performed

Being in the opposition, his constituency failed to secure any major project in the last 10 years of Akali-BJP rule. He got some funds released from Congress Rajya Sabha MPs to introduce ambulance service. He still enjoys a good rapport among the Rai Sikh community for his role in getting them Scheduled Caste status during the Captain Amarinder Singh regime (2002-07). He exploited his personal contacts within the bureaucracy to help the electorate of his constituency. He or his son Anumeet Hira Sodhi kept themselves at the beck and call of the voters. However, a section of voters and some Congress workers are not happy over the fact that the MLA didnt protest when they were being harassed by the police for political reasons.

Voter speak

By and large, he was accessible in the last five years, but he being in the opposition proved costly for the people as the segment remained ignored all these years.

Sat Narain, 51, lawyer.

Guru Har Sahai was deprived of development during the last 10 years. However, the MLA stood by the electorate in the thick and thin all these years.

Didar Singh, 53, farmer.

By the way

Flamboyant, he has dabbled in Punjabi films.

Tomorrow: Jalalabad, Fazilka, Malout, Muktsar
Residents continued to face inconvenience in purchasing day-to-day items even as banks were full to the capacity with people rushing to get Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 exchanged with new currency.

Banks were shut a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that existing notes of these denominations will be removed from circulation with immediate effect.

As the non-availability of Rs 100 notes remained acute, people continued to purchase less by cash and used their debit and credit cards more.

Mirroring the situation on Wednesday, shops and markets across the city continued to receive less footfall. Milkmen and vegetable vendors also refused to take old currency.

Heavy rush outside the Panjab University branch of State Bank of India as people wait to exchange old currency on Thursday. (Anil Dayal/HT Photo)

Traders and shop owners including chemists and kirana stores were ready to give items on credit but refused to accept Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. Even taxi drivers asked passengers to arrange for money beforehand as they would not accept those notes.

Jewellers preferred above all

While confusion prevailed over the situation even on day two, some city residents who had huge amounts of cash were busy trying out various options to dispose of the money. Some went to jewellers known to them to purchase gold.

Chandigarh Beopar Mandal chairman said, The markets continued to suffer losses as there were hardly any buyers. The entire focus was on bank transactions today so it was another low day for sales. Things are expected to get normal by next week with the opening of ATMs and withdrawing of cash from banks.
Banks in Amritsar and across the region witnessed heavy rush of people coming to exchange Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations, which were discontinued by Modi government to curb black money in the country.

Banks in the city opened to huge crowds, many even fighting to be the first in the queue, on Thursday morning.

People were overheard interacting with each other that it was the longest wait ever, as it was a wait for over 24 hours after which they will finally get exchanged currency for Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

A woman standing at Rani Ka Bagh branch of a public sector bank said, Yesterday I did not have even one low denomination note at home, and thus could not buy household items. My son was also upset as I couldnt give him the tuition fee to him.

Another lady, Manpreet Kaur said, ATMs will start functioning again on Friday, which will be a respite to the problem. Bankers have assured that the new currency, lower denomination notes will be flushed in and in the coming days, normalcy will be restored.

People queue-up outside an ATM in Amritsar on Thursday. (Sameer Sehgal/HT Photo)

Hundreds of people thronged at the banks and majority of them were from lower and middle class income groups.

Satpal Mawalia, senior manager at a public sector bank in Katra Jaimal Singh branch said, Our circle head has supervised the entire working at many branches in the city. He has asked us all to be efficient in our working and make sure that every customer is sent back satisfied. We have taken an initiative to sensitise people and educate them about currency deposits, withdrawals and further course of action.

There was also a wall at the branch, where banners stating Dear customers, dont worry, your money is safe were put up.

Bankers personally came forward to pacify the customers and asked them not to panic. Lower income group people were seen asking for swapping of currency; and traders, industrialists and businessmen were seen depositing cash into their accounts, which many bankers felt is the impact of the announcement. The businessmen were seen taking back new currency note of Rs 2,000 and appreciating its texture and colour.

But majority of the people said, Yeh chalana kaise hai ab, logon ke paas khulle to hain nahi aaj kal.

An employee at a rice exporting mill, Gurmeet Singh, who came to deposit cash, said, There are dealers in our circle, who are accepting Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 note, but the problem is that we will then have to exchange it at bank. Banks should flush in more lower denomination notes to regularise the situation.

Chemists refuse to accept old currency in Pathankot

PATHANKOT: It was a rush for new currency notes in almost all banks in Pathankot, where residents had started gathering before the gates of banks even before it was opened.

There was chaos as people not only crowded the banks premises but also parked their vehicles haphazardly, thus causing long traffic jams.

Banks that had opened additional windows were struggling to deal with the heavy footfall of customers, while many had to close their gates multiple times seeing the full house situation.

The customers are being requested not to panic, as we are here to help them, he added.

Meanwhile, Pathankot chemists decided not to accept the old currency notes, which is likely to hit the health of patients who are not be able to arrange for the required medicines as they do not have the new currency or small currency denominations.

Rajesh Mahajan, president of district chemists association, said that the government must exempt chemists from this ban till the new currency notes come in the market in abundance, to ensure our cooperation.

Umesh Gulati, a bank customer said that he had more than Rs 10,000 in old notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000. But he could exchange only Rs 4,000 for now, which will not serve his requirements.

The business community is facing a hard time, as customers are offering us the old currency notes, which are of no use now, he rued.
At 7:30am on Thursday, people in large numbers started gathering at Bank Square, Sector 17, to deposit Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes and withdraw notes of smaller denomination, hours before the banks were to open.

The central government on Tuesday had discontinued the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

They started making queues outside, only to wait till some banks opened at 9:30am, half an hour earlier than the scheduled time of 10am. Police personnel were deployed at the bank square.

Even as one can deposit the discontinued currency notes in banks till December 30, people chose not to wait and rushed to banks on the first day the banks reopened after the decision.

A man showing a new Rs 2,000 note. (Keshav Singh/HT Photo)

Pyara Singh (80) of Kansal village said, I am left with no money to buy grocery. I was eagerly waiting for the banks to open. I am standing in the queue since 9am. I have deposited the money and am waiting to withdraw cash. Mahender Singh (85), another said, I am happy with the Prime Ministers decision (of discontinuing notes). It is okay if we have to face small problem.

Then there were others standing in queues because they have to attend weddings, do shopping, pay loans and travel.

There is a wedding in my family and I dont have money. I could have come later to the bank, but I need money immediately, said Anchal Pathak, a Sector-20 resident. Several bank branches ran out of money even for short durations, making people to wait. I have deposited my money and now waiting for cash withdrawal. They are out of cash and they have asked us to wait for some time, said Poonam Sharma.

I am studying in London and came to Chandigarh for Diwali holidays. The governments decision to invalidate high currency notes suddenly made me cashless. I have money which I cannot use. I cannot go out for shopping, eating out or for a party, said Neha Kaur.

banks make Special arrangements

Many banks had deployed extra staff to cater to the rush. More cash counters were opened. Besides, banks were opened half an hour early and a few extended their closing time by two-three hours. We have doubled the number of cash counters and have deployed extra staff. We have made separate counters for senior citizens as well. The bank remained open till 6pm and we ensured that all customers were attended to, said Rajesh Tandon, chief manager, Bank of India.

At the Sector-17 main branch, 239 people exchanged money and 330 came for depositing currency. There were long queues as the process takes long time, he said. The SBI branch remained open till 7pm. We ensured that all customers were attended to. If needed, banks will function for extra hours tomorrow. We have opened extra counters and deputed additional staff, said Pawan Kumar Kedia, SBI circle financial officer.
The chaos entered third day after demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes as post offices and ATMs failed to disburse any cash on Friday.

The post master at sector 8 post office said that they did not have any new currency and their bank was yet to disburse cash to them. This was the second day when post offices went without any currency exchange. They are only allowing deposits.

When chief post master general Haryana Circle Sukhdev Raj was contacted, he expressed ignorance and directed to contact Superintendent JK Gulati. Around 3:45 pm, Gulati informed, There was some mistake in fixing the limit on computers. We got the cash quite late. We have just provided Rs 40 lakh cash to Sector 8 branch and they would soon start disbursing. We will remain open on Saturday and Sunday also.

Post office (HT File Photo)

ATMs did not work in Panchkula throughout the day. Reason: They are not calibrated to disburse only Rs 100 currency notes.

People continue to line up outside banks in entire Panchkula for currency exchange and depositing old notes. One has to fill a form and attach a photocopy of their identity card. HDFC branch in sector 8 has deputed its staffer to manage crowd. They were facilitating senior citizens. Police personnel are deputed around all bank branches.

At ICICI branch in sector 11, officials were entertaining only their customers while asking others to come after 4 pm. Other bank officials deputed outside their branches were seen deflecting people to other banks.

Around 1 pm, Allahabad bank in sector 11 said that there was no cash for exchange but officials said they would replenish it soon. Bank of Baroda in the same sector locked its gate and claimed that there was no cash. IndusInd Bank and Yes Bank also denied for exchange while officials of Vijaya Bank and Bank of Maharashtra in the same sector asked people to come around 3 pm as cash was yet to be replenished.

Poor man suffers

Only today I had got my salary of Rs 11,000 but in demonetized currency notes of Rs 500 or Rs 1,000. I have to pay rent and to grocery story. Where should I go. I have checked 3 banks so far but they are claiming that there was no cash, said Balwinder Giri, resident of Kharakmangoli slum. Giri works with a contractor.

Suman, resident of Mauli Jagran, works as maid. Today I had got my salary of Rs 6,000. I have an account in Bank of Maharashtra but they are refusing as of now to exchange it. They are claiming that cash is finished. I have to pay Rs 4,000 as rent and also to milkman and grocery shopkeeper.

Property tax

The local bodies department allowed depositing of property tax in Panchkula in demonetized notes of Rs 500 or Rs 1,000 till midnight of November 11.
A day after the Supreme Court declared illegal a law enacted by Punjab to terminate its river-water agreements with neighbouring states, the Haryana government has suspended operations of buses of Haryana Roadways plying to Punjab for security reasons.

Additional chief secretary, transport, Sudeep Singh Dhillon told HT that the department has decided to temporarily stop operations of buses plying on long routes to Punjab. It is a precautionary measure in view of the prevailing situation, he said.

Also read | What now? 3-member legal team to advise Punjab govt on SYL row

Though the transport department claimed that only long-route operations have been temporarily stopped, some depots have stopped plying their buses on short routes as well. It is also not clear for how long the operations have been suspended.

The strike-down of the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004, seen as a huge setback for Punjab, has created tension, with both sides sticking to their respective stands. While the Punjab government has refused to share water, there is jubilation in Haryana. A few state leaders and khaps have even threatened not to allow vehicles from Punjab to pass through Haryana if it does not accept the court verdict and give water.
Blaming the Union government for grave injustice with Punjab on the river water-sharing dispute, Punjab government on Friday indicated that it was legally examining to stop current flow of Punjabs river water to Haryana and Rajasthan.

These political temperature-raising twin attacks were launched by chief minister Parkash Singh Badal and deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal separately and are aimed at mounting pressure on the BJP-led central government  in which their Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) is a partner  and to outwit the Congress in the unfolding political tussle over the inter-state tug-of-war over water.

And this stance of the Badal government is a part of its calibrated strategy that comes a day after Supreme Court termed as unconstitutional Punjabs 2004 law, which had scrapped all water-sharing treaties between Punjab and its neighbouring states, including Haryana.

Also read | What now? 3-member legal team to advise Punjab govt on SYL row

Sukhbir at a function in Jalandhar on Friday. (Pardeep Pandit/HT Photo)

We respect court, but we respect the Constitution of India even more that clearly forbids the government of India from arrogating to itself the right to adjudicate on distribution of river waters among states. Grave injustice has been done to Punjab by the government of India violating this constitutional clause, Badal said in a letter to President Pranab Mukherjee, seeking audience, along with council of ministers.

Also read| SYL row: Punjab blames Union govt, may stop all water to other states

And, the deputy CM Sukhbir Badal opted Jalandhar to fire another stunning salvo, saying the Akali Dal-BJP government was also legally examining the issue of stopping already flowing water to Rajasthan and Haryana.

Sukhbirs disclosure is significant as the government is likely to bring a new bill in the November 16 emergency session on the inter-state water dispute.

The state government is mulling all options to stop implementing the anti-Punjab judgment. We will disclose the next move in the assembly session Na kise nu andar badan devange te, na hi paani di boond devange (We will neither allow anyone to enter Punjab, nor give a drop of water), Sukhbir said.

Government sources say at the heart of this move to bring a bill is to go beyond the 2004 Act passed unanimously by the assembly during the Congress rule (2002-07).

But Clause 5 of the 2004 Act protects the current flow of Punjabs river waters to Haryana and Rajasthan and the Akali Dal is exploring the option of bringing the bill with primary objective of stopping current flow of water to the neighbouring states.

Scrapping this clause is an election promise of the Akali Dal that blames Punjab Congress chief Capt Amarinder for having delivered the biggest blow to states interest by giving a legal guarantee to the flow of Punjabs river waters to Haryana and Rajasthan.

The SAD-BJP government will take political, legal and constitutional steps to redress this grievous wrong done to the people of the state, the 2007 manifesto of the Akali Dal promises.

Akalis demand is to implement internationally accepted riparian principle, applied by the Supreme court in Narmada river water dispute. Why should an exception be made to this principle only to turn Punjab into a desert? 2007 manifesto of Akali says.
Popular Telugu actor and Jana Sena chief Pawan Kalyan on Thursday announced that he will contest the Andhra Pradesh assembly elections in 2019. He made the announcement while addressing a public meeting in Anantapur.

Pawan said his partys first office would come up in Anantapur. The actor-politician had on October decided to register himself as a voter in Eluru town of Andhra Pradesh.

Pawan, who is a voter in Hyderabad, had asked his aides to take necessary steps to transfer his name to the voters list in Eluru town in West Godavari district.

He once again targeted Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for denying special status to Andhra Pradesh and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) for accepting it.

Pawan asked the two parties not to hurt the self-respect of people of the state and not to play with their sentiments. He rubbished the claims by the central government that under a special package, it was giving the state same assistance which it would have got with the special category status.

Describing the package as jugglery of numbers, he said that while Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has stated that the state is being given Rs 2.03 lakh crore, another central minister M Venkaiah Naidu has put the figure at Rs 2.25 lakh crore.

Pawan, who is a voter in Hyderabad, had asked his aides to take necessary steps to transfer his name to the voters list in Eluru town in West Godavari district.

Pawan quoted financial experts to say that the state would have anyway got Rs 1.70 lakh crore with or without special package.

Stating that he respected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Pawan said he cant keep quiet when injustice was done to the state.

He also alleged that corruption was growing under TDP rule in the state.

This was the third public meeting addressed by Pawan since August, targeting both BJP and TDP.

The actor had floated Jana Sena on the eve of 2014 elections but campaigned for the BJP-TDP alliance.

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop
Within hours of Donald Trumps victory in the US election, a Muslim student wearing a hijab was robbed at a university in San Diego, California, by two men who spoke about the president-elect and Muslims.

An African American woman about to enter a store in Bloomington, Indiana, vice-president-elect Mike Pences home state, saw a truck with some white men speed up on her. The men yelled out, F*** you n***** b****.

And a massive Nazi swastika was found painted on the wall of a public park in Wellsville, New York, along with Trump campaigns slogan Make America Great Again. Similar graffiti was found at Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

Wellsville NY softball field dugout marked with swastika, "Make America White Again" graffiti https://t.co/GBu7WHH17G  Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) November 10, 2016

Police are investigating a spate of hate crimes against Muslims, African Americans, Jews and members of the LGBT community being reported from all over country after the election of Trump, the Republican nominee, on Wednesday.

He pledged to be president for all Americans in his victory speech early on Wednesday morning, but it may take more than that to stop supporters who feel emboldened by his remarks and acts of omission and commission during the campaign.

Read | Trumps call to ban Muslims restored on his campaign website

Trump was slow to disavow support from David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan; threatened to ban Muslims from entering the US; castigated Black Lives Matter activists and repeatedly called Hispanics rapists and criminals.

He did eventually distance himself from Duke, but the white nationalist didnt. Duke celebrated Trumps win, tweeting that it was the most exciting nights of my life and adding, ominously, make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump!.

This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MAGA pic.twitter.com/HvJyiJYuVa  David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) November 9, 2016

Maha Abdul Gawad, a Muslim woman, told The Independent that a woman walked up to her at a Walmart store on Wednesday and pulled off her hijab. This is not allowed anymore, so go hang yourself with it around your neck not on your head.

At @Walmart a woman pulled her Hijab off today and threatened her.



Day 1 of Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/MXKtavyCPF  Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 10, 2016

There have been reports of Muslim girls in schools and colleges taking off their hijab on their own to prevent being subjected to verbal and physical abuse from classmates, and there have also been reports of those instances as well.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on Trump on Thursday to begin unifying the nation by repudiating the type of bigotry generated by his campaign for the White House.

Unless Mr Trump speaks out forcefully against hate attacks by his supporters, they will take his silence as tacit endorsement of their actions, the body said in a statement issued by CAIRs national communications director Ibrahim Hooper.

Read | US split in two: Oregon turns into epicentre of anti-Trump protests

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes and discrimination of all kinds, has started a campaign inviting people to sign an appeal calling on Trump to honour his pledge, in his victory speech, to be president of all Americans.

First, you must publicly disavow all forms of bigotry. Second, you must assure the country that no one associated with a hate group or any form of extremism will have a position, a voice or influence in your administration, the appeal said.

Trump, who has resumed tweeting, hasnt said a word on this. But he did write about coming together in another tweet about the protests: Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

That is clearly not enough, and the situation is likely to get worse. The Loyal White Knights, the North Carolina chapter of KKK, has announced a victory parade to celebrate Trumps election, saying, Trump's race united my people.

Read | Trump victory: Towards an inward-looking America
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon on Friday voiced confidence that Donald Trump will not seek to undo the Paris climate deal despite his campaign pledge to cancel the landmark agreement on combating global warming.

The US president-elect, who said during his campaign that global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese, has vowed to renege on US commitments to cut down greenhouse gas emissions and help finance the transition to a green economy worldwide.

He has made a lot of worrying statements, but I am sure that he will understand the whole importance and seriousness and urgency, said Ban in an interview to AFP.

The presidency may be important, but humanity and all our lives and our planet Earth are eternal, he said.

Environmental activists hold a banner during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump at the Climate Conference, known as COP22, in Marrakech, Morocco. (AP Photo)

Ban argued that there was a strong consensus in the United States and across the world on the need to address global warming, suggesting Trump would be recklessly out-of-sync if he scrapped the deal.

Read | A planetary disaster: Trump win raises questions on US role in climate deal

Now business communities are fully on board. Civil society members are fully on board. How can one change all this course? Its a huge trend, he said.

It will create serious problems if anybody wants to undo it, or unravel all this process.

Ban, 72, has singled out the climate accord reached in Paris in December last year as his proudest moment in 10 years as the worlds diplomat-in-chief.

The former South Korean foreign minister said he plans to speak by phone with Trump soon and hopes for a meeting before his tenure ends on December 31 to explain how the United Nations expects the United States to continue to work for humanity.

The billionaire real estate tycoon won the US presidency on a platform that calls for closer ties with Russia, shaking up security alliances and questioning US funding to the United Nations.

Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina. (AFP File Photo)

The UN chief brushed aside suggestion that the United States, by far the biggest contributor to the United Nations, could cut funding or sidestep the world body in addressing global issues.

This is what he said during the campaign period, on the campaign trail, Ban said.

Now, post-election, when he creates his transition team with experts and people with vision and expertise, I am sure that the United States will continue to play a leading role, said Ban in the interview at UN headquarters.

The interview was Bans first full assessment of the impact of the Trump electoral victory on global diplomacy.

Click here for full coverage on the US presidential election
The 22nd Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) got underway on Friday. And cine buffs can feast on an array of international films over the next seven days. Kolkata-based filmmaker Atanu Ghosh lists a few films, which are a must-watch this year. Atanu, who has directed Bengali films like Takhan Teish (2010), Rupkatha Noy (2013), Ek Phaali Rodh (2014) and Abby Sen (2015), too is looking forward to watching a few films by some of the masters. Atanu also explains why these films should be watched.

Summertime and Three Worlds: Three films of the French filmmaker and actor, Catherine Corsini, will be screened in the Special Screening section. Atanu says that two films of Corsini  Summertime and Three Worlds  are a must watch. Corsini was the president of the jury for the Camera dOr prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2016. Corsini is a popular name now. Three Worlds was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, 2012, he says.

A still from Catherine Corsinis Summertime. (kff.in)

Ugetsu and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums: This year six films of Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi will be screened in the Great Master section. Atanu recommends cinegoers to watch Mizoguchis Ugetsu (1953) and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939). Ugetsu also won the Silver Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. He is a master filmmaker, who is known for his long takes. An author and a screenwriter, I believe its important for every film lover to watch Mizoguchis films. I dont remember when his films were screened in Kolkata for the last time. So, its a rare opportunity for filmgoers this time, says Atanu.

Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchis Ugetsu will be screened at KIFF. (kff.in)

Othello: Atanu advises cine goers to watch Oliver Parkers Othello (1995), an adaptation of William Shakespeares work. Laurence Fishburne plays the title role in the film. I think audience should watch this film because a lot of literary adaptations of Shakespeare are happening nowadays in Bengali cinema. Bengali theatre is also experimenting with Shakespeare. So, this film will be an interesting watch under the Literature and Cinema section, says Atanu.

Laurence Fishburne in Oliver Parkers Othello. (kff.in)

Ashes and Diamonds: Andrzej Wajda, one of the most celebrated Polish filmmakers, passed away on October 9 this year. Atanu highly recommends every film lover to watch Wajdas films. Only one film of the master filmmaker will be screened at KIFFs Homage section. Ashes and Diamonds is a must-watch for every cinema lover, says Atanu, a fan of the Polish filmmaker. Ashes and Diamonds is also one of the favourite films of filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Andrzej Wajdas Ashes and Diamonds will be screened in the Homage section at this years KIFF. The Polish filmmaker passed away on October 9 this year. (kff.in)

Chinese films: Seven films from China will be screened at KIFF. China is the focus country this year and Atanu believes its important to watch a few Chinese films. We dont get to watch Chinese films in Kolkata on the big screen. This is a rare opportunity and I would encourage cine buffs to watch new-age Chinese films, he says.

American Dreams in China is one of the seven Chinese films that will be screened at KIFF. (kff.in)

Pinneyum and Tope: Malayalam filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan is one of the most prominent figures in the history of Indian cinema. Atanu says its mandatory for every film lover to watch Gopalakrishnans films. His 2016 film Pinneyum, starring Malayalam actors Dileep and Kavya Madhavan, will be screened under the Special Tribute section. Atanu also recommends Buddhadeb Dasguptas new film Tope (Bait). Both Gopalakrishnan and Dasgupta are important filmmakers of our time. So, their films are a must watch, says Atanu.

Buddhadeb Dasgupta on the set of his upcoming film Tope (Bait), which is one of the attractions at this years festival. (HT Photo)

A total of 156 films from 65 countries will be screened across 13 venues at the seven-day long festival .

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
There will be a double whammy at the forthcoming Dubai International Film Festival this December. A 4K compilation of restored movies which the French cinema pioneers, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere, made between 1895 and 1905 will be presented at the festival by the Cannes supremo, Thierry Fremaux.

Fremaux wears two hats -- as the chief of the worlds premiere film festival at Cannes and as the head of the Institut Lumiere at Lyon. He said in a note that the showcase enables us to rediscover and celebrate Auguste and Louis Lumiere, moviemakers who are responsible for film as we know it, whose pioneering moving image snapshots of life at the end of the 19th century (and the start of the 20th century) paved the way for the popularisation of the medium and its evolution into an art form.

The Lumiere movies have been produced by Bertrand Tavernier (President of the Institut) and Fremaux -- and whose visit to Dubai will be his first to the region.

Titled Lumiere! Inventing Cinema, will be screened on December 8, a day after the festival begins. This outstanding package will have 98 films, all restored and conserved.

A still from Les Pyramides. (Dubai Film Festival)

In 1895, the Lumiere Brothers invented the Cinematograph (a device for capturing, developing and projecting movies) and went on to film some of the first moving images in the history of cinema. Some of them show factory workers emerging from work, a steam engine and people scaling a snow-covered mountain. Some of these are celebrated masterpieces, others lesser known gems. They give us a glimpse of France and the world as they looked once upon a time.

A scene from Chamonis la Mer de Glace. (Dubai Film Festival)

The Brothers house in Lyon (France) is now a beautifully preserved museum. India too had its movie pioneers like Dadasaheb Phalke and Hiralal Sen among others. There are no memorials or museums for them, if one is right. A proper museum for the legendary Satyajit Ray (who actually introduced India cinema to the world on the Cannes platform) is still being talked about -- although a part of his house in Kolkata is now being seen as a memorial to the master.

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop
While their husbands met Thursday in the Oval Office to prepare passing the presidential torch, Michelle Obama and Melania Trump met elsewhere in the White House to plan their own transition.

This first meeting between the two women with vastly different backgrounds was held in the executive residence, far from the eyes of curious journalists.

Michelle has had a chance to greet the incoming First Lady, President Barack Obama told reporters later in the Oval Office, with Donald Trump sitting at his side. And we had an excellent conversation with her as well.

The first meeting between a First Lady and her successor traditionally offers both women a chance to confer about the best way to live in the goldfish bowl that is the White House, about how to raise children there, and so on.

Raising children may be one of the few points the two women have in common.

Michelle Obama, elegant at 52, is the first black First Lady in American history. A Harvard-educated lawyer, she will leave the White House on January 20 enjoying sky-high ratings -- approved by 79 percent of the American public, according to a recent Gallup survey. That makes her more popular than her husband.

Melania Trump, who is 46, is a Slovenian-born former model with high Slavic cheekbones, and what was once described as the ice blue eyes of a snow leopard about to sneeze.

Read more| Poised and glamorous Melania Trump the second foreign-born First Lady of US

The new first lady will have much to prove. Only 28 percent of Americans hold favorable opinions of her, while 32 percent are unfavorable -- the worst figures for a future First Lady since the 1980s, according to Gallup.

She kept a low profile through most of her husbands campaign, preferring to remain in their luxury penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower in New York to take care of Barron, the couples 10-year-old son.

Michelle Obama spared no effort in recent weeks to bolster the election campaign of Hillary Clinton -- the woman who was supposed to help preserve her husbands legacy.

First lady Michelle Obama campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (AP Photo)

Appearing at several Clinton rallies, the first ladys passionate speeches and boundless energy brought a level of heightened excitement on the campaign trail.

After a video emerged last month in which Donald Trump spoke of groping and kissing women against their will -- he later denied having actually done so -- she criticized his intolerable attitude toward women.

And at the Democratic nominating convention in July, Michelle Obama denounced, without naming him, the hateful language... that does not represent the true spirit of this country.

- Modern and elegant -

Often praised for her chic and modern sense of glamour, Obama was a particularly active First Lady. She was a prominent advocate in the fight against child obesity, supported the nations military families and, with her husband, launched an initiative last year to help young girls around the world get the education they deserve.

Melania Trump, always smiling, always immaculately turned out, is much more reserved -- more in keeping with the traditional image of a First Lady.

US President-elect Donald Trump greets supporters along with his wife Melania and family during his election night rally in Manhattan, New York on November 9. (Reuters)

At the age of 16, she began a career as a high-fashion model in Italy and France.

At the Republican convention in July, her speech introducing her husband, at first well-received, was roundly criticized after its similarities to a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama came to light.

She has always liked Michelle Obama and was inspired by her, Melania Trumps speechwriter later explained. After that, Melania largely disappeared from the campaign trail.

But she returned recently to deliver a speech -- visibly nervous -- to pay tribute to American values: kindness, honesty, respect, compassion, charity, understanding, cooperation.

We have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other, she said.

As someone who considers herself very independent, she added that as First Lady she would devote herself to the defense of womens and childrens causes -- and to fighting Internet bullying.

The latter comment was roundly mocked by online critics, who noted the virulent personal attacks Donald Trump regularly launched on Twitter.

Melania Trump, whose English bears the heavy accent of her native Slovenia -- and who speaks at least four other languages -- will become the first foreign-born First Lady since Louisa Adams, the British-born wife of John Quincy Adams, who was president from 1825 to 1829.

A US resident since 1996, she received American citizenship in 2006, a year after marrying the New York billionaire. In his recent campaign, she has stoutly supported him even amid the worst crises.

She does have one thing in common with Michelle Obama: Both women stand nearly 6 feet tall (1.80 meters).
Half-dressed, panting and disheveled, the lawmakers jolted awake by a middle-of-the-night vote were applauded by colleagues as they raced into an Australian state Parliament.

The Queensland lawmakers were quite the sight as they ran onto the floor of Parliament in Brisbane in bare feet, shorts and T-shirts on Thursday. One lawmaker managed to throw on a jacket but lacked a shirt.

The vote was called suddenly about 2:30 a.m. because opposition lawmaker Jeff Seeney was refused permission to give an unscheduled speech.

Several lawmakers caught unaware rushed back to the chamber from a nearby accommodation block in various stages of undress.

Lawmakers who were not caught napping laughed and applauded their panting colleagues while a government minister questioned Speaker Peter Wellington whether the shirtless man in a jacket complied with dress regulations.

Wellington allowed the irregular attire and advised lawmakers to get to the chamber to vote as quickly as possible.

Seeney lost his motion to speak 42-32 before Parliament was adjourned at 3 a.m.

Unexpected vote early this morning had MPs running into State Parliament half dressed. @ShaneDoherty9 #9News https://t.co/olCVXo9mSh  Nine News Brisbane (@9NewsBrisbane) November 10, 2016
Cyprus police say a Syrian woman claims she gave birth aboard a boat loaded with 128 other migrants as they made their way from Turkey to the eastern Mediterranean island.

Police spokesperson Andreas Angelides said Thursday the woman told authorities the birth took place a day into the two-day trip that began in Mersin, Turkey, and ended when rescue crews towed the boat to Cyprus northwestern coast.

Angelides said the captain had abandoned the boat before rescuers reached it late Wednesday. Most of the migrants, including 48 children, were taken to a reception center near the capital, Nicosia. Five of the children were unaccompanied.

Angelides said the migrants paid traffickers $2,000 each for the journey. Nine men were detained after they were found to have been previously deported from Cyprus.

Read | 25 people found dead in Mediterranean migrant boat off Libya: MSF
Like we had predicted, this Pakistani blue-eyed #ChaiWala is here to stay.

Arshad Khan, a Pakistani tea-seller, became the talk of the town after a photo of him went viral. But another Khan has now taken note of him -- none other than Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan!

It all started when Twitter user Sakshi Khurana posted a clip from the 18-year-old social media stars interview, where he says he resembles actor Shah Rukh Khan.

"@Khan_azwaSrkian: He Loves SRK @iamsrk too ! 

MUST WATCH IT !  pic.twitter.com/AkBbTOFEJw" kamina famous hogya ye  sakshi khurana (@electric_end) November 11, 2016

The video was shared multiple times and finally, even King Khan took notice. The superstar retweeted the video saying, How sweet is this. Beauty lies in simplicity.

How sweet is this. Beauty lies in simplicity. https://t.co/QZbTMQN8Sj  Shah Rukh Khan (@iamsrk) November 11, 2016

We all knew that King Khan was large-hearted, but this grand gesture makes us love him even more!

Arshad Khan, whos better known as the Pakistani ChaiWala, is one of social medias rags-to-riches story. After his photo went viral, Khans stardom landed him a modelling offer with an Islamabad-based retail site.

Khan, who comes from a poor background and lives with his sixteen siblings and parents, was later invited to a popular talk show, Good Morning Pakistan, on the ARY network , where he was given a makeover on-screen.

(Aley Bhaidani / Good Morning Pakistan)

Now that Shah Rukh Khan has blessed Arshad on social media, maybe the superstars success will rub off on junior Khan as a good luck charm.

via GIPHY

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Indian Army chief General Dalbir Singh arrived in Nepal on Friday on a three-day official visit aimed at boosting military and security ties between the two sides.

Singh is visiting at the invitation of his Nepalese counterpart General Rajendra Chhetri, and the trip comes close on the heels of a visit by Indian President Pranab Mukherjee last week.

Soon after his arrival, Singh held talks with Chhetri at the Nepal Army Headquarters. The two army chiefs discussed a wide range of military and security issues and various matters of bilateral interest.

Singh was accorded a guard of honour by a contingent from the Nepalese Army at the headquarters. Earlier, he laid a wreath at the "Veer Smarak" at the Army Pavilion in Tundikhel.

He is scheduled to pay a courtesy call on President Bidhya Devi Bhandari and Prime Minister Puspa Kamal Dahal Prachanda.

Singh and Chhetri will also inspect the Nepal-Indo joint training exercise "Surya Kiran X", being held at a battle school at Saljhandi in Rupandehi. The battalion-level exercise began on October 31 and will end on November 13. This is the tenth joint exercise between the two countries.

The Surya Kiran series of exercises are held annually, alternatively in Nepal and India. It is also the largest drill in which Nepalese troops participate.

The Indian Armys Kumaon Regiment and the Jabar Jung Battalion of the Nepal Army are participating in this years edition of the exercise, which is focussed on countering terrorism in mountainous terrain. The exercise will be yet another step towards taking the traditional friendship between the two nations to greater heights, an official statement said.
Members of the Madhesi Morcha boycotted Parliament on Friday to protest against the delay in amending Nepals new constitution to address their demands and grievances.

An alliance of Madhes-based parties, under the banner of United Madhesi Democratic Front ( UMDF), warned it would take to the streets if its demands were not met by November 15. Lawmakers belonging to the UMDF also walked out of the House and obstructed parliamentary proceedings.

The ruling alliance of Nepali Congress and the CPN-Maoist Center has been saying it will register a constitutional amendment bill in the House since Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda became prime minister in August but no progress has been made so far.

On Friday, when Prachandas government completed 100 days, he said preparations were being made to table the constitutional amendment soon to address the concerns of various groups and communities but did set a date.

During a meeting on Thursday, the Madhes-based parties decided to walk out of Parliament from Friday as part of efforts to pressure the government to register the amendment proposal by mid-November.

The alliance said it had decided to resume its protest because the government had given no indication that it would address the concerns of Madhesis. On the behalf of the UMDF, the Federal Socialist Forum's parliamentary party leader, Ashok Rai, said the government had not even implemented a three-point agreement inked by the Nepali Congress, CPN-Maoist Center and UMDF on August 3.
After almost six years of protracted negotiations, India and Japan on Friday signed a pact on civil nuclear cooperation. This is the first pact Japan has entered with a country that is not a signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The deal would help speed up Indias civil nuclear cooperation with the US. Though a US-based firm, Westinghouse is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Japanese firm Toshiba. Japan, the only country to have ever come under a nuclear attack, has remained wary of signing a pact with India, a non NPT country.

Read | India, Japan sign landmark civil nuclear deal

After five years of discussions two sides concluded the pact last year and it was signed on Friday after the annual summit meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe.

Japanese companies are world leaders in nuclear technology and most nuclear power plant equipment-makers, barring the Russians, are dependent on them.

Japan has a near monopoly over making reactor vessel with Japan Steel Works (JSW) leading the pack. In the fray are Chinese state-owned China First Heavy Industries, Creusot Forge, a subsidiary of Frances Areva group, Russias OMZ Izhora but JSW accounts for over 75% of the business globally.

Read | PM Modi calls on Japanese emperor ahead of bilateral talks with Abe

If Westinghouse is a Toshiba- subsidiary and even a General Electric reactor core is built by Hitachi. In other words, a pact with Japan would help the process of signing a nuclear cooperation agreement other countries easier.

The Japanese have upper hand in nuclear fuel fabrication and breeder technology. And the pact with Japan helps India advance the technology cooperation with Japan. A pact with Japan helps India bolster its non-proliferation credentials. Japan approving of Indian credentials is a shot in the arm for the country to stress on its non-proliferation track record when it is pulling out all stops to get an entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Previously unreported letters from the early 1900s by some of Indias Muslim soldiers who fought in World War 1 have been disclosed by a literature expert at Birmingham City University.

Islam Issa, lecturer in English literature, previously found that at least 885,000 Muslims were recruited by the Allies, having trawled through thousands of personal letters, historic archives, regimental diaries and census reports.

New personal letters discovered by Issa from more than 100 years ago highlight the experiences of Indian soldiers as they shared their impressions of England in comparison to their home country, a university statement said.

Commenting on the police in a letter dated October 1915, A Ali wrote: The police indeed deserve praise. If one policeman raises his hand every single person in that direction, rich and poor alike, stands still where he is as long as his hand is raised.

On his trip to a London department store, Ali said: We visited a shop where 2000 men and women were working and everything can be bought. There is no need of asking as the price is written on everything.

In the same letter, he shared his experience of the London Underground. Then we went in the train that goes under the earth, it was for us a strange and wonderful experience  they call it the underground train, he said.

Issa has been researching individual stories from the Great War for an exhibition commissioned by and held at the British Muslim Heritage Centre in Manchester, called Stories of Sacrifice.

In another 1915 letter by Abdul Said, more opinions on shopping and butchers are shared. Every shop in this country is so arranged that one is delighted to look at them. Whether you buy much or little it is properly wrapped up, and if you tell the shop man to send it to your house. You have only to give him your address and he delivers it.

The butchers shops in Hindustan are very dirty, but here they are so clean and tidy that there is absolutely no smell.

During his research, Issa found that 1.5 million Indians, 280,000 Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians and soldiers recruited from other parts of Africa fought for the Allies during World War 1.

The contribution of Muslims to the Allied forces during World War 1. (Islam Issa)

When I decided to look at soldiers letters, I expected a very bleak outlook on the war. Of course, sometimes, thats exactly what I found. But quite often, the letters were about individual experiences and very normal, human things, said Issa.

These anecdotes certainly helped shape my narrative for the Stories of Sacrifice exhibition. While theres an important narrative about the war as a whole, the personal and human narrative was probably more striking. Whatever your ideology or stance, you end up realising that these Muslim soldiers were individual humans and as a result, they were making sacrifices at that individual, human level.

Complete with a virtual library, lesson plans and a toolkit for schools, the British Muslim Heritage Centres exhibition is the first long-term event of its kind, devoted solely to exemplifying the Muslim communitys contribution and sacrifices during World War 1, the statement added.

The exhibition was part of Sadiq Khans first visit outside London as mayor, and was also recently visited by the head of the British Army, Gen Sir Nick Carter.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Pakistan said it has welcomed an earlier offer of mediation by US president-elect Donald Trump to reduce Indo-Pak tensions as it expressed the desire to work closely with the new administration.

Foreign office spokesperson Nafees Zakaria was responding to questions at the weekly news briefing here about Trumps victory in the US presidential election.

The US president-elect had offered mediation between Pakistan and India on Kashmir dispute during his campaign and we had welcomed that offer, he said, though reports did quote Trump specifically mentioning Kashmir.

The 70-year-old real estate tycoon had last month described tensions between India and Pakistan as a very, very hot tinderbox and offered to be the mediator or arbitrator if it was necessary and if the two countries so desired.

Read | Would love to see Pakistan and India get along: Donald Trump

Radio Pakistan also quoted Zakaria as saying that the people of Kashmir had given sacrifices for their right to self-determination and that Pakistan was concerned about the continued atrocities by Indian forces there.

He said Pakistan will continue to raise Indian brutalities and human rights violations at international fora besides extending moral, political and diplomatic support to the cause of Kashmiris.

The spokesperson said Pakistan was looking forward to work closely with the new US administration for the mutual benefit of both the countries.

Pakistan will continue the endeavour to promote and strengthen the existing relationship, he added.

Read | World Bank asks India, Pak to agree to mediation on Indus Waters Treaty

Pakistan has multidimensional and strategic relationships with the US including economic, defence, science and technology, education, strategic issues, counter-terrorism and wants to strengthen them further, he said.

To a question regarding violation of the Indus Waters Treaty by India, Zakaria said Pakistan has approached the World Bank for establishing a court of arbitration.

Pakistan is looking forward to the establishment of the court at the earliest in line with the Indus Waters Treaty, he said.

Zakaria added that India has not fulfilled its promise of investigating the Samjhauta Express incident. He said perpetrators of the incident had made public confession in which eight serving army officers were involved. He also said India did not share any information with Pakistan despite the latter repeatedly raising this issue bilaterally and on various forums.

Also Read | A wild card: Will Trumps presidency favour India, crack down on Pakistan?
The number of migrants illegally entering the United States from Mexico jumped more than 16 percent in October, US officials said on Thursday.

The US department of homeland security said it detained 46,195 people in October, up from 39,501 in September and 37,048 in August.

There are currently about 41,000 individuals in our immigration detention facilities  typically, the number in immigration detention fluctuates between 31,000 and 34,000, DHS secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement.

I have authorized US immigration and customs enforcement to acquire additional detention space for single adults so that those apprehended at the border can be returned to their home countries as soon as possible, he said.

Immigration officials have said that most of the undocumented arrivals are actually Central Americans making the arduous journey through Mexico to seek work and safety in the United States  amid poverty and a surge in gang-related violence at home.

US officials have engaged with a number of countries to repatriate their citizens more quickly, and they have agreed to do so, Johnson said, noting that many of the new arrivals have been asylum seekers and young children.

Our borders cannot be open to illegal migration. We must, therefore, enforce the immigration laws consistent with our priorities, he added.

We prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants who are convicted of serious crimes and those apprehended at the border attempting to enter the country illegally.

The latest immigration figures come two days after the November 8 presidential election that closed a campaign in which immigration has loomed large.

The immigration issue has been central in the candidacy of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to build a wall along the south-western border and make Mexico pay for it.

Trump met for an hour Thursday with the head of the US Senate Mitch McConnell, and again stressed his plans to highlight immigration during his presidency which starts in January

Were going to look very strongly at immigration, the billionaire businessman said.
The flashbacks come to Denys Plaud unbidden, making it hard to work: Gunshots threatening to pierce his cramped refuge in the Bataclan theater. The excruciating silence between rounds of fire. And when it was all over, stepping over the dead and dying to reach freedom.

One year on, survivors of Frances deadliest extremist attacks are trying to look to the future, but they will never forget.

More than 1,700 people have been officially recognized as victims of the horror that unfolded on November 13, 2015, at the Bataclan, Paris cafes and the national stadium. In addition to the 130 who died, nine remain hospitalized and others are paralysed or otherwise irreparably damaged. According to the governments victims minister, more than 600 are still receiving psychological treatment.

A year was the minimum period of time for me to recover, and to mourn the dead, Plaud said. Like a veteran, I will always have to live with this horrible (memory). You cannot make them fade. You can learn to live with them.

Read | Mumbai horror revisited: 26/11 pattern in Paris attacks

Plaud, a 48-year-old math and physics tutor, wrote a book to process his anguish. Cafe owner Gregory Reibenberg, whose wife died in his arms, also wrote a book, to help their 9-year-old daughter heal, and to find sense in the senseless. Another survivor turned his flashbacks into a graphic novel, depicting the attackers as skeletons and sprinkled with poignant humour.

Denys Plaud, 48, a Bataclan survivor who was teaching maths and physics, answers questions during an interview with the Associated Press in front of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France. (AP Photo)

As France prepares to mark one year since the attacks with commemorations on Sunday, Plaud still seems surprised that he escaped alive that night.

Itching to dance as he watched a concert by California rock band Eagles of Death Metal, he left the crowded dance floor for the balcony, for more room to move around.

I just heard what sounded like firecrackers, and the first seconds I thought that someone is spoiling the show  or maybe that it was part of the show. But when I heard some shots, some screaming from people being shot, I told myself theres something wrong, he told The Associated Press this week. I ran.

He and about 15 others hid in a small room and called police, who told them to keep quiet until emergency crews came.

It took nearly three hours.

We were listening to some shooting and screaming, and when we thought it was over it was just the time the terrorists would reload their weapons and shoot again, he said. At one point, bullets hit a wall he was squeezed against, and he felt it shake.

Read | Paris attacks show the good, bad and ugly of social media

When the silence and strain became too much for someone in the cramped room, he recounted, the others would softly say shhh  to show we were together, we were a unit, there was no one left alone.

When finally the emergency crew came to rescue us, we passed from that dark, tiny room to full light with a bloody battlefield . And policemen every five meters telling me dont look at them, mister, they are dead, you cannot do anything, he said. But there were so many corpses I had to look where I put my feet.

Today, the memories sometimes pierce his concentration when he is teaching, and he has to stop.

Survivors guilt is a problem for some. And many are still recovering from injuries.

The age of those killed in the Paris bomb attacks. (AFP Graphic)

Daniel Psenny was working from his apartment across from the Bataclan when he heard gunshots and saw panicked people escaping via the emergency exit and windows. He went down to help, pulled an injured American man into his building, reached to close the door  and was shot in the arm by an automatic rifle.

Psenny, a journalist for Le Monde, continues to undergo physical therapy after the shot burned his nerve endings. Ive lost part of the sensations and mobility in some fingers, he said. Its a bit better than one year ago because I am on my feet and alive. But its quite tiring and heavy-going.

We are not like we were before. There is a before and an after November 13th, in the way of being, looking, seeing, even if, in my case, I continue going to a performance, to a movie, take flights, and get on with my life.

Survivors also face frustrations  the protracted investigation, the French bureaucracy required to be recognized as victims  allowing for government compensation and medical support. And what they see as injustices, like not being invited to the Bataclans reopening concert with Sting on Saturday night. Families of those who died were given the priority instead.

Read | Its my baby: Longtime Bataclan owner hopes it lives on after attack

Reibenberg has chosen to look to the future after what happened that night, when 19 people were killed in his cafe, La Belle Equipe. His wife Djamilas last words were take care of Tess, their daughter. His guardian angel, cafe manager and long-time friend Hodda Saadi, also died, along with her sister Halima, celebrating her 36th birthday.

What these (attackers) were targeting, we were representing it fully  diversity, mixing, sharing, said Reibenberg. A French Jew, his wife was Muslim and his staff had roots reaching to Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Mexico, the Alps...

The owner of La Belle Equipe cafe, Gregory Reibenberg, answers questions during an interview with he Associated Press at his home in Paris, France. (AP Photo)

Reibenberg spoke from his apartment near the attack sites in the 11th arrondissement  and near a new tea shop hes opening soon, expanding his business because he refuses to give in to fear.

His message for the attackers is clear: Its not because you shoot us and take away our cherished ones that we will suddenly become stupid and hateful people who will stop loving others.

Read | How Paris has changed the war on terror forever
US President-elect Donald Trump visited Congress on Thursday and proclaimed that health care, border security and jobs will be his top three priorities when he moves to the White House next January.

Continuing a Washington victory tour of sorts after his presidential election shocked the world, Trump and Vice president-elect Mike Pence sat down with House Speaker Paul Ryan and then with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to discuss the Republican priorities in Congress.

Ryan and Trump had a testy relationship during the campaign, with the House speaker last month saying he would not defend the nominee after Trumps lewd comments about women were made public.

Now that Trump is the president-elect, Ryan appeared friendly and gracious as they met, first over lunch and then in his Capitol office.

We had a very detailed meeting, Trump told reporters at a brief photo spray.

As you know, health care -- were going to make it affordable. We are going to do a real job on health care, he said.

Trump made repealing Obamacare, and building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, pillars of his presidential campaign.

US President-elect Donald Trump speaks to the press with his wife Melania and House Speaker Paul Ryan at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on November 10, 2016. (AFP Photo)

Trump said he and the Republican majority in Congress were going to accomplish absolutely spectacular things for the American people, adding he was eager to get started.

Afterwards, following an hour-long meeting with McConnell on the other side of the Capitol, Trump stood at the Senate majority leaders side and stressed that we have a lot to do.

Were going to look very strongly at immigration, he said.

Were going to look very strongly at health care, and were looking at jobs -- big league jobs.

Trump did not elaborate.

McConnell said they discussed the transition operations and said hes anxious to get going early, and so are we.

Ryan for his part complimented Trump on his astounding come-from-behind victory against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Were going to turn that victory into progress for the American people, and we are now talking about how we are going to hit the ground running to get this country turned around and make America great again, Ryan said.

Congress returns to work next week, after an extended break for the US elections.

Obama meets Trump

Barack Obama and Donald Trump put acerbic rows and profound differences aside in a 90-minute transition meeting at the White House Thursday, hoping to quell fears about the health of the worlds pre-eminent democracy.

The outgoing president and his successor met one-on-one and sat in high-backed chairs before the Oval Office fireplace, for what Obama characterized as an excellent conversation.

President-elect Donald Trump (L) talks after a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama (R) in the Oval Office November 10, 2016 in Washington, DC. (AFP Photo)

Trump -- who previously called Obama the most ignorant president in our history -- said it was a great honor meeting with the US leader, adding that he looked forward to receiving the presidents counsel.

Obama -- who previously said Trump was a whiner and uniquely unqualified to be commander-in-chief -- vowed his support.

I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds, Obama told Trump

The two men ended the improbable and historic White House encounter with a handshake and refused to take questions

Heres a good rule. Dont answer questions when they just start yelling, Obama told Trump, referring to the press.

Read more| Meeting of many firsts: Obama has excellent talks with Trump at White House
Nostradamus, the famous French seer who died sometime in 1566, has predicted that a World War could start in 2016 or 2017. The seer has been credited with the predictions of the collapse of the World Trade Center, the rise of Hitler and Napoleon, and the great fire of London.

The Inquistr reported that the seer predicted that there would be an ordering of a military operation, which alludes to Donald Trump in his position as commander-in-chief of the US armed forces.

The Inquistr added that Nostradamus fans then claim that Trump would lead the US and the world into nuclear war after this election.

The seer reportedly predicted that Donald Trump would win the elections. Many believed that his description of "great, shameless, audacious brawler will be elected governor of the army" referred to Donald Trump.

In a gamersdrop report, Nostradamus supported the claims of believers that Trump will emerge victoriously. The prediction reportedly stated, "The false trumpet concealing madness will cause Byzantium to change its laws. From Egypt, there will go forth a man who wants the edict withdrawn, changing money and standards."

Some followers of Nostradamus reportedly believed that Hillary would win. Gamersdrop reports from a History Channel documentary that the seer predicted this year's polls between Clinton and Trump.

A prediction from a verse, Century VIII, Quatrain 15 described a masculine woman who will exert herself to the north. Another verse also explained that Trump will be attacked by some women, which he was, during the election, after he was accused of sexual misconduct.

Nostradamus also reportedly talked about a battle of the sexes, where he predicted a duel between the Blonde one and the "fork" nosed one, referring to Clinton and Trump, and implied that Donald Trump may earn the ire of the female gender.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
SpaceX Falcon 9 explosion on Cape Canaveral Air Force Base launch pad took the world by a storm. Now the company CEO Elon Musk believed that the Falcon 9 launch could be resumed in December 2016.

Thousands of people around the world had their eyes glued to the live launch of SpaceX Falcon 9 on Sept. 1, 2016. However, a terrible explosion took place at the launch pad at the time of take off because of unidentified reasons.

The team at SpaceX have been investigating into the reasons behind Falcon 9 explosion since past two months. Although the reason seemed a bit unclear at first, now Musk claims that the team has finally identified what led to an explosion.

According to Musk, the liquid oxygen used as propellent in Falcon 9 caused the explosion. Falcon 9 was being fueled when the explosion took place, and the investigators believe that the explosion took place when "extra cool" liquid oxygen entered Falcon 9 in a solid state.

This was a new issue altogether for SpaceX to resolve. Even American space agency NASA expressed its concern over the fact that SpaceX uses a strange way of fueling the rocket, just minutes before its actual launch, according to Nature World News.

Musk recently revealed that such a pitfall has never happened in the past. This is the primary reason why the investigation team took so much time to sort out things and figure out the actual reason behind explosion.

The team has now devised a new fueling system that the researchers at SpaceX are now planning to study. Despite all anomalies, SpaceX is confident that they will be able to launch Falcon 9 by the second week of the last month of the year.

After SpaceX explosion, there were rumors that a UFO may have caused an explosion because it did not want Falcon 9 to launch successfully. However, these reports were discarded by people belonging to the scientific community.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
It is highly likely that Nokia is on a comeback trail. HMD global Oyj has acquired the license for the unit from its former Finnish owner.

The brand has been popular decades ago but innovation difficulties left it at the mercy of many other revolutionary tech organizations. Although it has been incorporated into top companies like Microsoft, Nokia's approach has never been the same.

Based on a revelation by Quentyn Kennemer of Tech Reviewer Phandroid, the device projects a Nokia sign on the rear part of its case. Details on the same surface also include a couple of outlines probably for a camera flash and lens. The upper and lower edges present two silicon stripes which provide a clear radio spot for the unit's antenna.

It is being anticipated that Nokia will be unveiling its smartphone items very soon. In order to be competitive, it is believed that the product designs should be at par if not better with the current crop of sophisticated units.

The former Finnish-managed item has integrated camera specifications which are pretty common among android smartphones although a fingerprint sensor is now being added near the lens. On the other hand, the two silicon strips are closely affiliated with the new looks of the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus devices.

While the upcoming Nokia units are something to get excited about, the new product line does not entirely present the old outfit. It must be remembered that only its name has been revived by HMD. The new ownership will direct the device's brand criteria and performance efficiency.

The set-up may mean that HMD will focus on retooling the item in order to make it more competitive in the market. The organization will have nothing to do with Nokia's daily operations.

Meanwhile, Foxconn affiliate FIH Mobile will be handling the new product's distribution and manufacturing undertakings. In a capsule, Nokia's ventures will be processed by different groups.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Pangu normally releases a jailbreak tool two to three weeks after Apple released its newest beta. But this time, things have been slower from Pangu's end because it's been a month and no iOS 10 jailbreak tool has been released from the team.

There are several hackers who have shown to crack iOS 10 but nothing has been made public. There are alternatives but most come with a bit of a limitation as Neuro Gadget reported.

Pangu has remained tight-lipped about iOS 10 jailbreak tool, thus, Chinese developer team has given up to the enhanced security features of Apple operating system. However, apart from Pangu, there is a group of hacker who discover new ways how to jailbreak iPhone, iPod and iPad.

According to Mobi Picker, the team named themselves as Unlock-Jailbreak team who had claimed that their newly developed iOS 10 jailbreak tool works even better compared to the ones that was developed by Pangu.

iOS 10 jailbreak tool was expected to release long time back but that never happened. The new iOS 10 jailbreak tool will give users' access to Cydia apart from the usual benefits.

This tool seems to be the most logical crack to use and also flexible. It doesn't compromise Apple devices and even offers bonuses. Tool also includes broadening options for SIM card use plus lifetime support and money-back guarantees.

Additionally, the team has also claimed that their tool is safe and will not harm the device. But there is a risk in using jailbreaking so the users are advised to take precautionary steps especially those who are not technically well-equipped.

This iOS 10 jailbreak from the Unlock-Jailbreak team is very easy to install. it would be best for owners to backup their device. The crack can be used on devices ranging from the iPhone 5 to the latest iPhone 7.

Apart from the supposed working iOS 10 jailbreak from Unlock-Jailbreak team, another hacker named Luca Todesco has also reported to have successfully jailbreak the running iOS 10.1.1 in iPhone 7. However, this claim has not been verified.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
News, events, history, and other mid-week tidbits.

Tuesday, October 25, 4:30  7 p.m.

Orr Area EMS Open House

Brats and burgers will be served. Event includes a new ambulance tour and blood pressure screenings. For more info: 218-780-3798.

Orr Fire Hall

4540 Lake St., Orr

Tuesday, October 25, 12  6 p.m.

Essentia Health Job Fair

Talent recruiters and department managers will be on-site at Essentia Health-Virginia. Candidates from all backgrounds are encouraged to attendnurses, nursing and clinical assistants, surgery technicians, radiology technicians, respiratory therapists, human resource professionals, and those interested in environmental services or nutrition services. Essentia staff will greet candidates, conduct an initial screening and filter them to appropriate hiring managers for interviews. Select candidates will be verbally offered a position before leaving. Candidates are asked to bring a resume, but its not required. Attire is business casual. For more info: www.essentiacareers.org.

901 9th St. N., Virginia
Timo E. Kettern is the IT Director at Lapithus Hotel Management and a respected professional in his field. In anticipation of HITEC Amsterdam which will take place next year in March in Amsterdam, we spoke with him about shadow IT activities, technology, and devices that fall outside the traditional IT funding.

The central question is whether shadow IT like unapproved software, apps, and devices need to be managed by the IT department of the organization, considering that many of these tools may raise serious security challenges, leaving the business exposed to all kinds of attacks. Because each business is different and shadow IT evolves, should the IT department create a particular branch to manage such tools? How can IT not stifle innovation but still exercise required security and fiscal governance in the organization?

Kettern addressed some of the issues with his response, beginning with the increase of compliance and legal requirements and what hurdles hospitality pros need to overcome to get the job done, and ending with an emphasis on balance.

"It remains a matter of fact that in the last years more and more compliance and legal requirements came into effect. As all main business processes in the hospitality industry are technology enabled, what easier than to put the required compliance standards into the IT systems and processes? So far so good, you would think.

But these controls and processes make it more time-consuming and cumbersome for an associate to get their job done. For example, in some jurisdictions, we are required to capture certain private details of the guest and store them in our PMS. The data fields in the PMS then become mandatory for input. What then happens during a busy check-in is that anything will be inserted in the date fields by the associate just to finish registration process as quickly as possible. You can't really blame them for trying to serve the arriving guest as quickly and efficiently as possible. So, on we have a regulatory requirement that is translated into an IT process that results in Data-Mull.

As another example, hotels cannot send/receive credit card data in unencrypted emails. As IT responsible people in the hotel industry, we apply all sorts of technology to make sure non-plain text credit card number can be sent or received using the corporate email. But nothing stops the creative reservations team to set-up a webmail account with any free email provider and to use that to receive credit-card information from the guest. So who is to blame here? The institutions that create these rules? The corporate IT Team for doing their best to keep the company compliant and therefore out of trouble? Or the associates in the hotel who only want to get their job done efficiently?"

Kettern (pictured) concludes his response with an emphasis on balance, which is essential for good business.

"In my opinion, every organization has to find the right balance between compliance and risk of conducting the business  and, of course, that will vary greatly depended on the ownership of the hotel (group)."

Planning for HITEC Amsterdam is in full swing with guidance from an advisory council representing eight European countries. The council is chaired by Carson Booth, CHTP and vice-chaired by Derek Wood. For the latest news, follow HFTP/HITEC on HITEC Bytes, PineappleSearch, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (@HFTP) and Instagram (HFTP_HITEC). For more information about HITEC Amsterdam, contact the HFTP Meetings & Special Events Department at [email protected], +1 (512) 249-5333.
Hospitality Net today

Sign up to our free daily newsletter,
It looks like you've reached a page that doesnt exist (anymore).

Please use the navigation or search above to find content on Hospitality Net.

Go back to home
In year-over-year comparisons, the industrys occupancy fell 3.5% to 64.0%. Average daily rate (ADR) increased 1.6% to US$123.17. Revenue per available room (RevPAR) decreased 1.9% to US$78.82.

The U.S. hotel industry reported mixed results in the three key performance metrics during the week of 30 October through 5 November 2016, according to data from STR.

In year-over-year comparisons, the industrys occupancy fell 3.5% to 64.0%. Average daily rate (ADR) increased 1.6% to US$123.17. Revenue per available room (RevPAR) decreased 1.9% to US$78.82.

Opposite from last week, STR analysts cite a negative effect on results due to a Halloween calendar shift. The holiday was not included in the comparable week from 2015.

Among the Top 25 Markets, Orlando, Florida, saw the largest year-over-year increases in occupancy (+7.2% to 74.6%) and RevPAR (+15.2% to US$89.48). ADR in the market rose 7.5% to US$120.01.

Two additional markets registered a double-digit rise in RevPAR: New Orleans, Louisiana (+11.6% to US$130.53), and World Series co-host, Chicago, Illinois (+10.1% to US$117.57).

Chicago also posted the largest increase in ADR, up 9.4% to US$158.90.

St. Louis, Missouri, reported the steepest declines in occupancy (-14.1% to 62.1%) and RevPAR (-18.3% to US$61.13). ADR in the market fell 4.9% to US$98.41.

Three additional markets experienced a double-digit drop in RevPAR for the week: Boston, Massachusetts (-16.9% to US$135.55); Miami/Hialeah, Florida (-16.5% to US$125.97); and Houston, Texas (-15.1% to US$64.90).

Miami/Hialeah reported the largest decrease in ADR, down 5.6% to US$172.80.

After St. Louis, three other markets saw a double-digit decline in occupancy: Boston (-13.6% to 69.8%), Miami/Hialeah (-11.5% to 72.9%) and Houston (-10.5% to 61.8%).

View weekly U.S. hotel performance review

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.
A rare Air Jordan 9 is hitting retailers this weekend and it should appeal to every Kobe/Lakers fans, as well as those Randy Moss/Vikings fans.

The Kobe Air Jordan 9 is eerily similar to Kobe Bryants classic PE, which strongly resembled the Jordan PE cleats that Randy Moss laced up during his playing days for the Minnesota Vikings.

Just like Kobes pair, this rendition features purple patent leather and yellow accents, though these bad boys feature the #23 on the heel, as opposed to the #8 that was seen on the Black Mambas PE.

None of that shouldnt deter any Lakers fans from scooping up a pair when they release tomorrow, November 19th for $190.

Select Foot Locker locations will be implementing a Reservation system for the release so check out the Launch Locator to see how your local store is handling the Kobe Air Jordan 9 drop this weekend.

Per Foot Locker;

A new App Launch Reservation procedure is being PILOTED. This launch procedure will allow this release to be reserved through the app. App submissions open Monday 10am ET. Once the countdown clock expires, users who placed a submission will be notified via the app of their outcome. For full App Launch Reservation details see www.footlocker.com/launchreservation IMPORTANT: Once you enter your reservation submission your current VIP status will be locked.

Kobe Jordan 9
Well here it is. After weeks of promotion, which included the releases Shoot Back & Welcome To Planet X with Eminem, Long Beach rapper & Slaughterhouse member, KXNG Crooked, releases his new concept album Good Vs. Evil.

Laced with 14 records in total, the follow up to Statik KXNG (with Statik Selektah) features guest contributions from Eminem, Just Blaze, Tech N9ne, RZA, Xzibit, & more. Heres what the LBC emcee had to say about the album in an interview with XXL

Im the type of person who feels other peoples pain more than average. Ive been that way my whole life. Its a gift and a curse. With Good vs. Evil I decided to create a world where the victims of police brutality, government corruption and class discrimination fought back; but not through silent protestbut through violent protest. Sometimes you have to shake people up and shock them into paying attention. Imagine if Mike Brown, or Philando Castile survived the officers shooting them and went straight to the studio to record an album. What would they say? How wouldnt they feel?

Available now on iTunes, fans can stream the album in its entirety via Apple Music (below).





KXNG Crooked
Days after the Foo Fighters teased a European tour on their website, the tour finally starts to take shape. The bands vocalist, David Grohl, has now confirmed they will play as headliner for the Polish Opener Festival.

Foo Fighter fans all over Europe are getting excited as new tour dates are published on the internet. Joining the previously known headliner Radiohead, the Foo Fighters are playing on the festivals main stage Thursday, June 29, 2017.

After announcing their appearance at NOS Alive Festival in Portugal on July 7, and recently, their presence at Madrids Mad Cool festival on July 6, Poland now joins the list of European concerts. Fans are keeping an eye on the digital passport released before on the Foo Fighters website, expecting a string of European tour dates.

Due to this news rumours are surfacing about the possibility of the rock band playing at the Glastonbury 2017, where Radiohead also performs as a headliner.

Advertisement

The Opener is a Polish music festival taking place at Kosakowo Airport in Gdynia from June 28 to July 1. Last year the line-up surprised fans with famous bands such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Florence and the Machine. Other acts, beside the Foo Fighters and Radiohead, have not yet been published.
A great poet leaves us but he will stay in our hearts forever, reflects Antonio Banderas.

Tributes have been pouring in to the great Leonard Cohen.

Taking to Twitter, band member Hattie Webb says, Inspiration. Teacher. Friend.

Reacting within minutes to the sad news, Lisa Hannigan messaged: Leonard Cohen, right up the top of the Tower of Song. A North Star for so many songwriters and music lovers. Rest in Peace.

He was the best I ever met, says Dave Fanning; Rest in peace, you beautiful man, adds Steve from Windings; A great poet leaves us but he will stay in our hearts forever, reflects Antonio Banderas; Dear Leonard Cohen, thanks for the quiet nights, the reflection, the perspective, the wry smiles and the truth, says fellow actor Russell Crowe; Many Irish fans are mourning a terrible loss today. May he sleep well, proffers Brendan Howlin who reveals Suzanne to be his favourite Leonard song, and What we need right now is a lot of Leonard Cohen music on the radio, urges Graham Linehan;

Click through below for a lovely missive from 2fms Rick OShea.

Leonard, my friend, were going to miss you

"I've seen the future, brother. It is murder." #thankyouleonardcohen  Hozier (@Hozier) November 11, 2016
Veteran Waterford rock n roller Paul Butler  formerly of 1980s indie darlings Neuro  takes his music very seriously, but hes not overly precious about himself. When a jealous local muso had a pop in a bar last year, telling the 52-year-old Propeller Palms frontman that he was past it, the youthful-looking Butler used the insult as inspiration for the title of his bands sophomore album.

Yeah, this guy was saying I was past it, and he used other derogatory terms as well, Butler recalls, laughing. I said, Well, if you were listening to me you wouldnt know how old I was, but if you were looking at me you might! So I decided to title our second album Old Dog, New Tricks as a bit of an up yours! to him. Theres still a bit of life left in this old dog.

This is most certainly true. The follow-up to 2011s widely acclaimed All In This Together, Old Dog, New Tricks is another collection of finely-crafted, instantly hummable and wildly energetic rock n roll songs reminiscent of The E-Street Band or Exile On Main Street-era Stones.
Prepare to hear the Leeds-based band's debut album in entirety!

The British indie rock group are heading to Dublin next year to commemorate the 30th anniversary of their debut album George Best (1987).

"The boy Gedge has written some of the best love songs of the Rock n Roll Era. You may dispute this, but Im right and youre wrong! John Peel.

Current members include David Gedge on vocals and guitar, Charles Layton on drums, Danielle Wadey on bass, and Marcus Kain on guitar.

Reminisce with George Best below!

Advertisement

The band are set to play at The Academy in Dublin on June 17, 2017

Tickets 23.50 includes booking fee on sale now from Ticketmaster.ie and outlets Nationwide
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The owner of the Dakota Access Pipeline said Thursday that it expects "imminent" federal approval to begin drilling under the Missouri River in North Dakota and finish one of the last sections of the pipeline that would transport crude from the Bakken shale.

Executives of Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas said during a call with analysts that the pipeline is 84 percent complete. Workers are mobilizing drilling equipment now in preparation for approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns a 500-foot buffer around the river.

There is little other construction left to do in North Dakota, although the company is still working on sections in Iowa.

Native Americans and environmentalists continue to protest the pipeline's construction, setting up camps around Lake Oahe, a dammed reservoir on the Missouri River near the South Dakota border.

The Standing Rock Sioux reservation sits just south of the pipeline's path; the tribe says construction runs through sacred land and burial grounds.

Tribe members also fear a spill would spoil the Missouri and contaminate their water source.

Energy Transfer said that the pipeline is 99.98 percent on private land and does not cross any land owned by the Standing Rock Sioux.

Moreover, executives said, almost all of the land is adjacent to an existing pipeline and multiple studies have found no cultural artifacts or sacred sites in the project's path.

Energy Transfer said the pipeline will cross 90 to 150 feet below the reservoir, and have double walls and remote-control shutoff valves at each end of the lake.

The company has all other permits required to complete the pipeline, executives said; the Army Corps authorization is the sole outstanding approval.

"As soon as we have that, we are able to set up hydraulic drilling," Energy Transfer president Matt Ramsey said.

Energy Transfer's third quarter net income fell to $138 million from $393 million in the same period last year, the company reported, due largely to a $308 million write-down of assets in its Midcontinent Express Pipeline, which the company says is struggling. Revenue fell by $1.1 billion, or 17 percent, to $5.5 billion.

But company co-founder and chief executive Kelcy Warren said he was bullish on the future, especially following the upset election of Donald Trump, who has supported pipeline construction, including the Keystone XL, which would have carried crude from Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries but was rejected by the Obama administration.

"I'm stunned by the events of (Tuesday)," Warren said. "That's not to get into politics; I just didn't see this coming."
A Texas legislative panel that reviews state agencies on Thursday dropped all of the substantial - and controversial - proposals aimed at improving the operations and transparency of the Railroad Commission, the state's oil and gas regulator.

The proposals, recommended by the staff of the panel, called the Sunset Commission, included transferring the authority to oversee natural gas utilities, increasing reporting on wells used for the disposal of drilling wastewater, and changing the name of the Railroad Commission to better reflect its role in regulating the state's energy industry.

The Sunset Commission, comprising five state representatives, five senators, and two members of the public, is charged with recommending whether state agencies should be reauthorized by the Legislature and how they might do their jobs better. This is the third time in six years that the Sunset Commission has examined the state's oil and gas regulator; previous reviews in 2011 and 2013 were unable to win the endorsement of the Legislature because of controversial proposals such as limiting campaign contributions to Railroad commissioners, who are elected to six-year terms.

On Thursday, the Sunset Commission didn't even discuss two of the most contentious items on its list, transferring the oversight of gas utilities to the Public Utilities Commission and requiring oil and gas companies to post larger bonds to cover the costs of plugging and cleaning up abandoned wells. The oil and gas industry opposed both recommendations.

The Sunset panel also dismissed a proposal to change the agency's name to the Texas Energy Resources Commission, which many critics said would help raise the visibility of an agency that oversees the state's most important industry. The Railroad Commission was created in the 19th century to oversee railroads in Texas and later took on regulation of oil and gas, but kept the name, even after the federal government assumed oversight of railroads.

The final report of the Sunset Commission will largely reflect proposals supported by the Railroad Commission, including funding to digitize violations data to allow for easier access and better tracking.

Environmentalists also cheer a recommendation that the Railroad Commission consider seismic data from a state funded program in its regulatory decisions. Several studies have blamed deep wells used for to dispose wastewater from drilling operations for an increase in earthquakes near oil and gas fields.

But the Sunset Commission also didn't discuss proposals to address broader concerns about the wastewater disposal wells. The commission dropped modest recommendations that would have required monthly instead of annual reports on the wells and raised permit fees. Rep. Richard Pena Raymond, D-Laredo, the commission member who made the proposals, did not respond to requests seeking comment on why his recommendations were dropped.

Robin Schneider, executive director of Texas Campaign for the Environment, an advocacy group, said the Sunset Commission's recommendations would at best be a small step forward in improving the Railroad Commission's oversight of the oil and gas industry.

"It by no means meets the needs of the people of this state," she said. "Sometimes it's about baby steps."
For corporate America, there's a lot to like about President-elect Donald Trump's platform: fewer regulations, lower taxes and a singular devotion to deal-making.

Yet there's one signature campaign pledge - to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants - that has many executives across the country on edge. The proposal, if implemented even remotely as vigorously as Trump at times promised, would squeeze a labor pool that companies like Dunkin' Brands Group and Bojangles say has already been tightening for months. That in turn stands to further drive up labor costs at a time when many businesses are facing jumps in state-set minimum wages.

That may be precisely the desire of many Trump supporters: Prop up stagnant wages for working-class Americans. But for companies in industries such as construction, restaurants, hotels and technology, it could make filling jobs more difficult.

"We supply ready-mixed concrete to the housing industry, and if there's not enough workers to build houses, guess what? We don't get to supply the concrete," said Tom Hill, chief executive officer of Summit Materials.

Hill said he's in favor of gaining control of the border to stem the flow of drugs and people without documents. But lawmakers would have to devise a guest-worker program to provide laborers and should find a way to make legal the workers who are already in the U.S., he said.

"They tend to be really good hard-working people," he said. "I would love to see them have a path to citizenship."

Some business leaders, including Douglas Yearley, CEO of homebuilder Toll Brothers, said they hoped Trump's long experience as a businessman would inform his decisions.

"Our business is an immigrant-based business. Then again, so are his hotels and so are his casinos," Yearley said. "You go on a construction site of any homebuilder and it is the United Nations. I've been in this business 26 years, and I don't think I've ever met a Caucasian trowel hanger. It's just the nature of the business."

Trump has vowed to build a multibillion-dollar wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and hold legal immigration steady even as companies practically beg the government to raise the number of visas currently handed out. Trump's measures could have employers from meat packers to restaurants and software companies facing higher wages, renewed threats of work-site raids, the loss of seasonal workers and a continuation of decades-long backlogs for visas.

"We look forward to partnering with the Trump administration and Congress as they transition in the coming months and years," Karen McLoughlin, chief financial officer of Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., said at a conference Wednesday. "Obviously, immigration is a very important issue for Cognizant."

U.S. firms face a tight labor market. The unemployment rate sits at 4.9 percent, down from 10 percent in 2009, and wages have started to pick up steam. Most economists agree that the nation is on the verge of full employment,.

U.S.-born workers could benefit from Trump's policies.

"In the short run, it does create employment opportunities for native-born Americans and possibly higher wages," said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
BISMARCK, N.D. - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it's trying to defuse tensions between Dakota Access pipeline protesters and law enforcement in southern North Dakota, but the pipeline's developer isn't cooperating.

The agency released a statement late Wednesday imploring Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners to voluntarily stop work in the area where protests against the $3.8 billion pipeline have resulted in more than 400 arrests. The Corps made a similar plea last week, but was also rebuffed.

"Their absence will help reduce these tensions," wrote Col. John Henderson, commander of the Corps district covering the region.

ETP spokeswoman Vicki Granado told the Associated Press in an email Thursday that the company was still mobilizing equipment in preparation for tunneling under Lake Oahe. The reservoir is at the center of the Standing Rock Sioux's fight against the pipeline, which the tribe and its supporters fear could harm cultural sites and drinking water sources at the tribe's nearby reservation.

Granado said construction won't start until the company gets permission to work on Corps-owned land near the reservoir in a permitting process that has been stalled for months.

The nearly 1,200-mile pipeline is slated to carry oil from North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to a shipping point in Illinois. The Standing Rock Sioux is fighting the project through a federal lawsuit, and the tribe's chairman, Dave Archambault, called on President Barack Obama to stop the project before he leaves office. Obama has said his administration is monitoring the situation.

Corp officials didn't respond to messages outside of supplying Henderson's statement. The Corps has given no timetable for a decision on allowing ETP to work on the land near Lake Oahe. In the meantime, ETP has continued construction on private land nearby.

Experts said the Corps has few options outside of asking ETP to voluntary stop work on private property.

"If they're lawfully on private land, they can essentially do whatever they want there," said Brian Jorde, an attorney who has represented hundreds of landowners against pipeline companies. "It's kind of a sneaky way to do the preparation, to do it on land essentially that the Corps doesn't have jurisdiction on."
SMILEY N. POOL/STAFF

The University of Houston System has completed the purchase of 46 acres for a new campus in Katy that will offer UH classes and programs of the university's Victoria affiliate.

The land, at the northeast corner of Interstate 10 and the Grand Parkway, was purchased from Parkside Capital.
Houston's path out of recession is slow, shallow, and rocky, but finally at least appears visible.

That's the takeaway from a new forecast by University of Houston economist Bill Gilmer, who over the past six months has seen a rising rig count start to slow the losses of jobs in oil and gas.

"This is not going to be a V-shaped recovery," Gilmer said, delivering his semi-annual economic update to a room full of Houston business people. "We have a long, slow grind ahead of us."

This forecast is brighter than the one Gilmer delivered in May in part because of statistical error: The Texas Workforce Commission overstated Houston-area employment gains in early 2016 by about 20,000 jobs. Relative to that, the third quarter looked much better, meaning that Houston was sitting in the worst part of its downturn without realizing it. (See the full slide deck here.)

"So what we've basically done is switched from a 2017 recession in front of us, to a 2016 recession which is behind us, with a bit of job growth next year," Gilmer said. The Houston labor market has grown only 0.2 percent this year, compared to 4.3 percent in 2012, while the number of unemployed people has increased by 30,000 since 2014.

Still, much remains uncertain, since anything could happen with drilling activity. Gilmer, who said he voted for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, didn't touch on the election of Donald Trump, which threw the economy a curveball. Even without that, Gilmer's estimates for 2017 ranged widely, from a pessimistic scenario of nearly 20,000 jobs lost to an optimistic one of 27,000 jobs gained, depending on how many rigs return to the oil fields.

Complicating the picture, the $50 billion boom in petrochemical-related construction that had been driven by the natural gas rices is all but played out. "If we're struggling to get out of the recession, we can blame it largely on what's been helping us for so long, that east side petrochemical expansion," Gilmer said.

One thing is clear: Oil-related job levels will never return to their highs during the fracking boom. But Gilmer didn't foresee Houston sliding back into recessin over the medium term, due to continued population growth and the large professional and services sector that doesn't depend on the oil industry, such as aviation and insurance.

Another datapoint on Thursday appeared to affirm Gilmer's more upbeat tone. The Purchasing Manager's Index, a broad measure that takes into account many indicators of business expansion, moved into positive territory for the first time since December of 2014, when the oil bust began.
UPDATE: The controversial page is back in place, restored after widespread media coverage of its removal from the site.

"The website was temporarily redirecting all specific press release pages to the homepage," the Trump campaign told the Washington Post. "It is currently being addressed and will be fixed shortly."

ORIGINAL STORY: One of the most controversial tenants of Donald Trump's campaign has quietly been scrubbed from his website.

A page on Trump's official website that once had a statement on banning Muslims from the United States no longer exists, reports ABC News. It now redirects voters back to the homepage.

"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the page used to read. "According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population."

The statement existed on his site as late as the morning of the election, according to the Independent, but was turned into a redirect sometime after that.

MORE: 'Not my president:' Trump denounced in protests across US

Trump drew widespread criticism in 2015 when his campaign issued a press release calling for a complete ban of Muslim immigrants and tourists to the United States.

MORE: Seth Meyers tears up talking about Trump's victory over Clinton

President Obama called the proposed ban "repugnant" and an "affront to everything that we stand for as Americans."
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The dedication of the George R. Brown Convention Center's new showpiece sculpture, "Soaring in the Clouds," on Thursday wasn't only a celebration.

For artist Ed Wilson, the moment also felt like vindication, ending an ugly chapter of Houston art history and proving he could deliver a major public work deserving of one of the city's most high-profile spaces.

"I'm pretty happy with it, and relieved," Wilson said.

His monumental mobile, fabricated of perforated stainless steel, is a key element of Houston First's $175 million plan to create a vibrant new "front door" for the city, designed to draw visitors into the convention center's new Grand Lobby well after Super Bowl LI.

A fantasia of cloud and bird forms in colorful, shifting light, the installation celebrates Houston as a flyway for winged creatures. Especially from outside, it suggests a murmuration of birds in flight.

Closer up, it's easier to discern 14 layered "units," with about 300 elements total, that dangle 67 feet from the ceiling and drift slightly as they catch air currents.

The piece looks most dynamic at night, when changing lights amp up the shimmer and cast euphoric, moire effects on the ceiling; and reflections in the top windows create an illusion of endless, cloud-dotted sky.

"Soaring in the Clouds" is one of the largest and most expensive works of public art produced through the city's percent-for-art program, which earmarks a small portion of funds from major civic building construction projects for on-site art.

Wilson's commission stirred controversy in late 2014 after the Houston Arts Alliance, which managed the project for the city and convention center operator Houston First, gave the artist an $830,000 contract, then rescinded it, claiming it was awarded prematurely.

Documents obtained through the Public Records Act revealed that high-profile local art collectors who served on the alliance's selection committee wanted more "blue-chip" art for the space. Matthew Lennon, a friend of Wilson's and the alliance's then-director of civic art and design, resigned. Ultimately, Wilson re-won the job.

"Public art is messy, and public process is messy," said alliance president and CEO Jonathon Glus. "That said, public process worked. It's a beautiful, extraordinary piece made by a Houston artist."

Houston doesn't award commissions of this size frequently, although airport expansions also have yielded a few - most recently, Christian Eckart's 2015 "Cloud Room Field" at Hobby Airport, which cost $600,000.

Space was a challenge

"That puts you in some sort of rare territory, to prove that you managed a budget like that and delivered," Wilson said. "I think I have delivered a good finished piece and did it in a timely way."

The convention center's three-story atrium, which has a 92-foot tall ceiling, presented a unique challenge, Wilson said. "So my idea was to take a bunch of little objects and spread them out to activate the whole space."

The artist and his crew shaped each piece, including the large, puffy "clouds," using a hydraulic press he invented for the job. He hired theatrical lighting designer Christina Giannelli, also a Houstonian, to create the dazzling effects that "fill" the space to the ceiling. The lights will eventually run on an hour-long cycle.

"The idea is that you could walk through quickly and see one thing, and on your way back it will be different. Or you can sit and watch it unfold," Giannelli said.

She and Wilson also worked with WHR architects to add drama: The ceiling has a bright white, infinity wall-like surface that enhances the shadow play. The windows' low-reflectivity glass provides a clear view of the sculpture from outside, and gray escalators recede into the space so they don't distract from the spectacle.

"It was all about the ceiling and the reflections," Giannelli said. The placement of the lights was critical. "We didn't want people to get lights in their eyes when they look down on the sculpture, and we had to be careful not to get lights on the glass - that would pollute the image from the outside," she said.

Sara Kellner, who replaced Lennon, said once she saw Wilson's scale model with the lighting concept, she knew the piece would be "fantastic."

She admired it this week for other reasons, too. "This is an extraordinarily huge piece, and it's all handmade," she said. "This plaza is now going to be so much an area about civic celebration, and this piece is going to become the backdrop for so many future events in Houston."

Several dozen Houston artists, representing multiple generations, were at the dedication to cheer Wilson as he flipped a giant light switch below the installation with a cadre of officials.

"It's definitely a win-win for artists, especially after all the political back-and-forth," said Selven Jarmon, who knows all about epic struggles to realize monumental installations. Jarmon has spent several years raising funds for "360 Degrees Vanishing," which next spring will cloak the Art League Houston's Montrose building in a veil of African beads. He loves Wilson's piece. "The mock-up didn't really speak to the grandeur of the piece," he said.

Art is essential

Artist Terrell James, who wore "ED" buttons on her blouse from a campaign the arts community waged for Wilson two years ago, also loves "Soaring in the Clouds," and she was pleased to hear officials calling art essential to Houstonians' lives.

The convention center's other monumental commission, the kinetic "Wings Over Water" by Tucson's Joe O'Connell and Creative Machines, will spin above the new Fountain of the Americas by early January.

Houston First also commissioned eight smaller works by area artists to liven up the center's renovated walls and new device-charging stations. Those projects have been handled in-house by cultural programs manager Christine West.

Spokesman A.J. Mistretta said the center's first floor will be open to the public every night starting in early January, so that visitors can experience the art and dine at its four new restaurants opening in time for the Super Bowl: Pappadeaux, Grotto Downtown, Bud's BBQ and McAlister's Deli.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

More than 160 objects that were collected by emperors of China during several dynasties are displayed in one of this season's big shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Drawn from a vast cache of nearly 700,000 pieces that survived violent periods of political transition and plundering between the 11th and early-20th centuries, the objects have resided since 1949 at the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Your eyes could so easily be drawn to the opulent eye candy: delicate paintings, nuanced calligraphy and outrageously decorative antiquities of porcelain, gold and gemstones. You could admire them for hours, marveling at sumptuous details. Books could be written about virtually each piece.

National Palace Museum director Fung Ming-Chu notes in the show's catalog that the curators originally intended to call the exhibition "Emperors' Tastes." Jay Xu, director of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, where the show opened, suggested instead "Emperors' Treasures," "to better accommodate the American public."

The directors understood the timeless lure of glitz.

More Information 'Emperors' Treasures: Chinese Art From the National Palace Museum, Taipei' When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 12:15-7 p.m. Sundays, through Jan. 29 Where: Beck Building, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 5601 Main Info: $7.50-$15; 713-639-7300, mfah.org See More Collapse

For a more calming experience, however, you also can focus on the beautifully austere porcelains made during the early-15th-century reign of Emperor Yongle, during the Ming dynasty. Gazing into the unadorned "Jar with pale green glaze" or "Teapot with 'sweet-white' glaze," you enter a world of harmonious purity.

These vessels were no less challenging to produce than the show's ornately decorated works - and in fact may have been more difficult because imperfections have nowhere to hide.

In his fascinating 2015 book "The White Road," British porcelain artist Edmund de Waal notes, "You can get away with unevenness with other kinds of clay, but it is chancy with porcelain. Your errors, your slapdash decisions, are revealed."

For 500 years, no one in the West knew how porcelain was made: It requires a special kind of alchemy involving white clay that is found in only a few places in the world.

De Waal's pilgrimage to explore those locales began in the ancient Chinese city of Jingdezhen, "the place where emperors sent emissaries with orders for impossibly deep porcelain basins for carp for a palace, stem cups for rituals, tens of thousands of bowls for their households  the city of secrets, a millennium of skills, fifty generations of digging and cleaning and mixing white earth."

Most of the show's porcelains come from Jingdezhen, from the Ming period. Colorful monochromatic glazes were applied to many white pieces destined for imperial rituals: yellow for the Temple of the Earth, red for the Temple of the Sun, blue for the Temple of Heaven, white for the Temple of the Moon. Chinese artisans also mastered innovative painting techniques on white porcelain - the exhibition contains numerous fanciful examples.

Emperor Yongle, however, preferred white. For good reason, apparently.

As de Waal tells it, Emperor Yongle was a Renaissance man: He named his reign Yongle, which means "Perpetual Happiness," ordered the creation of the first Chinese encyclopedia, began to build the Forbidden City and instituted global trade. But he was also ruthless: He killed hundreds of relatives to capture the throne and later executed 2,800 women in his household.

White is a color of mourning in China, de Waal writes. Yongle didn't just love white porcelain, he employed it as a symbol of stability and purity. He even built a legendary towering pagoda of white porcelain, perhaps seeking restitution.

So what does all of this mean now?

We view everything in the context of our own experience and time. Can we just ignore the ugly history and find some contemporary metaphor in the peaceful aura of these vessels?

And what of the symbolism suggested by the purposeful shape of any vessel, which can contain so much more than water, wine, tea, flowers or air?

Take from the show what you will. There's plenty to contemplate.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Brandon Maxwell is careful not to get caught up in his own fame.

Even though he's Lady Gaga's stylist and his showstopping gowns have been worn by Michelle Obama, Kerry Washington and Gywneth Paltrow, Maxwell is quick to note he's just a small-town guy from Longview who loves chicken strips and watching movies with his best friends.

The 32-year-old designer recently visited Saks Fifth Avenue Galleria for Saks Fifth Avenue's Catwalk for the Cure, benefitting the Amschwand Sarcoma Cancer Foundation. He was accompanied by his best friend, Gabriela Cotton, an Austin-based hairstylist.

"I grew up in East Texas, eating fried foods and going to Wal-Mart, so I'm in a world that I sometimes feel very uncomfortable in. I don't think I fit into fashion and don't think I ever will," said Maxwell, who graduated from Austin's St. Edward's University in 2008.

Yet Maxwell has quickly made a name for himself in the fashion world as a stylist and designer. His first collection at New York Fashion Week in 2015 was praised by the critics, and he received the prestigious CFDA Swarovski Award for Womenswear in 2016.

But he points out that he's not a designer in the traditional sense. Maxwell, the oldest of five, is self-taught. His grandmother owned a clothing store, Riff's, in Longview.

More Information FAVORITE TRAVEL DESTINATION: Tokyo. FAVORITE SONG: "Rich Girl" by Hall & Oats FAVORITE BOOK: Any biography of a former first lady. "I've read Nancy Reagan's multiple times. I'm really into politics and that entire world." BEST ADVICE YOU'VE RECEIVED: "Don't talk about politics and money. So I don't." FAVORITE FOOD: Chicken strips, wings, burgers. "I don't have a very advanced palate." SURPRISING THING ABOUT YOU: "A suit is always uncomfortable on me. I never know which fork to use, and I'm selling these women's gowns not because I'm a glamorous person, but because I love making women feel beautiful." HIDDEN TALENT: "I can do back flips. I'm 32, and I might break something now, but I was a gymnast growing up. I was much leaner then." See More Collapse

As a teen, he and his friends would shop at thrift stores, then rework the clothes. Their selfie sessions became dramatic fashion shoots. Back then, he was preparing for a fashion career, even though he didn't know it yet.

"The same thing I did in Longview is what I do now, just on a larger scale," Maxwell said. "I know how to sew now, but no one taught me how to sew. We were do-it-yourselfers. When you grow up in a really small town, there's not a lot of access to some of the things we wanted to do, so we got creative."

After college, Maxwell moved to New York with his friends and found freelance styling jobs. Then in 2009, he got the chance to work with Nicola Formichetti, the Thierry Mugler creative director who shaped Lady Gaga's most outrageous looks.

Maxwell assisted Formichetti for two years, then took over styling Lady Gaga himself. He outfitted the superstar in white Azzedine Alaia for the 2015 Oscars, then he designed her a silver gown that showed ample cleavage for the Grammys that same year.

Maxwell's fashion line, which he self-funded, is an extension of his passion as a stylist.

"In the designing, I spend a lot more time alone in a room with a body form and fabric," he said. "I enjoy being able to make things with my two hands. I'm not classically trained in anything, but I've always been quite good at using my two hands and figuring it out. That's what I love most."

He lives in New York's Greenwich Village and has a design and sales team, along with a studio and showroom in the city.

He's been in the fashion industry for 10 years now, and his mission has never changed. "It's always about putting the woman first and foremost, and making sure, at the end of the day, she feels her best."

But life has changed in a big way for the Texas native. For example, now he can pay his rent. And he travels a lot.

"I never traveled growing up," he said. "I have a few passports that are full now. That's been great."

More than anything, he's found his footing in the world of fashion.

"I feel like I was sort of wandering aimlessly at a younger age. Now I feel like I've found a purpose and have a little more confidence in myself, just a little."
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The hardest thing I had to do on Wednesday, the day after the election, was go to work.

My bed felt a lot more secure than facing a country that had just elected Donald Trump, a person I considered the embodiment of decadence. I was 100 percent sure that the election results would finally quiet his loud, filthy mouth and bring peace to a nation that had been divided by his vicious rhetoric.

But it didn't happen.

Like many others, I watched in disbelief as the electoral votes climbed in his favor. With each state that turned red, my heart bled. The blue patches on the U.S. map were too few and far between, and I knew early in the night that a nightmare was unfolding.

I went to bed at midnight before the final count. Bewildered and fatigued, I sought a good night's rest.

At 3 a.m. I woke up in a panic. My heart was racing and I couldn't breathe. I walked to the restroom and took deep breaths to calm myself. Donald Trump had won! My mind kept reminding me that the unthinkable had happened.

When I finally went to bed, the morning seemed to come too soon, bringing with it a reality that I couldn't ignore: one of the most ridiculed persons in the world had just been elected to lead the most powerful country on earth.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Status quo in the mirror

How could this have happened? How could we have missed the opportunity to be progressive and enlightening by electing the first woman president of this country? Hillary Clinton was certainly flawed, but her experience and brilliance as a politician overshadowed Trump's vulgarity and ignorance. How could we have elected a man who showed little compassion to people of color, females or the disabled?

For a country that prides itself on democratic values, Trump was dictatorial, ready to pounce on anyone who disagreed with him.

Political pundits say that Trump won because he offered a change to the status quo. A change to the status quo! He is the status quo.

He's male, white and very rich; thus he's part of the power structure that has controlled this country for centuries.

He is different, though, in that he voiced his fear about the coloring of America, and gave others the confidence to do the same.

People of color and women have a leadership role to play in this country, and nothing will stop them. They may suffer temporary setbacks, but they will rebound and take their rightful place in this democracy.

Fragile solace

I got up and went to work.

To add to my sadness, the sky was overcast, gloomy, and threatening to rain.

In my office, I sat dejected and with tears welling in my eyes, and I'm sure macho Trump would have sneered at me for showing such weakness.

I went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee in hopes it would get me out of my funk. There I met a colleague, a white female, who was in tears.

She said she felt betrayed by the Trump supporters, many of whom, she said, voted out of "fear and hatred in their hearts."



When she asked me how I was, I couldn't utter a word. She looked at me and said: "We have a lot more work to do." And with that pithy statement, I went back to my office with a sense that I was not alone.

***

David D. Medina prefers to be introduced as "a Latino living in Houston" expressing his own views. He is also the Rice University's director of Multicultural Community Relations. He wrote this story as a contributor to the Houston Chronicle's Calle Houston blog.
Gary Coronado/Staff

University of Texas System regents will reallocate $41.3 million into research and academic efforts launched by Chancellor William McRaven, including a small portion of that money for the systems planned expansion into Houston.

McRaven said Thursday at the systems board of regents meeting that the committee tasked with advising the system on how to grow its footprint in Houston will brief regents on the plans in the next two months.
This years election season was historic in more ways than one. An unprecedented nine states considered liberalizing cannabis laws, and heres how it broke down: California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada saw their ballot measures pass, bringing the total number of states with legal adult-use cannabis laws up to eight. Arizonas ballot measure failed to pass.

Further, Florida, Arkansas, North Dakota, Montana passed their medical cannabis ballot measures, bringing the total number of states with medical cannabis laws up to 28 (Montanas measure expanded its already existing laws).

To many in the cannabis reform movement, this is cause for celebration. California is easily the biggest news here, being the sixth largest economy in the world and dwarfing all current cannabis-legal states combined. Thats a big domino to fall.

THE TREND toward legalization is sweeping the country, and it doesnt seem to be slowing. This might lead some who support the movement to assume legal pot nationwide is a foregone conclusion, but thats far from the truth.

The legality, or illegality, of cannabis at the federal level hasnt changed at all, where it is still classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act. That means that lawmakers consider cannabis a substance with a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Schedule I also includes drugs like heroin, LSD and ecstasy.

Despite many rumors that the Drug Enforcement Agency would reschedule cannabis to Schedule II earlier this year, meaning that it would legally have accepted medical uses, the DEA reaffirmed its decades-old position in August. Though many activists argue fervently for cannabis medical uses, the science of it gets rather complicated. The federal government likely will change cannabis legal status at some point, but nobody knows when thatll happen.

The DEAs decision had an important caveat though. It allowed new entities to apply to become producers and distributors of cannabis for research purposes.

Up until now, under federal law, the University of Mississippi was the sole entity allowed to produce cannabis for research purposes. This was a significant barrier for researchers because the University of Mississippi cultivated a limited number of cannabis strains that arent reflective on the vast diversity of strains that are consumed by users.

With more entities (likely other universities) doing this work, there will be a greater diversity of cannabis plants that can be researched. Unfortunately, the process to get a license to research a Schedule I drug is far more difficult than one of a lower scheduled drug, so research will be heavily restricted for as long as cannabis remains on Schedule I.

John Hudak of the Brookings Institution argue that the DEAs decision to allow more entities to produce marijuana cannabis for research was actually more important than rescheduling. Rescheduling would not have as much of an effect as many believe, while promoting research will lead to a better scientific understanding of cannabis medicinal value  and risk. This, Hudak argues, will then likely lead to rescheduling anyway.

Hudak is right in the sense that the federal government will eventually have to reform its stance as more and more states go legal. But how exactly will that occur?

As Hudak also pointed out, simply putting cannabis on Schedule II does far less than many believe. That would place cannabis on a list with drugs like oxycodone and morphine, which can be prescribed but arent sold recreationally in stores. That would allow physicians to prescribe cannabis and could lead to interesting and complicated ramifications.

The Food and Drug Administration would then begin regulating it, and you can expect the pharmaceutical industry to capitalize on cannabis as well. If people are worried about Big Marijuana, just wait until Big Pharma gets involved. But it would do little to legitimize the recreational systems that already exist in states like Washington and Colorado.

A Schedule II placement would also do nothing to change the industrys tax headache. An Internal Revenue Code provision that prevents cannabis businesses from making normal business deductions, and which takes a huge bite into their profits.

Cannabis would have to be on Schedule III  which includes drugs like anabolic steroids and Tylenol containing codeine  or below for that provision to no longer apply. Legalization advocates like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws argue that cannabis should be descheduled  not rescheduled  so that it would be regulated more like alcohol.

So how will federal reform take place? It can either come from the DEA or from Congress. But the DEA has shown little sign that it would reschedule cannabis, and given partisan gridlock in Washington, we cant expect Congress to take action on something as momentous as significant drug reform any time soon.

ONE INTERESTING alternative is proposed by famed legal theorist Erwin Chemerinsky and his colleagues. The federal government would take a cooperative federalism approach. That would allow states to further develop new drug laws without conflicting with federal laws, as they do now.

This would work by creating an opt-out system, where states can be left to craft their own cannabis policy so long as they meet certain federal requirements. This would allow the states to opt out of the Controlled Substances Act with respect to cannabis. The act would still apply as usual in states that dont have their own cannabis policy.

This would legally allow both federal and state policies to coexist without having to reschedule cannabis. Chemerinsky points out that the Clean Air Act already acts in this way, where the federal government regulates air pollution but also allows states to adopt their own regulations if they meet certain federal requirements.

History was certainly made this election season, but the story is far from over. Theres little indication that the trend of legalization will be reversed as more U.S. states legalize. How the U.S. government will act will perhaps be the climax of this policy story. It is difficult to know how  and when  that will occur.

Sam Mendez is executive director of the Cannabis Law and Policy Project at the University of Washington.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Bookmark Gray Matters. It has high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.


This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

If you think a full moon triggers weird happenings, get ready for Monday.

A supermoon is set to rise in the night sky on Monday, treating star gazers to the biggest full moon seen since 1948.

It won't actually be bigger, but it will certainly look that way.

"It will appear about 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter," said Carolyn Sumners, astronomy curator for the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. "If you are expecting more than that you might be disappointed."

A supermoon results when the moon reaches its full phase at the closest point to Earth along the satellite's elliptical orbit, causing the object to look somewhat bigger and brighter in the sky than usual. About 20 percent of full moons are supermoons and 20 percent are minimoons.

Rice University astrophysicist Pat Hartigan has pulled together some really insightful graphs that show the frequency of supermoons and minimoons, as well as the apparent lunar size (The January 2018 supermoon should be larger than Monday's.)

Monday's supermoon is noteworthy because the moon won't come this close to the Earth again for another 16 years.

So what's the best way to see this super supermoon?

The biggest and brightest moon can been seen before sunrise Monday morning.

NASA says closest approach will occur at 5:21 a.m. central time when the moon comes within 221,523 miles from the center of the Earth to the center of the moon.

But if you aren't an early riser, don't worry. Astronomers suggest looking at the moon on Sunday and Monday evenings. The differences will be pretty marginal.

You don't need a telescope to enjoy Monday's supermoon just your eyes, or maybe a pair of binoculars.

The supermoon will be discussed this weekend at the Houston Museum of Natural Science's "Starry Night Express" program. For more information about that program, please go here.
Music fans who enjoy science fiction may be reminded of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" during their next visit to Houston's popular Music Box Theatre. The company's current production of "THE 80's Mix Tape Diaries," delivers a generous musical look back at the popular music of that era. To propel this journey, the regular cast (Rebekah Dahl, Brad Scarborough, Kristina Sullivan, Cay Taylor & Luke Wrobel) has invented five imagined characters who were impacted in various ways by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens volcano in 1980. Sullivan portrays a TV news reporter blinded by the eruption, Wrobel is the station weatherman who falls for her, and Dahl is the ditzy "Sally from the valley" who brags she "will go down in the 'anals' of history." Miss Taylor plays a policewoman, and Scarborough brings a polished cockney accent to portraying British pop star, Andrew John Ridgeley, who co-starred with George Michael to comprise the 80's rock duo, Wham. Now don't get me wrong. Music is still king at this popular venue, and this is not a play about these lightly sketched characters. They simply provide a device to link the action from song-to-song with brief silly soliloquies, some funnier than others. Miss Dahl humorously introduced the format describing it as "The Vagina Monologues without the vagina."

But let us move on to the extensive musical catalogue of the period that is displayed here. By way of full disclosure at the outset, I make no pretensions of holding up rock as my favorite musical genre. That is probably why I first became aware of these talented performers when they starred in the many wonderful Broadway musicals presented year after year by Houston's late, great Masquerade Theatre. Happily, the skills they honed there are most often central to the musical styles generally offered at The Music Box. In such cases, the really beautiful voices these players possess can be properly showcased without my concern as a critic that any vocal chords (or eardrums) might be damaged by harsh or strident delivery of overly loud numbers from performers who appear to be attacking their microphones. Of course there was plenty of that in the 1980's, so here we are.
Process Technology is one of the fastest growing careers in the Houston area, due to baby boomers retiring from the field.

"The chemical and refining industries are in great need of process operators/technicians due to the large number of seasoned operators retiring in the next five to seven years," said Linda LaCoe, director of process technology at Lone Star College-Kingwood.

In preparation of the January 2017 start, LSC-Kingwood faculty are looking for interested students to enroll in the program. The college will host information sessions on Nov. 29 at 6:30 p.m. in the LSC-Atascocita Center cafeteria and Nov. 30 at 5 p.m. in the LSC-Kingwood Administration Building room 112. Potential students are encouraged to bring their unofficial transcripts if they have not enrolled in Lone Star College.

"Our goal is to inform prospective students about the process technology associate of applied science degree (AAS) and certificate," LaCoe said. "We will also discuss what process technology is and the job duties of a process operator/technician."

The brand new Process Technology program will start in January 2017 and will be housed at the LSC-Atascocita Center.

In order to be accepted into the Process Technology program, students must be at college level in reading, writing and math. Students should possess aptitude in science and math, have good interpersonal and communication skills, and be a team player.

LSC-Kingwood's Process Technology program will prepare graduates for entry level careers in the petrochemical, refining, power generation, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, plastics and related manufacturing industries. Program courses include introduction to process technology, process instrumentation, safety, health and environment, process systems, principles of quality, and troubleshooting.

In fall 2017, the program will move to the new Lone Star College-Process Technology Center located in Generation Park. The 40,200 square foot facility will be furnished with state-of-the-art simulation equipment, a fully functional pilot plant and general academic classrooms to train students.

The LSC-Atascocita Center is located at 15903 West Lake Houston Parkway. For more information on the program or information sessions, email Linda.Lacoe@LoneStar.edu or visit www.lonestar.edu/lsc-process-technology
Union Pacific Railroad is examining its bridge across the San Jacinto River in Humble after a low spot discovered in the span allowed two traincars en route to Houston to uncouple.

As they hit the dip, they somewhat separated from the train, Union Pacific spokesman Jeff DeGraff said.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

David Arnspiger is in his natural element, inching along a Memorial area street, Purple Heart ballcap pulled tightly on his head, two paying passengers in the back seat of his Ford Fusion.

"Do you want to hear a story?," Arnspiger asked, stopping at a traffic light last week and glancing at his Uber app running on the phone affixed to the dashboard.

The stories can be colorful, even peppered with salty language and themes, but at 88 years old Arnspiger, a Korean War veteran, has plenty of them. There's the one from long ago about his daughter giving then-U.S. Rep. George H.W. Bush way too much medical information about her mother. That one, he said, is a go-to for out of towners, who all know Bush. There's another about the time Arnspiger and the former president ran into a strict head usher at their episcopal church who insisted on ushers stepping in unison off the steps, left foot first.

Often, when it comes to the people he picks up as Uber's oldest driver in the Houston metro area, his Purple Heart hat or Purple Heart license plate gets the stories started. He'll likely be wearing it proudly for Veterans Day, one of the country's 18.8 million former members of the military, and more than 7.2 million still in the labor force. About 1.8 million Korean War vets are still alive, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, though it's unclear how many are still working in some manner - let alone keeping Arnspiger's more than 40-hour weekly pace.

"If they notice, they ask and thank me for my service," Arnspiger said, two hands on the wheel and one eye on the woman walking down the sidewalk as he chuckles at how short skirts have gotten.

Prompted, his mind moves quickly from fashion for women to war on the Korean peninsula, as seamlessly as he changes lanes. He grew up in New York City, the family moving there shortly before the Wall Street crash of 1929. He graduated from Wisconsin's Beloit College in 1950, where he'd been involved in ROTC and a Marine Corps platoon leader class. Rather than officer candidate school, Arnspiger chose a combat experience course. A few weeks later - just like his family's move to the city right before The Great Depression - North Korea invaded South Korea with help from the Soviet Union. The United Nations, and primarily America, leapt into the fray and China responded by aiding the north.

So Arnspiger ended up leading a mortar platoon on a hill that looked toward another hill populated by North Korean troops.

"You can't get better combat training than them shooting live bullets at you," he said.

Generally, they weren't shooting at him. Positions were entrenched and his platoon of mortarmen were trained but underappreciated.

"All my guys had flaming inferiority complexes," he said, brought on by infantrymen calling their use into question.

Blasting the North Koreans off the hill

Then a major visited Arnspiger's little hill, and decided that hill of North Koreans needed to go. He ordered infantry troops to train at night on a nearby hill and prepare for an assault on the enemy position. Arnspiger's men would be the final salvo, "so (the infantry) could get off the hill and the Chinese and North Koreans would run right into my mortars."

As the Marines fled after the assault, Arnspiger's men fired 103 mortar rounds - a quickening assault that blackened the opposing hillside, even as the enemy fired toward the retreating Marines. Infantrymen raced up to the mortar position frantically looking for cover behind the mortars shielding their escape.

"My guys were crying because it was the first time someone said something nice about them," Arnspiger said of the thanks infantry rained on the mortarmen.

Then they heard the sounds. That familiar "wish-woosh," Arnspiger recalled. The latrine exploded. Other blasts dotted the hill.

"I caught a piece (of shrapnel) in back of my flack jacket," Arnspiger said, shifting in his driver's seat as if a phantom piece of flying metal made its way into his car.

He noticed the men he was standing with were wearing tattered trousers, then realized his pants were shredded as well.

They were all taken downhill for medical treatment, bloodied and unsure of the severity of their injuries. Knowing hospitalization was a ticket out of the war zone, Arnspiger asked the medic if he'd be evacuated to tend to his wounds.

"He says 'Lieutenant, we'll have you back up on that hill in 15 minutes,'" Arnspiger said.

The wounds, though minor, earned him a Purple Heart for injuries during combat.

For years, Arnspiger said the award never sat right with him. He didn't talk much about it.

"I was kind of ashamed of it because I wasn't hospitalized," he said.

His acceptance, decades later, was more pragmatic than patriotic, he said. A friend who knew of Arnspiger's service noted he was "a fool" not to accept the merit. And there are perks, too. Purple Heart vehicle registrations are $3 rather than $53 in Texas. License plateholders can park in Harris County-owned parking garages and use local toll roads for free.

"I got over my problem," Arnspiger jokes as he takes a turn off Westheimer, seeking another Uber fare.

Unretiring after investment banking career

How a one-time solider born when Herbert Hoover was president got sucked into the gig-economy and Uber is a story all its own. When he returned from Korea, Arnspiger considered his options and settled in Wichita Falls, falling into the investment banking business. He moved to Houston a few years later in 1959, specializing in municipal finance and bonds. He raised a family with his wife and amassed a tidy sum.

"I retired in 1990 with more money than I ever thought I'd have," he recalled.

Then he got bored. So he went back into business and lost practically everything on an investment in a computer firm. At 68, he found himself needing to make ends meet for he and his wife. He sold cars, but it didn't suit him.

"I figured there had to be something better," Arnspiger said.

At 86, decades older than a lot of his driving peers, he settled into Uber in August 2014, liking the idea of meeting people, sitting in the car and shooting the bull.

Arnspiger bought a new car and developed a routine driving eight hours a day, six or seven days a week, which he keeps up today. The ride-hailing company confirmed Arnspiger is its oldest driver in the Houston region.

"I'm only 88," he laughs when asked about the taxing schedule.

That's not to imply, however, he is giving a pass to all elderly Uber and taxi drivers. To his knowledge, he's the oldest, but he concedes there might be others out there who outrank him.

"If there is anybody, I sure ... don't want to ride with him," Arnspiger laughed.

With so many stories, and so many memories, it's hard for him to compare one to another. He's seen war. He dodges Houston traffic daily. He laughs at the similarities and the glaring differences.

"As far as the war is concerned, it is mostly boring and scary, in that order," Arnspiger said, looking into traffic and waiting for his chance to take a right onto Westheimer from The Galleria. "This is just a pain in the ass."
       :         , 10     5    
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

WASHINGTON - Donald Trump has some friends in Texas, including former Gov. Rick Perry, who campaigned for him and long made known his interest in a cabinet post.

"The place that I'm passionate about is our veterans and our military, so somewhere in that area," Perry told reporters at the Republican National Convention in July.

He cheerfully played along Wednesday when speculation heightened that he could be on a short list of potential Trump cabinet officials.

"Just got a call to #makeamericagreatagain Saddle up & ride, bro!!," Perry wrote on Twitter, with an Instagram photo of him being handed a pay phone by former Navy SEAL and Houston native Marcus Luttrell.

As Trump visited the White House and Capitol Hill on Thursday, Perry was hardly the only Texan in the swirl of candidates being mentioned for posts or judicial appointments in the new administration. Other prominent names include U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, state Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, and U.S. Reps. Michael McCaul and Will Hurd.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Trump campaign's Texas chairman, also has been mentioned in political circles, though he has said publicly he intends to stay put in Austin.

More Information In the mix Texans being considered for Washington posts. Rick Perry Former governor George P. Bush Landcommissioner Michael McCaul U.S.House WillHurd U.S.House See More Collapse

"Had he not made those declarations, it would not surprise me if he was at the top of the list from Texas," said Anthony Holm, a Republican consultant who is close to Patrick.

McCaul, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and a former federal prosecutor, also is seen as a potential Trump pick, either to head the Department of Homeland Security or for some other legal or national security post in the Department of Justice.

McCaul, facing a term limit on his chairman position in the House, also is considering a challenge for Cruz's Senate seat in 2018. To political analysts, that suggests larger political horizons.

"He's a rising star, both nationally and in Texas," said Austin political strategist Ted Delisi, who has worked with Perry and McCaul. "His future is bright no matter what path it takes."

McCaul is considered an expert on homeland and border security, issues that were central to Trump's campaign, and he had a role in preparing the candidate for the debates. He also has dismissed Trump's vision of a 2,000-mile wall as a "simplistic and knee-jerk response" to the problem of border security, arguing that technology and air surveillance are more important.

"Fencing is a barricade, but it's not a panacea," he told MSNBC during the campaign. "It won't solve the problem completely."

Supreme Court vacancy

Another top priority for the incoming Trump administration is filling the Supreme Court opening left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett is one of more than 20 jurists Trump named during the summer as possible replacements.

Willett, who was appointed by Perry, comes in for high praise from conservative legal scholars. Political insiders say Cruz, who clerked for the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, cannot be counted out.

"It wouldn't surprise me if both those names were short-listed for the current opening, and likely others over the next four years," Holm said. "If it's about who's the best jurist in America, Ted Cruz must be on the list."

Cruz has dismissed speculation about a Supreme Court appointment, saying he is focused on his job in the Senate. As Trump's top rival in the GOP primaries, Cruz's selection would be considered a bold overture to the conservative wing of the party.

Like Perry, who once called Trump "a cancer on conservatism," Cruz also has had bitter words for his rival, calling him "totally amoral" before dropping out of the race in May.

Cruz also has feuded with Democrats and leaders of his own party, making him an uncertain bet for Senate confirmation.

"My sense is he ultimately wouldn't be the choice, but he will get some serious consideration," said Texas GOP analyst Matt Mackowiak, who has been one of Trump's sharpest Republican critics.

Miller also has come up in the Washington parlor game of people in line for administration posts.

A big Trump booster from a major farm and ranching state, Miller would enjoy instant credibility as a potential Department of Agriculture secretary.

But Miller has been storm-tossed by controversy, including a recent tweet that referred to Hillary Clinton as "C--t," using an obscene word for vagina.

"There are some sensitivities there that may lead to him not being the choice," Mackowiak said.

A more palatable choice from Texas is Hurd, one of only two black Republicans in the House, representing a border district. A former CIA officer, Hurd is viewed as a credible pick for a national security or defense job.

Having just won a tough re-election battle in the Lone Star State's only competitive congressional district, Hurd might be reluctant to leave Congress.

"If he hadn't won, he'd definitely have been on the list," Delisi said. "But the fact that he won, and did so pretty convincingly, I think you want Hurd where he is helping on Congress."

Possible link to Bush family

Rep. Jeb Hensarling's name also has come up as a possible candidate for Treasury secretary. Hensarling's office did not return a call Thursday, but the Dallas Republican, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, told the Wall Street Journal he would "certainly have the discussion" if asked by Trump's team.

Another Texan said to be in the mix is Land Commissioner George P. Bush, a scion of the Bush dynasty and one of the only members of his family believed to have voted for Trump.

However unlikely a pick, Mackowiak said, "A bridge to the Bush network wouldn't be the worst idea in the world."

Working against Bush, some conservatives in Texas rate his Trump endorsement an act of self-preservation, and one unlikely to be rewarded by a plum job in Washington.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath also is mentioned in Austin. Appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, Morath is respected in GOP circles as an accomplished businessman and education reformer.

With the Washington transition team divulging little, it is unknown whether Morath's resume has pinged Trump's radar.

Little also is known about Trump's most high-profile Texas booster: Dallas tea party activist and national Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, who was a near constant presence on television in the campaign's early going.

After a series of uneven television outings, Pierson's profile has diminished. A former Cruz aide who defected to Trump, Pierson is not rated by insiders as likely to play a high-profile role in the Trump White House.
I know a lot of good people who voted for Donald Trump. They aren't against immigrants and immigration. But they sought a different direction for America.

Many voters chose Trump due to fear of the ways our country is changing. At the same time, many in our communities now face the fear that they could be taken away by a Trump administration.

As the most diverse city in the nation, Houston resembles the future of America. And the city can lead the rest of us to unite on immigration, which became so divisive during the recent campaign.

In late October, I was honored to meet with faith, law enforcement, veterans and business leaders at a symposium on immigration at the Asia Society Texas Center. Leaders from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives spoke to the value of immigrants in their communities and the contributions they have made.

For me and everyone who attended, the event underscored that the immigration debate is about much more than politics and policy. It is about who we are as Americans, the security of our nation and the culture and values that tie us together as citizens.

In his 1989 farewell speech from the Oval Office, President Ronald Reagan told the American public, "All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins."

Houston's kitchen tables provide a powerful example of inclusion. The city's economic and social leadership cuts across racial, ethnic and economic lines.

Hispanics, Asians, non-Hispanic blacks and non-Hispanic whites are represented closer to equally in this metropolitan area than anywhere else in the nation. And the growing immigrant population is making huge contributions.

These different backgrounds, beliefs and ideologies offer an extremely important opportunity for us to engage with one another - perhaps around the kitchen table - to build consensus on immigration that is rooted in our shared values.

When it comes to immigrants and immigration, those values include effective border security without building walls. They include a pathway to legalized status and eventual citizenship for undocumented immigrants because it's the humane, achievable approach next to mass deportation.

Mass deportation and walls would come at a terrible human and financial cost, especially here. With so many churchgoers, business owners and schoolchildren potentially affected by such policies, the community that would feel the pain is not a subset of the population - it's everyone.

As for the actual financial costs to the nation, mass deportation could set us back $400 billion to $600 billion, according to the American Action Forum, and that's before you consider the economic costs of reduced productivity. And a wall spanning the entire border? That would cost $27 billion to $40 billion just to build, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have found.

Texas' relationship with Mexico is important to the economic health of the state, too. According to the American Mexico PAC, 382,000 jobs in Texas depend on trade with Mexico. These mutual benefits compound the costs of a border wall.

Fortunately, members of Congress who represent the Houston metropolitan region are in crucial positions to defend our values and strike a different tone on immigration. And strong support for immigrants and immigration continues among conservative faith, law enforcement and business leaders, here and elsewhere.

The federal government needs to uphold its constitutional responsibility to protect the homeland by investing in the technology, personnel and physical infrastructure necessary to secure the southern border, while still accounting for interconnected lives along the border.

An intelligent immigration system matches America's needs, emphasizes our safety and serves the interests of American workers. It does not dig into taxpayers' pockets to scale up deportations or build walls.

President-elect Donald Trump has an opportunity to gather America around the kitchen table. The decisions he makes, in terms of both policy and personnel, will determine the trajectory of America for generations to come.

Noorani is executive director of the National Immigration Forum.
Throughout our countrys history our veterans and the patriots before them answered the call of duty and have valiantly fought to make America a place where personal liberties are celebrated and the rights bestowed to us upon the Constitution are forever protected and preserved. Veterans Day is our chance to express gratitude for the service and sacrifice of our brave men and women in uniform who thanklessly gave their time and often lives to protect a truly free nation.

This week I visited several schools in southern Missouri that held ceremonies in honor of Veterans Day including Bourbon High School, Sikeston High School and Senath High School. It was wonderful to see a current generation of young people honoring the veterans that have served so they can continue to enjoy the same protections, rights and freedoms of those who came before. I encouraged all of the young Missouri students I visited this week to continue to honor our nations heroes not just once a year on Veterans Day, but challenged them to find an opportunity throughout the year to give back to their communities and say thank you to the brave men and women who serve our country.

This Veterans Day we also need to remember and recognize the special acts of those in our communities who demonstrated bravery, exemplified service, and made us all proud, those like Tom Surdyke who tragically lost his life in June saving the life of another. I had the honor of nominating Tom to West Point in 2015 and sharing in his familys celebration the day he earned his Eagle Scout. While on vacation on June 24th, 2016, Tom and another swimmer hed just met on shore were caught in a riptide. Tom instinctively went to save the other young man, sacrificing his own life. He was buried at West Point on July 4th, 2016 on his 19th birthday and was given the Soldiers Medal, the Armys highest non-combat valor award for saving the life of another. In June, I was lucky enough to honor another American hero, the now late Veteran Raymond Burbach, by presenting him with seven awards and accolades he earned during his service in the Korean War that were 60 years past due. Both Tom and Raymond will always be remembered as American heroes. Their dedication to a life of service and the instinct to put others first is what distinguishes our veteran patriots and heroes.

There is much we can do to honor our veterans not just on Veterans Day, but every day of the year by helping them transition successfully back to civilian life. Things like ensuring that veterans have access to adequate health care, including mental health, educational opportunities and good paying jobs when they return home.

For instance, when I heard from numerous veterans across southeast and south central Missouri that they wanted to see expanded care, service hours and options at VA facilities in Salem, I was proud to help by meeting with VA officials and securing additional hours and operations for the facility. Earlier this year, I was also able to play a role in supporting legislation which provided $176.9 billion in funding for the VA, including $52.8 billion in funding for VA medical services, which included mental health services, suicide prevention activities, long-term care services, funding for rural health initiatives and support services for caregivers of veterans and initiatives to fight homelessness among veterans and their families. This effort was an important reminder that our thanks shouldnt just be for their active service, but in helping them transition.

There are over 55,000 veterans living in the 8th Congressional District of Missouri alone who deserve our gratitude for their service to our nation. There is much work still to be done to improve the lives of our veterans when they return home  let us make that our duty, our service, and our commitment to all of them, they deserve it.

Jason Smith represents Missouris 8th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. Contact him at 573-335-0101 or visit https://jasonsmith.house.gov
As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content.

When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to.

After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. The page will reload and you will be prompted to enter an account number and a zip code.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO USE THE NUMBER OFF OF THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OR ANYTHING AFTER JANUARY 28, 2019 TO GAIN ACCESS!

OLD ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL NOT WORK

The account number and zip code are easily available on your most recent issue of the High Plains Journal or Midwest Ag Journal in the address fields as is shown here. Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those.
Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print.

Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition.

If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create.
MEDIA DOWNLOADS

Four dogs and two cats have arrived safely in the U.K. after being rescued by animal charity Humane Society International from Chinas notorious Yulin dog meat festival. As part of HSIs high profile campaign to end the trade, which combines political lobbying, public campaigning, and direct rescue of hundreds of dogs each year from slaughter trucks and markets, HSI rescued this group just one day away from being killed. The annual Yulin event in June sees thousands of dogs and cats brutally slaughtered for their meat. The group were part of a total of 170 sick and injured animals HSI was able to rescue from slaughterhouses and markets on the outskirts of Yulin. Terrified and traumatised, they received immediate veterinary care and rehabilitation by HSIs Chinese partner groups. Now well enough to travel, the four dogs and two cats have made the journey to the U.K. where HSI has teamed up with the All Dogs Matter rehoming centre in north London to find them happy forever families.

Actor Peter Egan, an All Dogs Matter patron and a passionate supporter of HSIs campaign to end Asias dog meat trade, greeted the animals on their arrival. Peter said: Its been an honour to meet these brave survivors of Chinas brutal dog and cat meat trade, and humbling to see how forgiving and loving they still are despite their appalling ordeal. Im shocked to think that were it not for HSI, these beautiful animals would have long been dead, innocent lives wasted for the Yulin festival. Thankfully they are safe, now adorable ambassadors for the campaign to end this horrific trade once and for all.

The Yulin dog meat festival takes place every year on June 21, with thousands of dogs and cats  many of them stolen pets driven many miles across China by unscrupulous traders  beaten and killed for eating. It is an event that has come to symbolise a brutal year-round trade that sees more than 10 million dogs killed for meat every year across China.

Claire Bass, HSIs U.K. director, said: These poor creatures have experienced the very worst of humanity  brutal treatment by dog traders, crammed onto the back of a truck with hundreds of other terrified animals, only to end up at a slaughterhouse in Yulin. Their fate would have been to be beaten to death in front of each other, until HSIs rescue team stepped in. We found them in a horrifying state but remarkably, they still wagged their tails in hope of kindness. And kindness is exactly what they have received from the moment they were safely in our care. Its so rewarding to see them alive and well, knowing that they will soon find loving homes and never again have to experience the fear of being eaten. Tragically though, millions of other dogs and cats still face that threat, and so HSIs campaign continues to end the cruelty once and for all.

The four dogs, Hope, Snowy, Alice and Lucy, and cat Simon, are all settling in at All Dogs Matter where they will be available for adoption. Anyone interested in giving them a home can apply here. The second cat, named Li, has already landed on her paws, adopted by HSI/UKs Director Claire Bass.

Ira Moss, CEO of All Dogs Matter, said: We are delighted and honoured that Humane Society International has given us the opportunity to take these dogs and cats in from China and the awful meat trade. Wed hate to think of what their fate may have been if they hadnt been rescued and flown to the UK by HSI for us to be able to re home them on their behalf. We are confident that all six will be safely in their homes by Christmas having their first Christmas dinner in their new forever home.

Fast facts about the dog meat trade

An estimated 30 million dogs a year are killed across Asia for their meat, more than 10 million in China alone, and thousands die just for the Yulin festival.

Yulin is not a traditional festival, it was only invented in 2010 by dog traders to boost profits.

The World Health Organisation warns that the dog meat trade spreads rabies and increases the risk of cholera 20-fold.

Dog meat is only eaten infrequently by less than 20 per cent of the Chinese population.

HSI works primarily in China, South Korea, Vietnam and Nagaland (India) to tackle the trade, as well as supporting project in other countries such as Laos and Thailand.

How You Can Help

* If youre interested to adopt one of our Yulin rescues, or any of the dogs and cats at All Dogs Matter, apply online at http://alldogsmatter.co.uk/adopt-a-dog/

*Text WOOF03 3 to 70070 to donate 3 to help HSI save dogs

*Donate dog toys and blankets to All Dogs Matter, South End Farm, Waltham Abbey, EN9 3SE.

Media Contacts:

UK: Wendy Higgins, whiggins@hsi.org, +44(0)7989 972 423
Americans may have developed a sudden interest in moving to Canada.

But that doesn't mean prospective buyers have done their research on the Great White North.

Realty firm Royal LePage has been fielding calls from Americans about buying property in Canada, chief executive Phil Soper told The Financial Post this week.

Advertisement

He told reporter Garry Marr that even a small influx of Americans could have a heavy impact on Canada's housing market.

And the search has been quite the education for some. Americans have called Royal LePage realtors wondering whether Toronto is close to the ocean (it's not), and how far it is from Ontario's Cottage Country (about a three-hour drive).

Those calls are just the latest indication that American interest in Canada has heightened following Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. election on Tuesday night.

Advertisement

Real estate portal Point2 Homes has seen U.S. searches for Canadian homes spike by 700 per cent in the days since the election. They had only spiked by 300 per cent the day after Trump was elected.

Meanwhile, searches for one-way flights to Canada on election night were 133 per cent higher on Cheapflights.com than they were the last four Tuesdays.

But not everyone thinks Americans are likely to seek refuge in Canada during a Trump presidency.

"Americans really don't know much about Canada," James McKellar, a real estate professor at York University, told The Toronto Star.

"It's just not on the radar."

"It's just not on the radar."

This isn't the first time that Royal LePage has suggested that a Trump presidency is likely to boost interest in Canadian real estate.

Advertisement

In April, the firm released a first-quarter national house price survey noting that the prospect of Trump's victory has "put renewed global focus on the often stark differences in opportunity and attitude that exist on either side of our huge border."

"In what started as a media prank, Canadas attractiveness as a more realistic place to pursue life, liberty and happiness is gaining traction even in America," Soper said at the time.
OTTAWA  Canada's defence minister says troops are headed to Africa for three years of dangerous peacekeeping missions, but his spokeswoman says cabinet hasn't made a decision yet.

Harjit Sajjan told The Toronto Star that Canada has committed to a three-year deployment in Africa that will be re-assessed each year to ensure it has an enduring impact.

Advertisement

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan in Brussels on June 14, 2016. (Photo: Francois Lenoir /Reuters)

Without specifying which countries Canadian forces and police are headed to, Sajjan said their UN missions would be focused on training, increasing local capacity, and the reduction of de-radicalization, the newspaper reported.

These missions, all of them, have the level of risk where peacekeepers have been hurt, they have been killed. And weve been looking at the risk factor in a very serious way, Sajjan told The Star in an interview published Friday.

However, Sajjans press secretary, Jordan Owens, told The Huffington Post Canada that the minister got a little bit ahead of where we are as a government.

Advertisement

Three years is part of the suite of options that will be considered, but this hasn't gone to Cabinet yet for a decision, she wrote in an email.

Up to 600 troops, 150 police officers to be deployed

In August, the Liberal government announced it will send up to 600 Canadian forces and 150 police to serve in UN missions but it did not specify where they would go. The government said it intends to take a whole-of-government approach and pledged an additional $450 million to the effort.

Last week, Sajjan told a gathering of Ottawa high school students that the new missions in Africa would focus on root causes of conflict with a special emphasis on young people.

In Africa right now, 50 to 60 per cent of the population in most of the countries are 24 years [old] and less. Instead of them being radicalized and going into other groups, why dont we use them as an empowerment, and our approach potentially can do that, he said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has also said Canada would be looking at ways to contribute that will be more than just stopping people from shooting at each other.

Advertisement

Canadas layered approach will consider different ways instability is created and perpetuated, and how to create the conditions for longer term stability and security, Trudeau said last Thursday.

Several cabinet ministers have recently travelled to Africa. International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau went to Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso in August and September. Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion just returned from travels to Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia this week.

Sajjan has been to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia and last week travelled to Senegal and Mali.

Mali is the deadliest active peacekeeping operation in the world. This year alone, 32 peacekeepers have died.

Advertisement

'Robust' rules of engagement

The defence minister cautioned The Star not to read too much into where he has travelled, saying he has also studied Canadas possible involvement in the Central African Republic, Darfur, and South Sudan.

Sajjan told the newspaper there are ways to mitigate the risks of the missions by ensuring that we put the right type of troops, the right equipment with the right mandate for that mission. He said he feels confident the rules of engagement for the UN missions are robust enough to address the risks.

The previous Conservative government was asked to consider committing Canadian forces to Africa but it decided against sending troops to the Congo and Mali.

Trudeau told reporters last week that a decision will be made in the coming weeks probably.

With files from Catherine Levesque

Also on HuffPost
Kevin OLeary is sounding the alarm over Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus plan for a national carbon price and apparent willingness to re-open the North American Free Trade Agreement now that Donald Trump is headed to the White House.

The reality TV star and chairman of OLeary Funds, who has mused about running for the federal Conservative leadership, suggested on BNN Thursday that Trumps victory just changed everything north of the U.S. border.

Advertisement

On the possibility of new NAFTA negotiations  as Trump promised on the campaign trail  OLeary said: My imagery of that, Donald Trump versus Trudeau, is Godzilla versus Bambi. Its going to be ugly.

With Republicans soon to control all three branches of the U.S. government, OLeary said Trump is certain to walk away from the Paris climate accord as Trudeau goes in the wrong direction by phasing in a federal carbon tax.

Were going into competition in oil and gas with the United States and they have no carbon tax, he said.

Advertisement

Trump has also pledged to lower the corporate tax rate to 15 per cent, OLeary noted.

Were screwed. We have to immediately pivot, he said.

"... Donald Trump versus Trudeau, is Godzilla versus Bambi. Its going to be ugly."

OLeary recommends scrapping federal carbon plans and immediately pushing a pipeline from east to west in Canada.

Do I think Justin Trudeau can do that? No. We got the wrong guy, he said. We need a Trump guy thats going to compete.

Watch OLearys full BNN interview:

Trudeau told reporters in Nova Scotia Thursday that he is willing to discuss NAFTA with Trump.

I think it's important that we be open to talking about trade deals, like NAFTA or any other trade deal,'' the prime minister said.

Trudeau also made it clear his government sees no need to change its climate plans, even if Americans just elected a man who has called global warming a hoax. Trudeau unveiled in October that his government would impose a national floor price on carbon emissions in 2018, rising to $50 per tonne by 2022.

Advertisement

The prime minister said such a plan will not put Canada at an economic disadvantage.

"One of the things people in Canada and indeed around the world understand is that there is tremendous economic disadvantage from not acting in the fight against climate change; for not pushing towards cleaner jobs and reducing emissions; towards not showing leadership at time where the world is looking for leadership," Trudeau said.

"We know that putting a price on carbon pollution is a way to improve our response to economic challenges, to create good jobs going forward, and to show leadership that quite frankly the entire world is looking for, along with the solutions that go with it."

Though OLeary has been called Canadas Trump because of his wealth, celebrity, and brash personality, the business mogul has said hes in favour of multiculturalism and immigration.

Advertisement

"I'm a Lebanese-Irish, I don't build walls (and) I am very proud of the society we're building in Canada  I think it is the envy of the planet, he told The Canadian Press earlier this year.

He also recently bashed Tory MP Kellie Leitchs proposal for a so-called values test for immigrants.

However, some have expressed doubts that OLeary is serious about possibly running for Tory leader. He doesnt speak French, spends much of his time in the United States, and Macleans reported last spring that he signed a two-year contract for his hit show, Shark Tank.

Attended first Tory leadership debate

In a blog for The Huffington Post Canada in September, OLeary said his phone had not stopped ringing since former cabinet minister Peter MacKay opted not to run for Tory leader.

All the other candidates make the assumption that I will not run and they want my endorsement, he wrote.

Advertisement

OLeary said any Tory leadership hopeful seeking his blessing will need a plan to end gridlock over the construction of pipelines.

If I can't find great managers to work for the Canadian people, I'll do it myself, he wrote.

When Tory leadership candidates gathered in Saskatoon for their first debate Wednesday, O'Leary was in the audience. He was seated just behind the moderator.

With files from The Canadian Press

Also on HuffPost
Most Canadians are stunned and upset by the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, and believe Canada-U.S. relations will suffer as a result, a new poll suggests.

The Angus Reid Institute released numbers Friday showing that nearly two-thirds of Canadians are unhappy with the U.S. election results, with 45 per cent of respondents saying they are very upset.

Advertisement

Just 18 per cent responded that they were somewhat or very pleased to see Trump win.

Sixty-nine per cent of Canadians told the firm they agreed with the statement: Im shocked that Trump won.

The poll suggests women are more likely than men to disagree with the choice Americans made. Seventy-one per cent of women said they were upset by Trumps win, compared to 53 per cent of men.

Advertisement

Trump has been accused of sexual assault by several women, has a long-track record of offensive remarks towards women, and defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton, the first woman nominated for president by a major U.S. party.

When asked if sexism in society was a significant reason Clinton lost, a narrow majority  52 per cent  said they agreed.

Women were 11 percentage points more likely than men to share that opinion  57 per cent compared to 46 per cent.

Seventy per cent of Canadians between the ages of 18-34 told the firm they were upset by the results.

Advertisement

Canadians who voted for the Liberals and New Democrats in the last election are overwhelmingly distressed by the results, while opinion appears to be more mixed for Conservatives.

While 75 per cent of Liberal voters and 78 per cent of NDP voters are upset about president-elect Trump, 39 per cent of Tory supporters are pleased. Another 36 per cent of Conservative supporters are upset, while 25 per cent are neutral.

The numbers suggest there could be some appetite in the party for the message of Tory leadership contender Kellie Leitch, who courted controversy Wednesday by saying Americans threw out the elites by electing Trump and sent an exciting message that needs to be delivered in Canada as well.

Leitch  a pediatric surgeon and former cabinet minister  has made bashing elites a key part of her campaign.

Advertisement

Leitch followed up by mentioning Trump several times at the first Tory leadership debate Wednesday night. She also said she agreed with him on the need to screen immigrants.

However, Trump supports the Keystone XL pipeline long advocated by the previous Tory government. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also in favour of Keystone and is already facing pressure from Tories to push Trump to make approval of the project a priority.

Though Trudeau has pledged to work with Trump  and even to discuss the North American Free Trade Agreement  most Canadians are pessimistic about the future relationship between the U.S. and Canada.

Advertisement

Fifty-two per of respondents said a Trump presidency will have a negative impact on relations between the two nations, while 57 per cent said it would hurt trade.

Two-thirds of Canadians told the firm that four years of President Trump will have a negative impact on Americas standing in the world.

The online poll was conducted between Nov. 9-10 among a representative, randomized sample of 1,515 Canadians who are part of the Angus Reid Forum. The firm says that, for comparison purposes, a probability sample of this size would have a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Also on HuffPost
Sure, Meghan Markle is catching the media's attention now that she's dating Prince Harry. But the 35-year-old has been making herself, and her voice, known since she was a kid.

"My mother raised me to be a global citizen, with eyes open to sometimes harsh realities," she wrote on her site The Tig.

Advertisement

"I must have been about 10 years old when we visited the slums of Jamaica," she continued. "I had never seen poverty at that level and it registered in my glazed brown eyes. 'Dont look scared, Flower,' she said. 'Be aware, but dont be afraid.'

She's just the best. And still smiles at me like that when I have food all over my face. Happy Mother's Day to the coolest one out there. http://thetig.com/love-letter/  A photo posted by Meghan Markle (@meghanmarkle) on May 10, 2015 at 4:24pm PDT





That awareness stuck with Markle. At the age of 11, the "Suits" actress noticed injustice -- and did something about it.

"I was just 11 years old when I was in my classroom at Hollywood Little Red Schoolhouse and a commercial came on for a popular dish washing liquid," Markle explains on her website. "The tagline of the campaign said, 'Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.' The boys in my classroom yelled out, 'Yeah, thats where women belong. In the kitchen.' My little freckled face became red with anger. I went home and wrote letters to powerhouse feminist attorney, Gloria Allred; to a host of a kids news program; to the soap manufacturer; and to Hillary Clinton (who was our First Lady at the time). With the exception of the soap manufacturer, they all pledged support -- and within a few months, the commercial was changed to, 'People all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.'

Advertisement

Soothsaying sweatshirt #canada #throwbackthursdays A photo posted by Meghan Markle (@meghanmarkle) on Nov 15, 2012 at 7:45pm PST





That passion to change the world hasn't left Markle. She is a global ambassador for World Vision Canada and recently travelled to Rwanda with the organization.





She is also an ambassador for UN Women and an advocate for gender equality.

Oh, what a night. Thank you #UNwomen -for the opportunity, for the faith in me, for my new role as UN Women Advocate for Women's Political Participation & Leadership. I am so humbled and grateful. A photo posted by Meghan Markle (@meghanmarkle) on Mar 10, 2015 at 9:55pm PDT





Markle's humanitarian work will only continue. She feels a duty to use her fame for good: "With fame comes opportunity, but in my opinion, it also includes responsibility -- to advocate and share, to focus less on glass slippers and more on pushing through glass ceilings, and if Im lucky enough - then to inspire."

Advertisement





Also on HuffPost
Getty

Should a teacher bring her service dog to school?

In Alberta, recently, a teacher for deaf students who is herself deaf, was prevented from bringing her service dog with her into the classroom where she normally teaches. She was re-assigned to a smaller classroom and not allowed to bring the animal into the office or to school functions.

The reason she was given by the school for excluding the service dog was that there were others in the school who are allergic to dogs. The instructions that came with the well-trained dog were that it should not be left unattended for longer than three hours. Besides, leaving the dog at home would defeat its purpose. The teacher would not leave the dog at home - because she needed its service.

Advertisement

There is no doubt that allergies are real and that they can, indeed, be life-threatening. Some children and adults cannot visit the homes of people who keep pets because they would become ill as soon as they walked through the door. These people need to be alerted to situations where they are likely to encounter things that could trigger their allergies.

Schools try reasonably hard to protect vulnerable members of their population. But how far should they go? In Ontario a while ago, a woman whose son was allergic to oak trees asked the city to cut down all the oaks he would encounter between his home and the school he attends. The city declined to fulfill the request.

Many, if not most schools forbid students and staff from bringing peanuts, peanut butter, nuts or nut products. And quite a few schools forbid latex balloons and gloves -- all because of allergies or possible allergies.

I have heard very angry people claiming that their picky children will starve if they can't have peanut butter. I have heard others say that the food bank only had peanut butter on its shelves this week. Peanut butter is not trivial, and neither are service dogs. However, we can see that to get to a place where the least harm is done, we need to look very closely at the facts. We cannot decide that one solution can fit every situation.

Advertisement

If a child in the deaf teacher's school has an allergy to dogs, is he or she kept separate from others who have pets at home and may have animal dander on their clothing? If not, why not? How does the school normally deal with allergens? Are they taking measures because they are concerned about an actual or a potential problem?

Discrimination is an odd thing. It often happens when people have the best of intentions. No one wants to make a person feel bad, but the actions they take, which they believe are in the best interests of everyone, can result in unfair treatment of someone. Rights will often come into collision with one another. Working out how best to balance this is not an easy job, but it must be done.

Did anyone find out whether the people with allergies to animals would, in fact, be likely to encounter the teacher's dog during their day-to-day activities? Did anyone ask the nature of the allergies, or if in fact, there were any people in the school community who suffered from them?

Did anyone ask the teacher what services the dog provided for her and if there could be another way of providing some of these services for a short duration while she moved through the location of those with the allergies?

There are no rights that always win out over other rights. Both those with allergies and those in need of service animals are human beings with particular needs, and the right to be safe. But, each need must be looked at in its context, and each person's dignity must be respected.

Advertisement

Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook
Shannon Stapleton / Reuters Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump pauses as he speaks at his New York presidential primary night rally in Manhattan, New York, U.S., April 19, 2016. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

From my Trump-free perch up here in Canada, I'm tired of watching you Middle Americans repeatedly vote against your own self-interest. You've been doing it for decades and now you've taken it to the most ludicrous and dangerous level: the election of Donald Trump as your next president.

I understand that there is anger among the white working class. I appreciate that you're hurting because many of the good-paying manufacturing jobs you once had are gone. You are frustrated with Washington legislators who seem tone deaf to your needs. You are furious at Wall Street bankers who brought the economy to the brink of disaster with impunity.

Advertisement

It's understandable that you want to lash out at those who have caused this situation and punish them for their uncaring arrogance. But why, in God's name, would you choose Donald Trump as your vehicle for doing so?

Don't you understand that the Republican Party is the primary institution that has caused your suffering? They claim to be looking out for the interests of average Americans but instead dedicate themselves to helping mostly the rich. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush handed out giant tax cuts to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Moreover, they deregulated the financial industry which almost bankrupted the country and forced you folks to bail them out.

Despite all the experience and all the evidence to the contrary, you chose once again to elect a pseudo-populist as president. Trump says he's going to make America great again but, as usual, the only ones who will benefit are the rich.

Why would you think that a man who hasn't paid federal income tax for two decades would do anything to help you, the average citizen?

If you're suffering, wouldn't a significant increase in the minimum wage be helpful? That's what Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton proposed. At best, Donald Trump has waffled on this issue.

Wouldn't it help the bottom line if the rich paid a little more in taxes? That's what the Democrats proposed but not Donald Trump. In fact, he has promised even more giant tax cuts for the wealthy and a resuscitation of the failed Reagan/Bush policy prescription of trickle-down economics. Why would you think that a man who hasn't paid federal income tax for two decades would do anything to help you, the average citizen?

Trump rails against Obamacare but proposes nothing substantial to replace it. Don't you want to have guaranteed affordable healthcare, ideally a government-run system like Medicare unencumbered by the greed and inefficiency of the private insurance companies? The Democrats want to help you get it; Donald Trump does not.

The Donald is no friend of the working man.

Democrats want to protect the rights of the weak and powerless. They believe in unions and workplace protections. Don't look to Donald Trump to help you there. As an anti-union employer who has stiffed countless employees, contractors and suppliers, The Donald is no friend of the working man.

You can rail all you want against different free trade agreements and the fact that some jobs were lost. But overall these agreements have benefited the country and, if you're looking for someone to blame, Republicans were the primary supporters of such agreements.

Advertisement

Trump says he'll bring the jobs back. But they're not coming back. What's needed instead is more financial support for education to help today's students prepare for this century's new high tech jobs.

Democrats want to provide more financial support for university students and help them stay out of debt. Don't look to Donald Trump for any such assistance.

Your country needs immigration to help meet the workforce needs of the future. Not the illegal immigrants that the Republicans have countenanced for years to benefit wealthy employers who exploit them. What's Donald Trump's solution? Build a wall and round up all the illegals at a cost of billions and billions of dollars with little chance of success. Believe me; there are better, more practical solutions.

Don't come whining to me in four years when you discover that you've been sold a bill of goods and been fleeced once again.

So Trump voters, you can continue to be willfully ignorant and vote against your self-interest. You can continue to shoot yourself in the foot and unwittingly subsidize more benefits for the wealthy. That's your choice.

Advertisement

But don't come whining to me in four years when you discover that you've been sold a bill of goods and been fleeced once again. I just hope, for your sake, that you still have a country left to save. Maybe then you will have finally learned your lesson and will have no choice but to do the hard work necessary to make America great again.

Also on HuffPost:
At precisely 11:11 a.m. today, Canadians observe a minute of silence for those who stepped forward to serve during wartime. My grandad, Alan John Wolfe, always feels very close to me. His courage in the Second World War helped give my children freedom.

But this year, Remembrance Day will take on an additional dimension for me. Gone are the days when wars were fought between enemy nations on remote battlefields. Most modern conflicts take place within countries -- not between them. And children are often quite literally caught in the crossfire.

Advertisement

Just try to imagine

I read this week that ISIL has launched an unprecedented wave of suicide bombers in their effort to hang onto Mosul, Iraq, one of the group's last remaining strongholds. Children are among those suicide bombers.

What does it take to convince a small child to throw herself at an advancing army, detonating herself in the process? I don't have the courage to even try to imagine.

Some of the children who have escaped Mosul are too terrified even to speak. More than two years under ISIL occupation, followed by the intense dangers of fleeing for safety, have taken a major toll on children's physical and emotional health.

Advertisement

"Many children have been stuck in their homes while bombings, sniper fire or chaos rules all around them," said Aaron Moore, World Vision's programs manager in Northern Iraq. "Others have witnessed the death of family members."

Just think about what that means. Imagine that it's your child who has done the witnessing. And consider that the person they saw being murdered -- often within a few feet of them -- might be you. How do we even begin to help that child heal?

Freed from the demons

When my son Derrick was five, we were stuck in a subway train for more than an hour as firefighters battled a blaze at the next station. We never saw the fire and were never in any real danger. But the PA announcements were loud, frequent and jarring. The adults jammed up against us were increasingly anxious.

After an hour, my little son lost it. His impatience turned to panic. Derrick began shrieking wildly and hitting his head with his fists. After we surfaced, he couldn't go back underground for months, not even in a shopping mall. Only several sessions with a child psychologist helped him face his fear.

Advertisement

It's not remotely the same thing as the children in Mosul -- except in this: being with Derrick and the counselor, I could see how his little spirit wanted to be whole again. He didn't want to live afraid any more. And with enough love and help, he somehow found a way to be free.

Be waiting at the end

What awaits child survivors of war, when they finally reach safety? Millions of children fleeing Syria have reached camps in places like Jordan and Lebanon, millions more remain displaced within both Syria and Iraq. There, they are often handed a whole new set of burdens to carry, including years of grinding poverty.

These camps are where Canadians can meet child survivors of war. You likely won't go there physically. But you can provide help for these children, even from the safety of Canada. You can give these children who've lost so much things like clean water to drink, nourishing meals, or a warm, safe place to sleep.

You can also help provide people to care for child survivors including trained Child Protection staff. These gentle healers begin by encouraging children to draw pictures of what they've been through. It's sometimes easier to tackle your nightmares with crayons in hand.

Advertisement

As children begin to open up about what they've experienced, our trained staff are there to listen.

Some child survivors from Mosul have reportedly used a lot of black and red in their pictures. Many have drawn war scenes, including tanks and war planes. At last, someone is witnessing even the smallest bit of their pain.

Of course, it's not enough to simply witness children's pain, or even provide them with comfort. Children must not experience war in the first place -- and Canada must help give them peace. Organizations like World Vision continue to campaign for a solution to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, for instance, and in other places like South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

The children of war will never forget what they've been through. When that minute of silence has ended this Remembrance Day, please keep the world's child survivors in front of you. Then reach out to help them.

Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook

Also on HuffPost:
The Washington Post via Getty Images WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 10:President Elect Donald Trump, center, walks through the halls of th U.S. Capitol for a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, left, (R-KY) on November, 10, 2016 in Washington, DC. Accompanying him are his wife, Melania, right, and Vice President Elect Mike Pence, second left.(Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The Trumpocalypse is upon us. If you are among the Orange One's supporters, congratulations; your guy won. In the words of a Facebook friend, I hope he's as great as you think he is. For the sake of civility, I will assume that you had rational reasons for selecting him, and were not driven by hatred of women, non-Whites, or foreigners.

If you are, like me, horrified by the proposition of four years of Trump-style Republican rule of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, these are dark days. My social media feed is alive with expressions of doom and Apocalyptic despair, as protests abound and professional friends in the U.S. are unironically looking for opportunities in supposedly more progressive countries.

Advertisement

I get it. There's a sense that president-elect Trump will roll back all of the progressive initiatives that President Obama worked so hard to bring to Americans. There will likely be fast action to repeal Obamacare, to de-fund agencies offering reproductive services to women, to further drain the treasury by implementing deep tax cuts, and some vicious efforts to hunt down undocumented immigrants and, frankly, to terrorize non-White newcomers.

The Trump presidency is going to be a reality. We who opposed him need to accept it.

Longer term, Trump and Pence are in a position to appoint several new Supreme Court members, essentially giving U.S. government and society a right-leaning bias for the next generation. What this means for landmark decisions, like Roe vs. Wade, is uncertain. But fear and trepidation are understandable feelings for many Americans today (the majority, based upon the popular vote).

I am a foreigner, a Canadian. So the domestic policies of a U.S. President do not directly affect me. It is, however, worth pointing out that ultra-Right actors here in Canada were quick to celebrate the Trump victory, former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Conservative leader wannabe Kelley Leitch prime among them.

While the U.S. president's domestic policies might not affect us Canadians directly, his or her foreign policies have profound effects on our lives, hence we can feel justified in having an opinion on who occupies the White House.

Advertisement

To go by the man's actual statements, a Trump presidency might result in wanton nuking of random targets. Or a partnership with Russia against the wrong side in Syria. Or maybe nothing at all. No one knows. A Trump presidency fills many with dread, largely because of the competing forces of his egregious claims and his status as a complete unknown with no policy track record.

But in the interests of our mental health, I would like to put forward a brief argument for hesitating optimism. The Trump presidency is going to be a reality. We who opposed him need to accept it. Here's how I'm getting through it.

1. Science policy

Yes, I'm about to cling to the barest of silver linings. As with almost all of his platform, Trump's position on science is vague. And certainly it stands to reason that he is likely to gut environmental programs and earth sciences surveillance programs.

But taking space policy as a case example, the Trump verbiage aligns somewhat well with the ethics of pure scientists. While Clinton would have mirrored Obama's position of requiring all funded programs to be mapped onto social priorities, Trump's position seems to be to allow space scientists to dictate the scope of their investigation, regardless of whether the outcomes and outputs of that investigation are immediately applicable to American life.

This might mean an increased focus on deep space exploration, where unfettered discovery is to be encouraged, and a decreased focus on low Earth orbit, where observations of Earth and climate changes are prioritized.

Advertisement

2. Congressional reform

Amazingly, Trump intends on introducing term limits to elected representatives in the House. I'm not sure what this would look like, but on its face this strikes me as a positive move toward more honest, responsive and representative government. Of course, there's already a push-back, as Mitch McConnell has already declared that such reform "will not be on the agenda in the Senate." But we will see.

3. He's a complete unknown

Bear with me now. This argument is a bit of a stretch, but I'm doing my best. With Hillary Clinton, given her long life in public service in the public eye, there would be no surprises regarding her intents, and tactics. She was a known quantity. For better or worse, we were pretty darn sure which of her claims would bear fruit, and which she had no intention or possibility of acting upon.

With Trump, all we have are his vague proclamations and the composition of his team. Now, to be as honest and forgiving as possible, his proclamations are not altogether worrying. He will replace Obamacare with "something terrific", for example. If he's not full of sh*t, then.... cool.

On the other hand, his advisors are, almost to a person, monstrous. The records, actions, opinions and intellectual qualities of Mike Pence, Ann Coulter, Omarosa, Katrina Pierson, and Newt Gingrich are known quantities. This fact inspires neither joy nor confidence.

Advertisement

However, if you're able to put aside the limitations of his rogue's gallery, then the Trump presidency is a blank slate. Trump himself has a public history of liberal behaviour. He's not particularly religious, and clearly not a cultural conservative, despite his recent campaign-trail stance. So maybe... just maybe... his actual actions will reflect more his inclusive Manhattan lifestyle and not his backwater election pandering.

4. Some historical perspective

I'm an old man now. I've heard this end-of-the-world talk before. Maybe it's different this time. Bill Maher and Seth MacFarlane think so, with the latter tweeting, "We got through Bush. You got through Obama. But this is different. Half of your fellow countrymen and women now feel as if they are in a strange land that is no longer their home. That should give some of you pause. We now need proof that he is who you say he is, and not who he appears to be."

I certainly see the temptation to perceive the rise of Trump, especially in the wake of his unprecedented divisive election tactics, as the anointing of a true tyrant, a leader with dictatorial ambitions, who has not hidden his open disdain for a large segment of the population he purports to lead.

However, this is a plea for optimism. So let me say that I was a very young man of 13 when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. But I was politically aware enough to understand the ramifications of Reagan's conservative, hawkish policies. We had just had four years of Carter progressivism, and I had just met the first Prime Minister Trudeau; I could tell that Reagan was a different animal.

When Reagan was elected, deep in the latter days of the Cold War, I was utterly convinced that World War III would start before his term was over in 1984. I was sure a post-nuclear apocalypse would befall us well before my 20th birthday.

Advertisement

I was wrong.

When Bush Jr. was "elected" the first time in 2000, I thought it would be business as usual, my political cynicism was so well entrenched. Bill Clinton, after all, was, to my mind, a right-leaning Democrat or a left-leaning Republican; I couldn't see much difference. Why would Bush be any different?

I was wrong. He was a nightmare.

When Bush Jr. was re-elected in 2004, I was sure the world had gone mad. How could the American electorate reward an anti-civil liberty stance, scaremongering, torture, and blatant abuses of the vaunted constitution? Surely, the path to fascism had been joined.

I was wrong. Bush's second term was horrible. But it wasn't the end of the world.

Well, Trump probably won't be the end of the world, either.

I hope.

Also on HuffPost:
JEWEL SAMAD via Getty Images US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton talks with Bernie Sanders backstage before a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, on November 3, 2016. / AFP / JEWEL SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

When Malcolm Gladwell says sexism and elitism are largely responsible for Hillary Clinton's unpopularity -- and now her loss -- he is right, but mostly wrong about the analysis.

About the right part, Gladwell and others are spot-on about the elitism. But let's be clear about the sort of elitism at the core of the problem.

Advertisement

It's not the sort of elitism the Republican base grumbles about when it comes to well-educated politicians. As if reading lots of books and studying in university are a detriment, instead of a virtue to one seeking public office.

It's also not the generic sort of elitism assumed by politicians, practically as a truism, as they step into office and suddenly forget about those voters who put them there.

Rather, it's an insidious sort of elitism, even for politicians. It shows itself when, with a hubris and arrogance of epic proportion, they take it upon themselves to decide the outcome of an election, despite what citizens may want.

So, while it's true there was an abundance of sexism and racism in the entrails that excreted Trumps' presidency, it wasn't sexism that defeated Hillary Clinton. At least the sort that believed it "wasn't ready for a woman president."

Advertisement

In reality, it was the audacious form of elitism in the Democratic Party leadership, along with many of their prominent, self-aggrandized followers (thank you George Clooney), that abundantly demonstrated they weren't really ready for a progressive President.

In other words, the Democrats did it to themselves.

One of the most reckless examples showed up early in the Democratic presidential primary race between Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Enter Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, who, before democracy had a chance to work, had decided herself that it was Hillary's turn.

These are the "elites" Gladwell could include, along with other prominent Democratic Party supporters.

So convinced that Hillary's time had come -- irrespective of the very democratic process Schultz was entrusted to protect -- she was found to have scheduled "debates at odd times, shutting Sanders out of the party's data file, stacking convention committees with Clinton supporters."

All that was missing was a sort of conviction of the papal sort, with white smoke, not coming out of chimney placed atop the Sistine Chapel's chimney, but coming out of the chimney at the Democratic Party headquarters.

Advertisement

Imagine. You, me or anyone else in a democracy deciding that because we are really convinced it's somebody's time, that we can then use our position of power to rig that outcome.

How much more tragic when that Presidential candidate may have resulted in a Democrat like Bernie Sanders. Piling on the tragedy is the likelihood that a Sanders presidency could've brought a Democratic majority in the Senate and the House.

Instead, this election's outcome is absurdly ironic.

The political party that was supposed to be progressive, refused to let their people chose their candidate. That's the sort of elitism that drove so many Democrats not to support Hillary: Either by voting for a third-party candidate; not voting at all; or, as reported, even voting for the Donald as a "protest vote." (Take a look at Sanders' assessment.)

The arrogance of some in the leadership of the Democratic Party, preempting the choice for Clinton, has resulted in a Trump/Republican triumph. What now?

There is much more to this election that'll require analysis, and it's one that'll surely keep rolling for the next number of years. We'll remind ourselves of the overt sexism. The overt racism.

Advertisement

But analyze all we want: we'll continue to see that the loss isn't because the people failed the demands of democracy. It's because those in political power, who thought themselves progressive, turned out to be as much an aid to Trump as his closest supporters.
zoranm via Getty Images Unrecognizable man eatiing fresh chicken salad in outdoor restaurant

"The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?" - Edgar Allen Poe

I don't believe in god. I don't really believe in fate either. In my early 20s a series of events happened that forced me to examine my beliefs, and I settled on synchronicity, defined as 'the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernable casual connection'.

Advertisement

I think I believe in goodness. Let's go with that.

Last week I met a person who once again forced me to reexamine the things I believe in. And once again I came up empty, but settled on synchronicity.

I left my partner and two kids in Killaloe, Ontario and went back to my home city of Toronto to do a television interview about the American election. I arrived earlier than expected and decided to grab lunch at Joe Badali's on Front Street, just a stone's throw away from the CBC building where the interview would take place.

I took my seat at the bar. Beside me was a guy chatting with the bartender. I heard the man say, "Canadians seem so nice, it's great."

"We're actually not that nice," I replied, sarcastically interjecting myself into the conversation, as I tend to do. "We're just REALLY passive aggressive."

Advertisement

The man laughed, and we spent 45 minutes or so chatting at the bar. He ate a pasta lunch, and I had bruschetta and a glass of wine. His name was Julian. He was from Maryland, a law school graduate, in town for a friend's bachelor party. He kept returning back to how he was floored by the niceness of Canadians, and I asked him about life in Baltimore. There was goodness in him, obvious to the bartender and me. Sometimes you can just tell. I asked about his family but he deflected, so I didn't press him.

The truth is I knew nothing about him, but my gut told me to keep the conversation going that afternoon.

About a half hour before my scheduled TV interview we said goodbye. I headed to the CBC building and was through in about 30 minutes. My sister picked me up and we headed to College and Manning to drop off my nephew whose father works at that building on the southeast corner, a few floors above the Blind Tiger nightclub.

That evening I wrote for hours at my sister's place and crashed at midnight or so. It wasn't until the next afternoon that I heard a news report that gave me goose bumps, and renewed my curiosity as to what life supposed to be about.

A man was murdered the night before, stomped and beaten by two men, outside the Blind Tiger nightclub at College and Manning. His name was Julian Jones, a tourist from Maryland. The reports in the days following revealed he was in town for a friend's bachelor party.

Advertisement

At first I didn't believe it. I thought I was connecting dots that didn't exist. I mean, what are the odds that you strike up a conversation with a stranger at a bar, only to visit the site of his eventual death just an hour later, a death that would happen just 10 hours later? But after finding his Facebook photo and comparing it to the news reports, I knew it was the same person.

I even called the police to tell them I had met the guy and spoke with him, just in case they needed a timeline of his whereabouts for the investigation. They thanked me but have not called back for any additional details. I did not tell them that I was at the scene of the crime before it happened. I didn't think it was relevant to them.

But it is relevant to me. It's more than relevant, actually. My mind keeps bouncing between "What are the odds?" to "What does this all mean?"

What are the odds that you strike up a conversation with a stranger at a bar, only to visit the site of his eventual death just an hour later, a death that would happen just 10 hours later?

I think it's meaningful. It must be, only I am not spiritually equipped to decipher the meaning. I've relayed the specific details to only six people, and the responses range from "That's just a coincidence" to "Welcome to the realm of the spirit."

Advertisement

And meanwhile, as I selfishly sit here trying to find meaning from a tragedy that had nothing to do with me, a man is dead; a man who probably did not want to talk about family because his own had been wrought with untimely deaths and horrible circumstances. No, this man only wanted to talk about how nice Canadians were, and then later that night two or more Canadians beat him until he stopped living.

The truth is I knew nothing about him, but my gut told me to keep the conversation going that afternoon. I'll converse with anyone, so it wasn't all that strange that I spoke to him. But I will also cut the conversation short if the person is dim witted, a racist, or just generally annoying. Julian was none of those things.

His smile never left his face. I like to imagine his family and friends reminiscing on how Julian was one of those people who fit the concept of the good dying young, because I'd hate to find out that I was wrong about him. But his goodness did shine through, and I can hang my hat on that.

He would be dead in hours, and neither of us had the spiritual wherewithal to see it coming. There is no goodness in that. None.

And when I think back to standing on the corner where he would be savagely beaten, just after we shared an unplanned sit-down, I try to capture some fleeting magical indicator that I can twist into something meaningful, but I can't. I'd be manufacturing something that probably was never there.

Advertisement

So I am left with the following; the magic was just two strangers sharing a talk, not looking at our phones and not sitting shoulder to shoulder and saying nothing. In an age where people rarely look up from their devices, and I am as guilty of that as anyone I know, this time we took the organic route and got back to basics. Thank goodness for that.

He would be dead in hours, and neither of us had the spiritual wherewithal to see it coming. There is no goodness in that. None.

Goodbye, Julian Jones of Maryland. Rest in peace.
Arpad Benedek

As we have seen in recent days, movements can change the world. Sometimes for good and sometimes, well, who knows.

This writer is known to be one of the fiercest champions of a city we know as Toronto. So why is another city holding our gaze?

Advertisement

Well, the current movement and its people who have created it make it impossible to look away.

We returned to the city of Hamilton various times after we called it Canada's Brooklyn in 2015 and the Internet blew up.

So, why did we go back? Well, many reasons, but frankly we wanted to make sure we were not being punked. That collective spirit we saw, was it still there?

What we found last year was a city where you are told that, "you can do anything in Hamilton." Upon our return, we were hit like a tsunami by a movement we can coin right here as "Hamilievers."

These are open, inclusive, big-hearted citizens. Sound familiar? They are people that are not chirping negativity on Twitter. Not talking about doing great things. Not throwing a city and community under the bus. Not being fearful of thinking big.

Advertisement

What we found were people that were doing. Doing more. Doing good. Doing big. Doing welcoming. Doing pride.

The catalyst of this movement is in fact the born and raised millennial Hamiltonian. These are people that believe so strongly in the potential of their city and are doing all they can for the world to understand one thing:

"You don't need to leave Hamilton to enjoy the fruits of a growing exciting world. And if you don't live here, please do come and be part of our family to create wonder with us."

These are citizens that clearly have heard Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's call. In his first days of office, he told us, "... I need your creativity. Your ideas. Your energy. Your leadership. Together, we can build this country into something extraordinary, because this is Canada. And in Canada... better is always possible."

Hamilton also exemplifies our prime minister's wish for how the world sees Canada and our people.

Going further, Gord Downie, another inspiring Canadian, clearly posed a challenge to our country when he sang those lyrics, perhaps for the last time that hit many of us right in the gut. "Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is our life." is what he inspired us to act on. Not to talk about. But to do something with.

Advertisement

Hamiltonians are stepping up and changing their reality for the better. This is a case study in active citizenship at work.

And as a timely new campaign from Hamilton tells us, ambition is in their blood. Watch here.

We had an opportunity to meet with three of the young millennials change makers that are driving this movement. They are all under the age of 35 years old. And there are many more who have taken the torch and are doing wondrous things.

What follows are highlights of this conversation. Stephen Kulakowsky is a real estate developer with several projects in the King William area, Ryan Moran, Co-Founder of CoMotion on King & Senior Manager of Marketing, Niagara Parks, and Erin Dunham, is the CEO and co-owner of leading restaurant group, The Other Bird Inc.

The partnership we see between millennial and established city builders is real and evident. What triggered this? What makes it work?

SK: Hamiltonians have known the potential of the city for decades, but potential needs to be realized before change can happen. The collaboration builds on the excitement to see the city prosper. Young or old, we are all sick of saying Hamilton is on the cusp or tipping point. We don't use those sayings anymore.

Advertisement

ED: I feel as though the established city builders are happy to have the younger generation showing an interest in developing Hamilton. I imagine some of them are pretty tired and looking to have the younger generation take on some of the load. We all want the same thing... a better, growing city... and we have to work together in order to achieve that goal.

RM: Most importantly, what triggered it and what makes it work is the crucial combination of an absence of ego, and a desire to just do good. What is special, and not necessarily unique about the Hamilton case, is the crucial combination of energetic and inventive emerging leaders bringing forward awesome projects, and established, yet insightful leaders who see beyond themselves to help make sure good things happen for the broader community.

What is a message you want to send the world to inspire them to come visit? And to live?

SK: City Hall has longed publicly for Hamilton to be the best place to raise a child in the country. We have interesting spaces to live, creative office space and a growing list of amenities not to mention some of the best geography and green space in the region.

ED: We aren't steel anymore; we are a perfect combination of everything else.

RM: Hamilton is Play-Doh. This is a place where you can come, love everything about it already, yet find an awesome community that encourages and supports you to dig your hands in, mold it and make it unique to you. It is diverse, fun, and ready for those who want shape the future.

We need to see what is happening here. We need to bottle it up and spread this type of active citizenship not only to other parts of Canada but to the world.

Advertisement

What is happening is what prime minister Trudeau desires in how we as citizens create the city and country we want. It's what Gord Downie wants in how we as Canadians step up and do something bold and meaningful.

There are countless reasons for you to visit or explore living in Hamilton. Here are a few.

Upcoming restaurant called The French.

Do check it out. It's people and vibe may change your life. It certainly has changed ours.

Is this the promised land as they so call say it is? Well, we are Hamilievers. So much so that we started a hashtag to prove it. Check it out #IAmAHamiliever.

Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook

Also on HuffPost:
ASSOCIATED PRESS In this June 1, 2016, photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wears his hat during a rally at the Sacramento International Jet Center in Sacramento, Calif. Trump is suggesting that the Obama administration, for political reasons, plans to keep consumers in the dark about premium increases for 2017 under the president's health care law. But the administration says next year's sign-up season is going ahead on schedule; insurers say they've seen no indication of a delay. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Were you really surprised that Donald Trump won the American election? Or that Justin Trudeau won the Canadian one? Or that Brexit happened?

While Americans may eventually rue their choice of president, these three results have much in common:

Advertisement

Insiders and politicians who were perceived as privileged and thought they knew better.

An enormous group of pundits, intelligentsia, entertainers, media and other so-called experts, many of who were also disconnected from the person on the street and who also thought they knew best.

The echo chamber of social media, which has effectively replaced mainstream journalism with individual "bubbles" where individuals are not exposed to dissenting views (or corroborating facts).

Individuals who actually know best... even if "everyone" from the first three groups thinks that they are dead wrong.

Putting aside the debate performances, the health issues, the size of the rallies and the television commercials, it is these four fundamental factors that opened the door to outsiders. People don't want to be told how to think and they want to hear ideas that personally resonate.

At the same time, people do have problems with politicians who are sexist, vulgar, lying buffoons (of course, former Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford comes to mind -- another outsider), and there are many intelligent voters who never would vote for politicians who are this way. But at this point in time, it seems the number who don't want to be told how to think "trumps" the number who have bona fide concerns.

People don't want to be told how to think and they want to hear ideas that personally resonate.

Interestingly, all of these outsiders are really just following a basic marketing 101 approach, albeit with their own unique angles:

Advertisement

Define the needs of your target. For Trump, this was jobs, immigration, security. For Trudeau, this was jobs through spending and political transparency. Use branding to encapsulate and represent your service or product. Trump's "Make American Great Again" slogan, as well as his personal brand as a successful businessman, helped. Trudeau's brand was in the legacy of his name and in his youth. Differentiate your offering. For Trump, this was his outrageously politically incorrect statements, which served only to ingratiate himself with people on the street. For Trudeau, it was the message of hope, which was completely different than his competitor's message of doom. Exploit your competitor's weaknesses. For Trump and Trudeau, this was the insider nature of their competitors, and their connection to scandal (Hillary's emails and Mike Duffy/Senate.)

The most important lesson these elections hold is even more fundamental: markets are in the midst of one of the most significant transformations around. Did the taxi industry (or taxi regulators) think about Uber a few short years ago? Or the hotel industry about Airbnb? Or the Republican party about Donald Trump? New players, new technologies and new ways of thinking are rocking traditional players to the core.

A warning for the complacent:

Do you really think that you "know best" what's right for those around you? Do you really think that what you see, hear and read provides balanced input for your decisions? And do you really think that each year, business (and life) will continue on its incremental journey, step-by-step without disruption? If so, your version of Donald Trump (or Justin Trudeau) is just around the corner.

Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook

Also on HuffPost:
Photo:Maude Barlow, Chair of the Council of Canadians at a massive rally in Stuttgart, Germany against CETA and TTIP. (Council of Canadians)

So the unthinkable has happened: president-elect Trump, the incoming cowboy president has been elected. He says he will rip up NAFTA, send the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the shredder and build a wall with Mexico.

Advertisement

Up to election day, Canadians had remained smug, declaring that Canada was different. While "waves of protectionism and racism" spread around the globe, we got onto the cover of The Economist as being oh so different. As the magazines Canadian correspondent Madeleine Drohan explained, The editor of The Economist came up with a question that superseded the story. Why, she asked, was Canada not seeing anti-immigration and anti-globalization protests like those that had led to Brexit in Britain, the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. and populist movements in Europe?

Last Sunday, on CBC Radios Sunday Morning, while defending CETA, the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland gloated, One of the things which is so important, I think, about Canada right now, is we have broad national support that very much crosses party lines, for what I like to call the open society. For being open to immigrants, for understanding that we need to be part of the global economy.

Again, the underlying thought was that those who oppose trade agreements are racists and backward people who want to go back to another time, who are against an open society and who hate diversity and immigration.

But this misses a large part of the picture. I was recently in Brussels and Strasbourg talking to European Parliamentarians and Walloon politicians and civil society. Paul Magnette, the prime minister of Belgiums Wallonia region, whose opposition to the proposed Canada-Europe trade agreement, was supported by 73 per cent of the population, cannot be reduced to some volatile right-wing bigot. His was a measured, well researched and thoughtful analysis of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).

Advertisement

In Germany, a country where hundreds of thousands came out to oppose trade agreements, and where, incidentally, the Syrian refugee intake has been exponentially higher than Canadas, a majority of popular opinion is against CETA and the proposed TTIP pact between the United States and Europe. During much of the process, Austrias Social Democratic chancellor, Christian Kern, expressed numerous objections to signing CETA and abandoned them only in the weeks before the deal was signed. Green and Left Parties in the European Union are also very concerned about trade agreements for environmental and social justice reasons, not because they want to build walls around Europe.

In the U.S., Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have maintained a coherent intellectual tradition in opposition to trade agreements for their effects on the commons, not because they dislike Latinos or Black people.

But why then are all opponents of trade deals put in the same basket as Donald Trump?

Celeste Drake, a trade and globalization specialist at the AFL-CIO and a Trump opponent, says, No matter what we say, the global business community and it allies will try to smear our critique with charges of protectionism, nationalism, isolationism and even racism. Our message is not one of hate or isolation and never has been. I think we need not fear our positions. Our positions elevate the power of the people vis-a-vis corporate power. Our positions are against neoliberalism.

Yes, Trump has poked a major wound in the prevailing economic outlook, capitalizing on globalization and how neoliberal economics has shifted power to an elite, concentrated wealth in the hands of a few and made states powerless to act. As Alexa Conradi pointed out in Ricochet, Among Americans who think that free trade is bad for employment, 65 per cent voted for Trump. In the U.K., among those who voted for Brexit, 69 per cent believe the global economy is a force of evil.

And among people in the U.S. who believe that the economy is bad, 79 per cent opted for Trump. Same thing in people unemployed in the U.K.: a majority voted to leave the EU. Interestingly, in the U.K., half of the "Leavers" and "Remainers" consider capitalism as a force of evil.

Advertisement

Unfortunately, the political centre, and some progressives, have endorsed many of these policies, seeing no alternative to corporate-led globalization, paralyzed by a global system that leaves states unable to act. In a way, with their inability to react to a growing need, they are defeating themselves. They are also fanning the flames of these right-wing populist movements.

So should Canadians rejoice in the fact that our country is more open? On the one hand, we have done somewhat better at integrating immigrants. Well, luckily for us, we are also among the most geographically isolated of countries, so we dont have to worry about Syrians or Mexicans swarming illegally across our borders. We can be smug in accepting, for the most part, only the most highly educated immigrants, who are generally better educated than the general population.

We can also ignore own traditions of systemic racism and colonialization of First Nations people.

We can be self-satisfied in knowing that, despite all the free trade agreements we sign, 75 per cent of our exports go to the United States. So, our global presence is a theoretical thing, not a real thing.

In fact we are so dependent on the U.S. that we are willing to placate President-elect Trump who is threatening to tear up NAFTA. We are even ready to renegotiate.

Remember how free trade was about common values, of openness, anti-racism and immigration? These are the shared values we hold in common with Europe, enshrined in our progressive Harper-era CETA agreement.

Advertisement

Well, apparently shared values are just something we use to sell free trade agreements. Our cool feminist Prime Minister just tweeted, I congratulate President-elect Donald Trump on his election victory in the United States. Our shared values are strong.

So shared values apply to Donald Trump?
President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands following their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) ASSOCIATED PRESS

The five things you need to know on Friday, November 11, 2016

Advertisement

This morning's Waugh Zone is by Ned Simons - following a peaceful temporary transfer of power. Paul is away.

1) SO VERY SPECIAL

Donald Trump and Theresa May spoke on the phone yesterday afternoon and the president-elect told the prime minister the US-UK relationship was "very important and very special". May was invited to visit Trump's White House as soon as possible. Which must have pleased Downing Street bigly.

On BBC Question Time last night, Yvette Cooper criticised May for not being more like Angela Merkel when the German chancellor made clear she had not forgotten Trumps hugely divisive election campaign.

This morning, Downing Street moved to squash the suggestion Nigel Farage, who thinks sexual assault is hilarious, will be unofficially advising international trade secretary Liam Fox on how to deal with Trump, as The Daily Telegraph reports. "Dr. Fox has no plans to talk to Mr. Farage," a government spokesman told Sky News. And the BBC reports Downing Street dismissed the Ukip leader as an ""irrelevance".

Advertisement

US vice president-elect Mike Pence also tweeted that he had spoken to Boris Johnson to discuss "America's longstanding and close relationship with the UK". Boris said the two men "agreed on importance of the special relationship & need to tackle global challenges together". Pence, by the way, really does not like LGBT people and backs laws that discriminate against them. Speaking in Serbia, Boris told people to stop having a "whinge-o-rama" about Trump's victory.

2) ACCESS NO AREAS

In Obama's White House yesterday, Trump and Obama met for talks. In the short super awkward public appearance after the meeting, Trump, who promoted the lie that Obama was not born in the United States, said he had "great respect" for the sitting president. During their brief appearance in-front of the cameras, Obama gave some advice to Trump when reporters tried to ask questions. "Here's a good rule: Don't answer the questions when they just start yelling."

It remains to be seen whether journalists will have many chances to ask President Trump any questions during his time in office. Yelled or otherwise. Trump broke with tradition on Thursday by heading to Washington, DC, without a protective pool of journalists to cover his movements for the larger press corps. As a candidate, Trump vilified reporters and blacklisted news organizations. He called reporters dishonest lying and scum. Hes promised vengeance, vowing to introduce laws to make it easier to sue news organisations.

Late last night, Trump tweeted that he had "great chemistry" with Obama. He followed that with a tweet complaining that "professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting" his election. "Very unfair!" he added. Sad.

3) TEAM TRUMP

One media figure that could have access to Trump's White House as the next president's chief of staff is Steve Bannon, the chairman of the alt-right Breitbart News who took a leave to be Trumps campaign CEO. Names are also emerging for Trump's cabinet. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has said anythings legal during war, is in the frame for Attorney General. Senator. Bob Corker, former UN Ambassador John Bolton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are reportedly under consideration for Secretary of State. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke are on the list for Homeland Security Secretary. Clarke, who is African-American, has been a forceful critic of the Black Lives Matter movement and spoke at the Republican National Convention. He also called for Trump supporters to bring out pitchforks and torches to fight a rigged system.

Advertisement

So far, the names being floated for a Trump administration largely have one thing in common: Theyre men.

BECAUSE YOUVE READ THIS FAR A woman, heartbroken at the election result, decided to talk her daughters for a walk in the woods in New York state. And she ran into Hillary Clinton, who was out walking her dogs with husband Bill.

4) BREXIT'S STILL HAPPENING BTW

Tim Farron this morning confirms his eight MPs will vote against triggering Article 50 unless there is a second referendum on the eventual Brexit deal."We will vote against Article 50 unless it allows the people a vote on the deal, because the will of the people must prevail - both on departure and destination," he said. "The government has no plan and their haphazard approach is leading us towards a disastrous version of Brexit which risks jobs, communities, security and the economic health of the nation."

It is highly unlikely this move will block the passage of Brexit in the Commons. But the Lib Dems join a few other MPs in saying they will vote against the government, including Labour shadow Foreign Office minister Catherine West and David Lammy. Veteran europhile Tory Ken Clarke has also said he will vote against Article 50. And the SNP MPs appear likely to do the same.

Advertisement

5) COMMONS PEOPLE

In this week's Commons People podcast myself and The Huffington Post's Martha Gill and Aubrey Allegretti discuss the fallout from Trump's victory and whether there are any lessons to be learned for British political parties. There is also a quiz about American presidents - which was in no way concocted at the very last minute.
Two speeches, 42 years apart. Have a quick read.

"So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

John F Kennedy, 10th June 1963

...and...

"It's true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Donald J Trump, 16th June 2015

Donnie, you had me at "Mexico"!

I wasn't born when Kennedy made that speech at Yale. Nor am I American. The timing of the speech doesn't have much cultural relevance for me either - for birth those reasons. But put the two in front of me and I can tell you which one resonates with me more.

Advertisement

Why?

Well, I don't want our leaders to be the kind of people who seek to position themselves based on our prejudices and to divide us. Leaders are the ones who inspire us. They literally should have "the best words" - and if they have to point it out to you in a semi-coherent fashion they probably don't.

It seems to me there's an eloquence in our politics that has been lost in the intervening 42 years. Kennedy's eloquence and that inspiration was linked to a vision. A vision of how things could be - in a time of true social change. Something that embodied "e pluribus unum" in a nation of migrants rather than splinter and divide. Whether you like it or not, if you've got David Duke putting out the bunting after your election you really need to think about who you're trying to reach.

In the couple of days since the election, I've heard an overload of commentary and a legion blogs about what should have been, what opportunities have been lost, what is to come. A lot of anger, people dumbfounded. A lot of us pointed at the US and scratched our heads that they didn't see what we all saw from a far, screamed at the screen that at the apparent madness. Just in the same way 48% of us did in June in the UK.

The 2016 Presidential Election is being labelled as the result of the new era of Post-truth politics. I'm not so sure, but it's definitely post-something. Firstly it assumes there was a truth beforehand that is now lost. That can't be true. It's just that information is more accessible than it used to be. And post-truth is supposed to be where you aren't really bothered about whether something you say is true so long as it resonates with enough people.

Advertisement

How about Post-caring? Apparently we've had enough of experts. I'm not sure we have. It's that the outliers, even the conspiracy theorists, can get their message out there as easily as the mainstream does. No fact checking, just publish and watch what happens. But, if Michael Moore is right then Tuesday was the biggest fuck-you in history. You have to give a damn to do that, right?.

It's certainly post-deference. It may be post-trust. It's actually more likely a connection of post-somethings. 2008 was the first election to properly start harnessing the power of the internet and social media. I think what we've seen here is where the internet became the pre-dominant media and republicans (or one of them at least) woke up to that. And maybe, we're struggling with that. It certainly makes it hard to know what to believe. This is "post-dialup" politics.

Internet campaigning has no time for structured, reasoned argument. It has to be fast, beat the other guy to the punch; it only works if its going viral. But we see the instant impact social media can have and forget that the internet never forgets. Ken and his jumper could have run for President as an independent - for a about 15 minutes until someone dug his internet profile and he was done for same as the rest of us would have been.

Trump built his constituency on being seen to "tell it like it is". Although it's not like it is for many, there's a constituency for whom it clearly resonated. I'm still trying to figure out how because most of the time his stream of consciousness speeches, an interconnected series of spoken tweets like a Dave Gorman "found-poem", was borderline unintelligible. And we clearly misunderestimated that. But such was that feeling in his constituency, he could ride out dozens of scandals and some pretty egregious statements about people who did nothing more than disagree with him and he comes off as the good guy. It's kind of astonishing really. And most of it was a free-ride with very little scrutiny because everyone else thought it was a joke.

It was a campaign of playing the man not the ball. For a day at least, you'll have noticed that to sound presidential, he speaks slower and just above a whisper. Still nothing makes sense, but it's altogether more calm. And on the face of it, conciliatory. Unifying, even.

Advertisement

I just don't get how he's going to achieve the two.

How do you you unite people with policies that are divisive and seek to alienate?

Supreme Court appointments will embolden pro-lifers and Sandy Hook wannabes, NRA members and fundamentalists at the expense of women's rights and people who are sick of all the violence.

Immigration changes, walls and addressing the perception of jobs going overseas alienates the 40% of the country that know they are migrants (as opposed to the 100% that are).

Lifting restrictions on energy production flies in the face of, well, scientific fact really but you can only think that unchecked it increases the likelihood of what happened in Flint happening elsewhere. Who other than the 1% are going to be cheering for the tax cuts and who other than those on the lowest incomes will mourn the demise of socialised medical care?

These are no policies to unify a country; any country. He might be President, but this can't be the sort of leadership that brings people together, can it?
A trip to visit a World War II battleship 70 years later brought back many memories for John Lucas Lenz of Coffman.

Lenz, born in 1926 and raised on a farm in Womack, a small community just south of Farmington, was called to serve his country in World War II against the Nazi forces. When Lenz reached the recruiting station in St. Louis, he requested to be placed in the Navy. Later, he traveled to the U.S. Naval Training Station in Great Lakes, Ill., for boot camp.

After completing boot camp, Lenz and his group traveled to Georgia where they were engaged in combat training. Before Lenz was able to receive the training, he was selected with two other Seamen First Class sailors and sent to Fort Pierce, Fla., where he was appointed to the USS LST 522 as a gunner's mate.

The USS LST 522 was an amphibious ship attached to the 7th fleet. Upon leaving Florida, they traveled to Mobile, Ala., to take on ammunition and bombs that would contribute to the efforts at the battlefront lines. The bombs were to be dropped off for use by the Air Force.

Passing through the Panama Canal, the ship began its journey across the ocean to the battle zone. They took on soldiers to be transported to the war zone where the amphibious boats would later take them to shore. Frequently the ship was under fire. At any point there was always a potential encounter against enemy submarines and airstrikes. After the fall of Germany, they transported prisoners of war, mostly to China.

In 1944, at the age of 18, Lenz was the youngest crew member and was nicknamed "The Kid." Lenz's main station was at the helm where the larger guns were located. His tour of duty was for two years, serving in the South Asiatic Pacific ranging from China to Africa with many ports in between. As the sailors docked in ports of other countries, they encountered women carrying rifles to protect their families and homes because the men were at war.

Lenz recalls many things from his time in the Navy. He remembers how the ships relied on the stars to keep them on course or get back on track after a storm. Another item Lenz recalls is when the ships were no longer needed for the war, they were dismantled and either sold or given to countries to use as cargo ships.

When Lenz's tour of duty concluded in 1946 and the war had ended, he returned to the U.S. on The President Adams at the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lenz is now 90 years old and says he would make the same decision to serve his country again. Many who also served in the military would likely agree.

Lenz, like so many others who experienced the war, does not see himself as a hero but "men who did what had to be done."

"We prayed and hoped it was enough," Lenz said.

Lenz enjoyed a recent visit to view the World War II battleship US LST 325-3 while it was docked at Cape Girardeau. Even though it was not the ship he had been stationed on, he said it brought back many memories of his days while serving his country.

It is because of Lenz and so many others who sacrificed so much that our country remains free today.
Born and raised in Michigan and having cast my vote, I write this from the land of Shakespeare. All the world's a stage, we are told, and the American voters have given Donald Trump his hour upon it.

Who, we might ask, is Trump, this player who struts and frets before us? And how do we disentangle what is real and what is staged? What should we now expect? Take just one example: the wall. Since the election, we have seen numerous interviews in which hapless journalists attempt to extract a reliable statement of Trump's intentions. Will he build a wall along the border with Mexico or was that just another bullish line from the Trump playbook? Does it matter if it is the latter? Do his baying mobs care about the material fact of a wall? Or is it the performance they crave, Trump's performance and their own, the catharsis of ten thousand voices chanting "Build the wall" and fixing upon a scapegoat.

Advertisement

I have now seen numerous Republican commentators chide journalists for asking about the wall. Apparently they took it all too literally. They failed to grasp that Trump is more player than politician. Importantly, this means that his lies are not the lies of an ordinary politician. They are the lines of a play. Trump was never a candidate in the ordinary sense of the word. He was the performance of a candidate. And his presidency too, will be a performance.

But when we speak hatred, we set it loose in the world. Trump's pronouncements enable racism and misogyny, religious hatred and homophobia. This is a man who, during the course of the campaign, regularly incited violence at his rallies, threatened to jail his opponent, muzzle the press, deport thousands, build a wall, and deny entry to a single religious group. This is a man who has denied climate change, bragged about sexual assault, mocked disability and disadvantage in others, celebrated tax avoidance.

So to those who would accuse us of taking Trump too literally, I say Goffman was right. The differences between world and stage are not easy to specify. In a chilling interview with Jon Snow, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan was asked, "Will he actually do all the things he said he'd do... wasn't a lot of it pantomime, macabre though it may have been?" To which, Sullivan replied, "Yes, let's hope!"

Is this what we are now reduced to - hoping that a Trump presidency is more theatre than reality? Sullivan clearly believes there is grave danger in such a position. "When you've revved up half the country... when you've made explicit promises to deport 11 million people, to build a wall... to discriminate and subject American Muslims to extra surveillance, how do you go back on that? He's as much a creature now of the mob as they are of him!"

Advertisement

So here we are, days after the election, minor players in the coming storm of a Trump presidency. It is shocking to see how quickly the dramaturgical rules came into play, how easily the election of a demagogue can be normalized. Trump delivered an acceptance speech described by the mainstream media outlets as "gracious." So too, Clinton's concession speech. Obama promised cooperation in the transition of power. These were single scenes, fleeting situational performances, to borrow again from Goffman. These were also failed performances because we know who Trump is. The long campaign revealed him to us. The question now concerns who we will be.

Under Trump's government, people are going to get hurt. Badly. For no other reason than that they belong to a group or community targeted by Trump and his followers. As citizen-players, we face stark choices. Goffman once said, "Choose your self-presentation carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face." If we put on the mask of appeasement, that is what we will become. Or we can choose to resist, refuse to normalize hatred.
The Girl Guide and Girl Scout Movement builds the confidence and skill of girls and young women across the world. Photo credit: World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts

Imagine a world where every girl is and feels valued. Where girls have the confidence to learn, lead and thrive. Where they have the ability to go to school, speak out in the classroom knowing what they're saying matters. Imagine a world where girls don't feel they have to look a certain way to succeed, where they aren't belittled or reduced to just a body image.

Advertisement

At the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), we aim to provide a space where girls can be the best they can be. In places local to them - safe from judgment, stereotyping and violence - they can learn by doing, they can make friends and have fun.

It's a concept that's worked for over 100 years and research released this week proves why the Girl Guide and Girl Scout Movement matters more than ever.

New research

According to research from scientists at Edinburgh and Glasgow universities, people who have been a Scout or Guide during their childhood tend to have better mental health in later life.

The findings were drawn from the National Child Development Study, a lifelong study of almost 10,000 people from across the UK who were born in November 1958.

Advertisement

According to the research, about a quarter of participants had been part of the Boy Scout or Girl Guide Movement. Those who had been part of the Movement were around 15% less likely to go on to suffer from anxiety or mood disorders at age 50.

It is different growing up as a girl today, compared to over 50 years ago. Girls are subjected to numerous pressures, due in part to the boom of social media, cyberbullying, violence and the desire to attain the perfect body image. However, we're working hard to keep up with the changes so today's Girl Guides and Girl Scouts can have better mental health later in life too.

Building confidence

Across our 146 countries, we are committed to developing global programmes that build the confidence and skills of girls and young women. They are leaders of today and, in a rapidly changing world, we want to empower them to live the life they want to lead. We want them to lead in their own way too, whether that is at home, in school, in the workplace or, perhaps, one day as the first female president of the United States.

The study further stated that self-reliance, coupled with teamwork and being active outdoors are benefits that will serve girls well into later life.

At WAGGGS, these three attributes are ones we believe in and ones we seek to instill in Girl Guides and Girl Scouts whether they live in Africa, the Arab region, Asia Pacific, Europe or the Western Hemisphere.

Advertisement

Our non-formal education approach -- which relies on experiential, hands-on learning -- helps to make complex topics accessible and fun for young people. By encouraging girls to work in small groups and using a mix of learning styles and activities such as role play, sketches and games, girls and young women can take ownership of their lives and develop leadership and skills. Small groups create a sense of belonging, providing a space where young people are able to listen, discuss what's important and better support one another.

Issues that matter

The topics we cover in these groups are more pertinent than ever to girls and young women across the world. In collaboration with Dove, we've developed the Free Being Me programme, which encourages girls to feel free to be themselves and banish the body myth. Studies have shown that taking part in activities like Free Being Me has a lasting impact on girls' well-being.

Girlguiding UK is encouraging its members to speak openly about mental wellbeing through its Think Resilient programme. Resilience helps girls cope when they're faced with the stresses of everyday life - whether that's in their schools, families or friendship groups - so that they can have fun, take new opportunities and have good mental wellbeing.

It's clear Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting builds confidence no matter where girls are from. It helps girls overcome adversity to ensure they have the opportunity to become the strong, confident women they so deserve to be.

I remember hearing the story of Pascaline, 29, who lives in Rwanda. She had been caught up in the genocide. It had torn her family apart and her father, two brothers and other members of her family had been killed. Through the support of her mother, together with her Girl Guiding group, she's developed into a strong, young woman who is using her experience to support others.

Advertisement

"Girl Guiding has taught me a lot about life," she said. "It's made me adjust to new environments, it's opened doors for my personal development and, more importantly, it's encouraged me to honour my existence as a global citizen. I wouldn't be where I am today if I wasn't a Girl Guide. I've gained knowledge, confidence and skills that school never offered, plus I've made everlasting friendships."
When the first batch of results were announced soon after Florida polling stations closed, the situation looked good for Hillary Clinton. She seemed to be performing better than expected in Democrat-friendly counties like Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, indicating that her high levels of Hispanic support were cancelling out Donald Trump's gains in rural, whiter areas of the state.

But as the night wore on, the situation in the Sunshine State started to look less certain. Whilst Clinton was performing as well as expected in urban counties, Trump was breaking records of his own to keep the race a tight affair. Clinton's share of the vote in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach largely mirrored Obama's four years ago, but away from the main cities, she was struggling to keep up with Trump. In Monroe County, which Barack Obama narrowly won by 0.4% of the vote in the last election, Trump ended up winning by 6.9%, whilst in St. Lucie - an area that not only voted Democrat in both 2008 and 2012 but had done so in every election since 1996 - a 7.8% lead was wiped out by the Republican nominee.

Unsurprisingly, both counties are overwhelmingly white, and their results highlighted a trend that would continue throughout the course of the night and, eventually, result in the most unexpected of victories for Trump.

Advertisement

Heading into the election, a lot of fuss was made about Florida. One of the key states that Trump had to win to have a chance of becoming president, the swing towards Trump left many Clinton supporters feeling understandably nervous. And whilst their fears would later be vindicated when Trump was eventually announced as the state's victor, Clinton never needed to win there to secure the presidency.

However, her struggles in rural, whiter areas of Florida gave an early indication as to how other battleground states might pan out, and as the night wore on and Trump's electoral college votes piled up, Clinton's hopes suddenly lay with three hotly-contested and predominately industrial states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

If Clinton's losses in Florida were damaging then her performance further north was catastrophic. Pennsylvania's Erie County, an area containing old industrial towns that Obama had comfortably won by 16.9% four years ago, voted for Trump, whilst Luzerne County resulted in an unexpected Republican landslide as the party's nominee won 58.4% of the vote, despite the fact that Obama won by 4.9% in 2012. Before this year, the Republicans had won in the county on just three occasions since Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, and only that win compares to the extraordinary gains made by Trump.

Even when Clinton was winning, it wasn't good enough. Lackawanna County, which includes the industrial city of Scranton, voted for Clinton but only by 3.4%, a lacklustre result compared to the double-digit thrashing of Mitt Romney that Obama enjoyed four years earlier.

Advertisement

It was a similar story in Wisconsin, another state with a large population of white, working-class and Democrat-leaning voters that had been enthused by Trump's populist message. Obama's 6.7% victory over Romney came thanks to the president winning 34 of the state's 72 counties. Clinton managed to win just 13. A large swathe of blue that had run from Dunn County in the northwest to Rock County in the south was almost entirely wiped out. Monroe County, which four years ago stood as a lone block of red in a sea of blue, is now bordered by just one Clinton-supporting county; the rest have shifted their allegiance to Trump.

During the campaign, a lot of column inches focused on the white working-class voters that had traditionally supported the Democrats but, fuelled by anxiety and anger over issues such as globalisation and immigration, found themselves attracted to Trump's populist and nativist message.

In the run-up to the election, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough argued, as many other commentators and political scientists did, that "there are not enough white voters in America for Donald Trump to win whilst getting routed amongst minorities". It was generally believed that Trump-supporting non-Hispanic whites (an ethnic group whose numbers continue to decrease) would be cancelled out by Hispanic and black voters, the majority of whom, according to opinion polls, were planning to back Clinton.

But, as has now been established, pre-election polling was deeply flawed and underestimated Trump's level of support, particularly in the industrial, working-class areas of the Midwest where a swing of just a few percent towards the Republican nominee was enough to win him key states and, ultimately, the presidency.

In the coming weeks, much will be said about the election as data is examined and things start to make more sense, but for now it seems clear that, in the end, the white working-class voters that were the focus of so much pre-election discussion swung the election in favour of Trump. Clinton proved unable to counter her opponent's populist rhetoric with a positive and inspiring message, resulting in working-class whites drifting even further away from the Democrats.

Advertisement
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed extraordinary graciousness, dignity, generosity and stature in their response to Donald Trump's surprising victory, and it is to their credit. President-elect Trump - words I find difficult to write - also showed surprising, uncharacteristic magnanimity in his victory speech and his meeting with President Obama at the White House, appealing for unity and speaking respectfully, for the first time, of the incumbent. I hope this lasts.

It may be that Trump's vulgarity, rudeness and threatening behaviour during the campaign - well described by Margaret Beckett - was all just an act, a show put on by a reality TV host playing to the gallery, or at least to his base. Let's hope so. For his behaviour during the campaign was among the most unbecoming for an incoming President.

Advertisement

Michelle Obama's line - "When they go low, we go high" - rings in my ears and stays in my mind. Boy, did they go low, and wow how amazing it was that the Obamas stayed high, even in defeat. I hope and pray that it is the case that the low levels to which Trump sank were simply a show, and that now he has won he will behave with the dignity and generosity of spirit his new office behoves.

There are, however, three things urgently needed right now.

First, no matter how much many of us may dislike it, we must accept the result - as we did with Brexit - and make it work. We must minimise the damage and seize whatever positive opportunities there might be.

Second, as with Brexit, it is imperative that the President-elect rein in his demons, especially his more extreme supporters. He must unequivocally condemn the wave of racist attacks, violence and hate speech which have occurred in recent days - the swastikers, the verbal abuse of racial minorities, the violent assaults on gay people. He must especially disown the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk - something he patently refused to do in the campaign. If he is not the racist that his opponents believe he is, he must act quickly to demonstrate that. He unleashed a lot of demons during the campaign which could tear the fabric of the United States apart if he does not act demonstrably and responsibly to bring the country together.

And third, those of us who do not understand how people could vote for a man like Trump need very urgently to listen and learn. When people are angry, they sometimes do stupid things - but that is not a reason to ignore the causes of their anger. Clearly, a significant proportion in the United States are very angry - angry at the establishment which they feel does not represent them, angry at their stagnant economic circumstances, angry that for too long they have not been heard by the political elite. The same is true in Britain, and that anger led to Brexit. The same could be true in France, Germany, the Netherlands and across Europe, with consequences that could be horrific.

Advertisement

Those of us, on the centre-right or the centre-left of politics, who believe in liberal democracy, open society and an internationalist outlook should be alarmed at rising populism in various forms around the world. From Modi in India and Duterte in the Philippines, to militant Buddhist nationalism in Burma and UKIP in Britain, to Putin and Trump, populism, nationalism and in some cases extreme racism and religious intolerance are all peas from the same pod. All these are varying shades of the same phenomenon, and they have their far left equivalents too. All play on fears, tap into anger and preach hatred.

But we should not just be alarmed. We should listen, learn and then act. We need to develop a vision that is true to the values of liberal democracy, one that celebrates diversity, promotes basic human rights and freedoms, protects the vulnerable, respects human dignity, liberates and empowers people and provides hope. A vision that is rooted and grounded in the realities of life, in an understanding of how hard the daily grind is for many ordinary decent working people, and is not consumed with lofty words and false promises, yet at the same time still lifts the spirits beyond the politics of anger and hate. A vision that offers real solutions.

Yet while our political leaders must focus on addressing the needs of their angry populations at home, they must not slip into a politics of parochialism. For many years, millions of people in countries ruled by dictators or torn apart by terrorists and religious extremists have looked to western democracies, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, to be their voice. We must not fail them.

Dissidents jailed and tortured in China or Russia, activists beginning to build a very fragile new democracy in Burma with the old military regime still powerful and still breathing down their necks, religious minorities across the Middle East, Pakistan and Indonesia, look to us to speak out for the basic human rights that we enjoy and which they have for so long been denied.

Over the past year or so hundreds of human rights lawyers in China have been arrested and detained, booksellers from Hong Kong have been abducted by Chinese agents, and Hong Kong's freedoms are being shredded. In North Korea, at least 100,000 people languish in political prison camps in dire conditions. In Eritrea, prisoners of conscience are locked up in metal shipping containers. In Burma, Muslims are facing a campaign of hatred which some experts say amounts to ethnic cleansing and may be a warning sign of genocide, while in Syria and Iraq Christians and Yazidis face what many believe is already a genocide.

Advertisement

In addition to the millions whose human rights are denied, millions more are in dire poverty, caused by war, natural disaster or bad governance. Humanitarian aid, development and efforts to tackle corruption - as well as to end the scourge of human trafficking or modern-day slavery - are challenges which the United States, Britain and the west cannot shirk.

In other words, we cannot and must not retreat either into isolation, protectionism or appeasement. As countries that still enjoy wealth and freedom, we must not pull up the drawbridge and disregard our responsibilities to others less fortunate than ourselves. We must reinforce free trade. And we must not coddle dictators.

Those thoughts are addressed most directly to President-elect Trump, a man who dismissed the Tiananman massacre as simply a "riot" and appeared to show admiration for the way the brutal butchers of Beijing quelled it. In particular, Mr Trump's friendliness towards Russia's Vladimir Putin is a source of deep concern. Putin is a bully, and we should speak the only language bullies understand: we should stand up to him.

My preferred choice for US President was Marco Rubio, as I wrote on these pages earlier this year, because he is consistent in speaking out on international human rights. There are many in the US Congress who continue to champion freedom around the world, in particular Congressman Chris Smith, and I hope they will keep a very watchful eye on Trump's foreign policy.

A key test will be who President-elect Trump appoints as Secretary of State. There are rumours that it could be Newt Gingrich. I have not studied Mr Gingrich closely, but one of my favourite films is Nine Days That Changed the World, a documentary he made about Pope St John Paul II's visit to Warsaw which sparked the Solidarity movement in Poland, leading eventually to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the liberation of eastern Europe. If the messages within that film suggests that Mr Gingrich might share St John Paul II's passion for human rights and freedom and put them into his foreign policy, given the chance, that would be very welcome.

Advertisement

Similarly, while not without controversy, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence is known to have shown an interest in international religious freedom and human rights when he served in Congress. I may be clutching at straws, but if foreign policy is largely guided by Mr Gingrich and Mr Pence, things may not be as bad as we fear. As long as Sarah Palin is not let anywhere near a foreign policy or security role, please God.
Coverage of this election has been ubiquitous, there's been plenty of scandal, but here is a few interesting points that you might have missed amongst all the other drama.

Hillary Clinton was passed questions for debate with Bernie Sanders during primary

While the furore over the FBI's reopening of its investigations into the Clinton e-mails may have cost the candidate some vitally important points in the last few weeks, there have been no dramatic revelations as yet, and indeed the FBI has clarified that it does not foresee any prosecutions arising. But a revelation that was seemingly drowned out in the recent fireworks was the discovery that incoming Democratic Party Chair Donna Brazille had, in her capacity as commentator on CNN during the presidential primaries, passed debate questions to Hillary Clinton's team. Was this revelation downplayed by the media in the hope that it wouldn't deter Bernie Sanders voters from turning up for Clinton at this key moment?

Nobody is quite sure what Trump's Russia policy will be, and that's a problem.

It is commonly acknowledged within policy wonk circles that Donald Trump has pulled off a fairly surprising feat in getting to within touching distance of the White House while producing almost nothing that looks recognisably like a policy platform. Take his Russia policy for instance, he has at times threatened to shoot down Russian aircraft in Syria, and at others times presented himself as cosy-ing up to Putin to fight ISIS. Not even his running mate can keep track, with Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence appearing to publically disagree with Trump and call for a tougher stance on Russia in Syria, a move Trump seemed to dismiss openly when asked about it during the final debate. This would seem like an unprecedented level of internal contradiction, but perhaps par for the course in this bizarre election.

Advertisement

Even Chelsea Clinton was aware of problems with the Clinton foundation

One of the areas that Republicans have targeted in their attempts to portray Hillary Clinton as an untrustworthy figure is through the activities of the Clinton Foundation. The charity was established during the couple's first stint in the White House and contributes to a number of environmental and development programmes. Critics have maintained it is something of a slush fund for the Clinton political dynasty, accepting donations in return for political access. This characterisation has been challenged by many prominent democrats, and while there hasn't been any revelations that go much beyond questionable practice, it has recently surfaced that even Chelsea Clinton had taken issue with some of the foundations dealings. Specifically relating to conflicts of interest and the influence of outside money. Again, hard to see the fire here, but the Clinton foundation has generated a huge amount of smoke throughout the course of this election cycle.

Trump's tax avoidance is one thing, his tax proposals are another

In what seems like a very long time ago in this election cycle, but was actually only a few weeks- we discovered that Donald Trump lost an eye watering amount of money in the 1990's (some $900 Million plus) and due to some very forgiving legislation in the US, hasn't had to pay much in the way of tax ever since. This somehow hasn't discouraged his proponents from celebrating his business acumen. But tax is a delicate issue in American politics, business persons can be vaunted for flaunting their avoidance, but it would seem positively reckless for a presidential candidate to do this while courting the vote of teachers, nurses and service personal who contribute a substantial portion of their salary to the national coffers. Regardless, Trump's lack of tax contributions are only part of the story, the few details we have about his proposals for tax reform indicates he also intends to expand tax breaks that directly benefit both himself and his heirs. That's some brass (or tangerine) neck.

Advertisement

Is Trump's entire electoral bid a publicity stunt for a new media channel?
Evgeny Gromov via Getty Images

If there is one thing that the current US election cycle hasn't lacked, its bluster, noise and full blooded argument. But yet for all the uproar generated by the opposing sides, there have been deafening silences.

One of the most noticeable gaps has been in foreign policy. While the topic of 'foreign-ness' has been a central theme, its been grounded in identity rather than geopolitics. When matters of policy are discussed, pronouncements are either so vague or outrageous that it is difficult to construct any kind of recognisable mandate from them.

Advertisement

Trump is perhaps the easy target here. For months he has talked about America's relationship to other countries with a level of casual dismissiveness that has drawn scorn from every corner of the foreign policy commentariat, and even from within the military hierarchy. His threats to NATO and other allied states that they run the risk of being told "congratulations, you will be defending yourself" if they don't start contributing to the cost of maintaining America's global military nexus left many a policy wonk's jaw on the floor. But this bluster, or his accusation that Clinton facilitated a $400 million cash transfer to Iran during the 2015 nuclear deal, or his constant referrals to China's theft of American jobs and intellectual property, are all mere extensions of the central element of his domestic campaign message: 'We are being ripped off by everybody.'

We don't know whether President Trump could actually do much to address the age old problem of freeriding within security communities, or whether he could reverse a Security Council sponsored nuclear deal with Iran, or implement the type of protectionist measures that would restrict off shoring of American labour. With much of the US political establishment openly hostile to him, major shifts in existing policy might be a tad ambitious.

What we could have expected is some insight into the candidate's potential responses to the most immediate fault lines in the international system. NATO's relationship with Russia for instance, has hit its lowest ebb in recent history due to the intransigence of the Syrian conflict, and the apparent inability of any peace arrangement to wrest the area free of intersecting foreign and internal interventions. We've witnessed the spectacle of Russian naval presence in the channel. The US and UK are increasing their military presence in Eastern Europe. Can either candidate make assurances about escalating tensions between superpowers?

Advertisement

Trump's Russia policy is a bizarre Schrodinger-esque duality, being both conciliatory and aggressive depending on whom on the ticket you ask. Mike Pence made clear in the VP debates that Obama has been too weak on Putin, thus contributing to the protraction of the Syrian conflict. Clinton, as Secretary of State within that administration would continue to fail to balance against Putin, whereas Trump would take a much stronger line. But ask Trump himself, and he maintains that he would pursue detente with the Russian Premier, and attempt to solve the Syrian conflict by working with the Russian government to stabilise the region and fight ISIS. This would seem an intolerable level of internal contradiction, but such is the small role foreign affairs has played in this election that this huge discrepancy can fade into the background.

Conversely, the issue with Clinton's Russia policy rests on its potential for toughness rather than reconciliation. The former Secretary of State has always had a reputation for hawkishness. Distracted by the sideshow of the Benghazi hearings, the media has paid much less attention to Clinton's role as a decisive proponent of the Libyan intervention. She has in private talked down the potential for more overt western military intervention in Syria, but will further military build-up in the region change her perspective. Shouldn't we know a lot more about where her administration's 'red lines' are in order to understand the risks of further degeneration of relations? The spectre of conflict between the superpowers is a point of global concern and should be treated as an issue of immense importance.

The vacuousness of Trump's foreign policy rhetoric has inflicted twin injuries on the electoral discourse. He has lowered the tone in most conceivable ways and in the process reduced important policy questions to trivialities and sloganeering. More importantly, his lack of basic competency has handed Hillary Clinton something of a free pass. In an area where she should, as contender for the most powerful office in the world, be encountering serious scrutiny, she need only hold invoke the frightful alternative than enunciate her own vision. She was receiving much more substantive challenges from Bernie Sanders in the primary.

Advertisement

It is easy to see why political contests bathed in personal vitriol generate cynicism. It's commonly argued that 2016's populist grandstanding has given rise to a 'post truth politics.' This itself seems like hyperbole. Try to find someone who will tell you that party politics used to be an honest game- I wish you luck. They might argue that things didn't always seem quite so shrill, and almost certainly social media has had an amplifying effect on the general unpleasantness that surrounds political campaigning. But it has also opened access to the majority for participation in debate.
scarletsails via Getty Images

Donald Trump's contentious victory as the 45th US President will undeniably have rippling effects experienced throughout the world due to the transformations in relationships with other countries that will occur after Trump implements his various policies.

Colossal criticism has been asserted by Trump on the membership of the US in NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), an intergovernmental military alliance. For the past 60 years, American foreign policy has been shaped around NATO. Trump condemned the organisation by claiming it as superseded and stated that its members were churlish allies who benefit from the USA's munificence. Hence, Trump has proposed he would retract American forces from European and Asian countries unless they pay up. NATO is indubitably dominant, composing 70% of the global total of combined military spending. Trump's chief complaint lies with the issue of the NATO members not meeting their expectation of spending at least 2% of their GDP on defence, with only five of 28 allies doing so. With the US spending the most defence, significantly more than the 2% of GDP asked from NATO members, Trump wants America's European allies to "pay their bills".

Advertisement

Trump has stated his belief in easing tensions with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, praising him as a strong leader, claiming they would have a peaceful relationship with one another. Albeit Obama claimed he wanted to "reset" the US-Russia relations and start fresh during his term, the ties have remained strained, feeble and indignant. It must be noted that Trump has not elaborated much on what the idea of 'easing tensions' actually entails but both Russia and the USA share the intention of fighting against the radicals of the so-called Islamic state of Syria.

Perhaps the fundamental change to the world will be the escalation in tensions between countries after the execution of Trump's policies. With the intent of scrapping the NAFTA between the US, Canada and Mexico, and the potential withdrawal from the World Trade Organisation, protectionism will be on the rise. With a fervent desire to stop 'job losses', Trump has the wherewithal to impose tariffs of 45% on China and 35% on goods shipped from Mexico. Subsequent effects of tariffs include an increase in prices for consumers, a decline in imports and potentially, retaliation from China. Implementation of these tariffs will result in 'de-globalisation' and is likely to increase tensions between the US and China even further.

However, Trump's argument for this is to enable Americans to gain their jobs back because the increase in tariffs will impel domestic production to occur and a spell of 'self-sufficiency', prompting more Americans to be employed in the manufacturing and production of these products. By increasing the employment levels, the standard of living of Americans will increase, especially those who have not seen substantial change under Obama.

Advertisement

Despite the likelihood of an increase in protectionist policy, a Donald Trump presidency is expected to be welcome by China, which is expecting a more isolationist US foreign policy. Another task of Trump's tasks on his to-do list is to suppress the likelihood of Asian countries such as North Korea to develop their own nuclear weapons while encouraging countries such as Japan and South Korea to reduce their dependency on the US and develop more nuclear arsenals for themselves.

US politics is deemed to be in entire shambles with Trump calling Kim Jong-un a "bad dude" yet also stating that he would happily negotiate with him. These somewhat erratic statements by Trump make the US less hopeful for a 'safe' America but we can only sit back and watch how Trump approaches exceedingly complex political issues between countries like North Korea and the US. Perhaps, he could even use his "You're fired" phrase from The Apprentice to North Korea when discussing nuclear weapons.

With the Paris Climate Agreement having being ratified in April 2016, the president-elect proposes the notion of "cancel(ing)" all of the climate change regulations that Obama implemented during his term, within his first 100 days of office. Obama recognised that early on, he would be unable to push through significant legislation as the Republicans held both houses of Congress and, subsequently, Obama compiled a plethora of initiatives to decrease the USA's greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption using regulation. However, the flip side of the coin means that Trump has the power to immediately order the regulators to cease enforcing the rules with the identical authority Obama utilised to get these in motion. Examples of what Trump will cancel include the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to let states develop strategies to decrease carbon pollution from power plants by 32% from 2005 levels by 2030. Thus, it will be no surprise that there will be a notable hitch in the reduction OF greenhouse gas emissions. To the dismay of green organisations across the world, Trump has a set idea of using coal for manufacturing, despite the lack of fossil fuels and the negative externalities of COAL consumption.

However, it should be noted that Trump has argued that human-caused climate change is a lie and is a "hoax created by the Chinese" in an attempt to reduce the competitiveness of US manufacturing by using more renewable energy sources or less efficient energy. Furthermore, the US remains legally bound to the Paris Plan for 4 years so we could still expect to see Obama's climate change plans materialise. Moreover, although environmentalists will not be a fan of Trump's plan, the focus is on providing cheaper energy for families across the nation and through this, employment levels are expected to increase, placing a positive multiplier effect on the US economy and for subsequent generations.

Advertisement
scarletsails via Getty Images

On Wednesday morning we learnt of one of the greatest upsets in modern political history - except that it was the second one this year. 2016 will go down in history as one of the most shocking years in politics that we've seen, but I believe it will actually go down in history as a little more than that. 2016 has been a year which has challenged even the most talented political commentators and analysts to explain this behaviour, and the direction it sends us, and so naturally it is now my turn.

What the vote to leave the EU in June meant and what Trump's election to the Whitehouse this month means is something the jury has still not quite come in on, however, it signals an end to the globalised capitalism which has been seen to hurt the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. The rise of the TNC and the trading bloc over the latter half of the 20th century has left the unskilled or semi-skilled workers here in Britain and in America feel like they've been handed the thin end of the wedge. The withdrawal from the EU, seen as the face of globalisation and the TNC, and the vote for Trump, a man openly skeptical of NAFTA, the WTO and many other trade plans, has proven that not only is it a bad year for acronyms (NATO/IMF/UN all included) but that people in the working classes have finally buckled under the constant pressure on their lives from rising living costs, shrinking wages and lack of job security. These people place the blame for this situation roundly on outsourcing to China and other cheaper production markets and see these international organisations as the reason this has occurred. These so called unpredictable outcomes have been a long time coming because the working people have needed a reaction to their modern predicament and they have found it in rejecting globalised capitalism.

Advertisement

However, this rejection of capitalism has not gone how Marx expected. Globalised capitalism has been rejected for isolationist capitalism, not socialism. There are some who despair at why the workers have not turned to socialism, but the answer comes from Trump's slogan. To "make America great again" refers to a time where socialism was a dirty word - in summary, capitalism has not failed for these brexiteers and trumpites, but it is globalisation that has.

Furthermore, the internationalist consensus which has been adopted by Britain and America since the second world war has been shattered. People have opted to favour a little (new) Englander mentality over the interventionist and globalist precedent which has been set over the last 50 years. Coupled hand in hand with the attack on globalisation is the attack on America's "world police" attitude. Trump's arguments of "America first," to bring troops home, is one that sells well with nationalist Americans (or is that tautology?), but also for the first time since the beginning of the cold war could see America take a back seat in geopolitics. With Trump tabling the idea of withdrawing troops from South Korea, Eastern Europe and all other external military bases with the aim of focusing on US defence we could see a more unstable world, but, Trump and his supporter's point is that it doesn't matter to him. America should be the Commander-in-Chiefs priority - which is something Americans from all over the political spectrum could get behind, probably to their own shock.

Advertisement

So what does this (un)shocking redirection of western policy-making mean? It could and is spelling disaster for much of the traditional political elite (you've heard this one before I know, but with a snap election on the cards, the pro-capitalist, nationalist, anti-globalisation brexiteers/trump voters could shake things up on this sceptred isle). Every European country has a right anti-immigration populist in prominent polling positions, and with elections in France, Germany and Italy next year expected to give them positive results, our political world is going through a seismic self-destruction - although after President-elect Trump, I don't think anything could surprise us anymore.
I'm currently writing this blog from 37,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean.

I'm on my way back to the UK from Miami where I have been campaigning for Hillary Clinton in the Sunshine State.

Like most people I'm shocked at the result.

As I reflect on the campaign, I cannot help conclude that there are striking and obvious similarities between the way in which this election played out, and our Brexit referendum in the UK. There was a generational division in the vote with middle aged and older voters delivering the White House for Donald Trump whilst the under 30s - who will live longer with the consequences of this vote - voted for Clinton in a landslide. Immigration was a central tenant for both campaigns and instead of hope, Trump and Brexit traded on hate.

As far as I can surmise, the truth is this; there is a New World Order in play. It's led by Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. It is scary. But it could get worse. That's unless the progressives on both sides of the pond act quickly to remind people what progressive politics has done for them and what it will do in the future. We must learn to once again speak with emotion and conviction about our plans and celebrate our historic achievements.

Advertisement

I believe there are four main parts to this new world order; the realigning of our national values, the manipulation of the democratic process, technological revolution and control.

Firstly, there is a fundamental shift in values and virtues. For instance, intelligence, expertise, fact, reason and civility are now seen in the contemporary political arena as vices akin to untrustworthiness and deceit. Instead, the world is implicitly instructed by Trump and Nigel Farage to accept ignorance, misogyny and hate as the best traits to define a nation because they speak to a 'rebellion against the establishment'.

I think progressives must wake up to this if we are to change the hearts and minds of people who support Trump and Farage at home and abroad. Whether we like it or not, the start line for our conversation has moved backwards. We like to think we are living in a wholly inclusive and tolerant society but just isn't so.

The truth as borne out on June 23 and November 8, is that Britain and America are more intolerant, more hateful and more divided than at any time in the last three decades. Politicians have exploited difference for political expediency but what is worse, they have been allowed to do it, virtually unchallenged until it is too late and the public's views are already deeply entrenched on issues such as immigration and the economy.

Advertisement

Our differences are magnified by social media and 24/7 rolling news. Trolling has taken the place of civilized debate. We are told education doesn't matter as much as it once did, but that life experience is more important. We have come to regard expert opinion and corruption as one and the same. And people have come to believe passionately, deep in their hearts, that there is a better Britain and America out there - one that has been lost - which these votes will somehow rescue.

It's why we need to see the task before us as one where we renew our commitment to challenging hate and intolerance wherever it appears. We must convince our countries that tolerance, decency and respect are the values we want the world to associate with our great countries and which lead to healthier and happier places to live, work and raise families.

Some will say that time alone will bear this out. In other words, Trump and Farage will be found out for the liars and hateful political creatures that they are; that the countries they have changed forever will wake up to the fact that we have more in common than divides us. They may be right. But I don't believe we should leave it to chance. Particularly given how volatile politics is at present.

That's why it's time for the rebuttal. It's time to talk up our progress, not just protect it.

As President Obama often alludes to; if you had a choice of which moment in history to choose to live, you'd always choose now. Despite the many harsh contentions of 21st Century Britain and America, our nations are more prosperous, healthier, fairer, more equal and more just that at any time in human history. It is the triumph of previous generations of Democratic and Labour activists.

In 2012, on the eve of the last presidential election, I sat in downtime Columbus, Ohio and listened as Obama explained that elections should always be about two things; "the future and hope".

Advertisement

I don't think this election met those tests and I don't think that is part of the structure of this new world order. Trump will argue he was hopeful about the future as he aimed to 'make America great again'. But the actuality is, he labored on about the past, wanted to turn back time and hate triumphed over hope.

So if the world is as outraged by Trump's victory as they appear to be, then it is time to really challenge the far-right. And it starts by reminding the world that the people who have actually stood up against the status quo for centuries have been the progressives, not the reactionaries. The people who are largely responsible for the advances in national prosperity, improved healthcare and delivered a more equal and just society than before, were all progressives. Is there more work to do? Of course there is. But never forget that Labour and the Democrats have got more right than they have got wrong over the last century and we need to reclaim that credit with the public.

And that leads to the second aspect of the New World Order. Democracy.

I believe in democracy but it needs to rigorous and reformed. I believe that in order for democracies to function as they should, it requires the presentation of reasoned, balanced arguments that inform voters and empowers them to make decisions based on the facts. That means our democracy extends beyond the ballot box and the physical act of casting your vote. It extends to the media, the strategists and the pollsters. Each have a responsibility to promote healthy debate, inform positions, prevent catastrophe and present the facts.

All parts of the democratic process should work together, hand in hand.

Too often in modern politics that hasn't been the case. Balance has been ostensibly omitted. In years gone by our consumption of news was controlled by journalists and their editors who would ensure that the sources were checked, double checked, and true. There were also only a select few sources of news; the main broadcasters and four or five national tabloid and broadsheet newspapers.

Today, we decide what news we receive as we fill our iPad, iPhones and tablets with the apps we want and we follow the journalists, bloggers and commentators we want on Facebook and twitter. The result is that we create echo chambers where rumour fills the time between the traditional tip off and the source being checked. Before you know it a lie is half way around the world. It's devastating for political campaigns and politicians. Yet as Brits come to terms with Brexit and Americans realise the reality of a Trump presidency, its increasingly becoming a toxic component of our democratic process.

Advertisement

Put plainly, today politicians can choose to manipulate the public very easily. They fill social media with lies and deceit and then sit back and watch as opinion poll after opinion poll demonstrates their gambles have landed. They never need the approval of an editor or a favourable journalist to get their message - however warped - out into the public domain.

No two people have done this better than Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.

In the UK the democratic process was manipulated to allow the country to vote to leave a union of 28 European countries, that saw Britain lead in the world, negotiate international treaties and trade deals and foster the longest period of peace in our continent's history. In the US the first black president will hand over the keys to the White House to a man who is openly supported by the KKK. This isn't a positive direction for anyone and it certainly isn't progressive.

I'm not suggesting democracy always has to be inspiring, but it has to rid itself of the intrinsic iniquitousness and depravity that now underpins its ability to function as it should.

However, I don't wish to categories all Trump and Farage fans. Progressives did stop listening and that should be a lesson we take away from 2016.

Anti-immigration is a large part of the Trump/Farage appeal to many people, but the year 2016 is also the year in which politics has had to confront the harsh realities of a technological revolution that has not been to the benefit of generations of workers. For the 11 years that I have been a student of British and American politics, we've known that advances in technology were costing people jobs, particularly those over the age of 50. We actively choose not to act on the basis that the remedy for this problem was simply too difficult.

Advertisement

But we got away with it in 2005, 2008 and 2012 because these people effected weren't voting.

Now they are.

Trump's success in Ohio and Michigan and Brexit's success in places like Barnsley and Sunderland are testament to the feeling of abandonment felt by many millions of voters who have seen their jobs become redundant in an economy that puts a premium on the power of technology over the power of people.

Between 1997 and 2010 in the U.K. it was the creative economy that was the second fastest growing behind the financial services. Jobs in graphic design, social media and multimedia journalism substituted the traditional jobs in factories and mines that were no longer needed. The same can be said for the automotive and aviation industry in the US, where great feats of engineering and scientific discovery have increased the efficiency of productivity but reduced the necessity for human hands to build.

Now the republicans led by Trump and UKIP led by Farage have seized the chance to speak to these people's grievances and have appeared to put their futures first in their list of political priorities.

It's Labour and Democratic territory but it's been lost to hard right extremists.

It will be uncomfortable for some progressives but in order to win these voters back we need to be prepared to have conservations along the lines of British jobs for British workers, British homes for British workers and Benefits for Brits.

As Obama went on to say in Columbus in 2012, 'I don't believe that government can solve all of our problems, but I don't think it's responsible for them either. I don't want to spend all of our time blaming other people. I believe we're all in this together. I believe that we have to take responsibility for ourselves, but also look out for one another".

Advertisement

And it was his focus on responsibility that hit home with me because it speaks to the Trump and Farage appeal around 'control'. If people really do want more control of their lives, then they must be prepared to take more responsibility. The shift in power that we are seeing in the UK and US towards greater control for the population - toward a more direct form of democracy - means the state or the establishment can no longer be to blame for the troubles facing working and middle class families.

The line that it's 'people power' who are 'giving the establishment a good kicking' is often part of a Farage interview script. But what will he do when it's not the fault of the EU or the establishment? What will Trump do now that he actually is the establishment?

In my view, having now campaigned in both countries in 2016 and seen for myself what is happening on the ground, it is clear that Trump and Farage are not politicians, and this is not a new world order, capable of coming up with progressive policies to change the fortunes of millions of Brits and Americans. Only progressives can do this.

Right now too many people have hate in their heart. You see it and hear it in cars and conversations, in schools and churches, in offices and street corners. Immigration stirs something in people that leads to venom. We are so blinkered by the narrative of hate and division peddled by Farage and Trump, that we fail to think for ourselves. To imagine something different.

As the brilliant LBC presenter James O'Brien said this week, by voting for Trump, 'people have voted to make their lives better and others' lives worse.' The same can be said for the people who voted to leave the EU.

Advertisement

Progressives must take back the narrative on immigration and the economy but also show, once again, the value in taking responsibility for yourself and your community. History proves that we are the ones who think big, who create bold policies that positively transform countries. It was Labour in the UK and FDR and the Democrats in the US that after the second world war, had the foresight and the vision to create the New Deal and the NHS, the Marshall Plan and the Welfare state. We built housing and New Towns, put a man on the moon and had the first black president to lead the free world.

So let's see this calendar year as a moment to shrug off our collective timidity about our progressive record and about our capacity to deliver big again in the future.

I know that there is much to be genuinely downbeat about if you're a progressive in trans-Atlantic politics right now. Brexit has unleashed demons in every town, city and region of the UK and the 45th president of America is openly racist, sexist and allegedly a serial sex offender.

Both UKIP and the republicans have fought campaigns on the most pernicious platforms since before the Second World War. They have encouraged their electorates to replace reason with fiction, to ignore science and fact and instead put premiums on difference and division. Their words have resonated - even to the households of people who should know better. The toxicity from one neighbour towards another is visible in all communities the length and the breadth of both countries. So it would be easy to walk away and quit.

And yet as I return to the UK with friends who traveled stateside to be the change they want to see in the world, I take away the words of Hillary Clinton, the most inspiring female politician of my lifetime, who said in her concession speech on Wednesday, "To all the young people, please, please never stop believing that fighting for what's right is worth it. It's always worth it. And we need you to keep up these fights now and for the rest of your lives."

Advertisement
SERGEI SUPINSKY via Getty Images

As front doors go, you probably wouldn't notice it if it wasn't for the ever-present protesters outside. They might prompt you to glance at the sign next to the door and you'd notice the blue plaque on the wall. Then you'd understand.

This is the door to Marie Stopes' historic central London family planning clinic, and it's still providing vital reproductive health services to women and men today.

Advertisement

Those services include abortion, which despite the fact that one in three women will have an abortion in the UK, remains controversial 49 years after the Abortion Act was passed by Parliament. And that's why the protesters are here.

If she'd been alive today, Stopes would no doubt have had strong views on the rights of women to access abortion clinics unhindered, and she'd have challenged the stigma that to this day surrounds women's right to choose whether and when to have children.

Stopes was a family planning pioneer and women's rights campaigner born in 1880. She would certainly be described by some today as a 'difficult woman', by which I mean unafraid to stand up for what she thought was right, and prepared to fight for it.

When it comes to our bodily autonomy, I'm delighted to say there are quite a lot of difficult women - and men - these days. You only have to look at recent political rhetoric and actions to see how desperately they're needed in large parts of the world.

Advertisement

Stopes died in 1958, and by the 1970s, her central London clinic was in trouble. It would have closed had it not been for another family planning pioneer, Dr Tim Black, who bought and turned it around.

From that blue door Black grew a global network of family planning services supporting some of the poorest, most vulnerable women around the world.

But as the charity that bears Marie Stopes' name celebrates its 40th anniversary, can we really say that, here where it all started, women's right to choose has become a reality?

It might not be perfect, but here's the top four on my wish list for women:

1.We're a pro-choice society, but there are still a small yet significant number of people minded to stand outside abortion clinic doors and do whatever it takes to prevent women from having an abortion.

This behaviour wouldn't be tolerated outside any other health service. I'll leave you to decide why it's ok outside abortion clinics. In the meantime, ask your MP for buffer zones to protect women.

Advertisement

2.What about contraception? It's more readily available now and better than ever. There are long-acting methods like the coil, one-off methods like the cap or condom, and those somewhere in the middle like implants or injections.

But men have just two options: the condom or vasectomy, so responsibility for contraception continues to rest with most women. And with the trial for a male contraceptive jab halted early due to 'side effects' that's unlikely to change soon.

Let's continue to invest in new methods of contraception for everyone, and protect the services delivering them.

3.Under-18 conception rates in the UK have been falling thanks to phenomenal efforts to implement Teenage Pregnancy Strategies. It's a huge success, but one that has been achieved despite a continued refusal, by successive governments, to put sex and relationships education on the curriculum.

Imagine what we'd achieve if we gave every young person the skills and knowledge to enjoy healthy, respectful sex lives: fewer sexually transmitted infections; fewer unwanted pregnancies; and much-needed clarity on consent.

Advertisement

Why wouldn't we want that for our children? Bring this up with your MP too.

4.Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Abortion Act, which was passed thanks to the considerable efforts of women and men who campaigned for safe, free, legal abortion.

This is a reality for women in England, Wales and Scotland, but as this week's appeal at the Supreme Court by a mother and daughter to allow women from Northern Ireland access to NHS-funded abortion care made painfully clear, women there are still subject to one of the most restrictive abortion laws anywhere in the world.

Most of them have no option but to find the money to travel to England, or have a baby. It will take political courage to put this right, but women in Northern Ireland deserve nothing less.

The past 40 years have seen a huge rise in the number of women accessing contraception, with the numbers in the world's poorest countries jumping 30 million in just the last four years. This increase has contributed to a decline in maternal mortality worldwide and progress - still achingly slow - in girls' education.

It's been a phenomenal achievement to get this far, made possible by huge collective efforts and considerable political courage.

Advertisement
In the last year, Brexit and Donald Trump's election victory have made it very clear that people both in the UK and US are angry and frustrated at the politicians who have served us of late. In recent years trust towards our elected representatives has sunk lower and lower, so can it really come as a surprise that a majority of people are now voting against the status quo?

The results on their own are not necessarily that big of a deal; Governments change because people aren't happy with the current leadership and want something better, that's how our whole system works. What's strange about what's happened recently is that people have voted for things they know may impact them negatively, whether it be economically or socially. So why do it?

Beginning with Brexit, many people have suggested that deliberate lies told by the leave campaign influenced voters who as a result thought that exiting the EU would be the best option. I think this greatly underestimates the average intelligence of British people- how many honestly believed that if we left Europe we would give an extra 350m a week to the NHS? People knew this would never happen, yet they still chose to ignore the vast majority of experts and economists who warned of the dire financial consequences a leave vote could bring. Since the referendum we have seen the Conservative government choose to interpret this as a vote against immigration, and it's hard to argue this- if we knew we were going to be less well off financially, then what other reason was there for voting to leave? The whole campaign was fought almost wholly around those two issues.

Advertisement

And then to America where we have seen Donald Trump triumph over Hillary Clinton after a bitter and divisive campaign. Again, it has been argued that voters were misled by Trump's lies and exaggerations, but again I would argue the electorate knew what he was saying to be untrue, yet voted for him anyway. With Brexit it was fairly clear we would be worse off economically, whilst with Trump it's quite obvious he was by far the less experienced, less knowledgeable, less professional candidate, yet we arrived at similar outcomes. And once again one of the overriding factors in this decision was immigration, particularly regarding Muslims and Mexicans. Mr Trump has been highly critical of ethnic minorities, LGBT people and women, so after alienating such a large amount of the population, who was there left to vote for him? Exit polls show that whilst roughly 90% of black people, 75% of Latino people and 54% of women voted for Clinton, white men voted 63% in favour of Trump, and that's where the election was won. It was clear that a vote for Trump was a vote against so much of the social progression that has been seen in America in recent years, as well as risking financial instability through his questionable foreign policy. And yet he emerged victorious nonetheless.
scarletsails via Getty Images

Against all the odds, Donald J Trump, one of the most controversial and universally hated men in the world has won the US Election. Despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won the most votes (albeit narrowly), Trump won the most states. So how has this man won the right to become the most powerful man in the world?

It's simple. A vote for Trump was a protest vote. People were fed up with the Political Establishment, which was very strongly represented by Secretary Clinton, also one of the most hated people in the USA. After decades of career politicians ruining the country, the American people have chosen the man that represents change. 'Make America Great Again' is his slogan, and it was an effective one at that. It fitted with his anti-immigration policies well, and many Americans are frustrated by the fact that they have over 50 million immigrants currently living in the country. With his policies to cut down immigration, he poached on people's fears about how America was no longer 'great', by promising to make it so.

Advertisement

With protests raging across America, many people are upset and angry at the election of this 'racist', 'Misogynistic' man. And yet he has won a democratic election to be the 45th President of the USA. A lot of American's judged the 'Remoaners', and yet half of the United States are burning flags and shouting 'This is not my president'. Hypocritical much? How many of these protestors actually voted though? How many of them could be bothered to get out there and make their vote count. Some protesters have said they 'couldn't be bothered' to vote, or that they didn't think their vote would matter as they thought Hillary was destined to win! What gives these people the right to complain if they didn't actually vote.

Of course, the vast majority of the protestors will have voted. But my next question to you is this: What good will protesting do? The election is over and Trump won it. Protesting changes absolutely nothing and these people need to get over that.

But back to Trump himself now. 'Outrageous' and 'Unbelievable' are two words I've seen on social media when talking about his victory. But is it really much of a surprise? The polls always said it was going to be incredibly close, and while they were wrong in regards to the end result, they did get the closeness correct. It was close. And besides, the same thing happened with Brexit, the General Election of 2015 in the UK and the Scottish Referendum. The polls are wrong and represent nothing. Either revamp them or ditch them for good.

The Email scandal certainly didn't help Clinton's already crumbling reputation, and the leaked clips of Donald Trump's disgusting comments regarding women didn't help him either. They are the two most hated candidates in US Electoral History. But did America make the right choice? Is Trump the best man for the job? The short answer... Yes.

Advertisement

If you have followed my blog you will know I have Left Wing views. So why would I feel that Trump was the better option? Because while I hate both candidates, I hate Hillary more. I don't condone Trump's unbelievable views on women or certain minorities. In fact I'm firmly against his deplorable, old fashioned views on many topics. But Clinton is corrupt. The second she became President she would most likely declare war on Russia and spark a World War, which is exactly what The Kremlin said would happen had she won. And despite what the Democrats tell you, America DOES have an immigration problem. As I said before, they have more immigrants than any other country in the world at 50 million. Someone needs to say it, they need that wall that the President-Elect is promising. It's the hard truth, but they need to keep Mexicans out.
Ueli Giezendanner via Getty Images

There's been jubilation in the HIV community about our landmark win this week. The Court of Appeal upheld the High Court's judgment that NHS England has the legal power to pay for PrEP, an HIV prevention drug. But what does this actually mean? Will PrEP now be available in sexual health clinics for those at risk of HIV?

Well, we're not quite there yet. Despite some media assertions, NHS England is not now obliged to fund PrEP. Our win establishes that NHS England has the power to fund PrEP, but not the duty. PrEP is not yet available on the NHS and we are lagging behind the likes of France and Norway on this. This case was about ensuring that PrEP was not dismissed from what should be an objective process for deciding which treatments the NHS provides.

Advertisement

We didn't go to court lightly. NHS England itself (until as recently March this year), assumed it would be responsible for paying for PrEP; it started the process over two years ago. PrEP is a form of HIV medication, Truvada, which NHS England already buys for treatment of HIV. So it simply makes sense for the NHS to purchase it, not least because of the buying power they have to drive costs down.

In June a policy proposal was due to be considered by an independent committee that would decide whether and how PrEP should be provided on the NHS. But in March NHS England suddenly changed its mind, claiming it didn't have the legal power to pay for PrEP. We were incredibly surprised and our legal advisers made it clear that the NHS was simply wrong. So, we contested; they reconsidered; they came to the same conclusion. Following legal advice, we decided to judicially review NHS England's decision to leave PrEP out in the cold.

Two court judgments in our favour show we were right to do so. The nuts and bolts of the case were on a technical point - whether PrEP is a public health intervention that can't be funded by the NHS but has to be funded by local authorities. But our success is also about making sure that NHS England aren't able to bypass the systems put in in place to ensure accountable decisions are made in the best interest of the NHS and the health of the country.

The importance of this is illustrated by the moralising media fall-out from the case which stigmatised gay men who continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV. Such rhetoric demonstrates how important it is that NHS decisions with equalities implications are lawful, unbiased and evidence-based.

Advertisement
For the International Day of persons with disabilities, I want to share my story on finding work as a severely-sight impaired lady.

In the UK there are almost two million people living with sight loss. This figure includes around 360,000 people registered as blind or partially sighted, with the number set to double by 2050. Unfortunately only one in ten of these are in work.

When I left school with good examination results, I trained at secretarial college and learned how to use a computer, and how to touch type. I then spent over a year applying for jobs, but although I wrote to lots of organisations, and followed up applications for work with phone calls it took me over 15 months to secure my first part-time position. Sadly, my experience of "equal opportunities" was not good at this time. After two and a half years, I realised that I wasn't going anywhere in the firm I first went to work, for so left my job and took myself off to college to study for a diploma in Legal Studies. Having gained my qualification, a year later, I was applying for work again! Some eight months later I joined Sightsavers.

Advertisement

After these spells of unemployment - you can therefore imagine, I am truly grateful for my job - and the chance it gives me to be economically independent. Whilst growing up I decided that I didn't just want a menial job in the office of a company, helping grow profits for a particular firm. Instead I wanted more - mainly more chances to give something back to society: more opportunities to make a difference for the better to the lives of other people.

So I consider myself very lucky to have been fortunate enough to work at Sightsavers for over sixteen years now in a variety of different roles. In that time thanks to the belief and support of some of my colleagues including my CEO, my career has gone from strength to strength. My current role as the inclusion co-ordinator is brilliant. I work with colleagues from all parts of the organisation (including our overseas offices) to make sure everything we do is accessible and inclusive for everyone.

I get a real buzz from talking to my colleagues and making recommendations for changes to make things better and attending conferences to learn about inclusion and accessibility and then sharing what I have learnt with my team. I also get pleasure from testing our systems to make sure they can work with my screen reading technology. I love working in our current offices and find them easy to navigate my way around. Most of all I get such satisfaction from knowing that the work that I do means that people who would otherwise be blind or visually impaired can see.

Although I love hearing about all the elements of the work that we do overseas, I particularly enjoy learning about our social inclusion projects where we help to keep children who become blind in school (because I know the value of a good education) and help to train adults with visual impairments so that they can find a job and live with dignity and independence in their communities (because this has happened for me too).

Advertisement
End all wars The first thing, of course, is that we should try to have as few wars as possible.

Remove hyper-masculinity from military culture

The second thing, you might think of, would be to take the hyper-masculinity out of the military culture.

But I don't think it's wise to tell soldiers that it's okay to fully feel their emotions when they're in battle, because that will get them killed.

We can't tell them that when they see their best friend killed in front of them, that it's okay to break down in tears and fully feel and express their grief.

We can't tell them that it's okay, in the heat of battle, to let themselves be overwhelmed with fear and curl up on the ground and whimper with terror.

Help the children

The easiest and most obvious thing we can do is to help the children. We can:

Explain what their parent is going through, so that the child doesn't feel that they're somehow the cause of what their parent is experiencing, and the child can have more compassion and understanding for the parent.

Help the child with whatever psychological issues they have already developed.

Help the veterans

We also need to help the parent with PTSD. That's particularly difficult if they want to remain in combat role in the military, because being in combat roles requires hyper-masculinity. And holding on to hyper-masculinity makes it almost impossible for any type of psychological therapy to succeed.

If you want to get to the core of your psychological issues, then you can't be suppressing and denying your feelings. You've got to start by acknowledging and accepting your situation and your feelings, so that you can soften and open and have some compassion for yourself.

This is something that applies to all men, even those that haven't been traumatised by war.

Hyper-masculinity is toxic. It's a straight-jacket that keeps you from being who you truly are. It prevents you from being able to overcome your psychological issues. And if you're a father, then it increases the chance that you'll create psychological issues in your children.

So if you're a hyper-masculine man, I encourage you to give it up, and if you won't give it up for you own benefit, then please give it up for the benefit of your children.
Ever since Brexit, and probably during the build-up to it, I kept thinking, "this is what it's like to live in history". To live in a time when such monumental shifts are happening they will appear on a curriculum somewhere in the future, and people will be writing theses on 2016 in the way that they might write one now on 1066, 1918 or 1939.

Like most of the 48% of people who didn't vote for Britain to leave the EU, I've had to come to terms with the fact that I've been living in a bubble (London - the biggest bubble of all). Seventeen million people in the UK didn't think the same way as me or my friends. I'd already had an inkling that this might be the case during the election that brought our current Conservative government to power, but Brexit was still a mighty blow and wake-up call.

As we approach Remembrance Day, I think about how the World Wars defined my family. I know about my great uncles Joe and William who both died fighting in France. I think about how being born in 1918 and serving in the Second World War defined my father - even his memoir was called 'Between the Fires'. He told stories to me when I was a child of how shells whistled over his head in the North African desert, and I treasure the little book of photographs he brought back with him, showing him with his army friends.

Advertisement

My mother was a teenager during the Second World War and told me stories of the American GIs in town, taking a gas mask to school, and the sound of bombs hitting Liverpool, across the River Dee. She told me how she used to hide under the dinner table when the air raids were on. These were the stories my parents told when they were asked about themselves. I thought they were all rather romantic and slightly wished I'd experienced them too.

For my generation, and for others, I think our story starts now. I don't think we've experienced anything that has forced us to identify our place in the world until now. Yes, we've had the miners' strike, yes we had to deal with the threat of nuclear war in the Reagan-Thatcher era, yes we've had the Falklands and Gulf Wars. But nothing, in my view, has made us look at ourselves and the person standing next to us until now.

There is a tidal wave of right-wing aggression sweeping world politics right now. Political popularity is being built on a rising tide of xenophobia and misogyny and I think we're right to draw comparisons with the 1930s, and right to wonder how the hell this is happening again.

For a few years now, I've been bumbling along in a bubble of left-wing liberalism, finding my feminist voice and shouting about things I feel strongly about on social media. Even so, I've never really felt able to completely define what I stand for, beyond feminism, because I've bought into an amorphous cluster of already defined liberal ideas: I stand against racism, sexism and homophobia, and support human rights, freedom of speech and international co-operation, 'just like everyone else'.

Advertisement

Except not everyone else does.

These are the times when I have to recalibrate where I stand in the world. This is not just a case of retweeting a few statements I agree with, or sharing a meme on Facebook that makes me feel like I'm standing up for my values. What are my values? What is my story? How am I going to live it? What is the real-life action I'm going to take?

I keep looking for silver linings, in this ridiculous, Trumped-up world we find ourselves in. One is that so many of us are finding our political identity for the first time and the confidence to show it to the world. There is no doubt in my mind that Brexit and the Trump win are part of a backlash against the liberal values I stand for. As Guardian US columnist Jessica Valenti tweeted:

Tonight is what backlash looks like - to women's rights, to racial progress, to a cultural shift that doesn't center white men.

I had no idea that the groundswell of support behind the ideas put forward by Trump, Farage and Johnson was so great. That the Daily Mail extremism of a Katie Hopkins or a Milo Yiannopoulos would actually be a populist view taken seriously by millions of people.

But it is. They are.

It's naive of us to think that we're not at the centre of a huge historical moment right now. All we need to do is join the dots. These are the times when I am going to wake up and define myself within it. I have to. There isn't a choice any more. There isn't a comfy armchair to sit in and watch the world go by.

Advertisement

I'm very very scared by the US election result. They have elected someone who bears all the hallmarks of a fascist dictator - one who might overturn a woman's right to abortion, who might build a wall to keep 'foreigners' out. So how wonderful is it that in a supreme case of role reversal, the German chancellor Angela Merkel is the one to fire a warning shot across US bows:

Germany and America are connected by common values: democracy, freedom, respect for the law and for human dignity irrespective of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political conviction. On the basis of these values, I offer the future president of America, Donald Trump, a close working relationship.

So here I am, Mum, Dad. Witnessing something colossal on the world stage, in the week where we remember events we thought could never be repeated. For the first time in my life I believe that they genuinely could. And for the first time in my life I feel compelled to define who I am, and witness my friends doing the same.

These are the times.
The smell of Cajun food in New Orleans or chocolate in Paris conjures up memories for travelers all over the world, yet nothing can replicate actually seeing Bourbon Street or the Eiffel Tower. So, how do people whom cannot see experience travel? Amar Latif, a visually impaired 41-year-old entrepreneur, dedicates his life to partnering the blind with the sighted in order to experience guided tourism - a form of travel that uses language to show the visually impaired our world.

While preparing for our phone call, Amar light-heartedly jokes about how difficult it is to see me. At the age of four, he was diagnosed with a disease that left him permanently blind by the age of 18. "It was a harsh reality that I had to accept", says Amar, "however, I couldn't let it control my life."

While studying Mathematics at the University of Strathclyde, Amar spent a year in Canada. "That was my first travel experience... it inspired me to continue and see the world," says Amar, whose desire to travel only intensified after graduation.

Advertisement

After spending time as an accountant, Amar redirected his life by teaming up with the BBC to collaborate on the documentary series: "Beyond Boundaries". The first season followed a group of disabled travellers, including Amar, across Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast. The team travelled over 220 miles in only 28 days, ending their journey by climbing an active volcano. It is hard to understand why this group, some of whom have no legs and no arms, would attempt hiking through grim indigenous forest. Amar humorously shouts, "why not!" He follows this exclamation with a pause and a subtle, yet, frustrated chuckle.

After his time in Central America, Amar found it difficult to join travel groups due to their suspicions in accommodating blind travellers. After being rejected by several companies, he set out to redesign industry standards. In 2004, he created Traveleyes, a one-stop online destination for blind and partially sighted people curious in exploring the world.

"It is vital to our experience that sighted travellers detail what they see" says Amar, as he explains his company's mantra. Traveleyes is not only for the visually impaired. The company offers a discount, up to 50%, to sighted travellers for lending their vision to describe each destination, as they see it. "It is important for our sighted explorers to paint a picture for those of us who can't see", states Amar whom is proud of the overwhelmingly positive feedback he receives from sighted travellers.

Amar guarantees a vacation that provokes all five senses. On a trip to Egypt, he suggested that in the vast open desert the entire group shut their eyes and run unreservedly down a sandy hill. Some travellers were uncertain. Nonetheless, as elated screams began to disappear into the desert, the whole group joined in on the fun. "It was freeing" says Amar, as he struggles to find more words describing this shared sensation.

Advertisement
shutterstock

In light of Tuesday's astonishing events, we in Britain have to respect the democratically-expressed will of the American people. But we cannot deny or ignore the uncertainty and anxiousness this bombshell result has created, both in the United States and around the world.

After the EU referendum result, we all worried about whether our values as an open country could survive the shock. After Donald Trump's election, we worry about open values globally - about whether the impact will threaten the open trade, inclusive societies and international cooperation that define us and set our democracies apart from others.

Advertisement

Taking The Donald at his word, the portents are not good. His rhetoric and his policy (such as it is) suggest a comprehensive challenge to openness in all its forms.

Free trade, which I believe is vital for growing our economy and creating jobs, is threatened by Trump's election. He speaks of renegotiating America's trade agreements to make them more advantageous to the US, scrapping NAFTA, and is bitterly opposed to both the TPP deal with Pacific Rim countries and the TTIP deal with the EU. Eurosceptics are already arguing that Trump's supposed fondness for the UK means that we will be at the front of the queue for a trade deal with the US. But Trump's anti-trade rhetoric is such that this argument must be taken with a pinch of salt. British diplomats heading to Washington for negotiations could not expect their American counterparts to make any compromises that imposed greater competition on American manufacturers and farmers. Abandoning our close trading relationship with Europe for a chimera of a deal with President Trump would be foolhardy in the extreme. The next four - maybe eight - years promise a rocky road ahead for global trade.

Possibly even more worrying is the impact on foreign policy and world security. As Tom Raines of the Chatham House think tank has pointed out, the twin poles of British foreign policy for the last forty years have been active membership of the EU, and a strong relationship with an Atlanticist US. In less than seven months, both have been put under great strain. Trump's alleged closeness to Russia, ambivalence towards NATO, and general lack of foreign policy experience are worrying for anyone who believes in Western unity and resolve, expressed partly through NATO, as the only way to counter common threats. In an increasingly unstable world, an 'America First' outlook cannot be in the interests of Britain or Europe.

Advertisement

Much ink has been spilt about Donald Trump's more outrageous outbursts - whether directed against women, Muslims, the disabled and many others. We must not allow such sentiments to cross the Atlantic. Open Britain will stand unequivocally for a vision of our country as a tolerant place, respectful of difference in all its forms.

Of course, the UK must continue to work closely with the US, even if we must hold our noses while doing so. But, as Hillary Clinton said in her inspiring concession speech, we "must never stop believing that fighting for what's right is worth it."

At Open Britain that means we will fight for Britain to remain an open country - open to trade, to talent, to Europe and to the world. Nothing has changed in our respect for the will of the British people. But with the uncertainty that this result has produced, it is vital that we remain as open to our European partners as possible. That means membership of the Single Market, which supports millions of jobs through the freest possible trade with Europe; unprecedentedly close cooperation on security and foreign policy; and common action to tackle issues like climate change.

We must also learn the lessons from the victories of Trump and of Vote Leave. While the American race had many characteristics of its own, there are common factors that we need to address. Both results were in part a reaction to the profits of globalisation being shared too unequally; to anger against political and economic elites; and to immigration. It is vital that we engage in both domestic economic reform and changes to the way immigration works in order to address this.

For us our campaign starts with being in the Single Market. If we abandon it, we will erect trade barriers with our largest partner, become closed to inward business investment, and open the door to workers' rights and environmental standards being undermined.

Advertisement

At Open Britain, we will be taking that message direct to voters in their communities. That's why this weekend we are having a national campaign day of action in towns and cities across Britain, running small street stalls to show people the benefits of Single Market membership. Ours is a grassroots campaign, and our greatest resource are our thousands of activists who believe as passionately as I do in Britain's future as an open society.

So the response to the US election must be to defend openness however we can - at home and abroad. In our own small way, we will start on Saturday. I would urge all who share our vision for this country to join us.
Image  Pixabay

I never dreamed Mr T would be the next president of the US of A. I expected after the election to be talking of finally being able to stop holding my breath because sanity had prevailed.

Not that I had that much time for Mrs C. But she seemed a darn sight less awful than the man who will now have his finger on the nuclear button and goodness knows what else!

Advertisement

But I probably should've known better after the Brexit vote. Like the UK, whole swathes of the US were out to give the establishment a kicking. The parallels are scary. But the outcome of the US election is Brexit on steroids. Who knows where we'll all end up.

One thing I have realised is how polarised views in both the US and UK are. And how out of sync urban centres like London, New York and Los Angeles are with the rest of their respective countries. And how out of touch the media and pollsters are too.

Opinions are poles apart. And each side stares at the other in disbelief.

And that peace, love and understanding thang just doesn't seem to cut it with the majority.

So how do we change that? How to we get to acceptance and inclusion? How do we get to empathy? How do women shatter that glass ceiling?

I believe women are the answer. And it's time for us to rise up.

Women generally, I think, have a different approach. And particularly women in midlife and beyond like those in my Mutton Club. We don't diss women because we are one. We don't diss the elderly because we know we'll be there before too long. We don't diss the LGBTQ community because, even if we're straight, we may have a child in that community. Same with the disabled.

Advertisement

I personally refuse to diss the refugee community because I was in Beijing at the time of the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. And I saw how the UK welcomed refugees after that ended in bloodshed. My first husband was an immigrant. I will always fight racism because that's the right thing to do. And my son is half Chinese. So it's personal.

So what next?

I'm still mulling it over. I used to have a Green Card so I have a lot of love invested in the US. My American friends are asking if I have a room for them. I tell them we're not so welcoming to immigrants in the UK anymore post Brexit.

But I honestly believe now is OUR time. I mean us, women.

I think maybe this was the kick in the teeth we needed for women to finally and unequivocally step into our power, find our collective voice and say 'enough with this bullshit men have given us!" This is not the world we want.

(I'm trying to process the rather alarming statistic that more white women voted for Trump than did for Clinton. I wonder if they will live to regret that choice.)

If nothing else, we owe it to the women and girls who come after us. As Hillary Clinton said in her very gracious concession speech, "And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity to pursue and achieve your dreams."

Advertisement

We all have the power to bring about change. We just need to believe we can and be prepared to try. As a member of our Flock said, "we need to keep fighting for kindness, for love, for honour and for dignity."

I hope we will. Are you in? Let's get to work.
Too many of us are suffering from confirmation bias: the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities. If any of you watched the US election results coming in on CNN you would have been able to see this over and over again as the pundits zoomed in and out of the 'magic map' tracking the votes in a desperate attempt to show that while Trump was ahead right then soon, once the votes in such-and-such an urban area were counted, he wouldn't be. I'm no statistician but wondered if Trump was ahead in so many states with 19 per cent of the vote having been counted, why shouldn't he still be with the full 100 per cent in? But then again what do I know.

None the less the way in which these results were being spoken about as they rolled in is probably much same as the way in which many of us have been interpreting the US election campaign and thus making predictions. It seems that these predictions are based on the confluence of confirmation bias, our echo chambers and finally optimism. We are all so stuck within these conceptual blinkers that not even those who are supposed to know about this stuff -the pollsters - are able to see beyond them.

Advertisement

What is clear is that we have a problem: in Britain communities most reliant upon European Union funding voted to leave that union, in Europe the number and strength of fascist parties is growing, and in the USA the newly elected president is considered to be unstable by both his own party and that of the Democrats.

At the risk of sounding like all our favourite enemies, this problem is something to do with so called experts and our political and professional elite. Certainly here in the UK these people often belong to the same demographic and have no, or very little direct experience of the issues at stake over which they advise and preside. For example if judges are less likely to be tenants and more likely to be homeowners, it shouldn't be surprising that they might be sympathetic to landlords; there is less of an imaginative leap required. This lack of experience compounds a deeper problem that is at the heart of the current crisis in the UK's political establishment. Our current Secretary of State for Justice, Lizz Truss has a background in sales and was deputy director of the think tank Reform (a think tank that seeks "value for money in public spending"). Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt is a former consultant and failed marmalade salesman, Secretary of State for Education Justine Greening, has been an accountant - the list goes on. The question is why should we expect politicians to be able to know what is best for something like justice, health or education- when they have zero experience within that field?

Further more none of these people have experience of long term unemployment, homelessness or poverty and it seems they have no curiosity to learn how that might make a person feel. If you have only experienced a series of successes and a couple of minor set backs, with one career step leading neatly to the next, it can be hard to understand the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness that prevents a person from jumping into action as an entrepreneur. Which is supposedly the answer to the problems of austerity and the sharing economy these days.

Advertisement

In the UK Thatcher's program of neoliberalism took funds from our industry, this did not help to balance the books (huge funds needed to be spent on the welfare required for the unemployed) - but did help to pave the way for greater globalised free trade. To compound this wages of ordinary workers have stagnated, while the income of C.E.O.s' has more than quadrupled.

These policies of deregulation, globalisation and free trade have left huge swathes of the UK high and dry. And it is the result of these policies and similar policies in the USA that are returning to haunt us with a vengeance. In 2011 Thomas Piketty warned that

unless Europe takes control of globalized capitalism gone mad... we run the risk of eliciting extremely violent nationalist reactions.

Immigrants have become the scapegoats.
Carlo Allegri / Reuters

Donald Trump's LGBT credentials - or, rather, the lack of them - are well known and don't need a further recital here. And whilst they must mean that we fear for both the physical and emotional safety and security of LGBT+ people in the US, his opinions have a far reaching consequence that sits right on our doorstep. As his rhetoric turns into policy and action over the coming weeks and months, we'll see whether his rants were hyperbole or actually as dangerous as many of us fear. There's one key Obama policy that will be binned, and that's the US Government's support for LGBT+ Pride events around the world.

Eighteen months ago, EuroPride took place in the Latvian capital, Riga, the first time the European event had taken place in a former Soviet state. Whilst much smaller than the EuroPrides that had gone before, several thousand people turned up to show support for LGBT+ rights in a country where homophobia, biphobia and transphobia are rife and arguably even state-sponsored.

Advertisement

Prominent in the EuroPride march was the US Embassy and its staff, alongside Obama's newly appointed Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons, Randy Berry, who spoke from the main stage. The US Embassy in Riga proudly flew the rainbow flag outside its huge building.

Left to right: Randy Berry, Charge D'Affairs Sharon Hudson-Dean, and Stuart Milk at EuroPride in Riga, 2015. Photo: Stuart Milk

With Putin's hatred of the LGBT+ community and Russian government legislating to restrict and remove LGBT+ human rights, may saw the United States' support for EuroPride in Riga as a deeply political act. As one human rights activist I spoke to in Riga said, "This is Mr Obama parking his tanks on Putin's doorstep. A nice little warning shot for a battle he doesn't need to have." This June, in neighbouring Lithuania, the US Embassy were supportive of Baltic Pride in Vilnius, and again marched in solidarity and provided financial support to the event.

Advertisement

It hasn't just been about countries where LGBT+ people face challenges. This August, the US Ambassador to Denmark, Rufus Gifford, hosted a reception at his official residence to celebrate Copenhagen Pride. He and his husband have joined the Copenhagen Pride parade several times have have been huge supporters of the event. Two months earlier, the US Ambassador to Britain, Matthew Barzun, walked at the head of the Pride in London parade alongside mayor Sadiq Khan, in a show of solidarity after the Pulse nightclub attack in June. The US Embassy in Grosvenor Square flew the rainbow flag again, and their float in the Parade also commemorated Pulse.

Left to right: Steve Taylor, Rufus Gifford and Kieron Yates at the US Ambassador's Copenhagen Pride reception, 2016. Photo: Steve Taylor

But it's inconceivable that any of this support for Pride will continue, and come January a State Department edict will overturn eight years of Obama's support for LGBT+ people overseas in one side of paper. From the very top down, it's unlikely President Trump will appoint a new Special Envoy to replace Berry, nor select many or any LGBT+ people to join his diplomatic corps. The rainbow flag hitherto fluttering above embassies will gather dust in a store room, and some Prides in hostile nations will see a vital source of their funding disappear. It's doubtful even the 'special relationship' will allow embassy staff in London to join the Parade there again.

It's ironic, really, that as Trump is inaugurated on 20 January, the European Pride Organisers Association board, myself included, will be meeting in Bulgaria to talk about how the Pride movement can best support our colleagues in the Balkans - one of the regions set to suffer the most from Trump's hatred of diversity and human rights.

Advertisement
For many of us Remembrance Sunday is about reflecting on events which have passed and showing our gratitude to those who we can never thank in person. As the nation falls silent to remember servicemen and women - whether historically at the Somme or in Normandy, or more recently in Fallujuh or Helmand Province, we must also spare a thought for those who experience the psychological impact from their military service.

For many such veterans - those who fought in the Falklands, Iraq or Afghanistan, or were deployed on humanitarian missions in Bosnia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere - a small but significant minority have been affected by mental illness.

Thankfully, the understanding of and treatments for military mental health conditions has advanced greatly in recent years. The servicemen who suffered from 'shell shock' during the First World War would scarcely believe the range of clinically effective rehabilitative treatments now available.

Advertisement

Yet whilst there has been a great advancement in the treatment and support services available, there is one area we must all do more to focus our efforts on - reducing the stigma which so often prevents those in the military community from seeking the mental health support they need and deserve.

Positive progress has been made. Over recent years, campaigns run by Combat Stress and the Ministry of Defence have made significant inroads into reducing stigma. Whilst these have proved effective in getting Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to seek support sooner - an average of four and two years after leaving the Armed Forces respectively - the typical delay in help seeking is 12 years for veterans of other conflicts. To put this in perspective, each year hundreds of Northern Ireland and Falklands veterans seek mental health help for the first time having suffered in silence for decades.

As we mark this Remembrance Sunday we must pause to remember not just those who we have lost, but those who remain and still need our support. Let us use this period of reflection to recognise the service of all our veterans, whenever and wherever they have served, to encourage those who are affected by the trauma they experienced as a result of their service to seek the help they need for a brighter tomorrow.

Combat Stress' 24-hour helpline provides free, confidential mental health advice and support for veterans and their families. If you or a loved one needs support, please call 0800 138 1619 or text 07537 404 719. Find our more at www.combatstress.org.uk

Advertisement
SoberP via Getty Images

In 2015, Harvard did a case study into the success of fashion blogger come style icon, Chiara Ferragni. Having witnessed the effect she had on a start up business last week, I don't need a Harvard degree to tell you that this blonde haired influencer, has a heck of a lot of influence.

Advertisement

Last Wednesday, the new media mogul, who has a clothing collection and collaborations with Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton and Chanel, under her perfectly styled belt, Instagrammed an image of her new, super glam bathroom wallpaper to her some 7 million followers. The wallpaper had been produced by a young, up and coming company called Fashion Formula. It's a UK based, digital printing textiles business who manufacture all its bespoke products in its London factory.

The picture quickly racked up over 140 000 likes as Fashion Formula simultaneously gained over 1000 followers. To anyone who Instagrams on the reg, you would understand that 1000 engaged, active followers are tricky to come by. To a young, start up, this is a game changer.

In the day of the fiercely prevalent traditional media vs. new media debate, it is silly and short sighted for businesses, particularly small businesses, to not embrace the often criticised world of digital influencers; their prevalence, influence and success is undeniable. While they may not offer the coveted Vogue tick of approval, they offer millions of viewers and a whole lot of likes. To savvy businesses out there, this is probably a whole lot easier to cash in on.

It got me thinking about the the television series Black Mirror, in particular the episode "Nosedive". Black Mirror is generally thought of as being an uncanny thermometer for how the modern world is evolving in regards to technology.

Advertisement

Within the episode the show told the story of a world where your life was documented on a social media platform. The characters were given a rating depending on the activities they showcased. The higher your rating, the more perks you get; the lower your rating, the harder you have to work to keep yourself afloat.

You only have to look at Chiara to realise that we are already living in the world of a likes economy. Chiara has successfully transformed her likes into cash and my hope is that young businesses can cash in on the Chiara effect by understanding how to successfully harness the power of online and social media.
Back view of a group of high school students walking down the hallway and talking

A 10-mile stretch of highway connects my current hometown to the town where I grew up and attended school. While making the drive last week that I have made hundreds of times before, I spotted an unusual and disturbing sight. A large pickup truck fitted with an oversized, freely waving Confederate flag crept beside me in the typical traffic-filled flow of the road. I gazed in disbelief and distress. In four years of living in the south, I had never seen such a blatant display of this symbol, and had never imagined I would see one in my diverse New Jersey community. I wondered if signs like these were emboldened by the rhetoric of presidential candidate Donald Trump, and if they would disappear after the majority of Americans rejected his hateful rhetoric and lack of vision.

I tend to be an action-oriented person, and believe that in most situations silence is permission, and that to permit is to promote. The man's freedom of speech may guarantee his right to display this symbol of hate, but I felt an obligation on principle to register my disapproval. My first instinct was to roll down my window at the next bottleneck and call out through the open passenger window to his truck, from one millennial to another. What would I say? I fought the urge to raise a middle finger and meet one symbol of intolerance with another. I wanted to scream. Heart racing, I peered in the rear view mirror at my 4-month-old son sleeping peacefully, simultaneously feeling awash in peace and anger.

Advertisement

That day I was thankful to not have to explain this symbol of hate to my son, to not have to find the careful words to say why some of his classmates and their parents had voiced support for a person who said such hateful things and made such threatening promises. The man in the truck looked to be about my age, and I imagined a future where his son is in school with my son. In the coming years, I will have to face the same dreaded challenge of explaining and comforting that so many parents and teachers faced the morning after the election. I will have to hope that my son's school is an inclusive and equitable safe space in a country that may not be.

Now that the votes have been counted, it appears that hateful rhetoric and abusive behavior is permissible to just about half of the populous that voted for Trump. By no means do I believe that all Trump supporters all subscribe to the xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist comments and ideas that Trump spewed during his media circus of a campaign. Now that the chips have fallen, I hope those who overlooked his troubling actions and the real violence they have caused will speak out. I hope they will demand respect for our highest office and for the ideals of our diverse and inclusive nation. I hope that the gravity of the office transforms Trump into a new reality character, one who still may "tell it like it is" but one who is willing to sideline the extreme expressions of hate that garnered support from fringe extremist groups and are truly dangerous. I hope the office impresses Trump with a renewed sense of responsibility to unite people, and to uphold the rights and freedoms that have always made America the world's greatest nation.

The character of Donald the candidate cannot define the character of this country, but the task of challenging and dismantling his rhetoric will start at the local level, in the groups that serve as the sites of our daily interpersonal interactions. With my son's future in mind, I believe the most important site of this work is in our schools.

Advertisement

On social media I have seen so many examples of desperate and defeated parents trying to find ways to reassure their children about our new leader, and what his election represents about our values. These parents have written about tearful daughters who are worried about Trump's violence towards women, about sons who fear that their friends will be forced to leave their homes, about the safety of their children of color.

After the difficult breakfast conversations of November 9, children of parents who were pleased with Trump's victory will go to schools and join classrooms with students who have absorbed the uncertainty and fear felt by their parents. Our local organizations and educational institutions will be the front lines of combatting messages of hatred through continued conversations and interventions to foster inclusion.

Our schools must create environments where all members are welcome in spirit and practice, supporting conditions under which all children have an opportunity to receive an excellent education. To do this, schools must take the pulse of their community, and can best do this by assessing school climate. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Education Association have pointed to a recent uptick in school-based bullying behavior due to the "Trump Effect." There has not been enough research to determine if this is the case. Going forward, the best sources of evidence will come from observations of behavior and climate in individual schools. Each student body may experience the impacts of the recent campaign in a different way depending on its specific social context and characteristics.

Fortunately, recent anti-bullying efforts have recognized the importance of data-driven approaches to improving school climate. The federal Department of Education and many state departments of education have created free school climate surveys, available online, to enable schools to begin uncovering and diagnosing local issues. Each school can use these data to design targeted interventions to improve inclusion and foster values such as civility in the school setting. This civility will need to extend to the digital space, and civility is what we must demand together of our new commander in chief.

Advertisement
Misplacing or losing your iPhone is the worst, but there are ways to find it even when the power's off.
I have always loved Veterans Day.

As a military spouse of more than forty years, I've seen public support for the military community ebb and flow over these decades of peacetime and war. Veterans Day, though, has remained a constant, a day to pause and honor the service of the eight percent of Americans who have worn the uniform. Having spent nearly all of my adult life surrounded by these men and women, I can say without hesitation that their commitment, honor, and selflessness warrants that recognition. Their service is truly a debt we cannot repay.

When those service members hang up the uniform, whether after four years or forty, they continue to serve as a force for good in our businesses and communities. Companies seek out veteran talent because they have seen that veterans are disciplined, loyal, hard-working leaders. Beyond their professional lives, research has shown that veterans are more engaged in their communities, volunteering, voting, giving to charity, and attending public meetings at higher rates than non-veterans.

My experience, however, has shown me that the value our veterans bring back to their post-military communities and careers is paralleled by one other group: military and veteran spouses. Military spouses are now sought out by savvy recruiters who recognize their inherent value. Like their service members, military spouses understand how to put the greater good before their own self-interests. Certainly, they have diverse backgrounds and wide-ranging skill sets, but as a group these spouses are united by a shared military community experience that lends itself to building independent, adaptable fast learners.

Advertisement

Present-day military spouses are benefitting from advances in technology that make teleworking more mainstream. This allow spouses to remain loyal to an employer through multiple moves, which is prized by employers at a time when millennial job seekers are increasingly choosing to change jobs and companies every few years.

I recently heard Eric Eversole, president of Hiring Our Heroes (HOH), remark that any company whose veteran recruitment program does not also specifically extend to military spouses has "half of a military recruitment program." It's exactly that sentiment - that employers should seek out this incredible talent pool that these military spouses represent - which makes me so proud to be working with HOH.

For more than five years, HOH has been working within communities and on military installations across the globe to connect businesses of every size to skilled job seekers from the military community. Earlier this year, which HOH declared the Year of the Military Spouse, I was honored to join HOH as an ambassador for the program, helping to connect service members, veterans, and their spouses with meaningful careers through in-person and virtual hiring events and online tools such as resume builders ResumeEngine.org and MyCareerSpark.org.

Military spouse job seekers, like their veteran counterparts, aren't in need of charity or pity. They are skilled, experienced, resourceful, and dynamic. What they do need is opportunity, the chance to demonstrate their loyalty and value to employers. I'm proud to be a part of making those connections for our military community. This Veterans Day, as we not only reflect on the service of our veterans but also celebrate all that they continue to do for our communities, let us also remember the military and veteran spouses who have served, and continue to serve, alongside them.

Advertisement
A girl joins demonstrators to protest outside of City Hall following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California November 10, 2016. REUTERS/Patrick T. Fallon

Yesterday, on my way to Israel, I stopped to visit the Anne Frank House along one of the western canals in Amsterdam. You can peer through the window, that was blacked out for the two years she and her family were hidden, towards one of the canals that traverse this beautiful city.

I had planned this visit months ago; it wasn't some maudlin return to a site of horror from the past century. It was relevant, however, since this lovely country was willing to allow over 100,000 of its citizens to be rounded up for execution. Hard to believe in a modern city, but the reality, nevertheless. Our new reality today.

Advertisement

I'm now getting beyond angry, beyond the reflexive anger I felt on Wednesday morning.

Mr. President, I don't need to hear from you that you want him to succeed. I know it's the polite thing to say, but it's the typical dissembling of Democratic politicians that turns people off. You don't have to steal the T keys on the keyboards, because childishness is foolish, but you need to realize that the main feeling today with the majority of voters in this country is #NotMyPresident.

This election is a rupture in American history (I know, I read too much sci-fi). Democrats must stop bending over pleading to be kicked, and they must start now -- not the day after the Inauguration, as the Republicans did to you -- in promoting their absolute refusal to work with or compromise with this Congress or administration. That is madness, and will be the end of this country.

I've been traveling, but I've heard both Wednesday's PBS NewsHour and yesterday's MSNBC morning show had unfiltered, unchallenged transphobia spewed out to the viewers. Why, after this week's disaster, do the "liberal" mainstream MSNBC and PBS continue to promote this garbage? Why are fascists given a platform?

Because humans are cowards, and they fall into line in lockstep so as not to lose out. Steve Bannon for Chief of Staff? A Nazi in the Oval Office? For God's sake, why? A failed governor and actor with sexual assault in his portfolio as Energy Secretary? Sure, he's so much more knowledgeable than a world-renowned physicist.

Advertisement

If the Democratic Party doesn't go into war mode than it will reap the whirlwind. Stop being polite. Fascists don't do polite. They might like puppies but they do not like you. Give no quarter, take no prisoners. Your constituents do not want nice. They want to obliterate the enemy that is destroying their country, and sending waves of fear and disgust through their homes.

Right now I don't care that the white working class is hurting, I really don't. Everything the Democratic party has done of significance for decades has been on their behalf -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, VAWA, pay equity, etc. -- who do you think benefits most from all that? They're ungrateful; they don't understand the simplest basics of civics. They are the poorly educated and Trump is one of them. We hurt their pride and now they want revenge. We need to return fire.

We ignored the elephant in the room for 40 years, and now it's coming home to roost (I'm too tired not to mix metaphors). We don't gain anything by giving away our dignity now; we owe no one any excuses. Oh, OK, I apologize for being an insensitive elitist. Feel better? I've spent my entire life with ignorant right-wing extremists clucking about my community being a bunch of perverted male sexual predators. I owe you nothing. Fix your own addictions and poor nutrition. Ya think Mr. Trump is going to help his darlin' "poorly educated"? Boy, are you in for a surprise. At least those ISIS sharia patrols won't be throwing any gay people off rooftops in LA any time soon!

My answer to a proffered hand, which I don't expect to get? No. And Senator Schumer, beware. You betrayed your colleagues on Iran. Try making nice with Mitch McConnell while you get kicked in the teeth and you'll hear from us. The Bernie Bros are still angry. They behaved badly, but when they start hurting they'll be taking it out on you.

And the American Jewish community leadership? You should be ashamed. You should all get on a plane and visit the Anne Frank House, because clearly your knowledge of recent history is succumbing to dementia.
FILE - In this Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2016, file photo, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence participates in the annual Statehouse Prayer Service at the Statehouse in Indianapolis. Pence's State of the State address on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016, will be an opportunity for him to make his case to Indiana voters for why they should re-elect him. Among the issues he'll address are his exact position on LGBT rights and the state's economy and unemployment rate. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

Many Americans who identify as Christian voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Not quite the majority of Americans, but close.

Many of you are disturbed by the threat Islamic extremist terrorists pose to the United States of America and to American people. Among the truly disturbing stories, shared even by the most conservative alt-right media, are cases of extremists throwing gay people to their deaths from rooftops. Perhaps you voted as you did because of these crimes against humanity, because you don't want them to make their way here through Syrian refugee immigrants.

Advertisement

Conversion therapy often involves electrically shocking people to induce seizures while forcing them to look at homosexual pornography. The process is intended to be psychologically damaging, and it also can cause severe brain damage. If this were endorsed by the Islamic State, American people would be up in arms. In fact, this practice has been endorsed by our vice-president elect, Mike Pence.

Our newly elected vice president supports this as a "treatment" to remediate LGBT people's natures. Since the election, I have seen no elected official, Republican, Democrat or otherwise, condemn this practice and promise to work against it should it be introduced into any kind of legislation. If you voted for Trump, then you voted for someone who supports forcing people to watch porn while electrocuting them. I don't know who you are. I really hope that no one reading this is one of those people, because you most certainly are no friend of mine.

I am gay. My new vice president would support strapping me down, forcing me to watch gay pornography, and electrocuting me until I had brain-damaging seizures. I am alarmed not because Hillary Clinton lost the election; I am alarmed because I feel that my personal safety and security are in immediate and present danger and I have no recourse. Via social media, I have asked Republican and Democratic congressional leaders alike to explicitly condemn the practice of conversion therapy and to promise not to use it against American citizens. The response, universally, has been silence. Nothing from Paul Ryan, nothing from even Elizabeth Warren or Nancy Pelosi. Not a word.

Right now, immediately, before the new administration takes office on January 20, the United States Congress must make a pledge to be at least better than ISIL/ISIS, better than Al Qaeda, and commit not to endorse or even consider conversion therapy or any other kind of terrorism or torture.

Advertisement

Mike Pence did not explicitly advocate electroshock therapy or triggering seizures in LGBT people -- he didn't use those words. Rather, as governor of Indiana, he sought to prohibit funding for HIV/AIDS resources to those who need them unless a clause was added that "resources should be directed to those institutions which provide assistance for those seeking to change their sexual behavior." Most people do not seek to change their sexual identities; in many cases, parents of LGBT adolescents force their children into such terror programs. In too many cases, as detailed in this TIME magazine story about 17-year-old Leelah Alcorn, teens forced into these programs (who would be vulnerable to Pence's law) kill themselves as the only viable escape from the torture.

What is this country? Who are we? How did this happen?

I understand that some people think that my worries are overreactive. The practice of conversion therapy is something the supposed Islamic terrorists do to people, but is supported and promoted by the very "good Christians" who tell us that people in the Middle East are evil. Most people can't imagine the panic that this induces in me and others like me because you probably are not among those on the list who our incoming regime may be targeting. People who think this practice is abhorrent but voted for the man behind it anyway, I am going to say this and I mean it absolutely: You are the same, the exact same, as the people who sent Anne Frank off to her death. Some part of you must recognize this and live with it for the rest of your life.
Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence attends a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, U.S. November 7, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

I can't say I am afraid. I am numb. I feel am impending sense of doom--but it's a kind of doom I have already lived through.

From seventh grade through 12th grade, I was tortured nearly every day I went to school. The common term for this is bullying, but that's not what it is. It is torture. Just as John McCain suffered indecencies and physical abuses as a prisoner of war, so did I in my youth. If you hate me for making that comparison, you hate me for saying what is true.

Advertisement

I was a happy, popular and active kid. When I reached puberty, my life changed. Before I knew myself that I was gay, others picked up on my mannerisms. My peers harassed me, demanding to know if I was gay. I didn't know.

My childhood best friend Nick McKinney stopped being a friend; he, along with a pack of neighborhood kids rode their bikes into me, threw things at me, called me faggot as I walked home pretending that this was not happening. If there was no empty seat on the schoolbus, I had to squat in the aisles. No one would let me sit next to them, and Betty, the blue-shadowed bus driver, would not drive until I squatted.

At school, I sat near the teacher hoping for some kind of protection as fellow students called me faggot, flicked my ears and kicked my legs under the desk. I allowed the ringleader of the abuses, Ian Kelly, who went on to found a multi-million dollar clothing company, to cheat from my tests in biology and chemistry classes. All of this in front of teachers. I gravitated in hallways toward any adult who I hoped would be a port in the storm. From seventh grade until I graduated from high school, only one single adult ever intervened on my behalf: a business teacher who held me after following a particularly brutal class in which several of my peers relentlessly called me an ugly zitfaced faggot. She told me that I will grow into my appearance and myself, and that life will change after high school for the better. I will never forget her kindness--even recognizing that her response was inadequate, as the abuse carried on until I graduated from high school in 1996.

Advertisement

My own grandmother, who always had been a doting, loving, spoiling figure suddenly didn't seem to love me anymore. Nothing made sense anymore. Throughout my teen years, I felt unworthy of living. I was smart; science, English and art came easily to me. My mother let me stay home from school when I couldn't bear to go--and thank God for her, because she saved my life.

After high school, I found out that the world is kinder outside of those cinder-blocked walls. And in the late '90s, the world coincidentally began a major revolution. Thanks to the influence of Will and Grace, Queer as Folk and all that followed, average people realized that LGBT people are just...people who deserve to be treated with decency.

I discovered later in life that my grandmother resented post-puberty me because she had a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her first husband, who moved her from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. just before World War II, turned out to be gay. She grew up in the Catholic church. The church refused to annul the marriage because it refused to accept homosexuality--and so my grandmother had no choice other than to divorce her first husband. As a result, she was excommunicated. She lost it all: church (not faith), husband, her reputation. She married my grandfather, a brilliant man haunted by his own demons and alcoholism, and her life took a direction she never planned it to take.

Witnessing me grow into a gay man triggered my grandmother's trauma, and she resented me--until we got to know one another again in the years leading up to her death. On her death bed, literally the evening she died as I was leaving the room, she asked me to embrace her and she told me that she always has been proud of me and always will be.

I never expected that relationship to mend, and it did because my grandmother and I came to know one another as people--but also because the public attitude toward homosexuality changed. She couldn't pretend to herself that LGBT people are evil anymore because it had become commonly accepted that we are not.

Advertisement

Now what?

Our vice president-elect, Mike Pence, is the same kind of person who populated my middle school and high school. I can't say whether he is one of the abusers who called me a faggot, who kicked me, flicked my ears, pinched and punched me in the locker room, and who ultimately caused me to read the suicide textbook "The Final Exit" and stockpile pills throughout my youth as an emergency escape hatch. I can say that he is now the vice principal of the school: he is the authority who not only ignores but who actively encourages abuses against people because of their sexuality.

I am not afraid, exactly, but I do have trepidation about speaking out about this publicly. But I have been through this and I know how it goes.

Mike Pence advocates conversion therapy. Make no mistake: Conversion therapy is torture. It involves electrocuting and drugging LGBT people to make them suffer while looking at homosexual pornography in order to "convert" them to heterosexuality. Not only has it been proven not to convert people, but it causes severe physical and psychological trauma and potentially can result in serious mental disorders. Teenagers have committed suicide in desperate moves to avoid ongoing conversion therapy. In the event a gay man, as an example, were coerced into either believing or pretending that he had been "converted" in order to stop the torture, the best-case scenario would be his entering into a marriage under false pretenses with a woman who otherwise could have found a loving partner.

It is a crime against humanity. Science has proven conclusively that it does not work.

Yet, under the influence of Vice President-Elect Pence and a fully Republican Congress and likely Republican-leaning U.S. Supreme Court, conversion therapy could become mainstream and supported by law if not codified in law.

How did this happen? How did we get here? Conversion therapy is a blatant human-rights violation and a sheer demonstration of hatred. It is a hate crime.

Advertisement

I survived six years of psychological terror and physical abuses, sanctioned by my peers and by authorities, throughout my youth. At that time, I had been convinced that something about me was "bad" and that I deserved it. I know better now, and I will not abide by it.

LGBT people and our allies must be vigilant as a new regime takes over our country. This is not a joke, and there is no evidence at this time that suggests fearing the worst--that our government would commit inhumane crimes against its own law-abiding people--is unreasonable.

I have lost more faith in the decency of the American people this week than I knew I had. Because of what I went through when I was young, and because I have seen how quickly attitudes changed toward acceptance, I know how quickly those attitudes can revert with a little peer pressure. I know how cruel people can be without a second thought.
With an announcement by Gov. Jay Nixon earlier this month, the installation of two new recreational trail heads into St. Joe State Park is one step closer to completion.

Nixon announced that the City of Park Hills has been awarded $150,000 to construct an off-road-vehicle (ORV) trail head leading into St. Joe State Park.

The funding is part of $2.9 million in grants awarded for 31 projects throughout the state to increase and enhance recreational opportunities for Missourians.

This funding provides new opportunities for Missourians throughout the Show-Me State to experience the outdoors, Nixon said. By expanding these recreational resources, we are creating healthier, happier communities.

The ORV trail head is being planned in conjunction with installation of a nearby hiking and biking trail head as part of the planned extension of Fairgrounds Drive in Park Hills.

Funding for the extension of the roadway and corresponding utilities was obtained some time ago, as was grant and other funding for the hiking/biking trail head. City officials were just waiting for approval of the grant for the ORV portion of the project, which they expected they would most likely receive because of the fact that St. Joe State Park is one of very few parks in the state that allow off-road vehicles.

This is through the (federal) Recreational Trails Program, said Norm Lucas, the citys economic developer. Its being awarded by DNR (Department of Natural Resources), although the money originates with the Federal Highway Administration  so it has all the federal strings attached to it  and we also get to satisfy DNR.

One of the requirements of the DNR is that the project does not threaten or unduly interfere with endangered wildlife and that plans to mitigate damage to the species vital habitat are included as part of overall planning for the project.

Theyre mostly concerned with the threat to our endangered species, Lucas said, but fortunately for us, there are only a couple of those in our area.

A species of bat and the Emerald dragonfly are the animals of most concern that will potentially be impacted by installation of both trails.

There arent any in that particular area, but in this part of the county theres a possibility that we could come across the Emerald dragonflies so we need to watch for that, Lucas said.

Bree McMurray, a nationally known endangered species specialist, is working with city officials to ensure that installation of the trail heads does not interfere with the endangered animals.

McMurray, who actually works for the Missouri Department of Transportation, has already cleared the area for the hiking and biking trail and will soon be doing likewise for the ORV trail head.

She has walked the hiking/biking trail with me and the road with me, Lucas said, and we did discover three trees in each of those two corridors that had to be marked so that when we come in, we make sure to only demolish those trees between the months of November and March when the bats have all vacated.

City Administrator Matt Whitwell had previously anticipated that the entire project could be completed around the end of the year, depending on various factors and, of course, how much cooperation they get from the weather.

The new trail heads will provide park visitors, especially hiking, biking and ORV enthusiasts, with another option for enjoying the extensive trails available at St. Joe. In addition to the extension of Fairgrounds Drive and the trail sections themselves, plans include a parking area for visitors in a section that will allow for the installation of expanded parking if the trail heads prove as popular as anticipated.

I think it will become a premier access to the state park, said Whitwell. Regionally, you can have people come from Illinois and north of St. Louis County and western Missouri and all around the south  the entire region  can come down Highway 67 and basically, within minutes, be on these trails.
White evangelical Christians and white Catholics went decisively for Donald Trump on November 8th, thereby propelling him to victory in a majority of the battleground states and the Electoral College tally. Roughly one quarter of all of those who voted on Tuesday were self-described white evangelicals and fully 81% backed Trump. Their votes were very important in such states as Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio. 60% of white Catholics voted for Trump to only 37% for Hillary Clinton. Their strong support was crucial to his victories in such states as Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.



That these kinds of voters preferred a thrice-married man who cannot be fairly described as morally traditional says something profound about their priorities. The American presidency was at first a mostly ceremonial office, with the president serving (except in wartime) as the national example-in-chief and not much more. With the emergence of the powerful modern presidency in the 1930's and '40's, the role of the president in the realm of what today we call public policy greatly expanded. White evangelicals and white Catholics who voted for Trump signaled that to them the higher priority is what he would likely do in the realm of public policy, rather than the example he has set in his own personal life.

Partly that choice stemmed from Donald Trump's very shrewd promise to appoint socially conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, a promise buttressed by Trump's release of a list of his top prospects to fill the current vacancy there. Those eleven candidates were hailed by social conservatives as likely to continue in the footsteps of former Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death earlier this year created that vacancy. The Court has been active in recent years in the areas of reproductive rights and marriage equality in ways deeply troubling to socially conservative white evangelicals and white Catholics. They want a Court that keeps cutting back on the legal right to abortion, and one that resists legal equality for gays and lesbians. Donald Trump has promised to appoint justices in the future who will do that, and in so doing won crucial support from socially conservative voters.

Advertisement

But there is more to this story than Trump's promises with respect to Supreme Court appointments. White evangelicals and white Catholics - older ones especially - appear to have responded positively to his overall campaign theme of "Make America Great Again." To them, that phrase implies a return to the kind of country and culture in which Trump grew up, which was more economically populist and morally traditional. That fairer and squarer America (as they see it) remains to many older white evangelicals and white Catholics not an anomaly but a norm to which the country should continue to aspire. Trump was believable as a messenger for that agenda in part because he is old enough to have personally experienced that earlier era. He was born in 1946 and so grew up during a time when there was much more national unity, and when the middle class was steadily expanding as a fraction of all households. Donald Trump won decisively among middle-class whites - the more morally traditional among them especially - because he consistently advocated recreating a society that worked better for them in some important ways.

A related factor was Trump's firmly stated praise for America's veterans and his pledge to rebuild the military. Many "greatest generation" veterans and their now middle-aged children responded very positively to that part of Trump's message. In the earlier time they remember, the U.S. military was something in which a much higher fraction of the population participated, and that was much more respected at home and abroad. Trump's pledge to restore the military's earlier, more central place in American life resonated strongly with many white evangelicals and white Catholics.

Advertisement
The latest ceasefire in Yemen is unlikely to prevent Saudi Arabia from resuming its brutal assault on its impoverished neighbor. The Yemeni people are paying the price for Riyadh's determination to reinstate an unpopular government friendly to the royal family. This commitment to rule or ruin apparently comes from Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known more for his ambition than judgment. Incoming President Donald Trump should end American involvement in Riyadh's aggression.

Without a vote of Congress the Obama administration has joined the Saudi-led coalition in war. Now the rebels apparently have been firing back. Last month the destroyer USS Mason appeared to come under missile attack from Yemen--though U.S. officials admitted the ship's radar might have malfunctioned. This presumably was retaliation for U.S. complicity in the murder of Yemeni civilians. No longer can the Obama administration pretend that fighting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's war has no consequences. Washington has turned the U.S. into a foreign target, yet again.

Still, the administration played the victim card, claiming that it destroyed Houthi radar stations in "self-defense." However, the U.S. had provided targeting intelligence, refueled airplanes, trained pilots, and supplied munitions to Riyadh since the latter, backed by several other Gulf states, attacked Yemen in March 2015. The Pentagon even deployed ships to prevent Iranian vessels from approaching Yemen's coast.

Advertisement

By taking an active role in the Yemeni civil war Washington made Americans as responsible as Saudis for the carnage in the world's poorest nations. Perhaps 4,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting, the majority by the KSA-led "coalition." These deaths also are America's responsibility.

The U.S. made much the same mistake when President Ronald Reagan intervened in the Lebanese civil war to back the "legitimate" government based in Beirut. The USS New Jersey rained death and destruction down on opposing Muslim factions. Colin Powell subsequently explained: "When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American 'referee' had taken sides against them. And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target," both the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks.

President Barack Obama developed a reputation for being reluctant to plunge into new Middle Eastern wars. What possessed him to decide to help kill Houthi rebels who had done not threatened America? The administration's involvement appears to be an embarrassed response to Riyadh's criticism of the Iran nuclear deal. Instead of dismissing the royals' presumption that American policy should revolve around their desires, the U.S. backed their aggressive war for regional influence.

Secretary of State John Kerry explained: "we're not going to step away from our alliances and our friendships." Even with an essentially totalitarian state which has promoted illiberal, intolerant religious teaching and Islamic extremism, and whose citizens have contributed both money and people to terrorist attacks against America.

Advertisement

America needs better allies and friends. And reasons to go to war.

Yemen long was torn by conflict. Fighting has waxed and waned since the 1960s. Along the way the country divided and then reunited, but violent unrest continued. The Houthis, known as Ansar Allah, or "Supporters of God" (who doesn't claim to be that in the Middle East?), belong to the Zaydi sect, and are Shia-lite, maintaining some theological similarities with Sunnis. The Houthis have been fighting the central government for years, including under U.S.-supported President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Saleh, no friend of the KSA, was ousted in 2012. Riyadh then seemed unconcerned about stability and legitimacy, and instead backed the new president, Saleh's old deputy Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The latter had little domestic support, while Saleh performed a classic political pirouette and joined the Houthis against Hadi. Most of the Yemeni security forces defected to Saleh and Hadi had to flee the capital of Sana'a to the golden embrace of the Saudi royals. Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute noted that "there is good reason to doubt these rebels pose a direct threat to Riyadh, outside the confines of Saudi paranoia."

Nevertheless, the KSA chose war to reinstate Hadi. It apparently envisioned a quick campaign, but nearly two years later the war rages on, with the rebel coalition governing most of the population. Occasionally the Yemenis also land a blow on Saudi territory. Secretary Kerry criticized attacks on the Kingdom, opining that Saudi Arabia "has a right to be free from missiles being launched from Yemen." He apparently forgot that Houthi-coalition was only retaliating for Riyadh's aggression.

The Kingdom proclaimed itself as following international law in backing the legally legitimate government. Yet it is doing the opposite in Syria. And after having called on Riyadh to kill his countrymen Hadi retains little following in Yemen. The Saudi royals would have to leave an occupying force to keep him in power.

The administration cites promoting stability as the justification for U.S. policy. For instance, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed that Riyadh was "sending a strong message to the Houthis and their allies that they cannot overrun Yemen by force." But Washington previously never much cared about who was battling whom for control of Yemen. Indeed, who rules matters little to anyone outside the country. Neither Ansar Allah nor Saleh could (or would) challenge Saudi predominance or block Gulf shipping.

Advertisement

Yet Secretary Kerry declared that the U.S. was "not going to stand by while the region is destabilized or while people engage in overt warfare across lines, international boundaries and other countries." He has a career in stand-up comedy when he retires from State. Apparently he forgot America's invasion of Iraq, which simultaneously violated international law and created regional chaos. U.S. intervention in Libya had much the same effect.

America still must worry about terrorism, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) remains a dangerous force. Alas, the KSA's aggression has created a vacuum, freeing AQAP to grab more territory and plot more terrorist attacks. The Houthis disliked the U.S. even before the American military joined with the Saudis to rain death and destruction upon Yemen, but they never attacked or even threatened America. Ansar Allah did, however, fight al-Qaeda--that is, until the movement was forced to concentrate on the Saudis. Last year Defense Secretary Ashton Carter acknowledged the terrorist group's resulting "great gains."

The KSA's last resort has been to justify its murderous military campaign by pointing at Tehran. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad calls all insurgents "terrorists," trying to appeal to Washington in the latter's fight against terrorism. The Saudi royals similarly call all Yemenis "Iran-supported" to camouflage Riyadh's depredations. It is an equally deceitful claim.

Not that it should matter. Iran is no friend of America, but Saudi Arabia is less free politically and culturally, allows no religious liberty, and has done more than any other country to promote Islamic intolerance and underwrite terrorist groups which have attacked the U.S. and the West. Exactly how the KSA differs from the Islamic State, except in relative refinement of repression, is not obvious.

In any case, Houthis have been discontented with the central government for years and differ from Iranians as well as Saudis in religion. Area specialists affirm that Iran never had much involvement in Yemen's multiple conflicts. Tehran sought to gain influence after Hadi's ouster but, wrote journalist Laura Kasinof, the Kingdom "blew the extent to which Iran supported the Houthis out of proportion." Another reporter, Peter Salisbury, reported that the conflict was "driven by local issues and competition for resources rather than regional or ideological rivalries." Similarly, the Jamestown Foundation's James Brandon saw a battle between two complex coalitions in which "Self-interest, and not sectarian affiliation" drove the fighting. Even British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond admitted that "the Houthis are clearly not Iranian proxies."

Advertisement

Ironically, it was the Saudi invasion that turned Yemen's traditional intra-state strife into an international sectarian proxy fight. Even so, the amount of Iranian support remains limited. Ansar Allah had access to plenty of weapons after fighting for years and being joined by most of Yemen's army. Safa al-Ahmad filmed a documentary about the Houthis and observed that they "don't need Iranians to bring them weapons. They're awash in weapons."

As for Tehran's involvement, military analyst Tom Cooper observed simply: "There's scant evidence of direct Iranian support for the Houthis." The New York Times recently reported: "American intelligence officials believe that the Houthis receive significantly less support from Iran than the Saudis and other Persian Gulf nations have charged." Anyway, the KSA can hardly complain about Iran entering a war that Riyadh started. Doing so is an inexpensive way to hit back at the Kingdom.

Particularly outrageous has been the dishonest neoconservative attempt to blame the apparent Houthi missile attacks on American ships on Tehran. For instance, the Wall Street Journal, which campaigned tirelessly for war with Iraq and against the Iran deal, headlined one editorial "Obama's Iran Missile War." The paper acknowledged only "limited intelligence" and "intelligence and arms" from Washington to Riyadh, ignoring the refueling of the very Saudi aircraft bombing Yemen. Never did the Journal recognize Washington's complicity in the KSA's killing.

Also maintaining the pretense that Tehran is responsible for the apparent missile attack was Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations. At least he admitted that the Yemenis are "mad at America for backing an assault" by the Saudi royals and their allies. Nevertheless, he would shoot down Syrian aircraft to punish Iran for a Houthi attack! Apparently it doesn't matter that Tehran doesn't actually control either Ansar Allah or Assad. Of course, Boot considers Iran, not Riyadh and its Gulf allies, backed by America, to be the "bullies" in Yemen's war.

Advertisement

After the missile attack the Jerusalem Post's Jonathan Spyer wrote of "the growing confidence and audacity" of "the Iran-led regional bloc," meaning the Houthis. Yet after 19 months of bombing and killing aided and abetted by America, it might be more accurate to highlight the Yemenis' growing anger and frustration. After all, the alleged attack occurred shortly after the latest Saudi bombing atrocity. Houthi leader Abd al-Malik al-Houthi responded: "the first and foremost party responsible for the carnage" is the U.S. since "the Saudis are killing Yemenis by means of U.S. weapons and military aircraft. They strike where Americans pinpoint and allow." It is difficult to deny the rebels' right to self-defense in retaliating.

Nevertheless, the administration maintained an air of injured innocence. Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said "if you threaten our ships, we'll respond." He added that "we don't seek a wider role in the conflict." But America already is deeply involved and by any normal understanding started the new round with Yemen.

In fact, the Obama administration, which chastised Russia for killing civilians in Syria, is becoming embarrassed by the Saudi tendency to bomb clinics, homes, hospitals, infrastructure, markets, mosques, schools, weddings, and recently funerals--killing more than 140 people and wounding another 500 in a raid Riyadh initially denied. Perhaps a third of Saudi airstrikes hit civilian targets. State Department lawyers previously acknowledged the possibility of the U.S. being held responsible for Saudi war crimes--but they seemed to worry more about legal liability than civilian deaths. And the administration continued to back the KSA.

With its latest strike the Saudis lost more than public respect. The dead included a number of influential tribal leaders previously not aligned with the rebels, whose families are unlikely to forgive and forget. Also killed were moderate insurgents who supported negotiations with the Kingdom. The Saudi royals have proved themselves to be the enemies of all. April Longley Alley of the International Crisis Group warned that "Now the desire for revenge is high and militants will be empowered, which puts us in a situation where a compromise might not be possible."

Apparently Washington has begun to scale back its assistance to the Saudis, attempting to limit "collateral" damage, that is, the killing of noncombatants. National Security Council spokesman Ned Price explained that we "are prepared to adjust our support so as to better align [Saudi activities] with U.S. principles, values and interests." Secretary Kerry pushed hard for the latest ceasefire as a means to lead to negotiations to end the war.

Advertisement

Better would be to simply stop supporting the war. Unfortunately, Washington cannot undo its past support. But the administration could say Riyadh is now on its own in prosecuting its royal jihad against fellow Muslims.

Indeed, the KSA's propensity for aggression rather than defense--sending troops into neighboring Bahrain to suppress pro-democracy protests by the majority Shia population, aiding the Islamic State and other radical groups attempting to overthrow Syria's Assad, and now bombing to impose Riyadh's preferred strongman on Yemen--should cause Congress to reconsider arms sales to the Kingdom. Certainly transfers should no longer be waved through, lest America facilitate more repression and killing.

The administration has made a pact with the devil in backing the Saudi royals' war in Yemen. There was no threat to America, not the slightest justification for the U.S. to back an oppressive, theocratic dictatorship in its aggression against a poor neighbor.

As a result of Washington's support for Saudi ruthlessness, Yemen has suffered desperately. Roughly 10,000 people, including some 4100 civilians, have died, 3.2 million people (12 percent of the population) have been displaced, pestilence (in the form of Cholera) has hit the capital, and famine approaches, with more than half the population "food insecure," according to the UN World Food Program. Eight in ten people need some outside aid. Jean-Marie Guehenno, president of the International Crisis Croup, calls Yemen "one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in the Middle East." Yet the Saudi royals, secure in luxury at home, bomb on, aided by America. The administration's response? Declare itself to be "deeply disturbed."

The Yemen war could go on for years. President Obama should end America's participation. If he doesn't care about the loss of innocent life he should look to his legacy. And if that makes no difference, as one of his first acts President Donald Trump should withdraw U.S. support. At least President George W. Bush could claim humanitarian and security purposes for his misbegotten invasion of Iraq. There is no justification for America to play bloody handmaiden to the Saudis in Yemen.


After the initial shock waves had subsided, it began to be apparent that the Trump victory was a revolution on the part of the disenfranchised, in this case non-college educated white males who had become sidelined by the forces of immigration and outsourcing. However despite the economic issues, it wasn't a socialist or Communist revolution based on the redistribution of wealth. If that were the case then electing Donald Trump would be tantamount to deposing the Romanovs to elect the Czar. No the revolution in question bears some comparison to the populist uprising presided over by Huey Long in Louisiana which was so eloquently documented by Robert Penn Warren in All the King's Men (though Trump was pointing his finger at politicians more than his fellow profiteers). It's a revolution against elites that has a lot in common with what has gone on in England (Brexit) and in France under the auspice Marine Le Pen's National Front. In America, England and France you have the same lethal cocktail of xenophobia and isolationism infusing a state of irrationalism. Pol Pot fanned similar flames in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge uprising was predicated on the notion that the urban bourgeoisie and intelligentsia were at the root of the country's problems. In the case of the current election, Hillary Clinton became the sacrificial cow. It's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Take fairly insurmountable problems like obsolescence or terrorism and simply eliminate those who have been trying to come up with creative anodynes for 30 years. The Khmer Rouge following the example of the Chinese Cultural Revolutionaries before them murdered or exiled those with skills and placed them in rural reeducation programs. If Donald Trump has his way he will "drain the swamp" and generations of Washington insiders will be history. "I know more about ISIS than the generals do" was one of the campaign slogans of our latter day Ubu Roi. Hegel posited the notion of the world-historical figure who's the agent of forces beyond his control. Hindsight is 50/50 and it's as difficult to fathom the causes of something while it's happening as it is to see a storm coming when you're out at sea; it's hard to predict where this particular revolution or movement is going to lead. Hillary Clinton fought hard but her exercise of willpower was no match for the powerful force of circumstance which became her ultimate adversary.
NOTE: I wrote this on Tuesday afternoon.

I entered law school in the fall of 1968. It was still the heyday of the Warren Court. Many members of my generation chose law school in no small part because we were inspired by the extraordinary achievements of the Warren Court. With its decisions on racial segregation, voting rights, criminal justice, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right of privacy, and a host of other issues, the Warren Court had transformed constitutional law.

To cite just a few examples:

in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the Court held racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional;

in Mapp v. Ohio (1961) it held that evidence obtained in an unconstitutional search must be excluded when offered by the government against the victim of the unconstitutional search;

Advertisement

in Engel v. Vitale (1962) it held school prayer unconstitutional;

in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) it held that indigent criminal defendants have a constitutional right to court-appointed counsel;

in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) it held that malapportioned legislative districts were unconstitutional and embraced the principle of "one person, one vote";

in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) it recognized that the First Amendment guarantees a freedom of speech that must be "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open" and placed sharp restrictions on libel actions by public officials;

in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) it held that individuals have a right of privacy that protects their right to use contraception;

Advertisement

in Miranda v. Arizona (1966) it gave substance to the privilege against compelled self-incrimination by requiring the police to warn suspects of their rights before interrogating them;

in Katz v. United States (1967) it overturned prior decisions to hold that wiretapping is a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment;

in Loving v. Virginia (1967) it held unconstitutional state laws that prohibited persons of different races from marrying;

and in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) it held that government ordinarily cannot prohibit speech unless the speech creates a likely and imminent danger of grave harm.

Of course, not everyone cheered. Critics insisted that the justices on the Warren Court had abused their constitutional authority by being too activist. Defenders of the Warren Court responded that the justices had done precisely what the Framers of our Constitution intended them to do. That is, they had interpreted and applied the guarantees of the Constitution in a manner that constrained the majority's power to disregard the rights of those who cannot effectively protect themselves in the political process. Like the Framers, they understood that that was the fundamental reason for having a Bill of Rights in the first place.

Advertisement

By the time I graduated from law school, though, the Warren Court was no more. Over the next 24 years, Republican presidents appointed 10 consecutive justices to the Supreme Court, completely transforming the vision of the Court. No longer interested in protecting the rights of minorities, the Court over the last four decades has instead indulged its judicial activism by holding unconstitutional affirmative action programs, laws designed to protect the voting rights of racial minorities, laws regulating guns, and laws limiting the amount that corporations and billionaires can spend in the political process.

The role of "liberal" justices over the past four decades has been largely limited either to dissenting from activist conservative decisions or trying to preserve aging liberal precedents. With the notable exception of the Court's decisions protecting the rights of gays and lesbians, the Court's more liberal justices over the past four decades have had little if any opportunity to expand the rights of those groups and individuals who were the focus of the Warren Court's jurisprudence and of the Framers' concern.

But now, for the first time in four decades, with the election of Hillary Clinton and a Democratic Senate, we are likely to see a majority of the justices appointed by Democratic presidents. Should this come to pass, those students now in law school face a completely new and uncharted future. What will a "liberal" Supreme Court do in the twenty-first century? It has been so long since we have had such Court that it is difficult even to imagine the possibilities.

What will this new, more liberal Court do as it looks to the future? Will it recognize a constitutional right to at least a minimal education? Will it recognize a right to publicly-funded birth control and abortion? Will it hold political gerrymandering unconstitutional? How will it deal with legislative efforts to limit the franchise in ways that are clearly designed to manipulate the right to vote in a partisan manner? How will it interpret the Fourth Amendment in the face of ever-evolving threats to our privacy?

I envy my current students. For the first time in four decades, they can look forward to a Supreme Court that will once again protect those rights that are truly fundamental to our society.

Advertisement
By Clint Rainey

Flame Grilled Steak Pringles these are not: Swedish craft brewery St. Eriks has created what it claims are the "most exclusive potato chips in the world," as that's the only food ostensibly worth pairing with its "first-class" India pale ale. The website created for the stunt explains these aren't "just any potato chips," but rather "potato chips made with some of the most exclusive ingredients available in the Nordics ... prepared by the talented chefs of the Swedish National Culinary Team."

The six ingredients include matsutake mushrooms picked by a person wearing cotton gloves, crown dill from Sweden's Bjare peninsula, potatoes plucked from a "south-facing" hillside in Ammarnas too steep to be accessed by machines, freeze-dried wort from the brewery's IPA, a very specific variety of Swedish onion "always planted on the eighteenth of May," and a seaweed that tastes like truffles and is only found in cold tidal waters off the Faroe Islands. Also, these uniformly sized chips were all handmade, the snack's creator, chef Pi Le, tells Adweek. That may or may not justify their $55 price tag for a five-pack, which comes in a fancy gold-lettered black box, but that's what you'll be paying regardless.

If this sounds like a way to one-up friends who snagged the world's hottest chip before it sold out instantly last month, the "very limited edition" of 100 boxes that St. Eriks just released has already sold out as well. On the other hand, you may now have the winning recipe for next year's Lay's "Do Us a Flavor" contest.
Sometimes we all need an escape. An escape from the bills, the politics, the ELECTION, the nine-to-five grind. If a week's vacation isn't enough for you, take heart: your real-world disappearing act is a lot more doable than you probably realize. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Americans have already gotten away from it all by moving to better-value, better-weather destinations overseas.

At International Living, we show potential expats where to go -- and how to get there. From climate, to cost of living, to quality of life, we pinpoint opportunity in destinations throughout the world -- from Latin America to Southeast Asia to Europe.

Here are International Living's top five picks for close-to-home escapes where you can create a better life for yourself ... and spend less than it costs you to stay at home ...



Mexico



View from the rooftops of Guanajuato, Mexico

Advertisement

Mexico today is like the U.S. was 50 years ago...before big government and big business. It is full of overlooked havens where you can live in luxury, and still only spend $2,190 a month. As well as a low cost of living, Mexico also offers first-class hospitals, excellent infrastructure, and relaxed pace of life. Financially, it's a great time to be anywhere in Mexico--the exchange rate today is 20.07 pesos to $1.

Panama



The highrise skyline of Panama City, Panama

For expats from the U.S., Panama is convenient because the currency is the U.S. dollar. They also enjoy high-speed internet, remarkable cell coverage, and well-trained medical professionals. Cosmopolitan Panama City is the most popular expat destination, but this country is so much more than just the city. The highland towns offer spring-like weather, nature trails, waterfalls, cloud forests and more. Take your pick of locations on the water...from the white sands of the Caribbean islands to the deep blues of the Pacific. And all of this comes at a budget of $2,500.

Costa Rica



The palm fringed shoreline of Manzanillo beach, Costa Rica

Known as one of the friendliest countries in the world, Costa Rica embraces a laidback, or "pura vida" lifestyle. It is a country of long stretches of deserted and undeveloped beaches...dense jungles teeming with exotic wildlife...towering volcanoes, lush green valleys, and hundreds of crystal-clear lakes and rivers, all of which can be enjoyed for a monthly budget of $2,000. Many U.S. citizens have already made the move to Costa Rica, meaning that there are already established expat communities throughout the country.

Belize



Locals relax and enjoy the sun in Placencia, Belize

With over 200 pristine islands are scattered along its coastline--each surrounded by crystal clear, turquoise seawater that teems with brilliant fish, coral, and sponges--English-speaking Belize is the quintessential Caribbean paradise. Its desirability is also heightened by the fact that a couple can afford to live here on $1,200 a month. This is the perfect place to relax in a hammock, watching the frothy white waves wash against the Mesoamerican barrier reef.

Advertisement

Peru



People stroll through Plaza de Armas in Cusco, Peru

Along with being the home of the mountaintop Inca citadel, Machu Picchu, Peru is also known for its low cost of living, welcoming hospitality, and world-renowned cuisine. It mixes the old and the new, with modern infrastructure and conveniences intermingling with historic structures and reminders of the country's colonial past. Peru's varied landscape also offers a wide range of destinations -- all offering an extremely low cost of living. Many expats report spending about $1,500 a month, all in.

This article comes to us courtesy of InternationalLiving.com, the world's leading authority on how to live, work, invest, travel, and retire better overseas.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:
I learned with great sadness of the closing and subsequent bankruptcy of ITT Technical Institute in September. ITT, a for-profit training institute, was no small operation. It had been around for half a century eventually operating 130 campuses in 38 states. At the time it closed, ITT had about 40,000 students.

There doesn't seem to be much doubt about the reason for ITT's demise. For many years, the school has been the subject of a series of investigations and complaints. It charged top dollar for its programs the cost of which for many students proved to be debilitating, especially when they were unable to find promised jobs. At the time ITT closed, thousands of students were at varying stages of progress in pursuit of degrees and have been left in limbo. It is not clear their credits can be transferred to other institutions such as community colleges that offer similar curricula. The people who ran ITT into the ground after so many years have much to answer for.

But in a larger sense the tragedy of ITT Tech is a reflection of our continuing failure to provide a viable career path for the many millions of Americans who aspire to useful careers but do not have the time, finances or inclination to pursue traditional four-year degrees. ITT Tech was in fact created out of necessity to provide such career training in technical fields.

The great fraud of our society is thousands of four-year colleges and universities charging students an arm and a leg for degrees that offer scant prospect of useful employment in the workplace. Thousands of people with bachelor's degrees are driving taxis and tending bar. There is nothing wrong with driving taxis and tending bar, but that is not what they invested all that time and money in.

Not so long ago, the public schools offered vocational training in which students learned practical skills that helped prepare them for work in trades and manufacturing. But somehow all that got squeezed out in favor of college prep curricula. But there are millions of very bright young people out there who are not academically inclined. They want to work with their hands and take satisfaction from performance of useful functions. They turn to schools like ITT Tech in the hope of learning practical skills that prepare them for real world jobs.

To some extent, community colleges are filling this conspicuous gap. Some of them work with local community businesses to learn what skills are in demand and provide them to their students. But there is a wide diversity among community colleges, too many of which remain wedded to the traditional academic mentality, possibly because many community college instructors are themselves products of the four-year curriculum.

There is a critical need for a comprehensive rethinking of our whole approach to education with an eye to equipping more young people with practical skills that are needed in the real world. Such a new approach would be good for the students as well as our society and economy.

Lt. Gen. Clarence E. "Mac" McKnight, Jr., (USA-Ret) is the author of "From Pigeons to Tweets: A General Who Led Dramatic Change in Military Communications," published by The History Publishing Company.
As you may know, Sixty and Me is a non-partisan website. We have over 500,000 women over 50 in our community from all walks of life. We have different political views, come from a variety of backgrounds and follow many religions. In our own way, we all want to make the world a better place for our grandkids.

As the leader of this community, you should know that, even if I don't agree with you on a particular issue, I respect you. I have nothing but love and kindness in my heart for you.

Yesterday, I posted an article to Sixty and Me in which I discussed the importance of accepting the election results and, more importantly, each other. In it, I urged the women in our community to remember what we have in common. I also said that we should dig deeper to understand the reasons that our friends and colleagues voted the way they did.

Advertisement

America Belongs to Us, Not the Politicians

No matter what Donald Trump, or any other political figure, says, we are the only ones that can unify the country. We are the only ones who can heal the political rifts that are tearing the United States of America apart.

While I stand by everything that I said yesterday, I wanted to clarify one important point. Accepting the results of the election is not the same as accepting defeat. Given the controversial nature of this campaign, it is more important than ever that we stand up for what we believe in.

This applies to Trump supporters as much as it does for Clinton supporters. So, I would like to take a few minutes to offer some advice to the women in each of these two groups.

To the Trump Supporters... Be Good Winners

Trump was an unconventional candidate. Part of the reason that he won the election was that he appealed to voters who felt like they didn't have a voice. His supporters were not ignorant or racist as some on the other side claimed. They were hard-working people with legitimate fears.

Advertisement

That said, it's hard to imagine a person who agreed with Trump on every point. I suspect that there are many voters out there, especially women, who disagreed with many of his comments, but, who voted for him because they felt that he offered economic hope.

My advice to all the Trump supporters is to be selective with your support. Don't feel like you need to get behind Trump on every issue just because you voted for him. Right now, there is talk of "a mandate" for the Trump presidency. As the discussion unfolds, people are claiming that Trump now has permission - or even an obligation - to do everything that he talked about during the election.

Don't let Trump get away with doing things in your name that you are not comfortable with. If you see him stepping over the line, raise your voice. Trump, more than anyone, understands your power.

Don't accept everything just because you voted for something.

To the Clinton Supporters... Don't Give Up

I had to reach for a tissue more than once yesterday as I read through your comments about the election. Some women in the community were worried about what would happen to the LGBT people in their families. Others were concerned for their Muslim or Hispanic friends and neighbors. Still others lamented what may be the end of America's fight against global warming. Given the rhetoric during the campaign, these are all legitimate concerns.

If your candidate lost this round, I have some advice -- don't give up! The GOP now has control of Congress, the presidency and, most likely, the Supreme Court. The only true check on the power of Donald Trump, for better or for worse, is YOU!

Advertisement

Never forget that accepting the results of the election, which all of us have an obligation to do as American citizens, is not the same as accepting defeat. In fact, I would argue that it is more important than ever for you to organize and support the causes that you believe in.

Let's Respect Each Other and Fight for What We Believe in

America is a great country. It was great before Donald Trump ran for president. It will be great four years from now.

That said, America is also a country that is suffering. It is struggling to adapt to a fast-moving global economy. It is dealing with political tribalism on a scale that we have never seen. It is a country in which many people feel left behind. It is also a country that has lost faith in its politicians.

For better or for worse, Donald Trump would never have been president if it wasn't for these factors. For some, he represents hope. For others, he represents fear. Regardless of what you feel about our new president, it doesn't change the fact that this is YOUR country.

Let's be clear about one thing. Real change doesn't start with the politicians. It starts with us.

Regardless of who you supported in this year's election, now is the time to get involved. Reach out to your friends and neighbors - especially those who have different political perspectives than you - and get to know them. Listen. Try to understand where they are coming from. Get involved in causes that you care about. Be passionate and caring.

Advertisement

America needs you more than ever.

Which political causes are you going to get involved in over the next 4 years? Do you agree that it is more important than ever for us to reach out to people who disagree with us... not to change them, but, to understand them? Please join the conversation at Sixty and Me.

Read More about Volunteering and Giving Back after 50:


Watching the election returns on Tuesday was a constant reminder of a place that will always be home for me: Montana. A red state, it supported Trump over Clinton as expected by a wide margin. But when Trump also gained enough votes in similar areas of the country to win the electoral vote, I was not as surprised as most of the nation seemed to be.

I grew up in the 1950s and '60s on a wheat and cattle ranch in eastern Montana. Our neighborhood of some 10 or 12 farming families defined our reality, explained the world. Members of the community watched out for each other: when accident, illness or other disaster befell, neighbors were there to help. There was a pervasive sense of responsibility for the well-being of those around us. When I think about growing up in a "rural community," I remember this: after my brother took over the family ranch he was hospitalized late one summer in the 1990s with encephalitis, and was for a time totally disabled. It was that critical window of time in August when the bulk of the year's income depended on getting his aging equipment running to harvest the wheat crop. Even though twelve-hour days are normal for everyone once the harvest starts, several neighbors were able to break away from their own work long enough to harvest my brother's wheat. They knew that he would have done the same for them.

Advertisement

Our lives centered on the changing of seasons and the work each involved. Our one-room elementary school held community celebrations for every Halloween, Christmas, and eighth-grade graduation, as well as a monthly square dance. We were very far removed from the big city world of dense populations, slums, traffic jams, commuting to work, urban crime, drug abuse (although that came, eventually) and unemployment. Race relations were a mysterious problem since the only non-white residents of the county were a small group of Latino families who had long been integrated into our small-town social structure. Government regulations that originated in that faraway world were the topic of ridicule but also of heated discussions. The widely shared cartoon from the 1970s of a cowboy being subjected to OSHA regulations typified our alienation from the world of big cities and big government.

That vast distance between Montana and Washington, DC included a clear sense that Congress and government agencies there didn't understand the reality of our lives, nor did they care to understand it. How do people respond to such alienation? Mistrust, along with a level of fear when the mistrusted element also exerts power. Fear and mistrust require a response, and by the 1990's, Montana was home to the Montana Militia movement, with some of the most permissive gun laws in the United States.

Even though I've lived most of my adult life in US cities I've never stopped considering myself a Montanan. I return to the family ranch as often as possible, and every trip home brings me face to face with the perceptions of the population in a red state. My conversations with family members are always deeply enlightening. They leave me at times dismayed at the cavernous differences in our perceptions of the rest of the world, but often something else emerges: commonalities, agreement, understanding.

Advertisement

A few examples. Some years ago when, in response to the 9-11 attacks, our military invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq - my conservative brother was irate, demanding to know what right we had to take those actions. Although he's a strong advocate of virtually no restrictions on gun ownership, he is also a ferocious advocate for gun safety. He's a highly skilled target shooter (a hobby that to me seems as good as any) and a very gentle man. What explains the differences in our thoughts about gun control? In addition to mistrust and fear of Big Government, he hasn't lived as I have in cities like Baltimore with a constant and realistic fear of the risk of being shot. Our life experiences since childhood have been vastly different.

Yet we agree on many important issues. I've spent time lately on work in opposition to the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. Until recently many Americans had no idea what the TPP represented, but my family members not only understood but were deeply opposed to it, for reasons similar to my own. The bloated military budget, the dangers of the growing use of military equipment against citizens by civilian police forces, fury at the "get-off-scot-free" coddling of the banking and financial establishment after the 2008 economic meltdown -- all are areas of basic agreement. We have many similar rational, well-thought-out responses to worrying trends in our country.

Voters in many rural areas all over the U.S. heavily favored candidate Trump over candidate Clinton. Was that simply an irrational attraction to a pompous narcissist? I think it was largely something else. My pre-election conversations in Montana included discussions in which Trump was characterized as crazy, erratic, even frightening. But a vote for the candidate who personified the established order that they so mistrusted, and who spoke of them as "deplorables," was unthinkable. Some 15% of those casting ballots nationally did so for the first time; many of them were the "undecided" or "missing" voters who finally believed they had a choice and emerged to support the rogue candidate. Other votes for Trump were protests against the Republican Party itself, which also had ignored their interests. Trump was clearly a different option, providing hope that they were finally being heard.

It's hard to think clearly about how we in the progressive community can actively resist the potential disasters of a Trump presidency. That we must do so is not a question. But I hope that process includes developing a genuine understanding and even a concern for the worldview of those Trump voters in the red states. They're an important part of America. They always have been.
Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.

Saving BUB, Beautiful Unique Biodiversity, as in this Giant Elephant Shrew (cousins to elephants, not American shrews), is another reason to preserve carbon storing forests.

Credit John White at calphotos.berkeley.edu

Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon

OO Nations Come Together To Save Kenya's Disappearing Coastal Forests - These forests:

have high levels of biodiversity; many unique plants and animals are found nowhere else in the world;

Are under increasing human pressure from arriving migrants;

have lost nearly 10 % of its tree cover in 15 years.

Threatened by planned major human and industrial developments.

A European funded program via the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a trade bloc of several African nations, wants to help communities and governments better manage their forests, restore others, and monitor and maintain the wildlife within them.



Advertisement

Short Term Greed, Long Term Loss - both for Indonesia, and the world: forests provide clean water and air, and moderate the climate, as well as store carbon. Source Mongabay

OO Higher Incomes Drive Indonesian Smallholders To Oil Palm And Rubber - creating an 'agricultural boom' that leads to clearing rainforest for agriculture, and a loss of the ecosystem services it provides - such as clean waterr for communities.



When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.

*

*

LOSING NOAH'S ARK

Beautiful, and Now Rare are tigers worldwide. Credit Matt Gibson

OO World On Track To Lose Two-Thirds Of Wild Animals By 2020 major report warns.

"The richness and diversity of life on Earth is fundamental to the complex life systems that underpin it."



OO Radical Overhaul Needed To Halt Earth's Sixth Great Extinction Event - Takeaways:

biodiversity is vital to human survival;

it is being wiped out at both the population and species leves;

it started thousands of years ago when humans wiped out megafauna;

the latest surge of this mass extinction correlates with exploding human populations

Not Just Useful, But Vital forest birds, like these birds of paradise, are essential to forest health, cleaning trees of pests and distributing seeds.

the WWF 2016 Living Planet Report shows a decline of nearly 60% in thousands of populations of thousands of animals worldwide;

these declines undercut our vital ecosystems.

How can we stop this?

What Are You Doing To My Future? Right now, ruining it, unless we change towards a sustainable way of life - a happier, different one.

Bring our populations and consumption down to sustainable levels;

Protect remaining wilderness and reserves;

Ban overhunting;

Elect leaders who make all of this a priority.

HOT NEWS

A Spanish Future? And much of the rest of the Mediterranean will be like this as global warming heats the planet just a little more, a new report indicates. Source www.forocoches.com

Advertisement

OO Rapidly Warming Mediterranean Headed For Desertification study warns; even with 2 degrees of global warming, the current global goal, desertification would overtake parts of this lush and vibrant region.



Related Headline:

OO Why Spain Could Be A Desert By 2100 say climate researchers, as Mediterranean vegetation could change dramatically as the climate warms just a little further.



OO Meanwhile, In The Real World, Climate Change Is Creating Vast Deserts and these is little sign that a Trump presidency will stop it.



*

*

FIXING CLIMATE CHANGE

@@ A Simple And Smart Way To Fix Climate Change given by Dan Miller in 2014 at a Ted talk suggests a way to profit as we tackle climate change, by finally charging those who sell and use fossil fuels - and distributing the revenues back to all of us.

Advertisement

The strategy is sure to speed transition to clean renewable energy. What's not to like? Check it out!

*

*

MELTDOWN

Danger: Subversive Melting Buying Big Sea Rise as dense salt water undermines vast ice shelves of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, threatening to destabilize the entire region, and thus raising sea levels worldwide by 4 to 15 feet. Source Rex Features via AP

OO Undermined By Warm Water, Antarctic Glacier Lost 1,600 Feet Of Ice

Within 10 Years An influx of warm waters under the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will help determine the future of coastal cities worldwide.



IT'S THE KIDS

OO How Fossil Fuel Use Threatens Kids' Health - Pollution and climate impacts of burning coal, oil and gas take a high toll, globally, on child health.

*

*

GOOD CLEAN NEWS

OO Renewables Poised For Rapid Growth Worldwide With about 500,000 solar panels installed daily worldwide. In China, two wind turbines are built every hour, are among the stats in a new report.

Advertisement

Related Headlines:

OO IEA Boosts Renewables Growth Forecast As Global Installed Capacity Surpasses Coal in a new International Energy Agency report. - Takeaways:

Renewable electricity capacity is expected to grow 42% worldwide by 2021;

Global renewable energy deployments are set to grow at a much faster pace than expected;

Renewable energy resources made up over half of the world's new electricity capacity in 2015.

OO Renewables Made Up Half Of Net Electricity Capacity Added Last Year Green energy accounted for more than half of net electricity generation capacity added around the world last year for the first time.



Keeping the Pandoran Carbon Box Closed by increasing soil's ability to keep carbon locked up in it. Source Natash at free images

OO Carbon-Storing Soil Preservation Gets Royal Touch - Prince Charles who joins an initiative to keep carbon locked in the world's soils to combat climate change. Takeaways:

Advertisement

The goal is to reduce the amount of carbon leaked from soils by 0.4% a year - enough to halt the rise of carbon dioxide levels in the air.

Nearly 180 countries have signed up to the initiative;

Small farming changes could lock in large amounts of soil carbon.

OO US To Unveil Path To Decarbonize By 2050 In Morocco With a sweeping plan at the November climate summit, giving other nations a template to plan their own shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources.

Electric Vehicle: Sign of a Healthier Future says the American Lung Association. Source NREL at energy.gov

OO Zero-Emission Cars Will Slash Healthcare And Environmental Spending says a new study by the American Lung Association.

In 2015, New York, Oregon, New Jersey and other states suffered24 billion in health-related costs,

including 220,000 lost work days, due to asthma, heart attacks, and other ailments caused by vehicle emissions.

OO New England Says No To Natural Gas, Yes To Renewables with a pair of decisions.





OO New Projects Boost Europe's Attractiveness To Renewables Investors



*

*

SOCIAL REPERCUSSIONS

Source LinkedIn

OO The Carbon Bubble: Why Investors Can No Longer Ignore Climate Risks The financial risks posed by climate change and bad investments could make an ugly dent in your retirement savings, a new report warns.



OO Years Of Living Dangerously Documentary Series Returns to deal with the political realities of climate change that our presidential election has largely ignored - and will likely be ignored by president elect Trump.





Against Her Will: Married at 13, Divorced at 14 is the fate of many Bengali climate refugee girls like this one, whose families can no longer support them. Source news.trust.org

OO Driven To Dhaka By Disasters, Bangladeshi Girls Harassed Into Marriage Girls forced from their homes by climate-linked disasters face early marriage in Dhaka's slums.



Advertisement

OO Diseases Released By Permafrost Become A Bigger Worry As permafrost melts under global warming, releasing and re-activating ancient bacteria that could be harmful.



OO Food Shortages Fueling Bear-Human Conflicts In Bolivian Andes Climate change is placing stress on regional ecosystems and forcing species to compete for territory and food.



WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

@@ Climate Change 101: Why Care?

What You Need to Know - Bill Nye tells it all in five minutes amid graphic, dynamic, engaging, compelling imagery. Check it Out!

*

*

*

*

GOOD IDEAS

Feel the Power as you wear this fabric, which captures energy and generates power. Source Live Science

Advertisement

OO This Fabric Captures Energy To Power Your Electronic Devices Via sunlight and your own motions, storing it in embedded fibers.



OO Green Roofs Take Root Around The World With San Francisco as the first U.S. city to require that certain new buildings be built with a green roof--an eco-friendly design technique that sows plants above a roofline.



OO A Low-Carbon Future Is The 'Only One Available' Says noted British economist Lord Stern: green development is the only route to global economic growth and points to China leading the world on climate change action.





OO Don't Rebuild Where The Sea Is Rising:

Jersey Shore Rebuilds In Sea's Inevitable Path - even though Superstorm Sandy crushed N.J. communities in part due to rising sea levels, rebuilding has not accounted for rising seas.



OO California: Why Are We Sending Precious Water Downstream

For Fish In The Middle Of A Drought? Because salmon may underpin much of what makes California special, from redwoods to Zinfandel to the carrion-eating condor.



Advertisement

OO Kenya Greens Drylands To Combat Land Degradation and is heavily investing in rehabilitation efforts to stave off the threat of desertification under continuing climate change and other human impacts.



OO Landfills Have A Huge Greenhouse Gas Problem.

Here's What We Can Do About It Takeaways:

Landfill methane is captured and generating energy at many landfills,

But far more just escapes. Better approaches:

Cut down on food waste

And compost whatever organic waste remains.

NATURAL REPERCUSSIONS





As Menacing As It Looks this giant mass of warm Pacific water, fueled by global warming, is disrupting wildlife and further fueling the California drought. Source NOAA

OO Dangerous ' Blob' Is Back:

Warm Ocean Mass Severely Disrupting Weather, Wildlife - Takeaways



A giant mass of warm Pacific water

Up to 300 m deep

Has waxed and waned since early 2014

Along the US western coast and much of the Pacific.

Empty Crab Pots, Empty Jobs as an algal bloom stalled the 2015 crab season. Source lostcoastoutpost.com

Advertisement

The blob has caused toxic algal blooms;

Is severely disrupting wildlife

From plankton and fish to birds and mammals,

And disrupting fishing industries.

The blog warms air,

creating more rain, less snowpack,

Further fueling the California drought.

A 'Ridiculously Resilient' High Pressure Ridge developed in 2014 over the Pacific and has never gone away despite waxing and waning. It shunts storms away from California.

The blog developed via

A longterm high pressure ridge

Resulting from abnormally warm west Pacific waters.

In that global warming is warming oceans,

the blob is linked to it,

and hints at further climate change disruptions.

OO Warming Boosts Early Ocean Algae Blooms -

And Potential Ripple Effects - New research shows that a base of the marine food chain, a common blue green algae blooms as much as 20 days earlier as oceans warm.

Advertisement

This, in turn, could disrupt the food chain, where, for example, whales and other marine animals have synchronized their life cycles to these blooms.

OO Australia Experiencing More Extreme Fire Weather, Hotter Days As Climate Changes and it's projected to get worse.



Coral Graveyards Now Common on the Great Barrier Reef as stressed corals further succumb to disease and predators. Credit Greg Torda, ARC Centre of Excellence Coral Reef Studies



OO Northern Great Barrier Reef Coral Bleaching Damage Worse new surveys suggest, 6 months after the bleaching started, as a growing coral death rate due to heat stress is worsened by disease and predators, scientists say.



Uncertain NZ future? Eastern Rockhopper penguins are critically threatened. Credit Laurent Demongin

OO New Zealand Oceans Deteriorating, Marine Wildlife Threatened as the oceans acidify and warm as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, a new government report warns.





Increased human pressure is risking the extinction of much of its native fauna, specifically:

33+ % of New Zealand's native species and subspecies of seabirds (eg, albatrosses, penguins);

50+ % of shorebirds (eg, herons)

25+ % of marine mammals (eg, dolphins, and whales)

*

*

SPEAKING OUT

OO Red, Race And Blue: Mobilize To Fight Climate Change - Bill McKibben and other activists are calling for a World War II-style mobilization to fight climate change.



OO North Dakota: Tribe Vows To Continue Pipeline Fight Despite Arrests

*

*

FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES

Caught In the Act as this video screencapture shows, of oil being released into the Gulf of Mexico by supervisors. Credit Evan Howington

OO Oil & Water: Video Catches Supervisors Dumping Oil In Gulf Of Mexico as they knowingly opened a valve on an oil pipeline 1,500 feet below, and 60 miles off the Louisiana coast.



OO What Is Causing The Rapid Rise In US Methane Levels? The rapid rise of gas mining in the US.



OO Australia's Coal Seam Gas Emissions May Be Vastly Underestimated by the industry, says a new report, jeopardizing Australia's commitments made at Paris and swamping any benefits gas has over coal,



Let Them Eat Carbon

OO US, Rich Countries Are Still Pushing Dirty Energy On Poor Ones Even as they pledge to cut emissions, they are helping to finance new coal-powered plants overseas.



Advertisement

OO US Nuclear Retirements Largely Replaced By Fossil Fuels which will up climate changing emissions.



*

*

If we do not live sustainably,

Our children will die inhumanely.



@@ The Cost of Unintended Pregnancy: Too Young

Teen childbearing 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.

They can go here to find locations:

And there are many more actions you can do, right here.

*

*

*

SOLAR KEEPS DANCING

OO Elon Musk Wants To Sell People Solar Roofs that look great, and he recently showcased a line of high-design roof tiles that generate power from the sun without the clunky panels sold by most companies.



OO US Company Launches All-In-One Home Clean Energy System

With Zero-Down Financing - Takeaways:



Swell company will cut capital costs by drawing utility revenue for distributed grid services;

Combining rooftop solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and an energy management system.

Customers get full-service electrical independence in exchange for a monthly fee.

Removing large upfront costs and maintenance responsibility will make for an easier sell.

MEH: In some ways this resembles Solpads except that Solpads sound more integrated.

Check it out here, right now!

*

*

*

WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS

Daily Climate Change: Global Map of Unusual Temperatures, Oct 12, 2014

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.

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.

*

*

*

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.

To help you understand just what science does and does NOT do, check this out!

Every day is Earth Day, folks, as I was reminded by this wild flower I photographed one spring. Making the U.S. a global clean energy leader will ensure a heck of a lot more jobs, and a clean, safe future. If you'd like to join the increasing numbers of people who want to TELL Congress that they will vote for clean energy candidates you can do so here. It's our way of letting Congress know there's a strong clean energy voting bloc out there. For more detailed summaries of the above and other climate change items, audio podcasts and texts are freely available.
Country

Afghanistan Albania, People's Socialist Republic of Algeria, People's Democratic Republic of American Samoa Andorra, Principality of Angola, Republic of Anguilla Antarctica (the territory South of 60 deg S) Antigua and Barbuda Argentina, Argentine Republic Armenia Aruba Australia, Commonwealth of Austria, Republic of Azerbaijan, Republic of Bahamas, Commonwealth of the Bahrain, Kingdom of Bangladesh, People's Republic of Barbados Belarus Belgium, Kingdom of Belize Benin, People's Republic of Bermuda Bhutan, Kingdom of Bolivia, Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana, Republic of Bouvet Island (Bouvetoya) Brazil, Federative Republic of British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Archipelago) British Virgin Islands Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria, People's Republic of Burkina Faso Burundi, Republic of Cambodia, Kingdom of Cameroon, United Republic of Canada Cape Verde, Republic of Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad, Republic of Chile, Republic of China, People's Republic of Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia, Republic of Comoros, Union of the Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, People's Republic of Cook Islands Costa Rica, Republic of Cote D'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, Republic of the Cuba, Republic of Cyprus, Republic of Czech Republic Denmark, Kingdom of Djibouti, Republic of Dominica, Commonwealth of Dominican Republic Ecuador, Republic of Egypt, Arab Republic of El Salvador, Republic of Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Faeroe Islands Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Fiji, Republic of the Fiji Islands Finland, Republic of France, French Republic French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon, Gabonese Republic Gambia, Republic of the Georgia Germany Ghana, Republic of Gibraltar Greece, Hellenic Republic Greenland Grenada Guadaloupe Guam Guatemala, Republic of Guinea, Revolutionary People's Rep'c of Guinea-Bissau, Republic of Guyana, Republic of Haiti, Republic of Heard and McDonald Islands Holy See (Vatican City State) Honduras, Republic of Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China Hrvatska (Croatia) Hungary, Hungarian People's Republic Iceland, Republic of India, Republic of Indonesia, Republic of Iran, Islamic Republic of Iraq, Republic of Ireland Israel, State of Italy, Italian Republic Jamaica Japan Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of Kazakhstan, Republic of Kenya, Republic of Kiribati, Republic of Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Republic of Kuwait, State of Kyrgyz Republic Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon, Lebanese Republic Lesotho, Kingdom of Liberia, Republic of Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Liechtenstein, Principality of Lithuania Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Macao, Special Administrative Region of China Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Madagascar, Republic of Malawi, Republic of Malaysia Maldives, Republic of Mali, Republic of Malta, Republic of Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania, Islamic Republic of Mauritius Mayotte Mexico, United Mexican States Micronesia, Federated States of Moldova, Republic of Monaco, Principality of Mongolia, Mongolian People's Republic Montserrat Morocco, Kingdom of Mozambique, People's Republic of Myanmar Namibia Nauru, Republic of Nepal, Kingdom of Netherlands Antilles Netherlands, Kingdom of the New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua, Republic of Niger, Republic of the Nigeria, Federal Republic of Niue, Republic of Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway, Kingdom of Oman, Sultanate of Pakistan, Islamic Republic of Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama, Republic of Papua New Guinea Paraguay, Republic of Peru, Republic of Philippines, Republic of the Pitcairn Island Poland, Polish People's Republic Portugal, Portuguese Republic Puerto Rico Qatar, State of Reunion Romania, Socialist Republic of Russian Federation Rwanda, Rwandese Republic Samoa, Independent State of San Marino, Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Senegal, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles, Republic of Sierra Leone, Republic of Singapore, Republic of Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia, Somali Republic South Africa, Republic of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Spain, Spanish State Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of St. Helena St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre and Miquelon St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Suriname, Republic of Svalbard & Jan Mayen Islands Swaziland, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Switzerland, Swiss Confederation Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand, Kingdom of Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of Togo, Togolese Republic Tokelau (Tokelau Islands) Tonga, Kingdom of Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Tunisia, Republic of Turkey, Republic of Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu US Virgin Islands Uganda, Republic of Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland United States Minor Outlying Islands United States of America Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe
WASHINGTON, USA - NOVEMBER 10: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, with his wife Melania (L), speaks after meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell two days after winning the 2016 Presidential Election in Washington, USA on November 10, 2016. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The peaceful transition of power from one elected president to the next under the rule of law is a sacred hallmark of our republic.

None can deny that Donald Trump is the legally chosen president-elect.

But that does not necessarily mean, as some in the media and the establishment Democratic and Republican parties would have it, that we who oppose Trump and most of what he stands for have any duty of loyalty to the man or his policies.

Advertisement

Quite the contrary. Those of us who believe in social and racial justice, greater income equality, and the compelling need to combat climate change, among other things, have a duty to use all of the tools of an awakened citizenry to block Trump from taking us backwards and to lay the basis for future progress, including in Congress, the media, the arts, the courts, electoral politics, and, if it comes to it, through widespread peaceful civil disobedience.

There's no automatic right of an incoming president to a "honeymoon" to see if he'll behave differently as president than he did as a candidate. As Maya Angelou famously said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

Over nearly 40 years in the public spotlight, Donald Trump has shown himself to be a narcissistic, bullying, misogynistic, racist, con man. It would be the height of naivete to think that he'll suddenly change at 70 years old or that any public hints at change are anything but a head fake to disarm the opposition.

Remember: Republicans didn't see fit to give President Obama a honeymoon. The very night of his inauguration, Mitch McConnell was meeting with Republican congressional leaders to plot a strategy aimed at insuring that Barack Obama would be a one term president. For nearly eight years, Congressional Republicans have used every tool in their toolbox to impede and obstruct President Obama's agenda. Congressional Democrats should be prepared to do the same to President Trump.

Advertisement

I applaud the tens of thousands of citizens who've taken to the streets in dozens of American cities during the past several days to protest what Trump stands for. I implore them to maintain nonviolent discipline, as violence will only make it easier for Trump to crack down on civil liberties. These are probably only the beginning of mass street demonstrations which are likely to escalate and grow during Trump's presidency.

But spontaneous street demonstration can only go so far. What's needed are permanent mass progressive organizations on a national, state and local level. Historically, progressive organizations have been fragmented and somewhat marginal. The Sanders campaign showed the potential for an exponentially new level of progressive organizations. Among most hopeful are Peoples Action, Black Lives Matters, and Our Revolution, the offshoot of the Sanders campaign. These organizations need to expand and work in unison.

Hopefully organizers from these groups are already circulating among the street demonstrators collecting names and email addresses for follow-up. These organizations need an inside/outside strategy, electing bold progressives at every level of government from dog catcher to city council, to mayor, to state legislatures, to Congress; while also engaging in mass issue movements and organizing street demonstrations.

They also need to take over and transform the Democratic Party from the hacks and corporatists who anointed the least electable Democrat, Hillary Clinton, as their nominee, and are partly responsible for giving us Donald Trump.

I've been quiet about Hillary and her crowd during the general election campaign, not wanting to give any aid and comfort to the Trump forces. But Hillary ran a disastrous campaign. She mistakenly thought she could win just by disqualifying Trump as Commander-In-Chief rather than emphasizing a substantive message of how she would make the lives of working class and middle class people better. Instead, Hillary's soft corruption in the form of her paid Wall Street speeches, selling of access to corrupt foreign governments and business people through the Clinton Foundation, and her idiotic penchant for secrecy that led her to use an unauthorized private email server allowed Trump to disqualify her.

Advertisement

Clinton didn't take the opportunity to run on the most progressive Democratic platform in modern history. And the Clinton's history of supporting job-killing free trade deals and financial deregulation gave her no credibility as a fighter for the economic interests of the working class. She ran as the embodiment of corrupt elites and voters rejected her for Trump.

Neo-liberal Clintonism and corrupt elites have dominating the Democratic Party for the past 25 years inevitably led to Donald Trump. These forces. needs to be marginalized in the Democratic Party and replaced by a politics that honestly speaks to the real grievances of the working class, which hasn't seen much of a raise in 30 years and who believes their children will be the first generation of Americans to have a worse life than their parents.

The Democratic Party needs a drastic overhaul. It needs to transform from an organization largely dedicated to raising money from corporations and billionaires to a mass popular party. It needs a DNC chair dedicated to that effort and a 50-state strategy, not a shill like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, or, as turns out, Donna Brazille (who fed Clinton the CNN moderators questions in advance of a town hall meeting with Bernie Sanders.)

It's being taken as a fait accompli that the next Democratic Senate minority leader will be the Senator from Wall Street, Chuck Schumer. The person filling that role will be the most powerful national leader of the Democratic Party. Schumer is constitutionally the wrong man to be the public face of a revitalized Democratic Party. The progressive wing of Senatorial Democrats should mount a challenge.

And, with all of the branches of the federal government in Republican hands, Senate Democrats needs to follow as strong a scorched earth policy to block President Trump and the Republican agenda as Mitch McConnell and his cohorts followed against President Obama. They need to use every trick in the Senate rules, including the filibuster, to block things like the repeal of Obamacare and the appointment of extreme right-wing Supreme Court justices.

Advertisement

Politics ain't beanbag. This isn't the time for a fake honeymoon. It's a time for progressives and Democrats to fight back with every weapon in their arsenal.

As Martin Luther King said, "We Shall Overcome, because the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

As union organizer Joe Hill said, "Don't mourn, organize."
Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes. Photo: Charles Platiau, Reuters.

This might be the understatement of the year: the world is full of surprises. Every so often, you hear about a truly astounding art discovery that comes right out of the blue: a long-forgotten canvas is found while cleaning out Grandma's attic; a rare antiquity is unearthed at a flea market; or a new attribution transforms an ordinary work of art into a priceless masterpiece. Just this week, it was reported that an oil painting depicting Jesus, trodden underfoot at an antiques fair in Avignon, might in fact be the original work of Renaissance great Raphael.

A possible Raphael, Noli Me Tangere. Credit: Colin Usher, Telegraph.

But how often does this really happen? If the long-running success of the television program Antiques Roadshow is any sort of barometer, the odds aren't astronomical that you might have some hidden treasure worth a surprising amount of money among Grandpa's old belongings. But these finds rarely make headlines. On occasion, however, true masterpieces are found in the unlikeliest places, lurking in attics and basements, just waiting for someone to discover their true value. We combed through MutualArt's database of art news articles from the last ten years to find out where to start looking.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Portrait of a lady as Flora.

First place to check is your attic, preferably your French attic, which is by far the most popular place for hidden family heirlooms that might be worth a lot of money. In 2008, an exquisite Giambattista Tiepolo masterpiece that had been discovered in the attic of a French chateau sold at auction for a stunning 2.8 million ($4.2 million), exceeding its pre-sale estimate by nearly 2 million. The Portrait of a lady as Flora had been hidden away in the attic by the vendor's grandparents, who perhaps felt a bit prude about a nude. In April of this year, another French attic produced a stunning long-lost Caravaggio painting, depicting Judith beheading Holofernes, and bearing the hallmark dark drama of classic Caravaggio. It was located behind a locked door in the attic, chanced upon by the house's owner while trying to repair a water leak. Quite the hidden treasure: the work is valued at more that 120 million euros, or $136 million. In September of 2013, the Van Gogh Museum unveiled an 1888 Van Gogh painting that had been banished to a Norwegian attic for years because of a passing suggestion that it might be a fake. It was subsequently rejected twice as inauthentic, but was finally authenticated by the Van Gogh Museum based on new evidence. Hidden masterpieces in the attic might also reveal further family secrets: in June of 2015, it was reported that a Scottish man discovered a Picasso painting rolled up and stashed in a suitcase in his mother's attic, while also learning that the painting had been a gift to his mother from a Russian soldier--his real father. And in a sensational story from 2010, a brother and sister chanced upon a Chinese antique vase in the attic of their deceased parents' house in London, and put it up for auction at Bainbridges Auction House. Expecting to sell it for between 800,000 and 1.2 million ($1.3-1.9 million), the siblings were shocked when the auction floor turned into a fast and furious bidding war. After 30 feverish minutes the Qianlong vase was sold to a Beijing-based advisor for a record-smashing 53 million ($85 million). Even the auction house director was flabbergasted at the intense demand for this Qing dynasty heirloom, admitting, "I didn't quite realize how exciting it was."

Advertisement

Vincent Van Gogh, Sunset at Montmajour, 1888. Herman Wouters for The New York Times.

Another great place to look is the basement. In September of 2015, an unknown painting, found in a New Jersey basement, went up for auction; the owner expected it to sell for $800, but it ultimately fetched $870,000 after three aficionados recognized it as an early work by Rembrandt, one of a series of small allegorical paintings he had executed as a very young man. (The fifth painting in the series, which illustrates the five senses, is still missing.) The basements of museums have also yielded some notable surprises in recent years, including Madrid's San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts' discovery of a Van Dyck Madonna, in 2011, which for years had been considered a copy. And 2010 saw a number of museum-basement-related finds, including an early Velasquez, discovered in the basement of Yale University's museum, and the Staedel Museum's rediscovery of a work by Ludwig Kirchner in its basement.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Unconscious Patient (An Allegory of the Sense of Smell), 1624. Getty Museum.

Antique shops can sometimes house overlooked masterpieces. In May 2014, it was confirmed that a painting bought at a Spanish antique shop for around $200, 20 years earlier, was indeed an early work by the artist Salvador Dali. It had fooled everyone for so long because the date inscribed on the painting read 1896 (eight years before the artist was born) rather than 1921 (the date that infrared, x-ray, and ultraviolet tests determined), possibly meant by the artist as a joke or an experiment with numerology. A Van Dyck painting identified on Antiques Roadshow in 2013 took the title of the most valuable work of art ever appraised on the television show, with presenter Fiona Bruce estimating its value at up to 500,000 ($780,000). It had been purchased 12 years earlier, at a Cheshire antiques shop, for only 400 ($625).

Advertisement

Salvador Dali, The Intrauterine Birth. Photo: AFP/JIJI.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paysage Bords de Seine, 1879. Photo: Potomack Company / Associated Press.

You can also get lucky on the digital equivalent of the flea market: eBay. In 2014, a collector found an original watercolor by Victorian artist Richard Dadd on eBay, unattributed and included as part of a larger collection of works for sale on the online bidding site. The painting was purchased for a mere 200 ($330), while comparable works are regularly sold at auction for tens of thousands. And in February of this year, the BBC show Fake or Fortune appraised a painting by Post-Impressionist painter Edouard Vuillard, at 250,000-350,000 ($310,000-436,000)--one of a pair of works with a distinct oval shape. The other canvas had been sold on eBay to a mystery buyer for only 3,000 ($3,750), or "the bargain of the century."

French School, 13th Century, Virgin and Child Enthroned.

Often enough, however, these modest, unassuming artworks with priceless pedigrees are hidden in plain sight. An ivory carving of the Madonna and child, purchased in 1949 in London for 80 (or about 2,600 or $3,260 today), spent the next 50-odd years sitting on a mantelpiece, assumed to be a fake or a Victorian copy. In 2013, it was reported that historians traced the carving back to the Bridgettine nuns, dating it to the 13th century - transforming a piece of mantelpiece kitsch to a bona fide Gothic ivory worth 1.2 million ($1.9 million). It was sold at Sotheby's in 2013 for nearly twice that. And in 2010, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen was surprised to find that a painting hanging in a reception room, that was attributed to one of Rembrandt's pupils, was by the master himself, instantly increasing the painting's value from 80,000 to 8 million euros ($87,500 to $8,750,000).

Advertisement

While some truly incredible works seem to have materialized out of thin air--the Caravaggio behind a locked door in the attic, for instance--most of the great discoveries in recent memory have resulted as a reappraisal of an existing work that was overlooked or underestimated. Clearly, art's value is not inherent to the object. It often just depends on whether the right pair of expert eyes has assessed its worth. So, once you've rummaged through the attic and investigated the basement, take a closer look at what you already know you have. Could that old canvas be misattributed? And have you had it appraised recently?
While in uniform, we collectively made the military more effective through our diversity, unique skills, and resilience. And after service, women veterans continue to positively contribute to our communities. A higher percent of female (vs. male) veterans are employed. Women veterans have higher median household income than women non-Veterans. A higher percent of women veterans earn higher education degrees and are enrolled in higher education compared to male veterans and female civilian counterparts. We also volunteer more often than men, at a rate almost double our current service participation of 16%. And these trends are likely to become more obvious in the coming years. According to the Department of Veteran's Affairs, female Veterans are on average younger (49 vs 64 years for men), healthier, and live longer.



Of course, as a sisterhood, we also face challenges our nation's veterans have never before seen. More veteran women are widowed compared to our civilian counterparts. A higher percent of women veterans have a service-connected disability, have no income, and experience poverty more than male veterans (though we fare better than civilian women in these areas). Women veterans are also more likely to be homeless than our male counterparts, and seven times more likely to commit suicide than women that have not served. One in three women in the service will have experienced sexual assault. VA studies also indicate 36.6% of military women suffer from domestic abuse.



Yet if one can find a silver lining, these unfortunate statistics serve to highlight the resilience among women who have served. We know how to pull ourselves up by the boot straps and carry on when tragedy strikes. We succeed when faced with adversity. We adapt and overcome. And quite often, we do this as a sisterhood, and our sisters in arms provide needed assistance and support.



Now we're looking for our communities to do the same.



Lack of awareness of female veteran challenges and hidden bias towards women brought our two organizations (Lean In Women Veterans and Think Broader Foundation) together to change the narrative as well as raise the profile of our sisters in arms, who continue to be our sisters after service.



We asked women from all services, all ranks, and all wartime eras, to send us a simple "I Served" selfie video. The response was overwhelming and powerful.



THIS is what a veteran looks like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la5srei_ylw&feature=youtu.be



We hope these images will not only inspire you, but they will also move your heart to see the pride in service exhibited -- from a World War II Army nurse who served in northern Africa, to a 95-year old Air Force vet, to a Marine Corps bugler. The imagery includes the first U.S. military woman to summit Mt. Everest, one of the first female Rangers, single women in command of military units abroad, and moms in command of their toddler "troops" at home.



We ask you to join us in celebrating the millions of women in your respective communities who are now serving as teachers, musicians, doctors, bankers, running non-profits or city councils, and beyond. We ask you to think broader about our veteran population and see women as an important part of that fabric.



Whether helping women transition to civilian life, or working to promote a more accurate and inclusive depiction of those who have served, we encourage you to join us and simply recognize the breadth and depth of talent among us. We do this while also encouraging increased connection within the communities where we live so we can ensure the successful reintegration of our nation's veteran force.



Paula Broadwell is the Co-Founder and Director of the Think Broader Foundation. She has served 20 years on active and reserve duty in the U.S. Army. She lives in North Carolina with her husband (also a vet) and their two sons. Learn more at www.thinkbroader.org @think_broader @paulabroadwell
An average of once every hundred years, the Electoral College count in a presidential election does not correspond to the so called "popular" vote. And after every such election, supporters of the popular vote winner often decry the federalist system enshrined in the Constitution and calls for abolition of it.

For example, in 1960, after the Congressional Quarterly declared Nixon to be the popular vote winner even as Kennedy won overwhelmingly in the Electoral College, aggrieved Republicans demanded that the federalist system of presidential elections enshrined in the Electoral College be abolished. Now, as Hilary loses the Electoral vote, but ekes out a win in the popular vote count, cries for abolition of the Electoral College can be expected from those who support the losing candidate.

Of course in parliamentary systems such as in the UK, where parliament serves the same purpose as the Electoral College in the U.S. by voting for the prime minister, it is not unusual for the popular vote to not correspond with the vote in parliament. For example, in 1974, the Labor Party lost the popular vote by 1%, but nevertheless won three more seats in the parliament, with the result the Labor was able to form the government.

Advertisement

But the Founding Fathers, in the interest of separation of powers, created the Electoral College to insure that no president would be beholden to the executive as in Parliamentary democracies. Thus they incorporated in the U.S. Constitution the Grand Compromise that united a loose confederation into a stable form of government that, by insuring a peaceful transition of power over more than two centuries, has become the envy of the world. That compromise brought together those state delegates who at the Constitutional Convention demanded a legislature and executive based purely on represensentation by popular vote, and those who insisted that each state have equal representation (as had been the right of states under the Articles of Confederation.) This Grand Compromise, upon which the U.S. was created, had two component parts: 1) the creation of both a House of Representatives based purely on popular vote, and the Senate based upon equal representation of each state; and 2) the creation of the Electoral College in which each state's electoral votes were based on both representation in the House, and representation in the Senate.

For the past two hundred years, the cyclical partisan demand for abolition of the Electoral College has been the same for the argument in favor of abolishing the U.S. Senate--namely that citizens of smaller states have greater representation in the Senate than those in large states. But as a young Senator John F. Kennedy stated in 1956 in opposing a knee-jerk Republican proposal to abolish the Electoral College, "(I) f it is proposed to change the balance of power of one of the elements (of the Grand Compromise), it is necessary to consider the others". In other words, if were are to abolish one prong of the Grand Compromise (the Electoral College), then we must consider the other element as well--namely the existence of the U.S. Senate.

Thankfully for the Republic, John Kennedy was successful in defeating the Republican proposal to abolish the Electoral College, and by implication also preserving the existence of the U.S. Senate. The wisdom of defeating such a proposal was reflected in the election of 1960, in which the popular vote was so narrow (within seven tenths of one percent), that had the Electoral College been abolished and a so-called "poplar vote" system been in place, the narrow margin of popular votes would have triggered re-counts in almost every state. If one recalls the national trauma of recounts in but one state in the 2000 election--Florida--one can imagine the national nightmare of recounts and court challenges in all 50 states under a popular vote system. Indeed, it has been estimated that without the Electoral College, it would have taken at least 6-9 months before a popular vote winner could be declared, if then. Thankfully, the wisdom of the Electoral College was vindicated when John F. Kennedy was declared the winner by virtue of an overwhelming Electoral College victory. Nixon didn't even bother to contest the election, despite substantial evidence of vote fraud in Chicago, and despite winning the popular vote, because he knew that even if he won Illinois, Kennedy's margin of victory in the Electoral College would still have resulted in Kennedy's election. Indeed, without the Electoral College, Trump would almost certainly have had a claim to countless recounts in every state because of the narrow margin of popular votes in favor of Clinton.

Advertisement

As the centuries pass, and Americans have become accustomed to almost instant winners in the Electoral College (except in the once in a century election in which the Electoral vote is close, as in 2000), the wisdom of the Founding Fathers has been vindicated again and again. One of the purposes of the Electoral College was to insure that support for a candidate be broad as well as deep. For example, if in the 1950's an overwhelming popular vote support for segregationist candidate in the Deep South had resulted in a narrow popular vote margin in the country as a whole, that candidate could not have won in the Electoral College given the opposition to that candidate across the rest of the country.

It remains to be seen if another John F. Kennedy will rise to the occasion to fend off the inevitable demands by the losing party in the resent presidential election for abolition of the Electoral College because it did not result in a win for the candidate which eked out a thin majority in the popular vote. But history will not be on the side of those who seek to destroy the federalist system created by the founding Fathers. In the last 200 years, there have been more than 200 aborted attempts to undermine federalism by doing so, including 100 proposals for a so-called "popular vote". All have failed once the catastrophic implications of such an undermining of our federal system have been understood.
The New York Times

Goodbye to the Climate

By Robert N. Stavins

Donald J. Trump once tweeted that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive." Twitter messages may not be clear signs of likely public policies, but Mr. Trump followed up during the campaign with his "America First Energy Plan," which would rescind all of President Obama's actions on climate change.

The plan includes canceling United States participation in the Paris climate agreement and stopping all American funding of United Nations climate change programs. It also includes abandoning the Clean Power Plan, a mainstay of the Obama administration's approach to achieving its emissions reduction target for carbon dioxide under the Paris agreement.

What should we make of such campaign promises? Taking Mr. Trump at his word, he will surely seek to pull the country out of the Paris pact. But because the agreement has already come into force, under the rules, any party must wait three years before requesting to withdraw, followed by a one-year notice period.

Those rules would seem to be mere technicalities. The incoming Trump administration simply can disregard America's pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26 to 28 percent below the 2005 level by 2025. That is bad enough. But the big worry is what other key countries, including the world's largest emitter, China, as well as India and Brazil, will do if the United States reneges on its pledge. The result could be that the Paris agreement unravels, taking it from the 97 percent of global emissions currently covered by the pact to little more than the European Union's 10 percent share.

In addition, Mr. Trump's Environmental Protection Agency probably will stop work on regulations of methane emissions (a very potent greenhouse gas) from existing oil and gas operations. Undoing complex existing regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan, will be more difficult, but a reconstituted Supreme Court will probably help President Trump when that plan inevitably comes before the court. Also, the new president will most likely ask that the Keystone XL pipeline permit application be renewed  and facilitate other oil and gas pipelines around the country.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to "bring back" the coal industry by cutting environmental regulations. That may not be so easy. The decline of that industry and related employment has been caused by technological changes in mining, and competition from low-priced natural gas for electricity generation, not by environmental regulations. At the same time, Mr. Trump has pledged to promote fracking for oil and gas, but that would make natural gas even more economically attractive, and accelerate the elimination of coal-sector jobs.

If he lives up to his campaign rhetoric, Mr. Trump may indeed be able to reverse course on climate change policy, increasing the threat to our planet, and in the process destroy much of the Obama legacy in this important realm. This will make the states even more important players on this critical issue.

Robert N. Stavins is a professor at Harvard, where he directs the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.
Attendees at the COP22 conference in Marrakech, Morocco, this week to implement the UNFCCC Paris Agreement need to consider more than just the physical degradation caused by climate change; the human costs of increasing global temperatures now include increased risks of child marriage. No more so than in Bangladesh, where increased floods, droughts and river erosion are exacerbating a pre-existing crisis where 52% of girls are married before their 18th birthday due to poverty, gender inequality, and tradition. A new series of documentaries entitled Hidden Connections follow the lives of two female friends: Razia, 14 and Brishti, 13 who have recently migrated to Dhaka after their homes, schools and crops have been desolated by flood waters.

Brishti is bought to Dhaka to be married before she discovers that her 'husband' is already married with children. She flees to her aunt's house and is featured discussing her ruined dreams of becoming a doctor and the prospect of fending for herself. Razia has only very recently migrated to Dhaka from Jamalpur. Her parents are struggling to feed and shelter their family. Only able to afford to send their youngest son to school, Razia's father sees her marriage as the only solution to their struggles. Her mother on the other hand is desperate to keep their daughter at home till she is 18, in the hope that this will give her a better chance of escaping poverty.

For families like Razia's, whose livelihood relies solely on agriculture, increasingly turbulent seasons make sustaining an income virtually impossible. Climate change is generating a fraught environment of food insecurity and poverty, causing an increase in child marriage. According to a study by the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit at the University of Dhaka, between 50,000 and 200,000 people are estimated to have migrated to Dhaka to escape climate-related insecurity, many of them young girls. These so-called 'climate change refugees' are living in increasingly impoverished conditions in the slums of Dhaka. Here, a girl's education costs substantially more than in rural areas, and is a luxury these families cannot afford. Where girls like Brishti and Razia might have stayed in education and married later in the villages, they are now having to flee to Dhaka where they will be married earlier.

Advertisement

Exacerbated poverty also sustains the dowry system in Bangladesh, whereby the bride's father is expected to pay the groom's family to protect and keep his daughter. Exchanging dowry in Bangladesh is illegal but remains pervasive throughout the country. For a family, such as Brishti's, who have just lost their paddy fields and home due to flooding, the short term expense of paying a dowry is a far more viable option than struggling to feed, clothe, educate, house, and protect one more family member. When a girl is married, her education will likely cease and she is at risk of premature sexual activity, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, and health problems.

A girls' honour is closely tied to a families' social standing in Bangladesh. 'Climate change refugees' new to Dhaka may be motivated to marry their daughters to appease these social pressures. For an unemployed father, forced to migrate to the city with his family having lost his livelihood, the pressure to maintain his honour also increases. For men, particularly fathers, feelings and perceptions of emasculation are tied to no longer being able to provide for his family. The risk of a daughter being 'gossiped' about, sexually harassed or considered 'promiscuous' in a city full of strangers furthers the risk of losing familial honour. Protecting a family's honour therefore becomes a driver of child marriage. Additionally, a recent survey suggests that 90% of women have experienced sexual harassment in urban Bangladesh. To avoid emasculation, dishonour, and in an attempt to protect their daughters from sexual attention, fathers are therefore encouraged to marry their daughters off early.

Advertisement

Hidden Connections raises unexplored but increasingly important questions for organisations tackling child marriage. It highlights the need for more research to establish how climate change is affecting girls and what needs to be done to ensure that climate change does not result in an increase in child marriages. In the meantime, governments and NGOs need to ensure that the risk of child marriage is integrated into humanitarian responses dealing with the consequences of climate change. This means ensuring that families' basic needs are met and that they have the resources to care for their daughters without turning to child marriage as a coping strategy. Girls must also have access to quality non-formal/formal education both during and after a crisis until schools can be re-established. No girl should be married early due to circumstances beyond her control, and climate change is no exception to this rule.
In every sphere of life, Africans are great innovators and entrepreneurs. You only have to step into an African market to see and hear that ingenuity.

But every entrepreneur needs investment, and that's where things often get tough in Africa. Investment is hard to come by, whether you're a small trader trying to open a bank account or a company trying to get a loan so it can grow.

African countries need investment, too. Right now, in particular, they need investment so they can adapt to the effects of climate change and play their part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change adds urgency to the investment needs that were already there -- for infrastructure, agriculture, health and education.

Advertisement

The historic Paris Agreement that was reached at the COP21 climate talks last year provides for such investment. Developed countries have committed to providing $100 billion a year between 2020 and 2025, and to set a new, higher goal for the period thereafter.

At this year's global climate talks, COP22 in Marrakesh, Morocco, in November, it's crucial that developed countries finalise the "roadmap" towards meeting that annual $100 billion goal. Above all, that means the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases: the United States (15% in 2014), the European Union (9.6%), Russia (5%) and Japan (3.6%).

There's a catch when it comes to the $100 billion. The definition of "developed countries" goes back to 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed. So it doesn't include China -- now by far the world's largest emitter (29.6%). China, Brazil and other emerging economies should be making their own significant contributions to climate finance, and stepping up to meet other global climate obligations.

The $100 billion is called climate finance, but it's really climate investment. Partner countries need to make sure that they invest in Africa to protect the progress that they have already helped to build. China, a major investor in many African countries, bears a particular responsibility to safeguard its investments.

Advertisement

On a global scale, climate finance for Africa is an investment in the future. Africa may contribute little to total emissions now, but almost all of the world's population gains over the next 50 years will happen in Africa. Africa and its climate finance partners need to make sure that growth is low-carbon growth.

Africa, for its part, is far from being a passive recipient of rich countries' money. Africa has the potential to become a global climate leader. The Africa Progress Panel, of which I am a member, demonstrated this powerfully in its recent report Power, People, Planet: Seizing Africa's Energy and Climate Opportunities.

African countries know that their 21st century growth needs to be driven by renewable energy, and they are making astonishing leaps. Delegates at COP22 need look no farther than Ouarzazate, where Morocco is building the world's largest concentrated solar power station. Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa have also built huge solar and wind power stations.

The continent needs low-carbon energy not just to climate-proof African growth, but to expand access to modern energy: two-thirds of Africans do not have electricity. It takes a long time to design, finance and build big power stations, and to extend grid access to remote areas. That's why many Africans are turning to off-grid solutions, especially solar. Off-grid household or mini-grid systems are expected to supply 70% of the 315 million people who will gain access to electricity in rural Africa by 2040.

That scenario will still leave at least 300 million people without electricity in 2040, however. And only 3% of international climate finance is being channelled towards such "decentralised renewables".

Advertisement

That gap illustrates starkly the triple challenge delegates must address at COP22. We need to increase our ambition, to act urgently, and to think long-term.

When it comes to ambition, one of the achievements of the Paris Agreement is the joint commitment to revise our global climate goals regularly. COP22 needs to maintain and increase that pressure. For one thing, there is widespread doubt over whether the $100 billion in climate finance will even be enough. Some experts have put the figure at $400 billion.

We need to act urgently because with every month that goes by, there is new scientific evidence that global warming's effects are more severe and more immediate than we had anticipated. Developing countries need to receive climate finance now so they can start adapting immediately for climate effects that will be upon us very soon. That means finalising a new workplan at COP22 to compensate countries for "loss and damage" from climate change.



We need to think long-term because this is not just about us, or even our children: this is an investment in every generation to come. They will look back and judge us not on the promises we make - or the excuses we make - but on the action we take now.

Strive Masiyiwa is founder and chairman of Econet Wireless and a member of the Africa Progress Panel--Chaired by Kofi Annan.


Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

On inauguration day in January, many of Trump's voters will be looking forward - among other campaign promises - to the construction of a wall along the Mexican border.

This means a physical barrier over 3,000 kilometres in length, on a border that one million people legally cross on a daily basis, producing half a trillion dollars in annual trade.

Advertisement

The promised wall

Trump compared his projected border barrier to the Great Wall of China. The wall, as Trump has dreamt it, will be as high as 17 metres.

It will have a "big, fat, beautiful door" that will only let legal migrants enter the US. The wall is supposed to keep Mexican and Latin American "bad hombres" - who Trump generally conceives as drug traffickers, criminals and "rapists" - away from the US.





Trump has promised that Mexico will pay for the wall. When he has been asked about how he is supposed to make Mexico pay for it, he has threatened either war or cutting off the flow of billions of dollars in payments that Mexican migrants send to Mexico.

The wall was central to Trump's campaign. He now has to deliver on his promises - however outrageous or irrational they may have been. The time for Mexico (and the rest of the world) has thus come. The sheer fact of Trump's victory sent the Mexican peso plummeting in global markets. Mexico is officially the first victim of the Trump effect.

Advertisement

The wall that is already there

Ironically, Trump's wall is already there. Its foundation stone was laid as early as 1848. In 1845, the US annexed Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory. Mexican claims over Texas prompted the US to invade Mexico in 1846. The military campaign was finalised by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which established the US-Mexican border at the Rio Bravo, and ceded more than half of Mexican territory to the US. A marble monument built in Tijuana commemorates the day Mexico and the US agreed to the current border lines.

The territorial spoils of the Mexican-American War allowed the US to emerge as a world power in the late 19th century. The peace that followed the war, from a Mexican perspective, established a bitter pattern of political, economic and military inequality between the two countries. This asymmetrical relationship has haunted Mexican-US relations ever since.

Enter globalisation. Wall construction along the Mexican-American border began during former president Bill Clinton's administration, 21 years before Trump's wall-building promise.

The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 displaced hundreds of thousands of Mexicans as small business owners and farmers were crushed under the corporate muscle of giants such as, for example, Walmart or Cargill. American officers foresaw this collateral effect of NAFTA, and rushed to harden immigration laws.

In 1996, Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The act approved the construction of a 22.5km fence near San Diego. Clinton thus replaced the barbed-wire fence at the border with an iron wall. The metal sheets that make up the fence were originally used by the US military to land planes during the Gulf War.

Advertisement

President George W Bush continued Clinton's work. In 2006, the Secure Fence Act - signed on the wave of post 9/11 security panic - resulted in setting aside of several laws to build almost 1400km of fencing in the border. Legal impediments on water and air pollution, endangered species and Native American heritage, among other matters, were waived to allow the construction of the wall.

When the history of the physical barriers constructed along the Mexican-American border is read in these terms, it is preposterous to pretend that the wall-building techniques used by the Chinese in the eighth century to control their borders will still be useful in the 21st century. Borders are meant to be crossed by people who do not necessarily have the resources to pay a visa. Nobody leaves his homeland without a reason. If Mexicans and Latin Americans could find the same economic opportunities they search for in the US in their countries, they would probably not leave.

Trump's promised wall has hence only made evident the hypocrisy of the supposed defenders of Latin American migrants in the US. Trump has explicitly said that the American Dream is not meant for everyone.

His predecessors - including Barack Obama, the American president who has deported the largest number of undocumented migrants (2.6 million) in American history - simply preferred an inconspicuous style of getting things done.

Another brick

In 1848, article XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave the US responsibility for controlling "hostile Indian incursions" in Mexico. Today, it is Mexico that watches over the border for the US, preventing Central and South American migrants from crossing it.

Advertisement

On August 31 2016, Trump hastily visited Mexico and met with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. The meeting was deemed a major political failure in Mexico. Mexicans felt betrayed because Pena Nieto did not comment on Trump's repeated insults against both Mexico and Mexican people.

There was little reflection, however, on Pena Nieto's claims about Central and South American migrants. Pena Nieto referred to a "humanitarian crisis" caused by "an increasing number of non-Mexicans" crossing the Mexican-American border. He also advocated for a bilateral agenda on "national security", aimed at controlling the flow of "undocumented people and illegal drugs and weapons".

There was not a single mention to the dangers that Central and South American migrants face in Mexico as they ride "The Beast" - that is, the Mexican network of freight trains.

Central and South American migrants "ride The Beast" atop the moving trains because there are no passenger railcars. They face obvious physical dangers that range from amputation to death, if they fall or are pushed. Beyond the dangers of the trains themselves, migrants are subject to extortion and violence at the hands of the gangs criminal groups that control the routes into the US.









Reuters





After visiting Mexico, Trump ridiculed Pena Nieto in his infamous Phoenix speech on immigration policy. He smugly used the Mexican president to boost his campaign. His major triumph, however, was the adoption of his views on immigration by the Mexican government.

Advertisement

On Trump's side, there was an unsurprising lack of empathy. On the Mexican side, however, there was a shameful lack of courage in acknowledging the role that Mexico plays in enforcing on non-Mexican migrants the harsh immigration policies that Mexicans loathe and fear from the US. All in all, as Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli has suggested, the Mexican government became that day just another brick in Trump's wall.

Taming the beast

On 15 August 2016 - just a few days before Trump's visit - article 11 of the Mexican Constitution was amended to grant refugees the right to both seek and be granted asylum in Mexico.

In similar terms, the draft Constitution of Mexico City defines Mexico's capital as refuge and destination of migrations and exiles. A sensible response to Trump's international bullying demands Mexico to take these principles and ideals seriously.

If Mexico wants to escape Trump's asphyxiating grasp, it needs to tame "The Beast" by protecting the non-Mexican migrants who cross into its own territory and treating them with the dignity they deserve. For Mexico, the only way to overcome Trump is by showing him that he may have the power and the money to build a huge wall, but he has neither justice nor reason on his side.

Luis Gomez Romero, Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory, University of Wollongong

Advertisement
K-State students get to 'Hang with Tang' on Tuesday

Cat Zone
While cyber crime is a hot topic in the press, one industry expert says that in the insurance world, cyber is just a buzzword.



Peter Hacker is group chief innovation officer at international broker Ed, as well as the co-founder of cyber research institute Distinction.Global in Germany.



The number one problem I think we are confronted with if we look into this particular topic, Hacker said, is that its a topic which is not a tangible risk.



The risks that insurers and brokers are used to dealing with are tangible, but the value propositions of corporations around the world today are heavily driven by intangibles, Hacker said while speaking at an Ed cyber academy event in London this week.



[Cyber] is a buzzword, its nothing more than what I call intangibles, and intangibles are the reputation the company has, the brand the company has, the data the company has, the revenue streams the company has, the intellectual property the company has, the relationships with its customers in general  thats what it really is.



Let me be very clear, Hacker explained, cyber risk is not a new risk.



What is new is the volatility of the risk, which has drastically developed over the last three or four years, he said, leading to a cyber economy today worth upwards of $1trillion.



As globalisation and digitisation continue to grow exponentially, so too does the risk of cybercrime and attacks, a threat which Hacker describes as unparalleled in nature due to its high frequency, high severity and potential global impact.



The biggest challenge in the long term for us, brokers as well as insurers, is going to be  can we offer a sustainable solution? And at what price? What is our value proposition?



The good news, according to Hacker, is that anyone who is agile or proactive in the field  whether an insurer or a broker  has a great chance to dominate the market.



People who are static will be caught on the backfoot, he said, because this is not a product-driven market going forward, this is a solutions driven market.



The relevance of the industry going forward, as far as cybersecurity and cyber-crime is concerned, is partly dependent on whether it can structure bespoke solutions, Hacker stressed.



If we want to make money as an industry from this, then we better know what exposures we can have on the books, quantitatively and qualitatively, and we need to have responses that go beyond just general insurance, he said.



And we can only do that if everybody works together.



Related stories:

Markel enters US cyber market with London hire

Threat, opportunity and disruption for the industry in 2017


Architect Jean Nouvel visits the Mohawk Theater with Mayor Richard Alcombright to view the scale model of the Empire State Building under construction for the forthcoming Extreme Model Railroad and Contemporary Architecture Museum in Heritage Park. Nouvel, left, Nicolai Ouroussoff, former chief architecture critic of the New York Times, and the mayor look over models built for the model railroad museum. PreviousNext

Renowned Architect Tours North Adams' Theater, Heritage Park



Nouvel taking a tour of Mass MoCA with Director Joseph Thompson.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel toured the city this past Saturday with Mayor Richard Alcombright and Thomas Krens to show him some of the redevelopment ideas being considered.



Krens, former director of the Guggenheim and founder of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, is developing an extreme model railroad museum in Western Gateway Heritage State Park and is bullish on the concept of a boutique hotel and refurbished Mohawk Theater. He's also looking at a for-profit art museum near the airport.



That's all part of a concept to develop a "cultural corridor" along Route 2 from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown to the center of North Adams.



"The expansion of the dream or the vision has spread to the Main Street and the downtown," said the mayor on Thursday. "[Nouvel] was very interested in the development and interested in the hotel and the theater."



He described any conversation with Nouvel as "in its initial phases," saying they had talked about current projects and concepts and "ideas that could contribute to the economic revitalization of the city."



Nouvel and Krens are friends who have collaborated on several projects. They appeared on Oct. 28 at the "Lunch at the Landmark" annual event in New York City, where Nouvel discussed some of his projects including the under-construction Louvre Abu Dhabi.



Krens had invited him back to his Williamstown home and to see the area, which he'd not visited in nearly a dozen years.



"I had the pleasure of meeting him and showing him around," said Alcombright, saying the French architect seemed to be "intrigued" by the historic buildings on Main Street's sunny side and Krens' ideas. Among those is the architecture and model railroad museum with its to-scale 31-foot-tall Empire State Building, recently moved from Mass MoCA to the empty Mohawk.



"We brought him in to see the Empire State Building so he would have a sense of the size and scope of the project," the mayor said.



Nouvel spent quite a bit of time looking at Heritage Park, and the natural scenery. He also toured the Clark Art

His body of work has been recognized with numerous international awards, including the Pritzker Prize for Architecture; the Aga Khan Award for Architecture; the Royal Gold Medal for architecture awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects on behalf of the British monarch; and the Wolf Prize in Arts.



"The concept of a cultural corridor in northwest Massachusetts is unique. The existing institutions are phenomenal. The combination of elements that exists here is like no other that I know of," Nouvel said in a statement released by Bertram Beissel von Gymnich, director of his New York office. "The landscape, the topography, the colors, and the collision of Main Street, the overpass, and the railroad lends itself to an extraordinary and precise intervention or series of interventions that would preserve the scale of the city, and build on the concentration of cultural resources in the region."



Nouvel is the latest friend of Krens to visit the gateway city. Last year, his motorcycle club  including Laurence Fishburne and Jeremy Irons  roared to the Mohawk to brainstorm ideas. And former governors William Weld and Michael Dukakis are onboard with the model railroad museum.



"The idea of having someone of this wonderfully positive notoriety coming to the city and looking at your stuff is pretty impressive," the mayor said of Nouvel. "It gives another level of credibility to the things Tom Krens is trying to do here."
We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector

We work towards an equitable,

gender-just, self-reliant and

sustainable fisheries,

particularly in the small-scale,

artisanal sector
Thank you for reading!

To read this article and more, subscribe now for as little as $1.99.
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
The content you are trying to view is exclusive to our subscribers.

To unlock this article:
Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken Travel to California

Santa Monica, California - Deputy Secretary Antony Blinken will travel to California from November 10-12.

On November 10, the Deputy Secretary will be in the Bay Area to meet with technology companies tackling global challenges and will attend a session of Stanford Universitys Hacking for Diplomacy course, a cooperative effort between Stanford and the Department of State to bring innovative approaches to bear on complex foreign policy issues.

On November 11, the Deputy Secretary will co-host a State Department Innovation Forum roundtable on the risks and opportunities of advanced machine learning-powered communication and its impact on our information environment and democracy worldwide. This event, including representatives from leading tech companies as well as experts from academia and civil society, will be co-hosted by the National Democratic Institute and the Institute for the Future.

This workshop is the latest installment in the State Department's Innovation Forum launched in January of this year to convene regular conversations between senior policymakers and global innovators to spark and accelerate new approaches to foreign policy challenges. Through workshops, roundtable discussions, and other events, the Innovation Forum allows the State Department to see more clearly around the innovation corner, while providing others a window into what we are trying to achieve and opportunities to join us.

On November 12, the Deputy Secretary will give remarks on innovation and foreign policymaking at the Rand Corporations Politics Aside conference in Santa Monica.
Ransomware - A closer look

Washington, DC - Ransomware has emerged as one of the most serious online threats facing businesses. The FTC examined this issue at a September 7th workshop kicking off the Fall Technology Series, the first of three events looking at new and evolving technologies that raise critical consumer protection issues. Panelists  including security researchers, technologists, law enforcers, and business leaders  discussed the nature of the ransomware threat, how to defend against it, and essential steps to take if your business becomes a victim.

What is ransomware?

Ransomware is a form of malicious software that infiltrates computer systems or networks and uses tools like encryption to deny access or hold data hostage until the victim pays a ransom, frequently demanding payment in Bitcoin. In the typical case, the criminals demand between $500 to $1,000, but some have demanded as much as $30,000. Panelists described a wide variety of ransomware variants. For instance, some hackers will delete the victims files if payment isnt made within a specified period of time, and many newer variants use highly advanced methods of encryption. Ransomware can be incredibly profitable to criminals, many of whom now have the resources to hire professional developers to build increasingly sophisticated malware.

Ransomware incidents have skyrocketed in the past year, and several high-profile attacks on health care organizations highlight the challenges that ransomware poses. In February, an attack on a hospital in Southern California knocked out its network for more than a week, leaving staff without access to email and some patient data. The hospital ultimately paid a $17,000 ransom to restore access. Another attack crippled the networks of ten Washington, DC area hospitals for nearly two weeks. But ransomware isnt just a health care problem. It affects businesses across the economy. Panelists agreed that incidents of ransomware will continue to increase across the board  and nobody is immune.

The risks associated with ransomware

If your business holds consumers sensitive information, you should be concerned about the threat of ransomware. It can impose serious economic costs on businesses because it can disrupt operations or even shut down a business entirely. In addition, a business failure to secure its networks from ransomware can cause significant harm to the consumers (and employees) whose personal data is hacked. And in some cases, a business inability to maintain its day-to-day operations during a ransomware attack could deny people critical access to services like health care in the event of an emergency. Thus, a companys failure to update its systems and patch vulnerabilities known to be exploited by ransomware could violate Section 5 of the FTC Act. Also, this principle is illustrated in several recent FTC actions that highlight the importance of defending against malware, such as cases against Asus and Wyndham.

How is ransomware delivered?

Criminals deliver ransomware in a variety of ways. According to one panelist, 91% of all ransomware arrives through email phishing campaigns. These typically require the user to take some kind of action such as clicking on a link or downloading a malicious attachment. Other campaigns use drive-by downloads, where a user visits a malicious website or a site that has been compromised, and the act of loading the site causes the ransomware to automatically download onto the users computer.

Other delivery methods are even more sinister. Several panelists described the rise of malvertising campaigns, where malicious code is hidden in an online ad that infects the users computer. These attacks are particularly nefarious because they can occur even on trusted websites through third-party ad networks that redirect the user to an infected server. More recently, attackers have exploited server-side vulnerabilities to deliver ransomware payloads by searching for networks that had failed to patch known vulnerabilities.

How to defend against ransomware

So what can you do to defend against the threat of ransomware? Panelists urged businesses to invest in prevention and recommended:

Training and education. Implement education and awareness programs to train employees to exercise caution online and avoid phishing attacks.

Cyber hygiene. Practice good security by implementing basic cyber hygiene principles: Assess the computers and devices connected to networks to proactively identify the scope of potential exposure to malware. Identify technical measures that can mitigate risk, including endpoint security products, email authentication, intrusion prevention software, and web browser protection. Implement procedures to keep security current. Update and patch third-party software to eliminate known vulnerabilities.

Backups. Back up your data early and often. Identify business-critical data in advance and establish regular and routine backups. Keep backups disconnected from your network so that you can rely on them in the event of an attack.

Plan. Prepare for an attack. Develop and test incident response and business continuity plans.

How to respond if youre a victim

If ransomware strikes, panelists urged organizations to consider these steps:

Implement your continuity plan. To be ready if an attack occurs, have a tested incident response and business continuity plan in place. Well-prepared organizations with reliable backups may be able to restore systems from those backups with minimal data loss or business interruption.

Contact law enforcement. Panelists recommended immediately contacting law enforcement, such as a local FBI field office, if you discover an attack.

Contain the attack. Keep ransomware from spreading to networked drives by quickly disconnecting any infected computer from the network.

What should organizations do if there are no backups available? Does it ever make sense to pay the ransom? Most panelists, including law enforcement, dont condone paying the ransom. If you pay, that doesnt guarantee your encrypted data will be returned. In some cases the attackers simply increase their demands once a victim expresses a willingness to pay. Despite the serious risks to consider before paying a ransom, panelists also recognized that businesses may need to evaluate all possible options in the event of a crippling ransomware attack that limits the organizations ability to function.

The Fall Technology Series continued last month with a workshop on Drones and will conclude with a workshop on Smart TVs on December 7th.




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!
Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

The Life Cinematic email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

No reindeer, no snowflakes. Not a hint of blue or cream. Sofie Grabol, aka Sarah Lund of The Killing (Danish: Forbrydelsen), is wearing a black cashmere sweater and black trousers. This is Nordic noir land. In a cafe on the waterfront, in Copenhagen. The water is dark and cold and forbidding and you wonder what lies beneath the surface. She is wearing a purple nail varnish. Her lips are a slash of red on snow. Even her gum is black, or it would be if she were chewing any. Having started smoking aged 13, she gave up at 30 when she was pregnant, but then became addicted to nicotine gum for the next 15 years. Im just waiting for the old dependency to kick in any time, she says.

Grabol would rather not be somebodys archetype or icon. After playing detective Sarah Lund, she was at a conference with Sophia Helin, who plays detective Saga Noren in The Bridge, and everyone wanted us to be this perfect tough woman, impossibly brave, impossibly wise, impossibly beautiful. She laughs at the absurdity of it and shakes her head free of the responsibility of embodying a myth. I cant be that, she says.

Its a paradox, but for me the whole idea of feminism is to get beyond gender. Otherwise you might miss all the beautiful nuances. Which she has a lot of. She is fun and funny, the opposite of a prima donna, and about as wise and brave and beautiful as you can reasonably get without being utterly impossible.

I only really have one major complaint about Grabol: she has no plans to reprise her Sarah Lund role. No intention to make a widely anticipated (maybe, more correctly, fantasised about or prayed for) fourth series of The Killing. Fellow fans and Lund addicts, trust me: I tried to talk her round. Maybe I even, very slightly, succeeded. I mention that Soren Sveistrup, the series creator, happened to say, I miss Sarah Lund. And she says, Oh really, he said that? That is interesting. I didnt know that.  Maybe there was a hint of something there, like the beam of Sarah Lunds great torch (which she has a habit of whipping out) stabbing a light through the darkness.

I was forever being asked about the female role. But in my mind what was interesting about Sarah Lund is not that she was a woman, but that she was a great character. But there has to be a but. But why would I go back?  I give her about 10 solid reasons. Its like a divorce,  she counters. Maybe you still love someone and all, but really, would you want to do the same thing all over again?

She concedes though that making The Killing was one of her all-time highs. There was so much energy,  she recalls. I was having the time of my life and we were laughing so much. Thats the magic of it. Everyone was  what is the phrase?  in sync. She even uses the word joy, not something often associated with Nordic noir.

Denmark was the land of pornucopia: Soren Sveistrup, creator of The Killing (Christian als)

Grabol gives full credit to the recently deceased director Birger Larsen, who shot the first few episodes, for inventing a whole new look and feel to crime drama which set the tone for the series. She dismisses the cliches about Nordic being moody and gloomy. But it really was darker than the average show. She means this literally. We had a lot of complaints from people who were having to turn up the brilliance on their TV sets. 

She is treated respectfully, but without undue deference by the cafe staff. Nobody comes up and asks her for her autograph or selfie. She not only turns up on time to our rendezvous but gets there before I do. She is a star but has no star mentality. I was always very bad at behaving like a star. And anyway there are no stars in Denmark. We have a flat society. Its in our DNA.

She nibbles at a herring and salad sandwich. Very Danish. She keeps fit, she says, by jogging a mere 1.5km most days, down to the waterfront and back to her flat. Very slowly. I run like an old lady. And hope I dont bump into anyone.

Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up

If this were Hollywood, she would be surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of agent, publicist, make-up artist, fitness instructor, and personal New Age guru. As it is she is gloriously free and unconstrained. And this must be part of the magic of the specifically Nordic strain of noir.

Grabol describes herself as an existentialist and quotes Kierkegaards to dare is to lose your footing, not to dare is to lose your self. She considers herself (and Lund) to be a misfit, in terms of authority, society, family. Not just the villain, she says, but the hero, the seeker-after-truth, must contain the darkness. There is a focus inward. In this way The Killing is like Hamlet (and Elsinore is only a couple of stops away from Copenhagen on the train). Its not just Who done it? its more Who-am-I? and What is my purpose in life?

The word angst comes up, as it inevitably must. As does the concept of romantic anomie, (usually translated as normlessness, from the Greek, meaning without laws), from Durkheims superior book on suicide. Normlessness is the norm in Copenhagen. But you dont have to commit suicide. Grabol is the opposite of Ophelia, who drowns herself. There is a brilliant scene towards the end of the third series of The Killing in which Sarah Lund is shot pointblank but, shrewdly wearing a bulletproof vest, gets to take out the bad guy. And, by the same token, blow a hole through the horrendous tradition, exemplified by Emma Bovary (Flaubert), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), and Miss Julie (Strindberg) in which a female protagonist is called upon to (a) have sex then (b) annihilate herself, and her only choice is poison, train, gun, or razor. Its like Grabol is taking revenge on literature.

Probably not on Sveistrup, the creator of The Killing, though. I meet him in the clean, well-lit offices of his production company, which are only a short walk away from the waterfront. I used to have so much fun every week finding another deep, dark, dripping dungeon for Sarah Lund to have to fight her way out of, he says, with a hint of a semi-sadistic bad guy chuckle. Sarah Lund is her torch. Famously he never let anyone know who-had-dun-it until right at the end. So they were kept guessing too. But did he know? He says he was guided by The Smiths song, Barbarism begins at home. 

Copenhagen: where normlessness is the norm... (AFP/Getty)

Not his current home, though, where things are well and he is due to leave the city the following day to take his kids to Legoland. It was not always thus. For Sveistrup, all Nordic noir drama springs out of a sense of loss. His family was dysfunctional and his mother committed suicide when he was 21. A family being amputated, that was the beginning, he says. I could have wasted my life going to a psychoanalyst but I did this instead. This being to write revolutionary television. The way he conceived Forbrydelsen was, broadly, anthropological; not in terms of individuals but of tribes. There is a single killing, but the effects are felt throughout a community or several communities: a family, a school, a whole political apparatus. Its like tossing a stone in a lake and watching the ripples radiate outwards, he says. Its like Oedipus and the whole city is hit by a plague, and can only be saved by exposing the truth. 

Sveistrup was born in 1968, so he is a child of the Sixties, but it is late Sixties. The flower in flower-power is starting to wilt and die. This is not the first-phase, super-charged Sixties, all Minis and Maharishis and marijuana-perfumed Haight Ashbury. This is not the era of Woodstock, but of the corpses of Altamont, with a cortege of Hells Angels. And the rise of porn.

Im drinking coffee and Sveistrup is drinking hot chocolate. We are surrounded by books called Dansk Porno and Scandinavian Blue. Which are research material. Sveistrup is no hippy, the hair tending more toward minimalist or degree zero. He was brought up not in Copenhagen but on a small island, Thuro, a few square kilometres with only a couple of thousand inhabitants, but even so he clearly recalls as a young boy close encounters with graphic sexual images at every turn, in the sweetshop, displayed among Smarties and bubble-gum, or in the petrol station, next to engine oil. There was no innocent pre-sexual idyll for him. Denmark was the land of pornucopia.

The Minister of Justice who, for the first time in history, signed off on the Porn Law in Denmark back in 1969, was not some wild-eyed, long-haired aficionado of Oz and Lady Chatterleys Lover. He was a straight-laced conservative who thought that, by making it legal, people would lose interest and porn would gradually fade into a distant memory. He got that a little bit wrong, says Sveistrup.

The fascinating thing about the mood and mentality of the time is that there really was a sense of innocence and enthusiasm in the air. A genuinely utopian moment. The first full-on sexual intercourse film, orgies on stage, and one show, he remembers, involving a woman and a pig attended by a lot of stars and good Copenhagen citizens. Then the gangs moved in and the porn wars began and thus was born the troubled, strife-riven, Scorsese-style society at the core of the new television series he has been writing, working title Kings.

There is a sexual tolerance now that we can thank the Seventies for, he says. But it was a disaster. Although not a believer Sveistrup often thinks in religious terms. It was like  what do you say in English  the Fall? he says. The expulsion from paradise. Before Sergeant Pepper, it was still pure, he says. Then noir takes over. Copenhagen was our Sodom and Gomorrah, he said. Noir is post-lapsarian. Nordic noir begins when the Scandinavian brand of the social democratic liberal idyll is shattered. Back then even feminism was pro-porn, we thought it was all about expressing your desires openly. But there is no liberation without coercion. Sex is no longer some blissful exercise in attaining inner peace Kama Sutra-style, but rather an enigma (one of his favourite words).

Inspector Norse: Grabol says that Sarah Lund, the seeker-after-truth, must contain the darkness (BBC)

Sveistrup is a post-romantic. He said he had to write The Killing because he couldnt get a proper job writing for the movies. He studied history and literature at the University of Copenhagen and then went to film school and signed up with the Danish television company DR. He had a strong sense that television was a second-class citizen, but that it could and should be the equal of film. It should be epic, like a Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone spaghetti Western, he says.

There is a vicious circle linking The Killing and Kings, almost a palindrome. The Killing is underpinned by the hermeneutic code: an act of extreme sexual violence has occurred; as the series progresses towards an end, we work our way back towards the beginning to find out the truth. We would often film Sarah Lund from behind, in the darkness, because more than anything you would want to see her face, says Sveistrup. Its a fundamental desire, to know, to solve the mystery, to resolve the enigma. But then we are into the realm of what Freud called epistemophilia, we need to peer through keyholes, we want to see not just the face but the impossibly naked body in which everything is revealed and it is this very impossibility that drives us in the direction of sexual violence.

There is also an obscure connection between Sveistrup and Lee Child, the Anglo-American author of the Jack Reacher thrillers. Sveistrup was deeply influenced as a child by watching Brideshead Revisited on Danish TV (with subtitles). I loved the melancholy, he recalls. And the pacing, where one short (Evelyn Waugh) novel is turned into 11 leisurely episodes, is found again in The Killing. In the production team behind that series was none other than Lee Child, in his previous incarnation as Jim Grant, television filmmaker.

I said I thought Lee Child would be pleased about having a small part in the genealogy of The Killing. Of course, we didnt have a lot of choice,  says Sveistrup. There was only one channel in those days. 

Next week, continuing his quest to understand what lies at the heart of Nordic noir, Andy Martin crosses the bridge (that really, really famous bridge) from Copenhagen to Malmo to meet Swedens Hans Rosenfeldt and Sofia Helin

Andy Martin is the author of Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me (Bantam Press, RRP 18.99). Andy Martin also teaches at Cambridge University
Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

IndyArts email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

On 19 March, 2000, 16 years before Donald Trump was elected president, The Simpsons aired an episode in which Donald Trump is elected president.

Bart to the Future turned out to be scarily clairvoyant, with Bart seeing a vision of his life in which his sister Lisa is president and forced to pick up the pieces from a Trump presidency.

"As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump," Lisa tells her staff at one point, who inform her the country is broke thanks to his time in office.

But why did the creators choose Trump as her predecessor?

"The important thing is that Lisa comes into the presidency when America is on the ropes, and that is the condition left by the Trump presidency," episode writer Dan Greaney told The Hollywood Reporter back in March, when Trump heading to The White House still looked unlikely.

"What we needed was for Lisa to have problems that were beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and that's why we had Trump be president before her."

More than just a plot device though, Greaney said it was a warning to America.

[It] just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom, he added. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane."

Democrats can at least take solace in the fact that, if The Simpsons continues its incredible run of predicting the future, Trump will eventually be replaced by the first woman president.

Last night, South Park hastily rewrote its latest episode to reflect the shock outcome of the election.
Sign up to the Independent Climate email for the latest advice on saving the planet Get our free Climate email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Independent Climate email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The Paris Agreement on climate change is dead following the election of Donald Trump as the next US President, right-wing MPs in Australia have claimed.

The Republican has dismissed climate change as a hoax and pledged to scrap the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in almost every form  a move with echoes of Theresa Mays decision to close the UKs Department for Energy and Climate Change, giving its responsibilities to the new Business Department.

Mr Trump has also appointed one of the most prominent climate change deniers in the US, Myron Ebell, to lead his transition team covering the EPA as he prepares to take office.

In Australia, the right-of-centre ruling Liberal Party decided to ratify the Paris Agreement.

But some of its MPs suggested the treaty was now dead, just days after it came into force.

George Christensen MP tweeted: With #ParisAgreement my vote would've been no. Australia has ratified but US withdrawal means Paris is cactus.

However he added that he thought parliament should approve treaties already negotiated by the Government.

Fellow Liberal MP Craig Kelly also wrote on Facebook that Paris is cactus.

Mr Kelly appeared to suggest he was from the Trump school of climate change denial with the President-elect having bizarrely claimed China is behind the global warming hoax.

I understand the faux outrage those in pockets of the Chinese solar panel manufacturers; they have a guilty conscience  and want silence the debate by yelling insults like you idiot, Mr Kelly wrote.

He also condemned protesters who gathered outside Trump Tower after the US election result.

World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Show all 29 1 /29 World reaction to President Trump: In pictures World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty Images World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mosul , Iraq Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures New Delhi, India Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Karachi, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kabul, Afghanistan AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem. Israel Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Moscow, Russia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Seoul, South Korea AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Peshawar, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Hyderabad, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kolkata, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Aleppo, Syria Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem, Israel EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Baghdad, Iraq Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Tokyo, Japan Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico Getty

Violent socialists, spew their Neo-fascist hate against the results of a democratic election on the streets of New York  while claiming to be all about love, Mr Kelly wrote.

So blinded by their self-righteousness, they can't even see their hypocrisy.

However the Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull dismissed a question from opposition Labor party leader Bill Shorten about whether Australias ratification of the Paris treaty was consistent with Mr Kellys cactus remark.

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

Mr Turnbull replied: The government has indeed ratified the Paris agreement and Australia is now the 104th country to do so  196 nations have entered into the Paris agreement.

Ensuring that we maintain energy security, energy affordability and meet emissions reductions, that is not a matter of ideology, it should not be a matter for political game playing as we have seen from the other side.
Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Lifestyle Edit email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The founder of fashion firm Nasty Gal has tearfully confirmed that it is filing for bankruptcy, saying: It's been a wild ride.

Sophia Amoruso started with an online eBay store and become one of the richest self-made women in the world after setting up the women's fashion retailer.

But on Friday she teared up on stage in Sydney, Australia as she confirmed that the company is filing for bankruptcy protection back in the US.

Only a few years ago, Amoruso was heralded by Forbes as Fashions New Phenom while The New York Times has described her as the Cinderella of tech.

"I flailed a lot before I started this business at 22, said the young entrepreneur, It was my first business and I got really far."

"Filing for bankruptcy is actually the most responsible decision for the business."

As Nasty Gal files for a Chapter 11 order, Amoruso will also step down as executive chairman but for her, this isnt the end.

She has just released her second book Nasty Galaxy and her life story is set to be turned into a Netflix series

In spite of its problems, the online retailer did, however, experience a sudden boost in sales a few weeks ago thanks to Donald Trump calling Hillary Clinton a nasty woman". Smartly, the brand seized a great opportunity from an otherwise unfortunate situation.

In an official statement, Nasty Gal assured its customers that their shopping experience will not be affected: We expect to maintain our high level of customer service and emerge stronger and even better able to deliver the product and experience that our customers expect and that we take pride in bringing to market, said Nasty Gal CEO Sheree Waterson.
Sign up to IndyEat's free newsletter for weekly recipes, foodie features and cookbook releases Get our Now Hear This email for free Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

IndyEats email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The classic combination of sweet and savoury has reached its extreme conclusion: offal with dessert.

Chef David Rossi in California has whipped up a foie gras banana split - with the fatty liver infused into a thick vanilla ice cream.

The indulgent dessert has been cooked up at The Ranch restaurant in Anaheim, California, to mark National Sundae Day.

The ice-cream is covered in a house-made chocolate shell, and served on top of strawberry sauce.

It's plated up with peanut crumble, boozy cherries, banana gel, and a vanilla bean sabayon.

It's served on a cross-section of tree, and is remarkably artistic, as well as decadent.

The dish is served on a cross-section of tree (Foodbeast)

The fatty French liver product is created by force-feeding ducks and geese.

Animal rights campaigners and politicians have made calls for a ban on the dish, but EU rules has so far prevented this.

Pressure could increase for a ban once Britain leaves the European Union.

The world's biggest food fights Show all 11 1 /11 The world's biggest food fights The world's biggest food fights La Tomatina, Bunol, Spain Biel Alino/AFP/Getty Images The world's biggest food fights La Tomatina, Bunol, Spain Biel Alino/AFP/Getty Images The world's biggest food fights La Tomatina, Bunol, Spain Biel Alino/AFP/Getty Images The world's biggest food fights World Custard Pie Championship, Kent Funk Dooby/Flickr The world's biggest food fights World Custard Pie Championship, Kent Funk Dooby/Flickr The world's biggest food fights La Merengada, Vilanova i la Geltru, Spain Ajuntament de Vilanova i la Geltru The world's biggest food fights La Merengada, Vilanova i la Geltru, Spain Ajuntament de Vilanova i la Geltru The world's biggest food fights Battle of the Oranges, Ivrea, Italy Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images The world's biggest food fights Battle of the Oranges, Ivrea, Italy Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images The world's biggest food fights Clean Monday, Galaxidi, Greece Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images The world's biggest food fights Clean Monday, Galaxidi, Greece Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images

Last year a ban was lifted in California after two years, when a judge determined that the law clashed with federal government regulations.

It is prized more for its texture than its taste: with a smooth, silky melt-in-the-mouth feel, and only a very subtle taste.
Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Lifestyle Edit email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

In 2009, a 61-year-old man joined an annual Remembrance Day parade wearing an impressive array of medals. So impressive in fact that an expert said their awarding would have made him world famous  and some sort of Rambo character. After he was tracked down, the man, later named as Roger Day, claimed his medals were pukka but his story was denounced by military personnel and the public alike.

(

Days tale is not an unusual case. Over the last few years, more and more instances of stolen valour have cropped up. So much so in fact that exposing military impostors has become somewhat of a cottage industry, with verified veterans themselves identifying and exposing fraudsters.

In Britain, a dedicated team of previous and currently serving personnel have created The Walter Mitty Hunters Club to expose those that they claim to be fake military personnel. I spoke to a retired major who served in the UK special forces about the club. He did not wish to be named but said on the record: Without wishing to comment on the methods employed by the Walter Mitty Hunters Club, the intent  to expose individuals who falsely claim to have served in the forces  is a public service.

Recommended Read more Clinton deploys volunteer army from America and world to take Florida

Though some may question what harm these eccentric types do, they actually damage the reputation and credibility of real veterans, resulting in an insidious effect on the way the public view former military personnel.

Personal gain

Impersonating a service member is more than just wearing a uniform to gain attention. Imposters can access financial support from military charities, secure employment, and even use the impact of deployment-related illness to gain leniency during court sentencing.

In some instances, fraudulent veterans with no service history have used information from real operational events in which service members have been killed to establish a credible story, and gain attention for several years before exposure. This can understandably be very upsetting for both the real service personnel involved and the families left behind.

But it is not just non-military personnel who make false claims. Some true veterans have also been found exaggerating the truth of their duty. Research from the US revealed that 41 per cent of those in a sample seeking post-traumatic stress disorder treatment had exaggerated their combat involvement.

Famously misleading

Superman actor Christopher Lee famously encouraged the embellishment of his two-year military service during the Second World War. Many believed he served in a number of elite British military units, including the SAS, but in truth he had only been attached as an RAF liaison officer. Though Lee never hid this fact, he failed to clarify his role and allowed false assumptions to be circulated.

Christopher Lee in uniform

Likewise, earlier this year it was revealed that American Sniper Chris Kyle had embellished his military records. He claimed to have earned two silver star and five bronze star medals, when in fact he had earned only one silver and three bronze stars.

Imposters who have never served are one thing but genuine veterans who talk up and embellish their service career are seen to be the most disappointing and frustrating. Recently retired Colonel Justin Holt, who served for more than 30 years with the Royal Marines, told me: Ive never met a veteran who isnt modest, to the point of humility, about his or her service.

He added: Those who embellish their stories are immediately suspect and do a disservice to themselves as everyone has a part to play in success, no matter how small. The eccentric impostors who have never served are a different matter, they deserve our pity rather than opprobrium.

There is no doubt that anyone who has served their country deserves far more than the medals and honours they receive  but those who inflate their resume erode their own real, legitimate heroism they showed during service.

Valour protection

Countries such as the US require personnel to serve a minimum period of time, and have been on at least one operational deployment to claim veteran status. Conversely, individuals only need to serve one day of basic training in the UK armed forces to qualify as a veteran  making it the most inclusive service in the world. As a result there are now an estimated 4.8 million veterans in Britain, making it easy for fraudsters to go unnoticed for long periods of time.

There are big differences in how fraudsters are dealt with on either side of the Atlantic too. In the US it is a specific criminal offence to impersonate military personnel to gain money, property or other tangible benefits. In the UK, impostors are mostly charged under the 2006 Fraud Act if they are found to be claiming to have won medals for financial gain.

Servicemen and women gather during the parade on Whitehall close to the Cenotaph during Remembrance Sunday (Getty)

A new British bill is in the works, however, which would go one step further than the US law. If passed it would prohibit the wearing or public display, by a person not entitled to do so, of medals or insignia awarded for valour, with the intent to deceive.

But are these strict criminal laws even enough to deter wannabe fraudsters? And what impact can amateur hunters really have? Though both certainly may deter some from so publicly announcing their false heroism, it is unlikely to cure the stolen valour epidemic entirely. For that to happen, we need to make it clear to one and all that veteran status is a right to be earned through proper service  not one that can be bought or made up.

This article first appeared on The Conversation (theconversation.com). Leanne K Simpson, is a PhD candidate, at the school of psychology, institute for the psychology of elite performance, at Bangor University
Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Lifestyle Edit email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

A new fitness class has been named the toughest in the world - with doctors and paramedics on hand in case anyone can't handle the intense pace.

London gym chain Gymbox launched its newest class called Flatline at its site in Farringdon, north London.

It is said to be so tough and potentially deadly that participants need to sign a disclaimer beforehand and fill in an organ donor form.

A compulsory oxygen station has been installed as part of the cool-down.

There are paramedics and a professional cardiologist on site in case of emergency medical situations and a compulsory oxygen station has been installed as part of the cool-down.

Curated by experienced Gymbox trainers and leading endurance experts, the class tests all elements of strength and stamina over a 45-minute period  the longest recommended time for a gym class of this intensity.

Participants wear a 12kg weighted vest as they work their way through a grid of activities including kettle bell thrusts, atlas stone throws, weighted rope climbs and box jump burpees. The class concludes with a 45-metre sprint while carrying two ammo cans.

Flatlineis said to be the most dangerous class in the world

The killer routine is then repeated five times.

David Cooper, director of Gymbox, said: Flatline comes with a significant warning: do not even think about this class if you are unsure in any way about the ability of your body to be pushed to its absolute maximum physical limits, and probably some way beyond. A lot of Gymbox members have said to us that their dream is to have a body to die for. With Flatline that will be a lot closer than some people think.

The class tests all elements of strength and stamina

The Farringdon site is the largest gym performance space in the UK and the only venue where Flatline is available. It opens on 14th November.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Chinese retail giant Alibaba has set a new record for its annual Singles Day event as sales reached $1bn in less than five minutes and hit $13.7bn in the first 16 hours as Chinese shoppers snapped up online bargains.

This means less than halfway through the day sales surpassed last years total.

At this pace, Alibaba could be on track to sell over $20 billion in merchandise, according to analysts.

Singles Day has become a Chinese tradition since students at Nanjing University in the 1990s chose the date as an antidote to Valentines Day, so single people could have a day to buy things for themselves. Alibaba, the driving force behind the event, turned into a shopping bonanza in 2009.

In terms of sales the day has now eclipsed both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the two biggest shopping days in the US.

"Back in 2013, 35 billion yuan ($5.14 bin; 4bn) was our one-day gross merchandise volume," said Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang in a live microblog posting on Alibaba's event.

"Now we can achieve it in one hour," he added.

About 83 per cent of transactions in the first hour were made on mobile devices this year, reflecting how China's consumers, armed with smartphones, are racing online to shop - to the detriment of bricks and mortar stores.

John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years Show all 9 1 /9 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years Shadows, 2007 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years From Me to You, 2008 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years Sweet Child of Mine, 2009 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years Rocking Horse 2010 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years The Long Wait, 2011 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years Snowpeople in Love, 2012 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years The Bear and the Hare, 2013 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years Monty the Penguin, 2014 John Lewis Christmas adverts through the years The Man on the Moon, 2015

The event was preceded by a musical extravaganza in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen that combined local and international celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham as well as the band One Republic.

Alibaba said its Singles Day sale would feature 6m products from 30,000 brands sold by 40,000 merchants.

Singles Day isnt just limited to Alibaba, other retailers such as JD.com also participate.

Chinas consumers purchased about $55.7 bn in merchandise online in 2015.

Additional reporting by Reuters
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

A journalist broke down in tears as he spoke of his fears over the type of country the United States may become under a Donald Trump presidency.

Jonathan Capehart, an opinion writer for The Washington Post, was asked by Channel 4s Jon Snow if as a gay, black man the current America is his America and whether he is worried the country may change under a Trump administration.

Capehart told Snow the question moved him almost into silence before his voice started quivering with emotion as he struggled to find his words.

President Trump protests Show all 20 1 /20 President Trump protests President Trump protests Patrons hold a sign as people march by while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators rally following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators march following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States expressing shock and anger over Donald Trump's election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency AFP/Getty Images President Trump protests Demonstrators protest outside the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois Getty President Trump protests A police officer aims a launcher after demonstrators threw projectiles toward a line of officers during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests An officer examines a vandalized police vehicle as demonstrators riot in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators take over the Hollywood 101 Freeway just north of Los Angeles City Hall in protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests A woman holds up a sign reading 'Trump you are an Idiot' as demonstrators gather during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump outside the City Hall building in Los Angeles, California EPA President Trump protests A masked demonstrator gestures toward a police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, near the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada Reuters President Trump protests Musician Lagy Gaga stages a protest against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in New York City Getty President Trump protests A woman yells as she takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A man dressed in red-white-and-blue sits on the curb during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A protester sets off fireworks during a protest against President-elect Donald Trumpin Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests University of California, Davis students protest on campus in Davis, California, U.S. following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests An Oakland police officer checks out damage after a window was broken by protesters at a car dealership in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests A protester faces a police line in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests President-elect Donald Trumpis victory set off multiple protests AP President Trump protests A fire burns during protests in Oakland, Calif AP

The election of President Obama was a great moment for this country and now we stand two months away from, excuse me, from all that disappearing, he said as he began to break down.

As an African-American, as an openly gay man, and as an American, that frightens me.

Snow then put Capeharts concerns to the President-elects campaign manager in Michigan who attempted to reassure him Mr Trump cares about you and your community.

Capehart said he had previously interviewed the former star of The Apprentice  shortly after the birther controversy where Mr Trump, along with others, speculated that Barack Obama was not an American citizen leading the President to release his long-form birth certificate  and found him warm, charming and engaging.

Recommended Seth Meyers chokes back tears reflecting on Donald Trump presidency

The man who ran for president over the last 15 months is not that man and that is why I and so many people are afraid. That is why I and so many people are praying for this nation, he said.

Capehart was not the only broadcaster to become emotional while dissecting the shock election results. On Wednesday, long-time Hillary Clinton supporter Seth Meyers choked back tears while conveying his hopes that both he and his mother live to see the first woman president of the United States.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

A mother from New York who was left heartbroken by the US presidential election result was given a shock when she ran into Hillary Clinton during a morning hike.

Margot Gerster was strolling with her young daughter in the woods in Chappaqua, New York, when she unexpectedly encountered the Democratic candidate walking her dogs.

Ive been feeling so heartbroken since yesterday's election and decided what better way to relax than take my girls hiking. So I decided to take them to one of favorite places in Chappaqua, Mrs Gerster wrote on Facebook.

 Donald Trump's win makes reporter break down on air

As we were leaving, I heard a bit of rustling coming towards me and as I stepped into the clearing there she was, Hillary Clinton and Bill with their dogs doing exactly the same thing as I was.

I got to hug her and talk to her and tell her that one of my most proudest moments as a mother was taking Phoebe with me to vote for her.

She hugged me and thanked me and we exchanged some sweet pleasantries and then I let them continue their walk. Now, I'm not one for signs but I think I'll definitely take this one. So proud.

Mrs Gerster posted a picture with Hillary taken by the latter's obliging husband Bill and signed off her message with the hashtag #iamstillwithher, a twist on Mrs Clintons famous campaign slogan Im With Her.

The Clintons are known to own a property in Chappaqua, situated around 30 miles north of New York City.

US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Show all 12 1 /12 US Presidential election: key moments in pictures US Presidential election: key moments in pictures The 2005 Access Hollywood video which showed Mr Trump bragging to Billy Bush Getty US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Hillary Clinton and her health concerns Getty US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Hillary Clinton and her health concerns Getty US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Mr Trump suggests gun-supporters could kill Hillary Clinton to prevent her from picking the supreme court justices Reuters US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Melania Trump plagiarises Michelle Obamas speech Getty US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Mr Trump said that judge Gonzalo Curiel would not be able to rule fairly, as he was of Mexican heritage United States Federal Court/AP US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Donald Trump anxious over securing black vote Reuters US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Hillary Clinton and concerns about securing black vote Getty US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Pope Francis Questions Donald Trump's Christianity Getty US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Donald Trump and his relentless remarks against Mexican people Getty US Presidential election: key moments in pictures Donald Trump and the sexual assault allegations Getty US Presidential election: key moments in pictures FBI director announced that there would be no charges for Hillary Clinton amid email scandal Getty

Mrs Clinton delivered an emotional concession speech in New York on Wednesday morning, urging voters to keep an open mind and telling young women not to lose hope.

The Democratic candidate won the popular vote by 47.7% to 47.43% but it was her opponent Donald who won the most electoral college votes and will become president in January.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Robert Vaughn has died aged 83 after a short battle with acute leukaemia.

The actor, best known for his roles in Man From UNCLE and Superman III, died 11 days before his 84th birthday with his family by his bedside, according to his manager, Matthew Sullivan.

He is survived by his wife, actress Linda, and his two children, Cassidy and Caitlin Vaughn.

Mr Sullivan, who represented the actor for 30 years, said Vaughn was the most wonderful human being and confirmed he died with his family around him.

Mr Vaughn was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar and Golden Globe for his early role in The Young Philadelphians and in 2012 he became the first major American star to feature on Coronation Street.

He played Milton Fanshaw, a wealthy American who met Sylvia Goodwin, played by Stephanie Cole, on a cruise, and later became a familiar face on British television with his role in the BBC show Hustle where he played conman Albert Stroller from 2004 to 2012.

Mr Sullivan added: He had a blast doing Hustle for the BBC, he loved that show and him and Linda loved living in London, it was one of his greatest joys doing that show.

Even at 83, women would still come up to the table to talk to him.

The Man From UNCLE saw Mr Vaughn's Solo paired with David McCallum's blond Russian Illya Kuryakin, in roles that were revived by Superman actor Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer for Guy Ritchie's big screen reboot in 2015.

Mr Sullivan added that the actor enjoyed seeing a new version of the spy story that made him famous. He said: He and Linda were living in Connecticut and the studio hired out an entire cinema for them to watch the movie.

He did enjoy it. He loved passing on what was next.

Since the announcement of his death, tributes have begun flooding in for the star on on social media.

Comedian and writer Stephen Fry tweeted: "Oh no. Robert Vaughn, such a fine actor, one of the best Columbo villains (no higher praise than that) and an utterly charming man, has died."

Former James Bond actor Roger Moore that he was sorry to hear the news of the actor's death.

Fans have described themselves as "disappointed" after hearing the news, with one praising him for an "eclectic career".

Before his death Mr Vaughn was being treated in hospitals in New York and Connecticut, according to his spokesman.

Press Association contributed to this report
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Police investigating a 14-year-old schoolgirl's claims that she was abducted and raped have now ruled out that she was not snatched off the street.

The girl told investigators that she was made to get into a hatchback car as she walked in Banbury Road in Summertown, Oxford, on September 28. Inside the car, she said a second man was waiting and she was raped. Now, Thames Valley Police have announced "the evidence gathered indicates that the reported abduction did not take place''. Officers are still investigating a claim of rape,

Police said they had carried out a "thorough review", including sifting through CCTV and dash-cam footage, as well as gathering witness statements.

E-fit images of two men investigators wanted to trace in connection with the report were publicly issued a fortnight after the girl came forward.

A police spokesman said: "Thames Valley Police continue to investigate an offence of rape against the victim and are following all lines of inquiry to establish what has taken place.

"Specially trained officers and staff from the police, Oxfordshire County Council children's services, health and other agencies continue to work with the victim, at her pace."

Superintendent Joe Kidman, local police commander for Oxford city, said the incident had caused "a great deal of community concern" but that such reports were rare.

Mr Kidman said: "In the weeks after the incident higher-visibility patrols were in place to provide reassurance and gather information.

"We have worked with schools in the area on their security plans and are ready to respond to concerns raised.

"Working with vulnerable and young victims is an extremely complex and lengthy process, and it is paramount that they are protected appropriately."
Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Lifestyle Edit email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

As Remembrance Day approaches, many people choose to wear a red poppy to commemorate the soldiers who have died in war. It is worn as a symbol of memory and hope, for those who gave their lives in battle.

A poppy is worn is because, despite years of fighting and destruction of the countryside landscape in western Europe during World War One, poppies continued to grow.

But today, some people choose to wear white, purple and black poppies instead.

Why do some people feel uncomfortable wearing a red poppy?

Some people believe that the red poppy has become politicised over the years. When it was first adopted, it represented mourning and served as a pledge that war must never happen again.

However, in recent years it has increasingly become utilised by political organisations, including Britain First, to promote their cause.

Others choose to eschew wearing poppies because of poppy policing or poppy fascism  in which people are lambasted for not wearing the flower.

In Northern Ireland, for example, it became regarded as a Protestant Loyalist symbol because of its connection with British patriotism, Peace Pledge Union (PPU), a pacifist organisation, says on its website.

A growing number of people have been concerned about the poppys association with military power and the justification of war.

The Royal British Legion has a neutral attitude towards the alternative symbol. The organisations website says: We have no objection to white poppies, or any group expressing their views.

We see no conflict in wearing the red poppy alongside the white poppy. We do ask that the items are not offered alongside each other however as this would confuse the public.

What are white poppies and why do people wear them?

The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts and embodies values that reject killing fellow human beings for whatever reason (Nankai/Wikimedia Commons)

While the red poppy is worn specifically in honour of the armed forces and is distributed by the Royal British Legion, the white poppy, given out by the PPU.

According to the PPU, it is intended to remember all victims of all wars, rather than just those in which British service people were involved.

It also demonstrates a commitment to peace and to challenging any attempt to glamourise or celebrate war.

The white poppies were first conceived by the Co-operative Women's Guild - a national organisation set up to provide women working in co-operatives a voice - in 1933, and they became used by non-violence and faith organisations. They were also frequently worn by the widows and children of dead soldiers.

While it is common to see red poppies worn in the UK during the Remembrance period, with millions sold each year, only around 100,000 white poppies are sold annually and they are more difficult to get hold of.

You can buy white poppies from the PPU website here and red poppies from the Poppy Shop here.

What do purple poppies mean?

A field of purple poppies (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The purple poppy is worn in remembrance of animals that served and lost their lives during war.

Horses and dogs were used during wartime to haul weapons and supply carts, while carrier pigeons transported messages between home regiments and those on the front line.

Animal Aid, a charity that campaigns to end animal abuse, has created a purple paw badge. The organisation aims to rewrite the narrative of animals as valiant servant of people, and that the badge is a symbol of how they were exploited by humans during wartime.

You can buy a purple paw badge here.

What do black poppies mean?

A Black poppy remembers African/Black/Caribbean/Pacific Islands communities that served in wars (BlackPoppyRose.org)

The black poppy, launched in 2010 by Selena Carty, acknowledges the contributions that African, Black, Caribbean and Pacific Islands communities have made to various wars since the 16th century.

The Black Poppy Rose organisation said the poppy signifies pride, honour and glory.

Black Poppy pins and wreaths can be bought from the organisations website, with proceeds going towards the collection, documenting and preserving of untold narratives of the different communities.

You can shop the collection here.
Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

New letters from some of Indias Muslims soldiers who fought in the First World War have been discovered by an academic at Birmingham City University.

The personal letters date to 1915 and reveal how Indian soldiers compared their experiences of England to their home nation.

Approximately 885,000 Muslims were recruited by the Allies, the majority of whom would have never visited Europe before.

One of the soldiers, named as A Ali, talks of his first experience of the London Underground and department stores.

We visited a shop where 2000 men and women were working and everything can be bought. There is no need of asking as the price is written on everything, Mr Ali wrote.

Then we went in the train that goes under the earth, it was for us a strange and wonderful experience  they call it the underground train.

This postcard was sent to LIEUT For Officer Commanding depot 33rd Punjabis by Sepoy Manga Khan, 33rd Punjabis, who was a prisoner of war at Halbmondlager in Zossen, Germany (British Muslim Heritage Centre/National Army Museum)

Mr Ali also reserved special praise for the police and the respect they demand.

If one policeman raises his hand every single person in that direction rich and poor alike, stands still where he is as long as his hand is raised.

Another letter, written by Abdul Said, compared butchers shops in Britain to those in India.

Every shop in this country is so arranged that one is delighted to look at them. Whether you buy much or little it is properly wrapped up, and if you tell the shop man to send it to your house you have only to give him your address and he delivers it, Mr Said wrote in 1915.

The butchers shops in Hindustan are very dirty, but here they are so clean and tidy that there is absolutely no smell.

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

Dr Islam Issa, a lecturer in English Literature, discovered the letters and said they show the personal narrative of the war.

When I decided to look at soldiers letters, I expected a very bleak outlook on the war. Of course, sometimes, thats exactly what I found. But quite often, the letters were about individual experiences and very normal, human things, said Dr Issa.

These anecdotes certainly helped shape my narrative for the Stories of Sacrifice exhibition. While theres an important narrative about the war as a whole, the personal and human narrative was probably more striking.

Whatever your ideology or stance, you end up realising that these Muslim soldiers were individual humans and as a result, they were making sacrifices at that individual, human level," he added.

Dr Issa has been researching individual stories from the War for an exhibition commissioned by and held at the British Muslim Heritage Centre in Manchester, called Stories of Sacrifice.
Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The entrance to Glasgow Central Station has been cordoned off after a man fell from a window.

Emergency services were called to Gordon Street just after 11am on Friday following the incident.

It is understood the man, who may have been naked according to some reports, fell from a third or fourth floor window of the Central Hotel, which adjoins the station.

Both entrances to the street were taped off and dozens of police and paramedics were in attendance.

Police have confirmed the incident and said the man has been taken to hospital.

A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: "Police Scotland can confirm emergency services are in attendance after a man fell from a window in Gordon Street, Glasgow.

"There are no details on injuries and the man is being taken to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital."
Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

All eyes have been on the US this week during the most fraught presidential election in years and the surprise victory of billionaire Donald Trump over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Front pages and social media have been dominated by news from across the Atlantic, but here are seven stories from the UK you might have missed.

Government rejects calls to introduce need for suspicion before detaining people under Terrorism Act

People will continue to be detained at British ports, airports and international railway stations without grounds for suspicion that the person is involved in terrorism or any other crime.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said introducing the element of suspicion to Section 7 of the Terrorism Act would fundamentally undermine the utility of the power.

Ms Rudd also announced she wants to bring forward legislation to ensure terror suspects admitted to hospital could have this time removed from their detention, giving police and security forces more time to question them.

This would apply to suspects arrested without a warrant, who can be detained for up to 48 hours without charge and for up to a week for further questioning, with the approval of a judge.

Another major change outlined by the Home Secretary in response to a report by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation will see national figures published for the use of stop and search under the Terrorism Act for the first time.

European Commission cuts UK 2017 growth forecast in half due to Brexit

Uncertainty following the Brexit vote has led the European Commission to cut its 2017 growth forecast for the UK to just 1 per cent  almost half the 1.8 per cent it predicted in May.

In a report released yesterday, the Commission said a sharp increase in uncertainty [...] is expected to hamper economic dynamics primarily in the UK but also in the EU and warned that the longer the uncertainty continues, the worse the negative impact could be.

It also emerged that the UK trade deficit widened unexpectedly in September to 5.2 billion from 3.8 billion in August, as the falling pound failed to lift exports of British goods.

Pentonville prison (Getty)

Emily Thornberry calls for Pentonville prison to be closed after two inmates escape

Pentonville prison in north London should be closed as soon as possible, the MP for the area surrounding the Victorian jail has said.

Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said the prison was controlled by gangs and called a recent murder and the escape of two prisoners this week the final straw.

The two escaped prisoners broke out of their cells using a diamond cutter and fooled guards by leaving sheets and pillows in the shape of bodies in their beds.

One of the escapees, 28-year-old Matthew Baker, was arrested last night, police said. They have renewed an appeal for information on James Whitlock, 31, who is still at large.

Demonstrators hold placards as they gather to protest against government changes to the welfare system and the proposed 'Bedroom Tax' in 2013 (Getty Images ) (Getty Images)

Supreme court says Government acted unlawfully towards disabled campaigners as families win appeal over bedroom tax

Conservative welfare policy suffered a blow after the Supreme Court ruled the Government discriminated against some disabled people with the controversial bedroom tax on Wednesday.

A spina bifida sufferer and a couple who look after their severely disabled grandson won appeals, but the judges rejected several other cases.

Disability campaigners have been protesting against the system, which removed subsidies for people in the social rented sector who were deemed to have spare rooms in their homes, since it was introduced in 2013.

Festivalgoers who set off flares and fireworks at music events could face three months in prison

Recommended First Isle of Wight Festival 2017 headliner announced

Audience members at festivals and concerts are to be barred from setting off flares, fireworks and smoke bombs under Government plans.

An amendment to the Policing and Crime Bill would make the possession of such pyrotechnic items at music events a criminal offence, with anyone found guilty facing up to three months in prison.

However, the law would not extend to event organisers and so hinder the staging of live performances.

Five men arrested in Rotherham child sexual exploitation probe

Five men have been arrested as part of the National Crime Agency's huge investigation into historical child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.

The men, who were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to rape, were been taken to a police station in South Yorkshire and have now been released on bail.

Nine people previously arrested as part of the operation also remain on bail, said an NCA spokesperson.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 1 November 2022 Englands Tara-Jane Stanley scores their sides seventh try against Brazil during the Womens Rugby League World Cup group A match at Headingley Stadium, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 31 October 2022 GBs James Hall competes during the mens parallel bars qualification at the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2022 People dressed in Halloween costumes paddle board along the river Avon in Christchurch, Dorset PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2022 Members of the public take pictures as police officers remove activists from a road during a Just Stop Oil protest, in London Reuters 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

Nicola Sturgeon bids to intervene in Brexit legal case

Scotland's First Minister will try to join a legal dispute over Brexit, with Nicola Sturgeon declaring she will seek to intervene as the UK Government bids to overturn a court ruling barring the Prime Minister from triggering Article 50 without a vote in Parliament first.

The Lord Advocate, Scotland's most senior law officer, is to lodge a formal application at the Supreme Court to intervene in the case, Ms Sturgeon announced.

She insisted it simply cannot be right that rights linked to membership of the European Union can be removed by the UK Government on the say so of a Prime Minister without parliamentary debate, scrutiny or consent.
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Theresa Mays chief of staff warned earlier this year against associating with Donald Trump, it has emerged.

During the Republican primary season Tory Nick Timothy said he didnt want any reaching out to Mr Trump, who was elected as President this week.

The tweet emerged just a day after Ms May issued a statement uncritically congratulating Mr Trump on his election win.

The Prime Ministers missive was completely devoid of any criticism of the far-right politician, who has said he would ban Muslims from entering the United States and start mass deportations of undocumented migrants.

Ms May later spoke to the President-elect on the telephone, Downing Street said.

Ms Mays approach was in contrast to many other European leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her cooperation with Mr Trump was conditional on Mr Trump upholding the values of equality and democracy. French President Francois Hollande warned that Mr Trumps election opened up a period of uncertainty.

Mr Timothy sent the tweet before he was appointed as chief of staff to the Prime Minister and before she took office.

Urgh  as a Tory I don't want any reaching out to Trump, Mr Timothy tweeted on 6 May this year, in response to an article in The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

The chief of staff has been dubbed Mays muse by sections of the press because of his closeness to the PM. He shares the role with co-chief Fiona Hill.

Mr Trump officially becomes US President after his planned inauguration in January 2017.
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Boris Johnson has spoken to Donald Trumps Vice President-elect in what is thought to be one of the US politicians first calls to a foreign ally.

Mr Johnson, who previously criticised Mr Trump as out of his mind, tweeted that the conversation with Mike Pence underlined the importance of the special relationship & need to tackle global challenges together.

It comes after Theresa May also had a conversation with President-elect Trump yesterday, albeit only after reports emerged that the US leader had not made contact with the UK a priority.

Mr Johnson has previously said Mr Trump is unfit for office after the property tycoon suggested a ban on Muslims entering the US.

But after the election result, Mr Johnson insisted the UK should be optimistic about the future, adding that it was time to be overwhelmingly positive about the possibilities of Mr Trumps presidency.

He said: Its time that we snapped out of the general doom and gloom about the result of this election and collective whinge-o-rama that seems to be going on in some places.

 Protests against Trump surge in cities across US for second night

The Prime Minister and Mr Trump had a telephone conversation at 1.45pm yesterday, Downing Street said, focusing on the UK-US special relationship and on strengthening bilateral trade.

But it came after news that Mr Trump had already spoken with at least nine leaders from other countries, including Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, Israel, Turkey, India, Japan, Australia and South Korea, before speaking with Ms May.

World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Show all 29 1 /29 World reaction to President Trump: In pictures World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty Images World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mosul , Iraq Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures New Delhi, India Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Karachi, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kabul, Afghanistan AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem. Israel Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Moscow, Russia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Seoul, South Korea AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Peshawar, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Hyderabad, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kolkata, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Aleppo, Syria Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem, Israel EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Baghdad, Iraq Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Tokyo, Japan Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico Getty

Meanwhile, Downing Street has rejected the idea that ministers may use Nigel Farages links to Mr Trump to build bridges with the next US President.

It was reported earlier this week that Mr Farage would likely become the first British politician to meet Mr Trump when he visits the US at the weekend.
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Donald Trumps election to the White House will weaken the Nato alliance and destroy Americas standing in the world, a majority of British voters believe.

A survey for The Independent by BMG Research found that 58 per cent of the public saw the USs global reputation faltering under the billionaire businessmans leadership.

Likewise, 52 per cent thought Mr Trumps election would erode the strength of Nato.

Voters in the UK reacted to Mr Trumps election upset with dismay, with 49 per cent saying they were shocked and 39 per cent anxious about the future following the election.

The findings come after Mr Trump spent part of his presidential campaign hinting that he would not stand by the Nato alliance agreement in all circumstances.

He suggested that under his leadership the US might not react to help countries in the alliance if they were attacked but had not spent the Nato target amount on defence  a category that includes nearly all the treaty organisations member states.

Former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton branded Mr Trump a puppet of Russian president Vladimir Putin during the election campaign. Mr Trump rejected the claim. The Kremlin has said it had contacts with Mr Trumps team during the course of the election.

World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Show all 29 1 /29 World reaction to President Trump: In pictures World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty Images World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mosul , Iraq Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures New Delhi, India Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Karachi, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kabul, Afghanistan AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem. Israel Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Moscow, Russia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Seoul, South Korea AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Peshawar, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Hyderabad, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kolkata, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Aleppo, Syria Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem, Israel EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Baghdad, Iraq Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Tokyo, Japan Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico Getty

Previous international polling by the firm GIA suggested that Mr Trumps popularity is mostly limited to the United States  though he apparently enjoys support amongst the Russian and Chinese publics.

Clearly the UK will want to do business with Trump, but Trumps values arent British values, Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesperson Tom Brake said.

A business-like approach, rather than adulation and sycophancy should be the order of the day.

The Government has so far taken a reconciliatory line since Mr Trumps election. Theresa May has so far failed to overly criticise the far-right politician in public and issued a congratulation statement for the president-elect devoid of any criticism.

BMG Research interviewed 2,245 UK adults online on 10-11 November. Data are weighted. BMG is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by their rules.
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Downing Street has rejected the idea that ministers may use Nigel Farages links to Donald Trump to build bridges with the next US President.

Sources close to the Prime Minister suggested Ukips interim leader, who appeared on the campaign trail with President-elect Trump, is an irrelevance to proceedings.

Recommended Trump reacts as election protests sweep US for second night

The Independent reported earlier this week that Mr Farage will likely become the first British politician to meet Mr Trump when he visits the US at the weekend.

Theresa May spoke to the President-elect on the phone yesterday, but only after claims that the UK had not been high on the new US leaders list of nations to call.

It was reported in the Daily Telegraph that International Trade Secretary Liam Fox intends to speak to Mr Farage before attempting talks with the President-elects advisers, but the ministers spokesman said he had no plans to speak to the Ukip chief first.

Ukip insiders said Mr Farage would travel to Florida to give a speech this weekend and then on to New York.

While a meeting with Mr Trump was not set in stone, Mr Farage will be seeing senior figures in his team and is likely to meet the President-elect.

 Donald Trump introduces Brexit leader Nigel Farage in Mississippi

In August, Mr Farage was invited to attend a Trump rally in Jackson, Mississippi, and was invited on stage to address the crowd.

Mr Trump and the Prime Minister had a telephone conversation at 1.45pm, Downing Street said, focusing on the UK-US special relationship and on strengthening bilateral trade.

But it came after news that Mr Trump had already spoken with at least nine other world leaders, including Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, Israel, Turkey, India, Japan, Australia and South Korea, before speaking with Ms May.
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

As the bitter and often fraught presidential battle across the Atlantic  and to the surprise of many, the election of Donald Trump, a billionaire businessman with little experience of the political machinery of Washington  came to a conclusion this week, many of the front pages in the UK and the commentary focused on the drama unfolding in the States.

But here The Independent looks at some of the news and reports released by the UK Government this week that appear to have slipped under the radar.

According to Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, ministers have slipped out a deluge of embarrassing announcements because Parliament is in recess. He added: "The Tories might think they can take things for granted while the world looks away, aghast at the election of Donald Trump but my party will be keeping a total focus on them and the damaging policies they are pushing through".

Transgender inmates

In a report released on the day of the American election results, the Ministry of Justice concluded in a brief report that the treatment of transgender people in courts, probation and prison services had not kept apace with development of a more general understanding of the issues surrounding gender in society.

Ministers launched a review of the care of transgender prisoners in 2015 after an inmate was discovered dead in her cell at an all-male prison.

It said allowing transgender offenders to experience the criminal justice system in the gender in which they identify "will, in the great majority of cases, represent the most humane and safest way to act".

It added: "We believe it will also assist successful rehabilitation".

The paper added that One in four prisons in England and Wales holds at least one transgender inmate, an official report has revealed.

Data collected in March and April showed that 33 of the 123 public and private prisons reported they had one or more transgender prisoners.

95 per cent of civil servants disagree with civil service reforms

The Government revealed in a written statement earlier this week that they have implemented changes to the civil service compensation scheme  despite 95 per cent of civil servants and unions representing them disagreeing with the proposed reforms.

There were some responses supportive of the changes proposed to the Civil Service Compensation Scheme but the majority of respondents were opposed, the Cabinet office consultation states.

In one of the questions, respondents are asked whether they believe the reforms are right. " Five per cent of respondents to this question agreed that these were the right principles for reform of the CSCS," the consultation document added.

In a letter to Ben Gummer, a Cabinet office minister, Labours shadow minister Ian Lavery said: I believe that the implementation of these reforms should be halted immediately in order for full parliamentary scrutiny to take place. I hope that you would be willing to meet with me to discuss these reforms further. As I am sure you are aware, the majority of civil servants are represented by PCS, Unite and POA and the fact that they were excluded from talks does not indicate a fully democratic or transparent process.

These reforms will impact hundreds of thousands of hard working and loyal civil servants, many of whom are currently facing job insecurity due to departmental budget cuts. For these reforms to be implemented with no debate, I feel, goes against the democratic aims of Government.

438 million blunder by the Treasury

It was revealed earlier this that the Ministry of Defence had been forced to ask for 438 million from the Governments emergency reserves to pay for a compensation service to members of the armed forces  after an administrative error by Her Majestys Treasury.

The blunder emerged after Mark Lancaster, the parliamentary under-secretary in the Ministry of Defence, submitted a written statement to the Commons describing an inadvertent publishing error.

According to Mr Lancaster, officials in his department noticed there was a shortfall of 438,193,000 to the Armed Forces Compensation scheme  a service available to serving and former personnel who are injured as a result of their service in the military.

The Armed Forces Compensation scheme is available to serving and former serving personnel who are injured as a result of their service in the military (Getty Images) (Getty)

It means the Ministry of Justice has now asked the Treasury to match the sum from its contingency funds, which are used to finance payments for urgent services and to provide funds required by government departments to meet temporary cash deficiencies.

Nia Griffith, the shadow Defence Secretary told The Independent: I am deeply concerned that this Government appears to have underfunded the Armed Forces Pension and Compensation schemes by over 438 million.

She added: These important schemes exist to support our veterans in retirement and to compensate those who have been injured in service. Our veterans and service members need urgent reassurance that the Governments accounting blunder wont leave them out of pocket.

Electrification cancellations

On Tuesday ministers were accused of abandoning flagship pledges to electrify major rail lines. The upgrades of key routes to Bristol, Oxford and Berkshire have been deferred after spending spiralled out of control  prompting speculation they will never happen.

Separately, the rail minister refused to commit to meeting the 2023 target  already delayed by three years  to electrify the Midland Mainline which connects Sheffield to London.

The announcement that the upgrades of four lines on the Great Western route have been put back indefinitely was made by rail minister Paul Maynard, in a written parliamentary statement.

Coasting schools

The Department for Education quietly slipped out statistics on the number of coasting schools. In the Queens speech, the government said it planned to convert these so-called coasting schools into academies. According to the Government a coasting school is one that over time does not support its pupils to fulfill their potential.

But the data in Dfe report claims that in the primary sector a higher proportion of academies than non-academies are likely to be named as coasting.

Terrorism charges

People will continue to be detained at British ports, airports and international railway stations without grounds for suspicion that the person is involved in terrorism or any other crime.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said introducing the element of suspicion to Section 7 of the Terrorism Act would fundamentally undermine the utility of the power.

Ms Rudd also announced she wants to bring forward legislation to ensure terror suspects admitted to hospital could have this time removed from their detention, giving police and security forces more time to question them.

This would apply to suspects arrested without a warrant, who can be detained for up to 48 hours without charge and for up to a week for further questioning, with the approval of a judge.
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

A leading Conservative Brexiteer has said he would have voted for the Libertarian Party candidate in the US presidential election.

Gary Johnsons campaign famously went up in flames after a series of media appearances in which it became clear he had limited knowledge of the world.

In one excruciating exchange on the MSNBC channel in August Mr Johnson was asked what he would do about the massacres occurring in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

Recommended Gary Johnson fails to name his favourite world leader

Mr Johnson replied: What is Aleppo? He had the situation explained to him by the host of the programme.

Mr Hannan, a Tory MEP has long campaigned for Brexit, made his choice clear during a tirade criticising people protesting against Donald Trump.

I wouldn't have voted for Trump either. I was for Johnson. But why don't these youngsters like democracy? What system would they prefer? he said, referring to a march of people protesting Mr Trumps election.

Mr Johnson went on to make similar gaffes during the course of his campaign. Asked to name a foreign leader he admired he said he could not think of any.

He eventually settled on the former president of Mexico but said could not remember the mans name.

The Libertarian Party candidate stood on a platform of sharp cuts to public spending and taxes, scrapping any government action to tackle climate change, and end to the limited state provision of healthcare in the United States.

Mr Johnson won 3.2 per cent of the vote
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

A high court in Zimbabwe has cleared a professional hunter in connection with the death of Cecil the lion.

The death of the animal  which was allegedly lured out of its home in Hwange National Park, shot with a bow and arrow and left to bled to death in July 2015  provoked outrage around the world with many calling for an end to trophy hunting.

The US dentist who shot it, Walter Palmer, was forced to temporarily go into hiding after facing death threats and protests outside his practice in Bloomington, Minnesota.

But on Friday the court ruled that Theo Bronkhorst, the professional hunter and guide who organised the trip, should not face criminal charges.

His lawyers successfully argued that the charge of "failing to prevent an illegal hunt" was too vague to answer and although he had breached National Parks regulations this did not amount to a criminal offence, the BBC reported.

The charges against Mr Palmer had been dropped by the court in October 2015.

Cecil had been wearing a GPS collar at the time of his death as he was participating in research by the University of Oxford  allowing park rangers to monitor his movements.

The most controversial animal killings Show all 6 1 /6 The most controversial animal killings The most controversial animal killings Cincinnati Zoo worker shots and kills Harambe, the 17-year-old gorilla Harambe, a 17-year-old gorilla was shot and killed by a Cincinnati Zoo worker after a three-year-old boy climbed into a gorilla enclosure and was grabbed and dragged by Harambe. The incident was recorded on video and received broad international coverage and commentary, including controversy over the choice to kill Harambe. A number of primatologists and conservationists wrote later that the zoo had no other choice under the circumstances, and that it highlighted the danger of zoo animals in close proximity to humans and the need for better standards of care Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden The most controversial animal killings Walt Palmer (left), from Minnesota, who killed Cecil, the Zimbabwean lion (pictured here with another lion shot in Africa) Walter James Palmer has been named by Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force as the shooter of Cecil, a 13-year-old prized lion. He is now wanted by Zimbabwe officials on poaching charges. The lion was protected and the subject of a decade long study by the Wildlife Unit of Oxford University in the UK. He was outfitted with a GPS collar and was killed in Hwange National Park. The Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Authority and the Safari Operators Association said that two men were charged with poaching in connection to Mr Palmer The most controversial animal killings Kendall Jones hunting images Kendall Jones, a 19-year-old Texas Tech university student, has provoked worldwide fury after posting pictures of herself smiling next to animals she hunted, including a lion, rhinoceros, antelope, leopard, elephant, zebra and hippopotamus The most controversial animal killings Rebecca Francis hunting images Rebecca Francis, a huntress who has killed dozens of wild animals has been sent death wishes by furious social media users after a picture showing her lying down next to a dead giraffe was circulated. Rebecca Francis has a website and Facebook page dedicated to the animals she has killed in hunts across Africa and America. Francis, a prolific hunter who has also co-hosted the television show Eye of the Hunter, regularly posts pictures of herself posing next to dead bears, giraffes, buffaloes and zebras, among other animals. She uses a bow and arrow to kill her prey The most controversial animal killings The slaughter of Marius, an 18-month-old healthy giraffe in Copenhagen Zoo Copenhagen Zoo made the controversial decision to euthanise a healthy giraffe named Marius, which was later dissected and fed to lions as visitors watched. The slaughter sparked a furious backlash from social media users and zoo staff have received death threats by phone and email. Soon after the incident, Copenhagen Zoo faced an international outcry once again after four healthy lions were put down The most controversial animal killings Swiss Dahlholzli zoo kills healthy brown bear cub A Switzerland zoo faced heavy criticism from animal rights groups, after keepers put down a healthy brown bear cub to spare it from being bullied by its dominant male father. The 360 kg male bear Misha had already killed one of his 11-week old cubs in public and was bullying the second, staff at the zoo said, because he was jealous of the attention the cubs were receiving from their mother, Masha. Both adult brown bears had been donated to Berns Dahlholzli zoo in 2009. Campaigners condemned staff there for not separating the cubs, who are being referred to as Baby Bear Two and Baby Bear Three, and their mother from Misha after their birth in January Facebook

The animal was famous in Zimbabwe and tourists would travel from all over the world to go on safari in the hopes of seeing him.

Following his death, donations to animal conservation charities in the region began to flood in leading to the foundation of the Conservation Wildlife Fund which funds community and conservation projects with a voluntary levy of $10 (7.50) a night on rooms in the park.

Due to a range of factors including poaching and loss of habitat, the lion population in Africa has dwindled to just 25,000. 450 of these live in Hwange National Park.
Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Californians have voted against forcing porn performers to wear condoms while filming sex scenes.

Proposition 60, which porn actors said could drive the industry underground and expose them to harassment and fines, was defeated by 53.9 per cent to 46.1 per cent.

The controversial bill, which was sponsored by the president of the Aids Healthcare Foundation, was designed to protect actors from sexually transmitted diseases. In addition to making condom use compulsory, the bill aimed to strengthen existing measures like STI testing for porn stars.

But most people working in the sex industry strongly opposed the rule, which would have allowed any of the 38 million people living in the west coast state to take legal action against a producer, if they saw an adult film in which condoms were not used.

Supporters of the bill said performers themselves could not be sued, but actors pointed out they would have been liable if they had a financial interest in an offending film.

Tasha Reign, an adult performer who campaigned against Proposition 60, is one of a number of actors who also produces her own films and would, therefore, have been at risk. In an industry becoming harder to monetise because of a glut of free adult content, porn stars are increasingly investing in the films they appear in. She said she could have been sued for up to $75,000 per offence had Proposition 60 passed.

Performers also argued they would have been left vulnerable to stalkers and harassment by having their details made public to those launching suits against them.

Ms Reign told The Independent ahead of the vote: My safety is now on the line because the proposition allows for California citizens to sue adult performers or anyone involved in the adult video, and with incentive to sue - theyre going to get paid.

And when they do, they gain access to our home addresses, which I am terrified of. I already receive death threats and things like that. This will open up a door for a whole other issue, and Im very scared about that.

The measure was branded legalised harassment by Mia Li, an adult performer, who said it would have allowed anyone with a laptop to sue her and profit by collecting 25 per cent of the penalties against her in addition to their legal fees. The rest of the fine would go to the state.

Ms Reign said the introduction of Proposition 60 would have driven porn underground where it could not be regulated, and would become more dangerous. Producing pornography is technically illegal in every state except California and New Hampshire, so the industry would have had nowhere else to go.

Evil Angel, a California-based porn studio, said in a statement released shortly after the result that they were delighted the bill had been defeated thanks to "porn activists".

Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself Show all 7 1 /7 Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself 5523167.jpg Paul Hackett Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself 5523182.jpg Paul Hackett Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself 5523181.jpg Paul Hackett Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself 5523183.jpg Paul Hackett Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself 5523184.jpg Paul Hackett Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself 5523185.jpg Paul Hackett Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself 5523186.jpg Paul Hackett

A spokesman said: "Thanks to California voters and the activists that engaged them, porn producers and wage earners are no longer threatened with unsafe standards or the loss of their livelihood.

"The poorly drafted Prop. 60, theoretically designed to protect porn talent, would in fact have made Californias adult performers far less safe, and the propositions draconian measures would have forced the multi-billion dollar industry out of state. The worst thing about Prop. 60 was that it would have replaced existing, effective STD testing standards with less effective tests conducted less often."

Californian voters also rejected abolishing the death penalty on Tuesday, instead passing a proposition designed to speed it up, and they elected to legalise marijuana for recreational use.
Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

A Canadian province is to run a pilot project aimed at providing every citizen a minimum basic income of $1,320 (773) a month.

The provincial government of Ontario confirmed it is holding public consultations on the $25m (15m) project over the next two months, which could replace social assistance payments administered by the province for people aged 18 to 65.

People with disabilities will receive $500 (292) more under the scheme, and individuals who earn less than $22,000 (13,000) a year after tax will have their incomes topped up to reach that threshold.

The pilot report was submitted by Conservative ex-senator Hugh Segal, who suggested the project should be tested on three distinct sites: in the north, south and among the indigenous community of Ontario.

Areas with high levels of poverty and food insecurity should be chosen for the test project, Mr Segal recommended.

It is in fact the precinct of rational people when looking to encourage work and community engagement and give people a floor beneath which theyre not allowed to fall, he said.

We can do this for seniors without having to add any more bureaucrats or civil servants, we respect their freedom to choose, we give them the money, they decide whats important. Why would we treat other poor people differently?

 Trade deal agreement signed between EU and Canada

What Ontario is doing is saying lets have a pilot project, lets calculate the costs, lets calculate the positive and the nudge effects behaviourally.

Mr Segal confirmed that participation in the project, which is due to launch in spring 2017, will be voluntary and promised no one would be financially worse off as a result of the pilot.

One in five children live in poverty in Canada, according to Unicef, and a recent poll of some 1,500 Canadians found two-thirds of those polled were open to the idea of basic income.

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

A similar project was tested in Dauphin, Manitoba, between 1974 and 1979, with families below the poverty line receiving over $3,000 (1,757) a month. Over 1,000 citizens were said to have benefited from the scheme.
Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Muslim students at New York University were chilled to find pro-Trump graffiti scrawled across the door of their prayer room, adding yet another case to the sharp rise in reported hate crimes in the wake of the presidential election.

The apparent vandal defaced the door with a simple Trump! at an NYU Muslim Student Association facility at the Tandon School of Engineering in downtown Brooklyn on the morning after Donald Trumps shocking win over Hillary Clinton  whose campaign headquarters were nearby.

Mr Trump ran his campaign on a number of promises that, if implemented, would have a dire impact on marginalised people, such as undocumented immigrants. But Mr Trump took special aim at Muslims, whom he said he would ban from entering the country altogether, breaking with one of the founding principles of the US: freedom of religion.

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

The President-elects message has appeared to resonate with his supports amid the wave of hate crimes and threats that have surfaced in the past 48 hours.

We awoke November 9th to a chilling wake-up call, the NYU Muslim Students Association wrote on its Facebook page, accompanied by a photo of the vandalism, Wednesday morning. And as we open our eyes and start to move and organise in the face of these new realities, we ask for your support.

The group added that they were now aware that even a college campus in the middle of a progressive enclave like Brooklyn was not immune to bigotry that grips America.

 Donald Trump says protests against him are 'unfair'

One student told the New York Daily News that even though the vandalism did not include specific threats against Muslims, the message was clear.

It was really rough because its a place to pray, its a centre of the Muslim community there. Its where all the Muslim kids go to be with other kids. They do their homework there, vice president of the Muslim Student Association, Sana Maya, 21, said. They didnt have to say go home Muslims. They just needed to write Trump on [the door] and they knew exactly what they were doing.

President Trump protests Show all 20 1 /20 President Trump protests President Trump protests Patrons hold a sign as people march by while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators rally following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators march following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States expressing shock and anger over Donald Trump's election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency AFP/Getty Images President Trump protests Demonstrators protest outside the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois Getty President Trump protests A police officer aims a launcher after demonstrators threw projectiles toward a line of officers during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests An officer examines a vandalized police vehicle as demonstrators riot in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators take over the Hollywood 101 Freeway just north of Los Angeles City Hall in protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests A woman holds up a sign reading 'Trump you are an Idiot' as demonstrators gather during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump outside the City Hall building in Los Angeles, California EPA President Trump protests A masked demonstrator gestures toward a police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, near the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada Reuters President Trump protests Musician Lagy Gaga stages a protest against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in New York City Getty President Trump protests A woman yells as she takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A man dressed in red-white-and-blue sits on the curb during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A protester sets off fireworks during a protest against President-elect Donald Trumpin Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests University of California, Davis students protest on campus in Davis, California, U.S. following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests An Oakland police officer checks out damage after a window was broken by protesters at a car dealership in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests A protester faces a police line in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests President-elect Donald Trumpis victory set off multiple protests AP President Trump protests A fire burns during protests in Oakland, Calif AP

The election of Mr Trump has created an atmosphere in which Muslim students feel unsafe at high schools and universities nationwide

Campus police at San Diego State University said one student reported an incident of a strongarm robbery. Two men allegedly attacked the woman  who is a black Muslim dressed in full Islamic dress  stealing her purse, backpack, and car. It is being investigated as a hate crime.

Multiple Muslim women have also shared incidents on social media where assailants allegedly pulled off their hijabs. One woman said she was berated by a white woman at a Wal-Mart, who told her hijabs are not allowed anymore after ripping it off her head. She then allegedly told the woman to hang herself with it. Wal-Mart has not confirmed the authenticity of this report.

The Council for American-Islamic Relations has called on President-elect Trump to speak out against the stream of reported attacks, and the general vitriolic bigotry that emerged from his 18 months on the campaign trail.

If President-elect Trump truly wishes to be the leader of all Americans, he must begin unifying the nation by repudiating the type of bigotry generated by his campaign for the White House, said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for CAIR.

Unless Mr Trump speaks out forcefully against hate attacks by his supporters, they will take his silence as tacit endorsement of their actions."
Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The former Secretary-General of Nato has urged Donald Trump to act against Russian aggression or face the beginning of the end of the US-led system.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was in charge of the alliance from 2009 to 2014, said Vladimir Putin only respects a firm hand and therefore Mr Trump must show strength.

The advice came in an email sent through his firm, Rasmussen Global, which provides geopolitical and strategic consulting services.

Neglecting [the Baltic States] will have far-reaching consequences and mark the beginning of the end of the US-led system, Mr Rasmussen said in the email, the Daily Mail reported.

As Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump must display strength towards Russia. Putin only respects a firm and steady hand."

Mr Rasmussen also suggested the US protect Ukraine from any future Russian aggression and impose a no-fly zone over Syria.

The US must increase support for Nato's eastern flank, set up military bases wherever Russia is threatening the freedom and livelihood of US allies, and whole-heartedly protect Ukraine against future Russian aggression, he wrote.

The US President must initiate a no-fly zone to impose and maintain a credible and durable ceasefire in Syria. The US must force the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, to the negotiating table and find a political solution to the devastating conflict.

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 former Prime Minister of Denmark, Mr Rasmussen, is currently working as an adviser to the Ukrainian president.

Mr Rasmussen's words came just after the current chief of Nato called on Mr Trump to clarify his position on the intergovernmental military alliance.
Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Haiti is facing a major food crisis and the international community is falling short of helping it to recover from Hurricane Matthew, the countrys interim president has said.

Jocelerme Privert said Haitians were suffering from higher levels of malnutrition and were unable to take action during the upcoming winter planting season due to the scale of the damage.

I dont want Haitian citizens to die because of the inability of international assistance, Mr Privert told BBC News. But I want the world to understand that we Haitians want to get back to work.

Lets take the winter planting season which looms and for which we need to begin to have mobilised this month. There needs to be somewhere between $25 million and $30 million dollars in order to do that.

Right now we have only been able to come up with about $2.5m of aid. If we dont manage to relaunch agriculture then in two, three, four months we will find ourselves before a major food crisis.

Mr Privert urged the international community to help more with the recovery effort, as 2.1 million people were affected by the hurricane and a large portion of the country was devastated by high winds.

The government of Haiti estimates 1.5 million people need immediate assistance, including more than 140,000 people who are living in temporary shelters.

Hurricane Matthew hits the US Show all 18 1 /18 Hurricane Matthew hits the US Hurricane Matthew hits the US COCOA BEACH, FL - OCTOBER 07: Metal is wrapped around a palm tree due to the heavy winds of Hurricane Matthew, October 7, 2016 on Cocoa Beach, Florida. Hurricane Matthew passed by offshore as a catagory 3 hurricane bringing heavy winds and minor flooding. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US Heavy rain and wind blow in an area near Atlantic Beach, Florida, on October 7, 2016, as hurricane Matthew approaches the area. Hurricane Matthew unleashed torrential rains and up to 120 mile-an-hour winds as it hugged the Florida coast Friday, after a blast through the Caribbean that reportedly left at least 400 dead in Haiti. / AFP / Jewel SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images) AFP/Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US National Guard units 1782 and 172 of Chester and Lancaster, South Carolina, board vehicles while deploying for duty for Hurricane Matthew service in Conway, South Carolina, U.S. October 6, 2016. REUTERS/Randall Hill - RTSR201 REUTERS Hurricane Matthew hits the US A fallen tree is seen outside a house after Hurricane Matthew hits in Melbourne, Florida, U.S., October 7, 2016. REUTERS/Henry Romero - RTSR89S Hurricane Matthew hits the US Sandbags are seen in front of a business ahead of Hurricane Matthew in Georgetown, South Carolina October 6, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane - RTSR43O REUTERS Hurricane Matthew hits the US An elderly man rests his head at a shelter for evacuees in a high school hallway before the arrival of Hurricane Matthew in North Charleston, South Carolina on October 7, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake - RTSR8WK REUTERS Hurricane Matthew hits the US A resident walks past a wall of sandbags protecting a store in one of the city's low-lying areas before the arrival of Hurricane Matthew, in Charleston, South Carolina, U.S., October 7, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake - RTSR7SH REUTERS Hurricane Matthew hits the US Homeowner Don Appell prepares to board up one of the windows at his home ahead of Hurricane Matthew in Cherry Grove, South Carolina, U.S. October 6, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane - RTSR2RD REUTERS Hurricane Matthew hits the US ST AUGUSTINE, FL - OCTOBER 07: Cars are seen in a flooded parking lot as Hurricane Matthew passes through the area on October 7, 2016 in St Augustine, Florida. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina have all declared a state of emergency in preparation for Hurricane Matthew. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US PORT ORANGE, FL - OCTOBER 07: Metal lies on the ground at a gas station damaged by the heavy winds of Hurricane Matthew, October 7, 2016 on Port Orange, Florida. Hurricane Matthew passed by offshore as a catagory 3 hurricane bringing heavy winds and minor flooding. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US DAYTONA BEACH, FL - OCTOBER 7: A view of a collapsed roof at a gas station after Hurricane Matthew passes through on October 7, 2016 in Daytona Beach, Florida. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina have all declared a state of emergency in preparation for Hurricane Matthew. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US DAYTONA BEACH, FL - OCTOBER 7: A vehicle drives through water on International Speedway Boulevard after Hurricane Matthew passes through on October 7, 2016 in Daytona Beach, Florida. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina have all declared a state of emergency in preparation for Hurricane Matthew. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 07: U.S. President Barack Obama (C) talks with reporters after meeting with members of his national security and disaster response teams to discuss Hurricane Matthew in the Oval Office at the White House October 7, 2016 in Washington, DC. The hurricane is now a category 3 and is headed for Florida after wreaking havoc in Haiti, Cuba and the Bahamas. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US A US flag blows in the wind in Atlantic Beach, Florida, on October 7, 2016, as hurricane Matthew approaches the area. Hurricane Matthew unleashed torrential rains and up to 120 mile-an-hour winds as it hugged the Florida coast Friday, after a blast through the Caribbean that reportedly left at least 400 dead in Haiti. / AFP / Jewel SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images) AFP/Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US COCOA BEACH, FL - OCTOBER 07: Heavy waves caused by Hurricane Matthew pounds the boat docks at the Sunset Bar and Grill, October 7, 2016 on Cocoa Beach, Florida. Hurricane Matthew passed by offshore as a catagory 3 hurricane bringing heavy winds and minor flooding. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US ORMOND BEACH, FL - OCTOBER 7: A downed tree from high winds rests against a car in a residential community after Hurricane Matthew passes through on October 7, 2016 in Ormond Beach, Florida. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina have all declared a state of emergency in preparation for Hurricane Matthew. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US FORT PIERCE, FL - OCTOBER 07: Tree branches that snapped off trees are seen blocking the road after Hurricane Matthew passed through the area on October 7, 2016 in Fort Pierce, Florida. The hurricane is expected to make landfall sometime this evening or early in the morning as a possible category 4 storm. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Getty Images Hurricane Matthew hits the US COCOA BEACH, FL - OCTOBER 07: Palm trees sway from the winds of Hurricane Matthew, October 7, 2016 on Cocoa Beach, Florida. Hurricane Matthew passed by offshore as a category 3 hurricane bringing heavy wind and some flooding. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Getty Images

Politicians said around $2 billion (1.5 billion) of structural damage was caused - equivalent to Haitis entire national budget - by the strongest storm to hit the Caribbean in a decade.

As well as the initial impact of the storm, the aftermath saw outbreaks of cholera due to storm flooding of sewage systems in October.

In early November, the US government announced it was beginning to send people back to Haiti after pausing deportation. Around 900 Haitian citizens were killed during the devastating storm.
Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Two people in Oregon state have submitted a petition to allow residents to vote on disbanding from the United States, following the election of Donald Trump as US president.

A writer and a lawyer from Portland filed the Oregon Seccession Act on Thursday morning, asking that the option to leave the union be put on the ballot in the 2018 mid-term election.

Residents of Californian have also said they want to become independent from the United States since the election result was announced on Wednesday, with the "Calexit" portmanteau trending on twitter.

Jennifer Rollins, who works in business and real estate law, and Chistian Trejbal, a journalist, said if their petition were to suceed and the proposition was voted through, they want Oregon to form its own country, together with any other states who want to become part of a new autonomous nation.

Mr Trejbal told the Oregonian newspaper they had been developing the idea for some time, but were spurred to act on the plan by Mr Trump's victory.

About 41 per cent of Oregon voters cast their ballots for Mr Trump. Nearly 52 per cent voted for Hillary Clinton.

The pair said they want the vote be scheduled for 2018, to give residents some time to think about the decision. They said they would begin collecting signatures on Thursday night at Pioneer Square in Portland, where an anti-Trump protest is planned.

In Oregon, a petition must get 88,184 signatures to be placed on the ballot.

The Oregon Secession Act says lawmakers shall seek secession alone or in conjunction with other states and Canadian provinces that seek to form a new nation, including but not limited to California, Washington, Hawaii, Nevada, Alaska and British Columbia..

Other groups have long been campaigning for independence for a pacific north west region, known as Cascadia, which encompasses several states including Oregon and northern California. This movement has been bolstered by the result of the election.

A group called Yes Cascadia is working to grow Cascadian autonomy and interdependence, according to the group's website.

The group said: Yes Cascadia will qualify a citizens initiative for the 2018 ballot that if passed would call for a special election for Cascadians in Washington and Oregon to jointly vote for or against the independence of Cascadia from the United States, and to build a pro-democracy movement for the Pacific Northwest.

"It is our goal to increase our bioregional autonomy; build an accountable and transparent democracy; strengthen liberties, rights and freedoms of individuals and communities; and to protect the things we love about the Pacific Northwest for our future generations.

However cynics point out that several petitions seeking secessions have been filed after previous elections, including one in Oregon in 2012 when President Barack Obama was first elected.

President Trump protests Show all 20 1 /20 President Trump protests President Trump protests Patrons hold a sign as people march by while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators rally following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators march following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States expressing shock and anger over Donald Trump's election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency AFP/Getty Images President Trump protests Demonstrators protest outside the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois Getty President Trump protests A police officer aims a launcher after demonstrators threw projectiles toward a line of officers during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests An officer examines a vandalized police vehicle as demonstrators riot in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators take over the Hollywood 101 Freeway just north of Los Angeles City Hall in protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests A woman holds up a sign reading 'Trump you are an Idiot' as demonstrators gather during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump outside the City Hall building in Los Angeles, California EPA President Trump protests A masked demonstrator gestures toward a police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, near the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada Reuters President Trump protests Musician Lagy Gaga stages a protest against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in New York City Getty President Trump protests A woman yells as she takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A man dressed in red-white-and-blue sits on the curb during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A protester sets off fireworks during a protest against President-elect Donald Trumpin Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests University of California, Davis students protest on campus in Davis, California, U.S. following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests An Oakland police officer checks out damage after a window was broken by protesters at a car dealership in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests A protester faces a police line in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests President-elect Donald Trumpis victory set off multiple protests AP President Trump protests A fire burns during protests in Oakland, Calif AP

Bill Funk, a constitutional law professor at the Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, told Portland local television station KPTV that those who file such "long-shot attempts [at independence] mostly just want attention".

Mr Funk said its not in the presidents power under the US Constitution to let a state secede. That would require amending the Constitution, which is extremely difficult and rarely happens.
Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The Senates soon-to-be top Democrat told labour leaders on Thursday that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade deal at the centre of President Obamas pivot to strengthen ties with key Asian allies, will not be ratified by Congress.

That remark from Charles E Schumer, the United States senator for New York, who is expected to be the incoming Senate minority leader, came as good news to the federation of labour unions, the AFL-CIO executive council, which met on Thursday in Washington. Mr Schumer relayed statements that Republican congressional leaders had made to him, according to an aide who confirmed the remarks.

Recommended Obama may be forced to omit trade and TPP from convention speech

Mr Obamas signature global trade deal had been on life support for months, as both Democrats and Republicans campaigned against unfair trade policies ahead of the 8 November election. And Donald Trumps triumph in the presidential race cemented its fate.

There is no way to fix the TPP, Mr Trump said in a June economic address. We need bilateral trade deals. We do not need to enter into another massive international agreement that ties us up and binds us down.

The deal never had much of a following among congressional Democrats to begin with. Only 28 of 188 House Democrats and 13 of 44 Senate Democrats supported granting Mr Obama the authority to negotiate and finalise a deal last year. And Mr Trumps rise has decimated support for free trade among Republicans. A former US trade representative, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, said he would oppose the TPP as he campaigned for re-election this year.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, the US Senator for Kentucky, said on Wednesday there was no chance that the deal would pass during Mr Obamas final months in office. And he said its up to Mr Trump whether any trade deal would move forward after that.

 Obama Tries to Sell TPP Trade Agreement at ASEAN

I think the President-elect made it pretty clear he was not in favour of the current agreement, Mr McConnell said. But he has the latitude because [congressional negotiating authority] is in place through the next administration to negotiate better deals, as I think he would put it, if he chooses to.

House Speaker Paul Ryan who has supported past trade deals, has said that the votes arent there in the House to pass the TPP in its current version and that he has no plans to bring it to a vote in the House.

The news of the trade pacts likely demise prompted disappointed reactions from some industry coalitions, which had hoped to access freer markets and a more level playing field with competitors overseas.

Among them were groups representing Americas farmers and ranchers. The TPP had promised to slash tariffs on US agricultural goods in large markets such as Japan and Vietnam, as well as eliminate agricultural subsidies that gave competitors in the trade bloc an edge.

We would have liked to get it done before the end of the year. The longer we delay, the more likely we lose market share in the Asia-Pacific since other countries are negotiating their own trade deals with nations in the region, David Warner, the director of communications at the National Pork Producers Council, said in emailed comments. Mr Warner said the TPP would exponentially increase pork exports, translating into more American jobs. We certainly hope the TPP is not dead.

Retailers had also largely thrown their support behind TPP, as it would have reduced tariffs on many goods that brands source from overseas. President Obama had even used Nikes Oregon headquarters as a backdrop for a speech defending his trade policy.

On balance, [TPP] was viewed by our industry as a win for retailers and our consumers, said David French, the National Retail Federations senior vice-president of government relations, in an interview conducted on Thursday before Mr Schumers statements were made known.

Mr French said he believes that the reduction in tariffs would have been passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. Tariffs on footwear can be as high as 67.5 per cent, according to the NRF, while clothing tariffs can be up to 32 per cent.

In September, a coalition of retailers  including Walmart, JCPenney, Gap, Michael Kors and Dicks Sporting Goods  sent letters to each member of Congress to urge them to support TPP. The letter said the agreement would remove $2.8m (2.2m) in duties on US imports of clothes, shoes and travel items such as backpacks. They called it a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reduce costs and open new markets for US brands and retailers.

 The Washington Post
Sign up to our free Brexit and beyond email for the latest headlines on what Brexit is meaning for the UK Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Brexit and beyond email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Britain could become an associate member of a new North American Free Trade Area (Nafta) once Brexit has taken place, it has emerged.

The prospect of the UK becoming part of a North American trade bloc under Mr Trump's presidency could be on the cards with the heightened flexibility Brexit is expected to bring and the President-elect's disapproval of the deal in its current form.

Moreover, US senator Newt Gingrich, who first proposed the idea of the UK joining Nafta in the 1900s, is now being tipped in some quarters to become the President-elects secretary of state - increasing the likelihood of talks about the UK's involvement, according to The Telegraph.

Nafta looks set to be either scrapped or reformed under Mr Trump after he repeatedly criticised it during his presidential campaign, describing it as the worst trade deal maybe ever signed [] in this country and blaming the deal for the decline of manufacturing jobs and the influx of immigrants from Mexico into the US.

Since Mr Trumps election victory, Canada and Mexico have said they are willing to open a dialogue about Nafta amid fears that it is in jeopardy, meaning reform is likely to take place.

Mr Gingrich raised the idea of Britain joining when he was Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1998, and received backing from Margaret Thatcher and right-wing Eurosceptics in the UK, but was rejected by the Labour government.

In November 1999 the US Senate Finance Committee proposed a study to see if the UK could be brought within the aegis of Nafta, but it was made clear that Britain would have to leave the EU to join.

Conservative MPs have welcomed the idea of British membership in the trade bloc, saying Britain and the US have similar policies towards the free market and describing it as an opportunity that comes with Brexit, which is likely to take place in March 2019.

What experts have said about Brexit Show all 11 1 /11 What experts have said about Brexit What experts have said about Brexit Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond The Chancellor claims London can still be a world financial hub despite Brexit One of Britains great strengths is the ability to offer and aggregate all of the services the global financial services industry needs This has not changed as a result of the EU referendum and I will do everything I can to ensure the City of London retains its position as the worlds leading international financial centre. Reuters What experts have said about Brexit Yanis Varoufakis Greece's former finance minister compared the UK relations with the EU bloc with a well-known song by the Eagles: You can check out any time you like, as the Hotel California song says, but you can't really leave. The proof is Theresa May has not even dared to trigger Article 50. It's like Harrison Ford going into Indiana Jones' castle and the path behind him fragmenting. You can get in, but getting out is not at all clear Getty Images What experts have said about Brexit Michael OLeary Ryanair boss says UK will be screwed by EU in Brexit trade deals: I have no faith in the politicians in London going on about how the world will want to trade with us. 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 Getty What experts have said about Brexit Tim Martin JD Wetherspoon's chairman has said claims that the UK would see serious economic consequences from a Brexit vote were "lurid" and wrong: We were told it would be Armageddon from the OECD, from the IMF, David Cameron, the chancellor and President Obama who were predicting locusts in the fields and tidal waves in the North Sea" PA What experts have said about Brexit Mark Carney Governor of Bank of England is 'serene' about Bank of England's Brexit stance: I am absolutely serene about the  judgments made both by the MPC and the FPC Reuters What experts have said about Brexit Christine Lagarde IMF chief urges quick Brexit to reduce economic uncertainty: We want to see clarity sooner rather than later because we think that a lack of clarity feeds uncertainty, which itself undermines investment appetites and decision making Getty Images What experts have said about Brexit Inga Beale Lloyds chief executive says Brexit is a major issue: "Clearly the UK's referendum on its EU membership is a major issue for us to deal with and we are now focusing our attention on having in place the plans that will ensure Lloyd's continues trading across Europe EPA What experts have said about Brexit Colm Kelleher President of US bank Morgan Stanley says City of London will suffer as result of the EU referendum: 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 What experts have said about Brexit Richard Branson Virgin founder believes we've lost a THIRD of our value because of Brexit and cancelled a deal worth 3,000 jobs: We're not any worse than anybody else, but I suspect we've lost a third of our value which is dreadful for people in the workplace.' He continued: "We were about to do a very big deal, we cancelled that deal, that would have involved 3,000 jobs, and thats happening all over the country" Getty Images What experts have said about Brexit Barack Obama US President believes Britain was wrong to vote to leave the EU: "It is absolutely true that I believed pre-Brexit vote and continue to believe post-Brexit vote that the world benefited enormously from the United Kingdom's participation in the EU. We are fully supportive of a process that is as little disruptive as possible so that people around the world can continue to benefit from economic growth" Getty Images What experts have said about Brexit Kristin Forbes American economist and an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England argues that the economy had been less stormy than many expected following the shock referendum result: For nowthe economy is experiencing some chop, but no tsunami. The adverse winds could quickly pick up  and merit a stronger policy response. But recently they have shifted to a more favourable direction Getty

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg told The Telegraph: What could be bad about it? As long as it does not stop us doing free trade deals with other people too.

This is one of the great virtues of Brexit  we can look at all these things and if we think they are good we can tag along. We should follow up every opportunity because that is the wonderful position we are in  it is such an exciting position for the UK to be in. Prior to 23 June we could not have had this discussion.
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The day after Donald Trump's election victory, a video has emerged showing a group of American school children chanting the Republican's slogan "build that wall".

In the footage, a small group of pupils at Royal Oak Middle School in Michigan can be heard shouting the slogan in their school dining hall on Wednesday, allegedly reducing other children to tears.

Dee Perez-Scott, who posted the video on Facebook where it has been viewed over four million times, wrote: "This happened today at Royal Oak Middle School in Royal Oak Michigan. It is so sad. Latino children were crying," adding that the scene was "just horrifying".

"Build that wall" was one of the most controversial slogans used by Mr Trump during his campaign and refers to his promise to build a wall along the border between the US and Mexico - and to force Mexico to pay for it.

He first proposed the barrier during his candidacy announcement speech in June 2015, saying he would "build a great wall" on America's southern border, before adding: "I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.

Police were deployed at the school on Thursday following concerns that children who chanted the slogan could be in danger of threatening and offensive comments online.

Lt Keith Spencer of the Royal Oak Police Department told The Detroit News: "We are aware of the video and are monitoring comments on it as it gets shared."

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

A statement issued by the school acknowledged that parents had expressed concern about the safety of the students following the incident.

Royal Oaks Schools' Superintendent Shawn Lewis-Lakin said: "In the incident a small group of students engaged in a brief build the wall chant. School personnel in the cafeteria responded when this occurred.

"We are committed to providing a safe, secure, and supportive learning environment for all students. We addressed this incident when it occurred. We are addressing it today. We are working with our students to help them understand the impact of their words and actions on others in their school community.

 Donald Trump: Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto congratulates the President-elect

"In responding to this incident  indeed in responding to this election  we need to hear each others stories, not slogans, we need to work towards understanding, not scoring points, and we need to find a way to move forward that respects and values each and every member of our community. We will be working on this in school today. Please work on this with us."

Exit polls from Tuesdays voting suggest Mr Trump's vow to build a wall between the US and Mexico has not earned major support among voters. A total of 54 per cent of voters said they were opposed to the idea of a wall.
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Bernie Sanders would have crushed Donald Trump according to new pre-election poll.

In the wake of the shocking election results, many have wondered what would have happened were the Democratic socialist chosen as the nominee.

The poll, reported by the Huffington Post, found that the Vermont senator would have likely earned 56 per cent of the vote, while Mr Trump would have only received 44 per cent.

President Trump protests Show all 20 1 /20 President Trump protests President Trump protests Patrons hold a sign as people march by while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators rally following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators march following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States expressing shock and anger over Donald Trump's election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency AFP/Getty Images President Trump protests Demonstrators protest outside the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois Getty President Trump protests A police officer aims a launcher after demonstrators threw projectiles toward a line of officers during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests An officer examines a vandalized police vehicle as demonstrators riot in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators take over the Hollywood 101 Freeway just north of Los Angeles City Hall in protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests A woman holds up a sign reading 'Trump you are an Idiot' as demonstrators gather during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump outside the City Hall building in Los Angeles, California EPA President Trump protests A masked demonstrator gestures toward a police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, near the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada Reuters President Trump protests Musician Lagy Gaga stages a protest against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in New York City Getty President Trump protests A woman yells as she takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A man dressed in red-white-and-blue sits on the curb during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A protester sets off fireworks during a protest against President-elect Donald Trumpin Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests University of California, Davis students protest on campus in Davis, California, U.S. following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests An Oakland police officer checks out damage after a window was broken by protesters at a car dealership in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests A protester faces a police line in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests President-elect Donald Trumpis victory set off multiple protests AP President Trump protests A fire burns during protests in Oakland, Calif AP

Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson, who endorse Mr Sanders during the primaries, commissioned the poll by Gravis Marketing.

Hillary Clinton did not fare quite as well in the poll amongst Independent voters  who could not vote during the primaries, resulting in Mr Sanders' loss to the former Secretary of State. The poll found that Mr Sanders led Ms Clinton among independent voters 55 to 45 per cent. Ms Clinton suffered a major blow Tuesday night from that particular demographic, losing independents to Donald Trump 48 per cent to 42 per cent.

 Bernie Sanders tells Donald Trump This is America. We will not throw out 11m people. We will not turn against Muslims

Mr Sanders, 75, has not ruled out another run for the presidency in 2020, but for now he is focused on his Senate re-election campaign in 2018.

"Four years is a long time from now," he told the Associated Press. "We'll take one thing at a time, but I'm not ruling out anything."

Mr Sanders added a sharp criticism of the Democratic Party in the days after their stunning defeat early Wednesday morning.

"It is an embarrassment, I think, to the entire [party] that millions of white working-class people decided to vote for Mr Trump," he said, "which suggests that the Democratic message of standing up for working people no longer holds much sway among workers in this country."
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

In the first Trump shake-up since the billionaire populist swept to victory on Tuesday, it emerged on Friday that Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey, has been sidelined as the head of his transition effort in Washington and replaced by Mike Pence, the Vice President-elect.

Mr Pence may have seemed the more suitable choice because, as former six-term member of the House of Representatives, he has a very wide network of contacts in the conservative complex in Washington DC, which is now in frenzied convulsions as many within it jockey for top jobs, in search of influence and coin.

The transition team has to help Mr Trump settle not just on cabinet members and other key positions in the White House, including a chief of staff, but also on choices for about 1,000 top-level posts in his coming administration.

A potentially ominous signal for Mr Christies hopes of securing a top-line job in the incoming administration, the reshuffle came as Donald Trump confronted the sheer complexity of the transition process that must be completed before inauguration on 20 January next year. He is also facing criticism for tapping a large number of local lobbyists in Washington to help recruit talent, sometmes for areas of government of direct interest to the companies and industries they lobby for.

Earlier on Friday, Mr Trump had sent out a Twitter message saying that he would be spending the day huddled with advisors on the top floor of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan to begin the immediate task of choosing a White House chief of staff as well as those he intends to tap to head the major departments of government and join his cabinet.

Mr Christie was the first establishment Republican to throw his lot in with Mr Trump back in late February, when he had abandoned his own bid for the Republican nomination. Thereafter he was an on-off figure in the campaign, almost disappearing from public view in the closing weeks.

By then he had already been picked to head the transition effort. However, there were some inside Team Trump questioning whether Mr Christie had pulled something of a disappearing act when the going seemed to be especially tough for the candidate in the last weeks of the race.

There are, meanwhile, obstacles to nominating the Governor for any position that would require confirmation by the Senate, including any cabinet title, after two of his former top aides were convicted last week for conspiring to close traffic lanes of a major bridge to Manhattan as punishment for a local mayor who had refused to support Mr Christie for re-election.

By being shuffled out of the top transition spot, Mr Christie may also find himself removed from Mr Trumps inner circle of advisors at arguably the most crucial moments in the transition when the first major appointments are likely to come.

Any discomfort for Mr Christie at this stage of the process will be met by schadenfreude among many voters in New Jersey. In part because the so-called Bridgegate scandal seemed to reinforce his reputation as a political bully, he has seen his popularity slide to new lows midway through his second term as governor.

For now Mr Christie has the consolation prize of remaining as one of several transition team vice chairs, who also include Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York City who is also making no secret of his desire for a top-level job in the new administration, along with former primary contender Ben Carson and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Both Carson and Flynn were also vocal supporters of Mr Trump in the campaign, including during his darkest periods.

Another vice chair is Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, also frantically peddling himself as a candidate for a cabinet spot, possibly Secretary of State. His furious support for Mr Trump during the race has carried over into a lack of magnanimity in victory, telling Fox News this week that those Republicans who didnt embrace the New York billionaire were little, whiny, sniveling, negative cowards.

Also sidelined on Friday was Richard Bagger, a close associate of Mr Christie, who had been serving as the transition teams director. The new transition director will be Rick Dearborn, the chief of staff to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, another prominent Trump backer.

In an email to reporters, Mr Trump also announced a new executive committee of his transition packed with loyalists and friends, including Jared Kushner, who is the husband of his daugther, Ivanka Trump. She and two of her siblings, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr were also listed.

Also onto committee is Peter Thiel, the Facebook co-founder who spoke for Mr Trump at the Republican convention, appalling some of his peers in Silicon Valley
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Canada and Mexico have said they are willing to open a "dialogue" about the Nafta trade deal amid fears it is in jeopardy following the election of Donald Trump as US president.

On the campaign trail, Mr Trump vowed to scrap the free trade agreement between the three nations which he and millions of voters believe led to the decline of manufacturing jobs in the US and the influx of immigrants from Mexico.

On Thursday, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said he was more than happy to talk about the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement with Mr Trump. A day earlier, Canada's ambassador to the US, David MacNaughton, also said a renegotiation was possible.

Mr MacNaughton also played down fears any scrapping of Nafta would mean the end of free trade between the two nations because in that case they would be bound by the terms of the 1987 Canada-US Free Trade agreement which was superseded by the three-way pact in 1993.

Sources close to the Ottawa government said they believed there was only a small chance that Mr Trump would move to dismantle Nafta, since changes would require cooperation from pro-business Republicans in Congress.

"He has other priorities, such as ending illegal immigration. Is he really going to burn up political capital on a step that could damage the economy?" said the person, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Meanwhile Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said they were willing to discuss the importance of the agreement with Mr Trump.

President Trump protests Show all 20 1 /20 President Trump protests President Trump protests Patrons hold a sign as people march by while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators rally following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators march following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States expressing shock and anger over Donald Trump's election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency AFP/Getty Images President Trump protests Demonstrators protest outside the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois Getty President Trump protests A police officer aims a launcher after demonstrators threw projectiles toward a line of officers during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests An officer examines a vandalized police vehicle as demonstrators riot in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators take over the Hollywood 101 Freeway just north of Los Angeles City Hall in protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests A woman holds up a sign reading 'Trump you are an Idiot' as demonstrators gather during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump outside the City Hall building in Los Angeles, California EPA President Trump protests A masked demonstrator gestures toward a police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, near the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada Reuters President Trump protests Musician Lagy Gaga stages a protest against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in New York City Getty President Trump protests A woman yells as she takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A man dressed in red-white-and-blue sits on the curb during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A protester sets off fireworks during a protest against President-elect Donald Trumpin Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests University of California, Davis students protest on campus in Davis, California, U.S. following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests An Oakland police officer checks out damage after a window was broken by protesters at a car dealership in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests A protester faces a police line in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests President-elect Donald Trumpis victory set off multiple protests AP President Trump protests A fire burns during protests in Oakland, Calif AP

He insisted they were not discussing renegotiation but instead opening a dialogue about all the deal has done for the three countries since its inception.

He said: "We're ready to talk so we can explain the strategic importance of Nafta for the region.

Here we're not talking about ... renegotiating it, we're simply talking about dialogue.

"Today the world is not competing by country, it's competing by region".

Recommended The US steel town destroyed by Nafta where Donald Trump is king

But Mr Guajardo also warned that Mexico was prepared to circumvent the US to form a broader trans-Pacific trade deal if necessary.

It comes as senior Democrat senator Charles E Schumer said the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal  which would supersede Nafta  is dead following Mr Trumps election.

The New York politician, who is expected to become the Senates next minority leader, said there is no way the unpopular trade deal with several Pacific-Asian nations would be ratified by Congress.

Speaking in June economic address, Mr Trump said: There is no way to fix the TPP.

We need bilateral trade deals. We do not need to enter into another massive international agreement that ties us up and binds us down.

Donald Trump played on popular dislike of free trade deals during his campaign. Pictured: anti Nafta protesters in Oklahoma in 2007 (Getty Images)

This means the Trump Administration will be able to drop the deal along with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership  or TTIP  which is currently being negotiated with the European Union.

Mr Trump has made a big show of his opposition to the country's current free trade deals saying in the past the US has hired stupid negotiators who failed to see the loopholes foreign officials had inserted into their terms.

According to the businessman, this allows them to steal manufacturing jobs and flood the US with the immigrants they dont want in their own countries  such as rapists and murders in the case of Mexico.

Additional reporting by agencies
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Its still theoretically possible for Donald Trump not to become president. But the near-impossibility all depends on the electoral college and the strange US system.

Donald Trump might have won the election by getting more of the votes in the electoral college than Hillary Clinton did. But strictly and legally, its not the election that just happened that matters: its the one where the members of the electoral college go and represent their voters and pick their candidate.

Thats due to happen on 12 December, at meetings in each state where all Republican or Democrat representatives  depending on how each state voted  will cast their vote. And it will almost certainly go one way, with most of the electors casting their ballots for Donald Trump and making him President.

US Election night in pictures Show all 24 1 /24 US Election night in pictures US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Reuters US Election night in pictures Reuters US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Reuters US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures Getty US Election night in pictures AFP/Getty Images

But that could, theoretically, not happen. Members of the electoral college could potentially change their mind  becoming what is known as a faithless elector  and so cast their ballot for somebody else, or not at all.

The phenomenon of the faithless voter is giving people hope that perhaps Donald Trump wont actually become the President of the US. Its almost impossible that it would make any difference, but it does show that Donald Trumps path to presidency might not be simple.

Recommended Ways to oppose the Donald Trump and have your voice heard

Unless something terrible happened, it would practically impossible to convince the electors that they should change their mind and switch to Ms Clinton  which would have to happen to a huge number of voters to even change the result. The party is in the process of coalescing behind Mr Trump, said Jacob Parakilas, deputy head of the US and Americas programme at Chatham House, and so any electors would have to defy the party if they chose not to vote for him.

The electors are chosen in large part because of their loyalty and service to the party, meaning that they are perhaps the least likely people in the world to go against their partys line. Its possible that some of them will retain a commitment to the kind of never Trump belief that some of the Republican party united around, but even in that case they will almost certainly just vote for nobody  or for another Republican like Ted Cruz or Mitt Romney  meaning that a large portion of the college would have to rebel to make any difference.

But perhaps more likely is that something happens that convinces the voters to change their mind away from Trump, so that the Republicans could have another candidate instead. That might happen if something bad happened for Trump, including if he became engulfed by another scandal or had issues with his work as president-Elect.

If enough voters did that, then there could be no winner of the electoral college and the result of the election would not carry.

In that case, it would pass the election to the House of Representatives  the members of which would only be able to chose another candidate who had won some electoral votes, giving them the choice only of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

 Donald Trump is 'vile and horrible' says former Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett

Theyd then be able to spoil that ballot and pass the decision on to the Senate. Theyd then get to pick another person  which would likely be Mike Pence.

No electors have turned faithless in recent elections. The last was in 2004, when an anonymous Minnesota elector was meant to vote for John Kerry but instead voted for his running mate, John Edwards. That one appears to have been a mistake.

But there have been electors in the past who have opted not to support their candidate because they disagree with them  about one per cent of all cases. And even in this election a couple of voters suggested that they might switch their vote away from Hillary Clinton because they didnt like her.

In many states, its perfectly legal for electors to change their minds. More than a dozen states dont have laws to punish them if they do go rogue.

But it remains almost impossible that anything will happen that will stop Mr Trumps electors, meaning that he will almost certainly find himself becoming the president.
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Donald Trump has abruptly changed his stance on continuing protests against his election after being accused of attacking Americans constitutional rights.

The President-elect called the demonstrations unfair on Thursday night, claiming the thousands of voters joining rallies across the US were incited by the media.

Just had a very open and successful Presidential election, the message said. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

A demonstrator pleads others to stand back from the police line during a demonstration in Oakland (Stephen Lam/Reuters)

His remarks came on a second night of rallies in major cities including New York, Chicago and Portland, where police deployed rubber bullets and CS gas as the situation degenerated into rioting and vandalism.

Critics accused Mr Trump of undermining the first amendment of the US constitution, which protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to peaceful assembly.

The man who will take an oath to defend the rights of all citizens is blasting people for exercising their rights to free speech and assembly, tweeted Andrew Stroehlein, the European media director of Human Rights Watch.

And note he is not talking about violence or rioting here. He is criticising the very idea of protesting itself.

But nine hours after the original tweet, a new message was posted on the President-elects official account in a dramatically different tone.

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country, it said. We will all come together and be proud!

The sentiment echoed remarks in Mr Trumps victory speech on Wednesday, when he launched an uncharacteristic plea for unity following one of the most divisive campaigns in political history.

President Trump protests Show all 20 1 /20 President Trump protests President Trump protests Patrons hold a sign as people march by while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators rally following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators march following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States expressing shock and anger over Donald Trump's election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency AFP/Getty Images President Trump protests Demonstrators protest outside the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois Getty President Trump protests A police officer aims a launcher after demonstrators threw projectiles toward a line of officers during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests An officer examines a vandalized police vehicle as demonstrators riot in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators take over the Hollywood 101 Freeway just north of Los Angeles City Hall in protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests A woman holds up a sign reading 'Trump you are an Idiot' as demonstrators gather during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump outside the City Hall building in Los Angeles, California EPA President Trump protests A masked demonstrator gestures toward a police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, near the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada Reuters President Trump protests Musician Lagy Gaga stages a protest against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in New York City Getty President Trump protests A woman yells as she takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A man dressed in red-white-and-blue sits on the curb during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A protester sets off fireworks during a protest against President-elect Donald Trumpin Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests University of California, Davis students protest on campus in Davis, California, U.S. following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests An Oakland police officer checks out damage after a window was broken by protesters at a car dealership in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests A protester faces a police line in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests President-elect Donald Trumpis victory set off multiple protests AP President Trump protests A fire burns during protests in Oakland, Calif AP

Now its time for America to bind the wounds of divisionI say it is time for us to come together as one united people, he told supporters including a man who appeared to shout Kill Obama!.

As polls predicted an emphatic victory for Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the vote, Mr Trump repeatedly suggested he would contest the election result and accused the system of being rigged.

Barack Obama said the Republican candidate was undermining democracy with comments questioning its legitimacy without a shred of evidence.

Mr Trump had called on Americans to march on Washington in 2012 to stop Mr Obamas victory, calling for a revolution against the electoral system.

We can't let this happen, read a tweet posted on 7 November. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!

But he has not repeated the sentiment following his own election victory, when the Electoral College system he once called a disaster for democracy allowed him to beat Ms Clinton despite her winning more votes.
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

There's only one group of people who can  very theoretically  stop the result of the Presidential election. And millions of people are calling on them to do so.

A petition arguing that the result of the election should be overturned has been signed by nearly 2.5 million people, all of whom are asking that Hillary Clinton becomes president.

Those behind the petition are arguing that since Ms Clinton is easily winning the popular vote  by as many as millions of ballots  she should be elected president. It also argues that Donald Trump is not fit to be the president and so shouldn't be allowed to take his position.

President Trump protests Show all 20 1 /20 President Trump protests President Trump protests Patrons hold a sign as people march by while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators rally following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators march following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States expressing shock and anger over Donald Trump's election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency AFP/Getty Images President Trump protests Demonstrators protest outside the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois Getty President Trump protests A police officer aims a launcher after demonstrators threw projectiles toward a line of officers during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests An officer examines a vandalized police vehicle as demonstrators riot in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators take over the Hollywood 101 Freeway just north of Los Angeles City Hall in protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests A woman holds up a sign reading 'Trump you are an Idiot' as demonstrators gather during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump outside the City Hall building in Los Angeles, California EPA President Trump protests A masked demonstrator gestures toward a police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, near the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada Reuters President Trump protests Musician Lagy Gaga stages a protest against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in New York City Getty President Trump protests A woman yells as she takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A man dressed in red-white-and-blue sits on the curb during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A protester sets off fireworks during a protest against President-elect Donald Trumpin Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests University of California, Davis students protest on campus in Davis, California, U.S. following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests An Oakland police officer checks out damage after a window was broken by protesters at a car dealership in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests A protester faces a police line in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests President-elect Donald Trumpis victory set off multiple protests AP President Trump protests A fire burns during protests in Oakland, Calif AP

It is just one of a range of forms of resistance that are springing up in the US in the wake of Mr Trump's win. Protests have begun across the country, with people arguing that Mr Trump should be stopped from taking up his office.

President-elect Donald Trump has hit out at the unfair protests. The controversial tycoon blamed professional protesters for the demonstrations which have turned ugly in some cities.

The chant of "not my president" has been central to the protests, with people looking to register their disagreement with Mr Trump's controversial platform.

Some have argued that it might still be possible for the result to be overturned, if the members of the electoral college change their votes away from Mr Trump. That is almost impossible and would rely on a specific piece of US law that has never been used, but the anger of some voters have led them to ask for it to happen.

That is the argument of a new petition that has been signed by nearly 2.5 million people and bases its argument on the popular vote. The US electoral college requires that designated voters choose their president on behalf of the voters in their state, but some are arguing that they should not obey that usual process and change their mind.

"On December 19, the Electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots," the authors of the petition write. "If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump will win. However, they can vote for Hillary Clinton if they choose. Even in states where that is not allowed, their vote would still be counted, they would simply pay a small fine - which we can be sure Clinton supporters will be glad to pay.

 Bernie Sanders tells Donald Trump This is America. We will not throw out 11m people. We will not turn against Muslims

"We are calling on the Electors to ignore their states' votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton. Why?

"Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.

"Secretary Clinton WON THE POPULAR VOTE and should be President."

Mr Trump himself has hit out at the way that the popular vote can affect the results of the election, arguing in 2012 that it was undemocratic and should be changed.
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

On a blistering August day in Arizona, 18-year-old Jorge Ramos was registering to vote on the steps outside Phoenix College, where he is a freshman student. The son of two formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants, he told The Independent hed been waiting for years to vote and took the privilege seriously. My parents always told me: Your vote counts, he said.

As a first-time voter from an immigrant family in the year of Trump, Ramos seemed like a made-to-measure Clinton supporter. But it wasnt that simple. Were in a big pickle right now with the choice we have, he said. We dont have anyone decent running. I dont think Donald Trump has what it takes to be a good president. But I feel the same about Hillary Clinton.

If someone like Ramos was on the fence, then perhaps the Democrat didnt have quite so much ingrained support among Latinos as her campaign had hoped. As it turned out on election day, the so-called Latino wave did not crest high enough to overcome her opponents wall of white voters. And meanwhile, many Latinos cast their ballots for the Republican.

Estimates of the proportion of Hispanic Americans who voted for Trump run from 18 to 29 per cent. But Latinos accounted for 11 per cent of voters overall, and even 18 per cent of 11 per cent of the entire US electorate is still a lot of votes for the man who called Mexicans rapists and pledged to deport all of the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US.

So what persuaded them?

Robert Alvarado

Robert Alvarado, a 57-year-old sales manager from Dallas, grew up in a conservative Hispanic household and has always voted Republican. He recently married his same-sex partner of 17 years. After I came out as gay, people automatically assumed I must be liberal, he says.

During the GOP primary, he was keen on Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, but he threw his support behind Trump as soon as it became clear that the businessman would be his partys nominee. Trumps not an idiot, hes a businessman and he knows how to get things done, he says.

Alvarado, 57, is a sales manager from Dallas, Texas

Is he crass? Yes. Then again, hes honest, hes a patriot who cares about the country and who said the things people wanted to say. He will surround himself with knowledgeable people. Hes going to be held accountable; he wont run the whole show.

I dont mean this in a degrading way, but its uneducated Latinos that fear deportation and the wall. Trumps not really going to do all that, hes just saying that immigrants have to come to America the correct way. I think when Latinos see what he does, theyll be pleasantly surprised.

I was as surprised as anyone that he won. I had butterflies in my stomach as the results came in from Florida and Ohio. Of course Im nervous. I see how America is reacting to it, and thats unnerving. But Im praying that the right things get done.

I listen to a lot of talk radio. I have a lot of liberal friends who call me brainwashed. My husband is a liberal, but we dont talk about politics at home. I have a son from my previous marriage who is a little more liberal socially, but I dont think he voted for Trump or Hillary.

Jessica Reyes

A teacher from San Diego, 37-year-old Jessica Reyes was born in Mexico but is now a US citizen. She served in the US Army, including a tour in Kosovo. After switching her allegiance from the Democrats, she has voted Republican since 2008.

Trumps offensive comments about Latinos or women didnt bother her. The taco bowl issue? I didnt mind, she says. If a politician doesnt see me as a person worth mentioning in a respectful way, then thats their problem, not mine.

Reyes, 37, is a teacher and US Army veteran who lives in San Diego, California

I was a silent Trump supporter. Im an educator and were expected not to discuss our politics or point of view in the classroom. And because of the candidate I was supporting, I would have faced a major backlash had I talked about it.

Its upsetting to me that as someone who served my country, I fear for my safety just because I support somebody with a different point of view than most of the people that I live around. My students asked me how I voted. I said: Thats between me and my ballot paper.

One of the main reasons I voted for Trump was because hes willing to listen to American veterans. Fiscal responsibility is important to me. And the Democratic party had eight years to do something about immigration and didnt do anything.

I didnt take his idea of the wall seriously. A lot of people believe his words, but it will be hard to put those words into action. Most politicians are just talk, so you have to decide whether youre going to believe what they say or wait to see what they do.

I never considered voting for Hillary Clinton. She failed to deliver when she was in office. As a veteran, the way she failed our brothers in Benghazi hurt me the most. A politician who cant protect our own people? What can I expect from her as Commander in Chief?

Katherine Vasconez

Katherine Vasconez, 30, a corporate lawyer from Los Angeles, is a lifelong Republican. She has always opposed abortion and favoured smaller government, and her family shares her views  they all voted for Trump, too.

That wasn't true of her friends and colleagues. This is the first election when I have lost friends over a political disagreement, she says. It has been intense to a degree Ive never experienced.

Vasconez, 30, is a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles

Ive been very vocal in my support since Day One of his candidacy. I have gay friends and other minority friends. I dont believe in shutting down other peoples views. But three people defriended me on Facebook. I got emails calling me racist and against women.

Trump really was my first choice. I was attracted to his winning spirit. Im a hard worker, and there are times when you really just want to win and youll go against everything else just to achieve that one goal.

You get Trump as a whole package. You cant have his winning style and fire, and also have an amazing speaker who never insults anyone. That person doesnt exist. But I really dont think he means ill in his heart. I dont think hes a racist.

He said and did a lot of things that werent politically correct. I can see other peoples perspective on those things, but hes not trying to be someone hes not. Theres something to be said for being yourself and owning it.

Im very compassionate towards Hillary, though. As happy as I was that Trump won, I was saddened for her loss. I can only imagine how she felt.

Juan-Carlos Gomez

JC Gomez was born in Chile but moved to the US with his parents in 1969. Now 50, he works as a computer solutions architect for Hewlett-Packard in northern Virginia. A Democrat as a young man, he says his politics have moved steadily rightward over the years.

He and his wife see eye to eye, Gomez says, but the rest of their family did not support Trump  and for that, he blames the media. A lot of my family listen purely to CNNs Spanish-language channel. And I know exactly how left-leaning CNN is, he says. The arrogance with which they called Mr Trump names, labelled him racist and misogynist  thats all my family ever heard.

A lot of Mr Trumps immigration platform was just noise. That wall already exists; it may not be a huge brick wall, exactly, but a dividing wall does exist and has for decades. I dont know of any country in the world that doesnt have some of law that enforces border crossing.

I agree with him that unprotected borders lead to the possibility of infiltration by foreign warriors. I have mixed feelings on mass deportation. There are challenges in just uprooting 11 million people, some of whom have lived here their entire lives.

Mr Trump is focused on levelling the playing field in the global market. The only way to stabilise our economy is to bring jobs back home. Ive been more and more indignant at policymakers making it easy for corporations to hire workers from abroad to take jobs here, predominantly in the IT market  while in the manufacturing space, they export all the work to overseas labour.

I hold the Second Amendment close to my heart. As a concealed-carry holder, I felt extremely threatened that Hillary Clinton would challenge the Second Amendment and perhaps even force the Supreme Court to change their interpretation of it. Law-abiding citizens like myself would likely have no choice but to turn in our firearms. Meanwhile, the thugs and criminals dont give a rats ass about law and would hold onto their weapons.
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

One of the nations leading immigration hard-liners is working with Donald Trumps presidential transition team.

Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, told a Wichita-based television station he was consulting with Trump insiders on the future of US immigration policy.

Im a member of the immigration policy transition team, and theres going to be a lot to do there, in part because Mr. Trump and Mr. Obama are diametrical opposites when it comes to immigration policy, so there will be a lot of changes, Kobach told KWCH.

Rather than coming to Washington for meetings in the official transition offices, Kobach said he was conducting most of his work remotely. An email to Kobach seeking further detail was not returned.

The work I do with the transition team is just conference calls and email, so its actually people all over the country who are experts in immigration policy and immigration law just working together and talking on the phone, he said.

Kobach has been described by critics as an anti-immigrant zealot and a favourite of far-right nativists. A graduate of Harvard, Yale and Oxford, he has helped shepherd dozens of restrictive immigration measures at the state and local levels across the country and is known for his affiliation with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the group behind Arizonas SB 1070 immigration law.

While serving as an adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Kobach told The Washington Post he opposed any attempt to give undocumented immigrants a path to legal status. He wants those who are in the United States illegally to voluntarily deport themselves.

We are constantly told that the only two options are massive roundups [of illegal immigrants] or an amnesty. But attrition through enforcement is the third way, Kobach said in 2012. Change the individual decisions of particular illegal aliens, and they will decide to leave the country.

World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Show all 29 1 /29 World reaction to President Trump: In pictures World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty Images World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mosul , Iraq Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures New Delhi, India Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Karachi, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kabul, Afghanistan AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem. Israel Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Moscow, Russia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Seoul, South Korea AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Peshawar, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Hyderabad, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kolkata, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Aleppo, Syria Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem, Israel EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Baghdad, Iraq Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Tokyo, Japan Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico Getty

Kobach is also heavily involved in the movement to require photo identification - his preference is proof of citizenship - at the polls or to register to vote. (A federal appeals court struck down a proof-of-citizenship requirement in three states in September, a blow to Kobach, who had defended it in court.) He was also behind a lawsuit challenging President Obamas executive action on immigration and an addition to the GOP platform that encouraged the teaching of the Bible in public schools.

There is one major idea he takes credit for when it comes to Trump - the notion that Mexico should pay for a border wall.

Theres no question the wall is going to get built, Kobach told KWCH. The only question is how quickly will it get done and who pays for it.

The Washington Post
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

President-elect Donald Trumps campaign staff temporarily redirected the webpage detailing his controversial proposal to temporarily ban Muslim immigration into the United States, one of the most divisive and controversial policy ideas of his campaign, but swiftly sought to restore it after reporter inquiries Thursday.

The proposal is detailed on a page titled, Donald J. Trump statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration. Starting on Election Day, that page redirected to a new page where supporters could donate to the campaign. Thank you America, said the banner on the new page. We showed America the silent majority is no longer silent.

The website was temporarily redirecting all specific press release pages to the homepage. It is currently being addressed and will be fixed shortly, the campaign told The Post in a statement.

The website detailing the controversial ban was restored Thursday afternoon.

Trump, who has said that Muslim immigration poses a threat to the United States, in December called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.

We can be politically correct and we can be stupid, but its going to get worse and worse, Trump said in December during a campaign event in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where he read the statement released earlier in the day. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem, and the dangers the threat imposes, our country cannot be the victim of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad.

The proposal was met with massive backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike, who accused the then-candidate of scapegoating Muslims and race-baiting. Trumps critics have accused him of using racial grievances and fears of radical jihadism to motivate his base.

I think Islam hates us, Trump said in March during an interview with CNN. Theres something there that - theres a tremendous hatred there. Theres a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. Theres an unbelievable hatred of us.

The campaign sought to back away from that language earlier this year amid intense scrutiny after it was clear he would clinch the Republican presidential nomination.

President Trump protests Show all 20 1 /20 President Trump protests President Trump protests Patrons hold a sign as people march by while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators rally following the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators march following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests Thousands of protesters rallied across the United States expressing shock and anger over Donald Trump's election, vowing to oppose divisive views they say helped the Republican billionaire win the presidency AFP/Getty Images President Trump protests Demonstrators protest outside the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois Getty President Trump protests A police officer aims a launcher after demonstrators threw projectiles toward a line of officers during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests An officer examines a vandalized police vehicle as demonstrators riot in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators take over the Hollywood 101 Freeway just north of Los Angeles City Hall in protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests A woman holds up a sign reading 'Trump you are an Idiot' as demonstrators gather during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump outside the City Hall building in Los Angeles, California EPA President Trump protests A masked demonstrator gestures toward a police line during a demonstration in Oakland, California Reuters President Trump protests Demonstrators protest against the election of Republican Donald Trump as President of the United States, near the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada Reuters President Trump protests Musician Lagy Gaga stages a protest against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in New York City Getty President Trump protests A woman yells as she takes part in a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A man dressed in red-white-and-blue sits on the curb during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests A protester sets off fireworks during a protest against President-elect Donald Trumpin Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood AP President Trump protests University of California, Davis students protest on campus in Davis, California, U.S. following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States Reuters President Trump protests An Oakland police officer checks out damage after a window was broken by protesters at a car dealership in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests A protester faces a police line in downtown Oakland, Calif AP President Trump protests President-elect Donald Trumpis victory set off multiple protests AP President Trump protests A fire burns during protests in Oakland, Calif AP

The repackaged proposal shifted from focusing on Muslims in particular and instead saying immigration should be suspended from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism. Many at the time saw it as an attempt to broaden his appeal beyond his base for the general election.

After shifting to a geography-based ban, Trump still made regular reference to jihadism and Muslims in speeches on the campaign trail. His campaign website still included the statement on the morning of Election Day, according to Web caches.

The Washington Post
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

One of Vladimir Putins closest advisors has claimed Donald Trumps victory has averted a third world war.

Speaking after Mr Trump won a shock victory over Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, Kremlin advisor Sergei Glazyev said the Democrat politician was a symbol of war and under Mr Trump the US had a chance to change course.

He told Russian news wire RNS: Americans had two choices: World War Three or multilateral peace.

Clinton was a symbol of war, and Trump has a chance to change this course.

Relations between the two countries have sunk to their lowest point since the Cold War after Russia was accused of interfering in the election with the strategic leak of emails which were damaging to Ms Clinton and the Democrat party.

In October, the Department of Homeland Security officially blamed Russia for the leaking of emails exchanged by members of the Democrat National Committee (DNC) where they conspired to undermine the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders. Russian officials have repeatedly denied allegations of interference.

On Thursday, Russias deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said the Kremlin had been in frequent contact with Mr Trumps campaign team ahead of his victory.

He told Russian news agency Interfax that Moscow had contacts within Mr Trumps inner circle.

World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Show all 29 1 /29 World reaction to President Trump: In pictures World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty Images World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mosul , Iraq Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures New Delhi, India Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Karachi, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kabul, Afghanistan AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem. Israel Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Moscow, Russia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Seoul, South Korea AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Peshawar, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Hyderabad, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kolkata, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Aleppo, Syria Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem, Israel EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Baghdad, Iraq Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Tokyo, Japan Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico Getty

He said: I don't say that all of them, but a whole array of them, supported contacts with Russian representatives.

It comes as the former head of Nato, Anders Rasmussen, warned Mr Trump to show strength against Russia or it will be the beginning of the end for the US-led organisation.

Mr Rasmussen, who led the alliance between 2009 and 2014, said Mr Putin only respects a firm hand when dealing with other world leaders and said Nato needs to intervene to protect the vulnerable Baltic states.

He said: The US must increase support for Nato's eastern flank, set up military bases wherever Russia is threatening the freedom and livelihood of US allies, and whole-heartedly protect Ukraine against future Russian aggression.

The US President must initiate a no-fly zone to impose and maintain a credible and durable ceasefire in Syria.

The US must force the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, to the negotiating table and find a political solution to the devastating conflict.

Mr Rasmussen, who previously served as the Prime Minister of Denmark, is currently working as an adviser to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

His comments follow remarks made by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright where she called Mr Trump a useful idiot for Mr Putin to exploit.

She said: The main thing is to remember that he is President of the United States and that our interests vis a vis what the Russians are doing are very important, and that our friends and allies in central and eastern Europe have been our friends and allies for a very, very long time.
Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Veteran's Day, a US national holiday, commorates the end of the First World War and pays tribute to all Americans who served in the country's armed forces.

When did it start?

The state and federal holiday, often confused with Memorial Day, dates back to World War I. Just before the war ended there was a ceasefire between the Allied forces and Germany before the 11th hour of the 11th month. Congress eventually passed a law creating the holiday in 1926 and it became a national holiday in 1938. Years later, in 1954, President Eisenhower changed the name to Veteran's Day.

Why is it not called Armistice Day?

It was originally known by this name in the US, just as it still is in the UK and other countries. It was dedicated to the troops who died in the First World War. However, after the Second World War, a veteran of that conflict, Raymond Weeks, campaigned for the day to be expanded to honour the veterans of all wars.

In 1954, Congress amended the wording to reflect the growing desire to honour all soldiers and former soldiers. The name stuck.

Who is off?

The US Postal Service along with all state and federal offices will be closed on Friday. Most schools will also be closed for the holiday.

The annual Veterans Day parade is expected to draw 500,000 attendees to 5th Avenue in Manhattan on Friday as many New Yorkers mourn the results of the presidential election - more than 79 percent of residents voted for Hillary Clinton.

Across the country, restaurants and fast food chains will offer free meals to veterans.

Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Show all 13 1 /13 Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans Photographer captures powerful nude images of amputee war veterans

What issues do veterans face?

Soldiers who have served in conflict can often face huge problems on returning to civilian life.

Some may be permanently crippled or face poverty and isolation.

Even if they are physically uninjured, many veterans face serious mental health issues. In particular, combat stress can cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is believed by the Department of Veterans Affairs to affect 11 per cent of Afghan war veterans and 20 per cent of Iraq war veterans.

PTSD is a potentially serious mental health issue, which can have a severe negative effect on the mental health of veterans.

 Rethink remembrance: WWII veterans in moving Armed Forces video

What symptoms might someone with PTSD have?

Veterans with PTSD may experience nightmares or flashbacks, and these may be triggered by certain situations which remind someone with the condition of a stressful event, perhaps in combat.

Avoiding certain events and feeling numb, empty or suicidal can be related to PTSD. Conversely, some people might be constantly alert and looking for danger, like they might in a combat situation.

A Veteran experiencing these or other unusual behaviours should seek professional help. In the US, the National Centre for PTSD is a good place to start.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Donald Trumps shock victory in the US Presidential election has ignited cries of celebration from a number of populist and controversial right-wing political figures in Europe.

As the Republican edged towards the 270 Electoral College votes needed to reach the White House, the leader of Frances far-right Front National party, Marine Le Pen, tweeted her Congratulations to the new President of the US, Donald Trump, and the American people", while Geert Wilders, leader of the right-wing Dutch Freedom Party, wrote: The people are taking their country back [in the US] and so are we."

Recommended Famous right wing commentator says what we all feared about Trump

Following his win, Britain was warned by anti-racist charity Hope not Hate that right groups are becoming bolder and more aggressive as their ideas are adopted into the political mainstream and European leaders said Wednesdays result now opens a period of uncertainty within the continent.

As support for populist and right-wing ideas grows, Europe faces a spate of elections that are set to shape the continents political landscape. Here are the elections that could have the most impact:

France

Presidential election April/May 2017

Following Trumps ascent to the White House, French pollsters are projecting that surprise results cannot be ruled out of the countrys presidential elections.

Incumbent Francois Hollande, who has yet to confirm his candidacy, is the most unpopular president in history and polls show no other leftist candidate has much of a chance. The former president Nicolas Sarkozy is also widely unpopular.

Far-right leader Ms Le Pen, who has dubbed herself Madam Frexit, is projected to be one of the top two candidates in the first round of the election but is projected to lose to the second-round run-off. This has not stopped analysts from suggesting Ms Le Pen could follow in Trumps footsteps. Former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said: "The main lesson for us in France is that Marine Le Pen can win", the Local reports.

Austria

Presidential election December 2016

Fears over rising unemployment and immigration and anger at traditional politics have fuelled support in Austria for the far-right Freedom Party, whose presidential candidate Norbert Hofer narrowly lost an election runoff in May.

The result was later overturned and a re-run ordered after postal-ballot rules were found to have been broken, but Mr Hofer now has a second chance to become Western Europe's first freely elected far-right head of state since 1945.

Austrian opinion polls have generally given a slight edge to Mr Hofer but within the margin of error.

"The American election is a wake-up call for Europe and not least for the presidential election in Austria," Mr Hofer's opponent, former Greens leader Alexander Van der Bellen, told a news conference.

Germany

Regional elections German regional elections Schleswig-Holstein and North-Rhine Westphalia May 2017

Parliamentary Elections September 2017

In Germanys local elections in September, the right-wing, openly anti-Muslim Alternative for Germany party (AfD) made significant gains as Angela Merkels Christian Democrat party (CDU) slumped to its worst ever result.

President Donald Trump life in pictures Show all 16 1 /16 President Donald Trump life in pictures President Donald Trump life in pictures Donald Trump poses in a rocking chair once used by President John F. Kennedy at his New York City residence Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Developer Donald Trump with his new bride Marla Maples after their wedding at the Plaza hotel in New York Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Donald Trump and Celina Midelfart watch the match between Conchita Martinez and Amanda Coetzer during U.S. Open. She was the date whom Donald Trump was with when he met his current wife Melania at a party in 1996 Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas serving as the grand marshal for the Daytona 500, speaks to Donald Trump and Melania Knauss on the starting grid at the Daytona International Speedwa Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Developer Donald Trump talks with his former wife Ivana Trump during the men's final at the U.S. Open Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Donald Trump and his friend Melania Knauss pose for photographers as they arrive at the New York premiere of Star Wars Episode : 'The Phantom Menace,' Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Billionaire real estate developer Donald Trump talks with host Larry King. Trump told King that he was moving toward a possible bid for the United States presidency with the formation of a presidential exploratory committee Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Donald Trump answers questions as Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura looks on in Brooklyn Park. Trump said on Friday he 'very well might' make a run for president under the Reform Party banner but had not made a final decision Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Billionaire Donald Trump makes a face at a friend as he sits next to Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso before the start of the 2003 Miss Universe pageant in Panama City Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Entrepreneur Donald Trump is greeted by a Marilyn Monroe character look-a-alike, as he arrives at Universal Studios Hollywood to attend the an open casting call for his NBC television network reality series 'The Apprentice.' Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Donald Trump and Simon Cowell present an Emmy during the 56th annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Donald Trump and Megan Mullally perform at the 57th annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Donald Trump, poses with his children, son Donald Trump, Jr., and daughters Tiffany and Ivanka Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Billionaire Donald Trump told Miss USA 2006 Tara Conner on Tuesday she would be given a second chance after reported misbehavior Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures Donald Trump holds a replica of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as his wife Melania holds their son Barron in Los Angeles Reuters President Donald Trump life in pictures U.S. property mogul Donald Trump stands next to a bagpiper during a media event on the sand dunes of the Menie estate, the site for Trump's proposed golf resort, near Aberdeen, north east Scotland Reuters

AfD won 14.2 per cent of the vote securing the anti-immigration party its first seats in the Berlin state parliament  the first far-right party to do so since German reunification. The CDU polled just 17.6 per cent of the vote, a major blow to Ms Merkel and an indication of the uphill battle the party will have at the national elections in Germany in October 2017.

Ms Merklel, whose popularity has dipped with backlash against her liberal immigration policy, is yet to announce if she will run for a fourth term. The success of the CDU in the May regional elections may help predict how the party will fair nationally.

Italy

Referendum December 2016

Next month Italians will vote on Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's plan to strip the upper house of parliament of its power to bring down governments, slashing the number of senators by two-thirds.

A Euromedia poll earlier this year found 35 per cent of Italians opposed the plan and 29 per cent supported it, Bloomberg reports.

 Marine Le Pen reacts to Trump victory

Mr Renzi has promised to resign if he loses, and following Trumps win the country's anti-establishment Five Star Movement have compared his fate to that of Hillary Clinton.

The Five Star Movement came second in the 2014 European Parliament election, winning 17 seats and 21.2 per cent of the vote. The next General Election is in 2018, and recent polls predict extremely tight race between pro-Europe and Eurosceptic parties.

Holland

General election March 2017

The election will determine whether leader of the Geert Wilders, leader of the Eurosceptic and anti-immigration Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) will be in with a chance of trying to form a government. Mr Wilders is known for his campaigning to stop the alleged Islamisation of the Netherlands.

The PVV continues to fare well in polls ahead of parliamentary elections, sitting in second place behind the Prime Ministers People's Party for Freedom and Democracy.

Czech Republic

General election October 2017

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka replaced two of his ministers in a cabinet reshuffle triggered by a poor showing in regional elections last month. Mr Sobotka's center-left Social Democrats came second, behind their coalition partner, ANO, a protest movement headed by Andrej Babis, a billionaire businessman and now finance minister, who has capitalized on voters' distrust in traditional parties.

Three opinion polls since the regional election showed his pro-European party almost 15 percentage points behind ANO and MR Sobotka acknowledged the party leadership faced a "tough fight" for a new mandate at its congress.

UK

Local elections May 2017

Comparisons between Trumps victory and Brexit have been rife, with the Republican himself decaling that his win would be Brexit plus, plus, plus.

 Nigel Farage jokes about Donald Trump groping Theresa May

In the wake of the countrys separation from the EU, the voting in May will prove the first major electoral test for Prime Minister Theresa May and her Brexit means Brexit stance.

Hungary

Parliamentary election Spring 2018

Hungarian leader Viktor Orban is renowned for his Eurosceptic nationalism, however he suffered a blow in October after his referendum on mandatory EU migrant quotas was rendered invalid due to a low turnout.

However, nearly 98 per cent of those who took part supported the government's call to reject the EU plan and recent opinion polls from Szazadveg, a pro-government think-tank, showed the ruling Fidesz partys approval rating had risen to 48 per cent this month, from 43 per cent in June and 40 per cent in December, the Financial Times reports.

Additional reporting by Reuters
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The head of the board of Turkey's opposition daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, has been arrested following a probe into "terrorist activities", the publication confirmed.

Akin Atalay was taken into custody at Istanbul's airport after arriving from Germany, said Cumhuriyet, which has in recent years taken a strong line against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).

He was targeted by a warrant that was part of a probe into terrorist activities, and ushered into a police vehicle that was waiting for him on the tarmac.

Nine of the paper's staff, including its current editor-in-chief, Murat Sabuncu, were remanded in custody at the weekend pending trial after raids that have added to growing international alarm about media freedoms in Turkey.

Turkish courts ordered a media blackout, prohibiting the press from reporting on the detention of the journalists.

The exiled former editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, fled to Germany earlier this year while appealing against a near six-year jail term for revealing state secrets.

Some 35,000 people have been arrested and tens of thousands more have lost their jobs  including military officers, judges, teachers, civil servants and journalists  in a sweeping crackdown in the wake of the failed July bid to oust Mr Erdogan.

Sibel Gunes, the general secretary of the Turkish Journalists Association, told the Associated Press that 170 media outlets had been shut down since the attempted coup and 105 journalists arrested.

More than 700 journalists are said to have had their press accreditation revoked and thousands are now unemployed.

Additional reporting by AFP
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Donald Trump's election has placed America's relationship with Europe at risk, EU president Jean Claude Juncker has warned.

In a series of blunt and forthright remarks on the shock winner of the US elections, Mr Juncker accused the new President-elect of ignorance and said he must be taught "what Europe is and how it works".

Speakng to students at a conference in Luxembourg, the EU Commission President said: The election of Trump poses the risk of upsetting intercontinental relations in their foundation and in their structure."

His blunt remarks reflected widespread shock and concern among Europeans at the election of Mr Trump, who among other statements had praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and questioned the principle of collective defense in Nato.

His comments contrasted with the more diplomatic reactions of European leaders who have said they look forward to working with the next Republican president.

Mr Juncker also warned against the pernicious consequences of the Republican's statements on security policy. He also recalled a Trump statement in which he seemed to think that Belgium, the country that hosts the headquarters of the EU and Nato, was a city.

Recommended British public fear Donald Trump will weaken the Nato alliance

We will need to teach the president-elect what Europe is and how it works, he said, adding that Americans usually had no interest in Europe.

I think we will waste two years before Mr Trump tours the world he does not know."

It comes after Mr Juncker had raised doubts on Thursday about Mr Trump's views on global trade, climate policy and Western security.

European Council president Donald Tusk and Mr Juncker invited the billionaire businessman to visit Europe for a summit meeting with the EU.

World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Show all 29 1 /29 World reaction to President Trump: In pictures World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty Images World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mosul , Iraq Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures New Delhi, India Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Karachi, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kabul, Afghanistan AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem. Israel Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Moscow, Russia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Seoul, South Korea AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Peshawar, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Hyderabad, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kolkata, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Aleppo, Syria Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem, Israel EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Baghdad, Iraq Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Tokyo, Japan Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico Getty

In a joint statement, they offered their sincere congratulations to the new US president-elect and stressed it was more important than ever to work together to tackle problems including Isis.

The two leaders said: The strategic partnership between the European Union and the United States is rooted in our shared values of freedom, human rights, democracy and a belief in the market economy. Over the years, the European Union and the United States have worked together to ensure peace and prosperity for our citizens and for people around the world.

Today, it is more important than ever to strengthen transatlantic relations. Only by co-operating closely can the EU and the US continue to make a difference when dealing with unprecedented challenges such as Daesh, the threats to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, climate change and migration.

Fortunately, the EU-US strategic partnership is broad and deep: from our joint efforts to enhance energy security and address climate change, through EU-US collaboration on facing threats to security in Europe's eastern and southern neighbourhoods, and to the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership - we should spare no effort to ensure that the ties that bind us remain strong and durable.

 Boris Johnson: End the 'whinge-o-rama' on Trump

We should consolidate the bridges we have been building across the Atlantic. Europeans trust that America, whose democratic ideals have always been a beacon of hope around the globe, will continue to invest in its partnerships with friends and allies, to help make our citizens and the people of the world more secure and more prosperous.

We would take this opportunity to invite you to visit Europe for an EU-US summit at your earliest convenience. This conversation would allow for us to chart the course of our relations for the next four years.

Additional reporting by agencies
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

A teenage Isis supporter scouted out some of Germanys most iconic buildings and monuments for a prospective attack, officials have said.

The 19-year-old Syrian man, who has not been identified, was arrested in March for suspected links to the so-called Islamic State after the alleged plans were uncovered.

Judges at the Federal Court of Justice ruled the man could be held for three more months to allow investigators to continue their work on Thursday, amid fears he could be part of a wider network plotting terror attacks.

In its decision, the court said the suspect had scouted out sites including the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag parliament building and Alexanderplatz square for potential attacks over several months.

Another Syrian man was arrested for planning a terror attack in Berlin in October (EPA)

Having arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in August 2015, he was believed to have been gathering detailed information for Isis until February this about the number of people and tourist buses in different areas.

A court document said intelligence was transmitted to an Isis contact in Syria using a smartphone.

Through electronic messages he also offered to act as a contact for potential attackers in Germany, commit a non-specified attack himself or alternatively with two unknown people officials said.

Investigators examined four mobile phones and data cards seized during his arrest, and had so far reviewed more than 37,000 text messages and chats, nearly 13,000 visual images and around 9,800 video images, according to the court document.

Investigators believe the man had worked with Isis in Syria since 2013, and maintained contact with the jihadist group using his mobile phone after arriving in Germany.

He also planned to return to Syria, where his parents, wife and son still live, to fight in the conflict there, according to the court document.

Another Syrian man, Jaber al-Bakr, was arrested on suspicion of planning a major bombing at a Berlin airport in October but killed himself in prison days later.

Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis Show all 9 1 /9 Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis Policemen outside Rouen's cathedral during the funeral of Jacques Hamel, the priest who was killed in a church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy on 26 July during a hostage-taking claimed by Islamic State group Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis Two jihadists, both 19, slit Hamel's throat while he was celebrating mass in an attack that shocked France as well as the Catholic Church Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis Muslims place flowers and hold a minute of silence in front of the church if Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, western France, where French priest Jacques Hamel was killed on 26 July Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis Two people hold each other by the new makeshift memorial in Nice, in tribute to the victims of the deadly Bastille Day attack at the Promenade des Anglais Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the truck attack that killed 84 people in Nice on France's national holiday. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, smashed a 19-tonne truck into a packed crowd of people in the Riviera city celebrating Bastille Day Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis Police work at a site where a Syrian migrant set off an explosive device in Ansbach, southern Germany, on 25 July, killing himself and wounding a dozen others Daniel Roland/AFP/Getty Images Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis A Syrian migrant set off an explosion at a bar in southern Germany that killed himself and wounded a dozen others in the third attack to hit Bavaria in a week. The 27-year-old, who had spent a stint in a psychiatric facility, had intended to target a music festival in the city of Ansbach but was turned away because he did not have a ticket Friebe/AFP/Getty Images Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis Police officers walk along train tracks in Wuerzburg southern Germany on 19 July, a day after a man attacked train passengers with an axe. German authorities said they had found a hand-painted IS flag among the belongings of the man, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who seriously injured four members of a family of tourists from Hong Kong in his rampage Daniel Roland/AFP/Getty Images Terrorism in 2016: Terror attacks in Europe claimed by Isis German police killed a teenage assailant after he attacked passengers on a train in Wuerzburg, southerg Germany with an axe and a knife on 18 July, seriously wounding three people Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/AFP/Getty Images

Authorities did not confirm whether there was any link between al-Bakr and the 19-year-old currently in custody.

Germany remains on heightened alert after a suicide bombing by a Syrian Isis supporter and axe attack on a train, both in July.

Earlier this year, a German-born former Isis fighter told The Independent he had been asked to return to his home country and carry out a terror attack by commanders in Raqqa last year.

Harry Sarfo said Isis leaders were specifically looking for recruits to attack the UK and Germany, having already set up networks in other targeted nations.

Police arrested five members of a network accused of radicalising German Muslims and sending them to fight for Isis in Syria on Tuesday.

Let by an extremist preacher known as Abu Walaa, the group is accused of using a mosque and Islamic school in the city of Hildesheim to create the ideological and linguistic foundations for future activity with Isis, then organising recruits travel to its territories.

Also on Tuesday, a court in Frankfurt sentenced a 30-year-old German man to eight years in prison for war crimes and membership of Isis.

The court said the man, identified only as Abdelkarim E, fought for the group in Syria in 2013 and 2014.


For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The social media network for professionals, LinkedIn, is to be banned in Russia, possibly within a week.

It comes after a Moscow court upheld an August decision in support of the countrys online regulator to block the website.

The monitor, Roskomnadzor, said LinkedIn flouted Russian law, which is purportedly intended to protect user privacy.

Critics are wary of the decision and have expressed fears that it is a further example of how state control over the lives of Russians has been extended into the online sphere.

Roskomnadzor said LinkedIn contravened Russian law because it didnt store personal information on the estimated 2.6 million users within the country.

But campaigners have said that keeping all personal data within Russia makes users more vulnerable to state surveillance and control.

The Russian courts decision has the potential to deny access to LinkedIn for the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses, said a company spokesperson.

She added: We remain interested in a meeting with Roskomnadzor to discuss their data localization request.

The most influential people on social media in 2015 Show all 6 1 /6 The most influential people on social media in 2015 The most influential people on social media in 2015 The most influential people on social media in 2015 Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie) Youtube The most influential people on social media in 2015 The most influential people on social media in 2015 Brandon Stanton The most influential people on social media in 2015 The most influential people on social media in 2015 Tess Holliday The most influential people on social media in 2015 The most influential people on social media in 2015 Lena Dunham The most influential people on social media in 2015 The most influential people on social media in 2015 Harry Styles The most influential people on social media in 2015 The most influential people on social media in 2015 Taylor Swift

However, it is unclear why LinkedIn, which will soon become acquired by Microsoft, have been publicaly targeted first of all the major tech companies operating in Russia.

Other companies, such as Booking.com, have said they will servers into the country in order to comply with Roskomnadzors demands.

Social media giants Facebook and Twitter have so far avoided installing servers in Russia to comply with the law.

However, major internet giants are in the process of complying with the law, said Roskomnadzors chief, Alexander Zharov, according to the Wall Street Journal. The organisation has checked 1,500 companies to ensure they obey the rules.

Despite this expression of confidence, other some analysts say the move is primarily a warning and that the biggest sites would be able to resist.

Since 2012, when large scale protests were organised largely by social media in response to rigged elections, the Russian state has been keenly aware of the power of the internet and taken steps to limit it.

Also in recent years, Russia has clamped down on domestic businesses it perceives as becoming too powerful and autonomous.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Ukrainian politicians have claimed the Kremlin faked a terror plot in Crimea to discredit their country in the eyes of US President-elect Donald Trump.

Russias spy agency, the FSB, said it caught three members of an alleged sabotage and terrorism group with explosives and weapons in the naval base city of Sevastopol on Wednesday, and claimed the trio were controlled by Ukrainian military intelligence.

The Ukrainian Defence Ministry quickly denied the allegation, suggesting instead that Vladimir Putin knew American special services would be feeding information to Mr Trump ahead of him assuming office in January, and wanted to make sure he was on Russia's side.

The FSB allege the three Ukrainian citizens were plotting acts of sabotage against military sites and crucial infrastructures on the Crimea peninsula, including power stations, water processing plants and gas networks, The Times reported.

But Zoryan Shkiryak, a Ukrainian interior ministry adviser, suggested that Russia had acted to create a myth about Ukrainian terrorism.

He said: The Russian special services know well that today Donald Trump started receiving information from the American special services, including about what is going on in Ukraine. This information was supposed to land on Trumps desk with the aim of discrediting Ukraine, although the president-elect is surrounded by Republican Party representatives who perfectly know the price of Russian provocations and their modus operandi.

Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the National Security and Defence Council, told Reuters: Nobody has detained Ukrainian military personnel... This is yet another frame-up by the Russian security forces.

A spokesperson for Ukraines ministry of defence told The Times the alleged Crimea plot was the latest fake by the Russian special services designed to cover up repression against inhabitants of the peninsula and discredit Ukraine.

In August, a Ukrainian and a Russian were arrested after a similar alleged plot.

The FSB claimed the alleged suspects captured on Wednesday were well-equipped. Powerful explosive devices, armaments, ammunition, special communication means and other material evidence of criminal activity, including schemes of the sites to be sabotaged, were seized from the detainees, it said.

The three men were remanded in custody for two months by a court in Sevastopol. A former colleague of two of them said they were military analysts who had worked for a thinktank, according to The Times report.

Ukrainian politician and former prisoner of war, Nadiya Savchenko, appealed to the US president-elect on Thursday to toughen sanctions against Moscow. She suggested that if he did not it could cause a third world war.

In a Facebook post she asked Mr Trump to help Ukraine fight Russian aggressors with military and diplomatic support.

She said that Moscow understands only force and resolve and when the world community adhered to the policy of appeasement, it led to the biggest catastrophe of 20th century.

You have all possibilities to prevent World War III, she wrote.

In the aftermath of Mr Trumps win, the Times reported Ukrainian politicians raced to delete social media posts labelling him a catastrophe. This is a symbol of true democracy  when nobody knew the results of the elections until the very last moment, said President Poroshenko of Ukraine in congratulating the President-elect.

Protests as Ukraine approves Russia navy base extension Show all 5 1 /5 Protests as Ukraine approves Russia navy base extension Protests as Ukraine approves Russia navy base extension 361263.bin EPA Protests as Ukraine approves Russia navy base extension 361262.bin Reuters Protests as Ukraine approves Russia navy base extension 361261.bin AP Protests as Ukraine approves Russia navy base extension 361281.bin AFP/Getty Images Protests as Ukraine approves Russia navy base extension 361282.bin EPA

Mr Trump said during his campaign that he would improve the relationship between Washington and Moscow. Vladimir Putins spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow the Russian president was also willing to work on the two nations deteriorating ties once the presidential vote was over, Russia's international news agency RIA Novosti reported.

Many people inside and outside of Ukraine believe that a strong relationship between Russia and the US could be a disaster for the country, as US economic sanctions are believed crucial to preventing Mr Putin's forces from invading the country.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Nato secretary-general, told the Times: The key challenge for Ukraine now is to make sure Trump fully understands that Ukraine is of the utmost importance for the US. His notion is America first but it is a vital American interest to support Ukraine. Its a core American interest to defend Europe, thats the bedrock of North Atlantic security.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Spains ruling party has presented a reform proposal aimed at banning internet memes which appear to mock politicians.

Lawmakers from the Popular Party (PP) announced the measures to halt the spreading of images that infringe the honour of a person and presented a motion to the national Congress.

The party claimed the reform will only involve memes which are insulting, involve death threats or accuse a person of committing a crime.

Politicians want the measures to be written into Spains Citizens Security Law, introduced in July 2015 and including restrictions on public protests and social media activism.

The ministers noted that a law from 1982 involving the spreading of insulting images was outdated and did not take into account the appearance of the internet. Many of the memes in question have made fun of the policies of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy.

Free speech campaigners have criticised the proposal as an attack on civil liberties, and believe the measures could lead to more restrictions on freedom of expression.

We are worried about this reform because internet does not require special laws; the same rights and duties should exist online as offline, Spains Platform for the Defence of Freedom of Information (PDLI) said in a statement.

If the intent is to pursue those who publish images without consent then an act as widespread as sharing political criticism in the form of memes becomes a risky activity.

Thousands of social network users reacted to the announcement by sharing dozens of memes involving Mr Rajoy, under the hashtag #SinMemesNoHayDemocracia - meaning no democracy without memes.

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

In September, a Socialist regional MP was caught creating a derogatory meme of his partys leader on his laptop in the middle of a parliamentary session.

Juan Jose Moreno Navarro was photographed in the Madrid assembly turning a picture of leader Cristina Cifuentes into the popular movie character Dirty Harry, in order to mock her proposed policies
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

An Israeli minister has called for the country to build more settlements in the occupied territories following the shock US Presiedential election victory of Donald Trump.

The Republican property magnate, who beat Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to the White House, has indicated that he may end the US's longstanding opposition to building in Palestinian territories.

Science Minister Otir Akunis told the Israeli state-controlled Army radio: "We need to think how we move forward now when the administration in Washington, the Trump administration and his advisers, are saying that there is no place for a Palestinian state".

Mr Trump said there was nobody more pro-Israel than I am in March, adding that he would oppose any attempt to force Israel into an agreement it opposes.

His adviser on Israel, David Friedman, said last month that he does not believe Mr Trump sees Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank as illegal, as the majority of the international community does.

Asked whether he believed in the two-state solution, the basis of more than two decades of peace negotiations, Mr Friedman said Mr Trump was "tremendously sceptical".

On Wednesday, Mr Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to invite him to visit the White House after his inauguration in January  before he made the customary phone call to other prominent world leaders, including British Prime Minster Theresa May.

World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Show all 29 1 /29 World reaction to President Trump: In pictures World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty Images World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mosul , Iraq Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures New Delhi, India Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Karachi, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kabul, Afghanistan AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem. Israel Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Moscow, Russia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Seoul, South Korea AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Peshawar, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Hyderabad, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kolkata, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Aleppo, Syria Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem, Israel EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Baghdad, Iraq Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Tokyo, Japan Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico Getty

Mr Netanyahu welcomed Mr Trumps victory, saying the former reality star was a true friend of Israel.

The Israeli Prime Minister, whose administration is said to be the most right-wing in the countrys history, has so far been very cautious about calling for more settlements and the Israeli government is still officially working towards a two-state solution.

But members of his Cabinet have been far more outspoken, with Education Minister Naftali Bennett saying Mr Trumps election signalled an end to the notion of a Palestinian state.

While Israel calls Jerusalem its capital, few other countries accept that, including the United States (EPA)

Last month Mr Bennett, who is said to have his eye on becoming Prime Minister himself in the near-future, said it was time to increase the sovereignty of Israel by building more settlements, providing the UN Security Council passed a motion condemning them.

Israel remains concerned that outgoing US President Barack Obama will attempt to push a resolution through before he leaves office.

Meanwhile, Mahmud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, gave Mr Trump a cautious congratulations and said he hoped peace could be achieved during his term based on the borders of 1967, the year Israel occupied the West Bank.

Recommended Trump adviser says Israeli settlements are not an obstacle to peace

But a high-ranking Palestinian official warned that, "We are worried because we have here someone who has been completely unpredictable, a loose cannon and also because this is not an issue just for the Palestinians but for the rest of the world."

He said the one consolation was that, "His statements are so unfeasible, unreasonable, illogical, so in violation of international laws and the international consensus, that they cannot be implemented."

"When faced with the realities of the office, things change," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Additional reporting by agencies
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Men wearing Iraqi federal police uniforms have tortured and extrajudicially executed civilians south of the Isis-held city of Mosul, rights groups have said.

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International researchers in al-Shura and al-Qayyara districts indicates that six people were shot dead on suspicion of having ties to the militants, a report from the group said on Thursday, and several more detained and beaten.

The claims are the first reported abuses of cilviians' human rights by Iraqi forces in the battle to date.

The four-week-old offensive to retake Mosul has driven Isis to retreat from surrounding towns and villages, in many cases taking hundreds of civilians with them as human shields.

Ten men and a 16-year-old boy who escaped being forcibly moved in late October handed themselves over to men wearing police uniforms, Amnesty found. Some had waved white cloth and pulled up their shirts to show they were not wearing explosive vests.

Six were handcuffed on the presumption they were Isis fighters who had been left behind and taken to an open desert area where they were insulted with sectarian language and beaten with rifle butts, punched and kicked. They were made to lie on their stomachs while shots were fired between their legs, Amnesty said, before three men were separated from the group and shot.

In pictures: Mosul offensive Show all 40 1 /40 In pictures: Mosul offensive In pictures: Mosul offensive A doctor carries an Iraqi newborn baby at a hospital in Mosul, Iraq July 18, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi girls play at a yard of a school in Mosul, Iraq July 18, 2017alal Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A woman on crutches who is a relative of men accused of being Islamic State militants is seen at a camp in Bartella, east of Mosul, Iraq July 15, 2017. Picture taken July 15, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A displaced girl, who fled from home carries a doll at Hamam al-Alil camp south of Mosul, Iraq July 13, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi federal police members and civilians celebrate in the Old City of Mosul on 9 July 2017 after the government's announcement of the "liberation" of the embattled city. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's office said he was in "liberated" Mosul to congratulate "the heroic fighters and the Iraqi people on the achievement of the major victory" AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A picture taken on 9 July 2017, shows a general view of the destruction in Mosul's Old City. Iraq will announce imminently a final victory in the nearly nine-month offensive to retake Mosul from jihadists, a US general said Saturday, as celebrations broke out among police forces in the city. AFP In pictures: Mosul offensive Members of the Iraqi federal police raise the victory gesture as they ride on a humvee while advancing through the Old City of Mosul on 28 June 2017, as the offensive continues to retake the last district held by Islamic State (IS) group fighters. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Smoke billows as Iraqi forces advance through the Old City of Mosul on 26 June 2017, during the ongoing offensive to retake the last district held by the Islamic State (IS) group. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi man wearing the green scarf of the Shi'ite faith kisses an Iraqi Army soldier on safely reaching the Iraqi forces position as Iraqi civilians flee the Old City of west Mosul where heavy fighting continues on 23 June 2017. Iraqi forces continue to encounter stiff resistance with improvised explosive devices, car bombs, heavy mortar fire and snipers hampering their advance. Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A picture taken from the inside of an Iraqi forces armoured vehicle shows residents walking through a damaged street as troops advance towards Mosul's Old City on 18 June 2017, during the ongoing offensive to retake the last district still held by the Islamic State (IS) group. Military commanders told AFP the assault had begun at dawn after overnight air strikes by the US-led coalition backing Iraqi forces. They said the jihadists were putting up fierce resistance. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi Army soldiers advance in a destroyed street after an Iraqi forces airstrike targeted an Islamic State sniper position 17 June 2017 in al-Shifa, the last district of west Mosul under Islamic State control. IS snipers, as well as car and suicide bomb attacks continue to hinder the Iraqi forces efforts to retake the final district. A series of airstrikes by Iraqi helicopter gunships attempted to hit multiple Islamic State sniper positions in al-Shifa. Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier frisks a displaced Iraqi man at a temporary camp in the compound of the closed Nineveh International Hotel in Mosul on 16 June 2017 which was recovered by Iraqi troops from Islamic State group fighters earlier in the year. A screening centre set up in the compound's fairgrounds sees a constant stream of Iraqis fleeing the battle for Mosul, awaiting their turn to be checked by the Iraqi forces who are searching for suspected Islamic State (IS) group members. The small fairground lies at the end of a pontoon bridge across the Tigris recently opened to civilians that is the only physical link between the two banks of the river. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqis staying at the al-Khazir camp swim in a river near the camp for internally displaced people, located between Arbil and Mosul on 11 June 2017. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi government forces drive on a road leading to Tal Afar on 9 June 2017, during ongoing battles to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi policeman carries a poster bearing an image of Mosul's iconic leaning minaret, known as the "Hadba" (Hunchback), on 22 June 2017. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqis stand in line to receive food aid in western Mosul's Zanjili neighbourhood on 7 June 2017, during ongoing battles as Iraqi forces try to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters. Living conditions in Mosul have again deteriorated since the start of the Iraqi government's offensive on the city in October in which they retook a large part of the west of the city. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Displaced Iraqis carry lightbulbs and sacks as they evacuate from western Mosul's Zanjili neighbourhood as government forces advance in the area during their ongoing battle against Islamic State (IS) group fighters on 13 May 2017 AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) flashes the victory gesture as he patrols in western Mosul's al-Islah al-Zaraye neighbourhood on 13 May 2017 AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi army soldiers from the 9th armoured division on a truck flash the sign of victory as they drive back from Mosul to the town of Qaraqosh (also known as Hamdaniya) Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Members of Iraqi forces flash the sign of victory on their vehicle as they advance towards Hammam al-Alil area south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi security forces gestures in Hammam al-Alil, south of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi children, one flashing the sign of victory, greet Iraqi army's soldiers from the 9th armoured division in the area of Ali Rash, adjacent to the eastern Al-Intissar neighbourhood of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Peshmerga forces look at a tunnel used by Islamic State militants near the town of Bashiqa, east of Mosul, during an operation to attack Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier takes a photograph with his phone as his comrade stands next to a detained man, whom the Iraqi army soldiers accused of being an Islamic State fighter, who was fleeing with his family in the Intisar disrict of eastern Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iranian Kurdish female members of the Freedom Party of Kurdistan (PAK) hold a position in an area near the town of Bashiqa, some 25 kilometres north east of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi families, who fled their homes in Hamam al-Alil, gather on the outskirts of their town Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Displaced people walk past a checkpoint near Qayara, south of Mosul, Iraq AP In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi families who were displaced by the ongoing operation by Iraqi forces against jihadists of the Islamic State group to retake the city of Mosul, are seen gathering in an area near Qayyarah In pictures: Mosul offensive A boy who just fled Abu Jarbuah village is seen with his family at a Kurdish Peshmerga position between two front lines near Bashiqa, east of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi child eats a pomegranate upon the arrival of Iraqi forces in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive People who just fled Abu Jarbuah village sit as they eat at a Kurdish Peshmerga position between two front lines near Bashiqa, east of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A couple who just fled Abu Jarbuah village are escorted by Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Women carry a boy over a wall as civilians flee their houses in the village of Tob Zawa, Iraq AP In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier and a civilian ride a motorbike as smoke rises behind them, on the road between Qayyarah and Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi forces, wearing a skull mask, waits at a checkpoint for people fleeing the main hub city of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier sits at a checkpoint in an area near Qayyarah Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi men prepare food portions for Iraqi forces deployed in areas south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi forces celebrate upon the arrival of vehicles bringing food to them Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi childen smoke cigarettes upon the arrival of Iraqi forces in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi forces distributes drinks to children in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty

Three more men in the area were also killed in separate incidents after trying to hand themselves over to men in police uniforms.

When the Mosul military operation began, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi made clear that violations by Iraqi armed forces and its allies would not be tolerated. Now is the time for him to prove just that, Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research for Amnesty in Beirut said.

The Iraqi authorities must immediately investigate these alarming reports of extrajudicial executions and torture, she added.

A statement from the Command of the Federal Police Forces denied the claims, saying that all pro-government forces in the coalition offensive to retake the city of Mosul were committed to protecting civilian lives and property.

It is not the first time Amnesty has documented supposed extrajudicial executions by men wearing Iraqi police uniforms in the fight against Isis: the group said that 16 men and boys were killed in similar circumstances after handing themselves over to liberating forces in the battle for Fallujah in May.

 Iraqi forces enter Mosul

Without effective measures to suppress and punish serious violations, there is a real risk that we could see war crimes of this kind repeated in other Iraqi villages and towns during the Mosul offensive, Ms Maalouf added.

Isis has also reportedly been tricking civilians by wearing Iraqi army fatigues and posing as Iraqi coalition forces: when residents go out to greet them they were shot, said Tariq, an engineering student from Hammam al-Alil, which was recaptured by pro-government forces last week. Even a one-year-old baby, they put a bullet in his head, he said.

The US-backed Operation Inherent Resolve to retake Mosul - Iraqs second largest city and home to at least 1.5million people - began last month, aimed at ousting Isis after two years and ending the groups incarnation as a land-holding force in Iraq.

Units from the 30,000 strong coalition of Kurdish Peshmerga, Iraqi army and Sunni and Shiite militias has entered Mosuls suburbs from the east, where they have been met with fierce resistance from jihadis in the form of suicide bombers, snipers and boobytrapped roads and bridges, and are preparing a second assault on the city from the south.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Two ancient cities in northern Iraq have suffered enormous destruction at the hands of both retreating Isis fighters and advancing Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers, researchers from the American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives (Asor Chi) have said.

Newly released satellite imagery from Birs Nimrud, 20 miles south of the Isis-held city of Mosul, shows that the ancient, towering ziggurat, or pyramid-like temple complex, was levelled at some point between late August and early October, probably by Isis militants falling back towards their stronghold.

Nimrud was the one of the great centres of the ancient Middle East. Founded in the 13th century BC, it became the capital of the Assyrian empire, whose rulers built vast palaces and monuments that have drawn archaeologists for more than 150 years.

Its huge stepped tower - 200 ft in height - was considered the most spectacular sacred structure known from ancient Mesopotamia when it was uncovered in the 19th century.

Unusually, Isis has not claimed responsibility for the destruction. Speaking to National Geographic, Michael Danti, ASOR CHI's academic director, said that the ziggurat ruins would have made a strategic defensive outpost since it was the highest point in the Nineveh plains for miles around - but Isis activity in the area has been unpredictable since the US-backed Iraqi coalition operation to retake Mosul got underway last month.

We're seeing a lot of really peculiar activity like this in Islamic State-held territory, Mr Danti said.

The nearby site of the city of Dur Sharrukin has also been damaged by Kurdish forces digging defensive trenches at some point between mid-October and early November.

Previously unexcavated earthen embankments thought to hold more artefacts were bulldozed and a large military outpost built on top of the sites remains, Asor Chi said.

Dur Sharrukin had previously been attacked and many of its archeological treasures destroyed or looted by Isis last year. The group views all human endeavour outside their extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam as heretical.

The coalition, which launched air strikes against IS two years ago, reported Thursday that Birs Nimrud had been cleared of Isis fighters - although the site could still be boobytrapped, as was the case when Isis fled the ancient city of Palmyra in neighbouring Syria earlier this year.

Operation Inherent Resolve, as it is known, is a ground offensive designed to deal a fatal blow to the self-styled caliphate Isis declared in 2014.

Units from the 30,000 strong coalition have entered Mosuls eastern suburbs and are preparing a second assault from the south in the face of fierce resistance from jihadis including suicide bombings, sniper fire and improvised explosive devices littering roads and bridges.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

At least 40 civilians have been shot and killed and their bodies displayed from electricity poles in the Isis-controlled city of Mosul, the UN has said.

The latest crackdown on residents suspected of treason against Isis so-called caliphate was reported by the UNs Human Rights Commissioner on Thursday, citing reliable sources within the city.

Another man was reportedly executed in a public square for ignoring Isis new ban on mobile phones.

The reports are the latest examples of how the jihadis are growing ever more ruthless in their attempts to suppress signs of rebellion as Iraqi coalition forces advance on Mosul to end the groups two-year-long occupation of the city.

The UN said that the recent killings were preceded by hastily-organised kangaroo courts in which the defendants were forced to don orange jumpsuits with signs reading traitors and agents of the ISF (Iraqi Security Forces) before being sentenced to death for treason and collaboration. One source cited escaped death by playing dead during one of the mass shootings.

Around 20 more people were also shot dead on Wednesday at Ghabat, in the north of the city, for supposedly leaking intelligence information to outside sources.

The executions are the latest in a string of atrocities reported by freed civilians as the US-backed forces recapture more and more Isis territory.

In pictures: Mosul offensive Show all 40 1 /40 In pictures: Mosul offensive In pictures: Mosul offensive A doctor carries an Iraqi newborn baby at a hospital in Mosul, Iraq July 18, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi girls play at a yard of a school in Mosul, Iraq July 18, 2017alal Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A woman on crutches who is a relative of men accused of being Islamic State militants is seen at a camp in Bartella, east of Mosul, Iraq July 15, 2017. Picture taken July 15, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A displaced girl, who fled from home carries a doll at Hamam al-Alil camp south of Mosul, Iraq July 13, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi federal police members and civilians celebrate in the Old City of Mosul on 9 July 2017 after the government's announcement of the "liberation" of the embattled city. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's office said he was in "liberated" Mosul to congratulate "the heroic fighters and the Iraqi people on the achievement of the major victory" AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A picture taken on 9 July 2017, shows a general view of the destruction in Mosul's Old City. Iraq will announce imminently a final victory in the nearly nine-month offensive to retake Mosul from jihadists, a US general said Saturday, as celebrations broke out among police forces in the city. AFP In pictures: Mosul offensive Members of the Iraqi federal police raise the victory gesture as they ride on a humvee while advancing through the Old City of Mosul on 28 June 2017, as the offensive continues to retake the last district held by Islamic State (IS) group fighters. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Smoke billows as Iraqi forces advance through the Old City of Mosul on 26 June 2017, during the ongoing offensive to retake the last district held by the Islamic State (IS) group. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi man wearing the green scarf of the Shi'ite faith kisses an Iraqi Army soldier on safely reaching the Iraqi forces position as Iraqi civilians flee the Old City of west Mosul where heavy fighting continues on 23 June 2017. Iraqi forces continue to encounter stiff resistance with improvised explosive devices, car bombs, heavy mortar fire and snipers hampering their advance. Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A picture taken from the inside of an Iraqi forces armoured vehicle shows residents walking through a damaged street as troops advance towards Mosul's Old City on 18 June 2017, during the ongoing offensive to retake the last district still held by the Islamic State (IS) group. Military commanders told AFP the assault had begun at dawn after overnight air strikes by the US-led coalition backing Iraqi forces. They said the jihadists were putting up fierce resistance. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi Army soldiers advance in a destroyed street after an Iraqi forces airstrike targeted an Islamic State sniper position 17 June 2017 in al-Shifa, the last district of west Mosul under Islamic State control. IS snipers, as well as car and suicide bomb attacks continue to hinder the Iraqi forces efforts to retake the final district. A series of airstrikes by Iraqi helicopter gunships attempted to hit multiple Islamic State sniper positions in al-Shifa. Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier frisks a displaced Iraqi man at a temporary camp in the compound of the closed Nineveh International Hotel in Mosul on 16 June 2017 which was recovered by Iraqi troops from Islamic State group fighters earlier in the year. A screening centre set up in the compound's fairgrounds sees a constant stream of Iraqis fleeing the battle for Mosul, awaiting their turn to be checked by the Iraqi forces who are searching for suspected Islamic State (IS) group members. The small fairground lies at the end of a pontoon bridge across the Tigris recently opened to civilians that is the only physical link between the two banks of the river. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqis staying at the al-Khazir camp swim in a river near the camp for internally displaced people, located between Arbil and Mosul on 11 June 2017. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi government forces drive on a road leading to Tal Afar on 9 June 2017, during ongoing battles to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi policeman carries a poster bearing an image of Mosul's iconic leaning minaret, known as the "Hadba" (Hunchback), on 22 June 2017. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqis stand in line to receive food aid in western Mosul's Zanjili neighbourhood on 7 June 2017, during ongoing battles as Iraqi forces try to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters. Living conditions in Mosul have again deteriorated since the start of the Iraqi government's offensive on the city in October in which they retook a large part of the west of the city. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Displaced Iraqis carry lightbulbs and sacks as they evacuate from western Mosul's Zanjili neighbourhood as government forces advance in the area during their ongoing battle against Islamic State (IS) group fighters on 13 May 2017 AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) flashes the victory gesture as he patrols in western Mosul's al-Islah al-Zaraye neighbourhood on 13 May 2017 AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi army soldiers from the 9th armoured division on a truck flash the sign of victory as they drive back from Mosul to the town of Qaraqosh (also known as Hamdaniya) Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Members of Iraqi forces flash the sign of victory on their vehicle as they advance towards Hammam al-Alil area south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi security forces gestures in Hammam al-Alil, south of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi children, one flashing the sign of victory, greet Iraqi army's soldiers from the 9th armoured division in the area of Ali Rash, adjacent to the eastern Al-Intissar neighbourhood of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Peshmerga forces look at a tunnel used by Islamic State militants near the town of Bashiqa, east of Mosul, during an operation to attack Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier takes a photograph with his phone as his comrade stands next to a detained man, whom the Iraqi army soldiers accused of being an Islamic State fighter, who was fleeing with his family in the Intisar disrict of eastern Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iranian Kurdish female members of the Freedom Party of Kurdistan (PAK) hold a position in an area near the town of Bashiqa, some 25 kilometres north east of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi families, who fled their homes in Hamam al-Alil, gather on the outskirts of their town Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Displaced people walk past a checkpoint near Qayara, south of Mosul, Iraq AP In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi families who were displaced by the ongoing operation by Iraqi forces against jihadists of the Islamic State group to retake the city of Mosul, are seen gathering in an area near Qayyarah In pictures: Mosul offensive A boy who just fled Abu Jarbuah village is seen with his family at a Kurdish Peshmerga position between two front lines near Bashiqa, east of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi child eats a pomegranate upon the arrival of Iraqi forces in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive People who just fled Abu Jarbuah village sit as they eat at a Kurdish Peshmerga position between two front lines near Bashiqa, east of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A couple who just fled Abu Jarbuah village are escorted by Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Women carry a boy over a wall as civilians flee their houses in the village of Tob Zawa, Iraq AP In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier and a civilian ride a motorbike as smoke rises behind them, on the road between Qayyarah and Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi forces, wearing a skull mask, waits at a checkpoint for people fleeing the main hub city of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier sits at a checkpoint in an area near Qayyarah Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi men prepare food portions for Iraqi forces deployed in areas south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi forces celebrate upon the arrival of vehicles bringing food to them Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi childen smoke cigarettes upon the arrival of Iraqi forces in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi forces distributes drinks to children in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty

The devil himself would be astounded by [Isis] methods of torture. It is beyond the imagination, Ahmed, a former English teacher from Hammam al-Alil, south of Mosul, said when the town was liberated last week.

He recalled listening to the cries of agony coming from a detention centre across the street from his home as Isis fighters dragged civilians outside to be executed in the middle of the night.

Since the offensive began four weeks ago there have been multiple reports from the UN and rights groups of civilians being executed for trying to flee fighting or for suspected links to the Iraqi police. Their bodies have either been buried in shallow graves or thrown into the Tigris river in order to scare other locals into submission.

Thousands more civilians have been forcibly driven deeper into Isis territory on trucks and minibuses for use at strategic locations as human shields. One source told the UN that a group of women and children who had not walked fast enough because one of their number was physically disabled had been shot at the roadside for delaying the rest of the convoy.

 Mosul battle: Civilians flee ahead of fighting

Speaking on Thursday the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, also expressed concern for the welfare of children and teenagers recruited as spies and fighters. Isis media channel released a video on Wednesday of children no older than 14 shooting four suspected police informants dead.

Elite Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service units have managed to infiltrate Mosuls eastern suburbs. The coalition is currently preparing to enter the city from the south as well, although resistance in the form of Isis suicide bomb and car attacks, sniper and mortar fire and improvised explosive devices has presented a challenging urban battlefield for the US-backed troops.

More than 45,000 people from surrounding towns and villages on the Nineveh plain have arrived at displacement camps so far, but aid groups warn up to 700,000 are expected to need humanitarian assistance as they flee fighting.
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he is determined to prevent Iran from becoming a military actor in the complex Syrian civil war.

We are determined to... prevent Iran... from establishing itself militarily in Syria, on the ground, in the air or at sea, Mr Netanyahu told reporters after talks with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Jerusalem on Thursday.

We are also determined to prevent [Iran] from bringing about the establishment of Shia militias, which it is organising, and of course, the arming of [Lebanons] Hezbollah with dangerous weapons aimed at us.

The Syrian government has been greatly aided in its fight against rebel factions by allies in Moscow and Tehran since the 2011 popular uprising deteriorated into civil war.

Thousands of troops belonging to foreign Shiite militias from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon are currently fighting alongside President Bashar al-Assads troops in the multi-sided conflict. Russia has lent the Syrian government air support since September 2015, which has markedly turned the war in the regimes favour.

Though formally neutral on Syria's civil war, Israel has frequently pledged to prevent shipments of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, which  like Iran  does not recognise the Jewish state.

In April Mr Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel had conducted air strikes in Syrian territory to stem the flow of weapons from the Golan Heights, but did not give details on when or where Israeli bombings had taken place.

In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Show all 19 1 /19 In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Syrian boys cry following Russian air strikes on the rebel-held Fardous neighbourhood of the northern embattled Syrian city of Aleppo Getty In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russian defense ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov speaks to the media in Moscow, Russia. Konashenkov strongly warned the United States against striking Syrian government forces and issued a thinly-veiled threat to use Russian air defense assets to protect them AP In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Syrians wait to receive treatment at a hospital following Russian air strikes on the rebel-held Fardous neighbourhood of the northern embattled Syrian city of Alepp Getty In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov speaks at a briefing in the Defense Ministry in Moscow, Russia. Antonov said the Russian air strikes in Syria have killed about 35,000 militants, including about 2,700 residents of Russia AP In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Jameel Mustafa Habboush, receives oxygen from civil defence volunteers, known as the white helmets, as they rescue him from under the rubble of a building following Russian air strikes on the rebel-held Fardous neighbourhood of the northern embattled Syrian city of Aleppo Getty In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Civil defence members rest amidst rubble in a site hit by what activists said were airstrikes carried out by the Russian air force in the town of Douma, eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria Reuters In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria A girl carrying a baby inspects damage in a site hit by what activists said were airstrikes carried out by the Russian air force in the town of Douma, eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria Reuters In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Civilians and civil defence members look for survivors at a site damaged after Russian air strikes on the Syrian rebel-held city of Idlib, Syria Reuters In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Civilians and civil defence members carry an injured woman on a stretcher at a site damaged after Russian air strikes on the Syrian rebel-held city of Idlib, Syria Reuters In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Volunteers from Syria Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, help civilians after Russia carried out its first airstrikes in Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria The aftermath of Russian airstrike in Talbiseh, Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Smoke billows from buildings in Talbiseh, in Homs province, western Syria, after airstrikes by Russian warplanes AP In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russian Air Forces carry out an air strike in the ISIS controlled Al-Raqqah Governorate. Russia's KAB-500s bombs completely destroy the Liwa al-Haqq command unit In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Caspian Flotilla of the Russian Navy firing Kalibr cruise missiles against remote Isis targets in Syria A TASS/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russia claimed it hit eight Isis targets, including a "terrorist HQ and co-ordination centre" that was completely destroyed In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria A video grab taken from the footage made available on the Russian Defence Ministry's official website, purporting to show an airstrike in Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria A release from the Russian defence ministry purportedly showing targets in Syria being hit In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russia launched air strikes in war-torn Syria, its first military engagement outside the former Soviet Union since the occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. Russian warplanes carried out strikes in three Syrian provinces along with regime aircraft as Putin seeks to steal US President Barack Obama's thunder by pushing a rival plan to defeat Isis militants in Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Caspian Flotilla of the Russian Navy firing Kalibr cruise missiles against remote Isis targets in Syria, a thousand kilometres away. The targets include ammunition factories, ammunition and fuel depots, command centres, and training camps A TASS/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis

Mr Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin set up a hotline between their defence ministries last year to avoid any accidental airspace clashes, which highlights the dramatic change in our bilateral relations, the prime minister said.

Jerusalem has increasingly welcomed relations with Russia in recent years in the light of strained relations with the US and the European Union caused by disagreements over the US-Iran nuclear deal and EU pressure on the Israeli government to stop settlement building in the West Bank.

Israel, Russia, the United States and many other countries share the objective of defeating the Islamic State, Netanyahu said during a joint media conference.

At the same time, we are also concerned by the second actor promoting radical Islam  Iran  which champions the destruction of Israel and also supports 360-degree terror on five continents.

 Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Calls UN 'Joke' and 'Moral Farce'

Mr Medvedev hailed the special values that Russians and Israelis have in common and agreed that the two countries have common challenges.

Every time I visit Israel I feel at home, he said. Our countries have common challenges, primarily terrorism. Terror threatens the entire world but in this region it is felt particularly strongly.

He did not comment on the Israeli prime ministers view of Moscows allies in Tehran.

Mr Medvedev began his trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories on Wednesday and is due to meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Jericho on Friday.

In September both Mr Abbas and Mr Netanyahu agreed in principle to peace talks in Moscow, although no date has been set for such a meeting.
Sign up to Simon Calders free travel email for weekly expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calders Travel email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Simon Calders Travel email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

The green-fuzzed outcrop was tantalisingly close. I could swim to it, couldnt I? Surely, in just a few strokes across the narrow blue channel, Id reach its shores? I could be, briefly, queen of my own private isle... But then Rob found a nice spot for lunch, and the picnics deliciousness trumped my desire to splash over to uninhabited Partridge Island. (Uninhabited, that is, aside from a colony of little penguins).

Tasmania is a rugged little heart shape loitering 150 miles south of mainland Australia. Its the countrys island state  but has a further 300-odd isles sprinkled off its shores, many of which are surrounded by even smaller outlying atolls. Its like the geological equivalent of Russian dolls, a chain of ever decreasing nuggets, and each adds something to the Tasmanian story.

Bruny Island is like Tasmania in a microcosm, explained my guide Rob Knight, as we gazed at Partridge from one of Brunys empty, white-sand beaches. It has virtually all Tasmanias microclimates, most of its wildlife, rich explorer and Aboriginal history, amazing food.

Neck Beach, which connects the north and south of Bruny (Andrew Wilson/Tourism Tasmania)

Bruny is also easily accessible from Tasmanias capital, Hobart, where Rob begins his award-winning Bruny Island Long Weekend, a two-night trip to the island, featuring boat rides, coastal hikes, a private wilderness camp and exquisite Tassie produce. Only around 10 per cent of visitors to Tasmania go to Bruny, most just for the day. Rob reckons its worth lingering. Bruny attracts creative, inventive types, he said. Artisan cheese makers. The southernmost vineyard in Australia. A recent exhibition in Hobart featured 60 Bruny artists  not bad for an island of just 600 people.

Rugged, 31-miles-long Bruny (two islands, joined by a narrow isthmus) is named after Antoine Bruni dEntrecasteaux, a French naval officer who stopped here in 1792, following in the wake of Abel Tasman, James Cook and William Bligh. DEntrecasteaux experienced positive interactions with the Aboriginal inhabitants, whod lived on the island for thousands of years. However, within decades this changed: by the 1830s, most of Tasmanias indigenous people had either been killed or relocated to far-north Flinders Island for their protection.

My history lesson was drip-fed over the weekend, during which we walked through coastal forests, cruised beneath some of the worlds highest dolerite sea cliffs, spotted wallabies, quolls and other antipodean wildlife, and learnt to shuck oysters fresh from the sea.

Accommodation was at Robs safari-style camp, where I listened to tales of Tasmania on the decking, serenaded by grey shrikethrushes and the breeze rippling through the towering gums, and enjoyed delicious meals of pulled pork from a rare-breed Bruny smallholding, wallaby seared with native pepper, delicate Huon salmon, and panna cotta drizzled with leatherwood honey.

The one strand of Tasmanian history that Bruny lacks is convict heritage  though the islands lighthouse, one of the oldest in Australia, was built by convict hands. To get a better understanding of this, I headed north up the east coast to Maria Island.

Despite the relatively small size of Van Diemens Land (as Tasmania was known until 1856), the state received 72,000 criminals  42 per cent of the total number transported to Australia. Most were not locked up on arrival: the whole of Tasmania, an alien land far from home, was a prison. However, penal settlements were created for those who committed offences in the colony. Maria Island was one of these.

Churning in the ferry from Triabunna harbour to Maria, a 30-minute ride, it seemed unlikely that anyone could have escaped it. But escape they did, which is why the first gaol on Maria was short-lived, operational from just 1825 to 1832. Subsequently, a probation station was established, from 1842 to 1850. The remains can still be seen; the old penitentiary is now a hostel, the only option (besides camping) for those keen to stay the night.

Maria Islands Mess Hall used to house 400 convicts (Peter/Flickr)

My first stop on Maria was the cavernous Mess Hall, which once served 400 hungry convicts; now visitors use it to cower from the rain. Fortunately, the weather soon brightened, so I ventured out  and almost tripped over a wombat, grazing amid the cells. It wasnt a huge surprise. While Maria used to be a place to rehabilitate humans, its now doing the same for wildlife. Since the 1960s the island has been a sanctuary for threatened species.

As I hiked away from the penal ghost town, bound for the twin peaks of Bishop and Clerk, I passed pademelons and Bennetts wallabies nibbling the heath, Cape Barren geese and Forester kangaroos. I didnt spy any Tasmanian devils (theyre nocturnal), though 15 were released here in 2012, part of a captive breeding programme to try to save this endemic species, which is being decimated by a facial tumour disease.

Maria Island is one of the best places to observe wombats in Australia

As I followed the trail into the forest of stringybark gums, a pair of kookaburras set to laughing, as if amused by someone climbing a mountain in this gloomy weather. They were right, I saw nothing but cloud from the clifftops, though I knew that to the north lay the fine finger of the Freycinet Peninsula and Schouten Island  my final port of call.

Designated in 1916, Freycinet is (along with Mount Field) Tasmanias oldest national park. Its also a candidate for Tasmanias most glorious  a tendril of land backboned by pink granite hills and edged by blindingly white curves of sand, not least much-photographed Wineglass Bay.

The white curves of Wineglass Bay (Tourism Australia)

A few days later, under brilliant blue skies, I walked to Wineglass; I took a dip in the rough waves and walked to the lagoon just inland, noisy with banjo frogs. There werent hundreds of people but, still, it was busy by Tasmanian standards. So to see Freycinet without the crowds, and tick off my final island-off-an-island, I boarded the beautiful yacht Volant. With owners Graeme and Kathryn at the helm, we cast off from Coles Bay, Freycinets main settlement, named after a Hampshire convict who set up a lime kiln here in the 1850s. Sails billowing, we silently traced the peninsulas west coast, looking up to the Hazards mountain range and scanning the waves for dolphins.

On some trips the boat is surrounded by them, Graeme told me as Kathryn passed over a glass of Tasmanian fizz. We see whales too.

Schouten Island

Alas, not today, though I continued to keep an eye out as we neared Schouten Island, which sits off the peninsula. Schouten, a large clump of hilly granite and dolerite, was named by Abel Tasman in 1642. More latterly sealers and coal miners exploited the islands resources. But now it sits quietly, uninhabited and unreachable without your own boat. Its another ruggedly handsome outcrop thats been returned to the wild; it now belongs to the penguins, shearwaters, fur seals and skinks.

With more time, we would have moored off the island, jumped into the waves and swum to Schoutens sandy bay. But the wind had been too gentle, our progress too slow. More fizz? asked Kathryn, as the Volant changed tack and turned for home. Oh well, another island untrampled. Yes, dont mind if I do.

Travel essentials

Getting there

Etihad (etihad.com) and its partner Virgin Australia fly from Heathrow to Hobart via Abu Dhabi and Melbourne.

Tasmanian Odyssey (tasmanianodyssey.com) arranges tailor-made trips to Tasmania. A seven-night self-drive holiday costs from 695pp including car hire and B&B accommodation.

Staying there

The Bruny Island Long Weekend (brunyislandlongweekend.com.au) costs AU$1,695pp (1015) all inclusive, except flights.

Sheoaks B&B, Freycinet (sheoaks.com) offers doubles from A$200.

Visiting there

Sail Freycinet (sailfreycinet.com.au) runs trips around Coles Bay from AU$320 for two people.

More information

discovertasmania.com.au
Sign up to Simon Calders free travel email for weekly expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calders Travel email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

Simon Calders Travel email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

British travellers get a pretty good deal from airlines, with the UK enjoying the most competitive market in the world. But the airlines could do better still. Until they decide to, these may help you on your travels.

Get a free city break

Fancy a two-centre trip without paying extra? Be imaginative when searching for flights online. For example, you want to go from Manchester to Dubai, and Air France is offering a very cheap deal in return for the extra hassle of changing planes en route in Paris. But you can turn that inconvenience into a positive, with an extra city break built in.

Typically airfrance.com offers some flight options that include allow an implausibly long connection time at Charles de Gaulle airport. Ive just checked a Manchester-Paris-Dubai-Paris-Manchester trip for later this month (out 15 November, back 24 November). For just 268 return, you fly out on Tuesday afternoon in time to head into the French capital for dinner in Paris, a night in a hotel (at your own expense) and all the following morning to explore the French capital before heading back to the airport and the onward flight to Dubai.

Coming back, its just a 75-minute change of plane, but on some itineraries, you can even weave in the option of a day in Amsterdam on the way back thanks to Air France and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines being part of the same company.

Using Avios? Book late

I get a fair number of complaints about British Airways frequent-flyer currency (also shared with its Spanish sister airline, Iberia). Collectors tend to grumble about limited availability even if they try to book extremely early. Heres a better idea: book extremely late. I mostly use Avios for short-notice, short-haul trips. Example: on Friday I needed to fly from Dublin to London. At 1pm, fares on all the airlines were very high; the cheapest on BA was 186 (160). But one Avios seat was available on the 3.20pm departure to Heathrow, for 4,000 points and just 10 in fees. Compared with the cash fare, that makes each point worth 3.75p - three times the cost of buying Avios in bulk at 1.25p each (normally with a once-a-year offer by email from BA).

There was last-minute availability to Dublin with Avios (AFP/Getty Images)

Long haul, there are two good ways to use Avios: one-way trips, which are still far too often more expensive than returns when paid by cash; and journeys you may have to cancel, which you can do at least 24 hours in advance for a generous fee of only 35.

Your ticket may be more flexible than you think

The cheapest possible ticket always comes with strings attached, the main one being: no changes. That means you cant switch flights, right? Well, no. Suppose, you turn up at Heathrow expecting to fly to New York JFK, but the departure is running two hours late because of a technical delay. The airline may have a flight to Newark airport, equally handy for Manhattan, scheduled an hour later. If you ask politely at the customer service desk, and theres an empty seat, you could be transferred free of charge. Thats not just the airline being kind: staff know from experience that a two-hour delay can sometimes get much worse, resulting in passengers demanding compensation and hotel rooms to be found and pay for. It's a good plan for the airline to reduce the risk exposure by shifting passengers to unaffected flights.

Airlines such as Virgin Atlantic fly to both JFK and Newark, and could be flexible with your booking (Getty Images) (Getty)

Flight cancelled? They have to make it right

This is going to be a dreadful winter for many airlines, particularly flying within Europe. They face ferocious competition and weak demand. As a result, it appears that they are cancelling more flights than ever  typically several weeks in advance, when they can see the likely load and may decide that the cost of operating a particular trip vastly outweighs the likely revenue from that flight.

So long as the airline gives you two weeks notice, they have no obligation to pay compensation. But EU airlines, or any carrier flying from a European airport, is bound by strict passenger-rights rules. They will typically offer a refund, or an alternative flight on one of their non-cancelled flights. But the regulations also oblige them to find you a seat on a rival airline if there is one that can get you where you need to be at close to the original time.

Keep a close eye on the time

The same passenger-rights rules oblige EU airlines (or any carrier flying from Europe) to pay cash compensation if you arrive at your destination three hours late or more. The only legitimate excuse for not paying: extraordinary circumstances, which can be pleaded only in a limited number of cases.

Airlines routinely fail to inform passengers of their rights. Some may also seek to sow confusion by, for example, providing you with a letter for your travel insurer - the implication being that this is your only option for claiming compensation. Keep persevering: if you are entitled to cash, it should arrive eventually.

Even if the delay is caused by something manifestly beyond the airlines control, such as terrible weather, a security alert or air-traffic control strikes, the airline has to provide you with meals and, if necessary, accommodation proportionate to the delay. Again, airlines are not as forthcoming as they might be about their obligations when things go wrong.

Click here to view our latest travel offers with Independent Holidays
Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Make America Great Again was the slogan of Donald Trumps election, but the immediate impact of his victory is to make the US less of a power in the world for two reasons: American prestige and influence will be damaged by a general belief internationally that the US has just elected a dangerous buffoon as its leader. The perception is pervasive, but is not very deeply rooted and likely be temporary, stemming as it does from Trumps demagogic rants during the election campaign. Those about relations with foreign countries were particularly vague and least likely to provide a guide to future policy.

More damaging in the long term for Americas status as superpower is the likelihood that the US is now a more deeply divided society than ever. Trump won the election by demonising and threatening individuals and communities  Mexicans, Muslims, Latinos  and his confrontational style of politics is not going to disappear. Verbal violence produces a permanently over-heated political atmosphere in which physical violence becomes an option. At the same time, the election campaign was focused almost exclusively on American domestic politics with voters showing little interest in events abroad. This is unlikely to change.

Governments around the world can see this for themselves, though this will not stop them badgering their diplomats in Washington and New York for an inkling as to how far Trumps off-the-cuff remarks were more than outrageous attempts to dominate the news agenda for a few hours. Fortunately, his pronouncements were so woolly that they can be easily jettisoned between now and his inauguration. Real foreign policy positions will only emerge with the formation of a Trump cabinet when it becomes clear who will be in charge.

But, if future policies remain unknowable, super-charged American nationalism combined with economic populism and isolationism are likely to set the general tone. Trump has invariably portrayed Americans as the victims of the foul machinations of foreign countries who previously faced no real resistance from an incompetent self-serving American elite.

 Donald Trump's win makes reporter break down on air

This sort of aggressive nationalism is not unique to Trump. All over the world nationalism is having a spectacular rebirth in countries from Turkey to the Philippines. It has become a successful vehicle for protest in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe. Though Trump is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly American phenomenon, his populist nationalism has a striking amount in common with that of the Brexit campaigners in Britain or even the chauvinism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Much of this can be discounted as patriotic bombast, but in all cases there is a menacing undercurrent of racism and demonisation, whether it is directed against illegal immigrants in the US, asylum seekers in the Britain or Kurds in south east Turkey.

In reality, Trump made very few proposals for radical change in US foreign policy during the election campaign, aside from saying that he would throw out the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme - though his staff is now being much less categorical about this, saying only that the deal must be properly enforced. Nobody really knows if Trump will deal any differently from Obama with the swathe of countries between Pakistan and Nigeria where there are at least seven wars raging  Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and South Sudan  as well as four serious insurgencies.

The most serious wars in which the US is already militarily involved are in Iraq and Syria and here Trumps comments during the campaign suggest that he will focus on destroying Isis, recognise the danger of becoming militarily over-involved and look for some sort of cooperation with Russia as the next biggest player in the conflict. This is similar to what is already happening.

Hillary Clintons intentions in Syria, though never fully formulated, always sounded more interventionist than Trumps. One of her senior advisers openly proposed giving less priority to the assault on Isis and more to getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad. To this end, a third force of pro-US militant moderates was to be raised that would fight and ultimately defeat both Isis and Assad. Probably this fantasy would never have come to pass, but the fact that it was ever given currency underlines the extent to which Clinton was at one with the most dead-in-the-water conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment in Washington.

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

President Obama developed a much more acute sense of what the US could and could not do in the Middle East and beyond, without provoking crises exceeding its political and military strength. Its power may be less than before the failed US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan following 9/11, but it is still far greater than any other country's. Currently, it is the US which is successfully coordinating the offensive against Isiss last strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa by a multitude of fractious parties in Iraq and Syria. It was never clear how seriously one should have taken Clintons proposals for safe zones and trying to fight Isis and Assad at the same time, but her judgements on events in the Middle East since the Iraq invasion of 2003 all suggested a flawed idea of what was feasible.

Trumps instincts generally seem less well-informed but often shrewd, and his priories have nothing to do with the Middle East. Past US leaders have felt the same way, but they usually end up by being dragged into its crises one way or other, and how they perform then becomes the test of their real quality as a leader. The region has been the political graveyard for three of the last five US presidents: Jimmy Carter was destroyed by the consequences of the Iranian revolution; Ronald Reagan was gravely weakened by the Iran-Contra scandal; and George W Bushs years in office will be remembered chiefly for the calamities brought on by his invasion of Iraq. Barack Obama was luckier and more sensible, but he wholly underestimated the rise of Isis until it captured Mosul in 2014.

The US no longer enjoys the superpower hegemony it had between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008. Its strength was further limited by failure to gain its ends in Iraq and Afghanistan and the return of Russia as a rival power, but it remains far-and-away the most powerful state in the world. It is a position full of pitfalls such as the prolonged effort by US allies like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel to lure the US into wars in Syria and Iran that will serve their own interests.

Obama resisted the temptation to fight new wars, but if Hillary Clinton had been in charge her record suggests that she might well have done so. How would Donald Trump have responded? There is a bigger gap between his words and deeds than there are with most politicians. But words create their own momentum and his constant beating of the patriotic drum will make it difficult for him to exercise the degree of caution necessary to avoid ensnarement in the Middle East. Over-heated nationalism cannot be turned on and off like a tap. He may want to concentrate on radical change at home, but the vortex of crises in the Middle East will one day suck him in.
Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

America is a great power, today the only superpower, we accept that. We want to and are ready to work with the United States said Vladimir Putin.  The world needs such strong nations like the US. But we dont want them constantly getting mixed up in our affairs, instructing us how to live, preventing Europe from building a relationship with us.

Putin was talking last June about the US election. He was asked about Donald Trump and described him with a Russian word which can be translated as colourful or gaudy. He had used the same word before to describe the then-Republican nominee, leading Trump to declare Its a great honour. When people call you brilliant, its always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.

Trump, in the course of the election campaign, went on signal that he would accept the Kremlins annexation of Crimea, would not necessarily defend the Baltic states against Russia, questioned the usefulness of Nato and warn allies Japan and South Korea they cannot depend on America to defend them against China and North Korea. American troops from the region may well be withdrawn and Tokyo and Seoul should, if necessary, get themselves nuclear weapons, he added. The man who wanted to be next President of the United States indicated that he was not too bothered about nuclear proliferation in East Asia or, indeed, anywhere else.

Five months on, Trump is preparing to move into the White House after the most staggering result in Americas presidential elections in a hundred years and Putin may well be musing on just how much longer America will remain the worlds only superpower. The Russian President has every reason think that the new America will be willing to accept a relationship between Europe and Russia very much to Moscows advantage.

 Protests against Trump surge in cities across US for second night

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in international relations overturning well established notions. Two and half decades ago, Francis Fukuyama held in The End of History that we are seeing not only the end of the Cold War and the withering of the communism, but the acceptance of liberal democracy as the ultimate and most gratifying form of human government. After the election of a man like Trump following a toxic and dishonest campaign, states criticised for being authoritarian are only too keen to point out the pitfalls of the Western system.

America is terribly ill wrote Yan Peng, vice president of a state run research centre in China in The Peoples Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party. The election would be remembered as a page of dirt, chaotic and poor performances. Gleb Pavlovsky, a former political consultant for the Russian government was sure they are drinking champagne in the Kremlin, for two reasons, one political, the other psychological.

The European Union was already under severe pressure, he pointed out, with the financial and refugee crisis followed by the blow of Brexit : but any move by Trump to row back American power abroad would mean that not only would Western Europe not be buttressed at a time of need, but the Wests position in the international status quo would start to unravel.

It is difficult to predict the specifics of the new administrations policies. In a public letter eight months ago attacking Trump, senior Republican security experts charged that his vision of the countrys influence and power in the world was wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle shifting from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.

World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Show all 29 1 /29 World reaction to President Trump: In pictures World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures London, England Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty Images World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mosul , Iraq Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Manila, Philippines AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures New Delhi, India Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Karachi, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kabul, Afghanistan AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem. Israel Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Moscow, Russia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Seoul, South Korea AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Lagos, Nigeria AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Peshawar, Pakistan EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jakarta, Indonesia Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Hyderabad, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Kolkata, India AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia Getty World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Sydney, Australia AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Aleppo, Syria Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico AP World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Reuters World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Jerusalem, Israel EPA World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Baghdad, Iraq Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Tokyo, Japan Rex World reaction to President Trump: In pictures Mexico City, Mexico Getty

The vision, since then, has focused more on isolationism, with military action limited to combatting Islamist terrorist groups like Isis although he seems to be prepared to leave much of that to Russia in Syria. The wars he is likely to fight are trade wars and America is hardly going to spread influence around the world peering from being tariff walls.

Isolationism is not, of course, new in the US. In the 1930s, as Europe moved towards war, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts. This helped embolden Hitler and the Germans, and their sympathisers in the States made considerable effort, covertly and overtly, to aid the isolationist movement. Even in 1939, as Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war, President Roosevelt, knowing he had to follow the prevailing mood in the Senate and House of Representative, was having to say in a speech that he would do all he could to keep America out of the war.

Vladimir Putin is obviously no Adolf Hitler. But it would be understandable for Moscow to test American reaction with an incident or two in Eastern Europe in the next few months. Nato has been making a lot of pronouncements about countering Russian aggression in the Baltics and Ukraine and holding military exercises in the region. Some Western politicians, especially the British, have been increasingly noisy on the issue. But Nato, without American muscle, is nothing much for Moscow to worry about.

In 1949, less than two decades after the Neutrality Acts, the British historian Robert Payne wrote of the US She bestrides the world like a Colossus, no other power at any time in the worlds history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations. A retreat into isolation now would not be reversed so quickly. China would use the absence of American military power in the Pacific to expand its hegemony. The South-East Asians nations, possibly with India as a nuclear-armed ally, would try to counter that. The Latin American states would emerge further from the shadow of the US. The European Union, reformed, would continue to be a formidable trading block and Russia would reclaim its place as a superpower.

The presidency of Donald Trump may see ensure that the American Century, which began at the end of the Second World War, is now over.
Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Iraqi Security Forces are embarking on a final and decisive campaign against Isis to liberate Mosul, an ancient city that has endured more than two years of brutal terrorist occupation. This dark chapter will soon be another episode in the provinces 3,000 year history.

The coming victory will represent a crushing blow to the terrorists dream of statehood, and will deter those who seek to join a collapsing organisation. The criminal terrorist gang we call Isis gained strength in 2014 from a seemingly unstoppable expansion. This image of invincibility is now in ruins.

The battle will see a diverse coalition of Iraqi forces. From the eastern axis of advance, a joint force of the Iraqi Armys 9th Armoured Division, Counter-Terrorism Services and Kurdish Peshmerga are moving from Khaza and Bashiqa, while the Iraqi Army's 15th Division is moving from the south. Meanwhile, Iraqi Security Forces are protecting the vital Mosul Dam. In the desert to the west of the city, Isis can be easily spotted from the air, and cannot escape.

South of the city, Iraqi Security Forces supported by Sunni tribal fighters, Christian volunteers and the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) are securing ground to ensure Isis cannot attack rear areas. The latter group are volunteers who have publicly pledged that the bells of Mosuls churches will ring again. On 21 October in the Christian town of Bartella, this pledge came true. The PMF are now cutting off Isis at Tal Afar.

 Iraqi forces enter Mosul

The increasing unity of Iraq's communities has defied predictions of the sectarian destruction of Iraq. There are now thousands of Sunni fighters on the front lines, with Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen and others. Iraq is moving beyond its troubled history.

In this effort, the UK has been particularly respectful of Iraqi sovereignty. From the start, we have maintained that Iraq must win the battle on the ground alone. Our allies have been overwhelmingly supportive of this aim, helping to build regional cooperation in maintaining the fight against Isis. We hope that the kind of international cooperation happening in Iraq will provide the basis for the campaign to continue in Raqqa, to ensure that Isis will not cross the border into Iraq again.

During months of preparation for the Mosul battle, every nation and force on the ground was given an agreed and carefully designated role coordinated with Baghdad, and we hope this coordination continues.

A united effort is vital because the threat is a common one. Isis has reminded us of this in murderous attacks from Paris to Ankara, Orlando and beyond. In Iraq, violence targeting people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds has increased the sense of unity among Iraqs communities. While we long for this suffering to end, we also understand that in the wider world, Isis represents an ideological disease which will require a unified international response.

Outside Mosul, a major effort is underway to provide for the many civilians who will be displaced by the fighting. The Iraqi government expect this figure to be between 700,000 and one million refugees. Since 2014, the Iraqi government has assisted the mounting number of people displaced by violence, a difficult situation following the more than 50 per cent decline in oil prices since 2014.

In pictures: Mosul offensive Show all 40 1 /40 In pictures: Mosul offensive In pictures: Mosul offensive A doctor carries an Iraqi newborn baby at a hospital in Mosul, Iraq July 18, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi girls play at a yard of a school in Mosul, Iraq July 18, 2017alal Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A woman on crutches who is a relative of men accused of being Islamic State militants is seen at a camp in Bartella, east of Mosul, Iraq July 15, 2017. Picture taken July 15, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A displaced girl, who fled from home carries a doll at Hamam al-Alil camp south of Mosul, Iraq July 13, 2017. Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi federal police members and civilians celebrate in the Old City of Mosul on 9 July 2017 after the government's announcement of the "liberation" of the embattled city. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's office said he was in "liberated" Mosul to congratulate "the heroic fighters and the Iraqi people on the achievement of the major victory" AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A picture taken on 9 July 2017, shows a general view of the destruction in Mosul's Old City. Iraq will announce imminently a final victory in the nearly nine-month offensive to retake Mosul from jihadists, a US general said Saturday, as celebrations broke out among police forces in the city. AFP In pictures: Mosul offensive Members of the Iraqi federal police raise the victory gesture as they ride on a humvee while advancing through the Old City of Mosul on 28 June 2017, as the offensive continues to retake the last district held by Islamic State (IS) group fighters. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Smoke billows as Iraqi forces advance through the Old City of Mosul on 26 June 2017, during the ongoing offensive to retake the last district held by the Islamic State (IS) group. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi man wearing the green scarf of the Shi'ite faith kisses an Iraqi Army soldier on safely reaching the Iraqi forces position as Iraqi civilians flee the Old City of west Mosul where heavy fighting continues on 23 June 2017. Iraqi forces continue to encounter stiff resistance with improvised explosive devices, car bombs, heavy mortar fire and snipers hampering their advance. Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A picture taken from the inside of an Iraqi forces armoured vehicle shows residents walking through a damaged street as troops advance towards Mosul's Old City on 18 June 2017, during the ongoing offensive to retake the last district still held by the Islamic State (IS) group. Military commanders told AFP the assault had begun at dawn after overnight air strikes by the US-led coalition backing Iraqi forces. They said the jihadists were putting up fierce resistance. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi Army soldiers advance in a destroyed street after an Iraqi forces airstrike targeted an Islamic State sniper position 17 June 2017 in al-Shifa, the last district of west Mosul under Islamic State control. IS snipers, as well as car and suicide bomb attacks continue to hinder the Iraqi forces efforts to retake the final district. A series of airstrikes by Iraqi helicopter gunships attempted to hit multiple Islamic State sniper positions in al-Shifa. Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier frisks a displaced Iraqi man at a temporary camp in the compound of the closed Nineveh International Hotel in Mosul on 16 June 2017 which was recovered by Iraqi troops from Islamic State group fighters earlier in the year. A screening centre set up in the compound's fairgrounds sees a constant stream of Iraqis fleeing the battle for Mosul, awaiting their turn to be checked by the Iraqi forces who are searching for suspected Islamic State (IS) group members. The small fairground lies at the end of a pontoon bridge across the Tigris recently opened to civilians that is the only physical link between the two banks of the river. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqis staying at the al-Khazir camp swim in a river near the camp for internally displaced people, located between Arbil and Mosul on 11 June 2017. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi government forces drive on a road leading to Tal Afar on 9 June 2017, during ongoing battles to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi policeman carries a poster bearing an image of Mosul's iconic leaning minaret, known as the "Hadba" (Hunchback), on 22 June 2017. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqis stand in line to receive food aid in western Mosul's Zanjili neighbourhood on 7 June 2017, during ongoing battles as Iraqi forces try to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters. Living conditions in Mosul have again deteriorated since the start of the Iraqi government's offensive on the city in October in which they retook a large part of the west of the city. AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Displaced Iraqis carry lightbulbs and sacks as they evacuate from western Mosul's Zanjili neighbourhood as government forces advance in the area during their ongoing battle against Islamic State (IS) group fighters on 13 May 2017 AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) flashes the victory gesture as he patrols in western Mosul's al-Islah al-Zaraye neighbourhood on 13 May 2017 AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi army soldiers from the 9th armoured division on a truck flash the sign of victory as they drive back from Mosul to the town of Qaraqosh (also known as Hamdaniya) Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Members of Iraqi forces flash the sign of victory on their vehicle as they advance towards Hammam al-Alil area south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi security forces gestures in Hammam al-Alil, south of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi children, one flashing the sign of victory, greet Iraqi army's soldiers from the 9th armoured division in the area of Ali Rash, adjacent to the eastern Al-Intissar neighbourhood of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Peshmerga forces look at a tunnel used by Islamic State militants near the town of Bashiqa, east of Mosul, during an operation to attack Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier takes a photograph with his phone as his comrade stands next to a detained man, whom the Iraqi army soldiers accused of being an Islamic State fighter, who was fleeing with his family in the Intisar disrict of eastern Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Iranian Kurdish female members of the Freedom Party of Kurdistan (PAK) hold a position in an area near the town of Bashiqa, some 25 kilometres north east of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi families, who fled their homes in Hamam al-Alil, gather on the outskirts of their town Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Displaced people walk past a checkpoint near Qayara, south of Mosul, Iraq AP In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi families who were displaced by the ongoing operation by Iraqi forces against jihadists of the Islamic State group to retake the city of Mosul, are seen gathering in an area near Qayyarah In pictures: Mosul offensive A boy who just fled Abu Jarbuah village is seen with his family at a Kurdish Peshmerga position between two front lines near Bashiqa, east of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi child eats a pomegranate upon the arrival of Iraqi forces in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive People who just fled Abu Jarbuah village sit as they eat at a Kurdish Peshmerga position between two front lines near Bashiqa, east of Mosul, Iraq Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive A couple who just fled Abu Jarbuah village are escorted by Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers Reuters In pictures: Mosul offensive Women carry a boy over a wall as civilians flee their houses in the village of Tob Zawa, Iraq AP In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier and a civilian ride a motorbike as smoke rises behind them, on the road between Qayyarah and Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi forces, wearing a skull mask, waits at a checkpoint for people fleeing the main hub city of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive An Iraqi soldier sits at a checkpoint in an area near Qayyarah Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi men prepare food portions for Iraqi forces deployed in areas south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi forces celebrate upon the arrival of vehicles bringing food to them Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive Iraqi childen smoke cigarettes upon the arrival of Iraqi forces in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty In pictures: Mosul offensive A member of Iraqi forces distributes drinks to children in the village of Umm Mahahir, south of Mosul Getty

Despite these difficulties, the Iraqi government has begun restoring services to cities such as Ramadi, while in Tikrit markets are once again busy following liberation. Unfortunately, the scale of the offensive in Mosul means we will need sustained international support. This must take the form of a long-term plan for social and economic assistance in the aftermath of this war, to help stabilise the wider region.

To this end, the Iraqi government has a multi-phase plan to resettle internally displaced people (IDPs). For each phase of this plan, the Prime Ministers Office will lead a high-level committee who will see operations through to a final reconciliation phase. The first committee will be responsible for demining Mosul and clearing unexploded bombs, working with the Ministry of Environment. Working in parallel, a second committee will oversee the restoration of basic services while a third committee will work on restoring the capability of local police forces, ensuring security for returnees. Lastly, larger reconstruction projects will be overseen by the High Committee for the Relief of Displaces Persons. The governor of Mosul will head a crisis cell, coordinating reconciliation efforts for longer-term peace.

Here, the UK has proved a reliable ally, donating 40m towards humanitarian aid for the Mosul offensive, a part of more than 150m overall assistance from the UK since June 2014, and $2.1bn pledged at the 24-nation donor conference for Iraq in Washington in July. Unfortunately, the challenge in Mosul is so great that the UN may be 50 per cent short of the funds required to construct enough refugee camps.

Even considering these many challenges, we are confident that civilians will be resettled, and that Iraq will move beyond this tragic era. Iraq is an ancient nation, from the first known writing of the Sumerians more than 5,000 years ago to the pioneering study of algebra and medicine in 9th century Baghdad.

Soon the attempts by Isis to erase this history will have failed completely. We are confident that our peoples strong endurance after this period will lead to a better future, for all of Iraqs communities.

Salih Hussein Ali Altamimi is Ambassador of the Republic of Iraq to the UK
Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }}

Why is the world so surprised at the success of Donald Trump? He is a dishonest salesman adhering to the salesman's greatest maxim: Find out what the people want, and sell it to them! The fact that the product is at best unknown and at worst a pup is not the point  he has sold a dream to millions of voters.

Alan Greenspan recently said that Trump was an actor, playing a part; actors are another kind of salesman. Like all snake-oil salesmen, we need to be wary and question any promises that come out of his mouth, be they about our special relationship or our future trade deals. Question, question, question!

Adrienne Fitzwilliam

Tunbridge Wells

Trump is the product of an archaic voting system

It has already been widely forgotten that, 16 years ago, George W Bush became President against the wishes of the American people, losing the popular vote. It should not be forgotten that, on Tuesday, the majority of the American people voted against fascism. Trump has become President-elect not because of the will of the American people, but through the peculiarities of an archaic and undemocratic electoral system.

Mike Wright

Nuneaton

Donald Trump is a product of our social media society

Our social media obsession leads us to construct an alt-reality where we are constantly bombarded with news and views similar to our own therefore trapping ourselves in ideological segregation. The danger of such a framework is that we lose touch with the wider community around us. When the bubble we live in bursts, we are mystified because we cannot explain the success of someone like Donald Trump becoming President.

The Trump phenomenon has been explained through various avenues such as identity, culture and race. All critically important however, one avenue which has been overlooked is society and medias obsession with fame. The road from celebrity to presidency is not uncharted territory a la Reagan.

However, the course Trump took was unprecedented. He utilised Twitter and by frequently making outlandish ludicrous comments kept himself in the spotlight. This coupled with his constant media presence even when they were laughing at him kept him relevant. Unfortunately, it is President-elect Trump who is having the last laugh now when he should have been disqualified to run many months ago.

Omar Mesba

London

America's funeral will be televised

Most of the planet is mired in disbelief, aghast at the thought of Donald Trump ascending to the White House throne. How can it be that voters would pass the baton from the first African American President to one supported by the Ku Klux Klan, calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, proposing a total ban on all Muslims entering the United States, mocked his opponents and the disabled?

How can it be that such a man escaped serious charges for allegedly assaulting more than a dozen women and boasting of such assaults? How did Melania Trump escape deportation or a jail term by violating the law by earning modelling jobs before she became a lawful resident (AP & New York Times report).

Trump used Hitlers propaganda ministers playbook, repeating lies to vanquish his Republican opponents and then bullied Clinton with the dreaded label crooked Hillary.

Under a Trump presidency (oh mercy!), the Supreme Court will make a hard right turn with the appointment of a Scalia clone.

Will his faithful lapdog Rudy Giuliani be appointed Attorney General, pardon Chris Christie (embroiled in bridgegate) and then put Clinton in jail? Will he organise a giant posse and round up all the Hispanics and build a giant southern wall? American voters proved they were no more immune to the lies of a dangerous demagogue than other democracies that succumbed to hate and cowardice to their eventual shame.

Funeral services will be held on 20 January.

Jagjit Singh

Los Altos, California

A letter to Donald Trump

Let me introduce myself. I am a white woman who was married to a black man and had two children. I now have grandchildren  three of whom are female. I did not vote for you. You put my amygdala in a tizzy because of your statements and actions of intolerance toward the very people you wish to govern. You scare me. Since you cannot read my mind, bear with me as I try to explain.

I was sexually abused as a young child, and to actually hear your voice speaking so cavalierly about which is equal to sexual harassment sent me spiralling back to the unwanted advances made in my youth. It disgusted me to think that a man who wishes to be my President thinks so little about the amount of damage done  not just to me, but also to millions of females around the world. Life-long damage, Mr. Trump. Had a man treated any of the females in your life that way, I can only imagine what form your indignation might have taken, and I sincerely doubt you would still carry the current attitude toward women that you seem to have today.

As for your various statements and actions regarding people who are non-white, I can only say, I would like to see DNA results for you. We all come from the same place, Mr. Trump, and you cant always see it in skin colour, customs or religion. If you are Christian, then you have to believe that we are all Gods creation and have equal standing. If you are not Christian, then I imagine you still must believe we started from some thing: ONE thing.

As a leader of a diverse nation, intolerance toward any human beings, regardless of your personal beliefs, should be vanquished in your actions, language and your thinking. Supremacy of any race should never be connected to you. The constant warring around the world based on colour and/or religious beliefs should serve as a reminder of what is possible here if we, as a nation, do not heed and embrace our diversity. Be astute, Mr. Trump. We cannot afford to let ego reign.

Youre asking me to trust you, and trust excludes fear. In ten weeks, we will be in a relationship. I can choose to view it as a shotgun wedding and fight it the whole way, or I can put my trust in you and believe you when you say you want the best for me. Your actions will make it clear, soon enough, whether you are truly for US or if you are mere talk. As with any relationship, the possibility exists you will treat me horribly and I will regret I ever knew you. I dislike being vulnerable, but there is only one way to find out if this relationship will work  we both must be willing. That being the case, I choose to trust.

We are One, Mr. Trump. All of us. Im not talking about being an American citizen; Im talking about being human. You are as much a part of me as I am of you. Disregarding you would be tantamount to ignoring my arm or my leg. It cant be done. Let us strive to make this relationship work. Be kind. Be loving. Be One.

Pagan Jackson

Address supplied

The political dream team has finally been formed

So finally, all those disengaged, disenfranchised, angry and often poor in our society, ignored for years, have had their revenge. We now have The Dream Team: Boris in the Foreign Office, Trump in the Oval Office.

Serves us right.

Brinnie Humm

Hastings
The continued availability of green diesel is important to rural Ireland with IFA President Joe Healy describing it as fuel that keeps rural Ireland alive.

In an Oireachtas Committee debate recently the 'pros' and 'cons' of agricultural diesel were discussed.

Sinn Fein TD Peadar Tobin said the use of two types of diesel creates a space in which criminals can operate.

This causes difficulties and generates significant policing costs.

An argument has been made for having one type of diesel and allowing farmers to apply for rebates, perhaps on a bimonthly basis.

Under the proposed scheme, farmers would continue to pay the same costs for diesel as they did for diesel for agricultural purposes.

At the same time, the scope for criminal activity would be eliminated and the 600 million annual cost of policing the issue would no longer arise.

Tobin said he accepts, that it would give rise to cashflow challenges for farmers as they would have to wait for a rebate.

Tobin Chairman of the Oireachtas Select Committee on Regional Development, Rural Affairs, Arts and the Gaeltacht consulted the Irish Farmers Association on the matter.

Responding, Thomas Cooney IFAs Environment Chairman said the proposal has been examined and the IFA believes it would be difficult to administer.

A farm family may have a number of cars and some family members could be employed elsewhere, which means the exemption could be abused, he said.

Cooney said the marker in diesel has been improved and he said the IFA has been informed that the use of laundered diesel has declined as a result.

The proposed scheme would create a cashflow problem initially and farmers are already experiencing problems accessing finance.

The scheme would impose a serious burden on agricultural contractors who cut silage in June and this burden would fall back on the farmer, creating an additional cashflow problem, he highlighted.
County Antrim based Greenmount College has just opened up a luxurious new pad for the college's flock of hill sheep at Glenwherry costing a cool 917,000 (825,000).

However, the new home for 726 ewes is no ordinary shed as it is packed with the latest technologies and equipment money can buy.

It's true, no ordinary sheep farmer would go to such extraordinary lengths, never mind the cost, of erecting such an elegant dwelling, but this house is not for any ordinary flock of sheep.

A total of 1,100 ewes are based at the Glenwherry Hill Farm together with a 100-cow suckler cow herd grazing up to a height of 1,000ft above sea level.

Expand Close A combi clamp aids the management of the sheep for dosing and inspection purposes / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp A combi clamp aids the management of the sheep for dosing and inspection purposes

The farm extends to 1,000 hectares, wrapped inside a 16 miles long perimeter, with only 40 of these hectares classed as improved grassland.

Situated at that height, the harsh winter weather really takes effect therefore the staff house the majority of the flock from mid-December onwards.

The original sheep housing at the farm has become very outdated and very labour intensive.

Moreover, three separate houses on different areas of the farmyard were used to accommodate the sheep which made it more difficult for the staff and students who were on lambing duties to keep an eye on them all.

It's been in the planning and making for the past two years but finally the new 72m by 26m shed at the hill farm is finished in time to house 726 ewes this winter period.

There are 21 new technologies built into the new house to aid with the feeding, management and lambing of the ewes which are mainly Blackface Swaledale crosses and Texel crossbreds.

Expand Close At the end of the race is a weighbridge and EID reader which can identify each animal in turn / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp At the end of the race is a weighbridge and EID reader which can identify each animal in turn

"The old houses had a capacity for 300 ewes and were over 30 years old," said CAFRE Farms Director Neville Graham. "During the heavy snowfall in March 2013, the flock suffered substantial losses as some of them were being out-wintered due to a lack of room.

"The sheep industry in Northern Ireland is worth 63m and employs 15 per cent of farm workers.

"This is the only government owned hill farm in Ireland and is a centre of education for students and farmers alike.

"It is also with that in mind that we have built this sheep house with all the latest technology. As it is an educational facility we wanted to show the top end of new innovations available for such a house. It cannot be compared, therefore, with a commercial sheep house."

Expand Close The cameras are all linked to a central monitor placed in the kitchen of the shed used for mixing lamb milk / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp The cameras are all linked to a central monitor placed in the kitchen of the shed used for mixing lamb milk

It's not only the sheep which will benefit from the new shed as the college farm staff and students, as well as the Northern Ireland sheep industry, will also reap the benefits.

The new premises will give farmers and students access to innovative technologies and enable them to learn about the very latest sheep rearing and management techniques.

Among the cutting edge features of the sheep house are handling facilities, including footbaths, a curved race, handling units and equipment to identify, weigh and draft animals, enabling large numbers of animals to be handled safely and efficiently.

The facilities incorporate the latest sheep EID technology and software to aid management decisions. Also included are flooring systems to provide improved health and welfare of housed ewes and slurry management including tanks, mixing points and flush systems to provide adequate storage and safety for stock and operators.

Furthermore, the sheep house boasts environmentally sustainable rainwater harvesting technology and natural ventilation, helping to reduce overheads and minimise environmental impact.

Expand Close The entire shed can be converted to a handling facility in a matter of minutes. Here there is a permanent race built to direct sheep to weighbridge / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp The entire shed can be converted to a handling facility in a matter of minutes. Here there is a permanent race built to direct sheep to weighbridge

The new shed was located on the most level field as close to the main farmyard as possible and it is central to the laneways leading down from the hills.

The shed eaves are four metres high with an 18 degree pitch roof. Three High Definition cameras with zoom lens are fitted along the main roof and a fourth one is placed over the lambing area. Each camera is linked to a central monitor located in a small kitchen in the shed which is used for mixing lamb milk.

The internal layout of 1800 square metres consists of a total of 17 slatted sheep pens floored using a suspended proprietary system to allow slurry to be collected in four below ground tanks.

Sheep will be housed in 15 8m by 6m pens which hold 44 ewes each and a further two pens at 6m by 6m which hold 33 ewes each. This allows a natural space per ewe of 1.1m2. The tanks are 1.2m deep with one extending to 1.8m deep due to the fall in the land. Mixing points are positioned outside the shed for safety reasons.

There is approximately 960 cubic metres of slurry storage in the shed which accounts for two years total slurry capacity for the livestock numbers housed there for a few months.

Tanks are slatted with the MIK stepper slat which has been specifically designed for sheep and goat flooring applications. The knobbed surface ensures high step safety and foot stability and it costs 35 (39) per square metre.

Expand Close Tanks are used to store rainwater harvested from the roof of the main shed / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Tanks are used to store rainwater harvested from the roof of the main shed

The fact that manure can easily pass through the slots guarantees a clean and dry surface which supports general animal health.

Greenmount College choose the plastic slat instead of a wire mesh slat as it said the stepper slat would last twice as long with a life expectancy of around 20 years.

There is a 5m wide central feed passage through the building, accessed from either end via a roller shutter in the gable.

Separate to the main pens there are also 66 individual lambing pens and a sheep handling unit.

The house will act as accommodation for the sheep in the winter months from around mid-December but will revert to a handling facility during the other times of the year.

Each pen is made with gates that have a special bar that drops into brackets lower down on the gates. This will prevent the sheep entering the pens when the shed is being used as a handling facility.

In one corner there is a sheep race which leads onto a sheep clamping unit and an EID reader and weighbridge.

All drinkers in the pens are on the one water circuit and are of a new shallow design which only allows a small volume to remain in the bowl. This ensures the water stays fresher for the sheep.

Also, if temperatures drop in the winter time a heating system kicks in to ensure the water in the circuit never freezes and is always available to the animals.

The entire shed can be cleaned with a volume wash system using water from the rain harvesting system which has the potential to collect 23m3 of rain per week.

College director Martin McKendry said the new sheep facilities and the education, training and knowledge and technology transfer benefits they will deliver, will help underpin the future of sustainable sheep farming in Northern Ireland.

He said: "The international marketplace is becoming ever more competitive and it is vital, therefore, that we are positioned to equip our students and farmers with the knowledge and skills they need to develop and manage sustainable and successful farm businesses.

"This new facility will enable us to deliver the very best sheep management training to thousands of young people for many years to come."
Oh, but I did answer your question. I wrote: Is it not true that women, regardless of their political party affiliation, engage in locker-room talk about men, just as men do about women? And what does locker-room sexual talk have to do with supporting a person for president who takes millions of dollars in donations from foreign government's which treat women as property and second class people?



There is a vast difference between locker room sexual talk, alleged sexual charges and a Government which actually treats women under law as property and second class citizens. I am just trying to understand why so many women supported Hillary Clinton who took millions upon millions of dollars in contributions from governments which use to force of government to treat women as property and second class people.





JWK
President Barack Obama shakes hands with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington yesterday in what was the first meeting of the two, who had traded insults during the election campaign. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

The Government is facing urgent calls to act swiftly to protect US investment in Ireland after a top adviser to Donald Trump warned a "flood of companies" will leave under the new regime's tax plans.

The serious threat issued by Mr Trump's economic adviser Stephen Moore sent shockwaves through political circles yesterday as the fallout from the US presidential election continues.

Just hours after Mr Trump held a 10-minute phone conversation with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, his senior aide revealed the centrepiece of the new Washington administration is to lure back multinational companies with radical tax cuts.

In a worrying development, Mr Moore cited Ireland on two occasions as one of Mr Trump's targets. He reiterated that the plan involves slashing the US corporation tax rate by up to 20pc in a move that could have major knock-on effects for Ireland.

"I believe that when we cut these tax rates, we're going to cut our business tax rate from roughly 35pc down to roughly 15 to 20pc - if you do that you are going to see a flood of companies leaving Ireland and Canada and Germany and France and they are going to come back to the United States," Mr Moore told BBC radio.

Read more: Top Donald Trump adviser warns that 'flood of companies' will leave Ireland

Read more: Global breakdown: What Trump victory means for future of the world

"There is no question about it, and we see day after day in this country that we are losing our businesses and our corporations.

"They are effectively renouncing their US citizenship and they are moving to Canada, to Britain, to Ireland, to China and Mexico. That is a significant loss of jobs and we want to have the jobs here in the United States, we don't want to have them go abroad."

A senior Government source last night reiterated that Mr Trump and Mr Kenny had a 10-minute conversation, during which the Republican politician complimented Ireland's economy. Mr Kenny is believed to be the first EU leader to receive such a phone call.

But the threat by Mr Trump's adviser was met with mixed views in political and business circles.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said a major plan needs to be developed, which involves the Government and key stakeholders meeting the leaders of multinationals based here.

"In my statement on the election of Mr Trump, I warned about his pursuit of US companies headquartered overseas and the need for Ireland to quickly develop a plan to deal with this," Mr Martin told the Irish Independent.

"These comments from Mr Moore would appear to confirm those fears and further emphasise the need for swift action on Ireland's behalf."

The Labour Party's jobs spokesman Alan Kelly said the warning from the Trump regime is stark and that any move to lure companies back could do "serious damage".

Speaking to the Irish Independent, Jobs Minister Mary Mitchell O'Connor insisted that US firms will continue to be a major source of investment here.

"If and when the global investment climate changes once more, we will adapt accordingly - as we have done in the past - and make sure that Ireland remains attractive to foreign investors," she said.

But business representatives said they did not believe US companies would leave Ireland.

Padraig Cronin, partner at Deloitte, said what's here will remain.

"What's here is embedded here and it's there for a reason, so I don't see any material risk to the near term to what's already in Ireland," he said.

It was a similar view shared by Peter Vale at Grant Thornton.

He said: "There's no question that this will make the US more attractive.

"But will it mean they will all up sticks and move back to the US? No it won't."
RTE have announced the appointment of Jon Williams to the position of Managing Director of RTE News and Current Affairs.

Jon has been Managing Editor, International News, at ABC News in New York since March 2013.

He led ABC's reporting of the war in Ukraine, the European refugee crisis, and the coverage of the ISIS terrorist attacks in Europe, as well as driving innovation, including the use of 360 and virtual reality video.

In announcing the appointment, RTE Director-General, Dee Forbes, said: "This position attracted a strong national and international interest; clearly, RTEs reputation in news and current affairs is a global one.

"Jons CV is exceptional: a proven and award-winning track record in international affairs is coupled with that key domestic experience, which is so important in the Irish context.

"Jons skill as editor, reporter, innovator and leader are unique; I very much look forward to working closely with him in his new role and as a member of the RTE Executive Board."

With strong experience in domestic politics, Jon was the BBC's UK News Editor during the 2005 general election and 7/7 terror attacks on the London transport network, coverage of which was recognized with a BAFTA award.

From 2000-2003 Jon was the Deputy Editor of the BBC's Six O'Clock News, the UK's most-watched news programme.

Most recently he was the BBCs World News Editor, managing a staff of 200 people in 30 different countries.

Before leaving the BBC, he oversaw the reporting of the civil war in Syria, which earned him a second Emmy, and was honoured with the 2013 International Prize by the Royal Television Society.

Jon Williams said: "I could not be more excited to join RTE - it's the privilege of a lifetime to be asked to lead such a talented team of journalists.

"From Brexit to the many domestic challenges facing the country, there's never been a more important time for RTE, as the national media service, to lead the conversation, across all of our platforms, on radio, television, online, mobile and social. I can't wait to get started."

Jon was born and brought up in Liverpool and will be moving to Dublin to take up his new role with RTE.

He will take up his appointment as Managing Director of RTE News and Current Affairs in the new year.
Rush Credit Union was placed into provisional liquidation last week following an application by the Central Bank. Photo: Mark Condren

Credit union services are set to be restored to the North County Dublin towns of Rush and Lusk, after a liquidator was appointed to shut down the lender there.

Rush Credit Union was placed into provisional liquidation last week following an application by the Central Bank.

It had around 11,457 members with savings worth 24m.

Cheques repaying the savings to members went out yesterday, under the terms of the State Deposit Guarantee Scheme.

The cheques went out to around 9,700 members of Rush Credit Union, the Central Bank said.

The total amount of compensation paid to date amounts to 22.3m, representing 98pc of deposits covered by the Deposit Guarantee Scheme.

The High Court was told last week the collapse of Rush Credit Union was likely to lead to prosecutions over suspicions of fraud.

Serious deficiencies were found in relation to a number of matters including control of cash, lending practices, and day-to-day running of the credit union.

And there were even questions around how car draws were conducted. Every member entered into the draws - many of whom did not give permission for this - has had money returned to them after a senior staff member won some of the cars.

The credit union's safe was being used to stash money to keep it away from the taxman. Deeds to foreign properties were discovered in the safe, with uncertainty about who owns the properties.

Shocked locals were annoyed at the closure of the lender this week, with the doors locked in both offices, and ATMs shut down. Now members of neighbouring Progressive Credit Union have voted to extend its reach into the towns.

The rule change has been registered by the Central Bank, officially clearing the way for it to do business in the area.

Manager of Progressive Sean Staunton said his credit union had been "inundated" with requests for membership from members of Rush Credit Union.

He said Progressive has expressed an interest in buying the loan book of the bust credit union, which was understood to have been valued at 10m during the summer. It also aims to buy one of the two offices of the insolvent lender.

"We have expressed an interest in purchasing the Rush building as well, but we must wait until the formal appointment as liquidators on November 21 before any decision is made," he said.

Progressive Credit Union has reported a strong financial performance for 2016 with a surplus for the year of 1.7m and total assets now standing at 142m. It has total reserves of 19.6m - well in excess of the minimum regulatory requirement.

Progressive Credit Union has total membership of 45,416 and comprises six north Dublin credit unions including the former Balbriggan, Baldoyle-Portmarnock, Donabate, Glasnevin, Howth-Sutton, Skerries and Swords-Rivervalley unions.
Families are facing paying more for health insurance after it emerged that a third provider is pushing up the cost of its premiums.

Health insurer Irish Life, which took over Glo and Aviva Health recently, is pushing up prices by an average of 6pc.

The policies going up were originally issued by Glo, with the move set to cost families up to 150 a year more on popular schemes.

The move to increase the cost of GloHealth plans comes as they are being rebranded as Irish Life Health plans after the takeover of the company earlier this year.

Irish Life Health boss Jim Dowdall blamed higher charges imposed by the Government for those with health insurance using public hospitals.

The higher prices take effect from December 1. This means those taking out the plans that are going up, or those renewing their cover on these plans, will end up paying more.

The popular mid-level Better Plan will rise in price from 1,523 a year to 1,653, which is a rise of 130, or 9pc, for one adult.

But the impact on a family will be lessened because the child rate is coming down.

A family of two adults and two children will see the price rise to close to 4,000 a year. This is a rise of 146, or 4pc for the family.

The entry-level Basic Plan will cost a family close to 2,000 a year from December, a rise of 93, or 5pc.

Some plans will see their costs rise by 23pc, while there are small reductions in the cost of other plans, according to health insurance expert Dermot Goode of TotalHealthCover.ie.

Members using a public hospital had previously been charged 75 a night - but that figure has now soared to 800 a night if they are treated as a private patient with health insurance.

In a statement Glo/Irish Life Health said: "Since 2015 this inflated charge has directly resulted in a 7pc increase in claims costs faced by private health insurers."

It said patients with private health insurance had already paid for public health through their taxes "so they are in fact being double charged by public hospitals which have raised over 150m per annum by applying this charge".

In 2014 legislation was introduced allowing public hospitals charge patients with private health cover.

VHI and Laya have already announced price rises.

A recent analysis of the increases announced by the two insurers showed that the cumulative rises were 10pc, three times more than the 3pc increases consumers had expected.

This is because health insurers are now announcing a number of small rises throughout the year, and when added up they amount to higher rises as insurance is renewed annually.
Enda Kenny spoke to US President-elect Donald Trump by telephone for 10 minutes

Aslan's Christy Dignam has called Taoiseach Enda Kenny a "spineless f**k" after he congratulated Donald Trump on being elected president of the United States.

Dignam said Mr Kenny (inset) should have followed German Chancellor Angela Merkel's lead and sent Trump a restrained message of congratulations.

"Enda Kenny is spineless," Dignam told the Herald. "He was calling Trump a racist and disgusting and then he sent him his sincerest congratulations. I thought Enda then went and licked his a**e instead."

Dignam said it reflected very poorly on Mr Kenny if he can so easily abandon his opinions and beliefs.

Expand Close Enda Kenny spoke to US President-elect Donald Trump by telephone for 10 minutes / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Enda Kenny spoke to US President-elect Donald Trump by telephone for 10 minutes

"I mean, stick to your guns. I know he's a politician, but he could have gone the Merkel route and said, 'Look it, if we have to work together, we have to work together, but respect my terms'."

Dignam took particular offence when he heard Mr Kenny had congratulated Trump on behalf of the Irish people.

"I just want to say that might be the opinion of many Irish people, but it's not mine," he said.

Read More

Asked if he would ever perform a gig in Trump's Doonbeg hotel, Dignam replied: "I would in me bol**x."

Mr Kenny issued a statement offering his "sincere congratulations" on Wednesday.

The two men spoke with each other yesterday, but Dr Merkel has been more reserved.

Video of the Day

Read More

In a statement she said: "Germany and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views.

"I offer the next president of the United States close cooperation on the basis of these values."
RTE have received over 1,000 complaints about controversial columnist Katie Hopkins' appearance on this Fridays Late Late Show.

So far RTE has received over 1,131 emails critical of the decision to feature Hopkins as a guest.

Hopkins, who is due to talk about her support of US President Elect Donald Trump, announced on Twitter that she would be appearing on the programme.

Many viewers and fans of the show felt the national broadcaster should not be giving Hopkins such a prominent platform.

Morning: The media need to address their role in allowing racist populism to spread

Afternoon: Katie Hopkins booked for the Late Late Show  Conor Graham (@conorjgraham) November 9, 2016

RTE are giving Katie Hopkins a platform this Friday on the Late Late. This is EXACTLY the kinda thing we need to stop. It only hurts people.  Conor Smith (@conorsmith) November 9, 2016

For the easily confused: not watching the Late Late when Katie Hopkins is on isnt an impingement of free speech, its a channel change.  Damien Owens (@OwensDamien) November 10, 2016

Pat Kenny Tonight had Leo Sherlock on. Friday night, it's Katie Hopkins on the Late Late Show. Stormfront booked for Ray D'Arcy on Saturday?  Brian Lloyd (@BrianMLloyd) November 10, 2016

Please consider sending an email of complaint to RTE about Katie Hopkins appearing on the Late Late show! The email is complaints@rte.ie pic.twitter.com/5WpEWetnUE  alexandra (@alexdalton97) November 9, 2016

Complain to RTE and The Late Late Show about Katie Hopkins. But then make sure you don't watch the bloody thing!  Dean Van Nguyen (@deanvannguyen) November 9, 2016

What I don't get is, Katie Hopkins was on the Late Late not that long ago, and after criticism about lack of female guests, they invite HER?  Zoe Alicia (@ZoeAlicia101) November 10, 2016

Trump gets into the White House, Katie Hopkins to appear on the late late show. Will the madness ever end  Mick McGuire (@DjMakG) November 9, 2016

Why is @rte having Katie Hopkins on the Late Late Show Friday night? Why are people giving her air time? @RTELateLateShow  Carol (@Carol_xox) November 9, 2016

Katie Hopkins on the Late Late is good actually, it's like when you infect yourself with a disease so that you can try to cure the disease  Colm (@emordino) November 10, 2016

Read More

Yesterday, Ryan Tubridy explained why Hopkins had been chosen; It has been a controversial week around the globe with a controversial election result so we are going to reflect that with a controversial guest.

Katie Hopkins does a job, she comes on, she expresses an opinion that is contrary and difficult but it starts a conversation.

Expand Close Katie Hopkins has praised Donald Trump for exploiting the US tax system / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Katie Hopkins has praised Donald Trump for exploiting the US tax system

RTE also issued a statement explaining why they decided Hopkins would be a suitable guest.

Donald Trump's victory has been one of the biggest political upsets of our time, a statement read.

Donald Trump himself expressed many controversial views during the campaign and is now President Elect.

Katie Hopkins is one of his most vocal supporters in the UK. She'll be giving her take on why his message resonated with American voters, and her promise to move to America in the event of a Trump victory.

Read More

The American election and its aftermath has been and will continue to be covered extensively across of range of RTE's output.

Hopkins has appeared three times on the Late Late Show since 2014 - once to discuss obesity in which she described overweight people as "fatties".

Video of the Day

Yesterday Ryan Tubridy launched new charity CD 'As seen on The Late Late Show' in RTE.

The double album features more than 40 music acts that have performed on RTEs flagship show over the past ten years.

Some of the stars on the album are U2, Michael Buble, Robbie Williams, Ellie Goulding, One Direction, Josh Groban, The Script, and 5 Seconds of Summer.

It also includes Ed Sheerans as Gaeilge version of his hit Thinking Out Loud.

All proceeds from the sales will go to the St Vincent de Paul.
NUIG president Dr Jim Browne and Taoiseach Enda Kenny at an academic conference in Galway entitled 1916-2016: The Promise and Challenge of National Sovereignty. Photo: Aengus McMahon

Ireland should continue to commemorate 1916 in the years ahead despite the centenary celebrations concluding, says Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

Mr Kenny, who officially opened the 5m Padraig Pearse tourism centre in Connemara before attending a centenary conference in NUI Galway, said the date should be honoured forever.

He said: "I think it's important that the State continues to re-enact it over the next 100 years.

"This Padraig Pearse cottage had a particular part to play, not just in 1916, but it also had a part to play in the education, in the business of development by legalism, the conservation of the Irish language."

Mr Kenny also said that it was important to build a legacy to pass on to generations, during a speech at the NUI Galway conference.

He said: "We will be coming back to this theme in the coming weeks, with details of a plan for the legacy of this year as an authentic expression of what actually happened - and as well beginning our work on the rest of the decade of centenaries.

"Because a legacy is something we create and leave for future generations.

"The centenary year gives us the opportunity, and creates the obligation, to articulate and define what this generation must do to create a legacy worthy of that bequeathed to us.

"I believe that when we take time to reflect on 2016 we will detect a new cultural revival in Ireland, a revival that puts arts and culture at the centre of public policy."

Meanwhile, the president of NUI Galway, Dr Jim Browne, said universities had led the way with their response to the 1916 centenary. He was speaking at the opening of the Centenary Conversations and its centrepiece event - Ireland 1916-2016: The Promise and Challenge of National Sovereignty.

Read more: 'NUI Galway is pleased to host this challenging national conversation'
Hollywood said: Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, same of chicken-**** posturing out of you, as usual.



Kid, I don't really expect you, or your ilk here, to answer. What I am doing is reminding people that you boys did not, could not or would not answer.



You boys know that the "life" of a given thread is not long, rarely over a couple of days.

By waiting a day or so and then "reminding" one of you boys that a pertinent question has not been addressed or answered that lack of an answer/response is brought up again and highlighted so to speak..



I WANT memes, I WANT it pointed out and stressed that MEMES are ALL you have. MEMES and nothing intelligent, thoughtful or even honest. Click to expand...

If once, just one time you had attempted to have an honest intellectual conversation w/ anyone who had an opposing viewpoint that post would hold some merit but you have not. Every once and a while I would attempt to enter into a discussion w/ you and every time it would end up w/ the same results. You are by the very definition a troll and not even a very good one at that so the general response to your inflammatory posts is memes because that is all that you deserve. In reality you do not deserve this response but in fact I am writing it for the other posters here and not for you.You sir have been dismissed.
ELECTIONS are about looking to the future, but America has attempted to reclaim the past.

A bubbling underbelly of racism, intolerance and insecurity has risen to the surface of public debate. It has scarred the greatest experiment in Republicanism and all but removed the word 'united' from the vocabulary.

After the most bizarre election in US history the race for the White House was on a knife edge this morning.

Donald Trump's supporters wanted to take the country back from the corrupt elite. In other words, return power to the white man and his wife.

But the message of 'Make America Great Again' stretched further than he could even have imagined.

At polling stations across New York, a Democratic stronghold, the unthinkable happened as voter after voter turned out to back the real-estate tycoon.

In central Manhattan, Rose Shapiro, a 73-year-old attorney from Israel, voted Trump because minorities are becoming the majority.

"We do construction and we take people from Mexico. I treat them well. And they cheat us from here to there," she said.

She argues that in 20 years "this country is going to be Latino".

On the other side, many of Hillary Clinton's backers wanted to live in the Obama era forever.

It was obvious at her final rally in Philadelphia when tears flowed down the faces of mothers and grandmothers as Michelle Obama talked about it being one of her final times on stage as First Lady.

The fact that a victory for Clinton would break the highest of glass ceilings was almost lost.

Her final speeches were soaked with rhetoric about being a president for everyone. But this was the same woman who during the heat of the campaign described half of her rivals' supporters as a "basket of deplorables".

Essentially, America has launched an unimaginable attack on itself. And whereas the wounds of physical assaults have brought it together in the past, the verbal onslaught will be much harder to overcome. "I think it's daunting. Other people are scared it might not go back - but America is strong and it will become strong again," said Clinton voter Karra Davis.

That's the task facing the new president. They must reunite the States in a way that might not be possible within four years.

It's hard not to wish that Clinton had faced a different candidate so that issues such as education, health and the economy might have been debated. That question about her trustworthiness might have been tested without the attachment of outright slander.

Talking to people of all races and backgrounds as they queued for up to two hours to vote gave the best insight possible into the damage that has been inflicted on this nation.

"Nut job", "corrupt", "insane", "crazy", "liar", "maniac" and "nasty" were descriptions that rolled off the tongues of apparently reasonable people. But others expressed a wish that things could just go back to normal. That election season would end and, like a bad reality show, would be dropped.

While the result may not have been about change in the traditional sense, the outcome had a lot to do with the changing demographics of America.

Much was made of the need for the Clinton campaign to roll out President Obama time and again as she struggled to convince African Americans to engage.

Just eight years ago they were celebrating the first black president with a vigour that would have risen the spirit of Rosa Parks. But Clinton has compiled her own coalition of Hispanics and Latinos with a cohort of millennials.

Trump reawakened the sleeping white middle class, many of whom had given up on politics.

The turnout suggests the country has rarely been more engaged. As the results rolled in, it was clear this was a hugely divided country. They may have been holding their election parties in the same city but these candidates polarised people like no others.

As the momentum swung back to Mr Trump, hordes of people who had queued up outside Ms Clinton's election party slipped away. There were shocked faces as early Democratic confidence ebbed away and a Trump victory became an increasing possibility.

From 'Yes We Can' to 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country', US presidents have always been good for a quote.

Abraham Lincoln said: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Today a new chapter begins. History has been made but at what cost to the land of the free?

in New York
A convicted paedophile, who four years ago was ordered to pay 100,000 damages to the nephew he sexually abused when the child was only six, has pleaded with a judge not to do anything that could cause him lose his home.

John ONeill, now a 51-year-old jobless law student, has been paying his nephew, Keith Battersby, 50 a week and faces an application for a well-charging order against his home at 86 Sarsfield Park, Lucan, Co Dublin, the Circuit Civil Court was told.

Judge Jacqueline Linnane said that at this rate it would take him almost 40 years paying off the debt. By that time ONeill would be 91 and his nephew 80 if both survived. And I certainly wont be around, the judge said.

Barrister Cathy Smith, counsel for Mr Battersby, told the court that ONeill had sporadically and irregularly been paying 50 a week to his nephew over the last four years with only 6,630 paid off the debt.

She was seeking a well charging order against ONeills property and, if necessary, orders for possession and sale of it.

In 2012 Keith Battersby, then aged 36, of Coill Fada, Longwood, Co Meath, sued his uncle who, he said, had committed 12 sexual assaults on him between 1982 and 1984.

The abuse had occurred in ONeills home and in the projection room of the Grove Cinema in Lucan where ONeill worked at the time and had commenced when Mr Battersby was just six years.

In July 2012 Battersby sued ONeill and the then High Court President, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, had awarded him 100,000 and costs for horrific experiences.

Ms Smith, who appeared with Pearse Mehigan Solicitors, said there was still about 93,000 outstanding and Mr Battersby wanted payment of the award so he could finally get on with his life.

ONeill, who represented himself in the Circuit Civil Court, said he had pleaded guilty at The Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to sexually assaulting his nephew. He had been given a two year suspended sentence and had not defended his nephews claim for damages in 2012.

Following his conviction and articles about him in the Sunday World he had lost his job in a taxi calls centre and had since been on social welfare. He was doing his best to pay off his nephew but did not want to lose his home.

ONeill said he had been a law student for the last four years and hoped on qualification to get a job and pay off his debt to his nephew. Following ONeills conviction in the Circuit Criminal Court in 2010 Mr Battersby had described his uncle as: A monster who stole my childhood.

Judge Linnane said that with a judgment already against him his credit rating had gone and it was fanciful of him to think that in the future a bank would lend him the money to pay off the award.

She said he had told the court he wanted to deal honourably with the situation but had raised a challenge to the Circuit Courts jurisdiction to deal with the matter.

Adjourning the proceedings into the New Year she said if he genuinely wanted to do the honourable thing he might consider consenting to the court being given unlimited jurisdiction to deal with Mr Battersbys application.
Dr Salah Abdel-Aziz Ahmed, a consultant obstetrician leaves a fitness to practice enquiry by the medical council at Finnstown House in Lucan. Picture credit: Damien Eagers

An inquiry into the care of three women in childbirth by a consultant obstetrician has heard that the doctor expressed concerns in 2012 about delays in finding adequate emergency theatre staff in after-hours situations.

Dr Salah Aziz Ahmed faces allegations of poor professional performance and professional misconduct relating to three mothers who gave birth at Cavan General Hospital between November 2012 and April 2014.

A Medical Council inquiry which began on Thursday continued today in Lucan, Co. Dublin.

Yesterday the inquiry heard details involving one of the patients, a 37-year-old woman, referred to as Patient One, whose baby passed away 32 hours after he was born.

The baby was born by emergency caesarean section on 22 November 2012 and it is alleged that Dr Aziz failed to proceed to the section in a timely manner.

The inquiry has already heard that the cause of death in the case of Patient One's baby does not form any part of the allegations.

This morning, the former director general at Cavan General Hospital, Bridget Clarke, spoke of the seriousness of a babys death.

Whenever you have a baby death, its one of the most serious things that can happen in hospital care, she said.

On the night of 22 November, when Dr Aziz decided that Patient Ones baby should be born by caesarean section, another woman was having an elective section in one of the theatres.

Ms Clarke said this other mother was scheduled for an elective surgery, and did not fall into an emergency category. Ultimately, because of the timing of this surgery, an additional theatre had to open in order to facilitate Patient Ones emergency section.

Dr Aziz and his consultant colleagues wrote to Ms Clarke on 30 November 2012, expressing their concern about finding adequate emergency theatre staff, particularly in after-hours situations when more than one theatre was needed.

Ms Clarke told the inquiry that she has never experienced a delay in opening an additional theatre, if one is needed in an emergency situation, or in sourcing additional emergency theatre staff.
Inset: Victims mum Sharon Whelan and her two daughters, Zsara (seven) and Nadia. Main Pic: Brian Hennessy

The family of a woman murdered along with her two young children on Christmas morning are to plead with the parole board to reject any application for early release by their killer.

The Whelan family warned it is "totally wrong" for the onus to be on the loved ones of murder victims to campaign against killers being released early on parole.

Brian Hennessy is now eligible for parole, despite having served less than eight years of a life sentence for the murders of Sharon Whelan (30) and her daughters, Zara (7) and Nadia (2), on December 24/25 2008.

Hennessy got a life sentence in November 2009 after being convicted of strangling Sharon Whelan in her south Kilkenny home near Windgap.

The postman later told gardai he set fire to her house in a bid to hide what he had done and the fact he had sex with the victim. The two girls were asleep in their bedroom when he started the fire and died from carbon-monoxide poisoning.

Despite his claims of remorse, Hennessy appealed the Central Criminal Court sentence and is now serving a concurrent life sentence for all three killings.

Sharon's brother John and his family will make a detailed submission to the parole board asking for any early-release submission by Hennessy to be rejected.

Read more: I need to make sure he serves every second possible - Killer of mother and two daughters applies for parole after just eight years

The submission will revolve around their insistence that Hennessy has not spent long enough behind bars, the gravity of his actions that Christmas morning and the fact that three people, including two children, were killed.

Mr Whelan, who is involved in the victim's rights group AdVic, said reform of the parole system was urgently required.

He said: "The system is cruel. He is now only serving one life sentence and we are still waiting to find out which one he is serving.

"People must remember that one-third of our entire family was wiped out that night.

"It is important that people also remember he is serving one life sentence for three murders."

Mr Whelan said his family had struggled to escape the horror of what Hennessy did that Christmas.

"Last month a prison liaison officer contacted us to tell us that Hennessy is eligible for parole from November," he said.

"As a family we have to make a presentation or submission to the parole board. The onus is on the victims' family to outline why he should not be released. It is disgraceful."

The Whelan family's submission will be presented to the parole board for the hearing which is expected to take place early next year. Hennessy's legal team will have full access to the document in advance.

"This man took three lives in the blink of an eye and now he is eligible for parole. As a family it brings us back to day one and we relive the horror," Mr Whelan said.

"The State is allowing this to happen not only to our family but to all the families of murder victims."
Scriptwriter and producer Stephanie Preissner (of Cant Cope Wont Cope fame) films student Benita Muranda, from Stillorgan, during her visit to the National Film School at the Institute of Art and Design Technology in Dun Laoghaire, which this week is running a masterclass for young women. Photo: Brian Farrell

Universities and institutes of technology are divided on the thorny issue of student fees.

University presidents have backed a study now, pay later, student loan scheme, with fees rising to 4,000-5,000.

But institutes of technology said there should be no fees at all for students on ordinary degree and higher certificate courses, known as Level 7/6. However, the institutes say fees "may be appropriate" for students on honours degree courses, known as Level 8.

Overwhelmingly, Level 7/6 courses are provided by institutes of technology. At the core of the institutes' argument is that their students tend to come from less well-off backgrounds.

They made their cases at the Oireachtas Education Committee, discussing the Cassells Report on future funding for higher education.

Professor Don Barry, chair of the Irish Universities Association said that high fees, such as those in the UK or the US, were not acceptable, whether paid upfront or under a loan scheme.

But, regardless of the level of the charge, there were arguments in favour of deferred payment, which avoided pressures on families to pay up front.

Prof Ciaran O'Cathain, chair of the Technological Higher Education Association (THEA), suggested a variation in the Cassells options with no fees at all for Level 7/6 courses.

But, a student contribution may be appropriate for Level 8 courses, because of the greater costs involved and the benefit to individuals the further they progressed in higher education, he said.
The three childrens hospitals in Dublin have issued an appeal to parents following a surge in youngsters having to be admitted with respiratory infections.

Parents are being asked to go to their GP or Out of Hours GP service and to limit attendances to the hospitals emergency departments over the weekend.

The appeal was issued by Temple St, Crumlin Children's Hospital and the childrens hospital in Tallaght.

A spokeswoman for the childrens hospital group said the hospitals are experiencing unprecedented demands for admissions to inpatient beds this week.

Of particular note is an increase in patients presenting with respiratory infections particularly in younger children and babies.

She added:The hospitals wish to apologise to any patients who may have an increased wait to be admitted and are making every effort to improve the situation.

The childrens hospital group is working closely with the clinical directors and hospital management in the three hospitals to ensure that every effort is made to manage this situation.
Red squirrels are carrying human leprosy and people have been warned to stay away from the animals to minimise the risk of catching the disease.

One of the strains  which is affecting squirrels on Brownsea Island, off the south coast of Dorset in the UK  shares close similarities with that responsible for outbreaks of the disease in medieval Europe.

Researchers tested 25 samples from red squirrels on the island and found that all were infected with the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae, though not all showed signs of the disease. Those that did had swelling and hair loss on the ears, muzzle and feet.

Until now it was thought that the animals only carried an animal version. Human leprosy has been found in red squirrels in other parts of England, Scotland and Ireland but of a different strain which has never infected anyone in Britain yet does elsewhere.

Although the risk to humans is small, scientists at the University of Edinburgh say people should avoid physical contact and wash hands thoroughly to minimise the risk.

Taking sensible precautions such as avoiding physical contact with wild animals and washing your hands before eating will further minimise any risk, said Professor Anna Meredith, of the University of Edinburghs Royal School of Veterinary Studies.

The discovery of leprosy in red squirrels is worrying from a conservation perspective but shouldnt raise concerns for people in the UK.

The bacteria that cause leprosy cannot survive outside the body and evidence shows that 95 per cent of all people are naturally unable to get leprosy, even if they are exposed to the bacteria that causes it.

We need to understand how and why the disease is acquired and transmitted among red squirrels so that we can better manage the disease in this iconic species.

One of the papers lead authors Dr Andrej Benjak said it was important to monitor the disease in Britain, as part of the WHO's global Leprosy Surveillance Programme.

"Leprosy has not been detected in the UK in decades, though we cannot exclude the possibility of rare, unreported or misdiagnosed cases that originated within the UK," he said.

The red squirrel is already endangered because of spread of grey squirrels and conservationists are concerned that the disease spread could cause further population decline.

The new bacteria shares close similarities with a strain discovered in the skeleton of a leprosy victim buried in Winchester 730 years ago.

Scientists, who collected samples of bacteria from dead squirrels, say their findings suggest that leprosy has affected red squirrels on Brownsea Island for centuries.

It was completely unexpected to see that centuries after its elimination from humans in the UK, Mycobacterium leprae causes disease in red squirrels, said Professor Stewart Cole, of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, co-author of the study.

This has never been observed before.

However scientists say their findings suggest that animals could be a reservoir for bacteria and may be thwarting attempts to eradicate the disease in other countries.

Angela Cott, National Trust General Manager for Brownsea Island, said: "Brownsea's wild red squirrel population has been living with leprosy for at least four decades.

But by working with the University of Edinburgh and Dorset Wildlife Trust, we hope to understand how best to look after Brownsea's wild red squirrels. Brownsea Island remains a spectacular place for people to see wildlife."

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Health Minister Simon Harris could only look on as other Oireachtas members including Fine Gael TD Kate OConnell donated blood in Dublin. Photo: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie

Health Minister Simon Harris had his offer to give blood declined yesterday because he suffers from Crohn's disease.

Mr Harris, who organised a bus from Leinster House to lead a group of TDs, Senators and Oireachtas staff on a special blood donation mission, was disappointed to be turned down.

However, his Crohn's disease - a long-term condition that causes inflammation of the lining of the digestive system - can lead to iron deficiency.

This can cause side-effects like anaemia, making sufferers unsuitable candidates for blood donation.

Fellow Oireachtas colleagues, including Fianna Fail Dublin West TD Jack Chambers, Junior Health Minister Helen McEntee and Fine Gael Dublin Bay South TD Kate O' Connell passed the medical test and were eligible for donation.

Blood donation is an essential lifeline for hospitals. Mr Harris's delegation was aimed at getting more people to donate - only 3pc of the eligible population of Ireland actively give blood. "Yet one in four people will require a blood transfusion at some time in their lives," he added.
Over 4,500 families were given a life-line today with a Better Together guide that helps them parent their premature babies.

The Better Together guide outlines 10 family-centred care giving activities that families can participate in when they have an infant in the NICU, such as comfort holding or assisting with tube feeding.

The aim of the leaflet is to guide families on how they can parent their infant in a positive way despite the clinical surroundings of the environment and highlights how their involvement must be seen as a necessary component of care delivery in the NICU.

The guide was created by the Irish Neonatal Health Alliance and launched by Minister for Health Simon Harris.

Mandy Daly, Director of Advocacy and Policy Making, INHA, said: As a mum to a little girl who was born prematurely, I have first-hand experience of life in the NICU.

We want to assure families who unexpectedly find themselves in the NICU with a premature or ill infant, that parenting their infant is possible and additionally has benefits for the infant, the family and the healthcare system. Our Better Together guide outlines 10 things families can do, such as comfort holding or assisting with tube feeding. The Better Together Guide is available now on INHA.ie.

More than 4,500 babies are born prematurely in Ireland each year, equivalent to 1 in 10 babies born.

World Prematurity Day, which takes place on November 17th, offers families and health care professionals an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the challenges these special early deliveries face, with many families affected by premature birth in attendance at the symposium this morning.

Health Minister Simon Harris said: It is an honour to meet so many inspirational families and the doctors, nurses and allied health professionals who look after these babies in neonatal intensive care units (NICU) all over the country.

I hope that the Better Together guide launched today will help to educate these parents about the family-centred care activities that they can participate in while their infant is in the NICU setting.

The full guide is available to download on www.INHA.ie
I don't know. Perhaps so.



That has nada to do with whether you can or can't know if all of Trump's sexual bragging is just talk. You claimed, "So he is personally is JUST LIKE BILL CLINTON, with one exception. BILL CLINTON DID, what Trump only Talked about doing in a private dressing room in a vulgar conversation between 2 men."



You can't know that. But whether you, I, or anybody can know isn't the point. We both damn well know Trump's lived the life of a sexual playboy and an unfaithful husband. Filling in the particulars presents a challenge, but Trump's grabbed his share of pussies perhaps consensually, perhaps not, made his share of passes, and definitely has refused to take no for an answer on more than one occasion.



We can know that.
Housing Minister Simon Coveney has come under fire for his handling of Irish Water and housing. Photo: Tom Burke

Housing Minister Simon Coveney's prospects of becoming the next Taoiseach are quickly fading as a result of his handling of recent controversies, according to a growing number of Fine Gael TDs.

Mr Coveney was challenged at a meeting of the Fine Gael parliamentary party this week over why the Government failed to block a "deeply flawed" bill on Irish Water proposed by Independent TD Joan Collins.

The bill, which proposes that a referendum be held on placing Irish Water under public ownership, was passed in the Dail yesterday after the Government decided not to vote against it.

But Fine Gael TDs were incensed over the response taken by the Government - and have directed their anger at Mr Coveney.

A number of backbenchers believe the Cork South Central TD is being "rolled over" by his opposite number in Fianna Fail, Barry Cowen.

"Cowen is walking all over him - it's embarrassing," said one source.

"He has completely rolled over to Fianna Fail and made it clear that accepting the Fianna Fail position is best, hence the no opposition to Joan Collins' bill," another member of the party said.

Deputies also criticised Mr Coveney's contribution at the meeting on Wednesday, during which he warned of the workload that would face members of the new committee set up to examine the recommendations of the water commission.

"He told us it will be intense and is not for the faint-hearted - it felt once again like we were being lectured," said one TD.

Another source present said Mr Coveney raised eyebrows after claiming he was delighted to have already received two text messages from TDs who would like to go on the committee once it was set up.

Mr Coveney also advised TDs to refrain from commenting about the issue of water charges, adding that he was due to receive a report from the expert commission by the end of the month.

A minister added that Mr Coveney's standing within the party had diminished in recent weeks as a result of his handling of changes to constituency boundaries.

He has also come under serious criticism from councillors after signalling that their pay would be increased, before backtracking days later.

His failure to tackle the homelessness crisis to any substantial degree has also attracted criticism.

But Mr Coveney still has supporters within the party who believe he is best placed to challenge Leo Varadkar, once Enda Kenny steps aside as leader.

Mr Varadkar, who is in Davos for a young political leaders' event, has been far more active in terms of his leadership bid.

But other sources came to Mr Coveney's defence in relation to Wednesday's meeting, insisting he merely set out the challenges the party would face in relation to water charges.

One TD said Mr Coveney set out in a "calm way" how Fine Gael needed to have a coherent strategy once the commission published its findings.

During the meeting, junior minister Damien English urged his colleagues to start using the term "treated water" when discussing Fine Gael's view that a charging regime should be put in place.

But Louth TD Fergus O'Dowd told the meeting he had "lost votes" because of the water charges fiasco.

Fianna Fail TDs are equally concerned over the party's approach to the findings of the Water Commission, which is expected to recommend the re-introduction of charges.

A rural-urban divide has developed within the party, with many rural TDs expressing unease over party leader Micheal Martin's claim that charges be abolished for good.

Read more: Varadkar puts leadership back on agenda with Kenny remarks

Read more: Kenny throws down gauntlet to rivals for Fine Gael leadership
European Commissioner Phil Hogan has said "there's no need to panic yet" over the feared threat to jobs by the election of Donald Trump as US President.

He said the bosses of US companies are "hard-nosed business people" who see the benefits of investing in Ireland.

Mr Hogan's remarks come after Mr Trump's economic adviser Stephen Moore warned that a "flood of companies" will leave Ireland under the new administration's plans to reduce US corporation tax.

Read More

The agriculture commissioner said he saw the headlines about the implications for Ireland and added: "I think there's a little bit of an over-reaction."

He said that what Mr Trump said on the campaign has to be put in the context of the eight-year legacy of President Barack Obama.

"I would say that there's no need to panic yet.

"There is going to be change but I think the change comes slowly and firms that are based here in Ireland are here for various reasons."

He cited the access to a market of 500 million people, the benefit of the EU single market and added: "they're here to make money".

"They're hard-nosed business people that are in charge of United States companies and their foreign direct investment here and they I think will continue to be here."

Mr Hogan was speaking at a Dublin seminar on the impact of Brexit on the agri-food sector organised by law firm McCann Fitzgerald.

Read More

He also said Ireland must forge alliances on issues like borders and agriculture with other EU member states like Spain the Netherlands, Denmark and France ahead of the Brexit talks.

"These are the type of coalition that will help ultimately at the end of the day to get the right result for Ireland," Mr Hogan said.

In relation to agriculture, he said the industry here needs to diversify its export markets to prepare for Brexit, suggesting the ten countries of the ASEAN group including Indonesia and Thailand as an area of potential.

He praised Agriculture minister Michael Creed for beginning this diversification process with trade missions to North Africa.

Housing Minister Simon Coveney also said there's no need to panic yet.

Companies want to have a foothold in the EU. Ireland will soon be the only English-speaking country in the EU so I wouldnt be panicking about this, he said.

The vast majority of big US multinationals that are in Ireland are here because they like the full proposition that Ireland offers.

Tax is just one of the elements of that. I dont see an exodus of multinationals from Ireland if there is a tax change in the US.

I think this is a lot more than a competitive tax rate. It is a combination of a whole series of things of which tax is only one.

Mr Coveney acknowledged that cities like Cork are understandably watching developments in the US with great interest given the dependence on US firms like Apple, EMC and Pfizer.

Read More

We have a very high number of US companies in Cork and Ireland. It is in the tens of thousands of people who are working for big US multinationals here, he said.

I think those companies are very happy here  and it is very, very rare that you see a company coming to Ireland and then leaving again.

That is because firms come here for lots of reasons. It is not just tax and it is very important to say that.

They get very good, highly skilled people here, we speak English here, it is a very stable country as well as a stable economy so while tax is one of the reasons why companies come here, it is only one of the reasons, he added.
Ireland must "practice what we preach" if we want US President-elect Donald Trump to help the 50,000 undocumented Irish migrants in the USA, the Dail has been told.

Labour leader Brendan Howlin said there are up to 26,000 undocumented migrants in Ireland - up to 6,000 of these are children "living in the shadows". Mr Howlin noted the priority given by the Taoiseach to lobbying for Irish immigrants in the USA in his first response to Mr Trump's election.

But he warned Mr Trump's policy was diametrically opposed to the Irish Government's aims. "He has promised to deport illegal immigrants in the first 100 days - and the clock is ticking," he said.

Replying for the Government, Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald, said the Government remains determined to help find a remedy for undocumented Irish immigrants in the US and the Taoiseach mentioned this to Mr Trump.

Ms Fitzgerald added that she was working with the Migrant Council of Ireland and hoped people could regularise their position.
Senator Aodhan O'Riordain made an impassioned speech to the Seanad on Thursday criticising the Irish government's reaction to Donald Trump being elected as the president of the United States.

During the speech, he said: "America has just elected a fascist and the best thing that the good people in Ireland can do is to ring him up and ask him, is it OK to still bring the shamrock on Saint Patrick's Day?

"I am embarrassed by the reaction of the Irish government to what has happened in America. I can't believe the reaction from An Taoiseach and from the government."

"I don't use the term fascist lightly. What else would you call someone who threatens to imprison his political opponents. What else would you call somebody who threatens to not allow people of a certain political faith into their country. What would you say, or what would you call somebody who was threatening to report 10 million people."

Mr O'Riordain's criticism extended beyond the Taoiseach, adding: "I am appalled that a member of this house - a female member of this house - went on social media to congratulate this man."

Senator O'Riordain went on to praise Germany's response to Trump's election win, also stating that the international community are at a crossroads, asking when the Irish government will have the "moral courage to speak in terms other than economy all the time and realise what is happening."

He finished his speech by requesting the Minister of Foreign Affairs to come into the Seanad and explain "how we are supposed to deal with this monster that has just been elected president of America?"
Ireland will use all its powers of persuasion to defend its interests with the new US President, Donald Trump, and his key officials, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said.

Mr Kenny has welcomed the President-elect's early confirmation that the now traditional St Patrick's Day visit by the Taoiseach to the White House will go ahead next March.

The personal invitation extended by Mr Trump, just hours after his election victory was confirmed, is seen as a sign that Dublin can develop positive relations with the new Washington administration.

The Taoiseach has stressed that lobbying on behalf of the 50,000 undocumented Irish immigrants in the US will remain a key priority. At the same time, Finance Minister Michael Noonan played down reports that one of Mr Trump's advisers predicted "a flood of companies" will leave Ireland to take advantage of the new US corporate tax regime.

Read more: Revealed: Details of Taoiseach's ten minute phone call with Donald Trump

A spokesman for Mr Kenny reiterated this view, he told the Irish Independent: "We are alive to all the challenges we face. The president's early reinforcement of the links with the St Patrick's Day invitation will allow us to defend Ireland's interests in the front line."

During the 10-minute phone call between Mr Trump and the Taoiseach, Mr Kenny congratulated him on his victory and officials said both men committed to working together to the mutual benefit of Ireland and the United States.

Mr Trump said "in the spirit of the strong ties between the two countries", he would continue the tradition of inviting the Taoiseach to the White House for St Patrick's Day. Mr Kenny said he specifically raised the annual St Patrick's Day visits with Mr Trump.

The Taoiseach said: "I had a very good conversation with the President-elect. He understands Ireland very well, he was complimentary about the decisions made about the economy here."

Mr Kenny said Mr Trump was looking forward to doing business with Ireland. The Taoiseach said he cited Irish undocumented migrants and the Northern Ireland peace process among concerns.

"I look forward to continuing that conversation again fairly soon," he said.

Senior economic adviser to Mr Trump, Stephen Moore, told BBC Radio 4 that wooing back multinationals with big business tax cuts was central to job creation plans.

He said business taxes would drop from 35pc to 15-20pc meaning a flood of companies leaving Ireland, Canada, Germany and France and returning to the USA.
Many shoppers are making the trip north in the run-up to Christmas (Stock picture)

Outlets and shops north of the border have experienced a significant double-digit growth in trade since Brexit, Independent.ie has learned.

Growth looks set to continue, with the sterling falling sharp against the euro meaning shoppers can get much better value in the northern aisles.

However, a Chamber of Commerce figure has warned that Border shops could be "decimated" as a result.

Currently, one British pound will get you 1.15 euro.

And with Christmas just around the corner, some outlets, off-licences and shopping centres are stocking up.

Since Brexit, we have seen a significant double-digit growth due to the sudden influx of customers coming up from across the border, says Chris Nelmes, Centre Manager of The OUTLET in Banbridge, Co. Down.

Expand Close Many shoppers are making the trip north in the run-up to Christmas (Stock picture) / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Many shoppers are making the trip north in the run-up to Christmas (Stock picture)

Coming up to Christmas, we are extending our trading hours. For the first time ever, we will be trading every night until 9pm during the Christmas period, Mr Nelmes told Independent.ie.

We have the benefit of being an outlet so prices are reduced, plus we are getting the euro advantage on top of that, so it is a double whammy for the outlet in terms of value for money.

Along with outlets, off-licences are too increasing their stock as people travel north to avail of the cheaper alcohol prices.

Read More

Oh yeah, were certainly stocking up in massive quantities, Siofra Hannaway, manager of First and Last off-licence in Newry told Independent.ie.

Weve seen it busy in previous years, but compared to last year it is a lot busier. At Christmas time there are a lot of offers too, so people are buying more brands, such as Powers, Absolut, Hennessy and Jameson.

A box of 20 Coors Light 330cl beers costs 24 in Tesco in the Republic, but 13 (14.50) in a Tesco up the north.

However, some shoppers argue that its not as cost-saving as some people think.

Its not worth it just for a bit of drink. Again you pay for fuel, two tolls and then what you would spend up there on top of it, one woman told Independent.ie.

For parents, it may be worth the trip for the Christmas toy run.

A Lego City Volcano Exploration base set will cost you 75 from a Smyths store in Dublin, but 55 (61) from Smyths in Newry - a 14 saving.

You can get a Paw Patrol bike for 87.99 in Smyths in Dublin, and 71.99 (82) from Smyths in Newry  a 6 saving.

Traffic

Road traffic data has shown a "surge" in Saturday morning shoppers travelling to Northern Ireland from the Republic since the Brexit vote, BBC reports.

The data shows that south-to-north traffic flows from 10am-11am on Saturday mornings are up from 3pc year-on-year before the vote, to 29pc year-on-year afterwards.

Ireland's National Roads Authority reported the largest increase in the opposite direction to be between 6pm-7pm on a Sunday.

Meanwhile, Brexit has also had a positive impact on the hotel industry in Belfast, which has seen a steady increase in tourists visiting for weekends away.

Brexits impact on the devaluation of the pound has definitely acted as a catalyst for our positive growth, but we also believe the influx has started due to the recent recognition of Belfast as a great destination, says James Sinton, Financial Director of Beannchor.

Beannchor operates two city centre hotels in Belfast, the newly developed Bullitt and the Merchant Hotel.

In terms of occupancy, we are hitting the 90pc mark, Mr Sinton told Independent.ie.

'Decimated'

In the Republic, a leading figure in the Dundalk Chamber of Commerce, said retailers in Border areas will be "decimated" if sterling weakens further.

Paddy Malone, chamber PRO, told TDs and Senators that the Government needs to consider measures to help firms operating in the area. He said more than 40pc of commercial rates in the Dundalk area haven't been collected "for years".

"The retail sector will be decimated if sterling drops. If sterling goes to 92p or 93p [against the euro] it will be decimated. We've faced this problem before. We will face it again. But this one is different," he said.

Ibec's Arnold Dillion said the Brexit vote has put jobs at risk.

John McGrane of the British Irish Chamber of Commerce said the speed of the decline in sterling has presented significant challenges.
A selection of four properties currently on the market and for sale around the university town of Maynooth.

Oak View, School Rd, R'coffey

635k Charters Estate Agents (01) 651 7000

Expand Close Oak View / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Oak View

As the address suggests, Oak View is less than five minutes' walk from Rathcoffey National School, and the village itself is about eight kilometres south-west of Maynooth. From the front it may look like a modest bungalow but Oak View is concealing most of its goodies from the road. It has a floor area of 4,500 sq ft in an L-shape. It has five bedrooms, two with walk-in wardrobes. There's also a living room, dining room, play room, games room and office. It's on two acres with a lawn and patio and a 500 sq ft outbuilding.

Elmwood, Leinster Park

645k Property Partners Brady (01) 651 0000

Expand Close Elmwood / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Elmwood

It should be relatively cheap to heat the 2,142 sq ft of space inside Elmwood, as it has a B3 energy rating thanks to solar panels and a heat recovery system. It's a three- or four-bedroom house, depending on whether or not you need a study, and one bedroom is en-suite. It also has an L-shaped sitting room with French doors, a dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows, and an eat-in kitchen with a centre island. Leinster Park is a cul-de-sac estate off the Dublin Road, about 250 metres from Maynooth's Main Street.

Clonfert North, Maynooth

690k REA Coonan (01) 628 6128

Expand Close Clonfert North / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Clonfert North

Animal-lovers would want for nothing at this red-brick dormer bungalow in the townland of Clonfert. There's an equestrian centre five minutes' walk away to the north and a pet farm 10 minutes' walk away to the southwest. It's on three-quarters of an acre, so there's space for a peacock or two. Built in 2011, the property has a floor area of 3,974 sq ft, with six bedrooms, three en-suites. By way of living rooms, there's a bay-windowed sitting room, a dining room with sliding patio doors, an office, playroom, plus the kitchen.

The Old Rectory, Parson Street

1.25m Sherry FitzGerald Country Homes (01) 237 6300

Expand Close The Old Rectory / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp The Old Rectory

The rector of Maynooth was a lucky man. Not only did he get a beautiful Georgian mansion on its own grounds in the heart of town, he also had a whole street named in his honour. According to the NIAH, the rectory was built in 1726 and later extended. It's on an acre of grounds close to the university and railway station. It's 5,145 sq ft in size on two storeys and a raised basement, and it has six bedrooms along with a drawing room, dining room, office and TV room. The kitchen is in the basement and has an Aga.
Last Saturday morning, 15 very eager, prospective buyers queued up outside Stonebridge from 3am in the hope of landing a home for 278,000 at the launch of the Ratoath development. After the first 16 homes at Stonebridge were booked up, the selling agent released a further six in a bid to meet demand.

While there are still some units up for grabs in the Meath development, interest in the properties is strong amongst first-time buyers buoyed by the tax rebate unveiled in last month's Budget and priced out of the Dublin market.

The scheme in the village is currently made up of three and four-bed semi-detached dwellings. There will be 66 homes there in all when the development is finished. Completions for the initial phase are scheduled from early next year.

Prices for the 1,157 sq ft three-beds from the B/B1 house type start at 278,000, while the 1,469 sq ft four-bed version, from the C house style, is priced from 340,000.

The scheme is being built by Kingscroft Developments, which has developed residential estates in the greater Dublin area, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow. It recently finished The Starlings in Shankill and The Paddocks in Lucan.

Interior features included as standard at Stonebridge are contemporary-style custom-fitted kitchens, fitted bedroom wardrobes along with sanitary ware and coordinated wall tiling in the main bathroom, ensuites and downstairs WC.

The properties have an A3 BER courtesy of a high-efficiency gas condensing boiler for the central heating system that can be controlled from three different zones, as well as solar panels on the roof and PV panels that generate free electricity.

For buyers working in Dublin, a 17-mile journey, there are regular bus services from Ratoath.

Enquiries to: Knight Frank New Homes (01) 6342466
Russian banks hit by cyber-attack





Five Russian banks have been under intermittent cyber-attack for two days, said the country's banking regulator.



The state-owned Sberbank was one target of the prolonged attacks, it said.



Hackers sought to overwhelm the websites of the banks by deluging them with data in what is known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.



Security firm Kaspersky said the attacks were among the largest it had seen aimed at Russian banks.

Da Doo Ron Ron, yea Da Doo Ron Ron....More: Russian banks hit by cyber-attack - BBC News
'Little ideas well worked bring fortunes," said the inventor Alfred Dunhill. He was right. Those in possession of a Dunhill Aquarium table lighter may well have a small inflammable fortune on the desk in front of them.

This October, a rare Dunhill Aquarium table lighter sold on eBay for 7,100 (7,870). Bidding had started two weeks previously at 1,000 (1,110). Part of the value of the piece was that it showed a scene with the RMS Queen Mary, the flagship of the Cunard Line (1936 to 1946). It was a high price, but not unprecedented. In April 2016, a Dunhill Aquarium table lighter, showing a salmon on one side and a fisherman on the other, sold for 10,000 (11,079) at Bonham's. Another, less rare, example fetched 1,625 (1,800) in the same auction.

One of the attractions of lighters is they're really cool gadgets. In August 2011, Stephen Fry placed the lighter number one on his list of 100 Greatest Gadgets, describing it as "fire with a flick of the fingers". There's also a subversive thrill in enjoying vintage smoking accessories, collectively known as "tobacciana". They date from a time when smoking was deemed a socially acceptable, even a healthy, habit.

The first lighters were converted from flintlock pistols and used gunpowder. In 1816, a German chemist called Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner invented a lighter that became known as 'Dobereiner's lamp'. The chemistry was complex, but it involved sulphuric acid, platinum and the highly explosive gas, hydrogen. Astonishingly, the lethal contraption became a household object and was used to light fires in middle-class English and German homes.

In 1829, a Berlin manufacturer described it as "a pleasant and useful Christmas present, a lighting machine outfitted with platinum, elegant, clean, and sturdily constructed, with Chinese and other decoration, insensitive to wetness and cold".

The advertisement didn't mention the fact that it could blow your house to smithereens. Dobereiner's lamps occasionally turn up at auction, usually in Germany, with estimates between 4,000 and 6,000. By the early 20th century, Dobereiner's lamp had been eclipsed by the safety match and other, less combustible, sources of flame. The modern lighter was born of the patenting of ferrocerium (a man-made material that produces hot sparks when scraped) in 1903. Based on this technology, an American company called Ronson produced a series of early lighters that culminated in the Ronson De-Light Lighter, which could be ignited with one hand. "A flip - and it's lit! Release - and it's out," the advertising slogan proclaimed.

In the early 1930s, Ronson's Art Metal Works produced many decorative table lighters. Some mimicked Georgian antiques, others resembled Art Deco buildings and others showed a seemingly random synthesis of modern and historic styles. For middle-class households, table-top lighters were aspirational objects and they had to match the furniture. A 1957 advertisement boasts that: "Only Ronson has a lighter for every room, every decor."

The archaic lighters, which often outlived their owners, are now highly collectible. So too are all species of early Zippo, which first saw the light of day in 1932.

Irish homes were much more likely to have an English-made Dunhill lighter than an American model. Alfred Dunhill inherited his father's saddlery business in 1893 and decided that automobiles were a better bet. He founded Dunhill Motorities, a shop that sold motoring accessories and promoted its wares under the slogan: "Everything but the motor." He even designed a "shield pipe" so people could smoke when they were driving.

Dunhill was a restless entrepreneur and a committed pipe smoker. In 1907, he opened a shop that offered personalised tobacco blends for individual customers. By 1924, the company had expanded and was producing patented lighters of Dunhill's own invention. Dunhill table lighters have a sense of playfulness that sets them apart.

The Dunhill Duelling Pistol Lighter (c1929) is made in the shape of an 18th century pistol (referencing the origins of early lighters). Dunhill Aladdin's Lamp (1952) looks just like a Roman lamp. But the most engaging of all table-top lighters are Dunhill Aquariums. Large enough to sit on a table-top, small enough to fit in a pocket, they look like mini aquariums with tiny painted fish swimming within a clear plastic case.

The fish, reeds and aquatic backgrounds are meticulously observed and delicately painted, and the depth of the clear Lucite that surrounds them gives the tableaux the illusion of movement. Some show seawater fish and some show freshwater, but never both.

The lighters are one-off items, each one was individually designed, etched on to the reverse of the Lucite panel and then painted by hand. All Dunhill Aquarium lighters were designed and made by an artist called Ben Shillingford between the early 1950s to the late 1960s. When Shillingford retired, the company couldn't find anyone else with the particular blend of imagination and skill to take over his job. No more Aquarium lighters were made.

The technological aspect of the lighters is relatively standard. The lighting mechanism at the top is robustly metallic, as is the base (this was where you put in the petrol that fuelled the lighters). They come in three metal finishes, silver-plated, gold-plated or chromium-plated, and two sizes: half giant (10cm long) and the slightly smaller, and rarer, service size (6cm long).

The Queen Mary Aquarium lighter that sold so well on eBay last month was one of a very small number, known as "non-aquatic aquariums", that show scenes of hunting, horse-racing, birds, or boats. Shillingford even made one showing the record-breaking racing car, the Bluebird-Proteus CN7, speeding along the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The reverse shows the home run.

A Dunhill Aquarium table lighter will be offered in Whyte's December 10 Christmas Auction, estimate 3,000-5,000.

See whytes.ie.

In the salerooms

O'REILLY'S

The next auction of Fine Jewellery, Watches and Silver takes place at O'Reilly's Fine Art, Francis Street, on Wednesday at 1pm. In the Christmas present price-bracket, there are a number of attractive antique pieces set with semi-precious stones, such as a simple blue zircon and diamond ring (est 200 to 250).

Over-the-top Victoriana includes a brooch-cum-pendant set with pearls and turquoises around a central garnet with a diamond in the middle of it - totally unrestrained and great fun (est 350 to 450). Another, more reserved, rectangular Victorian brooch is set with pearls and diamonds. A delicate aquamarine and diamond suspended necklace shows lovely craftsmanship (est 1,400 to 1,600), as does an 18ct gold bangle set with diamonds (est 1,200 to 1,500). In the investment price-bracket, an antique diamond ring with three old cut diamonds is estimated to sell between 34,000 and 40,000.

For full details and viewing times, see oreillysfineart.com.

ANTIQUES AND COLLECTORS FAIRS

As the run-up to Christmas gathers pace, the National Antiques, Art & Vintage Fair will take place at the South Court Hotel, Limerick, on Saturday and Sunday.

This is a very large fair and exhibitors include many accredited members of the IADA. Expect 18th and 19th century furniture from Roger Grimes and Martin Maguire; Greene's Antique Galleries, Drogheda and Donegal Antiques; fine art from George Stacpoole and Treasures Irish Art Athlone; books from Vanessa Parker; and jewellery from JW Weldon and Marie Curran. See hibernianantiquefairs.com.

This Sunday, there will be an Antiques & Vintage Fair at Clontarf Castle Hotel from 11am to 6pm. For more information, see vintageireland.eu or call 087 2670607.

WHYTE'S

Expand Close Basil Blackshaw painting / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Basil Blackshaw painting

The surprise of Whyte's online auction of affordable art must surely have been a small untitled oil on paper (above) by Basil Blackshaw. The painting, which shows a rough but dynamic depiction of a flower in a pot against a blue background, was estimated to sell for between 300 and 500. It sold for 2,600.

The rise in Blackshaw's prices is almost certainly linked to the death of the artist earlier in the year.

Harry Kernoff's stylised but insightful 'Self Portrait' (1936) slightly exceeded its upper estimate and sold for 2,100. 'The Harvest', by the British artist Thomas Saunders Nash (1891-1968), realised 1,900. The painting came from the collection of George & Maura McClelland and shows a crowded but neatly-composed pastoral scene with villagers carrying baskets of harvested produce under the direction of village elders.

The next auction of Important Irish Art at Whyte's takes place on November 28. See whytes.ie.
Screen grab taken from PA Video of a sign on the Punta Ballena strip in Magaluf, Spain, as the town saw tough new rules cracking down on drunkenness come into force at midnight on June 15 - but the resort still witnessed the debauched scenes that have made it infamous. PA Video/PA Wire

So long, 'Shagaluf'? Majorca's infamous resort has changed utterly in just a year, its authorities have claimed.

Magaluf, the Spanish resort known best for the debauchery and alcohol-fuelled antics that gave rise to its rude moniker, Shagaluf, has transformed itself into a family-friendly up-market resort, just one year into a five year regeneration plan.

This is the claim made by the triumvirate of organisations - the police, the town hall and the resorts hotel association - behind the project to shed the Majorcan town of its lewd and loutish party reputation so that it can attract more families with young children, adult couples and activity-keen travellers.

A crackdown on bad behaviour was first launched in 2015, in part a response to a film of an 18-year-old woman performing sex acts on 24 men during a pub crawl on the Punta Ballena strip that went viral.

Fines of up to 3,000 were introduced for those caught drinking, urinating or stripping off in the street, as well as new laws against balconing (the craze of jumping from hotel balconies), and limits on the numbers of bar crawls and the way they are run.

The rules have been added to an ambitious five-year plan to revamp the resort and its image, with an increase in the number of four-star hotels and as much as 240 million of investment.

Expand Close Punta Ballena, Magaluf, in 2014. Photo: JAIME REINA/AFP/Getty Images / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Punta Ballena, Magaluf, in 2014. Photo: JAIME REINA/AFP/Getty Images

All companies, big, medium and small are extremely happy with the changes that have occurred, a spokesperson behind the regeneration said.

Companies established in Magaluf a long time ago believed in the destinations potential and its capacity to evolve and become a leading tourism spot again. The launch of new hotels, infrastructures and leisure facilities have positively surprised managers at how fast the transformation in clientele has been achieved.

The group says that the number of families in the resort, which sits on the south-west coast of the Balearic Island, has risen, as has the number of couples, while young travellers has fallen by 9pc compared to 2016.

In 2015 the authorities opted for an educational approach towards misdemeanours, only using fines as a last resort.

However, this summer they took a hard line, issuing 114 fines to tourists for non-civic behaviour, and penalising 12 businesses for allowing it.

The resorts end of season statistics also showed that there were fewer accidents this year, with four tourists injured and two deaths recorded as suicide. A total of 197 tourists, up 70 per cent on 2015, were removed from hotels and asked to leave.

Expand Close Punta Ballena, Magaluf in 2014. Photo: JAIME REINA/AFP/Getty Images / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Punta Ballena, Magaluf in 2014. Photo: JAIME REINA/AFP/Getty Images

Last year the mayor of Calvia, the municipality which covers Magaluf, said that a years crackdown - which included the posting of British police to the resort - had been an unexpected success.

People are quite surprised that it worked so fast, he said. We have improved the experience for tourists and we are now no longer in the news for bad coverage. There has been a major decrease in infractions, arrests, balconing and all kinds of illegal or anti-social behaviour.

Travel writer Anna Nicholas visited this summer.

I think it's going to be a long process to really bring about changes and the likes of Melia [one of the hotel groups involved in the project] has been very brave in sticking its neck out to make the first move to a more up-market and less tacky resort, she said.

Expand Close Screen grab taken from PA Video of a sign on the Punta Ballena strip in Magaluf, Spain, as the town saw tough new rules cracking down on drunkenness come into force at midnight on June 15 - but the resort still witnessed the debauched scenes that have made it infamous. PA Video/PA Wire / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Screen grab taken from PA Video of a sign on the Punta Ballena strip in Magaluf, Spain, as the town saw tough new rules cracking down on drunkenness come into force at midnight on June 15 - but the resort still witnessed the debauched scenes that have made it infamous. PA Video/PA Wire

However, Nicholas added that her 20-year-old son and friends had recognised that Magaluf was changing and were considering elsewhere for their summer holidays.

He is not alone in noticing a change.

A spokesperson for Thomas Cook, which offers a number of hotels in the resort, said that the tour operator was seeing a move away from the traditional Magaluf.

Weve certainly seen a rise in demand for higher quality hotels which cater for a different kind of young traveller, the spokesperson said.

Magalufs night-time scene remains very popular but were catering for more people who also want to explore and take advantage of everything Majorca has to offer.

Of opponents to the regeneration, the spokesperson for the hotel association, Calvia Town Hall and Balearic Islands Civil Guard said:

Business centred on the night-life culture were initially hesitant to the project, however they are now fully on-board as they understand and can see the future of Magaluf.

Read more:

Read More

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Premium

John Downing Opinion New British prime minister Rishi Sunaks succession proves an important milestone in British political inclusivity

There is an old saying in British politics that goes: The right looks for converts while the left seeks out traitors. It comes to mind when one reflects upon the election of Rishi Sunak as the UKs first non-white prime minister in a party traditionally seen as most opposed to mass immigration and the dilution of national identity via multiculturalism.
After criss-crossing the country making urgent last claims to the White House, Donald Trump has made it. But there is nothing in his demeanour to suggest a president-in-waiting.

His shortcomings as president-elect appear particularly glaring on foreign policy, where his priorities can be summed up on the back of an envelope: bring Mr Putin in, keep the Mexicans out and make other countries pay a proper price for US protection.

And it is in foreign affairs policy that the contrast with Hillary Clinton is at its most stark. Mr Trump can easily be dismissed as an ignoramus, and/or a danger to US power. This, though, is to underestimate two realities: the first relates to Mr Trump's view of the world, the second to how the United States actually works.

On Mr Trump himself: it is quite simply wrong to argue that he has no coherent world view. Those of us who regard ourselves as liberal Europeans, or US Democrats, or even middle-of-the road Republicans may not like it, but it fits into a strand of foreign policy that has existed in the United States for a very long time.

It is isolationist, in wanting no part in foreign wars that have no direct impact on US national security. It is protectionist, in the sense of wanting to protect American workers against "unfair" competition. It is more legalistic than outright xenophobic.

It is realistic rather than ideological - hence the idea that a strong US leader should be able to do business with Mr Putin (and others).

What must also be recognised is that, while all these elements, individually and cumulatively, may reflect Mr Trump's business-eye view of the world, they also appeal to many Americans.

In today's US, that would include especially those towards the bottom of the economic pile.

Nor should Trump be dismissed too readily as a foreign policy buffoon. He may not know anything like as much as Mrs Clinton, but, as a much-travelled businessman now married to his second Slavonic wife, he may well know other things that are not without relevance - about reading people's intentions, say, about concluding agreements and about national difference and affinity.

Which brings us to the second reality: how the US system actually works.

It is true that a US president has more authority in foreign policy than in the domestic domain. But this does not mean Mr Trump can simply march into the White House, invite Mr Putin over for a chat, dispatch the army to build his wall with Mexico and start renegotiating terms with Nato and other allies.

There is a two-month transition period for the appointment of an administration and advisers. US presidents have more freedom here than their European counterparts, because senior posts in the equivalent of the Civil Service traditionally go to political appointees.

But Mr Trump finds himself with many jobs to fill, and could well have a hard time finding like-minded people to fill them. Quite a few senior figures who might have hoped for foreign policy positions in a Republican administration have already ruled themselves out.

Whether they would be so principled if asked "to serve" is another matter, but Mr Trump cannot expect a cabinet of "yes-people". He will surely know that some of the least-qualified foreign policy presidents - Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan - were also the most discriminating in seeking advice and judged by history to be among the most successful.

But even if Mr Trump does manage to cobble together a distinctly Trumpist administration, he would still have congress to reckon with. Regardless of its exact composition, congress has been notably hostile to Russia and China. It has been split on the benefits of free trade and migration, and it could in future expect the final say in interventions overseas.

Two specific pledges - abrogating the nuclear treaty with Iran and that wall with Mexico - could also be given a rough ride. The Iran treaty has plenty of opponents among Republicans, but probably not enough to be overturned, while the Mexico wall could run up against states' rights.

If the US system of checks and balances offers safeguards against the wilder excesses of Trumpism in power, it is also worth bearing in mind something else. Mr Trump has campaigned not as an iconoclast, but as an American.

The institution of the presidency comes with an aura of seriousness and responsibility that even Mr Trump is likely to accept. Once he takes the oath it is the national interest he will have sworn to serve, and - strange though it might seem - in foreign policy there could be more continuity with the Obama years than change.
Idris Elba will appear in the collection of five-minute long shorts entitled Five by Five

Idris Elba is joining forces with up and coming actors and writers for a new series of five short films for BBC Three, which will highlight issues surrounding identity.

The Luther actor will appear in the collection of five-minute long shorts entitled Five by Five - a joint effort by his production company Green Door Pictures and BBC Studios.

Elba will star alongside leading cast members Georgina Campbell, Michael Ajao, Ben Tavassoli, Ruth Madeley and Sope Dirisu in the London-based films.

Each standalone piece will focus on chance encounters people face, questioning identity and looking to change perception.

The films have been written by Cat Jones, who penned BBC iPlayer short drama Flea, and new writers Lee Coan, Namsi Khan, Selina Lim and Nathaniel Price.

Elba described the scripts for the individual pieces as "uplifting and incredible" and praised the "talented" writers for their contribution.

He said: "With this group of young actors now attached to star, BBC Three viewers are in for an absolute blast. I couldn't be prouder of what they have achieved."

Damien Kavanagh, Controller of BBC Three, said: "This BBC Three collaboration with Idris and Green Door gives opportunities to some of the best and brightest new talent to work with some of the biggest and most established talent around.

"It's a win win for everyone involved and I'm delighted BBC Three can be part of something like this."

In February this year, BBC Three became the first TV channel to switch to online, in a move that director general of the BBC Tony Hall called "risky" but innovative.

Video of the Day

The channel aims to entertain and educate viewers in a 16-34 age bracket with original and contemporary British comedy and drama programmes, as well as provocative and informative documentaries focusing on current affairs.
Andrew Lloyd Webber said he had asked Donald Trump not to use his music

Andrew Lloyd Webber has said he "persuaded" US President-elect Donald Trump not to attend the opening night of his Broadway musical, School Of Rock, so that he "didn't upstage the children".

The theatre boss and composer said he found what Mr Trump had been saying at his election rallies "shocking" and that he had, along with a host of other British composers, requested that he should "not use our music".

Lord Lloyd-Webber appeared on The Graham Norton Show to talk about his latest musical success, School Of Rock.

Next year a host of his shows - Cats, Phantom Of The Opera, Sunset Boulevard and School Of Rock - will all appear on Broadway at the same time.

He told Graham Norton: "If you've been in New York and vaguely in the New York scene, it's quite hard not to know him (Donald Trump), he's been around quite a long time.

"He wanted to come to the opening of School of Rock and I managed to persuade him not to come so he didn't upstage the children."

The musical debuted on Broadway at the end of last year and is an adaptation of the Jack Black movie of the same name. The show tells the story of an aspiring rock star-turned-teacher who forms a band with his class.

The West End veteran said he was not a fan of Mr Trump's, but added "we might just be all right" if the president-elect "surrounds himself with good people".

He said: " I think what he has been saying and doing at the rallies has been shocking, and along with a lot of other Brit composers, asked him not to use our music. But there's not a lot you can do.

"I don't think he is an idiot and if he surrounds himself with good people we might just be all right. I think we've all got our fingers crossed."

Video of the Day

Lord Lloyd-Webber praised the talented children who star in School of Rock, telling Norton: "Music liberates and empowers children. Teaching arts in school has never been so important."

He appeared on the show alongside Coldplay's Chris Martin, Gone Girl actress Rosamund Pike and comedian Michael McIntyre.

:: The Graham Norton Show airs on BBC One tonight at 10.35pm.
The government announced on Tuesday what it called a strike against those who keep unaccounted-for cash in India Reuters

Banks reopened to long lines and angry customers throughout India on Thursday after the governments surprise move to devalue high-denomination currency in an effort to fight corruption and so-called black money.

On Tuesday the government announced what it called a strike against those who keep unaccounted-for cash in India, where many jobs remain in the informal sector and few pay taxes. The countrys reserve bank temporarily shuttered banks and ATMs and voided its large bank notes, issuing a 2,000-rupee note (about 27.50) as the largest bill today.

Panicked customers lined up at banks to exchange and deposit old notes  sometimes standing in line for hours. Fistfights broken out at petrol pumps when clerks ran out of change; at toll booths operators simply gave up charging and let cars stream through.

Gold and silver prices soared as investors sought to move their money into tangible assets  partly a response to the currency switch as well as a reaction to global uncertainty following the US presidential election.

Indeed, some of those lined up at banks praised the government's move, exhibiting the same populist, anti-elite fervor that drove voters to Donald Trump and Brexit.

I'm happy about it. The country's rot is at its roots. Now the roots are going to be treated, said Kalindi Jagdish, 63, an interior designer who designs homes for Mumbai's wealthy and is often paid in cash.

India's Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, called for calm at a news conference today, reminding consumers they had until 30 December to change their legitimate bills into new currency. The move brings ethics and transparency and is a decisive move toward a cashless society, he said.

Experts predicted the worst-hit would be wealthy professionals in real estate, doctors and lawyers who are often paid in cash to avoid taxes and stash their money in overseas accounts. Only those with large sums of money will have to face the consequences under existing laws, Mr Jaitley said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long made fighting black money a priority  as the country moves to legitimize its shadow economy, change an age-old culture of corruption and bribes and attract foreign investment. A voluntary disclosure program has netted $19 billion so far, a fraction of estimates of the total, which range from $400bn to over $1 trillion.

Dinesh Rana was driving around Delhi on Thursday with a sack full of his boss's money, depositing 49,000 rupees (about $735) in separate accounts at five different banks. Anything over 50,000 rupees would have garnered official scrutiny.

Rich people are worried, he said. They are trying to get rid of cash or spread it around.

Some economists questioned whether the government's move would be effective in the long run.

Neeraj Hatekar, the director of the economics department at the University of Mumbai, said that the demonetization program will be an effective tool in ridding the system of counterfeit bills - some $20m alone was seized last year in his state, he said.

But it would likely not have much impact on India's black market economy overall  as much illegitimate funds are in real estate or gold.

Will it shut off new black money that's being created? It won't, said Rama Bijapurkar, a market strategist and consumer expert in Mumbai. But as a one-time shut-off it's a masterstroke.

The impact on regular folk was immediate and widespread. Rural villages whose economies are almost entirely cash-based ground to a halt as villagers scrounged for coins to pay for eggs and their daily vegetables.

Wives who secretly squirreled away hundreds in kitchen kitties - away from the control of domineering husbands  suddenly had to admit their secret stash or ponder opening their own bank account. Modi's government has made a major push to provide bank accounts to those who previously did not have them, but still 233 million remain unbanked, Bijapurkar said.

Dashrat Kumar Pal, 40, a steel company clerk and a Delhi resident, said that the lavish wedding party for his niece had been postponed in lieu of a small religious ceremony because the family did not have enough cash to pay the vendors.

The big party we had planned is called off, he said glumly. The cooks, the music band, the florist  all of them want to be paid in cash. Where do we go? What do we do?

He went on, Now we are calling everybody and canceling.

The governments move was a boon to India's growing online payment industry, which has long operated on a cash-on-delivery model designed to address low credit card use.

After the government's announcement, downloads of digital payment apps have soared.

Paytm, an online payment system, saw a 200 per cent increase in application downloads and 1,000 per cent growth in the amount of money flowing to digital wallets since Tuesday evening, according to Madhur Deora, the chief financial officer.

The government's decision will structurally change the digital payment behavior of Indians, said Rajnish Wahi, senior vice president for corporate affairs at Snapdeal, one of the major online retailers.

Suchi Goenka, a restaurateur in Mumbai, said that while she supported the government's plan, it will take time for the country to make the change.

In India we prefer cash, she said. We were brought up that way.
Turkish authorities have detained the chairman of the left-leaning and pro-secular opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet.

It comes a week after several senior staff members were arrested for allegedly supporting terrorist organisations.

Police detained Akin Atalay when his flight from Berlin arrived at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport, the state-run Anadolu agency reported.

Mr Atalay had a standing detention order issued along with other senior staff for allegedly supporting Kurdish militants as well as a movement led by Fethullah Gulen, the US-based Muslim cleric whom Turkey accuses of masterminding the failed coup in July.

Editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu, cartoonist Musa Kart and other staff were detained on October 31 and later put under arrest pending trial.

Atalay's wife, who was with her husband on the flight, told reporters at the airport that his arrest appeared to be a move that would pave the way for the appointment of a government trustee to oversee the newspaper.

"This isn't an action taken against the individuals. We think this action was taken so a trustee can be appointed to Cumhuriyet," Adalet Atalay said.

Cumhuriyet lawyer Bahri Belen said they were likely going to put Akin Atalay formally under arrest like his colleagues.

"We have been saying since the beginning that what was done against Cumhuriyet is a political operation, not a legal one. There is no legal basis behind the reasons given for our friends under arrest," he added.

Turkey has come under intense criticism from opposition groups and its allies over its crackdown on dissenting voices during the state of emergency declared after the coup.

Critics note that the purge, initially meant to eliminate the Gulen network, has since extended to other opponents of the government including pro-Kurdish and left-wing individuals.

Close to 37,000 people have been arrested, more than 100,000 people dismissed or suspended from government jobs, and 170 media outlets and scores of businesses and associations have been shut down over alleged ties to terrorist organisations.

On Friday, the Interior Ministry announced that another 370 associations had been closed for alleged terrorism links.

In a statement on its website, the ministry said 153 of the organisations had alleged ties to the Gulen network, 190 to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, eight to the Islamic State group and 19 to the banned far-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Army-Front, or DHKP-C.

AP
A woman has been charged with assisting an offender after an inmate who escaped from Pentonville prison was recaptured.

Kelly Baker, 21, of Ilford, east London, will appear at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court on Friday.

She was arrested on Wednesday night as Matthew Baker, 28, was apprehended after three days on the run.

He escaped from the north London jail alongside James Whitlock, 31, who is still being sought by police.

A 33-year-old man who was also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender has been released on bail.

Scotland Yard added that on Thursday officers arrested a second woman, aged 24, at an address in Bow, east London, on suspicion of assisting an offender.

She is currently in custody at an east London police station.

Scotland Yard launched a manhunt for Matthew Baker and Whitlock after their escape was discovered shortly before midday on Monday.

According to reports the cellmates' beds had been stuffed with pillows to make them look as though they were sleeping.

The pair are said to have used diamond-tipped cutting equipment to cut through bars before scaling a perimeter wall to freedom.

Baker was found guilty of attempted murder in October after stabbing a man during a dispute and was due to be sentenced on Friday.

Whitlock was on remand having been charged with conspiracy to burgle over 19 alleged ATM thefts.

Scotland Yard launched a manhunt for Matthew Baker and Whitlock after their escape was discovered shortly before midday on Monday.

According to reports the cellmates' beds had been stuffed with pillows to make them look as though they were sleeping.

The pair are said to have used diamond-tipped cutting equipment to cut through bars before scaling a perimeter wall to freedom.

Baker was found guilty of attempted murder in October after stabbing a man during a dispute and was due to be sentenced on Friday.

Whitlock was on remand having been charged with conspiracy to burgle over 19 alleged ATM thefts.
FOCUS ON DEFENSE CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND OCEANIA
Sources from the Popular Party say the proposal is merely an idea at this stage. Stock photo

Spain's ruling Popular Party (PP) has presented a reform proposal to Congress that could result in the banning of memes, social network users' way of gaining comic revenge on the politicians that rule our lives.

The reform wishes to curb the "spreading of images that infringe the honour of a person", making special mention of the fact that Spain's 1982 law covering this area is outdated due to the subsequent appearance of the internet.

"We are worried about this reform because internet does not require special laws; the same rights and duties should exist online as offline," Spain's platform for the defence of freedom of information said.

The PDLI's legal director, Carlos Sanchez Almeida, said: "If the plan is to clamp down on any publication of images without consent of the individual, the popular activity of using memes to generate political or social criticism would become dangerous."

Sources from the PP have said that the proposal is merely an idea at this stage.
Undated handout photo issued by Lincolnshire Police of the murder weapon as a 15-year-old girl has been found guilty at Nottingham Crown Court of murdering Elizabeth Edwards and her 13 year old daughter Katie. Lincolnshire Police/PA Wire

Tributes left outside a house in Spalding, Lincolnshire, where the bodies of 49-year-old Elizabeth Edwards and 13-year-old Katie were found, as a 15-year-old girl has been found guilty at Nottingham Crown Court of murdering Elizabeth and Katie, who were smothered and stabbed through the throat. Chris Radburn/PA Wire

Scene outside a house in Spalding, Lincolnshire, where the bodies of 49-year-old Elizabeth Edwards and 13-year-old Katie were found, as a 15-year-old girl has been found guilty at Nottingham Crown Court of murdering Elizabeth and Katie, who were smothered and stabbed through the throat. Chris Radburn/PA Wire

A teenage couple believed to be Britain's youngest double-murderers have been detained for at least 20 years for the brutal "executions" of a mother and her daughter.

The boy and girl - both 14 at the time of the murders - had sex, shared a bath and watched four Twilight vampire films as they "revelled" after the stabbing of dinner lady Elizabeth Edwards (49) and 13-year-old Katie Edwards.

Both killers stared straight ahead as they were handed life sentences by Mr Justice Haddon-Cave, who said the pair had a "toxic" relationship.

The male defendant, wearing a dark blue jumper and dark trousers, slouched in his seat in the dock as he was sentenced, briefly pursing his lip and glancing towards a security guard. The court was told the boy, who admitted murder, used a kitchen knife to stab both victims in the neck after attacking them as they slept at their home in Spalding, Lincolnshire, in April.

His girlfriend, who helped to plan the "cold, calculated and callous" killings, denied murder, claiming to be suffering an abnormality of mental function which impaired her ability to form rational judgments, but was found guilty after a five-day trial.

Sentencing the pair, who are both now 15 and cannot be named for legal reasons, Mr Justice Haddon-Cave told Nottingham Crown Court: "This case is, in many respects, without parallel. The killings were brutal in the form of executions and both victims, particularly Elizabeth Edwards, must have suffered terribly in the last minutes of their lives.

"You were in it together from the beginning, you conceived of the killings together and planned it together.

"Both of you are perfectly intelligent and knew exactly what you were doing - either of you could have backed out at any time but you were selfishly determined to do it together.

"You then revelled in what you achieved. I see no reason to distinguish between you in any way."

Elizabeth Edwards' partner attende the hearing, along with Katie's father.

Heartbreak

In a victim impact statement read to the court, Ms Edwards' eldest daughter Mary Cottingham, who was not present in court, spoke of her heartbreak.

"I have been thrust into the biggest nightmare of my life.

To be told that my mum and sister had died was bad enough but to find they had been the victims of a murder is just unbelievable," she said.

Addressing the couple, the judge said: "There was remarkable premeditation and planning - it was, on any view, substantial, meticulous and repeated."

The judge stressed that neither teenager will be freed until they have served their minimum term.

Offering mitigation before sentencing, defence QC Simon Myerson, representing the boy, said: "The reason that these offences were committed was, as far as anyone can ascertain, because the two children became trapped in a fantasy of their own devising."

Andrew Stubbs QC, representing the girl, said the couple were "almost playing chicken" as they spurred each other on.

Speaking outside court, Karen Thompson, deputy chief crown prosecutor at CPS East Midlands, said: "This is one of the most distressing and disturbing cases that I have ever encountered."

"The planning that went into the brutal murders of Elizabeth and Katie as they slept in their beds was cold, ruthless and chilling, as was the lack of remorse shown by the two juveniles afterwards," Detective Chief Inspector Martin Holvey said.
President-elect Donald Trump has not minced words about his approach to environment and energy policy.

He loathes regulation and wants to increase the use of coal, offshore drilling and fracking.

Mr Trump has said he believes climate change is a hoax and that he would "cancel" US involvement in the landmark Paris Agreement on global warming.

While he has been vague about precise policies, Mr Trump's election is likely to mean trouble for some of President Barack Obama's signature environmental initiatives, environmentalists and policy analysts say.

They say it is probable that Mr Trump's administration will seek to weaken or kill the Clean Power Plan, a cornerstone Obama policy meant to reduce carbon pollution from the nation's power plants as part of an effort to combat climate change.

The Clean Power Plan is being challenged in federal court, and if it survives, Mr Trump could move to scuttle it. But not without a fight.

"We don't consider the CPP dead. We have many tools to help preserve it," said David Goldston, director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defence Council. "He can't just snap his fingers and wish away regulations. There'd be a backlash, which would make Congress think twice."

Any move to back out of the Clean Power Plan or the Paris Agreement could be extremely unpopular moves, environmentalists argue. Polls have shown a majority of voters in at least two states believe global warming is a serious problem.

An exit poll conducted for The Associated Press and television networks found that about half of Trump voters in Florida, a state he carried, agreed that climate change was a serious problem. In Maine, just over half of Trump supporters also agreed, while about four in 10 disagreed.

Mr Trump has also vowed to tap into America's coal reserves in an effort to put the shrinking energy sector back to work. In a speech in the Bakken shale fields of North Dakota, he also said he would increase hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the nation's shale and natural gas reserves to further remove any dependence on foreign energy sources.

Industry advocates are buoyed by the possibilities presented by Mr Trump's win.

"We look forward to working with the new administration" on issues such as opening more public land and offshore areas to oil and gas drilling, building more energy infrastructure and reducing environmental regulations, American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard said on Thursday. He would not say whether he supported a US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

Likewise, the coal industry believes Mr Trump "understands the urgent need to rein in the Washington bureaucracy and sweeping, excessive regulations" to protect coal jobs in an industry where sharply falling demand for coal has led to permanent plant closures, the American Coal Council said.

"The coal sector has been devastated by lower demand and job losses in recent years due to the mounting impact of regulations pointed squarely at our industry," American Coal Council CEO Betsy Monseu said.

Some question whether it would make economic sense for the US to attempt to increase the use of coal, a fuel being phased out of the energy picture due to its pollution and falling prices of renewables such as solar and wind.

"Coal is not coming back," said Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director. "Ask investors on Wall Street, or regulators at the state and local level who are choosing solar and wind because of basic economics."

As for offshore drilling, Mr Trump could target the Atlantic and Arctic: two areas the Obama administration had made off-limits for oil leases in the immediate future.

While the Obama administration has moved to restrict drilling in waters off the Eastern Seaboard and Alaska, Mr Trump has been vague on whether he would support reopening these areas to drilling, saying he backs it when it "can be done responsibly".

Environmentalists said on Wednesday they hope Mr Trump concludes opening the Atlantic and Arctic to offshore drilling is a bad business decision.

"In the Atlantic, we hope he will recognise the strong opposition from the business community, which has mounted a concerted campaign to protect its fishing and tourism industries against the interest of the oil industry," said Jacqueline Savitz of Oceana, a group opposed to offshore drilling.

"In the Arctic, it's impossible to respond to an oil spill, with extreme cold, floating ice, darkness much of the year and no response facilities."

Concerns over the incoming administration's environmental approach were not confined to policy.

Some climate scientists expressed concern that the Trump administration could reduce government's efforts to study climate change.

For example, some Republicans have long wanted to stop Nasa's role in studying earth science and climate change - a key contribution to scientific understanding of the issue that helps drive policy decisions.

Waleed Abdalati, a former Nasa chief scientist, said in an email that the agency's contributions are extremely important to the nation's success.

"Part of this investment includes trying to better understand how and why our environment is changing and the implications for the American people, as well as people all over the world," Mr Abdalati wrote. "No one can argue that there is tremendous value in knowing what tomorrow will bring."

AP
Islamic State fighters have killed some 70 civilians in Mosul this week over accusations of collaboration with Iraqi forces pushing into the city to drive them out, the United Nations has said.

It said in a report that IS reportedly shot and killed 40 people on Tuesday after accusing them of "treason and collaboration", dressing them in orange jumpsuits and hanging their bodies from electrical poles.

The report said that in another incident, the extremists reportedly shot to death 20 civilians in the Ghabat Military Base on charges of leaking information.

Those bodies were hung at various traffic lights in Mosul, with notes stating that they had used mobile phones to leak information.

The reports were the latest evidence of IS exactions on civilians as it retreats into dense urban quarters of Iraqi's second largest city.

Iraqi troops are inching ahead in their battle to retake Mosul

The UN also revealed fresh evidence the extremists have used chemical weapons.

Exchanging small arms and mortar fire with IS positions, the special forces have entered the Qadisiya neighbourhood, advancing slowly to avoid killing civilians and trying to avoid being surprised by suicide car bombers, said Brigadier General Haider Fadhil.

Regular army troops control 90% of the Intisar neighbourhood, said one officer, but progress had slowed because "the streets are too narrow for our tanks".

Iraqi troops are converging from several fronts on Mosul, the second-largest city and the last major IS holdout in Iraq. Kurdish peshmerga forces are holding a line north of the city, while Iraqi army and militarised police units approach from the south, and government-sanctioned Shiite militias guard western approaches.

The offensive has slowed recently as the special forces - the troops that have advanced the farthest - push into more densely populated areas of eastern Mosul, where they cannot rely as much on air strikes and shelling because of the risk to civilians who have been told to stay in their homes.

Meanwhile, the UN human rights office has cited new details as proof that IS is using chemical weapons, which many fear the extremist group has and is saving for if they are cornered or about to lose the city, still home to more than a million people.

Amid concerns about IS' use of human shields in the city, rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said four people died from inhaling fumes after IS shelled and set fires to the al-Mishrag Sulfur Gas Factory in Mosul on October 23.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Ms Shamdasani said reports indicated IS has stockpiled "large quantities" of ammonia and sulphur that have been placed in the same areas as civilians.

"We can only speculate how they intend to use this," she said. "We are simply raising the alarm that this is happening, that this is being stockpiled."

She added that international law requires protection of civilians near such chemicals.

"There does not have to be an intention to target civilians with the use of these chemical weapons, but particular care must be taken to avoid this affecting civilians," Ms Shamdasani said.

"If that particular care is not taken, or if action is taken instead through negligence or through active action, to cause damage to civilians, then this is clearly prohibited - this is a war crime."

UN officials say about 48,000 people have now fled Mosul since the government campaign began on October 17.

AP
An Iraqi soldier runs before he fires his rifle in Karamah, south of Mosul, Iraq. Photo: Reuters

A displaced Iraqi girl, who fled the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul, is pictured in Debaga refugee camp, east of Mosul. Photo: Reuters

Peshmerga forces ride on the back of a vehicle in the town of Bashiqa, after it was recaptured from the Islamic State, east of Mosul. Photo: Reuters

A firefighter works to extinguish an oil well set on fire by fleeing Isil members .

Iraqi government forces have been accused of torturing and killing civilians near Mosul, in the first such reports since the start of the offensive to liberate the city from Isil.

Residents of recaptured villages were beaten and shot to death by federal police officers after being accused of having ties to Isil, according to Amnesty International.

A report released yesterday revealed details of how a group of 10 men, including a 16-year-old boy, handed themselves over to officers while waving white flags in the village of Nus Tal south of Mosul on October 21.

The officers then beat the group with cables and rifle butts, punching and kicking them, before setting fire to one man's beard, the charity reported.

The victims were made to lie on their stomachs and shots were fired between their legs, as they were insulted, often using sectarian language, and accused of being members of Isil.

Four of them were later found dead; one had been beheaded.

In a separate incident, a villager was discovered with a gunshot wound to the chest, blindfolded with his torso exposed, suggesting that he had been detained before being executed.

Amnesty said that forces operating in the area "were apparently presuming that only Isil fighters had remained behind", but that the extrajudicial executions were in any case unlawful.

Read More: Last food rations are handed out in besieged Aleppo

An interior ministry spokesman denied there had been any violations and said Iraqi forces respect human rights and international law.

"Men in federal police uniform have carried out multiple unlawful killings, apprehending and then deliberately killing in cold blood residents in villages south of Mosul," said Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty's Beirut office.

"When the Mosul military operation began, [Iraqi] Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi made clear that violations by Iraqi armed forces and its allies would not be tolerated. Now is the time for him to prove just that."

She added that, without accountability, the alleged abuses risked being repeated in other towns and villages.

There had been concerns that the offensive would stoke existing sectarian tensions in the country.

The Iraqi army is dominated by troops from the Shia Muslim sect. Residents of Mosul, a predominantly Sunni city, are fearful of their role in the liberation of Iraq's second city.

Previous operations to recapture other Sunni-majority cities, Fallujah and Tikrit, were largely spearheaded by the Shia militias.

In the days and weeks afterwards, reports of extrajudicial torture and killings committed against the Sunni population helped harden support for Isil and deepen mistrust in other Sunni areas.

In the battle for the Iraqi city of Fallujah in June, Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation Forces) militia forces were accused of so-called revenge attacks against Sunni civilians they accused of supporting Isil.

Locals suspected of having ties to Isil were beaten with metal rods and subjected to electric shocks, according to Amnesty.

Some were tied to the bonnets of vehicles and paraded through the streets or placed in cages.

The Mosul operation, involving a 100,000-strong alliance of troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga and Shia militias and backed by US-led air strikes, has entered its fourth week but has so far gained just a small foothold in the city.

Thousands of civilians being held as human shields are expected to stream out of the city in the coming days and weeks as the army advances. ( Daily Telegraph, London)
A Syrian pro-government fighter looks on from his sniper nest in a building in Aleppo's western Minyan district. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Smoke billows after rockets fired by rebels exploded in an area near Aleppo's western Minyan district. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Syrian pro-government forces are seen parked outside a building in Aleppo's western Minyan district. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

A general view shows a tank belonging to pro-government forces parked next to a destroyed tank on a mainroad in Aleppo's western Minyan district. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Syrian pro-government forces are seen parked outside a building in Aleppo's western Minyan district. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

A Syrian pro-government fighter looks on from his sniper nest in a building in Aleppo's western Minyan district. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

The last remaining food rations are being distributed in besieged rebel-held eastern districts of the Syrian city of Aleppo, the UN has said.

Humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland warned that without a resupply, there would be no food left to hand out next week to the 275,000 people living there.

Mr Egeland ruled out airdrops of food, explaining that they were not possible in densely populated urban areas. Government forces launched a major assault on eastern Aleppo in September.

Since then, troops have pushed into several outlying areas with the help of Iranian-backed Shia militias and Russian air strikes.

Rebels launched a counter-attack in an attempt to break the siege in late October. But their progress slowed after early gains.

The UN said weeks of air strikes and shelling have killed more than 700 civilians in the east, while rocket fire has left scores dead in the government-controlled west.

Humanitarian agencies have been unable to get into rebel-held Aleppo since the government siege resumed in September, and the last time significant aid supplies were delivered was in July.

Yesterday, Mr Egeland told journalists in Geneva that the UN's humanitarian taskforce had received a report that the last remaining food rations were being handed out.

"[Food] prices are now sky-rocketing on the market. We have reports of desperation for families and within communities," he said.

He warned that the "terrible" situation in eastern Aleppo might be about to get "much, much worse", with Russia saying it would soon resume air strikes after a three-week pause intended to allow civilians and rebels to be evacuated - an offer very few people took up.

Mr Egeland revealed that the UN had presented all the warring parties and their backers last week with a four-point initiative for getting aid to eastern Aleppo.

The plan would involve medical evacuations for about 300 patients in urgent need, delivery of food and medical supplies, and permission for medical personnel to enter the city.

Mr Egeland said he was confident that access would be granted because "the consequences of no help and no supplies will be so catastrophic I cannot even see that scenario".
Barack Obama still believes Donald Trump is unfit to serve as president, the White House said yesterday, just minutes after he held an outwardly warm meeting with his successor.

Mr Obama welcomed Mr Trump into the Oval Office yesterday for what he described as an "excellent conversation" about the handover of power from one administration to the next.

Exactly what happened in there isn't a matter of public record. No staff were present; the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, was reluctant to be drawn on details.

When their meeting was over, the press pool flooded in to the Oval Office and the two men gave a brief statement.

The gulf between words and body language was enormous. Mr Obama called it an "excellent" and "wide-ranging" conversation: "We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed - because if you succeed, then the country succeeds."

Mr Trump said it was "an honour" to be with the president. He added that the meeting was only supposed to last for 10 or 15 minutes but had run on for an hour and a half.

The press secretary was asked about this and he diplomatically said that Mr Obama actually had more than 15 minutes pencilled in his diary.

In a campaign season, Mr Earnest might have called Mr Trump a liar. Now the election is over, he left it up to the press to infer that 'The Donald' was making things up. Well, you can put a leopard in charge of the free world but he won't change his spots.

A journalist asked Mr Earnest if Mr Trump had discussed his plans to overturn Obamacare and put Hillary Clinton in jail. Mr Earnest looked as if he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

The differences between Mr Obama and Mr Trump are not just ideological but intensely personal - because Mr Trump ran a scorched earth campaign that questioned the very integrity of Mr Obama, Mrs Clinton and the Washington establishment. Now, he finds himself in charge of Washington, and the question on everyone's mind is can he actually govern - or has his candidacy left him with too many enemies?

Mr Obama said he was "encouraged" by the meeting, and vowed to do everything in his power to help Mr Trump become a successful president.

Afterward Mr Earnest was asked if the president still believed Mr Trump was "temperamentally unfit" and "uniquely unqualified" to lead the country.

"The president's views haven't changed; he stands by what he said on the campaign trail," Mr Earnest said.

The statement belied the praise Mr Obama and Mr Trump exchanged following their meeting, which had shown a sharp change in tone from a campaign in which Mr Obama mocked Mr Trump relentlessly.

Mr Earnest added that the meeting, which is customary between an outgoing president and his successor, was not intended to "recreate the debate" from the campaign.

Mr Trump noted after the meeting that he had never before met Mr Obama, and congratulated the president for his "really great" accomplishments.

"Mr President, it was a great honour being with you, and I look forward to being with you many, many more times in the future," he said.

The topics discussed during the "wide-ranging discussion" included foreign and domestic policy, as well as the process of staffing the administration.

Mr Trump remarked that the meeting was intended to only last "maybe 10 or 15 minutes", but had carried on for 90.

"As far as I'm concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer," he said.

Mr Trump had previously described Mr Obama as one of the worst presidents in history, and was a leader of the "birther" campaign based on the erroneous claim that Mr Obama was an illegitimate president because he was born outside the US.

While Mr Obama and Mr Trump met in the Oval Office, Michelle Obama showed Melania Trump around the East Wing, which houses the presidential residence.

That meeting too was tinged with awkwardness, as parts of Mrs Trump's address at the Republican National Convention were taken wholesale from one of Mrs Obama's speeches.

Mr Obama said he and the first lady were intent on making the Trumps feel welcome in their soon-to-be home.

"Most of all, I want to emphasise to you, Mr President-elect, that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed - because if you succeed, then the country succeeds," he told Mr Trump.

The Obamas did not pose for a photo opportunity with the Trumps, as they did with the Bushes during the equivalent meeting in 2008.

In addition to the White House meeting, Joe Biden, the vice-president, hosted Mike Pence, Mr Trump's running mate, at Mr Pence's soon-to-be residence at the US Naval Observatory. Mr Trump and Mr Pence then travelled to Capitol Hill to meet with Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House.

Behind the scenes, members of Mr Trump's transition team were working to vet candidates for key roles in the incoming administration.

The first selections are likely to be chief of staff - with son-in-law Jared Kushner and Reince Priebus, chief of the Republican National Committee, likely candidates - and Mr Trump's national security team. The effort is being led by Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who has been mired in political scandal, and Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator tipped for a senior role in Mr Trump's cabinet.
Theresa May has finally spoken with Donald Trump, after criticism that their failure to talk had left Britain somewhere near the back of the queue.

The two leaders had a telephone conversation at 1.45pm, Downing Street said, focusing on the UK-US special relationship and on strengthening bilateral trade.

A No 10 spokesman said: The Prime Minister and President-elect Trump agreed that the US-UK relationship was very important and very special, and that building on this would be a priority for them both.

President-elect Trump set out his close and personal connections with, and warmth for, the UK. He said he was confident that the special relationship would go from strength to strength.

The spokesman added: The call ended with President-elect Trump saying that the UK is a very, very special place for him, and inviting the Prime Minister to visit him as soon as possible.

The conversation came after the embarrassing revelation that Mr Trump had already spoken with at least nine other world leaders, apparently leaving claims of a special relationship in tatters.

In just 24 hours after his victory, he spoke with the leaders of Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, Israel, Turkey, India, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

By the time he chatted with Ms May, Mr Trump had invited the Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the White House for St Patricks Day next year.

And he had arranged to meet Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, next week before an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

Chancellor Philip Hammond raised eyebrows when he suggested Ms May and Mr Trump had not yet spoken because they had no urgent business to discuss.

Last month, the Republicans trade adviser said that under a Trump presidency Britain would come first in any trade talks between the US and Europe, after Barack Obama had said during the EU referendum campaign that the UK would be at the back of the queue if it chose to vote Brexit.

The Trump camp has said it has no immediate plans to travel to Britain or Europe ahead of his January inauguration.

The American and British leaders will meet at the next G7 summit, in May next year, and Ms May hopes to be invited to Washington before then, to discuss a possible post-Brexit trade deal.

Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, tweeted: Trump yet to call May, but has called Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, Israel, Turkey, India, Japan & Australia...almost like we are back of the queue.

Mr Trump quickly found time to speak with Mr Kenny and invite him to America. The tradition of a get-together with the Taoiseach on St Patricks Day would continue in the spirit of the strong ties between the two countries, Mr Trump said.

Mr Kenny said: I had a very good conversation with the President-elect. He understands Ireland very well, he was complimentary about the decisions made about the economy here. He is looking forward to doing business with Ireland.

Mr Trump also pledged his commitment to defend South Korea, during a phone call with its President Park Geun-hye, a news agency in the country said.

And Turkish President Tayyib Erdogan wasted no time in congratulating the President-elect and discussing the future of his country's relationship with the US, Ankara said.

Malcolm Turnbull, Australias Prime Minister, and Mr Trump spoke for 15 minutes on the telephone, covering trade, regional security and the fight against Isis.

A statement from the Egyptian presidency said Abdel Fattah al-Sissi was the first world leader to have a conversation, which focussed on how to foster closer diplomatic ties.

In the hours after the result, Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Francois Hollande offered Mr Trump only cautious support  warning that his win ushered in a period of uncertainty.

But Ms May ducked questions about past criticisms of his stance on Muslims, saying: Britain and the United States have an enduring and special relationship based on the values of freedom, democracy and enterprise.

We are, and will remain, strong and close partners on trade, security and defence.
People march through traffic while protesting the election of Republican Donald Trump as the president of the United States in downtown Los Angeles, California, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

Demonstrators protest after US President-elect Donald Trumps victory, at a rally in Los Angeles, California. Photo: Ringo Chiuringo Chiu/Getty

Demonstrations against Donald Trump continued in cities across the US as the president-elect accused those taking part of being "professional protesters".

Hundreds of people were marching against his unexpected election as president, including in Dallas, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

But Mr Trump wrote on Twitter: "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!"

He had earlier held a cordial White House meeting with President Barack Obama, and sketched out priorities with Republican congressional leaders in Washington.

Expand Expand Previous Next Close Protesters gather in Chicago as they demonstrate against the election of President-elect Donald Trump (AP) A group of protesters gather outside of the White House after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump met with U.S. President Barack Obama at White House in Washington. REUTERS/Carlos Barria / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Protesters gather in Chicago as they demonstrate against the election of President-elect Donald Trump (AP)

The meeting with Mr Obama spanned 90 minutes, longer than originally scheduled. Mr Obama said he was "encouraged" by Mr Trump's willingness to work with his team during the transition of power, and the Republican called the president a "very good man".

"I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including his counsel," Mr Trump said from the Oval Office. He will begin occupying the office on January 20.

In Dallas, dozens of demonstrators gathered for a second night at Dealey Plaza to speak against the election.

Just like on Wednesday night, the demonstration was peaceful with no disturbances or arrests reported. It ended with a march into the heart of Dallas by protesters carrying signs bearing such slogans as "Love Trumps Hate" and "Spirit Unbreakable".

Read More

A crowd that included parents with children in prams gathered near Philadelphia's City Hall. They held signs bearing slogans like "Not Our President," ''Trans Against Trump" and "Make America Safe For All".

About 500 people turned out in Louisville, Kentucky, chanting and carrying signs as they marched. A day earlier, five people were arrested at Western Kentucky University as demonstrators protested against Mr Trump's election.

The protests came as it was confirmed that Mr Trump had won Arizona's presidential contest and its 11 electoral votes.

The Republican president-elect had a solid lead over Hillary Clinton on election night, but a winner was not declared because there were so many uncounted votes. The latest batch of returns tabulated in Thursday made him the clear winner.

It extends a 20-year winning streak for Republican presidential candidates in Arizona. Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to take the state, winning in 1996.

Mrs Clinton was closer to gaining Arizona than Mr Obama, who lost by more than 9 percentage points during his two runs for president. She is losing by 4 points.

Arizona was one of three races that had yet to be determined from the Tuesday election. Michigan and New Hampshire remain too close to call.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence urged a rally in Indiana to support Mr Trump and to pray that the starkly divided country would be reunified.

He told the crowd he was humbled to be Mr Trump's vice president.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GAASI), successfully performed the first flight of the Avenger Extended Range (Avenger ER) remotely piloted aircraft (RPA). The flight occurred on October 27th at the companys Gray Butte Flight Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif.

The ER wingspan was increased by 10 foot  to 76 feet (23.16 m); also, the drone carries 2,200 pounds (1 ton) of additional fuel, extending the legacy Avengers endurance from 15 hours to 20 hours. The distinctive winglets which were also implemented in the MQ-9 ER are also used with the Avenger ER, designed to improve performance and improve fuel consumption. The increased endurance and high payload capacity will deliver tremendous capability to our customers, who need persistent situational awareness and strike mission affordability, said Linden Blue, CEO, GA-ASI. The Avenger flew its first flight in 2009 and was acquired by the US Air Force for evaluation in 2011. To date, the Avenger has accumulated over 13,000 flight hours to date, in both test and operational flights.

The new version has an extended range and endurance, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) and precision-strike capability, supporting a wide array of sensors and weapons payloads to perform ISR and ground support missions. Like the legacy Avenger, Avenger ER features avionics based upon the combat-proven Predator B/MQ-9 Reaper, has a 44-foot (13.41 m) long fuselage, 3,000-pound (1.36 ton) payload bay, and is capable of flying at over 400 KTAS (740 km/h). Avenger ER, along with its predecessor, is designed to carry payloads such as the all-weather GA-ASI Lynx Multi-mode Radar, the MS-177 Electro-optical/Infrared (EO/IR) sensor, and the 2,000-pound (907 kg) Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM).

While the Avenger platform is not operationally used by the US Air Force, a navalized derivative of the system is considered by the US Navy for its MQ-25 Stingray carrier-based drone. On another demonstration planned for 2018, the Avenger could carry a powerful laser, demonstrating new missile defense capabilities.

GA-ASI developed Avenger on Internal Research and Development (IRAD) funds with the intent of making an RPA that has a quick-response, armed reconnaissance capability. First flown in April 2009, the aircrafts fuselage was extended by four feet in 2012 to accommodate larger payloads and fuel. Avenger received an FAA-issued Experimental Certificate (EC) in 2016, enabling it to operate in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS).
President-elect Donald Trump meets US President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A top economic adviser to Donald Trump has warned that the incoming president's new tax plans could see a "flood of companies" leaving Ireland.

The Government is facing urgent calls to act swiftly to protect US investment in Ireland after comments by Mr Trump's senior aide Stephen Moore.

The threat issued by Mr Moore sent shockwaves through political circles yesterday as the fallout from the US presidential election continued.

Just hours after Mr Trump held a 10-minute phone conversation with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, his economic adviser revealed Mr Trump's plans to lure multinational companies back with radical tax cuts.

"I believe that when we cut these tax rates - we're going to cut our business tax rate from roughly 35pc down to roughly 15pc to 20pc - you are going to see a flood of companies leaving Ireland and Canada and Germany and France and they are going to come back to the US," Mr Moore said.

Government sources said Mr Trump praised Ireland's economy during his brief conversation with Mr Kenny.

The warning came as Mr Trump met President Barack Obama in the White House. Mr Trump said he looked forward to receiving the outgoing president's "counsel".
The Ku Klux Klan has announced plans to stage a "victory" parade in North Carolina celebrating Donald Trump's presidential win.

The Loyal White Knights, a KKK chapter based in rural village Pelham in North Carolina, announced that the parade will happen in December.

"Trump's race united my people," the announcement reads.

This is not the first time the KKK have pledged support for Trump. An official newspaper endorsed the president elect and praised him publically.

David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the hate group, called Mr Trump's election "one of the most exciting nights of my life" and said "our people" helped him win the election.

The Crusader newspaper, which calls itself "premier voice of the white resistance", pledged support to Trump just a week before the election.

The article read: "While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, 'What made America great in the first place? The short answer to that is simple. America was great not because of what our forefathers did  but because of who our forefathers were.

"America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great."

Mr Trump's campaign has rejected support from the KKK, and Eric Trump, Mr Trump's son, has said David Duke "deserves a bullet".

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
UK Ministers will use Nigel Farage as an unofficial intermediary to build bridges with Donald Trump to ensure the special relationship does not falter in the wake of his election.

The Telegraph understands that ministers will be forced to seek Mr Farages advice because they have no links to the President-elects inner circle.

Mrs May spoke to Mr Trump for the first time since his victory  but not until after he had spoken to the leaders of at least nine other nations.

Downing Street said that during the call, Mr Trump said that the UK is a very, very special place for me and for our country and suggested that he wants their relationship to be similar to the one enjoyed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Expand Close Donal Trump announces his presidential candidacy / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Donal Trump announces his presidential candidacy

But the delay in talking to the President-elect led to accusations that the Government had undermined its relationship with Washington by failing to anticipate Mr Trump's success.

Read More

Mr Farage - who joined Mr Trump on the campaign trail - told the Telegraph the relationship between Mr Trump's Republican Party and the Conservatives has "completely broken down".

It is understood that Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary who has links to the Republican Party, now intends to speak to Mr Farage before attempting to hold talks with senior Trump advisers.

On Thursday night, Number 10 said that Mr Farage will not be representing Mrs May in any official or unofficial capacity.

Expand Close US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks in New York during a press conference. AFP/Getty Images / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks in New York during a press conference. AFP/Getty Images

In their phone call Mr Trump and Mrs May on Thursday agreed that they would attempt to strengthen the special relationship.

It came as:

Mr Trump and Barack Obama met for the very first time. Following a 90 minute meeting at the White House Mr Trump called the man he will succeed as president as a "very, very good man".

Just minutes later the White House said that the current President still believes that Mr Trump is "uniquely unqualified for office".

Mr Trump held a meeting with the Republican leadership and said he will move quickly to lower taxes and reform healthcare.

Global markets continued to rally, with the Dow Jones hitting a record high, rising 191 points, and the FTSE rising 1.2 per cent

On Thursday it emerged that senior figures in Whitehall have in recent months warned that the Government was not taking seriously enough the prospect of a Trump presidency.

Three months ago Boris Johnson, then a relatively new Foreign Secretary, instructed his officials to do more to forge links with Mr Trumps campaign, fearing that there was too much expectation in the Foreign Office of a victory for Hilary Clinton.

I hand over the mantle to @RealDonaldTrump! Many congratulations. You have fought a brave campaign. pic.twitter.com/txD3RFMQ2l  Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) November 9, 2016

Read More

It has also been claimed that Sir Kim Darroch, Britains ambassador to the US, did not do enough to develop close links with Mr Trumps campaign in the build-up to the presidential election.

On Thursday Philip Hammond said the delay in talks between Mr Trump and Mrs May was because the pair had no "urgent business".

"We do not have any urgent business that we need to transact," the Chancellor said. "Obviously, in due course the Prime Minister will be looking forward to meeting Mr Trump once he is inaugurated as the President.

"I expect that the very strong and close relationship that always develops between a UK prime minister and US president will develop between those two."

But Mr Farage says that he is the only British politician who has "offered help or support" to Mr Trump.

Mr Farage says that he perceived snubs towards Mr Trump have damaged the relationship between the UK and USA.

He says: "Of Britains relationship there is going to be a slightly difficult start. Nobody in the British government has reached out to his campaign, believing as with our referendum that he could not possibly win.

"The traditional relationship between the British Conservative party and the Republicans has completely broken down."

Any issue between Mr Trump and Mrs May goes back to December 2015, when Mr Trump was criticised by the then Home Secretary over his suggestion that he wanted to ban all Muslims from America.

Mrs May said that the comments were divisive, unhelpful and wrong.

Mr Johnson, who was mayor of London at the time, said his views were ill-informed and complete and utter nonsense.

Mr Trump was also left furious after MPs in Parliament debated whether Mr Trump should be banned from the UK, even threatening to withdraw 600 million of planned investment in Scotland.

Before speaking to Mrs May at 1.45pm on Thursday, Mr Trump spoke to the leaders of Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, Israel, Turkey, India, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

It is traditional for one of a President-elects first calls to be to the British prime minister in recognition of the long-standing special relationship.

Sources close to Mr Trump insisted that the order of the calls was random. They said that proper plans had not been put in place for the day after the election.

Following the call Downing Street said: The Prime Minister and President-elect Trump agreed that the US-UK relationship was very important and very special, and that building on this would be a priority for them both.

President-elect Trump set out his close and personal connections with, and warmth for, the UK. He said he was confident that the special relationship would go from strength to strength.

Government sources confirmed that Dr Fox will travel to America as soon as possible to attempt to engage with Mr Trumps team.

Mr Trump invited Mrs May to the White House during their phone call on Thursday. It is expected that the Prime Minister will fly to Washington early next year.

Sir Christopher Meyer, who was Britains ambassador in Washington from 1997 and 2003, said it had been difficult for British officials to know who to speak to around Mr Trump.

He said the UK had to speak either to the family or to other figures like Governor Chris Christie or Newt Gingrich but it was not clear to what extent they are authentic spokespeople for Donald J himself.

He added: It must be more difficult to get alongside Donald than it was for me to get alongside George W [Bush] or my predecessor to get alongside Bill Clinton.

He said: What is really important now is to accept that he is president-elect, that he will be president, and that whatever the things were said and judgements made during the campaign, we now have to deal with who will be in the Oval office.

And that means cracking on with messages of congratulation, the embassy going full roar to get alongside those who are going to be in the new administration."

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
A group of protesters gather outside of the White House after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump met with U.S. President Barack Obama at White House in Washington. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Protesters took to the streets across the US following Donald Trump's divisive election victory.

People demonstrated from New England to heartland cities like Kansas City and along the west coast, with flags and effigies of the President-elect.

The protesters disrupted traffic and many declared that they refused to accept Mr Trump's victory.

In Los Angeles, thousands of protesters burned a giant papier-mache Trump head and started fires in Oakland.

Protesters in LA also beat a Trump pinata and sprayed the 'Los Angeles Times' building and news vans with anti-Trump profanity.

One protester outside LA City Hall read a sign that simply said "this is very bad".

Vishal Singh (23) said he was disappointed with voters who supported a man he sees as anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT.

Read more: 'Trump is not my President' - Windows smashed, bins on fire as protests against Donald Trump's victory continue in several states

"I expected better of my electorate," he told the 'Los Angeles Times'. "I thought this country was different."

Late in the evening, several hundred people blocked one of the city's busiest freeways, US 101, between downtown and Hollywood.

In Chicago, several thousand people marched through the Loop and gathered outside Trump Tower, chanting "Not my president!".

Chicago resident Michael Burke said he believes the President-elect will "divide the country and stir up hatred". He added there was a constitutional duty not to accept that outcome.

Police said up to 2,000 people participated in the Chicago protests. Police reported five arrests, including two for obstructing traffic.

A similar protest in Manhattan drew about 1,000 people. Outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown, police installed barricades to keep the demonstrators at bay.
FBI Director James Comey faces a complicated path under a Donald Trump administration.

Does he try to serve out the remaining seven years of his term under a president who has publicly questioned the FBI's integrity?

Or does he stay on as a safeguard against executive power and a guide for a novice president on complex national security matters?

He would be in the delicate position of working with a president who lobbed occasional criticisms from the campaign trail against the nation's premier law enforcement agency.

Though attention had centred on whether Comey could have co-existed with a Hillary Clinton presidency, given the FBI's investigation into her email practices and his own public statements about the probe, that question applies at least equally to a Trump administration.

As recently as Sunday, Mr Trump complained that Mrs Clinton was "protected by a rigged system" after Mr Comey renewed his decision not to recommend charges for her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Mr Trump's past rhetoric on the terrorism threat, including warnings that "radical Islam is coming to our shores," is out of step with Mr Comey's more measured assessments.

His stated desire to have an improved relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin comes even as federal intelligence officials have publicly accused the Russians of meddling through hacking in the American electoral process.

FBI officials did not respond to a message about Mr Comey's plans, but James McJunkin, a former FBI assistant director, said he doubted Mr Comey was fazed by Mr Trump's campaign trail statements.

He said Mr Comey knew when he was appointed in 2013 by President Barack Obama that his 10-year term would carry over at least two administrations that might differ sharply.

"I can't imagine he would think this is anything more than politics as usual," McJunkin said.

"I think politicians say whatever they think they can in order to seize the moment, and I think that once Trump settles into office, he'll realise the value of the independence that Comey displayed."
Germany has 983 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh

A suicide car bomber attacked Germany's consulate in northern Afghanistan, killing four people and wounding more than 100.

Four dead - two civilians and two unidentified bodies - were taken to the Balkh hospital, said Dr Noor Mohammad Faiz.

He said 128 people were wounded in the attack.

"The blast was too loud and powerful, which shattered windows, and many civilians were wounded inside their homes," he said.

The car exploded at the gate of the consulate in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, destroying the gate and wall at about 11.10 pm on Thursday, said Abdul Raziq Qaderi, head of security for Balkh province.

The blast destroyed the Mazar Hotel, where the consulate is based, and surrounding buildings. Residents said that casualties were contained because it was late, though an ensuing gun battle raged for around five hours.

President Ashraf Ghani called the attack a "crime against humanity and all international laws".

The Taliban claimed responsibility.

Germany's foreign ministry said all consulate employees were safe and unhurt after the attack.

It said "heavily-armed assailants" were beaten back by consulate security staff, Afghan security forces and international troops based in Afghanistan as part of Nato's Resolute Support mission.

Many houses and shops were destroyed or damaged, said Munir Ahmad Farhad, spokesman for the provincial governor in Balkh.

"The security situation is under control right now," Mr Farhad said, adding: "There are many women and children among the wounded."

Germany has 983 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh province, as part of the Nato mission. Mazar-i-Sharif is the provincial capital and one of the richest and most important cities in Afghanistan.

The Taliban's insurgency has spread from their southern heartland across the country in the past two years, following the withdrawal of most international combat troops. Attacks across the north have been increasing.

The Taliban statement from spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack was retaliation for recent airstrikes in the northern city of Kunduz, capital of the province of the same name.

A US airstrike earlier this month killed dozens of people and is under investigation.

AP
Malcolm Turnbull has announced that Australia will participate in the US-led programme to resettle Central American refugees

A group of asylum seekers after landing in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea in 2013 (AP)

The United States and Australia are close to announcing a deal over asylum seekers, it has been reported.

The agreement would see the US resettle hundreds of refugees banished by Australia to Pacific island camps, The Australian newspaper reported.

The US had agreed to accept up to 1,800 refugees held for up to three years at Australia's expense in camps on the impoverished island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, it said.

Such an agreement struck with the Obama administration could be opposed by President-elect Donald Trump, who has called for a moratorium or tight restrictions on Muslim immigration.

Most of the asylum seekers are Muslims from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The agreement could empty the camps that have been condemned by human rights groups as a cruel abrogation of Australia's responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention.

Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull declined to comment on negotiations with the US.

Rebecca Gardner, spokeswoman for the US embassy in Australia, said the State Department did not "comment on or discuss diplomatic negotiations".

Senior government minister Christopher Pyne praised the prospect of such an agreement being finalised before the Obama administration ends.

"There certainly is time - two and a half months is plenty of time - and if that's the case, it will be a great achievement for the Turnbull government," he told Nine Network television.

Senior opposition MP Anthony Albanese said: "If this occurs, that will be a good thing."

The opposition centre-left Labor Party criticised a previous deal struck between Australia and the US in 2007 to swap refugees, arguing that the prospect of US resettlement would attract more asylum seekers to Australian shores.

Under that deal, up to 200 refugees a year held on Nauru could have been swapped for Cubans and Haitians intercepted at sea while trying to get to the US and held at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But no refugee was ever traded under the agreement.

Mr Turnbull announced at Mr Obama's Leaders' Summit on Refugees in September that Australia would participate in the US-led programme to resettle Central American refugees from a camp in Costa Rica.

Australia would also increase its refugee intake by 5,000 to 18,750 a year.

Mr Turnbull said at the time that the agreement to resettle Central Americans was "not linked to any other resettlement discussions" involving Australia's refugees.

Immigration department secretary Michael Pezzullo told a parliamentary committee on Friday that "today we are closer than we were yesterday" to resettling asylum seekers from Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Immigration minister Peter Dutton said this week he was looking for countries that will accept all asylum seekers bound for Australia, including those who have had their refugee claims rejected but refuse to go home. Iran will not take back Iranians who will not go home voluntarily.

Almost 1,300 asylum seekers are on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Hundreds more have gone to Australia for medical treatment and have taken court action to prevent them being sent back to the islands.

Few refugees have accepted offers to resettle in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia because most hope that Australia will eventually take them in.

Australia refuses to resettle any refugee who has arrived by boat since the date the tough policy was announced, July 19 2013.

AP
KANNAPOLIS- Royce Apparel, located in Kannapolis, lent a helping hand to those impacted by Hurricane Matthew by donating thousands of shirts to flood victims.

Steve Deese, an employee of the company, said the owners donated about $12,000 in shirts to Harvest Ministries in Wadesboro. Steve and his wife Laceta Deese delivered the shirts to the ministry.

God laid this on mine and my wifes hearts. So I asked them (the owners) for the shirts and they gladly said yes, Steve Deese said.

He added that the owners of Royce Apparel, Chip Hoke and Sarid Roy, are always willing to help and have donated shirts to the homeless and needy in Cabarrus County in the past through New Hope Free Will Independent Church.

They are the most unselfish people. They are very charitable, Steve Deese said. They are good men and theyve got real hearts. This company has bent over backwards to help people.
close

New Choose your channels

You can update your channel preference from the Settings menu in the header menu.

Got it >
Indian equity markets see another green ending Markets saw yet another day in green today. Nifty 50 ended, up by 129.9 points. BSE Sensex ended, up by 374.76 points. Top Gainers today were Adani Enterprises, Divis Lab and NTPC. Top Lo... November 01, 2022 | 01-11-2022 4:04 pm

Five Star Business Finance IPO will open on November 9th The IPO of Five Star Business Finance will open for subscription on November 9th. The IPO will close on November 11th. The IPO intends to raise Rs 2751.95 crore through sale of existi... November 01, 2022 | 01-11-2022 3:32 pm

Suzlon Energy board approves allotment of 240 crore partly paid-up equity shares under rights issue Suzlon Energy Limited has informed that the Securities Issue Committee of the Board at its meeting held on October 31, 2022 has approved the allotment of 240,00,00,000 (Two Hundred Forty C... November 01, 2022 | 01-11-2022 3:10 pm

Markets in green; Nifty 50 around 18,100 level; IT stocks outperform Domestic benchmark indices in the fast lane today led by IT and Metal stocks outperforming. Both the Sensex and Nifty benchmarks were marginally higher amid positive cues from Asian market. ... November 01, 2022 | 01-11-2022 2:00 pm

SSWL achieves revenue growth of 11% yoy in October 2022 Steel Strips Wheels Ltd (SSWL) has achieved Net turnover of Rs334.42 crore in October 2022 Vs Rs300.58 crore in October 2021, recording a growth of 11% yoy and achieved Gross t... November 01, 2022 | 01-11-2022 1:07 pm
Can you explain to us the business model of Docplexus.in and its governance model?

Give us a broad overview on new trends witnessed in healthcare today and its likely impact on Docplexus as a platform.

Healthcare is going through massive transformation. How do you think Docplexus is impacting the healthcare landscape?

What are some of the areas where Docplexus can claim to be a game changer in todays healthcare scenario where healthcare is seeing massive evolution and is being closely observed as an industry to reckon with globally?

Who are your competitors in this space and what differentiates you from the competition?

Comment on the need and scope of a platform such as Docplexus in a growing economy such as India.

Tell us about your headcount and number of offices? Comment on your geographical spread. Are you looking to increase your presence?

Who is your target audience? What traction have you seen in India so far?

What are some of the challenges being faced in the industry?

What is your USP?

What is the vision for Docplexus for the next 3 - 5 year period?

What is the market cap and revenue spread for Docplexus? Can you share some details on your financials?

a healthcare tech start-up is one of the largest and fastest growing digital platforms for doctors in India which caters to the unique needs of the medical fraternity. With more than 150,000 doctors present on its platform, Docplexus provides an online platform for doctors to share their expertise, insights, know-how of technical enablement in the healthcare industry. Their vision is to improve 100 million patient outcomes every year. They aim to provide doctors with everything that is needed to treat the patient well, thus, revolutionizing the model of healthcare in India.Docplexus is the only doctor network across the globe which has created apps that are available on the web, android and iOS allowing doctors the freedom to decide the platform that they would like to choose.of IIFL provides you the highlights of his interaction withExcerpts from the interview:We do not charge doctors for membership on Docplexus. For some additional benefits such as certification for CMEs, we have nominal fees. Docplexus is very similar to Facebook for business, providing an ethical and wonderful marketing platform for Pharma and Medical Device companies to reach out to doctors with content based campaigns. The conventional mode of Pharma marketing has lost its effectiveness and there is no reliable way to measure the relative success of different marketing channels. In addition, proposed regulatory framework such as UCPMP Act will limit the opportunity for the Pharma and Medical Device companies to reach out to doctors. By assisting Pharma and Medical Device companies through efficient and interactive content marketing activities, we believe that Docplexus has great potential to generate revenue.We have already started collaborating with leading companies and educational institutes. This partnership provides a great learning and knowledge-sharing opportunity to doctors through webinars, Continuous Medical Education (CMEs) and Key Opinion Leader (KOL) interactions. Our partners know that with Docplexus they can reach out to doctors located in even Tier II, III cities and smaller towns effectively in a very short time. Perhaps, we have opened an entirely new market for them.The Healthcare sector in India is set to go through massive transformation as it is trying to catch up with international trends. The first very important transformation or trend we are seeing is in the area of connecting all the stakeholders in the sector. Patients, doctors, healthcare providers and pharmaceutical and medical device companies, are all critical stakeholders of this sector. In the near future, we will see a massive transformation in the way they are connected to each other.Connecting these all stakeholders digitally is the easiest and most efficient way. We will witness that in the near future.Secondly we will witness a new wave, in how Pharmaceutical companies communicate with doctors and market their product ethically. Digital marketing will become common as many of the Indian pharma companies are witnessing its benefits through Docplexus.In my opinion, we are best positioned to take this opportunity to address the concerns faced by all the stakeholders including the general population.Of course the healthcare sector is going through massive transformation. The most important transformation is connecting all the stakeholders in this sector. We have begun to see this change. Let me give you some examples, doctors in even remote areas are benefiting. We have seen doctors from remote areas of Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir and even the rest of North-Eastern India engaging with Doctors from urban and more accessible areas.In addition to routine cases, two of the cases are a real highlight.One of the cases, referred by a young doctor from a remote area of central India put forward a difficult case of bear attack. The young doctor was not trained during his residency to handle such a case. However, doctors from all over-India helped him make a proper diagnosis and ensured good prognosis throughout the case.The second case is also very interesting. A young girl was brought into the primary care facility in a small town of Maharashtra with intractable rash and fever. The young attending doctor tried everything he could but could not help the girl with fever and rash. Finally, as soon as he posted this case on Docplexus, he received advice from over 30 doctors who had faced a similar kind of case in their career.This is what the power of connecting doctors does. Ultimately, it helps improve patient outcomes.There are many such cases we have seen and many much where doctors have subconsciously made the choice of the treatment after he or she has read something new on Docplexus.India is a very large country with a highly fragmented healthcare system. Healthcare is a state subject and every state has different policies to tackle issues related to healthcare. However, the most important backbone of healthcare delivery in India is the large community of over 6,00,000 + doctors. Doctors play the most critical role ensuring that the general population receives care and treatment for various diseases etc.However, the statistics from the Government suggest that seamless connectivity between the doctors across India has been a big hurdle in ensuring the delivery to achieve national goals. At Docplexus we are solving exactly that problem. Docplexus is a community of over 1,50,000 practicing Indian doctors. The doctors from all over India are joining Docplexus to stay up to date with clinical information, to explore new treatments and drugs, and to stay informed about the policies that are related to the medical community. Over 6000 doctors are joining Docplexus every month making us Indias largest and fastest growing platform.By providing doctors the most updated clinical knowledge, we are helping patients to get the most effective and recent treatment. Every day over 12,000 doctors log on to Docplexus and over 10,000 patient cases have already been shared and solved by the doctors. Each doctor comes in contact with on an average 25 patients per day. That means Docplexus is helping to achieve better patient outcome for over 2,50,000 patients every day. Our ultimate vision is to empower each and every doctor in India so that they learn something new every day and treat their patients well. Our aim is to create a difference in healthcare by improving patient outcomes for at least 100 million patients every year.Our aim is to strengthen Indias medical fraternity to ensure the best treatment is made available to everyone.Unlike other platforms, at Docplexus we exclusively focus on discussions related to medicine and health policy decisions. Our members too want some direction and want to avoid casual discussions, discussions that are never going to help them or other doctors in their clinical practice or decision making.Secondly, with our strict registration process, we ensure only doctors from Allopathy or Modern Medicine join the Docplexus platform. Cross-pathy is a big problem for both doctors and patients, and we want to avoid that at any cost. In this aspect, we are way ahead from others in this space.We are the only Doctors Network in the world where doctors have an option to either login from android, iOS or desktop. We have ensured in this age of consumer empowerment that doctors can make the choice on how they want to connect with their peers.India is a very big country but the healthcare sector in India is very fragmented. The majority of the doctors are situated in the metros and tier one cities. The ones who are in the smaller towns and villages are somehow disconnected from their peers. It is important that even doctors from the remote villages are updated with current practices. There is huge potential to bring knowledge to these doctors and improve healthcare. And, thats what we are aiming to do.We are team of 30+ professionals based in Pune, Maharashtra. We have an expert editorial team to provide latest clinical insights to doctors in the form of articles, patient cases and online courses. Our editorial team is backed by a strong technical team which oversees all the technical aspects related to our community.We have doctors participating in the discussions from all corners of India. Metros, tier II and III cities and towns are also on our heat-map. We have identified that our members are present in over 1500 cities and towns across India. In addition, our members also access the Docplexus app when they are travelling internationally.I believe we are moving in the right direction and I am confident that we will have a bigger footprint in the years to come.As mentioned earlier, our target audience are all the doctors in India and those who have registered with Medical Council of India (MCI) as a practising doctor in the field of modern medicine.We are proud to say that we are Indias largest and fastest growing professional platform with doctors from 85 different specialties and super-specialties. In addition, Indias leading experts are engaging with their peers on Docplexus. Through Docplexus, doctors are also raising various issues and coming to unanimous conclusions after exhaustive discussions. I think this dialogue is the key to improve the healthcare scenario in India.The pharmaceutical sector is facing a wide variety of challenges, ranging from pressures on profits to regulatory challenges. The biggest challenge for pharma is how to reach out to key customers, doctors in this era where there is not enough time for doctors to consume the information provided by the pharma companies.Indirectly, this has put a lot of pressure on Pharma companies as access to their key customers is limited by time-constraints. This challenge transpires in all other departments and affects the performance.Pharmaceutical companies are also slow in adapting complete digital transformation across the board. Adapting digital transformation, especially in marketing appears to be another massive challenge pharma companies are facing.There are three key USPs or I would rather say principles with which we have excelled in our endeavour. These are:: With doctors in over 85 different specialties, we have now over 6000 articles shared by doctors on Docplexus. All of these articles are highly informative and aimed to provide a solution for a huge range of clinical and practice issues doctors face. Doctors in India now know that they have credible resources available on Docplexus. They also know that experts across India are now on Docplexus and in a situation where they face serious cases, there will get a solution on Docplexus if they share their problems. They also know now that Docplexus provides them an opportunity to interact with top experts directly in the form of video interviews and webinars. We have built our platform in such a way that doctors can ask their questions and get answers with the single click of a button on their smart phones or computers.: Neutrality is another important principle for us. The healthcare sector in India is quite complex. Doctors are often provided with information that is contradictory. Our editorial team is highly trained to research in depth and provide insights without a bias to ensure that Doctors receive accurate insights. The accuracy and neutrality of information is very critical.: Trust is the major driver in any community, even in the Doctors community. Building trust within the community and with other stakeholders of the healthcare sector is very important if we want to revolutionize healthcare sector in India. As everyone knows, constant communication is the best way to build trust. Therefore, Docplexus ensures consistent communication within the community by using different forms of content.In the future, we are also expecting to get pharmaceutical organizations onboard to share huge clinical resources they have with doctors.As mentioned earlier, in the next few years we want to connect all Indian doctors with each other. In addition, we want to bring onboard various professional organizations of doctors to ensure their communication reaches all their members. This will surely ensure improved patient outcomes. Our aim is to achieve 100 million patient outcomes every year.In addition, we will be connecting with top global medical institutions to bring best clinical information to Indian doctors through webinars and CMEs. We have already worked with various professional organizations in India and we will ensure most of the bodies are present on Docplexus.Being a tech enabled company; we always focus on how best we can provide solutions to our members and what it takes to do that. It is easy to get carried away with the technology but our focus will always remain on healthcare problems. This ensures that we stay ahead of the curve.We had raised $750,000 in the past and we have raised another $ 500,000 with the same investors. With the raised money, we are going to invest in creating better and more useful content for the doctors. In time to come, we shall launch online courses for Indian doctors in collaboration with national and international medical universities.We are currently collaborating with Indias leading pharmaceutical and medical device companies to take their clinical insights to doctors. We have started our partnership with Sanofi India, Boehringer Ingelheim, USV Pharmaceutical, Dr. Lal Pathlabs, Lupin, Emcure, Dr. Reddys Laboratories to name a few.In addition to addressing doctors legal and practice related issues, we have also initiated partnership with ancillary companies such as New India Assurance Ltd. which are also active in the healthcare domain.As a business, we believe very strongly in running a lean and sustainable business. Our aim is to be a profitable business by the end of the current financial year.
Hyde Park

51 N. Illinois St.

hydeparkrestaurants.com

Im a lover of all things yummy, decadent and luxurious. Unfortunately, my ducats havent kept up with my taste for the finer things. However, I am a journalist, and with great power comes great responsibility, the occasional concert ticket and, yes, I get to eat. A lot.

Last week, downtown Indy added yet another steakhouse. Before you start wondering, Do we really need another one? The answer is, probably not. Putting necessity aside, Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse is an amazing contribution to our towns bustling food scene.

Hyde Park, located at 51 N. Illinois St. (next door to Giordanos), is opulent, yet accessible. Upon arriving, my guest and I were escorted to our seats right away and given the five-star treatment. Im talking napkins in laps, attentive and friendly wait staff  the whole nine yards.

Their menu is a pretty standard offering of what youd expect from an upscale steakhouse: seafood appetizers, salads, steaks, chops and an assortment of gourmet accompaniments.

To start, I took a look at the impressive cocktail menu and decided on the cable car, a favorite drink of mine on days I want something other than my usual vodka/water combination. It was potent enough to last my entire visit without losing any of its spiritedness.

We were given a tasting of several menu items: the jumbo shrimp cocktail, which came to the table smoking (a dramatic effect created by dry ice); the Caesar salad, which featured freshly made croutons of white bread tossed in butter and garlic; Steak a la Lobster, a filet mignon over bordelaise topped with lobster and bearnaise, asparagus, and sliced mushroom; the Longbone Ribeye, a 34-ounce Australian wagyu beef monstrosity befitting Fred Flintstone or a small army; roasted Brussels sprouts tossed in honey and bacon jam; potatoes gruyere gratin; and lobster mac and cheese. Everything was wonderful, but my favorites were the Steak a la Lobster, Brussels sprouts and lobster mac. My dinner guest had very few complaints, and we spent most of our time oohing and aahing at the portion sizes (huge!) and presentation of each dish. At the end of dinner, we indulged in the sweeter side of things with bananas foster (complete with flaming bourbon) and a six-layer carrot cake that Im sure is the biggest dessert Ive ever seen in my life. The bananas foster was my favorite. The fruit, sliced lengthwise and drizzled with caramel, lay atop a very fluffy vanilla/banana infused cake that literally melted at the taste. The carrot cake was excellent, as well, and had bits of nuts and currants throughout.

At the end of the meal, I had coffee served in an individual French press with warm cream. It was just the boost I needed to drag myself, stuffed and happy, away from the table for a tour of the facility.

The decor, with hints of red, black and earth tones, is posh enough to let you know where you are without being too stuffy. The iconic photos of sexy Hollywood movie stars are a cool element, as well. To get my Spike Lee on here, Id only suggest that they put some color on the wall. Might I suggest a couple Denzel, Idris or Halle pics to round things out? The lighting is warm and inviting, and the music, a mixture of soul and Top 40 during my visit, adds to the relaxed ambience.

The space also features a beautiful mezzanine with classical paintings inlaid in the ceiling tiles, a fireplace, Smart TV and bookshelves that overlooks the main dining area. Below it, a VIP-style room with many of the same features boasts its own private entrance.

In all, my visit was fantastic, and I would definitely recommend this place to anyone  not only the rich and famous. Though many of the menu items are pricey (steaks range from mid $30s to nearly $60) Happy Hour, featuring bar plates starting at $5 and hand-crafted cocktails, is an affordable option MondayFriday from 4:306 p.m.
Im patiently waiting for the day the Lord opens peoples eyes so we can finally unite as one and treat one another with the utmost dignity and respect late night thoughts.

That profoundly thought-provoking statement was written by Jared Jones, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who has just entered the workforce. Ive known Jared and his family for a number of years, and my encounters with him have always been very light and free-flowing. We generally crack jokes with one another, and weve even teamed up in spirited fun to give others in his family a hard time.

Jared posted the comment on Facebook, and it instantly caught my attention. I cant recall the two of us ever having an incredibly deep conversation, so when I read his post, the seriousness of his words and the depth of the message made me pause. My first thought was, Wow, he has grown and matured so much. I was proud of him.

As I read and reread his post, the over-analytical Shannon arose. I wondered what he experienced  directly or indirectly  to make him write the post at that particular time. What was going through his mind? And what other late night thoughts did he have that were as deep as the one hed posted?

Rather than continue to wonder, I called Jared and asked him every question that occupied my brain since reading his post. Sometimes older adults dismiss or ignore the perspectives of younger generations. That, my friends, is an incredibly unfortunate and counterproductive thing to do. Sometimes we have to go directly to the horses mouth to see what he wants to drink  not force what we want onto him.

I had a lot of questions, and I was interested to see what someone of Jareds age thought. It was an enlightening discussion.

My first question was what led to that post.

I was just thinking about things in media and on Facebook. (I was) reading posts about people with different ethnicities and how they talk crazy about each other. To me, we would be in a much better place if people just got along.

My next question: Why do you think people dont get along with one another  particularly people of different races?

Because they dont understand (where the other person) is coming from. Someone bases things off their own viewpoints and perspectives. They dont see the broader picture. They see things in certain media, but that may not be the exact truth.

I followed up by asking Jared how he felt when he saw negative images portrayed in media that werent reflective of him, yet some people place him in that category because of the color of his skin.

It saddens me because we are constantly portrayed as unintelligent misfits. Hardly ever do I see media outlets displaying all the good things we do for our communities.

Shortly thereafter, Jared sent me a text with a picture of African-American actor Wendell Pierce. Included with the picture was a caption that read, Pierce, a native of New Orleans, has quietly built 75 homes in the historic African-American Pontchartrain Park neighborhood where he grew up. After Katrina he rebuilt his parents home, then his neighbors. He plans on building 100 more homes.

At this point in our conversation, I heard the resignation in Jareds voice. Part of it, I joked, was because he had just gotten off work, was tired, and he is still getting used to working in the real world. The other reason he had resignation in his voice was probably because he is feeling the burden of injustice, discrimination and hatred. Those are very adult feelings, and now that Jared is an adult, he better be able to see things as they are, in their most raw form.

In seeing things in an authentic manner, I asked Jared if he is optimistic that things will improve for America in general and Blacks in particular.

You try to put positive energy into the universe and hopefully it will come back and reflect positivity. But I really have no idea. If we keep going down the path we are going, its not going to end well for any of us. We  American citizens  overcame a lot of tragedies in the past. Blacks  we come so far but we are still so far behind. We still have work that we need to do. I wish we can all get together and realize that we wont survive in the long run if all this violence keeps happening.

Jared says he most often has his deep thoughts at night when hes unable to sleep. You just think about stuff, he says. And it gets heavy at times.

As we wrapped up our conversation we discussed the upsurge in crime, not only in Indianapolis, but seemingly everywhere. Since many of todays criminal offenders are in Jareds age range, I was interested to know how he would encourage someone his age who was not an upstanding citizen to end the violence.

If I could influence them, I would tell them to find something they are good at that is not street related. Try to grow their empire based off that instead of trying to get it off the street life. I would tell them you can make something of your life.

By the end of our conversation, I had mixed emotions. I was proud of Jareds evolution into manhood, and I felt reassured that he would be OK in life. But I was also sad that at such a young age, he had to deal with such ugly realities. Part of me wished he didnt have to be exposed to the harshness of the world, however, the other part of me was proud of the fact that he is well on his way toward helping to combat the ills we currently encounter.
The decision of scrapping Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes has made peoples lives topsy and turvy. On one hand, there is a co-ordination and understanding while on the other there is mere helplessness. Some are appreciating the PM's decision, while some are cursing him for the same.

Here are some instances of how the demonetization is affecting the common masses and is bringing out the best and the worst in Indians.

1. A rickshaw driver at Rapid Metro, Gurgaon ferried passengers for free

Image Credit: xinhuanet

Tabrez Haque was in for a sweet surprise when his auto rickshaw driver refused to charge fare as he told him that he is helping people by ferrying them for free. Ram Kumar, the auto rickshaw driver took Haque from the Rapid Metro station to Udyog Vihar for free as his regular passengers did not have enough change due to the note cancellation.

2. Kandukuri Vinoda hanged herself as she thought her Rs.56.40 lakhs cash were now useless

Image Credit: sakshipost

It was due to misinformation that Kandukuri Vinoda had to lose her life. Vinoda had Rs. 56.50 lakhs in cash after she sold 12 acre land. When she came to know about the note cancellation, Vinoda was too stressed and started asking her neighbours about how to put the cash to use before they get redundant. Her neighbours told her that the notes are now mere paper and her family too started blaming her for selling the land without consulting them. That made her too frantic and she hanged herself when her family was fast asleep.

3. These series of tweets

Guard at office didn't get paid by his contractor for past 3 months. He came in the morning & paid him for 5 months. All in 1000/500 notes.  Meghnad (@Memeghnad) November 9, 2016

After the guard took it, others made fun of him. Poor guy is so depressed. Was relieved when I told him he can get the notes changed.  Meghnad (@Memeghnad) November 9, 2016

4. Zaveri Bazaar was jam-packed with people who tried to purchase gold with their black money

Image Credit: reuters

Mumbais Zaveri Bazaar which is known for all things gold was jam packed minutes after, PM Modi announced the scrapping of notes. The jewelers, therefore took advantage of the situation and demanded Rs 55,000 for 10 gm of gold which was initially sold at Rs. 30,000! People, who had no idea about how to put their black money to use, went ahead and bought it.

5. Little piggy banks were broken for desperate cash

Image Credit: womansday

Who wouldve thought that the small savings of kids would be used during such desperate situations! Alok Kumar, a father of two from Bihar broke the piggy bank of his kids to buy milk and vegetables. Imagine, the plight of poor kids who saw their savings go for something trivial like milk and vegetables!

6. Some pharmacies and hospitals accepted people's old notes, while others turned them down

Image Credit: livemint

The family of patients who were getting admitted and those who were already admitted were in a soup as pharmacies and hospitals refused to accept new notes. Despite, the announcement that the hospitals and pharmacies should accept the notes for next 3 days, many private hospitals and chemists turned a blind eye to the notice.

7. Sex workers demand money via PayTm

Image Credit: quertime

According to a Hindustan Times report, the escorts are now demanding money via PayTm. Only PayTm users call or message me, otherwise dont disturb, I also accept Airtel Money and MobiKwik, said Shalu, a South Delhi escort.

8. Train passengers had to go hungry as pantry staff demanded only change

Image Credit: thehindu

It was a hungry night for passengers who had no change as pantry staff in many long-distance trains demanded only change. Usually, while travelling long distances, money is generally stored in the form of big denominations and therefore this caused a great inconvenience.

9. UP government helped tourists with money exchange

Image Credit: vagabondimages

There have been reports of tourists facing major money problems. So, on instructions of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, Chief Secretary Rahul Bhatnagar directed banks in Varanasi and Agra - both major tourist hotspots of the state to open special counters exclusively for foreign tourists.

10. People are rescheduling November weddings

Image Credit: weddingvenuesturkey.com

Many weddings were lined up as the month of November is considered auspicious. However, marriages are now being postponed as the wedding planners, caterers and decorators are refusing the currency.

11. Meanwhile outside an ATM in Mumbai...
Half the world is still in shock. Why you ask? Well, most of us were not prepared for Donald Trumps impressive victory. While we did have an inclination that he will get his fair share of votes, never had we ever thought in our wildest dreams that he would actually end up becoming the 45th president of The United States of America. Now that the deed is done, Americans and the rest of the world are letting it sink in slowly and steadily.

For the people on the other side of the globe, heres an interesting story particularly for the Indians. Donald Trump the real estate tycoon, did try to break into our country and set-up his very own Trump Tower in Mumbai. Yes, this was five years ago when he teamed up with a local builder for his first project in our country. However, this project never took off.

twitter

All thanks to Mumbai-based homemaker Smita Panvalkar. If youre confused, heres how the rest of the story unfolds. In order to build his monstrous 65-storey tower in Mumbai, the developer decided to take down the four-storey Pathare Prabhu Building completely and re-house its tenants.

Back in 2010, the tenants were given an ultimatum to vacate the building. While most of them agreed to this, Smita put her foot down and refused to do so.

getty

The developers offered compensation money and asked us to leave. Smita told them we won't leave the building unless they gave us an apartment in the new building. Much later we learnt that the building was named after Donald Trump, the famous American tycoon," Smitas husband told Mumbai Mirror.

This obviously created quite a hype in the country as several articles were published and interviews were taken and people praised the womans courage.

Mumbai Mirror used the headline Woman who won't let Donald Trump Mumbai for their article which created quite a storm back then.

the fiscal times

Saying no to this came with its own set of problems for Smita and her family. The living conditions that were already not up to the mark started deteriorating even further. The pipes leaked and the power cuts were regular. Once they did not have electricity for 45 days after a short circuit.

"We lived and slept in the flat in the sweltering humidity and heat. Smita was overworked, doing the chores," her husband said.

Despite all their hardships, the Panvalkars continued to live in the same building. Eventually, Trump moved on to other projects and this particular project was called off.

www.t13.cl

Another tragedy struck the Panvalkars, when Smita passed away last year after suffering a massive heart attack. And such was their love for her that the family continued to live in the same building to to fulfill her commitment.

As they say all good things come to an end, the family finally moved out a few months back after a builder assured them a flat in an upcoming 22-storey building.

Now, will this old building turn into President Trumps tower in the near future or not that remains to be seen.
The sudden demonetisation of currency by the government seems to be bringing out the worst among the people. A mob of nearly 500 people went on to ransack many shops and block the Noida-Badarpur in Southeast Delhis Shahin Bagh area. The ruckus affected areas near Apollo Hospital as well.

Tariq Anwar

Four policemen were injured as protesters started stone pelting when they were asked to return to homes. Some DTC buses were also attacked by the mob.

According to police, the incident was reported late in the evening when a mob blocked the main road outside the locality while protesting against the unavailability of money in the banks and ATMs in the area.

Tareque Anwar, Indiatimes

Tareque Anwar, Indiatimes

Meanwhile, rumours of 1 kg salt being sold at around Rs 400 added to the anger of these people, who yelled that the shopkeepers were hoarding and black marketing the essential products in the market.

Tariq Anwar

Many shops, Indiatimes correspondent visited, denied having salt. As the news spread, people throng to local grocery shops but were turned away.

We do not have the supply of goods as the suppliers are not accepting Rs 500 and 1000. People are thinking that we are hiding the stuff. Things will hopefully get better in the coming days, said Abdullah, a shopkeeper in the area.

Police, in the meantime, used lathi charge to disperse the angry mob. We did not use any force against the miscreants, but they were creating a ruckus and blocking the main road, which caused big inconvenience to the people, said a beat constable.

Tariq Anwar

Local residents, however, were angry on the protesters as well as the government for taking the decision without ensuring that everything will go smoothly.

The government should urgently do something about it. Neither we have money to buy essential things, nor they are easily available, said a local resident.

Tareque Anwar, Indiatimes

"We are doming the area. The situation is under control. 4-5 of our men sustained injuries. We are investigating the matter. We will check the footage of the area and take action against those who are found guilty," said DCP Southeast Ramil Bhatia.
Life is like a box of chocolates, which is why you should stick to the one in the middle row, that's usually where chocolate companies hide the best one. While the country rants against and celebrates the new currency notes, comment on them looking like monopoly money - the notes have brought the country together like very few things in our history. Plus it's also sent the world a message.

It's also corrected two historical wrongs: 1. That Indians are never on time and 2. Indians don't know how to line up and stand in a queue. Woohoo.

And we're actually getting creative about it!

1. Ahmedabad woke up early and lined up in front of banks, desperate to get their hands on money they could actually use. There was a cop too, his instructions were patiently listened to, some even became friends with him.
Desperate times require desperate measures. The family of a 35-year-old dengue patient paid back a Kolkata hospital in their own coins, literally.

wikimapia.org

On Wednesday, the hospital told Sukanta Chhaule's relatives to arrange Rs 40,000 for his discharge the next day.

It set off panic at the Chhaules' Dasnagar home for they neither had cards nor enough cash in denominations other than Rs 500 and Rs 1000. They pleaded with the hospital to accept the old notes, but were refused. Their offer of a cheque was also turned down.

The Chhaules then sent frantic messages over WhatsApp groups to friends, relatives and neighbours for loose change.The response was overwhelming. They were flooded with coins. By 3 am, they had collected the bill amount of Rs 40,000.

On Thursday morning, they wrapped the coins in cellophane packets and bundled these inside a big jute bag and arrived at the hospital gate.

BCCL/Representational Image

The stunned hospital authorities initially refused to accept the coins and asked for a demand draft. They relented when the family threatened to lodge a police complaint. Now, it was the hospital's turn to count the coins.

It took six staff members three hours to do the job.Sukanta was released at 3 pm. Snehashish, the patient's brother, said: "We had pleaded with the hospital authorities to accept the old notes or a cheque. But they refused. So we thought about collecting the coins, which, we knew would be difficult but not impossible."

navbharattimes

The Chhaules were bowled over by the response to their WhatsApp appeal. "While many gave us all the coins they had at home, others handed us their children's piggy banks.We kept receiving the coins till midnight," said Tapas Ray , his brother-in-law. A dozen relatives and neighbours then pitched in to count the money till 3am.

"At 11am sharp, we reached the hospital gate. But the authorities said they wouldn't accept coins and demanded a bank draft instead. We stood firm and told them this was the only way we would pay since it was legitimate currency . An official was still adamant but relented when we threatened to take police help," said Snehashish.
The Reserve Bank of India on Friday said enough cash is available and urged the general public to exercise patience in exchanging currency notes.

The RBI said it might take a while for the banks to recalibrate their ATMs. "Several ATMs have started functioning from this morning as the banks could complete recalibration of these machines to allow withdrawals up to Rs 2,000 to begin with," it said. Read more

1. ED Launches Probe Into $208 Million Embraer Aircraft Deal Over Kickback Allegations

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has started a probe into the Embraer aircraft deal which was signed during UPA rule in 2008. In the three-aircraft deal, foreign investigating agencies have alleged that payoffs were received by Indian agents for pushing the deal with the government.

The CBI had last month registered an FIR and named Vipin Khanna as the agent who allegedly received payoffs in the $208 million deal. Read more

2. India Accounts For The Highest Number Of Child Deaths Due Diarrhoea, Pneumonia, Even Worse Than Somalia And Sudan

India has the highest number of pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths among children in the world with nearly three lakh children dying in 2016, a report released ahead of World Pneumonia Day on November 12 said.

The Pneumonia and Diarrhoea Progress Report for 2016 which was released by International Vaccine Access Centre(IVAC), Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that the top five countries with highest global burden of child pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths are India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. Read more

3. Paytm CEO Strikes Back, Replies To Kejriwal After He Called The Company 'Biggest Beneficiary' Of Demonetisation

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had on Thursday launched a twitter attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi after online payment valet service Paytm had a front page newspaper ad featuring the Indian premier. But Kejriwal cried foul. In a series of tweets he questioned the ad, claiming that it was "utterly shameful".

Vijay Shekhar, the CEO of Paytm was quick to rebut Kejriwal's allegations. He replied to the Delhi CM saying "The biggest beneficiary is our country". Read more

4. Kolkata Man's Family Settles Rs 40,000 Hospital Bill In Coins After They Ran Out Of Cash Due To Demonetisation

Desperate times require desperate measures. The family of a 35-year-old dengue patient paid back a Kolkata hospital in their own coins, literally. On Wednesday, the hospital told Sukanta Chhaule's relatives to arrange Rs 40,000 for his discharge the next day. It set off panic at the Chhaules' Dasnagar home for they neither had cards nor enough cash in denominations other than Rs 500 and Rs 1000.

The Chhaules then sent frantic messages over WhatsApp groups to friends, relatives and neighbours for loose change.The response was overwhelming. They were flooded with coins. By 3 am, they had collected the bill amount of Rs 40,000. Read more

5. Meet Lakshmi - India's First Banking Robot, Who Debuted In Chennai

Endearing, interactive and superfast with data, India's first banking robot Lakshmi made her debut in Chennai. Launched by City Union Bank on Thursday, the artificial intelligence powered robot will be the first on-site bank helper.

Top private lender HDFC Bank, which is also experimenting with robots to answer customer queries, is testing its humanoid at its innovation lab. Lakshmi, which took more than six months to develop, can answer intelligently on more than 125 subjects. Read more
The smell of gunpowder and the echo of cannon fire wafted through the cool early-morning air Friday morning as hundreds of people of all ages gathered at Timber-Linn Memorial Park to remember the sacrifices of veterans near and far.

As always, a highlight of the 65th annual Veterans Day Memorial Service was a 21-gun salute of howitzer cannons by Bravo Battery 2-218 FA of the Oregon Army National Guard.

Program emcee Jim Willis opened the ceremony by reminding all that, Today we pause to remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

Chaplain Scott Delbridge reminded everyone, Life is precious, fragile and that we should remember we are a people of hope and love.

Albany Mayor Sharon Konopa welcomed everyone to a full day of events and said that the community is filled with caring people.

This memorial was built by those caring people, she said. Our veterans are humble people who consider it an honor to serve our country. Today, we honor those who served.

She urged everyone to also help make Albany an example of respect for all mankind.

Navy veteran and Linn County Commissioner Will Tucker said he vividly remembers coming home from deployments in the 1970s.

We didnt feel well received, he said. I remember attending the Veterans Day parade and crying. We could not ask for a better group of people who put it on every year.

Tucker said he didn't understand what veteran sacrifices meant until his own son was deployed to Iraq.

Thats when I realized how my parents felt when I deployed, he said. Serving affects their parents, their spouses and their children.

Major General Michael Stencel, commander of the Oregon National Guard, called the Albany Veterans Day celebration a great tradition.

Stencel is a 1983 graduate of the University of Washington, with a bachelors degree in civil engineering. He joined the Oregon Air National Guard in April 1984 and was commissioned through the Air National Guard Academy of Military Science in December 1984. He is a fighter pilot.

Stencel added although the military has a long tradition of being apolitical, he wanted to congratulate Mayor Konopa, who was re-elected to office on Tuesday.

Mayor Konopa is a great supporter of our veterans, he said.

Stencel, who was promoted to adjutant general in 2015, commands 8,100 citizen-soldiers and airmen. He was the keynote speaker at the annual veterans banquet held Thursday evening as well.

This is a day to reflect on the lives of our veterans, especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice, he said. We must reflect on how their service affects their families and their communities.

Stencel reminded all that Oregon has lost 20 soldiers in recent conflicts.

He also said todays military is charged with building global partnerships.

They understand the missions they have undertaken, Stencel said of our service men and women.

He thanked veterans for your courage and sacrifice that are reminders of the strengths of this great nation.

Willis presented Stencel with a framed aerial photo of the Linn County Veterans Memorial at Timber Linn Park.

Carl Frank and Terri Thorpe placed wreaths to honor POW/MIA and Gold Star families, those who have lost children in military service. Thorpe's son, Tyler Troyer, died while serving in Iraq.

Linn Benton Young Marines presented and retired the colors. Pastor Stephen Gantt gave the benediction and echo taps were played by Eriq Thompson and Colton Byers of Boy Scout Troop 99.

The 234th Army Band performed songs of each of the military services.
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.
Low Emission and Technology Minerals Conference (incorporating the twelfth annual Australian Uranium Conference)



With low emissions energy becoming more important than ever, the Australian Uranium Conference is being modified, broadening the scope to include other metals and minerals produced in Australia, which along with uranium, are critical in the production of low emissions electricity.



This conference, now in its twelfth year has been the leading event in Australia for the Uranium sector. Now expanded, the conference will look at minerals such as Rare Earths Elements, Lithium, Graphite, Zinc, Cobalt and others relevant to cleaner energy and energy storage.



Boasting between 220 and 600 delegates attending over the past few years from countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, UK, Singapore and USA as well as many others, this event has been the 'go to event' for these sectors. With over 44% of attendees being retail, corporate and industry investment based and with the chance to meet commodity buyers, brokers, funds, retail investors and government representatives, this event has been the number one event for the Uranium and Rare Earths Industry and will now be the number one event for all low Emission and Technology Minerals.
Shannon Compton joined the U.S. Army in 1985 as a combat engineer, and initially planned to use that as a way to pay for college.

I got married and we had a kid and the bills started backing up, he said. So he stayed in the military to help his growing family.

Compton, 50, is currently the Operations Sgt. Major for the Oregon Army National Guard, and in charge of operations and training for the agency. The Jefferson residents military career is coming to a close next March.

So hes planning to enroll in college. Better late than never, right?

Compton isnt sure what degree hell pursue, but it could have business administration aspects, which would fit nicely with the experience hes gained wearing a uniform.

Today, Compton will be honored as one of the Distinguished Veterans at the Albany Veterans Day Parade.

Its an honor to represent our veterans past and present, Compton said. Its pretty awesome to see the support the community puts forth.

Compton said his military career was enjoyable, for the most part.

I liked the camaraderie piece of it. You dont get that with a lot of other jobs.  Those links you make are always there, he added.

While serving with the National Guard, he ended up in war-torn Iraq in 2004 and 2005. There werent too many good times there.  Probably the best thing was when we took them through the election process, Compton said.

Hed recommend joining the military for any young man or woman. Everyone could learn a lot from a three-year term or a six-year term, Compton said.

He added that integration of females into combat units is a challenge, but the world is changing, and that is occurring despite a little bit of grumbling.

Its a tough time to be an old dog, Compton said, with a chuckle.

After high school, he served 10 years in the Army, then joined the Oregon Army National Guard part-time from 1995 to 1999. He began working with the guard full-time in 1999 and has been in his current position since 2012.

Compton and his wife Connie Compton have five children: Krista Hobson, 25, of Salem; Stephanie Compton, 23, of Albany; Joshua Compton, 21, of Jefferson, Jordyn Compton, 19, of Jefferson; and Haley Compton, 15, who is homeschooled. He also has three grandchildren.
The Ogun State Commissioner of Police, CP, Ahmed Iliyasu, has called on residents of Anglican Road, Ilupewo community in Ado-Odo-Otta Local Government Area of the state to remain calm after they reportedly received a letter from suspected armed robbers of an impending visit.

The robbers posted the letters on gates and doors informing residents of the boundary community between Lagos and Ogun States, to keep Christmas gifts for them as they would be visiting anytime soon.

Following the development, the residents have been living in fear, while some have deserted their homes.

According to reports, the residents, Wednesday, woke up to discover several of such letters posted to their doorposts, telling them that the robbers were coming for the operation because of the coming Christmas and New Year festivities.

The letter which had the following incomplete phone numbers  0702288949, 080449930  stressed that they (robbers) didnt want excuses from residents over non-availability of money at home.

The said letter reportedly typed in Yoruba language, introduced the robbers as Strong men of the road that own the night, urging the recipients to ensure they keep money at home always, even as they vowed to deal mercilessly with any resident who claims he does not have money as advanced notice has been given to prepare them.

But the CP, in a statement on Thursday, assured the residents that the police was working effortlessly to stop the planned robbery.

He stated that about 60 houses on Anglican Road had the letters posted on their doorposts and that the residents reported the matter at the Sango Police Station.

He, however, called on the residents to remain calm as the security operatives were up to task in dealing with the criminals.

We are on top of the situation and security has been beefed up in the community, the CP stated.

Source: Daily Post
Leaders of communities in the Oko Oba, Agege area of Lagos State have urged the police to tackle the upsurge in crime as the Yuletide approaches.

The leaders, who held a meeting with the Divisional Police Officer of the Oko Oba division, Oyegbemi Bukoye, under a programme tagged, Eminent Persons Forum, said the police had a lot of work to do as crimes usually increased towards the end of the year.

The Baale of Abule Egba Titun, Oko Oba, Akin Bakare, said some youths used end-of-the-year carnivals to perpetrate evils, asking the police to cancel such gatherings.

He said, Also, the use of bangers poses a great threat. The police should watch out for beer parlours to reduce crime rate in the communities.

The Secretary, Motorcycle Operators Association of Lagos State, Ojokoro branch D, Mr. Adesina Kareem, said riders using their motorcycles for robbery should also be checked.

The Area Commander, Area G Command, Ogba, Lanre Ogunlowo, said the police would achieve a great deal if the community leaders availed them of information at all times.

The Oko Oba DPO said the police would not relent in tackling crimes.

Source: Punch
Lagos State Governor, Mr Akinwunmi Ambode on Thursday said that investors willing to do business in the agricultural sector in the State can be rest assured of a ready market and returns on investment as the daily consumption of food items in the State is worth over N3billion daily.

The Governor, who spoke at the maiden edition of the Lagos Food Security and Exhibition Summit with the theme Actualizing Sustainable Food Security in Lagos State: A New, Comprehensive Agenda, said his administration remains committed in its efforts towards maximizing its comparative advantage in the sector to achieve food security.

He said Nigeria had no business resorting to importation to feed its citizens, adding that there was no alternative to achieving food security other than tilling the land and embrace best practices that will improve efficiency in the agricultural value chain.

The Governor said, Our core policy thrust towards achieving food security is to maximize the comparative advantage of the State in agriculture and establish partnerships with other States of the Federation with comparative advantage in specific areas.

Listing some areas of collaboration already activated, Governor Ambode said his administration has sealed a landmark partnership with Kebbi State Government for the development of agricultural commodities such as rice, wheat, groundnut, onion, maize and beef value chain, expressing optimism that the partnership can result in the supply of 70 per cent of the total national rice consumption.

We have also acquired agricultural land in other neighbouring States of Ogun and Oyo as well as Abuja. Specifically, 500 hectares of farm land has been acquired for rice cultivation in Eggua, Ogun State, 84.7 hectares at Okinni in Oshogbo for oil palm processing, among others, the Governor said.

He said the Lagos Food Security Summit and Exhibition was organized to bring together stakeholders in the Agricultural sector to proffer solutions to the challenges militating against the achievement of food security, noting that the success recorded in the last Traffic Summit that has eased the traffic situation in the metropolis can be replicated in the area of food security in the state.

He therefore said that in the wake of the economic challenges facing the country there was no better time for the nation to review its approach and the redirection of its energies to food production.

Behind every dark cloud, they say, is a silver lining. One of the challenges the current economic recession has brought to the fore is the urgent need to develop a sustainable programme that will guarantee food security for our people. As a nation, in the past, we spent billions of Foreign Exchange on importation of food and food items many of which can be cultivated in our country.

Our country is blessed with very good arable land and a climate that supports food production. We can achieve food security and create employment opportunities for our teeming youth if we put in place the right policies and incentives that will attract significant investment into the Agricultural sector, he said.
Nigerian newspaper headlines November 11, 2016.

Vanguard

Kogi State House of Assembly has called on the Federal Government to accord the state its rightful status as an oil-producing one, following the exploration of oil in Echeno and Udeke, all in Ibaji Local Government Area of the state.

Leadership

The Court of Appeal, Abuja division has allowed the motion for leave filed by the governorship aspirant of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Ondo State, Eyitayo Jegede, SAN to challenge the judgement of Justice Okon Abang of the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja which ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to recognise Jimoh Ibrahim as candidate of the party.

The Sun

Former minister of Aviation and director of Media and Publicity in the Campaign Organisation of former President Goodluck Jonathan, Femi Fani-Kayode was, yesterday, arraigned by the Federal Government before a Federal High Court, in Abuja, on a five-count charge of money laundering of N26 million.

Punch

There are strong indications that a gale of defection will soon hit the All Progressives Congress in the South-West.

Guardian

The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), John Odigie-Oyegun, yesterday urged support for Rotimi Akeredolu at the governorship polls.

The Nation

The continued free fall in the value of Nigerias local currency, the naira, has taken a big toll on the purchasing power of the ordinary man on the street, Director, Professional Programmes, Pan Atlantic University, Isaac-Ogugua Ezechukwu has said.

Thisday

The Chairman of Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and other Financial Institutions, Senator Rafiu Ibrahim yesterday said time would soon run out on recalcitrant obligors of the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), given the renewed commitment of the lawmakers to support AMCONs debt recovery drive.

National Mirror

President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday said most of the crude oil stolen from Nigeria passes through the Gulf of Guinea.

Premium Times

President Muhammadu Buhari and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, on Thursday disappointed a mammoth crowd who thronged the Democracy Park in Akure for the flag off of the 2016 governorship campaign of the All Progressives Congress, APC.
The Abia State Police Command said one person was killed during the violence at Wednesdays chairmanship primaries of the PDP in the state.

The commands spokesman, Ogbonnaya Nta, told the News Agency of Nigeria that the deceased, identified as Onyemaechi, was a member of staff of Isialangwa North Local Government Area venue of the election.

He died in a fire at the chairmans office, the spokesperson said.

The deceased died when the office was allegedly set on fire by aggrieved delegates while three others sustained various degrees of injuries.

The spokesperson said the police arrested four persons in connection with the mayhem.

A witness said trouble broke out when some delegates who came for the poll at the council headquarters in Okpuala-Ngwa, rejected the list presented by the party officials that came to conduct the exercise.

It was learnt that the group, which threatened to disrupt the exercise, alleged that the list was doctored to favour a particular aspirant.

The agitation was said to have caused confusion and tension at the venue.

The witness said that in the midst of the crisis that ensued, somebody sneaked into the chairmans office with a jerry can of petrol and set the place ablaze.

The intention was to burn the disputed list, the source said, adding that the fire escalated, killing one person on the spot.

Mr. Nta said that three other occupants of the office sustained serious burns and were rushed to hospital for treatment.

He said that the command had commenced investigation into the matter.

The primaries, which were organised to elect the partys flag bearers for the December 17 local government election in the state, was stalemated in most of the 17 council areas due to violence.

There were also allegations of attempts by some powerful politicians to impose their anointed candidates.

The Publicity Secretary of the PDP in Abia, Don Ubani, denied the allegations of violence in a telephone interview, but admitted that there were minor skirmishes during the exercise in some local government areas.

Mr. Ubani said that the partys leadership was still reviewing the reports of the election committees.

Source: NAN
The ruling party of Spain, Peoples Party is looking to amend the countrys privacy laws in order to adapt them to the new technologies and social media.

The reform wishes to curb the spreading of images that infringe the honour of a person, making special mention of the fact that Spains 1982 law covering this area is outdated due to the subsequent appearance of the internet.

The proposed amendments are aimed at satirical pictures that use images of people without their consent.

An adoption to this law would effectively outlaw popular memes, forcing web users to either stop creating and publishing such content or be prosecuted as criminals.

We are worried about this reform because internet does not require special laws; the same rights and duties should exist online as offline, Spains platform for the defence of freedom of information (PDLI) said. The PDLIs legal director, Carlos Sanchez Almeida, said: If the plan is to clamp down on any publication of images without consent of the individual, the popular activity of using memes to generate political or social criticism would become dangerous.

Peoples Party representatives stated however that the proposal has only just been put forward and may yet be reviewed and amended before its adopted.
After electrifying shows in Port Harcourt, Abuja and Abakaliki, Timaya will, once again, treat his fans in Onitsha to a medley of his biggest hits at the Legend Real Deal Experience this Sunday, November 13th.

In a bid to explain what his fans should expect from the show in Onitsha, the dancehall king said:
The Association of Lagos Titled Chiefs has called on the Senate to revisit the demand for special status for Lagos State, which was the content of a bill sponsored by Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu, who represents Lagos Central.

It would be recalled that the Senate voted against the bill through a voice vote called by the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu.

Reacting on the development, President of the Lagos Titled Chiefs, Mrs. Iyabo Foresythe, while commending the Senate for, at least listening to the bill, said the agitation for special status for Lagos became more forceful after the South West Zonal public hearing on proposed amendment of the 1999 Constitution.

According to her, It was the opinion of the people that Lagos be given a special status. As key stakeholders with varied interests in the cosmopolitan city of Lagos and the economic capital of Nigeria, we have continually stressed that the state remains the commercial and industrial capital of Nigeria with a contributions of about 60 per cent of the nations GDP.

The association also said that the state remains the largest employer of Labour in the country a situation which only a special status can sustain as we are convinced that the passage of the bill would translate to economic prosperity and wellbeing of Nigerians.

The association therefore noted that it would be unfair to deny the state a special status as it hosts millions of Nigerians and continue to attract more every day, saying, If Lagos was given a special status and more funds, the facilities that would be created would not be used by only Lagos indigenes or Yoruba indigenes but by all residents, irrespective of their ethnicity or nationality.

It added that the argument even becomes very incumbent following the recent passing of the North East Development Commission Bill, with the allocation of three percent Valued Added Tax (VAT) to the area. It is now obvious to us that equity and justice will always give rise to peace, stability and progress in any society, while injustice breed acrimony, instability and retrogression. We are indeed not happy that with the contribution of 68 percent of the VAT Income coming from Lagos, Lagos still does not deserve a special status to enhance economic development and fund the infrastructure deficit in the city-state.

The association stated that the resultant huge urban population and pressure on Lagos continue to put enormous pressure on amenities and services and pose peculiar security challenges to it adding that its strategic importance to Nigeria cannot be over-emphasized.

Lagos contributions in terms of GDP, political, social and economic development cannot be wished away. Indeed, we do not hesitate to call it a home for all Nigerians and it should be noted that those who have defined themselves in this country, can call Lagos their first or second home, as the city-state continue to play critical roles in the nations economic development.

Source: Guardian
The Lagos State Police Command on Thursday arrested a woman, Biola Simon, for allegedly defrauding bank customers after giving them fake prophecies.

Simon, who belongs to a four-member gang was arrested while her accomplices fled after they allegedly swindled a victim of N150,000.

It was gathered that the victim, after realizing hes been duped, immediately reported to Dopemu Police Division, and Simon was arrested with the N150,000 recovered from her.

A source at the Dopemu Police Station who spoke to our reporters said the criminal and her gang specialized in defrauding unsuspecting bank customers in the area through fake prophecies.

In her statement, she confessed that the syndicates mode of operation was to lurk around bank premises, while her role was to accost a bank customer suspected to be with money, the source added.

The suspect explained that she would pretend that she was new in Lagos and asked for direction from the victim. Simon would subsequently make shocking spiritual revelations about her victim, after which she would advise that a special prayer must be offered for the victim.

The next move was to take the victim to a nearby place where the three other accomplices were waiting and they would replace the money withdrawn by the victim with disposable papers, covered with a few naira notes.

A man who the suspect tried to swindle on Thursday of N150,000 raised the alarm, and a police patrol team in the area apprehended Simon.

A witness, Rafiu Jimoh, said the policemen had returned the money to the victim.

He said, The woman dressed responsibly, but she usually begged targeted customers coming out of the bank to direct her to an address. She is believed to use magical powers, as she will thereafter start giving revelations about her victim, luring the person to go for prayers with her.

While the purported prayer is going on by the syndicate, the contents of the victims bag or purse will be replaced with papers covered with a few real notes. They will thereafter disappear with the money.

The woman was arrested on Thursday by a police patrol team, but the three others escaped in a car. The stolen N150,000 was recovered and returned to the victim.

Confirming the arrest, the State Police Spokesperson, SP Dolapo Badmos, said the Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni, has directed that the suspect be charged to court.
Ten years later, the open-sourcing of Java remains a point of contention, with many in the community extolling the importance of an open Java, while others remain critical of its handling, including the belief that Sun Microsystems didnt go far enough.

Sun Microsystems officially open-sourced Java on Nov. 13, 2006a move long pined for by the industry at large. Javas code had already been accessible prior to that datea strategy that helped boost the platform from its earliest days, notes Java founder James Gosling.

[ The big 4 Java IDEs reviewed: See how Eclipse, NetBeans, JDeveloper, and IntelliJ IDEA stack up. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorlds Application Development newsletter. ]

The source code for Java was available to all from the first day it was released in 1995, says Gosling, who is now chief architect at Liquid Robotics. What we wanted out of that was for the community to help with security analysis, bug reporting, performance enhancement, understanding corner cases, and a whole lot more. It was very successful.

Javas original license, Gosling says, allowed people to use the source code internally but not redistribute. It wasnt open enough for the open source crowd, he says.

Sun's decision

IBM at the time wanted Java to be contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, where it would have been distributed under the Apache license. Ultimately, Sun chose to shift Java to the GNU General Public License, which then-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz called a momentous change. Under the GPL, derivatives of Java would also have to be distributed, a shift intended to help Java better fit in with the open source community, Gosling says.

Since the open-sourcing, Sun and, in turn, Oracle (which acquired Sun in early-2010) have remained in the drivers seat for Javas evolution, although other parties have contributed to the code. While Gosling has taken Oracle to task for its handling of Java at times, he sees the open-sourcing as beneficial.

Its one of the most heavily scrutinized and solid bodies of software youll find. Community participation was vitally important, he says.

The schism

A former Oracle Java evangelist, however, sees the open source move as watered down.

Sun didnt open-source Java per se, says Reza Rahman, who has led a recent protest against Oracles handling of enterprise Java. What they did was to open-source the JDK under a modified GPL license. In particular, the Java SE and Java EE TCKs [Technology Compatibility Kits] remain closed source.

This, Rahman says, has been a significant problem for projects like Apache Harmony, as well as for community members that would like to contribute to the TCKs.

Indeed, Sun retained a lot of control over Java even if the JCP [Java Community Process] is relatively open now, he says. In particular Sun and Oracle fully control Java-related intellectual property and copyrights through the JCP.

Sun was not an open source champion back then, Rahman adds.

Open-sourcing the JDK had a lot to do with Sun retaining credibility and increasing adoption for Java in the face of pressure from the broader community, industry, and IBM, Rahman says. Even then Sun pretty tightly controlled contributions to OpenJDK. Oracle does exactly the same.

Gosling likes the decision to go with the GPL.

I think its worked well, he says. We always had to juggle the communitys freedom against bad actors who were always trying to hijack the community.

While plenty could have been done differently with the open-sourcing, things would have only turned out worse, Gosling says. Avoiding powerful hijack attempts was the No. 1 reason that the licenses were less liberal than many would have liked.

The Java community, he adds, is on a pretty good track right now. Im really looking forward to JDK 10. Java Development Kit 9, not 10, is due next summer, featuring modularity.

Rahman, now a senior architect at CapTech Consulting, would like to see reformation of the JCP to reduce Oracles strong control. Despite his reservations about how the open-sourcing has gone, Rahman still likes the move.

It is definitely important for Java to be completely open source. It allows for some degree of contribution from the community, keeps the code relatively open, helps adoption by building confidence in the enterprise, and allows for some third-party use of OpenJDK code, he says.

More broadly, the open-sourcing helps build a strong ecosystem around Java by signaling that the platform is open source-friendly, Rahman adds. Without open-sourcing the JDK, I dont think Java would be where it is today.

Related articles
June 5, 1929  Nov. 7, 2016

Frances J. Shaffer slipped gently into the arms of Jesus on Nov. 7, 2016, following a valiant battle with lymphoma.

She was born in Pueblo, Colorado, on June 5, 1929, the second of five children of Lattye and Leonard Mummert. After living most of her life in Scio Frances relocated to Klamath Falls about seven years ago to be near her daughter and family.

She is survived by her daughter, Paula (Dick) Cloud; grandchildren Donny Cloud and Nikki (Jason) Blodgett; and four precious great-grandchildren, Noah and Natalie Cloud, and Wyatt and Evie Blodgett; as well as sister Bonnie (Richard) Schradle; brother Leonard (Kathy) Mummert; and many special nieces and nephews.

Frances was preceded in death by her parents and sisters, Lil Wartenbee and Barbara Morris.

A graveside service will be at 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19, at the Franklin Butte Cemetery in Scio.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to the Sky Lake Cancer Treatment Center, 2610 Uhrmann Road, Klamath Falls, OR 97601, or Klamath Hospice, 4745 S. Sixth St., Klamath Falls, OR 97603.
The shock of Donald Trumps upset victory has begun to wear off. Now the search for answers begins. In particular: How in this age of big data collection and data-crunching analytics could so many polls, economic election models, and surveyseven those by top Republican pollstershave been so wrong going into election day?

Some got it rightGeda, the mystic monkey from China, and Felix, a Russian polar bear, for starters. A survey of Halloween presidential candidate masks also predicted a Trump presidency, as did The Simpsons back in 2000. And there are a lot of Democratic strategists wishing theyd given more credence this past summer to Michael Moores analysis of the political landscape, especially in the Rust Belt.

[ Download the InfoWorld quick guide: Learn to crunch big data with R. | Cut to the key news in technology trends and IT breakthroughs with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter, our summary of the top tech happenings. ]

Looking for signs of intelligence

For those who like their predictions brewed with a dash more data, an artificial intelligence system developed by Indian startup Genic.ai successfully predicted not only the Democratic and Republican primaries, but each presidential election since 2004. To come up with its predictions, the MoglA system uses 20 million data points from online platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Twitter to gauge voter engagement.

MoglA found that Trump was topping Barack Obamas online engagement numbers during the 2008 election by a margin of 25 percentimpressive even after factoring in the greater participation in social media today.

Sanjiv Rai, founder of Genic.ai, admits there are limitations to the dataMoglA cant always analyze whether a post is positive or negative. Nonetheless, it has been right in predicting that the candidate with the most engagement online wins.

If you look at the primaries, in the primaries, there were immense amounts of negative conversations that happen with regard to Trump. However, when these conversations started picking up pace, in the final days, it meant a huge game opening for Trump and he won the primaries with a good margin, Rai told CNBC.

Artificial intelligence has advantages over more traditional data analysis programs. While most algorithms suffer from programmers/developers biases, MoglA aims at learning from her environment, developing her own rules at the policy layer, and developing expert systems without discarding any data, Rai said. His system could also be improved by more granular data, he told CNBCfor instance, if Google gave MoglA access to the unique internet addresses assigned to each digital device.

If someone was searching for a YouTube video on how to vote, then looked for a video on how to vote for Trump, this could give the AI a good idea of the voters intention, CNBC wrote. Given the amount of data available online, using social media to predict election results is likely to become increasingly popular.

Still not convinced and wanting to blame James Comey for Clintons loss? MoglA predicted a Trump victory before the FBI announced it was examining new Clinton emails.

Answer me this

There are also less data-intensive ways of making accurate predictions. American University professor Allan Lichtman doesnt rely on social media, poll results, or demographics to predict elections, but he has an even better track record than MoglA: Lichtman has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1984.

Using earthquake prediction methods that gauge stability vs. upheaval, Lichtman says he developed a set of 13 true/false statements that predict elections based on the performance of the party currently in the White House.

Theres a real theory behind this. And the theory is presidential elections dont work the way we think they do, Lichtman told CBSNews. Theyre not decided by the turns of the campaigns, the speeches, the debates, the fundraising. Rather, presidential elections are fundamentally referenda on the performance of the party holding the White House. If that performance is good enough, they get four more years. If its not, theyre turned out and the challenging party wins.

Lichtman says his 13 keys (explained in more depth by the Washington Post) are a historically based system founded on the study of every presidential election from 1860 to 1980. His keys are simply ways of mathematically and specifically measuring the incumbent partys performance based on the following factors:

Party mandate Contest Incumbency Third party Short-term economy Long-term economy Policy change Social unrest Scandal Foreign/military success Foreign/military failure Incumbent charisma Challenger charisma

If six of his statements are false, Lichtman says, the incumbent party loses the presidency.

Donald Trumps severe and unprecedented problems bragging about sexual assault and then having 10 or more women coming out and saying, Yes, thats exactly what you didthis is without precedent, Lichtman pointed out in an interview with the Washington Post. But it didnt change a key. By the narrowest of possible margins, the keys still point to a Trump victory.

Heres predicting that MoglA and Lichtman will be closely watched in the next electionin addition to Geda and Felix, of course.
Lean Hogs 79.45 target ONE44 Analytics - Tue Nov 1, 4:51PM CDT By looking at the chart alone you can see how the major Gann squares are where a lot of highs and lows happen. HEZ22 : 85.200s (+0.32%)

Cotton Closes Up the 3 Cent Limit Barchart - Tue Nov 1, 4:47PM CDT Cotton rallied by the 3 cent limits on Tuesday, marking just the 16th green day since August 28th. Dec contracts had dropped a net 42.16 cents since then. The FOMC is in session today and tomorrow, with... CTZ22 : 78.88 (+5.17%) CTH23 : 77.02 (+3.19%) CTK23 : 76.70 (+2.47%)

Cattle Fade on Tuesday Barchart - Tue Nov 1, 4:47PM CDT The live cattle futures market turned red in the back months during the afternoon. At the close the August 23 contract was a nickel in the black to the other contracts 10 to 57 cent losses. Tuesdays... LEZ22 : 151.950s (-0.34%) LEG23 : 155.250s (-0.37%) LEJ23 : 158.875s (-0.13%) GFX22 : 176.925s (-0.39%) GFF23 : 178.200s (-0.70%)

Firm Tuesday in Hog Market Barchart - Tue Nov 1, 4:47PM CDT Lean hogs ended up going nowhere to start the new month of November. Dec 22, May 23, and July 23 ended in the black, but with gains of less than 30 cents. June 23 closed 2 cents in the red,... HEZ22 : 85.200s (+0.32%) HEJ23 : 93.600s (unch) KMZ22 : 95.375s (-0.10%)

Afternoon Rally for Wheat Market Barchart - Tue Nov 1, 4:47PM CDT Wheats started the first trade day of the new month with weakness attempting a turnaround Tuesday. Afternoon strength pushed the board back into the black to extend the gains from Monday. CBT SRW ended... ZWZ22 : 900-2 (-0.25%) ZWH23 : 917-0 (-0.22%) ZWPAES.CM : 8.3311 (+2.22%) KEZ22 : 988-0 (-0.20%) KEPAWS.CM : 9.4786 (+1.17%) MWZ22 : 986-0 (-0.38%)

Dec Corn Held Under $7 Barchart - Tue Nov 1, 4:47PM CDT Corn added another 4 3/4 to 6 1/4 cents to the upside on Tuesday, but December failed to get above the contested $7 round number again. Open interest has been steadily rising in the Dec contract from 1.414m... ZCYAUS-BIW.CM : 177.93 (-0.46%) ZCZ22 : 696-0 (-0.25%) ZCPAUS.CM : 6.9269 (+1.50%) ZCH23 : 700-6 (-0.25%) ZCK23 : 700-0 (-0.25%)

Livestock Report Walsh Trading - Tue Nov 1, 4:20PM CDT Hogs consolidate
At 68, Tom Owen is an authority on issues surrounding Vietnam veterans and Agent Orange contamination. He's been to Washington DC 18 times and is in constant communication with senators and party leadership, having lobbied to pass legislation that would allow for research into the long-term health effects of the defoliant.

Owen was honored Thursday night at a banquet at the American Legion Post 51.

But when he was 21, when he processed out of the army at Fort Lewis in Washington in 1969, having spent a year in Vietnam, he would have never imagined he would be doing such work. In fact, activism was the very last thing on his mind.

"I took a cab to Tacoma and got a hotel room and filled up an ice bucket with whiskey and didn't get out of the bath until it was empty," he said.

Today, with his cheery, gravely voice and road-worn sensibilities, Owen talks about his time after the war working as a bar tender for a couple years, and then as a process photographer in California, before settling in Oregon, where he and some friends started a forest management company using draft horses to perform selective logging and planting. He did that for 17 years, and said it was the perfect job for him.

"I would load up with a chainsaw and a 30/30 and a fishing rod and head out to the back country," he said. "I couldn't believe I was getting paid to walk around the woods with my friends."

Such a life was also ideal for a Vietnam veteran in the late 1970's, he said, because, unlike today, nobody really wanted to talk about their experiences, and nobody really wanted to hear about them either.

"We were abandoned," he said, explaining that he did nothing on Veterans Day for decades. And when he did try to get involved in a veterans group back then, he said one of the old timers told him his war didn't count.

"So I said to hell with that and left," he said.

But it was out there working in the woods where he met George Laswell, a fellow veteran who would get him involved in veterans' causes.

The two men discovered they were both Vietnam veterans one day when they were blasting out tree stumps with dynamite.

After agreeing to take another stab at joining a veterans' group, Owen said he never looked back.

To date, Owen and his fellow activists have dedicated nearly 4,000 hours working to pass legislation on Agent Orange research. And even now, a bill that would make it happen, called the Veterans First Act, is in the senate.

"We're waiting for Mitch (McConnell) to call it for a vote," he said, "And we really need to get the vote in the next 30 days, because if we don't, then we have to start all over after the first of the year."

Owen's bulldog nature on the cause is shared with other veterans on his team.

"You've already put us off for 40 years," he said. "It's time to get it done."
There will be plenty of winners and losers in the new normal of the impending Donald Trump presidential administration. One potentially big loser: the so-called fiduciary rule.

The rule, created earlier this year by the Department of Labor (DoL) and set to go into effect in April 2017, was designed to protect retirement plan participants from conflicts of interest that can arise when high-commission financial products are sold to investors by stockbrokers and insurance salespeople. Eight years in the making, the rule was meant to address a lack of investment sophistication among most 401(k) and IRA investors by offering these additional protections. Now the rule is in danger, as high-level advisers to Trumps campaign have publicly vowed to stop its passage  most vocally SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci.

With Scaramuccis prompting, Trump, who has promised to eliminate most recent financial regulations, may target the fiduciary rule, despite his campaign pledge to make Washington work for average citizens and not special interests. Theres no question its in play now, says Michael Kreps, a partner at the Groom Law Group in Washington, D.C.

The fiduciary rule  or conflict-of-interest rule, as it is sometimes known  arose after years of complaints from both damaged investors and chief investment officers like Robin Diamonte, who heads up the pension fund for employees of United Technologies Corp., and financial planners like Sheryl Garrett, founder of the Garrett Planning Network. Stories abound of plan participants being sold inappropriate products, being coerced into rolling their 401(k) plan into a more expensive IRA without proper explanation, or being advised to select as many as 12 actively managed mutual funds in a 401(k) plan menu.

Since the rules announcement in April, the financial services industry has revolted against the new controls. There are currently seven separate lawsuits filed against the DoL by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (on behalf of small broker-dealers and insurance agents) and six insurance and other fund trade organizations (one suit was rejected by a federal judge earlier this month). In its November report on the state of asset management, Thriving in the New Abnormal, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. wrote, The DoL fiduciary rule constitutes one of the largest shocks to the wealth management industry in over 40 years. It strikes at the core of the business model  financial adviser compensation, the range of products, and the nature of advice itself.

Doubts over the fiduciary rules future grew when Scaramucci stepped into the fray, eager to defend the financial services industry against DoL regulation. In a November 2 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled Your 401(k) Doesnt Need a Babysitter, Scaramucci, managing partner of fund-of-hedge-funds firm SkyBridge, defended the financial industrys ability to police itself.

Calling the rule a case study in government overreach, Scaramucci, who is also the founder of the annual Las Vegasbased SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (the hedge-fund confab known as SALT), makes liberal use of the industrys basic defense: that small investors will be hurt when stock brokers, deprived of their once-lucrative sales charges, refuse to take them on as clients. Scaramucci is also concerned that the rule is causing passive investing to take over the world, to the detriment of active managers. In an interview with InvestmentNews, Scaramucci went so far as to compare the fiduciary rule to the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that reinforced the legality of slavery.

The administration has broad authority to change policy, according to Kreps. The rule could be stopped by issuing delays to its applicable April 2017 date or instituting a non-enforcement policy.

It is anybodys guess where a reversal would leave the financial services industry, which has spent millions getting ready to comply with the rule. Broker-dealer Edward Jones, for example, has said it would stop selling mutual funds on commission to retirement investors and reduce investment minimums on fee-based accounts to make them more attractive to IRA investors. Raymond James and Merrill Lynch have said they would continue to offer commission-based transactions on IRA accounts and make use of an exemption provided by the DoL to help brokerages, wirehouses, and insurance companies comply with the new rule when selling to retirement plan investors.

With or without the fiduciary rule, John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, says the industry is moving away from expensive, complex products. Speaking with Institutional Investor last week, he predicted, I can see indexing going to 50 or 60 percent of the market  today its about 30 percent  with not much happening except Wall Street is not as wealthy at the end of that trend.
Image: Gage Skidmore

As the world shifts on its new Trump axis, members of the insurance industry in the region are refusing to be anything but optimistic, despite a bad prognosis predicted for the Trans Pacific Partnership.Minister for Trade, Steve Ciobo, has admitted to Sky News that the TPP is less likely, than likely following the shock result with former foreign minister Bob Carr calling the partnership doomed in The Australian.One person that agreed with this assessment was managing director of ASX-listed insurer CBL, Peter Harris, who admitted the vote did not turn out how he expected it would.However, he said it did not spell doom for CBL by any means.I did not think the US would elect Trump, but it is done, and he will want to be a good president, so I am over it, and CBL is in a good space to make the best of it.The TPP is possibly dead, but other opportunities always arise.Harris said the vote outcome represented yet another wake-up call to politicians around the world that they have to listen to people, and not just through the pollsters.People in the Arab Spring uprisings, UKs Brexit, and now the US were clearly not happy with their lot, and they are sick of successive regimes which the general population think do not listen to them, he told Insurance Business.And the politicians particularly have to listen to people who are not doing so well financially.Those people (if they vote), have more votes numerically than people doing really well financially.Elections are now much closer, voters swing, and cannot be counted on for life any more.Harris remained hopeful for a better outcome for a Trump presidency than the doom and gloom being predicted around the world and reflected on the Trump protests which followed the result.If Trump focuses on getting the economy right, more people get jobs, and earn a little more, and learns to be a statesman and not just someone seeking soundbite media time, then maybe he might work out, he said.
Skuld, the Olso-based marine insurance provider, announced SMA/Gerling Norway will be renamed Skuld Marine Agency (SMA) following the companys acquisition by Skuld.

Marketing has now begun for Jan. 1, 2017 renewals on Skuld paper under the new SMA brand, the company said, noting that the formal acquisition process is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

The acquisition gives Skuld renewal rights on SMA/Gerling Norways hull & machinery book of business, which covers around 6,000 vessels paying some US$40 million in premium.

Any successful renewals will be insured with Skulds own corporate paper and operate separately from Skulds syndicate 1897 at Lloyds, the company said, explaining that Skuld 1897 will continue its existing strategy and will not be affected by the acquisition.

Stale Hansen, Skuld president and CEO, said: We are delighted to be close to completing this acquisition, being an important deal for Skuld, and very much in line with our strategy of diversification. Our priority remains our commitment to ensuring that brokers and policyholders experience no downgrade in service: it is simply a change of ownership and we are confident that in Skuld they will enjoy the service and competence that our existing partners and clients rely on.

Source: Skuld

Related:
Just how legalized weed in California will impact workers compensation is still uncertain, but what is certain is that the insurance industry can soon expect to be grappling with issues around paying for marijuana for injured workers.

The California Workers Compensation Institute issued a white paper this week that examines the implications of the passage of Proposition 64 by voters on Tuesday.

The paper, Working Through the Haze: Implications of Legalized Marijuana for California Workers Compensation System, examines the potential impact of the legalized recreational use of marijuana in California on employers, workers comp insurers and the workforce.

With recreational marijuana now legal in California, employers and insurers are well-advised to monitor this developing area of the law and its practical impact on claims processing requirements, the paper states.

Visit the CWCI site to download the full paper.

Because the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, its use is prohibited by federal law, and under current California law insurers cannot be required to pay for it even if it has been recommended for medical purposes, the paper notes.

But that doesnt mean there wont be pressure on insurers to pay for pot, according to the author of the paper, CWCI General Counsel Ellen Sims Langille.

The legalization of marijuana may have removed the stigma from it being used only for treating serious diseases, potentially opening the floodgates for injured workers who may now see it as an option, she said.

I think theres going to be a greater pressure on workers comp doctors to recommend marijuana as a treatment, Langille said.

Its that pressure that may lead to more new laws, forcing the issue on the insurance industry, she added.

Somebody somewhere in California is shortly going to start saying Yes this is treatment for an industrial injury, this does cure or reduce the effects of an industrial injury,' Langille said, adding that the conflict between federal and state law and the demand for pot can combine into pressure to change the law.

The CWCI paper examines the intersection of workers comp with medical and recreational marijuana laws in California, in other states, and at the federal level.

Among the issues discussed in the paper are a developing trend toward compelled compensation in various jurisdictions.

The paper also discusses the compensability of work-related injuries suffered by medicinal and recreational marijuana users, the enforcement of drug-free workplace policies and the potential for retaliation and discrimination claims.

The medical efficacy of marijuana and its use as an alternative to more opioids, and a lack of uniform dosage levels and delivery methods, are other questions the paper examines.

The paper also advises the insurance industry to start thinking ahead.

Claims administrators should work to establish standards of review for requested marijuana treatment and payment, the paper states. Any policies that are developed should also consider the impact of Californias board medical privacy laws and the potential conflicts under the Employers Bill of Rights as codified in the Labor Code.

Related:

Topics California Trends Workers' Compensation Cannabis Market
Beckerink assists businesses and individuals on a broad range of state tax planning and dispute resolution matters, including audit, litigation and appellate practice in matters such as state False Claims Act tax defence, state tax refund class action defence, individual residency, telecommunications, excise tax and sales and income tax.

He regularly advises multinational enterprises on multi-state tax planning and the tax aspects of mergers and acquisitions, and he has resolved complex state tax matters before administrative appeal boards, tax tribunals and state courts across the US.

Beckerink began his legal career at the US Tax Court as an attorney adviser to special trial judge Stanley Goldberg and served as an associate at Baker & McKenzie from 2006 to 2008. In his 10 years of practice, he has written several articles on tax law and has lent his talents to pro bono matters, including representing veterans before the Department of Veterans Affairs.
As president of the United States, Donald Trump was likely the wealthiest individual to inhabit the White House and his net worth remains a topic for debate.

In 2015, Donald Trump claimed in a press release that he was worth more than $10 billion, however, his net worth as of 2022 is estimated at $3 billion.

Key Takeaways Donald Trump is the founder of The Trump Organization, a private entity.

He is required to submit a financial disclosure document each year, although numbers are self-reported and dont provide an accurate estimate of his net worth.

Forbes estimates Donald Trump's net worth at $3 billion although Trump has claimed the value at $10 billion.

The Trump Organization

Since 1976, Donald Trump grew his wealth through global commercial, resort, and residential real estate development under the umbrella of The Trump Organization. As a private entity, The Trump Organization is not required to publish financial statements in the same manner as a publicly-traded company.

Donald Trump famously refused to publish his tax returns, which would show his annual income and taxes paid or owed. Although The New York Times published abbreviated information from Trump's tax returns on Sept. 27, 2020, the disclosure failed to provide details about his actual net worth.

As a former president, Trump completes a required annual financial disclosure to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Government financial disclosures may list assets and investments but in estimates and broad value ranges. In 2021, many of Trump's properties were valued at "over $50 million," however, these estimates are self-reported, unaudited, and also differ from numbers The Trump Organization has reported to state and local tax officials.

71 The number of properties in the portfolio owned and operated by The Trump Organization. This total includes commercial and residential real estate, golf courses, hotels, and personal estates.

Assets

In May 2022, Forbes estimated Trumps net worth at $3 billion, falling short of the $10 billion estimates that Trump suggested while running for office in 2015.

Forbes' numbers marry with the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which placed the former presidents net worth at $2.97 billion in August 2020.Forbes has attempted to break down Trump's net worth by assets.

Net Worth The value of all assets minus liabilities.

Much of Trumps wealth is tied to multi-use buildings in Manhattan, including retail real estate in the busy Midtown district. His highest value asset is a 30% stake in the office and retail space at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, valued at $2.2 billion, with a debt value of $950 million on the property.



The Trump Organization owns several exclusive golf properties estimated at $730 million, including clubs in Scotland and Dubai. Trump's private golf club in Palm Beach, Fla, Mar-a-Lago, is valued at $350 million.

Trump holds approximately $275 million in cash and liquid assets. Other personal assets include three Florida homes and his 11,000-square-foot residence in New York City, the Trump Tower penthouse. Residential units throughout the United States and around the globe have an estimated value of $340 million. This includes hotels and residential locations in Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Europe, Asia, and South America.



Donald Trump announced in October 2021 that he was creating his own social media platform. Truth Social, held through Trump Media, garnered Donald Trump $430 million from investors. The Donald Trump brand, including his licensing and management business, is valued at just over $50 million.

Trump holds roughly $275 million in cash and liquid assets. Other personal assets include three Florida homes and his 11,000-square-foot residence in New York Citythe Trump Tower penthouse.



Trumps vast real estate empire includes approximately residential units throughout the United States. This includes hotels and retail locations in Chicago, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.

What Are Donald Trump's Estimated Liablities? Trump has a lengthy financial record which includes corporate bankruptcies and lawsuits. In 2021, Trump Organization owed $590 million in debts due within four years by 2025.



What Prominent Real Estate Locations in New York City Has Donald Trump Owned? Donald Trump has owned and sold many buildings in New York including the Plaza Hotel, the St. Moritz Hotel, now the Ritz Carlton on Central Park South, and the land under the Empire State Building.

What Is Considered One of Trump's Bad Investment Decisions? In 2014, Donald Trump partnered with an Azerbaijani family that U.S. officials called notoriously unethical. The building, a five-star hotel, and residence called the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku in Azerbaijan has never opened.

The Bottom Line

Donald Trump's net worth has ranged in estimates from $3 billion to $10 billion. With his private firm, The Trump Organization, and its limited public disclosures, it has been difficult to capture the true net worth of his global commercial, resort, and residential real estate as well as his licensing and social media ventures.
When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. You can find out more about our use, change your default settings, and withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by visiting Cookies Settings, which can also be found in the footer of the site.
Executives and other key company employees who are hoping to expand their retirement assets beyond their 401(k) or individual retirement account (IRA) may find the answer in a supplemental executive retirement plan (SERP). This kind of non-qualified deferred compensation plan is designed to offer additional retirement benefits once youve reached the maximum contribution limits allowed by other qualified plans. Understanding their structure and function can help you decide whether a SERP fits with your overall retirement strategy.

Key Takeaways SERPs accumulate money on a tax-deferred basis.

SERPs do not have an early withdrawal penalty.

SERPs do not have contribution limits.

Employers often fund a SERP by taking out a cash value life insurance policy on you.

Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan (SERP) Basics

SERPs can vary from one employer to the next, but they generally follow the same set of guidelines. The employer determines how the plan will be established, how much it will contribute, what form those contributions will take, and how distributions from the plan are paid out to participating employees.

When a SERP is set up as a defined-benefit plan, the employee receives either a lump sum or an annuity at retirement, which is equal to a set percentage of the employees average lifetime compensation. A defined-contribution SERP would allow for regular contributions to an individual employee account. These funds would be invested on behalf of the employee until the funds are paid out at retirement. Money can also be withdrawn in the event of a disability or by the plan participants beneficiary upon the participants death.

In terms of how SERPs are funded, life insurance is an option many companies turn to. Your employer takes out a cash value life insurance policy on you and names itself as the beneficiary. During your lifetime the employer draws on the cash value to fund your SERP account. When you reach normal retirement age, you can begin making withdrawals.

How SERPs Benefit Employees

There are a few reasons why you might want to add a SERP to your existing retirement accounts. First and foremost, youre accumulating funds on a tax-deferred basis, and distributions before age 59 arent subject to the 10% early withdrawal penalty. If your employer is using life insurance to fund your account, you dont have to worry about whether or not enough money is being put into the plan to cover your anticipated future benefit.

Because the employer assumes responsibility for funding the plan, youre not obligated to defer any of your salary or bonus money into it each year. The fact that SERPs fall under the heading of nonqualified deferred compensation plans also means theyre not subject to the same Internal Revenue Service (IRS) restrictions on annual contribution limits that a 401(k) or another qualified plan would be.

Finally, if something were to happen to you, your spouse or other beneficiaries would be able to draw annuity income or a lump-sum survivor benefit, so the funds dont go to waste.

SERPs are usually only made available to company key executives who are already making a substantial salary. They are a means of ensuring that valued employees will remain with the company long term. If you decide you want a SERP, you probably need to make it a part of your negotiating strategy. One thing to remember: SERPs are not protected from a companys creditors if it is beset by financial woes, so they can go away entirely in a bankruptcy.

SERPs are paid out as either one lump sum or as a series of set payments from an annuity, with different tax implications for each method, so choose carefully.

How SERPs Benefit Companies

SERPs are easy to put together, require little management, and are not subject to approval by the IRS. The company is in charge of deciding whom it wants to favor with a SERP, and it both controls the plan and derives income on its books from the SERPs cash value growth, which is tax-deferred. A SERP can be set up to allow a company to recover its cost, and the company would get a tax deduction when benefits are paid out.

Taxation of SERPs

One thing to weigh carefully before enrolling in a SERP is how it may affect your taxes. SERPs are tax-deferred, meaning you wont pay taxes on the funds until you withdraw them in retirement.

The payout you select will affect how you are taxed. Choosing a lump sum would require you to pay the taxes due all at once, leaving the remaining funds to be included in your retirement income. Opting for regular monthly annuity payments would allow you to spread out the taxation.

If youre not sure which path is best, run the numbers in both scenarios to see how much youd be paying in taxes. If your long-term plan includes withdrawals from tax-advantaged accounts, spreading out the payments from a SERP over time may result in more after-tax income.

The Bottom Line

A SERP could significantly add to your savings if youre planning to stick with your employer for the long haul. These plans may be most appealing if youre consistently maxing out your other retirement accounts, but its still possible to reap some benefits even if you're not. Consider how much more you stand to save and weigh that against the impact of any added tax liability when deciding whether a SERP is right for you.
What Is Calexit: The Secession of California?

"Calexit" refers to the secession of California from the United States, after which it would become an independent country. The word is a portmanteau meaning "California exit," which is based on similar coinages such as Grexit and Brexit. The term came to the foreground in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential electionHillary Clinton won the state of California with 61% of the votethough it is not the state's first independence movement.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published in January 2017 showed 32% of Californians supporting Calexit, up from 20% in 2014. After that poll was published, a different Berkeley IGS Poll released in March 2017 found Californians opposed a "Calexit" by more than 2-to-1.

Calexit is being spearheaded by Yes California, an independence campaign based on the state paying more in taxes than it receives for spending from the federal government and cultural differences. The campaign planned to place an initiative on the 2019 state ballot, which ultimately failed. Once again, on Sept. 10, 2020, a new effort to collect petition signatures for California's secession was once again renewed.

Key Takeaways "Calexit" refers to the secession of California from the United States, after which it would become an independent country.

The term came to the foreground in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

"Calexit" is spearheaded by an organization called Yes California, which aimed to put an initiative on the 2019 state ballot, but failed. As of Sept. 2020, Yes California got approval again to collect petition signatures.

Present-day arguments for California sovereignty center on the state's large population and economic power, which make California the world's fifth-largest economy if it were an independent country.



Understanding Calexit: The Secession of California

Present-day California formed part of the Mexican province of Alta California until the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in May 1846. The next month, 30 American settlers seized a Mexican garrison in Sonoma and declared an independent republic. An updated form of their flag emblazoned "California Republic" is currently the flag of the state. The republic never performed any administrative functions as a government and lasted less than a month before U.S. Navy Lieutenant Joseph Revere landed at Sonoma and raised a Union flag.

Present-day arguments for California sovereignty center on the state's large population and economic power. At $3.51 trillion, California's gross domestic product (GDP) was larger than France's ($2.94 trillion) in 2021, the last full year for which data is available. Using World Bank figures, California would be the world's fifth-largest economy between Germany and the United Kingdom, if it were an independent country. The state was home to 39.2 million people as of most recent data on July 2021, according to the Census Bureau. Cultural issues, while more muted, have featured in independence rhetoric, particularly as they relate to environmental issues.

California GDP vs Other Nations, 2019

Yes California

Yes California was known as Sovereign California until the summer of 2015 when its leaders, New York-born Louis Marinelli and Marcus Ruiz Evans reorganized the organization into promoting California's independence. Late 2016, the group submitted an initiative to the California Attorney General calling for an independence referendum in November 2020. After the controversy surrounding Marinelli's residence in Russia while running the Yes California organization, Evans took over as the president of the organization.

According to its website, Yes California summarizes its primary reasons for wanting California to be an independent country with the following three reasons:

California is a distinct society with its own unique history and culture. California as the worlds fifth-largest economy has what it takes to be its own country. The best people to govern California are the people of California.

Requirements of Calexit

Since its rebranding, the organization has changed tack and dropped the "military annexation" argument. In a pamphlet posted to its website, the group argues that "California could do more good as an independent country than it is able to do as a just a U.S. state" and enumerates nine areas in which California would be better off as an independent country:

Peace and security: "Not being a part of [the U.S.] will make California a less likely target of retaliation by its enemies."

"Not being a part of [the U.S.] will make California a less likely target of retaliation by its enemies." Elections and government: "California's electoral votes havent affected a presidential election since 1876."

"California's electoral votes havent affected a presidential election since 1876." Trade and regulation: "The United States is dragging California into the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement which conflicts with our values."

"The United States is dragging California into the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement which conflicts with our values." Debt and taxes: "Since 1987, California has been subsidizing the other states at a loss of tens and sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars in a single fiscal year."

"Since 1987, California has been subsidizing the other states at a loss of tens and sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars in a single fiscal year." Immigration: "Independence means California will be able to decide what immigration policies make sense for our diverse and unique population, culture, and economy, and that we'll be able to build an immigration system that is consistent with our values."

"Independence means California will be able to decide what immigration policies make sense for our diverse and unique population, culture, and economy, and that we'll be able to build an immigration system that is consistent with our values." Natural resources: "Independence means we will gain control of the 46% of California that is currently owned by the U.S. Government and its agencies."

"Independence means we will gain control of the 46% of California that is currently owned by the U.S. Government and its agencies." The environment: "As long as the other states continue debating whether or not climate change is real, they will continue holding up real efforts to reduce carbon emissions."

"As long as the other states continue debating whether or not climate change is real, they will continue holding up real efforts to reduce carbon emissions." Health and medicine: "California can join the rest of the industrialized world in guaranteeing health care as a universal right for all of our people."

"California can join the rest of the industrialized world in guaranteeing health care as a universal right for all of our people." Education: "We will be able to fully fund public education, rebuild and modernize public schools, and pay public school teachers the salaries they deserve."

Is Secession Legal?

The U.S. Constitution does not directly address the issue of secession; Article IV limits itself to the accession of new states and the division or fusion of existing states. The beginning of the document contains the phrase, "in order to form a more perfect Union," which is often interpreted to mean a "more perfect Union" than the "perpetual Union" described in the Articles of Confederation.

There are two major precedents for territorial secession in U.S. history, the first beginning with the American colonies themselves declaring independence from Britain. The Declaration of Independence frames its arguments in terms of universal rights, rather than British law. In practice, the colonies won their independence through war.

The second is the secession of the Southern states in 1861, which sparked the Civil War.

The Confederacy was defeated on the battlefield, rather than the courts, although subsequent legal issues created by the attempt at independence led the courts to express an opinion on the legality of secession. In Texas v. White, a dispute over a bond sale by the Confederate States, the Supreme Court ruled in 1869 that Texas' secession had not been legal. According to the majority opinion, entry into the Union formed "an indissoluble relation"; it was "final," "perpetual," and left "no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through the consent of the States."

In other words, the Supreme Court appears to recognize the legitimacy of independence through armed struggle, although that hardly matters; the outcome of the war is the deciding factor regardless of a court's opinion.

Current Day Secession

Nor does it matter for Yes California, which is avowedly nonviolent. The "consent of the States" provides an opening, however, according to Marinelli. In a blog post from March 2016, he interprets the Supreme Court's opinion to mean that California can propose a constitutional amendment allowing it to secede. If that is approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and 38 states ratify it, California can become independent. Alternatively, two-thirds of the delegates of a constitutional convention could approve the amendment, which would then have to be ratified by 38 states.

Whether that interpretation passes legal muster is uncertain. In any case, it is a long shot to get two-thirds of the House and Senate  not to mention legislatures from two-thirds of the states  to agree on anything, particularly the secession of the country's largest state, economically speaking. Many analysts deem California's secession and highly improbable.

On Sept. 10, 2020, a new effort by Yes California to collect petition signatures for California's secession was renewed.

Giving It a Go

Undaunted, Yes California submitted a proposed ballot measure to the California attorney general's office on Nov. 21, 2016, hoping to get an independent vote on the ballot in 2019. The measure would repeal Article III, Section 1 of California's constitution ("The State of California is an inseparable part of the United States of America, and the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land") and pose the question to voters, "Should California become a free, sovereign, and independent country?" According to the proposed ballot measure, 50% of registered voters will need to turn out for it to be valid, and 55% will have to mark "yes."

Ultimately, the initiative failed. However, on Sept. 10, 2020, Yes California initiated a new effort to collect petition signatures for California's secession, which was approved by the Secretary of State.

Can California Legally Secede From the Union? California can legally secede from the United States if at least 50% of registered voters in California participated and at least 55% percent voted "yes" to secede, and then if two-thirds of both houses of Congress and 38 states ratify it. Then, the governor of California would have been required to write to the United Nations to request its membership as a nation.

Can a City Secede From a State? Although it has never happened, some law experts say that under Article IV, Section III of the U.S. Constitution, a city could petition to secede from a state, with the necessary votes from Congress.

What if California Was a Country? Many believe that California's strong economy would allow it to stand alone as a country. Using World Bank figures, California would be the world's fifth-largest economy between Germany and the United Kingdom, if it were an independent country.

What Did the Calexit Poll Show? In what is referred to as the "Calexit poll," a Reuters/Ipsos poll published in January 2017 showed 32% of Californians supporting Calexit, up from 20% in 2014.

The Bottom Line

There have been hundreds of attempts for California to secede from the United States, all with very little possibility of succeeding. Yes California is only the latest organization to spearhead "Calexit." With this new effort approved in Sept. 2020, only time will tell if the organization is able to collect enough signatures to make it onto the ballot.
ARE YOU A TOP COMPANY?

What it Really Means to be a Top Company!

To be a Top Company in Irish Construction Industry Magazines Top Companies listing means far more than just a rank and position in an ordered catalogue of names. To us, it means that your efforts to be the best you can be and to excel in your industry and sector have been effective and have paid dividends. To us, it means that your determination and commitment to develop and instil a positive work culture and environment have brought your business due success plus satisfaction. We see it as you being a supportive and inclusive place in which to work that strives to bring the best out of everyone across every level of the organisation.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
The United States and Australia are close to announcing a deal over asylum seekers, it has been reported.

The agreement would see the US resettle hundreds of refugees banished by Australia to Pacific island camps, The Australian newspaper reported.

The US had agreed to accept up to 1,800 refugees held for up to three years at Australia's expense in camps on the impoverished island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, it said.

Such an agreement struck with the Obama administration could be opposed by President-elect Donald Trump, who has called for a moratorium or tight restrictions on Muslim immigration. Most of the asylum seekers are Muslims from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The agreement could empty the camps that have been condemned by human rights groups as a cruel abrogation of Australia's responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention.

Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull declined to comment on negotiations with the US.

Rebecca Gardner, spokeswoman for the US embassy in Australia, said the State Department did not "comment on or discuss diplomatic negotiations".

Senior government minister Christopher Pyne praised the prospect of such an agreement being finalised before the Obama administration ends.

"There certainly is time - two and a half months is plenty of time - and if that's the case, it will be a great achievement for the Turnbull government," he told Nine Network television.

Senior opposition MP Anthony Albanese said: "If this occurs, that will be a good thing."

The opposition centre-left Labor Party criticised a previous deal struck between Australia and the US in 2007 to swap refugees, arguing that the prospect of US resettlement would attract more asylum seekers to Australian shores.

Under that deal, up to 200 refugees a year held on Nauru could have been swapped for Cubans and Haitians intercepted at sea while trying to get to the US and held at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But no refugee was ever traded under the agreement.

Mr Turnbull announced at Mr Obama's Leaders' Summit on Refugees in September that Australia would participate in the US-led programme to resettle Central American refugees from a camp in Costa Rica.

Australia would also increase its refugee intake by 5,000 to 18,750 a year.

Mr Turnbull said at the time that the agreement to resettle Central Americans was "not linked to any other resettlement discussions" involving Australia's refugees.

Immigration department secretary Michael Pezzullo told a parliamentary committee on Friday that "today we are closer than we were yesterday" to resettling asylum seekers from Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Immigration minister Peter Dutton said this week he was looking for countries that will accept all asylum seekers bound for Australia, including those who have had their refugee claims rejected but refuse to go home. Iran will not take back Iranians who will not go home voluntarily.

Almost 1,300 asylum seekers are on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Hundreds more have gone to Australia for medical treatment and have taken court action to prevent them being sent back to the islands.

Few refugees have accepted offers to resettle in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia because most hope that Australia will eventually take them in.

Australia refuses to resettle any refugee who has arrived by boat since the date the tough policy was announced, July 19 2013.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation earlier this week warned of potential strikes by its 40,000 members  and further action is still very possible if current talks fail with the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland.

Now Siptu president Jack OConnor has given the Government just a week to invite the public service union members of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to talks on a renegotiation of the pay deal. He said those talks should begin no later than February 1.

Moreover, if they do not [issue the invite] before this day week [Thursday], our national executive council will authorise any negotiating group of members, who are covered by LRA, and who wish to do so, to commence balloting for industrial action and/or strike action in pursuit of their demands, he said.

There are 60,000 members of Siptu who are currently covered by Lansdowne.

We utterly reject the assertion that there is no money and that it is a choice between pay increases and services for the public, said Mr OConnor.

The Government made choices in the budget.

He said those choices included the continuation of the lower Vat rate for the hospitality sector, despite the fact the industry has fully recovered and splurging a further 46 million on gifting for the wealthy through cutting capital taxes.

The Siptu president said his union fully respected the right of every union to take such action as it deems necessary, in the interests of its members, and especially to address the injustice of lower entry rates.

However he added: The problem is that once a group embarks on a solo run, everyone else will have to follow. This is because it could lead to a situation that any resources that are available will be absorbed in settling these individual disputes and there will be nothing left for anyone else.

He also warned the terms of a new agreement must acknowledge that economic conditions have improved considerably more rapidly than those envisaged when the LRA was first negotiated.
In Ireland women receive an average hourly wage across the economy which is 14.4% less than their male counterparts which, according to fashion designer and founder of Dress for Success Dublin, Sonya Lennon, means they are effectively working for free for the last seven weeks of the year.

"The gender pay gap is integral to our work as an organisation, as our role is to support women towards their economic independence," Ms Lennon says.

The gender pay gap is defined as the difference in the average hourly wage between men and women across the economy.

"The pay gap in Ireland widened during the austerity period, says the National Women's Council of Ireland (NWCI) director, Orla OConnor.

Childcare costs and the lack of family-friendly policies in the private sector only add to this gap, Ms OConnor says, adding that women are also more likely than men to be reliant on minimum-wage jobs, often associated with precarious hours and contracts; for example within the retail sector.

Although increases to the minimum wage have been positive, the introduction of living wage of 11 per hour would help narrow the gender pay gap, she says. A change of culture with men is also needed to help close the gap as women are still more likely to take on family responsibilities, Ms OConnor added.

Although part of the gap is due to women's life choices or career breaks, in some cases women in the workplace are not being valued as they should be, says Network Ireland.

Its sad to see that the wage gap between men and women is still so wide and this is something we are very conscious of within Network Ireland, says group president Deirdre Waldron.

Women should be encouraged to be more ambitious when it comes to their careers, by being more assertive when it comes to equal pay, promotions and flexibility, according to the organisation.

Meanwhile, Dress for Success Dublin plans to address TDs at Leinster House next Wednesday, November 16, on how to bridge the pay gap, as part of a month-long pay equality campaign.

Dress for Success Dublin promotes the economic independence of women by providing career development tools and a support network.

The women we work with come from all walks of life and range from early school-leavers to women struggling to find work again after a career break for family reasons, said Sonya Lennon.

Their common characteristic is that theyve faced barriers in entering or re-entering the workforce."

The organisation is calling for donations of 50 to support a woman to enter or re-enter the workforce.

"By donating 50 as part of our Equal Pay Day campaign, you can help a woman overcome these barriers and take her first steps towards economic independence," Ms Lennon added.

Throughout November, Dress for Success Dublin is encouraging people to share their reasons for donating and their own thoughts on gender equality, by posting on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #EqualPayDfSD.

Further information about the organisations work is available at www.dressforsuccessdublin.org or on Twitter, @DFSDublin, #EqualPayDfSD.
The campaign for Ann Roe, who is running for Congress against Lyin' Bryan Steil has come out with the best one-liner of this cycle so far: I can't argue...

1 year ago
He faced questions from Fianna Fail finance spokesman Michael McGrath yesterday, who asked: Is legislation needed? Fundamentally, will it make a difference on the issue of premiums?

The Department of Finance working group, which Mr Murphy chairs, is examining factors contributing to the rising cost of premiums.

He confirmed legislation would be needed from the reports 40 recommendations, which would result in consumers understanding how premium prices change. He said an action plan on motor insurance would be initiated after the report is published.

As recommendations go through, hopefully we will see costs coming down, he told the Dail. With changes, which may include a public database on charges that already operates in Britain, there would be more transparency in the sector, added Mr Murphy.

Drivers would be able to see how cover increases are happening year on year.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Michael Noonan said Nama saw nothing wrong in being lobbied by a former Fine Gael TD over the sale of lands allegedly connected to him.

AAA/PBPs Paul Murphy raised the issue about former TD Brian Walshon how he had lobbied Nama on behalf of business partners without making any disclosure. Mr Murphy said he had a letter on headed Dail paper from Mr Walsh to Nama with questions about property which went on to be sold to developer Liam Mulryan.

He doesnt mention the fact that he owned at least six properties with Mr Mulryan, said Mr Murphy.

Mr Noonan said the agency had received hundreds of representations by politicians about properties.
James Brennan, who locals regard highly, particularly for his turf-cutting skills, from Killoe, Cahersiveen, would occasionally break out on drink and have to be brought home by gardai, the court heard.

On this occasion, a week after his 71st birthday, he had to be lifted off the street and gardai had to break in to his house to get him inside.

On St Patricks Day last, around 4pm, gardai got a call that a man was laid out on the footpath of Main St, Garda Karl Griffin outlined at Cahersiveen District Court.

He was intoxicated and unable to stand. He had to be lifted up and placed in the back of the patrol car.

Gardai brought him to the station and after a while, were able to bring him back to his house at Killoe.

Mr Brennan, however, had no key to get in, so the gardai had to break in to get him back into his own house.

We had to break into the house because he had no key, said Garda Griffin.

Mr Brennan had seven previous convictions.

Judge James OConnor said: 71 years of age and out cold on the street! What day of the week was it? When was Pension Day?

St Patricks Day 2016 fell on a Thursday, the judge was told.

Solicitor Gerry OConnor said all the previous convictions were minor public order matters.

And if the court was only dealing with the likes of James Brennan, it would be a very quiet court, said Mr OConnor.

Judge OConnor then inquired why Mr Brennan was not in court to face the charge.

Killoe is the other side of the mountain... he would have to walk here, It could be up to nine miles, the solicitor replied.

However, Judge OConnor said the other side of the mountain behind Cahersiveen was not that far away.

At this point, Garda Griffin intervened to say, He breaks out the odd time. Sometimes he has to be picked up and brought home. He was just too bad to be brought home this time.

Judge James OConnor convicted Mr Brennan of being so intoxicated he was a danger to himself and imposed a fine of 100. However, the judge said he would give him 10 months to pay.
A bill providing additional rights to freelance workers, initially put forward by Labour senator Ivana Bacik, yesterday received cross-party support when it passed through the Seanad.

The Competition (Amendment) Bill 2016 will allow self-employed workers, such as actors and journalists, who personally provide work or perform services, to collectively bargain with their employers.
Chardonnay Ward it was claimed fell over a kink on a mat and hit her head.

Chardonnay Ward, now aged 9, of Ashdale, Coosan, Athlone, Co Westmeath, had sued through her mother Margaret Roche the governor of Cloverhill Prison, Dublin, as a result of the fall on February 16, 2012.

It was claimed the child fell over a kink on a mat which had been placed on a wet floor near the doorway. The little girl fell against a plastic chair and a windowsill hurting the side of her head and above her eye.

It was claimed there was an alleged failure to keep the floor of the premises free from articles which were likely to cause the child to slip and fall and an alleged failure to take any appropriate measures to remove the dangers presented by the water on the floor.

It was claimed there was an alleged failure to take any or adequate precautions for the safety of the child whilst visiting the prison.

The claims were denied.

Kerida Naidoo, counsel for the child, told the court the child was taken to hospital and later recovered but has been left with a permanent scar over her right eyebrow.

Approving the settlement of 25,842, Mr Justice Kevin Cross said the scar was not a significant blemish.
Mayo-born Mike McCormack won the Goldsmiths Prize 2016 for Solar Bones, which covers just a few hours in the life of Irish engineer Marcus Conway, briefly returned from the dead on All Souls Day in 2008.

Mr McCormack thanked Tramp Press for backing him during his long and difficult adventure as a writer.

I didnt think I was going to win. It would have been too much of a fairytale on top of a fairytale of getting the book published and it being critically well-received. That was it: I didnt think it was going to go any further but it has.

And Mr McCormack called on more publishers to take risks with experimental authors. Its about time the prize-giving community honoured experimental works and time that mainstream publishers started honouring their readership by saying: Here are experimental books. Readers are smart. Theyre up for it. That was what the people at Tramp Press taught me  theyre up for it. There are readers out there and they have been proved right.

Mr McCormack, 51, grew up in Co Mayo and is best known for his collections of short stories, including Getting It In The Head (1996) and Forensic Songs (2012).

Solar Bones was chosen from 111 books and is the fourth winner of the competition, founded in 2013. Last years winner was Irish writer Kevin Barry.

One of the judges, Prof Blake Morrison, said: Set over a few hours in a single day, and told in the first- person voice of a middle-aged engineer, Mike McCormacks Solar Bones transcends these seeming limits magnificently.

Politics, family, art, marriage, health, civic duty, and the environment are just a few of the themes it touches on, in a prose thats lyrical yet firmly rooted. Its subject may be an ordinary working life but it is itself an extraordinary work.

Extract from Solar Bones

The book begins: The bell the bell as hearing the bell as hearing the bell as standing here the bell being heard standing here hearing it ring out through the grey light of this morning, noon or night...

The bell is the Angelus bell, ringing out in rural Ireland  in Louisburgh, near Westport, Co Mayo, a county with a unique history of people starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles [...] blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer-houses and hermitages [...] a bordered realm of penance and atonement....

It continues as prose, but without any full stops or full sentences.
The Dails Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heard that Pimco said it was disappointed that its withdrawal from the 1.3bn sale had been repeatedly mischaracterised by Nama.

Several PAC members last night described the Pimco letter as a gamechanger as it contradicts evidence given by Nama to the committee.

We would suggest that Nama has conflated what may or may not have been discussed at the Nama board level (upon which we can not comment) and the reality of the calls that Pimco made to Nama and Pimcos own decision to withdraw, it said.

The PAC heard Pimco ditched its bid to buy the so-called Project Eagle portfolio in March 2014 over concerns about 16m in success fees.

According to evidence heard at the committee, the fees were to be split between Frank Cushnahan, ex-member of Namas Northern Ireland Advisory Committee, US law firm Brown Rudnick, and Ian Coulter, a managing partner of Tughans, a Belfast law firm hired to handle the deal.

The Pimco letter was read into the record by Committee chairman Sean Fleming.

The investment firm said that at no stage did Nama ask it to withdraw from the process.

According to Pimco, Nama said it was not aware of the fee arrangements but inquired if the firm would proceed with the sale should Mr Cushnahans involvement or fee proposal be an issue for the agency.

In no way did Pimco seek the acquiescence of Nama to any fee arrangement nor sought agreement that any fee arrangement was appropriate, a four-page letter, signed by Tom Rice, a chief legal officer at Pimco stated.

Pimco also said it would not attend the committee hearings, which are investigating the controversial Project Eagle sale, because it did not want to prejudice investigations in the US and the UK.

Pimco said it told Nama just before pulling out of a proposed deal that it was disappointed disclosures had not been made by relevant parties to the agency.

It did not want to be part of any process where there would be a suggestion of impropriety, it said.

Nama has strongly rejected any suggestion that it did not set out the circumstances of Pimcos withdrawal accurately.

A Nama spokesman said that it has made its position clear to the PAC on the withdrawal of Pimco from the process. The Nama board was very clear that, if Pimco did not withdraw, then Nama would exit them, the spokesman said.

The Project Eagle portfolio was eventually sold to US investment fund Cerberus for 1.3bn. The C&AG concluded the sale incurred a potential loss to the taxpayer of 190m.

Members of the PAC described the contents of the letter as very serious and explosive and called on Nama to respond fully.

Sinn Feins Mary Lou McDonald said the Pimco letter is a game changer.

She said: It now seems that Project Eagle was conceived not by Pimco but by Brown Rudnick along with Tughans and Mr Frank Cushnahan.

Fianna Fail TD Shane Cassells questioned the credibility of Nama. The very core of this key evidence regarding Pimco shows that they (Nama) has been dishonest with the committee.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner after the meeting, Mr Cassells said the issues raised are of very serious concern given the clear conflict in evidence.
Amid high rents which are now soaring beyond the boom times in Dublin, the Government is set to unveil a package of measures for the rental sector next month.

Rent freezes, introduced by the last government, stop reviews of rates for two years. These restrictions on rent reviews will stay in place until 2019.

Despite this measure to slow increases, Daft.ie has released a report which shows that rates are dwarfing the Celtic Tiger era. There were double-digit hikes in most areas this year.

As part of Rebuilding Ireland proposals, Mr Coveney yesterday said there will be a fresh drive to speed up the delivery of developments for specifically identified sites.

A new housing delivery office in his department and stronger co-operation between local authorities and developers, coupled with planning approvals being fast-tracked, will help building, he said.

Sites and home numbers identified for the speedy building initiative include Poolbeg (1,500), Cherrywood (2,000), Donabate (1,500), Adamstown (2,500), and Clonburris (2,000) in Dublin.

Developments in Cork include the docklands (600), Old Whitechurch Road (600), Midleton (1,500), and Ballincollig (2,000) as well as units planned for Greenpark in Limerick City (700) and Arduan in Galway (500).

However, Mr Coveney, ahead of rent measures being released next month, indicated that a clamp down on rising rates for tenants is unlikely: The balancing act here from a policy perspective is on the one hand to respond to unsustainable rental inflation, which is causing huge problems for a lot of people.

And at the same time in attempting to respond to that, we dont actually put the dead hand of regulation on the construction sector and therefore stop any momentum that is starting to build more rental accommodation.

Sinn Fein housing spokesman, Eoin O Broin, noted that 750,000 people rent nationwide, and said emergency measures are needed and could be introduced as early as next week.
WHEN film producer Williams Rossa Cole decided to make a documentary about his Irish patriot great-grandfather, discovering his forebear was the self-proclaimed inventor of terrorism was a shocking moment in a journey that propelled him and his brother to the centre of living history in centenary-era Ireland.

Padraig Pearses graveside oration at the funeral of Fenian rebel Jeremiah ODonovan Rossa, in August 1915, is acknowledged as one of the sparks that lit the fuse of the Easter Rising, but in life, ODonovan Rossa was every bit as incendiary.

In Rebel Rossa, Williams Rossa Cole and his brother, who goes by the not dissimilar name of Rossa Williams Cole, set out to rediscover the mysterious figure that was frequently evoked during their upbringing in New York and occasional visits to Ireland.

In interviews with historians, ODonovan Rossas controversial lifelong political struggle is revealed to the Coles. Following periods of imprisonment in English jails throughout the 1860s, during which he was punished brutally for his defiance of authority, ODonovan Rossa was exiled to the US, where he organised and funded the first bombings by Irish republicans of English cities in what was called the dynamite campaign.

Complicated history

It was this tactical decision to commit targeted acts of violence on English soil that gave rise to the moniker of inventor of terrorism, historian Shane Kenna explains to the brothers.

Yes, to hear that term associated with your great-grandfather is shocking, says Cole, but its also an interesting window into exploring what that term means, when its something that people throw around all the time.

At that time, in the eyes of Irish Americans that was a justifiable, thought-out strategy. I get a kick out of throwing that in the face of Americans today who rant about brown people coming to the States and committing terrorist acts.

The brothers play up the cliche of the Yanks coming back to trace their roots during the documentary. There are moments, like when they are shown the metal cold-box that transported ODonovan Rossas remains to Ireland and his birthplace of Reenascreena, Co Cork, and assured that it was to stop sharks from attacking the boat, when they seem like lost outsiders, laughing benevolently but confusedly along with jokes at their expense.

Yet Cole is a former Fulbright Scholar to London School of Economics, where he studied the role of social and political documentaries in British broadcasting, and little of the political nuance that the brothers find themselves immersed in evades him.

Films with a social justice leaning have formed the backbone of his 15-year career producing documentaries, from 2014s Finding Fela! to HBOs Gunfight, which explores both sides of the gun control debate in the US. His decision to visit nationalist communities in Belfast and Tyrone for the documentary is an astute one, portraying the steely present-day ideological core to ODonovan Rossas legacy. His name gained him access to former H-Block hunger strikers who still believe in the cause his great-grandfather championed.

How do societies and cultures look back on their revolutionary forebears and reintegrate them into the political narrative of the present? he says.

When we screened an earlier version of the film at the Galway Film Fleadh, people said that if you grew up in Ireland you could never make that film but it didnt feel tense, maybe because were these bungling quasi-ignorant Americans coming in without quite knowing what the splits and allegiances are.

West Cork visit

Shooting during the commemorative celebrations gave Cole a wealth of interesting footage to enrich what could otherwise be quite a dull history; in Skibbereen, he shot the night-time torchlit parade for their local legend, and found himself rubbing shoulders with Gerry Adams and President Michael D Higgins at commemorations of ODonovan Rossas funeral.

British torture

Yet one of the emotional highlights of the documentary wasnt captured on film: Cole visited the British Library Archives and found stacks of primary evidence of his great-grandfathers torture at the hands of his incarcerators: Shackled with his hands behind his back for excruciating periods of up to 35 days at a time, he was forced to eat on his hands and knees and denied correspondence with family and friends.

There were stacks of files in the booth, says Cole. I thought, Are these copies? But they were the real letters from the 1800s, from governors, and from him. It blew my mind. Luckily I had my phone and took a load of pictures. It was amazing in terms of the physicality of history, to hold that stuff in your hands.

Digging up a harrowing past in Skibbereen, notorious as one of the worst-hit townlands during the Famine, Cole has no difficulty in understanding the root of ODonovan Rossas commitment to Irish emancipation, forged by his childhood of hunger and eviction in famine-stricken West Cork.

The Coles find themselves guests of honour at commemorations that compete politically for the ODonovan Rossa legacy; a Sinn Fein-backed event claims to play true homage to what Pearse described as an unrepentant Fenian, while the official State commemoration is met with accusations of revisionism from some historians. I hope it comes across in the film that we are being used as a prop, by everyone; by all sides, says Cole.

Sanitising the complex figure of his great-grandfather wouldnt do justice to his memory, believes Cole: If I wanted to make something that glorified him, I wouldnt have put in anything about terrorism or the dynamite campaign. Thats not the point of the film; the point of the film is to examine what motivates somebody. You have to look at these figures from all angles.

Rebel Rossa premieres on Sunday at 1.30pm in the Gate Cinema as part of Cork Film Festival

Truth is stranger than fiction: Other documentaries at Cork Film Festival

Dancer

Today, Gate Cinema, 6.30pm

Steven Cantors portrait of Russian dancer Sergei Polunin, christened the James Dean of the ballet world.

Weiner

Tomorrow, 4.30pm, Gate Cinema

Weiner charts the attempted comeback of aptly named ex-congressman Anthony Weiner, whose career was devastated by digital indiscretions. What begins as an unexpected political comeback takes a sharp turn once Weiner is forced to admit to new sexting allegations.

Syl Johnson: Any Way the Wind Blows

Sunday, 7pm, The Gate Cinema

Rescued from obscurity by the sampling revolution, soul singer Syl Johnson had the best voice in the business until he slid into obscurity in the 1980s, and then given a new lease of life as a sample favourite for hip-hop DJs. Features interviews with Wu Tang Clans RZA and Soulsonic Forces Jazzy Jay.

Gimme Danger

Tomorrow, 9.30pm, The Everyman

Ghost Dog director Jim Jarmusch is no stranger to working with musicians. A long-time fan of The Stooges, in the absence of deceased brothers Ron and Scott Asheton who formed the band, Jarmusch delves into the memories of Jim Osterberg, AKA Iggy Pop, left, to relive, among other things, the night the stage dive was invented.

The Space in Between: Marina Abramovic and Brazil

November 17, 7pm, Gate Cinema

Controversial Serbian artist Marina Abramovic is the closest thing performance art has to a rock star.

In this film, she travels through Brazil, a country whose mysticism she is enthralled with. It includes Abramovics ayahuasca ceremony.

I Shot Bi Kidude

November 18, 8.45pm, Triskel

In 2012 Bi Kidude, the renowned east African taraab singer, mysteriously vanished in Zanzibar. Filmmaker Andy Jones, set out to find her in this part mystery story and part tribute.
The movies have even mostly managed to retain a decent cast, with lead Kate Beckinsale only sitting out one entry - the rather fun Rise of the Lycans which still had Rhona Mitra, Michael Sheen and the delightful Bill Nighy.

2012's Awakening might even have been our favourite yet, with lashings of blood and a load of vampire nonsense set in the near future. Now it has a direct sequel which is all about blood.
AFTER success in Britain, with Brexit, and in the US, with Donald Trump, populists are setting their sights on the next five dominoes at risk.

Votes are looming within less than a year in Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, France, and then Germany. Exasperation with the political and business establishment, over a raft of grievances, from inequality to immigration, will likely shape all of these votes.

Exasperation with the political and business establishment, over a raft of grievances, from inequality to immigration, will likely shape all of these votes.

Now, I think, we are beginning to learn that the polls always under-report the extremist, nationalist candidate, Bob Janjuah, a senior independent client adviser, told Bloomberg TV. The populist surge first broke through the establishment barrier in Britain. Below is a timeline of the challenges of the coming 10 months.

The populist surge first broke through the establishment barrier in Britain. Below is a timeline of the challenges of the coming 10 months.

The Brexit referendum vote, on June 23, to leave the European Union, was the watershed. Voters defied the massed ranks of the British establishment, and the advice of global institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to NATO. The reverberations are still being felt, as uncertainty clouds prime minister, Theresa Mays plans four months after she came to power.

The reverberations are still being felt, as uncertainty clouds prime minister, Theresa Mays plans four months after she came to power.

Fast forward to Donald Trumps win on Tuesday, and the revolution continues, Nigel Farage, acting leader of the UK Independence Party and an architect of the Brexit vote, said. Two massive upsets in 2016. The unholy alliance of big business, big banks, and big politics is, I believe, coming to an end.

Two massive upsets in 2016. The unholy alliance of big business, big banks, and big politics is, I believe, coming to an end.

The first test in Italy is weeks away. Italians vote, on December 4, in a constitutional referendum that prime minister, Matteo Renzi, says will make governments more stable and which will streamline legislation. Renzis promise to resign, if he loses, has turned the plebiscite into a vote on his premiership. Opinion polls predict a narrow defeat for Renzi, which would boost the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. It could also trigger early elections next year, in which case governments accounting for 75% of the euro area would be in play in just one year.

It could also trigger early elections next year, in which case governments accounting for 75% of the euro area would be in play in just one year.

Comic-turned-politician, Beppe Grillo, co-founder of Five Star, said that the Trump win was incredible. This is the deflagration of an epoch. Its the apocalypse of this information system, of the TVs, of the big newspapers, of the intellectuals, of the journalists. Five Star, which runs Rome and Turin, is calling for a referendum on Italys membership of the euro area.

Its the apocalypse of this information system, of the TVs, of the big newspapers, of the intellectuals, of the journalists. Five Star, which runs Rome and Turin, is calling for a referendum on Italys membership of the euro area.

Five Star, which runs Rome and Turin, is calling for a referendum on Italys membership of the euro area.

Former premier, Enrico Letta, told Italian newspaper, La Stampa, that elected officials need to overhaul their relationship with voters and what he called the Clinton model, in which politicians enjoy such long careers, is over for ever. Traditional parties, as we have conceived them, are finished, he added.

The same day, December 4, Austrians return to the polls to elect a new president. An earlier attempt was annulled. While in Austria, as in neighbouring Germany, the real power is held by the chancellor, the contest for the ceremonial post will be closely watched. It could bring to power the first far-right leader of a western European country since World War II. In May, Green Party candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, eked out a victory over the anti-immigration Freedom Partys Norbert Hofer. The margin was 30,000 votes from

It could bring to power the first far-right leader of a western European country since World War II. In May, Green Party candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, eked out a victory over the anti-immigration Freedom Partys Norbert Hofer. The margin was 30,000 votes from 4.5m cast. The outcome is still too close to call.

For chancellor, Christian Kern, the US vote holds lessons for Europe. Im convinced that electoral battles will become fierce battles for the middle classes, and thats a fight well take on, he said.

The Dutch kick off Europes unprecedented 2017 voting season with parliamentary elections on March 15. The Netherlands is a laboratory for European politics, with unstable, multi-party coalitions the norm and 13 parties poised to enter parliament next year. Geert Wilders, who leads the anti-Islam Freedom Party  allied with, but no relation to, the Austrian party of the same name  is running neck-and-neck with prime minister Mark Ruttes Liberals (VVD) in some polls. The people are taking their country back, tweeted Wilders, who wants to emulate Britain with a Nexit vote on European Union membership. So will we. And yet the Netherlands may use the time to thwart a Wilders surge. Rutte has ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party, and its hard to see how Wilders could cobble together a working

The Netherlands is a laboratory for European politics, with unstable, multi-party coalitions the norm and 13 parties poised to enter parliament next year. Geert Wilders, who leads the anti-Islam Freedom Party  allied with, but no relation to, the Austrian party of the same name  is running neck-and-neck with prime minister Mark Ruttes Liberals (VVD) in some polls. The people are taking their country back, tweeted Wilders, who wants to emulate Britain with a Nexit vote on European Union membership. So will we. And yet the Netherlands may use the time to thwart a Wilders surge. Rutte has ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party, and its hard to see how Wilders could cobble together a working

Geert Wilders, who leads the anti-Islam Freedom Party  allied with, but no relation to, the Austrian party of the same name  is running neck-and-neck with prime minister Mark Ruttes Liberals (VVD) in some polls. The people are taking their country back, tweeted Wilders, who wants to emulate Britain with a Nexit vote on European Union membership. So will we. And yet the Netherlands may use the time to thwart a Wilders surge. Rutte has ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party, and its hard to see how Wilders could cobble together a working

The people are taking their country back, tweeted Wilders, who wants to emulate Britain with a Nexit vote on European Union membership. So will we. And yet the Netherlands may use the time to thwart a Wilders surge. Rutte has ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party, and its hard to see how Wilders could cobble together a working

Rutte has ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party, and its hard to see how Wilders could cobble together a working majority, if he won the election. On the one hand, the victory of Trump makes populist politics more accepted, said Kees Aarts, professor of political science at Groningen University. But, on the other, all parties and politicians that might have still been a little asleep, regarding the March elections, are now wide awake.

On the one hand, the victory of Trump makes populist politics more accepted, said Kees Aarts, professor of political science at Groningen University. But, on the other, all parties and politicians that might have still been a little asleep, regarding the March elections, are now wide awake.

But, on the other, all parties and politicians that might have still been a little asleep, regarding the March elections, are now wide awake.

French voters have twice backed the National Front to the run-off stage of elections, under two separate generations of Le Pens, only to back away from the anti-immigration party at the last moment. But Brexit and Trumps victory show nothing can be taken for granted in the presidential election second round, on May 7. With Francois Hollande the most unpopular president in French history and his deeply disliked predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, vying to ride the Republican nomination to a comeback, Marine Le Pen may have an opening.

But Brexit and Trumps victory show nothing can be taken for granted in the presidential election second round, on May 7. With Francois Hollande the most unpopular president in French history and his deeply disliked predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, vying to ride the Republican nomination to a comeback, Marine Le Pen may have an opening.

Germany, with its constitutional checks to prevent dictatorial bents, is the European country most resistant to populism. Federal elections in autumn, 2017 will show if that post-war assumption still holds. Demagogic populism is not just a problem in America, finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said.

Federal elections in autumn, 2017 will show if that post-war assumption still holds. Demagogic populism is not just a problem in America, finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said.

Frauke Petry, co-leader of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, sees Trumps victory as a lesson for Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel has suffered regional election defeats on the back of an open-door refugee policy.

* John Follain is the Rome correspondent for Bloomberg and is also a non-fiction author.
Asia Philippine Leader to Honor Defense pacts with Friends US

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks after arriving from Malaysia, at Davao International airport in Davao city in southern Philippines, Nov. 11, 2016. / Lean Daval Jr / Reuters

MANILA, Philippines  Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday he would respect defense treaties with friends and ally the United States, but still wanted foreign troops to leave his country by the end of his term.

Duterte spared the United States one of his trademark verbal lashings and took a more conciliatory tone than usual, although he hinted at revoking the 2014 Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement that gives US troops rotational access to Philippine bases.

We are friends, with an ally, we have a military pact that would bind us, he told a pre-dawn news conference upon his return from a visit to Malaysia.

We will maintain our cooperation  and respect is there, and in all matters between the two countries, especially the treaties we signed with them, so many agreements, we will honor all of these things.

Duterte has been strongly against, at times furious about, dependence on the former colonial power and has called for the scrapping of dozens of joint exercises.

He said the Philippines did not need the exercises and by the end of his six-year term he wanted no foreign soldiers in his country.

We do not need any foreigners to train Filipino troops. By themselves they are warriors, he added.

He also said he would be turning to other countries for defense procurements, like China, Israel, Japan and Russia, because US gadgets were expensive.

Duterte, who is often dubbed Trump of the East due to his fierce rhetoric and outrageous comments, was asked by a reporter if he thought the Donald Trump comparison was accurate.

I am just a small molecule on this planet, he is now president of the most powerful country in the world. I am just a president struggling barely just above the water, he responded.

No I dont think so, what we share in common maybe is the passion to serve.

A change at the White House would not affect his decision to build closer alliances with countries beyond the United States, like China and in Southeast Asia, he said.

I will pursue what I started, Im not into habit of reneging on my work, he said.
Burma Commission Submits Myitsone Assessment Report

Myitsone area photographed in December 2015. / Tin Htet Paing / The Irrawaddy

RANGOON  The commission tasked with evaluating hydropower projects on Burmas Irrawaddy River has submitted its first assessment report to President U Htin Kyaw on Fridaymeeting its projected deadline, a member of the commission told The Irrawaddy.

The commission was formed on August 12, a week before State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyis trip to China as Burmas foreign minister. It was assigned to assess possible impacts of proposed projects on the environment, society, foreign investment, economy and water resources along the Irrawaddy River.

Deputy Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament U T Khun Myat chairs the 20-member commission and State Counselors Office Minister U Kyaw Tint Swe serves as vice-chairman.

While there has been no official statement released regarding the report, commission member U Cho Chowho is also on the advisory board of the National Water Resources Committeetold The Irrawaddy on Friday that the commission is likely to hold a press conference on the report next week.

This is just an initial report and there will be no details released yet, he said, refusing to comment on the content of the report.

After formation of the commission in August, U Cho Cho told The Irrawaddy that the commission would carefully assess all proposed projects in line with international standards while consulting local communities regarding their concerns.

Since the National League for Democracy (NLD) government assumed office in April, China has lobbied to restart the multi-billion dollar Myitsone Dam, which was being constructed in Kachin State with Chinese backing just downriver from the confluence that forms the Irrawaddy. A government suspension order in September 2011 under former President U Thein Seins administration following widespread public protest stalled the project.

Protests against the dam were fueled by a variety of fears and misgivings: the majority of electrical power generated would go to China; the dams location near a seismic fault line posed a flood risk in the case of an earthquake; and a general lack of transparency or public consultation was undertaken before the project was awarded to China.

Environmental non-governmental organization Myanmar Green Networkcomprised of several civil society groupscalled for an immediate end to the project and urged the public to participate in the cause during the networks fifth annual meeting at the end of October.

We call for an end to all proposed mega hydropower projects including the Myitsone Dam on the Irrawaddy River, said Daw Devi Thant Sin, a prominent environmentalist and leader of the Myanmar Green Network.

In the meantime, we also dont want any dams on the Mali Hka or the NMai Hka, she added, referring to the two streams that form the Irrawaddy River.

The commission consists of experts from different fields and their recommendations are likely to vary, she said, adding that she hoped the commission would reflect the networks concerns.

U Win Myo Thu, co-founder and managing director of environmental organization Ecodev, said the commission should carefully analyze advantages and disadvantages of the project for both the public and stakeholders.

He also stressed the importance of transparency regarding the Myitsone Dam contract between the Chinese and Burmese governments and said the commission should recommend resolutions for the current situation.

If the government decides to resume the project, the public will definitely be against it, he said. The NLD government will suffer political disadvantages and a loss of public trust.

Additional reporting by Htet Naing Zaw.
Burma Ethnic Alliance Holds Off on Signing Ceasefire Agreement

The United Nationalities Federal Council and the Burmese delegation led by Dr. Tin Myo Win at the National Reconciliation and Peace Center in Rangoon on July 1, 2016. / Hein Htet / The Irrawaddy

Burmas ethnic armed group alliance the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) has delayed signing the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) because it wants to ensure a strong agreement includes all groups, the UNFCs negotiation delegation told The Irrawaddy.

The governments peace commission led by Dr. Tin Myo Win met the councils Delegation for Political Negotiation (DPN) to discuss how non-signatories could continue participation in the peace process at Rangoons National Reconciliation and Peace Center on Thursday.

After a half-day meeting, delegation spokesperson Khu Oo Reh told reporters that the process is moving forward despite difficulties in the negotiations.

Khu Oo Reh acknowledged public dissatisfaction over the five-year negotiation process but said the council wanted a strong agreement to avoid further conflicts.

Ongoing conflicts between the Burma Army and ethnic armed groups in Kachin and northern Shan states have exacerbated negotiations.

UNFC leaders met with State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in July, participated in the 21st Century Panglong peace conference in August and September, and have continued talks almost every month since then.

We believe that inclusiveness is the only way to overcome the problem comprehensively, Khu Oo Reh said. He reiterated that the UNFC had agreed to take the path of the NCA, under the current political landscape.

Despite co-drafting the ceasefire text, UNFC members did not sign in October last year as some of its member groupsthe Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA), the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), and the Arakan Armywere not accepted by the Burma Army as NCA signatories.

The TNLA and the MNDAA asked to leave the alliance this year and a TNLA spokesperson told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that the group has recently had no contact with the UNFC.

The DPN held a separate meeting with the Joint Ceasefire Monitoring Committee (JMC) on Wednesday.

Khu Oo Reh said they discussed JMC mechanisms, ceasefire codes of conducts, and approaches to political dialogue. A good result can be expected when we are all agreed on the framework, he added.

The negotiators will meet for further talks later this month.

Nang Lwin Hnin Pwint contributed to this report.
Burma Lawmakers Oppose Yawnghwe Haw Night Bazaar

Yawnghwe Cultural Museum. / Ko Soe / The Irrawaddy

More than half of the 100 elected lawmakers in Shan States Parliament sent an objection letter to the state government this week in response to a plan to open a night bazaar inside Yawnghwe (Nyaung Shwe) Haw, the residence of Burmas first President Sao Shwe Thaike.

Hotels and tourism minister U Ohn Maung said in early September that the residence would be turned into a heritage tourist site open two nights a week from 6pm to 11pm, with the help of French experts.

Nang Khin Htar Yee, a Shan Nationalities League for Democracy lawmaker representing Shan States Hsenwi Township, said there has been no response from the chief minister to the objection letter, which was signed by 61 lawmakers and sent on Monday.

State lawmakers met with Shan State chief minister Lin Htut at the end of September to discuss the issue.

He [Lin Htut] told us the plan would not proceed. We asked for this in writing, which he still has not provided, Khin Htar Yee told The Irrawaddy.

She stated that the residence should remain a cultural museum rather than be turned into a tourist attraction.

We have to preserve our cultural heritage. It is a valuable legacy from our first President and we allnot only the Shan State people but all the people of Burmamust value this, Khin Htar Yee said.

If an answer is not received, the lawmaker said the question would be raised in Parliament when it resumes next month.

The lawmakers who object to the plan are from more than half a dozen political parties, including the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, Union Solidarity and Development Party, Pa-O National Liberation Organization, the Taang (Palaung) National Party, Kokang Democracy and Unity Party and the ruling National League for Democracy.

Last week, the outspoken former Lower House lawmaker Nang Wah Nu of the Shan Nationalities Democratic Party (SNDP) also said it objected to the plan. The SNDP did not win any seats in the 2015 election.
Burma Report: Prison Reforms Must Respect Human Rights

Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt's grandmother (2nd L) kisses him as he reunites with his mother (R) and elder brother (L) in front of Pa-an prison, in Pa-an January 13, 2012. / Soe Zeya Tun / Reuters

Prison reforms currently being considered in Burma fall short of meeting international human rights standards, Amnesty International said on Thursday.

New draft prison legislation represents a significant improvement on laws currently in effect that are more than a century old, but it still fails to meet international norms, the UK-based rights group said.

Burmas prisons have for decades been known to facilitate conditions where prisoners were cramped into small cells or kept in overcrowded spaces, denied adequate health care and clean water, and subject to arbitrary transfers, torture and forced labor, Amnesty said in a new report.

The draft Prisons Law of July 2015 is among the priority laws identified by the governments Commission for the Assessment of Legal Affairs and Special Issues.

It is heartening to see that the government and the countrys parliamentarians, many of whom endured torture and other ill-treatment in these same prisons, are considering crucial prison reforms. Now, they must ensure that no other prisoners are subject to the same fate, said Rafendi Djamin, Amnesty Internationals Director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific in a statement.

The report titled Myanmar: Bring Rights to Prisons assesses that the proposed new legislation fails to prohibit torture and other ill-treatment or include safeguards against other abuses, including unlawful detention and forced labor.

Mandatory independent monitoring of prison conditions and the establishment of an independent complaints mechanism for prisoners would create greater transparency for a prison system that has long relied on secrecy, the report says.

It also urges lawmakers to introduce provisions in the draft law that will guarantee that minimum standards of health, food, potable water, accommodation, sanitation and hygiene are met.

Provisions that address the special needs of juveniles and women and regulate the use of force by prison officials should also be added, it adds.

Amnesty International calls for problematic provisions in the draft law to be removed, including the resort to restraint and prolonged solitary confinement as disciplinary measures.

The new draft law is set to repeal the 1894 Prisons Act, the 1900 Prisoners Act and the 1920 Identification of Prisoners Act. Amnesty added that it believes that the draft law has been sent back by Parliament to the Ministry of Home Affairs to be amended.
Friday, November 11th, 2016 (8:44 am) - Score 1,977

The Deputy Leader of Shropshire Council, Steve Charmley, has accused Openreach (BT) of embarrassing itself after their new FTTC fibre broadband Street Cabinet in the village of Whittington ran out of capacity sooner than expected. It wouldnt be so bad, except BT have a base in the same area.

We recently ran an article on the issue of full FTTC (VDSL2) based Street Cabinets (here), which is especially common in areas where Openreach installs a new cabinet and then underestimates local demand. On the surface its a nice problem to have because it confirms that more people want your service than originally predicted.

However if the upgrade requires an additional or larger cabinet to be built then it can sometimes take several months or even longer to resolve (assuming there are enough customers in the area to even warrant an upgrade) and that may result in frustration and confusion for consumers, many of whom could have been told that superfast broadband is available and yet they cant order it.

An Openreach Spokesperson said: The cabinet in question has exceeded all expectations in terms of take-up, and arrangements are in hand by Openreach  BTs local network business  to increase capacity as soon as possible to enable more local people to be able to order faster fibre broadband.

The issue in Whittington is particularly interesting because BT, which happens to be one of the biggest employers in the area, are also based out of the nearby Whittington House on Whittington Road. Despite this the village, which is home to around 2,600 people, was not included in the operators original commercial roll-out plan for up to 80Mbps capable FTTC technology.

Councillor Steve Charmley claims he campaigned hard to get the village included into the programme, which he views as being a bit silly given BTs base in the area. Needless to say that Steve isnt best pleased at having achieved this, only for the cabinet to fill up and run out of capacity in double quick time.

Cllr Steve Charmley said (here): Why arent they building capacity into the system to allow for surges in take up in local areas? Thats my big problem. Im not comfortable promoting super fast broadband, running around like a headless chicken trying to get people signed up to the service, if theres no capacity in the system.

In fairness, most of the time Openreach do get it right and additional capacity can usually be added quite quickly by simply installing some extra kit into the existing cabinet, but if the cabinet fills up completely then more effort is often required. Its a difficult balancing act and decisions might be constrained by economic models.

Some recent data supplied by Openreach to ISPs revealed that roughly 1,970 out of 77,033 live cabinets were full to capacity and awaiting upgrades (around 2.6%). At present Openreachs FTTC/P network is available to roughly 26 million premises across the United Kingdom.

Its worth pointing out that the biggest FTTC cabinets can handle up to 384 active ports, although by comparison Openreachs forthcoming roll-out of G.fast technology is still struggling to achieve its eventual target of supporting 96 ports via 4 cards (each with 24 ports). So we might see a repeat of the capacity issues when G.fast arrives.

However the initial demand for G.fast may be lower than it was for FTTC, at least until more people start feeling a need for the extra speed it offers. Remember that ISPs will also charge more for G.fast than FTTC to compensate for the heavier requirements, but most people may initially prefer to stick with a cheaper FTTC solution (provided FTTC / VDSL2 offers them decent speed of course).

Meanwhile the people of Whittington will have to wait another 4-5 months before local FTTC capacity is given a boost.
Friday, November 11th, 2016 (11:38 am) - Score 897

Fibre optic ISP TrueSpeed has hinted to Ofcom that its 150Mbps Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) broadband network, which is currently rolling out to parts of the Chew Valley in rural North East Somerset (England), could also be expanded into Devon, Wiltshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.

The provider has already deployed into the village of Priston and theyre now in the process of expanding to Compton Dando, Stanton Drew and Stanton Wick. The demand-led expansion could also help them to reach Woolard, Publow, Pensford, Chew Magna, Chew Stoke and Bishop Sutton in the near future.

Of course its not uncommon for such providers to seek Code Powers from Ofcom, which works to simplify the planning process (no need for lots of individual licenses during civil works) and can thus speed-up the roll-out of new networks. TrueSpeed has today tabled just such an application and this reveals a few tentative hints about their future plans.

Apparently TrueSpeeds primary goal for North East Somerset is to put their pure fibre optic broadband network within reach of 8,000 properties and theyre also in the process of establishing themselves as a customer for Openreachs (BT) Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) product, which might enable them to roll-out with greater efficiency by harnessing the operators existing cable ducts and poles. The ISP sees PIA as being fundamental to enable it to provide broadband coverage to remote locations.

On top of that they also confirmed their intention to be actively involved in bidding for future Broadband Delivery UK linked contracts around the South West of England and revealed that future expansion could bring FTTP to parts of Devon, Wiltshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.

Extract from TrueSpeeds Application

The Applicant has explained that it is building an advanced fibre optic network via fibre optic links direct to homes and businesses. It has explained that its network will enable ultrafast internet access, with reliable symmetrical speeds of 100MB/s to 10GB/s, and telephony services. According to the Applicant, it has already completed deployment of its network in the village of Priston and some of its backbone fibre network is already installed within key areas of Bath. The Applicant has explained that it has also co-invested with Hibernia Networks and has, as a result, secured access to Hibernia Networks high specification ducting across the Wiltshire and Somerset regions and purchased sub-ducting from Hibernia Networks along that route. According to the Applicant, this will enable it to increase broadband connectivity for thousands of businesses and homes along the 77km route from Brean to Chippenham. The Applicant has explained that its network will be linked initially to the Hibernia fibre spine through a series of fibre nodes. These nodes can be configured and reconfigured in a variety of ways, providing a future-proof and scalable network.

As usual the regulator has proposed to grant the code powers and opened a public consultation, although it should be said that such applications are often written in an overly optimistic way in order to make them look as attractive as possible for the regulator to wave through.

Subscribers typically pay from 47.50 per month for an unlimited 100Mbps package with a phone line included, although theyve recently added a new 150Mbps Home Office package that also includes 2 phone lines for 69.50 per month.
There has been a run of acquisitions in the telecommunications sector, headlined by AT&Ts acquisition of Time Warner and CenturyLinks deal to acquire Level 3. Here is another to add to the list: Windstream and EarthLink are merging in a $673 million deal.

EarthLink shareholders will receive 0.818 shares of Windstream common stock. Within three years of the deal, the companies claim that they will save $125 million annually via operating and capital synergies.

The two wired ISPs, if the deal closes, will have 145,000 route miles of fiber in the United States.

BT Commercializes Gigabit Service

BT is pushing 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) service beyond the trial phase.

The English carrier is offering service at that speed on its Openreach fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network. So far, the service is available to only 327,000 homes and businesses in the United Kingdom. It is set to double in size during the next year and reach 2 million premises by the end of 2020, according to CED.

Overall, BT is planning to use a variety of approaches to offer 12 million premises accelerated speeds by that date. Two new products are expected next month, including a service that offers 500 Megabits per second (Mbps) downstream and 220 Mbps upstream speeds.

Schools Making Online Progress

The number of public school districts with speedy broadband connections has risen from 19 percent to 68 percent since 2013, according to a report from the Consortium for School Networking.

The report also says that only 6 percent of high schools nationwide lack Wi-Fi. The next step, however, may be tough: The schools report that they need more modern connections, though 60 percent say that cost is a problem.

AT&T/Time Warner Deal No Sure Thing

Since AT&T announced that it will acquire Time Warner for $85.4 billion, a few things have happened. One thing is that the U.S. Department of Justice is suing DirecTV, which is owned by AT&T, for collusion in how it handles carriage negotiations for Dodgers games in Los Angeles. The other is that the next president has been elected.

Analysts MoffettNathanson LLC interviewed 20 regulatory experts and found that the consensus of the experts, most of which were interviewed before the lawsuit involving DirecTV was filed, is that the closing of the deal is anything but certain. Among the uncertainties, according to the report at Light Reading, is whether the Federal Communications Commission would review the deal. The story says that technical changes can be made to avoid FCC review, but that this could be a strategic mistake.

More Colorado Communities Open to Local Telecom Platforms

Voters in Colorado are opting to enable their communities to create their own telecommunications services platform. Community Broadband News reports that 26 communities  seven counties and 19 municipalities  voted to do so in referendums.

The referendums are necessary due to SB 152, a 2005 state law that requires that the step be taken before local governments can work with the private sector on telecommunications. The 26 communities that did so in the recent vote bring the total to 29 out of Colorados 64 counties and 66 of the states municipalities.

Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at [email protected] and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.
Over the past several days, Ive seen some hopeful things about Donald Trump, at least with regard to technology. First, he clearly pivoted based on a very different approach to analytics during the last days of the election, which showcased that he got that none of the polling research coming out of the research houses was any good (something most of us had known for some time). Then I got a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) showcasing that one of his few solid positions was actually on cybersecurity. Finally, I learned that Peter Thiel, one of the better-regarded VCs out of the Valley, was going to remain an advisor and confidant.

Now all of this together at least supports the position that hell be better with technology than the last two presidents were and Hillary Clinton would have been. Given that hes the guy who will have the job, that gives me hope for the future. And if there is anything we need right now, it is hope. Im one of those who believe, in terms of priority, that fixing our cybersecurity problem trumps nearly everything else either candidate discussed.

Peter Thiel vs. Mark Cuban vs. Meg Whitman

Im not saying Thiel is the strongest player in the Valley, but he is generally better regarded than Mark Cuban. In addition, Cuban was largely used, like Clinton used Meg Whitman, as a way to piss off Trump, while Thiel actually spoke to the critical technology infrastructure and security needs of the country more. Thiel was more focused on the critical topic of making the nation better, while Cuban and Whitman came off as opportunists who now clearly have figured out that they bet wrong.

Both Whitman and Cuban had access to analytics, and Whitman sells analytics solutions, yet Trump used this tool far more successfully than Clinton did, suggesting that Thiel was likely a far greater technological asset to Trump than Cuban or Whitman were. In fact, while Cuban and Whitman seemed almost laser-like in their focus on status, Thiels support of Trump actually hurt his status. Yet he stood the course and, it turned out, this choice was the right one if he, in fact, wanted to make a difference.

This was one of the issues with President Obama and Google. The relationship didnt seem to benefit Obamas presidency; it just seemed to protect Google from timely U.S. anti-trust action and created ethics problems for both parties. Thiel, on the other hand, has Trumps ear and appears focused less on personal status and more on actually fixing problems.

By the way, I think it was pretty stupid for both Cuban and Whitman to be used tactically as weapons during a presidential campaign. The benefits if their candidate won were fleeting, but the exposures if they lost could last four to eight years. Trump isnt known for being forgiving.

Use of Analytics

Up until this week, I wasnt convinced that Trump or Clinton could spell analytics, let alone use this powerful tool correctly. It wasnt that both campaigns werent using the tool but both seemed to be using it badly, or not at all, leading to a never-ending string of bad tactical and strategic decisions. But then, about 10 days before the election, Trump got a clue. Suddenly, he is the poster child for how to use analytics to win elections from behind. Clinton is now the poster child for how to commit political suicide with a huge advertising budget.

The reason a lot of us were concerned about the use of analytics during the election was that it was clear that normal sampling methods couldnt, and wouldnt work.

Trump actually listened; the result was a changed approach that is credited with him winning the election. Once a tool works for you, there is a good chance youll use it again, and this also showcased the value of accurate data.

Wrapping Up: The U.S. Strategic Technology Asset

Ive now watched two relatively young U.S. presidents get technology wrong, and I had pretty much given up on anyone in politics ever getting it right. Up until this week, I doubted that either Clinton or Trump were going to be any different but, surprisingly, Trump actually has a clue and I think we desperately need someone that has a clue in technology. If you want more good news, read this ITIF report on his technology positions. He doesnt have many, but he hits solidly on the one that most concerns me, cybersecurity.

Maybe things are getting better. I figure this is something positive to take into the weekend, and positive works for me. I hope it does for you.

Rob Enderle is President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, a forward-looking emerging technology advisory firm. With over 30 years experience in emerging technologies, he has provided regional and global companies with guidance in how to better target customer needs; create new business opportunities; anticipate technology changes; select vendors and products; and present their products in the best possible light. Rob covers the technology industry broadly. Before founding the Enderle Group, Rob was the Senior Research Fellow for Forrester Research and the Giga Information Group, and held senior positions at IBM and ROLM. Follow Rob on Twitter @enderle, on Facebook and on Google+
PayPal co-founder and investor Peter Thiel received criticisms for supporting then US Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. The tech industry, particularly the Silicon Valley is not really fond of Trump. Thiel is probably the only person from the industry who is not scared of a Trump presidency. Now, since Trump is already president-elect, the tide might have turned for Thiel.

Thiel's Loyalty To Trump

Thiel seemed to be vindicated once Trump was officially the president-elect. His support had been constant despite the issues President-elect Trump had encountered during the campaign. According to The New York Times, Thiel did not shy away from expressing his excitement for Trump.

He said that a page in the book of history has turned. Thiel also said in the interview that may be problems can now be seen and understood from a new perspective. Unlike most people thought, Thiel predicted that Trump would win the presidential election.

Thiel's Knew Trump Would Win

The media, polls and the whole world expected a Hillary Clinton win. Thiel acknowledged this and said that his odds were very badly underestimated. He also pointed out what has already become evident after the result.

Thiel mentioned that Trump voters were not captured well by the polls. A lot of analysts have agreed that a lot were certain that Clinton was going to be the next US President. The electoral votes eventually have proven this wrong. The media have already tagged this as the "biggest upset in US political history".

Thiel added that what happened is very similar to the Brexit vote in the UK. The polls did not reflect the result.

Thiel's Possible Role In Trump's Administration

The New York Times further reports that Thiel has no formal role in Trump's administration. However, he said he will try to help the president [elect] in any way he can. Thiel cleared that he does not have a plan of leaving the Silicon Valley for Washington D.C.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other tech companies have yet to congratulate or comment on Trump's win. According to TechCrunch, among the policies that might be unfavorable for the tech industry include that in the global trade, immigration, renewable energy and cybersecurity.
Women in the U.S. are setting up appointments with their gynecologists and are planning to get IUDs, or intrauterine devices, a small t-shaped device inserted into the uterus, which is the most effective form of reversible contraception and can last from 3-10 years, depending on the variety. That means, if you get one now, it can last until the entire Trump presidency.

Trump's Pro-Life Campaign Versus Obamacare

Trump ran an anti-choice campaign and said he would not be funding Planned Parenthood while he's president. He also said that he would take several steps to restrict abortions and funding to organizations that provide abortion services, and that he will be committed to promote pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Obama administration has been a strong advocate to women's reproductive choice. Under Obamacare, women have access to 18 FDA-approved types of birth control at no out-of-pocket costs. Now that a Trump presidency is on its way, women are more likely to go to a doctor and ask for a presidential term's worth of birth control.

What Reproductive Choices Do Women Have?

Doctors say that women who are concerned about their reproductive rights can choose to get IUD's, simply because it has longer effects. A copper IUD - Paragard - can last up to 10 years. This type of contraceptive is toxic to sperm and makes the uterine wall slicker so that it would be difficult for an egg to implant.

Planned Parenthood's Dr. Raegan McDonald-Mosley said: "It's too early to tell if we'll see an uptick in requests for IUDs as a result of the election. While we truly hope that birth control methods will be available, accessible, and affordable to all women under the Trump administration, we understand people's real concerns about losing access to birth control, which is basic health care for women."
A report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last Tuesday has revealed that U.S. has just experienced the third of the hottest October to have ever been recorded in decades.

Hottest October In Decades Or Since October 1963

Research shows that it has never been this hot since October 1963. Scientists from NOAA claims that October is usually known for being a month of cuddly weather and autumn coats but for many of the U.S.' population, it seems like it's more of a season for heading out to the beach.

On its monthly presentation, the meteorological service's report shows that the amount of rainfall recorded last month has been below average and most of their stations have also reported to have received less than half of the normal rainfall amount for the said period.

According to reports released by CBS News, the NOAA has allegedly found that this year's most extreme heat level across the US has occurred in the most unexpected state of Alaska. Typically, Alaska has been noted for its chilly ambiance. Apparently, its recorded year-to-date temperature was 6.7 degrees above the average which has now reached up to 36.3 degrees Fahrenheit.The said phenomenon was known to have broken Alaska's record that was previously set between the periods of January to October of 1926.

Climate Change Worsens Droughts

Furthermore, Climate Central reports that the occurrences of these warm temperatures has actually paved the way for drought to get worsen especially in the Northeastern and Southeastern territories since the temperature was found to have increased the amount of evaporation from soils and as well as the transpiration process from various plants and trees. Experts believe that it was because of the extreme heat and drought that has fueled to an even higher wildfire activity in the Southeastern parts of the US.

Meanwhile, the shifting of temperature in Alaska are considered by the experts as another sign of climate change which in turn, brings crucial disruption to the state and its people. Generally, NOAA's record book has also revealed that there are already 37 states; which are known to have experienced one of their five warmest January to October periods.
Pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergey Markov confessed that Russia might help the transparency radical organization WikiLeaks with Hillary Clintons emails, in order to make Donald Trump get elected as president of the U.S., which could mean fit in Vladimir Putins interest. This confession could escalate tensions between both countries, which have been characterized as bad diplomatic relations in the past decades.

Markov Helped WikiLeaks With Clintons Emails A Little Bit

According to the International Business Times, Markov explained that the elections results were a great news for American democracy, and denied any kind of state involvement with Clintons emails. However, he later said that "Maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks". Some weeks ago, the U.S. government blamed Russia for being behind the hacks and wanting to interfere with the elections, but the Kremlins denies the accusations.

In response to Markovs confession, the non-profit organization discredits the media for they made a bad translation of the Pro-Kremlin analyst comments, and put into question the reliability of the news. WikiLeaks has always claimed that there was no group or government involved in its actions against the Democratic nominee, although it has been repeatedly said that Putin was behind it.

Some Kremlins Members Doesnt Rely On Trumps Unpredictability

Even when WikiLeaks wasnt working with any other party, it is an undeniable fact that the organization didn't want Hillary Clinton as the new president, since the leaks that it was published were exclusively from her campaign chairman, John Podesta. As reported in a previous article, the most suspicious detail about all of this is that WikiLeaks and Russia shared the same interest in the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

According to The Guardian, the editor-in-chief of Russias liberal Echo of Moscow radio, Alexei Venediktov, explained that even when many Kremlin members have openly shown their support for Donald Trump and their joy for the elections results, the most serious members could be actually worried, since no one knows which Trumps real intentions are, considering his unpredictability.
The 2016 presidential election shook the American people. Though America has always been divided with its political views, the divide has become so vivid and Hilary supporters have been protesting non-stop in the streets of America. Apple, who is known to be against Donald Trump has also expressed its own way against President-elect Donald Trump's victory.

According to an article written at Buzz Feed, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out an all-hands memo to its US Apple employees last Wednesday evening. The intention of the memo was to call for unity amid the uncertainty inspired by Donald Trump's presidential win. In the memo, it reads:

"Team, I've heard from many of you today about the presidential election. In a political contest where the candidates were so different and each received a similar number of popular votes, it's inevitable that the aftermath leaves many of you with strong feelings.

We have a very diverse team of employees, including supporters of each of the candidates. Regardless of which candidate each of us supported as individuals, the only way to move forward is to move forward together. I recall something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said 50 years ago: "If you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward." This advice is timeless, and a reminder that we only do great work and improve the world by moving forward.

While there is discussion today about uncertainties ahead, you can be confident that Apple's North Star hasn't changed. Our products connect people everywhere, and they provide the tools for our customers to do great things to improve their lives and the world at large. Our company is open to all, and we celebrate the diversity of our team here in the United States and around the world - regardless of what they look like, where they come from, how they worship or who they love.

I've always looked at Apple as one big family and I encourage you to reach out to your co-workers if they are feeling anxious.

Let's move forward - together!

Best,

Tim."

Why is a tech company like Apple against a politician?

In an article at CBR Online, earlier in the year, president-elect Donald Trump said to the general public at a rally in South Carolina to boycott Apple products. He said the Apple should give the security code to the authorities. The reason of this is because Apple refused to assist the FBI in unlocking an iPhone that belonged to one of the killers involved in the San Bernardino mass shooting. He then said that Apple products should be boycotted until they help the authorities. And since then, there have been many exchanges made between president-elect Trump and Apple.

What will happen to Apple?

As of now, it is clear that Apple, just like any other American citizen who supports Hilary has yet to recover from the election. But critics believe that as Time Cook and Donald Trump are both businessmen, they will certainly settle their difference and reach an agreement to work together in the near future. It is also a fact that president-elect Trump has Apple stocks.
According to well-known KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has decided to cancel its 2017 annual upgrade of the iPhone SE.

New Apple Leak

According to Cult of Mac, the KGI Securities analyst Kuo is widely regarded as the best Apple analyst, so this rumor is highly likely to prove true. According to MacRumors, Kuo says that the high-tech giant has decided to cancel the release its 2017 update of the iPhone SE. This might come as a surprise, since most of the tech analysts agree that the company's budget friendly 4-inch handset has been a commercial hit. Apple iPhone SE is considered as a better buy than even the flagship iPhone 7, according to Forbes.

Reasons To Cancel iPhone SE 2017

Despite its lower starting price point, Kuo explains that dropping iPhone sales are the main reason for the potential decision. Apple might consider that releasing an updated version of the SE could negatively affect the profits of the more expensive iPhone 8, according to DigitalSpy. As its older components reduce in price, Apple could also increase margins on the 2016 iPhone SE sales if it is not releasing an updated version next year.

According to market analysts, Apple is far more interested in profit share rather than market share. Therefore, these reasons make financial sense on a business level. But the downside of this decision could be lower raw sales figures. According to Kuo, iPhone shipments might drop at least 10 percent in the second quarter of 2017. Compared to 40.4 million sales in the second quarter of 2016, sales will drop at circa 35 million units.

This wouldn't be the first time when Apple adopts such a decision. The company has previously skipped many years of MacBook Pro upgrades and iPad generations. Anytime when Apple has deemed existing models still get the job done, the company decided to skip an upgrade. However, now it would be the first time when Apple would pass over an iPhone.
A Samsung patent application revealed a look of its possible foldable phone. There have been a number of reports about the tech company's plan of releasing such device next year. Though Samsung has not confirmed anything yet. Now, a source disclosed to the Korea Herald that the tech giant is cautious of actually releasing foldable smartphones in the market.

Capable But Unsure

A source said to the Korea Herald that the Samsung already capable of mass producing foldable phones. The tech company may very well release it by 2017 if they want to. Though the premium models will only be available in small quantities. However, there is uncertainty on the part of the Korean-based tech company.

Samsung is not sure whether the possible pricy foldable smartphones can meet the market demand. The said source further said that the company needs to confirm the market condition before making a decision. He added that Samsung will likely unveil foldable tablets instead of smartphones.

The said tablets will have panels facing outward. Apparently, this particular design has less technical burden than inward panels.

Foldable Phones Will Be A Huge Step Forward

Samsung's caution is not unfounded. The company has suffered two huge blows this year. The recalls of its Galaxy Note 7 and washing machines have put Samsung in a bad light. The Android Headlines is right that the company has to ensure the safety and cost-effectivity of its upcoming products.

However, Samsung should take the risk of releasing these foldable smartphones in the market. Such innovation can be an advantage for them. LG and Lenovo are still the only tech companies it could go up against.

Samsung's Patent Application

The recently published patent application of Samsung shows a phone that can be folded half down its middle. Sam Mobile described the device's hinge similar to that of the Microsoft Surface Book. Furthermore, it might have the same cavity when it is folded.
Leprosy is a disease that has been feared by many people. Today it is still so, even if it has largely been controlled. Leprosy affects animals as well, as is the case of leprosy bacteria found in red squirrels in Britain and Ireland.

Leprosy is largely known to a disease in humans. Much has been written about it. It social implications on victims can be great, to the point of being ostracized by society. Because of medical advances leprosy has been controlled through antibiotics among humans.

That is not the case though with many animals in the wild. Cases of leprosy has been found in animals. An example of this is the case of armadillos contracting leprosy. Another group of animals that are infected with it is the red squirrel from Britain, Scotland and Ireland.

Two labs have tested about 110 red squirrels, according to Phys Org. Stewart Cole of EPFL and Anna Meredith from the University of Edinburgh conducted the tests on the red squirrels. Some of the squirrels didn't have the leprosy bacteria, but most were found to be infected.

One group of red squirrels from Brownsea Island, just off the coast of southern England, is infected by the M. leprae strain. Another group coming from Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Wight are infected by the M. lepromatosis strain. The two leprosy strains have come from a common one some 27,000 years ago.

Meredith said that continued research and study on the leprosy cases among red squirrels is essential in order to manage the disease among them. The red squirrels are considered as an endangered species and there are conservation efforts for them. Cole said that the presence of leprosy among the red squirrels shows that a disease can still exist in the environment even though it has been controlled among humans.

There is no danger of leprosy that humans can be infected, said Kenrad Nelson, a Professor at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is not involved in the study. Though the animals can transmit the disease to humans, contact between red squirrels and humans is low, as Live Science noted.

Lead study author Charlotte Avanzi said leprosy presence among non-humans might be higher than expected. This, she added, might be of importance in countries where leprosy is still not controlled. It could be that some leprosy cases have been through contact with animals that have it.

The study continues for leprosy bacteria found in red squirrels in Britain and Ireland. Even if leprosy has already been controlled in much of the UK, animal populations still have the disease. The Zika virus might also have a remedy, as an Army-developed vaccine is being tested.
The botulinum toxin has been used for clinical and cosmetic purposes. It is regulated the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as such. Any mislabeling or purposefully misleading people of its use can be a federal offense. That is what happened when a nurse pleads guilty to illegally distributing Botox.

Botox is the commercial name of the botulinum toxin distributed by Allergan. Allergan has been approved by the FDA to commercially distribute and sell the product. However, only a licensed medical doctor can administer the product to patients. Distribution of the product without the proper labels and identification is a federal offense.

Bridget "Gigi" Goddard has been charged with illegally receiving and delivering Botox without any proper identification labels on it. This happened after a sting operation has been done wherein an FDA operative posing as a customer caught her, according to MyNews LA. Goddard will likely plead guilty to the charge of receipt and delivery of a misbranded drug.

Goddard is the owner of Pure Indulgence Skin Rejuvenation, Inc. The spa is claimed to be frequented by stars from "Real Housewives of Orange County." According to search warrants, Goddard claims to have been featured in the show as well as on the CBS program "The Doctors," as Metro reports.

Goddard is said to have purchased the products online. The purchase has been made from SB Medical Inc. which has also been involved in a federal case in 2015 for distributing misbranded products. SB Medical Inc. has ceased operation. After it shut down, Goddard purchased the products from a Canadian source called Doctor Medica.

Goddard will be making her first appearance in court on December 12. Her spa has also been shut down. Some of the customers have prepaid for services and are said to be asking a refund. George Karavestos, head of the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations said that they are primarily targeting high volume purchasers as well as those who ignore FDA warnings about mislabeled products.

The botulinum toxin is a federally regulated substance, and any product that is mislabeled or misbranded should not be distributed. A nurse pleads guilty to illegally distributing Botox. A report also states that the FDA has approved drug ads for unapproved treatment, which is causing concern among medical practitioners.
Google's Daydream View is now available and YouTube is making sure users get to live the dream.

YouTube just released a dedicated virtual reality app for the Daydream View, Google's latest mobile-based VR headset. This allows owners of the VR headset to enjoy YouTube videos like they are part of the video itself.

Tech Radar reports that Google is looking into bringing the YouTube VR app to its other devices.

Setting up the Daydream View is easy especially when compared to other VR headsets. To operate the Daydream View, simply start off by opening the hatch at the front of the headset. This is where the controller is kept. Just take it out. Next, place a phone on the headset's door. Make sure the phone is on first. After adjusting the straps, hold down the calibration button on the controller. Then, it can be played.

Another good thing about the Daydream View is that it automatically pairs with the phone. The user also has no need to calibrate, adjust or alter things manually. Navigating the menus is done through the motion controller. A cursor will follow the user's motions so navigation is done by simply pointing at where the cursor needs to go.

The Daydream View is relatively cheap at $79.99 each. In comparison, the HTC Vive goes for $799. The Samsung Gear VR sells for somewhere between $75 and $125 while the Oculus Rift is worth $599. The PlayStation VR has a $399 price tag.

CNet cites the daydream View's affordable price, portability, and ease of use as among its good points. It does have some issues with the frequency that the headset had to be adjusted because of its front-heavy design. Also, the Daydream View only works with Google Pixel but an update will surely follow.

The View is also quite limited. Unlike some of the other VR headsets, the user cannot walk around or grab stuff. Plus, the app selection is still quite limited.
Not a lot of valid complaints were made about the Pixel and Pixel XL during the first weeks of their launch. However, as of recently, a number of non-US users of the Pixels have reported LTE-related issues that they have encountered with their phones. Apparently, their phones could not connect to LTE and it's unclear what the main reason behind this is.

Google Pixel And Pixel XL LTE Issues

As per GSM Arena, a small number of Pixel users from South America and Canada have reported having issues in connecting to LTE. In summary, it looks like the said phones and/or carriers in said locations rely on Band 4 to get their LTE connection. Because of this problem, the phones' connection gets pulled back to an HSPA+ connection.

Google Pixel Phones LTE Problems Resolutions

Right now, Google hasn't really provided a solid solution to the Pixels' connection problem. Although, it's good news that the company has already acknowledged the problem, Android Central reported. However, there's still no clarity as to how this issue could be fixed. There are users who say that the company has allowed them to swap out their phones. However, of course, there's no assurance that the hardware swap will do the trick and fix the LTE issue.

Since Google hasn't actually provided an explanation for these, affected users have their own assumptions as to what the root of the problem is. Some users would say that this could be fixed by registering your SIM cards to a different IMEI number. Some people also associate this problem to Qualcomm's compatibility issues of some sort. Needless to say, this problem is a minor one and hopefully, Google can finally point out what the real issue is.

It's worth noting that the said LTE problem in Pixel phones has only been recorded outside US. The said problem is still almost non-existent in the US. It could be because the number of US cases is pretty low, or the said Pixel problem simply doesn't exist in the country. With that said, US carriers could actually support all kinds of LTE connections, thus saving themselves from such a problem.


With only a few sleeps until the 2016 Los Angeles Auto Show, things are getting hotter and hotter as Porsche announced that the 2017 Panamera in its Executive Edition is coming to grace the event. A lot of people are already excited about the upcoming event and with this announcement, enthusiasts will have more to expect as they get ready to meet the Executive Edition of the all-new 2017 Porsche Panamera.

The 2017 Porsche Panamera Executive Edition

The 2017 Porsche Panamera Executive Edition is said to be a car meant for chauffeurs according to a report from CNET. The 2017 Porsche Panamera Executive Edition is coming with several trims including the base trim Panamera-4, 4-E-Hybrid, 4S and Turbo. In another report, the trims are said to come with 330, 462, 440 and 550 horsepower respectively with rear-wheel steering feature and soft-close doors for the latter two trims.

Other Features

As reported, the 2017 Porsche Panamera comes with a panoramic roof, roll-up sun blind, heated rear seats that can be adjusted electronically and a PASM air suspension from Porsche. It also has ambient lighting, LED lights as well as a four-zone climate control for the turbo model. All the Executive trims have 10.1-inch displays from the front seats' back rest that can also be detached and used as a tablet outside the car.

Availability

It was noted that the delivery of the 4S and Turbo should be expected in the early months of the following year. However, there is no report yet as to when the other two trims will be available. Porsche's Panamera line now comes at a total of nine different variations

Wait And See

With all these being said, surely many Porsche enthusiasts are getting more excited to meet the 2017 Porsche Panamera Executive Edition. Of course, they are going to have to wait a few days until the 2016 LA Auto Show opens where it will be making its much awaited appearance.
After several leaks, the HTC Bolt is now a reality. The company unveiled the new smartphone recently and it will be available on the Sprint network in the U.S. The smartphone features a very fast Snapdragon X10 LTE modem and also supports the 3X20 carrier, which is why this phone is only available on Sprint.

HTC Bolt Features - No Headphone Jack

The all new HTC Bolt is made using aluminum and features IP57 water resistance certification. This means that the all-aluminum Bolt is resistant against mild rain, water splashes, spills and submersion under 3.2 feet of water for up to 30 mins.

HTC has included a 5.5 inch Super LCD 3 display that is protected by Gorilla Glass 5. The display has a resolution of 1440 x 2560 and underneath, there is a Snapdragon 810 processor. The 810 is an octa-core CPU and is coupled with 3GB of RAM. That is not a lot considering that current smartphones have at least 4GB of RAM. The internal storage on the Bolt is only 32GB, but there is a microSD slot available that supports up to 2TB of external storage.

The Bolt features a 16 megapixel rear camera that includes PDAF laser focus and an f/2.0 lens. It also supports Optical Image Stabilization, RAW format and can capture 4K video. A front facing selfie camera is available with an 8 megapixel sensor. The smartphone has a 3200mAh battery that supports Quick Charge 2.0. As for ports, the device includes a USB 2.0 Type-C port and no headphone jack. It also comes installed with Android 7.0 Nougat and Sense UI.

As per PhoneArena, the HTC Bolt will be a great competitor for the iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S7/S7 Edge.

HTC Bolt Price and Availability

The HTC Bolt will only be available from Sprint in U.S and is exclusive to the carrier. The Bolt is priced at $600 or through an installment plan where the user will have to pay $25 a month for 24 months.

The smartphone is available in two colors; Gunmetal and Glacial Silver. According to The Verge, there is a catch to the HTC Bolt being so fast when it comes to downloads and uploads. The Sprint LTE Plus with 3X20 Carrier aggregation only works in Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio.
"Sister Wives" star Robyn Brown is reportedly determined to divorce Kody Brown. A close friend to Kody's legal wife recently revealed that Robyn is already talking to lawyers about the divorce. Rumors are also rife that the other three wives of Kody are thinking of kicking him out of the house following his incapability to provide for their big family.

Previous talks have it that Robyn has long been thinking of getting a divorce from Kody. The fourth wife's close friend, Kendra Pollard, has been a source of confirmation about the alleged divorce plans. While Pollard already talked about the said plan earlier this year, she again has revealed to media that Robyn is already meeting with her attorneys.

"She's quietly consulting with attorneys," Pollard told Life & Style magazine, as cited by IB Times. She said that Robyn will soon push through with the separation and will move to Northern Carolina where she and her five children can start a new life. Pollard also revealed that Kody has let down Robyn when rumors about the polygamous husband getting a fifth wife surfaced.

Some reports have noted that Kody's plan of getting another wife is purely for money. The Brown family, for a fact, have been enjoying a comfortable life since TLC signed the members to publicize their lives. The "Sister Wives" series talks about how a family of different wives can stand the absurd setup of polygamy, and the Browns are earning a great amount from that kind of living. Thus, Kody allegedly came up with the idea of getting a new wife to give TLC another reason to renew their show for more seasons. However, rumors say that it is for this selfish plan, plus his being sick, that Kody is now being kicked out by his four wives.

With a new wife possibly coming, all other four wives are said to be going. Robyn and Kody were merely seen together in the new trailer for "Sister Wives" season 8. This has made the speculations stronger and fans are now believing that they might see the Brown family torn apart in the upcoming season.

Also, talks have it that Kody has been battering Robyn with unkind comments saying she won't sell anymore since she is no longer the "hot wife" that everyone considered her to be. This is another reason pointed out for Robyn to finally leave Kody. Finally, Kody's alleged incapacity to continuously support the family -- which has been in a difficult financial situation when Robyn's son Dayton was placed under a surgery -- is a major indication for Robyn to stop pursuing her marriage.

All of these are believed to be revealed when the Brown family returns on "Sister Wives" season 8, which is scheduled to air on Nov. 27.


Image courtesy of IIDEX CANADA

IIDEX CANADA 2016

IIDEXCanada is Canadas National Design + Architecture Exposition & Conference, and is proudly co-presented by IDC, Interior Designers of Canada and RAIC, Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. The annual show focuses on all areas of design including workplace, healthcare, hospitality, retail, residential, education, architecture, landscape architecture, lighting and sustainability, wellness and accessibility.



Image courtesy of IIDEX CANADA

IIDEXCanada celebrates 32 years on Wednesday November 30 & Thursday December 1, 2016, in the North Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. IIDEXCanada is part of The Buildings Show which includes Construct Canada, PM Expo Toronto, World of Concrete Pavilion, HomeBuilder & Renovator Expo, and The Real Estate Forum Toronto.

Image courtesy of IIDEX CANADA

The Buildings Show is North Americas largest exposition, networking and education event for design, construction and real estate which attracts 1,600 exhibitors, world-class keynotes, 500 speakers, 350 seminars and tours, and 30,000 Canadian and International trade attendees including interior designers, architects, property managers, landscape architects, facility managers, builders, developers, real estate, suppliers, government, media, creative thinkers and corporate clients.

Image courtesy of IIDEX CANADA

IIDEXCanada brings together the multidisciplinary interior design and architecture communities for a sourcing, networking and education event that celebrates creativity and best practices. It is a place to be truly inspired, to connect in person and to discover new products and services. IIDEXCanada is where new relationships are built, ideas are synthesized, and where creative collaborations begin.

Metro Toronto Convention Centre, North Building

Wednesday November 30  Thursday December 1, 2016



more. iidexcanada
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described as crazy the criticism that fake news on its news feed to users had tilted the vote in the U.S. presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way  I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience, Zuckerberg said in an interview at the Techonomy 2016 conference in Half Moon Bay, California.

Besides Facebook, Twitter was also marked out for its role in influencing voters to back Trump. Twitter said social media was being made a scapegoat for the election result, ignoring the roles that candidates, journalists, and voters play in the democratic process.

On Thursday, Zuckerberg seemed to be saying that some people were overestimating the role of the fake news, simply because they were taken by surprise by the election results.

I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news, Zuckerberg said. If you believe that, then I dont think you have internalized the message that Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.

The role of social media in the elections is likely to be debated for a long time. Recent findings by the Pew Research Center suggest that 20 percent of social media users said they had modified their stance on a social or political issue because of content they saw on social media, while 17 percent said social media helped to change their views about a specific political candidate.

"Still, it is important to note that the majority of social media users are not swayed by what they see in their networks," wrote Monica Anderson, a Pew research associate.

U.S. President Barack Obama has also weighed in on the role social networks like Facebook can have in elections. The way campaigns have unfolded, we just start accepting crazy stuff as normal. And people, if they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again, as long as its on Facebook, and people can see it, as long as its on social media, people start believing it. And it creates this dust cloud of nonsense, Obama said in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the run up to the election.

Facebook promotes democracy by letting candidates communicate directly with people, Zuckerberg said.

Dismissing the view that Facebook creates a filter-bubble where people get a reinforcement of their own views by seeing similar content on the social network, Zuckerberg said Facebook research shows that almost everyone has some friends on the other side whether on religious, political or other issues.

That means that the immediate diversity and diversity of information that you are getting through a social system like Facebook is going to be inherently more diverse than say twenty years ago when people were limited to a few news stations and newspapers, Zuckerberg said.

The problem at this point isn't that there isn't enough content from different points of view, but people just don't click on it, just tune it out when they see it, Zuckerberg said. Right now the problem isnt that diverse information isnt therebut we havent gotten people to engage with it in higher proportions, he added.
Get unlimited access to all content and features at ivpressonline.com with our Full Online Access Subscription. Read our E-Edition, the digital replica of the print newspaper online, access content in exclusive sections including Family, Teen, Business, Databases, Farm and more. This option does not include daily home delivery of the Imperial Valley Press newspaper. For home delivery service, please select Premium or Premium Plus.
Town sued over denied water service The town council met in executive session last week to discuss its defense after a lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court by a Jamestown homeowner who was denied permission...

Scout earns Eagle rank with boardwalk work A local Boy Scout is the latest member of Troop 1 Jamestown to lead an environmental project at a wildlife sanctuary in his mission to attain the Eagle rank. Alex...

State: Steer clear while deer breeding As deer begin mating during the rut, public safety officials are urging drivers to be cautious on the roads because herds tend to move around more frequently during this time....
Johnny Depp fans are very excited on the latest scoop of "Pirates of the Caribbean 5." Rumors have circulated all over the internet that the title be changed from "Dead Men Tell No Tales" to "Salazar's Revenge".

There were speculations that the said fantasy-action film "Pirates of the Caribbean 5" which directed by Joachim Ronning will change its to "Salazar's Revenge". According to Slashfilm, the said movie will be entitle as "Salazar's Revenge" in United Kingdom and "The Revenge of Salazar" in France, Spain and Italy. The said source did not mention clearly why the said fantasy film will change its title.

On an Instagram account of Ronning, he revealed that the film is currently in post-production. The eager fans quickly asked the director about the rumors of "Pirates of Caribbean 5" if it is really true. Apparently, Ronning did not have any comments about the rumors surpassed on the internet.

On the other hand, there were speculations that Johnny Depp's character as Captain Jack Sparrow will be less seen on the upcoming sequel as Javier Bardem, played the role of Captain Salazar will take place. Salazar is the great villain of "Pirates of the Caribbean 5".

As revealed by Official Plot Synopsis, Salazar puts Jack Sparrow to an end as he escaped from the Devil's Triangle. Jack can only survive with the help from Trident Poseidon which allows anyone who possess it can control the seas.

Another report asserts that Captain Jack will be getting married on the upcoming sequel as he meet Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) whom he met along his quest to find the trident. Fans were totally freaking out if the pirate will finally meet the love of his life. "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" will have its premiere on May 26, 2017.
The latest update of the upcoming "Sherlock Holmes" film describes the drafting of colossal writers from two blockbuster films. "Sherlock Holmes 3" will be ready for production soon.

It has been five years since "Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows". Fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic private investigator could not help but wonder when 'the next game is afoot.' The line-up of new writers guarantees that the third sequel is going to be as huge as London's Big Ben.

In a report by Slash Film, it is revealed that Gary Whitta of "Star Wars: Rogue One" and Nicole Perlman of "Guardians of the Galaxy" will preside the writing room of "Sherlock Holmes 3" production. Assisting them are Kieran Fitzgerald of "Snowden" and Justin Malen of the 2017 movie adaptation of "Baywatch".

It would seem that Robert Downey's commitment to reprise the Victorian martial artist crime fighter has contributed to expediting the third installment. "Sherlock Holmes 3" production will ensue following the two-part Marvel film "Avengers: Infinity War."

While "Sherlock Holmes" fans are thrilled, the avid supporters of playboy billionaire genius Tony Stark were not happy. An article published by Parent Herald stated that the lack of patronage by stalwart "Iron Man" fans may cause a poor reception in its fourth installment without Robert Downey Jr. playing the role.

Although many factors contribute to the possible removal of Robert Downey Jr. as the lead star in "Iron Man 4", it is clear that playing the "Sherlock Holmes" sequel is his bigger priority. In fact, "Sherlock Holmes 3" may not even be the last in the proposed line of future sequels for the franchise.

In an article published by Jobs & Hire, Marvel Studios president, Kevin Feige, announced that future solo films of its superheroes are going to be played by new actors. With this in mind, the fast lane for the "Sherlock Holmes" role is paved for Robert Downey Jr. and the rest of the assembly building the sequel.
Transcription

1 Washington University Law Review Volume 65 Issue Delaware Section 102(b)(7): A Statutory Response to the Director and Officer Liability Insurance Crisis James B. Behrens Follow this and additional works at: Part of the Insurance Law Commons Recommended Citation James B. Behrens, Delaware Section 102(b)(7): A Statutory Response to the Director and Officer Liability Insurance Crisis, 65 Wash. U. L. Q. 481 (1987). Available at: This Recent Development is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington University Law Review by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact

2 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS DELAWARE SECTION 102(b)(7): A STATUTORY RESPONSE TO THE DIRECTOR AND OFFICER LIABILITY INSURANCE CRISIS The director and officer liability insurance crisis is a major concern to many executives.' A recent survey by Peat Marwick and the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) reveals that small to midsize companies, not-for-profit organizations, public companies, financial institutions, chemical companies, hazardous waste firms and some high tech companies have experienced significant increases in director resignations. 2 Many executives are loathe to serve as corporate directors in today's litigious environment because they fear becoming the target of lawsuits. The increased incidence of suits against corporate directors has also prompted suggestions that potential directors be screened more rigorously for independence and expertise. These reforms only promise to compound the current director shortage. 3 Several protections have arisen to ease director concerns over personal liability. 4 The most significant legal development is the trend of states to modify or enact indemnification statutes to permit the use of corporate 1. See Neff, Liability Panic in the Board Room, WALL ST. J. Nov. 10, 1986 at P.3, col. 2. Corporate Boardroom Woes Grow, NAT. L.J., Aug. 4, 1986, at 29 (a 1985 study found 68 percent of 592 companies whose insurance was up for renewal face premium hikes averaging 362 percent). The director and officer liability insurance crisis is only part of a larger insurance problem facing the professional community at large. Rising premiums and policy cancellations are predominant and are worrying a wide variety of economic enterprises including doctors, lawyers, accountants, hospitals, dayeare centers and school districts. See generally Hunter and Borzilleri, The Liability Insurance Crisis, 22 TRIAL April 1986, at See Nash, Walking the Boardroom Tightrope, WORLD, April-June 1987 at 46 (J.M. Nash is President of the Washington, D.C. based NACD) (WORLD is a published quarterly by Peat Marwick). 3. The overall concern about D & 0 liability is heightened by new requirements of the National Association of Securities Dealers that its listed companies must have two outside directors, and by a Treadway Commission proposal that the Securities and Exchange Commission requires all registered public companies to have audit committees composed entirely of independent directors. The situation becomes even more complex when one envisions the potential for legislation that would virtually "license" the duties and responsibilities of directors. For example, there is now debate at the federal and state level over whether to certify directors as qualified to serve. In other words, they may have to prove specific expertise. Id. 4. Id. While restricted insurance coverages entering the director and officer insurance liability Washington University Open Scholarship

3 482 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW QUARTERLY [Vol. 65:481 funds to pay money judgments and costs incurred by directors in defending suits. The pervasiveness of Delaware chartered corporations nationwide makes Delaware's recently enacted provision significant.' This development discusses the mechanics and policy behind Delaware's new statute, Section 102(b)(7) of the Delaware Code. 6 After comparing Section 102(b)(7) with other state indemnification provisions, this development concludes with some data on the effect of Delaware's provision on corporate boards and shareholders. Most state indemnification provisions resemble Delaware's Section 145(a). 7 Section 145(a) allows a corporation to indemnify a director, officer, employee or agent for amounts paid in settlement "if [he is] reasonably believed to be [acting] in or not opposed to the best interests of the corporation..." 8 Statutes like Section 145(a), however, do not protect directors who negligently or intentionally breach their duty to the corporation or its shareholders. Section 102(b)(7)-type statutes broaden the scope of director protection by permitting corporations to shield directors from liability for grossly negligent acts. This type of statute differs from the typical indemnification provision because it affects the shareholder's cause of action. In contrast, indemnification statutes do not limit a shareholder's right to recover from a corporate director. In jurisdictions that have enmarket are easing the liability insurance availability problem, there remains insufficient coverage to meet the need. 5. Approximately half of the Fortune 500 companies and 40 percent of those listed on the New York Stock Exchange are incorporated in Delaware. See WALL ST. J., June 19, 1986, at DEL. CODE ANN. tit. 8, 102(b)(7) (1983 & Supp. 1986). See infra note 9 for text. 7. DEL. CODE ANN. tit. 8, 145(a) (1983). See also REV. MODEL BUSINESS CORPORATION AcT (RMBCA) (1983). RMBCA 8.51 provides that a corporation may indemnify a director against liability if the director acted in good faith and, in the case of conduct in his official capacity, he reasonably believed his conduct was in the corporation's best interests. RMBCA 8.52 requires a corporation to indemnify a director who was wholly successful on the merits or otherwise against reasonable expenses incurred in defending any proceeding. N.Y. Bus. CORP. LAW 721 (Consol & Supp. 1986), infra notes and accompanying text; Mo. REV. STAT (7) (1986). 8. DEL. CODE ANN. tit. 8, 145(a) (1983 & Supp. 1986). Most indemnification statutes also authorize a corporation to purchase and maintain insurance on behalf of its directors and officers. See, e.g., DEL. CODE ANN. tit. 8, 145(g) (1983 & Supp. 1986); ILL. REV. STAT. ch. 32, 8.75(g) (1985); Mo. REV. STAT (8) (1986). Most director and officer liability insurance policies require the insureds to bear five percent of each loss at their own risk. Furthermore, if the application for insurance contains misrepresentations the insurance company may be able to rescind the policy. See, e.g., Bird v. Penn Central Co., 334 F. Supp. 255 (E.D. Pa. 1971), motion denied on rehearing, 341 F. Supp. 291 (E.D. Pa. 1972).

4 1987] LIABILITY INSURANCE CRISIS acted 102(b)(7)-type statutes a director's exposure to personal liability is limited to his intentional misconduct in managing the corporation. Delaware's Section 102(b)(7) expressly enables a corporation to amend its articles of incorporation to include "[a] provision eliminating or limiting the personal liability of a director to the corporation or its stockholders for monetary damages for breach of fiduciary duty as director... 9 This provision, however, is limited to those cases where shareholders accuse directors of violating their duty of care.' 0 Section 102(b)(7) does not permit a corporation to shield directors from liability for: (1) breaches of their duty of loyalty;" (2) any acts or omissions done in bad faith or knowingly in violation of the law; 1 2 (3) unlawful payment of dividends or unlawful stock repurchases or redemptions; or (4) transactions from which the director received improper personal benefit. ' 3 In those corporations which adopt 102(b)(7)-type provisions, the shareholders bringing suit bear the burden of proving that the challenged conduct of the director falls outside the scope of coverage. Section 102(b)(7) is only an enabling provision and therefore is simul- 9. DEL. CODE ANN. tit. 8, 102(b)(7) (1983 & Supp. 1986) in its entirety provides that the certificate of incorporation of any corporation may contain [a] provision eliminating or limiting the personal liability of a director to the corporation or its stockholders for monetary damages for breach of fiduciary duty as a director, provided that such provision shall not eliminate or limit the liability of a director (i) for any breach of the director's duty of loyalty to the corporation or its stockholders, (ii) for acts or omissions not in good faith or which involve intentional misconduct or a knowing violation of law, (iii) under section 174 of this Title, or (iv) for any transaction from which the director derived an improper personal benefit. No such provision shall eliminate or limit the liability of a director for any act or omission occurring prior to the date when such provision becomes effective. All references in this subsection to a director shall also be deemed to refer to a member of the governing body of a corporation which is not authorized to issue capital stock. When Delaware enacted Section 102(b)(7), it also enacted DEL. CODE ANN. tit ) (1983 & Supp. 1986). Section 1450) extends a corporation's obligation to indemnify and advance expenses for costs of defending suits arising from acts of directors beyond the date of resignation. 10. Duty of care refers to negligent decisionmaking. 11. Duty of loyalty addresses those situations where a director has a conflict of interest with the corporation or where he may be engaged in self-dealing. 12, When a director has committed an intentional wrong, the complaining shareholders may ask for punitive damages. Courts are split as to whether a corporation may insure a director for punitive changes. Compare Northwestern Nat'l Casualty Co. v. McNulty, 307 F.2d 432 (5th Cir. 1962) with Greenwood Cemetery, Inc. v. Travelers Indemnity Co., 238 Ga. 313, 232 S.E.2d 910 (1977). 13. See Johnston, Corporate Indemnification and Liability Insurance for Directors and Officers, 33 Bus. LAW. 1993, 1994 (1978) (Under certain circumstances indemnification would violate public policy. Statutes should "seek the middle ground between encouraging fiduciaries to violate their trust, and discouraging them from serving at all."). Washington University Open Scholarship

5 484 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW QUARTERLY [Vol. 65:481 taneously restrictive and flexible. The provision merely authorizes shareholder approval of a charter amendment which limits or precludes director liability for breaches of their duty of care. The extent to which shareholders may protect directors is flexible. Shareholders may choose to entirely eliminate director liability for breaches of fiduciary duty or may limit the corporation's indemnification obligation to a stated dollar maximum. 14 Moreover, shareholders remain free to condition the elimination of liability on the performance of specific actions by directors or to deny the protection of the statute in connection with some types of transactions while permitting it in others. 15 Section 102(b)(7) operates only when monetary judgments are assessed against directors. It has no effect on the availability of equitable remedies like injunction or rescission which may become available upon a director's breach of his duty of care. 16 The ability of shareholders to seek equitable relief, however, does not threaten the personal assets of directors. Thus, the fact that Section 102(b)(7) does not shield directors from 14. In enacting 102(b)(7), the Delaware legislature rejected providing a statutory "cap" for the personal liability of directors because this approach would fix the remedy for liability in an arbitrary amount unrelated to the facts of each case. Under 102(b)(7), corporate shareholders may choose to fix any amount it wants as a "cap" on liability and it may determine each particular "cap" according to the particular transaction at issue. See Bus. LAW, July/Aug. 1986, at 203. The idea of putting a statutory "cap" on a director's potential liability is not a new concept. At least one commentator several years ago argued that directors, in the case of simple or even gross negligence, should have an idea of what their maximum liability could be. See Johnston, Corporate Indemnification and Liability Insurance for Directors and Officers, 33 Bus. LAW at The Delaware legislature rejected a proposal to amend 145(b) of its indemnification statute which would have allowed indemnification ofjudgments or amounts paid in settlement in derivative suits. The stockholders would not have benefited under the proposal because the corporation would simply be paying itself for injuries its directors caused. See Bus. LAW, July/Aug. 1986, at 2. Under 145(c) of the Delaware indemnification statute, and other state indemnification statutes, a corporation must indemnify a director who has been successful on the merits or otherwise. These statutes have led to questionable results, at least in terms of policy, when applied to a director's defense against criminal actions. For instance, in Merritt-Chapman & Scott Corp. v. Wolfson, 321 A.2d 138 (Del. Super. Ct. 1974), the court held that any result other than conviction in a criminal proceeding was a success on the merits. Id. at 141. In Merritt-Chapman, the defendant directors were charged with five criminal counts. Two of the directors agreed not to pursue their defenses under two of the counts in exchange for the prosecutor's agreement to drop the other charges. The court held that the corporation had to indemnify those directors for their legal costs incurred in defending the charges that were subsequently dropped. Id. at 144. In doing so the court rejected the corporation's argument that it should not have to indemnify the directors because there had been no finding of the directors' innocence. Id. at Because the Delaware statute does not affect equitable remedies, it will not affect cases concerning elections, proxy contests, resignations, and removal contests.

6 1987] LIABILITY INSURANCE CRISIS liability in equity does not make the provision a less effective means of encouraging individuals to serve as corporate directors. Other states have passed legislation which seeks to alleviate director concerns about personal liability but which differs from Section 102(b)(7). For example, New Jersey's recent enactment permits New Jersey corporations to include in their certificate of incorporation a provision that limits, either partially or entirely, the liability of officers, employees or agents, as well as directors, to the corporation or its shareholders. 7 New Jersey corporations must either authorize the new statute in their certificates of incorporation or obtain shareholder approval. 1 8 The New Jersey provision, like Delaware's, denies relief for an act or omission: (1) in breach of the person's duty of loyalty to the corporation or its shareholders; (2) made in bad faith or in knowing violation of the law; or (3) resulting in receipt of an improper personal benefit. t9 New York has given corporations chartered under its laws the power to indemnify directors and officers. 20 New York's Section permits a corporation to expand its indemnification provision by a resolution of shareholders, directors or by agreement. 22 Like Delaware and New Jersey, New York also prohibits corporate indemnification when a director acted in bad faith, was deliberately dishonest or when he made a 17. See New Jersey Senate Bill No (enacted Feb. 4, 1987) reprinted in 19 SEC. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) 301 (Feb. 13, 1987). Delaware's Section 102(b)(7) only protects directors. Two Delaware commentators have suggested that officer protection was not needed because officers of Delaware corporations who enact the statute are likely to take every controversial decision before the board of directors. The officers could thus shield themselves from personal liability by shifting the responsibility to the directors. Black and Sparks, infra note 20, at 312. The portion of the New Jersey law pertaining to limiting the liability of officers is subject to "sunset" provisions and will expire after two years unless the legislature extends this protection. 19 SEc. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) 301 (Feb. 27, 1987) SEC. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) 301 (Feb. 27, 1987). 19. Id. In addition to permitting corporate indemnity of directors, officers, employees and agents, the New Jersey Act permits corporations to purchase insurance on behalf of its agents. The remainder of the Act permits banks and capital stock savings banks to limit the liability of directors and officers by providing for indemnification in their certificate of incorporation. 20. A committee of the Delaware Corporate Law Section considered legislation which would greatly expand the power of Delaware corporations to indemnify their directors and officers. The committees, however, decided that legislation permitting shareholders to limit director liability was a more direct approach to the D & 0 liability insurance problems. See Black and Sparks, Analysis of the 1986 Amendments to the Delaware Corporation Law, Prentice-Hall, Inc., July 29, 1986, p See N.Y. Bus. CORP. LAW 721 (Consol & Supp. 1986). 22. Id. Washington University Open Scholarship

7 486 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW QUARTERLY [Vol. 65:481 personal gain that he was not legally entitled to. 23 Although there are differences in language, construction and scope, Delaware's new provision has undoubtedly prompted a trend in state corporate indemnity legislation. As of March 1987, twenty-one states had introduced legislation permitting corporations to eliminate or limit director liability in certain circumstances. 24 Additionally, three states had introduced legislation which would permit charitable and not-forprofit corporations to limit the liability of their directors. 25 In contrast, Hawaii has introduced a bill which would statutorily prescribe standards for director actions. 26 Of course, if enacted, Hawaii's statutory scope of acceptable activity will dictate director exposure to personal liability. 23. N.Y. Bus. CORP. LAW 721 (Consol & Supp. 1986) provides as follows: NONEXCLUSIVITY OF STATUTORY PROVISIONS FOR INDEMNIFICATION OF DIRECTORS AND OFFICERS-The indemnification and advancement of expenses granted pursuant to, or provided by, this article shall not be deemed exclusive of any other rights to which a director or officer seeking indemnification or advancement of expenses may be entitled, whether-contained in the certificate of incorporation or the by-laws or, when authorized by such certificate of incorporation or by-laws, (i) a resolution of shareholders, (ii) a resolution of directors, or (iii) an agreement providing for such indemnification, provided that no indemnification may be made to or on behalf of any director or officer if a judgment or other final adjudication adverse to the director or officer establishes that his acts were committed in bad faith or were the result of active and deliberate dishonesty and were material to the cause of action so adjudicated, or that he personally gained in fact a financial profit or other advantage to which he was not legally entitled. Nothing contained in this article shall affect any rights to indemnification to which corporate personnel other than directors and officers may be entitled by contract or otherwise under law. See also Mo. REv. STAT (7) (1986). Missouri's indemnification statute is similar to New York's Section 721. A Missouri corporation may indemnify their directors, officers, employees or agents. Missouri requires that indemnity provisions be authorized in the corporation's articles of incorporation, by-laws or in an agreement adopted by shareholder vote. Like Delaware and New York, Missouri prohibits director indemnification when that person has been knowingly fraudulent, deliberately dishonest or has committed willful misconduct. Id. Recently, Missouri has considered legislation which would make directors immune from suit arising "from conduct of the affairs of [the corporation]." See 19 SEc. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) 179 (Jan. 30, 1987). 24. The twenty-one states are Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming. See 19 SEC. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) (March 13, 1987); 19 SEC. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) (March 6, 1987); 19 SEC. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) (Feb. 20, 1987); 19 SEC. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) 203 (Feb. 6, 1987). According to Mr. Lewis S. Black, Jr., of the Delaware law firm Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell, states may be using different terminology in their new proposed statutes, but they are using the Delaware statute as a starting point. Telephone interview with Mr. Lewis S. Black, Jr., member of Delaware Bar, Partner, Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell (March 26, 1987). 25. The three states are Arizona, Montana and Vermont. See 19 SEc. RaG. & L. REP. (BNA) (March 6, 1987); 19 SEc. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) (Feb. 20, 1987). 26. See 19 SEc. REG. & L. REP. (BNA) 385 (March 13, 1987).

8 1987] LIABILITY INSURANCE CRISIS While a statutory standard could protect directors from personal liability to the corporation or its shareholders, legislatures favor giving the shareholders or the corporation an option to limit director liability. Accordingly, where permitted, corporations must take steps to limit director liability, usually by shareholder vote or, for new corporations, in drafting the articles of incorporation. Since Delaware's indemnity statute was the first of its kind, enactment of this statute by Delaware corporations may foretell whether corporations and shareholders nationwide are likely to sanction director liability and indemnification provisions. Whether Delaware's Section 102(b)(7) will result in widespread adoption of similar statutes is not yet certain. 2 7 Nonetheless, there is encouraging evidence that the statute will have its desired effect. Some corporations have already received shareholder approval and added a Section 102(b)(7)-type provision to their articles of incorporation. 28 One commentator sees most of these corporations limiting director liability to the fullest extent permitted by law rather than adopting caps or conditional indemnity. 29 Many more corporations are currently seeking shareholder approval to shield their corporate boards. According to one report, more than twothirds of Delaware corporations are proposing Section 102(b)(7)-type provisions to their shareholders. 3 Moreover, some suggest that enactment of these statutes will remain the most popular proxy item for the next few years N.Y. Times, Jan. 13, 1987, at 26, col. 1. According to Marie Shultie, Delaware's Corporation Administrator, about two hundred corporations a month were filing changes in their certificates of incorporation to take advantage of the Delaware statute. This number was expected to be much higher during the Spring months in 1987 after shareholders returned their proxies. Id. 28. Such corporations include Health Management Associates Inc. (see 1987 Business Wire, March 24, 1987, available on Nexis News Service); Tejon Ranch Co. (see 1987 Business Wire, March 24, 1987, available on Nexis News Service); Synercom Technology Inc. (see 1987 Business Wire, March 12, 1987, available on Nexis News Service); Penril Corp. (see PR Newswire, March 2, 1987, available on Nexis News Service); Holiday Corporation (see 1987 Business Wire, Feb. 27, 1987, available on Nexis News Service); Hudson Foods (see PR Newswire, Feb. 6, 1987, available on Nexis News Service); and Resource Exploration Inc. (see 1987 Business Wire, Jan. 28, 1987, available on Nexis News Service). Tejon Ranch Co. recently reincorporated in Delaware and the new certificate of incorporation will eliminate director liability "to the maximum extent permitted by Delaware law." The company reports that limiting its directors' liability will enhance its ability to attract high quality directors. Tejon also believes that this limitation may also eventually reduce insurance costs. See 1987 Business Wire, March 24, 1987, available on Nexis News Service. 29. Telephone interview with Mr. Lewis S. Black, Jr., supra note N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 13, 1987, at 26, col Telephone interview with Mr. Lewis S. Black, Jr., supra note 24. Washington University Open Scholarship

9 488 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW QUARTERLY [Vol. 65:481 Although a trend toward adopting Section 102(b)(7)-type provisions is not yet evident, its widespread proposal signifies Delaware corporate board confidence that it will ease director concerns over personal liability. Moreover, widespread enactment of Section 102(b)(7)-type provisions by state legislatures and a corresponding adoption of indemnity provisions by corporations nationwide could remove the need of many directors to retain costly indemnity insurance. James B. Behrens THE URGENT NEED FOR SURROGATE MOTHERHOOD LEGISLATION I. INTRODUCTION An estimated ten to fifteen percent of all married couples are infertile.' The rate of infertility has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. 2 The rise in infertility is due to a variety of causes including use of certain drugs and contraceptive devices, 3 sexually transmitted diseases, 4 chemi- 1. L. ANDREWS, NEW CONCEPTIONS: A CONSUMER'S GUIDE TO THE NEWEST INFERTILrTY TREATMENTS, INCLUDING IN VITRO FERTILIZATION, ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION, AND SUR- ROGATE MOTHERHOOD, 2 (1984). Approximately 15% of couples are unable to conceive after one year of unprotected intercourse. R. HATCHER & G. STEWARD, CONTRACEPTIVE TECHNOLOGY (13th rev. ed. 1986). 2. The overall infertility rate in the United States is almost three times as much as it was 20 years ago. The Saddest Epidemic, TIME, Sept. 10, 1984, at 50. The National Center for Health Statistics compared a 1965 survey with a 1976 survey and found an 83% increase in infertility among married couples in which the wife was years old, a group which is considered most fertile. L. ANDREWS, supra note 1, at A variety of drugs including high blood pressure and ulcer medications can lower a man's sperm production. Sons and daughters of women who took DES (di-ethyl-stilbestrol) have a higher incidence of certain types of fertility problems. L. ANDREWS, supra note I, at Use of the IUD sometimes leads to infertility by causing severe inflammation of the uterine lining or by increasing a woman's risk of pelvic inflammatory disease which causes scarring and blockage of a woman's fallopian tubes. Id. at Abortion can also cause infections which can lead to infertility. Id. at According to Centers for Disease Control, one million people contract sexually transmitted diseases each year. Infertility results in 150,000 to 200,000 of those cases. Sexually transmitted diseases lead to infertility by scarring the woman's fallopian tubes or the man's sperm ducts. Id. at 29.
Email

Links to our top local news stories of the day, Monday through Saturday.
Susan Rudd receiving an award at Lemoore Air Base in Californias San Joaquin Valley (Winston-Salem Journal, Scott Sexton)

Susan Rudd loves painting. She took it up 30 years ago when she was in her late 60s, and shes good at it. So good that she has an exhibit in the Reynolda Manor Public Library branch.

Yet shes modest.

When the exhibit first went up, Rudd didnt think to hang a placard that says anything about her. And if you look at her paintings, you have to hunt for a signature. My initials are on there, she said, up there in the corner.

Modest and unassuming.

Funny, but Rudd is like that about her service, too. In 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor, she and a girlfriend ran away from home to enlist. She stayed in the Army until the wars end, mustering out as a sergeant.

But if you ask if shell swell with justifiable pride, march in a Veterans Day parade or even pull into a parking space reserved for veterans, she demurs.

Oh no, I wouldnt do that, Rudd said. I dont really think Im entitled. I was never really in dangerous places or anything. But Im very glad I was in the service.

Yet like nearly every other man and woman whos taken the oath to support and defend the Constitution that we celebrate today, she has her gripes.

There were moments, Rudd said.

Spoken like a true veteran.

Millions have served

Some 350,000 women served in the Armed Forces during World War II. Millions more entered the workforce to supply and sustain the war effort.

But when we celebrate Veterans Day, many times theyre overlooked. Ask anyone what a veteran looks like, and the image of an older man, bent by the years, wearing a campaign hat leaps to mind.

More than 215,000 women are on active duty today in all branches of the service. More than 1.85 million have served. And as of December 2015, all jobs and posts in the military, including combat roles, are open to women.

But when Rudd joined in 1942  she was Susan Hubbard then  none of that was possible.

She and a friend from across town in their native Cleveland, Ohio, decided they needed to serve the country. We each had special friends in the service who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, she said.

Their parents were opposed to them joining, too. But the young women were determined and hatched a plan.

She told her mother she was at my house, and I told my mother I was at hers, Rudd said. Then we went down to Columbus to enlist. And then it was too late.

Rudd said her mother was obviously displeased and made her promise she wouldnt go overseas. I promised her but figured that the Army doesnt ask, she said. They just give orders.

Rudd and her friend, Roselle Graham, wound up joining the Womens Army Auxiliary Corps for one simple reason. The Army said they could stay together, much like the modern buddy system used to promise.

The women went to Daytona Beach for training. There, they completed physical training and learned to work in supply and as clerks. Still, it was wartime and reminders were frequent.

Nazis were off the coast, she said. You could hear planes taking off and bombs. They strafed us (on the bases). When they had us go out to the beach to march, there were big globs of oil everywhere.

There were other dangers, too. One friend died after being bitten by a coral snake, Rudd said.

Even though theyd enlisted in the WAAC, Rudd said, they werent officially considered full-fledged part of the Army until 1943 when it became the Womens Army Corps. When that happened we were given the option to go home or be part of the regular Army, she said.

Of the 175 women in her WAAC unit, only two or three went home. Rudd was officially sworn into the Army in July.

The funny thing about it  and it remains a sore spot  is that she believes she was shorted. They never did give me credit for all my time in, Rudd said.

Glad I got to see it

Graham wound up in Europe, and Rudd was sent to California. Her request to stay in the U.S. to keep a promise to her mother was honored.

In true military fashion, Rudd, who was trained to be a supply clerk, went to the Lemoore Air Base where someone else was already doing the job to which she was assigned.

I was smart enough to know that I didnt want to be in the clique in that office.

Instead of working in supply, Rudd eventually wound up running a flight simulator that trained future pilots how to fly at night, one stop among several aviators who had to pass.

We were told not to flunk anybody, she said. I worried about that. We were so desperate for pilots. But I realized that (the bad ones) would wash out somewhere down the line after they left us.

At one point, Rudd developed blisters so bad that she required medical attention. And while she was in the hospital, the Army had her fitted for new shoes but insisted she do it while wearing the bandages medics had applied.

Its the Army, she said with a smile. (Her mother eventually had to use war ration coupons to send her a pair that fit.)

Rudd was discharged Nov. 30, 1945  after her special friend, whod joined the Marines.

She went back home, married and started a family. When her marriage ended, Rudd moved south to Winston-Salem to be closer to her parents. She became a licensed practical nurse, made a home and grew older.

A few years ago, in her one concession to her status as a veteran, Rudd climbed aboard one of the Flights of Honor, sponsored trips where older vets travel to Washington D.C., to see the World War II monument.

Im so glad I got to see it, she said. Its just gorgeous. I felt so proud to think that theyd honored us like that.

Spoken like a true veteran.
Wake Forest University Police are investigating a report of offensive language being used on campus in an incident following the election of Donald Trump as president.

An anonymous posting on the Facebook account Heard At WFU said that students were running through the university south campus and shouting a racial slur.

"Several individuals rushed parts of South Campus, shouting the N-Word in and around residence halls following last night's election results," the post said.

University spokeswoman Katie Neal confirmed that the university police are investigating a bias report about a racial slur being used early Wednesday morning. Police are working with the student who reported the offensive behavior, and two students have been identified as suspects, she said.

"Wake Forest University condemns and will not tolerate offensive behavior or language," Neal said in a statement released Thursday.

Students are planning a "walk out" and rally on Wake Forest's Manchester Plaza today at noon in response to Trump's election.
State Republican legislators may use a special session after Thanksgiving  ostensibly to vote on Hurricane Matthew relief  to also put two additional justices on the state Supreme Court, according to two sources.

Aides for Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, said he doesnt comment on rumors, and such a move has been denied by state Rep. David Lewis, the House Rules Committee chairman.

One of the Journals sources, a state legislator, asked not to be identified in order to maintain the ability to negotiate legislation.

The other source, a lawyer, did not want to be identified as taking credit for the information. The lawyer said the information was sent in an email to the legal community from an individual who had heard the same scenario  appointing justices during a special session  from another state legislator.

Expanding the court would neutralize the stunning election victory of Superior Court Judge Mike Morgan, a Democrat, over Justice Bob Edmunds, a Republican, for a seat on the non-partisan Supreme Court.

Morgans win means that there will be more Democrats (four) on the state Supreme Court than Republicans (three), representing a potential check and balance on bills coming out of a General Assembly that has Republicans holding a super-majority in both chambers.

Another potential check on the General Assembly would be the confirmation of state Attorney General Roy Coopers lead over Gov. Pat McCrory, as well as the apparent victory of Democrat Josh Stein over Republican Buck Newton as attorney general.

As it currently stands, Cooper holds a 4,979-vote lead with all 2,704 precincts statewide counted. A recount is expected to be requested by McCrorys re-election campaign following the Nov. 18 canvassing of the voting ballots in each county.

Bob Orr, a Republican and a Supreme Court justice from 1994 to 2004, said any potential attempt to expand the court is less sour grapes about Edmunds defeat and more about redistricting and the implications of current litigation and the call for independent redistricting with 2020 looming.

The party in charge of the General Assembly in 2020 will have the task of carving the next round of redistricting maps based on North Carolinas population growth and in-state migration patterns.

If we had independent redistricting, we would have significantly less litigation, Orr said.

Expanding the court for the sake of redistricting is a bad look for the Supreme Court and the judiciary because it makes the court appear bipartisan and undermines the confidence the public has in the judiciary systems independence.

Rep. Ed Hanes, D-Forsyth, said he does not favor adding justices to the court.

Changes are made on the court when there is evidence that workload has become a problem for the existing justices, Hanes said.

Hanes said the most recent legislative study on the performance of the N.C. Supreme Court, done in 2014, indicates that there is no such issue on the court, nor has there been any request from the Chief Justice (Mark Martin) during the two-year gap the report doesnt cover.

Unless that has changed dramatically since Tuesday night, I will not support additional justices.

Orr said there is no justification for expanding the court based on the case load. He credited Martin with making the court more efficient in his two years as its leader.

Earlier this year, Arizona and Georgia, both of which have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors, approved increasing the number of Supreme Court justices by two members  Arizona to seven and Georgia to nine.

The governors of both states (Arizonas Doug Ducey and Georgias Nathan Deal) said their main reason for supporting the expansion was having additional judges would allow the court to take on more cases amid significant population increases, and ensure swift justice, according to Ducey.

The additional Arizona justices was reported to have a $1 million cost annually, and came despite objections from Chief Justice Scott Bales, who said additional judges are not needed and expansion is not warranted when other court-related needs are underfunded.

Reps. Donny Lambeth, R-Forsyth, and Verla Insko, D-Orange, and Sen. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, said they have not heard of a push to expand the state Supreme Court.

According to officials with the N.C. Courts system, the state constitution calls for a chief justice and six associate justices, but the constitution allows the General Assembly to expand the court by up to two additional associate justices.

It is not clear how the nomination process would work for the potential two new court seats, whether its the responsibility of the legislature or the governor.

Each justice serves an eight-year term unless they turn age 72 during their term, in which they are required to retire from the court.

Edmunds, 67, would have turned 72 during his term had he been elected.

It appears that the potential appointees would serve until the November 2018 election, when legislators are next up for re-election. It is not clear whether Cooper could request the removal of the potential two additional justices since they were appointed and not elected.

Mitch Kokai, a policy analyst with Libertarian think tank John Locke Foundation, said he does not recall any previous effort to expand the state Supreme Court to nine members.

The role of the state Supreme Court was added to the state Constitution in 1868.

The General Assembly initially appointed all justices, but when the court was added to the constitution in 1868, the selection of justices shifted to voters with the exception of allowing the governor to fill vacant seats until the next election involving the General Assembly.

Legislators passed a Republican-sponsored bill in 2015 that would have removed voters ability to choose Supreme Court justices.

Instead, each justice would have faced a retention election, essentially a yes or no vote on their term in office without an opponent on the ballot.

Sabra Faires, a Raleigh attorney, challenged the law. A state Superior Court judge panel determined the law to be a violation of the state Constitution. With the Supreme Court splitting 3-3 on the question, with Edmunds abstaining, voter election of justices was maintained.

Kokai and N.C. Policy Watch, a left-leaning advocacy group, have written blogs about the potential for such a special session and additional justice appointments.

Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy NC., said he has not heard specifically of a legislative effort to add justices to the Supreme Court.

If it is true, Hall said, then its completely hypocritical and astonishing that a group of elected leaders who say that the will of the people matters would try to circumvent the will of the people in this Supreme Court race.

Hall said the same voters chose to elect Republican Donald Trump as president, re-elect Republicans U.S. Sen. Richard Burr and N.C. Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and, apparently, deny McCrory a second term.

That shows a will of the people to have both parties with a role in control of the political process in North Carolina, Hall said.

Therefore, it would be expressively outrageous and an abuse of power to permit the additions to the Supreme Court because it would allow the legislature to conduct an outright takeover of another branch of government.

Its such a bold move, if undertaken, that it should have Trump supporters, Republicans and people of conscience rising up and saying this is intolerable as another potential example of corruption of government and rigged elections.

The possibility of appointing up to two justices during a special session has rankled some left-leaning advocacy groups, particularly considering how GOP legislative leaders pushed through House Bill 2 on March 23 with little public debate.

McCrory signed the bill that night  a piece of legislation whose overall content he did not request, but came to embrace it as the statewide and national face of HB 2.

McCrorys stance on HB 2 could have cost him enough support in the states eight urban counties to lose his re-election bid, according to conservative and liberal advocates and elected officials.

Hall said he would like to think that McCrory, if he has been defeated in his re-election bid, would not want the blight on his record that his final major act as governor would be a grossly partisan move.
GREENSBORO  Living downtown has not been easy for Army veteran Sharon Clark.

Emergency-vehicle sirens, trains and even the fireworks during Grasshoppers games keep Clark on edge, often triggering migraines. Clark, 44, has post traumatic stress disorder and lumbar degenerative disc disease.

Sometimes I feel helpless, as if something is going to happen, and other times I feel out of control, as if I need to do something, but I dont know what to do, Clark said. Its like Im trapped in the noises and myself, on guard and looking out the windows at every sound that goes off, hoping it will hurry and go away.

Thanks to the Building Homes for Heroes program, Clark will move next month to a mortgage-free home in a quiet neighborhood near Randleman Road. She hasnt seen the inside of the home yet, only the backyard.

I am tickled with what I can see so far, she said. The support from the community for someone theyve never met is overwhelming.

Clark is not the only veteran receiving a new home. Daniel Miller, 27, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2008 to 2012, got the keys to his home in Greensboro on Thursday. The house was donated by Wells Fargo and the Military Warriors Support Foundation, a nonprofit that supports wounded veterans as they transition into civilian life.

A machine-gunner, Miller suffered a traumatic brain injury when his vehicle hit an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2009. The Purple Heart recipient, who also suffers from PTSD, had moved from apartment to apartment over the past few years.

Stability  its a word I dont understand sometimes, he said. So to have a stable home for myself and my son means a lot.

Miller will live in the three-bedroom house with his 5-year-old son.

Its incredible, unbelievable and very humbling to think people are willing to sacrifice their time for someone they dont know, said Miller, who plays in a band and is a contractor with a masonry company.

Clark, who retired in 2014 after serving in the military for almost 20 years, was a non-commissioned officer advising shifts and serving in a medical role in Iraq in 2010 and 2011.

We were on alert 24 hours a day, always carried a weapon and experienced mortars coming into camp, she said. I had to treat some horrific injuries.

Clark said she stressed about whether she would come home to her children but worried even more about the soldiers who served with her, some very young.

You want to make sure they make it back safely, she said.

After retirement, she entered a vocational rehabilitation program with the Veterans Administration and moved to Greensboro.

I grew up in Danville, Va., and my parents are still there and getting older, so I chose to move to Greensboro to be on my own but also be close to them, Clark said. Her son is a junior at N.C. Central University, and her daughter, a high school senior, lives with her.

Clark, who is pursuing a masters degree in clinical mental health counseling from Webster University, will move into her new home Dec. 8. She discovered Building Homes for Heroes while researching other programs.

Committed to rebuilding lives and supporting men and women who were injured serving our country after Sept. 11, 2001, during the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Building Homes for Heroes builds and provides mortgage-free homes and completes home modifications.

Clarks four-bedroom home is being modified to accommodate her injuries and includes a fenced-in, landscaped yard complete with a fire pit. Community volunteers widened some doors and halls in case I need a walker or wheelchair one day, Clark said.

Now, I dont have to struggle, can do something for myself and be free from huge bills, she said. This house is a blessing.

She will be responsible for insurance, maintenance and utilities for the house.

Building Homes for Heroes is thankful to have the opportunity to gift this astonishing woman a piece of the American dream that she bravely served so many years to protect, said Andy Pujol, founder and CEO.

After starting college and realizing she was not ready, Clark joined the U.S. Air Force, following in her fathers footsteps.

My father was in the 82nd Airborne, and I wanted to fly airplanes, she said.

But her vision at the time was not 20/20, so she was not qualified to fly. Her husband was in the Army, so Clark decided to leave the Air Force and enlist in the Army, too.

She served at various bases across the United States and completed her bachelors degree while in the service, graduating in 2004. Her marriage eventually ended in divorce.

Through her injuries and the trials of military service Clark said, her Christian faith was her rock.

My faith helped sustain me, and I was able to share with soldiers why I was able to stay strong, she said.

Clarks John 15:17 tattoo  a reference to a Bible verse  reminds her where her strength comes from, she said. In the verse, Jesus says, This is my command to you: Love one another.

Clark and Miller both want to serve other veterans.

In his free time, Miller helps wounded veterans learn to play an instrument, and Clark plans to complete her masters degree in counseling and work with veterans.

Ive seen what they endure every day, and I want to help them be able to cope when they return home, she said. My hope is to be successful in every endeavor and give back to veterans because someone gave to me.
Events honoring military veterans are planned this week in the Triad:

VETERANS DAY CELEBRATION: 8 a.m. today in the Millis Center at High Point University. Visit www.highpoint.edu/veteransday to make a reservation.

WINSTON-SALEM PARADE: 10 a.m. today along Fourth and Liberty streets downtown. Free. For information, email onebentskid@gmail.com.

KING CELEBRATION: 10:15 a.m. today at Central Park Amphitheatre and Veterans Memorial, 302 Kirby Road, King. Speakers, a wreath-laying, reflections on the day and more. Music provided by Ken Bloom and the 208th Army Band Ensemble. For information, call (336) 593-8159 or go to www.stokesarts.org.

VETERANS DAY CEREMONY: 11 a.m. today at the Carolina Field of Honor at Triad Park, 9652 W. Market St., Kernersville. Lieutenant General Walter F. Ulmer, (USA-retired), the former CEO of the Center for Creative Leadership, will be the special guest.

COMMEMORATION OF VIETNAM VETERANS: 11 a.m. today at the Interstate 85 rest stop in Davidson County at milepost 99, between Thomasville and Lexington. The Old North State Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution is sponsoring a ceremony and wreath presentations. For information, email kathryntague@hotmail.com.

VETERANS DAY SERVICE: 11 a.m. today at the at the Yadkin County Park, 6600 Service Road, Yadkinville.

LUNCH ON THE LAWN: 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. today at Broyhill Office Suites, 3540 Clemmons Road, Clemmons. Lunch provided by Gunny Smittys Hot Dogs. Cost: $10, with $3 going to Hope for the Warriors. For information, call (336) 391-3409.

OPEN HOUSE: noon- 4 p.m. today at HARRY Veterans Community Outreach, 897 Peters Creek Parkway, Suite 102. A light lunch and gift-bag giveaway for veterans and active-duty military personnel after the Winston-Salem parade. Must show proof of service. For information, call (336) 725-3410 or email harryvcos@gmail.com.

VETERANS DAY SERVICE: 7 p.m. today at the at the Winston-Salem Rescue Mission New Life Center, 718 N. Trade St. The speaker will be Sgt. Drake Phillips of the N.C. National Guard.

FLAG RETIREMENT CEREMONY: 10 a.m. Saturday at Holy Cross Catholic Church, 616 S. Cherry St., Kernersville, sponsored by the Pope John Paul II Assembly of Knights of Columbus. Worn and faded flags will be retired and burned. The ceremony lasts 60 to 90 minutes, and refreshments will be served afterward

HOME FRONT HIT PARADE: 7 p.m. Saturday at Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, 301 N. Main St., Mount Airy. The NoneSuch Playermakers Dinner Theater will present a flag-waving, finger-snapping, heartfelt journey down memory lane. Coffee, tea and desserts will be served. Cost: $25 a person. For information, call (336) 776-4478 or go to www.northcarolina museum.org.

400 YEARS OF MILITARY HISTORY: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday at Fort Dobbs State Historic Site, 438 Fort Dobbs Road, Statesville. The park will honor and showcase North Carolinas military history. Free, but donations are encouraged. For information, call (704) 873-5882 or go to www.fortdobbs.org.

VETERANS DAY OBSERVANCE: 11 a.m. Sunday at St. Stephens Episcopal Church, 810 N. Highland Ave. The speaker will be Col. (retired) William W. Gore of Clemmons. All veterans are invited to attend and join in the procession. A reception will follow the service. For more information call (336) 724-2614.

FREE FAMILY PORTRAITS: 1-4 p.m. Sunday at Summit School, 2100 Reynolda Road. Ninth-grade students will host an event for families of active military service members. Each family will receive a free digital file suitable for printing, posting or emailing to the service member. Portrait appointments can be made by emailing portraits@summitmail.org.

PANCAKES FOR VETS: through Nov. 22, several franchise IHOP locations in Winston-Salem. Greensboro and High Point will collect donations to support the Armed Forces Families Foundation. Diners wishing to support military families may buy a paper icon for $1 or more. In return, donors will receive a coupon for a free stack of three buttermilk pancakes. For information, go to www.ihop.com.

Compiled by Holly Kerfoot
"How the fuck did she lose to this clown?

-David Keith, Democratic operative

Before we dive into this, I want to remind everyone that 25.6% of eligible voters cast their ballots for Clinton and 25.5% voted for Trump. But a massive plurality of eligible voters-- 46.9%-- didn't, for one reason or another, vote at all.





A few days before the election we looked at a massive poll of school children and Clinton led Trump 57-32%, even beating him in deep red strongholds like Louisiana, Alaska and Idaho, where Hillary wound up losing, respectively, with just 38.4%, 37.7% and 27.6%. Now look at this map of the U.S. tweeted by Eliza Byard after the election, showing how 18-25 year old voters went. Yeah-- the South is solid again... for Hillary. I see just 5 red states: Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, Kentucky and West Virginia, which happened to be among the worst-performing Clinton states this Tuesday across all ages. As we mentioned, she lost Idaho with just 27.6%. It was even worse in Wyoming (22.5%) and West Virginia (26.5%). Just 27.8% of North Dakota voters went for her and Kentucky gave her a relatively robust 32.7%.









Intercept piece, Thursday morning Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) tweeted "no job, no hope, anger driving rural voters to the polls is the same keeping urban voter home. Dems need to get this." They could start by reading Glenn Greenwald'spiece, Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit . It excoriates the elites on both sides of the Atlantic who branded the Brexit supporters and Trump backers as "primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational... The indisputable fact," he wrote, "is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much-- when they caused a ruckus-- and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy."

That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population-- all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction-- are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. Theyre going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard-- not without reason-- as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.



...Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who-- for very good reason-- was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. Its astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble-- that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate-- are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.



But thats just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who-- when she wasnt dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks-- spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.



It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden. Thats too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian, its consummate beneficiary.



Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt Stollers indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical, self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.





The Guardian, stated flatly that DWT readers to consider Not clear enough? Naomi Klein, writing for, stated flatly that it was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump , something we askedreaders to consider back in September . Klein smirks that today the Democratic Party, Inc "will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry. But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview-- fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine-- is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake? Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present... Trump speaks directly to that pain."

Trumps message was: All is hell. Clinton answered: All is well. But its not well-- far from it.



Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trumps support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.



It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.



People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.



Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a peoples agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.



Bernie Sanders amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.



That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned.

Don't forget, Obama won union households in Wisconsin by 33 points in 2012. Tuesday Clinton scraped by with a bare 10 point margin, the reason she lost the state. One of the brightest spots Tuesday came in Seattle, where Pramila Jayapal was elected on an unabashedly progressive/activist platform, with 56.7% of the vote. "We have to be clear as a party," she warned, "about where we stand on trade deals." In a state where every other Democratic member of Congress is a pro-TPP New Dem, she wasn't afraid to speak up loudly and clearly that unfair trade deals should be a line in the sand in Democratic Party politics.

















really know where Trump stands on anything from minute to minute. David Sanger, Maggie Haberman and Binyamin Appelbaum got into it in the NY Times yesterday, terming the one shining principle that shines through the mishmash of Trump pronouncements is that "the world is a zero-sum place, and nations, like real estate developers, are either on the winning side of a deal or the losing side" and that he's "the Aside from reminding him that "the people" willed Hillary be the president and that it was the system-- the corrupt, rigged system-- that gave it to Trump, let's remember that we don'tknow where Trump stands on anything from minute to minute. David Sanger, Maggie Haberman and Binyamin Appelbaum got into it in theyesterday, terming the one shining principle that shines through the mishmash of Trump pronouncements is that "the world is a zero-sum place, and nations, like real estate developers, are either on the winning side of a deal or the losing side" and that he's "the ultimate pragmatist , perfectly willing to dispense with seemingly core beliefs in return for negotiating advantage. That is why many of his closest supporters have long cautioned that the most headline-grabbing proposals of his run for the presidency should not be taken literally-- they are guideposts, the supporters suggest, not plans... [T]he world is about to find out what Donald Trump really believes. Or at least what he is going to try to do."

[H]is instincts often mix elements of what he has heard or read from the left and the right. His economic policy might best be described as Big Government Conservatism, a mix of major tax cuts, mostly for businesses, and a massive infrastructure program to rebuild the dank airports and collapsing bridges that he used in the campaign as a symbol of Americas declining status. It is a subject he comes to easily as a developer who wanted to get customers to his properties.



So far, those proposals do not add up to a coherent strategy. The tax cuts come right out of the Republican playbook; the spending right out of the Democrats agenda of spurring the economy with government-led job creation. His commitment to preserve social programs is far more Obama than Reagan. His vow to rip apart the Affordable Care Act, the symbolic domestic achievement of the Obama presidency, adopts the favorite cause of the Republican leadership with whom he has often clashed.



Experts who have looked at his proposals-- many so vague they cannot be priced-- have concluded that federal deficits will soar. And that gets to Mr. Trumps willingness to entertain two completely contradictory thoughts at once, because rarely did he finish an interview or a debate without reminding listeners that a federal debt heading toward $20 trillion was a disaster that only he could fix. In his first year, he will have to square those two promises-- or not.

NY Times Wednesday about the Let me circle back to young people and how to reform a decrepit Democratic Party and its sclerotic leadership which is no longer a vehicle for the legitimate aspirations for America's working families as much as it is a vehicle for career advancement for mortal enemies of America's working families, from the Clintons down the food-chain to bottom-feeders like Rahm Emanuel, Wasserman Schultz and Joe Crowley. Simon Sanders was Bernie's Press Secretary. She wrote an OpEd for theWednesday about the role for millennials inside the party
This is an updated version of an editorial we first published on Veterans Day 2010.

The well-known story of Doris Dorie Miller, a Texan awarded the Navy Cross for bravery for his actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor, reminds us why we honor all veterans, living and dead, on Veterans Day  those who served in war and those who put on the uniform during peacetime.

Miller represents the potential danger that any member of the armed forces, combat-trained soldiers as well as support troops, can face at any time. As a cook 3rd class on the USS West Virginia, Miller responded to the call to man his battle station at an ammo battery on the ship that fateful morning of Dec. 7, 1941. When he found the battery destroyed, he was assigned to load a pair of unmanned Browning .50-caliber anti-aircraft guns. With no training, he mounted one of the guns and began firing at the invading Japanese aircraft. He fired until his ammunition ran out, then abandoned ship as the West Virginia, hit broadside by a torpedo, was going down.

After Pearl Harbor, Miller returned to being a ships cook. He died the following November when the USS Liscome Bay was sunk in the Pacific in the Battle of Tarawa.

We rightly honor our brave combat troops, especially those who make the ultimate sacrifice, but today we pay tribute as well to the Dorie Millers of the armed services, past and present  the cooks, mechanics, pencil pushers and skivvy stackers, the typewriter jockeys, the intelligence analysts, the nurses and technicians  all those who provide invaluable support to front-line troops. In swearing to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, they know that one day their moment may come.

On this Veterans Day, we are fortunate to have millions of veterans living amongst us, from the last warriors of World War II to the veterans of the war against terror that continues to this day in new and frightening ways. Whatever happens, these vets will always be there for us. They include dedicated men and women from all the broad and beautiful stripes of race and ethnicity that have long defined this country. They represent the best of working diversity. Many of them, home from afar, are giving back to their communities, setting an example for us all.

Wed all do well to learn some unity and dedication to country from them.

If you know or meet a veteran, you need not ask what they did in their time in the service, but if they want to talk, listen closely to their stories. What we honor them for is their sense of duty, their willingness to step into harms way whether or not the opportunity ever arose. Thats worth a heartfelt thank you.
A year-long investigation found $53.1 million worth of parts from rhinos, elephants and tigers.

Environmentalists turn the spotlight next week on a Vietnamese wildlife trafficking hub smuggling millions of dollars of endangered animal products like rhino horn, demanding Hanoi act to shut it down.

A two-day public hearing opening on Monday in The Hague will lay bare the results of a year-long investigation by the newly-established Wildlife Justice Commission.

During the dangerous undercover probe, a team of investigators found $53.1 million worth of parts from rhinos, elephants and tigers being trafficked from the small Vietnamese village of Nhi Khe, south of Hanoi.

There were parts from up to 907 elephants, 579 rhinos and 225 tigers. But there were also other dead animals for sale, including pangolin, bear, hawksbill turtles and helmeted hornbills smuggled to the Southeast Asian country mostly from Africa and overwhelmingly destined for customers in China.

The public hearing in front of five experts, including international judges, will also hear what the commission says is a failure by the Vietnamese government to take action.

Hanoi has carried out major seizures of illegal ivory in recent weeks, and issued directives ordering a crackdown on such trade.

But the commission, an NGO based in The Hague, says such steps are not enough.

Vietnam is "a critical part of the chain," said executive director Olivia Swaak-Goldman.

"If you can bring down the high-level traders operating in the Nhi Khe you can really have a huge impact on the global trade," she told AFP.

Earlier this year the commission handed over its evidence to Hanoi, naming 51 people operating as part of the Nhi Khe network.

"We've given them everything they need," Swaak-Goldman told AFP. "We've told them specific dates and specific individuals who offered us a specific number of rhino horns. And they haven't taken steps."

"We need to make that public, so they can no longer hide behind the fact saying that they didn't know."

The hearing will be streamed live and translated into Vietnamese. Representatives from Hanoi are expected to attend, but will not participate.

It comes just a few days before Vietnam is to host a major international conference on the illegal wildlife trade to be attended by Britain's Prince William.

Set up in March 2015, the commission aims to build up solid evidence for governments and law enforcement agencies to take legal action against those trafficking illegally in wildlife.

The demand for goods such as ivory and rhino horn is huge, raking in an estimated $20 billion a year worldwide.

Although the commission has no power to take action itself, it hopes the hearing will draw up recommendations for Hanoi and the international community.

Ten other investigations around the world are also underway, although the commission does not want to publicize where they are for fear of jeopardizing the probes and putting their teams at risk.

But a similar inquiry in Malaysia for example led to the arrest of 16 people.

Related news:

> Vietnam to destroy seized rhino horn, ivory

> Police rescue 149 pangolins from trafficker in northern Vietnam
With decades of teaching experience in several capacities in Texas and over the past three years with The Flowertown Blossoms in Summerville, Anicia D. Brown is dead set on handing youngsters the tools to master stage acting and production, while also imparting impactful life lessons along t Read moreFlowertown Blossoms preaching the value of teamwork
Reddit Email 0 Shares

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

Anti-Trump demonstrations have broken out all over the country in the wake of his surprise victory on Tuesday. Latinos are afraid he will deport their undocumented relatives, breaking up millions of families. Women are afraid for their basic rights to control their bodies, a right Trump and his tiny hands clearly do not respect. Environmentalists are afraid he will ramp up carbon emissions, spelling curtains for planet earth. Muslim-Americans are afraid he will make them register, sort of like Jews had to register in Nazi Germany before the Holocaust (registering was the prerequisite for the Holocaust, along with removal of citizenship rights). African-Americans are afraid he will revive the KKK.

I have been asked on several occasions in the past couple of days about how we can possibly get through these next four years. I agree that it is an urgent question, and I disagree with the Pollyannas who maintain that everything will be all right. It clearly wont be all right. The rights of millions of people will be injured. Racist gangs will target people of color because they think they have impunity. It is already happening. Critics could be targeted for dirty tricks. It isnt hard for a government agent to sneak up behind someone at the airport and slip a bag of cocaine into their luggage. Nixon actually had an office of dirty tricks, and I expect most of the White House to be taken up with the vindictive and petty Trumps such office. If you dont know how Nixon did a number on rival Ed Muskie with the Canuck letter and allegations that his wife was a pill addict, look it up. Muskie could have defeated Nixon in debates and at the polls, if Nixon had played fair. Some people are incapable of playing fair.

So how can we get through all this? Do something. Organize! Individuals are weak. Organizations are strong. If you have the opportunity to join a union, do so. The decline of unionized workers, at which the corporations connived for decades, is a big part of our current problem. But nowadays we also have new forms of organization including crowdfunding, e.g. of political campaigns. The early 20th century labor organizer Joe Hill, castigated as a radical wobbly and ultimately framed by conservative officials for a murder he did not commit, then executed, inspired the famous song that Joan Baez song at Woodstock.

Joan Baez Live @ Woodstock 1969 Joe Hill.mpg

The song writer was wise, and any social scientist will tell you, was right. Organize!

We have a first past the post political system, which means that the winner takes all. That fact underpins our 2 party system. The only vehicle we have to oppose Trump on the national stage effectively is Democratic Party activism. Of course, that is at the level of the legislatures, e.g. Other kinds of organizing are also important. Here are some suggestions about what to do.

1. Speak out against the corporate medias normalization of Trump. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, ABC and CBS are culpable in having given him billions of dollars of free air time. After the election the anchors suddenly started fawning on him. It isnt all right to have an alt-Right president. Racism isnt all right. Sexism isnt all right. Religious bigotry isnt all right. All those media have contact pages. Write them. Pressure them. Get up advertiser boycotts of the biggest ass-kissers. Organize pressure groups to make sure that Trump-inspired racist intimidation and violence is covered by the corporate media and not swept under the rug. Make sure that climate change is covered (it isnt, presently). These are money-making enterprises. Hit them where it hurts. Threaten not to buy the products advertised on their shows unless they change their ways. This way of proceeding is contrary to liberals first instincts, since they believe in airing a variety of opinions. But some opinions are beyond the pale, and if we dont draw a line in the sand here, white nationalism will become our reigning ideology and many of us will be jailed. There are some baby discourses that must be strangled in the crib.

2. Work toward a consumer boycott of corporations that gave money to Trumps campaign or who support his presidency. Do some web searches to see which consumer companies have a history of belonging to ALEC and supporting right wing causes. Find ways of publicizing Trumpish leanings among them and embarrassing them.

3. Speak out! Everyone can now be an op ed writer. Social media is everywhere. Start a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog, and update it at least weekly. It doesnt matter if you dont get many hits at the beginning. If you are regular and keep at it, it may well grow. Try to develop a beat cover something no one else is paying enough attention to, and show the ways Trumps reign is harming the country. Corporate media will try to crowd out our voices and normalize Trump and Trumpism. Dont let them invade our social media space.

4. Mobilize to ensure the Democrats take the Senate in 2018. That is a tough proposition, since only 8 Republicans are up for reelection, mostly in reliable red states, whereas 25 Democrats face a contest, and some of them may be in trouble, as in Missouri. But this configuration is a challenge, not an insuperable problem. It needs money and effort. Republicans often do better in the midterms because only a third of people vote, and they are disproportionately older and whiter and wealthier, as compared to presidential election years. But it doesnt have to be that way. Lets aim for a massive voter turnout in the 2018 midterms. For instance, Arizona could be trending blue, with a significant increase in the number of Latino voters and more importantly in the number of registered Latino voters. This trend could make Sen. Jeff Flake vulnerable in Arizona. Likewise, Latino voters are key to bluing Nevada and defeating Sen. Dean Heller. But it isnt just Latinos. White workers and millennials and middle classes at risk from Trumps policies are even more numerous. But youth in particular tend to stay home in off-year elections. They cant afford to do that if they want health care and want a liveable planet. Despite gerrymandering, there isnt actually any barrier to the Democrats taking the lower house, as well, in 2018, if enough people get of their duffs and devote resources to it and actually go out and vote. Walk your neighborhood. Donate to the progressive candidates. Mobilize.

5. Latino-Americans who worry about Trump and his policies toward them havent registered to vote should think seriously about a) registering and b) voting in 2018 and 2020. And, Democratic activists need to volunteer their time for voter registration drives in minority neighborhoods. Some 71% of registered Latino voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama in 2012. Only 65% voted for Hillary Clinton. While in crucial Florida Clinton actually did better with Latinos this time than Obama had in 2012, she lost Cuban-Americans compared with Obama and she didnt pick up as many Puerto Ricans as she needed to in order to take Orlando. Trump couldnt have won without Florida, so it matters.

6. Where you can vote for judges, mobilize to elect progressive ones who will strike down Trumpist legislation.

7. Take risks. If Trump follows through and tries to register Muslim-Americans, insist on being registered along with them. Muslim with a large M means a follower of Muhammad and someone who practices Muslim faith and law. But in the Quran, the Muslim scripture, muslim with a small m actually just means generic believer in God. Abraham was a muslim, it says, and even Jesus was. The small m muslim could even be understood as someone who accepts Reality as it is. So in this sense, everyone can be a muslim. The Federal government doesnt have the right to Establish an official religion or tell us what to believe, by dint of the First Amendment. Lets all be muslims. Lets all register. If he tries to keep Muslims from entering the country, lets tie up the bureaucracy by saying we are muslim.

The Republican Party will expect the scattered protests to die out. They and their corporate backers will expect people to go back to being couch potatoes and letting the grown ups run the government. They will expect us to be silent when goons beat up Latinos or African-Americans or Muslims or liberals. Only sustained activism and organizing and effective steps to change the balance of power in Washington and in the statehouses can actually challenge Trumpism.

Lets foil their expectations.
Amnesty International (AI) [advocacy website] on Thursday accused [press release] members of the Iraqi police force of torturing and unlawfully killing villagers during an operation to liberate Mosul from Islamic State (IS) forces. AI found [CNN report] that men in Federal Police uniform[s] carried out multiple unlawful killings, apprehending and then deliberately killing in cold blood residents in villages south of Mosul. The report found that some of these residents were tortured before being shot execution-style. The Iraqi Federal Police have denied such actions and there is no proof that these med were actual police forces and not just men in Iraqi police uniforms. AI found that 10 mean and a 16-year-old boy were tortured after turning themselves over to the group. At least six of these individuals have been found executed.

Iraq has recently faced much criticism for its forces committing war crimes and abuses the rights of its people. In October AI reported that the Iraqi government and paramilitary forces committed war crimes [JURIST report] and human rights abuses. AI found that the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government were detaining internally displaced persons for no reason. AI said that these individuals faces abduction, torture and execution. In September the UN said that civilians [JURIST report] bear the biggest brunt of terrorism and violence in Iraq, reporting that civilians accounted for more than two-thirds of those killed or injured in the month of August. In August Human Rights Watch reported that Iraqi militias are recruiting children [JURIST report] from at least one civilian camp of displaced persons in the region of Kurdistan. Earlier in August the UN issued a report detailing the terrible atrocities [JURIST report] committed by the IS against the Yezidi people and other ethnic and religious groups in Iraq.
Googles Senior Vice President and General Counsel Kent Walker rejected EU allegations [blog] on Thursday that it abused its market dominance of its Android mobile phone operating system. Terming EUs concerns over how the company manages Android compatibility and distribute its own apps as baseless, Walker stated that Android hasnt hurt competition, its expanded it. Walker stated that the European Commissions finding is based on the false premise that Android does not compete with Apples iOS: We dont see it that way. We dont think Apple does either. Among other things, Google has been accused of undue preference to its own apps, especially its search engine, in agreements with cellphone makers. To this, Kent responded:

No manufacturer is obliged to preload any Google apps on an Android phone. But we do offer manufacturers a suite of apps so that when you buy a new phone you can access a familiar set of basic services. Androids competitors, including Apples iPhone and Microsofts Windows phone, not only do the same, but they allow much less choice in the apps that come with their phones.

The Commission sent a statement of objections to Google in April alleging that it has been engaging in anti-competitive practices contrary to EU law. If the Commission rules against the company, Google will be required to change its practices [BBC report] in addition to paying a fine. Kent said that his company hopes for a continuing dialogue with the Commission.

Google has faced numerous legal suits both in the US and internationally. In August the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) [official website], South Koreas antitrust regulator, confirmed [JURIST report] that the country is investigating whether Google violated the countrys antitrust laws. It was in April that Margrethe Vestagar [official profile], the Commissioner of Competition for the EU, opened the probe [JURIST report] into this specific matter Kent Walker is currently responding to. In August 2015 the EU filed an antitrust claim [JURIST report] against Google claiming that the company structures its search results to favor its own services over those of rivals. In June 2015 privacy software company Disconnect [corporate website] filed antitrust charges [JURIST report] against Google with the European Commissioner. In January 2015 a representative for Google signed an agreement [JURIST report] to rewrite the companys current privacy policy in response to pressure from the UK Information Commissioners Office [official website]. The same month Google was among four tech companies that reached a $415 million settlement [JURIST report] in a class action lawsuit claiming the companies unlawfully agreed to reduce employee compensation and mobility.
Lawyers for ousted former Brazil president Dilma Rousseff [Britannica profile] filed documents with the Superior Electoral Court [official website] in Brazil on Thursday alleging that her former vice president and current President Michel Temer took a large bribe. Specifically, the lawyers produced copies of documents [Reuters report] showing that Andrade Gutierrez [corporate website], a construction firm, transferred US $295,351 directly to the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party [official website] (PMDB) general campaign finance fund. According to a check dated July 10, 2014, produced by the lawyers, the exact same amount was deposited into Temers personal campaign finance fund. However, both the PMDB and Temers staff have thus far rejected any allegation that the campaign donation from Andrade Gutierrez was illegal and stated that it was properly disclosed to the electoral court. Furthermore, Temers staff requested the court to separately investigate the allegations against him and Rousseff adding that Rousseff must take sole responsibility for any wrongdoing as the head of the ticket in 2014.

Rousseffs successful reelection campaign in 2014 has been under investigation for months for alleged use of illegal funds, but the court is yet to rule on that matter. If the court rules that the use of illegal funds did in fact occur, then Temer will also have to step down [Reuters report], regardless of the outcome of any specific findings against him, because such a finding has the potential to reverse Rousseffs entire campaign victory. More than 100 individuals and 50 politicians have been arrested in connection to the Petrobras [corporate website] scandal that continues to plague the country. In September the Brazil Supreme Court [official website] approved a motion [JURIST report] by prosecutors to open a preliminary investigation into accusations from Sergio Machado, former Transpetro head, that Temer sought illegal campaign donations in 2012. In August the Brazil Senate voted to convict Rousseff [JURIST op-ed] on charges that she used improper accounting to cover-up a growing budget deficit and illegal loans from state-owned banks. Earlier the same month a Brazilian judge accepted charges [JURIST report] against former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva relating to the Petrobas Oil Scandal. In May the Brazil Supreme court suspended [JURIST report] lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha after being suspected of obstructing investigations into his allegedly corrupt activities.
The visit follows the first port call made by three Chinese warships to Vietnams strategic Cam Ranh Port.

A Chinese Coast Guard ship carrying 101 officers and crew began a four-day visit to the northern port city of Hai Phong on Thursday.

It is the first visit ever made by a vessel from Chinas Coast Guard to Vietnam, Vietnam News Agency reported, adding that the visit is part of a cooperation program signed between their coast guard forces.

During their visit, the Chinese guests will pay a courtesy call on leaders of the Hai Phong's Peoples Committee, hold talks with Vietnams Coast Guard leaders, participate in sporting activities with their Vietnamese counterparts and visit local tourist sites.

In October, three Chinese naval vessels carrying 750 sailors made their first four-day port call at Vietnams Cam Ranh International Port. The visit represented part of an annual exchange to strengthen political trust and foster bilateral relationship between the two nations defense ministries.

Related news:

> Chinese warships make first port call at Vietnams Cam Ranh Bay
Russia [BBC profile] will block LinkedIn [corporate website] within the country after a court ruling Thursday. The local court found [NYT report] that the company had breached the countrys data protection rules. This comes during a time of increased tension for American tech companies operating within the country. Russia has imposed this ban after lawmakers passed a new rule [ComputerWeekly report] last year that required any personal digital data on Russian citizens to be stored within the country. The decision by the Moscow court upheld and previous ruling against LinkedIn. The ban on the company could take effect as early as Monday, with Internet service providers blocking access to LinkedIn in Russia.

Russia has faced off against numerous American Tech companies in the past. In March a Moscow arbitration court rejected an appeal by Google [JURIST report], upholding a ruling that the company broke anti-monopoly laws by abusing its dominant position within the cellular application industry. In July 2015 the Russian parliament voted in favor [JURIST report] of a bill that forced online search engines to remove search results about a person at that persons request. In April 2014 the Russian parliament approved a set of bills [JURIST report] that applied new restrictions on the internet and blogging which many feared was an attempt at the government to regulate and silence any opposition.
The Taiwanese Parliament [official website] has begun work on passing three bills in support of same-sex marriage. Mei-nu Yu [official profile], a ruling Democratic Progressive Party MP, is sponsoring the same-sex marriage bill now in line for parliamentary debate [ABC report]. Same-sex marriage a was also supported by President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwans first female head of state, just this past October.

The rights of same-sex couples are still being debated throughout the globe. Earlier this week the Australian Senate rejected a proposed plebiscite on same-sex marriage [JURIST report]. In September tens of thousands of people marched [JURIST report] in Mexico in protest of same-sex marriage, a controversial topic in the country exacerbated by a proposal from embattled President Enrique Pena Nieto to recognize same-sex marriage. The Aruban legislature voted [JURIST report] in September to give official recognition to same-sex couples, giving them the right to register their unions and receive the benefits granted to other married people. The New York Court of Appeals ruled [JURIST report] in August that the definition of parent under a section of the states Domestic Relations Law should be expanded, in a decision that will serve to better accommodate same-sex couples. Also in August, the Belize Supreme Court struck down [JURIST report] a law banning sodomy, declaring it unconstitutional. Section 53 of the Belize Criminal Code banned carnal intercourse against the order of nature.
NEWSLETTER

Sign up

Tick the boxes of the newsletters you would like to receive.

Just Drinks Daily News

The top stories of the day delivered to you every weekday.

Just Drinks Weekly News

A weekly roundup of the latest news and analysis, sent every Monday.

Just Drinks Magazine

The industry's most comprehensive news and information delivered every quarter
A photo from the Nguoi Phu Quoc Facebook page that shows a group of young men apparently torturing a dolphin.

Many people have gone on the social network to blast the men as 'stupid' and 'cruel'.

Photos of a group of young men, suspected to be from the southern island of Phu Quoc, capturing and slaughtering a dolphin have ignited anger on social media, but police have failed to take any action.

A series of photos posted on Nguoi Phu Quoc, a Facebook page run by several Phu Quoc locals to promote the popular tourist destination, showed a group of men sitting with a dolphin, grasping its beak and holding a knife on a fishing boat.

One photo shows a headless dolphin, and another shows a dolphin head with organs laid out on the deck of the boat.

The page posted the photos on Thursday afternoon and it has been shared widely with many comments calling the men stupid and cruel.

The page urged authorities to step in and investigate, but no action has been taken.

A number of dolphin species are classified as endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, while many more are known to be in serious danger due to pollution and fishing, including collisions with boats. Many countries ban or restrict the act of holding them in captivity.

Ha The Phong, director of the Phu Quoc Marine Park, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that he would check the photos and call for authorities to punish those responsible.

Together with turtles and dugong, dolphins are strictly protected, Phong said. The fishermen's actions are unacceptable.

Dolphins are common in the waters around Phu Quoc, and they are highly respected by most fishermen who believe that the mammals bring them luck and protect them at sea.

Dolphins that wash up dead are given a proper burial and worshiped at temples along the beach.

Vietnamese fishermen also worship whales in the same way.

Social media has disturbingly been used as a platform by some people to display abusive acts against animals in Vietnam.

In January, a man from the central province of Nghe An posted on Facebook very graphic photos of monkeys being brutally killed and processed to make bone glue, which some people believe can have medicinal properties.

The photos caused widespread anger and disgust, prompting the authorities to investigate the man. He was not punished because he only shared the photos.

Another man identified as the one killing the monkeys, which belonged to a protected species, was fined VND5.25 million ($234).

Related news:

> Facebook post helps Vietnamese police track down monkey murderer

> Vietnam bans animal slaughter at violent spring festivals
In this file photo by Reuters, foreign boats were destroyed in an Indonesian island after being accused of fishing illegally its waters.

One Vietnamese fisherman died and two others were injured.

Vietnams foreign ministry has spoken in opposition to Indonesias use of force against two Vietnamese fishing boats recently, which led to one death.

The ministry's spokesman Le Hai Binh made the statement at a press conference on Thursday, regarding the incident on October 21 when an Indonesias naval ship chased and shot at two Vietnamese fishing boats, injuring three of 13 fishermen on board. One succumbed to serious injuries later.

The Vietnamese boats were operating in the overlapping waters of Vietnam and Indonesia, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

Vietnam strongly protests the use of force by Indonesia against Vietnamese fishermen and their fishing vessels, Binh said, as cited by the news agency.

The Indonesian forces actions are incommensurate with the strategic partnership between Vietnam and Indonesia as well as the principles of humanitarian treatment towards fishermen, he said.

Vietnam asks that Indonesian agencies promptly clarify the incident, seriously punish violators, and compensate the Vietnamese fishermen, Binh said.

On November 1, the foreign ministry also sent a note to the Indonesian Embassy to oppose the actions.

The embassy is reportedly working with Indonesian agencies to seek more information and provide assistance to the injured fishermen, who are under treatment, and repatriate the body of the dead victim.

Indonesia has been taking strong measures to protect its territory in recent years, sinking and blowing up boats including those from Vietnam which were accused of poaching in its waters.

Related news:

> Vietnam calls for peace, stability as US warship enters flashpoint waters

> Vietnam protests Chinas election and patrols in flashpoint waters

> Indonesia frees 228 illegal Vietnamese fishermen
By An Yen November 11, 2016 | 11:00 am PT

The biennial award aims to honor architects who have made significant contributions to the progress of architecture in Asia.

Hoang Thuc Hao, a lecturer at Hanois University of Civil Engineering, has been named the winner of the SIA-Getz Architecture Prize.

The awards, which are held every two years, aim to honor architects who have made significant contributions to the progress of architecture in Asia.

Thanks to a chain of projects designed for ethnic communities, the Vietnamese architect surpassed 16 other nominees to take home the $20,000 prize.

Hoang Thuc Hao's architecture goes beyond just building sustainability," the jury said in a statement. "He also addresses cultural sustainability in his works, an aspect often neglected in developing economies.

Hao was also given the title of Architect of the Year at the Ashui Awards 2015, Vietnams annual awards to honor outstanding architects and projects.

Below are some projects designed by Hao.

A Community center for Dao ethnic people in the northern mountainous province of Lao Cai.

The house is inspired by the traditional red scarves worn by Dao women, and made from environmentally-friendly materials like stone, adobe bricks and recycled timber

Lung Luong Primary School for poor children in the northern province of Thai Nguyen.

The colorful school was constructed to replace the creaky old school, encouraging local children to attend class regularly.

The National Happiness Center the architect designed for Buhtans government.

The design harmonizes with its surrounding materials: soil  stone  wood; between indoor and outdoor spaces; between technology and traditional vernacular experiences.

Photo courtesy of Vu Xuan Son and 1+1>2

Related news:

> Vietnamese bamboo house wins American architecture award

> Tree house hidden in Hanoi jungle enraptures travelers
The luxury cruise ship is expected to be a regular visitor to Vietnam following its launch.

The Genting Dream, the largest luxury cruiser in Asia, has stopped off at several Vietnamese beach towns this week during its maiden ocean voyage, and is expected to make many return calls in the coming months.

The cruise liner, carrying 2,300 tourists from around 20 countries, arrived at Tien Sa Port in the central city of Da Nang on Thursday afternoon, after docking in the southern beach town of Vung Tau on Tuesday and the popular resort town of Nha Trang on Wednesday.

It will depart on Saturday for Hong Kong. It's the ship's maiden voyage after being launched in Germany in October. It had docked in Singapore before Vietnam.

The Genting Dream, which is 335 meters long with a capacity of 3,400 passengers and 2,000 crew members, is designed for the Asian cruise market with a large number of restaurants and a casino.

The ship is expected to make ten more calls in Vietnam, including the popular Ha Long Bay, by March 2017, carrying tourists mostly from Malaysia and Singapore, according to local media.

Ngo Quang Vinh, director of Da Nangs Tourism Department, said local travel agencies are teaming up with the cruise company to bring the ship to Da Nang once a week.

The city will have a lot of opportunities to promote its attractions, Vinh said, as cited by Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Thursday.

Da Nang considers cruise tourists an important part of its tourism development.

A total of 58 cruise ships have brought nearly 81,300 tourists to the city this year, up nearly four times from a year ago.

Inside the Genting Dream:

Related news:

> 70 divers search for missing tourists after cruise ship goes down in Da Nang

> Chinese Coast Guard ship makes landmark visit to Vietnam
Foreigners at a music festival in Hanoi in November. Photo by VnExpress/Xavier Bourgois

The city attracted more than 18 million visitors including 3.2 million foreigners in January-October.

After its strong performance in first 10 months, Hanoi now expects foreign arrivals to increase 22.6 percent from 2015 to four million this year.

Hanois Tourism Department said the city attracted nearly 3.2 million foreign tourists in the first 10 months, up 23 percent from a year ago.

Asian tourists from China, Japan and South Korea topped the list of arrivals, followed by travelers from Australia, Germany, France and the U.S.

Tourism revenue in the first ten months reached VND50.7 trillion ($2.27 million), thanks also to more spending from 14.8 million Vietnamese tourists.

The industry is projected to earn $2.8 billion from tourism, up 13 percent from 2015.

Hanoi was among 20 fastest-growing tourist cities, with an average annual growth rate of 11.64 percent in foreign arrivals between 2009 and 2015, according to a MasterCard survey in September.

The city has been making various efforts to attract more visitors. It opened a pedestrian-only zone around the iconic Sword Lake in September and lifted the midnight curfew for bars and restaurants during weekend nights in August.

Hanoi's tourism department partnered with tour operator Vietnamtourism to launch a free tour through craft and guild streets in the historic Old Quarter in October. It also opened a tourist support center in Hoan Kiem District.

Last year, Lonely Planet named the Old Quarter among the places to see at least once in a lifetime, while the visual social network Pinterest ranked the capital city the third most-pinned location of all time.

TripAdvisor has also named Hanoi the best value destination for the past three years.

Vietnam received more than eight million tourists in the first 10 months, up 25.4 percent year-on-year, with its visa waiver policy for some key markets believed to be a major reason.

Related news:

> Let's take a walk: Hanoi launches free tour around Old Quarter craft streets

> Hanoi considers expanding pedestrian zone around Hoan Kiem Lake

> Hanois oldest pagoda named among the world's most beautiful
Around 57 million Americans expected to see Hillary Clinton shatter the glass ceiling. Weve been fooling ourselves by thinking weve all come further than we have.

Lets take care of each other and work harder. This is not over.

 Jenny Yang

It is not the first time Ive fled my country just in time. Last time it was Greece, September, 2009. Having spent 20 years in Athens, I moved back to the country of my birth. Never having known it but through the media that trickled through our Hellenic screens, I was to meet the good ol US of A, for the first time since I was a year and a half old. It just so happened that it was right before the economic crisis of the early 10s really hit the globe, striking Greek society a debilitating blow. I didnt really know it until I literally saw Athens burn.

After a year as a young American, I was home for summer 2010. Leaving mybar  a small gay sanctuary, one of the few that used to exist in downtown Athens  we were stopped by the smell of smoke.

Its hard to remember if we heard the glass break then, or if the sound is so vivid in my mind not because Ive heard it but because of the infinity of violently shattered store windows, which I would see over the next days, months and years. But, I know we saw the fires. We followed the shouts, we walked around the corner and we saw the flames.

It only got worse from there. Not because the violence continued unabated (though it certainly increased and eventually turned itself on minority groups rather than property). What has been most painful to feel is the absolute depression in which near the entire population of the country plummeted, a plight which worsened as the years went by and barely now shows signs of lifting.

When a people feel something in common, its amplified. Whether thats enthusiasm and hope inspired by a charismatic leader or despair brought on by referendums and austerity. Being in the States for Barack Obamas reign had a dash of the former. The result of the 2016 US elections goes beyond the latter.

About 57 million Americans expected to see Hillary Clinton shatter that glass ceiling, whether they were with her from the get go or ended up having to choose her as the lesser of two evils. Some of us hoped, some thought it a given that there would be a new President Clinton. No matter what disagreement one may have with her politics, it is a fact that her nomination meant a lot to many. As would have her presidency.

Now, it turns out it was a joke. One weve been fooling ourselves by continuing to think weve all come further than we have. How did we think that in the years of #BlackLivesMatter, minority voters wouldnt be suppressed? How in the name of Gabby Douglas did we think the country wasnt going to Lochte it up majorly, in automatically siding with the white male regardless of his actions? How can we fool ourselves into thinking that still using the bizarre electoral system could produce anything resembling a truly democratic result?

I believe we are experiencing a backlash to President Obama, to better healthcare for all, to Same Sex Marriage, Michael Horvich captures a feeling thats permeating the Internet. Where he writes Obama let me add in particular his race. The Dark Lord Trumps election is, in part, a result of this pushback, or whitelash as Van Jones coined it. And it is also a by-product of misogyny which would have been just as powerfully directed at any other woman, with any other political views, on the ticket for President of the United States.

These views go hand in hand with our older population but are not exclusive to it. So they must be on their way out!, you might think. This isnt a time to hope an older generation dies out, counters Asha Michelle Wilson, We take education and open mindedness for granted, []. This is a time to extend a hand with kindness, while standing your ground. Yes, to both.

These ideas are on their way out and we need to be kind and fierce to rise to the challenge. They are going partly because of the age of those who tend to hold them. But also because there has been too hard a push for progress for too long a time, legislation has changed, youths views have and are shifting. Thus those who are still tied to archaic thinking are lashing out; galvanized, they rally around an amoral populist who only picked them to begin with because they are dying. Easy prey.

Even worse are those in power who back that predatory behaviour because they stand to gain more. Whats worst is that we are all, on both sides, complicit in allowing profit to continue to be the highest guiding principle in our society. Higher than love, higher than decency, higher than common fucking sense. And here we are. We are witnessing the fall of the Empire. The election of He Who Must Not Be Named sounds the death throes of America the Beautiful.

So, why, at this point, should those who hear the noise, who have been let down and shut out, strive now to be kind on top of it all? It is a matter of what will rise out of the ashes to take the old Empires place. Sometimes the bottom must be reached before reclamation, before a cure, before recovery, as Horvich puts it. If we have hit rock bottom, if thats where our society is and the worst is about to unravel over the next four years, the only way to go from there is up. We might as well lift with us who we can and fight, once again, for the future we want.

It is not only a matter of time. As projections of the oft-maligned millennial voters showed us when contrasted with reality, the course is already in motion but the journey is not complete. We let ourselves think we were there before we got there. So, covered in gravel and with friction burns, we gotta mourn as much as each needs and dust ourselves off. There is a chance for the hopeful, inclusive and big-hearted future of Clintons concession speech.

We just need to do more work. To reach out across party lines and come together with those who are open to discussion. To protect our youths progress in the face of backwards forces. To continue to call out injustice wherever it may show itself, organize, act and shout so loud that we may shatter the system and build anew on equal ground. But above all, to take care of ourselves and our people first so that we may be able to do all the work we need to.

Far be it from me to pretend to bear the brunt of what this election wrought. I am male. I am cis. I count as white. I moved away from Los Angeles in 2015. But I am queer and an American. I was born there, I lived there, I married my husband there. I continue to love the best parts of it and be horrified by the atrocities on which it was built, which it continues to foster. I care for its people, my people there and around the world who are affected by its ebbs and flows. Change isnt emotion. Its real work and organization and strategy, take it from Michelle Obama.

I got out just in time, once more. I wont have to feel the sadness as much. The hate-speech and acts of entitled aggression that have already begun might not seem quite so dystopian from Madrid, where I am now. But we are on our way to becoming a global community (its already in motion); we must in order to survive. We can not go on divided, fighting and afraid, when our problems are planet-wide. It is not just about America. Its racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia the world over. Its All Lives Matter, the Pulse shooting, Brock Turner and Bill Cosby, the Golden Dawn and Brexit.

Greece caved in. There is no coming back for the UK. Yet, among the ruins, we, the American people, stand a chance to stand tall once more. Alongside the absurdity and the absolute disdain we may feel and in spite of the humongous challenges and regressive action we are sure to face in the next four years, we were lucky on November 9th, 2016. The problem has been diagnosed. We have till 2020 to heal as best we can. Voldemort hit and we must survive it. We can all be the girls and boys who lived.

PS: Follow Ijeoma Oluo, Jenny Yang and more community organizers who can lead you into action better than I.

PPS: Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote.

Giorgis [your-geese] Despotakis is American born, Athens raised. He has worked in grassroots fundraising, LGBTQI outreach and TV production. He has freelanced for Netflix, been a hired cannabis harvester and translated for the Huffington Post, Greece. Hes written some good stuff including shorts, songs, screenplays, thought pieces and pilots. Currently writes, sings, travels out of and lives in Madrid, with his Alex.
Hanoians huddle up as first cold spell of winter descends

An unexpected cold snap has hit northern Vietnam over the last few days.

The first cold spell of winter has surrounded northern Vietnam this week, including the capital Hanoi. Temperatures in the city are hovering at around 18-20 degrees Celsius by day and 15-17 degrees Celsius by night.

While small traders are making the most of the opportunities the inclement weather offers, homeless people are huddled under their blankets on Hanois sidewalks.

Rural migrants flock to streetside clothes markets to to search for cheap coats, costing around VND120,000 ($5.4).

Blankets and carpets can also be found on the streets.

The colder the weather becomes, the more roasted sweetcorn and sweet potatoes I sell, said Tam, a street vendor. She added that she can earn about VND500,000 ($22.5) working just four hours a night.

Foreign visitors pick up warm coats on Ma May Street.

Fruit traders at Long Bien wholesale market wrapped up in their jackets. The cold weather has driven customers away.

Hanoians are using small fires to fend off the cold.

A homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk of Trang Thi Street.

An elderly woman huddles in front of a store at 2 a.m.

Yen Phu bus station has become a shelter for homeless people.

An elderly woman sleeps in temporary tent.

The National Meteorological Forecasting Agency predicts that temperatures in Hanoi will will rise to over 22 degrees Celsius on Friday, and then jump to 30 degrees Celsius over the weekend.

Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Thanh

Related news:

> Hanoi welcomes first breeze of winter
The low-cost carrier now flies to Cam Ranh and Da Nang airports.

Hong Kong Express Airways on Wednesday launched its new direct service to Cam Ranh International Airport in the central province of Khanh Hoa.

The flights, on Airbus A320 aircraft, will be operated on Wednesday and Sunday.

The low-cost airline has already flown to Da Nang. Khanh Hoa is most famous for its resort town of Nha Trang and and the beautiful Nha Trang Bay

Data showed that more than 28,500 people from Hong Kong visited Vietnam in the first 10 months, up 72.5 percent from the same period last year.

Hong Kong Express, also known as HK Express, also has direct services to several other Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand and Malaysia.

Related news

> VietJet Air makes maiden flight to Tainan

> Air New Zealand touches down in Vietnam with new direct flight

> Chinese airlines add more flights to Ho Chi Minh City
WASHINGTON (AP)  In a cordial beginning the transfer of power, President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump met at the White House Thursday. Obama called the 90-minute meeting "excellent," and his successor said he looked forward to receiving the outgoing president's "counsel."

Afterward, Obama said to Trump, "We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed the country succeeds."

The two men, who have been harshly critical of each other for years, were meeting for the first time, Trump said. The Republican said he looked forward "to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel."

Obama blasted Trump throughout the campaign as unfit to serve as a commander in chief. Trump spent years challenging the legitimacy of Obama's presidency, falsely suggesting Obama may have been born outside the United States.

But at least publicly, the two men appeared to put aside their animosity. As the meeting concluded and journalists scrambled out of the Oval Office, Obama smiled at his successor and explained the unfolding scene.

If Trump makes good on his campaign promises, he'll wipe away much of what Obama has done during his eight years in office. The Republican president-elect, who will govern with Congress fully under GOP control, has vowed to repeal Obama's signature health care law and dismantle the landmark nuclear accord with Iran.

First lady Michelle Obama also meet privately in the White House residence with Trump's wife, Melania, while Vice President Joe Biden prepared to see Vice President-elect Mike Pence later Thursday.

Trump traveled to Washington from New York on his private jet, breaking with protocol by not bringing journalists in his motorcade or on his plane to document his historic visit to the White House. Trump was harshly critical of the media during his campaign and for a time banned news organizations whose coverage he disliked from his events.

Also on Trump's schedule were meetings with House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to discuss the GOP legislative agenda. Ryan, who holds the most powerful post in Congress, was a sometime critic of Trump, was slow to endorse him and did not campaign with the nominee. Pence intended to join both meetings.

As scores of journalists waited to be admitted to the Oval Office to see Obama and Trump together, they saw White House chief of staff Denis McDonough walking along the South Lawn driveway with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. A handful of Trump aides trailed them.

The anticipated show of civility at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue contrasted with postelection scenes of protests across a politically divided country. Demonstrators from New England to the heartland and the West Coast vented against the election winner on Wednesday, chanting "Not my president," burning a papier-mache Trump head, beating a Trump pinata and carrying signs that said "Impeach Trump."

Republicans were emboldened by Trump's stunning victory over Hillary Clinton, giving the GOP control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

"He just earned a mandate," Ryan said.

In an emotional concession speech, Clinton said her crushing loss was "painful and it will be for a long time" and acknowledged that the nation was "more divided than we thought."

Still, Clinton was gracious in defeat, declaring: "Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead."

In Washington, Trump's scant transition team sprang into action, culling through personnel lists for top jobs and working through handover plans for government agencies. A person familiar with the transition operations said the personnel process was still in its early stages, but Trump's team was putting a premium on quickly filling key national security posts. The person was not authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to an organizational chart for the transition obtained by The Associated Press, Trump was relying on experienced hands to help form his administration. National security planning was being led by former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, who previously worked for the FBI. Domestic issues were being handled by Ken Blackwell, a former Cincinnati mayor and Ohio secretary of state.

Trump was expected to consider several loyal supporters for top jobs, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for attorney general or national security adviser and campaign finance chairman Steve Mnuchin for Treasury secretary. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker were also expected to be under consideration for foreign policy posts.

As president-elect, Trump is entitled to get the same daily intelligence briefing as Obama  one that includes information on U.S. covert operations, information gleaned about world leaders and other data gathered by America's 17 intelligence agencies. The White House said it would organize two exercises involving multiple agencies to help Trump's team learn how to respond to major domestic incidents.

If Trump makes good on his campaign promises, the nation stands on the brink of sweeping change in domestic and foreign policy. He's pledged to repeal Obama's health care law and pull out of the landmark nuclear accord with Iran. He's vowed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and temporarily ban immigration from nations with terror ties.

It's unclear whether Trump will embrace many of the traditions of the presidency. He'll enter the White House owning his own private jet as well as a hotel just blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue.
OMAHA -- Two people were arrested and pepper balls were used to disperse remnants of an anti-Trump rally Wednesday night in the Old Market.

The rally had started about 6:15 p.m. in the Gene Leahy Mall across from the downtown library, but shifted to the heart of the Old Market. As the evening progressed, protesters blocked the intersection at 11th and Howard Streets, and that is when police shot pepper balls at their feet, striking some. The balls dispense a stinging gas. The two arrests were on suspicion of obstructing and unlawful assembly, said Officer Phil Anson, a police spokesman.

Police considered the downtown demonstration lawful, but when, about 10 p.m., people sat and lay in the street, "that's when it became a problem," Anson said.

Brett Masterson said he thinks the police use of pepper balls went too far.

"It was a peaceful protest, all we were armed with were signs," the 29-year-old Omahan said.

After the crowd moved out of the intersection, about 40 people remained in downtown, walking and chanting late into the night.

Early in the evening, the main part of the rally drew about 250, mostly young people, many women and a smattering of children.

Chants by the crowd included "Not my president," "Dump Trump," and "Hey hey, ho ho. Donald Trump has got to go."

Supportive drivers honked to the cheers of the crowd.

Among those at the rally was Sara Zaleski, who said Wednesday felt like a day of mourning.

About 18 hours after Donald Trump won the presidency, she was sitting on steps in the Leahy Mall, finishing a handmade sign that she would hold in the demonstration. She said she was girding for the years ahead, what the 18-year-old Omaha woman considers the worst-case scenario.

"This hurts like hell," she said.

Abigail Dawdy was drawn to the rally after feeling frightened and at a loss.

The 27-year-old Omahan fears the country will slip into fascism if Trump follows through on his campaign promises to restrict a free press, prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. and otherwise reduce human rights. That he has named a leading climate change skeptic, Myron Ebell, to handle the environmental policies transition feeds her worst fears, she said.

"This was what I needed, the energy was good," said Dawdy, who left the rally early in the evening with two friends.

In west Omaha, at 144th and Harrison Streets, about a dozen young people gathered and held up signs heralding love as an antidote to the anxiety some people feel following the election.

Eighteen-year-old Logan Miller of Omaha organized the love rally. Miller said Trumps victory has been upsetting. He said he took comfort Wednesday from an online video urging people not to be afraid.

"A lot of people are scared," Miller said. "We did this to help people feel not so scared."

Miller found himself frightened. It didnt seem that the new executives followers liked people like him: African American and gay.

"I was handling it in a bad way," he said. "I was cutting off all Trump supporters" in his life.

But then he decided he would do something positive with his fear. Telling strangers he loved them would be more constructive than wallowing at home. And the response was mostly positive. Passers-by offered water and granola bars, he said, and honked.

"Spreading love was what I felt, optimally, to be most effective today," he said.

World-Herald staff writer Nancy Gaarder contributed to this report.
Cars from Vietnam and China pass the Mong Cai international border gate on November 10, 2016. Photo courtesy of Vietnam's Nhan dan news site

Visitors will only be allowed to stay in both countries for a maximum of three days.

Two towns in Vietnam and China have kicked off a pilot scheme to allow tourists to travel across the border by car with no visa restrictions.

The program, approved by the two governments, will run until January 11 next year.

Cars from China will be allowed to travel to Mong Cai in the northern province of Quang Ninh, while Vietnamese tourists visiting Dongxing City in China's Guangxi Province by car will be regulated by Chinese authorities, Vietnam's government portal said in a statement.

On Thursday, 20 cars from Vietnam and the same number from China crossed the international border gate at Mong Cai following an opening ceremony.

Only 9-seater cars and below are allowed through the gate. No more than 100 cars from each country can make the trip per day, and visitors can stay for no longer than three days, the statement said.

All cars from Vietnam will be under the management of the Hong Gai Tourism and Services Joint Stock Company appointed by Quang Ninh's provincial government.

The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism said the country has received more than 2.2 million Chinese arrivals this year, up 55 percent from the same period last year.

China now accounts for roughly a quarter of all foreign visitors to Vietnam.

Short flights and a strong cross-border relationship between the countries have played an important role for tourism.

Most Chinese tourists to Vietnam enter via northern border provinces, particularly Quang Ninh, home to the much loved Ha Long Bay.

Related news:

> Vietnam wary of Chinas offer to loan $300 million for major road project

> Vietnam named a favorite destination for Chinese tourists
Twenty years after the United States and Vietnam normalized their relations, the two countries have steadily strengthened their cooperation. The bilateral relationship has never been stronger, cooperating on a full spectrum of issues including education, science and technology, climate change, sustainability, public health, and security.

Indeed, in May of this year, during a visit to Vietnam, President Barack Obama announced the lifting of the decades-old arms embargo. By doing so, President Obama removed the lingering vestiges of the Cold War and ensures that Vietnam has access to the equipment it needs to defend itself. This change also underscored the commitment of the United States to a fully normalized relationship with Vietnam, including strong defense ties with Vietnam and the region for the long term.

Building upon the May 2016 visit of President Obama to Vietnam and the July 2015 visit of the Communist Party of Vietnams General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong to the United States, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry invited Dinh The Huynh, Executive Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee, to Washington to deepen engagement between the two governments.

Secretary Kerry and Mr. Huynh reiterated the two countries commitment to deepening our comprehensive partnership, promoting trade and economic growth, and strengthening regional security and stability. Additionally, they discussed the peaceful management and resolution of disputes in the South China Sea, cooperating on humanitarian and disaster relief response, advancing human rights and legal reform, and collaborating on climate change mitigation and adaptation, particularly in the Mekong Delta. Both underscored their countries commitment to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement that has the potential to shape the future of the region.

We both share a commitment to the peaceful use and respect for rule of law in the South China Sea, said Secretary of State Kerry during a joint press conference.The people of Vietnam today are witnessing a remarkable economic revolution. They are engaged in an amazing economic endeavor, a capitalist endeavor. Its one of the fastest growing countries in the region. We very much look forward to a very productive relationship.
306 Shares Share

It wont be the last sacrifice you make for medicine.

These were the words my surgical intern said between yawns as I expressed regret at having to miss a distant cousins wedding. The digital wall-clock read a blurry 3:15 a.m. as we sat together in the on-call room, the coffeemaker dripping black gold into the pot.

She had three pagers affixed to her scrub pants which would beep intermittently in turn, signaling anything from an order that had been overlooked in the electronic medical record to a patient arriving by ambulance who would need urgent attention.

I was the medical student assigned to the service she was covering, which meant that I was her shadow cast by the fluorescent hospital lighting. For two weeks, I watched as she glided gracefully through the wards, responding to emergency after emergency with confident poise. She taught me a lot about taking care of people who had just undergone surgery over the 150 or so hours we spent together over those two weeks.

In the silent moments when a pager wasnt chirping, she would take me aside and teach me why she chose a specific medication for Mrs. Jones, or the reason we couldnt perform a certain operation for Mr. Rodriguez. Then, the familiar beeping noise would sound, and off we would go. For 150 hours, I watched her work day and night, and I listened carefully as she taught me how to take care of sick patients.

Sometimes, the lessons were not easy to bear. Some decisions can be hard  or even impossible  to make. Throughout medical school I watched even senior physicians walk out of certain encounters noticeably heavier from the gravity of their discussions.

After participating in clinical medicine during a year of clerkships, I find it unsurprising that, in one study, almost half of U.S. physicians reported symptoms of burnout. Often cited reasons for burnout included excess administrative work and a lack of face-to-face time with patients.

This isnt just a problem for physicians. Its been shown that physician burnout negatively affects clinical outcomes for patients. We also know that dissatisfied physicians are more likely to make mistakes in prescribing. With both physician and patient wellness at stake, it seems obvious that something must be done to address the problem.

I sat down with my surgical intern to get her thoughts on burnout in a coffee shop near the hospital, this time by the light of day. She looked unfamiliar in street clothes, out of the blue scrub uniform that now seemed cartoonish in my memory. I asked her how she dealt with the demands of a surgical residency.

The justifications for her resilience were unexpected. She described growing up in a family that pushed her to read fiction. She talked about how she attempted to view each patient as an individual with a rich life story, rather than another case of appendicitis. She spoke about how her background in theater helped her to understand subtleties of communication from people, and how that made her work more meaningful. I also learned that she had delivered a baby just two months before we were on service together, and that somewhere between the 150 hours we spent together, she had been pumping breast milk for her infant. She talked about how encouraging her partner and family were, and how privileged she was to have emotional and psychological support to steady her in uncertain moments.

Her experiences ring true with the evidence on burnout. High levels of empathy are associated with lower rates of burnout in physicians and nurses. It is also true that the ability to provide quality care is a major driver of satisfaction for physicians. It seems that burnout intensifies when physicians who want to provide quality care to their patients are prevented from doing so by infrastructural barriers. Hope for the future lies in the fact that advocates have suggested adding a fourth aim of improving the work life of healthcare providers to the Institute for Healthcare Improvements Triple Aim framework for optimizing healthcare.

As we finished our discussion and prepared to part ways, my resident (now friend) remarked that she would be missing her nieces middle school rendition of Annie in order to head back to the hospital to take call that night.

Its not the last sacrifice youll make for medicine, I said jokingly.

She smiled. Its not the last sacrifice Ill make for people.

Ali I. Rae is a medical student. This article originally appeared in the Gold Foundation blog.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings  though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.



Jen Johnson, CTU, Local 1 in Substance


Mark Chilton, 89, of Elko passed away on Nov. 9, 2016, from complications of a second hip fracture. Mark was born in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1927 and attended grammar school in Missouri and high school in Texas. After graduating, he entered the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1944.

He served in the Air Corps for 3 years and was stationed in the Philippines as a photo lab technician and aerial photographer. He received a U.S. Army appointment to West Point in 1946 and attended the Army Preparatory School at Stewart Field in Newberg, New York. When his entrance to West Point Military Academy was delayed for a year to recuperate from a back operation, he enrolled at Colorado University in Boulder, Colorado under the G.I. Bill. He later declined his West Point appointment after completing his sophomore year at the University. The academy would have required him to start as a Plebe and after four years he would receive a degree in Military Science, not Civil Engineering, which was his goal.

During his junior year, he met Kathryn Joan Ward, an education major from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They were married in 1950 and both graduated a year later, being rewarded not only with their diplomas but also with a daughter, Cheryl.

Mark was a member of Chi Epsilon Civil Engineering Honor Society. To help ends meet during his senior year, he worked as a laboratory assistant in advanced surveying for professor Roland Rautenstraus, who later was promoted to University of Colorado president.

Due to his previous military training, Mark was qualified to enter the advanced Army Reserve Officer Training Corp Program when it began at CU in 1948.

He served as the Cadet Colonel of the unit, and when he received his B.S. in Civil Engineering, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps of Engineers Reserve.

After graduating Mark was hired by the Engineering Department of the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, headquartered in Amarillo, Texas. The job offer was made by the railroads chief engineer, a CU graduate. In 1954 another CU graduate was responsible for Marks hire by Western Pacific Railroad stationed in Elko, Nevada. He advanced to assistant Roadmaster, in the Maintenance of Way Department. In 1959 Mark made a career change and joined a civil engineering and land surveying consulting firm in Elko, owned by William Settelmeyer. Eventually, he bought the firm from Settelmeyer and rechristened it Chilton Engineering. Mark specialized in Civil Engineering services and Land Surveying in Northeastern Nevada and was elected as the Elko County Engineer for three terms, and served many small communities in Northern Nevada over the years as either County or City Engineer.

Chilton Engineering grew from a two-employee business, one being his wife, Kathryn, as secretary, to a firm with more than a hundred employees with offices located in Elko, Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada and Lake Havasu, Arizona.

Under Marks direction the firm had many notable accomplishments. One of the most significant was a ten year $45 million Railroad Relocation Project in Elko. Commonly known locally as Project Lifesaver, the project eliminated seventeen at-grade crossings in the citys central business district, re-channeled the Humboldt River through the city, placed both the east and west bound railroads in a corridor next to the river channel and constructed two vehicular bridges and one pedestrian bridge over the re-channeled river relocated rail corridor. This federally funded demonstration project was one of nineteen in the United States and received special recognition as the only major project of its kind to be completed.

Another major accomplishment involved negotiations for funding, and supervision of the design and construction of a $20 million

Recreation Reservoir in Elko County. Southfork Reservoir consists of a 90 foot high earth-fill dam 1800 feet long, holding back 40,000 acre feet of water located 15 miles from Elko. Mark, who played an instrumental role in this project, said it, benefitted many, threatened few, and was affordable for all.

The professional accomplishment Mark was most proud of was the creation and existence of his firm. It is not one made of steel or dirt, but it is the accomplishment of providing a respectable and challenging workplace over the years for many dedicated engineers and surveyors. Many of them were invited to become co-owners of the firm. Mark retired in the early 2000s and the firm was acquired by Farr West Engineering in 2012.

Over the years, Mark obtained a commercial pilots license with instrument and multi-engine ratings and became the owner of several single and twin-engine aircraft, to aid in business transportation which covered several states. A Flight Instructor was on staff and engineers and land surveyors, when hired as employees, were encouraged to get their pilots license and several did.

Marks professional and community recognition includes past membership as a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He was awarded the National Council of Engineering Examiners Distinguished Service Award for his 12 years of service on the Nevada State Board of Engineers and Surveyors. He was an Emeritus of the board.

Mark served as the Nevada State President of the National Society of Professional Engineers and served on two boards of the Desert Research Institute of the University of Nevada System.

He was a founder and co-donator of land for the campus of the Great Basin College and served on its Foundation Board and was a member of the Elko Rotary Club and was a Paul Harris Fellow in Rotary. In 2015, to encourage and support the Civil Engineering and Land Surveying professions, Mark and Kathryn made an endowment to GBC for engineering and surveying scholarships to be awarded to qualified and eligible applicants.

Mark and his wife Kathryn, who recently celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary, have two daughters, Cheri Chilton Smith (husband, Doug) of Carson City, Carey Chilton Charyk (husband, John) of Spokane and a son, Ward William Chilton (wife Mariam), in Reno, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. The family has enjoyed many gatherings together celebrating holidays, anniversaries, birthdays and weddings. Pops, as the family referred to him, valued his family greatly and delighted in creating games and humorous educational activities at these reunions.

Mark Chilton (Pops) was an inspiration to his family, friends, and associates. He was always grateful to be a contributing member of the Elko and greater Nevada communities.

A memorial service will be held Saturday, November 12, at 4:00 pm at the First Presbyterian Church in Elko, followed by a Celebration of Life Reception at the Northeastern Nevada Museum at 5:00 pm. The family would like to invite all who knew him to attend.

To continue Marks dedication & service to his adored community of Elko, please consider a donation in his name to Great Basin College, Engineering & Surveying scholarship fund.
1 of 4

Arun Jaitley confirms no GPS tracking chip in Rs. 2000 notes



Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday confirmed that RBI's new Rs. 2000 note has no GPS tracking chip. The Rs. 2,000 notes that will enter into circulation from November 10, 2016 will not have any electronic chip, the Reserve Bank of India clarified on Wednesday.



Read More...


SPRING CREEK  Dorothy Ojala of Spring Creek Middle School has taken the first step in becoming an internationally recognized artist by winning a local competition sponsored by the Spring Creek Lions Club.

Ojalas poster was among more than 600,000 entries submitted worldwide in the 29th annual Lions International Peace Poster Contest. Lions Clubs International is sponsoring the contest to emphasize the importance of world peace to young people everywhere.

The poster was selected for its originality, artistic merit and portrayal of the contest theme, A Celebration of Peace. Ojalas poster will advance to face stiff competition through the district and international competition if she is to be declared the international grand prize winner.

One grand prize winner and 23 merit award winners will be selected. The grand prize includes a cash award of $5,000, plus a trip for the winner and two family members to an award ceremony. The 23 merit award winners will each receive a certificate and a cash award of $500.

Our club is cheering for Dorothy as her poster advances in the competition and we hope that her vision will ultimately be shared with others around the world, Karen Taufer, Peace Poster chair for the Spring Creek Ruby Mountain Lions, said.

Dorothy was honored at a special presentation with a $50 check from the Spring Creek Ruby Mountain Lions. If her poster is the winner of the Nevada Lions District 46 competition she will receive a check for $125 and her poster will be sent on to the international level.

The Spring Creek Lions Club invites the public to view international grand prize and merit award winners at www.lionsclubs.org.

Lions Clubs International is the worlds largest service club organization with 1.4 million members in more than 46,000 clubs in more than 200 countries and geographic areas. In addition to its efforts toward conquering blindness, the organization has made a strong commitment to community service and helping youth throughout the world.
Local girl, Sarah Hogan from Kilkenny has won a place in the prestigious final of The Most Beautiful Girl in Ireland, in which she has a chance to represent Ireland at the Most Beautiful Girl in the World in Dubai in January 2017.

The 25 year old from the city will be up against 13 other ladies from around the country on November 25 the Limerick Strand Hotel.

"The Most Beautiful Girl in Ireland is a nationwide beauty competition open to all girls between 18 and 30. Our hope is to find that one girl who is beautiful inside and out, who will represent MBGI nationally and internationally with the aim of promoting body confidence and inspiring young girls across Ireland and internationally. MBGI embraces all kinds of girls from different walks of life. We want a girl,that hold their own style, are passionate about what she believe in, girls who are charming, have poise, and personality, Suzzie Deniyi, Director of the competition.

The makeup sponsor is GOSH Copenhagen Ireland.

The winner of Most Beautiful Girl in Ireland will jet of to Dubai in January and will represent her country at the international final and compete with more than 40 contestants around the world.
Thirteen students from Transition Year and fifth year in Colaiste Eamann Ris, Callan, will travel to Embulbul in Kenya as part of the school's Kenyan Immersion Project 2017.

The students will be accmpanied by Mr Ryan, Mr Murtagh and Ms Griffin. The team will travel next Easter for a period of 10 days.

The aim of the project is to immerse themselves fully in the poverty-stricken region of Embulbul, which is located outside of Nairobi. They will mix with the local people, visit their schools and homes, and develop a better understanding of how they live their day-to-day lives.

The Immersion Project will provide the students with a life-changing experience and allow them the opportunity to develop both as individuals and as a team.

A number of fundraising events have been completed, and the current fund stands at approximately 17,000. It's hoped that this money will help improve the standard of living for the citizens of Embulbul.

Fundraising

Each student, along with a personal contribution, has been working hard to organise various fundraising activities. Their goal is to reach 30, 000, and further fundraising initiatives are to follow, such as a tractor run, street bucket collection in Kilkenny, school talent show and raffle, 5km run and a Nowlan Park bucket collection.

With the continued support of staff, students, parents and the people of Callan and surrounding areas, the Kenyan Immersion Project 2017 will be a huge success.
PRAGUE, Nov 11 (Reuters) - The Czech central bank's exit from its weak crown policy is conditioned on economic developments, the bank's monetary department head Tomas Holub said on Friday, reiterating the exit would not come before the second quarter next year.

Holub said in a presentation published on the bank's website that, in his opinion, manufacturers should not speculate on the crown's development after the exit.

He reiterated the bank board's statement that it would be ready to smooth out excessive swings in the crown after the exit and repeated the bank would not communicate any concrete intervention levels.

The bank board has said the exit of intervention regime, launched in 2013 to fight deflation risks, would likely come in mid-2017.

(Reporting by Robert Muller and Jason Hovet)
By Steve Holland and Luciana Lopez

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, Nov 11 (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump put vice presidential running mate Mike Pence in charge of his White House transition team on Friday, knocking New Jersey Governor Chris Christie down a peg as he began the work of filling top administration jobs.

Christie will remain as a vice chair of the transition effort, Trump's campaign said, as he deals with the fallout from the 'Bridgegate' lane closure scandal that has damaged his political standing. The announcement came shortly after Trump aides convened at the real-estate mogul's apartment building in New York City to begin weighing candidates for some of the 4,000 jobs he will have to fill shortly after he takes office on Jan. 20, 2017.

Trump said three of his five children and his son-in-law Jared Kushner would help oversee the transition.

"I can see already how he is going to be a great president and I'm glad I could play a small role in it," former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani told reporters after the meeting.

Giuliani is the leading contender for attorney general, according to two sources familiar with the discussions. Christie, once a top candidate for the job, appears to no longer be in the running, they said.

Since his surprise defeat of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's election, dozens of possible appointees have been floated, from grassroots conservative heroes like Sarah Palin to seasoned Washington hands like David Malpass.

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus is a strong candidate for White House chief of staff, according to sources close to the campaign. Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, a conservative provocateur, is also being considered for the job.

SMALL POOL

Trump has a relatively small pool of candidates to work with, as many Republicans condemned his racially inflammatory rhetoric over the course of the campaign and some of his positions, such as his attacks on free trade, run against party orthodoxy.

Trump's campaign spent relatively little time on transition planning during the campaign, and even his Republican supporters had been bracing for a loss.

"I was on Romney's transition team, and it was a well-oiled machine months before the election. Now there's a scramble," said one Republican source, referring to the party's 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.

With a Republican-controlled House and Senate, Trump has the ability to follow through on his campaign promises to cut taxes, tighten immigration, scale back climate change rules and repeal President Barack Obama's signature Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare.

An Obama administration rule requiring retirement advisers to act in their clients' interests could also be on the chopping block.

But House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and other congressional Republicans may balk at his protectionist trade policies and expensive transportation spending plan.

"Busy day planned in New York. Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!" Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday morning.

Trump's most loyal supporters could play a prominent role in his administration. Campaign sources say Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions could serve as Defense Secretary, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich might be named as Secretary of State and retired General Michael Flynn could serve as national security adviser.

Those three, along with Giuliani and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, were named as vice chairs of the transition team on Friday.

DEMOCRATS REGROUP

Meanwhile, Democrats began regrouping from their loss. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean said he wanted to return as head of the Democratic National Committee to build the party's presence in conservative states.

Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, a Muslim who leads the party's liberal wing, also emerged as a candidate for the job, while former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, whose presidential bid fizzled early this year, said he was taking a "hard look" at running for DNC chairman as well.

Though many top Democrats on Capitol Hill have pledged to try to cooperate with Trump, the Senate's top Democrat sounded a defiant note.

"If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate," said Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who is retiring in January.

(Additional reporting by David Shepardson, Emily Stephenson, Ginger Gibson, Diane Bartz, Julia Harte and Julia Edwards Ainsley in Washington; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Bill Rigby)
HANOI, Nov 11 (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 0518 GMT.

Nov 11 Nov 10 USD/VND mid-point 22,056 22,043 USD/VND interbank 22,325/22,328 22,300/22,365 USD/VND unofficial 22,380/22,420 22,340/22,355 SJC gold (mln dong/tael) 35.85/36.12 36.25/36.62

Interbank offered rates Overnight 0.9-1.6 0.9-1.6

1 week 0.9-1.7 0.9-1.8

1 month 1.6-2.1 1.6-2.2

3 months 3.5-4.6 3.5-4.7

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, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Swiss bank PostFinance will start charging private customers to hold deposits of more than 1 million Swiss francs ($1.01 million), it said on Friday, citing the impact of the Swiss National Bank's negative rates policy to curb the strong franc.

"From Feb. 1 2017 and until further notice, it will charge a 1 percent fee on the proportion of the credit balance of wealthy private customers that exceeds 1 million francs," it said on its website. "The assets in all private and savings accounts will be taken into account. Most private and business customers will remain exempt from the fee on the credit balance."

Almost all Swiss banks have refrained so far from imposing negative rates on retail customers although some do for very large cash holdings by private clients.

($1 = 0.9872 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by Oliver Hirt)
(Adds background, minister comments)

HELSINKI, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Finland's centre-right government will propose about 100 million euros ($109 million) of new funding for a loss-making nickel mine in the north of the country until new investors are found, it said on Friday.

The decision marks a U-turn for the austerity-minded government, which said in May that it would start closing the Terrafame mine if a private investor is not found by the end of the year.

The government took over the mine last year and founded Terrafame to run it after production problems, environmental damage and a drop in nickel prices had pushed former owner Talvivaara into a debt restructuring.

Seeking to protect jobs in the rural Kainuu region, the state has so far injected about 500 million euros into the site and the cost of a closure has been estimated at about 300 million euros.

About 990 people, including contractors, worked at the site at the end of September.

Economy minister Olli Rehn said conditions for the mine to turn profitable had improved in recent months.

"Terrafame can continue negotiations over private funding even after the end of the year if that is needed for reaching a best possible solution," he told a news conference.

Terrafame, which made an operating loss of 42.5 million euros in the third quarter, said this week that it was in talks with several possible investors. ($1 = 0.9174 euros)

(Reporting by Jussi Rosendahl; Editing by Gwladys Fouche and David Goodman)
(Adds central bank receiving first tranche)

CAIRO, Nov 11 (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund's executive board has approved a three-year, $12 billion loan to Egypt to support its economic reform programme, the Fund said in a statement on Friday.

The IMF said its board's approval allows for an disbursement of an initial tranche of $2.75 billion of the loan. The remaining amount will be phased in over the duration of the programme, subject to five reviews, it said.

The Central Bank of Egypt received the $2.75 billion tranche, which increased the country's foreign reserves to $23.3 billion, state television said.

The programme "will help Egypt restore macroeconomic stability and promote inclusive growth," the statement said.

"Policies supported by the program aim to correct external imbalances and restore competitiveness, place the budget deficit and public debt on a declining path, boost growth and create jobs while protecting vulnerable groups."

Import-dependent Egypt has struggled to attract dollars and revive its economy since tourists and investors fled after the 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.

Facing a gaping budget deficit, plummeting foreign reserves and a burgeoning currency black market, it agreed the IMF loan in August but had to secure $5 billion to $6 billion in bilateral financing for the deal to be completed.

Egypt made the final push for the loan after the central bank abandoned its currency peg of 8.8 pounds to the U.S. dollar last week in a dramatic move welcomed by the Fund and World Bank.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; additional reporting by Mostafa Hashem; editing by Larry King)
FILE PHOTOS BY Larry Steagall / Kitsap Sun The Rich Passage 1 was pressed into service last month on the Bremerton-Port Orchard route.

SHARE

By Ed Friedrich of the Kitsap Sun

PORT ORCHARD  After two days of counting late ballots, the Kitsap County Auditor's Office is comfortable in saying there is no reason to believe Kitsap Transit's fast ferry proposition won't pass.

Of the 103,939 ballots counted, 51.3 percent support Proposition 1 and 48.7 percent oppose it. A simple majority is required for the measure to be approved.

"We're extremely grateful to Kitsap County voters for their support of Kitsap Transit," Executive Director John Clauson said. "Cross-sound foot ferries have played an essential role in our region's history. With this vote, we start a new chapter in cross-sound travel."

Proposition 1 authorizes Kitsap Transit to levy an added 3/10 of 1 percent sales tax that is designated for passenger-only ferry service. Kitsap Transit plans to launch service from Bremerton to downtown Seattle next summer, followed by service from Kingston in 2018 and Southworth in 2020.

On Tuesday, 50.8 percent of ballots counted were in favor of Proposition 1. On Wednesday, 52.4 percent of the 10,875 additional ballots tallied were supportive. And Thursday, 54.1 percent of the 9,988 additional ballots tallied were supportive.

About 16,500 ballots remain to be counted. The trend would have to reverse to only 42 percent "yes" votes to swing the result.

"Based on what we know historically and statistically, it's unlikely the result will change," elections manager Kyle Joyce said. "There's no reason to believe we'd see such a dramatic shift in the trend."

The election results will be certified Nov. 29.
SHARE

By Christina Henry of the Kitsap Sun

SOUTH KITSAP  After two failed attempts in 2016 at passing a bond for a second high school, the South Kitsap School District is polling the community for its thoughts.

More than 90 people so far have taken an online survey asking them to identify what should be the district's top priority in managing crowding and addressing aging facilities.

Two parents who attended a Thursday forum with school board members think the district should do something for the current high school before building a new school. The 2016 proposal called for building a new high school with capacity for 1,500 to 1,800 students on property the district owns off Old Clifton Road, an area of the city that's seeing growth in new housing.

Having a second high school to ease crowding at South Kitsap High School would be a good thing, said Diana March, but she's not keen on "the idea of building a new one and leaving the other high school in the dust." That's a perception among some in the community, said March, who has considered enrolling her daughter outside the district when she reaches ninth grade.

The 2016 bond that twice fell just short of the required 60 percent approval rate would have raised $127 million for the second high school and $2 million for technology upgrades at South Kitsap High.

March and another parent, Marla Johnson, also would like to see major work done on South Kitsap Community Pool at the high school, which is used by Puget Sound Swim Club. Both their children take part in the club. The pool is one of three in Western Washington that allows for a course in meters. That's important for swimmers who want to compete at higher levels (including the Olympics), and it allows the club to hold regional meets. But there are problems with the movable wall dividing the pool.

The two moms, who volunteer with the club, offered to partner with the school on grants.

"This is important for my family," Johnson said. "We are hoping to help get funds for repair and upkeep of the facility in general."

Displays at the forum, held at Marcus Whitman Junior High School, showed the age and condition of schools around the district. A recently updated capital facilities plan lays out the long list of work needed at each to maintain the safety and integrity of school buildings.

Three of the district's elementary schools  Orchard Heights, Olalla and South Colby  were constructed before 1960. Orchard Heights, the oldest, was built in 1945, according to a recent report by the district. The original part of South Kitsap High was built in 1962, with a major renovation in 1978. Because of their age, all four buildings qualify the district for state assistance if they were to be renovated or replaced.

South Kitsap hasn't passed a bond since 1988.

"Because they spent so much time without funds, the mindset is, 'We don't have the funds,'" said Tom Adams, facilities and operations director.

His thought is to outline what's needed, then ask what it costs. The district last year laid out a long-term funding plan for capital construction and renovation. That plan needs revision in the wake of the two bond failures.

Members of the school board met individually with the handful of parents who attended the forum to hear their thoughts. The board will weigh their comments and information from the online survey in deciding whether and how to move forward with a capital levy, a bond or both. The facilities targeted and the scope of any measure the board might put on the ballot is yet to be determined.

Parent Marsha Scott, with three children in kindergarten through sixth grade, stands ready to help.

"I want to get this bond passed," Scott said. "I want to educate myself with how we're moving forward so I can educate my family and friends. I think we're in desperate need of a second high school."

The district plans two more forums next week. The survey is available on the district's website, www.skitsap.wednet.edu.

Capital facilities forums

Nov. 14: 6 p.m. at Cedar Heights Middle School, 2220 Pottery Ave.

Nov. 15: 6 p.m. at John Sedgwick Junior High School, 8995 SE Sedgwick Road.

This article has been updated to correct the year of the district's two most recent bond measures.
One of my favorite characters in Nevada History is John C. Fremont, leader of the first and most significant exploratory expeditions through the Great Basin. He and his party were the first non-Indians to lay eyes upon such wonders as Pyramid Lake, Lake Tahoe and the fertile valleys that we now know as Nevada. It will take more than one article to tell about Fremont and the many things he has done. The series will conclude with the amazing story of the discovery of the elusive cannon abandoned by Fremont during his 1844 crossing of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

John Charles Fremont (January 21, 1813July 13, 1890) was an American military officer, explorer and the first candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party for President of the United States. In 1841, Fremont married Jessie Benton, daughter of Missouri Senator Thomas Benton, champion of the expansionist movement. The expansionists believed that the entire North American continent, including Mexico and Canada, should belong to the citizens of the United States.

Having considerable political clout, Benton pushed Congress to perform national surveys of the Oregon Trail, Oregon Territory, the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This cause became known as Manifest Destiny. Through his power and influence, Benton was able to obtain for his son-in-law, John C. Fremont, the position of leading each exploratory expedition.

In his early years, Fremont attended the College of Charleston from 1829 to 1831. He was appointed a mathematics teacher aboard a navy vessel and became a lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Fremont led many surveying expeditions throughout the western territories in the 1830s. He first met frontiersman Kit Carson on a Missouri River steamboat in St. Louis during the summer of 1842. Fremont was preparing to lead his first expedition and was looking for a guide to take him to South Pass. Carson offered his services and guided Fremont along with 25 men on a successful five-month journey.

From 1842 to 1846, Fremont and Kit Carson led expedition parties on the Oregon Trail and into the unexplored regions of the Sierra Nevada Mountains where Fremont was the first American to see Lake Tahoe and to map what we now know as the Great Basin. It was during these expeditions he searched for the legendary Buenaventura River, believed to cross through the Sierras to the Pacific Ocean. After finding there was no river crossing the Sierras, Fremont determined that the Great Basin had no outlet or river flowing to the sea and that the region was indeed a Great Basin.

As you may have noticed, there are many place names throughout the western states that have the name of Fremont. He is remembered by having cities, counties, schools and mountains named after him. In addition, he gave many geographic places the names we know today. He named the Carson River after his guide Kit Carson. Later Nevadas Capital was named Carson City. When Fremont saw the 600-foot high rock formation at Pyramid Lake, it reminded him of the Egyptian Pyramids, so he called the place Pyramid Lake.

Fremont was a prolific report writer who accurately described the areas he explored and published the reports to guide future travelers.

His writings from one of his expeditions inspired the Mormons to consider Utah for their permanent settlement. Fremonts Report and Map, published by Congress, led to the publication of Joseph Wares Emigrants Guide to California. This became the travelers guide for the forty-niners through time of the California Gold Rush.

After Fremonts remarkable explorations of the American West, he attempted to advance his military career and to dabble in politics. As it turned out, he was much better at being an explorer and pathfinder than he was at politics.
/For the Kitsap Sun Nixon Kelly (from left), Bella Bruns and Aiden Foster join the rest of the student body singing "God Bless the USA" Thursday at South Colby Elementary's Veterans Day assembly.

Steve Zugschwerdt / For the Kitsap Sun

SHARE Leonard Young salutes during the presentation of colors Thursday at South Colby Elementary's Veterans Day assembly. Steve Zugschwert / For the Kitsap Sun The South Kitsap High School ROTC presented the colors at the Veterans Day assembly Thursday at South Colby Elementary. Steve Zugschwerdt / For the Kitsap Sun Abby Bock (left) and Rose Nitz hold flags representing the Army and Navy during Thursday's Veterans Day assembly at South Colby Elementary. Steve Zugschwerdt / For the Kitsap Sun Abby Bock hands out flowers to veterans Thursday at South Colby Elementary's assembly for Veterans Day. Steve Zugschwerdt / For the Kitsap Sun

By Christina Henry of the Kitsap Sun

SOUTH COLBY  Two days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, provoking a range of elation and despair across the country, students at South Colby Elementary School celebrated a nation united, strong and free, thanks to members of the military and veterans.

The Veterans Day ceremony Thursday featured rousing songs and heartfelt speeches by the students, along with patriotic music by the Navy Band Northwest Woodwind Trio.

Schools are closed Friday in observance of Veterans Day.

Jerry and Nancy Lyman, whose daughter Joan Mott teaches at the school, were among the nearly 100 guests. Jerry served in the Army in Korea when the couple were just married.

"I'm proud to be a veteran, and it means a lot to me to see the young people appreciate the veterans of our country," Jerry said.

The ceremony in the school gym  decorated with students' art of swooping eagles and American flags  began with South Kitsap High School's NJROTC Color Guard presenting the colors. In unison, young and old placed their hands over their hearts to join in the Pledge of Allegiance, as those in uniform saluted.

"This particular event reminds me of how patriotic many of our schools and the children are," said Leonard Young of VFW Post 2669, whose members were invited, along with American Legion Post 30, as in years past. "It's always been really encouraging to me to be a part of these things. We have a great country, because of the kids who are involved in this thing."

Not present, though invited, was World War II veteran James Young, of South Colby, who advocated to have the school built decades ago. Young, 91, was a bit under the weather, said Theresa Meyers, office coordinator.

The program, organized by music teacher Amanda Dick, featured songs by the school's choir such as "Yankee Doodle," "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Proud of Our Veterans." Young the VFW member saluted back to kids on the stage as they sang: "You are citizens with honor and faith standing tall. Our freedom is assured to us because you all came through. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to you."

Student speakers paid tribute to the military heros in their lives. Sixth-grader Megan Wormwood told about her uncle, Daniel Wormwood of Spokane, who in 1966 lost an arm and a leg in a grenade attack in Vietnam. Wormwood died Sept. 16 of an apparent heart attack while feeding chickens.

In between students' songs, the Navy Band Northwest members gave a polished performance of several patriotic tunes. Students clapped along to their lively rendition of "The Klaxon," by Henry Fillmore. The trio played a soulful version of "America the Beautiful" during a slideshow of veterans related to students and staff at the school.

Members of the ensemble included Petty Officer 2nd Class Emily Zizza on clarinet, Chief Sterling Strickler on bassoon and Petty Officer 1st Class Edgardo Hernandez on flute. Zizza said playing Veterans Day ceremonies at schools is "one of the best parts" of her job.

For kindergarten student Maggie Nelson, the best part of the day was when the whole school belted out Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA."

Her message to veterans, "Thank you for serving my people, for serving the American people."
SHARE

By Kitsap Sun Staff

BREMERTON  A young Bremerton man remains at Harborview Medical Center for observation after being struck by a car Wednesday night on Kitsap Way.

At about 7 p.m., the 18-year-old was crossing Kitsap Way near 11th Street, not in a crosswalk, and was hit by a Ford Taurus driven by a 59-year-old Port Ludlow man, said Bremerton Police Traffic Officer Steven Forbragd.

Bremerton Fire Department took him to Harrison Medical Center. From there, he was flown to Harborview in Seattle where doctors are monitoring a traumatic brain injury, Forbragd said.

The driver is not suspected of speeding or being impaired.
Professor Jordan Peterson writes in the Toronto Sun:

In early October, I recorded a set of three videos about political correctness and posted them on my YouTube channel, Jordan Peterson Videos. The first of these decried the latest legislative moves to make gender identity and gender expression protected categories under the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. This set off a firestorm online and in the traditional media, particularly after a free-speech rally, organized by students, met with counter-protesters who tried to shut it down with white noise, chanted cries of shame and, finally, assault and deceit. Perhaps three million people have watched the cellphone videos of these events online.

Generation Snowflake seems unable to handle a professor who defends free speech.

I noted in the videos that the policy statements surrounding similar laws already in place in Ontario and several other provinces were dangerously vague and ill-formulated. I also indicated my refusal to apply what have become known as preferred pronouns to people who do not fit easily into traditional gender categories (although I am willing to call someone he or she in accordance with their manner of self-presentation).

So this isnt about refusing to call someone by the gender pronoun they prefer, just that he wont use gender neutral pronouns such as zhe. And for this he has been demonised.

I also objected to the requirement that I mouth words that have been produced by those pushing an ideology with which I strenuously and deeply disagree. I regard artificially formulated words such as the so-called gender neutral pronouns as part of the vanguard of a wave of political correctness which has historical roots that disturb me (the association with Marxism) and psychological motivations that I do not trust (based as they are on an excess of care best devoted to infants and grounded in an intense resentment of anyone who has become successful for any reason whatsoever).

Not unreasonable.

On Oct. 3, the University of Toronto sent me a letter warning me about the potential illegality of my actions, and reminding me of my obligations to students as detailed in its own recent equity-based policies. On Oct. 18, U of T sent me another letter requesting that I stop talking about such things.

Another university that cant handle free speech.

Civilized people present themselves in a manner that makes dealing with them simple. This is because each of us is only one person  but one person surrounded by a multitude of others. It is impossible for us to interact with that multitude, even one-on-one, without conventions that make each of us more straightforward than we are. If I am interacting with a bank teller, for example, I do not want to know about his or her sexual proclivities, medical problems, financial issues, and past traumas. To do her job, she has to dress in a relatively innocuous manner, and present herself in way that enables particularized, efficient and relatively shallow interactions. Thats how society functions. I might ask her, Hows your day? Depending on the genuineness of my request, she might share a bit of personal information. But there are strict implicit limits on how far she can (and should) go in revealing the person behind the persona. It is simply not reasonable for a stranger  say, a student in one of my classes  to request that I learn, speak and remember a whole set of personal descriptors as a precondition for our interactions. It is certainly not reasonable to demand that I do so  and it is absolutely unreasonable for that demand to have been given the force of law. You dont get to exercise control over my speech.

But they want to.

The demand for use of preferred pronouns is not an issue of equality, inclusion or respect for others. Its a wolf in sheeps clothing. Its a purposeful assault on the structure of language. Its a dangerous incursion into the domain of free speech. Its narcissistic self-centeredness. Its part and parcel of the PC madness that threatens to engulf our culture. A line must be drawn somewhere, and this is a good place to draw it. We should, further, abolish the Ontario Human Rights Commission and its enforcement wing, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. We should reject Bill C-16, and we should repeal its sister legislation in those provinces where it has already been instantiated. We should refuse, in no uncertain terms, the demands by the ideologically possessed that we speak their special language. Or we should await the consequences, and they wont be pretty.

Very brave of him.

Share this: Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Reddit

WhatsApp

More

Pinterest

Print



Tumblr


Asra Nomani writes in The Washington Post:

A lot is being said now about the silent secret Trump supporters. This is my confession  and explanation: I  a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman of color  am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And Im not a bigot, racist, chauvinist or white supremacist, as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some whitelash. In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States. But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

So why?

I support the Democratic Partys position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change. But I am a single mother who cant afford health insurance under Obamacare. The presidents mortgage-loan modification program, HOPE NOW, didnt help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.

The media didnt report very much the 25% increase in health premiums as a result of Obamacare. But that was a big issue for many.

Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the Islam in Islamic State. Of course, Trumps rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

Bravo.

By mid-October, it was one Aug. 17, 2014, email from the WikiLeaks treasure trove of Clinton emails that poisoned the well for me. In it, Clinton told aide John Podesta: We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL, the politically correct name for the Islamic State, and other radical Sunni groups in the region. The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia killed my support for Clinton. Yes, I want equal pay. No, I reject Trumps locker room banter, the idea of a wall between the United States and Mexico and a plan to ban Muslims. But I trust the United States and dont buy the political hyperbole  agenda-driven identity politics of its own  that demonized Trump and his supporters.

And for the future:

Days before the election, a journalist from India emailed me, asking: What are your thoughts being a Muslim in Trumps America?

I wrote that as a child of India, arriving in the United States at the age of 4 in the summer of 1969, I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a Trump America. The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trumps rhetoric to come to fruition. What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America. These dictatorships are no shining examples of progressive society with their failure to offer fundamental human rights and pathways to citizenship to immigrants from India, refugees from Syria and the entire class of de facto slaves that live in those dictatorships. We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims, so that everyone can live with sukhun, or peace of mind, I finished in my reflections to the journalist in India.

Again, bravo.

Share this: Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Reddit

WhatsApp

More

Pinterest

Print



Tumblr


ELKO  The Elko County School board will have to make some adjustments to fill one of its seats following the local election results.

Despite dropping out of the race in September, former school board candidate Mike Ayala won the vote to take the District 2 seat in January.

Ayala plans to move early next year and had since thrown his support behind Tammie Cracraft-Dickenson for the seat.

Cracraft-Dickenson was appointed to represent District 2 in October when the position was advertised and she was the only candidate who submitted a letter of interest.

Since Ayala was elected to the school board seat, he will have to send in a letter of resignation. After his resignation, the board will have to advertise the position again at which point Cracraft-Dickenson and any other interested candidate will be interviewed for the position.

Ayala will keep a residence in Elko but is planning to make Arizona his home. He plans to submit his letter of resignation soon and is confident that his opponent will do well if she is appointed.

I think this will be a great opportunity for her. Shell do great on the school board, he said.

School District Superintendent Jeff Zander said he is still under the impression that Ayala does not intend to serve on the school board.

Im under the assumption that Mike Ayala is still planning on moving, from what he told me before, he said.

Zander also said the board has not been in a position like this before. The only other situation similar to this one involved a school board member who resigned shortly after being elected. Lou Basanez was appointed to fill the vacant seat in that case.

Cracraft-Dickenson was not discouraged by the result.

I wasnt surprised, she said. Mike has strong name recognition and was the more well-known candidate.

Cracraft-Dickenson also said the Ayala reached out to her via Facebook when the results came out to offer his support.

He said he voted for me, which is a nice gesture, she said. Hes been very supportive of me.

Zander is expecting Cracraft-Dickenson to reapply for the position but pointed out that anyone whos interested could apply.

Anybody whos interested in that seat could throw their name in the hat and be interviewed right alongside Tammie, he said. Last time, she was the only person who expressed interest so she didnt have to go through an interview process. They just appointed her.
Earth is surrounded by hundreds of thousands of space debris particles. ESA

Spains Royal Navy Institute and Observatory (ROA) is playing a key role in an EU initiative to monitor the millions of pieces of space junk orbiting the Earth and prevent them from colliding with satellites or the International Space Station (ISS).

Only 7% of what is up there are functioning satellites, says Jose Martin Davila, the Galician-born director of ROA, in the southern Spanish city of Cadiz. There are around 30,000 particles that are more than 10 centimeters across, around 700,000 between 10 centimeters and one centimeter, and millions that are less than a centimeter long, he adds.

The more debris is catalogued and its orbit tracked, the easier it will be to prevent accidents

The observatory is one of just a few in the world able to track such tiny fragments, which can cause huge damage. Using laser technology, around 20,000 pieces of space debris have so far been located and their orbit tracked.

The ROA says that space junk represents a threat to densely populated areas of the planet such as Western Europe. Late last year, four titanium balls each weighing around 17 kilograms and with a diameter of approximately 65 centimeters fell over southeastern Spain, fortunately away from populated areas. The US Air Force, which wants them back, says they belonged to the Atlas V rocket.

This is an important issue. But nobody has wanted to deal with it because some countries, like China, preferred to ignore it, says Martin Davila. He says that the EU, which is contributing to the cost of updating the ROA, wants a giant eye made up of many smaller ones to protect Europe. The more debris is catalogued and its orbit tracked, the easier it will be to prevent accidents with functioning satellites or particles falling to Earth.

Aside from the observatory in Cadiz, Spain has a telescope in the Pyrenees that photographs the sky to calculate the position of objects orbiting the Earth. The ROA is also able to correct the orbit of satellites fitted with retroreflectors, mirrors that reflect back light to its point of origin.

The Royal Navy Observatory in Cadiz will track space debris with laser technology.

Founded in the late 18th century, Spains Royal Observatory served (and continues to serve) the same purpose as the Greenwich Observatory in Britain  providing an accurate source of time for the Navy and the country. But unlike Greenwich, the ROA is on a restricted-access military base and is not open to the public. It has a staff of approximately 90 people ranging from groundsmen to scientists. Around 35% are military and the rest civilians.

English version by Nick Lyne.
Mercedes-Benz Korea CEO Dimitris Psillakis speaks during the introduction of the German automaker's two new SUVs  the GLS and the GLE Coupe  at its training center in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, Friday.

/ Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz Korea



By Lee Hyo-sik

Mercedes-Benz Korea (MBK) has been riding high on brisk sales of its SUVs this year, capitalizing on the rapidly growing segment. The increasing popularity of its SUVs, together with E-Class sedans, has been a big factor in the German brand's record performance in 2016.

To further solidify its No. 1 status among imported brands, MBK has introduced two new SUV models: the GLS and the GLE Coupe, completing its SUV lineup, which also includes four other models: the GLA, the new GLC, the new GLE, and the G-Class.

"Our full SUV lineup will enable our customers to enjoy an urban lifestyle with sporty, on and off-road experiences in compact, mid-size and luxury full-size SUVs," MBK CEO Dimitris Psillakis said during the unveiling at the firm's training center in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, Friday.

"The two latest models will further increase our SUV sales. We will continue to mobilize substantial resources to make this segment account for a larger portion of our sales here. We will attract more Korean motorists seeking to experience off-road challenges with our premium SUVs."

MBK sold 7,454 SUVs in the first 10 months of this year, up nearly threefold from 2,758 in the same period last year. SUVs accounted for 16.6 percent of the firm's sales, up 7.1 percent on the previous year.

In October, the company sold 6,400 vehicles, becoming the first imported auto brand to sell more than 6,000 in a month. It is widely expected to become the No. 1 foreign auto brand in Korea this year in sales, outpacing German rival BMW.

"We had to deal with some difficulties this year, but we have been able to accomplish all of our goals," the Greek-born CEO said. "We will continue to provide top-quality products and services to our Korean customers and contribute more to improving local society."

The GLS, which starts at 125 million won ($110,000), is a full-size luxury SUV capable of accommodating up to seven people. The GLE Coupe, priced at 106 million won, is MBK's strategic model, aimed at attracting younger people.

The German automaker also plans to introduce its seventh SUV model, the GLC Coupe, in Korea early next year.
Kwon Eun-joo, left, poses with Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz, sixth from left, and other designers of Starbucks red cups at the official launch in New York, Wednesday (local time). / Courtesy of Starbucks Korea



By Park Jae-hyuk

A Korean housewife's design will be featured on one of Starbucks' red cups this Christmas season, the coffee chain's Korean branch said Friday.

It said Kwon Eun-joo, 24, who lives in Daejeon, depicted a "Sleigh Ride"  which is also the title of her design  on an eight-fluid-ounce "Short" cup.

Her design was one of 13 winners among 1,200 entries and will be introduced to the customers of 23,000 Starbucks stores in 75 countries.

"For her whimsical design, Eun Joo depicted Santa's sleigh on a starry night," Starbucks said on its website. "Tiny snowmen adorn overlapping circles."

Kwon said: "As I raise my two children, I always live busy days. A cup of coffee comforts me a lot when I am totally distressed. I thought it would be nice to give my friends a cup of coffee in specially designed red cups or to reuse the used cups as Christmas decorations. That is why I participated in the contest."

With 12 other designers, Kwon met Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz in the United States and gained a chance to travel to the country.

During an official launch in Manhattan on Wednesday (local time), Schultz said: "This year, we decided to do something quite different. With everything that's going on in the world, and everything that's going on in our country, we have a lot to be thankful for."

Starbucks Global Chief Marketing Officer Sharon Rothstein said: "We hope that this year's red holiday cup designs express the shared spirit of the holidays as told by our customers."

Since 1997, Starbucks has celebrated the holidays with special red cups. The company provoked controversy among customers last year with a rather plain cup that had no illustrations.

This year, Starbucks features red cups designed by customers for the first time. It invited customers to share their designs on Instagram last December and chose 13 from six countries, including Korea, Indonesia, Canada, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S.
Hamleys CEO Gudjon Reynisson, left, poses with Gym World CEO Park Kee-young, right, and British Ambassador to Korea Charles Hay, after a signing ceremony at the British Embassy in downtown Seoul, Thursday. / Yonhap



By Park Jae-hyuk

Hamleys, the world's oldest and largest toy retailer based in London, will open its first store in Korea next year, the company's Korean business partner, Gym World, said Friday.

The Korean toy maker said it signed a contract with Hamleys to operate its Korean branch and held a signing ceremony at the British Embassy in downtown Seoul, Thursday.

Gym World CEO Park Kee-young, Hamleys CEO Gudjon Reynisson and British Ambassador to Korea Charles Hay attended.

Park said his company will choose the site to build the Hamleys store by the end of this year and is considering opening 20 stores nationwide, including in Busan, Daegu, Daejeon and Incheon.

"We know the philosophy, spirit and vision of Hamleys well, so we will create stores which meet its values," Park said after the signing ceremony. "We will reflect our educational values  the biggest asset of Korea  in our store and make it a role model for the world."

He said Gym World wants to use Hamleys as one of the most important platforms to sell its Magformers  magnetic toys  to the world.

The company has supplied Magformers to Hamleys stores in London and Moscow since last year.

Founded by William Hamley as "Noahs Ark" in London in 1760, Hamleys has been well known for selling toys to the British royal family, including the sons and daughters of the Queen Elizabeth II.

Its flagship store on Regent Street covers over seven floors, selling more than 50,000 toys a year.

The global toy brand has 10 other outlets in the U.K. and more than 90 stores in 24 countries. It plans to open 16 stores by the end of this year.

In 2015, Chinese footwear company C.banner purchased Hamleys for an estimated $154 million.
US president-elect may seek engagement with NK after initial hike in tensions



By Kim Jae-kyoung





Prof. William Brown

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump may jeopardize stability on the Korean Peninsula if his North Korean counterpart continues to rely on nuclear brinkmanship, according to a North Korea expert based in Washington, D.C.

William Brown, a professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, said Trump may take immediate countermeasures against any military provocations by North Korea and its unpredictable leader Kim Jong-un.

"Pyongyang has a history of provocations in order to make it feel noticed, and I expect that may happen again," Brown said. "If so, Trump would respond and might create some kind of crisis.

"Our government would give very clear notice to Pyongyang that any nuclear or conventional provocations will be immediately countered and that better relations can quickly develop if Kim wants to move in that direction and is willing to make some important reforms and changes."

Brown, a retired U.S. government official, expects that the former billionaire businessman, who will take office in January, will use a combination of "engagement and containment" policies to change North Korea.

"President Trump eventually will want to engage to change the dynamics of the North Korean regime," he said. "North Korea, especially its economy, is changing on its own and we might be able to hasten that process. We can be pretty sure new thinking will go on in Washington about how to do that."

Under the new administration, for example, he expects Russia will play a bigger role in controlling North Korea's nuclear threats.

"Russia might become more important, and China less so," Brown said. "We should remember that Russia was a key contributor to the North Korean missile and nuclear programs and might be able to play a more constructive role in stopping it."

Brown, who previously worked for the CIA, the Commerce Department and the National Intelligence Council, believes Trump's unpredictable, aggressive way of thinking may make Pyongyang more cautious about its military provocations.

"Pyongyang might be more than a little afraid of Trump, whom they don't know, and they thus might move more cautiously than normal," he said.

"In the end, though, I think the only thing that will force change in North Korea is fear of not changing, and Trump might be in a good position to present such fears."

Brown expects that once a policy line is developed, and coordinated with Seoul, the Trump administration will find a way to communicate directly with Pyongyang.

He stressed that to sustain the solid bilateral alliance, South Korea should make more efforts to secure channels not only to the White House but also to the U.S. Congress to tip the policy review process in favor of South Korea.

"We often tend to focus on presidential politics but actually Congress makes most of the rules," he said.

"Republican congressmen and senators will have a lot of positive things to say about trade and security relations with South Korea and these bode very well for our relations with Seoul."

Park's political scandals

Brown expects Trump to call for a complete review of U.S. policies toward Korea.

"In Trump's way of thinking, it is important for the U.S. to first figure out what is in the U.S. national interest and I'm sure this will be the focus of his review," he said.

However, he believes the ongoing political scandal surrounding President Park Geun-hye and her friend Choi Soon-sil, accused of meddling in state affairs for her own gains, will negatively affect the review process.

"Unfortunately, the current situation in Seoul will complicate the review process since Trump will want to ensure Seoul and Washington are in general agreement, and this may take time," Brown said.

"President Park's political problems will give reasons for both Washington and Seoul to delay policy reviews. That would be a big mistake and Seoul needs to try to quickly engage the new administration, telling it that North Korean issues are beyond politics in South Korea."

Brown, who served as a senior research fellow in the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in the 1980s, said time is very short for the review because the recent North Korean nuclear progress is strong.

"Once they have achieved a solid deterrence, at least in their own minds, our leverage will be lessened," he said.

"I hope that Trump does not fall into the trap of so called strategic patience, putting North Korea policy on the back-burner as soon as difficulties are encountered."

Brown called for Korea's policymakers to come up with strategies for potential changes in advance.

"An up-front willingness to consider major changes in strategy and tactics would be helpful," he said. "Trump may not yet be aware of how integrated the U.S and South Korean forces have become. Whereas he doesn't like entangling alliances, on inspection, this one works pretty well."

Regarding trade treaties, such as the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement, Brown believes there won't be major changes because that agreement has widespread support in Congress, and generally among the public.

"There have been U.S. issues with respect to South Korean adherence to all the rules and these will be likely be emphasized in an effort to improve compliance," he said.

"But to South Korea's advantage, I'm pretty sure that if a Trump administration were to ever re-renegotiate something like the TPP, it will invite Seoul to join at the outset."

He emphasized that since Seoul-Washington relations have been so good in recent years, Korea has to be careful to make sure they are not taken for granted.

"Our focus today is Trump but this soon could be applied to politics in Seoul as well," Brown said.
King Felipe reviews retired soldiers. Lavandeira jr

The Spanish government has unblocked a 40 million arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

The sale of 155mm artillery ammunition had been on hold for a year due to concerns the munitions might be diverted to the civil war in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia is one of the Spanish military industrys top clients

The decision to approve the sale comes shortly before King Felipe VI of Spain is scheduled to go on his first official visit to Riyadh, between Saturday and Monday.

Felipe VIs visit was originally scheduled for January, but was cancelled after the Saudi kingdom executed 47 people.

The trip is proving controversial in any case. Spanish parties like Podemos and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) oppose it, while Ciudadanos has asked the king to demand respect for human rights.

And Amnesty International has sent Felipe VI a letter asking him to use his influence to get Saudi Arabia to end the attacks on Yemens civilian population. Over 7,000 people are believed to have died in the civil war that erupted last year.

A stretch of the AVE line being built between Medina and Mecca.

Five corvettes

Although there is no official confirmation yet, it is expected that during the visit Saudi officials will also sign on the purchase of five corvettes worth over 2 billion from Navantia, the Spanish state-owned shipbuilding company.

If the vessel deal goes through, it will be Navantias largest export ever, providing work for 2,000 employees over the next five years at the shipyards of San Fernando (Cadiz) and Ferrol, in Galicia.

The contract includes ship maintenance and a makeover of the King Abdulaziz naval base near Jubail, in the Persian Gulf.

Queen declines Unlike his father Juan Carlos, Felipe VI will not be traveling with business leaders. His wife, Queen Letizia, will not be accompanying him on this trip because of the discrimination suffered by women in Saudi society.

Saudi Arabia is one of the Spanish military industrys top clients. In 2015, it purchased equipment worth 546 million.

Felipe VI, who will be travelling with Spain's new Foreign Minister, Alfonso Dastis, but without his wife, Queen Letizia, will also discuss progress on the ongoing project to build a high-speed AVE train to Mecca, awarded to a Spanish-Saudi group for 6.7 billion.

And Spain has other economic interests in Saudi Arabia as well, including the construction of a subway system in Riyahd by FCC and the upgrade of the countrys refineries by Tecnicas Reunidas.

English version by Susana Urra.
POSCO Chairman Kwon Oh-joon

The chief of POSCO, Korea's No. 1 steelmaker, will be grilled by prosecutors Friday over its former affiliate related to an influence-peddling scandal surrounding a close friend of President Park Geun-hye.

The prosecution said it summoned Kwon Oh-joon, 66, to appear before the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office at 7 p.m. to undergo questioning over allegations that an associate of Choi Soon-sil, Park's longtime friend, attempted to forcibly take over the shares of the steelmaker's former advertisement subsidiary last year.

He became the first head of a Korean big business group to be questioned by prosecutors looking into the snowballing political scandal.

Choi's close associate Cha Eun-taek, who is now in custody, is suspected to have used his ties with Choi and other senior government officials to put pressure on a small ad agency, which acquired Poreka from POSCO, to hand over 80 percent of its shares. The attempt, however, ended in failure as the ad agency declined to hand over the shares.

A number of officials, including former senior presidential secretary An Chong-bum, have been put under custody for alleged involvement in the process.

Prosecutors are expected to see if Cha, Choi or other presidential officials intervened in the process of the steelmaker's decision to sell its advertisement arm, and any decisions made afterward. (Yonhap)
One of the coast guards sent to rescue five construction workers from rocks near Chogok Harbor in Samcheok, Gangwon Province, Nov. 8, struggles to hang on in rough waves. / Yonhap



By Ko Dong-hwan

A coast guard who went missing while on a rescue mission on Nov. 8 was found dead Friday morning.

The East Regional Headquarters of the Korea Coast Guard mobilized 13 ships and 19 divers in the search for Kim Hyeong-wook, 38. His body was found around 8:24 a.m. submerged about 50 meters south of where a big wave swept him away near Chogok Harbor in the city of Samcheok, Gangwon Province.

Friday morning's mild weather, with 1.5-meter waves and light winds, made it easier for searchers to find the body.













(From left) Coast guards Kim Hyeong-wook and Park Kwon-byeong



Kim and three other coast guards were sent to rescue five construction workers from rocks near the harbor. Four of the workers were trapped on the rocks and one fell into sea. A high wave swept Kim and colleague Park Kwon-byeong, 30, into the water. Park died at the scene.

Kim went missing on his daughter's birthday and a day before the anniversary of his father's death.
Eight KTX trains stopped abruptly on Thursday night, terrifying passengers. The cause of the power failure is unknown. / The Korea Times File



By Lee Han-soo

Eight trains between East Daegu and Chilgok County in North Gyeongsang Province stopped abruptly at 11:18 p.m. Thursday, panicking passengers.

The stops ranged from 15 minutes to an hour and passengers began to worry because no announcements were made.

KTX 184, bound for Seoul from Busan, was halted for 55 minutes inside Waryong Tunnel No. 1.

Passengers trembled with fear and the cold as a backup generator failed. Some even called the emergency hotline and asked whether they should escape by breaking a window.

Korail turned on the tunnel lights at 11:26 p.m. and sent emergency crews to the site. The train was fixed and sent back to Busan.

"There was a power failure on the electric car line for unknown reasons," a Korail employee told Yonhap news agency. "We are currently investigating the accident. Electrical problems happen from time to time. Although we closely monitor the system, we cannot prevent it from happening."
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will likely deliver his campaign pledge to press South Korea to bear a larger share of the costs in keeping American troops in the country, Victor Cha, a Korean-American academic well versed in Korean affairs, said Friday.



"Throughout the campaign, he has held to the view that allies need to pay their fair share, he espoused the view that the United States will treat allies fairly, but he also wants allies to treat the U.S. fairly," the chairman at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a lecture at Seoul National University. He was a top advisor on North Korean affairs for former U.S. President George Bush.



The cost-sharing issue will be the first substantive issue challenging the U.S.-South Korea alliance under the Trump administration next year when the allies' five-year agreement will be up for renewal before its expiry in 2018, he said.



"It's about real money, so it's very difficult negotiations ... Trump feels allies should pay fair shares so I think the U.S will probably press Korea to pay more," he said.



Under the current the Special Measures Agreement, which is renewed every five years, South Korea foots more than 40 percent of the bill or around 1 trillion won ($859.8 million).



"My guess is that the U.S. wants Korea to pay more in a new co-sharing agreement," Cha said.



A Trump presidency would also dash South Korea's bid to join a U.S.-led multinational free trade pact Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), he said.



"He (Trump) said it's a bad deal, this reflects fundamental opposition to free trade agreements because it exports U.S. jobs and it causes U.S. companies to remove manufacturing bases overseas ... if it's (true) then I don't think it's about simply revising TPP," according to Cha.



"South Korea wants to be the first major economy to join the TPP after it goes into effect. I don't think it's an issue anymore because the TPP as we know it is not likely to continue in its current form under the Trump administration," he added.



Still, the plan to deploy the U.S. air defense system Terminal-High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) will remain unaffected in line with Trump's demand that "allies carry more burden," he noted.



In addition, the Trump administration is also expected to expedite Washington's transfer of wartime operational control of South Korean forces to Seoul, he said.



"If the U.S. wants Korea to carry more burden, the U.S. will seek the completion of OPCON transfer as a way of shifting the burden," according to Cha. (Yonhap)




Cha Eun-taek, a visual artist allegedly involved in an influence-peddling scandal, is taken to the Seoul Central District Court in southern Seoul for the court's review of an arrest warrant for him, Friday. / Korea Times photo by Hong In-kee



By Lee Kyung-min

Prosecutors questioned POSCO Chairman Kwon Oh-joon, Friday, over his alleged involvement in suspicious dealings regarding POSCO's previous in-house ad firm Poreka last year.

Investigators at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office questioned Kwon over the allegation that POSCO's selling of Poreka was intended to benefit Cha Eun-taek, a visual art director who is a close friend of Choi Soon-sil, the scandal-ridden confidant of President Park Geun-hye.

It is alleged that Cha, along with former senior presidential secretary for policy coordination An Chong-bum, threatened a small ad company, which acquired Poreka, into handing over 80 percent of its shares to him.

Prosecutors are focusing on a recently revealed taped conversation between Kim Young-soo, then Poreka head, and the small company's boss. In the recording, Kim said Kwon approved Poreka's sale to the company, a remark which the prosecution considers as evidence of Kwon's prior knowledge about the deal that helped Cha.

The prosecution already secured testimony from An that he asked Kwon to help Cha acquire the shares. An was recently arrested over numerous charges, including coercion.

The suspicion is that Kwon become POSCO chairman succeeding Chung Joon-yang in 2014 due to pressure from Cheong Wa Dae, and he granted favors to Cha, who was close to Choi, in return for securing the top post.

It is alleged that Kwon established a relationship with the President and her close aides through his wife who was an advisor to Park for her by-election in 1998.

Meanwhile, Cha told the prosecution that he asked Choi to put his friends and family in high-ranking government positions: his graduate school professor at Hongik University Kim Jong-deok as culture minister; his uncle Kim Sang-ryul, a Sookmyung Women's University professor, as presidential secretary of education and culture; and his long-time friend Song Sung-gak as president and CEO of the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA).

They were all appointed by the President after Cha was named director of the creative convergence center under the Creative Economy Initiative, which runs the Culture Creation Convergence Belt, one of the culture ministry's major projects.

The prosecution plans to question Choi over whether she asked the President to help Cha.

It is also alleged that An helped one of Cha's friends get an executive position at KT. The friend then allegedly helped Cha's company get advertisement orders from KT. For this, Cha was also charged as an accomplice of An's abuse of power.

Meanwhile, it has been alleged that Cheong Wa Dae contacted Cha last month when he was staying in China apparently to avoid investigation. While it is suspected that Cheong Wa Dae attempted to cover up the allegations by conspiring with him in advance before he came to Korea, the presidential office denied the allegation.
By Kim Hyo-jin



President Park Geun-hye is facing the most critical moment in her presidency today.

Shouts of "Down with Park Geun-hye" from more than 500,000 people at Gwanghwamun Square, just a few blocks away from Cheong Wa Dae, could reach the presidential office.



Park has ignored growing public calls for her to come clean about the scandal involving her confidant Choi Soon-sil. But she will find it harder to keep turning a deaf ear to the people's mounting calls for her to quit.



All three opposition parties have decided to participate in the street rally, raising the pressure on the embattled President. The main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) made her resignation the party's official stance, Friday, following the minor opposition People's Party and Justice Party.



The People's Party has officially pushed for her resignation since Thursday, along with the Justice Party.



They assert that the President has lost confidence not only among the public but also neighboring countries, and so should step aside from diplomacy and security affairs to prevent further confusion.



"President-elect Trump cannot save Park," said DPK Chairwoman Rep. Choo Mi-ae. "Diplomacy is the key to deciding the fate of the country  especially for a country like us that has been influenced by major nations. It makes no sense for Park, viewed as unqualified by the public, seeks to keep a grip on diplomacy."



The opposition parties and potential presidential candidates have demanded that Park give up control of diplomatic, military and domestic affairs and hand it over to a new prime minister selected by the National Assembly.



Moon Jae-in, a former leader of the main opposition party, renewed his call on Park to delegate full authority to the future new prime minister, saying she has been given a "last chance" before the upcoming civic protest.



"Park lost her authority to manage state affairs. People have no trust in her anymore, not to mention she has lost face on the global stage. She is damaging the national pride once again by trying to hold onto power," Moon said in a Facebook post, Friday.













"We cannot let the bewildered President sink the country. She should hand over full authority to a rival parties-backed prime minister and guarantee a new bipartisan Cabinet to manage state affairs until the next administration takes over."



Park has been under pressure to resign amid a myriad of allegations that her longtime friend Choi, despite having no official position and security clearance, regularly received classified information and meddled in state affairs, exerting influence on economic, foreign and defense policies adopted by Park.



In a move to appease the public outcry, she proposed Tuesday that if the National Assembly picks a prime minister she will let him or her to take over "effective control" of the Cabinet.



Park, however, has taken flak from the opposition bloc for failing to elaborate to what extent she will give up her own authority.



Cheong Wa Dae remained negative toward the opposition's demand, calling it "unconstitutional."



"They are forcing Park to act unconstitutionally but the President still has to stick to the responsibilities enshrined in the Constitution in any situation," a presidential official said, hinting at Park's refusal to give up rights to control the military and diplomatic affairs.



Meanwhile, public anger towards the ruling bloc is showing no signs of abating.



In the latest Gallup poll conducted from Nov. 8 to 10, Park's approval rating remained at an all-time low of 5 percent for the second consecutive week. The ruling Saenuri Party's support rating stood at 17 percent, the lowest since the party's predecessor the Grand National Party was established in 1997.



Meanwhile, the main opposition DPK has a 31 percent approval rating and the minor opposition People's Party 13 percent, remaining unchanged compared to the previous week.



"The point here is that Park has no authority whatsoever anymore among citizens. She should give up full power and advance the presidential election to normalize state affairs," said Kim Hyung-joon, a politics professor at Myongji University.
By Rachel Lee



South Korea plans to sign a provisional deal next week with Japan on sharing military intelligence about North Korea despite strong objections from opposition parties, the defense ministry said Friday.



The two countries have reached a consensus on key details of the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) through two rounds of discussions, held on Nov. 1 and Thursday, the ministry said.



"The third round of working-level talks will take place sometime next week to sign a provisional deal," ministry spokesman Moon Sang-gyun said in a briefing.



"We have asked the foreign ministry to request the Ministry of Government Legislation to review the agreement."



After the screening, the foreign ministry will submit it to a vice ministerial meeting and a Cabinet meeting. As soon as all elements of the process are passed, the defense ministry will officially sign the long-delayed deal with Japan.



In 2012, the two sides were about to sign the GSOMIA under the Lee Myung-bak administration. But this fell through at the last minute due to fierce public criticism here over the government's alleged clandestine attempts to sign a sensitive agreement with the former colonial ruler.



In the two rounds of meetings, Seoul and Tokyo agreed on the confidentiality of the classified information and designation of government officials who can access it.



However, the defense ministry's decision for a provisional deal is drawing criticism that it is rushing to complete the pact. Previously it said "conditions" needed to be created first that overcome public resistance stemming from the bitter memory of Tokyo's 1910-1945 colonial rule and Japanese soldiers using Korean women as sex slaves.



The opposition is criticizing the government's GSOMIA talks as an attempt to avert public attention from the influence-peddling scandal involving President Park Geun-hye's longtime confidant Choi Soon-sil. The scandal sent Park's approval rating nose-diving to 5 percent for the second straight week, Friday.



Three opposition parties warned Thursday that they will submit a motion for the dismissal of Defense Minister Han Min-koo unless the ministry stops the GSOMIA discussions.



If signed, the deal would allow Seoul and Tokyo directly to share and exchange intelligence on North Korea's military activities related to its nuclear and missile programs. Japan and Korea now indirectly exchange such intelligence through the United States under a trilateral sharing pact signed at the end of 2014.




North Korea's state radio station broadcast a new set of mysterious numbers Friday after a five-day break that could be some kind of coded message to its agents operating in South Korea.

Radio Pyongyang started broadcasting messages about an hour after midnight (Seoul time), calling out a series of pages and numbers.

The radio announcer "gave review work in metal engineering to No. 27 expedition agents." The content was different from the transmissions in the early hours of Sunday.

Since June 24, North Korea has sent out 13 encrypted numbers broadcasts, with three being broadcast in October.

Broadcasts of mysterious numbers are considered a kind of book cipher that was often used by North Korea to give missions to spies operating in South Korea during the Cold War era. Spies could decode numbers to get orders by using a reference book, although many intelligence officials believe this form of sending orders to be totally outdated.

Many have said the broadcast may be some sort of psychological strategy aimed at sparking internal confusion within South Korea.

Pyongyang had initially suspended such broadcasts in 2000, when the two Koreas held their first historic summit.

Tensions are already running high on the divided peninsula after North Korea carried out its fifth nuclear test in September and the unsuccessful launching of two Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles last month, with some observers forecasting another kind of missile provocation soon. (Yonhap)
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has inspected an artillery unit stationed on an island bordering South Korea and ordered a firing drill on the spot, the North's state-run newswire reported Friday.

Kim stressed the need to train soldiers there as "indomitable fighters" during a visit to the artillery detachment on Mahap island, said the Korean Central News Agency, which did not elaborate on when the visit was made. North Korean news outlets usually report its leader's activities one day after they are made.

Mahap is a border island, just 18 kilometers from South Korea's northernmost Baengnyeong Island in the West Sea.

During the visit, Kim mounted an observation post to be briefed on a firepower strike plan and combat readiness, the agency said.

Kim, in particular, made a surprise order to soldiers to strike a designated target, and guided a live shell firing drill, according to the agency.

Kim's latest inspection came only two days after he made another military visit, which the news agency reported, where he instructed soldiers to raise their combat readiness.

Experts say Kim's military inspections just before and after the U.S. election are designed to make his presence known. (Yonhap)
By Han Seung-bum

Donald Trump has won the U.S. presidential election.

Let's look into President Trump's influence on the Korean Peninsula. The Republican candidate's campaign has met a barrage of criticisms from the U.S. media. The South Korean media also depict him as a distasteful candidate, as they often quote from major American media. Negative reports on the candidate, involving sexual harassment and other scandals, as well as his uncontrolled remarks, unveil his true character. In particular, his South Korean policies include sensitive issues such as a possible pullout of U.S. troops from Korea and a re-assessment of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, resulting in an almost unanimous disapproval from South Korea. According to a poll conducted last month by the South China Morning Post, only 7 percent of South Korean respondents support Donald Trump. In addition, 63 percent of South Koreans have a "very hostile" perception of the U.S. President-elect. This comes as no surprise.

South Korea should maintain an objective perspective toward a Trump White House and seriously assess its potential policies and vision regarding the Korean Peninsula. A book providing insight into Trump's stance on foreign affairs and the Korean peninsula was published last November in the United States, titled "Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again," and on July 14 a Korean translation was published by Iremedia Publications. Trump's standpoint on the Korean peninsula can be inferred from this book, which describes Trump's foreign policies, and in particular his policy toward Iran.

The key phrase of Trump's foreign policies is to "Make America Great Again." For a greater America, national interests take absolute priority. A case in point is his declaration to keep out illegal immigrants by building a high wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He wants the United States to stop giving out citizenship to all children born on American soil - as per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution - expressing his strong determination to ban all illegal immigrants who presumably degrade American values and exhaust its welfare budget. This may come as unfortunate news to those Koreans who go on the so-called "maternity trips" to the United States.

Likewise, Trump's foreign policies are also strictly "national interest first." For those countries with conflicting interests with the United States, he will be hard-nosed to the point of ruthlessness. For instance, regarding the Islamic State, which is becoming a serious threat to American security, he will go as far as to send ground forces to obliterate it. In this regard, South Korea needs to pay close attention to the nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran. Trump has expressed his revulsion toward this negotiation, calling it "the worst ever." He insists that Iran is an untrustworthy country and that the United States should have pushed harder and completely stripped Iran of its nuclear power.

North Korea's nuclear experiments and test missile launches have now become a menace not only to the Korean peninsula but also the United States mainland as well. Trump will insist on a fundamental and ultimate disarmament of North Korea. To this end, a Trump administration will take coercion and sanctions toward North Korea to a completely different level. In a nutshell, Trump will see to it that North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un hit rock bottom. When coercion and sanctions do not work, he will not rule out the assassination of Kim or other military action such as the demolishment of nuclear facilities. This will be a clear change from Washington's lukewarm attitude toward North Korea up to now.

The day North Korea's armaments become a substantial threat to the United States, that will be the end of Kim's days. For Trump, the security of South Korea or safety of the Korean people is evidently low on his list. We will never witness another scene like that in 1994, when Bill Clinton's administration's plan to bombard North Korea's Yeongbyun nuclear facilities was dissuaded by then South Korean President Kim Yong-Sam. Trump states that "the United States will use power if necessary, and the world will treat the U.S. differently once they know we mean it." This should send a chill down Kim's back.

Trump's stance on war is, "if you want peace, prepare for war." He intends to create the most powerful army in history, in order to possess "an army so overpowering that no occasion will rise to use it in the first place." A Trump administration will bring uncharted confusion and unprecedented uncertainty to the Korean Peninsula. South Korea's top presidential candidates, practically begging Kim in the North for peace, should take to heart Trump's pronouncement that "if you want peace, prepare for war."

Han Seung-bum, CEO of MACCINE Korea. Write to ceo@maccine.net.
Pablo Iglesias, Spain's answer to Donald Trump? Luca Piergiovanni (EFE)

Donald Trumps victory in the US elections has led some Spanish political commentators to draw what seems at first an unlikely comparison between the property magnates populist approach and that of Pablo Iglesias, the leader of the anti-austerity grouping Podemos, which has managed to upset the political balance in Spain in a few short years.

Populism is not an ideology...it is a way of building politics from the outside Pablo Iglesias

But Iglesias, who has called Trump a fascist in the past, has angrily rejected any similarity with Trump. Writing in a blog published in the online left-leaning Publico, he argues: Populists are outsiders and can be on the right, the left, or they can be ultra-liberals or protectionists, although they can use similar methods. Albeit for different reasons, Trump and Iglesias reject trade deals and say that NATO should be overhauled.

Populism is not an ideology or a collection of policies, it is a way of building politics from an outside that expands at moments of crisis, writes Iglesias, arguing that populism doesnt define political choices, but instead political moments.

Despite forming an alliance with the Communist Party-led United Left in Junes elections, Podemos has always sought to avoid a left-right alignment, instead attacking what it sees as the countrys political elites, which it says includes the Socialist Party (PSOE), and defending the people.

Pablo Iglesias has called Donald Trump a fascist in the past

Iglesias says that the populist hypothesis that led to the creation of Podemos during the widespread street protests that swept Spain in 2011 known as the 15-M movement is now fading.

The debate we have to have in the coming months is whether Podemos should continue to be a populist movement or not, said Iglesias last month, defending what he called left-wing populism against a Podemos that seeks compromise and respectability within the institutions of the state.

Podemos and Trump share three types of voter: those who feel they have lost out as a result of the global crisis; those who feel their cultural and national identity is threatened by globalization; and those who want to punish the establishment. Podemos has made no appeal to Spaniards who feel threatened by globalization or immigration, and in socio-economic terms its policies are very different to Trumps.

Mariam Martinez-Bascunan of Madrids Autonomous University, sees a connection between Trumps populism and that of Podemos, through their discourse.

Populists are outsiders and can be on the right, or on the left Pablo Iglesias

Trump has no ideas, his discourse is based on hate, a reaction to all that Obama represents and has managed to cement popular support, she says, adding: Playing on peoples emotions to create a common identity is something both the far left and the far right do. The problem is how peoples passions are used. She points to the work of Beligan sociologist Chantal Mouffe, whose work is much admired by many in Podemos leadership, that the only way to stop right-wing populism is by creating a left-wing populism.

For the moment, no right-wing populist along the lines of Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom or Marine Le Pen in France, has emerged in Spain.

English version by Nick Lyne.
Trump victory can bring opportunities



Donald Trump's victory in the recent U.S. presidential election has sent Korea into panic mode, making it feel all the worst-case scenarios - from security to the economy - are about to come true.



Taken together with the leadership crisis from President Park Geun-hye's influence-peddling and breach of trust scandal, it is as if the nation is wringing its collective hands for brewing a perfect storm.



At least one media outlet reflected the uneasy feelings of people, compared now with the turn-of-century period when the enfeebled Joseon Kingdom was engulfed by the battle of colonial powers for annexation before Japan snatched it up.



Capturing the public's mind is the chaotic time leading to the 1950-53 Korean War, triggered by North Korea's invasion after the withdrawal of U.S. troops at the start of the Cold War.



This desolate mood is owed to the U.S. president-elect's unconventional wisdom, hints of which were dropped during the campaign; the sorry state of politics we are in; our habit to think about the worst and our failure to comprehend our own growth.



Being one of the world's leading trading and industrial countries, Korea is neither of its two previous selves. It no longer depends on the handouts of big countries, including the U.S., and is a partner in dialogue with those countries.



It would be best for Trump to see the benefits of his country's current military presence here but even if he doesn't, there would be no need to get cold feet about it. If he wants to increase Korea's share of the burden of U.S. troop maintenance, the two sides could negotiate. The same goes for the trade imbalances in Korea's favor.



As shown in his 1987 part-biography and part-management primer, "The Art of the Deal," he is not an unconventional businessman and as with any businessman is eager to make good deals. This philosophy is well reflected by the "Trump doctrine" of giving the best deal to Americans but being fair to the rest of the world." Korea's best counter-strategy is to out-Trump Trump, helping him clearly understand what cut he can get in any future deals. Perhaps dealing with the U.S. under Trump could be easier than it has been with his predecessors, politicians who sometimes didn't understand what they wanted.



The other source of anxiety - the scandal-ridden President of Korea - is also being better handled, although not as fast as desired, as the parties involved are trying to get things done within the legal framework. The Trump presidency presented the nation with an awkward occasion for the disgraced leader to represent the nation internationally but this challenge also should be dealt with patiently.



All told, Trump's victory means a change which can serve as the source of chance as well as of crisis. Considering the world is stuck as it has been for a while, as it is with Korea, Trump's victory should be seen more as a chance.



Much is left to our discretion. In this Trump era, the first priority is to stop panicking and believe in ourselves. We are a lot smarter and stronger than we give ourselves credit for.




Choi Hwan-seung, CEO of Minoa Art Assets, poses in his office, in an interview with The Korea TImes. The company and the Seoul Arts Center will host "The Great Graffiti" at the Seoul Calligraphy Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center.

/ Korea Times photo by Kim Ji-soo



Minoa Art Assets CEO talks about art management

By Kim Ji-soo

Choi Hwan-seung, former Wall Street broker and financial consultant and now Minoa Art Assets CEO, interestingly finds a commonality between being a broker and dealing in artistic content.

"On Wall Street you would think all the decisions are rationally made, when, in fact, there is a lot of emotion involved as well," Choi said.

"It's akin to how a company's stocks are evaluated in the United States, where analysts often pore over the people of the company as well as the figures."

Perhaps it is because of that similarity that Choi chose to start his own art content management and museum show company, Minoa Art Assets.

Founded in July 2015, the company, with the Seoul Arts Center, will host "The Great Graffiti" exhibition from Dec. 9 through Feb. 26, 2017, at Seoul Calligraphy Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center.

The exhibition features 60 works of the some biggest names in graffiti art. They are Crash (John Matos), who is regarded as a pioneer in the graffiti art movement; Nick Walker; JonOne (John Andrew Perello), who collaborated among others with LG Electronics to put his work on LG Bluetooth devices; (Frank) Shepard Fairey, a.k.a. Obey Giant, who used graffiti art to convey political messages, as with the 2008 Obama Hope Poster; Zevs (Christophe Aghirre Schwarz), who also worked with LG products; L'atlas (Jules Dedet) and JR (Jean Rene). Four of the artists  Zevs, JonOne, Nick Walker and L'atlas  will visit Korea for the exhibition.

During the exhibition, several artists will perform live painting, and works will go on sale during the exhibition.

"Other elements of hip-hop are already in Korea in earnest, such as rappers, b-boys and DJs, and now it is graffiti's turn," Choi said.

Once considered vandalism, graffiti art is very much part of contemporary life  everything from art and design to products. It is also the happening art of the moment.

There have been exhibitions as recently as the one by Brainwash this year in Seoul, but the coming exhibition may well be one of the first blockbuster shows of graffiti artists.

It's a new challenge for Choi, who spent his previous career in finance. "But this company is akin to investment banking," Choi said.





Poster for "The Great Graffiti" exhibition that will open at the Seoul Arts Center on Dec. 9.



After having studied sociology at Yonsei University, he went to Adelphi University on Long Island, New York, earning an MBA. He then began work as a broker with the firm Equitable, which later became AXA Financial. In the late 2000, he became executive vice president of North East division in charge of New Jersey at AXA Advisors. These were times when he was earning a million-dollar income annually. But he wanted to come back to Korea, so in 2007, he returned to work for Samsung Life Insurance, before working as senior executive director at Allianz Life Korea from 2009 through 2015.

As with many of his peers in their 50s, he wanted to do something that brought him joy.

"I think when you are in your 30s or 40s, you're driven toward success and you're full of passion," he said. "Then you get into your 50s, and you want to do work that brings you joy. When you enjoy what you do, your business will be better; you're also likely to be a better member of society."

It's not that he did not consider opening a financial firm in Korea, but there were too many regulations. In addition, he had to find something enjoyable to do, something in which he could be a leader rather than just a follower.

Fortunately, he has a business partner who has an extensive network in the arts. Choi did not disclose any more information about his partner, who does not like publicity, he said.

"I hope to make Minoa Art Assets a platform where people can enjoy the arts and that can lead into various opportunities and brands," he said. He envisions expanding Minoa Art Assets to include a cultural tour travel agency, arts publishing, auction and other business ventures, such as promoting Korean artists abroad. Immediately after "The Great Graffiti" exhibition in Seoul, he hopes to take it to China and Japan.

He said when he first started the company, many asked him to reconsider. His family still lives in the United States. But Choi said he never liked that word "benchmark" and he wanted to create and therefore lead, and with his new company, he hopes to lead through the arts.

"The arts can connect with all industries, I personally believe," Choi said. "Also, as Korea remains divided and has no natural resources, I believe our existing model of competing with other nations through manufacturing products has limits. For Korea to be competitive, we should tap into the creative, innovative geyser of the arts and culture so that we can create brands and industries."

Choi has poured much of his wealth into the exhibition. As an entrepreneur, he wants to take risks and speak through the results, rather than through words.

"It's a big beginning, but I am only beginning," he said.
By Kang Seung-woo





James Choi

James Choi, a South Korean-born Australian, has been named Australia's ambassador to Seoul, its Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) said Wednesday.

It is the first time a Korean-Australian will assume the position after the two nations established diplomatic ties in 1961.

He also is the second ethnic South Korean to head a foreign embassy in Seoul, following Sung Kim, the former U.S. ambassador who is now ambassador to the Philippines.

"James Choi has been appointed as Australia's next Ambassador to South Korea, with non-resident accreditation to North Korea," the department said.

Canberra maintains diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, so Choi, 46, will double as the ambassador to North Korea.

Choi migrated to Australia in 1974 when he was four and graduated from the University of Sydney, earning a Bachelor of Economics and a Bachelor of Laws.

Choi has been a senior career officer with DFAT since 1994. He has served as Ambassador to Denmark, with earlier postings at the Australian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York and at the Australian Embassy in Seoul.

Choi, who will take over from Ambassador Bill Paterson, is scheduled to begin his appointment in December, according to DFAT.

South Korea is Australia's fourth-largest trading partner and two-way trade was worth over $36 billion (41 trillion won) in 2015. They signed a free trade agreement in 2014, which DFAT said is delivering strong results for business in both countries.

The two nations also have strong education and tourism links and cooperate in multilateral forums as active members of the G20, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the East Asia Summit (EAS) and the MIKTA grouping.

"Australia and South Korea enjoy a warm relationship founded on common values and interests," DFAT said.
By Yoon Sung-won



LG Welfare Foundation said Friday it will award two coast guard officers who died rescuing construction workers for their sacrifice.



"We decided to present the awards to their families, hoping that society will long remember the strong commitment and spirit of sacrifice of the coast guard officers who have taken on the tough task of keeping people safe," LG said.



Alongside the awards, the foundation will also present 100 million won ($85,962) to each family.

On Tuesday, four Korea Coast Guard special operations team members, including the two who died  Sergeant Kim Hyeong-wook and Park Kwon-byeong  were trying to rescue workers at a bridge construction site in Samcheok, Gangwon Province.



The workers were in distress amid waves exceeding three meters. After rescuing two of the four, Kim and Park were swept away by a wave trying to save the others.













Park was rescued unconscious and transferred to hospital. But he died soon after. Kim's body was found Friday morning.



Meanwhile, LG Welfare Foundation has presented awards for those who have shown great courage and sacrificed themselves for the good of the nation and society since last year.
Afro-Bolivian King Julio Pinedo greets his followers. REUTERS

More information El ultimo rey de America

It is eight in the morning. The suns rays are unable to pierce the thick fog covering the green slopes, ravines, rivers, waterfalls and lush vegetation surrounding Mururata, in the region of Los Yungas, northwest of the Bolivian capital of La Paz.

It is here, far away from the tribulations of the capital, that Julio Pinedo rules as the king of the Afro-Bolivians.

Pinedo is the recognized descendant of a Congolese monarch who was brought to Bolivia as a slave by the Spaniards in 1820.

His house is 50 meters away from Mururatas main square. He lives there with his wife Angelica Larrea the Afro-Bolivian queen and their son Rolando, the crown prince.

The ground floor of their home also doubles as a grocery store that sells bananas, canned sardines, oil and soft drinks.

Pinedo is pessimistic about the chances of eradicating discrimination

Pinedo, 74, has worked in agriculture all his life. He wears neither a crown nor a cape in his everyday life  those adornments are reserved for special occasions.

These days, the king is busy building social housing near his own home as part of a state program. He works Mondays through Saturdays from 8am to 6pm, and he is already late for work today.

Sitting at the table, he pushes aside a cup of coffee and a slice of bread that were going to be his breakfast, and grants the reporter a few minutes of his time.

King Bonifacio was my grandfather. Our ancestors were brought here to work in the mines of Potosi [in southwest Bolivia]. Later, they were brought to the area of Los Yungas, where they got sold to the hacienda owners, he explains.

His ancestor was Prince Uchicho, of the Kongo people. He arrived in Bolivia around 1820 as part of one of the last shipments of slaves to the Latin American country.

Uchicho ended up working at the estate of the Marquis of Pinedo, whose name he adopted. He was crowned in 1832 and was succeeded by Bonifaz, then by Jose and Bonifacio, who was crowned in 1932.

Bolivias indigenous people still face racism and discrimination. Enrique Vaquerizo

My grandfather was a very kind person. He loved my brother and me very much, but he was very strict, recalls the current monarch.

But the royal lineage of the Pinedos was up in the air for many years after that. Following the death of Bonifacio in 1954, the family was unable to claim the title back until 1992, when Julio was recognized by his people.

In 2007, the government of La Paz crowned him again. And two years later, with the new Constitution, Bolivians of African descent were recognized as one of the 36 constituent ethnic groups of the Andean nation. This recognition bolstered Afro-Bolivian customs and traditions, including their own ancestral kingdom.

Julio Pinedo is recognized as a ceremonial figure, not as a political authority. He is sparing with his words, but speaks enough to express dissatisfaction with his peoples lack of organization.

With a greater effort from everyone, I could do a better job as a representative, he notes.

Until the National Revolution of 1952, Afro-Bolivians lived in semi-feudal conditions. After being recognized by the state, in 2012 they were included in the Census for the first time. Today, they are an estimated 26,000 people in a country of over 10 million.

His ancestor was Prince Uchicho, of the Kongo people

A lot of progress has been made. We Afros are being taken into account, and we are present in places where important decisions are being made, says Ancelma Perlacios, Bolivias first Afro-Bolivian senator, adding that the official acknowledgment of Julio Pinedos roots means a lot to her people.

But both the senator and the king believe there is still a lot of work to do to ensure that Afro-Bolivians receive the same kind of protection from the state as other ethnic groups. In Bolivia, over 41% of the population is indigenous.

But Pinedo is pessimistic about the chances of eradicating discrimination altogether.

Racism and discrimination are never going to disappear from Bolivia, he says. The mixed-ancestry people, the indigenous population and the black population  each one gets their share of it. We are always pushing one another.

Then, the last monarch of the Americas gets up to go work at the construction site.

English version by Susana Urra.
Eddie Izzard is a man with Brexit on his brain. The transgender comedian, actor, activist and aspiring politician campaigned hard for the United Kingdom to stay in the European Union, only to see his efforts come to nothing on June 23, when Britons narrowly voted in favor of leave. But speaking to Izzard nearly five months after  on the day of the US elections , no less  the topic of Britains future is clearly still at the forefront of his mind.

Comedian, actor and activist Eddie Izzard. Amanda Searle

After a first, hugely successful run of shows in an intimate venue in Madrid in 2014, Izzard is coming back to Spain with his long-running Force Majeure show, this time performing his surreal brand of comedy in both the capital and Barcelona. And as he did two years ago, he will be performing part of his set in Spanish  despite speaking very little of the language. Its his way of bringing his audiences together  a cause he's passionate about.

So how were those first Madrid shows?

The problem with Spanish is the subjunctive and the two forms of to be

They were great, I think i may have managed about 12 or 15 minutes of Spanish, which I will be continuing this time. Its a radical way of learning a language. I back-fill the show with Spanish, so I do the first part in English, y poco a poco en espanol.

The challenge might sound daunting, but Izzard has been here before, having already translated and performed Force Majeure in several different languages. In fact, for his so-called 333 gigs, he delivered three consecutive hours of comedy in German, French and then English.

Its such a simple method, he explains. You just learn it like a play first, and then you go and learn the language after that. If I hadnt been an actor as well I wouldnt have been able to come up with this.

During the Madrid run, Izzard was taking Spanish lessons during the day and then performing his set at night. But he has now abandoned that idea and will first focus on learning the show by rote. But what difficulties did he face with the peculiarities of Spanish?

I think Im going to have the same problems as everyone does, the subjunctive, the two forms of to be  whats going on there?! You just have to get used to it, the irregular verbs But I love the way you pronounce Spanish as you see it  as an English speaker, the accent just means emphasize this or that, so thats wonderful. Theres a number of wonderful easy things.

When the conversation turns to his impression of Madrid and its people, the Brexit floodgates open.

Eddie Izzard in action. Idil Sukan (Draw HQ)

They were great, I enjoyed it and Im happy to be back. This is my thing. If half my country is saying lets walk backwards, Im saying: Carry on walking forwards. Im proud of my country but I reach out my arms to other countries. Can you learn from us, can we learn from you? Trump is shutting it down, saying Brexit  it is a time of extremists. We are allies, we fought together in the Second World War against extremists and the Allies have to come together and fight again against the extremists.

Izzard was a very visible part of the Remain camp, having chosen a striking pink beret  complete with British and European flag badges  as his wardrobe trademark for the entirety of the Brexit campaign, touring the country in a bid to get young people to vote on their future. So how did he feel after the result came in?

I accept it but much of it was a con, he says. We were told that 350 million pounds a week would go to the NHS and then the next day Nigel Farage said that was a lie. So we were conned. The good people of the United Kingdom were lied to. Even the most horrible people in the world have to accept that we have to head towards a world where everyone has a fair chance. And if you dont accept that, youre not a fair person. And how do we head towards that? Weve got to make the continents work first, thats what the EU was set up to do.

Even the most horrible people have to accept a world where everyone has a fair chance

Izzards intervention in the campaign was not without its critics, however. In particular an appearance on BBC politics panel show Question Time came in for particular scrutiny, after he continually clashed with UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage and members of the audience. A subsequent editorial in British daily The Independent said that if he wants Remain to prevail, Eddie Izzard needs to stay out of the EU referendum debate. So did the campaign experience dishearten him in any way?

We have to work towards a world where all seven billion of us have a chance, he responds. Because otherwise we put people in despair, and despair is the fuel of terrorism, hope is the fuel of civilization. We have got to be fighting towards hope. Running and hiding, the pound going down the toilet because of a hard Brexit, pulling out of the single market... it doesnt work, it will not work.

In another episode during the campaign, a pro-Brexit protestor at a Remain demonstration actually stole the pink beret off Izzards head, running off with it before being tackled by the police.

Its got to be hope and not brex-hate, brex-hate is a terrible thing, he says of the incident. They were standing there with death-head masks on and paramilitary uniforms, thats the kind of hatred that brex-hate inspired. I jumped in and got the beret back, and the police took him down and he pleaded guilty.

Izzard came out as transgender 31 years ago, and has suffered plenty of abuse  much of it homophobic, despite his not being gay  since. But was he surprised by the often ugly turns the Brexit campaign took ahead of the vote?

No, I think that human beings have this capacity, we saw it back in the 1930s, he says. The idea of leaving the single market and going back to 1973  was 1973 such a wonderful time? I dont think so. Youve got Farage, hes from an immigrant family, hes married to an immigrant, and he hates immigrants. If you look at the word hypocrisy [in the dictionary], Nigel Farages face is grinning out from there, holding hands with Donald Trump, who says he wants Brex-hate plus plus plus Theyre just pushing for hatred. Its an easier one to go for. Building is much harder than tearing apart, and theyre trying to tear things apart. We have to build, we cannot go back to the dark ages of the 1930s. We have to put more hope in the world than despair. Thats what Im trying to do  thats why Im going into my fourth language.

And of course, we all know what happened next. Less than 24 hours after Izzard spoke to EL PAIS, the Republican candidate was confirmed as the winner of the US election. It looks like pro-EU, anti-Trump Eddie Izzard might need a few more languages yet...

Eddie Izzard  Force Majeure en ingles... y (poco a poco) espanol. Various dates in November Cafe Teatre Llantiol, Barcelona. See www.barcelonacomedyfestival.com for more information and to buy tickets. Various dates in December in Ancora, Madrid. See www.madridcomedyfestival.com for more information and to buy tickets.
Tourists at the Revolution Museum in Havana. Ramon Espinosa (AP)

More information El triunfo de Trump deja en el aire el deshielo con Cuba

Cubans are the best people in the world. I would love to help rebuild their country and restore its former splendor. As soon as laws change, I am ready to build the Taj Mahal in Havana, said Donald Trump two decades ago.

Today, Trump is the president-elect of the United States, and one of the many unknowns about his future tenure is what his Cuban policy will be.

Trumps role will no longer be to fantasize about the fabulous business deals to be had on the island, but to address Cuba as a matter of state.

We should ask him if he wants to do more business

Carlos Alzugaray, former Cuban diplomat

The man who will hand over the Oval Office to him on January 20, Barack Obama, will be remembered for paving the way to the end of the historic conflict between the US and Cuba.

But it is unclear whether his Republican successor will pick up where Obama left off or whether he will dump the Obama doctrine altogether.

We dont know whats going to happen. The situation could go back to the way it used to be, with more restricted contact between both governments, an even tougher embargo and sanctions, along with less contact between both people. The thaw is at risk, says Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

President-Elect Donald Trump has given mixed signals about what his Cuban policy might be. MARK WILSON (AFP)

Obama believed that the best way to push Cuba toward democracy was to facilitate contact with the United States. He made it easier for Cubans working in the United States to send money home, eased conditions for US citizens to travel to Cuba, reopened regular flights, signed permits allowing some companies to start doing business with the island, and eliminated barriers on the import of Cuban rum and cigars.

Trumps business background would suggest he too would take a pragmatic approach to trade. The trouble lies in the fact that nobody knows what the next presidents foreign policy will be.

During his campaign, Trump went from more or less supporting the thaw its fine, but I think we should have done a better deal to visiting Bay of Pigs veterans two weeks before the election and promising that he will not talk with Havana unless the latter pledges to fully embrace civil liberties.

His rhetoric was aimed at attracting anti-Castro votes, but Trump could backtrack when he fully assesses the Cuban interests of companies like Starwood, Caterpillar, Google or PayPal.

Trump has said many things. We should ask him what he wants: whether he wants to do more business, for example," says Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat. If so, the ball is in his court: he will have to force his Republican colleagues to lift the embargo. But if his policy is what he announced in Miami toward the end of his campaign, well, we've heard all that before.

Cubans at home and abroad are wondering what will happen next. If US policy tightens, their economic and family ties could become more difficult again.

The news comes just as the Cuban-American vote had tipped in favor of the Democrats for the first time. A poll by Latino Decisions shows that 50% of the Cuban-American vote went to Hillary Clinton and 48% to Trump. In 2012, 65% voted Republican.

Meanwhile, the Cuban government has issued a neutral message of congratulations to the next president of the United States. In an apparently unrelated move, the Ministry of Revolutionary Armed Forces has announced military maneuvers for next week.

English version by Susana Urra.
The definitive test of the health of any democracy is the handover of power after elections, when candidates with different or the same ideas work together to observe the popular will, expressed through the ballot box. Barack Obamas promise to work for a successful transition is proof of this. He and his team will now do all in their power to facilitate the arrival in office of the next leader of the free world, a racist and a sexist with no experience in office and whose only stated objectives are to lower taxes for the rich, build a wall along the Mexican border and improve relations with Vladimir Putin.

Trump supporters celebrate at the New York Hilton on Tuesday night. SHAWN THEW (EFE)

Donald Trump is a danger, and a serious one. Hillary Clinton may have wished him every success on Wednesday and offered to help with whatever he needs, but the very existence of Donald Trump endangers a system created in the aftermath of World War II that has seen the United States guarantee the global balance by leading a democratic bloc against a huge number of authoritarian regimes.

Put simply, one half of the United States has voted against the rights of the other half. The people celebrating Trumps victory on Tuesday night were celebrating the triumph of boorishness, intolerance, fear, and ignorance. The only sure thing we know about Trump is that he will say one thing one day and another the next, depending on which way the political wind is blowing, or which side of bed he got out of. In a single day he has been for and against abortion rights, same-sex marriage and banning Muslims from entering the country. And when it suits him, he has no problem lying.

The United States is about to enter a dark age

Some observers have said Trump won because Hillary Clinton didnt or couldnt. The new president garnered fewer votes than Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008, both of whom lost. Some voters may have sought to punish Hillary Clinton for Barack Obamas mistakes: his chaotic healthcare reform, for having governed sometimes like a moderate Republican, or for improving relations with Cuba and Iran. Or it might simply have been that she was a weak candidate with the wrong surname taking on a male-dominated machine.

The winner of this election is white America, a concept that the Obama presidency looked to have made obsolete, but that has returned stronger than ever. Trump has made it his business to insult just about everybody else: blacks, Hispanics, women, homosexuals, transsexuals, and even the disabled. The decision by a large number of white, middle-aged men with a basic education has handed over to a property tycoon with delusions of grandeur the keys to the country, the Oval Office, and a lectern at the United Nations; and all with the support of White Supremacists he has refused to distance himself from.

Many people who have voted for Trump are or have been Democrats. This has happened before. When Lyndon B. Johnson won the presidency in 1964, he approved civil rights legislation and ended racial segregation. The southern states, until then solidly Democrat, turned Republican. This left the part with the middle and lower middle classes, labor unions and the poor, for whom state aid was the only way to keep their head above water. The Democratic Party will need to look at the impact of the policies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which were not that different from those of George W. Bush.

Trump garnered fewer votes than Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008

The United States is about to enter a dark age. There is no other way to say it. The will of the people is the cornerstone of a democracy, but that doesnt mean that we always elect the best candidate. In this case, this is the decision of 58 million people, but it is still the wrong decision, and an unfair one. Any number of glorious nations have committed collective suicide through the ballot box. There is a collective responsibility here for leaving the most vulnerable unprotected.

Speaking immediately after the election results were in, Obama told Americans no matter what happens, the sun will rise in the morning Doubtless, but in the fickle world of Donald Trump, who knows? He may try to convince us otherwise one of these days.

English version by Nick Lyne.
Text in which the author defends ideas and reaches conclusions based on his / her interpretation of facts and data

The Free State of Jones, an extraordinary film that went largely unnoticed when it was released a couple of months ago, tells one of those little stories that reflects History with a capital H. A humble Mississippi farmer and Confederate deserter, brilliantly played by Matthew McConaughey, establishes a colony with fellow white deserters and runaway slaves. They find refuge in a remote, marshy area of Jones County that the Confederates, fighting ever-encroaching Union troops, cannot reach.

Two women watch the count on election night. WIN MCNAMEE (AFP)

More information El fin de un sueno

The movie is filled with moments of simplicity and grandeur, especially as the colony grows and McConaughey fills the screen with righteous speeches about the equality of all men regardless of the color of their skin. Dont miss it.

That story unfolded in 1863, when a few good men began to build the foundations of racial equality in the United States. That struggle ultimately led to the election of the first black man, Barack Obama, to the presidency in 2008. But small heroes like that farmer, along with great men and women like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks paved the way for it.

At the age of 69, Hillary Clinton has missed her opportunity

The film also highlights the need for another revolution: gender equality. When the characters speak of equality, they are always talking about men, and even the women applaud them.

Men were equal with men before women were equal with men. This is not about comparisons between the two causes, because slaves were fleeing the cruelty and barbarism of a system that had enriched itself through their exploitation. The point is that in a century, the United States has tried to make this epic journey toward both goals, but it looks like gender equality will have to wait.

The Fifteenth Amendment of the US Constitution granted African Americans the right to vote in 1870, though it required the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under the Lyndon Johnson Administration to become a reality. The Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920.

A Hillary Clinton victory in 2016 would have closed the circle that suffragettes began. But the dream vanishes with Donald Trump, a man who insults women.

Hillary Clinton, born in Chicago in 1947, has faced all kinds of problems, including her own lack of charisma, that have prevented her from breaking the glass ceiling. For many years, she represented generations of women who gave up their careers to support their husbands and build families.

Men were equal with men before women were equal with men

She worked as a lawyer on the Democrats impeachment of Richard Nixon after Watergate (1974) and then gave up her career in Washington to return to Arkansas with Bill, whom she married in 1975. Since then, she has lived in his shadow.

She campaigned for him, served as first lady when he was governor (1983-1992) and then in the White House when he was president (1992-2000). She endured the Monica Lewinsky case with sad sobriety and failed to see her healthcare program implemented when she had more power. She was always Bills wife and finding a role to match her education became an impossible mission.

But Hillary Clinton waited. Once the Bill era ended, she won a Senate seat for New York. But she also had to wait for the Barack Obama era to pass after losing the 2008 Democratic primaries. At the age of 69, she has missed her opportunity to put into practice what she said in a speech at Wellesley College in 1969:  Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now. There is no more time. The dream is over.

Electing Hillary Clinton would not only have put a woman in charge of the most important country in the world, along with other great nations like Germany (Angela Merkel), the United Kingdom (Theresa May and before her, Margaret Thatcher) and Brazil (Dilma Rousseff until she was impeached). More importantly it would have allowed the United States to make two symbolic moves in two back-to-back revolutions: racial equality and gender equality. And if it were on a roll, why not imagine a Hispanic man or woman in the White House?

Instead, the United States has elected the enemy of minorities, women, immigrants, Muslims and the political correctness that has made coexistence possible in democracies. The dream fades and, in its place, a nightmare begins.

English version by Dyane Jean-Francois.
An easier-than-expected first mammogram experience HUNTERSVILLE  Scheduling a cancer screening probably ranks somewhere on your to-do list between "clean out the garage" and "donate those clothes that don't fit." Sure, you'll get to it at...

Chamber retreat helps discover strengths in communication The Lake Norman Chamber of Commerce has proved that networking can come in many ways. It doesnt have to come at a luncheon or happy hour or Christmas party, but...
The SLFP does not condone the continuation of the Emergency Regulations (The Public Security Ordinance) more than a day necessary

Read more
PRESS RELEASE

Chas Freeman: Time for the U.S. To Fully Join the Belt and Road Initiative

Nov. 10, 2016 (EIRNS)Ambassador Chas Freeman, who addressed a recent Schiller Institute Berlin conference, delivered a lengthy address to the China Maritime Study Institute conference in Hawaii on Nov. 4, focusing on the China Belt and Road program as something that the United States must join in. Freeman cited President Eisenhowers early experience as a young Army officer, taking 62 days to travel from the east to the west coast in 1919, as part of a military convoy. He built the national interstate highway system, based, in part, on that memory of the challenges of maintaining a unified nation without a comprehensive infrastructure grid. In 1990, Freeman noted, China adopted that approach and has since that time, built 76,000 miles of interstate high quality roads and an even larger grid of high speed rail, which first began construction in 2007. Under the five-year plan that ended in 2015, China built 82 new airports and improved another 100. In 2015 alone, China built 1.6 million miles of new fiber optic cable, making China the most connected nation in the world.

The Belt and Road is economic, not military and it will transform Asia and Europe in the biggest market link up in history. The U.S. corporate sector can play a vital role in the project, and the United States must have a seat at the table, not only for the economic benefits, but because it will assure that the Belt and Road project is truly international. He cited plans for a new Russian deep water port near the Russian-North Korean border, that will greatly reduce the shipping time and costs between the Russian Far East and the United States.

He joked that if you are not seated at the table, chances are good that you will be served for dinner.
PRESS RELEASE

Glazyev Comments on Trump Victory: Americans Dont Want War

Nov. 10, 2016 (EIRNS)Russian economist and Presidential adviser Sergei Glazyev has given an interview to Itar-TASS discussing the significance of Donald Trumps victory in the just-concluded U.S. presidential elections.

On Nov. 9, Itar-TASS published statements made by Putin adviser Sergei Glazyev on the U.S. election outcome. I believe Trump is a practical man; he will lift sanctions on Russia that are harmful to U.S. business, too, Glazyev commented.

As a result, the trade turnover, financial and economic relations between Russia and the U.S., as well as the West in general, will be restored and start growing, depending on the economic situation only.

The election results show that

The American people dont want war; for the first time in the worlds history there is a chance to move to a new global economic order without waging a world war. Resetting is sure to take place, because the outgoing administrations foreign policy was based on the aggressive approach towards Russia in order to retain Washingtons supremacy. We can say that this approach has failed.

Glazyev noted that the policies of the Obama Administration have led to the United States losing China, and so the transition now to a peaceful multipolar world is all the more crucial. Detente between the U.S. and Russia is necessary in this regard.
PRESS RELEASE

Scientists from Belt and Road Countries Gather in Beijing

Nov. 10, 2016 (EIRNS)Twenty national scientific and research organizations from countries and regions along the Belt and Road Initiative issued a declaration on Nov. 8, establishing an alliance of international scientists to promote cross-border cooperation. This was the First International Forum of National Scientific Organizations on the Belt and Road Initiative.

The declaration was made after a two-day forum attended by more than 350 scientists from 40 countries and regions.

"The declaration not only represents the scientists and research organizations willingness to strengthen international cooperation among countries and regions along the Belt and Road Initiative, but also includes mechanisms that will enhance cooperation,"

said Tan Tieniu, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which co-organized the forum.

The mechanisms include holding the forum every two years; multilateral personnel exchange and student training programs, and joint scientific research projects.

"The Chinese Academy of Sciences has been expanding cooperation with countries along the Belt and Road Initiative since 2013, and proposed this international scientific alliance, so we hope to play a leading role in the cooperation,"

Tan said. The academy started a project in 2013 that offers 200 full scholarships per year to overseas candidates.

The meeting was addressed by Bai Chunli, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"Science and innovation not only holds the promise of solutions to complex scientific challenges in the development of the Belt and Road Initiative, but can also be of significant value to the upgrading of the capacity and quality of cooperation between China and other countries,"

said Bai Chunli, president of the academy.

"Scientific organizations, scientists and experts from diverse backgrounds should enhance their efforts and cooperation in developing communities of common interests, responsibility and goals, and in providing a strong scientific basis for construction of the Belt and Road Initiative,"

he said.

Scientific organizations that issued the declaration include the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyzstan Academy of Sciences, the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences.
PRESS RELEASE

Progressive Democrats Lay Down Conditions for Collaboration with Trump

Nov. 10, 2016 (EIRNS)Some leading progressive Democrats who either fought Hillary Clinton or backed her out of pragmatic motives, have signaled publicly that they are ready to work with Donald Trumpunder certain conditions.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren delivered a speech to the AFL-CIO trade union alliance this afternoon, in which she continued her take-no-prisoners attacks on some of Donald Trumps actions and attitudes, but at the same time, she acknowledged that

There are millions of people who did not vote for Donald Trump because of the bigotry and hate that fueled his campaign rallies. They voted for him despite hate. They voted for him out of frustration and anger and also out of hope that he would bring change.

She returned to that same theme later in her remarks, telling the labor leaders that

When President-elect Trump wants to take on these issues, when his goal is to increase the economic security of the middle-class families, then count me in. I will put aside our differences and I will work with him to accomplish that goal," she said. "I offer to work as hard as I can and to pull as many people as I can into this effort.

Rep. Keith Ellison, co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus, made the same point in an interview with USA Today:

If the Democratic Party is not clear as crystal on the side of the working man and woman of America, some opportunistic politician is going to pick up that mantle and create confusion. I dont think anyone can deny that Trump tried to sound like an economic populist... We need to address the needs of people who have been living in stagnation.

USA Today quoted Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who emphasized that progressive Democrats have repeatedly warned that Republicans could outflank Democrats on trade, jobs, Wall Street reform, and corporate greed.

This race should not have been so close, she complained,

and Democrats will lose in the future over and over if they dont go through a serious ideological shift and follow Elizabeth Warrens lead, fighting against the rigged economy in a truly authentic and real way.

Sen. Bernie Sanders joined Warren and Ellison in pledging to work with Trump so long as he sticks to his campaign promises to create jobs, build infrastructure, and boost wages.
PRESS RELEASE

Korean Source: The THAAD Is Probably Dead

Nov. 10, 2016 (EIRNS)A Korean who served in the previous government of Lee Myung-Bak told EIR that Obamas plan to deploy U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles in South Korea is probably dead, for two reasons.

First, the current raging crisis in Seoul, which will result in either Park Geun-hyes resignation or accepting greatly reduced power, as a new Prime Minister accepted by the opposition is given most powers over government. Although the THAAD deployment is not an issue in the leadership crisis, the opposition has long opposed the THAAD deployment and is now in a position of significant influence.

Secondly, Trump pledged during his campaign that he would demand that South Korea (and Japan) pay more for the U.S. military presence, or it will be greatly reduced, or even pulled out. The current plan for THAAD, as agreed to by President Park, has the United States paying the taband Trump, at a minimum, is expeced to demand that South Korea pay for it, which it will not (and probably could not in their current economic crisis condition).

The source also said that the recent meeting between North Korea representatives and a team of Americans who had been involved in the 1990s "Agreed Framework" with the North under Bill CLinton (which was working until Cheney came in and scuttled it), saw a very open and relaxed attitude from the North, which he believes is a signal that Pyongyang is open to a new dialogue.

The source believes that even if Park does not resign, her Saenuri Party (which already has an anti-Park faction) will likely split or disintegrate. Elections are scheduled for December 2017, but if Park resigns there would likely be new elections within 60 days.
Ameriabank: At the Vanguard of Armenia's Banking Sector

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

Google Ad

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

Google Ad

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

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
The Los Angeles Times today announced a youth journalism and community engagement project in collaboration with California State University, San Bernardino and Cajon High School in San Bernardino. The project is intended to encourage public service through journalism and to honor victims of the Dec. 2, 2015 terrorist attack. It will help expand community coverage of San Bernardino through The Times HS Insider student journalism platform, Cajon High Schools Cajon Courier and CSUSBs Coyote Chronicle.

The Times won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of the San Bernardino massacre. A Times delegation went to Columbia University in New York last week to receive the prize and a $10,000 check. Davan Maharaj, Times Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, said that the staff was donating the $10,000 to the journalism project in San Bernardino.

Our reporting on San Bernardino showed how a community can come together in the face of adversity, find strength in each other and work together to solve problems, Maharaj said. We hope to honor the victims and the community as a whole by helping to create more opportunities to spark dialogue, tackle tough questions and tell the stories of San Bernardino.

The Times HS Insider team will partner with Cajon High Schools journalism program to sponsor 14 students for a fall journalism conference, and one for a paid summer internship, and will introduce a My San Bernardino feature. In addition, a grant from The Times will fund a dedicated editor and reporter at CSUSBs Coyote Chronicle to launch a community news section. Cajon High Schools student journalists also will have the opportunity to receive mentoring from the Chronicle staff and pitch stories for the college newspaper.

Advertisement

CSUSB hosted a community event Thursday at which Maharaj announced the youth journalism and community engagement project.
The stories in Dana Johnsons collection In the Not Quite Dark take place in and around Los Angeles, the historical Pacific Electric Building in downtown in particular. Characters across stories live there, either the victims of gentrification or the unapologetic gentrifying. In Because Thats Just Easier, yuppie parents try to teach their child that there is nothing she can do for the homeless of downtown. When the girl observes a man prone on the sidewalk, she wonders whether or not hes alive. Her father kneels down and says, If hes not dead  then its harder. The girl decides by the end of the story that the homeless man must be dead then, because  as the title states  thats just easier.

This is part of what makes Johnsons work remarkable: She portrays characters both privileged and oppressed with empathy while avoiding cliche. They are constantly shrugging off preconceived notions that readers, especially white readers, may have when reading about  for the most part  black characters.

The stories all deal with race, with blackness in particular, but Johnson lets her fiction question the nature of that conversation, whether it is central or peripheral to what are unquestionably excellent stories. She uses boxes that popular culture often puts black people in and breaks them from within, calling further into question the nature of assumptions. In Rogues, college boy J.J. has no money or work ethic and complains that his brother Kenny, who works hard, spends his money on jewelry or shiny tire rims... on health insurance for their dog. The mix of what weve been taught to think of as urban bling and the suburban indulgence of pet health insurance exemplifies both the breaking of stereotypes and incredibly telling character details.

Advertisement

In the Not Quite Dark has a variety of voices and stylistic tones yet holds together tightly as a collection. It focuses on place, with its multiplicity of meanings  physical space, social status or rank, and the action of positioning oneself or others.

In The Liberace Museum, Charlotte visits her white husbands family home in the South. When her father-in-law says, Ive been all over the world.  And no matter where I go, I know my place, there is a hint at possible reproach  is he saying Charlotte doesnt know hers? Or is he really only referring to his heavy Southern accent? Johnson doesnt give us answers, but her questions form meaty, satisfying stories.

In 2001 Johnson, who now teaches at USC, was the recipient of the Flannery OConnor Award for Short Fiction. The 2015 winner is Anne Raeff, for her collection The Jungle Around Us.

The connective tissue of Raeffs stories is displacement, whether from home or societal conventions. Her characters are all fleeing  physically or emotionally, running away from war, from discrimination, from spurning lovers.

In After the War, a doctor and his wife left Vienna for Bolivia during World War II, and when it ended immigrated to New York. It is a haunting tale of trauma, told subtly through a simple narrative. Karl, the doctor, misses Bolivia where nothing ever changed, even though they had a coup every six months. His displacement is not only physical but also speaks to a loss of intimacy. He had a friend in Bolivia  an alcoholic priest who had no interest in quitting drinking. The priest once told Karl, You have been sent to me by God to relieve me of my own thoughts. I have had conversations with only myself for so many years that I had nearly forgotten that there were people to talk to, not just people who list their sins and ask for forgiveness. And who am I to grant forgiveness? Indeed, in a wartorn country, with genocide underway in Europe, it is hard to see a priest having any authority to grant forgiveness, especially when he is a sinner too. Karl is bereft without him in New York, especially as the priests words about his wife keep coming back to him: Your wife is very beautiful and very unhappy.

While Raeff is more subtly political than Johnson, she speaks to identity as well. In The Boys of El Tambor, an epistolary story about a woman who has left her unfaithful girlfriend, the narrator describes a gay bar where the drag queens yearn for Amsterdam where a girl can be a girl and walk down the street in heels without have rocks hurled at her. The narrator muses to herself, I suppose my life could be worse. I could have been born a queen in Mexico.

This ability to fit unfortunate truth and acknowledgment of privilege in one line is typical of Raeffs work. Her stories emerge from what is clearly a socially conscious place, but it is never spoon-fed to readers. These are truly good stories, full of emotion and energy. Her style is uniform, quietly lush, with a distance between narration and story where atmosphere lives.

Where Johnsons stories will put you directly on the ground with her characters, Raeffs will let you watch them through binoculars, peering in close enough to read their lips but not always their hearts, giving them a private, appealing inner life.

Masad is an Israeli American writer living in New York.

In the Not Quite Dark

Dana Johnson

Counterpoint: 225 pp, $16.95 paper

::

The Jungle Around Us

Anne Raeff

University of Georgia Press: 160 pp., $24.95
Millions of Californians have gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Now the future of that federal law  and medical coverage for those people -- is in doubt. President-elect Donald Trump said repeatedly during his campaign that one of his first acts would be to repeal and replace the law known as Obamacare.

The Times spoke to experts about whether it would be possible for the state to keep operating its Obamacare exchange called Covered California, where consumers shop for subsidized health insurance, if the law was repealed.

Could the state keep its Obamacare exchange?

Advertisement

The simple answer is that it would be extremely costly, said Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Kominskis research team estimates that California is receiving more than $20 billion annually in federal assistance to subsidize consumers who buy policies from Covered California and pay for others who became eligible for free or low-cost care under Medi-Cal, which covers the poor.

Walter Zelman, chair of the public health department at Cal State L.A., said the infrastructure for the Covered California online marketplace has already been built. He said the state could pass a law similar to Obamacare requiring everyone to have health insurance and banning insurers from discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions.

The only problem would be the money, Zelman said. It would require a substantial rise in state taxes, he said. Its probably out of the realm of possibility.

So what happens if the law is repealed?

In the worst-case scenario, millions of Californians would lose coverage. Californias uninsured rate has fallen from 17% at the end of 2013, just before the law was enacted, to 8.1% at the end of last year, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One group at risk of being uninsured are poor adults without children who became eligible for Medi-Cal under an expansion of the program included in the law. And about 90% of those with higher incomes who have purchased insurance through Covered California now get subsidies financed by federal taxpayers.

The Urban Institute estimates that there will be 7.5 million uninsured in California in 2021 if the law is repealed. That would be more than twice the number without insurance if the law had stayed in place, the group said.

How likely is a full repeal?

Even Trump said during his campaign that he supports the mandate for all Americans to have insurance as well as the requirement that insurers cover those with pre-existing conditions.

Well, I like the mandate, Trump said in February at a GOP town hall in South Carolina. I dont want people dying on the streets. The Republican people, they dont want people dying on the streets.

On Friday, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he was willing to preserve at least two provisions of the law: the ban against denying coverage for existing conditions and a provision that allows children to stay on their parents policy until they reach the age of 26.

It will be much harder for them to repeal and replace than they think, Zelman of Cal State L.A. said. You cant just step in and change the rules on which people have been relying for years.

melody.petersen@latimes.com

Follow @melodypetersen on Twitter

ALSO

Lazarus: Defending Obamacare: Dont agonize. Organize

More people signed up for Obamacare the day after Trump was elected than any day this enrollment period

Some Californians see health premiums rise sharply as Obamacare enrollment nears
When it comes to healthcare, President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear that hes all in favor of dessert but doesnt want any Brussels sprouts.

He was asked during a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday night about health insurers not being allowed to deny coverage to people with preexisting medical conditions  by far the most popular aspect of Obamacare.

Would Trump maintain such a measure in whatever he and congressional Republicans come up with as part of their plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act?

Advertisement

Yes, he answered. Because it happens to be one of the strongest assets.

True. And polls consistently show that everybody likes this part of the healthcare reform law.

Heres the thing, though: In the real world, you dont get dessert unless you finish your veggies.

If Trump and his conservative cohorts want to keep this provision of the law, theyll also have to accept what is arguably the least-popular aspect of Obamacare  the mandate that most people who dont receive insurance from an employer purchase coverage on a state-run exchange.

They can fantasize all they want about separating the two elements. But in the cold, hard light of economic viability, theres no pulling them apart. They are inextricably linked.

As I wrote in my Friday column, this is whats known as guaranteed issue  the idea that health insurance is available to all, regardless of medical condition.

That has financial consequences. Guaranteed issue means an insurer has to cover more sick people, and sick people are expensive. They submit claims that have to be paid.

To balance that out and keep coverage affordable, insurers need more young and healthy people paying premiums. Thats what Obamacare accomplished with its mandate.

And thats precisely where reality intrudes on Trumps wishful thinking.

Even though Trump said in February that he sees the sense of Obamacares mandate, it doesnt seem like the idea remains a part of his policy goals. Hes said far more frequently that he views the healthcare reform law as a catastrophe and a disaster.

Moreover, there isnt a single prominent Republican in Congress who supports the mandate.

Thats a problem.

If they dont have a mandate, the whole thing unravels, said Alain Enthoven, a Stanford University health economist. You need a way to get young, healthy people into the program.

This is how single-payer systems in other developed countries work. Using taxes instead of premiums and copays, they include everyone in the risk pool, sick and healthy, young and old. That spreads the insurance risk throughout the entire population and keeps costs down for all.

This is one reason that the average citizen of the European Union pays $3,600 a year for healthcare. The average American pays $9,400.

Unless Trump plans on nationalizing private insurers  thus creating an American single-payer system  theres not much he can do to force private insurers to play ball. These are primarily for-profit companies and theyre not in the business of losing money.

No insurer would agree to guaranteed issue without a mechanism in place to expand their coverage of the young and healthy.

Even if the Republican-controlled Congress passed a law forcing them to do so, which would never happen, insurers would simply raise rates to the point where no one could afford policies.

Or the sick could be broken off into a separate high-risk pool, which would be similarly self-defeating. Yes, it would keep costs down for the healthy, but anyone with a pre-existing condition would find coverage so expensive as to be unthinkable.

That, in turn, would necessitate government subsidies, and then look  youre pretty much back where you started with Obamacare, but in a much more inefficient form.

Incredibly, after all the political sweat, heavy lifting and heartache that went into crafting the Affordable Care Act, Trump still talks like healthcare reform is a relatively simple matter.

The way he describes it, weve been fools to pay so much for healthcare all these years when we could have had even better treatment at a lower cost.

Itll be great healthcare for much less money, Trump said of his plans Sunday. So itll be better healthcare, much better, for less money. Not a bad combination.

President Obama was a good deal more level-headed when he told reporters during his Monday news conference that this office has a way of waking you up.

Those aspects of his positions or predispositions that dont match up with reality, he will find shaken up pretty quick because reality has a way of asserting itself, Obama said of Trump.

If the president-elect wants to keep guaranteed issue, hell have to wake up to the reality that insurance is the art of managing risk, and you cant manage healthcare risk without increasing the number of healthy people in the risk pool.

If Trump truly wanted to create a system of better healthcare for less money, hed call for expanding Medicare so it covered everyone  basically bringing us in line with the rest of the developed world.

But that too is a fantasy.

David Lazarus column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.

ALSO

If the Obamacare law is repealed, could California keep it anyway?

Donald Trump wants to replace Obamacare. But its not that simple.

More people signed up for Obamacare the day after Trump was elected than any day this enrollment period

UPDATES:

Nov. 14 5 p.m.: This article was updated with new information, including President-elect Donald Trumps comments on 60 Minutes and President Obamas comments at his news conference.

This article was originally published on Nov. 11.
Once the canon of great artists is established, altering it is next to impossible.

Case in point: the introspective, quietly breathtaking art of John McLaughlin (1898-1976). His geometric abstract paintings are the subject of a gorgeous retrospective exhibition that opens Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

John who, you might ask?

McLaughlin is among the most profound avant-garde painters to work in the United States in the aftermath of the cataclysm that was World War II. Hes also Southern Californias first momentous postwar artist.

In paint on easel-size canvases or panels, McLaughlins perceptual abstractions took shape in essential ways between 1951 and 1952, and he refined and deepened his works resonance over the next quarter-century, never letting up. Born in the closing years of the 19th century, he laid the foundation for the environmentally scaled wonders of 1960s Light and Space art, which ranks as Los Angeles most original contribution to high culture at the end of the 20th century.

You could say that the global powerhouse L.A. has become for the production of new art today can be traced back to McLaughlins studio. Or, more precisely, to his modest house an hour south in Dana Point, where the self-taught artist began to devote his life to painting at the age of 48.

In those days, circa 1946, the L.A. avant-garde, both producers and consumers, could have fit into a proverbial phone booth. (Remember those?) Even in such limited circumstances, McLaughlin was something of a loner.

But his painting retrospective is the most moving and viscerally beautiful exhibition to be installed in BCAM, the museums contemporary galleries, since the building opened eight years ago. He had a few small museum shows during his lifetime, and a lovely posthumous survey was organized at the little Laguna Art Museum in 1996. But, with 52 paintings and 13 works on paper, this is the first time a major institution has mounted a proper, full-scale retrospective.

Installation view, John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction at LACMA (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

That such an indispensable painter didnt merit one until 40 years after his death tells you all you need to know about how passed-over this brilliant artist has been. In fact, Ive been waiting those same 40 years for it.

I had never heard of McLaughlin before moving from New York to Southern California in 1976, arriving just six weeks after he died. I saw a few lithographs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and later some paintings at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in West Hollywood. I found the work to be riveting  but confounding.

His flat, uninflected rectangles of solid color bore superficial resemblance to 1960s Minimalist art, which they predated by nearly a decade. Yet his work isnt merely the paint-as-paint literalism of that stripped-down aesthetic. It took a long while to grasp, but eventually the mystery began to unravel.

I had been schooled in Abstract Expressionism as ground zero for the postwar American avant-garde. McLaughlin began to paint just as its gestural extravagances and emotionally fraught chromatics began to coalesce into the New York School. In the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, those artists stared straight into the void.

McLaughlin did too. But his void is different.

Radically so.

His void is not an abyss of social and spiritual terror in which interior narratives of worldly experience can be told, as it was for Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. Instead, his is the negative space that allows consciousness to blossom and manifest itself. Their art is about inviting us into their deep perception, while his is about inviting us into our own.

McLaughlins void is ma, the poetic space and interval between things that animate Japanese art.

McLaughlins work does reflect a reduced abstract geometry familiar in the Western avant-garde  especially Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. He knew their work, if only through magazine reproductions.

Utopianism, however, was not his goal. European abstraction provided a form for his arts embodiment of Japanese aesthetic philosophy.

McLaughlin had looked at Japanese paintings since his childhood outside Boston. Son of a jurist on the states Superior Court, he was a regular visitor to the illustrious Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts. His great-uncle was a collector, and he left his Japanese paintings to McLaughlins mother.

In 1928 McLaughlin married the grandniece of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Together they moved to Tokyo and then Beijing, staying for two years. Returning to Boston, he opened a gallery to deal in Japanese prints. When the war erupted, he was sent as a Japanese translator to Californias Manzanar internment camp, then shipped off for similar Navy work in India, Burma (now Myanmar) and China.

At wars end, Bronze Star in hand, the couple settled in Dana Point. McLaughlin began to paint.

The LACMA show unfurls his mature work in five chronological galleries. A sixth and separate room has early studies, where he struggles to banish references from the visible world. These small paintings retain elements of Cubist still life.

Nearby are later works on construction paper. Before putting brush to canvas, he used collage to figure out scale, color and spatial relationships. As perhaps befits a self-taught painter working in general isolation, he bought his art supplies at the local Sears, Roebuck store.

And, boy, did he learn fast. Within six years, McLaughlin was the best painter in the small Southern California avant-garde, eclipsing the likes of Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Helen Lundeberg. His work rivals in imaginative depth and beauty any produced in the undisputed art capital of New York.

The hard edge between crisp, rectilinear color-shapes is like the sharpness at the boundary of a black shadow cast by an early afternoon California sun. Yet there is no hint of a recognizable image  no tree, stairway or cafe table, as there might be in an Ellsworth Kelly.

The rectangular internal shapes instead insist on the primacy of the paintings own external shape, emphasizing its independence. The hard edges underscore the autonomous boundaries of the canvas.

Paint application is mostly smooth, uniform and flat, creating pure, clean abstractions. Black, white, gray and taupe are common, but so are limpid hues  sky blue, vivid yellow and crimson, plus an occasional green.

What these spare, stripped-down paintings do to your eyes is uncanny, undermining normal visual communication. Binary vision, the instinctive tendency for a viewers eyes to converge and create depth perception and the parallax vision that locates objects in space, is unplugged. The flat, bilateral compositions thwart that natural urge.

Whats left is a void  a rush of perceptual nothingness that nonetheless overflows with fulsome light and space. As he once explained, their subject is the viewers act of seeing.

McLaughlins best paintings are contemplative experiences, designed for solitary looking. Several times in the show, I wondered what the paintings might be like hanging in LACMAs Japanese Pavilion, each installed within a tokonoma, the traditional domestic alcove where a single scroll or screen would be displayed for viewing.

To enhance this essential one-on-one relationship between a McLaughlin painting and its viewer, LACMA commissioned artist Roy McMakin to design a dozen sturdy, slat-back chairs. Built according to McLaughlins pictorial principles, they are dispersed throughout the galleries.

John McLaughlin, "#6, 1970, 1970, oil and acrylic on canvas. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Each is slightly different, fusing American Shaker and Dutch De Stijl elements and painted in solid neutrals of ivory, cream or black. A reflection in a surreptitiously inserted mirror, glimpsed from the corner of your eye, will suddenly activate the space between painting and chair, or the layering of slats might echo a paintings sequence of rectangles.

In one of the best, the chair back has no slats at all. Its horizontal, white-framed empty rectangle faces a vertical, black-painted rectangle hanging on the wall. A physical void confronts a perceptual void, and you lodge yourself into a comfortable seat between them.

The exhibition was assembled by LACMA curators Stephanie Barron and Lauren Bergman. It comes with an excellent catalog featuring contributions by them, as well as by curator Ilene Susan Fort, artist Tony Berlant, and critics Michael Duncan and Russell Ferguson.

The show will not travel. Thats a shame.

But its not for want of trying. LACMA offered the gorgeous McLaughlin retrospective to 39 museums, including majors like the Whitney in New York and the Chicago Art Institute; Bostons Museum of Fine Arts, so important to shaping the artists aesthetic in his hometown; and important university galleries at Yale, UC Berkeley, Brandeis and Ohio State. Several are lenders to the show.

McLaughlin occupies the top tier of 20th century American art, yet none chose to host this first, full accounting of a critically important, under-regarded artist. That failure speaks of a profound void in the larger mission of Americas art museums, which continue to falter within our wealth-driven, celebrity-minded institutional culture.

Installation view of John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction at LACMA. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

------------

John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction

Where: LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: Sunday-April 16; closed Wednesdays

Information: (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org

christopher.knight@latimes.com

Twitter: @KnightLAT
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them held its world premiere on Thursday, kicking off the final countdown until Muggles and No-Majs can head to theaters to dive into a brand new film series set in the Wizarding World.

Harry Potter author and Fantastic Beasts screenwriter J.K. Rowling joined the films cast and crew in New York for the premiere and fielded questions at a press conference. She dilvulged more details about the movies themes, as well as the return of fan-favorite character Albus Dumbledore.

Recently revealed as the first in a five-part film series, Fantastic Beasts follows British wizard and magizoologist Newt Scamander (played by Eddie Redmayne) as he travels to New York in 1926. The film will depict a world where wizards live in fear of persecution, addressing themes of authoritarianism and xenophobia.

Advertisement

This period was threatening to become very dystopian, said Rowling, according to the New York Times. You were looking at the rise of a very dark force. I conceived the story a few years ago, and I think I was partly informed by a rise in populism around the world.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour 

Harry Potter fans, of course, are no strangers to serious themes such as racism and oppression interwoven into Rowlings work.

Rowling also discussed how Dumbledore will be featured in future installments of the Fantastic Beast films, including whether Dumbledores sexuality will be openly addressed.

You will see Dumbledore as a younger man, and quite a troubled man, she said. We will see him in what I think is the formative period of his life. As far as his sexuality is concerned: Watch this space.

While no actor has been cast for the part, Rowling did share with E! News that she did have someone in mind for the part, but she is choosing to just keep quiet to respect whoever does get cast.

Rowling, an activist who has been very vocal about her politics, declined to discuss President-elect Donald Trump at the event, focusing instead on putting some good things out into the world.

Anytime you release a movie, youd like to think youll give everyone a couple of hours of pleasure, and solace, for everyone  because lifes tricky, right? she told USA Today at the premiere. And thats why we make movies and like music, and maybe I feel that hopefully, putting out something thats lovable in this world in this moment is not a bad thing.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will hit theaters on Nov. 18.

tracy.brown@latimes.com

Twitter: @tracycbrown
David O. Russell in 2016 is a five-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker known for such films as The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. David O. Russell in 1996 was a relatively little-known independent filmmaker seeing to the release of his second movie, Flirting With Disaster.

AFI Fest will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Flirting With Disaster with a screening Friday night, followed by a Q&A with Russell.

The film weds a snowballing comedic momentum to concerns over identity and family, as Ben Stiller plays a new father suddenly anxious to find the birth parents who put him up for adoption as a child. The films outrageous sensibility  LSD and armpit licking feature as plot points  nevertheless points the way toward the bristling energy of Russells more recent work. The film has a staggering cast that also includes Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, Josh Brolin, Richard Jenkins, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin.

Advertisement

In his review at the time, Times critic Kenneth Turan wrote of the film,  Flirting With Disaster doesnt just begin, it irrepressibly erupts, like Champagne too impatient to stay in the glass. A beautifully balanced, frenetic comedy about searching for love in too many places, Flirting thrusts you into a sexy, giddy maelstrom of confusion, mischance and misadventure that gets funnier and funnier as it goes along.

Russell got on the phone earlier this week to talk about his memories of the movie and how it led to the filmmaker he is today.

When was the last time you watched the movie?

I havent watched it in a while. Ive seen scenes from it. Im looking forward to watching it, and I can say there are sections of it Ive watched that crack me up, which was the entire undertaking, for the purpose of laughter. I just wanted to make a comedy at the time. I remember laughing when I was writing it.

Does it feel like 20 years have gone by?

Its definitely been a lifetime, because my oldest son was 1 year old when I was making the film and hes 22 now. And in 20 years, Ive gone through quite a lot of chapters as a filmmaker and different transitions in my own life. When I made that picture, I was still a burgeoning filmmaker, it has a freshness and a fun to it. The last three or four films are when I really began to do more of the kind of work I had been wanting to do and everything else was a prelude to, in a way. It made sense when I arrived at The Fighter and Silver Linings and American Hustle that those felt like they were coming together. When youre young, you have things you want to do and sometimes you dont fully know what you want to say or how to say it. And I feel like that is something that changed in 20 years.

How do you look back on the filmmaker you were then?

Well, as I say, there is a way of seeing and feeling things that you dont even realize youre doing it because its just kind of who you are. Its the way I seem to experience people and situations that simultaneously is emotional, strange and funny. Its all happening at the same time, it can be all these things at the same time. And sort of the kinetic-ness and an intensity to what happens that I think is always dramatic too. Thats something I think Im always drawn to, and having scenes with a lot of people in a room, they start gyroscoping.

Its embracing the dysfunctional... the movie was about having an idea in your head and life being something else.  David O. Russell on Flirting With Disaster

A 1996 photo of director David O. Russell for his film Flirting With Disaster, described in the original caption as a romantic screwball adoption comedy. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times )

Is that where that specific energy of your films comes from, just having a lot of people in the scenes?

But you have to orchestrate it. Its sort of like a song, those scenes. Theyre written and theyre rehearsed, with a rhythm, and its very particular how you create them. And you do them again and again and again and everybody gets the rhythm and gets whats happening. Its almost dance-like. Thats what we do when we rehearse and then thats what we do when were on set. That dinner table scene where Richard Jenkins is on acid is something that everybody really felt on the day, and there were things that people did that were surprises, like when Lily Tomlin lifted her leg up.

And Flirting in some ways was embracing gay marriage and gay adoption and all that stuff and exploding the myth of the dysfunctional family. It was having fun with it, and in a strange way, saying theres not some ideal thing that youre going to find, thats a journey without a destination. So the fantasy of an ideal, the movie is having fun with it and just keeps blowing it up.

Blowing up the trope of the dysfunctional family?

I think it takes the idea that youre going to find an ideal and blew that up. So, in a way, its embracing the dysfunctional. Its sort of deconstructing the idea of dysfunction. Its saying, Isnt all function in some way a perfectly imperfect thing? Which is what The Fighter is in a way and Silver Linings in its own way. I was definitely aware that the movie was about having an idea in your head and life being something else.

SIGN UP for the free Indie Focus movies newsletter 

Mark.Olsen@latimes.com

Follow on Twitter: @IndieFocus
Anna Biller is steaming out a curtain. The filmmaker is used to considering the smallest detail, as on her new film, The Love Witch: She is credited as director, writer, producer, editor, costume designer, production designer and composer. So for a recent photo shoot she helped secure the location, styled the set, spoke to her cinematographer about proper lighting and arranged for lead actress Samantha Robinson to appear in full makeup and costume. So getting out a few final wrinkles is just a part of a whole.

In The Love Witch, a young woman named Elaine (Robinson) arrives in a small town hoping to leave her troubles behind. A practicing witch, she creates potions and casts spells in pursuit of new love. Rather than a string of broken hearts, Elaine and her witchcraft create a growing body count.

The film exists in an idiosyncratic world that feels like an exacting re-creation of a late-60s/early 70s low-budget movie but with a sharp, contemporary feminist point-of-view that would never be found in some period exploitation cheapie. Films such as The Witch and The Neon Demon have most recently explored a connection between witchcraft and feminine power, but even with all its short skirts, ample cleavage and nude rituals, The Love Witch comes from a decidedly female point of view.

Advertisement

Im making a movie about a witch, its about witchcraft, and its going to have to put a spell on the audience, Biller said. And cinema is already a magical spell, its already about voyeurism. So the men are being mesmerized by Elaine in the movie and I want the audience to be mesmerized by the film.

For the Los Angeles-based Biller, the all-inclusive aspect of her work is an important element for the craft of the movies but also conjuring the specific mindset and worldview she is trying to create for an audience. Her previous feature was 2007s Viva, in which she starred as a woman caught up in the suburban world of the 1970s sexual revolution. She spent about two years traveling and promoting the movie. Biller noted that despite the films positive reception and reviews, all it led to were numerous offers to appear in pornographic films from filmmakers hoping her credibility could allow them some mainstream crossover.

The anger, confusion and depression Biller felt from that response was partly what fueled the righteous fury at the heart of The Love Witch, even as it comes swathed in sumptuous fabrics and a palate of deeply saturated colors. It is that personal aspect that also sets her films apart from a simple retro homage or va-va-voom Russ Meyer-styled appropriation.

What I always do is relate it to my own experience, my banal experience, my downtrodden existence as a woman in the world, Biller said. And this is whats different than the films people compare my films to. Theres not that level of personal experience going into the movies men are making about sexy women. Because thats half of it. Its from the inside of a woman, the inside of a femme fatale.

The film was shot in locations in Northern California and across Los Angeles. Biller enlisted cinematographer M. David Mullen, who she knew from her time at California Institute of the Arts and who went on to shoot films such as Jennifers Body. He shot Witch on 35-millimeter film, attempting to replicate vintage lighting and camera techniques. (Some venues, such as the Los Angeles run at the Nuart, are even exhibiting the film in 35mm.)

Im doing a thing for men and Im doing a thing for women. And the thing Im doing for women tends to be invisible to men and I like that.  Ann Biller on The Love Witch

While Biller played the lead role in Viva herself, for The Love Witch she knew she needed an actress with abilities beyond what she felt she was capable of. While meeting with actresses to cast the part, she had an immediate feeling about Robinson.

Shes got this weird bitchy diffidence, Biller said. Actors are so hungry and they just want the part and they come in all whiny and desperate. And she just came in and was like, whatever.

Waiting for the photo shoot, Robinson, who has her first lead role in the film, was checking her cellphone while dressed in a sheer black dressing gown, vintage-style bullet bra, garter belt, briefs, stockings and heels. Her elaborate hair and electric eye makeup, along with dramatic statement jewelry, felt at once ceremonial and somehow casual.

Robinson noted how in preparation she and Biller watched a number of films together including Leave Her to Heaven starring Gene Tierney and Secret Ceremony starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow. But for Robinson it was Biller and the world she created that provided the greatest inspiration.

I was so in awe of her attention to detail and it was inspiring to me as an actress, Robinson said of Biller. The way you came on set and everything was so impeccable, you just live in this world. Its like nothing Ive ever experienced as an actress before.

She creates an entire universe. Its hers, added Jared Sanford, executive producer and an actor in the film. Sanford is a longtime collaborator of Billers, and it is his Los Feliz home that provided the location for the photo shoot and also where Biller stores racks of costumes and many props. She chose every object and every color, every moment is an invention by her. So it is a complete world.

While she is cautious to warn that The Love Witch is not just sexploitation pastiche, Biller also wants to make it clear that its OK to be turned on by the movie, but asks viewers not to just stop there. For straight men in particular, the idea that a movie can be sexy and playful on the surface and also contain something deeper underneath can cause scrambled circuits and feelings of internal confusion. And thats OK too.

On some level I was doing that on purpose to men. My intention is to mesmerize men in this way, being sexually stunned by the film, Biller said. What I object to is when people say that all I was doing was this thing for men. Because Im doing a double thing, Im doing a thing for men and Im doing a thing for women. And the thing Im doing for women tends to be invisible to men and I like that.

SIGN UP for the free Indie Focus movies newsletter 

Mark.Olsen@latimes.com

Follow on Twitter: @IndieFocus

Also:

Warren Beatty talks Madonna, Ishtar, his conquests, his new movie and just about everything else

Rebecca Hall and the makers of Christine explore a real-life tragedy

Park Chan-wook returns with The Handmaiden, an erotic romance, con-artist story and period piece
Fans of Downton Abbey may want to sit down before reading this: In the opening scene of Michelle Dockerys new TNT series, Good Behavior, the woman formerly known as Lady Mary Crawley scrubs a filthy toilet bowl. The stylish crime drama, created by Chad Hodge and Blake Crouch, follows Letty, a recovering meth addict, thief and con artist. Recently released from prison, shes attempting to stay straight.

But then she crosses paths with Javier, a devastatingly handsome hitman (Juan Diego Botto), and lots of very bad behavior ensues.

To have the opportunity to do something so different wasnt something I expected so soon after Downton Abbey, so I feel really fortunate, said the 34-year-old British actress, who also has a major role in the Netflix miniseries Godless, due in 2017.

Advertisement

Coming out of Downton Abbey, how did you decide what youd do next? What were your creative priorities?

Its difficult to top something like Downton. The writing is first and foremost. Good Behavior came about sort of midway through [the final season of Downton Abbey]. On first reading I thought, this is something I have to do. Letty is such an emotionally raw character. In the same way that Mary was a challenge for me, at the time, this was also a challenge.

Letty and Mary are, at least superficially, quite different. Do you see any similarities?

Theres definitely parallels with these women, two very strong women whove been through a significant amount of trouble in their life. You do carry with you some of what youve gained from those other roles that youve played. Ill never forget Mary. She has a very special place in my heart.

Did you get lots of offers for costume dramas after Downton Abbey?

Surprisingly, no. What Ive always hoped for is a varied career and different characters and times in history to learn about. [Being typecast in period roles] wasnt really something that I was too worried about. Id already done a film, Sense of an Ending, which is present day. Godless, the Netflix miniseries that Im shooting right now, is set in 1883. I have to say I loved going back to period clothes.

Michelle Dockery poses in between filming a scene of Downton Abbey at Highclere Castle. (Bethany Clarke / For The Times )

Its wonderful to play a female role that is so, so strong and very honest and unapologetic.  Michelle Dockery

There were times during Good Behavior that I wondeed what the Dowager would say.

Thats what all the headlines will say, Im sure. Its wonderful to play a female role that is so, so strong and very honest and unapologetic. Letty doesnt behave in the way society tells you is good, but she doesnt apologize for that. She is who she is, but she is trying to be the best version of herself. It really is an exploration of what is good behavior. When you meet her, shes trying to get on the straight and narrow. The problem is thats really boring.

How did it feel to say goodbye to Downton Abbey?

We each had our own ending because not everyone wrapped at the same time. It was a strange feeling finishing something like that, that journey ending after six years. It felt like the right time but of course it was sad to leave it behind. Everyones off doing their own things and we all try and stay in touch.

You got your start on the stage in England. Any plans to do Broadway?

Yeah, Id love to. Theater full stop, I dont care where it is, actually. Its just a question of timing and the right thing. I do miss being onstage.

You shot Good Behavior in North Carolina and now youre in New Mexico for Godless.

Its certainly an adjustment. Humidity to dry heat. The weather is one of the main things. I have to drink a lot more water than I normally would. Wilmington is a beautiful, beautiful place. I didnt really know what to expect and kind of fell in love with it. And the same with Santa Fe. Im a bit of a Gypsy at the moment, but really enjoying it

What was the biggest challenge to this role?

The American accent. When I did the pilot, I kept up the accent for the first week or so while I was on set just to keep the feel of it constantly. I didnt have to do that so much going into the series because by that point I was really beginning to embody the character. Also, its exhausting to do that constantly.

Accent aside, it must feel physically liberating to play someone like Letty after Mary.

That was part of the challenge of Mary for me, that stillness, that very subtle performance which was very different from this. Letty is much more expressive and physically much freer.

What helped you build this character?

Certain performances really were an inspiration to me. Edie Falco in Nurse Jackie, a character who is struggling with addiction, for me that was a great source.

One of the best things I looked at was a documentary called The Life and Times of Doris Payne, about this now-86-year-old woman who has been a thief her whole life. Like Letty, she would dress up as these characters, essentially, and walk into jewelry stores and pretend that she was this rich woman looking for a fabulous piece of jewelry. Its a fascinating documentary about the mind of a thief and why they do it. [Its] the high of actually doing it and getting away with it. Thats why Letty does it, because it keeps her off of drugs and alcohol.

Have you practiced picking pockets?

The only thing Ive ever stolen was penny sweets when I was a kid. I was a pretty good girl.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour 

Follow me @MeredithBlake
Pottery Barn Kids will be serving up some Italian flavor come January when Margherita Maccapani Missoni Amos becomes the latest young designer to lend her talents to the Williams-Sonoma Inc.-owned retailer. The Margherita Missoni for Pottery Barn Kids collection comprises over 50 pieces for the nursery, bedroom and playroom, and is her first foray into childrens home furnishings. Amos, who has two young sons with her race car driver husband Eugenio Amos, launched her childrens clothing line Margherita Kids in March 2015.

Here, she talks about her latest design endeavor.

What were your inspirations for this collection?

Margherita Maccapani Missoni Amos: With Margherita Kids, I seek to design childrens wear that encourages self-expression and allows children to explore their individuality. When the brand launched last year, I already had a whole world for children in mind  not just clothing, but lifestyle products, too. I dreamed of creating everything from accessories to bedding to furniture, but it takes time to expand into new categories. When Pottery Barn Kids approached me to create this collection, I thought, Its such a natural progression. I want this collection to inspire kids to imagine, create and play. Its sophisticated but whimsical, colorful and cheerful.

Advertisement

What learning experiences did you take from Margherita Kids and bring to Pottery Barn Kids?

Its been fun to use my experiences both as a mother and as a designer, from the conception of this project to the final products. As with the Margherita Kids collection, the items in this collaboration are meant to be mixed and matched. Theres a lot of mixing of colors, patterns and textures. Its quite playful.

What are some of your favorite pieces in the collection?

I absolutely love the graphic black-and-white pop-color striped rug and the color-blocked rug. Then theres a wicker pendant lamp which I adore. Theres also a lot of precious embroidery in the collection, which I think both parents and children will love. The lullaby-embroidered bedding and nursery pouches are my favorite.

Whats next for Margherita Kids?

Well be launching some new categories in the near future and this spring, the collection will be carried at John Lewis, Lane Crawford, Lord & Taylor, and several new retailers including Harvey Nichols, Nordstrom, Next and Macys. I hope to continue developing new categories and increasing the brands presence globally. Ill also continue working on a number of collaborations; theres always new and exciting projects in the works.
Ara Papian: It is important to know who Trump's aide will be (video)

Head of the Modus Vivendi Center, expects changes in the world after Donald Trumps victory in the U.S. presidential elections. I expect good changes for Armenia. Trump is a little unpredictable, but I expect interesting developments for us, Ara Papian said on November 11. The political analyst says at this moment the recognition of the Armenian Genocide is not as urgent and important for us as compensation for it. Mr. Papian does not expect major changes in the U.S.-Armenian relations over the Karabakh issue; rather he sees certain stability in them. The U.S will be one of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries and will try to come up with initiatives, though Trump personally said that he is unaware of the problems in Artsakh, Karabakh. At this moment, it is more important to know who Trumps aide will be who will teach him how to work. Bako Sahakyans congratulations [sent to Trump] will not play any role and will be considered a private, rather than public congratulation. Mr. Papian says Russia was delighted by Trumps victory as it hopes that the new U.S. President will stop sanctions. Speaking about the military exercises to be held by Azerbaijan on the border with Karabakh, the political analyst said it is disturbing as Azerbaijan is trying to solve the problem by force but they cannot.
While many Hollywood liberals were still processing the results of the presidential election, Ralph Lauren made its presence known on the West Coast with a cocktail party on Wednesday night to celebrate the reopening of its Rodeo Drive flagship.

Tapping a next-gen set of hostesses in Emmy Rossum, Camilla Belle, Dylan Penn, Bella Heathcote, Langley Fox Hemingway and Alexandra Richards, the house channeled the optimism of a younger generation on what could have been a bleak night.

It was definitely tough getting up this morning. I was hoping to enter the new year with our first female president, so Im definitely disappointed, but I have to respect the process and the system and know that the sun came up today, said Rossum. Im happy to be alive and healthy and in a free country where I have the opportunity to vote and exercise my opinion. It was heard, but it didnt prevail. But it will hopefully next time.

Advertisement

Belle agreed, We have to be positive and hope for the best. Enough of this negativity. Were lucky to be American so you have to find the silver lining in something. This is such an iconic American brand and to be celebrating someone like Ralph, who is such a wonderful human and pioneer, that makes me happy.

Hemingway said the houses timeless Americana vibe was apropos. Hopefully we stick with that instead of being sad. I think theres a lot of love right now in a scary realization that was not expected. A lot of people, instead of sitting and waiting, are taking control of their beliefs and its an exciting time because its so shocking. Its time to change.

Underneath the stores grand staircase, Richards spun Whitney Houstons How Will I Know to keep the crowds spirits up. Its like a mansion in here, like a big open closet, she said. Ive worked with Ralph before so its really nice of them to think of me to DJ this. I love coming out to California, especially when its getting cold in New York. Having arrived the night before as the votes were being counted, she said, It is what it is. Work is work and you gotta stay busy. Keep moving forward, thats my motto. You gotta roll with the punches.
What do you think of when you hear the words Aunt Jemima? While African Americans have shaped and defined the food culture of the United States for centuries, these rich and varied contributions have often been overshadowed by demeaning stereotypes such as the illiterate Aunt Jemima.

Culinary journalist (and former Times writer) Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years compiling one of the largest private collections of cookbooks by African American authors. Her book, The Jemima Code, explores many of these cookbooks, unraveling what she has termed the Jemima code, a mythology compiled of various stereotypes of African American women into a mammy-type character. The book has won a number of awards and honors, including the 2016 James Beard Foundation Award.

Tipton-Martin will be featured at a brunch and book signing from noon to 2 p.m. Saturday at Dulans Soul Food on Crenshaw in Los Angeles. We caught up with her to discuss her book, its success and its significance today.

Advertisement

The Jemima Code explores more than 150 books from rare 19th century texts to modern cookbooks. Why are they laid out in chronological order?

The book is chronologically organized because that makes the most sense, but it is interesting that they present themselves also as a social arc. We see the kinds of activities African Americans were pursuing in response to external forces against them at various times.

We can see that in the 19th century, during that time when people did not own their own lives, the most that they could do was try to express their humanity. You see that in the first book by Robert Roberts [The House Servants Directory, first published in 1827]. When he speaks to his young trainees, he talks to them about his work ethics and what he values  time management, hygiene, self-decorum, promptness  values we just dont associate with that working class.

We can roll forward by decades and see that by the turn of the century, people wanted to be educated and they understood the value of that. Even if society was binding them to work in service, then they were determined to be educated about service, and to present themselves as learned servants.

The books were also responsive to the times.

As they get more freedom, under Jim Crow, when other cookbooks were disparaging them and mocking their intelligence, the authors response for each of these social events is a culinary response. And so the responses to the Jim Crow stereotyping in the industry are books about black history and the accomplishments we made, whether they were acknowledged or not. And the uplifting of the community becomes the messaging.

How has the book resonated with readers?

This code cuts across racial lines, and it has impacted people in different ways. My experience with Southern white people is that they had to  and many people have described in emotional terms  suppress childhood memories associated with these [African American] women. As children, they might be standing in the kitchen with this woman that they love and worship, but outside in the front room and in the streets, people are burning crosses. The kids dont know what to do with that, so they suppress it.

These are the kinds of emotions that have been tumbling out of people in every city I go. And theyre able to now reclaim the positive memories that they have of these women and what contributions they made to their families.

What about the African American community?

African Americans have not had as many of those experiences with this book. Im hoping to intentionally visit sites where I can draw attention to the African American experience. I want black people to also be able to reclaim this woman. And I think their initial instinctive reaction is, Oh, well shes probably only a white historian trying to keep black women in that service box, when that is the opposite of what Ive been trying to accomplish.

The Jemima Code has received a number of awards. What do all of these awards, and the reception of the book, mean in the larger social context?

It has been very-well received. This creates a state of hopefulness for me. It was evident in the week before the [presidential] election, I was in North Carolina twice, to standing-room only crowds of mixed and diverse people, students, young people that were crying out to know more, to share with one another

What I saw was an evolution of readers engaging with material and having their own personal experiences with the code and realizing the manipulation of history and the mythologies created to divide us. People became extremely emotional in response to this book, and it was very hopeful to me. Those were signs of hope, that more people got in touch with the realities of racial division in this country. The more that those experiences occurred, the closer we would be to racial reconciliation.

But theres still division.

Its difficult to answer today in the glare of the results of the election. What Im concerned about is that the dominating expression evidenced in the election isnt just about race or class as The Jemima Code and other American mythologies articulate. It goes back to the treatment of women, to the narrow dominance and control by a small group of people over a larger population.

How does The Jemima Code fit into into the larger issues and explorations of identity and appropriation?

I have always been reluctant to endorse positions of first or only or groundbreaking or watershed. But the reality is that we knew that the publication of The Jemima Code was going to create opportunity for new voices to emerge and for those voices to not only be heard, but to be celebrated, embraced and respected. That when we all look at that cover in the beginning, were all in the same place. Whatever our individual place is, its disjointed. We are all at the state of realizing that there are two sides to every story, and our side has not always been heard or honored.

Marcus Samuelsson just released The Red Rooster cookbook based on his restaurant of the same name and its reflection of Harlem and its cuisine. Other regional and indigenous cuisines are increasingly being recognized and celebrated in cookbooks, articles and books, as well as restaurants.

Thats what Samuelsson is doing; hes being recognized and respected for his uniqueness, rather than continually being pushed back into the soul food box. That [box] is the experience black people have all the time  that food youre creating or that conversation youre having  when it doesnt reflect the outer worlds expectation of what blackness means. He is being respected for his ability to claim the historical legacy, but also to adapt it. And thats what my next book, and the next logical step, is for us.

What is your next project?

We did not include recipes in The Jemima Code because the material was already complicated enough. But now we want to take the authors featured in the book, which include Marcus, and focus on their recipes. Ive been testing over 500 recipes for the book that is to come, titled Jubilee. Its so-named because of the biblical expression of freedom in the Old Testament and what it meant for the Israelites to be free. And African Americans have also had jubilee celebrations. The diversity of the two enslaved populations, its symbolic to me.

Love cooking as much as I do? Follow me @noellecarter

ALSO

Try this roasted squash and apple salad recipe

Holiday Cookie Bake-Off: Enter our 6th competition now

Sweet potatoes are in season. Here are some of our favorite recipes
If youre single and facing a lonely Saturday, think about signing up for the first Love Me Run , where singles ages 20 to 90 can meet others over a pleasant 5K sprint/walk in Santa Monica. The brainchild of Valencia-based Camilla Swagar, the event encourages people to stop swiping a screen and instead meet in a casual setting. There will be a pre-run juice bar and a post-run social gathering. In between, people are paired with a different prospective match for each of the five kilometers  some geared specifically toward walking and conversing instead of running.

The run starts at 11 a.m. Saturday at Clover Park, 2600 Ocean Park Blvd., in Santa Monica. Arrive a couple of hours early to register and mingle.

The cost is $45 in advance; $60 on race day. Discounts available for companions, or wingmen, and groups of four.

Advertisement

Info: lovemerun.com

Ayurvedic specialist Jeff Perlman will run a two-hour workshop on pranayama, a breathing technique purported to increase lung capacity, help circulation and calm and de-stress the mind, at Goorus Yoga in Pacific Palisades. The $35 class will show participants how to be more mindful of their breathing.

Time: 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday

Info: Goorus Yoga, 15327 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 765- 4871, goor.us

Heres a festive take on spirituality: a $35 yoga class combined with a wine tasting. Cindy Godell, an instructor at One Down Dog yoga studios in Silver Lake and Eagle Rock, is offering a one-hour vinyasa yoga class at the Eagle Rock location on Nov. 20. After, sommelier Chiara Shannon will guide participants through a tasting of three wines alongside healthful snacks.

It takes place from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. on Nov. 20.

Info: One Down Dog, 2150 Colorado Blvd., onedowndog.com

READ ON!

Why midnight snacking is the worst

7 reasons why you cant lose the weight

Actress Sofia Vergaras secret? Lifting weights
Good morning. It is Veterans Day, Friday, Nov. 11. Shes got a fantastic sweater and even better dance moves. This woman looked like she had a great time at the Warriors game. Heres what else is happening in the Golden State:

TOP STORIES

Future of L.A.

Advertisement

Mayor Eric Garcettis vision for Los Angeles is coming into clearer focus after voters approved measures to build new transit lines and housing for the homeless. Garcetti now has billions of dollars to put toward more mass transit, housing for the homeless and other issues. But as he seeks reelection, there are a few darker clouds  rising crime and rents among them. Los Angeles Times

Crime and punishment

Many looked to California this week to see if the time had come to overturn the death penalty. Instead, voters appeared to back a measure that would speed up the process. California voters have spoken loud and clear that they want to keep the death penalty intact, Sacramento County Dist. Atty. Anne Marie Schubert said in a statement. This is the ninth time California voters have voted in favor of keeping the death penalty for the most heinous killers. Los Angeles Times

Lost funds

Audits show Los Angeles County likely lost $6 million in tax revenue because officials did not adequately monitor the lease with the operator of the L.A. County fairgrounds. The finding comes after months of scrutiny by The Times over high salaries and other issues involving the Los Angeles County Fair Assn., which for decades has operated the sprawling recreation and business complex in Pomona. Los Angeles Times

Dont miss a moment of the Los Angeles Times coverage of the election. Sign up here for a week of free access.

L.A. AT LARGE

Taking it to the streets: Thousands of people flooded the streets of downtown Los Angeles chanting, carrying signs and at one point burning a papier-mache head of Donald Trump on the steps of City Hall. But it was the decision to block traffic on the 101 Freeway that concerned city officials most. Mayor Eric Garcetti said he supported peaceful demonstrations but said demonstrators need to be respectful and safe. Los Angeles Times

A resolution: Ending a long environmental battle, Orange County tollway officials agreed in a legal settlement to preserve San Onofre State Beach and withdraw their approval of a six-lane highway through the popular park. Los Angeles Times

POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

Gubernatorial run: This was a long time coming: Former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is running for governor. Villaraigosa said his campaign will focus on building up the middle class, improving public schools and investing in infrastructure. Im going to reach out to unions, to business, to every interest group in every part of the state. Because my candidacy is about the public interest, he said. Los Angeles Times

Saving the Earth: Gov. Jerry Brown is calling for unity in the wake of Tuesdays election, but not at the expense of Californias values. We will protect the precious rights of our people and continue to confront the existential threat of our time  devastating climate change, he said in a statement. Los Angeles Times

Were outta here: Is there going to be a Calexit? Yes California is backing a constitutional exit from the rest of the country. California is more economically powerful than France and has a population larger than Poland. Point-by-point, California compares and competes with countries, not just the 49 other states, according to the campaign. CNN

Making sense of it all: Columnist Robin Abcarian went to Berkeley and found young people are feeling a lot of rage and grief after Tuesdays election. Its hard for adults not to take these losses personally. So imagine how much harder it is for the teenagers and young adults who have been through cataclysmic social upheaval in the past couple of years, she writes. Los Angeles Times

New developments: NIMBYs lost in Tuesdays election. Via the ballot, voters in Southern California embraced public transit and dense development. I think theyre loud people, but theyre not as politically powerful or numerous as we sometimes think, said urban planner Shane Phillips. LA Weekly

CRIME AND COURTS

Singled out: Muslim and Latino students in California reported a number of incidents Wednesday that they believe are related to the election of Donald Trump. We are unequivocally committed to supporting all members of our community. That is who we are. It is a core strength and part of our DNA, according to a statement from the chancellor of the California State University system and the president of the California State Student Assn. Los Angeles Times

Student targeted: A 19-year-old woman at San Jose State University says a man tried to yank her hijab off. It happened a day after Trump was announced as president-elect. If it was for another reason, its such a weird coincidence, said Esra Altun. Mercury News

Rehab Mogul arrested: Chris Bathum was arrested on multiple charges of fraud, money laundering, grand theft and sexual assault after a yearlong investigation. Bathum owns a chain of 20 sober-living homes and outpatient clinics. LA Weekly

DROUGHT AND CLIMATE

Put away the umbrella: La Nina could bring California a dry winter, but its exact effect is unclear. Sacramento Bee

CALIFORNIA CULTURE

Beauty out there: How Death Valley remains so hot, so dry but still so vibrantly alive. The valley shimmered with myriad points of color, as if Georges Seurat had touched up a Georgia OKeeffe. The New Yorker

Information flow: Did Facebook and Twitter help Trump win the presidency? Dont be so fast to credit (or blame) Silicon Valley. BuzzFeed

Whats the future? But the election of Trump may force the people behind publishing platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to rethink their role in media. Our democracy has a lot of problems, but there are few things that could impact it for the better more than Facebook starting to care  really care  about the truthfulness of the news that its users share and take in, said Joshua Benton with Nieman Lab. The Atlantic

Remembering the past: Twenty-two boxes of Oskar Schindlers papers have ended up at Chapman Universitys Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education. Orange County Register

Lets chill: Its been a long week. If youre in San Francisco, maybe treat yourself to one of these Bloody Marys this weekend. SFist

CALIFORNIA ALMANAC

It will be 82 and sunny in San Diego. In Los Angeles, it will be 86 and sunny. Riverside will be 88 and sunny. San Francisco will have sun and a high of 71. Sacramento will have fog in the morning and later a high of 75.

AND FINALLY

Todays California Memory comes from Amy Lamon:

I was born and raised in Palm Springs back in the 70s. I grew up there when it was still pretty dead. All shops and restaurants would close in August, so downtown really became a ghost town. What I remember and loved the most were the sand dunes.  They were everywhere. We would roll down them sideways, similar to how others would roll in snow, and wed make sand angels. Those were special days!

If you have a memory or story about the Golden State, share it with us. Send us an email to let us know what you love or fondly remember about our state. (Please keep your story to 100 words.)

Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints and ideas to Alice Walton or Shelby Grad.
Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez led an interfaith prayer service Thursday evening in which he stressed the importance of unity and reassured immigrants in the country illegally that the church would continue supporting them after the election of Donald Trump.

More than 100 people, including Mayor Eric Garcetti and religious leaders, gathered for the event in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles.

In the past couple days since the election  we have children in our schools who are scared, Gomez told the congregation. They think the government is going to come and deport their parents.

Advertisement

During his campaign, Trump promised to build a wall along the the U.S.-Mexico border and deport people in the country illegally.

Tonight we promise our brothers and sisters who are undocumented, we will never leave you alone, Gomez said, drawing applause.

After the archbishops remarks, interfaith leaders including Rabbi Sharon Brous; Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council; and the Rev. Najuma Smith-Pollard, program manager at USCs Center for Religion and Civic Culture; echoed the archbishops call to unite.

Brous called for solidarity to ensure justice and equality for all, including Muslims, the LGBT community and people of color.

Racism that has always been part of this country has surfaced with a vengeance, Brous said, referring to recent attacks on minorities following the election.

Ernesto Vega, a Mexican immigrant who is the archdioceses coordinator of Hispanic Ministry for Adults, attended the service and expressed fear about the fallout from the election.

Im close to becoming a U.S. citizen, Vega said. But I think of my brothers and sisters who have recently immigrated, who are barely learning the language and who are being punished because of the color of their skin.

When I came here to this country, I did feel discrimination -- in the Catholic Church, in society and in school. But I thought that we had gone way ahead, Vega said. Now it seems like all this effort that society has done is in danger of being destroyed.

Religious leaders at Thursdays prayer event urged people to look out for one another regardless of their religion, race or background.

Be together, Gomez said in his closing remarks. Thats what this is all about.

LA mayor Eric Garcetti hugs Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, following an interfaith prayer service for peace and unity at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times )

makeda.easter@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @makedaeaster

ALSO

Anti-Trump protesters swarm downtown L.A. for third night

The Ku Klux Klan says it will hold a Trump victory parade in North Carolina

A primer on executive power: What Trump can and cant do
Ronnie Shirley cant wrap his head around the many questions he has about the death of his 39-year-old daughter, who was shot and killed by Torrance police last month.

He struggles to understand why three Torrance police officers shot at his daughter, Michelle Lee Shirley, as she was driving in the city on the afternoon of Oct. 31. It was clear, he said, she had been in some type of accident before the shooting because her car was damaged and she was probably in distress.

Torrance police said they did what they had to do to prevent a larger tragedy.

Advertisement

It was a losing situation by all involved, but we tried to stop that car, said Sgt. Paul Kranke. We didnt want to do this.

It was a losing situation by all involved, but we tried to stop that car. We didnt want to do this.  Sgt. Paul Kranke

On Thursday, Ronnie Shirley and his wife filed a claim for civil rights violations, demanding more information about what led up to their daughters fateful encounter with police.

Boris Treyzon, an attorney representing the Shirley family, said the parents havent decided whether to file a lawsuit, but he has filed notices, asking local agencies to preserve evidence. The attorney and his firm are scouring social media, looking for more videos of the shooting. So far, Treyzon has obtained two videos.

From the videos, he said, Shirley appeared to be acting irrationally and that her car had signs of a very serious accident. In the moments leading up to the shooting, Treyzon said it appeared police had her car confined near a gas station and that officers appeared to wave her through.

She starts driving, she appears to be making a turn, then all of a sudden 20 shots ring out, Treyzon said. We dont understand why 20 shots are fired.

Kranke said he understands the parents grief, but that police had no way of knowing that Shirley was experiencing a mental episode when they encountered her.

There is nothing to alert us that someone is going through a mental episode, he said. She didnt want to be stopped.

According to police, multiple callers had reported an erratic driver in the area of Arlington and Post avenues about 2:28 p.m. The vehicle had extensive collision damage and the side airbags had been deployed.

Police spotted the vehicle, which they said had been driving dangerously, and began pursuing it through residential streets for several minutes. After driving for more than a mile, police used a precision immobilization technique to disable her vehicle at Sepulveda Boulevard and Cabrillo Avenue.

While in reverse, the vehicle accelerated and struck a police cruiser, Kranke said. Then, Michelle Shirley drove forward and rammed into a second cruiser, according to Kranke.

Thats when three officers opened fire on the vehicle. Kranke said he doesnt know how many shots were fired.

Michelle was wounded and taken to an area hospital, where she died about 30 minutes later.

Kranke said officers were faced with limited options at the time. It was a busy Halloween afternoon and children had just been released from nearby elementary and high schools, he said.

We would have had a major tragedy, Kranke said.

Michelles vehicle, he said, was essentially a weapon and posed a significant threat because she tried to run over the officers.

Geoff Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina who has researched police policies and training in pursuits, said the only other tactic officers could have used to stop Michelles vehicle would have been to block her in.

Still, he said, the situation was likely unfolding quickly and they couldnt allow her to keep going.

She was just like a guided missile, Alpert said.

To her father, Michelle was a bright woman who was a loving mother to her 14-year-old son. She studied law and had an ambition of becoming an attorney, but never passed the state exam, her father said.

Michelles struggles with bipolar disorder were not a secret to those who knew her.

She talked about her battle in an video, wanting to raise awareness about mental illness.

If I could rewind time and go back 10 years I would have taken my first diagnosis more seriously, she said.

Her symptoms began when she was an undergraduate in college.

Sleepless nights led to an overload of creative ideas that went unfinished, she said. Her thoughts became unmanageable, and she set a fire inside her condominium.

That woke me to the reality I had bipolar disorder, she said. I could not just blame stress or the devil. This time I took the diagnosis seriously. I learned that for some unexplained reason, all of a sudden, my brain will just kick into high gear and start processing information too quickly.

Times staff writer Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.

veronica.rocha@latimes.com

For breaking news in California, follow @VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

ALSO

Nearly 200 arrested in third night of anti-Trump protests in downtown L.A.

Two Newport Beach fires that burn industrial lot, middle school building deemed suspicious

Flights for 1,500 passengers canceled at LAX after a fender-bender between truck and plane
In spring 1993, historian David Crowe sat spellbound in a darkened theater, viewing the saga of a Holocaust hero who risked business ruin and his own personal safety to save the lives of some 1,200 Jews hed hired at his Polish enamelware factories.

Steven Spielbergs epic Schindlers List, depicting the exploits of German industrialist Oskar Schindler, tugged at Crowes heart with its stark black and white scenes recreating the terror of the ghettos in Krakow, Poland, during World War II.

Schindler had joined the Nazi party, but used his fortune to save his Jewish workers, creating lists of employees he said were invaluable while bartering and lavishing bribes on a ruthless work camp commander intent on sending them to a concentration camp.

Advertisement

The movies namesake would soon dominate Crowes life, moving him to devote seven and a half years to researching and writing whats been called the definitive biography of Schindler.

Now, all of Crowes documents, interview transcripts and translations for Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind The List  will soon be available to students and scholars at Chapman University  courtesy of a transformative gift to the school, officials announced Thursday.

It is believed to be among the most complete collections of papers and archival materials on Schindler and his wife, Emilie, officials said.

I had been searching for a home for these things and I thought some museums might be sort of snooty, said Crowe, an emeritus professor of history at Elon University in North Carolina. Unless youre a scholar, theyre not going to let you come in and look at this stuff, thumb through the knowledge. Here, learning is welcomed and theres the right space for it.

Marilyn Harran, director of Chapmans Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, remembers reading a message from Crowe offering his donation, then getting 19 boxes shipped via FedEx that included police records, photos and architectural sketches.

I was stunned and very excited, Harran said. Its an incredible milestone to receive a collection of this size, of this educational value. And what makes it so extraordinary is it will be accessible to those eager to study more.

Harran set about finding a safe space for these treasures, choosing the Brandman Survivors Room inside the Sala and Aron Samueli Holocaust Memorial Library. Crowe got his first look at the 720-square-foot archival space at Thursdays ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The climate-controlled room highlights the experiences of three Holocaust survivors who were on Schindlers list  Leon Leyson and Leopold and Ludmilla Page  and is a combination work and reading space with the new archives separated by a glass wall. Harran plans to hire an archivist who will start in January, preparing the collection  valued at $250,000  for use by students and researchers.

Crowe, 73, whos also a Chapman presidential fellow, is a specialist in Russian and Chinese history, comfortable with the old-fashioned way we research. For his 700-plus page tome published in 2004, he crisscrossed the globe, traveling to Israel and Argentina and making multiple stops in the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany on Schindlers trail.

This was pre email, but I prefer digging that way, Crowe said. Something is missing when youre sitting in an armchair scrolling down the screen versus combing through dusty clippings in a prison that once was secret police headquarters. I have umpteenth pages of handwritten notes. Copious notes.

Crowe had never heard of Schindler before Spielbergs film and later used his facility in eight languages, including French, German, Hebrew and Yiddish, to mine the rescuers background.

His collection provides a real insight into how an eminent historian sifts through so much information to create a book, Harran said, adding that the material shows us not just who Schindler saved but how he dealt with Nazi bureaucracy.

The donation, she said, will boost the librarys credentials and will build on long-term relationships the school has with several Holocaust survivors. The greatest tribute we can offer them and the Schindlers is to continue to learn from their actions.

Harran stressed one more point.

Dr. Crowe shows us that in a complex digital world, papers  documents  still matter, she said. In this election, you see people doing a lot of fact-checking to figure out what story they do or do not believe in. For his book, he did that too. And he understands that its part of our future to protect our past.

anh.do@latimes.com

Twitter: @newsterrier

ALSO

In California, death penalty abolitionists pledge to keep fighting

What the academys boost in foreign membership means in the aftermath of #OscarsSoWhite

Call to lock her up puts Trump in a bind over his threat to prosecute Hillary Clinton
The founder of 19 sober-living facilities in Southern California and Colorado was arrested Thursday on suspicion of sexually assaulting more than a dozen female patients as well as defrauding insurers in an elaborate $176-million scheme, authorities said.

Christopher Bathum, a self-described rehab mogul, was taken into custody at his Agoura Hills home during a raid that included searches of 15 locations in Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to law enforcement officials. The 55-year-old operator of Community Recovery of Los Angeles, also known as CRLA, was booked on several counts of sexual assault, said Lt. Todd Deeds of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Departments Major Crime Bureau.

In addition, Bathum and the firms chief executive, Kirsten Wallace  who was also arrested  are accused of stealing patients identities to buy health policies without their knowledge, according to the California Department of Insurance. They continued to bill insurance companies for tens of millions of dollars in drug and alcohol treatment after the services were completed, the department alleged in a news release.

Advertisement

Insurance companies paid out $44 million before they discovered the fraud, according to the department.

Bathum and Wallaces alleged conspiracy victimized hundreds of people addicted to drugs and alcohol by keeping them in a never-ending cycle of treatment, addiction, and fraud  all the while lining their pockets with millions of dollars from allegedly fraudulent insurance claims, said Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones in a statement.

According to the Sheriffs Department, Bathum ran six centers in Colorado and 13 drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Detectives began investigating Bathum in May after someone filed a sexual assault complaint, Deeds said. Deeds declined to describe the allegations against Bathum, but he said more than a dozen former patients have accused him of sexual assault. The assaults allegedly occurred between 2012 and 2016 at the treatment centers.

Deeds said he suspects there could be more victims and urged any others to notify investigators.

We want every one of them to come forward, the lieutenant said. He is in custody right now.

Formal charges have not been filed against Bathum, said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorneys office.

The investigation was launched a month before ABCs 20/20 aired an hourlong episode on Bathum and his treatment centers, which had been the subject of an L.A. Weekly report last year detailing the allegations and dozens of lawsuits filed against him.

In the episode, Amanda Jester, one of the women who filed a lawsuit against Bathum, said his Malibu facility appeared to offer the relief and help she needed to free herself from her alcohol addiction. Jester alleged that he sexually assaulted her in a sweat lodge on the massive property and in a hotel room.

I have no credit card, no money, no cellphone  I felt like I had no choice, she said.

Other recovering addicts praised Bathum for helping them.

Bathum has denied the allegations.

You gotta understand something. Youre in a world of accusations thats amazingly complex and has people saying ... all kinds of crazy things  in a trauma-filled world, he told 20/20.

veronica.rocha@latimes.com

For breaking news in California, follow @VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

MORE LOCAL NEWS

Los Angeles is ready to embrace a new future

Anti-Trump protesters swarm downtown L.A. for third night; graffiti and vandalism reported

Juan Corona, California serial killer convicted of killing 25 farmworkers, is again denied parole
A California review board has once again denied parole to Juan Corona, who was convicted of killing 25 itinerant farm laborers in what was once the worst serial murder case in U.S. history.

The state Board of Parole Hearings on Wednesday denied Coronas request for parole  his eighth appearance before the board.

Now 82, Corona is not eligible for a hearing for five years and will continue to serve his life sentence at Corcoran State Prison, according to Luis Patino, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Advertisement

Corona has been behind bars since 1971, when a farmer in Sutter County came along a freshly dug hole in a peach orchard. The farmer, who had contracted with Corona to hire field workers, returned the next day and saw the hole filled with dirt. To allay his suspicions, he called police.

In the shallow grave, officers found a mans body with his head hacked and his body riddled with stab wounds. Corona was arrested a week later. Over the next two weeks, police recovered the bodies of more slain farmworkers from shallow graves along the Feather River near Marysville, north of Sacramento.

The vast majority of the 25 victims were hacked and stabbed to death. One was shot.

The evidence against Corona was largely circumstantial and much of the motive around the killings has remained a mystery. From Coronas home and vehicles, investigators confiscated a green ledger book with the names of eight of the victims, along with an 18-inch machete, a post-hole digger, a wooden club and a gun.

Prosecutors also claimed they had a receipt from a local butcher with Coronas name and handwriting that was found in one of the graves.

After a lengthy trial in 1973, Corona was sentenced to 25 consecutive life terms  a penalty so harsh that it elicited gasps in the courtroom when the judge handed it down.

But a state appellate court overturned the first conviction in 1978, blasting Coronas defense attorney for mounting a farcical defense and calling no rebuttal witnesses to counter the prosecutions 119 witnesses.

A second trial began in 1982 and was notable for Coronas defense offering an alternative theory behind the slayings. His attorney told jurors that it was Coronas late brother who carried out the killings, driven by a maniacal rage that originated in the frustration of a morbid sexuality. The lawyer argued that Corona was more mild-mannered than his brother, and innocent.

After closing arguments took 12 days to complete, the jury of seven men and five women convicted Corona of all charges.

While in custody, he lost an eye from an inmate attack, his wife divorced him, he had at least two heart attacks and he suffers from dementia.

Corona intimated his guilt for the first time in a 2011 parole hearing, saying the men were winos and had trespassed in the orchards, the Associated Press reported.

But Sutter County Dist. Atty. Amanda Hopper told the AP that in Thursdays hearing, Corona appeared to walk back his earlier comments.

When it had anything to do with killing the 25 people or his mental state, he conveniently could no longer remember, Hopper told the news service. He specifically said that, I dont remember that I killed anyone, I dont remember that I did anything.

matt.hamilton@latimes.com

Twitter: @MattHjourno

ALSO

Uber driver charged with raping unconscious 17-year-old in Orange County

Man suspected in Winnetka double-killing arrested at U.S.-Mexico border, authorities say

Search for missing California mother continues after husband passes polygraph exam, officials say
A fender-bender between a truck and a plane grounded flights for nearly 1,100 passengers at Los Angeles International Airport.

A tow truck moving a China Southern Airlines flight at LAX collided with the aircraft late Thursday, sparking a chain reaction that canceled three flights. None of the roughly 450 passengers on the plane were injured, and the truck driver suffered only minor injuries, airport officials said.



For the record: An earlier version of this story said that the accident had forced the cancellation of two China Southern flights and affected nearly 1,500 passengers. Only one was canceled and nearly 1,100 fliers affected.

The collision happened just before midnight Thursday on a taxiing lane on the tarmac between Terminal 4 and the Tom Bradley International Terminal, LAX officials said. China Southern Flight 328 was scheduled to fly to Guangzhou but after the collision, the Airbus 380 aircraft was towed to another part of the airport for inspection and repairs. The nose gear door was damaged.

Advertisement

The collision forced authorities to close the taxi lane temporarily, which forced the China Southern flight and two American Airlines flights to be canceled.

Airport officials said 1,060 passengers were affected. The Guangzhou-bound flight was rescheduled for 10:20 p.m. Friday, officials said. An investigation into the crash is ongoing.

Joseph.serna@latimes.com

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.

ALSO

Nearly 200 arrested in third night of anti-Trump protests in downtown L.A.

Rehab mogul accused of sexually assaulting patients and elaborate fraud

Juan Corona, California serial killer convicted of killing 25 farmworkers, is again denied parole
Ameriabank: At the Vanguard of Armenia's Banking Sector

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

Google Ad

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

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
Two suspicious fires broke out hours apart in Newport Beach early Friday, triggering explosions that shook neighbors awake and knocked out power for nearby residents.

The first blaze was reported about 2:30 a.m. in the rear of an industrial business in the 800 block of Production Place after an explosion, said Newport Beach Fire Battalion Chief Jeff Boyles.

The area is known for homeless encampments and one person suffered third-degree burns in the fire, he said.

Advertisement

By nature of the explosion and fire and heat, it makes it suspicious by nature, Boyles said.

The fire knocked out power to more than 50 Southern California Edison customers, the companys website showed.

Just two hours later and two miles away, a fire broke out inside a small office next to the girls locker room at Ensign Intermediate School.

There appeared to be signs of a forced entry and damage to the electrical systems was suspicious, Boyles said.

A girls locker room doesnt just burn down for any reason, Boyles said.

Though the fires were both deemed suspicious, they likely started in noticeably different ways.

Its not like someone going around with a Molotov cocktail, Boyles said.

Several Orange County fire departments helped fight both blazes as Newport Beachs crews were spread thin due to the larger industrial fire, Boyles said.

The investigation into both fires is ongoing.

Joseph.serna@latimes.com

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.

ALSO

Flights for 1,500 passengers canceled at LAX after a fender-bender between truck and plane

Nearly 200 arrested in third night of anti-Trump protests in downtown L.A.

Juan Corona, California serial killer convicted of killing 25 farmworkers, is again denied parole
A police and FBI investigation is underway into the deaths of three people who were found early Friday at the scene of a house fire in a quiet Oakland neighborhood.

A woman, a San Jose resident, has been detained and was being interviewed by investigators in connection with the deaths, Oakland police Lt. Dom Arotzarena told KNTV.

We are still in the early stages of this investigation, he told reporters at the scene.

Advertisement

Few details have been released about the incident, which occurred at about 12:20 a.m. in the 9400 block of Dunbar Drive, according to the Oakland Police Department.

Someone called police after hearing multiple gunshots and seeing a man down in the street. The man was dead.

When officers arrived at the neighborhood, they found two women with gunshot wounds inside the two-story home. KNTV reported the women, who were dead, had also been stabbed.

According to the Oakland Fire Department, there was a blaze in the homes garage.

The FBI was assisting police and collecting forensic evidence, Arotzarena told the news station.

veronica.rocha@latimes.com

For breaking news in California, follow @VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

ALSO

Grief-stricken family demands answers after Torrance police fatally shoot woman

Nearly 200 arrested in third night of anti-Trump protests in downtown L.A.

Flights for 1,500 passengers canceled at LAX after a fender-bender between truck and plane
Nearly 200 people were arrested early Friday after demonstrators flooded the streets of downtown Los Angeles and marched between City Hall and the Staples Center, the third night of demonstrations against the election of Donald Trump as president.

An estimated 185 people were arrested and one officer was injured during the hours-long demonstrations, LAPD officials said. Details on the officers injuries were not available but he was expected to be released from the hospital early Friday, said Officer Norma Eisenman.

The crowd halted traffic but was mostly peaceful, although some vandalized property with graffiti, hurled bottles and launched fireworks during the incidents late Thursday and early Friday. At one point, a large boom resembling that of a firecracker thundered near 2nd and Spring streets.

Advertisement

One person defaced a Los Angeles police cruiser, prompting officers to reach for beanbag shotguns, but a clash with demonstrators was avoided.

A man with a megaphone urged fellow demonstrators not to resort to vandalism.

We are proud and productive people, and were gonna show them that, he yelled.

The arrests were made sometime after 1 a.m., mostly for vandalism or disobedience of a lawful order, according to Sgt. Jack Richter, an LAPD spokesman.

1 / 68 Police arrest an anti-Trump protester in the early morning hours Saturday. The LAPD arrested about 150 people at Grand Park after a night of marching through downtown L.A. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 68 Police arrest about 150 anti-Trump protesters at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles in Saturdays early morning hours. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 68 An anti-Trump protester scales a fence at Grand Park in Los Angeles to avoid being arrested by police in the early morning hours Saturday. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 68 LOS ANGELES, CALIF. -- THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2016: Anti-Trump protesters on the 101 freeway, in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 10, 2016. ((Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)) 5 / 68 Police prevent anti-Trump protesters from accessing the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles on Friday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 68 On Friday night an estimated 3,000 people marched throughout downtown Los Angeles protesting the election of Donald Trump. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 68 An estimated 3,000 people filled the streets of downtown Los Angeles on Friday night to protest the election of Donald Trump. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 8 / 68 LAPD officers circle a protester while he was being arrested during an anti-Trump protest Friday night. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters fill the streets of downtown Los Angeles Friday evening. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 10 / 68 A large group of anti-Trump protesters walks over the 4th St. ramp, off the I-110 south freeway on Friday night. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 11 / 68 A protester stands in the middle of Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles during an anti-trump march Friday night. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles TImes) 12 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters on 4th steert marching into downtown Los Angeles on Friday night. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles TImes) 13 / 68 Garrett Gage, 28, of Woodland Hills holds an American flag as he protests in downtown Los Angeles on Friday night. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles TImes) 14 / 68 A passenger takes a video of anti-Trump protesters on downtown L.A. streets on Friday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 15 / 68 Hundreds of anti-Trump protesters stream down Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles on Friday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 16 / 68 Protesters gather on the steps of L.A. City Hall before beginning their march through the streets of downtown on Friday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 17 / 68 A protester waves the peace sign to LAPD officers blocking the intersection of Olive Street and Olympic Boulevard during an anti-Trump march through downtown Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 18 / 68 A police officer takes aim at demonstrators after cans and bottles were thrown at LAPD officers during an anti-Trump march through downtown Los Angeles (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 19 / 68 Protesters chant and wave signs as LAPD officers halt their march through downtown Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 20 / 68 Protesters raise their hands as LAPD officers halt their march through downtown Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 21 / 68 Police officers stand guard at LA Live as anti-Trump demonstrators hit the streets. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 22 / 68 A anti-Trump demonstrator waves a large Mexican flag as protesters on the march snarl traffic in downtown Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 23 / 68 Motorists wait it out as anti-Trump protesters on the march snarl traffic in downtown Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 24 / 68 A small group of demonstrators blocks traffic at the intersection of Figueroa Street and Chick Hearn Way. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 25 / 68 Demonstrators gathers march near LA Live to protest President-elect Donald Trump on Thursdaynight. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 26 / 68 A small group of demonstrators march down Second Street in L.A. to protest President-elect Donald Trump. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 27 / 68 Demonstrators march down Spring Street in L.A. to protest President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 28 / 68 Some motorist join in to cheer on the anti-Trump protesters march up San Pedro street in Los Angeles on Nov. 9. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 29 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters march down Spring Street in Los Angeles on Nov. 9. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 30 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters gather outside Los Angeles City Hall chanting, Love Trumps Hate on Nov. 9. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 31 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters flood the 101 Freeway. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 32 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters gather outside of Los Angeles City Hall on Nov. 9. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 33 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters gather outside of Los Angeles City Hall chanting, Not my president, not my president, in Los Angeles on Nov. 9. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 34 / 68 There was graffiti tagging along the sidelines of the anti-Trump protest downtown in Los Angeles on Nov. 9. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 35 / 68 An anti-Trump protester stands in defiance blind folded and holding an American flag in front of police officers, as protesters block up the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles on Nov. 9. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 36 / 68 Police shout at anti-Trump protesters on the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles on Nov. 10. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 37 / 68 A protesters with a Guy Fawkes mask stands aside watching other anti-Trump protesters on the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles on Nov. 10. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 38 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters march on the 101 Freeway near downtown Los Angeles on Nov. 9. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 39 / 68 Protesters flood onto the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 40 / 68 Protesters climb out of the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 41 / 68 Protesters flood onto the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 42 / 68 A police officer watches protesters behind a concrete barrier along the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 43 / 68 Police officers form a line to prevent protesters from walking onto the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday night. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) 44 / 68 Police block traffic on the 101 Freeway near downtown L.A. as protesters rally against Donald Trumps election as president. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 45 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters on the 101 freeway, in Los Angeles, California. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 46 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters march on the 101 Freeway near downtown Los Angeles on Nov. 9. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 47 / 68 A driver is stuck in his car while Trump protesters block traffic in downtown Los Angeles. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 48 / 68 Protesters stop traffic in downtown Los Angeles. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 49 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters clear the road for an emergency vehicle in downtown Los Angeles. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 50 / 68 Protesters walk the streets of downtown Los Angeles, rallying against the election of Donald Trump. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 51 / 68 Protesters burn an effigy of Donald Trump outside Los Angeles City Hall. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 52 / 68 Protesters burn an effigy of Donald Trump outside Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) 53 / 68 Hundreds of anti-Donald Trump protesters hold a demonstration in Washington Square Park as New Yorkers react to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) 54 / 68 Hundreds of anti-Donald Trump protesters hold a demonstration in Washington Square Park as New Yorkers react to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) 55 / 68 Demonstrators block traffic on the 580 Freeway during a march through the streets in protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Oakland, California. (PETER DASILVA / EPA) 56 / 68 A demonstrator faces off with police during a march through the streets in protest against President-elect Donald Trump in Oakland, California. (PETER DASILVA / EPA) 57 / 68 A protester in San Francisco holds up a sign for President Obama in opposition of Donald Trumps presidential election victory. (Jeff Chiu / Associated Press) 58 / 68 Thousands of anti-Trump protesters shut down Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) 59 / 68 Protesters yell in San Francisco. (Jeff Chiu / Associated Press) 60 / 68 Students stage an anti-Trump rally on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) 61 / 68 Tears are shed at the postelection candlelight vigil outside the White House. (Michael Reynolds / EPA) 62 / 68 Fletcher Jones, 14, joined other students at an anti-Trump rally at L.A. City Hall. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) 63 / 68 An anti-Trump rally in Seattle. (Karen Ducey / Getty Images) 64 / 68 Emotions run high at the postelection protest at L.A. City Hall. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) 65 / 68 Approximately 200 students protested President Elect Donald Trump on the steps of city hall (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) 66 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) 67 / 68 Anti-Trump protesters march through downtown L.A. early Wednesday, shortly after the election result was announced. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times) 68 / 68 A postelection vigil outside the White House. (Michael Reynolds / EPA)

Richter said officers have noticed a significant amount of graffiti on downtown buildings and will have zero tolerance for anyone who remains in the downtown area after officers gave dispersal orders to various crowds of protesters near the Staples Center around 11:30 p.m.

The crowd swelled to more than 300 as it marched through the city, many shouting profane chants that disparaged Trump. Not my president echoed throughout the downtown corridors.

By 11 p.m., at least 200 had reached Olympic Boulevard and Olive Street, where dozens of LAPD officers  some with beanbag guns and helmets  filled the street, split the demonstrators into groups and hemmed them in.

About 11:30 p.m., police issued an order to leave the area, but only allowed five to six demonstrators to exit at a time. Officers urged them not to return.

We dont want anyone to get arrested tonight, one LAPD commander told the crowd.

But attempts to gain order were often disrupted. At one point, a firecracker boomed, and at least one person was arrested but details were not immediately available, LAPD Officer Sal Ramirez said.

In a separate incident, a man was involved in an altercation with officers just before 11 p.m. near the dog park outside Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, according to LAPD Officer Tony Im. The man was taken into custody and its unclear if he was involved in the demonstrations.

Jose Garcia, 25, came to downtown from South Gate and said the protests were a way to demand that Trump govern not just his supporters but the entire nation.

People say it doesnt achieve anything, but I feel like as long as our voices are heard, we wont be shut out, Garcia said.

Bill Doyle, 53, of Los Angeles said he came to protest for a personal reason: The Affordable Care Act lowered the price of his wifes cancer treatments, and he worried that Trump may repeal the healthcare measure.

But he also wanted Trump to disavow what he described as racist rhetoric by the candidate during the campaign.

If we dont have a country thats safe to live in, whats the point? Doyle said. The Republicans need to wake up and deal with this. Its not going anywhere.

In Van Nuys, up to 40 demonstrators gathered outside the federal building along Van Nuys Boulevard, and as of 9 p.m., the crowd was mostly peaceful, LAPD Officer Sal Ramirez said.

The protests mirrored demonstrations across the state. In Oakland, about 100 protesters poured onto the eastbound lanes of the Interstate 580 at 9:30 p.m. and blocked traffic, according to California Highway Patrol Officer Marc Johnston.

Seven business were vandalized, trash cans were set on fire and officers found one protester with a cache of Molotov cocktails, Oakland police said. Officers arrested 11 people on various charges including assault on police, vandalism, failure to disperse and public intoxication, police said.

Earlier in the day, a group marched onto the 10 Freeway in Boyle Heights but was quickly ushered off by police. The incident forced the closure of the freeway for about 20 minutes.

Still, the crowds were smaller on Thursday than the thousands of people who protested Wednesday. Of those, hundreds flooded the 101 Freeway, one of the main arteries through downtown L.A., blocking traffic and ultimately prompting police to move in.

City officials said Thursday that they were prepared for more nights of demonstrations and civil disobedience, with their attention focused on the freeways.

Folks need an avenue by which to express themselves  we want to provide them with that, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said in an interview. But we want them to do it in a lawful manner.

Those remarks were echoed by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who told reporters he was proud of the activism he saw Wednesday night. Although the majority of protesters were peaceful, he said, he feared the message could be overshadowed by the unlawful behavior of a few.

Theres no place for the destruction of property or the dangerous stoppage of traffic in a city where the overall majority of people are exercising in peaceful protest, he said. Youre getting in the way of 99% of peoples own message.

Twenty-eight people were ultimately arrested overnight Wednesday for impeding traffic, police said. Officials said some may also be booked on suspicion of vandalism.

In Wednesday nights protest, police had initially wanted to intervene as little as possible, Beck said.

That was our goal, he said. To let people exercise their 1st Amendment rights and do so as unaffected by policing as we could possibly do it.

That changed, however, as protests in L.A. often do, when they reach a freeway. At that point, out of concerns for the safety of the demonstrators, Beck said, the LAPD had to change our posture dramatically.

Officers worked with the California Highway Patrol to stop traffic and try to clear the cars already in the area. Then it was time to try to move protesters from the freeway, Beck said.

That piece of freeway is really tough for us, the chief said. Theres like 17 on- and off-ramps in a very, very tight area; theres a short fence. Four-hundred or 500 people  stopping them from trying to get access is very difficult.

Its going to take a while to get them off, he added. We have to make sure we get them off safely.

Beck watched the demonstrations on television as he called his command staff on the ground, discussing their plans. Garcetti said he also spoke to the chief, at times listening to a police radio for a play-by-play.

Both the police chief and mayor cautioned protesters against returning to the freeway should more protests arise. Beck said the LAPD was working with the CHP to prevent protesters from returning to the roadway on Thursday and beyond.

The CHP issued its own statement Thursday afternoon, saying the freeway takeover endangered motorists and kept scores of officers from responding to other incidents. The groups message, the agency said, was lost in the chaos.

The California Highway Patrol takes pride in being able to safeguard the rights of every citizen, including freedom of speech and freedom to assemble, the statement said. However, when an assembly changes from peaceful to unlawful and the actions of some reckless citizens begin to infringe on another persons rights, including endangering them, the CHP will take swift action to restore safety.

The concern, Beck stressed, was safety. He noted that the LAPD will often block traffic for marchers on surface streets. The freeway, he said, was a different matter.

I think people should see the obvious difference between the way I treat people on Broadway and the way I treat people on the 101 Freeway, he said. The freeway is far too dangerous.

Times staff writer Joseph Serna contributed to this report.

kate.mather@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter: @katemather

ALSO

A primer on executive power: What Trump can and cant do

See how every neighborhood voted in the 2016 election

He is the face of the country but we are the country. Students and teachers react to Trumps win

UPDATES:

6:15 a.m.: This article was updated with arrest totals in Los Angeles and Oakland.

1:17 a.m.: This article was updated with information about additional arrests.

Nov. 11, 12:30 a.m.: This article was updated with details on demonstrators near Olympic Boulevard and Olive Street.

10:55 p.m.: The article was updated with details on one arrest and a smaller demonstration in Van Nuys.

10:25 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Bill Doyle.

10 p.m.: This article was updated with details on protests in Los Angeles and Oakland.

8:40 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from demonstrators in Thursday nights protests.

7:40 p.m.: This article was updated with details on Thursdays demonstrations.

This article was originally published on Nov. 10 at 3:40 p.m.
In the weeks after newspapers began publishing reports on U.S. government surveillance programs uncovered by Edward Snowden, law enforcement officials were under fire.

One congressional hearing in July 2013 centered on the revelation that for years the National Security Agency had been collecting data on phone calls made and received by millions of Americans. Lawmakers wanted to know if the program had produced any results.

Federal officials pointed to a little known case in San Diego. Using the agencys database of phone records, NSA analysts in 2007 linked a cellphone belonging to a Somali immigrant taxi driver to a phone number associated with Shabab, a terrorist group in his homeland.

Advertisement

Based on that lead, a top FBI official testified, agents spent months eavesdropping on the mans phone calls, building a case against him and three other Somali men living in the area. The men were convicted of conspiring to aid terrorists and were sent to prison. The cab driver, Basaaly Saeed Moalin, was sentenced to 18 years behind bars.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, Congress did away with the law the NSA relied on to justify the bulk collection of phone records and replaced it with more restrictive rules. But Moalin and the other defendants on Thursday revived questions about the defunct programs legality when they argued to a federal appeals court that their convictions should be overturned because the governments use of the phone records was improper.

The case marks the first time a challenge to the phone data program has been used to appeal a conviction, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the men.

In filings and at the hearing before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday, lawyers for the ACLU and the government offered contrasting views of the case.

Alex Abdo, an attorney for Moalin and the other men, urged the judges to find that the lynchpin of the governments case against the men was its initial reliance on information gathered from the NSAs database of phone records. As such, he argued, the wire tap evidence that FBI agents went on to collect against the men and which was the centerpiece of the case against them should not have been allowed at trial.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael Smith challenged the idea that the case against the men had been tainted by the use of the NSA data. The panel, he said, should find the men were convicted in a fair trial and uphold the rulings of the judge in the case, who denied the mens request for a new trial when the NSA program became public and concluded the government had investigated the case appropriately.

While the NSAs collection of phone records has been stopped, Abdo argued the case still had significance beyond the fate of the four men since the government has maintained its authority, in general, to conduct bulk collection of data on Americans. A definitive ruling from the judges in favor of the defendants, Abdo said, would serve as deterrence against the government starting up similar surveillance.

Moalin, who was granted asylum in the U.S. in the mid-1990s and later became a U.S. citizen, had maintained close ties to Somalia, which was upended by years of civil unrest and fighting between a transitional government and militias opposed to its rule, including Shabab.

Moalin, a well known figure in San Diegos sizable Somali immigrant community, and the others were accused of sending several thousands of dollars to Shabab to help fund the terror network. In phone calls recorded by the FBI and played at the trial, Moalin was heard speaking to a man who prosecutors alleged was a Shabab commander. In one call, the alleged commander told Moalin that it was time to finance the jihad.

Defense attorneys countered that Moalin and the other men were not aiding Shabab, but were sending money to Moalins struggling home region to help build schools and orphanages. The man heard on the recordings, they said, was not a terrorist commander but a local police chief talking about the need to help fund local militias in their fighting against Ethiopian forces that had come to the side of the Somali government.

In court filings, Abdo and other defense attorneys argued that the NSAs bulk collection of phone records was not authorized by the Patriot Act, the counterterrorism law that agency officials used to justify the program. Moreover, they said, the search of the database that produced Moalins phone number violated the constitutions protections against searches and seizures.

Judge Marsha S. Berzon, who asked nearly all the questions at the hearing Thursday, gave no indication from her line of questioning how the panel might come down in the case.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

For more news on federal courts in Southern California, follow me on Twitter: @joelrubin
Lock her up! was his supporters fervent cry.

But its Donald Trump who may find himself in political shackles, stuck between his followers yearning to put Hillary Clinton in jail and his expressed desire to unite a badly fractured country after an election in which he lost the popular vote.

The tension is not likely to dissipate anytime soon. After having pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton, Trump faces a dilemma: He can either drop the matter and risk angering his supporters, or charge ahead with a criminal inquiry targeting his vanquished political foe, something never before done in U.S. history.

Its a tough decision, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Trump advisor and a top choice to be the next attorney general, told CNN on Thursday. I dont know what the right answer to that is. Its a tough one that ought to be given a lot of thought. 

Advertisement

The answer, of course, rests with Trump. The president-elect may have signaled his intentions to forgo an investigation when he told supporters Wednesday morning during his victory address that the country owed Clinton a major debt of gratitude for her service.

That doesnt sound like what you would say when you are about to seek a special prosecutor, according to legal experts and political consultants. Trump is surely cognizant, they said, of the immense political and legal hurdles of forging ahead.

A prosecution of Clinton for mishandling classified material on a private email server while secretary of State would certainly inflame Democrats and anger independent voters wishing for nothing more than to put the nightmare of the 2016 campaign behind them. It would also become campaign fodder in the 2018 midterm election and might distract from Trumps efforts to build a wall on the border of Mexico and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Is there a backlash to him reopening this? There would be, said Reed Galen, a Republican strategist. This country is so highly divided along political lines. Are you really going to antagonize 160 million Americans for the purposes of making the other 160 million happy?

If I were advising him, and I am certainly not, I would tell him to take the [victory] speech he gave and allow the Clintons to fade into American political history, Galen said.

Douglas Brinkley, a bestselling author and historian at Rice University, said appointing a special prosecutor would be unprecedented and draw comparisons to the well-known vindictive streak of President Nixon.

Trump has to be careful not to seem Nixonian and develop his enemies list and destroy opponents, Brinkley said. I think he has his hands full with building a wall, and Im not sure playing to the lock her up motif gets him anywhere. It would just be very bad, a terrible precedent to start trying to jail your political opponent after an election.

The problem of dropping such a promise is that Trump issued his pledge to appoint a special prosecutor during a presidential debate viewed by tens of millions of people. In one back-and-forth, Clinton said she was glad that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

Trump shot back: Because youd be in jail.

In rallies later, he repeatedly said Clintons illegal actions were the worst political scandal since Watergate and that the Clinton Foundation was the most corrupt enterprise in political history.

The idea of jailing Clinton has long been enthusiastically embraced by his followers and their anger at Clinton was a major motivator for many Trump voters. They have produced merchandise including T-shirts and bobblehead dolls emblazoned with Hillary for Prison or Clinton wearing pinstripes or jail jumpsuits.

Their desire to put Clinton in handcuffs has not dissipated with Trumps ascension to the presidency, and they would surely be disappointed if he backed off his promise. Such a course risks Trump being seen by his supporters as suddenly part of the same rigged political system that he long said was protecting Clinton.

She should be prosecuted, Shawn Gibby, 50, a maintenance manager in Bessemer City, N.C., said this week. I want justice to be served. We should be a nation of law and order.

Said Stephanie Bevens, 46, also of North Carolina: Hillary should be held accountable  just like anyone else. Id like to see her investigated, and I think her punishment should be the same as it would be for anyone else. Shes been treated as if shes above the law. Shes not above the rest of us.

Some of his top advisors have also advocated charging Clinton. During his interview with CNN, Giuliani expressed an eagerness to lead the Justice Department, saying that as a former associate attorney general and U.S. attorney in New York, theres probably nobody that knows the place better than he does.

Giuliani has long said he favors prosecuting Clinton. I would have brought such a case, he told ABC News in August. I would have won such a case.

On CNN on Thursday, he hesitated when asked whether he would accept the attorney generals job if Trump also demanded he drop the re-investigation of Clinton as a condition of the appointment.

We would have to talk about that, said Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and No. 3 at the Justice Department in the Reagan administration. We would have to talk about ... what the ramifications of that to other prosecutions, future prosecutions, how would you couch that? Suppose more evidence came forward a year from now that we dont know about now that makes it a much worse situation?

There has been some speculation that President Obama could pardon Clinton, even without her being convicted of any crimes. Giuliani told CNN that he hoped Obama -- and presumably Trump -- didnt issue one. I dont think that would be right because if he pardons her, hes got to pardon about five other people who helped her, Giuliani said.

Legal experts said reopening the case  barring the discovery of new and explosive evidence  would either end without charges or be savaged in the courtroom. For one, they said, career prosecutors and agents have already determined that no charges were warranted.

FBI Director James. B. Comey, who previously served in a Republican administration, has said the thorough investigation uncovered no evidence that Clinton or her aides intended to violate espionage laws. In the end, the FBI said, agents uncovered classified information in 193 emails that were part of 81 email chains.

On Oct. 28, Comey sparked a political wildfire when he sent a letter to Congress saying agents were reviewing new emails potentially relevant to the case. On Sunday, two days before the election, he sent a second letter reiterating his earlier position that no charges were warranted after his agents reviewed the new emails discovered on a laptop belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a Clinton confidant.

If Trumps political appointees at the Justice Department were to reach a different conclusion upon reviewing the evidence or ordering a new investigation, they might appear vindictive or perhaps unethical.

To make matters more difficult, any future prosecution would be marred by the earlier determination that no charges were warranted, legal experts said.

It would be a tremendous waste of time and resources, said Steven Levin, a former federal prosecutor and registered Republican. It would be a disastrous prosecution.

Friction could develop between career prosecutors and their political bosses if they saw the evidence differently, and such embarrassing disagreements could become public.

You are free to disagree with what Comey did, but to pick up the same evidence and just reach a totally different result would make us look like a banana republic, said a former top Justice Department official in Republican administrations, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject. They would need career prosecutors and agents, however. If they just tapped a bunch of political appointees to do the case, the Justice Department building would just explode.

Special correspondent Jenny Jarvie in North Carolina contributed to this report.

Follow @delwilber on Twitter

del.wilber@latimes.com
A bitter wind blew across Sewells Point on a recent afternoon as ocean waves crashed against a concrete pier where two black attack submarines were tied up for the day.

Pier 3 was taking the last hits of a severe storm that had roared ashore a few days before. It flooded four buildings, tore up rooftops, knocked down trees and briefly cut electricity at the worlds largest naval station.

Storms obviously arent new here, but they are worse than ever  and the Pentagon blames climate change.

Advertisement

We see the rising sea levels and flooding events, said Capt. Dean VanderLey, who oversees Navy infrastructure in the mid-Atlantic region. We have a responsibility to prepare for the future. We dont have the luxury of just burying our heads in the sand.

President-elect Donald Trump has described global warming as a hoax, and Republicans in Congress who reject science showing that greenhouse gases have warmed the planet have blocked funding meant to help the Pentagon assess the damage and plan for the future.

We have a responsibility to prepare for the future. We dont have the luxury of just burying our heads in the sand.  Capt. Dean VanderLey

The House voted in June to bar the Defense Department from spending money to evaluate how climate change would affect military training, combat, weapons purchases and other needs.

When we distract our military with a radical climate change agenda, we detract from their main purpose of defending America from enemies like Islamic State, said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), sponsor of the measure.

Partly as a result, the Pentagon says it does not keep figures on what climate change may mean for the military budget. Planners sometimes list upgrades to infrastructure as maintenance or repairs to avoid scrutiny from lawmakers.

But the debate is settled at the Pentagon. Rising sea levels and temperatures have forced it to rebuild or relocate roads, housing, air fields and other vulnerable facilities damaged by mudslides in Hawaii, floods in Virginia, drought in California and thawing permafrost in Alaska.

It also has led to a shift in strategic challenges around the globe.

The Pentagon doesnt say that climate change alone will cause wars. But the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Defense Departments major planning blueprint for the next four years, calls it an accelerant of instability and a threat multiplier.

The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world, the document said.

In Africa, extended droughts have been a factor in several sub-Saharan and North African conflicts. When rising temperatures created food and water shortages, for example, increased poverty and migration created breeding grounds for terrorist groups in Mali, Nigeria and elsewhere.

Similarly, increasingly powerful typhoons spawned from warming seas have battered U.S. allies in the western and central Pacific. Humanitarian aid operations, once a rarity, are expected to become a core Pentagon mission as natural disasters have steadily grown.

In the Asia Pacific region, rising sea levels could inundate island nations such as Fiji and Micronesia, push saltwater into groundwater supplies and croplands in Vietnam and Indonesia, and threaten major cities, including Manila, Shanghai and Jakarta, Indonesia.

Climate change is the biggest long-term security threat facing the region, Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, then head of U.S. Pacific Command, said in 2013.

The Pentagon also expects to expand operations in the Arctic, the worlds fastest-warming region.

So much sea ice has melted that a northern shipping route over Russia and a northwest passage over Canada are now open to navigation and oil and gas exploitation for much of the year. Partly as a result, Russia is reopening Cold War-era military bases on its Arctic coastline.

The impact of global warming also is visible at some military bases in the United States.

At drought-stricken Ft. Irwin in California, north of Barstow, engineers have cut base water use by one-third by ripping out 20 acres of grass, installing low-flow urinals and toilets and building novel irrigation systems, among other changes.

A new $100-million water-treatment plant will tap underground aquifers for the 26,000 people on the base, which covers an area larger than Rhode Island.

Without water, we have no mission, said Muhammad Bari, director of public works. We have to be ready to face the impacts from climate change.

The Pentagons Climate Adaptation Roadmap, issued in 2014, pointed to the Hampton Roads area in Virginia, which includes Naval Station Norfolk and Langley Air Force Base, as a top concern.

The sea-level rise and land subsidence is causing increased tidal and storm flooding in the area. Saltwater intrusion already is a problem, with three rivers flowing into the Chesapeake Bay.

The low-lying region has recorded the fastest sea-level rise on the East Coast: 18 inches in the past century, according to the Navy.

By 2030, scientists project the sea to rise six more inches. The Navy expects the main road into the base to be underwater for two or three hours a day by 2040.

Incremental changes often are irreversible so its important to plan ahead, according to David Adams, director of climate policy on the White Houses National Security Council.

It takes awhile for people to get it, he said at an Oct. 19 panel on Norfolk at the World Resources Institute in Washington. It doesnt go boom.

As a result, when the Navy constructed new barracks on base last year, officials directed they be built on a foundation four feet higher than construction codes required.

The base also replaced four single-level piers with new double-decker versions  at a cost of nearly $150 million each  to service and better provide heavy-weather mooring for aircraft carriers, guided missile destroyers and attack submarines.

Pier 3 probably will be upgraded next, VanderLey said.

Anytime we think about the future, we have to factor in sea-level rise, he said. We definitely dont have a solution on how to stop it. But we have to be as resilient as possible.

william.hennigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @wjhenn

ALSO

Holocaust scholar and Schindler author donates his archives to Chapman University

What would a recreational marijuana market in California look like?

Still fighting: Vietnam vets seek help for rare cancer
Resisting calls by President Obama to accept Donald Trumps victory, tens of thousands of protesters  some too young to vote  took to the streets in cities across the country to protest that Trump is not my president.

During a second night of demonstrations, a protest in Portland, Ore., was transformed into what police called a riot. Police said a small number of anarchists in a crowd of 4,000 smashed cars with baseball bats, threw rocks and Molotov cocktails and spray-painted graffiti. There were 26 people arrested.

Overnight, protests were popping up almost spontaneously in other cities around the country. Columbus, Ohio; Minneapolis; Madison, Wis.; and Milwaukee joined in protests that had begun Wednesday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston and other larger cities.

Advertisement

Trump addressed the protests in his usual fashion  over Twitter. On Thursday night, he decried them as professional protesters, incited by the media. But by Friday, as protests spread, he issued a conciliatory message, tweeting at 6.14 am.: Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Trump himself had urged a march on Washington in protest of President Obamas re-election in 2012.

We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

Portland's anti-Trump protest turns to chaos as anarchists smash cars and bus stop. Photos by @chrisonstott. https://t.co/4U5XGixqL6 pic.twitter.com/po6oIbIOIQ  Aaron Mesh (@AaronMesh) November 11, 2016

More demonstrations are planned in the coming days, with some organizers saying they were saving their energy for the weekend.

In Oakland on Wednesday, police reported that they extinguished at least 40 fires and that protesters had thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails and vandalized police cars.

Time to riot, read a hand-scrawled poster carried by one woman.

Due to extensive criminal and dangerous behavior, protest is now considered a riot. Crowd has been advised.  Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 11, 2016

Rudolph W. Giuliani, former New York mayor and advisor to the Trump campaign, also denounced the student movement. The reality is they are a bunch of spoiled crybabies, he said Thursday on Fox News Fox & Friends. He added that campuses are getting more conservative. If youre looking at the real left-wing loonies on the campus, its the professors, not the students.

So far the protest movement  barely 48 hours old  appears to lack strategy and coordination. But some activists are focusing on the electoral college, which is due to meet Dec. 19 to formally vote Trump into office. Political scientists say electors have in the past switched their votes, but such occurrences are rare and have not altered the election outcome.

Clinton appears on track to win the popular vote  as of last count she was 388,000 votes ahead  the fourth time in U.S. history that the largest vote-gatherer has failed to get the necessary electoral votes. The last time was 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election to George W. Bush.

In the past, about 99% of electors have voted for the candidate to whom they are pledges, but defections do happen and Democratic activists promise to work on those Republican electors who have expressed anti-Trump sentiments.

A petition on Change.org that started Thursday morning received more than 2 million signers in less than 24 hours.

The potential challenge to the electoral college does not appear to have the support of Clinton, who conceded defeat and, like Obama, has urged the American public to accept Trump. In fact, during the campaign, Clinton blasted Trumps threats not to respect the outcome of the election.

Still, the nascent anti-Trump movement among young people threatens to throw another wrench into a painful and prolonged election process that many people want to have behind them.

The passive side of this generation needs to step up to the plate and show that we have not surrendered, said Ariana Shirzay, a 20-year-old graphic design student who is organizing protests in New York in coming days. She says that her generation was lured into complacency about Americas liberal values.

We basically grew up with liberal America and transcended into adulthood under Obama, Shirzay said.

At Pratt Institute, Shirzay said, her classmates, who had assumed that Democrat Hillary Clinton would win, watched the election results in tears, the shock comparable to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks  at least for those old enough to remember.

High school students around the country walked out of classes Wednesday and Thursday to show their support for the anti-Trump movement. Most protesters were young.

Its important to me as a 14-year-old  seeing people like this, united. [It] makes me feel like Im not the only one here, said middle schooler Yesena Gomez, who was one of the speakers at a rally in Seattle.

When I walked into school Wednesday morning, my teachers were crying. Students were sobbing, fearing for their family and themselves and friends. We held each other up. And I think we all felt like we wanted to feel heard because most of us are never heard by the government or the world, said Chloe Li, 15, who goes to a high school with many immigrant`

Elsewhere, protesters targeted Trump-branded buildings  the newly opened hotel in Washington, D.C., near the White House, Trump Tower in Chicago. A Trump effigy was burned in Los Angeles, where protesters on Wednesday had also blocked the 101 Freeway and spray-painted anti-Trump graffiti on vehicles and buildings.

Protesters burn an effigy of Donald Trump outside Los Angeles City Hall. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times )

White Supremacy. Misogyny Is Not My America, No More Small Men With Big Mouths, read the slogans  along with what have become the hashtag of the protest movement, #notourpresident and #notmypresident.

The largest protest Wednesday appeared to be in front of New Yorks 58-story Trump Tower, where Trump lives in a penthouse condominium. Two separate marches through Manhattan converged in front of the building, forming a crowd that some reporters estimated at 10,000. The night was illuminated by hundreds of iPhones taking selfies of protesters gesturing with their middle fingers toward the Trump building.

New York City police said Thursday that there were 65 arrests, mostly for disorderly conduct, obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest.

The protests appear to be less about supporting Clinton than opposing Trump. Many young voters were unenthusiastic about Clinton, failing to lend her campaign the energy they put behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders  or for those old enough, behind Barack Obama in 2008.

Derek Muller, who teaches election law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, said that in recent months his students had been more mobilized by the California proposition on marijuana legalization than they were by the presidential election.

There are things that get voters excited and things that dont. For young people, it was marijuana legalization. Barack Obama mobilized young people. Bernie Sanders mobilized young people, Muller said. He believes that the protests, while still gathering momentum, will probably fizzle out in a few weeks as Trumps inauguration becomes reality.

We have seen in the past these amazing nearly spontaneous movements  that burned brightly for a brief period of time and then just went away, Muller said.

Their chances are basically zero. You would need a lot of coordinated action to get that many electors to change their mind, he said. Its very hard now, given that Trump has won.

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Twitter: BarbaraDemick

Special correspondents Vera Haller and Rick Anderson contributed reporting from New York and Seattle, respectively. Times staff writer James Queally contributed from Los Angeles.

ALSO

Anti-Trump protesters swarm downtown L.A. for third night

Portland anti-Trump protest now considered a riot, police say

The Ku Klux Klan says it will hold a Trump victory parade in North Carolina

UPDATES:

6:35 a.m. Nov. 11: This article was updated with additional information about the protests in Portland, Ore., and a statement on Twitter from Donald Trump.

10:35 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details about the riot in Portland.

9:12 p.m.: This article was updated with details from Thursday nights anti-Trump protest in Portland, and a 2012 tweet from Donald Trump.

7:30 p.m.: This article was updated with a tweet from Donald Trump.

6:15 p.m.: This article was updated with the latest number of signatories to the change.org petition.

This article was originally published at 5:55 p.m.
As president, Donald Trump can move swiftly to gut President Obamas signature immigration policies by ramping up deportations and ending a program that has given temporary work permits to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.

Nearly a third of the 742,000 so-called Dreamers  those given protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program  live in California and are potentially at risk of losing legal status.

Using the same executive authority that Obama claimed to create DACA and other initiatives, Trump also can quickly fulfill his promises to severely restrict the number of refugees admitted each year and to effectively bar visitors from countries with large Muslim populations.

Advertisement

Trump said Thursday, after meeting with Obama at the White House and Congressional leaders on Capitol Hill, that immigration and border security would be among his top priorities when he takes office in January.

People will be really, really happy, he said. Asked if he would work with Congress to ban Muslim immigrants, Trump walked away without answering.

Trumps aides have begun drafting instructions that he can issue on his first day in office for the nations 5,000 deportation officers to begin rounding up more people for removals, according to two advisors to his transition team.

There is vast potential to increase the level of deportations without adding personnel, said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and a member of Trumps immigration policy transition team.

By giving more authority to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Trump easily could boost deportations by more than 75% in his first year in office, Kobach said.

That would meet the record set in 2012, at the end of Obamas first term, when more than 400,000 people were deported. It fell to 235,00 last year after illegal immigration fell, and after agents were ordered to focus first on deporting criminals, repeat immigration violators and recent arrivals.

Under Trump, Kobach said, agents likely will return to raiding workplaces and checking workers status. That practice roiled immigrant communities in the final two years of George W. Bushs presidency and was stopped when Obama came to office.

Trump may find it far more difficult to fulfill other prominent promises, however. They include building a tall wall along the entire border with Mexico and deporting millions more people.

Both proposals would require major appropriations from a Republican-led Congress that wants to cut spending, not increase it. It would require hammering out deals with Democrats who fiercely opposed Trumps proposals on the campaign trail.

Trump has said the wall could cost up to $12 billion to build. An analysis published by MIT Technology Review estimated the cost at $38 billion, nearly the entire annual budget for the 22 federal agencies in the Department of Homeland Security.

Similarly, the cost of forcibly finding, arresting, detaining and ultimately flying or busing millions of people out of the country would be sizable; it would depend on how many and how fast.

A recent surge in families from Central America illegally crossing the border, for example, means the 40,000 beds in detention centers are full. Additional space would require additional funding.

Kobach argued that construction of a border wall could begin quickly. The Homeland Security Department already has authority to build physical barriers and structures on the border and doesnt need permission from Congress, he said.

Next years budget for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for the Border Patrol, includes $175 million for procurement, construction and improvements. Even if that money is diverted to the wall, it wouldnt go very far in a multibillion-dollar project.

Once the building is beginning on a very large scale, there would almost certainly need to be larger appropriation or a shift in dollars, Kobach said.

Mexican officials have adamantly rejected Trumps declaration that Mexico will agree to pay for the wall.

Whether Trump has leverage is unclear. He has touted the fact that Mexican workers in the United States transfer $24 billion in earnings back home each year to help their families.

Trumps supporters have floated a proposal to impose a fee on remittances from people not authorized to work in the U.S., though its not certain how that would work.

With his pen the president can reduce or slow down the process by which Mexicans get travel cards and visitors visas. But that could backfire by hurting businesses and tourism near the border.

Republican lawmakers previously have drafted bills to increase spending on border security and to force business owners to check immigration status of new hires on a federal database, among other requirements.

With the GOP controlling Congress, similar bills could make it to Trumps desk. Democrats in the Senate would probably use their filibuster to block the most onerous requirements, however.

The number of refugees admitted to the country can also be trimmed dramatically during Trumps first months in office.

He can reduce the maximum number of refugees admitted from each country as well as change the procedures for screening them, according to Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School.

A 21-step screening process for refugees who face ethnic or religious persecution, or who fit into other legal categories for protection, already takes more than a year.

I dont know what anyone could do to make it longer and more onerous than it is right now, but well see if he comes up with something, Yale-Loehr said.

Trump also could change regulations to deter companies from hiring skilled foreign workers, such as raising wage requirements for H1-B visa recipients, although it would take time.

Its a big bureaucracy, and particularly when it comes to agency regulations, the process of getting new regulations through is extremely long and complex, Yale-Loehr said.

Under Obama, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill in 2013 that would have opened a pathway to legal status for immigrants in the country illegally and boosted spending for border security, but the House killed the bill without a hearing.

Unable to win comprehensive reforms in Congress, Obama then resorted to issuing executive actions. In many cases, Trump can reverse them with the stroke of a pen.

He is almost certain to end the DACA program, Obamas signature immigration initiative to protect immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.

As of June about 742,000 people  mostly Mexican-born  had qualified for protection under DACA, according to Homeland Security figures. About 29% of them live in California.

Its a new world. said Roy Beck, the head of Numbers USA, a Virginia-based group that advocates reducing legal immigration levels. Rolling back DACA is a pretty good start, he added.

When immigrants submitted to background checks under DACA, the paperwork assured applicants their information would not be used to deport them later. But the assurance is not legally binding.

That has stoked widespread fear in immigrant communities.

Maria Pacheco, 21, was brought to Ohio illegally from Mexico as a toddler. Since she received a two-year work permit under DACA, shes been able to get a drivers license, buy a car and work as a pizza shop cashier on the outskirts of Cleveland. Her boss wants her to be a manager.

When people say, Go back to your country, I dont know my country, she said by phone Thursday. Ive been here since I was 4. This is my home.

She hopes Trump will allow immigrants like her, who work and pay taxes, to stay. Her work permit expires next year, and she fears she wont be able to find a job or keep her car.

Hes a businessman. Maybe he can find a way to keep all these kids working, she said. Maybe he can look at it in a business way.

brian.bennett@latimes.com

Follow me @ByBrianBennett on Twitter

ALSO

An immigration hard-liner is joining Donald Trumps transition team

Clinton and Trump supporters come from different Americas. Between them lies bitterness and distrust

L.A. archbishop, other religious leaders urge unity, reassure immigrants after Trumps election
Three days after Election Day, President Obama used his last Veterans Day speech to urge Americans to learn from the example of veterans as a divided nation seeks to forge unity after the bitter 2016 campaign.

Obama, in remarks at Arlington National Cemetery, noted that Veterans Day often comes on the heels of hard-fought campaigns that lay bare disagreements across our nation.

But the American instinct has never been to find isolation in opposite corners, Obama said. It is to find strength in our common creed, to forge unity from our great diversity, to maintain that strength and unity even when it is hard.

Advertisement

He added that now that the election is over, as we search for ways to come together, to reconnect with one another and with the principles that are more enduring than transitory politics, some of our best examples are the men and women we salute on Veterans Day.

Tuesdays election of Republican Donald Trump led to protests across the country.

Obama noted that the U.S. military is the countrys most diverse institution, composed of immigrants and native-born service members representing all religions and no religion. He says they are all forged into common service.

With just two months left in his term, Obama also noted how hes aged over the past eight years.

He read excerpts from an essay by a middle-schooler who wrote that veterans are special because they will defend people regardless of their race, gender, hair color or other differences.

After eight years in office, I particularly appreciate that he included hair color, Obama quipped, referring to his noticeably graying hair.

Turning serious again on his final Veterans Day as commander in chief, Obama said that whenever the world makes you cynical, whenever you doubt that courage and goodness and selflessness is possible, then stop and look to a veteran.

On Veterans Day, we acknowledge humbly that we can never serve our veterans in quite the same way that they served us, but we can try. We can practice kindness, we can pay it forward, we can volunteer, we can serve, we can respect one another, we can always get each others backs, he said.

Before speaking, the president laid a wreath at the cemeterys Tomb of the Unknowns. He bowed his head in silent tribute before a bugler played taps.

ALSO

They made it home from Vietnam. Now, these vets battle a rare form of cancer

For the fourth time in American history, the president-elect lost the popular vote. Credit the electoral college

Climate change is real: Just ask the Pentagon
On a rainy Saturday in September, Trish Woodbury walks into the Northeast Portland American Legion Hall with a guitar case slung over her shoulder and a Minnesota Golden Gophers ball cap on her head.

Its my Northwest umbrella, she explains.

Woodbury, 62, was only really interested in becoming a female Bob Hope with the USO when she visited an Army recruiters office in San Diego in 1974. Instead, she ended up enlisting, and soon was the only woman stationed in a biomedical repair shop at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

I was a hippie who joined the Army, recalls Woodbury, who now works as a doula. I learned a lot of stuff there, but none of it had to do with entertaining the troops.

Advertisement

She learned the horror of being kidnapped and raped by a male soldier, for one thing. I didnt report anything, she recalls. I remember a woman who was raped and she reported it, and it was a big joke. So other women, including me, didnt say anything, either because we wanted a military career or didnt want to be harassed.

Woodbury was left with post-traumatic stress disorder from whats classified as military sexual trauma. The incident shattered her self-confidence and sense of safety for a spell, but she hails from a military family, and her commitment to service remained.

Left: Trish Woodbury participates in Soldier Songs and Voices gathering in Portland. Right: Clayton Knight, Retired US Navy, leads the group in a song. (Kevin P. Casey / For The Times )

After leaving the Army, Woodbury joined Californias National Guard for three years. Then, after an 18-year civilian break, she logged 15 years with the Oregon National Guard, where she was a human resource specialist until 2013. Then one day, she saw a flyer at the Portland Vet Center for a group called Soldier Songs and Voices that met every Sunday at a Presbyterian church in Southeast Portland.

Founded by Americana musician Dustin Welch in Austin, Texas, the nonprofit evolved from the Welcome Home Project, which released a benefit CD that Welch contributed to. Upon rechristening the group, Welch  who is not a veteran  shifted the meeting venues from sterile classrooms to honky-tonks.

Every veteran who shows up is given a guitar, but other than that core tenet, each of the groups eight chapters is permitted to function as it sees fit. Whereas the ex-soldiers in San Marcos, Texas, typically meet on the patio of Cheatham Street Warehouse to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and swap songs and stories, the Portland sessions are more like group lessons, where musical theory is discussed and pupils are subjected to various songwriting exercises.

Intrigued, Woodbury followed up with one of the groups leaders, a local musician named Carl Solomon, who invited her to attend the next meeting. He gave her a guitar and patiently taught her to strum out chords and write songs. Nowadays, shes his most prolific pupil.

Woodbury now owns five guitars and has written some 30 songs since joining Soldier Songs and Voices, which recently switched its meeting space to a well-known acoustic music venue called Artichoke Music. A recent Sunday gathering there included half a dozen ex-soldiers who also suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Leading the group was Robert Owen, a mustachioed Army vet and folk musician with a soothing demeanor. His pupils were assembled in a circle in a bright, high-ceilinged room, with coffee and Oreo cookies available. Woodbury was there with her Golden Gophers hat on; early in the meeting, she revealed that shed reworked the melody of Bob Dylans Knockin on Heavens Door to include lyrics that werent horrible thematically.

Spin, spin, spinnin in my head/Kissin frogs and hugging toads/Leading down the same old road/Nothings normal after 5, she sings in a warm, husky tone.

Today, the group has brought in a guest guitar instructor named Tom Scharf, who walks the fledgling musicians through a 12-bar blues progression. Chad Garrett, a former Army policeman who now works as a McDonalds cashier, seems especially determined to nail the lesson, and after much struggle, he more or less does.

While stationed in Germany, Garrett says he had a commander who pushed too hard and tried to destroy his career. This provoked his PTSD.

I spent two years in hell, and thats just too much, he says.

Since leaving the Army, hes taken a variety of medications, the combination of which has led to a nerve conduction problem he says tricks his brain into thinking his feet are in pain. But after drilling that blues progression, his focus mercifully shifted.

Normally Im 24 hours in pain, he told the group. Just a few minutes ago, it went down to about a two.

Robert Owen, an Army veteran and folk musician, smiles after performing a song for the Soldier Songs and Voices group during a recent gathering at Artichoke Music in Portland. (Kevin P. Casey / For The Times )

Woodbury uses words including cathartic and therapeutic to describe the impact singing about her most painful experiences has had on her. Nontraditional efforts to help veterans deal with past trauma are increasingly gaining acceptance in mainstream military circles.

The arts, in general, are among the most important rehabilitative forms for people whove seen unspeakable atrocities, says Berkeley psychologist Michele Ritterman, whos written extensively about torture victims. Theyve experienced things that to talk about them in the linear discourse of conversation is impossible. A song is a way to tell a story with a lot of passion, emotion and non-linear phenomena. When youre trying to tell a story about things that blew away the cognitive mind  thats what PTSD is  what other modality exists than the arts?

But Solomon has had a handful of incidents where what one participant shares has provoked a strong emotional reaction in another, which concerns University of Toronto neuroscience professor Michael Thaut.

PTSD is a very serious cognitive disorder, so people who suffer from PTSD need very good care and very good professional care, says Thaut, whos written about the impact of musical therapy on brain-injury sufferers. If a guy breaks down, musicians dont know how to deal with that  because theyre not trained to. People getting together to share music is a good thing, but musicians should not dabble in therapy. If youre dealing with PTSD and asking people to express themselves, youre in some kind of therapy universe. There needs to be a professional attached to it.

Coincidentally, Solomon happens to be a licensed rational emotive cognitive behavior therapist. Im not giving them prompts like, When was the first time you shot your gun in combat? he said. But if a vets breakdown feels like it might lead to something serious, like suicide, he adds, I could open my bag of tricks as a therapist or counselor and do some things, and I would. But Im also gonna make sure that its purely triage, and were gonna get this person to somewhere where they need some therapeutic help.

After the meeting at Artichoke Music, Woodbury plays a song about a homeless vet she encountered called A Little Bit Drunk and a Lotta Bit Broke.

Gave him a light and gave him a smoke/Hes a little bit drunk and a lotta bit broke, she sings. Saw 82nd Airborne on the side of his jacket, peeking out from an old Army blanket/We never even spoke/Now Im a little bit drunk and a lotta bit broke.

I write sad songs, but Im not a sad person, says Woodbury. Im the happiest blues writer youll find.

Seely is a special correspondent.

ALSO

Why did Trump win? Because Democrats stayed home

They made it home from Vietnam. Now, these vets battle a rare form of cancer

Citing service on Veterans Day, Obama urges nation to forge unity after bitter election
Villagers refused to pay AMD 1000: Headman addressed JACES (video)

The situation remains tense in Aygestan village of Ararat region. The Republican Mayor of the community, Sokrat Hovsepyan, has addressed to the Judicial Acts Compulsory Enforcement Service requesting the latter to collect the unpaid land taxes from people. The village headman has filed 77 lawsuits. Mr. Hovsepyan confesses that he has asked the residents to pay AMD 1000 a month. I shall do my work and shall not receive a reprimand from the governor. Likewise, he will not receive a reprimand from his superiors, he said. He says the situation is catastrophic in the village as no one wanted to pay taxes. We were unable to collect money before October 1. I paid one million dram in taxes. I cannot pay the salaries of my employees and the staff of the kindergarten. I took 500 000 drams from others to be able to pay the land tax, he added. Sokrat Hovsepyan says the situation became tense in the village when the other candidate announced that farmers are not required to pay taxes. My contender used to say, Are you fools to pay taxes? If I am elected, I shall annul all taxes.
A protest against Donald Trumps victory in the presidential election turned into a riot in downtown Portland late Thursday, culminating with officers firing rubber baton rounds and arresting at least 29 people who refused to disperse after some protesters smashed windows, spray-painted buildings and ignited a dumpster fire.

Portland police said on Twitter that they would have a complete update on arrests, charges and photos related to the hours-long incident, which started peacefully Thursday with demonstrations by about 4,000 people.

The protest was declared a riot after extensive criminal and dangerous behavior, police said. By late Thursday authorities were calling the disturbance an unlawful assembly as repeated orders to disperse were ignored.

Advertisement

Police said officers used less lethal munitions in order to make arrests and move the crowd. By 11 p.m. police estimated the number of marchers at about 1,500; by midnight crowds were thinning and splintering off.

Multiple media outlets livestreamed the scene early Friday as rioters threw glass bottles and a trash can toward officers while yelling at them. The livestreams also showed officers firing rubber baton rounds and dispensing pepper spray at the group. Police tweeted that officers deployed less lethal munitions such as OC spray and vapor (pepper spray), rubber ball distraction devices, rubber baton rounds.

Officers took several protesters to the ground and arrested them, livestream video showed. Police had advised on Twitter that those arrested could face felony riot charges.

What started as a peaceful demonstration took a forceful turn when some protesters caused significant damage to vehicles at a car dealership, police said. News video showed some protesters also used rocks and baseball bats to smash the windows of businesses and start small fires as they moved through the citys Pearl District, a showcase neighborhood and site of many boutiques and art galleries.

Another video showed an altercation after a woman threw laundry detergent at protesters.

At 10 p.m. Thursday, police told protesters who had not returned to Pioneer Courthouse Square that they were under arrest. Police had previously told people who wanted to continue peacefully demonstrating to head back to the square. Media outlets showed at least one woman who appeared handcuffed walking away with officers while other protesters appeared to scatter.

A crowd soon after continued marching through the streets.

Oregon Department of Transportation officials closed portions of Interstate 5 and Interstate 84 in the area intermittently as a precaution. Officials urged travelers to watch for people in unexpected places on roads.

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales said earlier in the day that he supports peaceful protest by people exercising their constitutional rights, but he cautioned that walking on to freeways and blocking light rail lines is dangerous for everyone involved.

ALSO

Anti-Trump protesters swarm downtown L.A. for third night; graffiti and vandalism reported

A more presidential Trump tries to woo Washington in visits to the White House and the Capitol

The Ku Klux Klan says it will hold a Trump victory parade in North Carolina

UPDATES:

2:30 a.m.: This article has been updated with the latest arrest numbers.

Nov. 11, 1:25 a.m.: This article has been updated with reports of arrests.

11:30 p.m.: This article has been updated with details about protesters behavior.

10:30 p.m.: This article has been updated with additional information about protesters and warnings from authorities.

This article was originally published on Nov. 10 at 10:05 p.m.
Donald Trump says hell keep tweeting from the White House

What kind of tweets can we expect from President Trump? "I'm going to be very restrained," he says https://t.co/98NSZeWp51 pic.twitter.com/D3fafA8Zrt  CBS News (@CBSNews) November 12, 2016

Few presidential campaign tools have ever been as effective as Donald Trumps Twitter account, where he could fire off 140 characters that would immediately disrupt the race.

Given his history of tweets labeled offensive, newsworthy or simply shocking, one question that arose after he won the election Tuesday was whether he would keep tweeting from the White House. Defending the value of Twitter as a venue to get his message out directly, Trump said the answer is yes.

Its a great form of communication, he told CBS 60 Minutes in an interview to air Sunday. "... Im not saying I love it, but it does get the word out.

Trumps sometimes-erratic tweeting  messages were sent in the middle of the night or to wage an ill-advised fight  contributed to Hillary Clintons accusations that he was too unstable to serve as president.

Anytime you see a story about me or my campaign saying "sources said," DO NOT believe it. There are no sources, they are just made up lies!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016

How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up--and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted? https://t.co/gECLNtQizQ  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2016

Trump, whose relationship with the media can be described as rocky at best, said he also views Twitter as a way to counter tough news reports about him.

I have a method of fighting back, he said.

It was an ominous warning from a president-elect who vowed to sue several news organizations that ran unflattering stories about him during his campaign and to reexamine libel laws should he win the presidency, though no federal libel law exists.

How hell carry out his tweeting remains a question. The Secret Service will likely ask him to restrict his electronics use for security reasons; President Obama fought to keep hold of his Blackberry when he came into office and ultimately agreed to use a modified device.

Another unknown is whether Trump will tweet from his existing account of @realdonaldtrump or move to the @POTUS handle, which Obama has said hell hand off to his successor.

Perhaps hell choose a mix. Trumps personal account has about 15 million followers, while the presidential handle has just under 12 million. Trump could use his account for more informal or even politically incendiary tweets and save the other for more more formal messaging.

He uses a similar pattern on his own account now: Tweets sent from Android devices tend be feistier and are thought to come mostly from Trump himself, while those written on iPhones are more traditional campaign fodder and believed to be written, or at least edited, by staff.
Diplomats and environmental scientists from nearly all the nations of the world are meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, to figure out how best to fulfill the promises made in last Decembers Paris climate agreement to limit global warming. But with Tuesdays election of Donald Trump as president, perhaps the American contingent should simply pack up and come home.

Trumps refusal to believe the broadly accepted scientific fact that human activity  primarily the burning of fossil fuels  is filling the atmosphere with carbon and other greenhouse gases could have lasting and devastating consequences for the entire world. The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that those emissions are causing global temperatures to rise and are transforming the natural environment in ways that already are having profound negative impacts on plant and animal life. Melting glaciers and the polar ice cap are raising sea levels, and climate patterns are shifting with disastrous effects, from forest die-offs to increased flooding to prolonged droughts. And warmer air and oceans are fueling more intense, powerful storms.

Trump, however, believes its all a hoax. Hes suggested that American efforts to reduce emissions work to the benefit of China. He has pledged to withdraw from the Paris agreement, to cancel it.

Advertisement

In other words, he wants to move us backward even as the United Nations Environment Program reports that the emissions goals in the agreement  designed to keep warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial era levels  are, if anything, too little, too late. The U.N. program has also said that without immediate and drastic action to curtail carbon emissions by 2030, global temperatures will rise to a level between 2.9 and 3.4 degrees above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

Trump has also pledged to scrap the Obama administrations Clean Power Plan, which was meant to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. His plan, by contrast, is to roll back emissions controls, open more federal lands to mining and oil-and-gas drilling, ease permitting for more pipeline projects and try to revive the coal industry.

To help him accomplish those dangerous and counterproductive ends, Trump has tapped deeply into an anti-climate-change, anti-regulatory crowd of conservatives, beginning with energy-sector lobbyist Mike McKenna (Koch Industries and Halliburton have been among his clients) as head of his energy transition team. To run his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency  which he has suggested he would either cut back or eliminate  Trump turned to Myron Ebell, a climate-change skeptic and opponent of environmental regulations.

This way disaster lies. And it is unlikely to receive much pushback from a Congress in which Republicans  who generally favor less regulation and oversight of oil and gas production  are firmly in control, and where the only bulwark against rollbacks of environmental law may be Senate filibusters by minority-party Democrats.

Perhaps once he grasps the levers of power, Trump will begin to listen to more learned experts than the lobbyists he has so far turned to for advice. But if not, the most influential nation on the planet  and the second-leading producer of climate-changing emissions after China  could find itself leading the world down a path of even worse environmental degradation and destruction.

The good news, if there is any, is that the rest of the world may not follow. The United States is only one signatory among nearly 200 to the Paris agreement, and as the prospect of a Trump presidency rose, many of those nations rushed to formally adopt the pact, which went into effect four days before the election. If Trump pulls out of the agreement, it will still stand, and the other signatories say theyll stay the course (though itll be tough to meet its international goals with the second-largest emitter opting out). Ironically, by withdrawing, Trump could hand over the mantle of global environmental leadership to China, which has ambitious plans to reduce its emissions.

Trump may not believe the science, but he cant change it. For the sake of the world, lets hope he wakes up to reality.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
Multiple donors with ties to one developer contributed more than $600,000 to the election campaigns of the mayor and members of the Los Angeles City Council. Most of those same politicians later approved that developers controversial $72-million Harbor Gateway project in spite of recommendations against it by both the Department of City Planning and the Planning Commission. And the public wasnt the wiser until the Los Angeles Times reported the details about the Sea Breeze apartment development.

Sea Breeze, according to The Times, is a case study in the myriad ways money can flow to City Hall when developers seek changes to local planning rules. The politicians who received donations and spoke to The Times claimed the campaign money played no role in the projects approval. Now the L.A. County district attorneys office is reviewing the situation. Whatever the D.A. discovers, the Sea Breeze story is an overdue call to change the way Los Angeles makes planning and development decisions. Whether or not charges are filed, the process is morally corrupt; its wrong.

Despite City Halls rhetoric about zoning reform and a vision for the future, the [citys current neighborhood plans] remain hopelessly out-of-date.

Advertisement

Los Angeles suffers from outdated zoning rules and poor planning processes. State law requires cities to maintain General Plans, which need to be updated every five years. The Los Angeles General Plan includes 35 separate community plans that establish legal land-use parameters for the citys neighborhoods, plus one each for the Port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles International Airport. Unfortunately, most of these community plans have not been updated in 20 years or more. Despite City Halls rhetoric about zoning reform and a vision for the future, the plans remain hopelessly out-of-date.

A recent attempt to update the Hollywood Community Plan was thrown out in 2014, after residents sued and the judge in the case ruled the new plan contained errors of fact and law and was fatally flawed. Los Angeles paid $1.75 million in legal fees to the plaintiffs, and Hollywood is back to relying on a 1988 community plan.

What happens when Los Angeles tries to move forward with outdated plans? Requests for updates  zoning and planning variances  land in the hands of the 15 City Council members. They more or less have the authority to ignore the old rules and decide what projects will be built in their districts, subject to sign-off by the mayor. No project of any consequence can move forward without these approvals.

This spot-zoning system gives those who can afford to fill campaign coffers outsized influence over the size, shape and location of new development in the city, with average Angelenos left out of this backroom cycle of monied interests and City Hall politicians.

Changing such deeply rooted behavior in City Hall will not be easy because it will take away elected officials biggest source of money and power. Yet fixing it can start with three simple steps: Limit campaign contributions, make all such donations public and get L.A.s community plans updated.

Los Angeles should impose strict limits on campaign funding from those who have development business before the City Council. The Securities and Exchange Commission has already imposed such limits on Wall Street firms that are doing, or plan to do, business with Los Angeles. Many more such rules are in effect in municipalities around the country. The devil is in the details, but Los Angeles could use the SEC rules as a starting point in order to reduce the potential for undue influence from campaign contributions on City Hall.

Next, whatever contributions are made should be a matter of public record. All campaign donations received from any person, corporation or lobbyist connected to projects under consideration for variances from the City Council should be published. It shouldnt take months of research by The Times to connect the dots. The public has a right to know this information before any decisions are made by City Hall that will affect their neighborhoods.

Finally, the City Council should do its job and update the 35 community plans. Rules and planning goals that were adequate a generation ago simply dont meet the citys needs now. The updating effort will require input from neighborhoods and a comprehensive approach to city planning. Once the plans are updated, developers may still need variances  no plan can cover every eventuality  but the city will have a current, transparent set of rules, debated and agreed upon by its residents, against which to judge those requests.

Los Angeles has the makings of a great 21st century city. If it is to succeed, its foundation has to be built not on plans determined by which developers have the deepest pockets or the whims of individual elected officials, but on community plans that reflect L.A.s needs today and anticipate its hopes for the future.

Austin Beutner and Mickey Kantor were co-chairs of the L.A. 2020 Commission, which published a report in 2013 highlighting, among other issues, the need for development reform in Los Angeles.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook

MORE FROM OPINION

L.A. voters have a vision for the future  and are willing to pay for it

Trust us, you dont want a reservation at L.As hottest new restaurant

We may not have a female president, but four out of five of L.A.s county supervisors will be women
When I left the military in 2014 after nearly 12 years of service in the Air Force, a fellow veteran advised me on how to respond when a civilian says, Thank you for your service. Such expressions of gratitude, while never wrong, often leave veterans uncertain how to answer. He suggested a very simple reply: Thank you for your support.

In the past, I found civilians expressions of appreciation humbling, if occasionally awkward. I was proud that Id served in the great struggle and adventure of my generation. In the years since, though, Ive become discomfited by the lionization of the military by those who havent served. More and more I found I met their appreciation with a growing cynicism. This terse response, Thank you for your support, has been my crutch. It gracefully ends the conversation, freeing me from having to explain that my service and their gratitude is a source of consternation for me.

This terse response, Thank you for your support, has been my crutch. It gracefully ends the conversation.

Advertisement

Some of my angst, at first, stemmed from the fact that I didnt feel I really sacrificed enough to earn thanks from strangers. Although I had multiple tours in Iraq, my deployments were shorter and much easier than most others in the armed services. My exposure to danger, though real, was limited to brief moments of hostile action. I never killed, nor were any of my intimately familiar friends killed. The only thing I ever bled was time.

As years have passed, Ive felt a growing disdain for the Iraq War itself. Veterans of other conflicts, I imagine, can take comfort in knowing they served in the defense of their nation, its allies, and its values  their wars reflected in some way the U.S. heritage of military restraint that dates to the very start of our Republic.

In a letter in late 1775, Benjamin Franklin compared this embryonic nation to a rattlesnake, noting that she never wounds till she has generously given notice and She never begins an attack She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. Abraham Lincoln echoed these sentiments in his second inaugural address. Speaking of the Civil War, he said, All dreaded it, all sought to avoid it and that the North would only accept war rather than let [the Union] perish. This idea, that we go to war only as a last resort, persists in the ethos of Americas military.

Unfortunately, that wasnt the case with my war.

The American invasion of Iraq of 2003, which began just months before I commissioned in the military, was baseless, belligerent and detrimental to U.S. interests. It certainly violated the ideals defined by Franklin and Lincoln. We were the aggressor in a conflict that cost our nation thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and international influence. And the result is a region in disarray.

Time revealed that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Any suggested connection to the 9/11 attacks was unfounded. Rumors of weapons of mass destruction were completely fictional. My role, however small, in this unprovoked, unjust and unwinnable war has left me uncomfortable accepting praise for my service.

On this Veterans Day, it is a good opportunity to consider the contributions our military personnel have made to the United States. All veterans made sacrifices to the nation and it is right to be grateful for those who serve in our honorable all-volunteer military. Acknowledging the cost paid by service members is a small but admirable action by those who never donned a uniform or carried a weapon.

Yet with every thank you for your service, I silently squirm. As I struggle to see my service in Iraq as anything but an abrogation of our national ideals, praise falls as a heavy burden. I feel more deserving of hostility than veneration.

But the insults and animosity never come, only continued fawning from the well-intentioned. Unable to avoid the groundswell of appreciation in the post-9/11 culture, and without better words to make sense of my angst, I will fall back on my stoic response.

Thank you for your support.

David Max Korzen is a graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
To the editor: Perhaps because I read The Times every day, I was not as shocked as everyone else was about Donald Trumps victory. Being a scientist, I recognized that the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll would be statistically the most advanced. (The USC/L.A. Times poll saw what other surveys missed: A wave of Trump support, Nov. 8)

Not that I am happy about this, but I hope that people will get over the shock and take action. This should not be about policy  like it or not, as the victor Trump has the right to push a conservative agenda. But I see no hope that he can unify our great country, unless he sincerely acts to heal the wounds he has inflicted.

We must unite in a protest movement and demand that he sincerely apologize, without laying any blame elsewhere, first to President Obama and African Americans for perpetuating the birther myth, and then to all women, Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Muslims and the disabled for his hateful and demeaning rhetoric.

Advertisement

Steve Mills, Glendale

..

To the editor: The Daybreak poll was the other outsider who won this race. Our high Gini coefficient (an indicator of income inequality) also won this race.

The long denial of income inequality in this country by the two parties and the media finally ambushed them. If Trump takes on that issue and brings the banks and financial firms to heel, he will have the most opposition from his own party.

An income gap this large is always a cause of social instability, strikes, riots and revolutions. In this case, American workers brought it to the polls.

Does this mean the system is working?

William DuBay, Poulsbo, Wash.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
California Democrats ask Obama to pardon nearly 750,000 Dreamers, but White House says it wouldnt work

The members of Congress who persuaded President Obama to grant temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought into the country illegally as children are now asking him to use a pardon to prevent those immigrants from being deported by President-elect Donald Trump.

The White House, however, promptly batted down the idea.

Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Downey) and Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) sent a letter to Obama on Thursday asking him to use his pardon authority to forgive the past and future civil immigration offenses of the nearly 750,000 people granted deportation deferrals under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

They believe that would keep those people from being deported, and even though it would leave them in legal limbo without work permits or visas, they could more easily apply for legal status from within the U.S. without immigration offenses on their records.

They wouldnt have a piece of paper, they wouldnt have work authorization, but they wouldnt have to be living in fear every moment of their lives about deportation, Lofgren said after a news conference Thursday.

Lofgren, a former immigration attorney, said the pardons would probably be applied to the civil offenses related to entering and remaining in the country without authorization.

But whether a pardon would actually be applicable in the so-called Dreamers situation is unclear. Lawyers disagree over whether the immigrants could be pardoned for civil crimes they havent been formally accused of, and whether such a pardon would actually prevent them from being deported while they seek legal status.

A White House official signaled late Thursday that the administration was not considering a pardon for those registered under DACA because it believes a pardon would not allow them legal status.

We note that the clemency power could not give legal status to any undocumented individual. As we have repeatedly said for years, only Congress can create legal status for undocumented individuals, an administration official said.

After immigration reform efforts stalled in Congress during Obamas first term, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pressured Obama to act independently to protect from deportation certain immigrants brought into the country illegally when they were children. He then used an executive order to create the DACA program in 2012.

The Dreamers, one in three of whom are estimated to live in California, gave the Department of Homeland Security their fingerprints, home addresses and other information to undergo background checks that allowed them to defer deportation under DACA.

At the time, advocates and the administration emphasized that providing the information would protect the Dreamers and was worth the risk. But with Trump vowing to deport millions of people who are in the country illegally and many fearing he may let the DACA program expire, Dreamers are worried the information they provided will be used to deport them.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), whose husband is an immigration attorney, said at the news conference she has been getting a flood of messages from frightened Dreamers. On Tuesday she sent a letter to Obama asking him to keep their information from the Trump administration.

We promised these recipients security, and now they are facing a nightmare, she said.

Roybal-Allard said those who pushed Obama to create the program and persuaded people to come out of the shadows to register with the government have an obligation to protect them.

These are kids. We feel a sense of responsibility. We went out into our districts and we talked to the Dreamers, and they asked us, Is it really OK for us to do this? Roybal-Allard said. And we said, No, dont worry, you need to come forward. Now we are in a situation where all that we said, in fact, could possibly be reversed.

Although the presidents pardon power is normally used for individual cases, there is some precedent for the chief executive to pardon a large group of people.

President Jimmy Carter pardoned half a million Vietnam War draft evaders in 1977, and at least seven other presidents have issued broad pardons.

Congress and the Supreme Court cannot undo a presidential pardon, nor can a new president.

Lofgren said if Obama doesnt pardon the Dreamers, she hopes he responds with his own idea to help them.

These young people are not alone, they are not going to be abandoned by us, she said.

UPDATES

4:59 p.m. This post was updated with additional details throughout.

2:15 p.m. This post was updated with the White Houses response to the proposal.

This post was originally published at 11:30 a.m.
President Obama bet his presidency on executive power, acting without Congress to implement his agenda with the understanding that his legacy rested largely on whether his successor kept his maneuvers intact.

Then Donald Trump was elected on a promise to dismantle what Obama had built.

Suddenly, the presidents signature accomplishments are in peril on climate change, immigration and foreign policy. His chief legislative triumph, the healthcare reform law known as Obamacare, is one that Republicans in Congress are eager to repeal and Trump has promised to replace.

Advertisement

Were going to fix healthcare, make it more affordable and better, Trump said Thursday after his first meeting with Republican leaders in Congress. ... Were going to do a real job for the public.

Obama is scrambling to salvage his agenda with little more than a public relations strategy to help him.

Arguing that the presidents achievements will take more unwinding than Trump or Republicans believe and that they are popular with Americans, Obama aides are preparing a campaign to remind the public of whats at stake if his regulations, executive orders and negotiated agreements are rolled back.

Erasing Obamas deeds will upset Americans, argued Josh Earnest, White House press secretary. Thats something that Republicans will have to consider moving forward.

But not only did Trumps victory jeopardize Obamas chief accomplishments, it also likely ended the presidents admittedly weak opportunity to complete his presidency with a flurry of last-minute victories during a lame-duck session of Congress. Aides had hoped that if Hillary Clinton won the presidential race and Democrats made gains in Congress, the outgoing Republican majorities might agree to deals with Obama on trade, criminal justice reform and perhaps even his Supreme Court nomination eight months ago of Merrick Garland, which Republicans have refused to consider.

Instead, as Republicans prepare to take control of the executive and legislative branches, Obama is planning a farewell tour of the country, aides say, to send a message of unity but also to remind Americans of what they stand to lose if Republicans peel back his actions.

On Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, 20 million people stand to lose healthcare coverage if the law were repealed. Obamas strategy is to remind those consumers about what they stand to lose, in turn pressing Republicans to come up with a replacement that ensures their coverage remains intact.

A lot of his signature programs are going to get gutted, predicted presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. But this idea that Obamas suddenly losing his legacy is premature. He may lose the Affordable Care Act, which is a major part of his legacy. But the amount of things hes been able to do over eight years will be looked upon well in history.

Obama aides hope to take advantage of divides within the GOP about the best path forward, and Democratic allies in Congress are plotting how to fend off Republican efforts to undo Obamas key accomplishments and to work with Trump on issues where there is some agreement.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), for instance, has cited a robust infrastructure jobs bill and child care and paid family leave issues, which Trump campaigned on but that Republicans have opposed, as areas of potential cooperation.

Nullifying other key Obama accomplishments might not be as easy as Trump made it sound on the campaign trail. For example, the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, which Trump repeatedly assailed as a sign that Obama is a weak negotiator, cant be easily undone without the other countries involved. Trump could conceivably reimpose sanctions on Iran that Obama eased as part of the agreement, but that would free Iran to fire up its reactors again.

As for other international agreements, like the global landmark climate accord reached in Paris in December, Trump can refuse to take the steps toward carbon reduction that Obama agreed to.

Other administrative actions on climate are easier to undo, like regulations of coal-fired power plants or fuel efficiency standards for cars. Still, many industries have already adapted to the regulations and made investments they cant recoup; that could put corporate pressure on Trump to preserve them.

Trump may also find, as Obama did, that declaring intent to act doesnt always bring about change right away. Eight years after ordering the closure of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, for example, Obama still hasnt been able to make it happen.

Obama and Trump met for 90 minutes at the White House on Thursday. Aides said Obama had not planned to litigate old grievances with Trump in their first sit-down meeting, and so probably did not bring up the issue of birtherism with the man who used it to undermine his presidency for years.

Afterward, the two exchanged pleasantries and sounded flattering notes in their remarks to reporters in the Oval Office, and Trump dashed to Capitol Hill to weigh in more specifically on agenda items.

Meeting with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan in the Wisconsin Republicans ceremonial office, Trump ticked off the big items he campaigned on: immigration, lower taxes and healthcare, saying his administration was going to make it more affordable.

We are going to do absolutely spectacular things for the American people, Trump said, and I look forward to starting.

Whatever parts of the Obama presidency Trump has pledged to undo, Brinkley predicted, Obama was likely trying to preserve as he opened a new chapter in his relationship with Trump.

One thing I know Barack Obama is not going to do, said Brinkley, is start belittling Donald Trump.

Times staff writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Twitter: @cparsons, @mikememoli

ALSO

A more presidential Trump tries to woo Washington

A primer on executive power: Trump cant end same-sex marriages, but he could speed up deportations

Donald Trump wants to replace Obamacare. But its not that simple.
Sociologist: Every tenth family in Armenia goes to bed hungry (video)

Sociologist Aharon Adibekyan says the results of a recent survey show that every tenth family in Armenia goes to bed hungry. Half of the population chews something before sleeping. About 30 percent meet their basic requirements while 20 percent have incomes and do not limit themselves to anything. This is the general picture in Armenia, Mr. Adibekyan told journalists today. He says people in Syunik region lead a better life than in other regions as they have jobs. People [in Syunik] receive salaries, do shopping, go to a barber or salon, buy books, etc, the sociologist said. Ethnographer Hranush Kharatyan notes that workplaces in Kajaran are created at the expense of peoples health. Cancer rates are increasing in Kapan. The Kajaran factory is ready to recover the surgery costs to silence people, she said. The sociologist reminded that the best way to reduce poverty is to create jobs. He added that two-thirds of the people live in the real poverty. Ethnographer Hranush KHaratyan added, in turn, that it is a shame to live in poverty in Armenia. Those who do not have bread to eat or a roof over their heads are considered poor in Armenia. A person does not consider himself to be poor when he does not ask others for bread and lives on pickled cabbage and potatoes all year round.
Fresh from a successful battle against a Democratic opponent, Donald Trumps attention must now turn to defining his presidency.

His campaign offered two divergent approaches. He was a disruptive rabble-rouser when it came to general demeanor and his immigration and national security stances. He was a more conventional Republican when it came to his social-issue positions and economic concerns.

The warring options were on sharp display overnight into Friday.

Advertisement

Responding to protests around the country Thursday night, Trump first issued a tweet in keeping with the defiant tone of his campaign that professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

Nine hours later came one that was more presidential in approach, if a reversal from his first sentiment.

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud! he said.

The early discussions about key positions in his administration included similarly opposed sentiments, suggesting that Trump has yet to lock down precisely how he will approach governing the nation.

Among those being considered for presidential chief of staff  the figure who more than any other determines how well a White House works, and at what  was Stephen Bannon, who took a leave as chairman of Breitbart News to serve as Trumps campaign CEO.

Bannon is a controversial figure even among Republicans, seen during the campaign as encouraging Trumps more eye-opening stuntssuch as his news conference with several women with grievances against the Clintons, most of whom had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct. He also fanned some of Trumps incendiary rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims and African Americans. But he has no experience in governing or keeping on track an organization as large as the executive branch.

Another person being considered was the far more buttoned-down Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, an establishment figure who has close ties to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and other GOP leaders, having helped to run the party for almost six years.

Bannon and Priebus share an alliance with Trump, but little else. The pick is seen as essential to Trumps direction since the chief of staff often has the presidents ear just before a decision is reached.

The picture is no clearer for other top Cabinet posts, such as secretary of State. Trump is considering Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, a consensus builder in the Senate who is well-liked across the aisle. But he is also looking at former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, one of the most aggressive neoconservative hawks during the George W. Bush administration and a favorite among the Breitbart set.

Adding further uncertainty, on Friday afternoon Trump shook up his transition team, announcing that Vice President-elect Mike Pence would take over, replacing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

As much as staffing, Trumps presidency also will be defined by the issues he chooses to take up early in his administration. Already, outside groups and Republicans on Capitol Hill, who will continue to control both houses, are pressuring Trump to make good on myriad and sometimes competing campaign promises. And they are moving into the vacuum formed by the lack of substantive policy proposals in the campaign.

Trumps success in Tuesdays election rested on running against both parties, Democrats and Republicans alike. That suggests that he may end up cutting a distinct path untethered to the traditional lines, even Republican ones.

For now, the president-elect is keeping his options open, at least publicly. In a brief comment to reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday, he offered only one broad directive.

Were going to work very strongly on immigration, healthcare and were looking at jobs, big-league jobs, he said.

Asked specifically whether he intended to ban Muslims from entering the United States, as he pledged during the campaign, Trump raised his hand, said thank you and walked off.

Turning from a campaign to governing is difficult for any winning nominee, but for Trump it represents not just an occupational shift but a cultural one. He will go from being the top man in a company bearing his name, with his children as his chief lieutenants, to commanding the sprawling executive branch with miles-long lines of authority and an expansive reach over issues with which he has no experience.

He will confront not only the power of the presidency but its limitations  specifically the other equal partners in government, such as a legislative branch that runs on its own calendar and with its own priorities.

For more on politics 

Both Trump and Capitol Hill Republicans appear eager to make the repeal of Obamacare a prime early focus. In the waning days of the campaign, he had talked of calling a special session to repeal his predecessors signature achievement, but Congress will already be in session by the time he becomes president.

We would urge them to go big on the issues, and the first would be to repeal Obamacare, said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers-allied interest group that worked in dozens of states to elect Republicans.

It was a key issue in the elections in the Senate and the presidential as well. Dont nibble around the edges. Go big, said Phillips, whose organization also favors early action on tax reform.

But calling for the repeal of a measure at campaign rallies with voters who dislike President Obama is different altogether than taking health insurance coverage away from 20 million Americans without a detailed plan for replacing it.

Trump said Friday that he would keep in place several popular parts of Obamacare, also known the Affordable Care Act, including its coverage guarantee for sick Americans and a provision that allows young people to remain on their parents insurance until they are 26.

I know how to do this stuff, he told 60 Minutes for an interview set to air Sunday, after making similar comments in a Wall Street Journal interview.

Already, differences have emerged between Trump and Ryan as to how expansive changes would be.

The House speaker, in a Fox News interview on Friday, suggested a revamping of both healthcare and the Medicare and Medicaid programs, long thwarted by Obamas threatened veto.

If you are going to repeal and replace Obamacare, you have to address those issues as well, Ryan said. Those things are part of our plan.

But the coalition that helped elect Trump benefits from the very programs that Ryan wants to shrink. And as a candidate, Trump deviated from Republican promises to curtail entitlements.

Still on his campaign website is a quote from the candidate distancing himself from the very measures Ryan discussed Friday.

Im not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and Im not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid, Trump said.

Ryan and Trump also differ when it comes to immigration, one of the president-elects premier issues. Ryan has shirked from backing Trumps call to build a giant wall on the Mexican border. While the speaker has emphasized border security, he also has not signed on to Trumps proposal to deport millions of people here without proper papers.

The initial stages of building an administration are as much about sending messages as crafting a lasting structure. The next days and weeks will be watched closely by the Washington political ecosystem as Trump builds out from a small coterie of trusted aides to the much larger assemblage needed for his administration.

Among the questions will be how broad a net he casts into parts of the Republican establishment that opposed him as nominee. Trump is known to value loyalty, but will be under pressure to hire some who were skeptical of him in order to reassure Republicans that the party is unified. Whether he sees that as necessary is an open question.

Trump already has started outsourcing much of the transition to the very lobbyists and insiders he vowed to eradicate with his calls to drain the swamp.

Among others, a lobbyist for fossil-fuel companies is heading the transition teams energy independence group and a tobacco lobbyist will oversee staffing for the Department of Homeland Security.

David Tamasi, the Trump Victory finance chair for Washington, said he does not believe Trump has a litmus test that would exclude lobbyists, Washington insiders or people with corporate experience in filling his staff positions.

Its a cross-section, he said. Its people with Washington experience, which provides a historical perspective of how you get things done and how the process works, and people with private-sector experience who know how to make the government work more efficiently. All of these are core principles of what the guy ran on.

But thats not all Trump ran on. He owes his election to a band of followers who, like him, have no fondness for the Republican establishment in Washington, which they viewed as having ignored their plight for years. They are intensely interested in his plans to create jobs, which may rest at least initially on cutting a deal on infrastructure spending with a wary Republican Congress.

In many ways, Trumps positioning is similar to that of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he became governor of California after the 2003 recall. Like Trump, Schwarzenegger was a hybrid of showman and political leader, running to blow up politics as usual, but without a particularly ideological set of positions. That helped him win the election, but left him marooned when he ran into trouble trying to put his plans into action.

Trump has similarly made promises that could prove impossible to deliver, whichever path he sets for his administration, said Jon Cowan, president of Third Way, a centrist advocacy group in Washington.

The distance between the things he said he would do and the actual reality of how he would do them is larger than any nominee for either party I have ever seen, he said.

Times staff writers Lisa Mascaro and Noah Bierman contributed to this report.

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Twitter: @cathleendecker

evan.halper@latimes.com

Twitter: @evanhalper

ALSO:

For reeling Democrats, now what?

Updates on California politics

Live coverage from the campaign trail

UPDATES:

4:15 p.m.: This story was updated with Trumps comments on Obamacare.

This story was originally published at 2:50 p.m.
President-elect Donald Trump named Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, to head their transition team, abruptly replacing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Friday amid increasing signs that the effort to prepare the next White House is off to a rocky start.

Trump also took the unusual step of naming his three oldest children and his son-in-law to top posts, moves certain to create potential conflicts of interest given that his attorney said Trump would put his children in charge of his assets while he is president.

The transition team is always crucial, but especially so for the first president elected without experience in either government or the military. In addition to recruiting thousands of people to staff the White House, Cabinet agencies, embassies and other key government posts, the transition team needs to make sure Trump is briefed and prepared to take responsibility for the government and for implementing his policy initiatives as soon as he is inaugurated in just 76 days.

Advertisement

You need to have your team on the field when the clock starts, said Max Stier, who heads the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington nonprofit that focuses on good-government practices. This is not simply about achieving the policy promises; its also about keeping us safe. Transitions are the point of maximum vulnerability for our nation.

The effort is almost always well underway before a new president is elected, given the complexity and critical nature of the job, even as candidates know the work will be in vain if they are not chosen by the voters. Legislation passed in 2010, and updated in 2015, formalized much of the process for the transition from George W. Bush to Obama after the 2008 election, considered one of the smoothest in history. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton formed transition teams months ago that began working with the White House on first steps toward a potential handoff.

One of the biggest dangers is that people will underestimate the scope, said former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who ran Mitt Romneys transition team in 2012.

That may have happened in Trumps case. Following Trumps meeting Thursday at the White House with the president, several Obama officials privately noted the extent to which Trump and his staff seemed unprepared to discuss basic aspects of staffing a new administration and daunted by the extent of the challenges ahead. A follow-up meeting between Trump aides and White House transition officials scheduled for Friday was canceled, a senior Obama aide said.

To be sure, some of the observations made by White House officials could be colored by partisan differences or concern that Trump appears set to dismantle Obamas legacy achievements. Many had counted on a smoother transition to a Clinton administration in which top personnel would likely include former coworkers.

Trumps decision to elevate Pence to run his transition team was one of several announced Friday.

Pence has proved a loyal second to Trump, backing him when other establishment Republicans were critical and finding ways to explain some of his more controversial statements in public. A former member of the House, Pence also has close ties to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other top Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Christies departure came after the recent convictions of two former top aides for creating a traffic jam leading to the George Washington Bridge to punish a mayor who would not endorse him to be reelected New Jersey governor.

The mission of our team will be clear: Put together the most highly qualified group of successful leaders who will be able to implement our change agenda in Washington, Trump said. Together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding this nation.

Christie was retained as a vice chair of the team, along with several of Trumps most visible campaign advisors: Dr. Ben Carson, a former GOP primary rival; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).

Sessions, who may be the most hard-line member of the Senate on immigration, has long been among Trumps most influential advisors. Stephen Miller, a former top aide to Sessions, has been Trumps top policy advisor and will take a similar role in the transition team. Rick Dearborn, Sessions chief of staff, was named as the executive director for the transition team.

The team also includes Stephen K. Bannon, Trumps campaign chief who is on leave from heading the arch-conservative Breitbart News. Several prominent business people, including Peter Thiel, one of the only major figures in Silicon Valley to endorse Trump, were named, as was Pam Bondi, the Florida attorney general who solicited and accepted a $25,000 campaign donation from Trumps family foundation in 2013, four days after Bondi said her office was considering joining a New York state probe of Trump University.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the Tulare Republican who leads the House Select Intelligence Committee, was also given a top spot. He could be a key bridge for Trump and the intelligence community, which has been reluctant to rally behind Trump.

Trumps children and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who guided him throughout the campaign, appear to have retained their influence in an official capacity. Kushners presence at the White House on Thursday drew notice from Obamas staff when he asked, as they toured the West Wing, how many of the individuals there would remain into the next administration. Nearly all will depart along with the president.

Briefing reporters Friday about the presidents trip next week to Greece, Germany and Peru, Ben Rhodes, Obamas deputy national security advisor, repeatedly referred to the imperative of fully educating the incoming administration about the major foreign policy issues Trump will face.

The main focus of the conversation [between Trump and Obama] ... was determining how to make the best use of this transition period to fully brief up the president-elect and his team, he said. Theres a great deal of complexity.

Trumps spokespeople did not respond to calls and emails asking about his preparation.

Passages on Trumps transition website, GreatAgain.gov, were copied from the site of the Center for Presidential Transition, a nonprofit that had consulted with both campaigns about the transition, Politico reported.

Its in everybodys interest to have a good transition, said Martha Kumar, the director of the White House Transition Project. Were living in a world of great vulnerability. You cant afford to not prepare well.

Los Angeles Times staff writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Twitter: @noahbierman, @mikememoli and @cparsons

ALSO:

Why did Trump win? Because Democrats stayed home

Clinton and Trump supporters come from different Americas. Between them lies bitterness and distrust

See how every neighborhood voted in the 2016 election

UPDATES:

4 p.m.: This article was updated with more details on Donald Trumps transition team and with comments from White House officials.

This article was originally published at 11:25 a.m.
Lock her up! was his supporters fervent cry.

But its Donald Trump who may find himself in political shackles, stuck between his followers yearning to put Hillary Clinton in jail and his expressed desire to unite a badly fractured country after an election in which he lost the popular vote.

The tension is not likely to dissipate anytime soon. After having pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton, Trump faces a dilemma: He can either drop the matter and risk angering his supporters, or charge ahead with a criminal inquiry targeting his vanquished political foe, something never before done in U.S. history.

Its a tough decision, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Trump advisor and a top choice to be the next attorney general, told CNN on Thursday. I dont know what the right answer to that is. Its a tough one that ought to be given a lot of thought. 

Advertisement

The answer, of course, rests with Trump. The president-elect may have signaled his intentions to forgo an investigation when he told supporters Wednesday morning during his victory address that the country owed Clinton a major debt of gratitude for her service.

That doesnt sound like what you would say when you are about to seek a special prosecutor, according to legal experts and political consultants. Trump is surely cognizant, they said, of the immense political and legal hurdles of forging ahead.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published online Friday, Trump suggested he had higher priorities. Its not something Ive given a lot of thought, because I want to solve healthcare, jobs, border control, tax reform, he said.

Its a tough decision.  Rudy Giuliani on appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton

A prosecution of Clinton for mishandling classified material on a private email server while secretary of State would certainly inflame Democrats and anger independent voters wishing for nothing more than to put the nightmare of the 2016 campaign behind them. It would also become campaign fodder in the 2018 midterm election and might distract from Trumps efforts to build a wall on the border of Mexico and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Is there a backlash to him reopening this? There would be, said Reed Galen, a Republican strategist. This country is so highly divided along political lines. Are you really going to antagonize 160 million Americans for the purposes of making the other 160 million happy?

If I were advising him, and I am certainly not, I would tell him to take the [victory] speech he gave and allow the Clintons to fade into American political history, Galen said.

Douglas Brinkley, a bestselling author and historian at Rice University, said appointing a special prosecutor would be unprecedented and draw comparisons to the well-known vindictive streak of President Nixon.

Trump has to be careful not to seem Nixonian and develop his enemies list and destroy opponents, Brinkley said. I think he has his hands full with building a wall, and Im not sure playing to the lock her up motif gets him anywhere. It would just be very bad, a terrible precedent to start trying to jail your political opponent after an election.

The problem of dropping such a promise is that Trump issued his pledge to appoint a special prosecutor during a presidential debate viewed by tens of millions of people. In one back-and-forth, Clinton said she was glad that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

Trump shot back: Because youd be in jail.

In rallies later, he repeatedly said Clintons illegal actions were the worst political scandal since Watergate and that the Clinton Foundation was the most corrupt enterprise in political history.

The idea of jailing Clinton has long been enthusiastically embraced by his followers and their anger at Clinton was a major motivator for many Trump voters. They have produced merchandise including T-shirts and bobblehead dolls emblazoned with Hillary for Prison or Clinton wearing pinstripes or jail jumpsuits.

Their desire to put Clinton in handcuffs has not dissipated with Trumps ascension to the presidency, and they would surely be disappointed if he backed off his promise. Such a course risks Trump being seen by his supporters as suddenly part of the same rigged political system that he long said was protecting Clinton.

She should be prosecuted, Shawn Gibby, 50, a maintenance manager in Bessemer City, N.C., said this week. I want justice to be served. We should be a nation of law and order.

Said Stephanie Bevens, 46, also of North Carolina: Hillary should be held accountable  just like anyone else. Id like to see her investigated, and I think her punishment should be the same as it would be for anyone else. Shes been treated as if shes above the law. Shes not above the rest of us.

Some of his top advisors have also advocated charging Clinton. During his interview with CNN, Giuliani expressed an eagerness to lead the Justice Department, saying that as a former associate attorney general and U.S. attorney in New York, theres probably nobody that knows the place better than he does.

Giuliani has long said he favors prosecuting Clinton. I would have brought such a case, he told ABC News in August. I would have won such a case.

On CNN on Thursday, he hesitated when asked whether he would accept the attorney generals job if Trump also demanded he drop the re-investigation of Clinton as a condition of the appointment.

We would have to talk about that, said Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and No. 3 at the Justice Department in the Reagan administration. We would have to talk about ... what the ramifications of that to other prosecutions, future prosecutions, how would you couch that? Suppose more evidence came forward a year from now that we dont know about now that makes it a much worse situation?

There has been some speculation that President Obama could pardon Clinton, even without her being convicted of any crimes. Giuliani told CNN that he hoped Obama -- and presumably Trump -- didnt issue one. I dont think that would be right because if he pardons her, hes got to pardon about five other people who helped her, Giuliani said.

Legal experts said reopening the case  barring the discovery of new and explosive evidence  would either end without charges or be savaged in the courtroom. For one, they said, career prosecutors and agents have already determined that no charges were warranted.

FBI Director James. B. Comey, who previously served in a Republican administration, has said the thorough investigation uncovered no evidence that Clinton or her aides intended to violate espionage laws. In the end, the FBI said, agents uncovered classified information in 193 emails that were part of 81 email chains.

On Oct. 28, Comey sparked a political wildfire when he sent a letter to Congress saying agents were reviewing new emails potentially relevant to the case. On Sunday, two days before the election, he sent a second letter reiterating his earlier position that no charges were warranted after his agents reviewed the new emails discovered on a laptop belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a Clinton confidant.

If Trumps political appointees at the Justice Department were to reach a different conclusion upon reviewing the evidence or ordering a new investigation, they might appear vindictive or perhaps unethical.

To make matters more difficult, any future prosecution would be marred by the earlier determination that no charges were warranted, legal experts said.

It would be a tremendous waste of time and resources, said Steven Levin, a former federal prosecutor and registered Republican. It would be a disastrous prosecution.

Friction could develop between career prosecutors and their political bosses if they saw the evidence differently, and such embarrassing disagreements could become public.

You are free to disagree with what Comey did, but to pick up the same evidence and just reach a totally different result would make us look like a banana republic, said a former top Justice Department official in Republican administrations, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject. They would need career prosecutors and agents, however. If they just tapped a bunch of political appointees to do the case, the Justice Department building would just explode.

Special correspondent Jenny Jarvie in North Carolina contributed to this report.

Follow @delwilber on Twitter

del.wilber@latimes.com

ALSO:

Tracking down guns used in crimes and terror attacks is still surprisingly low-tech

Aspiring agents learn from mistakes of FBIs shameful investigation of Martin Luther King Jr.

How these Brooklyn prosecutors work to get innocent convicts out of prison

UPDATES:

12:25 p.m.: This article has been updated with Trumps comments to Wall Street Journal.

6:15 a.m.: This article has been updated with additional background.

This article was originally published at 4 a.m.
Kamala Harris said Thursday that in her new role as Californias U.S. senator she will to do everything in her power to protect immigrants, both legal and those who entered the country illegally, and criticized Donald Trumps demands for mass deportations and a giant border wall as absolutely unrealistic.

Harris struck a defiant tone during the first public appearance since her landslide Senate win over Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Orange), purposely holding the event with immigrants and immigrant rights activists at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Today we are rededicating ourselves to fighting for the best of who we are. And there are a lot of people, as a result of this election, that are feeling dispirited at best, she said. Part of what we have to say is that you are not alone, you matter and weve got your back.

Advertisement

Harris said she already has talked with her future Democratic colleagues about banding together to protect immigrants from what she described as the draconian immigration proposals of the president-elect. Harris said she wants to preserve Obama administration policies intended to shield some immigrant children and their parents from deportation, though some the presidents actions have been blocked by the courts.

Trump has vowed to overturn many of the presidents executive actions on immigration, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which temporarily shields from deportation people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

 Yorleni Bello, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiary

This issue of how we are treating our immigrants, and in particular our undocumented immigrants, is one of the most critical issues facing our country, Harris said. We are not going to be achieving who we say we are as a country if we attack our community members, our neighbors, our friends and our colleagues.

Harris said she recently met with immigrant families with children who are terrified they will be forced to leave the United States.

Harris will be Californias next senator >>

Elena Mercado, a house cleaner from the San Fernando Valley, was invited to Harris event to share her story. Her three children are protected from deportation under the Obama administrations immigration policies, but she is not.

My heart is broken, in part because of revolt of this election, she said in Spanish. Im very worried for my future, the future of this nation and also the future of my family.

Angelica Salas, executive director of the immigration center, said now is the time for Californians to come together to protect all immigrants from the hate and division stirred by the presidential campaign.

Along with protecting the rights of immigrants, as well as women, the LGBT community and others, Harris said Democrats must work to appeal to the disaffected working-class voters whose support was critical to Trumps surprise victory. Her idea for doing so hewed toward union-friendly policies, including job training, workplace protections and preserving collective bargain rights.

These are very real issues and is something that should be a priority for all of us, Harris said.

Harris, Californias two-term attorney general, said shes an optimist that a bipartisan accord can be reached to fix the nations dysfunctional immigration system, adding that, despite the rhetoric from Trump, most Republicans realize it cannot be ignored.

Election 2016 | California politics news feed | Sign up for the newsletter

I think the Republicans have come to understand that this is something theyre going to have to deal with, Harris said.

Whether Trump would stick to his pledges for mass deportations and to ban Muslim immigrants from coming to the U.S.  or soften those hard-line stances  is another story, she said.

We have yet to see, to be honest with you. Harris said. I think its absolutely unrealistic that were going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it. I dont think thats going to happen.

With Trump now in a position to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, Harris said she doesnt expect Democrats in Congress to engage in the same obstructionism the GOP used to block Obamas nominee to fill the the seat of late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Democrats in the Senate can thoroughly vet Trumps nominees without handcuffing the high court, she said.

Its basically what we teach our children, just because somebody does something bad in the classroom, you dont do something bad in return, Harris said. It is time for all of us to perform our duties. Theres too much work to be done. I dont expect the Democrats are going play those kinds of games.

phil.willon@latimes.com

Twitter: @philwillon

ALSO:

Kamala Harris breaks a color barrier with her U.S. Senate win

An immigration hard-liner is joining Donald Trumps transition team

Obama is trying to stop Trump from undoing his biggest achievements

For many Latinos, a historic election turns into a nightmare

Trumps victory assures a conservative majority on the Supreme Court

Follow the Harris transition
Authorities are looking into the apparent shooting death of a 34-year-old man at the Los Angeles Burbank Airport Marriott Hotel in Burbank.

At approximately 11 p.m. Thursday, police responded to a report of shots fired in the 2500 block of Hollywood Way. Officers found the man lying on the ground in the valet parking area of the hotel with a gunshot wound.

He was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.

Join the conversation on Facebook >>

Detectives with Burbank police interviewed several witnesses at the scene, and a firearm was recovered.

While the gunshot wound appears to be the cause of death, officials said the manner of death is still under investigation.

--

Andy Nguyen, andy.nguyen@latimes.com

Twitter: @Andy_Truc
Samantha Vazquez remembers Sept. 11, 2001.

The Vanguard University junior, who was 5 years old at the time, stayed home from school and watched the news of the terrorist attacks with her family.

She remembers her mother trying to assure her that everything would be all right.

Fifteen years later, Vazquez and 12 of her peers at the Christian university in Costa Mesa met the man who led the U.S. Justice Departments response to the attacks.

John Ashcroft, who at the time was attorney general in the administration of then-President George W. Bush, visited the campus Thursday to meet with select students in the morning and speak for the schools second annual Bill & Jo Anne Larson Lectureship of Ethics & Business during the evening.

Its really valuable, Vazquez said of the opportunity to meet Ashcroft. We got to hear about someones firsthand experience and perspective of being a U.S. attorney general.

Leaders of Vanguards business and political science programs chose the students who met with Ashcroft at the universitys Scott Academic Center.

During the short Q&A session, senior Jordyn Salter asked Ashcroft, who also is a former Missouri governor and U.S. senator, to describe his day as the 9/11 attacks unfolded.

Ashcroft said he was on a plane to Milwaukee when he learned that two commercial airliners had hit the World Trade Center towers in New York.

I just turned and said The world will never be the same, and the world has not been the same, Ashcroft told the students. We used to think that we were insulated by oceans. But this struck us.

The group also briefly discussed this weeks presidential election. Ashcroft noted the robust evangelical vote for winner Donald Trump, which according to exit polls was 81% in his favor.

I think there has been more talk about religion in this most recent campaign than Ive ever seen in any campaign in history, Ashcroft said. And if I had to guess for any reason why, I think people feel that theyre threatened in their ability to sustain a lifestyle based on their spiritual understanding.

Junior Amanda Enzenauer ended the session by asking Ashcroft for advice for any student interested in entering politics.

Ashcroft urged the students to study hard and to not fear failure. He referred to his Senate reelection bid in Missouri in 2000 in which he lost to Mel Carnahan, who had died in a plane crash two weeks before Election Day but was still on the ballot. After the election, Carnahan was replaced by his widow, Jean.

If you want to adjust your ego, run for office and get beat by a dead guy, Ashcroft said.

You have to be willing to have the living daylights beaten out of you, he told the students. You have to have a compass that reflects that you know who you are and what you believe in.

alexandra.chan@latimes.com

Twitter: @AlexandraChan10
A Huntington Beach woman was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of running a statewide fraudulent foreclosure scam, authorities said.

Brandy Taylor, 55, was taken into custody Nov. 9 on suspicion of fraud and is being held on $1.36 million bail, police said.

Authorities from Santa Barbara and Alameda counties contacted the Orange County district attorneys office after a months-long investigation into a so-called foreclosure rescue scam, in which a Huntington Beach-based company called Carrington Investments/The Wellington Group is suspected of defrauding victims throughout California, police said.

Police said the company would offer to halt the foreclosure of peoples homes with fraudulent deeds of trust. The company also charged a monthly fee.

The company had clients sign documents that were sent to banks to stop foreclosures, but the banks ultimately recognized the documents were falsified, said police spokeswoman Jennifer Marlatt.

Marlatt said Taylor ran the business.

Huntington Beach police detectives, along with district attorneys offices from Orange, Alameda and Santa Barbara counties, served several search warrants in Huntington Beach.

Alameda and Santa Barbara counties issued two arrest warrants for Taylor in early November and she was taken into custody by Huntington Beach police, police said.

Marlatt said Taylor has been the only person arrested in this case.

benjamin.brazil@latimes.com

Twitter: @benbrazilpilot
When we celebrate Veterans Day, we celebrate more than the sacrifice that brave men and women have made for our country. We celebrate the awe-inspiring spirit of America at its best.

I have the privilege of celebrating that spirit every day. At Goodwill of Orange Countys Tierney Center for Veteran Services, Goodwill employs veterans, offers them best-in-class services and helps reintegrate them into civilian life. These men and women are like no one else you will ever meet.

In 2013, when Goodwill of Orange County first launched our veteran program to connect veterans with the resources they need to transition successfully into civilian life, I spoke to the business community about the fact that hiring a veteran is more than a patriotic obligation. Its a smart business decision.

I explained how veterans offer an exceptional level of leadership, dependability and discipline. I shared statistics showing how companies benefit from vets results-based background and clear communications skills. I gave concrete examples of the 10 vet advantages every man and woman who has served our country affords a prospective employer, regardless of industry. Today, I want to share the story of a company that has been transformed by the work that veterans have provided: mine.

By hiring and engaging with veterans through the Tierney Center, Goodwill of Orange County has connected thousands of veterans with employment opportunities. We find these warriors real careers, not simply jobs. We have further served the transition to civilian life by helping several hundred men and women who served our country secure housing and other life resources. Sometimes the best fit for these warriors is a career with us. And we have become a better company as a result.

An Air Force veteran I know is one of the reasons we are stronger today. He came out of the Air Force with a plan: work for a company with a meaningful mission. Jumping from job to job, feeling discouraged about his prospects, he came to Goodwill. Here, his true talents shine. He is an inspiring member of Goodwills Tierney Center team, telling his story, advocating for fellow veterans, helping them understand the opportunities and resources available to them.

He reminds us all why we do this work  and encourages us to work harder. Not only has he found success for himself, he has found a way to continue helping his fellow vets and support them on their path to employment.

When we are able to help, we not only stay true to our mission, we improve as a company. Everyone involved can feel it.

We, all of us, can strive to become better versions of ourselves. Regardless of political persuasion, military service or even worldview, thats what impresses about the human spirit. It is what motivates the brave men and women who volunteer to serve our country through military service. It is what we celebrate when we celebrate Veterans Day.

FRANK TALARICO JR. is president and CEO of Goodwill of Orange County.
I attended both of the recent Sagebrush hearings. I even spoke at the second one. The vitriol, hyperbole and deceit from one side was nauseating. Two women opposing the transfer of the area from Glendale Unified to La Canada Unified spoke at the first meeting. One compared the Sagebrush residents to fascists. The other implied the Sagebrush parents only wanted their kids to go to a school where their kids would look like them.

No one from the anti-transfer side, not even the Glendale superintendent, apologized for those hateful and racist comments. My guess is that it is the prevailing sentiment among the Glendale Unified side.

The usual scare tactics of a desperate school board also came into play with threats of teacher layoffs and cutbacks if the Sagebrush students were to transfer. Really, 200 students will wreak economic havoc in a school system with more than 25,000 students?

Join the conversation on Facebook >>

Contrast that to the case for transfer articulated by Andrew Blumenfeld, a former member of the La Canada school board. He made a compelling and factual argument which was the highlight of the second meeting. If the transfer is approved he deserves a great deal of credit for making that happen.

I certainly was not expecting that amount of animosity and anger from the Glendale/La Crescenta contingent. It is sad that they have turned this into a David vs. Goliath battle, and you know how that ended. La Canada comprises such a small part of the gigantic Glendale Unified School District, and it is obvious from the comments that our students are only seen as dollar signs. Sagebrush is viewed as outsiders to Glendale Unified and are only tolerated because it provides a small funding source. All we are asking is to let La Canada residents attend La Canada schools.

Bob Tanabe

La Canada Flintridge

..

A letter worth keeping

Re: The story of our local bears, Mailbag, Oct. 28. That was a thoughtful, interesting, informative and lovely letter from Jo Anne Sadler. I have cut it out to keep. Thank you, Jo Anne, for taking the time to write it.

Carol Brusha

Glendale

..

Crosby cons go up in smoke

Shame on the News-Press for publishing an anti-Proposition 64 propaganda piece days before the election when there is no time for a rebuttal. Brian Crosbys column, The potential side effects of legalization, contains the easily refuted falsehood that there will be TV ads for cannabis products. Those ads are barred in all states by the FCC, which licenses all TV stations. Crosby claims that the FCC will abandon a duty that they have never before abandoned.

Crosby claims tax dollars should not be used to approve the sale of more cancer-causing substances, in spite of the fact that the ballot includes the states analysis of the fiscal impact. It states that there will be additional tax revenues ranging from high hundreds of millions of dollars to over $1 billion annually. Plus reduced criminal justice costs of tens of millions of dollars annually. So Crosby is saying the state cannot perform budget calculations and we should trust him instead.

He then claims the only reason that California is rushing into legalization is to make money for the industry. Having met many people in the cannabis business myself, I have noticed quite a few who are in it for the money. But the majority are people who have friends and relatives whose lives were saved by cannabis, like a friend of mine who was weeks from death but survived cancer when he switched from pharmaceuticals to marijuana.

Cosby failed to mention perhaps the biggest reason to end prohibition: For almost 100 years it has been enforced in a racist manner and used as a tool to oppress and imprison minorities.

It is a sad day when a shameless propagandist like Crosby, who appears to have little interest in being truthful, is trusted to be in a classroom with children.

Scott Peer

Glendale

..

Election bodes well for U.S.

After 16 years of useless, foreign wars, after 16 years of economic stagnation, after 16 years of staggering political debts, America can breathe again.

As a gay man, I embrace Donald Trumps call to end identity politics and his rejection of political correctness.

As a member of the California Wintu Indian Tribe, I embrace Trumps call for America first.

As an atheist, I embrace Trumps defense of religious freedom.

As an American, I embrace Trumps understanding of the deadly danger of Islam to civilization.

As a patient, I embrace the repeal of Obamacare.

Finally, the Republican and Democratic elites  who turned their back on individual rights and the rule of law  will reform themselves or end up as croaking toads in the political swamp which Trump will drain.

The dawn of a new America is breaking, and America can breathe again.

Ray Shelton

Glendale
Christmas seems to come earlier every year. Right now, youll find Christmas trees decorating the marquee at Hollywoods Pantages Theater, Santa in his sleigh strung above Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, and a decorated Christmas tree in Little Tokyo.

If youre looking for more places to a jump on the holiday spirit, consider visiting these spots  even if it is sunny and 80 degrees outside.

Disneyland Resort

Advertisement

The theme park resort kicked off its holiday doings on Thursday, just two days after election day.

If youre visiting the Happiest Place on Earth this weekend, youll see seasonal shows such as the Christmas Fantasy Parade in which Santa Claus joins the procession of characters.

Its a Small World changes it up with holiday songs and tunes, and Sleeping Beauty Castle will suddenly have snow and icicles during the Believe in Holiday Magic fireworks.

At California Adventure Park, youll find the nighttime World of Color-Season of Light, which features water shooting 200 feet into the air from 1,200 fountains. Santa Claus and his elves appear here too, at the Ahwahnee Camp Circle, and theres a 50-foot-tall Christmas tree on Buena Vista Street.

Festivities continue through Jan. 8. One-day tickets to a single park costs $95, which includes anyone 10 and older. Info: Disneyland, (714) 781-4565

Legoland California

The theme park in Carlsbad holds off on its holiday festivities until Nov. 25, the Friday after Thanksgiving. Features include a 30-foot-tall Christmas tree made of forest-green Duplo bricks, and a live holiday show at Heartlake City stables. Bluegrass music and character meet-and-greets with Lego Santa are in store too. Festivities last through Jan. 1.

The parks Sea Life Aquarium also gets into the act, offering a daily dive show with a holiday theme and another Lego Christmas tree. Holiday goings-on are included with park admission: $89 for children 3 to 12 years old and $95 for adults. Info: Legoland California, (760) 918-5346

Sacramento

The Macys Theatre of Lights free light-and-sound show begins Nov. 23 and takes place around around a 60-foot-tall Christmas tree in Old Sacramento. It features a reading of The Night Before Christmas accompanied by props, holiday lights and snow. The 20-minute evening performances continue through Christmas Eve on Thursdays through Sundays (except Thanksgiving) at 6:15 p.m. and 7:45 p.m and then nightly from Dec. 19 to Dec. 24. Info: Old Sacramento, (916) 442-8575

And what would the holidays be without model trains? Small Train Holiday on Nov. 25-26 sets up trains, tracks, buildings and the works  all with a holiday theme  at the California State Railroad Museum. Tickets cost $10 for adults, $5 for children 6 to 17 years old. Info: California Railroad Museum, (916) 323-9280

San Diego

Snap a photo of your kids with Santa ... Surfin Santa, that is. This St. Nick wears a Hawaiian shirt and arrives in a speedboat. He poses on a giant surfboard for free photos with kids from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 26. Info: Seaport Village, 849 West Harbor Drive

Ice rinks

Never mind the Southern California heat, ice rinks are the thing that make us imagine that we are part of the cooler holiday tradition.

Ice at Santa Monica at the corner of Fifth Street and Arizona Avenue is open daily now through Jan. 16. Admission and skate rental cost $15.

Looking for a rink right next to the beach? The Hotel del Coronado in San Diego will open Skating by the Sea, transforming the hotels huge lawn into a sea of ice. The rink is surrounded by holiday lights in palm trees too. It opens Nov. 24 and continues through Jan. 2. Admission and skate rentals cost $25.

The Holiday Ice Rink at Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles is open now until Jan. 16. This year you can skate ($9 admission), take a curling lesson ($5 per person at 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Sunday, Dec . 11 and Jan. 8) or ice dance the night away at the Silent Night Skate Party on Dec. 1.

ALSO

Top 17 for 2017: Best new rides at theme parks around the world

Top 17 for 2017: Best new attractions coming to U.S. theme parks

Take a New Years Eve train to see northern lights in Alaska

National park tips: Heres the site of the worst home-front disaster of WWII
Karabakh: Azerbaijan roughly violates agreements reached in Vienna and St. Petersburg

On the night of November 10 -11, and during the day the Azerbaijani armed forces shelled the frontline positions of the NKR Defense Army near the villages of Talish and Yarimja from 60 and 82 mm mortars. Such massive use of mortars occurring for the first time after a large-scale aggression against Nagorno Karabakh in April, has become the continuation of recent escalation of tension on the Line of Contact by Azerbaijan. It is of serious concern that the aggravation of the situation takes place against the background of Azerbaijan's preparation for the large-scale military exercises near the NKR borders, employing a large number of military equipment and manpower. Such actions are a flagrant violation of agreements reached at summits in Vienna and St. Petersburg on inadmissibility of escalation of tension on the Line of Contact and indicate to the intention of Azerbaijan to impede the measures aimed at creating conditions for the resumption of the negotiation process. Moreover, Azerbaijan not only rejects creation mechanisms for investigation of incidents and expansion of the office of the Personal Representative of the OSCE CiO, but also seeks to undermine the only international monitoring mechanism to maintain the ceasefire regime by firing an area where the OSCE mission carried out a planned monitoring on the day before. In this situation, we call on the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, the OSCE Chairperson in Office and the international community as a whole to condemn in the strongest terms destructive policy of the Azerbaijani authorities, and to take effective measures to prevent a further escalation of tension. For its turn, the NKR will suppress any actions of Azerbaijan, threatening the security of the Republic, the peace and stability in the region.
Cruise the jagged coastline of Norway, see tall peaks and deep fjords and visit towns and villages on Hurtigrutens Voyage North Cruise.

The shipping company, which has been sailing Norwegian waters since 1892, carries passengers as well as cargo on routes from Bergen in the south to Kirkenes near the Russian border.

The seven-day cruise offers excursions such as kayaking, hiking and birdwatching plus visits to the historic capital of Trondheim; the UNESCO-protected Geirangerfjord; and North Cape, the northernmost point in Europe.

Advertisement

Dates: Departures daily June through August

Price: From $2,028 per person, double occupancy, including accommodations and meals. International airfare, luggage handling and optional excursions not included

Info: Hurtigruten, (888) 898-2598

ALSO

Forget the election: 7 reasons to visit Washington D.C. right now

If youre dining in D.C., heres whats new, whats cool and why you need to stop worrying about calories

I know where Ill be staying in Washington D.C., but here are more hotels to consider
National Park of American Samoa, the most remote of the 59 full-fledged national parks, has one of the most lonely and gorgeous tropical beaches in the U.S. -- Ofu Beach, which is 2 miles long, with white sand, black boulders, coconut palms and great snorkeling. (Also blue skies, on most days.)

So how to get there? Fly to Honolulu. Then fly an additional five hours to Tutuila (main island of American Samoa). Then catch the weekly flight to Ofu Island (population about 300). Ofu Beach is a short walk from the airstrip, just past the seven-room Vaoto Lodge. To get home, wait seven days, then reverse directions.

In honor of this years National Park Service centennial, the Travel section is posting 100 park travel ideas and tips based on trips staff travel writer Christopher Reynolds has taken, along with photo-op advice from Times photographer Mark Boster. Well post one per day through Dec. 31.

Advertisement

Follow Reynolds on Twitter: @MrCSReynolds

See travel videos by Reynolds from around the world.

ALSO

Heres the site of the worst home-front disaster of WWII

Drink in this San Francisco bar with a steampunk starship vibe

My two favorite places to see the Golden Gate Bridge

Disney Museum in San Francisco tells Walts story

How to cross the Continental Divide in high style
Heres a great airfare for London for off-season: $555 round trip, including all taxes and fees, from LAX to Londons Heathrow on Air New Zealand.

Heres the catch: You must buy your ticket by Nov. 17. The fare is for departure between Dec. 6 and 10 or between Jan. 10 and April 6. You must stay at least one Sunday, but you may not stay longer than than six months.

Info: Air New Zealand, (800) 262-1234, www.airnewzealand.com

Advertisement

Source: Airfarewatchdog.com

ALSO:

Sample the wine and the wow of Mexicos Guadalupe Valley, before the hordes descend

The one crucial question to ask when visiting a national park: What about the women?

If youre dining in D.C., heres whats new, whats cool and why you need to stop worrying about calories
A taboo-busting reminder of Adolf Hitlers life has popped up in Germanys capital with the opening of a new exhibit -- a replica of the Nazi dictators bunker.

The Berlin Story Bunker re-creates a section of Hitlers 3,000-square-foot underground living space near the end of World War II. It includes copies of furniture, a portrait of Frederick the Great, Hitlers favorite Prussian leader, a small desk that holds a miniature brass statue of Hitlers dog Blondi and an iron oxygen bottle with a mask.

The original custom-made Fuehrerbunker built in 1944 about a mile away was encased in a 13-foot-thick concrete shell and buried 30 feet underground. It was designed to keep Hitler safe from bombings by Allied Air Forces and Soviet artillery pummeling Berlin late in World War II. Its also where he committed suicide in 1945 after finally accepting that his Nazi Germany was about to lose the war.

Advertisement

The bunker was partly destroyed after the war ended in 1945, closed off to the public in the no-mans land east of the Berlin Wall in Communist East Germany before ultimately being sealed in the early 1990s in the aftermath of German reunification. Authorities did not want the location turning into a shrine for neo-Nazis.

Bristling at criticism that they might be glorifying Hitler and the infamous hole in the ground where his newlywed bride, Eva Braun, poisoned herself before he shot himself on April 30, 1945, the creators of the Fuehrerbunker replica insist that it is designed to be educational.

A lot of people have a difficult-to-define fascination with Hitler and his bunker, Enno Lenze, one of the organizers of the privately funded exhibit, said in an interview after a recent tour. Its a peculiar combination of voyeurism, a curiosity about separating the facts from fiction where Hitler killed himself, and a genuine interest in the history of what it felt like where the Third Reich essentially ended.

Although Germans have meticulously studied the causes, horrors and aftermath of the Nazi regime, precious few seemed to have any particular interest in knowing precisely where the reviled Hitlers bunker was located. Yet local officials say many foreign tourists have been curious about where the bunker and the Berlin Wall were. The disappointment was palpable for many that there was no monument, no memorial and nothing to mark the spot where the Third Reich ended until a small plaque was put up in 2006.

Over the last 25 years, a growing number of small representative sections of the Berlin Wall  which was almost entirely torn down in haste in 1989 and 1990  were rebuilt for tourists. It seemed to be a question of time before something about the bunker was added to the citys list of tourist attractions.

There are so many tourists coming to Berlin who want to know more about what was going on here during the war, said Wieland Giebel, who is also part of the Historiale organization that created and operates the exhibit, which opened Oct. 28. One of the most-asked questions we get is: Where was Hitlers bunker? He added that the idea was to give people a sense of what the bunker was like during those final days of the Nazi regime.

Officials from other state-backed exhibits on the Nazi era in Berlins museum-filled landscape, such as the nearby Topography of Terror that explores the Gestapos history and Nazi crimes, have dismissed the Fuehrerbunker exhibit as sensationalism. Some Jewish leaders in Berlin and historians have expressed reservations about any attempt to make Hitler, seen by many as the incarnation of evil, appear in a normal light.

The 2004 film Downfall sparked controversy in Germany about Hitlers final days because at times it portrayed him doing everyday activities such as eating spaghetti and showing kindness to his secretary and dog.

On the one hand, the new exhibit brings this aspect of history to people who might not otherwise get to experience it, Arnd Bauerkaempfer, a historian at Berlins Free University, said in an interview. But on the other hand the danger is that this suggests a fake authenticity and there is also a danger that it personalizes the history of Hitler in his bunker.

Bauerkaempfer said the exhibit reflected a yearning among the latest generation of postwar Germans to view the Hitler era with some detachment as a part of the countrys overall history rather than a part of their own lives.

To a certain degree its a good thing that German society is able to look at the Nazi era with fewer inhibitions than earlier generations had, he said. But the truth is that Hitler is never, ever going to be just a normal part of German history.

In 2008, a German man angrily pushed his way past security guards to tear off the head of a waxwork figure of Hitler on the opening day of the exhibit at Berlins Madame Tussauds museum. The wax head was later repaired and restored but then the figure was kept behind a security glass. The controversy filled Berlin newspaper headlines for weeks.

To deter right-wing extremists or Nazi sympathizers from causing disruptions at the new Fuehrerbunker, visitors are required to take part in a 90-minute guided tour of the dingy premises with its suffocating and bleak feel. Any extremists will be denied entry or summarily kicked off the premises, Lenze said, and their 12-euro ($15) entrance fee donated to charities for victims of right-wing violence.

Nevertheless, some Germans harbor the same fears that long prevented Germany from marking the bunkers original location: that the Fuehrerbunker replica will become a destination for pilgrimages.

There are always a lot of fears in Germany that doing an exhibit like this will get you painted as a far-right supporter, said Lenze, 34, who was often puzzled about a reticence among fellow Germans to touch the subject. People start to panic when it involves Hitler. Its sometimes hard to understand. Weve got to stop panicking and have enough faith to look into all these aspects. I think its important to look at the end of Hitler to help understand how it all happened and how democracy got shunted aside.

This should help set the record straight, Lenze said. No, the ceilings werent made from marble. No, there wasnt a secret escape tunnel to the airport. No, he didnt flee to Argentina ... His death in this bunker was effectively the end of World War II in Europe.

ALSO

More women in Iran are forgoing marriage. One reason? The men arent good enough

From a bridge in South Africa, sidewalk bookseller believes in the power to change lives

Chinas version of Black Friday  the worlds biggest shopping day  is expected to surpass $20 billion in sales
Then in her late 20s and rebounding from a string of broken relationships, Fahimeh Azadi moved alone into an apartment in working-class southern Tehran. Her very presence, she recalled, was a walking challenge to the men.

Azadi had joined a growing number of women in Iran who are electing to remain single, defying their parents expectations and the strict conventions of the Islamic Republic.

Still, Azadi had to balance independence with caution. She ascended the staircase only when it was clear of neighbors and admonished visiting friends to walk on tiptoes to avoid attracting attention.

Advertisement

But men in the building still wondered about the single young woman upstairs.

Is she divorced? one asked a neighbor. The connotation being: Is she available for sex?

My guard was up, Azadi recalled. I behaved in a way that men didnt dare poke their noses into my affairs. And I managed to live there for two years without anyone harassing me.

Fahimeh Azadi, 35, a university graduate and tour guide who is fluent in English and Russian, is among a growing number of women in Iran who are electing to remain single. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times )

Now 35, Azadi has moved to a more genteel part of town but still lives by herself.

More than 3 million educated Iranian women over 30 are unmarried, according to Mizan, the official news agency of Irans judiciary. Their numbers are increasing as divorce becomes more common and more women attend universities, exposing them to careers and incomes independent of men who, by law and custom, are supposed to be their guardians.

That is a profound generational shift in a society of 80 million whose theocracy preaches that a womans main purpose in life is to be a wife and mother. Clerics promote marriage relentlessly and often cite the prophet Muhammad, who is quoted as saying about his own marriage: He who does not follow my tradition is not my follower.

But as Iran has promoted higher education, throngs of women have answered the call, in part to improve their prospects in a job market stagnating under international economic sanctions. More than 60% of university students in Iran are female, according to official statistics.

But once equipped with degrees, many struggle to find men willing to embrace a more liberated woman.

Because of higher education, women have higher expectations, Azadi said over tea at Tehrans aging Naderi cafe, a onetime haunt of artists and intellectuals. A university graduate working as a tour guide, she is fluent in English and Russian.

These days it is difficult to find a really open-minded Iranian man. They are lagging behind us  Fahimeh Azadi

You cant marry a normal Iranian man who will limit you and say, Dont work; dont go out. These days it is difficult to find a really open-minded Iranian man. They are lagging behind us.

Azadi, her styled golden-brown hair half-covered by a patterned ivory scarf, described a man she lived with for two years. He came from a well-off family and had studied in Armenia. She broke up with him last year after he refused to let her go out in the evenings alone and interrogated her after parties about men she had danced next to.

Her late father, a goldsmith, and mother supported her decision to remain single  particularly after her older sister, a successful lawyer with a 10-year-old son, divorced a husband who opposed her going on business trips.

I have made friends on and off with men my age over the years, but none were responsible enough for me to consider marrying or having a child with, Azadi said.

Older men prefer women who are younger than me, and younger men just want to have sex because they think I dont expect marriage  and because I can afford to pick up the tab at coffee shops.

Several women interviewed spoke with an extraordinary frankness about sex and relationships that would shock Irans buttoned-up mullahs. That alone reflects how women are asserting themselves, particularly among the urban middle class, where the Internet and Western satellite channels are slowly expanding the boundaries of what is socially acceptable.

That includes more unmarried couples who live together  known as white marriages  and more divorces. In the last nine months of 2015, the number of registered marriages nationwide dipped by 3.4%, while divorces rose by 4.2% from the previous year, the state IRNA news agency reported.

Marrying remains a powerful norm in Iran, and many laws still treat women as the property of men. Married women need their husbands permission to travel outside the country.

In 2013, the parliament attempted to pass legislation that would have required single women of any age to get their fathers consent to travel overseas. Womens rights groups rose up to defeat the proposal.

Thanks to women asserting their power, attitudes are slowly changing, and society is accepting the economic independence of women, said Sara Mahtabi, a 33-year-old unmarried ski instructor.

Mahtabi fell in love in her early 20s, but her first boyfriend was unwilling to introduce her to his devout parents. A more recent relationship with a suave computer expert broke up when he told her he would only marry a virgin.

The way he dressed was as fashionable as any European, Mahtabi said, but mentally he was an old-timer.

But with so much of Iranian life centered on the family, many single women struggle with loneliness. The slim, dark-eyed Mahtabi wonders whether she should lower her standards with the next man she dates.

On the other hand, she said, I feel our Iranian boys are not educated enough by our parents to tolerate living with a liberated woman, let alone enjoy it.

Abidar Dadman, a 37-year-old bank employee studying for a masters in international business, recently dated a man who was uncomfortable with the fact that she earns about $300 a month more than he does.

He would bring up money at odd times, she said. Sometimes he would slip in underhanded comments, saying she must have gotten her job through family connections.

Eventually, she dumped him.

My shrink says Im torn between my duty as a woman and living my life, Dadman said.

I am soul-searching. We educated Iranian girls are stuck between tradition and modernity. I just want to be a decent girl who is a traditional mom and at the same time part of modern society.

As divorces become more common, some women are picky about whether to remarry.

Hajar Hasani, a 32-year-old pathologist, divorced her surgeon husband two years ago after his long work hours took a toll on their marriage. He had grown uninterested in sex, she said, although later she found suggestive texts on his phone from nurses and female co-workers.

Im trying to learn from my failed relationships and choose a spouse more carefully, Hasani said at a shopping mall cafe in well-heeled northern Tehran. She already had rejected two suitors, she added, because they seemed mainly to be after sex.

She believes that even many highly educated Iranian men continue to hold regressive views about women.

I think parents should educate their sons to take responsibility for family life and cultivate their minds  not just make them graduate from universities, Hasani said. Holding a PhD or an M.S. or an M.A. does not make our boys mature enough.

A woman rides on the back of a motorcycle in Tehran. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times )

In many rural areas, attitudes remain staunchly traditional. A 33-year-old theater actress from the Kurdish region of northwest Iran said that marriage prospects in her hometown were limited to truck drivers, and that she would have been forced to become a housewife had she stayed home.

The actress, who asked to be identified as Marziyeh to avoid angering her conservative family, moved to Tehran to study drama over the worries of her parents. She has put thoughts of marriage on hold.

Any spouse of mine should accept me as I am and adapt himself to my long days and nights of auditions, rehearsals, production and studying my lines, Marziyeh said. I want to start a family and have one or two children, but not at any cost.

But she remains hopeful  because of the growing ranks of single women like her. The quantity of educated women will change the quality of men someday, she said. Until then, we will keep fighting with tradition.

Outside, Marziyeh stepped into a taxi and rode back to the apartment she shares with a single girlfriend. She had a date that night.

Mostaghim is a special correspondent.

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

Follow @SBengali on Twitter for more news from South Asia

ALSO

Pastry, fat, and perfection: A recipe for Baghdads favorite breakfast food

A reluctant Islamic State fighter insists he never wanted to get my hands bloody

Chinas version of Black Friday  the worlds biggest shopping day  is expected to surpass $20 billion in sales
He was once a luminary of Mexicos ruling party, the governor of a strategic and wealthy state that is a key source of campaign funds for the long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Leading national politicians, including President Enrique Pena Nieto, sought him out, despite rumors of corruption and a rising tide of violence and human rights abuses in the Mexican gulf state of Veracruz, where various drug cartels battle for dominance.

Now, former Veracruz Gov. Javier Duarte is a fugitive, accused of money laundering, involvement with organized crime and various alleged acts of fraud, including setting up shell companies to divert public funds for his private use.

Advertisement

On Friday, Mexican authorities announced a reward of 15 million pesos (about $730,000) for information leading to the arrest of Duarte, who stepped down from the governors post on Oct. 12, six weeks before the end of his six-year term.

At the time of his resignation, the 43-year-old Duarte publicly vowed a robust fight against swirling allegations of wrongdoing, asserting his innocence. Instead, the onetime power-broker took a powder.

Hes become a symbol of ingrained institutional corruption in Mexico.

Opposition politicians, including Miguel Angel Yunes, the governor-elect of Veracruz, have publicly questioned how Duarte was able to vanish despite an ongoing corruption investigation. Mexican authorities denied giving Duarte an opportunity to decamp.

Critics say state administrations in Mexico are often rife with corruption, allowing governors to amass great wealth and dole out patronage contracts and jobs to cronies and political supporters.

As the presidential candidate in 2012 of the ruling party, known as the PRI, Pena Nieto spoke glowingly of a new generation of PRI leaders, naming three then-sitting governorsDuarte in Veracruz, Roberto Borge in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo and Cesar Duarte (no relation to Javier Duarte) in the northern state of Chihuahua.

Four years later, Duarte is on the run and the other two former PRI stalwarts have become embroiled in corruption allegations.

The reward announcement for Duarte comes a day after an arrest in a separate case involving allegations of official corruption at the gubernatorial level.

On Thursday, Guillermo Padres, former governor of northern Sonora state, which borders Arizona, turned himself in to authorities on pending corruption charges.

Padres, who had been a fugitive, surrendered to authorities after giving a radio interview early Thursday denying the allegations. He said he was turning himself in voluntarily.

I go with my head held high, Padres told a radio interviewer, before heading off to present himself to Mexican authorities.

Padres, a member of the opposition National Action Party, was governor of Sonora from 2009 to 2015.

The two cases, involving Mexicos two major political parties, illustrate how allegations of corruption can be a bipartisan affair in Mexico.

In Padres case, investigators say they traced $8.8 million in overseas accounts in the governors name. Prosecutors also outlined an alleged scheme to direct millions of dollars worth of contracts for school uniforms to companies linked to Padres.

The government inquiry into Duarte was triggered by an investigation by a news website, Animal Politico. The site found that the Veracruz government issued dozens of public contracts for services that were never delivered.

Duarte is suspected in a broad scheme that involves the siphoning off of millions of dollars in government funds paid to a series of shell companies.

Media accounts in Mexico in recent weeks have shed light on various properties reportedly linked to Duarte, including estates in Veracruz, apartments and houses in Mexico City and environs, and other properties in the United States.

When the allegations first arose, a defiant Duarte declared publicly that he had not taken one cent of government money. But the scandal eventually resulted in his expulsion from the ruling party.

Before being elected governor in 2010, Duarte had served as a federal congressman from Veracruz and as secretary of finance in the administration of his predecessor, Fidel Herrera.

In addition to the corruption allegations, Duarte has been widely blamed for bloating the state debt in Veracruz and failing to curb rising violence, often linked to competing drug cartels. Human rights activists have also assailed his record, citing the deaths of more than a dozen Veracruz journalists during his term.

In one of the most notorious cases, a Veracruz photojournalist, Ruben Espinoza, and a Veracruz student activist, Nadia Vera, were among five people murdered in an apartment in Mexico City in July 2015. Eight months before the killings, Vera taped an interview saying that if anything amiss were to happen to her or other allied activists, Duarte would be responsible.

The unpopularity of Duarte contributed to the ruling partys loss of Veracruz state in gubernatorial elections last June, a staggering blow for the ruling party. The Institutional Revolutionary Party had controlled Veracruz for more than eight decades..

During the heated electoral contest, Yunes, from the opposition National Action Party, made punishing Duarte for his alleged corruption a centerpiece of his campaign. Duarte alleged that Yunes was the corrupt one and compared him to Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, the jailed drug cartel leader.

patrick.mcdonnel@latimes.com

Cecilia Sanchez of the Times Mexico City bureau contributed.

ALSO

Mexico is one big cemetery: The search for the secret graves of the disappeared

A federal judge who ruled on some of Mexicos highest profile criminal cases was gunned down in broad daylight

Can Trump fulfill his campaign promises on immigration and trade? Mexico hopes not
The pudgy Islamic State fighter was wearing a short beard, sweater and jeans when troops caught him crossing the front line with civilians in east Mosul on Thursday and ushered him into an abandoned house for questioning.

He admitted to being a militant.

They forced me, said Omar Ahmed.

After he was detained and questioned Thursday, Ahmed agreed to speak with a reporter and interpreter from The Times, and to be photographed by the paper. He was not restrained, soldiers did not coerce him into talking or prompt him to answer, beyond clarifying questions. Gunfire sounded outside during the interview, because of the proximity to the front line, but Ahmed did not express concern about his safety or ask to leave.

Ahmed, 21, a native of Mosuls eastern, middle-class Zahra neighborhood, said he was a reluctant militant.

Advertisement

In the beginning, I refused the idea. I refused them, he said, his voice calm and even. I was not convinced. I was accused of being an apostate.

But once Islamic State came to power, he said, I became obliged.

Families escaping the violence of Mosul head toward the edge of the town of Gogjali, where an Iraqi soldier directs them to be checked. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times )

Ahmed said he declared his allegiance to the caliphate on March 18 at Mosuls Mohammed Abd Wahhab mosque, named after the Muslim preacher who founded the extremist Sunni movement of Wahhabism.

I was supposed to become Islamic State police inside Mosul, not on the front lines, he said as he sat on the floor of an empty room, facing several Iraqi special forces soldiers. I would prefer to be a policeman, not to kill people, not to get my hands bloody.

Instead, he was sent to fight, first in an Islamic State province in Syria, then in Mosul.

Ahmed said he did not kill anyone, not at all, just one mortar. The mortar went into the river.

He described Islamic State forces as organized along military lines, with brigades and battalions as well as special forces and suicide bomb squads.

Each one has his work, he said.

Women and children who had just fled Mosul on foot rest in a house before being transported to a camp for the displaced near Irbil, Iraq. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times )

But he noticed cracks in the facade. While he was stationed in Syria earlier this year, near the Iraqi border, fighters disappeared.

In Mosul, where he served more recently, he said, Islamic State administration was better.

They are taking care of their fighters. If someone needs a leave, they will give it to him, Ahmed said. Fighters in Mosul have high morale. Most people who have low morale, its because of the airstrikes.

Ahmed said airstrikes have taken a toll on militants.

They will be besieged and they will be upset and they will want to get out, so they will have fights between them, he said. If the airplane will just come without striking, if someone is outside you will see fighting and firing between fighters.

On Wednesday, he said his father urged him to surrender. The older man approached an Iraqi army officer and said, I have someone whos with Islamic State.

Iraqi special forces member Waleed Nabi prepares to go back to the front line on the edge of Mosul. He had to go home when his cousin died in a mine accident near the Jordanian border. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times )

But then he said his father changed his mind, telling him not to talk to soldiers.

Dont go and give up now, because they will think that you are going to attack them, he recalled his father saying.

My dad told me just wait until the army comes and civilians leave their houses and are welcoming the army, then you can go and give up, Ahmed said.

On Thursday, he said, I gave up. I surrendered.

Across the room, 1st Lt. Haitham Moala, of the Iraqi armys elite special forces Golden Division, interrupted him.

Hes lying, Moala said. We got some wounded here and then our soldiers saw someone was coming toward the road behind the clinic. When we were questioning him, [turns out] he was Daesh, the lieutenant said, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

He said Ahmed had posed as a civilian. He had tried to slip past them with a crowd of others toting white flags at the field clinic a few yards away, next to a berm separating the village from Mosuls embattled Malayeen neighborhood, where mortar rounds were still flying.

He was pretending to be a displaced person because of the operation on that side, like he was lost. Then we saw him close to the clinic, Moala said.

He turned to Ahmed.

You said before when I was questioning you that your dad was encouraging you to be Daesh, he said.

The Times asked Ahmed where his father was. My dad left at 9:30 a.m., he said.

It was dusk.

Members of the Iraqi special forces wait to be transported to the front line, where fighting has been heavy against Islamic State, as the battle for Mosul continues. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times )

Before the meeting with the captive, soldiers had directed The Times reporter and photographer to the charred remains of two other Islamic State fighters. Soldiers claimed that the pair had been armed with a machine gun, and that they had killed them as the fighters fled after attempting to assist a suicide bomb attack. There was no sign of the machine gun, which soldiers said they had removed.

Amnesty International called on Iraqi authorities Thursday to investigate reports that fighters wearing Iraqi federal police uniforms tortured and extrajudicially executed residents in villages outside Mosul.

Deliberately killing captives and other defenseless individuals is prohibited by international humanitarian law and is a war crime, the group said in its report.

Iraqi federal police rejected the allegations in a Facebook post Thursday.

Iraqi officials also have an incentive to keep Islamic State captives alive as informants. Ahmed was still being held late Thursday, according to Moala and a special forces commander.

Moala said officials planned to transfer Ahmed to Baghdad for further questioning.

He will have good information, he said.
All material is subject to strictly enforced copyright terms & conditions and cannot be repurposed or reproduced.  19882022 Latin American Financial Publications Inc.
U.S President-elect Donald trump and President Obama has finally met for the first time on Thursday in the Oval Office residing all the bitterness that have immersed during the long campaign season to discuss the nation's interest and the transition to the Republican's inauguration when President-elect Donald Trump take over into the White House on January 20.

The two sat side-by-side and President Obama emphasizes that they're going to do everything they can to help the President-elect to succeed 'cause if Trump succeeds, then the nation succeeds. The 90-minute meeting in the oval office both Obama and Trump describes it as 'excellent' and 'great honor.' No aides present over the stunning victory of Trump over Obama's former secretary, Hillary Clinton, as reported by New York Times.

Obama actively campaigned for his former secretary and fellow democrat to succeed him and repeatedly warned the public that Donald Trump cannot be trusted over the issue of nuclear codes and called Trump unfit for the position of President though business claimed that the administration of Obama was a 'disaster.' But on Thursday they both appeared to help the country, Trump told reporters that they really discussed a lot of things and situations both wonderful and difficulties, President-elect Trump looking forward seeing President Obama according to him "many, many many more times in the future."

Trump met the congressional leaders, the Vice President-elect Mike Pence including Paul Ryan, the U.S House of Representatives Speaker, the Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mc Connell. According to Reuters, there are protests in the U.S cities on the second day to expressed concern over Trump elected as President would be a blow to civil rights. Securities surrounded Trump's new hotel in Washington, blocks from the White House and the New York's Trump Tower as dominantly protested by the students about his controversial winning.

Obama offered assistance over the next couple of months to Trump and has urged the country to unite as they were facing a lot of challenges.
Experiential learning: Lehigh Engineering's fabled undergraduate program has been all about it since the very beginning. Here, students discover their passions, make real impact, and evolve into the engineers they aspire to be. Our faculty specializes in providing meaningful opportunities for talented young minds to engage in the lab, the workplace, and the community, here in the beautiful Lehigh Valley and all around the world. These are a few examplesare you next?
Majestic Realty plans to build another massive 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse on former Bethlehem Steel Corp. land.

Majestic Bethlehem Center has proposed its fourth massive warehouse for its land off Route 412 in Bethlehem. This warehouse is now used by Crayola. (Lehighvalleylive.com file photo)

Thursday afternoon the Bethlehem Planning Commission gave Majestic approval for its latest project on 441 acres of former remote ex-Steel land in the city.

There is no tenant for the warehouse proposed at 3633 Commerce Center Blvd. off Route 412, Majestic Realty Co. Vice President Ed Konjoyan said.

It would join Majestic's 2.5 million square feet of existing warehouses already built in the Majestic Bethlehem Center. The building is designed to resemble other warehouses on the site.

Without knowing the tenant for the latest proposal, Konjoyan said it was hard to say the number of jobs or the traffic created. But Majestic officials noted that Commerce Center Boulevard was designed to accommodate the traffic that comes with warehousing.

"We're glad to see 412 is being completed," Konjoyan said of ongoing work to the thoroughfare.

Majestic is also about to begin construction on a third 1 million square-foot warehouse with the option to expand it by 930,000 square feet depending on the tenant's needs, Konjoyan said. The company is still searching for a tenant for the space, but this phased approach worked well with the first building, he said.

If the full build-out occurs, that would make it the city's largest warehouse to-date.

Majestic in 2012 built an 800,000 square-foot warehouse for Crayola at the site and there is also a Wal-Mart fulfillment center. California Cartage Co. leases almost 540,000 square feet of warehouse space.

Upon full build out the Majestic site will feature 8 million square feet of warehouse. Plans call for three more buildings.

This map shows Majestic Bethlehem Center's master plan and highlights the fourth building being pitched. (Sara K. Satullo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Distribution is the Lehigh Valley's fastest growing industries given its prime location in close proximity to New York City and Philadelphia and access to major highways, like Interstate 78 and Routes 22 and 33.

Penn State Lehigh Valley just announced it will begin offering a bachelor of science degree in project and supply chain management in fall 2017 due to the regional demand.

The property is adjacent to Lehigh Valley Industrial Park VII where Liberty Property Trust has also built warehouses speculatively with success.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Free rabies clinic for West New York dogs and cats

A rabies vaccination is administered to a cat May 14, 2014, in West New York, New Jersey. (Jersey Journal file photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Two cases of rabies in cats have been confirmed recently in Lower Saucon Township, according to police there.

Both have been in the area of Dartford Road, off Black River Road, and one resident was bitten by one of the rabid felines, township police said in a news release Thursday night.

Rabies is nearly always fatal, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Strays or unwanted animals that attack a person or pet should be confined and observed for 10 days or be euthanized and tested for rabies immediately. The latter goes for skunks, raccoons, foxes and bats that bite humans, the CDC says.

According to township police:

"There are two common types of rabies in cats. Furious rabies is characterized by extreme behavioral changes, including overt aggression and attack behavior.

"Paralytic rabies, also referred to as dumb rabies, is characterized by weakness and loss of coordination in the cat, followed by paralysis."

Police advise townships residents who encounter a cat behaving strangely to stay away from and call the department. Police may be reached via 911 or the Northampton County dispatch non-emergency line at 610-759-2200.

Rabies is spread through saliva or brain/nervous system tissue, the CDC says. Anyone bitten by an unfamiliar or wild animal is urged to wash any wounds immediately and seek medical treatment for any trauma due to the attack before considering the need for rabies prophylaxis.

Post-exposure vaccination consists of five doses administered in the arm, like a flu or tetanus vaccine.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and on Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The New York Times headed to Nazareth this week as it tried to explain to its readers how Donald Trump won the hearts of the women who propelled him to victory.

Fifty-three percent of all white female voters, according to exit polls, cast ballots for Trump despite recent allegations of sexual assault against the president-elect.

Debbie Biro is one of those voters, according to the Times. Biro, 57, of Nazareth, might seem an unlikely supporter of Trump.

A lifelong Democrat, Biro is a single mom who loves yoga and doesn't eat meat, according to the Times. She actually changed her voter registration to support Trump and jumped into politics for the first time in her life.

Biro tells the Times she liked Trump's business acumen. And she knows exactly when he got her on board. Read about that in the full article.

The Times headed to the Lehigh Valley because it is a bellwether region in a swing state crucial in Trump's electoral win.

Several weeks before Tuesday's election, a political research group headed by a GOP operative identified Northampton County as one of the 10 biggest battleground counties nationwide in the presidential race.

That's because the presidential candidate who won the county in the last four elections garnered a percentage of votes that closely mirrored the percentage of the vote the candidate received statewide to carry the entire state of Pennsylvania.

Trump was the first Republican to carry Pennsylvania since 1988 and the election results bore out that theory.

Many of the women interviewed across the country emphasized to the Times that their vote for Trump was not a vote against Hillary. They liked their candidate.

Although they thought his comments about women were "vile," the women were skeptical about his accusers, the Times reports.

Biro avoided ever talking politics at her job at Crayola or with her Democratic friends. She feared their reaction, she told the Times.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
In a celebration of the Lehigh Valley's artistic groundswell, the ArtsQuest Foundation held the inaugural Linny Awards at SteelStacks on Thursday evening.

Taking home the top prize of the evening was Ann Roth, the Oscar- and Tony-winning costume designer who was born in Hanover, Pa., and now lives in Lower Mount Bethel Township.

"I feel as though I'm in the middle of a rebirth ... of a community erupting into art," Roth said of the region as she accepted the first-ever "Pinnacle of the Arts" award.

Roth was the ArtsQuest Foundation's first choice for the inaugural Pinnacle of the Arts trophy, said Executive Director Jeff Parks, who sported a handcrafted iron bow tie to the ceremony.

The costume designer is know for her work in movies including "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and "The Birdcage" and stage productions like "The Book of Mormon" and "The Nance."

The glass statuettes handed out Thursday were meant to capture the spirit of their namesake, the late philanthropist and stained-glass artist Marlene "Linny" Fowler, who died in 2013 at 73. The awards, blown in ArtsQuest's own glass studios, depict a figure rising its arms skyward.

Fowler's generosity was a recurring theme throughout the ceremony.

"Maybe it's best we didn't meet, because she's larger than life to me," said Steve Tobin, the Quakertown sculptor who won a lifetime achievement Linny Award for his art.

His spindly, rootlike figures have graced the SteelStacks grounds, but his work has also spread throughout the world -- he said on stage that he had just returned from Shanghai.

"I come back to the Lehigh Valley to lick my wounds," Tobin said.

The artists and presenters exalted the area for supporting its artists.

"It means people have been listening," said blues musician Craig Thatcher of his award for best performing artist of the year.

Visual Artist of the Year Vicki DaSilva said the honor showed that freedom of speech in the arts is still alive.

The winners had been announced months in advance. To keep up the ceremony's momentum, pre-recorded video statements played in lieu of live acceptance speeches for most recipients.

The roughly 250 people gathered in the Musikfest Cafe also heard from local veteran Harold Siegfried, who, with the support of a scholarship from ArtsQuest, has risen out of homelessness and is pursuing artistic ambitions.

"Without all of you I wouldn't be here," Siegfried said.

The evening left at least one attendee inspired to lend a hand to the local arts community.

"I think I'll volunteer for all those people who said I should volunteer," said Roth before leaving the stage.

Here are the night's winners:

Visual Artist of the Year:

Performing Artist of the Year:

Emerging Artist of the Year:

Arts Educator of the Year:

Philanthropy in the Arts Award:

Penn State Lehigh Valley Scholarship Award:

Lifetime Achievement Artist Award:

Lifetime Achievement Volunteer Award:

Pinnacle of the Arts Award:

Excellence in Product Design:

Three local businesses were honored for supporting the arts:

Concannon Miller, Bethlehem (under 100 employees)

Embassy Bank, Bethlehem (100-199 employees)

Air Products, Allentown (200 or more employees)

Andrew Doerfler may be reached at adoerfler@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @adoerfler or on Facebook.
A former police chief in Northampton County lost his appeal Thursday of the 20-to-40-year prison sentence handed down for killing his wife in 2001.

Edward Yale (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Edward Yale, who turns 78 this month, was arrested in June 2013 after authorities reopened the cold-case investigation into the March 22, 2001, death of his 61-year-old second wife, Joan Yale.

He told police he was watching television in their Middle Smithfield Township, Monroe County, home and found her dead at the bottom of a stairs leading to their garage. She had been headed to a hair appointment, and Yale found her only after realizing he hadn't heard the garage door and went to investigate.

Medical experts testified at trial Joan Yale was either "stomped to death" or strangled and beaten. The defense's medical experts contended the victim died either from falling down the 11 steps or stumbling along the staircase and being fatally injured in a fall into a pile of firewood.

A jury convicted Edward Yale on Oct. 23, 2015, of third-degree murder and tampering with evidence. He is serving his sentence at the Pennsylvania state prison at Fayette, in La Belle, Fayette County.

Yale appealed his sentence to the Pennsylvania Superior Court, and a three-judge panel entered its opinion Thursday upholding the penalty.

The appeal focused on testimony and jury instruction, as well as on a neighbor's statement during cross-examination that Joan Yale had told him she feared her husband would kill her, something not revealed during the neighbor's initial testimony. Edward Yale also sought unsuccessfully appeal to question the qualification of a blood-splatter expert who testified.

A former heavyweight boxer, Edward Yale was chief of the former Upper Mount Bethel Township Police Department, which township supervisors voted in August 1996 to disband.

The cold-case investigation was reopened in 2013 through a county investigating grand jury that found Joan Yale was murdered during an ongoing dispute, in which Edward Yale was pressuring her to add his name to the deed for the home, according to Monroe County District Attorney's Office Chief Detective Eric Kerchner. Yale was living on Bray Street in East Bangor when he was arrested.

Yale's attorney, Marshall Anders, and Monroe County First Assistant District Attorney Michael Mancuso argued the appeal Aug. 31 in Philadelphia before Superior Court Judges Paula Francisco Ott, Mary Jane Bowes and Carl A. Solano. Ott wrote the opinion, filed Thursday.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and on Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Voters in four more states decided this week they want marijuana legalized for sale to adults ages 21 and older, including the first two east of the Mississippi River: Massachusetts and Maine.

Pennsylvania, meanwhile, continues to make progress on the rollout of medical cannabis, and is looking for public input this month from potential patients and on how best to regulate laboratories that will test the drug.

And polls show an increasing majority of Americans backing legalized recreational pot -- 60 percent, according to a recent Gallup poll.

The question now is what effect on marijuana's expansion will be seen under Republican President-elect Donald Trump's administration and a GOP-controlled Congress emboldened by Tuesday's election.

Marijuana remains illegal nationwide under federal law. The Obama Administration has decided against interfering with medical marijuana and the recreational marijuana programs in Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia. In addition to the two New England states, joining the ranks of permitting possession and sales this week were Nevada and California. Arizona voters rejected legalization.

"As far as the new administration goes, there is a little bit of watching and waiting," said Taylor West, deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association. "As a candidate, Donald Trump did express on more than one occasion the idea that states should be allowed to have these programs without the federal government interfering, but also on occasion made statements that seemed slightly less supportive of the industry."

The Christie question

Then there is the question of Trump's attorney general. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, battered of late by the Bridgegate convictions of two former allies, was back on stage with Trump early Wednesday as the president-elect celebrated his surprising win.

Christie inherited New Jersey's medical marijuana program, signed into law days before he took office in January 2010 by his predecessor, Jon Corzine. But the rollout suffered from extensive delays under Christie. He is an outspoken opponent of legalization who, during his own campaign for president, put Colorado on notice in July 2015 that pot smokers should "enjoy it" now before his would-be inauguration in Washington, D.C.

West, whose association regularly lobbies and works with Congress on federal cannabis policy, said Trump was asked directly in Colorado whether Christie, a former federal prosecutor, would crack down on legalization efforts were he to be picked to serve as attorney general. Trump said that would not happen, according to West.

"The proof will be in the pudding and it remains to be seen how things will develop," she said. "But there are reasons to believe that a Trump administration will at the very least respect states' rights and respect the decisions of the voters in these states to go a different way with their marijuana policies than the federal government."

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a post-election conference call with reporters that Trump's win and the Republican-controlled House and Senate "suggest there are various ways for the federal government to throw a wrench in the works."

"Momentum is strong, the wind is at our back, but it is not a lock," he said in an nj.com report.

About 75 million people accounting for more than 23 percent of the nation's population live in states where recreational pot is legal or is about to be, following the will of voters.

In the states where voters approved full legalization of recreational marijuana, the proposals generally treat cannabis similar to alcohol. Consumption is limited to people 21 or older and forbidden in most public spaces. Pot is highly regulated and heavily taxed, and some states let people grow their own.

In addition, voters in Florida, North Dakota and Arkansas this week approved medical marijuana measures, bringing to 28 the number of states, plus the District of Columbia, with such programs available to patients who qualify.

Pennsylvania and timing of initiatives

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed the Keystone State's program into law in April, and implementation is projected to take 18 to 24 months -- or October 2017 at the earliest. Parents and caregivers of children who qualify for medical cannabis can obtain a Safe Harbor Letter permitting the purchase and transportation of approved products from other states with existing programs.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health wants to hear from the public until Friday, Nov. 18, on two topics: Eligible patients are invited to take a survey geared toward ensuring the program meets their needs, and input is sought on the proposed temporary regulations for laboratories that would be responsible for testing medical marijuana. The patient survey and testing survey are available via health.pa.gov.

So how long until pot shops pop up in Massachusetts and Maine? In Massachusetts, adults 21 and older will be permitted to possess up to 10 ounces and grow a dozen plants at home starting Dec. 15, with retail stores opening as early as Jan. 1, 2018, bostonmagazine.com reports.

Maine's measure permits those 21 and older to possess 2.5 ounces of marijuana beginning 30 days after the governor certifies the election results, according to businessinsider.com. A nine-month window follows to develop regulations for recreational sales, possibly delaying retail opportunities for years.

Nevada and California are also looking at launching retail sales in 2018, businessinsider.com reports.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and on Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Scott Bashioum.jpeg

Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, police officer Scott Leslie Bashioum, 52, died Nov. 10, 2016, after an abush in western Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy Canonsburg police)

An audio recording of an ambush on police early Thursday in western Pennsylvania spells out the frustration after an officer was wounded: "I can't get to him, because I'm still being shot at," said another officer, according to pennlive.com.

Canonsburg police officer Scott Leslie Bashioum, 52, died and a second unidentified officer was wounded in the shooting about 20 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, the news website said.

The suspected shooter, 47-year-old Michael Cwiklinski, died in the home from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. A woman who reports say may have been pregnant also died in what was initially reported as a domestic disturbance, according to pennlive.com.

Soon after police found the home on Woodcraft Drive, an officer screams "Shots fired. Shots fired."

"We have an officer shot," an officer says.

"Officer down," another officer says. "I'm unable to get to him at this time. He's on the ground and he is still moving. But I can't get to him, because I'm still being shot at."

One of the wounded officers was pulled into a patrol car, pennlive.com said.

"He is bleeding badly," an officer says in the report. "They're gonna try to get him to the heliport."

Bashioum was pronounced dead at 4:10 a.m. Thursday at Canonsburg Hospital, the Oserver-Reporter newspaper said. The retired member of the Air Force was a borough police officer for seven years. He was married and had two sons and two daughters, the newspaper said.

"He was always willing to do the job," police Chief Alexander Coghill told the Observer-Reporter. "He never once said no when I asked him to do something. He was always there. This is one of the things you hope you never get a call about."

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Hillary Clinton may have carried the vote in New Jersey, traditionally a blue state.

But there's no doubt about this: the northwestern corner of the state is colored red.

Rural areas in New Jersey overwhelmingly voted for Republican Donald Trump, the winner of Tuesday's historic election, while New Jersey's populous urban centers threw their support behind Clinton, the Democrat.

NJ Advance Media compiled town-by-town results of the presidential election across New Jersey. The vote counts and percentages are included in the interactive map below. Hover over your city to see how it voted.

In Warren County, Trump captured 29,562 votes to Clinton's 17,063, or 60 percent of the votes cast for either candidate, according to unofficial election returns. (The results shown don't count provisional ballots and include others on the presidential ticket).

Trump won every community in Warren County, and failed in only one -- Phillipsburg -- to garner more than 50 percent of the presidential vote. He got 49.3 percent in the county's most populous community, according to the unofficial returns.

His greatest margin of victory came in White Township, outside Belvidere, where he received 68.6 percent of the votes cast for president.

Other decisive margins were reported in Frelinghuysen Township (67.8 percent), Knowlton Township (67.6), Liberty Township (67.4), Hope Township (67 percent) and Harmony Township (66.8)

Find the rest of the Warren County votes -- and all of New Jersey here:

Jim Deegan may be reached at jdeegan@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @jim_deegan. Find lehighvalleylive on Facebook.
Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content.

Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist.

If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider contributing and/or subscribing to our free daily Newsletter .

Support our mission and join our community now.
This morning, Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron has laid out a red line on Article 50 and said unless the government agrees to a referendum on the final Brexit deal, the party will vote against Article 50 in the House of Commons.

Tim Farron said:

Millions of people are deeply worried by the governments handling of Brexit.

So my position is very clear: the Liberal Democrats believe that the people are sovereign.

They must decide whether or not they agree with the deal that the government reaches with Brussels, which means a referendum at the end of the negotiations where people can either vote for the deal or to remain in Europe.

We will vote against Article 50 unless it allows the people a vote on the deal, because the will of the people must prevail  both on departure and destination.

The government has no plan and their haphazard approach is leading us towards a disastrous version of Brexit which risks jobs, communities, security and the economic health of the nation.
Ive supported the Lib Dems for as long as I can remember, but until now, only ever from the comfort of my sofa. Ive always been interested in politics, I studied the subject at college and university, but never felt compelled to get involved.

So what prompted me aged 36 to join the party? Well, on the face of it, its easy: Brexit. The referendum result was my call to arms. Like many others I joined the party a few days after the vote, realising that it was time for apathetic liberals (small l) like myself to stand up and fight back.

Most of my adult life was spent in a political system dominated by the centre ground. As a second generation East European, I was proud to be part of a tolerant and generous society that welcomed everyone. Brexit woke me up to how quickly things can change. It was a stark reminder of how xenophobia and intolerance could become prevalent. All those history lessons about the 1930s suddenly began to make sense.

On reflection, the reason I didnt didnt get into politics earlier, was probably because I didnt think I needed to. My views were mainstream and pretty well represented in politics. I joined the fight when I saw this change. The Liberal Democrats were the only party I could see that would be able to revive a fair and tolerant centre ground.

So thats what brought me into the party, but why stand for election to the local council? Well, Ive lived and worked in the Whitechapel area for the past 7 years and I care deeply about the neighbourhood my young family grows up in.

I recently began the hunt for my 2 year old daughters first school and was shocked to see first hand the challenges parents and teachers faced in the borough. I dont want to rely on someone else to fix those problems for me. I had a fairly good comprehensive school education and was fortunate enough to get into Cambridge university, so Id like my daughter and her friends here in Tower Hamlets to have at least the same opportunities I did.

So what qualifies me to be a councillor? Well, Ive run my own businesses for the past 15 years and successfully grew an IT services company to 8m turnover and 300 employees. My latest venture, Squirrel, is a tech startup that helps people to budget and save. I know how to get things done, especially with the procurement of services and technology, an area I think the council can dramatically improve on. We need elected representatives who can get value from taxpayers money, I know I can do that. We need to bring better technology into public services, I can do that too.

Theres an extremely important parliamentary by-election happening on 1st December in Richmond, so our party resources are rightly being focused on helping Sarah Olney win that. Just spare a thought though for the smaller, but no less worthwhile battle were taking to Labour in Whitechapel that same day. If you can spare some time to help us here, well welcome you with open arms! Find us here on Facebook.

* Emanuel Andjelic is a newbie who joined us after the referendum, now fighting the Whitechapel by-election on 1st December
Ozempic Shortage: How a Weight Loss Fad Has Slashed Access to a Diabetes Drug

The type 2 diabetes injectable semaglutide (Ozempic) has gone viral on social media for one of its side effects  weight loss  and become harder to access among people who use the drug to manage their blood sugar.
UNIVERSITY Maternity Hospital Limerick will hold its annual remembrance service in the city this weekend.

The service will be held at the Church of the Holy Rosary, Ennis Road, this Sunday at 3pm. Parents who have experienced the death of their baby and pregnancy loss, together with their family, friends and hospital staff, are welcome to attend the service.

A spokesperson said: People are very welcome to stay after the service for a chat and a cup of tea. As some parents may be recently bereaved, we respectfully ask those hoping to attend the service not to bring babies or young children.

Speaking ahead of the service, Marie Hunt, bereavement counselling midwife, UMHL, said: The death of a baby is recognised as one of the most difficult bereavements in life and something which has a lifelong impact on parents and families.

The service is an annual event which aims to acknowledge the pregnancies that were lost and the lives of babies who have died through ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death.

"We welcome parents and families whose babies may have died many years ago as well as those more recently bereaved. Staff at UMHL witness the deep grief and sadness felt by parents who have been told their baby has died.

"The remembrance service provides a space for staff, the parents and extended families to reflect on the love and care they have shown to families who are bereaved and to acknowledge and express their own grief and sadness for the little lives that were lost, she said.
LIMERICK City and County Council is planning to spend hundreds of millions of euro on major new projects for the urban area.

This includes 171m up to 2019 on housing and building projects  54m next year.

The capital plan section of the draft budget presented to councillors shows the spend may come with the backing of a 32m loan taken out by the local authority, plus government grants and development levies among other sources.

Cllr Joe Leddin said the blueprint is exciting and ambitious, but Cllr James Collins warned it is a wish list, and not all of the schemes will happen.

None of these projects are 'ready to go as it were. What happens is they publish the list, and each directorate takes a look at what projects need to progress and procure the funding for it, he explained, But there is quite a lot in each of the divisions.

The budget shows that controversial plans for a social housing estate near the North Circular Road are back on the table, with a 7m grant earmarked.

Social housing units are also planned at St Josephs Street, the Rathbane Road, Sycamore Avenue, with the second phase of Wallers Well at the Roxboro Road.

It is also understood that housing will be built around the site of the former Brannigans Pub in Mulgrave Street.

The much vaunted upgrade to OConnell Street is included in the expenditure programme, with some 9m planned over three years.

This may be funded with a grant of 4m, plus part of the aforementioned loan.

After cycle routes were previously put in place between the University of Limerick and the centre, the citys two other third level institutions will also be linked by a bike lane under the proposals.

And, a feasibility study may be conducted for a park and ride facility, with 50,000 being proposed for this in 2018.

In terms of roads, 4m a year is being proposed for the Coonagh to Knockalisheen distributor road.

2017 may also see the completion of a link road to allow motorists travel from the M7 into the city centre, via the Maldron Hotel. A previous link was closed some years ago.

11m is being proposed for flood reliefs in Kings Island, and a further 1.6m for Verdant Place.

The controversial footbridge planned for near Merchants Quay may also be funded to the tune of 13m under these plans with 5.1m coming from a grant, and a further 7.8m from other sources.

A total of 300,000 is being earmarked for a proposed craft hub at Nicholas Street, while the Biblical Institute at Dominic Street/Cecil Street could have 2.5m dedicated to it, as Innovate Limerick bids to develop a digital learning hub there.

Some 18m is being proposed for a Georgian City Scheme, which could act as a demonstration area to show that city living in these types of buildings is possible.

This idea came following a proposal by Cllr Collins, who said: I have been asking for them to do a residential scheme for the city centre to develop a Georgian block as a residential amenity. There isnt really anyone living in the city centre, so this could show it off. If we can show it can be done, the commercial developers and landlords would be more inclined to follow on afterwards.

Labour councillor Leddin said: It is an exciting, and ambitious. Thats what it should be. It gives specific time periods and costings. It is just a question of the economy continuing to grow and develop which will enable some of these projects to move forward.

Elsewhere in the budget, councillors may sign off on a commercial rates rise  although this could be offset by a scheme which will see early payers see a real term rates freeze.

Councillors will sit down today to thrash out the local authority budget for 2017.

- For updates on the budget deliberations, stay with the Limerick Leader online and see the print editions next week
BANK of Ireland will officially open a unique new facility for small companies at its main city branch today.

The Bank of Ireland workbench is free and open to start-up companies to use as a base to work from.

The branch hall has undergone an extensive reconstruction to allow for these facilities, which includes a free co-working deskspace.

People using the facility can take advantage of free WiFi, coffee and tea.

The launch will mark the start of National Enterprise Week in Limerick, with Bank of Ireland hosting a networking event.

This will be hosted at the Treaty City brewery, based at Unit 13 in the Childers Road enterprise centre next Tuesday, November 15, from 6.30pm to 8.30pm.

The events enable people to share business information, gain industry insights, access resources and build new leads. Flash Networking Events are open to all however people must register to attend.

For more information on the facility see here, telephone 076-6247715, or you can also visit @BOIbusiness.
CONSTRUCTION plans for a large number of houses on Limerick city's northside have been submitted for planning approval.

On Thursday, November 3, Limerick City and County Councils planning department received an application from John McInerney, for the building of 66 houses and associated site works, at Knockhill, Ennis Road.

The project, if approved by the council, will also include access to the Ennis Road.

Mayor of Limerick City and County Council, Cllr Kieran OHanlon welcomed the initiative to construct new homes in the city. He said: I welcome any development because with the new jobs announcements that we have had, since I have become mayor, there have been the bones of 1,000 jobs announcements, there is a housing shortage, rents have increased enormously here in Limerick, as well as Dublin.

"So, I would welcome the fact that new houses are being built, and it is great to see that contractors are going back on site and cranes going up.

He added that the news of jobs announcements and construction projects is a sign that Limerick is on the move again".

It shows confidence in the city. I am sure there will be a huge demand for them, and I hope that the lending agencies will be more receptive to young couples who need housing.

He added that a Northern Distributor Road, between Coonagh and Annacotty would also open up huge potential for additional housing projects and enterprise in the future.

MacMahon and Hardiman Consulting Engineers is the architect for the proposed project. A decision for the permission of the major northside project is due on January 6, 2017.
NEIL Delamere returns to the University Concert Hall in January with new tour, titled Handstand.

The top Irish comic has announced details of the brand new tour, which calls to the UCH on January 21.

Audiences can expect Delameres usual banter and quick wit, plus his well observed comedy that has made him one of the most prominent Irish comedians, both on stage and television.

The star of RTEs The Panel, 2 nd Republic, BBCs The Blame Game, Fighting Talk and Michael McIntyres Comedy Roadshow is popular for his powerhouse performances both at home and abroad at Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Montreal Just For Laughs Festival.

An accomplished broadcaster as well as comic, Neil is the host of his own hugely-popular show on Today FM, Neil Delameres Sunday Best, while he has also made a recent return to screens with the Blame Game.

Fond of a snappy title, the affable Offaly funnyman packed out the UCH in January of this year with his Ctrl+Alt+Delamere show, telling the Leader he always loves the live stuff, it is the reason you start and that you keep going. Nothing beats the immediacy of having an audience in the room with you.

See www.uch.ie.
We and our partners use cookies to Store and/or access information on a device. We and our partners use data for Personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. An example of data being processed may be a unique identifier stored in a cookie. Some of our partners may process your data as a part of their legitimate business interest without asking for consent. To view the purposes they believe they have legitimate interest for, or to object to this data processing use the vendor list link below. The consent submitted will only be used for data processing originating from this website. If you would like to change your settings or withdraw consent at any time, the link to do so is in our privacy policy accessible from our home page.
Throughout the long months of this tumultuous presidential election season, parents and caregivers have struggled with how to talk to their kids about its more volatile moments. The voting may be over, but many difficult conversations are just getting started. And uncomfortable though it may be, experts say kids will benefit from confronting tough issues directly.

Presidential campaigns aren't always indicative of presidential actions, and Americans don't know what Donald Trump will ultimately do as president. Even so, children may have heard, at home or in school, about promises made by Trump during campaign speeches and debates, including descriptions of deporting undocumented immigrants who are currently protected, banning Muslims from entering the U.S., and proposing legislation that would strip rights from LGBTQ people, women and minorities. He described Mexicans as "rapists" in one speech, and espoused committing sexual assault against women in a recording that was circulated widely in the media.

And the recognized hate group the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) has celebrated Trump's election, praising him on Twitter and even planning a Dec. 3 victory parade in North Carolina, a KKK representative told Snopes.com on Nov. 9. [Nasty Elections: 5 Times Presidential Candidates Went Low]

Some children may be too young to understand the implications of what they are hearing but are aware that family members and other adults are anxious about a Trump presidency. Others may be old enough to worry about how his proposed policies could affect them and their loved ones. How should parents speak to their children about these concerns?

Children will listen

It may be tempting for adults to downplay controversial topics in order to shield children from harsh truths about the world and how certain people behave. But kids can usually tell when adults are upset, and ignoring serious subjects  such as those that arose during this election  won't make them magically disappear, children's book author Erick Walter, who has written about bullying, told Maclean's.

"I've talked to people who are literally struggling to sleep because they're anxious. Children pick up on that," Walter said.

"You can't protect them by pretending it doesn't happen," he added.

In fact, if young children suspect that their parents are distressed  regardless of the cause  they will likely hold themselves responsible unless they are told otherwise, according to Ken Yeager, an associate professor in the psychiatry department at the Ohio State University (OSU) Wexner Medical Center.

Yeager, director of OSU's Stress, Trauma and Resilience (STAR) program, told Live Science that young children tend to assume blame for everything around them. If their parents are anxious about something, kids need to hear from them that it's not their fault.

Maintaining standards

It's also important for parents to explain what may appear perplexing to children  the example of society rewarding bad behavior. In this case, what children might consider "bad behavior" by Trump could be statements about touching women's genitals without their consent, claiming that someone's race prevents them from performing their job properly, or mocking someone with disabilities. This contradicts a basic concept called the "just world belief"  the idea that good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished, Yeager explained. Of course, the world is often unfair and unjust, which makes it even more important for people to hold themselves to a higher standard, Yeager said.

"There are situations where some people who behave in ways that are less than good are rewarded for it and people who behave in very good ways have bad things happen to them," Yeager said.

"It's important for parents to say to their children, 'You will see injustices around you every day, but that doesn't give you permission to act in unjust ways.' There are things that you can do, things to prevent bad things from happening  and we should do that  but sometimes, bad things still happen," he said, referring to the rewarding of "bad" behaviors. [5 Ways to Talk to Your Kids About Bullying]

"The Trump Effect"

The anti-immigrant rhetoric that is part of Trump's platform is particularly frightening to many children, according to a report released Apr. 13 by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The report described the negative impact of the 2016 presidential election on schools in America as "The Trump Effect.".

In the report, a survey of 2,000 teachers revealed that rhetoric in the campaign "is producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom," the SPLC wrote.

And recent events in the United Kingdom suggest that such language spurs aggressive and harmful behavior toward immigrants and people of color.

After the recent "Brexit" referendum  a vote for the U.K. to leave the European Union, largely spurred by anti-immigrant propaganda  there was an uptick in hate crimes, reported by police to be five times "the usual level," according to the Independent.

In the U.S., a day after Trump was declared the president-elect, Muslims and people of color in multiple cities were targeted by taunts and harassment, the International Business Times reported. And graffiti with pro-Trump and pro-Nazi messages was found on a Philadelphia storefront on Nov. 9, according to Time.

But as president, Trump will not be making unilateral decisions about immigration policies  or, in fact, any policies  on his own. Yeager recommended that parents explain to fearful kids that our government is constructed so that no individual gets to change the way the country runs.

"The democracy we have is very complex, with a system of checks and balances," Yeager said. "Yes, there are certain aspects of it that one person can impact. But all this is in place because we don't want any one person being the dictator."

The power of words

Still, the normalization of ugly language during this election is troubling, but parents can offset that by reminding children that using demeaning or abusive words is not okay, Yeager told Live Science. He added that it was encouraging to hear Trump call for unity in a divided country during his acceptance speech, for people to start working together and that emphasizing this message to children will be an important part of moving forward.

"Life is not easy, and challenges are always present," Yeager said. "The people who are the most successful learn to live outside of their comfort zone."

Indeed, many people woke up the morning after the election outside their comfort zones, he added, ruefully. Challenges may lie ahead, but within them are possibilities to emerge stronger and wiser than before, Yeager said.

"This is an opportunity for personal and individual growth," Yeager said. "Because when you're in a place where you're less comfortable, you have a chance to change and to grow and to learn."

Original article on Live Science.
Thousands of protesters march down 2nd Avenue in Seattle, Washington, on Nov. 9, 2016. Social scientists say the deep divides being revealed since Donald Trump won the presidential election are not about ideology.

Deep in the heart of Alabama, psychologist Josh Klapow is getting worried.

"I know people hanging up the phone on their best friends in the world."

It's safe to say that the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election has been contentious. In Chicago, New York and other big cities Wednesday night (Nov. 9), anti-Trump protesters took to the streets. In Birmingham, Alabama, even widespread deep-red politics haven't saved average Americans from uncomfortable conversations with their friends and neighbors.

"People are absolutely burning personal bridges, because they're making the decision, consciously, saying, 'I cannot live with you for voting for that person,'" Klapow, a clinical psychologist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, told Live Science. "This is the most socially damaging thing I've ever seen."

In Hillary Clinton's concession speech to Donald Trump on Wednesday, the Democratic candidate called America "more deeply divided than we thought."

And indeed, exit polls that show major gaps in Republican and Democratic support by social class, by ethnic and racial identity, and by geography paint a grim portrait of American unity. Strangely, though, surveys on specific policies and party affiliation show that the American public is not particularly polarized: Ideology is the domain of a noisy few. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

The divisions in America are instead cultural, experts say. And this more intransigent division can explain how a rabble-rouser candidate with a potpourri of political views captured the presidency in a system that has long calcified into liberal and conservative wings.

"The cut in the electorate isn't a clear left and right," said Peter Ditto, a political psychologist the University of California, Irvine. "It's kind of an up and down, or it comes in diagonally where education and ethnic identity seem to be the things that are determining votes."

What the polls missed

Men preferred Trump over Clinton 53 percent to 41 percent, according to CNN. Women were a near mirror image, preferring Clinton to Trump 54 percent to 42 percent. Whites preferred Trump over Clinton 58 percent to 37 percent; blacks preferred Clinton 88 percent to Trump's 8 percent. College grads went for Clinton 52 percent versus 43 percent for Trump, while those without a college degree chose Trump over Clinton by 52 percent versus 44 percent.

The divisions seen in 2016 exit polls aren't new. The Republican candidate in 2012, Mitt Romney, took 52 percent of the male vote (versus 45 percent for Obama), while Obama took 55 percent of the female vote (versus 44 percent for Romney), according to CNN exit polls. Similarly, 59 percent of white voters went for Romney in 2012, while 93 percent of African-American votes went to Obama.

Ahead of this election, pollsters and pundits expecting a Clinton victory fell into one of two traps, said Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution. They may have missed people who were unwilling to admit their support for Trump for fear of social censure, he said. More important, though, was that the likely Clinton turnout was overestimated, while the likely Trump turnout was underestimated.

"The Democrats were too confident in their ground game," Fiorina said, and didn't consider that voters weren't as enthusiastic about Clinton as they had been about Obama. [Nasty Elections: 5 Times Presidential Candidates Went Low]

Ideological overlap

The election upended conventional thinking in other ways, too. In previous years, gridlock in Congress raised worries over the polarization of the left and right. Political scientists agreed that Democrats and Republicans had become more polarized since the 1970s. They now tend to run in lockstep: Rarely will you find a Republican who supports abortion rights, or a Democrat who likes open-carry gun laws.

"The party and the ideology have lined up much more closely than they were in the past when the Democrats had a conservative wing and the Republicans had a liberal wing," Fiorina said.

It doesn't follow, however, that the American public also became polarized. In fact, while activists and donors increasingly identify strongly with one or the other party, the general public has been fairly consistent over the past 40 years, Fiorina wrote in an essay in September. The number of people who identify as "moderates" or "don't know" on the nationally representative General Social Survey has stayed steady at around 40 percent since the 1970s. The long-running American National Election Surveys likewise find that on the issues, Americans don't conform as neatly to their partys official stance. On issues ranging from military spending to government-provided health care, Americans cluster around moderate positions, with typically around 10 to 15 percent of people staking out positions on the "very liberal" and "very conservative" sides.

All of these voters, however, must choose between two increasingly different political parties, Fiorina said.

The public is closely divided," between these two parties, Fiorina said, "but not deeply divided." Many, he said, simply don't fit comfortably in either.

Enter Trump. He presented a mix of ideological positions, Fiorina said: Anti-immigration policy not so alien to the right alongside a proposed infrastructure stimulus plan that seemed out of the Democratic playbook. Praise of Russia that makes Republicans blanche, with condemnation of Islam that makes Democrats shudder.

"I think a large part of the voting for Trump was not really issue-related," Fiorina said "It was just a desire to stick it to people [that Trump voters] think had been looking down on them."

"I'd be willing to be that the New York Times helped Trump by being so over-the-top," Fiorina said, referring to the paper's strong anti-Trump editorial stance. There's general contempt among the Democrats' well-educated upper-middle class constituency for "the patriotism and the religiosity and the lifestyle" of conservatives, Fiorina said.

"I think people sense that," he said.

Two Americas?

Trump voters wanted to send a defiant message, agreed political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia. [The 5 Strangest Presidential Elections in US History]

"The way to understand this election is that it was a 'FY' election," Poole said, "You can't say it, but that means f*** you."

Between 40 and 50 percent of the lowest-income families in America haven't seen an increase in income for the past 40 years, Poole told Live Science. The economic gains of the past eight years have gone mostly to those in the upper-income brackets, he said.

"That's why you keep seeing these polls that say America's on the wrong track," Poole said. In a country divided along economic lines, Trump tapped voters, many rural, who felt left behind, he said.

And those voters might not know anyone who supported Clinton  just as many urban Clinton supporters might not know a single Trump voter. Americans are increasingly segregated in bubbles of people like them, said UC Irvine's Ditto. Partisans seek out news sources tailor-made to support their opinions, he said. And people choose neighborhoods where they feel comfortable, which often means they end up living next door to people who vote just like them, Ditto added.

"That's harder because the policies can change, and the divisions can stay the same," Ditto said.

Indeed, Ditto said, Trump's election was more about personality and morals than policy vision. Trump resonated with conservative voters because he spoke to values that political conservatives tend to cherish more than liberals: authority and traditionalism, for example, Ditto said.

"It's not that the two sides have completely oppositional values but different things bother them, and other things they allow to go," Ditto told Live Science. [5 Animals With a Moral Compass]

According to psychology's Moral Foundations Theory, liberals tend to care most about issues of care and fairness, while conservatives care about those things, too  but also worry about things liberals don't tend to care much about, like loyalty, deference to authority and sanctity.

Thus, when Trump made statements that struck liberal voters as unforgivably racist or homophobic, Trump supporters didn't necessarily love those statements, either, Ditto said, but they aren't bothered as much as liberals.

"When he says racist things, they go, 'Yeah, I don't like that, but it's not a deal-breaker for me," Ditto said. "Where for liberals, it's a deal-breaker."

That kind of morality schism is hard to overcome, Ditto said. It turns into a self-sustaining cycle of distrust and fighting.

"It's possible that something could intervene to bring the country back together," he said. "External threats do that. But my guess is we're going to be looking at this kind of conflict continuing."

In Alabama, there's little sign of reconciliation so far, Klapow said. People who had previously lived in harmony with people they disagreed with are "calling each other out" over the results of the election, he said. And the schisms aren't over the usual political arguments, but over whether Trump is morally fit to lead  and whether voters for either side are good people, he said.

"It's going to change the social fabric," Klapow said, "because nobody wants to hold hands right now."

Original article on Live Science.
This fossilized vertebra is the only evidence showing that an ancient dolphin once swam around the waters of Madagascar.

A single fossilized backbone is the first evidence on record that dolphins once swam around the waters of ancient Madagascar, scientists say.

The fossil backbone, or vertebra, dates to between 5 million and 9 million years ago during the late Miocene epoch, and belongs to a previously unknown and still unnamed species of dolphin, the researchers said.

"This exciting discovery marks the first fossil cetacean [a group including dolphins, whales and porpoises] from Madagascar," said study lead researcher Karen Samonds, an associate professor of biological sciences at Northern Illinois University. [The World's Biggest Beasts: Here and Gone]

A side view of the ancient Malagasy dolphin vertebra. (Image credit: Ewan Fordyce)

Samonds found the fossilized vertebra on Nosy Makamby, a tiny island off the northwest coast of Madagascar, in 2010. It was ensconced in marine rock by the shore, and it dated to well after the time that Madagascar became an isolated island, Samonds said.

"[The fossil] was a challenge to identify," Samonds told Live Science in an email. "When we discovered it, we could tell that it was a vertebra, and there were various characteristics about its shape that could tell us that we were looking at a mammal."

But the researchers weren't certain what type of mammal it was. The vertebra was relatively long and slender, about 4 inches (10 centimeters) in length and about 2 inches (5.3 cm) wide, "which is unlike most terrestrial or land-dwelling mammals," Samonds said.

Karen Samonds excavates the rare dolphin fossil. (Image credit: Courtesy of Karen Samonds)

After an anatomical analysis, the researchers determined that the vertebra had a robust neural spine, the triangular part of the vertebra that juts out. This remarkable feature indicated that the fossil likely belonged to a dolphin, a mammal that uses its long neural spines to help rhythmically bend its backbone as it swims, Samonds said.

The vertebra's features are similar to those seen in modern river dolphins, including the Amazon River dolphin, or boto, (Inia geoffrensis) and the La Plata River dolphin, or franciscana, (Pontoporia blainvillei), she said.

"The boto and franciscana are riverine or estuarine [estuaries occur where rivers flow into seas], while the Madagascar dolphin was marine," Samonds said. "However, boto and franciscana are the closest likely relatives to the fossil, suggesting that they and the Madagascar dolphin had a common ancestor in [the] western Atlantic region."

It's difficult to say too much about the dolphin based on one fossil vertebra, but the creature likely measured between 5 and 6.5 feet (1.5 to 2 meters) in length, said study co-researcher Ewan Fordyce, a vertebrate paleobiologist at the Univeristy of Otago in New Zealand.

Fordyce said that Madagascar is on his list of places to hunt for fossils; Samonds, on the other hand, has worked there for years, detailing other fossil Malagasy animals, including an ancient juvenile crocodylian detailed in the journal PeerJ and a Miocene-epoch shark described in the journal PLOS ONE. But despite these findings, it's unclear where most of the island's diverse fauna originated, she said.

"One major impediment to our understanding has been the lack of a Cenozoic [65.5 million years ago to present] fossil record, the time period when many animal groups are thought to have arrived [in Madagascar]," Samonds said. "Our work is finally beginning to elucidate this unknown time period."

Nosy Makamby, the tiny island off the northwest coast of Madagascar where Karen Samonds found the fossil. (Image credit: Karen Samonds)

Nowadays, several types of dolphins swim around Madagascar, including humpback dolphins and Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, a nature conservancy organization in Madagascar.

The study, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, was presented Oct. 28 at the 2016 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Salt Lake City.

Original article on Live Science.
Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein is the host of the national public television series Healthy Minds with Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein. The show aims to remove the stigma of mental illness, educate the public and offer a message of hope by humanizing common psychiatric conditions through inspiring personal stories, cutting-edge research on diagnosis and treatment, and interviews with well-known personalities. Borenstein contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

When we think about the men and women in our military this Veterans Day, we should also think about their mental health.

In August, in the largest study to date on the topic, the Veterans Administration found that an average of 20 veterans died as a result of suicide every day in 2014. Some of these veterans may have had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that affects people's ability to function and can lead to other psychiatric problems, alcoholism, drug addiction, self-medication and suicide.

Though the statistics are grim, there are encouraging developments going on in the mental health community that will help to recognize, destigmatize and treat veterans who are suffering.

Suffering among veterans is not new. I recently spoke with Dr. Matthew Freedman, a senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs National Center for PTSD, who recalled treating veterans during his medical residency in 1973. At that time, the VA was flooded with Vietnam vets who were depressed, hyper-vigilant, or in a state of constant alert, and suffering from flashbacks. The condition was named post-Vietnam syndrome.

Psychiatrists eventually realized that the condition, which is now called PTSD, is the result of exposure to traumatic and potentially life-threatening events. In addition to veterans, other people are susceptible to PTSD, including victims of sexual violence, first responders, firefighters, ER doctors and mental health professionals who work with prisoners of war and refugees. In fact, more than half of all men and women in the United States have been exposed to at least one traumatic event; but 8 percent of people have been diagnosed with PTSD, according to the VA website.

The good news is that the human mind is resilient. Most people don't forget the traumatic events that occur in their lives, but the majority can cope with them and move forward with their lives.

Researchers desperately want to understand why some people experience a trauma and recover without lingering effects on their mental health, while for others, a traumatic event causes a long-term mental health condition. One explanation may be findings that show the likelihood of developing PTSD increases with repeated exposure to trauma.

But the links between trauma, PTSD and suicide are still unclear. Dr. Marianne Goodman, a psychiatrist at the Bronx VA and at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, recently told me about astudy that looked at 1,800 veteran suicides over the past 2.5 years. Although many studies of suicide have found that a previous attempt is a significant risk factor, of those 1,800 veterans who died by suicide, 70 percent had never made any previous attempts. Psychiatrists don't know much about the veterans who die as a result of suicide without prior attempts, and the VA is trying to understand who is at risk and how to provide the help they need before they make that first attempt.

The study also found that the vast majority of these veterans who died by suicide never saw a mental health professional. However, many had visited a primary-care physician in the month before they died as a result of suicide. [5 Myths About Suicide, Debunked]

The New York Psychiatric Association is now leading an effort to educate primary-care doctors about prescribing antidepressants in the hope of reducing the number of veterans who take their own lives.

We also need to educate the friends and families of veterans about how to better support the veterans in their lives, and to identify their signs of distress. It's rare that someone takes their own life without an underlying mental health condition, and PTSD, depression, substance abuse, agitation and insomnia can be a lethal combination. Many veterans who attempt suicide are unusually stressed and have legal, relationship or financial issues.

Unfortunately, suicide is often an irrational and spontaneous act, and isolation is a huge risk factor. Many people who are thinking about suicide often turn their phones off, won't answer texts or answer the door.

The VA's suicide prevention programs help veterans cope, manage their emotions and, most important, develop a safety plan that can be used when someone feels suicidal. It is also important to remove risks by securing any guns and emptying the medicine cabinet of pills.

New York State Sen. Thomas D. Croci, a veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is still in the Reserves, told me that for some soldiers, the hardest part of a deployment is coming home. Although deployments are stressful, many soldiers say they have never felt more productive or relevant than during their deployment. Coming home means facing pressure and expectations from work and family.

He says a veteran's mission is not complete until he or she returns home, readjusts and reintegrates.

Our veterans have made great sacrifices. We hope they will not suffer in silence. We need to make them understand that with help, there is hope.

Originally published on Live Science.
Traumatic events may affect the brains of boys and girls differently, a new study finds.

Among boys in the study, a brain area called the anterior circular sulcus was larger among those who had symptoms of a trauma, compared with a control group of boys who did not have any trauma symptoms. But among girls in the study, this brain region was smaller among those who had trauma symptoms.

The region is associated with emotional awareness and empathy, the researchers said.

The scientists said they were surprised to see that "the boys and girls were so clearly on different ends of the spectrum," said Megan Klabunde, the lead author of the study and a psychologist and neuroscience researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

The researchers compared the size of this brain region in the boys in the control group with that of the girls in the control group, finding that the region was of approximately similar size in both groups.

A potential explanation for these results is that "exposure to traumatic stress may impact brain development rates" differently in boys than in girls, the researchers said. However, because the study was conducted at a single point in time, it's not possible to know whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship  in either girls or boys  between trauma and the size of this brain region, the investigators said.

In the study, the researchers scanned the brains of 59 children ages 9 to 17, using a type of scan called structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI). There were 29 children total in the control group, and there were 30 children in the group that had symptoms of trauma, such as mood changes, and mentally re-living their traumautic events. These children had experienced a traumatic event more than 6 months prior to the start of the study.

The researchers compared the size of the anterior circular sulcus, located within a brain region called the insula, which plays a role in people's emotions, awareness and empathy.

However, "the insula doesn't work in isolation," Klabunde told Live Science. Rather, this region is connected to other parts of the brain, which are also involved in emotion processing and empathy, she said.

Previous studies have shown that about 8 percent of girls and 2 percent of boys develop post-traumatic stress disorder sometime during their lifetime. Girls, in general, are more likely to develop the condition than boys are.

The researchers noted that their study had a relatively small number of participants. In addition, the research did not specifically study the impact of factors such as the time since the trauma, the age of the participant when the trauma first occurred, the severity of the trauma and other potential stressors that may also affect changes in the brain.

Future studies may shed light on how trauma affects other brain structures related to empathy, and whether these effects also show gender differences, the researchers said.

Additionally, further research may also help scientists determine whether these physical differences in the brain in turn lead to behavioral differences between boys and girls, the scientists said. Such research could help psychiatrists develop gender-specific treatments for boys and girls who have suffered traumatic events, the researchers said.

Originally published on Live Science.
As one of Irelands best-loved authors, Maeve Binchy sold more than 40 million copies worldwide during her illustrious career.

She appeared on The New York Times best-seller list and in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, and finished third in a poll for World Book Day in 2000, ahead of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Stephen King.

Best known for her sympathetic and often humorous portrayal of small-town life in Ireland, her characters, heartfelt stories and clever surprise endings have captured the hearts of so many.

Now for the first time ever, Binchys work has been adapted for the stage in the world premiere of 'Minding Frankie'.

Directed by Peter Sheridan, brother of renowned film director Jim Sheridan, 'Minding Frankie' has been wowing audinces and critics alike since opening in Dublin last month

A family love story, full of Maeve Binchys trademark wisdom, warmth, and humour, the play follows Noel Lynch, who is struggling with an alcohol addiction when he gets a call from Stella, a girlfriend with whom he shared a drunken weekend.

Stella is having Noels child. She is also dying from cancer, so Noel must raise their daughter, Frankie.

Social worker Moira Tierney has other ideas, and is prepared to do battle for custody of the child.

In order to prevail, Noel must prove that he can fill a womans shoes, break all the stereotypes, and become the best mother than he can be.

Along the way, he discovers that it takes a village to rear a child, or at least a street.

'Minding Frankie' comes to the Backstage Theatre, Longford for one night only on Friday, November 11.

Tickets, priced at 18/16, are available on 043 33 47888, from Farrell & Coy in Longford town or online on www.backstage.ie
Gardai believe that suicide bomber and Irish convert Terence Kelly [Khalid Kelly], who is understood to have blown himself up in an Isis bombing attack in Iraq last Friday, began his commitment to becoming an Isis suicide bomber while he was living in Ardagh.

The 50-year-old, from The Liberties in Dublins inner city is believed to have driven a modified military vehicle packed with explosives into a base near Mosul used by Iraqi forces fighting Isis for control of the city, last weekend.

From Dublin, he moved to London, where his Pakistani wife and three children now live, but left in 2008 and is believed to have travelled to Pakistan to train with the Taliban.

Later he moved back to Dublin.

In 2010 Kelly settled in Co Cavan, but afterwards moved to Ardagh where he lived for nearly two years.

He lived alone in Ardagh - in a rented cottage, which has been described as isolated - and received occasional visits from his wife and children.

Locals say that he ran at night and visited the local shop, but kept himself to himself and did not become involved in the community there.

Gardai say that Kelly left the Republic for England eight months ago, and spent some time in the UK with his wife and children.

He then tried to travel to Syria via Turkey but was prevented from doing so after his departure from the Republic had been flagged internationally by the Gardai.

He was apparently known by Isis as Abu Usama an-Irelandi and called himself 'Khalid Kelly'.

He was also known as 'Taliban Terry' after reports emerged that he was training with the terrorist group in Pakistan in 2009.

Isis has released statements on social media, along with video and photographs of the explosion in which Kelly died, saying the attack had killed and injured large numbers.

However, the Shia Popular Mobilisation Units, whose forces Kelly attacked, claimed that, while there had been injuries, there were in fact no fatalities.
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Arts & Culture, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events

By Long Island News & PR Published: November 11 2016

The Village of Hempstead and Nassau County Legislator Siela Bynoe recently celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month with the Village community.

Village of Hempstead residents demonstrate Hispanic American dances for an audience of more than 100 community members.

Hempstead, NY - November 3, 2016 - The Village of Hempstead and Nassau County Legislator Siela Bynoe recently celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month with the Village community. Village of Hempstead Deputy Mayor Luis Figueroa and Trustee Don Ryan spoke about the contributions of the Hispanic community to the world and to Hempstead, and honored notable Hispanic residents in the Village who have greatly contributed to the community. Residents celebrated this rich culture of Hispanic Americans embracing, enriching and enabling America through an evening of food, dance, art and storytelling.

The Village provided traditional food to celebrate Hispanic culture such as pupusa, empanadas, tamales and tacos from El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras. Nassau County Police Chaplain, Pastor Derek Garcia was the Keynote speaker.



(L to R): Village of Hempstead Trustee Don Ryan; Leadership Award recipient Leslie Gomez, Sr.; Community Service Award recipient Angel A. Perez; Mayors Recognition Award recipient Vivian Pereira; Mayors Recognition Award recipient, Pastor Derek Garcia; Community Service Award recipient Biena Depena; Mayors Recognition Award recipient Karla A. Guerra; Nassau County Legislator Siela Bynoe and Village of Hempstead Deputy Mayor Luis Figueroa stand for a photograph during the Village of Hempsteads recent Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. During the celebration the Village honored the national contributions of local members of the Hispanic community and showcased Hispanic American food, dance, art and storytelling.'

Honorees included: Leadership Award recipient Leslie Gomez, Sr.; Community Service Award recipient Angel A. Perez; Mayors Recognition Award recipient Vivian Pereira; Mayors Recognition Award recipient, Pastor Derek Garcia; Community Service Award recipient Biena Depena and Mayors Recognition Award recipient Karla A. Guerra.

For more information, please call the Incorporated Village of Hempstead at 516.489.3400 or visit the website at www.villageofhempstead.org
ShopRite of Massapequa Opens with Prepared Foods Department, From-Scratch Bakery and More

Food, Wine, & Dining, Local News, Business & Finance, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: November 11 2016

ShopRite opened its newest full-service supermarket in Massapequa. with a ribbon-cutting ceremony held on Sunday, Nov. 6.

Pictured (L to R): Zabrina Lyons- Hernandez, Sofia Lyons- Hernandez, Julio Hernandez, Emma Hernandez and Melissa Buonadonna- Hernandez cut the ribbon on the new ShopRite of Massapequa.

Massapequa, NY - November 1, 2016 - ShopRite announced today that it has opened its newest full-service supermarket in Massapequa, with a ribbon cutting ceremony on Sunday, Nov. 6.

Located at 5508 Sunrise Highway, the 67,000-square-foot ShopRite of Massapequa is operated by the Buonadonna ShopRite, LLC, a family-owned and operated company. The new ShopRite offers a large selection of fresh produce, natural, organic and gluten-free products at ShopRites low, everyday prices.



Pictured: Interior of ShopRite in Massapequa. Photo courtesy of ShopRite.

The location underwent an extensive renovation to meet ShopRite standards and customers can expect a state-of-the-art supermarket with freshly prepared foods including sushi, salad and olive bars, made-to-order sandwiches, cheesesteaks, a hot buffet and coffee.



Pictured: Interior of ShopRite in Massapequa. Photo courtesy of ShopRite.

Customers will also find a from-scratch bake shop featuring special occasion cakes and freshly made bread; meat department with trained butchers; full service seafood department with daily, fresh catch deliveries; a floral shop and full service deli department with gourmet and grab-and-go items and a wide variety of domestic and international cheeses. The new ShopRite store will employ 175 full- and part-time workers.



PIctured: Julio Hernandez, Melissa Buonadonna- Hernandez and daughter Emma Hernandez cut the ribbon on the family's new ShopRite of Massapequa. Photo courtesy of ShopRite.

We are thrilled to bring ShopRite to this new location in Massapequa. We are a family business committed to the families we serve in the communities where our ShopRite stores operate on Long Island, said Melissa Buonadonna-Hernandez.

The new store is open daily from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. The store phone number is 516-799-5651.

About ShopRite

ShopRite is the registered trademark of Wakefern Food Corp., a retailer-owned cooperative based in Keasbey, NJ and the largest supermarket cooperative in the United States. With more than 260 ShopRite supermarkets located throughout New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware and Maryland, ShopRite serves more than six million customers each week. A long-time supporter of key community efforts, ShopRite is dedicated to fighting hunger in the communities it serves. Through its ShopRite Partners In Caring program, ShopRite has donated $40 million to 2,000 worthy charities and food banks since the program began in 1999. For more information, please visit www.ShopRite.com.
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
A Taliban suicide assault team killed six civilians and wounded more than 100 in an attack on the German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif last night.

A Taliban suicide bomber rammed a truck packed with explosives into the outer wall of the consulate compound and detonated, creating a breach for the armed assault team to enter the compound. The German Foreign Office confirmed that there was fighting outside and on the premises of the German Consulate.

German security personnel, Afghan security forces, and special forces from NATOs Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan battled the Taliban on the consulate grounds for at least an hour before defeating the Taliban attack. Resolute support reported all 21 staff members of the German Consulate were safely evacuated to Camp Marmal. However, Afghan civilians were killed and wounded as a result of the massive explosion that destroyed the outer wall of the consulate.

The Taliban claimed credit for the attack on its official website, Voice of Jihad, and said it was carried out to avenge the deaths of civilians in an airstrike in Kunduz province last week.

[A] brave Mujahid of the martyr squad of the Islamic Emirate carried out a powerful explosion using a vehicle filled with explosives followed by direct shooting attacks and gunfire within the Consulate building that left a large number of the local security personnel and Consulate employees as well as German invaders dead and wounded, the Taliban claimed. It is worth mentioning that the Germans were part of the perpetrators plotting recent Kunduz bombings that inflicted casualties over 50 innocent and defenseless civilians.

The Taliban is referring to the Nov. 3 airstrike outside of Kunduz city limits that is said to have killed at least 30 Afghan civilians. The Taliban blamed Germany for conducting the attack, but US Forces-Afghanistan said it launched airstrikes after a team of Afghan commandos advised by US special forces came under fire. The combined Afghan and US force was targeting a Taliban commander outside of the embattled city and was surrounded, according to reports from Afghanistan. Two US soldiers and three Afghan commandos were killed in the fighting.

While the Talibans claim that it attacked the German consulate to avenge those killed in Kunduz, another consulate in the capital of Balkh province was targeted earlier this year. That attack highlights the interlinking web of jihadist networks.

On Jan. 3, 2016, jihadists assaulted the Indian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif and held off security forces for a day before being killed. No group has claimed credit for the attack, but one of the fighters wrote in Urdu Afzal Guru is avenged on the wall in his own blood before being killed, according to The Indian Express. Afzal Guru was a Jaish-e-Mohammed operative who was executed for his involvement in the Dec. 2001 assault on Indias Parliament in New Delhi. That assault was executed by Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

To complicate matters further, Asmatullah Muawiya, a Pakistani terrorist who serves as one of several al Qaeda company commanders as well as the leader of the Taliban in Punjab province, had threatened to avenge Gurus execution.

Whichever group attacked the Indian consulate earlier this year would need the help of the local Taliban to carry it out.

Jaish-e-Mohammed is also suspected of executing the Jan. 2, 2016 suicide assault on Pathankot Air Force Base in Punjab province in India. Jihadists said the Pathankot attack was launched to avenge Guru.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of 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 Treasury Department announced today that Dr. Abdallah Muhammad Bin Sulayman al Muhaysini and three other jihadists have been added to the US governments list of designated terrorists. All four were designated for acting for or on behalf of Al Nusrah Front, al Qaedas affiliate in Syria.

Treasury also notes that Al Nusrah Front has changed its name to Jabhat Fath al Sham (JFS), but described the new brand name as merely an alias.

Muhaysini, who is from Saudi Arabia, has claimed that he is an independent sharia scholar with no formal affiliations inside Syria. But The Long War Journal assesses this is unlikely and he is probably a senior al Qaeda sharia official. He has numerous connections to al Qaedas international network.

Treasury describes Muhaysini as a key Al Nusrah (now JFS) leader, thereby indicating that he is not truly independent.

As of late 2015, Muhaysini was an accepted member of al Nusrah Fronts inner leadership circle. He has served as Nusrahs religious advisor and represented the group in an Idlib Province, Syria, military operations room as of July 2015. Although Treasury doesnt mention it, Muhaysini was one of the most important ideologues in the Jaysh al Fateh alliance during this period. Jaysh al Fateh, which was cofounded by Nusrah and Ahrar al Sham, overran Idlib province in early 2015.

Muhaysini has been a prolific recruiter for Nusrah and has helped to form a new jihadi state in northern Syria, Treasury reports.

In April 2016, Treasurys announcement continues, Muhaysini launched a campaign to recruit 3,000 child and teenage soldiers across northern Syria for Al Nusrah. The enrollment drive was supposed to benefit all of the insurgency groups that supported it, but the US government indicates that it was mainly an Al Nusrah effort. [For more on the recruiting campaign, see LWJ report: Al Qaeda-linked cleric leads new recruiting campaign for jihadists in Syria.]

The Saudi jihadist cleric has also played a crucial role in providing financial aid to Al Nusrah, raising millions of dollars to support the organizations governance efforts in Idlib Province, Syria between 2013 and 2015. He has also set up institutions providing financial aid to terrorist groups, including a highly successful campaign that he claimed had secured $5 million in donations to arm fighters.

The Long War Journal has reported on Muhaysinis activities since early 2014. He was a student of Sulayman Al Alwan, a jihadist cleric responsible for indoctrinating some key figures within al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission found that al Alwan even instructed one of the 9/11 hijackers. Muhaysini has defended and spoken fondly of al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri. In early 2014, Muhaysini even issued a proposal for jihadist reconciliation that was timed to coincide with Zawahiris own. The initiative was intended to reconcile the Islamic State with its jihadist rivals in Al Nusrah Front and Ahrar al Sham. While the latter parties agreed to the plan, the Islamic State rejected it. On one of his popular Twitter feeds, Muhaysini subsequently described his meetings with Abu Ali al Anbari, a senior Islamic State leader, as he tried to broker the truce.

In addition to Al Nusrah Front (JFS), Muhaysini has worked closely with other al Qaeda groups in Syria, such as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) and similar ethnic jihadist brigades. His work has been featured in Al Masra, an al Qaeda newsletter launched earlier this year, as well as in the Talibans literature. Muhaysinis popular social media sites are regularly littered with references to al Qaeda, including eulogies for senior al Qaeda operatives killed in American airstrikes.

Three others designated by Treasury

In addition to Muhaysini, Treasury designated three other Al Nusrah (JFS) figures today.

Jamal Husayn Zayniyah was Al Nusrahs emir of al Qalamun, Syria and Lebanon as of late last year. In that capacity, Zayniyah has overseen both abductions and hostage negotiations. Treasury says he was responsible for kidnapping a group of Christian nuns in Maalula, Damascus Province and has also been the intermediary for the negotiations over hostages held by Al Nusrah, including 16 Lebanese soldiers.

Abdul Jashari is an Al Nusrah military advisor who has also helped to raise funds for the families of fighters, according to the US government. The emir of Nusrah (JFS), Abu Muhammad al Julani appointed Jashari as leader of Nusrahs military operations during the summer of 2014 and led the groups military operations in northern Syria one year later.

Jashari is also known as Abu Qatada al Albani (the Albanian). During a fiery speech that was leaked online in July 2014, Abu Muhammad al Julani told his followers that Abu Qatada al Albani had been appointed as the new head of Nusrahs military forces and that they must obey him. Julani also promised that the time had come to build an Islamic emirate, or state, in northern Syria. Other Al Nusrah officials quickly walked back this claim. But as Treasurys designations indicate, Muhaysini and others are working to build a jihadi emirate. From al Qaedas perspective, however, it was premature to declare its existence in 2014, as such a state may not be strong enough to survive its enemies advances.

Ashraf Ahmad Fari al Allak is an Al Nusrah military commander in southern Syria, namely Dara Province, and has also served as the groups emir of Saraya, Syria and Dara City, Syria. In that role, he has been responsible for mobilizing both fighters and weapons.

Todays designations were likely timed to coincide with President Obamas order to launch airstrikes against key JFS personnel. To date, the US has only targeted jihadists with longstanding al Qaeda pedigrees, while leaving al Qaedas paramilitary forces untouched. But according to the Washington Post, President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of JFS, because the president is concerned that the group is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al Qaeda on Europes southern doorstep.

However, that threat has been present for some time. The US began launching precision airstrikes on al Qaeda leaders who are part of the so-called Khorasan Group in September 2014. Those infrequent bombings have continued into 2016, including one last month. Ayman al Zawahiri ordered the Khorasan Group to begin preparations for attacks in the West more than two years ago.

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.
Luton is a large town, borough and unitary authority area of Bedfordshire. Luton and its near neighbours, Dunstable and Houghton Regis, form the Luton/Dunstable Urban Area with a population of about 258,000. Luton is home to Championship team Luton Town Football Club, London Luton Airport and The University of Bedfordshire. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. For all the latest news from Luton sign up to our newsletter here.




The highlight of this years event is the improved quality of participants with the appearance of many leading trademarks of the domestic food industry such as Sabeco, Habeco, Vinamilk, Antesco, Rang Dong Plastic and Tien Giang Food Company.

Vietnam Foodexpo 2016 will welcome the business delegation of Italy as well as the National Honoured Exhibitor. Several Italian businesses are bringing to the exhibition state-of-the-art technology, unique products representing Italys world-leading food industry.

The event will attract an incredible variety of commodities for exhibit, including: vegetables (fresh, dried, canned and frozen); seafood (frozen, canned and processed); beverages (wine, beer and soft drinks); tea and coffee; food ingredients (rice, nuts, spices, seasonings, sauces); processed food (confectionery, dairy, dairy products, canned and processed food, instant food, and specialty food); and food processing technology and machinery.

The pavilion, Investment in developing the food sector, will be one of the featured pavilions at Vietnam Foodexpo 2016 with the focus on introducing modern technology and machinery for producing and processing high-quality and competitive-cost foods.

Within the exhibition framework, series of events will be held, including business matchmaking seminars between Vietnam and foreign companies, a signing ceremony for business cooperation agreements, culinary presentations, "Impressive Vietnam Foodexpo 2016" awards, and business tours to food factories.

The event is expected to welcome 20,000 visitors; many of them are business delegations and potential buyers from Vietnams target markets. These include the Republic of Korea, Japan, the US, the EU, and the Middle East./.
Da Nang city Party Committee Secretary and Peoples Council Chairman Nguyen Xuan Anh meets with permanent Politburo member and Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress of China, Zhang Dejiang. (Photo: baodanang.vn)

During a reception,stressed that Zhang Dejiangs visit played an important role in contributing to promoting the strategic partnership between Vietnam and China.

Secretary Xuan Anh gave an introduction of the city as well as its socio-economic development, adding that the import-export turnover between Da Nang city and China tended to be on the rise; however, the rate of turnover growth has not been stable throughout years.

In 2015, Da Nang citys exports to China reached USD23 million while its imports from China reached USD200 million. In the first half of 2016, the figures were estimated at USD9 million and USD80 million, respectively (not including figures with Hong Kong). There are currently 19 enterprises in Da Nang city setting up import relations with China.

As of late July, there were 10 FDI projects worth over USD3.88 million from China in Da Nang city, not including projects from Hong Kong and Taiwan. There are 10 direct flights from Chinese localities to Da Nang city with 54 flights per week. The number of Chinese tourists in Da Nang city ranked first, with 304,044 in 2015 and an estimated of 211,079 in the first half of this year.

Secretary Nguyen Xuan Anh showed his desire to promote cooperation with Chinese localities in tourism, urban greening, hi-tech industry and the building of smart cities; and worked with Chinese localities to realize the commitments reached by the two Parties and States leaders.

*** According to Nguyen Ngoc Quang, Secretary of the Quang Nam provincial Party Committee and Chairman of the provincial Peoples Council, a stable community of over 1,500 Chinese-Vietnamese now live in Quang Nam provinces Hoi An city in fairly good economic condition.

He added that Hoi An had established and prepared to establish the relationship with Chinese localities. At present, there are five Chinese businesses investing in Quang Nam province with a capital of nearly USD68 million.

Secretary Ngoc Quang expressed his hope that Quang Nam would increase cooperation with Chinese partners in economics, trade, investment, tourism, preservation and promotion of cultural heritage values.

Zhang Dejiang showed his pleasure to visit Da Nang city and Quang Nam province, confirming the success of his visit to Vietnam. Talks with the Vietnamese Party and State took place in an atmosphere of friendship, he said.

He stressed that the Chinese Party and Government attached great importance to relations with Vietnam, and would promote Vietnam - China relations to develop comprehensively./.
A pre-election poll suggested that 72% of the people who surveyed had the opinion that the country is on the wrong track. Mr. Donald J. Trump who detected that anger among the electorate and tapped it to win the Presidency is on the way to the white house. It is a historic victory that stunned the Political Class in this country and the Globalists around the world.

The recently concluded campaign for the Presidency was characterized as one of the most acrimonious in history and vitriolic in tune that has brought disrepute and scorn upon the candidacies of Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, one is described as misogynist, xenophobic, sexist and racist and the other as deeply corrupt and untrustworthy.

Obviously, the polls were wrong, and projection models turned out to be flawed. The pundits in the media who were veterans of previous presidential campaigns got it totally wrong as well. Defying all predictions, American voters swept Republicans to power, handing the GOP the White House, the Senate and the House in a wave very few who saw it coming. Academia will now spend the coming weeks and months studying just how and why everyone missed it!

What has gone wrong? According to Peggy Noonan of Wall Street Journal written months before the election, the rise of Donald Trump is directly attributable to protected Americans dismissing the needs of unprotected ones. Noonan who was a speechwriter for President Reagan defined the protected class as not only wealthy Americans but also financially successful people in Government, Media, Hollywood, and Wall Street and Tech sector with strong careers. They have money; they live in nice neighborhoods and they can pretty much do anything and they are insulated.

The protected make public policy and the unprotected live in it Noonan added. In other words, unprotected Americans with less money, less access to good schools and less opportunity than the Elites ( also dubbed as Establishment), who mostly live in rural and suburban America are left to fend for themselves without help from either Democrats or Republicans. The protected class, the types of Think Tanks, Career Politicians, Bureaucrats and Lobbyists continued to make policies that have enormous negative consequences on the lives of the average American, and it appears to have gone on for so long and that it finally reached a boiling point. In short, the story is that Trump, the Republican nominee, was able to tap into that feeling of alienation and succeeded.

Undoubtedly, the election of Trump is also viewed as a rebuke to the Technocratic driven policies, increasing centralization of power in Washington and unchecked Immigration policies that are heavily favored by the Democrats. Obamacare has become a hot button issue towards the end of the campaign as soaring costs of premium was seized upon as an issue by opponents and used it to sway a significant number of voters in the Blue States to go Red.

It has been said that in every election, people ultimately vote with their pocket book and there is no wonder then, the economy and the jobs were trending as top priority issues for the electorate. Trump was able to hammer home the issue that the loss of manufacturing jobs from the Rust Belt States was directly attributable to the Trade deals like NAFTA and promised to renegotiate to make it more of a Fair Trade than Free Trade; The failures of the Obama-Clinton foreign policies loomed large over the discourse of the election debates as well. Trump has questioned the wisdom of spending Trillions of dollars in foreign wars where America gained few advantages while wreaking havoc in the regions, especially in the Middle East, and creating millions of refugees fleeing their homes. A case in point is the US support for the Al-Nusrah Front in Syria, an offshoot of Al-Qaida that is fighting for the overthrow of the President Bashar al-Assad. The atrocities committed by ISIS against Christians, Yezidis and other minorities in the region and the threat of terrorism from these Islamic groups at home remained top

concerns to many voters across the nation.

People of faith have also witnessed increased hostility and scorn from the ruling class in Washington and reacted strongly with greater mobilization and participation that certainly cushioned a Trump victory. The vacant seat in Supreme Court and its future direction also weighed heavily on this conservative segment of the electorate. The United States was the leading proponent of globalization but the recent Brexit

decision and the Trump election clearly points to a re-thinking on the part of the voters in both countries. An upswing of nationalism based on culture and sovereignty was apparently a hidden component that might have energized the largely white middle class, especially in rural America to go and vote for a change in this election cycle. However, it is unfair to characterize this whole group as basket of deplorables though some elements who support racism and anti-immigrant policies might be part of the entire equation.

Despite the torrent of criticisms from all quarters, the United States is still considered the lone superpower in the world and a beacon to millions who value democracy, freedom, and justice. However, it is also viewed now as a nation in decline. With 90 million people out of work and 50 million people on Government assistance and 20 Trillion dollars in debt and with anemic growth in GDP and no real income growth for the middle class in last several years, the country was ready for a change.

In summary, the election of Trump is mostly about the economy and jobs, and it is also about the forgotten man whom the establishment looked down with disdain. When someone came along and listened to their voices and connected, a tectonic shift has taken place in America; a Trump presidency!

(Writer is a former Chief Technology Officer of the United Nations)
If Benjamin Netanyahu were voting in Americas presidential election on Tuesday, he might very well write in himself as candidate. For aides to the Israeli prime minister say that although he has said complmentary things about both Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, he mistrusts both candidates.

While Mr. Netanyahu is said to fear that neither partys nominee can be counted upon to protect Israels vital interests, he suspects that Trump might be the more dependable ally. After all, Trump, unlike Mrs. Clinton, has vowed to move Americas embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Although few political analysts take that pledge seriously, Donald Trumps strongly pro-Israeli statements, the GOPs slavishly pro-Israeli platform, Trumps Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the huge financial support that Trump has received from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, one of Mr. Netanyahus biggest financial backers, have led Mr. Netanyahu, if not a majority of Israelis, to conclude that a President Trump might not be such a disaster for the Jewish state.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, is the opposite. His policies are all over the ideological map. Espousing ever shifting, contradictory views, his ignorance of basic tenets of foreign affairs have proven even more shocking than his unorthodox positions such as his praise for Russias Vladimir Putin as a strong leader.

Although Trump has vowed to be great for Israel, skeptics remember his earlier pledge to be neutral on the Israel-Palestine issue. Several Jews who attended his speech last December to the Republican Jewish Coalition saw his claim that many members wouldnt support him because he was rich and didnt need their support as reinforcing Jewish stereotypes. And many American and Israeli Jews are exceedingly wary of, and deeply alarmed by the strong support that Trump has received from the anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan and other right-wing fanatics, his racist remarks about Mexicans, and his assault on female critics as pigs and dogs.

On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel-US ties would remain strong no matter who won Tuesdays election, and that despite tension with the Obamas administration over the past eight years, relations with Washington were solid and would remain so. But he has also drawn the same conclusion that others have drawn about Mr. Obamas effort to withdraw from Americas intense involvement in the Arab Middle East and focus more on issues at home. While tradition, aid, and democracy assure that Washington is likely to remain Israels closest ally, Netanyahu has reached out to Russia, China and other states to enhance Israeli ties and profile there. That, too, reflects a wise judgment about Americas isolationist mood.

This piece originally appeared on YNet News

______________________

Judith Miller is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal; a best-selling author, and a Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative reporter formerly with the New York Times.
General Ngo Xuan Lich receives Cambodian Ambassador Prak Nguon Hong. (Photo: PANO)

During a reception for the Cambodian ambassador, General Lich affirmed that Vietnam and Cambodia had set up fine friendship and solidarity in the struggle for national independence earlier, as well as in the current national construction and development.

According to the Vietnamese General, the cooperation relations between the two countries have continuously developed in diverse areas, including defence cooperation. The relationship between the two armies has been expanded, especially in exchanging high-ranking delegations; training cadres; coordinating among border protection and management forces; and seeking, burying and repatriating sets of remains of Vietnamese volunteers and experts who sacrificed their lives in Cambodia during wars, he said.

Ambassador Prak Nguon Hong said he hoped to receive assistance and favourable conditions from the Vietnamese Ministry of National Defence during his working term in Vietnam, confirming that he would do his utmost to contribute to reinforcing and developing the traditional relationship and comprehensive cooperation between Cambodia and Vietnam.

Receiving Indian Ambassador to Vietnam Harish Parvathaneni, General Ngo Xuan Lich stressed that Vietnamese and Indian people always supported each other during wars for national independence in the past, as well as during the current national construction and protection.

General Ngo Xuan Lich presents a souvenir to Indian Ambassador Harish Parvathaneni. (Photo: PANO)



He appreciated the precious assistance that the Indian Ministry of National Defence granted for Vietnam, especially in training and cooperation of navy forces and air forces.

For his part, Ambassador Harish Parvathaneni said that the relations between the two countries had been continuously increased based on political trust and similarities in viewpoints about regional and international issues.

According to the Indian ambassador, defence cooperation has been considered an important pillar in the two countries relations, adding that India is happy to support Vietnam in the modernization of the army./.
MARTINSVILLEThey called it the world. No reference to specific states or the country itself. For U.S. soldier Erza Barnes Jr. and his troopmates, America was the world, a place to go back to. They wanted to survive the fighting in Vietnam and just make it home.

I never thought Id be recognized until I died, Barnes, Jr. said. For his service, Barnes Jr. was honored with two Purple Heart medals, on his return home.

It's been a struggle at times, adapting back to the way "the world" works on this side of the ocean. Barnes, who is now blind, said he cant escape the images of the battlefield whenever he lies down at night.

The war changed me. It just made me cold, Barnes said. Being in a place like that with so much chaos and death. The friends you know in body bags, things like that. Its kind of mind boggling. I still dream about it once in a while, especially when I see a military movie or hear on the radio something thatll bring back memories. I like to sweep it under the rug.

On Wednesday, Barnes revealed things he never even talked to my sons about.

Drafted at the age of 19, Barnes left behind a son and daughter to fight in the United States Army. After completing basic training at Fort Bragg, NC, and advanced infantry training at Fort Polk, LA, Barnes traveled home for a week, then went to Roanoke, caught a bus to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and flew to Oakland, California. From there, Barnes and his comrades boarded a plane to Vietnam.

Two other individuals from the Martinsville area  Larry Hatcher and David Wilson  caught the same plane. The three local boys were separated upon arrival at Long Binh, Vietnam.

Ever which unit had the most causalities, thats the one theyd send us to, Barnes said.

Eventually, Barnes ended up about a quarter of a mile outside of Saigon, presently Ho Chi Minh City. There, he and 23 other troops worked 12-hour shifts. One day when the men changed shifts, three or four Viet Cong soldiers appeared armed with AK-47s and grenades. Two Americans lost their lives in the attack.

I got hit with a grenade in the stomach and chest, Barnes said.

Injured, Barnes arrived at a military base hospital near Saigon.

The wounds, they couldn't stop the bleeding in my left lung, Barnes said. I had to sit up on the side of the bed and they had to take a big ol syringe and go in through my ribs and draw the fluid off my lung until they could get me stable enough to move me back to the world.

The soldier remembered waking up in the hospital.

I had tubes all in me, Barnes said. Tubes in my nose and down my throat and in my chest and other places. Thank God for good doctors.

Barnes awaited transportation from a helicopter that would take him to Japan.

Most of our guys was in Vietnam. But in Tokyo, we knew we was getting close to coming back home to the world, Barnes said.

While Barnes awaited relief, Viet Cong soldiers shot down a helicopter flying toward the base hospital. A few hours later, Viet Cong troops killed an American radio telephone operator.

I was pretty familiar with the radio and everything. I told them not to come in. Wait because it was getting dark. The Viet Cong was all over the place, Barnes said.

Barnes revealed that while he felt uncertain about his chances, he chose to save the lives of others. He asked the helicopter to wait until morning when they had light.

I thought I would probably die, but the medic stopped most of my bleeding, Barnes said.

Troops bombed the area to clear it of Viet Cong soldiers, then flew Barnes to the 106th General Hospital in Yokohama, Japan, about 25 miles south of Tokyo, where he recovered for two and a half months.

Barnes received a Purple Heart, a United States military decoration awarded to troops wounded or killed in action.

The following year, Barnes received a second Purple Heart.

That was an accident, more or less, Barnes said.

A truck he was traveling in overturned after hitting a road mine.

We had to stay there for about a day before we could get rescued out from that, Barnes said. We was pinned down. Well, we wasnt pinned under it or nothing, but we couldn't move because the truck was a barrier for us so they couldnt shoot us and stuff.

While Barnes recalls getting a lot of bruises and bangs from the incident, the soldier also suffered a broken jaw, had a titanium rod placed in his left forearm and underwent surgery where a doctor took a bone out of Barness right hip and placed it in his elbow.

Surviving the horrors of war, Barnes often attempts to suppress the memories.

I usually harbor it in, Barnes said. I do that all the time. I just block it out. I try to put on a talking book or some kind of music or something to get my mind off of it.

However, Barness coping mechanisms for PTSD dont work all the time. Sometimes, he feels like theres no relief.

I find it hard to cry. I cant cry. I can lay in bed and tears come to my eyes when I think about it, but as far as the boohooing or anything, I just cant do it, Barnes said. I guess its like the song, It Hardened My Heart or whatever.

Feeling they could be experiencing similar traumas, Barnes expressed empathy for veterans returning to the United States from warzones.

I dont see how they could avoid it, you know. Especially in combat situations, Barnes said. Unless theyve been there in firefights, theyve only heard stories about it. When youre in it, its different.

Even experiencing all that he has since being drafted, Barnes is still honored to have served in the army. One of his sons purchased a book, Horsepasture Reflections by R. Darryl Holland, which features Barnes on page 79. The book offers brief descriptions of area men who fought in American wars. A reminder of his days in service, Barnes holds the book dear, as well as both of his Purple Heart medals.

Concerning the time the veteran spent fighting for his country, Barnes said, Im proud Ive done it.

Amie Knowles reports for the Martinsville Bulletin. She can be reached at amie.pickeral@martinsvillebulletin.com
COLLINSVILLE  A judge on Thursday sentenced a Bassett man who pleaded guilty to three counts of distributing cocaine to a total of 30 years in prison, with four years, nine months active and the balance suspended on certain conditions.

Judge Martin F. Clark Jr. sentenced Warren Gabriel Norman in Henry County Circuit Court.

Clark ordered that Norman serve part of his active sentence in the Virginia Department of Corrections Indian Creek therapeutic community. (That would be the last two years of Normans active sentence, Henry County Assistant Commonwealths Attorney Dawn Futrell said in an interview.)

According to a Virginia government website, Indian Creek Correctional Center is a medium-security, intensive long-term institution-based treatment program for incarcerated substance abusing offenders.

Judge Clark suspended 25 years, three months of the prison sentences on conditions of five years of probation, good behavior, payment of a total of $1,500 in fines, payment of $320 restitution to the Henry County Sheriffs Office with interest, and suspension of Normans drivers license for a total of 18 months.

In reviewing positives and negatives before sentencing, Judge Clark said positives included that Norman accepted responsibility, pleaded guilty and has a pretty solid work history.

Judge Clark said negatives include that, looking just at substantive matters, Norman has more than 10 prior convictions, including some minor drug cases and probation violations; his record spans three decades; and he has been given a number of chances and opportunities. Clark also said, You are a for-profit drug dealer, and he indicated that cocaine is a serious drug.

Norman allegedly sold a total of 2.6 grams of cocaine on July 21, Aug. 4 and Nov. 19, all in 2015.

Also in Henry County Circuit Court on Thursday, Judge Clark delayed sentencing Joshua Scott Moore of Martinsville, so he can be screened to see if he qualifies for the Diversion Center, an alternative to traditional incarceration. Moore was charged with distribution of a schedule 2 controlled substance but pleaded guilty to an amended charge of distribute schedule 1 or 2 controlled substance as an accommodation.

HENRY COUNTY GENERAL DISTRICT COURT

During a preliminary hearing Thursday, Judge Marcus Brinks found probable cause to believe Jacqueline Shannon Wilson , 57, of Axton, committed the crime of grand larceny. Brinks sent that charge to Henry County Circuit Court.

According to a criminal complaint, Wilson allegedly stole two weedeaters valued at a total of about $740 from William Martins farm on Axton Road on July 12.

During another preliminary hearing Thursday, Judge Brinks found probable cause to believe Derek James Lide, 28, of Martinsville, committed the crime of possess cocaine on July 4, 2016. Brinks sent that case to Circuit Court.

(In Martinsville Circuit Court on Thursday, a judge dismissed a charge of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute against Lide, according to online court records.)

In another case Thursday in Henry County General District Court, Judge Brinks dismissed a charge of shoplifting third or subsequent offense against Brandi Megan Royal of Bassett after surveillance footage could not be played in court Thursday because of technical problems.

A criminal complaint by Deputy R.M. Turner of the Henry County Sheriffs Office alleged that Royal took $31.07 worth of merchandise from the CVS on Riverside Drive on July 17 and that video surveillance recorded the incident.

Paul Collins reports for the Martinsville Bulletin and can be reached at paul.collins@martinsvillebulletin.com.
AXTON-The Henry County Sheriffs Office is investigating a death.

Thursday at about 4:40 a.m., Michael Deangelo Graves, 28 of 1621 East Meadow Road, Eden, North Carolina, was transported via personal vehicle to Morehead Memorial Hospital in Eden, according to a news release from the Henry County Sheriffs Office. Upon his arrival, Graves was pronounced dead. He had suffered a gunshot wound.

Deputies from the Henry County Sheriffs Office were already on-scene at Morehead Memorial Hospital investigating an unrelated incident. It was quickly determined that Graves was shot while at 2052 Stoney Mountain Road, Martinsville (in the Axton area). Upon arrival at the residence deputies discovered damage to the front door, along with several bullet holes located in the home.

Through the course of the investigation, it was determined that Graves and his brother, Charles Rydell Flood Jr., had driven to 2052 Stoney Mountain Road. After arriving, Graves forced his way into the home and was shot during a confrontation with one of the occupants.

After Graves had been shot, Flood fired multiple rounds from a handgun into the home. Flood has been charged with shooting into an occupied dwelling, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He was jailed without bond.

An autopsy will be performed at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the Western District of Virginia.

Anyone having information regarding this incident is asked to contact the Henry County Sheriffs Office at 276-638-8751 or Crimestoppers at 63-CRIME (632-7463). The Crimestoppers Program offers rewards up to $2,500 for information related to crime. The nature of the crime and the substance of the information determine the amount of reward paid.
Vietnamese Ambassador to Laos Nguyen Manh Hung receives

donations from Xieng Khouang Fellow-Countrymen Association. (Source: VNA)

At the ceremony, Vietnamese Ambassador to Laos Nguyen Manh Hung received USD11,850 from the representative of the General Association of Vietnamese People in Laos, Association of Vietnamese Businesses for Cooperation and Investment in Laos, Overseas Vietnamese Association in Vientiane, Xieng Khouang fellow-countrymen Association, Mekong Club, Nguyen Du bilingual school and several Vietnamese individuals living and working in Vientiane.

On behalf of the residents in the Central provinces, Ambassador Nguyen Manh Hung thanked the Vietnamese philanthropists in Laos and confirmed this showed the good tradition of Vietnamese people.

Ambassador Nguyen Manh Hung stressed that the gesture of the Vietnamese community in Laos, people throughout the country, as well as overseas Vietnamese in many other countries around the world, would warm the residents in the Central provinces, helping them quickly overcome the consequences of the floods and stabilize their lies after the great losses caused by the floods.

The Ambassador also hoped the Vietnamese community in Laos would continue to maintain and uphold the tradition of solidarity to build and strengthen the Vietnamese community in Laos, contributing to building a prosperous Laos and toward the homeland.

Ambassador Manh Hung committed that the full amount would quickly be transferred to the people in central provinces.

On this occasion, the Ambassador also thanked individuals and collectives of the Vietnamese community in Laos for earlier organizing the rescue team and initially transferring money and goods for the relief of residents in the Central provinces after the floods. He also urged people to continue to contribute to support the people of the Central provinces to overcome the consequences of the floods and stabilise their lives.

Earlier, the Buddhists and monks from the Phat Tich Pagoda in Vientiane raised USD20,000 together many items including clothes, blankets and mosquito nets to present to families suffering heavy losses due to floods in the two provinces of Quang Binh and Ha Tinh./.
MARTINSVILLE-Nine people were arrested Thursday as a result of narcotics indictments handed down and sealed Monday in Martinsville.

All total, those nine had been arrested on 25 of 28 indictments issued by a Martinsville grand jury.

According to a news release from the Martinsville Police Department, officers arrested these people Thursday:

Marvin Nathaniel Redd, on charges of cocaine possession, marijuana possession and distributing cocaine, no bond;

Roderick Tyron Coleman, three counts of selling marijuana and three counts of selling cocaine, $5,000 secured bond;

Brenda Aileen Newman, cocaine possession and two counts of methamphetamine possession, $2,500 secured bond;

Timothy Calvin Kendrick, possession of a schedule 1 drug and possession of a schedule 2 drug, $2,500 secured bond;

Jonathan Lee Hagerman, possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, $1,500 secured bond;

Keondre Demone Holmes, distributing less than one-half ounce of marijuana, four counts of distributing cocaine, two counts of distributing greater than one-half ounce of marijuana, no bond;

Bradley Witt, possession of a schedule 3 drug and possession of a schedule 4 drug, $1,000 secured bond;

Pierre Quartez Scales, distributing marijuana, no bond;

Christopher Orlander Martin, distributing cocaine (third offense) and probation violation, no bond.

On Monday, a Martinsville grand jury handed down a total of 62 indictments, of which 28 indictments on 10 people were related to the distribution of illegal drugs.

Members of the Martinsville Police Department, Henry County Sheriffs Office, Patrick County Sheriffs Office, Virginia State Police, U.S. Marshals Service, assisted by the Martinsville Sheriffs Office and the Martinsville-Henry County 911 Center, set out to make the arrests on the narcotics warrants.

These indictments were a result of the Martinsville Police Departments continuing effort to fight the distribution of illegal drugs and the harm they do to our community," the department said in a statement. "Each of the arrests was made possible by the strong partnership that has been developed between the community and the Martinsville Police Department. We would also like to recognize the hard work of the Martinsville Commonwealths Attorneys Office during this process.

The Martinsville Police Department would like to thank the community and all of the law enforcement agencies who assisted in this and operation.

Additional charges are forthcoming as Thursdays arrests led to the recovery of other narcotics and weapons
MARTINSVILLE  Celebrating Diwali, or the Festival of Lights, Piedmont Arts will host India Family Day from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday.

Diwali  which honors the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, knowledge over ignorance and hope over despair  is a five-day Hindu festival that takes place annually in the northern hemispheres autumn season.

Highlighting the festival for the first time at Piedmont Arts, Bernadette Moore, director of marketing, communications and design, says she looks forward to the event.

We are excited to learn about this holiday and to share this new experience with all members of our community, Moore says. The Martinsville-Henry County community is culturally diverse. Learning about the cultures of our friends and neighbors broadens our horizons and helps to foster a true sense of community.

At India Family Day, visitors can enjoy authentic Indian snacks made by volunteers and also will experience Indian music and dancing throughout the day. At 11:30 a.m. children will fashion traditional Indian attire.

The family-oriented event promotes fun for all ages and will include a variety of culturally inspired crafts.

Moore says children will be able to create a paper diya, or oil lamp, which is a traditional symbol of Diwali.

Other crafting opportunities include 3D elephant cutouts and 3D architecture cutouts.

Kids also can make Rangoli coloring sheets, which are artwork to bring good luck, Moore explained.

Alongside India Family Day, new exhibits  The Art of the Quilt: Lets Celebrate and Works by Virginia Foothills Quilters Guild  will be open to the public.

These exhibits feature traditional and contemporary quilts, quilt art and clothing, Moore adds. Forty artists from across the Southeast are showcased in The Art of the Quilt: Lets Celebrate, a biennial exhibition curated by master quilter Linda M. Fiedler.

Both exhibits are on display at Piedmont Arts through Dec. 31.

We are excited to present this years exhibit, as it marks the shows 10th anniversary at Piedmont Arts, Moore says of Fiedlers exhibition.

Just like the celebration event on Saturday, Moore adds, Admission to the museums galleries is always free of charge.

Amie Knowles reports for the Martinsville Bulletin. She can be reached at amie.pickeral@martinsvillebulletin.com
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Hal Quinn, President and CEO of the National Mining Association, submitted a letter to the editor concerning my recent column about coal.

Admittedly, Mr. Quinns letter was about how I was wrong about everything I said, but still, its flattering to see that the President and CEO of a massive national organization apparently takes me seriously, considering that, to date, the most impressive thing I have ever been the leader of was a hard rock Randy Newman tribute band (though to my credit, it was a killer band).

In my previous column, I argued that regulation isnt whats killing the coal industry; instead, the free market is turning away from coal and turning toward natural gas, wind and solar. I further argued that struggling former coal miners should be given the option of re-training in new fields, even energy-related fields.

With the exception of Mr. Quinns letter, the letters and comments I received regarding my column were positive. But I understand Mr. Quinns position. If I were President and CEO of the National Pie Association, I would be opposed to any and all government-mandated pie-making regulations.

But I do not want to dismiss Mr. Quinns arguments. He argued that EPA regulations have done more damage to the coal industry than a free market move toward natural gas, and that without such regulations, coal production would increase and stabilize. He also argued that wind and solar energy receive government subsidies, and thats true. He said that the coal industry is not looking to be saved, but is looking to compete on a level playing field without a government that is working behind the scenes to remake the energy market without coal.

This begs the question: Why would the Environmental Protection Agency impose regulations on coal?

In my last column, I said that I was going to focus solely on the economics of coal. Now, its time to focus on the health and environmental impact.

Coal has a wide variety of negative health effects. An estimated 1,500 former coal miners die each year from the effects of breathing in coal dust. Youve probably seen the commercials advertising settlements relating to coal miners pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung disease.

We generate millions of tons of coal ash each year, and it is highly toxic, containing uranium, mercury and other heavy metals. In 2009, research by Physicians for Social Responsibility linked air pollution from coal smokestack emissions to asthma, strokes, reduced intelligence, artery blockages, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, lung cancer, and the list goes on. A 2010 study by The Clean Air Task Force linked coal pollution to more than $100 billion in annual health impacts.

As for the environment, mining can cause disastrous effects to the water table, and ash spills can contaminate waterways. Were not strangers to those issues. Less than three years ago, Duke Energy accidentally spilled nearly 39,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River. At the time, people were advised against letting their skin come in contact with the river water. I know people who werent able to heed that rule. They said the water burned their skin.

Im glossing over a lot of terrible consequences of coal mining because I simply dont have space. To save time, go to Google, type mountaintop removal mining West Virginia into the search bar, and click on the tab that says images. I assure you, a picture is worth a thousand words, and most of those words spell out the phrase this is not sustainable.

There is one final point to unpack. In his letter, Mr. Quinn stated that The governments Clean Power Plan would double the coal plants closed to reduce global warming by just 0.018 degrees centigrade over the next century.

I realize many people do not believe that human activity has an impact on global climate change. However, 97 percent of scientists believe otherwise. If 97 percent of scientists said that the moon was going to crash into the Earth tonight, I would spend most of today hugging my loved ones.

If we choose to believe the scientific consensus, we must also understand that even a seemingly tiny increase in the global temperature  even just 0.018 degrees centigrade  could have disastrous and unpredictable consequences for the planet, the sort of consequences that we are already experiencing because previous generations did not possess the scientific knowledge that we enjoy today.

If we take a short-term view and dont actively seek less harmful energy alternatives, there is a chance that no one alive today will be around to experience the negative consequences. However, I am optimistic that humankind will be around for awhile, and I want future generations to enjoy snowball fights, not beachfront property in Kentucky.

Ben R. Williams reports for the Martinsville Bulletin. He can be reached at benjamin.williams@martinsvillebulletin.com.
The past four months have seen a movement, which has been unprecedented in the history of Kashmir. Nearly 100 people have been killed by the ruthless repression of Indian armed forces while 17,000 people, including women and children, have been injured. A large number of the dead and injured have been youngsters, some less than twelve years old. The pellet guns used by security forces have damaged the faces of 1600 people and more than 1100 people have partially or lost their eyesight completely. In many aspects, this has become the biggest uprising in Kashmir's history.

Image: Public DomainKashmir - commonly referred to as "Paradise on Earth" due to its beauty - has a long history of revolts and mass movements against the cruel rulers who throughout history have looted and plundered its wealth. After the bloody partition of India by the British Raj almost seventy years ago, Kashmir has become a festering wound in the subcontinent. The ruling classes of Pakistan and India have fought three wars over Kashmiri territory, leading to the deaths of thousands of people on both sides. Both of these imperialist states have treated the Kashmiri masses in their occupied territories as pawns in their strategic maneuvers in the region. The heavily militarized areas on both sides and continuous shelling at the Line of Control (LoC) has made this place a living hell. Pakistan has maintained a mockery of "Azad (Independent) Kashmir" under its occupation with its puppet legislative assembly, though the army commander has the final say in all political or strategic decisions. On the other side, India has declared Jammu and Kashmir its state with some special autonomous powers. Despite all this, the Kashmiri masses have never accepted this slavery as a fait accompli.

The biggest uprising in Kashmir against occupation was in the 1990s, which continued for more than a decade; more than 70,000 people were killed. In 2010 a big uprising of youth was again seen in which they raised the demand of employment along with Azadi (freedom). 119 people were killed in this movement by the repression of security forces.

But this movement, which started on 8 July after the killing of 21-year-old Burhan Wani, has surpassed all previous movements in its depth and magnitude. For four months curfew has been imposed continuously and life has been paralyzed in most parts of the valley. This has broken all records, including the last record of seventy two day of continuous curfew. Along with a huge number of killings and injuries, 10,000 have been arrested so far, many under the Special Powers Act in which anybody can be detained without charge for up to two years. Out of these, 1,500 are still in prisons. 2,400 cases were registered in these months.

A large number of those killed, injured and arrested are youth. The youngest ones killed so far are eleven year old Nasir Shafi Qazi, twelve year old Danish Sultan Haro and thirteen year old Junaid Ahmed. Many Indian journalists who visited the valley during this uprising have reported that youngsters of even only eight years old have taken to the streets and are throwing stones at the Indian security forces. On almost every wall the slogan of "Azadi" is seen, painted by rebellious youth. Despite heavy repression by the army, they come forward throwing stones and chanting slogans while tearing apart their shirts, taunting the army to go ahead and kill them. But they will never step back from their demands. Indian security forces are using a special pellet gun to crush this rebellion, which has injured a large number of protestors. When they hit the face, these lead pellets damage it and injure the eyes. Those arrested are subjected to severe humiliation and torture inside the prisons. Sixteen-year-old Qaisar of Srinagar who died in an ICU on Sunday 6 November was allegedly given poison when in police custody. He was a student of school year ten. In Kashmir, security forces have a long history of torture and brutality. An excerpt from a recent report in the Guardian sums it up:

"Rebellion against Indias rule over Kashmir is neither new nor surprising  and the brutality of the states response is equally familiar. In the 1990s, India came down hard on a widespread uprising in the Kashmir valley  killing, torturing, disappearing, and imprisoning thousands. Some estimates put the number of people killed since 1989 at 70,000. Some 8,000 non-combatants are thought to have been disappeared, and 6,000 are believed to have been buried in mass graves. Human rights reports have identified thousands of cases of torture, including shocking techniques such as simulated drowning, striping flesh with razor blades and piping petrol into anuses.

According to a 2012 report in the Guardian, government documents revealed that one group of security agents had lopped off the limbs of suspects and fed prisoners with their own flesh. (the Guardian, India's crackdown in Kashmir, 8 November)

Despite these brutal and horrifying measures, the movement continues to spread and relentless youth keeps on sacrificing their lives for their freedom. Although there is a long history of struggles, this movement is qualitatively different from all previous movements. An important aspect of this movement is that it is not limited to urban areas, as is usually the case. This time the movement has a strong base in the rural parts of South Kashmir. Most of the time, bourgeois analysts have belittled the movements in Kashmir, characterising them as simply a mischievous act of rogue boys living in cities. But this time the movement has its base in far off villages and remote parts of the valley. Sanjay Kak, who made a documentary "Jashn-e-Azadi: How we celebrate Freedom" in 2007 on the uprising in Kashmir, while talking to Al-Jazeera, called this movement a peasant revolt due to its size and depth. Many others have also remarked in similar ways and have tried to persuade Indian authorities that this movement can't be controlled this time through repression alone.

Another important aspect of the movement this time is that it has no central leadership. All the parties in the valley are discredited and have deceived the aspirations of the masses many times. This is why nobody is ready to believe their demagogy and is not following any so called leader. The Indian state has tried to send many delegations to start farcical negotiations with separatists to calm the situation down and regain control, but this has not been fruitful this time. Previously, leaders of Huriyat Conference used to issue a calendar of protests and strikes, and the masses followed this calendar. But this time youngsters in every area issue their own calendar and everyone follows it. Muzamil Jaleel writes in Indian Express:

"Though the separatists arent in control of the streets and are only reacting to the azadi groundswell that had filled villages and towns across Kashmir, the Hurriyats protest calendar is the reference point for the protesters."

The separatist Huriyat Conference, a loose formation of many splinter groups, was itself split for more than a decade; its leaders Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq were not even on talking terms. But the pressure of the movement has brought them together, and on 8 November they held a day-long meeting in which Yasin Malik of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was also present. The meeting, it was said, also included representatives of different sections of society and announced the formation of the Joint Resistance Leadership to continue the agitation. The meeting included representatives from traders, transporters, religious and political organizations, lawyers and others.

In fact, none of these represent the youth on streets, who are ready to sacrifice their lives but will not follow these leaders. The Huriyat Conference and all other parties have become totally irrelevant in this situation. The ruling PDP and its Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, were discredited when she formed a coalition with the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist BJP two years ago. The National Conference, which has ruled Kashmir for the most part of the last seventy years in coalition with Indian Congress, couldn't deliver anything and was responsible for brutally crushing the 2010 uprising in which 119 were killed.

Apart from these parties, there are small outfits involved in armed struggle against the occupation. Most of these have been sponsored and backed by the Pakistani state in the past, but now a phenomenon of homegrown militancy is rising. Burhan Wani was one these militants who joined Hizbul Mujahideen, a militant outfit from the movement in 2010, at the age of fifteen. He was from a new generation of militants who used social media extensively for recruitment. Using his real name and regularly uploading pictures of his militant actions, he was immensely popular among youth. This was confirmed after his death when over 200,000 attended his funeral. At many places his funeral prayers were offered in absentia.

This shows a shift away from the Pakistani-sponsored militancy which derailed the movement in 1990s. At that time a large number of Mujahideen (holy warriors) who were fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan, backed by the US, were also used by the Pakistani state to infiltrate across the LoC in Kashmir and attack the Indian security forces. This gave the Indian state an excuse not only to brutally crush the movement through severe repression, but also to increase the presence of troops up to 600,000, making it one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world.

Since the start of this movement, both the imperialist states of India and Pakistan have started accusing each other for the atrocities in Kashmir. An attack on an army camp in Uri, near the LoC, by terrorists killed 19 Indian soldiers and injured many on 18 September. Both have accused each other for this and the exchange of fire across the LoC has intensified after this, killing many civilians and soldiers on both sides. Soon after this attack, India launched a 'surgical strike' inside Pakistani-occupied Kashmir in which they claimed to have killed a number of terrorists who were planning to be launched to the Indian part of Kashmir. The Pakistanis, meanwhile, claimed to arrest an Indian soldier involved in this operation from crossing the LoC. These intensified hostilities are a tactic to drive the attention away from the real issues and derail the movement. India has claimed that a large number of terrorists are infiltrating Kashmir from Pakistan and are attacking Indian forces, which Pakistan denies. However, this has given them an excuse to increase the repression on ordinary rebellious youth.

However, the serious strategists of the Indian state have warned them to avoid using the usual tactics to deal with this situation and to first try to understand the realities of this new situation. In an article in The Hindu on October 11, former National Security Adviser and former Governor of West Bengal, M.K. Narayanan, tried to analyze this new situation for the Indian state. The article, entitled "Address the 'new normal' in Kashmir", explains that we are witnessing a whole new situation, unprecedented in history, saying:

"History will not, however, spare those who do not make a distinction between current realities and past situations."

He describes the new generation of militants as 'unattached', as previously they were linked with Pakistani state-sponsored terrorist organizations.

"The death of Burhan Wani in a July 8 encounter (Kokernag, Anantnag district) would in the past have routinely led to a minor flare-up. Pakistans involvement in such instances was a given. Hence, this long spell of continuing violence in the Valley needs somewhat deeper introspection to understand the real causative factors responsible for this situation.

"The unattached militant involved in the current violence is a new phenomenon  and a far cry from the erstwhile foreign militants. Kashmir had become accustomed since end-1988 to the presence of foreign militants and their involvement in stoking violence."

This serious strategist of the Indian state points at the change in the situation on the ground as compared to previous movements.

"Treating the current turmoil in the Valley as an extension of the earlier spells of unrest could be highly simplistic. Since end-2013, signs of a change in atmosphere had become visible. This was apparently missed. Even nowno meaningful attempt has been made to understand what is happening beneath the surface. Few seem to think that this could well become a dangerous watershed in the troubled history of Kashmir.

"The character of the struggle has also altered, and the reasons for this also need deeper introspection. It is not a case of rumours metamorphosing into a violent movement. The particularly ferocious public reaction to Burhan Wanis death should be troubling to everyone  politicians, authorities, the security establishment and even ordinary people. The movement gives the impression today of being on autopilot, without any known leaders.  "Hackneyed arguments to explain the current upsurge in Kashmir can prove counterproductive. The Burhan Wani phenomenon will not go away by sympathetic references to the accumulated animosities and suspicions of Kashmiri youth against atrocities perpetrated by the security forces, or by attributing the situation to Delhis lack of understanding of the Kashmiri Weltanschauung. It must not also be mistakenly attributed to a new generation of youth from the educated classes exploiting the social media seeking freedom from India. The basic causes are much deeper. The presence of over 200,000 people at Wanis funeral needs a satisfactory explanation.

"...The spontaneity of many mini-uprisings demands a different explanation from earlier ones, for it smacks of near total alienation of an entire generation of young Kashmiris angry with the present state of affairs. Many are even willing to commit suicide to vent their anger."

Narayanan also points out the irrelevance of the current political leadership. About the Huriyat Conference he says,

"Talking to separatist leaders may make good copy, but they are irrelevant in todays context, and out of sync with the younger generations now in revolt"

This clearly shows that alarm bells are ringing amongst the state authorities and they haven't yet found out the 'real reasons' for this change in the situation and the mass movement. Narayanan explains that using force will stoke the anger further. He writes,

"Using force of the kind employed against the Lashkar, Jaish and Hizbul against todays 10 and 12-year-old schoolchildren would only inflame passions further."

But in the end he has no alternative solution, and only suggests that the assistance of social scientists and psychologists should be sought to deal with this situation.

This clearly shows the bankruptcy of the current system and the ruling class that preside over it. The real cause of this unrest is mass unemployment, which has left the youth with no other option but to come out on the streets and fight for a better future. Azadi for the youth means not only freedom from the torture, killings and search operations of occupying forces, but also a bright future with full employment and better living standards. In 2011, Mercy Corps, a development organization in the US, reported that 48% of youth in Kashmir are unemployed. With seventy percent of the 12 million people in Kashmir under the age of 31, this makes a huge number. This figure must have increased in the last five years, with no major breakthroughs seen. This shows that this rotten system cannot offer the youth any future, and they are abandoning classrooms to get an education on the streets by fighting day and night.

The last four months have also provided many new lessons for the entire population. Surviving continuous curfews would not have been possible without a collective effort at the community level. Collective kitchens and the sharing of essential items necessary for survival has developed into a new routine. This has given more depth to the movement. In many places, large protests of women have taken place, and children have been seen throwing stones at the Indian armed forces. This is actually the new normal, which cannot be defeated by any armed force in the world.

Another tactic of the BJP-led government in Delhi, with their stooges in the valley, will be to stoke the flames of religious hatred amongst the Hindus of Jammu and the Muslims of the Valley - to drown this movement in a religious frenzy once again. Memories of mass rioting in 1948 are once again hyped, with armed militias of the Hindu fundamentalist RSS organizing everywhere in India. For the first time, the BJP got a majority from Jammu in the last elections, giving it the authority to spread its venom among the masses.

A bigger threat to the movement is a limited war between two nuclear-armed states occupying Kashmir. Pakistan has kept its 200 million people in hunger and poverty while spending billions of dollars on its nuclear arsenal and huge military personnel, under the pretext of fighting a war with India. It is the same case on the other side. To drive attention away from the real issues facing the 1.5 billion living, the ruling classes of these two countries have used their traditional animosity to curb any internal dissent. But this time, these usual tactics may prove counterproductive.

There is a huge movement of the working class in India taking place, which led to the biggest general strike in history on 2 September, in which 180 million participated. A student movement in the elite universities of India is spreading, protesting against 'reforms' in education. Similarly, movements and strikes in various public sectors are emerging on the other side of the border in Pakistan against privatization and other anti-worker policies. Any flare up on the border or scaling up of tensions can also give a new spark to these movements, which can become more widespread and deeper.

The only way forward to counter these threats is to build solidarity with the mass movements in both countries along class lines. This can be attained only through connecting with those movements that are also protesting the brutalities of the ruling classes on both sides. The common enemy of the masses of India and Pakistan and the whole world is the capitalist system and the class which is beneficiary of this system. The Pakistani ruling class is exploiting its workers and oppressed nationalities and has thrown them into deprivation, hunger, disease and placed them at the mercy of terrorists and suicide bombers. An independent Kashmir under capitalism will also be unable to provide any jobs to such a huge population and will always be at the mercy of the imperialist powers. Only overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist federation can give the Kashmiri masses Azadi (freedom), not only from the occupying forces, but also from unemployment and poverty. This can be achieved only through a socialist revolution, in which working class and revolutionary youth of India and Pakistan will play a key role. In a socialist federation of South Asia, Kashmir will be free - not only from the oppression of a bourgeois state, but also from the economic tyranny of Capital. This is the only way forward; the only way to guarantee a life full of happiness and pleasure in the 'Paradise on Earth'.
Student crossing Binh Di river (Photo: vnexpress.net)

An Phu district has seven border communes. Each day it receives more than 1,200 Vietnamese students from Ko Thum district, Kandal province, to study Vietnamese language. From August until now, Cambodia has banned ferry boats operating on Binh Di river, which makes travel difficult for students and residents.

Khanh An commune has the largest number of overseas Vietnamese students with 700 children. When ferry boats were banned, residents in Ko Thum district got small boats to transport the students across the river in the flood and collect VND1,000 per person.

"With swift-flowing water, we are very afraid, but we have no other choice to go to school, said Le Van Sang, a student from the Khanh An primary school.

Before the danger, many parents put aside their businesses to take their children to go to school and wait until they finish school to take them to home. Many people also take their own boats to take their children to go to school.

"The river is few hundred meters wide in flood season, and the boat is tiny so I cant leave my children alone. Every day, my husband and I have to take turns to take my two children go to Khanh An commune to study," said Mrs. Nguyen Thi Ngoc from Ko Thum.

Each day, the Ngoc family pay about VND40,000 -50,000 for her two children to go to school, including paying for motorbike taxi and small boat.

Previously, large boats didn't collect money from the students. The children could go to school on foot or we could take them by motorbike, the cost was less than VND20,000 and it was safer, Mrs. Ngoc said.

Mr. Nguyen Hung Long, Chairman of the Khanh An commune People's Committee, said that it is very dangerous for the students and the residents to cross the river by small boat during the flood season. However, the prohibition of the operation of large boats is of Cambodia. In the coming time, they will open a large road, set up a checkpoint and allow a wharf to operate, it will create convenience for controlling people and vehicles crossing, to ensure security and safety.

"In the short term, the local government communicates and mobilizes the school, parents and owners of small boats to ask the students to wear life jacket when crossing the river, and the small boats should not be overloaded," Mr. Long said.

According to An Phu district administration, overseas Vietnamese people must use their boats to cross the river to take their children to go to school because Long Binh - Chrey Thom bridge (the only bridge crossing Binh Di river) connecting the two adjacent districts has been completed but it is not yet open for crossing.



The Vietnamese side has completed the construction but the Cambodian side has not built a road to the bridge and some other items./.
LONGMEADOW  Servicemen who fought in wars from World War II to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan shared their experiences and reflections on returning home to civilian life after.

The speeches were delivered to an audience of about 80 at a Veterans Day gathering in the Longmeadow Community House on Friday, for a Town Hall-style meeting at which nearly 10 veterans were given 10 minutes each to speak about what their service means to them.

The format of the event was inspired by author Sebastian Junger, who has advocated for combat veterans who struggle with high rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder when they return home, said Joseph Somers, a Longmeadow veteran who organized the event.

"(The United States) is a very appreciative nation, but it is disconnected from the veteran community," Somers said before introducing the first speaker. "The purpose of these events is to build that connection."

During World War II, one in 10 men fought overseas, Somers said. The current number has dwindled to about 1 in 200.

From the podium, Tom Martinelli spoke about fighting in Europe during World War II. Martinelli enlisted in the Army as a 17-year-old college sophomore, and served as an infantry soldier from 1943 to 1946, he said.

"We fought everyone from SS troops to Hitler Youth," said Martinelli, who was part of a 1945 military operation in which Allied forces successfully crossed the Rhine River as part of their invasion of Germany.

Robert Kelliher, of Wilbraham, served in the Army's 1st Air Calvary Division in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970, he said.

Before Kelliher left home in Springfield to fight, the controversial conflict in Vietnam had already become a sharply divisive topic in the United States, sparking protests across the nation. But in combat, Kelliher said, the politics surrounding the war became irrelevant, as he and his comrades put each other at the top priority.

"We took care of one another, and we were willing to lay down our lives for each other unequivocally," Kelliher said.

When they couldn't save a fellow soldier's life, they did their best to preserve their honor. During a firefight, Kelliher came to the assistance of a soldier lying facedown in the mud. Kelliher turned the young man over, only to realize that he had suffered a mortal wound to his torso. As bullets whizzed by, Kelliher held the dying infantryman's head until he passed, so that his final gasps for air would not be breathed into a puddle of mud.

"The only job I had right then was to make sure that this young soldier who had a fatal wound died with dignity," Kelliher said.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 inspired Army Captain Eric Etter, a freshman in college at the time, to pursue a career in the military.

While Etter can only personally speak to his experience serving in Iraq, the individual stories and perspectives of war veterans weaves an important historical narrative, he said.

"We few who are speaking (today) represent many more," Etter said. "Maybe it's just my story, but maybe it's part of a collective story."
NECC.jpg

fdapromo.jpg In this Oct. 16, 2012, file photo a Food and Drug Administration Agent stands at the doorway of New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. (AP Photo/Bill Sikes, File)

(AP Photo/Bill Sikes, File)

BOSTON -- The majority owner of a pharmacy that was linked to a meningitis outbreak which killed 64 people was sentenced in Federal Court Wednesday for financial crimes.

The Associated Press reported that the majority owner of The New England Compounding Center Carla Conigliaro, and her husband, Douglas Conigliaro, were sentenced Wednesday in federal court after pleading guilty in July to illegally withdrawing cash from bank accounts in an attempt to defeat financial reporting requirements. Carla Conigliaro received a year of probation and a $4,500 fine, and Douglas received two years of probation and a $55,000 fine.

It was just two years ago when The New England Compounding Center's owner, president and head pharmacist Barry Cadden, 48, of Wrentham, supervisory pharmacist Glenn Chin, 46, of Canton, and 13 employees faced serious charges, including life in prison, for unsafe practices at their pharmacy that caused a deadly outbreak of meningitis in 2012.

Cadden faced life in prison for 25 counts of murder. As a result of the 2012 outbreak, 64 people died and more than 750 were made ill.

The outbreak was linked to tainted steroid injections made by the Compounding Center, causing victims to suffer from inflamed linings in their brain and spinal cord, the Associated Press reported.

The pharmacy's owners have plead not guilty to murder charges.

In 2015, authorities seized $16.8 million from the Conigliaro's, and $1.5 million from Cadden
403 Forbidden 403 Forbidden Code: AccessDenied

Message: Access Denied

RequestId: C98E982030BF455A

HostId: F4D6cug1TnHgIIYvS0fxKBPRZLIfzjxuRvl7KMWqcdx0jAJQdftEtP8kgtOVKLtBUX7P1DUh6Es= An Error Occurred While Attempting to Retrieve a Custom Error Document Code: AccessDenied

Message: Access Denied

SPRINGFIELD -- A Chicopee man and woman this week denied charges stemming from a shooting in late August outside a bar in Chicopee.

Dalmain Peters, 24, of 199 Broadway, denied nine charges in Hampden Superior Court. He had previously denied charges in Chicopee District Court, where records describe a bar dispute over fashion choices and the use of cellphone cameras.

Indictments by a Hampden Superior Court grand jury have moved Peters' case to that court. Bail was set at $200,000 Monday by Judge Edward J. McDonough.

Also indicted in connection with the shooting was Zelena Jackson, 27. Jackson denied three charges and bail was set Thursday at $10,000 cash with an order that if she makes bail she must stay away from the named victim.

Jackson is charged with armed assault with intent to murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and witness intimidation.

Peters is charged with two counts of carrying a firearm without a license and a count each of armed assault with intent to murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, having a loaded firearm, possessing a large-capacity feeding device, possession of heroin with intent to distribute, possession of cocaine and possession of marijuana.

The incident happened about 1:55 a.m. Aug. 28 on Exchange Street. The shooting was sparked by a disagreement in the Rollin' Roc Tavern, where Peters' girlfriend started arguing with a group of women, according to a police report included in Chicopee District Court documents.

"(The girlfriend) was upset because (the victim) and her friends were overdressed for that type of bar and were taking selfies of each other," Detective Chris Sawa said in court records.

When patrons were leaving at the end of the night, Peters allegedly fired a handgun at the victim's vehicle, striking the car multiple times, flattening a tire and hitting the passenger side at least three times, court records said. The victim also suffered minor injuries when she was struck in the legs by flying debris, court records said.

Witnesses said they heard the girlfriend yell to Peters: "Why don't you go to the trunk and take out the big one to show them what we really are about," court records said.

During the investigation, Sawa and Detectives Michael Dion identified Peters as a suspect in the shooting. They then staked out Chicopee District Court on Wednesday after learning he would likely be accompanying his girlfriend, who is on probation for an unrelated crime, while she met with her probation officer, court records said.

Peters and another man were in a car that dropped off the girlfriend. Police then followed them until they stopped at a gas station on Front Street. At least seven officers from the detective, narcotics, K-9 and uniform divisions apprehended Peters.

While searching him, police allegedly found a loaded 9-mm handgun with a 30-round clip, 90 packets of heroin, cocaine and marijuana, court records said.

It was unclear Friday whether Jackson was the girlfriend referred to in the police report by Sawa.
Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton caught many people paid to know such things by surprise, from journalists to political consultants to, according to Politico, the Republican National Committee's own polling team.

Political commentator and former White House advisor David Gergen was among them, he freely admitted during a Springfield Public Forum talk Thursday evening.

"I think one of the things we all share together is we've never seen one like this before. A bizarre, unpredictable, exciting, exhausting, upsetting, hope-we-never-see-it-again election," Gergen said. "Nobody that I knew foresaw what happened Tuesday night."

The rise of Trump caught the professional political class off guard, but fits within a pattern that has swept across Western Europe, Gergen said. Right wing populist movements have made gains in Iceland, France, Germany and Britain, where the popular vote to leave the European Union was met with similar shock from pollsters.

Prior to the election, Gergen said he spoke to members of the Clinton campaign and Democratic strategists who were "almost smug" in their certainty that Clinton would win.

"They were measuring the drapes in the Oval Office," he said. "And then, boom. It was a shock in newsrooms around the country."

He also suggested, in a juicy bit of hearsay, that Trump initially entered the presidential race without any serious thoughts of winning.

"He told a friend of mine privately shortly after he declared, 'I don't expect to be doing this very long. It'll be a few weeks, it'll help my brand, then I'll drop out and endorse Chris Christie,' " Gergen said.

Gergen said that people who were wrong about the election should react with humility, and consider that Trump had tapped into economic concerns from white working-class voters who had in the past been ignored by both parties.

While the exact reasons why Clinton lost are not yet clear, Gergen said it appeared that 4 million fewer Democratic voters turned out than in 2012. Midwestern states that had been Democratic strongholds for a generation, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, flipped to Trump.

And while he praised Clinton's knowledge, saying that her adeptness with policy was remarkable, he concluded that she was not a very good candidate for President.

"She doesn't relate well to voters," Gergen said. "Trump is a much more charismatic figure. He commanded the airwaves. He gave voice to the working people of this country in ways no other candidate did."

While he credited Trump for a strong political performance, Gergen was harshly critical of the racially degrading and sexist tone set by his campaign.

"How can it be that this man who appears to be a predator won out over this highly qualified woman? That's hard to explain," Gergen said. "Presidents should be a role model for our children."



But, Gergen said, the public should give him the opportunity to prove himself, pointing to his conciliatory victory speech and meeting Thursday with President Barack Obama as reasons for optimism.

"My hope, my prayer is, whatever we have to say about Donald Trump and the way he got here, the way forward will be more positive and more united."

Gergen, a White House staffer for Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton is the former editor of U.S. News and World Report and a senior political analyst for CNN.
AMHERST -- Discontent with the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House continued in the Pioneer Valley overnight Thursday, with the burning of an American flag flying at Hampshire College.

According to a message sent to the Hampshire College community from college secretary Beth Ward, officials arriving at the campus Friday morning discovered the flag was burned overnight. As a result, Ward wrote, "veterans and others in our community will come to campus to find the flagpole empty."

A reporter's visit to the campus revealed that a new flag had been raised on the pole by early morning.

Ward's message, sent before the flag was replaced, read: "We are deeply saddened that we are not able to fly the flag today in their honor, and we acknowledge the anger and hurt many will feel both because the flag is absent and the reason for its absence."

Wednesday night, members of the college community "who felt deep anger and fear in response to the election results" lowered the flag to half-staff, she wrote in the message.

College officials allowed the flag to remain at half-staff on Thursday "out of respect for the anguish that they were feeling, even while recognizing that for others in our community the flag connotes very different meanings," Ward wrote.

The college planned to raise the flag Friday on Veterans Day because the school is home to a "multiplicity of perspectives and life experiences," with military veterans among the college's student body and employees.

Decisions about the flag fall to the Board of Trustees -- "a responsibility our trustees take very seriously," Ward wrote.

"The trustees had already planned to talk about the questions raised by a number of members of the community regarding the flag, and will still do so," Ward wrote. "We will communicate with the campus soon about next steps."

The college offered counseling services Wednesday to students who were upset about the election. Services were also offered at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash sent a message to the community Wednesday to try to ease those feelings.

In that message, Lash wrote that he had heard from students, faculty and staff who were "struggling to understand the meaning and implications" of the results.

"I feel both anguish and sadness," Lash wrote. "I am particularly concerned about members of our community who felt themselves specifically targeted during a hateful campaign by repeated racist, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, and misogynistic statements."

The message continued: "I want our community to know that while I am saddened and troubled by last night's outcome, I am committed to us working together to live up to the ideals of our mission: to draw resilience, strength, and meaning from every kind of diversity and to foster ethical citizenship, justice, and positive change in the world."

Students were surprised by the burning. One student on campus had wanted to have a discussion about what the flag meant, said Soren Moesswilde. He doesn't know who took the next step.

He said some see the flag as a symbol of racism and wanted to raise awareness.

On Wednesday, some students burned parts of the flag and cut pieces of it, said Ethan Donahue, who was working at the Coles Science Center that night. They were both surprised that it had actually been burned.

"I understand why someone did it," said Donahue, adding that he doesn't necessarily agree that as the best means of expression "the day before Veterans' Day."

But he agrees that there should more discussion.

"I understand the frustration," said student Sonam Friedensohn. But he too wondered about the burning being "a productive means of expression. There are other options."

The Hampshire Board of Trustees happened to be meeting Friday and were going to be discussing the flag at a future meeting, but the flag-burning overnight prompted a 90-minute discussion, spokesman John Courtmanche said.

He said there will be meetings on campus over the next few weeks to "create the opportunity for anyone to discuss the flag and what it represents."
water fountain

File photo of a water fountain. (la vaca vegetariana / flickr)

HOLYOKE -- Several water sources within Holyoke Public Schools have tested positive for lead or copper.

Holyoke Public Schools conducted tests of the schools' drinking water in October. More than 1,800 samples were taken from taps located inside the district's 11 schools.

Initial testing found approximately 14 percent of faucets across Holyoke Public Schools tested higher than allowable state levels for lead or copper.

Water was flushed through these taps and further samples were taken. During the second round of testing, 2 percent of faucets tested positive for lead or copper.

Holyoke Public Schools Receiver Stephen Zrike notified members of the Holyoke Public School community by letter Thursday. He said that the district is taking action and that the source of contamination isn't believed to be city water but plumbing and fixtures in school buildings.

"The challenge we face is not uncommon for older school buildings across the state," Zrike said. "The safety and well-being of our students and staff remain our primary concern and I can assure you that we will continue our proactive and aggressive approach to this issue."

Lead primarily enters drinking water through service lines and plumbing materials, according to information found on the state Department of Environmental Protection website.

Federal mandates require there be no more than 20 parts per billion of lead in a school's water source, while Massachusetts standards are higher. The state requires corrective action be taken if a school tests at 15 parts per billion or higher.

Prolonged exposure to high levels of lead can cause serious health problems including gastrointestinal distress and brain damage.

Use of taps and faucets that tested positive in both rounds of testing will be disallowed in the short term. Taps and faucets that tested positive initially but not the second time will remain in use on a conditional basis. Such water sources will be available for use following a flushing protocol or bottled water will be provided.

Holyoke was one of 179 communities across Massachusetts to conduct such tests, with funding and technical assistance from the state Department of Public Health and Department of Environmental Protection.

Members of the community are invited to an information session on the matter which will be held Monday, Nov. 21st at 6:30 p.m. at Dean Technical High School.
Muslim photo exhibit

Photographs of Pioneer Valley Muslim families, including their first-person narratives, will be on display at Northampton City Hall.

(Amanda Herman photo)

NORTHAMPTON -- A local writer and photographer have teamed up to learn about Muslim culture in the Pioneer Valley, and their project will be on display at Northampton City Hall throughout the month of November.

Over six months, Jenny Bender and Amanda Herman interviewed and photographed Muslims in the Pioneer Valley. They asked people four main questions: What their religion means to them, the role of women in Islam, what their experience has been in today's political environment, and what they believe non-Muslims should know about Islam.

According to the Northampton Arts Council, the project arose in response to Islamophobia and the mistrust and misinformation many non-Muslims have about the religion and those who practice it.

The exhibit features a series of 16 portraits accompanied by first-person statements. An opening reception is set for Friday evening as part of the city's monthly Arts Night Out. The show runs through December 2.

If you go:

What: Neighbors: Voices & Portraits of Muslims in the Valley

Where: Northampton City Hall, 210 Main St.

Reception: Friday, Nov. 11, 4:30-6:30 p.m.
clinton dog walk .jpg

A photo of Margot Gerster, her daughter Phoebe, and Hillary Clinton. Gerster wrote she was walking through the woods in Chapaqua, N.Y. because she was depressed about the election when she bumped into HIllary and Bill Clinton. This photo was take by Bill Clinton.

(Courtesy of Facebook)

A New York woman, sad over Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump, decided to clear her head by taking her daughter for a walk in the woods Wednesday afternoon. As fate would have it, she bumped into Hillary and Bill Clinton who were also out hiking as well.

And before you can say "photo or it didn't happen," the woman, Margot Gerster, posted the picture of her with Hillary Clinton in the woods of Chappaqua, New York. The Clintons have a home in Chappaqua.

The photo, posted on her Facebook page had, by Thursday evening, garnered 47,000 likes and 3,700 shares.

The story had also been picked up by several websites including Mashable, Yahoo news and Vanity Fair. CBS News picked it up, and thousands of people tweeted and retweeted it on Twitter.

As Gerster, a Clinton supporter, wrote in the caption accompanying the photo that she had been feeling heartbroken over Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump the day before, and felt the best thing to do was to go for a hike with her daughter, Phoebe.

"So I decided to take them to one of favorite places in Chappaqua. We were the only ones there and it was so beautiful and relaxing," she wrote. "As we were leaving, I heard a bit of rustling coming towards me and as I stepped into the clearing there she was."

"She," of course, was Hillary Clinton, who was accompanied by Bill Clinton, and their dogs.

Gerster reports the Clintons were "doing exactly the same thing I was."

If the timeline is correct, Gerster bumped into the Clinton just a few hours after Hillary Clinton delivered a televised concession speech in New York City that was watched by millions.

"I got to hug her and talk to her," she wrote. Gerster also told Hillary Clinton that one of her proudest moments as a mother was to bring her daughter to the polls to vote for her.

The Democratic nominee thanked her for her support, they hugged, and posed for a photo that the former president took with the camera on Gerster's phone. She wrote she regretted not thinking to have one of the Secret Service agents take the photo in order to have Bill Clinton in the photo too.

"We exchanged some sweet pleasantries and then I let them continue their walk," she wrote. "I'm not one for signs but I think I'll definitely take this one."
SPRINGFIELD - A man is dead after a car crash on an Interstate 91 off ramp Friday morning, which authorities say was preceded by a police chase just south of the state line.

Massachusetts State Police spokesman David Procopio told WWLP 22 News that around 12:30 a.m. Friday, Connecticut State Police notified them they were about to terminate a police pursuit at the state line, and that the subject was heading into Massachusetts.

The vehicle, which police were attempting to stop in Connecticut for a yet-to-be disclosed reason, apparently attempted to get off the highway at Exit 2, but crashed due to high speeds, Procopio said. Police say he was driving as fast as 100 miles per hour during the pursuit.

Exit 2 on I-91 north heads into Springfield's Forest Park neighborhood via Longhill Street.

The driver, who has not been identified by authorities, was taken to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield where he was pronounced dead.

The investigation is ongoing, although authorities say the exit has since reopened.
HOLYOKE -- Rafael Rivera and Sheila Velazquez received the keys Thursday to a new, two-family home at 230-232 Beech St. -- and with it, a $130,000 mortgage, a commitment to the property and recognition that they had a lot of help.

"It's a great feeling," said Rivera, 37.

Ownership of the property was transferred to Rivera and Valazquez in a ceremony with Mayor Alex B. Morse and other officials.

The city had seized the property for nonpayment of taxes in 2015 and for $2,000 transferred it to OneHolyoke Community Development Corp., or OneHolyoke CDC, a private nonprofit housing provider, Morse said.

Federal grants and other federal money mean that Rivera and Velazquez will be paying $130,000 of the property's $300,000 purchase price. It's a deal that gets a blighted spot returned to the city tax rolls and makes owning a home and gaining rental income from a tenant a lifestyle that otherwise would be beyond the family's reach, officials said.

Rivera said the deal wasn't possible for the family without the help of the city, OneHolyoke CDC, which use to be known as Olde Holyoke Development Corp. and Easthampton Savings Bank, through which Rivera and Velazquez have the mortgage.

"No, no, never," Rivera said.

"I'm real excited with the help that I had from the Easthampton Savings Bank, the OneHolyoke and the city of Holyoke," he said.

"I'm proud," said Velazquez, 37, "and I'm thankful for all the help that we received and like I always say, we did this for our family because we want our family growing up in a safe place."

The couple has a son Samuel who is 5 and Velazquez is stepmother to another son, Xavier, 8, she said.

The federal money that allowed the home ownership deal to take place at 230-232 Beech St. was a combination of funds from the Community Development Block Grant program and the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, officials said. Both programs are administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The HOME Investment Partnerships Program especially is aimed at helping the process of home ownership in poor cities like Holyoke in arrangements with local nonprofits like OneHolyoke CDC.

"We see home ownership as an opportunity that should be available to all of Holyoke's families," Morse said.

The point of such taxpayer-funded federal programs is to put such taxpayer funds to use and help make homes affordable in poor cities like Holyoke, said Michael Moriarty, OneHolyoke CDC executive director.

"Homes like this wouldn't be possible in neighborhoods like this" without such programs, Moriarty said.

The transfer of ownership of 230-232 Beech St. marks the 164th that OneHolyoke CDC has done since it was founded in 1971 as Olde Holyoke Development Corp., he said.

A neighborhood that includes Wistariahurst Museum at 238 Cabot St. and the Senior Center at 291 Pine St. will improve with the installation of taxpaying homeowners at 230-232 Beech St. and removal of one more spot of blight, he said.

"This was an illegal dump a year ago," Moriarty said. "There was construction debris hidden behind a mountain of overgrowth."

The pieces to the modular home were delivered in four boxes in December. By the end of the summer, the structure was built and utilities installed, he said.

OneHolyoke CDC publicized that a home was going to be available with advertisements, distribution of fliers and a posting on its website. An application date was announced and Rivera responded, Moriarty said.

"Rafael was in line at 5 a.m. It was like Grateful Dead tickets," Moriarty said.

Once OneHolyoke CDC and the city determine an individual is a qualified home buyer, the home buyer is responsible for securing a mortgage. Rivera did that through Easthampton Savings Bank, Moriarty said. Harry Montalvo, community development specialist with Easthampton Savings Bank, participated in Thursday's ceremony.

"I want to thank everyone," Velazquez said.

The deal requires that the family remain living at 230-232 Beech St. for 15 years. If they leave within that time, they must pay the difference between the property's appraised value and its sale price, a cost known as the depreciation recapture, Moriarty said.

Rivera and Velazquez said they plan on staying. Both work at Holyoke Health Center on Maple Street downtown, Rivera in maintenance and Velazquez in the pharmacy as a community health worker, they said.

Both were born in Puerto Rico and have lived in Holyoke for 15 years, previously at 266 Essex St., Rivera said.

Despite the ceremony, they actually moved into the right-hand side of the duplex a month ago, Rivera said. Velazquez said they are seeking a tenant for the other side. Rivera displayed features like the tile backsplash above the kitchen sink and the fenced-in back yard.

"Got a nice yard," Rivera said.
Racist, anti-Semitic and pro-Donald Trump graffiti has appeared on a cliffside of Mount Tom, sparking outrage from local residents on social media.

In green, white and blue spraypaint, messages including "gas the Jews," "Kill all n******,"Trump 2016" and a swastika now overlook the Mount Tom State Reservation on the border of Holyoke and Easthampton. The graffiti appeared in early November, prior to Election Day, according to an eyewitness.

Images of the graffiti, posted on an Easthampton Facebook group, drew quick condemnation. "Awful," one commenter wrote; "Vile, disgusting and deplorable," wrote another.

It is not the first time that unidentified people have spraypainted Mount Tom -- though never before with such violent, political and racially charged language.

Naima Workman, a Northampton resident, organized a cleanup of Mount Tom's graffiti in early October. Someone -- she suspects teenagers who use the park at night -- had spraypainted both rock faces and trees on the trails.

"I go hiking there all the time and it was getting to the point where something had to be done about this," she said in an interview. "The graffiti has been up there for decades, but it was starting to get more and more obnoxious."

Before the cleanup, the graffiti was mostly unoffensive -- love notes and names -- though some messages said "go home, this is America," Workman said.

But after her group cleaned up much of the graffiti last month, it returned with a more vicious tone. Workman believes the new graffiti is a response by the original graffiti artists to its removal, though she cannot be sure.

"I know people are thinking it's in response to the election, but I'm 99 percent sure it's a backlash directly to the cleanup," she said.

The new graffiti lashed out at Jews and Mexicans, and began just days after the cleanup. But Stephen Tremblay, who took photographs of the new vandalism that were posted on Facebook, said the most noxious messages were painted between Nov. 1 and Nov. 6.

"I discovered the graffiti on Sunday," Tremblay said. "There's been tons of graffiti up there, and there's more and more graffiti every time I go. But the swastikas and hateful stuff wasn't."

Tremblay, who hikes Mount Tom with his dog two to three times per week, said the graffiti was disheartening.

"It was incredibly disappointing. This is kind of my temple where I go to relax and get away from all the madness this election has created," he said. "I didn't feel angry, just kind of disappointed."

He also said that teenagers often use the mountain to party at night, often leaving trash and sometimes lighting prohibited fires. But he cannot be sure they were responsible for the graffiti.

In a statement, the Anti-Defamation League condemned the graffiti and said it was monitoring the situation.

"This incident at Mt. Tom contradicts the values upon which America was founded and warrants condemnation from everyone," ADL New England Director Robert Trestan said. "Now more than ever, the community must be united in our condemnation of all forms of hate and bigotry. The country is experiencing a post-election uptick of hate incidents and ADL is closely monitoring and responding to these reports."

Workman said that new cleanup efforts are being organized.

The Holyoke and Easthampton police departments said they had not received any reports of graffiti on the mountain.
SPRINGFIELD  Heriberto Flores has become known as one of of the region's leading businessmen and nonprofit leader, but he was at one time a Puerto Rican teenager who picked tobacco for $1.25 an hour and later a U.S. soldier in the Vietnam War.

A large crowd made up of colleagues, friends and family gathered at the Lyman and Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History on Thursday night to honor his 35 years of leadership in the community.

Flores founded the region's first agency for migrant farm workers, New England Farm Worker's Council, which still exists today. He is the chairman of Partners for Community Inc. and his latest effort is a $10 million project to redevelop the Memorial Square Apartments in the city's North End.

"I feel real proud of this because this is a project that everybody in the community is shooting to make happen," Flores said during a recent interview with The Republican. "I think we have to do more like this in this city and take all these old buildings and rehab (them)."

The event was an opportunity to celebrate his past accomplishments and future projects.
The Idaho Department of Commerce will ask legislators to add a project category to the states Tax Reimbursement Incentive program so the program can better accommodate small businesses in 2017.

A TRI is a tax credit available to moving or expanding businesses. The credit can be worth up to 30 percent of a companys income, payroll and sales taxes for as long as 15 years.

By: Benton Alexander Smith

Full Story: http://idahobusinessreview.com/2016/11/04/department-of-commerce-seeks-change-to-tri-program/
On Friday, folks from all over McDowell County paused at the McDowell Senior Center and Veterans Memorial for the annual Veterans Day observance. The service was held on the 11th hour of the 11th day. Retired Army Major Robert Smith welcomed all those who attended. In this photo, these folks are saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag.
Balwinder Sahani has a lot of money. So much so that he plopped down $9 million to buy a license plate for one of his Rolls Royces.

The Indian businessman, who owns a property management company as well as multiple Rolls Royces, cast the winning bid at a government auction for a Dubai license plate reading D5, according to Bloomberg.

Auctions of license plate numbers are a big draw in the United Arab Emirates where a shorter number is a status symbol coveted by the wealthy, Bloomberg reported.

Sahani told CNN Money the license plate gets attention wherever he goes and he has no regrets about dropping nine mil.

I always like to give myself a gift every year," he said. "When you work very hard, you need to present yourself something.

Darn tootin, I say.

Thats why I believe Sahani needs a few other auto accessories to make his Rolls stand out in that oil-rich, Rolls-packed nation. And I just happen to have a few of those on my truck, items I would be willing to part with for a fair price.

The following section of this column is a personal message for my new best pal Balwinder Sahani. Everyone else, please respect our privacy, stop reading now and move on to the hilarious antics of everyones favorite cartoon cat, Garfield, or perhaps an article about a politician doing something stupid.

Dear Balwinder:

Hows the property management business going? Wheeling and dealing as always, Im sure. Whenever I discuss property management with my drinking buddies, which is quite often, I always say, Now that Balwinder, he knows how to manage him some property.

I am just dropping you a line to let you know I read about you on the interwebs how you scored that sweet, sweet D5 tag for one of your many Rolls for only nine mil. Let me tell you, son, that is the deal of the century.

But, lets consider a probable scenario. You pull into the Dubai A&P to pick up a quart of milk and a carton of smokes after hard day managing property and there beside you is another Rolls with the tag D4. You look to the other side and there is a Rolls with the tag D6. Suddenly, you are not so unique. You are just another rich D-bag.

What could set your Rolls apart? I believe it is some of the accessories currently affixed to my 12-year-old truck.

First and foremost, you need my dancing dashboard hula girl. Since I got her, she has seen close to 60,000 miles of mostly western North Carolina highway, from the interstates to the blacktop to the back streets, sashaying along to the radio and convulsing wildly when I hit a speed bump too fast.

Sure, you can pick up a dancing dashboard hula girl online or maybe at a Dubai Stuckeys, but you cant get MY dancing dashboard hula girl, the most special dancing dashboard hula girl on the planet, I assure you.

The price? $4.75 million and that, my friend, is a steal.

What else am I willing to part with to make your Rolls stand out in a Dubai crowd?

My Johnny Cash is a Friend of Mine rear window sticker is now on sale at a discounted price of $2.5 million due to slight fading. Despite weather damage, it will make your fellow Dubains say, Hey, who is that cool fellow with the $9 million license plate and the faded Johnny Cash sticker?

Need more? How about a magnet proclaiming My Zombie Child Ate Your Honor Students Brain? Yes, I have one and it can be yours for only $1.6 million.

Hurry and act now, Balwinder. My supplies are limited.

Scott Hollifield is editor/GM of The McDowell News in Marion, N.C. and a humor columnist. Contact him at rhollifield@mcdowellnews.com.
The Kherson airport after its reconstruction would remain in municipal ownership, as it is a sensitive facility of national defense, Governor of Kherson region Andriy Hordeyev has said.

"I would like to thank previous governor Andriy Putilov who saw a potential in this facility. Since 2014 we jointly with the Cabinet of Ministers have decided to invest in it. We passed the bill on the public fund development in parliament and lobbied for the airport's reconstruction. We could have finished it more quickly, but red tape slowed completion," he said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

He said that aprons and two taxi strips will be finished by the end of the year, and the terminal will be rebuilt.

"We have two potential investors who are competing. These are foreign investors who are ready to complete reloading, refrigerating and passenger terminals around the airfield. They would provide for logistics. They are interested in reconstructing the runway for Boeing-747 planes  to reinforce it and enlarge by 1,200 meters. My only requirement to them is the financial ability and retaining the facility in municipal ownership. We would not sell it to anyone, as it is a sensitive facility of national defense," he said.

He said that this year the airfield was actively used by Turkish Airlines.

"The loading of flights with tourists was 86% on average. Today it carried over 90,000 tourists. Even if each tourist gives UAH 500 to our economy (taxies, hotels, cafes, food), this is UAH 45 million in the internal economy of our region. We have invested far less," he said.

Hordeyev said that the region has agreements with Ukraine International Airlines (UIA).

"They received flight permits and presented a technical rider on the possibility of servicing flights. Thus, the passenger flow would expand more. UIA seeks to launch Kherson-Warsaw flights via Boryspil. This would help to reach Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv with transfers. This would fully open Boryspil and the European destinations. Now we have Kherson-Istanbul  a large transport hub where one can reach any destination with transfers," he said.
The Ukrainian government would find schemes for resuming large-scale production of agricultural machinery in Ukraine, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said during his visit to Kherson Machine Building Plant.

"As for support of combine production The top managers of the enterprise say that this combine has been brought up to date. If it is so and it is proved, I think we would be able to speak about finding tools to support building of combines in Ukraine," the press service of the government said on Thursday, citing Groysman.

The prime minister said that the government considers support of machine building in Ukraine a top priority.

"Today we see that equipment for agriculture, including machinery, can be made in Ukraine," Groysman said, commenting on the operation of Kherson Machine Building Plant.

He said that around 20 enterprises in Ukraine are cooperating with the plant delivering knots for machinery.

"The competitive advantage is the quality and the price. The price is twice cheaper than the analog. This is good. The quality would make farmers to believe in these products and start using them," he said.

"Today we have absolutely all chances to create a Ukrainian tractor," Groysman said, adding that the government wants to create schemes for compensating a part of the cost of agricultural machinery.

The prime minister said that around 100 types of agricultural equipment are made in Ukraine.

"We are ready to compensate 20-30% of the cost of equipment to Ukrainian farmers who produce national products. This would cheapen farmers' goods, and farmers would have a chance to use this equipment in production. We want to launch this circle," he said.

He said that the Cabinet of Ministers and the national committee for industrial development are working on the issue.

He said that the government envisaged UAH 5.5 billion for support of small and medium-sized farms in the draft 2017 national budget. It could be expanded to UAH 10 billion. Now the government is holding consolations with parliament to look for the required tools.
by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 10, 2016

Google will use mobile content to rank as a default in search engine query results, rolling out the new ranking system over the course of a year. Only when a company doesn't have mobile content or a responsive Web site design, Google will consider pulling from desktop content. This means the underlying content that serves up on devices will come from mobile sites.

Search Marketing Daily caught up with search engine optimization (SEO) expert Sastry Rachakonda, CEO of iQuanti, who shared some insights on the shift.

SMD: How should marketers prepare?

Rachakonda: The most important point is to make sure to use structured markup data on the pages, so the pages communicate to Google the content on the page. Look at the search queries driving traffic to the Web site and compare it with the page content on the mobile site visitors land on. Make sure the pages are structures to answer the queries to drive the ranking.

advertisement advertisement

SMD: Will mobile-first indexing prove to be a positive move?

Rachakonda: Yes, because we as users have gravitated toward using mobile devices. Publishers and brands are not there yet. It's forcing companies to meet consumers and adapt to their behavior.

Sometimes we talk about markets changing consumer behavior, and other times we see a company that pushes the market in a specific direction. Think about when Apple dropped the floppy disc. It shifted the whole industry forward.

What Google is doing won't happen in one swoop, but it will force marketers to focus on the mobile experience, which is where consumers are.

SMD: Will this force Bing to move in a mobile-first direction?

Rachakonda: The reality is, consumers are moving more toward using mobile devices, so any company wanting to offer services must take the mobile device into account. It will automatically force other companies to move in that direction or lose traffic.

If I'm going to give you information I must take into account how you will consume the information.

If you are already developing a mobile site but haven't finished it, Google suggests not to launch it. Make sure the mobile experience is good before launching it.

SMD: What are the eight ranking factors?

Rachakonda: There are four major and four minor. Two of the four important factors will now be calculated from a different content (data) mix when Google goes mobile-first. So most likely all the results are going to get affected.

The major factors include:

1) Quality and quantity of the main content of the page

2) Expertise/authority/t rustworthiness

3) Reputation of the Web site

4) Needs met (meaning the intent of the query and the page)

Minor Factors:

1) Web site information -- whether the site is a real person, company or entity that can be contacted

2) Quality of supplementary content -- site-level summary of quality of ads on the page, etc.

3) Page Design  whether it is easy to navigate at the site level

4) Whether the site is well maintained at the site level, such as broken links, site speed, etc.
by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, November 10, 2016

What went so wrong for Hillary Clintons campaign?

Just over 24 hours out from the most devastating blow to the Democratic establishment in decades, some are starting to sift through the data to see where the bottom fell out.

Despite President Barack Obamas 52.1% approval rating on the eve of November 8, higher than Ronald Reagans at the tail end of 1988, Clinton was unable to turn out the now mythical Obama coalition: droves of millennial, African American and Latino voters.

Clinton fell behind Barack Obamas 2012 turnout levels in all three crucial demographic groups, and barely made up a point or two among women.

Obama won 93% of African Americans in 2012 -- Clinton succeeded in getting just 88% of that vote. Latinos voted for Obama in 2012 by a strong 71%, whereas 65% voted for Clinton. Millennials also had a six-point gap between their support of Obama and Clinton, with 60% supporting Obama in 2012 and 54% voting for Clinton.

advertisement advertisement

In retrospect, the Clinton campaign may have been aware of this potential shortfall. In the weeks leading up to November 8, Barack Obama embarked on one of the most active campaign schedules weve seen from a sitting president.

Commentators (not that it appears theyll have much clout going forward), kept likening Obama to Hillary Clintons running mate, or even at times flipping that around. It was as it felt many hoped Obama was the candidate again, and Clinton the running mate.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, so those devastated by the results can briefly comfort themselves in knowing that the majority of the American people, in fact, do NOT want a bigoted, misogynist, xenophobe in the oval office. Not much consolation, though, when Donald Trump will become president of the United States on January 20, 2017.

In the end, the projected numbers were off, and the invisible Trump vote, misinterpreted by the pollsters, materialized in the South and the Rust Belt. On the morning of Election Day, when Hillary and Bill Clinton voted in Chappaqua, New York, she didnt look like a candidate who had a sense the numbers were against her.

Conversely, Donald and Melania Trump could barely fake a smile when they voted in New York City.

Probably most telling: Reports say iinternal Republican polling numbers had Donald Trump losing the election on the eve of November 8.
by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, November 11, 2016

The election of Donald Trump has been a punch in the gut for the liberal media. The constant barrage from the now president-elect against reputable news sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico and others during the campaign is unlikely to stop.

As recently as mid-October, Donald Trump threatened to sue The New York Times for its article covering his sexual indiscretions. In just a few months, he will have the weight of the Justice Department to do his bidding, which surely sends shivers down the spines of the Sulzbergers.

One of the hallmarks of a strong democracy is a protected and free press.

Newsrooms that have disagreed with Donald Trumps political approach will have more reasons to cover, investigate and factually criticize the next president of the United States. If Trump tries to shut up the Fourth Estate, we the people (or traditional Third Estate) will have to fight to retain the constitutional right to speak up against our government, whether through the courts or by other means.

advertisement advertisement

Will Trump have a media enemies list? P.J. Bednarski of MediaPost wrote a cogent commentary on what could happen if the vindictiveness we saw during the campaign seeps into Trumps time in the White House.

This apprehension shouldnt discourage.

Rather, it can usher in an era of more rigorous reporting in search of what is truth and what is fabrication.

Jacob Weisberg editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, who also hosts the Trump-critical 'TrumpCast,' joined David Plotz, Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson on this weeks 'Political Gabfest,' where he discussed the role of Slate in the Trump administration.

My only positive feeling when I woke up this morning was that Slate has never been so necessary or so important, Weisberg told Bazelon and Plotz on November 9. The basic truth-telling function of journalism is going to be more necessary than its ever been, and more under siege than its ever been.

There are these tremendous natural forces to normalize Trump, and now that hes won the presidency, to treat him and treat this like its an unusual but acceptable phenomenon in American politics. As a member of the press, as someone who leads the business side of a news organization, I feel our role is to not be strident, not be hysterical, but to tell the truth and describe the reality.

And to stand up for the idea of rationalism and an enlightened approach to policy and ideas. Fake news is just one expression of the whole rejection of a rationalist world-view. You cant give in to that and say: Well you have your facts, and we have ours.

You have to uphold rationalism and reality as a cause.
Nibulon to invest at least $300 mln in river transport in Ukraine

Nibulon agricultural company in the framework of its strategic plans in the field of inland waterway transport intends to build five new river transshipment terminals, continue building inland and mixed navigation transport ships.

According to the company's presentation, posted on its website, the strategic plan also provides for investing no less than $300 million in river transport of Ukraine.

The report reads the transport potential of Ukraine's inland waterways for grain transportation is more than 10 million tonnes, other freight more than 50 million tonnes.

This will allow reducing burden on roads by 2.5 million trucks and therefore saving about UAH 47.4 billion of budget funds for road repairs.

Nibulon was created in 1991. It is one of the largest operators in the grain market of the country. It has elevators with a total capacity of about 2 million tonnes, as well as its own transshipment terminal with a capacity of 5 million tonnes in Mykolaiv.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, November 11, 2016

Facebook will prohibit marketers from using a race-based targeting option for ads offering housing, employment or credit, the company said today.

"There are many non-discriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these types of ads," Vice President Erin Egan stated today in a blog post.

Egan added that Facebook plans to update its ad policies to require advertisers to promise they won't "engage in discriminatory advertising."

The move comes two weeks after ProPublica reported that Facebook enables advertisers to prevent their ads from being shown to users who belong to certain "ethnic affinity" groups -- including people the social networking believes have an ethnic affinity of black, Asian-American and Hispanic.

advertisement advertisement

ProPublica said it was able to use Facebook's self-service tool to create an ad for an event aimed at renters, and then block it from pages of users with black, Asian-American or Hispanic ethnic affinities.

The news drew complaints by lawmakers, and also sparked a potential class-action civil rights lawsuit.

Egan said in her post that the company has recently had talks with numerous organizations, including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Fair Housing Alliance, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Brookings Institution, and Upturn. "We will continue to explore ways that our ethnic affinity solution can be used to promote inclusion of underrepresented communities, and we will continue to work with stakeholders toward that goal," she wrote.

The company's new policy drew praise from The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "We welcome Facebooks announcement that it wants to look for other ways to combat discrimination, and look forward to further conversations with Facebook to ensure robust and specific prohibitions against discriminatory ad targeting based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other protected characteristics, Wade Henderson, CEO of the advocacy group, said in a statement.
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, November 11, 2016

Microsoft Research has been working on building technology that analyzes site visitor's behaviors to optimizes content, pricing and ad serving in real-time. It learns from the actions that visitors take on the Web site to personalize recommendations and news.

The technology will change the way advertisers and publishers think about optimization.

The platform, Decision Service, uses machine learning to make choices on the content to serve in real-time by quickly integrating and processing new data from clicks and views. It optimizes based on the end metric marketers preset in the system, such as increasing click-through rates or purchases, rather than accuracy or precision recall.

LiHong Li, senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and Gal Oshri, program manager at Microsoft Research, speaking at the Bing Ads Next event in Redmond, Washington walked through how the platform works.

advertisement advertisement

An ongoing test with MSN in which the editorial team chooses about 20 articles and their rankings shows how data from views and clicks funneled into the platform in near real time produces a revised optimization model every five minutes. It led to nearly a 27% lift in click through rate and improved the overall engagement with the page, having an indirect outcome by increasing advertising clicks by 9%.

The research and data behind the modeling creates an unbiased evaluation, solving many of the problems behind traditional machine learning in real-time scenarios, Oshri said. "This is important for applications like News, because when a new story gets published you need to react quickly. A breaking news story can become less popular in less than an hour."

The same can be done for ecommerce sites. In one instance that led to a 38% increase in revenue per click the company monitored visits, clicks and purchase through a banner advertisement.

The technology can potentially "site hope" in which the platform optimizes for content, advertisements, and pricing for the same visitor.

The research group, which published a paper on the topic, also tested the platform with a media Web site to recommend videos at the bottom of article pages. There hasn't been any tests optimizing programmatic TV, but researchers say it's possible.

In one test, Microsoft doesn't choose the ads the visitor sees initially, but rather what they see after clicking on the ad, he said. The optimization comes on the second click where the Decision Service chooses the event based on the data.

Privacy also plays a role. Each application of the platform gets customized per publisher, advertiser, or ecommerce site. The user data remains in their respective systems and not shared with other systems. The user information is stored by the application not Decision Service.
A gene that regulates bone growth and muscle metabolism in mammals may take on an additional role as a promoter of brain maturation, cognition and learning in human and nonhuman primates, according to a new study led by neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School.

Describing their findings in Nature, researchers say their work provides a dramatic illustration of evolutionary economizing and creative gene retooling - mechanisms that contribute to the vast variability across species that share nearly identical set of genes yet differ profoundly in their physiology.

The research reveals that osteocrin - a gene found in the skeletal muscles of all mammals and well-known for its role in bone growth and muscle function - is completely turned off in rodent brains yet highly active in the brains of nonhuman primates and humans.

Notably, osteocrin was found predominantly in cells of the neocortex - the most evolved part of the primate brain, which regulates sensory perception, spatial reasoning and higher-level thinking and language in humans.

The gene's marked presence in an area of the brain responsible for higher-level function and thought, the researchers said, suggests a possible role in the development of cognition, a cardinal feature that distinguishes the brains of human and nonhuman primates from those of other mammals.

Brain development in humans and other primates is profoundly affected by sensory experience and social interactions. Scientists have long sought to unravel genes in the brain that are turned on and off by experiences to fuel the rise of brain functions unique to such complex species.

The HMS team's findings - part of an ongoing quest to elucidate the mechanisms that underlie human brain development, function and disease - reveal that osteocrin is precisely one such gene, activated by sensory stimulation. Furthermore, the team added, this is the first illustration of evolutionary gene repurposing in the brain.

"We have uncovered what we believe is a critical clue into the evolution of the human brain, one that gives us a glimpse into the genetic mechanisms that may account for differences in cognition between mice and humans," said senior investigator Michael Greenberg, the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology and chair of the HMS Department of Neurobiology.

For their experiments, the team analyzed RNA levels-the molecular footprints of gene activity - in the brain cells of mice, rats and humans. Although many of the same genes were activated in both mouse and human brain cells, the scientists observed, a small subset of genes was activated solely in human brain cells. Much to the scientists' surprise, the bone gene osteocrin was most highly expressed in the human brain, yet completely shut off in the brain cells of mice.

Going a step further, the scientists placed brain cells from all three species in lab dishes and chemically re-created conditions that mimic sensory stimulation. Chemical stimulation activated osteocrin selectively in excitatory neurons, so called for their role in stimulating rather than dampening nerve signaling. But researchers noted something even more intriguing: The activity of the gene was most intense in neurons of the neocortex, the topmost layer of cells covering the brain and responsible for higher-level cognition, such as long-term memory, thought and language. At the same time, osteocrin was noticeably absent from other parts of the brain responsible for noncognitive functions such as spatial navigation, balance, breathing, heart rate and temperature control.

When researchers compared osteocrin levels to levels of another brain protein, BDNF, well known for its role in neuronal growth and repair, they noticed another striking difference. While BDNF was present throughout the brain, osteocrin was restricted to the neocortex and, to a lesser extent, the amygdala, an area of the brain thought to play a role in memory formation, decision making and emotional responses. Osteocrin was also markedly expressed in cells of the temporal lobe, which houses functions such as learning, memory and audio-visual processing - and the occipital lobe, which houses the visual cortex, the area of the brain responsible for the processing of visual information.

Further analysis revealed that in the primate brain, sensory stimulation appears to switch on osteocrin through a previously unknown DNA enhancer. Enhancers - snippets of DNA that act as the genome's regulators - are the "handles" that turn on some genes while shutting off others. In doing so, enhancers can profoundly alter genetic expression, fueling dramatic differences between organisms with nearly identical DNA. The rodent versions of osteocrin lacked the stimulation-activated DNA enhancer, the analysis showed.

In yet another critical observation, researchers found the osteocrin enhancer was, in turn, switched on by a protein called MEF2. Mutations in MEF2 are a well-established cause of intellectual disability and neurodevelopmental disorders, so the link between the two begs further study, the researchers said, as it may portend a role for osteocrin in such developmental anomalies.

"Humans share many genes with rodents and as much as 90 percent of their DNA in some parts of the genome," says co-first author Gabriella Boulting, a neurobiologist at HMS. "In this case we see how turning up the expression of the same gene in a different location may precipitate dramatic differences in the function of brain cells."

Further analysis revealed that osteocrin's activation curbed the growth of neuronal dendrites--branchlike projections responsible for transmitting signals from one brain cell to the next.

"Restricting dendritic growth is a precision-enhancing mechanism, essential to ensuring that neuronal wires don't get crossed and compromise signal transmission from one cell to the next," says study first co-author Bulent Ataman, a neurobiologist at HMS.

This observation, Ataman added, suggests that osteocrin's activity may help enhance nerve cell agility and proper signal transmission to ensure robust communication across neurons.

To confirm that the activity-induced gene expression observed in nerve cells in the lab also occurred in the functioning, intact brain, researchers temporarily blocked vision in one eye of a macaque, a common technique to study activity-triggered brain plasticity and visually-induced gene activation in the visual cortex. This proof-of-concept experiment, they surmised, would reveal whether osteocrin is, indeed, awakened by visual stimulation and shut off by its absence. A day later, the researchers observed that osteocrin expression was markedly higher in cells from the visually intact parts of the macaque brain, compared with cells in vision-deprived areas.

The findings illustrate a foundational principle in neurobiology - abnormal visual experiences can interfere with the development and function of brain cells in the visual cortex, a phenomenon first described more than 50 years ago by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, two of the founding members of the Department of Neurobiology at HMS. The two shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries on visual information processing in the brain.

"Nature and nurture interact to wire up the brain, and abnormal vision can alter that wiring," said Margaret Livingstone, the Takeda Professor of Neurobiology at HMS. "Our observations reveal the molecular basis for what Hubel and Wiesel observed more than half a century ago."

Researchers say their findings have sparked more questions, including exactly how osteocrin interacts with neurons, precisely what factors regulate its expression and, most importantly, how it can alter brain physiology in disease and health.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health grants RC2MH089952 and P50MH106933 with additional support from the Ellen R. and Melvin J. Gordon Center for the Cure and Treatment of Paralysis at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and by the NIH's Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award 5F32NS086270.
Research published in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology shows there are no initial warning signs for pancreatic cancer, but as symptoms evolve there are a range of subsequent symptoms that predict a diagnosis including jaundice, change in bowel habit and weight loss. This is the first research project worldwide that has looked at symptoms and diagnostic intervals in people before they are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer has the worst survival rate of the ten most common cancers. Just 5% of patients survive five years after diagnosis. Pancreatic cancer is very difficult to diagnose, with the majority of patients only diagnosed when the disease has spread.

The charity Pancreatic Cancer Action part-funded the research led by Dr Fiona Walter at the University of Cambridge. The study looked at the symptoms of 391 people who had been referred to hospital on suspicion of pancreatic cancer. Of these patients, 30% were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, 12% with other cancers and 58% with no cancer.

The study found no initial symptoms that could predict a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, but it found a number of subsequent symptoms that predicted pancreatic cancer, including jaundice, fatigue, change in bowel habit, weight loss, decreased appetite, indigestion and 'feeling different'. Other symptoms, such as back pain, nausea or vomiting, and a change in urine or stool colour, were less commonly experienced and not predictive of pancreatic cancer among the study's participants.

The research found that the time it took for people to be diagnosed depended on other medical conditions and the symptoms they presented with. People with jaundice and decreased appetite as their first symptoms took less time to diagnose, but people with other illnesses such as diabetes and mental health problems took longer.

''GPs and hospital doctors should all have an increased awareness of the risk of pancreatic cancer among people with diabetes and beware of misattributing potential symptoms of pancreatic cancer in those with mental health problems," said Fiona Walter, GP and Principal Researcher in Primary Care Cancer Research at the University of Cambridge, who led the study.

The results of this study mirror the experience of Ali Stunt, the founder and CEO of Pancreatic Cancer Action, and a rare survivor of pancreatic cancer. Aged 40, she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, despite having no obvious risk factors; a year later she experienced excruciating back pain, weight loss and a change in her bowel habit. It took six visits to the doctor over an eight week period before she was finally referred to a pancreatic surgeon, who confirmed a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

"I hope this research will raise awareness among people and medical professionals about the variety of warning signs for pancreatic cancer. It's only by going to the doctor earlier and getting a quicker diagnosis that we can improve the appalling survival rates for pancreatic cancer, "said Ali.

November is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month. On 7 November, Pancreatic Cancer Action launched a nationwide advertising campaign to raise awareness of the symptoms of pancreatic cancer. The adverts will be shown in service stations, railway stations and shopping centres across the UK, as well as in regional newspapers and online. For more information, see wwww.pancreaticcanceraware.org.

Article: Symptoms and patient factors associated with diagnostic intervals for pancreatic cancer (SYMPTOM pancreatic study): a prospective cohort study, Dr Fiona M Walter, MD, Katie Mills, PhD, Silvia C Mendonca, MSc, Gary A Abel, PhD, Bristi Basu, PhD, Nick Carroll, FRCR, Sue Ballard, John Lancaster, Prof William Hamilton, MD, Prof Greg P Rubin, PhD, Prof Jon D Emery, DPhil, The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, doi: 10.1016/S2468-1253(16)30079-6, published 4 October 2016.
Chagas disease (Trypanosoma cruzi infection) is a parasitic infection that can lead to fatal cardiac disease. While Latin America is known as an endemic area, there have been relatively few studies investigating the prevalence of Chagas disease in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. A paper published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases led by researchers at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine suggests that the disease burden in southern Texas is much higher than previously thought. Considering up to 30% of people infected with Trypanosoma cruzi can develop fatal cardiomyopathy, this study's findings carry important implications to the health of the population of south Texas.

"Kissing bugs", (triatominae) who feed on both humans and animals, are the vectors primarily responsible for the transmission of Chagas disease. The disease is predominantly found in impoverished regions where substandard living conditions can lead to increased exposure to the parasitic kissing bugs. In order to assess the infection status of vectors and seroprevalence among human and mammal populations living in in the lower Rio Grande Valley, Dr. Melissa Nolan Garcia, instructor of pediatrics at Baylor who is also with Texas Children's Hospital, and colleagues tested kissing bug vectors and retrospectively analyzed previously collected sera from coyotes, stray dogs, and human participants.

Out of 841 human sera samples, 3 people (0,4%) tested positive for T. cruzi, while 8% of coyotes and 3.8% of stray dogs were found to be infected. Among the insects sampled, 56.5% were found to be T. cruzi carriers. Based on the findings of the study, the authors estimate that around 4,600 people in the Rio Grande Valley are currently infected with Chagas disease, and of those, an estimated 1,300 are at risk for developing cardiomyopathy. These results not only confirm the risk for disease transmission in south Texas, but indicate that the regional burden of Chagas disease is 23 times higher than previously estimated.

The study does have limitations, as the authors acknowledge that the specimens were originally collected for other studies, and they are now conducting larger, more extensive surveillance studies targeting Chagas risk in this region. Overall, the findings point to a greater need for attention to Chagas disease in United States, particularly the identification of high risk groups. The authors assert that, "with up to 30% of infected individuals developing a potentially fatal cardiac disease, it is imperative that we identify and treat patients before heart disease occurs."

This study was supported in part by MD000170 P20 funded from the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Centers for Translational Science Award 1U54RR023417-01 from the National Center for Research Resources and the Centers for Disease Control Award RO1 DP000210-01, the United States Department of Defense, Army (W81XWH-04-2-0035), the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), and NIH/NIAID 1R21AI114877-01A1. TPF and RP are supported by the NIH grant 5R25GM100866-02 564 awarded to Robert K. Dearth and Jason G. Parsons. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Article: One Health Interactions of Chagas Disease Vectors, Canid Hosts, and Human Residents along the Texas-Mexico Border, Melissa N. Garcia, Sarah O'Day, Susan Fisher-Hoch, Rodion Gorchakov, Ramiro Patino, Teresa P. Feria Arroyo, Susan T. Laing, Job E. Lopez, Alexandra Ingber, Kathryn M. Jones, Kristy O. Murray, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0005074, published 10 November 2016.
New research finds taking single biopsy can miss key genetic mutations that could influence drug susceptibility and resistance.

Clinicians should take multiple biopsies from patients in clinical trials of targeted breast cancer drugs to avoid missing key mutations with important implications for treatment, new research has found.

Genetic profiling of patients' tumours using biopsies has become more common in recent years, helping to drive personalised therapy and ensure that patients receive the treatments most likely to be effective for them.

The study, funded by leading charity Breast Cancer Now and published today in the journal Nature Communications, found that analysing a further biopsy could catch key genetic mutations that may influence a patient's response to aromatase inhibitor treatment.

Researchers at the Breast Cancer Now Toby Robins Research Centre at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust found these mutations were likely to be missed in around a quarter of patients by investigations which rely on a single biopsy.

They concluded that researchers should take several biopsies to develop a more accurate picture of mutations within the tumour, and warned that previous studies which relied on only one biopsy should be treated with caution as they could have missed important mutations.

The study, led by Professor Mitch Dowsett and Dr Pascal Gellert, analysed samples from the POETIC trial (perioperative endocrine therapy - individualising care) - the largest pre-surgical study to date to identify what makes some patients respond well to aromatase inhibitors while others do not.

In POETIC, post-menopausal women with ER+ breast cancer received an aromatase inhibitor for a four-week period starting two weeks prior to standard surgery. Biopsies were collected at baseline and surgery, and a control group of patients were not given aromatase inhibitor treatment but still had two samples taken, which allowed genetic differences in repeat biopsies to be seen without any potential confounding effects of treatment.

Comparing the six most frequently mutated genes in paired baseline and surgery samples from 86 patients, the researchers found that the same mutations were present in both samples in 71% of cases, but at least one of the mutations was present in only one of the samples in 29% of patients. The control and treated groups were analysed separately, as well as together, revealing no difference in the variability of mutations between samples, and indicating that the short-term use of aromatase inhibitors had not influenced the comparisons.

The results reveal a significant group of patients for whom a single biopsy would have missed potentially important mutations - for example those which may predict how the tumour will respond to aromatase inhibitor treatment or others that could reveal weaknesses within the tumour that may render it sensitive to the addition of another drug.

The findings could be due to the high degree of spatial heterogeneity in mutations within a patient's tumour, with different genetic information driving the cancer's growth being found in different areas of the tumour.

The research team also identified that mutations to a particular gene could be centrally involved in the resistance to aromatase inhibitor treatments used in oestrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer, such as anastrozole and letrozole.

ER+ tumours account for up to 80% of cases and aromatase inhibitors, which reduce the production of oestrogen, are the most effective means of treating this form of breast cancer in post-menopausal women. However these drugs are not effective for all patients and some can develop resistance to them.

Tumours which responded poorly to aromatase inhibitor treatment were found to have a greater number of mutations overall. In particular, a master regulator in the tumour cells called TP53, was mutated more in patients with poor response to aromatase inhibitors.

In the long-term, this research will help to find the best way of delivering personalised treatments based on the genetic profile of each patient's tumour. To achieve this, doctors need to be able to reliably predict how an individual ER+ patient will respond to aromatase inhibitor treatment at diagnosis, which would ensure that patients only receive treatments that benefit them.

Study leader Professor Mitch Dowsett, Professor of Biochemical Endocrinology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Head of the Ralph Lauren Centre for Breast Cancer Research at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said:

"Accurately identifying the mutations in cancers are critical to our understanding of the causes of cancer and to the development and targeting of new drugs more precisely to individual patients.

"Our work in patients with the most common form of breast cancer showed that to identify the mutations accurately in an individual's tumour required more than one biopsy of the type usually used for diagnosis."

"It is critical that we take this information into account as we try to identify those patients most likely to respond to our new therapies."

Baroness Delyth Morgan, Chief Executive at Breast Cancer Now, said:

"This research looks at how some of the most common forms of breast cancer become resistant to treatments which are usually extremely effective.

"By taking more than one biopsy, which can reveal a wider range of genetic mutations, the researchers found an improved method which will in future give us more insight into drug resistance.

"This points the way to improve future research into personalised treatments, by capturing as much genetic diversity within patients' tumours as possible."

Breast Cancer Now is very grateful to Walk the Walk, the Eranda Foundation, and The Trustees of The Mary-Jean Mitchell Green Foundation for their exceptionally generous support of Professor Mitch Dowsett's research.

The POETIC trial was funded by Cancer Research UK.
Thanks to NABU over UAH 100 mln returned to accounts of state-run companies

Over UAH 100 million has been returned to accounts of state-run companies thanks to operations of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Bureau Director Artem Sytnyk has said.

The NABU press service reported on Thursday that Sytnyk met diplomats and told them that 200 NABU detectives are investigating into more than 215 criminal cases and 36 cases are waiting for court hearings.

He said that judges are not in a hurry to pass sentences.

"In spring the Bureau sent a case against an officer of Prosecutor General's Office who tried to get a job at NABU using a bribe. Six months has passed and there is no sentence in this uncompleted case," Sytnyk said.

He recalled that 'hot imprisonment' which society is waiting for is the work of not only NABU, but the effective work of the whole law-enforcement system. The creation of the higher anti-corruption court is important. The court along with NABU and Special Anti-corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP) would create a full-featured vertical to combat corruption in upper echelons.

Sytnyk at the meeting thanked international partners for assistance in establishing NABU, cooperation during pretrial investigations and support of NABU functional independence.
WASHINGTON

Nov. 11, 2016

the United States

Donald Trump

the United States

/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Catholic Health Association ofextends its congratulations to president-elect. As citizens and people of faith, we have a responsibility to work together to make his term a success for the country we love so much. We also have a responsibility to pray for him and his administration.As citizens and caregivers with a privileged role in protecting and restoring the health of our country, we have a responsibility to share with him and the members of his administration our insights on our health care delivery system.Our current president and even ardent supporters of the Affordable Care Act have said that it can and must be improved, but it is an undeniable fact that for millions it remains the first time they have had health insurance and health care access. Because health care is so critical to the well-being of individuals and the country, we must exercise great care in making changes. We have missed the opportunity to make the ACA work as optimally as possible for our country because it unfortunately was one of the most politicized programs in our history. This election has confirmed that we must get beyond this pattern and begin focusing on the people's business.We at CHA commit ourselves to working with all people of goodwill in this new administration to make health care delivery worthy of the dignity of all the people of our country. We must not allow their health care to continue to be politicized. Too much is at stake. We can and should proceed with caution and concern as we deal with this important issue.founded in 1915, supports the Catholic health ministry's commitment to improve the health status of communities and create quality and compassionate health care that works for everyone. The Catholic health ministry is the nation's largest group of not-for-profit health systems and facilities that, along with their sponsoring organizations, employ more than 750,000 women and men who deliver services combining advanced technology with the Catholic caring tradition.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cha-stands-ready-to-work-with-president-elect-trump-300361507.html



SOURCE Catholic Health Association of the United States




NEW YORK

Nov. 11, 2016

Calvin Clark

/PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Clarity Benefit Solutions simplifies online employee benefit administration for brokers, employers, and consumers. The company's technology and services are designed to save time and lower the costs of managing benefits while also promoting employee self-service and automated ACA compliance.Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161109/437685LOGOHealth Savings Accounts (HSAs) offer a multitude of benefits to employees, but chances are they are unfamiliar with these advantages. Clarity shares four ways to increase employee enrollment in HSAs.1.. It is essential to share HSA plan options and details in a multitude of formats. Everyone processes information differently. Send emails, hang posters, pass out flyers and tip sheets, text or tweet millennials. Make sure the information is attention grabbing and includes some numbers. Communicate welland often.2.. After communicating HSA information to your employees, follow up with open enrollment meetings where the benefit administrator clearly outlines the costs and benefits of each plan the employer offers. Allow time for employees to ask questions after the information is presented. Holding a breakfast or lunch meeting may make the meeting more attractive to your employees.3.. Emphasizing the benefits of HSAs will empower your employees to make a decision that best suits their needs. Employees can contribute their pre-tax money (through payroll deductions) to pay for health expenses like deductibles, co-pays, prescription drugs, and dental/vision expenses. The employee has access to the money as soon as it is placed in the account, and the employee can change the contribution amount at any time. HSAs also follow the employee from company to company, provided they also have a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP).4.. Don't assume that once an employee is on board with an HSA that your job is done. Make sure that your online resources you have provided are easy to access and comprehend. Create a section for FAQs/answers if there isn't one already. And, provide an HSA calculator if one is not provided.Clarity Benefit Solutions provides technology that makes the health insurance plan selection process fast, easy, and straightforward. For over two decades, we have provided clients with industry-leading technology, compliance, and exceptional customer service. Our offering is designed to save time and lower the costs of managing benefits while also promoting employee self-service and automated ACA compliance., Clarity Benefit Solutions, 732-428-8272, cclark@claritybenefitsolutions.comNews distributed by PR Newswire iReach: https://ireach.prnewswire.comSOURCE Clarity Benefit Solutions
BOSTON

Nov. 11, 2016

the United States

Stuart C. Gordon

Detroit

Mei Lu

Monday, November 14

11:15am

Erin Meadows

/PRNewswire/ -- Over the past decade, the prevalence of cirrhosis has increased by almost 40 percent among people with hepatitis C (HCV) in, according to research presented at The Liver Meeting  held by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.Hepatitis C has been linked to cirrhosis (i.e., scarring of the liver), decompensated cirrhosis, and death, but the extent of the prevalence of these conditions among hepatitis C patients in the U.S. has not yet been observed in large real-world studies within the U.S. Researchers recently sought to fill this research gap by studying the prevalence of cirrhosis and decompensated cirrhosis  as well as the incidence of death  among 11,169 U.S. adults between 2006 and 2014."This analysis of cirrhosis prevalence is part of a larger study of viral hepatitis in the U.S., called the Chronic Hepatitis Cohort Study or 'CHeCS'," explains, MD; director of Hepatology, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Henry Ford Health System and one of the lead investigators in the study. "Based at Henry Ford Health System in, we work in concert with three other U.S. health systems and the Centers for Disease Control to study the outcomes and treatments for hepatitis B and C in 'real world' patients, i.e., those under routine clinical care. Previous estimates had suggested that the medical burden of chronic hepatitis C and its complications would increase in the U.S. given the aging of the population, including the "baby boomer" cohort born between 1945 and 1965 who are at the highest risk for infection. We attempted to a) gauge whether, in fact, HCV related cirrhosis and its complications were increasing and b) if so, whether there were disparities among different populations in order to better target for treatment those groups that may be at higher risk of poor outcomes."The patients studied were receiving care at the four large U.S. healthcare systems that participate in the CHeCS study. The investigators identified cirrhosis using liver biopsy reports, serum markers of liver scarring, and ICD-9 diagnostic codes. The team also used a set of ICD-9 codes that have been shown to predict decompensated cirrhosis  the term used when cirrhosis becomes so severe that the liver ceases to function properly  to determine its presence in patients.Once patients with cirrhosis were identified, the researchers looked at the annual percentage change between several different points in time to identify trends. They observed that the prevalence of cirrhosis among HCV patients increased from 20.5 percent in 2006 to 28.5 percent in 2014, with the steepest increase occurring from 2006-2007. Prevalence of decompensated cirrhosis varied by patients' age; it increased by roughly two percent per year over the study period in the oldest patients (those over 60), but largely stayed the same among younger patients. Finally, deaths in this group of patients nearly doubled from 1.7 percent in 2006 to 3.2 percent in 2013, but most of this increase took place prior to 2010, after which the rate of deaths leveled off."The proportion of hepatitis C patients with cirrhosis and its complications has grown significantly in the past decade, particularly among those over 60," says Dr. Gordon. The present analysis confirms the rising burden of chronic hepatitis C infection, and its complications, on the U.S. health care system. These rising rates may have leveled off in recent years, however, possibly related to better options for treating HCV infection. Future studies will help determine whether increased uptake of these newer medications can help stem the tide of HCV disease progression."HepatologyAASLD is a medical subspecialty society representing clinicians and researchers in liver disease. The work of our members has laid the foundation for the development of drugs used to treat patients with viral hepatitis. Access to care and support of liver disease research are at the center of AASLD's advocacy efforts.AASLD is the leading organization of scientists and healthcare professionals committed to preventing and curing liver disease. AASLD was founded in 1950 by a small group of leading liver specialists and has grown to an international society responsible for all aspects of hepatology.Press releases and additional information about AASLD are available online at www.aasld.org.Media Contact:Phone: 404-803-2857On-site Phone: 617-954-2956Email: emeadows@aasld.orgThis release was issued through The Xpress Press News Service, merging e-mail and satellite distribution technologies to reach business analysts and media outlets worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.XpressPress.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/large-study-identifies-increase-of-cirrhosis-in-hepatitis-c-patients-300360289.html



SOURCE American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD)




Advertisement

Fernandez-Bustamante and her colleagues, including Karsten Bartels, assistant professor of anesthesiology at CU Anschutz, set out to understand these PPCs better and how to address them.They studied patients classified as "physical status 3" by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, meaning they suffered severe systemic disease. The patients underwent prolonged, non-cardiac or thoracic surgery with general anesthesia and mechanical ventilation.A third of them developed one or more PPCs after surgery. These patients were often older with hypertension, cancer or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Severe complications were rare. The most common complication was simply requiring oxygen for longer than 24 hours after the operation. That was followed by atelectasis (or portions of the lungs being partially collapsed).But even these relatively mild complications were associated with significantly increased hospital stay, admission to the ICU or mortality within the first week after surgery.And this was observed at seven large American academic hospitals."This tells us that care could be improved," Fernandez-Bustamante said. "If we could understand better and prevent mild PPCs we could improve the recovery of thousands of patients."Doctors know that giving patients too many fluids or too big breaths during anesthesia can cause pulmonary problems afterwards.Fernandez-Bustamante said that paying more attention to preventing atelectasis, for example, before, during and after surgery, could reduce some of them, improve oxygenation and prevent the need of oxygen therapy and hospital stay.She noted that physicians must also optimize fluids and pain control, and minimize blood loss during operations to prevent PPCs. Doing all of this, she said, could improve patient outcomes and result in shorter hospital stays."Surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, respiratory therapists, and others, must collaborate better to make this successful. And of course patients need to know they play a critical role in their own recovery. We must work with them closely before, during and after surgery," Fernandez-Bustamante said. "If we want patients to have less pulmonary complications, we need a truly comprehensive approach to this problem."Source: Eurekalert


Please complete this form and we'll send you a personalised information that is requested

You may use this for your own reference or forward it to your friends.

Please use the information prudently. If you are not a medical doctor please remember to consult your healthcare provider as this information is not a substitute for professional advice.
Advertisement

To do this, the researchers recorded and analyzed a total of 1263 ads, corresponding to a total of 256 hours of television. All of them were broadcast on the two most-viewed children-oriented channels watched by Spanish children between 2 and 12 years, and two generalist channels targeting all audiences.The record was carried out by a nutritionist specialized in marketing, who classified the different types of ads based on the amount of nutrients, subliminal messages and recommendations on healthy habits they gave. Thematic channels broadcast 16 food advertisements per hour, a figure that rises to 25 in the case of generalist channels.The most broadcast ads on thematic channels were on infant feeding (excluding milk formulas), with a total of 191 ads (33% of total ads), followed by dairy products (136 ads, 23.5%). In the case of generalist channels, the most broadcast ads were on fast food restaurants (72 ads, 10.5%), vitamins and mineral supplements (71 ads, 10.4%), and dairy products (60 ads, 8.8%).The results showed that the broadcast of these ads on children-oriented thematic channels increased between 2007 and 2013 (from 6 to 10 ads per hour and channel, respectively), similar to what happens with the generalist channels, where, despite the regulations, the broadcast of 'junk food' advertisements has also increased.Given the results of their work, the researchers warn of the need to increase control over food commercials that are broadcast on Spanish television, "and take advantage of the level of attention that children pay to television as they watch cartoons to promote healthy lifestyles and a healthy nutrition, with the goal of preventing overweight and obesity", professor Cristina Campoy Folgoso, UGR professor and lead author of this work, says.The researcher warns that it would be necessary to analyze a larger sample of television channels, in order to know, with precision, the information that Spanish children are getting through advertising.She also notes that "there is currently no control of the advertisings that reach children through games downloaded to their cellphones and tablets as well as in social networks, so it is very necessary to legislate said aspect".Source: Eurekalert
The following are some of this week's reports from the MEMRI Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM) Project, which translates and analyzes content from sources monitored around the clock, among them the most important jihadi websites and blogs. (To view these reports in full, you must be a paying member of the JTTM; for membership information, send an email to [email protected] with "Membership" in the subject line.)

Note to media and government: For a full copy of these reports, send an email with the title of the report in the subject line to [email protected]. Please include your name, title, and organization in your email.

EXCLUSIVE: New Book By Al-Qaeda Supporter Suggests Attacking Financial Institutions, Global Maritime Transport To Topple U.S.

A new book published by an Al-Qaeda supporter that encourages Muslims to carry out attacks on strategic economic targets in the U.S. and the West in general, whether as part of planned organizational activity or on the part of lone wolves, in order to topple the U.S.

EXCLUSIVE: ISIS Claims Killing Four Americans In Ramadi

On November 7, 2016, the Islamic State's Anbar province claimed that it killed four Americans working for a private security firm.

EXCLUSIVE: Pro-ISIS Hacking Group Threatens to Target the West With A Destructive 'Electronic Virus' Soon

On October 31, 2016, pro-ISIS hacking group Hack Kabir announced on its Twitter account that it will soon launch a destructive electronic virus on the "infidel West."

EXCLUSIVE: Pro-ISIS Woman In Belgium Tweets Her Wishes For Martyrdom

From July 7, 2016 to October 21, 2016, a French-speaking girl posted close to 900 messages on Twitter, praising jihadi fighters and in particular the Islamic State (ISIS), while expressing her desire to die.

Video Released By ISIS's Al-Jazeera Province Shows Children Executing Spies, Threatens Russia And West With Attacks

On November 9, 2016, the Islamic State (ISIS) Al-Jazeera province released a video documenting the execution of spies by four Islamic State children. The video, which is aimed at deterring Muslims from spying against the Islamic State, emphasizes ISIS's resilience and success in capturing and punishing such spies, and urges other spies to repent before it is too late.

Irish ISIS Fighter Who Tweeted Threats Against West And Followed Garland, Texas Shooter Online Carries Out Suicide Attack In Iraq

On November 4, 2016, the Islamic State (ISIS) Al-Jazirah province announced that a vehicular suicide attack had been carried out against the Popular Mobilization Forces near Mosul by an Irish jihadi, Abu Osama Al-Irlandi, and posted a photo of Irlandi standing next to the vehicle that he used in the attack.

ISIS Calls On Sunnis To Defend Mosul, Urges Muslims Worldwide To Kill Infidels And Apostates, Threatens To Attack Turkey And Rome

On November 7, 2016, the media office of ISIS in Al-Khayr province released a video urging the Sunnis in Mosul to join its ranks to defend the city, calling on Muslims worldwide to kill, terrorize, and harm infidels and apostates, and threatened to strike in Turkey and Rome.

ISIS Weekly Launches Series Of Articles On Electronic Warfare

Issue 54 of the Islamic State (ISIS) weekly newsletter Al-Naba', released online today, featured the first in a series of articles on electronic warfare.

ISIS Announces New Website For Broadcasting Its Al-Bayan Radio Station

On November 6, 2016, the Islamic State (ISIS) announced a new website for broadcasting its Al-Bayan radio station.

AQAP Official And Ex-Gitmo Prisoner Ibrahim Al-Qusi Threatens To Continue Attacking U.S., Says To Americans: You Will Not Dream Of Security Until Muslims Are Safe

On November 5, 2016, Al-Malahem, the media arm of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), released an audio statement by Ibrahim Al-Qusi, a member of the group's Shura council and a former Guantanamo prisoner. In his statement, Al-Qusi threatened to attack the U.S. and vowed that American will not be safe until Muslims around the world are safe.

Jabhat Fath Al-Sham Announces Death Of Several Group Officials In American Attack In Idlib

On November 9, the Syria-based jihadi group Jabhat Fath Al-Sham (formerly Jabhat Al-Nusura), posted a communique on its official Twitter account announcing that several of its fighters were killed in an American airstrike in Maarrat Misrin in the Rif Idlib area earlier this month.

Taliban News Agency Offers Advice To President-Elect Donald Trump

The following report is now a complimentary offering from MEMRI's Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM). For JTTM subscription information, click here.

On November 9, 2016, the Alemarah news agency published a statement by Taliban Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid on its official English-language website regarding the results of the U.S. presidential election, which offers advice to president-elect Donald Trump.

ISIS Article Denounces U.S. Presidential Election, Says American Muslims Who Vote Are Apostates, And Calls For Killing Muslim, Christian, And Women Voters

The following report is now a complimentary offering from MEMRI's Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM). For JTTM subscription information, click here.

On November 5, 2016, the Islamic State (ISIS), via Al-Hayat Media, released a seven-page article in English threatening American Muslims if they vote in the November 8 U.S. presidential election. Most of the article is directed at Muslims in the U.S., lashing out at them for participating in the democratic process and warning them of the consequences of such actions. It accuses all American Muslims who vote of apostasy and heresy, and calls on ISIS supporters to spill their blood if they do not repent. Similarly, it calls for killing "Crusader" (Christian) voters, including women, who, it says, "are no longer mere wives serving Crusader husbands and raising cross-worshiping children," but female voters who are part of the democratic system that decrees that "crusades be waged against Islam and the Muslims." The article concludes with a threat to the elections, praying that Allah will "make this year's U.S. presidential election a dreadful calamity like no other to have struck America throughout its pathetic history."
The following is an overview of Russia's official reactions to Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. Presidential election. While the overall tone of the comments in the previous MEMRI Special Dispatch displayed optimism and hope for a genuine reset of U.S.-Russia relations under a Trump presidency, the following comments generally seek to dampen excessive expectations that U.S.-Russia relations will improve significantly:

Prime Minister Medvedev: 'It Is The Political System That Has Allowed [Trump] To Win'

On November 10, during an official visit to Israel marking 25-years of diplomatic ties between the two countries, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said: "As for the [US] election results, they should be analyzed by political scientists. I can only say that victory by a so-called political outsider is unusual for the US political system. I have read many comments which say that Donald Trump has defeated the system. I don't think this is true; rather, it is the political system that has allowed him to win. As for the future, this political system will likely try to keep the new president in line, which it can certainly do because the US political system is very powerful. Will President Trump be able to withstand this pressure? Will he stick to the priorities he declared during his presidential campaign? Time will tell."

(Government.ru, November 10)



Medvedev during a press conference in Israel. (Source: Government.ru, November 10)

Zakharova Dixit:

Russia's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova wrote in her Facebook page: "The NY Times writes that Trump's victory is an unanticipated present for Putin... The Western media, kings of the mainstream, cannot admit even now that they turned out to be chump experts. They cannot admit that their 'glorified' analytics is a bluff. The main reason for their failure is simple - it's the LACK OF OBJECTIVITY [uppercase original]. For many years, they aggressively instilled in all the mantra that 'bad Russia' is the source of all misfortune. Then they discussed it so much that they began to believe it themselves. Under these circumstances, the election results were 'unexpected' for them and their listeners."

(Facebook.com/maria.zakharova.167, November 10)



Maria Zakharova (Source: Instagram.com/mzakharovamid)

Foreign Minister Lavrov: 'I Cannot Say That All Of Our Partners' Previous Leaders Were Predictable In Every Situation'

On the sidelines of the ceremony where foreign ambassadors presented their credentials to President Vladimir Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took questions from the media on Trump's victory:

Question: "Donald Trump has won the presidential election in the United States. Was this unexpected?"

Sergey Lavrov: "Why? We said that the American people would decide. The American people have made their decision. We waited for them to do this and it has happened."

Question: "Is this a positive result for Russia?"

Sergey Lavrov: "We do not have any preferences. As President Vladimir Putin said, we will work with any new US leader elected by the American people. This attitude remains, it has not changed in any way.'

Question: 'Many people point out Donald Trump's unpredictability and impulsiveness..."

Sergey Lavrov: "I have already said that we are ready to cooperate with any president. I cannot say that all of our partners' previous leaders were predictable in every situation. This is a part of life and politics. We are hearing a lot of words but we will judge by deeds and respond accordingly."

(Mid.ru, November 9)

Pushkov Tweet Storm:

Senator and former chair of the International Affairs Committee of the State Duma, Aleksey Pushkov, (@Alexey_Pushkov) posted on his twitter account: "We should expect neither love nor presents from Trump: he is a patriot and a businessman. But he is not driven by ideology - he is a realist. And a realist understands the language of agreements [or deals]."



(Twitter.com/Alexey_Pushkov, November 10, 2016)

Pushkov also wrote: "Madonna stripped and Katy Perry got undressed in vain to support Clinton. [Robert] De Niro got angry for nothing. America was not excited by it. Curtain time."



(Twitter.com/Alexey_Pushkov, November 9, 2016)

Minister of Economic Development Alexey Ulyukaev: 'I'm Afraid To Frighten Away The Hope'

Commenting on Trump's victory, Minister of Economic Development Alexey Ulyukaev said: "I'm afraid to 'frighten away the hope.' Eight years ago, when Barack Obama got elected, there were great expectations. Back then there was a talk about a policy of reset, and some steps were even taken. Unfortunately, we ended up with a poor result. That's why I believe we must be conservative with the estimates; there are lots of things to understand ahead of us. We would definitely want to restore the high level of confidence and cooperation on strategic matters as well as economic cooperation."

(Ria.ru, November 9)

Chairman Of The State Duma Committee For International Affairs Slutsky: 'The Status Of Russo-American Relations Remains An Issue Of Serious Concern'

The Chair of the State Duma's International Affairs Committee, Leonid Slutsky, said: "Today new hope has dawned for Russia and the entire world. There is hope for certain positive developments in Russian -American relations - if we go by Trump's pre-election rhetoric and primary on the fact that the line of the previous administration headed toward building a unipolar world based on blood[shed] will be phased out. The upcoming weeks will show the extent that Trump stands for world stability, multi-polar world order and constructive cooperation with Russia or he did he disguise his true position from the voters.

(Ria.ru, November 9)

In another interview Slutsky said: "The status of Russo-American relations remains an issue of serious concern. We still await a reaction, although we don't have a particular hope that the US Senate and House of Representatives States will convene together with some representatives of the four committees for foreign affairs to discuss the situation."

(Kommersant.ru November 11)

First Deputy Chairman of the Duma Committee for International Affairs Novikov: 'It Is Still Too Early To Hope For Any Grand Changes In The White House'

Vyacheslav Novikov, first Deputy Chairman of the state Duma Committee for International Affairs, also said that it is unrealistic to expect swift changes after Trump's victory. "Trump's victory is a signal that problems in the U.S.A. have accumulated...Hillary Clinton personifies the continuation of the current course, and this result therefore shows an attempt to change something. However, the second part of the problem lies in the fact that Trump will be president of his own country. He will have to work with the ruling elite, and it is still too early to hope for any radical changes in the White House's policy. The rise of a new figure is a good opportunity for the U.S. to escape those pitfalls which appeared in the preceding period, and get out with dignity and with good face. Trump may adjust a series of foreign policy lines; and this will not appear to be a painful defeat but may on the contrary [be seen as] a reinforcement of America's position on the world stage."

(Kommersant.ru November 11)

Pro-Kremlin Think Tank Director General Kortunov: 'Is Putin Ready To Give Trump An 'Advance' For Future Friendly Russian-American Relations?'

Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the pro-Kremlin Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), wrote in the pro-Kremlin think tank Valdai Club website: "As to the Russian-American relations, for the first time in a long time there is some light at the end of the tunnel, even very distant and faint one. If Hillary Clinton won, to begin a dialogue with the new administration would be much more difficult, considering everything that she said about Russia and Vladimir Putin during the election campaign. Psychologically and politically Trump is rather ready to turn the page and start a new chapter in relations with Moscow.

But a lot will depend on the Russian side. The most intriguing question, in my opinion, is as follows. Is Vladimir Putin ready to give Donald Trump an 'advance' for future friendly Russian-American relations? Is the Russian leader ready to offer his new American counterpart something that goes beyond what the Russian side has offered Barack Obama - whether on the Syrian settlement, on strategic arms, or on some other important issue? Or will Moscow simply expect further new initiatives from Washington to begin a serious conversation?"

(Valdaiclub.com, November 9)

Head of the Civil Society Development Fund Kostin: 'Let's Wait For The Formation Of The Trump Administration'

Renowned political strategist and the head of the Civil Society Development Fund, Konstantin Kostin, commented: "Let's await the formation of the Trump administration. It is hard for me to understand the enthusiasm of Russian MPs, who greeted the news of Trump's election with applause. Trump is the US President, and he will act in his own country's interests first and foremost..." Kostin then added: "US-Russian relations have always been better and more predictable during the times of Republican presidents... Trump, as an adherent of realpolitik, will certainly be against budgetary expenditures to fulfill a [US] mission of global hegemon, exporter of democracy and color revolutions... Trump is the most unusual and anti-system candidate in modern US history. The support that Trump has received means that most Americans are a lot more interested in their own income, taxes, rational implementation of the budget and safety than in the rights of sexual minorities, migrants and support for 'color revolutions'."

(Pravdareport.com, November 9)
Donald Trump's election as the 45th U.S. president was received in the Arab world with mixed emotions. While Syria and Egypt welcomed the result and expressed hopes for cooperation with the new American administration, reactions in the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were ambivalent. Although the Gulf states were glad to see the back of the Obama administration, which had brought them tremendous disappointment because of its Iran and Syria policies, and expressed cautious optimism that Trump's policies would be radically different, they were at the same time very concerned because of his hostile statements regarding Muslims.

The different positions of Arab countries was manifested in their leaders' reactions to Trump's victory. Egyptian President 'Abd Al-Fattah Al-Sisi was among the first leaders to call and congratulate him, and also invited him to visit the country.[1] Others, including Saudi King Salman, sufficed with sending congratulatory letters stressing the importance of their countries' relations with the U.S.

This document will review reactions in several Arab countries to Trump's win, as expressed in statements by officials as well as in press articles, especially editorials and op-eds by prominent journalists. It should be mentioned that the Palestinian press has yet to publish editorials addressing Trump's victory.

Egypt: We Expect Trump To Bring New Spirit To Egypt-U.S. Relations

The Egyptian regime, under President 'Abd Al-Fattah Al-Sisi, welcomed Trump's election. As soon as his win was announced, Al-Sisi was one of the first to call him and congratulate him.[2] A statement by the president's office read: "Egypt expects that Trump's presidential term will bring a new spirit to the relations between the countries" and that the two countries will become closer.[3]

Editor Of Official Egyptian Daily Al-Ahram: Trumps' Victory - An Opportunity For Egypt To Regain Regional, International Prominence

Muhammad 'Abd Al-Hadi 'Allam, editor-in-chief of the official Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, wrote in a similar vein: "The phone conversation between Egyptian President 'Abd Al-Fattah Al-Sisi and U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump, and the congratulations [Al-Sisi] conveyed to [Trump], are a direct reflection of [the former's] honest desire for deep relations with a country that, for over three decades, has had tight strategic diplomatic and economic ties with Egypt - although in the last few years these relations were marred by disagreements about internal [Egyptian] and security matters that created a schism between the largest Arab country and the world's most powerful country...

"Trump's victory and Clinton's defeat [deliver] a crushing blow to the foundations of the tamkin project [the Muslim Brotherhood's plan for strengthening Islamic rule in Egypt], and pave the way for Egypt to regain its natural role as the pivot of the Middle East and the Arab world. The opportunity exists, and both sides must seize it. If we what to seize this opportunity to cooperate with the new administration in Washington, which understands that Egypt's role can be realized only [if there is] cooperation and understanding on crucial issues, we must recalibrate [our course] and make changes, so we can play a more central role and dare to confront the existing positions of [certain] regional countries that openly sponsor terrorist organizations."[4]

Similar sentiments were expressed by Al-Ahram Ahmed 'Abd Al-Tawab: "Whatever the commentary on his tendencies and ideas, most of which concern domestic U.S. matters... from now on we must consider the positive points where we can collaborate with him, especially in light of his explicit remarks on the war on terrorism, and specifically his promise to eliminate ISIS.

"As for Hillary Clinton, her defeat is highly profitable for Egypt and the Arab region. She was involved in all the destructive actions that harmed the region since she became secretary of state. It was she who adopted and helped spread the policy of reliance on the so-called 'moderate Islam,' that included the Muslim Brotherhood [MB] in that moderate camp. Therefore, the MB is miserable over her defeat, since while she deluded herself into thinking that she was ahead, she promised to help them return to Egypt's political life. She also boasted of her support for Israel and questioned her rival Trump's support for it, and even ratcheted up presidential campaign with overblown slogans about who supports Israel more! She also acknowledged U.S. involvement in establishing the notorious Al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Trump once accused her of participating in creating ISIS..."[5]

On the other hand, Al-Shurouq editor-in-chief 'Imad Al-Din Hussein, known for his criticism of the Al-Sisi regime, wrote: "We forget that it was the various organizations' increasing extremism and terrorism in the name of Islam, and their operations in Europe and the U.S., that triggered the rise of Western extremism. Extremists everywhere, especially ISIS, will be the ones who are happiest with Trump's victory, as he will breathe new life into them.

"We in Egypt and in the Arab world must read and understand the Americans' real feelings, how they think, and what motivated them to elect a man believed by nearly the entire world to be insane. Most world leaders did not yearn for a Trump victory, and some even openly hoped he would lose. But everyone in politics will forget about that and look ahead. This is the reality in the cruel world of politics...

"Personally, hand on my heart, I am afraid of Trump's surprises [to come, which may pose] the greatest danger to the world. But in politics we must learn to be pragmatic, and must completely separate passionate emotions and aspirations from interests..."[6]

Egyptian TV Host Tamer Amin: At Least Trump Says He's An Enemy to Your Face - Democrats Wear One Million Masks

On Egypt's Al-Hayat TV, on November 9, television host Tamer Amin said that he was happy that Trump had won, adding that he couldn't stand Obama's policies in the Middle East, and accused Clinton of founding and financing ISIS. He further said that Republicans tell the truth to your face, while Democrats have "70 faces and one million masks." He concluded: "We congratulate ourselves that we will get to see First Lady Trump, as well as his daughter, who is truly a sight for sore eyes."

To view the MEMRI TV clip, click here or below.

Editor Of Syrian Daily: Trump's Election Brings Joy To Syria

In Syria, there was optimism and joy at Trump's win, because of his positions on terrorism, but primarily because of his defeat of Clinton, who as secretary of state when the Syria crisis erupted in 2011 was firmly against the regime's violent suppression of the revolution against it.

President Bashar Al-Assad's political and military advisor Bouthaina Sha'aban expressed caution in an interview with NPR: "Syria does not interfere in the results of the elections and in who won them. What interests Syrians is the policy of the new president. If the policy is in line with Damascus's aspirations, then Syria will be open to any collaboration with the U.S. as well as with other nations that respect national sovereignty and preserve the interests of people, instead of interfering in their affairs. American interference in the affairs of other countries has brought nothing but disaster. The U.S. must undertake a policy of collaboration with countries, as opposed to one of superiority and [issuing] dictates."[7]

However, Syrian MP Muhammad Kheir Al-Akam, who is one of the regime's representatives in talks with the opposition, was more decisive: "A Trump victory is better than a Clinton victory. [Had she won], the situation in the region would have been far worse, and the Gulf states would have been the big winners."[8]

Waddah 'Abd Rabo, editor-in-chief of the Syrian daily Al-Watan, which is close to the regime, was thrilled at Trump's win, saying that all his views "benefit Syria." In an article titled "Trump - Crisis For Global Elites, Joy For Syria," he wrote that the American street "has chosen extremism over manipulation and honesty over lies and deception." He said that the win of both Brexit in the U.K. and Trump in the U.S. clearly showed that both peoples "are more aware [than before] of their politicians' deceit, lies, and destructive wars, as well as their reliance on Gulf money, their obsequiousness to backwards and reactionary [Gulf] emirates, and their disregard for the spread of Wahhabi Islam in their own countries' mosques and suburbs - and of the fact that they had enabled Al-Sa'ud [the Saudi royal family] and others to arm and fund terrorist organizations..."

Explaining why he was glad about Trump's win, he wrote: "U.S. President-Elect [Trump] has no aspirations regarding Syria and the region, and does not believe that the Gulf states' plans to destroy Syria are beneficial. He, like most Syrians, seeks the elimination of ISIS and other extremist terrorist groups, and could take the hands of Russia and Syria so that they together could end one of the most horrible crimes of the century, which was perpetrated by the previous American administration along with its Saudi, Qatari, and Turkish allies; he could also protect his own country's borders and revive its deteriorating economy. These positions all benefit Syria. Therefore, you could not miss the joy on the faces of most Syrians, many of whom spent the entire night watching the tally of the votes, while others awoke to the results for which they had hoped but did not expect." 'Abd Rabo added: "There is no way that Trump will take, and hold, power without seriously changing his country's foreign policy..."[9]

Senior Figure In Syrian Opposition: We Expect To Cooperate With Trump In Order To Stop Killing Of Syrian People

At the same time, the Syrian opposition also congratulated Trump on his win and expressed hope to cooperate with him in order to end the tragedy of the Syrian people. The general coordinator of the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), Riyad Hijab, sent a letter to Trump in which he congratulated him on his own behalf and that of the HNC, and "on behalf of millions of Syrians yearning for freedom and democracy," and wrote: "This is a historic opportunity that we must seize in order to deepen the friendship between the Syrian and American peoples... We in Syria expect to deepen the ties and the coordination with you in order to bring peace to our region and find just and expedient solutions to the threat of terror that is endangering the region, in all its forms and organizations, especially the state terror that the [Syrian] regime is employing against the Syrian people - [a people] that is fighting to rid itself of a repugnant dictatorship and enjoy freedom and democracy like all other nations of the free world... We expect to cooperate [with you] in order to stop the killing of Syrians and find, along with [the U.S.] and Syria's other allies, the best and most expedient ways to defend [Syria's] citizens, relieve their suffering and bring peace and security to our region."[10]

Qatari Dailies: "Trump's Win Is Greatly Worrying For Arab Rulers And Leaders"

In the Gulf countries there was cautious optimism and hope that Trump's policies on issues of regional concern, particularly Iran and Syria, would differ from those of his predecessor. Gulf leaders sent Trump congratulatory messages expressing their desire for closer relations with the U.S.

However, the London daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, owned by Qatar, that openly supported Clinton, reported that "far from [diplomatic] protocol, Trump's win is greatly worrying for Arab rulers and leaders. They are facing a new America led by Trump, and they fear that he will change the regional order that existed for decades." The daily also stated that Gulf leaders "want an American president who understands their fears, after eight years of lack of confidence because of Obama, with whom they did not have the kind of personal relationship that they highly value."[11]

The daily's November 11, 2016 editorial expressed these apprehensions felt by the Gulf states. It noted that the first to rejoice at Trump's victory and congratulate him were Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Egyptian President 'Abd Al-Fattah Al-Sisi and the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad, whereas the Gulf states felt "considerable apprehension" about his win. He added: "One of the controversial aspects of Trump's election campaign was his position towards the Arab Gulf states, and his statements to the effect that the U.S. would not defend these states for free, but would exact a price for this protection. This is close to blackmail... The fact that he made similar statements regarding [America's] allies in NATO may comfort the Arabs somewhat, but this statement nevertheless alerts [the Arabs] to how he truly sees them: as weaklings who need to bribe someone to defend them!

"Some might say that Trump the president will be completely different from Trump the candidate who wanted to collect votes, and that the U.S. is a state of institutions. Those are reasonable arguments, but Trump is known as an authoritarian figure, and unlike Obama, his party has a majority in Congress. Add to that the fact that the Supreme Court will be under his influence, [and we are led to the conclusion that] the distance between his slogans and his actions may not be so big. Therefore, some of the Arabs' and Muslims' fears may unfortunately come true."[12]



Cartoon in Qatari daily: "The real end of the world" will not be the result of "a meteor hitting the earth," "the eruption of a super-volcano" or "the return of the ice age," but of "trump's victory in the U.S. presidential elections (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, London, November 11, 2016)



Cartoon in Qatari daily: "The scream of the U.S. elections" (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, London, November 10, 2016)

In an editorial, the Qatari daily Al-Raya called on Trump to take seriously the Gulf countries' apprehensions about U.S. policies in the region, and to rethink them so that they are more in line with these countries' regional and international status: "The history of solid relations between the Arab Gulf states and the U.S., which evolved into a strategic partnership, mean that the new American president must take seriously the concerns in the Gulf about U.S. policy, particularly the U.S. position on problems in the region - the bizarre JASTA [Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act], Iran's interference in regional affairs, Israel and the Palestinian problem, and the situation in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria - because these issues impact relations between the U.S. and the Gulf states...

"Trump's presidential win, and the beginning of a new presidential era for the U.S., offer the perfect opportunity for the American administration to reexamine its positions on Gulf and Arab issues. Therefore, the U.S., which is facing a new era, must realize that the international and regional situation has completely changed, and that the Gulf Cooperation Council states will no longer stand on the sidelines of the regional and international crises that affect them. This is especially true after they became main and central actors, whose positions on all matters are listened to, and after they became central partners regionally and internationally who cannot be dismissed, circumvented, or glossed over, as the past.

"Therefore, the Gulf states, including Qatar which has congratulated the new American president on his victory, openly yearn for the glorious future that awaits their relations with the U.S., because they grasp their importance. They hope that the Gulf and the U.S. will act together to overcome the fears impacting their relationship and will strengthen their strategic partnership on the basis of new principles that meet Gulf demands. This hinges on settling of matters that are pending, which is the most important thing being demanded of the new American administration."[13]



Cartoon in Qatari daily: Trump in the White House (Al-Sharq, Qatar, November 10, 2016)

Saudi Editorial: Perhaps Trump, Unlike Obama, Will Once Again Acknowledge The Existence Of A Global Axis Of Evil

Saudi King Salman bin 'Abd Al-Aziz sent his congratulations to Trump, underlining the close U.S.-Saudi relations and expressing his wish for even greater closeness in a way that will serve the interests of both.[14] Saudi prince and businessman Walid bin Talal, who last year called Trump a "disgrace... to all America" and demanded that he withdraw from the presidential race for his remarks about Muslims, tweeted: "President elect @realDonaldTrump whatever the past differences, America has spoken, congratulations & best wishes for your presidency."



(Twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal, November 9, 2016)

Several editorials in Saudi dailies expressed optimism about Trump's future policies. The official Saudi daily Al-Watan's stated: "Trump promised that he would reexamine international treaties signed between the U.S. and other countries, chiefly Iran, whose foreign minister yesterday asked the new American president to honor past agreements. Perhaps Trump will [re-acknowledge the existence of] the global axis of evil declared by George Bush Jr., [a recognition] which Obama abandoned when he negotiated [with Iran on the nuclear issue], saying at that time that this was a good thing...

"There is no doubt that Trump, who blamed Obama and his administration for the failure of American foreign policy, will be successful in his own foreign policy, as the years past have been one long failure because of false red lines, empty promises, and agreements that damaged international peace and security. There will be no radical changes to the strategy of U.S. policy around the world despite eight years of weakness and withdrawal to the domestic arena. But Trump will restore confidence in the U.S. government, which has lost credibility worldwide [due to events in] Crimea, Syria, China, and Libya..."[15]

In its editorial, the official daily 'Okaz stated: "We are hopeful - [although] it is hope mingled with fear - that the new [American] policy that we will see in Trump's presidency will be more positive vis-a-vis the important issues in the Middle East, after the waning of the U.S. role [here] changed the situation in the region from one end to the other."[16]









Cartoon in Saudi daily: Following Trump victory, "American Muslims and Arabs" immigrate to "Canada and other countries" (Al-Medina , Saudi Arabia, November 10, 2016)

Former Editor Of Saudi Daily: Trump's Position Against Terrorist Muslims Should Not Be Considered Racist

Senior Saudi journalist 'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, formerly editor of the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and also former director of Al-Arabiya TV, sought to reassure readers, writing that the U.S. is a state of institutions, and that even if Trump does make changes in U.S. foreign policy, there will not be a complete reversal: "Don't look at President-Elect Trump, but at the U.S., which is an establishment state... Perhaps there will be changes, but there will be no reversal of [U.S.] foreign policy. Trump won the U.S. presidential election, so the debate that comprised the election campaign is over, and you will hear no more statements against Muslims and foreigners...

"Will Trump go very far from the policy of his predecessor Obama? He may do so on issues that the previous policy failed to tackle, and on issues that have been proven by developments to threaten the interests of the U.S. or its allies in Europe, or that are connected to the international balance of power..."

With regard to Trump's statements about Muslims, Al-Rashed wrote: "The president-elect has a rich background in his attitude towards Muslims, and he never took a racist stance and never joined informational or political campaigns against Muslims in the U.S. or outside it, even in the wake of the phobia that prevailed following the September 11 terror attacks in New York, his own city...

"Being against Muslims involved in terrorism and in extremism should in no way be seen as racist. This is also the Muslims' position. It is groups of ideologies with a terrorist perception that are trying to blur [the difference between] hostility to extremism and hostility towards Islam, and it is they are trying to disrupt and incite for their own political aims. The Arab countries have much to do in order to create a relationship with the new administration in Washington once it is established, and in order to work with the U.S. superpower that impacts the region's stability and prosperity. We must not blame Washington [for our troubles] and ignore the fact that most of our problems stem from our own decisions and actions, and that most of the solutions are in our own hands."[17]



Cartoon in Saudi daily: U.S. presidents change; U.S. policy stays the same ( Al-Sharq, Saudi Arabia, November 10, 2016)

A post on the Twitter page of Saudi blogger and human rights activist Raif Badawi likewise reacted to Trump's election. Badawi, founder of the "Liberal Network" website and a prominent figure in Saudi Arabia's liberal movement, was sentenced in May 2014 to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam. The post on his Twitter account, which is managed by his wife, congratulated Trump and urged him not to forget to defend human rights and the prisoners of conscience against extremism.[18]

Jordan: Relations With The U.S. Are Not Impacted By Election Results

In Jordan too, it was emphasized that the U.S. is a state of institutions, and that relations with it will not be impacted by the election results. King Abdullah sent a letter of congratulations to Trump expressing his hope that U.S.-Jordan relations will become closer.[19]

Jordanian government spokesman Muhammad Al-Momani said: "Our relations with the U.S. are friendly and strategic in economic, political, military, and security aspects, and they are genuine relations between institutions, not only between leaderships... The U.S. is a state of institutions and cooperation with it continues regardless of the election results... President[-Elect] Donald Trump has already expressed his esteem for Jordan, in several statements in the past, saying that he, like the Congressional leaders, expects to cooperate with King Abdullah II, particularly in matters pertaining to fighting terrorism and to security and stability in the region."[20]

Editor In Official Jordanian Daily Al-Rai: Jordan's Good And Strategic Relations With U.S. Will Continue In Trump Era

On the day after the elections, the official Jordanian daily Al-Rai published on its front page an article titled "Jordan-U.S. Relations Are Good and Strategic," by Faisal Malkawi, a senior member of the paper's editorial board. He wrote: "Over the last decades, Jordan's relations with the U.S. have developed from [mere] bilateral ties into strategic ties and an alliance in various domains. This did not change with the changing U.S. administrations, whether Democratic or Republican... The various U.S. administrations [all] appreciated Jordan's role and the leadership of King Abdullah II, [and Jordan's] positions on regional and international issues...

"Jordan-U.S. relations will [continue to] develop in all areas under the administration of the 45th American president, Donald Trump...

"At all stages and in all conditions, and under various U.S. administrations, the Middle East, with all its issues, crises and circumstances, has been at the focus of U.S. concern, and it is expected to remain a central issue of concern for the new U.S. president Donald Trump... In the coming days we will witness strategic Jordan-U.S. relations anchored in a long history and with a present and future based on cooperation and trust... There is nothing to keep Jordanian diplomacy from embarking on a new path of [joint] work with President[-Elect] Donald Trump and the new U.S. administration..."[21]



Cartoon in independent Jordanian daily: Statue of Liberty seeks to emigrate to Canada following Trump's win (Al-Ghad, Jordan, November 10, 2016) [22]

Newspaper of Lebanon's March 14 Forces: Trump Will Necessarily Adopt A Middle East Policy That Differs From Obama's

Lebanese Prime-Minister Elect Sa'd Al-Hariri sent a congratulatory telegram to Trump, stressing that in light of the great challenges faced by the Middle East, his leadership is "essential for achieving stability, security, and peace in it." He stressed in the telegram that Trump will find Lebanon to be a partner for his efforts, and that the Lebanese "have high hopes for his help in advancing peace, security, stability, and democracy in our region that suffers from instability, [and this] begins with a political, peaceful solution for the Syria crisis."

In its editorial, the Lebanese Al-Mustaqbal daily, which Al-Hariri owns, stated that in light of the failure of the Obama administration's policy, the Trump administration would certainly change U.S. foreign policy, but wondered whether this would be better or worse for the world: "After Trump's election, the Lebanese and the Arabs in general cannot but hope for an improvement in the atmosphere in the region, in a way that will advance a policy of tackling explosive issues instead of letting them be a main cause of loss of human life, property, and resources and a wide arena for terrorism...

"There is no argument that Obama's policy, characterized by hesitation, withdrawal, and passivity, was one of the main reasons for the escalation and spread of these crises, for the increase of the human and humanitarian tragedies that they brought, and for their spilling across their geographic borders, particularly in Syria and Iraq, into farther-flung areas in the region and in the world.

"Therefore, no one disputes that the only sure thing now is that President-Elect Donald Trump will change the policy of his predecessor and adopt a different perception with regard to what is going on inside and outside the Arab region, as he himself said. The question is whether this change will help or hurt the region and the world."[23]



Cartoon in UAE daily: Trump, just like Obama, dives blindly into Middle East waters (Al-Arab , London, November 10, 2016)

Endnotes:
Donations from readers like you allow us to do what we do. Please help us continue our work with a monthly or one-time donation.
Sanctions against Russia could be withdrawn only after the full implementation of the Minsk Agreements, Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Jan Pieklo has said.

"The clear position of the West is a complete implementation of the Minsk Agreements. The issue is that we do not see this implementation, and as long as we do not see this, sanctions will be retained," Pieklo said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

He said that some EU member states are opposed to sanctions toughening, but it was possible to maintain existing sanctions and extend them by means of compromise.

"If some countries, such as Poland and Lithuania, want to tighten sanctions, the others try to mitigate them, but it is necessary to find a compromise, so that the sanctions are saved on the same level," the Polish diplomat said.

Pieklo drew attention to the fact that the issue of preservation sanctions by the EU against Russia influences the factors that are not relevant to the situation with Ukraine, in particular, elections for the U.S. presidency, military actions in Syria, etc.
Have you ever wondered how it is up there in the skies? You can never know the feeling really. Your airplane window cant do justice to the incredible beauty that is out there, thousands of miles above earth. Christiaan van Heijst, a 747 Dutch pilot, has captured the sight of heavens above. Shooting with a Nikon D800, Heijst has taken breathtaking pictures from his cockpit and believe you me, the sight is very different from what we see from our plane windows. Take a look yourself!

For all those who have the Northern Lights on their bucket list

 Instagram

The Milky Way lighting up the sky over Egypt

 Instagram

I'll meet you at the horizon  Gliding over the snowy terrain in Mongolia

 Instagram

An encounter in the sky

 Instagram

Mt Rainier peeping from the clouds above Seattle

 Instagram

City Lights

 Instagram

A home in the skies

 Facebook

A job that brings the stars in your eyes every day

 Facebook

That's how the light falls on you

 Facebook

Enough beauty to fill the heart and soul for a lifetime

 Facebook

These bright red lights in the middle of the Pacific Sea baffle and challenge what you think is the normal:

The sky, like the ocean, is mysterious and magnetic in its beauty. These stunning photographs are proof nature is so much more than we can ever imagine.

H/t  Bored Panda, Christiaan van Heijst

For more of this authors work, click here; to follow them on Twitter, click here.
You dont need tons of money or influence to help the society, sometimes a noble heart and selfless attitude is all it takes to make a difference and Tejinder Pal Singh is living proof. Singh is the founder of Food Van, an organization that serves free food to the homeless and the needy people on the last day of every month. Singh is not a millionaire or a businessman, he drives a taxi for a living, yet every month he organizes a feast for all those people, from his own pocket.

Recognizing his efforts, Singh will be honoured as the 2017 Northern Territory Local Hero as a part of Australian of the Year award on January 25, for feeding the homeless people and for his services to the Sikh community. In fact, he even got great support from Michael Gunner, Northern Territorys chief minister.

 Twitter

In 2006, Singh came from India and started driving a taxi. His journey was far from being rosy, yet he never lost hope and worked towards the betterment of the society. He was subjected to racial abuse by a passenger in his taxi, but his reply left many a people stunned and even acted as a catalyst in bringing a change in peoples behaviour towards him and his community. He didnt lose his cool and explained that its their religious faith that requires them to cover their heads with turban and why turbaned Sikhs are as much a creation of god as any other human being. Truly, well said!

2017 NT Local Hero is food van founder & taxi driver Tejinder pal Singh who provides free food for hungry and needy people around Darwin. pic.twitter.com/IOjUpq7Z9b  AusoftheYearAwards (@ausoftheyear) November 2, 2016

Earlier, in the year 2015, he was honoured as Australian of the Day for feeding the homeless. While, there are some people fighting over religion, here is one man who is restoring our faith in both religion and humanity. But, what inspires him to work so selflessly? He believes, My religion says 10% of my income should go towards helping those in need and those who need to eat. It does not matter what religion they belong to or what country them come from.

We truly salute your attitude Mr. Singh and feel that you deserve every bit of the respect people have for you. If only we could think like him, the world would definitely become a better place for everyone irrespective of their nationality or religion.

Source: The Times Of India
Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Jan Pieklo has said that the failure of the European Union to complete the process of ratification of the Association Agreement with Ukraine will be a signal to all the countries of the Eastern Partnership (Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia) that the EU is not credible.

"It would be a very bad sign for all the countries of the Eastern Partnership if the European Union is not able to complete the process of ratification of the Association Agreement. That would be a signal that the EU is not credible. I think that a solution on deal with this Dutch referendum will be found," Pieklo said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

According to the ambassador, the current situation may provide additional motivation for the EU to abolish visas for Ukraine. "The situation with the Netherlands can help in the abolition of visas to some extent," Pieklo said.

The diplomat also said that the EU has no choice but to accept the decision on visa liberalization for the Ukrainians.

"If this visa regime is maintained in the future, it will lead to frustration in the Ukrainian society. On the EUs part it will look like a step back ... I think this [the abolition of visas] will be done, because there is no other choice," the ambassador said.
As part of the Kremlin's plans to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, several sessions of regional councils are scheduled demanding the establishment of contractual relations between the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers and local councils, chief of the SBU national protection department Anatoliy Dublyk has said.

"Over half of November and beginning of December, the sessions of several regional councils were planned according to their idea, which, under the banner of decentralization, will require the practice of contractual relations between the Cabinet of Ministers and local councils," he said a briefing in Kyiv on Friday.

According to the SBU representative, a number of regional councils had already taken such decisions, which resulted in opening criminal proceedings, as previously reported. The proceedings are underway, and the evidence is being collected. A legal assessment of the organizers who are responsible for the preparation of the so-called "sessions or forums" will be provided.

"The regions are also planning to hold meetings and community meetings, leading to the meeting of the All-Ukrainian Forum of Local Councils. Direct demands of federalization are not foreseen. At the same time the strategy of creeping erosion of central authority is chosen. That is, the main plan is to create conditions to paralyze the bodies of central authorities," Dublyk said.
We will create new political force, our goal is early parliamentary elections, change of Ukrainian political elites

Former head of the Odesa State Regional Administration Mikheil Saakashvili has said about intentions to create a new political force for participation in the parliamentary elections and the change of the political elite in Ukraine.

"We will create a new broad political power, a platform of new forces and our goal is to change the present, existing, so-called political elite, but actually profiteers and social misfits," Saakashvili said at a briefing in Kyiv on Friday.

He also said that "our goal is early parliamentary elections to be carried out as quickly as possible in the shortest possible time."

The politician also said that a new political force will help business, but is opposed to the presence of business representatives in the politics.

"We will not let the business into politics, and we will not let business into the Verkhovna Rada," Saakashvili said.

He also said the new political force will not form blocs with other parties. "As regards who we will form blocs with, we won't do it with anyone but the people of Ukraine. The political spectrum is virtually fully rotten," Saakashvili said.

"Our purpose is early parliamentary elections held within the shortest period of possible time, promptly. As soon as the people of Ukraine are ready to tell the administration to go away, it [the administration] will go away," the politician said.

The politician said the longer the current politicians stay in power "the sooner they will eat us." "Getting rid of them is a national security task," Saakashvili said.

"I hope people will follow me. I am ready to also be the playing coach of these young forces," Saakashvili said.

That there are young people among his supporters is testament to his ability to find a common language with new political forces, the politician said.

Asked by a journalist whether his call for early parliamentary elections could be construed as playing up to the Russian plot, earlier announced by the Ukrainian Security Service, of destabilizing the situation in Ukraine, Saakashvili said: "Do you seriously believe that I would ever play our enemy's game? I'll tell you who is playing our enemy's game: the pseudo-patriots who were calling for a one-hryvnia levy for the anti-terrorist operation and then declared billions of hryvni in the e-return."

"We will have people who - I repeat once again - have not been in the Rada for more than one full term, with no record of involvement in bad things and have not held a high executive office for long. Nothing personal. Even if good people ended up on the other side, we won't have them," Saakashvili said.

During the press conference, the words 'New Forces Platform' came up on the screen with an e-mail address, an Interfax correspondent reported.
One Ukrainian serviceman was killed and two were wounded in attacks carried out by the enemy on Friday, Yuriy Harbuz, the head of the Luhansk region's state administration and the head of the regional military-civilian administration, said.

"One Ukrainian serviceman was killed and two were wounded in an attack today," Harbuz said on Friday.

According to a report posted on the official website of the Luhansk regional administration on Friday, the enemy breached the ceasefire regime eight times in the past 24 hours and after midnight.

Specifically, anti-tank grenade launchers, sniper weapons and firearms were used three times on the Ukrainian troops' positions near the city of Schastia and the village of Krymske, Novoaidar district. 82 mm caliber mortars were used in attacks in the direction of the village of Novozvanivka, Popasna district. Then the enemy opened fire using grenade launchers, firearms and sniper weapons four times in the direction of Ukrainian Armed Forces' positions near Stanytsia Luhanska.

The head of the region's administration said the Ukrainian troops had not returned fire.

"It's a demonstration that we want peace. We will keep the situation under control and we prevent the disruption of the Minsk Agreements," Harbuz said.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has a plan to counteract Russian intentions to destabilize the situation in Ukraine to hold early parliamentary elections, chief of the SBU national protection department Anatoliy Dublyk has said.

"The plan is ready, all the forces and resources, the SBU and Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine at their disposal, have been readied. We work closely with the National Police, other law enforcement agencies, courts and prosecutor's office," Dublyk said at a briefing in Kyiv on Friday.

"If we hadnt had such a plan, you know, what would have happened on the streets of Kyiv ... The plan is effective, we are working around the clock," the head of the department said.

At the same time, he said that all the actions of law enforcement officers in this regard do not violate the rights of citizens.

"People have the right to take to the streets and make themselves heard, but when they are being used to do this at protests [this is unacceptable]," Dublyk said.
Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias will participate on Sunday, 13 November, in the extraordinary meeting of the 28 EU Foreign Ministers, in Brussels, during which a discussion will be held on the results of the US elections and the future of the relations between the European Union and the United States of America.

On Monday, 14 November, Mr. Kotzias will attend the meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council (FAC), at which he will present Greeces positions during an exchange of views on the recent developments in Turkey.

The Foreign Ministers will also discuss the situation in North Africa and the Middle East, while the working luncheon will focus on Syria. Mr. Kotzias will brief his European Union partners on the results of his recent visit to Lebanon, which was carried out as a follow-up to, and in the spirit of, the Rhodes Conference for Security and Stability.

The FAC agenda also includes the course of the Eastern Partnership, the assessment of the implementation of the Goals set by the 2015 Riga Summit, and the evolution of the EUs relations with the Eastern Partners.

Finally, the FAC afternoon session  in a joint session of Foreign Affairs and Defence Ministers  will look at the Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy and the progress in the drawing up of the Implementation Plan on Security and Defence.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Visitors,

It is a pleasure to welcome you to Athens and to the Foreign Ministry.

We believe that the European Network of the National Commissions for UNESCO is one of the most active and influential informal sub-regional networks within the framework of the Organization.

Through its remarkable contribution, particularly in the exchange of know-how and best practices, the European Network strengthens our common European voice in UNESCO.

Another thing we see as positive is the European Networks role in enhancing UNESCOs ability to effectively fulfil its mission on a European level, through the provision of specific results in the sectors of education, science, culture and management of cultural heritage and communication.

I hope that todays meeting will prove constructive and fruitful, paving the way for the upcoming meeting of the European Network, which will take place in April 2017, in Thessaloniki.
Poland's Ambassador to Ukraine Jan Pieklo believes cooling in the relations between Ukraine and Poland over the Volyn tragedy will be beneficial only to Russia.

"We both know that Russia will be the only one who will benefit from the marred relations between the two countries over historical issues," Pieklo said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

According to the ambassador, the number of bilateral visits of high-ranking officials demonstrates the importance of the Ukrainian-Polish relations on the agenda of the two countries.

The Polish diplomat also said that the two countries set up an ad hoc commission which consists of 12 people to study the events in Volyn region during World War II.

A roadmap of the commission's meetings is designed for a year and a half, a report will be published upon the completion of the mission which will contain the [commission's] findings," Pieklo said.
Poroshenko to go on official visit to Sweden on Nov 14

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Monday, November 14, will pay an official visit to Sweden.

The visit program includes Poroshenko's meetings with the Swedish prime minister, the speaker of the Riksdag (parliament) of Sweden, as well as the leader of the Moderate Party, which leads the opposition Alliance in the Swedish parliament, the website of the Ukrainian president reported,
The NATO-Georgia Exercise 2016 kicked off at the Joint Training and Evaluation Center in Georgia's Krtsanisi near Tbilisi on Thursday.

According to the Georgian Defense Ministry, along with Georgian soldiers, servicemen from 11 NATO member states, namely Turkey, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belgium, Slovenia, Britain and the United States and two NATO parter states, Ukraine and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, will participate in the drills.

The exercise aims to enhance the interoperability of Georgia and its NATO partners, as well as command and control capabilities, said the ministry.

"I welcome the start of the joint drills, the second NATO-Georgia exercise, which runs from Nov. 10 to 21, another milestone in the long-standing, deep cooperation between NATO and Georgia and further recognition of Georgia's commitment to strong defense," NATO Secretary General's Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia James Appathurai said on his Facebook page.

It is the second NATO-involved military exercise launched in Georgia this year.

In May, Georgia, together with the United States and Britain, launched a three-week long joint military drill named "Noble Partner 2016" at Vaziani base near Tbilisi.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) holds a welcoming ceremony for Ecuador President Rafael Correa Delgado before their talks in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 6, 2015.

China will sign agreements with Ecuador, Peru and Chile in areas including trade, investment, finance and nuclear power during President Xi Jinping's third trip to Latin America next week, according to the Foreign Ministry. He will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders meetings in Lima, Peru, as part of the weeklong trip.

China will announce assistance plans and issue loans to Ecuador during the president's visit. China will offer to help with rebuilding work, including the construction of hospitals, houses and roads in the country, which was hit by a strong earthquake in April, Zhang said. China has already provided $2 million as well as $60 million worth of materials for quake relief, he added.

China will also initiate negotiations with Chile over expanding the free trade agreement that was signed 11 years ago.

Since becoming president in March 2013, Xi has visited Latin America twice, going to Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico in 2013 and Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba in 2014.

China is the largest trade partner of Peru and Chile and the third-largest of Ecuador, and is the main investment source for the three countries. Last year, China's direct investment in Latin America reached $126.3 billion.

Although China's trade volume with Latin America dropped last year, Latin America's agricultural exports to China increased last year, Wang said.

Xu Shicheng, a researcher of Latin American studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that China-Latin America trade volume dropped in recent years due to the price decrease of commodities like crude oil and minerals.

Latin America needs China's support in building infrastructure, factories and hydropower stations, he said.

China's capacity in steel, manufacturing and equipment could be exported to Latin American countries to benefit both sides, he added.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's recent purchase of navy vessels from China, combined with the Filipino pivot toward China, has put holes in Washington's net around the Middle Kingdom.

The goal of the US pivot's redeployment of 50 to 60 percent of the US Navy's fleet by 2020 to contain China and sever what China calls the "Maritime Silk Road," is now at risk.

Malaysia's announcement of a 2 billion ringgit ($476 million) cut to its 2017 defense budget from 2016 benefits China. The cuts have forced the cancellation of a US Marine-backed project to develop an amphibious corps with the Malaysians.

Najib is following Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who has said his country's future is wedded to China and not the US. Cambodia and Laos have less dramatically made the same choice.

The Philippines' reshuffling has geographically fractured the Asian pivot, separating South Korea and Japan from Vietnam, and causing Malaysia, which holds the Strait of Malacca, through which 40 percent of global trade and more than 80 percent of China's oil imports pass, to engage bilaterally with China.

It's simple: US allies are being overwhelmed by China's sheer industrial production, and infrastructure investment is more attractive than US foreign military base construction.

For Duterte, the decision to pivot to China comes from believing the US has failed Filipinos. The Philippines is racked with poverty. China offers investment. The Filipino economy is 18 percent tourism, with 4 million tourists last year. Manila wants to increase this with a slice of last year's 120 million outbound Chinese tourists.

The Philippines craves infrastructure. High-speed rail, industrial development, telecommunications and loans from China could double the Filipino economy. The US no longer has the industrial capacity, or will, to do this as its economy is stretched to such a degree that US infrastructure is in disrepair.

The soft-power infrastructure policy of China has been more successful than US military bases. The five US bases in the Philippines haven't alleviated poverty. After decades of vassal state relations with the US, China's policy of building roads, ports, and airports is being favored. This policy has succeeded in Africa, causing the US to establish Africom to counter China's burgeoning influence.

The Philippines is militarily weak compared to China. Beijing may be unyielding on the South China Sea issue. Given the huge power asymmetries, it could be grossly difficult for the Philippines to deal with China on its own. However, the Philippines' repositioning could create a compromise between them.

Japan and South Korea may become isolated if the ASEAN countries continue to turn towards Beijing, and will have to decide what is more beneficial: US-led containment or collaborating with a China-led Asia.

South Korea's reliance on the US for security and vast trade with China puts it in a precarious position. It's maintaining a careful balance in relations with China, which is a multi-trillion dollar economic power that is closer, with the industrial capacity to inspire the growth of Asian economies. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the alternative economic system within the rebalancing, which ostracizes the Chinese economy. South Korea doesn't want a trade war with China, as it would be against its own interests.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's recent meeting with Duterte showed his coy revisionist nationalism. The US ambition to assert leadership over a China-containment coalition is collapsing. Abe would choose exploiting the rebalancing to rebuild Japanese regional clout by cultivating direct bilateral ties with Asian states. He would do this over emphasizing US leadership to confront China. Abe could have repudiated Duterte for breaking with the US, but he didn't.

The balance between advocating the pivot and advocating national interest is allowing China to lure in its neighbors. By offering infrastructure and beneficial projects like the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank, not service-based trade and numerous military bases, China's industry is fracturing the American's Asian "ring of steel."
CASEVILLE  The Historical Society of Caseville is sponsoring a special program Thursday at the James Stahl Auditorium at Caseville Public School. The presentation by father-son team, Al and Dave Eicher, of Program Source International, entitled 'Michigan In the Civil War,' will be a visual depiction of Michigan resident's participation in this conflict. It begins at 9:15 a.m. and will run until about 10:45 am.

Program Source International is experienced in presenting an interesting outlook on historical events. With more than 380 lectures and visual presentations to their credit, the Eichers pride themselves on keeping their audiences entertained and educated.

'Michigan In the Civil War' took more than five years to put together. The Eichers, formerly of Pigeon, traveled extensively to gather the information necessary to accurately portray Michigan's part in the Civil War.

The presentation includes old photos showing recruiting centers in Michigan, as well as photos of historical interest to the conflict in locations where Michigan soldiers served. These sites include the Harper's Ferry Arsenal, and battlefields at Gettysburg, Bull Run, and Fredericksburg. There will also be visuals of Civil War reenactments, which take place throughout the country, including Huron County.

'Michigan In the Civil War' presents a month-by-month timeline of Michigan service men and women within the state and in the many battlefields associated with the Civil War. The lecture is open to the public.

Tickets for 'Michigan In the Civil War' are $5, and are available at the Historical Society of Caseville Museum, located at 6733 Prospect St., in Caseville. You can also pay at the door.

Following the presentation at the school, everyone is invited back to the museum for light refreshments and a chance to talk to Al and Dave Eicher about Michigan's role in the Civil War. This will also provide the opportunity to see the historical displays in the museum. The Historical Society of Caseville has worked diligently to ensure the quality and diversity of historical memorabilia in the museum.

'Michigan In the Civil War' will add to the experience of seeing how our ancestors lived and worked. It will be an entertaining experience for anyone interested in the history of our county and state.
At 12:20, on November 9th in London, Ma Kai, China's Vice Premier and Baroness Neville Rolfe, UK's Minister of State for energy and intellectual property unveiled the board for UK-China Nuclear Joint Research and Innovation Centre(JRIC). It is China's first joint Research and Innovation Center with a western developed country in nuclear energy area, which ushers in a new era based on the investment to nuclear power. UK and China will have a more comprehensive and deeper cooperation in scientific research, technology, and in the whole nuclear industrial supply chain.

The unveiling ceremony is hosted by Nur Bekri, vice director of China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and chief of National Energy Administration. Besides, Wang Yiren, vice chairman of China Atomic Energy Authority (CAEA) shows his expectations for the subsequent operation and performance of JRIC. UK's and China's representatives of the government and some corporation leaders have attended the ceremony as invited. Both Qian Zhimin, president of CNNC and chairman of CNNP board, and Paul Hawoz, CEO of NNL give a report on UK-China nuclear R&D ability and their future development patterns in nuclear area.

Based on Manchester, the center will be funded by the UK government and CNNC with a total amount of 50 million pounds, whose aim is to build a promising and influential nuclear technology interface between China and the UK as well as a R&D platform. The center is owned by CNNP UK Company Ltd and NNL for 50% respectively. The establishment of the center is one of the implementations of the national strategies of Innovation Driven, One Belt One Road and Nuclear Power Export. Nuclear power is view by both China and the UK as an irreplaceable form of energy. The founding of the center will facilitate the cooperation between the two countries in nuclear power technology. Focusing on the research of market demands from China, UK, and the globe, and the development of nuclear power and nuclear technology, the center proposes the projects, finds the right R&D group while in charge of the management and provides consult services. Its R&D activities include the following aspects: advanced nuclear fuel, R&D of advanced nuclear technology and material, digitalized reactor, reactor decommission and waste disposal, and its code and standard, etc. Some related projects have already been initialized.

Representing the starting and ending point of One Belt One Road China-UK cooperation, the center has a profound meaning to the nuclear industry chain of the countries along the road and to the diversification development of CNNC in global market. Simultaneously, a cooperation platform of innovation is built in nuclear industry, which will have a positive effect on the continuing nuclear technology collaboration between China and the UK to export our nations nuclear technologies and products.

It is reported that, by taking advantage of its properties in the whole industry chain, CNNC has signed several agreements/contracts with its UK counterpart on the waste disposal, decommissioning, compact reactor, R&D collaboration, operation and maintenance, etc. CNNC also established CNNP UK Company Ltd to be the major endeavor to carry out the cooperation with the UK nuclear power sector.
Experian plc, together with its subsidiaries, operates as a technology company. The company operates through two segments, Business-to-Business and Consumer Services. It provides data services to identify and understand the customers, as well as to manage the risks related with lending. The company also offers analytical and decision tools that enhance businesses to manage their customers, minimize the risk of fraud, comply with legal requirements, and automate decisions and processes. In addition, it provides financial education, free access to Experian credit reports and scores, online educational tools, and applications to manage their financial position, access credit offers, and protect themselves from identity fraud. The company serves customers in financial service, direct-to-consumer, health, retail, automotive, software and professional services, telecommunications and utility, insurance, media and technology, government and public, and other sectors. It operates in North America, Latin America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. The company was formerly known as Experian Group Limited and changed its name to Experian plc in July 2008. Experian plc was founded in 1826 and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.
Matson, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides ocean transportation and logistics services. The company's Ocean Transportation segment offers ocean freight transportation services to the domestic non-contiguous economies of Hawaii, Alaska, and Guam, as well as to other island economies in Micronesia. It primarily transports dry containers of mixed commodities, refrigerated commodities, packaged foods and beverages, building materials, automobiles, and household goods; livestock; seafood; general sustenance cargo; and garments, footwear, e-commerce, and other retail merchandise. This segment also operates an expedited service from China to Long Beach, California, and various islands in the South Pacific, as well as Okinawa, Japan; and provides container stevedoring, refrigerated cargo services, inland transportation, container equipment maintenance, and other terminal services to ocean carriers on the Hawaiian islands of Oahu, Hawaii, Maui, and Kauai, as well as in the Alaska locations of Anchorage, Kodiak, and Dutch Harbor. In addition, the company offers vessel management and container transshipment services. Its Logistics segment provides multimodal transportation brokerage services, including domestic and international rail intermodal, long-haul and regional highway trucking, specialized hauling, flat-bed and project, less-than-truckload, and expedited freight services; less-than-container load consolidation and freight forwarding services; warehousing and distribution services; supply chain management services, and non-vessel operating common carrier freight forwarding services. The company serves the U.S. military, freight forwarders, retailers, consumer goods, automobile manufacturers, and other customers. The company was formerly known as Alexander & Baldwin Holdings, Inc. and changed its name to Matson, Inc. in June 2012. Matson, Inc. was founded in 1882 and is headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Imperial Oil Limited engages in exploration, production, and sale of crude oil and natural gas in Canada. The company operates through three segments: Upstream, Downstream and Chemical segments. The Upstream segment explores for, and produces crude oil, natural gas, synthetic oil, and bitumen. As of December 31, 2021, this segment had 386 million oil-equivalent barrels of proved undeveloped reserves. The Downstream segment is involved in the transportation and refining of crude oil, blending of refined products and the distribution, and marketing of refined products. It also transports crude oil to refineries by contracted pipelines, common carrier pipelines, and rail; maintains a distribution system to move petroleum products to market by pipeline, tanker, rail, and road transport; and owns and operates fuel terminals, natural gas liquids, and products pipelines in Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario. In addition, this segment markets and supplies petroleum products to motoring public through approximately 2,400 Esso and Mobil-branded sites. Further, it sells petroleum products, including fuel, asphalt, and lubricants for industrial and transportation customers, independent marketers, and resellers, as well as other refiners serving the agriculture, residential heating, and commercial markets through branded fuel and lubricant resellers. The Chemical segment manufactures and markets various petrochemicals, benzene, aromatic and aliphatic solvents, plasticizer intermediates, and polyethylene resin. Imperial Oil Limited has a strategic agreement with E3 Metals Corp. to advance a lithium-extraction pilot in Alberta. The company was incorporated in 1880 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada. Imperial Oil Limited is a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil Corporation.
Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. provides investor communications and technology-driven solutions for the financial services industry. The company's Investor Communication Solutions segment processes and distributes proxy materials to investors in equity securities and mutual funds, as well as facilitates related vote processing services; and distributes regulatory reports, class action, and corporate action/reorganization event information, as well as tax reporting solutions. It also offers ProxyEdge, an electronic proxy delivery and voting solution; data-driven solutions and an end-to-end platform for content management, composition, and omni-channel distribution of regulatory, marketing, and transactional information, as well as mutual fund trade processing services; data and analytics solutions; solutions for public corporations and mutual funds; SEC filing and capital markets transaction services; registrar, stock transfer, and record-keeping services; and omni-channel customer communications solutions, as well as operates Broadridge Communications Cloud platform that creates, delivers, and manages communications and customer engagement activities. The company's Global Technology and Operations segment provides solutions that automate the front-to-back transaction lifecycle of equity, mutual fund, fixed income, foreign exchange and exchange-traded derivatives, order capture and execution, trade confirmation, margin, cash management, clearance and settlement, reference data management, reconciliations, securities financing and collateral management, asset servicing, compliance and regulatory reporting, portfolio accounting, and custody-related services. This segment also offers business process outsourcing services; technology solutions, such portfolio management, compliance, fee billing, and operational support solutions; and capital market and wealth management solutions. The company was founded in 1962 and is headquartered in Lake Success, New York.
The rise of Donald Trump has plunged the world into a period of deep uncertainty about the policies and impact of the next U.S. administration. For China, the big question is what U.S foreign policy will look like with the next administration.

Nobody knows what to expect, and the deep uncertainty surrounding Trump has been compounded by his contradictory statements and lack of details on how he will address the worlds problems. However, Beijing is confident that the worlds most important bilateral relationship will remain strong. Soon after Trumps victory, Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated the President-elect, and President Xi said he hoped they could work together to boost China-U.S. relations.

But despite the confidence, deep uncertainty remains.

A return to 1980 politics?

Trump views Ronald Reagan as a truly great President, and he sees himself as the next Reagan, at least according to his tweets. The 2016 presidential election also shares some parallels with 1980. Presidential candidate Reagan claimed that Americas strength was being eroded by President Jimmy Carter, and he blamed the President for destroying confidence in the nations strength. In October 1980, presidential candidate Reagan gave a major speech entitled, A Strategy for Peace in the 80s. Reagan argued that peace is made by economic, military, and strategic strength; and is lost when such strength disappears or is seen as disappearing. We must build peace upon strength. There is no other way, Regan said.

Trump will almost certainly follow Reagans example. If so, Trump will place Americas national interests over foreign policy and follow the axiom of build peace through strength. But a striking difference remains. Reagan valued the bilateral relationship:

Our relationship with the Peoples Republic of China is in its beginning stages. It is one that can and will grow, and I repeat my intention to assist its rapid growth. There is an historic bond of friendship between the American and Chinese peoples, and I will work to amplify it wherever possible. Expanded trade, cultural contact and other arrangements will all serve the cause of preserving and extending the ties between our two countries.

Will Trump pivot away from the pivot?

It is unlikely that the pivot will fade under Trump. In fact, it will probably have a harder edge. The Pentagon has been pushing for a stronger military presence in the region, but has been constrained by the White House. After Trump is sworn into office, America will be under single-party rule for at least two years, because the Republican Party has control over the U.S. Congress. With Trump in office, the Pentagon could get its way. Trump has already stated his intention to increase defense spending, and his vision for national security includes adding 350 ships to the U.S. Navy. Increased military presence in the Asia-Pacific is likely.

No one knows how Trump will approach China, but we do know how some of those around him will approach China. In February 2012, Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for president not because he agreed with him on every issue, he tweeted, but because he will get tough with China. Shortly after the endorsement, Romney published a commentary entitled, How Ill Respond to Chinas Rising Power. The next day, Trump tweeted that Romney gets the China problem. Romneys plan can be used as a proxy method to understand how Trump might respond to China. Romney argued that the inherent strength of the nation depends on three strengths: economy, military, and values; and that those three strengths must be restored and then applied in policy toward China. Trumps approach should not differ greatly.

Trumps inner circle will influence his thinking and push back when needed. Two of those people are Mike Pence, the vice-president elect, and James Woolsey, a former director for the CIA and a senior adviser to the President-elect on national security, defense, and intelligence.

Pence is a strong supporter of free trade and trade partnerships. According to Vote Smart, a website that provides information on candidates and elected officials, Pence voted yea for every free-trade agreement that came before him. At least two of the agreements favored freer trade with China. Pence voted to keep the U.S. in the World Trade Organization and to maintain Chinas normal trade relations status with the U.S. in June 2001 and March 2005, respectively. His support for free trade and trade partnerships puts him at odds with Trump, who has vowed to scrap trade deals. In June 2016, Trump praised Britain for taking back their country during a trade speech in Pennsylvania. Now its time for the American people to take back their future, Trump said.

Woolseys influence will loom large on China-U.S. relations. On November 10, he offered a peek at the future in an op-ed entitled, Under Donald Trump, the U.S. Will Accept Chinas Rise  As Long as It Doesnt Challenge the Status Quo. Woolsey recognized Chinas leadership role, but also said that the balance of power in Asia depends on Americas strength. He signaled major policy change. He called U.S. opposition to the formation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank a strategic mistake, and said that the new administration should warm up to the Belt and Road initiative. He expressed hope for a new agreement between the two sides. I cansee the emergence of a grand bargain in which the U.S. accepts Chinas political and social structure and commits not to disrupt it in any way in exchange for Chinas commitment not to challenge the status quo in Asia, Woolsey said.

Deep uncertainty surrounds Trump, but that does not change the importance of the bilateral relationship. China and America depend on each other, so it is critically important for them to work together to strengthen the relationship. Pulling back would weaken America and create even more uncertainty. To make America stronger, Trump must strengthen the China-U.S. relationship by taking full advantage of its benefits, because Americas strength depends on Chinas strength.
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.
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.
The Pentagon and State Department plan to aggressively pursue President Barack Obama's military and diplomatic goals in the remaining two months in office despite potential conflicts with the views of President-elect Donald Trump.

Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was committed to a "smooth and effective transition" to the next administration but also made a point to note "we do this job right, and we serve the current commander-in-chief."

Carter was "carrying out the policies of the current commander in chief," Cook said. "We have one commander-in-chief at a time. We leave it to the next administration to speak to their policy choices."

The press secretary and a State Department counterpart, Mark Toner, said the departments were following Obama's policies on Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, China, NATO, and climate change -- all areas in which Trump has expressed pointed differences of opinion. However, Cook said "we're not going to get into a policy debate that was part of the campaign."

As for policy decisions by incoming administration officials, Cook told reporters Thursday at a Pentagon briefing, "You're best served by speaking to them."

In a memo to all service members and Defense Department employees on Wednesday, Carter said "we must stay focused on our duty to confront our current challenges and any that might arise during this period."

Cook said Carter was also still committed to seeking ways to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, though progress on that front appeared extremely unlikely in a lame duck session of Congress.

Closing Guantanamo "remains certainly a priority for this secretary" and if congressional leaders wanted to discuss ways to do that, Carter would be "open to having that conversation," Cook said.

From his first day in office, Obama made closing "Gitmo" one of his main priorities, but he has been thwarted by Congress' refusal to permit the transfer of any prisoners to the U.S. for detention or trial.

Guantanamo once held 781 detainees, but the population has shrunk under releases and transfers to other countries during the administrations of former President George W. Bush and Obama to the current number of 60.

Carter has appointed his chief of staff, Eric Rosenbach, to oversee the transition to the Trump administration but as of Thursday morning "we had not had any direct contact from anyone from the Trump campaign," Cook said.

Cook didn't respond directly when asked if Carter would consider staying on as defense secretary in a Trump administration if asked, but his answer to another question on the state of the military suggested that he would be stepping down when the new president is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

"The secretary believes he inherited a military in excellent shape and he believes he's leaving with a military in excellent shape -- the best military in the world," Cook said.

Cook also said Carter was hopeful that his "Force of the Future" initiatives to lure high-tech talent from Silicon Valley and elsewhere to the Pentagon through the new Defense Innovation Board and Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) would survive in the next administration.

"The secretary is confident that good ideas survive," Cook said. "The Force of the Future initiatives are all initiatives that make good sense" in recruiting and retention. "It's a signature issue for him."

Cook said there were no signs of resignations at the Pentagon ahead of Trump's inauguration -- "I'm not aware of any at this point" -- but State Department spokesman Toner was less definite on whether many career diplomats would leave rather than work under a new president.

"It's a valid question," Toner said at a briefing Wednesday. "I wouldn't attempt to speak for any of my colleagues," he added, noting the State Department was committed "to making sure that this incoming administration is given every opportunity for a smooth transition."

Toner said it was also a "fair question" on whether morale at the State Department was shaken when it became clear that Trump had won the election. "You have to compartmentalize your own political beliefs" to stay focused on professional duties, he said. "I wouldn't predict any mass exodus," he added, but "anything's possible."

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.

Related Video:
The U.S. military is working with Australia, Japan, South Korea and other allies to bring them up to speed on the power and potential of fifth-generation aircraft like the F-35 and F-22.

Pacific Air Forces, the Hawaii-based major command whose area of responsibility stretches to the Asian coastline, is leading the effort to integrate the F-35 with allies, according to Col. Art Primas, the command's international affairs division chief.

American pilots are leveraging their "experiences with our fifth-gen fighters" to help allies better understand the unique capabilities of the Lockheed Martin Corp.-made F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F-22 Raptor.

The Defense Department is constantly evaluating what planes, exercises and intelligence it needs to bolster ties in the region, which contains 60 percent of the world's population, officials said.

New Training

In a few years, the Pentagon may change "the flavors" of annual exercises to include new training with fifth-generation platforms, added Col. Kelly Lawson, PACAF chief of current operations. The training may include replacing old missions sets with new ones and hosting more joint-service operations and multilateral training.

As new and emerging threats appear, "we're evolving to be as efficient as we can," he said.

RELATED: US Reportedly Weighs Deploying B-52s, F-22s to South Korea

Upgraded fourth-generation assets such as the F-16 Fighting Falcon and F-15 Eagle "get better and better on integrating with the fifth-gen because it's new technology," Lawson said.

With F-22s permanently stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii and Joint Base ElmendorfRichardson in Alaska, the Raptor "will be part of our calculus forever," he added.

As the U.S. military continues to shift more troops and equipment to the region as part of the strategic plan known as the "Pacific pivot," pilots will increasingly fly both fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft in theater to better understand the next realm of fighter training engagements.

"F-35 training is going to be critical, and we're improving our ranges, especially at the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex to be able to meet the unique training requirements for advanced fourth-gen and fifth-gen fighters," Primas said.

The Air Force has roughly 65,000 square miles of available airspace for realistic, world-class training at complex, where partner forces will be welcome to experience first-hand the F-35's power. The service in April announced that Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska will host two squadrons of F-35s by 2020.

Bomber Basing

In 2014, a B-52 Stratofortress from Guam landed in Australia to train with the Royal Australian Air Force. Its stop was preceded by a November 2011 agreement which stipulated the U.S. could increase its military presence there.

"The idea is  much like we do in Guam  a rotation of tankers and bombers to do training and working with our Australian allies as well as training our pilots and aircrew [about] what it's like in the region, to understand the vastness of that region," Gen. Lori Robinson, then the head of Pacific Air Forces, told defense reporters last year.

In March, officials once again began the dialogue to potentially base bombers -- likely B-1B Lancers -- in Australia.

Lawson said since then, all three long-range bombers -- the B-2 Spirit, B-52 and B-1B -- have appeared in the Pacific, some stopping in or flying over the far East continent.

A permanent station would be attractive because "the Australians have some really talented folks, and it's to our benefit to interact with them as well, and we can learn from them just as much as they can learn from us," Lawson said.

Primas said this has jumpstarted PACAF to work with the Australians on enhanced air cooperation activities "for greater and broader" engagement with the country.

"When you don't have as many resources, you have to think more deeply," Lawson said, "and these guys know the region, have good equipment, smart folks, but bring a different perspective  which harmonizes with ours."

The Aussies are definitely "a leader in the region," Primas said, which helps the U.S. connect to other nations through them.

"It just makes the whole region stronger," Lawson said.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

Related Video:
[File photo]

A company in Qingdao, Shandong province has launched a limited-edition bottled water design whose packaging contains information about missing children. The company hopes that such advertisements will raise public awareness of human trafficking in China, and also help the missing children to return home.

The campaign, which is being jointly launched by the water company and Baobeihuijia.com, Chinas best-known online platform for finding missing children, is outfitting water bottles with the photos and personal information of six missing children. The youngest child among the six went missing in 2012 and would be 8 years old by now. The oldest disappeared in 2003 and should be 18. Citizens can provide any information about the missing children via a hotline.

The parents of the missing children authorized us to post their information on our products in July. So far we have produced 500,000 bottles, most of which are being sold in local supermarkets, airports and train stations. The first batch of water bottles ... will remain on the market for a year, while the information of more missing children will be printed on our products in the future, a manager surnamed Wang told Dzwww.com, a local news portal. No useful information has been reported so far, according to Wang.

[File photo]

Non-governmental organizations have been playing an important role in tackling human trafficking in China. Baobeihuijia.com has helped 1,704 children find their parents, while 31,125 families have registered on the website to search for missing children as of press time.

Due to a traditional preference for male heirs, particularly in rural areas, a rampant black market for children has thrived for years in China. Some families who are unable to have biological children are willing to pay large sums of money to buy a child. Accurate statistics of the countrys missing children are difficult to obtain, though the head of the Ministry of Public Security's anti-child trafficking department has denied the figure of 200,000 children going missing each year. That number was reported in 2013 by Cnr.cn.
(Photo/Qianjiang Evening News)

On Nov. 9, Hangzhou International Airport asked several airplanes to postpone landing in order to make way for an airplane carrying a 4-month-old baby in need of emergency medical aid.

Juneyao Airlines Flight H01094, flying from Kunming to Shanghai, made an unexpected landing in Hangzhou on the morning of Nov. 9, after the infant, Taotao, began to develop worsening symptoms on the flight. In order to make way for the unplanned landing, five to six airplanes were ordered to hover and wait rather than landing as scheduled.

Air traffic controllers also guided the flight to land on a runway close to the airport to minimize time spent taxiing, Qianjiang Evening News reported.

The sick baby was then immediately transferred to an ambulance, where emergency treatment was administered even before the vehicle reached the hospital. Taotao was suffering from severe pneumonia and congenital heart disease, which were worsened by the flight. His family was taking him to seek medical attention in Shanghai when the incident occurred.

Sadly, the baby passed away despite efforts made to save his life.
110111-news-mott-hospital-mrm-4262a28b59a3490b.jpg

A view of Nichols Arboretum, from the 11th floor window of C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. Melanie Maxwell I AnnArbor.com

(AnnArbor.com)

ANN ARBOR, MI - University of Michigan police are offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the sexual assault of a runner that occurred at Nichols Arboretum in October.

A student was assaulted by an unknown man while running about 8 p.m. Oct. 7 on the path from the Geddes Avenue entrance to Nichols Arboretum, police previously said.

The woman reported that she was grabbed, pulled to the ground, punched in the face and sexually assaulted before she was able to break away and run out of the arboretum.

The suspect was described as a white man in his 20s, about 5 feet 8 inches to 6 feet tall, with an average build and brown hair, last seen wearing a black sweatshirt.

Those with information on the incident are asked to call the University of Michigan Division of Public Safety and Security at 734-763-1131, through the university's anonymous tip line at 1-800-863-1355 or at dpss-safety-security@umich.edu.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Saying the city has more needs than it has resources, Mayor Christopher Taylor is floating the idea of a new tax for pedestrian safety.

He mentioned it Thursday night, Nov. 10, as the City Council took some initial steps following the death of 16-year-old Justin Tang, who was struck and killed by a car while crossing Fuller Road near Huron High School.

Several dozen people, including parents, students, school officials and other community members, packed into the City Council chambers for Thursday night's meeting to demand more action to improve pedestrian safety around schools.

Taylor said the city has placed tremendous emphasis on pedestrian safety over the years and is committing to do more.

Will voters be asked to approve a tax for crosswalk improvements and better street lighting?

But he said improving crosswalks and street lighting requires real money, and the city will need more of it to meet the community's aspirations.

"Going to the voters to ask whether this is something they would support is certainly one way to do that," he said.

"I think we as a council owe it to the community to ask that question."

Taylor's comments prompted Kathy Griswold, a former Ann Arbor school board member and pedestrian safety advocate, to speak out.

"I am truly sickened tonight that the mayor has used this tragedy to hint at a tax increase for the public after siphoning millions of dollars from non-motorized transportation funding over the last decade. We have the funds. No excuses," she said, arguing the city has underfunded pedestrian safety for years.

Other residents at the meeting suggested the city should hold off on conducting a deer cull this winter and instead put the money toward improving crosswalks. The city has estimated it would cost $258,545 to conduct a combination of lethal and nonlethal deer management efforts in 2017.

The idea of a tax for pedestrian safety improvements was discussed last year in a report by the city's Pedestrian Safety and Access Task Force.

The City Council hasn't acted on the recommendation, though it did vote 7-3 earlier this year to approve a resolution stipulating that the city's 2.125-mill levy for streets and sidewalks, which was reauthorized by voters in August, could be used for a number of things, including on-street bicycle lanes and other non-motorized facilities, construction or enhancement of pedestrian crosswalks, and construction of accessible street crossings and corner ramps.

"There's no formed proposal," Taylor said of the idea of putting a new tax proposal to voters. "My point is that this is an area that infrastructure is expensive. We are constantly looking for ways to improve. In order to accelerate improvement, both in terms of quality and quantity, more funds will be necessary."

Taylor said a new tax could help fund improved street lighting, flashing crosswalk signals, more frequently applied paint for crosswalk markings, different crosswalk designs, signage, and pedestrian refuge islands.

"The things which we now do to improve crosswalks, increased in both number and scope," he said, adding the city cares deeply about pedestrian safety.

"We have a lot of projects going on all the time throughout the city. We are constantly making improvements with respect to pedestrian safety -- bump-outs, signage, islands, expanding our sidewalk network. These are things that we pay attention to and that we move forward on."

Stephanie Preston spoke on behalf of A2SafeTransport, a coalition of concerned parents and residents who have come together following Tang's death. They're lobbying the school district and City Council to improve safety, particularly for children walking and biking to school in unsafe conditions.

"We started as a result of the tragedy and the avoidable death of Justin Tang, but we are not here to grieve. We are here to insist that the city make pedestrian safety a priority," said Preston, a former PTO president and a parent whose children attend Angell Elementary and Tappan Middle School.

Ratifying a decision already made by the city's administration, the City Council approved a resolution Thursday night to make it a top priority to install new streetlights on Fuller Road at the crosswalk near Huron High School.

The council also directed the city administrator to work with Ann Arbor Public Schools to evaluate all crossings near schools and report back within 60 days with prioritized recommendations and cost estimates for improvements.

That could include improved street lighting, signage, reduced speed limits, traffic enforcement, crosswalk re-design, flashing signals or new crosswalks.

"The tragedy at Huron High School has clearly demonstrated to all of us the urgency of addressing pedestrian safety at our schools," said Council Member Jane Lumm, who introduced the resolution.

"As we know, and as many folks have communicated to us, there has been a lot of study done already -- by the city, by the Ann Arbor Public Schools, and by others -- on pedestrian safety at our schools," said Lumm, an independent from the 2nd Ward. "I'm sure that will be immensely beneficial to city staff to expediting completion of the report and recommendations to us."

Lumm said what the council is asking staff to do is very comprehensive and 60 days is an aggressive timeframe.

Council Member Julie Grand, D-3rd Ward, the 60-day turnaround doesn't mean the city can't take some steps sooner, such as establishing a school speed zone.

"What it does mean is that, instead of having a reactive approach, we'll be looking at all of our schools within the system, hopefully working with our principals and families," Grand said, encouraging community members with concerns to get in touch with their school leaders and let them know what those concerns are.

"We want to make sure that we're making smart decisions and that we're aware of all of the issues that are in the community so that they can get prioritized and so that we can take action as soon as possible."

Preston argued the resolution council approved Thursday night was inadequate because it's limited to new lighting on Fuller Road and further study.

"Further study is not what we need right now," she said. "We need a commitment by the city to prioritize pedestrian safety in the city budget."

She said the police officer recently installed in the area where Tang was killed was almost hit by a car just days after the incident.

"This is not about one intersection or one boy," Preston said, arguing lack of pedestrian safety is a problem across the city.

"There's already a national best-practice guide for crosswalks," she said. "We already have a 59-page task force report on pedestrian safety and access, and a 40-crosswalk audit. What we need now is a budgetary commitment with concrete steps and milestones."

By the time school resumes in January, A2SafeTransport wants to see school speed zones established at all Ann Arbor schools, added street lighting at crosswalks, and crossing guards assisting students.

"The city must make pedestrian safety in Ann Arbor the No. 1 priority at your annual December budget retreat with funding in the (2017-18) budget to upgrade all crosswalks according to best practices," Preston added.

Jeanice Swift, Ann Arbor Public Schools superintendent, and Huron High School Principal Janet Schwamb also spoke out, along with Andy Thomas, an Ann Arbor school board member. They thanked city officials who attended a Transportation Safety Committee meeting last week to talk with school officials.

"While we work very hard to keep our students safe, we need your partnership," Swift told city officials Thursday night.

She said she was pleased to hear City Administrator Howard Lazarus say inadequate funding will not be a reason for failing to keep students safe.

She said it's time to move away from years of talk and instead take action to implement comprehensive solutions, including adequate lighting, appropriate speeds, crosswalks that are well marked, and flashing lights when appropriate.

She wants to see the city shift from an "as we have the money" approach to a "whatever it takes to protect our children" approach.

Thomas said student safety is being endangered on a daily basis in Ann Arbor and many of the issues have been repeatedly called to the city's attention over a period of many years while remaining inadequately addressed. He said school officials had a thorough and frank discussion with city officials last week about frustrations dealing with the city's bureaucracy to improve crosswalk safety.

"It became clear that one of the problems has been that concerns raised by the committee have not always been communicated upward to those in a position to make decisions," he said. "I believe that Mr. Lazarus now understands this and is taking steps to ensure that this does not continue."

Griswold said it was with great sadness that she had to address council Thursday night because she has done so many times over many years.

"A positive tonight is, in the audience, we have many fellow pedestrian advocates -- pedestrian advocates who will be at every meeting with me if that's what it takes to get this done and make Ann Arbor a leader in pedestrian safety," she said. "It is shameful that we have played games for almost 20 years."

Grand said she's committed as a member of the City Schools Committee to work with the schools on the issue.

"This is a complex problem," she said. "We all have to be in this together. That is not to abdicate the responsibility of the city in any way, shape or form."

Grand said she fully expects the council to make pedestrian safety a high priority at its annual budget retreat in December.

"But we need to partner with the schools," she said. "As parents, we need to take responsibility to make sure that if we're driving our kids to school that we do it safely, that if our kids are walking in the dark that we try to make them more visible, so all of us need to take steps."

Council Member Kirk Westphal, D-2nd Ward, said Tang's death is heartbreaking and the city has to do more for pedestrian safety.

"We have to do better and we will do better," he said. "We will make a commitment and put the resources behind it. I have no doubt about that. Public health and safety is our No. 1 priority and it will continue to be that even more."

Council Member Chuck Warpehoski, D-5th Ward, said he appreciates the push from the community to do better.

"We've been trying to do better, but obviously there's still a lot more that needs to be done," he said.

Council Member Sabra Briere, D-1st Ward, said city officials have been concerned about pedestrian safety for a number of years, but she acknowledged the city has moved "sometimes terribly slowly" to accomplish its goals.

"I wish it weren't as slow as it has been," she told the community members who came out for Thursday's meeting. "And I certainly wish that what had brought you out tonight was to cheer us on, rather than to remind us that we had failed to do it in a timely fashion. That is painful because, as we have tried to behave proactively, when you're making policy proactively you think you have lots of time.

"We are now reacting to a tragedy, and I apologize that we don't always know how to anticipate and move as swiftly as we'd like."

Council Member Jack Eaton, D-4th Ward, encouraged community members to continue to keep watch on council.

"Because we do fail to move forward when we're not watched," he said. "This last budget process, we failed to fund a couple of additional police officers for traffic enforcement. It doesn't matter what we set our speed limits at if no one enforces it.

He added, "We failed to divert $320,000 from the DDA to street lighting in our neighborhoods. We know how essential lighting is for our pedestrians and our students coming and going to work and school. We're failing."

Continuing to address the crowd, Eaton added, "We need engineering for our crosswalks, not planning. We need best practices, not a haphazard, unique crosswalk marking for each crosswalk we install. We really need to focus on how we spend our funds on this essential issue and really I cannot emphasize how important it is that you came out tonight to tell us that we're failing.

"I think that we now have a sense that we need to do better, and I will be there to emphasize these spending priorities during our budget discussions."

Taylor said the city has increasingly turned its attention to pedestrian safety over the last several years.

"You've seen throughout the city increased pedestrian-related infrastructure," he said, mentioning flashing crosswalk signals, streetlights, additional signage at crosswalks, and the introduction of curb bump-outs and pedestrian islands.

"These are things that we have done," he said. "And as is plain to all, they are not throughout the city sufficient. It is something that we continue to work on."

Lazarus said the direction city staff is getting from both council and the community will further enable and empower them to move forward.

"My comments about lack of funds not being an adequate reason to put our children at risk is not said with cavalier disregard to the fiscal responsibilities we have," he emphasized. "But rather, within the funds that we have, we should be able to focus on those things that hold great community value."

As far as actions that already have been taken since Tang's death, Lazarus said the city has reached out to DTE Energy and the new streetlights on Fuller Road are being scheduled, so that's in progress, as is the re-striping of the crosswalk. He said the city also is going to look at speeds along Fuller Road.

After he comes back within 60 days with prioritized locations for pedestrian crossing improvements near schools, Lazarus said the city will use current funds to launch things quickly, rather than waiting for funds in next fiscal year's budget.

"We are going to make the routes that our kids take to school safe and we are going to put a pedestrian scale on what we do," he said.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Veterans and University of Michigan ROTC members gathered Friday, Nov. 11, to honor veterans and their service.

The VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System hosted its annual Veterans Day program at the University of Michigan North Campus Research Complex Building while the VA undergoes a renovation.

Speakers included U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor and Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency Targeted Outreach and Performance Management Division director Rob Price. Lt. Col. Lawrence Millben gave the keynote address.

The event included a benediction and playing of "Taps."
ANN ARBOR, MI - Just one day after being elected to the University of Michigan Board of Regents, Ron Weiser found himself publicly defending his Republican political affiliation following Donald Trump's surprising presidential victory.

Previously serving as the state party chairman from 2009-11 and the Republican National Committee's national finance chairman from 2011-13, Weiser was named one of six vice chairs to the Republican National Committee's finance committee tasked with raising funds for president-elect Trump's election campaign.

While participating in the panel "2016 Decided: Post election analysis" on Wednesday, Nov. 9, the founder and CEO of McKinley Associates was asked how he could support a candidate like Trump, from his stances against immigration to condoning the attack of a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies.

Weiser said he is offended that people often aren't able to make the distinction between his association with the Republican Party and some of the stances held by Trump.

"I quite frankly find it offensive that people think I'm bigoted because I voted for somebody who has certain principles - economic principles and other principles - that I happen to agree with," said Weiser, the former Slovakian ambassador under George W. Bush.

"We all make choices and I'm an economic conservative," he added. "Some of the things I believe in are fundamental and I don't believe that they're being promoted in order to take advantage of those who are disadvantaged."

Weiser pointed to his record with fundraising as a co-chair for the United Negro College Fund and the creation of an Islamic Studies Program within U-M's Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies as examples of his past outreach to minorities and the Muslim population.

Weiser also argued his political views aren't an influence on his ability to guide the university as a member of the Board of Regents.

"Those are views I find despicable," Weiser said when asked whether his views were considered "Trumpist."

"I think there are Democrats that didn't agree with everything Hillary Clinton said and did. To paint everything with a broad brush and say, 'Because you're Republican, you must believe everything that Donald Trump did or said,' is not a right conclusion.

"Yes, I'm a Republican and yes, quite often on campus I feel very unwelcome," he added. "I was asked to be here long before this election took place. I was as surprised with the outcome as most of the people in this room were. It was not a pretty election but I will tell you, I do believe in democracy and there is a will in majority."

Following the election, Weiser said he is hopeful Trump can lead the country in a positive direction and was optimistic based on the speech Trump gave after receiving a call from Hillary Clinton that she was conceding.

"The one thing that was refreshing to me, for those who stayed up that late, was Trump's speech, which was a very conciliatory," he said. "I thought he was very positive in his attitudes toward Hillary Clinton. One of the things I really liked was that he recognized the little people who played a part in his campaign, including the secret service."
BAY CITY - Veterans from across Bay County gathered at the War Memorial in front of the Bay County building to remember their fallen brothers and sisters while celebrating their service to the United States.

The 11 a.m. ceremony was one of three planned for Friday, including a noon dedication aboard the U.S.S. Edson in Bangor Township and a 1:45 p.m. meeting at Bay County Medical Care Facility, 564 W. Hampton Rd. in Essexville.



Veterans from the U.S. Marines and Navy stood at attention on either side of the memorial's "Avenue of Heroes" as American Legion chaplain Kenny Burtch delivered a prayer. Marine Corps Vietnam veteran Bruce Douglas then addressed the crowd before a firing squad of American Legion members delivered a 21-gun salute.



Bugler Lori Wenglikowski ended the ceremony with the playing of "Taps."
There are two anti-Donald Trump protests scheduled to take place at 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11 in the Detroit area.

The demonstrations are part of a growing trend of rallies across the nation protesting the newly-minted President-elect Trump, which typically organize under the name "#NotMyPresident."

The first, "Stop Trump Royal Oak," will meet at the Oakland Community College campus, 739 S. Washington Ave., to "protest fascism, bigotry, and Trump's dangerous policy proposals."

The other, "WSU Rally & March To Shut Down Trump's Racist Vision For America," will meet in front of the Wayne State University undergrad library, 5515 Gullen Mall.

"Donald Trump has used the presidential election in the United States to build a movement modeled on the semi-fascist ultra-right wing immigrant bashing parties of Europe, like the Le Pen National Front, and the historical experience of the rise to power of Mussolini's fascists and Hitler's Nazi's," the Wayne State rally's Facebook page reads. "With Donald Trump's assumption of the presidency, the first step would be taken in the creation of a fascist power over the American government and the American people. The feeble electoral tactics of Clinton's Democrats have failed to prevent this disaster for democracy in the U.S. and around the world.

"Both the Democratic Party and the American news media have proven bankrupt in defeating Trump or even in speaking the plain truth about the threat he presents and the real character of the movement he heads."

Protests in Michigan have stretched from Grand Rapids to Ann Arbor and Detroit in the aftermath of the general election. More than 2,000 are reported to have attended the #NotMyPresident gathering in Grand Rapids on Thursday.

Trump himself addressed the protests that have been taking place across the nation since presidential election was decided in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016
MT. MORRIS TWP., MI -- The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is sending testing kits to Beecher schools after a sample from a kitchenette/office space in the Head Start wing at Dailey Elementary recorded a level of 49 parts per billion.

Additional water samples were taken on Nov. 9 by the Beecher Water Department. A trace amount of lead -- 3 parts per billion -- was found at the faucet in a kitchenette area.

"The samples collected have all been within acceptable limits and safe for drinking," said Beecher superintendent Josha Talison, adding no lead was found at the point of entry into the school building.

The Genesee Intermediate School District called for the earlier testing in the building. Talison said the GISD conducts tests in classrooms they operate in buildings around Genesee County.

Steve Tunnicliff, deputy superintendent with the GISD, said the fixture was replaced Thursday and testing will continue. It was located in a classroom that was reconfigured to serve as an office area for the Head Start program.

He noted the GISD Head Start programs use a food solution center and Food Bank of Eastern Michigan to feed children "so food preparation for students hasn't been impacted in any way."

Kits are being provided and testing will be done free of charge by the MDEQ at all Beecher school buildings in the next few weeks, Talison said.

Bottled water is being provided for use by students and staff as a precautionary measure until testing takes place on all fountains, faucets, and kitchen area where water is used in each building, according to a Nov. 10 letter by Talison addressed to Beecher families.

"I think our parents are very grateful that we found out about it and we were transparent about it," he said, Thursday afternoon.
On Nov. 10, together with the Ministry of Finance of the Peoples Republic of China, the Asian Development Bank held a symposium commemorating the 30 years of strong partnership between China and ADB at the Asia-Pacific Finance and Development Institute in Shanghai. Thirty years signifies maturity in China, and ADB is eager to develop further, our mature partnership with China.

From 1978 to 2015, China not only achieved average annual growth of nearly 10%, but it also transformed its economy substantially: from a rather basic agriculture, mining and heavy industry dominated one to manufacturing and export led one, and then to the current service sector and consumption led one. Of particular importance was the fact that China has pursued policies conducive for rapid economic growth, especially by investing rigorously in infrastructure.

China joined ADB in 1986, and I am proud of ADBs contribution to Chinas rapid socioeconomic development over the past 30 years. Since the approval of our first loan to China Investment Bank in 1987, ADB approved a total of $34 billion in loans by the end of last year, including $3 billion for the private sector.

Half of our total assistance to China has been in the transport sector. Particularly in early years, ADB assistance focused on filling the gaps  such as the sections of north-south or east-west corridors in transport sector or to address generation and transmission capacity constraints in the power sector. In later years, the focus of ADB assistance has moved to less developed parts of China, and to address the issue of inclusiveness, environmental concerns or to introduce innovative approaches. Instead of expressways, we are now supporting feeder roads in rural areas or road maintenance and road safety. In the energy sector, Guangdong Energy Efficiency Power Plant, approved in 2008, was one of the first large-scale energy efficiency projects in China to demonstrate that energy efficiency improvements can even negate the need for a new power plant.

ADB has also supported China through our knowledge work. Since 1986, our approved technical assistance grants have amounted to $430 million. These grants cover the preparation of infrastructure projects, sector reforms, public finance, environmental protection, and capacity development.

Chinas Persistent and Emerging Challenges and the Role of ADB

China needs to continue transforming its economy, and move up the global value chain, advancing its productivity and labor force skills. At the same time, continuing efforts are needed to reach out to the remaining poor in the pockets of poverty, and to respond to emerging challenges such as aging population. There are also challenges in realizing ecological civilization, through protection and promotion of environment, and by investing in livable cities.

ADB is ready to help Chinas further transformation and address economic, social, and demographic challenges. We are now working with Guizhou Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to reform their technical and vocational education systems. ADB can also provide more assistance in elderly care, pharmaceutical industry reform, and health sector finance.

ADB is committed to providing strong support for the realization of the vision of an ecological civilization. We have been supporting Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) even before it became a ministry and we are having regular dialogue with MEP to strengthen our collaboration.

Climate change is another important area of our partnership. China is the worlds largest energy consumer with the largest greenhouse gas emissions of 24% of the global total. With ADBs corporate target to double our climate financing from $3 billion a year to $6 billion by 2020, we are ready to help China green its economy. I would like to highlight that last year ADB approved its first policy-based loan to China of $300 million to improve air-quality in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei greater capital area and to reduce CO2 emissions.

Deepening and Widening the ADBPRC Partnership

This year, as China adopted its 13th Five-Year Plan, ADB adopted its new Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) with China for 20162020. The new CPS presents the intention of China and ADB to further deepen and widen our partnership in four different aspects.

First, ADB aims to increase our lending to China, along with ADBs total lending capacity. The five priority areas are (i) environmental protection and climate change, (ii) promoting regional cooperation and integration, (iii) continuing efforts for inclusive development to address poverty and inequality, (iv) promoting innovation and knowledge-led development, and (v) supporting reforms and strengthening institutions.

Second, the new CPS presents a clear vision for deepening our partnership through knowledge. Our knowledge work in China and tacit knowledge created through our operations in China are useful to other developing countries in the region.

Third, ADB and China will work together to promote regional cooperation. We share a common goal of connectivity in transport, energy, and communications and trade facilitation across China, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. We will collaborate closely with China and other development partners including the newly established Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank.

Fourth, China is becoming a larger financial contributor to ADB operations. I appreciate that China has more than doubled its contributions to the Asian Development Fund, ADBs concessional window, from $45 million to $100 million, in the recently concluded 12th replenishment negotiations. China also established the PRC Poverty Reduction and Regional Cooperation Fund at ADB in 2005, as the first China-financed trust fund in any multilateral development bank, and since then it contributed $40 million to this facility.

The theme of this years ADBPRC 30th anniversary celebration is Partnership for the Better World. As Chinas importance in the region and globally increases, so too does the importance of further deepening and widening of our partnership.

The author is president of the Asian Development Bank
water bottles.JPG

(Emily Lawler | MLive.com)

FLINT, MI - It's unlikely a door-to-door water delivery service ordered Thursday by a federal judge will begin immediately, according to Gov. Rick Snyder's office.

U.S. District Judge David M. Lawson issued a preliminary injunction Thursday, Nov. 10, ordering bottled water be delivered to Flint residents unless officials can regularly prove there is an operating, properly-installed water filter in their home.

Lawson's order requires city and state officials file a status report with the court by the end of Dec. 16 documenting their compliance with the order.

But, Snyder's spokeswoman Anna Heaton says it's unlikely the state will be able to immediately implement such a program.

"(T)he Attorney General's office is reviewing the order to determine how to proceed," Heaton said. "If door to door delivery commences, it won't be immediate, as it will require a great deal of planning, funding and logistics."

Heaton did say, however, that filters and bottled water would continue to be delivered for those who requested it.

Flint spokeswoman Kristin Moore could not be reached for comment.

The city's interim CFO David Sabuda told the judge it would cost $9 million per month to fund such a program. State officials said their response costs would likely triple to roughly $9.4 million per month if they had to deliver five cases of bottled water each week for every home in the city, according to court records.

The decision requires the city and the state to provide door-to-door delivery of four cases of bottled water per week, per resident unless the home is exempt from the program.

Homes can only become exempt if they opt out of delivery, refuse to permit the installation and maintenance of a faucet filter, if officials regularly verify a filter is properly installed and maintained at the home or the home is unoccupied.

City and state officials argued residents had access to clean water through bottled water distribution sites scattered throughout Flint and through water filters being provided to residents free of charge.

But, Lawson ruled it wasn't enough to ensure residents were receiving safe water, pointing to improperly used filters and difficulties some are having obtaining bottled water.

"The likelihood that some of the filters are installed improperly and Flint residents are continuing to consume lead is quite high under the circumstances," Lawson wrote in is order.

Concerned Pastors for Social Action, Flint resident Melissa Mays, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the ACLU of Michigan sought the injunction as part of a case brought under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

Their case included accounts from residents and experts on how clean water still isn't available for all in the city.

A 67-year-old Flint resident told the judge a filter was delivered to his home in early 2016, but it did not include installation instructions.

"He installed it and assumed it could remain in place until the indicator light turned red," Lawson wrote in his opinion. "However, after four months the indicator light did not change, and a canvasser subsequently told him that he should be changing the filter at least once a month. Therefore, he and his family do not trust the filtered tap water."

Michael Hood, executive director of Crossing Water, a non-profit started in response to the water crisis, testified 52 percent of homes visited by his agency had some type of problem with the water filters, including being given the wrong cartridge replacements, cartridges being compromised by running hot water through them or using the filters without a cartridge entirely.

Others were unable to read the installation instructions, lacked the tools needed for installation or had faucets that simply weren't compatible with the filters.

Some residents also told Lawson of the difficulties in regularly obtaining enough bottled water for their entire households.

The state has identified a list of homebound residents, 1,250 people, who receive weekly deliveries of water, but Lawson found it still was not enough to ensure safe water was reaching everybody.

"Those efforts certainly are commendable" Lawson wrote. "However, the plaintiffs have offered credible anecdotal evidence that indicates that the distribution network is in flux and not completely effective in providing safe drinking water to several households."

Lawson's order also requires residents be provided with clear and current information about the lead contamination of their water supply, and notices must be presented in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hmong.

While strides have been made in the city to replace lead-tainted service lines and reduce lead levels being detected in the water system, authorities warn the city's water system is still unsafe to drink without proper filtration.

State Sen. Jim Ananich, D-Flint, said Lawson's ruling highlight how much more work needs to be done in response to the water crisis.

"This emergency is not over and as long as a single person can't get access to the safe water they deserve the system is failing," Ananich said. "The order tonight reinforces how far we still are from fully recovering."
FLINT, MI - An excavating contractor and Consumers Energy shoulder the blame for a gas line explosion that injured two people last year, according to a new state report.

A gigantic fireball erupted June 6, 2015 after crews ruptured an 8-inch gas line while working on the bridge-replacement project at Dort Highway and Interstate 69.

Two people were sent to the hospital, including a motorcyclist who was riding through the area when the gas line exploded.

A report from the Michigan Public Service Commission finds that Consumers Energy had five violations ranging from "distribution line valves" to "general provisions" and "procedural manual for operations, maintenance and emergencies."

In all, the commission determined the explosion caused more than $100,000 in damages.

The investigation determined Consumers did not adequately mark the entire scope of the Miss Dig work ticket. Miss Dig is a private organization that helps contractors identify underground utility lines.

The area where the damage to the main occurred was not marked by Miss Dig, according to the report.

The violations call for Consumers to pay a civil penalty of $40,000, according to a letter from the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs to Consumers.

There was no mention of any monetary fines levied against the contractor, Dan's Excavating, Inc. in Shelby Township, according to the documents.

The Flint Journal could not reach a representative for Dan's Excavating for comment.

The report also found that Dan's Excavating, Inc., violated state law by not updating the notification system when workers determined there a gas main that was not correctly marked.

The gas burned for more than 3 hours before Consumers Energy crews were able to cut off the gas to the leak, causing traffic stoppages on both directions of I-69 and the surrounding area.

The state found that contributing factors included:

The excavator did not hand expose the existing gas facilities to verify the gas main location and depth and sufficient intervals.

Consumers did not secure the area affected by blowing gas and did not prevent possible sources of ignition from entering the area affected by gas.

The miscommunication between emergency responders and Consumers resulted in allowing motor vehicles in the area affected by gas. Roles and responsibilities were not know during the incident for traffic control and site perimeter security.

Consumers did not dispatch a distribution construction crew until after Consumers' first responder arrived. Consumers was notified initially by the excavator that there was blowing gas from a below-grade facility.

Consumers did not attempt to isolate the damaged main with emergency isolation valves. This particular section of the main was installed in 1997 connects to several older steel systems to the south at Lapeer Road and to the north at Court Street. There are no valves on the 1.2-mile length of main installed in 1997.

A Consumers spokeswoman said the utility is making changes in light of the report but declined to elaborate on specifics.

"Yes we reached a consent agreement with (the Michigan Public Service Commission) and we are going to be initiating some enhancement to our gas safety program as a part of the agreement," said Consumers Energy Spokeswoman Debra Dodd.

An attorney for the injured motorcyclist said a lawsuit is ongoing.

Alfred Miller, 28, of Flint, was burned on his head, back and arms when the gas ignited as he drove a motorcycle north on Dort Highway.

Miller subsequently filed a lawsuit against the city, Flint Fire Department, Consumers, Dan's Excavating and others after burns over 40 percent of his body required multiple surgeries, according to his attorney Leonard E. Miller.

"He'll have pain for the rest of his life," Leonard Miller said. "He's unable to resume his daily activities that he was able to do before the incident. The man can't put on his shirt without pain."

Both Consumers Energy and City Attorney Stacy Erwin Oakes declined comment about the lawsuit
FLINT, MI - Genesee County has agreed to pay $125,000 to a man who alleged an unprovoked attack by jail deputies caused him to lose a molar and left him with a bloody gash on his head.

Joseph Rowlery Jr., 46, reached an agreement Oct. 17 with the county to settle a federal lawsuit accusing Genesee County Jail deputies of excessive force following a 2010 incident inside the jail.

The settlement was released Thursday, Nov. 10, to MLive-The Flint Journal through the Freedom of Information Act.

Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell and Rowlery's attorney Shawn Cabot could not be reached for comment. The settlement contained a confidentiality agreement.

Rowlery was in the jail on a warrant for failure to pay child support, according to court records.

U.S. District Judge Judith Levy reviewed jail surveillance video submitted as evidence in the case and claimed it showed Rowlery standing by a jail cell for about two minutes before deputy Robert Winston and another deputy approached him.

Rowelry claimed he was responding to a question from another inmate while picking up his jacket in preparation of being released from custody.

Winston allegedly asked Rowlery what he was doing and Rowlery replied that he was being released, according to court records. Rowlery said that Winston responded, "No you're not. Give me your coat, you're going back in your cell."

Winston claimed Rowlery was ordered to sit on a bench while waiting to be fingerprinted prior to his release, but instead he walked down a hallway and "harassed a female detainee in a cell 'by talking to her,'" according to court records.

That's when he was approached by deputies.

The judge described the video as showing Rowlery talking with the two deputies while a third walks down the hall toward him, according to court documents.

The video does not contain audio.

Rowlery then removes his coat and places it on the floor. At this point, there are five officers standing in the hallway, according to court records.

Rowlery claimed Winston ordered him to lie down on the floor and put his hands behind his back. Rowlery maintained he was fully compliant with this order, according to court documents. Winston told the court Rowlery was not compliant with any of his instructions, but acknowledged that he removed his shoes and jacket voluntarily.

Levy described the video as showing Rowlery turn to face the wall followed by Winston lunging at him, pushing him against the wall. Winston claims he felt Rowlery tense up and push back when Winston tried to guide Rowlery into the cell, according to court documents.

In order to get him to the ground, Winston testified he "delivered a strike to [plaintiff's] left common peroneal," which is a nerve in the back of the leg. This is a strike officers are trained to use to restrain someone who is resisting their commands, according to court records.

The video shows Rowlery was forced to the floor and landed on his face, according to the judge.

Three of the other deputies then restrained Rowlery at his head and feet while Winston appears to kneel on top of Rowlery's back, according to court records.

Rowlery also alleged that while lying handcuffed face-down on the floor, Winston beat on the back of his head while kneeing him in the back, causing his head to "split open on the hard concrete floor."

However, the deputies claim that Rowlery was resisting while on the floor by tightening his arms to make restraining him more difficult. While Rowlery was being restrained on the floor, a sixth officer walked down the hallway toward the melee.

A group of deputies then lifted Rowlery up so he was sitting in the middle of the hallway. The end of the video showed Rowlery sitting handcuffed with his pants around his ankles and blood on the left side of his face and above his right eye.

Rowlery also alleged one of his teeth was knocked out from the strikes to his head. He had to be hospitalized because he had a large cut on the back of his head and lost a tooth during the altercation, according to court records.

The settlement agreement drops the lawsuit against the county and eight deputies.

It was the second time in less than a month the county had to pay because of allegations of excessive force inside the jail.

A federal jury ordered Genesee County on Nov. 3 to pay $36.6 million in another excessive force lawsuit against five Genesee County Sheriff's deputies.

William Jennings sued multiple Genesee County Jail deputies claiming excessive use of force during an incident at the Genesee County Jail following his arrest on Sept. 18, 2010.

Taxpayers could be on the hook for picking up a part of the tab if a $36.6 million verdict stands as the county's insurance policy will only cover up to $20 million.

The county's insurance policy will cover the Rowlery settlement.
LAPEER COUNTY, MI -- A person of interest is in custody after the Lapeer County Sheriff's Office discovered the remains of a 37-year-old Flint woman buried outside a home in what police have labeled a suspicious death.

The tip was received around noon Nov. 9 in regards to a body buried outside a home on Davison Road west of Bassett Road in Elba Township. Deputies moved dirt from a fresh grave site to confirm the information.

"You could tell the ground was not consistent with the surroundings," said Jason Parks, a detective sergeant with the Lapeer County Sheriff's Office.

He noted the body may have been there up to a week prior to its discovery.

The Michigan State Police Bridgeport Crime Lab aided deputies at the scene west of Bassett Road with evidence collection. An autopsy has been scheduled for the coming days in what Parks called a "very active investigation."

A preliminary investigation suggests the homeowner is not involved, according to police. Police zeroed in on a 36-year-old Flint man as a person of interest. The Flint man is an acquaintance of the homeowner.

Deputies with the Genesee and Lapeer County Sheriff's Office, Flint office of the ATF, Lapeer County Sheriff's Special Response Team all took part in a check of the home after a search warrant was obtained Nov. 10.

The person of interest was taken into custody at that point. Discussions have taken place with the Lapeer County Prosecutor's Office, but Parks said no formal charges have been filed at this time.
Bottled water for Flint

Donated bottled water collected at Mt. Zion Baptist Church bound for First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church in Flint Jan. 26, 2016. (Mark Bugnaski/Kalamazoo Gazette)

FLINT, MI - A federal judge has ordered bottled water must be delivered to Flint residents unless officials can prove there is an operating, properly-installed water filter in their home.

U.S. District Judge David M. Lawson issued a preliminary injunction Thursday, Nov. 10, that also requires residents be provided with clear and current information about the lead contamination of their water supply and notices must be presented in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hmong.

Concerned Pastors for Social Action, Flint resident Melissa Mays, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the ACLU of Michigan sought the injunction as part of a case brought under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

"The Court today affirmed that all people have the right the safe drinking water, including the people of Flint, Michigan," said Dimple Chaudhary, Senior Attorney with NRDC. "The court correctly recognized that the government created this crisis, and it's the government's responsibility to ensure that all people in Flint have access to safe drinking water."

The decision requires the city and the state to provide door-to-door delivery of four cases of bottled water per week per resident unless the home is exempt from the program.

Homes can only become exempt if they opt out of delivery, refuse to permit the installation and maintenance of a faucet filter, if officials regularly verify a filter is properly installed and maintained at the home or the home is unoccupied.

"This is a very significant victory for the people of Flint, who now have the assurance from a federal court that they will have access to safe drinking water every day," said Pastor Robert Blake, a member of the Concerned Pastors for Social Action. "But there's still much more to do to fix Flint. As I testified in court, poverty is high in Flint, but just because you have impoverished people, we ought not treat them like third-world people."

Check back with Mlive.com for more on this developing story.
FLINT, MI -- A month after settling on a long-debated contract with the nurse's union, McLaren Health Care is facing negotiations with a new group of employees.

ASFCME Local 2650 has been in negotiations with McLaren since July 2014 after members voted down a possible contract, said Shawndrica Simmons, labor representative. The union represents employees in Flint and Lapeer.

"It's not uncommon (to go two years) in the realm of negotiating contracts, but for this local, it's a long time," Simmons said.

It took about a year for McLaren-Flint and ASFCME Local 875 - the nurse's union - and an impending strike vote for an agreement to be reached on labor contracts. Nurses fought for better working conditions and lower patient-nurse ratios.

Now, Local 2650 - the non-tech worker's union, which includes employees like housekeepers, billers, phlebotomists, nurse aids, pharmacy techs and others - are negotiating with the hospital for affordable health care.

"The holdup is the employer peddling their own health insurance and wanting to charge top-dollar to workers who only make $9 an hour," Simmons said.

McLaren and union officials are still working together to iron out the details, said McLaren Spokeswoman Laurie Prochazka.

"I would like to emphasize that McLaren Flint is continuing to bargain in good faith and to work collaboratively with AFSCME Local 2650 toward fair and competitive contract terms," she said.

Simmons agreed, saying there has been no talk of strike yet, and while it's never off the table, the employer was initially shocked that the contract was voted down.

Both sides are still working together to reach an agreement, Simmons said.

"We're not even in the talks right now of taking a strike vote. We want to be proactive and try to give the employer a chance to rectify this matter," she said.

In a recent, four-hour chat between union and hospital leaders, 10 main issues were identified - mainly the lack of choices in healthcare and its cost.

"The employer wants them to pay, at maximum, 18 percent of the premium share, which can amount to virtually $200 per (bi-weekly) pay period for a family, $130 per two persons and $80 per pay period for a single person -- and these are people who barely bring home $400 per pay period," Simmons said.

Other issues include 10-cent annual wage increases, part-timers not being eligible for benefits, re-classification of jobs without wage changes and small bonuses with high taxes.

The local, which has more than 900 members, now waits for a new contract proposal from McLaren, but Simmons says they need affordable health insurance before any kind of settlement is made.

"The employer was shocked that contract was voted down, but we weren't as union," Simmons said. "The bottom line is that even with $3,000 in bonuses, the employees still can't afford the health insurance. That's just how it is."

Union and McLaren leaders are scheduled to meet again Monday, Nov. 14.
SAULT STE. MARIE, MI - A suspected drug courier and his Uber driver, residents of Quebec, wound up in the hands of U.S. authorities when their GPS led them to the International Bridge Plaza.

They were headed from Montreal to Edmonton, Alberta, but inadvertently swung by the U.S. port of entry.

Neither had the required immigration documents to legally enter the U.S.

Federal investigators recovered 2,024 grams of methamphetamine and 914 grams of Ecstasy pills contained in plastic bags in a Kellogg's Frosted Flakes box.

A Google map showing the route from Montreal to Edmonton, Alberta.

Mayooran Rajasingam was named in a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court alleging he conspired with others to distribute a controlled substance. Todd Wilton, a special agent for Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, filed the complaint.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Timothy Greeley ordered Rajasingam held pending a Nov. 17 detention hearing.

Wilton said in the complaint that Rajasingam, from Sri Lanka but a Canadian citizen, and his Syria-born Uber driver, tried to enter the U.S. on Wednesday, Nov. 9. Both showed Quebec driver's licenses.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, noting that neither had documents to legally enter the U.S., referred the vehicle and occupants for a secondary inspection.

The driver had a small amount of marijuana in his pocket.

Investigators found a Saigon Tourist travel bag near the hatch back of the rented 2017 Hyundai Tucson. The bag held the cereal box containing what turned out to be illegal drugs, the government said.

Authorities say drugs were hidden inside a cereal box.

The Uber driver told investigators he was to be paid $600 to drive to Edmonton, and was unaware that drugs were in the vehicle.

Rajasingam told police he thought he was delivering cash. He said he was to receive $1,000.

"Rajasingham said that he and the driver utilized a GPS navigational device for directions, and that the GPS led them to the International Bridge Port of Entry in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan," Wilton wrote in the complaint.

"Rajasingham stated that they had no intent to enter the United States."
Plans for a massive protest the day after President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration are making their way around the internet.

Titled the "Million Women March on D.C.," the event scheduled for Jan. 21, 2017 invites women and anyone who supports women's rights to gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and march to the White House.

Plans are in their early stages at this point, but Facebook events promoting the rally have been popping up in states throughout the country, including Michigan.

Word of the rally has been spreading throughout the state and is being shared on social media.

Organizers are emphasizing the march is meant to be an inclusive gathering for everyone who supports women's rights.

Women and girls, men and boys, families, people of color, immigrants, the LGBT community, climate change advocates and anyone else willing to support the cause are listed on the Facebook promotions nationwide.

Protests against Trump's impending presidency have been commonplace throughout the United States in recent days. Thousands of people attended rallies in Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor and East Lansing this week.

The Grand Rapids rally featured chants such as "Not my president" and "Donald Trump, go away. Sexist, racist, anti-gay."

Trump is expected to be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2017.
[File photo]

Chinas first dark matter probe satellite had explored 1.6 billion particles by Nov. 10, 328 days after the detector started to search the signals of invisible material.

The satellite, named "Wukong" after the Monkey King character in the Chinese classic "Journey to the West," was launched on Dec. 17, 2015 using a Long March 2-D rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu province. The satellite boasts the largest observation scope, as well as the best energy resolution ratio and particle-resolving ability worldwide.

Recently, the satellites orbital height has remained stable at around 504 kilometers. Its remote control and load temperature are also in the normal range. Wu Jian, head engineer of the satellite, explained that researchers have revised the data calibration and templates over 4,600 times in order to guarantee precision.

The satellite sent back its first set of observation data several minutes after its operation commenced; its performance has only improved since then. The satellite won recognition from a number of assessment experts thanks to its in-orbit test three months after launching.

Chief scientist Chang Jin said that the satellite focuses on precise detection, high efficiency and low cost. Considering the data, Chang expressed his belief that a breakthrough, adding Chinese power to the development of space science, was not far away.
KENT COUNTY, MI - Todd Grinage, president-elect of the Village of Caledonia, vowed Thursday, Nov. 10, to fight for his post while serving 60 days in jail for third-offense drunken driving.

Grinage, 53, stood in the lobby of the Kent County Jail and apologized for his mistakes.

He just wants to serve the town he has called home his entire life, he said.

"The people know who I am and what I'm about," he said, standing next to his attorney, Andrew Rodenhouse.

"My convictions for DUI have nothing to do with what I can do for the village."

The village may have other ideas.

An unidentified village official asked village attorney Mark Van Allsburg to suggest to Grinage that he resign. If that fails, the official wants Van Allsburg to ask Gov. Rick Snyder to remove Grinage from office, Rodenhouse said.

Todd Grinage

Van Allsburg could not immediately be reached.

Election law says: "The governor shall remove all village officers chosen by the electors of a village when the governor is satisfied from sufficient evidence submitted to the governor that the officer has been guilty of official misconduct, willful neglect of duty, extortion, or habitual drunkenness, or has been convicted of being drunk, or whenever it appears by a certified copy of the judgment of a court of record of this state that a village officer, after the officer's election or appointment, has been convicted of a felony."

Rodenhouse said that the drunken-driving offense alleges only that Grinage had a blood-alcohol level over 0.08 percent, which isn't enough to satisfy requirements to remove an elected official from office.

Rodenhouse said his client, who "cares deeply for the community," has no plans to quit.

Snyder has rejected efforts to remove elected officials for greater infractions, the attorney said.

Grinage was arrested June 11 at Cherry Valley Avenue SE and 84th Street. Grinage pleaded straight up to the charge, his attorney said. He said Kent County prosecutors don't accept plea deals for third-offense drunken driving, a five-year felony.

He was sentenced on Nov. 3, five days before the election.

A pre-sentence report compiled by a probation officer recommended a jail sentence of 30 days, but Kent County Circuit Judge Mark Trusock gave him 60 days.

Trusock, aware that Grinage was running for office, also rejected a request that Grinage start his jail term after the election.

Grinage is on work release.

On work days, he leaves jail in the morning, then has to return by 5:30 p.m. He had only a few minutes to talk Thursday before he was locked back up.

His attorney said he got help after his arrest. He goes to counseling and Alcoholics Anonymous.

"He stepped up like a man and took responsibility for his actions," Rodenhouse said.

He did not know how many voters knew about his client's legal problems. The word had gotten around, he said.

"At least some people were aware of it," he said.

Grinage had 371 votes to Danise Regan's 260. Both have been village trustees since 2010.

Rodenhouse said that Grinage would start his job as president on Jan. 1. He is expected to be released from jail on Dec. 20.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- A peaceful anti-Trump rally in downtown Grand Rapids turned into a bit of a traffic headache for police as an impromptu 90-minute march clogged streets.

The Thursday, Nov. 10 march followed a "#notmypresident" rally at Rosa Parks Circle that attracted an estimated 500 people who chanted slogans such as "Take our rights, we will fight" and "Sexist, racist, anti-gay, Donald Trump go away" and "Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go."

Many of the protesters were passionate about Tuesday's election and say they cannot accept president-elect Trump without voicing their opposition.

Many said they were taken aback by comments he made during the campaign -- or were revealed in media accounts -- about immigration, women and other issues.

Megan Bardenhagen, a Grand Valley State University junior who helped organize the rally, said she wants Americans to do whatever possible to keep Trump from the presidency.

"We need to take a stand against this misogyny, this sexism, this racism, this white-supremacist nation we have right now" she said.

Petra Castillo of Grand Rapids showed up at the rally with a "Not My President" sign and said that as both a woman and minority, Trump does not represent her values.

"You can't just get elected and think that all of us who have been targeted are going to be OK with it," she said.

Elizabeth Lynn of Holland said it's difficult for her to understand Trump's appeal to people who voted for him.

"I understand that voters wanted somebody completely different and an outsider, but this is not the man," she said.

Many of the protesters said they realize it may be too late keep Trump from office now, but said they hope people will work to put more Democrats in Congress in two years and also stop a possible presidential re-election in four years.

Trump tweeted about the wave of protests across the country on Thursday.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

The impromptu march started about 6:20 p.m. and headed up Monroe Center NW, then began to meander around downtown streets that included major thoroughfares such as Fulton Street, Division Avenue, Monroe Avenue and Michigan Avenue.

Grand Rapids police Chief David Rahinsky said police were not aware that protesters planned to march, but he said officer were prepared.

Police scrambled to get ahead of the protesters and block off intersections. In some cases, the crowd of sign-carrying, slogan-chanting protesters walked between cars stopped because of the procession.

Rahinsky said the march was free speech and, other than a traffic inconvenience for many downtown motorists, the protesters were peaceful.

Rahinksy said he believed people not at the Rosa Parks Circle rally joined in the march as it went along, growing its size to up to 2,000 people.

The rally and march did attract a handful of Trump supporters.

Ken Jantovsky of Sparta stood across Monroe Center from Rosa Parks Circle with a Trump/Pence political sign. He held it above his head.

"They came out to exercise their rights, I'm going to exercise mine," he said.

Another "#notmypresident' protest is planned for 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12, also at Rose Parks Circle.
In the early morning hours of Election Day, Donald Trump's supporters packed DeVos Place in downtown Grand Rapids to hear him speak at his final campaign rally.

Now that Trump has turned what most experts predicted was a long shot into an upset win over Hillary Clinton, his passionate followers have high expectations.

"The first 100 days, I think will be a whirlwind," said Ron Vandermolen, who works in in the Allegan County community of Wayland where nearly two out of three voters supported Trump.

"There's a lot of stuff that has to get done. He has people around him to do that," Vandermolen added. "If there's something I don't know I go and ask the guy who knows. He has proven time and time again that he's not afraid to go and ask."

Former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who has spoken with the president-elect several times, said he expects Trump to work as hard as president as he had the last few days of the campaign when he visited five states each day.

"He'll put a tremendous amount of pressure on Congress to get things done," Hoekstra said. "I think he will expect the same kind of intensity from Congress as he puts into his job."

Infrastructure programs, tax reform, ideas to help job creation and others should all be addressed in the first 100 days, Hoekstra said.

Away from home, he added that it will be interesting to see how quickly Trump puts his imprint on foreign policy, particularly the fight against ISIS.

Wayland resident Gary Stout, a disabled veteran who flew helicopters in the Vietnam War, used Trump's mantra of "Drain the Swamp" when referring to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"We've got a whole lot of people in Washington D.C. who need to be gone," he said. "The Veterans Administration has some really terrific people working there, a lot of them sacrificially. But the hierarchy, these people are getting bonuses for not taking care of the vets, that' a problem."

Vandermolen added that he expects Trump to "gut the VA in a heartbeat."

"We are failing those people miserably," he said.

Even some fellow Republicans who did not support Trump are vowing to work with him after he takes office Jan. 20.

In a statement, U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, who had been critical of Trump during the campaign, said "we've got a lot of work to do."

"It's time to put the divisiveness of the past behind us, and come together as a nation," Upton said. "Building a better future for our children is something all Americans have in common and is a goal we all need to work towards."

Healing a divided nation proved to be a theme among supporters MLive talked to. Kalamazoo County Treasurer Mary Balkema, an at-large Republican delegate for Michigan, was among the most vocal.

"We certainly hope he tones down some of the rhetoric and brings some healing to a for country that is so divided right now," Balkema said.

Trump's federal judicial nominees will be vital, Balkema said, since those positions are so important.

Trump has vowed to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, a position Upton has supported in the past. However, the details for how exactly that might work have yet to be revealed by Trump.

Before the election, Trump talked about the importance of speeding up the approval process within the federal government for life-saving medications, a cause Upton has championed with his 21stCentury Cures Act.

U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Cascade, who also was critical of Trump and did not support him during the campaign extended something of an olive branch after the results came in.

On Twitter, Amash wrote: "Congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Let's work together to defend liberty, the Rule of Law, and the Constitution."

Not all of Trump's detractors were so conciliatory, of course.

A somber mood fell over the campus of Grand Valley State University, where Clinton held a large rally on Monday, and a protest was held Thursday evening in Grand Rapids.

The chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Kalamazoo County, where Clinton won with 53 percent of the vote, said her community would lift each other up even with Trump in the Oval Office.

"Anyone feeling scared or unsure in the country right now: What we can say is we all have a place here in this county and we will figure out a way forward through this," Shannon Sykes said.

Back in Wayland, Tom Garter, who lives in nearby Shelbyville, said he is hopeful that Trump will follow through on promises to work with Congress on both sides of the political aisle.

That includes immigration, an area that generated plenty of conversation during the campaign.

"I had some phone calls yesterday from our large Hispanic population," Balkema said. "There's a lot of fear when it comes to immigration. I would like him to come out with a plan to calm those fears that are out there right now."

Whether Trump's planned "impenetrable wall" actually happens remains to be seen.

Rick Levett, an independent voter who did not support Trump, said his main concerns were how Trump handles policies involving construction, government contracts and labor unions.

A retired union sheet metal worker, Levett said he didn't realize know what to expect from a Trump presidency but he liked the fact that Trump was a political outsider who could bring a fresh perspective to Washington D.C.

"We need someone who doesn't have 'Good Ole Boy' syndrome," Levett said. "Donald Trump definitely doesn't have that."

MLive reporters Meagan Beck and Malachi Barrett contributed to this report.
Donald Trump

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the Macomb Community College, Monday, Oct. 31, 2016, in Warren, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

(Carlos Osorio)

The aftermath of Donald Trump's surprise victory in Tuesday's presidential election could be felt just about everywhere - including Michigan's schools, where students have responded with emotions ranging from joy to heartbreak.

But in at least a few instances, those emotions boiled over into behavior that officials say was offensive and made other students uncomfortable.

At a Royal Oak middle school, for instance, students were captured in a video chanting "build the wall" - a reference to Donald Trump's campaign pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border - during their lunch hour.

And officials at Dewitt Public Schools, located outside of Lansing, were investigating an incident in which junior high students reportedly formed a "human wall" to disrupt minority students.

How widespread such incidents are remains unclear. Officials at several schools contacted by MLive.com say emotions have been charged in the wake of Trump's election but students have largely been well behaved.

At Portage Central High School, about seven miles south of Kalamazoo, students showed a mix of exhilaration and displeasure, said principal Eric Alburtus. One Middle Eastern student, for instance, was in "tears" over questions of what a Trump presidency would mean for Muslims like him, Alburtus said.

Others at the school were clearly pleased with the billionaire's win, he said, pointing to a group of male students who started Wednesday morning by loudly chanting Trump's name - prompting one female student to complain because she felt uncomfortable.

"Yesterday was a very emotional day," Alburtus said. "There were some kids who were thrilled and there were some kids who were, quite frankly, frightened about what was happening on a national level."

Across the nation, reports surfaced on social media - many of which were collected by a website called The 74 - of students bullying and fighting one another in wake of Trump's victory. A 2011 Michigan law requires Michigan schools to have an anti-bullying policy in place. But to what extent that will apply to students involved in the incidents in Royal Oak and Dewitt remains unclear.

Speaking in general -- and not about the Royal Oak and Dewitt incidents -- Alburtus said student discipline varies on a case by case basis, but incidents of harassment generally result in a suspension.

Grand Rapids Public Schools spokesman John Helmholdt said there had not been any reports of harassment or fighting as a result of the election at his district.

However, he said the district has seen "a large number of students who are confused, fearful, and uncertain about the future."

"The two things we have heard most is fears about mass deportation and elimination of health care that families are receiving under Obamacare," he said. "Another question has been around the Electoral College vs popular vote."

At East Grand Rapids High School, teacher Janice Yates saw a number of students "openly crying" and who found it "difficult to contain their emotions."

"There were students who were truly worried that we are going to start a giant deportation force," she said. "And that's scary, but that's the rhetoric."

On the other hand, she said, some students were "gleeful," sporting Donald Trump shirts and hats.

Her message to concerned students: relax.

Yates, who teaches economics and government, explained to students that the U.S. is "bigger than one person and one election," that presidential power is subject to a series of checks and balances, and that it's time for the nation to heal and come together.

She did not receive any reports of bullying or harassment at her school. But she did witness a minor incident in which one student walked by another student who was visibly upset over the election and started chanting "Trump, Trump, Trump." She later stopped the student and told him to remain respectful of his peers.

Throughout the election, Trump's opponents talked about how his incendiary rhetoric was trickling into schools, resulting in an increase in bullying.

The Southern Poverty Law Center surveyed 2,000 teachers and found that Trump's candidacy was "producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom" and "many students worry about being deported."

The center's survey was not scientific, and consisted of teachers who visit the group's website and email subscribers.

Still, teachers like Alfonso Salais, a Spanish teacher at Lansing Eastern High School, said he's seen that effect firsthand. He said his school serves a number of students whose families are working toward citizenship, and he's received questions such as "what's going to happen to my parents" if Trump is elected.

Student have also asked, "What about this rhetoric that we're going to gather up so many millions of people and we're going to send them out." he said.

"We've had to reassure them that they are in a safe place," Salais said.
LANSING -- Rep. Sam Singh, D-East Lansing, has been named House Democratic Leader by the Michigan House Democratic Caucus.

Rep. Christine Greig, D-Farmington Hills, will serve as the Democratic floor leader.

Sam Singh

Singh, currently House Democratic floor leader, was elected to the state House in 2012. He will take over for current House Democratic Leader Rep. Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills, in January.

Singh, 45, previously served as East Lansing mayor and spent 10 years as an East Lansing City Council member, where he helped strengthen ties between the city and Michigan State University and worked on regional cooperation and economic development.

He has also served as the president and CEO of the Michigan Nonprofit Association and worked on the New Economy Initiative. He holds a history degree from MSU.

"Our work is as important now as it ever was, and it includes bringing more good-paying jobs to Michigan, making sure that each child in our state gets a world-class education and building an economy that leaves no hardworking family behind," Singh said in a press release announcing his selection. "We will fight to ensure the rights of all of our residents and to make Michigan an inclusive and welcoming state for all of its people and businesses."

Greig was elected to the Michigan House in 2014. Prior to that, she served as a founder and executive director of the Farmington/Farmington Hills Education Foundation and as president of the Farmington Area PTA Council from 2007-2011.

She has more than 20 years of experience in the business community, including working for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a consultant and for Kmart Corp. before co-owning Fulcrum Computer Services in Farmington Hills. Greig earned a bachelor's degree in American studies and computer applications from the University of Notre Dame.
Former Michigan Congressmen Mike Rogers and Peter Hoekstra are among those who could play a role in the Trump administration on national security issues, based on their role as advisers during the campaign.

Peter Hoekstra

Hoekstra, who was the co-chair of Trump's Michigan campaign, told MLive on Thursday that he has not been contacted yet by Trump's transition team, but serving a Trump presidency would be "an honor."

"If the transition team reached out and wanted to discuss opportunities," he'd be open to the conversation, said Hoekstra, 63, a Holland resident who represented Michigan's 2nd Congressional District from 1993 to 2011.

"Obviously, I worked my tail off to help him get elected and serving him would be an honor," Hoekstra said.

A natural fit for his interests might be in the areas of international relations and national security, he said. While in Congress, Hoekstra was the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He is currently part of the Investigative Project on Terrorism as a Shillman Senior Fellow, specializing in national security, international relations, global terrorism and cyber security.

During the campaign, Hoekstra was among Trump's advisers on combating Islamic terrorism.

Before his election to Congress, Hoekstra was a vice president for furniture maker Herman Miller.

"We'll see what happens," Hoekstra said. "Life is good. ... It was a very, very sweet victory here in Michigan."

Mike Rogers

Rogers, 53, could not be reached for comment.

The Wall Street Journal reported Aug. 9 that Rogers was expected to play a senior role on Trump's transition team to advise the candidate on national security, and on Thursday, the Associated Press reported an organizational chart for the transition shows national security planning is being led by Rogers.

Rogers, who served in Congress from 2001 to 2015, is the former U.S. Representative for Michigan's 8th Congressional District, which currently covers Ingham and Livingston counties as well as a portion of Oakland County.

Prior to his time in Congress, where he chaired the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers worked for the FBI as a special agent. He currently makes appearances on CNN as a commentator on national security issues, hosts the radio program "Something to Think About with Mike Rogers" and sits on the boards of several security and technology companies.

Another possible Michigan name that could see an appointment in the Trump administration is Detroit native Ben Carson, who ran in the Republican presidential primary but has since become a top surrogate for Trump.

He campaigned with Trump in Michigan in September, giving him a tour of his former neighborhood in Detroit, and also toured the state campaigning for him on Oct. 29.

Trump will officially be sworn into office as the next president Jan. 20 and is expected to continue forming his administration in the coming weeks.
In the 2016 presidential election, Michigan's status as a historically Democratic state changed in dramatic fashion.

As the votes rolled in Nov. 8, the election remained too close to call for hours until Republican Donald Trump pulled through by roughly 13,225 votes, according to unofficial election results from the Michigan Secretary of State.

The last time Michigan went to Republicans in a presidential election was in 1988, when George H.W. Bush won the election.

Michigan, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, have been part of the "blue wall" in the electoral college for the last several elections, long providing a cushion of sorts for Democratic candidates looking to swing the electoral math in their favor.

Some of the shift away from that, in Michigan at least, can be attributed to voter turnout -- specifically, lower turnout in traditionally Democratic areas and higher turnout in some rural and traditionally Republican areas compared to the 2012 election.

The total number of registered voters who cast a ballot was up slightly from 2012, with 4.9 million Michigan voters participating in the 2016 presidential election compared to 4.8 million in 2012, when President Barack Obama was running a reelection campaign against Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

But at a county-by-county level, some of the counties with large, Democratic-leaning population centers -- including Wayne, Genesee and Saginaw counties -- showed large decreases in turnout compared to 2012. By contrast, many rural counties throughout the state showed modest or significant increases in voter turnout that by and large benefited Trump.

Below is a map showing changes in turnout by county from the 2012 presidential election to the 2016 presidential election.

To search for more data on any specific county, browse through the database below.

The database can be searched by county, counties by more or fewer turnout change from 2012 to 2016 and counties by winning party in 2016.
ADRIAN, MI - U.S. Army veteran Ernest Cardinal says the reception he received at Prairie Elementary School the morning of Thursday, Nov. 11, was far different than the one he received after returning from the Vietnam War.

The students at the school in Adrian were excited to meet Cardinal, who served as a medic in the Army during the war. Cardinal was one of more than a dozen veterans who visited the school on Veterans Day, to share their stories and tell the children about the military.

"It brings tears to my eyes," Cardinal said about how excited the children were to meet him. "I break down crying sometimes because when I came home it wasn't like this. They spit on you and it was just bad.

"I'm glad to see the country has turned and is more friendly to the veterans."

Cardinal's visit was part of the school's "Take a Veteran to School Day," a program that is celebrating its 10th year this year. The program allows students to bring family members who served in the military to school with them to meet their classmates.

Veterans visited the various classrooms where the students were able to ask questions about everything from what the veterans did day-to-day to how high they were in the air when jumping from a plane.

Each veteran was also given a book of some letters and words of thanks from students in the school.

The event was created by teachers Diana Forester and Sarah Holtz who each had family serve in the military. The duo thought the event would just be a small gathering, but now is one of the most anticipated days of the year at the school.

"In preparation for 'Take a Veteran to School Day,' Prairie Elementary students have learned what it means to serve their country and how blessed they are to live in America," said Mike Perez, Prairie Elementary School principal. "The event lets veterans know how much we appreciate them, and it's another example of our teachers finding new ways to educate our students beyond the classroom and engage them with their community."

Forester said she's happy to see such excitement surrounding the event from everyone involved.

"It means so much for our veterans to hear the words 'thank you' when they return home from combat. Coming from the mouths of children in their community, it means even more," Forester said. "It is crucial our youth understand the sacrifices our veterans make for us, and that freedom isn't free. The message of 'Take a Veteran to School Day' has clearly resonated with students, veterans and the Adrian community."

Former Marine Tim Lothamer served from 2003 until 2008 and is now an employee in the Adrian School District. Lothamer was a popular figure during his visit as he wore his full Marine uniform while visiting classrooms.

For Lothamer, the experience was very enjoyable.

"I really like being in this type of environment and connecting with the kids," Lothamer said. "It makes me feel great. It makes me appreciate that I served my country."
JACKSON, MI - Saying he was treated as a "virtual sex slave" by a Michigan Department of Corrections counselor, a former inmate has filed a lawsuit against the department and the social worker, the mother of his 1-year-old child.

Steven Moerman, 44, accuses Susan Clingerman of raping him on a weekly basis, intentionally inflicting emotional distress, and the department of improperly supervising and training her and for creating and failing to prevent a "sexually hostile prison environment."

Moerman filed suit in September in Jackson County Circuit Court, a little less than two years after Clingerman was terminated from her job at Parnall Correctional Facility in Blackman Township, north of Jackson.

Because he is mentally ill, the Grand Rapids man had frequent counseling sessions with Clingerman while he was in prison and in May 2014, she initiated a sexual relationship by asking questions about his genitals. Feeling he had no real choice in the locked office, Moerman "reluctantly acquiesced," according to the lawsuit.

Clingerman, 44 of Mason, treated the man as a "virtual sex slave," demanding sexual gratification "at her whim" and taking full advantage of her control over Moerman, the document alleges. "Given the profound disparity in power and authority..., the sexual relationship was inherently involuntary."

This continued until September 2014 and Clingerman, desperate to have a child, gave birth to his baby on April 3, 2015, a fact proven by the results of a paternity test contained in the court file.

No answers to the complaint had been filed as of Thursday, Nov. 10.

A lawyer for Clingerman, Lauren Elster, said an answer was forthcoming. She said she could not make any further comment.

An attempt to contact Clingerman was not successful. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, she denied she used him as a sex slave and disputed his contention she targeted him because she wished to be a mother.

She said she suffered from seizures that left her feeling confused, a condition that contributed to her involvement in what she characterized as a consensual relationship with a man who has become her "protector" during group therapy sessions.

A spokesman for the Department of Corrections, Chris Gautz, said he was unable to provide much information because of the pending litigation.

In an email, he said Clingerman was barred from the prison Sept. 12, 2014, and discharged Jan. 8, 2015.

She was charged in 2014 with second-degree criminal sexual conduct, an accusation the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office eventually dropped. She pleaded guilty in June 2015 to to misconduct in office and Jackson County Circuit Judge Thomas Wilson ordered her to serve nine weekends in jail.

She was on probation for 18 months and had to pay $1,148 in fines and costs, according to court records.

Moerman, paroled in February, was sentenced in March 2013 in Kent County to at least three years in prison for operating or maintaining a drug lab, corrections records show.

Last spring, Clingerman filed a child support and paternity complaint against him in Ingham County.

In the lawsuit, Moerman also names Gov. Rick Snyder, former Department of Corrections Director Daniel Heyns and other department officials.

Corrections authorities should have known he was at "serious risk of being sexually assaulted" and failed to provide him with human conditions of confinement by "knowingly, voluntarily, recklessly, and with willful disregard to (his) personal safety allowing him to be sexually assaulted and raped."

He alleges another counselor employed by the corrections department served as a "lookout" for Clingerman. The other counselor was not terminated and Gautz did not believe her name surfaced in the department's investigation.

Moerman asks for more than $25,000 in damages.

"(He) suffered severe mental distress, indignity, great humiliation, emotional distress, embarrassment, anger, disappointment, fear, stress, worry, all of which is substantial and enduring," the lawsuit states.
HANOVER TWP., MI -- Lt. Ryan Reynolds of the Michigan National Guard soon will head to Latvia for his 13th year of service, and on Friday, his community let him know how much it appreciates that.

At Hanover-Horton Elementary School, Veterans Day, Nov. 11, is more than a thank you -- it's a celebration and another chance to learn what patriotism means.

"This was great," said Reynolds, who has five kids in Hanover-Horton schools. "After the last few weeks of election tension, it was nice to be in a room with kids and veterans who have nothing but love to share."

The school hosts an assembly for veterans and their families each year. This time around, Reynolds gave the address.

He asked the kids what patriotism means to them, to which one student answered, "Love and honor."

Reynolds also took the time to honor a fallen soldier, Sgt. Matthew Soper who in 2007 died during his second tour in Iraq. Soper earned a Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

His three relatives read a poem on stage before Reynolds' address.

"That man is a legend in the Michigan National Guard," Reynolds said.

About 60 veterans sat in the front of the gym as the students sang songs and shared thoughts through videos.

Fifth-graders started the singing with a U.S. Military Medley rendition.

"It was amazing, we were a little off key bit it was fun," Danielle Riggs, 10, said. "They mean so much. They go and hurt themselves badly so we can live freely."

After the hour-long assembly students, veterans and staff members mingled to continue the celebration.

"With my dad being of the Vietnam generation, and growing up not seeing this, it is awesome to see these kids stop and say, 'Thank you,'" said John Denney, Hanover-Horton School District superintendent.
The Singles Day online shopping festival kicked off on Nov. 11, and the volume of express delivery resulting from the festival is estimated to be over 1 billion packages, according to Chinas State Post Bureau. Technology is therefore indispensible for parcel delivery during this period.

Best Express Company has established over 160 cloud warehouses, in which transfer robots will be deployed to collect items. Additionally, 22 automatic sorting systems will be used by the company in 24 provinces and regions, uniting big data analytics, cloud computing, intelligent terminals and image processing.

JD.com, another e-commerce giant, will use drones for parcel delivery in cities including Suqian, Xian and Beijing. Liu Qiangdong, CEO of JD.com, said the company has been planning its routes carefully since drones have been authorized to fly in four provinces.

ZTO Express will use its own independently developed automatic sorting system to deal with up to 23,000 parcels per hour. Ni Genyan, the deputy operating manager of ZTO Express, said that just 85 workers can handle nearly 500,000 parcels thanks to the system.

Meanwhile, the Beijing branch of China Railway Express will utilize 200 high-speed trains departing from Beijing, and the Beijing Railway Bureau will specially operate four freight trains for deliveries to Shanghai and Guangzhou, with over 300 tons of cargo being transported by each train. All the express trains can arrive at their destinations the same day as they depart.
HILLSDALE COUNTY, MI - Police have issued a challenge to the people of Hillsdale County to stuff as many toys as they can into police cruiser Saturday, Nov. 12.

The public is invited to join Michigan State Police, the Litchfield Police Department and the Litchfield Fire Department at a "Stuff the Blue Goose" event to collect new toys for the annual Hillsdale County Toys for Tots campaign, according to a Michigan State Police press release.

From noon to 3 p.m. at the Litchfield Dollar General, 505 Marshall St., police and fire fighters are accepting donated toys with the goal of filling a Michigan State Police patrol car.

Donated toys must be new and unwrapped. All toys collected will stay in Hillsdale County.

Hillsdale County families wishing to be recipients in the Toys for Tots program must pre-register at the Salvation Army, 160 East Bacon St.

To pre-register, residents must provide photo identification for the parent, birth certificates for the minor children being claimed and a 2015 tax return or a benefit letter from the Department of Health and Human Services dated within 90 days of registration.

Pre-registration times are as follows:

Monday, Nov. 14, 10 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Tuesday, Nov. 15, 10 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Wednesday, Nov. 16, 10 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Thursday, Nov. 17, 10 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Friday, Nov. 18, 10 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Late pre-registration is Dec. 1, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
KALAMAZOO, MI -- Carrie Klein has kept a memory stone on her desk for 23 years.

She got it from the family of Rebecca Binkowski, a 25-year-old Western Michigan University graduate student murdered in 1993. Klein prosecuted the case, getting a first-degree murder conviction against Binkowski's killer.

Klein still keeps in touch with the victim in another case she prosecuted, a girl who spent years being sexually abused by her stepfather until, at 14, she was reached out for help.

"To me, that is what real courage is," Klein said. "I try and remember her when I get up in arms because I'm in a traffic jam, or something stupid and petty like that."

After 31 years of prosecuting cases and helping victims get justice in Kalamazoo County, Klein is retiring as Kalamazoo County chief assistant prosecutor. She has been second in command in the prosecutor's office since January 2005, when former Prosecutor Jeff Fink took office.

As a prosecutor, Klein has shown an exemplary compassion for crime victims, said Greg Russell, himself a veteran assistant prosecutor and division chief for Kalamazoo County Circuit Court. Klein has served as a sounding board for victims, a shoulder to lean on, said Russell, who me Klein met in law school at Wayne State University in the 1980s and has worked alongside her ever since.

"She really reaches out to the victims in cases she's prosecuted and has maintained relationships with them outside of the office," Russell said of his colleague. "If there's someone they need to talk to she's there for them."

He said Klein has been a strong leader, recognized for her high integrity.

"She's really going to be missed with that presence that she has that makes you want to be around her, to do excellent work that she would be proud that you are doing that," Russell said. "She never hesitates to praise what any individual does."

Klein was one of current Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting's first supervisors when he started in the prosecutor's office in 1990.

"I still look back and remember things she taught me, not just about being an assistant prosecutor but a good lawyer," Getting said. "She helped make me the attorney I am now. She helped educate me, guide me and still does."

Klein, second in command in an office of 27 assistant prosecutors, has been the office's liaison to the courts and police departments, and is respected by everyone in the criminal justice system, including the defense bar, according to Getting.

"She's an extraordinary attorney," he said. "She's had an incredible career here in the prosecuting attorney's office, both as a trial attorney and in administration. Throughout her career she has helped many victims of crime. She's never lost focus of them in doing her job. Her retirement is a huge loss, not just for the prosecuting attorney's office but for the community."

Getting appointed Scott Brower to replace Klein as his chief assistant prosecutor.

Looking back on how the job and the criminal justice system have changed over the last three decades, Klein said technology has made much more information readily available since the 1980s. While that's information prosecutors like to have, it is much more to review and process and has made their jobs more complicated.

She said the focus of prosecution also has changed.

"When I started back in the 80s, the idea was that we're just going to grab everybody that's committed the crimes, and we're going to prosecute them, and they're going to face consequences," she said. "We've done a lot more in the criminal justice system not just looking at punishment and consequences, but we've also done a lot more trying to find ways to get to the root problems. The advent of the drug courts, mental health courts, juvenile mental health court, those kinds of programs have made a big difference."

Ask her what she's learned in 31 years on the job, and she'll tell you it is what true courage is.

"In this job you deal with a lot of people who have been through horrific, horrific situations, and yet they keep moving on," Klein said. "They put their life back together and they find a way to live despite what has happened to them. It really helps you keep your own life and your own petty problems in perspective when you think about what come crime victims have gone through."

Despite all of the people she's helped, Klein said she remembers the ones that were found not guilty more than the ones convicted. She still has cases that haunt her.

In one of them, two children were being sexually abused by their sister's husband but didn't disclose it for years. In between the time the perpetrator was abusing them, he had joined the military and was stationed in Japan, where he sexually abused other children. He was court martialed and sent to prison.

"We didn't know any of that was going on," Klein recounted. "The kids here in Kalamazoo had disclosed, we charged, and then we found out he was in prison. We brought him here and we took him through trial. The jury here found him not guilty, and he and his wife had two little kids.

"I just knew that when he got out of prison, those kids were going to be in danger."

Five years later, she got a call from a prosecutor in Colorado asking for her case file. Authorities there were pressing charges against the man for abusing his own children.

"If you want to talk about a case that haunts you, that one haunts me," Klein said. "It does."

Klein has been around long enough to see crime cycle through generations, people who went through the county's juvenile system and now are adults who have children going through the system.

"There is a direct correlation between if you see parents engaging in criminal behavior, their kids will, if there's not some intervention there," she said. "You are an example to your kids."
ALAMO TOWNSHIP, MI-- The group of four bicyclists Valerie Litznerski was riding with Thursday night had flashing taillights on their bicycles, and wore flashing lights. Their bicycles were marked with reflective material, and so was their clothing.

All four of the riders were very experienced and well equipped for night riding, said Litznerski, secretary of the Kalamazoo Bicycle Club.

"We do things right," she said. "We are all really proud of our night gear."

And yet, they were struck from behind by a pick-up truck that kept on going.

Two of the four cyclists were taken by ambulances to the hospital for treatment of their injuries. Both are expected to recover, authorities said.

Paul Selden, Director of Road Safety for the Kalamazoo Bicycle Club, said stronger laws are needed to protect cyclists and pedestrians alike.

"The hit-and-run nature of this incident underscores the need for stronger legal protections for vulnerable roadway users, both locally and in Lansing," Selden said. "bicyclists and pedestrians don't stand a chance when struck by a motor vehicle."Two cyclists struck by pickup truck released from hospital

The Michigan Senate last month adopted two 5-foot passing bills (SB 1076 and 1077) and a driver's education improvement bill (SB 1078) designed to help protect bicyclists from motor vehicles, and the measures are now in the House.

Bicycle crashes are on the rise statewide, according to Aneta Kiersnowski, development and communications director for the League of Michigan Bicyclistsin Lansing.

In 2015, the state saw a 57 percent increase statewide in bicycle - vehicle crashes, she said, "and already this year we have had more and more bicycle crashes reported."

She said heard of the Alamo Township crash Friday morning when a member brought it to her attention.

"It's everybody's responsibility" to keep the roadways safe for all users, Kiersnowski said.

"These cyclists were doing everything they needed to do to keep themselves safe," she said, adding that she would hope motorists be as diligent about keeping everyone safe.

After Thursday night's incident a passing motorist stopped and stayed with the group of cyclists until emergency crews arrived to the rural Alamo Township location of the crash.

The crash comes just three days after Charles Pickett Jr. was ordered to stand trial in Kalamazoo on five counts of second-degree murder following a preliminary hearing Monday, Nov. 7.

Pickett was the driver in a June 7 crash that killed five Kalamazoo-area bicyclists and injured four others.

It also comes just days after clock were set back for the daylight saving time change.

"Motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians need to use extra caution at this time of year, especially with the increasing hours of darkness," Selden said. "Be especially alert when making turns and at intersections.

"And for heaven's sake, don't drive distracted or while impaired," he added. "That cuts your ability to react at night even more, sometimes with fatal consequences ... regardless of who is involved."
UPDATE: 2 bicyclists struck released from hospital

KALAMAZOO COUNTY, MI -- Police say four bicyclists were involved in a hit-and-run crash with a pickup that left two people injured.

Kalamazoo County sheriff's deputies said the crash happened at North Sixth Street and Ravine Road about 7:05 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10.

The pickup was seen leaving the scene, headed southbound on Sixth Street.

Deputies said four bicyclists were involved in the collision, but only two needed treatment. They were taken to Bronson hospital with injuries not considered life-threatening.

Police said the pickup should have damage to the front passenger side of the vehicle.

The crash comes after a June 7 crash that killed five bicyclists and injured four others.

In the case, Charles Pickett Jr. was ordered to stand trial Monday on five counts of second-degree murder following a preliminary hearing Monday, Nov. 7.

The five people who died were riding on North Westnedge Avenue in Cooper Township when a pickup smashed into a group of nine riders.

Anyone with information about Thursday's crash can call police at 269-383-8748 or Silent Observer at 269-343-2100.
KALAMAZOO, MI - Shocked, scared and sad are some of the feelings students at Western Michigan University who voted for Hillary Clinton are experiencing following the Democratic nominee for president's loss to Donald Trump in Tuesday's election.

"It's hard to explain the emotion," Matthew Derrick, a senior at WMU said about the election results.

"His campaign is just completely based on hate and I'm just scared for those people that are a part of the groups that he ran against," WMU senior Amanda Cockroft said of President-elect Donald Trump.

An exit survey of 100 random students conducted by Western senior Harold Fish, besides one student who claimed to have written in the university's President John Dunn, found 66 percent of those voters at WMU's Bernhard Center had chosen Clinton.

The 2016 election was expected to create a larger than normal voter turnout and that seemed to hold true on campus, with people across the state waiting in lines lasting for more than an hour. Voters at the Bernhard Center had to wait for nearly an hour-and-a-half at around 6 p.m., just hours before polls closed.

While long lines like those at WMU may have created the impression that millennials got out to vote, exit polls show that at least nationally they actually didn't.

According to WMU political science professor Peter Wielhouwer, Clinton did not generate the same enthusiasm among young voters as President Barack Obama did. "In 2006 and 2012, younger voters made up 12 to 13 percent of the electorate," Wielhouwer said.

Exit polls from this election, he said, showed that millennials only made up about 10 percent of the voting electorate. While Clinton ultimately won among voters in the 18-29 age range as shown in polling from both CNN and the New York Times, she still had trouble reaching the entire generation.

"We know that from the Democratic primary that there's a significant break with Hillary Clinton among young voters who actually preferred Bernie Sanders," Wielhouwer said.

Of the dip in turnout from the 2012 to 2016 in younger voters, Wielhouwer said: "I'm convinced that that 1-2 percent difference could have tipped things" in Clinton's favor.

The WMU political science professor said Trump found success in appealing to those who were "economically left behind," which includes older voters.

"The older people, they have experience in the economy and some of them were economically left behind, and so that in itself simply doesn't have a resonance to young people because they haven't been left behind," he said.

While some of America is showing its displeasure with the election outcome through protests against Trump, Wielhouwer offers some advice for young people who are feeling down: "For millennials who are frustrated, I think that over time as they age, when they get married, when they buy a house, when they have children, their participation in their civic life of their communities will naturally increase and they will find their place in the American electorate," he said.

"I would just encourage patience and persistence."
MUSKEGON, MI - The "Not My President" protest that has been spreading across the nation is coming to Muskegon Sunday.

The protest is scheduled to begin at noon Nov. 13 on Western Avenue near the Third Street traffic circle in downtown Muskegon.

Protestors have been marching in streets in cities throughout the nation since Republican Donald Trump won the presidential election Tuesday.

"There are so many people who feel threatened by his presence in our White House and they don't know how to express it," said Mandy Clark, an organizer of the Muskegon protest.

She said anyone is welcome to attend Sunday's protest and encouraged them to bring signs, banners, flags and "anything thing they want to use to draw attention," Clark said. The group is not supportive of any sort of disrespectful displays such as burning flags, she said.

The protest is for anyone "who feels hopeless and downtrodden" after the election and who is "fearful" about what Trump's presidency will bring, Clark said.

She said the protest also is designed to bring attention to the need to eliminate the electoral college. Trump received enough electoral votes to win the election though Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
WELLS TOWNSHIP, MI -- Michigan State Police determined a report of an abduction and sexual assault of a woman in Caro was false, according to officials in the Tuscola County Prosecutor's Office.

On Oct. 30, a woman reported she had been abducted from the area of Riley Road between Pierce and East Dayton in Wells Township between 3-5 p.m., according to police.

She told police she had stopped to help a stranded motorist and two men instead forced her into an older Chevrolet Lumina that was dark in color, drove her to an unknown location and sexually assaulted her. Police said physical injuries were observed.

A few days later, police released a sketch of one of the men they believed was involved in the attack.

On Nov. 9, though, the prosecutor's office issued a statement saying, "It was conclusively determined that the report that was made on Oct. 30, 2016, was false and entirely devoid of merit."

The investigation is ongoing, according to the prosecutor's office.
Prelim for four men charged with conspiring to commit first-degree murder at Saginaw's Bridgton Place Townhomes

Devine L. Bullock, left, talks to his attorney Alan Crawford during Bullock's preliminary hearing in front of Saginaw County District Judge A.T. Frank on Thursday, Aug. 18, 2016.

(Jeff Schrier | MLive.com)

SAGINAW, MI -- A 17-year-old charged along with three others in a March murder conspiracy will have a separate trial from that of his co-defendants, a judge has ruled.

Circuit Judge Darnell Jackson on Monday, Nov. 7, ruled Devine L. Bullock will be tried separately from his relative Devontae M. Bullock and other co-defendants Scinicor L. McMullen Jr. and Donquavius P. White.

The four teens are charged with 16 felonies each in connection with a March 26 incident outside the Bridgton Place Townhomes on Vestry in Saginaw.

Jackson made his ruling in response to a motion filed by McMullen's attorney, James Piazza, who asked Jackson to grant McMullen a separate trial. Piazza noted that Devine Bullock has told investigators that he and McMullen opened fire as a 2004 gray GMC Envoy was leaving the Vestry complex, which is next to the Bloomfield neighborhood off South Washington near Sheridan.

In the motion, Piazza wrote McMullen's right to confront his accuser would be violated because, in a joint trial, he would not be able to cross-examine Devine Bullock unless Bullock chose to testify. In a response, Assistant Prosecutor Al Reimers wrote that at trial, he would only introduce Bullock's statement as evidence against Bullock and not his three co-defendants.

Rather than allow McMullen a separate trial and possibly have to rule on similar motions for Devontae Bullock and White, Jackson ordered Devine Bullock will have a separate trial. With Devine Bullock no longer on trial at the same time, either the prosecution or defense could call him as a witness, though he still could invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Testimony from the defendants' preliminary hearing showed the incident arose from a possible fight between two groups of females. Ashari McCray-Laury testified she called some of her friends to come to Vestry when she learned some females wanted to fight her.

Paul Harris testified he arrived on Vestry in the Envoy with three others and a 3-year-old boy. The women in the vehicle got out and confronted other women, and at that point, some males got involved, Harris said.

One of the women who came with Harris, Jamelia Weatherspoon, argued with the males, Harris said. Soon after, Weatherspoon's cousin Bryant Manning got in the back of the Envoy, Harris said.

After the other women got back in the Envoy, Harris drove away from the complex, he said. Harris said he saw two males near the exit gate look into the vehicle and yell, "There he goes." As Harris pulled out of the complex, gunshots rang out, Harris said. Harris returned fire, he said.

Michigan State Police Detective Trooper Robert Scott testified Devine Bullock told him he and the other defendants, who are all now 17, went to Vestry to watch the fight. When they were there, they saw Manning, who they knew as being affiliated with the East Side Gang, Scott said Bullock told him. Manning gave the impression that he had a gun, but Bullock said he never saw a gun, Scott said.

Bullock told Scott that he and McMullen went to Bullock's home on Scofield, which is in the Bloomfield neighborhood, to get a .45-caliber handgun and a 9mm handgun, Scott testified. When the two friends returned, they waited in the northeast area of the property of Coulter Elementary, Scott said Bullock told him. Meanwhile, Devontae Bullock and White waited near the gates as lookouts, Scott said Bullock told him.

When Devontae Bullock and White yelled out after the Envoy passed them, Devine Bullock and McMullen opened fire, Scott said Bullock told him. Bullock told Scott their intention was not necessarily to shoot anybody in the vehicle but to prove a point to Manning that he should not come to the area, Scott testified.

While the Envoy was not shot, it ultimately came to a stop with at least one flat tire, testimony showed.

Other motions

In addition to the separate trial motion, Piazza filed three additional motions, including one asking Jackson to dismiss the charges based on Piazza's argument that District Judge A.T. Frank should not have allowed Scott to testify to what he observed on surveillance footage from the complex, including identifying the defendants. Frank then abused his discretion in binding McMullen over for trial, Piazza argued.

Jackson took the motion under advisement, meaning he will issue a ruling at a later date. He also took under advisement a similar motion asking Jackson to preclude such testimony at trial.

In those motions, Piazza argued case law states that to testify regarding video recordings, the witness must have actually seen, in person, the incident in question.

Reimers disagreed, writing witnesses' perception of the recording is pertinent. Identifications such as the ones Scott made are admissible, Reimers wrote, where "the witness possesses sufficiently relevant familiarity with the defendant that the jury cannot also possess and where the [images] are not either so unmistakably clear or so hopelessly obscure that the witness is better-suited than the jury to make the identification."

Piazza also asked Jackson to preclude testimony regarding gang affiliations or territories. Testimony was presented at the preliminary hearing that the defendants thought Manning should not be in the Vestry area because of an ongoing rivalry between the East Side Gang and the Bloomfield and Vestry neighborhoods.

"There was no evidence to introduce at the (preliminary hearing) with the exception of broad brush comments regarding gang, gang activity, gang membership, as well as gang territory," Piazza wrote. "As such, an attempt to introduce same would be highly prejudicial."

In his response, Reimers mentioned a recent Court of Appeals decision on a Saginaw murder case -- directly tied to the aforementioned gang rivalry -- that noted such gang-related evidence is admissible to show motive, which Reimers wrote is "always relevant."

Jackson on Monday ruled that witnesses can testify as to which neighborhoods the defendants and Manning associate themselves with but cannot testify specifically about gangs.

The most serious charge the teens face is conspiring to commit first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory penalty of life in prison with the possibility of parole. They also face six counts of assault with intent to murder, a single count of carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent, and eight counts of possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony.

White's attorney, James Hession, has filed motions similar to the ones filed by Piazza. Jackson is scheduled to rule on those on Nov. 21.

The Bullocks and White also face felony gun charges, along with De'Erick D. Thomas-O'Neal, in connection with an April 22 traffic stop outside White's home that led to the seizure of five firearms. Piazza also represents Thomas-O'Neal, and his motion asking Jackson to suppress statements that Thomas-O'Neal made to police is pending an evidentiary hearing.

All five males remain jailed and are scheduled for trials on Dec. 13.
Wurtsmith.JPG

Michael Wurtsmith is the supervisor for Briley Township, which includes the unincorporated Atlanta, making him the de facto mayor.

(Emily Rose Bennett)

This is an opinion column.

This election has always been about more than Donald Trump, the man.

He's a symbol of discontent felt by the millions of Americans who voted him into office Tuesday.

I'm wary of Trump -- for all the same reasons enumerated a million times in the last 15 months - but, for better or worse, come January he'll be my president. I just hope he keeps his promise of greater prosperity for the blue collar people who voted him into office.

I've interviewed some of his supporters. They've been treated like oddities and "others" by the media throughout the campaign. But, for the most part, they're just regular, everyday people.

In the summer, I traveled up to Montmorency County, the Michigan county with the highest percentage of Trump voters per population in the primaries. The people I met in Atlanta, Michigan were all-in on Trump back then. It seems like all the other rural counties in Michigan felt similarly, turning our state red in a presidential election for the first time since 1988.

The county is made up of older, non-wealthy, white people who never went to college. Thirty percent of people are over the age of 65, 97 percent are white and only 10 percent of the people older than 25 have a college degree. The number of young people is dropping, too. In 2015, 15.8 percent of the population was under the age of 18, a drop from 16.8 percent in 2010. The median household income in 2014 was $36,448.

The folks I met there were concerned about jobs, gun rights and a corrupt Hillary Clinton, so I wasn't surprised to see the voting results for Montmorency County from Tuesday: 70 percent for Trump and 26 percent for Clinton.

But one person who didn't vote for Trump was the de facto "mayor" of Trump Town, Michigan: Michael Wurtsmith, the soon-to-be former supervisor of Briley Township which includes the unincorporated town of Atlanta.

Wurthsmith's term is up and he declined to run again this election. He cedes power to the new supervisor later this month. When I caught up with him Wednesday morning, he was miles away from the Elk Capital of Michigan, enjoying the sunshine in Arizona.

I asked if he voted Trump.

"I was one of the few in the county who didn't," he said. "I just couldn't bring myself to it."

Wurtsmith, who considers himself a conservative, didn't like Trump for the same reason as many others: his offensive tone and lack of a plan.

"I couldn't see exactly what he was going to do," he said.

Wurtsmith confessed he was surprised by the Trump victory.

"I guess I was kind of amazed that as many people spoke as loudly as they did," he said. "It tells us a lot about where the American people are and how Washington hasn't been listening to the common person."

Wurtsmith's passion is community health - making sure people in his rural county get adequate care, which involves Medicaid. He's not sure if the current system will change under President-elect Trump, who has been hazy on any concrete plans.

Wurtsmith is also concerned that whomever Trump appoints to the Supreme Court will circumvent the law in an eager effort to make abortion illegal. This comes from a pro-life conservative. But Wurtsmith said working within the laws is more important than his pro-life belief.

He also didn't like the way Trump has divided our nation.

"The tone was pretty volatile," he said. "You look on Facebook and (both sides) are beating back and forth."

But in the end Wurtsmith - like me - will accept Trump as president regardless of his disagreeableness.

"I guess we have to get behind him and I will," he said.
Harry Truman

(W. Eugene Smith)

Anyone who's been caught in the rain on a day that was promised to be nothing but sunshine is familiar with the feeling: Can't these people get anything right?

And yet, most days, the meteorologists who predict the weather come pretty close. Forecasters of both weather and voting behavior have a set of sophisticated tools they bring to their jobs, which generally work, except when they don't.

This year, in predicting the presidential election, they didn't work. What polls consistently suggested would be a victory for Democratic former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- both nationally, and in Michigan -- turned into a humiliating upset, and a victory by Republican billionaire Donald Trump. As a stunned nation confronted the results, many asked why they'd been led so astray by poll after poll.

Why? Because voters are people, and people are like storm clouds and cold fronts; they generally move in predictable ways, but not always.

Also, because the better the polling, the more expensive it is, and the traditional clients for political polling include news organizations, the budgets for which have been decimated in recent years.

Today's client commissioning a poll is likely to have a whole different set of objectives than just figuring out who is going to win an election. They may want the results quickly, and as in many efforts, the less time spent on task, the less likely it is to be done well.

These are among the explanations offered by Michael Traugott, professor specializing in political studies at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. There are other reasons -- including an increasing number of voters who no longer have land lines and are reluctant to answer their cell phones when unfamiliar numbers call.

Once the sample of voter sentiment is obtained, "a lot of the modeling pollsters do is based on what happened last time," by which he means in the most recent previous election. But, as pollsters across America discovered the hard way this week, "every race is different," Traugott said, adding that there is some art associated with its analysis. This includes the fact there's no standard "likely voter" model, so commercial pollsters create their own, and consider them proprietary, making them difficult for others to analyze.

Polling, in other words, is "constrained applied science," Traugott said, and the constraints are always changing.

Tim Kiska's polling practices have served him well, delivering accurate predictions, since 1974. This year they failed. (Courtesy photo)



Tim Kiska is among those who got it wrong.

He does not attempt to deflect blame or responsibility, and admits that a model he has relied on for accurate results since 1974 simply failed him in 2016. His client, the Detroit Free Press, received national attention Tuesday evening for its early call that Clinton would carry Michigan. She didn't, and Kiska and the paper were left struggling to explain the error on Wednesday.

In the wreckage of this embarrassment, Kiska told Bridge that his miscalculation stemmed from jumping the gun based on returns from about three-quarters of the 80 precincts that Kiska, a former journalist and a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, typically examines across the state.

He explained his method: He has reporters fan out around the state, north to south, and has them call in results as soon as polls close. Those numbers are plugged into a spreadsheet, which compares them with results from previous elections. Kiska does other analytics, and makes his call based on what he sees.

At 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, he said, he had 60-65 precincts reporting, indicating Clinton was up 3-5 percent. That figure, Kiska said, was critical.

"It's not that I was under any pressure to call it early," he said. "But it was consistent as the returns came in." And, he added, it was the figure that advance polling had her winning by.

"Was I sucked in by that groupthink?" he said. "I think maybe so."

If he had it to do over again, Kiska said, he'd have waited another hour before making the call, because the later-arriving data showed a startling surge for Trump in the state's rural counties, the equivalent of a fast-moving storm front that appears out of nowhere. Suddenly, that confident early prediction was in peril.

At the same time, the state's largest, traditionally Democratic urban areas were still reporting. Although Kiska said he grew nervous about his early call, he thought Genesee, Wayne and Washtenaw counties would still carry the state for Clinton.

Aaron Kall, director of the U-M debate program and dean of students, agreed with Kiska's battlefield assessment.

"The major error of the Free Press calling the state for Clinton was kind of consistent with those polls that were released a few days before the election that had Clinton favored by as much as 5 points," Kall told MLive.com. "The major take here is a lot of people doing projections were making those projections based off of 2012 and 2008 election data. The thing that Trump did was get increased support in rural areas of Michigan."

Kiska stressed that pollsters who want to keep working generally don't try to skew results to please clients.

"People really want to get it right," he said. "It's not like I've got my thumb on the scale."

But sometimes crazy years happen. And this, Kiska said, was "worse than 'Dewey Defeats Truman,'" the infamously inaccurate Chicago newspaper headline a triumphant Harry Truman held up on election night in 1948.

"In the end, it was me and my data," Kiska said. "It is what it is."
A training center in Beijing recently opened a new course, which claims to help students absorb energy from the universe through a special cabin built according to the angles of the pyramids. Staff at the center said that a nine-day course costs 20,000 RMB. Local police are currently investigating the case.

A girl surnamed Xiaoyu, who was sent to the training camp by her mother, told Beijing Morning Post about the content of the so-called training.

"They told me to sit in an 'energy cabin' and imagine my body floating in the air," said Xiaoyu, adding that she was instructed to write poems after she came out of the cabin. Meanwhile, another girl was told to sleep on the floor for three days, during which time she was given only three apples and a small amount of water to consume, according to Xiaoyu. Such "training" is supposed to refresh both the body and mind.

Tao, an instructor at the center, said that the training is designed to expand and change students' way of thinking. Instead of traditional memorization-based teaching, the training helps students to receive knowledge through their brains' natural instincts, Tao said. He also promised that students' Chinese would be greatly improved after two days of study, and that academic performance in every subject would soar if students trained for nine days.

Tao said that the center has trained more than 200 students nationwide, and they have verified the ability of the energy cabin to function as a refreshing force.

Now the case has been reported to police, and further investigation will be carried out.
A home furnishing store has inflicted a bizarre punishment on its employees: requiring them to eat live yellow mealworms in public.

At around 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 8, approximately 50 people wearing store uniforms gathered in a square in downtown Hanzhong, Shaanxi province. Soon, a man arrived with two bags in his hands. One bag contained chopsticks, cups and two bottles of liquor; the other contained live yellow mealworms. After reading off the names of underperforming employees, the man poured some liquor into each cup, added a worm, and then asked employees to drink the liquor. Five or six people accepted the man's instructions and drank the liquor.

According to a store employee, workers are required each morning to report their work objective to the supervisor, and those who fail to meet their objective are punished the following day.

"Today's punishment is eating worms they bought from a pet market. Four worms for losing one customer," explained an employee.

On Nov. 10, a local newspaper reporter interviewed Mr. Cao, the man in charge.

"We set sales targets for the next day and everyone signs a guarantee. If anyone fails to achieve the target, he or she will accept the punishment voluntarily," Cao said. "The targets are set by employees, with the purpose of self-motivation."

However, some citizens who observed the event expressed a different view. They said the company ought to respect its employees instead of resorting to demeaning punishments. Zhao Xiaodong, a local lawyer, noted that forcing employees to eat live worms infringes upon the employees' rights, giving them just cause to report the violation to labor inspection departments.
The telecoms industry is gearing up for the rollout of 5G in the next couple of years, which is expected to provide Internet connections 40 times faster and with at least four times more coverage worldwide than current 4G connectivity. Delivering on these expectations requires a cost-effective and reliable means of providing connectivity on a massive scale, and Internet service providers (ISPs) across the globe are weighing their options for deploying 5G as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Why wireless?

Where 4G was a pure mobile play, it seems increasingly likely that 5G will be initially introduced over fixed wireless. This is because fixed wireless currently offers the greatest commercial value for 5G technology, providing reliable, high-performance connectivity that can be established with relative ease and at a low price point in densely populated areas.

Verizon has voiced its goal of being the first U.S. company to roll out 5G technology and, earlier this year, CEO Lowell McAdam stressed that the companys focus is on fixed wireless rather than mobile, as it offers the return on capital you need. This logic has also resulted in U.S. Cellular and Nokia testing 5G technologies together over fixed wireless, as the companies look to play a key role in the introduction of the technology across North America.

5G on trial

However, given the scarcity and cost of the precious cellular frequencies, carriers are looking to increase capacity for 5G over fixed wireless by hunting for alternative spectrum. The critical dialog now is about which bands will be a good match technically for these types of fixed applications, and of course, which is the most cost effective.

A number of interested parties have pushed the FCC to progress its plan to open up additional high-frequency, mmWave spectrum for 5G. The commission first allocated high-frequency spectrum for 5G earlier this year, and last month it announced a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would open an additional 17.7GHz of spectrum for licensed fixed and mobile use.

In October 2016, U.S. Cellular and Nokia completed tests on 28GHz spectrum in both an outdoor setting and indoors in a lab. The outdoor trial involved a point-to-point, clear line-of-sight scenario between a base station and user equipment, with real world environment impairments such as dry wall, windows and metal panels introduced. However, it is unlikely this same success could be replicated in a densely populated urban setting, where manmade infrastructure and foliage are more widespread and impair high frequency mmWave signals. Furthermore, in higher frequency bands, it is more likely that weather will negatively impact signal propagation. As a result, using the mmWave spectrum, homes and businesses could experience limited connectivity.

At longer distances, without being able to penetrate barriers like foliage, and with limited ability to generate multi-path, line-of-sight becomes a virtual necessity with mmWave band connectivity. The only viable solution is to shorten links to overcome environmental challenges, resulting in a much denser constellation of base stations, closer to households. This in turn will significantly increase the cost of covering an area. Furthermore, the current cost of the equipment in the 28GHz spectrum is over $700 per subscriber due to expensive high frequency RF components and requires professional installation. This begs the questions of whether the mmWave bands are appropriate for delivering 5G.

The sub-6GHz spectrum solution

Fortunately there is an alternative. Rather than using mmWave channels that are not proven in dense urban areas, ISPs should switch their focus to reusing a small amount of spectrum in the 6GHz spectrum, used by Wi-Fi. Over 14,000 wireless ISPs globally have quietly proven in rural areas where the sub-6 GHz bands are extremely effective at delivering fixed wireless services at long distances.

The 5Ghz spectrum has traditionally been subject to potential interference from Wi-Fi operators in the same frequency bands. However, by using GPS+GLONASS to synchronize transmissions across the network, a single channel can be reused in a given geography. This means it will not suffer from the self-interference typically seen in Wi-Fi and FDD microwave deployments as more radios are added to increase network capacity.

MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) technology can also help solve the problem of interference by using a large number of antennae at the base station, allowing it to serve many users in densely populated urban areas while staying in the confines of the radio spectrum. This approach results in improved signal propagation and near-line-of sight performance, as well as considerable cost savings; the current cost of the subscriber equipment in 28GHz is more than seven times that of sub-6GHz equipment.

There is also potential to utilize the 3.55-3.70GHz in the deployment of 5G services, leaving as much spectrum available to Wi-Fi as possible. The FCC has already established regulations for the 3.5GHz band (the Citizens Broadband Radio Service band), which will make 150MHz of spectrum available for ISPs. Google is actively conducting experiments in the 3.5GHz band in up to 24 areas in the U.S., and preparing for the new SAS spectrum sharing database to go live in early 2017. With new innovations in fixed wireless spectrum re-use, using the 3.5GHz band could further extend the value of the sub-6GHz spectrum and raises geocapacity to unprecedented levels.

5G adoption will be vital in order to support the increasing demand for data and connectivity, particularly in light of the expanding IoT. Despite ongoing debate, it is likely that fixed wireless for 5G within the sub-6GHz spectrum will offer the best commercial model for operators. Unlike mmWave spectrum, advances in technology mean 5G can be reliably delivered in built up urban areas, and the costs of equipment and deployment are considerably lower than those incurred deploying 5G in mmWave spectrum. Capacity is a major challenge for wireless networks, and a solution will only come about with continued trialling of technologies and methods, ultimately creating an efficient 5G infrastructure which will serve all environments on a global scale.

About the Author

As Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Mimosa, Jaime is driving a disruptive wireless alternative solution for gigabit fixed Internet and Wi-Fi applications. With his prior experience as CTO of 2Wire (acquired by Pace), Jaime pioneered delivering IP services to the home over Fiber and xDSL.

At Mimosa, he now aims to surpass the capacities of legacy wireline technology and deliver multi-gigabit wireless access solutions at a fraction of the cost. Previously, he headed Product Management at Polycom, and Zhone Technologies. Jaime holds a BSCE from the University of California, Irvine, USA.







Edited by Alicia Young
President Xi Jinping holds a welcoming ceremony to greet Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in Beijing on Thursday. Xie Huanchi / Xinhua

BEIJING, Nov. 11 -- A Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson said on Friday that China is willing to work with the Philippines to expand friendly cooperation.

"Through the joint efforts of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including the Philippines, the South China Sea situation had been easing off and is back on the right track of seeking solution and managing differences through negotiations by parties directly involved in the issue," said spokesperson Lu Kang at a regular briefing.

He was commenting on some remarks by the Philippines' incoming ambassador to China Jose Santiago Sta. Romana, in which Romana voiced optimism over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Lu urged other parties and the media to respect the progress, make objective and responsible remarks, and contribute more to regional peace and stability.

Noting that China has border treaties with 12 out of its 14 land neighbors, Lu said that as long as nations are sincere and patient, most differences can be handled through consultation and negotiation.

Lu reiterated that China and the Philippines reached consensus during Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte' recent visit to China, and both agreed to focus on cooperation, put aside their differences and bring the South China Sea issue back to the correct track of bilateral negotiation and consultation.

Read more:

Xi, Duterte hail 'springtime' of ties

Duterte to prioritize economic cooperation, put South China Sea issue on back burner during China visit: experts
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

Trend:

Over the past 24 hours, Armenias armed forces have 27 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, said Azerbaijans Defense Ministry Nov. 11.

The Armenian side was using 60 and 82-millimeter mortars.

The Azerbaijani army positions located in the Gizilhajili village and on nameless heights of Azerbaijans Gazakh district underwent fire from the Armenian army positions located in the Berkaber village of the Ijevan district and on nameless heights of the Noyemberyan district of Armenia.

Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani army positions located in the Alibayli village and on nameless heights of Azerbaijans Tovuz district were shelled from the Armenian army positions located in the Aygepar and Chinari villages of Armenias Berd district.

Moreover, the Azerbaijani army positions also underwent fire from the Armenian positions located near the Armenian-occupied Garagashli, Bash Gervend villages of the Aghdam district, Horadiz, Gorgan, Garakhanbayli villages of the Fuzuli district, Kuropatkino village of the Khojavand district, as well as on nameless heights of the Tartar and Khojavand districts.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
you are here:
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Anakhanum Hidayatova  Trend:

The US is likely to maintain its South Caucasus strategy by working with Russia and Turkey to further resolve issues in the region, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in particular, Theodore Karasik, senior advisor at Gulf State Analytics, told Trend Nov. 11.

The transition between [the US] administrations is not likely to result in major changes to American policy, Karasik stated.

Trumps policy is the exact same policy articulated by the Obama administration in its last months in office where Washington literally ceded the South Caucasus to Moscow and Ankara, he explained.

Meanwhile, said Karasik, it is important to remember that the Trump administration is looking for "bargain deals" with energy remaining the key focus.

There is one South Caucasus country  Georgia  that may benefit from the Trump administration, Karasik said.

This is due to Trump's earlier visits to that country, the expert 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.
The Social Business Academys Conference chaired by the Nobel Memorial Prize Laureate Mahammad Yunus has taken place in Paris within November 9-10.UNECs Rector, Professor Adalat Muradov participated in the Conference attended by more than 300 representatives from more than 30 countries (the US, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, India, Russia, France, Germany, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Azerbaijan, Italy and so on.) with the Nobel Laureate Mahammad Yunus invitation.

Different aspects of social business, as well as its priorities, advantages, differences off the traditional business and characteristics of administration were debated within the conference. Detailed information about the performances of the Social Business Centers established at the Universities of California (US), La Trobe (Australia), Renmin (China), Kyushu (Japan), UNEC (Azerbaijan), Technology Petronas (Malaysia), Kasertsard (Thailand), Colleges Baker (USA), Kings, Oxford School of Finance and Social Business (Great Britain), EADA Business School (Spain) was delivered.

Making a speech within the conference, UNEC Rector, Professor Adalat Muradov delivered detailed information about the University of Economics. He made proposals on the future activity plan of the newly established Social Business Center of UNEC. M. Yunus appreciated Rectors suggestions on establishing social business library, conducting research together with the Social Business Centers performing in other countries by creating consortium and implement projects highly.

Afterwards, UNECs Rector, Professor Adalat Muradov and the Chairman of the International Eurasian Press Fond Umud Mirzayevs meeting with M. Yunus took place.

A.Muradov noted that it would be beneficial to conduct the research on social business together with the Social Business Center of UNEC led by M. Yunus. In addition M.Yunus was offered to perform the supervision of some nominee doctors of UNEC. At the same time M. Yunus was offered the post of the honorary editor of the journal Economic Studies: Theory and Practice published in English at UNEC. The Nobel Prize Laureate also offered to submit articles to above mentioned journal. Professor M.Yunus welcomed the proposal and promised to submit the article to the journal in the shortest time.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

Trend:

3rd National Advisory Group (NAG) meeting was conducted in Baku within the the EU-funded Programme for Prevention, Preparedness and Response to Natural and Man-made Disasters in the Eastern Partnership Countries (PPRD East 2).

The meeting was attended by the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Republic of Azerbaijan and other national stakeholders from Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Ecology and Natural Resources, Health, Education, National Assembly, State Border Service, State Customs Committee, Republican Seismic Survey Centre and Institute of Geography of Azerbaijan National Academy of Science, Azerbaijan Red Crescent Society and Trend Agency, and representatives of UNICEF, French Embassy and EU Delegation in Azerbaijan.

The objective of the meeting was twofold  to report to the national stakeholders the accomplishments of the Programme in 2016, and to present, discuss and agree upon the next steps and activities that will be undertaken within the PPRD East 2 Programme in the region and specifically in Azerbaijan. Flood risk management, disaster risk assessment, civil protection volunteerism, raising awareness about disasters, and host nation support, complemented with civil protection capacity building, have been specifically addressed and discussed in details. These are thematic topics selected by the national disaster risk management stakeholders at the 2nd NAG meeting organised on 1-3 March 2016 to be further addressed within the PPRD East 2 Programme in Azerbaijan.

The EU-funded Programme for Prevention, Preparedness and Response to Natural and Man-made Disasters in EaP Countries (PPRD East 2) is contributing to the peace, stability, security and prosperity of the Eastern Partner Countries. It is also aimed to protect the environment, population, cultural heritage, resources and infrastructures of the region by strengthening the countries resilience, preparedness and response to man-made disasters and disasters caused by natural hazards.
November 11, 2016 Nusra On The Run - Trump Induces First Major Policy Change On Syria The people loyal to the Syrian government are happy with Donald Trump winning the U.S. election: At the passport counter, a Syrian officers face lit up when he saw an American traveler. Congratulations on your new president! he exclaimed, giving an energetic thumbs up. Mr. Trump, he said, would be good for Syria. The first significant step of the new administration comes while Trump is not even in offices. Obama, selfishly concerned with his historic legacy, suddenly makes a 180 degree turn and starts to implement Trump polices. Lets consider the initial position: Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster but the city had "basically" fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favor of rebels without knowing who they were. The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed program, and jihadists such as the group formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. The Obama administration, through the CIA led by Saudi asset John Brennan, fed weapons, training and billions of dollars to "moderate rebels". These then turned around (vid) and either gave the CIA gifts to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al Nusra) or joined it themselves. The scheme was no secret at all and Russia as well as Syria pointed this out several times. The Russian foreign Minister Lavrov negotiated with the U.S. Secretary of State Kerry who promised to separate the "moderate rebels" from al-Qaeda. But Kerry never delivered. Instead he falsely accuse Russia of committing atrocities that never happened. The CIA kept the upper hand within the Obama administration and continued its nefarious plans. That changed the day the president-elect Trump set foot into the White House. While Obama met Trump in the oval office, new policies, prepared beforehand, were launched. The policies were held back until after the election and would likely not have been revealed or implemented if Clinton had won. The U.S. declared that from now on it will fight against al-Qaeda in Syria: President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, U.S. officials said. That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. ... possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow.

...

U.S. officials who opposed the decision to go after al-Nusras wider leadership warned that the United States would effectively be doing the Assad government's bidding by weakening a group on the front line of the counter-Assad fight.

...

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and other Pentagon leaders initially resisted the idea of devoting more Pentagon surveillance aircraft and armed drones against al-Nusra.

al-Qaeda hears of Clinton's defeat, haz a sad (illustrative pic) Ash Carter is, together with John Brennan, the major anti-Russian force in the Obama administration. He is a U.S. weapon industry promoter and the anti-Russia campaign, which helps to sell U.S. weapons to NATO allies in Europe, is largely of his doing. He saw al-Qaeda in Syria as a welcome proxy force against Russia. But Obama has now shut down that policy. We are not yet sure that this is for good but the above Washington Post account is not the only signal: The U.S. Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took action today to disrupt al-Nusrah Fronts military, recruitment, and financing operations. Specifically, OFAC designated four key al-Nusrah Front leaders  Abdallah Muhammad Bin-Sulayman al-Muhaysini, Jamal Husayn Zayniyah, Abdul Jashari, and Ashraf Ahmad Fari al-Allak  pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, which targets terrorists and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism.

...

These designations were taken in coordination with the U.S. Department of State, which today named Jabhat Fath al Sham as an alias of al-Nusrah Front  al-Qaidas affiliate in Syria.

...

Abdallah Muhammad Bin-Sulayman al-Muhaysini was designated for acting for or on behalf of, and providing support and services to or in support of, al-Nusrah Front. This is a major change in U.S. policy. Nusra will from now on be on the run not only from Russian and Syrian attacks but also from the intelligence and military capabilities of the United States. The newly designated Al-Muhaysini, a Saudi cleric, is Nusra's chief ideologue in Syria. Some considered him the new Osama Bin-Laden. Here he is, on the left, arm in arm with chief al-Qaeda in Syria propagandist and "journalist" Hadi Abdullah.

bigger Hadi Abdullah, friend of the designated al-Qaeda terrorist Muhaysini, just received the 2016 Press Freedom Price from the CIA/Soros financed "regime change" influence operation Reporters Without Borders. Might this mean that Hadi Abdullah is himself a CIA assets? He would not be the first such "journalist" in Syria. Obama, obviously as a direct consequence of the Trump election, now ordered the Pentagon to wage war on al-Qaeda in Syria just as the Russians do. This after five years of nearly unlimited U.S. support for al-Qaeda and its "moderate" Syrian affiliates. It is not yet know what new orders, if any, Obama gave to the CIA. Will the CIA follow these policies or will it (again) try to counter the Pentagon policies in Syria? It is unusual that the WaPo report above about this new direction includes no commenting voice from the CIA. Why is such missing? Russia and Syria will welcome the new Obama policies should they come to fruit on the ground. Hillary Clinton had planned and announced to widen the conflict in Syria and with Russia and Iran. Obama would surely not have acted against such policies if she had been elected. But with Trump winning and thereby a new policy on the horizon he now changed course to a direction that will provide "continuity" when Trump takes over. Not only is Trump kicking a black family out of its longtime limewashed home, he also ends U.S. government support for the disenfranchised Jihadis in Syria and elsewhere. This even months before taking office. He really is the menace we have all been warned about.

bigger UPDATE: This interview in today's WSJ confirms that Trump is still in the pro-Syrian/anti-Jihadist camp that is opposed to Obama's original policy: Donald Trump, in Exclusive Interview, Tells WSJ He Is Willing to Keep Parts of Obama Health Law He said he got a beautiful letter from Russian President Vladimir Putin, adding that a phone call between them is scheduled shortly.

...

Although he wasnt specific, Mr. Trump suggested a shift away from what he said was the current Obama administration policy of attempting to find moderate Syrian opposition groups to support in the civil war there. Ive had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria, he said. He suggested a sharper focus on fighting Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria, rather than on ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. My attitude was youre fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria.  Now were backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are. If the U.S. attacks Mr. Assad, Mr. Trump said, we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria. Posted by b on November 11, 2016 at 15:13 UTC | Permalink Comments next page  next page 
Kaile Itow, a student in Darren McDonalds class at El Toro Elementary School, earned third-place honors in the Santa Clara County Office of Educations video contest that asked participants to tell their story of how they are being civic-minded and getting others involved.

Itow, whose video was titled, Civic Engagement, was one of nine students honored at the Nov. 2 county school board meeting.

Students entered as groups or individually in three grade-level categories: K-5, 6-8 and 9-12. Itow was the lead student for her team, which placed in the 6-8 division.

Winners who finished in the top three received a video production kit for their teacher and classroom, and each individual student received a gift card.

The SCCOE and several partnering organizations recently launched a website, civiced.sccoe.org, as part of a comprehensive civic engagement initiative to develop resources to provide to schools and stakeholders. Partners include the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, the Santa Clara County School Boards Association, the Eastside Alliance and the County of Santa Clara.

A committee from the partner organizations has been meeting since the spring to steer the initiative, which directly supports the goal of the Framework for California Public Schools that, by high school graduation, students are ready for college, careers, and civic life.
Last August, I had the opportunity to speak at a Hitachi conference for Chief Information Officers from companies in Vietnam. This conference was held in Danang, Vietnam, which was in the area of operations during my tour in Vietnam. I took this opportunity to visit some of the battle sites I was engaged in 50 years ago.

One of the areas that I visited was Tinh Binh near Quang Nhai. This was the site of Operation Utah where my unit, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, engaged two regiments of the North Vietnamese Army. After a day-long battle, we were overrun and had to call air strikes down on our position to survive.

I found a villager that lived in the area who was a 16-year-old Viet Cong at the time. He did not participate in the fighting, but he helped the North Vietnamese Army dig their fortifications. He later became an officer, and he and his wife were honored by Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. We walked the battlefield together using my old military map and later he invited me to his home for tea where he and his wife showed me their many citations from Ho Chi Minh.

My best friend in the Marine Corps was the executive officer of G Company when he was shot through the chest on the first day of Operation Utah. He survived Operation Utah and we both joined IBM after we left the Marine Corps.

Over the past 50 years, he has sent me a Christmas card every year, with which he encloses a picture of his family. I have seen his family grow with kids, marriages, grandkids and now their wives and husbands. All this would not exist if the bullet had hit him a few millimeters either way or the helicopter had not evacuated him in time.

Operation Utah was a success for the Marines in the way they kept score in that war. There were 98 Marines killed in action versus an estimated 600 North Vietnamese. If you visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., you will see the names of these Marines on the wall in the time period, March 4 to 6, 1966.

When I visited the area of Operation Utah this August, there was a large military cemetery where hundreds of Vietnamese soldiers were interred. These were North Vietnamese soldiers who had travelled from their homes in North Vietnam to fight and die and be buried in this area so far from their family homes. I said a prayer for them as I prayed also for our Marines.

Now 50 years after that war, I wonder at the loss we all suffered and the senseless waste. I work with my Vietnamese colleagues in Hitachi, whose fathers and grandfathers fought against us in the same war. There is no hatred or distrustonly a shared sense of vision and cooperation in our work.

Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, made many speeches on World Peace Through World Trade. I am hopeful for that vision. In Hitachi, our corporate strategy is Social Innovation, developing solutions to make society healthier, smarter, and safe. That means a world without war.

Hubert Yoshida is a Morgan Hill resident.
The Rev. Michael Bailey is preparing to leave the church he has dedicated more than a decade of his life to serving.

Bailey will preach his last sermon at First Presbyterian Church of Morganton as head of staff during worship on Sunday at 10:55 a.m. before leaving to take the position of pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

The church invites members of the community to join them for the service and a luncheon that will be held in Baileys honor afterwards. The Scottish-themed celebration is free to attend, but donations will be accepted to defray the cost of the food. There will be games for children, and church members will share some heartfelt sentiments with Bailey.

Bailey recently reflected on his experiences over the past eleven years. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, he was working as an associate pastor at First (Scots) Presbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2005, when he became pastor at FPC Morganton.

They were willing to be led by their faith to offer the job to a 31-year-old, and I thought, Thats the kind of faith I would like to work with, Bailey said of the church members here.

He said he has come to appreciate the strong sense of community in Morganton and the surrounding area.

Its been really wonderful not just being a pastor to people who are members of my church, but to be a pastor to the community, Bailey said. Weve got good relationships with folks in the community. Ive been able to do some things in the last two or three years I never would have been able to had I not already had the relationships and the trust level built up.

He said has been thrilled with church members willingness to help others over the years.

The churchs strong desire and inclination toward reaching out to help those in need is an important part of what the church is supposed to be, Bailey said. First Presbyterian takes that very seriously and does a good job with it.

Bailey looked on success in ministering both locally and abroad as a church-wide effort.

I really dont look at anything thats happened as my accomplishments, Bailey said. I have just been really blessed to witness a lot of great things in the church.

He is proud of the mission statement he helped create for FPC, which reads, Growing and Going Deeper in Faith.

We have really together sought to intentionally grow in and deepen our faith, Bailey said. When we take our faith more seriously, we are necessarily sent out into the world to spread the good news we have heard.

The church has taken that call seriously enough to establish a mission presence in Malawi, Africa and support the work of church member Dr. Barbara Nagy at the Nkhoma Hospital there, an ongoing commitment he greatly appreciates.

Many members of the church have gone to Africa and supported this medical mission, Bailey said. People (also) are constantly offering support throughout the year, whether its financial, or sending over supplies for the school, or medicine for the hospital, or cards or birthday gifts for the family. Its become this year-long thing, and weve made a big difference in Malawi. The health standards in our little area of Malawi have greatly improved.

The church also helps a local mission project that ministers to the area Hispanic population. The Sweet Delights Bakery, created by Burke United Christian Ministries in 2013, gives young Hispanic women the materials and training to make baked goods to sell to the community to raise money to go to college. Bailey and FPC members offered the churchs kitchen as the new home of the ministry when it needed a new location.

It just sounded like such a neat idea, bringing the young ladies together and learning a skill to benefit them in life and raising money to encourage and incentivize education, which will help them throughout their lives, Bailey said. I also like the idea of building cross-cultural relationships. Im proud of the way our church is working with the Hispanic community in ways we hadnt before. I would encourage folks in our community to be more willing to reach out to some our immigrant populations. Those relationships that I have built have been sources of great joy.

FPC of Tuscaloosa contacted Bailey several months ago and spoke with him about their need for a pastor. He said after a while, he felt like God was calling him to accept the position. He will be moving there with his wife, Laura, and their three children: Hudson, Charlie and Katherine.

He said he will greatly miss the FPC congregation.

They are a very caring, loving supportive family, Bailey said. The people have been so good to me and have invited me into some of the most sacred, precious moments of their lives. Being at a bedside when people die and pass on is such a sacred space in life, and people have invited me to be a part of that. Im forever grateful for that privilege, and hope Ive brought a sense of Gods presence into those situations.

FPC Morgantons Associate Pastor Adam Bowling shared how much working with Bailey has touched his life since Bowling began working at the church in 2007.

It has been a pleasure to work with the Rev. Michael Bailey, Bowling said. Michael is a gifted preacher, and has been a wonderful spiritual leader for the congregation. Personally, Michael has been a model and mentor in ministry who was always willing to help me improve and grow as a pastor and preacher. He provided me with opportunities to lead, preach, teach and walk alongside him as we ministered to the community.

Members of the church also shared how much Bailey has come to mean to them:

 When I think of Michael, I think first of his sincerity of mission and his passion for serving Christ in all areas of his life. He has graced us with his ability to prepare and deliver outstanding messages, to display genuine concern and care for the congregations needs and to manage the organization itself. Perhaps my favorite thing about Michael is his sense of humor that is woven throughout every facet of his ministry.  Linda McCrary

 Among other things, Ill miss our gifted pastors maturity and wisdom well beyond his years, his sense of humor, excellent preaching and sincere dedication to his pastoral calling.  Gwen Veazey

 One of the things I most admire and like about Michael is how he models the basics of the Reformed Christian faith in his daily life. He is very big on the sovereignty of God. If you compliment him and tell him he gave a great sermon, which was often, he is quick to give all the glory to God.  Rick Leissner

Bailey said he believes FPC Morganton will continue to thrive under new leadership. The church will hire an interim minister until a permanent replacement can be found.

No one likes transition and change, but this church is ready for it, because of the way we have sought to deepen and ground ourselves in the faith, Bailey said. Theyre going to be fine. The future is strong for First Presbyterian Church. And I say, Thank you for allowing me to be your pastor.

Tammie Gercken can be reached at tgercken@morganton.com.
This November, middle and western Tennessee craft beer enthusiasts will no longer have to travel to Chattanooga and Knoxville to find a Catawba beer. Catawba Brewing of Asheville, Morganton and Charlotte, N.C. is partnering with DET Distributing of Nashville and Jackson, Tenn. to launch Catawba beers in middle Tennessee.

One of the first markets we entered outside of Asheville was Knoxville, and weve done very well in eastern Tennessee for nearly 15 years, says Catawba owner Billy Pyatt. Were excited about the growing beer scene throughout the state. Tennessee has always been among our top priorities for expanded distribution. After investing around $2 million over the past year to increase capacity, were making enough beer now to achieve that goal of going statewide distribution in Tennessee.

Catawba will enter the Nashville and Jackson markets with four of its flagship beers: White Zombie, a Belgian Wit that is the brewerys most popular beer; Mother Trucker, an American-style Pale Ale generously hopped with Magnum and Cascade; Farmer Ted, a refreshing cream ale that Catawba has been making since 2002; and Brown Bear, an English-inspired Brown Ale recently introduced in both package and draft. These beers will be available in kegs and cans throughout the state, with Carter Distributing and Cherokee Distributing continuing to serve the Chattanooga and eastern Tennessee markets, respectively. Look for higher gravity offerings to be introduced in early 2017 with the passage of new alcohol content restrictions.

Kick-off events are scheduled throughout Nashville during the week of Nov. 14th including:

 Tuesday, Nov. 15: Flying Saucer Draught Emporium

 Wednesday, Nov. 16: Craft Brewed

About Catawba Brewing Company

Founded in 1999 by the Pyatt family, natives of Western North Carolina, Catawba Brewing operates a main production facility in downtown Morganton, N.C. at 212 S. Green St.; a boutique brewery/tasting room in downtown Asheville, N.C. at 32 Banks Ave.; a tasting room in Ashevilles Biltmore Village at 63 Brook St. Catawba beers can be found in N.C., S.C., Tenn., and now Ala. Learn more at www.catawbabrewing.com

About DET Distributing

One of the largest beverage distributors in Tennessee, DET Distributing provides over 100 brands of beer and bottled water to over 20 counties since 1951. Today, DET has over 150 employees and operates from headquarters in MetroCenter, designed as a beer distributor from the ground up.
CONNELLY SPRINGS  A wildfire at South Mountains State Park that began late Sunday has grown again, expanding to roughly 400 acres as of Thursday afternoon.

The fire has grown each day this week, expanding to 75 acres Monday afternoon, then 150 acres Tuesday afternoon and to a little more than 150 acres by Wednesday evening. No cause has been pinpointed for the blaze. The wildfire is one of several in the western half of North Carolina, including blazes in Dysartsville and at Chimney Rock State Park.

Weve probably got about 400 acres involved at this point (on Thursday at 4 p.m.), said Charlie Peek, public information officer for the North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation. We had to drop back (the containment lines) again. We had to drop back (Wednesday) to try to make a larger containment area.

We did that again (Thursday) to about a 2,000-acre containment area. What that means is were using logging roads and trails and what fire lines we can do to try and encircle an area of about 2,000 acres to keep that fire within that 2,000 acres. Right now, it has burned about 400 of that total.

According to Weather Underground, areas in Burke County received sustained winds of 11-17 mph on Wednesday, with gusts as high as 25 mph. The Weather Channel forecasts winds of about 7 miles per hour for Friday. Peek said those higher winds Wednesday were a challenge when battling the fire and were part of the reason the containment lines had to be moved back again.

(Wind) was probably the central thing that gave us the most problem, he said.

On Thursday, 21 personnel from the parks service remained onsite to deal with the fire, Peek said. Many of those workers are from other state parks in the region, he said. Peek said there were also some forest service crews still on hand at South Mountains as of Thursday afternoon.

Peek said the park will remain closed indefinitely as no timetable can be determined for extinguishing the fire as of yet. No evacuations have been necessary yet for the South Mountains fire because it is not threatening any structures or residential areas, said Peek.

The parks services campfire ban remains in place for state parks and the forest services open burn ban is still ongoing in 25 counties in the western part of the state, including Burke County, and the cancelation of burning permits in those counties is still in place.

The Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests implemented a total fire ban Thursday due to the extremely dry conditions, high fire danger and little chance of rain in the immediate forecast. Building, maintaining, attending or using a fire or campfire, including charcoal-based fire, whether in a grill or not, is not allowed anywhere on the national forests. The use of commercially available portable lanterns, stoves, or heating equipment that utilize gas or pressurized liquid fuel is allowed.

Peek cautioned citizens to use extreme caution with fire and to understand the situation that is being caused by dry conditions. The agencies that are having to deal with wildfires are being pushed to the limit already, he said.

Id say for everybody just to be very careful, said Peek. We dont want to strain our resources beyond what we have to this point. All the agencies are a little bit strained and stretched a little thin. So, the more people who are aware of the danger, the better off well be.

Justin Epley can be reached at jepley@morganton.com or 828-432-8943.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Elmira Tariverdiyeva  Trend:

Freedom to believe in whatever religion is what sets Americans apart from much of the rest of the world, but Azerbaijan, a country located in the heart of the Muslim world, also believes in this inalienable right, said Raoul Lowery-Contreras in his article published by the Daily Caller Nov. 11.

Contreras closely cooperates with FOX News and The Hill, as well as gives commentary to a number of leading US TV channels.

Recent visitors to Azerbaijan that participated in the Baku International Humanitarian Forum visited three Muslim mosques, a Russian Orthodox Church, a Roman Catholic Church that Pope Francis visited on Oct. 2, and a Jewish synagogue in Downtown Baku, says the author, who also was a participant of the Forum.



All of the churches and synagogues are supported by Azerbaijani government, said Contreras adding that nonetheless, there is a strict separation of religion and state.



Religious tolerance by government can be measured in many ways, but a stunning example in Azerbaijan is the presence and stature of long-time member of the Azerbaijani Supreme Court  Justice Tatyana Goldman, a Jewish woman justice of the Supreme Court, noted the author.

Today Supreme Court Justice Tatyana Goldman is a living monument to the advanced state of religious tolerance in Azerbaijan. Pope Francis visit is another, says the article. So are the flourishing Christian churches and Jewish congregations in Muslim Azerbaijan. This observer was stunned at the religious freedom found throughout this country.

That status was cemented when we walked out of the summer Jewish temple in Quba, and visited a huge mosque across the river. When the Rabbi and Imam saw each other, they hugged, telling us amazing stories of their longstanding friendship. Where else can we find synagogues and mosques within sight of each other, serving the same communities and getting along so well? Where else in the entire world? added Contreras.
2016 has been a year of considerable market noise: Turmoil over China at the start of the year has been followed by political disruption in the form of Brexit, and now the US election. Fund managers have had much to distract them, but many would argue that they should be able to see through short-term turmoil. Do they? To what extent is short-termism a problem for investors?

The prevailing view is that investors are too short-term, therefore fund managers are too short-term, and therefore companies are too short-term. Earlier this year, Neil Woodford, founder of Woodford Asset Management, called short-termism frustratingly rife in fund management, arguing that it hindered the UKs institutional investment industrys ability to hold executive management teams to account.

Gavin Haynes, investment director at Whitechurch Securities, says: Investors are becoming more short-term in terms of wanting rewards and not accepting periods of underperformance or that markets go through cycles.

This is seen in asset flows: only a handful of fund managers can persuade investors to stick with them through their weaker moments, while others have to watch assets fall away.

This creates problems for the companies in which they invest. If fund managers are being judged by short-term performance statistics, they are more likely to impose it on company management teams. This means companies may target short-term earnings over and above longer-term investment. Corporate investment levels remain low, which in turn is seen as a key barrier to productivity improvements. In this way, short-termism is a drag on economic growth.

A Threat to Prosperity?

Politicians and academics have highlighted the problem: US Vice President Joe Biden has called short-termism one of the greatest threats to Americas enduring prosperity, while the UN has suggested that short-termism is a barrier to companies embedding socially responsible and environmental concerns into their business.

Chris Hills, chief investment officer at Investec Wealth & Investment, believes that short-termism is also proving a problem for certain investment strategies: Contrarians effectively become momentum-watchers. They recognise that if a companys share price is going down, there will be ten sellers to every buyer and if they try and buy in, they could see real weakness. As a result, increasingly they dont do anything on the way down and try and wait until it turns.

It has been a problem for value-focused managers as well. Increasingly, says Haynes, investors are unwilling to accept the period of underperformance that inevitably accompanies a value strategy. He says: Good value managers look at mispriced opportunities. It can take some time for that catalyst to be realised and investors need to be patient. This phenomenon is evident in the performance of funds such as the Schroder Recovery fund, which had a difficult year in 2015, but has had a good year in 2016.

UK Funds Show Low Turnover

This all sounds very bleak, but not everyone agrees that short-termism is a universal problem. For example, in August of this year, the Investment Association (IA) looked at turnover across different IA sectors as part of an investigation into trading costs. It found no evidence that fund managers overtrade  an indication of short-termism. Certainly, there were sectors, such as the China, Europe including the UK, and North American sectors where turnover was higher, but for the UK All Companies sector, portfolio turnover was a relatively modest 28%, compared to 11% for a tracker.

It concluded: if it were the case that investors were systematically suffering from poor active management, excessive trading and hidden implicit transaction costs, we would expect to find poor realised outcomes as well as very high portfolio turnover levels and, as in previous research, the results clearly do not show this.

Average holding periods across the market have fallen, but this may be the influence of a few very short-term traders, such as high-frequency traders. This has been argued by academics such as Martijn Cremers, Ankur Pareek, and Zacharias Sautner, who suggest that holding periods for mutual funds and pension funds have not change significantly.

What Should Investors Do?

With this in mind, how should investors approach the problem? Even if it is not universal, short-termism can have an impact on returns through higher trading costs and poor market timing. As such, Haynes ensures that his core holdings are all with fund managers who take a long-term approach and have low turnover of between 10 and 20%.

This is managers such as Neil Woodford, Nick Train at Lindsell Train, Richard Pease at Crux or James Anderson at Scottish Mortgage Investment trust (SMT) who generate their competitive advantage by knowing the companies in which they invest intimately and ignoring short-term factors.

He says that while there is a place for shorter-term trading strategies, it is more in the absolute return or hedge fund area.

There are regulatory changes in the offing, such as the Financial Transaction Tax, which may force a longer-term approach on investors. Short-termism and its impact on productivity is increasingly capturing the attention of policymakers. The fund management industry and the behaviour of investors might find itself increasingly under scrutiny.
David Harman, who is in his early 60s, is looking forward to retirement. He does not imagine he will stop working completely at the age of 65, but over the next few years hes likely to decrease his working hours.

Harman, who lives in West Sussex with his wife, has built up a portfolio of using pension and ISA wrappers over a number of years. More recently he has also invested in peer-to-peer lending.

He says: Ive watched this sector with interest for a few years, and decided to invest via Octopus Choice. This is the peer-to-peer lending arm owned by Venture Capital firm Octopus Investments. The money investors like Harman put in, is used to provide the capital for property loans.

Unlike other peer-to-peer lenders this means these loans are asset-backed. However, in common with other peer-to-peer lenders this remains an unregulated sector, and this investment is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

Harman says: It certainly isnt for everyone but I am comfortable with the risks. I get a steady income stream from the money Ive lent out, currently around 5 to 6% a year.

Multi-Manager Funds for a Broad Appeal

When it comes to his ISA and pension allowances, Harman invests in a wide range of funds.

I chop and change holdings quite regularly, he admits. Although I make many of the decisions myself, I also used discretionary fund management services, and this can help ensure I have a balanced portfolio.

The couple, who have two grown-up children, invest in a number of the Jupiter Merlin multi-manager funds run by John Chatfeild-Roberts and Algy Smith-Maxwell.

Morningstar gives the Jupiter Merlin Balanced Portfolio a four-star rating - reflecting its strong outperformance in recent years. The fund also has a coveted Silver-medal Rating.

Analyst Randal Goldsmith says: Chatfeild-Roberts and Smith-Maxwells high-conviction approach to manager selection has served investors well, providing them with significant outperformance of its category peers over time.

They run a concentrated list of underlying managers, typically backing them for many years. The fund has outperformed consistently in the tougher years like 2008, 2011, and 2015  doing a better job than peers of protecting investors capital. It has outperformed in the majority of other years.

The Jupiter Merlin teams investment process starts with a thorough assessment of the macro environment, which guides portfolio allocation and influences manager selection on different multi-manager portfolios.

Equity Income Star Fund Managers

Harman tries to look out for fund managers who have built up good long-term track records. He had previously invested in the Invesco Perpetual High Income fund. When manager Neil Woodford left to launch his own fund management company in 2013, Harman decided to invest in its Woodford Equity Income fund.

Woodford Equity Income has a Silver Rating from Morningstar. Peter Brunt, an analyst at Morningstar says: Our confidence is growing in this fund. It is managed by one of the most talented fund managers in the sector and, after some initial teething problems, we are reassured to see a period of increased stability at Woodford Investment Management.

Woodford applies the same investment approach that helped him created a strong and consistent track record during his three decades at Invesco Perpetual. Brunt says: The approach is best described as high-conviction, long-term, and contrarian in nature. They point out that his funds can deviate significantly from benchmarks, and are managed with a total return mind-set, the objective being to grow capital and income, with a keen eye on capital preservation.

As such, investors should be aware that there may be periods where the fund is not always the highest yielding relative to peers, Brunt warns.

While the Woodford fund is predominantly UK based, Harman has also invested some of his pension and ISA savings with Fundsmith Equity, a global fund run by Terry Smith.

This fund has a five-star rating from Morningstar, reflecting its very strong performance in recent years.

Smiths approach is to invest in companies that are already winners rather than trying to find tomorrows emerging stars. He is looking for compoundable earners which, in theory, he can hold over the long term.

This leads to significant biases within the fund - but in performance terms it has been in a sweet spot in recent years. Between November 2010 when the fund launched and November 2015, the fund was up by 16.7% on an annualised basis; by comparison, the MSCI World Index was up by just 10.3%.

Harman says he adopts a similar investment strategy with his ISA and pension. The main difference will be how I take an income from them. It sounds counter-intuitive but it makes sense in tax-terms to take an income, and withdraw capital from the ISAs first, and other investments like the peer-to-peer lending.

In inheritance tax terms it is far more efficient to leave surplus pensions funds than ISA funds - so these will be the last investments I cash in.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Maksim Tsurkov  Trend:

A meeting between the Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping CJSC and a delegation of Irans Ports and Maritime Organization was held in Baku, the Azerbaijani company said in a message Nov. 11.

During the meeting, the sides noted necessity to develop cooperation in navigation.

Jabbar Jalilian, head of the Iranian delegation, expressed confidence in the capacity to implement joint projects with the Azerbaijani company.

Also, the parties noted the need for cooperation in cargo transportation and ship repair, rendering agent services, as well as in the activities outside the Caspian basin, the message said.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
Maintaining independence and editorial freedom is essential to our mission of empowering investor success. We provide a platform for our authors to report on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investors point of view. We also respect individual opinionsthey represent the unvarnished thinking of our people and exacting analysis of our research processes. Our authors can publish views that we may or may not agree with, but they show their work, distinguish facts from opinions, and make sure their analysis is clear and in no way misleading or deceptive.

To further protect the integrity of our editorial content, we keep a strict separation between our sales teams and authors to remove any pressure or influence on our analyses and research.

Read our editorial policy to learn more about our process.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Anvar Mammadov  Trend:

Trade turnover between Azerbaijan and China increased by 56 percent in the first nine months of 2016 as compared to the same period of 2015, said Azerbaijani Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev.

He made the remarks during a meeting with Chinese businessmen in Baku, said Azerbaijans Economy Ministry in a message Nov. 11.

Azerbaijan is interested in further development of relations with China, noted the minister.

He added that there is a big potential between the two countries in development of relations in the spheres of energy, transportation, transit freight traffic and investment.

During the meeting, Wang Shihong, member of management board at the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), for his part, said that economic and political relations between Azerbaijan and China are at a high level.

Speaking about the activity of his company in Azerbaijan, Shihong recalled the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR and CNPC and noted the importance of implementation of a project to create a chemical and oil refinery complex in Azerbaijan.

During the meeting, the sides also discussed the opportunities of expanding cooperation between the two countries entrepreneurs.

Trade turnover between China and Azerbaijan reached $641.39 million in January-September 2016, $145.81 million of which accounted for export to China, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee.

China is one of main trade partners of Azerbaijan  the country ranks the fifth in Azerbaijans trade turnover over the nine months of 2016, the third  in Azerbaijans import and the 12th  in export.
Speaking to stakeholders in a November 9 visit to Toronto Community Housing, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development Jean-Yves Duclos emphasized the need for continuous support to social infrastructure to ensure the nations long-term economic health.In a press release published online by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Duclos said that the recently released Fall Economic Statement outlined provisions for $21.9 billion to be poured into social infrastructure over a period of 11 years, on top of the $3.4 billion (to be released over 5 years) already allocated in the 2016 federal budget.Our government is following through on its promise to make historic investments in social infrastructure  investments that will accelerate support to those who need it most, while creating good, well-paying jobs that help strengthen and grow the middle class and Canadas economy, Duclos said in his address.The funds are to be invested into additional affordable housing units, as well as support for ventures focused on child care and early learning. Support for indigenous communities is to be expanded, as well.We believe these investments will also help empower Canadians to build better lives for themselves, their families and their children, and enable them to contribute to and share in the prosperity of the country, Duclos stated.In the coming months, the Government will continue to work to ensure the successful implementation of the first phase of investments in support of social infrastructure and will announce further details on the allocations for the new $21.9 billion investment in social infrastructure through Budget 2017, the CMHC said.Related Stories:
The aftershocks of Donald Trumps surprise victory in the U.S. presidential elections cannot be overstated from an economic point of view, as the United States remains to be Canadas largest trading partner with US$575 billion in goods and services exchanged between them in the previous year alone.Experts warned that the imposition of trade barriers such as new tariffs would prove to be disastrousa sobering notion considering Trumps apparent preference for an isolationist policy, if his campaign statements are any indication.Almost one in five Canadian jobs is dependent on trade with the United states, former industry minister James Moore told the Financial Post.I think theres a tremendous amount of anxiety because this was an election about anger and division. It wasnt an election that was heavy with public policy.PNC Financial Services Group senior international economist Bill Adams said that Trumps stated policy preferences could have wide-ranging effects on U.S. trade and global growth.The direction of these policies may be clear, but the scope and pace of their implementation is anything but. Ratifying a treaty to replace NAFTA would require the advice and consent of a two-thirds majority of Senators, meaning the participation of some Democratic senators, Adams wrote in a November 9 analysis.Such a drastic change might not materialize right away, but BMO Capital Markets chief economist Douglas Porter advised vigilance just the same.Hes usually complained about the specifics of NAFTA, not Mexicos economy in general. So, I think theres still room to work something out. Im sure hes going to come under tremendous pressure from his own party  and from industry, as well  to try to work something out. But well see.Weve got a long history of candidates, both in Canada and the U.S., talking about renegotiating NAFTA or changing NAFTA. Admittedly, Mr. Trump is far out on the spectrum on that one. And it would be pretty tough to imagine hed completely backtrack on that front, Porter concluded.Related Stories:
We have the answers to all your investment questions in our Property Forecast Guide -- the industry's very own crystal ball, which will appear in the January issue of CREW.Think of the guide, which spans dozens of pages, as your handbook for investing in real estate in 2017. Want to know whats in store for the economy? How about hot, up-and-coming areas? This guide will help you get rich  or even richer  by giving you the best research, right in your lap.We spoke to veteran investors, respected economists and profiled every market and every trend that investors need to know about.Below is just a sample of what you can expect.Strong and growing economy, stable and growing post-secondary institutions, airport, expanding highways, increase Go Train service and now a rapid transit system all point to a strong year for the KWC real estate market. Rental demand will continue to grow, especially around the new LRT and Go Train stations as well as the renewed downtown cores. This region is growing into Millennial Central and that bodes well for market demand for decades to come.It is still a market where investors and homeowners need to have very localized knowledge in order to ensure they aren`t buying in neighbourhoods that will underperform the market. 2017 should begin a slowing of demand from investors and landlords, but increased Go Train service, a renewal of Hamilton`s reputation and the promise of LRT will keep interest high.Although two very separate cities, they are economically co-joined. In one year Barrie will lead in growth and housing demand, and in the following Orillia will. Orillia looks to grab the lead in 2017 with the Hydro One purchase of the local utility and the development of a high-tech research center bringing in above average salaried employees. The demand in Barries mid-range market should continue to be strong as new mortgage rules push people out of Vaughn and Toronto.Anything ground-oriented (single family homes, semis, townhomes) are poised to outperform the rest of the market, especially given the Provincial Places to Grow act limiting the amount of new-land sprawl, thus driving up the price of developable land within these constrained boundaries. Condo demand will continue with a movement to larger and therefore further from the core units beginning to feel the upward demand pressures as young families begin to grow and require more room. Units located within 800 Meters of TTC subway stations or 500 meters of street car stops will feel the highest demand increases in both rental and purchase in 2017.Canadian Real Estate Wealth is the countrys premier guide for real estate investors. It includes the most timely and in-depth market analysis, delivered right to your doorstep six times a year.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Maksim Tsurkov  Trend:

A presentation of the Baku International Sea Trade Port was held at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, said the port in a message Nov. 11.

The presentation was held during the working visit of the ports head Taleh Ziyadov to Belgium.

Addressing the presentation, Ivo Vajgl, a member of the European Parliament from Slovenia, noted that Azerbaijan, besides being a reliable energy partner of the EU, will also be a strategic transportation partner.

Ziyadov, for his part, said that transportation and logistics infrastructure, petrochemical and pharmaceutics zones are planned to be created in the free trade area in the Baku Ports territory, and the work to produce, package and label different products will be carried out there.

Therefore, 1,000 jobs will be created in the free trade zone that will contribute to attraction of big investments to Azerbaijan, noted Ziyadov.

During the visit, Ziyadov also held negotiations with Henrik Hololei, director general for mobility and transport at the European Commission, and discussed prospects of future cooperation.

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree March 17, 2016, on measures to create a free trade zone type special economic area covering the territory of the Baku International Sea Trade Port in the Alat township of Bakus Garadagh district.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
Mount Pleasant, SC (29464)

Today

Partly to mostly cloudy. Low 59F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly to mostly cloudy. Low 59F. Winds light and variable.
Spooky sites Fall is the season of holiday spectacle in Moorpark. In December, of course, Pinedale Road transforms into Candy Cane Lane and dazzles visitors with Santa splendor. But for those who...

Local hula group inspires global connections When the pandemic ushered everyone indoors, Moorpark resident and longtime dancer Lisa Rauschenberger decided to get people back outsidesocially distanced, of course. She began to hold weekly hula lessons at...

Teens face high stakes in the Oval Office A press room befitting Americas commander in chief was set up inside the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. Journalists and others gathered inside. Ladies and gentlemen, I need you all...
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

Egyptian companies may resume flights between Baku and Sharm El Sheikh in winter to attract tourists from Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani Ambassador to Cairo Tural Rzayev told Trend Nov. 11.

Azerbaijan and Egypt have great potential for cooperation in the tourism sphere, said the ambassador. Both countries show great interest in establishing relations in this sphere. A direct flight between Baku and Sharm El Sheikh was opened in June to increase mutual tourist flow.

The Egyptian companies offered Azerbaijani tourists tour packages at very attractive prices, Rzayev said. However, later the flight was suspended due to its unprofitability. This is explained by a number of reasons: the opening of the flight coincided with the month of Ramadan and the summer in Egypt, where the air temperature, as a rule, is not very comfortable for guests from Azerbaijan. In this regard, the Egyptian side decided to suspend the flights.

Rzayev said that in order to make flights profitable, Egyptian companies were considering the possibility of organizing joint flights with one of the countries of Central Asia.

On June 3, Egypts Air Cairo opened the direct Baku-Sharm El Sheikh-Baku flight, thus having created conditions for increasing the tourist flow from Azerbaijan.

However, later the airline decided to temporarily suspend the flights from the resort city to Baku, explaining its decision by the lack of demand for the flight.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Asebaa
Skip the thank you for your service. Lets talk about what veterans really need.

Veterans Day is today, and strangers who learn that I served seven years on active duty in the U.S. Army will inevitably thank me for my service. While some people believe that veterans deserve lifelong gratitude for their role protecting our country, more than a few of us find it annoying; an empty platitude that civilians use to absolve themselves from asking what exactly we sacrificed, or what we truly need now.

What post-9/11 veterans need are good jobs, with good benefits. They need employers who dont thoughtlessly cut-and-paste job prerequisites that favor someone who spent four years partying at a state university over a vet who was waking up at 6 a.m. and wearing a uniform during 60-hour workweeks, except for when they were in combat.

Thats what vets said they need in a poll by iCIMS Hiring Insights, a labor market research firm.

More than 3.6 million Americans have completed military service since 2001, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These men and women have an unemployment rate of 5.8 percent, about a point higher than the rest of the country.

Most Americans may hail them as heroes, but nearly three-quarters of post-9/11 vets believe their military experience hurts them because hiring managers dont understand or appreciate what they did in the military. Another 37 percent believe hiring managers devalue their military experience, and 36 percent believe job postings often require more specialized experience than they have for jobs they know they can do.

The entry into the workforce following military service is really not a great experience for these vets, said Susan Vitale, chief marketing officer and workplace expert at iCIMS. There is a disconnect, and veterans are not feeling necessarily valued after their service when it comes to employment.

Consider for a moment how many jobs require a bachelors degree as a minimum requirement. In many cases, employers will accept almost any degree if the job they are filling does not require a specific certification. Employers think the bachelors degree will give them candidates with critical thinking skills.

Thats bad news for the 25-year-old veteran, who joined the service when he or she was 18 and doesnt have a degree. That employers focus on a bachelors degree means it will miss the fact that the vet managed a $1 million program budget and supervised 15 troops as a noncommissioned officer, probably in a high-stress situation that required sound judgment.

Isnt that better than a college degree and two years of experience in an entry-level management job? I think so, but the veteran I just described was me in 1990. Ive since earned a degree, and I can attest that what I learned in the military is far more valuable than what I learned in college.

Many employers, when they are crafting a job description, and describing who would be perfect in whatever role it might be, dont necessarily place enough stock in the right things, Vitale confirmed. Other things that might really make a difference, they dont place enough value on.

The military and the vets themselves share some of the blame. There are few corporations that will invest that much authority in a young person, but the military does it because most troops retire in their early 40s.

Vets also acknowledge they are not very good at explaining how their skills apply to a civilian business. Twenty-eight percent say they dont know how to sell themselves to a civilian hiring manager, and 47 percent say they understate or leave out their military experience for fear it might hurt their chances.

While I was with the Associated Press, I routinely embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and spent about two years on the front lines with truly remarkable young people. I am still friends with many of the soldiers I wrote about between 2003 and 2008, and adjusting to civilian life has not been easy for them.

Many of them went to work for defense contractors or government, both of which are very good with vets. Others have found success with major corporations with paramilitary, hierarchical structures. Others became teachers and police officers, and one became a sommelier.

All of us have lost too many comrades to suicide, though, and there are some who still painfully struggle to find their place in civil society.

A good job with a supportive employer makes all of the difference. And there are state and federal programs that provide tax credits to employers willing to make the extra effort to employ vets who are disabled or have suffered from chronic unemployment.

All employers should know the military trains people to focus on a mission, solve problems, adapt to change and work as a team, to include stepping up as a leader when needed. These are also the qualities that employers say they need.

The next time your company advertises an opening, make sure the job posting lists the skills that are truly desired and drop the pro-forma prerequisites that could screen out a capable veteran.

Then take the time to understand what a veteran can offer. Talk through what they did and how they did it.

There is an enormous amount of untapped potential out there. Dont let it go to waste.

----

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Which Wich will Midlanders choose?

A second unit of the Dallas-based sandwich franchise chain is set to open in mid-December in the Borgata shopping center north of Lowes Home Improvement.

The first shop is downtown at the Wall Street Lofts.

Midland has treated us very well, and were excited for our second location, Tom Granger, a partner in Quattro FS LLC, the Wich Which franchisee, said in a phone interview from his offices in San Angelo.

Midland has exceeded our expectations, Granger said. The only difficulty was in hiring, and we feel hiring for the second location will be easier.

The Borgata is surrounded by more residences, which means more students and thats primarily our workforce, he said.

The franchisee opened a store in San Angelo at about the same time as the first Midland store, which opened in March 2015, and San Angelo will be getting a second location as well. Granger said a fifth location will be opening in either Odessa or Abilene. The company is looking for an Odessa site now, he said. Quattro is also contracted to open stores in Sweetwater and Big Spring.

He said he and his partners wanted to grow their company, which is why they signed an agreement to open eight Which Wich locations. He said they are within the time frame they wanted.

Quattro has been a fantastic franchise partner, Scott McIntosh, director of franchise development with Which Wich, said in a phone from his Dallas offices.

He said Quattro is on its way to becoming the companys largest franchisee.

The initial (Midland) location is doing fantastic, and hopefully the new one will have similar results, McIntosh said, adding that the new location will feature Which Wichs drive-through system.

Company founder Jeff Sinelli devised the concept of having customers mark their sandwich choices on paper bags when he started Which Wich in 2003, McIntosh said.

He was looking for a way to have a more creative approach to the ordering system, McIntosh said. The customers enjoy filling out the paper bag and handing it in.

Franchising the concept began in 2005 and in that 10 years has grown from one Dallas location to 418 in 39 states. Another 60 stores are scheduled to open over the next 12 months, McIntosh said.

Our system was designed as a franchise concept, he said. We spend our days supporting franchisees, as it should be. We have a few company stores, but our growth has been with the franchisees.

He said the company is particular about its franchisees, seeking those who create a positive environment for both employees and customers and exude that positive vibe.
Samaritan luncheon honors area family

On Tuesday, Samaritan Counseling Center will host its 22nd Annual Family of the Year Celebration Luncheon. The event will feature guest speaker Dr. James T. Reese, a Bronze Star medal recipient, author and former criminal profiler with the FBIs Behavioral Science Unit. The event will also recognize Vivian and Kent Moss as the Midland Family of the Year.

The family was chosen for their examples of family life and gifts of time and support to church, community, and workplace which make the community a better place.

The event begins at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Green Tree Country Club.

Special Olympics Texas in need of volunteers

Sixty five volunteers are needed for Special Olympics Saturday bowling competition. The organization described the need as critical. Volunteers are needed to assist with selling merchandise, presenting awards and serving as lane monitors. More than 200 children and and adults with intellectual disabilities will bowl in the Permian Basin/Big Bend Area competition.

More from F&P Centers celebrates new outlook with a new building

Different shifts are available. The morning shift is from 8:45 11:30 a.m. and the afternoon shift will go from 11:30 a.m.3:30 p.m..

For more information, contact Suzanne Anderson by calling 512-491-2934 or emailing sanderson@sotx.org.

Annual Diwail celebration at Horseshoe Pavilion

The Hindu Association of West Texas invites the community to join in the celebration of Diwali, the festival of lights.The local Hindu community of West Texas embraces cultural diversity and celebrates its unique practices and festivals in the spirit of "unity in diversity".

The event will be followed by a dinner of authentic Indian cuisine and popular folk danes.

This year's cultural celebration happens Saturday from 5-7 p.m. at the Midland County Horseshoe Pavilion. Tickets are $25 for adults and $15 for students and children. Call 432-689-3575 to purchase tickets.

Texas Roadhouse meals for veterans

Texas Roadhouse in Midland will provide special meals to the homebound veterans of Meals On Wheels.

At Texas Roadhouse, we believe anyone who fights for our country is legendary.Thats why we offer a free Veterans Day lunch for all past and present soldiers. If youre a veteran, we can never repay you for your service, restaurant representative Aaron Battles said in a press release.

SeniorLink prepares more than 500 meals every weekday to homebound elderly. The organizations partnership with Texas Roadhouse ensures veterans in the Meals on Wheels program can be honored as well on Veterans Day.

Texas Roadhouse is respectfully and thoughtfully including veterans receiving Meals On Wheels in their recognition of those having served our country in the military. Not everyone has a choice about where they can have lunch and Meals On Wheels is proud to partner with Texas Roadhouse in remembering the service and sacrifice of our greatest generation, said Jody Sneed, executive director of Senior Link Midland.

Sibley Nature Center host Chief Luis Tijerina

Sibley Nature Center will host Odessa native Chief Luis Tijerina for their Brown Bag Lecture on Wednesday, Nov. 16 at noon.

After several years of Sundancing he became the chief of the tribe in Trans-Pecos Region in 2005. He will be speaking on the heritage and culture of several peoples including the Lipan Apache. With the use of many traditional items, he connects you to the lives and ceremonies of the past.

The lecture is at noon on Wednesday, Nove. 16 at Sibley Nature Center,1307 E Wadley Ave. Admission is free with tea and cookies will be provided.

United Way announces grant recipients

The United Way of Midland Community grant program provides support to nonprofit health and human service organizations for immediate and creative responses to needs in our community. Through this program, one-year Community Grants will be allocated for new or expanded programs identified by United Way of Midland and a one-time project.

Final recommendations were voted on by the United Way of Midland Board of Directors on Oct. 20. This year, 12 programs at 10 agencies will receive a collective total of $45,000.

Those agencies include Agape Counseling Services of West Texas: Ruby Paynes Bridges Out of Poverty training, Be the Change: Challenge Day and teams, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Midland Community Impact Grant, Midland County System of Care wraparound services, Mission Center Adult Day Services basic health care project, Samaritan Counseling: cognitive behavioral therapy, The Junior League of Midland, Inc.: Reading Olympics, The Springboard Center: Fred Westmoreland Fitness Center, UTPB: First 5 Permian Basin: Teen Fatherhood Engagement Program and Little Free Libraries, Early Childhood Coalition of the Permian Basin.

Support hurricane victim relief at Saturday wrestling event

Emma Daniels is a first-grade student in Odessa who with an idea to help victims of Hurricane Matthew. She wants to raise enough money to send at least one truckload full of bottled water to the victims of hurricane Matthew in Goldsboro, NC.

At OSW Presents: "The Good, The Bad, and The Funk" at the Ector County Coliseum Barn D, Dnaiels and her mother will have a table displaying information about her endeavor and to accept donations.

For more information, visit facebook.com/texanscarebyemma.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Police officials say they are confident they have found the body of a missing teenage girl days after her mother and sister were found dead in the family home in Baytown.

An Amber Alert was issued for Kirsten Fritch after the bodies of Cynthia Morris, 37, and her daughter Breanna Pavlicek, 13, were discovered about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday n the 5400 block of Louisa, according to the Baytown Police Department.

According to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, Morris had gunshot wounds in her torso and neck while Pavlicek had gunshot wounds in her head, neck and right shoulder. Their deaths were ruled homicides.

Police said Fritch and Morris' white, Chrysler PT Cruiser, were missing from the home. The car along with a person of interest in the case, Fritch's 21-year-old boyfriend, Jesse Dobbs, were later found Monday in in Texas City.

Fritch, however, remained missing.

Volunteers with Texas EquuSearch scoured areas Thursday along Texas 146 between Texas City and Bacliff, said Tim Miller, the group's founder and director.

At an afternoon press conference Baytown police Lt. Steve Dorris said Fritch's body had likely been there over 24 hours.

Equusearch volunteers on ATVs found the body within half an hour of starting day two of the search about 12:30 p.m. Thursday. Dorris said the body was found just outside the area police searched Wednesday evening.

The body was found on the northeast edge of a wooded area behind Shenanigan's bar in Texas City, where Dobbs was arrested. Surveillance video reportedly showed him entering the bar wet and shoeless.

"We'll be looking for a gun," Dorris said, though he could not say whether the body had a gunshot wound.

Dobbs is likely to be charged with murder, Dorris said. Police and the Galveston County District Attorney will weigh evidence when considering whether to pursue capital murder charges.

Thursday night police issued a statement that said,in part: "At this time no charges have been filed on Jesse Dobbs in connection with the murders, however he is currently considered a suspect in both, the murders of Kirsten and the murders of Cynthia and Breanna in Baytown. He does however; remain in the Galveston County Jail on the resisting arrest charge."

Dobbs would not cooperate with investigators and has asked to speak with a lawyer, Dorris said.

The lieutenant thanked Equusearch for their volunteer work, saying they were a "force multiplier" that freed up detectives to pursue other aspects of the case.

"It's a tragic ending to something that we hoped would have a different (outcome)," Dorris said.

The victims' relatives were notified, Dorris said. "In the blink of an eye, you're losing three family members."

The search Wednesday included the FBI and state DPS as well as local police, Dorris said. Equusearch was asked to come out Thursday.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Anvar Mammadov  Trend:

The 26th meeting of the Trade and Transport Facilitation (TTF) Project Steering Committee of the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development will be held in Azerbaijan, the countrys State Customs Committee said in a message Nov. 11.

The decision was made during the 25th meeting of the committee in the city of Lviv, Ukraine.

At the meeting, Azerbaijan was represented by chief of the Main Department for Activity Assessment and Development Programs of the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan, customs service major-general Igbal Babayev and Chief of External Relations Department of the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan Dilavar Farzaliyev.

The GUAM member countries also discussed the technical conditions to organize preliminary information exchange regarding the goods and vehicles transported across their state borders, according to the message.

The establishment of internal procedures to sign the protocol on mutual recognition of customs inspection results regarding a number of products, as well as coordination of the agreement to simplify transit of goods and vehicles among the GUAM member countries were considered.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Nov. 11

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

Several project are being implemented in Turkmenistans mining industry by foreign investor companies under the production sharing agreements (PSA), the Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper reported.

In particular, Dragon Oil (the UAE), Petronas (Malaysia), RWE (Germany), Eni (Italy), CNPC (China) and several other companies are actively developing offshore and continental fields and increase annual volume and their share in total volume of oil and gas output by Turkmenistan, says the article.

The share of oil output by joint and foreign companies increased by 54 percent in 2015, as compared to 15.6 percent in 2006, and this figure reached almost 56 percent in the first half of 2016.

The share of gas output by foreign companies amounted to more than 25 percent in 2015 and 28.5 percent during the first six months of 2016.

Meanwhile, foreign investments in oil and gas output total tens of billions of dollars and continue to rise, according to the article.
Supersets for Super Muscle Gains

Written by Team MD

23 March 2019

Supersets for Super Muscle Gains

Arnold Schwarzenegger was a volume fanatic, as you may have seen in Pumping Iron. He trained major bodyparts as often as three days a week, and used a six-days-on/one-day-off, double-split routine throughout much of his professional career. What people dont know is that Arnold would often train his back in tandem with chest: he would so supersets in which he did chest exercise immediately followed by a back movement. He loved doing exercises that increased his training volume, and was known to do lots of supersets. In fact, many have said that Arnold was the Superset King. HOLY SHIT!! Who trains like that anymore?

Maybe Arnold knew something about superset training thats been lost over the years something that can shock your chest/back into new growth. Arnold was known to have a physique that was superior to his competitors, which may have been due to his unorthodox training techniques.

In this feature we know Arnold was not crazy for doing supersets with chest and back and that this method may be the key to new and increased muscle growth.

Superset Background

A superset describes groups of exercises that are usually performed successively, targeting different muscle groups. Superset can also be used to describe protocols for grouping exercises that target the same muscle group. A typical superset would be a set of biceps curls, followed immediately by triceps extensions. Another superset combo would be to do a set of bench presses, immediately followed by bent-over rows. Superset training has been shown to enhance power output and to be an efficacious and time-efficient means for developing strength and power.1-6

There are a few scientific studies to suggest that the activation of an antagonist muscle can enhance muscle power output. In a study of trained male athletes, an increase in power output was observed in the bench press throw (performed on a Smith machine, where someone takes the bar and throws it up as high as it can go, for maximal power) three minutes after a set of ballistic bench pulls (where someone lies on the bench and pulls the weight to his stomach, similar to doing a bent-over row) compared to the power output in a set of bench press throws with no intervention. It was suggested that preloading the antagonist muscles of the back might have altered (i.e., reduced the braking period) the neural firing pattern during the agonist power exercise of the chest.

Burn More Fat With Supersets

Adding supersets to your pre-contest bodybuilding regimen may be something you want to try. In a study from Syracuse University, researchers looked at two types of strength training to see which style burned more calories. The researchers compared superset training to traditional strength workouts. Study participants completed two strength-training workouts, separated by at least seven days. Their workout consisted of 4 sets of six exercises, and they performed 10 reps of each exercise. During one week, they trained using supersets. One week later, they did traditional resistance training.

Subjects in the above study who used supersets had a faster workout as the superset sessions took less time to complete, but more importantly, researchers found that markers of energy metabolism such as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC; a measure of resting energy expenditure after exercise) were higher, blood lactate measures were higher, and total energy expenditure for the workout was higher.9 This means supersets lead to a super metabolic rate for burning fat!

Supersets Increase Anabolic Hormones

Increases in testosterone and growth hormone (GH) have been implicated in the role of muscle growth and strength. It has been shown that high-intensity resistance exercise is a powerful stimulant for increasing testosterone levels.10-12 In fact, previous research demonstrated a positive correlation between testosterone in an acute response, and an increased number of cellular androgenic receptors.13 Additionally, it has been found that that there may be a relationship between volume and intensity of training, and the basal concentration of anabolic hormones.14 The same authors suggested that higher testosterone levels at rest are a determining factor in the development of strength, but only in high-performance strength athletes. If you are looking for a challenging workout, try supersets and I guarantee you will be gasping for breath! The metabolic demand for performing supersets is incredible to say that your muscles burn is an understatement.

Higher Volume Training With Supersets

Supersets are a time-efficient way of training you get more done in less time.7 A new study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research investigated a superset training regimen of coupling two heavy resistance-training exercises (bent rows and bench presses), performed over 3 consecutive sets and reported that superset training appeared to be a more efficient method of exercise than traditional exercise. If you want to get more done in less time, supersets are the way to go.

Because similar volume and loads are achieved under the less time-consuming, superset training, its more efficient than traditional weight training. Interestingly, EMG activity (a measure of muscle motor-unit recruitment and muscle activation) was not different under the two conditions suggesting that the level of neuromuscular fatigue did not differ under supersets, compared to traditional training.

Research suggests that the effects of alternating agonist and antagonist work on muscle volume are somewhat less detrimental than the effects of performing multiple sets of one exercise before performing multiple sets of another. This means that even though you are doing different movements back-to-back, you are not going to get so fatigued that you cant work the muscle.5

If you are looking to crank up your volume to increase muscle growth, supersets are the way to go! The current data indicates that heavy resistance training using supersets allows a greater loading to be imposed on the musculature than whats achieved with traditional resistance exercise training, or working one muscle group. Given similar timelines, it would appear that performing agonist and antagonist work in an alternating manner such as supersets compared to performing all sets of agonist work with one muscle group allows for greater recovery and subsequently greater loading of the muscle.

Example of Arnolds Superset Routine

Superset:

Barbell Bench Presses

1 set 15-rep warm-up

5 sets x 10, 8, 8, 6, 4 reps

Wide-Grip Chins (behind the head)

5 sets x 10 reps (to back)

Superset:

Dumbbell Incline Presses

5 sets x 10, 8, 6, 6, 4 reps

Close-Grip Chins

5 sets x 10 reps

Superset:

Dumbbell Flyes

5 sets x 10, 8, 6, 6, 4 reps

T-Bar Rows

5 sets x 15, 10, 8, 8, 8 reps

Superset:

Parallel Upright Dips

5 sets x 15, 10, 8, 8, 8 reps

Bent-Over Barbell Rows

5 sets x 10 reps

Superset:

Seated Cable Rows

5 sets x 10 reps

Dumbbell Pullovers

5 sets x 15 reps

Arnolds Advanced Biceps and Triceps Workout

Do 4 sets x 10-12 reps for each superset without rest or at the very least, minimal rest.

Superset 1:

Barbell Curls

superset with Lying Triceps Extensions

Superset 2:

Alternate Dumbbell Curls

superset with Pushdowns (either variety)

Superset 3:

Seated Incline Curls

superset with Kneeling Extensions

Superset 4:

Concentration Curls

superset with One-arm Triceps Extensions

Reference:

Schwarzenegger A, & Dobbins B. The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. Simon & Schuster, New York. Revised and updated November 5, 1999.

DISCUSS THIS ARTICLE ON THE MD FORUM

READ MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS IN THE TRAINING SECTION

ARNOLD ON HIS OFF-SEASON & PRE-CONTEST EATING
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov.11



By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:



The non-OPEC oil supply will stand at 56.20 million barrels per day in 2016, according to OPECs monthly oil market report (MOMR) released Nov.11.



The non-OPEC oil supply estimation for 2016 has been revised down by 0.1 million barrels per day since the October MOMR to now show a contraction of 0.78 million barrels per day to average 56.20 million barrels per day, said the report.



This revision was due to higher-than-expected declines in the third quarter of 2016 in the US, Mexico, Norway, the UK, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and China, which were partially offset by higher output from Canada, Russia and other European members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said OPEC.



The report said that non-OPEC production in the second half of 2016 is is expected to be lower than in the first half of 2016, despite the continued rise in US rig counts, the end of seasonal maintenance, and the startup of new projects.



For 2017, non-OPEC supply growth has also been revised down by a marginal 10,000 barrels per day to show an increase of 0.23 million barrels per day, said the report.



Non-OPEC supply is expected to average 56.43 million barrels per day in 2017, according to the cartels estimations.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Elena Kosolapova  Trend:

Kazakhstan and South Korea signed 23 documents worth $640.2 million during a bilateral business forum held in Seoul, the Kazakh National Export and Investment Agency Kaznex Invest reported.

The forum, attended by 350 businessmen from the companies of both countries, was held on Nov. 10 during the visit of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev to South Korea.

The agreements were signed in the spheres of healthcare, information technologies, construction, finance, trade, tourism and others.

The major documents signed include a memorandum on establishment of a cluster of pharmaceutical and medical-biological plants Nefertem worth $350 million in Kazakhstan, a memorandum on cooperation between Korean SEOHA and Kazakh Investment and Development Ministry worth $150 million, as well as a memorandum on creation of the Kazakh-Korean Consortium to attract investment for the construction of a clinic worth $80 million, designed for 504 beds.

Today, 465 South Korean companies are operating in Kazakhstan in the spheres of production, trade and services, construction, agricultural and industrial complex, consulting and finance, subsoil use and exploration.

There are also 27 South Korean-Kazakh joint ventures that operate in chemicals industry, energy production, mechanical engineering, pharmaceutics, information and communication technologies, mining and metallurgical complex, infrastructure and light industry in Kazakhstan.

Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova
New members inducted into Institute of ...
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Nov. 11

By Huseyn Hasanov- Trend:

German company Salmet Eurasia (part of Salmet company) successfully cooperates with its Turkmen counterparts in the agricultural sector, Yury Veselsky, the companys regional business manager, said in an interview with the Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper.

Poultry farming is a very promising area in this sector of the Turkmen economy, according to Veselsky.

Nowadays, Turkmenistan has not only satisfied the domestic demand for chicken meat and eggs, but it also supplies these products abroad, he said.

We are proud that this success contains certain contribution of German manufacturers of innovative equipment for the maintenance and rearing of young animals, as well as production lines of the cellular systems for broilers," the businessman said.

At the investment forum held in Avaza, much attention is paid to the environmental technologies developed by the companys experts, Veselsky said.

These technologies are applied in different branches of agriculture, including production of fertilizers and diversified waste disposal, according to him.
Sonora, CA  Randy Hanvelt, Tuolumne County Supervisor for District 2, shares his thoughts about what can be learned from this presidential election, stating in his newest blog, It is always better to have a real landslide than a narrow margin of victory.

Hanvelt notes that he is not sure about all of the aspects of cause and effect, but points to the denial of both the establishment in Washington and the mainstream media of the electability of Republicans and also acknowledges, The Republican side got more negative press about it probably because of the inflammatory style.

Hanvelt states divisiveness grew during President Obamas administration and acknowledges Hillary Clintons win of the popular vote, and her many California supporters. He states, Nationally, the rural communities have been ignored, abused and taken advantage of by the urban segment, bringing up the growing movement to split the State as the backlash response. Hanvelt points out other divisions, stating; I have seen racial tensions grow. Gender issues that should never have happened grow. And more! He adds, I am not going to judge whether that is is intentional or malicious

Hanvelt goes on to detail how Corruption in government is real and more blatant that ever, and calls on everyone to change and be more inclusive. Read Hanvelts full statement in his blog Leadership For All People here.
Governor Brown at the Mother Lode Fair: Photo taken by: Tracey Petersen View Photos

Sacramento, CA  Governor Jerry Brown calls for the countrys unity after the presidential election but urged Californians to not back down on the fight against climate change.

On Thursday, Brown issued a statement regarding the election and the transition to a new administration. Brown has travelled the world boasting of Californias aggressive actions to slow greenhouse gas emissions while Trump has pledged to roll back federal environmental regulations. Brown stated that Californians will stay true to our basic principles and will protect the precious rights of our people.

Here is the Governors entire statement:

Today we saw the beginning of the transfer of power to the President-elect. While the prerogatives of victory are clear, so also are the responsibilities to ensure a strong and unified America. As President Lincoln said, A house divided against itself cannot stand. With the deep divisions in our country, it is incumbent on all of us  especially the new leadership in Washington  to take steps that heal those divisions, not deepen them. In California, we will do our part to find common ground whenever possible. But as Californians, we will also stay true to our basic principles. We will protect the precious rights of our people and continue to confront the existential threat of our time  devastating climate change.

E PLURIBUS UNUM.
(R) Congressman Tom McClintock's Town Hall meeting View Photos

Congressman Tom McClintock recently took to the House Floor to discuss his concern over the increasing Federal Footprint.

McClintock was Fridays KVML Newsmaker of the Day. Here are his words:

Google Federal Footprint.

When you do, youll have a complete picture of how much land the federal government owns and how much of your state and your community is affected. And it may surprise you.

It owns just 7/10ths of one percent of the State of New York. It owns just 1.1 percent of the State of Illinois. It owns just 1.8 percent of the State of Texas.

But then go further west and you will see the reason for the Western revolt. The Federal Government owns and controls 62 percent of the state of Alaska, 2/3 of Utah and 81 percent of the state of Nevada. It owns 48 percent of my home state of California. Nearly half. In one county in my district  Alpine County  the federal government owns 93 percent of the land.

If you are not from one of the Western states, you need to understand what that means. Thats all land thats off the local tax rolls. Its land that carries increasingly severe restrictions on public use and access, which means its generating very little economic activity to these regions. And often, federal ownership means that federal land use policies are in direct contravention to the wishes of the local communities entangled with it.

Recently, the Natural Resources Committee held a field hearing in North Las Vegas at the request of Congressman Crescent Hardy.

If youve flown into Las Vegas, you know how vast are the empty and unutilized lands of Nevada, stretching as far as the horizon. Yet local leaders all complained of how the regions economy suffers from a great shortage of land  for homes and shops, businesses and infrastructure. What an irony  and what a commentary about the harm that is being done by the decisions of our federal land managers.

More than a century ago, we began setting aside the most beautiful lands in the nation for the use, resort and recreation of the American people.

But somewhere along the way, public use, resort and recreation became look, but dont touch. And the federal government became indiscriminate and voracious in the amount of land under its direct control.

My congressional district is in the heart of the Sierra Nevada. Common complaints from my constituents and local government officials range from abusive federal regulatory enforcement, inflated fees that have forced families to abandon cabins theyve held for generations, exorbitant new fees that are closing down long-established community events, road closures, and arbitrary denial of grazing permits for family ranchers who go back generations on that land. A small town trying to install a $2 million spillway gate for their reservoir was just given a $6 million estimate from the Forest Service to relocate a hiking trail and a handful of campsites.

Let me relate one quick story that came to me from the Sheriff of Plumas County just outside my district. An elderly couple horseback riding near their home came across an old horseshoe. An ambitious young forest service official saw them pick it up. The next thing they knew, six federal law enforcement officers descended on their home, tore it apart, and ultimately prosecuted them for removing the horseshoe. Ultimately the federal judge dismissed the charges and chastised the officials responsible for this travesty  but only after this couple had gone through hell.

Ask yourself, how would your local economy fare if the federal government owned 93 percent of the land in your county, forbade or greatly restricted any economic activity on it, and ignored your local city council or county board?

In my district, the federal government has consigned our forests to a policy of benign neglect, we now have roughly four times more trees per acre than the land can support. In this overcrowded and stressed condition, the trees can no longer resist drought and beetle infestation. An estimated 85 percent of the pine trees in the Sierra National Forest adjacent to Yosemite are dead. Christmas-tree-in-July-dead.

The National Parks Service estimates it is facing more than $12 billion of maintenance backlog, yet we keep adding to the federal holdings that we cant take care of.

Thats why the federal footprint map is so important to understand, and why fundamental reform of our land use policy is of paramount importance.

The Federal Lands Subcommittee has three principal goals: to restore public access to the public lands; to restore sound management to the public lands; and to restore the federal government as a good neighbor to those communities most impacted by the federal lands.

But overarching these imperatives is the simple fact that excessive federal land ownership in the West has become a stultifying drag on our economies and a direct impediment to taking good care of our public lands.

I think Congressman Gohmert put it best in a hearing last year when he compared the federal government to the miser whose old mansion has become the town eyesore  the yard is overgrown with weeds, the paint is peeling, the roof is dilapidated, the windows are broken  while he spends all his money and attention on plotting to acquire his neighbors properties.

There needs to be a proper balance between federal ownership, state and local stewardship and the productive private ownership of lands. One look at the federal footprint map should warn even the most casual observer that we have lost that balance, and we need to restore it.

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard every weekday morning at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45 AM on AM 1450 and FM 102.7 KVML.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Nov. 11

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

Turkmen and the European Commission officials during a meeting in Brussels stressed the importance of the work under the Ashgabat Declaration meant for development of energy cooperation between Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey and the EU.

The meeting participants stressed the progress on the main projects of cooperation with the EU, including sustainable energy, the Turkmen Oil and Gas Complex said November 11 citing a message from the European Commission.

The sides also pointed to the progress achieved by the EU and Turkmenistan in trade and economic development.

The Ashgabat Declaration was signed in May 2015 by Director of the Turkmen State Agency for Management and Use of Hydrocarbon Resources Yagshygeldi Kakayev, Minister of Energy of Azerbaijan Natig Aliyev, Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources of Turkey Taner Yildiz and the European Commission Vice-President for the Energy Union Maros Sefcovic.

Kakayev, Aliyev, Yildiz and Sefcovic agreed on the need to establish the Caspian Development Corporation for development of the Turkmen gas export to Europe.

The EU, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan are regularly discussing an opportunity of supplying the Turkmen gas to Europe. In particular, the issue rests in implementing a project for laying the Trans-Caspian gas pipeline to the coast of Azerbaijan to deliver the Turkmen gas from there to Turkey, Bulgaria and other European countries.

The Trans-Caspian pipeline could be part of several large-scale projects, including AGRI and TANAP.

Ashgabat believes that the consent of the sides of the project, that is, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, is sufficient for laying the pipe through the bottom of the Caspian Sea, the legal status of which has not been defined.

Azerbaijan has expressed its readiness to provide its territory, transit opportunities and infrastructure for the projects implementation.

Turkmenistan ranks fourth in the world for the volume of natural gas reserve after Russia, Iran and Qatar, according to a BP report.
Protests in cities across the country sparked by President-elect Donald Trump's victory came to Orlando on Friday night.

Shouts of "Orlando Strong!" among protesters

Handful of Trump supporters also showed up

Orlando Police reported no arrests, major incidents

Organizers said they wanted to have a peaceful way of showing their differences in opinion with the man who will soon be their president.



I want to tell our president-elect that his policies are not acceptable, are not okay, said protester Camilo Echeverri.



Echeverri was one of many members of the LGBT community protesting because they say theyre worried president-elect Trump will reverse progress theyve made towards equality and acceptance.



Protesters expressed belief that progress was accelerated in Orlando after the Pulse shooting. There were repeated shouts of Orlando Strong! which was also on many of the signs people waved.



And that really has become Orlando and Im really, really proud of us, said Abagail Tomes, a protester. I really, really love Orlando.



Protesters expressed numerous concerns. Marshall Gilmore is worried about climate change.



Neither [Trump or Pence] believe in global warming, and global warming is going to massively impact Florida, said Gilmore. A third of Florida is going to be underwater.



The protesters were not alone in representing their opinions in the city's streets Friday. A handful of Trump supporters showed up, as well.



Its not to start a fight or anything like that, or to be the black sheep in the group," said Trump supporter William Wiggs. "I actually came out here because Im tired of seeing America separated like it is."



While Wiggs mainly just observed the protests, other Trump supporters werent so calm. At one point things got heated between another Trump supporter and the Trump protesters.



After some pushing and shoving, Orlando Police diffused the situation. Most of the night remained peaceful. OPD reported there were no arrests, injuries or major incidents.



Echeverri said despite his concerns, hes going to keep an open mind.



If he proves to be a competent and rational president that doesnt violate our human rights, then I may be able to accept it, said Echeverri.

Police prepared

Prior to the protests starting, Orlando Police Chief John Mina said Friday morning that his force was prepared for the Lake Eola Park protest.

"A lot of people want to come out and protest. That's their First Amendment right. We're there to keep the peace," he said.

The police chief said the force is well-staffed and would offer a large police presence, but he would not discuss specific safety tactics.

"As you remember, I think it was in July, we had several thousand Black Lives Matter protesters. The protest march went peacefully. We were able to handle that, no problem. We're not anticipating any problems, but we'll be ready," he said, mentioning that officers in riot gear would only be on standby.

RELATED: 2 Facebook events pages: https://www.facebook.com/events/216626302102655/ https://www.facebook.com/events/199905460417644/



Two Facebook events have circulated on the social media network, with more than 1,400 people responding that they would attend the 6 p.m. event. One of the pages repeatedly stresses that the event will be "peaceful," in opposition to Trump's victory.

Although protests across the U.S.  from New York to Los Angeles  have been mostly peaceful, some have turned violent. In Portland, protesters vandalized cars, smashed store windows and knocked out power.

Portland Police tweeted that some in the crowd were anarchists, determined to cause destruction.

Many in crowd trying to get anarchist groups to stop destroying property, anarchists refusing. Others encouraged to leave area.  Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 11, 2016

They later tweeted that they made 26 arrests during Thursday night's riot.

Theres always a few in every crowd who want to make a statement, and were more than ready to put those people in jail if they destroy any property or cause anybody any harm or threaten anyone, Mina said.
Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Nov. 11

By Demir Azizov  Trend:

Uzbekistan will export one million tons of fruits and vegetables by late 2016, Ulugbek Rozukulov, Uzbek deputy prime minister, said at the first International Fruit and Vegetable Fair in Tashkent.

"Uzbekistan exported around 700,000 tons of agricultural products in 10 months of 2016 and this figure will reach one million tons by late 2016," Rozukulov added.

In total, the export of fruits and vegetables from Uzbekistan will increase by 1.4 times in 2016.

He added that the supplies to Russia and neighboring countries increased by three times, to South Korea by five times, to the UAE by 1.8 times, and to Germany by 1.6 times.

Rozukulov said that agricultural products have been recently exported to such countries as Norway, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Cyprus, Macedonia, and the US.

Around 16 million tons of fruits and vegetables are produced in Uzbekistan annually.
PLAINVILLE  Nearly 40 veterans and their families enjoyed a hot breakfast at Plainville High School Friday morning along with a special diploma presentation.



Thank you for coming today and for serving, said Superintendent of Schools Maureen Brummett.



George David Musshorn accepted an honorary diploma on behalf of his uncle Elmer, who left Plainville High School at 17 to join the Navy during the Korean War.



Like his uncle Elmer, who was not able to attend, Musshorn also served in the Navy.



The four-year Vietnam War veteran accepted the diploma and thanked the community for honoring veterans.



He said the diploma represented all the veterans that left school to join the service.



My father also, in WWII, at 17 joined the Navy, Musshorn said.



The high schools culinary arts department prepared a hot breakfast for veterans of all ages and military branches. Family members, some of them students, joined the veterans as well as staff and administration.



Principal Roberto Medic recognized two teachers who are veterans and explained the importance of the day.



Veterans Day was Armistice Day, (in honor of) World War I, he said. Over time in American history the day has changed to celebrate veterans of all the wars, all service, and all the branches.



The high school had a display case of photos in honor of Veterans Day. Classes also decorated doors with American flags and thank you messages to veterans.



Its good for students, said Stephanie Aresco, a social studies teacher. Were so lucky to have the freedoms we have.



The other schools in the district also honored veterans Friday with assemblies, flag ceremonies, and special class lessons.



On behalf of our school community, Medic said. Id like to thank all our veterans for your service, sacrifice, and commitment to our country.






State lawmakers are expressing guarded optimism and some concern over what a Donald Trump presidency could mean for the state and the country.



Hillary Clinton won Connecticut with 53 percent of the vote to Trumps 41 percent, in addition to winning the popular vote nationwide. But in central Connecticut, Trump won five out of seven towns, and the nations electoral victory.



I thought Trump would help us in some areas of the state where we needed help, said state Sen. Joseph Markley, R-Southington. He didnt run as well as we hoped in Meriden.



Clinton won Meriden with 57 percent of the vote. She also won Cheshire with 49.1 percent of the vote over Trumps 46 percent. But Trump won narrowly in Wallingford and with wider margins in Plainville, North Haven, Berlin and Southington.



Markley supported Trump despite his not having fully developed principles, he said. His policy plans for the federal government and the states remain unknown, but Trumps message of distrust of Washington resonates with everybody, Markley said.



I have my fingers crossed, Markley said. I rather have what Im not sure of, than what I know I dont want.



Markley is also pleased Trump will be making Supreme Court nominations, to end what he feels is judicial activism.



Trumps stunning win was the result of assuming the turnout for Clinton would be similar to the turnout for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and underestimating the turnout for Trump, said state Rep. Mary Mushinsky D-Wallingford.



Mushinsky said it is hard to say what Trump will or wont do because he has changed his positions so often.



In a meeting with water quality advocates Thursday, Mushinsky said many expressed concern about Trump attempting to dismantle environmental regulations to protect clean water and against climate change. Trump denied the science behind climate change and has pledged to eliminate some environmental regulations.



We depend on quite a bit of federal funding, Mushinsky said about protecting clean water. We have funding in place, but we dont know whats going to happen in 2017. Climate change is of great concern to me. What type of world (will) our kids live in? There is great apprehension among the environmental community.



Mushinsky is also concerned for the Latino population in Wallingford, including the prospect that stricter deportation policies will split up families.



We have to see if his policies match his rhetoric, she said.



State Sen. Leonard Fasano, R-North Haven, said that while he did not endorse Trump, he voted for him and is optimistic about the possibility of former New York Mayor Rudy Guliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich serving in Trumps cabinet.



Thats a step in the right direction, Fasano said. Whats important is that I think political correctness has led to prohibited conversations that put the taboo on words and ideas to solve the problems.



Guy Beeman, Meriden Republican town chairman, said he didnt agree with Trumps words or actions, but didnt trust Clinton.



What he said or how he acts is less important than her being investigated for all these things, Beeman said. She has so many issues against her now. Its pretty scary. He was the more positive candidate.



Beeman also liked Trumps track record of running a business and making things happen.



Meriden City Manager Guy Scaife would not comment on the outcome of the election except to say there could be some changes to municipal budgets and programs of which city leaders need to be cognizant.



Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr. said regardless of who won the election, municipalities will have to cut back spending unless there are significant changes in the state and national economies.



There was very little talk about the economy during the campaign, Dickinson said. Without improvement that puts a pall over available money and where we are going.



mgodin@record-journal.com (203) 317-2255 Twitter: @Cconnbiz






Anti-Trump demonstrators spilled onto the streets of downtown Oakland on Thursday night, meeting resistance from police who sought to prevent protesters from stopping freeway traffic and vandalizing downtown businesses as theyd done the night before.

Large crowds from a peaceful rally at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza that ended around 8 p.m. tried to make their way down Broadway, where on Wednesday some lit street fires, smashed windows and sprayed graffiti.

Officers in riot gear stood firm across sections of Broadway, trying to limit the crowds access to the citys central strip of businesses. Splinter groups made their way along other downtown streets and managed to emerge on parts of Broadway where minor vandalism was reported.

Many demonstrators headed north up Telegraph Avenue, where several attempted to get on Interstate 580 around 10 p.m. to block cars. But long lines of police appeared to succeed in keeping traffic mostly flowing. At least two demonstrators who cut through a fence and ran onto the freeway, causing a brief hangup, were arrested.

By 11 p.m., the bulk of the protestors had returned to Frank H. Ogawa Plaza where they resumed chants against Trump and the Oakland Police Department. They numbered a few hundred, down from about 1,000 who attended the initial rally.

Several incidents of graffiti, much of promoting violence and offering such plugs as Kill Trump, were reported. Many small street fires were set and a handful of windows were smashed. The crimes, though, did not initially appear to be as widespread as the night before.

At least a half dozen arrests were made.

Police staffing was increased on both sides of the bay after frustration with Tuesdays election outcome prompted thousands to take to the streets in both Oakland and San Francisco on Wednesday.

Before the Oakland rally near City Hall ended and the crowd of about 1,000 spread out, speakers shared their concerns about what they saw as Donald Trumps racism and sexism as well as the broader issue of police brutality while supporters looked on.

I thought about what people around the world must think about what weve done, said Berkeley resident James George, referring to Trumps election. I think if they see protests, theyll know that not all Americans think that way.

While the real estate mogul and reality star soundly defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, many in the Bay Area and across the country remained concerned about the Republicans agenda, notably his campaign pledges to keep out immigrants, do away with the Affordable Care Act and appoint conservative judges to the courts.

The different branches of government are all going to be controlled by the right, said El Sobrante resident Christopher Ray, 31, who also gathered at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. That is scary for passing any sort of liberal legislation.

In San Francisco, where protests on Wednesday similarly drew thousands of people but remained more peaceful, a small rally began at 6 p.m. at the Embarcadero. About 50 protesters marched on the sidewalk along Market Street to Fourth Street, and back again, chanting such slogans as Not my president and Putin and Trump, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

Its sad we have someone so hateful for president, said Jessie Sharp of San Francisco. Ive had a terrible few days. Im not sleeping. Its just been awful.

Many demonstrations, from high school walkouts to student protests at San Francisco City Hall, took place Thursday morning and continued into the afternoon. Traffic backups were reported at various points, following police advisories Wednesday evening for commuters to avoid downtown areas.

Emilia Mckiley, a senior at Mission High School who had been marching in the streets near the school since 9 a.m., said she and others would be out until they were too tired to walk.

People are going to go home and come back, she said.

Police from across the Bay Area have been brought in to assist local agencies during the rallies, especially in Oakland.

The department has increased our staffing and aligned resources to facilitate a peaceful march, said Oakland Police Department spokesman Joe Wolfcale earlier Thursday. We are committed to upholding the constitutional right to free speech and peaceful assembly, while enforcing all laws against violent acts, vandalism, trespassing or other criminal activity.

Oakland officials pleaded with demonstrators to remain peaceful Thursday after the previous nights violence. Three police officers were injured in skirmishes with protesters and a student journalist from UC Berkeley said he was attacked by four masked men as he tried to photograph the looting and vandalism. He was taken to an emergency room with a fractured cheekbone and abrasions.

Thirty people were arrested for the suspected crimes of vandalism, assault on an officer, failure to disperse, unlawful assembly and possession of a firearm, according to police.

In a letter to Oakland business owners, Mayor Libby Schaaf apologized, explaining why it seems our police department cannot stop the anarchists who invade peaceful demonstrations.

When (police) step in to stop an act of vandalism while it is happening, they become the new focal point for the crowds which can lead to an escalation of violence, not a decrease in the vandalism, Schaaf said in the letter.

On Thursday afternoon, residents and business owners, who were still cleaning up after Wednesdays events, were preparing for more destruction Thursday. Many glass doors and windows on storefronts were covered with plywood.

Sameer Arahimi, who owns the franchise for the MetroPCS store at Broadway and Ninth Street not far from Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, remembered the unruly protests two years ago that sprung from the Black Lives Matter movement and feared similar destruction.

I hope that nothing goes wrong, he said, referring to Thursday nights planned activities. Its possible that protesters are mad and they take it out on every business they see.

In recent years, the MetroPCS store has installed security cameras and a metal retractable fence at the entrance to prevent looters from breaking in.

Were just a family-owned operation trying to make a living, Arahimi said.

Chronicle staff writers Evan Sernoffsky and Sarah Ravani contributed to this report.
Luxury car makers and truck manufacturers pulled out all the stops to lure buyers at this years San Antonio Auto & Truck Show, complete with a 30,000 square footRam Truck Territory obstacle course

Maserati rolled out an extensive collection of its newest vehicles, including the luxury auto manufacturers two-door convertible, four-door sedan and Levante SUV.
This article was first published on NerdWallet.com.

Ask Brianna is a Q&A column for 20-somethings or anyone else starting out. Im here to help you manage your money, find a job and pay off student loans  all the real-world stuff no one taught us how to do in college. Send your questions about postgrad life to askbrianna@nerdwallet.com.

This weeks question:

I have way more student loan debt than I can handle, and its all I can think about. Are there options for canceling my debt?

Not knowing how to deal with your debt is painful  and understandable. But theres hope.

You might already know that loan forgiveness is available to public-sector workers and to those who choose an income-driven repayment plan. You may not know that you can get your loans canceled if your school closed while you were enrolled, it committed fraud, or youre totally and permanently disabled.

We focus here on federal student loan forgiveness programs because private student loans generally have less flexible repayment options. Your best bet is to contact your lender directly if youre having trouble making your payments. Also, except in the case of Public Service Loan Forgiveness and in some specific circumstances, you may be taxed on the amount forgiven.

Explore the options below, and check out studentaid.ed.gov for more details.

Closed school discharge

If your college shutters while youre enrolled or within 120 days after you leave a program without getting a degree, you can receive a closed school loan discharge, meaning the loans you took out to attend that school will be canceled. Recent closures of for-profit colleges including Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute and Marinello Schools of Beauty have put this option into the spotlight, says Debbie Cochrane, vice president of the Institute for College Access & Success.

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced automatic loan discharges for borrowers who were enrolled in a school that closed on or after Nov. 1, 2013, and who didnt re-enroll elsewhere within three years. If your school closed before that period, you can apply for a discharge through your loan servicer. But youre not eligible if you transferred your credits to a comparable program, Cochrane says, so make sure you meet the specific requirements before applying.

Borrower defense to repayment

A growing area of loan cancellation is called borrower defense to repayment, a provision of federal law that allows students to seek debt relief because their school committed fraud or misrepresented itself.

On Oct. 28, the U.S. Department of Education released final regulations to streamline the process for submitting a borrower defense to repayment claim. Additionally, the department now has the ability to discharge groups of borrowers loans without an application when theres evidence of a schools sweeping misrepresentation.

If you think your school might have defrauded you, submit a claim to fsaoperations@ed.gov along with the required accompanying documentation, available at studentaid.ed.gov. Online applications are also available for certain former students, says Jennifer Wang, director of the Washington, D.C., office of the Institute for College Access & Success. You can work with a lawyer or a nonprofit legal assistance organization to submit your claim.

Total and permanent disability discharge

You can also have your remaining debt canceled if you have a total and permanent physical or mental disability and youre unable to be gainfully employed. You must show documentation from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration or a doctor.

Its something that not that many people apply for, even if they qualify, says Jay S. Fleischman, a student loan lawyer.

After the government discharges your loans, it will monitor your finances and disability for three years. If you take out new student loans, earn more than a certain amount of money or no longer meet the Social Security Administrations disability guidelines, you must resume your loan payments.

Income-driven repayment plans

Income-driven repayment is available to all federal student loan borrowers. It will slash your federal loan payments to a percentage of your earnings, and if you have no income, youll pay $0 and still keep your loans in good standing. Youll also get your remaining balance forgiven after 20 or 25 years of payments, but it will be taxed as income. Apply for the program on studentloans.gov.

Job-based forgiveness programs

Public-sector workers can get federal loan forgiveness after 10 years of eligible employment. The main program, known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, is available to full-time nonprofit and government workers with federal direct loans. The amount forgiven wont be taxed.

Brianna McGurran is a staff writer at NerdWallet, a personal finance website. Email: bmcgurran@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @briannamcscribe.

This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by The Associated Press.

The article Ask Brianna: How Can I Get My Student Debt Canceled? originally appeared on NerdWallet.
Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Nov. 11

By Demir Azizov Trend:

The European Union (EU) and Uzbekistan held their 13th Subcommittee meeting on Justice, Home Affairs, Human Rights and related issues November 8-9 in Brussels, the European External Action Service (EEAS) said in a message posted on its website.

The Delegation of Uzbekistan was headed by Nodir Juraev, the countrys deputy minister of justice. The EU Delegation was headed by Toivo Klaar, head of the EEAS Central Asia Division.

The meeting was held in a constructive and open manner, with discussions between the parties covering a wide range of issues, including on further advancing cooperation between Uzbekistan and the EU, according to the EEAS, the EU diplomatic service.

The EU welcomed that a fully-fledged OSCE Election Observation Mission had been invited to monitor the December 4 presidential election in Uzbekistan, reads the message.

Persistent problems with freedom of expression and religion, the penitentiary system, womens rights and vulnerable populations were discussed in detail, including individual cases, the message said.

The EU recognized significant efforts made by Uzbekistan to modernize relevant legislation, for example the upcoming reform of the judiciary system, the draft anti-corruption law and measures to improve the business climate. Economic and social rights were also discussed in this context.

On October 21, the Legislative (lower) Chamber of the Uzbek parliament adopted the draft law On Combating Corruption submitted by acting President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev as a legislative initiative.

In late October, Mirziyoyev also signed a decree on the introduction of a number of changes to the criminal law, criminal procedure, civil procedure and other kinds of Uzbek legislation aimed at improving the efficiency of the administration of justice.

Uzbekistan mentioned progress on rooting out child and forced labor in the cotton harvest and ratification of International Labor Organization (ILO) Conventions at the meeting, according to the EEAS.

Both sides emphasized the importance of continued monitoring and, more generally, cooperation with international and regional organizations, such as the UN, the ILO or the OSCE.

The talks between the delegations of Uzbekistan and the EU focused on issues such as violent extremism and radicalization, the fight against terrorism, illicit drugs, migration and border management.

Cooperation and dialogue programs such as BOMCA (Border Management Program in Central Asia) and CADAP (Central Asia Drug Action Program), as well as the European Rule of Law Initiative for Central Asia provide important support to these policy fields, the message said.
Rafe Swan/Getty Image

Three Pittsburg students were arrested Thursday during a class-walkout protest, one of several Bay Area high school demonstrations against President-elect Donald Trump.

The students, who were not named, were taken into custody after a group of about 200 from Pittsburg High School and Black Diamond High School detached from a larger crowd of protesters and marched onto the campus of Antioch High School about 10 a.m., police said.
San Jose Police Department / / San Jose Police Department /

A man was arrested early Thursday on suspicion of breaching security at Mineta San Jose International Airport after crew members found him on a restricted airfield, officials said.

Jerry Hyde, a 38-year-old transient, was arrested on suspicion of entering restricted areas at the airport.
The day after the presidential election, Esra Altuns friends offered to walk her to her car inside a San Jose State University parking garage, but the 19-year-old Muslim student said she would be fine by herself.

As Altun approached her car that afternoon, a man came up behind her in the third-floor of the garage and pulled her by her head scarf, or hijab, causing it to tighten around her neck and choke her, she said.

Altun said she has dealt with stares and slurs for her faith, but never physical violence until now. She said on Thursday that the election of Donald Trump as president could have played a role by emboldening her attacker.

For me, its kind of a weird coincidence this occurred right after Trump gets to be president-elect, Altun said. Im worried not only for the Muslim community but the Latino community, the black community, the LGBT community. Im actually terrified.

Trump, elected the 45th president of the United States on Tuesday, said during his campaign that Muslims should be barred from entering the United States and called for a database to track American Muslims.

Altuns friends always offer to walk her to her car, but she was alone inside the universitys west parking structure at Fourth and East San Salvador streets around 1:20 p.m. Wednesday when the man grabbed her by her head scarf, she said.

The cloth was tied around her neck so when the assailant pulled her, she began to choke. She reflexively arched her back as he pulled her down, trying to break free and hurting her back in the process, she said.

He finally let go, and she fell knee first to the ground, she said. Altun says she was not seriously injured, but was shaken up as she then drove to her 10-year-old sisters school.

When I picked my sister up, thats when I started completely breaking down, she said. I was scared, I was terrified, I was disgusted.

Altun said she didnt see her attackers face, but noted the skin on his hand was white. He never said anything to her, and quickly ran away afterward, she said.

The school issued a statement Thursday condemning the attack.

We are, of course, very concerned that this has occurred on our campus, university spokeswoman Pat Harris said in the statement. No one should experience this kind of behavior at San Jose State.

Harris said the incident could be labeled a hate crime, but police apparently dont have enough evidence to back up the suspicion.

No arrest has been made. The campus police department referred all questions about the incident to university officials.

Another Muslim student was assaulted on the same day as Altun in an incident officials say will be investigated as a hate crime. The woman, wearing a hijab, was robbed at San Diego State University Wednesday afternoon by two men who made comments about Trump and the Muslim community, according to a campus alert.

California Attorney General and U.S. Sen.-elect Kamala Harris released a bulletin Thursday asking law enforcement to be vigilant against hate crimes, although the statement did not mention the election.

San Jose States Muslim Student Association is planning to meet with administration officials and the local Council on Islamic Relations to ensure student safety, said Doaa Abdelrahman, president of the association.

Racism always occurred, said Abdelrahman, a 22-year-old student. The fact that now Trump is president, its just another thing were going to have to worry about...his supporters are going to follow up by action.

Altun says police told her it was not necessarily a hate crime because the assailant didnt say anything, but she feels it was motivated by the election results.

If her attacker ever is apprehended, though, Altun said she wants to have a conversation with him about why she wears her hijab and the struggles that come with practicing her faith.

The whole ordeal came as a shock to Altun, who said the fact that it happened on such a diverse and accepting campus is the most disturbing thing.

As a young Muslim American woman, she said, she cant help but feel uneasy about the current climate in the country.

This is my home, she said. For my rights and my safety to be at stake its terrifying.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJourno
Rafe Swan/Getty Image

Police identified the man stabbed to death in the Polk Gulch neighborhood early Wednesday and arrested the stabbing suspect, officials said.

Bruce Sawyer, a 55-year-old San Francisco resident, was found on the 2000 block of Polk Street near Russian Hill, shortly before 4 a.m., with multiple stab wounds. Sawyer succumbed to his injuries shortly after being transported to San Francisco General Hospital.
Two women and their 19-year-old son were found slain early Friday after officers responded to reports of gunfire at an East Oakland home that was partially on fire, officials and neighbors said.

Police said they and the FBI were investigating the incident as a triple homicide and detained a San Jose woman for questioning about her possible involvement.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Kimberly Veklerov / The Chronicle / Kimberly Veklerov / The Chronicle Show More Show Less 3 of 3





At 12:21 a.m., police received a call about multiple gunshots on the 9400 block of Dunbar Drive, between 92nd and 98th avenues in the Elmhurst neighborhood, said Officer Johnna Watson, a spokeswoman for the Oakland Police Department. The caller told a dispatcher that a person was down in the street.

When officers arrived they found a man lying in front of the residence suffering from apparent stab wounds, police said. Officers later went into the house and found two women suffering from gunshot wounds, officials said.

All three victims died at the scene.

Oakland police Lt. Dom Arotzarena said the garage of the single-family home was on fire when officers arrived. He said the investigation was in its preliminary stages and did not release further information.

Firefighters responded to the fire shortly after officers got there and had it under control half an hour later, a fire dispatcher said. The cause of the blaze has not been determined.

FBI agents were processing the scene Friday for forensics and other evidence, officials said.

The house where the slaying occurred is in a newly developed residential neighborhood next to a shipping-container yard.

Nate Savage, 17, who lives a block away, said the victims were Benny Wright  one of his close friends  and Wrights adoptive mothers  Patricia Wright, 57, and Charlotte Silby, 55.

Benny Wright lived with Savage for most of his senior year at Berkeley High School when his parents temporarily kicked him out, Savage said.

He said he heard of the slayings from Benny Wrights brother, who attends Mississippi State University and was on his way back to the Bay Area on Friday.

Its not cool, an emotional Savage said. I dont even know what happened.

Ericka Matthews and her 21-year-old son, Erick, were startled when they heard about the triple slaying from a news report, and even more stunned when they realized the house where it happened was only two blocks away from where they live.

Its unnerving, Ericka Matthews said. Three people and the FBI, its not your typical murder case.

Matthews and her son had both slept through the gunshots and didnt hear any sirens, they said. Neither of them knew the people who were killed.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
The life story of Al Capone is unrivaled in Chicago history, and perhaps American history.

How did an ill-educated bouncer from Brooklyn become not just a powerful crime boss  many such crime bosses have come and gone  but one who fascinates us generation after generation?

Deirdre Bairs new book, Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend, is the latest volume to attempt to answer this question.

Bair, who won a National Book Award for her 1981 biography of Samuel Beckett, is a brilliant and engaging writer, able to construct compelling and nuanced life stories in gripping prose.

Her latest book distinguishes itself from its competitors due to her access to descendants of Capones large family.

Their memories and family stories are being added for the first time to the Capone narrative. Bair sets out to answer some of the fundamental contradictions Capone poses.

She begins: This is a story of a ruthless killer, a scofflaw, a keeper of brothels and bordellos, a tax cheat and perpetrator of frauds, a convicted felon, and a mindless, blubbering invalid. This is also the story of a loving son, husband, and father who described himself as a businessman whose job was to serve the people what they wanted. Al Capone was all of these.

Indeed he was. A few more complexities might be offered up front: Capone was a self-serving mythmaker, one whose willingness to talk to reporters (until they turned against him) helped fuel what might be called a bootleg version of history.

Relatively few stories about Capones public or private life can be entirely verified, and so writers from his day to ours have had to grapple with myriad sources, to weigh them one against another, and to proceed with caution.

More Information Capone By Deirdre Bair Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $30 See More Collapse

The addition of Capones family stories to the mix has tremendous potential to deepen our understanding of the man as an individual human being.

But it inevitably runs the risk of adding another unverifiable ingredient to the already bubbling caldron of legend.

Not just more myths, either, but myths from people who can fairly be considered as biased toward a primarily positive understanding of Capone, as his foes (and victims) would be toward a wholly negative one.

Bairs subtitle  Life, Legacy, and Legend  suggests that she will attempt to untangle the biography, address what Capone left behind and investigate the mythology surrounding the man.

In the end, however, Bairs book does not live up to this promise. Her focus on Capones family life, marginalizing details of his criminal endeavors, is unbalanced. She pays scant attention to Capones legacy, the ongoing history of organized crime since he helped create the Chicago Outfit. Finally, a single concluding chapter covers the legend, the presence of Capone in popular culture and memory, more a gesture than an actual examination.

Al Capone still awaits the biographer who can fully untangle, and balance, the complexities of his life.
Author Mary McAuliffe begins When Paris Sizzled by explaining that the U.S. Roaring Twenties coincided with Paris les Annees folles, or the Crazy Years.

After World War I, Paris especially was poised to live it up.

But what emerges from McAuliffes book is how a substantial amount of the energy and money for les Annees folles flowed from people who came to Paris that decade from other countries, especially the United States.

The Americans included novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, bookseller Sylvia Beach, author Gertrude Stein, songwriter Cole Porter, showgirl Josephine Baker, composers Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, dancer Isadora Duncan and photographer Man Ray. Wealthy couples, including Gerald and Sara Murphy, arrived ready to throw extravagant parties.

Others from outside France were Soviet composer Igor Stravinsky, Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, Polish scientist Marie Curie and Irish novelist James Joyce.

The French certainly played their roles, too, in the cultural mayhem. They included novelist Marcel Proust, painters Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, government leader Georges Clemenceau, fashion designer Coco Chanel, numerous composers, including Erik Satie, Gabriel Faure and Maurice Ravel, carmakers Andre-Gustave Citroen and Louis Renault, military leader Charles de Gaulle plus filmmaker Jean Renoir, the painters son.

They and others intermingled in Paris to change France and the rest of the world during the 1920s, moving civilization culturally, scientifically, economically and politically forward.

More Information When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends By Mary McAuliffe Rowman & Littlefield, $29.95 See More Collapse

McAuliffes book basically brings all these great names from many fields together by organizing chapters by year, spanning 1918 to 1929, and revealing what the characters were doing.

McAuliffe pays special attention to the Left Bank quarter of Paris known as Montparnasse, where bars became the watering holes for the rich and soon-to-be-famous.

The effect is a portrait of a time and place like no other decade.

The U.S. economic crash in 1929 and the resulting Depression helped end the party, but les Annees folles unfolded with such brightness, creativity and energy that the period basically burned itself out.

McAuliffes book at times reads like the revelations one might find in gossipy newspaper society columns, especially with all the marital cheating and divorces.

Stravinsky, for example, was a wild party animal, while Joyce lived a sumptuous life while begging poverty and constantly borrowing from the publisher of his Ulysses novel.

But McAuliffe helpfully provides historical and cultural contexts not likely to have been widely understood as events unfolded during the decade.

Baker fled her native United States, for example, because of its racism, only to find widespread appreciation among the French for her risque banana skirt dance routines. Ironically, Baker still encountered the same racism in Paris from nearly all of the Americans who were there.

People can still travel to Paris, but they cannot visit les Annees folles unless they read McAuliffes absorbing, well-researched book.

dhendricks@express-news.net
An episode of "What Would You Do?" that aired last summer has resurfaced this Veterans Day, because people haven't forgotten the heartwarming actions of San Antonians that were broadcast nationally.

The show, hosted by San Antonio native John Quinones, was taped last spring at a La Fiesta on Pecan Valley Drive. When it aired last July, Military City, U.S.A. did not disappoint.
There are few things we agree with Austin folks about, but we wholeheartedly endorse the Austin Chronicle when it declared Express-News food writer and restaurant critic Mike Sutter "Best Referee in the Taco War."

RELATED: 10 things to know about the Texas Taco War between Austin and San Antonio

In its 2016 Best of Austin issue, the alternative weekly paper deputized Sutter with these words:

"As the former Austin American-Statesman food critic, Sutter handled the beat with style and depth before parting ways and concentrating on his likable blog Fed Man Walking. He's now at the San Antonio Express-News where, on National Taco Day, he diagrammed Austin-born Torchy's: reasons it both sucks and doesn't. If there is to be a Taco War truce, his deft prose will lead the cease-fire."

RELATED: 10 reasons Torchy's Tacos doesn't suck as bad as you think (and 5 reasons it does)

A permanent cease-fire may be too much to ask. Maybe a temporary armistice in one of last year's most incendiary interstate rivalries.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 10

By Farhad Daneshvar, Dalga Khatinoglu  Trend:

Irans Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company plans to increase its annual output to 21 million tons over the current Iranian calendar year (started March 21, 2016), a company official told Trend.

Rasul Ashrafzadeh, director of planning and development at Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company, says the company has produced 18.5 million tons of petrochemical products so far.

According to the official, the company is capable of producing 24 million tons of petrochemical products per year which has not been realized due to some obstacles, including lack of petrochemical feeds.

Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company is among the largest petrochemical producers in Iran and its production volume is estimated to exceed 40 percent of the countrys petrochemical output.

Ashrafzadeh added that the company is in talks with four large international companies for developing its projects.

Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh earlier announced that the country needs to lure $52 billion in investment to develop its petrochemical sector.

While the current capacity of Iranian petrochemical industry stands at 60 million tons per year, the country plans to increase its annual output to 180 million tons by 2025.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Courtesy of Jill Moore Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Courtesy of Jill Moore Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Delaney Moore is only 9 years old, but her stuffed cranberry pork chops could wind up winning $30,000 from Uncle Ben's rice toward a cafeteria makeover for Stone Oak Elementary School.

Delaney is one of 25 finalists in the "Ben's Beginners" recipe contest for her "Cran Fan" pork chops, which are stuffed with a zesty cranberry barbecue sauce and, of course, Uncle Ben's rice. (Get the recipe here)
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

SAN ANTONIO  When at home, handling food with bare hands seems innocent, but for licensed food establishments the practice is generally considered unsanitary by health code standards.

For example, practices spotted at the Culebra Super Meat Market at 1662 Encino Rio, in the Stone Oak area, are against health code. The market was cited during a random inspection when an employee was seen mixing donut glaze with their bare hands and dish soap was being used for hand washing.

The meat market, as well as 46 other San Antonio establishments, earned enough demerits to make this weeks dirty list, but Culebra wasn't the only spot in trouble for unsanitary employee hands.

To make the Express-News' list of dirtiest restaurants, an establishment must earn a score of 89 or below  or anything less than an "A"  during a random city inspection.

Saltgrass Steak House at 16910 US 281 N. received demerits when an employee handled dirty equipment and then proceed to touch clean dishware without washing their hands, and Texas Brisket at 2456 Harry Wurzbach was cited when an inspector saw an employee get sauce on themselves and then wipe their bare hands on the inside of the mixing bowl.

In other reports this week, inspectors noted vast amount of mold in a cold-hold unit, fresh droppings along walls and ice cream scoops sitting in murky water.

Notable names this week include Market Square's Fruteria Cano at 102 Produce Row, Koi Kawa Japanese Restaurant on Broadway, Southtown's La Focaccia Italian Grill at 800 S. Alamo St. and Augie's Barbed Wire Grill at 3709 N. St Mary's St.

Get all the highlights from this week's dirtiest restaurant list in the slideshow above.

RELATED: San Antonio restaurant inspections: The worst reports from last week

The San Antonio Express-News examines hundreds of restaurant inspections each week conducted by the San Antonio Food and Environmental Health Services division to bring you the eateries with scores of 89 or below.

Restaurants are graded on a 100-point system, where "100" is a perfect score, and demerits are based upon the number of violations found during a regular food establishment inspection. There are three categories of demerits and each are assigned a demerit score of 3, 2 or 1 points, according to the health division.

Scores and demerits listed are only representative of the state of the restaurant at the time of inspection and are surveyed at random.

rsalinas@mysa.com

Twitter: @RebeccaLSalinas
BRIDGEPORT  A proposal to issue identity cards to residents who are in the country illegally has hit some snags, even as Donald Trump brings his anti-immigrant positions to the White House.

Its still moving along, Mayor Joe Ganim said in an interview last week about the municipal ID initiative. There are some issues.

Already offered in New Haven, Hartford and out-of-state urban centers like New York City and San Francisco, the cards are intended to help immigrants without legal status in various ways, from dealing with local police to opening bank accounts.

Its valuable for people that want to make sure they can do many, many things in the city they wouldnt be able to because they dont have an identification with their name, said Julio Lopez Varona, of Bridgeport. He is state director for the Make the Road CT, an immigrant advocacy nonprofit.

Connecticut began issuing special drivers licenses to residents without immigration documents in December 2014. But Varona said some people do not want a drivers license, and the municipal IDs can be quicker to obtain.

Varona estimated there are 20,000 non-U.S. citizens illegally residing in Bridgeport, and the majority of those are from Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras. He said the cards, which do not specify whether a holder is a U.S. citizen or not, can also benefit the homeless and the elderly.

Former Mayor Bill Finchs administration in May 2015 pledged to move ahead with an ID program.

Ganim was elected mayor a year ago and he and his staff had said they were committed to issuing the cards. They settled on charging $15 per card and moved forward with hiring a firm to draft a model card for final approval and production.

But Ganim this week said there are deliberations among members of his staff about ensuring the IDs cannot be used to register to vote.

Av Harris, the mayors spokesman and senior adviser for public policy, clarified the situation. Prior to joining Ganims administration Harris was spokesman for Connecticuts top elections official, the Secretary of the State.

Were ready to roll these out very soon, Harris said.

But, he said, the administration is considering redesigning the cards to specifically state they cannot be used for voter registration purposes. Harris said because of existing registration requirements it would be a rare way to try and commit voter fraud, but could happen.

Harris said another challenge has been finding banks that will agree to accept the municipal ID cards for holders to open an account.

Varona struggled to understand why the city is grappling with the voting fraud issue, arguing there are plenty examples of best-practices in Connecticut and nationwide for Bridgeport to follow.

But, Varona added, The bank issue is a real one. Not all banks are going to allow this type of ID to be used.

Tuesdays election of Donald Trump as president would seem to add another potential challenge. Trump has been both praised and vilified for his campaign positions and statements on undocumented immigrants, from accusing Mexico of sending rapists across the boarder, to pledging to deport all illegal immigrants, to proposing a ban on allowing Muslims to enter the United States.

Trump has also threatened if elected to withhold federal funds from cities that aid undocumented immigrants.

Harris insisted Trumps rhetoric is not a consideration as Bridgeport evaluates issuing municipal IDs. He also questioned the legality of the president-elects threat regarding federal aid.

We have to be concerned with acting in the best interests of our community, and undocumented immigrants are definitely part of the fabric of the Bridgeport community, Harris said. He added: Conflict between municipal, state and federal governments is nothing new in America.

City Clerk Lydia Martinez helped lobby Finch to issue municipal ID cards when she was a member of the Bridgeport City Council. Martinez worried that some non-citizens will now be afraid to apply for the cards given Trumps victory.

I feel so bad for people, Martinez said. They dont know the difference between the federal government and us.

Varona said issuing the cards could actually allay some anxiety among Bridgeports immigrants.

People are really scared right now, he said. And being able to have an ID and a bank account is something that would be very exciting for them.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

BRIDGEPORT  There were plumes of smoke pouring from a lot in the citys South End Friday morning, with a decidedly cinnamon and barbecue smell to it.

Ethan Aiken and his son, Delroy, their clothes streaked in soot and grease, were standing over several large grills, shifting dozens of chicken legs and racks of ribs over the open flames.

This is jerk food, Ethan Aiken explained in his Jamaican accent, as he pulled a leg from the grill with a long pair of metal tongs. We make jerk chicken, ribs and fish.

The father and son have been grilling food in the lot at the corner of Park Avenue and Johnson Street for the past six months for sale on food trucks in New York and around Connecticut. But Ethan Aiken said they eventually hope to open their own take-out restaurant on the site, and to call it Ethans Grill.

Unlike a lot of places that are only open in the summer, we want to have a place in the winter where people who want jerk food can put their coat on and come here and get good food, Ethan Aiken said.

He said he grew up in Jamaica learning how to cook from family. The recipe for his barbecue sauce is a family secret passed down among family members.

All our food is cooked over charcoal, its very important to have the fire just right, he said. There is a lot of smoke, but we are not smoking the food.

For more information on Ethans Grill, call 203 953-6528 or ethanaiken1@gmail.com
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

STAMFORD  Its no secret the city is home to one of the largest wealth and student achievement gaps in the nation.

While hundreds of Stamford students earn AP-scholar designations each year and many high school graduates go on to attend prestigious colleges, including Ivy League schools, others dont have the same experience  often because of an income disparity.

About 12 percent of Stamford children under 18 live in poverty, and more than half of public school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, district data show. Such challenges make it harder for children to be as successful as many of their classmates.

Local educators say there has been steady progress, thanks largely to the dozens of programs, organizations and partnerships already offering support and mentoring to city children and families. But the question many have asked is how effective these resources can be when they are not aligned with each other.

Jeff Edmondson, managing director of StriveTogether, said cities that are program-rich like Stamford often spray and pray.

The most vulnerable kids need to have access to the resources they need right at their fingertips, he told a crowd of educators and community leaders at the University of Connecticut in Stamford this week. It cannot be random that they stumble upon those resources. It is our responsibility to make sure that they are right there, that they can just reach out and grab them.

His speech Thursday morning was part of the official launch of a new collective impact initiative created to align community programs and resources to ensure children are getting the assistance they need from cradle to career.

The effort, Stamford Cradle to Career, uses the nationally recognized StriveTogether framework, which connects more than 10,000 organizations across 32 states. Under the United Ways direction, the initiative aims to ensure children are born healthy and start school ready to read and that youth successfully transition from school to college and careers.

Kim Morgan, CEO of United Way of Western Connecticut, said a childs education can have consequences in the entire society.

Childrens brains grow and develop exponentially and lost years means more risk to the child, to our school system and ultimately to a productive work force, she said. We cannot expect great things from our children if we do not empower, educate and support their families.

When a child arrives at a school having experienced trauma, poverty or not speaking the language, it is our responsibility to provide the resources that will help them achieve their potential, Morgan added.

The first tasks of the multiyear, multiphase program included identifying the best practices already in place and align those resources so the school district and about 60 community organizations, companies and other partners are on the same page.

The first phase culminated with a 34-page baseline community report released this week.

The report found that among students entering kindergarten in the city, about one-quarter need substantial support to be ready academically, about 17 percent need substantial support to be ready socially and nearly half need some or substantial support to be prepared physically.

The partnership will also tackle prenatal care, childhood nutrition, pre-kindergarten education, transition among school levels and transition to college and careers.

We have here in Stamford very, very talented young people who score the highest levels on the standardized tests, who take all sorts of AP exams  more AP exams than most private schools have, Superintendent of Schools Earl Kim said. But theres another Stamford  students who dont come to us with the resources and opportunities that others have.

Recent testing data shows a greater number of higher-income students perform at or above proficiency than lower-income students across grades in English and math assessments.

Our challenge as a community is not to lower the standards but to give equal access and opportunities true opportunities  to all those young people who arent as resourced as others, Kim said. Thats what takes a village.

Similar initiatives are taking place or being launched in Bridgeport, Norwalk and Waterbury.

United Way has reserved more than $600,000 to invest in the effort over the next 10 years and it anticipates more than $1 million being pledged over the next five years from a variety of sources.

The executive director of the Stamford partnership is former Assistant Superintendent of Schools Mara Siladi, who has also worked with Educational Management Solutions and the state Office of Early Childhood.

noliveira@hearstmediact.com, 203-964-2265, @olivnelson
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

GREENWICH  About 100 students, teachers, parents and community members gathered on the front lawn of Riverside School to remember and honor the nations veterans on Friday morning.

It was brisk and sunny, with orange and yellow leaves falling from the trees in the slight breeze. Children sang softly in the wind, and parents and grandparents watched a flag raised from half staff to full and a wreath laid beside it.

Veterans Day is my favorite holiday of the year, because it gives us a chance to celebrate those who put on a uniform and protect our country, said State Sen. Scott Franz to the crowd.

Christopher Weiss, principal at Riverside School who was serving as the Master of Ceremonies for the event, read off the list of alumni who died serving the country in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. A childrens choir added their voices to the ceremony; four students played Taps.

Chuck Standard, a local Riverside resident and recipient of the Navy Cross, was a guest of honor. State Rep. Fred Camillo was also in attendance.

Schools Superintendent Sal Corda explained the importance of the day to the children gathered behind him.

It is hard many times to think about why you are doing this, Corda said, as much to the parents in front of him as to the choir full of children behind him.

You have a family, and they are very important to you, Corda said. If someone threatens that, or there is a possibility that someone threatens that, the question is asked: who will protect us? Who will go?

pfrissell@hearstmediact.com; @PeregrineFriss
Its no secret that finding right financing is essential to the health of your small business. Theres plenty of capital available -- lenders are sitting on a record amount of cash -- but do the terms make sense for you? If youre not in love with the business financing deals youve been offered, taking care of your business credit health should be first and foremost on your mind.

Lets look at four fundamental principles that will help you both establish a business credit report and raise your business credit score.

1. Separate your business and personal finances.

Ideally, business owners will want to incorporate their business. However, even sole proprietors should get an employer identification number (EIN) and register their business with state and/or local agencies, and obtain proper business licenses.

Always consult with a tax advisor before changing your business legal structure. Small business owners should also get a business bank account and credit card, rather than a personal one. Once youve established a business line of credit, try to avoid dipping into your personal finances to subsidize your business. Keep the two separate so you dont have to put your personal credit on the line every time youre applying for a business loan.

2. Establish business credit accounts.

Establishing a business credit history requires accounts that report payment history to commercial credit agencies like Dun & Bradstreet and Experian. As a small business owner, obtaining a business credit card is an easy first step, since the decision is often based on the owners personal credit and finances.

According to a Manta and Nav survey, more than two-thirds of small business owners dont have a dedicated business credit line, so thats a good place to start. In addition, its important to do business with lenders and/or vendors that report.

3. Maintain a good payment history.

Payment history is the most heavily weighted factor in the majority of commercial credit scoring models, so aim to pay all your bills on time. To earn the highest D&B Paydex score, businesses must consistently pay early. For instance, if you have 30 days to pay, and can pay it earlier, do so.

Some lenders may also evaluate income and cash flow (from bank checking accounts, credit card receipts, etc.), maintaining a strong cash flow can provide you additional funding options, though that factor does not directly affect your business credit scores.

4.Know your scores, and check them often.

Youll never be penalized for checking your own personal or business credit scores. Besides providing you with a composite picture of where you stand in terms of credit, these scores can point to any discrepancies that might be hurting your credit profile. For instance, if you notice a sudden and inexplicable drop in your business credit score from one month to the next, this might be due to a reporting error that you can correct.

Related:

4 Steps to Establishing a Good Business Credit Score

Equity Crowdfunding's First Report Card

How Silicon Valley is Changing the Fintech Space



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Anybody who has been either end of a bad feedback session knows only too well that the delivery of unwelcome and unwanted feedback seldom ends well. It can be infuriating when you want to provide much wanted feedback and the person who desperately needs it turns a deaf ear to you. Especially so when youve asked if they want some feedback, they consent, and then they refuse to listen. Over the years, I have been ambushed enough times by people pretending to have my best interest at heart, only to use my consent as a pretext to hurl insults and venom at me.

Related: 17 Ways to Tell if Your Colleague Hates You

The best way to avoid bad feedback sessions is to mind ones own business. But sometimes, emotions (or a couple of drinks) get the better of us, and we find ourselves providing feedback that turns out to be intrusive meddling. We start acting like a felt-up prom-date and indignantly tell the stars above that we were only trying to help, wondering plaintively, "Is this is the thanks I get?" In truth, we can avoid our poor-mans death scene from Camille by asking ourselves some basic questions before leaping into a bad feedback session.

Do I have the right to provide feedback?

I am so often asked who I am that I literally had business cards up that say, Phil La Duke, Obnoxious Stranger. Among the services offered on the card are boring stories, unwelcome advances, unsolicited advice, and over-stayed welcomes. In addition to being a nice icebreaker, its incredibly accurate. The pertinent offering here today is unsolicited advice. Before we have a right to provide feedback, we need to have some standing, such as an employer-employee relationship, a familial tie, a friendship, etc. Otherwise, we are little more than obnoxious know-it-alls who poke our noses into the business of others. So while I might think that the stretch pants worn by the woman in the checkout line in front of me looks like someone trying to squeeze cottage cheese through a plastic bag, as much as I may think she is in desperate need of a fashion intervention, without standing I must keep my opinion to myself.

Am I offering feedback to help the person?

It may bug the heck out of me that Milo talks too much in meetings, but how will my telling him that he needs to shut up in meetings help him be successful? It doesnt.

Related: 9 Ways to Manage Underperforming Employees

Moreover, it makes me look like a self-important bully, someone who likes to point out other peoples faults while under the misguided impression he is perfect. Just getting things off my chest may make me feel better, but it's not helpful to others. People lose respect for me, and when the time comes that I really do need to provide constructive feedback, its likely to be dismissed as more venting.

Does the person respect my opinion?

I used to work for a guy who looked like he dressed in the dark and slept in dumpsters. I honestly expected to find pizza crusts in his lapels. Nonetheless, he would razz me about my choice of colors and styles. I would slowly look him up and down and say, "fashion tips mean so much coming from you. I respected him as a businessman but a fashionista he was not. Okay, I didnt really respect him as a businessman, but Im trying to be nice.

Have I been hypercritical to the person in the past?

If every time I'm offered feedback I get an earful of what's wrong with Phil, Im less likely to answer yes the next time you offer your sage feedback. There is only so much criticism a person is willing to tolerate and in the case of me, its not much.

Will the person change behavior based on the feedback?

Sometimes we just cant resist trying to teach the old dog new tricks, but if we are providing feedback to someone we know most probably wont change, its can be more like trying to teach an old dog a new card trick. Years ago I read an article about a failed government funded program where a scientist tried to teach a pig to sing. The scientist was baffled why no one was able to teach a pig to sing. It seems that a pig is intelligent enough to learn just about anything (except neurosurgery, but my bet is a half-intelligent pig could be taught to drive better than most), and pigs can make a variety of noises that could be used to approximate notes. After years of frustration the scientist conclude his task was pointless. I kept the headline which was a direct quote from the scientist: Never try to teach a pig to sing -- you won't succeed and you will only aggravate the pig."

Related: 3 Ways Owning Your Mistakes Will Make You Powerful

In too many cases, we arent really providing feedback, were merely trying to teach a pig to sing.

Related:

Before Offering Feedback Consider If You're Trying to Teach a Pig to Sing

7 Tips for Improving the Quality of Your Feedback

5 Ways You Can Stop Stunting Your Company's Growth



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Emil Ilgar  Trend:

Frances Total has willingness to work in Iran-Iraq joint North Azadegan oil field, while BP and Royal Dutch Shell are negotiating with Iran to develop independent oil fields in southern regions of the country, the Managing Director of National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) for Engineering and Development Affairs Gholam-Reza Manouchehri told Fars Nov. 11.

He said Iran is also in talks with Chinese companies on North Azadegan and Yadavaran fields, both are joint with Iraq.

Manouchehri also said that BP and Shell are keen to develop several independent fields, but the talks have not been finalized.

He didnt name any fields, but Fars reported citing anonymous oil officials that BP wants to work in one of four fields, namely Kananj, Parsi, Rag Sefid or Shayegan.

All of them are in operation area of state-run National Iranian South Oil Company, which produces 3 million barrels per day, or 82 percent of Irans total crude oil output currently.

IRNA also quoted Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh Nov. 11 as saying that the country would announce a tender on Azadegan, and Total is to compete with other foreign companies to win the project.

Total, Shell and BP resumed crude oil purchase in spot from Iran after removal of nuclear sanctions in January 2016.

Last week, Total, Chinese CNPC and Irans Petropars signed a heads of agreement to develop Phase 11 of South Pars gas field to produce 56 million cubic meters of gas per day.
NORWALK  Faith leaders from Norwalk and two nearby cities will gather at Grace Baptist Church Monday afternoon to call upon state leaders to develop a fair education funding formula.

The group, consisting of leaders from Norwalk, Bridgeport and Milford, will meet at 3 p.m. to urge all newly elected and re-elected Connecticut General Assembly members to adopt a fair, equitable, and predictable education funding formula by the end of the 2017 session.

The call to action follows an open letter sent and signed by more than 100 clergy leaders from across the state late last month urging immediate action to develop a fair education funding formula as called for in Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawshers recent CCJEF v. Rell ruling.

For too many years, we have seen too many students in our communities struggle in schools that are not meeting their learning needs, where they are not being prepared to succeed after they graduate and  in many cases  where a culture of low expectations persists, the letter reads. We know that change and a better education are not only possible, but necessary for our children to be successful and for our communities and the churches we lead to thrive. But achieving this goal  a great education for every child  requires choices to be made.

On Sept. 7 Moukawsher made his ruling in the case that gave the state six months to change what has been dubbed an irrational school funding formula into a rational one.

The decision was appealed by state Attorney General George Jepsen and was subsequently taken up by the state Supreme Court.

The clergy leaders said that process could jeopardize or further delay action to fix the long-standing problems.

We all recognize that the problems in our education system didnt happen overnight. This is not about assigning blame, the letter read. At the same time, we recognize that this court case has taken over a decade to get to a decision and we know that our children cannot wait another decade for someone else to decide they deserve great schools.

Richard Clarke, of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Norwalk; Carl McCluster, of Shiloh Baptist Church in Bridgeport; Lenore Jordan, of The New Place of Worship in Norwalk, Lindsay Curtis, of Grace Baptist Church in Milford; Deborah Fludd, of New Light Missionary Baptist Church in Norwalk and Henry G. Floyd Sr., of New Jerusalem Baptist Church in Norwalk will be in attendance Monday.

KSchultz@thehour.com; 203-354-1049; @kevinedschultz
This December the iconic barn doors of the Carriage Barn Arts Center in Waveny Park, home of New Canaan Society for the Arts, will be adorned with one-of-a-kind wreaths created by artists, designers and other creative members of the community. Deck The Walls!, a new holiday event and fundraiser, will showcase the creative community of New Canaan and the Carriage Barn Arts Center while raising money for education arts programming at the Carriage Barn.

Artists, individuals and creative professionals can find details and register to donate a wreath at www.CarriageBarn.org through Nov. 18. Wreaths can be any size and made from any materials. The creative wreaths will be showcased at the Carriage Barns Cocoa In The Courtyard family event and ornament decorating party on Dec. 4 from 2 to 4 p.m., and at a Deck The Walls cocktail and wreath raffle party on Dec. 7 from 6 to 8 p.m.

This new Carriage Barn Arts Center initiative is being launched with sponsorship support from Bankwell and April Kaynor Homes / William Raveis. Funds raised from Deck The Walls! will help bring speakers, hands-on art workshops and other educational programs to the Carriage Barn Arts Center in 2017.

Elf Jr. opens at Saxe

The annual Saxe Middle School fifth- and sixth-grade production this year will be Elf The Musical Jr. Performance dates are Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. and Nov. 19 at 2 p.m. Both performances will take place at the New Canaan High School auditorium.

Based on the beloved holiday film, this hilarious fish-out-of-water comedy follows Buddy the Elf in his quest to find his true identity. It features songs by Tony Award-nominees, Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin, with a book by Tony Award-winners, Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin.

Buddy, a young orphan, mistakenly crawls into Santas bag of gifts and is transported to the North Pole. The would-be elf is raised, unaware that he is actually a human, until his enormous size and poor toy-making abilities cause him to face the truth. With Santas permission, Buddy embarks on a journey to New York City to find his birth father and discover his true identity. Faced with the harsh reality that his father is on the naughty list and that his half-brother doesnt even believe in Santa, Buddy is determined to win over his new family and help New York remember the true meaning of Christmas.

Under the direction and choreography of Lauren Nicole Sherwood, along with Joe Gergle, the musical director, and Matt Blank, the stage manager and assistant manager, audiences will be transported to the North Pole and New York City and reminded of the true meaning and spirit of the holiday season.

More than 100 students have dedicated three afternoons per week to practice their singing and dance routines. Students also volunteered as stage crew and have been working tirelessly to transform the high school auditorium and stage.

Tickets may be purchased online at https://sites.google.com/site/saxeelfjr2016/home or in person one hour prior to each performance.

Bow hunting update

Fairfield County has become a top destination for bow hunters this season. Across the state, bow hunters have killed 2,464 deer this season. Thats nearly 300 more than a year ago.

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection updates its deer harvesting list each week. Between Sept 15 and Oct. 31, hunters nabbed 26 deer in New Canaan.

To see the complete statewide totals: http://www.ct.gov/deep/lib/deep/hunting_trapping/pdf_files/ReportedHarvest.pdf.

Looking forward

New Canaan Career Transition Support Group presents "How to Succeed at Jobs that Don't Exist Yet" on Nov. 17.

Eighty-five percent of the jobs that today's learners and workers will be doing have not been invented yet. And most Americans will have eight to 10 jobs by the time they are 38, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From 7 to 9 p.m., learn about identifying and connecting with target companies and how to leverage inside contacts. For more information contact: Leonaura Rhodes by email doc@project-jobsearch.com.

A brewer shares his story

Scott Vallely, resident and owner of the Charter Oak Brewing Company, will speak to the New Canaan Mens Club at 10 a.m. Nov. 18 in Morrill Hall at St. Mark's Church. He will talk on the history of beer, particularly the burgeoning trade of craft beer, the challenges in that industry and the challenge of doing business in Connecticut.

Valley has lived in new Canaan for nearly 32 years with his wife, Michelle. All of their six children attended the public schools in town.

Valley spent over 30 years of his career as an operating executive in the paper, distribution, and ecommerce industries. After selling his last enterprise, Paper.com LLC, Valley decided to exit the paper market. He founded Charter Oak Brewing Company, a microbrewery that focuses on the creation of brews, development of markets and selling the beer. He brews four handcrafted brands, as well as limited releases that are more complex, robust and have a higher alcohol content.

The New Canaan Men's Club has openings for new members 55 and over. Anyone interested is invited to be a guest at the meeting. For more information, contact Kevin Faughnan at 203-966-5702 or SMCNC.org.

At Lapham

Registration for winter programs at Lapham Community Center will be starting soon and will continue until all classes are filled. Registration for most classes can be accomplished in person, by mail, by phone or online at at laphamcenter.org. All are free and open to the public; reservations are requested at 203-594-3620.

Medicare help: Medicare counselors are now helping recipients review their prescription drug plans, known as Medicare Part D. The annual Open Enrollment period, which runs until Dec. 7, is the only time Part D plans can be changed. Prescription drug companies often take this opportunity to make changes to their rules, formularies and pricing. The only way for Medicare recipients to know that the plan that was best for them in 2016 will also be the best one in 2017 is to use the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Finder located at Medicare.gov.

Call to schedule a free one-hour meeting.
The Conroe City Council joined Montgomery County commissioners in opposing a proposed 230-kilovolt transmission line across Lake Conroe.

The council approved a resolution Thursday urging Entergy Texas to select another northern route for the construction of the transmission line.

Commissioners Court approved a similar resolution last month against the line being built across the lake.

Entergy's project is pending approval of the Public Utility Commission of Texas. The line will come from the Shiro area to the Lewis Creek Substation near Willis.

The three dozen proposals are expected to be submitted by the end of the year or in the first quarter of 2017, with an anticipated approval early next year by the PUCT, according to officials with Entergy.

"One of them does go squarely over Lake Conroe in the FM 1097 corridor," City Attorney Marc Winberrys said. "There is another conceivable route that would run along the east shore of Lake Conroe and turn south and follow the (Texas) 105 corridor toward the Montgomery area and up to Shiro."

Shiro is in Grimes County, northwest of Richards.

Winberry said the resolution approved by the council opposes both those routes.

"We are glad you brought this resolution forward," Mayor Pro Tem Duke Coon said. "I know we are following the county on this, but we all realize what a precious commodity and asset Lake Conroe is to our county and our city."

Once approved, construction could begin late 2017 and be completed by 2018 or early 2019, according to Allen East, director of Customer Service for Entergy Texas West.

Independent of the new power plant, Entergy is seeking land to construct multiple substations within the next three to five years along the Interstate 45 corridor to keep up with the community's current and future need as growth moves north out of Houston and Conroe. At least four scattered locations are being considered between Willis and Huntsville and west of Interstate 45.
Washington

As they struggled through the wreckage of one of their worst election nights in memory, Democrats faced a brutal reckoning over how the party, soon to be out of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, can regain relevance.

Democrats went into Tuesday's balloting presuming that they would win the presidency for a third time in a row, gain a majority in the U.S. Senate and, if everything went well, cut into Republicans' congressional margins, too.

Nothing went well.

Not only did Hillary Clinton suffer defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, but a tide of conservative voters swamped Democrats at other levels, as well.

Sooner rather than later, given unified Republican control of Washington, the damage will include President Barack Obama's signature achievements, like the health care plan Trump and congressional Republicans have vowed to repeal.

"That's got to be a huge wake-up call for the inside-the-Beltway Democratic establishment. They fundamentally failed," said Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin, who worked for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign this year.

Democrats already seemed to be split over how to regroup. Some argued for a more aggressive effort to move the party to the left, hoping to drive up turnout among younger and minority voters. Others stressed a need to reach out to the disaffected working-class white voters who so conspicuously deserted the party this year.

The debate is made even more difficult because, however devastating Tuesday's defeat was, it was also agonizingly close. Clinton won the popular vote  the second time in 16 years that the Democratic candidate had gotten more votes than the Republican, but lost the electoral college. A switch in three states of only about 50,000 votes out of 120 million cast nationwide would have been enough to give her the victory.

The narrowness of her defeat made keeping to the same path and striking out in a completely different direction both appear equally plausible options.

In the meantime, however, Democrats were left searching for the basics: a message, messengers, and a structure to defend their goals, since the Democratic National Committee was a handmaiden to Clinton's defeat.

Essential, all sides say, is a compelling jobs pitch.

"There's no question that Democrats have to figure out an economic message that resonates with working families who are still devastated by the Great Recession," said Yvanna Cancela, political director for Culinary Union Local 226, which represents workers at Las Vegas casinos and hotels.

"And I think that message extends beyond the minimum wage and goes deep into income inequality and affordable healthcare," she said. "It has to be an economic message that really helps people imagine a better life for them and their families."

Veteran Democratic strategist Mark Mellman, who served as the pollster for John F. Kerry's unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004, said the party needed, as well, to find a way to talk with white voters.

"We have some people upset with the cultural direction of the country," Mellman said, "and to win, Democrats have to find a way to advance principles and causes that we believe in, while not angering those people in quite the same way."

After their sobering defeat in 2012, Republicans wrote a postelection report detailing how to succeed in 2016. Trump ignored it, and won anyway. Now, it's the Democrats' turn as they seek to figure out what could have kept voters who sided with Obama in 2008 and 2012 from abandoning them this year.

"As a party we have a lot of listening to do," said Cancela. "And a lot of discussions to have with voters."

According to a Huffington Post story Thursday, Donna Brazile, the interim leader of the Democratic National Committee, was delivering a speech to roughly 150 DNC staffers when a participant interrupted to question her credibility. "Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this? You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself," said the staffer who, according to two sources in the room, was named Zach. Others began booing the man, who continued even after Brazile attempted to rebut. "You are part of the problem," he proclaimed.
Los Angeles

A day after Donald Trump's election to the presidency, campaign divisions appeared to widen as many thousands of demonstrators  some with signs with messages declaring "NOT MY PRESIDENT"  flooded streets across the country to protest his surprise triumph.

From New England to heartland cities like Kansas City and along the West Coast, demonstrators bore flags and effigies of the president-elect, disrupting traffic and declaring that they refused to accept Trump's victory.

Flames lit up the night sky in California cities Wednesday as thousands of protesters burned a giant papier-mache Trump head in Los Angeles and started fires in Oakland intersections.

Los Angeles demonstrators also beat a Trump pinata and sprayed the Los Angeles Times building and news vans with anti-Trump profanity. One protester outside LA City Hall read a sign that simply said "this is very bad."

Late in the evening several hundred people blocked one of the city's busiest freeways, U.S. 101 between downtown and Hollywood.

City News Service reported that 13 people were arrested as officers in full riot gear walked the protesters off the freeway.

By 1:30 a.m., the freeway was clear of demonstrators but lanes remained closed for cleanup.

In Oakland, several thousand people gathered in Frank Ogawa Palaza, police said, clogging intersections and freeway on-ramps.

In Chicago, where thousands had recently poured into the streets to celebrate the Chicago Cubs' first World Series victory in over a century, several thousand people marched through the Loop. They gathered outside Trump Tower, chanting "Not my president!"

Chicago resident Michael Burke said he believes the president-elect will "divide the country and stir up hatred." He added there was a constitutional duty not to accept that outcome.

Police said that an estimated 1,800 to 2,000 people participated in the Chicago protests. Police reported five arrests, including two for obstructing traffic, but said there were no major incidents.

A similar protest in Manhattan drew about 1,000 people. Outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in midtown, police installed barricades to keep the demonstrators at bay.

Hundreds of protesters gathered near Philadelphia's City Hall despite chilly, wet weather. Participants  who included both supporters of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who lost to Clinton in the primary  expressed anger at both Republicans and Democrats over the election's outcome.

In Boston, thousands of anti-Trump protesters streamed through downtown, chanting "Trump's a racist."
Tehran, Iran, November 11

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

Iranian Ports and Shipping Organization officials during a visit to Baku discussed prospects of bilateral cooperation with their Azerbaijani counterparts.

The Iranian delegation was led by Managing Director of Ports and Maritime Organization, Jabar Jalilian, while the Azerbaijani side was represented by Rauf Valiyev, the chairman of Azerbaijan Caspian Shipping Company, IRNA news agency reported November 11.

The sides discussed cooperation in maritime transport, repair of ships, dredging, agency services, education, etc.

Iran and Azerbaijan are Caspian Sea littoral countries.

This year presidents Hassan Rouhani and Ilham Aliyev exchanged visits, where they signed several MoUs on boosting bilateral ties.
A Willis woman is one step closer to trial for allegedly stabbing her ex-girlfriend over clothes the woman said were stolen.

A Montgomery County grand jury indicted Amanda Willis, 31, on first-degree felony charges Tuesday for her involvement in the June incident.

The argument started three weeks prior to the stabbing when Willis broke up with the woman and reportedly took her clothes to a man's apartment in Spring, court records show. The ex-girlfriend went to the apartment two weeks later to get her clothes back when Willis wasn't there.

Days later on June 23, Willis was visiting a friend in the 11500 block of Persimmon Street near Willis when she spotted her ex-girlfriend and said, "That's the (expletive) who stole my clothes," court records show. She went to confront the ex-girlfriend and allegedly pulled out a knife and stabbed her.

A judge signed a warrant for Willis' arrest Aug. 8, and she was finally caught Sept. 26, jail records show. She is being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $50,000 bond.

Court records show Willis spent time in the Montgomery County Jail in 2012 for attempting to tamper with a governmental record. She also spent 100 days in the Montgomery County Jail in 2014 for possessing a controlled substance.

Court records show she was on parole for illegally possessing a gun at the time of the alleged stabbing. She will be back in Judge Kathleen Hamilton's 359th state District Court Dec. 6 for an information hearing.

Montgomery County grand jury indictments for Nov. 8 and 10:

David Scardino, possession with intent to deliver/manufacture controlled substance and possession of controlled substance

Garry Boden Jr., assault family strangulation

Jeffrey Mosmeyer, theft

Jose Luna II, possession with intent to deliver/manufacture controlled substance

Abigail Delgado, possession with intent to deliver/manufacture controlled substance

Jared Keeting, unauthorized use of motor vehicle

Phoebe Wilson, possession of controlled substance

Freddy Villanueva, online solicitation of a minor

David Dean, online solicitation of a minor

Kyle Smith, online solicitation of a minor

Herman Kinder V, promotion of child pornography (two counts)

Andreas Henschke, possession of child pornography (five counts)

Daniel White, tampering with physical evidence and possession of child pornography

Kevin Canada, possession of controlled substance

Santiago Beltran, possession with intent to deliver/manufacture controlled substance

Andrew Peters, escape

Megan Gorman, possession of controlled substance

David Locy, unauthorized use of motor vehicle

Jesus Orellan-Paguada, terroristic threat

William Goddard, possession of controlled substance

Patti Mackay, possession of controlled substance

Craig Hatchett, tampering with physical evidence

Reuben Meddress, theft of firearm

Kirk Griswold, evading arrest detention with vehicle

Dallas Caceres-Torres, possession of controlled substance

Timothy Peters, tampering with physical evidence and possession of controlled substance

Dale Goggans, possession of controlled substance

Lawrence Deshetler, theft

Oaige Landers, theft

Billy Golden, burglary of building

Michele Chandler, possession with intent to deliver/manufacture controlled substance

Philippe Delflache, DWI  third or more
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

The Presidio Heights stretch of Sacramento Street has long been a prime destination for antiques and decor hunting. Not surprisingly, this is where Maja Lithander Smith decided to open her own store, after years in the business of interior design. Found By Maja, an atmospheric abode with a gallery floor, seemingly keeps up with the interior design angle but stands out, thanks to the emphasis on global inspiration and a strong nod to fashion. Seated in armchairs upholstered in Uzbekistani ikat silk-velvet and surrounded by sequined Balinese rice bags, Palestinian blown-glass vases and Cambodian silk beads, Smith talked about travels, befriending artisans and long dusty van rides to uncover hidden gems.

Q: How do you curate the varied objects in the store?

A: I source things in the U.S. as well as all over the world, but they have to have a story  it has to be something original, something I havent seen before. I do not want to compete with anyone else on Sacramento Street. On the technical side, I look for sources that are able to do wholesale, and there must be some Internet access.

Q: Is connectivity a common issue when working with remote locations?

A: Almost never, but, for example, my Moroccan basket weaver isnt very good at communicating with me. A lovely women I met in Marrakesh sends her driver to pick the baskets up and then ships them to me.

Q: How is having a store different from being an interior designer and doing trunk shows?

A: Trunk shows helped me gauge the market better. I had a store in Newport Beach (Orange County) for eight years ages ago, so Im very comfortable in a space I can welcome people into, a little jewel box filled with objects. Its been in my brain and my blood for a long time, and its very exciting that people can come by anytime now, as opposed to meeting once a few months at a trunk show.

Q: How do you locate the best authentic finds in places like India and South America?

A: The most important thing is relationships. I love knowing the person who makes or sources the item. My mother lives in Guatemala  and I go there quite often, so a friend of my mothers in Antigua employs the artisan who makes the cuffs Im displaying at the store. In India, I found this rug dealer. Ive gone to Jaipur and met with his weavers and know theres no child labor involved. We work together on custom designs and theres a lovely interplay. He helps me source textiles and prints, and goes out of his way to help me find the right people.

Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle

Q: What is the balance between decor items and fashion items in the store?

A: Right now Im stocking up on gifts for the holidays because I realized its important to have take-away gifts. Not everyone is out to buy a big rug every day. So right now, though home decor is my passion, Im 50-50 on decor and fashion accessories, like bags, jewelry and pashminas.

Q: How adventurous do you get while scouting and curating for the store?

A: All my sourcing trips are pretty far flung and therefore require lots of planes, trains and automobiles. I have been taken down dark alleys only to emerge into gorgeous courtyards, old crumbling mansions filled with cobwebs and treasures. The hunt is what makes it fun and challenging, but from the oldest piles and corners sometimes emerge the best finds. On a recent trip to Sri Lanka, I rode four hours in a van, driving over potholed roads to find an incredible silk factory.

Q: Whats your favorite globally inspired trend at the moment?

A: Tassels and pompoms  I love the statement they make. They transform the ordinary into something fun and whimsical.

Majas stylish picks for fall

Brass Klong candlesticks from Sweden ($140 small, $180 large) They are utterly refined  some of my favorite pieces in the store!

Ikat brass clutch ($100) These chic statement pieces are made in Malaysia. They make an outfit and are a perfect gift.

Moroccan suede tassel key chain ($68) Theyre massive, so youll never lose your keys again!

Andraab cashmere scarf ($350) The most divine cashmere, featherweight yet warm, in rich stripes and solids with amazing jewel tones.

Leather Lasso horsehair necklaces ($80): Incredibly cool and available in a multitude of colorways.

Found by Maja, 3484 Sacramento St., San Francisco, www.foundbymaja.com
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

On Feb. 3, 1945, life changed for Harriett Smith.

On Veterans Day Friday, the Panorama Village resident reflected on the circumstances that led to her knight in shining armor  a Texas-born soldier  sweeping her from confinement more than 71 years ago and bringing her back to the Lone Star State for a long-lasting, and loving marriage.

"Saturday morning at daylight, the air got awfully noisy," said Smith, describing the scene on that fateful day in 1945 at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Philippines  the internment camp set up by the Japanese to house American and British citizens for nearly three years during World War II.

U.S. Navy airplanes flew overhead. A message dropped from the sky.

"Whoever he was wrote a note, 'We'll see you in a little while,' and attached it to his goggles and dropped it straight into the camp," said Smith, who entered the camp as a 17-year-old American citizen born in the Philippines. "That is how we knew we were being liberated."

The Sunday Tribune Newspaper printed in Manila on July 12, 1942, captures images of the internees sunbathing, washing laundry and participating in other "peaceful" activities. The estimated 3,000-plus internees were free to roam around, but at 9 p.m. had to be within the building, according to Smith, who had 3 feet of bed space to sleep in a room with 15 people.

Smith stood at roll call "morning and night." Outside of being "locked up," these moments reminded her she was a prisoner of war.

"And when our stomach started to growl," she said, "we were only eating 400 calories a day. How I managed to live this long - I don't know."

The ground began to rumble at 5 p.m. Feb. 3, as American tanks rolled past the Japanese military.

"They (the Japanese military) were going to kill us the next morning," she said. "By dark, they (the Americans) went through the walls. They fought block for block to get to us."

The sound indicated freedom to the prisoners within the camp.

"I felt excited," Smith said. "It was crazy. It was just as much a surprise for us as for the soldiers (who were unaware there were American citizens in the camp)."

Once liberated, the soldiers took over UST and brought in their own kitchen crew. Smith, who supervised the vegetable line in camp, returned to the kitchen to look for the other girls who usually helped her serve breakfast.

That's when she met her future husband, Pvt. James C. Smith--the first GI she met.

"I looked up and I saw boy, girl, boy, girl, and he was standing alone," Smith said. "I asked, 'Haven't you found a girl yet?' He said, 'No, I haven't.'"

"Those were the first words I said and ended up with him," she said with a laugh.

The two instantly fell for each other, she said.

The "rugged and "unshaven" 6-foot-2-inch tall soldier from Big Spring, Texas, would visit the city with his friends in his "ridiculous" jeep with pet monkeys multiple times to see her. He even found her in her new home when she and her family left the university, bringing her food and chocolate candy.

"When he told me he was leaving, he put his arms up, corralled me in the middle (against a tree), and then he kissed me," Smith said. "That did it."

The two left Manila for the United States on separate ships. They docked side by side until they separated so hers could pick up the wounded military members in Hawaii. She still wore the same tired shoes she entered the camp in among the only items rolled in a bed sheet.

Then, the ship sailed to the U.S.

"We were going under the Golden Gate Bridge when all of the radios on the ship came on," Smith said. "The war had ended. That was touching."

The two reconnected in Big Spring, where she accepted his third proposal. They married one year and one day after the liberation, on March 3, 1946. The couple moved to Conroe in 1959 when James was transferred to the Exxon Mobil Plant. He was employed with the company for 43 years.

The two shared 63 years of marriage and fishing trips together, two daughters and three grandchildren before he died in 2007. She still remembers the chemistry in the air from the first time she saw her husband.

"I can't understand it to this day," she said. "It was like sparks in the air."

She remains grateful to her late husband and the soldiers.

"I am thankful," she said. "If we didn't have the army, if the younger generation didn't think to enlist, we would have been in trouble."

The two never returned to the country they met in.

"I brought back what I wanted from the Philippines," she smiled. "I don't need to go back. I already had him."
Tehran, Iran, November 11

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

Thirty-six Iranians have been arrested in Iraq for entering the country without a visa, said Hassan Qashqavi, deputy foreign minister for consular affairs, Tasnim news agency reported November 11.

He said the mentioned amount of people have been arrested in the past 48 hours.

So far 1.5 million visas have been issued for Iranians to visit Iraq during the religious ceremony of Arbaeen held in Karbala.

The official said it is predicted that the number of visas issued for Iranians will reach three million by the day of Arbaeen, November 20 (Shia Muslim religious observance that occurs forty days after the Day of Ashura).

Qashqavi added the Iranian embassy in Iraq is working to organize the release of mentioned 36 people.

Last year 2 million Iranians visited Iraq on Arbaeen, many of them without a visa.

But this year both Iran and Iraq have tightened security measures to prevent unauthorized travels.

On November 6, suicidal attacks in two Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Samarra claimed at least 39 lives, including some 10 Iranians.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Emil Ilgar  Trend:

Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that Tehran is committed to nuclear deal and it is better that all the sides (P5+1 Group) remain committed to it as well.

Zarif said during a press conference in Prague, Czech Republic on November 11 that Iran called all to remain committed to nuclear deal, but this doesnt mean that Iran has no any other choice, IRNA reported.

Iran and P5+1 Group, including the US, the UK, France, Russia, China and Germany reached a comprehensive nuclear deal, which was implemented in January 2016.

During his presidential campaigns, US president-elect Donald Trump said the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was a terrible and disastrous deal.

We give them $150 billion [Irans assets blocked abroad], we get nothing, he said.

Under the JCPOA, Iran accessed its assets blocked abroad.

Zarif also said the JCPOA is an international agreement, not a bilateral [between Iran and the US].

This is a deal, approved by the UN Security Council, though US hasnt committed to its all obligation yet, he said.

Earlier, Federica Mogherini, the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said the US cant cancel the deal.

Touching upon some financial restrictions, Iranian officials accuse Washington on evading its commitments on the nuclear deal.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

An Austin man allegedly continued to violate a restraining order when he attempted to corner Taylor Swift near her private jet after sending "alarming" emails to her father, according to local media reports.

An arrest warrant was filed on Thursday for the apprehension of 39-year-old Andrew Hoover, who allegedly followed Swift's motorcade from the Circuit of the Americas track where she performed on Oct. 22 to a private hangar at Austin Bergstrom International Airport.

According to an affidavit obtained by the Austin American-Statesman, Hoover told airport employees he wanted to get a picture with the pop star.

RELATED: Violent threats lead to charges of soliciting capital murder of unborn child in Comal County

Swift had previously filed a lifetime restraining order in Kansas that prevents Hoover from coming within 500 feet of her. During the latest run-in, Hoover drove to Swift's motorcade, allegedly coming within 50 feet of her, the Statesman reported.

Airport employees who spoke to Hoover said he was staring out the window at her plane. In addition to wanting a photo, he told them he wanted to "possibly accompany Taylor wherever she goes," KVUE reported.

From Aug. 28 through Oct. 27, Hoover violated the restraining order by sending Swift's father, Scott Swift, emails with content ranging from God to Satan and job opportunities, the Statesman reported.

RELATED: Ex-TV reporter gets prison for stalking, harassing San Antonio couple

In September, he told Swift's dad he had received a message from God.

"Without her, I walk the earth alone forever and she'll continue to experience failed relationships that break her heart," the email said according to the report.

The emails intensified after the Oct. 22 incident, when Hoover began sending emails  one with a picture of Swift with red captioning saying, "A whore named Satan dies," according to the Statesmen.

RELATED: Schertz man charged with stalking after slashing ex-wife's tires

Hoover was arrested for repeated violation of a protective order on Thursday. He remains in custody at the Travis County Jail on a $100,000 bond as of this write according to online records.

mmendoza@mysa.com

Twitter: @MaddySkye
A Rio Grande Valley businessman has been arrested on allegations he laundered money stolen in a foreign country, part of a case with San Antonio connections.

Luis Carlos Castillo Cervantes was arrested Tuesday and had his initial appearance Wednesday in a McAllen federal court on charges of money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to commit fraud. His lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Police are investigating a string of more than 50 car burglaries that occurred overnight in the Stone Oak area.

The massive string of break-ins occurred in the area of Wilderness Oaks and Prospect Hill  between Blanco and Hardy Oak  where an undetermined number of robbers broke into a series of vehicles parked in driveways, police said.
Bob Owen/San Antonio Express-News

SAN ANTONIO  The airport began experiencing some power surges overnight, according to a spokesperson, prompting possible delays for airlines coming in and out of the various terminals.

Airport spokeswoman Evelynn Bailey confirmed that the airport was experiencing some difficulties earlier this morning, with CPS Energy officials on site to assist in correcting the problems.
SAN ANTONIO  The Bexar County Sheriffs Office is looking for a 32-year-old man who allegedly offered $1,000 to a young girl for nude photos.

Patrick Edgell, the subject of a warrant for online solicitation of a minor under 14 years old, weighs about 180 pounds and is about 5 feet 9 inches tall. He has blond hair and blue eyes. He may be in the San Antonio, Houston or Baytown areas, Keith said.
SAN ANTONIO  A 32-year-old man was arrested Wednesday for allegedly being married to two different women across the state, according to court documents.

Ildefonso P. Juarez faces a third-degree felony charge of bigamy, which poses a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

It was a season of political whiplash.

One by one, Republican candidates for president disavowed now President-elect Donald Trump's rhetoric and policies throughout the primary. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is rumored to be considered for a position in the Trump Administration, according to Politico, repeatedly said the 70-year-old was unfit for the White House. Christie said Trump was not "suited" to be president, Politico reported.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz began his campaign in what many called a "bromance," with Trump, only to end it calling him a "sniveling coward," refusing to endorse the Republican nominee, and then doing an about-face and endorsing the reality star weeks before a tape where Trump described sexually assaulting women was released.

So what will happen to those who insulted Trump, only to endorse him weeks or months later or not at all?

RELATED: As Trump met with Obama, Hillary Clinton went for a hike in New York

Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on The Apprentice and avid Trump supporter, told the Independent Review Journal the president-elect was keeping a list of his enemies and those who insulted his run for the White House.

"It's so great our enemies are making themselves clear so that when we get into the White House, we know where we stand," Omarosa said.

During the primary, many Republicans, like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry were vocal in their denunciation of Trump. Perry, according to news archives, called Trump a "cancer on conservatism;" Graham said Trump would be the "most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican party," ABC News reported.

RELATED: Trump on Twitter taking on protesters: 'Very unfair!'

Graham did not vote for Trump, and instead cast his ballot for Independent candidate Evan McMullin, he said on Twitter.

"If (Graham) felt his interests was with that candidate, God bless him. I would never judge anybody for exercising their right to and the freedom to choose who they want. But let me just tell you, Mr. Trump has a long memory and we're keeping a list," Manigault told the Independent Review Journal.

The day after Trump was elected, Perry posted an Instagram saying he got a call to make America great again. He previously said at the Republican National Convention in July that he would be willing to serve in a Trump administration.

RELATED: Zuckerberg: That Facebook influenced election is 'crazy'

On Thursday, Trump visited the White House where he met with President Barack Obama, a man he called, BBC reported, the "worst president in the history of the United States," House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, both of which had to come around to supporting the reality television star.

Trump said Obama, the man whose citizenship, as the New York Times reported, he questioned for five years, was a "very good man" Thursday.

Trump said on Twitter Friday that in the coming days, he would be "making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government."

kbradshaw@express-news.net

Twitter: @kbrad5
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Emil Ilgar  Trend:

The Manhattan Attorney has announced charges against Turkish and Iranian nationals for conspiring to evade US sanctions against Iran as well as other offences.

They allegedly used the US banking system to conduct international financial transactions for Iranian entities, Department of Justices official website reported.

Habibollah Zarei, Bora Deniz, Nesteren Zarei Deniz and Abdullah Evren Erdem are accused of conducting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions on behalf of the government of Iran and other Iranian entities using the US financial system, which was barred by United States sanctions.

They are also accused of laundering funds in connection with those illegal transactions and defrauding several financial institutions by concealing the true nature of these transactions.

The four defendants are alleged to have orchestrated fraudulent transactions that were intended to hide the fact that the transactions were for the benefit of Iranian entities and to have laundered funds in connection with that illegal activity, said the Department of Justice.

All four defendants currently remain at large.

The charges on Turkish and Iranian citizens come as the Manhattan Attorney also announced Nov. 7 that the files of four other Iranian and Turkish citizens  charged of evading the sanctions  were submitted to a court.

According to a report, superseding indictment alleges that four defendants  Mohammad Zarrab, Reza Zarrab, Camelia Jamshidy and Hossein Najafzadeh  allegedly used the US banking system to conduct international financial transactions for an Iranian airline put under sanctions for supporting terrorist groups.

The superseding indictment further alleges that they participated in financial transactions for the benefit of Mahan Air, an Iranian airline sanctioned for providing services for the Iranian Qods Force and Hizbullah.

Reza Zarrab was arrested on March 19, 2016, and is scheduled to stand trial on January 23, 2017.

Mohammad Zarrab, Jamshidy and Najafzadeh remain at large.
I write this on behalf of the despondents.

Those voters who were depressed about the election and shocked by Donald J. Trumps cocktail of racism, misogyny, sexism, xenophobia and anger. The ones shaken and troubled by his signals of authoritarianism in this country. Your anguish reflects deep patriotism. Your concern is love for America and respect for the tenets of freedom, tolerance, plurality and openness.

Make America great again. That is quite a rhetorical turn from the City on a Hill, much less a thousand points of light or compassionate conservatism or hope and change. All were messages of American optimism, exceptionalism and dignity. They were statements about looking forward, not backward.

Make America great ... again. Clearly, many voters believe we have lost our greatness. But what does it mean to make our country great again if you are despondent about this election outcome? What does it mean if you are fearful of where this election goes? If you are troubled by the anger in the air?

First, it means accepting the outcome  Trump is our president  and honoring the democracy we live in. It means honoring the votes of others and taking the time to understand their perspectives and concerns. It means hoping that Trump and Congress bring more jobs and prosperity to those who feel left behind.

If this were a normal election, we would end the conversation there. In democracy, you win some and you lose some, and we move forward together to new debates and policies.

But this was not a normal election. A darkness emerged this election in ways I never imagined. It existed before Trump, but he emboldened it with his vulgarities, bullying and intolerance. His campaign tapped into this darkness, normalized and nurtured it, and gave it life. Before we go on, let me be clear: Many of Trumps supporters (I believe the majority) are neither racist nor uncivil. I hear from you in emails and phone calls, and I hear your love of this country, too. Some of you are my neighbors. Please, continue to write and call me, especially when you disagree. But your silence about this darkness is stunning.

Please, we all must be clear-eyed about what is out there: The racism and anti-Semitism raging on Twitter, the normalization of incivility, the burning of a black church in Mississippi with Vote Trump painted on the wall, the jubilation of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who called Trumps election one of the most exciting nights of my life.

A few anecdotes, mild compared to some recent and troubling news reports, that reflect how these fissures may become more pronounced:

Its Halloween and Im taking my daughter trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. We stop at a house with a prominent Trump sign. My daughter blows them a kiss. They blow kisses back. But as we are leaving, a Hispanic family walks by and sees the Trump sign. The kids become agitated and upset. They interpret the sign as an endorsement of intolerance of them. The kids start yelling about voting for Hillary Clinton. Its just Halloween, a festive time, and these are just children. The scene broke my heart.

Its the morning after the election, and my sister in California sends me a text message about an ugly scene from her sons school. A boy, who is white, starts yelling about how President Trump will get rid of all the Mexicans. A Mexican-American child is crying. An argument ensues. The teacher has to break it up and remind the kids that we are here together. These are just children. What have we done to ourselves?

One last anecdote. Its early summer, and this editorial board is meeting with a political consultant. He shares a story about a focus group he did after the Texas primary with 50 GOP voters. Now, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz won the primary with 44 percent of the vote, but Trump scored an impressive 27 percent. When the consultant asked the group for whom they voted, 49 said Cruz and one said John Kasich. Thats possible, but not likely. Some people werent owning their votes. Such quiet support has haunted me.

This is not the time to be silent. We need to get out of our bubbles and have conversations with each other. My door is always open.

We also need to acknowledge  and fight  the dark undercurrent of intolerance, hate and racism highlighted in this election. If you are despondent about this election outcome and concerned about what might come, quit thinking about moving to Canada. Stand tall for plurality, tolerance, acceptance, civility and openness. Those are pillars of our democracy and exceptionalism. They are the principles that make this country great. Dont let it slip away.

jbrodesky@express-news.net
The senior community where I live hosts a monthly Veterans Social. Discussions evolve mostly to regaling one another with tidbits of antiquity about battles during whichever war(s). I add next to nothing in such context. Reliving events 72 years ago simply is not my thing. But there is a far more powerful reason.

Some 71 years ago in Germany one night, in a well-known forest, 11 soldiers in my infantry platoon were killed while I, as the second lieutenant leader, was charged with keeping them alive. Foxholes provided scant protection from artillery and mortar tree bursts.

Yet eventually some good at a personal level came from that unforgettable night. My writing skill was born when I struggled to write the wives and parents of each of those 11 young men, trying to explain how come I let them die. It was of no consolation that my company commander also died that night or that I earned a Purple Heart.

Ive lived with those 11 soldiers and those letters in my head ever since.

Seven years after the letters, in Korea as a major, I was given an infantry battalion. The job called for a pay grade higher than mine. My hundreds of soldiers each mattered, as did the 40 or so in World War II, but it could not get quite so personal now. Twenty-one years after the letters, the secretary of defense made me chief of his public affairs office and occasional frontman at his speaking engagements. That entailed considerable writing. He gave me a medal to say thanks when I retired to become a professional writer.

There is nothing in all that to boast about at meetings. I did not win any battles or wars except within myself. Thats why I contribute little in groups of veterans. So why am I opening up now  this year and this month? Because I will turn 95, and I guess its OK to let the story out of my head  if it will let me.
On Nov. 11, 1918, almost 100 years ago today, the guns fell silent across Europe. The Great War, now known as World War I, had come to an end, and this was celebrated in America as Armistice Day. Sadly, more than 53,000 Americans died and another 200,000 were wounded in combat in Europe.

It was a brutal war that left many questions unanswered and took a significant toll on the nation. From that first Armistice Day was born our current Veterans Day, bringing attention to the sacrifices of our nations service members.

America has always given thanks to our veterans for their service and sacrifice, and Texas has felt honor-bound to do so as well. When Texas was a republic, it paid those who served in the Texian army with land grants. The widow of David Crockett claimed her grant after his death, and she is buried on the land she settled.

In carrying on the proud tradition of honoring our veterans, many of us will participate in parades and ceremonies over the weekend. Many of us will recall family members and loved ones who have served to protect our nation and defend our freedom.

There are 1.7 million veterans in Texas, and there is certainly no more honorable profession and no greater cause of valor than to be called a veteran. Texans have always answered the call to military service, going back to Gen. Sam Houstons proclamation in 1835 urging volunteers to aid in the independence of Texas.

Among our states most famous veterans are Adm. Chester Nimitz, who led the U.S. naval forces in the Pacific during World War II, and Audie Murphy, who became the most decorated American soldier during WWII at only 19 years old.

Texas veterans are served by a state agency, the Texas Veterans Commission, which advocates on their behalf and helps secure the benefits they earned in exchange for their service. Our veterans also have their own committee in the Texas Senate, which I have the high honor of chairing. As chairwoman of the Veteran Affairs and Military Installations Committee, it is my responsibility to ensure that our veterans and military families are recognized not just in words but also in deeds.

This past legislative session our committee passed 55 bills that were signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott. They addressed important issues for the veteran community, including improved access to mental health care, enhanced employment opportunities and the addition of workforce resources, strengthening the College Credit for Heroes program, and providing tax relief for veteran homeowners and veteran-owned businesses.

With the next legislative session just around the corner  beginning in January  it is time to focus on ways we can build on these successful programs, as well as protect the mission-readiness of our states 15 military installations. As the committee chair, I want to hear from all veterans about the issues that affect you the most. We are here to serve you, and veterans and their family members are encouraged to contact the committee office at veteran.affairs@senate.texas.gov.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a veteran of the Civil War, once said, We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top  in our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.

We have all been affected by the sacrifice and heroism of Americas service men and -women, and our hearts are touched to do what is right for our veterans 365 days a year.

Donna Campbell is an emergency room physician who represents Texas Senate District 25, which includes parts of Austin and San Antonio. She serves as the chair of the Veteran Affairs and Military Installations Committee in the Texas Senate.
Since 1983, Palo Alto College has transformed the landscape on the South Side of Bexar County by providing more options for higher education to an underserved community.

The origins of Palo Alto College date to a period when community members were seeking higher learning opportunities near where they worked and lived. Today, Palo Alto College continues to be a pillar of the South Side and remains committed to providing high quality education for the community.

In many ways, my childhood and family represent the same underserved community that Palo Alto College was meant to support. My father did not speak English for many years, but he took advantage of free night courses at the community college just two blocks from our home. When my sister and I were in elementary school, we took part in the federally funded swim programs in Palo Alto Colleges brand-new natatorium, the only public swimming facility south of Highway 90. As a middle school student, I participated in free summer Pre-Freshman Engineering Programs in collaboration with Palo Alto College and UTSA.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the internet and personal computer access were expensive luxuries for families like mine, I walked to Palo Alto College to research, access the web, and fill out college applications. Additionally, Palo Alto College offered dual credit courses at my high school, and with that, professors to guide my journey to college. I credit Palo Alto College with much of my personal and educational success, which allowed me to earn a bachelors and masters degree from Stanford University and come back to San Antonio to be a leader in my community.

This fall, I am proud to publicly acknowledge yet another mark of excellence for Palo Alto College as the institution received notification for a site visit review from the judging panel for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nations highest award for organizational performance excellence.

Of the 34 national applicants, Palo Alto College was one of 15 organizations selected for a site visit  and the only educational organization to do so. To receive the Baldrige award would be a testament to Palo Alto Colleges organizational management systems that ensure continuous improvement, demonstrate efficient and effective operations, and provide a way of engaging and responding to students and community stakeholders.

As someone who has personally benefited from the college, I am proud  but not surprised  of all that Palo Alto College has achieved in only 30 years of existence. The Little Engine That Could reference is fitting for all the hard work and perseverance our community college continues to display for San Antonio residents. I have no doubt that the colleges story will not only inspire millions of residents in our community but will serve as an inspiration for generations to come.

Rey Saldana represents City Council District 4.
Tehran, Iran, Nov. 11

By Mehdi Sepahvand  Trend:

The election of Donald Trump as the US president cannot leave a long-lasting impact on oil prices, said Irans Deputy Oil Minister Qolamreza Manuchehri.

Oil is subject to other more important factors, but, Trumps accession can have some short-term impact, he told ISNA news agency November 11.

The Brent crude experienced a 76-cent decline in price for the day to stand at $45.08.

The West Texas Intermediate went down by 88 cents to be sold at $43.78.
When I opened my front door Wednesday morning after little sleep and numb from a bad dream that wasnt a dream, a dreary rainfall glazed the sidewalk as two neighbors gazed blankly in my direction.

As I leaned down to pick up my newspaper, a Carole King song filtered through my pre-coffee brain fog: Something inside has died, and I cant hide, and I just cant fake it. Oh, no, no. Good ol Carole King.

From there, my morning proceeded mechanically: Find remote control, turn on Morning Joe, fix coffee, open refrigerator door, close refrigerator door, turn off sound on ringing cellphone, turn off TV, lie on floor. Im guessing this routine sounds familiar to fellow election-dazed denizens.

As regular readers of this column know, I rejected Donald Trump on Day One and have spent the past year  in columns, on TV and in speeches across the country  highlighting the many reasons I found him unacceptable for the job of president.

My opinion hasnt changed, but as Hillary Clinton said in her acceptance speech, Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead. And Trump, in his victory speech, said without irony that now its time to heal the wounds of division.

Head hurting, but OK.

To begin, there needs to be an honest assessment of what just happened. It isnt really that complicated or mysterious, if youve spent any time in the America where Trump voters live.

Two weeks ago, I began saying that Trump would win, whether I liked it or not. Today, I offer a clarification: He didnt win the election. Clinton lost it.

For voters who couldnt stand Trump, she was a terrible alternative. Never a great candidate, she was also, tragically, a Clinton when people were ready to move on. She received several million fewer votes than Obama did in 2012.

And speaking of Obama, he also lost this election to Trump, despite exit polling that showed the presidents approval rating at 50 percent-plus.

The 2016 election was as much a referendum on his legacy as it was on the candidates themselves.

Thus, a vote for Trump was really a vote against Obamacare and the rising costs of health insurance. It was a vote against the doubling of the national debt to nearly $20 trillion under Obama. It was a vote against a foreign policy that saw the Islamic States expansion rather than its defeat.

Minorities have reason to feel threatened in a Trump-inspired environment of hostility toward the other.

But leaning primarily on racism, bigotry or sexism to explain what happened Tuesday is too facile by half. Missing from the audiences that television cameras focused on were millions of others  Republicans, independents, libertarians and maybe even some Democrats  who would rather be horse-whipped than attend a Trump rally but were compelled to vote R against the likelihood of a liberal Supreme Court, lax immigration laws and an increasingly costly health care system, among other concerns.

Trump captured a moment and promised to make America great again. He also said that hell be the president of everybody. Lets hope he wasnt just reading from a teleprompter  and that the word trickles dow

kathleenparker@washpost.com
On Veterans Day, we honor the men and women who served in our armed forces. Their sacrifices ensured our security and promoted our prosperity. Their sacrifices supported the growth of our democracy.

Yet sacrifice only works when we serve without guarantee of personal reward. It requires broad participation, across races, classes and regions. It demands some basic faith in our imperfect system of governance and our always flawed leaders. Sacrifice is about devoting oneself to a higher public cause.

In our turbulent times just following a storm of an election, our society would benefit from less hate and recrimination, and more attention to the virtues of sacrifice. We need not agree on the solutions to our problems if we can agree to commit ourselves to work together in selfless ways. We need not always like one another if we can find shared identity in common struggle. The challenges demanding collective sacrifice are evident today, and a prior generation offers a useful model of citizenship.

At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the American economy was still in the midst of the worst recession in the nations history. As President Franklin Roosevelt contended with economic disaster, he had to resist the global trend toward fascist hatred and prepare to fight the strongest militaries in the world on two distant continents. The president knew that meeting these monumental challenges required the full commitment of the American people. Roosevelt spoke directly and honestly to call on Americans for help in collective efforts to produce, prepare, arm and fight.

Roosevelt demanded widespread sacrifices because he had no choice, but also because he understood that collective sacrifice created reservoirs of strength and unity in a country desperately in need of both after a decade of depression. Turning the war against fascism into a war of the people, by the people, and for people improved the citizen body. As Abraham Lincoln predicted at Gettysburg, an active and committed population made our nation great, not the reverse.

It worked. More than 6 million men and women voluntarily joined the U.S. armed forces between 1941 and 1945. Americans also stepped forward to contribute to the cost of the war. Eighty-five million people, half the population of the United States, bought war bonds. Private citizens purchased $185.7 billion of those bonds, covering roughly 60 percent of the cost of the war.

Those numbers are staggering, but they do not fully measure the sacrifices of Americans. Parents and children cut back at home in their homes to save waste fats for explosives, reduce meat consumption, and lived by the slogan of grow your own, can your own. Commuters were told that when you ride alone you ride with Hitler, join a car sharing club today! And they did in large numbers.

Farmers donated scrap material to sink a sub from your farm. Women joined the workforce in record numbers to replace men who were deployed abroad. And Americans learned that spies could be lurking anywhere so loose lips might sink ships. The effort to win the war and build a better world involved nearly every citizen. Under President Roosevelts leadership, Americans curtailed their personal desires, risked their lives, and invested directly in the war effort. Americans stepped forward to sacrifice.

We face many of the same challenges today, including gathering threats abroad and a loss of faith in our democracy at home. We cannot renew our national strength without a return to public sacrifice by all citizens  including those with the highest incomes and the best connections.

Instead of arguing over personalities and wedge issues, we need leaders who will motivate citizens for sacrifice toward common goals. We will only come together again when we sacrifice together again. That is the fundamental lesson our veterans have taught us. It is a lesson a new generation will embrace, if the bickering politicians will finally step aside and let a new set of citizen-soldiers take the field.

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Mark Eaker is a graduate student in history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Tragedy is patient.

It can wait and wait, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for ...

Everyone knows that; everyone knows that setbacks, huge and small, are part of life.

But the darkness, the pall of gloom and suffering, hangs over some of us more oppressively, more constantly, than it does others.

Our brave fighting men and women know the feeling.

They live with it every day, and they face the struggle abroad so that we, all of us, do not have to face it at home.

We should honor that sacrifice and commitment every day, but especially today  Veterans Day.

In 1926, Congress adopted a resolution celebrating world peace in the aftermath of World War I, a decree later expanded to honor all veterans.

Although most of us work on this day, it has taken on the fervor of a national holiday, and with good reason  we owe our livelihoods, if not our very existence, to the brave men and women who have fought to preserve our way of life.

Our veterans left everything they knew and loved and served with exemplary dedication and courage so we could all know a safer America and a more just world, President Barack Obama said in his Veterans Day proclamation last year. They have been tested in ways the rest of us may never fully understand, and it is our duty to fulfill our sacred obligation to our veterans and their families.

President Obama was right, but sadly, the words have not always matched the commitment. Our veterans deserve more than they receive, much more, and the current situation is telling. They have suffered regular, sometimes fatal, delays in health care  woeful treatment exacerbated by the fact that the Veterans Administration has tried to cover up these delays, according to investigations.

Consider this startling irony. Our soldiers have suffered enough at the hands of the enemy. But to come home and face more suffering and indignity from their own government is worse than reprehensible; it is inexcusable.

The country has just emerged from the ugliest, most contentious presidential campaign in recent history, perhaps ever. We heard discussions on issues that had never been discussed before. Lost in the cacophony of these discussions were issues of weightier import, including the treatment  or mistreatment  of our veterans.

It is incumbent on President-elect Donald Trump to direct more energy to help those who have done so much to help us. He must resolve to do this. A nation that turns its back on its veterans is a nation that has lost its moral authority. America is better than that.

Our veterans have shown, time and again, that they answer the call during our times of greatest need. In 2002, the first full recruitment year after the attacks of 9/11, 79,585 people joined the Army, up more than 5,000 over the previous year, according to Army statistics. Recruiters were not surprised.

One of the worst days in Americas history saw some of the bravest acts in Americans history, President George W. Bush said during a ceremony at the Pentagon Memorial in 2008. Well always honor the heroes of 9/11. And here at this hallowed place, we pledge that we will never forget their sacrifice.

Our soldiers have not forgotten that sacrifice. They have answered the call, and many have died doing so. More than 6,800 soldiers have perished in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

And so, today, we honor our brave veterans. But we must honor them tomorrow as well ... and the day after that and the day after that. For our soldiers do not just keep us safe. They elevate us. As the great American writer Bernard Malamud once said, Without heroes, we are all plain people, and dont know how far we can go.
Many voters in the South San Antonio Independent School District who cast ballots in the general election chose not to participate in the school board elections. Hundreds cast ballots for president and other contests but skipped the school board races.

South San would have benefited from higher voter participation. Regrettably, this weeks school board elections will not bring the changes needed to move the district forward. South San Kids First, a grass-roots organization created to bring attention to education needs in the district, supported candidates in each of the four races on the ballot, but only two of those candidates were victorious.
Students of American history are familiar with the idea of American exceptionalism, which claims that we hold a special place in human history, based on democratic ideals and personal freedom.

The idea can be traced to 1630 when John Winthrop, the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, said: We shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us  a reference to Matthew 5:14 in which Jesus says, You are the light of the world. A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hidden.

Donald Trump is definitely an exceptional character. But will his character  or lack thereof  cause the rest of the world to question our character?

Time will tell. At least he was conciliatory in his acceptance speech. Thats a start.

Carl Lloyd

Waste of time

Re: Bexar Countys early voting continues to see big turnout, Front Page, Nov. 2:

It was good to see people exercising their constitutional right to cast a ballot. However, one must wonder why anyone stood in long lines up to two hours to vote for the worst presidential candidates in U.S. history.

Did they vote for career politician Hillary Clinton and four more years of government involvement in their everyday lives, more expensive Obamacare and politics as usual?

Or did they vote for an arrogant billionaire who alienates vast voting factions without regard for his actions?

John D. Shicora

Abusing homeless

Re: When police cruelty shakes your faith in basic humanity,Gilbert Garcia, Sunday:

The police officer who gave a homeless man a dog feces sandwich and thought it was funny was certainly not one of San Antonios finest. He should never be reinstated. The whole damn world is going to war, and we have people like that on the payroll here in San Antonio. There is a reason that Texas is the best state in the nation, and he is not one of them. The poor man was already down on his luck; why magnify it?

God bless Texas!

Michael B. White

Dubious record

Re: Penn State is facing a record $2.4M penalty, Nation & World, Nov. 4:

Penn State has set another record by incurring the largest fine for not reporting crimes on campus.

Under the Clery Act, colleges and universities are required to disclose the number of criminal offenses on campus reported each year and issue timely warnings if there is an ongoing threat to students and staff. With the ongoing and growing investigation  and disclosures  at Baylor, this $2.4 million record fine may not last long.

Ruben Zamora

Front-page news?

Re: Arkansas cheese dip latest attack on Texas, Front Page, Nov. 4:

I am going to take a risk and defy the advice that one should never argue with those who buy ink by the barrel.

In what journalistic universe is the origin of chili con queso worthy of the front page? Has Taste, the food section in the Sunday edition, been discontinued? Can there be little wonder why newspapers are losing subscribers?

My headline? Some dip!

David Garrett
Well, we told the world who we are. Now, we can only hope that Donald Trump isnt who he revealed himself to be. That its all been an act.

Anger won. Anxiety won. But lets not fool ourselves; sexism, racism and xenophobia were rewarded. And Hillary Clinton turned out to be more politically flawed than the polls indicated.

Yes, much of that was helped along by 11th hour meddling by the FBI on the matter of emails  followed by what amounted to a too-late oops  but mostly due to nearly 25 nonstop years of vilification that made every transgression seem like a new Watergate, though none really was.

Politically, these flaws were real enough. In a fact-free, pants-on-fire lying zone, perception reigns.

But it was mostly a deep miasma of angst and hunger for change that propelled Donald Trump into the presidency. An equally deep layer of angst now envelops all those voters who witnessed what was clearly a campaign that traded on sexism, racism and xenophobia. And that leads to an inescapable conclusion.

That is who we are as a nation. Correction. In the initial count, Clinton appears to have narrowly won the popular vote. So it is what nearly half of us believe who we are. They will give the characteristics different names  not racism, but law and order; not xenophobia, but making America great again by scapegoating those people; not sexism, just boys will be patriarchal boys.

Here is what weve told the world. Were OK with a president who brags about sexual conquest, whether the approaches are welcome or not.

We are OK with a president who knows next to nothing of policy, global or domestic. Who admires a certain Russian strongman, whose hacking has also been rewarded. Look for more.

We are OK with a president who said he would jail his political opponent and hinted that there were Second Amendment solutions to her very existence.

Global warming? A hoax, of course, foisted on us by the Chinese.

That is what we  the American voters  have just told an incredulous world, which was prepped a bit by the identical anti-immigrant fervor sweeping much of Western Europe. Think of it as Brexit, American style.

And all that soul-searching predicted  including by me  for Republicans? Well, it should happen anyway because Trump just staged a coup, but my fear is that, in Trump, the party will have found a winning formula involving hucksterism that will be replicated until the last angry person calms down. This will not be pretty for minorities and women. But payback for those Republican leaders who will have been viewed as only lukewarm in their support for our new Supreme Leader will not be pretty, either. So there still might be intraparty warfare.

Democrats will be playing the what-if game. What if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee? What if it was anyone except Clinton, a candidate whose unfavorability ratings were only slightly below Trumps? And what if Clinton had actually chosen Julian Castro as a running mate? She won by just 5 percent in Tim Kaines Virginia.

I note that Trump won heavily Latino Texas barely in double digits, 10 percent. And Latinos apparently made a difference in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, all of which Clinton won. California is already solidly blue. That leaves Arizona, which Trump won also by single digits, 4.3 percent. This is a harbinger for the Southwest. What looks like a win today might not look so stylish in the future.

But here is the biggest takeaway from this election. Post-racial? Not even close. All those divisions we thought we had grown out of ... we simply havent.

Despondent? Dont be if, after your vote, you can look yourself in the mirror.

o.ricardo.pimentel@express-news.net

Twitter: @oricardopimente

Correction: An earlier version contained a tweet attributed to former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, in which he urged voters to turn out to thwart Hispanic and black voters. It was a fake. He did not post any such tweet.
STAMFORD  City police officers had to draw their weapons to stop a man who ran away from a traffic stop.

Sgt. Jennifer Lynch said someone from an East Main Street restaurant called police at about 9:10 p.m. Thursday about a man who had come in and out of the establishment several times asking what time it was closing.

Mi Terruno restaurant employees called police because they were concerned the man was plotting to rob them, Lynch said.

An officer spotted a silver Hyundai police were told the man was driving as it pulled out of a parking lot onto East Main Street, Lynch said.

The officer pulled the car over, but when he got out of the cruiser, the Hyundai sped away, Lynch said. The driver went through several stop signs and turned onto Maher Road, which is a dead-end, Lynch said.

The driver got out of the Hyundai and the officer drew his gun and told him to put his hands up and to get back into the car, Lynch said.

The driver, identified as Chaz Harris, 23, of Soundview Avenue, refused to comply and was taken into custody when another officer tackled him to the ground, Lynch said.

Lynch said Harris never explained to police why he did not stop when pulled over or what he was doing at the Colombian restaurant. One of the officers suffered a minor injury to his left leg.

Harris was charged with engaging police in pursuit, reckless driving and resisting arrest.

jnickerson@scni.com
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Mayor Ed Lee and San Francisco politicians are bracing for what President-elect Donald Trump lists as one of his main priorities: blocking all federal funding for sanctuary cities.

Hundreds of cities around the country have sanctuary policies, which broadly means local officials limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities to turn over immigrants living in the country without documentation. The scope and degree of those policies vary, and San Francisco has some of the most stringent noncompliance policies in the country.

Should Trump follow through on his stated intention, it could have a major and immediate impact on the city of San Francisco, which receives around $1 billion annually from the federal government, according to city Controller Ben Rosenfield.

Of that money, $478 million comes directly from the federal government. The balance comes from the federal government via the state of California. The citys current budget is $9.6 billion.

City officials are making contingency plans in case that money disappears.

Its certainly something the mayors office, the citys lobbyist and our office has started looking at, Rosenfield said Wednesday, one day after Trump was elected in a surprise victory over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Yet it is far from clear what pulling funding from sanctuary cities would mean in practice.

A 2015 resolution by the House of Representatives called for pulling funding from sanctuary cities for three criminal justice grant programs administered by the Department of Justice: the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), the Community-Oriented Policing Services program (COPS), and the Edward Byrne Memorial JAG (Justice Assistance Grant) program.

Of those three programs, San Francisco appears to receive funding only from JAG  $272,540 in the current fiscal year  said Severin Campbell, director of the citys Budget and Legislative Analysts Office. JAG funds drug treatment programs and technology improvements for police departments, among other things.

Campbell said its possible the city receives additional money from the three Justice Department programs, but thats not detailed in the budget.

Saira Hussain, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said the details of Trumps plan will determine the effect on the city.

So far, nothing concrete has been put forward, Hussain said. Folks are obviously trying to make an assessment and use every tool at our disposal to protect the rights of the immigrant community here in San Francisco.

If Trump manages to block all federal funding, as described in his 100-day plan, city services across the board will take a tremendous hit.

The Municipal Transportation Agency has received more than $200 million in federal funds over the last two years, mostly toward building rail and overhead lines for Muni trolley buses and trains.

Most of the welfare programs provided by the citys Human Services Agency are paid for in part with federal dollars, including the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, known as TANF, but also food stamps. The new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing receives $30 million annually for supportive housing and other services, among other federal funds.

The district attorneys office also receives approximately $1.68 million a year in federal funding, which is routed through the state. That doesnt include one-time grants, such as a $1 million Department of Justice grant in 2013 to help reduce neighborhood crime in the eastern Bayview.

By far, the biggest hit to the city would be the elimination of reimbursements it receives for Medicaid, which provides free or low-cost health coverage to low-income people.

Trent Rhorer, director of the Human Services Agency, said Trump could not single-handedly take away funding for most of those programs  that would require acts of Congress. However, with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, such actions are possible.

My immediate reaction was not the hammer dropping right away, Rhorer said. But the effects over time could be draconian.

Despite the potential consequences, city officials Thursday reaffirmed their commitment to sanctuary policies.

We cannot start rolling back our closest-held values. We have to be an example of what it means to fight back, said Hillary Ronen, the supervisor-elect in District Nine, which includes the heavily Latino Mission District.

Supervisor Malia Cohen said she is concerned about the revenue San Francisco stands to lose, but added: I am not interested in revoking the sanctuary city status.

And Mayor Ed Lee also affirmed his support for sanctuary policies and suggested Trump may not follow through on his threat to take away all federal funding.

The federal funds we currently receive support programs the new administration also supports, such as veterans housing and health, public safety, infrastructure and education, said Deirdre Hussey, Lees spokeswoman.

She added: San Francisco is and always will be a sanctuary city.

About 44,000 people living in San Francisco are undocumented, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute using 2014 census data.

Emily Green is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: egreen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @emilytgreen
Tehran, Iran, Nov. 11

By Mehdi Sepahvand  Trend:

The Islamic Republic of Iran will not cross its redlines, especially regarding capital punishment and Qisas (retribution) in human rights talks with the European Union, Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi said.

Iran will not accept the trend where the EU is both negotiating and exerting pressure, he told ILNA news agency November 11.

The EU is demanding Iran to reconsider its regulations on capital punishment.

Tehran says it cannot do away with capital punishments based on Islamic rules.

Iran and the EU sat for human rights talks in Brussels on November 8, the first round of their talks on any subject since the nuclear deal that was reach in 2015.

Recently, the EU passed a resolution on normalizing ties with Iran.

Iran and the EU have agreed to sit for talks every six months to discuss bilateral cooperation.

Takht-Ravanchi said Iran and the EU are to hold a high-level meeting in two or three weeks, where they will discuss politics, economy, environment, regional issues and human rights.
1 Syria conflict: Syrian Kurdish-led force fighting the Islamic State north are on the verge of surrounding a wide area north of the militants stronghold of Raqqa, according to a spokeswoman for the group. Cihan Ehmed of the U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces said on Thursday that its fighters are advancing on two fronts north of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic States self-declared caliphate. The operation has been ongoing for days under the cover of air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition.

2 Interpol chief: A top Chinese police official was elected president of Interpol on Thursday, setting off alarm bells among rights advocates over abuses and a lack of transparency within Chinas legal system, as well as the potential misuse of the police organization to attack Beijings political opponents. Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei was named as the first Chinese person to hold the post at the organizations general assembly on the Indonesian island of Bali, Interpol said. The organization, which is based in France, has 190 member nations and has the power to issue red notices to member countries listing people who are wanted for extradition.
WASHINGTON  On Election Day, 12 gubernatorial races were on the ballot, yielding party changes that favored Republicans.

Democrats may have converted one Republican state house, in North Carolina, as Attorney General Roy Cooper (D) leads incumbent Pat McCrory (R) by just 5,000. Provisional, absentee and overseas ballots remain to be counted. Republicans took Democratic posts in Missouri, New Hampshire and Vermont. Open seats in Delaware and West Virginia remained in Democratic hands, while Republicans held their two open seats in Indiana and North Dakota.

Democratic incumbents were re-elected in Montana in a close election (Gov. Steve Bullock), Oregon (Gov. Kate Brown), and Washington (Gov. Jay Inslee), while Republicans held Utah (Gov. Gary Herbert).

Overall, the gubernatorial count advances to 34R-15D-1I, with Alaska Gov. Bill Walker (I) being a former Republican and the North Carolina post still undecided.

Voter Turnout

The voter participation rate appears to be coming in well under the 129,172,069 people who officially cast ballots in 2012. At the end of initial counting, just under 126 million individuals are recorded as voting, but that number will continue to increase as more state counts become final. It is estimated that possibly more than 50% of voters took advantage of the early voting procedures that are available in 43 states and the District of Columbia. A total of 37 states and D.C. allow no-excuse early voting, meaning anyone can vote by mail or in-person as a matter of choice. In six states (KY, MS, MO, NY, SC, VA) one still must have a valid excuse to vote early or absentee, meaning the individual must indicate that they are unable to be present at their usual polling place on Election Day.

We wont know the final turnout numbers for at least two weeks, as states will conduct their official canvasses after all votes have been received. Large blocks of votes, meaning at least a million, will be reported in California during the next several days and even weeks, as their large number of mail votes results in a laborious counting system that begins only when all votes are received. Washington, one of three states that employs a total vote-by-mail procedure, accepts ballots post-marked on Election Day, meaning the count will stretch for maybe as long as the next 10 days. The other two, Oregon and Colorado, require ballots to be received on Election Day.

In the last 30 years, turnout has increased from 81.5 million voters in 1976 to a high of 131.4 million in 2008. The fall-off between 2008 and 2012 was -1.7%. During this 30-year span, presidential turnout has increased in every election except for 1988, 1996 and 2012.

The largest drop-off from one successive presidential campaign to another (7.8%) occurred in 1996, when President Bill Clinton defeated Republican Bob Dole. The biggest increase in successive elections came in 2004 (President George W. Bush defeating Democrat John Kerry), when a modern-day record occurred. An increase of 16.1% in voter participation arose in 2004, when compared to vote levels from the 2000 election. Until then, the highest increase was found in 1992, when 14.0% more voters cast their ballots than did in the 1988 election.
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Readers, I kinda had to go vertical and do some research and write an essay, so there arent as many items as there normally are. lambert

Also, yesterday we developed a terrific list of trustworthy writers. Could we today put together a list of trustworthy sources? I mean, besides Naked Capitalism.

2016

UPDATE Days Until: -3. Comment on polling: Election calls have never seemed very interesting to me  were it my place to make them  in the same way that predicting when a flood will crest is a lot less interesting than understanding (and perhaps managing) a watershed. That doesnt mean predictions are not fun! Madison asked in the Federalist 51: But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? By the same token: What is the horse race, but the greatest of all the performing arts? That said, putting past Water Coolers into the call frame, the method I used didnt yield bad results. Rather than tracking the very noisy individual polls, I decided to use the RealClearPolitics polling averages every Monday  once a week, for sanitys sake  and plug those averages into a reasonable list of swing states provided by the New York Times, whose interactive tool then enabled me to game out scenarios in the electoral college. In all the weeks I did this but one, Trump had a plausible path to victory, depending on reasonable scenarios in individual states.

In other words, still in the call frame, I beat most of the paid pollsters in the political class who were, er, trumpeting Clintons victory. And as we saw in yesterdays Water Cooler, I tied the Trump teams internal polling; they thought they were going to lose, though they qualified their views by pointing out plausible paths to victory, just as I did.

Why did I not get the scale of Trumps victory? I mean, in 2008 and 2012, and maybe farther back, the Republican candiate always made a show of putting Pennsylvania in play, and it never came to anything. Trump won it! Along with Michigan and Wisconsin (where Sanders, interestingly, defeated Clinton as well). First, I felt that the RCP averages would protect me from outliers. But when all the lemmings are headed toward the same cliff, what the average lemming is doing doesnt much matter (I believe this is called herding.) Second and more importantly, I always felt that Clinton had a natural institutional advantage of 4%; her control of the Democrat Party nomenklatura, the fact that the press was functioning as a branch of the Clinton campaign at the operational level, that the entire political class was behind her (and my perception of the importance of this last may have been affected by the dominance games that Clinton supporters constantly played on Twitter, where I live a good part of the day). And of course, all the money. However, I also believe that we are building toward a legitimacy crisis (that is, the flood will crest). So I should have had the courage of my convictions and discounted the 4% advantage I felt Clinton had, since the institutions that should have given her that advantage are visibly crumbling.

Finally, Yves cites to anecdote: [E]very single bit of anecdotal information I had from real people ran against what experts and the polls were saying. So its worth asking when the very concept of anecdote rescales to the idea that a personal network, properly configured, can serve as a better proxy for voters views than a survey. (Im too geographically marginal to have a network of Yvess size and diversity.) This is similar to the idea of spot checks (see Stats Watch) on stuff being at the very least a necessary corrective to official statistics. This is also similar to the Los Angeles Daylight poll, which (uniquely) follows a panel of voters through the year. One might wonder if Naked Capitalism meetups might perform such a function  if we can avoid creating our own bubble!

Policy

It is clear to any objective observer that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has resulted in rapidly rising premiums and deductibles, narrow networks, and health insurance, has not been a success. A Trump Administration will work with Congress to repeal the ACA and replace it with a solution that includes Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and returns the historic role in regulating health insurance to the States. The Administrations goal will be to create a patient-centered healthcare system that promotes choice, quality and affordability with health insurance and healthcare, and take any needed action to alleviate the burdens imposed on American families and businesses by the law [President Elect]. Let us know how that works out. And: To maximize choice and create a dynamic market for health insurance, the Administration will work with Congress to enable people to purchase insurance across state lines. The Administration also will work with both Congress and the States to re-establish high-risk pools  a proven approach to ensuring access to health insurance coverage for individuals who have significant medical expenses and who have not maintained continuous coverage. And: Modernize Medicare, so that it will be ready for the challenges with the coming retirement of the Baby Boom generation  and beyond

Maximize flexibility for States in administering Medicaid, to enable States to experiment with innovative methods to deliver healthcare to our low-income citizens Hmm. Donald Trump has said he wants to repeal Obamacare, and we hope that wasnt an empty campaign promise, said Twila Brase, president and co-founder of CCHF. It will take more than a promise to make American health care great again and to restore health care freedom to patients and doctors. Republicans need to advance visionary ideas for health care, ideas that are bigger than buying across state lines; ideas that put patients and doctors back together again without the costly interference and intrusions of profiteering outsiders. The high cost of health care comes primarily from the middlemen, including managed care and government' [Citizens Council for Health Freedom]. CCHF is a good conservative site on health care policy. I dont agree with them on policy, but CCHF is relentless and above all they dont make stuff up. Obamacare Replacement Might Look Familiar [Kaiser Health News]. Could be. ObamaCare was, after all, originally a Republican plan, so it should be possible to rebrand it. It gets into a questions of semantics, said Mark Rouck, an insurance analyst for Fitch Ratings. Are they really repealing the act if they replace it with new legislation that has some of the same characteristics?  Topping the list of ACA provisions likely to survive under Trump is the requirement that employers cover workers children up to the age of 26, analysts said. The measure is widely popular and not especially expensive. A health law crafted by Republicans might also retain the ACAs protections for people with preexisting illness seeking coverage, said Glenn Melnick, a health economist at the University of Southern California The ACAs biggest coverage expansion came through the Medicaid program for the poor and disabled, which added more than 15 million people. Trump has suggested giving states fixed federal grants for Medicaid, which could lead to a substantial reduction in coverage or benefits. Whos Advising President-elect Trump on Heatlh Care? (PDF) [Holland & Knight]. Rich Bagger: Executive Director (Health care policy advisor). Was Assistant General Counsel at Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield)

Eric Ueland: Budget Advisor (Entitlements)

Jim Frogue: Domestic Policy (Health Care, State Policy). Was Health Care Policy Analyst for Heritage Foundation [home of ObamaCare, interestingly enough]

Ado Machida: Domestic policies (Health)

Ed Meese: Executive Office of the President Lead

Andrew Bremberg: Domestic Policy (Affordable Care Act repeal and replace) Bremberg was on Walkers team when the candidate unveiled a healthcare proposal that included repealing the Affordable Care Act and splitting Medicaid into smaller programs with separate funding [Modern Health Care]. And: For eight years, Bremberg served in the Department of Health and Human Services. From 2005 to 2007, he was special assistant to the Immediate Office of the Secretary and from 2001 to 2005, he was special assistant to the executive secretary [Health Care Finance]. And: Names reportedly under consideration for HHS secretary include former Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Gov. Rick Scott, R-Florida, and former Rep. Renee Ellmers R-North Carolina. Thin bench! One day after his election, we polled our readership of healthcare managers and clinicians to see what they think the short and long-term effects will be of Trumps policies on the healthcare sector, and we were flooded with responses. While most of them detail the deep concerns industry professionals have, a small few felt the businessmans idea could improve competition and lower costs [Health Care FInance]. Good article. Then Donald Trump was elected president, and now the tables may have turned again. Trump has on several occasions expressed his opposition to net neutrality, once calling it another top down power grab [MarketWatch].

Realignment

At this early stage, we cant know with certainty exactly why Clinton lost. In a narrow sense, obviously, the electoral vote was lost because she lost Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Iowa. Exit polls (which are often unreliable, but all we have for the moment) and the vote distribution strongly suggest those states were lost because Clinton lost many of the white working-class voters that broke for Obama in 2012. Overall exits show a 16-point swing to Trump among voters making less than $30,000 compared to the last presidential election  the biggest of any group in The New York Times crosstabs. Also, general turnout was off from 2012 [The Week]. So to fire the blame cannons at working class racism, you have to argue like this: Trump won the racist vote because the people who voted for the black guy wouldnt vote for the white woman. Oh, OK. Now, you can deploy the misogyny blame cannons, but the identity politicians seem to be going with racism at the moment. People often talk about racism/sexism/xenophobia vs. economic suffering as if they are totally distinct dichotomies. Of course there are substantial elements of both in Trumps voting base, but the two categories are inextricably linked: The more economic suffering people endure, the angrier and more bitter they get, the easier it is to direct their anger to scapegoats. Economic suffering often fuels ugly bigotry [Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept]. I would go further and urge that racism/sexism/xenophobia are forms of politics, and that they are the evil twin of identity politics, and together are the only forms of politics permitted by elites. See the next link. A top liberal group [The Center for American Progress] has temporarily abandoned plans for a new project designed to court white working class voters after it could not marshal the necessary financial support for the project, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon [Washington Free Beacon (2014)]. So, the Democrats abandoned the (white) working class because the squillionaires wouldnt fund the effort to reach out to them (and here we are!) Could it be that the squillionaires had a reason for that? Like that would be against their class interests? More: The stated need for the project suggests potential pitfalls for Democrats in its eventual delay: In a midterm election year expected to heavily favor Republicans, CAP has apparently abandoned, for the time being, an effort to reach out to a constituency that it acknowledges could determine the viability of the Democrats voting coalition going forward. The Bobby Kennedy Project was the brainchild of CAP senior fellow Ruy Teixeira, who for the past decade has stressed that a lasting Democratic majority will require the party to make inroads with white working class voters. Much too little, much too late from Teixeira, who injected the identity politics virus into the Democrat bloodstream to begin with. UPDATE [R]ace politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature [Adolph Reed, Common Dreams (2015)]. And: An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class. Reeds just getting rolling. Read the whole thing! The Dems need organization and focus on the young. Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman again, Dean said [Yahoo News]. Oh, HoHo. Really? After helping Clinton rig her selection as a superdelegate and smearing Trump as a coke user on no evidence? Yeah, the 50-state strategy was great. But that was before you lost your mind! The Real Lesson in Grubhub CEO Telling Trump Supporters to Resign (Plus an Earlier, Personal One)  WP Original [WirePoints]. Chelsea Clinton being groomed to run for Congress [New York Post]. Hail, Hydra! Immortal Hydra! We shall never be destroyed! Cut off a limb, and two more shall take its place!

Stats Watch

Consumer Sentiment, November 2016 (preliminary): Indications going into the presidential election are very positive as the consumer sentiment index is up more than 4 points in the November flash to 91.6 for the best showing since June (the data were compiled before the November 8 result). The gain is concentrated in the expectations component [Econoday]. People expect Trump to do better, then? And: While this is a very small sampling that is not always universally accurate, investors, traders and economists love to dwell on this report because it is really the first real look at live data for each month [MarketWatch].

Rail: Week 44 of 2016 shows same week total rail traffic (from same week one year ago) marginally expanded according to the Association of American Railroads (AAR) traffic data. Rolling averages remain in contraction  but are improving [Econintersect]. Finally some good news!

Employment Situation:  The good news is the prime working age group has started to grow again, and is now growing at 0.5% per year  and this should boost economic activity. And it appears the prime working age group will exceed the previous peak later this year [Calculated Risk].

Honey for the Bears: Sales arent falling year over year but they arent growing at 5% as they would do in normal times (charts) [Mosler Economics].  In normal times inventories increase with sales, adding to output. But when sales slow inventory growth stops and reverses:

Fodder for the Bulls: Spot metallurgical coal topped $300 a metric ton for the first time since flooding in Australia curbed output from the worlds biggest seaborne exporter five years ago [Bloomberg]. Chinas efforts to cut overcapacity in its coal industry have reduced domestic supply and boosted imports of both metallurgical and the variety burned in power stations.

The Bezzle: If a variable is normally distributed we can use standard probabilistic techniques to analyse it. If it is not then we cannot [Phillip Pilkington, Econintersect]. So, what about economic variables? Are they normally distributed? Short answer: no, they are not. Oops. If you look at income (a proxy for class) you dont see a bell curve. You see a power law curve. And see the last link in News of hte Wired, too.

The Bezzle: In September, with typical marketing hoopla, Fitbit Inc. rolled out two new gadgets, the Charge 2 and Flex 2. Designed to measure more detailed fitness stats, the trackers were well reviewed and seemed poised to help Fitbit retain leadership of an increasingly competitive market. But within weeks the devices were piling up in stores, according to analyst spot checks [Bloomberg]. In other words, the stuff wasnt moving. We need more spot checks everywhere.

The Bezzle:  UberEats And UberRush Couriers Complain They Dont Get Their Tips [BuzzFeed].

The Bezzle: Apple cuts USB-C adapter prices in response to MacBook Pro complaints [The Verge].  Apples cables, unlike those you might order from a random seller online, are going to be well-made and reliable. Thats really funny. My genuine Apple cable wore out in about a year. The mouse cable is wearing out even faster.

Co-ops: Can you lead and manage the operational activities of Co-operatives UK, the membership organisation which works to serve Britains seven thousand co-operative enterprises? [Cooperatives UK].

UPDATE Industrial Romance: The Business of Being Pantone: Turning Color Into Money [The Fashion Law]. Pantone monetizes wavelengths and pigments the way Coca-Cola bottles water and Manhattan developers buy up chunks of the sky. Technically, its a kind of biochemical company. After developing colors in a lab, Pantone makes most of its money by selling the shades and corresponding formulas to fabric mills, printers, and designers in a range of disciplines. Its a simple model, and business has never been better. Reminds me of identity politics, conceptually and methodologically.

Among facts that take a stubbornly long time to sink in, heres one: Countries that borrow in their own currencies never have to default on their debt [Wall Street Journal, Message from the Gilt Market: U.K. Can Never Run Out of Pounds].

Todays Fear & Greed Index: 46 Neutral (previous close: 44, Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 14 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 11 at 12:52pm. Its amazing the dire predictions that didnt come true. The global economy did not collapse. Neither did the markets or the Internet. There wasnt violence at the polls. Putin did not hack our electronic voting systems. Funny how when you turn the gaslights off, things stabilize. As Peggy Noonan wrote: [I]f trendlines that have proved reliable in the past continue, the sun will come up on Wednesday [Wall Street Journal].

Class Warfare

The Elephant Chart: Divergence In Financial Sector Income [Econintersect].

News of the Wired

RIP Leonard Cohen [Rolling Stone].

Regex that only matches itself [Stack Exchange]. Too meta!

What Percent of the Top-Voted Comments in Reddit Threads Were Also 1st Comment? [Max Woolf]. The answer is 17.24% of all top-voted comments! Thats certainly more than what I expected! Additionally, 56% of the top-voted comments were posted within the first 5 comments, and 77% within the first 10 comments. The chart follows a power-law distribution.

* * *

Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And heres todays plant (ChiGal):

A second hornbeam tree

Readers, Water Cooler is a standalone entity, not supported by the very successful Naked Capitalism fundraiser just past. Now, I understand you may feel tapped out, but when and if you are able, please use the dropdown to choose your contribution, and then click the hat! Your tip will be welcome today, and indeed any day. Water Cooler will not exist without your continued help.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 11

By Elmira Tariverdiyeva  Trend:

The supply of Russias Iskander missiles to Armenia will increase the threat of nuclear proliferation in the region, said human rights activist Armine Sahakyan in her article published by The Huffington Post Nov. 11.

The reason is that Iskander 9K720 missiles can carry nuclear, as well as conventional warheads, and Armenia has the scientific capability and material to make nukes, said the article.

Some Armenian military and civilian leaders have hinted that the country is actually developing nukes, said Sahakyan. I began asking myself whether the advanced Iskanders presence would not only precipitate a missile race in the region, but also increase the threat of nuclear proliferation.

Armenian leaders have made a number of comments this year that suggested that nukes might in the cards, according to the article.

Retired General Arkadiy Ter-Tadevosyan said on March 27 that Armenia was developing a weapon that could unleash great destruction, noted the author.

On April 16, Acting Defense Minister Norat Ter-Grigoryants, the retired head of Armenias armed forces, said nuclear weapons could play a role in the countrys defense as a deterrent and a means of retaliation.

During a press conference on April 29, former Prime Minister Grant Bagratian said unequivocally that Armenia has a nuclear weapon.

Some political analysts note that Armenia has both the scientific capability and the material to make nukes, said Sahakyan adding that the country has a nuclear power plant at Metsamor, 36 kilometers west of Yerevan, and scientists and engineers running the plant would certainly have the knowledge to make nuclear weapons.

And the plant uses bomb-capable fuel, added the author. Thats apparent from the arrests of a number of Armenian nationals who have tried to smuggle radioactive material out of the country in the past decade.

It would be terrible for the region and the world if other countries fears of a nuclear-armed Armenia prompted them to begin building nukes, said Sahakyan.

That would mean that the purchase of the Iskanders that were supposed to increase Armenias security actually did the opposite, she added.
By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She now spends most of her time in India and other parts of Asia researching a book about textile artisans. She also writes regularly about legal, political economy, and regulatory topics for various consulting clients and publications, as well as writes occasional travel pieces for The National.

The biggest story on Indian television yesterday wasnt the election of Donald Trump. For on Tuesday night (IST), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a surprise speech declared that currency notes of rupees (Rs) 500 and Rs 1000  the highest two denominations in circulation would be invalid as of midnight that same night. The withdrawn notes could no longer be used for transacting business or as a store of value for future usage (with some limited exceptions, but even these were only allowed for a short transition period).

From Modis speech:

There is a need for a decisive war against the menace of corruption, black money and terrorism Corruption, black money and terrorism are festering wounds which make the country hollow from within, he said, adding such activities hold back the nations progress. Describing illegal financial activities as the biggest blot, Modi said that despite several steps taken by his government over the last two-and-a-half years, Indias global ranking on corruption had moved only to 76th position from 100th earlier. This shows the extent of the web of corruption in the country. The disease of corruption is the domain of some veted people who are flourishing. Some people have misused their positions and benefitted. On the other hand, honest people are suffering, he said.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) the Indian central bank as reported by The Times of India, elaborated:

The incidence of fake Indian currency notes in higher denomination has increased. For ordinary persons, the fake notes look similar to genuine notes, even though no security feature has been copied. The fake notes are used for antinational and illegal activities. High denomination notes have been misused by terrorists and for hoarding black money. India remains a cash based economy hence the circulation of Fake Indian Currency Notes continues to be a menace. In order to contain the rising incidence of fake notes and black money, the scheme to withdraw has been introduced.

Chaos Ensues

India remains a cash-based economy, especially for low-value transactions, and the move has caused widespread chaos, as I write this from Kolkata where I am currently visiting. The move was accompanied by a temporary shut down of all banks and ATMs, with banks reopening earlier today and ATMs due to reopen tomorrow.

Initially, after the announcement, the highest denomination legal tender note in circulation was the Rs 100 note. New legally tender Rs 500 and Rs 2000 notes have been made available today, according to Tushar Roy, chief manager of a nationalized bank, Central Bank of India. Not all banks have yet received the new notes, but Roy says that this problem is expected to be resolved soon. The government also expects to re-introduce Rs 1000 notes soon, to include advanced security features. When ATMs open tomorrow, withdrawals will be limited to a maximum of Rs 2000 per transaction, as compared to the Rs 10,000 and in some cases, Rs 15,000 limits, that previously applied.

Starting today, after producing appropriate identification, people are allowed to exchange old notes for new at any of the 19 RBI offices, any bank branch, or at any head post office or sub-post office. They will have until December 30 to complete their transactions.

Individuals receive full value for the entire volume of bank notes tendered at any of these venues, but heres the kicker: At the moment, each person is limited to receiving only Rs 4000 per person in cash irrespective of the size of tender. Anything over and above that amount can only be credited to a bank account. This allows the government to track whether the sums tendered have been legitimately acquired. Withdrawals from bank accounts will be limited to Rs 10,000 a day and Rs 20,000 a week. The government has announced this part of the policy may be relaxed in future, says Roy, in order for employers, for example, to meet payrolls currently made in cash. (Ultimately the government wants more transactions to be paid via bank accounts, so that they can be tracked and taxed appropriately).

Does The Policy Make Sense?

Its beyond the scope of this post to speculate on the impact the new policy will have on individuals of various occupations and with myriad reasons for transacting in large amounts of cash. For more on this point, interested readers might wish to look at this article in The Wire.

Some have criticized the policy for focusing on currency alone, and have noted that black money is typically not held by Indians in stacks of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, but in one of two alternative ways.

The very rich store black assets in offshore accounts (as detailed in, among other sources, the Panama Papers).

But tax evasion and corruption is not limited to the very richest alone. In India, many doctors and other professionals, members of the business community, and small traders also underreport their taxable income. They tend to hold their black assets on-shore, within India, in the form of real estate, art work, gold bullion, jewellery, or securities.

Unlike other current policy areas border incursions into Pakistan, for example the political opposition has has not contested the objective of the Modi move. There is virtually unanimous concurrence at least publicly on cracking down on black money. Yet as The Hindu reported, former Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has criticized the Modi governments method for achieving its objective:

We support the objective of the government to stamp out black money. But the method they have adopted raises questions The move has come as a bolt from the blue for the common man. The real test for the government would begin [Thursday], Mr Chidambaram said. How efficiently and how quickly the money is exchanged. If there is harassment or inconvenience and all kinds of questions are asked, then I think that will be completely counterproductive. A similar move had been contemplated by the previous Congress-led UPA government, he recalled. But the idea was dropped as the economic gains were not too great. Mr. Chidambaram said the introduction of the new series of notes was estimated to cost Rs. 15,000 crores to Rs 20,000 crores [Jerri-Lynn here: a crore is 10,000,000 in the Indian numbering system]. The economic gains of demonetisation should be at least equal to that amount.

If the additional tax revenue pulled in by the Modi move is less than that amount, the new policy will actually have ended up costing the government money rather than increasing government revenues.

As Chidambaram summarized (again from The Hindu article quoted above):

The economic wisdom of the governments decision, Mr Chidambaram said, would be tested on three parameters: a) the present cash to GDP ratio is 12 per cent. Will it come down to the world average of about 4 per cent? b) The value of the high denomination notes currently in circulation is about 15 lakh crore rupees [Jerri-Lynn here: a lakh is 100,000, a crore, 10,000,000, so a lakh crore is 1,000,000,000,000.] Will that value come down significantly? c) Will gold imports surge, indicating that unaccounted income/ wealth is seeking refuge in bullion and gold jewellery?

Various economists have also presented other criticisms of the governments move, as reported by The Wire. Requiring a switch to new bank notes means Indians must take time to switch their existing Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes into the new bank notes. If new notes are not freely and widely available, this will freeze trade and the normal functioning of an exchange economy. Further, many Indians receive salaries in cash and do not have bank accounts at present, so requiring transactions to pass through the banking system will cause them considerable immediate inconvenience.

Impact on Economic Activity

But there is a wider reason for critiquing the policy. Black money and not paying taxes: These are bad things in a society, says Suvojit Bagchi, Kolkata bureau chief for The Hindu. Not surprisingly, everyone including the opposition agrees on the objective of cracking down on black money. Increasing the tax base- is the prime objective here. But will the demonetization policy produce substantial tax revenue? Bagchi noted that Chidambaram questioned whether taxes raised would be sufficient to recoup the cost of printing new bank notes.

Another objective, Bagchi added, is to move India away from its reliance on cash, toward a more American or European plastic system, where its easier to track and tax money.

And finally, at least half of Indian economic activity occurs in the informal sector, which is not tightly controlled. Bagchi gave the example of a building promoter, whose building activity produces both black and white revenues. Indeed, perhaps 40% of the promoters overall activity, he estimated, might be black activity. But that black activity also generates employment, as well as other knock on effects. While the government hopes that its policy will increase the tax base, its also possible that demonetization might instead lead to the shut down of at least some black activity. So, the governments latest move may actually slow economic activity considerably, Bagchi says, But for how long, and to what extent, no one knows.

He further added, At the moment, the Indian economy is somewhat insulated from the world economy, in part due to its reliance on cash and the existence of considerable black activity. Once India moves to a plastic system, and cuts back on that black activity, it will lose some of this insulation.

As reported in The Wire, Abhijit Sen, former member of the Planning Commission, is also concerned about contraction in the informal sector:
Obituary: Leonard Cohen BBC

Norwegian, Russian to Square off in World Chess Championship ABC (furzy)

Fuel economy of American vehicles continues to drop TreeHugger. Cheap gas will do that.

Green loons pursue wowser apocalypse MacroBusiness

India rupees: Chaos at banks continues after ATMs reopen BBC

Moscovici: Trumps US could be tax haven blacklisted EurActiv. The inclusion of Trump in the headline is clickbait. The tax haven issue is a possible issue regardless of who had won. But Moscovicis remarks suggest that hes gotten his information about Trumps taxes by reading New York Times headlines.

Ukraine/Russia

Syraqistan

Syria Analysis: Obama Declares Fight is With Terrorists Rather Than Assad EA WorldView. Resilc: We are fighting our own funded people?

Trade Traitors

he Battle over CETA is far from over Defend Democracy

2016

90-Minute Meeting Was a Great Honor, Says President-Elect New York Times. Body language in other Obama-Trump pix not as awful as the one on the NYT front page, but the ones Ive seen in the Michelle-Melania shots looked good, FWIW.

Trump presidency: Protests turn violent in Portland, Oregon BBC

More anti-Trump action planned after second night of protests across US Guardian. Have a look at the subhead: Activists say they are weighing up their next moves, as hundreds of people take to the streets again following election of Donald Trump. Hundreds of people?!? And this is the lead story at the US edition of the Guardian?

Chris Matthews on Trump Protests: What Kind Of Statement Is There To Make? They Lost RealClearPolitics

Acts of intimidation, violence and vandalism reported after Trump win Yahoo. Reports acts on both sides.

Ten-Step Program for Adjusting to President-Elect Trump New York Times. Actually not bad.

Donald Trump Ran on Protecting Social Security But Transition Team Includes Privatizers/ Intercept (martha r). Looks like the answer as to whether Trump was getting rolled by the Republican establishment is coming pretty quickly. Remember that Trump doesnt owe Wall Street anything; this appears to be the result of turning to Republican experts.

List reveals Sarah Palin and Chris Christie as well as oil tycoons and bankers in Donald Trumps possible cabinet Independent (martha r)

Trump Recruiting Among the Lobbyists He Once Denounced New York Times.

Donald Trump: JPMorgans Jamie Dimon Being Considered for Treasury Fortune (resilc). Wonder if Trump is running this trial balloon to make Elizabeth Warren see red and make Trumps good buddy Carl Ichan look good by comparison.

Trumps Transition Team Works to Form Cabinet Wall Street Journal. Story flogs Hensarling as a possible Treasury Secretary candidate (gah!) along with other scary ideas. But I tend to discount this because Hensarling is a buddy of Pence, and so far, Trumps interactions with Pence have featured lots of friction. And Hensarling is plenty useful to Trump right where he is now. Lets hope this reading proves to be correct.

U.S. consumer financial agency could be defanged under Trump Reuters

Trump Ascends to the Cherry Blossom Throne  Tyler Sic Semper Tyrannis (Kfathi). A contrary view to the links above, and todays must read. Bear in mind that he exaggerates the role of Soros in US politics (Eastern Europe is a completely different kettle of fish). Too many other squillionaires throwing $ at candidates and think tanks. See his comment about John Bolton in particular (mind you I dont see how anyone can think Bolton is a good idea), and his warning: Instead, my friends on the Left, worry that he will not only do what he said he would, but hell go above and beyond, and the people will love him for it. But this cheery reading discounts the difficulty Trump will have in securing the ability to govern. Saboteurs on what is nominally your side are a tougher obstacle than external opponents.

Blankfein Says Trump Infrastructure Commitment Good for Growth Bloomberg (resilc)

Before Taking the White House, Trump Due in Court over Fraud Vanity Fair. A Presidents power of pardon is absolute save for impeachment, so Trump could pardon himself. But would he dare? And Im not an expert on immigration law, but its hard to see how Trump is on shaky legal ground in deporting undocumented aliens. Other countries do it all the time. Try overstaying your visa and watch what happens if you get caught out.

Trump Shows Every Sign of Carrying Out Sweeping Immigration Crackdown Bloomberg. If Trump moves too fast on deportations, as opposed to policy changes (as in relying on loud noises, including warnings to employers, to induce many undocumented workers to leave of their own accord), Trump could precipitate sustained and serious protests. But the Feds may lack the staffing to increase deportations all that much near term.

Record Numbers of Undocumented Immigrants Being Detained in U.S. Bloomberg. Resilc: Last I checked a demo has been in control since 2008.

Trump bucks protocol on press access Associated Press. Lambert: And where were they when Clinton didnt hold a press conference for ~300 days?

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/58393. Martha r:

When you go to the link, click on Attachment to download the pdf of the 9-page report. from the bottom of page 6: OTHER INSIGHTS:

Based on group discussion, and debate exercises distributed prior to the debate.

By the Numbers

 Who won the debate: 27 to 2(or 3*) in favor of Sanders

 Who is more electable in November: 15 to 13 in favor of Sanders

 Who has a stronger message: 17 to 11 in favor of Sanders

 Who will win the South Carolina primary: 10 for Sanders, 9 for Clinton, and 11 unsure

 Who moved undecided voters: 14 lean Sanders, 2 lean Clinton, 14 remain undecided

*One of the HRC supporters was uncertain about her position post group.

The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why. FiveThirtyEight. Resilc: Because they are a con and mumbo jumbo? Moi: Notice how Silver focuses on how pollsters missed to exculpate his own failings. As Keynes said:

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

An App Saw Trump Winning Swing States When Polls Didnt NPR (jawbone)

The 13 most amazing findings in the 2016 exit poll Washington Post

Former Democratic candidate said he will not rule out another presidential bid in 2020 Common Dream

Trumptastic Voyage The Simpsons

Give BrandNewCongress.org a look

Join Bernie Sanders and Support Keith Ellison for DNC Chair Bernie

The Democrats are leaderless. Slate. Resilc: Bernie/Warren Crips vs Marthas Vineyard Bloods. Crips better win. Lambert and I saw Warrens outreach to Trump via the media yesterday as moving into the power vacuum.

The whole Democratic Party is now a smoking pile of rubble Vox. Yes. Heck of a job, Matty. Not that you are solely responsible, but you and your ilk were all oozing self congratulation these past eight years.

Democrats Deserve President Trump For Creating A Cult Following Around Hillary And Cheating Bernie | The Huffington Post (furzy(

Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more Robert Reich, Guardian (martha r). A good summing up.

Trump, Empathy & Epistemic Closure American Conservative (resilc)

DNC Staffer Screams At Donna Brazile For Helping Elect Donald Trump Huffington Post (kj1313)

Donna Brazile: Im sorry only that I got caught cheating with debate questions Salon. Resilc: Until these Demo swine pay the GOP will win.

5 countries Hillary Clinton supporters should move to The Duran (Chuck L)

Hillary Clintons Celebrity Feminism Was a Failure New Republic (Steve C)
By Felix Roth, Associated Research Fellow, University of Gottingen, Lars Jonung, Senior Professor, Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies, Lund University, and Felicitas Nowak-Lehmann, Senior Researcher at CEGE and IAI, University of Goettingen. Originally published at VoxEU

The euro as a common currency has recently been the subject of harsh criticism by economists from both sides of the Atlantic, including claims that citizens in some Eurozone countries are turning against the it. This column argues that, in fact, the euro currently enjoys comfortable popular support in each of the 12 original member states of the Eurozone and that potential upcoming referenda in any of these countries do not appear to pose a threat to the currency. In contrast, popular support for the euro has declined sharply in non-Eurozone EU member states since the recent crisis, with the UK standing out as the country with the most negative view.

Recently the euro as a common currency has been the subject of strong criticism by economists from both sides of the Atlantic (e.g. Stiglitz 2016, Sinn 2014). This criticism has been inspired by the financial and economic crisis in some Eurozone countries and by the slow recovery in the region after the Global Crisis of 2008. Scholars claim that a majority of citizens have turned against the euro in large member states of the Eurozone, such as Germany (Stiglitz 2016: 314) and Italy (Guiso et al. 2016: 292, Sinn in Kaiser 2016a).

In the wake of the vote for Brexit in the UK referendum in June this year, it is argued that knock-on effects in the form of potential upcoming referenda on the euro in the Eurozone (e.g. in Italy) might lead to its break-up (Feldstein 2016, Stiglitz in Martin 2016, Stiglitz in Kaiser 2016b). In addition, it has been postulated that animosity amongst EU member states is at a high (Alesina 2015: 78). This suggests a rising threat to the European project, including the common currency.

These claims concerning the standing of the euro raise the question: How does the public in EU member states actually look upon the common currency at this stage? We are able to provide an answer based on survey data on the popularity of the single currency, which are available from its creation, as polled by TNS-opinion (European Commission 2016). These data are provided through the Eurobarometer (EB). The euro is a unique currency in the sense that similar time series evidence does not exist for any other currency.

Our answer draws upon our previous contribution to this site (Roth et al. 2012), where we explored Eurobarometer survey data on public support for the common currency from 1990 to 2012. There we concluded that in the first four years of the crisis (2008-2012), public support for the euro declined only marginally. Now the question is: What has happened in the most recent years regarding public support for the euro?

Support for the Common Currency Within the Original Eurozone

We present an up-to-date picture of the evolution of public support for the euro until May 2016, adopting our approach in Roth et al. (2016). First, we focus on the original 12 Eurozone member states (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain  the EZ12) that adopted the euro as a physical entity in January 2002. Figure 1 shows average net support (in per cent) for the single currency in the EZ12 countries over a 27-year period from 1990 to 2016.

Figure 1 Average net support (in %) for the single currency in the EZ12 countries, 1990-2016

Note: The y-axis displays net support in percent. Since the figure depicts net-support, all values above 0 indicate that a majority of the respondents support the single currency. The dashed lines distinguish the introduction of the euro as a book keeping entity in January 1999, the actual circulation of the euro in January 2002 and the start of the financial crisis in September 2008. Data for EB45 were not available. Population-weights are applied. Net-support is measured as the number of For responses minus Against responses and is constructed according to the equation: Net-support = (For  Against)/(For + Against + Dont Know).

Source: Figure 1 is an updated version of Figure 1 until 5/2016 (by EBs 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016; 948).

Figure 1 leads us to the following conclusions:

Over the 27-year time period, a majority of citizens within the EZ12 has supported the single currency (with average net support exceeding 15% at all times).

Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, a large majority of EZ12 citizens has supported the euro (with average net support exceeding 30%).

In the 8th year (in May 2016) since the start of the financial crisis, average net support of 42% has surpassed the pre-crisis level of 40% in March-May 2008.

Figure 1 gives the aggregate picture. How has support for the euro evolved in the individual members of the EZ12? Figure 2 provides an answer.

Figure 2 Net support for the single currency in EZ12 countries, 1990-2016 (%)

Source: Figure 2 is an updated version of Figure A1 until 5/2016 (by EBs 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 957).

Figure 2 suggests that:

Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, aside from short periods in Finland and Greece before the crisis, a majority of citizens in each member state of the EZ12 supported the euro, even in times of crisis.

From 2008 to 2016, significant increases in support in Greece, Portugal and Germany (26, 23 and 10 percentage points, respectively) have levelled out the fall in net support in other EZ12 countries, ranging from 11 percentage points in Ireland to 5 percentage points in Finland.

Over the 27-year time period (1990-2016), Italy has always had a pro-euro majority, with the minimum net level of 17% in November 2013, clearly above the majority threshold of 0%.

Support for the Euro Among the New Members of the Eurozone

How has support for the euro evolved in the new member states that joined the euro after its physical introduction in January 2002, that is, in Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia? After adopting the euro, aside from short periods in Cyprus, a majority of citizens in each country has supported the euro.

Figure 3 Net support for the euro across seven EZ countries that joined the euro in the period 2004-16 (%)

Source: Figure 3 is an updated version of Figure A3 until 5/2016 (by EBs 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 958).

Support for the Euro Outside the Eurozone

In our 2012 column, we highlighted the distinct fall in public support for the euro in EU member states outside the Eurozone (Roth et al. 2012). What has happened since then? Figure 4, displaying the evolution of net support for the euro outside the Eurozone from 1990-2016, gives an answer.

Figure 4 Net support for the single currency in non-EZ countries, 1990-2016 (%)

Source: Figure 4 is an updated version of Figure A2 until 5/2016 (by EBs 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 958).

Figure 4 suggests:

Outside the Eurozone, net support for the euro has declined in a pronounced manner. Whereas in Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Poland a majority of citizens supported the euro in the years preceding the crisis, a majority in those countries has turned against the euro after the crisis. The decline in support, ranging from 65 to 30 percentage points, is strong. In contrast, in Romania and Hungary, in spite of a fall of 35 and 28 percentage points, respectively, a majority of euro support still exists.

In Denmark and Sweden, the majority has turned away from euro support after the crisis. Just before the crisis, there was for brief periods a majority for the euro.

The UK is an exceptional case. For the 26 years from 1991 to 2016, a majority of citizens was always against the single currency. During the crisis, net support for the euro reached levels as low as -66% (in November 2012). Given the persistent rejection of the euro, the Brexit vote should not come as a surprise but rather as reflecting a long-running critical view towards the European project. Therefore, any knock-on effects of the Brexit vote in the form of a break-up of the Eurozone via potential upcoming referenda in the Eurozone are not likely to emerge. On the contrary, recent survey data from July 2016 by the French polling institute, Ifop, suggest an enduring majority support for the euro in the Eurozone (Fourquet et al. 2016: 52).

Conclusions

Our updated analysis of public support for the common currency over a quarter of a century, from 1990-2016, brings out four major conclusions.

First, in contrast to recent claims, a majority of citizens support the euro in each member state of the original Eurozone, including in Germany and Italy. This was the case even during the peak of the recent crisis.

Second, in contrast to some critical euro voices, we do not believe, on basis of Eurobarometer data, that any knock-on effects of the Brexit vote in any potential upcoming referenda on EU issues would pose an imminent threat to the euro.

Third, taking into account our earlier findings, which identify the unemployment rate as a key driver of public support for the euro in times of crisis (Roth et al. 2016), a strong job recovery in the Eurozone is likely to increase public support for the euro.

Fourth, popular support for the common currency has fallen sharply after the recent crisis in EU member states that have not adopted the euro. Here the negative sentiment is strongest in the UK.

We suggest the following bottom line: with the exception of short periods in Finland and Greece before the crisis, the evidence points towards majority support for the euro in each original Eurozone member state (including Italy and Germany) before, during and after the crisis. So far, the euro has clear backing from the public. It has adopted the common currency as its own currency.

See original post for references
By Nick Cunningham, a Vermont-based writer on energy and environmental issues. You can follow him on twitter at @nickcunningham1. Originally published at OilPrice

Donald Trumps victory could ultimately lead to a lot more oil pipelines moving forward, one sector of the fossil fuel industry specifically targeted by environmentalists.

The most controversial project right now, the Dakota Access Pipeline, received a jolt from Tuesdays result. The more than 1,100-mile pipeline, valued at $3.7 billion, would carry oil from North Dakota to refineries in Illinois. The Obama administration has requested a temporary halt to construction, although the company behind the project, Energy Transfer Partners, has pressed forward, ignoring the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps reiterated a request for a stoppage this week, but the outcome is up in the air.

The Dakota Access Pipeline has been reeling from protests, work stoppages, bad press and a federal government willing to listen to the grievances from the Native American community affected. Trump has shown little inclination of being as accommodating, so the Dakota Access Pipeline has gone from being a project on the ropes to one with a great deal of momentum. Unless the Corps rescinds a permit in the next few months, the project will move forward. Even if it is blocked, however, it would likely be revived under a Trump administration. Energy Transfer Partners stock price surged as much as 9 percent on Wednesday and was up more than 3 percent on Thursday. The company hopes to complete construction by the first quarter of 2017.

And Dakota Access predecessor, at least in terms of a national flashpoint, could also be coming back from the dead. TransCanada issued a statement on Wednesday, telegraphing the companys interest in reviving the defunct Keystone XL Pipeline, which would take Alberta tar sands to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. TransCanada remains fully committed to building Keystone XL, spokesman Mark Cooper said in the post-election statement. We are evaluating ways to engage the new administration on the benefits, the jobs and the tax revenues this project brings to the table. TransCanadas stock price jumped more than 2 percent on Wednesday.

During the campaign Trump said that he supported the pipeline, but wanted the U.S. to get a better deal. His words are often conflicting and contradictory  he has also said that he is for an America First energy plan that would remove all barriers to responsible energy production. So there is no reason to think that he wouldnt simply revive the project as is, especially given that he is surrounding himself with advisors from the oil and gas industry.

Beyond these two projects, the oil industry is hoping for broader easing of permitting and regulations on pipeline construction. The Army Corps under Trump could clear the way for energy infrastructure, downgrading its scrutiny of the effects on rivers and lakes from oil pipelines. Were hopeful the pipeline approval process will now be allowed to work without political interference, John Stoody, vice president of the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, told E&E News. And with plans to dismantle much of the EPA, the ability to break ground and lay down pipeline could get a whole lot easier.

While Trump supports the Keystone XL Pipeline, his presidency complicates things for Canada a bit. For one, he wants to renegotiate NAFTA. But leaving that aside, the resuscitation of Keystone XL could create problems for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was thought to be nearing an approval for the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, which would take Alberta oil to the Pacific Coast. It is not obvious that both the Keystone XL Pipeline and Kinder Morgans Trans Mountain Pipeline both need to be built.

Related: Money Managers Slash Long Positions On Crude Amid OPEC Disputes

Albertas Premier is not ready to put all her eggs in one basket by trusting that the pathway to Canadas south for oil will be cleared up. We must continue to work to diversity Canadas energy markets, and to build trading relationships with more than one buyer, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said in a statement following Trumps victory. For that reason, a Canadian pipeline to tidewater remains an important priority for Alberta.

Finally, the environmental movement has been left shocked and terrified over what a Trump administration would mean for the environment, but they have vowed not to give an inch. I think they will greenlight lots of fossil fuel projects, Jane Kleeb, a key activist fighting the Keystone XL Pipeline in Nebraska, told E&E News. And well fight all of them.
Yves here. While the recent trend in foreclosures looks alarming, it appears that servicers are making a push to clear out what they regard as old inventory, even though it appears to be include defaults that started after the crisis. One has to note cynically that they waited to the tail end of the Obama administration to act. Did servicers hope that their move would not get much notice from the press, given all the election noise, and hence little to no pushback from politicians in the affected cities and states. Here is one take, from DSNews:

October foreclosure filings increased 27 percent from the previous month after experiencing a 129-month low in September, according to the latest U.S. Foreclosure Market Report from ATTOM Data Solutions. Despite increases month-over-month in foreclosure starts, bank repossessions (REO), and scheduled foreclosure auctions, these trends including total foreclosure filings still saw a marginal decline year-over-year. Part of this could be tied somewhat to the election with lenders holding back for the last few months as there are uncertainty around the election, says Daren Blomquist, SVP of ATTOM Data Solutions. Even though they didnt know the outcome in October when we saw this activity take place, there was probably a lot of certainty thinking that Clinton would win. I think with this certainty, lenders went ahead and pushed through more foreclosures.

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street

The total number of homes with foreclosure filings jumped 27% in October from September, when theyd been at the lowest level since 2006. It was the biggest jump in monthly foreclosure filings since August 2007.

Compared to October last year, homes with foreclosure filings still decreased, but this nationwide decrease is covering up what is now happening in 28 states and Washington D.C., according to the Foreclosure Report by ATTOM Data Solutions. There, the inventory of homes with foreclosure filings is beginning to rise even on a year-over year basis. And in some states it soared year-over-year:

Colorado +64%

Georgia +22%

Pennsylvania +20%

Arizona +17%

Virginia +15%

Massachusetts +11%

New York +10%

When home prices rise for years, foreclosure filings become rare because defaulting homeowners can usually sell the home for more than they owe and pay off the mortgage. The problem arises when home prices fail to rise locally, and it balloons when home prices fall. Weve seen that last time around. After bouncing along super low levels during Housing Bubble 1 through 2005, foreclosure filings skyrocketed during the housing crash starting in 2006. At first it was just an uptick that no one paid attention to. By 2008, it helped take down the financial system.

Foreclosure filings peaked in late 2009, began dropping in 2010, and then tapered down to 2006 levels as foreclosures were processed, and as the home price surge of Housing Bubble 2 made new defaults less likely. But the spike in October stands out as much as those in the early phases of the housing bust in 2006 and 2007. Note the blue bar on the right:

While some states are still trying to digest the foreclosures from the last housing crisis, according to Daren Blomquist, senior VP at ATTOM, the foreclosure activity increases in states such as Arizona, Colorado and Georgia are more heavily tied to loans originated since 2009:

The loans used in this housing recovery that appear to be most susceptible to foreclosure are those such as FHA and VA with low down payments. Our data shows FHA and VA loans combined represent 49% of all active foreclosure inventory for loans originated in the seven years ending in 2015.

This chart shows the soaring proportion of FHA and VA mortgages issued since 2009 among the active foreclosure inventory.

On average across the nation, the foreclosure rate was one foreclosure filing for every 1,258 housing units. But in some states, the foreclosure rate was much worse. Here are the top ten:

Delaware: one in every 355 housing units New Jersey: one in every 564 housing units Maryland: one in every 679 housing units Illinois: one in every 704 housing units South Carolina: one in every 801 housing units Nevada: one in every 826 housing units Florida: one in every 895 housing Ohio: one in every 930 housing units Pennsylvania: one in every 1,018 housing units Georgia: one in every 1,028 housing units.

And here are the top ten highest foreclosure rates among the 216 metropolitan areas with a population of over 200,000:

York-Hanover, PA: one in every 274 housing units Atlantic City, NJ: one in every 301 housing units Rockford, IL: one in every 481 housing units Columbia, SC: one in every 498 housing units Trenton, NJ: one in every 499 housing units. Reading, PA: one in every 542 housing units Chicago, IL: one in every 571 housing units Dayton, OH: one in every 573 housing units Philadelphia, PA: one in every 597 housing units Salisbury, MD: one in every 625 housing units.

These foreclosure filings are based on data that ATTOM gathered in 2,200 counties where over 90% of the US population lives. They include data on the three phases of foreclosure:

Foreclosure starts: lender issues Notice of Default (NOD) and Lis Pendens (LIS)

Auction notices for future public foreclosure auctions: Notice of Trustees Sale (NTS) and Notice of Foreclosure Sale (NFS);

Real Estate Owned (REO) properties that have been foreclosed on and were repurchased by a bank at auction and are now held by the bank.

Broken down based on these three phases of the foreclosure process:

Foreclosure starts jumped 25% in October from the prior month, to 43,352. While still down 11% year-over-year, it was the highest monthly increase in foreclosure starts since December 2008.

Foreclosure starts increased even year-over-year in 23 states and Washington D.C. In some states they soared. The top five:

Colorado +71% Arizona +48% Ohio +34% New York +15% Virginia +15

Auction notices jumped 30% from the prior month to 43,815 (in some states, these are foreclosure starts), the biggest monthly increase since January 2006. While still down 6% year-over-year nationally, auction notices rose year-over-year in 25 states and Washington D.C. The top five:

Pennsylvania +66% Indiana +37% Illinois +34% New York +12% New Jersey +6%

Bank repossessions (REO) jumped 25% from the prior month to 34,288 homes, the biggest monthly increase since July 2015. While REOs were still down 6% year-over-year nationally, they increased in 22 states and Washington D.C. The top five:

Massachusetts +104% Georgia +53% Wisconsin +45% Texas +38% Virginia +17%

The fact that mortgages issued since 2009 are now seeing rising defaults again is worrisome enough. Its doubly concerning that 49% of these foreclosure filings are on homes with low-down-payment mortgages backed by the FHA and VA and issued since 2009. Recall that low-down-payment mortgages played a big role in the last housing collapse.

ATTOM VP Blomquist tries to remain sanguine: The increase in October isnt enough evidence to indicate a new foreclosure crisis emerging in these states, but it certainly demonstrates that this housing recovery is not completely devoid of risk.

So take this as an early red flag, the kind you might have seen in 2006 when no one paid attention to red flags in the housing market.

Some of the same characters that played leading roles during the last housing bubble and bust are back in their full glory. Read Housing Bust 2? Low- and No-Down-Payment Mortgages Surge, Shadow Banks Dominate
NASCAR championship contenders have plenty of ARCA Menards Series experience The Championship 4 have been set for the NASCAR Cup Series, NASCAR Xfinity Series and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, and the contenders in each series all have plenty of experience  and in most cases success  within the ARCA Menards Series platform.
The US-led coalition against Daesh announced that over 1,300 of the jihadist militants have been killed since October, when joint Iraqi forces first teamed up with the coalition to take back Mosul, Sputnik International reported.

UN special representative to Iraq Yan Kubish told the UN Security Council on Wednesday that 58,000 deaths had been recorded in Iraq since Daesh first took control of Mosul in 2014, up until September 2016.

The operation to regain control over Mosul began in the morning of Oct. 17. In addition to Iraqs government forces, local Peshmerga paramilitaries participate in the operation.

The operation is supported by international anti-terrorism coalition air force.

Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq with a population of 1.3 million people, has been under the IS control for more than two years.

Mosul was surrendered almost without a fight during the extremists attack in June 2014.

The Islamic State considers Mosul as its main stronghold in Iraq.
The festive season will take full flight at the Limerick Institute of Technology on Wednesday 30th November as the Marketlink Entrepreneur Program hits the Clonmel campus.

First and Third year Bachelor of Business students along with first year Bachelor of Science in Creative Multimedia students will host the fun filled day to raise vital funds for local charities St. Vincent de Paul and The Deise Animal Sanctuary.

The Christmas themed market will be open to the public with plenty on offer from the 10 different stalls present on the day.

Marketing and Entrepreneurship lecturer Fiona Browne says - The MarketLink Entrepreneur programme facilitates the application to theory learned in the classroom setting. As part of continuous assessment, students research and plan a market stall business which they will then manage on a group basis for a day. The exercise sharpens business acumen as students are exposed to issues faced by start-up and small businesses. The assignment instils confidence and professionalism in students, while enhancing both hard and soft skills.

The event which has now been running at the LIT campus in Moylish, Limerick for nine years has been extremely successful with sums of up to 8,000 raised on the day for chosen charities. Not only is the event significant for the charities involved but it is also hugely beneficial for the students as Head of the Department of Business Eoghan Sadlier states. There is no substitute for a good business idea. The MarketLink Entrepreneur programme is a good example of getting students to walk the walk instead of talking the talk. Putting theory and business ideas into practice will prove to be invaluable for these students as they look to progress their careers beyond third level education.

The market is open to the public from 10am  2pm with all proceeds going to worthy local charities.

Check out the LIT Facebook page to keep up to date with this and many other events throughout the year at www.facebook.com/LimerickIT.
Iraqi security forces are preparing to advance toward Mosul airport on the city's southern edge to increase pressure on Islamic State militants fighting troops who breached their eastern defenses, officers said, Reuters reported.

The rapid response forces, part of a coalition seeking to crush them in the largest city under their control in Iraq or Syria, took the town of Hammam al-Alil, just over 15 km (10 miles) south of Mosul, on Monday.

Officers say they plan to resume their advance north, up the western bank of the Tigris River towards the city of 1.5 million people who have lived under the ultra-hardline Sunni Islamists for more than two years.

The operation to regain control over Mosul began in the morning of Oct. 17. In addition to Iraqs government forces, local Peshmerga paramilitaries participate in the operation.

The operation is supported by international anti-terrorism coalition air force.

Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq with a population of 1.3 million people, has been under the IS control for more than two years.

Mosul was surrendered almost without a fight during the extremists attack in June 2014.

The Islamic State considers Mosul as its main stronghold in Iraq.
Killenaule parents Maggie Butler and Michael Power are calling on the Government to reinstate the mobility allowance so that their son can continue attending school and hospital appointments.

Five year old Alex Butler, a twin to Adam, was born at 27 weeks. He has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, epilepsy, sleep apnea, vision impairment and is tube- fed. Alex spent last Christmas and New Years in Temple Street Children's University Hospital on a ventilator fighting for his life. He requires 24/7 care, cant travel in a car seat and needs to be accompanied by a nurse.

Maggie was presented with the South Tipperary Carer of the Year award at a special ceremony in Clonmel Town Hall on Friday last, November 4. She told The Nationalist that she isnt getting adequate resources to care for her son. Their 2008 Renault Trafic was purchased two years ago, has clocked up over 230,000 kms and is on its last legs. The family had to take out a loan with the Credit Union to fund the car and still have two years of repayments left. They fear the destructive effect it will have on Alexs development if the car breaks down.

A roadworthy wheelchair accessible car is an absolute necessity in order for Alex to continue attending up to three hospital appointments per week and Scoil Aonghusa in Cashel. She hopes that a meeting with Minister of State for Disability Issues Finian McGrath can be arranged to coincide with the national carer awards on November 16 or shortly afterwards to discuss the challenges they face on a daily basis.

Its constant battle for services and grants such as the mobility grant which Mattie McGrath and councillors Imelda Goldsboro and Richie Molloy are helping us with, Maggie explained.

Alex gets up at 6am for school where he has a physio regime, speech and language  After school, Alex goes in a standing frame to help with his hips. We monitor him for seizures all the time, she informed.

Maggie said its lovely to be awarded South Tipperary Carer of the Year and thanked everyone for attending the ceremony. She also praised Alexs twin Adam, sisters Megan (8) and Caoimhe (13) and brother Dillon (15) for helping out. Alex responds very well to them, she smiled.

In nominating Maggie for the award, Carrick-on-Suir carer Michelle Russell highlighted her admiration for Maggie. She dedicates her life to her partner Michael and her children. She does an amazing job with Alex and will go to the end of the earth and back for him. In spite of all this Maggie has the time to fundraise every year for the Jack and Jill Foundation and other childrens charities, she noted.

Family Carers Ireland area manager Cllr. Richie Molloy paid tribute to the unbelievable care and dedication Maggie has shown her son, before pinpointing the problems carers with children who have special needs face.

Its personal stories like Maggies that register at Government level, Cllr. Molloy highlighted.

Carers in Maggies position know that there are hardly any resources available. Any carer that has to attend Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin understands how difficult it is to get to Dublin for a start off. As an organisation were very strong on the fact that the site which has been earmarked for the childrens hospital is definitely in the wrong place, especially for people in rural areas such as Tipperary. How are these people going to get there? We call again on the Government to review that decision and change the position of the site, Cllr. Molloy continued.

Independent TD Mattie congratulated Maggie, before calling on Minister Finian McGrath to immediately escalate Government efforts to introduce a revised version of both the mobility allowance and motorised transport grant schemes. I can see the constant fight Maggie and Michael have on a daily basis to get anything. At the moment its the mobility grant which was axed in 2013. We take for granted [being able to put our kids and grandchildren] into cars, drop in the car seat and away we go. We don't realise that they need to have a specially adapted car. It shouldnt even be a question; they should be entitled to the mobility grant as simple as that, he voiced.

Deputy McGrath later said: The minister has informed me that the legislation required to introduce the new schemes is still only at draft stage. This will come as a severe disappointment to all families, like those of Alex Butler, who have been hit hard since the sudden closure of the schemes three years ago.

Family Carers Ireland regional manager Pat Grogan also criticised the lack of resources for children with special needs. Medical cards for children have been introduced in recent years, but this needs to be extended to kids with special needs. Were lobbying for the therapies a child needs to be included. Its a wrong situation that needs to be addressed, he voiced.

Mayor of the Clonmel/Cahir Borough District Cllr. Andy Moloney said Maggie is a well worthy recipient of the award, but suggested that its only small comfort for what she has to deal with daily.

It's a great honour to have won the award, but it works out at 29c an hour for the average carer. Its a voluntary organisation, and the day that volunteers and carers put down tools and say were not caring our health system will reach a stand still.

Maggie needs the mobility grant and the car to do what she needs to do and have some bit of pleasure in life. Hopefully a meeting with the minister will have rewards, Mayor Moloney concluded.




Before Steven Mnuchin became a possible candidate for Treasury secretary, he was a driving force behind one of the most controversial banking turnarounds during the financial crisis.

Mnuchin was the top fundraiser for Donald Trump's victorious presidential campaign. He is now viewed as one of the leading candidates to run the Treasury Department as speculation about the future Trump cabinet grows. Other possible names that have been floated in connection with the job include House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling and even JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon.

Mnuchin, who spent nearly two decades at Goldman Sachs, had drawn attention in recent years for a big gamble he and fellow investors took in commercial banking. He was instrumental in the recapitalization of the failed mortgage lender IndyMac, its return to financial health as OneWest Bank and its ultimate sale it to CIT Group in a lucrative deal. He joined the CIT board after the 2015 sale and has since pushed the $66 billion-asset company to slim down and boost returns.

How that experience would translate into a career in public service is unclear. Though Mnuchin  who has never held public office  has a track record of success in financial services, there have also been hiccups along the way, including criticism from community groups for ignoring the needs of underserved communities.

"He took a company that was a very visibly failed institution of the mortgage crisis and rehabilitated it," said Vincent Caintic, an analyst with Stephens. "He made it into a stable and viable company and sold it successfully for double the money."

Caintic said that Mnuchin's experience rehabilitating companies could bode well for a career in government. Additionally, the fact that he worked closely with regulators, negotiating the terms of a failed-bank acquisition, could work in his favor.

But memories of Mnuchin's crisis-era move into banking still gnaw at some community activists. Mnuchin in 2009 led a group of Wall Street investors  including George Soros and John Paulson  in rebuilding IndyMac under the OneWest brand.

"In some ways, the bank was the poster child for income inequality," said Kevin Stein, deputy director at the California Reinvestment Coalition, noting the disconnect between the high-profile bank investors and borrowers who were struggling during the crisis to pay their mortgages.

Stein said that the company generated ill will around its Pasadena, Calif., footprint, in particular, because of foreclosures it made on widows through Financial Freedom, its reverse-mortgage-servicing business.

Financial Freedom is currently under investigation by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for issues related to its accounting. CIT has discontinued the business.

The deal also was one of those that attracted intense scrutiny because of the windfall it generated for private-equity investors, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Sheila Bair has said.

Though a nomination is uncertain, especially in as fluid a situation as the days following Trump's stunning win over Hillary Clinton, it would mark a career shift for Mnuchin, a financial executive who has had a somewhat peripatetic career.

Mnuchin began his financial services career in 1985 at Goldman, where he ultimately rose to partner and chief information officer. He left the investment banking giant in 2002 and, two years later, established the investment firm Dune Capital Management.

Outside of his career in banking, he has also earned a reputation in film. He has helped finance hit movies such as "Avatar." He also briefly served as co-chairman of Relativity Media but resigned last year before the Beverly Hills, Calif., studio filed for bankruptcy.

Within the world of bread-and-butter banking, though, Mnuchin has earned a reputation for getting results.

Mnuchin decided to enter the business back in 2008, when he saw a TV news shot of customers lined up outside of the $32 billion-asset IndyMac, hoping to withdraw their money. He decided that the time was right to buy a bank, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek story on him.

He led a group of investors who bought the assets of IndyMac in 2009, nine months after its blockbuster failure. The group negotiated lucrative terms to a loss-share agreement with the FDIC and within less than a year turned a $1.6 billion profit.

As chairman of the newly formed OneWest, Mnuchin helped lead a rapid turnaround. The company moved away from risky mortgage loans and sought to become a more of a "full-service" regional bank with additional branches, according to Caintic.

In August 2015, OneWest was sold to CIT, which was run at the time by Wall Street icon John Thain. The deal pushed CIT  another crisis-era turnaround story  above the threshold to be considered a systemically important financial institution.

A key priority of Thain was asset growth and burnishing CIT's reputation as a major industry player. But Mnuchin has been influential in pushing CIT to focus, instead, on boosting returns and simplifying its business model.

Mnuchin was a key figure behind CIT's decision last year to shed its costly aircraft-leasing business, according to Caintic. The company announced plans to sell it last fall; Thain at the same time announced his intention to step down. Thain was succeeded earlier this year by Ellen Alemany, who currently serves as chairman and CEO and was previously a member of the CIT board.

CIT's acquisition of OneWest encountered a number of challenges. The reverse-mortgage business has had significant problems with its accounting. There have also been issues with culture clashes between the two companies.

The deal also received significant pushback from community activists, who criticized the foreclosure policies at OneWest and its overall commitment to working with underserved communities.

In approving the deal, regulators required CIT to revise its plan to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act.

"What we know of [Mnuchin] is in relation to OneWest Bank, which we found to be very problematic," Stein said.

Still, both at OneWest and now on the board of CIT, Mnuchin has backed decisive actions that benefit shareholders.

CIT, for instance, is in the midst of a multiyear effort to boost its return on average common equity above 10%, in part through significant cost cuts. As of the third quarter that figure stood at 7.5%.

"I think they have been a positive influence on getting CIT back on track," Caintic said. "Mnuchin has been a key person in pushing for that type of execution."
President-elect Donald Trump's victory poses a unique quandary for the Federal Reserve both before and after he is sworn in  whether the central bank should attempt to finish the many rules still in process or keep its head down to avoid provoking a hostile Congress.

The Fed has a raft of rules still outstanding, many of which relate to the Basel III accords and Dodd-Frank requirements that remain incomplete.

Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president of Regulation at the American Bankers Association, said the big question is whether the agencies  including independent ones like the Fed  will rush to complete those rules before Trump takes office.

"Will there be a rush on the part of these agenciesto rush things through before the new president is inaugurated in January?" Abernathy said. "I don't think there are as many opportunities to do that as in the pastbut there might be some."

Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, said that there typically is a rush at the end of each calendar year to get rules out the door, and that tendency is heightened during administration changes  even between terms of the same president.

But with this particular transfer of power, where there are major ideological differences between the parties relinquishing control and those assuming it, that normal rush will likely be intensified  even if just to make policies that much harder to reverse.

"I think that will be hyperactive policy making, because I think the Obama administration and the federal regulators will tryto get as much done as they can before the new president and structure come in," Petrou said. "I think they will try to finish as much as they can to try to force policy reversals through a more lengthy, deliberative process."

There are a number of outstanding rules on the Fed's docket, some of which may be finalized.

The most likely regulation to be completed by the end of the Obama administration is the Total Loss Absorbing Capacity rule, which the Fed proposed last October and which would require the U.S. Global Systemically Important Banks to hold unsecured debt that can be used to recapitalize a successor institution should it fail.

Fed Gov. Daniel Tarullo, who chairs the Fed Board's Committee on Supervision, said in an appearance at Columbia Law School last month that TLAC and other resolution rules are critical elements in the regulatory toolbox  elements that cannot be replaced by simply mandating higher capital standards, because capital can be expended in a crisis and when it is, the firm has nothing to recapitalize itself with.

"At some point, the firmis no longer in an actively capitalized state. So in a sense it doesn't matter where your capital level was beforehand, you now have to stipulate that they don't have it anymore  that's why they're in resolution," Tarullo said. "That's why you need an identifiable set of instruments which will, by definition, not have been eroded in the run-up to the stress period, which will then be available to the [Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.] to convert into equity, thereby recapitalizing the firm."

The Fed is also considering a net stable funding ratio  another regulation outlined in Basel III  which is designed to ensure that the largest banks have stable funding sources to maintain operations for one year. That rule, which was proposed in April, hewed closely to the Basel outline but was still criticized by banks as unnecessary.

Other regulations include a single counterparty credit limit proposed in March, a plan to set capital weights for banks' commodity assets that was proposed in September, and an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking  a kind of regulatory pre-proposal  for capital and supervisory standards for systemically important nonbanks in June. Tarullo also outlined a series of changes to the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review stress tests in a speech in September, but those changes have for the most part not been formally proposed.

The Fed  along with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, FDIC, National Credit Union Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Housing Finance Agency  issued a proposal in April limiting incentive-based compensation for banking executives. That plan has been a high priority for the Obama administration, but its progress has also been uncommonly slow, owed in large part to the challenges of coordinating a single rule across multiple agencies.

Trump himself has been inconsistent in his attitude toward the central bank and its chair, Janet Yellen. He has by turns praised her stance on monetary policy as wide and measured, and has also criticized the same policies as being designed to benefit his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. He was critical of Wall Street during his campaign, even attempting to pick up former supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) by touting his antipathy to the finance industry.

But his fellow Republicans in Congress have criticized the Fed more consistently and on a range of issues. Yellen has routinely faced questions during her semiannual Congressional testimonies about the virtues of a rule-based monetary policy, the need for the Government Accountability Office to audit the central bank's monetary policy decisions, scrutiny about a leak from the Federal Open Markets Committee in 2012, and questions about the Fed's payment of Interest on Excess Reserves.

One banking industry official who asked not to be quoted on the record said that the Fed should take Congress' hostility into account when it considers whether to attempt to finish its regulatory agenda, particularly as it pertains to Basel commitments.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision  which is charged with outlining the accords  has been in a public feud with the European Union for months about whether and to what extent the final Basel rules will amount to higher capital requirements for member banks. EU officials have suggested that if that were the case, the bloc would simply not abide by them, whereas Basel officials have suggested that the rules would not amount to a substantial increase in capital.

The Fed would be ill-advised if it seeks to finalize a series of rules related to Basel before Republicans take over Washington in January, the banking official said, because it could draw unwanted attention and give Congress reason to push for the kinds of structural changes to the Fed that the central bank has fought so hard to avoid.

"I think they have a lot of reason for concern in a Republican Washington, which is interested in auditing the Fed, restructuring the Fed, and doing any number of things to the Fed," one banking industry official said. "I think this would be an inopportune time of them to be seen as subverting both the transition process for the administration and the Basel process by rushing out rules that the rest of the world is retreating from."

While Trump's views on bank capital requirements may be hazy, others in his transition team might have more definitive stances. If the Fed were to beat feet to try to get those rules out the door before Trump takes office, that might push the new president to put people in place who, like the EU and Asian countries, are loath to increase capital requirements for banks.

"There's a reason the Basel accords are fracturing in Europe and Asia, and it's becausethe finance ministries have concluded that higher capital requirement are hurting their economic growth," the official said. "I wouldn't be surprised if some people in the Trump orbit have a similar belief, or come to have that belief. I would be very surprised if the Fed were unwise enough to rush out rules before the Trump administration comes in. That would probably be a very unwise thing to do in terms of their long-term interests."

Others are not so sure that a Trump administration would be easy on the banking industry. Upon arrival, Trump will have two vacancies to fill on the Fed board, one of whom could also be appointed as Vice Chairman for Supervision  a yet unfilled position created by Dodd-Frank designed to focus a top official on banking supervision. Tarullo, whose term expires in 2022, is also widely expected to resign if and when Trump nominates someone else to that position, which would create a third vacancy within months of the new administration.

Former FDIC chairman Sheila Bair said that Trump could pick someone as vice chairman for supervision who could meet his Congressional counterparts' demands for a more hawkish monetary policy on the FOMC and also be tough on Wall Street. FDIC Vice Chairman Thomas Hoenig, current Kansas City Fed President Esther George and Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker would all meet those criteria, she said, and those picks would likely face a relatively easy confirmation.

"I'd love to see a Tom Hoenig, Jeff Lacker, Esther George or some of those regional Fed presidents" take the job, Bair said. "Regional Fed presidents would be good candidates that would get bipartisan support. I could see some common ground."
Eight years ago, as Barack Obama woke up the day after he was elected president of the United States, he faced housing and economic challenges of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression. These included a raging foreclosure crisis and deepening recession, plummeting stock market, a contentious $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout, and concerns about whether our major financial institutions could survive.

Today, the storm is over and the financial environment is very different. Facing no economic crisis, the new president has much more flexibility regarding the challenges surrounding housing policies that he might want to take on. How will he choose?

The national homeownership rate is at its lowest level in 50 years. Yet, despite recent decades of a bipartisan consensus in the overriding importance of homeownership, this announcement elicited almost no reaction, no calls to arms for new programs or a commitment to reverse this trend.

Instead, the new president faces different, more subtle challenges. Rents have skyrocketed in many communities and rental affordability for lower- and even moderate-income families and seniors has become a real concern. The government has some tools at its disposal  a newly implemented National Housing Trust Fund, pending affordable rental housing Duty-to-Serve requirements for the government-sponsored enterprises, and federal assistance in the form of Housing Choice Voucher Program and public housing assistance. But the federal budget is tight, and the government has limited tools at its disposal. The question is whether the new president will make this a priority, and if so, whether it will turn to government programs, private sector initiatives, or both, to address the problem.

A second issue is access to mortgage credit. Irresponsible lending practices of the last decade gave to more conservative underwriting policies and the Ability-to-Repay rule. Lenders are also exercising more caution in general. The question is whether we have overreacted in the other direction, whether mortgage credit is too restrictive. And if so, is the answer to push the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do more to meet housing needs? Or will the new administration work to bring in more private sector lending, by trying to revive the mortgage-backed securities market, or increasing bank mortgage loans.

Federal housing policy issues loom large. Remarkably, it's been more than eight years since the government took the GSEs into conservatorship, with no clear end in sight. It is not clear whether Congress has the stomach to take another crack at reform, given its complexity and ideological divisions. Arguably, this will only become a reality in the next several years if the new administration makes reform a priority, and a commitment to see it through.

Divisions also exist when looking at the Federal Housing Administration. Some believe that as a major source of mortgage loans for first-time homebuyers and minorities, particularly for otherwise qualified lower FICO score and low-down-payment borrowers, the FHA should be doing more, whether by cutting premiums and/or focusing more on helping the still-significant number of distressed borrowers with loan modifications. Others believe that the FHA is standing in the way of private sector lenders coming back into the market, and would like to see the FHA return to more historical levels of market share.

Finally, the most contentious partisan issue going into the next administration and the next Congress likely is what will happen with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The mortgage industry has been at a standoff for six years, with one side arguing that CFPB rules and supervision are stifling mortgage lending and other credit, and those on the other side strongly defending and resisting changes to the Dodd-Frank Act and the CFPB.

The recent ruling on PHH v. CFPB by the U.S. Court of Appeals has raised some questions about the structure of the CFPB and we can expect the CFPB's governance structure to be a continuing battle within Congress. The new administration will have to decide whether to wade into this battle  and if it does, whether it wants to take a side in the debate.

As Thanksgiving approaches, we can all give thanks we don't have the crises we faced the last time a new administration took office. But the preceding discussion shows that there is no lack of issues and choices with regard to housing policies. To be sure, there are a host of other domestic and other foreign policy challenges. So the real question is: where does housing rank on the list of priorities being drawn up as a new administration takes power? We will soon find out.

Scott Olson is Executive Director of the Community Home Lenders Association and former Democratic Housing Policy Director, House Financial Services Committee.
Sedition is okay when Democrats call for it?

No constitutional way to secede, so violence may be a foregone conclusion

(NaturalNews) As we feared was likely to happen, an election victory for Republican President-elect Donald J. Trump is sparking dangerous protests in far-Left regions of the country, with some activists now openly calling for violence.In an interview with CNN the day after Trump defeated Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, a Latina woman named "Lilly" was clear and blatant in her threat to turn American cities into war zones."If we don't fight, who is going to fight for us? People had to die for your freedom where we're at today. We can't just do rallies, we have to fight back," she said."There will be casualties on both sides. There will be, because people have to die to make a change in this world," she continued. "Trump, enough with your racism. Stop splitting families. Don't split my family."Never mind the hypocrisy, once more, of the Left  they claim to have cornered the market on "compassion" while denouncing the "hate" of the right  what this woman is calling for isThat's sedition, pure and simple. Beyond that, it's a threat to murder American citizens. But you'll notice from the video featured here atthat the idiot CNN "reporter" didn't even bother to point out the danger of this woman's threat or make her aware that what she appeared to be calling for was the start of another civil war We can only imagine the virulent outrage if Clinton had won and Trump supporters took to the street threatening another civil war. The establishment media coverage would be wall-to-wall. President Obama would be denouncing the candidate and his supporters. Clinton herself would claim she was right about Trump voters being "deplorables."But the fact is, as has been documented over and over again , Clinton- and Obama-aligned Leftists have been the instigators of violence throughout this election cycle. And now that Trump has pulled off what they viewed as impossible, they don't want to accept the results  though they would have demanded the country accept Clinton had she been victorious.This threat of violence is real and there are indications that it's only going to get worse. For example, in the wake of Trump's victory, the insane Left now wants California to secede from the United States (#Calexit), with state leaders having already contemplated it, which is amazing in and of itself.Mind you, Left-wing Democrats are the same people who ridiculed and demonized a secession movement in Texas during the administration of Barack Obama, saying that the first Civil War decided the issue and that any attempt to pursue same is a waste of time.My, how hypocrisy changes perspectives when, suddenly, the angry Left doesn't get its way.But it's not just California. A wider movement would have four states secede from them to form their own country : Nevada, California, Oregon and Washington.All of this is based on an irrational and unrealistic belief that somehow, in this day and age, Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will attempt to bring back slavery and institutionalized racism, all while jailing gays and lesbians and militarizing the borders. That kind of thinking is epically stupid, narrow-minded and just plain goofy, but it passes for legitimate among the political Left. It also lays bare the absolute hatred the Left has for any ideal they disagree with and any person who is not on their side, politically and ideologically.Our founding fathers sought to break away from an England that was oppressive, autocratic and unwilling to grant its subjects in the colonies basic human rights and freedoms. Their adherence and loyalty to the crown was non-negotiable, and whatever the king wanted, the colonists had no reasonable recourse against.Those conditions don't exist today, despite what these violent Leftists want you to believe. There are constitutional protections; there are courts; there are state legislatures and various other avenues of recourse. In fact, realistically speaking,, by ignoring provisions and statutory laws he did not agree with.But Trump , who has never held an elected office, is being compared to some of history's worst figures, simply because he believes in the rule of law and the Constitution. And for that, crazy Californians and Leftist thinkers on the West Coast want out.The danger here is, if they don't get their way legally and constitutionally, they will resort to violence. And in fact, the latter option is the most likely, considering that after the Civil War, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that there was nothing in the Constitution that permitted a state to leave the union once it was accepted in.We're already seeing the fomentation of discontent to which the always-violent Left seems perpetually engaged. It could get ugly from here.
Sting operation targets dangerous moms and their home cooking

Prosecutors punish defendant for refusing unfair plea agreement

(NaturalNews) A single Californian mom with six children is facing a possible jail sentence foron a Facebook community food group.Several years ago, Stockton resident Mariza Ruelas joined a Facebook food and recipe trading group called 209 Food Spot. There, Ruelas and other cooking enthusiasts would trade recipes, organize pot luck dinners, and sometimes sell their home cooking to group members who lived nearby.Occasionally, Ruelas would sell or trade her signature version of ceviche  a classic Latin-American seafood dish  to friends or contacts on 209 Food Spot.One day, she received an order for her ceviche through the Facebook group from a person whom she thought was just another food enthusiast, but who in fact was a San Joaquin County undercover agent.Ruelas and a dozen other members of the group were the target of an elaborate sting operation that was apparently needed to make sure moms don't make a little extra cash selling their homemade cooking to other food lovers.The offenders were charged with running food operations and engaging in business without proper permits.All of the others charged accepted plea bargains involving probation, fines and community service, but Ruelas refused to give in and decided to fight her case in court.If she loses, she faces up to two years behind bars."It was just, like, unreal that they were saying that you could face up to a year in jail," Ruelas toldOn Facebook, Ruelas wrote:"It was just some cooking me and my daughters would do for fun on a weekend we didn't have anything to do."Never tried to be in business. Never tried making an extreme amount of money. I just enjoy cooking. Not something I want to do daily lol or even weekly."Ruelas chose to fight the charges because she felt that the terms of her plea bargain offer were unreasonable, and that she had received a harsher sentence for being outspoken.From The"Most of the offers gave the defendants a year of probation, 40 hours of community service and $250 in fines. But Ruelas said hers was different  she was offered three years' probation and 80 hours of community service. She said it was her punishment for refusing to take down her posts about the ceviche incident from social media."In fact, just after Ruelas refused to accept the plea agreement, prosecutors, instead of revising the plea bargain terms, decided to pursue two additional misdemeanor charges against the defendant. If those charges stick, Ruelas could serve as much as two years jail time.The absurdity of this case is staggering. However necessary food safety laws may be, they are obviously not intended in spirit to apply to those who share  and yes, occasionally sell  their home cooking as a hobby.It's reasonably safe to assume that Mariza Ruelas gained a following for her ceviche because it was fresh, tasty and prepared with the kind of care that moms are famous for.Meanwhile, fast food companies sell poisonous industrial garbage that is killing people and causing disease, GMO agricultural corporations spray their Frankenfood crops withbefore foisting them on the public, and grocery store shelves are lined with processed foods that contain lots ofand little nutrition.But none of them are subject to criminal charges. Instead, imprisonment for food safety violations seems to be reserved only for people like Mariza Ruelas.Nice to know that our tax dollars are being put to good use in funding elaborate sting operations designed to prevent us from ever having a chance to taste Mariza's specialty dishes.
Hillary campaign tried to steal Bernie Sanders' platform, emails reveal

(NaturalNews) Julian Assange's sacrificial effort to expose the vast corruption behind the Clinton Machine through his "WikiLeaks" releases, has done so much over the past year to change the course of both the nation and the world for the better  most notably with the recent election of outsider Donald J. Trump as America's next president-elect. But what else do these WikiLeaks releases reveal that hasn't been covered by the media, particularly with regards to food policy?A simple search for the word "Monsanto" in The Podesta Emails batch of leaked email documents shows that the biotechnology giant is a close friend of Hillary Clinton and her family's Clinton Foundation  big surprise, right? Dozens of emails and email chains speak about the world's most evil corporation, several discussing its many contributions to what has now been exposed as a massive money-laundering "charity" scam that the Clintons used to line their own pockets.Along with Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble and a multitude of other ill-regarded multinationals , Monsanto is exposed as being a longtime contributor to the Clinton Foundation, likely "scratching the back" of the organization with pay-to-play "donations" in exchange for political favors. This is, of course, what the Clinton Foundation is all about, we now know, which is why the Clinton campaign worked so hard during the final days of the election to keep all eyes distracted from WikiLeaks.But these tactics ultimately failed, and what the public now has access to via WikiLeaks is incredibly telling as to the nature of Clinton's relationship with Monsanto. While secretary of state, for instance, Hillary Clinton used her position to "target" nation states that hadn't yet accepted Monsanto's agenda . Countries that didn't cooperate with the plan to adopt transgenic crop technology, it was revealed, were punished with economic and other forms of "retaliation."After word of all this broke headlines, Hillary Clinton earned herself the name "Bride of Frankenfood" for her now-exposed ties to the biotechnology industry, a position that way-back-when cost her in terms of public support. But what we now know from WikiLeaks is that Clinton's handlers worked overtime to rebrand her as an opponent of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), a position that her primary opponent Bernie Sanders genuinely held, and that helped him tremendously in gaining grassroots support.Back in March, a peculiar email sent from Gary Hirschberg, chairman of the "Just Label It" GMO labeling campaign to John Podesta, campaign chairman of the Clinton campaign, exposes plans by insiders to rebrand Hillary as some type of hero for food freedom. Dated March 16, 2016, the email sent by Hirschberg , who also serves as chairman of the organic brand Stonyfield Farm, urges Podesta to have Hillary "weigh in" on the GMO issue "if we hope to tap the Bernie progressives' enthusiasm after he concedes."Clinton's attempt to ride on the coattails of Bernie's legacy ultimately failed, but it wasn't the only time that such a strategy was attempted. According to another email , the campaign also tried to brainstorm ways to rebrand Clinton as a dynamic candidate who demonstrated genuine human emotions, as opposed to the "overly programmed" liberal demagogue perception that dominated her previous run for the presidency.All in all, 46 emails in The Podesta Emails archive make mention of Monsanto, and many others discuss biotechnology and other elements of the industrial agriculture system to which Hillary Clinton is bound in allegiance due to her strong financial connections with this industry. Now that she's out of the running for president, though, the American people will hopefully no longer have to endure anymore of her lies.
Real America LOVES Trump

We the People "Got your back"

We will support aggressive police action against the leftist terrorists

When we elected you, we knew this would be a long and difficult fight for freedom

Do your job, and we'll do ours!

(NaturalNews) Is anyone surprised? The very same leftists who wagged their finger at candidate Donald Trump and demanded he "accept the outcome of the election" and "respect democracy" are now burning flags, rioting in the streets and torching buildings in their own collapsing cities.As it turns out,and refuse to accept the results of a democratic election. When they lose at the ballot box,I predicted this almost 100 days ago, of course. In this August 30 Natural News article , I wrote:That's where this is headed, of course. International terrorism coordinators like George Soros are already funding domestic leftist terror groups to. Their marching orders are to cause maximum chaos and give the lying leftist media -- full of delusional morons and anti-American traitors pretending to be journalists -- enough editorial traction to ridiculously claim that America hates Trump.In truth,. That's why my article entitled LOVE WINS was so popular. LOVE wins when we elect a President who is trying to save America rather than dismantle it.But the Hillary Clinton supporters are now trying to DESTROY America. That's why they're burning American flags. They hate America, they hate democracy and they hate the irrefutable fact that the American voters have rejected their hatred, bigotry and leftist lunacy with an intensity never before witnessed in American politics.So my message to President Trump today (yes, I call him "President," not "President Elect," because in my mind, Barack Obama was never my President) is simply this:President Trump, as you wake up each day for the next eight years, remember one thing above all else: WE THE PEOPLE "GOT YOUR BACK."Or, in military parlance, we've "got your six."By "We the People," I mean all the genuine patriots across America. We are the alternative media publishers, the active duty and retired military and police officers, the firemen and EMTs, the factory workers, concealed carry holders and small business entrepreneurs. We are armed in self-defense, we are dedicated to protecting America, and we are at the ready to do what is needed to restore law and order while defending our families, communities and national borders against terrorists and traitors.Keep that in mind, President Trump. President Bush never had this kind of popular support among patriots, and Obama was seen as a traitor from the very first day he took office (see the 2009 Alex Jones film, "The Obama Deception"). But YOU, Mr. Trump, have the full backing and goodwill of almost everyone who grew up loving this country and pledging to support it.That is a rare asset... it's almost unheard of in the history of our nation... and it may need to be invoked to defend our cities from the leftist terrorists who are already trying to burn them down.I've spoken with numerous leaders in the alternative media and patriot communities. They all tell me the same thing: While they were terrified of Martial Law under Obama, they would gladly support aggressive police action as needed to stop the leftist terrorists who are already trying to burn down our cities. By "aggressive," they mean very specific things such as giving police officers marching orders to stop being passive when the riots take place. They need to aggressively subdue and arrest all the violent rioters from the very start.We the People are ready to get behind our police and even volunteer our own efforts in a variety of ways to protect our communities from the violence of the radical left.For example, I'm now donating my forensic laboratory services ( CWClabs.com is my private science laboratory) to various law enforcement agencies in Texas to help them put away violent criminals and keep our communities safe. This is my own little way of using SCIENCE to stop VIOLENCE, and like tens of millions of other Americans, I'm also a firearms owner with many thousands of rounds of ammunition that I'd be ready to donate to the local Sheriff if they needed those rounds to defend our communities. (Heck, if things get really bad, I'll just lend the local Sheriff some ballistic vests and my .50 cal. Barrett semiauto rifle, and the local deputies can go to town while I keep bringing more ammo as needed...)The point is,. We didn't merely elect you into office and then think we were going to walk away and leave you with all the heavy lifting. We understand that. It's not a one-man show, it's an entire nation coming together to say "Enough leftist violence! Enough of the lying media! Enough of Hillary Clinton pre-selling the White House and Barack Obama handing billions of cash to Iran!"It's not enough that we merely stop the riots, either. We mustand end the left-wing media propagandists who have run a multi-year campaign of sedition and lies against America's interests. (Talk to Michael Savage. He has the best ideas on how to initiate investigations into the "anti-American activities" of people like George Stephanopoulos, whose wife has already said they will likely flee the country.)We've all had enough of the leftist lies, the planned economic destruction of our nation and the deliberate media propaganda. So we elected you into office. And nowno matter what it takes.We recognize that you are our last hope for a free America. We all knew that a Clinton presidency would have meant World War II on the international scale, and very likely domestic civil war here at home. Your courage to fight the corrupt democrat election machine has led the way, and now we are here, at the ready, willing and able to support youBuild the wall.Arrest the Clinton co-conspirators, including the criminal collusion artists pretending to be journalists.Shut down the idiotic climate change payments to Al Gore's company.Repeal Obamacare (and all of Obama's illegal executive orders).Push hard for term limits.Unleash the military on ISIS.Protect the Second Amendment.Protect religions freedoms.Ban third trimester abortions and outlaw organ harvesting from human babies.End the Big Pharma monopoly over medicine so that we can prevent disease with natural health supplements and remedies that will save the nation BILLIONS in health care costs.Rebuild the Supreme Court with Constitutional justices.And, above all,We got your back.
Social media is arguably one of the best products of the internet. It has made the world a smaller, made other cultures within reach and it has created a community in which people can find other individuals they can relate to. Social media has bridged family together -- it has made people feel less alone.

Over 2 billion people subscribe to at least one social media platform. This accounts for 31 percent of the global population. Twitter arguably is amongst the most popular option -- ranking 9th in the tally of the most popular platforms worldwide. However, despite its popularity, Twitter welcomed 2016 in shaky ground. The number of new users has dipped, their campaigns and strategies remain confusing and investors have pulled out and lost their faith on the social media platform.

In September, news broke that the people behind Twitter are already looking for sellers to dispose the company to. Since then Vine, a video sharing app launched by Twitter, is also poised to shut down. Although several companies have expressed their interest to purchase Vine, things are still not looking up for Twitter. In fact, mere hours ago one key person behind the social media platform announced his resignation from the fledgling company.

Adam Bain, COO of Twitter, announced on his account his intention to depart from the social media platform. According to Bain, he has already spoken to Jack Dorsey, current CEO of Twitter, about his plans to resign. In his announcement, Bain expressed gratitude to everyone he has worked with over the last six years. He wished the company well and gushed over how proud he is to have been part of Twitter.

"So...I have some news. After 6 years and a once-in-a-lifetime run, I let Jack know that I am ready to change gears and do something new outside the company" read a part of Bain's announcement.
Large-scale coral cover depletion in the Great Barrier Reef has been attributed to different factors, and one of them is due to the invasion of the crown-of-thorns. Just recently, updates on the terminator-like robots which hunt down these COTs shed hope on resolving the invasion including additional future upgrades for better performances.

Lead by a research team from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), a robot called COTSbot was firstly introduced last year and was even dubbed as the reefs' 'Terminator'. After several months, it has now been tested on the field and the robot performs much better as the team has expected.

Feras Dayoub, one of the researchers from QUT, said on Science Direct that the capabilities of COTSbot are quite astonishing, especially with its machine learning system. To eradicate the COTs, the robot uses a computer vision and ejects a lethal amount of bile salts to kill them. "The robots detection rate is outstanding, particularly because COTS blend in very well with the hard, corals they feed on, and because the robot must detect them in widely varying lighting conditions and shapes as they hide among the coral," Dayoub said.

Just last month, the innovative robot has won a financial support from Google through a project with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation by winning the people's choice vote for Google Impact Challenge Australia. Summing up with a total of 750,000 Australian dollars, the new upgraded robot will be called RangerBot. "It will stay under the water almost three times longer than a human diver, gather vastly more data, and operate in all conditions and all times of the day or night," according to Matthew Dunbabin who is also a member of the QUT research team.

The soon-to-be RangerBot will be much smaller and is expected to make more than what the COTSbot can do. Aside from hunting down the crown-of-thorns, it will also simultaneously collect data and do water quality analysis and even monitoring of coral cover. According to the representative of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation's Anna Marsden, the COTSbot and RangerBot concepts are truly in line with what their group is fighting for. "Were very grateful the world shares our vision, so generously voting to protect reefs around the globe," she said.
Evidence has been found in south-western suburbs of Aleppo, the military experts said as cited by Konashenkov, Sputnik International reported.

"While conducting reconnaissance in the 1070 area, the officers of the scientific center of the Russian Troops of Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defence (RChBD) have found evidence of chemical weapon use by terrorists against the civilian population and Syrian servicemen," he said on Friday.

Konashenkov added that the Russian military specialists found unexploded ammunition with chemical agents and took soil samples in areas where terrorists used their weapons.

"After conducting an express analysis in a mobile laboratory it was determined that the toxic substances that filled the militants artillery ammunition were with high probability chlorine and white phosphorus," Konashenkov said.

The Defense Ministry spokesman specified that a detailed analysis of the samples will be made at the laboratory of the scientific center of the Russian Troops of Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defence (RChBD). The laboratory is accredited by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
Studying the space and the universe is never easy, and it's even getting more complicated with the new advances in technology and information that experts get every day. Now, models developed by researchers from the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal have explored another possible end of our universe.

Our universe is a vast space of mystery yet to be fully understood. Some say it is continuously expanding and soon, all the heavenly bodies will eventually die off. This theory called the Big Freeze has been generally accepted by many scientists due to the observed continuous expansion of the dark matter in the outer space, including the increasing distances between the stars and galaxies. But according to a recent study using the Lambda CDM Model, the Big Freeze might not be the future of our universe.

Testing the hypothesized Rip Theory, the team tried to simulate possibilities that may happen using data from the observations of the Planck satellite and the Wilkinsonn Microwave Anistropy. The concentrations and lumpings of the so-called "dark matter" are analyzed with their previous behavior, considering the possible reaction of the matter that we might never thought of before.

The analysis tried out three scenarios: the Big Rip, the Little Rip and the Little Sibling of the Big Rip. For the differences, the Big Rip referred to an abrupt breaking of the space due to continuous expansion while the other two refer to a gradual ripping apart. Through their analysis, they have found out that the most possible end of the universe is the Little Rip.

According to Rebecca Boyle from New Scientist, people should not worry on whichever of the scenarios would happen since based on calculations, it will also need about 100 billion years to happen. The researchers papers are not yet peer reviewed and may still face more issues and revisions, but many experts believe that the models that they have developed will be very much helpful to future studies on exploring the universe.

Read here: Cosmological perturbations in an effective and genuinely phantom dark energy Universe
Three fishermen from Oman have stumbled a very rare and precious catch: a giant lump of ambergris or whale vomit. The ambergris weighs more than 176 pounds and is estimated to be worth $3 million.

According to a report from Science Alert, ambergris is a waxy substance that comes from the whale stomach, which binds food and other objects that the whale could not digest. It is secreted in chunks through the mouth or excretion.

The three fishermen in Oman found the giant chunk of ambergris floating off the coast of Qurayat located in the northeastern part of Oman, the Times of Oman reports. The men used a rope to collect and carry the prized find into their boat.

"We used a rope to collect it and carry it inside the boat. I was told earlier that ambergris has an icky smell, but after a couple of days it imparts a pleasant scent. We rushed back to the beach with joy and happiness," said Khalid Al Sinani, one of the fishermen.

               60          . pic.twitter.com/mAYXgANPVE     (@zajel_oman) November 1, 2016

Despite its gross production, ambergris, also called floating gold, is a highly south and extremely expensive material as it is used in high-end perfumes to make the scent last longer.

This is not the first time that people has stumbled upon a giant chunk of ambergris. Back in April, a couple from the U.K. also found a rock of ambergris while walking on the beach, which costs $70,000.

Currently, the Omani fishermen have had offers from a Saudi trader for $2.8 million. The fishermen is likely to wait for an auction before selling the chunk of whale vomit.

Read:

Rare Whale Vomit Considered As Floating Gold, Costs $70,000; Will It Endanger Sperm Whales?

British Man Finds Rare Whale Vomit on Morecambe Beach
China's heavy-lift rocket Long March-5 has successfully launched on Nov. 3 from the new Wenchang Space Launch Center carrying an experimental satellite into near-Earth orbit.

The 187-foot-long Long March-5 is equaled in power with the U.S. Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle - which was used by NASA to test-launch the new Orion spacecraft - about 25 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, Ars Technica reports. Scientists said the rocket launch easily shows that China could one day land taikonauts on the moon if it wants to.

Earlier this year, China had expressed its intent to land a man on the moon in the next 15 to 20 years. According to scientists, the Long March-5 is already powerful enough to stage an Earth orbit for landings on the moon and to push payloads of about eight metric tons into a Lunar transfer orbit.

"By launching and rendezvousing four of those in low Earth orbit, it would be possible for the Chinese to construct a manned lunar mission with no more than that rocket and no more than Apollo technology," Mike Griffin, former NASA Administrator, told the House of Representatives in September 2011, as reported by Ars Technica.

"I have in fact, in the past, written up how that mission would work from an engineering perspective. So with the Long March-5, the Chinese inherently possessed the capability to return to the Moon should they wish to do so."

Its most recent launch also demonstrates China's capability to deploy both humans and medium-sized payloads into orbit. As Ars Technica points out, these launch capabilities will allow China to build the modular space station it plans to complete by 2018, which could easily beat the International Space Station (ISS).

"China is developing very rapidly into one of the major space players," Fabio Favata, head of the program coordination office at the European Space Agency's (ESA) directorate of science, said in a statement.

The Long March-5 will also be used to launch China's Mars 2020 probe and the Chang'e-5 lunar probe in 2017.

China is now developing the Long March-9 rocket, a super-heavy lift rocket about the size of the Apollo program's Saturn V. However, the rocket is not expected to fly until 2025.
NASA's journey to Mars is about to unfold and may happen in the next few decades. But in order to do it, the agency has to scout the best-qualified applicants to become the first humans on Mars.

Last June, NASA released a series of retro-themed posters inviting workers, farmers, engineers and other experts to Mars. The posters were recently re-launched as the journey to Mars in 2030 draws near.

"NASA originally commissioned these posters for an exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor's Complex in 2009. As part of our Journey to Mars, these versions are now available to everyone online," a NASA official said in the Mars posters website.

But to give the public an idea, NASA is actually starting to scout for potential Martians and are inviting capable experts in their respective fields for a one-on-one interview. Take astrophysicist Christine Corbett Moran who was invited by NASA for an interview while she was working in Antarctica. The goal of the invite is to fill up the slots for the next astronaut class of 2017.

Moran is currently working and studying the echoes of Big Bang and has been in the Antarctica for 10 months. By the end of the month, Moran will journey to Houston to face NASA officials. Her long professional background includes working with SpaceX and co-creating encrypted communications app. NASA's interest in her showed the astrological requirements to qualify for the next astronaut class. This means only the best of the best will be offered a lot and can potentially become the first human to walk on Mars.

Experts say that for the journey to Mars, the premiere space agency is changing its course in terms of recruitment standards. The more 'science-based' space exploration calls for expertise other than what previous astronauts possessed.

Some say her expertise in working remotely in the cold dangerous areas of the Antarctic made her a good candidate as well. "Most of the things that I like doing happen indoors," Moran said in an interview.

This just means, if NASA really wanted someone, they will search the planet Earth, even the most desolate places like the Antarctica to find qualified potential astronauts.
The San Francisco Fire Department is moving to dismiss veteran captain who had commanded an elite rescue dive team on charges he made sexist and racist remarks and made inappropriate contact with women firefighters, NBC Bay Area learned on Friday.

Jon Del Bino was escorted from a fire house at 7 a.m. Friday and now faces dismissal after at least a dozen firefighters came forward. Some say he engaged in inappropriate bumping and touching.

The investigation, first reported by NBC Bay Area, began after Del Bino, who has not responded to requests for comment, was notified earlier this year that he faced a 10-day suspension for ordering an African American firefighter on the rescue dive team Del Bino commanded to descend to a depth that was 30 feet lower than his certified dive level.

After that probe, several firefighters under his command at Station 7 came forward to claim that Del Bino routinely made disparaging remards about women and African American firefighters. Some women firefighters accused him of inappropriate bumping and touching.

Sources said that Del Bino is now on paid administrative leave after being removed from Station 20 in Diamond Heights, where he had been transferred pending the outcome of the probe.

There is a process and the process is under way, Chief Joanne Hayes White said Friday. Beyond that there is not much I can say because it is a personnel matter. I always respect the process.

NBC first reported a string of embarrassing incidents at the department involving sexual harassment.

The chief ordered a command shuffle at Station 2 in Chinatown, where a woman firefighter recounted an intimidation and harassment campaign that included someone.

In an unrelated case, Hayes-White demoted a member of the command staff, Ken Lombardi from assistant deputy chief to captain amid allegations that he harassed a civilian subordinate.

Hayes-White also issued a bulletin requiring department wide sexual harassment training by years end.
Donald Trump The Apprentice collectible dolls sell for between $25 and $50 on sites such as Amazon and eBay.

And this week, his likeness, complete with dark suit and red tie, appeared at a #NotOurPresident Oakland protest outside City Hall. Only his owner had moved his left hand up, in a Heil-Hitler style salute. He was dangling on a string from a stick, and Michelle Luo documented the striking image and sent it to NBC Bay Area.

"I am a software engineer and have been her for 16 years," Luo said, adding she is originally from Shanghai. "I have a white husband and a 4-month-old baby. Everything has been great until Donald Trump was elected president. I just feel the American dream is shattered. I'm afraid."

So, when she saw a woman holding up the Trump doll with its hands raised, Luo photographed the striking image. "I thought she was so brave to wave it," Luo said.

Others have burned Trump effigies in the streets, and a mysterious Syrian artist created a "Trumpette" doll, packaging it up in a "misogynistic box," the Telegraph reported.

While half the country supports Trump, voting him in as the nations 45th president on Tuesday, many others fear his past statements calling for a ban on all Muslims from entering the United States and his desire to oust illegal immigrants. Trump also has the unabashed support of the Ku Klux Klan, which he has not openly courted, but not openly condemned, either. There are calls this week from activists to have him respond to the alarming number of hate-inspired activity cropping up across the country, including an attack on a student wearing a hijab at San Jose State University.

Michelle Luo

The Anti-Defamation League noted a huge rise in anti-Semitic tweets against journalists from people with Trump in their Twitter bios this election season, and the Southern Poverty Law Center this week noted that the uptick of hate-crimes is extraordinary following Trump's election.

This week, Trump's tone has changed a bit. He made a conciliatory speech trying to unite the country after being elected, and had a peaceful meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday.

At first, he blamed "the media" for all the protests around the country, but on Friday changed his tone. He tweeted: "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. Will all come together and be proud!"
Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov.11



By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:



The benefits of Donald Trumps victory in the US presidential election for Russia are likely to be smaller than expected, according to the analysts of the UK Capital Economics consulting company.



Trumps victory in the US presidential election has raised hopes in some quarters that economic sanctions on Russia will be lifted. As things stand, this is far from certain, said the analysis obtained by Trend.



The analysts believe that even if sanctions were removed, the benefits for Russias economy and its financial markets would probably be smaller than most seem to think.



Moreover, according to Capital Economics, its not clear whether Trump would be as willing to lift sanctions as some suggest.



He may be unlikely to act unilaterally on this issue. Just as importantly, Trumps policy goals are centered on domestic issues, said the analysis.



The main economic benefit would come from improving external financing conditions, permitting Russian firms to roll over external debts more easily, according to Capital Economics.



That would allow for higher investment and stronger GDP growth, the analysts said.



The US held presidential election November 8. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump won the election.
More than 8,000 people in San Francisco have been evicted from their homes over the past four years, but hundreds of those residents may have been wrongfully evicted, according to an analysis by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit.

Landlords can legally evict their tenants for one of 16 reasons, including failure to pay rent and housing too many roommates. One of the fastest growing evictions, however, allows landlords to kick out their tenants if they, or, in some cases, their relatives, want to move into the home.

Owner move-in evictions have spiked more than 200 percent in just the past five years. The Investigative Unit spent six months interviewing over 100 people all across the city to determine whether landlords or their family members are actually living in the homes they claimed to move into. The investigation revealed what appears to be widespread abuse that is now shocking residents, lawmakers, and even those who investigate wrongful evictions.

NBC Bay Area

Limited enforcement

It actually does surprise me that its that high  one in four is a lot, said Robert Collins, Executive Director of the San Francisco Rent Board, the agency in charge of investigating fraudulent evictions. Maybe your report here will inspire a variety of other people to see the remedies that are available there. 

While there are some enforcement provisions included in San Francisco housing laws, the Investigative Unit discovered they are rarely, if ever, used. Each year, the rent board submits a random sampling of 10 percent of all owner move-in eviction notices to the San Francisco District Attorneys Office for possible investigation. In nearly 10 years, however, not a single landlord has ever been prosecuted for a fraudulent owner move-in eviction. The district attorneys office said it's extremely difficult to prove a landlord intended to commit fraud when evicting a tenant.

While the rent board can look into potentially fraudulent owner move-in evictions, those investigations are only triggered once a former tenant submits a complaint. Collins said the agency isnt designed or equipped to confirm whether every eviction filed in the city is actually legitimate.

Theres no way of knowing that for the rent board  thats not one of the tasks we have, Collins said. I suppose for the individual person who was evicted, there would be other ways of finding out, perhaps. But it would be up to them, it wouldnt be something the rent board does.

With San Francisco rental prices among the highest in the country, there is a serious financial incentive for landlords to evict long-time tenants under rent control in order to find brand-new tenants who are willing to pay more. Some believe the lack of enforcement makes exploiting the system too easy.

While landlords can face hefty civil penalties in court for cheating the system, its difficult to catch landlords in the act. In most cases, city officials concede the only way a landlord can get caught is if an evicted tenant does their own detective work. Many tenants say they just dont have the time or energy to do that after theyve been evicted.

NBC Bay Area

Widespread abuse

The Investigative Unit obtained every owner move-in eviction notice filed with the San Francisco Bent Board in 2014, more than 300 in all, and set out to see how many landlords or their family members are actually living in those units.

After six months, 271 door-knocks, and dozens of phone calls, the Investigative Unit was able to survey residents about their living situation at about 100 addresses where an owner move-in eviction took place. In 24 cases, nearly one in every four, the landlord or family member who was supposed to be living there was not. Instead, there were often new tenants living there, paying significantly more rent than the previous tenants.

If applied to the nearly 1,500 owner move-in evictions in San Francisco since 2013, those findings would mean hundreds of people over that time period were possibly kicked out of their homes illegally by landlords claiming they were going to move in.

At one address, three new tenants were living in a unit where the landlords mother was supposed to be living, according to the eviction notice filed with the city. A recent online ad for the property listed the retinal price at $5,000 per month, nearly three times the price Angelique Rochelle was paying for the unit before she was evicted.

My whole life was there, said Rochelle, who was evicted from her large three-bedroom San Francisco apartment in 2014. She lived there for 10 years under rent control, and was paying $1,805.88 per month, a bargain in todays rental market.

Angelique Rochelle

The single mom, who has since moved to a much smaller apartment in Oakland, now commutes an hour or more each way to work. She said she couldnt afford to find a comparable apartment in San Francisco, so she now shares her Oakland home with her 11-year-old daughter. Rochelles two older children, 16 and 18, used to live with her in San Francisco, but when they were evicted, they opted to stay with their father so they could stay in the same school.

My kids are living in a different place, Rochelle said. For my daughter, I think its the worst because shes eleven years old. I mean she grew up with [her siblings] since she was a baby and they no longer live together.

The landlord informed her that she was being evicted so that his mother could move into the apartment, however, Rochelle said she was skeptical. She wasnt surprised when the Investigative Unit informed her the landlords mother wasnt actually living in her old apartment. She believes San Francisco should require landlords to provide documentation that proves they moved into the unit following an eviction.

If thats what theyre able to evict people on, if thats the sole reason theyre able to have families split apart, then definitely [landlords] need to show what theyre doing.

Rochelles landlord declined to be interviewed for this story. The landlords attorney did not respond to the Investigative Units request for comment.

Wrongful evictions can mean big paydays for tenants

Collins said tenants can sue their landlord if they believe they were fraudulently evicted. The damages can total millions of dollars for a single case, according to private attorneys.

The remedies are significant enough that a landlord is taking a really big chance that theyre going to be sued, Collins said.

If caught, the evicted tenants arent the only ones who can cash in. New tenants who have moved into the evicted unit are eligible to lock in the previous tenants old rent for a period of up to three years. If the eviction took place in 2015 or later, the period stretches to five years, as the result of recent legislation. All it takes is a phone call to the rent board for the tenant to determine if those rules apply to their apartment.

If you are a tenant thats recently rented a unit and you have anything that looks odd, you can certainly give us a call and check whether someone was evicted from that unit, Collins said. You might end up having much better rent that you thought you wouldve ever had.

NBC Bay Area

Here's how to save thousands on your rent

The Investigative Unit mapped out every owner move-in eviction in San Francisco for the past three years. You can use the interactive map below to find evictions in your neighborhood. While many of these evictions are legal, if your address is listed and you are not a landlord or a relative of the property owner, someone may have been wrongfully evicted from that unit, which might entitle you to lock in the previous tenants cheaper rent.

If your address is listed, let us know about it by emailing us here. You should also submit an official request to the city to have your rent reduced.

Losing friends and neighbors

Supervisor Jane Kim is concerned landlords are abusing the system. In fact, shes been forced out of two homes because of an owner move-in evictions herself, although she said those were completely legitimate.

Since 2014, shes introduced two separate amendments to strengthen the existing owner move-in eviction laws, including a five-year freeze on the rent a landlord can charge for a unit if they perform an owner move-in eviction. The change was designed to remove incentives for landlords to use an owner move-in eviction to force out rent-controlled tenants and re-rent the apartment to new tenants at market rates.

But it still requires the landlord to get caught, and with no enforcement agency, that can be difficult.

Like many laws on the books, we are a complaint-driven system, Kim said. So we depend on tenants coming forward and letting us know that they were illegitimately evicted through an [owner move-in eviction].

Kim said nearly everyone in San Francisco has either been evicted themselves, or knows someone who has. She is concerned illegitimate evictions are forcing vulnerable people out of their homes and community.

We are losing our friends, our neighbors, Kim said. Were also losing many of our neighborhood retail small businesses, our auto repair shops. Were here at a time in San Francisco where everyone is incredibly anxious about whos going to live here.

Kim said she and her staff plan to look into the possibility of boosting resources at the Rent Board in hopes of more effectively enforcing the citys current evictions laws.

I think its very serious if were finding that at least 25 percent of [owner move-in] evictions are used illegitimately and for simply the sake of making more buck on your unit, Kim said. Thats the type of behavior were trying to discourage.

Also contributing to this story: Robert Campos, Brendan Weber, Isabelle Tham, Ysa Gomez-Gonzalez, Michael Horn, and Ashlyn Lipori-Russi.

______________________________________

Watch the entire series in this NBC Bay Area investigation:

 Part 1: SF Landlords May Have Wrongfully Evicted Hundreds of Tenants

 Part 2: SF Fails to Prosecute Landlords for Certain Wrongful Evictions

 Part 3: San Francisco Considers New Eviction Laws Following I-Unit Series

 Part 4: NBC Bay Area Investigation Leads to Government Hearing

 Part 5: SF Eviction Crackdown Passes After Investigative Unit Series

 Part 6: SF Mayor To Sign Law After NBC Bay Area Investigation

 Part 7: SF Mayor Inks New Law to Combat Wrongful Evictions

 Part 8: Lake of Oversight Puts Oakland Tenants at Risk of Eviction

 Part 9: Oakland Voters May Get Say on When Landlords Can Evict Renters

 Part 10: Expansion of Eviction Protections Heads to Ballot in Oakland

 Part 11: Oakland Couple Uses Hidden Camera to Fight Eviction

 Part 12: Landlords Frequently Ignore Oakland Eviction Laws

 Part 13: Oakland Housing Director Defends Department

 Part 14: Oakland Housing Chief "Fired," Says Source
There was a time when Rodney Ewing gripped a gun, outfitted head-to-toe in combat fatigues, patrolling a patch of strangled Iraq desert, when dark clouds suddenly began to swarm overhead.

So you see everybody putting on their rain gear, Ewing recalled of the incident during Operation Desert Storm. Suddenly his Army unit realized it wasnt rainclouds forming at all.

It was the smoke when Sadaam was burning up the oil fields, Ewing said. The spookiest thing weve ever seen.

These days, Ewing clutches painting brushes instead of a rifle. And his unbridled terrain is an art studio in San Franciscos South of Market where he was recently busy preparing works for a San Francisco Arts Commission gallery show devoted to the experience of military veterans.

For his contribution, Ewing folded 20 drab green army blankets with military precision as a tribute to his late father, who fought in Vietnam and served 20 years in the Air Force.

Joe Rosato Jr./NBC Bay Area

My father passed away a little over a year ago, Ewing said folding one of the blankets. I folded them in the same way that the American flag that my mother has now.

The Arts Commission show is titled Not Alone: Exploring bonds Between and With Members of the Armed Forces. It runs through March 4th in San Franciscos War Memorial Building. Most of the artists in the show are military veterans, now exploring the emotions of post-military life through art.

I dont think people relate veterans with artists, Ewing said, clarifying that he was making art before he was in the military.

Photographer Amber Hoy was 21-years old when her Army service landed in her in Operation Desert Storm. The ammunition specialist also armed herself with a camera during training and in her time in Iraq. Her photographs in the gallery show depict her young fellow-soldiers holding rifles, the endless desert, and photos of Hoy wearing fatigues and a grin. A photo of a clump of radishes resembled the heads of her battalion  she said.

Joe Rosato Jr./NBC Bay Area

What Im trying to do with my work is kind of looking back and understanding, Hoy said, scanning a table covered in prints of various sizes.

Her favorite photograph in the show was a jewelry box filled with things like perfume and dog tags. She said the juxtaposition of feminine and military items sums up her feelings toward her eight years in the Army.

It kind of fits with the shows title, Hoy said, that other women veterans arent alone in their experiences.

Oakland Artist Michael Hall didnt serve in the military but he lived Operation Desert Storm through his father who was served in the war. Several years ago, Hall stumbled on the stacks of letters his father sent him from Iraq, revealing a father trying to maintain a long-distance relationship through radically alternate conditions.

Theres definitely him giving me that standard dad, teenage love advice, Hall said in his Oakland Studio. There were letters that we were discussing things like no blood for oil.

For the show, Hall reproduced his fathers letters in large watercolor images. Hall said re-tracing his fathers handwriting helped him empathize with his fathers situation in the war. One letter in particular seemed to explain the motivation for his fathers willingness to go to Iraq.

One of the reasons I dont go crazy being here, his father wrote, is knowing i dont have to worry about you being here in five years or so.

Ewing said veterans face challenges relating their service to those outside the uniform. There are expectations of service members to contend with  even as veterans themselves grapple to understand their experiences.

I think people when they think of veterans they either accept it, what was going on, Ewing said, and theyve moved on  or theyre troubled.

Hoy said being a young woman in the military was difficult at times. But ultimately, she said she was thankful for the experience.

I cant really imagine the person I would be today, Hoy said, without having those experiences.

For more information, check the SFAC Main Gallery.
Authorities are investigating a breach at Mineta San Jose International Airport.

Police said 38-year-old Jerry Hyde somehow made his way onto the restricted airfield at SJC at 1 a.m. Thursday.

Airport officials said Hyde, a transient, made contact with an electrician, who was working on the airfield. The electrician then called airport police.

"We are reviewing what happened and what we can do to prevent it from happening again," SJC spokesperson Rosemary Barnes said.

The breach is at least the sixth time someone breached security at SJC in the last 18 months and comes after several enhancements to security at the airport, including higher fencing.

"In many areas, we increased it to 11 feet, far exceeding federal standards," Barnes said. "We even changed the mesh used on that fenceline, so it's very difficult to scale."

The improvements came after previous breaches at SJC.

In 2015, Deanna Predoehl was arrested and after allegedly hopping a fence at the airport. Also last year, Miguel Zaragoza was arrested on suspicion of jumping the fence, stealing a city maintenance truck and driving onto the property.

A report issued in 2015 signaled that Mineta San Jose had the fifth highest amount of breaches nationwide since 2004.

San Jose's most infamous breach came in 2014 when a teenager scaled an airport fence and stowed away in the wheel well of a commercial airplane en route to Hawaii, prompting national attention.

Still, many passengers on Thursday seemed undeterred by news of the breach.

"A little bit concerned, but I think security will take care of it," passenger Michael Tung said. "I think security at the airport has been pretty good."

Security upgrades at SJC will continue through next year, including hardware and software improvements.
Mirroring protests across the country, San Ramon students took to the streets on Thursday in a demonstration against racism, hatred and President-Elect Donald Trump.

About 100 students left class at California High School in San Ramon shortly after 1 p.m. Carrying signs that said "Make America United Again," they shouted "Love Trumps Hate" as they walked through the Iron Horse Trail to the steps of City Hall, where they sat down in a peaceful sit-in.

At one point, the protesters shouted "thank you" to the San Ramon police officers who followed them and who halted traffic to make room for them. The officers responded with big smiles and thumbs up, saying the thanks was "very much appreciated."

Among the dozens of protests happening in the Bay Area, San Ramon's is unique: The city is largely considered one of the more conservative enclaves in the staunchly Democratic region. On Tuesday, city voters helped elect Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, the Bay Area's only GOP legislator, to her second term.

According to Danika Katovich, a student and primary organizer of the demonstration, the protest was a gesture of solidarity with students who may feel marginalized because of a Trump presidency, including women, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos and members of the LGBT community.

"A large group of people felt genuinely unsafe," Katovich said. "Not necessarily because of Donald Trump, but because of the sentiments that he put forward in his campaign that have given racists, sexist, homophobic people the platform to be like 'Yes, I can hate openly now.' That's not good for our country."

Students who participated in the protest were told by teachers that they would be given an unexcused absence after leaving fifth period, but those in attendance told NBC Bay Area that it was worth it. At least one instructor, Rebecca Bartow, came down to City Hall to show solidarity with the grieving students.

"I came to hear them, stand with them and hopefully work together to move things forward," said Barstow.

Katovich and Alana Winston, the president of the Black Student Union at California High, both fear that a Trump presidency will legitimize and stoke racism and prejudice. The protest, they said, was to show that discriminatory behavior will not be tolerated on their campus.

"There are going to be more things planned," Winston said. "This isn't it."

Protests have erupted nationwide in response to the election of Donald Trump. Thousands flocked to San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley over the last two days to decry a presidency that they feel is fueled and based on hate.

In Contra Costa County, students walked out of Concord and Olympic High Schools, Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, and at Pittsburg High School.

In Concord, a city with a large Latino population, the devastation of a Trump presidency is especially acute. One of the president-elect's most prominent platforms was the creation of a "big, beautiful wall" separating Mexico from the U.S. and a "deportation force," rattling many students who know or who are undocumented immigrants.

"It's not that I'm afraid for myself, I'm afraid for the immigrant community that is made up in California and I am hurting for them," explained Irma Soto, a student at Olympic High School. "The thing is, there are so many things that are being said to the immigrant community that they feel scared, dehumanized, like they're not worth anything."

A whopping majority of the protesters in Contra Costa County have been peaceful, although three minors who attend Pittsburg High School were arrested during the protest. Two teachers at College Park were also assaulted by protesters who didn't attend the school, according to police.

The Republican National Committee's Harmeet Dhillon said that she sympathized with the Concord and San Ramon protesters, but opined that marching in the streets would do "no good."

"There are no do-overs," she said. "Maybe they missed their civics class. They should have learned that what happened in the White House today is what happens in America. The outgoing president meets with the incoming president -- no matter the party -- and hands over the reins of power peacefully."

Students said Thursday that they will continue to fight against hateful rhetoric, social injustice and inequality. Many of the students at both the Concord and San Ramon protests are looking forward to voting, saying that they are hopeful 2018 and 2020 will bring Congress back to the Democrats and push Trump from the White House.

"We didn't have a say in this but I am going to vote when I can," Soto said. "But right now, this is the only option we have to show we are not okay with what's going on."

Gillian Edevane covers Contra Costa County for NBC Bay Area. Contact her at Gillian.Edevane@NBCuni.com.
Two teachers at College Park High School in Pleasant Hill were assaulted by students Thursday morning during a protest over the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States, according to police.

While the 11 a.m. classes were in session, a group of about 200 students, seemingly mostly from different high schools in Concord and Walnut Creek, marched onto the College Park High School campus, said Pleasant Hill police Sgt. David Downs.

The mostly peaceful protest winded its way around campus and through the hallways while students chanted slogans and waved signs.

The alleged assault took place when one teacher was confronted by two or more protesters. It appears the teacher was punched and shoved, and when another teacher came to his aid, that teacher also was attacked, Downs said.

Neither teacher required hospitalization.

Officers are reviewing video surveillance in the hopes of identifying the suspects.

Student protesters from dozens of other Bay Area high schools walked out of classes Thursday to protest the Trump election. Students in San Francisco, Richmond, Pittsburg, Napa and Oakland all took to the streets to voice their displeasure at Tuesday's election results.
During his campaign for president, Donald Trump promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Now that he's president-elect, people on social media are urging women to get to the doctor before inauguration day.

Repealing the national health care law known as Obamacare could once again leave women without coverage for birth control.

"I know a lot of women who are worried about preventative care in terms of being female and how they're going to get birth control," said Amanda Levin.

Planned Parenthood says its phones are ringing. Some callers are concerned a Republican White House will cut the agency's funding. Others are concerned about their Covered California insurance.

"We're also recieving a number of calls from clients who are concerned about what does this mean for them, is that gonna happen tomorrow," said Heather Saunders Estes, president of Planned Parenthood Northern California.

Birth control coverage isn't the only thing at stake. Some parents are concerned about keeping their adult children on their insurance plan until age 26.

Women are hoping Trump and Congress will keep everyone's health in mind.

"If a man can get Viagra through his coverage, I think a woman should get any family planning or birth control through coverage," Levin said.

Whatever happens after Jan. 20, Planned Parenthood says its doors will be open.
Anti-Trump demonstrators took to the streets in several cities across the country for a second day of protests against the president-elect, who returned to Twitter Thursday evening to accuse them of being "incited by the media."

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very Unfair!" Donald Trump tweeted Thursday evening.

Early Friday, he struck a different tone: "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!"

Trump's complaint about the media echoes the rhetoric of his campaign, when he railed against the press as "disgusting" and "dishonest." The president-elect showed unusual restraint on social media in the final days of the campaign and has been nearly absent since Tuesday night's victory.

Meanwhile, several hundred people marched across dozens of states across the country, including Michigan, Oregon, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Dallas and California.

In Portland, Oregon, police arrested 26 people after a protest turned into a "riot" overnight, NBC News reported.

Some demonstrators armed with bats smashed stores and cars, and others lit fires, police said. Many in the crowd were trying to stop the vandalism, according to police.

Some 600 protesters marched through downtown Baltimore to the M&T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens were hosting the Cleveland Browns for Thursday Night Football.

Hundreds of protesters, including parents with strollers, gathered near Philadelphia's City Hall. They held signs bearing slogans like "Not Our President," ''Trans Against Trump" and "Make America Safe For All."

Even in Texas, where the majority of voters supported Trump, at least 200 people marched through Dallas in what organizers stressed was a rally, not a protest, against Trump.

In New York City, a large group of demonstrators once again gathered outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue Thursday night. They chanted angry slogans and waved banners baring anti-Trump messages.

Demonstrators also gathered outside Chicago's Trump Tower to voice opposition to Trump's election.

More than a thousand students staged a citywide walkout and marched through San Francisco's downtown, chanting "not my president" and holding signs urging a Donald Trump eviction. They waved rainbow banners and Mexican flags, as bystanders in the heavily Democratic city high-fived the marchers from the sidelines.

About a hundred protesters gathered at Union Square in Manhattan earlier in the day and marched to Washington Square Park to protest a Trump presidency. They held signs that read "Divided States of America" and "Not My President" and "Let the New Generation Speak!!"

At a subway station along 14th Street, New Yorkers expressed their thoughts  "Time to Fight Back" and "Keep the Faith! Our work is just beginning!"  along the walls of a walkway using sticky notes.

Similar protests were also held by school students in other cities across the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Miami, Florida.

On Twitter, Trump supporters accused protesters of not respecting the process because it didn't work out in their favor.

"You're literally protesting against free democratic elections. Go live in North Korea, you absolute trash," one said. "They're not protesting Trump, they're protesting democracy and the right to disagree with them. Isn't that fascism," said another.

For the most part, demonstrations have been peaceful, but some arrests have been made in California and Chicago.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump met with Obama at the White House to talk about the transition of power.

"I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including his counsel," Trump said from the Oval Office.

"We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed the country succeeds," Obama said.

Trump also visited with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"We're going to move very strongly on immigration," Trump said after emerging from those meetings. "We will move very strongly on health care. And we're looking at jobs. Big league jobs."

Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
The leaders of some American companies are grappling with workplace diversity in the wake of Donald Trump's election as president.

Several CEOs have written letters to their employees ensuring them that they will honor and celebrate the diversity of their teams. One letter from the CEO of Grubhub, which he later clarified, singled out Trump for the statements he made impugning minorities during the long and rancorous campaign.

Matt Maloney, the food delivery service co-founder, sent an email to all his employees Wednesday saying he rejects Trump's "nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics." He added that many of Trump's campaign comments "would have resulted in his immediate termination."

Maloney went on to say in the email that the Chicago-based company would fight on behalf of anyone who felt exposed in the wake of the election.

"If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here," Maloney said. "We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team."

Maloney later clarified his position in a statement on Grubhub's website Thursday, saying his email advocated for inclusion and tolerance and that Grubhub doesn't discriminate based on political beliefs.

"The message of the email is that we do not tolerate discriminatory activity or hateful commentary in the workplace, and that we will stand up for our employees," the statement said.

Trump has not responded to these remarks, or others from U.S. businesses about diversity. NBC reached out for a comment from a Trump representative.

Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud storage company Box, reached out to his staff as well. He posted an edited version of his emailed message on Medium.com, writing that people "have been through an emotional roller coaster of toxic rhetoric and behaviors throughout this campaign."

"At Box, we are strongly committed to our values of openness and inclusion and will do everything to fight for these principles going forward," Levie continued, reiterating a commitment to building a culture that reflect's the organization's diversity.

"Rest assured that in this upcoming administration, we'll be a major advocate for all issues that affect our employees and our values as a company (LGBTQ rights, fair immigration policies, racial and gender equality, etc.)," Levie said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook also sent an email to his employees Wednesday night, after hearing from employees with strong feelings about the election, Buzzfeed reported.

"We have a very diverse team of employees, including supporters of each of the candidates," Cook reportedly wrote. "Regardless of which candidate each of us supported as individuals, the only way to move forward is to move forward together."

Cook added that Apple is "open to all" and that the company will "celebrate the diversity of our team," Buzzfeed said.

One company spokesperson that publicly supported the president-elect received a quick and fiery backlash Wednesday.

A New Balance spokesperson expressed positive feelings about Trump's presidency to to a Wall Street Journal reporter Wednesday, at which point customers responded by setting their New Balance shoes on fire.
A protest in Portland, Oregon, against Donald Trump's election boiled over into what police described as a "riot" overnight after some demonstrators armed with bats smashed stores and cars, and others lit fires.

Police arrested 26 people, but said many in the crowd were trying to stop those responsible from vandalizing property.

Trump initially tweeted saying that the "professional protesters" had been "incited by the media" and called the situation "very unfair!" He followed that up with a more positive message early Friday: "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!"

People have taken to the streets in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and elsewhere, rallying around the slogan "not my president."
Gov. Bruce Rauner released his 2015 tax returns Friday, reporting more than $176 million in taxable income.

Additionally, Rauner reported more than $187 million in gross income in 2015. Thats three times more than the $58 million he and his wife, Diana, reported in 2014, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

According to that report, Rauner has an estimated net worth of roughly $500 million. Before being elected governor in 2014, Rauner served as the chairman of the private equity firm GTCR, which is based in Chicago.

Rauners overall federal tax liability was over $43 million dollars. He also paid nearly $7 million in state income taxes. According to the report from Rauners office, the governor and his wife reported charitable donations that totaled more than $11 million.

In Tuesday's election, Rauner was able to chip away at Illinois' Democratic House supermajority after spending more than $30 million on political campaigns across the state, the Sun-Times reports.

The governor has asked for a Monday sit down with House Speaker Michael Madigan, Senate President John Cullerton, House Minority Leader Jim Durkin and Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno.

A meeting of the minds with the four legislative leaders and the governor is the prime opportunity to jumpstart our collaborative process, Radogno said on a conference call Thursday. The time is now to come together to address the serious issues facing Illinois with comprehensive solutions.

In June, Rauner signed a stop gap budget that expires at the end of December. A comprehensive, balanced budget will likely be lawmakers' top priority when they reconvene in Springfield later this month. The Illinois General Assemblys veto session begins Tuesday.

On Friday, Rauner made his first public appearances since the election, showing up at a series of downstate Veterans Day celebrations.
Belarus and Turkey are capable of reaching a new level in the development of their relations, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said, BelTA agency reported.

He made the statement during restricted-attendance talks with Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Minsk Nov. 11.

I am convinced that as a result of your visit we will be capable of reaching yet another level in the development of our relations, the Belarusian head of state said. We have virtually no political differences of opinion. We have common views on the international agenda. The relations via diplomatic channels are very good.

Yes, our trade and economic relations are slightly behind our personal and interstate relations. But even in this part the dynamics is positive and good progress has been secured, he added.

Alexander Lukashenko assured Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Belarus' sincere attitude towards the friendly state of Turkey, BelTA reported.

Our friendship and relations have passed the test of time. You can rest assured that our relations are solid. Belarus will always be predictable for Turkey. Our policy will always conform to the policy you've been pursuing for more than one year, stated the Belarusian head of state.

The Belarus president remarked that personal relations play a major role in interstate relations.

If we take into account this factor, I can say that the relations between me and you have existed for a long time. They have existed for more than 10 years already, said Alexander Lukashenko.

The Belarusian head thanked the Turkey president for bringing about 200 representatives and top executives of major Turkish companies as part of his delegation to Minsk.

We are going to open a Belarusian-Turkish forum. About 300 companies have been registered as participants. It may be the largest forum on record in the history of independent Belarus in terms of the number of companies, noted the head of state.

Alexander Lukashenko remarked that it was the first visit of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Belarus. The Belarusian head of state said he was confident that his Turkish counterpart will like the country despite the unfavorable weather.
Republican nominee Donald Trump was elected Americas 45th president Tuesday in a shocking surprise victory, but what does that mean for President Barack Obamas legacy?

On Wednesday, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, who endorsed and voted for Trump, called the billionaire real estate magnates victory a repudiation of the status quo of failed liberal progressive policies, according to the Associated Press. Obama and Trump met Thursday in the Oval Office.

Heres how a Trump presidency could undercut some of the cornerstones of Obama's political legacy:

Health Care

During his first term, Obama worked with lawmakers to pass the Affordable Care Act, which has come to be known as Obamacare. The legislation is the single-most significant overhaul of the countrys healthcare system.

According to a March report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 20 million people had gained health insurance coverage through Obamacare, although estimates vary.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, railing against the program's premium hikes. Now, with Republicans controlling the White House, Senate and House, some experts claim its possible.

Through budget reconciliation, it is possible for them to repeal and replace the bill entirely, Ana Gupte, an analyst for major investment bank Leerink, told NBC News Wednesday. They could choke off the blood supply to Obamacare."

Same-sex Marriage

In 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that state-level bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, grant marriage equality to couples throughout the country. In response to the ruling, Obama said, We have made our union a little more perfect, according to the Washington Post.

However, Trump opposes same-sex marriage, leaving the future of LGBTQ rights in question. In January, Trump told Fox News that he would strongly consider appointing Supreme Court justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage.

Trump is set to inherit the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia when he assumes office in January. Additionally, three judges who voted in favor of same-sex marriage are in either their late 70s or early 80s. Given their ages, Trump could potentially be called on to fill more than Scalia' vacancy.

Nevertheless, even if appointments shifted the make-up, the Supreme Court would still have to be presented with a case that challenges their original ruling.

Climate Change

During his time in office, Obama made climate change a top priority, brokering deals internationally and instituting policy domestically. This week, the Paris Agreement enters into force, Bloomberg reports. The deal serves as a pact between nearly 200 nations to reduce climate pollution.

But Trump denies that climate change even exists.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US. manufacturing non-competitive, the Republican said in a 2012 tweet.

Despite calling the tweet a joke in January, Trump has repeatedly referred to climate change as a hoax, PolitiFact reports.

Iran Nuclear Deal

Obama supported the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a framework agreement signed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and a group of world powers, including the U.S., the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany and China.

The deal, which regulates Irans nuclear program, lifted certain nuclear-related economic sanctions on the country.

Trump has vehemently opposed the deal, calling it a disaster and the worst deal ever negotiated, Reuters reports. Trump even warned that the deal could lead to a nuclear holocaust and promised to dismantle the disastrous deal.

Trans Pacific-Partnership

During his presidency, Obama pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal between the United States and eleven other Pacific Rim countries, including Japan, Mexico and Canada, among others. The proposal was signed in August of 2016 and is awaiting ratification.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has repeatedly trashed the trade deal, comparing it to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which he wants renegotiated.

There is no way to fix the TPP, Trump said in a June speech obtained by Politico. We do not need to enter into another massive international agreement that ties us up and binds us down."

As a result, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is slated to become the Senates top Democrat, told labor leaders Thursday that the TPP will not be ratified by Congress, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Its the middle of the night; your infant child is hungry, and youre exhausted. So you bring your baby into your bed to feed him there, and then you both drift back to sleep.

Jessica Gordon of Plainfield did just that in the middle of a September night in 2011  nursing her 10-week-old son Payton in her bed and falling asleep as he ate.

He always slept in his bassinet, and just that one time is all that it took, said Gordon.

She woke up to find Paytons face pressed to her chest, his lips blue. She panicked and called 911. Payton died that night of accidental suffocation.

Incidents like Gordons happen more than you may think.

Experts all agree that the data is underreported, but NBC 5 Investigates found that in the past decade, an average of 30 to more than 50 babies die in Illinois every year after accidentally suffocating while sleeping with a parent.

And while the overall infant-mortality rate in Illinois has fallen by nearly 20 percent, this problem appears to be growing.

Weve already seen this year to date: 77 deaths related to unsafe sleep that have been reported to the (Department of Children Family Services), said Nora Harms-Pavelski, DCFS Deputy Director for Child Services.

Data inconsistent due to reporting requirements

NBC 5 Investigates has analyzed data from several state agencies, including DCFS, the Illinois Department of Health, the Cook County Medical Examiners Office and the Illinois Child Death Review Team.

Each agency reported varying data on the number of accidental suffocation infant deaths related to bed-sharing in the last decade. Experts attributed the disparity to a lack of research and technology.

For example, Harms-Pavelski said many of the deaths were categorized as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, deaths.

As weve been able to research more, we find that many of those deaths are actually suffocation or asphyxiation death, it wasnt a death from SIDS, said Harms-Pavelski.

DCFS said Illinois lost 148 infants to sleep-related death from 2009 to 2014, the most current reporting year. Harms-Pavelski said a majority of those deaths was a result of babies sharing the same sleep surface as parents.

The Illinois Child Death Review Team recorded an annual average of 55 infant suffocation deaths from 2006 to 2014.

One death is way too many, said Nancy Maruyama, Executive Director of SIDS of Illinois.

Maruyamas first-born son Brendan died of SIDS in 1985. She has since dedicated her life to education and awareness of safe sleep.

Our goal for our organization is to put ourselves out of business.

Advocates of safe sleep said parents should follow the ABCs: babies should sleep alone, on their backs, and in their own cribs without pillows or blankets.

Bed-sharing has benefits, say some researchers

Dr. James McKenna, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, advocates for what he calls breast-sleeping.

McKenna said breastfeeding and bed-sharing are not only interdependent but encouraged. He said research shows breastfed babies depend on that close contact.

Bodies as infants really depend on physiological sensory exchanges, said McKenna in a phone interview.

McKenna and other advocates also said both nursing moms and babies get much more rest when bed-sharing.

Leigh Skorupskas, a mother of four, including a 2-month-old, agrees.

A breastfeeding mom seems to be more in tune with a sleeping baby, and their sleep cycles match each other, said Skorupskas, who said she only supports bed-sharing strictly for nursing mothers. Just like everything else in this world, nothing is for everybody. Theres no all-for-one situation.

New guidelines

The American Academy of Pediatrics announced in October new recommendations that newborns should share their parents bedroom for the first year as a way to reduce SIDS. That does not mean they should share the same beds or any sleep surface, according to the academy.

But Gordon goes a step further. Shes a new mom again to four-month-old Emmett after Paytons death five years ago.

I have his bassinet set up where I actually have to walk to him. I turn on the lights, turn on the TV. I do what I have to do, said Gordon. Whenever I feel like I cant do this anymoreI always have this picture in my head of Payton in heaven, tapping someone on the shoulder and saying, Do you see her? Thats my mom, and Im proud of her. Thats what keeps me going.
More women are asking Planned Parenthood workers about access to birth control and other health care since Donald Trump was elected president, according to the organization's chief medical officer.

Some women have taken to social media to discuss their concerns about the prospect of affordable access to womens health care diminishing, with one long-lasting form of birth control called an IUD apparently attracting extra attention.

Trump has promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act as one of his first acts in office, which could mean the end of free, FDA-approved contraception, including birth control pills, diaphragms, IUDs and emergency contraception like Plan B. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday, Trump said he would consider keeping at least two parts of President Barack Obama's signature health care law: a ban on insurers denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and a provision that allows young adults to stay on their parents' plans.

Since the election, we have seen an uptick in questions about access to health care, birth control, and the Affordable Care Act, said Dr. Raegan McDonald-Mosley, the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood. While we truly hope that birth control methods will be available, accessible and affordable to all women under the Trump administration, we understand peoples real concerns about losing access to birth control, which is basic health care for women.

There is a real possibility that health care cuts could come in the months after Trump is inaugurated in January, according to Cindy Pearson, the 19-year executive director of National Women's Health Network.

"It's not an irrational fear," Pearson said. "It's a fear that stems from people who will soon be in charge of Congress and the White House. We're very concerned since Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence have supported policies that would leave women in difficult situations."

NBC has reached out Trump's campaign for comment.

In an appearance on CNN's "State of the Nation" Sunday, House Speaker Paul Ryan would not answer a question about whether or not new health care legislation would include contraceptive coverage.

"Im not going to get into all the nitty-gritty details of these things," Ryan told host Jake Tapper.

When Tapper pressed Ryan on the issue, the speaker responded: "Im not going to get into  Im not going to get into hypotheticals about legislation that hasnt even been drafted yet."

Trump has expressed different positions on women's health issues. He voiced disapproval for abortions during the campaign, even telling MSNBCs Chris Matthews in March that women who get abortions should be punished, though he later backtracked on that statement. As for birth control, Trump said on "The Dr. Oz Show" in September that women shouldn't need a prescription to have access to it.

There is one safe and effective form of birth control that can last for four years, when another president may be elected, and some women appear to be discussing it.

The IUD, short for intrauterine device, is a T-shaped object inserted in a woman's uterus, where it can stay for years. It is 99 percent effective at preventing pregnancies  more than condoms, though IUDs do not prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Hormonal IUDs can last for about 3 to 6 years on average, while non-hormonal IUDs can last for up to 12 years, according to Planned Parenthood.

IUDs have offered a unique appeal for their longevity. Google searches for the term were four times their average on Wednesday night, after Trump was projected to win the presidency.

//

And women on Twitter have suggested that others get IUDs to last through a Trump presidency.

Ladies! Please get your IUDS, breast cancer screenings, and all reproductive health done before January 20th.  Shayal  (@Shhaallll) November 9, 2016

Kristyn Brandi, MD, OB/GYN and family planning specialist at Boston Medical Center and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health called the Affordable Care Act a "game-changer" for helping women afford contraception.

We don't really know what will happen with the new administration," she said. "I have heard of several women that are concerned about either access to IUDs or replacing existing ones. We have already seen patients who are seeking contraception based on concerns about what will happen to reproductive health and the Affordable Care Act."

The talk of IUDs may have been prompted by an article in The Daily Beast last week.

"What Donald Trump has promised to doand what Mike Pence has actually done during his tenure as governor of Indianais to make birth control a lot more difficult for women to access, Erin Gloria Ryan wrote, advocating that women consider getting an IUD in case Trump were elected.

IUDs are the third most popular form of contraception, according to Planned Parenthood, behind condoms and birth control pills, and they were already becoming more popular. The organization has seen a 91 percent increase in IUD users in the last five years alone.

McDonald-Mosley said Planned Parenthood expects that trend to continue in coming years.

Democrats have long supported Planned Parenthood, but Republicans have fought in recent years to restrict funding to the organization. Since Trump was elected president, the organization has made it clear that they are there to stay.

"We now face a very different future, and there is uncertainty ahead," their website read after the race was called. "But one thing is for sure: We will never back down, and Planned Parenthood will never stop providing the care patients need."

Pearson and the NWHN are preparing to "fight like crazy" to stop potential health care cuts, she said.

--Suzanne Ciechalski contributed to this story
A planned protest by Black Lives Matter activists on Friday at Marist High School in Mount Greenwood on the Far South Side has been canceled over concerns about safety.

Instead, activists will meet with Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, Alderman Matt OShea (19th) and Marist High School Principal Larry Tucker, spokeswoman Rachael Perrotta said in a statement. The protest was cancelled after online messages threatened violence against the protesters.

Black Lives Matter Youth and Walter Payton College Preps Black Student Union had planned to meet at Wrigley Square Millennium Park and travel to Marist High School to denounce the racist response of locals in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood and students at Marist High School to the murder of Joshua Beal.

Beal, 25, of Indianapolis was shot to death after he pointed a gun at an off-duty officer and others during a traffic dispute Saturday afternoon in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood on the Southwest Side, authorities said.

Since Beals shooting, Black Live Matter and Blue Lives Matter supporters have verbally clashed in protests near where Beal was fatally shot in Mount Greenwood.

Officials at Marist High School, a private Catholic school in Mount Greenwood, said they decided to cancel classes on Friday due to safety concerns for students and to limit disruptions on school grounds, the school announced on its website Thursday. The decision was also made after school officials learned that a five block stretch in front of the school, 4200 W. 115th St., would be blocked starting at noon Friday for the protest.

Marist officials released a statement Monday after they were made aware of racially charged posts on social media that involved students at the school. The students involved faced disciplinary action, the school said.

Racism is a sin and has no place in the Church, including the Archdiocese of Chicago, Archbishop Blase J. Cupich said in a statement supporting disciplinary action against the students.
Nearly 2,000 protesters marched in Chicago's downtown streets Wednesday night, shutting down Lake Shore Drive and chanting angry slogans about the president elect outside Trump Tower, according to a Chicago Police Department estimate.

Demonstrators carried signs and shouted "Donald Trump has got to go," and "We reject the president elect," after a crowd of a few dozen grew into multiple groups totalling at about 1,800, sparking a huge police presence downtown as the evening wore on.

Chicago Police said about 10 p.m. that there had been no arrests or injuries.

"We will be ensuring adequate police coverage so that participants have an opportunity to safely assemble and demonstrate, but the department will be intolerant to any criminal or destructive activity," Chicago Police said in a statement.

A massive amount of people showed up to do just that.

"We don't stand for sexism, we don't stand for racism, homophobia--this is not my president" protester Reily O'Neil said.

The crowd also drew some Trump supporters who hoisted signs and argued with his detractors.

"I expect the Republicans to rally around [Trump] and the things they can agree on get done," Don Peterson, who drove in from Yorkville, said.

About 8 p.m. one of the large groups spilled onto Lake Shore Drive, halting traffic from Fullerton Avenue to Roosevelt Road. A swarm of protesters at one point climbed atop a stopped CTA bus. Multiple bus routes were impacted by the protesters, the transit agency tweeted Wednesday night.

Demonstrators protesting the president elect, Donald Trump, Wednesday night climbed atop a halted CTA bus after shutting down Lake Shore Drive.

The emergency protest was scheduled following Donald Trumps shocking victory over Hillary Clinton.

The event, which involved groups including Answer Chicago, Freedom First International and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, originally planned to gather from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., according to organizers. But by 10:30 p.m., groups of protesters had fragmented into smaller packs roving downtown's streets.

We must resist this outcome, organizers wrote in a Facebook page for the protest. In fact, we cannot be idle. We must get into the streets immediately. We must unite and stand with immigrants, Muslims, women, LGBTQ people, poor and working people and Black Lives Matter. Only the people can defeat racism, bigotry and hate.

Chicago police had been stationed outside the hotel Wednesday morning prior to the protest for extra security purposes, authorities said.

Other similar demonstrations took place in various cities throughout the United States Wednesday, with high school and college students from coast to coast staging walkouts.

Trump, who entered politics after a career in real estate and reality TV, defied pollsters and pundits Tuesday to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

"Now its time for America to bind the wounds of division," Trump told a crowd of joyous supporters early Wednesday morning. "... We're going to dream of things for our country and beautiful things and successful things once again."

Clinton called Trump to concede after Trump had taken several battleground states, including Florida and Ohio.

Minutes after Trump was declared the winner, hundreds of protesters flocked to the streets of the Bay Area in California, blocking freeways, lighting fires and chanting, "Not our president" and "F--- Trump."

Protesters also burned Trump effigies, smashed windows of the Oakland Tribune newsroom, and set tires, trash and newspaper stands on fire in Oakland and Berkeley.

Hundreds of students protested on other California university campuses following Trump's victory. Police said at least 500 people swarmed on streets in and around UCLA early Wednesday morning.

Trump, 70, directed his campaign primarily at white, working-class men who felt left behind by the economic recovery after the 2008 recession, and insecure in an increasingly globalized economy.
A man has been charged with beating a 21-month-old baby to death Tuesday morning in the South Side Back of the Yards neighborhood.

Uriel Vega, 22, faces one count of first-degree murder for the death of Raiylana Vasquez, according to Chicago Police and the Cook County medical examiners office. He was responsible for taking care of the child at the time of her death.

Officers responded at 11:22 a.m. to the 4700 block of South Honore and found Raiylana unresponsive, authorities said. She had suffered obvious signs of trauma.

Raiylana, who was 21 months old, was taken to Holy Cross Hospital where she was pronounced dead at 12:18 p.m., according to the medical examiners office. An autopsy Wednesday found she died of multiple injuries due to child abuse, and her death was ruled a homicide.

The investigation revealed that the girl died due to blunt force trauma caused by Vega, who lives on the same block as the incident, police said. He was scheduled to appear in bond court Thursday.

The state Department of Children and Family Services is investigating the mothers boyfriend for allegations of abuse and neglect, according to a spokeswoman.

DCFS has had prior contact with the babys mother, according to the spokeswoman. Two investigations, one in September 2015 and one in August 2016, proved unfounded. The mother was indicated for neglect in February 2016.

There are three siblings in the family who do not live with the mother, but with another family member who has custody, according to the DCFS spokeswoman.
The first trailer for a documentary showcasing the horrific story of how two 12-year-old girls tried to kill their friend to please a fictional horror character on the internet has been released.

Beware the Slenderman, an HBO documentary directed by Oscar- nominated filmmaker Irene Brodsky, follows the 2014 story of two young girls who are accused of luring their best friend into the woods and stabbing her 19 times to please the fictional character notorious for stalking and terrorizing children.

The documentary, shot over 18 months, features heartbreaking access to the families of the would-be murderers and plunges deep down the rabbit hole of their crime, a Boogeyman and our societys impressionable consumers of media, according to its description on the SXSW website.

The entrance to the internet can quickly lead us to its dark basement, within just a matter of clicks, the description reads. How much do we hold children responsible for what they find there?

Authorities say the girls, who have since been charged as adults, plotted for months to kill their friend Payton Leutner and told investigators they believed Slender Man had a mansion in a Wisconsin forest. They planned to go live with him after the slaying, authorities said.

The girls left Payton for dead after stabbing her more than a dozen times, but she was able to crawl from a wooded area and was discovered by a passing bicyclist. After several surgeries, Payton has returned to school.

Wisconsin law requires attempted homicide cases start in adult court if a suspect is at least 10, but the girls' attorneys have said they hope to see the charges moved to juvenile court, where more services might be available. A judge suspended the case last fall while an appeals court decides whether to review a decision to keep the case in adult court.

The story of Slender Man has provided spooks and thrills for legions of online readers, inspiring a series of videos and once earning the moniker of "the Internet's monster."

The character first surfaced in 2009, when a user on an online forum called Something Awful posted a doctored photo and fictional article in response to a call for fake supernatural images, according to the site KnowYourMeme.com and an expert who has studied the evolution of the Slender Man myth. While such creations aren't uncommon, Slender Man struck a nerve. Soon, users were contributing their own visions of the monster and versions of the terror he'd inflict on unsuspecting school children and others.

In variations of the legend, Slender Man was said to "cause memory loss, insomnia, paranoia, coughing fits," according to Know Your Meme. His narrow frame was accented by tentacles or arms that could stretch and retract in some accounts.

The story spread, inspiring a spin off online video series, video games and threads on various message boards and sites dedicated to scary folklore. It has since become a popular topic on the site Creepypasta, where the two girls charged with the attack reportedly told authorities they encountered the tale.
Three Quinnipiac University students have been arrested for possession large amounts of marijuana, Hamden Police said.

On Nov. 4, Hamden Police responded to the school and learned that Quinnipiac University public safety had located large quantities of marijuana in a dorm room.

Andrew Stein, 19, Thomas Famulary, 19, and Samuel Belanger, 20, all of New Jersey, were arrested and charged with possessing marijuana with intent to sell, police said.

More than 300 grams of marijuana and $810, in addition to drug paraphernalia was found in the students' shared dorm room, police said.

They were each assigned a bond set at $5,000 and are expected to appear in court on Nov. 17.
President-elect Donald Trumps proposed policy of cutting funding for sanctuary cities is hitting home with the immigrant community in New Haven.

Father James Manship is the pastor at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in the Fair Haven section of the Elm City.

"One can feel the anxiousness and the fear in the community, both here in the parish and in the neighborhood," he told NBC Connecticut Friday afternoon.

Most of the parishioners who worship in his church are immigrant families worried about President-elect Donald Trumps campaign promises on immigration, Manship said.

Often citing the murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant released by police, Trump has pledged to cut federal funding for sanctuary cities like New Haven.

These cities, which include New York and Los Angeles, have policies for police to target undocumented immigrants nor turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"We are a community that values everyone," New Haven Mayor Toni Harp said.

The mayor offered these words of reassurance to the Elm Citys immigrant population when asked about Trumps threat to slash funding for sanctuary cities.

"We see them as part of very vibrant community," she said of immigrant families, "That our policies have not changed and will not change and we dont want them to be afraid here in New Haven. Please dont be afraid to send your kids to school."

Newly re-elected Sen. Richard Blumenthal said fixing a broken immigration system requires bi-partisan congressional action.

"Whats needed is fundamental, far-reaching immigration reform that will enable the 11 million people who are in the shadows now to come out and have a path to earn citizenship," Blumenthal said.

The idea of splitting up families through deportations to maintain federal funding for things like schools and construction projects does not sit well with Father Manship.

"Its not just about money," he said. "But its about tearing apart the fabric of the community."

If Trump follows through on this campaign promise, New Haven would not be the only affected city in the state. Hartford, Bridgeport and Stamford are also sanctuary cities.
A Central Connecticut State University student said he is trying to spread unity throughout campus after some students feel a Trump presidency could have their school divided.

Dozens of CCSU students marched and chanted across campus Wednesday. Among them, Jose Diaz. The 23-year-old is an immigrant from Mexico. He's in the U.S. on a work permit and is part of program helping immigrants receive an education.

After hearing Donald Trump won the presidency, he worries about his future here in the states.

"I see the way he expresses the way towards immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and people overall. That specifically makes me scared," said Jose Diaz.

Fueling the fear. Social media posts he receives. Some post, calling Diaz undocumented, and demanding his deportation.

At the rally, Diaz said the criticisms were shouted not tweeted.

"They were saying profanity," said Diaz.

The rally's purpose students said wasn't to show opposition for Tump. Instead, to show unity among fellow organizations on campus. And unity for fellow students no matter who they support.

"After they came and talked to us they understood it," said Diaz.

Understanding. An idea without borders. And an idea Diaz said he hopes others will support. So everyone has the greatest future possible.

"We define our future, it's the things that people do, and what we do together, is what our future will look like," said Diaz.

Since the rally organizations here on campus have been supporting each other more students said.
Ankara, Turkey, Nov. 11

By Ahmet Ismuhan  Trend:

Turkeys Energy Market Regulatory Authority has fined 15 energy companies for selling fuel in several provinces without licenses, said a message posted on the Regulatory Authoritys official website.

According to the message, the fines totaled 2.542 million liras (official exchange rate on Nov. 11 is 3.2105 TL/USD).

The names of the fined companies were not disclosed.
Some of the biggest names in the Connecticut business world saw significant gains on Wall Street in the past 24 hours.

They included the Farmington-based United Technologies Corporation, the New Britain-based Stanley Black and Decker, and Lockheed Martin, the corporate parent of Stratford-based Sikorsky.

Economic observers say there is a direct effect from the presidential election.

"After Trump's speech there was a second chance to take a deep breath and take a look that it may not be as chaotic as we thought it would be."

In the hours leading up to the election there was an international sell-off that led to a halt in Dow futures trading, heightening uncertainty.

In the two days since, there has been more optimism, which Stanley Black and Decker has benefited from, Cadden said.

Because of Trump's discussion about infrastructure improvements, Cadden said, "its not surprising that the construction stocks would see a significant increase."

Smaller employers in Connecticut are excited for a different reason, the new Republican influence in the Connecticut State Senate.

The 18-18 split with Democrats holding the tie-breaking vote by virtue of Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman is the first such divide since 1893.

Connecticut business owners say such balance means more certainty on budget and tax matters.

"We're going to hold their feet to the fire," said Douglas Johnson, the President of Marion Manufacturing in Cheshire.

He says he hopes the Republican influence leads to less talk about tax hikes and more discussion about tax rebates and incentives.

Johnson said, "We can see what happens into the early parts of the session and if these changes come true that we think were going to see, absolutely, people are going to be able to release some of that pent up money and the improvements that we need to do internally."
Electric Boat (EB) employees build state-of-the-art submarines for the Navy, and many served themselves.

On the eve of Veterans Day, the company saluted those veterans who made the sacrifice to protect Americans' freedom.

There were multiple services throughout the day to make sure all shifts at the shipyard were able to attend. Employees have holiday off.

The SubTones, EB's chorus, sang the National Anthem and the Navy Hymn.

Engineer Darrell Comena gave the invocation. And there were remarks from EB Veterans Network Lead Anthony Paolino, MDA-UAW Financial Secretary Bill May, and Supervisor of Shipbuilding Capt. Jeffrey Heydon.

The first Veterans Day observance at EB was in 1999. It's been a tradition since.

Staff also made sure to tout their new initiatives to mentor and hire more veterans.

"Keep this country safe for those who are going to be here after I leave the earth, and my kids, and everything," said EB employee Angel Rosa, retired U.S. Air Force. "It was a great honor to do that."

Rosa served the Air Force for 23 years as a mid-air refueling specialist.

"I am the son of two veterans of World War II. My father was Army Air Corps, my mother was Navy," said veteran and EB employee David Gallup, choking back tears.

Gallup said the military is in his blood.

"I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know what it would mean until I got older and life and the importance of the service," he said.

In a way, these veterans are still serving by helping to build the Navy's fast-attack submarines that keep Americans safe.

"I'm proud to serve, and I'm sure (those in the military) are proud to serve and keep this nation free and safe," Rosa said.
As demonstrations against President-elect Donald Trump take place across the country, a New Haven-based activist group organized a protest for Thursday afternoon.

The New Haven Workers Association  Unidad Latina en Accion is calling their protest United Against Hatred, We are Here to Stay.

The group is holding their demonstration outside Federal Court on Church St. across from the New Haven Green. It is expected to last from 5 p.m. until 6:30 p.m.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump made building a wall on the Southern Border a centerpiece of his immigration plan.

Trump also says he wants to end sanctuary cities, where local police do not alert federal law enforcement of people living in the country illegally.

New Haven is one of those cities with a population of undocumented immigrants, many of whom live in the Fair Haven neighborhood where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and deportations have taken place in the past.

Trump has given his followers permission to hate, organizers wrote on the Facebook event page for the protest.

While in the past 8 years we have endured the highest-ever amount of deportations under Obama and expected to continue resisting the same from Clinton, a Trump presidency threatens the very fabric of our community. We gather without fear to say that our unity trumps his hate.

Another demonstration titled Solidary Rally (in wake of Donald Trump presidency) is scheduled for Friday afternoon at 5:30 p.m. on the New Haven Green, according to the event Facebook page.

Tune into NBC Connecticut News at 5 and 6 for live coverage of the New Haven anti-Trump protest.
Waterbury Hospital was on diversion after a patient was transported to the hospital in cardiac arrest and found with a bag labeled as sodium cyanide.

Officials from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said firefighters and medics responded to American Electroplating, at 1358 Thomaston Ave., because someone was suffering a health issue.

At the hospital, someone found a plastic bag in the patient's pocket that had sodium cyanide written on it and noticed powder the patient's clothing, according to DEEP.

The fire department isolated the HVAC in the hospital, shut down the emergency department and crews isolated the ambulance, along with the engine and their crews.

Hospital staff members set a protocol into motion once the person was in the emergency department and ambulances were diverted to other hospitals, according to Waterbury Hospital officials.

The hospital is no longer on diversion.

The hospital has hired an environmental contractor to decontaminate the ER and DEEP and the fire department are working on a plan for the apparatus and gear, DEEP officials said.

DEEP officials also said police are investigating how and why the person brought to the hospital was exposed.

Other patients and staff did not show symptons of sodium cyanide exposure.

The emergency department is accepting walk-in patients, according to hospital staff.
Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in World War Two, just a few hundred thousand were women. However, they played an integral part in winning the war.

I wanted to fight for my country. I wanted to live in a free country and if I could do anything I was gonna do it, Constance Collins said.

The 92-year-old said her sense of patriotism pushed her to join the military during World War II, specifically the bombing of Pearl Harbor. At just 20 years old, she asked her parents for permission to enlist in the Navy, following in her fathers footsteps.

On the same day, Collins, her older sister and a younger brother all left for war, while another brother joined a monastery.

On one day the family went from nine to five, Collins said.

However, Collins said her family supported their daughters decision.

Mother was gung-ho. Constance, if you want to go, you go, her mother said, Collins recalled.

In 1944, women were not allowed to join the full Navy and could only serve stateside. Collins and her sister Shirley went into the reservist program called WAVES or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

You felt that you were really helping the war effort, Collins said.

She worked as a cartographer in Washington D.C, drawing maps of the Pacific, based on photographs taken from the air.

We would place the bridges and places that they were supposed to bomb on the map. Every time I did it, I said a prayer, Please let me put the bridge where it is, she recalled.

With men leaving their jobs in droves to join the fight in World War II, women were also encouraged to enlist. However, not everyone supported their participation.

The men were terrible. They didnt want the women in the service. That was their territory, Collins said.

Many women weren't much better.

Collins remembered drawing the ire of some women for ignoring social norms and wanting a career instead of staying home.

Most of them sort of turned their back on you, she recalled. Because they were so limited in their thinking and narrow-minded they missed the opportunity to be part of the war effort. I didnt care how they treated me. I thought they were the losers.

When asked if the war could have been won without the help of women like her, Collins said, Absolutely not, recalling that even President Dwight Eisenhower said the war couldnt have been won without their participation.

The women ended up doing all the jobs that the men were doing because the men had to go fight, she added.

After two years in the service, Collins attended Sargent College of Boston University on the GI Bill. It was located in Cambridge, right next to Harvard Law School, which was experiencing the largest class to date as the war had just ended.

By that point, Collins said men were less concerned about a womens role in the war and more worried about finding a wife.

Wow what fertile ground, because the men were afraid there werent going to be enough women to go around, she said. Boy, what a field day. I had at least a half a dozen proposals the first week I was at Sergeant College. I thought, Wow, this is great. I said to one guy, You dont even know my name!

One young man, a former Army captain attending Harvard Law, did catch her attention.

Theres my Jim. The love of my life. We were soul mates, she said, looking at Jim Collins picture on the dining room table.

The two married and had four kids.

There werent very many of my friends who had mothers who were telling stories like that, and when she showed excitement about being patriotic, she showed excitement about going out and being part of the world and the adventures she had and the thankfulness she had to the country for being able to get a free education it just made you feel good, her daughter, Betty Collins, said.

Jim, a Connecticut judge, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Harford County twice in the 1960s.

Still, life seemed pretty rich compared to growing up in the Great Depression.

Collins said their service during World War II paved the way for those possibilities.

I lived in a free country and freedom is priceless, she said, patriotically.

Jim died tragically of cancer in 1975, at the age of 56.

Collins visits his grave every Memorial Day and joins volunteers who put flags out at West Hartfords Fairview Cemetery, honoring the freedoms they served and fought to protect.

After the war, Collins and the rest of the women in the Navy Reserves were declared full members of the military.
As the Democratic Party absorbed the shock of Donald Trump's presidential win and, at least, another two years of a Republican-controlled Congress, progressives were calling for a more liberal agenda and eyeing a takeover of the Democratic National Committee.

Trumps win underscored the divide among the so-called establishment and a more populist wing allied with senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clintons former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The next chair of the DNC will play a key leadership role as the party builds itself back from defeat.

According to NBC News, Rep. Keith Ellison, the co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus, is gaining momentum as the left's apparent candidate of choice to lead it, according to NBC News. Sanders announced his support for Keith, of Minnesota, in an Associated Press interview Thursday morning.

The party's liberal wing has begun jockeying for power since Clinton's defeat, arguing that her loss could be attributed to her reluctance to fully focus on economic inequality and tougher Wall Street regulations.

"More than anything, this election is an indictment of politics as usual," said Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, the Democrat-aligned labor federation.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, speaking at the AFL-CIO on Thursday, noted that though Trump won the Presidency under a Republican flag, the party's leaders  Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan  and the Republicans in Congress were rejected.

"Rejected by their own primary voters, rejected during the campaign, and rejected in Tuesday's election," Warren said.

Meanwhile, Howard Dean has announced a bid to head up the Democratic Party again, a post he held during the Bush administration.

"The dems need organization and focus on the young," Dean tweeted Thursday. "Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman again."

Dean mounted an insurgent primary challenge in 2004, running on a more liberal platform than eventual nominee Sen. John Kerry.

He served as Democratic National Committee chairman from 2005 to 2009. Interim chairwoman Donna Brazile is supposed to end her position early next year. Without a Democratic president to pick her successor, the committee will hold open elections for the post.

Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley and Rep. Xavier Becerra of California are also rumored to be considering running for the position.
Local and national lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community groups are fielding a lot of concern after the results of the 2016 election.

"The rhetoric of this presidential election has been hurtful to many," Dallas Resource Center CEO Cece Cox wrote in a social media statement to members this week. "The outcome of the election is now known and many of us are afraid and uncertain."

LGBTQ community members across the country have shown expressed worry about how future policies from President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence could alter their rights or lead to discrimination for them.

Donald Trump doesn't have a reputation for discrimination against that community and even said during his campaign that transgender people should use whatever bathroom they like.

The Republican Party platform does stand against altering bathroom policies to suit transgender people though, and as the governor of Indiana, Pence signed a bill allowing businesses to refuse service to LGBT people, among other actions.

Mark Phariss, from Equality Texas, said he's concerned about the potential for more bills like that showing up at the federal and state level with this recent shift and without clear advocates in the White House.

"People need to start contacting their legislators and let them know there are voters in their district who won't tolerate this," he said.

While many on both sides of the political aisle have made calls in recent days to give the new administration a chance, Phariss said his community can't afford to sit back and just hope for the best.

"It's really 180 degrees different," said Phariss. "Real lives are at risk."
A 21-year-old woman who went missing in Dallas Thursday night has been located and is safe, police say.[[400804961,C]]

Dallas police said Ashley Wiley had last been seen in the 9600 block of Forest Lane at about 9:45 p.m.

Police said she may have been a danger to herself.

In an updated at 2:25 p.m. Friday police said Wiley was safe.
Authorities said a Houston-area man who called 911 to report his wife was sick but never mentioned that she was shot must serve 85 years in prison for her death.

Daniel Politte of Missouri City was sentenced Thursday night. A Fort Bend County jury on Monday convicted him of murder in the 2014 fatal shooting of his 29-year-old wife, Stephanie, at their home.

Prosecutors said the 32-year-old Politte shot his wife in the back of the head, likely as she slept, then called 911 to report she was vomiting blood. The husband never mentions a gun or a wound.

Attorneys for Politte suggested his wife had a gun, wanted to hurt herself and he tried to stop her.

Politte must serve at least 30 years before he's eligible for parole.
Actor Song Joong-Ki arrives at the 2011 Mnet Asian Music Awards at the Singapore Indoor Stadium on November 29, 2011 in Singapore. (Photo : Getty Images/Chris McGrath)

Lately, there has been a lot of speculation surrounding the follow-up to the hugely successful television series "Descendants of the Sun," which catapulted actors Song Joong Ki and Song Hye Kyo to fame. However, several reports claim that the second season has been cancelled due to the unavailability of Joong Ki.



Advertisement

After wrapping up the first season of the popular KBS series, the actor has kept himself busy with other projects. The Hallyu star is currently filming the movie "Battleship Island," because of which he will not be joining "Descendants of the Sun 2," according to Asia Times.



Moreover, rumors are rife that Hye Kyo also will not be a part of the upcoming season due to scheduling conflicts. Joong Ki played the role of South Korean Special Forces captain Yoo Si Jin in the first season of the South Korean series while the actress portrayed the character of Dr. Kang Mo-Yeon.



Both Joong Ki and Hye Kyo gained immense popularity during the series. The pair also shared a great on-screen chemistry, prompting fans to dub them as Song-Song. The co-stars are also rumored to be dating each other in real life.



Fans will be devastated to know that both lead actors will not be reprising their roles in the second installment as their love story is what made the series successful. While some believe that the "Descendants of the Sun 2" will go ahead with production by bringing on board new actors, some reports state that there will be no second season without the two major characters.



The first installment of the series was a blockbuster hit all across the Asian continent. As a matter of fact, the show did so well that after the finale, KBS added three extra episodes featuring the best scenes from the series.



"Battleship Island" is a war movie, which also stars So Ji Sub and Hwang Jung Min. The movie has already been pegged as a blockbuster because of its powerful star-cast. The film, directed by "Veteran and The Berlin File" director Ryoo Seung Wan, revolves around the brave Korean fighters who escaped the titular island, where they were forcefully taken to during the Japanese Invasion, according to Asia One.



For more details on the upcoming movie, watch the video below:






As people fight over the role of government in the wake of a turbulent election season, a Southeast Dallas church is feeding neighbors with no government support.

In just a few years, the Inspired Vision Church food pantry has grown into a key source of nourishment for a needy neighborhood.

From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day there's a traffic jam in the 9400 block of Military Parkway as people crowd into the little place for fresh food items. Many are donated to the church because they are too close to expiration for grocery stores, but still healthy for hungry people.

"We don't turn anything down because somebody needs it," said the Rev. Karen Belknap, pastor at Inspired Vision Church.

She started the food bank after a fifth grader at the charter school she ran passed out in class the day after Thanksgiving break.

"We found out she hadn't eaten in six days, since the last school lunch before Thanksgiving. When I found that out, I made up my mind, not on my watch will that happen again," Belknap said.

The pastor learned that hunger is a huge problem in her part of wealthy North Texas. So far this year, the church has served more than 76,000 families.

Patricia Berry said she visits several times a week to help feed her family.

"We're out of money now and we just got our money on the 3rd and it doesn't go very far, so this helps," Berry said. "A lot of people bring other people who don't have a way."

Hospice caregiver Rita Speed said she comes to help feed herself and some of her patients.

"It's very helpful because by the time you buy groceries, my patients buy groceries, you don't have enough money to buy vegetables," she said. "So this place here, it really helps. It really helps, and I thank God for it."

Belknap said dozens of people now volunteer at the church each week.

"Most of them are people that needed food themselves and they've come to help us make it happen now," she said.

The church also offers donated merchandise like diapers and toiletries. It has rooms full of donated toys ready to be holiday gifts.

The neighborhood food pantry and relief operation has been so successful, Belknap said the greatest need now is a bigger building to house the growing mission at Inspired Vision Church.
Dallas Homicide detectives said they found a suspect linked to the murder at a convenience store back in September.

Lonzell Hunter, 22, is one of the suspects that police believe killed Mowaffaq Shararah at the Sunshine Food Mart located on the 3800 block of South Cockrell Hill Road.

Detectives said the suspect robbed the Sunshine Food Mart at around 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 23.

They said Hunter and another suspect pointed their weapons at Shararah, who was an employee, and demanded cash from the register. They ended up shooting and killing him before they fled on foot, detectives said.

Earlier on that same day the suspects robbed a 7/11 at the 5900 block of Singleton Boulevard. Police said the men were armed with an assault rifle and handgun and stole cash, cigarettes and cigars.

Hunter is currently in jail on an another capital murder charge from Sunday, Oct. 30.
Several protesters have been arrested during Texas demonstrations by people angry over the election of Republican Donald Trump for president.

Some demonstrators Thursday night in Dallas carried signs saying "Stop Trump." Officials say more than 200 people marched to Dealey Plaza to protest Tuesday's results. Dallas police say three people were arrested.

Some minority students at Plano East Senior High School complained after a chalk drawing of a wall was scrawled on the ground of a breezeway. Nearby captions said: "Build that wall" and "Can't Stop Trump." Trump has suggested building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Administrators have increased campus security.

[[400706961,C]]

Houston police arrested five anti-Trump demonstrators during a downtown protest Thursday. Texas troopers in Austin detained two demonstrators on the grounds of the Capitol.

Protesters marched for the second straight night Thursday in downtown Dallas to voice their opposition to President-elect Donald Trump.

The Next Generation Action Network advocacy group held a peaceful protest Wednesday night and planned to hold protests in Dallas and Fort Worth Friday night. The group held a news conference to discuss the protests at 11 a.m. Friday.

Watch the full Next Generation Action Network news conference regarding election protests in North Texas.
A transgender high school student said a Dallas Independent School District administrator asked her inappropriate questions about her body after another student complained about her using the women's restroom.

Jamie Lynn was born male, but now identifies as female. She's been using the women's restroom at North Dallas High School all school year without incident  until Monday, when a student complained about the 16-year-old being in the restroom.

"There's never been a problem. There's been girls in there and I just talk to them because I like to be friendly. They've never made a complaint," Lynn said.

According to a Dallas ISD spokeswoman, Lynn met with an assistant principal and two school resource officers to discuss the incident. She said that's when the assistant principal started asking inappropriate questions.

"He asked, 'Do you have your boy genitals and is the top real?' meaning my breasts," she said. "That's something that made me feel really bad because I feel like an assistant principal shouldn't ask anyone that."

That night Lynn went home and told her mother.

"The situation was very embarrassing and I was worried (about) the way she was treated," said mother Miriam Citalan.

The school is investigating the incident, but Lynn still wants to know why she isn't allowed to use the restroom she's always used.

Administrators know that Lynn is transgender, and have made special accommodations for her to use a restroom in the nurse's office. The district said Lynn is aware of the accommodations, but she denied that, saying she just learned about it on Monday, after the incident with the assistant principal.

Without a bathroom policy to rely on, the school said she must use that restroom from now on.

"I feel isolated  like something they want to hide," she said.

"I don't like it. It's like they push you to the side from everybody else when we're all normal," Citalan said.

Lynn has started a petition requesting that the school allow her to once again use the women's restroom. She said the policy is important for her and transgender students in the future.

"I feel like everyone is open-minded about this idea," she said. "I have to keep going for those kids that don't have a voice."
The lives of two veterans from two different generations are now intertwined.

Nick Holland is an 11-year United States Navy veteran who spent seven years overseas, including two tours in Iraq. He now works maintenance at the Presbyterian Village North senior living community.

You take care of everybody under your care, he said about the lessons he learned in the Navy that he applies now to his second career.

Jim Clutts, 91, is a longtime resident of the community. Clutts, a proud member of the Greatest Generation, served in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

Clutts spent much of his service on the island of Tinian in the South Pacific, which was home to one of the largest airbases in the world. Tinian was the staging base for near-continuous bombing attacks on the Japanese and the departure point for the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, two planes that delivered two of the most significant weapons ever developed.

I could see there was something happening over on the other side [of the airfield] that I couldnt understand what it was, so I jumped in my Jeep and I drove around over to where that was," he said. "They wouldnt let me in as far as I wanted to go, but later I learned when they dropped the atomic bomb thats what was happening.

Clutts said he does not think of his service much, but when he does he thinks of the men he served with and the terrible damage they inflicted upon the enemy.

I think about the fact that we should never have been involved in that. The Japanese made a tremendous mistake in attacking us at Pearl Harbor. We just wiped them out, really, Clutts said. I can remember flying over Tokyo and Tokyo Bay and youve never seen such a city so severely damaged as that city was. It was just terrible, and it did more damage in regular bombing than the atomic bombs did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Clutts later devoted his life to creating buildings as opposed to destroying them. He worked as an architect in Dallas-Fort Worth for decades designing and overseeing construction of several significant buildings on the campuses of UT Southwestern Medical Center and the University of North Texas, including the Coliseum, also known as the Super Pit.

Clutts, who served as president for the Texas Society of Architects and the American Institute of Architects-Dallas, was honored in 2014 with a Lifetime Achievement Award from AIA Dallas.

Holland said he is always impressed to hear the stories of older veterans like Clutts.

Hollands father served in the United States Army, and he has siblings who also served in the military. So Veterans Day will never be just another day to him.

[If other people] have any sensibility about how they live in America, they need to think there were other people that made a lot of tremendous sacrifices for them to get up that morning and not be under any tyranny, Holland said. Ive been to countries where they dont have freedom, they dont have running water, they dont have shoes. In America we have those things available. People should wake up with a sense of, Okay, I know I cant do much for veterans, but maybe if I see one, shake a hand or just say, Thank you for your service.
President Elect Donald Trump will not take office until Jan. 20, but the transition of power is already in full swing. Speculation about the company Trump will keep, when he moves to Pennsylvania Avenue, has already begun.

There are several Texas leaders being considered for top White House positions, advisers, and cabinet members.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a major supporter of Trump throughout his campaign, is being considered for a top position.

According to a spokesman, "Mr. Trump called the Lt. Governor after he won the election thanking him, but he has made it clear he will not be moving to Washington. He is passionate about the work he is doing here in Texas," the spokesman said.

Patrick did, however, give Trump some recommendations:

Congressman Michael McCaul, from Austin, chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.

Patrick also recommended Former Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Trump expressed that Cruz may be his U.S. Supreme Court appointee.

Other Texas Republicans that Trump may consider are Sid Miller, who is the Texas Agricultural Commissioner, and Former Texas Governor Rick Perry.

Miller, who refers to himself as a "deplorable" on social media said "I would be honored to serve in Washington with Trump. I would still need to pray about it and talk to my family about it. I think my experience would bring something unique to the position."

The eighth-generation rancher recently made headlines after he referred to Syrians as "refugees," and a tweet was sent out from his account calling Hillary Clinton the "c-word."

Rick Perry has been open about his interest in serving alongside Donald Trump. The two time republican presidential candidate posted a picture on social media implying that he "got the call" from Trump, and was ready to "saddle up."

Trump has not officially named anyone to a specific position. When he takes office he will need to fill 4,000 positions.

You can find a complete list of those positions, and the application here.
Los Angeles police chases injured more bystanders in 2015 than in any other year in a decade, renewing calls for the Police Department to reform its pursuit policy, according to a report published Thursday.

The Los Angeles Times reviewed data showing 78 people were hurt during LAPD chases they had nothing to do with last year. That eclipses the previous highest tally of 61 in 2005.

LAPD chases in 2015 injured bystanders at four times the rate of police pursuits in the rest of the state, the newspaper reported.

The number of injured bystanders, which includes pedestrians as well as drivers and passengers in cars that were not involved in the pursuit, was the highest in Los Angeles since at least 2002, the earliest year for which the California Highway Patrol has available data.

In most cases, fleeing suspects whose vehicle collides with pedestrians or other motorists caused the injuries. But some law enforcement experts blamed the high rate of injuries on the LAPD's pursuit policy.

The department allows officers to give chase for a wide array of crimes, including relatively minor offenses such as car theft, reckless driving or driving while intoxicated. Fleeing motorists who are impaired are more likely to cause a crash while speeding or driving erratically as they try to escape, critics said.

"Every one of these, you're playing with fire," said Eugene O'Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

LAPD officials argue it is unfair to compare bystander injuries to those in other cities, because Los Angeles' system of freeways and thoroughfares allow fleeing vehicles to go faster and make wild turns, increasing the likelihood of injuries.

Last year's rise in injuries, they said, coincided with an increase in pursuits across the city and state. The LAPD was involved in 527 chases last year, compared with 345 in 2014. Investigators with the LAPD and CHP could not give the Times a specific reason for the increase in pursuits in California.

"The instances, the people willing to flee and choosing to flee, is what's on the rise here," said Lt. David Ferry.

Most injuries to bystanders, LAPD officials said, were relatively minor. And the first five months of this year saw a 45 percent decline compared with the same period in 2015, according to the most recent data provided by the LAPD.
A mother and her 2-year-old son were viciously attacked by two dogs in their front yard in Anaheim this week.

The home's surveillance cameras captured the attack, and footage shows the large dogs approach the toddler, named Grayson, as he walks out of his house ahead of his mother into their front yard.

At first the dogs appear to be friendly, but then suddenly they start biting Grayson.

"It was like a bad movie," said Spenser Bishop, the mother's husband and the boy's father. "It was surreal."

Bishop said the dogs got out through his neighbor's open gate on Tuesday.

Surveillance video shows the mother as she picks Grayson up and tries to hold him up away from the dogs while the dogs continue to attack her and try to bite the boy.

"They bit her hair and pulled it, and threw her around like a rag doll," Bishop said.

Later, the video shows another neighbor, 17-year-old Leslie Arias, come up to help them holding a stick.

Arias said she was in her room across the street when she heard a woman yelling for help. When the panicked yelling continued, she looked out her window and saw the dogs attacking the mother.

Arias said it was "heartbreaking" to see the dogs biting the boy, and said her only instinct was to "just help the boy and the mother."

"I grabbed anything that I saw to hit the dogs or something, and that was a metal stick," Arias said.

She stopped a garbage man to help, and another neighbor came out and grabbed one of the dogs. Arias called 911 and police and an ambulance were sent to the home, she said.

Although one of the dogs bit Arias, she said had the bite checked and was OK.

Grayson will need surgery for the large gash on his cheek and bites on his leg.

Although Bishop filed a police report with the Anaheim Police Department, Orange County Animal Care was investigating the attack Thursday.

After additional information is gathered about the attack during the investigation, a decision will be made whether or not to file a lawsuit, the family's attorney Richard Patterson said.

One of the dogs has been euthanized, Bishop and Patterson said. It was not immediately clear if the owners of the home owned both dogs.

"People that have dogs like that really need to know that they're powerful animals," Bishop said.

NBC4 tried to speak with the neighbor who reportedly owns the dogs, but a woman who answered the door did not comment.
Calvin Shepherd survived World War II. He's shaken hands with a senator. And, he's lived into his 90s.

But Shepherd acknowledged he was surprised by the attention he got Thursday while talking to an auditorium full of elementary school students via Skype.

Wearing his red Marine Corps league jacket and hat, Shepherd beamed as he told his story about becoming one of the first black men to fight in war as part of the Montford Point Marines.

"I'm a little bit embarrassed by all the attention I'm getting at this late date," said Shepherd, whose face was projected on a big screen from his home outside Detroit to an auditorium filled with over 200 Valley View Elementary School students in La Crescenta. "I am also humbled and pleased."



The students got a valuable history lesson the day before Veterans Day, asking Shepherd questions during the nearly 30-minute assembly  why he went into the Marines, where he served and why he wanted to risk his life for his country.

His answer to that last one?



"It's the only country I have. I'd do it again, if I had to."



Among the students was Shepherd's great grandson, Jesse Cooper, 10.

"I was really excited," Jesse said. "It meant a lot. There was one question that hit me, 'What challenges did he face during the war?' I thought, 'ooh that's a good question.'



"He persevered and worked hard and went past it."



Jesse's mother and Calvin's granddaughter, Nicci Amberg, hopes the students took away an understanding about race in the military and in America.



"To the kids, the idea of segregation is so foreign, that for them to hear somebody living was excluded from something just because of their color is just astounding to them," she said.



Shepherd grew up in Tennessee. As a kid, he daydreamed about fighting in a war. When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, a then lanky 16-year-old Shepherd couldn't wait to sign up, despite the misgivings of his parents who had witnessed the carnage from soldiers returning home after World War I two decades earlier.



"It sounded glamorous as a 16 year old," Shepherd said. "Just the thrill of a uniform, even war itself sounded thrilling. You get a movie version. That's what you have in mind."



At age 18 in 1943, Shepherd was drafted.



Instead of the Army, he chose to go into the Marines, and became one of thousands of African American men who became part of a desegregated Marine Corps. He was among about 20,000 men between 1942 and 1949 who trained at the segregated Montford Point Camp, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.



"Everyone said they wanted to go into the Army," he said. "I was like, 'I am going to be a fighting Marine.'"



Most of his fighting was in the Marianas in 1944. He was assigned to an anti-aircraft gun with a Naval gun crew on a boat and survived several assaults by the Japanese. The fighting against the Axis was hard enough, but the Montford Point Marines also had to endure discrimination from fellow soldiers and sailors, even after the island was secured.



"We were actually fighting two wars," he said.



After the war, Shepherd settled in Michigan, met his wife, and raised four sons and a daughter. He worked for the same company for 31 years, first as a handyman, later as a chemical technician.



His wife, Prynsetta, died in 1995 and he's been a bachelor ever since.



He never spoke much about the war until several years ago, after President Obama and Congress awarded the Montford Point Marines the Congressional Gold Medal.



Today, Shepherd's uniform sits in a display case at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Virginia. When he's not ogling trains at his local railroad club, he's Skyping and Facebooking with his family.



He had this advice for the kids during Thursday's presentation.



"Whatever you attempt to do," he said. "Do the very best that you can."
Ken Kaneki is the protagonist of "Tokyo Ghoul" and "Tokyo Ghoul:re." (Photo : YouTube/ Val974 AmVs)

"Tokyo Ghoul" Season 3 release date rumors are rife as it has been more than a year of hiatus since the previous season to "Tokyo Ghoul" had ended and fans are becoming more restless.



While the confirmation of the release of "Tokyo Ghoul" Season 3 seemed to have pacified the ever-increasing demand for its production and immediate airing, a source said that the next installment of "Tokyo Ghoul" would likely be coming out this winter, according to Otakukart. The tipster added that the anime will introduce a complete Kakuja of the main protagonist, Kaneki.



Advertisement

There have been many speculations on the complete Kakuja form of Kaneki. In retrospect, we have learned in the previous "Tokyo Ghoul seasons that Centipede is the current incomplete Kakuja form of Kaneki. And such growing interest, Aminomail presented some proofs that the next Kakuja complete form of the main anime protagonist would be a "Snake" based on photos and manga.



Another proof is the cover Volume 5 of Tokyo Ghoul with the eyes of Kaneki resembling that of a snake. Moreover, in Volume 5, Eto, the one-eyed owl, licked Kaneki's eye. And needless to say that an owl like Eto are known to devour snakes, and perhaps including Kaneki.



Although the proofs are quite convincing, the next season still lacks the crucial confirmation coming from the creator and even the production. Things will definitely be more interesting and savagely violent for the "Tokyo Ghoul" Season 3, especially that Madhouse is known for gory and bloody presentation will taking over as the producer of the anime series following the famous anime studio Pierrot.



However, there is no telling how fans would react with the upcoming season of the hit anime, for before the take-over of production by Madhouse as Otakukart mentioned, few fans already aired out their fear for drastic changes. In an Anime News Network forum, some fans even strongly pleaded that production should not be given to Madhouse, while others seek for a reboot.



The desire for a change of animation studio who will be continuing Tokyo Ghoul was well emphasized through the act of some fans in making an online petition. Their main concern is that Tokyo Ghoul manga which is far better than the anime was not accurately followed. Thus missing important characters and stories.



Watch here below Tokyo Ghoul alleged trailer for season 3:






A Los Angeles substitute teacher is accused of telling sixth-graders their parents would be deported in the wake of Tuesday's presidential election.

An audio recording of the exchange captured at Bret Harte Middle School in South Los Angeles by a student's cell phone is under review by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The conversation occurred a day after billionaire businessman Donald Trump defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the race for president.

A mother of one of the students told NBC4 Southern California that she expected some backlash after Trump made a hard-line stance on deportation part of his campaign from the time he announced his candidacy last year.

"I would think the kids would do it, but I never thought a teacher would do it," said Jennifer Reynaga.

The Reynaga family shared the audio with NBC4 and sister station Telemundo 52. On the recording, an individual can be heard telling Reynaga's 11-year-old daughter, "If you were born here, then your parents got to go. Then they will leave you behind, and you will be in foster care."

Reynaga said her daughter asked the physical education substitute teacher how the president-elect knows where her family lives.

"I have your phone numbers, your address, your mama's address, your daddy's address. It's all in the system, sweetie," the person says in the recording.

LAUSD officials said they declined to comment on pending personnel matters. Reynaga and her husband said they met with school officials and were told the substitute teacher has been fired.

Immigration was a key component of Trump's campaign, and his win Tuesday led Los Angeles immigration rights advocates to offer reassurances Thursday to the city's undocumented immigrant community.

"You have scared children," said Steve Zimmer, board president of the Los Angeles Unified School District. "One of most important things you can do is make sure that children who have qualified for DACA know that they are safe and their status is secure."

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, went into effect in 2012. It allows certain people who came to the United States as children to request permits to stay in the United States that are renewable every two years, provided they meet guidelines.

Trump has vowed to deport people convicted of serious crimes who are in the United States illegally. In a September speech, then candidate Trump promised a more hard-line approach to a crowd of Arizona supporters.

"There will be no amnesty," Trump said. "Our message to the world will be this: You cannot obtain legal status or become a citizen of the United States by illegally entering our country."

Los Angeles County has an undocumented immigrant population estimated as high as 800,000, about 12 percent of the county's 10 million residents, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The agency estimates that nearly 40 percent of adult undocumented immigrants live with children who were born in the United States. An estimated 13 percent of K-12 students in California have a parent who is an undocumented immigrant, according to PPIC.
Life for the undocumented has always carried a level of risk and uncertainty. But now the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, after a campaign pledging mass deportation, has elevated their concern.

"It means fear. It means careful," said Maru Galvan, who remains undocumented 16 years after she and her husband immigrated to California from Mexico, raising two children and opening a carpentry shop. "We have to be more careful."

Since the election, there have been cases of undocumented workers hesitant to go to their job, and children of undocumented parents expressing fear of going to school, according to immigrant rights advocates. Some expressed concern that some who denounce the undocumented will be emboldened.

"They think they have the right now to be violent, more racist," Galvan said.

California is home to more than two million undocumented immigrants according to the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).

The undocumented population of Los Angeles County has been estimated as high as 800,000, or nearly 12 percent of the county's 10 million residents. Undocumented immigrants live in every county of the state with 170,000 estimated in San Diego County, according to the PPIC.



The presence of undocumented immigrants has been a divisive issue for decades, with advocates for strict enforcement of immigration law insisting that those who entered the U.S. unlawfully simply have no legal right to stay.

Supporters of extending rights to those without papers, including elected officials from the city, county and school district, came together in a coalition Thursday at Los Angeles City Hall. They offered reassurance to the undocumented that local government is not in sync with the policy positions and comments of the President-elect during his campaign -- creating a deportation force, building a wall along America's southern border, and requiring Mexico to pay for it.

"California is unlike the rest of the country," said Hilda Solis, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

"We want people in the community to be calm and continue their daily lives," said Gil Cedillo, Los Angeles city councilman for the first district, which has a predominantly Latino population.

"This city, this police department, will not cooperate with immigration," said Cedillo, referring to department policies not to inquire about immigration status in the course of responding to calls for service, nor to permit federal immigration enforcement officials to question people under their watch in jail.

"Nothing has changed in LAPD polices," said Deputy Chief Robert Arcos.

Los Angeles designated itself a sanctuary city decades ago, but some have expressed concern that under the incoming administration in Washington, federal funding to the city could be cut if it does not comply with immigration law.

U.S. Senator-elect Kamala Harris offered her continued support for providing services to the undocumented during a noon hour visit to the office of the Coalition for Humane Immigration Reform of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).

"At this point in time we are all being challenged to fight for our ideals," said Harris. She said she will join the push for the comprehensive immigration form that the Obama Administration has sought, but acknowledged the decreasing likelihood with Trump's presidency and Republicans holding a majority in both houses of Congress.

Since 2012, an executive order by President Obama known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) has offered permits to stay that are renewable every two years.

"My main concern is the children. They have a lot of fear," said Vicky Cerpa, a CHIRLA volunteer who herself went a decade undocumented. She obtained legal residency through the amnesty granted by the the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed by then-President Ronald Reagan.

"You have scared children," said Steve Zimmer, board president of the Los Angeles Unified School District, directing his comments to President-elect Trump. "One of most important things you can do is make sure that children who have qualified for DACA know that they are safe and their status is secure."

Opponents of Trump's announced crackdown on illegal immigration expressed the belief that as president he will find the wall and mass deportation not feasible. Other Trump critics said the emphasis should be on, not reassurance, but a call for action.

"Our message to the community: don't mourn -- organize," said Nativo Lopez of Hermandad Mexicana, speaking with the coalition in city hall. "Yes my message is a tad different from the group here. Be concerned. Be alarmed. Rise and organize to defend your families. That is your God-given right," Lopez said.

"The struggle is just beginning," said Cerpa, citing the impact of the election. "It didn't end. It's just beginning."
A man who is serving a 33-year-to-life prison term for a 1990 shooting in Los Angeles in which a stray bullet struck and killed a woman and injured a man told a judge Thursday that he was "wrongfully convicted."

At a hearing in which the defense is seeking to have his conviction vacated, Willie James Cooks told Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William C. Ryan that he was in San Diego when Yvonne Walters was shot to death on Oct. 12, 1990.

"I was wrongfully convicted, accused for an incident that happened in South L.A.," the now 46-year-old defendant said.

Prosecutors are opposing his request to have his conviction overturned.

"... None of the contentions in the petition have merit," Deputy District Attorney Erika Jerez wrote in response to the defense's filing.

Defense attorney Mark McBride said outside court that he believes Cooks is innocent.

While Cooks was in prison, he reached out to an attorney for help.

"Something about his case I liked and I took it pro-bono," McBride said.

Cooks was convicted in 1991 of first-degree murder for Walters' killing, along with the attempted murder of Michael Twyman, who was struck in the back by the gunfire.

"Did you commit the murder in this case?" Cooks' attorney asked his client during the hearing.

"No," the defendant responded.

He also denied firing toward Twyman.

When Cooks' attorney asked if he was in the area of the shooting the day the crime occurred, the defendant responded, "No ... I couldn't be two places at one time."

He said he returned home from San Diego after he called to speak to his family, and his mom told him that the police came looking for him in connection with a murder.

"I didn't have no reason to run," Cooks said, adding that he went with a lawyer to the Los Angeles Police Department's Newton Station and explained that he had been in San Diego to celebrate the birthday of his son's mother.

The attempted murder victim -- Twyman -- was the first witness called to the stand during the hearing.

He said he didn't want to see "an innocent man in jail," noting that he had been to prison himself.

"Did my client shoot you?" McBride asked.

"No," Twyman responded.

"Do you know who shot you?" the defense attorney asked.

"No," he again responded.

Twyman said he was riding on a motorcycle when he was shot from behind.

Under questioning by the prosecutor, he said he didn't remember if he had seen Cooks' vehicle in the area or if he had been involved in a prior verbal confrontation with Cooks in which Cooks allegedly told him, "I am going to get you. You are slipping"

McBride told NBC4 that Cooks hired a private investigator who got three witnesses to the shootings, including Twyman, to admit they lied on the stand all those years ago.

In court on Thursday, Twyman would only say the man seated across from him was not the man who tried to kill him.

The hearing is set to resume Jan. 5, when the defense is expected to call two witnesses who have since stated that they lied when they identified Cooks as the shooter.

John Cadiz Klemack contributed to this report.
Three days after Election Day, President Barack Obama used his last Veterans Day speech to urge Americans to learn from the example of veterans as a divided nation seeks to "forge unity" after the bitter 2016 campaign.

Obama, in remarks at Arlington National Cemetery, noted that Veterans Day often comes on the heels of hard-fought campaigns that "lay bare disagreements across our nation."

"But the American instinct has never been to find isolation in opposite corners," Obama said. "It is to find strength in our common creed, to forge unity from our great diversity, to maintain that strength and unity even when it is hard."

He added that now that the election is over, "as we search for ways to come together, to reconnect with one another and with the principles that are more enduring than transitory politics, some of our best examples are the men and women we salute on Veterans Day."

Tuesday's election of Republican Donald Trump led to protests across the country.

Obama noted that the U.S. military is the country's most diverse institution, comprised of immigrants and native-born service members representing all religions and no religion. He says they are all "forged into common service."

Obama, with just two months left in his term, also took note of how he's aged in office over the past eight years.

He read excerpts from an essay by a middle-schooler who wrote that veterans are special because they will defend people regardless of their race, gender, hair color or other differences.

"After eight years in office, I particularly appreciate that he included hair color," Obama quipped.

Before speaking, Obama paid tribute to veterans by laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He bowed his head in silent tribute before a bugler played taps.

Obama also held a breakfast reception at the White House with veterans and their families on his final Veterans Day as commander in chief.
What to Know Miami-Dade County has 21 percent of Florida's violent crimes but last year sent away only six percent of the state's prison population

Counties like Broward and Hillsborough have less than half the amount of gun crimes, but sent more people to prison

NBC 6 Investigators discovered dozens of felons who avoided a mandatory minimum prison sentence but later got arrested of new crimes

On average, about four people will be murdered this week in Miami-Dade County  80 percent of them with a firearm.

Miami-Dade leads the state in gun crimes. But its far behind other counties when it comes to sending criminals who use guns to prison for mandatory minimum sentences.

In 2015, county police agencies reported 21 percent of the states firearms crimes and 18 percent of its violent crimes, but produced just six percent of the states prison admissions last year.

Miami-Dade prosecutions were responsible for 1,725 new prison admissions, compared to 2,078 from Broward, 1,951 from Duval and 1,769 from Hillsborough -- counties that have, on average, less than half the number of firearms crimes as Miami-Dade.

As gunshots fell more bodies  especially those of children  the NBC 6 Investigators examined how people arrested in Miami-Dade for firearms crimes fare in a criminal justice system that allows mandatory minimum sentences.

State law allows prosecutors to seek the enhanced punishments under the so-called 10-20-Life law: three years for a felon possessing a gun; 10 years if used in a crime; 20 years if fired; and 25 years to life if used to shoot someone.

Last year, Miami-Dade sent 156 defendants to state prison with mandatory minimum sentences, 12 percent of the states total.

Tangela Sears, an advocate for mothers who  like her  lost a child to violence, says more should be done to hold firearms criminals fully accountable under the law.

The only thing the police can do is put you in jail. Somehow they find their way back to the streets, she said of gun-toting criminals.

By examining a database containing thousands of court records, the NBC 6 Investigators discovered dozens of felons who did not get mandatory minimum sentences and then went on to be arrested or convicted of new crimes.

Prosecutors allowed Josh Ferreiro to serve less than a year in jail when prosecutors waived what would have been a three-year minimum sentence for possession of a firearm by a felon.

He was later arrested, allegedly in possession of another gun, and is awaiting trial.

Asked about the guns, he said, I dont know what gun youre talking about, man. Get out of here.

Others repeatedly got breaks from mandatory minimums, only to be arrested or convicted again.

NBC 6 Investigators gave the state attorneys office more than two weeks to review a dozen such cases, and asked if it could explain why the mandatory sentences were not sought.

But the office said it is so far unable to respond to the inquiry.

In general, the office said, it considers the specifics of each case before deciding whether to waive a mandatory minimum sentence. Availability of witnesses, strength of the evidence and defendants background can all have an effect on which gun criminals get a break and which do not.

Of all the felons we found avoiding prison, the most creative was Register Holsendorff III.

Arrested in 2005 on three armed robbery charges -- which could have produced a 10-year mandatory sentence  he persuaded a judge he was so severely mentally disabled, he was not competent to stand trial.

After he spent years in medical and group home facilities, the charges were dismissed.

But in 2012, he was allegedly sharp enough to lure a man to a Miami street and shoot him to death in an argument over a woman or money, according to court records.

This time, the judge wasnt buying it.

His attorney, Allen Greenstein, explained, The judge found he was not competent to stand trial (in the 2005 case). The court this time found he was competent.

Citing evidence of an unsophisticated attempt to malinger, the judge in the more recent case noted Holsendorff does have some mental illness, but ruled he is not intellectually disabled.

Holsendorff, the judge noted, was competent enough to launch a sophisticated scheme to reroute his disability checks from a group home to another address, so he could cash the checks and spend cash unrestricted by the group home.

Group home workers also noticed he scheduled visits from his wife and his girlfriend so that the two women did not cross paths, the judges order noted. It cited evidence he gambled at card games  often successfully  and could drive, as he did on the day hes accused of murdering a man he had a dispute with over money or a woman, according to court records.

Greenstein did not dispute that the court found Holsendorff was faking his incompetence in the 2005 armed robbery case.

Well, according to this judge, he said, but remember this wasnt the judge back in 2005.

Asked if severe mental retardation was something one can be cured of, Greenstein replied, I dont believe you can get cured of mental retardation.

Holsendorff is now facing trial for a murder he would not have been free to commit, had he received the mandatory 10 years in prison in the first case.

Sears, the anti-violence activist, said she sees a pattern.

Laws are not being enforced and thats a major problem,  she said. We continue to have this rise in killings.

The state attorneys office could not provide records showing how often it waives minimum mandatory sentences and which defendants benefit from those decisions.

But, after the NBC 6 Investigators inquiry, the office has launched a new program to track each of those cases and hopes to use the data to better understand why some armed felons are not going to prison for as long as they might under the mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
A Florida Keys man is accused of killing his girlfriend at their Tavernier home.

Jeremy Stigler, 44, was arrested Thursday on a murder charge in the killing of 47-year-old Jade Dixon, Monroe County Sheriff's Office officials said.

Stigler was being held without bond Thursday, jail records showed. No attorney information was available.

Authorities say the body of Dixon was found in the couple's bedroom Monday after Stigler went to the sheriff's office substation and told deputies she was dead and he was a suspect.

Stigler said Dixon lunged at him with a knife and he punched her in the face and then stepped on her chest when she fell on the ground to stop her from getting the knife, officials said.

He said he helped her to their bedroom and they went to bed and when he woke up, she was dead, officials said. But authorities said an autopsy revealed her cause of death to be manual strangulation.

Officials said the couple had been involved in a domestic dispute Saturday night and Dixon had been hospitalized for unrelated medical issues. She was last seen alive Sunday morning when she was released from the hospital.

Deputies had responded to a crash on the same street the couple live on later Sunday involving a car owned by Dixon. Neighbors reported that Stigler was the driver but when deputies arrived he wasn't at the scene, officials said.

Stigler told deputies after he found Dixon dead, he took a large number of valium and Xanax pills then got in the car and crashed. He said he went back to the house after the crash.
One of the most generous donors to the University of Miami has passed away.

Susan Sue Miller, the matriarch of the family that donated $100 million to the universitys medical school that now bears the name of her late husband, died of cancer Thursday at the age of 81, according to the schools website.

Miller, who made the donation in a 2004 ceremony honoring her late husband Leonard  a former chair of the schools Board of Trustees , was part of a family that gave millions to the school and the South Florida community as a whole.

Some of the various organizations that benefited from the familys gifts included the United Way of Miami-Dade and the Council for Educational Change. The Millers also donated $5 million each to the schools Contemporary Judaic Studies program and School of Music. Just recently, they gave the lead gift of $50 million for the new Lennar Foundation Medical Center on the schools Coral Gables campus.

Both Massachusetts natives, the Millers arrived in Miami following Leonards graduation from Harvard in 1954. They invested in a construction company that ultimately became Lennar Corporation, one of the countrys leading homebuilders. In total, the Miller family has donated more than $200 million to UM over the years.

Miller is survived by her three children  including one who later served as chair of the schools Board of Trustees like their father - , 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
The Russian military said Friday its officers have found evidence of chemical weapons use by Syrian militants in the northern area of Aleppo where government forces are trying to regain control of areas they recently lost to insurgents.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said that ministry experts have found unexploded ordnance and fragments of munitions containing chlorine and white phosphorus on Aleppo's southwestern outskirts. Konashenkov said the discovery proves the militants have used chemical weapons against civilians and Syrian army soldiers.

The announcement comes as the Syrian government and Russia appear to be preparing for an all-out offensive on the besieged eastern parts of Aleppo that are held by opposition fighters. Pro-Syrian media outlets in Lebanon have been reporting that heavy reinforcements have been arriving in Aleppo over the past weeks in preparation for the attack.

The Interfax news agency reported Friday that jets from the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov have been flying over Syria over the past few days to survey the area in preparation for future combat missions. It said that preparations are underway for the carrier and escorting ships to launch strikes against militants.

The U.S. and its allies have pushed for sanctions on the Syrian government for using chemical weapons. Russia has questioned international investigators' conclusions linking chemical weapons use to the Syrian government and pointed at evidence of their use by the militants.

The U.N. Security Council has voted to extend the mandate of inspectors working to determine those responsible for chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city and once commercial capital, has been the center of violence in recent months where government forces have besieged eastern rebel-held neighborhoods.

The insurgents had seized a couple of strategic areas in western Aleppo since they launched an offensive on government-held parts of Aleppo on Oct. 28 in an attempt to break the siege imposed on areas they have controlled since July. The siege on eastern Aleppo was coupled with a punishing bombing campaign by Syrian aircraft and supported by Russia, which has been backing the government of President Bashar Assad. Since late October, Russia said it would halt the airstrikes, amid rising civilian casualties, urging rebels to leave the territory.

Syrian troops launched a counteroffensive capturing much of the southwestern areas they lost as well as parts of Al-Assad district west of the city.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said warplanes carried out dozens of airstrikes on the western edge of Aleppo and nearby villages. It added that government forces are trying to regain control of the remaining parts of Al-Assad district that are still under rebel control.

The Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, also reported intense airstrikes on Al-Assad district as well as an airstrike on the nearby village of Kfar Dael, saying it left dozens of people killed or wounded.

On Thursday, Jan Egeland, the special adviser to the U.N. envoy for Syria, said the last food rations in besieged eastern Aleppo will run out by next week. Speaking in Geneva, Egeland said the last time the over a quarter of million people inside east Aleppo received any humanitarian aid was in the beginning of July.
After learning the results of the polarizing presidential election, Theresa Govert, of East Haddam, Connecticut, felt compelled to paint a sign with a powerful message for her town. Someone vandalized it within a day and spray-painted "Trump 2016" over it.

The sign says, "Dear Muslims, immigrants, women, disabled, LGBTQ and all people of color, we love you boldly and proudly. We will endure." The message was taken from a tweet by writer and activist Shaun King.

Govert said she thought it was something people needed to see after the election.

"I just wanted to make sure that even in our small community that anyone who did feel marginalized felt supported and it's about coming together," she said.

Govert painted the sign and put it up at Wilmer F Palmer Road and Route 149 on Wednesday afternoon. By Thursday morning, someone had spray-painted over the message with "Trump 2016."

Govert said she knew when she painted the sign that there was a chance someone might deface the sign. But she wasn't expecting it to happen with the name of the president-elect.

"A sign that is encouraging love to use his name to do the opposite seems counterproductive," she said.

Residents who were supportive of the sign's original message were shocked by the vandalism.

"I hope that's not the message that the Trump presidency has, to be racist and prejudiced," said George Hungerford, a lifelong East Haddam resident.

"Unless you have everyone together, you cannot make America great again," Kate O'Boyle said.

Another longtime resident, Nancy Murray, was so shocked by the sign that she bought a bucket of paint and painted over the graffiti.

"They're trying to divide us," she said. "We just don't want division here."

Govert said she plans to paint another sign with the same message and post it again.
Courier Services in China Get Ready Ahead of Alibabas Singles Day Shopping Bonanza on Friday

A courier loads packages for delivery using an electric bicycle in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. (Photo : Getty Images)

Courier companies in China have made early preparations to meet the projected rise in delivery on Singles' Day, the world's biggest online shopping festival in 2016, which falls on Friday, Nov. 11, the Xinhua News Agency reported.



Advertisement

The industry is expected to handle about 1.05 billion packages for the much-awaited event this year, up 35 percent year on year, based on Alibaba's Cainiao logistics network forecast.



Alibaba's Singles' Day event has overshadowed other similar events in the U.S. such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Last year, about $13.5 billion worth of goods were sold by Alibaba on its online payments platform.



As part of their preparations, some express courier companies in China have renovated their delivery networks to enable them to cover long-distance and high-volume deliveries.



According to Wang Wenbin, chief technology officer of Cainiao, a series of new digital solutions was adopted by the company to help monitor, distribute and track down e-commerce deliveries.



"The new technology helps capture and collect orders from certain regions so that logistics firms can arrange the distribution and loading facilities to improve efficiency by at least 10 hours," Wang was quoted as saying.



Yunda Express, a China courier firm has added about 10,000 delivery vehicles to adapt with the additional demand, the report said.



A 200-meter automatic line was also installed in the company's logistic center in Shanghai to "smart sort" the packages, the company said.



Across the sector, most companies are looking for delivery staff and almost all major delivery companies have sent out recruitment notices ahead of Friday's event, the report said.



Some companies offer delivery staff applicants with a monthly salary that ranges between 5,000 yuan ($739) and 8,000 yuan, which is on par with salaries for university graduates.



During major Chinese holidays such as Spring Festival and other busy events such as Singles' Day, the need for couriers is high while the supply is short.



Gao Zhenhai, secretary general of the Shanghai Express Industry Association, said that it has become a big challenge for courier services to deliver the huge number of packages to shoppers in a few days, especially during Singles' Day when online shopping revenue is expected to grow.



At last year's Singles' Day, the purchases amounted to 780 million packages, while courier services handled maximum daily deliveries that reached 160 million.



To help courier services cope with this year's shopping extravaganza, the country's railway transport network has opened a special services dubbed the "E-Commerce Golden Week" service. From Nov. 11 to 20, China Railway's high-speed trains, which traverse 505 cities, will provide express services to courier companies.



At least three daily trips will run from Nov. 11 to 20, connecting Shenzhen with Beijing, under an agreement signed by the Guangzhou Railway (Group) Corp with express firms, JD Express, STO Express, SF Express and YT Express, the report said.


Another Kardashian heir has arrived.

E! News has confirmed that Blac Chyna and Rob Kardashian have welcomed their first child together. Their baby girl, who they named Dream Renee Kardashian, arrived at 9:18 a.m. PT weighing 7 pounds 5 ounces via c-section. Renee also is Chyna's middle name.

"She is gorgeous and has tons of hair!" a source tells E! News.

Chyna and Rob arrived at the hospital at around 6:40 a.m. PT Thursday morning and were joined by Chyna's mother Tokyo Toni, who was dressed casually in sweats and a hat. Kardashian looked "giddy excited" as he and Chyna entered the hospital, E! News learned. Both looked comfortable in black sweatshirts and sweatpants. Kris Jenner and Corey Gamble also went to the hospital to be with Rob and Chyna.

Blac Chyna's Pregnancy Looks

Tokyo also celebrated the day with a picture of her Chymoji face on Instagram and captioned it, "All praises to God!!!!!!!"

Chyna brought two big Louis Vuitton tote bags filled with leopard throw blankets and sheets with her to the hospital!

The couple have shared pregnancy milestones throughout their journey to the baby's arrival with fans on social media.

My new niece is absolutely stunning!!! So thankful I was able to land in time to witness this miracle happen! Praise God!   Khloe (@khloekardashian) November 10, 2016

The new proud parents sweetly shared the joy they had when they felt their baby move inside of her belly.

"So today I felt my baby move," Kardashian says in a clip posted on Blac Chyna's Snapchat. "Super excited @robkardashian and I felt our baby moving today," she wrote on Instagram.

Rob Kardashian Reveals How He's Spending the Last Days of Blac Chyna's Pregnancy

Blac Chyna also openly discussed her pregnancy weight on social media and in late October she posted a photo from her doctor's office with the following caption: "Checking on our baby girl! Never knew I'd be so happy about gaining 72 pounds!"

"If you guys are wondering, I'm actually having a really good pregnancy similar to King's," she said to fans back in June in reference to her 3-year-old son, King Cairo Stevenson, whom she shares with ex-fiance Tyga. "No morning sickness, no cravings--just baby," she declared for the camera.

While both she and Kardashian have chronicled their lives together as parents-to-be on social media, fans got an even closer look at the stars' personal lives in their own docu-series on E!, which showed the engaged duo preparing for their new life together and their cute addition.

"I fell in love with her immediately because of how great of a mom she is," Kardashian wrote on Instagram in dedication to Chyna on Mother's Day. "Now I'm looking forward to starting a family with her!"
Good luck not falling in love with Kristin Chenoweth in her new one-woman concert, now playing through Nov. 13 at Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

The Tony-winning pint-sized powerhouse  known for her roles on stage in "Wicked" and "On the Twentieth Century," and on screen in "Glee" and "Pushing Daisies"  will warm your heart in her pitch-perfect show. It's a perfect venue to show off her charismatic personality, quick-witted sense of humor, and killer pipes.

In fact, the 48-year-old soprano has never sounded better as she works her way through a nearly two hour-set  accompanied by a six-piece band led by music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell on the piano.

Her radiant voice shines on songs from an eclectic catalog of choices. Broadway classics like "Bring Him Home" and "I Could Have Danced All Night" come to life with her signature operatic high-notes, while she stunningly reinvents pop songs like Don Henley's "The Heart of the Matter" and country tunes like Dolly Parton's "Little Sparrow"  the latter surrounded in an intimate performance by her band.

"Wicked" staple "Popular" is brought out, too  as an instructional guide for President-Elect Donald Trump (who didn't win the popular vote, in this case). "Thank Goodness," from the same show, is a tender, heartfelt closer.

A mashup of Willie Nelson's "Always on My Mind" and Stephen Sondheim's "Losing My Mind" is a show highlight. "A House Is Not a Home" and "Smile" will both bring tears to your eyes.

She looks stunning throughout, wearing head-to-toe custom designs from "Project Runway" winner Christian Siriano. One look  a sexy pink sequined hot-pants romper  even inspired one fan in the audience to tell her, "You are so hot, Kristin." Her delightful response? "You're not gay, are you?"

There are surprises along the way  including a special guest each night brought up on stage to chat with Chenoweth and sing a duet. Renee Fleming, Alan Cumming, Lea Delaria, Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis, and Jason Robert Brown are just some of the names who have popped up so far.

A rotating selection of local youth choirs also guest in the show each night, backing Chenoweth for two numbers  Sandi Patty's "Upon This Rock" and Lady Antebellum's "I Was Here." They're dedicated to LGBT rights and Chenoweth and Campbell's charity initiatives, respectively.

Direction comes from Richard Jay-Alexander  a concert veteran whose recent credit includes Barbra Streisand's latest tour and a previous world tour for Chenoweth. Here he brings out the best in the Emmy winner  keep the staging simple, the interludes poignant, and the song selection tight.

Chenoweth returns to TV on Dec. 7 in NBC's "Hairspray: Live"  but try to catch her on Broadway first. It's an evening you won't regret.

Kristin Chenoweth: My Love Letter to Broadway," through Nov. 13 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W 46th St. Tickets: kristinonbroadway.com or call 877-250-2929.
When Cardinal Timothy Dolan unveiled a plan to pay settlements to victims of priest sexual abuse, he touted the new victim compensation fund as a way to seek reconciliation with those who have been harmed by the church.

For at least one survivor of priest sexual abuse, the settlement fund has had the opposite effect.

"I felt victimized once again, extremely angry," said Lex Filipowski, a former altar boy at Holy Cross Church in South Centerville, New York.

In his first interview using his real name, Filipowski says he called the New York Archdiocese to inquire about the victim compensation fund, only to learn he was ineligible because his abuser was a priest of a religious order  the Carmelites.

The compensation program pays only victims of diocesan priests.

"How can that be?" Filipowski said. "Theyre all Catholic priests. The Church that I went to was and is part of the Archdiocese of New York."

According to the website explaining protocol for the New York Archdiocese Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program, "the individual claim of clergy sexual abuse may not be directed against a member of a religious order or priests of another diocese."

According to Joe Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, it makes sense to restrict payouts to victims of diocesan priests because Carmelites, Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans and priests of other religious orders do not answer directly to the Cardinal.

"Just as other dioceses in the U.S. have put policies and protocols in place to deal with the issue of sexual abuse among minors, so have the religious orders," Zwilling said. "The religious orders have taken responsibility for the misbehavior of their members."

Ken Feinberg, an attorney selected by the New York Archdiocese to negotiate victims' settlements, said abuse survivors should seek compensation from a religious order if their abusing priest was a member of that order.

"Assuming that priest engaged in misconduct as part of a Carmelite order, the Carmelite order has the responsibility of dealing with that claim," Feinberg said. "This is the simplest, cleanest, most efficient way."

But critics say priests of religious orders, like Fr. Boxelaar, would not be able to preach in diocesan churches without approval of the bishops.

According to Filipowski, Boxelaar molested and kissed him over the course of four years in the early 1970s. Most of the abuse happened on Sunday mornings while the young altar boy helped the Carmelite priest put on his vestments inside Holy Cross Church -- a building owned by the New York Archdiocese.

Fr. Michael Kissane, Prior Provincial of the Carmelites in Middletown, NY, said there were multiple credible accusations of abuse against Fr. Boxelaar that came forward in the early 1980s.

"At that time Boxelaar was removed from ministry," Kissane said.

Boxelaar reportedly moved back to his native Holland and died there in the early 1990s.

Last year, when Filipowski came forward with his story of abuse, Kissane agreed the Carmelites would pay for some of his therapy, but he said the money for a more substantial settlement wasnt there.

"I did have a conversation with him. He did ask about some compensation for pain and suffering," said Kissane. [But] I cant make a decision as Provincial, to pay someone money. We dont have that kind of money. The Archdiocese does, but we dont.

New Yorks statute of limitations on child sexual abuse claims runs out when a victim reaches the age of 24.

Sen. Brad Hoylman (D-Chelsea) is the sponsor of a bill that would extend the statute of limitations and provide a one-year period during which child sex abuse victims of any age can pursue civil claims against their alleged abusers.

"The Catholic Church has spent millions of dollars to lobby against this legislation for the last decade or more in Albany. Its really inexplicable to me," Hoylman said.

When asked why Cardinal Dolan opposes extending the child sex abuse statute of limitations, Zwilling referred the I-Team to a statement of opposition released by the New York State Catholic Conference, which represents Catholic Bishops across the state.

[The] legislation is seriously flawed in that it contains a statute of limitations window to open up previously time-barred civil claims going back indefinitely, reads the statement.

"God has no statute of limitations," Filipowski countered. "There is no statute of limitations for doing the right thing."
One year after ISIS terrorists killed 130 people in attacks across Paris, the city remains on edge, with residents still grappling with traumatic memories and security authorities there, including members of the NYPD, working to stop the next attack, the I-Team discovered in a recent visit overseas.

"I still have nightmares," said Anne Sophie de Chaisemartin, who lives near the Bataclan Theatre where terrorists killed 89 people attending a concert on Nov. 13, 2015. Others were killed in a cafe below Sophies apartment. She recalled running down to help, arriving before first responders.

"I saw about 15 bodies lying on the floor. A lot of smoke from the gunshots. A smell of gunpowder," she told the I-Team. "And then a woman looked into my eyes. She was lying on the floor and she asked for help and I will never forget this look. She just reached her hand like this, like in a horror movie."

As de Chaisemartin, who helped save the life of an American woman in the cafe, struggles with emotional trauma from that night, shes also worried about another attack.

I think were stuck in some kind of a nightmare here because were, like, expecting the next one to arrive, she said.

French authorities have been operating in a state of emergency since the attacks. Thousands of extra police and military units have been deployed throughout the country, especially landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.

The country has also been traumatized by more attacks this year, including the murder of a police officer and his wife in June, and a priest in July. ISIS claimed responsibility for both attacks. The terror group was also suspected initially in the truck attack in Nice that killed 86 people. In Paris alone, authorities said they have made 15 terror-related arrests in just the last three months.

To stop the next attack, authorities in France are working closely with security forces around the world, including the New York Police Department. The NYPD has intelligence officers stationed in Paris, in part to share information in real time.

The biggest concern, officials say, are the 1,700 French citizens who traveled to Syria in the past few years.

"We know there are ongoing plots. We know some of these foreign fighters have returned," an NYPD detective told the I-Team. The detective, whose name is being withheld out of security concerns, said geography makes the numbers of fighters far more concerning in Europe than in the United States.

"Its more difficult to get to Syria from the U.S. versus leaving from France or Belgium," he said.

While the heightened security makes residents like de Chaisemartin feel safer in the Batacalan neighborhood, its also a reminder of the constant danger, fueling a fear for some that Paris may never fully recover.

"I hate myself when I feel this, but now its our daily life. It will happen again," said de Chaisemartin. "Can I ask you a question? How do you feel after September 11th? How did you manage to get over it? I think you, America, all the people who lived this 9/11 horror might be in the same state as we are."
What to Know Protesters were marching up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square Park on Thursday in the second day of demonstrations following the election

At least 60 people were arrested when thousands marched in the streets of New York City to protest President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday

They gathered in front of Trump Tower and Trump International Hotel to voice their anger and fear over a Trump presidency

Protesters marched Thursday in a second day of demonstrations denouncing the election of President-elect Donald Trump, and police are implementing new security measures around his midtown home in response.

Hundreds of protesters marched between Union Square and Washington Square Park Thursday afternoon to send a message that they don't support him or his policies. Later, they gathered and chanted across the street from Trump Tower, where police have set up barricades.

"It's important to let the rest of the country know that the president they've chosen in not our president," said David Montricher.

"It's not the popular vote," said Jada Johnson. "People are hurting from this. Look at everyone."

Not everyone agreed.

"I think it's absolutely crazy," Nadia Ramnarine said of the protests. "I think it's a little too late. We are stuck with Trump."

"This is like a hard hit reality," she said. "He's here and he's going to be here for at least four years."

Protesters, security and barricades are becoming the new normal at Trump Tower and the surrounding area in midtown: Police are now blocking off 56th Street between Fifth and Madison avenues, which is the entrance Trump uses to enter Trump Tower. And the sidewalk in front of Trump Tower is also blocked off between 56th and 57th streets, open only to those doing business or shopping at Trump Tower.

"It's an inconvenience, I'm not gonna lie," said Upper East Side resident Ed Egilinsky, who says he has to change his commute by walking up or down a few blocks and cutting across.

It's not clear what will be done on 56th Street once Trump moves to the White House but in the meantime people will have to continue navigating around the new security blockades.

Evidently the anti-Trump protest here in NYC is 20 blocks long. pic.twitter.com/FM4TD3Outc  Jim Caruso (@JimCaruso1) November 10, 2016

A scuffle broke out Thursday night at the corner of 55th Street and Fifth Avenue when two women who were protesting and a pedestrian exchanged words, according to witnesses. The protesters pushed the man to the ground, injuring him.

Police arrested the two protesters; no charges have been filed. The victim was taken to St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital and was listed in serious but stable condition.

No other protest-related arrests were reported Thursday.

Late Thursday night, Trump went back on Twitter to take on the protesters who have gathered in cities across the nation since his election. Trump tweeted: "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!"

Thursday's march comes hours after a pair of raucous protests that originated in Columbus Circle and Union Square before converging outside Trump Tower and Trump International Hotel. At least 65 people were arrested during those demonstrations, mostly for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Similar anti-Trump protests also continued for a second straight day in other American cities Thursday.

At a subway station along 14th Street, New Yorkers are expressing their thoughts along the walls of a walkway using sticky notes - "Time to Fight Back" and "Keep the Faith! Our work is just beginning!"

Despite spending his entire life in New York City, Trump was not a popular choice in the Big Apple on Election Day. He was beaten by Clinton in every borough except Staten Island. He also lost the popular vote statewide by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.
What to Know Kevin Darden pushed 61-year-old Wai Kuen Kwok in front of an oncoming subway train in 2014 as the man's wife stood by

Police say the two didn't know each other

Darden originally faced a murder charge, but pleaded guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a lesser sentence

A 36-year-old man accused of fatally pushing a stranger in front of a moving New York City subway train has been sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Kevin Darden was sentenced Thursday after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the 2014 death of 61-year-old Wai Kuen Kwok.

Kwok was standing with his wife on a Bronx subway platform when Darden shoved him in front of an oncoming train.

Police say Darden, who has a history of arrests for assault and robbery, did not know the victim.

On Tuesday, a former home health aide was charged with shoving a woman to her death in front of an oncoming subway train in Times Square. Authorities have described the 30-year-old suspect as emotionally disturbed
A 12-year-old boy was caught with a small kitchen knife at a Queens middle school Thursday, a day after a 13-year-old student at the same school was taken into custody when he was found with a loaded gun on the property, authorities say.



Police say the knife was found during an unannounced metal detector check at MS 202 in Ozone Park. A juvenile report was prepared and the student was released to a custodial parent.



On Wednesday, police responded to the Lafayette Street school after getting a call about a 13-year-old with a gun. A .22-caliber gun was recovered with one round in the chamber; no one was hurt, authorities said.

The union that represents school security workers told NBC 4 New York after Wednesday's discovery that it was pushing for extra security measures.

The city's Department of Education hasn't yet responded to the finding of the knife. Regarding the gun, a spokeswoman called the case "troubling."



"Students and staff are safe, and we will work in close partnership with the NYPD as they conduct an investigation, the spokeswoman said.
President-elect Donald Trump is about to be enshrined in wax.

Madame Tussauds, which has wax museums around the world including in Times Square, said it was working to create a full-size wax figure of the businessman after he won the race for the White House on Tuesday.

The wax figures are being completed at the museum's headquarters in the United Kingdom and will be unveiled at museums in New York, Washington, Orlando and London in conjunction with Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

The museum unveiled wax busts of Trump and Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton in June with plans to complete figures of the election's winner.
A villager uses the Internet to sell products from her farm in Songtao Miao Autonomous County of Tongren in Guizhou Province. (Photo : Getty Images)

Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and JD.com are battling to attract consumers from the countryside, as rural e-commerce is expected to be worth 1 trillion yuan ($148 billion) by 2020, an article by technologynewschina.com said.



Advertisement

According to the report, consumers from places outside the megacities of Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, are the targets of Alibaba and JD.com, especially for events such as the Singles' Day, the biggest online shopping event of the year.



There are about 618 million people living in China's countryside which have once become the source of labor for factories in the city. But now, as incomes rise and education has improved, Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba and JD.com, as well as smartphone brands Vivo and Oppo, are reaching out to consumers in far-flung provinces, who have money to spend through online shopping.



Alibaba has reportedly spent at least 10 billion yuan in the rural areas to facilitate orders of their customers and send the deliveries to them.



Meanwhile, JD.com is trying to adapt to its rival and has established its present in about 90 percent of the nation's counties and districts, the company said. It has also built new warehouses and about 2,000 regional sorting centers with an army of drivers and other workers to ensure full deliveries.



"We have somewhere around 200,000 agents and representatives in rural areas," Shen Haoyu, president of JD's international business, said. "They help people to place orders and in certain circumstances they help with the delivery as well."



The cost of living in the countryside is lower compared to that in the urban areas hence people in rural areas have more money to spend. From 2004 to 2014, the disposable income in rural towns increased by about 160 percent, which lifted people out of poverty and pusjed the government's effort for domestic consumption.



"Rural populations, especially the young rural population, are not what we knew before," Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine, said. "They are the best-ever educated rural youth in Chinese history. Their parents--as migrants or farmers--worked hard, and then they gave the young people the capacity and resources to be able to consume."


The member of a Brooklyn community watch who was caught on wiretap bragging he used his connections in the NYPD to obtain more than 150 gun licenses for people who wouldn't otherwise qualify for them has pleaded guilty to bribery.

Alex "Shaya" Lichtenstein, 44, faces up to 10 years in a federal prison for his role in a scheme that allegedly involved two other members of the NYPD's licensing division, one of whom has also pleaded guilty to his role in the case.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said that Lichtenstein, a member of a Shomrim patrol in Borough Park, admitted to being a gun "expediter."

This type of corruption not only undermines public confidence in law enforcement, but it undermines public safety," Bharara said. "And it cannot be tolerated."

Lichtenstein conspired with at least three members of the NYPD's license division and others from 2013 through February to pay bribes to obtain gun permits. He said his customers needed his services "because the License Division would otherwise reject applications 'for the biggest stupidity,' such as a history of moving violations," the court papers said.

He bragged about connections with Officer Richard Ochetal and Sgt. David Villanueva, but when he tried to bribe another sergeant there, the sergeant informed internal affairs and caught Lichtenstein on a wire, officials said. On the wiretap, Lichtenstein said he paid about $6,000 for the licenses. At least two officers said they received "lunch money" in exchange for helping him, according to the complaint.

The mission of the Shomrin includes stopping criminal activity and locating missing people. In many neighborhoods, its members are the first call - not law enforcement. The group has about 150 members who are all required to volunteer at least one night a month. Dispatchers take hotline calls and send out patrols. Volunteers pay for their own gas. Expenses like office rent and two-way radios are funded by donations with some support from local elected officials.

Villanueva is currently facing corruption charges, while Ochetal pleaded guilty to accepting bribes and is cooperating with a government investigation.

Lichtenstein's arrest came amid a federal probe into whether police officials accepted gifts in exchange for favors. Federal agents interviewed at least 20 officers on whether they accepted gifts in exchange for favors from two businessmen who gave money to Mayor Bill de Blasio's 2008 mayoral campaign and others.
A city councilmember is under fire by some constituents for dismissing concerns about Donald Trump's election win.

Eric Ulrich, a Republican city councilman who represents Queens' 32nd district, ruffled feathers when he tweeted on Tuesday that participants in the protests against the president-elect should "get over" the election results.

"The protesters in NYC tonight are the leftovers from the anti-police demonstrations," he said. "Trump won. Get over it!"

The protesters in NYC tonight are the leftovers from the Occupy Wall Street and the anti-police demonstrations. Trump won. Get over it!  Eric Ulrich (@eric_ulrich) November 10, 2016

Several people took issue with his statement, especially some New Yorkers who viewed his statement as a sign of disrespect. Others felt that Ulrich ignored the crux of why so many opposed Trump's platform: his polarizing policies and rhetoric.

.@eric_ulrich half (more than!) the voting public of United States agrees with these protestors. You need to respect your fellow New Yorkers  Joanna Oltman Smith (@jooltman) November 10, 2016

protests r not about win or lose, it's about the rhetoric he spewed and his policy towards immigrants and minority communities.  Sahand (@Sahand_1) November 10, 2016

https://twitter.com/kizzyhugz/status/796674368248090624

My kid asked me if she had to hide being gay now. My Latino veteran husband is afraid of hate crimes. Don't tell us to 'get over it.'  Frances Locke (@lockedesign) November 10, 2016

Fellow elected officials also challenged Ulrich's statement. Manhattan Democratic District Leader Kim Moscaritolo told him to be more empathetic towards Trump's opposers in a Twitter exchange.

"People are terrified of losing healthcare, or being deported," she said in a tweet on Tuesday evening. "Have some empathy."

I take issue with your flip "get over it." People are terrified of losing healthcare, or being deported. Have some empathy.  Kim Moscaritolo (@kimmosc) November 10, 2016

Of 14 Queens councilmembers, Ulrich is the only Republican representing the borough. He self-identifies as a "moderate Republican", according to his Twitter profile.
Hate crimes and other racially tinged incidents, ranging from vandalism to threats to beatings, are being reported across the country in the aftermath of the presidential election.

Some of the incidents were reported by police, though many more appeared on social media as anecdotes and not all have been verified.

Most of the recent cases appear to involve graffiti or violence directed at racial or ethnic minorities and in some reports the perpetrators indicated support for Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, detectives in Chicago are investigating one video that appears to show a man being beaten for voting for Trump.

Trump's candidacy was marked in part by promises to deport undocumented immigrants and monitor and ban Muslims, and one of Hillary Clinton's arguments for voting against Trump was to denounce race-baiting rhetoric by voting for tolerance. Trump pledged in his acceptance speech early Wednesday "to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans." And President Barack Obama, with whom Trump met Thursday, said he was "heartened" by Trump's speech.

Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, is "seeing a rash of hate crimes, of hate rhetoric, racist graffiti in campuses around the country," said Mark Potok, an SPLC senior fellow, who called the uptick extraordinary.

"We have seen [Ku Klux] Klan literature drops, we have seen that suicide hotlines are ringing off the hook, and we are hearing of very extensive bullying in and around schools," he added.

Trump has not commented on the hate crime incidents and his presidential transition team has not responded to NBC's requests for comment on Thursday and Friday. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes," Trump said he did not hear about the violence and harassment in his name or directed at his supporters, other than "one or two instances."

He also said "I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, Stop it. If it-- if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it," Trump said.

Among the reports of events occurring in the aftermath of the election:

A San Diego State University student walking to her vehicle had her purse, backpack and car keys taken by two men making comments about the president-elect and the Muslim community, university police said. She walked away to report the incident, and then returned to discover her vehicle was missing. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime.

A short video posted Wednesday and viewed at least 250,000 times on Facebook showed students at a school carrying a Trump sign while someone can be heard saying "white power." Two students at York County School of Technology in Pennsylvania walked with a sign into the lobby and chanted "white power" twice before the director "squelched it," said communication outreach coordinator Renie Mezzanotte, who added that "the administration has been absorbed by" the incident for two days, the outcry has become disruptive to instruction, and that instruction and student and staff safety are always the school's priorities. An officer at the York Area Regional Police Department confirmed that they investigated the incident.

Police were investigating the appearance of a swastika, the word "Trump" with a swastika replacing the T and the words "Seig Heil 2016," on a store front in South Philadelphia hours after the election was called. The Anti-Defamation League said it was disgusted to learn of the graffiti.

A representative of NYU's Tandon School of Engineering confirmed that someone had wrote the word "Trump!" in graffiti on a door at the school's Muslim prayer room. It has since been removed and Dean K. R. Sreenivasan said in an email to students that any violation of civility and mutual respect in the community "is an offense against us all."

In Chicago, video posted to Twitter and shared thousands of times appears to show a man being beaten by a group of people who say he voted for Trump. The victim appears to be white, the assailants black. The attack happened just before 1 p.m. Wednesday on Chicago's West Side, police said. Chicago detectives have the video but a representative did not elaborate about political affiliations of those involved.

And the Times-Dispatch of Richmond, Virginia, reported that the words, "Your vote was a hate crime" were spray-painted on several monuments to figures from the U.S. Confederacy.

Black students at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia recieved racist texts Friday from an account on an app called GroupMe."The account contains violent, racist and thoroughly repugnant images and messages," university spokesman Ron Ozio said in an email.

An 18-year-old woman of Middle Eastern descent in Louisiana said she made up a story that she was beaten by two white men who were yelling racial obscenities, according to the Acadania Advocate. She had told city police, according to a statement, that she was repeatedly struck in the back near the University of Louisiana Lafayette by the males, who she said also took her hijab and wallet and fled. Lafayette police confirmed the woman retracted her story to NBC.

There were 5,479 hate crime incidents reported in 2014, according to that year's FBI hate crime statistics report, the most recent one available. The 2015 report is due out Monday.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's president released a statement Wednesday saying the group has begun holding Trump to his promise to serve as president for all Americans.

"Today, we're facing a new reality  a president-elect who has denigrated people because of their race, their religion, their ethnicity, their gender, and more," SPLC President Richard Cohen wrote.

Potok, the SPLC senior fellow, said the last time he saw such a similar rash of attacks was after Obama was elected, but "they tended to be more hidden."

"This time around we are seeing people more emboldened," he said.

Potok said that there hasn't been an uptick on black-on-white crime.

The attacks on minorities are drawing comparisons, including from Potok, to the days after Brexit, when Britain voted to leave the European Union. Those attacks died down in a few weeks, Potok said.

But he added that American white nationalist groups are declaring victory online after Trump's election.

"One would hope that well-meaning citizens would stand up and defend their fellow Americans against this kind of hatred, and I think that's starting to happen, especially in schools," he said.

The SPLC has created an online forum where people can report hate incidents: splcenter.org/reporthate.
What to Know A notorious New Jersey drug dealer, Luqman Abdullah, was convicted on all 19 charges levied against him on Thursday in Union County

Abdullah became a fugitive in 2009 and was featured on "America's Most Wanted"

He turned himself in to the Union County Sheriff's Office in December 2012

An Elizabeth drug kingpin who became one of the nation's most wanted fugitives was found guilty of all 19 criminal charges levied against him on Thursday following a two-month trial, the Union County Prosecutor's Office said.

Luqman Abdullah, of Elizabeth, was convicted by a Union County jury Thursday after four days of deliberation, authorities said. He was convicted of a number of charges including first-degree maintaining a controlled dangerous substance production facility, three second-degree weapons offenses, and third-degree money laundering.

The 34-year-old was the primary target of a five-month joint investigation executed by New Jersey State Police and the FBI in 2009, prosecutors said. Officers discovered nearly seven pounds of cocaine, over 800 folds of heroin, three firearms and various drug paraphernalia.

After he was featured on "America's Most Wanted" in November 2009, he surrendered himself to authorities in December 2012.

Abdullah has an extensive criminal background that includes seven felony convictions for crimes ranging from aggravated assault, to burglary, to other drug and weapons offenses. He was also convicted in an incident where he and others kidnapped, shot, and killed a rival drug dealer.

Abdullah will be sentenced on January 6, 2017. The State of New Jersey intends to file a motion for an extended term that could result in a life sentence in state prison.
Looking for a fun, family-friendly event this weekend? Head to The Centre Theater in Norristown for the family musical, The Perfect Dog.

The musical is part of National Dog Show Month in Philadelphia and was adapted from John O'Hurley's book by the same name.

O'Hurley hosts the dog show each year. He's had the gig since the show started in 2002.

The Perfect Dog musical debuts Friday, Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. Kids can bring a blanket and get treated to free popcorn, cookies and juice.

Saturday's performance is in the afternoon and if you come an hour early at 2 p.m., you get to meet and hang out with adoptable dogs from Mostly Muttz Rescue.

The performance starts at 3 p.m.

Sam, a 12-year-old girl, is the central character of the show. She's a perfectionist searching for a flawless dog to enter in her town's dog contest. The moral to the story is: there's no such thing as perfect, but there is such a thing as being perfect for each other.

Tickets are $10 each. Get them at the door or online.

The Centre Theater is located at 208 DeKalb Street, Norristown, Pa., 19401. [directions]

And don't forget -- The National Dog Show gets taped next weekend out at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and is then broadcast Thanksgiving Day on NBC. Get more info on the Nov. 19 & 20 events and tickets right here.
Dreams really do come true. This week, Eater San Diego confirmed the beloved Shake Shack will, in fact, be expanding to Americas Finest City. Check out what else is shaking things up in San Diegos food scene this week.

Shake Shack Confirms San Diego Expansion

Eater received exciting news from Shake Shack confirming the recent rumors that the wildly-popular burger chain is looking to add San Diego to its West Coast expansion boom. A rep from the publicly-traded company says that Shake Shack will open in Westfied UTC sometime next year. And other locations are presumably in the works.

Harvest by The Patio Combines Casual Food & Cocktails

Now in the East Village is Harvest by The Patio, a new casual concept from The Patio Group that features a healthy, all-day menu via counter service. On the eatery's upper level is an assortment of seating options ranging from communal tables and lounge seats, to a large bar mixing up seasonal craft cocktails.

Breakfast Republic Opens First North County Location

A bustling morning eats concept known for its creative breakfast plates and playful design, Breakfast Republic currently operates eateries in North Park and Liberty Station. Now, the eatery has gone to San Diegos North County, opening another outpost in Encinitas that features an outdoor patio, bar, and plenty of room for brunching.

10 Years in With Market Restaurant + Bar Chef/Proprietor Carl Schroeder

Eater sat down with Carl Schroeder, the leader of the much-admired restaurant to talk about the past, present, and future of the Del Mar dining destination on the occasion of its 10th anniversary. Schroeder shares his philosophy on food, his thoughts on farm-to-table practices, and hints about a potential new concept.

Where to Dine Out on Thanksgiving in San Diego

Thanksgiving is fast approaching, so it's time to decide where you'll be feasting with friends and family this year. Eater has 15 great suggestions around town, ranging from multi-course menus to elegant buffets, and even take-home meals for every price point.

Candice Woo is the founding editor of Eater San Diego, a leading source for news about San Diegos restaurant and bar scene. Keep up with the latest Eater San Diego content via Facebook or Twitter, and sign up for Eater San Diegos newsletter here.


Its a pretty common deal: switch phone carriers and the new company will buy out your previous contract.

Keri Persky out of Rancho San Diego thought it sounded like a great idea when she heard about Verizons new buyout program.

We were trying to consolidate to only have one bill, so we were transferring our family account from Sprint to have one bill with Verizon instead of having two, Keri said.

The family account would merge with her husband's existing Verzion account. The deal included new phones and Verizon paying off her old phone account.

But they had to turn in the phones from their previous carrier.

We handed over my Sprint phone there at the Verizon store and my daughter, who lived in Riverside, mailed hers in because it had to come directly to the store, Keri said.

Everything was working out great until Keri started getting bills and collections notices from her old phone carrier Sprint, saying her account was never paid off.

Three months after they switched, Verizon told Keri she didnt qualify for the special Verizon offer because her husbands account was a business account.

Keri says that was never mentioned when they signed up at the Verizon store.

I dont think its my job to know their policy, I feel its Verizon employees job to know their policy and educate me as the customer, Keri said.

Keri says she talked to 10 different people at Verizon trying to straighten out the problem, but nothing seemed to work, so she contacted NBC 7 Responds for help.

It would be amazing if I could just get what I was promised, Keri said.

We reached out to Verizon and they promised a thorough investigation. At first, Verizon offered Keris family a partial refund but after we walked them through the situation, Verizon honored what was originally promised and covered all of the costs for Keris Sprint plan, totaling over $2,000.

A spokesperson for Verizon told us through email, We try to deliver the best possible experience for each and every Verizon customer. In this case, we did not deliver on that promise. We appreciate NBC 7 Responds for bringing this issue to our attention and for giving us the opportunity to do the right thing for our customer."
President-elect Donald Trump has outlined his plan for his first 100 days in office in a contract posted on his website.

In the Contract with the American Voter, Trump states that he wants to restore honesty and accountability" and bring about change to Washington.

The contract focuses on three main areas: cleaning up corruption and special interests in Washington, protecting American workers, and restoring security and constitutional rule of law.

Trump also outlined his plan to work with Congress to pass legislative measures. They include providing middle class tax relief, ending Common Core, and funding the construction of a wall, with the understanding that Mexico will reimburse the United States.

NBC 7 spoke to local voters, regardless of whom they supported in the election about what they want to see Trump achieve in his first 100 days.

I think repealing Obamacare would be huge because it's killing the middle class, said Bonnie Lofton-Fuentes from Santee.

Anna Pollard from Kearny Mesa said: I dont think he should repeal it, I think he should make it better. Or if he does repeal it, then he has to come up with something that is not going to affect those people who are on it right now.

El Cajon resident Jim McGough told NBC 7 that he believed that besides Obamacare, Trump needs to "organize government" and "cut it down."

"I think thats what hes got to do," McGough said. "Border security. We live in San Diego and we know what thats like, so whatever he can do with that would be nice.

But one Tijuana resident in San Diego disagreed.

Theres already border security so I dont what else you can do, the resident said.

But regardless of the specific action plan, Lakeside resident Linda Rich said she hopes Trump will keep his promise.

Make America great again, like he promised. Thats my hope," Rich said.
A pedestrian was struck by a car in San Diego's Ridgeview-Webster neighborhood, San Diego Police (SDPD) confirmed.

The collision happened at approximately 6:08 p.m. Thursday on the 4700 block of Federal Boulevard.

According to SDPD, the pedestrian, a 71-year-old man was crossing the 1500 block of 47th street from east to west when he was struck by a 60-year-old male in a Lexus. The pedestrian was not in the crosswalk.

The pedestrian was taken to Scripps Mercy Hospital where he was treated for serious non-life threatening injuries.

Police said there is no indication anyone fled the scene.

No other information was immediately available.

Check back for updates on this breaking news story.
Travelers were evacuated from the San Diego International Airport Friday morning after a faulty smoke alarm sounded off, airport officials confirmed.

Rebecca Bloomfield, of the San Diego Airport Authority, told NBC 7 the alarm went off in the Southwest Rotunda at around 8:45 a.m., near Gates 3-10 at Terminal 1

Crews with the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department (SDFD) and the San Diego Harbor Police went to the airport and soon, officials cleared Terminal 1. Less than15 minutes later, travelers were allowed back into the airport.

Some were very frustrated  and rushed  because they had to go back through security lines. Many feared they may miss their flights.

#BREAKING: Fire alarm forces evacuations at @SanDiegoAirport. These passengers waiting to get back through security. Stay w #NBC7 pic.twitter.com/ar8oo6V5Vq  Liberty Zabala (@LibertyNBC7SD) November 11, 2016

Other passengers said they were relieved to hear the evacuation was only due to a false alarm, and that no one was hurt.

The Airport Authority said passengers traveling Friday should check with their airlines in case of delays. As of 10 a.m., the San Diego International Airports website showed departing flights leaving on time.
Bleeding Steel Press Conference & Photocall (Photo : Getty Images)

Four movie industry achievers would receive an honorary Academy Award on Saturday from the Board of Governors of the Oscar. The list is topbilled by Kung Fu Yoga star Jackie Chan.



The other recipients are film editor Anne Coates, casting director Lynn Stalmaster and documentarian Frederick Wiseman. The honorary Oscar recognizes lifetime achievements and contributions to the film industry, according to Associated Press.



Advertisement

Jackie Chans Oscar awards is unexpected, the action star said. He never imagined that he would receive such as award, the actor said. I still remember my very first proudest moment was when I received an award for stunt choreography. At that time, I didn't know much about directing. I just knew how to do action and fighting sequences and stunts. Receiving this honorary award has raised my feelings to another level, he said.



He will fly to Los Angeles to receive the award at the 8th annual Governors Award. At 62, and having been a writer, director, producer and actor in his more than five decades in the movie industry, Jackie Chan observed that Hollywoods approach is very organized and systematic when it comes to film making. In contrast, it is more dynamic in Hong Kong since things could be changed on the set while shooting.



Jackie Chan considers the most fun experience he had in Hollywood filming the Rush Hour series although he admitted the English dialogue was the most challenging. He shared having a near-death accident while performing a stunt in Armor of God, and filming Operation Condor while the temperature in the desert was more than 40 degrees Celsius.



Previous awardees of an honorary Oscar include Walt Disney, Spike Lee, Judy Garland and Federico Fellini. Comicverse pointed out that the award that Jackie Chan would receive is the precursor for many of the Academy Awards existing today. The website noted the Best Stunt Coordination in a Motion Picture has been woefully absent from the Oscars for far too long.






A group gathered alongside the road outside the gates of Camp Pendleton on Friday, Veterans Day, in a show of solidarity for President-elect Donald Trump.

Were looking forward to a strong leader, rally organizer Jeff Schwilk said.

Schwilk, founder of San Diegans for Secure Borders, was once associated with the San Diego Minutemen.

He said he gravitated to Trump as soon as he heard the campaign platform combined support for military veterans with a tough stance on illegal immigration.

Our laws have been on the book for 30 years, its time we have a president and an administration to enforce those laws, Schwilk said adding that he hopes Trump will end sanctuary cities like the ones in California.

Trump supporter Wiley Drake, Chair of the Congressional Prayer Conference of Washington, D.C., said he supports the president-elect because he wants to take the country back to traditional America.

He held a shofar, a horn used for Jewish religious purposes, and credited the instrument with helping Trump reach the White House.

We trumpeted Trump into the leadership position around midnight and then, of course, now the rest is history, Drake said.

Mark Sackett, NBC 7

Drake admits that Trump is not a perfect man but he said hes a good man who will serve our country well.

We will blow the trumpet for Trump and Trump will lead our nation back to one nation under God, he said.

Many car horns honked while the group held signs at the intersection of San Rafael and Harbor Drive in Oceanside.
A North Carolina chapter of the Ku Klux Klan announced it will hold a rally in December to celebrate Donald Trump's presidential victory, in what a national hate-tracking group called the latest evidence that white supremacist groups are feeling emboldened since the election.

Calls are now growing for Trump to speak out against a string of hateful incidents across the country since his election.

The Loyal White Knights of Pelham, North Carolina, one of the largest Ku Klux Klan groups in the U.S., said on its website it will hold the event on Dec. 3. The time and location of the event were not listed. The group is based in Pelham, a small, unincorporated community in Caswell County near the Virginia border. It organized a rally in South Carolina last year protesting the removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol building.

A phone call to the number on the group's website was not immediately returned. Caswell County Chief Deputy Scott Halbrook said Monday the sheriff's office doesn't have any credible information that the parade will happen in the county and that the group did not take out a permit for the event in the area. He said it's possible they plan to hold the event elsewhere.

The official newspaper of the the KKK, The Crusader, endorsed Trump for president days before the presidential election and Trump's campaign was quick to reject the support.

"Mr. Trump and the campaign denounces hate in any form. This publication is repulsive and their views do not represent the tens of millions of Americans who are uniting behind our campaign," the campaign said then in a statement.

Trump was previously criticized for being slow to condemn former Klan leader David Duke after he gave the candidate his backing. The Republican has also repeatedly retweeted messages from white supremacist sympathizers.

Duke celebrated Trump's win over Democrat Hillary Clinton, tweeting early Wednesday, "This is one of the most exciting nights of my life. Make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump!"

Ryan Lenz, spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and crimes, said Trump's election "has ripped opened wounds of racial resentment in this country, wounds we thought were healed or we were working to heal for some time."

The SPLC has received reports of 200 racially-tinged incidents and hate crimes from across the U.S. since the election and it's working to review them and understand what is going on, Lenz said.

He added that the KKK and other white supremacist groups feel legitimized by Trump's victory: "The fact is they are once again going to march on the street and celebrate Trumps victory is proof positive that Donald Trump's campaign has legitimized extremist ideologies in this country so much that they are no longer relegated to the fringes of American society."

Trump has not commented on the hate crime incidents and his presidential transition team has not responded to NBC's requests for comment on Thursday and Friday. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes," Trump said he did not hear about the violence and harassment in his name or directed at his supporters, other than "one or two instances."

"I would say dont do it, thats terrible, cause Im gonna bring this country together," Trump said in addressing his supporters.

He added: "I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, Stop it. If it-- if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it."

The president-elect did tweet about protesters who have held demonstrations across the U.S. against his presidency. In one tweet he said the protesters were "incited by the media." In a follow up tweet Friday morning, he struck a more conciliatory tone, saying "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!"

While most of the anti-Trump rallies were peaceful, police in Portland, Oregon, said a rally there overnight Thursday turned into a "riot" when some protesters carrying bats smashed car and store windows and lit fires. Early Wednesday, protesters in Oakland, California, smashed windows at the Oakland Tribune newsroom, and set tires, trash and newspaper stands on fire there and in Berkeley.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said incidents of vandalism from anti-Trump protesters also are a "troubling" trend.

Greenblatt added he's not surprised by KKK's move and their attempt to gain publicity by exploiting the presidential election. He said other white supremacist groups are also celebrating Trump's victory.

James Edwards, a white supremacist who runs The Political Cesspool, a radio show based in Tennessee, wrote about Trumps opponents, I hope President Trump shows them no mercy. Dont be magnanimous, Mr. President. Crush the defeated, especially those in the media, and Make America Great Again!

Lenz said The Daily Stormer, the most influential Neo-Nazi website, put out a call Thursday to harass Hispanic and Muslim immigrants and to make them feel a genuine sense of fear.

SPLC published a petition Friday morning asking the president-elect to reject hate and bigotry. More than 17,000 people have signed it.

Human Rights Watch has also called for Trump to speak out against hate-filled violence. The New York Times issued a similar appeal in an editorial.

President Barack Obama, Clinton and other prominent Democrats have said they wished the billionaire businessman the best as he transitions to the presidency.

But departing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid lashed out at Trump, saying in a statement that he has "heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics."

"Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America," he said.

He said that if Trump "wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately."
A 108-year-old World War II veteran will be in Washington, D.C., Friday to attend the yearly Veterans Day breakfast at the White House.

Bill Mohr was an army sergeant with the 45th Infantry Division. His daughter says the Hatboro man participated in Operation Dragoon in France and marched into Germany to liberate the Dachau concentration camp.

He worked as a lathe operator in Warminster until he was 93 when a fall injured his shoulder.

Members of American Legion Post #255 of Sellersville honored Mohr with a military send-off and motorcade as he departed for the nation's capital on Thursday.

Mohr plans to visit the World War II Memorial. He'll be escorted by local veterans.
Police have made two more arrests in the death in the shooting death of a 22-year-old man in Manassas, Virginia, bringing the number of people charged with nine.

Kevin Vigil Cruz, 22, of Manassas Park, and Carlos Antoni Cisneros-Espinal, 21, of Manassas were arrested in Ohio Thursday, the Prince William County police said.

The arrests came one day after four men, two women and a 17-year-old boy were also charged in the death of Edwin Ivan Chicas.

Chicas died after he was shot multiple times the night of Oct. 29 on the 7500 block of Quail Run Lane.

Investigators believe the suspects are affiliated with a gang.

Prince William County Police Department

The fact that they are associates of MS-13, a gang, a very violent criminal gang, makes us want to get them into custody even more," police spokesman Sgt. Jonathan Perok said.

These nine suspects were arrested:

Kevin Vigil Cruz, 22, of Manassas Park was charged with accessory after the fact.

Carlos Antoni Cisneros-Espinal, 21, of Manassas was charged with accessory after the fact.

Marlon Edenilson Argueta Flores, 23, of Manassas, was charged with murder and use of a firearm in commission of a felony.

Gerson Aldair Sorto Ramirez, 18, of Manassas, was charged with murder.

Omar Javier Villegas-Ayala, 19, of Manassas Park, was charged with conspiracy to commit a felony.

Kevin Portillo Quintanilla, 19, of Manassas, was charged with conspiracy to commit a felony.

Ana Luisa Hernandez-Ramirez, 29, of Manassas Park, was charged with accessory after the fact.

Tania Manilo Henriquez-Carronza, 24, of Manassas Park, was charged with accessory after the fact.

A 17-year-old boy from Manassas, who police did not name, was charged with conspiracy to commit a felony.

Courtesy of family

After Chicas was killed, one of his sisters wept as she spoke about what he was like.

"He was a very good brother, and he was a very good uncle, and he was a very loving person and he didn't deserve this at all," she said.

Chicas's mother previously said she feared for her son because he spent time with gang members.

Northern Virginia bureau chief Julie Carey reports on the murder of a 22-year-old Manassas man. A neighbor described hearing the shots and running to help.

Chicas's death is the third gang-related murder in Prince William County this year, police said.
A Black Lives Matter sign hung outside a church in Montgomery County, Maryland, has been vandalized for the fourth time in a little over a year -- and church leaders say they are willing to engage with the vandals.

The sign outside Christ Congressional Church in Silver Spring was defaced on election night. Someone cut the word "black" out of the sign, so it read simply "Lives Matter."

In a ceremony Friday, a diverse group of religious leaders, elected officials and concerned residents rededicated the sign, with the word "black" replaced.

"We felt it necessary to come and let the citizens of Montgomery County and the residents of Silver Spring know that we will not tolerate the hate in our community," Rev. Jeffrey Thames said.

Vandals and anyone who wants to discuss the "Black Lives Matter" movement is welcome at the church.

"We love you so much that we are inviting you to come in and have a meeting with us so that we can understand what it is that you're feeling, we can understand what you're afraid of, we can understand why you feel that your life may not matter because at this moment we're focused on black lives," Thames said.

Congressman-elect Jamie Raskin, who will represent the 8th District, attended the ceremony.

"It seems like the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' is threatening to a lot of people, and obviously all lives matter," he said.

James Stowe, the director of the Montgomery County Office of Human Rights, spoke at the ceremony about inclusion.

"Whoever cut out the word 'black' is still part of this community," he said. "How do we impact in ways so that for those folks, they also feel part of the community? I'll tell you, at the end of the day we've got to be one Montgomery County. One."
A man, 82, has died after he was assaulted inside an assisted living facility in Alexandria, Virginia, police said.

Hunter Alexander died Oct. 26 after he was attacked Oct. 25 inside the Sunrise of Alexandria facility on the 3200 block of Duke Street, the Alexandria Police Department said Friday.

Alexander was assaulted by a 72-year-old man, police said. No charges against that man have been filed. It was not immediately clear if the attacker also was a resident of the facility.

Sunrise Senior Living bills their facilities as providing "the best possible lifestyle for each resident," their website said. They offer 24-hour staffing, daily activities and group trips.

Alexander is the sixth person killed in Alexandria this year.

Anyone with information on the assault is asked to call police at 703-746-6751.
The fact that Hillary Clinton most likely won the U.S. popular vote but won't be president has some people wondering, "Wait, why do we do it this way?''

Thank - or blame - the Founding Fathers for creating the possibility of a so-called "divergent election'' when they set up the Electoral College.

How and why the U.S. selects its presidents this way:

ORIGINS

The Electoral College was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was a compromise meant to strike a balance between those who wanted popular elections for president and those who wanted no public input. Alexander Hamilton wrote, "If the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.''

At the time, the country had just 13 states, and the founders were worried about one state exercising outsized influence, according to a white paper from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Small states were worried that states with large populations would have extra sway. Southern states with slaves who couldn't vote worried that Northern states would have a louder voice. There were concerns that people in one state wouldn't know much about candidates from other states. The logistics of a national election were daunting. The thinking was that if candidates had to win multiple states rather than just the popular vote, they would have to attract broader support.

HOW IT WORKS

The electoral system has been tweaked over the years, but the gist endures. The president is selected by a "college'' of 538 electors from the states. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has members of Congress, and the District of Columbia gets three. To be elected president, the winner must get at least half the total plus one - or 270 electoral votes. Most states give all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the state's popular vote. So while Clinton is leading Trump in votes nationwide 47.7 percent to 47.5 percent, Trump's total in the Electoral College stands at 290, with races in Michigan and New Hampshire yet to be called. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote but lost to Republican George W. Bush in the Electoral College 271-266. Overall, there have been four such cases of divergent elections.

THE PROS

A lot has changed since the Electoral College system was established, making many of the original reasons for its existence outdated: The U.S. now manages to run national elections quite well. Voters nationwide have no shortage of information about candidates. Slavery no longer exists. But there are still concerns that small states and rural areas would be ignored in favor of those with bigger populations if the race hinged strictly on the popular vote.

THE CONS

In 1967, a commission of the American Bar Association recommended that the Electoral College system be scrapped, finding it to be "archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous and dangerous.'' Fifty years later, critics are still complaining, arguing that the system results in huge swaths of the country being ignored while candidates focus on a dozen or so battleground states.

"It's a terrible system,'' says George C. Edwards III, a Texas A&M professor who's written a book on the subject. Edwards tracks every campaign stop by the major candidates, and he says big states that are sure to vote for one candidate or another - say, California for the Democrats or Texas for the Republicans - now get completely ignored, and small states largely get overlooked, too.

IS CHANGE AFOOT?

Don't count on it. Republicans have benefited the most from the system in recent years, and they're in control of Congress. However, there is an effort underway to get around the winner-take-all aspects of the system without abolishing the Electoral College.

A group called National Popular Vote is pushing an interstate compact under which states would pledge to deliver all their electoral votes to the nationwide winner of the popular vote. Over the past decade, 11 states have approved such a bill.

John Koza, chairman of the group, is quick to point out that both Trump and Clinton are on record in recent years saying the system is flawed. He's hopeful Trump's election won't make Republicans less amenable to changing it.

"We're talking about a policy change that's largely dictated by the need to create a 50-state campaign for president instead of a 12-state campaign for president,'' says Koza.
A Virginia man got 30 years in prison for the gang-related slaying of a man at a popular park last year, the Alexandria Commonwealth's Attorney's Office said.

Boris Elias Rosa Castro, 19, of Fairfax County, was sentenced to life in prison with all but 30 years suspended in the death of 22-year-old Eduardo David Chandias Almendarez. Castro pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in June.

Almendarez was found dead in Four Mile Run Park behind Cora Kelly School Dec. 4, 2015, six days after he was reported missing.

"The victim was set upon in a surprise attack and, according to the medical examiner's report, received at least 96 separate stab wounds, many of which would have alone proved fatal," Commonwealth's Attorney Bryan Porter said in a news release.

Edwin Alexander Guerreo Umana, of Arlington, who pleaded guilty in October, told police in April he and two others lured Almendarez to a McDonalds to buy marijuana and then took him to the park.

According to court documents, Almendarez's death was revenge for his testimony in the murder trial of a gang member.
A suspect has been arrested after police said he pulled a young woman out of her car after a crash in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and sexually assaulted her over a period of two hours.

Roberto Carlos Flores Sibrian, 26, was arrested Thursday at a construction site in North Carolina, the Stafford County Sheriff's Office said. He has been charged with rape and sexual battery.

Stafford County Sheriff's Office

The sheriff's office said they received about 100 leads after the crime, which happened in the early-morning hours of Oct. 31. The woman was driving east on Kings Highway (Route 3) when an SUV hit her car. She was then pulled from the car, dragged into a ditch and sexually assaulted, authorities have said.

The assailant finally left, and the victim was able to call for help.

Flores Sibrian is being detained in Lee County Jail in North Carolina on a $100,000 secured bond and an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer.

Authorities said Flores Sibrian has no fixed address but was living in the Fredericksburg area before the crime.
A University of Maryland lecturer postponed a test he had planned for the morning after Election Day, saying some of the 150 students in his class might need time to process what must be a personally threatening election result.

In a message to students in his class examining whether Hollywood gets planetary science right Wednesday morning, Alan Peel canceled class, saying a test wouldn't be fair that day since scores might reflect circumstances far beyond the mastery of the current material, the Diamondback first reported. The test will be held Friday instead.

The university has championed diversity, but Peel told students Trump has made no secret that he's not in favor of it. He called the postponement a minimum courtesy to students who believe they're part of a marginalized minority.

I still think I made the right call, Peel told the Associated Press by telephone Thursday.

He knew the test would come after a night when many students would stay up late watching election returns. He pondered the situation of students who felt targeted by campaign rhetoric and could reasonably be too stressed to answer questions about other planets.

While he has received messages from people decrying his move, Peel said he has also been approached by students -- even some not in his class -- who thanked him.
Dead ISIS fighters in Mosul. (Photo : Iraqi Army)

Iraq has reported that over 2,000 ISIS militants have been killed by the Iraqi Army, Iraqi joint forces and popular Iraqi militias assisted by U.S. and coalition aircraft since the attack to re-take the ISIS held city of Mosul began on Oct. 17.



Nineveh Operations Commander Najim Abdullah al-Jabouri said among those killed were "senior and elite leaderships in the group. He added that only six kilometers separate us from battles at the eastern coast of Mosul."



Advertisement

Jabouri praised the air cover provided by Iraqi and US-led coalition air forces for destroying ISIS infrastructure and the majority of the group's ammunition caches.



"Apache (attack helicopters) have engaged in battles at the western coast o Nineveh and a number of fighting axes, thanks to their defensive and offensive capabilities and accuracy in detecting targets, especially in guerrilla battles."



Jabouri said ISIS fighters, on the other hand, rely merely on suicide attacks, IEDs and hit and runs to hiding among civilian houses.



"Our sources confirm a collective escape by group elements," he said.



If accurate, the loss of 2,000 men represents 40 percent of the estimated 5,000 ISIS fighters said to be defending Mosul against a massive attacking force consisting of 100,000 allied ground troops. Other estimates place the number of ISIS defenders at 7,000.



Not all of this vast number is engaged in combat inside Mosul, however. Some aren't directly involved in the assault on the city; others are secure positions behind the front lines while still others play supporting roles.



Of this total, 54,000 are members of the Iraqi Security Forces and 40,000 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. There are also 14,000 members of paramilitary units: 9,000 Sunni fighters and 5,000 from other minorities including Christians, Turkmen and Yazidis.



Shia paramilitaries will not be involved in the assault on Mosul, but will be tasked with securing areas around the city instead.


While excitement for the opening of MGM National Harbor builds, so does concern about traffic in the area.

Some lawmakers said the state did not do enough to stop gridlock in the area.

In Prince Georges County Thursday, Maryland Secretary of Transportation Pete K. Rahn boasted about the millions of dollars Gov. Larry Hogan is pouring into transportation projects, but with no money going into troubled Maryland Route 210, a major entry point for the new casino, it was hard for the council member for that area to focus on much else.

Residents are just downright scared, Council member Obie Patterson said. They dont understand how theyre going to get out of their driveways into the main Oxon Hill drive  Its just a frightening experience, and I just think weve been failed.

For decades, people who live in southern Prince Georges County have been promised overpasses for 210 to help with the incredible congestion on that roadway. Numerous proposals have been drawn up, but nothing has happened.

Its been under construction now, and in the design-build phase, for three years, so we need to try to really accelerate and put additional resources into completing the construction as quickly as possible, Prince Georges Department of Public Works and Transportation Director Darrell B. Mobley said. As you know, MGM will be opening Dec. 8.

Major cuts in state revenues, including lower gas prices decreasing the state's gas tax, has cut millions of dollars in state transportation dollars, Rahn said. The 210 improvements most likely will not happen until 2018.

We know what needs to be done from a standpoint of how can we improve it, Rahn said. I dont have the money at the moment.

But he did have an idea of where that money could come from: Casino revenues.

One of our hopes is how to try to leverage the money from the tax thats dedicated to improvements there thats coming out of the casino, he said.
The body of a fisherman who was swept out to sea Tuesday has been found off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Manoel DeSonsa and another person were fishing on the rocks of Rafes Chasm Park when they were swept away. One made it back safely, but DeSonsa remained missing.

A search was conducted Tuesday for the man with a Coast Guard helicopter, 47-foot boat, Environmental Police, and Massachusetts State Police helicopter.

Massachusetts State Police dive crews were back out searching on Wednesday morning.

Thursday afternoon, just before 5 p.m., the body was found near Shore Drive in Magnolia Point. It has since been identified as DeSonsa.
Thousands of people in Boston took to the streets Wednesday night to protest the election of Donald Trump, one of many rallies taking place across the country.

Elan Axelbank didn't know what to expect. But as he watched the election results pour in early Wednesday morning, he knew he had to do something. So the Socialist Alternative organizer created a Facebook page advertising a rally later that night.

"When we were calling the protest the question was, will this resonate?" Axelbank wondered. "Will people want to come out to this?"

On Wednesday night, more than 4,000 people turned out marching peacefully through the streets of Boston.

"If somehow we can stop him from becoming president, I'd much rather him not be president, that is for sure," Axelbank said. "We don't want to totally remove that from the realm of possibility."

"The most likely thing is he becomes president and we have to do what we can to fight against his agenda," he added.

On Thursday morning, Gov. Charlie Baker welcomed the protests, as long as they stayed peaceful.

"If people want to come out and make their voices heard, we are going to make sure they are able to do that in a peaceful and collaborative way," the Governor said.

Two days after the election, many in Boston still trying to digest the news.

"I said yesterday I felt like Kennedy got shot, I was born a few years before he was shot, or 9/11 when the planes hit the building, that was the feeling I had yesterday," Bill O'Brien said.

Dan Gebhart wasn't feeling much better.

"How are you feeling? Like I have been punched in the gut, bent over double trying to catch my breath, it just wild that we have elected Donald Trump," he said. "He just doesn't care about anyone but himself."

Meanwhile, Axelbank was organizing a second night of gathering for Thursday night. He said the group would meet in a smaller space to outline a longterm agenda.

"It is important that we don't just kind of burn ourselves out," he said. "This needs to be a lasting movement, to last."

"Trump is President is going to be four years at least, you know, what we need to do is get organized and figure out not only what are we fighting against, but what are we fighting for," he added.
The Coast Guard has suspended the search for three men who left a Cape Cod marina on a fishing trip earlier week and never returned.

The Coast Guard says it and multiple local agencies searched nearly 4,000 nautical miles in Cape Cod Bay for the men over two days before suspending the search Thursday night.

Authorities say, Carlos Amaral, Dylan Amaral, and Mario Fialho _ all from the New Bedford area _ left a Sandwich marina in a 23-foot Wellcraft on Tuesday and did not return at 2 p.m. as scheduled. A friend reported them missing at about 7 p.m. that day.

Their truck and trailer were still parked at the marina.

No additional information on the men was immediately available.
A 52-year-old woman is accused of stealing overs $8,000 from a graduation fund for students in Rockland, Maine.

Brenda Carty of Owls Head, Maine was arrested for stealing from the fund, which was started by parents to help offset costs for class events, according to WCSH6.

Police said that parents became suspicious when she told them that there was only $4,800 left in the account. Bank records showed that a total of $13,114 was deposited in the Class of 2018 account since 2013.

Further charges may be pending.
Police are searching for three car thieves who led state troopers on a chase in stolen vehicles along the shoreline early this morning.

Three people in a 2004 Jeep Liberty had been stolen out of Hamden on Nov. 8 went to Clinton overnight and stole a 2008 Mercury Mariner and 2003 Toyota Camry that were unlocked and had keys nearby, according to state police.

They then went to Old Saybrook, where they tried to steal or break in to more cars, but an alarm went off and they fled, police said.

However, a resident saw the cars and called Old Saybrook police and officers responded to Quarry Street just before 2:30 a.m. to investigate suspicious activity.

Within 25 minutes, Old Saybrook police called state police because the people who had been trying to break into cars fled south on Interstate 95.

When state police saw all three vehicles, they tried to stop them, but the drivers kept going and tried to get off the highway at exit 56, state police said.

At that point, the Mercury Mariner hit an embankment, crashed in a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot at East Industrial and Leetes Island roads, and the driver fled, according to state police.

The drivers of the Jeep Liberty and Toyota Camry continued going and fled on Route 1 into East Haven, police said. At that point, state troopers called off the chase.

Minutes later, East Haven police called state police because a Jeep Liberty hit a house on Dodge Road in East Haven. The driver fled after causing damage to the porch. Police said no one was home at the time of the crash.

The driver of the Camry was able to get away in the vehicle and all three drivers remain at large.

Anyone with information should call 860-399-2100 or text TIP711 with any information to 274637.
The victim in a fatal tractor trailer crash that shut down a major road in Hollis, Maine, has been identified as a former fire deputy chief.

WCSH reports Samuel Horn, a former York Beach Fire Department deputy chief, was killed in Friday morning's crash outside the Poland Spring Water plant.

State police say Horn, who was behind the wheel, had just left the plant when he swerved off Killick Pond Road and hit a telephone pole.

No other details were immediately available.
President-elect Donald Trump, working with Congress, may try to make it harder and more expensive to hire H-1B workers. His intent would be to change the economics of visa usage and encourage employers to hire U.S. workers.

Trump could do this by working with a bipartisan group in Congress committed to reform. But Trump also has executive power levers and could impose changes on his first day in office. He also can prod various federal agencies to launch investigations into visa use.

Ron Hira, associate professor of public policy at Howard University, said its too early to predict what a Trump administration will do, if anything, about the visa programs. Republicans and Democrats have splits on this issue in each of their parties, and business interest groups will be out in full force trying to stop any sensible reform.

Also uncertain is the business response to visa changes by a Trump administration. The practice of offshore outsourcing is deeply embedded in major U.S. companies. The use of the H-1B visa grew with industry, and IT services companies use about half of all the visas issued.

India-based Infosys, for instance, earns more than 60 percent of its $9.5 billion in revenue from business in North America. It employs about 200,000, but only about 20,000 of those employees work in the U.S. Many of those workers are on an H-1B visa, but much of the work is done offshore.

One possibility is that H-1B visa restrictions could force India-based firms and other large H-1B-using companies to hire more U.S. workers. It also may prompt IT services firms to try to cut the amount of work they do in the U.S.

Increases in H-1B wages makes "managing complex IT projects a lot more expensive, Phil Fersht, the CEO and chief analyst at HFS Research, wrote in a blog post following Trumps victory.

Fersht said that more enterprises will turn to cloud-based systems because the cost of maintaining legacy systems will spiral with visa reforms. Maintaining legacy systems is a staple of IT outsourcing firms, he noted.

Fersht also said Trumps effort to restrict visa will help push the industry to automate, in much the same way the auto industry has been automating. IT is no different, he said. But this may have more impact on lower-skilled workers.

Hira said he doubts that automation will bring many changes to IT services delivery. The industry remains very labor intensive and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The question is whether that labor is delivered from U.S. workers or foreign workers, who are offshore and on-site with guest worker visas.

Changes in guest worker policies, which impact offshoring decisions, will not impact the trajectory of automation adoption. It will, though, impact jobs for U.S. workers, in a positive way.

John Miano, the founder of the Programmers Guild, a group that opposes offshore outsourcing, and a programmer who became a lawyer, was buoyed by Trumps win. Miano has been fighting President Barack Obamas administration in court over its extension of the Optional Practical Training extension, which allows STEM students to work up to three years on a student visa.

There is great joy right now in tech worker land, Miano said. The next big question, he said, is what steps Trump will take. Miano said he hopes that Trump will reverse some of Obamas executive actions, but also take affirmative steps to use his authority to protect working Americans."

This story, "What will Trump do with the H-1B visa?" was originally published by Computerworld .
The Daydream mobile virtual reality experience proves critics who call VR a fad wrong. Googles new platform will attract many new apps and experiences and create new business models.

Daydream VR combined with the Pixel hardwares powerful performance and thoughtful design of the headset will create a market of hundreds of millions of VR-capable phones. The Pixel is expensive, but the relentlessly declining price performance of mobile components will quickly bring affordability into alignment with consumers budgets.

Unique Pixel hardware enables premium VR

The Pixel hardwares Snapdragon 821 CPU, Adreno 530 GPU and first-place Dxomark camera rating might position the smartphone in the flagship category among a lot of competition from great phones, such as the Galaxy S7 and the HTC 10. But inside it has a high-performance gyroscope and accelerometer, finely tuned with software algorithms that made a step-functional improvement in mobile VR.

Google Pixel XL

Gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer fusion deliver accuracy that synchronizes the head movement with very low latency, rendering a high-quality VR experiences. Rendering a high frame rate at 60Hz is not hard at high resolution.

And Pixel designers and developers solved the hard problem of tracking head movement and changing the perspective of the users view while maintaining the frame rate and keeping the user spatially oriented with less than 20-ms delay.

Google also developed factory calibration processes and software calibration algorithms to ensure consistent high performance.

Daydream View headset and controller design aesthetics

Fast frame rates and low latency are the two features Google nailed in upgrading mobile VR to premium mobile VR. The controller and the Daydream view headset also contribute to the premium experience that is an improvement over the mobile VR market leader Samsung Galaxy Gear VR and make it competitive with the Oculus Rift desktop VR.

The flexible Daydream View headset simplifies alignment of the phone compared to Google Cardboard and the Gear VR. Just drop the phone into the headset, and the NFC chip inside the headset turns on Daydream VR and the Hall-effect sensor automatically aligns the screen with the lenses. The phone can be inserted quite far out of physical alignment, and the screen aligns perfectly from inside the headset.

Google Google Daydream

Google cardboard needs the phone to be carefully aligned for the VR experience to feel right. The Gear VR has a heavy plastic headset that a Note 5 or Galaxy S6 or S7 snaps into with a USB connector, which is much less comfortable or convenient compared to the flexible and soft Daydream View headset.

Sometimes the Gear VR USB connection fails; the user notices from inside the headset that the phone is in phone-mode, not VR-mode. To fix that, the headset must be removed and the phone taken out and reinserted. The simplicity of dropping the Pixel into the headset, closing the cover and immediately starting Daydream VR mode on the phone cannot be overstated.

The Daydream controller has a very comfortable and lightweight minimalist design. It has a touchpad-like button, an application button (right-click mouse button) and a home button that returns the user to the top-level menu. The overall performance and three degrees of freedom (3DOF) works well, though there is a bit of drift that can easily be corrected by pressing the home button.

The Cardboard does not have a controller.

The controller mounted on the side of the Gear VR is much less intuitive and is less than optimal when a game, experience or virtual keyboard requires frequent inputs. The Gear VRs line-of-sight pointer is efficient and accurate. Ideally, if a simple and intuitive transition between the Daydream handheld controller pointer to a line-of-site pointer could be designed, Daydream would have the best of both platforms.

The unified design of the Pixel, controller and headset really work well together. The controller fits into a storage compartment in the headset when not in use to prevent it from beint misplaced or forgotten between uses.

The Daydream experience within the limits of 3DoF feels like the Oculus Rift that costs much more and is constrained by its tether to an expensive PC. This needs to be qualified with the clarification that there are just five Daydream VR apps and five Google VR adapted services, which prevents an app-to-app comparison with the Oculus Riftso the frame rates and latency could not be compared.

Both the Daydream and Rift can be made to leave artifacts in the users view with really fast and hard head movements. It would be interesting to measure the tolerance of both head tracking systems with the same app running on both. If Daydream supported two controllers, it could be a very competitive alternative to Oculus Rift desktop VR. Maybe a mod for the second controller could appear either from Google or the community.

Wiley Corning at the MIT Media Lab, who contributed his wealth of VR cross-platform experience, found that with the home button, the controller could be reoriented to any comfortable position. So, the user does not have to hold the controller with arm extended for an uncomfortably long time. The controller can be held in any comfortable physical orientation during extended use, and the pointer can be aligned to point forward, though the controllers physical orientation is not.

Battery life during testing lasted about four hours, and the Pixel XL charged quickly with Qualcomms Quick Charge 3.0. After running the Pixel non-stop at the MIT Media Lab while a number of people stressed the Pixel with persistent and intensive use, an overheating warning came on screen. This is a corner case that few users will likely experience.

Unity Daydream development accelerates app development

A lot of apps will follow because Unity and Google created a very useful development environment. Drop in a prefab viewer and controller and import the Daydream SDK, and the VR developer can build with an emulated controller running on an Android phone, emulate the view through the headset lenses and move the camera perspective around the scene.

The future of VR and AR

The Pixel camera piques ones curiosity. What could be done with it if it were exposed? Could Daydream create an augmented reality (AR)? Surely a developer will drill a hole in the headset and try.

Less a matter of curiosity and more a matter of future sensor development is the next generation of mobile VR augmented with a 3D camera and sensorslike the Tango camera that gives machine vision a human-like understanding of 3D space.

This also could add inside-out tracking, enhancing the experience with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) that would track the users movement around the room. Inside-out tracking is an open problem for mobile VR that will make it competitive with the top-tier HTC Vive. Today, 6DoF is implemented on the Vive with two ceiling or tower-mounted base stations emitting IR laser pulses that are read by the headset to track head movement and physical movement. Inside-out tracking would not need base stations, but it is a much harder problem to solve than head tracking with gyroscope and accelerometer fusion adding sensors and more computational overhead.

Daydream has given a boost to mobile VR. The Pixel XL is a top-tier priced phone. The price of the phones will drop quickly over the next couple of years. In a year, prices on Daydream-capable phones will drop into the midrange, and in two years it will be hard to find a phone that doesnt have this capabilityexcept the lowest budget-priced phones. Hundreds of millions of Daydream phones will make this an important platform and will attract developers who will fill the Google Play Store with many apps and experiences.
Brad Pitt and 2015 Entertainment Innovator Angelina Jolie Pitt attend the WSJ. Magazine 2015 Innovator Awards at the Museum of Modern Art on November 4, 2015 in New York City. (Photo : Getty Images/Dimitrios Kambouris)

Brad Pitt, 52, is a relieved man now as the LA Children and Family Services have cleared the "Allied" star of child abuse allegations this week. It is expected that this victory will give Pitt a great advantage in the custody battle with his estranged wife Angelina Jolie, 41.



Soon after the "Maleficent" actress filed for divorce from Pitt in September 2016, Jolie accused her husband of abusing one of their kids - Maddox, 15, - during a flight on the couple's private jet on Sept. 14. Pitt was thoroughly investigated for the alleged incident, but the LA Children and Family Services did not find him guilty, TMZ reported.



Advertisement

According to the report, social workers had extensive discussions with Pitt, Jolie, all the six children of the couple and even witnesses on the private jet. While everyone reportedly cooperated with the investigators, the officials failed to find any abuse that reportedly emanated from an argument between Pitt and Maddox. As a result, officials have decided not to initiate any further action related to this issue.



A rep for Jolie said that right from the beginning, the actress felt the need for necessary action for her family's health. After an eight-week involvement in the investigation, she feels relieved now. However, Pitt's rep refused to comment on the issue, People magazine reported.



Now the couple's case is likely to be referred to the family court once again, the publication quoted Steve Mindel, a Los Angeles-based family lawyer not related to the case, as saying. According to Mindel, both parties will need to decide whether they want to follow the issue in the public court system or whether they want an alternative resolution to the dispute resolution. If they go for the second alternative, they may opt for arbitration, mediation, a private judge program," he said.



Elaborating on the options before Pitt and Jolie, the lawyer said that their next move would largely depend on the level of privacy Hollywood's now-separated power couple is looking for. If they want to pursue the matter in the public court, there will be no privacy. On the other hand, mediation is very confidential and will allow the couple to reach a mutual agreement away from the preying eyes of the media.



Watch the real reasons why Brangelina split:






Park Ha Sun and Ha Seok Jin in the 12th episode of tvN drama, "Drinking Solo." (Photo : YouTube/Romantic Drama)

Producer Lee, who worked as the assistant PD (producer director) of tvN drama "Drinking Solo," has committed suicide in his hotel room. The incident took place two weeks ago, but it was not until Nov. 10, Thursday, that the news of his death was revealed.



A source from CJ E&M told Soompi that on Oct. 26 at approximately 4 a.m., Lee was found dead inside a hotel room located in Seoul's Gangnam district. The police are investigating the death as a suicide as no foul play is suspected.



Advertisement

Lee started working at CJ E&M in January and his unexpected death even before completing one year at the Korean media giant has left investigators stumped. His death has raised several questions about whether he took the drastic step due to work pressure.



Lee's friends from Seoul University, where he graduated, stated that the producer was depressed and miserable because of the unfair way he was being treated at CJ E&M as a result of his background. His family members have also demanded an investigation to determine the real reason behind his suicide.



The family also did not allow any one from CJ E&M from attending the funeral service at the Seoul University Hospital, but around 2,000 university students came to pay their last respects to Lee. The producer reportedly left a suicide note addressed to his family members, but only a portion of it has been revealed by his kin.



Lee's family also held a meeting with representatives from CJ E&M and tvN, demanding that the producer's honor and reputation be restored. The family has also formed an investigation committee, which comprises of two congressmen, lawyers and the student union among others, and has asked CJ E&M to co-operate with the investigation.



"Even if we don't win, we will fight against CJ...We thank all the people who are standing by us for [Lee's] restoration of reputation and honor," the family said in a statement to AllKPop. It is not entirely clear as to what exactly happened between the producer and CJ E&M / tvN, but the family is ready to take matters to court should the need arise.



Check out the trailer of Drinking Solo below:






By PTI

NEW DELHI: Taking estranged former chairman Cyrus P Mistry head on, Tata Sons today sought his removal as well as that of the group's friend-turned-foe Nusli N Wadia from the board of Tata Motors.



Tata Sons, which holds 26.51 per cent stake in Tata Motors, asked the manufacturer of Land Rover to convene an extra-ordinary general meeting of the company to consider its resolution seeking removal of Mistry and Wadia.



Mistry continues to be chairman of several listed companies of Tata Group even after he was removed as chairman of the holding company, Tata Sons. These companies include Tata Motors and Tata Chemicals.



The move comes a day after independent directors on board of Tata Chemicals reposed faith in leadership of Mistry. Wadia is on the board of Tata Chemicals as well and is said to have switched sides to join the Mistry camp.



In a regulatory filing, Tata Motors said: "The company has received a requisition and a special notice dated November 10, 2016... from Tata Sons Ltd, the company's promoter and shareholder representing 26.51% of the company's voting capital, for convening an extraordinary general meeting of the company for considering and passing resolutions for removal of Cyrus P Mistry and Nusli N Wadia, Directors of the Company under Section 169 of the said Act."

NEW DELHI: Taking estranged former chairman Cyrus P Mistry head on, Tata Sons today sought his removal as well as that of the group's friend-turned-foe Nusli N Wadia from the board of Tata Motors. Tata Sons, which holds 26.51 per cent stake in Tata Motors, asked the manufacturer of Land Rover to convene an extra-ordinary general meeting of the company to consider its resolution seeking removal of Mistry and Wadia. Mistry continues to be chairman of several listed companies of Tata Group even after he was removed as chairman of the holding company, Tata Sons. These companies include Tata Motors and Tata Chemicals. The move comes a day after independent directors on board of Tata Chemicals reposed faith in leadership of Mistry. Wadia is on the board of Tata Chemicals as well and is said to have switched sides to join the Mistry camp. In a regulatory filing, Tata Motors said: "The company has received a requisition and a special notice dated November 10, 2016... from Tata Sons Ltd, the company's promoter and shareholder representing 26.51% of the company's voting capital, for convening an extraordinary general meeting of the company for considering and passing resolutions for removal of Cyrus P Mistry and Nusli N Wadia, Directors of the Company under Section 169 of the said Act."
By PTI

MUMBAI: To help its pre-paid consumers who are short of balance post the demonetisation drive, telecom operator Vodafone today said it is extending them a credit on talktime and data usage.



The pre-paid users, who form a big chunk of the subscriber base for all operators, will be given a credit of Rs 10 in talktime and data of 30 MB across network with a 24-hour validity, it said in a statement.



For post-paid customers in Mumbai, it has also extended the bill payment date by three days.



"To help our customers tide over the demonetisation period, Vodafone has extended post-paid bill payment deadline by 3 days in Mumbai. Additionally, pre-paid Vodafone customers can opt for small credits on both talktime and data, allowing them to stay confidently connected," Pushpinder Singh Gujral, Business Head for Mumbai, said.



The government's surprise move to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes has posed some temporary trouble for consumers in a cash-dominant economy like India.



For the second day, banks and ATMs witnessed longer queues of anxious customers waiting either to deposit the scrapped notes or exchange them to meet their expenses.



Vodafone said the special services can be availed either by calling a toll-free number or dialling a Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) short code on phones.



MUMBAI: To help its pre-paid consumers who are short of balance post the demonetisation drive, telecom operator Vodafone today said it is extending them a credit on talktime and data usage. The pre-paid users, who form a big chunk of the subscriber base for all operators, will be given a credit of Rs 10 in talktime and data of 30 MB across network with a 24-hour validity, it said in a statement. For post-paid customers in Mumbai, it has also extended the bill payment date by three days. "To help our customers tide over the demonetisation period, Vodafone has extended post-paid bill payment deadline by 3 days in Mumbai. Additionally, pre-paid Vodafone customers can opt for small credits on both talktime and data, allowing them to stay confidently connected," Pushpinder Singh Gujral, Business Head for Mumbai, said. The government's surprise move to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes has posed some temporary trouble for consumers in a cash-dominant economy like India. For the second day, banks and ATMs witnessed longer queues of anxious customers waiting either to deposit the scrapped notes or exchange them to meet their expenses. Vodafone said the special services can be availed either by calling a toll-free number or dialling a Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) short code on phones.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: IN a major embarrassment to the Siddaramaiah government, primary and secondary education and minority affairs minister Tanveer Sait was allegedly caught on TV camera watching obscene pictures on his cell phone during a Tipu Jayanti function in Raichur on Thursday.

TV channels aired the footage that shows Sait, who is also the district in-charge minister, allegedly watching the sleazy pictures and later switching off his phone and maintaining a calm demeanour.

The opposition was quick to attack CM Siddaramaiah and demand Saits resignation. However, the CM said that he would react only after speaking to Sait and ascertaining the facts and would not rely on media reports.

Sait, in his defence, said he had no knowledge about who sent him the message as he never saved numbers on his phone. He said he was updating himself on Tipu Jayanti celebrations across the state on Whatsapp, when he received the message. He also insinuated that this was part of a pre-planned conspiracy to embarrass him and the government.

Incidentally, Tipu Jayanti celebrations had passed off peacefully in the state this time, unlike last year when it claimed two lives in Kodagu district.

As BJP state president BS Yeddyurappa, Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Jagadish Shettar and JD(S) state president HD Kumaraswamy called for Saits sacking, KPCC Working President Dinesh Gundurao came to the ministers defence. Sait was just scrolling down his Whatsapp messages he had received on his mobile. He had neither zoomed nor downloaded the alleged sleazy pictures, he said. Terming the demand for Saits resignation as unfair, Rao added, The minister had just viewed the pictures for a few seconds. It was the TV cameramen who were zooming and blowing up the pictures.

The issue comes at a time when Siddaramaiah went ahead with Tipu Jayanti celebrations brushing aside BJP protests.

For the BJP, which had been pilloried in 2012 when three of its ministers were caught watching porn in the assembly, this episode has come at an opportune time. The party has threatened to mount a strong attack against the government at the Belagavi session of state legislature starting on November 21 and organise a state-wide agitation if Sait is not sacked.

BENGALURU: IN a major embarrassment to the Siddaramaiah government, primary and secondary education and minority affairs minister Tanveer Sait was allegedly caught on TV camera watching obscene pictures on his cell phone during a Tipu Jayanti function in Raichur on Thursday. TV channels aired the footage that shows Sait, who is also the district in-charge minister, allegedly watching the sleazy pictures and later switching off his phone and maintaining a calm demeanour. The opposition was quick to attack CM Siddaramaiah and demand Saits resignation. However, the CM said that he would react only after speaking to Sait and ascertaining the facts and would not rely on media reports. Sait, in his defence, said he had no knowledge about who sent him the message as he never saved numbers on his phone. He said he was updating himself on Tipu Jayanti celebrations across the state on Whatsapp, when he received the message. He also insinuated that this was part of a pre-planned conspiracy to embarrass him and the government. Incidentally, Tipu Jayanti celebrations had passed off peacefully in the state this time, unlike last year when it claimed two lives in Kodagu district. As BJP state president BS Yeddyurappa, Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Jagadish Shettar and JD(S) state president HD Kumaraswamy called for Saits sacking, KPCC Working President Dinesh Gundurao came to the ministers defence. Sait was just scrolling down his Whatsapp messages he had received on his mobile. He had neither zoomed nor downloaded the alleged sleazy pictures, he said. Terming the demand for Saits resignation as unfair, Rao added, The minister had just viewed the pictures for a few seconds. It was the TV cameramen who were zooming and blowing up the pictures. The issue comes at a time when Siddaramaiah went ahead with Tipu Jayanti celebrations brushing aside BJP protests. For the BJP, which had been pilloried in 2012 when three of its ministers were caught watching porn in the assembly, this episode has come at an opportune time. The party has threatened to mount a strong attack against the government at the Belagavi session of state legislature starting on November 21 and organise a state-wide agitation if Sait is not sacked.
By Express News Service

ATMs remain closed; agitated customers claim there was confusion and uncertainty over the limit for exchange; supply of new currencies to several post offices delayed; all banks to remain open for public transactions on November 12 and 13

CHENNAI: Confusion in banks and frustration and disappointment among people marked the second day after the Centre announced that it was scrapping Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currencies.

Anxious to exchange the demonetised denominations in their possession with fresh currencies, customers lined up in front of banks even from the morning, Thursday being the first day for getting new notes in lieu of the scrapped currencies. To prevent any untoward incident, policemen were posted outside banks.

People suffered more as ATMs also remained closed. Boards indicating that the machines were out of order were kept outside the kiosks.

A crowd waiting patiently in front a bank in the city on Thursday for exchanging the demonetised currencies | P Jawahar

Compounding the confusion was the daily limit for exchanging Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currencies. Agitated customers said there was utter confusion and uncertainty over the limit for exchanging the demonetised currencies. They said that while some banks imposed a ceiling of Rs 4000, ICICI bank allowed exchange up to Rs 10000. Some wondered whether Rs 4000 was sufficient for a family even with one child.

Banks should ensure that the procedure for exchange and other details should be displayed outside their branches, said A Rajasekhar, 35, who came to a bank branch at Anna Nagar well before 9am.

Apart from banks, there were huge crowds also in front of post offices, which accepted the old notes. However, there was delay in supplying new currencies to several post offices which made people frustrated.

Many post offices started exchanging the notes almost an hour late, instead of the scheduled 10am.

The problem was rectified by officials, who also said they would extend the working hours for the convenience of the public.

Postal department officials told Express that Anna Road Head Post Office exchanged old notes worth nearly Rs 50-60 lakh. They said the exchange facility will be made available in rural post offices in the State from Friday.

Meanwhile, to facilitate the exchange process, all banks will remain open for public transactions on November 12 and 13.

Banks remained shut on Wednesday, while ATMs barring a few, did not function. Reserve Bank of India has said ATMs may resume functioning from Friday upon their recalibration to dispense currencies of only Rs 50 and Rs 100 denominations.

ATMs remain closed; agitated customers claim there was confusion and uncertainty over the limit for exchange; supply of new currencies to several post offices delayed; all banks to remain open for public transactions on November 12 and 13 CHENNAI: Confusion in banks and frustration and disappointment among people marked the second day after the Centre announced that it was scrapping Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currencies. Anxious to exchange the demonetised denominations in their possession with fresh currencies, customers lined up in front of banks even from the morning, Thursday being the first day for getting new notes in lieu of the scrapped currencies. To prevent any untoward incident, policemen were posted outside banks. People suffered more as ATMs also remained closed. Boards indicating that the machines were out of order were kept outside the kiosks. A crowd waiting patiently in front a bank in the city on Thursday for exchanging the demonetised currencies | P JawaharCompounding the confusion was the daily limit for exchanging Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currencies. Agitated customers said there was utter confusion and uncertainty over the limit for exchanging the demonetised currencies. They said that while some banks imposed a ceiling of Rs 4000, ICICI bank allowed exchange up to Rs 10000. Some wondered whether Rs 4000 was sufficient for a family even with one child. Banks should ensure that the procedure for exchange and other details should be displayed outside their branches, said A Rajasekhar, 35, who came to a bank branch at Anna Nagar well before 9am. Apart from banks, there were huge crowds also in front of post offices, which accepted the old notes. However, there was delay in supplying new currencies to several post offices which made people frustrated. Many post offices started exchanging the notes almost an hour late, instead of the scheduled 10am. The problem was rectified by officials, who also said they would extend the working hours for the convenience of the public. Postal department officials told Express that Anna Road Head Post Office exchanged old notes worth nearly Rs 50-60 lakh. They said the exchange facility will be made available in rural post offices in the State from Friday. Meanwhile, to facilitate the exchange process, all banks will remain open for public transactions on November 12 and 13. Banks remained shut on Wednesday, while ATMs barring a few, did not function. Reserve Bank of India has said ATMs may resume functioning from Friday upon their recalibration to dispense currencies of only Rs 50 and Rs 100 denominations.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: A minor fire broke out in the basement of Krishi Bhawan around midnight tonight but was contained and no major damage has been reported.

"A fire call was received around 12 AM about a fire in Krishi Bhawan's basement but it was doused by 12.20 AM," a fire department official said.

"The blaze started when some junk material kept in the basement caught fire," an officer from Delhi Fire Services said, adding that as a precautionary measure, six firetenders were rushed to the spot.

The cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained.

NEW DELHI: A minor fire broke out in the basement of Krishi Bhawan around midnight tonight but was contained and no major damage has been reported. "A fire call was received around 12 AM about a fire in Krishi Bhawan's basement but it was doused by 12.20 AM," a fire department official said. "The blaze started when some junk material kept in the basement caught fire," an officer from Delhi Fire Services said, adding that as a precautionary measure, six firetenders were rushed to the spot. The cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained.
By IANS

NEW DELHI: Amid rumours of a salt shortage in different parts of Delhi, National Capital Region (NCR) and Uttar Pradesh, both central and Delhi governments on Friday clarified there is no such shortage.

"There is no shortage of salt. State governments have all powers to ensure its availability at reasonable prices," a central government spokesperson said.

The clarification came after rumours were rife that the price of salt has gone up to Rs 250 per kg in Delhi/NCR and Rs 400 per kg in Uttar Pradesh.

This led to a panic-like situation in Noida, Laxmi Nagar, Chandni Chowk and some other places in the national capital.

"The department monitors the prices of 22 essential commodities on daily basis. As per the prices reported by centres from across the country, there has been no increase in price of salt whatsoever," Department of Food and Consumer Affairs said in a statement.

There has been no report about any disruption in production of salt, its supply and distribution, it added.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also took to Twitter to dispel the rumours.

"Some people are spreading rumours that there is a shortage of sugar and salt. This is completely false. Anyone hoarding salt won't be spared," he tweeted.

Manish Sisodia, the Delhi Deputy Chief Minister, also urged people of Delhi not to believe on the rumours.

"There is no shortage of salt in Delhi. Teams of SDMs and Food Supply Officers are patrolling. Salt is available everywhere. No cause for panic," Sisodia tweeted.

On his part, Delhi Food and Supplies Minister Imran Hussain also held an urgent meeting at his residence following the rumours.

Earlier in the day, rumours of no salt stocks in Uttar Pradesh led to panic buying in many parts of the state.

Lucknow Senior Superintendent of Police Manzil Saini trashed reports on paucity of salt and dubbed it as "mischief" by some rumour mongers.

While it was yet to be determined how the rumour started, people flocked to grocery shops and retail outlets in large numbers to buy salt in large quantities. As the panic spread, several quintals of salt vanished from shop shelves.

In some areas salt was said to be selling, if available, anywhere between Rs 100-200 per kg.

Meanwhile, police was directed to increase patrolling as the rumour could result in a law and order situation, an official told IANS.

Lucknow Inspector General of Police A. Satish Ganesh asked all SSPs in the zone to start special patrolling in busy thoroughfares and markets to prevent untoward incidents.

A special team has been put on the trail of a message that went viral within minutes of appearing on social media sites, triggering panic.

NEW DELHI: Amid rumours of a salt shortage in different parts of Delhi, National Capital Region (NCR) and Uttar Pradesh, both central and Delhi governments on Friday clarified there is no such shortage. "There is no shortage of salt. State governments have all powers to ensure its availability at reasonable prices," a central government spokesperson said. The clarification came after rumours were rife that the price of salt has gone up to Rs 250 per kg in Delhi/NCR and Rs 400 per kg in Uttar Pradesh. This led to a panic-like situation in Noida, Laxmi Nagar, Chandni Chowk and some other places in the national capital. "The department monitors the prices of 22 essential commodities on daily basis. As per the prices reported by centres from across the country, there has been no increase in price of salt whatsoever," Department of Food and Consumer Affairs said in a statement. There has been no report about any disruption in production of salt, its supply and distribution, it added. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also took to Twitter to dispel the rumours. "Some people are spreading rumours that there is a shortage of sugar and salt. This is completely false. Anyone hoarding salt won't be spared," he tweeted. Manish Sisodia, the Delhi Deputy Chief Minister, also urged people of Delhi not to believe on the rumours. "There is no shortage of salt in Delhi. Teams of SDMs and Food Supply Officers are patrolling. Salt is available everywhere. No cause for panic," Sisodia tweeted. On his part, Delhi Food and Supplies Minister Imran Hussain also held an urgent meeting at his residence following the rumours. Earlier in the day, rumours of no salt stocks in Uttar Pradesh led to panic buying in many parts of the state. Lucknow Senior Superintendent of Police Manzil Saini trashed reports on paucity of salt and dubbed it as "mischief" by some rumour mongers. While it was yet to be determined how the rumour started, people flocked to grocery shops and retail outlets in large numbers to buy salt in large quantities. As the panic spread, several quintals of salt vanished from shop shelves. In some areas salt was said to be selling, if available, anywhere between Rs 100-200 per kg. Meanwhile, police was directed to increase patrolling as the rumour could result in a law and order situation, an official told IANS. Lucknow Inspector General of Police A. Satish Ganesh asked all SSPs in the zone to start special patrolling in busy thoroughfares and markets to prevent untoward incidents. A special team has been put on the trail of a message that went viral within minutes of appearing on social media sites, triggering panic.
Melania Trump: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's wife has several first-ever landmarks as the next first lady

Melania Trump waves to the crowd after delivering a speech on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo : Getty Images/Alex Wong)

As Republican candidate Donald Trump triumphed in this week's United States presidential elections, the spotlight starts to focus on his wife, Melania Trump. The media wonder what is the future first lady hopes to bring to the White House.



When thinking of Melania, first-lady historians think of Jackie Kennedy, instead of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama or Eleanor Roosevelt. Melania is seen as having the inclination to the traditional role, such as in being a traditional social hostess in the White House.



Advertisement

United States first ladies have become not just good wives and mothers but are expected to be seen, like a celebrity, supporting their husbands and project what is good for the nation. Melania is expected to be in the center and front, USA Today reported. As the new First Lady of the United States, she has several first-ever landmarks.



Melania is the first FLOTUS who is foreign-born in over 191 years. She was born in Slovenia, Eastern Europe on April 26, 1970. She follows President John Quincy Adams' wife Louisa who was born in England in 1775.



The 46-year-old beauty is the first third wife for a FLOTUS as her president-elect husband married and divorced twice before marrying her. She is the first former fashion model who lived as Melania Knauss before meeting her husband at a fashion party. They tied the knot in 2005 and have one son, 10-year-old Barron William Trump.



The former model is the first to have posed nude with her images shown in The New York Post in 1995 and British GQ in 2000. She is the first who does not have English as a first language. She speaks native Slovenian as well as English, German, Serbian and French. Her being multi-lingual could come handy, as it did for President Kennedy, whose first lady spoke Spanish and French.



The new first lady was raised by her father Viktor Knavs, a Communist party member who managed car dealerships for the state-owned car maker. Her mother, Amalija Ulnik was a pattern maker at a textile factory.



Melania began modelling at 16 when photographer Stane Jerko saw her in Ljubljana as he left a fashion show. He did a trial photoshoot of her which led way to her promising modelling career.



At 18, Melania got a contract with Italian model agency ID in Milan and she also worked in Paris, gracing the world's catwalks and magazines. She currently runs a jewelry business, selling on shopping channel QVC, according to Mirror.



Listen to Melania's speech during the campaign in Pennsylvania below:







Save


By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Banjara Hills police on Thursday arrested the Audi car thief in Bangalore, who was wanted in 23 cases in seven states. The accused spent all the money in horse racing and IPL betting, said police.

Notorious for his modus operandi in cheating people, Samanasa Venkata Ramana (29)had committed 83 offences so far. Despite his arrest twice at Parvathipuram in 2009 and Guntur in 2015, he escaped from police custody.

He changed 47 mobiles and sim cards in six years, to avoid police vigil. Currently, he is wanted by the police of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and six non-bailable warrants were pending against him, west zone DCP A Venkateshwar Rao said at a press conference here on Thursday.

The DCP said the interrogation revealed that Ramana had established a fake company PHAV Software Technologies at SR Nagar in 2007 and cheated 230 job aspirants to a tune of Rs 2.5 crore.

The DCP said that sometimes, Ramana posed as son or relative of MLAs and MPs or as a doctor approached the dealers of automobiles and fled away with the cars on the pretext of taking a test drive. He used to place advertisements in newspapers for sale of the cars and escaped after collecting huge amounts as advance from the unsuspecting customers.

HYDERABAD: Banjara Hills police on Thursday arrested the Audi car thief in Bangalore, who was wanted in 23 cases in seven states. The accused spent all the money in horse racing and IPL betting, said police. Notorious for his modus operandi in cheating people, Samanasa Venkata Ramana (29)had committed 83 offences so far. Despite his arrest twice at Parvathipuram in 2009 and Guntur in 2015, he escaped from police custody. He changed 47 mobiles and sim cards in six years, to avoid police vigil. Currently, he is wanted by the police of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and six non-bailable warrants were pending against him, west zone DCP A Venkateshwar Rao said at a press conference here on Thursday. The DCP said the interrogation revealed that Ramana had established a fake company PHAV Software Technologies at SR Nagar in 2007 and cheated 230 job aspirants to a tune of Rs 2.5 crore. The DCP said that sometimes, Ramana posed as son or relative of MLAs and MPs or as a doctor approached the dealers of automobiles and fled away with the cars on the pretext of taking a test drive. He used to place advertisements in newspapers for sale of the cars and escaped after collecting huge amounts as advance from the unsuspecting customers.
Toby Antony By

Express News Service

KOCHI: Abdul Qadir might be having dreams every night about his home, relatives and friends. Over the last year or so, this 60-year-old from Balochistan, who is languishing behind the bars of Ernakulam District Prison at Kakkanad, has been waiting for someone to tell him: Baba, now you can go home.

In the international arena, Pakistan has been claiming Balochistan as its integral part, but the neighbouring nation till date has not initiated any steps to free Qadir from the prison.

Qadir was among the 12 persons (11 Iranians and 1 Pakistani) who were arrested by the Indian Coast Guard from an Iranian vessel which trespassed into Indian waters last year. In March this year, he and 10 others were acquitted and charges against them were dropped. Within a week, Iranians left for their country after the Embassy of Iran issued Emergency Travel Documents.

He is neither a convicted prisoner nor a pre-trial prisoner. He is forced to live in the jail due to delay from authorities in his home country in arranging documents to facilitate his travel. With the assistance of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Pakistan Embassy was informed about his situation but till now there is no communication, said an official of the District Jail.

The jail officials believe that Indias verbal support to Balochistans effort to attain freedom can be a reason behind the delayed action in Qadirs case. His Pakistani citizenship was confirmed from an identity card issued by Gwadar Port, Pakistan.

At present, Qadir is the sole Pakistani living in a Kerala jail. He was taken to Tihar jail after the authorities informed the MHA about him in September. As part of the MHAs sitting over the matters of foreign prisoners, Qadir was taken to Tihar jail. However, since there was no response from the Pakistan Embassy, he was brought back to Ernakulam District Jail. He is innocent and cooperates with jail officials. He takes parts in jail activities. He speaks Balochi language and knows a bit of Hindi. Inmates here call him Baba, officials said. Express had approached authorities to meet Qadir, but they said since the matter is under consideration of MHA and MEA meeting him was impossible.

While acquitting Qadir, the NIA court had ordered that he would remain in the custody of Foreigner Regional Registration Officer (FRRO). But the FRRO Nedumbassery said documents related to Qadir have been sent to the department concerned.

KOCHI: Abdul Qadir might be having dreams every night about his home, relatives and friends. Over the last year or so, this 60-year-old from Balochistan, who is languishing behind the bars of Ernakulam District Prison at Kakkanad, has been waiting for someone to tell him: Baba, now you can go home. In the international arena, Pakistan has been claiming Balochistan as its integral part, but the neighbouring nation till date has not initiated any steps to free Qadir from the prison. Qadir was among the 12 persons (11 Iranians and 1 Pakistani) who were arrested by the Indian Coast Guard from an Iranian vessel which trespassed into Indian waters last year. In March this year, he and 10 others were acquitted and charges against them were dropped. Within a week, Iranians left for their country after the Embassy of Iran issued Emergency Travel Documents. He is neither a convicted prisoner nor a pre-trial prisoner. He is forced to live in the jail due to delay from authorities in his home country in arranging documents to facilitate his travel. With the assistance of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Pakistan Embassy was informed about his situation but till now there is no communication, said an official of the District Jail. The jail officials believe that Indias verbal support to Balochistans effort to attain freedom can be a reason behind the delayed action in Qadirs case. His Pakistani citizenship was confirmed from an identity card issued by Gwadar Port, Pakistan. At present, Qadir is the sole Pakistani living in a Kerala jail. He was taken to Tihar jail after the authorities informed the MHA about him in September. As part of the MHAs sitting over the matters of foreign prisoners, Qadir was taken to Tihar jail. However, since there was no response from the Pakistan Embassy, he was brought back to Ernakulam District Jail. He is innocent and cooperates with jail officials. He takes parts in jail activities. He speaks Balochi language and knows a bit of Hindi. Inmates here call him Baba, officials said. Express had approached authorities to meet Qadir, but they said since the matter is under consideration of MHA and MEA meeting him was impossible. While acquitting Qadir, the NIA court had ordered that he would remain in the custody of Foreigner Regional Registration Officer (FRRO). But the FRRO Nedumbassery said documents related to Qadir have been sent to the department concerned.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: Lengthy queues and chaos were the feature across the State on the second day after the Government scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. Though there were no untoward incidents, the demonetisation process has hit the common people hard.

They queued up in front of banks from early morning. I initially went to the branch of a nationalised bank at the Lissie Jn. But the token number given to me was 300 and remember, it was only 10 am.

The bank officials told us to wait till the arrangements are made. I soon rushed to the Reserve Bank of India nearby where I waited for another two and half hours to exchange my two Rs 1000 notes, said P K Thomas.

Small traders, including vegetable sellers and fish vendors, were hit as they transact in cash. Small traders and hotels were hit hard by the demonetisation. We urge the RBI and the Central Government to take immediate steps to tide over the present crisis, said Kerala Merchants Chamber of Commerce general secretary K M Mohamed Sageer.

Mumbai: Banks in Mumbai witnessed serpentine queues as thousands flocked to deposit scrapped notes and withdraw lower denomination and new banknotes. Not everyone returned with their pockets full though since a few were turned down due to unavailability of cash. Mumbaikars started queueing up as early as 6 AM, nearly 3-4 hours before the banks open.

New Delhi: In the capital, long lines formed before banks reopened after being shut on Wednesday to prepare for the change. Some people frustrated by the long wait got into argument with bank officials and a few others barged into queues that wound through the banks and on to the street outside.

Chennai: Anxious customers thronged the branches much before the opening time --some at the crack of dawn -- and had to wait for several hours to complete their transactions with senior citizens also not being spared of hardships.

Kolkata: Several people complained of having to wait long before they could replace old notes or withdraw from their bank accounts using pay-in slips or cheques.

KOCHI: Lengthy queues and chaos were the feature across the State on the second day after the Government scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. Though there were no untoward incidents, the demonetisation process has hit the common people hard. They queued up in front of banks from early morning. I initially went to the branch of a nationalised bank at the Lissie Jn. But the token number given to me was 300 and remember, it was only 10 am. The bank officials told us to wait till the arrangements are made. I soon rushed to the Reserve Bank of India nearby where I waited for another two and half hours to exchange my two Rs 1000 notes, said P K Thomas. Small traders, including vegetable sellers and fish vendors, were hit as they transact in cash. Small traders and hotels were hit hard by the demonetisation. We urge the RBI and the Central Government to take immediate steps to tide over the present crisis, said Kerala Merchants Chamber of Commerce general secretary K M Mohamed Sageer. Mumbai: Banks in Mumbai witnessed serpentine queues as thousands flocked to deposit scrapped notes and withdraw lower denomination and new banknotes. Not everyone returned with their pockets full though since a few were turned down due to unavailability of cash. Mumbaikars started queueing up as early as 6 AM, nearly 3-4 hours before the banks open. New Delhi: In the capital, long lines formed before banks reopened after being shut on Wednesday to prepare for the change. Some people frustrated by the long wait got into argument with bank officials and a few others barged into queues that wound through the banks and on to the street outside. Chennai: Anxious customers thronged the branches much before the opening time --some at the crack of dawn -- and had to wait for several hours to complete their transactions with senior citizens also not being spared of hardships. Kolkata: Several people complained of having to wait long before they could replace old notes or withdraw from their bank accounts using pay-in slips or cheques.
Anand Das By

Express News Service

PATNA: The prevailing public anxiety in Bihar following the ban on currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations caused critical delay in taking a three-year-old rape victim to a referral hospital as the ambulance driver refused to accept the banned notes from the girls family.

After the three-year-old girl was found raped and badly injured in Phulwaria in Begusarai district, local police promptly arrested the accused and took the girl to the Sadar Hospital nearby. Doctors there administered first aid to the girl and referred her to Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH) in Patna. But getting the ambulance to take the girl there proved hard for her family.

The driver of the government-run 1099 ambulance allegedly refused to accept currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 from the victims family, thus leading to a three-hour delay in her reaching PMCH. The driver wanted the cash for diesel in the ambulance and his wage. He agreed to take the girl to PMCH when some people gave him currency notes of Rs 100 denomination, but it was three hours after he was approached, said a source. Although the ambulance is run by the government, drivers are privately employed, he added.

The minor rape victims condition is stated to be stable at PMCH. Police sources said she was raped by a man in his late 20s living in her neighbourhood.

Despite assurances by the Centre and efforts by banks to exchange the banned currency notes with new ones, there was massive anxiety across Bihar. Queues as long as five km were seen outside many bank branches. Most post offices in Bihar and Jharkhand, where large crowds had gathered since 10 AM to get their currency notes exchanged, had not received the new currency notes as late as 3 PM.

A clash between the staff of a fuel station and buyers took place in Ara in Bihar when the staff refused to accept the banned notes. Most shops in rural areas in Bihar and Jharkhand remained shut on Wednesday. In the towns, business remained thin at major shopping complexes.



PATNA: The prevailing public anxiety in Bihar following the ban on currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations caused critical delay in taking a three-year-old rape victim to a referral hospital as the ambulance driver refused to accept the banned notes from the girls family. After the three-year-old girl was found raped and badly injured in Phulwaria in Begusarai district, local police promptly arrested the accused and took the girl to the Sadar Hospital nearby. Doctors there administered first aid to the girl and referred her to Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH) in Patna. But getting the ambulance to take the girl there proved hard for her family. The driver of the government-run 1099 ambulance allegedly refused to accept currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 from the victims family, thus leading to a three-hour delay in her reaching PMCH. The driver wanted the cash for diesel in the ambulance and his wage. He agreed to take the girl to PMCH when some people gave him currency notes of Rs 100 denomination, but it was three hours after he was approached, said a source. Although the ambulance is run by the government, drivers are privately employed, he added. The minor rape victims condition is stated to be stable at PMCH. Police sources said she was raped by a man in his late 20s living in her neighbourhood. Despite assurances by the Centre and efforts by banks to exchange the banned currency notes with new ones, there was massive anxiety across Bihar. Queues as long as five km were seen outside many bank branches. Most post offices in Bihar and Jharkhand, where large crowds had gathered since 10 AM to get their currency notes exchanged, had not received the new currency notes as late as 3 PM. A clash between the staff of a fuel station and buyers took place in Ara in Bihar when the staff refused to accept the banned notes. Most shops in rural areas in Bihar and Jharkhand remained shut on Wednesday. In the towns, business remained thin at major shopping complexes.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Just as Modi arrived in Japan with the agenda of inking a civilian nuclear deal with the country, his defence marksman Manohar Parrikar poured out his feelings on Indias no first use policy on nuclear warfare. Why cannot India say we are a responsible nuclear power and that we will not use it irresponsibly instead of affirming to a no first-use policy, he asked. Parrikar was, however, quick to add that it was his personal sentiment and that it did not reflect the views of the government on the matter.

No first use (NFU) is a policy by India to not use nuclear weapons unless it is first attacked using similar weapons. India and China are the only major countries in the world to have such a policy. Indias NFU policy was formulated in 2003 under the Vajpayee government, much after the nuclear weapons test of 1998. In fact, Japan had imposed sanctions on India after the 1998 tests.

The minister and defence ministry spokesperson Nitin Wakankar later clarified that the comments were his personal opinion, and did not reflect government policy. However, this failed to satisfy his critics. If the Defence Minister wants to speak in his personal capacity, he should resign from the government, tweeted CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury. The Indo-Japan nuclear deal that is to be signed shortly includes a clause for exit by Japan if India conducts a nuclear test.

NEW DELHI: Just as Modi arrived in Japan with the agenda of inking a civilian nuclear deal with the country, his defence marksman Manohar Parrikar poured out his feelings on Indias no first use policy on nuclear warfare. Why cannot India say we are a responsible nuclear power and that we will not use it irresponsibly instead of affirming to a no first-use policy, he asked. Parrikar was, however, quick to add that it was his personal sentiment and that it did not reflect the views of the government on the matter. No first use (NFU) is a policy by India to not use nuclear weapons unless it is first attacked using similar weapons. India and China are the only major countries in the world to have such a policy. Indias NFU policy was formulated in 2003 under the Vajpayee government, much after the nuclear weapons test of 1998. In fact, Japan had imposed sanctions on India after the 1998 tests. The minister and defence ministry spokesperson Nitin Wakankar later clarified that the comments were his personal opinion, and did not reflect government policy. However, this failed to satisfy his critics. If the Defence Minister wants to speak in his personal capacity, he should resign from the government, tweeted CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury. The Indo-Japan nuclear deal that is to be signed shortly includes a clause for exit by Japan if India conducts a nuclear test.
Harpreet Bajwa By

Express News Service

CHANDIGARH: All 42 Congress MLAs in Punjab submitted their resignations to the secretary of the state's Assembly today even as chief minister Parkash Singh Badal wrote to the president seeking time for a meeting to present Punjab's case on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link [SYL] canal dispute.

These political moves followed the Supreme Court verdict yesterday outlawing a state law that terminated all previous agreements on the project which involves sharing of river waters between Punjab and several of its neighbouring statesx.

Congress MLAs led by PCC president Amarinder Singh and other party bigwigs, handed over their resignations to the secretary of the Vidhan Sabha in the absence of the speaker.

An independent unattached MLA, Rajnish Babbi, was also present to tender his resignation.

Amrinder Singh said Congress MPs have been advised to stay their resignations in order to debate the SYL issue in Parliament.

Upping the ante on the SYL issue, the Congress today announced a campaign to skewer the Akal Dal-BJP government in the light of the Supreme Court verdict. Congress workers will burn effigies of chief minister Badal in all the 117 Assembly segments of the state on Saturday and on Sunday, there will be a rally at Abohar  which lies at the tail-end of the SYL canal  to highlight the Akalis' alleged mishandling of the case in court.

The task of organizing the rally has been given to PPCC vice-president Sunil Jakhar.

The party has also decided to seek a meeting with the President.

Amarinder Singh is keen to use the leverage provided by the Supreme Court to bid for a two-thirds majority in the elections next year. The party is plugging a hard line on the SYL isue, insisting that Haryana has no right to the Satluj river water. It also wants another tribunal to be set up to assess the amount of water available to Punjab.

Shiromani Akali Dal secretary-general Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa wondered that if the Punjab Congress was so aggrieved by the apex court's advisory to the President, why hadn't its Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs quit along with Assembly members?

Meanwhile, former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda of the Congress said that if the SAD-BJP government in Punjab continues to defy the orders of the apex court, the Union Government should dismiss the state government.

CHANDIGARH: All 42 Congress MLAs in Punjab submitted their resignations to the secretary of the state's Assembly today even as chief minister Parkash Singh Badal wrote to the president seeking time for a meeting to present Punjab's case on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link [SYL] canal dispute. These political moves followed the Supreme Court verdict yesterday outlawing a state law that terminated all previous agreements on the project which involves sharing of river waters between Punjab and several of its neighbouring statesx. Congress MLAs led by PCC president Amarinder Singh and other party bigwigs, handed over their resignations to the secretary of the Vidhan Sabha in the absence of the speaker. An independent unattached MLA, Rajnish Babbi, was also present to tender his resignation. Amrinder Singh said Congress MPs have been advised to stay their resignations in order to debate the SYL issue in Parliament. Upping the ante on the SYL issue, the Congress today announced a campaign to skewer the Akal Dal-BJP government in the light of the Supreme Court verdict. Congress workers will burn effigies of chief minister Badal in all the 117 Assembly segments of the state on Saturday and on Sunday, there will be a rally at Abohar  which lies at the tail-end of the SYL canal  to highlight the Akalis' alleged mishandling of the case in court. The task of organizing the rally has been given to PPCC vice-president Sunil Jakhar. The party has also decided to seek a meeting with the President. Amarinder Singh is keen to use the leverage provided by the Supreme Court to bid for a two-thirds majority in the elections next year. The party is plugging a hard line on the SYL isue, insisting that Haryana has no right to the Satluj river water. It also wants another tribunal to be set up to assess the amount of water available to Punjab. Shiromani Akali Dal secretary-general Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa wondered that if the Punjab Congress was so aggrieved by the apex court's advisory to the President, why hadn't its Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs quit along with Assembly members? Meanwhile, former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda of the Congress said that if the SAD-BJP government in Punjab continues to defy the orders of the apex court, the Union Government should dismiss the state government.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Army Chief General Dalbir Suhag, who is a Gorkha officer, is visiting Nepal as his farewell visits before hanging his boots at the end of next month. Suhag is also holding honorary rank of  General  of the Nepalese Army.

Gorkha has over 50,000 ex-servicemen of Indian Army, who are now settled in parts of hilly nation. During his visit to General Suhag will be meeting veterans of Gorkha regiments which has five regiments of indian army.

Army Chief General Dalbir will be Nepal from 11 to 13, where he scheduled to meet Nepalese President and his counterpart of Nepalese army to discuss issues to further strength relations between the two armies.

 The visit assumes special significance in the light of Indias special relationship with Nepal, underpinning Indias priorities in maintaining friendly relations in the region, said a army statement.

Gen Suhag will also meet Nepalese Prime Minister. Besides he will also be witnessing tenth edition of Ex-SURYA KIRAN-X, a joint training exercise between Indian and Nepalese Armies being conducted at Saaljhandi, Nepal.

The Surya Kiran series of Exercises are being conducted annually, alternatively in Nepal and India. Notably in the series of military training exercises undertaken by India with various countries, Surya Kiran series with Nepal is the largest in terms of troops participation.

The aim of this exercise is to conduct battalion level joint training with emphasis on Counter Terrorism in mountainous terrain. Aspects of Disaster Management have also been included in the exercise.

NEW DELHI: Army Chief General Dalbir Suhag, who is a Gorkha officer, is visiting Nepal as his farewell visits before hanging his boots at the end of next month. Suhag is also holding honorary rank of  General  of the Nepalese Army. Gorkha has over 50,000 ex-servicemen of Indian Army, who are now settled in parts of hilly nation. During his visit to General Suhag will be meeting veterans of Gorkha regiments which has five regiments of indian army. Army Chief General Dalbir will be Nepal from 11 to 13, where he scheduled to meet Nepalese President and his counterpart of Nepalese army to discuss issues to further strength relations between the two armies.  The visit assumes special significance in the light of Indias special relationship with Nepal, underpinning Indias priorities in maintaining friendly relations in the region, said a army statement. Gen Suhag will also meet Nepalese Prime Minister. Besides he will also be witnessing tenth edition of Ex-SURYA KIRAN-X, a joint training exercise between Indian and Nepalese Armies being conducted at Saaljhandi, Nepal. The Surya Kiran series of Exercises are being conducted annually, alternatively in Nepal and India. Notably in the series of military training exercises undertaken by India with various countries, Surya Kiran series with Nepal is the largest in terms of troops participation. The aim of this exercise is to conduct battalion level joint training with emphasis on Counter Terrorism in mountainous terrain. Aspects of Disaster Management have also been included in the exercise.
By Express News Service

KOLKATA: The case has come to light here of an automobile engineer held as a slave and subjected to sexual and physical abuse by his employer in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the past seven months.

Jayanta Biswas, the 23-year-old automobile engineer from Mamudpur in Naihati in North 24 Parganas district, landed in Riyadh on May 15 this year after paying three Delhi-based agents Rs 5.35 lakh, which he raised by selling off his ancestral agricultural land. The agents told him he would be paid a salary of Rs 30,000 per month.

However, he soon found that the promise was a lie. He and other youngsters from Bangladesh and India were confined in a room in the house of their Saudi kafeel (employeer), Naeef Bookme.

He (Jayanta) used to call me and cry that he and other boys were being beaten up regularly by the employer and no food was given. He revealed that he was being sexually abused regularly, Jayantas elder sister Ria Biswas told New Indian Express.

Jayanta tried to escape captivity in August and went to the Indian Embassy in Riyadh but was denied any help there. When the employer Naeef found Jayanta missing, he accused him of theft of 10,000 riyals and booked a case with the Saudi police. Jayanta was arrested on August 9 and jailed till October end.

After his release, Jayanta again went to the Indian Embassy. This time, he was heard, but he was asked to bring a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the employer to return to India.

When he returned to his employers house, he was tortured again. His employer is continuously threatening him with death and now is demanding 3,500 riyals to let him go. We are scared because of Saudi laws have a reputation of cutting off hands, limbs or ears, Ria said.

Jayantas brother Uttam Biswas has tweeted the case to the External Affairs Ministry and to external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj. Other relatives have written letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and to the website madad.com, which aids Indians stuck abroad.

If we do not get any response from the government within two days, our locality dwellers will launch an agitation demanding the return of my brother, Ria added.

After securing an engineering degree from a private polytechnic college in Raiganj in North Dinajpur district in 2014, Jayanta worked for six months at a private firm in Dehradun. He was then introduced by a friend to agent Muneer Ahmed of Al Hamid Manpower Consultancy and two other agents H M Sadiq and Tabrez Alam in Delhi.

KOLKATA: The case has come to light here of an automobile engineer held as a slave and subjected to sexual and physical abuse by his employer in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the past seven months. Jayanta Biswas, the 23-year-old automobile engineer from Mamudpur in Naihati in North 24 Parganas district, landed in Riyadh on May 15 this year after paying three Delhi-based agents Rs 5.35 lakh, which he raised by selling off his ancestral agricultural land. The agents told him he would be paid a salary of Rs 30,000 per month. However, he soon found that the promise was a lie. He and other youngsters from Bangladesh and India were confined in a room in the house of their Saudi kafeel (employeer), Naeef Bookme. He (Jayanta) used to call me and cry that he and other boys were being beaten up regularly by the employer and no food was given. He revealed that he was being sexually abused regularly, Jayantas elder sister Ria Biswas told New Indian Express. Jayanta tried to escape captivity in August and went to the Indian Embassy in Riyadh but was denied any help there. When the employer Naeef found Jayanta missing, he accused him of theft of 10,000 riyals and booked a case with the Saudi police. Jayanta was arrested on August 9 and jailed till October end. After his release, Jayanta again went to the Indian Embassy. This time, he was heard, but he was asked to bring a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the employer to return to India. When he returned to his employers house, he was tortured again. His employer is continuously threatening him with death and now is demanding 3,500 riyals to let him go. We are scared because of Saudi laws have a reputation of cutting off hands, limbs or ears, Ria said. Jayantas brother Uttam Biswas has tweeted the case to the External Affairs Ministry and to external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj. Other relatives have written letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and to the website madad.com, which aids Indians stuck abroad. If we do not get any response from the government within two days, our locality dwellers will launch an agitation demanding the return of my brother, Ria added. After securing an engineering degree from a private polytechnic college in Raiganj in North Dinajpur district in 2014, Jayanta worked for six months at a private firm in Dehradun. He was then introduced by a friend to agent Muneer Ahmed of Al Hamid Manpower Consultancy and two other agents H M Sadiq and Tabrez Alam in Delhi.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Even as its creating euphoria around Narendra Modis surgical strikes against black money, the BJP is counting on the Prime Ministers anti-corruption image to counter any backlash the move to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes could have from traders in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh elections.

That the BJPs core voter base is feeling the pain over the decision of the Central government to demonetise the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currencies is true. The party may face a backlash in the upcoming elections. But this decisive step against corruption and black money has also endeared the Prime Minister to the hearts of the poor, said a senior BJP leader.

The party will soon launch a massive blitzkrieg showcasing the gains that people will have from the government decision.

Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had become the messiah of the poor by nationalising banks in one stroke. The Congress electorally exploited it for many years. Modi will excel Gandhis deeds when the poor are explained the benefits that would come their way in the years to come, added the BJP leader.

The saffron party is also drawing comfort from the belief that its political rivals would be financially decimated thanks to the crackdown on black money. The political rivals will be financially paralysed for at least six months. This gives the BJP an edge over the rivals in the crucial elections in five states, said a senior party functionary.

The party will explain to people that those depositing Rs 2.5 lakh in their bank accounts wont be touched by income tax sleuths.

The poor and the people in the rural areas who have currencies of lower denominations and are out of the tax net are already hailing the government move and expressing joy that the Modi government has hit the rich and the affluent class. The Congress attempts in the past to label Modi as pro-corporate have come to naught with the singular action by the government against black money hoarders, he added.

The BJP appears all set to make the surgical strikes in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the currency demonetisation its top election campaign agendas.

Meanwhile, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal alleged that the BJP and its friends were informed about the demonetisation plan a week before, especially keeping the upcoming Uttar Pradesh polls in mind. He took potshots at Modi for being featured in a newspaper ad for Paytm, saying the e-wallet company was the biggest beneficiary of the move.

Common men are the only ones suffering. I spoke to many people, they told me that black money holders have done settings already. Money will be delivered to their homes in lieu of 15 to 20 per cent commission, Kejriwal said.

NEW DELHI: Even as its creating euphoria around Narendra Modis surgical strikes against black money, the BJP is counting on the Prime Ministers anti-corruption image to counter any backlash the move to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes could have from traders in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh elections. That the BJPs core voter base is feeling the pain over the decision of the Central government to demonetise the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currencies is true. The party may face a backlash in the upcoming elections. But this decisive step against corruption and black money has also endeared the Prime Minister to the hearts of the poor, said a senior BJP leader. The party will soon launch a massive blitzkrieg showcasing the gains that people will have from the government decision. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had become the messiah of the poor by nationalising banks in one stroke. The Congress electorally exploited it for many years. Modi will excel Gandhis deeds when the poor are explained the benefits that would come their way in the years to come, added the BJP leader. The saffron party is also drawing comfort from the belief that its political rivals would be financially decimated thanks to the crackdown on black money. The political rivals will be financially paralysed for at least six months. This gives the BJP an edge over the rivals in the crucial elections in five states, said a senior party functionary. The party will explain to people that those depositing Rs 2.5 lakh in their bank accounts wont be touched by income tax sleuths. The poor and the people in the rural areas who have currencies of lower denominations and are out of the tax net are already hailing the government move and expressing joy that the Modi government has hit the rich and the affluent class. The Congress attempts in the past to label Modi as pro-corporate have come to naught with the singular action by the government against black money hoarders, he added. The BJP appears all set to make the surgical strikes in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the currency demonetisation its top election campaign agendas. Meanwhile, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal alleged that the BJP and its friends were informed about the demonetisation plan a week before, especially keeping the upcoming Uttar Pradesh polls in mind. He took potshots at Modi for being featured in a newspaper ad for Paytm, saying the e-wallet company was the biggest beneficiary of the move. Common men are the only ones suffering. I spoke to many people, they told me that black money holders have done settings already. Money will be delivered to their homes in lieu of 15 to 20 per cent commission, Kejriwal said.
By IANS

KOLKATA: There was commotion in a city private hospital on Thursday after its management refused to release a patient, whose relatives had paid the entire bill amount of Rs 40,000 in coins - in view of demonetisation of higher currency notes.

Sukanta Chauli, a resident of West Bengal's Howrah district, was admitted to B.P. Poddar Hospital and Medical Research Ltd at New Alipore in south Kolkata four days back after being detected with dengue.

The hospital authority, on Thursday, informed Chauli's family that he was fit for discharge and asked them to clear the dues.

According to the patient party, the hospital refused to accept denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.

"The hospital told us to first clear all dues amounting to Rs 40,000 in denominations other than Rs 500 and Rs 1000, as those are now useless," said a relative of the patient.

In a desperate attempt to release Chauli, his relatives turned to their piggy banks and arranged the entire bill amount of Rs 40,000 in coins; which the hospital authority refused to accept.

"We have arranged for the due amount in coins but the hospital won't accept them now as they say it is logistically impossible to count so many coins," a member of Chauli's family complained.

"They came up with bags of coins and piggy banks to complete the payment. We refused to accept that initially as it is impossible to count so many coins," a hospital employee said.

The situation got out of hand as the hospital staff and the patient party engaged in a war of words over the payment. A television journalist was reportedly beaten up by the hospital security guards and sustained a head injury.

"The television journalist was badly beaten up when he enquired about the issue," an eye witness said.

But after matters turned ugly, the hospital buckled and agreed to release the patient by accepting the coins.

The hospital management said the turn of events would be probed.

"We have accepted the coins and the patient has been discharged today. We can not comment on the altercation with the TV reporter before probing who beat up whom," Sumit Khan, the hospital vice president, told IANS.

KOLKATA: There was commotion in a city private hospital on Thursday after its management refused to release a patient, whose relatives had paid the entire bill amount of Rs 40,000 in coins - in view of demonetisation of higher currency notes. Sukanta Chauli, a resident of West Bengal's Howrah district, was admitted to B.P. Poddar Hospital and Medical Research Ltd at New Alipore in south Kolkata four days back after being detected with dengue. The hospital authority, on Thursday, informed Chauli's family that he was fit for discharge and asked them to clear the dues. According to the patient party, the hospital refused to accept denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. "The hospital told us to first clear all dues amounting to Rs 40,000 in denominations other than Rs 500 and Rs 1000, as those are now useless," said a relative of the patient. In a desperate attempt to release Chauli, his relatives turned to their piggy banks and arranged the entire bill amount of Rs 40,000 in coins; which the hospital authority refused to accept. "We have arranged for the due amount in coins but the hospital won't accept them now as they say it is logistically impossible to count so many coins," a member of Chauli's family complained. "They came up with bags of coins and piggy banks to complete the payment. We refused to accept that initially as it is impossible to count so many coins," a hospital employee said. The situation got out of hand as the hospital staff and the patient party engaged in a war of words over the payment. A television journalist was reportedly beaten up by the hospital security guards and sustained a head injury. "The television journalist was badly beaten up when he enquired about the issue," an eye witness said. But after matters turned ugly, the hospital buckled and agreed to release the patient by accepting the coins. The hospital management said the turn of events would be probed. "We have accepted the coins and the patient has been discharged today. We can not comment on the altercation with the TV reporter before probing who beat up whom," Sumit Khan, the hospital vice president, told IANS.
Brad Pitt attends a LA Fan event for the Paramount Pictures title 'Allied' at Regency Village Theatre on November 9, 2016 in Westwood, California. (Photo : Getty Images/Jonathan Leibson)

Brad Pitt was on the red carpet scene again for his recent movie "Allied." He stepped out on the night of Nov. 9, Wednesday, to the premiere of his World War II drama, his first appearance since his split with ex Angelina Jolie.



At the Regency Village Theatre in Westwood, Los Angeles, Pitt appeared to be in good spirits, smiling for photos and chatting with fans during the event which was live streamed on Facebook. He thanked his fans for their support in the wake of the split. Paramount's "Allied," which likewise stars Marion Cotillard will hit theaters on Nov. 23.



Advertisement

The 1962 movie "Lawrence of Arabia" inspired "Allied," Variety quoted director Robert Zemeckis admitted in a post-screening Q&A. "When we were shooting on the sand dunes, I was copying David Lean."



Cotillard admitted her difficulties in shooting gunplay scenes and recalled the director saying, "I can tell that you hate guns. So pretend that you love guns."



The leading actress likewise said she is usually not willing to endure costume fittings. However, she was dazzled by the early 1940 dresses and said it was like a girl's dream to try on beautiful outfits.



The night was a big night for Pitt as he was cleared by child abuse allegations hours before the premiere, by the Department of Children and Family Services of Los Angeles, PEOPLE reported. It was after an investigation into altercation between Pitt and his 15-year-old son, Maddox on their private plane on Sept. 14.



The 52-year-old actor first appeared in public on Nov. 7, Monday, since his ex-wife filed for divorce. He attended the "Moonlight" private screening in Los Angeles with "Ocean 11" co-star and friend Julia Roberts. Plan B, his production firm collaborated with A24 for the coming-of-age drama that is earning an Oscar buzz.



Prior to that, Pitt stayed out of the spotlight, skipping the premiere of "Voyage of Time" on Sept. 28. Jolie requested sole physical custody of Maddox and their other five children: Pax, Zahara, Shiloh and twins Knox and Vivienne. On Nov. 4, Pitt filed a response for joint custody.



Check out the "Allied" trailer below:







Save


By IANS

RANCHI: A man was arrested for trying to deposit Rs 25 lakh cash belonging to a Maoist guerilla in a bank, police said on Friday.



Nand Kishore, a petrol pump owner from Bero situated on the outskirts of Ranchi, was arrested late Thursday. He was carrying the money to deposit it in a bank.



Police intercepted Kishore while he was on his way to the bank. During interrogation, he admitted that the money belonged to banned Maoist organisation People's Liberation Front of India's (PLFI) supremo Dinesh Gope. Kishore was to deposit the money in his account in the name of petrol and diesel sale.



After Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were demonetised on November 8, Maoist guerrillas have been using their contacts to deposit the money.



"We are keeping watch on such transactions. Our networks have been activated to keep close watch on such transactions," Jharkhand police spokesperson M.S. Bhatia told IANS.



RANCHI: A man was arrested for trying to deposit Rs 25 lakh cash belonging to a Maoist guerilla in a bank, police said on Friday. Nand Kishore, a petrol pump owner from Bero situated on the outskirts of Ranchi, was arrested late Thursday. He was carrying the money to deposit it in a bank. Police intercepted Kishore while he was on his way to the bank. During interrogation, he admitted that the money belonged to banned Maoist organisation People's Liberation Front of India's (PLFI) supremo Dinesh Gope. Kishore was to deposit the money in his account in the name of petrol and diesel sale. After Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were demonetised on November 8, Maoist guerrillas have been using their contacts to deposit the money. "We are keeping watch on such transactions. Our networks have been activated to keep close watch on such transactions," Jharkhand police spokesperson M.S. Bhatia told IANS.
Fawaz Wani By

Express News Service

SRINAGAR: Senior separatist leader and former chairman of Hurriyat Conference Prof Abdul Gani Bhat Friday called on mainstream and separatist parties to join heads and come up with a joint resolution urging India and Pakistan to resume the stalled dialogue process.

He also called for third-countrys involvement in India-Pakistan talks to safeguard the dialogue process.

Let all political leaders and political parties including mainstream National Conference, PDP, Congress, BJP and separatist groups sit together to break walls and join hands for the interest of people of Jammu and Kashmir. They should sit together to draft a joint resolution to impress upon leaders of India and Pakistan to restart the stalled dialogue process for the peace and stability of South Asia, Bhat said at the launch of his autobiography Beyond Me.

Bhat had been a strong votary of former Pakistan military ruler General Parvez Musharrafs four point formula on Kashmir.

Stressing Indian and Pakistan to devise a mechanism for result oriented talks in respect to the resolution of Kashmir issue, he sought involvement of third-country, which has friendly ties with both New Delhi and Islamabad, in India-Pak talks.

The involvement of third country will safeguard the talks and the friendly country can play an active role in getting the talks resumed in case they get stalled, Bhat said.

Stressing that a message of togetherness should flow from Kashmir, the separatist leader said, Kashmiris would light this candle for ending the darkness that has engulfed the minds of Kashmiris, Indians, Pakistanis and people of entire South Asia.

We shall guide Indians and Pakistanis to the righteous end and light is only in the Indo-Pak dialogue at all costs, said Bhat, who is an executive members of moderate Hurriyat Conference led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, said India had entered the pockets and stomachs of Kashmiris but not into the sacred chambers of their hearts.

India entered Kashmir with the roar of gun amidst the noise of democracy, he said.

The former Hurriyat chairman said the lingering Kashmir issue has been the main cause of tension and instability in the South Asian region and has led to armed conflicts between India and Pakistan in past causing enormous problems for the smooth and peaceful development of this region. 

By relegating Kashmir issue to backburner, entire South Asia would get plunged into instability and insecurity. A small spark can stoke fires in the entire region, he said adding by exhibiting political courage, India and Pakistan leadership would secure the bright future of the people living in South Asia.

Bhat said people of Kashmir have always been in favor of the resolution of Kashmir issue by peaceful means and through a result-oriented dialogue.

In an indirect reference to the separatist leaders, who are spearheading the over four-month-long unrest in the Valley, Bhat said the leadership needs to hear the heartbeat of the people and understand tomorrow.

As a politician, one has to have a deeper understanding, faith, and strategy, he added.



SRINAGAR: Senior separatist leader and former chairman of Hurriyat Conference Prof Abdul Gani Bhat Friday called on mainstream and separatist parties to join heads and come up with a joint resolution urging India and Pakistan to resume the stalled dialogue process. He also called for third-countrys involvement in India-Pakistan talks to safeguard the dialogue process. Let all political leaders and political parties including mainstream National Conference, PDP, Congress, BJP and separatist groups sit together to break walls and join hands for the interest of people of Jammu and Kashmir. They should sit together to draft a joint resolution to impress upon leaders of India and Pakistan to restart the stalled dialogue process for the peace and stability of South Asia, Bhat said at the launch of his autobiography Beyond Me. Bhat had been a strong votary of former Pakistan military ruler General Parvez Musharrafs four point formula on Kashmir. Stressing Indian and Pakistan to devise a mechanism for result oriented talks in respect to the resolution of Kashmir issue, he sought involvement of third-country, which has friendly ties with both New Delhi and Islamabad, in India-Pak talks. The involvement of third country will safeguard the talks and the friendly country can play an active role in getting the talks resumed in case they get stalled, Bhat said. Stressing that a message of togetherness should flow from Kashmir, the separatist leader said, Kashmiris would light this candle for ending the darkness that has engulfed the minds of Kashmiris, Indians, Pakistanis and people of entire South Asia. We shall guide Indians and Pakistanis to the righteous end and light is only in the Indo-Pak dialogue at all costs, said Bhat, who is an executive members of moderate Hurriyat Conference led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, said India had entered the pockets and stomachs of Kashmiris but not into the sacred chambers of their hearts. India entered Kashmir with the roar of gun amidst the noise of democracy, he said. The former Hurriyat chairman said the lingering Kashmir issue has been the main cause of tension and instability in the South Asian region and has led to armed conflicts between India and Pakistan in past causing enormous problems for the smooth and peaceful development of this region.  By relegating Kashmir issue to backburner, entire South Asia would get plunged into instability and insecurity. A small spark can stoke fires in the entire region, he said adding by exhibiting political courage, India and Pakistan leadership would secure the bright future of the people living in South Asia. Bhat said people of Kashmir have always been in favor of the resolution of Kashmir issue by peaceful means and through a result-oriented dialogue. In an indirect reference to the separatist leaders, who are spearheading the over four-month-long unrest in the Valley, Bhat said the leadership needs to hear the heartbeat of the people and understand tomorrow. As a politician, one has to have a deeper understanding, faith, and strategy, he added.
By PTI

TOKYO: Shedding its reservations, Japan today made an exception to sign a landmark civil nuclear deal with India, opening the door for export of its atomic technology and reactors, after adding features like safety and security keeping in mind its sensitivities on the issue.

The nuclear deal, described as historic by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was part of the ten agreements signed between the two countries in various areas after he held talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe on the second day of his three-day visit.

They held wide-ranging talks which covered aspects like trade and investment, security, terrorism, cooperation in skill development, aerospace and people-to-people contacts.

The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries and Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar said the nuclear deal was similar to the agreements signed with the US and other countries with added features on safety and security in keeping with Japan's sensitivities.

The two leaders, despite objections by China, also discussed the South China Sea issue and agreed on the need for respecting freedom of navigation and overflight in tune with the principles of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

The nuclear agreement will also push implementation of the Indo-US atomic cooperation agreement since the major American companies in this sector have alliances with Japanese companies like GE-Hitachi and Toshiba-Westinghouse Electric Company.

The deal will come into effect as soon as the Japanese Parliament  Diet  approves it.

The Japanese Prime Minister, while noting that his country was the only one to have suffered atom bomb attacks, said he was "delighted" over the signing of the agreement with India despite it not being a signatory to the NPT.

At the same time, Abe, with Modi standing next to him, appeared to remind India about the NPT, saying his country wishes to see universalisation of the treaty, which New Delhi terms as "flawed".

"This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in Non-Proliferation regime even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT," he said at a joint press interaction with Modi.

"It (the agreement) is in line with Japan's ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons," said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II.

He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership...Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of climate change," Modi said.

Apparently with Japan's sensitivity in mind, he added, "I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan".

He thanked Abe, Japanese government and Parliament for their support to the agreement.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.

In his remarks, Prime Minister Modi said as democracies, the two countries "support openness, transparency and the rule of law".

"We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he said.

The landmark Indo-Japan nuclear agreement is strikingly similar to atomic agreements India inked with the US and most of the other countries, having provisions like 'termination' clause, Jaishankar said. However, he added that this pact has some added features like on safety and security reflecting Japan's concerns.

Also, the four steps  123 agreement (2007), NSG waiver (2008), Reprocessing pact (2010) and Administrative mechanisms (2013)  that were part of the Indo-US deal have been "compressed" and "captured" in the deal with Japan, he added.

He said Japan's sensitivities and concerns were addressed in the agreement as much more emphasis was given on nuclear safety and security.

Asked about Abe's reminder about the NPT signing, the Foreign Secretary said India "understands" Japan's position but India's point of view is that it has a "very good" record on non-proliferation front which was the basis for the fructification of the atomic pact with Tokyo.

With regard to Abe's mention about Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), Jaishankar said India had unilaterally and voluntarily declared a moratorium on nuclear testing, a declaration regarding which had enabled the NSG's waiver in 2008. He said the contents of that declaration have been reiterated.

TOKYO: Shedding its reservations, Japan today made an exception to sign a landmark civil nuclear deal with India, opening the door for export of its atomic technology and reactors, after adding features like safety and security keeping in mind its sensitivities on the issue. The nuclear deal, described as historic by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was part of the ten agreements signed between the two countries in various areas after he held talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe on the second day of his three-day visit. They held wide-ranging talks which covered aspects like trade and investment, security, terrorism, cooperation in skill development, aerospace and people-to-people contacts. The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries and Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar said the nuclear deal was similar to the agreements signed with the US and other countries with added features on safety and security in keeping with Japan's sensitivities. The two leaders, despite objections by China, also discussed the South China Sea issue and agreed on the need for respecting freedom of navigation and overflight in tune with the principles of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The nuclear agreement will also push implementation of the Indo-US atomic cooperation agreement since the major American companies in this sector have alliances with Japanese companies like GE-Hitachi and Toshiba-Westinghouse Electric Company. The deal will come into effect as soon as the Japanese Parliament  Diet  approves it. The Japanese Prime Minister, while noting that his country was the only one to have suffered atom bomb attacks, said he was "delighted" over the signing of the agreement with India despite it not being a signatory to the NPT. At the same time, Abe, with Modi standing next to him, appeared to remind India about the NPT, saying his country wishes to see universalisation of the treaty, which New Delhi terms as "flawed". "This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in Non-Proliferation regime even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT," he said at a joint press interaction with Modi. "It (the agreement) is in line with Japan's ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons," said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II. He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests. "Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership...Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of climate change," Modi said. Apparently with Japan's sensitivity in mind, he added, "I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan". He thanked Abe, Japanese government and Parliament for their support to the agreement. Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia. In his remarks, Prime Minister Modi said as democracies, the two countries "support openness, transparency and the rule of law". "We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he said. The landmark Indo-Japan nuclear agreement is strikingly similar to atomic agreements India inked with the US and most of the other countries, having provisions like 'termination' clause, Jaishankar said. However, he added that this pact has some added features like on safety and security reflecting Japan's concerns. Also, the four steps  123 agreement (2007), NSG waiver (2008), Reprocessing pact (2010) and Administrative mechanisms (2013)  that were part of the Indo-US deal have been "compressed" and "captured" in the deal with Japan, he added. He said Japan's sensitivities and concerns were addressed in the agreement as much more emphasis was given on nuclear safety and security. Asked about Abe's reminder about the NPT signing, the Foreign Secretary said India "understands" Japan's position but India's point of view is that it has a "very good" record on non-proliferation front which was the basis for the fructification of the atomic pact with Tokyo. With regard to Abe's mention about Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), Jaishankar said India had unilaterally and voluntarily declared a moratorium on nuclear testing, a declaration regarding which had enabled the NSG's waiver in 2008. He said the contents of that declaration have been reiterated.
By ANI

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday issued a notice to the Centre on the Kohinoor diamond matter seeking a reply in four weeks.

Senior Advocate Sommo Chkravarthy said that an impression has been created that the gem was gifted by Maharaja Dilip Singh to the Britishers, but documents produced prove that it was actually stolen.

There must be proper diplomatic parley between the Central government and the government of United Kingdom , that must be supervised by the Supreme Court. Second, is that the impression is created that the gem was gifted by Maharaja Dilip Singh to the Britishers but we have produced all the documents that it was actually stolen, he said.

Britishers had acquired it illegally and forcefully. The archaeological survey of India has also directed to file the affidavit. Supreme Court has directed it to come up within four week. They have been directed to file an appropriate counter affidavit, he added.

Earlier, after UK Minister of Asia and Pacific affairs Alok Sharma's assertion on the restitution of 'Kohinoor' diamond, Advocate Nafis Siddiqui, the petitioner of the case, said that he will file a new application and if Britain doesn't return the gem still, he will then appeal in the UNESCO and in the UN.

"New application will be filled in the Supreme Court to send the advocated commissioner to Britain and request the British government to return the property of India and to get a stay on the selling or auctioning of the diamond. We will get it back, if not, we will appeal through the UNESCO or through UNO," said Siddiqui.

Earlier, in the Supreme Court Centre said that Britain did not steal the 'Kohinoor' but rather it was gifted to them.

Referring to UNESCO declaration of 1970 and 1978, he added that UNESCO has mentioned to return everything that has been looted from the colonial ruled country back to them. France, America and even Australia did so, Britain must also.

After the subjugation of Punjab in 1849 by the British forces, the properties of the Sikh Empire were confiscated and the Kohinoor was also transferred to the treasury of the British East India Company in Lahore.

Later, the diamond was shipped to Britain and was handed to Queen Victoria in July 1850. It was cut to improve its brilliance and was mounted into Queen Victoria's crown. The diamond now sits in the tower of London along with the Crown Jewels.

The people of India have been demanding the return of the 105-carat diamond, which the British Government rejected in 2013.

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday issued a notice to the Centre on the Kohinoor diamond matter seeking a reply in four weeks. Senior Advocate Sommo Chkravarthy said that an impression has been created that the gem was gifted by Maharaja Dilip Singh to the Britishers, but documents produced prove that it was actually stolen. There must be proper diplomatic parley between the Central government and the government of United Kingdom , that must be supervised by the Supreme Court. Second, is that the impression is created that the gem was gifted by Maharaja Dilip Singh to the Britishers but we have produced all the documents that it was actually stolen, he said. Britishers had acquired it illegally and forcefully. The archaeological survey of India has also directed to file the affidavit. Supreme Court has directed it to come up within four week. They have been directed to file an appropriate counter affidavit, he added. Earlier, after UK Minister of Asia and Pacific affairs Alok Sharma's assertion on the restitution of 'Kohinoor' diamond, Advocate Nafis Siddiqui, the petitioner of the case, said that he will file a new application and if Britain doesn't return the gem still, he will then appeal in the UNESCO and in the UN. "New application will be filled in the Supreme Court to send the advocated commissioner to Britain and request the British government to return the property of India and to get a stay on the selling or auctioning of the diamond. We will get it back, if not, we will appeal through the UNESCO or through UNO," said Siddiqui. Earlier, in the Supreme Court Centre said that Britain did not steal the 'Kohinoor' but rather it was gifted to them. Referring to UNESCO declaration of 1970 and 1978, he added that UNESCO has mentioned to return everything that has been looted from the colonial ruled country back to them. France, America and even Australia did so, Britain must also. After the subjugation of Punjab in 1849 by the British forces, the properties of the Sikh Empire were confiscated and the Kohinoor was also transferred to the treasury of the British East India Company in Lahore. Later, the diamond was shipped to Britain and was handed to Queen Victoria in July 1850. It was cut to improve its brilliance and was mounted into Queen Victoria's crown. The diamond now sits in the tower of London along with the Crown Jewels. The people of India have been demanding the return of the 105-carat diamond, which the British Government rejected in 2013.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: India's TV channels will no longer have to queue up to have their broadcasting licences renewed every year. They need only pay the annual permission fee 60 days before the due date and carry on with their operations.

This was one of the two major decisions announced by the Union minister for information and broadcasting M Venkaiah Naidu Firday. The other is to take online all the processes of the print media registrar, the Registrar of Newspapers in Indian (RNI).

Until now, broadcasters had to apply for renewal of their permission for uplinking and downlinking every year. >From now on, payment of the renewal fee would by itself be treated as permission for continuation for a further period of one year, Naidu said at the Economic Editors Conference here. This measure will apply to 963 channels and teleports in India.

The decision regarding online RNI processes was revealed to the consultative committee of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry on Friday.

In the chair, Naidu said there has been phenomenal growth of the print media after the opening up of the economy in the 1990s, and the print media policy and guidelines have undergone some changes since then. So there was a need to update, contemporarise and revise the legal mechanism pertaining to the print media and to give statutory backing to print media policy and other guidelines.

NEW DELHI: India's TV channels will no longer have to queue up to have their broadcasting licences renewed every year. They need only pay the annual permission fee 60 days before the due date and carry on with their operations. This was one of the two major decisions announced by the Union minister for information and broadcasting M Venkaiah Naidu Firday. The other is to take online all the processes of the print media registrar, the Registrar of Newspapers in Indian (RNI). Until now, broadcasters had to apply for renewal of their permission for uplinking and downlinking every year. >From now on, payment of the renewal fee would by itself be treated as permission for continuation for a further period of one year, Naidu said at the Economic Editors Conference here. This measure will apply to 963 channels and teleports in India. The decision regarding online RNI processes was revealed to the consultative committee of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry on Friday. In the chair, Naidu said there has been phenomenal growth of the print media after the opening up of the economy in the 1990s, and the print media policy and guidelines have undergone some changes since then. So there was a need to update, contemporarise and revise the legal mechanism pertaining to the print media and to give statutory backing to print media policy and other guidelines.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Admitting Rajasthan Governments request for an urgent hearing against Salman Khan's acquittal in the twin cases of Chinkara poaching, the Supreme Court on Friday issued a notice to the Bollywood superstar.



The Rajasthan High Court had on July 25 acquitted Khan in two cases of Chinkara (black buck) poaching in Jodhpur, while observing that the statement of a key witness could not be considered as he had "disappeared" and the defence could not cross-examine him during the trial.

The witness, driver of the vehicle in which the actor was travelling when the alleged incidents had taken place, surfaced after the High Court verdict and claimed Khan had shot the gazelle.

The High Court's decision were countering two trial court's verdict convicting the Bollywood actor and handing him one and five years of imprisonment, following which the superstar had to spend 13 days in jail.

Salman was convicted by a lower court in 2006 in the two chinkara cases, but this was overturned by the High Court in its judgment Monday.

One of the animals was killed at Bhawad on the outskirts of Jodhpur on September 26, 1998, and the other at Ghoda Farms on September 28, 1998.

At that time, they were shooting for film 'Hum Sath Sath Hain'.

Chinkara is an endangered animal accorded the highest protection under the Wildlife Protection Act.

NEW DELHI: Admitting Rajasthan Governments request for an urgent hearing against Salman Khan's acquittal in the twin cases of Chinkara poaching, the Supreme Court on Friday issued a notice to the Bollywood superstar. The Rajasthan High Court had on July 25 acquitted Khan in two cases of Chinkara (black buck) poaching in Jodhpur, while observing that the statement of a key witness could not be considered as he had "disappeared" and the defence could not cross-examine him during the trial. The witness, driver of the vehicle in which the actor was travelling when the alleged incidents had taken place, surfaced after the High Court verdict and claimed Khan had shot the gazelle. The High Court's decision were countering two trial court's verdict convicting the Bollywood actor and handing him one and five years of imprisonment, following which the superstar had to spend 13 days in jail. Salman was convicted by a lower court in 2006 in the two chinkara cases, but this was overturned by the High Court in its judgment Monday. One of the animals was killed at Bhawad on the outskirts of Jodhpur on September 26, 1998, and the other at Ghoda Farms on September 28, 1998. At that time, they were shooting for film 'Hum Sath Sath Hain'. Chinkara is an endangered animal accorded the highest protection under the Wildlife Protection Act.
Nandini Lal By

A picture of Donald Trump staring down at a desi girls bare brown back at a recent Hindus For Trump event organised by the Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC) in New Jersey has gone viral. So has a poster of Trump sitting on a red, white and blue lotus. Another shows Sonia Gandhi and Hillary Clinton with horns coming out of their heads. Very classy. At the event which raised a million dollars, Trump called India a key strategic ally and declared himself a big fan of Hindu (sic), thus completely reimagining a new India without Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims or Parsis (and of course all the other non-mainstream faiths). The Jimmy Kimmel show interviewed a number of Indians who couldnt decipher a word of Trumps accented Hindi, Ab ki baar Trump sarkar, a short slogan that Trump still got wrong (abhi instead of ab) after 15 takes.

While such attention seems gratifying, it is important to remember that the event only focused on a subset of Hindu victims of Islamic terrorism in Bangladesh and Kashmir (Pandits). This points less to solidarity with Indians than an attempt to demonise all Muslims as terrorists, and ignores the 180 million Muslims who reside peacefully in our country. A rising tide of nationalism brought both Modi and Trump to power. Both exist at least partly by ignoring Indias diversity. Only 7% of Indian Americans are Trump supporters. The majority of Indians in the US are not. Quite a few have canvassed for Hillary Clinton. (I myself have done shifts on phone banks for her. Clearly it wasnt enough.)

Its early days yet for Trump as President Elect. Well know more when he spells out specifics. We need to see whom he appoints as his secretary of state, secretary of defence, and national security advisor. As long as these are sensible appointments, we can hope for pragmatic deals. Trump is a businessman. Given his personality, this could mean quick efficient decision-making or impulsive risk-taking. A lot will also depend on how India plays its cards. On foreign policy, India has common interests with regard to Islamic terrorism in Pakistan, the need to contain China, alliances with Russia  but not his stand against Iran, with whom we have amicable history. His mistrust of Pakistan would strengthen Indias hand in reducing border tensions. Delhis current record-breaking pollution levels have been making headlines everywhere this month. It is unfortunate that Donald Trump picked a climate change denier to run his EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) transition team this week. He will probably turn his back on last years UN agreement on climate  one that India is party to. And his rollbacks on Obamacare could impact our pharma companies.

Trump may be against undocumented immigrants in the US, but he is positive about skilled highly paid labour. There are concerns about visas for students or professionals, especially in the IT sector, but he is happy with the ingress of skilled labour in this country. We need to wait and see. Trump has railed bitterly about outsourcing in the past (and once mimicked calling up India to learn about his credit card), but most Trump products are made through outsourcing. But on the whole, he seems bullish on India. He has also invested in a couple of luxury real estate projects (Trump Towers) there.

India has no reason to be overly concerned over how the regime change plays out for us. The US will always favour bilateral ties with India as it is the worlds fastest-growing big economy. And his rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is okay with India because New Delhi isnt a partner. The problem with such expediency is that we might forget that his isolationism and protectionism (which he has given every indication of doing) may come at a cost, especially as we have opened ourselves so resolutely to a globalised world.

As the largest democracy in the world unites with the most powerful democracy in the world, it is important that our accountability to the world is kept front and centre. We should be governed by self interest, but also remember that we are answerable to our future generations. An America that insists on a new relationship with the world that is purely transactional and short-term, rather than strategic, can never bode well. Sadly, Trump has given every indication of that. While we welcome a businessmans drive and quick bold decision-making, there is the usual fear of risk-taking. Trump has not shared much that's substantive on what he plans to do as President, so we have nothing but projections based on his pet obsessions to go on.

(Nandini Lal is a columnist based in Washington, DC)

A picture of Donald Trump staring down at a desi girls bare brown back at a recent Hindus For Trump event organised by the Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC) in New Jersey has gone viral. So has a poster of Trump sitting on a red, white and blue lotus. Another shows Sonia Gandhi and Hillary Clinton with horns coming out of their heads. Very classy. At the event which raised a million dollars, Trump called India a key strategic ally and declared himself a big fan of Hindu (sic), thus completely reimagining a new India without Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims or Parsis (and of course all the other non-mainstream faiths). The Jimmy Kimmel show interviewed a number of Indians who couldnt decipher a word of Trumps accented Hindi, Ab ki baar Trump sarkar, a short slogan that Trump still got wrong (abhi instead of ab) after 15 takes. While such attention seems gratifying, it is important to remember that the event only focused on a subset of Hindu victims of Islamic terrorism in Bangladesh and Kashmir (Pandits). This points less to solidarity with Indians than an attempt to demonise all Muslims as terrorists, and ignores the 180 million Muslims who reside peacefully in our country. A rising tide of nationalism brought both Modi and Trump to power. Both exist at least partly by ignoring Indias diversity. Only 7% of Indian Americans are Trump supporters. The majority of Indians in the US are not. Quite a few have canvassed for Hillary Clinton. (I myself have done shifts on phone banks for her. Clearly it wasnt enough.) Its early days yet for Trump as President Elect. Well know more when he spells out specifics. We need to see whom he appoints as his secretary of state, secretary of defence, and national security advisor. As long as these are sensible appointments, we can hope for pragmatic deals. Trump is a businessman. Given his personality, this could mean quick efficient decision-making or impulsive risk-taking. A lot will also depend on how India plays its cards. On foreign policy, India has common interests with regard to Islamic terrorism in Pakistan, the need to contain China, alliances with Russia  but not his stand against Iran, with whom we have amicable history. His mistrust of Pakistan would strengthen Indias hand in reducing border tensions. Delhis current record-breaking pollution levels have been making headlines everywhere this month. It is unfortunate that Donald Trump picked a climate change denier to run his EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) transition team this week. He will probably turn his back on last years UN agreement on climate  one that India is party to. And his rollbacks on Obamacare could impact our pharma companies. Trump may be against undocumented immigrants in the US, but he is positive about skilled highly paid labour. There are concerns about visas for students or professionals, especially in the IT sector, but he is happy with the ingress of skilled labour in this country. We need to wait and see. Trump has railed bitterly about outsourcing in the past (and once mimicked calling up India to learn about his credit card), but most Trump products are made through outsourcing. But on the whole, he seems bullish on India. He has also invested in a couple of luxury real estate projects (Trump Towers) there. India has no reason to be overly concerned over how the regime change plays out for us. The US will always favour bilateral ties with India as it is the worlds fastest-growing big economy. And his rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is okay with India because New Delhi isnt a partner. The problem with such expediency is that we might forget that his isolationism and protectionism (which he has given every indication of doing) may come at a cost, especially as we have opened ourselves so resolutely to a globalised world. As the largest democracy in the world unites with the most powerful democracy in the world, it is important that our accountability to the world is kept front and centre. We should be governed by self interest, but also remember that we are answerable to our future generations. An America that insists on a new relationship with the world that is purely transactional and short-term, rather than strategic, can never bode well. Sadly, Trump has given every indication of that. While we welcome a businessmans drive and quick bold decision-making, there is the usual fear of risk-taking. Trump has not shared much that's substantive on what he plans to do as President, so we have nothing but projections based on his pet obsessions to go on. (Nandini Lal is a columnist based in Washington, DC)
Balbir Punj By

The one big revelation from the US presidential election campaign is the widening gap between the liberal media and the people of America. For days together during the campaign the media went on to tell the world  not just Americans  that Donald Trump was not fit to be the President of America.

Trump has been elected by the same America that had twice elected a black as the President. It has now turned against the minoritism that raised the once suppressed or the ordinary to the White House  the haberdasher Truman, the Catholic Kennedy, the non-academic Ronald Reagan and the African-American Obama.

The overflow of liberalism in the US saw ideas like same-sex marriage, bearing children via surrogacy, the surge in divorce reducing over 40 per cent families to single parent ones, the huge outflow of American jobs to other countries, the Lehman collapse and the resultant popular anger against the Washington establishment  added up to a return to the conservative core that made America what it is: honour for the man who fights his battle alone, wins and makes his billions by taking enormous risks.

In the case of the Republican nominee Trump, besides his self-made billions, there was the straight talk that if elected, he would not allow America to be swamped by immigrant Muslims from North Africa and West Asia and will not treat the terrorist jihadis of the IS with kid gloves. The US media failed to get to the heart of growing American anger against the religious liberalism that was enabling many American Muslims to become a jihadi.

In this growing anger against international jihadism, Americans are not alone. The election results in Germany, France and public opinion in Britain are turning against the new demon of self-proclaimed destroyer of all that is not its version of Islam in a war against civilized values of humanity.

After the drubbing the US media got in this election, the media elsewhere, especially in India should take notice. It should rethink its attempt to be the evangelist of every dissident countrymen who think it is their basic right to condemn their own country as the one which needs to be broken down to pieces and the countrys detractors elevated to heroes instead of being sent to the gallows.

The upset victory of the straight-talking and no-nonsense real estate billionaire in the US should be a warning that across the globe, especially in India, that often it is the intellectuals claiming to be liberals who, by seeing virtues in felons and fifth-columnists alike are weakening a nations defence against the determined infiltrators and the death-spewing jihadi terrorists.

Today, France that has been hit hard by jihadi killers in Paris. Belgium also has been affected by similar killers who targeted the Brussels airport. Britain, Germany, Spain that had a taste of such barbarism are ruing the day that they had allowed North African and West Asian refugees and immigrants to enter freely.

In our country, several districts in Assam, West Bengal, Bihar etc., have witnessed a change in religious demography. There is a sharp rise among the Muslims in Hyderabad and North Malabar under the influence of the IS. It has resulted in over 21 couples  many recent converts  opting to join the IS and organisations seeking to impose by force a Sharia rule in their area as a parallel law to Indias civil and criminal law.

The US Presidential campaign saw the conservative Donald Trump getting demonstrative support from a good section of influential Indian Americans there. America is now fully aware of the perfidy and double talk of Pakistan using American aid  latest Congressional reports indicate 33 billion dollars  to build up its armed force for allegedly helping American interests but actually to attack India, thrice in direct war and now continuing terrorist thrusts.

China is seeking to build up Pakistan as a client state against Indian interests and continues to oppose New Delhis entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The country is also blocking the effort of the international community to declare JeMs Masood Azhar as a terrorist.

Trumps entry into the White House will coincide with a resurgence of Chinas One Belt, One Road, Asian domination under Beijings diktat, the Chinese bid to grab the South China Sea Islands in which there are seven other claimants from the neighbouring Pacific rim countries and its claims on everybody elses land to its south and east.

The Trump presidency will also coincide with the comparative decline in the growth of the Chinese economy and growing awareness of its neighbours from Japan to South-east Asia and India about Chinese imperial ambitions. If Trump is to reassert America as the global leader he will have to accept India as a firm partner in an Asian alliance against Beijings ambition to dominate Asia. The hopeful sign is that Donald Trump has captured American imagination with a denouncement of the Washington cabal that is more eager to balance for peace rather than going along with it.

It may be historic that while India has had two years and more of a pragmatic, no-nonsense Prime Minister who can take bold decisions as he demonstrated in fighting deeply entrenched black money with a courageous but risky move by demonitisation of high value notes, America too now will have a no-nonsense President. That gives hope for a stronger India-America partnership for keeping the peace and curbing jihadi undergrowth and ambitions.

Balbir Punj is a former Rajya Sabha member and a Delhi-based commentator on social and political issues

Email: punjbalbir@gmail.com

The one big revelation from the US presidential election campaign is the widening gap between the liberal media and the people of America. For days together during the campaign the media went on to tell the world  not just Americans  that Donald Trump was not fit to be the President of America. Trump has been elected by the same America that had twice elected a black as the President. It has now turned against the minoritism that raised the once suppressed or the ordinary to the White House  the haberdasher Truman, the Catholic Kennedy, the non-academic Ronald Reagan and the African-American Obama. The overflow of liberalism in the US saw ideas like same-sex marriage, bearing children via surrogacy, the surge in divorce reducing over 40 per cent families to single parent ones, the huge outflow of American jobs to other countries, the Lehman collapse and the resultant popular anger against the Washington establishment  added up to a return to the conservative core that made America what it is: honour for the man who fights his battle alone, wins and makes his billions by taking enormous risks. In the case of the Republican nominee Trump, besides his self-made billions, there was the straight talk that if elected, he would not allow America to be swamped by immigrant Muslims from North Africa and West Asia and will not treat the terrorist jihadis of the IS with kid gloves. The US media failed to get to the heart of growing American anger against the religious liberalism that was enabling many American Muslims to become a jihadi. In this growing anger against international jihadism, Americans are not alone. The election results in Germany, France and public opinion in Britain are turning against the new demon of self-proclaimed destroyer of all that is not its version of Islam in a war against civilized values of humanity. After the drubbing the US media got in this election, the media elsewhere, especially in India should take notice. It should rethink its attempt to be the evangelist of every dissident countrymen who think it is their basic right to condemn their own country as the one which needs to be broken down to pieces and the countrys detractors elevated to heroes instead of being sent to the gallows. The upset victory of the straight-talking and no-nonsense real estate billionaire in the US should be a warning that across the globe, especially in India, that often it is the intellectuals claiming to be liberals who, by seeing virtues in felons and fifth-columnists alike are weakening a nations defence against the determined infiltrators and the death-spewing jihadi terrorists. Today, France that has been hit hard by jihadi killers in Paris. Belgium also has been affected by similar killers who targeted the Brussels airport. Britain, Germany, Spain that had a taste of such barbarism are ruing the day that they had allowed North African and West Asian refugees and immigrants to enter freely. In our country, several districts in Assam, West Bengal, Bihar etc., have witnessed a change in religious demography. There is a sharp rise among the Muslims in Hyderabad and North Malabar under the influence of the IS. It has resulted in over 21 couples  many recent converts  opting to join the IS and organisations seeking to impose by force a Sharia rule in their area as a parallel law to Indias civil and criminal law. The US Presidential campaign saw the conservative Donald Trump getting demonstrative support from a good section of influential Indian Americans there. America is now fully aware of the perfidy and double talk of Pakistan using American aid  latest Congressional reports indicate 33 billion dollars  to build up its armed force for allegedly helping American interests but actually to attack India, thrice in direct war and now continuing terrorist thrusts. China is seeking to build up Pakistan as a client state against Indian interests and continues to oppose New Delhis entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The country is also blocking the effort of the international community to declare JeMs Masood Azhar as a terrorist. Trumps entry into the White House will coincide with a resurgence of Chinas One Belt, One Road, Asian domination under Beijings diktat, the Chinese bid to grab the South China Sea Islands in which there are seven other claimants from the neighbouring Pacific rim countries and its claims on everybody elses land to its south and east. The Trump presidency will also coincide with the comparative decline in the growth of the Chinese economy and growing awareness of its neighbours from Japan to South-east Asia and India about Chinese imperial ambitions. If Trump is to reassert America as the global leader he will have to accept India as a firm partner in an Asian alliance against Beijings ambition to dominate Asia. The hopeful sign is that Donald Trump has captured American imagination with a denouncement of the Washington cabal that is more eager to balance for peace rather than going along with it. It may be historic that while India has had two years and more of a pragmatic, no-nonsense Prime Minister who can take bold decisions as he demonstrated in fighting deeply entrenched black money with a courageous but risky move by demonitisation of high value notes, America too now will have a no-nonsense President. That gives hope for a stronger India-America partnership for keeping the peace and curbing jihadi undergrowth and ambitions. Balbir Punj is a former Rajya Sabha member and a Delhi-based commentator on social and political issues Email: punjbalbir@gmail.com
Prime Minister Narendra Modis three-day visit to Japan which began Thursday appears to have Beijing rattled. This is the third annual summit meeting between Modi and his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe. It is not the nuclear deal that the two leaders are likely to sign which is the main cause of concern. It is the fear that India might gang up with Japan on the South China Sea. India overestimates its South China Sea leverage, declared the Global Times in a sanctimonious editorial.

Warning that such a step would be a mistake in Indias China policy, it said: Although Chinas major rivals in the dispute, such as the US and Japan, have been trying to draw India into their camp, the country will be likely regarded as having a token role. ..India should beware of the possibility that by becoming embroiled in the disputes, it might end up being a pawn of the US and suffer great losses, especially in terms of business and trade, from China. Even by Chinese standards, those are strong words. Though Beijing has not raked it up yet, it is also worried about the nuclear deal likely to be signed between India and Japan, which follows almost six years of negotiations. Similar to the Indo-US deal of 2008, the deal (which will eventually have to be ratified by Japans parliament) will allow Japan to supply nuclear reactors, fuel and technology to India. China had earlier expressed concern over the possibility of India getting Shinmaywa US-2 amphibious aircraft from Japan.

This would be one of Japans first sales of military equipment since Abe lifted a 50- year ban on arms exports. A meeting of Indias Defence Acquisitions Council earlier this week to consider the purchase a dozen of these search and rescue aircraft was inconclusive. Though unlikely, it will be interesting to watch Beijings reaction if the two leaders do invoke the South China Sea issue in their talks or statements.

Prime Minister Narendra Modis three-day visit to Japan which began Thursday appears to have Beijing rattled. This is the third annual summit meeting between Modi and his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe. It is not the nuclear deal that the two leaders are likely to sign which is the main cause of concern. It is the fear that India might gang up with Japan on the South China Sea. India overestimates its South China Sea leverage, declared the Global Times in a sanctimonious editorial. Warning that such a step would be a mistake in Indias China policy, it said: Although Chinas major rivals in the dispute, such as the US and Japan, have been trying to draw India into their camp, the country will be likely regarded as having a token role. ..India should beware of the possibility that by becoming embroiled in the disputes, it might end up being a pawn of the US and suffer great losses, especially in terms of business and trade, from China. Even by Chinese standards, those are strong words. Though Beijing has not raked it up yet, it is also worried about the nuclear deal likely to be signed between India and Japan, which follows almost six years of negotiations. Similar to the Indo-US deal of 2008, the deal (which will eventually have to be ratified by Japans parliament) will allow Japan to supply nuclear reactors, fuel and technology to India. China had earlier expressed concern over the possibility of India getting Shinmaywa US-2 amphibious aircraft from Japan. This would be one of Japans first sales of military equipment since Abe lifted a 50- year ban on arms exports. A meeting of Indias Defence Acquisitions Council earlier this week to consider the purchase a dozen of these search and rescue aircraft was inconclusive. Though unlikely, it will be interesting to watch Beijings reaction if the two leaders do invoke the South China Sea issue in their talks or statements.
President-elect Donald Trump and WWE Chairman Vince McMahon attends a press conference in Green Bay, Wisconsin back in 2009. (Photo : Getty Images/Mark A. Wallenfang)

Donald Trump became the first WWE Hall of Famer on Tuesday to be elected as president of the United States of America. The latest rumors suggest that soon-to-be POTUS Trump could make a surprise appearance at WrestleMania 33 next year in Orlando.



The unthinkable has happened as the billionaire became the 45th American president by beating out Hillary Clinton. The 70-year-old is a very controversial figure and he has divided the nation. However, it might be what the WWE needs at the moment.



Advertisement

According to Unibet, a British betting website, President Trump could be one of the surprise guests at the Grandest Stage of Them All next year. He is a +1000 underdog to make an appearance at WrestleMania 33 but anything could happen.



It should be noted that Trump was inducted to the WWE Hall of Fame by Vince McMahon in 2013. He has been a great friend of the WWE since he promoted the early years of WrestleMania in the 1980s. WrestleMania IV and V were held at the Trump Plaza in 1988 and 1989, respectively.



Trump also got physical in the ring during his feud with McMahon in the Battle of the Billionaires back in 2007. He got to shave McMahon's head after the match but he also received a stunner from Stone Cold Steve Austin that night at WrestleMania 23.



Now that Trump is the president, his star power alone could help boost the ratings of the WWE. However, he might be even more difficult to schedule since he will be busy running the world's most powerful country.



According to Forbes, Trump's association with the WWE is very helpful as the company's stock went up by 5 percent after the election results became official. It comes at a very desperate time for the WWE since their stock went down by 17 percent in October due to the declining number of WWE Network subscribers.



The report also noted that Vince and Linda McMahon are big republican donors and helped Trump during his campaign. If ever Trump wants to repay the McMahon Family back, an appearance as the United States president at WrestleMania 33 is not a bad idea.



Nevertheless, these are just purely speculative at the moment and nothing has been confirmed. Check out the video below to see some of the highlights of the Battle of the Billionaires.




The Supreme Courts decision to hear Justice Markandeya Katjus views on the Soumya murder verdict is unprecedented. On September 15 when the court reduced the punishment given to Govindachamy for the rape and murder of the 23-year-old girl in 2011 from death penalty to life imprisonment, it evoked widespread criticism, particularly in Kerala. The court relied on the lack of evidence that the girl was pushed down from the moving train to exempt him from the gallows. However, the doctor who conducted the post-mortem explained to the media how the injuries found on her body clearly proved that she did not fall down from the train but was pushed down.

In a Facebook post, Justice Katju who retired from the Supreme Court and was chairman of the Press Council of India, found fault with the SC verdict. He wrote, I submit that the Supreme Court has erred in law in not holding the accused guilty of murder, and its judgment needs to be reviewed to this extent. It was proved that Govindachamy banged her head against the trains wall several times, raped her and she died of the injuries she suffered a week later. She did not fall down from the train accidentally. Even if he had not pushed her down, he deserved the highest punishment for his barbarous acts which resulted in her death.

The state government and Soumyas mother have approached the Supreme Court for a review of its verdict. The hearing on the review petition will be heard on November 11. The court has taken a serious view of Justice Katjus comment.

It is unfortunate that he has taken the stand that he will not appear in the court. True, there is a bar on retired apex court judges appearing in courts on behalf of any client but in this case, it is the court which has requisitioned his service. It will be in the interest of justice if Justice Katju appears before the court and explains his stand. Ultimately, let justice triumph.

The Supreme Courts decision to hear Justice Markandeya Katjus views on the Soumya murder verdict is unprecedented. On September 15 when the court reduced the punishment given to Govindachamy for the rape and murder of the 23-year-old girl in 2011 from death penalty to life imprisonment, it evoked widespread criticism, particularly in Kerala. The court relied on the lack of evidence that the girl was pushed down from the moving train to exempt him from the gallows. However, the doctor who conducted the post-mortem explained to the media how the injuries found on her body clearly proved that she did not fall down from the train but was pushed down. In a Facebook post, Justice Katju who retired from the Supreme Court and was chairman of the Press Council of India, found fault with the SC verdict. He wrote, I submit that the Supreme Court has erred in law in not holding the accused guilty of murder, and its judgment needs to be reviewed to this extent. It was proved that Govindachamy banged her head against the trains wall several times, raped her and she died of the injuries she suffered a week later. She did not fall down from the train accidentally. Even if he had not pushed her down, he deserved the highest punishment for his barbarous acts which resulted in her death. The state government and Soumyas mother have approached the Supreme Court for a review of its verdict. The hearing on the review petition will be heard on November 11. The court has taken a serious view of Justice Katjus comment. It is unfortunate that he has taken the stand that he will not appear in the court. True, there is a bar on retired apex court judges appearing in courts on behalf of any client but in this case, it is the court which has requisitioned his service. It will be in the interest of justice if Justice Katju appears before the court and explains his stand. Ultimately, let justice triumph.
By Express News Service

PARADIP: Police on Thursday raided the offices of Orissa Stevedores Ltd (OSL) in Paradip and Cuttack, besides houses of the companys Managing Director Mahimananda Mishra, Executive Director Basant Bal and two other officials in Puri, Paradip, Cuttack and Kendrapara in connection with the murder of Seaways Group manager, Mahendra Swain. Five police teams had raided 10 locations by the evening. Police also froze the OSLs bank accounts.

OSL Managing Director, Mishra and the other officials are allegedly the prime suspects in the murder case. Police also interrogated the employees of OSL to know the whereabouts of Mishra and others.

Jagatisnghpur SP, JN Pankaj said the raids will continue. Earlier, police had issued a look-out circular against Mishra.

Last week, Paradip Police questioned four dumper owners after it received a letter from Dumper Owners Association which alleged that attempts by Swain to unsuccessfully induct new dumpers for transportation may have caused acrimony leading to the October 26 murder.

PARADIP: Police on Thursday raided the offices of Orissa Stevedores Ltd (OSL) in Paradip and Cuttack, besides houses of the companys Managing Director Mahimananda Mishra, Executive Director Basant Bal and two other officials in Puri, Paradip, Cuttack and Kendrapara in connection with the murder of Seaways Group manager, Mahendra Swain. Five police teams had raided 10 locations by the evening. Police also froze the OSLs bank accounts. OSL Managing Director, Mishra and the other officials are allegedly the prime suspects in the murder case. Police also interrogated the employees of OSL to know the whereabouts of Mishra and others. Jagatisnghpur SP, JN Pankaj said the raids will continue. Earlier, police had issued a look-out circular against Mishra. Last week, Paradip Police questioned four dumper owners after it received a letter from Dumper Owners Association which alleged that attempts by Swain to unsuccessfully induct new dumpers for transportation may have caused acrimony leading to the October 26 murder.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI/TIRUCHY:The six-year-long struggle by farmers, environmental organisations and political parties in Tamil Nadu against methane extraction and shale gas projects finally came to an end after Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Dharmendra Pradhan, announced on Thursday that the Centre has given up these projects.

Though licences given to the private company for the methane project were cancelled last year, a concrete announcement on scrapping the project has come only now, culminating the struggle triggered by late activist farmer Nammalvar. Farmers in the delta districts welcomed the news by bursting crackers and distributing sweets.

Generations have been saved; 690 sq km of the Cauvery delta would now breathe easy, as the air, water and land would remain free from the threats posed by this project, Cauvery Dhanapalan, of Cauvery Delta Farmers Protection Association, told Express. However, some farmers view this announcement with suspicion. PR Pandian, president, Cauvery Delta All Farmers Associations Coordination Committee, pointed out that the ministers statement could not be accepted as final, as it is a policy decision of the government.

CHENNAI/TIRUCHY:The six-year-long struggle by farmers, environmental organisations and political parties in Tamil Nadu against methane extraction and shale gas projects finally came to an end after Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Dharmendra Pradhan, announced on Thursday that the Centre has given up these projects. Though licences given to the private company for the methane project were cancelled last year, a concrete announcement on scrapping the project has come only now, culminating the struggle triggered by late activist farmer Nammalvar. Farmers in the delta districts welcomed the news by bursting crackers and distributing sweets. Generations have been saved; 690 sq km of the Cauvery delta would now breathe easy, as the air, water and land would remain free from the threats posed by this project, Cauvery Dhanapalan, of Cauvery Delta Farmers Protection Association, told Express. However, some farmers view this announcement with suspicion. PR Pandian, president, Cauvery Delta All Farmers Associations Coordination Committee, pointed out that the ministers statement could not be accepted as final, as it is a policy decision of the government.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu is looking forward to facilitate exchange programmes and building partnership with South Korea since the level of learning in school education in the state was is similar to that of that far eastern nation, Education Minister K Pandiarajan said on Thursday.

Addressing a seminar organised by the School Education Department and Academy of Korean Studies here, he said Tamil Nadu has a tie up with United Kingdom for a students' exchange programme and a similar partnership was expected from Korea. We desire facilitate student exchange programme with Seoul University.

For school students, we want children from 13 to 16 years to work on cyber projects with their counterparts in South Korea. Let's institute some nice projects which we can take forward. It is a very target oriented and long term mission of our Chief Minister, he said. According to him such exchanges would help students to learn and internalise different cultures. The TN government will soon come up with Amma Science kit and Amma Maths kit, he disclosed. Speaking on the occassion, D Sabitha, School Education Secretary, said in the last six years the department had received the highest budget to the extent of `1,120,00. We have appointed 75,000 teachers in the last six years. capacity building. We want to emulate the Republic of Korea to provide capacity building for the teachers, she added.

CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu is looking forward to facilitate exchange programmes and building partnership with South Korea since the level of learning in school education in the state was is similar to that of that far eastern nation, Education Minister K Pandiarajan said on Thursday. Addressing a seminar organised by the School Education Department and Academy of Korean Studies here, he said Tamil Nadu has a tie up with United Kingdom for a students' exchange programme and a similar partnership was expected from Korea. We desire facilitate student exchange programme with Seoul University. For school students, we want children from 13 to 16 years to work on cyber projects with their counterparts in South Korea. Let's institute some nice projects which we can take forward. It is a very target oriented and long term mission of our Chief Minister, he said. According to him such exchanges would help students to learn and internalise different cultures. The TN government will soon come up with Amma Science kit and Amma Maths kit, he disclosed. Speaking on the occassion, D Sabitha, School Education Secretary, said in the last six years the department had received the highest budget to the extent of `1,120,00. We have appointed 75,000 teachers in the last six years. capacity building. We want to emulate the Republic of Korea to provide capacity building for the teachers, she added.
Gopika Nair By

The outpouring of defeated Facebook status updates commenced at around 11:30 p.m. (EDT), almost three hours before Donald Trump addressed America as president-elect of the United States.

Im moving to Canada served as the official punchline of election night until Canads Immigration and Citizenship website crashed when Trump began leading in the state projections. At that point, the possibility of a Trump presidency finally registered and only mild disbelief followed CNNs announcement that Hillary Clinton had called Trump, conceding the race.

Still, the outcome was unexpected.

I attend a liberal arts college in Delaware, a predominantly red county in Ohio. Even so, the rhetoric I consumed every moment leading up to Election Day consisted of my fellow millennial peers, most of whom are American citizens, urging others through lengthy social media posts to vote for the candidate who has political knowledge, who discussed actual policies instead of spewing meaningless, grandiose statements and who hadnt repeatedly offended women, people of colour, those who belong to the LGBTQIA+ community and people with disabilities.

On November 7, Clintons campaign office in downtown Delaware set up camp at a crosswalk near my university. While students walked to and from classes, the volunteers from the campaign office called out to passersby, asking if they had registered to vote, well into the night. Trumps campaign office made no such effort.

As it turned out, the local GOP office didnt need to; Trump won Delaware County by 53 to 40 percent, while he won 52 to 44 percent in the swing state of Ohio.

Following the presidential results, a lull fell over my university on the morning of November 9. We were dead on our feet, not just because many of us stayed up until 5 am, closely following or covering the election, but because the result ultimately felt like a slap in the face to everyone who wasnt a Trump supporter.

A few professors cancelled class, others used their class time to discuss the election results and though some unity emerged in my university, this election emphasised how divided the US is and now more than ever, we are scared for the future of women, minorities, immigrants and the poverty-stricken.

The evening after the results were announced, I, along with other international students who hold non-immigrant, F-1 student visas, received an email from my universitys International and Off-Campus Programs office. The email from the assistant director assured us that neither our legal status nor our place at the university have changed because of the election. The assurance came after several students expressed concern about their visa status given Trumps rise to power.

Clinton wasnt an exemplary candidate. Accusations follow her and her family like fruit flies and most of them have been founded on evidence. But the fact of the matter is no political candidate will ever represent the true American ideal; that picture-perfect model is subjective.

Earlier this semester, Edward Snowden, former National Security Agency contractor, talked to students, faculty and the general public at my university via Google Hangouts as part of a lecture series.

Toward the end of his talk about national security, an audience member asked Snowden if he would feel more comfortable returning to the US if Clinton was elected as president. Snowdens response noted that citizens must be careful about placing all of their trust in political figures, no matter who they are.

But perhaps if Clinton had been elected, more than half of Americas population wouldnt feel discomfited. Illegal immigrants wouldnt have to worry about being torn away from their families. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), who has supported immigration reform, said deportation of noncitizens is impractical and inhumane to a lot of those families.

Minorities wouldnt be concerned about being discriminated against based on their religion, race, gender or sexuality. International students who come to the US for higher education wouldnt have to worry about their legal status in the US despite holding valid F-1 student visas.

Attending college in the US has been a dream of mine since I was 12. Of course, at the time, the dream was frivolous. I ate up what I saw in American movies about the American life and yearned for that. But now, Im here, 20 years old and a nearly 16-hour plane ride away from my parents and the city I grew up in because the dream isnt frivolous anymore. Studying at a liberal arts college in the US expanded my views on many social, cultural and political issues through uncensored conversations Ive been exposed to while at school.

America has often been called the land of the free. Those words appealed to me when I was 12 and it still appeals to me eight years later. But Trumps comments and his stance on issues of public concern make me question whether America would really be the land of the free under his leadership.

The land of the free would ideally let people practice their religion without shaming them. It would let people marry whoever they want without stigmatising it. Walls wouldnt be built to keep immigrants away.

Americas strength is its diversity and openness and that shouldnt be destroyed under the leadership of a man who feeds off of working-class white Americas xenophobia, something that stems from a feeling of becoming marginalised due to job losses and having to give up their beliefs, politically incorrect that they are in the new world. Which is why theyve voted to reverse things and go back in time. One can only hope that the great task of leading a country gives Trump a new and broad outlook that while addressing the major concerns of unemployment and barely-trickling-down economic development among his voterbase, he also realises the importance of inclusivity.

The outpouring of defeated Facebook status updates commenced at around 11:30 p.m. (EDT), almost three hours before Donald Trump addressed America as president-elect of the United States. Im moving to Canada served as the official punchline of election night until Canads Immigration and Citizenship website crashed when Trump began leading in the state projections. At that point, the possibility of a Trump presidency finally registered and only mild disbelief followed CNNs announcement that Hillary Clinton had called Trump, conceding the race. Still, the outcome was unexpected. I attend a liberal arts college in Delaware, a predominantly red county in Ohio. Even so, the rhetoric I consumed every moment leading up to Election Day consisted of my fellow millennial peers, most of whom are American citizens, urging others through lengthy social media posts to vote for the candidate who has political knowledge, who discussed actual policies instead of spewing meaningless, grandiose statements and who hadnt repeatedly offended women, people of colour, those who belong to the LGBTQIA+ community and people with disabilities. On November 7, Clintons campaign office in downtown Delaware set up camp at a crosswalk near my university. While students walked to and from classes, the volunteers from the campaign office called out to passersby, asking if they had registered to vote, well into the night. Trumps campaign office made no such effort. As it turned out, the local GOP office didnt need to; Trump won Delaware County by 53 to 40 percent, while he won 52 to 44 percent in the swing state of Ohio. Following the presidential results, a lull fell over my university on the morning of November 9. We were dead on our feet, not just because many of us stayed up until 5 am, closely following or covering the election, but because the result ultimately felt like a slap in the face to everyone who wasnt a Trump supporter. A few professors cancelled class, others used their class time to discuss the election results and though some unity emerged in my university, this election emphasised how divided the US is and now more than ever, we are scared for the future of women, minorities, immigrants and the poverty-stricken. The evening after the results were announced, I, along with other international students who hold non-immigrant, F-1 student visas, received an email from my universitys International and Off-Campus Programs office. The email from the assistant director assured us that neither our legal status nor our place at the university have changed because of the election. The assurance came after several students expressed concern about their visa status given Trumps rise to power. Clinton wasnt an exemplary candidate. Accusations follow her and her family like fruit flies and most of them have been founded on evidence. But the fact of the matter is no political candidate will ever represent the true American ideal; that picture-perfect model is subjective. Earlier this semester, Edward Snowden, former National Security Agency contractor, talked to students, faculty and the general public at my university via Google Hangouts as part of a lecture series. Toward the end of his talk about national security, an audience member asked Snowden if he would feel more comfortable returning to the US if Clinton was elected as president. Snowdens response noted that citizens must be careful about placing all of their trust in political figures, no matter who they are. But perhaps if Clinton had been elected, more than half of Americas population wouldnt feel discomfited. Illegal immigrants wouldnt have to worry about being torn away from their families. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), who has supported immigration reform, said deportation of noncitizens is impractical and inhumane to a lot of those families. Minorities wouldnt be concerned about being discriminated against based on their religion, race, gender or sexuality. International students who come to the US for higher education wouldnt have to worry about their legal status in the US despite holding valid F-1 student visas. Attending college in the US has been a dream of mine since I was 12. Of course, at the time, the dream was frivolous. I ate up what I saw in American movies about the American life and yearned for that. But now, Im here, 20 years old and a nearly 16-hour plane ride away from my parents and the city I grew up in because the dream isnt frivolous anymore. Studying at a liberal arts college in the US expanded my views on many social, cultural and political issues through uncensored conversations Ive been exposed to while at school. America has often been called the land of the free. Those words appealed to me when I was 12 and it still appeals to me eight years later. But Trumps comments and his stance on issues of public concern make me question whether America would really be the land of the free under his leadership. The land of the free would ideally let people practice their religion without shaming them. It would let people marry whoever they want without stigmatising it. Walls wouldnt be built to keep immigrants away. Americas strength is its diversity and openness and that shouldnt be destroyed under the leadership of a man who feeds off of working-class white Americas xenophobia, something that stems from a feeling of becoming marginalised due to job losses and having to give up their beliefs, politically incorrect that they are in the new world. Which is why theyve voted to reverse things and go back in time. One can only hope that the great task of leading a country gives Trump a new and broad outlook that while addressing the major concerns of unemployment and barely-trickling-down economic development among his voterbase, he also realises the importance of inclusivity.
By AFP

MOSUL: Elite Iraqi troops battled the Islamic State group in the streets of Mosul on Friday as US-backed forces in Syria pressed an advance on jihadist bastion Raqa after a sandstorm eased.

The high winds in the desert which separates the Syrian Kurdish-Arab militia alliance from the jihadists' stronghold in the Euphrates Valley had slowed their advance on Thursday as visibility levels plummeted.

Iraqi forces too had regrouped after meeting stronger than expected resistance from IS fighters on the east bank of the Tigris River which runs through Mosul after thrusting into the built-up area last week.

The jihadists had been expected to pull back to the west bank, a stronghold of Sunni Arab insurgency even before IS swept through the minority community's heartland north and west of Baghdad in mid-2014.

Commanders of Iraq's elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) said that troops were advancing on two eastern neighbourhoods of the city.

The battle to retake Mosul is now in its fourth week, and while troops have entered the built-up area, there are weeks, if not months, of fighting still to go.

"Our forces have begun the attack on Arbajiyah. The clashes are ongoing," Staff Lieutenant Colonel Muntadhar Salem said, referring to an area in the east of the city.

The latest fighting came "after a few days of quiet," he said.

Another CTS officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ali Hussein Fadhel, said that the first row of buildings in Arbajiyah had been seized.

"We are within firing range of Karkukli but the full attack has not yet started," he said, referring to another eastern neighbourhood.

In a makeshift command post in a two-storey house, a CTS soldier used an iPad to control a reconnaissance drone on the lookout for jihadist suicide bombers.

Iraqi forces launched the operation to retake Mosul on October 17, with federal and Kurdish regional forces closing in on the city from three sides.

Pro-government Shiite paramilitaries later began an advance on the town of Tal Afar, which commands the city's western approaches, with the goal of cutting the jihadists off from territory they control in neighbouring Syria.

The advance up the Tigris Valley from the south has been slowest. The troops on that front had the farthest to cover, with a string of jihadist-held towns in their path.

On Thursday, the battle neared the remains of ancient Nimrud, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of Mosul, raising fears for the famed heritage site already ravaged by jihadist bombs and sledgehammers.

Syrian forces converging near Raqa

In Syria, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said their advance on Raqa was back on track after a sandstorm which swept through the area on Thursday eased.

"We seized control of two new villages yesterday but we didn't advance as far as planned because of the sandstorm," SDF commander Merkhas Kamishlo told AFP.

Fighting has focused on the IS-held village of Al-Heisha, around 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Raqa.

An AFP correspondent reported heavy air strikes on Friday morning by the US-led coalition supporting the SDF forces.

"Al-Heisha is totally besieged and overnight the US-led coalition hit four Daesh positions inside the village, and destroyed a vehicle being prepared for use as a bomb," Kamishlo said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

The SDF launched its offensive last weekend and has been pushing south from areas near the Turkish border towards Raqa.

Kamishlo said SDF forces advancing south from the towns of Ain Issa and Suluk were close to converging at a position some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from Raqa.

"The situation is good, the operation continues," SDF spokeswoman Jihan Sheikh Ahmed told AFP.

Dozens of families have been seen fleeing towards SDF lines in recent days.

Many have been arriving in trucks and cars, loaded down with belongings and in some cases with livestock including cows and sheep.

Raqa had a population of some 240,000 before the eruption of Syria's civil war in 2011 but more than 80,000 people have since fled there from other parts of the country.

Mosul is much bigger, home to more than a million people, and over 45,000 people have fled since the offensive began.

Aid workers have expressed fears of a major humanitarian crisis as fighting intensifies inside the city, where IS is expected to use civilians as human shields.

MOSUL: Elite Iraqi troops battled the Islamic State group in the streets of Mosul on Friday as US-backed forces in Syria pressed an advance on jihadist bastion Raqa after a sandstorm eased. The high winds in the desert which separates the Syrian Kurdish-Arab militia alliance from the jihadists' stronghold in the Euphrates Valley had slowed their advance on Thursday as visibility levels plummeted. Iraqi forces too had regrouped after meeting stronger than expected resistance from IS fighters on the east bank of the Tigris River which runs through Mosul after thrusting into the built-up area last week. The jihadists had been expected to pull back to the west bank, a stronghold of Sunni Arab insurgency even before IS swept through the minority community's heartland north and west of Baghdad in mid-2014. Commanders of Iraq's elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) said that troops were advancing on two eastern neighbourhoods of the city. The battle to retake Mosul is now in its fourth week, and while troops have entered the built-up area, there are weeks, if not months, of fighting still to go. "Our forces have begun the attack on Arbajiyah. The clashes are ongoing," Staff Lieutenant Colonel Muntadhar Salem said, referring to an area in the east of the city. The latest fighting came "after a few days of quiet," he said. Another CTS officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ali Hussein Fadhel, said that the first row of buildings in Arbajiyah had been seized. "We are within firing range of Karkukli but the full attack has not yet started," he said, referring to another eastern neighbourhood. In a makeshift command post in a two-storey house, a CTS soldier used an iPad to control a reconnaissance drone on the lookout for jihadist suicide bombers. Iraqi forces launched the operation to retake Mosul on October 17, with federal and Kurdish regional forces closing in on the city from three sides. Pro-government Shiite paramilitaries later began an advance on the town of Tal Afar, which commands the city's western approaches, with the goal of cutting the jihadists off from territory they control in neighbouring Syria. The advance up the Tigris Valley from the south has been slowest. The troops on that front had the farthest to cover, with a string of jihadist-held towns in their path. On Thursday, the battle neared the remains of ancient Nimrud, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of Mosul, raising fears for the famed heritage site already ravaged by jihadist bombs and sledgehammers. Syrian forces converging near Raqa In Syria, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said their advance on Raqa was back on track after a sandstorm which swept through the area on Thursday eased. "We seized control of two new villages yesterday but we didn't advance as far as planned because of the sandstorm," SDF commander Merkhas Kamishlo told AFP. Fighting has focused on the IS-held village of Al-Heisha, around 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Raqa. An AFP correspondent reported heavy air strikes on Friday morning by the US-led coalition supporting the SDF forces. "Al-Heisha is totally besieged and overnight the US-led coalition hit four Daesh positions inside the village, and destroyed a vehicle being prepared for use as a bomb," Kamishlo said, using an Arabic acronym for IS. The SDF launched its offensive last weekend and has been pushing south from areas near the Turkish border towards Raqa. Kamishlo said SDF forces advancing south from the towns of Ain Issa and Suluk were close to converging at a position some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from Raqa. "The situation is good, the operation continues," SDF spokeswoman Jihan Sheikh Ahmed told AFP. Dozens of families have been seen fleeing towards SDF lines in recent days. Many have been arriving in trucks and cars, loaded down with belongings and in some cases with livestock including cows and sheep. Raqa had a population of some 240,000 before the eruption of Syria's civil war in 2011 but more than 80,000 people have since fled there from other parts of the country. Mosul is much bigger, home to more than a million people, and over 45,000 people have fled since the offensive began. Aid workers have expressed fears of a major humanitarian crisis as fighting intensifies inside the city, where IS is expected to use civilians as human shields.
By Associated Press

MEXICO CITY: A former Mexican governor sought by authorities on suspicion of corruption reappeared Thursday and turned himself in.

Accompanied by his lawyer, ex-Gov. Guillermo Padres of the northern state of Sonora proclaimed his innocence in an interview with Radio Formula and said he was voluntarily appearing before a judge to face the allegations against him.

"I go with my head held high," Padres said.

After the interview was over, he left the radio station in a white SUV. Mexican television news showed him being escorted by marines to a jail in the capital.

Padres was governor of Sonora, which borders Arizona, from 2009 to 2015.

Late Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Gilberto Higuera Bernal said Padres and one of his sons were arrested on charges of organized crime and use of illicitly obtained funds.

Crisongo de Jesus Diaz, head of the division for financial analysis in the Attorney General's Office, said investigators had traced $8.8 million to accounts Padres controlled outside the country.

Authorities also allege that between 2009 and 2014, Sonora state awarded school uniform contracts totaling more than $20 million to front companies tied to Padres.

Officials said they traced deposits totaling about $15 million from the fictitious companies to an account controlled by a Padres relative and low-level government functionary. The funds then spread out to accounts controlled by other family members, including Padres' son, Diaz said.

Padres' whereabouts had been unknown, and Mexican officials said in October that the international police agency Interpol had issued a red notice for his detention.

"I was not fleeing, nor have I left the country," Padres told Radio Formula. "I have always been in Mexico."

Padres said it "pained" him greatly that his conservative National Action Party suspended his party rights.

In a statement, the party said Padres made the right decision to submit himself to authorities.

"Just like every citizen, he has the right to a fair trial in which the diverse evidence will be evaluated with total objectivity," the party said.

MEXICO CITY: A former Mexican governor sought by authorities on suspicion of corruption reappeared Thursday and turned himself in. Accompanied by his lawyer, ex-Gov. Guillermo Padres of the northern state of Sonora proclaimed his innocence in an interview with Radio Formula and said he was voluntarily appearing before a judge to face the allegations against him. "I go with my head held high," Padres said. After the interview was over, he left the radio station in a white SUV. Mexican television news showed him being escorted by marines to a jail in the capital. Padres was governor of Sonora, which borders Arizona, from 2009 to 2015. Late Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Gilberto Higuera Bernal said Padres and one of his sons were arrested on charges of organized crime and use of illicitly obtained funds. Crisongo de Jesus Diaz, head of the division for financial analysis in the Attorney General's Office, said investigators had traced $8.8 million to accounts Padres controlled outside the country. Authorities also allege that between 2009 and 2014, Sonora state awarded school uniform contracts totaling more than $20 million to front companies tied to Padres. Officials said they traced deposits totaling about $15 million from the fictitious companies to an account controlled by a Padres relative and low-level government functionary. The funds then spread out to accounts controlled by other family members, including Padres' son, Diaz said. Padres' whereabouts had been unknown, and Mexican officials said in October that the international police agency Interpol had issued a red notice for his detention. "I was not fleeing, nor have I left the country," Padres told Radio Formula. "I have always been in Mexico." Padres said it "pained" him greatly that his conservative National Action Party suspended his party rights. In a statement, the party said Padres made the right decision to submit himself to authorities. "Just like every citizen, he has the right to a fair trial in which the diverse evidence will be evaluated with total objectivity," the party said.
By Associated Press

ATHENS: An armed anarchist group in Greece is calling for "attacks and clashes" during next week's visit by U.S. President Barack Obama.

The Conspiracy Cells of Fire group is urging anarchists to "spoil the party ... and sabotage" the Nov. 15-16 visit to Athens.

The nihilist group has organized a string of bomb attacks on judges, police and other authority figures. The attacks have caused minor injuries, but no fatalities.

In a posting on a left-wing website Friday, the group called on anarchists to use Obama's visit to "return a little of the violence we receive daily."

Anarchist groups are planning a protest march to the U.S. embassy in Athens on Nov. 15. Similar protests during a 1999 visit by then-president Bill Clinton led to extensive violence.

ATHENS: An armed anarchist group in Greece is calling for "attacks and clashes" during next week's visit by U.S. President Barack Obama. The Conspiracy Cells of Fire group is urging anarchists to "spoil the party ... and sabotage" the Nov. 15-16 visit to Athens. The nihilist group has organized a string of bomb attacks on judges, police and other authority figures. The attacks have caused minor injuries, but no fatalities. In a posting on a left-wing website Friday, the group called on anarchists to use Obama's visit to "return a little of the violence we receive daily." Anarchist groups are planning a protest march to the U.S. embassy in Athens on Nov. 15. Similar protests during a 1999 visit by then-president Bill Clinton led to extensive violence.
By IANS

KATHMANDU: Nepal's banking system has held banned Indian currency (IC) 500 and 1,000 notes worth Rs 35 million ($524,737).



"As reported by the banking institutions licensed by us, they have held banned IC notes worth 35 million rupees as of Thursday," said Narayan Poudel, spokesperson of Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), adding that the amount could cross Rs 40 million ($599,700) once remaining a few banking institutions send their details about the stock of such notes.



However, Nepalese central bank believes that the traders and general public living in bordering areas with India as well as Nepalese migrant workers who had returned from India might have held huge amount of these notes, Xinhua news agency reported.



"We don't have record of IC notes held by general public," said Poudel.



The IC notes denominated upto 100 rupee has long been freely exchangeable in Nepal.



But, India had allowed Nepal to use IC notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees last year only after Nepal made request to its southern neighbour for such provision considering easing Nepalese migrant to carry Indian currency notes while returning home. They were facing the risk of being robbed on the way while carrying large bundle of low denominated IC notes.



After India allowed Nepal to use of IC notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees last year, the Himalayan nation had allowed Nepalese migrant workers and Indian nationals to carry such notes upto 25,000 rupees in Nepal.



Sudden Indian decision of banning the use of these notes left shockwaves across Nepal's banking sector as well as people around the bordering areas and migrant workers' families. Officials of NRB and Nepalese banks said that they were getting constant inquiries from people whether the IC notes held by them would be exchanged.



Meanwhile, Nepal's central bank has asked Indian central bank Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to make arrangement for exchanging the banned notes available with Nepal's banking system as well as the cash held by people upto 25,000 rupees.



"We have written the RBI for making exchange of legally available stock of such IC notes in Nepal," said Basudev Adhikari, director of foreign exchange management department at NRB.



"We have also written to Nepal's Finance Ministry for making diplomatic initiative with India for settling the issue."

KATHMANDU: Nepal's banking system has held banned Indian currency (IC) 500 and 1,000 notes worth Rs 35 million ($524,737). "As reported by the banking institutions licensed by us, they have held banned IC notes worth 35 million rupees as of Thursday," said Narayan Poudel, spokesperson of Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), adding that the amount could cross Rs 40 million ($599,700) once remaining a few banking institutions send their details about the stock of such notes. However, Nepalese central bank believes that the traders and general public living in bordering areas with India as well as Nepalese migrant workers who had returned from India might have held huge amount of these notes, Xinhua news agency reported. "We don't have record of IC notes held by general public," said Poudel. The IC notes denominated upto 100 rupee has long been freely exchangeable in Nepal. But, India had allowed Nepal to use IC notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees last year only after Nepal made request to its southern neighbour for such provision considering easing Nepalese migrant to carry Indian currency notes while returning home. They were facing the risk of being robbed on the way while carrying large bundle of low denominated IC notes. After India allowed Nepal to use of IC notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees last year, the Himalayan nation had allowed Nepalese migrant workers and Indian nationals to carry such notes upto 25,000 rupees in Nepal. Sudden Indian decision of banning the use of these notes left shockwaves across Nepal's banking sector as well as people around the bordering areas and migrant workers' families. Officials of NRB and Nepalese banks said that they were getting constant inquiries from people whether the IC notes held by them would be exchanged. Meanwhile, Nepal's central bank has asked Indian central bank Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to make arrangement for exchanging the banned notes available with Nepal's banking system as well as the cash held by people upto 25,000 rupees. "We have written the RBI for making exchange of legally available stock of such IC notes in Nepal," said Basudev Adhikari, director of foreign exchange management department at NRB. "We have also written to Nepal's Finance Ministry for making diplomatic initiative with India for settling the issue."
By ANI

TOKYO: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who arrived in Tokyo last night on a three-day visit, met Japanese Emperor Akihito today, where they discussed the common bonds between their nations and deliberated on the future of Asia.

Speaking of civilizations. PM @narendramodi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of #IndiaJapan and the future of Asia. A rare audience that symbolizes the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in a series of tweets.

Later in the day, Prime Narendra Modi will have wide ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe at the11th India Japan annual summit in Tokyo which will include security, trade and investment, skill development and infrastructure development.

Several agreements will be signed after talks between the two leaders.

Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Tokyo last night will also address Japanese business leaders.



Bilateral trade at 14.51 billion dollars witnessed a decline of about 6.5 per cent in 2015-16 as compared to 2014-15.

Indias export to Japan was 4.66 billion dollars while import stood at 9.85 billion dollars.

Prime Minister during his talks with Abe and Japanese business community may try to address this downward trend in bilateral trade.

TOKYO: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who arrived in Tokyo last night on a three-day visit, met Japanese Emperor Akihito today, where they discussed the common bonds between their nations and deliberated on the future of Asia. Speaking of civilizations. PM @narendramodi and Emperor Akihito talk of the common bonds of #IndiaJapan and the future of Asia. A rare audience that symbolizes the unique warmth between #IndiaJapan. PM @narendramodi greets His Highness Emperor Akihito of Japan, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in a series of tweets. Later in the day, Prime Narendra Modi will have wide ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe at the11th India Japan annual summit in Tokyo which will include security, trade and investment, skill development and infrastructure development. Several agreements will be signed after talks between the two leaders. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Tokyo last night will also address Japanese business leaders. Bilateral trade at 14.51 billion dollars witnessed a decline of about 6.5 per cent in 2015-16 as compared to 2014-15. Indias export to Japan was 4.66 billion dollars while import stood at 9.85 billion dollars. Prime Minister during his talks with Abe and Japanese business community may try to address this downward trend in bilateral trade.
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 specs update: Artificial intelligence capabilities, improved storage capabilities, camera upgrade (Photo : YouTube/AskTheAndroidGuy)

According to many reports, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is in the works and it will be released in 2017.



At present, the electronics company Samsung is conducting the Note 7 Exchange Program wherein people who purchased the device will be able to upgrade to Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge or Samsung Galaxy S7.



Advertisement

Furthermore, consumers will get awesome discounts on Galaxy Note 8 or Galaxy S8 devices once they are unveiled.



It is important to note that Samsung has not confirmed any of the rumoured features and specifications of the Galaxy Note 8. However, several reports indicate that the electronics company will go for an early release of the Note 8 so that it does not lose more consumers.



According to tech experts, Samsung will release the device in the first quarter of next year, as early as January, during CES. Patrick Moorhead, President of Moor Insights & Strategy, has said that either January at the CES next year or in March at the MWC.



If rumors are to be believed, Samsung Galaxy Note 8 will get 6GB RAM, Exynos 8895 chipset and a 4K resolution.



Several reports have predicted a camera upgrade, improved storage capabilities and artificial intelligence capabilities.



Furthermore, a rear dual camera setup is anticipated with 8MP and 16MP sensors. An updated S Pen and fingerprint scanner will reportedly be incorporated. Speculations are doing the rounds that the electronics company will go back to the removable battery feature.



The company's unprecedented Note 7 recall was a huge blow to the company. The electronics company took a huge financial hit, and its image was severely hurt after having to recall the device twice.



It killed the Note 7 just a few months after it unveiled it, The Verge reported. According to the leaker Evan Blass, Samsung is making a Galaxy Note 8 and two Galaxy S8 models for 2017.



The company may still decide to cancel the Note 8; however, at present, it looks like that Samsung is actively planning to manufacture a new phablet in 2017. Many reports suggest that the company is looking to target potential Note 7 buyers with a larger Galaxy S8 version next year.



Furthermore, according to reports, the two Galaxy S8 models will have edge displays. If latest reports are anything to go, the South Korean company is ditching flat screens on upcoming flagship smartphones.


By IANS

WASHINGTON: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who battled unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he is ready to cooperate with President-elect Donald Trump on behalf of "working families".

"To the degree that Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him," Efe news agency cited a statement by Sanders.

"If he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him," the statement added.

According to the Vermont senator, Trump "tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media".

"People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids - all while the very rich become much richer," Sanders said in the message, which did not congratulate Trump on his victory.

Sanders ultimately endorsed Clinton, angering many of his followers with what they saw as a betrayal of the stands he took during the campaign.

The ire of disgruntled Sanders supporters was later fueled by a WikiLeaks release of documents showing that the supposedly neutral Democratic National Committee (DNC) was working to ensure that Clinton got the nomination.

WASHINGTON: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who battled unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he is ready to cooperate with President-elect Donald Trump on behalf of "working families". "To the degree that Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him," Efe news agency cited a statement by Sanders. "If he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him," the statement added. According to the Vermont senator, Trump "tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media". "People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids - all while the very rich become much richer," Sanders said in the message, which did not congratulate Trump on his victory. Sanders ultimately endorsed Clinton, angering many of his followers with what they saw as a betrayal of the stands he took during the campaign. The ire of disgruntled Sanders supporters was later fueled by a WikiLeaks release of documents showing that the supposedly neutral Democratic National Committee (DNC) was working to ensure that Clinton got the nomination.
COLOMBO: Sri Lankas private TV channels are worried over the governments proposal to increase the levy on imported and dubbed TV programs and films from LKR 90,000 (US$ 610) to LKR 300,000 (US$ 2,032) for every 30 minutes of running time.

The proposed hike was part of several economic revival packages proposed by Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake in his annual budget speech on November 10.

Sri Lankas ten TV stations, barring those in the state sector, fear that they may be starved of income generating programs if the levy comes into force. Most of the private TV channels depend heavily on Hindi, Tamil and English films and tele-dramas (dubbed into Sinhalese and Tamil ) for advertising revenues as these are very popular.

It is no surprise that these imported and dubbed versions are gobbling up prime time in the evenings. Sources in the TV stations say that the islands electronic media will be financially crippled by the hike. Some will have to close down or cut their staff, they said.

A top official of Maharaja TV, which runs popular channels in all the three languages in the country, said that if the past is any guide, such levies do not yield the desired results. In 2007, the Mahinda Rajapaka government, at the instance of some leading Sri Lankan TV and film personalities, imposed a levy.

The levy helped the government collect money but did not increase the presence of local productions in the telecasts as expected, because local productions did not measure up to viewers' expectations.

The idea in imposing the levy was to help the Sri Lankan film and tele-drama industry to make better quality products and ensure them time in the TV channels. But this did not happen. The ultra-modern film city at Ranmihitenna in South Sri Lanka near Matara, built in 2010 with the money collected from the levy went mostly unused.

But actor, producer and politician Ravindra Randeniya feels that the hefty hike is a good idea if there is consistent follow up action to improve the quality of Sri Lankan productions. The Ranmihitenna Cine City with boarding and lodging facilities for stars and crew and ample space should be maintained, as shooting can be done without loss of time there, he said. The Bollywood film Bombay Velvet was shot in Ranmihitenna. But due to political reasons the facility has been allowed to rot.

At present, Sri Lankan TV and film producers are unable to show their productions. According to Randeniya, up to 400 productions are waiting for slots. But these are occupied by imports which, for a small investment, fetch a lot of money for the TV stations, he said.

COLOMBO: Sri Lankas private TV channels are worried over the governments proposal to increase the levy on imported and dubbed TV programs and films from LKR 90,000 (US$ 610) to LKR 300,000 (US$ 2,032) for every 30 minutes of running time. The proposed hike was part of several economic revival packages proposed by Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake in his annual budget speech on November 10. Sri Lankas ten TV stations, barring those in the state sector, fear that they may be starved of income generating programs if the levy comes into force. Most of the private TV channels depend heavily on Hindi, Tamil and English films and tele-dramas (dubbed into Sinhalese and Tamil ) for advertising revenues as these are very popular. It is no surprise that these imported and dubbed versions are gobbling up prime time in the evenings. Sources in the TV stations say that the islands electronic media will be financially crippled by the hike. Some will have to close down or cut their staff, they said. A top official of Maharaja TV, which runs popular channels in all the three languages in the country, said that if the past is any guide, such levies do not yield the desired results. In 2007, the Mahinda Rajapaka government, at the instance of some leading Sri Lankan TV and film personalities, imposed a levy. The levy helped the government collect money but did not increase the presence of local productions in the telecasts as expected, because local productions did not measure up to viewers' expectations. The idea in imposing the levy was to help the Sri Lankan film and tele-drama industry to make better quality products and ensure them time in the TV channels. But this did not happen. The ultra-modern film city at Ranmihitenna in South Sri Lanka near Matara, built in 2010 with the money collected from the levy went mostly unused. But actor, producer and politician Ravindra Randeniya feels that the hefty hike is a good idea if there is consistent follow up action to improve the quality of Sri Lankan productions. The Ranmihitenna Cine City with boarding and lodging facilities for stars and crew and ample space should be maintained, as shooting can be done without loss of time there, he said. The Bollywood film Bombay Velvet was shot in Ranmihitenna. But due to political reasons the facility has been allowed to rot. At present, Sri Lankan TV and film producers are unable to show their productions. According to Randeniya, up to 400 productions are waiting for slots. But these are occupied by imports which, for a small investment, fetch a lot of money for the TV stations, he said.
By AFP

The death toll from a powerful Taliban truck bombing at the German consulate in Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif city rose to at least six Friday, with more than 100 others wounded in a major militant assault.

The Taliban said the bombing late Thursday, which tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars, was a "revenge attack" for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead.

The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

All German staff from the consulate were unharmed, according to the foreign ministry in Berlin.

But seven Afghan civilians were killed, including two motorcyclists who were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop, said deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri.

A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added.

Local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez said the city hospitals received six dead bodies, including two killed by bullets.

At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries, he added.

"The consulate building has been heavily damaged," the German foreign ministry said in a statement. "Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families."

A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting.

"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."

Afghan special forces have cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area after the explosion.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations.

America's longest war

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents routinely exaggerate battlefield claims.

Posting a Google Earth image of the consulate on Twitter, Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.

US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims' relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

The country's worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up air strikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign -- even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.

The death toll from a powerful Taliban truck bombing at the German consulate in Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif city rose to at least six Friday, with more than 100 others wounded in a major militant assault. The Taliban said the bombing late Thursday, which tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars, was a "revenge attack" for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead. The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover. "The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP. All German staff from the consulate were unharmed, according to the foreign ministry in Berlin. But seven Afghan civilians were killed, including two motorcyclists who were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop, said deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri. A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added. Local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez said the city hospitals received six dead bodies, including two killed by bullets. At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries, he added. "The consulate building has been heavily damaged," the German foreign ministry said in a statement. "Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families." A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting. "There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene." Afghan special forces have cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area after the explosion. The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations. America's longest war Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents routinely exaggerate battlefield claims. Posting a Google Earth image of the consulate on Twitter, Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz. US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident. The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city. The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims' relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets. Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism. The country's worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up air strikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict. The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election. Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign -- even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president. President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.
By PTI

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump shook up his White House transition team, putting running mate Mike Pence in charge and naming a cohort of Washington insiders -- and three of his children -- to help nail down picks for his future cabinet.

The reshuffle by the Republican president-elect came after thousands of angry protesters took to the streets for a second straight night, sign of the acute tensions coursing through the nation after the most divisive campaign in memory.

In Portland, a march by some 4,000 protesters turned violent, with cars vandalized and projectiles thrown at police, who used rubber bullets and pepper spray to disperse the crowd. Twenty-five people were arrested.

Yesterday, the real estate tycoon-turned-world-leader was ensconced in his luxury Manhattan apartment at Trump Tower. As the aides who guided him to victory marched in to help Trump map out the way forward, he announced he was elevating Vice President-elect Mike Pence to lead the transition.

He also included three of his children and his son-in-law Jared Kushner on the team -- a move likely to raise eyebrows, since the tycoon earlier announced that should he win he would place his vast business interests into a blind trust operated by Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump.



And in a clear shift with the tone of his abrasive campaign, he named a string of insider figures from the very establishment that he railed so strongly, including Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus.

"Drain the swamp" became a popular Trump refrain in the closing weeks of the race as he vowed to end the ways of the US capital.

Trump tweeted yesterday that he had a "busy day" ahead. "Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!"

Predictions swiftly turned to who would serve as his chief of staff, with the names of Priebus and Steve Bannon, the combative political operative who came from conservative news organisation Breitbart to chair Trump's campaign, thrown about.

The 70-year-old incoming president has a mammoth task of fleshing out his cabinet.

The names of several Trump surrogates have been mentioned for top-level posts, including Giuliani, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Senator Jeff Sessions and retired lieutenant-general Michael Flynn.

Trump's finance chairman, Goldman Sachs veteran Steven Mnuchin, is reportedly a strong consideration for Treasury secretary, along with JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon.

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump shook up his White House transition team, putting running mate Mike Pence in charge and naming a cohort of Washington insiders -- and three of his children -- to help nail down picks for his future cabinet. The reshuffle by the Republican president-elect came after thousands of angry protesters took to the streets for a second straight night, sign of the acute tensions coursing through the nation after the most divisive campaign in memory. In Portland, a march by some 4,000 protesters turned violent, with cars vandalized and projectiles thrown at police, who used rubber bullets and pepper spray to disperse the crowd. Twenty-five people were arrested. Yesterday, the real estate tycoon-turned-world-leader was ensconced in his luxury Manhattan apartment at Trump Tower. As the aides who guided him to victory marched in to help Trump map out the way forward, he announced he was elevating Vice President-elect Mike Pence to lead the transition. He also included three of his children and his son-in-law Jared Kushner on the team -- a move likely to raise eyebrows, since the tycoon earlier announced that should he win he would place his vast business interests into a blind trust operated by Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump. And in a clear shift with the tone of his abrasive campaign, he named a string of insider figures from the very establishment that he railed so strongly, including Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus. "Drain the swamp" became a popular Trump refrain in the closing weeks of the race as he vowed to end the ways of the US capital. Trump tweeted yesterday that he had a "busy day" ahead. "Will soon be making some very important decisions on the people who will be running our government!" Predictions swiftly turned to who would serve as his chief of staff, with the names of Priebus and Steve Bannon, the combative political operative who came from conservative news organisation Breitbart to chair Trump's campaign, thrown about. The 70-year-old incoming president has a mammoth task of fleshing out his cabinet. The names of several Trump surrogates have been mentioned for top-level posts, including Giuliani, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Senator Jeff Sessions and retired lieutenant-general Michael Flynn. Trump's finance chairman, Goldman Sachs veteran Steven Mnuchin, is reportedly a strong consideration for Treasury secretary, along with JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon.
President-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump walk from a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the U.S. Capitol November 10, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo : Getty Images/Mark Wilson)

The Silicon Valley is reportedly facing an uncertain future following Republican Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Trump was not only critical about several major tech firms in the country during his campaign, but is also yet to announce a specific technology policy.



Advertisement

In June this year, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had released a detailed tech platform, which was applauded by executives. On the contrary, Trump advocated stringer limits on immigration as well as trade led to panic in the tech circles, which greatly depends high-skilled immigrants and also earns a major part of their revenue from abroad, Wall Street Journal reported.



Furthermore, Trump's standpoint that attributed the sufferings of many common Americans to the elites may also affect the Silicon Valley. The president-elect has accused the industry of being profit and market-centric, while ignoring the employment needs of the middle class Americans.



Silicon Valley's dependence on overseas talents is reflected from the fact that several top tech executive have been lobbying for immigration reform and opening the doors for more foreign workers in the United States. In 2013, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway joined hands to help establish FWD.US, an association that works for the cause of immigrant workers, Los Angeles Times reported.



During his aggressive campaign, Trump took potshots at several big tech companies. While the Republican nominee urged the consumers to boycott Apple products for the tech giant's denial to assist the FBI access the iPhone of a slain terrorist, he accused IBM of moving jobs abroad.



Trump also criticized Jeff Bezos for allegedly for utilizing the Washington Post, owned and run by him, to promote the interests of the retail giant Amazon Inc, which is also owned by Bezos. However, Bezos has vehemently refuted the claims made by the president-elect during his campaign.



Therefore, it is not surprising that Trump did not receive much support from the tech executives during his campaign. Aside from entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, most tech stalwarts either maintained a distance from the campaigning, or supported Clinton. In fact, Meg Whitman, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. chief executive, and John Chambers, chairman of Cisco Systems Inc, both considered to be two prominent Republicans in the industry, also backed Clinton.



Soon after the counting of votes began on Nov. 8, Tuesday, several tech executives as well as investors expressed their concern over a possible Trump victory. Shervin Pishevar, a prominent venture capitalist, went to the extent of suggesting that California should secede if Trump was elected the next president of the United States.



1/ If Trump wins I am announcing and funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation.







Contrary to this, the tech industry flourished under President Barack Obama. Today, the four most valuable companies worldwide are Apple, Google parent Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon. Incidentally, all of them are tech firms.



Watch Clinton supporters staging violent protests across the United States against Trump's victory:






Actors Jared Padalecki (L) and Jensen Ackles attend the 'Supernatural' Special Video Presentation And Q&A during Comic-Con International 2016 at San Diego Convention Center on July 24, 2016 in San Diego, California. (Photo : Getty Images/Kevin Winter)

The Winchester brothers will face a mysterious threat in "Supernatural" Season 12 episode 6. Latest spoiler news teased the arrival of a powerful demon who is out to kill hunters.



"Supernatural" Season 12 episode 6 will feature a special gathering between hunters that will eventually turn into a blood bath. Titled "Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox," the Winchester brothers will join other colleagues to pay their final respects to a deceased hunter. However, Sam (Jared Padalecki), Dean (Jensen Ackles) and other hunters will find themselves trapped inside a house, according to episode spoilers posted on Spoilers Guide.



Advertisement

It appears that a mysterious and powerful demon has placed a spell on the house to prevent the Winchester brothers and other hunters from leaving. Despite the group's efforts to try and escape, several hunters will succumb to the demon's evil powers.



With a dangerous game where the only rule entails the death of all the individuals inside the house, the demon will embark on a one-hunter-at-a-time killing spree. It will be up to Sam, Dean and the Winchester boys' mother Mary (Samantha Smith) to defeat the mysterious demon.



Finding a way to beat the demon will serve as the Winchester boys' latest challenge on the CW show. In "Supernatural" Season 12 episode 5, Sam and Dean were faced with Nazi necromancers who were adamant to resurrect their iconic leader Hitler.



An old gold pocket watch served as the vessel for Hitler's soul in the said episode. With a little bit of magic, blood and a willing host, the German leader returned to the land of the living although Dean managed to kill him.



In an interview with TVLine, cast member Padalecki commented on the CW show's unique depiction of Hitler. He stated, "It's fun to see the Supernatural take on what Hitler was really like behind the camera."



"Supernatural" Season 12 airs every Thursday on the CW. Watch the preview for episode 6 below:






The Egyptian president is the first world leader to speak with the new US president election on the phone.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi invited on Wednesday US President-elect Donald Trump to visit Cairo, in a telephone call in which El-Sisi congratulated Trump personally on his triumph in the US presidential elections, the Egyptian Presidency announced.

In a statement issued on Wednesday by the Egyptian presidency, El-Sisi expressed his hope for more cooperation between Egypt and the United States in all fields.

On his part, the newly-elected 45th president of the United States thanked El-Sisi, saying he appreciated the call and hinting that it was the first telephone call he had received from a world leader.

Trump also expressed his wish to meet with the Egyptian president soon.

"Egypt is looking forward to seeing a new spirit brought to the presidential term of President Trump in terms of Egyptian-American relations, including more cooperation and coordination for the mutual benefit of the American and Egyptian people," the Egyptian presidency's statement read.

The Egyptian Presidency added that Egypt is looking forward to the enforcement of peace and development in the Middle East and hopes for continued stability and prosperity for the American people.

El-Sisi met Trump in September during the UN General Assembly. He was the first Arab president to meet the Republican nominee.

Republican Donald Trump won the Presidential election in the United States defeating Democratic Hillary Clinton early Wednesday.



Search Keywords:

Short link:


Portsmouth boy bullied for long hair has plan to donate it

It makes me feel so proud of him, his generous spirit. He cares about others more than he cares about himself sometimes."
Reporter/Columnist

Julie Wurth is a reporter covering the University of Illinois at The News-Gazette. Her email is jwurth@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@jawurth).
Reporter

Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).
Reporter

Debra Pressey is a reporter covering health care at The News-Gazette. Her email is dpressey@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@DLPressey).
Almost all of Egypt's political parties and movements, except pro-Muslim Brotherthood groups, have announced that they are not participating in the anonymous calls

As Egypt moves forward on the path to securing a $12 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the country has found itself facing mysterious calls on social media for protests on Friday against economic conditions."

The calls grabbed active social media users attention, but almost all of Egypt's political parties and activist movements, except pro-Muslim Brotherthood groups, have announced that they are not participating in the anonymous calls.

The online interaction with the pages posed a lingering question that rapidly spread through Egyptian street: Who was behind the calls to protest and what were the demands?

On Wednesday, however, the page calling for protests announced it was shutting down activities on Facebook, citing "security persecution" against the administrator of the page. The page called on people to "like" a page calling for protests on 8 December to demand the return of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

The future of Friday 11 November's protests remains unclear.

Timing

The Revolution of the Poor has become shorthand for a number of mysterious calls to protest, which preceded Egypts announcement of an EGP flotation and the rise in subsidised fuel prices over the weekend.



The calls made their debut on social media in early September; amid a price spike in food commodities and scarcity of some essential foodstuff.

In early September dozens of parents gathered in Cairo to protest the lack of subsidised baby formula, as well as increased prices.

Shortly thereafter, the army announced that it would intervene to solve the baby formula crisissaying it would provide the formula at a lower-than-market price.

In a speech later that month, Egypts President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said the army provides food essentials to counter price hikes for low income citizens. The president explained that the action was a choice made by the army to help the country in its hour of need.

El-Sisi also said at the time that Egypt's armed forces could be deployed in six hours to protect the country," a statement interpreted by some as a warning of possible confrontation on 11/11, or in the event of any threat to the security and stability of the country.

In weeks following, Egypt has suffered a shortage in some food supplies, including sugar and rice, amid a foreign currency crisis.

Some shortages continue at the time of writing. The government announced however that reserves of essential supplies are now sufficient for six months, or even a year and a half.

The "Revolution of the Poor page, which has attracted around 80,000 likes over the past weeks, is supervised by a spokesperson who goes by Yasser El-Omda. He identifies himself as the revolutions poet has released a couple of videos calling people to protest on 11 November against the governments ongoing economic austerity policies.

Other anonymous pages followed, leaving people confused over who the original backers of the potential 11/11 demonstrations might be.

This is not the first time that the current government has faced protest calls.

Members of the Islamist National Alliance to Support Legitimacy (NASL) have been leading the protest scene against Egypt's current and interim governments since the July 2013 ousting of ex-president Morsi and the dispersal of the Rabaa and Nahda sit-ins in August that year.

The NASL announced in September its intention to participate in any 11/11 protests, calling on all Egyptians to participate on this day as preparation for Januarys big event."

Since its announcement, the NASL has been calling for additional protests prior to 11 November. They never materlised.

The Muslim Brotherhoods English speaking portal, IkhwanWeb, has consistently published statements by the alliance, but it is unclear whether the group as a whole supports the 11/11 calls to protest.

Since 2014, the Muslim Brotherhood has witnessed divisions within its once organized framework, which it has not publicly discussed.

Egypt's political parties have announced that they are not participating in the anonymous calls.

Khaled Dawoud, the spokesperson for Egypts Democratic Alliance Current (DAC), told Ahram Online that the party has no relationship with the calls and does not know the people behind them."

The DAC includes several parties: the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, the Constitution Party and others.

Dawoud said that the government shouldnt exaggerate the seriousness of the calls and what they might mean for Friday. History doesnt repeat itself. You cant set a specific date for revolting, Dawoud said.

He added that he doesnt expect the calls to for protest to achieve demands on social justice, democracy, and the release of detainees."

Sherif El-Rouby, the 6 April Youth Movement spokesperson, has also denied any involvement in the 11/11 calls. 6 April, now banned in Egypt, has long been considered by government supporters as a movement allied with the Brotherhood.

Some experts believe that the 11/11 calls should not be underestimated.

Timothy Kaldas, a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) told Ahram Online that the state was pretty nervous about the possibility of something happening."

There are reasons why someone would protest right now; however, it's hard to know how many people will turn out in the end, Kaldas told Ahram Online.

There are two things happening in terms of the economic pressure people are under: the value of purchased goods is being restricted, their money is worth less, and [they're feeling the] humiliation of not being able to supply essential goods to their families,  Kaldas said, adding that this would fuel frustration.

The current government has taken similar calls to protest seriously in the past. In November 2014, the ultraconservative group Salafist Front called for an uprising of the Muslim youth and a day of Islamic Identity, in which the group's supporters were encouraged to raise the Quran in demonstrations against the government.

The group's demands included the imposition of Sharia law.

Security forces were swiftly deployed to protect vital facilities, raising high alert. However, the protests never materialised.

11/11 in the media

Ahmed Moussa, one of the prominent media anchors known for his affirmative pro-government stances, warned viewers in an episode on 7 September of the Poor Movement," which he said was led by the Brotherhood domestically and internationally in an attempt to exploit the price spikes situation.

Moussa showed screenshots from several websites he said were affiliated with the Brotherhood, including the El-Mesryoon portal and that of the Freedom and Justice Party, and quoted the alleged leader of the movement, El-Omda.

Dont let anyone use you and your agony like they used you in the January 25 days: the Brotherhood, the fifth column, El-Baradei, Revolutionary Socialists and others, Moussa said.

Moussa added that not a single noble, patriotic citizen is involved in this," referring to the protests as part of a conspiracy to topple the state."

MP Mostafa Bakry, has begun sharing news about the Brotherhoods intentions to spread chaos." He has shared documents of assassination lists before 11/11, including 25 figures public figures, from media personnelincluding Bakry himselfto military officers, police officers, and judges.

Ibrahim Eissa, a prominent journalist, writer, and night show host, told audiences on Monday that it was in the best interest of some security institutions that people become afraid of 11/11. It is also in the interest of terrorist groups that [Egyptians] become nervous about the calls."

Eissa is known for being highly critical of the government, but said repeatedly that he believes "nothing will happen on 11/11."

Taking no chances

Police said on Thursday it had uncovered a stash of weapons that supporters of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood were plotting to use ahead of planned protests against deteriorating economic conditions.

Having won little support from activist groups, it was unclear if protests would go ahead on Friday. But authorities are taking no chances. Dozens of people were detained in recent weeks for allegedly inciting unrest.

The Interior Ministry confiscated on Thursday a cache of arms and ammunition hidden in a graveyard and house in Fayoum province, southwest of Cairo.

It also said it raided five bomb factories around the country on Wednesday, accusing a militant group of coordinating with the Brotherhood to attack police checkpoints on the eve of the protests.

"The armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood intended to use the weapons in terrorist attacks as they take advantage of economic conditions to incite protests," it said in a statement.

In recent weeks, several people have been arrested on suspicion of inciting protests on 11 November and/or joining a terrorist group that aims to obstruct state institutions.

The suspects face charges of inciting violence to topple the regime, attempting to change the country's constitution and its republican system, incitement to attack police stations and joining the banned Muslim Brotherhood group.

Late Monday, Egypts President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi held a meeting with leaders of the countrys security institutions, including Interior Minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar, defense minister Sedki Sobhi, and intelligence and military intelligence chiefs.

According to statements from the Presidents office, El-Sisi ordered continued maximum vigilance and combat readiness to ensure the countrys security and the citizens safety.

Interior ministry spokesperson Tarek Attia said in press statements on Tuesday that the ministry has a security plan in place to combat any riots in 11/11, in coordination with the armed forces.

Attia added that Egypts security is a red line," and that the ministry would not allow anyone to violate the law.



Search Keywords:

Short link:


Columnist

Tom Kacich is a columnist and the author of Tom's Mailbag at The News-Gazette. His column appears Sundays. His email is tkacich@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@tkacich).
Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.
By Keynote Contributor Dr. Xiangjian Zheng Head of Lab of Cardiovascular Signaling,

Centenary Institute, Sydney Medical School

Written by Dr Zheng, PhD

Cerebral cavernous malformation (CCM), also knows a cavernous hemangioma, cavernous angioma or cavernoma, is a brain blood vessel malformation characterized by irregularly clustered small thin-walled blood vessels.

These abnormal vessel clusters can occur in any part of brain and spinal card, although mostly found in white matter. They can be progressive, but are not cancerous.

These abnormal vessels are filled with slow-moving or stagnant blood and are fragile. Bleeding from the lesions or displacement of neuronal tissue by the enlarged lesions are the underlying causes of clinical symptoms.

Prevalence

CCM has been estimated to affect up to 0.5% in human population. About 80% of cases occur in a sporadic form (without family histology), and 20% of cases occur in a hereditary (familial) form.

The sporadic cases often only have a single lesion, while the familial cases often present with multiple lesions. The lesion size in both form of CCM can vary from a few millimeters to a few centimeters.

Genetics & Genomics eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today

About 60% of familial cases are symptomatic, most of them manifest symptoms in 20-30 year of age. The percentage of symptomatic cases in sporadic form is not easily assessable.

In general, CCM can develop at any age, no preference for male or female, or a particular ethnic population. Among all the diagnosed cases, about 25% are children.

Symptoms and diagnosis

The symptoms of CCM disease are variable neurological manifestations including: seizure, non-specific headaches, progressive or transient focal neurologic deficits (such as cranial nerve deficits, sensory deficits, difficulty with vision or speech, weakness in arms or legs, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, problem with balance, muscle coordination or memory).

CCM are diagnosed according to these symptoms and MRI scans. For patients with atypical MRI, genetic test of CCM genes is necessary to ascertain diagnosis.

For diagnosed patients with multiple lesions, family history of CCM disease characteristics, or very young onset age, genetic tests for patients and related family members are recommended.

Causes

Genetic studies with familial cases of CCM have identified mutations is CCM1, CCM2 or CCM3 causes CCM lesions. Mutations in these three genes accounts for about 90% of all familial cases, the cause of the rest 10% arises from other unknown cause.

Somatic mutations in these three genes have also been identified in sporadic cases of CCM. Among these three genes, mutations in CCM1 and CCM2 gene are more common, together account for 70-80% of familial cases, whereas mutations in CCM3 gene accounts for about 15% of familial cases.

But Mutations in CCM3 gene cause greater lesion burden and higher risk and early onset of hemorrhage, usually within 10 years old in age. Patients with CCM3 mutations more likely devastated by lesion burden and repeated hemorrhages.

Treatment

Currently there is not drug available to treat CCM. The only treatment option is surgical removal. The decision for operation need to be made based on surgery risk of approaching the location of lesions and risk of life-treating hemorrhage or neuronal tissue displacement, especially for the cases with CCM lesion sin brain stem.

After diagnosed with CCM, generally annual MRI is recommended for patients assess the stability of diagnosed lesion and any new asymptomatic lesion. Treatment for seizure and headache are provided if they are the symptoms. Surgical operation is assessed according the risks for patients with recent severe hemorrhage, or severe disabling seizures or neurologic deficits.

Research to understand the disease

Since the identification of three disease genes, scientists around the world are working hard to understand what the function of these genes is in normal life and how damages of these genes cause disease.

Using animal models and cultured human cells, scientists have found proteins produced from three genes working together to maintain the tight interaction between blood vessel cells. These proteins are essential for the formation of lumen in blood vessel.

Animals with complete loss of these genes before birth cannot form functional blood vessel systems to support blood flow. Using genetic tools to delete the disease genes, mice will form CCM lesions mimicking those in humans.

With this mimicking animal model, scientists have found a few other proteins that are critical for CCM lesion formation, which are being considered as potential drug targets.

Using the most advanced tools, Scientists at the Centenary Institute and University of Pennsylvania have recently found 3 additional proteins that mediate the function of damaged CCM proteins. Genetically deleting any one of them is sufficient to prevent the development of CCM disease.

Therefore, blocking the production or activity any of these proteins will potentially treat CCM disease. The Zheng Lab at Centenar

y Institute is currently collaborating with medical chemist at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences to search for a drug to block these abnormally increased proteins.

Currently two drugs, both targeting the activity of a particular protein, called ROCK, are in development in two small biotech companies in USA. Both are still in the early testing phase in cell culture and animal studies, so it is still not clear whether they will be effective enough to reach the phase of clinical trial.

About Dr Zheng

Dr. Xiangjian Zheng obtained his PhD in Molecular Medicine from Medical College of Georgia. He received postdoctoral training from Department of Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University and Cardiovascular Institute at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

He joined the faculty of Centenary Institute to lead the Lab of Cardiovascular Signaling in 2014. He is also a member of Faculty of Medicine at Sydney University. Dr. Zheng started to work on CCM disease in 2006.

Since then he has made major contributions to CCM research by generating advanced animal models, developing new CCM imaging method in animal models and identifying a series of new molecular players and their integrative functions in CCM pathogenesis.

His work has been published in top biomedical research journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Developmental Cell. His current research is expanding from basic research to translational studies in searching for drug candidates to treat CCM disease.

Disclaimer: This article has not been subjected to peer review and is presented as the personal views of a qualified expert in the subject in accordance with the general terms and condition of use of the News-Medical.Net website.
Have you ever reached the end of a holiday buffet with a plate filled with more food than you intended?

The holiday season is primetime for overeating, said Nan Jensen, family and consumer sciences agent with University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension Pinellas County.

As part of the UF/IFAS Extension Family Nutrition Program, Jensen's job is to teach residents how to buy and prepare healthy meals and keep up a healthy lifestyle. "My programs are based on the idea that food is medicine," she said. "This is the idea that food and lifestyle can help prevent and manage chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes."

While exercising 30 minutes a day and filling half your plate with fruits and vegetables is good advice year-round, the holidays present a special set of challenges for our health and wellness, Jensen acknowledged.

Jensen has these tips for avoiding common holiday health pitfalls:

1. Be mindful. "Be aware of what you put into your body, and think about what it will do for your body," said Jensen. If you're in an endless buffet line, try to put only those things on your plate that you really want and that will do your body good.

2. Make every calorie count. "You want to make sure that you're getting the most bang for your buck, nutritionally speaking, when you put food on your plate," said Jensen. For example, fruits and vegetables are highly nutritious but are lower in calories than many less nutritious foods. Jensen recommends reserving a small portion of your plate for something decadent and filling the rest with nutrient-dense foods.

3. When it comes to alcohol, take it slow. "We always teach 'alcohol in moderation,'" said Jensen. "In addition to containing lots of sugar and calories, alcohol can take away our inhibitions when it comes to indulging in other food and drink. Pace yourself by drinking a glass of water in between drinks."

4. Keep up activity levels. Keep up whatever activity routine you normally have throughout the year, said Jensen, though don't attempt any big changes in your fitness or nutrition regimen. "Don't necessarily try to lose weight during the holidaysjust try to maintain your weight where it is," she said.

5. Take the focus off food. "Sometimes food is the center of family gatherings, especially during the holidays, and that can lead to overeating. Think about other activities you can do together that will still be fun for everyone," said Jensen. "And don't stress about making the holidays perfectthat can lead to stress eating!"
Ginolis Ltd, a global desktop automation and liquid handling solutions provider, today announced the delivery of the first LFDA-3 to Suzhou Dingshi Medical Technology company in China. The revolutionary rapid test assembly solution provides manufacturers flexible production capacity within a desktop footprint.

The new modular compact LFDA-3 went beyond all our expectations. We are very happy with the system and the cooperation with Ginolis. states Dingshi CEO Alex Xi. They have been professional and accommodated all our needs. We are looking forward to going further with Ginolis.

The innovative lateral flow device assembly solution provides high volume production capacity with automated visual inspection and guidance ensuring the highest standard of quality control. The LFDA-3 solution is easily adaptable and can assemble different rapid tests with minimal product specific adjustments.

The first LFDA-3 system delivery was a great success. Dingshi has been a great partner and we look forward working with them in the future states VP Sales and Marketing, Jorma Venalainen. This is a very important step for us moving forward in the Asia Pacific market. We feel that there is huge growth potential for Ginolis solutions in Asia and this deal is a testament to that.

The total value of the deal is not disclosed.

The company will be showcasing the LFDA-3 at the Medica tradeshow in Dusseldorf, Germany on November 14  17, 2016. Visit Ginolis Ltd at Hall 1 stand B15.
Parents may be confused with how and when to introduce peanut-containing foods to their infants. Presentations at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting will offer guidance, based on soon to be released guidelines, on how to approach this topic without going "nuts."

"The first step is determining if your child is at high-risk for peanut allergy," says Amal Assa'ad, MD, chair of the ACAAI Food Allergy Committee and a co-author of the guidelines. "Before introducing peanut-containing foods to a high-risk infant, the infant should be seen by their primary health care provider who will determine if referral to an allergist for testing and/or in-office introduction is needed."

According to the guidelines, an infant at high risk of developing peanut allergy is one with severe eczema and/or egg allergy. The guidelines recommend introduction of peanut-containing foods as early as 4-6 months for high-risk infants, after determining that it is safe to do so.

"If your child is determined to be at risk, and then is tested and found to have peanut sensitization, meaning they have a positive allergy test to peanut, from that positive test alone we don't yet know if they're truly allergic," says allergist Matthew Greenhawt, MD, MBA, MSc, ACAAI Fellow, incoming ACAAI Food Allergy Committee chair, and a co-author of the guidelines. "Peanut allergy is only diagnosed if there is both a positive test and a history of developing symptoms after eating peanut-containing foods."

A positive test alone is a poor indicator of allergy, and studies have shown infants who are peanut-sensitized aren't necessarily allergic. "Infants sensitized to peanuts showed the most benefit from early introduction of peanut-containing foods in the Learning Early About Peanut allergy (LEAP) study," says Dr. Greenhawt. "Some allergists caring for a child who has a large positive skin test may decide not to do an in-office challenge. Instead, they might advise that the child avoid peanuts completely due to the strong chance of a pre-existing peanut allergy. Other allergists may proceed with a peanut challenge after explaining the risks to the parents."

Children with mild to moderate eczema who have already started solid foods do not need an evaluation, and can have peanut-containing foods introduced at home by their parents at around 6 months of age. Children with no eczema or egg allergy can be introduced to peanut-containing foods at home as well, according to the family's preference.

The new guidelines offer several methods to introduce age-appropriate peanut-containing foods to infants who have already eaten solid foods. It is extremely important that parents understand the choking hazard posed by whole peanuts and to not give whole peanuts to infants. Peanut-containing foods should not be the first solid food your infant tries, and an introduction should be made only when your child is healthy. Do not do the first feeding if he or she has a cold, vomiting, diarrhea or other illness.

"The soon to be released updated guidelines on preventing peanut allergy are sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases," says Dr. Greenhawt. "The guidelines are an important step toward changing how people view food allergy prevention, particularly for peanut allergy. They also offer a way for parents to introduce peanut-containing foods to reduce the risk of developing peanut allergy."

The guideline authors, an expert panel of food allergy researchers, physicians, nurses and lay organization representatives from many fields, reviewed existing evidence and made comprehensive recommendations.

The authors recognized early introduction of peanut-containing foods may seem to depart from recommendations for exclusive breastfeeding through six months. One recent study showed introduction of peanuts did not affect the length or frequency of breastfeeding, and did not negatively influence growth or nutrition.

"This is a very exciting development for those of us who have been treating an increasing number of kids with peanut allergies in the past 25 years," says Dr. Assa'ad. "To be able to offer parents a way of reducing the risk of their children developing peanut allergies is remarkable and of real importance."
As the nation honors our veterans on November 11, we must pause to remember the long-lasting health effects soldiers experience not only from bullets or bombs, but from exposure to unexplained pesticides, radiation or other toxins during their time in the service.

At least a quarter of the 700,000 soldiers who fought in the 1991 Gulf War suffer from a debilitating disease called Gulf War illness (GWI).

GWI is a medical condition that affects both men and women and is associated with symptoms including fatigue, chronic headaches, memory problems, muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal issues, neurological problems, respiratory symptoms, hormonal imbalance and immune dysfunction.

Researchers at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) are conducting multiple studies to learn more about and ultimately help veterans facing GWI. Two NSU research teams recently received grants from the U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity totaling $1,830,389 to fund three studies.

Improving Diagnostics and Treatments for GWI Females by Accounting for the Effects of PTSD1 - $655,822 (Travis Craddock, Ph.D., principal investigator)

Disentangling the Effects of PTSD from GWI for Improved Diagnostics and Treatments2 - $592,825 (Travis Craddock, Ph.D., principal investigator)

Persistently Elevated Somatic Mutation as a Biomarker of Clinically Relevant Exposures in Gulf War Illness3 - $581,742 (Stephen Grant, Ph.D., principal investigator)

The first two, three-year studies1&2 are aimed at identifying subgroups of GWI based on the presence or absence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from time on the battlefield in both men and women. Dr. Craddock and his research team will perform a systems biology analysis to isolate biobehavioral profiles that identify the effects of PTSD in GWI to improve diagnostic criteria and to assess potential treatment avenues for GWI in the context of probable PTSD diagnosis.

Neuroscience eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today

GWI is at least in part caused by illness-specific inflammatory activity. The extent and nature of the resulting inflammation may be altered in people who also experience PTSD, leading to a shift in treatment targets/strategies for each subtype. Specifically, Dr. Craddock's team aims to understand the role of systemic inflammatory mechanisms in GWI in the presence and absence of probable PTSD diagnosis as this is critical to define subtypes of GWI, and for the development of subtype-specific treatments.

Travis Craddock, Ph.D., assistant professor in the NSU College of Psychology's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and associate director of the NSU Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine's Clinical Systems Biology Group, is the principal investigator for the first two studies. His research team includes Nancy Klimas, M.D., director, NSU Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine; Gordon Broderick, Ph.D., director, NSU Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine's Clinical Systems Biology Group; and Stephen Messer, Ph.D., associate professor, NSU College of Psychology's Department of Clinical Psychology.

The final three-year study3 is based on the idea that long-term effects of exposures from service in the Gulf Wars are due to damage affecting the regenerative stem cells of the body. Dr. Grant and his research team will examine the cumulative effects of many types of exposures that can damage DNA in cells (genotoxicity) using blood samples from patients with GWI to help determine possible causes of the disease using a patent-pending biodosimetric technique.

Rather than identify a single agent as cause for GWI, the study proposes that it is due to the cumulative effect of all exposures. Results of the study could be used to develop new treatments and screen patients to predict who is at greatest risk of developing symptomatic GWI.
Funders help to purchase OCT microscope used in clinical trial

Following on from a successful worlds first Phase I gene therapy trial for choroideremia, Professor Robert MacLaren and his team at Oxford University and the Oxford Eye Hospital at the John Radcliffe Hospital have started a Phase II trial enrolling 30 patients.

In this trial Professor MacLaren is using an operating microscope with integrated optical coherence tomography (OCT) that will refine the surgery that is integral to the gene replacement therapy. The purchase of this vital piece of equipment called OPMI Lumera 700 Rescan is thanks to a number of funders including: Fight for Sight, Tommy Salisbury Choroideremia Fund at Fight for Sight, National Eye Research Centre, Choroideremia Research Foundation USA, Saturday Hospital Fund and benefactors of the MacLaren Group. The project has been funded by the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) Programme, a Medical Research Council (MRC) and NIHR partnership.

Choroideremia, is an incurable genetic condition affecting approximately 50,000 men worldwide. It is caused by a genetic fault in the REP-1 gene and gene therapy is being trialled to replace the faulty gene with a healthy one. The intraoperative OCT microscope enables surgeons to track changes in the retinal anatomy in real time and thereby permit safe and precise delivery of the gene therapy with the ultimate goal of improved vision for patients.

Paul McGuire, 45, from Billericay, was diagnosed with the condition in March 2013 and was the first patient to have the operation using the operating microscope. He said:

I cant thank the team at Oxford enough. Im incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to potentially halt further deterioration in one eye and I already feel it has made a slight improvement to my vision. Having experienced first-hand the benefits of technology and the importance of eye research I will continue to fundraise for Fight for Sight and hope one day there will be a cure.

Paul along with the other patients will have visual function tests including; best corrected visual acuity, microperimetry (assesses the visual function of a specific area of the retina), and retinal sensitivity tests for comparison of baseline values conducted six months after surgery.

Professor of Ophthalmology at University of Oxford Robert MacLaren said:

On behalf of the Clinical Ophthalmology Research Group at the University of Oxford I would like to thank all its generous benefactors for assisting us in raising funds for an OCT operating microscope for the Oxford Eye Hospital. The equipment is being used in exciting new gene therapies for the treatment of patients suffering from incurable eye conditions. By using the OCT operating microscope it allows for better and safer outcomes for patients due to more refined surgery using the microscope. If successful this trial can be translated to other conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa, which affects 1 in 4,000 people.

Dr Dolores Conroy, Director of Research at Fight for Sight said:

Professor Robert MacLaren and his team at Oxford have been making incredible breakthroughs. We were delighted to have been involved with the first phase of the clinical trial, which had promising results for patients. Having raised vital funds it has allowed a crucial piece of equipment to be purchased. It also gives patients hope that one day that could be a cure for the condition. We wish Robert and this team every success with the trial and glad we can be part of it.

A reception for benefactors who helped fundraise for the OCT microscope will be held on Tuesday 8 November at the John Radcliffe Hospital, part of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Egypt condemned what it described as irresponsible statements made by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the Egyptian government.

Earlier on Thursday, Erdogan said during an interview with Qatari channel Al-Jazeera that he accused the Egyptian regime of providing support to the Gulen movement, which is led by Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been accused of masterminding the failed coup attempt in Turkey last July.

We differentiate between the Egyptian people and the administration there. We love the nation like it was ours and thats why we have provided all support to them but we are against coup governments and the violation of freedoms, and we will stand with the Egyptian people in their fight for democracy, the Turkish president said during the interview aired on Thursday.

In an official statement on Thursday, the Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman said Egypt considered the Turkish statements as a continuation to the blundering and double standards approach that the Turkish policies have been characterised by through out the past years.

The foreign ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid expressed his surprise at the Turkish president inaugurating himself as a guardian of democracy and protector of freedoms at a time when his government is arresting hundreds of professors and media personnel and tens of parliamentary members, as well as shutting down tens of newspapers and eliminating thousands of civil workers and army officers and judges from their jobs over their role in the coup attempt.

The Egyptian spokesman pointed out that it wasnt surprising that such statements came at such a time on Al-Jazeera in particular, considering it clear incitement that aims to shake off stability in Egypt; pointing at the11/11 protests against the Egyptian government planned for Friday which are supported by the Muslim Brotherhood group, a close ally of Erdogan's AKP government.

This is the latest round of scathing statements between the two countries since their relationship severed since the 2013 ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, a close ally of Erdogan's AKP government.

Despite the strained relations,Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said late August that Turkey is looking to improve relations with Egypt only hours after Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi spoke about Turkey in a press interview.

El-Sisi's commented in August on the troubled relationships between the two countries for the first time, saying that Egypt was giving the Turks" time to correct their position.

Cairo has repeatedly accused Ankara of "interference" in its domestic affairs and providing a safe haven for leading members of the now banned Brotherhood group.

Search Keywords:

Short link:


New Delhi: Chaos reigned on the streets for a fourth day on Friday as panicked people made a mad dash for banks and ATMs to exchange old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes that are no longer legal tender.

But the government and RBI assurances of enough new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes having been printed in advance belied the reality as ATMs across the country were starved of cash.

Political mudslinging over the move aimed at curbing black money also continued with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and BJP chief Amit Shah questioning criticism of the action. Both said only those with black money should be afraid of the demonetisation.

With people fast running out of cash, the government later in the day extended by another 72 hours the use of old currency notes to pay public utility bills. The suspension of toll collection on National Highways was also extended till the midnight of November 14.

Read all the Latest News , Breaking News , watch Top Videos and Live TV here.
London: Personal letters written by Indian Muslim soldiers who fought in World War I sharing their impression of England 100 years ago in comparison to their home country were on Friday released by a literature expert.



Islam Issa from Birmingham City University earlier this year found that at least 885,000 Muslims were recruited by the Allied forces in the war between 1914 and 1918. He released the letters to mark Armistice Day, or the end of the war.



The over 100-year-old letters highlight the experiences of Indian soldiers as they share their impressions of England in comparison to their home country, Heritage Daily reported.



Issa has been researching individual stories from the war for an exhibition commissioned by and held at the British Muslim Heritage Centre in Manchester, called Stories of Sacrifice.



During his research, he found that 1.5 million Indians and 280,000 Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians fought for the Allies during World War I, many of them Muslims.



"When I decided to look at soldiers' letters, I expected a very bleak outlook on the war. Of course, sometimes, that's exactly what I found. But quite often, the letters were about individual experiences and very normal, human things," said Issa.



"These anecdotes certainly helped shape my narrative for the Stories of Sacrifice exhibition. While there's an important narrative about the war as a whole, the personal and human narrative was probably more striking.



Whatever your ideology or stance, you end up realising that these Muslim soldiers were individual humans and as a result, they were making sacrifices at that individual, human level," he said.



Complete with a virtual library, lesson plans and a toolkit for schools, the British Muslim Heritage Centre's exhibition is the first long-term exhibition of its kind, devoted solely to exemplifying the Muslim community's contribution and sacrifices during World War One.



On his trip to a London department store in 1915, soldier A. Ali writes: "We visited a shop where 2000 men and women were working and everything can be bought. There is no need of asking as the price is written on everything."



In the same letter, he shares his experience of the London Underground: "Then we went in the train that goes under the earth, it was for us a strange and wonderful experience they call it the underground train."



In another 1915 letter by Abdul Said, more opinions on shopping and butchers are shared.



"Every shop in this country is so arranged that one is delighted to look at them. Whether you buy much or little it is properly wrapped up, and if you tell the shop man to send it to your house you have only to give him your address and he delivers it.



"The butcher's shops in Hindustan are very dirty, but here they are so clean and tidy that there is absolutely no smell."
New Delhi: Long queues were witnessed at banks and ATMs, which opened after two days, as people rushed to get new banknotes in lieu of their old defunct bills.



Many ATMs ran out of cash in couple of hours as there were heavy rush to withdraw lower denomination currency. Most of the machines were equipped to tender Rs 100 notes, while some were still not working.



Banks are saying that they are trying to recalibrate their machine for higher denomination notes, it will take some days before they start tendering new high security Rs 500 and 2000 notes which is expected to ease pressure.



However, to ensure customer convenience, banks have been asked to provide all cash withdrawal transactions at their ATMs free of cost till 30 December.



Banks across country are witnessing heavy rush on the second day as people gathered to get new banknotes in exchange of old bills.



After the government scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, banks were shut on Wednesday, and ATMs were supposed to be out of service for re calibration on Wednesday and Thursday.



In the financial capital of the country, shutters of ATMs of State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda, Yes Bank, Dena Bank were down in many parts. ATMs of many banks reported running dry.



From today onwards, customers are allowed to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day from ATMs till November 18. The withdrawal limit will be raised to Rs 4,000 per day per card from November 19, 2016.



In the two days when the ATMs were out of service, the banks said they will re-configure their ATMs to dispense Rs 100 and Rs 50 notes.


Salt shortage rumours trigger panic buying sprees in Western UP; some stores selling salt at Rs200/Kg pic.twitter.com/j33Si0ii2V  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) November 11, 2016

Allahabad: Panic among people after rumours of salt shortage in UP, authorities say there is no shortage pic.twitter.com/z6XqOuXHsq  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) November 11, 2016

                             Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) November 11, 2016

No shortage of salt, prices are the same. State Govts need to take action on those who spread rumours: Food minister Ram Vilas Paswan pic.twitter.com/v35TX3mctW  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

                           Ram Vilas Paswan (@irvpaswan) November 11, 2016

                            Ram Vilas Paswan (@irvpaswan) November 11, 2016

Rumours of acute shortage of cooking salt sent prices of the kitchen commodity soaring to Rs 400 per kg in some areas of Uttar Pradesh as people already spooked by the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes made a mad dash for local stores.Long queues were seen outside wholesale shops in state capital Lucknow and areas of the National Capital Region, forcing the administration to order early closing of shops. The government also assured people that there was no shortage of salt.Rumours of supply shortage started in the afternoon and spread like wild fire. By evening, shops in some areas were selling one kg of salt for as much as Rs 400. The administration had deploy police teams to manage the increasing crowd on the streets.People queue up outside a shop in Lucknow to buy salt late on Friday. (Photo: Akhilesh Rastogi)Apart from Lucknow, panic also set in Kanpur, Etah, Lakhimpur, Sitapur, Mirzapur and Fatehpur towns of eastern Uttar Pradesh. In Lucknow district, magistrate Satyendra singh assured there was no shortage of the essential commodity. Strict action will be taken against those spreading rumours, he said.Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav instructed the principal secretary of food and civil supplies to ensure adequate and smooth supply of salt across districts. He also ordered strict action against black marketeers and rumour-mongers.As the panic seemed to enter the national Capital, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, too, denied shortage of salt.Union Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, too, said there was no shortage.The Department of Consumer Affairs, too, said there was no disruption in production of salt, its supply and distribution.A statement issued by the department said: The Department of Consumer Affairs, Government of India, have been informed about the rumoured increase in the prices of salt in some parts of the country. The Department monitors the prices of 22 Essential Commodities on daily basis. As per the prices reported by centres from across the country, there has been no increase in price of salt whatsoever. There has been no report about any disruption in production of salt, its supply and distribution.The total production of salt in India, on an average, is about 220 lakh tonnes. Of this, only around 60 lakh tonnes is used for domestic consumption. The remaining quantity is for industrial use and exports. Thus, there is sufficient manoeuvrability to meet any unexpected localised shortage, if any. No cause for Panic thus.
New Delhi: When in crisis, fold your hands. Temples and temple trusts are emerging as a new vehicle for those stuck with unaccounted cash to bypass the new demonetization scheme.



News18 spoke to a range of players for this story, and predictably, all of them chose to remain anonymous fearing action from enforcement authorities.



One of the most brazen efforts at lending a divine hand to whitewash money was reported from Karnataka where a religious head has spread the word that unaccounted money can be deposited in his mutts cash collection box. The sum would later resurface in official documents as donation from an anonymous donor and will be deposited in banks, and will eventually make its way back to the donor after a handsome commission to the mutt head.



In some cases black money hoarders are getting rid of their wealth at a steep discount and in some cases the commission is up to 50%.



The temples managed by the private persons are also being used to convert substantial amount of black money into white. The managements offer to return 50%-70% of the money to the "donors" after a few months.



Rural and urban cooperative banks and non-banking financial institutions too are being pressed into service to bring the worthless currency back to life across India.



In one instance that News18 independently verified in Kolar, Karnataka, more than Rs 5 crore was divided into a bundle of Rs 2.5 lakh each  villagers were given individual bundles that were later deposited in cooperative societies.



According to a PTI report, hurried donations made to nearly 100 temples and trusts. Sudden spurt in cash reserves in nearly 1,000 cooperative banks and credit societies were noticed in Maharashtra after Centre's decision to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000.



"The suspicious part of the whole rush for temple donations and opening six deposit accounts is that they were triggered immediately after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the announcement of demonetising currency notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 denomination," PTI quoted a senior minister as saying.



The minister, who did not wish to be named, said officials have apprised the state government that there has been a surge in donations to temples immediately after the announcement. "Some people have tried to secure their unaccounted cash by donating it to temples by taking its management into confidence and making receipt of such donations as anonymous donors," he said.



A similar pattern was seen in some cooperative banks that are associated or directly controlled by politicians, he said.



"Some people having unaccounted cash in lakhs of rupees have managed to secure receipts of opening of fixed deposit account. It was possible because these (cooperative) banks operate locally with handful of branches and cater to local banking needs," the minister said.



"In such cases, the unaccounted cash will turn into white money, if people manage to produce all valid documents. We have asked officials from departments concerned to keep a tab on any suspicious transaction, donations or deals," he said.



"In most of these banks, works, including issuing receipts, is done manually. As a result, some people managed to get the date of opening of the FD account, as prior to the PM's announcement. To counter such frauds, government will check the unnatural rise in the cash reserves in these banks. They will be under scanner," the minister added. Such fraudulent transactions have taken place in over 100 temples and trusts in the state, he said, adding, action will be initiated against those guilty of colluding with the fraudsters. The government will also monitor the sudden spurt in cash reserves in the nearly 1,000 cooperative banks and credit societies in Maharashtra. Some temple managements are "close to political parties, making such transactions possible," he alleged.


Doosra rasta duniya khojti hai  Bharat ke paas hai (India has that alternative path that the world is seeking), he said on Friday, addressing a Prerna Shibir on the 80th anniversary of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the womens wing of the RSS.

Talking about the importance of strengthening the Hindu society, Bhagwat asked: Why do we need to consolidate or strengthen the Hindu samaj? Why do we need to establish Hindu thought in the character of Bharat? Because there is no other solution, he said.

The world is changing and 90% of the work will be done by the machines. There is debate who will be the master: man or machine? he said.

: The Indian way of life is the only option left for a world thats standing on the edge of destruction, a reason why we should firmly establish the Hindu thought in the character of Bharat, according to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.We can guide how to progress without exploitation. Bharat is an example of unity in diversity, which the world cant manage. We dont talk about tolerance but live the ideal of acceptance and respect. Sabki unnati ke liye kaam karta hai (We work for everyones progress). Also its kutumb vyavastha (family system) has caught the attention of the world, the RSS Sar Sanghchalak said, stressing on the strength of matru shakti.The homo sapiens ate into the space of other species, but time is running out even for them, Bhagwat said. A thousand years from now even the homo sapiens would go extinct. How did these fault lines appear? he asked.The RSS chief said that science had made human life comfortable and convenient and this was matched by development of technology. And it is going to go like this, he said, observing that farmers will become managers of their land, many occupations will come to an end, all of which can be seen now by trends like people going for cashless transactions.The other perspective cannot be ignored. We have to see, if with progress mans mind will function constructively There is no guarantee that the mind that will become empty with progress will not be governed by devil, he said.Our past is marked by fundamentalism because of which there has always been struggle, and has that stopped? The same fundamentalism works even now and that is how ISIS is born. But nobody gave any solution to that problem. Fundamentalism is giving rise to terrorism, he said.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court issued contempt notice to former SC judge Markandey Katju for one of his Facebook posts on the Soumya rape and murder case amid dramatic scenes in the courtroom on Friday.



Contempt notice issued for Katju's blog in which he allegedly used intemperate language against judges. Statement in Katju's blog is a serious assault on judges, not on judgment. Hence, the contempt notice, the court said.



After a war of words, Justice Ranjan Gogoi called in security guards and asked Katju to be escorted out after he was issued the contempt notice.



As he was asked to be escorted out of the courtroom, Justice Katju protested saying that it was not a proper way to treat a former Supreme Court judge and reiterated that he was called here by the apex court and it was not his personal choice.



Several lawyers too protested against the move to have Katju escorted out.







Justice Katju was summoned to the court after he wrote a Facebook post criticizing the commuting of sentencing to Govindachamy from death to life in the Soumya rape and murder case. A Supreme Court Bench had converted the Facebook post into a review petition and took suo motu judicial notice of his blog post.



Justice Katju had remarked that the Bench had grievously erred in law by not holding the convict Govindachamy guilty of murder.



The top court on Friday also rejected the review petition of the Kerala government and victim Soumya's mother challenging Govindachamys acquittal from the murder charge.



(With PTI inputs)


: The Centre's assurance that ATMs across the country would start working by November 10 midnight clearly hasn't materialised on the ground.As people in Delhi ventured forth on Friday morning to withdraw the permissible 2000 on their debit cards, they were met with disappointment as one ATM machine after another declined their requests.Some ATMs had their shutters down and some just added to the existing confusion.Others had error messages stuck on them.BJP President Amit Shah apologised to the aam aadmi for the inconvenience caused, asking them to bear with it as it would only be a matter of a week to ten days.On the ground, not everyone is convinced.Vineet Rawat is a software engineer buying an apartment in Noida. "I need to pay 20,000 rupees for my flat's registry. I have to come to the bank and stand in such long queues for five days just to withdraw that amount. My son's mundan (a religious ceremony) is also coming up and there isn't enough cash for the expenses involved. The government should have planned the logistics of this move better."And it gets worse.28-year-old Jagdish Nath's sister is getting married on the 23rd of this month. But the government's announcement to scrap 500 and 1000 rupee notes has put the Naths in a fix."No caterer is willing to finalise a booking unless an advance of up to 50,000 rupees is paid in cash and that too in the new currency only. How is it even possible for us to withdraw that kind of money with the current restrictions in place? Imagine all the expenses, we have to pay 1.8 lakh to the marriage hall and with all payments on hold, most of the work too is being held up."39-year-old Rakesh Kumar's cousin is getting married. "Our caterer is now asking us to cough up an additional 1.3 lakh rupees above the 6 lakhs we were already supposed to pay him. He says he'll have to pay taxes now but he's putting the brunt of those taxes on us. As if there isn't enough of a hassle already."Those going for a holiday are just as worried. 35-year-old Shatarupa Chaudhuri has been spending half her day in bank queues. "Yesterday, my husband and I stood in the line for four hours to withdraw 4,000 each. We're back in the line today as we're leaving for Goa tomorrow for a five day trip and we'll desperately need the cash."But the public sentiment is palpably still in favour of the crackdown on those with crores of black money stashed in their homes and offices.27-year-old Rejith Kumar explains, "I have been waiting for hours on end but I agree the move is a good one and will hit the corrupt where it hurts. My only grievance is that the government should have thought about how this will affect those in emergencies and planned measures to address their concerns."
Great to know @deepikapadukone is presently shooting for #MajidMajidi. Now this is greater news than that of working in a Hollywood flick. pic.twitter.com/gt9Ve2bemW  Arindam Sil (@silarindam) November 10, 2016

Deepika Padukone is taking her international film career a step forward and is currently shooting for Iranian director Majid Majidi's next. The talented actress will be seen portraying the role of a slum woman.Deepika was clicked in a complete de-glam look recently while giving a screen test near a slum area. She is quite noticeably playing the role of an underprivileged woman.After portraying a glamourous ally to Vin Diesel in XXX: Return of Xander Cage, Deepika is set to challenge the actress within her and thus opted for a signature Majidi's film. According to sources, the film will be shot largely in Mumbai, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and the shooting will continue till early 2017.Now we know why the Bajirao Mastani star didn't sign any film in 2016. After ruling the Bollywood in 2015, the actresses completely focussed on her international career and will return to the home industry in 2017 with Padmavati.Not to mention, her smart move to work with one of Iran's finest directors will prove extremely beneficial. Majidi is known for his realism and his notable films include Children of Heaven, The Song of Sparrows and The Willow Tree.
Prosecutors ordered the detention of an Egyptian judge on Thursday after he was found in possession of 68 kilograms of hashish (cannabis extract), Al-Ahram daily reported on Friday.

Security forces stopped the unnamed male judge in his car at the Ahmed Hamdy tunnel which connects the eastern and the western banks of the Suez Canal and discovered the drugs, which have a value of around EGP 1.5 million (approx. $92,410) according to Al-Ahram.

The judge's driver and a European woman travelling with them were also arrested.

Judicial sources told Al-Ahram that Justice Minister Hossam Abdel-Rahim accepted the resignation of the judge following the incident.

Hash has been illegal in Egypt since it signed the Geneva International Convention on Narcotic Control in 1925.

Search Keywords:

Short link:


Kolkata: The 22nd edition of the week-long Kolkata International Film Festival begins here on Friday under the shadow of demonetisation with organisers roping in the Whos Who of Bollywood and a galaxy of global cine personalities to kick-start the event with the usual punch.



West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday announced the presence of megastar Amitabh Bachchan, his wife and actress Jaya, stars Shah Rukh Khan, Sanjay Dutt, Kajol, and Parineeti Chopra at the inaugural ceremony.



China will feature as the focus country in the annual cine extravaganza organised by the state government.



A delegation of at least eight persons from the Chinese government and film industry will attend the fest, which will screen as many as seven films from the neighbouring country.



As many as 15 films from 13 countries have been selected for the international competition (Best Film by a Woman Director and Best Woman Director).



Despite the hours inching closer to the opening, a distinct lack of buzz at the venue - the Nandan theatre complex - was conspicuous. In fact, the absence of usual traffic snarls at the site of the theatre cluster in the busy Rabindra Sadan area in south Kolkata was noticeable.



Workers were occupied in putting final touches to the decor.



Asked on the low-key atmosphere, one replied it was due to the rush in banks to exchange and deposit the withdrawn Rs 500 and Rs 1000 denominations.



"People are in banks. The focus has shifted to money and that is the common man's main worry and not tickets to watch films," a worker told IANS while framing up the banners.



Banerjee has also been vocal against the rushed nature of the move going to the extent of dubbing it an "all-India unannounced strike".



However, she remains firm on her resolve to ensure people get to celebrate the best of cinema.



"It's truly cinema for all, all for cinemaa," she posted on Facebook.



The regional focus is on Marathi films.



The fest will pay tribute to late American screen icon Gregory Peck and Kanan Devi, dubbed as the first superstar of Indian cinema, with the ongoing year marking her centenary.



Six films of Japanese film director and screenwriter Kenji Mizoguchi will be showcased in the 'Great Master' segment.



Homage will be paid to Australian filmmaker Paul Cox and Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami (who passed away this year) and others.



The festival will also remember the 450th death anniversary of William Shakespeare by screening some of the major film adaptations of the bard's works.



Among additions, debuting this year is the international competition in innovation in moving images with nine films from seven countries.



A segment on biopic documentary has been introduced in the 22nd edition.
Fifty kilometers from Kanpur, in the poll-bound UP BSP leader Satish Mishra, is holding a bahichara sammelan. The talk of the town this Friday afternoon is economics and not politics. Just about everyone wants to know the impact of midnight demonitisation.



There is a long serpentine queue outside a public sector bank in the heart of the town. Both Mayawati and Mulayam have called for ending this "economic emergency". Uttar Pradesh CM Akhilesh Yadav has sought further relaxation from Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in using high-value currency notes in hospitals and pharmacies till month end.



In the national capital New Delhi, BJP, however, had decided to up the ante with Party president Amit Shah almost pulling off a George W. Bush on demonetisation of high-value currency notes.



As serpentine queues outside banks and ATMs grew, Shah asked opposition parties to decide if they are with or against terror which survives on hawala transactions and black money.



The government was preparing to take harsh measures on black money was first articulated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at BJP National executive in Allahabad earlier this year. In the closed-door meeting, he urged party men to be prepared for some harsh measures. Two and a half years after taking over the reins of power, it was a political imperative which could not be delayed any further.



Of all the poll promises, which ushered in BJP to power, perhaps, two issues struck a direct chord with the electorate: employment generation and curb on black money. That clampdown on accounted wealth would bring in fifteen lakh rupees in every bank account was embedded in the larger poll narrative.



In every assembly election that the BJP has contested in the last two years, the 15 lakh 'jumla' has reared its head all too often to the discomfiture of the top party leadership.



Arvind Kejriwal raised the issue during Delhi assembly polls, so did Nitish and Lalu in Bihar elections. And now, as one approaches UP polls, Mayawati in all her rallies has sought to know from people on promises made and kept by the Modi government in the last one year.



The midnight demonetisation of high-value currency notes aims to blunt this opposition attack which would have only grown in the days ahead. An Akhilesh Yadav would have made a comparison in his election speeches between the performances of his government in the state vis-a-vis the centre.



If nothing substantive was done, all this would have reached a crescendo by 2019.



The government, thus, has decided to bite the bullet. But there is also an inherent political risk association in a transformation of this nature and magnitude. First, the demonetization has a direct impact on the urban middle class, especially the trading and business community which has been the stock BJP vote bank.



Secondly, it is not very clear how this will play out in the rural economy, especially in the short term.

All the important players in UP have already articulated their position on the issue.

It is now for the government to deliver and people to decide.




New York: At least 65 people were arrested in protests following Donald Trump's surprise victory in the US presidential election, even as Trump-themed swastika graffiti was found in a local town here, media reports said.



On Wednesday in Wellsville, New York a passer-by spotted a swastika and the phrase "Make America White Again" on a softball dugout, according to a local daily.



Graffiti, with Nazi imagery and the word "Trump", was also discovered on a storefront in Philadelphia.



Police said they would look into the incident, though they haven't received any reports.



Meanwhile, thousands of people gathered on Wednesday afternoon in Union Square, Columbus Circle and other parts of New York City for demonstrations that had been organised via social media.



The New York City Police Department confirmed on Thursday that at least 65 people were detained on different charges, including disturbing the peace and resisting arrest, ABC News reported.



As in other cities, the protesters in Manhattan chanted "Not Our President" and "New York Hates Trump" and held up signs with messages that included "Don't Lose Hope".



Even after police intervention, hundreds of protesters continued toward Trump Tower, where police formed a barricade to prevent people from getting too close to the 58-story building.



In another development, disturbing footage from Chicago has emerged showing a mob beating a man for supposedly voting Trump.



The footage shows the victim being clobbered by at least two others, as onlookers heartily cheer in the background.



A spokeswoman for the Chicago police said Thursday the department learned of the footage on Wednesday.



"We're looking into it. We have no new information to add to it," New York Post quoted a Chicago police officer as saying.


British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, setting aside his previous hostility toward Donald Trump, said on Thursday the U.S. Republican's presidential election victory offered economic opportunities and there was no need for Europeans to be despondent about it.



"I may respectfully say to my European friends and colleagues that it's time we snapped out of general doom and gloom about this election," Johnson said after meeting Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.



"He is after all a deal maker. He wants to do a free trade deal with the UK," Johnson told reporters.



Trump's upset victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton has delighted far-right politicians in France, the Netherlands and Austria but worried some mainstream politicians who fear it may be part of a populist, anti-establishment trend.



"I believe that this is a great opportunity for us in the UK to build on that relationship with America that is of fundamental economic importance for us but also of great importance for stability and prosperity in the world," Johnson said.



Johnson was one of the leading proponents of the successful Brexit campaign to get Britain out of the European Union. Trump aligned himself with the Brexit movement during his campaign.



On Wednesday, Johnson, the former London mayor, congratulated Trump on his victory and tweeted that he looked forward to continuing the partnership between the two nations.



Johnson said last year that he feared going to New York because of "the real risk of meeting Donald Trump" after the New York businessman said parts of London were now so radicalised that police officers feared to go there.



Later on Thursday, Johnson said on his Twitter account he had spoken to U.S. Vice President-elect Mike Pence.



"We agreed on importance of the special relationship & need to tackle global challenges together," he tweeted.
Mazar-i-Sharif (Afghanistan):The death toll from a powerful Taliban truck bombing at the German consulate in Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif city rose to at least six on Friday, with more than 100 others wounded in a major militant assault.



The Taliban said the bombing on Thursday, which tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars, was a "revenge attack" for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead.



The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, smashing windows of nearby shops and leaving terrified local residents fleeing for cover.



"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.



All German staff from the consulate were unharmed, according to the foreign ministry in Berlin.



But seven Afghan civilians were killed, including two motorcyclists who were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop, said deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri.



A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added.



Local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez said the city hospitals received six dead bodies, including two killed by bullets.



At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries, he added.



"The consulate building has been heavily damaged," the German foreign ministry said in a statement. "Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families."



A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting.



"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."



Afghan special forces have cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area after the explosion.



The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations.



President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.
Kathmandu: Nepal's banking system has held banned Indian currency (IC) 500 and 1,000 notes worth Rs 35 million ($524,737).



"As reported by the banking institutions licensed by us, they have held banned IC notes worth 35 million rupees as of Thursday," said Narayan Poudel, spokesperson of Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), adding that the amount could cross Rs 40 million ($599,700) once remaining a few banking institutions send their details about the stock of such notes.



However, Nepalese central bank believes that the traders and general public living in bordering areas with India as well as Nepalese migrant workers who had returned from India might have held huge amount of these notes, Xinhua news agency reported.



"We don't have record of IC notes held by general public," said Poudel.



The IC notes denominated upto 100 rupee has long been freely exchangeable in Nepal.



But, India had allowed Nepal to use IC notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees last year only after Nepal made request to its southern neighbour for such provision considering easing Nepalese migrant to carry Indian currency notes while returning home. They were facing the risk of being robbed on the way while carrying large bundle of low denominated IC notes.



After India allowed Nepal to use of IC notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees last year, the Himalayan nation had allowed Nepalese migrant workers and Indian nationals to carry such notes upto 25,000 rupees in Nepal.



Sudden Indian decision of banning the use of these notes left shockwaves across Nepal's banking sector as well as people around the bordering areas and migrant workers' families. Officials of NRB and Nepalese banks said that they were getting constant inquiries from people whether the IC notes held by them would be exchanged.



Meanwhile, Nepal's central bank has asked Indian central bank Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to make arrangement for exchanging the banned notes available with Nepal's banking system as well as the cash held by people upto 25,000 rupees.



"We have written the RBI for making exchange of legally available stock of such IC notes in Nepal," said Basudev Adhikari, director of foreign exchange management department at NRB.



"We have also written to Nepal's Finance Ministry for making diplomatic initiative with India for settling the issue."
Islamabad: Pakistan formally joined the Paris Agreement on Climate Change by submitting its instrument of ratification at a ceremony at the UN headquarters, becoming the 104th country to ratify the landmark deal.



Pakistan's envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi deposited the "Instrument of Ratification" signed by the President of Pakistan, a Foreign Office statement said on Friday.



"With the ratification, Pakistan has become 104th country to ratify the agreement, which entered into force earlier this month," the statement said. Pakistan had signed the agreement on the first day of its opening for signature in New York in April this year.



The ratification by Pakistan corresponds with the ongoing Marrakech Climate Change Conference, which was formed to take important decisions for the comprehensive implementation of the Paris Agreement.



On October 5 the conditions for the agreement's entry into force were met which required ratification by at least 55 countries, accounting for 55 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.



The agreement obliges member states to keep global warming below 2 degrees centigrade - regarded as the threshold for safety by experts and scientists.



Pakistan's ratification is in line with its firm commitment to the purposes and objectives of the Climate Convention. It also highlights the resolve of Pakistan to remain fully committed to the implementation of the Paris Agreement, the statement said.



India on October 2 became the 62nd country to ratify the agreement.


Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell walk together to meet in McConnell's office at the US Capitol. (Image: Reuters)
APPOMATTOX  Representatives from the Appomattox County High School marching band and Future Farmers of America requested funding from the Appomattox County School Board on Thursday night during a public hearing on Fiscal Year 2018 budget goals.

Brandy Bryant, whose son Brandon is in the Marching Raiders band, said numerous studies show music improves students scores on the SATs.

We are still forced to charge band fees to cover costs, competition fees, state assessment fees, Virginia band directors association fees  instrument maintenance and uniform cleaning, she said.

The students are forced into a pay to play system, Bryant added.

Jonathan Garrett, an Appomattox resident and former member of the FFA, thanked the school board for its past financial support and requested its continued support.

He also asked the board to follow the recommendation of the Career and Technical Education Advisory Committee to reinstate a certified horticulture teacher.

There is a class [Elizabeth] Duncan teaches that has 19 students that would be interested  Ive used it personally in my experience, from cutting grass to helping people with landscaping businesses, Garrett said.

The board said Thursday it achieved its 2016-17 budget goals of providing staff a 3-percent pay raise, adding six staff positions, decreasing employees health insurance costs, hiring an assistant principal for Appomattox Primary School and leasing two buses.

Following the public hearing, the board decided to delay setting budget goals for the 2017-18 school year until the proposed state budget is released in mid-December.

I dont expect us to get extra money [from the state], probably get less money, Board Chairman Bobby Waddell said.

Vice Chairman Greg Smith said he would prefer to wait for the state numbers to be released instead of making goals and then having to remove those goals because of lack of funding.

The next meeting of the school board will be at 5 p.m. Dec. 15.
Test results on new cases of pneumonia following an outbreak in Timberlake-area schools now are arriving at the Virginia Department of Healths Central Virginia District. Last week 15 cases of the disease were identified.

I have heard of more and more cases anecdotally in the community. Its starting to appear more community-wide than concentrated in one area, Central Virginia epidemiologist Haley Evans said Thursday.

Some test results have ruled out possible causes for the outbreak, but it is too soon to draw any conclusions, Evans said.

Residents are encouraged to go to a local physician if they are experiencing symptoms such as difficulty breathing, severe coughing or fever, which can be signs of pneumonia.

Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs that can be spread person-to-person when small droplets of water containing the bacteria are expelled and breathed in by others, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To prevent the spread of any illness, the department recommends frequent soap and hand-washing, coughing and sneezing into an elbow instead of hands, not sharing drinks with others and keeping children and adults at home if fever rises about 100 degrees.
Security in main squares was intense in anticipation of possible protests

Egypt's main squares and streets were quiet on Friday apart from the notable presence of security forces, despite anonymous calls for protests against "harsh economic conditions" which had been endorsed by pro-Muslim Brotherhood Facebook pages.

Although the protest calls had not gained the support of political parties or many activist movements, there were minor gatherings of pro-Muslim Brotherhood groups across the country.

Earlier this month, Egypt's government announced several measures aimed at reviving the country's ailing economy, including a full currency float and a cut to energy subsidies. The decisions came amid shortages in some basic commodities and food price hikes.

Security authorities arrested around 300 protesters nationwide on Friday, Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported, citing a security source.

According to Ahram, 50 people were arrested in Cairo, and 40 in Giza during small protests in the areas of Mansouria, Omraniya, and Kirdasah.

In Beheira governorate 98 Muslim Brotherhood supporters were arrested.

Another 110 protesters were arrested in different provinces, including Alexandria, Minya, Beni Suef, Kafr El-Sheikh and Suez, in protests which lasted for only a few minutes before being dispersed, or were far from major cities or city centres.

In Cairo, two photojournalists and one reporter were arrested, according to Khaled El-Balshy, the head of the freedoms committee at the Egyptian press syndicate.

"Two of them have been released, while one photojournalist is still being examined by the national security apparatus at Omraniya police station, and we [the committe] communicated with the Giza security directorate in attempts to free him," El-Balshy told Ahram Online.

Prime Minister Sherif Ismail hailed Egyptians "who chose stability, reform, development and construction, and refused any calls against those goals," in an interview with state TV on Friday.

Some downtown coffee shop owners told Ahram Online that they were advised to close on Friday, while building doormen were told by security forces to report any tension or unusual activities.

Ahram Online reported quiet streets in downtown Cairo from Thursday night onward, after the government decided to close Tahrir Square's metro station. Police sirens could be heard as security vehicles patrolled downtown neighbourhoods.

Most shops around Tahrir were closed amid an intensive security presence, with barricades, dozens of armored trucks, and male and female riot police deployed all over central Cairo.

Search Keywords:

Short link:


The rockets and mortar blasts became commonplace at the base near Baghdad where Brian Moore was stationed in 2008.

Radar gave the soldiers a three seconds warning before one hit. The procedure: Hit the ground, wait for the blast and then head for the bunkers.

The attacks typically were scattershot, but on April 8, 2008, the mortars hit their targets. Moore found himself lying face down, unable to move, listening to one of his men calling his name over and over in the dust cloud.

Moore, inspired by his family of soldiers, first joined the National Guard in 1987. He was a 27-year-old police officer in his native New Hampshire. He first was deployed in 2003 to Iraq, where his unit escorted convoys. By that time, Moore was an educator and raising four children with his wife, Raquel.

People said, I bet you never thought you were going to have to go to war, he said. I always thought I was going to war. Some people glom on to the idea that the National Guard doesnt go. They do and they have 

His second tour found him embedded with native troops in Afghanistan.

When he returned from that tour, he became a military police officer, and the sergeant was given a unit of six soldiers in need of a commander. The unit grew to about 60 soldiers straight out of basic training. That group deployed to Iraq.

My famous last words to my wife were, Dont worry. Im the platoon sergeant. I dont have to go outside the wire. Im just going to be on base, just kind of running things. Beans and bullets.

The soldiers were sent to a small base near Baghdad that was targeted by mortars and rockets daily.

Theyd hit stuff but it was so random, he said. Theyd do the all clear and wed go back to work.

The first round to hit the morning of April 8 was a smoke round. Moore later learned the Iraqi barber on base was directing the assault by cellphone from atop a building.

The guys were complacent, so they were kind of meandering into the bunker, like, OK, here we go again, he said. So Im pushing guys in. The rocket came in behind me. It hit our trailer and I was blown from there.

Moore, then 48, found himself face down in a cloud of dust and chemicals expelled from exploded fire extinguishers. Blood trickled from his ears and he was choking on the dirt. The blunt trauma left him unable to move.

Being face down on the ground in Iraq is no place to be, Moore said. The rockets kept coming.

Moore suffered a concussion, nerve damage in

his spine, a dislocated hip and lacerations from shrapnel.

I couldnt see much because of all the dust and stuff, he said. Hearing the other guys who were wounded  One of my guys, he kept calling my name. I couldnt move. 

I could hear the radio as they were calling out the wounded. Several of the guys who got hurt were leadership because they were the guys pushing the guys into the bunker. They were the ones exposed.

That day, one man from Moores unit was killed and more than 10 were wounded.

Soldiers began moving the wounded on flatbed trucks to get them to the hospital as the mortars chased them. Moore was strapped into helicopter and airlifted.

At the time, Moores brother-in-law also was in Iraq, working to help its government create its own aviation program. As a joke, Moore scrawled his brother-in-laws name on the wall and his phone number with the message: If I get blown up, call Terry.

So they did, Moore said. He met me at the hospital  and he was able to call my wife.

Moore remembers the doctors and nurses wanted to cut away his boots. He begged them not to, because it takes forever to break in a pair of boots.

They cut the laces, Moore said. My lieutenant, hes there, hes talking to me and all of a sudden, I realize Im naked. All these nurses and people running around  I said, Am I naked? and he said, Oh, yeah. So I grabbed a blanket and threw it over me.

Raquel Moore said during his deployments, she juggled her childrens daily routine, trying to minimize their worry about their father. Her brother-in-law lived across the street so when the call came from Iraq, he relayed the information to Raquel before the two Army representatives arrived at her door.

The Army chaplain showing up is not very comforting, she said, but she quickly learned she knew more about her husbands condition, thanks to family, than the Army representatives.

Moore spent three weeks in a hospital in the Philippines.

I should have gone home, but I said, If I can walk, send me back, he said. We only had a month. It wasnt a good idea, but they sent me back and I

finished the tour with them.

He now has arthritis in the hip that was dislocated. He suffered nerve damage, leaving his hands feeling as though they are asleep. Doctors have told him his wiring is a little fried from the blast and as a result, he suffers from muscle contractions that can cause chest pain and shortness of breath. He still has migraines.

[Brian] and I joke he has a legion of angels following him, Raquel Moore said. There are so many times we should have lost him and we didnt.

The explosion ended his military service. He went through rehabilitation but was medically retired in 2010. Raquel and Brian Moore moved to Campbell County in 2011.

Moore struggled with returning to his life in New Hampshire.

I would wake up in the middle of the night convinced I was in Iraq and wondered why my wife was in Iraq with me, he said.

Other soldiers struggled, too, and one man he served with committed suicide within his first six months home. Data compiled by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs found about 20 veterans commit suicide nationwide every day. In 2014, 7,400 veterans killed themselves, accounting for 18 percent of suicides in the United States, though veterans make up less than 9 percent of the population.

Moore began writing a book as therapy at the recommendation of his counselor.

The more your talk about it, it minimizes it, Moore said. It doesnt become this big, dark secret anymore.

Moore said his wife encouraged him to put the book together for some closure. He thought the only person who would read it was his mother, but he gave away some copies and soon started hearing from other veterans with whom his story resonated.

Raquel Moore said she encouraged him to finish it so their children could understand this piece of their father. She thought their children, grandchildren and Moores mother would be the only ones to read it, but then Liberty Mountain Press picked it up.

The proceeds from his book are funneled into area veterans groups and Providence Farm in Concord, which is creating a transitional program for veterans.

A number of veterans and soldiers found comfort and a voice they were able to share, she said. Through Brians voice, they were able to communicate with their families better.

Moores book, Purple Hearts and Wounded Spirits, can be ordered through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Christian Book Distributors.
Bob VandeLinde remembers his unit of just eight men ended up on the outskirts of a village in Korea with about 200 enemy troops camped nearby.

He still carries the scars of the battle that ensued Oct. 21 and 22, 1950, a battle that left him unable to walk after a grenade struck him in the leg.

VandeLinde joined the U.S. Army in August 1948, just after finishing his first year of college at Marshall University. He was 18.

The three of us guys got together and we talked ourselves into joining, VandeLinde said. The 185th Airborne Division was in Japan and we thought that would be kind of neat going to [a] foreign country.

As the Korean War began to unfold two years later, VandeLinde, a paratrooper with the 11th Airborne, found himself in combat immediately after he arrived in the country on Sept. 25, 1950.

His regiment didnt have time to plan their assault with some 6,000 enemy troops surrounding the area when they arrived.

When I landed in Korea all the buildings were bombed out, he said. There were kids in the streets hungry and dirty and orphaned.

VandeLindes first jump behind enemy lines came Oct. 20, 1950.

2,860 paratroopers jumped on that day, he said. One of the things we were supposed to do was recapture our prisoners.

That rescue mission never happened. Delayed due to rain, VandeLinde said they arrived to find the men dead.

His regiment continued on to the village of Yongju, setting up roadblocks along the way.

Then on Oct. 21 and 22, VandeLindes unit of eight men found their outpost was just down the road from an enemy encampment of about 200.

VandeLinde engaged the enemy while the other men pulled back to strategic locations.

I used my hand grenades. I used my rifle and my .38 pistol, he said. Then I ran back into a low cover yard there.

North Korean soldiers sprinted by, lobbing hand grenades at him.

A couple knocked me down with a concussion, he said. The third one caught me in the leg and wounded me pretty bad. I was unable to walk.

Using his rifle as a crutch, VandeLinde made his way back to one of the officers and alerted him of the attack.

Then that night we ran out of ammunition and all we had was our bayonets, he said.

VandeLinde said he was injured again while fighting off a North Korean soldier, and he passed out from blood loss.

They reported me as either killed or captured,

he said. Then they found me lying in a ditch. Two medics put me on a stretcher and then took me to

the hospital.

VandeLinde convalesced for a month before commanders began talking about moving him to a different unit. Not wanting to be away from his men, VandeLinde borrowed a cane and convinced a pilot to take him back to where his regiment was stationed.

It was about this time the Chinese entered the war, bringing with them 80,000 to 100,000 troops, VandeLinde said. In early December, unable to defend Youngju, the American troops left.

We marched almost 200 miles with a medic treating me every day, VandeLinde said. We didnt have a choice. We had nowhere to ride. We just had to walk. ...

It was kind of dumb [leaving the hospital] because I had a nice bed, clean sheets, hot meals and one or two pretty nurses. I left that to fight Koreans again.

VandeLinde still carries three pieces of shrapnel in his leg.

Youre trained to do a job and you do what you can to be the best soldier you can be, he said.

During his time in Korea, VandeLinde made seven jumps; two of them straight into combat. After a year in Korea, he came home.

There was no parade, VandeLinde said. There were no greetings. The only greeting we had was a coffee and doughnut from the Red Cross.

Life carried on after the war. He met his wife and went into the insurance business. After retiring in 1991, VandeLinde moved to North Carolina for a while until moving to Moneta 16 years ago to be closer to their grandchildren.

But VandeLinde said he didnt talk about his time in Korea until he wrote his first book detailing the experiences.

Unless youve been there, you dont understand, he said. A true combat veteran doesnt want to be thought of as exaggerating or not telling the truth.

VandeLinde said few people know the details of the Korean War.

It was not a television war. There are not a lot of books written about it, he said.

His son, Marty VandeLinde said it wasnt until he was in his mid-50s that he understood his fathers experiences at war.

During a trip to Northern Virginia, Marty VandeLinde said they met one of his fathers friends from the Army who told Marty VandeLinde war stories.

We always knew dad was a hero, Marty VandeLinde said. When [the friend] started

talking I was breathless.

Growing up, Marty VandeLinde said his father showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder but said it never stopped him from being a great dad.

We knew he had mood swings and sleepless nights, he said. We just didnt know what it was. There wasnt a term for it yet.

Bob VandeLinde credits the grace of God for surviving the war.

God had a plan for me and my life, he said. I am nobody special. Any Army or Marine that was on the ground fighting would have done the same thing I did. Many of them did.
Leighton Dodd was just 19 years old when a machine gun blast knocked him from the back of a Jeep and he was left for dead.

Now 85 years old, Dodd is a retired banker, a former Lynchburg mayor and a veteran of the Korean War.

He was awarded two Purple Hearts during his service. He joined the U.S. Army at age 17.

One of a dozen children growing up on a farm in Charlotte County, Dodd knew there was no money for college, so he enlisted, following in the footsteps of his three older brothers who served in World War II.

Dodd joined in 1949 at a time of peace.

He underwent basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, then was stationed in Japan with the 1st Cavalry Division, 7th Cavalry Regiment of Fox Company in 1949. He was stationed just outside Tokyo when the U.S. entered into the conflict in Korea. His company was the second unit sent to arrive in the country in July 1950.

About a month later, on Aug. 19, 1950, Fox Company was camped near the Nakdong River when they came under enemy fire.

Dodd was firing a .50-caliber machine gun from the back of an open-top Jeep as his commander feed ammunition into the weapon so it wouldnt jam.

He didnt seem to be too happy with me firing so  we switched places and about a minute later, we were hit by a round of machine gun fire by the Koreans, he said. Both of us were knocked off the Jeep. He was killed instantly.

Dodd was hit with a glancing blow across his chest. The Jeeps driver drove away, likely thinking both men were dead.

I was scared to death, Dodd said. Blood was coming out of my chest where it hit me and I really thought, you know, I might die. It really turned out to be a flesh would but it looked awful.

Dodd laid on the ground, alone, for about 30 minutes before 2nd Lt. Lippincott arrived and dragged him back to safety. Dodd said the company headquarters was just on the other side of the hill and could hear the assault on the Jeep.

My thought about it is this: Without some divine intervention, I wouldnt be here today, Dodd said. Why me? Why am I alive and why is that captain dead? It kind of impacts your entire life. Although I got wounded twice, I consider myself one of the lucky ones to get out of there and come back and have a normal life.

Dodd was taken to a hospital in Japan where he spent he spent three months before returning to Korea in December 1950. He still bears the scar on his chest and subconsciously rubs it when he talks about that day.

Dodd returned to Fox Company after his hospital stay and leave was completed. By that time, the Chinese had entered the war.

The North Koreans were all around, Dodd said. You are fighting the North Koreans and the South Koreans  you never knew which is which because they all look alike. The number of times we had someone who we thought was South Korean and then they would kill someone or wound someone. It was very difficult fighting because you didnt know which person was your enemy.

He was wounded for a second time Feb. 12, 1951, as his company began a strategic withdrawal, headed from the Yalu River in northern North Korea south toward Seoul.

We were walking, coming back all day, and every night theyd be right back on us again. As fast as we moved back, they were following us, he said.

As Dodds division approached Seoul, his company headquarters was hit by a mortar shell.

The shrapnel struck him in 13 places. His left arm was broken, and he still carries a piece of that shrapnel in his chest.

I wasnt knocked out or anything, I just had these wounds and none of them were life-threatening. But you didnt know that at the time, Dodd said.

An ambulance driver came by after the blast and said he couldnt take anyone else. A private, whom Dodd remembered as a character and a great squirrel hunter, told the ambulance driver to take Dodd or he would shoot the driver.

Sure enough, he took me back, Dodd said. That kid, I dont know if he would have done it, but he just might have.

He was flown to Japan, then to the Aleutian Islands, then Hawaii, San Francisco, and Mobile, Alabama before he ended up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. By then, he had spent 48 hours in the air, on a propeller plane strapped to a stretcher. At Walter Reed, he was diagnosed with malaria.

And I have claustrophobia, Dodd said. It just drove me nuts. All I could do was shut my eyes and tolerate it.  It wasnt as bad as Korea was.

The broken arm was going to take a while to heal, Dodd said, so the Army decided to send him home a few months early.

I said Hallelujah, raise the flag!

Dodd had enlisted for three years, but a fourth was added when the Korean War broke out. Due to his injuries, he was discharged three months early.

When Dodd returned home, he went to Lynchburg College on the GI bill, graduating in 1956, and ended up making a pretty good life in Lynchburg. I hope I made a contribution along the way.

Mary Ann Dodd, his wife of 52 years, first met her husband when she was a nurse at Virginia Baptist Hospital and he was her patient. She recalls it being love at first sight, but it was only later in life he shared the details of his wartime experiences with her.

You just dont talk about it, she said. It made it easier if you didnt bring it up. As our children got older, they asked, but it was the same wall.

Dodd became a Lynchburg City Councilman in 1970, and then mayor from 1972 to 1976 during a pivotal time for Lynchburg as the city underwent a controversial annexation of parts of Bedford and Campbell counties. Hes served on the boards of Lynchburg College, the Salvation Army, the Lynchburg Chapter of the American Cancer Society and other many boards and committees.

He was always doing things, always gone to a meeting, his wife said. He never really talked about Korea. Now I look back and realize that is a typical response for GIs. They experience such horrible visual things.  Its difficult to deal with.

Mary Ann Dodd said surviving when some of his fellow soldiers didnt is why she thinks her husband has been so focused on giving back to his community.

Hes a very close to the chest man anyway, but he told me that there was a purpose in that for his life, and he had to work to serve others, she said. Hes an excellent role model and father. Hes just incredible. He does things very quietly. Even now, he goes to the market and brings back peaches for the neighbors. 

His life was saved so he could be so helpful to people.

Dodd retired in 1995 from the banking industry, and the couple moved to Hilton Head for a while, before returning to Lynchburg to be closer to their grandchildren.

During his time in South Carolina, Dodd managed to find a phone number for the lieutenant who saved his life and called him.

It was really very emotional, Dodd said. I asked if he remembered me and he did. Very much so.  He was in Korea a while longer and he never was wounded, interestingly enough.
Samuel Mosley calls it his personal Pearl Harbor Day  Dec. 7, 1950.

That was the day Mosley was drafted into a then-segregated U.S. Army, serving in the 7th Infantry Division.

Mosley rose from an enlisted man to an officer, leading troops in their efforts to storm a hill amid a barrage of grenades during the Korean War. His bravery earned him a Silver Star, and shrapnel thrown by three grenades is how he ended up with three Purple Hearts.

Now 88, Mosleys war wounds have left him with an aching back, and he relies on a cane to walk.

During basic training, Mosleys leadership skills began to show. That, coupled with his ROTC training and extensive knowledge of the Manual of Arms, an instruction book for handling weapons, helped propel him into Officer Candidate School.

Then he went to U.S. Army Airborne School, to see how much courage I had.

Mosley became a platoon leader of the E Company, 2nd Battalion and was sent to Korea in the fall of 1952. His battalion was tasked with forming the main line of resistance.

Mosley said his platoon first was assigned regular patrols, then had to seize control of a hill and hold that position.

You usually couldnt, he said. Theyd run you back off.

The assault that injured Mosley happened near Kumhwa, as United Nations troops battled Chinese forces for control of several hills as part of the Battle of Triangle Hill.

The effort to take Triangle Hill was the biggest and bloodiest battle of 1952, according to Veterans

Resources.org. After 42 days of heavy fighting, the Army could not gain control of the two hills, Triangle Hill and Snipers Ridge. The battle for Triangle Hill lasted 42 days, and eventually the United Nations Command was defeated, suffering 9,000 casualties,

Mosleys unit was to take Hill 598.

An assault the day before had failed when troops encountered withering fire, Mosley said.

We were going up the very next day and that was a lot tougher, he said, adding the only likely avenue of approach was the same road troops took before, and the enemy was prepared.

As his platoon began storming the hill, Mosley saw at least 40 black dots falling from the sky. It took a moment to register grenades were soaring toward his men.

I thought What in the world? Mosley said. I had never heard of an attack like that before.  We were dodging and dancing around, trying to stay out of it. It wasnt quitting either. They got more aggressive. This is where the other attacks stopped  when they ran into that kind of resistance.

Shrapnel from an exploded grenade struck Mosley in the head.

I remember the blow. I was like Boy, I got troubles, and you are stunned  but I had to go so I was able to get around and do maneuvers on that strike.

Communication by radio had been severed and the only means of sending messages with troops providing supportive fire was to use smoke grenades in the fog.

I said Hold up. I got to do something about this so I decided to do what they call a fire maneuver, where you lay down a base of fire so the enemy keeps their head down so you can maneuver, he said. They did the fire and I did the maneuver.

Mosley heard the artillery battery kick out another salvo and he and his men waited for shrapnel to light up the hillside. Then it was time to move.

Mosley moved his men into position to lay down cover fire, and he worked his way around and into the enemy trenches.

And so they just keep small arms fire, just to keep the guy from getting bold and looking, Mosley said. I went around and flanked a little bit, tight flank too, and I got in the enemy trenches.

I look back at that, I said Thats crazy.  But you couldnt stay there. No way you could. Hundreds of grenades coming at you.

When Mosley made his way into the enemy trenches, he said the ledge was small  less than two feet wide before a sharp drop.

Thats when another grenade rolled out in front of Mosley. He had nowhere to go.

I couldnt back up, he said. It got me in the knee and so the knee gave out and I rolled down the hill.

Shrapnel from a third grenade blast struck him in the shoulder.

He was wounded three times ... but he kept going, his wife, Phyllistine, said. He was the leader and he kept going and getting his troops through and getting the job done and taking the hill. Injured.

Phyllistine Mosley said the Armys prevailing stance when her husband served was white men would not accept orders from a black commanding officer.

About 95 percent of those were Southern white boys, she said. He was leading them up the hill to accomplish a mission he was given that the other two battalions didnt.

He advanced in rank from second lieutenant to first lieutenant after his actions that day. He later became a rifle company commander and was responsible for four platoons.

That right there dispels the myth on whether black people can lead or not, Mosley said. Such a horrible conclusion.

After taking the hill, the troops immediately began setting up machine gun defenses to try to hold their new position.

We got in some other flaps like that, he said. Hill 200, to take and hold that hill, and you are looking right down the muzzle of every cannon in the world and they blew us right back off there.  Wed take it one day and be pushed off the next. Back and forth, back and forth. It still dont make any sense.

There was no place to rest out there. That war itself, its some mean stuff. I wish theyd find some other way to settle their differences.  Something different has to be done.

Mosley returned home and spent more than 50 years as a self-employed trucker, retiring only after road vibrations began to irritate his old war wounds.

He rarely spoke of the war, his wife said. Then the sons of the men he lead began to contact him, wanting to capture some tiny part of the men their fathers were.

You get to know them, he said. You walk up and down the line making contact, see how the guys are doing and see if you got any troops you can count on when the chips were down. But then you move into another situation, into another flap, and then you lose some of them. You lose a man, and you wonder what could have been done differently to save them. Its just an impossible question to answer.

Mosley began to speak about his experiences after his wife noticed the Korean government was inviting veterans back to the country on the 50th anniversary of the armistice at Panmunjom, signed July 27, 1953.

He initially didnt want to go, Phyllistine Mosley said. But she convinced her husband to travel to the country once again.

Our mission over there was to destroy and we did a good job of destroying, he said. To see the complete reversal, the paved streets, high-rise buildings, from no buildings. Wed shelled them all off.  From the destruction we created, they changed, they emerged. 

This war liberated them. Every country over there exploited them. They were free.
Rockets and bombs and the enemy striking an ammunition dump at Ahn Khe marked Clarence McCrays first day in Vietnam, but it wasnt until about six months later that McCray was injured when his helicopter plummeted into the jungle.

[The first day] was a beautiful day, McCray said. The night wasnt so beautiful. McCray received his draft notice in 1968, but never read it. When his aunt told him it arrived, he simply asked her to tell him when to report.

When we got down to the reception center  I didnt want to be infantry in Vietnam, McCray said. I scored high enough in mechanicals to be a mechanic 

He arrived in Vietnam in 1969, serving with the U.S. Armys 238th Aerial Weapons Unit as an armament specialist.

By September 1969, McCray had been promoted from gunner to helicopter crew chief.

The day started off, [it] was a beautiful day, McCray said with a laugh. I know it was a Sunday because we took the big malaria pills on Sunday; we were supposed to go on the mission and get off and have the rest of the day off.

They took off from the base near Cam Ranh Bay, on a mission to insert troops near Phan Rang Air Force Base.

During a second run, McCray said a loud boom reverberated in the chopper.

So we started looking to see where we [were] hit, McCray said. [We] never did actually find it because we crashed and left the helicopter in the jungle that day.

The official report said small-arms fire brought the chopper down, and it never was recovered.

The helicopter team was about five miles from base when it began to yaw and pitch, forcing them to begin looking for a place to land in the mountainous and tree covered terrain.

 We cut the top off some trees and the pilot  we called him Gator, was flying the thing, he said we got to land, McCray said. I was thinking, Land? There aint nothing but trees here ...

McCray remembers the tail of the helicopter hitting the trees and beginning to spin.

We all got knocked out, all four people, on the trees, McCray said. The ship got knocked out, thank God for that; I believe that saved us.

When he regained consciousness, McCray said the helicopter lay on its left side  his side  and a sapling lay across his helmet. The gunner, who was on the right side of the helicopter when it crashed, landed on McCray when he took off his seatbelt. The impact knocked McCrays shoulder out of place.

That was it; we all survived the crash, he said.

It took about 45 minutes from the time the chopper crashed until the four soldiers were rescued from the jungle by a small helicopter nicknamed Pedro.

We had to recover the radios and the guns, he said, adding his job was to care for his gunner, pilot and co-pilot.  I was just doing my job; thats what youre trained to do and thats what you do.

He remembers after the crash, their unit attempted a rescue but didnt have the equipment to penetrate the thick jungle.

We formed a back-to-back perimeter, four men, McCray said with a laugh. What good that would have done, I dont know, but we went through the ritual of doing it anyway.

When the helicopter Pedro arrived, he said the crew chief of that chopper pulled him out first, despite McCrays protests.

I told him no, Im not supposed to be pulled first because it was my helicopter, Im supposed to be the last man up, he said.

The Pedros crew chief told McCray he looked like he could fire a machine gun and although they werent under fire at the time, he was instructed to go to the back of the helicopter and provide cover while the other soldiers were extracted.

McCray spent three days recovering before the flight surgeon put him back on duty.

After leaving Vietnam, McCray spent some time in Fort Hood, Texas, and he believes it played a role in his recovery to stay with fellow soldiers and talk about their experiences.

To come home was sort of strange because its like I [came] back from a trip, Im back home, McCray said.

After leaving the Army, McCray joined the National Guard, where he continued to work on helicopters, until retiring to Lynchburg in 1993.

Lynda McCray said things were difficult when he first got back, but as the years go on it gets easier. She said her husband has post-traumatic stress disorder, though not as bad as some people.

I still like him and he still likes me, Lynda said. Hes a good father, a good husband, [and] a good son.

His wife said the two exchanged letters while McCray served in Vietnam and he would share some details of his service.

I still have the letters, Lynda McCray said. He would tell me about his daily adventures and I would tell him about my daily adventures.

McCray said for a long time he didnt wear his Purple Heart on his uniform. At one point, he was up for a promotion to Sergeant Major in the National Guard and one of the commanders told him he was out of uniform. McCray responded he knew and it was because he refused to wear the Purple Heart patch.

I never thought that I deserved a Purple Heart, McCray said. [You] see these guys come back, theyre banged up, their legs missing; and I met the criteria but, in my heart I didnt wear it for a long time.

McCray said it was his son who encouraged him to get the medal and the Purple Heart license plate.

Lynda McCray said her husband still feels he didnt do anything to deserve a Purple Heart, but she believes he does.

Hes a fantastic man; everybody likes him, Lynda said. Hes dependable [and] always there; we love him and were going to keep him.
Tucked in a box in the back of a closet, medals and memorabilia sat untouched, hidden from view and from the memory of former Marine Sgt. Dennis Janiak.

More than three decades after returning from Vietnam, Janiak wanted to keep the pieces of his story out of view, preferring to forget about the bloodshed he witnessed and the injuries he endured as a 23-year-old during the Tet Offensive in 1968.

But when his son, Jeffrey Janiak, was required to write about his hero for a high school assignment, the box was opened. Dennis Janiak parsed through the contents and decided it was time to share his story.

I realized then that the history, what I did and what all the veterans do, it kind of dawned on me that its part of our familys history, he said.  I thought to myself, he needs to learn about me so that he can tell my grandchildren about me when Im gone, because Im part of the family history. And I wanted to make sure we dont forget the veterans like we did when I came home from Vietnam.

While Jeffrey Janiak knew some about what his father had experienced as a Marine during the war, he said he didnt know the details.

Just to know somebody like that in my dad, [I] feel humbled by my dad willing to go out and do that, at such a young age, too, and help protect our country and everything, Jeffrey Janiak said. It just made me think hes someone that put his life on the line. To know someone like that personally, and him be your dad, was something that was nice to have.

Dennis Janiak told his son of the experiences he and his fellow Marines endured during the Tet Offensive, explaining his unit, the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, was sent in February to Hue City to clear government buildings, hospitals and homes amid a constant barrage of enemy fire.

Our thoughts were, this was after about the first six or seven days were going through combat, that, I dont think were gonna make it, Dennis Janiak said. Every day we were getting casualties. Every day wed move maybe a block or so, and wed get six or seven killed, eight or 10 wounded. Every day it was like that.  We thought that either youre going to get killed or youre going to get wounded. It was one or the other.

According to historynet.com, nearly 1,600 Marines and soldiers were killed or wounded in the battle for Hue City.

At one point, after evaluating their odds of survival, Dennis Janiak and a buddy wrote a letter to their loved ones and said to each other, If we dont make it back, make sure that the letter gets mailed.

When I was in Vietnam and when I was in combat, you were fighting for the person on the right and the left of you, he said, because you were all there for the same thing: to stay alive; to do the job and to stay alive.

On Feb. 13, two Marines were hit by enemy sniper fire and lay wounded in the street. Dennis Janiak and another Marine in his unit made the decision to venture into the street, as snipers continued shooting, to pull the two wounded to safety.

When they got to the street, Dennis Janiak and his friend grabbed the first wounded Marine by the flak jacket to drag him around the side of a building. Thats when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded.

I just remember there was a huge explosion. I couldnt hear anything, he said. I was on the ground, and the guy that was with me, he was on the ground, and I looked and I had blood on my arms and my face, and I had holes in my flak jacket where some of the shrapnel had hit.  I was sitting kind of dazed, knowing that I was hit but not knowing how bad I was hit.

Luckily we werent closer. If we were closer  I wouldnt be here today.

Shards of shrapnel were lodged up and down Dennis Janiaks arms and hands.

Its just something that just hits you right in the heart to know that your dad was hurt, Jeffrey Janiak said.  Just [to] think that something couldve happened to him  to know that he was willing to put himself somewhere that he couldve been hurt or killed, it was humbling to know that he was willing to do that.

Despite his injuries, Dennis Janiak was sent back to the streets of Hue City to continue clearing houses amid a barrage of attacks from the North Vietnamese.

If you were walking and you were breathing, you went back to combat, he said.

About a week later, Dennis Janiaks arm began to swell, and he was airlifted out of Hue City to receive treatment for an infection caused by pieces of shrapnel still lodged in his forearms and hands. The infection took him out of combat for the remainder of his service.

After two years, Dennis Janiak was discharged and went back to college and work.

He doesnt think of himself as a hero. He has and will continue to honor others who were killed or injured during the Vietnam War and all those who fought as heroes, though.

For years, Jeffrey Janiak and his father visited the nations capital every Labor Day. Each time, theyd make a trip to the Vietnam Memorial, where Dennis Janiak searched for the dates of the Tet Offensive and the battle for Hue City.

I took him there and I said, You thought of me as a hero, but here are the real heroes. They didnt make it back, Dennis Janiak said, adding he believes all those who served their country deserve to be honored for their sacrifices.

He explained he plans to take his entire family, including his wife and his children and grandchildren to Washington, D.C., for an extended trip, where theyll all get to visit the Vietnam Memorial to remember the sacrifices of all soldiers wounded or killed during the war.
Frank Brown Jr.s ears still ring from the explosion that knocked him off his feet in a bunker near Pleiku, Vietnam.

The now-retired letter carrier still suffers from hearing loss, tinnitus and post-traumatic stress disorder from that assault more than 40 years ago.

After he graduated from high school, Brown began working in the construction business, but decided wintertime work in Northern Virginia wasnt for him.

I came home and I grabbed me an armload of Uncle Sam, said Brown, now 67 years old.

That was in May 1969. By December, the 20-year-old found himself working as a wheel mechanic in Vietnam, stationed at a base near Pleiku in the central highland.

You could sit out there all night and see stuff youd never see here, he said. Shooting stars, you could sit up there and count them all night long. Some nights it was so dark you couldnt see your hand in front of your face and some nights it was so light you could sit out in the dark and read books.

Brown was wounded on Mothers Day 1970 when the base he was stationed at was overrun by enemy troops.

You didnt have any fear doing this because nothing ever happened, Brown said. Nothing like this happened until that night.

Earlier that day, Brown found some butterfly-shaped flat pieces of metal wrapped with wire as he swept the bunker line. He never figured out what it was, though he always wondered if it was something the enemy troops had planted.

After his shift was over that evening, Brown recalled sitting with a fellow soldier atop one of the bunkers.

The other guy said, Man, I got to go. I said, Why, man? He said, I dont know, man, I just got to go. So he left. I was sitting there and I started feeling uneasy too  just like I was being watched. It was really strong so I eased, snuck off, just like a snake.

Brown was scheduled to work listening post duty, watching over the compound, but another soldier offered to trade shifts.

See, where I was supposed to be was outside the compound, on what they called LP. I never really liked that. You are out there with somebody you didnt really know, Brown said. So I switched with somebody.

Brown decided to go to a bunker to sleep. He recalls being shaken awake by a fellow soldier.

We was getting overrun, he said. When he woke me up, everything was already in motion.

He hopped out of the bed and began to follow the soldier who woke him when a mortar round detonated over their heads, knocking them both off their feet.

When I crawled over, trying to figure out what was going on, he was slumped over against the sandbags, Brown said. He was dead.

That is when I realized what was going on. I heard all this foreign talk. I knew they had overrun the compound. I laid over in the corner and just froze, cause I knew there was nothing I could do.

Brown said fluid was running from his ears and they were ringing like church bells. Thats when enemy troops entered the bunker.

One guy grabbed me by the elbow, one by my ankle and proceeded to pull me out of the corner, Brown said, adding when they heard the sound of a Jeep pulling up, enemy troops dropped him and ran.

Its this part of Browns story that bothers his wife Kathryn the most.

I really dont like to hear it, it was so bad, she said. When they thought he was dead and were trying to drag him off and you dont know when they are going to realize youre not dead  I just dont like to talk about it too much.

She didnt know Frank Brown then. She met him after the war, but early in their relationship, he told her what happened to him in Vietnam.

Where I would have been, five of the guys I bunked with were killed, Frank Brown said. It was just the grace of God that I didnt die in that bunker.

When the sun rose the next day, he learned several of his friends were dead and he had to help load the bodies onto a truck to be hauled away.

It just ripped my soul out, he said.

It was the first time I was in a situation where you see death. You could feel it and smell it on the air. You could smell death. It was just an eerie experience.

The three men on duty that night were never seen again.

Six of Browns friends died in the assault; a seventh was seriously injured.

You aint got time to be grieving, he said. The days go on, and the battles go on and your mission continues. You have to harden yourself up.

Brown was flown to Japan to recover from his injuries, spending about three months there working light-duty jobs. He was assigned to the operating room detail, taking patients back and forth from surgeries.

The injured soldiers  the amputated limbs, the broken bones, the suffering  imprinted in his mind, and he now has trouble going into a hospital or nursing-home setting.

Brown spent three years in the U.S. Army before returning home to Lynchburg, where he worked as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, retiring after 35 years.

I was fortunate, he said. Ive seen some of my friends come back loony.

Kathryn Brown said her husbands ability to cope with his post-traumatic stress disorder varies from day to day. The couple has been married for more than 40 years, meeting after Frank Brown struck up a conversation with her as she sat on her porch.

From time to time, he talks about it, she said. He does pretty good, but its still there. He hasnt forgotten about it.

His medication helps, Kathryn Brown said, but he doesnt like to take it.

Frank Brown said he still struggles with being in crowds, he rarely sleeps through the night and sometimes dreams of being chased.

The Army was a learning experience, he said. It would make you a man if you werent already one.
George Murphys guard duty shift finally ended and he was determined to get some sleep.

As he headed back to his tent the morning of Oct. 13, 1967, the hill his unit held in Vietnam became the target of a vicious mortar attack.

Murphy was blown off his feet and knocked unconscious in the blast. Shrapnel embedded in his skin, but the only thing Murphy, then 19, could think of was helping his men.

While many Vietnam soldiers were drafted into war, Murphy enlisted. He was ready to leave behind his suburban Washington, D.C. home in order to see the world.

I wasnt satisfied at home, he said. The idea of going to another country appealed to me at that point. Given that the Vietnam War was in full swing, I decided to make that my [destination].

At age 16, Murphy headed down to the local recruiting office, bound and determined to join the U.S. Army. But he was too young.

They told me I had to be at least 17 with family consent, he said. So I forged my dads signature and went down and enlisted.

Murphy went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for basic training, then to demolition training and flight school to become a paratrooper, just like his father and grandfather. By February 1967, Murphy was on his way to Vietnam.

I didnt like it, he said. I wanted to go home. The heat, the smell  it was unbearable for me at first because I was used to the climate in Maryland.

Murphy first worked as a demolitions expert with the A Company 326th Engineering Battalion, but transferred after just two weeks a part of the 101st Airborne Division, working long-range reconnaissance patrol.

He was in for one year until the unit was deactivated and absorbed into L Company 75th Ranger Regiment.

Then I volunteered to come home, he said.

In the days leading up to Oct. 13, 1967, Murphys unit was called in to hold Hill 488 until the 327th Infantry could arrive.

So they used my team, which was six men, and then they brought in another team to make us a heavy team of 12, he said.

We held the hill that night. No trouble. [The] 327th Infantry came  the next day and started setting up their camp. Again, no trouble.

That night, though, the men started receiving heavy gunfire and were hit with rocket grenades and motar rounds, Murphy said.

We were kept on our toes, he said.

At about 7 a.m. Oct. 13, Murphy finally came off duty and headed back to his tent for a good nights sleep.

All of the sudden motar rounds started coming again and again and again, he said. I was heading back to the bunker and one of them landed several feet from me, knocked me out and threw me back several feet.

When Murphy regained consciousness, he noticed blood. Shrapnel was embedded in his legs, torso

and face.

Medics patched me up, he said. They wanted to send me to the rear area and I refused. I wanted to stay with my unit.

Thats what Murphy did, though he eventually was sent back to medics for x-rays to make sure there was no more shrapnel left in his body, he said.

Murphys unit never lost that hill. The men were relieved after a week and headed back to base camp, he said.

We were lucky, he said. We were able to scrounge from the other units what we needed and wanted and just trade off for what they had. It worked very well.

Murphy decided it was time to go home in 1969, but when he returned, things were different, and the heavy backlash against Vietnam veterans caused Murphy to hide his military experience.

I would not wear a uniform in public, he said. I got a Mohawk haircut because everyone knew military couldnt wear a Mohawk.

Murphy remained in the Army upon his return but he struggled with the more structured environment.

I was used to a rogue unit and pretty much doing whatever we wanted to do, he said. We knew our job  to the point where other units were calling on us all the time for what we did.

He was transferred from Fort Meade, Maryland, to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where he was promoted to sergeant E5 and was placed in charge of a training unit.

Murphy was discharged in 1970 after serving four years. He worked as a police officer in Maryland for another four years until he moved to Lynchburg in 1980.

It was about that he met his wife Doris, who Murphy said played a crucial role in encouraging him to seek help for post-traumatic stress disorder.

As it turned out, a friend of hers met me and brought me to [Doris house] to introduce me to Doris, saying this was going to be her new beau, Murphy said. What ended up happening was it ended up being Doris and I, instead of Doris friend.

The couple married in 1991.

When Doris and I got together she made it clear that if I didnt get more help I wasnt going to live here, Murphy said. So that convinced me to do what I needed to do. Shes a very persuasive lady.

Doris Murphy said her experiences with her father, a World War II veteran, helped her prepare for the dark days ahead.

The nightmares, flashbacks, she said. We would go into a restaurant and [George] would have to sit with his back against the wall.

As a child, Doris Murphy said she saw her father experience similar behaviors after he returned from the war. At the time, she didnt understand it. But it lead her to encourage her husband to seek help for the sake of her sons, who were ages 16 and 23.

It did disturb [the family dynamic], she said. The boys would have questions. We talked about it.

Murphy was admitted to the Salem VA hospital for 30 days, and during that stay, Murphy and other veterans talked about their experiences in Vietnam.

There are still [dark days] from time to time, he said. But now I have people to talk to [and] people I can go to.
Steve Bozeman recalled the rain of flaming transmission fluid and the voice of the helicopter pilot telling the crew to brace for a crash.

He threw himself over a Marine who had been shot in the chest as the chopper fell from the sky in Vietnam. That was the first of two Purple Hearts for Bozeman.

Now 70 years old, the Bedford County man is a passionate advocate for veterans in the Lynchburg area.

Bozeman was drafted at age 19 and chose delayed entry for a four-year term in the U.S. Marine Corps as a helicopter mechanic. By January 1967, he was a door gunner in Vietnam.

Helicopters were the ambulances of war, Bozeman said, charged with inserting troops, carrying out the injured or dead and bringing in water and supplies.

On May 4, 1967, Bozeman and his crew were called to evacuate two Marines who had been shot  one in the chest and the other in the leg. F-4 Phantom jets had come through strafing the enemy, and the approach was quiet, he said.

As soon as we got about treetop level and started moving, on the crew chiefs side of the helicopter, machine gun fire hit the top of our helicopter, he said.

It struck the transmission. Suddenly, burning fluid was raining down on Bozeman, the other door gunner and the two wounded Marines.

The pilot said, Im losing control. Were going to crash, Bozeman said. Im hearing this on my headphones in my helmet and at the same time, I got my ... Marine laying face up, [Im] trying to keep the fire off of him.

The helicopter crashed about a quarter mile away, but Bozeman was ready. He had removed the M60 from its gun mount, and as soon as the helicopter hit the ground, he rolled out into a rice paddy and ran for the nearest dike.

He could see the two pilots had escaped, and the other door gunner and the Marine with the bullet wound in his leg.

I turned around and looked back at the chopper, he said. It was engulfed in flames. I saw his hand on the door. I said, Hes still in there. Of course he is. He couldnt get out. I just dropped my machine gun and ran across the rice paddy to the burning helicopter.

Bozeman reached into the inferno, which had grown so hot ammunition started to cook off.

So I just reached in there, grabbing him, trying to bring him around the corner, he said. He was strapped in this big gurney. I was trying to get the gurney out. Finally, I unstrapped the gurney. By that time, my crew chief, he saw me struggling to get him out.

The wounded Marines morphine had started to wear off. He told Bozeman to leave him.

Of course we didnt do that, he said. So we yanked him on the ground and by that time, the two pilots came over and everyone grabbed an arm and leg and hauled ass across the rice paddy to get to safety.

The infantry witnessed the crash and sent a squad to secure a perimeter until another helicopter could take the two wounded Marines to safety. Bozeman and the chopper crew waited for a second helicopter.

We were fortunate that where we landed, crashed and burned, that we didnt land in the midst of a hornets nest, he said. We werent getting shot at.

Bozeman suffered second- and third-degree burns on his arms, face and neck.

Later that night, as Bozeman lay in his sleeping quarters, he thought about how he could have died in that crash and had to remind himself he survived.

Im amazed I even slept that night, so much adrenaline, he said. The next morning, we got up and went to the flight line. Like a cowboy that falls off the horse, they put me back on a helicopter as a door gunner. Just another day in the office. 

May 4, 1967. I didnt know what they called it then, but they call it your alive date.

Bozemans second Purple Heart came later in 1967. Almost 500,000 troops were in Vietnam and Bozemans unit had moved to a helicopter base near

Dong Ha, just south of the demilitarized zone.

The base soon was targeted by mortar rounds several times per day from an enemy just eight miles away. Commanders had decided to move the base, but that hadnt happened by Sept. 3, 1967.

Bozeman was flying night missions at the time and had just gotten off duty at 7 a.m. About an hour later, he awoke to a whomph. The first whomph was about 70 feet away, right behind my hooch, he said.

There was a large bladder of aviation fuel behind Bozemans sleeping quarters and as he ran to the back door, an explosion knocked him to the floor.

Bozeman climbed to his feet and ran for the other door, and into the nearest bunker. He and two other men sat in the three-foot-deep bunker. Thats when Bozeman realized he left everything in his sleeping quarters, including his pistol.

Rockets continued to hit the base. One struck the ammunition area, and the rounds held there began exploding.

Then we were getting impacted from our own ammo, he said. One round hit right on top of our bunker. It shut us down. The lights went out and thats when I thought Im dead.

The three Marines crawled from the bunker, only to be forced into another, this one with at least a dozen men. Then the sandbags on that bunker caught fire and the Marines started to choke on the smoke. Bozeman was the last one to flee the bunker. He was confronted by a wall of fire.

I dove through it and it caught my shirt on fire, he said. I rolled on the ground to put my shirt out. As soon as I realized I was burning to death, I have to get up and run to another bunker. Grenades were going off, mortars were going off.

Forty-four Marines were hurt that day, but no one died.

Bozeman was taken to the first aid station, then to the Navy hospital ship the U.S.S. Repose.

Ironically, it was where we carried wounded Marines to, and here I am being carried out to it, Bozeman said. You survived another moment of looking death in the eye. Youre hurting and thinking, Who else is hurt in my squadron? Who is dead?

Bozeman spent a few days on the ship being treated for burns and a throbbing headache before he hitched a ride to Marble Mountain, where his squadron had been moved.

A few hours after he got there, another Marine brought him the two things of his that had survived the assault  one dog tag and his lighter. He still has them to this day.

Immediately, I said OK, Im alive and well, he said.

His time in Vietnam was up in October. Bozeman planned to extend his tour, but another incident changed his mind. Bozeman escaped with just a bruised spine after he was hit with shrapnel from an exploded piece of equipment during a helicopter run. Thinking about how he could have been paralyzed or killed, he decided it was time to go home.

Bozeman returned to a base in

Chicago, where he worked as a crew chief. By early 1968, the Tet Offensive was underway, with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops coordinating

attacks on more than 100 South Vietnamese cities.

Bozeman watched news reports, thinking, That could be me. By that time, being scared to death had worn off, he said.

By September 1968, he was back in Vietnam for a 13-month tour. This time, he worked as an aviation mechanic on a C-117, an old Gooney bird, as they called it. That tour was less eventful.

The good Lord was looking out for me, he said. I had angels on my shoulders the whole time I was there. I could have been dead. I could have had my name along with the 58,000 others on that wall. For me to go back  it was insane.

Bozeman grew up in Alabama, lived in Chicago for a while until a job with Babcock & Wilcox lead him to Lynchburg. He spoke little of his experienced in Vietnam, but the 1986 dedication of several memorials to the citys war dead at Monument Terrace downtown spurred him to get involved in veterans affairs.

In 2001, Bozeman and a group of veterans began the Support Our Troops rallies held at Monument Terrace every Friday that continue today.

In a way, I guess, the good Lord said We need to keep this Marine alive. He needs to be doing something decades later, Bozeman said. What Im doing now with Iraq and Afghanistan vets, and the Support the Troops rallies  I think my mission is this.

Debbie Bozeman said her husbands experiences in the Marine Corps played a huge role in shaping Bozeman and instilling in him a servants heart.

He rose to the challenge, endured and made the best of it, she said. When they got back, you didnt talk about it, you got a job and you moved on. As hes gotten older, hes got to where he and so many others talked about that experience.

Whenever there is someone in need, he wants to help. A lot of the time, its talking about it. For some, it helps to put the experience behind them.

In 2013, Bozeman wrote U.S. Sen. Mark Warner asking for his help to find out what happened to the Marine he pulled from that burning helicopter in 1967.

Bozeman wrote, Not a day goes by that I dont think of this incident and always wondered if that Marine lived or died once he was medi-evac on another helicopter after our crash.  I would like to at least know his name and hopefully he lived and I might be able to talk with him.

That Marine, Lance Corporal Melvin Lee Allen, of Chicago, died May 4, 1967 at the hospital. He was 21 years old.

Bozeman learned Allen was on a search and destroy mission at An Xuan Village when his squad was pinned down. Allen repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire to help the wounded Marines and was shot on his fourth attempt, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Both you and Lance Corporal Melvin Lee Allen performed extreme acts of bravery while serving your country as United States Marines, risking your lives to assist your fellow soldiers and protect the freedoms that we Americans enjoy to this day, Warner wrote.  I regret that your comrade did not survive and is not here to share stories with you and reflect on that fateful day.
After watching his close friend suffer a bitter defeat, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Thursday that he's already reached out to Donald J. Trump to start building a productive relationship with the president-elect.

McAuliffe said he was "totally shocked" by Tuesday's outcome, adding that he's invited longtime friend Hillary Clinton to Richmond for some post-election relaxation.

"Things happen. All I can tell you is Hillary worked her heart and soul out in this campaign," McAuliffe said. "I'm very proud of her."

McAuliffe, who chaired Clinton's 2008 presidential bid and had close ties to her 2016 campaign, said he sent a Trump a congratulatory letter and intends to start working with the new president on behalf of a state that remains dependent on federal dollars.

"We're done with politics," McAuliffe said. "And I look forward to working with the new president to increase the military assets here, protect the ones we have and keep the economy going. It's critical for us."

Though McAuliffe and Trump were on opposite sides this year, McAuliffe noted that he's known the New York real estate mogul for nearly two decades. Trump donated $25,000 to McAuliffe's unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2009.

"He knows me very well," McAuliffe said.

As chairman of the National Governors Association, McAuliffe said he'll lead a meeting at the White House early next year between Trump and the nation's governors.

Asked about anti-Trump street protests in several American cities, including Richmond, McAuliffe said people have a right to "show their displeasure," but should do so non-violently.

"I think it's great that you can go into the streets and protest. You're entitled to do it," McAuliffe said. "But for us in elected office, we've got to get back to work.'
At 11 oclock in the morning on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, The Great War  the war that later, sadly, would become known as the First World War  came to an end when Germany ceased hostilities against its American, British and French adversaries, followed by the June signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

It had been a long, bloody conflict, kicked off four years before in Sarajevo, Serbia, when a Serb nationalist assassinated Crown Prince Ferdinand of the Austrian empire. With the familial and political ties between the various powers of Europe, war soon began. From Africa to the Middle East and Asia, battles between the great powers were fought; in Moscow, the 400-year-old Romanov dynasty fell, in part because of its disastrous involvement in the conflict. The war only creaked to an end when the United States entered on the side of Great Britain and France.

The next November, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Nov. 11 as Armistice Day, in commemoration of the end of The Great War. Nineteen years later, in 1938 and on the eve of yet another bloody global conflict, Congress declared Armistice Day an official federal holiday.

In 1954, after World War II and the Korean War, Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower approved changing the holidays name to Veterans Day, in honor of all American troops who have answered their nations call to arms to protect the nation and democracy.

The men  and later, women  who have worn the uniform of their nation are a special group of people. Whether drafted in times of conflict or volunteering in times of peace and prosperity, they show the world the power of an idea, the power of the dream America stands for: democracy and the equality of all people under the law.

To some folks, that may sound corny and trite. To others, it may sound sappy and ring just a bit hollow, given how often America has fallen short of its potential.

But ask a veteran of WWII how it felt when American troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in April 1945 or when the flag was raised on Mount Suribachi in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Ask a veteran of the first Gulf War about the outpouring of gratitude from Kuwaitis when America liberated their country from the grip of Saddam Hussein.

But as much as America claims to honor its veterans, we have a poor way of showing it sometimes. Look at the reception vets returning from Vietnam received in the 1960s; look at the underfunded Veterans Administration health care system; look at the poor pay the average serviceman receives. We may make films of medal-winning heroes of long-ago battles, but are we doing all we can to to keep todays volunteer warriors from having to go war in the first place?

Veterans Day is a day to honor those who have served, but as we salute those who have worn the uniform, we need to ask ourselves one question: Are we truly worthy of these great men and women, especially this Veterans Day 2016?
A bomb blast in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast has killed a local government official and wounded at least two other people, authorities said Friday.

The explosion that state-run Anadolu news agency blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) tore through the area near a government building in Derik on Thursday.

The PKK, which has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, has resumed attacks on security forces since the rupture of a fragile ceasefire last year.

Muhammet Fatih Safiturk, who served as sub-prefect as well as mayor of Derik, was tasked by the government with running the area as part of a vast effort to replace local authorities suspected of PKK ties.

He "was martyred early Friday by wounds sustained in a PKK terrorist attack on his office a day earlier," provincial authorities said in a statement.

After the attack security forces apprehended 20 people in the area and they were being held for questioning, Anadolu reported.

Ankara has replaced a string of local elected leaders in the Kurdish majority southeast, which the government says is part of its effort to battle the PKK.

Turkey's main pro-Kurdish party, the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), on Sunday said it was pulling out of parliament after nine of its MPs including the two co-leaders were arrested in an unprecedented crackdown.

The arrest on Friday of the MPs, including party leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, added to tensions as Turkey wages a relentless battle against Kurdish militants and deals with the aftermath of a July 15 failed coup.

They have been charged with membership and promotion of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The move also compounded concerns among Turkey's Western allies that the state of emergency imposed after the coup bid is being used for a general crackdown against critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and not just the suspected plotters.

Search Keywords:

Short link:


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.
No One Has

Done This Before

in Billboard's History
The death toll from a powerful Taliban truck bombing at the German consulate in Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif city rose to at least six Friday, with more than 100 others wounded in a major militant assault.

The Taliban said the bombing late Thursday, which tore a massive crater in the road and overturned cars, was a "revenge attack" for US air strikes this month in the volatile province of Kunduz that left 32 civilians dead.

The explosion, followed by sporadic gunfire, reverberated across the usually tranquil northern city, shearing off the facades of nearby buildings and blowing out windows several miles away.

"The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of the German consulate," local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.

All German staff from the consulate were unharmed, according to the foreign ministry in Berlin.

The city's hospitals received six dead bodies, including two killed by bullets, said local doctor Noor Mohammad Fayez.

At least 128 others were wounded, some of them critically and many with shrapnel injuries, he added.

Deputy police chief Abdul Razaq Qadri gave a death toll of seven, including two motorcyclists who were shot dead by German forces close to the consulate after they refused to heed their warning to stop. A suspect had also been detained near the diplomatic mission on Friday morning, Qadri added.

"The consulate building has been heavily damaged," the German foreign ministry said in a statement. "Our sympathies go out to the Afghan injured and their families."

A diplomatic source in Berlin said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had convened a crisis meeting soon after the attack.

"There was fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate," a ministry spokesman said. "Afghan security forces and Resolute Support (NATO) forces from Camp Marmal (German base in Mazar-i-Sharif) are on the scene."

Afghan special forces cordoned off the consulate, previously well-known as Mazar Hotel, after the explosion as helicopters flew over the site and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area.

The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jump-start stalled peace negotiations.

President Ashraf Ghani condemned the "barbaric" attack, calling it a crime against humanity.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the "martyrdom attack" on the consulate had left "tens of invaders" dead. The insurgents routinely exaggerate battlefield claims.

Posting a Google Earth image of the consulate on Twitter, Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.

US forces conceded last week that its air strikes "very likely" resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.

The strikes killed several children and triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims' relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.

They came after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.

The country's worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up air strikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.

The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.

Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaign -- even though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit America's longest war with no end in sight.

Search Keywords:

Short link:


(Newser)  Those interested in understanding Donald Trump's win will want to read Alec MacGillis' deep dive at ProPublica. In interview after interview with middle-aged Trump supporters in small towns of Rust Belt states, MacGillis finds three clear themes emerging among this mostly white group: "They lived in places that were in decline, and had been for some time. They lacked strong attachment to either party ... and they had profound contempt for a dysfunctional, hyper-prosperous Washington that they saw as utterly removed from their lives." He encounters people in their 50s and older voting for the first time, which perhaps holds a clue to the pollsters' bad predictions: These were "people who were so disconnected from the political system that they were literally unaccounted for in the pollsters modeling, which relies on past voting behavior."

So why did they feel so compelled to go for Trump? Take the example of 54-year-old Tracie St. Martin who lives near Dayton, Ohio. She's a heavy-construction worker who generally voted Democrat and whose union had been urging her to back Hillary Clinton. She should have been a slam-dunk Clinton voter. But when Trump canvassers showed up at her door, "St. Martin was visibly affected," writes MacGillis. She recounted, with some difficulty and much emotion, a recent job razing a local GM plant. Obama had let her down; Benghazi and email and the Clinton Foundation grated on her. "People dont realize theres nothing without a blue-collar worker," she said. MacGillis kept in touch with her, and she did indeed vote for Trump. "I am AMAZED at the number of people voting for him," she emailed him at one point. "The polls have to be wrong." Click for the full piece, which makes the case that Democrats gambled incorrectly in writing off this "forgotten class." (Read more Election 2016 stories.)
(Newser)  Germany's consulate in northern Afghanistan was attacked late Thursday when a suicide car bomber rammed the compound, a senior police official said. The car exploded at the gate of the consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif city, destroying the gate and wall around 11.10pm local time, said Abdul Raziq Qaderi, head of security for Balkh province. He said three police were wounded. "Police have surrounded the area and our forces are inside the compound," he said. The Taliban issued a statement saying they had sent suicide attackers to the consulate, the AP reports. Sher Jan Durrani, spokesman for the police chief of Balkh province, said early Friday that a gun battle was going on at the consulate. Walter Hassmann, the German ambassador to Afghanistan, confirmed the "incident is ongoing" and provided no further details.

Mazar-i-Sharif is the capital of Balkh province and one of the most important cities in the country. Residents in the city reported hearing a huge explosion near the consulate that shattered windows in buildings nearby. Germany has 983 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh, as part of NATO's Resolute Support mission. The Taliban's insurgency has spread from their southern heartland across the country in the past two years. The Taliban statement from spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack was retaliation for recent airstrikes in the northern city of Kunduz, capital of the province of the same name. A US airstrike earlier this month killed dozens of people, including women and children, and is under investigation. (Read more Afghanistan stories.)
(Newser)  Two couples who met at a Texas church are now involved in possibly the furthest thing from a post-sermon potluck: a sex tape blackmail case. As the Houston Chronicle reports, Leslie Amanda Hippensteel, 31, and John Ousley, 32, met Saul Eisenberg, 28, and his then-fiancee, 24, at a church in Katy; Ousley and Eisenberg's fiancee ended up having an affair. They made sex videos, which were ultimately found by Hippensteel. She allegedly blackmailed Ousley with them and emailed them to Eisenberg, who in turn allegedly forwarded them to his mother and stepfather. A big mess ensued: Hippensteel and Ousley divorced in March; Eisenberg and his former fiancee are in the midst of custody proceedings over their 6-year-old child; and both Hippensteel and Eisenberg face misdemeanor charges of unlawful disclosure of intimate visual material.

Hippensteel was arrested earlier this month for allegedly blackmailing her ex-husband with the sex videos during their divorce proceedings, threatening to send them to the Christian high school where he worked if he didn't give her money. Ousley showed police records appearing to prove he gave Hippensteel $7,812.21. She then allegedly sent the videos to Eisenberg, who says he received them on Feb. 2, and also allegedly sent them to Ousley's employer. Ousley resigned after administrators confronted him about the videos. The videos also somehow ended up on pornhub.com. On Thursday, a judge barred Eisenberg from contacting Ousley or his former fiancee. The Dallas Morning News, which notes that Hippensteel is an actress, reports both she and Eisenberg face up to a year in jail. (Read how a criminal found America's first big sex tape.)
(Newser)  Looks like the honeymoon might be over: President-elect Donald Trump complained on Twitter Thursday night about "unfair" protests against him, which continued for a second night. "Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" he tweeted in his first public comment on the protests. But his tune was changed by this 6am tweet, which read, "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!" The Washington Post notes that after President Obama was re-elected in 2012, Trump urged people to "fight like hell" and tweeted: "We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!"

The Los Angeles Times reports that the many of the anti-Trump demonstrations around the country Thursday night were not as big as the protests on Wednesday, though some organizers say they are planning bigger rallies over the weekend. One city where things intensified was Portland, Ore., where police declared the protest to be a riot because of "extensive criminal and dangerous behavior," CNN reports. The BBC reports that protests remained largely peaceful in cities including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York City, where a crowd gathered outside Trump Tower for a second night. (Read more Donald Trump stories.)
(Newser)  US Secretary of State John Kerry became the highest-ranking American official to visit Antarctica on Friday when he landed for a two-day trip. Kerry, who will hear from scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent, left from New Zealand after being held up for about a day by bad weather. Kerry and his entourage left the Christchurch airport at 6am aboard a C-17 Globemaster military cargo plane, the AP reports. After a smooth trip of about five hours, the group landed on the Pegasus Ice Runway, the strip of ice that serves McMurdo Station. The large base is the hub for US operations.

Kerry made no public remarks on the initial leg of the trip. In Christchurch a day earlier, he congratulated President-elect Donald Trump for winning a "momentous election" and said he had reminded State Department staff of the "time-honored tradition of a very peaceful and constructive transfer of power." In Antarctica, Kerry's plans called for his entourage to transfer immediately at the airstrip to a smaller military transport plane for a three-hour flight to the research station the US government operates near the South Pole. Kerry plans to visit that station for about two hours before returning to McMurdo for the night. (He recently helped ink a deal to create a huge marine protected area in the region.)
(Newser)  As bodies connected with Todd Kohlhepp continue to emerge, the suspected South Carolina serial killer's mom is linking four of the killings he's admitted to to one thing. "This is all why people tell kids not to bully. This is what can happen," Regina Kohlhepp said Thursday, per CNN. She was referring specifically to a quadruple murder in 2003a cold case recently busted open by Kohlhepp's arrest, ABC News notesthat took place in a Chesnee motorcycle shop, where she says her son went to get some riding lessons and ended up leaving humiliated. "They laughed at him when he fell over on the bike," she tells CNN. "Todd was bullied and embarrassed and I think he just held it in long enough." The shop owner, his mom, and two employees were killed. It's unclear whether the murders took place the same day as the alleged bullying incident.

The widow of the slain owner offers a different version, saying her husband and the others were just doing some gentle ribbing about the fact the first bike Kohlhepp bought from the shop had been stolen. "That is the kind of thing that a normal everyday person wouldn't go crazy over," she told CNN affiliate HLN. Regina Kohlhepp also talked with ABC about her son's conviction in 1987 as a 15-year-old for kidnapping and raping a 14-year-old girl at gunpoint, noting "Todd was not a child you left alone" and that the rape took place when Todd's dad had to leave Todd for three days due to a family emergency. The judge who moved Kohlhepp's case to adult court back then noted Kohlhepp was "very bright and should be advanced academically," but also that he was "behaviorally and emotionally dangerous," per ABC. (Read more Todd Kohlhepp stories.)
(Newser)  A California high school student was seen handing out fake deportation notices to students of varying ethnicities a day after Donald Trump's election win. "The students involved are all friends and the act was meant as a joke," though Shasta High School in Redding isn't viewing it that way, Principal Leo Perez said in a message to parents, per the Record Searchlight. "It goes without saying, we don't think this sort of behavior is funny nor reflective of the culture at Shasta High, and behavior that is racially or culturally insensitive will not be allowed to go on at any of our schools," says Superintendent Jim Cloney, adding he isn't sure if Trump's win was a factor in the stunt, "but I guess it would be hard to say it wasn't."

A member of the Shasta County Citizens Advocating Respect group goes further, claiming "our president-elect's boorish behavior" has encouraged such hateful acts, which Cloney says will be handled with the "appropriate consequences." Also in California on Wednesday: Two men "made comments about President-elect Trump and the Muslim community" before robbing a Muslim college student wearing a hijab in San Diego, police say; a student in Woodside was attacked after expressing support for Trump; and a man pulled out a gun while arguing with another man about the election in Burbank, reports the Los Angeles Times. On Thursday, the attorney general's office called for the protection of "all Californians from acts of hate and bigotry." (Read more California stories.)
(Newser)  Much like those "rapid-fire warnings at the end of prescription drug commercials," a disclaimer on a Ten Commandments monument in New Mexico might require "a reasonable observer  to get on his knees" to read it, an appeals declared this week. That was one of the factors in its decision that the monument's home on Bloomfield city property is unconstitutional, the Farmington Daily Times reports. The US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled Wednesday that the monumentdescribed by the ABA Journal as a 5-foot-tall, 3,400-pound structure erected in 2011 on the City Hall's lawn"would give an objective observer the impression of official religious endorsement," given that it's right next to the city's main government building.

Per the Durango Herald, the case came out of a 2012 lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of two local Wiccan followers who said they were offended by the structure. But Jonathan Scruggs, an attorney with the advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which is working with the city, points out that monuments honoring other "significant documents in American history" are also nestled close byone for the Gettysburg Address, as well as one for the Bill of Rights. "The city is not playing favorites here," he says. "It's allowing anyone to erect a monument on the lawn as long as it's historical." The court disagreed, citing the "impermissible taint of endorsement." (A Texas county agreed to remove crosses from cop cars.)
Saudi Arabia's government has set aside 100 billion riyals ($26.7 billion) to pay debts that it owes to private sector companies after payment delays that have lasted months, an official document seen by Reuters shows.

To help curb a huge budget deficit caused by low oil prices, the government of the world's largest oil exporter has slashed spending and reduced or suspended payments that it owes to construction firms, medical establishments and even some of the foreign consultants who helped to design its economic reforms.

But the payment delays have seriously damaged some companies, slowing the economy, and earlier this week the government said it would make all delayed payments by the end of this year.

Authorities have not disclosed the total size of the unpaid bills, but private analysts have estimated they may total tens of billions of dollars.

The document, labelled urgent and issued by the finance ministry for transmission to all government agencies, says a royal decree has mandated the finance minister "to take the necessary procedures to pay all delayed payments by the end of the current fiscal year".

"Payments should not exceed 100 billion riyals," the document adds, saying the money will come from budget surpluses accumulated in previous years. It does not say whether the government expects actually to pay out all of the maximum allocation of 100 billion riyals.

Government agencies should register payment orders at a finance ministry website created for this purpose within three weeks, the document says.

Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan reiterated on Thursday that the government intended to make all delayed payments to the private sector "as soon as possible", estimating these payments could total a "significant amount of billions" of dollars.

The government's original budget plan for 2016 envisaged a deficit of 326 billion riyals, after a record deficit of 367 billion riyals in 2015.

Local analysts have been forecasting this year's deficit, expected to be announced late next month along with the 2017 budget plan, will be smaller than the original projection by a large margin.

A 100 billion riyal payout by the end of this year would exceed the expectations of many analysts and could result in a larger deficit than they have been forecasting, perhaps around 250 billion riyals or more.

Search Keywords:

Short link:


(Newser)  "That's Debbie, it's hyperbole, she is nuts." That's the vibe Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who represents her state's 12th Congressional District, says she received throughout Election 2016, when she tried to warn her fellow Democrats that no, Hillary Clinton was not on an assured path to victory. In the Washington Post, Dingell mentions her district's diversity, from the "Downrivers"a group of communities south of Detroit rife with auto factories, manufacturing plants, and unionsto the college town of Ann Arbor. She points out how much of her district leans Democratic (many were Bernie Sanders supporters in the primary), with the working class among them comprised of "all races, creeds, and colors."

But they also believe "the system is rigged" and "economic and national security fears" reigned supreme for them on Election Day. Per Dingell, the "ordinary working man or woman ... isn't asking for a lot" (affordable health care, safe homes), but "many don't understand ... how these things are in danger of becoming unattainable for too many Americans." Dingell is confounded how those in her own party, including Hillary Clinton and her camp, could have neglected to appeal to this demographic. "It did infuriate me that Clinton and her team didn't show up until the weekend before the primary, when it suddenly became clear they had a problem," she writes. "How would any sane person not predict how this one would go? It was fixable for the general election." Read her full take here. (Read more opinion stories.)
The election of Donald Trump will create an impact of the United States Health System. The health Care policy of the country was greatly tackled during the campaign and was an issue of the Presidential debate.

The popular Obama care was one of the vital laws passed by the administration. However, critics see this as an outrage as claimed by Donald Trump. He promised that this law would be repealed for the American people.

Trump on Health Care Reform

On Chicago Business, it was exemplified that the passage of the law according to Trump was maneuvered by the partisan President and those who supported it in the House and of the Senate. Now that Trump won, it is possible that ACA insurance reform will be eliminated helping around 20 million Americans.

On the campaign website supporting Trump, it emphasizes that economic uncertainties have been raised in the reign of the Obama Care. It says that every individual residing in the country has been affected rapidly and adversely as it drags down the people as the health care collapsed.

Solutions were highlighted on this citing that aside from Congress repealing the law it should also modify existing law that will benefit not just the government but the health needs of the people. It also insists that health insurance premium should be deducted and certain reimbursement is provided.

Requiring transparency on medicine prices is also a major factor, said on Time. Manufacturing company has been taking advantage making prices go high because the government will pay them anyway. There are others reforms that Trump is outlining for their health care.

American people cannot completely ignore the things Trump promised during the election. The health care reform must be pushed. Despite that, during the campaign, Trump was not able to provide tangible changes for the health care reform.

It is now up for Congress for them to sit with White House, Health Experts, and those that are concerned to come up with a win-win solution. Perhaps, this is one way to make America Great Again.
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low around 0F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low around 0F. Winds light and variable.
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.
Washington:

President Barack Obama on Thursday hosted his successor Donald Trump at the White House to discuss smooth transition of power.



During the meeting, Obama assured full support for Trumpas successful term. aWe'll do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, the country succeeds,a President Obama told Trump.



Trump,70, flew from New York on his private jet and landed at Reagan National Airport, just outside the nation's capital.



He broke from protocol and barred journalists from travelling with him to cover his first meeting with Obama.



The president-elect was accompanied by his wife, Melania, who will have a meeting with First Lady Michelle Obama.



Vice President-elect Mike Pence also accompanied them.

#WATCH: US President Barack Obama meets President Elect Donald Trump, in Washington DC. pic.twitter.com/wrEnISGBUb a ANI (@ANI_news) November 10, 2016

The Republican president-elect has questioned Obama's US citizenship and vowed to dismantle his legacy.



During the election campaign Obama called Trump "uniquely unqualified". On Wednesday, Obama had urged all Americans to accept the result of the presidential election.



"We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country," he said.



White House spokesman Josh Earnest has insisted that Obama is sincere about ensuring a smooth handover although he added: "I'm not saying it's going to be an easy meeting."

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Mazar-i-Sharif:

A powerful Taliban truck bomb struck the German consulate in Afghanistans northern Mazar-i-Sharif city, killing at least two people and wounding 32 others in a major militant assault in the war-torn country.



The Taliban called it a revenge attack for recent US airstrikes in the volatile province of Kunduz earlier this month that left up to 32 civilians dead.



Sporadic gunfire rattled the usually tranquil city after the huge explosion yesterday, which smashed windows of nearby shops and left terrified local residents fleeing for cover.



German officials in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif were not immediately reachable for comment.



The suicide attacker rammed his explosives-laden car into the wall of German consulate in the city, local police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat told AFP.



Afghan special forces cordoned off the area as helicopters were seen flying over the consulate and ambulances with wailing sirens rushed to the area.



At least two dead bodies and 32 wounded people had so far been brought to the local city hospital, said Noor Mohammad Fayez, the head doctor.



The carnage underscores worsening insecurity in Afghanistan as Taliban insurgents ramp up nationwide attacks despite repeated government attempts to jumpstart stalled peace negotiations.



Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the martyrdom attack on the German consulate had left tens of invaders dead. The insurgents are routinely known to exaggerate battlefield claims.Mujahid said the assault was in retaliation for American air strikes in Kunduz.



US forces conceded last week that its air strikes very likely resulted in civilian casualties in Kunduz, pledging a full investigation into the incident.



The strikes killed several children, after a Taliban assault left two American soldiers and three Afghan special forces soldiers dead near Kunduz city.



The strikes triggered impassioned protests in Kunduz city, with the victims relatives parading mutilated bodies of dead children piled into open trucks through the streets.



Civilian casualties caused by NATO forces have been one of the most contentious issues in the 15-year campaign against the insurgents, prompting strong public and government criticism.



Afghanistans worsening conflict has prompted US forces to step up airstrikes to support their struggling Afghan counterparts, fuelling the perception that they are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict.



The latest attack in Mazar-i-Sharif comes just two days after a bitter US presidential election.



Afghanistan got scarcely a passing mention in the election campaigneven though the situation there will be an urgent matter for the new president.



President-elect Donald Trump is set to inherit Americas longest war with no end in sight.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Most of the ATMs in West Bengal ran dry within few hours of reopening forcing the people to make a beeline for banks. They downed their shutters and put up notices announcing that they were left with no cash.

In Gujarat, Depositors are complaining about the "time-consuming"procedure they have to undergo in order to exchange their cash at the banks. many ATMs ran out of cash within hours while many others did not open at all, thus adding to the frustation of people.

Congress Vice president Rahul Gandhi was on Friday seen standing in queue with public at SBI ATM in Parliament street, Delhi. The common man is suffering, that is why I am standing with my people. I am here to exchange 4000 rupees, he said.

Elderly man collapses while standing in queue at Mumbai ATM to withdraw cash, dies

Long queues were witnessed at banks and ATMs, which opened after two days, as people rushed to get new banknotes in lieu of their old defunct bills.

Many ATMs ran out of cash in couple of hours as there was a heavy rush to withdraw lower denomination currency.

Most of the machines were equipped to tender Rs 100 notes, while some were still not working.

More than two lakh cash machines (ATMs) across the country have started dispensing new hard-to-fake currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 from Friday following PM Narendra Modi's announcement that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes would cease to be legal tender.

In Muzaffarnagar, several people were injured after police resorted to lathicharge during a protest against inadequate arrangements at banks to change the old currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000.

The police action resulted in stone pelting by the protesters who also ransacked public property.

Read | ATMs to dispense new 'hard-to-fake' currency notes from Friday: Govt

Cash management agencies that move billions of rupees in and out of ATMs across the country have also carried out a major exercise that may see Rs 40,000 crore worth of notes being shifted around and hope to normalise operations for the public in two weeks.

Some ATM management companies have even set up 'war rooms' to ensure smooth functioning of cash machines.

Here are the live updates from major cities:

New Delhi

People started queuing up at ATMs as early as 6am in the morning. Serpentine queues were seen outside cash dispensing booths in the Capital as people jostled to get lower denomination currency and new banknotes to pay for their daily basic needs. People are facing difficulties in paying for household items, essential commodities and vegetables as they are running out of savings of small currencies while it was tough to get cash from banks which opened on Thursday after a day's break.

Read: Withdrawals, deposits and ATMs: Know how to deal with currency overhaul at banks

Lucknow

People in Uttar Pradesh's capital city were seen fretting over inadequate arrangements at ATM booths. Hundreds of angry and panicking customers returned from ATMs empty-handed as most of the machines were found in-operational. Customers say that they have until December 30 to deposit or exchange their 500-and 1000-rupee notes for smaller bills or the new 2000-rupee note that is expected to make counterfeiting harder.

Mumbai

Serpentine queues were seen outside ATM booths in country's industrial capital Mumbai too as people jostled to withdraw money from cash dispensing machines. Mumbaikars started queuing up early morning and banks too are witnessing unprecedented huge rush and therefore, they have sought the deployment of police personnel to deter any unwarranted circumstances. Several ATM machines have ran out or cash in early hours.

Kolkata

In Kolkata also, people complained about in-operational ATMs.

"No cash yet in ATMs. We can adjust for 2-3 days as its a good step, just hope everything will be sorted out soon," said Abhijit, a Kolkata resident.

Bengaluru

Jaipur

ATM ran out of cash early morning on Friday as people lined up to withdraw money for their household needs. The in-operational cash machines triggered a panic among customers who hoping for some respite after a two-day break. There are reports that some bank ATMs are not accepting cards of other lenders.

Read: Long queues at banks, chaos at petrol pumps; how people are coping with Modi govt's currency demonetisation move

Bhopal

Madhya Pradesh's capital also witnessed long queues outside banks and ATMs. People said that they were not happy with the arrangements made by banks.

"I have checked all the ATMs in the 2km radius and none are working," a Bhopal resident said.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Muzaffarnagar:

The CB-CID, which is probing the Vicky Tyagi murder case, Thursday recorded the statement of Additional District Sessions judge in whose court the gangster was gunned down.

SP CB-CID K Angel recorded the statement of Additional district Sessions court judge Mayank Chouhan in connection with the case, a CB-CID official said.

The Uttar Pradesh government had handed the investigation into Vicky Tyagi murder case from local police to CB-CID.

Tyagi was gunned down in the court room by a shooter during the hearing in another case here in February last year.

An alleged shooter Sagar was arrested from the spot while another accused Brijbir was nabbed the next day.

Police had registered a case against 11 people, including Sagar and four police officials.
Jammu:

Jammu and Kashmir Governor N N Vohra on Friday asked the Army to heighten vigil along the international border in Jammu region in the wake of continued attempts of infiltrations, ceasefire violations and militant activities.

Maj Gen Sanjeev Kumar Sharma, GOC, 26 Infantry Division on Friday called on Vohra at the Raj Bhavan here and briefed the Governor about the security situation along the IB in the area of his responsibility, an official spokesman said.

Considering the continuing attempts at infiltration, ceasefire violation and militant activities in the hinterland, the Governor stressed on the need for heightened surveillance on all fronts.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Washington:

Bernie Sanders is leaving open the possibility of another presidential bid as shell-shocked liberals focus on helping the Democratic Party rebuild after Donald Trumps victory.



Four years is a long time from now, said the 75-year-old Vermont independent, noting that he faces re-election to the Senate in 2018. But he added: Well take one thing at a time, but Im not ruling out anything.



Democrats have begun postelection soul searching, with Sanders and Sen Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, urging the party to embrace a more populist economic message. As some Democrats protested across the country, the partys liberal wing began jockeying for power, arguing that Clintons loss could be attributed to her reluctance to fully focus on economic inequality and tougher Wall Street regulations.



The final results may have divided usbut the entire electorate embraced deep, fundamental reform of our economic system and our political system, Warren told the AFL-CIO on Thursday. Working families across this country are deeply frustrated about an economy and a government that doesnt work for them.



Warren laid out the principles she believes should govern Democrats during the Trump era: Standing up to bigotry, pushing for economic equality and combatting the influence of Wall Street.



We will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled Americans on anyone. Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever, she said.



The sweeping Republican gains have thrown the future of the party into uncertainty, as Democrats process the scale of their losses and try to figure out the best way to come back in the 2018 elections. The Democratic National Committee may end up being ground zero for the fight, with no clear successor in line to replace interim chairwoman Donna Brazile.

Sanders is backing Minnesota Rep Keith Ellison.



Warren and Sanders were articulating the frustrations among many liberals in the aftermath of Trumps stunning triumph over Hillary Clinton. But their influence underscores another problem facing Democrats: Many of the partys leading voices are senior citizens, older than their core constituencies of young and minority voters. Warren is 67.



Sanders said that millions of working-class voters decision to back Trump was an embarrassment to the party and Democrats must take a strong stand against the role of corporate interests in politics. He said the party as a whole was unable to make a strong enough case to struggling workers, particularly in the industrial Midwest, who sided with Trump.



You cannot be a party which, on one hand, says were in favour of working people, were in favour of the needs of young people, but we dont quite have the courage to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class. People do not believe that. Youve got to decide which side youre on.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Madrid:

Spanish police said on Friday they have arrested 56 men suspected of sharing photos online of severe abuse on young children, some of them babies, in a nationwide crackdown on child pornography.

The suspects, the majority Spanish aged between 40 and 60, are accused of "distributing over the internet images of extreme cruelty involving very young minors," police said in a statement, adding that most of the children were younger than 10.

"In many cases, there are even babies subjected to serious abuse, including torture," Luis Garcia Pascual, in charge of the investigation, told reporters at a press briefing.

Over 150 police officers and 46 investigating magistrates took part in the operation carried out across Spain.

Police said they seized over 170 computer hard drives, as well as 614 CDs and DVDs, which contained pornographic images.

Garcia Pascual said there were "aggravating factors" in almost all the arrests made, such as the age of the victims, the huge amount of files found or the degrading nature of acts committed against the children.

The authorities are examining the material to see if any of the men who were detained sexually abused minors themselves.

Police said several of the suspects, none of whom were identified, had been arrested in the past for exchanging pornographic images involving minors over the internet.

They risk up to nine years in jail. Close to 750 people have been arrested this year over alleged cyber crime, including nearly 400 for offences involving sexual abuse on minors, Ignacio Cosido, director general of Spain's police, told reporters at the briefing.

In August police arrested seven people, mainly French and Moroccan nationals, who were suspected of running a ring that produced pornography involving children.

The authorities suspect the ring exploited at least 80 minors during the past 15 years and distributed over a million pictures and videos of pornography and over a thousand DVDs.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Chennai:

The Madras High Court Friday granted three months time to the Centre to examine appointment of an additional expert member on regular basis to the National Green Tribunal (Southern Zone) here.

The court gave the directive while disposing a PIL by D Karthik, an advocate, who submitted that after constitution of NGT, Southern Zone, all the cases relating to environmental matters pending before various high courts in the south were transferred to the tribunal here.

ALSO READ: (NGT passes a number of directions; asks govt to set up monitoring panels on air pollution)

The previous expert member Nagendiran has resigned from the office a few months ago and no member has been appointed in his place till date, he submitted.

Due to want of more expert members, there has been huge delay as well as listing cases for hearing.

The volume of litigations with respect to environment has increased manifold in the southern states and it was only due to this fact, a second court was actually established a few years ago in Chennai. However, without there being sufficient expert members, the tribunal could not function effectively, he submitted.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Mumbai:

The ensuing elections to municipal councils and nagar panchayats across Maharashtra will be a major test for the two-year-old Devendra Fadnavis government, in the backdrop of caste polarisation triggered by campaigns of different communities, including influential Marathas in pursuance of their various demands.

Political observers here are of the view that all parties may feel the heat of the Maratha campaign, pressing for reservations in jobs and education, and the counter movements by Dalits, OBCs and Muslims in the state.

Even though these campaigns have so far refrained from targeting each other, undercurrents of caste tensions have been palpable, they point out.

Some of them feel that the BJP-led government has not taken these morchas seriously and made efforts to defuse the caste tensions slowly building up.

There is a distinct possibility that voters around the state, especially in rural areas, will take the civic polls as a referendum on the performance of the Fadnavis regime, they said.

Law and order issue, spurt in crime against women and farmers distress and suicides are also to figure prominently in the elections, they said.

The government is yet to declare Minimum Support Price for soyabean, cotton, paddy, sugarcane and has not taken a decision on starting procurement centres, they observed.

While ruling partners BJP and Shiv Sena have struck a deal to contest the polls together, the Congress and NCP, who control majority of municipal bodies, have left the decision of alliance to their local leadership.

NCP has 1,300 seats while Congress 1,293. BJP has 437, Sena 454 and MNS 61. There are over 400 independents as well.

Dismissing suggestion that the Maratha campaign could hit the BJP, party spokesman Madhav Bhandari said Congress and NCP are to be blamed for the caste polarisation.

Maratha leadership of both these parties have ruled the state throughout. They did nothing for uplift of the community. It is only after Devendra Fadnavis became CM, the community feels it is backward, he said.

If large morchas are taken out by the dominant community, naturally the non-Marathas will get insecure and the marches organised by them are a result of this insecurity, Bhandari said.
Kabul:

Germanys consulate in northern Afghanistan was attacked when a suicide car bomber rammed the compound, killing four people and wounding more than 100, police and a doctor said on Friday.



Four dead, two civilians and two unidentified bodies, were brought to the Balkh hospital and around 115 people were wounded, said Dr. Noor Mohammad Faiz.



The blast was too loud and powerful, which shattered windows, and many civilians were wounded inside their homes, he said.



The car exploded at the gate of the consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif city, destroying the gate and wall around 11.10 pm on Thursday, said Abdul Raziq Qaderi, head of security for Balkh province.



Police have surrounded the area and our forces are inside the compound, he said. Mazar-i-Sharif is the capital of Balkh province and one of the most important cities in the country.

Also read | Taliban attack German consulate in Afghan's Mazar-i-Sharif

The Taliban issued a statement saying they had sent suicide attackers to the consulate.



Many houses and shops were destroyed or damaged, said Munir Ahmad Farhad, spokesman for the provincial governor in Balkh. The security situation is under control right now, but locals are in fears of last night attack, there are many women and children among those who wounded, Farhad said.



The German Foreign Ministry said in a statement there was an armed attack on the consulate but didnt specify the nature of the attack or mention any casualties.



The statement said there had been fighting outside and on the grounds of the consulate and that Afghan security forces and troops from the international Resolute Support mission were at the scene.



Germany has 983 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Balkh, as part of NATOs Resolute Support mission.



The Talibans insurgency has spread from their southern heartland across the country in the past two years.



The Taliban statement from spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack was retaliation for recent airstrikes in the northern city of Kunduz, capital of the province of the same name.



A US airstrike earlier this month killed dozens of people, including women and children, and is under investigation.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetisation of higher denomination notes, people started asking Google How to convert Black money into white.

PMs announcement came with a stated aim of curbing black money, corruption and tax evasion, causing much uproar and panic among citizens.

The ban on 500 and 1000 Rupee notes which means 86 per cent of currency in circulation making it worthless. Since then many cases have been reported of people burning sack full of notes or either throwing them away.

ALSO READ: (Modi govt's crackdown on black money, demonetisation of currency: How India reacted in last 40 hrs)

This one decision intended to rectify the future course of action in terms of corruption and tax evasion prompted people to search for converting black money into white.

Google Trends and searches show Gujarat topped the list in searching for how to convert black money into white? Haryana is the second, Punjab takes third position followed by Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir.

Apparently it seems that these are the places which are too keen to know how to convert black money into white.

Overall what came up from the searches is Indian sought more information about governments planned new currency notes that include better security features.

States that searched for how to convert Black money into white on Google

For all the Latest Business News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Los Angeles:

A US federal judge has encouraged lawyers involved in a class-action lawsuit against President-elect Donald Trumps now-defunct university to settle the case out of court.

US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump accused of bias during the campaign because of his Mexican heritage, said at a hearing in San Diego, California, yesterday that another judge had offered to work with both sides on a possible settlement.

I can tell you right now Im all ears, Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli told Curiel, according to local media.

ALSO READ: (Watch: US President Obama meets Pres-elect Trump, assures full support)

Petrocelli told the judge it was unlikely that Trump, who has been called as a witness in the case, would be able to attend the trial set for November 28 in San Diego. He added that he planned to file a motion for the trial to be delayed for several months while Trump prepares to take office on January 20.

Attorneys for Trump have sought to exclude from the trial any comments their client made during the presidential campaign on the grounds it could prejudice the jury.

Trump repeatedly hit out against the Indiana-born Curiel during his run for the White House. He claimed that the jurists Mexican heritage would stand in the way of a fair trial given Trumps controversial stand on illegal immigration and his vow to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.

The six-year-old lawsuit alleges that Trump University fleeced students by tricking them with aggressive marketing that amounted to fraud.

ALSO READ: (FLOTUS Michelle Obama gives her successor Melania tour of White House)

Students paid as much as USD 35,000 to enroll, believing they would make it big in real estate after being taught by experts hand-picked by Trump, the suit says.

Trumps lawyers counter that many students have given the program a thumbs-up and those who failed to succeed have only themselves to blame.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New York:

Donald Trump should begin work to kick-starting the economy, enforcing immigration laws and tackling terrorism in Asia, a US-India political action committee has said, as it expressed confidence that the US will have greater relations with India under his presidency.

The US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) congratulated Trump on winning the 2016 Presidential race and commended efforts of all Indian-American supporters who canvassed and fund raised for this successful campaign.

USINPAC Indiana Chair and Chair for Asians for Trump-Pence Campaign Raju Chinthala described Trumps election win as historical in American history, saying he has changed major political system in USA. He will be a great president and will build greater relations with India.

Assuring the support of Indian-Americans to a Trump administration, USINPAC Chairman Sanjay Puri said Trump must work on kick starting the economy, tackling ISIS and terrorism in Asia. The Indian-American community congratulates President Trump on such a decisive win and pledges to work with the new administration.

RNC National Committee woman from California Harmeet Kaur Dhillon said Trumps stunning victory heralds a new era of opportunity and promise for all Americans, which will naturally benefit Indian-Americans.

With Trumps penchant for hiring the best talent, Dhillon expressed confidence that many prominent Indian-Americans will be inducted into the new administration.

As a diverse community, Indian-Americans can expect the new President to focus on lowering regulatory burdens, reducing taxes on individuals and corporations, focusing on jobs and growth for America before other countries, enforce the laws of the United States, including its immigration laws, and keep our nation safe from harm, Dhillon said.

Dhillon added that the countrys leaders have failed to put the nation first, enabling foreign nations to perceive America as weak.

The committee said foreign policy challenges for Trump will include eliminating ISIS, renegotiating the NATO treaty, reconfiguring US relations with Russia and the war in Syria and illegal immigration.

President Trump now has the mandate to navigate the party to the future with a mix of conservatism and populism, it said. The political action committee focuses on the over 3.2 million Indian-Americans and works on issues that concern the community. It supports candidates for local, state and federal office and encourages political participation by the Indian-American community.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

One of the earliest and best-loved comedians of Indian Cinema, Johnny Walker brought smiles and amusement to all whenever he was on 70mm screen. His charisma, his timing, his sheer brilliance continues to transcend into the hearts of generations even after his demise, after all great people never die.

The nation on Friday celebrated the 96th birth anniversary of the legendary actor Johnny Walker (born as Badruddin Jamaluddin Kazi). Born into the family of a mill worker, Jhonny was the second of 10 children and worked several odd jobs before he landed his much awaited break in cinema.



The marvellous actor re-christened himself after the famous whisky brand and went to play iconic roles of drunk characters in several movies.



Although he has done countless remarkable comedy scenes but the songs he featured on have become memorable for every fan. Lets have a look at some of his most famous songs.



Pyaasa (1957): Sar Jo Tera Chakaraye



One of the most famous numbers of golden era, the tappy song Sar Jo Tera Chakaraye will always be puts music and Walker lovers at ease.









C.I.D. (1956): Ae Dil Hai Mushkil Jeena Yahan:



The original number that inspired recent multi-starrer blockbuster Ae Dil Hai Mushkil featured Jhonny Walker and was a tribute to the spirit of Mumbai, then Bombay. The song always struck a chord with all those who ever went through the struggle of moving to a big city with dreams of make it one day.







Mr and Mrs 55 (1955): Jaane Kahan Mera Jigar Gaya ji



The famous romantic song featured in Mr. & Mrs. '55, a 1955 Bollywood film, by director Guru Dutt. Guru Dutt stars alongside Madhubala, supported by Lalita Pawar, Johnny Walker and Jagdeep in this socially critical romantic comedy set in contemporary Bombay.





Black Cat (1959): Nashe Mein Ham Nashe Mein Tum



A Mohd Rafi and Suman Kalyanpur song from the movie Black Cat is another endearing romantic number featuring the evergreen actor Jhonny Walker. His remarkable performance in the song proves that he was as versatile as talented.





Aanad (1970) : Zindagi aur Maut

The darling of all who knew him left the world in year 2003. But the words he spoke in film Aanad will always continue to reverberate in Indian psyche:



"Zindagi aur maut upper wale ke hath mein hain jahanpanah, use na aap badal sakte hain na main;



Hum sab rangmanch ki kathputliyan hain, jinki dor upper wale ki ungliyon mein bandhi hai;



kab kaun kaise uthega, koi nai bata sakta."



(Life and death is controlled by the God, my lord; neither you nor I can change it

We are all but mere actors on the stage of life, who are directed by the one super power

Who will leave, when and how  no one can tell)



For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Lucknow:

With an aim to ensure medical facilities to poor, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister on Friday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance minister Arun Jaitley to allow Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 invalid notes at private hospitals and medicine shops till November 30.

The demonetisation has raised concerns among medical facilities to poor, who are facing a lot of problems after ban of high denomination notes, he said in separate letters to Modi and Jaitley.

"As Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 were banned in haste, those undergoing treatment at hospitals and nursing homes are facing a lot of problems. I, therefore, request you to intervene and allow private hospitals, nursing homes and medicine shops to accept these notes till at least November 30," Yadav said.

"Due to the ban, those going to avail medical facilitiesin hospital are a harried lot. It is proving fatal for them.Allowing (Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes) currency will help peopleget medical treatment," he said.

As foreign tourists were facing difficulties due to demonetisation of Rs500 and Rs1,000 rupee notes, Yadav had on Thursday directed the state Chief Secretary to ensure opening of extra counters for them to exchange currencies.

"The Chief Secretary should coordinate with banks and ensure opening of extra counters for foreign tourists in Agra and Varanasi. This will help them in exchanging their notes easily," Yadav in his directive. As the Centre's move caught people by surprise, especially with wedding season round the corner, SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav demanded a roll back of demonetisation decision for a few days in view of the wedding season. He suggested that people be given a week's time by the government. BSP chief Mayawati has also said poor people and farmers have been badly hit by high denomination rupee ban decision,which reminded people of the dark days of Emergency imposed by then Congress government.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Pakistan becomes the 104th country in the world to ratify the landmark Paris Agreement on Climate Change at a ceremony held at United Nations Headquarters in New York.

UN Maleeha Lodhi deposited the Instrument of Ratification signed by the President of Pakistan."With the ratification, Pakistan has become 104th countryto ratify the agreement, which entered into force earlier this month," the Foreign Office said in a statement on Friday.

The agreement obliges member states to keep global warming below 2 centigrade regarded as the threshold for safety by experts and scientists. Pakistan's ratification is in line with its firm commitment to the purposes and objectives of the Climate Convention. It also highlights the resolve of Pakistan to remain fully committed to the implementation of the Paris Agreement, the statement said.

It said that Pakistan played a leading role in the Climate Change negotiations. The Prime Minister of Pakistanhad himself led the delegation to Paris last December wherePakistan joined the international consensus on Climate Change.

This ratification by Pakistan also coincides with the ongoing Marrakesh Climate Change Conference, which is intendedto take important decisions for the comprehensiveimplementation of the Paris Agreement and maintain themomentum achieved in Paris and subsequently, it added.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Congress Vice president Rahul Gandhi was on Friday seen standing in queue with public at SBI ATM in Parliament street, Delhi. aThe common man is suffering, that is why I am standing with my people. I am here to exchange 4000 rupees,a he said.

People present at the ATM surrounded Rahul Gandhi and started taking selfies with him. Earlier on Friday, queues outside banks grew longer as did confusion and chaos, with all cash vending machines still not functioning despite a two-day break for stocking up new currency notes.



People waited for hours to get the cash needed to meet their daily expenses as most prevalent higher denomination currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 were declared invalid.



ATMs, which reopened two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetisation of two biggest currency notes, had people queued up since early morning.





But not all of them were operating and the crowds at many of the machines grew increasingly agitated on learning that they were still inactive.



Bank officials said all ATMs should start functioning by tomorrow after old notes are removed and new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 ones stocked in them.



However, withdrawal from ATMs is limited to a maximum of Rs 2,000 per card in a day up to November 18, 2016. The limit will be raised to Rs 4,000 per day per card from November 19, 2016 onwards, bankers said.



State Bank of India, the nationas largest lender, said it could take 10 days for ATM services to settle down to normal.



There are nearly 2 lakh ATMs in the country. Many of them are configured to dispense only Rs 500 or Rs 1,000 notes and cannot dispense Rs 100 or Rs 2000 notes, so they have to be reconfigured too.



(With inputs from PTI)

Delhi: Congress Vice president Rahul Gandhi surrounded by people taking selfies with him at SBI, Parliament street pic.twitter.com/9ojzLXXubD a ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Delhi: Congress Vice president Rahul Gandhi surrounded by people taking selfies with him at SBI, Parliament street pic.twitter.com/62QSnjU8vM a ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Mere logon ko kasht hua hai, mai unke saath khada hoon yahan: Congress VP Rahul Gandhi at SBI, Parliament street pic.twitter.com/v2fXfkmOdq a ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Gareeb vyakti ko kasht ho raha hai, mai yahan Rs 4000 badalne aaya hoon: Congress VP Rahul Gandhi pic.twitter.com/gnyH1Xtetc a ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Delhi: Congress Vice president Rahul Gandhi at SBI, Parliament street pic.twitter.com/38Y3Eb3hCp a ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Delhi: Congress Vice president Rahul Gandhi in queue at SBI, Parliament street pic.twitter.com/WG6rYoXLel a ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Tokyo:

India and Japan on Friday signed a landmark civil nuclear cooperation deal after talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his counterpart Shinzo Abe, a move that will boost bilateral economic and security ties and facilitate US-based players to set up atomic plants in India.

The two countries had reached a broad agreement for cooperation in civil nuclear energy sector during Abe's visit to India in December last year, but the deal was yet to be signed as some issues were yet to be worked out.

"A landmark deal for a cleaner, greener world! PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo witness exchange of the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement," External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup tweeted on Friday.

PM Narendra Modi and Japan PM Shinzo Abe witness exchange of the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement pic.twitter.com/7Ut2LStKQi  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

PM: Our strategic partnership is not only for the good & security of our own societies. It also brings peace, stability & balance to region pic.twitter.com/FQK15boEDo  ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

Highlights of India-Japan joint press statement-



What PM Modi said:



# Our strategic partnership will bring stability, peace and balance in both the countries.



# We see japan as our natural partner, there is vast scope in combining our resources.



# Our cooperation in this field (Civil Nuclear Agreement) will help us in tackling climate a change as well.



# Dynamism and depth of our ties has increased with passage of time with continuing commitment to our partnership.



# I wish to thank Prime Minister Abe for the support extended for Indias membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.



# We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism.

The deal would allow Japan to export nuclear technology to India, making it the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo. It would also cement the bilateral economic and security ties as the two countries warm up to counter an assertive China.

Also read: Indo-Japan civil nuclear deal signed: Here's why it matters for India

There was political resistance in Japan - the only country to suffer atomic bombings during World War II - against a nuclear deal with India, particularly after the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

Japan is a major player in the nuclear energy market and an atomic deal with it will make it easier for US-based nuclear plant makers Westinghouse Electric Corporation and GE Energy Inc to set up atomic plants in India as both these conglomerates have Japanese investments.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mangolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Friday issued a contempt notice to its former judge Markandey Katju for allegedly scandalising apex court judges.

The contempt notice issued for Katjus blog in which he allegedly used intemperate language against judges, said the Supreme Court.

The apex court said: Statement in Katjus blog is a serious assault on judges, not on judgement. Hence, the contempt notice is issued, the top court said.

In return, Justice Katju allegedly told the bench that Supreme Court judges should not behave like this.Its like a threat to me from a judge, Katju reportedly said in the courtroom.

Earlier in October, the apex court had asked Katju to appear before it on November 11 and justify his blog, which had described the court judgment as legally flawed in setting aside the death penalty of the convict in Keralas Soumya rape and murder case.

With PTI inputs

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

A landmark civil nuclear cooperation deal, the main highlight of Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Tokyo, was on Friday signed by India and Japan. The deal was signed after PM Modi held talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

When Abe visited India in December last year, the two countries had reached a broad agreement for cooperation in civil nuclear energy sector. However, the deal was not signed because some issues were required to be worked out.

Here is why the civil nuclear deal matters for India:

#This move will boost bilateral economic and security ties between India and Japan

#The deal will facilitate US-based players to set up atomic plants in India

#The India-Japan civil nuclear deal will allow Japan to supply nuclear reactors technology to India

#Indias negotiations are in advanced phase with Japan's Toshiba-owned US-based Westinghouse Electric to make six nuclear reactors in southern India

ALSO READ | India, Japan sign civil nuclear deal; PM Modi says it's historic step to build clean energy partnership

#India has plans to ramp up its nuclear capacity by 2032

#India has now become the first non-NPT signatory to have such a deal with Tokyo



#India has a similar nuclear agreement with the US, which was signed in 2008, giving India an access to nuclear technology after decades of isolation

#The deal is crucial in view of Chinas rising influence in South Asia

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Chandigarh:

Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh on Friday said the party's state unit leaders, including MPs, will meet President Pranab Mukherjee to discuss the SYL issue and accused the SAD government of failing to protect the state's interest.

He questioned the right of Haryana over Ravi and Beas river water and demanded that a tribunal must be set up to assess the availability of water with Punjab before taking any decision on this matter.

"We are going to ask for time to meet President and we will apprise him of situation. The President knows everything (about the issue)...we will present him a memorandum," Amarinder said after all Congress MLAs submitted their resignation letters to Punjab Assembly Secretary here on Friday.

In a huge setback to the Akali Dal government in poll-bound Punjab, the Supreme Court on Thursday thwarted its attempt to wriggle out of the SYL canal water sharing agreement, saying it cannot "unilaterally" terminate it or legislate to "nullify" the verdict of the highest court.

Asserting that sharing of Ravi-Beas water is going to affect the lives of millions of Punjabis, Amarinder said, "It is essential that before any decision is taken on the quantum of water, a tribunal must be set up to find out what amount of water available."

Questioning the right of Haryana over the share in Ravi-Beas river water, he said, "If they claim SYL water then we can claim share in Yamuna water. There is 5.5 MAF of Yamuna water and we never claimed it as Punjab is not riparian to that water after the reorganisation in 1966."

On Khaps in Haryana have reportedly threatened to cut off Punjab from Delhi if the apex court ruling is not implemented, Amarinder said, "What right do they (Haryana) have? They are not riparian. If they think they want to pressurise through Khap we are not going to be pressurised."

Hitting out at the SAD-BJP rule, Amarinder alleged that the Parkash Singh Badal-led state government has failed to protect the interest of the state and claimed had SAD been serious on water sharing issue, Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal and others MPs should have tendered their resignations.

"If they are so concerned about the impact of the SYL verdict on Punjab why have the Akali MPs not resigned from their parliamentary seats?" he asked and said, "Till they do so (resign), they really have no face to make allegations against others."

On whether the Congress MLAs will attend the special session on November 16 called by Punjab Cabinet over SYL issue, he said, "Once the resignation is given, the matter is over. It is up to the Speaker to accept it. We have nothing to do with the Assembly session. We will go to the people."

Amarinder also said that if Congress comes to power in Punjab, it will use "constitutional powers to amend and nullify the decision of the apex court".

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Tokyo:

India and Japan on Friday signed 10 pacts covering a range of areas such as boosting Japanese investment in infrastructure, railways, and for cooperation in space and agriculture, as part of agreements to bolster bilateral ties.

An MoU was signed between the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund Limited and Japan Overseas Infrastructure Investment Corporation for Transport and Urban Development to enable cooperation and promote investment in infrastructure projects in railways & transportation; port terminals; toll roads; airport terminals and urban development.

"This MoU would also enable the two sides to explore opportunities to set up a NIIF-JOIN joint fund," the Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement.

Two memorandum of understandings were signed to boost cooperation in space technology. One of the MoUs between Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) concerned cooperation in outer space in satellite navigation and planetary exploration.

Also read: India, Japan sign landmark civil nuclear deal; PM Narendra Modi thanks Shinzo Abe's support for NSG membership

It also included joint missions and joint use of ground systems for mutual support.

The other MoU between India's Ministry of Earth Sciences and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science aims to promote cooperation in areas of joint survey and research, and exchange of scientific visits by researchers and experts.

In past two years, India received about USD 55 billion in foreign direct investments, which, Modi has said during this visit, is "not only the highest ever FDI but also highest growth in FDI in India".

Also read: Indo-Japan civil nuclear deal signed: Here's why it matters for India

Making an exception, Japan also signed a historic civil nuclear cooperation deal with India. The agreements, including the one for cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy, marks a historic step in their engagement to build a clean energy partnership, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after wide-ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries and Abe said at the joint media interaction with Modi that he was delighted over the signing of agreement on peaceful use of nuclear energy.

"This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in Non-Proliferation regime even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT," he said.

"It (the agreement) is in line with Japan's ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons," said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II.

He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said.

"Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of Climate Change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan," he said and thanked Abe, Japanese government and Parliament for their support to this agreement.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.

In his remarks, Prime Minister Modi said as democracies, the two countries "support openness, transparency and the rule of law".

"We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he said.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Lucknow:

The rumours of shortage of salt triggered panic among citizens in Uttar Pradesh with some people buying it at Rs 200 per kg, reports said on Friday.

The rumours were initially spread in cities like Bareilly, Rampur and Sambhal. The rumours spread like wild fire and started doing rounds even in the national capital. In Lakshmi Nagar area of Delhi, 60-70 kgs of salt was sold in shops, reports said.

Meanwhile, the Delhi government has appealed to Delhiites not to pay attention to rumours of shortage of salt in the city and assured that there is no scarcity of such essential commodity.

Here are the Live updates:

#Protesters in Delhi pelt stones at cops

#Angry protests in Delhi as people come out on streets

#There is sufficient manoeuvrability to meet any unexpected localised shortage, if any. No cause for Panic thus: Dept of Consumer affairs

#As per prices reported by centres from across country, there has been no increase in price of salt,no report about disruption in production



#Department of Consumer Affairs Govt of India have been informed about rumoured increase in the prices of salt in some parts of the country

#I appeal state Govts to take action if any wrongdoing, or rumour mongering is taking place: Food minister Ram Vilas Paswan

#No shortage of salt, prices are the same. State Govts need to take action on those who spread rumours: Food minister Ram Vilas Paswan

#Delhi Food and Supplies Minister Imran Hussain holds meeting at his residence regarding black marketing of salt, sugar & other commodities

#There is ample salt in the state, people can buy it any time.Will take action against rumour mongering: ADG (Law and Order) Daljit Chaudhary

#State administration states that there is no dearth, scarcity of salt in the state, request all to not believe rumours: ADG (Law and Order)

#Salt shortage issue: One detained in Uttar Pradesh's Rampur for spreading rumours.

Some people are spreading rumours that there is shortage of salt and sugar, this is false: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal a ANI (@ANI_news) November 11, 2016

#Please do not believe in any rumours. There is no shortage of salt or any other necessary commodity nor any price hike info," Mumbai Police tweeted.

Please do not believe in any rumours. There is no shortage of #salt or any other necessary commodity nor any price hike information. a Mumbai Police (@MumbaiPolice) November 11, 2016

#An alert has been issued after rumours of shortage of salt. There is no shortage of salt, it is all rumour. Strict action will be taken against those who are spreading rumours," ADG, Law and Order said.



#In a message to all SSPs of Lucknow Zone, IG said, "Please sensitize all officers to remain alert on spread of rumour regarding shortage of salt.A It may result in Law and Order problem.A Identify the rumour mongers and take strict legal action."



#The rumour regarding shortage of salt is a rumour.A Kindly do not pay any attention to it and help us maintaining law and order, IG Zone Lucknow said.

Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said teams of food supply officers and sub-divisional magistrates are rounding cityas markets where salt is available in sufficient stock.

Allahabad: Panic among people after rumours of salt shortage in UP, authorities say there is no shortage pic.twitter.com/z6XqOuXHsq a ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) November 11, 2016

Moradabad (Uttar Pradesh): Salt shortage rumours trigger panic among buyers, some stores selling salt at Rs200/Kg pic.twitter.com/jjjqPXww1W a ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) November 11, 2016

Salt shortage rumours trigger panic buying sprees in Western UP; some stores selling salt at Rs200/Kg pic.twitter.com/j33Si0ii2V a ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) November 11, 2016

aThere is no shortage of supply of salt. Teams of food supply officers and sub-divisional magistrates are rounding the cityas markets where salt is available.



aEverywhere salt is available. Donat pay attention to such rumours,a the Deputy CM tweeted.

aaaaaa aaa aaa aa aaa aaa aaaa aaa aaaa aaaaaa aaaaa aa aaaaaa aa aYaaaa aaaaaaaa aaa aaaa aa aaaa aa aaa aaa aaaaaa aaa aaaaaaa aaa a aaaa a Manish Sisodia (@msisodia) November 11, 2016

Rumours of salt shortage triggered panic among people in the evening who rushed to markets to buy salt in some of markets in the national capital.



Later, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also assured that there is no shortage of salt and sugar in Delhi.



Food and Civil Supplies Minister Imran Hussain said four teams have been deployed at different locations to crack down on black marketing of salt.
Chennai:

Income Tax and Central Excise Intelligence sleuths are conducting raids at jewellery outlets across Tamil Nadu following information that there were heavy gold purchases after the demonetisation of high-value currencies.

"We have begun our raids at gold jewellery retail and wholesale outlets today. We are seeing if unaccounted demonetised currencies were used for gold purchases and hawala operations through the gold market," a top Income Tax official told PTI.

The raids were being conducted following a tip-off that heavy gold purchases were witnessed after the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, the official said.

Replying to a query, he said, "There are some evidences...the searches are on and these are at a preliminary stage," adding that so far, the IT sleuths have searched eight outlets.

Central Excise Intelligence sources said surprise raids were being conducted at all the major jewellery shops in the state since Thursday.

As many as 35 officers of the ranks of senior intelligence officer, assistant and deputy director are conducting the raids.

The stock and sale details of gold jewelleries, from November 7 onwards, are being verified.

In case of discrepancies in the stock and sale details, appropriate legal action will be considered against the jewellers, the sources said.

Also, it is being verified if gold, imported through illegal channels, was being used for manufacture and sale of jewellery vis-a-vis unaccounted demonetised currency.

A press release from the Directorate General of Central Excise Intelligence, meanwhile, said, "The survey is basically aimed at verifying whether unaccounted currencies in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were used to invest in the gold market, subsequent to the declaration of demonetisation of these currencies."

So far, about 30 jewellery shops at Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore and Tiruchirappalli have been raided by the DGCEI teams.

"The exercise was taken up by the DGCEI as reports were received from reliable sources that some of the jewellers were accepting the demonetised notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations on commission basis," the release said.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

BETHEL - Local veterans taught Bethel Middle School students about military life and the value of serving their country Thursday afternoon, the day before Veterans Day.

About 250 eighth-graders rotated through several classrooms to hear the stories of 12 veterans, some who served in the Vietnam War and others who served more recently.

Debbie Tierney, who has taught social studies in the middle school for 28 years, started this program three years ago after teachers were encouraged to make real-world connections to classroom lessons as part of the new Common Core standards. The students are now studying the Revolutionary War, she said.

This helps students see first-hand what life is like in the military without reading it in a textbook, Tierney said.

The vets wore their uniforms, and one vet brought a camo vest for students to try on. Some showed photos from their time in the service while recounting their experiences, and the students asked questions ranging from why they joined up to what the food was like.

One student asked Charlie Weeks whether he regretted joining the Navy at 17 to serve in Vietnam.

I did when I got into boot camp, Weeks said. When they close that gate behind you, thats the scariest day of your life....Youve got people yelling at you what to do and in those days, in the 60s, you had people smacking you around to get you to do what you have to do.

But after boot camp, Weeks said, he had no regrets.

Nor did Bob Evans, who served in the Marine Corps from 1988 to 1996. His father was in the Air Force, so he grew up on a base in West Germany during the Cold War, but he had never wanted to be in the military. He described himself as an undisciplined punk, who couldnt handle Boy Scouts, let alone the ROTC.

I thought I was smarter and better than that, he said.

But as he matured after college, Evans decided to enlist.

It changed me more than I can tell you, he said. My parents were really good at teaching me the difference between right and wrong...The Marine Corps was good at teaching me the discipline to choose how to do the right thing.

He asked the students whether any wanted to join Bethel High Schools ROTC program. About five raised their hands.

All of you who are ready now for ROTC, I applaud you, he said.

Evan Roxburgh Sr., who flew planes in a top-secret operation in Thailand during the Vietnam War, suggested that some of the students could join the military after high school.

What are you going to do when its your turn? he asked the students. I didnt have an idea, either [at your age], but you guys have got a whole thing ahead of you.

Brianna Duffy, 13, said she felt grateful after listening to the vets.

It made me feel proud to be an American because you have these people having amazing stories from fighting our country, she said.

She said hearing the vets talk about getting drafted stood out to her the most.

They probably never thought their lives would be like that at our age, Duffy said.
Small-business owners face seemingly endless responsibilities. That makes it even more important to prioritize. Research from the National Federation of Independent Business strongly suggests that finding affordable health insurance for your employees should be near the top of your list.

Youd be right to expect full transparency from your health insurance broker when discussing all the possible options and prices. But how can you be assured your broker is showing you the whole picture?

Here are three things your broker might not be telling you:

1. 'You have more options than Im showing you.'

Small-group health plans, the individual marketplace and the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) exchange combine to give companies more choices than some brokers present. This might be because some brokers may not have access to all carriers in their market or operate in a single market (group or individual). And it's realistic to assume some agents simply have a personal preference for certain plans over others.

Related: 3 Things to Know About Buying Insurance

Many brokers focus solely on traditional group plans. They may be unable to offer SHOP exchange plans including subsidies or individual-market solutions, which offer even greater subsidies through the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Also, brokers may be limited to selling plans from only a few insurance companies, possibly leaving out dozens of plan choices for you to consider.

Its important to keep yourself educated about healthcare choices, even if you have a broker or agent. You need to be aware of the respective benefits of both group insurance and enrolling your employees in individual plans. Push your broker to show you all of the options -- or find an agent who will.

2. 'My services may be limited.'

When was the last time you heard from your broker? That long? Practitioners of the write and run approach -- selling the business but not providing the appropriate follow-up and support -- exist in nearly every industry. Health insurance is no different. Judge your broker the same way you would any other service provider.

Your broker should be a strategic partner who helps you determine the intersection of health benefits, talent acquisition and retention, cost and coverage. Find a broker who focuses on smaller businesses, understands your needs for continued service and is willing to invest in assisting your employees, too. You and your employees deserve open, candid communication. You also should be able to count on your agent for support in understanding whats available and how to make the best decisions.

Related: Should You Tell Customers You're Raising Prices to Cover Health Insurance?

3. 'You could be at risk for large fines.'

Make a wrong move, and you could be exposed to fines of $100 per employee per day. Seriously. If you dont offer a group policy but instead provide some funding to help employees pay for individual health insurance, you might be in trouble due to a recent IRS ruling.

Moreover, if you exceed 50 full-time equivalents (FTEs), be careful. You could be exposed to penalties under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) if you dont provide qualifying group coverage. The ACA employer mandate requires applicable large employers -- small-business owners with 50 or more FTE employees -- to offer health insurance to at least 95 percent of FTEs and their dependents.

There are a few other requirements, too. Coverage must be affordable, which means a plan cannot exceed 9.5 percent of the employees income. It also must meet a key minimum value: equivalent to the minimum essential-coverage and cost-sharing amount for a bronze plan (60 percent). Theres a lot to keep track of, so make sure your broker educates you on all the pitfalls and steers you clear of penalties.

Related: This Insurance Strategy Could Save You Thousands

What should you do now?

Small-business owners deserve a knowledgeable, communicative broker. Remember, your broker works for you and should provide you with the level of guidance needed for your business. If you're experiencing something less, dont hesitate to shop for a new broker.

Ask a few key questions to help you evaluate potential agents and determine if they're a good fit for you and your company.

How long have you been selling health insurance?

What locations and marketplaces do you specialize in?

What carriers do you have access to?

How frequently do you communicate with your customers?

What kind of support will I have when it comes to compliance paperwork to steer clear of penalties?

Are there plans available to me beyond what you're presenting?

Ask your broker about his or her experience and level of knowledge in the various marketplaces. You might be surprised by what you're missing or what your current broker isnt telling you. Employers -- and employees -- deserve better.

Related:

3 Things Your Health-Insurance Broker Might Not Tell You About Open Enrollment

3 Things to Know About Buying Health Insurance

Should You Tell Customers You're Raising Prices to Pay for Health Insurance?



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Robert Vaughn, who starred in numerous film and television shows since the 1960s, passed away Friday after complications from acute leukemia, his manager confirmed to Deadline. Vaughn was 83-years-old.

"Mr. Vaughn passed away with his family around him," Matthew Sullivan told Deadline.

Vaughn, who lived in Ridgefield, Conn., is survived by wife Linda, his son Cassidy and his daughter Caitlin.

Ridgefield First Selectman Rudy Marconi said Vaughn lived in the town for many years with his family, though remained out of the public eye.

"It is unquestionably sad about the passing of anyone, especially someone who was able to achieve so much in his lifetime," Marconi said. "He and his wife ... were really great residents of the town.

"As is the case in Ridgefield, we're all kind of part of the same family so it's sad to lose him and we appreciate his many contributions to Hollywood [and] Ridgefield."

Vaughn rose to stardom in the 1950s and 60s, most known for his turn as secret agent "Napoleon Solo" in the hit show "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." Vaughn's portrayal of the suave and sophisticated agent, created by "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, is largely credited as fueling the secret agent craze of the 1960s.

Vaughn's countless credits also include roles in "Bullitt" (1968), "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), and "The Towering Inferno" (1974).

Most recently, he starred in episodes of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," made comedic appearances as a shouting audience member on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," and starred in the Kickstarter-backed film "Gold Star," about a daughter's relationship with her veteran father set and filmed in Connecticut.

"Gold Star" had recently premiered at the Buffalo Film Festival on Oct. 7. The film is set to debut in Connecticut at FilmFest52 on Dec. 7 at Bethel Cinemas.

Vaughn won an Emmy award in 1978 for "Outstanding Continuing Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Drama Series" in "Washington: Behind Closed Doors," and was nominated for four Golden Globes awards and an Academy Award for "Best Actor in a Supporting Role" in 1959's "The Young Philadelphians."

The actor was also award a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1998.

Danbury News-Times reporter Mackenzie Rigg contributed to this report.
Election night was a resounding success for those supporting medical and recreational cannabis legalization. Recreational use was legalized in California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Maine. Voters in Florida, North Dakota and Arkansas all approved medical marijuana initiatives. A second go-around for Florida where, two years earlier, a medical marijuana measure earned an impressive 58 percent of the vote, but was short of the 60 percent threshold needed for passage.

Voters in Montana realigned the current laws to reflect the patient interests outlined in the original 2004 medical marijuana law. Described as a restoration by NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano -- This decision restores the rights of patients and providers.

The celebrations.

Accompanying each of these victories were a new American phenomena: Cannabis legalization parties. In states like California and cities like San Francisco, cannabis industry activists, entrepreneurs and consumers anticipated a favorable outcome, with little opposition, and planned parties accordingly.

But lots of these end of prohibition parties sobered up pretty quickly as the night went on and the election of Donald Trump became apparent. This wasnt supposed to be the plan. President Obama was hands-off to states lawmaking decisions around cannabis, and Hillary had hinted shed be the same way. But now cannapreneurs have Trump, and that means relative uncertainty for the entrepreneurial future of cannabis.

Related: Legal Advice for Cannabis Startups: First, Invest. Then, Stay out of Jail.

The speculation.

Earlier this year, Merry Jane writer Zeus Tipado wrote "If you want the candidate with the highest probability of ensuring marijuana will be legal across the country, Donald Trump is your best option. Tipado cited, among other things, Trumps long critical stance on the failed drug war.

Could he be right?

Some think hed better be. There is always concern when authoritarian regimes grab hold because they tend to resort to harsh criminal justice strategies to control human behavior, including substance use, Amanda Reiman, the Drug Policy Alliances manager of marijuana law and policy, told "Entrepreneur." However, during the campaign, Trump vowed to respect the states that decided to change their cannabis laws. With the issue more popular in this election than either candidate, Trump would be wise to honor that promise and recognize that this is an issue supported by a majority of Americans, Reiman advised.

Related: How to Grow a Cannabis Farming Business in the Blazing Marijuana Economy

While others suspect entrepreneur Trump might seize cannabis as an opportunity to help deliver new federal revenues hell need to run the country. Trump will realize that the business opportunity in cannabis will bring jobs and much needed tax revenue to the country for each state, predicts Anton Ansalmar, founder and CEO of mobile and web seed-to-sale tracking and compliance system, Medik8mobile. As a businessman, he will want to make sure that Mexican cartels won't dictate the future of the illegal trade.

The truth is, just as we couldnt predict how hed behave in a national debate, we cant predict what will happen to cannabis under President Trump. He has stated he believes it should be up to states to decide. "In terms of marijuana and legalization, I think that should be a state issue, state-by-state," Trump told The Washington Post. " Marijuana is such a big thing. I think medical should happen  right? Dont we agree? I think so. And then I really believe we should leave it up to the states."

On the other hand, he has spoken negatively about the cannabis industry in Colorado. I really dont know, Bob Eschino, co-owner of the edibles brand Incredibles, Colorados largest edibles company, told the Denver Post. Its really going to come from the Senate and the Congress and the people that are making the rules.

Susan Soares, Executive Director of the 501(C) (3) cannabis organization C.A.R.E., agree its not Trump himself thats concerning for the cannabis industry, its those he may appoint. If Rudy Giuliani becomes the attorney general, he is strongly against cannabis legalization and has been a strong proponent of the war on drugs, Soares relates.

Related: How to Plant the Seeds of Success in the New Cannabis Economy

Sam Chapman, founding member of New Economy Consulting LLC, a firm based in Portland Oregon focused on advising entrepreneurs and investors in the cannabis industry, feels the nation is too far down the path to be forced backwards now. Assuming Trump doesnt completely delete the progress cannabis reform has made over the past decade (still too early to know), even in the event of a complete market crash, the market for legal cannabis is not going anywhere...The current trajectory and momentum the industry is seeing will not be easily knocked off course.

Still, presidential interference in states progress might not be the biggest problem for entrepreneurs and investors in the cannabis industry, according to The Motley Fool. Drug rescheduling could be. Whereas, rescheduling of marijuana from schedule I to schedule II could allow for tight product regulation from the Food and Drug Administration. From cannabis industry manufacturing, packaging and marketing, to testing and certification, the FDA could add very cumbersome and costly regulations, hindering what otherwise looks like an inviting industry for entrepreneurs.

The First Test

So how confident do cannapreneurs feel on the whole?

We'll know soon enough with the industry's largest tradeshow set to take place next week in Las Vegas. The Marijuana Business Conference and Expo runs November 16-18, 2016 at the Rio Hotel. MJBizCon has for years served the industry as a gathering point immediately after national elections, a place and time for industry professionals to get a pulse on what the future will hold. This year, the opportunities are bigger than ever before  yet so are the uncertainties, which makes this gathering all the more prescient and critical., remarks Cassandra Farrington Co-Founder & CEO, Marijuana Business Daily and President at Anne Holland Ventures Inc. As a cannabis industry entrepreneur myself, Im looking forward to convening with the best and brightest of the industry, to understand what the collective wisdom says about the best paths forward.

Related:

Broad Voter Approval for Cannabis Has Likely Ignited Explosive Growth

Will the 'Entrepreneur' President Embrace the Cannabis Economy?

Legal Marijuana a Big Winner in Elections Across the Country



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Nearly 74 years ago in Mississippi several hundred young men, mostly from New England and many only 18, 19 or 20 years old, who until a week ago had been civilians, clamored out of old dirty railroad cars in which they had been riding on a circuitous two day route from Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

They were lined up, greeted by army sergeants and officers, packed into trucks and taken to Camp Shelby. There they were told that they were now members of a new army unit, the 296th Engineer Combat Battalion.

Their commanding officer was Jack Jeffrey, then a captain, but soon promoted to lieutenant colonel. Jeffrey, the only commander the 296th had, was a tall, lean Texas A&M graduate, who with his other officers and a cadre of non-commissioned officers, had the responsibility of turning these teenagers and young males into a cohesive military unit able to perform army engineering duties under combat conditions.

For the next several months, this transformation from a crowd of civilians all with varying backgrounds into a disciplined army unit took place.

The men were marched and drilled. They learned close order drill. They went on forced marches in hot humid Mississippi weather where the temperature frequently went over the 100-degree mark. As the 296th was an engineer combat unit, the men learned to handle explosives, land mines and booby traps. They bivouacked in the snake and insect infested forests around Camp Shelby and put pontoon bridges together. Basic infantry training became part of their routine and they fired rifles, machine guns and went through bayonet drill.

Six months after their arrival, the young men of this new battalion were once again loaded onto trains that carried them to a port of embarkation. With other units they were packed onto an old passenger steamer that had been converted to troop transport duty and sailed out of Boston.

Ten days later on Oct. 18, 1943 they landed in Liverpool, England, where the unit became part of Operation Bolero, the U.S. Armys master plan to build facilities for the massive buildup of troops and supplies arriving in the United Kingdom in preparation for the coming Normandy invasion. Early in 1944 the battalion was released from its construction duties, sent to Gloucester, England where they lived in tents and trained for the upcoming invasion.

The 296th left Gloucester in June, went to Southampton, loaded aboard LSTs and shortly after D-Day landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy. The men cleared minefields, kept supply roads open and worked on the front lines with the 4th Infantry Division in Operation Cobra that ended the slow, grinding bloody war fought in the hedgerows of Normandy. From there the 296th joined the armys race across France to the German border.

On Dec. 16, 1944 Hitlers armies launched its last major offensive through the Ardennes in what is known as the Battle of the Bulge. Panzer forces lead by SS Col. Joachim Peiper pierced American lines and were headed to the Muese River until as Peiper swore they ran into Those Damned Engineers. In his book On To Berlin, Gen. James A. Gavin, commander of the 82d Airborne Division said:

Peipers arrival immediately south of Stavelot, brought him for the first time, up against a force that was to prove as effective as a good combat division. They were the Engineer troops of the U. S. First Army, specifically the 296th, the 291st and 51st Engineers.

When the war against Germany ended on May 6, 1945, the 296th went to Berlin as part of the American occupation force. In the time since its landing in Normandy, the battalion had taken part in five major campaigns, Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes and Central Europe. Twenty one men in the battalion did not survive these campaigns. The battalion was disbanded in October 1945 and most of the men, who had been overseas for more than two years, arrived back home in time for Christmas.

As most of the members came from New England, the battalion held reunions every other year, rotating the reunion locations among Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Some of the members formed close lifelong friendships. Others came occasionally. The last reunion was held six years ago and only a handful were able to attend. Many used canes and walkers. And there was a wheel chair or two.

Today, of the teenagers who formed most of the battalion in 1943, there are only a few still alive and they are in their 90s.

The work the battalion did in its march from Normandy to Berlin was not the type that commands headlines. The battalion kept vital supply lines open. They built and maintained bridges so that tanks, trucks and supplies could move. They cleared mines and when called on performed infantry duty. They know their casualty rate, compared to that of an infantry battalion, was low. Above all they knew there were hundreds of other units like theirs who served their nation well in a time of a national crisis.

The veterans of World War II are now old. In a few years there will only be a handful of the millions who served still alive. Their Veterans Day hope is that the memory of what they did in the cause they served does not die with them.

Forrest C. Palmer, a retired newspaper publisher of The News-Times and a Southbury resident, was one of the teenagers in the 296th.
101 suspected transnational fraudsters arrested in China

China,Crime/Disaster/Accident, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Beijing, Nov 11 (IANS) Since June, 101 suspects have been detained in China in connection with transnational-telecom crimes involving 20 million yuan (about $2 million), the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) announced on Friday.

Of the suspects, 76 were from China and 25 from Taiwan and they were linked to 135 cases currently under investigation, the MPS said.

The fraudsters had targeted victims living in Zhejiang province, and police first began to receive complaints about telecom and internet fraud in April, Xinhua news agency reported.

The subsequent investigations led to outfits based in Cambodia, where the suspects were allegedly swindling victims out of their money by pretending to be government or law enforcement officials.

The police captured 39 suspects, 14 from China and 25 from Taiwan, in Cambodia.

Following the arrests and raids in Cambodia, and under the coordination of the MPS, police departments from seven provinces in China carried out multiple raids and arrested 62 suspects and dismantled three transnational fraud outfits.

Around 590,000 telecom fraud cases were reported in 2015, involving the loss of 22.2 billion yuan.

--IANS

ksk/dg
Remembering India's fallen in World War I

Belgium,Art/Culture/Books,Defence/Security,Diaspora, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Brussels, Nov 11 (IANS) World leaders gather in Belgium on Friday to mark the 98th anniversary of the end of World War I in which 1.5 lakh Indian soldiers participated as part of the largest volunteer army in the world.

On November 11, 1918 -- at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the Allies and Germany formally signed an Armistice agreement ending their fight.

Nearly a century later, several nations continue to observe Armistice Day every November 11 in remembrance of more than 17 million lives that were lost in the Great War -- that later came to be known as World War I.

At the Indian War Memorial, in the little town of Ypres, a few among the millions of Belgians who still remain thankful to India's support pay tribute to the Indian martyrs in a memorial concert along with Indian soldiers from some of the regiments which fought in the Great War.

Hans Vermeersch, a Belgian music composer, does an extraordinary thing at the Indian war memorial by holding a concert as his personal tribute to the martyrs of India.

Vermeersch, married to an Indian Finla Noronha, has promoted Indian music worldwide, particularly of Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam and the Carnatic tradition.

He has also unearthed from the British Museum copies of Rabindranath Tagore's original notations and claims now to play Rabindrasangeet in the way Rabindranath and his companions actually composed them during their journeys to Europe.

--IANS

ahm/dg
Taliban attack on German consulate kills 2 in Afghanistan

Israel,Terrorism,Crime/Disaster/Accident, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Kabul, Nov 11 (IANS) At least two persons were killed and more than two dozen injured in an overnight Taliban car bombing against German consulate in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, local officials said on Friday.

"One terrorist detonated a car bomb near the gate of German Consulate office late Thursday night, killing himself and one other person and injuring 28 others," a security source told Xinhua news agency.

UN official sources put the number of the injured at 90 by the powerful explosion which occurred roughly at 11.15 p.m. on Thursday.

"The injured were residents who suffered injuries by the bomb shrapnel and flying glasses as the blast damaged several buildings near the site," the source said, adding an investigation was launched into the incident and further details will be released afterwards.

The Taliban militant group claimed responsibility for the attack shortly after the blast.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a purported Taliban spokesman, told local media that the bombing was a revenge attack against killing of civilians by "invaders" in Kunduz province.

On November 3, a series of air strikes were carried out by NATO-led forces on outskirts of Kunduz city, following ground operations conducted by foreign and Afghan security forces.

--IANS

vgu/
China will never allow any part of its territory to break off: Xi Jinping

China,Defence/Security,Diplomacy, Fri, 11 Nov 2016 IANS

Beijing, Nov 11 (IANS) China and Taiwan should make joint efforts to fight separatists and safeguard unity of the country, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Friday.

"Any attempt to split the country will be resolutely opposed by all Chinese people," Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying, who added that "we'll never allow anyone, any organisation or political party to rip out any part of our territory at any time or in any form".

The President's remarks were made to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen, who led a revolution in 1911 to end the imperialism rule of the Qing Dynasty and founded China.

To achieve the complete reunification of the motherland is in the fundamental interest of the Chinese nation and it is common aspiration as well as sacred duty of all Chinese, Xi said.

It is the shared conviction of Chinese that China is a unified country, and it is this belief that ensures the continuation of the nation as a whole, Xi said, quoting Sun.

Sun is also the founder of Kuomintang (KMT), which governed Taiwan for decades from 1940s to 1990s and from 2008 to 2015. Mentioning that Sun is a national hero and compatriot, Xi said that the late revolutionary leader is a firm supporter of national unity.

For all Taiwan political parties, organisations and personals, as long as they acknowledge that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, the mainland side would like to communicate with them, Xi said.

Xi called on compatriots from both sides across the Taiwan Strait and Chinese all across the globe to unite and oppose "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces, saying the future of compatriots of both the mainland and Taiwan is closely intertwined with the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

--IANS

ask/dg
$9.5-million investment will create jobs, expand research and foster innovation

THUNDER BAY, ON, Nov. 10, 2016 /CNW/ - The Government of Canada values the role of post-secondary institutions as they help equip young Canadians with the education and training they need for future careers that will help them join a strong, healthy middle class. Today's $9.5-million investment in Lakehead University will do just that by fostering the training needed for the well-paying middle-class jobs of today and tomorrow.

The funding was announced today by the Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Status of Women, on behalf of the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, and by the Honourable Michael Gravelle, Ontario's Minister of Northern Development and Mines.

Canada's Innovation Agenda aims to make this country a global centre for innovationone that creates jobs, drives growth across all industries and improves the lives of all Canadians. This investment exemplifies that vision in action.

Lakehead University will receive $9.5 million to modernize and expand an existing building to create a new state-of-the-art research complex to be known as the Centre for Advanced Studies in Engineering and Sciences. The new centre will enable Lakehead University to offer advanced training courses and will help local businesses and start-ups commercialize their products and services and help grow the region's economy.

Federal-provincial investments in this project include:

$7.96 million from the Government of Canada ; and

from the Government of ; and $1.54 million from the Province of Ontario .

Lakehead University will provide an additional $9.07 million, for a total project investment of $18.57 million.

In total, universities and colleges throughout Ontario will receive more than $1.9 billion from the Government of Canada, the provincial government, the institutions themselves and private donors. Federal funding will be allocated through the Post-Secondary Institutions Strategic Investment Fund, which will enhance and modernize research facilities on Canadian campuses and improve the environmental sustainability of these facilities.

As a result of these investments, students, professors and researchers will work in state-of-the-art facilities that advance the country's best research. They will collaborate in specially designed spaces that support lifelong learning and skills training. They will work in close proximity with partners to turn discoveries into products or services. In the process, they will train forand inventthe high-value jobs of the future. And their discoveries will plant the seeds for the next generation of innovators.

That is how the Strategic Investment Fund will jump-start a virtuous circle of innovation, creating the right conditions for long-term growth that will yield benefits for generations to come.

Ontario is making the largest investment in public infrastructure in the province's historyabout $160 billion over 12 yearswhich is supporting 110,000 jobs every year across the province with projects such as hospitals, schools, roads, bridges and transit. Since 2015, the Province has announced support for more than 475 projects that will keep people and goods moving, connect communities and improve quality of life. To learn more about infrastructure projects in your community, go to Ontario.ca/BuildON.

Quotes

"This once-in-a-generation investment by the Government of Canada is a historic down payment on the government's vision to position Canada as a global centre for innovation. That means making Canada a world leader in turning ideas into solutions, science into technologies, skills into middle-class jobs and start-up companies into global successes. This investment will create conditions that are conducive to innovation and long-term growth, which will in turn keep the Canadian economy globally competitive."

 The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development

"Our government is committed to supporting innovation and economic development, which will help grow the economy across Northern Ontario. This investment will allow Lakehead University to modernize its facilities so that students, local businesses and innovators can create and innovate in state-of-the-art environments."

 The Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Status of Women

"This investment demonstrates our government's commitment to making Canada a leader in science, technology and innovation. This facility will create growth in northwestern Ontario and contribute to a diverse and skilled work force. I look forward to seeing the progression across all industries in the region and to creating more opportunities for our young Canadians."

 Don Rusnak, Member of Parliament for Thunder BayRainy River

"Today's investment in Lakehead University's Centre for Advanced Studies in Engineering and Sciences will give students in Northern Ontario access to state-of-the-art laboratories and provide space for them to advance their research and develop new technologies. By supporting this important project, our government is helping to grow the local economy and create jobs for Thunder Bay residents today while providing students access to high-quality education and training facilities to support the jobs of tomorrow."

 The Honourable Michael Gravelle, Ontario's Minister of Northern Development and Mines

"Lakehead University has positioned itself as a leader in the area of research and innovation, both provincially and nationally, and at the same time, has helped to drive economic growth in Thunder Bay and the region. I am pleased that the province is investing in the Centre for Advanced Studies in Engineering and Sciences. This investment will allow Lakehead to further enhance its tremendous work in supporting the development and enhancement of the knowledge economy in Thunder Bay and the region."

 The Honourable Bill Mauro, Ontario's Minister of Municipal Affairs

"This funding will make it possible for our talented researchers and students to do their work to the fullest of their abilities in new labs with state-of-the-art equipment. Thank you to the federal and provincial governments for this support."

 Dr. Andrew P. Dean, Vice-President, Research and Innovation, Lakehead University

"Thanks to the federal and provincial governments, Lakehead University will create a new space on campus that will allow our researchers to answer important questions and create exceptional innovations that will impact this region and the world. This investment will significantly increase research and entrepreneurial opportunities at Lakehead University."

 Dr. Brian Stevenson, President and Vice-Chancellor, Lakehead University

Quick facts

The Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario are providing more than $950 million for research infrastructure at institutions across Ontario .

and the Government of are providing more than for research infrastructure at institutions across . Canada's Innovation Agenda is designed to ensure our country is globally competitive in promoting research, translating ideas into new products and services, accelerating business growth and propelling entrepreneurs from the start-up phase to international success.

Innovation Agenda is designed to ensure our country is globally competitive in promoting research, translating ideas into new products and services, accelerating business growth and propelling entrepreneurs from the start-up phase to international success. The targeted, short-term investments under the Post-Secondary Institutions Strategic Investment Fund will promote economic activity across Canada and help Canada's universities and colleges develop highly skilled workers, act as engines of discovery, and collaborate on innovations that help Canadian companies compete and grow internationally.

and help universities and colleges develop highly skilled workers, act as engines of discovery, and collaborate on innovations that help Canadian companies compete and grow internationally. The Post-Secondary Institutions Strategic Investment Fund supports the Government of Canada's climate change objectives by encouraging sustainable and green infrastructure projects.

Associated links

Follow Minister Bains on social media.

Twitter: @MinisterISED

SOURCE Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

For further information: Contacts: Matt Pascuzzo, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Status of Women, 613-291-5561; Media Relations, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, 343-291-1777, [email protected]
OTTAWA, Nov. 11, 2016 /CNW/ - Each year, we fall silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. We do so to remember those who served our countrythose who were wounded and those who never came home. We do so to remember their families and loved ones, who also sacrificed so much for Canada. And we do so to think about the terrible cost of war, and of its consequences for our veterans and soldiers.

Todayon Remembrance Daywe say thank you to those who served Canada so bravely.

As we mark this moment with sombre reflection, our thoughts also turn to the year ahead. In 2017, we will not only celebrate Canada's 150th birthday, but also mark the centennial of the battles of Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, as well as the 75th anniversary of the Dieppe Raid.

It's important to know what happened so we can honour those who were there for us. Our soldiers, past and presentas well as their familieshave given so much in support of our country. Now, it's our turn to support them. By remembering. By honouring. By committing ourselves to finding peaceful solutions to our problems.

On Remembrance Day, let us recall the bravery, service and dedication of so many men and women in uniform. Lest we forget.

David Johnston

Please note that the video version of this message will also be available at www.gg.ca.

Follow GGDavidJohnston and RideauHall on Facebook and Twitter.

SOURCE Governor General of Canada

For further information: Media information: Josephine Laframboise, Rideau Hall Press Office, 613-990-9324, 613-668-1929 (cell), [email protected]
ANNUAL CONTRIBUTION FROM SALES OF THEIR EXCLUSIVE LINE, AWEARNESS KENNETH COLE

TORONTO, Nov. 11, 2016 /CNW/ -- Moores Clothing for Men and Kenneth Cole Productions launched the "AWEARNESS Kenneth Cole" collection in November 2015 with the mission to create tailored clothing so the modern man can "look good, for good." This Remembrance Day, Moores and Kenneth Cole Productions are proud to announce that the "AWEARNESS Kenneth Cole" collection generated over $155,000 in donations over a 12 month period to support True Patriot Love Foundation and their mission to assist Canadian military Veterans. "Our efforts to build a product line synonymous with a charitable give back have been successful. We see this initiative as part of our continued company-wide goal of giving back to the communities in which we serve," says Richard Bull, Vice President of Merchandising at Moores.

Since the launch of the collection, a one percent contribution from all gross sales of "AWEARNESS Kenneth Cole" products sold exclusively at Moores have been allocated towards this charity. "This collection was created to continue our ongoing initiative to raise social awareness around the Canadian Military Veteran population and their transition into the civilian workforce," said Kenneth Cole, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of Kenneth Cole Productions. "We look forward to the continued success of the AWEARNESS Kenneth Cole line and to continue to support our charitable partner."

The benefitting charity partnering in this mission has a strong history supporting Veterans. True Patriot Love Foundation is a national charity that honours the sacrifices of members of the Canadian Armed Forces, Veterans and their families in both times of peace and conflict. Among many other programs, True Patriot Love Foundation pairs injured soldiers with Canadian business leaders on ambitious expeditions to profile our soldiers' perseverance and continued commitment to service, as well as the transferability of their military skills to a civilian career. On November 10, Moores Clothing for Men was proud to present Bronwen Evans, CEO of True Patriot Love Foundation with their donation check at an intimate ceremony hosted at the Moores flagship store in downtown Toronto.

About Moores Clothing for Men:

Launched in 1980 and a subsidiary of Tailored Brands, Inc. (NYSE: TLRD), Moores Clothing for Men is the leading national retailer of men's business attire in Canada with over 120 stores. Moores' stores carry a full selection of suits, sport coats, slacks, formalwear, sportswear, outerwear, dress shirts, footwear, and accessories in non-exclusive and exclusive merchandise brands such as Joseph Abboud, AWEARNESS Kenneth Cole, Black by Vera Wang, among others. Moores is also the largest provider of tuxedo and suit rentals in Canada. For additional information on Moores Clothing for Men, please visit mooresclothing.com

Follow us on social media @MooresClothing (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)

About Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc.

Kenneth Cole is an American designer, social activist, and visionary who believes business and philanthropy are interdependent. His global company, Kenneth Cole Productions, creates modern, functional, clothing, shoes, and accessories for inspirational urban lifestyles under the brand names Kenneth Cole New York, Kenneth Cole Reaction and Unlisted, as well as footwear under the name Gentle Souls. The company has also granted a wide variety of third party licenses for the production of men's and women's apparel, fragrances, watches, jewelry, eyewear, and several other accessory categories, including children's footwear. The company's products are distributed through department stores, better specialty stores, company-owned retail stores and its e-commerce website. Over 30 years ago, Kenneth Cole leveraged his passion and unique brand platform to make a meaningful impact on people's wardrobes, as well as communities in need. He did what others didn't and said what others wouldn't. Today, The Kenneth Cole Foundation remains committed to helping communities in need by supporting Collective Health, Civil Liberties, and Artistic Activism.

About True Patriot Love Foundation

True Patriot Love Foundation (TPL) is a national charity that funds unique programs and innovative research in the areas of Veteran family health and support. We honour the sacrifices of members of the Canadian Armed Forces, Veterans and their families by bridging the gap between military and civilian communities, hosting multinational symposiums and organizing ambitious global expeditions. Since 2009, TPL has committed approximately $15 million to support military charities and research on physical health and rehabilitation, mental health and wellbeing, and innovation across Canada. For more information, visit www.truepatriotlove.com.

For media inquiries, contact:

Director of Public Relations All Brands

Diego Louro, [email protected]

Public Relations Marketing Manager

Julie Weber, [email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438180

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438128LOGO

SOURCE Moores Clothing For Men
OTTAWA, Nov. 10, 2016 /CNW/ - On the day leading up to Remembrance Day, Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Perry Bellegarde is reinvigorating the AFN's longstanding commitment to action and advocacy for First Nations veterans. Today, National Chief Bellegarde convened a gathering in Ottawa of First Nations veterans from across the country to set priorities and establish a new AFN Working Group on First Nations Veterans Affairs. The National Chief and First Nations veterans will participate in tomorrow's Remembrance Day ceremonies in Ottawa.

"The AFN is deeply committed to keeping First Nations veterans at the forefront of all our work. Today we revitalize these efforts for our brave women and men who served proudly and with distinction," said National Chief Bellegarde. "This Remembrance Day, I vow to stand with them as we push for fairness, recognition and respect for every First Nations veteran, young or old, and for their families."

Today's meeting focused on the priorities of First Nations veterans and included representatives from Veterans Affairs Canada. Discussion ranged from securing benefits and inclusion of ceremonial means of calling home the spirits of fallen comrades lost overseas. Veterans requested the National Chief seek formal support from the Royal Canadian Legion Dominion Command for a gathering of First Nations veterans as a step towards re-establishing the First Nations Veterans Association, and to press for resources from Veteran Affairs Canada to support these efforts.



The Assembly of First Nations will lay two wreaths at Canada's National War Memorial during Friday's Remembrance Day ceremony. One wreath will be laid by AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde. A second wreath will be laid on behalf of all First Nations veterans in Canada by Alan Knockwood, a Mi'kmaq from Nova Scotia and a veteran from the Vietnam era.

"It was a sincere pleasure joining National Chief Bellegarde and fellow vets from across Turtle Island today at the AFN," said Mr. Knockwood. "I'm greatly looking forward both to laying the wreath tomorrow and to getting our new Working Group off the ground. It's high time this level of sprit and energy were brought toward First Nations veterans issues."

AFN Chiefs-in-Assembly have passed dozens of resolutions over the years pertaining to the rights of First Nations veterans. For more than two decades, the Assembly of First Nations has had a presence at every national Remembrance Day ceremony in Canada. It was not until 1995 that Indigenous peoples were allowed to lay wreaths at the National War Memorial.

The AFN is the national organization representing First Nations citizens in Canada. Follow AFN on Twitter @AFN_Updates.

SOURCE Assembly of First Nations

For further information: Jenn Jefferys, Communications Officer, 613-222-9656, [email protected]; Alain Garon, Bilingual Communications Officer, 613-292-0857, [email protected]
OTTAWA, Nov. 11, 2016 /CNW/ - The Honourable Kent Hehr, Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence, issued the following statement today on the occasion of Remembrance Day 2016:

"Every year on Remembrance Day, Canadians come together at memorials and local cenotaphs to honour those who have served and continue to serve our great country.

"More than 2.3 million Canadians have served in our armed forces since Confederation. We remember those Canadians who answered the call of duty to defend peace, freedom and democracy. Their selfless dedication and courage has given us the Canada we enjoy today.

"As we pause on Remembrance Day, we recall military events that took place around the world; from South Africa to Flanders, Bosnia to Kandahar, and Kapyong to Hong Kong and pay tribute to the exceptional achievements made by Canadian men and women in uniform. Their efforts have helped build a legacy for our tomorrow.

"Let us continue to show our brave men and women in uniform, past and present, especially those that made the ultimate sacrifice, that we remember them."

SOURCE Veterans Affairs Canada

For further information: Media Relations, Veterans Affairs Canada, 613-992-7468, [email protected]
MONTREAL, Nov. 11, 2016 /CNW Telbec/ - Trium Group Inc supports the initiative "Operations Sous Zero" by organizing a considerable donation for children in need. With the recent announcements of a harsh winter, the company has decided to move quickly and offer coats that will warm the hearts of children.

After more than 10 years, "Operations Sous Zero" has managed to gather many private and business donors and can now count on Trium Group's support.

Today, Trium Group is a major player in the uniform industry and is devoted to support this noble and worthy cause by donating no less than 850 winter jackets representing several tens of thousands of dollars.

We are extremely happy to provide these winter jackets to such a great organisation says Alec Veilleux business partner at Trium Group.

"Being myself a father of 3 children, I just had to find a way to support Operations Sous Zero. I understand far too well that buying winter clothing is sometimes financially difficult for some and that's why our company is committed to be part of these special donors working for an equally exceptional cause. "

About Trium Group

Founded in 1993, Trium Group has made its mark as a manufacturer, importer and distributor of high quality corporate apparel and uniforms.

We take pride as a manufacturer of corporate apparel and uniforms with our customized collections geared to reach and exceed our clients' expectations.

We also specialize in uniform management systems and supply a multitude of companies across Canada and the United States. We currently have a great expertise and skill in product development, making our clothing more comfortable, distinctive, and adapted to the most demanding needs of our customers.

Trium Group goes to great lengths to support and guide companies towards complete uniform management solutions. We have invested greatly in technology and offer fully integrated web stores that allow our customers and their employees an extremely easy and flexible ordering platform.

Today, Trium Group is the expert in corporate apparel, uniforms and high end promotional items. We serve many different business segments such as transport, engineering, manufacturing, police force, road technicians and much more. Our goal remains to offer the best solution to our customer's needs.

For more information: www.groupetrium.com

SOURCE Trium Group Inc.

Image with caption: "Trium Group delivers 850 jackets at the Hochelega community center. Roland Barbier (Operations Sous Zero), Alec Veilleux (Trium Group), Carole Briere (operations Sous zero) Left to right of photo. (CNW Group/Trium Group Inc.)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20161110_C2916_PHOTO_EN_816003.jpg

For further information: Alec Veilleux, Partner with Trium Group Inc., 514-717-1294, [email protected]
Key iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn Technology Group, benefited from cost control on growing use of automation in its factories, but its bottom line dropped due to smaller gains in non-operating income.

In the quarter to September, Foxconn reported sales of 1.07 trillion New Taiwan dollars ($33.57 billion), up 0.91% on the year. Operating profit rose 10.33% year-over-year to NT$42.1 billion, but net profit fell 8.51% to NT$34.63 billion.

Foxconn has been working aggressively to expand automation on its Chinese campuses, including the iPhone assembly facility in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou told the Nikkei Asian Review on Nov. 5 that Foxconn has now deployed 60,000 robots on its production lines.

We plan to increase that number by 20% to 30% every year, Gou said. Weve already had some lights-off facilities [due to large-scale deployment of robots] and we will have more of them in the future.

Despite a double-digit gain in operating profit, the bottom line suffered from factors not directly related to the companys main line of business.

SOURCES Nikkei
The US Department of Energy (DOE) has agreed to sell around 300,000 tonnes of depleted uranium hexafluoride to GE Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) for re-enrichment at a proposed plant to be built near DOEs Paducah site in Kentucky. The agreement paves the way for commercialisation of Silex laser enrichment technology.

GLE was selected by the DOE in 2013 to enter contract negotiations on the construction of a laser enrichment plant former at the former gaseous enrichment site at Paducah, Kentucky to re-enrich its inventory of high-assay depleted uranium tails. The tails, left over from previous enrichment operations, contain a lower proportion of uranium-235 than in naturally occurring uranium but can potentially be re-enriched for use in nuclear fuel.

GLE will finance, construct, own and operate the Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility, which will be a commercial enrichment plant licensed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Re-enrichment of the 300,000 tonnes of tails would take place over 40 years, producing around 100,000 tonnes of natural-grade uranium which would be sold into the world uranium market. The balance of the material  low assay tails  would be returned to the DOE for disposition.

Sometimes described as third-generation technology, laser enrichment processes promise improved efficiency and lower costs than the centrifuge enrichment plants in operation today. Silex stands for Separation of Isotopes by Laser Excitation.

Australian company Silex Systems Ltd, which developed the technology, said the production rate of the Paducah facility and the subsequent sale of uranium into the market is likely to be regulated by the US government at around 2000 tU per year, equivalent to a mine producing around 5 million pounds U3O8 per year.

Silex said that subject to timely completion of the technology commercialisation program, prevailing market conditions and regulatory approvals, construction of the Paducah plant could take place in the early 2020s.
In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, NASAs Spitzer and Swift space telescopes joined forces to observe a microlensing event, when a distant star brightens due to the gravitational field of at least one foreground cosmic object. This technique is useful for finding low-mass bodies orbiting stars, such as planets. In this case, the observations revealed a brown dwarf.

Brown dwarfs are thought to be the missing link between planets and stars, with masses up to 80 times that of Jupiter. But their centers are not hot or dense enough to generate energy through nuclear fusion the way stars do. Curiously, scientists have found that, for stars roughly the mass of our sun, less than 1 percent have a brown dwarf orbiting within 3 AU (1 AU is the distance between Earth and the sun). This phenomenon is called the brown dwarf desert.

The newly discovered brown dwarf, which orbits a host star, may inhabit this desert. Spitzer and Swift observed the microlensing event after being tipped off by ground-based microlensing surveys, including the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). The discovery of this brown dwarf, with the unwieldy name OGLE-2015-BLG-1319, marks the first time two space telescopes have collaborated to observe a microlensing event.

The Astrophysical Journal  The First Simultaneous Microlensing observations by two space telescopes: Spitzer and Swift Reveal a Brown Dwarf ina Even Ogle-2015-BLG-1319

Arxiv  The First Simultaneous Microlensing observations by two space telescopes: Spitzer and Swift Reveal a Brown Dwarf ina Even Ogle-2015-BLG-1319

We want to understand how brown dwarfs form around stars, and why there is a gap in where they are found relative to their host stars, said Yossi Shvartzvald, a NASA postdoctoral fellow based at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and lead author of a study published in the Astrophysical Journal. Its possible that the desert is not as dry as we think.

What is microlensing?

In a microlensing event, a background source star serves as a flashlight for the observer. When a massive object passes in front of the background star along the line of sight, the background star brightens because the foreground object deflects and focuses the light from the background source star. Depending on the mass and alignment of the intervening object, the background star can briefly appear thousands of times brighter.

One way to understand better the properties of the lensing system is to observe the microlensing event from more than one vantage point. By having multiple telescopes record the brightening of the background star, scientists can take advantage of parallax, the apparent difference in position of an object as seen from two points in space. When you hold your thumb in front of your nose and close your left eye, then open it and close your right eye, your thumb seems to move in space  but it stays put with two eyes open. In the context of microlensing, observing the same event from two or more widely separated locations will result in different magnification patterns.

Anytime you have multiple observing locations, such as Earth and one, or in this case, two space telescopes, its like having multiple eyes to see how far away something is, Shvartzvald said. From models for how microlensing works, we can then use this to calculate the relationship between the mass of the object and its distance.

The new study

Spitzer observed the binary system containing the brown dwarf in July 2015, during the last two weeks of the space telescopes microlensing campaign for that year.

While Spitzer is over 1 AU away from Earth in an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun, Swift is in a low Earth orbit encircling our planet. Swift also saw the binary system in late June 2015 through microlensing, representing the first time this telescope had observed a microlensing event. But Swift is not far enough away from ground-based telescopes to get a significantly different view of this particular event, so no parallax was measured between the two. This gives scientists insights into the limits of the telescopes capabilities for certain types of objects and distances.

Our simulations suggest that Swift could measure this parallax for nearby, less massive objects, including free-floating planets, which do not orbit stars, Shvartzvald said.

By combining data from these space-based and ground-based telescopes, researchers determined that the newly discovered brown dwarf is between 30 and 65 Jupiter masses. They also found that the brown dwarf orbits a K dwarf, a type of star that tends to have about half the mass of the sun. Researchers found two possible distances between the brown dwarf and its host star, based on available data: 0.25 AU and 45 AU. The 0.25 AU distance would put this system in the brown dwarf desert.

In the future, we hope to have more observations of microlensing events from multiple viewing perspectives, allowing us to probe further the characteristics of brown dwarfs and planetary systems, said Geoffrey Bryden, JPL scientist and co-author of the study.

Abstract

Simultaneous observations of microlensing events from multiple locations allow for the breaking of degeneracies between the physical properties of the lensing system, specifically by exploring different regions of the lens plane and by directly measuring the microlens parallax. We report the discovery of a 3065M J brown dwarf orbiting a K dwarf in the microlensing event OGLE-2015-BLG-1319. The system is located at a distance of ~5 kpc toward the Galactic Bulge. The event was observed by several ground-based groups as well as by Spitzer and Swift, allowing a measurement of the physical properties. However, the event is still subject to an eight-fold degeneracy, in particular the well-known close-wide degeneracy, and thus the projected separation between the two lens components is either ~0.25 au or ~45 au. This is the first microlensing event observed by Swift, with the UVOT camera. We study the region of microlensing parameter space to which Swift is sensitive, finding that though Swift could not measure the microlens parallax with respect to ground-based observations for this event, it can be important for other events. Specifically, it is important for detecting nearby brown dwarfs and free-floating planets in high magnification events.

SOURCES- JPL, Arxiv,
The Debye effect could be used hunt submarines using the magnetic signatures of their wakes. Seawater is salty, full of ions of sodium and chlorine. Because those ions have different masses, any nudgesuch as a passing submarinemoves some farther than others. Each ion carries an electric charge, and the movement of those charges produces a magnetic field.

Currently submarines rely on stealth to do their jobs, whether that is sinking enemy ships or hiding nuclear-tipped missiles beneath the ocean. The traditional way of hunting them is with sonar. Modern sonar is extremely sensitive. But modern submarines are very quiet, and neither side has gained a definitive upper hand.

There are other options. Submarine-spotting aircraft carry magnetic anomaly detectors (MAD) which pick up disturbances in the Earths magnetic field caused by a submarines metal hull. Those disturbances are tiny, which means MAD is only useful at ranges of a few hundred meters.

Cortana Corporation and the US navy will not discuss exactly what they are up to. But it is likely that the technique can only detect certain submarine movements in some situations. Submarines produce many different types of wake. As well as the familiar V-shaped wake they leave underwater disturbances known as internal waves, flat swirls called pancake eddies and miniature vortices which spin off from fins and control surfaces. These all depend not only on speed and depth but also on the submarines hydrodynamics (the underwater version of aerodynamics).

Work done in Russia, whose navy has long been interested in alternatives to sonar, suggests the Debye effect can be turned into something quite potent. In 1990, two contributors to the Soviet military magazine Naval Collection wrote that as a consequence of the great extent of the wake, it is easier to detect this anomaly than the magnetic anomaly due to the metallic hull of the submarine. That suggests that a well-tuned Debye detector might be able to pick up a trail from several kilometers back and follow it to find the submarine. Russias claims in this area have long been regarded in the West as exaggerated. The new American interest suggests they might not have been.

Things are likely to get easier, too: a new generation of high-tech magnetic sensors based on machines called SQUIDssuperconducting quantum interference devicesshould be more sensitive than existing ones

Aquilinefocus blog reviewed alternative methods of submarine detection back in 2010. This included the debye effect and other Russian methods.

Falkenhagen Effect. This is the increase in conductivity of an electrolyte solution, such as an ocean, when the applied voltage has a very high frequency is known as Debye-Falkenhagen effect

SOURCES- Economist, wikipedia, aquilinefocus
Resident doctors attached to the Federal Medical Centre, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State last week protested over unpaid four months salaries owed ...

Resident doctors attached to the Federal Medical Centre, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State last week protested over unpaid four months salaries owed them by the Federal Government, threatening to withdraw medical services to patients on November 15.The protesting doctors, under the Association of Resident Doctors said though they have met the management of the Federal Medical Centre over the issue, the responses were not encouraging.The aggrieved resident doctors led by their Chairman, Dr. Nonso Okoye, and armed with placards some of which reads Our Families are hungry, FG pay our salaries and we are hungry, MMM is becoming an option, called on Nigerians to prevail on the Federal Government to pay up salaries owed them.The protesting doctors in Bayelsa recently. According to the protesters, they were paid 52 per cent salary from February to May, 2016 and owed September and October.We want the Federal Government to pay us our monies. We have not withdrawn services. All we are saying is for the government to pay us for work done.Nigerians should prevail on the Federal Government to pay us. As much as we dont want to withdraw our services, we have resolved to withdraw the services by 15th of November if nothing is done. We have met with the management but all they did was pay us a month salary.They told us that the budget available cannot pay salary, the protesters said. Contacted, the Chief Medical Director of the Federal Medical Centre (FMC), Dennis Alagoa said the blame is not from the management, but added with Tuesday statement by the President, we are assured that the issue will be resolved soon.On the alleged threat by the resident doctors to down tools, he said the issue of strike will not make a difference as the matter is on the table of the Federal Government.
A legal luminary, Mr Kayode Ajulo, has cautioned Nigerian Nobel Literature Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, against carrying his threat to ...

A legal luminary, Mr Kayode Ajulo, has cautioned Nigerian Nobel Literature Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, against carrying his threat to destroy his American Green Card in protest of Donald Trumps victory at the U.S. Presidential election.Ajulo gave the advice in an interview on Thursday in Abuja. Soyinka issued the threat to destroy his American Citizens Card before voting begun in the keenly contested election between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Most people around the World, including some huge population of Americans, had wished for the Democratic Partys candidate to win the race to the White House.The election of the Republic candidate as the U.S. President-elect had sent some waves of shock to most countries. Reacting to the threat, Ajulo warned Soyinka that he risked a jail term of three to seven years, if he (Soyinka) cut his green card. I have no problem with Kogi; he is an opinion moulder, an elder statesman and nation builder, who should know the implication of such act. Under the American law losing or having your U.S. green card destroyed can be a serious problem, he said.He said legally such is tagged as wishful destruction of governments property. Ajulo said the truth is that Soyinka is far better and far bigger than that because such act is provocative and unacceptable. He stressed that the literary icon is free to leave the country but does not have to tear the card; instead he should return the card as required by the law.Ajulo said the 82-year-old author, who is currently a resident scholar at New York Universitys Institute of African American Affairs, should know better. He said it has a lot of implications for Nigerians. Ajulo said green cards or passports are valuable documents and should be looked after it with care. He said mishandling of passport could stop you from travelling not to talk of destroying green card. Ajulo described Soyinka as a good ambassador who cares not just about Nigeria but the world at large, advising him to keep to it. He said Trumps victory had brought an already teetering world closer to the precipice.Trumps wall is already under construction. Walls are built in the mind, and Trump has erected walls, not only across the mental landscape of America, but across the global landscape, said the lawyer. Soyinka pledged to keep a promise he had given a few days before the Nov. 8 election, when he told students at Oxford University that I will cut my green card myself and start packing up if Trump won the polls.The literary icon also vowed to leave the United States by Jan. 20, 2017, the day president-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated. The green card is the U.S. permanent residence permit.
Aide to former President Goodluck Jonathan, Reno Omoki has shared a photo on what African should be afraid of and not US presidential elec...

This is what we as Africans should be concerned about, not complaining about the result of a free and fair election! pic.twitter.com/RG9MeKo4Tn November 10, 2016

Aide to former President Goodluck Jonathan, Reno Omoki has shared a photo on what African should be afraid of and not US presidential election result.Omokri on his social platform said: "Even those without democracy in their own nations are protesting Trump's Win. You came to the United States voluntarily. If you don't like it, leave the United States voluntarily. This is what we as Africans should be concerned about, not complaining about the result of a free and fair election!"
President Muhammadu Buhari and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, on Thursday disappointed a mammoth crowd who thronged the Democracy Park in Akur...

President Muhammadu Buhari and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, on Thursday disappointed a mammoth crowd who thronged the Democracy Park in Akure for the flag off of the 2016 governorship campaign of the All Progressives Congress, APC.The event, which effectively kicked off at about 11 a.m., was however attended by some APC governors, federal ministers, and top echelons of the party.Officials of the campaign kept informing the crowd at the earlier part of the event that the president and his deputy were on their way; but as time went on, it was soon clear that they would not be coming.The publicity secretary of the party in Ondo State, Abayomi Adesanya, said the president and his deputy encountered an emergency situation that they needed to attend to on Thursday.The President and the Vice President had an emergency state matter they had to attend to and so could not turn up, he said.Investigations revealed that the Ondo event was never on Mr. Buharis schedule.Mr. Adesanya, however, said President Buhari would be in Ondo State for the grand finale of the campaign, scheduled tentatively for November 19.Messrs. Buhari and Osinbajo were not the only obvious absentees from the rally the party hopes to use to jumpstart its troubled campaign.A national leader of the APC, Bola Tinubu, and top party leaders close to him, also boycotted the event. Mr. Tinubus allies who were absent include the current Lagos State Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, and the Osun State Governor, Rauf Aregbesola. Vice President Osinbajo is also an ally of Mr. Tinubu and was reportedly nominated for his position by the former Lagos governor under whom he served as justice commissioner.
Biola Simon Photo credit: PUNCH A woman, Biola Simon, has been arrested by the police in Lagos State for allegedly...

Biola Simon Photo credit: PUNCH

A woman, Biola Simon, has been arrested by the police in Lagos State for allegedly defrauding bank customers after giving them fake prophecies in the Dopemu area.Our correspondent learnt that Simon, who came from Ibadan, Oyo State, was arrested on Thursday by the Dopemu Police Division, after one of her victims reported her to the police.While the suspect was arrested, it was learnt that other suspected accomplices fled.Our correspondent gathered that a sum of N150,000, which the woman had allegedly swindled out from her victim, was recovered by the policemen after the arrest.A police source at the Dopemu division said Simon belonged to a four-member syndicate that specialised in defrauding unsuspecting bank customers in the area through fake prophecies.He said, In her statement, she confessed that the syndicates mode of operation was to lurk around bank premises, while her role was to accost a bank customer suspected to be with money.The suspect explained that she would pretend that she was new in Lagos and asked for direction from the victim. Simon would subsequently make shocking spiritual revelations about her victim, after which she would advise that a special prayer must be offered for the victim.The next move was to take the victim to a nearby place where the three other accomplices were waiting and they would replace the money withdrawn by the victim with disposable papers, covered with a few naira notes.A man who the suspect tried to swindle on Thursday of N150,000 raised the alarm, and a police patrol team in the area apprehended Simon.A witness, Rafiu Jimoh, said the policemen had returned the money to the victim.He said, The woman dressed responsibly, but she usually begged targeted customers coming out of the bank to direct her to an address. She is believed to use magical powers, as she will thereafter start giving revelations about her victim, luring the person to go for prayers with her.While the purported prayer is going on by the syndicate, the contents of the victims bag or purse will be replaced with papers covered with a few real notes. They will thereafter disappear with the money.The woman was arrested on Thursday by a police patrol team, but the three others escaped in a car. The stolen N150,000 was recovered and returned to the victim.The Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer, SP Dolapo Badmos, confirmed Simons arrest.The state Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni, has directed that the suspect be charged to court, she added.
President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday met for the third time within one week with the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, at the Presidentia...

President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday met for the third time within one week with the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.They met first last week Friday while the second meeting was on Wednesday after the President met with members of the South East Caucus in the Senate led by the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, and Eyinnaya Abaribe.The third meeting on Friday was held after the Jumaat prayer in the Presidents office.Just like Wednesdays meeting, this Fridays meeting was termed private as State House correspondents were not allowed to cover the meeting.The Senate had recently rejected Buharis approval request for $29.9 billion loan.It also described the 2017 to 2019 Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) forwarded by President Buhari for approval as empty.The MTEF is yet to be approved by the Senate.The Senate President, at the end of last week Fridays meeting, had told State House correspondents that the issue of the $29.9 billion loan was work in progress.Bukola during the encounter also warned Nigerians not to politicise the issue of the loan request.
(Beijing)  China's Ministry of Agriculture said it summoned to the capital top agricultural officials from four regions, including Liaoning province, to discuss their failure to curb the illegal cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops.

The session followed a report by Greenpeace China in January that said GM corn was widely grown and distributed in Liaoning, a major grain supplier for China, Agriculture Ministry official Zhang Xianfa told Caixin on Thursday.

A Greenpeace China survey of five rural counties in Liaoning late last year found 93% of corn produced in the region was genetically modified, the international advocacy group said in January.

Commercial cultivation of GM crops other than cotton and papaya is not allowed under Chinese law, according to Li Yifang, head of the food and agriculture campaign for Greenpeace. However, the level of contamination from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the production, supply and distribution is high in the country, he added.

GM crops, some of which are resistant to weeds and pests, are promoted, particularly by some small seed companies in China, to meet demand from farmers who want the high yields and economic benefits the GMOs bring, according to some industry analysts.

A lack of oversight of the seed market in China by authorities has also led to a growth in the GMO black market, according to Greenpeace.

Provincial agricultural authorities in Liaoning had said they looked into the accusations by Greenpeace and taken steps to clamp down on the problem.

However, the authority did not provide details over how it dealt with the problem, which prompted the Agriculture Ministry to call a meeting, according to Zhang, a ministry deputy division head overseeing GMO security and intellectual property rights. He did not say when the session took place.

Such sessions often involve a show of a ministry's disapproval of how local officials are handling an issue, followed by an order to fix the problem by a certain time.

Agricultural authorities said that elsewhere, they have uncovered 933 acres of GM corn in violation of government regulations in Fuhai county in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, and in Jingbian county, Shaanxi province, also in the northwest.

Crop farmers in Xinjiang and Gansui province in the northwest were ordered to destroy 167 acres of GM corn last year, according to the agricultural ministry.

But Zhang of the ministry said that illegal cultivation of GM crops in China remains more sporadic than widespread.

Contact reporter Li Rongde (rongdeli@caixin.com); editor Ken Howe (kennethhowe@caixin.com)
(Beijing)  Taikang Life Insurance Co., China's fifth-largest insurer by sales, said it will buy a sixth of NorthStar Realty Finance Corp.'s health care assets for $1 billion.

New York-listed NorthStar Realty, a U.S. investment trust, owns over 460 health care properties, including 200 eldercare homes in the U.S. and Britain. The properties are valued at $6.1 billion, according to the company's latest financial report.

The sale comes as NorthStar Realty prepares for a three-way merger with NorthStar Asset Management LLC and private equity firm Colony Capital Inc.

The assets will be managed by a joint venture between Taikang and NorthStar Realty, NorthStar Realty CEO Jonathan Langer said during an earnings call on Tuesday. NorthStar expects to complete the deal in the first quarter of 2017 subject to certain regulatory and financing approvals.

Taikang and other Chinese insurers have been on a global shopping spree in recent years as returns from domestic investments dwindle.

The NorthStar Realty deal is Taikang's largest investment to date for health care assets, a Taikang spokesperson said.

In July, Taikang said it had bought a 13.5% stake in Sotheby's, making Taikang the biggest shareholder of the auction house. Last year, the company bought the iconic Milton Gate building in downtown London for 198 million pounds ($246 million) with Gaw Capital Partners. A consortium led by China Life, the country's largest life-insurance company, invested $2 billion in a hotel portfolio owned by Starwood Capital Group in October.

Contact reporter Poornima Weerasekara (poornima@caixin.com); editor Ken Howe (kennethhowe@caixin.com)
In this Oct. 4, 2012 file photo, large sections of pipe are shown in Sumner, Texas. If completed, the Keystone XL pipeline would carry roughly 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File)
2 indicted for murder of Hollygrove teen who took 15 days to die
New medical center for Louisiana veterans will be state of the art: Letter
The federal government plans to pour $125 million into the fight against a mysterious disease that has ravaged corals in Florida and much of the Caribbean, and now poses a dire threat to the treasured reefs off the Louisiana and Texas coasts.
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.
Centier, the largest privately held bank in Indiana, has launched a new veterans checking account to military personnel and veterans.

CEO Michael Schrage said the account is meant to honor those who serve, and provide banking amenities convenient to a military lifestyle, such as worldwide mobile banking and access to more than 53,000 free ATMs on the Allpoint network.

The account requires a $25 deposit to open, and a $100 minimum balance. It has no monthly service charge if the minimum balance is maintained, reduced overdraft fees, free phone transfer requests and a 25 percent discount on safe deposit boxes.

"As a 30-year military veteran, it is my pleasure to support this initiative in appreciation of my fellow veterans and active servicemen," stated Darrell Jaggers, a senior partner at the Merrillville-based bank who served in the Army. "Centier employs many guardsmen, reservists, and veterans among our associates and our extended family and we have made a corporate vow to continually recognize and support our country's service members and their families in peace, in crisis, and in war."

Centier will donate $50 to the American Red Cross Service to the Armed Forces for every veterans account opened through the end of the year.

"We are thrilled to partner with Centier Bank," said Duchess Adjei, Regional Communication Director for the American Red Cross. "Thanks to the generosity of funds that Centier Bank donates through its new Veterans Checking program, the Red Cross will continue to provide 24/7 global emergency communication services, along with military and veteran health care facilities across the country and around the world."

For more information, visit www.centier.com.
Duneland residents will have to find somewhere else to "eat good in the neighborhood."

Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar closed its Chesterton location.

The sit-down chain restaurant 791 Indian Boundary Road put a message on its voice mail saying it's now permanently closed. The message did not list a reason and referred customers to nearby Applebee's restaurants in Portage and Valparaiso.

The restaurant franchisee was not immediately available for contact.

The Chesterton Applebee's by the Jewel/Osco supermarket east of Ind. 49 has been on the Indian Boundary Road commercial corridor for more than a decade.

The Kansas City-based restaurant chain, known for American fare like burgers and steaks, has more than 2,000 restaurants across the world, including in Munster, Merrillville, Schererville, Portage and Valparaiso. All of them are independently operated as franchises.
Valparaiso Police Chief Mike Brickner and others from the department recently traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to receive the third accreditation from The Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.

The goal of the program is to improve the delivery of public safety services by maintaining standards covering a wide range of up-to-date initiatives, according to the organization.

The Valparaiso department has been accredited since 2010 and underwent a reassessment in August. The assessment team evaluated general orders, interviewed department members and reviewed documentation that supported all of the departments 489 policies.

This is a great accomplishment for our entire department, Brickner said.
GARY  A 62-year-old gas station convenience store worker was beaten Wednesday by several men who robbed the store of cash and cigarettes, police said.

Gary police were dispatched about 1:30 p.m. to the food store in the 1700 block of East Dunes Highway for a robbery.

The worker told police he prepared an order of nachos for a man and when he opened a door to the cashier area, the man and two accomplices pushed their way in and knocked him down, Lt. Dawn Westerfield said.

Two of the men kicked the worker, while the third took money and cigarettes. The three, who were accompanied by a woman, left before police arrived.

The worker refused medical treatment. Anyone with information is asked to call Detective Sgt. Jon Basaldua at (219) 881-1210. To remain anonymous, call (866) CRIME-GP.
HAMMOND  Gerald Beaman has served the government in various roles in the decades following his graduation from Hammond High School in 1970 and now the retired vice admiral is potentially eyeing another role within the new administration of President-elect Donald Trump.

Beaman, now president of the unmanned systems division for Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, said he has been asked to submit an application/resume and cover letter to Trumps transition team. He said he would rather not say who asked him to submit the application.

You know there are a couple of different areas where I think I might be able to contribute  Homeland Security, certainly within the Department of Defense  and you know, maybe a bit far-fetched, but to serve as director of the FBI, he said.

While he thinks such a position may be a long shot, Beaman has a knack for meeting his goals and exceeding expectations.

His friend, Stan Levin, remembers how Beaman used to talk about wanting to eventually become a fighter pilot when the two were classmates at Hammond High School more than 45 years ago.

He was a real focused guy even as a youngster, said Levin, whose family operated a car dealership next to the school.

Beaman not only realized his goal to be a Navy pilot, but during a long, distinguished military career reached the top ranks of the U.S. Navy as commander of the U.S. 3rd Fleet out of San Diego. He also garnered a chestful of medals and racked up more than 1,000 landings on aircraft carriers.

Two years after the 1986 movie Top Gun brought a surge of young men wanting to be fighter pilots into the military, Beaman was based at the Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN) as maintenance officer, operations officer, and executive officer.

Levin recently honored his friends career with a commemorative brick at the Community Veterans Memorial in Munster.

I think that all of Northwest Indiana should know about his accomplishments in the military, Levin said.

Beaman said he actually had a couple of goals when he was a young man in Hammond. One was to become a pilot that landed on aircraft carriers  just like the World War II aviators displayed in the movies.

The other goal was to become a special agent with the FBI. The son of former Hammond police officer Dwight Beaman, he achieved that goal in 1981 and served with the bureau until 1984 when he decided to return to military service.

Beaman said he thinks it would be premature to say how he would approach things if he were to obtain an appointment as director of the FBI or some other leadership role with Homeland Security.

I dont want to indict those who are there now, but I certainly think there are things that I would approach differently, he said. Ill just leave it at that.

As a special agent with the FBI, Beaman was involved in working reactive crimes including bank robberies and also spent about 14 months undercover. After three years, however, he was ready to return to the Navy.

As much as I liked it and enjoyed it and felt good when I would take a felon off the street and put them behind bars, I missed the camaraderie and flying, Beaman said of his decision to return to duty.

Beaman originally went into the military just as the Vietnam War was coming to a close. At the time, he said, the government was reducing funding and the number of people entering the military was down. He feels things got better for the military with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and the release of the movie Top Gun brought in a number of recruits who wanted to be Maverick and Goose, the two main characters from the movie.

Beamans role with the Navy Fighter Weapons School was just one of a number of leadership assignments for the Navy veteran. Other assignments included commander of Naval Network and Space Operations Command in Dahlgren, Virginia and director of operations of Naval Network Warfare Command. He assumed command of the U.S. 3rd Fleet, headquartered in San Diego, in April 2011 before retiring in August 2013.

The investigative knowledge that Beaman acquired in the FBI came into play when he headed up a Navy inquest looking into coarse, sexually charged skits aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. He interviewed more than 100 people in the course of the investigation. A March 9, 2011, story in the politically progressive magazine Mother Jones said Beamans report launched a broadside attack on the continuing remnants of a pervasive culture in Naval Aviation that mistakenly accepts that a certain, extreme level of coarse humor is acceptable in training warfighters.

Trump, of course, came under intense criticism of his own for a 2005 recording that caught him using coarse, offensive language regarding women. Beaman, however, does not think there will be a reversion of the military back to acceptance of the coarse behavior that he helped expose in his report.

I honestly believe thats not going to be an issue going forward, he said. I dont think theres any fear of reverting back to the old days.

He also said he was encouraged by Trumps remarks after the election about making sure the government took care of those who have served in the military.

Beaman, whose wife Yvonne is a 1970 graduate of George Rogers Clark High School in Hammond, still returns from time to time to Hammond and praised those living in the Region as hardworking salt of the earth people. He said he feels bad that he could not raise his own children in the area.

To this day I would not trade one day of my upbringing in the Midwest and Hammond in particular, Beaman said.
INDIANAPOLIS  Hoosier lawmakers are likely to wait and see what Republican President-elect Donald Trump and the new GOP Congress do next year on illegal immigration before deciding whether to pursue the limited state policy options.

An Indiana Senate study committee, led by state Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, ended its eight-month review of immigration issues Thursday without recommending any legislation for the General Assembly to consider adopting when it convenes in January.

Washington, D.C., may actually engage this issue once and for all, and if they do that it will make the problem less in the states and we wont have to be talking about this, Delph said.

Delph said hes confident Trump will build a wall on the Mexican border and declared that national security concerns justify Trumps plan to deport approximately 11.1 million immigrants living in the United States without legal permission.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised a lot of things to the American people, and I take him at his word that he will fulfill all of his promises, Delph said.

The study committees report estimates that the 100,000 or so illegal immigrants living in Indiana cost taxpayers about $130 million a year, primarily for childrens education and health care.

Though the committee also discovered that illegal immigrants pay some $60 million a year in sales and income taxes to the state, and many Hoosier businesses and agricultural operations rely on their labor.

State Sen. Frank Mrvan, D-Hammond, said those findings show that its wrong to demonize immigrants, most of whom he said are escaping violence in their homelands and only want a job where they can support their families.

The immigrants arent all rapists or thieves, Mrvan said, referring to an infamous Trump claim about illegal immigrants from Mexico. Theyre people just like our parents who came over and had to work real hard.

Mrvan said Senate Democrats next year will propose allowing non-citizen children who grew up in Indiana to pay in-state university tuition, as well as permit any Indiana resident to obtain a drivers license to reduce road dangers posed by untrained and uninsured motorists.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised a lot of things to the American people, and I take him at his word that he will fulfill all of his promises. state Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel
CROWN POINT  A Lake County councilman said he wants to decriminalize marijuana for medical use.

Councilman Jamal Washington, D-Merrillville, is sponsoring a proposed resolution that the County Council support the passage of a prescribed medical marijuana program statute by the State of Indiana.

The full County Council may consider passage of the resolution as early as its next regular meeting Tuesday.

This is long overdue, Washington said. There is a difference between legalizing and decriminalizing cannabis, an earth-grown substance. This is something that can help people in terms of a coma, glaucoma, Crohns disease, like I have. When it comes to health, it is important we give everyone the best available options.

He said two bills regarding the use of medical marijuana were studied by the General Assembly earlier this year, but neither was passed into law. Instead they were submitted to study committees for future consideration.

Council President Ted Bilski, D-Hobart, said he would be willing to support the resolution if there is solid evidence it will help those suffering from cancer pain.

This is one of those topics people are afraid to talk about, Washington said, because it could lead to negative press. I dont care about that.
PORTAGE  Mayor James Snyders $93,000 in legal fees will be turned over to an outside, independent attorney for review and investigation.

Utility Services Board Vice Chairman Mark Oprisko said this week he had hired John Hughes of Hoeppner Wagner & Evans in Valparaiso to review Snyders legal fees associated with a more than 2-year-old federal investigation. However, Oprisko said after spending an hour and a half with Hughes on Thursday, Hughes decided it would not be in his law firms best interest to take on the issue, Oprisko said.

Oprisko said he would move forward, seeking another attorney for the job.

Oprisko, also president of the City Council, said after last months controversy he spoke with City Council and Utility Services Board members and felt this is the right way to go. Snyder chairs the board.

Snyder, who has been under investigation by the FBI, had two checks cut by the utility department on Sept. 26, totaling more than $93,000 to pay his two attorneys representing him during the investigation. The checks initially were sent to the firms without board approval. The money was returned to the utility department after the firms said they couldnt collect payment from the utility department because it was not their client.

The request for reimbursement for the legal fees is legal under Indiana law, but only if a grand jury fails to indict the officer or employees and the acts investigated by the grand jury were within the scope of official duties of the officer or employee.

Snyders request for reimbursement would indicate the federal investigation is over.

Oprisko, who was on vacation and out of the country at the time, asked the matter be tabled upon further investigation.

Oprisko said he has no guarantee that the investigation is over and if the funds are reimbursed to Snyder and Snyder is indicted, the utility department will have lost the money.

He also said hes uncertain if the entire investigation has to do with Snyders role as board chairman. The investigation began over Snyder using a utility department credit card to take a trip to Austria that he said was for economic development. However, it spread beyond to include the street department and purchasing of garbage trucks.

Snyder said before Wednesdays Utility Board meeting that he had no intention of submitting the claims to the board a second time until the review was completed. Even then, he added, he may not submit the claims.

This is the right, the fair thing to do, said Oprisko about reviewing the claims. I till have an obligation to anyone sitting on this board to find out what is correct and legal.
CHICAGO  A Chicago Catholic high school has canceled classes after a protest was announced targeting the institution for alleged racial slurs following demonstrations over a police-involved shooting of a black man.

Marist High School Principal Larry Tucker says he canceled Friday classes after Black Lives Matter activists announced plans to gather at the school to denounce the alleged racist response of Mount Greenwood residents to the death of Joshua Beal of Indianapolis. The demonstration was canceled over safety concerns and protesters plan to meet Friday with city officials and Tucker.

The 25-year-old Beal was shot to death after he pointed a gun at an off-duty police officer and others during a Saturday traffic dispute in the largely white Mount Greenwood neighborhood.

Since Beal's shooting, Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter supporters have verbally clashed during protests.
HOBART The boys and girls and one of their biggest fans got a night out Thursday at Avalon Manor, thanks to the Steak and Burger Soiree.

The evening was the eighth of its kind, all to raise money for a good cause, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Northwest Indiana. The 2016 fundraiser was something a little different, said development director Megan Henning.

Last year was a regular sit-down dinner. This years was a buffet, complete with chafing dishes filled with mini-sliders, steak and chicken shish kabobs.

The group also honored its volunteer of the year, Jennifer Betz, of Lake Station, also a guest speaker, whose selection for the volunteer honor was a complete surprise.

Betz, said Henning, is a hardworking volunteer who brings something near and dear to her heart into the mix: her special needs daughter, Cathryn.

Betz said Henning, volunteers three days a week (at the Lake Station Boys & Girls Club), works full time and is raising her daughter.

Chairman Jeffrey Strack, who introduced Betz, said it was a pleasure to give back to someone who gives so much.

The six clubs under the groups umbrella are in Cedar Lake, East Chicago, Gary, Lake Station, Merrillville and Hammond. An art exhibit featuring chalk and crayon drawings as well as paintings from various club locations was displayed in the back of the room.

Then there were the team program stations. Programs offered by Boys & Girls Club, meant to foster leadership and other skills, were represented in two sets of tables that stretched the length of the room.

Attendees got to take passbooks, actually little paper folders on which they wrote their contact information, and take it from table to table, getting it stamped by the young program members who manned each table.

Once the passbooks were filled, by a stamp representing each program, they could be turned in for a drawing held at near the end of the night. Prizes included gift cards from Carrabas, Tapas Cafe, Tandoor, Pepinos Italian and others.

The nights sponsors also included United Way, Strack & Van Til, Carmax, Pirates4Kids, the John W. Anderson Foundation, Alberts, Arcelor Mittal, Southface and Legacy Foundation.
A 19-year-old man was arrested Monday on allegations he claimed to be a police officer during a dispute over a frappe coffee at a McDonalds in Merrillville.

DaLone Fields was charged Wednesday in Lake Criminal Court with impersonation of a public servant, a felony, and disorderly conduct.

Police were dispatched Monday evening to the McDonalds at 6100 Mississippi St. in Merrillville after receiving reports of a disturbance, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Fields told police at the scene an employee at the restaurant twice threw food at him after he asked her to make his chocolate-chip frappe again, the affidavit states.

Officers asked Fields, who wore a silver-and-gold badge around his neck that identified him as a private security officer, if he was a police officer, according to the affidavit. Fields said no, but he was a minister and intern with Lake County Homicide Division, the affidavit states.

Employees of the McDonalds told police a different story than Fields.

The employees said Fields became enraged when he received a wrong order at the drive-thru window, so he entered the restaurant and threw his coffee at an employee, the affidavit states.

When the employees threatened to call police, Fields allegedly flashed his security badge and yelled I am the police, b******!, according to the affidavit.

The employees provided police a cellphone recording of the exchange, the affidavit states.

Fields bond is set at $10,000, according to court records.

An initial court appearance has not yet been scheduled.
EAST CHICAGO  Some residents scheduled to leave the lead- and arsenic-contaminated West Calumet housing project over the weekend are reporting difficulty in getting Housing Authority staff to cut checks for relocation assistance.

Latasha Marshall had keys in hand for a new apartment back on Oct. 28  but she said she is still waiting on the $1,700 owed by ECHA to secure a moving truck and leave what she calls a toxic environment.

Ive been here long enough and Im ready to go, Marshall, a mother of four, said Thursday. Marshall said she turned in her relocation paperwork a couple of weeks ago to move to Markham, Illinois.

Kate Walz, director of housing justice with the Chicago-based Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, said her team appealed to ECHA on Monday to issue checks on or ahead of the Veterans Day holiday.

"I repeatedly asked if there is a check being issued (Friday) ... because we have families holding keys, ready to move, and this is their only obstacle," Walz said.

"They've known about this since the beginning of the week. They had an entire week to resolve this, especially when they had families personally coming in and begging them for a check so they could move," Walz said.

Jewel Harris Jr., attorney for the ECHA, said checks cannot be issued today because of Veterans Day. But once the problem was brought to his attention, staff agreed to write out checks twice per week, instead of once per week.

Residents should communicate often with staff, coordinate move-out dates early, and ensure all paperwork is filled out properly to avoid delay in payment, Harris Jr. said.

The ECHA reached a civil rights settlement with the Shriver Center on Nov. 2 The fair housing organization first filed a discrimination complaint on Aug. 29, alleging ECHA was noncompliant with federal law in relocating more than 1,000 residents.

Under the agreement, residents were given rent abatement and more time to move. Households with elevated blood lead levels qualify for additional financial assistance, including help when moving beyond a 50-mile radius.

Shantell Allen said her family is moving to Las Vegas, and believes she qualifies for more assistance because her children have had high blood lead levels. She was approved for $1,900 before the agreement, but said a U-Haul to Las Vegas costs about $3,100.

Allens youngest of five children tested at 33 micrograms per deciliter  or more than six times the Centers or Disease Controls threshold for action  in February 2015.

She turned her paperwork in Monday but said staff cant cut her a check today. She has already pulled her children out of school and turned on utilities at the new place, she said.

"They are working at their own pace," Allen said. "I did everything I was supposed to do. That's the only thing I'm waiting on."
VALPARAISO  Retired Air Force Col. Tom Cedel said he likes the word service when describing the jobs of military veterans.

The guest speaker Thursday at the annual Veterans Day program at Valparaiso University spoke forcefully about his career of service in the military and reminded the audience to contribute their own brand of service in the community.

Cedel, a distinguished professor of leadership at VU, was a fighter pilot in F-4, A-7, and F-16 aircraft in a career that took him to Pakistan, Japan, Korea, Europe and the Middle East. His last assignment before retirement was in the Pentagon working for the Defense secretary on strategy and requirements issues.

Cedel said Armistice Day first commemorated the armistice ending hostilities on the Western Front of World War I. President Dwight Eisenhower changed the name to Veterans Day, Cedel said, to honor all members of the military who served the country.

Cedel urged the audience to remember veterans, noting that nowadays, only a small fraction of our population answers that call, so it might be easy for people to forget all those who have come before and served.

He asked the audience to appreciate the hardship of military life, which includes countless relocations, the reality of combat, personal and family sacrifice and the uncertainty that comes along with the call.

Cedel recalled his own career as the most incredible thing Ive ever done, even though at times it was equal parts frustration and reward.

I learned more about leadership in the military than any book or course could ever teach me, Cedel said to an audience of about 50 people gathered at the Center for the Arts.

Cedel said that although those in the military dont look to fight, they are trained and prepared to fight if necessary.

We will fight hard, we will fight well, and we will fight to win, said Cedel. There is no second place in combat.

He encouraged VU students to get to know veterans in the community and to pursue their own dreams with a mind for service.

It is important for you to remember we live in community and we are all called to service in that community, Cedel said. Whatever you do, do it in the context of service to community.

As the VU Chamber Concert Band played Armed Forces on Parade, veterans in the audience stood when they heard the song of their branch of service.

Their duty, honor and lives are precious gifts, said Chaplain David McKee at the programs close. Today we stand to remember the most honorable among us. Today is for remembering our veterans  dont forget them.
HAMMOND  When Michael Vela started losing patches hair after serving in the first Gulf War, his doctor said the likely culprit was post-traumatic stress disorder.

Vela had no idea what that was.

Twenty years later, the condition is more well-known, though Vela, a former paratrooper in the Army, says not well enough. Even now, people he knows tell him he should just get over his extreme anxiety and depression.

They said you just jumped out of a plane. Yeah, to enemy fire, he said. Its not like throwing a GI Joe off a roof, tied to a string.

I saw a lot of burned up bodies, charred bodies, he added. It was unimaginable.

Even worse were the things he witnessed back at his military base in North Carolina: fellow soldiers dying in training accidents and suicides, including one who shot and killed himself playing Russian roulette.

Vela, of Hammond, is now using his experiences, as well as the subject hes studying at Purdue University Northwest, to help other people understand what former soldiers like him are going through. A public relations student, Vela has been sending out news releases and reaching out to various community organizations to raise awareness about PTSD.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created millions of new veterans, many with heavy psychological scars. Most of those men and women are now back home and in need of mental health care the Department of Veterans Affairs is often unable meet the demand for. An estimated 20 veterans commit suicide every day.

Vela says a good place to start is to teach civilians what those veterans are dealing with. Imagine having to take another life. Imagine killing innocent people by mistake. Imagine watching your friends die in front of your eyes.

Then have some empathy if you encounter a veteran with a short temper or who has a public panic attack or a nervous tic.

Vela, 46, figures he went on more than 100 combat missions during his year and a half in the Middle East. When he returned home, he noticed the hair loss, then the mood swings. He got in fights, acted impulsively, drank a lot.

Hes been married twice yet never shared his bed with either wife. He sleeps on the couch because of his near nightly nightmares.

He admits that its often a chore to wake up in the morning, and he sometimes watches the clock hoping the day will just hurry up and end already.

He did manual labor for a time before deciding to try his hand at college. He chose to major in public relations because it would give him an outlet for sharing what veterans with his condition go through on a daily basis.

Its been a challenge. Hes almost dropped out over frustrations that hes not performing well enough, only to have professors tell him otherwise. Hes been asked questions only to start shaking and freeze up. But he endured, in part, because, post-military service, he has a new mission.

He wants to not only educate the public how to deal with loved ones who have PTSD but encourage veterans with the condition to get help. He hopes to save lives, like that of a friend from Hammond, who shot himself through the heart four years ago, Vela believes, because of undiagnosed PTSD.

I dont feel like I fit into the world. So I figured I should fit into a world I know best, and thats PTSD, he said. I just want to do something to help veterans.
VALPARAISO  My being was hurt from having to engage in combat. Those scars are in your conscience and morality and faith and understanding of humanity.

Kevin Houcek was talking about the moral injuries of war, which are different from the physical or even psychological damage of battle. They are the ethical and spiritual dilemmas veterans often have to process after returning from conflict.

Houcek, 35, served in the Army during the beginning of the Iraq War.

Back then, there was confusion about who was a combatant and who wasnt, said Houcek, who now works in veterans outreach. You look back at it a decade later: A lot of people got killed by mistake.

Houcek, of Steger, is one of the regular members of a veterans moral injury support group that has been meeting weekly the past seven months in Valparaiso.

While the post-traumatic stress disorder faced by veterans gets a lot of attention, less discussed is the moral and spiritual suffering many of them endure. Killing, for instance, might go against their faiths; others may have taken the lives of female or child enemy combatants. The veterans might feel shame for leaving their comrades behind when their deployments ended, or survivors guilt for having made it out alive.

These groups give name and an outlet for what they are feeling, said Camille Cooke, a community outreach representative for the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University. Cooke approached Bill Foy, a Marine veteran and Lutheran pastor in Valparaiso, about starting a meeting in Northwest Indiana. These support groups provide community, healing and an opportunity for a sense of absolution. They are veteran-led; for other veterans, its a sacred space.

On Wednesday, the group shared a dinner of bratwursts and Italian beef and talked not just about their war experiences but the presidential election, hunting and superhero movies. They spent much of the time joking with one another, the camaraderie like they were back in the military.

Youre burning em, Army veteran Rob Wentz teased Foy as he grilled the sausages.

Im not burning them. Im going to burn you, Foy responded, metal spatula in hand.

At other times, the conversation turned serious.

We werent even soldiers yet  we had a guy blow his brains out in basic training, said John Ferguson, a 27-year-old utility laborer from Westville and National Guard member.

When I landed in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive started 12 days later, said Dan Orlich, 70, of Portage. I was there about four weeks and my best friend in the Marine Corps died in a helicopter crash.

One kid I knew drove a Humvee off a cliff and died, said Foy, 55, who served during the buildup to the Gulf War. Wentz, 34, a volunteer fireman from Lakes of the Four Seasons, discussed being the victim of friendly fire in Iraq.

Group members also talked about being prescribed numerous psychiatric medications and how the drugs didnt get at the root of the problem. While PTSD is a clinical diagnosis, one that can get a veteran disability benefits, moral injury is something different altogether.

Said Houcek: Its less, Im hyper-vigilant and angry and cant sleep. Its more, That sucked. Why did I have to do that? How do I get my life back?
Protests erupted outside of Trump Tower for a second night Thursday, although the crowd was smaller than the night before and the NYPD confirming that only one person was placed under arrest. Lori Chung filed the following report.

Outside Trump Tower, demonstrators sent a message they hope the president elect hears loud and clear.

"We reject the president-elect," they chanted.

"He's hateful and he's a bigot, and he's not going to be my president," said one demonstrator.

Harsh words for Donald Trump from the hundreds lining Fifth Avenue outside his residence.

"The man that has given the alt-right and racial politics a voice in the United States of America lives right in that tower," said one demonstrator.

The protesters rejected his Election Day success and his rhetoric.

"All the Latinos work so hard for this country and we are called rapists," said one demonstrator. "It's such an insult."

"There's been plenty of times when elections didn't turn out the way that you wanted them, you know, Republican, Democrat, it swings, and I'm OK with that. But this is like a different level."

There were also messages of outrage and anger at the election results in Union Square and Washington Square Park.

"I don't want us to have a president that tells people that to grab them by the p word," said one demonstrator.

The billionaire businessman shared his thoughts on the post-election unrest in a tweet Thursday night and again Friday morning.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

"The media's not putting us up to anything," one demonstrator said. "Everybody's, we're terrified."

Some watching the protests unfold throughout the city urge participants to keep an open mind.

"I'm willing to give Trump a chance," said one New Yorker. "I think we should heal the wounds. This country's very divided. I think we should come together."

Some protestors used these demonstrations as an opportunity to raise support for a petition to the Electoral College hoping to convince electors to swing their support to Hillary Clinton, because she leads in the popular vote.
Shes a good girl, Betsy Ebeling, Hillary Clintons best friend since childhood, recently told me of Mrs. Clinton, whom she met in the sixth grade. She works hard, she is loyal, she listens.

I had met Ms. Ebeling in Chicago, along with a dozen more of Mrs. Clintons friends, whom I joined to watch the final presidential debate. At the time, I didnt know what to make of the remark. Mrs. Clinton was certainly not a girl  and what makes a good girl anyway?

And yet, watching her concession speech on Wednesday morning, I suddenly understood.

Mrs. Clinton did what good girls  women  have to: She played by the rules.

She put her head down and worked hard, devoted her life to service, waited her turn, and never got angry (or at least never showed it). She made mistakes along the way, certainly  but she had the resume, the qualifications, the stamina, and she didnt lash out when those things were questioned. Mrs. Clinton took the high road, again and again: deflecting interruption after interruption, maintaining her momentum in the face of a man hovering over her, not responding when he called her nasty in front of millions of viewers.
Around the country women weep, wondering how the glass ceiling still stands. But now is not the time to bury our faces in our hands. For white women in particular, now is the time to look in the mirror.

Ninety-four percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton. Sixty-eight percent of Latina women did so. But 53 percent of the white female voters in this country voted for Donald Trump.

As a young white woman, I realize that white women did not do the work needed to keep Mr. Trump, and his boasts about sexual harassment, from the White House. They did not rise to the uncomfortable challenge of convincing other white women to support not just their own interests, but those of women and men of color, L.G.B.T. Americans, immigrants and people in poverty.

The problem may lie in myopia: On Tuesday, women honored suffragists by placing their I voted stickers on Susan B. Anthonys tombstone. How many remembered that the suffrage movement put white women first, and failed to fight for women of color?
A strip of masking tape on the surface of a wooden barrel says mackerel. Here lies the realm of controlled rot. Emde pops a lid, yielding blasts of aroma and images of furry mold that can lead a squeamish visitor to wince and gag. I dont think its disgusting, says Emde, unfazed as she stirs her hand around the frothy murk. Its nature.

The story of Jori Jayne Emde  her own evolution into someone who has joyfully mastered the task of wresting deliciousness from turnip stems, strawberry tops and hazelnut shells  comes with unexpected twists. She was born 36 years ago in Houston, and grew up mostly in Austin (aside from a stretch of time at a boarding school in Idaho) in an environment where the scent of stray barrels of sardine guts might have spurred a panicked call to the local sanitation department. She and her three sisters did not grow up with haute cuisine. A lot of our food came out of boxes from Sams Club, she says.

Emde, though, is part of the first generation spellbound by a media-driven culinary wave: the Food Network was ascendant. As a teen, she says, I was obsessed with watching Molto Mario and Two Fat Ladies. Twenty years earlier, a young, creatively restless woman who wanted to find the fastest highway out of Texas might have formed a punk band or enrolled in film school. For Emde, as for thousands of her contemporaries, cooking appeared to be where the action was. I was not going to stay home and get pregnant at 22 like my sisters did, she says. I was always the family outcast.

By 2000, she had signed up for two years of culinary school. At the time, her mother handed her a cookbook from the French Laundry, the revered Northern California restaurant run by Thomas Keller. (Although she would only realize it later, Emdes future husband appeared in its pages in a group shot of Kellers team of cooks; Pelaccio occupied, for a time, the intensely challenging role of saucier.) Emde whisked through basic training in Austin, headed straight for an internship in New York and immediately climbed aboard the pirate ship she seemed to long for: Lupa, a Roman-style trattoria in the West Village operated by her TV hero Mario Batali, and his business partner Joe Bastianich.
LONDON  Londons bridges will slowly fill with light as the tide rises. Luminous colors will wash across their surfaces. Beams will shoot out from each bridge, pierce the sky and then drop, connecting with a beam on a neighboring bridge to trace the path of the Thames. The bridgess underbellies will glow gently; the banks will offer floating stages for performances; waterfalls will create a screen for projections; a weave of projected light planes will hover over the surface of the Thames, creating a ghostly river of light.

These are some of the ideas put forward for what is being called the largest-scale permanent public art project that any city has yet undertaken. Illuminated River is a hugely ambitious, 20 million ($24.8 million) plan to light the span of the Thames River from the Albert Bridge in the west to Tower Bridge in the east. (The money will come from private and philanthropic sources, with $12.6 million already contributed by the Rothschild and the Arcadia foundations.) It aims to transform this part of the Thames into a glowing river of light and spectacle, and is part of the citys ambition to match other international metropoles with a vibrant nighttime economy.

The light project will also draw tourists to the bridges and banks of the Thames, which traces a loose S shape through central London, and has 17 bridges along its trajectory. The river is now a black snake through the city at night, Hannah Rothschild, the chairwoman of the Illuminated River Foundation, said at a preview on Monday of a three-week exhibition of the final proposals. With this project, she added, the transformation will be dramatic: Light, energy, beauty, commerce, at the flick of a switch, she said, adding that it was also a meeting point for art, design and technology.

The six finalists were chosen from 105 entries, including big-name architects, designers, engineers and artists of all stripes from all over the world. The winning team will be announced on Dec. 8, and the organizers hope that the project will be started by 2018.
Itzhak Perlman will play and conduct works by Beethoven and Brahms with the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday.

Credit... Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
In recent years, Brooklyn has become famous for trailblazers: inventive artists, artisanal food and beer makers and, of course, New Yorks original hipsters. But this weekend the Brooklyn Museum will celebrate a pioneering but probably lesser-known borough species: childrens book creators.

Even 10 or 20 years ago, Brooklyn had a lot of literary spots and authors, said Sallie Stutz, the museums vice director for merchandising and founder of its Brooklyn Childrens Book Fair. But I feel that the childrens book community has really grown. They look forward to gathering here.

More than 50 authors will do so on Saturday at the largest fair yet, the 10th-anniversary edition. As always, they live or work in Brooklyn and come prepared to share their talents. The free event, largely geared to children under 12, will feature several presentations, as well as writers and artists offering book-related activities.
1. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, above center, will lead Donald Trumps transition effort, taking the reins from Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

Mr. Trump now says he may be willing to leave in place two popular provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

He is holding meetings with his advisers in Trump Tower, which has been transformed into a kind of fortress by the Secret Service and the local police.
(Want to get this briefing by email? Heres the sign-up.)

Good morning.

Heres what you need to know:

 Trump visits the White House and Capitol Hill 

President-elect Donald J. Trump and President Obama spoke for 90 minutes on Thursday and made a public show of putting their differences aside.

We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds, Mr. Obama told Mr. Trump.
LONDON  One of the most influential musicians and style icons of his generation, David Bowie, who died in January, was less well known as an art collector. But as he told Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times critic, in 1998, Art was, seriously, the only thing Id ever wanted to own.

On Thursday evening, Sothebys launched its two-day Bowie/Collector sale, an auction of some 350 works, or about 65 percent of his total collection, on behalf of Mr. Bowies estate.

Buoyed by the huge amounts of publicity and public interest, the opening-night sale of 47 lots tripled its low estimates raising 24.3 million pounds, or $30.3 million. The collection of The Man Who Fell to Earth created a string of 12 auction highs for artists as the allure of the David Bowie provenance pushed the values of Modern British art to a new level.
A sample ranking of the most-shared sites on Facebook from January had Breitbart at No. 14, just behind ABC and The Washington Post, but ahead of Bleacher Report, Comicbook.com, Yahoo and The Hill. The month before, the site ranked between the BBC and The Guardian, just behind The New York Times, which was at No. 7.

These told, narrowly, the story of reach on a new platform  one that the news industry was still coming to terms with as it redefined the terms of consumption. At the same time, they signaled much broader changes: On social platforms, all media had become marginal; elsewhere, much of the media was in structural collapse.

Growing distribution systems belonged to technology companies and their users. Publishers had become mere guests, their own distribution systems, like printed newspapers, stagnant or shrinking. So a news organizations ranking in that online world  one in which the importance of legacy was diminished  meant something.

Faith in the importance of social metrics was a common trait among pro-Trump media, and for obvious reasons. They were clear indicators of support, participation and success, though exposed to no methodology. They were relative to other media and, by proxy, to politics.

The pro-Trump media understood that it was an insurgent force in a conversation conducted on social media on an unprecedented scale. It understood that its success could be measured by the extent to which it contributed to the assembled millions carrying out their political reading, watching, sharing, commenting and arguing among family and friends. David Bozell, president of ForAmerica, a conservative nonprofit group that operates a large Facebook news page, boasted of its social media prowess: Because of our success, we know there are real voters delivering real-time political activism every day on these platforms. The press and the political class, at their own peril, ignored the signs, which is why so many got President-elect Trumps victory wrong.
So the reconciliation continues. Kind of.

Whatever their feelings about Donald J. Trump winning the presidential election, President Obama and the first lady have been careful to demonstrate that it is time to now come together, work together, to deal with the many challenges that we face, as Mr. Obama said when he met the president-elect at the White House on Thursday.

Hillary Clinton began the messaging when she wore a purple-lapel Ralph Lauren pantsuit for her concession speech on Wednesday morning, uniting red and blue in a single shade as she urged the country to unite. And Michelle Obama continued the subliminal signals when she chose a purple Narciso Rodriguez dress with an orange aftershock sunburst curve for her meeting with Melania Trump.

It was a nice bit of color diplomacy.

But it also wasnt without implicit references to Mr. Obamas administration and legacy. After all, it was the second time she wore Mr. Rodriguez this week, the first time being for her final speech for Mrs. Clinton in Philadelphia, delivered in a navy coat by the designer.

Mr. Rodriguez is, as it happens, Cuban-American, the son of immigrants and a classic American success story. He is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Frost Art Museum in Miami, chosen in part, the curator told The New York Times, because It is very important to incorporate the accomplishments of Latin American artists, architects and designers into the canon of history.
With the rise of the nasty woman meme comes a decline in the fortunes of the Nasty Gal brand.

Nasty Gal is an e-commerce darling founded in 2006 by Sophia Amoruso and a model of social-media-driven millennial entrepreneurship. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Nov. 9 to secure financial relief while it restructures.

The company, which sells its own collection, vintage pieces and items from other brands, will continue to run its business and has asserted that customers and employees will see no change in day-to-day operations.

There are also reports that Ms. Amoruso, who ceded her role as chief executive to Sheree Waterson in 2015, will resign from her current post as executive chairwoman, and that Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, which invested nearly $50 million in Nasty Gal in 2012, will step down from the board. Nasty Gal hasnt confirmed these moves and did not offer any additional comments.

The news may come as a surprise for those who have followed Nasty Gals seemingly endless upward trajectory. By the end of 2015, Forbes estimated that the company surpassed $300 million in revenues (up from a reported $10 million in 2010), and this year internet Retailer estimated that Nasty Gals five-year compound growth rate was 92.4 percent, compared with a median 15.3 percent among online apparel sites.
Rightists Buoyed by the Election; Open New Drives, the multilayered headline declared. They See 26 Million Votes for Goldwater as Proof of Their Rising Power / Gain Conceded by Foes / Ultraconservatives Bidding for Recruits  Plan Fight for Control of G.O.P.

Mr. Jansons article was given prominent play on the front page of Nov. 23, 1964, though his reporting ran against the grain of what The Times was otherwise telling its readers.

Conventional wisdom held that President Lyndon B. Johnsons landslide victory over Senator Barry Goldwater a few weeks earlier meant that America had embraced a liberal agenda and repudiated the conservatism embodied by Mr. Goldwater.

He has wrecked his party for a long time to come, wrote James Reston, the dean of Times columnists and a master of flyover assessments of the national mood. He ran so far behind the very progressives he scorned in his own party that he now faces a G.O.P. revolt.

The Times hailed the election result (probably in the voice of John B. Oakes, the editorial page editor): The American people have given emphatic notice that they want to move forward constructively along the road of international understanding and domestic progress.
Do your parents keep track of your whereabouts through the location-tracking feature of your phone? Do they look at your social media accounts or read your texts or emails? And if so, do you mind?

Nick Wingfield begins Should You Spy on Your Kids? by describing how he and his wife have used the location-tracking capability in their phones to find each other. But he then writes:

She and I have both tracked the whereabouts of our 13-year-old daughter using her phone to reassure ourselves that she was on her way home from school or a trip to the store. When did you start working for the National Security Agency, Ive asked myself in jest. Most Americans dont like the idea of their government spying on their internet activities, and a lot of them have misgivings about companies tracking their online habits for commercial purposes. But when they are presented with the tools and opportunity to play Big Brother with others in their family, its tough for some to resist. Im not just talking about family members who register on the creepy-stalker side of the spectrum, although there are certainly jealous spouses and overbearing parents out there who surveil their partners and children with an unhealthy vigilance. Digital monitoring  from tracking those whom loved ones communicate with to snooping on their social media accounts to checking their locations  is becoming common even among people who view themselves as mindful of the boundaries with their children and partners. Is there such a thing as responsible spying on loved ones? The answer depends on whom you ask. Strong believers in privacy reject the premise of the question outright, while others believe it is possible if consent, trust and respect are involved. ... Parents now routinely keep tabs on their childrens digital behavior in one form or another. A Pew Research Center survey of adults with children 13 to 17 years old published this year found that 61 percent of parents checked the websites that their teenagers visited, 60 percent visited their social media accounts and 48 percent looked through their phone calls and messages. The portion that tracked their teenagers whereabouts through their cellphones was 16 percent.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

 What kind of tabs do your parents or guardians keep on your digital behavior? How do you know? What aspects of your online behavior do they monitor?

 Have you and your family discussed this topic openly, or do your parents check up on you surreptitiously?

 However your parents handle this, what effect have their actions had on you? For instance, if they have a hands-off policy and do not track you in any way, has that made you more independent  or has it led you to do things you regret? If they do track you in some way, how do you think that has affected your relationship with them?

 What degree of digital spying do you think youll do with your own children? Why?
The president-elect walked onto the stage before a crowd of euphoric supporters. It was his first public sighting since the networks called the election for him. Gone were his hoarse pleadings for support. His face bore a heaviness I had not seen from him before. Now he had won, and this was a different face.

The face was what struck me most when I watched Barack Obama take the stage for the first time as president-elect eight years ago in Grant Park. I will never forget it. His eyes seemed wider and his gaze farther off than they had a few days before. Despite the wild applause in Chicago, a strange quiet descended. He was not smiling as you might expect. Or maybe it made perfect sense that he wouldnt be. For as prepared as he might have felt, Obama had just learned that he would inherit a responsibility whose scope and gravity were almost unimaginable.

Theres something inherently vain about running for president. You spend months touting yourself as someone who is better suited to an impossible task than anyone else in the United States. This is not normal. It takes immense chutzpah and (no doubt) self-delusion. And then you are granted the wish, and everything changes. Your vanity is suddenly joined by  if not overrun by  a sense of shock, fear and, you would hope, humility.

I was thinking about the face as we awaited our first glimpse of a new president-elect in eight years. That prospect became all the more fascinating when it was clear early Wednesday morning that it would be Donald J. Trump. He has never been terribly expansive about how he viewed the presidency and how he would approach the job. There was even a hint of suspicion that Trump didnt really want it. He just liked running as a way to assert his dominance and prove he could win and drink up all the adulation. (Hillary Clinton seemed just the opposite  she desperately wanted the job, if only she could avoid running for it.)
Under the new deal, builders would get the special tax benefits for a longer period  a 100 percent tax abatement for 35 years. A plan embraced by the mayor had called for a 25-year abatement followed by a phased-in return to full taxes over an additional 10 years. Details of the new deal were hashed out by state officials; members of the Real Estate Board of New York, the industrys powerful lobbying arm; and union officials. They were announced on Thursday by the board, known as Rebny, and the governor.

In the proposed version of the program, subsidized apartments would have to remain affordable for 40 years.

The deal sets a pay schedule for developers who get the tax breaks in prime areas. In Manhattan below 96th Street, they would have to pay an average $60 an hour in wages and benefits for workers on buildings of 300 or more units.

On the fast-growing waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens, the average would have to be $45 an hour on buildings of 300 or more units. The Brooklyn and Queens projects would have to be within a mile of the East River waterfront. The program would not require the use of union contractors, but at those wage levels the construction unions could compete for the work.

We are pleased to have reached an agreement that will permit production of new rental housing in New York City, said Rob Speyer, a developer and chairman of Rebny. We would like to thank Governor Cuomo for his leadership on this critical issue.
In the blue sea of New York City, where Hillary Clinton crushed Donald J. Trump in the election on Tuesday, there were still some districts  working-class areas in the southeast Bronx, Mr. Trumps childhood neighborhood in Jamaica Estates, Queens, and most of Staten Island  that did not go Mrs. Clintons way.

But of all the outlying pockets of Trump supporters in New York, perhaps the most distinct lay six miles south of the Clinton campaign headquarters: the Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that would seem to have little in common with Middle America, where Mr. Trump drew most of his support.

With its Judaica stores, kosher pizza shops, men in traditional black coats and hats and women with long skirts, Borough Park is home to thousands of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, belonging to a range of sects, including Bobover, Belz, Satmar, Ger and Viznitz.

The vast majority of voters in the neighborhood are registered Democrats, but they often vote Republican, and this year was no different. In Brooklyns 48th Assembly District, which encompasses most of Borough Park, Mr. Trump got 69 percent of the vote, while Mrs. Clinton got 27 percent.
It may not be immediately apparent how daring that inquiry was 22 years ago. DNA testing was then in its early days as a tool in criminal justice, and few people anticipated that prisoners would clamor to have old biological evidence retested in hopes of clearing their names.

Moreover, hardly anyone was willing to say aloud that innocent people really were locked up. Politicians could not spend money fast enough on prisons. After a long climb in crime rates, the country was ratcheting up sentences. Bill Clinton had suspended his presidential campaign in 1992 so that he could be in Arkansas, where he was then the Democratic governor, for the execution of a murderer who had shot himself in the head and was so brain-damaged that he asked prison guards to save the pecan pie from his last meal for him as he was being led to his lethal injection.

Ms. Reno had read, though, about the exoneration of 16 people, including a former marine, Kirk Bloodsworth, who had been sent to death row in Maryland for the killing of a child on the strength of testimony by five eyewitnesses.

At such a tough-on-crime moment, the notion that fallibility was poured into the foundation of the criminal justice system was startling and disruptive. Ms. Reno, who died this week at 78, was unafraid of looking directly at it. The first woman to hold the position of attorney general, she served eight years.
A member of a volunteer security force in Brooklyn pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges that he paid Police Department officials thousands of dollars in bribes to obtain expedited handgun licenses for clients.

The arrest in April of the man, Alex Lichtenstein, came as part of an expansive series of related federal investigations into police corruption and fund-raising efforts by Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, and his associates; in June, for example, three police commanders were arrested on corruption charges.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Lichtenstein, a member of the Borough Park Shomrim, an Orthodox Jewish patrol society, ran a business that charged clients as much as $18,000 to expedite gun license applications, and then paid thousands of dollars in bribes to obtain the licenses.

According to the complaint, Mr. Lichtenstein offered one officer bribes of $6,000 for each gun license he helped him obtain  more than youll make in the Police Department, Mr. Lichtenstein told the officer.
We allege that the defendants engaged in a deliberate scheme to exploit those struggling with substance abuse in order to line their own pockets with millions, the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, said. Medicaid cannot serve as a personal piggy bank for criminals and fraudsters who have little regard for the well-being of their fellow New Yorkers.

Image Anthony Cornachio Credit... Office of the New York State Attorney General

Officials from the NRI Group and Canarsie Aware did not return calls for comment. Mr. Cornachios lawyer did not return calls for comment, and the Baumblits lawyer could not be reached.

A spokeswoman for the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services said the office was aware of the arrest of Mr. Cornachio and was monitoring his programs to ensure that the clients are receiving the services they need.

The Times in May 2015 detailed the underground industry of so-called three-quarter houses, seen as somewhere between regulated halfway houses and actual homes. It had flourished for years, largely because residents could not afford to stay anywhere else on the $215 monthly housing stipend for poor people in New York City or on their disability checks. Although no one knows how many of the homes exist, because they are unregulated, tenant advocates estimate there are hundreds.

After the article was published, the city formed a task force and began relocating residents from homes that could be tracked and that violated the law.
A memorial would do much to counter these sorts of misguided impressions, and remind Americans  now and long into the future  that all veterans, whatever their health and financial situation, deserve profound respect.

The need for such a site is obvious; the shape of it, not so much. Picturing it is hard because the conflict is so complex. Is it one war, or many? How do you commemorate a war that was never declared, that is being fought on multiple fronts with multiple enemies, that has no clear end? It is a war unlike any we have ever seen, ranging from conventional battlefields to the streets of Paris and New York.

What would such a memorial look like? In 1981, we were fortunate enough to have Maya Lin propose her moving, if controversial, wall, upon which the names of the fallen could be inscribed  a searing black cut in the earth that has come, through its V-shaped open arms, to be a site of healing.

I hope we will find the next Ms. Lin to design the memorial itself; for now, we are busy building support. In October 2015 I formed a group of business leaders to help devise a plan. We werent alone  we soon discovered a grass-roots effort, the Global War on Terror Memorial Foundation, composed of talented junior officers, all recent veterans and led by an energetic West Point graduate named Andrew Brennan, that was already working toward the same goal. We soon joined forces.

Even with our combined efforts, this will be a daunting task. There is support in Congress, and in communities across the country, but it will take even more money and political will than we needed in 1979. The Mall is more crowded, construction more expensive. And the country, for all its talk about veterans, has largely ignored them. America is at the shopping mall while the Army is at war, it is said.

The Iraq veteran Adam Linehan wrote recently that war creates a division between those who didnt experience it and those who did, and that division is usually only perceived by the latter, and added, The grand gesture of erecting a war memorial on the National Mall wont heal that divide, but it could help.

Lets remember our obligation to those in uniform. For 31 years, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been a site of mourning, remembrance and healing for those who served, but also societys acknowledgment of their service. The Americans who have defended their country since Sept. 11, 2001, want, and deserve, a memorial in Washington that will do the same for them.
In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump pledged that he will be president for all Americans, and he asked those who did not support him for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.



Heres some guidance right off the bat, Mr. President-elect: Those sentiments will have more force if you immediately and unequivocally repudiate the outpouring of racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic insults, threats and attacks being associated with your name. Do this in a personal plea to people who supported your candidacy. Tell them this is not what you stand for, nor is it what your new administration will tolerate.

Explicit expressions of bigotry and hatred by Trump supporters were common throughout the campaign, and they have become even more intense since his election. On a department-store window in Philadelphia, vandals spray-painted Sieg Heil 2016 and Mr. Trumps name written with a swastika. In a Minnesota high-school bathroom, vandals scrawled the Trump campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, and next to it, Go back to Africa. There are many more reports pouring in of verbal and physical harassment of Muslims, Latinos and other members of minorities. Though not all are verifiable, the atmosphere of intimidation and fear is unquestionably real and will keep growing. Mr. Trump may not be able to stop it by himself, but he must do everything he can.

The problem, of course, is that Mr. Trumps campaign was based on appeals  some explicit, some coded  to racial and ethnic resentment and division. His followers heard it starting with his speech declaring his candidacy, warning of Mexican immigrant rapists, continuing to a rally last weekend where he promised to bar all Syrian refugees because they will import generations of terrorism, extremism and radicalism into your schools and throughout your communities. These statements emboldened and even encouraged those who have been looking for a license to lash out against immigrants, refugees, minorities and anyone else they find threatening. They take his victory as vindication of their feelings.
Even more important, it has become clear over the past two decades that globalization has not been such an unalloyed boon for the United States as some wish to portray it. In fact, it is the industrial heartland of America that has borne the brunt of the displacement caused by the breakneck globalization advocated by the Washington elite.

The key question now is whether Americas nascent isolationism will translate into policy. Even if it does, it wont happen soon. The American political elite remains almost universally interventionist and supportive of globalization.

In the meantime, as Russia tries to figure out what to expect from the Trump presidency, it has very little reason to hope that the new president will offer any major concessions or strike any major deals with Moscow, regardless of what he said during the campaign. And Moscow has very little to offer to Washington at the moment. There are few areas for possible cooperation. Even if Mr. Trump does want to improve relations with Russia, he will find out when he moves into the Oval Office that the United States has little to gain from such an improvement.

This is why there is no reason to expect  either now, or in the foreseeable future  that America and Russia will strike some grand deal to divide the world into spheres of influence. Even more modest compromises seem unlikely. The Trump administration will have no incentive to make overtures to Moscow, such as taking a softer stance on Ukraine or easing the sanctions on Russia. Besides, for Mr. Trump any softening toward Russia would face opposition from within the Republican Party and in the American foreign policy and defense communities. The new president is unlikely to be willing to pay the steep domestic political price, especially since improving relations offers no tangible benefits to America.

The basic problems in Russian-American relations stem from Moscows fundamental aspiration to return to the global arena as a great power, and even to contemplate integration into the American-led, pro-Western world order only on the condition of being recognized as a great power that dominates most of its former Soviet neighbors. These Russian aspirations will remain unacceptable to any American administration for years, if not decades, to come.

Theres only one way this could change, though it is a scenario that many Americans may find uncomfortable to contemplate.

In the event of further major deterioration of Americas positions in the global arena  for example, if the United States is dragged into a confrontation with China while remaining mired in the Middle East  Russia may look like a more appealing ally, or at least a less appealing adversary. A confrontation with China, and other foreign-policy complications, might force Washington to seek a rapprochement with Russia, in the same way that rivalry with Germany had once forced the British Empire to put aside its longstanding differences with Russia and sign a pact in 1907. But for this scenario to come to pass, Moscow will have to remain firm and unyielding for as long as it takes.
The government of President Francois Hollande has moved to combine existing information on at least 60 million French citizens into a single sprawling database. The government says the goal of merging data from French passports and national identity cards is to prevent identity fraud. But the measure risks opening the door to mass government surveillance of the entire country and increases the danger that private information about citizens could be hacked.

The new Secure Electronic Documents database, known as T.E.S., will contain biometric information  like fingerprints and eye color  ID photos, names, addresses and marital status. One big issue is that the database could easily be checked against information, like video footage, collected by intelligence agencies. While the government claims the new database will be used only to confirm identities, it rejected a proposal for individual data chips in passports and identity cards that would serve the same purpose without compromising citizens rights to privacy.

The new database was created by a government decree published on Oct. 30, while many French were enjoying a long holiday weekend before Halloween. The timing prompted a member of the National Assembly, Lionel Tardy, to accuse the government of treating the French people like pumpkins. The French minister for digital affairs, Axelle Lemaire, complained that she was not even consulted about the new database.

Using a decree, rather than legislation, allowed Mr. Hollandes government to avoid a debate by lawmakers. Public outcry has since forced Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to promise that Parliament will now have an opportunity to debate the measure, but this will be a mere airing of opinion with no legislative consequence.
Donald Trumps ethics proposals didnt get much notice when he unveiled them late in the campaign. (At the time, his claims that the election was rigged were dominating the news.) Now that President-elect Trump is assembling an administration, his plan deserves attention. It goes well beyond existing restrictions to slow the revolving door to riches for government insiders.

Mr. Trump would ban executive branch officials from lobbying for five years after they leave public service, and he would ask Congress to do the same for its members and staff. He says he would also impose a lifetime ban to prevent senior executive branch officials from lobbying for a foreign government. Existing regulations ban lobbying for up to two years. Mr. Trumps rules would expand the definition of lobbyist to include paid consultants, a loophole that former lawmakers at K Street firms routinely use.

For Mr. Trump, the new rules are important to realizing a campaign commitment to drain the swamp of Washington, to deliver wholesale change and to end corruption. Regrettably, the names being bandied about for high-profile roles in his administration  Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani  do not inspire confidence that such hopeful change is upon us.

These three relentlessly ambitious politicians, far from signaling something new and inspiring, represent a petty, vengeful past.
Some good news from Tuesday, a point of sanity on a day when the nations electoral judgment went catastrophically astray: Voters in Maricopa County, Ariz., sent Sheriff Joe Arpaio packing. He lost his bid for a seventh term. After 24 years, Americas Toughest Sheriff is done.

Non-Arizonans might know the 84-year-old sheriff from news accounts and TV, mostly Fox, where he poses as a national expert on immigration and inmate humiliation. Hes the lawman who makes jail inmates wear pink underwear and live in a scorching desert tent and eat only two meals a day, because whatever criminals deserve, it isnt dignity. You may also know him as a chief instigator of the birther movement, having dispatched his cold-case posse to Honolulu to track down the supposedly forged Obama birth certificate. Donald Trump has backed away from birtherism, but Sheriff Arpaio evidently has not. He told Tea Party die-hards as recently as September that he was still on the case. Sheriff Arpaio and Mr. Trump are longtime mutual admirers; the sheriff spoke at the Republican convention, hailing the nominee and attacking immigrants, to whoops from the law-and-order crowd.

Law and order is not what Sheriff Arpaio is about. Immigrant advocates, civil-rights organizations and reporters in Arizona have spent years screaming into the wind about this, trying to alert the world that this celebrity peace officer does not, in fact, keep the peace. On the contrary: He abuses his power to mistreat inmates, to terrorize law-abiding Latinos, to harass and intimidate his critics and political adversaries.
IT REALLY WAS A CHANGE ELECTION The voters were serious about that. And there was only one change candidate.

STRONG AND WEAK CURRENTS BEAT DATA AND ANALYTICS The models for both support (vote share) and turnout were off significantly. It appears that there really were hidden Trump voters, meaning his ceiling of support was higher than most of us believed possible based on polling and modeling survey responses. And millions of potential Clinton voters who the models suggested would vote stayed home.

THE THIRD PARTIES This will need to be confirmed by more data and analysis, but one major reason Mr. Trumps ceiling could have ended up higher than projected was that the potential Trump voters parked with Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, left to vote for Mr. Trump. But potential Clinton targets, especially the younger Johnson voters, stuck with him. Mr. Johnsons support declined over time, but not equally  those who were potential Clinton voters were stickier than the Trump targets. Mr. Johnson won 8 percent of voters under 45, but only 2 percent of those over 65.

MESSAGE MUDDLE The only two messages that appeared to punch through were the anti-Trump line, on the left, and the grossly overhyped email issue on the right. Mrs. Clinton talked about what she wanted to do from a policy perspective every day, but this campaign was not the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it was Mad Max: Fury Road. The three big TV networks together devoted 32 minutes on their evening newscasts to policy coverage in 2016. Again  32. The race turned into The Jerry Springer Show, and that was the kind of campaign Mr. Trump was most comfortable with  and Im sure the ugliness had the added effect of suppressing turnout.

THE TRUMP CAMPAIGNERS WERE SMART As they flew around Pennsylvania and Michigan and boasted they could change the map, many people, including me, ridiculed them as aimlessly and amateurishly wasting time and resources. But they saw something and committed to a strategy few even in the Republican Party thought would work. They challenged conventional wisdom, and were proved right. And Mr. Trumps appeal to voters in these states was as strong as he predicted it would be.

JAMES COMEY From the last debate until Election Day, the dominant news was the F.B.I. and Mrs. Clintons emails along with a drumbeat of daily WikiLeaks dumps. Postelection research will help shed light here, but the small number of undecided voters at the end should have broken at least equally based on their demographic and voting history. If exit polls are accurate, they moved to Mr. Trump much more than to Mrs. Clinton in certain battleground states, and its quite possible the shadow created by the F.B.I. director was the major culprit. Oct. 19, the day of the final debate, was a long 20 days to Nov. 8, and the atmosphere was far from ideal for the Democratic candidate.
INTERNATIONAL

An article on Oct. 11 about the town of Bojaya, Colombia, which was the scene of a devastating rebel attack in 2002 yet voted overwhelmingly for a peace deal between the government and the rebel group that the rest of the country rejected, mistranslated, in some editions, a comment by Rosa Mosquera, a resident of Bojaya who survived the attack. She said, In order to live in peace, you have to disarm  not disassemble  your heart. And, But when you disarm  not rebuild  your heart, you can go on, you can give a lot of love.



The Memo From Britain article on Oct. 14, about efforts by British conservatives to force Prime Minister Theresa May to consult them about every aspect of Britains departure from the European Union, misstated, in some editions, the month that Britons voted on exiting the bloc. It was June, not July.

BUSINESS DAY

An article on Thursday about the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, one of the few leaders in the technology industry who backed Donald J. Trump, misidentified the politician Mr. Thiel backed in the presidential primaries in 2008 and 2012. It was Ron Paul, then a congressman from Texas  not his son Rand, who is a United States senator from Kentucky.



An article on Nov. 1 about Robert M. Bakishs appointment as acting chief executive of Viacom misstated the year Mr. Bakish started at the company. It was 1997, not 1987.
Yeah, there will be some disruption, but look at the bright side: the holidays are coming anyway, Midtown is going to be all messed up anyway.

NEW YORK MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO, on security measures being implemented outside Trump Tower, home of President-elect Donald J. Trump until he moves into the White House.
Never Trump has become Maybe Trump. But whether he would have them is another matter.

Mr. Trump, a man known to nurse grudges long after doing so is beneficial, has boasted for months that he has a better understanding of how to best serve the nations security interests than nearly anyone who has made policy in the area for the past decade. At the same time, his transition team faces the daunting task of filling hundreds of jobs in a constellation of national security agencies.

At stake is more than a parlor game about who gets what job. Personnel decisions by Mr. Trump and his team will help determine both the course of the administrations foreign policy and whether the president-elect will hew to the themes of his campaign  a suspicion of alliances, skepticism of foreign intervention and admiration for authoritarian figures like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Some of these views have been embraced by some of Mr. Trumps current advisers, including Michael T. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Such positions are generally anathema in Republican foreign policy circles largely dominated by hawkish former George W. Bush administration officials  from Eliot A. Cohen, a former State Department official, to Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bushs national security adviser.

There is some common ground, particularly on counterterrorism policy. For instance, Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised the brutal interrogation methods the Bush administration used against Qaeda suspects, including waterboarding. Torture works, Mr. Trump said during a campaign stop in February. Most former Bush administration officials insist that the methods, used by the C.I.A., did not constitute torture.

Since the election was resolved early Wednesday, there have been at least informal contacts between the two factions, according to several people in both camps who refused to be identified. One person who is helping Mr. Trumps transition team said the group was already receiving resumes from former Republican officials, including some of the signers of two open letters this year excoriating Mr. Trumps foreign policy views. At the same time, the transition team has also made unofficial overtures to some of the people who signed the two letters  one in March and the second in August.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.  It was visceral. Women felt gutted, shocked, appalled, afraid. The prospect of celebrating the election of the nations first female president had been crushed by a man whom many women viewed as sexist.

In this liberal enclave, where Mrs. Clinton won 89.2 percent of the vote over Donald J. Trump, one of her strongest showings anywhere, Molly Hubner, 33, said she was having difficulty explaining the result to her 6-year-old daughter.

We had told her that he wouldnt be a good president because hes not very kind, Ms. Hubner said, pushing her young son in a stroller as she jogged down a leaf-covered sidewalk. After the election, she said, they told her it is important to be kind to people and that our country is O.K., its still a safe place to be.

Women across the country who supported Mrs. Clinton are just starting to process their feelings about the long roller coaster ride that in their view ended in disaster.
In short, they embraced Mr. Trumps sales pitch for himself.

I think that women see the big picture  women are smart, Mrs. Gauta said. The fact that he said something crude, she said is not going to change my mind about the good he can do for our country.

Did I like that, no, she went on. But do I think he can do a better job than Hillary? Absolutely. I think he has got the best interests of this country at heart. Hes got a beautiful family; he wants to leave a nice country  the great country he was raised in  for his kids. And I think he said the only way Im going to get that done is by being president myself.

She took her sons, 14 and 16, to a Trump rally, and said she was even more impressed by him in person than on TV. But as to his sometimes foul mouth, If my boys ever said anything like that, Id put them over my knee and spank them.

In Chicago, Nicole Been, 22, a Roman Catholic who attends DePaul University, is deeply opposed to abortion and the hookup culture. She complained that other students branded her a racist and a bigot for supporting Mr. Trump.

In Philadelphia, Daphne Goggins, 53, an African-American community activist and ardent Republican, always knew she would vote for Mr. Trump. She said she believed decades of Democratic efforts had done little for black people. When Mr. Trump invited her to a minority outreach meeting, she told him tearfully that for the first time in my life, I feel like my vote is going to count. (Only 4 percent of black women, exit polls show, supported Mr. Trump, while 26 percent of Latinas did.)

For the women interviewed, as for male Trump backers, the economy was of utmost concern. Mrs. Gauta and her husband are tired of paying $1,800 a month in health care premiums, with a $12,000 annual deductible. Ms. Lincoln, the retired college administrator, now works at her husbands auto body shop in Old Town, Me., to help pay the bills.
WASHINGTON  After President-elect Donald J. Trump promised to drain the swamp that he sees in the nations capital, his millions of supporters are expecting vast changes in the sprawling federal bureaucracy, and conservative activists are drooling at the chance to remake, resize or reduce the reach of government.

Mr. Trump repeatedly told voters during the campaign that he would shut down the Environmental Protection Agency and repeal the Affordable Care Act. He said the Education Department is massive, and it can be largely eliminated. He has made the federal work force of 2.8 million employees a target, declaring that you have tremendous waste, fraud, and abuse.

But the one-time real estate mogul has largely avoided specifics about cuts he might make, and much of his agenda imagines changes that would require huge increases in federal spending: tripling the number of border patrol agents; supplying the military with more warships and fighter jets; increasing spending on infrastructure; undertaking new efforts to confront cyberterrorism; and aggressively working to remake trade policies.

Whatever change he envisions will likely be vastly more difficult to enact than his army of supporters believe. Veterans of Washingtons many fights over policy warn that the city is full of ingrained bureaucracies, each of which has entrenched support on Capitol Hill. And while Mr. Trump will have some executive authority, legal, practical and political limitations will constrain his efforts.
RALEIGH, N.C.  Roy Cooper, a Democrat, held a razor-thin lead on Thursday in North Carolinas bitterly contested race for governor. If it holds, it would be a rare bright spot for his party this week, one that has much to do with Mr. Coopers call for repealing a state law limiting transgender bathroom access that has subjected North Carolina to a gale of international criticism, boycotts and cancellations.

Yet many here are now predicting that the contentious law, which catalyzed a national debate over lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, is unlikely to be repealed even if Mr. Cooper becomes governor.

On Thursday, State Representative Rodney W. Moore was one of a number of Democratic lawmakers who predicted that Republicans here in the capitol would have little reason to dump the law, commonly known as House Bill 2, or H.B. 2, even if Mr. Cooper were elected.

Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican seeking his second term, has refused to concede until thousands of mail-in and provisional ballots are counted by elections boards in each of the states 100 counties. That process is set to conclude on Nov. 18. Mr. McCrory was widely criticized for having signed the law.
SAN DIEGO  Donald J. Trumps lawyers agreed on Thursday to enter settlement talks in a class-action fraud lawsuit involving the president-elect and Trump University, now defunct, raising the possibility of a quick end to the six-year-old case just before it goes to trial.

Daniel Petrocelli, Mr. Trumps lead lawyer on the case, also asked to delay the trial to early next year, saying Mr. Trump needed time to work on the transition to the presidency.

The good news is that he was elected president, Mr. Petrocelli told Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of Federal District Court. The bad news is that he has even more work to do now.

Mr. Trump has accused Judge Curiel, who was born in Indiana, of bias in the case because of his Mexican heritage.
After the State Department announced the reward, an Iraqi news agency, Alsumaria, reported that Mr. Khalimov had been promoted to military commander for the Islamic State, replacing Omar al-Shishani, an ethnic Chechen from Georgia who was killed in the airstrike. Russian news outlets have also said Mr. Khalimov was promoted, but neither those accounts nor the Iraqi report could be independently verified.

The U.S. putting a bounty on his head is significant, Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, in London, said in a telephone interview. But its not possible to know if hes the strategist of military operations.

Further muddying the picture, the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda, has found no formal Islamic State announcement of Mr. Khalimovs position, according to Adam Raisman, an analyst who studies the groups postings.

If Mr. Khalimov was, in fact, promoted, he would be the second Islamic State commander in chief to have been trained in American military aid programs in the former Soviet Union. Mr. Shishani, whose real name was Tarkhan Batirashvili, had served in the Georgian Army, which is equipped and funded by the United States as a bulwark against Russian expansion.

American military aid to Tajikistan is more narrowly focused on fighting terrorism and narcotics, because the country is a close ally of Russia. The aid has flowed even though Tajikistan is ruled by an eccentric and authoritarian president, Emomali Rahmon, whose police forces are often accused of abuses.

Along with jailing dissidents and using excessive force  in one case, killing 20 civilians in a paramilitary action  Mr. Rahmons police forces have been accused of more unusual human rights abuses. A provincial governor recently said that he had forcibly shaved the beards of 13,000 men suspected of sympathizing with fundamentalist Islamists.

Muhiddin Kabiri, the exiled leader of Tajikistans main opposition party, the Islamic Renaissance Party, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Khalimov was always against the moderate opposition and that his police unit was known for abuses, but that the United States had turned a blind eye.
LONDON  The number of deaths from measles has fallen by 79 percent worldwide since 2000, thanks mainly to mass vaccination campaigns, but more than 350 children still die from the disease every day, global health experts said on Thursday.

In a report on global efforts to make measles history, the United Nations Childrens Fund, or Unicef, the World Health Organization and other health agencies said the fight against measles was being hampered not by a lack of tools or knowledge, but by a lack of political will to get every child immunized against measles.

Without this commitment, children will continue to die from a disease that is easy and cheap to prevent, said Robin Nandy, Unicefs head of immunization.

The report said measles vaccination campaigns and a global increase in routine vaccine coverage had saved about 20.3 million young lives from 2000 to 2015.
The United Nations implored all sides in the Syria conflict on Thursday to allow food deliveries to rebel-held eastern Aleppo, where roughly 250,000 residents, under siege for months, just received their last rations.

Russia appeared to reject the plea.

I dont think anybody wants a quarter of a million people to be starving in east Aleppo, Jan Egeland, the United Nations official in charge of a humanitarian task force for Syria, told reporters at the organizations Geneva headquarters.

Food supplies have not been replenished in eastern Aleppo since mid-July, Mr. Egeland said. The last food rations are being distributed as we speak, he said. There will not be more to distribute next week.

The divided city of Aleppo has become a prime battleground in the war pitting an alliance of Western-backed rebel groups and jihadist fighters against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his foreign supporters, Russia and Iran.
CAIRO  An Egyptian human rights group that treats torture victims was prevented on Thursday from accessing its funds and was told that its account had been blocked, its lawyer said.

The lawyer, Taher Abu al-Nasr, who represents the group, the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture, said that an employee was not allowed to cash a check for the center and was told by a bank manager that the central bank had ordered its account suspended until it registered as a nongovernmental organization with the Social Solidarity Ministry.

The Nadeem Center says it is registered as a clinic with the Health Ministry and does not need to register as an nongovernmental organization.

We couldnt cash a check today, Mr. Nasr said. We dont know exactly what happened, whether our assets are frozen or our account is shut down or what. We will try to obtain the written order on Sunday when banks reopen.
Its an uncomfortable, irksomely breathless approach, but if nothing else, their reporting reinforces the often voiced concern that murders of prostitutes dont get the investigatory attention that other homicides do. Whether in Atlantic City or Daytona Beach, Fla., the filmmakers suggest, government agencies dont want too much focus placed on such cases because of concern about civic image. No city wants to admit that it has prostitutes walking the streets or going on calls arranged via the internet.

Ms. Mills and Mr. Zeman rely heavily on amateur investigators who frequent sites like websleuths.com; some of these people are as creepy as the johns, pimps and other unsavory figures the filmmakers interview. In this online world of speculation and guesswork, substantive clues and mere coincidences tend to carry equal weight, so the filmmakers end up with an awful lot of threads to follow. They dont always make it easy for viewers to keep up as the focus shifts from Gilgo Beach to other places where there have been multiple murders of prostitutes.

A bigger flaw is the disingenuousness that pervades the series. For instance, by Part 4, the filmmakers are in Atlantic City, looking into the killings of four women whose bodies were found there in 2006. They hunt down Terry Oleson, who was questioned in the case but not charged, and who leads them on a tour of the crime scene while complaining that his life has been ruined by being linked to the case.

If the media and police were guilty of dragging Terry through the mud, Mr. Zeman solemnly intones at the end of the segment, then we were as well. Wed pushed Olesons narrative as far as it would go. Maybe we wanted it to be true so that we could finally solve this mystery. Unfortunately, for so many of us, allegation is as good as truth.

Right. After all the overheated investigating, the cloak of high-mindedness, which these filmmakers reach for about once an episode, fits uneasily.
Even had there been no news in Megyn Kellys new memoir, Settle for More, the book would have drawn a considerable audience. Ms. Kelly, the 45-year-old anchor on Fox News, has emerged as this presidential elections unlikely feminist heroine and Hildy Johnson, the intrepid gal reporter who made herself indispensable to the brass and resisted the herd mentality of the men around her. She was the hen in the Fox house, taking it upon herself to ask at nearly every turn: Shouldnt we be concerned that the Republican nominee for president is profoundly disrespectful of women in his public discourse? And accused of being a sexual predator at that?

That man, Donald J. Trump, is now Americas president-elect. After reading Ms. Kellys book, scheduled to be published on Tuesday but obtained early by The New York Times, I must say I feel nervous for her. According to her book, Mr. Trump did not take kindly to Ms. Kellys questions, and he appeared to retaliate in creepy, personal ways. Many journalists are already concerned that he has little regard for their professional responsibilities or First Amendment rights. Settle for More wont allay their fears.

Ms. Kelly writes that her problems started in August, the Monday before the first Republican presidential primary debate. She had just done a segment on her show, The Kelly File, that infuriated Mr. Trump. He refused to make his own scheduled appearance on her show unless she phoned him personally.

I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you, she says he told her, and I still may.
But Mr. Ditlow carried to fruition many of the initiatives that Mr. Nader began after he and Consumers Union jointly founded the Center for Auto Safety in 1970. Mr. Ditlow, who became the centers executive director in 1976, was instrumental, for example, in long campaigns to require that all motor vehicles have seatbelts and airbags.

Over four decades, Mr. Ditlow badgered the traffic safety administration for more stringent standards, saying its leaders were often political appointees reluctant to move against the powerful auto industry.

He also became the industrys fiercest critic, issuing scathing reports on defective vehicles and related problems ranging from child car-seat flaws to dangerously designed engine mounts. He testified at scores of congressional hearings on safety and warranty issues, consumer protection, air pollution and fuel economy, and he pushed for myriad recalls.

There were 51 million vehicle recalls in the United States in 2015, including millions for defective Takata airbags. In 2014, 2.6 million G.M. cars were recalled worldwide for a deadly ignition-switch defect; in 2013, 1.6 million Jeeps for exploding gas tanks; in 2009 and 2010, more than 10 million Toyotas for sudden acceleration. In the 1970s, 1.5 million Ford Pintos  half of all those produced  were recalled for fuel-tank fires in rear-end collisions.

In addition to millions of other recalls in the 1980s and 90s, Mr. Ditlow and his organization achieved lemon laws in all 50 states to protect consumers. Over the last 25 years, he also served on the boards of Consumers Union, the environmental group Friends of the Earth and the Canadian highway and the auto safety organization Automobile Protection Association.

He often sought data under the Freedom of Information laws and sometimes found shocking unintended revelations. In 1978, he discovered a secret internal memo that raised questions about the safety of Firestone 500 steel-belted radial tires sold in the 70s. A dozen deaths resulted from blowouts caused by tires that overheated. He pressed the issue, and 15 million tires were recalled.

Image At a news conference in 2014, Mr. Ditlow displayed a G.M. ignition switch similar to those linked to 13 deaths and dozens of crashes. Credit... J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Jackie Gillan, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, called Mr. Ditlow the Sherlock Holmes for auto safety when it came to investigating and identifying faulty vehicle systems.
WASHINGTON  Congressional leaders confirmed this week what seemed inevitable with the triumph of Donald J. Trump: The far-reaching trade agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim nations that President Obama hoped to leave as a major legacy, but which Mr. Trump called a terrible deal, is dead.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the incoming Democratic leader, told labor leaders on Thursday that the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest regional trade agreement in history, would not be approved by Congress. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said flat-out no when reporters on Wednesday asked whether the agreement would be considered in the lame-duck Congress that convenes next week  its last legislative chance, given the opposition from the president-elect.

Mr. Trump, whose invectives against trade agreements were central to his appeal to disaffected working-class voters, will have the authority as president to negotiate better deals, as I think he would put it, Mr. McConnell said.

Yet there is little likelihood of Mr. Trump seeking a new agreement. That reflects not only his campaign statements, but also his yearslong hostility to past trade accords as well as the sheer difficulty of renegotiating a Pacific pact that was seven years in the making, entailing compromises among a dozen countries including Australia, Canada, Chile and Japan, but excluding China.
Terri Marsh, 61, in Goose Creek, S.C., did not hesitate to sign up again for a Blue Cross plan as soon as she could. Insurance is something you have to have, she said. Before the marketplace plans were available, she had been without coverage for five years, despite having a serious inflammatory disease.

Because I have a pre-existing disease that is off the wall for them, I could not get insurance, she said. Without getting the coverage through the law, she said, I could possibly be dead.

Yet Republicans have seized on some areas where the law is struggling and in the government-run insurance marketplaces in particular. This month, for example, Republicans highlighted the sharp rise in the average price of an insurance plan on the marketplace  25 percent  as proof that the law was fatally flawed. Mr. Bertolini warned that rates could go even higher next year.

Without a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, Republicans will probably be unable to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act. But they can eliminate several consequential provisions through a special budgetary process called reconciliation.

Last year, the Senate passed a reconciliation bill that undid large portions of the health bill. The House passed it. President Obama vetoed it.

The bill would have eliminated the expansion of Medicaid coverage for Americans near or below the poverty line. It would have eliminated subsidies to help middle-income Americans buy their own insurance on new marketplaces. It would have eliminated tax penalties for the uninsured, meant to urge everyone to obtain health insurance. And it would have eliminated a number of taxes created by the law to help fund those programs. (It was written to kick in after two years, meaning the programs would not disappear immediately.)
TOKYO  Despite objections from antinuclear campaigners, Japans government cleared the way on Friday for companies that build nuclear power plants to sell their technology to India  one of the few nations planning big expansions in atomic energy  by signing a cooperation agreement with the South Asian country.

The deal is a lifeline for the Japanese nuclear power industry, which has been foundering since meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in northeastern Japan in 2011. Plans to build a dozen new reactors in Japan were canceled after that, a gut punch for some of the countrys biggest industrial conglomerates, including Toshiba and Hitachi.

With the domestic market moribund, Japanese companies had been pursuing deals abroad, but success was elusive.

The economic case for nuclear energy has weakened as a result of low oil and gas prices, prompting utilities and governments around the world to rethink construction. The Fukushima disaster increased safety concerns. And Japanese vendors have had to fight lower-cost rivals from places like Russia and South Korea for a shrinking number of customers.
She drolly described one party at which Elizabeth Taylor and a flirtatious Richard Burton  he flirted with everyone but Elizabeth  stayed late. And in 1986, she dropped a bombshell that shook the pillars of Nouvelle Society: Sid Bass, the Texas oil billionaire, was leaving his wife to marry Mercedes Kellogg. (They asked her to wait a day so Ms. Kellogg could tell her diplomat husband that she was divorcing him.)

After late nights of dogged merrymaking, Mrs. Mehle typically worked from her palatial Manhattan apartments, first on Park Avenue and later in an Upper East Side townhouse, preferring not to be disturbed before noon and delivering her columns to downtown newsrooms by messenger.

What I do is somewhere between ditch digging and galley slaving, she told Life in 1966. It is a neck-swiveling, dont-miss-anything job. When I walk into a party, while Im saying, Hello darling, hello dear, how are you? to everyone I havent seen since yesterday, I case the place. I have a fast eye.

I also listen, listen, listen, she went on. When I come home dog-tired at 1 a.m., I often havent a line to go on. Ive even put my little head down on the typewriter and cried a few rusty tears. But then I snap out of it and get to work.

She entered the crowded, fiercely competitive field of gossip columnists in the waning days of Walter Winchell (who was also at The Mirror), when high society still preoccupied mass audiences as passionately as Hollywood stars did, and when the rich still delighted in tattling on one another in print.

No matter what I say about them, Mrs. Mehle confided, it cant begin to compare with what they say about each other.

She recalled an editors advice that Id be a success only when I could walk into a room full of people who whisper, Here comes that bitch Suzy.
The de Blasio administration said it was examining the proposal, but city officials were reluctant to commit to paying for it without the help of the state and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who controls the authority. Given the tension between the mayor and Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, Mr. Jones said he hoped the city would act quickly to finance the program itself.

The local push to establish discounted fares for the poor is part of a broader national effort: The Seattle area embraced the idea of charging residents with low incomes less to ride public transportation last year; Boston is examining the concept; and transit systems in cities like Charlotte and Denver offer discount passes through nonprofit groups.

But the idea of offering income-based fares in New York would be the biggest experiment of its kind yet. The citys subway and bus system is vast, with more than 7.5 million daily riders, and the plan would be expensive, especially at a time when the authority is financially strapped and struggling to cope with record ridership.

The Community Service Society of New York and Riders Alliance, an advocacy group for subway and bus riders, released a report this year calling for half-price MetroCards for New Yorkers with household incomes below the federal poverty level, about $24,000 for a family of four. If frequent riders applied for discounted fare cards at rates similar to those at which they seek public benefits like food stamps, the report found, about 360,000 people might participate at a cost to the authority of about $194 million a year in lost revenue.

In a letter to the mayor last month, supporters of the program urged Mr. de Blasio to include money for the program in his proposal for the next executive budget in January. The letter was signed by more than two dozen City Council members, as well as Letitia James, the public advocate, and Scott M. Stringer, the comptroller.
American presidents have been fond of hosting Pakistani dictators at Camp David. Now its the turn of Americans themselves to be ruled by a dictator, and of their own choosing. We, at least, never picked ours.

The U.S. election result will make democrats in my part of the world rethink terms like anti-establishment and working class. To them, it looks like white men and women led by a pretend-billionaire and real bigot are rebelling against other white men and women with slightly better manners. Those here who gloat over the Trump win are basically saying that those previous American presidents werent that different. Theyd put their arm around your shoulder and walk beside you for a bit, and then theyd stab you in the back. Trump kicks you while spitting on your face with a crowd cheering on.

The race was made to look like a fight between education-hungry, willing-to-do-anything immigrants and the white blue-collar working class ignored by the elite. But why would the struggling white working class vote for Trump? Because he is from the elite but doesnt have its pretensions? Do people really vote for one rich man in order to spite the other rich men?

I have seen pictures of your apartments, your private jet, your gold-plated crockery. Thanks for sharing. Heres my vote. Is that the essence of democracy that America has championed all over the world?

Pakistani democrats are quite fond of explaining away their own contradictions by saying, This is the beauty of democracy. One day the American nation is being asked how a person who cant handle his Twitter account will deal with nuclear codes. The next day that person is handed down those very codes. This is indeed the beauty of democracy. This is also the curse of democracy when democracy is practiced to keep brown and black people and women in their place.

Americans are often accused of being ignorant about the world, of not being able to tell their Mosul from their Kandahar, of having no memory of who they bombed and why. If the world beyond your borders doesnt really interest you, maybe there is some merit to staying home, cooking dinner and taking out the trash. But first stop calling each other trash and then decide whose turn it is to take it out.
To the Editor:

Re Anxiety, and Jokes, North of Border After U.S. Vote (news article, Nov. 10):

While the thought of hordes of well-heeled American citizens fleeing to Canada is kind of heartwarming, perhaps a note of caution is called for.

Anyone seriously thinking of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, should try a week or two in the winter. Also, some practice at standing on a hilltop to get decent cellphone reception would be advisable. Quebec has its own challenges: Try listening to The Apprentice in French before making that move.

Most important, why would we roll out the welcome mat for anyone who is too spineless to stay in his own homeland and fight for what he truly believes?

FRANK TAKER

Prescott, Ontario

To the Editor:

Count me as one of the people who are throwing in the towel.

As a Canadian citizen and a permanent resident of the United States for more than 45 years, I can say with confidence that the results of this election will reveal themselves in the long-term and permanent decline of this great country.
To the Editor:

Re Trump and Obama Meet to Break the Ice (front page, Nov. 11):

In 2008, Barack Obama was a president-elect who needed very little education in the challenges and dangers of the job. This is not the case with Donald Trump. Even the pundits who criticized Mr. Obama constantly for eight years and the millions who voted for Mr. Trump should appreciate that difference.

Mr. Trump, humbled by the ramifications of taking on the hardest job on earth, is seemingly willing to put away his childish campaign rhetoric. He seems to appreciate the schooling that Mr. Obama, always putting country first, is willing to give him.

Indeed, after the meeting, Mr. Trump said it was a great honor to meet the president; that the president was a good man who had informed him about many issues and, most significantly, that he hoped to meet with Mr. Obama in the future and receive his counsel before taking office.

That is encouraging.

JOHN E. COLBERT

Arroyo Seco, N.M.

To the Editor:

I believe in the peaceful transition of power as a cornerstone of American democracy, and President-elect Donald Trump, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Speaker Paul Ryan and the rest are behaving impeccably at the moment to ensure that goal. But a corrosive subtext is also apparent, and the people in the streets feel it.
To the Editor:

Re For Standing Up, Scorn (Business Day, Nov. 1):

On behalf of CWS, a global humanitarian organization and refugee resettlement agency, I commend Chobanis founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, for making the concerted effort to employ more refugees at his yogurt company. In a time of widespread xenophobia and hateful rhetoric, his compassion, boldness and good entrepreneurial sense are especially uplifting.

Through his own employment practices, he helps demonstrate that refugees are hardworking, productive members of our society, not the economic burden some suggest.

Mr. Ulukaya, an immigrant from Turkey, also warrants our praise for establishing a foundation that assists migrants, traveling to Greece to witness the refugee crisis firsthand and committing to give away most of his fortune to help refugees.

Mr. Ulukaya illustrates tangibly whats right about our country: longstanding values of hospitality, diversity and industry.
In this new weekly feature, we will surface some of the more thoughtful and provocative concerns that come into our office. The public editors column can only address so much and, though well reply to many of your comments, we unfortunately arent unable to reply personally to everything that lands in our inbox. By giving a weekly glimpse into our mailbag, we hope to give exposure to the fluctuating concerns of The Timess audience  and in doing so, help facilitate a better conversation between the Gray Lady and her readers.

This week, as you probably would guess, our inbox is inundated with readers reacting to one of the more astonishing presidential election surprises in modern history. As the returns were coming in Tuesday night, readers became increasingly concerned over how The Times could have so incorrectly forecasted the outcome. The public editors column addressed the issue on Wednesday, and the letters continue to stream in. Some complained of The Timess perceived liberal bias and think its New York newsroom is out of touch with much of America.

Here are some of the letters:

Despite being a liberal newspaper, one thought (at least I did) that there was strong journalism behind your reporting. You consistently had Hillary to win and often by huge margins! I recognize that bias exists in journalism but to be so far off? Lisa Lincoln, Walpole, Mass.

Though a lefty-liberal who is going through occasional tremors over a Trump presidency, your incredible bias during the race almost makes me glad he won. The NYT is in many ways the voice of wishy-washy and pro-Wall Street globalist liberalism that so many on both the right and the left hate  not to mention the many workers dispossessed by the free trade which you love so much. Thanks, at least, for giving me a reason to laugh in these incredibly surreal and rather sad times. Marc Rose, Portland, Ore.

Comments on Wednesdays public editor column generally echoed the sentiment.

You wore your prejudices on your sleeve and rarely, if ever, presented a balanced portrait of why Trump received the nomination and why he was attracting support and, even, admiration from thoughtful people in the heart of the nation. You are such a valuable part of this nations culture and you are putting your position at risk by allowing your editorial positions to flow so easily into your news articles. James Duncan, Santa Fe, N.M.

Try asking calmly, and with interest in these voters as human beings. This is important, because the vote was a protest vote and they did the only thing they could think of to get their voices heard. Ignore the voices of all kinds of people at your peril. mjb, Tucson, Ariz.

Public Editor Spayd writes: I hope its editors will think hard about the half of America the paper too seldom covers... Well, currently on the NY Times home page there is a headline: What You Get: $2,800,000 Homes in California, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. How about writing some real estate articles about What You Get for $50,000 (or less) in some of the so-called flyover states? How many readers can afford the houses regularly featured in What You Get? Windsor Morgan, Harrisburg, Pa.

Perhaps The Times should look at the backgrounds  ethnic, class, educational and geographic  of its reporters, editors and analysts. I am guessing theyre generally a homogeneous  and elite  bunch who treat traveling in America outside the East Coast like taking an anthropological field trip. Ellen D. Murphy, New England

Pamela Colloff, executive editor of Texas Monthly had this to say, on Twitter:
Mr. Ebell, who revels in taking on the scientific consensus on global warming, will be Mr. Trumps lead agent in choosing personnel and setting the direction of the federal agencies that address climate change and environmental policy more broadly.

Mr. Ebell, whose organization is financed in part by the coal industry, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the linchpin of that policy, the Clean Power Plan. Developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the plan is a far-reaching set of regulations that, by seeking to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation, could result in the closing of many coal-burning power plants, among other effects.

Mr. Ebell has said that the plan, which has been tied up in the courts since it was finalized in 2015, is illegal. In the interview in Paris last year, he said he hoped whoever was elected president would undo the E.P.A. power plant regs and some of the other regs that are very harmful to our economy.

As the person Mr. Trump has chosen to lead the transition at the E.P.A., Mr. Ebell, 63, will be in a position to begin to do just that.
Donald J. Trump rarely goes to church, said hes never sought forgiveness for his sins, and in his acceptance speech early Wednesday morning, never mentioned God.

Religion was almost invisible during the presidential campaign, and yet it is the missing piece in understanding Mr. Trumps victory. The Christian right worked largely under the national medias radar this year, but it helped deliver the presidency to a thrice-married mogul who bragged about groping women and has been accused by multiple women of actually doing it.

They were willing to forgive Mr. Trumps personal transgressions because he stoked their fears that a Hillary Clinton administration would take away their religious liberties, use their tax dollars to fund late-term abortions at home and abroad, and expand the rights of gay and transgender people, political analysts said. Mr. Trump warned at rallies and at conservative Christian gatherings that he alone was their last hope to protect them against a changing culture, using the refrain, This is your last chance.

Now that he has won, evangelical leaders say they are confident Mr. Trump will deliver on the political promises he made to them. These include appointing a conservative to the Supreme Court, defunding Planned Parenthood, protecting businesses that refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings and rescinding the mandate in the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance coverage for birth control.
On Tuesday night, Gwen Carr stood before a throbbing crowd at the Javits Center in Manhattan and talked about all the change Hillary Clinton would usher in.

Ms. Carr, whose son Eric Garner died in July 2014 after being placed in a chokehold by a police officer in Staten Island, then watched from a couch as Donald J. Trump won state after state. She and other Mothers of the Movement watching the results held hands and silently began to weep as it became clear there would be no victory to celebrate.

It was like somebody died when that news came through, Ms. Carr said.

Mrs. Clinton embraced Ms. Carr and the other mothers of black people killed by the police, and promised that she would crack down on any police mistreatment of minorities. But the election of Mr. Trump was seen by many as a repudiation of their message, as well as of the Black Lives Matter protests that have filled cities for the past two years. And it left questions about what policing would look like under Mr. Trump, who ran on a pledge to restore law and order.

Mr. Trump presented himself as the antidote to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has protested the killings of black people by the police. While black activists denounced instances of police brutality and racial profiling, Mr. Trump has said cities need more police officers and more use of stop and frisk tactics. While young organizers demanded a decrease in police funding and an increase in community programs, Mr. Trump vowed to put an end to a war on our police.
WASHINGTON  Before the election, it was clear that Democrats were looking at the very real prospect of scrapping the filibuster to keep Republicans from blocking the Supreme Court nominees of a President Hillary Clinton.

Now the tables are turned. It is the Republicans who will control the White House, Senate and House  the coveted Washington trifecta. And that raises a crucial question: If Democrats in the even more narrowly divided Senate embrace the filibuster to block what could be a flood of legislation, would Republicans respond by eliminating the 60-vote threshold in order to push their priorities through on simple majority votes?

In the afterglow of their election success, Republicans prefer not to discuss this unpleasant possibility. They would rather rhapsodize about a sunny legislative future in which the two parties work in harmony, negating the need for all those troublesome Senate cloture votes to try to break filibusters (a tactic that they, in fact, employed very effectively to stymie President Obama).

I think what the American people are looking for is results, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who will retain his majority leader title by virtue of surprising Republican victories, told reporters. And to get results in the Senate, as all of you know, it requires some Democratic participation and cooperation.
More than 1,000 people have shown interest on Facebook in a march in Louisville, Kentucky - the first state to be called for Donald Trump on election night. The march has been organized by people who say they are "against racism, misogyny, transphobia, and xenophobia."

The organized protests against a president-elect in the days after the election are largely unprecedented. In addition to New York City, where people demonstrated against Trump on Wednesday, more protests are planned in cities in blue, red, and swing states.

Immigrants, people of color, refugees, and members of the LGBT community are among those protesting various positions their next president promoted during his campaign.

President-Elect Donald Trump's victory in Tuesday's elections is being greeted by protests in several major U.S. cities.

 Facebook Event

The Facebook event also includes a link to the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, which details civilian rights during protests and demonstrations in the state, largely protected under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment Right to Free Speech.

A smaller protest will take place in Boise, Idaho, a city and state that both voted for Trump on Tuesday. Dozens of residents committed to fighting "against him every day for the next four years" plan to meet outside the state's capitol building.

More than 2,000 people have said they will be attending a protest against Trump in Minneapolis, a blue city in the state of Minnesota, where Hillary Clinton edged out Trump.

The event description for the protest calls for a peaceful protest against climate change denial, building the infamous wall on the border with Mexico, and attempts to "roll back" women's and LGBT rights.

And in the critical swing state of Ohio, which voted for Trump, nearly 600 people have said on Facebook they will be protesting in solidarity with the African-American, LGBT, and Latino/a communities outside the state's capitol.

 Anger Over Discrimination

Though a few protests, including an LGBT march planned in New York City, are being promoted by a specific community or with a specific platform in mind, many of the marches across the country are speaking out more broadly against discrimination, in protection of minority communities they say Trump attacked during his campaign.

Looking out further than this weekend, anti-Trump Americans have begun planning an inauguration day protest in Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in New York, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia and Boston to protest Donald Trump's election victory. There were few reports of violence or arrests.

 New York protest

A large crowd packed New York City's Fifth Avenue, directly in front of the Trump Tower where the president-elect lives, waving signs reading "Love Trumps Hate."

Another group gathered across from Trump's soon-to-be-home, the White House in Washington. Just down Pennsylvania Avenue, at the newly-opened Trump Hotel, protesters chanted "Say it loud, say it clear: Refugees are welcome here."

 West Coast, Midwest

Demonstrations were also held in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Minnesota's Twin Cities, Omaha, Nebraska and Kansas City, Missouri. Elsewhere on the United States' East Coast, demonstrations were held in Miami, Philadelphia and Boston, where protesters carried signs calling for Trump's impeachment and an end to the Electoral College, the constitutionally-established process that resulted in Trump winning the presidency despite his apparent narrow loss in the overall popular vote.

Even Texas, a solidly Republican state, saw demonstrations in its larger cities, including Dallas and the state capital, Austin. In Oakland, California, demonstrators burned trash in the streets and some store windows were smashed.

No one from the Trump staff has commented on the protests.

 Calls for Unity

In his victory speech Tuesday, Trump promised to be a president for all Americans, saying "It is time for us to come together as one united people."
The irony is that after 20 months of watching and listening to Donald Trump every day in the news, we now face this moment where it feels like we are staring into kind of a black hole.

That was Evan Osnos, a correspondent for The New Yorker, describing how difficult it is to anticipate what Mr. Trumps presidency might look like, given how unconventional his campaign was.

For a recent article, published before the election, Mr. Osnos spoke to more than 50 experts in an attempt to understand the actions that Mr. Trump could take in his first term.

In a phone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Osnos detailed some of his conclusions. We supplemented his reporting with our own to try to anticipate what Mr. Trump is likely to do once he takes office.
Two people familiar with the reorganization discussion said Jared Kushner, Mr. Trumps son-in-law, had wanted to marginalize Mr. Christie, who had come to recognize that he was not in the running to serve as a top adviser in Mr. Trumps White House. It was unclear whether concerns about his ability to be confirmed might prevent him from being offered a cabinet post.

The changes will also push aside Richard H. Bagger, a former top aide to Mr. Christie who had been working on the transition. The transition team said Mr. Bagger will return to the private sector but will remain an adviser.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Michael T. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general who has been a top campaign supporter, will also serve as vice chairmen of the transition, the transition team said Friday afternoon.

The 16-member advisory committee is made up of four women and 12 men. It will include several members of Congress; Rebekah Mercer, a top Republican donor; Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee; Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal; Attorney General Pam Bondi of Florida; Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive; and Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager and Trump supporter. Mr. Bannon will also serve on the committee. A political committee supporting Ms. Bondi received a $25,000 donation from the Trump Foundation, raising questions because it was around the time her office was reviewing allegations against Mr. Trumps for-profit education programs.

This team of experienced leaders will form the building blocks of our presidential transition team staff leadership roster, and will work with elected officials and tireless volunteers to prepare our government for the transfer of power on Jan. 20, Mr. Pence said in a statement.

There are some indications that the transition effort was slow to start, perhaps the result of Mr. Trumps upset victory, which caught much of the political world by surprise. At least a few of the people helping organize the search for Mr. Trump were tapped at the last minute, while others have been preparing quietly for weeks.

At the Pentagon and the State Department, officials of the Obama administration said on Thursday that they had not yet heard from Mr. Trumps transition team about beginning the complex work of transferring responsibilities and authority. A spokesman for the State Department said he did not have any firm word on when briefings might begin for designated officials from the new government.
On Tuesday, Wisconsinites chose a Republican for president, something they had not done since 1984, propelled by worries over the economy and a desire to shake up Washington. Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by about 1 percentage point, or about 27,000 votes. Some voters here said that they were encouraged by a flip to Republican control of Wisconsins Legislature and governors office six years ago, and favored Mr. Trump in the hopes that he would deliver more of the same to the nation.

Since 2011, we have made decisions one after another  some controversial, many, many bipartisan  to move Wisconsin forward, Robin Vos, the speaker of the State Assembly, said on Wednesday. And I think thats the model that we want to use as we go to look at what Washington, D.C., should do. Stick to your principles. Remember the people who actually sent you to get things done.

Wisconsins state-level switch to Republican control was not without a battle. In 2011, thousands of demonstrators furiously protested efforts to limit labor union power, including sharply cutting collective bargaining rights for most public-sector workers. Gov. Scott Walker soon faced a recall election, which he won. Labor unions shrank significantly in the state, and the Republicans pressed on with other parts of their agenda, including voter ID requirements and redrawing political maps. On Tuesday night, the Wisconsin Legislature remained firmly in the hands of Republicans, including what leaders described as their largest majority in the Assembly since 1956.

The Republicans didnt work with the Democrats at all, said Chris Larson, a state senator, who was among a group of Democratic lawmakers who fled to Illinois for weeks in 2011 in an unsuccessful attempt to block passage of the collective-bargaining cuts. They came in and just did everything as fast as they could. They jammed through everything. And pretty quickly, they had everything they wanted.

In more than a dozen interviews in Somers, a bedroom community on Lake Michigan dominated by farms, small businesses and a public university, many residents said they were pleasantly surprised to wake up to the news Wednesday morning that their state had flipped from blue to red.
As nations honored their war veterans on Friday  Armistice Day and Veterans Day a 19-year-old in California is trying to preserve as many voices of World War II veterans in the United States as he can.

Many of the veterans are in their twilight years, with ages in the late 80s and the 90s. The teenager, Rishi Sharma, has started a nonprofit organization, Heroes of the Second World War, to record video interviews with them for posterity.

Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, about 620,000 are still alive, and 372 die each day, according to the National World War II Museum.
Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets in several cities across the country for a second night on Thursday in protests against the election of Donald J. Trump as president.

In Portland, Ore., the police arrested 29 people while contending with what they described as an aggressive crowd of about 4,000 protesters and widespread reports of vandalism, fires and broken windows.

Due to extensive criminal and dangerous behavior, protest is now considered a riot, the Portland Police Department said on Twitter.

Sgt. Pete Simpson, a police spokesman, said Thursday that there were accounts of protesters with bats and drivers being attacked, but there were no reports of injuries.
SAN FRANCISCO  The West Coast has long prided itself as an engine for reinvention and progressive ideals, distinct from the rest of the country. But after Tuesdays election, the states bordering the Pacific Ocean feel increasingly like an island unto its own.

While large parts of the American electoral map, particularly in the industrial Rust Belt, turned more Republican in Tuesdays election, California went more Democratic, with 61.5 percent of voters choosing Hillary Clinton, the highest percentage for a Democratic presidential nominee since the re-election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

On social policies, the election made the Rockies look more like a border than a mountain range. In a raft of ballot measures, voters embraced causes like bilingual education, stricter gun control and taxes on sugary drinks. Amid Donald J. Trumps promises to slash taxes, voters in the West decided the opposite, raising taxes and voting to pour billions of dollars into schools and transportation. And the entire West Coast has legalized marijuana, now that California joined Washington and Oregon.

While there have been gestures of conciliation in Washington toward Mr. Trump, political leaders in the West were defiant. Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, said the election inspired him to team up with enlightened leaders in the West to push back aggressively against policies on immigration and the environment from the future Trump administration.


BEIJING  When Flappy McFlapperson and Skybomb Bolt sprang into the sky for their annual migration from wetlands near Beijing, nobody was sure where the two cuckoos were going. They and three other cuckoos had been tagged with sensors to follow them from northern China.

But to where?

These birds are not known to be great fliers, said Terry Townshend, a British amateur bird watcher living in the Chinese capital who helped organize the Beijing Cuckoo Project to track the birds. Migration is incredibly perilous for birds, and many perish on these journeys.

The answer to the mystery  unfolding in passages recorded by satellite for more than five months  has been a humbling revelation even to many experts. The birds journeys have so far covered thousands of miles, across a total of a dozen countries and an ocean. The common cuckoo, as the species is called, turns out to be capable of exhilarating odysseys.

Its impossible not to feel an emotional response, said Chris Hewson, an ecologist with the British Trust for Ornithology in Thetford, England, who has helped run the tracking project. Theres something special about feeling connected to one small bird flying across the ocean or desert.
BEIJING  Well, of course I kept my name when I married, said Yang Huiping, mystified at being asked about it as she polished the glass doors of an apartment block in Beijing.

My husband is called Zhao, but Im called Yang, the 47-year-old cleaner said. Its always been like that. Why would I change my name?

In Japan, under a 19th-century law upheld last year by the countrys Supreme Court, all married couples must use the same surname, and by overwhelming custom  in 96 percent of couples  women take their husbands name. Even in the United States, where feminism has influenced attitudes for decades, the rate is about 80 percent.

But in China, as in other Asian societies shaped by Confucian values, including Korea and Vietnam, women traditionally retain their surname at marriage. This is an expression not of marital equality, Chinese feminists are quick to note, but of powerful patriarchal values. A married woman continues to be identified by her fathers lineage.
President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has a reputation for salty language. But at a state dinner in Malaysia on Friday, the leader  who once called President Obama a son of a whore  displayed a penchant for sappy melodies and dulcet tones.

On a two-day state visit, Mr. Duterte and Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia found time for a bit of karaoke.

Mr. Duterte crooned Bette Midlers Wind Beneath My Wings, while Mr. Razak sang The Young Ones by Cliff Richard and the Shadows.
Because many parts of Canada rely on electricity produced by dams, hydro is often synonymous with electrical power and electrical utilities. The countrys efforts to cut emissions linked to climate change have, not surprisingly, renewed interest in hydroelectricity. But demonstrations in Labrador last month and research led by a Nova Scotia native now at Harvard that was published this week highlighted an often overlooked consequence of hydro dams  mercury buildup in the water behind them. Without costly and time-consuming remediation, they can poison indigenous people who live downstream.

Celtic sounds. While out in Cape Breton, my colleague Craig Smith spent time with Ashley MacIsaac, Natalie MacMaster, Christine Melanson and other musicians to learn the how the dirt gets into the islands famous fiddle music. He also discovered that when fiddlers from Cape Breton began traveling in greater numbers to Scotland about 30 years ago, they helped set off a revival of their music in the country where it began. Be sure to watch the Daily 360 video that accompanies Mr. Smiths story.

Across the border. While its unlikely that Americans unhappy with Donald J. Trumps election as president will lead a mass migration to Canada, the result of this weeks vote will probably create a wide range of challenges for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Perhaps at the top will be the question of how to go ahead with a carbon tax in Canada if Mr. Trump follows up on promises not to act on climate change in the United States. The Conservative opposition is already arguing that imposing such a tax in Canada without similar American action will disadvantage Canadian companies.

Canadas musical poet. While Leonard Cohen spent much of his life outside of Canada, he maintained in a house in Montreal. On Thursday, after the announcement of Mr. Cohens death at age 82, mourners gathered there with guitars to sing his songs, the best known of which is Hallelujah. Mr. Cohens sophisticated, magnificently succinct lyrics, with their meditations on love sacred and profane, were widely admired by other artists and gave him a reputation as, to use the phrase his record company concocted for an advertising campaign in the early 1970s, the master of erotic despair, Larry Rohter wrote in Mr. Cohens obituary.
Solopova says LinkedIn can appeal Thursday's ruling. The case was brought by Roskomnadzor, the Russian state telecommunications and media regulator.

The Moscow city court rejected LinkedIn's appeal against a ruling that it had broken a law that requires personal data on Russian citizens to be stored on servers within Russia, court spokeswoman Ulyana Solopova told The Associated Press.

LinkedIn's website was still accessible on Moscow internet connections as of Thursday afternoon, though Roskomnadzor representative Vadim Ampelonsky told the Interfax news agency that LinkedIn would be blocked as soon as the agency received the full text of the court's ruling, likely next week.

"LinkedIn's vision is to create economic opportunity for the entire global workforce," the company said in a statement. "The Russian court's decision has the potential to deny access to LinkedIn for the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses. We remain interested in a meeting with Roskomnadzor to discuss their data localization request."

Russia's main antitrust regulator, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS), also announced Thursday it had opened a case against Microsoft, which is in the process of concluding a $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn.

 Separate Case Against Microsoft

The FAS said Microsoft was accused of abusing a dominant market position by failing to give enough time for anti-virus developers to adapt to the Windows 10 operating system, allowing them a matter of days rather than the two months allowed previously. The FAS argues that gave an unfair advantage to Microsoft's own Windows Defender, anti-virus software built into the operating system, and hurt competitors including Russia's Kaspersky Lab, which filed a complaint to the regulator.

"Such actions lead to an unjustified advantage for Microsoft in the program market. Our task is to ensure equal conditions for all participants in this market," FAS deputy head Anatoly Golomolzin said in a statement.

Kaspersky spokeswoman Yulia Shlychkova said the company was also preparing a complaint to be sent to the European Commission.

Company founder Eugene Kaspersky accused Microsoft of trying to drive anti-virus software makers out of the Windows market, adding in a blog post that "a dominating antivirus is a security threat in and of itself."
But that is nowhere near the total that officials worry could be in danger once the fighting moves to the most populated areas across the Tigris on the west side of Mosul, which is still believed to be home to at least one million people. Reports from inside the city indicate that the Islamic State has set up elaborate defenses on the banks of the Tigris, including artillery pieces.

The United Nations said that militants were reported to have shot six civilians on Oct. 20 for keeping hidden SIM cards in defiance of an order to surrender them. A week later, a 27-year-old man was killed for keeping a cellphone, she added.

Among the witnesses to the recent killings was the sole survivor from a group of 50 former members of Iraqs security forces who was abducted by militants, taken to the Mosul airport and shot. Although wounded, he pretended to be dead, escaped, and we spoke to him, she said.

Meanwhile, a mass grave discovered on Monday by Iraqi troops near an agricultural college in the town of Hamam al-Alil was only one among numerous sites of large-scale killings, Ms. Shamdasani said. The grave contained at least 100 corpses, but Islamic State fighters were also reported to have dumped bodies down a well and at a cement factory yard in the same town, and at several other locations including the Mosul airport and in the Tigris.

On a lengthening list of atrocities reported from Mosul, militants had deployed sons of the Caliphate, believed to be teenagers or younger, around the old town armed with explosive belts. They had also brought abducted women, some of them members of Iraqs Yazidi minority, into the city to distribute them as slaves for their fighters.

Interviews with residents inside Mosul in recent days indicate a pattern of brutality by the Islamic State much like what the United Nations has been reporting, including an increase in the number of boys on the streets carrying rifles and swords. One resident told The New York Times that the Islamic State in recent days had executed 18 former security force members and driven their bodies in the back of a pickup truck to a freshly dug mass grave.

In addition to the Islamic States forcibly moving civilians into Mosul for use as human shields to deter attack, the United Nations said it had credible reports of the groups fighters using chemical weapons and chemical agents like chlorine gas against advancing Iraqi and Kurdish forces. Ms. Shamdasani said that Iraqi troops entering the city had found large quantities of sulfur and ammonia stockpiled in civilian areas of the city.
WASHINGTON  President-elect Donald J. Trump will enter the White House having promised to radically alter United States foreign policy, with ramifications for Americans and the world.

But its not yet clear how. Mr. Trump offered vague and sometimes contradictory proposals during his campaign, with few of the typical details or white papers. Voters, foreign policy professionals and the countrys allies are all, to a real extent, left guessing.

Here, then, is a rundown of what we know about Mr. Trumps foreign policy ideas and what some experts say about their feasibility and likely ramifications.

What are Mr. Trumps proposed policies?

Mr. Trump has repeatedly emphasized a set of ideas that would reduce Americas role in the world. He said he would take unilateral action, move away from traditional allies and move closer to adversaries.
It should be easier to save money for retirement. We can all agree on that, right?

But about half of all Americans who work in the private sector do not have access to an employer-based retirement plan like a 401(k). Federal legislation to increase those numbers has not amounted to much. And fledgling state efforts, while welcome, seem most likely to create the same confusion we now have with college savings and the patchwork of differing 529 plans all over the land.

A requirement that employers siphon money out of every employees paycheck and put it into a retirement savings plan (unless the worker opts out) would both promote self-reliance and create a foundation for a safety net. So is it too much to hope that a president-elect who promised to throw the rope back to people who feel left behind might agree to something like this?

First, let us consider the facts on the ground and bow our heads in collective shame. We are decades out from having more or less abandoned private pensions, yet we have replaced them, in many instances, with nothing at all.

 Of the roughly half of private sector workers who do not have workplace savings plans, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office study, many work for small businesses, the engines for supposed growth and prosperity.
How did you approach your next big role after a blockbuster like Downton Abbey?

I wasnt out to do something outrageously different just because. I read the script and was hooked, couldnt put it down, completely fell in love with the character and the story.

Did you worry about being typecast?

It didnt happen, it seems, so I didnt have to worry. [Laughs.] I think its the opposite, actually. You just cant get away from the fact that we were those characters in Downton Abbey. So a modern part makes more sense. Otherwise its like Lady Mary in another period drama.

Letty seems to be less a hostage than a willing participant on a thrill ride.

Letty enjoys the reckless sense of danger that her life often involves. But its more than that. With Javier, they sort of smash into one another and discover an understanding in that theyre both loners. They live on the outskirts of society and find it difficult to live a normal life. Theres a chemistry that they havent seen in anyone else. And now that theyve found each other, they really cant be apart.

Lady Mary was a clothes horse but Letty is a master of disguise.

Lettys disguises are really her way of escaping through the masks of these women she puts on. It often starts with a wig, and each one has its own personality.

Youve said that characters who are not necessarily likable are the most fun to play.

Like with The Sopranos or Nurse Jackie  or even Lady Mary, particularly in the last [season]  theyre characters that you go through phases with. Youre rooting for them but you dont always approve of their behavior. Yet you understand their predicament. Its about playing a character that is more than just one thing, as we all are. And were seeing more and more female roles that are multifaceted, with vulnerability, humor.
When we first reconnect with her, she has been toiling for many years and many more miles  from New York City to Valley Forge to the Carolina swamps  to track down her beloved epileptic younger sister, Ruth, shipped off to a Charleston plantation. Ruth is at last found but is not so glad to be found as Isabel had hoped, and the sisters future course is by no means clear. The upheavals of war have left Americas slaves (stolen people, Isabel calls them) in a state of uneasy autonomy. Some were searching for kin, like us. Others were seeking a safe spot of ground they could call their own. . . . All of us who wandered thus owned only the clothes on our backs. We relied on our wits to keep us fed. We traded information like coin. Through this treacherous and shifting landscape, Isabel and her party wend their way north, only to be stopped once again by the war  in this case, the extended siege of Yorktown. Pinned down on yet another battlefront, Isabel must grapple with where her political allegiances lie and, at long last, gauge her true feelings for Curzon, her longtime companion in adventure and woe.

Ashes isnt the most powerful book in Andersons trilogy. It contains no moment quite so harrowing as Isabels branding in the first volume, nor any characters quite so diabolical as the loyalist Mrs. Lockton or the patriot Bellingham. As for the climactic battle, Isabel is the first to acknowledge its not a guns-blazing showdown but a campaign of attrition. In this, it bears some resemblance to Andersons work, for the cumulative impact of Ashes derives, at least in part, from our having followed these characters through such a long and weary pilgrimage. A third of Isabels life has been spent under wars shadow, and any redemptive moments become all the sweeter for being so hard-won.

Beneath the sweetness, though, lurks an unreconcilable bitterness. Isabel and Curzon, in the midst of calling each other names like muzzy-headed blatherskite and vexatious cabbagehead, argue over which army has their true interests at heart. Curzon, in thrall to the rebel cause, harkens to the dream of a nation built on freedoms. Isabel reminds him that they have been enslaved by patriots and loyalists alike and that neither side was talking about freedom for people who looked like us. In perhaps the books most stirring moment, she declares: I am my own army. My feet and legs, my hands, arms and back, those are my soldiers.

Ashes ends on a note of precarious hope, but Anderson allows the inherent contradictions of the American Revolution to linger unresolved. She pays her young readers the ultimate compliment of not writing down to them, of letting them see how bitter and bloody  and incomplete  a nations birth can be.
Then comes a perhaps too-brief look at what some might think is Whites greatest accomplishment, his work as a stylist in the 1930s and 40s for The New Yorker. White invested his sentences with a new kind of wry simplicity that became a model for a lot of 20th-century American prose. He wrote as a wide-eyed outsider to New York and its anxieties, and that let him say many things that the ornate insider prose of the Algonquin circle, which had dominated the magazine, could not.

His friendship with James Thurber is mentioned and that they loved each others stuff, but  perhaps understandably in a book meant for ages 8 to 12, perhaps too prudishly in a book meant to tell them biographical truth  not the title, much less the matter, of the collaborative book that made them famous: Is Sex Necessary?

The bulk and heart of Sweets book, though, is spent telling how Whites two best childrens tales, Charlottes Web and Stuart Little, along with the third, only slightly less good one, The Trumpet of the Swan, came into being, the latter two after his semiretirement to Maine. Even those who think they know the books well will learn a lot, and enjoy them more, for reading Sweet. She tells the story of how Harold Ross objected to the idea that Stuart, the dapper mouse, was born to the Little family  White should have said that he was adopted  and of how White in later editions compromised, wonderfully, with arrived. She takes us through Whites many beleaguered drafts of the first sentence of Charlottes Web: First, Charlotte was a gray spider who lived in the doorway of a barn; then I shall speak first of Wilbur; only to arrive at last at the active, scene-setting, Wheres Papa going with that ax? There can be few better demonstrations of why good writers rewrite, and how a good writer knows when hes finally got it.

Making much, and not wrongly, of the pastoral charm of the book, Sweet does not, perhaps, sufficiently underline its ironic, dryly witty and, in its own muted, stoical manner, even tragic aspect. There are not many more poignant deaths in American literature than Charlottes, and the book, from that dread-filled first sentence, is all about death  the Christmas murder of animals, the brutal messiness of the farm and the real circle of life, dramatized in a manner considerably more acid than the benevolent circles of life in The Lion King. The real circle of life, Charlotte reminds us, is not so much a circle as a chain  forever being broken so that no one link stays in for long. Will the circle be unbroken? the hymn asks, and Whites answer is that it breaks every day, with look-alike new links sneaking in overnight, so that what looks like renewal is really replacement. Charlottes children extend Charlottes influence in Wilburs life, but theyre not Charlotte.

That so many generations of American kids have been stirred and moved by a book with such a morbid subject is a reminder that what kids like is emotional truth, even when wrapped up in animal fable. We protect them at our peril. One should also note that Charlottes Web is, in the first instance, a satire of modern advertising: In truth, Wilbur is not Some Pig. Hes just a pig. Whites point is that Charlotte is some writer. So if we go on reading White, and we should, it will be as the owner of a disabused mind and a fine, clear eye, not as a lovable backwoods bard. Nothing worse can happen to a fine writer than to be turned into a piece of Americana.
In spare, lyrical language Rebecca Young describes the voyage in just enough words to let us know the boy is sometimes sad, sometimes lonely and sometimes purely awed by the majesty of the world around him. Whales calling to each other remind him of his mothers calls. He has suffered a great loss, but the illustrations of the magnificent gray whales swimming by the boat make us think that the spirit of his mom is still with him and the whales are helping to protect him.

A seed sprouts in the soil in his teacup, growing into a beautiful tree that gives shade to the boy when he reaches land. He eats fruit from the tree and starts his new life, complete with a new friend who can share his home. Readers will be left satisfied and at peace.

In Barrouxs Welcome, polar bears are the refugees. Three bears are sitting together when their bit of ice breaks off from the mainland and floats away. The bears travel around the ocean looking for a safe place to land as their ice floe gets smaller and smaller. They come to a country full of cows and ask to come in, but the cows say no because the bears are too furry. They find a land of giraffes, but the giraffes are too busy having tea to hear the cries of the bears. Finally, the bears find a new home that they dont have to share with anyone  until a boatload of monkeys reaches their shore. Will the bears do to the monkeys what was done to them, or will they remember their own journey and behave better?

There is a happy ending, one that offers a sense of joy and satisfaction, not just because the bears (and monkeys) are now safe, but also because its clear the bears had the ability to choose how they wanted to be, and they chose to be kind.

The story is simply and eloquently told. The illustrations are bright and accessible, with thick brush strokes and whimsical, big square snouts on the polar bears. Although the story in Welcome mirrors the current refugee crisis, it could also be relevant to a child starting a new school or trying to find a place to fit in.

Gie Gie, the girl in The Water Princess, goes on a daily journey with her mother. They rise every day before the sun, put large pots on their heads and walk for miles across the dry earth to fetch water. The Water Princess is based on the early life of the model Georgie Badiel, who, we learn in an afterword, grew up in Burkina Faso and has started a foundation that is partnering with Ryans Well to bring clean water to African communities.

Susan Verde has created a character in Gie Gie who dreams big and has big emotions. The illustrations by Peter H. Reynolds draw us into the world of this likable child. When Gie Gie is mad, we can feel her frustration. When she finally gets to drink, we can feel the water trickling down her parched throat. The orange of the desert sands and the deep purple of the night sky make us feel we are in rural West Africa.

This is a hopeful book about a problem that can be easily solved. The refugee problem is more complex, but we can tackle it if, like the Welcome bears, we simply decide to be kind.
NICOTINE

By Nell Zink

288 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

Nicotine is an addictive stimulant, and so is Nicotine, the new novel by Nell Zink. Following her widely admired debut, The Wallcreeper, in 2014, and a second novel, Mislaid, in 2015, Nicotine is intellectually restless, uniquely funny and, I would argue, her best yet. Its disarming heroine, 23-year-old Penny Baker, was brought up around sweat lodges and drum circles, the daughter of animist drug freaks; when we catch up with her in 2016 shes in possession of a business degree and tending her father, Norm, an aging healer-guru, in a hospice. The affection between them is palpable. Penny proves herself caring and loyal  a truepenny  during Norms decline, which Zink has artfully fashioned as the overture to the high-spirited comedy that makes up the rest of the novel.

In need of a place to live, Penny visits Jersey City to check out her fathers abandoned childhood home, where she finds that the house has been named Nicotine and is occupied by an approachable band of squatters, ostracized by other activist households because of their tobacco habits. The group at Nicotine  Rob, Jazz, Sorry, Anka and Tony  has a motley collection of aims. As Sorry puts it: Live one day at a time, and try to afford cigarettes by living in New Jersey. Penny is smitten right off not only with the freegan scavenger Rob but with the entire collective scene. At Tranquility, a nearby house where Penny interviews for a room, shes game for any topic on the table, which in this case happens to be the awesomeness of puppets: Why shouldnt loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare? . . . Puppets it is! Big ones! Faced with Sunshine, a man most often seen in the kind of footed sleeper also known as a onesie, shes ready with a compliment: Theres dignity in trying to save energy. In this new milieu, Penny herself is quickly prized. Having been called koala half her life, she knows she has a cara de buena persona. She also knows that her bodys bootylicious.

The novel develops around Pennys psychic replenishment, her hairy family relationships and the fate of Nicotine and its residents. Zinks narrative is propulsive, wonderfully stuffed with irreverent and absorbing banter among these characters who move in slightly off-kilter orbits, as if their wills are counterweighed by ballasts of personal history that we can only guess at. Here, for instance, is Jazz on sexuality: To me, eroticism is transcendent. It has a will of its own. And heres Penny, decrying the save-the-world claims that start-up companies make to their investors, even when all theyve got is an app that tells you when to refill the dog dish. And Anka, commenting on Robs popularity: Its a market. The heterosexual economy that Rob dominates with his scarcity.
At the height of his fame in the 1940s and 50s, Algren did not want for admirers  foremost among them Ernest Hemingway, who confided to his editor that Algrens second novel, Never Come Morning (which had raised the ire of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America for its unsavory description of Polish life in Chicago), was as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago as James T. Farrell is flat, repetitious and worthless. On behalf of Algrens next effort, The Man With the Golden Arm, Hemingway raised an even blunter cudgel against writers who werent two-fisted enough: Into a world of letters where we have the fading Faulkner and where that overgrown Lil Abner Thomas Wolfe casts a shorter shadow each day, Nelson Algren comes like a corvette. . . . Truman Capote fans grab your hats, if you have any, and go. This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch. No hats, mind; we all know what that means. But then, Algren himself wasnt above renting a monkey suit when his third novel won the National Book Award. A despondent reporter for the defunct Hobo News, watching his hero take a plaque from Eleanor Roosevelt, prompted a New York Times correspondent to quote Brownings threnody: Just for a handful of silver he left us / Just for a riband to stick on his coat.

What Hemingway or The Hobo News thought of Algrens romance with the existential feminist Simone de Beauvoir isnt recorded in these pages, though its likely they heard about it at some point, along with just about anyone else who read books in English or French. The affair began in 1947 and was immortalized seven years later in Beauvoirs roman a clef, The Mandarins, where Algren appears as the American writer Lewis Brogan. One gleans from this portrayal that it wasnt Algrens charm or lapidary prose that most attracted Beauvoir, so much as his being a palatable sexual alternative to her usual boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre. On paper the match is hard to figure. Its true the younger Algren was something of a heartthrob as novelists go  an amalgam of Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, his friend Art Shay recalled, with a healthy dash of Woody Allen  but his main reaction to the girlfriend he called Crazy Frog seemed a kind of irritated puzzlement, and he later claimed that he never understood a word she said. Above all, he deplored her slavish devotion to Sartre, who insisted on their pursuing contingent love affairs while otherwise living as a de facto married couple. Anybody who can experience love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped, Algren wrote in 1965, officially killing whatever lingered of the romance. Procurers are more honest than philosophers.

Algrens peculiar mix of boorishness and sensitivity is nicely illuminated by his interlude with Beauvoir, and throughout Wisniewski characterizes him with laudably objective empiricism. The Chicago bookseller Stuart Brent is one of many who remember him as a good listener, an essentially diffident man who was quiet and careful in his speech; he also stole books from the store, as Brent later discovered to his dismay. Nor did Algren shrink from obloquy, though he professed shock at the sometimes cruel indiscretions  especially the ones visited on himself  in Beauvoirs work. In 1973, angered by the meager sales of The Last Carousel, Algren told the Chicago Daily News that his editor at Putnam, Bill Targ, was an inept blob. Targ fired back with a letter describing Algren as a liar, an ingrate and a turd. Algren, delighted, kept the letter folded in his wallet and liked to produce it for his friends amusement.

Wisniewski is astute about the relative merits of Algrens work, and I was especially pleased when she remarked of the last novel published during his lifetime, A Walk on the Wild Side, that it was more fun to read than the others. Ah, I thought, she gets it. Which is to say: Algren had a fine ear for the nuances of Chicago Polonia dialect, and the felicities of his prose are many, and cumulative, but  well, getting through it all can be a slog. Wisniewski is not above describing Algrens unfinished novel, Entrapment, as a picaresque muddle, an apt phrase for most of his longer fiction. Given her grasp of this basic failing, I had to wonder why she felt constrained to summarize his plots so exhaustively.  Somebody in Boots doesnt have much of a story, she concedes of Algrens first novel, after a rambling blow by blow, then points out that its lack of suspense, humor and character growth is also a problem: It is a tough read. Perhaps its for the best, then, that shes saved us the bother.

As far back as 1956, the critic Leslie Fiedler dismissed Algren as a museum piece, and indeed Wisniewskis hopes for his reputation seem on the modest side. At the end of her book, she remembers covering an Occupy Wall Street protest for Reuters and stopping to chat with a young man who mentioned an interest in reading The Man With the Golden Arm. Algren may not be taught in classrooms alongside Hawthorne and Austen, Wisniewski bravely concludes, but in backpacks across America, Algren still lives. Especially if the backpacker in question has heard of Simone de Beauvoir.
Cruelty, Slouka tells us, is not in his nature. This revelation is a release. Careful not to demonize her, he battles his rage and love (or duty, anyway) and the biological imperative he feels to protect the person who gave him life. He sets about tackling the enormous task at hand: overcoming his discomfort with unraveling complicated truths, both personal and political. Describing a scene in 1938, for instance, when the formal announcement is made that Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist, days before Sloukas father will observe through blue curtains as Hitlers motorcade passes through Brno, the author writes: Theres no ambiguity: Adjust or die.

This instruction becomes the mandate that Slouka himself will later follow, creeping around his mothers moods, careful and conciliatory, not knowing what he did wrong other than grow up.

He does not attempt to diagnose Olgas condition. It might have stemmed from the incest she endured: impregnated by her Nazi sympathizer father at 19 and rushed into marriage. But then she might be bipolar, or her behavior might result from the benzodiazepines she was addicted to for 30 years. The particulars of her madness are ultimately beside the point. It is the effect and feelings  the shrapnel from the explosion  Slouka is interested in. How and where her rage was deployed, and the lasting damage it caused.

Embedded in all of this is a tragic love story between Sloukas mother and a man she truly loved. Slouka writes forgivingly of her affair with F., revealing that she could experience joy, even illicitly. They met at a language camp in Moravia in the summer of 1946, when she was 20 years old and already married to Zdenek. Both were Roman Catholic; the situation was hopeless. They broke up, but continued to see each other before she was forced into exile across the border. F. looked for her once in America, to no avail. In 1975, they miraculously recognized each other across a crowded intersection on a highway in Czechoslovakia. She would spend the next four or five summers with him there, pilfered interludes of happiness, and then return to her family in America in the fall. Slouka knew of this affair, and sanctioned it. After F. dies, his mothers heart flattens out.

Zdenek saved himself, eventually divorcing and remarrying. Slouka saves himself by cleaving to his own family  the one he creates. Olga returns to the Czech Republic alone, never loving her grandchildren, still at war with herself, her fury at the world undiminished by time or circumstance.

The story is spun like a Spirograph. Reflections swirl into a complex history that loops back and forth in time. The author, a novelist and essayist, has taught writing for years, and his thoughtful and erudite reflections deepen the narrative and infuse it with compassion.

Its just that he reflects an awful lot. Perhaps we could have done with less about Sloukas unease regarding this emotional Goliath  the prospect of humiliating and betraying his mother  since the question of fairness is the starting line any memoirist must arrive at before beginning. When he addresses the reader directly (before a particularly disturbing passage he was hesitant to include), the confession seems misplaced. I want to reassure him: The passage is there because it needs to be.
Just two days after his stunning election victory, President-elect Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, visited the White House, invited by President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.

No press was allowed to film their arrival Thursday, but the president and the president-elect gave brief statements to reporters in the Oval Office after the meeting.

Despite a long history of animosity between Obama and Trump, both were gracious.

"I just had the opportunity to have an excellent conversation with President-elect Trump, Obama said. It was wide-ranging. We talked about some of the organizational issues in setting up the White House; we talked about foreign policy, we talked about domestic policy, and, as I said last night, my number one priority in the coming two months is to try to facilitate a transition that insures our president-elect is successful."

Trump told reporters the meeting was supposed to last about ten minutes but lasted 90, and it could have gone on even longer.

"I look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel," he said. "He explained some of the difficulties and the high-flying assets and some of the wonderful things that have been achieved. Mr. President, it was wonderful meeting with you and I look forward to meeting with you many more times in the future."

The White House said Obama officials are making sure that Trump and his yet-to-be-named key officials are "prepared from day one to protect our national security." U.S. intelligence and defense officials are starting to give Trump daily briefings on threats to the country's security and overseas military operations.

In addition, the Obama administration plans to host two exercises involving several government agencies to help familiarize Trump officials with how the government responds to domestic emergencies, whether terrorist attacks or such natural disasters as violent tornadoes and hurricanes.
Seven new paperbacks to check out this week.



THE PATIENT WILL SEE YOU NOW: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands, by Eric Topol. (Basic Books, $17.99.) Smartphones have created the potential to shift the power dynamic between people and their doctors, allowing patients to assert more agency and control over their health care. Soon, Topol predicts, phones could routinely aid in diagnoses; grant patients greater access to their medical records; and even perform some tests  ushering in a revolution in the field.

SUBMISSION, by Michel Houellebecq. Translated by Lorin Stein. (Picador, $16.) Its 2022 in France, and an Islamic party has risen to power. Francois, a bored literature professor, is offered an irresistible deal: a position at a prestigious university and the chance to partake of the joys of polygamy. Houellebecqs morally complex novel follows an ambivalent society losing sight of its values.

MARY McGRORY: The Trailblazing Columnist Who Stood Washington on Its Head, by John Norris. (Penguin, $18.) McGrory, a longtime Nixon foe, was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for her work on the Watergate scandal; in addition, her columns eulogizing John F. Kennedy and excoriating the Vietnam War are enduring monuments. As McGrory herself put it: I have always felt a little sorry for people who didnt work for newspapers.

THE VEGETARIAN, by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. (Hogarth, $15.) Grisly nightmares drive Yeong-hye, an unhappy housewife in Seoul, to give up eating meat, inadvertently bringing yet more violence into her life. The ramifications of her decision, including violations of her body and mind, are explored in this novel from the perspectives of her husband, her older sister and her brother-in-law.
Because the Grimms wanted to celebrate German culture, they made changes  over the course of seven editions  to weed out foreign influences and reflect their own moral values. The tales have never ceased evolving, interpreted again and again by writers and artists who saw something  perhaps worrisome, perhaps delightful  that they wanted to explore. Two new books, The Singing Bones, by the Australian author and illustrator Shaun Tan (The Arrival, Rules of Summer), and Snow White, by the American graphic novelist Matt Phelan (Bluffton, The Storm in the Barn), take unexpected approaches to the tales and come up with something new for readers past the age for picture books.

Much of what we know about the Grimms comes from the work of the fairy tale scholar and translator Jack Zipes. In an introduction to The Singing Bones, Zipes writes that if it if hadnt been for illustrations, the tales would never have become popular. When the Grimms first published them without pictures in 1812, sales were sluggish; it was only when they saw a successful English translation with drawings by the satirist George Cruikshank that they realized illustrations would allow them to reach a wider readership.

Image From The Singing Bones.

The Singing Bones definitely tips the balance of art-to-text toward illustration: Tan gives his readers only a few sentences from each of 75 stories, accompanied by a full-page photograph of his starkly lit sculptures. The best of these, often in the red, black and white palette we associate with the tales, have a look reminiscent of Inuit art; they appear simplified and smoothed by many hands. Their scale is hard to gauge. They seem simultaneously monumental and small enough to tuck in a pocket, like Japanese netsuke. As the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman puts it in his introduction, Tan makes me want to pick them up, inspect them from unusual angles, feel the heft and weight of them. He makes me wonder what damage I could do with them, how badly I could hurt someone if I hit them with a story.

Gaiman (whose clever, feminist reworking of Sleeping Beauty was illustrated in a quite literal style by Chris Riddell) makes a strong case for Tans approach: The sculptures are, in themselves, stories: not the frozen moments in time that a classical illustration needs to be. These are something new, something deeper.
Ashers debut, Thirteen Reasons Why, was a best seller for nearly a decade. What Light has been around just as long in concept, and it harks back to a simpler time of young adult storytelling, with its linear first-person narrative (just one!) and classic themes of forgiveness, hope and the power of true love. Even Calebs violence feels innocent compared with acts of his peers in recent novels. But as with holiday traditions, theres something beautiful about a novel done the old way, particularly when theres enough heart to make you weep.

Image

HOLDING UP THE UNIVERSE

By Jennifer Niven

391 pp. Knopf, $17.99. (Young adult; ages 13 and up)

What happens when a boy who cant recognize faces sees one he cant ignore? What happens when that face belongs to a girl formerly known as Americas Fattest Teen, a girl who had to be cut out of her home when, after her mothers death, she became too fat to leave it? Libby Strout weighs 351 pounds, down from 653. Returning to high school as a junior, she meets Jack, a master at fitting in, who has a secret: He has prosopagnosia, which means that every time he sees a face (including his girlfriends and his moms), its new to him. He uses identifiers like ears that stick out to keep track of whom hes supposed to know. In the wake of a cruel prank, Jack reveals his face blindness to Libby. They end up in school counseling together, slowly connecting.

Niven (All the Bright Places) alternates between Jacks perspective and Libbys, ricocheting forward and backward in time. Whether the pair can be together is the question propelling the book  pretty standard fare, but Niven is adept at creating characters, and at saving the books sight-and-blindness messaging from being cloying. Libby has survived not only her mothers death but also ridicule that would fell most adults, and her courage and body-positivity make for a joyful reading experience. Jack, a boy who desperately wants to see and finds himself able to do so in ways he didnt expect, provides a worthy counterpart.

Image

GIRL MANS UP

By M-E Girard

373 pp. HarperTeen/HarperCollins, $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up)

There are four of us dudes sitting here right now, and I kick all of their butts when it comes to video games  and Im not even a dude, says Pen (for Penelope) Oliveira in Girards debut novel. Her status as one of the guys means shes expected to help reel in hot girls for her best friend, Colby, an act she justifies because maybe someday, when I finally man up, one of these girls could end up liking me instead.

Pen knows who she is  the problem is other people. I dont feel wrong inside myself, she explains. But her traditional Portuguese mom and dad criticize her for dressing like a punk druggie and lament that she has cut off her long hair. Strangers mock or menace her. Colby and the guys use and abuse her. Only her older brother, Johnny, truly gets her. Then she meets Blake, who is as interested in Pen as Pen is in her, and Olivia, Colbys ex-girlfriend, who listens without judgment and needs Pens help. In them, Pen finds firmer ground to be herself. Girards novel is compulsively readable, by turns wrenching and euphoric. Pen is an inspiration to anyone whos struggled to be understood, and a vital addition to the growing world of genderqueer protagonists.
WHEN THE MOON WAS OURS

By Anna-Marie McLemore

273 pp. Thomas Dunne/St. Martins Griffin, $18.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up)

McLemores second novel is such a lush, surprising fable, you half expect birds to fly out of its pages. But magic realism is more than special effects. When the Moon Was Ours is about identity  the love story of Miel, a girl whose wrist sprouts roses, and Sam, a transgender boy who paints moons and sets the canvases in trees. McLemore uses the supernatural to remind us that the bodys need to speak its truth is primal and profound, and that the connection between two people is no more anyones business than why the dish ran away with the spoon. Sam lives as a boy, inspired by his Pakistani grandmothers stories about the bacha posh custom, in which girls are raised as males to protect sisters  and he fears he will be expected revert to his correct gender one day. Miels fantastical history sparks its own trauma. Still, she cares for him in a label-obliterating way: It was his body. It was his to name. And he was under this roof of gold and darkness with a girl who would learn to call him whatever he named himself. In an authors note, McLemore talks about her transgender husband, and you realize the novel is a love letter. Theres a reason Miel is so moved by Sams lunar paintings in trees: Hes hanging the moon.

Image

STILL LIFE WITH TORNADO

By A.S. King

295 pp. Dutton, $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up)

A 16-year-old girl named Sarah hands her art teacher a blank piece of paper and says, Ive lost the will to participate. Its a funny, deadpan moment  but she means it. Sarah spends much of Kings ninth novel skipping school and wandering around Philadelphia in an existential funk. She rides buses, tails a homeless artist she believes is living an original life and considers changing her name to Umbrella. In a beautifully matter-of-fact use of the supernatural that brings Haruki Murakami to mind, Sarah also meets herself at the ages of 10, 23 and 40, and circles closer to some stark truths about her family. Still Life With Tornado is a moving, unapologetically strange, skillfully constructed novel about how sometimes the most broken home on the block is the one where the parents are still pretending their marriage works. (Spike Jonze should buy the movie rights immediately.) Kings insights about parenting, denial and abuse are so raw and true, grown-ups may want to avert their eyes. But she is a witty, humane writer. Sarah at 40 is the most well adjusted, so a happy ending always floats just ahead of our heroine, like a firefly. Read this book, whatever your age. You may find its the exact shape and size of the hole in your heart.
There is little sign of this trend slowing, only accelerating. Facebook and Google represent the largest and most successful advertising-funded businesses in history. They are busy developing technologies that track not only our attention but also every aspect of our online behavior and, in Facebooks case, synthesizing it with what is known as our social graph. That graph is the circle of colleagues, acquaintances, families and friends we connect with online and determines as a result what type of advertising and even what type of news or other content we see. We are largely unaware of how the hidden tracking technologies operate and are complicit in how much we surrender.

From his historical perspective, Wu can see that often a moment such as this one, in which our eyeballs are so thoroughly monopolized, is followed by resistance. But his concern is that we have not individually or collectively paid enough attention to the commercialization of every part of our lives: Our society has been woefully negligent about what in other contexts we would call the rules of zoning, the regulation of commercial activity where we live, figuratively and literally. It is a question that goes to the heart of how we value what used to be called our private lives.

Clearly not a fan of the selfie stick or the culture of microfame, Wu sees a tendency to self-aggrandize online, turning us all into miniature attention merchants. As the man who coined the term net neutrality and a skilled thinker about the importance of an open web, Wu is nevertheless largely disappointed about where the internet has taken us. In a chapter titled The Web Hits Bottom he describes in some detail the business model of the new-media company BuzzFeed and the quest for virality. Wu is steadfastly skeptical, seeing little to admire online. Though he briefly describes bright spots like Wikipedia and Reddit and name-checks online legacy media that he grudgingly admits have improved their offerings, he sees them as being engulfed by the vast areas of darkness, the lands of the cajoling listicles and the celebrity nonstories, engineered for no purpose but to keep a public mindlessly clicking and sharing away.

What his thesis doesnt allow for is the possibility that despite his skepticism, we may have become rather deft in developing our own spam filters and that while the open web has in fact delivered a lot of cats falling over, it has also given us access to more knowledge than ever before and more engaging forms of information. It has done this in part because of the possibility of advertising revenue, not despite it. As for his dismissiveness about our selfie culture, he never considers the opportunities that the internet has opened up for women, minorities and those outside the mainstream medias boundaries of acceptability to take control of their own image.

For Someone uniquely skilled at advocating a stronger regulatory climate, Wus ultimate point is surprisingly low-tech: If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have. It might be an idealistic aspiration, but it is a timely one.

What Wu achieved with his first book, The Master Switch, was to demystify the recent history of the ownership and governance of our communications systems, from telecom companies to the web, while identifying how open systems over time became compromised and closed. In The Attention Merchants he applies the same thesis of a business cycle to explain the development of the advertising market and the ways in which it has adapted to avoid our natural inclination to ignore it. Despite the books occasional finger-wagging, Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect.

When Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, the revelatory 1957 book about advertisings hidden psychological manipulations, he did so just as the mass media stood at a turning point. He did not stop the march of commercial television, but he provided a powerful critical framework through which to think about it. Wu has written a Hidden Persuaders for the 21st century, just as we stand squarely on the threshold of a post-broadcast world where the algorithmic nano-targeting of electronic media knows our desires and impulses before we know them ourselves.
THE EASTERN SHORE

By Ward Just

200 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25.

Right out of the gate in The Eastern Shore, his 19th novel, Ward Just offers the reader the gift of a fable. Its teller is Ralph Ayres, a World War I veteran now domiciled in an old folks home, although he isnt old. The listener is his nephew, Ned Ayres, a boy transfixed by an uncle whose stories help the two escape the confines of their routines.

Uncle Ralph recounts a surreal encounter between American infantrymen and the Hun in the French countryside. The Germans came from the forest into twilight. Wolves were among them, mangy creatures, undisciplined, furtive in the shadows. And then the wolves vanished and the German infantry was in our midst. . . . They were weary. And they carried gifts, candy bars and chocolate bears, bunches of flowers. They looked half starved but they couldntve been friendlier. Talking, laughing, the German soldiers stay for an hour or more, and then, slowly, they disappeared into the rain, one by one.

Its an evocative, powerful fantasy, the work of a mind that is either optimistic or damaged, or both. But Neds father, a literal-minded judge who disapproves of fictional creations, reminds his son that Uncle Ralphs stories are only that  after all, they are not factual. Still, Ned insists on returning. Those stories mean something to him.

And here, at once, are the two totems of this book, the wonder of the literary imagination and the authority of fact. Its possible that all of writing lies between them, and Ned, you might say, splits the difference. He will become a newspaperman, specifically an editor, whose job it is to assess a compilation of facts and manipulate them into something aspiring to truth. It sounds portentous to say so  and Just, with his predilection for understatement, never would  but questions of storytelling and truth are at the center of The Eastern Shore. What makes a story true? What means of storytelling best capture reality? Are facts a path to truth or a finely constructed gate? Just, who has been a newspaperman and a memoirist, as well as a novelist, may be as qualified to consider these questions as any American writer.
Early leadership lessons for you as a manager?

Im what I call a happy aggressive person. So when I do things, Ill say to people, Come on, lets go do this and go after something. That has gotten me into trouble a couple of times.

I had a boss who said to me, You are pushing so hard on the things that you want to get done that youre driving some of the people around you crazy because youre just so manically focused. Youre not bringing them with you.

Thats how I was growing up. When I did things, and people couldnt keep up, I didnt care. But the boss said to me, Hey, do you smoke pot? And I said, No. And she said, You ought to. That was pretty funny.

This is your first C.E.O. role. Did you always want the top job?

No. It just wasnt on the list. I like getting things done. I like building things that matter. I love working with great people. It doesnt mean you have to be a C.E.O. to do it.

What I have found really interesting, and what I like about it, is that when youre the C.E.O., you get to set a tone from your seat thats different than if youre working within an organization.

That ability  to actually shape the culture, talk about the things were going to do, how were going to treat each other, what we want our values to be  is different. I didnt realize it until I was in the seat.

Give me an example of whats important in your culture.

Ive been a champion of women in technology for a while. This stems back to my youngest sister, who passed away in her 30s. She was a psychologist and psychology professor at Washington State, and one of the foremost researchers on the effects of the media on womens body image and self-esteem, and their relationship to bulimia and anorexia, which she had as a kid.
There are many facets to the populist, anti-establishment anger that swept Donald J. Trump into the White House in Tuesdays election. A crucial element fueling the rage, in my view, was this: Not one high-ranking executive at a major financial firm was held to account for the crisis of 2008.

As millions of foreclosures and job losses followed, the failure to go after fraudsters confirmed the suspicion that the powerful got protection while those on Main Street were kicked to the curb. When Mr. Trump asserted that the system was rigged, he tapped directly into such misgivings.

Many readers of The New York Times, particularly if you live in Manhattan, San Francisco or another affluent enclave, may not see how an accountability failure of years ago could still resonate. But the failure to prosecute even one or two high-profile bankers  or force them simply to pay fines and penalties out of their own pockets  left millions of Americans believing that our justice system was unjust.

Recall that more than 800 bankers went to jail after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. And that mess wreaked nowhere near the devastation that the housing debacle did on the overall United States economy.
LONDON  Waiters held trays of Champagne-filled glasses on the landing. Enormous photographs of David Bowie stared or smiled out from the walls. The soundtrack from Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture played, and a dim blue light filled Sothebys auction rooms in London as guests strolled in on Thursday night for the first of three eagerly anticipated sales of some 350 works from Bowies art collection on behalf of his estate. (The auction, called Bowie/Collector, had two more sales on Friday.)

There was no shortage of anticipation. Ever since Bowies death in January, interest in the musicians life and work has been at fever pitch. (Not that anyone was disinterested before; the Victoria and Albert Museums David Bowie Is exhibition, which opened in London in 2013, has been seen by 1.5 million people in eight locations around the world and is the most visited show in the museums history.)

In the 10-day pre-sale viewing period, more than 37,000 people came to see the collection in London, and several thousand more saw it on pre-sale tours to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dubai and Hong Kong. It feels like you get a bit closer to him, to what he was like, said Leah Andrews, 57, who added that Thursdays auction was her first time at a sale.

Composer, pop icon, actor, fashion lodestar and avatar of the avant-garde, Bowie pursued collecting  not just visual art, but also furniture, design, ceramics, books and records  with the same energy, passion and commitment that he gave to his art. The 350-odd items on sale at Sothebys represent about 65 percent of the work he acquired in the 1990s and 2000s, according to Sothebys.
To fall in love with a sailor is to court a broken heart. But in 2009, when Lauren Sloss spied Alex Kleeman in a Bay Area bar, she never guessed he harbored a dream to sail the world.

Outwardly, there was nothing salty about Mr. Kleeman, a tall, skinny mathematician who worked for a climate forecasting start-up and spent workdays knee-deep in algorithms. In fact, Mr. Kleeman, an affable Midwesterner from suburban Chicago, was known to his many friends as a man who never swore.

Like many millennial San Franciscans, Ms. Sloss, now 29, was also working at a start-up, in advertising. That night, she stared at Mr. Kleeman, a handsome guy in a Black Keys T-shirt, trying to work up the courage to tell him that the Black Keys were her favorite band.

But when urged to make a move, she balked. Her friend Irene Yuan made it for her.

My friend Lauren is your soul mate, Ms. Yuan said. Can she have your card? Mr. Kleeman, slightly flummoxed, obliged.
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump on Thursday told President Park Geun-hye the U.S. stands by Korea "100 percent," Cheong Wa Dae said.

"We are going to be with you 100 percent," Trump said when Park called him in the morning. We will be steadfast and strong with respect to working with you to protect against the instability in North Korea."

On the campaign trail Trump repeatedly singled out the alliance with Korea as an expensive commitment the U.S. can do without, and described the free trade agreement with Korea as a "disaster."
For a certain kind of woman in Manhattan or Brooklyn, or Santa Monica or Minneapolis, for that matter, Tuesday began with a bright spirit, a pantsuit  a popular show of sartorial support for Hillary Clinton  and a promise to children brought into voting booths that the next morning they would wake up in a country that had elected its first female president.

That this sort of woman didnt know anyone with a fondness for Donald J. Trump, or at any rate couldnt fathom how any woman, in particular, could develop such a thing, only served to affirm the conclusions of big data that had put Mrs. Clinton ahead.

In December 1972, the film critic Pauline Kael, famously acknowledging her urbane parochialism, said that in her corner of the world she knew only one person who had voted for Richard M. Nixon. In the days leading up to this presidential election, many women in New York City would not have been able to name a single person they had ever met  not at Eataly or Barneys or Naral fund-raisers  who was voting for Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, or even considering it.

But excitement over Mr. Trumps election was confined not merely to the distant, vast American territory of the Waffle House. In New York States 62nd Assembly District on Staten Island, Mr. Trump defeated Mrs. Clinton, his Democratic counterpart, by a rate of three to one. According to preliminary exit poll data from CNN, Mr. Trump held a considerable lead over Mrs. Clinton among white women nationally. In Tottenville, a prosperous area on the southern tip of Staten Island, nearly every white woman I approached on Wednesday was eager to tell me how thrilled she was about his victory.
It took Hillary Clinton a while to talk about the first-woman-president idea. She didnt stress it early in her 2008 campaign. But people kept coming up to her with pictures of their grandmothers who got to vote for the first time in 1920. Others begged her to get the job done so they could see a woman in the White House before they died.

The dream sank in.

Now, I  I know  I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, Clinton told her grieving supporters. It was already late Wednesday morning by the time she gave her concession speech, winner of the popular vote but loser all the same. She told all the little girls who were watching  and there probably still were little girls watching, since the excitement had been so grand  never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.

And so it ended. But when we look back on the Clinton campaign as part of history, well see something different from the abrupt, shocking defeat her backers experienced last week. It was a big step in a journey thats been both inspiring and really, really long.

When history teachers want to include women in the story of the American Revolution, they often have their students read the famous letter Abigail Adams wrote in 1776 to her husband, urging him to remember the ladies and write laws for the new country that would put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty. The kids are not generally encouraged to move on to John Adamss reply: As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh.
Its hard to overestimate the couples stranglehold on the party  its think tanks, its operatives, its donors  for the last two decades. Most top Democrats had vested interests in the Clintons, and energy that went into supporting and defending them didnt go into fresh ideas and fresh faces, who were shut out as the party cleared the decks anew for Hillary in 2016.

In thrall to the Clintons, Democrats ignored the copious, glaring signs of an electorate hankering for something new and different and instead took a next-in-line approach that stopped working awhile back. Just ask Mitt Romney and John McCain and John Kerry and Al Gore and Bob Dole. Theyre the five major-party nominees before her who lost, and each was someone who, like her, was more due than dazzling.

After Election Day, one Clinton-weary Democratic insider told me: Im obviously not happy and I hate to admit this, but a part of me feels liberated. If shed won, wed already be talking about Chelseas first campaign. Now we can do what we really need to and start over.

Obama, too, contributed to the partys marginalization. While he threw himself into Hillary Clintons campaign, he was, for much of his presidency, politically selfish, devoting less thought and time to the cultivation of the party than he could  and should  have. By design, his brand was not its. Small wonder, then, that its fate diverged from his.

He anointed Clinton over Joe Biden, though Biden had more charisma and a better connection with the white voters who ultimately supported Trump. Had Biden been the nominee, he probably would have won the Electoral College as well as the popular vote (which Clinton indeed got).

And had Bernie Sanders been? Michael Bloomberg would almost certainly have jumped into the fray, sensing unoccupied territory in the political center, and an infinitely saner and more capable billionaire might well be our president-elect.

Democrats bungled a terrific opportunity to retake the Senate majority by ignoring the national mood as they picked their candidates. A party that prides itself on looking out for the little guy went with the biggest names it could find.
As anyone who lives in a big city knows, space is a valuable commodity. Whether youre in a minuscule studio or a Classic 6 with too few closets, there is rarely enough of it. Most of us try to make the best of what weve got, embracing our tiny kitchens and eking out storage where we can. But what do designers who specialize in small spaces  and those who have made an art form of living in them  know that the rest of us dont? Below, some tips and tricks.

GET ORGANIZED Having a place for everything is key, said Lauren DeCaro, who moved from the large one-bedroom she shared with three roommates into a 550-square-foot studio in Brooklyn Heights that she bought for about $500,000 last winter. Working with a contractor she found through Sweeten, a free service that matches homeowners with vetted professionals, Ms. DeCaro, 28, who works in development for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, overhauled the apartment with special attention to where all her things would go.

I knew I didnt want a dresser taking up valuable floor space in my apartment, so I made sure to install drawers and shelving in the closet, she said, noting that the $1,500 system from California Closets was custom made, taking into consideration everything from her height to the number of shoes she owns.

In the kitchen, $40 rolling cabinet inserts from the Container Store help corral her Tupperware and pots and pans. She installed her microwave in an under-counter cabinet (along with its own electrical outlet) to avoid taking up valuable counter space and added a linen closet in an awkwardly shaped wall niche in the bathroom. Having a designated place for everything has allowed me to have a streamlined, uncluttered studio apartment, she said.
The attacks hurt us right away  our usual occupancy rates were 80 to 82 percent, but in December and January, they were 60 percent. We bounced back slightly in the spring, but as of October, our average occupancy for the year is 72 percent. The biggest change is that we have fewer leisure travelers than before  our weekdays are busy with business travelers, but our weekends, which used to be 100 percent full, are only 70 percent full. Also, these leisure travelers now book six weeks in advance instead of six months. Our all-day restaurant is faring better. After last November, we went from serving 800 meals to 400 meals a day, but now, were back up to where we were. Its never occurred to me to lower room prices because theyre already low. Im hopeful that, eventually, like the restaurant, occupancy comes back.

EDWIGE CHEVALLIER, the general manager and owner of W Travel France, a Paris-based company selling half- to multiday tours of Paris.

Typically, May, June and September are our busiest months  we sell 20 to 30 tours a day, but this year, the most we managed in these months was 15. And, instead of booking six months in advance, clients, most of whom are from the United States, will book a few weeks or even just a few days in advance. The unpredictability of whether I will get bookings or not is stressful, but I hope that by next summer, people wont be afraid to come to Paris anymore.

LAURENT GARDINIER, the co-owner of Les 110 de Taillevent Paris, a wine bar, and Taillevent, a 70-year-old restaurant with two Michelin stars; both are in the Eighth Arrondissement

Paris has always attracted tourists, but since Nov. 13, it feels like the city has been forgotten. I see this at Taillevent  70 percent of our dinner crowd used to be tourists, mainly Americans and Japanese, but right after the attacks, they stopped coming, and earlier this year, business was down 20 to 30 percent. Though the average dinner costs between 250 and 300 euros a person, I dont think price is an issue for these diners  its fear thats keeping them from Paris. At Les 110, where a meal is around 85 euros a person, we havent been hurt because the diners are mostly Parisian. But, the situation may be improving because the reservations at Taillevent for September and October are almost as high as they were last year.
When David LeFevre set out to develop his third restaurant in Manhattan Beach, just south of Los Angeles, he focused on steak. The inspiration is both personal and refreshingly simple. I wanted a great American neighborhood steakhouse, Mr. LeFevre said. Food that is soulful makes me remember growing up in the Midwest. The result is the Arthur J, which opened in June 2015.

Mr. LeFevre has two other wildly popular restaurants only a few blocks away: Manhattan Beach Post, also called M. B. Post, which features New American farm-to-table food and opened in 2011, and Fishing With Dynamite, a cozy, oyster-focused and seafood-driven restaurant that followed two years later.

The Arthur J is dedicated to the late Arthur J. Simms, a World War II bombardier and successful restaurateur in his own right. His namesake restaurant is a sleeker counterpart to Mr. LeFevres other restaurants. The interior, with its California-cool vibe, could double as a West Coast set for an episode of Mad Men. Black bar stools surround the marble bar, and the main dining area is full of natural light.

I grew up in the late 1960s and 1970s and love midcentury-modern design, Mr. LeFevre said. I wanted to have a Palm Desert meets the beach feel.
I was motoring along Route 101 in northwest Washington State in my little rental car, getting a kick out of the fact that I frequently drive the same highway in Southern California, where I live. There were few other similarities, though: The air in Washington had a refreshing bite to it, cold and clean. The sweet smell of wet earth seemed to follow me wherever I went, indoors or out. And soon after I left Port Angeles  a small town on the 101 thats a quick 90-minute ferry ride to Victoria, British Columbia, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca  and entered Olympic National Park, it began to rain and didnt stop until I left the park seven hours later.

Which, in a way, was exactly what Id hoped for. I was planning to spend a day in the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the only rain forests in the United States. (It was also my way of saying happy birthday to our national park system, which turned 100 in August.) Using the small, quirky coastal town of Port Townsend (roughly a two-hour drive from Seattle in my $25 per-day Budget rental) as my base, I set out to enjoy what Washington does best: some good hiking in a beautiful setting paired with an idiosyncratic hospitality. Even better, I was able to do all this without putting too much of a strain on my wallet.

Its raining! I called out as I pulled up to the entrance of the rain forest, and immediately winced at how foolish I must have sounded. The friendly National Park Service employee took it in stride. It does tend to do that here, he called back. The Hoh gets a whopping 12 to 14 feet of precipitation each year. On the lengthy drive to the forests entrance I felt as if I were being consumed by wetness and foliage. The ferns on the ground became more lush and dense, and the mosses and lichens covering the Oregon maples, Sitka spruces and Douglas firs more varied and more intensely green.

I paid the $25 admission, which initially seemed somewhat steep, but less so when I learned the pass is good for one vehicle, and all its occupants, for seven days. (An annual pass is only $25 more.) By the way, the park ranger added, this is a primarily coniferous forest. Some people come here expecting the Amazon; Im not sure why.
How could a wine seem so simultaneously mature and young?

Isnt it funny, Mr. Ohlsson said, we admire maturity in youth and youthfulness in maturity.

One of the wines, at least, from Marchesi di Barolo, seemed suspiciously young. It was improbably dark, rich and fruity. We all assumed it either was not a 64 or had been adulterated by wine from other regions, as was sometimes done to beef up wines that seemed thin.

Another bottle, a Fontanafredda riserva, also seemed too young, though it was more clearly Barolo. Mr. Dal Piaz speculated that it had been topped off by the producer in the 1970s before it was sold.

Other highlights included a supple Cordero di Montezemolo, which had the aroma of soft leather; a Vietti that was as pale as a dark rose yet dense with earthy, meaty flavors; a floral, sweetly fruited Cavallotto riserva; and a savory, fresh, complex Franco Fiorina, a producer I had never encountered before.

Rounding out the 14 producers were a graceful Prunotto; a Marcarini from the Brunate vineyard, which one person said, smells like something I would want to eat, but seemed a bit strident to me, and three wines that seemed a little off or musty, from Francesco Rinaldi, Luigi Einaudi and G. B. Burlotto, a producer whose wines I ordinarily love.

The exhilarating qualities of the best wines made up for these disappointments. They offered a trip through time to an era when so many wines still spoke only the local dialect. A half-century later, they could be understood around the world.
President Park Geun-hye seems to have been emboldened by the election of tarnished outsider Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency to show she is still at the helm despite a massive corruption scandal.

Cheong Wa Dae officials and pro-Park lawmakers in the ruling Saenuri Party, who had been keeping a low profile since the scandal came to light, are starting to fight back against growing calls for Parks resignation over the scandal.

Park has resumed her foreign affairs and security duties, scheduling an urgent call to Trump just a day after his shock election win.

She moved faster than her predecessors, who took two or three days to congratulate new U.S. presidents on their victories.
After weeks of discussion between developers, the community and the city of Auburn, the Auburn Planning Commission denied a preliminary plat approval for a subdivision on South College Street with a 3-3 vote at its regular meeting Thursday.

Plans for the proposed subdivision, known as The Talons, showed six high-end homes on two existing parcels on South College Street, one of which would be the developers home. The subdivision would be located off an access road.

Homeowners near the proposed development brought their concerns before the council last week and before the commission Thursday, most of which were safety related.

A group of homeowners, including Wade Kennedy, addressed three main concerns with the development: safety for motorists, water management and the character of the neighborhood. Several residents and commissioners expressed their concerns about the safety of future residents exiting the subdivision onto South College Street.

The citys Planning Department evaluated sight distance and determined the amount required for the exit was acceptable, said Thomas Weintraut, principal planner. Accidents occurring near the property were also evaluated with two occurring in 2013, 11 in 2014, seven in 2015 and three so far in 2016.

However, Kennedy talked about the tricks they had to learn to stay safe exiting their homes.

That you cant explain with a traffic study, Kennedy said. When you top that hill it is going to be an accident waiting to happen.

Commissioner Warren McCord said though he was struggling to side one way or the other, he felt that once the project was engineered it would be appropriate. However, Commissioner Charles Pick said he had been out to the site to evaluate the traffic and said there was a real feeling of danger."

Weintraut said the project could be resubmitted to the commission with substantial changes to the plat, otherwise developers would have to wait a year to submit the same plat.

The commission also:

> Approved a recommendation to city council for conditional use approval for a three-level event space and lounge, Oak Tree Corner, on Magnolia Avenue.

> Approved a recommendation to city council for conditional use approval for a 78 bedroom third phase of The Boulevard on Harper Avenue.
Multiple wildfires caused smoky conditions in Lee County on Thursday.

A 136-acre contained wildfire in Coosa County was still active, according the Alabama Forestry Commission. Additionally, wildfires in north Georgia and eastern Tennessee were being blown into the area, according a smoke advisory issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Three contained wildfires on Fort Benning were generating smoke in the Columbus area, according to Nate Snook with the Fort Benning public affairs office.

A small 5-acre fire occurred Thursday morning east of Opelika on Lee County Road 178.

Atmospheric conditions were preventing the smoke from dispersing in the upper atmosphere, according to Jim Stefkovich, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service office in Birmingham.

Temperatures at 3,000 feet were warmer than the ground level creating a cap that keeps the smoke below that height and causes it to spread out, Stefkovich said.

"It's going to stay right around that 2,500 to 3,000-foot level probably through a good part of the day, and even into the overnight hours," Stefkovich said.

Gov. Robert Bentley signed a no-burn order for the entire state Monday as drought conditions worsened.

Lee County is under an extreme drought, according the U.S. Drought Monitor. A large portion of east Alabama is under an exceptional drought, the highest category from the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Since October there have been at least 1,421 wildfires in Alabama that have burned 15,409 acres, according to the governors office.

"With these extremely dry conditions, any fire can quickly spread out of control. Over the past few weeks weve seen an increase not only in the number of wildfires that have occurred, but also the size, said Gary Cole, interim Alabama forester, in a press release that announced the statewide burn ban. Several of these fires have been large, not only resulting in damage to our forests but also directly threatening residential areas.

"If not for the efforts of Forestry Commission firefighters and assistance from volunteer fire departments we would have lost homes."
"If I had known Choi was involved, I would not have done what I did," prosecutors quoted him as saying. "I can't be responsible for Choi's mistakes."

According to prosecutors on Thursday, An claimed he coerced the donations from businesses at Park's orders without knowing Choi was behind the scam.

An has been arrested on charges of extorting some W77.4 billion from big businesses for the dubious Mir and K-Sports foundations run by Park's longtime friend Choi Soon-sil (US$1=W1,150).

An Chong-bum, the former presidential secretary for policy coordination, has implicated President Park Geun-hye more deeply in a crony scandal that has led to massive calls for her resignation.

An told prosecutors that his diary contains records of what was said in private meetings Park had on July 24 and 25 last year with executives from the Samsung, Hyundai, LG and Lotte conglomerates, all of which made lavish donations to the nonprofits that were allegedly mere vehicles for Choi to siphon off money.

The diary fell into the hands of a Cheong Wa Dae administrator, who handed it over to prosecutors on Monday. An also told investigators that Park ordered him to help in an attempt by a drinking buddy of Choi's to acquire a controlling stake in an advertising company.

Commercial video director Cha Eun-taek, in a mafia-type attempt at extortion, apparently leaned on the company to hand over 80 percent of its shares, trusting that his connections would make the offer impossible to refuse.

An is not the only former aide who is putting the blame squarely at Park's door. Jeong Ho-seong, the former Cheong Wa Dae secretary for private presidential affairs, has told prosecutors that Park ordered him to hand over classified documents to Choi and has the phone recordings to prove it.

Meanwhile, sources in the business community say that the leaders of major conglomerates prepared "wish lists" to hand to the president during their one-on-one meetings with her last year. That could lay them open to charges of bribery and Park personally of receiving bribes.

Yet Choi continues to deny all charges, and prosecutors are now considering summoning her daughter, Chung Yoo-ra, who is in Germany.


Porter Ross Heatherly 2012-2016 Porter Ross Heatherly, 4, was welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven Thursday, November 10, 2016. He passed peacefully in the loving arms of his parents after a hard fought battle with GM1 gangliosidosis. Porter was born in Opelika, AL on September 14, 2012. His life positively impacted everyone who knew him and knew his life story. Porter never said a word, but his life spoke volumes. Porter never took a step, but he showed us how to walk with the Lord. In the four short years of his life he left a lasting legacy. Porter helped raise funding and awareness for GM1 research at the Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine. He is survived by his parents Michael and Sara A. Heatherly; maternal grandparents Daniel Richter (Lisa); paternal grandmother Toni Hermetz Treadway; aunts and uncles Michelle Heatherly and Jacob Richter (Hannah) Visitation will be held in the Parlor at Frederick-Dean Funeral Home on Friday, November 11, 2016 from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m. Funeral Service will be held at Auburn United Methodist Church Saturday, November 12, 2016 at 11:00 a.m. with Brother Charles, Brother Corey, and Brother George officiating. Interment will follow at Town Creek Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Chattahoochee Hospice or the Cure GM1 Foundation. Chattahoochee Hospice http://www.chattahoo cheehospice.com/ Chattahoochee Hospice 6 Medical Park North Valley, Alabama 36854 Cure GM1 Foundation http://curegm1.org/ PO Box 6890 Albany, CA 94706 Frederick-Dean Funeral Home is directing. www.FrederickDean.com Funerals & Cremations Since 1900
Susan Fitzpatrick Pool February 26, 1954 - November 8, 2016 Susan was born on February 26, 1954 in Dallas, TX and died on November 8, 2016 in Auburn, AL. She attended Auburn City Schools and then Auburn University, class of '76. Then, she went on to Troy State as a graduate student, receiving a Masters Degree and an Ed.S. She taught public high school in Alabama and Georgia for 34 years and enjoyed it. "It's nice to have a career you actually like." She is preceded in death by the best father ever, Ben Fitzpatrick, Jr., her wonderful mother, Marjorie Higgins Fitzpatrick, and her loving daughter, Katie Hinds. She is survived by her husband, Kelly W. Pool, daughter, Becky (Kent) Bootz, brothers, Jack and Kenneth Fitzpatrick, and grandchildren, Jude, Max, Lucas, and Charlotte, as well as two dogs and 7 cats. "To my family and friends: It was a great ride and I shall see y'all on the other side. Think of me when you hear a Beatles tune." Visitation will be held at 2:30 pm-4:30 pm Sunday, November 13, 2016 at Jeffcoat-Trant Funeral Home. In lieu of flowers, please send any donations to The Chattahoochee Valley Humane Society, 3265 Fairfax Bypass, Valley, AL 36854. www.jeffcoattrant.com
Prosecutors are looking into mounting evidence that President Park Geun-hye met last year with the heads of conglomerates to solicit donations for her friend Choi Soon-sil's dubious nonprofit foundations and promised them favors in return.

Sources said on Thursday that executives from Samsung, Hyundai Motor, SK and four other top conglomerates prepared their own "wish lists" for the meeting with Park in July last year.

They allegedly wrote down how they intended to contribute to Cheong Wa Dae's economic and cultural pet projects and what type of assistance they wanted in return.

The wish lists were then allegedly passed to-and-fro between the office of the chief presidential secretary for economic affairs and conglomerate staff.

Some conglomerates apparently wrote euphemistically worded requests for cooperation involving either the tax-free transfer of management control from the owners to their children or for pardons of owners who were serving prison terms.

One source said, "Rather than directly demanding support for the transfer or for pardons, the chaebol groups said that their management situations needed to be 'stabilized' if they were to invest in the projects Cheong Wa Dae was proposing."
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa is claiming victory in his hotly contested re-election bid, but Democratic opponent Doug Applegate says the numbers are too close to call while there are nearly 1 million ballots left to count in Orange and San Diego counties. The congressional district straddles the counties border.

Current tallies show Issa, seeking his ninth term, leading by 2.2 percentage points, 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent. The votes still to be counted include late mail ballots, mail ballots dropped off at the polls on Election Day and provisional ballots.

The voters of the 49th District have spoken, and I am grateful for their support in our winning campaign, Issa, a Vista resident, said in an email Wednesday night. As the final ballots are counted, we are confident they will affirm the results from Election Night.

But the Applegate campaign is far from ready to concede.

The professionals who work at the Orange and San Diego County registrar of voters are working around the clock to ensure every vote is counted, said Applegate campaign manager Robert Dempsey. Its important that we let them do their jobs. There are hundreds of thousands of ballots left to count.

Applegate, a San Clemente resident, is an attorney and retired Marine colonel making his first bid for elected office.

Despite Issas claim of victory, he doesnt appear to be taking the win for granted: His campaign has had two observers on hand to oversee the counting of mail and provisional ballots, hoping to make sure no invalid ballots are tallied and no valid ballots are thrown out.

Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley categorizes close contests as those with margins of 2 points or less, and is prioritizing the counting of remaining ballots by pushing close races to the front of the line.

Issas advantage is slightly more than Kelleys rule of thumb, but that race is also being prioritized as a courtesy to the Issa observers, Kelley said.

The ballots still be tallied could account for more than 40 percent of all votes cast, depending on how many are from Issas district and how many provisional ballots are valid. The two counties elections offices have 30 days after the election to finish their counts.

Contact the writer: mwisckol@scng.com
LOS ANGELES  A man who operated more than a dozen Southland drug treatment and rehabilitation facilities was arrested Thursday on suspicion of sexually assaulting former clients, and detectives urged other possible victims to contact authorities.

Christopher Bathum, 55, formerly owned and operated 13 Community Recovery treatment centers in Los Angeles County and Orange County, as well as six in Colorado, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department.

In May, detectives began investigating several allegations of sexual assaults that reportedly took place between 2012 and this year at Community Recovery treatment facilities and that involved former clients of Bathum, according to a sheriffs statement.

Detectives believe it is possible other former clients of Mr. Bathum were sexually assaulted, according to the sheriffs department, which urged anyone with information on the case to call the Special Victims Bureau at (877) 710-5273, or Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-TIPS.

Bathum was booked on suspicion of sexual assault at the Lost Hills sheriffs station and is expected to be arraigned Monday in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom.

Separately, the California Department of Insurance said Bathum and an associate, Kirsten Wallace, were arrested on multiple felony counts of grand theft and identity theft for allegedly conspiring to defraud patients and insurers out of more than $176 million through an elaborate conspiracy.

Simultaneously, search warrants were executed at 15 locations throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties, the agency said.

The agency said Bathum, as owner and CEO of Community Recovery of Los Angeles, and Wallace, its chief financial officer, are accused of luring vulnerable people addicted to drugs and alcohol to Community Recovery with a variety of treatment marketing schemes.

The Department of Insurance said its investigation found Bathum and Wallace conspired to steal patient identities and buy health insurance policies for patients without their knowledge. After completing treatment, Bathum continued to bill insurance companies for treatment services, the agency alleged.





The Register contributed to this report.
Unlike historic paintings and sculptures that remain readily accessible to patrons during museum hours, the art of classical ballet is something that exists exclusively within a performance space. It is the opinion of some choreographers, such as Mikhail Messerer, ballet master in chief of the Mikhailovsky Theatre, that the memories of these early ballets can only be preserved through renovated productions of the originals.

Messerer will present one such production this week at Segerstrom Center for the Arts as the Mikhailovsky Ballet brings its version of Le Corsaire for the first time to the United States.

I believe that a ballet should be revisited in order to live, said Messerer in program notes for the American premiere. Many productions have not survived as they never were edited.

Messerers Le Corsaire joins a lineage that includes 19th century choreographers Marius Petipa, Joseph Mazilier, Jules Perrot and Pyotr Gusev, but is most closely based on the 1973 production by Konstantin Sergeyev for the Kirov (now Mariinsky) Ballet.

The original idea for Le Corsaire came from a poem written by Lord Byron in 1814 that centers on a pirate captain named Conrad who risks his life to save a Turkish harem girl. The ballet adds characters and scenes that are not mentioned in the poem, but keeps the exotic location and passionate hero in place.

When the Mikhailovsky Ballet comes to Orange County, the part of Conrad will be played by Russian ballet star Ivan Vasiliev, who joined Mikhailovsky Theatre as a principal in 2011.

The role of Conrad I have danced many times at different theaters in different productions, Vasiliev said. It is not always the case that you return to the role eagerly, but Ive always liked the role of a pirate.

For Vasiliev, Le Corsaire is appealing because of the interesting and colorful characters, such as wealthy harem-buyer Seyd Pasha, who Vasiliev said brings comic relief to the story.

I like performing in bright ballets, said Vasiliev. In the course of the story, my character, Conrad, experiences love, friendship and betrayal and you have to show all of the emotions through dance and acting.

And while Vasiliev has performed the ballet before, several times as Conrad in particular, he, like Messerer, sees value in the repetition of the older work.

Everybody is changing all the time, youre always developing, said Vasiliev. Thats why me as Conrad 10 years ago and me as Conrad today are two different people. Probably both of them are charismatic, but, it seems, also diverse.

When Vasiliev takes the stage in Le Corsaire he will be helping to perpetuate an art form that survives because of its link to the past  a past that Messerer has every intention of preserving for the future.

Audiences love watching ballets such as Le Corsaire, said Messerer. I understand because I consider classical ballet one of the important achievements of human civilization.

The company will perform four shows Friday through Nov. 20 and in doing so hopes to give Southern Californian audiences a fresh perspective on a centuries-old Russian art. For audiences convinced that this upcoming production will be nothing more than a typical 19th-century ballet melodrama, Messerer promises this version also steps partway into the thriller genre.

Said Messerer: I hope Le Corsaire will prove the popular view of Russian ballet-goers  that at the Mikhailovskys productions, one is never bored.

Contact the writer: 714-796-6026 or kwright@ocregister.com
To the millions of Californians who obtained health insurance as a result of Obamacare, know this: Despite the election of Donald Trump, who has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, nothing is going to happen to your coverage immediately.

In fact, open enrollment for Covered California plans continues through January 31, despite the election outcome.

Dont panic. The open-enrollment period is set, says Myles Pappadato, an insurance agent based in Valencia whose firm, QuoteBroker, has about 600 clients with Covered California policies. He fielded about a dozen calls the morning after the election from worried consumers.

Dont make any decisions based on speculation, he adds.

Beyond that, uncertainty reigns.

In California, two major Obamacare initiatives brought health insurance to millions of people: About 1.3 million of you have plans through Covered California, the state health insurance exchange. And about 3.7 million others joined Medi-Cal, the states Medicaid program for low-income residents, after it expanded its eligibility criteria.

Its not yet clear how Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress will seek to pick apart Obamacare next year  or how long that could take. An outright repeal might be difficult because it would require 60 votes in the U.S. Senate to overcome a Democratic filibuster, which means the Republicans would need the support of at least eight Democrats.

Republicans could use budget procedures instead to kill critical portions of the law, including the funding for Medicaid expansion in states like California and the federal tax credits that lower premiums for most Covered California enrollees.

If the subsidies go away, the vast majority of folks are not going to be able to afford their coverage. Theyre struggling as it is, Pappadato says.

Officials from Covered California, Medi-Cal and the state Health and Human Services Agency are scrambling to figure out whats next, but the outlook isnt good.

I cannot provide false comfort, says Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access California. This is a real risk for coverage that millions of Californians depend on.

Lyn Jutronich, of San Diego, came close to tears when describing the anxiety she felt before Obamacare. Jutronich, 44, has three children under the age of 12 who are now covered by Medi-Cal. She and her husband, a contractor, have a Covered California plan and receive tax credits.

When my child got sick or injured, I used to ask myself, How am I going to pay for this? That burden was completely relieved by Obamacare, she says.

The thought of having to go back to that is just shattering.

Before the law, Jutronich went without insurance for more than a year because she had preexisting medical conditions. At that time, insurers were not required to cover people who had previous medical problems, or they could charge them significantly more.

The premiums for the familys insurance  with her included  would have been about $3,000 to $4,000 a month before Obamacare, so they opted to buy a plan for the kids and her husband, because of his dangerous job.

Im terrified that in the near future I will have to go without insurance again, and that I will again have that horrible Do I really need to take my child to the emergency room today or can it wait? question looming in my head, Jutronich says.

The Department of Health Care Services, which administers Medi-Cal, says there are no immediate changes to that program. It did not offer advice to Medi-Cal enrollees.

But Jen Flory, a senior attorney at the Western Center on Law and Poverty, says Medi-Cal expansion enrollees should feel free to use their Medi-Cal. If they qualify and havent applied, they should still apply. No new law has been passed.

And if youve been waiting to get a medical procedure or delaying an exam, dont put anything off, Flory suggests.

Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), chair of the Senate Health Committee, also wants Californians to keep enrolling in the coverage theyre eligible for and using the coverage they have.

Continue doing what youve been doing. You have health insurance. Use it as you need it, he says.

Hernandez expects California lawmakers to do everything we can to protect patients to make sure they have access to health care.

Could that include finding state money to replace any federal funding that may be cut?

We have to ask ourselves the billion-dollar question: Does the state take on that responsibility? Hernandez says. Thats a discussion the state Legislature will have to have, but were not there yet.

Wright, of Health Access, urges Californians to advocate for themselves in the meantime.

Until something happens, people should sign up for the benefits and then join the political fight to keep them, he says.

Jeffrey Kolsin, a certified public accountant in Fountain Valley, agrees that consumers need to speak up.

Kolsin, 61, and his wife receive tax credits for their Covered California policy, and the cost of their monthly premiums would double if federal funding were cut.

What happens to people like myself who have depended on those tax credits, and all of a sudden theyre gone and now you have this huge bill? he asks. How do you pay for it?

He plans to share his opinion with lawmakers, asking them not to repeal or gut Obamacare without coming up with a replacement plan first. He wants others to do the same.

Questions for Emily: AskEmily@kff.org. Click here to find previous Ask Emily columns. This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, which publishes California Healthline, a service of the California HealthCare Foundation.
Since the election, April Hunter has wished she could move to her husbands native Scotland, not so much to escape a Trump presidency, but for the universal health care offered there.

Thats whats affecting me personally is the health care, said Hunter, 46, a school health assistant from Santa Clarita who voted for Hillary Clinton. Im still really worried about how thats going to play out.

Hunters husband works part time after losing his job as a video game artist. He has diabetes and is covered with a federally-subsidized policy through the states Obamacare exchange, Covered California, for $150 a month. Hunter said they cant afford to add him to her employer-sponsored policy because his share would be full price.

Were not leeches; were not trying to bilk the system, Hunter said. Were just trying to make it.

Across Southern California, residents who rely on Covered California policies are grappling with what will happen to the Affordable Care Act under a Republican administration.

Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, said Thursday that enrollees have been calling and posting on Facebook with questions about the future of their coverage. Open enrollment for next year started Nov. 1.

Were seeking to provide them the assurance we can that their coverage is not in jeopardy, Lee said.

He advised Californians to take a deep breath and proceed with shopping around for the best price. He noted that state and federal contracts with insurers are already in place for next year.

Coverage is going to remain intact for 2017 and for the foreseeable future, Lee said. Rates wont change. Financial assistance wont change. Looking further down the horizon, there will be changes. The nature and form of those changes is something we all need to monitor and watch.

Lee will personally deliver that message in Southern California beginning Saturday as he kicks off an open enrollment tour, which includes a stop Saturday afternoon at Quote Selection Insurance Services in Huntington Beach.

George Balteria, chief executive of Quote Selection, said as his customers ask what to expect, he advises them to proceed with picking a plan for next year, reminding them that coverage begins before Donald Trump takes office.

People are really looking for an answer right now and there is no answer, Balteria said. The tragedy probably would be to have a person dissuaded emotionally from signing up now that Trump is in, thinking this is all going to go away.

Newport Beach resident Hollie Young, 58, a breast cancer survivor, said shes very worried about if she could get coverage and what it would cost if the health law is repealed. She and her husband, who are self-employed, have a $523 monthly Kaiser Permanente policy through Covered California.

I have a pre-existing condition, Young said. If I cant go to Kaiser, no one else will take me if it goes back to the way it was before. If he does take it away, our premium is going to be $1,600 for the two of us, back to what it was before Obamacare. We dont have that money right now.

Contact the writer: 714-796-3686 or cperkes@scng.com
Initial reports show voter participation was down nationwide in Tuesdays landmark election. But Orange County appears on track to have its highest turnout since it voted for Gerald Ford 40 years ago.

As of Friday morning, 836,597 ballots had been counted in Orange County, with 411,049 mail ballots and provisional ballots remaining to be tallied. Even if 18,872 of those remaining ballots are found to be invalid, the county will have had 80-percent turnout of registered voters for the first time since 1976.

The county is also on pace to have much higher turnout than the state, which is headed for about 70 percent turnout. That would be the lowest for a presidential general election since 1996, when turnout was 66 percent.

The county hasnt outpaced the state in turnout for a presidential general election since 2000.

While Donald Trump drove up turnout in some portions of the country, that may not have been the case in Orange County where Hillary Clinton was leading 49.8 percent to 44.8 percent as of Friday. Late mail ballots typically favor Democrats, meaning Clinton could surpass 50 percent in the county when all is said and done.

Among ballots counted so far, about 30,000  3.6 percent  of those who voted in the county left the ballot blank for president, reflecting the record-high unpopularity rating of Trump and Clinton.

Four highly competitive local races with lots of money spent and lots of volunteers on the ground likely contributed to the high turnout. Those were the reelection bids of Rep. Darrell Issa, Assemblywoman Young Kim and county Supervisor Andrew Do, along with the race between Ling Ling Chang and Josh Newman for an open state Senate seat.

Also bolstering the countys turnout numbers is a technicality.

Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley is more rigorous and prompt in scrubbing rolls of voters who have moved or died than most other counties registrars. Because Orange Countys rolls consist of a higher percentage of active voters, turnout numbers are higher than if there were more inactive voters included in the calculation.

Fewer women

A woman wont be president next year and those hoping for that barrier to be broken wont be consoled by the status of women politicians in California.

The number of California women in the state Senate, Assembly and U.S. House of Representatives will all decline as a result of Tuesdays election, according to an analysis by California Women Lead, a group designed to engage, empower and elect women.

Initial elections results, which are still being updated as late mail ballots are counted, show the number of women in the 80-member state Assembly will go from 19 to 17. Orange County will have one woman among its seven Assembly members, although its not yet clear whether it will be Republican Kim or her Democratic challenger, Sharon Quirk-Silva. Quirk-Silva has a narrow lead with many mail ballots left to count.

One of those leaving the Assembly is Ling Ling Chang, R-Diamond Bar, who will be replaced by Republican Phillip Chen in the tri-county district that includes part of Orange County. Chang did not seek reelection, instead running to replace termed out state Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, in another tri-county district that also includes part of Orange County. She is leading Fullerton Democrat Josh Newman.

If she wins, that would mean three of the Orange Countys five state senators would be women. All three are Republicans.

But womens numbers in the 40-member Senate would shrink nonetheless, from 12 to 10.

The women in states 53-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives would drop from 19 to 17. One of those losses is Loretta Sanchez, D-Orange, who stepped down for an unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid. She is being replaced by former state Sen. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana.

In the new Congress, two women  Mimi Walters, R-Laguna Beach, and Linda Sanchez, D-Lakewood  will be among Orange Countys seven representatives.

Contact the writer: mwisckol@ocregister.com
WASHINGTON  President Barack Obama on Thursday asked Congress for $11.6 billion in additional war-related funding, including money to fight Islamic State militants, sustain higher overseas troop levels, and modernize the Afghan militarys helicopter fleet.

The request was sent to lawmakers for consideration during the lame-duck session that starts next week. Its evenly divided between the Pentagon and the State Department and foreign aid accounts related to battling the Islamic State.

In addition to enhancing our effort to defeat ISIL, this plan would fund the presidents decision to adjust our troop levels to better support the Afghan governments strategy to secure its nation, and would help enhance Afghanistans aviation capability, said Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Swift passage of this plan will help the Department of Defense and our partners in the U.S. government and around the world protect this nation.

The requests fate in the coming weeks is uncertain. Its not clear what Republicans controlling Congress want to do about a raft of unfinished spending bills now that Donald Trump has won the White House.

While top Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., want to clear away the unfinished budget work  and avoid cluttering the Trump agenda with this years leftovers  many conservatives hope to win better outcomes next year with Trump in the White House. At the very least, however, Congress must pass a temporary spending bill to avert a government shutdown next month, which would give lawmakers and the new administration time to hash out a final accord on more than $1 trillion in unfinished bills to fund agency operating budgets.

Before the election, Democrats promised they would try to play a strong hand against GOP moves to beef up the defense budget without comparable treatment for domestic programs. The White House and congressional Democrats insist that additional defense dollars be matched with increases for non-defense programs, and pairing the upcoming Pentagon request with non-defense items that would still fit under the umbrella of security costs could free up money for domestic programs elsewhere.

The military portion includes $2.5 billion to maintain elevated U.S. troops levels of 8,400 in Afghanistan as announced over the summer. About $383 million would pay for air strikes against IS. The request would mean a total of $85 billion in war-related funding for the budget year that started in October.

The $5.8 billion portion of the request for the State Department and the Agency for International Development would help stabilize areas of Iraq that have been reclaimed for the militants, remove unexploded bombs and increase aid for Somalia, among other purposes.
There is an ancient tradition of falconry practiced by the people of Mongolia where burkitshi, or eagle hunters, train golden eagles to respond to their call and hunt hares and foxes in the frozen landscape. Its a skill and ceremonial practice thats learned from age 13 and has been largely the domain of men.

Enter Aisholpan, a 13-year-old nomadic Kazakh girl who wants to be an eagle hunter. Her father is one. Her grandfather was too. And its a family tradition that dates back 12 generations. Its this shy, rosy cheeked and brave little girl whose story to become the first female eagle hunter in her family is lovingly told in the documentary The Eagle Huntress , which is sure to inspire and enchant generations of young children with its heartwarming story and stunning locations.

Its fitting that the film is narrated (and executive produced) by Daisy Ridley, who shepherded the Star Wars universe into a more empowering space for women with her portrayal of the ambitious and self-sufficient Jedi-in-training Rey.

Director Otto Bell embeds the audience in Aisholpans world, which looks both modern and ancient at the same time. She lives with her parents and siblings in a spacious yurt. Her mother cooks and cleans and her father herds goats and cattle across the Mongolian Steppe. Aisholpan helps out with the chores at home and is a top student who hopes one day to become a doctor. But first, she wants to follow in her fathers footsteps and train eagles.

There is an obvious girl power message in the film thats spelled out loud and clear by both the narration and the framing of Aisholpans accomplishments. Although her father and mother support her dreams, Bell makes sure to show a room of elder eagle hunters expressing doubts about a womans ability to perform the job because they lack the necessary bravery and are too fragile. They might as well be twirling their mustaches for how on the nose it all is.

In fact, theres an overriding level of artifice to The Eagle Huntress thats hard to shake. Bell opts for reality show techniques to up the drama throughout, like a cut of Aisholpan removing her hat at a competition to reveal shes a girl juxtaposed with a shot of a man looking aghast while the music crescendos. Was he really looking at her? Was it an authentic moment? As it plays out, it certainly doesnt feel real even if the spirit of truth is there. Its something thats unlikely to bother or even register with younger audiences and perhaps its even a necessary storytelling device. But it does break the spell of this otherwise enchanting and quite sincere film.

Its hard not to get swept up in Aisholpans bravery and determination as she climbs down a rocky terrain to kidnap her very own eagle, or as she braces for impact when her eagle swoops down to land on her arm. The drone shots of the landscapes, too, are something to behold. It is indeed a rare and special story, and, as a film, its a wholesome lark that youll want to show your daughters and sons.
KABUL, Afghanistan  Four Afghans were killed and 119 people were injured late Thursday when a suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the German Consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, officials said.

A spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry said all its two dozen German staff were safe and uninjured after the bombing, adding that Afghan security forces and German special forces had repulsed the heavily armed attackers.

Afghan officials said the suicide bomber had been the only attacker.

Taliban militants claimed responsibility, saying they had launched an attack on invading infidels in revenge for civilians killed in airstrikes on northern Kunduz.

More then 30 civilians were killed and 19 others injured in a series of airstrikes carried out in the city of Kunduz by U.S. forces supporting Afghan troops in early November.

Munir Farhad, a spokesman for the governor of Balkh province, said Thursdays blast was so powerful that the windows in most buildings in the vicinity had shattered, which caused most of the injuries.

The German Foreign Ministry said the consul building had been considerably damaged.

The trucks load of explosives had been hidden under a heap of coal, according to Sayed Kamal Sadat, the provincial police chief.

Around 1,000 German soldiers are stationed at Camp Marmal, about 6 miles away from the consulate, and a rapid response team was sent immediately after the attack.

A small contingent of German troops has also been stationed in Kunduz since March to train and assist local soldiers, but the government in Berlin says the Bundeswehr was not involved in the November airstrikes.
Local Mexican consulate officials are wondering, with Donald Trumps remarks on immigration that aired Sunday and that he made throughout his campaign: What will his election mean for Californias undocumented population?

Appearing on 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Trump said he planned to deport 2 million to 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records immediately, then would turn his attention to securing the border and at some point would make a determination on the remaining undocumented immigrants.

Were looking very strongly at immigration, Trump told reporters covering his first visit to the White House last week. Were going to look at the borders.

During the campaign, Trump emphasized his plans to ramp up deportations and end the Obama administrations executive action known as Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, a program that shields from deportation undocumented residents who came here as children.

His plans, if enacted, could dramatically reshape California.

The state is home to the largest population of Mexican nationals in the United States, estimated to be around 4.2 million, including about 363,000 in Orange County and 562,000 in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

At the 10 Mexican consulates in California, including offices in Santa Ana, San Bernardino and Los Angeles, diplomats are preparing people on how to deal with a future that, as of now, is very uncertain.

In interviews last week, Mexican Consul Generals Mario Cuevas of Santa Ana and Salomon Rosas of San Bernardino said, in the wake of Trumps win, their offices are continuing a push to get Mexicans who are legal U.S. residents to become citizens and helping others figure out what to do next.

The two men also answered questions about the future of their community.

Were you surprised by the presidential election results?

Mario Cuevas: It is a very unique situation, of course. But surprised? No, not really.

There were only two strong candidates, so it was always a possibility.

This was a decision of the American people  we have nothing to do with it. We respect the process; we respect the institutions. Within that framework, we now have to figure out how to empower the Mexican community and protect their rights.

How are Mexicans in your area reacting to Trumps victory? Are they worried about what might happen when he takes office?

Salomon Rosas: There is a kind of fear among many people. They are coming to the consulate because they dont know what is going to happen.

We let them know that it is important for them to remain calm. We have to wait for a few weeks to see what the new policies are going to be.

The Mexican government will work productively and respectfully with the new American government. And it will also work to protect the Mexicans living in this country. But we believe that we have strong relations with the United States and here in the Inland Empire.

Cuevas: We havent seen a wave of people coming into the consulate, so far. But people who are coming in, for passports and other things, they ask if I know whats going to happen. I say, Nope! Lets wait and see. Nobody knows whats going to happen.

In the meantime, we tell them to get ready, be prepared, get as much information as possible.

Get your papers in order, take advantage of DACA now; if you are a legal resident, become a citizen. And we will provide legal assistance.

We will defend firmly the rights of Mexican citizens living in this country. We will continue providing legal assistance. Weve been doing that anyway. But now we have to be very alert  open our eyes and our ears.

How concerned are you that Trump will follow through on the immigration policies he proposed during the campaign?

Rosas: We are going to wait to see what the new policies are going to be. We cannot, and we should not, speculate about it.

We have to make sure we get the right information  the official information  to Mexicans living in this country, as soon as its available.

You mentioned that people should continue to take advantage of DACA. But Trump has said that he would end the program.

Cuevas: We will work with DACA until there is an end, if there is going to be an end. Were telling people to stay calm, get informed  nobody knows whats going to happen. We dont have a crystal ball. We have to wait and see the programs of the new government.

People are wondering if they are going to be deported, if there are parents going to be deported. I can understand that. There are other options, but we have to wait and see what those options are.

I hope that there continues to be some kind of immigration relief for young people  so many people have benefited from DACA. And they are contributing, with their brains, with their hard work. It doesnt harm anyone.

So we hope that if DACA ends, there will be a plan to offer those cases some other kind of immigration status. Some of those people came here when they were very young  their lives are here. If they are sent back to Mexico, or El Salvador, or Bolivia, what are they going to do there? This is their land.

Some DACA recipients are now worried that the information they gave to the government to join the program will make them vulnerable to deportation. Do you think thats something to be concerned about?

Cuevas: I dont think that information will be used  I dont foresee that. We promote (DACA) because at least it is some kind of relief.

What is going to happen? Im not sure. But we promote that people keep staying in DACA in the meantime. They are worried. I would be. But lets wait and see. The consulate organizes clinics for DACA, and we will continue to do that. We will tell everyone to stay calm.

The details of Trumps plans might not be clear for a few months. Is there anything the consulate is doing to prepare in the meantime?

Rosas: We are going to continue offering assistance and consular protections to Mexicans in this region, regardless of their immigration status. And we are going to be looking for more and better ways to protect their rights.

We want Mexicans and Mexican Americans to keep in touch with our consulates. Its very important to let them know that they can come to our facilities or call our hotlines, so that we can give them the right information and the official information. They need to be informed, so they can know their rights and protect themselves. We dont want people to become victims of immigration fraud. We have already been in touch with all of the groups of Mexican nationals here, including migrant workers, laborers, business people, and we will be meeting  with all of them. We are also talking to a team of lawyers who will be permanently attending to people at the consulate.

Finally, I have to ask? Are you worried that Trump might actually build a wall?

Cuevas: (Laughs) Do you think its going to be built? There is already a wall! There are fences in San Diego  right into the ocean!

I am sure that reality will prevail. This is not a typical situation, even for Americans. Little by little, we have to build this relationship again.
Now a Broadway musical on its national tour, Hedwig and the Angry Inch began life in 1990s glam-punk clubs. Late in that decade, the material made its way to Los Angeles, produced by David Bowie in Hollywood, then returned to its club-like feel with productions under the Los Angeles areas 99-Seat Plan.

The 2014 Broadway revival, directed by Michael Mayer, upped the production values and the fame of its stars, most notably Neil Patrick Harris. Now at the Pantages, the tour stars Darren Criss of Glee fame as the title character.

The show is considerably more polished than it was in its small-theater incarnations. But it remains potent. Where prior Hedwigs started the show hungrier and more pathetic, Criss at first makes a slicker MC. He grows darker, truer, as the story unfolds.

As the book by John Cameron Mitchell tells it, Hedwig grew up with the name Hansel, in East Germany, the male gay child of a father who abandoned him and a stony mother who should have. Long obsessed with American rock music, Hansel took up with an American G.I. and began dressing and grooming as a woman.

But under East German law, for the soldier to marry Hansel, Hansel had to be female. A sex change operation went horribly wrong  thus this musicals title  but Hansel took his mother, Hedwigs, name and left for America.

The soldier abandoned Hedwig, who grew more outlandish in style and personality, forming a glam-rock band. Hedwig, baby-sitting a local child, fell in love with the childs brother, Tommy. The songs they wrote together became hits, but Tommy found out Hedwig was biologically male and he, too, fled. Tommy is now an internationally celebrated rock star who doesnt acknowledge Hedwigs share in the fame.

Thats the backstory we learn from Hedwig. On this night, we are at Hedwigs one-night gig at a theater abandoned by a swiftly shuttered production of Hurt Locker: The Musical, the hilarious playbills for which litter the Pantages floor.

Hedwig very much starts as a comedy act and drag show  flirting with the audience, sexual puns, in-jokes about musical theater. But the musical grows deeper, enhanced with entertaining and, later, haunting songs by Stephen Trask.

At its core, Hedwig is about our origins, our environment, our genetic and cosmetic makeup, how we treat one another. Its about reunification  of nations, of our souls.

Who are we, not just in gender and sexuality, but even more deeply? And have we been authentic when it mattered most to us?

The writing is sometimes roughly crafted, which wasnt so noticeable in the shows smaller form. The shows lighting design is a little hard on the eyeballs, but surprisingly the sound is not too hard on the eardrums, though song lyrics arent as clear as could be.

But this musical continues to prove that when someone so guileless, so much in pain, shows up in our lives, we cant help but feel compassionate love for that person.

A quieter but likewise pained character lives onstage with Hedwig. This is Yitzhak, Hedwigs husband, a former drag performer from Croatia. Like wives the world over, Yitzhak gave up a career and now does menial tasks to keep his spouse in performance shape.

Partner abuse knows no gender. Hedwig treats Yitzhak horribly. To be fair, Yitzhak provokes Hedwig, repeatedly forcing Hedwig to face Tommys success and Tommys neglect.

Yitzhak fortunately also sings backup for Hedwig. And in the person of performer Lena Hall (a Tony winner as best featured actress for this gender-swapped role), the vocal performance is galvanic. It starts small but grows in volume and in its Yma Sumac-like range. But its Halls evocation of the love and hurt tearing at Yitzhak that most remains in memory.

The ending of Hedwig is powerful. Its also ambiguous, the subject of unwinnable debates among the shows fans.

Whatever and whoever we see at the storys end, its about at long last relinquishing all the attempts to be the entertainer, to make others happy, to appear flawless.

Hedwig leaves its audience indelibly feeling something  whether its sadness, joy, release, introspection or fully realized humanity.
On Veterans Day, its time to raise the bar we set for heroes and honor the men and women who volunteer for the valley of death.

Meet John Hughes. Dec. 7, 1941, was his baptism by fire.

The California boy was one of the first at Pearl Harbor to shoot at the enemy, and he was one of the last to evacuate the wounded from the battlefields of Korea more than a decade later.

Never heard of Hughes? Dont feel bad. The retired Marine major lives on a quiet, tree-lined street in Santa Ana and doesnt much care for fancy recognition.

Even with the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor less than a month away, he would never call himself a hero.

But he sure lived the life.

In the Pacific theater during World War II, he flew more than 150 combat missions  some skimming treetops for pinpoint bomb drops. He flew transport in China during that countrys civil war. In the Korean War, he piloted dozens of helicopter rescues and saved countless lives.

Now 97 years old with the health and stamina of a man more than a decade younger, Hughes chuckles and waves away what he calls his adventures.

He also dismisses being called a hero. The Marine says what he did during his 27 years in the Corps was just part of the job.

Some job. Its a miracle that Hughes survived.

LASTING LEGACIES

It is Oct. 26 at the Pacific Club in Newport Beach, and Hughes is here with 11 other veterans who survived Pearl Harbor. Their ages range from 92 to 104 and their history is the stuff of legend.

Just two weeks ago, Pearl Harbor survivor Neil Jones died. Jones was an 18-year-old seaman aboard the USS West Virginia when the first torpedo hit. On this day, Jones is with us thanks to a PowerPoint slide he was fond of quoting: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Jones and Hughes were members of the Orange County-area Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, Chapter 14. It disbanded two years ago because of dwindling numbers. I had the privilege of knowing some of the men before they died. I hope you did as well.

On this day, a color guard of Santa Ana High Schools crack ROTC unit kicks off the ceremony sponsored by the Orange County Council and the Navy League of the United States. The young women form a canopy of unsheathed swords as the veterans enter.

Raymond Chavez, 104, is the oldest at this gathering and perhaps that explains the grin on his face when he enters to a standing ovation.

A landscaper until he decided to retire at 85, Chavez was coming off night patrol at Pearl Harbor when he spotted a two-man submarine. He told his commander and a destroyer was able to blow up the sub.

World War II was on.

With the veterans wearing Hawaiian shirts and purple leis, the luncheon is a celebration of life. During one Hawaiian song, the crowd at Hughes table stands, joins hands and sways to the music. Hughes smiles while grasping the hand of his daughter, Nancy.

Capt. Gregory Keithley, U.S. Navy retired, steps up to the podium and asks the crowd: How does it feel to be in a room full of heroes?

His question is answered with thunderous applause and reminds me how many of us toss around the word hero. A mountain climber, for example, is no hero. These veterans are.

Being in this room is humbling  and an honor.

Your legacy, Keithley tells the World War II veterans, still runs in the veins of the men and women who serve today.

DAY TO NEVER FORGET

Hughes grew up in the San Fernando Valley and enlisted in the Marines soon after he graduated from high school. The year was 1937, and it seemed the world was at peace.

He trained as an airplane engine mechanic and after celebrating New Years 1941, he shipped out to a new airbase called Ewa. It was on an island hed never heard of named Oahu, just west of a place called Pearl Harbor.

On a Sunday morning 11 months later, Hughes walked toward a small store to buy a newspaper. He heard an unfamiliar drone, looked up and spotted a plane flying low over a sugarcane field.

It had a big red ball on the side, Hughes tells me, and a torpedo underneath.

Briefed that Japan was up to something  but no one knew exactly what or where  the young Marine immediately realized that the island was under attack.

He ran back to base, reported to his sergeant, grabbed his 1903 rifle and started firing.

Within minutes, there were more planes. Then more.

Hughes ran to the airfield. With rows of planes neatly lined up, the enemy was wreaking havoc. Bombs exploded. Sitting planes burst into flames. Strafing tore apart metal, glass and flesh.

As black smoke swirled and choked, Marines pushed planes apart so the explosions wouldnt create a domino effect. The airfield was filled with fire, ash and blood.

Next, thunder echoed. The harbor was six miles away, and Hughes knew the pounding could only mean that the big battleships such as the USS Arizona were hit.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the battle was over. The cost at Ewa: 33 airplanes destroyed, 14 damaged, four Marines killed.

But something far bigger was beginning.

We knew, Hughes says, leaning forward on his couch, we were at war.

DEADLY BLACK PUFFS

A few months later, Hughes dream came true  he was admitted to flight school.

In his cozy Santa Ana home, I ask Hughes why he wanted to fly when he could have kept his much safer job as a mechanic.

The old fighter pilots eyes twinkle. Flyings a lot better than driving a car.

In early 1943, Hughes flew through the hell of Guadalcanal. It was his first mission as a dive bomber pilot.

Over the next two years, he flew combat missions from the Solomon Islands to the Philippines  all the while forcing his mind to ignore black puffs of exploding anti-aircraft shells. He had missions to complete.

The heck with everything else.

He lost count of the number of bullet holes that punctured his planes. We had holes, the Marine says dryly, in the holes.

On one mission, enemy bullets shredded a wheel. With sparks flying and metal crunching, Hughes guided his craft to a bone-rattling landing. He shook off the debris, took a breather and climbed into another dive bomber.

After the war ended in 1945, Hughes was assigned to the El Toro Marine base. Soon, he married Mary Duba from Libertyville, Ill., and the couple went on to raise five children. But in May 1952, the pilot was back in heavy action in Korea, flying helicopters and evacuating wounded to field hospitals.

Like the warrior he is, helping the injured was Hughes favorite assignment. Youre doing some good.

Later, Hughes served on the USS Bairoko during the Bikini Atoll H-bomb tests, went on to Washington, D.C., to work with the Bureau of Aeronautics, was airfield operations manager in Okinawa and finished his career at El Toro.

After his service, Hughes took a job managing a small store. I shake my head in disbelief. Why not become a commercial airline or helicopter pilot?

The Marine grins and shakes his head, It wasnt the kind of flying I wanted to do.

He never mentions that he was awarded the Air Medal, Distinguished Pistol Shot, Distinguished Rifleman, Navy and Presidential citations, letters of commendation and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The way of the hero.

Contact the writer: dwhiting@scng.com
Jeff Nichols Loving, about Richard and Mildred Loving, is about simple-minded people simply being in love.

Both born and raised in the hills of Central Point, Virginia, the Lovings wed in 1958. But five weeks later, while Mildred was pregnant, they were roused from their bed at 2 a.m. by a Caroline County sheriff, put in jail and later ordered out of the state for 25 years.

In Nichols tender, graceful film, a love story progresses naturally, beautifully, with sudden, surreal interruptions  like the middle-of-the-night arrest  that play like abductions. And thats essentially what they were. Richard was white and Mildred was black, and that was enough to make their marriage a crime in 1958 Virginia.

The Lovings would, after years raising their family in Washington, D.C., spark the landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling, Loving v. Virginia, that unanimously struck down all anti-miscegenation laws and declared marriage an inherent right.

But Loving has none of the familiar dramatics of a social justice narrative. Its about civil rights revolutionaries who werent in the slightest revolutionary. The only time civil rights is uttered in the film is when a relative of Mildreds advises, while watching Martin Luther King march in far-off Washington: You need to get you some civil rights  like she was suggesting a new carburetor.

Richard (Joel Edgerton) is a taciturn bricklayer with a buzz cut that would look conservative in the Army. Mildred (Ruth Negga), too, is meek, with big, soulful eyes that belie a quiet inner strength. Theyre poor, little educated and overwhelmingly humble. Edgerton and Negga spend a significant part of the film with downcast eyes, too modest to insist on anything except to be left alone. Richard wants to build them a home in a field half a mile from where Mildred grew up. Mildred wants Richards mom to deliver her children.

They arent chatty people. When, in the films first scene, Mildred tells Richard shes pregnant, his face is at first stoic, and we fear a harsh response. But then comes a smile, huge and warm, and the answer, Good.

The movie is spoken largely in their faces and their intimate, telling gestures: arms draped around each other, a head laid on the shoulder of the other. The body language comes directly from the tremendous photos taken of the couple by Grey Villet for Life Magazine as well as the 16mm black-and-white footage shot by Hope Ryden, a central component of Nancy Buirskis 2012 documentary, The Loving Story.

The force of Nichols film is a steadily accumulating one. The Lovings, played with exquisite quietude by Negga and Edgerton, are steadfast and pure  arguably to such a degree as to risk stiffness. Even as their case swells with out-of-town lawyers and the potential to make history, they are little affected by the gravity. They dont go to hear the Supreme Court hearing; Tell the judge I love my wife, is Richards complete message to his attorney.

But the absence of larger histrionics is what gives Loving its understated power. Nichols, the talented Arkansas native who made Mud and Take Shelter, has stood out, in part, for his good-sense restraint as a filmmaker. His rural landscapes are richly American, with soil running through their fingers. His protagonists are soft-spoken, and the deeper truths all interior and unknowable.

In Loving, the full impact isnt felt until the final words, ones that will stay with moviegoers after the lights have come up. Remembering her husband years after his later death, Mildred is quoted with fitting  and no less moving  simplicity. I miss him. He took care of me.
SANTA ANA  An angry crowd of more than 650 anti-Donald Trump protesters took over several Santa Ana intersections Wednesday night and into early Thursday morning, pelting police with rocks, bottles and illegal fireworks.

Seven adults and three juveniles were arrested on suspicion of various offenses including assault with a deadly weapon  a rock hit at least one officer  being drunk in public, violating curfew, and damaging property including five police vehicles.

Were here to help peoples First Amendment rights  in a civil manner, Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said. But when people start violating the law, obviously we cant tolerate that.

None of the protesters was seriously injured.

More than 180 officers from the Santa Ana Police Department and a dozen other law-enforcement agencies mobilized to control the protest that began at around 7 p.m. Wednesday by blocking traffic at McFadden Avenue and Bristol Street.

The unruly crowd became larger and more violent as the night wore on.

While some protesters carried anti-Trump signs and shouted profanities, others hurled rocks, bottles and illegal fireworks at officers, who were armed with batons and rifles that fired bean-bag rounds, pepper balls, and rubber projectiles.

Fireworks tossed by protestors lit up the sky with an array of colors and landed just feet away from officers and reporters.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder across Bristol, police marched in unison for about two miles to West Central Avenue, pushing the protesters back. Periodically, they stopped to fire non-lethal projectiles toward the crowd.

Make sure we know where we are shooting, an officer in charge shouted to the others.

Four Santa Ana police cars and one vehicle belonging to the Orange County Sheriffs Department, and at least two businesses, were vandalized.

Protestors smashed patrol car windshields and dented hoods and caved in the roofs by jumping on the cruisers. One police vehicles interior was thrashed and a $6,000 license-plate reader was destroyed.

At least two businesses, on Bristol, were tagged with graffiti, Bertagna said. The windows and doors of a 7-Eleven were shattered with rocks.

Police wrestled at least one protester to the ground and handcuffed him. Those arrested were loaded into a prisoner transport van. By 2:30 a.m. Thursday, most of the protesters had dispersed.

The violence in Santa Ana was in contrast to peaceful protests Wednesday at UC Irvine, Chapman University, and Cal State Fullerton where students marched, carried signs and shouted anti-Trump slogans.

Meanwhile, Santa Ana police prepared for the possibility of more unrest late Thursday night. We are monitoring all social media sites and looking for intelligence, Bertagna said.

Staff Writer Alma Fausto contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7767 sschwebke@scng.com Twitter: @thechalkoutline
As a registered Republican with libertarian values living in California, I have not had my choice for president since 1984. This has forced me to realize that while I need to stay true to my core values, there are others who believe differently. The fact that others have different political opinions than I does not make them my enemy, nor does it validate me being critical of them or their candidates for no other reason than not being my guy.

As I watch celebrities on the Left come unglued with Donald Trumps win, as they blame third party voters for Hillary Clintons loss, as they make proclamations about how horrible our new president is less than 24 hours after he has been declared the victor, I realize my perspective is in the minority. At the risk of sounding like the old geezer yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn, all I can say to these folks is to grow up. If you believe the election of a president that you didnt support is a rational reason to move out of the country, then you are massively ignorant as to how the Constitution of this country works and you truly have no faith in humanity or democracy.

Patrick Buckley

Rancho Santa Margarita

  

Lost amidst the furor over the presidential candidates and the shock of the election results to both sides, is something truly historic. While the eventual ramifications are yet unknown, we have had the most successful political revolution of our countrys history since the Civil War. Even better  it was bloodless.

No matter which candidate you favored, its still a huge paradigm shift. Millions of angry voters sent a harsh warning to the political elite: the career politicians, the army of faceless bureaucrats, political consultants and pollsters. Theyve just been given notice of changes to come  our democracy is not about government, but about the citizens.

Another victory for democracy.

Johnny Knox

San Juan Capistrano

  

For the first time Im hoping that a president does not keep his campaign promises, like deporting millions of people who want to continue to work and live here and turning people away for their religious beliefs. I could go on but you get my drift. I can only hope these radical campaign statements were just to get in office and not sincere. If they are sincere, God help us all.

D.L. Marshall

Villa Park
BEIRUT  A Syrian Kurdish-led force fighting the Islamic State group north of the country is on the verge of surrounding a wide area north of the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa, a spokeswoman for the group said Thursday.

Cihan Ehmed of the U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces told The Associated Press that its fighters are advancing on two fronts north of Raqqa, the de facto capital of Islamic States self-declared caliphate. The push from Ein Issa and Suluk north of Raqqa has been ongoing for days under the cover of airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition.

The SDF, which includes Kurdish, Arab, Syriac and Turkmen fighters, say they have committed 30,000 fighters to the offensive aiming to eventual recapture the city of Raqqa, which was announced on Sunday. Iraq is meanwhile waging a major offensive to drive Islamic State from the northern city of Mosul.

Ehmed said once the forces coming from the two directions meet north of Raqqa, they will surround 212 square miles of territory controlled by the extremists.

The operations are ongoing according to the plan, she said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said many people are fleeing areas of fighting north of Raqqa. It added that SDF fighters have advanced north of Raqqa, capturing new areas and raising to 17 the number of villages and farms taken from Islamic State since the offensive began.

Later on Thursday, the SDF said on social media that its fighters have captured three farms, a village, and have approached the village of Hayes where intense clashes are ongoing.

The operation to recapture Raqqa has been dubbed Euphrates Rage and a joint operations command has been set up to coordinate various factions taking part in the battles.

Elsewhere in Syria, a rocket fired by rebels struck a school in the capital Damascus central al-Mohajireen neighborhood wounding three children, state media said without providing further details. In the rebel-held Damascus suburbs of Douma and Saqba, government airstrikes killed at least 11 civilians, including four children and three women, according to the Syrian Civil Defense in Damascus suburbs. The Observatory also said 11 were killed, but said they included four women.

In the northern city of Aleppo, seven people were wounded, some critically, when rebels shelled two government-held neighborhoods, state news agency SANA said. Later on Thursday, pro-government media also said allied troops moved in on new rebel advances in the western part of the city, regaining control of parts of the strategic Al-Assad district amid intense clashes.

The rebels had seized a couple of strategic areas in western Aleppo since they launched an offensive on government-held parts of Aleppo on Oct. 28 in an attempt to break the siege imposed on areas they have controlled since July. The siege on eastern Aleppo was coupled with a punishing bombing campaign by Syrian aircraft and supported by Russia, which has been backing the government of President Bashar Assad. Since late October, Russia said it would halt the airstrikes, amid rising civilian casualties, urging rebels to leave the territory.

A statement by Russian Defense Ministry Thursday said such halts would continue. Russia had earlier bristled at extending the breaks in the fighting in Aleppo, saying it would play into the hands of the insurgents.

The humanitarian pauses are undoubtedly needed, said Spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov. But we believe that simply extending their duration without offering real assistance to civilians, and allow the terrorists to restore their capabilities, would be unproductive and defy common sense. Russia and Syrias government refer to all armed opposition as terrorists.

Insurgents have refused to leave, saying the halts are not supervised by the U.N. and lack safety guarantees for evacuation. The U.N. has failed to secure humanitarian aid to the besieged Aleppo districts during the halts. During the last Russian-declared pause on Friday, rebels fired at one of the corridors, wounding two Russian servicemen and a Syrian journalist.
SANTA ANA  Two Santa Ana City Council members and other community leaders sought Thursday to reassure local immigrants anxious about what a Donald Trump presidency will bring.

Santa Ana Councilman Vicente Sarmiento said he wanted the areas immigrants to know we stand together. Our values in Santa Ana havent changed, the law hasnt changed.

At a news conference in front of the Old Orange County Courthouse, the councilman said he woke up very disappointed in the election results. And I feel for those families who woke up not just disappointed, but traumatized. Theyre not even sure they can do even daily things.

Sarmiento emphasized that the anger and disappointment should inspire action.

Lets use that energy to make a difference in two years, four years, Sarmiento said of the next federal elections.

Santa Ana City Councilwoman Michele Martinez said, This is a city that always supports and respects immigrants They are safe in the city of Santa Ana.

Referring to a mass protest Wednesday night that turned raucous at times as some demonstrators clashed with police, Martinez said the gathering was a testament that our residents are fearful, but we need to understand we are in a community that respects every individual.

Martinez encouraged anxiety-ridden residents to call their city and elected officials if they need help.

The councilwoman said Trump has disrespected our community, but he was chosen as president and we need to respect that.

Abraham Medina, a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program, said his permit to remain in the country legally expires in May, so he is making plans to try to remain in the U.S. He is getting married within the next couple of months and will seek to gain citizenship.

The fear is real for a lot of us, he said. Were all trying to assess what to do on a family level. Some people are considering getting married.

Some immigrants will look at becoming citizens, Medina said.

Some are even seeking dual citizenship for their children in case they get deported so their kids can go to school in their country of origin, Medina said.

Some parents tell us (their children) were crying and they had to sleep with them at night after the election, Medina said. The younger the children, the more fear of random attacks to the family.
SANTA ANA  Sad. Nervous. Angry. Confused.

As they sat in a circle Thursday morning, students in Maria Soberanis eighth-grade class at Spurgeon Intermediate School had a lot to say about the presidential election.

I feel scared theyre going to take away my mom and dad and grandma, one girl softly shared with some 20 classmates.

Such circles have been repeated since Election Day across the Spurgeon campus and other schools in the Santa Ana Unified School District, with teachers trying to help students in the wake of Donald Trumps election.

He made a lot of people in my family cry, Angel Avelar, 13, said.

Meanwhile, the Anaheim Union High School District told parents in recorded phone calls Thursday night that teachers and administrators are being extra vigilant in supporting those who express fear or anxiety.

The Los Angeles Unified School Districts board president sent out a message saying support would be offered to those who need it.

And Tom Torlakson, who oversees the states public schools, issued a statement late Thursday: The election outcome has caused deep concern among many students and their families. 

In California, diversity is strength, he said. And I want to tell young women and girls that they will always be safe, be respected, and be protected at school.

In Santa Ana Unified, children gathered in circles, to talk.

It doesnt mean that it makes everything better, but it offers them a chance for their voices to be heard and a chance to recognize that theyre not alone, said Spurgeons principal, Stuart Caldwell.

On Wednesday, some children had broken down crying, he said. One child said her family was already packing suitcases. Many boys and girls thought deportations would be imminent.

In Soberanis class, the eighth-graders expressed disappointment and sadness that so many Americans voted for Trump, a candidate who has disparaged women, called Mexicans criminals and demanded the immediate deportations of people living in the country illegally.

The school district, Orange Countys largest, is 96 percent Latino.

One student questioned whether America would ever be the same again.

Soberanis asked her class what would they like to tell the new president and his supporters.

I would like to tell Donald Trump and his supporters that not all Mexicans are bad. We deserve to be here, just as much as they do. Because we work as hard as they do, Stephaney Diazbarriga said.

We came here for a reason, she told her classmates. Our families wanted a better life for us. And I think its fair for us to be here, because I know that everyone came from somewhere else.

Not a lot of people originated from America.  Everyone is immigrants.

Margarita Guzman, Diazbarrigas mother, said in a phone interview that she has tried to reassure her daughter that everything will be OK, and if they have to leave, they can move near the border so her U.S.-born daughter can go to school here. Shes still very stressed.

Students like Avelar said the circles boosted spirits: It made me feel better to know others felt the same way.

var _ndnq = _ndnq || []; _ndnq.push([embed]);

Matthew Munoz said he took some solace from the teachings in history class: The Constitution protects us against tyranny. All the power doesnt rest with Donald Trump.

The eighth-graders talked about what they could do to help their community  the concensus: vote when they turn 18. And if they could have a super power that would make a difference in this election, what would it be?

One popular concept: the ability to read Trumps thoughts. Another: the ability to make others feel empathy.

David Haglund, deputy superintendent of Santa Ana Unified, stopped by Soberanis class Thursday and told the students: I see you. I hear you. I believe in you. I will protect you.

Contact the writer: Twitter@RoxanaKopetman and rkopetman@scng.com
Seven surfboard builders from around the world will be honored in Huntington Beach as part of the International Surfboard Builders Hall of Fame induction, Saturday, including Huntington board maker and lifeguard Gene Belshe, an early influencer on Southern Californias surf culture.

The event, to be held at the International Surfing Museum, will honor Belshe, California board makers Randy Wong, Wayne Rich and Robert Millner, Australian surfboard builders Mike Davis and Bob McTavish, and Greg Loehr from the East Coast.

The Hall of Fame was created in 2000 by Bob The Greek Bolen and Mike Micky Rat Ester to honor the builders and creators of the surfboard industry.

Belshe, who died in 2012, was one of the earliest California surfboard makers when he started hand-carving boards out of redwood.

The boards resembled what was being ridden on the islands, Bolen said. Red wood was pretty plentiful at the time, and it would shape easily.

Bolen and Ester created the awards because surfers who dedicate themselves to the art of building surfboards are rarely honored.

Its important to us because we want to get these legends nominated while they are still with us so we can preserve our history and our sport, Ester said. Its been long overdue.

Through the years, 87 surfboard builders have been honored, including big names such as Dale Velzy, Mickey Munoz and Jack ONeill.

If it wasnt for them building the boards, we wouldnt have the tools to ride, Ester said.

The first inductee was Bill Holden of Holden Surfboards. Bolen met Holden in 1958, when he had a shop on Beach Boulevard right behind his moms house in Midway City.

Each inductee picks another person to honor for the following year.

I think thats more important than anything, they get nominated by their peers, Ester said. That means the world to these guys.

Contact the writer: lconnelly@scng.com
The Huntington Beach Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is bringing back some old-time religion. Really old-time.

A full-scale replica of the tabernacle built by Moses and the Israelites, and described in the Old Testament, was set up by members of the Huntington Beach Mormon stake, or congregation, in the parking lot of the church in Fountain Valley.

It will be open for guided tours from 5 to 8 tonight and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Also scheduled is an interfaith celebration from 11a.m. to 1p.m. today with Catholic, Christian, Islamic and Jewish faith leaders.

The idea was born after Rick Johnson, president of the Huntington Beach Mormon stake, saw a similar replica in Idaho in August 2015. The tabernacle, or tent sanctuary, was made to the exact scale described in Scripture, down to the cubit.

Although the early tabernacle was made of wood and plated in gold, this wooden replica is covered in metallic gold paint.

The structure was built by congregants and about 450 youths and teens as a centerpiece for a summer youth conference in Murrieta, and reassembled this week at the church, at 17500 Bushard St.

Its been a real labor of love, Johnson said. Its been a neat opportunity to share it with others.

On its first night, Tuesday, more than 900 visitors toured the site.

The tabernacle also includes a courtyard area, replica altars of sacrifice and incense, a laver of water, a menorah and a table of unleavened showbread.

In the back of the tabernacle is the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary where God was said to dwell. The sanctuary houses replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, which consisted of a cover with angels known as the Mercy Seat, and the ark itself, which contained the tablets with the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down, a golden bowl containing manna, or food, and a rod that belonged to Moses brother, Aaron.

In ancient times only the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies and only once a year on Yom Kippur to offer blood from a sacrificed animal and burn incense.

As Johnson describes it, the journey through the tabernacle is not unlike a faith journey.

We believe in sacred spaces, he said. The further you go in, you get further and further from the world and nearer to God.

To Johnson, the idea of worship places transverses many religions, making the tabernacle valuable to people of different faiths. This helps explain why his churchs display has gotten so much interest, he said.

To congregants, the tabernacle and its contents are part of Gods way of foretelling the coming of his son.

Most all of the things reflect Jesus Christ and his ministry, said Elder Taylor Feitz, one of the tour guides.

He said being able to see and visualize (the tabernacle) brings Jesus to life in a different way.

For Einon Brock, who just started his two-year mission in Southern California, the ancient tabernacle draws a line to the temples of today.

In addition to the tabernacle, the Mormon church opened its doors and is showing a video about the making of the tabernacle. There are additional historic displays in the churchs cultural hall.

Johnson said plans are in place to turn the tabernacle into a traveling display, with trips to USC and Ann Arbor, Mich., being considered.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7964gmellen@scng.com
Trestles was saved Thursday and will be for the foreseeable future.

After 15 years of contentious negotiations  which brought thousands of people to drawn-out public meetings, sparked lawsuits and countersuits and led to countless Save Trestles bumper stickers  a deal was announced Thursday that ensures the iconic surf spot wont be wiped out by a toll road.

The deal involves the key players: Orange Countys toll road agency, a coalition of environmental groups and the state attorney general. In addition to protecting Trestles, saying the 241 toll road wont be extended to its border, the deal also protects San Onofre State Beach.

The agreement, approved by the Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency Board on a 10-2 close session vote and announced outside the offices shortly after, specifically settles five lawsuits brought by the Save San Onofre Coalition and the attorney general. Those challenged the agencys 2006 so-called Green Alignment and the 2013 approvals of its Foothill-South and Tesoro Extension projects.

The state beach, the Richard and Donna ONeill Conservancy and surrounding open space and the wildlife habitat in the San Mateo Creek and watersheds all will be permanently protected from toll roads agency-sponsored projects. That includes the world-renowned surfing spot Trestles, a cobblestone beach that sits within San Onofre State Beach.

In exchange, the toll road agency will be allowed to explore other routes to extend the 241.

This settlement gave us what weve been fighting for all along, said Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the California State Parks Foundation and spokeswoman for the Save San Onofre Coalition of 12 California and national environmental organizations. We achieved that; otherwise, we would not have signed it.

The toll road fight dates back to the early 2000s, when the TCA announced a plan to extend the 241 toll road through San Onofre State Park.

That idea rankled many, including the surf community, as surfers came to believe one of the worlds most pristine breaks could be threatened by an extension of the toll road.

We, as a group of surfers, really grabbed ahold of this. We made it cool and sexy and we made it our fight, said Rick Erkeneff, president of the South County Surfrider Foundation. We brought in heavy hitters like the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, these die-hard environmental organizations. And we stood arm in arm and we said, No, were not going to allow this.

At one 2008 meeting, thousands packed the California Coastal Commission and testified for nearly 12 hours.

The agreement doesnt mean a toll road isnt coming to the area. Traffic on I-5 remains congested, and the toll road is sold as an alternative that could reduce congestion. But if one is built, or if the 241 is extended, it wont be allowed to threaten Trestles or the San Mateo Watershed.

We reached this decision through each partys deep respect for one anothers priorities and objectives, said Craig Young, chairman of the Transportation Corridor Agency.

This settlement represented a win for both our regions transportation needs and our regions environmental priorities.

It wasnt just a one-sided win, Erkeneff said. The toll road agency got a promise that the Save San Onofre Coalition wont challenge future plans for a toll road extension as long as it doesnt encroach environmentally sensitive areas.

The (TCA) wanted to put it to bed  They realized we were never going to go away, we were never going to stop fighting, Surfriders Erkeneff said. Thats what they got out of it. And we effectively saved Trestles, forever.

At least 16 proposed plans have been brought forward by the public at two meetings, according to TCA spokesperson Kelsey Eiben. Any plan would need to go through environmental studies, community outreach and approvals.

One proposal calls for extending the toll road through the east side of San Clemente, Erkeneff said. Another might connect a northern stretch of Ortega Highway to I-5.

This agreement reflects this new thinking on their part that they want to look at these other options, said Dan Silver, executive director of the Endangered Habitats League.

In addition to wiping out the plans struck in 2006 and 13, the deal announced Thursday pays about $7 million in legal fees to environmental groups. Also, the TCA agreed to create a $28 million conservation fund that will help restore the San Mateo Creek and its watershed, which could lead to the restoration of the southern steelhead trout population. An oversight committee will be part of the habitat restoration projects.

Projects that could be funded through the settlement include land acquisitions, restoration or removal of exotic vegetation and cleaning up the water.

Environmental groups may partner with other agencies to add money to the fund.

The San Mateo Creek is a very special watershed, Silver said. Its the only remaining undammed watershed in this part of California.
A Republican president usually fortifies local GOPs.

But while Donald Trump won the country this year, he lost Orange County  the first time a Democrat has won since 1936. Two high-profile Republican candidates for the state Legislature declined to endorse their partys nominee, and two GOP congressional members condemned his lewd open mic comments.

With Democrats rapidly gaining ground in the county, Republicans here face a challenge beyond broadening their appeal to minorities and youth: They must establish an identity apart from Trump, with whom many minorities and millennials have taken offense.

Its not like when Reagan was elected. His presidency galvanized Orange County Republicans and attracted many new voters, said Jodi Balma, a Fullerton College political scientist. County Republicans are going to have to distance themselves from some of the messages that will be coming from the White House.

In 1990  a year after Reagan left office  the county GOP peaked with a 22 percentage point registration advantage over Democrats. That lead is now at 3.8 points and is on a trajectory to disappear in the next few years.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton won the county handily, 49.8 percent to Trumps 44.8 percent, according to the latest available tallies.

County GOP Chairman Fred Whitaker discounts the idea that Trump has had a significant effect on the local party. Republicans who backed Trump, and those who had reservations with the nominee, set those differences aside to work together for down-ticket candidates, he said.

Ive never had that big of a challenge of getting people on board because I havent really focused on the presidential race, Whitaker said. Our focus was on the down-ticket races. Wherever people stood on Trump, they came together on everything else.

We managed pretty well, and I think well continue to manage pretty well.

WARY OF TRUMP

Of the countys four high-profile face-offs between Republicans and Democrats, GOP candidates were ahead in three as of Fridays tallies. Whitaker noted that all four candidates outperformed Trump in the Orange County portions of their districts.

Two of those candidates, GOP state Senate candidate Ling Ling Chang and GOP Assembly incumbent Young Kim, made it clear over the summer that they would not be taking a public position on the presidential race.

Trump has made so many outrageous and offensive comments that they are too numerous to mention, Chang said well before Trumps open mic video became public.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, backed Trump but condemned the open mic comments.

Issa and Chang hold narrow leads in their races, while Kim is trailing. Rep. Mimi Walters, R-Laguna Beach, won easily but also criticized the open mic comments.

They sort of threaded the needle this time, said Oranges Jimmy Camp, who spent 30 years as a Republican consultant before leaving the party this summer over disgust with Trump winning the nomination.

Balma thinks Orange County candidates strategy of distinguishing themselves from Trump may be essential in the future.

Those local officials who dont are going to have a hard time getting re-elected, she said, adding that staying away from hot-button social issues and focusing on pro-business, anti-corruption messages may be the most successful approach.

The anti-intellectual, anti-scientific worldview is not the path forward for California Republicans, Balma said.

MINORITY OUTREACH

On the plus side for Republicans everywhere is that their party now controls the White House and both congressional chambers.

At least in the short term, I think even the Never Trumpers will rally together, said Peter Ditto, a social psychologist who studies political behavior at UC Irvine. Whether that will hold or not will depend on how successful Trump is.

Lucy Dunn, chief executive of the Orange County Business Council, agreed.

Success will do more to affect trends than anything, said Dunn, who did not vote for either of the major-party candidates.

Ditto, Camp and Whitaker all noted that shifting demographics make it increasingly important for the GOP to attract minorities and millennials for long-term success.

Donald Trump is not the person for that, Camp said.

Nonetheless, Whitaker is committed to appealing to growing portions of the electorate. We understand that demography is destiny, he said.

Exhibit A is the county partys inroads with Asian candidates. Two of the countys state legislators are Republican Asians, as are three of the five county supervisors.

A tougher sell is Latino voters, but Whitaker pointed to two Latinas who are poised to win seats on the five-member Santa Ana Unified School District board. Republicans often use school boards and city councils as springboards to higher office  and Santa Ana is the countys most heavily Democratic city.

However, those inroads into the Latino community could get tougher if Trump follows through with vows to deport immigrants currently protected by President Barack Obamas executive orders.

As for young voters, Whitaker said that Republican clubs at UC Irvine and Chapman University are well-established and growing, and that many of the countys community colleges have fledgling GOP organizations.

That is the foundation of building an activist movement, he said. I see seeds there.

Meanwhile, Tea Party activist Deborah Pauly  an ardent Trump supporter  thinks the divisiveness of the campaign will fall away now that the election is over, noting the president-elects victory speech early Wednesday.

He immediately addressed the divide, she said.

He has a big ego and that means he wants to succeed. To do that, he needs a bigger portion of the country behind him  more than voted for him. I think he wants to do a good job. And I think everybody in the country wants that, too.

Contact the writer: mwisckol@ocregister.com
Russian authorities in the city of St. Petersburg recently came under fire after it was discovered that they had used digital editing software like Adobe Photoshop to fake the cleanup of a local lamp post.

Last week, a resident of St. Petersburg submitted a request on the local government official website asking that a lamp post covered with obscene advertising stickers be cleaned. This Tuesday, an employ of the St. Petersburg administration responded to the complaint, letting the person know that the job had been done, even posting a photo of the cleaned up lamp post as proof. It had apparently been scrubbed of advertising materials, but after taking a closer look, a number of users noticed that the infrastructure element depicted in the photo didnt look quite right.

Zooming into the picture, it was revealed that the lamp post in question had been given the spray can treatment to create a two-tone speckled grey effect over the stickers. And as if the shoddy digital cleanup wasnt obvious enough, someone even noticed a bizarre blob of white digital spray paint suspended in mid air by the right of the infrastructure element.

After the post went viral on Russian social media, reporters from Radio Baltika decided to investigate. They went to the busy intersection where the lamp post was located and found that it was still covered in advertising stickers for sex services. Baltika posted an article about the situation on their website, with the headline St Petersburg officials used Paint to clean adverts off the lamp post, which spread like wildfire online.

Faced with heavy criticism from the public, St. Petersburg authorities put out a statement insisting that the cleanup job had actually been performed, but that an overzealous employee may have taken it upon themselves to embellish the results a little. In any place you can find a person who wants to present the situation in a better light than it really is. We will of course investigate, Dmitry Popov told Radio Baltika.

That reaction didnt stop Russian internet users from mocking the embarrassing digital makeover on social media. One person posted their own version of the after photo, where the lamp post is so clean that it sparkles, while another commented Im looking forward to the time in Russia when they will eradicate poverty, crime rate and unemployment with the help of Paint. Quick and easy.

Incidentally, this controversy occurred mere days after a similar incident was reported in the Primorsky district of St. Petersburg. Then, officials responded to a request to have a local pathway repaired with a digitally rendered photo that depicted it in pristine condition. The repair of the mentioned asphalt walkway has been completed. Photo attached, their response mentioned. After a similar backlash from the public, the official explanation was that instead of announcing the postponement of repairs for 2017, one of the administration employees mistakenly uploaded a Photoshop-edited picture of what the walkway would look like when covered with asphalt. It was nothing more than a mock-up shared by a contractor, but it was apparently so well done that the employee mistook it for an actual photograph.

However, this most recent story shows that it wasnt just an isolated accident and that St. Petersburg government may be using digital software as a quick and cheap fix to the citys problems.

Source: Radio Baltika via BBC
Jason Morris

Successful Corporate Social Responsibility programs go beyond one-time donations or galas aimed at raising money for a cause. They involve an institutional commitment that starts in lines of business like operations, HR and marketing, and spread through an organization until CFOs and the board of directors understand the impact they can have on top and bottom line.

The worlds most visible and admired brands have put sustainability, social justice and corporate citizenship at the forefront of their communications programs. It starts at the top, with Marc Benioff and Richard Branson tweeting and speaking out on topics related to climate, diversity and social justice in a way that permeates their corporate brands. That focus is bottom-up from the employees and top down from the CEOs of those brands, making it much easier to achieve institutional buy in for CSR campaigns. But not every company has that buy-in at the CEO level out of the gate, so it becomes critical to demonstrate the value of CSR over time.

Part of convincing internal executive audiences and external investors of the power and strategic value of CSR rests in the ability to show that those initiatives are having tangible business impact. Getting the word out  both through external and internal communications  is critical to establishing that buy-in. And that is where companies tend to struggle.

Here are three reasons CSR communications programs struggle and how to fix them:

Lack of focus

Too many brands bundle CSR under existing communications functions where they inevitably are lost. While data has shown that effective CSR can boost employee engagement and productivity, attract better candidates, and drive top line and bottom line growth, the impact is less linear than say, a successful product launch. Proactive CSR communications die a slow death when managed by the same team focused on corporate and product PR.

CSR communications needs a separate carve-out from corporate PR with its own resources, a dedicated team and a focus that doesnt allow it to become lost in the shuffle of a product launch or corporate earnings announcement. You also need a team that understands CSR issues and can anticipate objections from external stakeholders related to initiatives you may be implementing.

Is this energy efficiency approach novel or noteworthy? Are there any perceived environmental drawbacks to adopting this type of renewable energy? These are the types of questions that can paralyze a talented corporate PR professional or mystify a product PR professional, making it even easier to back burner a CSR initiative. CSR needs focus, attention and it needs expert support. Anything less is a half measure.

Primary goal: earned media

Many brands come to CSR wanting something theyre used to getting for positive corporate or product news: earned media coverage. Earned media is a great crutch for PR teams as it is an output that they can put in front of executives to show that the program has momentum. And while media coverage is still an incredibly important part reaching strategic audiences, it cannot be the primary goal of a CSR program.

The great thing for companies is that there are a number of other channels through which you can get the word out about your charitable giving and broader CSR initiatives. Content  including contributed, owned and social content  can be a very effective way to tell a story around your broader CSR initiatives. When the focus is on, what content can we create to highlight this initiative? you establish much more realistic goals that still have tremendous impact. You also avoid that awkward line of pushing your charitable programs so hard that people begin to question the motives behind them.

When Yamaha recently announced its Music Essentials charitable giving initiative with DonorsChoose.org, it did so with a Medium post by an executive and punctuated the campaign with an event at an East Palo Alto school featuring violin prodigy and music star Lindsey Stirling. The event itself generated plenty of visual content and social buzz which helped drive visibility for the initiative. This softer approach to publicizing CSR initiatives can still generate earned media coverage and be highly effective for a brand while keeping the emphasis in the right place: on the cause.

Transactional, no narrative

In an age where content and thought leadership are highly effective ways to communicate consistent and compelling company narratives, most PR professionals understand that a one-off transactional approach to PR does not work. Unfortunately, CSR communications is an area where that sort of approach still dominates with companies wanting to highlight one-time donations, campaigns or initiatives that dont tie back to a larger story or focus.

Companies need to paint a larger story with a clear focus, third-party validation and backed up by progress and milestones. The most impactful outcomes from a communications perspective involving a focus on why the company is involved and not what the company is doing, so from a messaging perspective the focus needs to be on the larger issue.

Organizations should also not completely shy away from communicating what they get as a benefit from driving a campaign. Journalists and most other external audiences are smart enough to figure out how a brand may benefit from championing a cause or embracing energy efficiency in California, so brands can only benefit from being transparent and establishing trust internally and externally with CSR stakeholders.

CSR programs have never been a more strategic aspect of an organizations internal communications and public relations programs than they are today. Generational attitude shifts, climate-driven environmentalism and a slow but steady climb out of the financial crisis have converged to make corporate citizenship a cornerstone of employee and stakeholder engagement. But without focus, the right goals and the right approach, your CSR PR could undersell the great work you are doing.

***



Jason Morris is EVP and General Manager of InkHouses San Francisco office.
Joe Honick

Now that the celebrations and/or mournings have died down, its important  if not urgent  to make sure all Americans understand that we did not elect a monarch or king with Donald Trump. We elected a President who represents one part of the three branches of federal government: the Executive. The Legislative and the Judicial, however powerfully influenced by the President, remain independent forces that are often challenges to the White House, even when theyre of the same party.

Having spent a good part of my professional career in D.C., as many others who read these pages have, knowledgeable people know that the President has to use lots of experience with the system to get his wants turned into action. Multiplying Trumps hurdles in this respect is the fact he spent much of his campaign insulting the Congressional Republican leadership, going far below the belt compared to most ordinary political criticism.

Will the Republican Congress simply capitulate after being so roundly demeaned during the campaign?

Further complicating President-elect Trumps path to delivering on his many campaign promises is the reality that he has no experience in negotiating with those who differ from his opinions, whether its in his own corporations  all 500 of them  or where others have been willing to take him on in any number of accusatory places from sex to business. As a public figure, he will simply not be able to threaten a lawsuit to beat back challenges as he already has in more than 3,000 cases.

In the broader sense, I, like so many who deal in international matters, are on the receiving end of calls and e-mails expressing fears as to whether already established agreements will be kept or whether there will be a divergence on the part of the President-elect regarding what he said and what he really has planned. Early expressions from some world leaders who have sold their own nations on deals negotiated with President Obama are being carefully polite, but covertly pondering which American leader will emerge after his inaugural.

Its to President Obamas and Hillary Clintons credit that theyve been so publicly sensitive to the way in which theyre showing respect for the election results and the urgency of maintaining a semblance of national unity. But, given the unusual demonstrations across the country in these early days, Trump has some major decisions right now that could force him to retract or otherwise minimize threats he made during the campaign in order to establish a peaceful transition and confidence abroad. Were he to take a few important steps backward, well, that could also backfire should his supporters feel deceived.

Theres an urgent need for the leaders of the Legislative Branch to carefully maintain its respect for the new national leader while avoiding any sense their standing was not diminished by Trump commentary and to ensure that they remain a powerful branch of American government.

In the end, however, once a conclusive expression of Trumps established position is defined beyond just an official inaugural, theres immense pressure for those already in power to make sure the nation has elected a President who must be both a leader and a partner with other branches, and those steps must take place fast and convincingly. Hes not a monarch who can simply take complete control.

* * *

Joseph J. Honick is president of GMA International in Bainbridge Island, Wash.
Independent Senator Lynn Ruane has encouraged early school leavers to return to education to reach their full potential. Senator Ruane was speaking in Dublin at an event aimed at increasing participation in adult learning by using storytelling.

Senator Ruane understands first-hand the transformative power of education as a learner, mother, social activist and Senator. She left school shortly after completing her Junior Certificate, during which time she was pregnant with her first daughter. By the time she was 21, Senator Ruane had a second daughter, and a career as a drugs addiction worker in her community. She returned to education through the Trinity Access Programme at the age of 26, and went on to be elected Student Union President.

Telling her story, Senator Ruane said, After I left school, I went to a community education centre An Cosan in Tallaght. I didnt do well in school and An Cosan provided the structure I needed. Community education gave me the foundation for learning that led me to Trinity College and then to the Seanad. When I tell my story, I hope that its a signpost for people like me who left school early and theyll think I can do that.

Harnessing the Power of a Story was hosted jointly by AONTAS, The National Adult Learning Organisation and Leargas. It was attended by staff from adult learning centres throughout Ireland. Commenting about the event, Niamh OReilly, CEO of AONTAS, said: As a nation, we must look at widening participation in lifelong learning, particularly for early school leavers. Irelands participation rate stands at only 7.2 percent. Our closest neighbours, the UK has a participation rate of 15.7 percent while Demark leads the table at 31.3 percent.

Veteran broadcaster Bryan Dobson also spoke at the event and shared his view of storytelling from a journalists perspective. He said, sStorytelling is essential to the human condition its the way we make sense of the world. Compelling stories have a singularity and at the heart of every story is a human being.
Loading... OilVoice will be with you shortly...
For a while, Arrival is exactly whats been advertised: Independence Day with a Ph.D.  a smart and exquisitely crafted alien invasion movie from a team of artists and actors at the top of their respective games.

For a while, Arrival is a painfully timely movie of the moment, using its sci-fi premise to probe a host of pressing issues: our fear of the other, our fear of the unknown, our inability to communicate with those on the opposite side of the border, whether that border be national, ideological or, in this case, extraterrestrial.

And then Arrival pulls a bait-and-switch. It remains those other two movies, but it also becomes (abruptly, exhilaratingly) a third film, one that has not been teased in any of the marketing. And its moving, and its mind-blowing, and its far too interesting to spoil. Lets leave it at this: Come for the alien invasion movie, stay for the _____________.

The film starts surprising you right out of the gate, with a sequence of life and death and internal monologue that plays like a deleted scene from Terrence Malicks Tree of Life. A baby hand grabs a finger, neoclassical swells onto the soundtrack and cinematographer Bradford Youngs camera considers the unbearable lightness of it all, and (holy moly) has this movie grabbed you by the throat in mere minutes.

And the aliens havent even arrived yet!

When they do, its a stunningly orchestrated feat of realism. News alerts and texts start popping up on phones. Humanity rushes home to turn on TV news. To sit, to wait, to worry.

Twelve spaceships (which look like skipping stones stood upright) have parked at different parts of the world, and people are losing their bloody minds. Economies collapse, churches burn. Mass suicides, riots, truly a greatest hits list of dumb things humans do to themselves and one another when theyre scared.

Governments and their militaries are scrambling to find answers for the arrival. Really just one answer to one question: What is your purpose on Earth?

One ship is hovering over the Montana countryside, and though the U.S. military has entered the ship and attempted to make contact, the aliens and the humans arent understanding each other. And so the military enlists the help of some academics.

Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker) invites linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to the base camp surrounding the ship and ultimately to meet the aliens, who are far more alien than the large-skulled bipeds weve seen in previous cinematic close encounters.

The interior of the ship offers gravity-defying physics and a Kubrick-ian aesthetic. Whatever the aliens want, this much is known: Their interior design sensibilities lean toward the minimalistic.

Louise embarks on an increasingly coherent series of talks with two aliens, whom Ian names Abbott and Costello. She quickly learns that written language is the key to divining their purpose  the aliens write in a circular language in a substance like black disappearing ink.

Meanwhile, other world governments, especially China and Russia, are getting antsy trying to figure out what motivates the visitors. In America, right-wing media (including an Alex Jones-like radio host) stoke fear and distrust of the aliens, encouraging the government to fire a shot across the bow, so to speak. Some of the soldiers guarding Louise and Ian start getting catastrophic ideas. Conflict is imminent, and Louise is on a timeline  to underline this, there is at one point literally a ticking time bomb.

As he did with his equally excellent 2015 film Sicario, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve puts a woman in the middle of a massive military operation where she becomes the sole voice of opposition in a room full of men. One of the biggest obstacles in deciphering the aliens intent is that 12 ships in 12 different nations are all saying something, but 12 governments arent sharing the information with one another.

We need to be talking to each other! Louise screams at an Army tent full of soldiers and spies.

Louise believes that language is the foundation of civilization. When communication breaks down, the rest of the world follows. Along with the film, she gradually finds that the fault may not come from our stars but from ourselves, that what the aliens are trying to tell us might be beside the point.

Once Arrival lays all its cards on the table, it becomes incredibly exciting, tickling your intellect before pivoting into its hidden agenda: draining your tear ducts.

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer adapted Arrival from a short story by Ted Chiang called Story of Your Life (also the films original title), and he retains the big ideas and thematic focus of the source material. Its a very clever story, and Villeneuve brings it home with some help from a few of his Sicario MVPs.

Johann Johannsson offers a pummeling score, while editor Joe Walker merges past and present events in a way that blurs the boundaries of linear time. The special effects are uniformly terrific, save a scene or two of shoddy computer animation. (Arrival was shot on a $50 million budget, less than a third of the cost of Independence Day 2.)

But for all its technical virtues  and this is remarkable for a commercial blockbuster  the movie really comes down to one performance.

Once Arrival clears its big turn, it demands the world of Adams. By the finale, shes doing the acting equivalent of playing both sides of a three-dimensional chess game ... while strapped to a rocket ship ... while men yell at her.

Arrival wrestles with plenty of familiar themes  like love, time, death, the universal need to be heard and understood. But it tells its story and comes to its conclusion in a way thats not quite like anything Ive seen before. To stick its landing, it needed an actress of superhuman abilities.

It found the right woman for the job.

ARRIVAL

Grade: A

Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language

Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes

Theaters: Aksarben, Alamo, Bluffs 17, Majestic, Oakview, Regal, Twin Creek, Village Pointe, Westroads
Before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, John W. Estabrook was a Midwestern teenager with the usual interests: school, sports, girls. With World War II raging, he became a patriot.

Estabrook served in the Pacific as a boiler room engineer on an LST transport ship, what sailors called a long, slow target.

By wars end, he was too sick to be sent home. He had developed tuberculosis, then a highly contagious, potentially fatal lung disease.

For two years, Estabrook was kept on mandatory bedrest at a VA-contracted sanitorium, enduring painful treatments that collapsed his lung to rest it from the infection.

An outspoken young man with little patience or enthusiasm for the care received and inefficiencies observed, Estabrook voiced his frustrations. Repeatedly.

The physician who ran the facility told his unhappy patient, You complain so much. Maybe you should go into hospital administration and fix it.

Thats exactly what Estabrook did.

In 1951, while enrolled in business administration at the University of Omaha (now UNO), Estabrook met with Rev. Bret Lyle, superintendent of Methodist Hospital, then at 36th and Cuming. Rev. Lyle hired Estabrook as an administrative intern at $125 a month.

I scrubbed floors, ran the elevator and night switchboard, Estabrook said. I did laundry, bookkeeping, bedpans, every job in the hospital.

When Rev. Lyle retired in 1959, Estabrook took his place as Methodist Hospitals first professionally trained hospital administrator. Within a year, revenue increased 10 percent. Estabrook led the way to new efficiencies, innovations and financial success based upon a truly patient-centered culture of caring.

Value is not only determined by cost, but by the quality of care provided to every patient, Estabrook said.

Treat patients with dignity, compassion and empathy. Your attitude influences patients response to treatment.

Caring was woven into the fabric of his work, said Ruth Freed, PhD, RN, former vice president of Methodist Hospitals patient care services. Mr. Estabrook kept his hand on the pulse of organization while always moving forward and raising the bar.

Methodist Hospitals reputation for excellence grew as Estabrook implemented Nebraskas first surgical suite with adjacent recovery room, first ICU, first telecobalt therapy unit, first specially trained hospital IV team, first nationally accredited hospital blood bank and first 24/7 emergency department.

Estabrook was committed to creating the ideal health care environment, and he looked west to 84th and Dodge, where Omaha was projected to grow. A new 328-bed Methodist Hospital opened in 1968, built from the ground up with the most modern features, including 14 operating rooms, a coronary care unit and Nebraskas first linear accelerator. One surgeon called Methodist the Cadillac of medical facilities in Omaha.

For 41 years, Estabrook led with vision, humility and respect for the responsibilities entrusted to him. He retired as President Emeritus of Methodist Health System in 1992.

In 2006, the Methodist Cancer Center was renamed to honor John W. Estabrook, the health care innovator described by John Fraser, president and CEO of Methodist Health System, as Methodists George Washington.

Fraser points to Estabrook as the modern-day founder of the caring culture that continues to makes Methodist The Meaning of Care.

I learned so much from being a patient, Estabrook said. We can have the nicest bricks and mortar, and the best technology, but without our people, were nothing.

For more stories about Methodist Health Systems amazing 125-year history, or to share your own story, visit bestcare.org/share.
The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that it had issued an order requiring an Omaha railcar cleaning company to take immediate steps to clean up its facility.

The agency issued an imminent and substantial endangerment order to Nebraska Railcar Cleaning Services LLC for failing to identify, handle and properly dispose of waste that presents a potential danger to public health and the environment.

The EPA estimates that the firm, which cleans railcars and rail tank cars, generates 5,700 pounds of solid crude oil, 4,000 pounds of liquid crude oil and an unknown quantity of ethanol and methanol waste each month.

These materials and others are highly volatile, as demonstrated by low flash points and a deadly explosion in April 2015 involving these materials, EPA regulators said, referring to a blowup at a company facility near First and Hickory Streets on April 14, 2015, that killed two people and injured a third.

Nebraska Railcar didnt immediately return a phone message seeking comment Thursday.

As a result of an investigation into the 2015 explosion, Nebraska Railcar Cleaning Services was placed in the Occupational Safety and Health Administrations severe violator enforcement program, a strict safety oversight program.

The company late last year said it was disappointed in an OSHA investigation that cited the company for more than 30 safety violations and levied a fine of nearly $1 million in the wake of the April explosion. Nebraska Railcar said at the time that it didnt put employees at risk and that it would challenge the fine and alleged safety violations.

Raymond Bosch, attorney for the EPAs Region 7, which covers Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska, said Thursday that the company has met with regulators and is in the process of complying with the order.

Theyve been very cooperative, Bosch said.

The EPA order requires the firm to identify hazardous waste on its premises, as required by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, properly dispose of it and provide the agency with regular reports of its actions.

janice.podsada@owh.com, 402-444-1142
Gas prices are down in Omaha and across Nebraska and Iowa, dropping a nickel or more in some locations.

The price for regular unleaded gas has dipped below $2 per gallon at many spots around Omaha.

Whats driving the price dip? OPEC.

Its all about OPEC, said gasbuddy.coms Patrick DeHaan. Its a very sensitive market right now.

Last month, he said, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries considered cutting oil production, which caused prices to increase. Now, DeHaan said, OPEC is indicating it may not cut production, which has led to the recent price drop.

Oil was trading at $43 a barrel Friday, he said.

Consumers will get a better picture of whether prices will rise or fall following OPECs meeting in Vienna after Thanksgiving.

Well probably continue to see a gentle decline until then, DeHaan said. The upcoming OPEC meeting is critical, he said.

AAA Nebraskas Rose White said she didnt expect a price increase before Thanksgiving due to high inventory levels and falling commodity and wholesale prices.

Forecasting gas prices can be difficult, she said, when factoring in hurricane seasons, global matters and refinery and pipeline issues such as unscheduled shutdowns.

DeHaan said Donald Trumps victory in the presidential election has had no effect on prices. Trumps impact will come after he names his Cabinet and announces an energy policy, DeHaan said.

Friday, according to gasprices.aaa.com, Omahas average price for a gallon of regular unleaded was $2.12, down 5 cents in the last week. Iowas average also was off a nickel to $2.10. The average for Nebraska was down 6 cents to $2.13.

In Omaha, regular unleaded gas was selling for as low as $1.83 per gallon, according to gasbuddy.com.

In the last month, average prices have decreased 7 cents nationally, 8 cents in Omaha, 12 cents in Nebraska and 11 cents in Iowa.

Air travelers also are taking advantage of the lower prices, White said.

In some markets where the competition among air carriers is high, she said, we are seeing great rates for those planning to travel by air this holiday season.
MUMBAI, India  Banks reopened to long lines and angry customers throughout India on Thursday after the governments surprise move to devalue high-denomination currency in an effort to fight corruption and so-called black money.

The government Tuesday announced what it called a strike against those who keep unaccounted-for cash in India, where many jobs remain in the informal sector and few pay taxes. The countrys reserve bank temporarily shuttered banks and ATMs and voided its large bank notes, issuing a 2,000-rupee note (about $30) Thursday as the largest bill.

Panicked customers lined up at banks to exchange and deposit old notes  sometimes standing in line for hours. Fistfights broken out at gas pumps when clerks ran out of change; at toll booths operators simply gave up charging and let cars stream through.

Gold and silver prices soared as investors sought to move their money into tangible assets  partly a response to the currency switch as well as a reaction to global uncertainty following the U.S. presidential election.

Indeed, some of those lined up at banks praised the governments move, exhibiting the same populist, anti-elite fervor that drove voters to Donald Trump and Brexit.

Im happy about it. The countrys rot is at its roots. Now the roots are going to be treated, said Kalindi Jagdish, 63, an interior designer who designs homes for Mumbais wealthy and is often paid in cash.

Indias Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, called for calm at a press conference Thursday, reminding consumers they had until Dec. 30 to change their legitimate bills into new currency. The move brings ethics and transparency and is a decisive move toward a cashless society, he said.

Experts predicted that the worst-hit would be wealthy professionals in real estate, doctors and lawyers who are often paid in cash to avoid taxes and stash their money in overseas accounts. Only those with large sums of money will have to face the consequences under existing laws, Jaitley said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long made fighting black money a priority  as the country moves to legitimize its shadow economy, change an age-old culture of corruption and bribes and attract foreign investment. A voluntary disclosure program has netted $19 billion so far, a fraction of estimates of the total, which range from $400 billion to over $1 trillion.

Dinesh Rana was driving around Delhi on Thursday with a sack full of his bosss money, depositing 49,000 rupees (about $735) in separate accounts at five different banks. Anything over 50,000 rupees would have garnered official scrutiny.

Rich people are worried, he said. They are trying to get rid of cash or spread it around.

Some economists questioned whether the governments move would be effective in the long run.

Neeraj Hatekar, the director of the economics department at the University of Mumbai, said the demonetization program will be an effective tool in ridding the system of counterfeit bills  some $20 million alone was seized last year in his state, he said.

But it would likely not have much impact on Indias black market economy overall  as much illegitimate funds are in real estate or gold.

Will it shut off new black money thats being created? It wont, said Rama Bijapurkar, a market strategist and consumer expert in Mumbai. But as a one-time shut-off its a masterstroke.

The impact on regular folk was immediate and widespread. Rural villages whose economies are almost entirely cash-based ground to a halt as villagers scrounged for coins to pay for eggs and their daily vegetables.

Wives who secretly squirreled away hundreds in kitchen kitties  away from the control of domineering husbands  suddenly had to admit their secret stash or ponder opening their own bank accounts. Modis government has made a major push to provide bank accounts to those who previously did not have them, but still 233 million remain unbanked, Bijapurkar said.

Dashrat Kumar Pal, 40, a steel company clerk and a Delhi resident, said the lavish wedding party for his niece had been postponed in lieu of a small religious ceremony because the family did not have enough cash to pay the vendors.

The big party we had planned is called off, he said glumly. The cooks, the music band, the florist  all of them want to be paid in cash. Where do we go? What do we do?

He went on, Now we are calling everybody and canceling.

The governments move was a boon to Indias growing online payment industry, which has long operated on a cash-on-delivery model designed to address low credit card use. After the governments announcement, downloads of digital payment apps have soared.

Suchi Goenka, a restaurateur in Mumbai, said that while she supported the governments plan, it will take time for the country to make the change.

In India we prefer cash, she said. We were brought up that way.
The discount bus company Megabus will make its last trips between Omaha and Chicago on Jan. 9.

The company said it is ending the Omaha-Chicago route after five years because low gas prices have reduced demand for its services. It seems people would rather pay to fill up their own cars than to ride the bus. The route also has stops in Des Moines, Davenport and Iowa City.

The route cancellation is part of a wider reorganization of Megabus Midwest hub, with job losses in Chicago and cutbacks in some other routes, the New Jersey-based company said.

Spokesman Sean Hughes told The World-Herald that Megabus may in the future reevaluate the need for the route and possibly reinstate it if demand warranted it.

But for now, he said, It didnt have enough business.

Omaha is one of the westernmost cities served by the bus company. Seats are sold for as low as $1; tickets from Omaha to Chicago were priced Friday at between $15 and $59 for rides over the next month.

Burlington Trailways continues to offer bus service to Chicago from Omaha, and tickets were priced Friday at $75.
A former state probation officer in Kearney has been sentenced to nine years in prison after being convicted of subjecting four female probationers to unsolicited and nonconsensual sexual contact, a press release from the U.S. Attorneys Office for Nebraska said.

Thomas Peterson, 57, had been charged with four counts of violating the civil rights of the probationers. He was also convicted of one count of lying to the FBI when interviewed about the accusations, the release said.

The violations occurred between 2010 and January 2014. The jury also heard from three other women who reported sexually charged advances or comments from Peterson.

Peterson got the maximum sentence. He will also have to undergo five years of supervised release after getting out of prison.
TAMA, Iowa (AP)  A 23-year-old central Iowa mother who vanished without a trace in 2000 is believed to be a homicide victim, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

A review by a multi-agency task force has concluded that Cora Okonskis disappearance was not voluntary, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation said in a statement.

The agency said it reclassified Okonskis disappearance as a homicide rather than a missing persons case and that it was under investigation by state and local police and prosecutors. Okonski, the mother to a toddler son, had worked as a waitress in Tama, a town of about 2,800 residents 60 miles northeast of Des Moines.

Police have never identified a suspect in her disappearance. But Okonskis ex-boyfriend, Tait Purk, has long faced scrutiny from police. He was with her the night she disappeared.

The two were scheduled to be married one month after she vanished, and they had a volatile relationship marked by drug use and fighting. Purk is set to be released from a federal prison in Kansas on unrelated drug and gun charges in April, after about 14 years behind bars.

Purk has denied involvement in Okonskis disappearance, telling police that she left their home to walk to the store to buy cigarettes and never returned.

Investigators have made recent trips to the location where Okonski was last seen, have identified new witnesses and reinterviewed old ones.

It was put on the shelf and collected dust and then it was opened back up by the DCIs interest in it, said Tama County Sheriff Dennis Kucera, who has assigned a detective to the case. Its a case of interest and theres been new information thats been discovered.

Kucera and others involved in the investigation declined to elaborate on the new information.
Protesters upset about Donald Trumps election as the nations next president gathered again Friday night at the Gene Leahy mall in downtown Omaha.

About 150 people with signs at 14th and Farnam gathered about 4:30 p.m. Primed by a leader with a bullhorn, they chanted Not my president and What do you do when youre under attack? Fight back!

A few times, the protesters left and marched through the Old Market and downtown area before returning to the corner. The rally ended about three hours after it began.

The demonstration followed one Wednesday night that ended with two people arrested and police using pepperballs to disperse a crowd that had blocked streets in the Old Market.

Anti-Trump protest downtown. "Love Trumps Hate! Love Trumps hate!" pic.twitter.com/HKkVJWfNPM  Andrew Nelson (@nelson_aj) November 11, 2016
In the aftermath of a nasty election cycle that has students threatening a school walkout over a Donald Trump presidency, Central High School staff gathered students together in assemblies Thursday to reiterate a few key points.

Dissent is OK, disrespect is not.

Students can play a part in getting involved and making their communities positive places to help bridge the nations current divide.

And that Central High, a downtown Omaha high school celebrated for its diversity and political activism, will always be a welcoming and safe place for all voices, viewpoints and people.

"I want you to know that at Central High School, regardless of whats going on in the country, the state or the city, we are a family," Assistant Principal Dionne Kirksey said. "Central represents all walks of life, all people."

School officials across the Omaha metro area said they are fielding questions, concerns and comments from students who have clearly been closely following the election, whether or not they were old enough to vote on Tuesday. Civics teachers described walking a tightrope in classes where students were both triumphant or despondent over Trumps victory this week, following an intensely personal and divisive election season.

"When I walked into the classroom at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, I already had kids waiting to talk to me because they were scared about the outcome of the election," said Tim Royers, who teaches world history at Millard West High School.

Anti-Trump protests have erupted in cities and on college campuses across the country, including one in downtown Omaha Wednesday night that ended with arrests and crowds being dispersed via pepper balls.

At Central, students planned a walkout Friday morning during the Pledge of Allegiance to protest Trump.

Ralston High School students staged a protest across the street from the school Thursday afternoon.

Students have been asked not to demonstrate on school grounds or disrupt the school day, Ralston spokeswoman Katy Core said.

"This is obviously an emotional week for many Americans, including our students," she said in an email. "We are proud that our students are actively engaged in the process, and when questions and comments have come up, our teachers are encouraging open conversation."

At Central, administrators organized the assembly on the fly to address head-on the political rumbles in the hallways and classrooms after Tuesdays election.

"Were coming together today because I know theres a great deal of frustration out there," Central Principal Ed Bennett told students. "We have to take a neutral stance on this. This is not going to be a situation where we talk about one specific candidate over another. We are here to address your feelings and your concerns."

Hillary Clinton handily won a mock election at the school, although rapper Kanye West managed to capture a sliver of student votes, too. In other schools, results were mixed. Trump won the student poll at Papillion-La Vista South High School, while Clinton narrowly edged out Trump at Millard West.

At Papillion-La Vista South, American government teacher Ray Keller tried to keep things light on Wednesday, opening class with an old "Saturday Night Live" skit. He had students dig into election data by looking at exit poll voter demographics and studying which swing states were in play this election.

Some students were pumped up over Trumps win, others were disappointed.

"I said before we even knew who the winner was, whether it was Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, I told my students one person doesnt govern our country," he said. "We have a systems of checks and balances and separation of power."

At grade-level assemblies at Central, students could anonymously text questions or comments through the Poll Everywhere app. Several questions reflected students fears and uncertainties about the countrys political future, and even administrators struggled to answer them.

A Trump supporter texted in to say he or she felt personally oppressed by the vitriol directed at Trump voters.

"Ive never seen a presidential race with as much hostility as this one," Bennett said. "It has created a divide in our country that is serious. The question becomes, what do we do to move forward? Its about disagreeing, but not being disagreeable."

Another student wondered what would happen to the LGBT community under Trump.

"We will continue to be respectful and kind to one another," Omaha Public Schools spokeswoman Monique Farmer answered. "Thats what weve always done, thats what well do moving forward."

One question came from a student who has Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, for immigrants brought illegally into the country when they were children.

"Donald Trump will get rid of it (DACA)," the student wrote. "I will become illegal and wont be able to work or go to college. Then what will I do?"

Jenn Walker, Centrals director of counseling, said questions about immigration have been weighing heavily on the minds of Centrals refugee and immigrant students, and came up at a student Latino Leaders meeting Wednesday.

"Some kids were scared, they wanted to know Are we allowed to talk about this at school? " she said. "You all are able to talk about all of these fears and concerns with one another. This is something right now, as grown-ups, we dont have answers for."

Other school officials reminded students of Americas checks-and-balances system of government.

"These decisions arent made solo," Farmer said. "This is still a democracy."

Other questions touched on whether the Electoral College system should be retained, what Trump might accomplish in his first 100 days in office and whether students will face consequences if they participate in the planned walkout.

Bennett said students who skip class will be marked truant, which could result in an after-school suspension or Saturday school.

Still, he encouraged students planning protests to talk to Central administrators, who could suggest ways for students to protest peacefully or outside school hours.

He said student safety is always a concern when it comes to demonstrations, mentioning a time eight years ago when Central students launched a counter-protest against Westboro Baptist Church members in Omaha. Someone threw a piece of firewood at protesters from a car, almost hitting a student.

Bennett said he also didnt want students to use the protest as an excuse to be rowdy, and urged students to think about how it would look to protest on Veterans Day. Extra police officers and OPS staff will be at the school Friday.

Several students said they still planned to walk out.

"I disagree with Trump completely," said junior Sahdia Thomas. "The things hes said, the things hes boasted about, are horrible. Imagine him being Americas leader."

Several students said they wanted the protest to focus on civic engagement and moving forward.

"Theres no excuse for apathy anymore," said senior Olivia Larson. "We have to get involved."

erin.duffy@owh.com, 402-444-1210
DES MOINES (AP)  Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad acted within his constitutional authority when he vetoed funding for two state-run mental health care facilities and closed them last year, the State Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

Twenty legislators and Danny Homan, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest state employee union, had sued Branstad. They claimed a section of state law requires Iowa to have four mental health care institutes  one each in Mount Pleasant, Clarinda, Cherokee and Independence.

Branstad closed the Mount Pleasant and Clarinda institutes in June 2015 when he vetoed the Legislatures funding for them. The lawsuit also claimed the law creating the state facilities limited the governors ability to close the facilities by vetoing their funding.

The high court concluded that the law doesnt require the continued existence of state mental health institutes.

The unanimous decision, written by Justice David Wiggins, delves into the history of the Legislatures creation of the mental health institutes and concludes that lawmakers changed the language of the laws over the years and eliminated permanently established facilities.

Nothing in the history of state law leads us to construe the General Assemblys intent is to mandate the continued existence of the state mental health institutes, Wiggins wrote.

He also concluded the statutes dont limit the governors ability to veto appropriated funds for such institutions.

The decision agrees with a November 2015 ruling by District Judge Douglas Staskal and dismisses the lawsuit.

Todays unanimous Supreme Court decision affirms the governors action by allowing more Iowans to have access to quality mental health care and substance abuse treatment than ever before, Branstad spokesman Ben Hammes said in a statement. The states mental health care redesign allows Iowans to access treatment in a community-based setting and through more modern means.

Mark Hedberg, the plaintiffs attorney, said he hadnt read the ruling and may comment later.

Branstad removed funding for the two mental health facilities when he released his budget proposal in January 2015. Some lawmakers and health care providers criticized the move, but a legislative push to restore some funding was vetoed by Branstad.

Branstad maintained the facilities were housed in old buildings, were outdated and patients could receive treatment elsewhere. Critics argued the facilities were well maintained and were well-suited to some patients with special treatment needs.

Branstad and the Iowa Department of Human Services, which oversaw the mental health facilities, were further criticized after three men from the Clarinda facility last year died within weeks of the state transferring them to a private nursing home.

The mental health institutes in Cherokee and Independence remain open, employ 366 and served 717 people in the most recent fiscal year.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
An Omaha man suffered life-threatening injuries when his motorcycle collided Thursday evening with a turning pickup truck in southwest Omaha, police said.

Nathaniel R. Darby, 22, was taken to Creighton University Medical Center. He suffered severe injuries to his legs and abdomen, police said.

Darby's 2008 Yamaha YZFR6 motorcycle was eastbound on West Center Road when about 6 p.m. it collided with the pickup truck's cargo bed at 171st Street, police said. The 2016 GMC Sierra was towing a trailer and was westbound on West Center and turning south.

Darby's speed contributed to the collision, police said.

Anthony Miller, 28, of Wichita, Kansas, drove the pickup truck, police said. Miller was not injured, they said.

Also Thursday, a pedestrian was injured when he was struck by a station wagon in north-central Omaha, police said.

The man was hit about 4 p.m. by a Chevrolet HHR near 90th and Ohio Streets.

The pedestrian was taken in critical condition to the Nebraska Medical Center. Early Friday, police had not released his name or age, nor had they offered other information about the circumstances of the accident.
From the first days of boot camp, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are trained to pair up and look out for one another.

So its no surprise that, for veterans, their closest friendships often are formed during their military service  especially the friendships that are forged in combat.

Just ask Nebraska National Guard members David Munoz and Justin Saner, both 31, battle buddies since Army basic training in 2003, when they were still in high school. Their friendship tightened during an exhausting 2005-06 combat tour in Iraq with Troop A of the 1st Squadron, 167th Cavalry Regiment.

As they do every year they can, theyll spend Veterans Day today deer hunting together.

Once again, theyll have each others back.

Its a different kind of bond when you go to your friend and say, Grab your weapon, we have to go someplace dangerous,  Munoz said. We are, literally, like brothers.

Saner said he has close friends outside the military, too. But with Munoz, theres something extra, something unspoken.

Youre quicker to ride or die with your military buddy, Saner said. This dudes got my back, because hes done it 30 times before.

Barely out of high school, Saner and Munoz were among the youngest of the 63 soldiers from the 167th Cavalry who got orders for Iraq. They deployed in June 2005, part of the first Nebraska National Guard combat arms unit called up for war since World War II. A reporting team from The World-Herald was embedded with their unit for two months during that tour.

Their friendship is an unlikely one, considering how badly it started.

Saner and Munoz had never met but coincidentally were assigned to the same training platoon during boot camp at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Munoz was made platoon leader because he impressed the instructors with his neat locker. But one day, Saner got caught napping when he was supposed to be working. In military fashion, Munoz was punished for Saners infraction.

He got to sleep while I got smoked by every drill sergeant, Munoz said. I kicked him in the head when I got back.

I was tired! Saner protested as the two shared a plate of chicken wings last week at a northwest Omaha bar.

Soon after, though, they discovered they were practically neighbors  Munoz from Grand Island, Saner from Burwell, 80 miles to the north.

We realized we were both from Nebraska, so we became friends, Saner said.

Both were ecstatic when they got their deployment orders a few months after graduating from basic training. Munoz called his parents to tell them.

I was super excited. I said, Im going to Iraq! Its so awesome!  he recalled. Then I heard my mom crying.

Within weeks, the unit was in training. They flew to Kuwait on June 22, 2005, part of a brigade that included Guard members from several states.

Only then did they find out they would be patrolling Ramadi, a city in the throes of a full-scale rebellion against the central Iraqi government and its U.S. allies. The cavalry troopers got hit almost daily by roadside bombs.

Both soldiers were part of a quick-reaction force, whose job was to respond to emergencies. They also pulled regular patrols. And the troops commander, then-Capt. Jeff Searcey, made sure they drilled constantly. The teams got one day off each month.

Training breeds confidence, confidence breeds team, Searcey would say.

Their travels frequently took them down Route Michigan, a dusty four-lane road through the city that was routinely seeded with roadside bombs.

Something happened every time we went down there, Saner said.

They would race through at 71 mph, the maximum speed they could muster in their heavy, armored Humvees. Still, bombs frequently exploded near their trucks. They became blase about them, capturing blow-ups on their dashboard-mounted cameras and laughing over them back in the barracks.

When it becomes not the first time, not the 10th time, but the 20th time  thats a whole lot different, Saner said.

Amazingly, all 63 soldiers survived that year of constant combat, though 14 earned Purple Hearts.

I dont know how no one got hurt, Munoz said. Youre constantly walking with death.

Searcey  now a lieutenant colonel serving at Nebraska National Guard headquarters in Lincoln  is sure of the answer.

From my aspect, (it shows) there is a God. I saw it proved many times, Searcey said. Were good, but were not that good.

Undermanned, they never really stood a chance of retaking Ramadi. They eventually were replaced there by a much larger force.

We fought it the whole year, Saner said. We just tried not to die.

The unit returned home the following summer, battle-hardened.

Saner and Munoz moved in together for a while  they still live near each other in west Omaha  and quickly gained a reputation for daredevil stunts. Both bought motorcycles with some of the tax-free deployment cash they had earned in Iraq.

Im 18 years old. What am I going to spend my money on? Toys! Munoz said.

They racked up three traffic tickets in their first month home. Saner wiped out on his motorcycle when a car turned in front of him in Grand Island, tearing the ligaments in his right leg and earning him a ride to Lincoln on a medical helicopter.

A 2007 Omaha World-Herald story on the 167th Cavalry a year after their return portrayed the pair as fun-loving and reckless. A photo accompanying the story of Saner in his Guard uniform, standing on the seat while riding his motorcycle, no hands, earned him a butt-chewing from a Nebraska National Guard general.

We were really immature, Saner admitted, but we were lots more mature than when we left for Iraq.

Both say those hijinks are now far behind them, and in the decade since, theyve climbed up the military ladder, both becoming staff sergeants. They left their cavalry unit and joined a parachute-rigging unit based in Mead  though Saner has lately returned to the infantry in search of more action.

I wanted to go back to a line unit, Saner said. Back to doing mean (stuff).

They have worked at various jobs and pursued college degrees online, but the Guard has kept them busy with schools and extended duty all over the country. Parachute riggers are in high demand.

Theyve tried repeatedly to go back to war zones, including their reorganized former cavalry units 2011 deployment to Afghanistan. But they were needed at home.

Searcey, their former commander, said hes impressed with the maturity Saner and Munoz have gained since that first combat tour.

I would trust both soldiers not just with my life, but with other soldiers lives, Searcey said. I have serious pride in who these men have become.

Munoz helps Saner build the furniture he sells through his business, Patriot Custom Furniture, on Facebook. And Saner helps Munoz  an FAA-certified rigger  pack parachutes for his company, Skyshark Parachute Rigging Services.

For both men, sky diving offers the kind of adrenaline rush they once got from combat and fast motorcycles, but with safety equipment and guidelines they strictly follow. Both are Army jumpmasters. Munoz has racked up more than 300 civilian and military jumps and Saner 100.

The sport is just awesome, Munoz said. Theres literally nothing you cant do in the air.

Both men say they dont suffer any post-traumatic stress or traumatic brain injury, though neither has been tested at a VA hospital.

When I came home it was kind of like, you just shut it off, Saner said. I dont think I have any significant issues with it.

Many of the veterans of that deployment still serve in the Guard, and they are regarded with something approaching awe by younger Guard members who came after them.

At Guard events, 167th Cavalry veterans search the room for one another and exchange glances, like theyre part of a club. That includes officers.

When you have to salute, theres a different kind of an engagement, Saner said. Its a unique bond, something like Ive never had in any other unit.

And out of uniform they hold informal reunions, like the one last summer in Wood River, Nebraska, on property owned by one of the units veterans. They hunted and drank beer to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their safe return.

Its almost like we never skipped a beat, Munoz said.

Even senior officers, men theyve saluted for years, are treated like equals.

It was like coming home, Searcey said. Thats your brother for life. That bond is forever.
Lt. Gov. Mike Foley praised and thanked Nebraska veterans  and criticized national anthem protesters  at a Veterans Day program at Platteview High School on Friday morning.

In the crowd of about 1,200 were high school students as well as students from the districts elementary schools and middle school, parents, school board members, veterans, and other community members. The ceremony is an annual event in its 14th year.

Your presence today is a beautiful act of patriotism, Foley told the crowd.

Foley spoke about the sacrifices Nebraskas veterans have made, many at young ages and several times over, and the enormous debt of gratitude they are owed.

Nebraskans continue to make these sacrifices today, he said.

Foley mentioned Capt. Dustin Lukasiewicz, who died while trying to save people after the earthquake in Nepal in 2015. Lukasiewicz grew up in Wilcox, Nebraska, before joining the Marines.

His contribution to freedom will not be forgotten, he said.

While talking about a ceremony for wounded soldiers that he attended at Offutt Air Force Base about a month ago, Foley also chided national anthem protesters.

I can assure you that when it was time to begin that ceremony with the raising of our flag and the singing of our national anthem, no one took a knee, he said. No one wouldve dared to be so disrespectful.

The crowd applauded.

Earlier during the event, Jim Jenson, commander of the Springfield American Legion Post 143, commended students for putting together the event. Jenson referenced Donald Trump protesters and said it was good to see students honoring their veterans rather than in the Old Market, marching around.

Springfield Platteview Community Schools Superintendent Brett Richards said none of the districts students had organized protests or chosen to sit during the Pledge of Allegiance after Tuesdays election.

Our kids are very patriotic, he said.

The event is important for the students because it shows them that veterans are not a just part of the countrys past, Richards said.

A lot of people are still around who gave up parts of their lives for our country, he said. Its real, and its not that long ago.
LINCOLN  Nebraska is sending a second group of state troopers to North Dakota to help that state deal with continuing protests of a controversial oil pipeline.

State emergency officials made the announcement Thursday, two days after a previous group of troopers returned to Nebraska.

Both groups were sent at the request of North Dakota, under a multistate compact that requires Nebraska to provide aid, if it can spare the personnel.

An opponent of multistate oil pipelines based in Nebraska issued a statement late Thursday calling on Gov. Pete Ricketts to keep the troopers at home. Jane Kleeb, director of the Bold Alliance, said the North Dakota protest doesnt rise to the level of civil unrest that warrants a mutual aid response.

Gov. Ricketts should step in now and tell North Dakota our cops are staying home where they are needed, she said. Police officers have no business protecting a Big Oil company."

Jodie Fawl, a spokeswoman for the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency, said states typically respond to such requests by offering a certain number of personnel for a certain period of time.

A requesting state can make a new request if it needs continuing help, she said. The arrangement allows troopers to be rotated out, rather than spend more time away from their homes and regular duties.

Fawl declined to say how many troopers were going this time, saying that North Dakota officials did not want to reveal operational details.

Under terms of the compact, the requesting state picks up the cost of such deployments.

The first group of 11 troopers, along with two pilots and an airplane, was deployed to the protest site, which is just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation along the Missouri River.

The troopers were among a multistate law enforcement force that clashed Oct. 27 with protesters on property owned by the pipeline company; 142 protesters were arrested.

Native Americans and environmentalists have gathered in recent months to protest the Dakota Access pipeline, which they maintain threatens drinking water supplies and desecrates sacred sites.

Supporters of the $3.8 billion pipeline project say it will be a safer and less expensive way to ship oil from North Dakotas Bakken oil fields to a refinery in Illinois.
Speaking from China, where he is on a trade trip with Nebraska business representatives, Gov. Pete Ricketts told news media Friday that he supports Nebraskans right to protest.

Ricketts said it is disgraceful that protesters spray-painted anti-Trump messages on the State Capitol.

The vandalism to the buildings north side read Trump = racism and Ricketts = racism.

People are going to have all sorts of different opinions, he said. What I think is really problematic is that people are destroying public property.

We certainly want to encourage people to express themselves and use their First Amendment rights. Defacing public property is not the way to do that.

Regarding the protest rallies in Nebraska, he said:

We welcome expressions of opinion. Thats one of the great things about our society is that we do have the ability to express ourselves.

This is part of the democratic process. We have a fair and free election. Now its time for people to come together. Thats one of the things the president-elect expressed, that now that the campaign is over its time for everybody to come together.
A striking aspect of the 2016 presidential election was the impact from voters in Americas rural areas and small towns.

Strong turnout in those areas in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and, it appears, Michigan was crucial in flipping those states into the GOP column and giving Donald Trump key support for an Electoral College win.

What were seeing across the country is that Trump is just outperforming other recent Republican candidates in a lot of these smaller, rural areas and in small towns  in some areas that were once Democratic, Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, told Bloomberg News. Hes getting huge margins out of these rural areas.

Nationwide, rural voters backed Trump over Clinton 62 percent to 34 percent, according to exit polling conducted by the Associated Press and television networks.

A president needs to have a general understanding of and respect for the breadth of concerns in our nation, whether its high-population urban areas or small-town rural ones. We are one nation.

How well Trump can succeed in meeting the hopes raised during the campaign for rural and small-town supporters remains to be seen.

A lighter regulatory hand and tax relief, as expected under the new administration, may help. More problematic are the campaign promises to bring back manufacturing to many small towns, given the complexities of the global economy, automation and the shrinking demand for low-skilled shop-floor employment.

As for agriculture, any time you can open up trade, its beneficial to commodity prices, Dax Wedemeyer, an analyst with West Des Moines-based U.S. Commodities Inc., said this week. Its unclear, however, whether the next four years will bring more open markets or, instead, a trade war.

Its positive that issues from rural areas and small towns will receive greater attention from national leaders. With the campaign over, the next step is to see what realistic actions are possible to tackle the needs the election identified.
The Nebraska State Patrol is asking for the publics help investigating graffiti at the Nebraska State Capitol.

Anti-Donald Trump and anti-Pete Ricketts sentiments were spray-painted on the building early Wednesday, said patrol spokeswoman Deb Collins. The graffiti was sprayed on the buildings north side, reading Trump = racism and Ricketts = racism. A third message was indistinguishable.

Cleanup efforts will be the responsibility of the Nebraska Capitol Commission, Collins said. There were no other acts of vandalism on the building, she said.

Pictures of and information about the vandalism can be found on the Lincoln-Lancaster County Crime Stoppers website at lincolncrimestoppers.com. Information can be given by calling Crime Stoppers at 402-475-3600.
A cold front that moved through the Omaha area overnight will usher in cooler but still above-normal conditions over the next two days.

Tonight in the Omaha area, expect temperatures below 32 degrees, leaving any unprotected potted plants or flowers still on your porch or patio in jeopardy.

Sunny skies and a high in the mid-50s are forecast for today, the National Weather Service office in Valley said. Tonights low will dip into the upper 20s to lower 30s under clear skies.

Some spots outside the Omaha area are more likely to drop below the freezing mark tonight, said Ryan McPike, a meteorologist at KMTV.

Saturday looks to also be sunny with a high in the mid-50s, forecasters said, but Saturday nights low will slip only into the mid-30s.

Skies will remain sunny Sunday through Thursday, the weather service said, with conditions warming up. Highs are to be in the lower to mid-60s and overnight lows will be in the upper 30s to lower 40s.

The average highs for mid-November in the Omaha area are the low 50s and the average lows are the low 30s.

McPike said some locations in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa, including the Omaha-Council Bluffs vicinity, could heat up more than others.

I think we could be pushing the 70s next week, he said.

Friday, however, could bring a big change to the Omaha area  lower temperatures, stiff winds and rain, McPike said.

And an even bigger change is possibly in store for areas to the north of Omaha  plowable snow, he said.

McPike said he will keep a close eye on next Fridays storm track. He also said the Omaha area is in for a bit of a roller-coast ride into late next week.

In a nutshell, for the next seven to 10 days, well cool off, warm up, see winds and rain and then warm back up again right after next Friday, McPike said.
Currency Exchange: Bengaluru student alleges Aadhar misuse

Bengaluru

oi-Anusha

A Bengaluru student alleged that her Aadhar number had been misused to exchange currency without her knowledge. The girl pursuing her MBA course was shocked when bank authorities on Friday told her that her Aadhar number was already used for a transaction and may not be able to use it to exchange currency.

When she walked into the Race Course Road of Vijaya Bank on Friday, Abhilasha was hoping to exchange invalid notes worth Rs 4000 with new currency notes. She filled out the forms and gave a copy of her Aadhar card to the bank staff who entered the details into their systems but instead of handing out change to Abhilasha the staff claimed that her Aadhar number had already been used for an exchange.

Speaking with OneIndia News Abhilasha said, "I immediately went to the branch manager but he was utterly helpless. All he could do was ask me to produce some other ID proof. My question is how my Aadhar number was misused without my knowledge. No one seems to have the answer". The girl posted about her ordeal on the Bengaluru Police facebook page.

[Also Read: ATMs go dry soon after opening; queues continue at banks]

The bank's inability to provide further details on the alleged misuse of her Aadhar number did little to help the already worried student. "The bank had no details of when and where my Aadhar number was used. I want to know how and by whom it was used. Doesn't this mean other ID can also be misused? The bank manager told me he was helpless and asked me to question higher authorities", she added.

OneIndia News
Praises pour in for Bengaluru's good Samaritan cop

Bengaluru

oi-Anusha

Social media is abuzz with praises for a Bengaluru traffic cop whose timely intervention saved a man's life. An eyewitness to the act, Shankar Vishwanathan wrote a mail to the Bengaluru City Police describing how traffic Head Constable Kumar C jumped in to help a family on Wednesday morning.

In his mail Vishwanathan spoke of how Kumar acted swiftly after being approched for help by a woman whose driver was experiencing chest pain. "He immediately took control, moved the driver to the passenger seat and drove to Mallige Hospital. He also instructed the cardiac care section staff to start treatment immediately", he said.

He further added that Head Constable Kumar offered to pay for treatment since the driver's family wasn't around, informed the driver's kin about the incident and waited for them to arrive at the hospital. In a mail full of praises for the cop, this Bengalurean complimented the police department as well.

Kumar C is a head constable with High grounds police and was discharging duty at Windsor Manor Circle on Wednesday morning when the incident took place.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, November 11, 2016, 17:47 [IST]
Trump win: What is in store for other countries including India

Feature

oi-Oneindia

By Vappala Balachandran

Even the Trump camp was surprised at the tsunami of his win. "Washington Post" ran a news, early during the counting, "The Trump campaign is really lowering expectations right now". It said that his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway was seen beginning "the process of offering excuses for his likely loss - pointing, as expected, to the lack of unity and support from the GOP establishment". So how did it happen?

Reasons for Democratic Party's defeat:

There are many reasons for the unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton. Certain influential Conservative circles in America had been feeling that they had become a "Declining power" under 8 years of Democratic rule. They felt that US was not able to assume leadership in any part of the world to be the final arbiter of local disputes. The constant theme of Trump was to repair a" Broken America" since the leadership was only "apologizing" to other nations.

[Also Read: Trump's triumph: Contradictions bundled in irony]

The "Gun Boat" diplomacy followers supported Israel's misinterpretation of President Obama's Iran policy on nuclear issue as capitulation. They felt that his efforts to normalize relations with Cuba after long years of hostility since 1961 were in breach of the traditional American domination of its neighbourhood. They felt that USA and NATO could not prevent Russian incursions into Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The rise of China and the inability of US to enforce its writ on the South China Seas was yet another reason.

While this impression was gaining among intellectual circles, the effect of globalization was felt both by the Blue Collar and White Collar workers who were steadily losing jobs. A survey by "US News" in December 2014 said that America lost 3.2 million jobs between 2001 and 2014 to China. Simultaneously there were complaints about China's currency manipulation which had increased US trade deficit. Another report on March 13, 2016 by "Global Research" quoted a University of California study saying that 14 million White Collar jobs were threatened by outsourcing. These were "not only call-center operators, customer service and back-office jobs, but also information technology, accounting, architecture, advanced engineering design, news reporting, stock analysis, and medical and legal services".

[Also Read: American Muslims express shock, fear over Trump's victory]

"New York Times"( November 9) confirmed this since the White and Blue collar workers, the power base of Democratic Party from the time of F.D.Roosevelt, deserted the party "when these voters were offered a Republican who ran as an unapologetic populist, railing against foreign trade deals and illegal immigration".

The other major reason was the inability of Hillary Clinton to put forward any new ideas of "Change" than what was done by Obama for 8 years. They felt that she was "More of the same" as the last 8 years. Anti-incumbency feelings among the voters were strong and Clinton campaign did not fathom what was brewing in their minds. The last reason was the traditional American White Male prejudice against women aspiring to become senior politicians. The popular "Public Broadcasting Service" (PBS) had run a series on this in 2016.

Trump's Campaign:

As against this, Trump strode into the campaign with raw energy and chose to be an unorthodox campaigner. To quote "New York Times" again: "His rallies - furious, entertaining, heavy on name-calling and nationalist overtones - became the nexus of a political movement.......He seemed to embody the success and grandeur that so many of his followers felt was missing from their own lives - and from the country itself. And he scoffed at the poll-driven word-parsing ways of modern politics, calling them a waste of time and money. Instead, he relied on his gut".

[Also Read: Iran: Expect Trump to respect nuclear deal]

He hurled unorthodox challenges, incited fears and prescribed unusual remedies. He frightened an average American on terrorism from Islamic organizations, blamed all Muslims for that and said that he would not allow them into America. He scared workers about job losses due to immigration and promised to erect a wall between America and Mexico. He said he would take action against China and India who were snatching away American jobs. He rattled NATO partners by praising President Vladimir Putin and said that America should recognize Russian claims on Crimea. He annoyed Japan by suggesting that Tokyo should pay for the American troops stationed there and advising that they should develop nuclear arms to protect themselves. He trashed the "Climate Change" theories and said that he might revoke the successful "Paris Accord".

Trump knew fully well that he would not be able to translate all these into national policies even as President. Over the years the US President has become almost a prisoner of those very institutions like National Security Council (NSC) and Inter-Agency Committees for adjudicating policies. Then there is Congressional oversight to check President's impulsive ideas. Decisions are recorded and available for scrutiny. The helplessness of even a formidable President like Eisenhower can be gauged by what he wrote on an NSC meeting paper on Jan.3, 1957 on the questionable decision to give arms aid to Pakistan: "This was the worst kind of a plan and decision we could have made. It was a terrible error, but now we seem hopelessly involved in it". (Quoted by Dennis Kux in "United States & Pakistan-1947-2000-Disenchanted Allies") Effectively Trump would be told by his bureaucracy what all campaign promises could be implemented and what he cannot.

Trump's policies towards India, China & Pakistan:

Some print and visual media correspondents have reported on November 9 that Trump is very grateful to the Indian American Community for their voting. They based this impression by getting some odd sound bytes from Trump's relatives. Today morning dailies have even said that he followed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's election strategy. Similarly the "Trump Republican Hindu Coalition" has also claimed credit for his victory and said that he would be "tough" with Pakistan. Some others are claiming that he would be extra tough on China.

[Also Read: We are all rooting for Trump's success: Barack Obama]

All these are far fetched. Presidents usually find that they cannot implement even 10% of their campaign promises within 4 years. They are far too occupied with international events. Trump did not have a single Indian in his campaign team to advise him, notwithstanding the claim of "Trump Republican Hindu Coalition". Usually it is the campaign team that shapes the positioning of officials in the White House for making policies. As against this, Hillary had some key Indian Americans in her campaign team who could have influenced some decisions.

Trump dislikes media. However media can shame and oust an unconventional president as they did to Nixon. During campaigning Trump parried all uncomfortable questions on his business empire. But an elected President cannot dodge media queries on his personal or financial details. Nor can he run a nation like how he ran his business empire. There are far too many demons lurking in his past life. A "News Week" investigation on October 3, 2016 had alleged that he had opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers in at least two of his last three construction projects instead of US corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. When asked about it he said that they were commercial decisions that were good for business. An earlier investigation by Bloomberg on March 7, 2016 had said that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had raised some issues at the practice of issuing visas to wealthy Chinese on priority to help "finance a huge Trump branded tower in New Jersey".

These allegations about the clash of commercial interests with those of the state are likely to come up in days to come. Meanwhile we should wait and watch to see what type of team Trump would be assembling in his cabinet before forecasting any spectacular upswing in the Indo-US diplomacy vis-a vis US-China-Pakistan relations.

[The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat & author of "National Security & Intelligence Management-a new Paradigm"]
Five years of demonetisation: Notes in circulation on rise; so are digital payments

2 die in Maha, Kerala in a rush to junk banned notes

India

oi-PTI

Mumbai/Thalassery(Ker), Nov 11: The scramble by millions of panicked consumers to exchange banned currency or deposit them turned tragic on Friday when two people died in separate incidents in Maharashtra and Kerala amid chaos and confusion for the second straight day with poor cash flow.

As banks across the country struggled to contain serpentine queues since early morning, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi took people by surprise when he visited SBI's Parliament Street branch in Delhi to exchange banned notes with new ones, in a show of solidarity with increasingly impatient people.

There were no signs of immediate relief even as several cash-strapped people were told to go back after bank servers at several branches reportedly collapsed while several ATMs went dry in a few hours.

People who were able to exchange the old currency could get hold of the new notes only after waiting for several hours.

Vishwanath Vartak, 73, who was standing in the queue before an SBI branch for exchanging currency, collapsed and died on the spot at Navghar in Mulund in eastern suburbs, police said.

Vartak had been standing for hours in the queue to exchange Rs.1000 and Rs.500 denomination notes. Though he was rushed to hospital by some people who saw him collapse, he was declared dead before admission, police said.

In another incident, a 48-year old man, who came to deposit Rs five lakh worth scrapped high denomination notes in a bank in Thalassery in Kerala, died after he fell down from the second floor of a building.

Also read: Rahul Gandhi queues up to exchange demonitised notes

Unni, a Kerala State Electricity Board employee, was filling the necessary forms to deposit the amount in the State Bank of Travancore's branch, located in the first floor, when the mishap occurred, they said quoting preliminary information.

He had unsuccessfully tried to deposit the notes yesterday and came to the bank again this morning. Running out of money for the last two days, men and women across the country had thronged the ATMs since early morning while in many places, to their disappointment, they found the machines not working.

Police was also called in to help banks control the angry depositors whose patience wore thin after standing in long queues. "People are facing hardships. That's why I have come to join them. I am here to exchange my Rs 4,000 with new notes," Rahul Gandhi told reporters.

"Neither you (reporters) nor your crorpati owners nor Prime Minister will understand the problems faced by people." The Congress leader, who reached the SBI's Parliament Street branch at around 4.25 PM, waited for his turn in queue to exchange his old notes.

"I waited for an hour in the queue and minutes before my turn the ATM was already down. My biggest problem is buying groceries and paying for other petty expenses," said 35-year-old housewife Aditi Saha in Kolkata.

Even the bank employees are facing tough time dealing with customers in view of people rushing to the banks to exchange their old money.

"We (employees) could not get time to have our lunch during the day as the branch was flooded by people," S K Shrivastava, Manager, Bank of India, S K Nagar branch in Patna said.

PTI
All 42 Punjab Congress MLAs submit resignations over SYL decision

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Chandigarh, Nov 11: All 42 opposition Congress legislators in Punjab on Friday submitted their resignations over the Supreme Court decision on a presidential reference regarding a 2004 law on sharing of the Sutlej-Yamuna river waters.

The Congress also announced a statewide protest on November 13 over what it said was the state government's failure to represent Punjab's case strongly in the apex court, which declared as "unconstitutional" a Punjab assembly-passed 2004 law to deny Haryana its share in the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water.

On Thursday, the ruling Akali Dal announced a special one-day Punjab assembly session on November 16 to discuss the issue threadbare.

The 42 Congress legislators, including Leader of Opposition Charanjit Singh Channi, handed over their resignations to assembly Secretary Shashi Lakhanpal Mishra here in the absence of Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal.

Senior Congress leaders Amarinder Singh, who announced his resignation as Lok Sabha member on Thursday, and Rajya Sabha members Partap Singh Bajwa and Ambika Soni accompanied the party legislators.

"(Chief Minister Parkash Singh) Badal has failed to protect the interests of Punjab's people. We will stage a statewide protest on the issue on Sunday," Amarinder Singh told reporters here.

"I am not in Parliament and our MLAs are not in the Vidhan Sabha. We will go to the people," he said.

"Why is Badal not protecting Punjab's interests? Is it because he has made a lot of money and doesn't care what happens in his area," Amarinder asked.

Parkash Singh Badal told reporters: "Our decision to not allow any water to flow out of the state is not a violation of the Supreme Court verdict. The most important thing for Punjab is to save its river waters."

"We will fight for the state's rights rather than run away. If we were to resign, Governor's rule will be imposed. Who will then defend the rights of Punjab? We will do anything to oppose any attempt at building the SYL canal," Badal's son Sukhbir, who is the Deputy Chief Minister, said.

The ruling Shiromani Akali Dal has announced a statewide agitation from December 8 and also call on President Pranab Mukherjee to request him not to accept the Supreme Court's advice on the SYL issue, a senior Akali leader had told IANS.

At the initiative of the then Congress government headed by Amarinder Singh, the Punjab assembly had in 2004 unanimously passed the law terminating all the agreements with Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Chandigarh and Delhi on the sharing of the waters of Sutlej-Yamuna rivers.

This Act was brought to tide over the January 15, 2002, apex court judgement and decree and subsequent judgement and order of June 4, 2004.

IANS
Chinkara case: SC admits Rajasthan's plea against Salman Khan

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Nov 11 The Supreme Court today admitted the appeal filed by Rajasthan govt challenging the acquittal of Bollywood actor Salman Khan in a case of Chinkara poaching in Jodhpur.

A bench comprising Justices A K Sikri and R Banumathi also said the matter will be given an expeditious hearing. The bench issued notice and sort response of the actor.

The Rajasthan government had last month moved the plea against Salman's acquittal by High Court on the ground that the judgment suffered from "legal infirmities". The state government sought stay of Rajasthan HC judgement by which the 50-year old actor's conviction and jail term of five years was set aside.

The Rajasthan government has filed a Special Leave Petition (SLP) in the apex court saying the High Court has erroneously exercised its revisional powers to set aside concurrent findings of lower court which convicted Salman for 5 years and the judgment suffers from legal infirmities...

"Salman's conviction was based on material evidence which High Court has turned down on hyper technical issues which is unsustainable," Additional Advocate General Shiv Mangal Sharma had said in a statement.

The lawyer had said that minor discrepancies in trial should never dilute the entire prosecution case and High Court has failed to see the "entire circumstances" which are proved beyond doubt against Salman by prosecution.

"The actor had ample opportunity to cross examine the eye witness Harish Dulani, the driver of Gypsy and when he intentionally did not examine him the statement given by the witness should be accepted against Salman," the lawyer had said.

The High Court on July 25 had acquitted the actor in two cases related to poaching of Chinkaras in Jodhpur in 1998 while holding that the pellets recovered from the Chinkaras were not fired from Salman's licensed gun.

Two separate cases had been registered against Khan under section 51 of Wildlife Protection Act for poaching of two chinkaras in village Bhawad on 26-27 September, 1998 and one chinkara in Mathania (Ghoda Farm) on 28-29 September, 1998.

The trial court (CJM) had convicted him in both the cases sentencing him to one year and 5 year imprisonment on February 17, 2006 and April 10, 2006 respectively.

PTI
Don't panic, your hard earned money safe: Govt assures people

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Nov 11: Assuring people that their hard earned money is safe, the Finance Ministry today said there is no need to panic and depositing junked Rs 500/1,000 notes of up to Rs 2.50 lakh in bank accounts will not be reported to the tax department.

It also cautioned people against depositing the money of unknown people in their own accounts or falling prey to cheats, thugs and rumour mongers. Besides, the ministry said, farm income continues to remain tax free and can be easily deposited in bank.

Small businessmen, housewives, artisans, workers can also deposit cash in their accounts without any apprehensions, it added. "Deposits up to Rs 2.50 lakh will not be reported to the Income Tax department.

There will be no harassment or investigation. All honest citizen need not worry. Farmers' income is tax free and can be easily deposited in bank," the ministry said in newspaper ads. In its biggest crackdown ever on black money, the government on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and asked people holding such notes to deposit in bank accounts.

Since yesterday people have been thronging banks amid concerns among people over exchanging and depositing the scrapped high denomination currency.

People can deposit old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in their accounts till December 30, 2016, without any limit. Restrictions have been imposed on withdrawal limit and people can withdraw up to Rs 10,000 per day or Rs 20,000 per week.

This limit will be reviewed after few days. Besides, old notes up to Rs 4,000 can be exchanged at any bank or post office till November 24, 2016, by showing photo ID proof. ATMs can be used to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day per card till November 18 and Rs 4,000 from November 19 onwards.

This limit too will be reviewed subsequently. The ministry also advised people to make payments using cheques, demand drafts, debit or credit cards and electronic fund transfers and there is no restriction on such transactions.

PTI
India gets first chunk of information of Swiss Bank account holders

Has black money held by Indian in Swiss Bank increased since 2019: FinMin calls report false

Ensure safety of banks, post offices: Home Ministry tells States

News

oi-Anusha

The Ministry of Home Affairs in an advisory to all state governments on Friday asked for additional security for banks, post offices and agencies managing ATMs and cash.

Apart from the regular security guards at banks, post offices and ATMs the advisory asks State governments to also depute police forces at all times at places involved in cash transactions.

With citizens making a beeline to banks, ATMs and post offices additional security is being deployed to avoid ruckus, crowding and to ensure smooth transaction.

[Also Read: Currency Exchange: Bengaluru student alleges Aadhar misuse]

Many banks had approached local police stations for additional security before the currency exchange process began on Thursday enticipating crowds. Speaking on additional security in cities like Bengaluru, the city's Additional Commissioner of Police, East division, Harishekharan said, "Policemen will be deployed outside banks for additional security. We have decided to continue the deployment till November 20".

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, November 11, 2016, 17:37 [IST]
Images of Rs 2,000 note leaked- Govt sets up probe

News

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

New Delhi, Nov 11 The government is probing how images of the new Rs 2,000 note was leaked on the social media even before the Prime Minister made the announcement to ban Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. A few hours before the PM addressed the nation on Tuesday, images of the new Rs 2,000 note were circulating all over the social media.

While the decision to scrap the Rs 500 and 1,000 notes was taken a few months back, the same was a highly guarded secret. The government did not even give a hint about this decision. However there was speculation galore on chat groups and some messages with images of the new note too were in circulation.

Sources say that if the images have leaked then it had to be an insider job. At the time of the printing which began a few months back, someone could have clicked a picture and leaked, it the source also added.

The matter is being probed and the person who leaked the images will be dealt with severely government sources said. We are viewing this very seriously and at a time when the government is trying to clean up the system such acts are unpardonable the official also said.

OneIndia News
Indo-US relationship will continue to grow under Trump: US Envoy

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

New Delhi, Nov 11: The US has exuded confidence that while there have been "gains over the years in the relationship" between India and the US over the past two decades, the trend will continue under the new dispensation headed by President-elect Donald Trump.

"As you look at the gains over the years in the relationship, particularly over the past 20 years, those have occurred in Republican and Democratic Administrations," US Ambassador Richard R. Verma said on Friday while speaking at a Ficci function here.

"President Clinton's visit was in many ways a landmark moment; Bush's embrace of the civil nuclear cooperation and the defence framework deepened our strategic cooperation; and Obama over the past eight years has taken our ties to new heights... And, I'm confident this trendline will continue," Verma said.

Speaking on the topic 'Beyond the Election -- The Future of India-US Relations', he pointed out: "In a time of deep political polarization in our country, enhancing the US and India partnership is something that is refreshingly unifying, across the political divide."

Verma said: "A strong bipartisan consensus (in the US) on the importance of the US-India relationship exists" and that consensus has only grown and strengthened over the years.

"Anyone who saw Prime Minister's (Narendra Modi) speech before Congress this past summer realized that both Republicans and Democrats enthusiastically embraced our enhanced ties, rising to their feet in applause numerous times," he said.

The US envoy said, moreover, there has been "greater convergence" on the big issues between the two countries.

"If we previously spent the bulk of our bilateral relations engaging in cordial but on separate political, economic and strategic tracks over the years well, those tracks are now converging. We've made it clear, perhaps in a way that it wasn't before, that we support India's rise as a global power...," Verma said.

He said such spirit of convergence is also seen "in the counter-terror declarations and the unity of our condemnation of terrorism of all forms, including cross-border terror".

In this context, the ambassador said: "We see our renewed convergence on issues related to Afghanistan, our trilateral cooperation with Japan, the increasing complexity, pace and character of our military exercises, and we see it in a recent and historic designation of India as a Major Defence Partner".

Verma said in fact, none other than Prime Minister Modi has himself echoed the spirit of the new Indo-US era and pointed out how Modi in his address to the Congress had said, "a strong and prosperous India is in America's strategic interests".

"It's that simple. It's that important. And this philosophy has helped drive our cooperation upward, deeper and closer," the ambassador said.

He further said the practical impact of this view is in the embrace of a Joint Strategic Vision for Cooperation across the Asia Pacific, a landmark agreement our two leaders entered into in January of 2015, and one that stands for the peaceful resolution of disputes, freedom of navigation, counter piracy, counter WMD, economic integration and so much more.

Referring to trade and commerce, he said in a world of declining exports the two-way trade is "actually up".

"Now at nearly $110 billion, the US continues to be India's largest trading market, and you continue to have a nearly $30 billion trade surplus in our bilateral trade. The character of our trade and investment relationships has changed. The vision of India as simply an outsourcing destination is outdated," Verma said.

IANS
Judges appointment- Centre lobs the ball right back at the Supreme Court

News

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

New Delhi, Nov 11 The centre today lobbed the ball right back into the court of Supreme Court. We have no file pending with us regarding appointment of judges. What happened to the draft Memorandum of Procedure sent by us, Attorney General of India, Mukul Rohatgi asked a Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India.

The AG informed the Supreme Court that no proposal regarding the appointment of judges to the High Courts are pending with us. He said that the centre had out of the 77 names proposed by the judges cleared 34. The proposal for the rest of the 43 names were returned to the Supreme Court, the AG also said.

Further the AG reminded the Supreme Court about the Memorandum of Procedure which was prepared to ensure transparency in the appointment of judges. The AG sought to know from the court what steps had been taken by the SC collegium on the same. It is unfortunate that that the Collegium has not responded to the MoP.

The court informed the AG that the collegium would meet on November 15 to discuss the MoP. The matter will has now been adjourned to November 18

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, November 11, 2016, 11:44 [IST]
Happy Kannada Rajyotsava 2022: Wishes, Quotes, Messages and to Share on Karnataka Formation Day

Karnataka Rajyotsava 2022: Add these 5 songs to your playlist to hum Kannada glory

Narrow escape for devotees after temple chariot collapses onto crowd

Karnataka minister views porn, CM seeks explanation

News

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Bengaluru, Nov 11 The Chief Minister of Karnataka Siddharamaiah has sought an explaination from a minister who was caught watching porn on his mobile phone during an official function on Thursday.

The minister, Tanveer Sait was captured by television channels viewing explicit content on his mobile phone at a function conducted to mark the birth anniversary of Tipu Sultan.

Kannada channels aired the footage of Sait viewing explicit pictures on his mobile phone.

Sait who was the chief guest at the function was seen scrolling through the photographs.

The Chief Minister, Siddaramaiah and Home Minister Dr G Parameshwar were briefed about the same.

Both have sought an explaination from the minister about this embarrassing incident.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, November 11, 2016, 8:55 [IST]
SC issues contempt notice to Justice Katju, Don't scare me says the retired judge

India

oi-Vicky

The Supreme Court on Friday issued contempt notice to retired judge, Markhandey Katju in the Soumya rape and murder case. The contempt notice was issued because he criticised the judge and not the judgment.

Once the notice was issued, Justice Katju said," I am not scared, do what you what. Do not threaten me." The Bench observed that the remarks made by Justice Katju were on an assault on the three judge bench and it was not a criticism of the judgment. This is the first time in the history that a former judge of the Supreme Court is being slapped with a contempt notice.

Justice Katju was told to appear before the court and debate his Facebook post in which he criticised the judgment of the Supreme Court in the Soumya murder and rape case. The court had acquitted the accused.

There was plenty of drama in the court today. Justice Katju lost his cool several times as he kept saying he is not scared of the Supreme Court. Justice Gogoi on the Bench reminded him that he was junior to Katju. When Justice Katju lost his cool, the Bench called for security. The Bench then asked if there was anyone to escort Justice Katju out of the court.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, November 11, 2016, 17:01 [IST]
This is 21st century, where have we reached in name of religion: SC on hate speeches

SC notice to Centre on plea against supply of electoral roll to candidates

Special anti-corruption courts in every district: SC to take up plea next week

SC frowns on two-finger test in rape case: Stop the practice immediately it says

States have right to levy entry tax on goods coming in: SC

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Nov 11: The Supreme Court today upheld the constitutional validity of the state legislations with regard to levy of entry tax on goods coming into its territory.

A 7:2 majority verdict by the apex court ruled that the tax legislation by the state does not require the consent of the President under Article 304 B of the Constitution.

The nine-judge bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur said though state governments are empowered to impose tax on goods coming from other states there cannot be a discrimination between the goods.

Further the apex court said if a state imposes entry tax on products made within the state it was not empowered to impose higher tax on the identical products entering from other states.

The majority view also left it for the smaller regular bench to adjudicate upon the term 'local area' whether it would refer to the entire state or some pockets within its territory. Besides the CJI, the majority view was held by Justices A K Sikri, S A Bobde, S K Singh, N V Ramanna, R Banumathi and A M Khanwilkar.

Justices D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan delivered the separate minority judgement. Justice Banumathi, who shared the minority view also read out, a separate verdict expressing her disagreement on some of the points by saying that in her opinion the term 'local area' implied the entire territory of the state.

PTI
The fake currency industry is 'OFFICIALLY' dead

News

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

New Delhi, Nov 11 It would be safe to say now that the fake currency industry is officially dead. The scrapping of the Rs 500 and 1,000 notes killed the entire industry in one go.

Just when the Pakistanis began discussing faking the Rs 100 and 50 notes to make up for their loss, the government made yet another announcement. It was decided that new notes of all denominations would be released in the next couple of months with added security features like the one found in the new Rs 500 and 2,000 notes.

This move would surely get the Pakistan based fake currency racketeers as well the Dawood Ibrahim syndicate re-thinking. They would think twice before putting out fake Rs 100 notes into the market as the entire investment would go waste. Moreover the other point here is that with added security features in the new notes, it is next to impossible to make fakes.

Can't fake it anymore:

A top official with the Intelligence Bureau informed OneIndia that after careful examination of the new notes, it can be said that it is next to impossible to forge the same. There are too many security features in the new notes and this makes it impossible to fake it, the officer also informed.

The Pakistanis had managed to replicate the Rs 500 and 1,000 notes with ease. They had started importing the paper for the notes from the same places which India did. Moreover the security features in the older notes were not too difficult to replicate and the Pakistanis managed to do a thorough job with it.

The fake notes that were in circulation in India were so accurate that it had become impossible to tell between the genuine and the fake. It was a menace that was becoming increasingly difficult to curb and was threatening to break down the Indian economy.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, November 11, 2016, 12:51 [IST]
Assassination threats against Donald Trump now flood Twitter

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

New York, Nov 11: Donald Trumps shock victory in the US elections has triggered a flood of calls on Twitter and other social media outlets for the President-elect to be assassinated  and authorities will investigate all threats deemed to be credible, The New York Post has learned.

The development comes as demonstrators continued to take to the streets for a second day across the US against Trump's victory in the country's presidential election.

In Portland, Oregon, an estimated 4,000 protesters chanted "We reject the president-elect!", with some throwing objects at police, prompting several arrests.

According to The Post, a simple search on Twitter can reveal dozens and dozens of calls to gun down Trump. Some posts called for both Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence to be assassinated, and there's even an #AssassinateTrump hashtag.

"Trump chose the literal worst case scenario as VP so nobody would try to impeach or assassinate him," one user posted on Twitter.

Last Saturday, Trump was rushed off a stage on in Reno, Nevada, where Secret Service agents took action after an "unidentified individual shouted 'gun'" in front of the stage. Authorities took the man, Austyn Crites, into custody, but did not find a gun, the Secret Service said in a statement, according to the Washington Post.

Also read: Big decisions on his administration coming 'soon': Donald Trump

Meanwhile, Trump, after blasting the media and protesters in aggressive tweets after people took to the streets to protest against the election results, Trump on Friday said he loves the "passion" of his countrymen for their country, media reported.

"Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country," Trump tweeted, the New York Post reported.

"We will all come together and be proud!"

The gracious gesture - playing down the widespread protests or what police labelled as "riots" - was a change from Thursday night when Trump flashed annoyance at his detractors.

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Trump tweeted.

Trump's Muslim ban temporarily removed from website

Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in major cities across the US since Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night, with the slogan "Not my President".

Since Thursday, thousands of demonstrators, including immigration rights and environmental activists, have protested in cities like Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in front of the Trump International Hotel.

On Wednesday in Wellsville, New York a passer-by spotted a swastika and the phrase "Make America White Again" on a softball dugout. Graffiti, with Nazi imagery and the word "Trump", was also discovered on a storefront in Philadelphia.

Police said they would look into the incident, though they haven't received any reports.

The New York City Police Department confirmed on Thursday that at least 65 persons were detained on different charges, including disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.

IANS
How the flame of Azadi was kept ablaze by the tribal community: PM Modi explains

Civil nuclear pact with Japan historic step: Narendra Modi

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Tokyo, Nov 11: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday called the civil nuclear agreement with Japan a "historic step", adding that Japan is a natural partner of India.

"The agreement for cooperation on peaceful uses of nuclear energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said after the agreement was signed.

India and Japan on Friday signed the landmark civil nuclear agreement following the annual bilateral summit led by Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe here.

The present agreement will open up the door for collaboration between Indian and Japanese industries in India's civil nuclear programme.

Also read: India and Japan sign civil nuclear deal

"We see Japan as a natural partner in our aim to be a major centre for manufacture and investments and 21st century knowledge industries. Our strategic partnership is not only for the good and security of our own societies. It also brings peace, stability and balance to region," Modi said.

The Prime Minister said the success of the joint military exercise Malabar 2016 in June by India, Japan and the US "underscored the strategic convergence in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific region".

"We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he added.

IANS
Nato summit 2018 begins in Brussels: What is Nato?

Jaishankars Brussels visit would decide on Modis participation at UN summit

Diwali celebrations at European Parliament

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Brussels, Nov 11 The European Parliament, in cooperation with the Indian embassy in Brussels organised a grand Diwali celebration at its premises in Brussels.

European Parliament Vice President Antonio Tajani led the celebrations on November 9 along with the Chair of the European Parliament's Delegation for Relations with India, Geoffrey Van Orden.

Syed Kamall, the chairman of the UK conservative group in the European Parliament was present along with co-host and event organiser Neena Gill, a British MEP of Indian origin.

Around 100 people participated in the celebrations.

Meanwhile on Thursday, renowned instrumentalist of India, Pandit Bhajan Sopori, hailed as 'King of Strings' on the mellifluous Kashmiri Santoor, enchanted a large audience with his music in the European Parliament.

IANS
Hafiz Saeed says Donald Trump's win a 'victory of racism and ignorance'

International

oi-Sandra Marina Fernandes

Islamabad, Nov 12: 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed on Friday said that Donald Trump's victory in the US Presidential elections is a 'victory of racism and ignorance.'

According to a report in nation.com.pk, Saeed said knowledge, wisdom, understanding and endurance have been defeated while racism and ignorance won in America.

Saeed went on to say that the entire world has expressed shock on Trump's victory even as the markets in US crashed. "God has entangled America into internal issue in the shape of Trump," he was quoted saying.

However, he goes on to add that Pakistan need not worry about Trump's victory. "We believe that there is no need to worry about it. Indeed, America has done injustice in the world, killed Muslims and spread barbarism. Now Allah wants to punish Americans," he said.

Meanwhile, protests erupted in several parts of US after Donald Trump was named as the President-elect in the recently concluded US Presidential elections.

Protestors took to the streets rejecting the idea of Trump as their president and in several parts the protests turned violent.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Saturday, November 12, 2016, 0:18 [IST]
North Korea fires two more missiles towards Japan

Sumo: Is Japan's national sport on the ropes?

Narendra Modi calls for closer business ties with Japan

International

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Tokyo, Nov 11 Prime Minister Narendra Modi today invited Japanese investments, saying India has a huge and substantial need for finances and his government was pursuing reform policies to make the country the world's "most open" economy.

Addressing business leaders at the India-Japan Business Leaders' Forum, he mentioned progress on GST and talked about other reforms in policies and rules to make investments and doing business easier in India.

Coming together for greater trade and investment. PM @narendramodi interacts with members of the India-Japan Business Leaders' Forum pic.twitter.com/eubXqdkBMO  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

PM @narendramodi addresses IJBLF meeting. Mentions his longstanding ties with Japan since he was CM Gujarat pic.twitter.com/jd2Oj1mmMP  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

PM @narendramodi :India has conducive biz environment which Japan can take advantage of. Have taken steps to implement your suggestions pic.twitter.com/oGFodHLP0z  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) November 11, 2016

"India's prowess in software is complemented by Japan's strength in hardware. Want to assure you that we will provide a level-playing field," he told business leaders.

(With agency inputs)

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, November 11, 2016, 11:28 [IST]
Rodrigo Duterte says he is against 2014 defense pact with US

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Manila, Nov 11 Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday that he is against the implementation of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that Manila and Washington signed in 2014.

With the statement, Duterte again hinted that he might scrap the agreement that allows prolonged deployment of American forces in the country as well as build logistics hub in Philippine military bases.

Duterte, who arrived in Davao City after an overnight official visit to Malaysia, told a news conference that he does not want to see any foreign troops on Philippine soil, Xinhua news agency reported.

He added that the joint military activities that will be carried out this year by the Philippine and US troops would probably be the last.

Duterte also said that he is against the joint war games between the Philippines and US forces as only the US soldiers benefit from these exercises.

He added that the Americans do not share their sophisticated and state-of the-art communication equipment with Philippine troops.

In October, he also told a business forum in Tokyo during his visit in Japan that he wants his country "freed of the presence of foreign military troops" in the next two years.

"I want them out, and if I have to revise or abrogate agreements, executive agreements, I will," he had said.

Asked whether there would be changes in policies with the new US administration, Duterte said, "I will pursue what I've started."

He reiterated that the Philippines will continue to honour the treaties that the Philippines signed with the US, including the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.

IANS
The government is probing how images of the new Rs 2,000 note was leaked on the social media even before the Prime Minister made the announcement to ban Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. Sources say that if the images have leaked then it had to be an insider job. At the time of the printing which began a few months back, someone could have clicked a picture and leaked, it the source also added.
 2008-2022 One News Page Ltd.

All rights reserved.

One News is a registered trademark

of One News Page Ltd.
OK! Magazine 01 Nov 2022

Celebrities are mourning the tragic loss of Takeoff, who made up a third of the rap group, Migos, alongside Quavo and Offset.
Fake spirit sellers sentenced

From:Shanghai Daily | 2016-11-11 02:46

TWO men were given prison sentences for selling more than 800 bottles of fake baijiu distilled spirit purporting to be from the luxurious Moutai brand for more than 900,000 yuan (US$132,500), the Pudong New Area Peoples Court announced yesterday.

One of the defendants, surnamed Wang, who bought the fake spirit and sold it to the other defendant, surnamed Yao, for more than 600,000 yuan, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and fined 150,000 yuan. Yao, who then sold the baijiu to others, was sentenced to a three-year suspended prison sentence and fined 70,000 yuan.
Malaysia foods to be bought online

By:Jiang Wenran | From:english.eastday.com | 2016-11-10 10:11

Shanghai, November 10- With various exotic foods and rich food culture, Malaysia has long been known as Paradise for Gourmet.

The Malaysian government yesterday led 42 local food enterprises to exhibit Malaysian food products and food culture at Chinas Global Food & Beverage Exhibition FHC China 2016.



During the exhibition, all kinds of tasting activities will be held at Malaysia pavilion, providing a good opportunity of an insight into Malaysian cuisine and local customs for FHC visitors.



Besides, Malaysia Online Sales@JD.com was officially released during the opening ceremony of Malaysia Pavilion. Chinese consumers can directly buy Malaysia foods online from now on.



Over 20 Malaysia brands will be included in the online sales platform, including food and beverage, daily necessities, health care products as well as fresh food.



Dato Seri Ong Ka Chuan, Second Minister of International Trade & Industry noted that the establishment of Malaysia Online Sales@JD.com will help local food enterprises more conveniently and quickly enter Chinese market.
Daily Record 12 Nov 2021

Having signed the Armed Forces Covenant in 2013, the council has reaffirmed its pledge to support those who have served their..
euronews (in English) 11 Oct 2022

Sturgeon said that if the courts blocked a referendum, we put our case to people in an election or we give up on Scottish..
BAC 2016 Brings Record Affiliations, Biggest Ever

Published November 11, 2016 by Lee R

The third affiliate conference of the year was the biggest ever.

As expected, BAC 2016 was a smash hit, with the numbers and reactions to prove it.

Wide Diversity

The years third and final iGB Affiliate conference and exhibition hosted record attendance of 3,056 delegates at Messe Berlin from October 20-23. A rich mix of affiliates, affiliate managers, introducing brokers, media personalities and more left delighted and empowered.

Impact

After Amsterdam and London, the overflowing demand for the third version of the event taking place taking place alongside the Financial Partners Expo for introducing brokers and affiliates within the financial sector is rapidly transforming the global gambling industry by increasing public comprehension of the value of affiliate marketing to the economy of the gambling sector.

Evolution

First held in 2015, the Berlin Affiliate Conference began as an update to the Barcelona Affiliate Conference, enhancing the identity of the affiliate conference with the German capital instantly proving popular to industry professionals.

Exhibition Meshes With Networking

In the BAC exhibition sector, gambling operators and suppliers proudly introduced their latest products to enthusiastic attendees networking against the fabulous backdrop of Berlins urban opulence, with unique conference activities and formats facilitating productive interaction and easy access between speakers and audience.

Diversity

BAC hosted affiliates with all levels of experience: attendees entered the affiliate market through meeting new affiliates and finding new affiliate managers to secure and organize the best affiliate arrangements. The innovation and strategy of the conference programming is something that all attendees responded to, serving to distinguish the affiliate conference and the affiliate industry overall.

Expert Insights Shared

Attendees were empowered to a man by a long list of speakers whom shared their insights about the state of the iGaming affiliate market including Alexandre Tomic, Co-Founder of SlotsMillion.com; Johnny Devitt, Chief Marketing Officer of Betfair; Michael Caselli, Editor in Chief of iGaming Business; and Rahul Sood, Chief Executive Officer of Unikrn.

Building Momentum

Head of Business Operations at iGaming Shona ODonnell characterized the conference as a record-breaking and resounding success, even as she hinted at further exciting announcements forthcoming regarding the upcoming London Affiliate Conference 2017.

Outlook

Whether you are one yet or not, all current and future affiliates should stay tuned.
Matthias Knab, Opalesque: Jonathan Rochford, CFA, Portfolio Manager at Narrow Road Capital, writes on Harvest Exchange: In the aftermath of the US presidential election Donald Trumps victory is continuously being called "shocking".The reality is that the result was not a shock at all. The graphic from Real Clear Politics below is their final prediction of where the states would land, published on the day before the election. All Trump needed to do to overcome Clintons slender lead was win a few thousand more votes in New Hampshire. Anyone who looked at this graphic alone would have said that the only certainty was a close race. A reasonable person delving further into the widely available data would also have looked at the early voting patterns. Here Trump was doing better than Romney did in key states. Clinton was leading, but it is widely known that Democrats do better in early voting and Republicans do better on election day. What the early voting also revealed was that polls were oversampling Democrat voters, a point Republican supporters had frequently raised. The response rate to polls had slumped from 20% to 5%, making the potential for error much higher than previous elections. Yet still the polls had narrowed substantially in the weeks leading up to the election. After the release of the infamous Trump video in early October many assumed Trump had no chance. However, after FBI Director James Comey said the Clinton email investigation was being ...................... To view our full article Click here
I'll be speaking at the upcoming Iraq Tribunal about war lies of 2002-2003 vintage. I'm nostalgic for the days when presidents had to lie to Congress and the public and obtain some modicum of support before bombing a foreign country.

Already by the day after this week's election we saw the return of street protests, of big plans for mass mobilizations, and of preparations to urge a presidential impeachment as soon as Trump commits the first obviously impeachable offense not routinely committed by Barack Obama.

But we are not going to see the return of the office of the presidency as it was inherited by George W. Bush or even as it was passed along to Barack Obama. When Bush became president, spying on everything everybody did was deemed unacceptable. Imprisoning people without charge or trial was an outrage. Torture was illicit. Going through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays to pick whom to murder with a drone would have filled the streets with protest. When Congress passed laws, presidents were supposed to veto them, sign and obey them, or quietly ignore them in secret until caught, not sign them and publicly announce which parts they would violate.

When Obama became president, illegal surveillance was a crime of his predecessor awaiting prosecution. Guantanamo and similar death camps were a problem to be remedied. Torture was a felony the prosecution of which was mandatory under the supreme law of the land. And drones were just one weapon of many to be used in existing wars.

Donald Trump -- elected by Republicans after admitting the 2003 attack on Iraq was a disaster that helped create ISIS, and after pretending that he had opposed launching that war at the time -- now moves into the White House with the power to spy on everything, the power to imprison anyone, the power to torture without consequences, the power to kill anyone in any place, and the power to start new wars anywhere in the world at his whim using the most costly military in the history of the earth, mobilized from more bases in more countries than any military ever before inherited by any ruler. For Trump, obeying laws or even announcing plans not to obey laws will be totally optional, and scrapping laws invented by previous presidents outside the legislative process is now routine. So is concocting new laws. And potential whistleblowers have been conditioned during the Obama years to know that they will be mercilessly persecuted.

When the Democratic Party refused to impeach George W. Bush, as when it escalated the war on Iraq that it had just been empowered to end, as when it cheated Bernie Sanders out of a nomination, it may not have been looking as clearly into the future as it should have been. Accepting immunity for Bush's crimes on the grounds that Obama was now president may not have ever actually made any sense had anyone paused to think about it or to ask what the hell "Looking forward" actually meant. Formalizing, continuing, and expanding crimes and abuses in the Obama years was a reckless lead up to whoever came next.

Up until the Trumpian honesty of "steal their oil," what was unique about the 2002-2003 Iraq lies was not the lies, but the number of people they killed. Those lies were preceded by lies about every previous war including Afghanistan, and followed by lots more lies about Iraq, as well as about Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, the Philippines, China, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, NATO, the state of the U.S. military, the state of U.S. veterans, etc.

But beyond the immediate damage they did, there is something else unique about the Bush-Cheney Iraq lies: a lot of people know about them. And yet they are already being glossed over in history books. War lies once known about have to be re-taught over and over or they will be simply erased if possible or distorted if necessary. Let's make sure it's the latter, and then let's correct the distortions from here on out. It was awareness of these Iraq lies that helped us prevent the proposed 2013 bombing of Syria. That awareness will also be our biggest aid in discouraging President Trump from wars or in stopping whatever bombing he quietly begins.
Remember Archie Bunker? He was the central character in Norman Lear's "All in the Family." Archie was the working class bigot we all laughed when Carroll O'Connor brilliantly played him during the 1970s.

Everyone loved Archie. Someone even printed a t-shirt: "Archie Bunker for President."

The Carroll character admired Herbert Hoover. He longed for a time when "we didn't need no welfare state," and when "'goils' were 'goils' and men were men." He was patriarchal, racist and xenophobic. He despised "homos" and called liberals like his son-in-law "meatheads."

Well, believe it or not: Americans just followed through on that t-shirt slogan. They elected Donald Trump -- a billionaire Archie Bunker. Better put, America's Archie Bunkers voted in Mr. Trump as (in Norman Lear's own words) "another version of themselves."

Like those who elected him, Donald Trump is tired of having to pussyfoot (ahem!) around the sensibilities of blacks, women, Hispanics, non-Christians, and others who have exhibited annoying touchiness around the epithets white men have applied to them so comfortably in the past. Like them, he is the sworn enemy of "political correctness."

True, Trump doesn't know much about history or politics. He can't even define the "nuclear triad." He is mistrustful of scientists warning about human-induced climate change. He wonders: "If we have nuclear weapons, why don't we use them?"

But to his admirers (in Orwell's words) such "ignorance is strength." Once again, it means Mr. Trump is like his constituency. He reflects their own mental processes. For them, what his detractors call "ignorance" means Mr. Trump is unencumbered by indoctrination into the Beltway's arcania and by the restrictions of international business-as-usual. None of that is working anyway. So to hell with it all!

Since things can't get much worse, why not elect a climate-change denier and someone accused of and having bragged about multiple instances of sexual assault? Why not vote for a man endorsed by the Klan -- or one who has promised to punish women who have abortions. So what if he wants to build a wall along the Mexican border, prevent Muslims from entering the country, reinstate torture, racial profiling and stop-and-frisk policies, deport undocumented Hispanics, jail his presidential opponent, lower taxes for the wealthy, dismantle the Affordable Care Act, and punch those who disagree with him in the face?

Archie Bunkers love all that stuff.

And maybe it's just what we all need. It may bring the entire dysfunctional system down. I mean, Donald Trump is hated nearly as much by the Republican Establishment as by Democrats. This may be the end of them both.

And at least he isn't as hawkish as his opponent, Hilary Clinton. His vaunted friendship with Vladimir Putin may keep us out of the nuclear war that Mrs. Clinton appeared to salivate over. As well, Trump seems less trustful of NATO than Clinton who loves that particular engine of war.

Moreover, the Donald will predictably mobilize the "Meatheads" among us. In fact, they somehow seem to do better when people like Nixon or "W" are in power. So after January's inauguration, watch progressives from Black Live Matter activists to Dakota Access Pipeline Water Protectors mobilize in unending protest.

Finally, the surprising election results where (once again) the victor received fewer votes than the defeated, may lead to election reform. It's time to insure that everyone's vote actually matters, rather than those cast in just a few "swing states." Reforms should include shortening of the electoral season, reversal of the Citizens United decision, abolition of the Electoral College, universal reintroduction of paper ballots, reinstatement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and elimination of voter-suppression tactics that militate mostly against people of color.

Choosing Archie Bunker for president is not entirely without merit.
During the last decade the deteriorating political and military situation in the world have proved the necessity of well-prepared armed forces.

It is obvious that the level of patriotism in Lithuania is high as ever. Many young men are thinking to join the armed forces and be useful to the country. The government only should maintain and strengthen this trend. But battling with numerous political and economical problems the government is going to make some changes in military sphere that could have far-reaching adverse consequences.

It should be said that today there is a serious gap in providing the national armed forces with officers. Professional outflow is higher than inflow.

Lithuania's army has lost 258 trained commanders for the last three years and only 231 lieutenants have come on their places. There is one reason for it -- the total absence of advantages for those who are ready to become officers. But Lithuanian authorities want to solve the problem in another way.

Minister of National Defence Juozas Olekas declared that new amendments to the law providing the lengthening the service for Lithuanian officers, generals, admirals and chaplains have been prepared. Officers will serve up to 56, generals and admirals up to 60 and up to 65 years old. The proclaimed aim of such actions is to prevent the command from weakening. Lithuanian officers usually retire at 45 and successfully start new civilian careers. Until now they have such a right, but the authorities have decided to deprive of it.

In other countries, such as the US and Great Britain, in exchange for the increased responsibility and risks, officers receive superior benefits and excellent credentials valued by military. Such way is much more effective than those the Lithuanian authorities have chosen. But it is of course more costly and difficult.

Hopefully Lithuania's new government will go another way than the previous one and Lithuania will not lose the future of its armed forces. It is no good to "patch holes" by lengthening service, the armed forces need officers sure in their social security and benefits for their families in exchange of preparedness to risk their lives. The choice to enlist in the Lithuanian Armed Forces is a life-changing decision that many men and women make taking in consideration all "pros and cons." And the decision of young men highly depends on the government's today attempts to improve the situation and keep the military professionals in the army.
Just two days after Trump's election, reports of anti-Muslim attacks spike

Like millions of voters and minorities, the upset victory of Donald Trump on Tuesday night was not a pleasant situation for the seven-million-strong American Muslim community that was at the receiving end during the controversial 2016 presidential election campaign. Hence, an urgent question for the American Muslims is how they will be treated by the forthcoming administration of Donald Trump.

With this in mind, nine Muslim and Arab civil-advocacy groups held a joint press conference in Washington DC on Wednesday to offer reaction to the election of Donald Trump as the nation's 45th president. They were joined by the National Council of Churches of Virginia.

Muslim groups have called upon the President-elect Donald Trump to respect the rights of all Americans and pledged to work with the new president to strengthen the nation. The Muslim groups also called on President-elect Trump to unite all Americans under the Constitution.

The Muslim groups emphasized that they fully cherish the democratic process of the country in which they endeavored to participate this election season by launching voter-registration campaigns and drives to motivate the Muslim voters to go out and cast their vote.

Nihad Awad, National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told the press conference "as citizens of this great nation, we accept the result of the democratic process that has bound us together as one nation.

"Regardless of who won or lost yesterday's election, American Muslims are here to stay. We are not going anywhere, and will not be intimidated or marginalized," declared Nihad Awad of CAIR, which is America's largest Muslim civil-liberties and advocacy organization.

The CAIR official went on to say that the American Muslim community will continue to mobilize to challenge bigotry, to uphold justice and to protect the freedoms and rights of all Americans. In this respect, he added, American Muslims will increase outreach to their fellow citizens of other faiths and backgrounds to build bridges of mutual understanding and cooperation.

He assured the frightened Muslim community that his organization will continue to be a fearless and principled defender of the Muslim community, regardless of who leads our nation. "To those in the American Muslim community who are fearful of the future, know that America is your home and you have the same rights and responsibilities as all other Americans. Rest assured that CAIR is here for you, your family and your children."

Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, Director Outreach at Darul Hijra Islamic Center, Falls Church, Virginia, said we support the political process of this country and recognize the work done by each individual community in upholding the values and principles of a democratic process.

He hailed the acceptance speech of Donald Trump and hoped that "we will move together as one nation, a call for national unity, a commitment to rebuild the social fabric and cohesion of America and to stand for civil rights and civil liberties of everyone."

As an American, as an African-American and as a Muslim, we believe in these values and principles and intend to hold every elected official to the standard of democracy, Imam Johari added.

Ilhan Cagri of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) said last night represented a shift in American landscape and exposed a deep division in our nation. "This presidential campaign did not create these divisions but reminding us how changing demographics in our country have created fear and hysteria in some leading to unrest and a fractured society," she added.

We accept the result of the election because we believe in the principle of democracy and peaceful transfer of power, Ilhan said, adding: Engagement is needed now more than ever and MPAC will redouble its efforts for seeking common ground with the left or right, those who are disfranchised and left out.

Rev. Steven Martin, Communications Director of the National Council of Churches of Virginia, expressed concern over the level of fear in the American Muslims who are very worried about their future and about their economic future. "We hear daily incidents of hatred and bias against our Muslim brothers and sisters.

"We are deeply respectful of the democratic process and it is necessary to stand behind our leaders and we pledge to do so," Rev. Steven Martin said, adding: But we also call upon leaders, those who are newly elected, to exercise their power with compassion, with care and with deep concern for all Americans so that no one is left behind. So that we all prosper. It is this kind of America where we all be able to exercise true faith, a faith that is found in freedom.

Next Page 1 | 2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
From Nation of Change

Trump is in the White House, but the takeaway from voters in this election is a mandate for progressive economic populism and more diversity among public officials.

Buckle-up friends, it's going to be a hairy ride.

Start with Day One for President Trump (gotta get used to saying that). He will need to be up-and-at-'em no later than 12:01 am, for during his campaign he promised to get oodles of big stuff done on his very first day in office, including: "Repeal Obamacare"; Begin working on impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall; Meet with Homeland security officials and generals to begin securing the Southern border; Fix the Department of Veterans Affairs; "Repeal every single Obama executive order"; Suspend Syrian refugee resettlement; "Get rid of gun-free zones in schools"; "End the war on coal"; "Defend the unborn"; "Start taking care of "our military"; And convene top generals and inform them they have 30 days to come up with a plan to stop ISIS.

Good grief! Americans have actually put a xenophobic-misogynous-racist-nativist-narcissistic blowhard in the Oval Office. Has our country gone right wing? Or completely nuts?

No. Trump was not elected on issues, but on anger -- a deep seething fury that the economic and political elite themselves have created by knocking down the working-class majority, then callously stepping over them as if they didn't exist. Exit polls revealed that most Trump voters don't think he's any more honest than Hillary Clinton (only 38 percent of all voters had a favorable opinion of him, with only a third saying he was qualified to be president). Also, his own voters disagree with much of his agenda (especially his grandiose wall across the Mexican border).

But his core message -- "The system is rigged" by and for the elites -- came through loud and clear to them, so they grabbed him like a big Bois-D'arc stick to whap the whole establishment upside its collective head.

The major message from voters was, "We want change." The Donald was the one most likely to shake things up (or blow things up), while Clinton clearly was the candidate of the status quo. As a West Texas farmer told me several years ago, "status quo" is Latin for "The mess we're in," so change voters, including those who would normally side with Democrats, cast their ballot for the Republican.

Indeed, on specific issues, voters around the country supported very progressive changes offered to them in a variety of ballot initiatives:

-- All four states that had minimum wage increases on the ballot passed them -- Arizona (59 percent for it), Colorado (55 percent), Maine (55 percent), and Washington (60 percent). Plus, a South Dakota proposal to lower its minimum wage was rejected by 71 percent of voters.

-- Two states had initiatives calling for a constitutional amendment to repeal the Supreme Court's Citizen United decision that has allowed unlimited corporate cash to flood into our elections -- California (53 percent for it) and Washington (64 percent "yes"). Also, 52 percent voted for campaign finance reform that will provide public funding of elections there.

-- A Minnesota initiative to take away the power of state lawmakers to set their own salaries, instead creating a bipartisan citizens council to consider any increases, won a whopping 77 percent approval.

In addition, many solidly-progressive "firsts" were elected on Tuesday, such as the first Indian-American woman in Congress (Pramila Jayapala of Washington), the first Latina U.S. senator (Catherine Cortez Mastro of Nevada), first Indian-Black woman elected to U.S. Senate (Kamala Harris of California), and first openly-LGBT governor (Kate Brown of Oregon). Stephanie Murphy (of Florida)is the first Vietnamese-American woman elected to Congress, Ihlan Omar (of Minnesota) is the first Somali-American Muslim woman elected to state legislature, and Sam Park (of Georgia) became the first openly gay state legislator there.

Trump is in the White House, but the takeaway from voters in this election is a mandate for progressive economic populism and more diversity among public officials.


Beit Ommar Demo June 4 2011 2

(Image by PSP Photos) Details DMCA



To start, we insisted that Israel was a theocracy. Some objected saying no, it is a democracy. We pointed out so is Iran, and further, the Founders had in our own history, the theocratic seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony and its democratic trappings. We can also point out that Israel has no constitution and never had one. Its fundamental laws are what are passed by the Knesset, its parliament, which could change all at a moment's notice. Its current basic laws support the continued majority Jewish power in the country indefinitely, making and enforcing the laws of the country. The minority rights in religious matters are merely those of sufferance, and can be withdrawn by the majority at any time, or denied, as the Israelis have continuously done with the property rights of Islamic and Christian Arabs. But even though Israel is an obvious theocracy, that need not be proved to deny congressional military aid to Israel, under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Israeli laws, like the discriminatory Right-to-Return law that does not extend to former Arab inhabitants of Palestine or their descendants, and its action in government-supported encroachments by settlements and protection of settlers in Arab lands by its armed forces, equally clearly bar Israel from any claim to U.S. taxpayers' money.

Israeli settlements are Jewish Israeli civilian communities built on lands occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War, and currently exist in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and in the Golan Heights. Government spending per citizen in the Jewish settlements is double that spent per Israeli citizen in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, while government spending for settlers in isolated areas is three times the Israeli national average. Most of the spending goes to the security of the citizens living there. On 30 June 2014, according to the Yesha Council, 382,031 Jewish settlers lived in the 121 officially recognized settlements in the West Bank, over 300,000 Israelis lived in settlements in East Jerusalem and over 20,000 lived in settlements in the Golan Heights. In January 2015 the Israeli Interior Ministry gave figures of 389,250 Israelis living in the West Bank and a further 375,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem.

Many settlements began as military outposts and were later expanded and populated with civilian inhabitants. According to a secret document dating to 1970, obtained by Haaretz, the settlement of Kiryat Arba was established by confiscating land by military order and falsely representing the project as being strictly for military use while, in reality, Kiryat Arba was planned for settler use. The method of confiscating land by military order for establishing civilian settlements was an open secret in Israel throughout the 1970s, but publication of the information was suppressed by the military censor.




Congress Switchboard: 202-224-3121

"In his new book, Bottom-Up, Rob Kall's exploration of top-down and bottom-up forces in our culture, our brains, and our planet provides a deep insight into the challenges we face. He offers pathways we can use to create the changes we need to break free of the war economy and build local peace economies."



Jodie Evans, cofounder of Code Pink and Chair of the Women's Media Center


(Image by tedeytan) Details DMCA



We got 1,001 things wrong in the latest U.S. election. Here are the top 10:

1. Expecting an election to solve deep injustices that require a massive movement, as have all the deep injustices of the past. This can be fixed through education and activism.

2. Rigging the DNC primary to deny Bernie Sanders a nomination. This could have been fixed by Sanders running as an independent. It can now be fixed by all DNC donors abandoning it and putting their funds into activism. Of course the DNC should dump Brazile and all Clintonites, but installing Howard Dean or Keith Ellison hardly solves anything. Disempowering parties through some of the proposals below would work.

3. Rigging the RNC primary by giving Donald Trump endless free media coverage. This can be fixed by busting up the media cartel, requiring free and equal air time for candidates, limiting the election season, banning legalized bribery, and publicly funding elections. (These things also disempower parties.)

4. Voter suppression that Greg Palast says stripped 1.1 million voters from the rolls in swing states, but which Democrats seem not to give a damn about -- perhaps because Putin didn't do it. This can be fixed by creating a right to vote, making voter registration automatic, debunking the myth of "voter fraud," undoing the anti-voter restrictions of recent years, providing adequate polling stations, and making election day a holiday.

5. Unverifiable election machines, including optical scanners, that have left us in an awkward situation. Exit polls, which the U.S. Department of State uses to judge the credibility of elections in other countries, show that Clinton won in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. But we are supposed to just take it on blind faith that in fact she didn't. This can be fixed by publicly hand counting paper ballots in every polling place. Of course the acceptable position is to believe on faith that the vote counts are accurate, but since when is taking it on faith the progressive position, when taking it on empirical evidence is a perfectly possible alternative?

6. The winner-take-all system in most states, which concentrates the election on a handful of states and leads to the winner of the popular vote losing the election. This can be fixed by states choosing to distribute their electoral college "votes" in proportion to their actual human votes.

Next Page 1 | 2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
From Alon Ben-Meir Website

If nothing else, the 2016 elections have once again reaffirmed America's solid democratic system. Without any major incidents, tens of millions of Americans went to polling stations across the land, voted for the candidate of their choice, and readied themselves, as always, for the peaceful transfer of power. I believe that even those who were deeply disappointed with the results of the election will sooner than later rise above the fray, put the nation's interests first, and work to build a more wholesome union.

Notwithstanding the post-election trauma that many Americans are experiencing and the time the Trump administration will need to sort out a host of domestic and foreign policy issues, the US faces numerous foreign crises and it does not have the luxury of time to pause in dealing with them. America's leadership role and responsibility remain pivotal to mitigate, if not end, many of these violent conflicts sweeping the Middle East in particular. Although President-elect Trump is inexperienced and lacks the nuanced knowledge of the complex crises America is confronted with, he must now navigate his own way and develop new strategies, particularly in the areas where Obama fell short, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Sunni-Shiite war, and the civil war in Syria.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: There is no doubt that President Obama has made supreme efforts to solve the seven-decades old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However admirable his efforts were, the president and his chief mediator Secretary of State John Kerry failed to take into account the psychological dimension of the conflict, which has been and remains the core impediment to resolving the conflict, especially from religious, historic, and ideological perspectives.

Throughout the two sets of intensive negotiations in 2009-2010 and 2013-2014, and in spite of the progress made on various conflicting issues such as the Palestinian refugees, the future of Jerusalem, and borders, the failure to mitigate the psychological aspect connected to these issues made it impossible for either side to deliver what they have agreed upon.

At this juncture, the gulf between the two sides has become even deeper and wider, and no amount of mediation, compensation, or coercion can persuade either side to make the significant concessions needed to make peace possible.

The Trump administration must first focus on a process of reconciliation (people-to-people activity) that would mitigate the profound mutual distrust, instill a sense of mutual security, and disabuse the strong constituencies on both sides that they can have it all.

During this process of reconciliation between the two sides, which should last for about two years, the US with the support of the EU (led by France) should promote the Arab Peace Initiative (API) to provide the overall framework for peace based on a two-state solution.

Although many Israelis celebrated the election of Trump, believing that he would not pressure Israel to accept a two-state solution, the Trump administration will make a mistake of historical proportions if it leaves Israelis and Palestinians to their own devices.

The current relative calm should not be taken for granted as the simmering tension can explode any time if the Palestinians see no prospect of ending the occupation in the foreseeable future.

Only by creating the social, political, and psychological atmosphere conducive to peace, and with the support of the Arab states, the EU, and other major powers, can the negotiations be resumed with a far better prospect of success. If Trump is concerned about Israel's future security and political integrity, he must not hesitate to pressure Israel now to seek a solution and save it from its own destructive path.

The Sunni-Shiite war: ISIS came to being in the wake of the Iraq war, which instigated a renewed violent conflict between the Sunnis and Shiites. Although the eventual defeat of ISIS is inevitable, it will not bring an end to the Sunni-Shiite conflict as long as Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are fighting for regional hegemony; they will continue to wage a proxy war in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to secure their goal.

The key to settling this conflict is to revisit the Iraq war and its repercussions on the Sunnis in Iraq. After 81 years of their continuous rule, the Iraqi Sunnis now find themselves at the mercy of the Shiite governing majority, which has systematically discriminated against and marginalized them from the first day the Maliki-led Shiite government came to power.

The Trump administration must now understand that maintaining the unity of Iraq as a single country is no longer a viable option. Though the Sunni Iraqis loath ISIS, they despise and detest the Shiite government in Bagdad even more. To help bring a swifter end to the civil war in Iraq, the Sunnis need to be granted autonomy along the line of the Iraqi Kurds.

The US must now begin the dialogue between the Sunni and Shiite leadership in Iraq to reach an amicable agreement with which both can live. The three Sunni provinces that include the city of Mosul should constitute the contours of such an entity, but given the lack of natural resources (i.e., oil) in these areas, an equitable distribution of oil revenue should be established between them and the central government.

Next Page 1 | 2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
So now we know. The 45th President of the United States will be Donald Trump, a billionaire who has presented himself as an insurgent anti-establishment figure who promised change. And what did the Democratic Party machine do? Instead of choosing their own insurgent who defined himself as a democratic socialist -- Bernie Sanders -- they chose the establishment-personified figure, Hillary Clinton. How dumb was that? The success of the Trump campaign has, in my view, been a vote against Clinton rather than for Trump, and can be summarized as "anyone but Clinton."

One of the best responses to Trump's success came from the leader of Britain's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn:

"Trump's election is an unmistakable rejection of a political establishment and an economic system that simply isn't working for most people. It is one that has delivered escalating inequality and stagnating or falling living standards for the majority, both in the US and Britain. This is a rejection of a failed economic consensus and a governing elite that has been seen not to have listened. And the public anger that has propelled Donald Trump to office has been reflected in political upheavals across the world."

I don't know what a Trump presidency will mean for America and the world, no-one knows, but I think we can be sure of one thing, that demonization of Russia and Putin will stop. The Clinton team and establishment figures that supported her have made Russia enemy number one in their campaign. I hope a more mature dialogue between the two heavily nuclear-armed states will begin that respects the interests of both nations.

Hillary Clinton was advocating stronger military intervention in Syria, and the enforcement of no-fly zones that would have put America on a collision course with Russia. What a catastrophe for the whole world that would have been!

Let us de-escalate the conflict and let the Syrian people decide who will govern them. The insistence by the US and the West that Assad must go first has been the stumbling block to ending the unbearable suffering of the Syrian people. It is not up to the Americans, the West, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia or anyone else to decide how Syria should be governed and by whom. Let us have elections in Syria supervised by international bodies to ensure that they are fair and free. Russia says they want parliamentary and presidential elections in Syria, and so let us take the Russians at their word and work for that to happen

I was listening this morning to someone on the Today program talking about the US becoming isolationist under President Trump; this is not a bad thing, in my view, when it comes to foreign policy. Interventionist US led to the catastrophic Iraq war and the continuing suffering of its people. Interventionism destroyed the Libyan state, and now lawlessness and anarchy are blighting the lives of its people. Military interventions abroad and particularly in the Middle East, rarely if ever, produce good outcomes for the people who have the misfortune of being interfered with. Commentators should stop making statements as if they are evident truths, no explanations required. Serious journalists should not let them get away with it.

What lessons here in Britain do we learn from America as it elects President Trump? Well, the anger with establishment figures and politics as usual is deep and profound. This is reflected in Britain by the Brexit vote. The lesson for the Parliamentary Labour Party is this; stop undermining Jeremy Corbyn. Any other Labour politician chosen as leader will be seen as an establishment figure and Labour will be punished for it. The only person in the Labour Party capable of winning the next general election is Jeremy Corbyn.

Had the Democrats chosen Bernie Sanders as their candidate we would now be talking about President Sanders instead of President Trump.


(Image by cnn.com) Details DMCA



Donald Trump has been elected president, but the big winner this election was the media.

It's hard to see how Trump's victory could've happened without the unprecedented free media he received -- nearly $3 billion through April, according to one estimate.

And networks were eager to do it, with the increased viewership he brought.

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," CBS president Leslie Moonves said of Trump's candidacy. "What can I say?... The money's rolling in, and this is fun."

While the media at large benefited from increased ratings and clicks from Trump's run, CNN led the way.

From the moment Trump announced in June -- calling Mexicans criminals and rapists -- CNN provided him with disproportionate airtime.

"Honestly, I think I get better press from CNN than I do Fox," Trump told Fox in December. "I don't know why."

CNN president Jeff Zucker said the coverage was appropriate since "the front-runner always merits the most amount of attention." But CNN's warped coverage started from the get-go, well before Trump attained the top Republican spot, the Wall Street Journal reported.

CNN Turnaround

Things were bleak at CNN before the campaign, with Wall Street analysts questioning whether there was even a need for the network.

Wall Street's not asking that anymore.

CNN is on track to post a 2016 profit of nearly $1 billion.

"This is the best year in the history of cable news," Zucker recently told The Hollywood Reporter. "I think CNN has outshined everybody."

AT&T even highlighted CNN in announcing its $85 billion purchase of Time Warner, CNN's parent company. (The deal must receive regulatory approval, which Trump has vowed to block; Trump's opposition comes on the heels of CNN's switch to more critical reporting on Trump during the general election.)

Together Again

Next Page 1 | 2 | 3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Progressive Content Not Found

Sometimes, authors delete their progressive content after publishing.



To see if the progressive content was renamed or re-published, please click here.
Global Flooring Market: Increase in Construction Activities to Boost Develop Market at 7.0% CAGR during 2015 - 2023

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=3813

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/flooring-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/

http://globalresearchanalysis.blogspot.in/

According to a recent market research report released by Transparency Market Research, the global flooring market is expected to develop positively at a CAGR of 7.0% during the period from 2015 to 2023. The report, titled Flooring Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2023, anticipates the overall market to reach a valuation of US$391.38 billion by 2023. In 2014, the global flooring market was valued at US$214.29 billion and in terms of volume, the market stood at 16,419.2 million square meters in the same year.Flooring products refer to the construction materials used to cover the floor area of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. A range of products such as wood, vinyl and rubber, tile, carpets and rugs, and others are used to cover the floor area. The report points out the growing construction industry as a primary factor driving the demand from the global flooring market. Flooring products are extensively used as floor coverings in automobiles and deck coverings in ships. Increasing productivity of the automotive industry, coupled with rapid growth in the global shipping industry is expected to significantly augment the growth of the overall flooring market.Download And Get Sample PDF File Of Flooring Market :However, the fluctuating prices of the raw materials for flooring products will restrain the global flooring market during the forecast horizon. Wood or lumber is the major raw material used in wood floor coverings. Volatile price of lumber is expected to negatively impact the growth of the overall market. On the basis of product type, the report segments the global flooring market into tile flooring, carpets and rugs, wood flooring, vinyl and rubber flooring, and others including laminate flooring. In 2014, the demand for carpets and rugs was the highest with the segment accounting for a market volume of 6,556.9 million square meters. This can be attributed to the increasing usage of carpets and rugs as flooring products in cold climates in the developed regions of North America. However, during the forecast horizon vinyl and rubber flooring is expected to grow at the fastest rate owing to the cost efficiency and high durability of these flooring products.In terms of application, the report categorizes the global flooring market into commercial, residential, and others including automotive and industrial. In 2014, residential application emerged as the largest segment in the flooring market, generating a revenue worth US$121.93 billion. Increase in construction activities across developed and developing regions have contributed to the growing application of flooring products in the residential segment. Growing interest for green buildings in the construction industry has led to the increased demand for eco-friendly flooring products in various commercial construction projects.Browse the full Flooring Market Report At :The report studies the global flooring market across five key geographical regions: Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Middle East and Africa. Demand from North America and Asia Pacific has contributed significantly in driving the overall market. The report profiles some of the key players in the global flooring market such as Armstrong World Industries, Mohawk Industries Inc., Gerflor Group, Tarkett Group, and Avant Holding GmbH.The research study has been segmented as below:Flooring Market: Product Segment AnalysisCarpets & rugsTileVinyl & rubber flooringWood flooringOthers (including laminate flooring)Flooring Market: Application AnalysisResidentialCommercialOthers (including industrial and automotive)About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Visit Blog :
Sodium Iodate Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=16715

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sodium-iodate-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/

http://globalresearchanalysis.blogspot.in/

Sodium iodate is the sodium salt of iodic acid which is used as an oxidizing agent. Sodium iodate is a colorless, rhombic crystal and is used as the catalyst in bis-indole synthesis. Sodium iodate is formed by the chemical reaction between a salt base and acid. Sodium iodate may decompose on exposure to light, air, or moisture and is heat and shock sensitive. The reaction between a concentrated solution of sodium hydroxide and iodine can also lead to the formation of sodium iodate. Sodium iodate is used as a source of iodine supplement and also as analytic reagent.Get PDF Brochure for more Professional and Technical insights :The key factor which drives the global sodium iodate market is the salt industry in which the demand for iodized salt keeps on increasing. The growing baking industry is another significant market driver of sodium iodate as sodium iodate in trace amounts is used as disinfectant against bacteria. Recent advancements in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry is acting as a driver of sodium iodate as it is used as an analytic reagent. Growing technical developments in the field of cell biology is also acting as a significant market driver of sodium iodate. The analytical reagent market is a driver of sodium iodate due to the ability of sodium iodate to quickly detect morphine and heroin.The global sodium iodate market is segmented on the basis of product grade as medicine grade, food grade, feed grade, reagent grade, cosmetic grade, industrial grade, and agriculture grade. Based on product categories, sodium iodate is segmented as inorganic compounds, inorganic salts, synthetic reagents, analytical reagent and Puriss p.a. On the basis of raw materials, sodium iodate is segmented as iodine and sodium hydroxide. In terms of application, the market is classified as iodine supplement, disinfectant, preservative, medical disinfectant, ordinary and chromatographic analytic reagent, and feed additive.The global sodium iodate market witnessed decent growth in 2015 and the same trend is expected to follow during the forecast period (2016-2024). In terms of region, the global sodium iodate market has been segmented into Asia Pacific, North America, and Europe. In the Asia Pacific region, China is the major player due to the growing pharmaceutical industries in the country. North America and Europe are the significant players in the sodium iodate market due to the rising demand for analytical reagents. Middle East and Latin America are growing markets for sodium iodate owing to recent developments in the pharmaceutical sector in these regions.Browse Market Research Report with ToC & Free Analysis :Key players of the global sodium iodate market include Iofina, Ajay-SQM, Hanwei Chemical, Shandong Boyuan Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, Chemos GmbH, Hangzhou Dayangchem Co. Ltd, Charkit Chemical Corporation, Barentz N.V,CG Chemikalien GmbH & Co. KG, BKM Resources Inc., Kinbester Co., Ltd, Jin Dian Chemical Co., Ltd., and Simagchem Corporation.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysisAbout UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Visit Blog :
Social Networking Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2014 - 2020

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=199

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Social networking has evolved from being a mere platform to bring together people who share activities, interests, real-life connections, or backgrounds. Companies today are using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to build brand images, expand client base, recruit potential employees, and engage with consumers.The popularity of social networking sites depends on and varies by the level of usage among different demographics and in different countries. The research report compares the most popular social networking sites, reviews them on the basis of active account usage, number of user accounts, and frequency, and offers a summary on the latest trends that govern the social networking market.Interpret a Competitive outlook Analysis Report with PDF Brochure:Details on which is the most popular social networking site worldwide, fastest growing network, and use of social network by different demographics are covered by the report. In addition, the report also offers a look at the leading players in the social networking market, their features, product strengths and weaknesses, business strategies, market size and share, regional breakout, and forecasts through 2017.Overview of the Social Networking MarketAs of October 2014, Facebook had an estimated 1.36 billion active monthly users. Market analysts, however, have indicated that although Facebook continues to be the top-ranking social networking site in 2015, it is no longer growing at the pace it was a couple of years ago. With a figure rounding off at 343 million, Google+ in 2013 became the social networking site with the second highest number of monthly users. Facebook, however, has managed to retain its surging revenues even today thanks to the introduction of video calls and the acquisition of WhatsApp in February last year.Social networking sites have opened up a world of opportunities for both enterprises and consumers. Vendors in the enterprise social networking space such as Broadvision, Atlassian, Jive, IBM, Salesforce, Microsoft, Telligent, Social Text, and Yammer, and players in the consumer social networking sphere such as Facebook, Badoo, LinkedIn, Google+, Qzone, MySpace, Yelp, and Twitter have not only presented a platform to engage users and expand their services, but also turned out to be one of the most promising methods of revenue generation. Opportunities for content management companies, social media advertizing agencies, social media managers, and social media strategists have received a boost thanks to the global growth of the social networking market.Growing penetration of internet connectivity, economic growth and rise in disposable incomes in emerging economies, change in lifestyle, proliferation of smartphones, development of the e-commerce industry, and transition from texted-based content to image-centric solutions has fueled the growth of the social networking market.Companies Mentioned in the ReportThe leading players competing in the global social networking market today are Classmates, Tumblr, Inc, Google+, Meetup, Tagged Inc., Facebook, Inc., LinkedIn Corporation, Twitter Inc., MeetMe, Inc., Flickr, VKontakte, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, and Ask.fm.Some of these players are profiled in the research report based on parameters such as company and financial overview, recent developments, business strategies, and a SWOT analysis.About TMRTMR 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.Contact TMR90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software Market - Global Forecast, Share, Size, Growth And Industry Analysis, 2012 - 2018

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=845

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Customer relationship management (CRM) software refers to a type of enterprise software that comprises a wide range of applications as well as software that will aid companies in managing customer interaction, support, and data, automating sales and marketing, and accessing and managing key business information with respect to partners, vendors, and employees.The CRM software market today holds immense business opportunities and advantages, providing invaluable insights on customers and improving operational efficiency.Get PDF Brochure for more Professional and Technical industry insights:Providing a comprehensive study on the global CRM software market, the research report not only monitors but also evaluates the various trends impacting the worldwide industry. With the help of numerous qualitative and qualitative research tools, the report presents the big picture, highlighting geographical and application-based categories that ensure high growth of the CRM software market.By offering key insights provided by industry experts and analysts within the CRM software market, the report aims to ensure that clients devise well-informed and accurate business strategies, thereby leading to the overall development of the CRM software market across the globe.Overview of the customer relationship management (CRM) software marketIdentifying 2012 to 2018 as the forecast period, the research report indicates that the CRM software market presented a slow growth rate at the beginning of the forecast period, but has since then gained a rapid momentum. Despite the fact that the CRM software market has reached maturity in many developed regions of the world, the fact remains that this technology has been gaining widespread acceptance and adoption in developing economies. The presence of many local participants, such as those in Asia Pacific, signals the growth of the CRM software market in numerous parts of the globe.CRM software can be segmented into four key categories based upon its application: sales, marketing, customer service and support, and others. This software finds usage in multiple industrial verticals such as healthcare, consumer goods and retail, government and academia, energy, utilities, and power, banking, financial services, and insurance, and automotive, transportation, and logistics.CRM software may be used by large enterprises or even small and medium businesses (SMB), and on the basis of deployment type, may be segmented into on premise, on demand (PaaS and SaaS), and hybrid. A key factor that stimulates the use of CRM software in many of these enterprises is the surging competition among industries. Recognizing the benefits that CRM software brings, companies have been investing huge amounts of capital in strengthening customer relationship management. Trends such as integrating social media with CRM software and hosted CRM software have also lent their support in fueling the growth of this market.On the other hand, the willingness and acceptance on the part of enterprises still remains a matter of concern. Apart from this, privacy and security concerns have threatened to stall the growth of the CRM software market. Nevertheless, vendors have been developing the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) ecosystem and solutions for problems specific to a business, and this is anticipated to help the CRM software market maintain its growth over the forecast period.Companies mentioned in the research reportThe global CRM software market is dominated by SAP AG, SalesForce.Com, and Oracle. Of these three, SAP AG has emerged as the leader over the years, accounting for a 20% share of the overall CRM software market. Other participants playing a significant role in the growth of the CRM software market include Adobe Systems Incorporated, Microsoft Corporation, The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Amdocs, and SAS Institute.About TMRTMR 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.Contact TMR90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Release Liner Market : In-Depth Market Research Report 2015 to 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3531

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3531

Release liner is a carrier web material made up of paper or plastic. Release liners are coated on one or both the sides with release agent (chemical used to prevent one material from bonding to surfaces of another material). These releasing agents provide a releasing effect when kept in contact with any kind of stick materials. Adhesive (substance when applied to the surfaces of any materials binds them together and resists separation) and mastic (kind of gum) are of the stick material used for releasing agents. Release liners are available in different colors in the market; it can be a printed or non-printed release liner. Commercial coating companies are engaged in the manufacturing of release agent, providing unique solutions to their clients, based on a wide variety of substrates used to manufacture releasing agents. Commonly used releasing agents for release liner are cross linkable silicone and other coating materials that have low surface energy.Request to view Sample Report @On the bases of materials used to manufacture release liner, global release liner market can be fragmented into paper release liner (super calandered kraft paper, clay coated kraft paper, machine finished kraft paper and machine glazed paper), plastic film release liner and others (poly coated kraft papers and poly coated BO-PET film). Release liner can be used as pressure-sensitive labels and pressure-sensitive tape. Release liners have major application in label stocks industry and packaging industry. Other major application of release liners are in the field of graphic arts, envelopes, medical, tapes and hygiene.North America has the largest market share for release liner products, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. The U.S. and China are the largest markets for release liner in the global market owing to increased food and pharmaceutical business in these countries. North America is expected to maintain its dominance in the forecasted period with Europe showing marginal growth. However, Asia Pacific region is expected to witness highest growth in the coming future owing to increasing domestic demand by the food and pharmaceutical industry in the developing countries such as India and China.Increasing demand from the end-user industry for better labeling is driving the global release liner market. Additionally, with increasing investment in the food and pharmaceutical industry, demand for better quality packaging is expected to increase, in turn demand for release liner is expected to increase. Also, with increasing population paired with rising international trade, demand for quality packaging and labeling is expected to increase, further increasing the demand for release liner products in the global market.Request to view Table of content @Owing to increasing demand from the food and pharmaceutical companies paired with increasing demand from the other end-user industry for better packaging and labeling. The multinational players operating in the market are influenced to invest in the emerging markets of Asia-Pacific. Also, the regional players have increased their production to some extent to compete in the market. Global release liner market is dominated by multinational companies. However, there are some companies operating in the market, but at niche level. Some of the major companies operating in the global release liner market are Gascogne Laminates, 3M Company, Rayven Inc and Sil TechAbout 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.305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Cloud Services Market:Facts, Figures and Analytical Insights 2015 - 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/6667

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/6667

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com

Cloud services are those services that are offered to users via the Internet from the server of cloud computing service provider. Such services provide scalable and easy access to various resources and applications, and are entirely managed by the cloud service providers. The examples of cloud services include web-based e-mail services, online backup solutions and data storage, document collaboration services, technical support services, and database processing among others. Cloud service providers supply the necessary software and hardware required for cloud service, thereby eliminating the need for organizations to deploy their own resources for managing networked services. The other advantage of cloud services over the traditional methods of providing infrastructure is faster deployment of services and reduction in in-house maintenance costs.Request for Sample Report:On the basis of mode of delivery, the cloud services market is segmented into Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The SaaS mode of delivery is further segmented into SMB and mobile corporate SaaS cloud services, corporate SaaS cloud services, SMB SaaS cloud services and others. North America is the largest contributor to the cloud services market due to the high penetration of internet in this region. This region is followed by Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW).Major benefits offered by cloud services are driving business organizations in implementing the use of cloud services. Cloud services maximize the effectiveness of shared resources and ensure the business organizations higher returns and faster paybacks. In addition, cloud services offer scalable solutions to growing business organizations at low cost of ownership. This drives business organizations to invest in such services that allow them to generate higher revenues by optimizing the available resources. However, the data security issues are the roadblocks that are adversely affecting the growth of this market. The increasing data hacking incidences using sophisticated tools result in loss of sensitive data, causing serious dents in the business revenues. Also, there are constant evolutions of new security threats that are affecting the quality of cloud services. Further, the small and medium businesses find it difficult to repeatedly invest in the customized solutions available for cloud services security. Due to such factors, the business organizations are reluctant in investing in the cloud services and prefer to carry on with conventional methods of network infrastructure.Request for Table of content:Some of the major players in the market are improving their existing services by adding new and innovative features. This helps them in staying competitively ahead in the market. For instance, Akamai Technologies, Inc., one of the leading cloud services providers, recently added Zone Apex Mapping feature to its Ion network acceleration technology. This feature reduces DNS resolution time and avoids HTTP redirects. Other major players in the market include VMware, Inc., (U.S.), Taleo Corporation (Ireland), Oracle Corporation, (U.S.), NetSuite Inc., (U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (U.S.), Joyent Inc., (U.S.), International Business Machines Corporation (U.S.), Hewlett-Packard (U.S.), Flexiant Limited (United Kingdom), ENKI Consulting (U.S.), Etelos Inc.,(U.S.), Citrix Systems Inc., (U.S.), Cisco Systems Inc., (U.S.), CA Technologies, Inc., (U.S.), and SAP AG (Germany).About Us:Persistence 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 Us:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Smart Factory Market : Key Growth Factor, Industry Analysis 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/4698

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/4698

Smart factories are affordable and offer fully integrated automation solutions for manufacturing facilities to streamline the flow of materials during the manufacturing process. Smart factories are characterized by increasing the use of technology and field devices to offer complete automation in manufacturing process. By incorporating cyber physical system into the forefront of manufacturing flow, smart factories are able to connect every process and component across the value chain. This interconnection of information and production has revolutionized the automation industry and thereby, facilitated manufacturing units to perform at an optimum level. Moreover, manufacturing companies are able to achieve shortest time to market and zero waste production through smart factories. Automation in smart factories makes the use of various control devices such as sensors, motors, drives, switches and relays and networks technologies such as wired, wireless and radio frequency identification (RFID). Integrated systems such as Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Information Technology (IT) system, Programmable Logic Control (PLC), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) are designed to meet the specific requirements of a manufacturing unit. These industrial control systems manage the process and streamline the flow of materials across the manufacturing line. Smart factories also make use of industrial robots such as articulated robots, SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm or Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm) robots, Cartesian robots, cylindrical and other robots for various manufacturing processes such as painting, welding, conveyance, heavy lifting etc.Request to view Sample Report @One of the major factors driving the growth of smart factory market is the increasing need for improving efficiency and energy saving in the manufacturing process. Automation has enabled manufacturing units to utilize every second of production time through efficient streamlining of the manufacturing process. Technological advancements such as machine to machine communication enable smart factories to eliminate wastage of time caused due to the delay in the process change. Moreover, with rise of Internet of Things (IoT) and services, integration of manufacturing and engineering processes has experienced a tremendous leap forward. However, the growth of smart factory market faces a few restraints due to lack of standardization and interoperability issues. These factors raise concerns in designing integrated solutions using components provided by several automation solution providers. The shortage of trained workers and increasing skill gap further restrains the growth of smart factory market. Other crucial factors such as cyber security threats and associated costs limit the growth of this smart factory market in industries such nuclear, weapons and armaments.With its immense applications in industries such as automotive and transportation, packaging, mining of minerals and metals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and process industries such as oil and gas, the smart factory market is expected to experience immense growth in coming years. Thereby, companies have invested heavily to explore untapped opportunities in the applications of industrial robots and control devices.Request to view Table of content @Some of the major players in smart factory market include Intel Corporation, General Dynamics Corporation, CMC Associates, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Honeywell International Inc., Johnson Controls Inc., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Rockwell Automation Inc., Siemens AG, Schneider Electric SA, General Electric Co., Apriso Corporation, Emerson Electric Co., Invensys Plc., Teledyne Technologies Inc., ABB Ltd., Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, and National Instruments Corporation.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.305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Coffee Premixes Market On the Rise : Industry Analysis, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016  2024

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=16208

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/coffee-premixes-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Overview:Coffee premix is a fusion of different ingredients made from premium quality coffee beans with distinct flavors and aromas, which produces a unique result for consumption. It contains caffeine, coloring agents, preservatives and other ingredients. The use and necessity of coffee premixes are rising both at individual level and at Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), thus, adding more to the demand for the particular market at a substantial rate over the years. The consumption of coffee is high, and, to meet the most of the growing demand, new flavors are being introduced in the market. Coffee premixes have a relatively longer shelf life because it is sealed, which prevents it to absorb moisture. In case of revenue, instant coffee premixes mixed with milk or water captured the largest market share among all other instant beverage premixes and is projected to be the leader during the forecast period. The coffee premixes market growth is largely connected to the growing end user industry of coffee. Coffee premix can be consumed with milk or water, as per individual preferences. Seasonal menu components served in restaurants and quick serve restaurants (QSR) is an opportunity for coffee premix market. For instance with desserts, sweet coffee premixes is preferred generally as toppings or granules.Get More Information:Global Coffee Premix: Market SegmentationCoffee premixes is intermediate which can be directly purchased by end users for their own consumption and, it can be also used in vending machines. The global coffee premix market is segmented on the basis of type, brewing, flavors and forms. Different types of coffee beans used to make premixes are green, black, brown and white. Coffee premixes on the basis of brewing style can be mainly segmented into instant, cappuccino, mocha, latte, espresso and regular. Among all the brewing style, regular occupies the largest market share followed by cappuccino. Flavors are segmented into chicory, chocolate, maple walnut, honey cinnamon and rosemary. Chocolate occupies the largest market share among all the flavors available in the market. Different forms of coffee premixes market are roasted/grounded, blended and soluble.Global Coffee Premix Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the coffee premixes industry can be divided by major regions which include North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. Coffee premixes consumption is highest in Finland followed by Norway and Netherlands. Production of coffee premixes is highest in Brazil followed by Vietnam and Colombia. The plantation of coffee covers 25,000-30,000 square kilometers of the land in Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo and Parana which are the south eastern states in Brazil and it contributes 40% of the worlds total coffee supply.Global Coffee Premix Market: Growth DriversCoffee is the major application of coffee premixes which is the main growth driver for this market. The changing and varying life style is one of the driving force behind the coffee premix market. People are going experimental, so they tend to try different flavors of premixes available in the market. Health awareness is also a driving force in the market. Black coffee premixes are calorie and fat free, containing soluble fibers, which help fighting diabetes and boom mental state. Other driving health issues are, overcoming depression, improve physical stamina, burn fat, regulate blood pressure level, and the antioxidants enhance brain activity. The packaging of coffee premixes is also one of the drivers. Packaging in small sachet, provides the consumers ease of carrying it, anywhere. With the growth in service sectors and rise in number of work places, there is a high demand of coffee premixes across the globe.Browse Full Report With ToC:Global Coffee Premix Market: PlayersSome of the key players identified across the value chain of the global coffee premix market includes Nestle (Nescafe), The Coca Cola Company (Georgia), Starbucks Corporation, Unilever, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company Limited, European Coffee Federation, Paulig Juhla Mokka, Vending Updates India Pvt. Ltd. And others. The companies are expected to expand their business by enhancing their product portfolio in global Coffee premix market. The companies are projected to frame certain strategies in future in order to gain the competitive advantage in global Coffee premix market till 2024.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.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Xylanase Market: Global industry analysis and forecast 2016 - 2024

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/12160

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/12160

Xylanase belongs to the enzyme class which degrades or break down the hemicellulose and thus converts in to a simple sugar called as xylose. Xylanase are produced by fungi, bacteria, yeast etc. where filamentous fungi produces more quantity of xylanase. Alkaliphilic and thermophilic organism are important for industrial class of xylanases, where former is beneficial for pulp and Kraft bleaching. Principally xylanase are of two grades, feed grade and food grade. Commercially xylanase is used as ingredient in paper and pulp industry. Besides, some of the important uses of microbial xylanase includes, as a food additive ingredient for poultry, in baked products, coffee extractions, agriculture silage etc. The xylanase market is expected to be robust during the forecast period due to increase requirement in animal feed industry.In animal feed, nutritional additives is a prime need for poultry industry. Besides, the costs of animal feed in production of poultry and livestock is maximum when compared to other operational costs. Thus, to improve the feed digestivity of livestock and cut expenses with profit gain enzymes use is the best way. Animal feed industry, poultry are the major driving force for the growth of global xylanase market. Also, the paper and pulp industry aids in the growth of global xylanase market. The ecofriendly use of xylanase enzyme over the harsh chemical usage further fuels the global xylanase market.View Sample Report @The global xylanase market is segmented on the basis of grade, application and end user industry.Based on the grade, global xylanase market is segmented into:Feed gradeFood gradeBased on the application, the global xylanase market is segmented into:Feed and livestockBleaching of wood pulpAdditive (in poultry)BakeryAgro waste treatmentBased on the end user industry, the global xylanase market is segmented into:Paper and PulpPoultryFood and Feed industryThe global xylanase market is geographically divided in to five key regions including North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific, especially China, Indonesia holds maximum share of xylanase market due to major poultry production. Followed by Asia Pacific is North America, Europe, Latin America and MEA. In Europe, the presence of poultry companies such as PHW-Gruppe Lohmann & CO. AGxylanase, Plukon Food Group, LDC Group momentous the growth of xylanase market. The global xylanase market is expected to be robust due to poultry industries and other industrial applications during the forecast period.Some of the key players identified in the global xylanase market are Habio. Net, BioResource International, Inc, Royal DSM, Enzyme Development Corporation, Elanco, Shandong Longda Bio-Products Co., Ltd. Shenzhen Leveking Bio-Engineering Co., LTD., Beijing Smile Feed Sci. & Tech. Co., Ltd. etc.Request TOC (desk of content material), Figures and Tables of the report:The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections done using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to categories such as market segments, geographies, type, machine size and end use.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market in-telligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexi-ble without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Textile Printing Market Set to Grow Exponentially During the Forecast 2020

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3457

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3457

Application of coloring pattern and design to decorate the finished fabric is referred as printing. At the time of printing the color is applied to the fabric so that the color or design is not affected at the time of washing. Textile printing is a process of applying color to fabric in definite pattern and design. Textile printing is sometime confused with dyeing. In dyeing whole fabric is uniformly colored with one color only, where as in case of textile printing more than one color is applied on the fabric to some part in defined pattern. In textile printing, wooden blocks, stencils, engraved plates or rollers are used to apply color on the fabric. Thick dyes are used at the time printing to prevent the spreading of color beyond the limit of design.Request to view Sample Report @Main objective of textile printing is to produce fabric with attractive design and defined pattern. On the bases of technology the global market for textile printing can be bifurcated into direct printing, discharge printing (white and color discharge) and resist painting (white and color resist). Other methods of printing include block printing, roller printing, duplex printing, screen printing, stencil printing, transfer printing, blotch printing, jet spray printing, electrostatic printing and digital printing. Digital printing is expected to witness highest growth in the forecasted period.Asia Pacific has the largest market share for textile printing, followed by Europe and North America. China and India alone holds the largest market share for textile printing globally. Europe is expected to witness marginal growth in coming future. Asia-Pacific region is expected to witness highest growth and maintain its dominance in the forecasted period. Domestic demand in India and China are the major region for increasing demand for textile printing technology in the Asia-Pacific region.Advancement in technology paired with increasing method of printing is driving the global textile printing market. Additionally, with increasing disposable income customers are able to afford designer ware with attractive design on the fabric; this is again driving the global textile printing market. Also, increased demand for digital printing on saris and dress materials is further expected to increase the textile printing technology to some extent.Request to view Table of content @Some of the major companies operating in the global textile printing markets are AM Printex, JV Digital Printing, Digitex India Inc., AGS Transact Technologies, Dazian LLC, Fisher Textiles, Inc., Glen Raven, Inc., Dickson Coatings, Mehler Texnologies and China Dyeing Holdings, LtdAbout 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.305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Global Needle Guidance System Market Is Expected To Generate Huge Profits by 2016 - 2024

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11722

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11722

Needle Guidance System is breakthrough technology in diagnosis and ultrasound-guided procedures as well as other critical procedures and surgeries. Needle guidance system provides needle localization information enabling the medical professional to perform a particular procedure. Inserting needle blindly onto the epidural space was difficult and led to various risks during the procedures such as biopsy, invasive radiology and others, therefore improved guidance system such as needle guidance systems are introduced in real-time procedures. The needle guidance system monitors the needle to enter the target that is in the epidural space enabling the health providers to increase access to care. There are significant advances in the field of anesthesiology, major medical technology companies are primarily focusing on developing new features such as electromagnetic sensors and GPS technology to improve efficiency in performance and aid medical professionals. Ultrasound needle guides are widely used in various types of procedures such as peripheral nerve block, the system enhances visualization of needle and reduces the potential of complications increasing patient safety.View Sample Report @Globally, the number of diseases are increasing rapidly due to the factors such as changing lifestyle, aging, smoking, weak immunity, alcohol consumption and obesity. These factors the lead to various health disorders such as arrhythmia, cancer which when diagnosed at proper stage are treatable if not, ultimately leading to death. Varicose disease is one of such disease where needle guidance systems are used to clear the veins by sclerotherapy. There are various advantages of needle guidance system such as improving accuracy, visualization of needle, reduces risks associated during intraneural and intravascular injections. Real-time 3D ultrasound based motion tracking is one of the focus segments where needle guidance systems can have a potential application, as suggested by scientists. Physicians are now changing their focus from general or traditional methods of biopsies to using advanced technologies such as needle guidance system to perform better procedures.The global market for needle guidance system is segmented on the basis of product type, application and end user:Segmentation by product type of Needle Guidance SystemNeedle Guide KitTransducer CoverSterile GelColoured BandsAccesoriesSegmentation by application of Needle Guidance SystemTissue BiopsyFluid AspirationSclerotherapy proceduresAblationOthersSegmentation by End user of Needle Guidance SystemHospitalsDiagnostic CentersAmbulatory Surgical CentersContract Research OrganizationsWith increasing number of biopsies, the needle guidance system market is expected to have substantial growth prospect during the forecast period (2016-2024). The major factors which are expected to be driving the growth of needle guidance system market are increasing prevalence of cancer and cardiac disorders, advancement in diagnostic technologies, increasing healthcare infrastructure. While the factors affecting the needle guidance system market are lack of healthcare accessibility, limited number of skilled medical professionals, low adoption of advanced technologies in developing countries and more. Needle guidance system market is rapidly gaining acceptance in North America and Europe, where hospitals and diagnostic centers are adopting the innovative systems to perform surgical procedures. Image-guided needle biopsies have proven to be useful in definitive diagnosis of breast cancer with high accuracy and clinical benefits as well as ease of operation.Request TOC (desk of content material), Figures and Tables of the report:On the basis of regional presence, needle guidance system market is segmented into five key regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Currently, North America is expected to capture the largest market share for needle guidance systems due to high adoption rate and advanced healthcare facilities. Europe, is estimated to capture second largest market share in the needle guidance system market. The needle guidance system market in Asia Pacific and Middle East and Africa is expected to register high CAGR owing to increase in healthcare expenditure and emerging medical technology companies in coming years.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market in-telligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexi-ble without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Europe Biodegradable Foodservice Disposables Market Projected to Reach US$ 1,429.9 Mn by 2022

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/10753

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/europe-biodegradable-foodservice-disposables-market/toc

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/europe-biodegradable-foodservice-disposables-market.asp

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com

the Europe biodegradable foodservice disposables market is estimated to be valued at US$ 985.8 Mn by the end of 2015 and is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 5.5% over 2015 - 2022 in terms of value, to reach a market value of US$ 1,429.9 Mn by 2022.The Europe (U.K. Spain, France & Switzerland) biodegradable foodservice disposables market is driven by increasing consumer adoption of ecofriendly products and rise in number foodservice providers seeking sustainable business practices. Moreover, increasing tax on landfill collection, coupled with increasing price of fossil fuel, is further expected to drive market growth in the region over the forecast period.Request Report Sample @On the basis of type, the Europe biodegradable foodservice disposables market has been segmented into plates, trays & containers, cutleries, cups & containers, and clamshells. The cups & bowls segment dominated the market with a revenue share of 33.7% in 2014 and is projected to maintain its dominance through 2022. Increased usage of biodegradable cups by various foodservice providers for serving hot or cold drinks is supporting the segment growth in the market currently. The trays & containers segment is expected to exhibit favorable growth over the forecast period.On the basis of raw material, the market is segmented into bio plastics, pulp & paper & woods & leaves. The pulp & paper segment accounted for the largest share in 2014 and is estimated to be valued at US$ 1,208.0 Mn by 2022, expanding at a CAGR of 4.7% over 20162022. The bio plastic segment is expected to exhibit substantial growth in the market.For More Information Request TOC (desk of content material), Figures and Tables of the report @On the basis of end use, the market is segmented into hotel & other accommodation facilities, restaurants, cafe and bistros, bars & pubs, clubs, foodservice providers/caterers & institutions. The restaurants segment accounted for the highest value share of the overall market in 2015 and is expected to remain dominant over the forecast period.In terms of a distribution channel, the market has been segmented into the wholesaler, cash & carry, hypermarket/supermarket, logistic provider, distributors and online. The cash & carry segment is projected to exhibit the highest growth over 20162022. The online segment was valued at US$ 168.2 Mn in 2014 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 6.5% during the forecast period.The report provides in-depth information about the various trends driving each segment and provides analysis and insights about the biodegradable foodservice disposables market in specific countries. The U.K. market accounted for the largest volume share of 46.1% of the Europe biodegradable foodservice disposables market in 2014.Browse Report @Key players in Europe biodegradable foodservice disposables market that are covered in the report include Biopac (U.K.) Ltd, Huhtamaki Group, Bionatic GmbH & Co. KG, I.L.P.A. S.p.A. Group, The Jim Pattison Group, GreenGood USA, Gold Plast S.p.A, Vegware, Eco Guardian, and Bunzl plc.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:
Food Sorting Machines Market Volume Forecast and Value Chain Analysis 2015-2025

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-843

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-843

www.futuremarketinsights.com

Automation is becoming more of a requirement than an option in the food processing industry. The rigorous quality and cost controls required in the food industry is making it more critical. Production of high grade food requires capable and efficient inspection and sorting systems, in the operations and production line. The food is sorted by color, size, shape, specific gravity prior to inspection and other criteria depending upon the raw material and application.Global interest is increasing towards the quality of food consumed along with the stringent legislations on product quality and operating procedures. In the food industry, the product specification is extremely important, and is one of those area where new developments are crossing the boundaries. The food industry is under immense pressure of meeting the demands of growing world population.The global population is becoming urbanized and there is heavy industrialization seen in the emerging economies. This leads to an upward trend towards convenience foods that are healthy, nutritious and easy to prepare. Food security is an emerging challenge for policy makers and companies in the food supply chain. Over the period food production will be under threat from climate change, competing land uses, erosion and diminishing supplies of clean water. One of the solutions to this dilemma is increased efficiency and waste reduction in the food supply chain. Food sorting machines offer increase in efficiency by selectively filtering out the undesired materials from the main food. The main purpose is separation of foreign seeds and bodies, such as unhealthy or spotted grains. The insertion of optical sorter into strategic positions of the milling process facilitates and optimizes the whole cleaning process. Worldwide the optical sorters are being used in the food industry. Its highly adopted in the processing of harvested foods such as fruits, potatoes, vegetables and nuts where it achieves non-destructive,100% inspection on full production volume. Since manual sorting is subjective and inconsistent, its not preferred. Optical sorting helps to improve the product quality, increase yields, maximize throughput while reducing labor costs. Since few years the trend is of integration of the traditional mechanical cleaning process with optical sorting machines.Request for sample report:Food Sorting Machines Market: Drivers & RestraintsGrowing population, rising urbanization, growing technological awareness, industrialization of emerging economies and increasing per capita income are some of the key factors driving the growth of the food sorting machines market.Environmental Protection Agency regulations on disposal of food waste, changing consumption patterns and smaller households are few of the probable factors restraining the growth of the food sorting machines market.Food Sorting Machines Market: SegmentationThe global food sorting machines market is broadly classified on the basis of product type, technology and geographies.Based on product type, the global food sorting machines market is segmented into:Channel SortersFreefall SortersBelt SortersADR SystemsBased on technology, the global food sorting machines market is segmented into:LaserCameraLEDX-rayFood Sorting Machines Market: OverviewThough food sorting machines is a new technology for emerging economies like India, but in the developed economies like North America and Europe the same technology is in use for years.With growing global population and increasing pressure on food industry to meet the customer demands, the acceptance of food sorting machines is gaining popularity. The global food sorting machines market is expected to expand at a promising CAGR during the forecast period (2015-2025).Request for TOC:Food Sorting Machines Market: Region-wise OutlookThe global food sorting machines market is expected to register a double-digit CAGR for the forecast period. Depending on geographic regions, global food sorting machines market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, South America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. As of 2015, North America dominated the global food sorting machines market in terms of market revenue followed by Europe. Asia Pacific & Japan are projected to expand at a substantial growth and will contribute to the global food sorting machines market value exhibiting a robust CAGR during the forecast period, 2015?2025.Food Sorting Machines Market: Key PlayersSome of the key market participants in global food sorting machines market are Tomra Systems ASA, Sesotec GmbH, Buhler AG, Key Technology, BarcoVision, Satake USA Inc.About us:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Contact us:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705T (UK): + 44 (0) 20 7692 8790Email:sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Global Bromine Market : Asia-Pacific Demanding Region

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/4274

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/bromine-market/toc

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/bromine-market.asp

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com

Global demand for bromine market will reach 483 kilo metric tons (KMT) in 2016, up from 470 KMT in 2015. Demand will be impeded by growing regulation and legislation, especially in the European Union (EU), where the use of certain brominated flame retardants is banned or restricted.Request Report Sample @Flame retardants will continue to remain the largest application segment, accounting for 203 KMT volume in 2016, a y-o-y increase of 2.8% over 2015. Use of bromine in oil and gas drilling will continue its upward momentum in 2016, growing at 4.3% in terms of volume  the fastest among all the application segments.The chemicals industry will remain the largest consumer of bromine, accounting for 292 KMT volume in 2016, representing market value worth 1,284 Mn. Use of bromine in the oil and gas sector will also continue to witness steady growth, as clear brine fluids gain traction for drilling purposes. Demand will be offset by sluggish adoption in the electronics industry, as use of brominated flame retardants continues to face stricter regulations. Demand for bromine from electronics sector will witness a growth rate of 2.1% in 2016 over 2015.For More Information Request TOC (desk of content material), Figures and Tables of the report @Asia Pacific will remain the largest market for bromine, representing annual revenues worth US$ 1,087 Mn in 2016, up from 895 Mn in 2015. This is primarily due to expansion of end-use industries such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles, and electronic in APAC. Latin America will continue to offer growth opportunities to manufacturers, with global demand witnessing a 2.0% volume growth in 2016 over 2015. Demand will face constraints in the mature markets of North America and Western Europe in 2016 as well.Browse Report @Israel Chemicals Limited, Chemtura Corporation, Albemarle Corporation, Gulf Resources Inc., Tosoh Corporation, Tetra Technologies Inc., Tata Chemicals Limited and Hindustan Salts Limited are the key players in the market. Top players are continuously focusing on expanding their product offerings, especially in flame retardants segments. Collaborations and joint ventures are key business strategies to develop green brominated flame retardants.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:
Tumour Ablation Devices Market Value Share, Supply Demand, share and Value Chain 2015-2025

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1325

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-1325

www.futuremarketinsights.com

Tumours are the groups of abnormal cells that accumulate together and form lumps and grow consistently. Tumour are categorized into noncancerous and cancerous tumours. Precancerous conditions have the potential of developing into cancer. Tumour ablation is a tool utilized to treat cancerous malignancy. Tumour ablation is the process of removing the cancerous cells from the body. Tumour ablation became more useful during 1970s and 1980s due to advances in laparoscopic surgical approach. The most common means for definitive treatment of primary and metastatic focal malignancy, is the evolution of imaging devices during the past two decades and image-guided tumour ablation.Tumour Ablation Devices Market: Drivers & RestraintsIncreasing prevalence and incidences of cancers, technological advances and increasing geriatric population, increasing numbers of hospitals and healthcare awareness are facilitating the growth of global tumour ablation devices market. Additionally, economic pricing, short recovery time, low risk of infection, and minimal hospital stays are increasing the importance of tumour ablation devices.Side effects associated with ablation treatment and limited performance of the devices are the factors restraining the growth of global tumour ablation device market.Request for sample report:Tumour Ablation Devices Market: SegmentationThe global tumour ablation devices market has been classified on the basis of product type, application and end user:On the basis of product type, the tumour ablation devices market is segmented into the followingRadiofrequency ablationLaser ablationHigh intensity focused ultrasound ablationMicrowave ablationCryo ablationBased on application type, the tumour ablation devices market is segmented into the followingLiver Cancerkidney CancerColorectal CancerBone CancerBreast CancerLung CancerProstate CancerOther CancersBased on end use type, the tumour ablation devices market is segmented into the following:Hospitalso 500 and more beds hospitalso 200 to 499 beds hospitalso Less than 200 beds hospitalsAmbulatory Surgical CentersTumour Ablation Devices Market: OverviewThe lung cancer application segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR in the next five years due to large patient population of lung cancer present across developing and developed regions. This has increased the investment of manufacturers to develop and commercialize innovative lung cancer ablation products. The radiofrequency ablation is widely used technique due to specificity of treating target tissue without causing damage to the surrounding cells. Microwave ablation product segment is expected to grow significantly due to increase in adoption rate of microwave ablation devices by healthcare professionals.Request for TOC:Tumour Ablation Devices Market: Region-wise OutlookRegion wise, the global tumour ablation market is classified into regions namely, North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa.The global market is expected to be dominated by North America due to factors such as early introduction and adoption of rate of tumour ablation products in the region, trend of replacing older technologies and introducing the new technologies, and increase in private and public funding to develop and commercialize the novel tumour ablation products.The Asia-Pacific market is expected to grow at a higher CAGR in the forecast period due to factors such as large population with the high prevalence of various cancers in the region, government initiatives for developing and modernizing the healthcare infrastructure.Tumour Ablation Devices Market: Key PlayersKey players of tumour ablation devices market are Boston Scientific Corporation, St. Jude Medical, Inc., Biotronic NeuroNetwork, LLC, Baylis Medical, biolitec AG, Spectranetics, Esaote SpA, ALPINION MEDICAL SYSTEMS Co., Ltd., Chongqing Haifu Medical Technology Co., Ltd., Koninklijke Philips N.V, Hironic Co., Ltd., Monteris Medical, Inc, EDAP TMS, EYE TECH CARE, NeuWave Medical, Inc, Vison medical, AtriCure, Inc, Galil Medical Inc, ENDOCARE INC, IceCure Medical, Sanarus HealthTronics, Inc, MEDTRONIC, MedWaves, AngioDynamics, Microsulis Medical, Perseon, SympleSurgical Inc. to name a few.About us:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Contact us:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705T (UK): + 44 (0) 20 7692 8790Email:sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Global Anti-Obesity Drugs Market: Advanced medical research by drug-manufacturing companies, medical universities and institutes contributed toward the growth of the anti-obesity drugs

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=12461

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/anti-obesity-drugs-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

The World Health Organization reveals that global obesity has more than doubled since 1980, with over 1.9 billion adults overweight in 2014, of which, more than 600 million were obese. Percentage-wise, an estimated 39% of adults were overweight and 13% were obese in 2014. An additional 42 million children below the age of five were found to be overweight or obese in 2013. Based on two surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an astounding 68.8% of the U.S. adult population is considered to be overweight or obese. It is no surprise, then, that today, most of the worlds population lives in countries where obesity and overweight are claiming more lives than underweight and malnutrition.This alarming rise in the prevalence of obesity, particularly in the developed region of North America, has been single-handedly propelling the anti-obesity drugs market. Anti-obesity drugs  both prescription and OTC  are of two main types: Centrally-acting drugs and peripherally-acting drugs. These contain a host of pharmacological agents that control or reduce weight by altering either the absorption of calories or regulating appetite.Download exclusive Sample of this report:This comprehensive research publication offers clients an exhaustive database of accurate, authentic, objective, and the most recent information on the global anti-obesity drugs market. The overall market is segmented based on several key criteria and each segment is thoroughly evaluated to identify the leading and weakest categories. Statistical data and inputs from industry experts support the qualitative data offered in the report and help clients devise actionable and profitable decisions for the future.Global Anti-Obesity Drugs Market: Key Trends and Regional OutlookThe global market for anti-obesity drugs has been expanding at a significant pace in recent years. With the obvious driving factor being the surge in obesity levels around the globe, this market is also propelled by the strong pipeline of anti-obesity drugs. Advanced medical research by drug-manufacturing companies, medical universities and institutes, and government agencies has also substantially contributed toward the growth of the anti-obesity drugs market.The anti-obesity drugs market in North America has been flourishing over the years owing to the high level of awareness among the population about obesity and the various risks arising from the medical condition, increased healthcare expenditure, the presence of favorable reimbursement policies, extensive research and development activities in the field, and the increased involvement of government as well as non-government organizations in generating awareness and funding research.The Asia Pacific market for anti-obesity drugs is anticipated to gain momentum in the coming years thanks to the rise in obese population, resulting from increased spending on processed and packaged foods and the growing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. Improving healthcare infrastructure and mounting healthcare expenditure is also expected to drive the market for anti-obesity drugs in APAC.View exclusive Global strategic Business report:Global Anti-Obesity Drugs Market: Competitive Landscape SnapshotThe leading companies operating in the global anti-obesity drugs market include Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc., Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Limited, Zydus Cadila, Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, Merck & Co. Inc., Eisai Co. Ltd., Novo Nordisk A/S, Orexigen Therapeutics Inc., Zafgen, GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Norgine B.V., Pfizer Inc., and F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG. Owing to the increasing prevalence of obesity in several parts of the world, the degree of competition among players in the anti-obesity drugs market has been on the rise. Companies have been heavily investing in the development of agents with increased weight-loss efficacy and a high safety threshold. This gives players a greater chance of approval from regulatory bodies such as the US FDA.Companies around the globe are also focused on the development as well as successful commercialization of anti-obesity drugs that are both clinically effective and safe in the long run and also have the potential to generate massive sales and reach blockbuster status. The current portfolio of prescription weight-loss drugs and emerging anti-obesity drugs in pre-clinical or clinical trials acts as a significant force driving the global anti-obesity drugs market.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports andservices. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight forthousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sourcesand various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Global Canned Fruits Market 2016 Rhodes Food Group, ConAgra Foods Inc, Princes Group and Pinnacle Foods Inc

Canned Fruits

http://bit.ly/2eIOLqZ

http://bit.ly/2eOVlzq

Global Canned Fruits Market 2016 Industry Size Share Growth Forecast Research and DevelopmentThe Global Canned Fruits Industry report gives a comprehensive account of the Global Canned Fruits market. Details such as the size, key players, segmentation, SWOT analysis, most influential trends, and business environment of the market are mentioned in this report. Furthermore, this report features tables and figures that render a clear perspective of the Canned Fruits market. The report features an up-to-date data on key companies product details, revenue figures, and sales. Furthermore, the details also gives the Global Canned Fruits market revenue and its forecasts. The business model strategies of the key firms in the Canned Fruits market are also included. Key strengths, weaknesses, and threats shaping the leading players in the market have also been included in this research report.The report gives a detailed overview of the key segments in the market. The fastest and slowest growing market segments are covered in this report. The key emerging opportunities of the fastest growing Global Canned Fruits market segments are also covered in this report. Each segments and sub-segments market size, share, and forecast are available in this report. Additionally, the region-wise segmentation and the trends driving the leading geographical region and the emerging region has been presented in this report.Get Sample Copy of Report @The study on the Global Canned Fruits market also features a history of the tactical mergers, acquisitions, collaborations, and partnerships activity in the market. Valuable recommendations by senior analysts about investing strategically in research and development can help new entrants or established players penetrate the emerging sectors in the Canned Fruits market. Investors will gain a clear insight on the dominant players in this industry and their future forecasts. Furthermore, readers will get a clear perspective on the high demand and the unmet needs of consumers that will enhance the growth of this market.Table of ContentChapter One Canned Fruits Industry Overview1.1 Canned Fruits Definition1.1.1 Canned Fruits Definition1.1.2 Product Specifications1.2 Canned Fruits Classification1.3 Canned Fruits Application Field1.4 Canned Fruits Industry Chain Structure1.5 Canned Fruits Industry Regional Overview1.6 Canned Fruits Industry Policy Analysis1.7 Canned Fruits Industry Related Companies Contact InformationInquiry For Buying @MarketResearchStore.com is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Contact US:Joel JohnSuite #8138, 3422 SW 15 Street,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803
Computer Assisted Coding Market - Worldwide Industry Investigation, Size, Share, Evolution, Trends Prediction 2024

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=16412

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/computer-assisted-coding-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Hospitals need to manage and store a large quantity of patients medical record in its system. These medical records contain patients personal data and treatment history which is documented in a proper manner. The document is used by administrative staff for billing purpose during patients discharge from hospital. Thus, the handling and preservation of records is a tedious work for administrative person in hospital. However, with the introduction of information technology, these medical records are now being recorded in digital form and are stored in a computer.However, the time taken by an administrative person to extract appropriate information from the document is more as the person needs to read the whole document carefully. Computer assisted coding software aims to resolve this issue by analyzing the medical record or document for specific keywords. The keywords are analyzed by comparing the document data with available database. Thus, computer assisted coding software provides appropriate keyword to the administrative person or coder who can use it for billing purpose.Get More Information:Computer assisted coding software uses structured input or natural language processing (NLP) technology for document processing. This helps to increase productivity and reducing process time of the administrative person or coder. Computer assisted coding software also helps in reducing errors and improving efficiency of healthcare facility. It can be used by billing personnel, compliance officers and auditors to verify document in healthcare industry. Today, computer assisted coding software is available in cloud-based and on-premise types depending upon the hospital requirement.The rapid adoption of electronic health record (EHR) in many healthcare facilities is creating demand for computer assisted coding market. Computer assisted coding software can be used for insurance claim reimbursement in healthcare sector. Computer assisted coding software will see more adoption in healthcare facilities due to the adaptation of ICD-10 coding in coming years. ICD-10 is the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) list which is promoted by World Health Organization (WHO). ICD-10 contains codes for diseases, abnormal findings, symptoms, complaints, social circumstances and causes of injury or diseases. This is used by computer assisted coding software as a coding database.Browse The Report:The major challenge for computer assisted coding software is its high initial cost and the problem of adaptation by the hospital management. Hospitals consider it as an unnecessary investment and focus on improving other facilities. Computer assisted coding software also have problem in processing handwritten notes for coding processes. This limits use of computer assisted coding software in traditional healthcare facilities were information technology is not yet implemented.Developed economies such as North America and Europe will see a good demand for Computer Assisted Coding market in coming years. This is due to strict regulation norms adopted by the governments in developed economies. The demand for computer assisted coding software in developing countries such as China, India and Brazil is going to increase in coming years due to the increase in healthcare infrastructure. Some of the key Computer Assisted Coding software providers are Cerner Corporation, MModal IP LLC, Optum Inc, PlatoCode LLC, QuadraMed Affinity Corporation, 3M Company, Artificial Medical Intelligence Inc, Craneware PLC, Mckesson Corporation, Dolbey Systems Inc, Optum Inc, Precyse Solutions, Nuance Communications Inc, and Trucode.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market.It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a 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:
Global Wound Care Sealants Market 2016 Industry Trends, Sales, Supply, Demand, Analysis & Forecast to 2021

Wound Care Sealants

http://www.qyresearchgroup.com/market-analysis/global-wound-care-sealants-market-2016-industry-trends.html

http://bit.ly/2g2l8Gz

Global Wound Care Sealants Industry 2016 Market Size, Share, Trends, Global Price, Company Profiles, Demand, Insights, Analysis, Research And Forecast 2016-2021.QY Research recently announced the addition of a new report titled Global Wound Care Sealants Industry 2016 to its research database. This is a comprehensive report that provides an analytical view of the global Wound Care Sealants market. Research conducted to compile the report was focused on analyzing the performance exhibited by the Wound Care Sealants market across developed as against the developing nations of the world. Factors impacting the market trends is analyzed in detail in the report. It also studies the incumbent demand and supply trends in the market and evaluates how these trends sketch the growth trajectory of the market. The study also presents refined growth forecasts for the global Wound Care Sealants market based on information obtained through primary and secondary research. The market share evaluation of the primary players of the Wound Care Sealants market given in the report offers a thorough evaluation of the market shares of the companies profiled in this report. The report fuses an analysis of the company profiles as well as the industry patterns for Wound Care Sealants market used transversely over diverse end-use businesses.Browse Complete Report with TOC @In order to present an executive level blue-print of the market, the study closely observes the key factors contributing to the growth of the market and bottlenecks hindering the market expansion. It also identifies the prospective growth opportunities worldwide, which leading market players can capitalize on to ensure sustainable growth in the future. Apart from this other information included in the report are historical statistics and accurate data charting for individual market segments through the forecast period. To study the competitive landscape of the market, the report profiles the most prominent companies in the industry and estimates how their sales strategies have benefitted their operations in the global Wound Care Sealants market. This helps the report to present a 360 degree overview of the market.Other crucial determinants evaluated by the report includes government plans and policies and how it impacts the growth trajectory of the market. To provide an in-depth analysis the report studies the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats exhibited by the key players of the market using analytical tools such as SWOT Analysis and Porters five forces.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @About Us:QYResearch Group is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. QYResearch Group also carries the capability to assist you with your customized market research requirements including in-depth market surveys, primary interviews, competitive landscaping, and company profiles. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics. QYResearch Group is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651
Global Learn Chinese Online Market 2016 Industry Trends, Sales, Supply, Demand, Analysis & Forecast to 2021

Learn Chinese Online

http://bit.ly/2fH5wrp

http://bit.ly/2fHqW3Q

Global Learn Chinese Online Industry 2016 Market Survey Study Analysis and Overview : Industry Trend, Size, Share, Growth and ForecastThe report begins with a broad introduction of the Learn Chinese Online market and then drills deeper into specific segments such as application, regional markets, end-users, policy analysis, value chain structure, and emerging trends. The Learn Chinese Online market report makes a case for investments in particular regions based on a realistic view of their regulatory environment, manufacturing dynamics and availability of skills and resources. Also, recommendations are made based on regions and market segments that are not poised for appreciable growth in the near future.The Learn Chinese Online market and its dynamics are evaluated using industry leading tools and techniques. A qualitative analysis forms a sizeable portion of the research efforts as well. With emerging changes on the horizon, the Learn Chinese Online market is poised for certain important change. It is imperative that market players gear up for these changes. The report helps companiesboth new and establishedto identify white spaces and opportunities for growth in the Learn Chinese Online market.Browse Complete Report with TOC @The leading companies in the Learn Chinese Online market are profiled to offer a complete overview of their growth strategies, financial standing, product and services pipeline, as well as recent collaborations and developments.The reports analysis is based on technical data and industry figures sourced from the most reputable databases. Other aspects that will prove especially beneficial to readers of the report are: investment feasibility analysis, recommendations for growth, investment return analysis, trends analysis, opportunity analysis, and SWOT analyses of competing companies. With the help of inputs and insights from technical and marketing experts, the report presents an objective assessment of the Learn Chinese Online market.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @A detailed segmentation evaluation of the Learn Chinese Online market has been provided in the report. Detailed information about the key segments of the market and their growth prospects are available in the report. The detailed analysis of their sub-segments is also available in the report. The revenue forecasts and volume shares along with market estimates are available in the report.The competitive landscape of the market presented in the study profiles the most prominent players in the market.About Us:QYResearch Group is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. QYResearch Group also carries the capability to assist you with your customized market research requirements including in-depth market surveys, primary interviews, competitive landscaping, and company profiles. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics. QYResearch Group is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651
Global Streaming Media Device Market to grow at a CAGR of 6.02% over Forecast period 2015-2019

http://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=376616

http://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=376616

http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG

Albany, NY, Nov 11: A streaming media device allows end-users to receive unencrypted subscribed channels through an addressable system, which allows them to view encrypted channels. It is used to decode transmitted signals into video content from an external signal source to display on the screen of a connected TV or a computer. A streaming media device allows end-users to connect a video displaying device to the Internet to stream online content. The following are some of the features of a streaming media device: streaming media content from other connected devices to a TV, recording content from a TV, and pausing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding live content from a TV.The global streaming media device market to grow at a CAGR of 6.02% over the period 2014-2019. This report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global streaming device market for the period 2015-2019. To calculate the market size, the report considers the unit shipments of streaming media devices. It discusses the major drivers that influence the growth of the market. It also outlines the challenges faced by vendors and the market at large, as well as the key trends that are emerging in the market.Get a Sample Research PDF with TOC:Technavio's report, Global Streaming Media Device Market 2015-2019, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the landscape of the global streaming media device market and its growth prospects in the coming years. The report includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors- Amazon.com- Apple- Google- Roku- SonyOther prominent vendors- Asus- Arris- D-Link- Himedia- Hisense- Huawei- Keedox- LG Electronics- Matricom- Microsoft- Netgear- Nvidia- Philips..................Enquiry at:Key questions answered in this report- What will the market size be in 2019 and what will the growth rate be?- What are the key market trends?- What is driving this market?- What are the challenges to market growth?- Who are the key vendors in this market space?- What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?ResearchMoz is the worlds fastest growing collection of market research reports worldwide. Our database is composed of current market studies from over 100 featured publishers worldwide. Our market research databases integrate statistics with analysis from global, regional, country and company perspectives. ResearchMozs service portfolio also includes value-added services such as market research customization, competitive landscaping, and in-depth surveys, delivered by a team of experienced Research Coordinators.Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn at:
Europe Residential Security Market to Expand USD 1,867.5 Million in 2020

Residential Security Market in Europe

http://bit.ly/2d8Lt4H

http://bit.ly/2eb8iBQ

http://www.marketresearchstore.com/requestquote?reportid=35582

http://bit.ly/2dZ5nP2

http://www.marketresearchstore.com

Zion Research has published a new report titled Residential Security Market in Europe (Surveillance Systems, Intruder Alarms, Access Control Systems and Software) : Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2014 - 2020. According to the report, the Europe residential security market was valued at USD 759.2 million in 2014 and is expected to reach USD 1,867.5 million by 2020. Europe residential security market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.11% between 2015 and 2020.Access Report Sample atResidential security system includes various components such as surveillance systems, intruder alarms, access control systems and software. Residential security is a part of physical security that assures the security of homes and individual. With increasing instances of criminal activities such as burglary and theft in residential buildings and among the aging people has resulted into growing demand for residential security systems in Europe. Residential security system also provides safety against gas leaks, fire, and other hazards. It effectively provides the surveillance services and facilitates an option raise an alarm in case of any emergency.ey factor driving demand for residential security in Europe is increasing installations of smart homes. Smart home market in Europe is growing at a rapid pace and is expected to cross 15 billion mark by the end of 2020. Smart home market is on the rise especially in Germany, UK and France. With increasing number of installations of smart home, demand for residential security systems is expected to increase. Moreover, advances in the technology and entry of the new players in the Europe residential security systems market is expected to lower down the price of residential security. This in turn is expected to boost the demand for residential security market in Europe. However, high installation cost and uncertain economic conditions across Europe except Germany is expected to arrest the growth of residential security market.Get Inquiry for buying report aturveillance systems, intruder alarms, access control systems and software are the key segment of residential security market. Surveillance systems segment dominated the residential security market in 2014 with around 35% share in total market. Surveillance systems are witnessing strong demand from end users. However, it is expected to decrease in its market share during the forecast period owing to availability of different substitutes such as cloud-based services. Access control systems market is expected to exhibit fastest growth rate during the forecast period.ome of the key industry participants in residential security market include Honeywell International Inc., Bosch Security Systems Inc., Tyco International, GE Security Inc Ltd., AMX Corp., Control4 Corp., Alarm.com Inc., Siemens Building Technologies AG., and home Automation Inc.Request a Quote atThis report segments the Europe market as follows:Residential Security Market: Product Segment AnalysisSurveillance SystemsIntruder AlarmsAccess Control SystemsSoftwareBrowse The Full Report atAbout 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 USJoel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442 United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWebsite:
Parking Sensors Market: Electromagnetic Sensors to Gain Prominence in Near Future

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=2220

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/parking-sensors-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

The global market for parking sensors has registered a remarkable surge in the recent times, finds a report by Transparency Market Research (TMR). The study, titled Parking Sensors Market - Global Industry Analysis, Market Size, Share, Trends, Analysis, Growth and Forecast 2015  2023, states that the market is highly influenced by the increasing trend of automated vehicles.The research report presents an all-inclusive analysis of the worldwide market for parking sensors, taking the key trends and prospects in consideration. According to the study, the benefits of parking sensors, such as easy identification of unoccupied parking spaces, has fueled their demand considerably. However, the limited detection range may emerge as a potential restraint in the growth trajectory of this market during the forecast period, notes the research study.PDF Sample For Latest Innovation And Upcoming Advancements @Broadly, the global market for parking sensors can be studied on the basis of technology and geography. Based on the technology, the market can be classified into ultrasonic and electromagnetic sensors.Ultrasonic parking sensors have the ability to detect hurdles even when the vehicle is stationary, owing to which, they are preferred by customers in comparison to electromagnetic sensors. However, the limited detection range of ultrasonic sensors is likely to act as a restraint in their adoption in the coming years. Electromagnetic sensors are projected to benefit substantially from this factor over the next few years, states the market report.By geography, the global parking sensors market can be segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific. North America has surfaced as the key contributor to this market. Supported by the increasing enforcement of government regulations pertaining to pedestrians safety, the North America market for parking sensors market is anticipated to remain dominant throughout the forecast period.Asia Pacific and Europe are also projected to register steady growth in the global market for parking sensors in the coming years. The rising demand for high-end vehicles with superior quality sensors is driving the Europe parking sensors market while the Asia Pacific market is projected to be propelled by the growing awareness among customers regarding the benefits parking sensors offer in terms of time and fuel efficiency, says an analyst.Market Insight can be Viewed @The competitive landscape of the worldwide market for parking sensors has also been evaluated in this study. Players operating in this market include both, sensor manufacturers and OEMs. Honda, Ford Motor Co., NXP Semiconductors N.V., Volkswagen, Abbott Analog Devices Inc., Robert Bosch GmbH, BMW, Texas Instruments Inc., Freescale Semiconductor Ltd., Hyundai, Audi, Denso Corp., Continental AG, and Mercedes-Benz are some of the leading participants in this market, states the research report.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Transparency Market Research90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Mobile Hotspot Router Market Size Will Increase to USD 4.74 Billion, Globally By 2020

Mobile Hotspot Router Market

http://bit.ly/2cYuzov

http://bit.ly/2d7xOqP

http://www.marketresearchstore.com/requestquote?reportid=60689

http://bit.ly/2fHtsqK

http://www.marketresearchstore.com

Zion Research has published a new report titled Mobile Hotspot Router Market by Type (Standalone devices and Bundled devices): Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis, and Forecast, 2014 - 2020 According to the report, the global mobile hotspot router market was valued at approximately USD 1.42 billion in 2014 and is expected to reach approximately USD 4.74 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of around 22.50% between 2015 and 2020. In terms of volume, global mobile hotspot router market stood at approximately 85.69 million units in 2014.Request Report Sample atMobile hotspots are portable devices or features on smart phones that provide wireless internet access on many devices. Mobile hotspots typically use mobile broadband service from cellular providers for 3G or 4G Internet access. Hotspot is a physical location where one can obtain Internet access using Wi-Fi technology by means of a wireless local area network (WLAN) and using a router connected to an internet service provider. A mobile router is specially designed pocket-sized device with an in-built battery, which can be easily carried from one place to another. The main use of a mobile hotspot router is to provide connectivity to multiple users allowing a wide range of devices to access data from the Internet.Get Inquiry for buying report atIncreasing demand for wireless broadband such as active mobile broadband subscribers drives the mobile hotspot router market. Development of e-commerce such as online shopping through portable devices also contributes impulse growth to the mobile hotspot router market. Increasing adoption of the most recent technology in the mobile broadband like Long Term Evolution (LTE) is expected to drive the demand for mobile hotspot router in coming years. The emerging trends in Wi-Fi such as Hotspot 2.0, 802.11ac (Gigabit Wi-Fi) is likely to open new market avenues in the near future.The standalone devices and bundled devices are the types of mobile hotspot router market. Bundled devices are the leading segments and are anticipated to remain dominant in the near future owing to wide range of applications. Standalone devices are also one of the fastest growing segments of mobile hotspot router market.Request a Quote atAsia Pacific dominates the mobile hotspot router market owing to increasing number of mobile subscribers and high penetration of mobile internet in the region. China and India are the two leading countries having largest mobile markets in the world. In India increase in Internet users has led considerable growth in smartphone subscription that grew by 55% to 140 million subscriptions in 2015. This indicates that Asia Pacific is likely to grow at the fastest pace over the next few years. North America was the second largest regional market for mobile hotspot router in 2014. North America was followed by Europe and accounted for over 20.53% market share in 2014.Apple Inc., Nike Inc., Garmin Ltd., Qualcomm Incorporated, Sony Electronics Inc., Martian Watches, Pebble Technology Corporation, Fitbit Inc., Connecte Device Ltd., and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., are some of the leading key players in mobile hotspot router market. Launching new products, joint ventures and partnerships are the strategies followed by the organizations for the market growth.Browse The Full Report atAbout 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 USJoel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442 United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWebsite:
Beauty Supplements Market Revenue Predicted To Go Up by 2021  Persistence Market Research Report

Beauty Supplements Market, Beauty Supplements, Beauty Supplement Market

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/5855

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/5855

www.persistencemarketresearch.com

Beauty supplements market is segmented on the basis of application which includes beauty supplements for skin, hair, nails, teeth and others. Rising self-obsession among the consumer regarding their personal appearance and outlook is driving the growth of beauty supplements market across the globe. On the basis of application segments, skin care beauty supplements is expected to dominate in terms of revenue followed by hair care beauty supplements during the forecasted period.Request for TOC @Beauty supplements market is also segmented on the basis of distribution channel which includes beauty specialist outlet, chemist/pharmacies/drugstores, supermarkets, online retailing and others.Chemist/pharmacies/drugstore is expected to be the major contributor in terms of revenue in the beauty supplements market. Furthermore, beauty specialty outlet is expected to occupy the second position in terms of market share followed by supermarkets. However, sell out through internet is expected to show a double growth in the forecasted period. The growth of online purchasing is supported by the increasing penetration of internet and rising concern for convenience among the consumers across the globe.The global market for beauty supplements is expected to witness a favorable growth during the forecast period. This growth is expected to be supported by the influence of people with their peers, television, magazines, celebrities lifestyle coupled with rising disposable income. Globally among all the regions Western Europe is expected to dominate the market in terms of revenue followed by North America and Asia Pacific during the forecasted period. The growth in The beauty supplements market in Western Europe is supported by the rising concern of people towards their external outlook and appearance coupled with high disposable income possessed by the consumers. In Asia Pacific region, Japan is expected to be the prominent contributor in terms of revenue followed by China. .The key factors driving the market growth of beauty supplements market globally includes rising concern of consumers for their external outlook and appearance coupled with self-obsession for looking younger. Furthermore, influence and awareness among the people from the celebrities, models, advertisements, magazines and peers is also expected to fuel the growth of beauty supplement market. Moreover, rising inclination of male section towards their appearance is also expected to support the market growth of beauty supplements by 2020.However restraining factors which are expected to hinder the market growth of beauty supplements includes less awareness among the consumer regarding its availability, usage and consumption, high prices of these products and less inclination of consumers in emerging regions. Also, consumer perception towards side effects of beauty supplement products is hampering the market growth.Request for Sample Report @Some of the international players operating in the market of beauty supplements include The Boots Company PLC, HUM Nutrition Inc., Murad UK Ltd. BeautyScoop, NeoCell Corporation and Lifes2good Inc.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Automotive Engine Oil Market is Expected to Witness a Steady Growth by 2020

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/2838

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/2838

The function of engine oil in automobiles is to reduce metal-to-metal contact in order to minimize overall friction and reduce damage. In automobile, friction is one of the major sources of engine heat, which produce more wear and deform moving engine parts. The oil in automobile engine develop a skinny, lubricating film on all metal parts that lets them move smoothly over each other thus minimizing friction. Engine oil also removes small particles of dust and other impurities present in automobiles fuels. Furthermore, it seals the gap between the pistons and the cylinder walls so that the fuel combustion is more efficient. It also coats all the moving parts of automobile engine to provide a layer of protection against rust.Request to view Sample Report @Engine oil are mostly differentiated on the basis of their viscosity index (resistance to thinning with increasing temperature), their engine size and volume. In general engine oil has a propensity to drop viscosity index, when it is used for longer duration. Thus it is important to protect viscosity loss to allow the engine oil to sustain the lubricating film between engine parts at least for thousands of miles. In order to improve viscosity index over longer period of use certain additive such as Dispersants, anti-wear agents, friction modifiers, pour-point depressants, antioxidants and foam inhibitors are used in engine oil.Based on the technology engine oils are broadly classified in four market variants: Premium Conventional engine Oil (used in two/three wheelers and medium sized cars), Full Synthetic engine Oil (for high-tech engines such as Chevy Corvette and Mercedes-Benz), Synthetic Blend engine Oil (these engine oil are a blend of synthetic engine oil mixed with organic engine oil used in LMVs and SUVs) and Higher Mileage engine Oil (oils with higher viscosity index and used in H.M.Vs and SUVs).North America is the largest market for automotive engine oil mainly attributed to large volume of motor vehicle in this region. It is followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. The market is witnessing an escalating growth in Asia Pacific region. China, in recent years, has become the global hub for the automobile industry. Some of the other region in Asia Pacific such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines are growing into the largest markets for small car segment in the world.Growing middle class, rising disposable income, developing surface transportation infrastructure, growing aspiration of owning private vehicles, increasing mobility due to development of satellite township near megacities and increase demand of goods carriers from micro, small and medium size enterprises are fueling the market for automotive engine oil in Asia Pacific region. Growing automotive aftermarket and do it yourself (DIY) culture in North America and Europe is fueling the growth of automotive engine oil in retail sector in these two region.Request to view Table of content @Some of the major players operating in the automotive engine oil market include Saudi Arabian Oil Co., Total S.A, Gazprom, ROSNEFT, LUKOIL oil company, Royal Dutch Shell plc, Exxon Mobil Corporation, BP p.l.c, Statoil, Chevron Corporation., Sinopec Lubricant Company, JIANGSU LOPAL TECH. CO.,LTD. and Ashland 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.305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Market Is Expected To Generate Huge Profits by 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/4723

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/4723

The global augmented reality & virtual reality market is expected to grow at a substantial growth rate especially in training and infotainment market. Heavy penetration is the wide spectrum of application areas for these technologies. Virtual reality application in healthcare shows a tremendous growth and driving the market for augmented reality & virtual reality. It is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer generated data. Augmented reality consists of various benefits which includes interactive in real time, also data can be generated in real-time. Augmented reality has various applications which include video games (physical interaction with 3D models), presentations, television, theme park, and simulations (driving, flying etc.).Request to view Sample Report @The report contains the global scenario of augmented reality & virtual reality market discussing detailed overview and market figures. The research report analyses the industry growth rate, industry capacity, and industry structure. The report analyses the historical data and forecasts the augmented reality & virtual reality market size, production forecasts along with key factors driving and restraining the market growth.The global augmented reality & virtual reality market is segmented into two major categories, on the basis of technology into augmented and virtual reality technologies, on the basis of sensors and components into sensors, semiconductor components, augmented reality sensors and components, virtual reality sensors and components. The market is also segmented by application into E-commerce, gaming, medical, education, military and other industrial applications. The market is further segmented by geography into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and rest of the world regions. Among these regional markets, Asia Pacific registered the fastest growth rate during the forecast period from 2013 to 2019.The global augmented reality & virtual reality market is driven by factors such as the increasing demand in healthcare, boosting demand for smartphones. Rising Prevalence of Computer Technology and Internet Connectivity will also act as drivers for the global augmented reality & virtual reality market.Some of the factors inhibiting the growth of the global augmented reality & virtual reality market are privacy and awareness, image latency. Requirement of hardware is also restraining the growth of the global augmented reality & virtual reality market. Programming physics, costs, under development and graphics are also other factors restraining the growth of the global augmented reality & virtual reality market. The emerging applications and increase in R&D initiatives will serve as an opportunity, fuelling the growth of the global augmented reality & virtual reality market.Request to view Table of content @Some of the key players dominating the market are Blippar, Catchoom, Innovega Inc., Laster Technologies, Metaio Gmbh, Total Immersion, Vertalis Ltd, Augmented Pixels Co., Kooaba AG, Kishino Limited, Qualcomm Incorporated, Wikitude Gmbh and others. Earlier the global augmented reality & virtual reality market was dominated by players with relatively low brand image. However, after the entrance of new big players in the industry, the demand for augmented reality & virtual reality has increased among the consumers.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.305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Beer Market Revenue Predicted To Go Up by 2020  Persistence Market Research Report

Beer Market, Beer, Alcohol market, Beer Alcohol

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3174

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3174

www.persistencemarketresearch.com

Beer is the most widely consumed alcoholic beverage in the Asia Pacific region. Growing drinking population in the countries such as India and China is boosting the market for beer in the Asia-Pacific region. By types, Beer market can be segmented into premium, mainstream and economy.Request for TOC @Countries such as China have the largest consumption of beer in the Asia Pacific region, followed by Japan. Increasing population and more inclined towards western culture are the major factors for the growth of beer market in the Asia Pacific region. Countries such as India, Singapore and South Korea are the fastest growing market for beer in the Asia-Pacific region.Rising disposable income, ever-increasing population, increasing in the number of bars and restaurants, increase in the acceptance of western culture and relaxation in the rules and regulation related to the operation of beer industry are some of the major driving force for beer market. Increasing disposable income among the working class population allows the customer to go out more to restaurants and bars and spend more on beer. In addition, consumers are now willing to pay more for premium segments also. According to the National Bureau of Statistics China, annual per capita disposable income of urban households in China increased from USD 2,271.0 in 2008 to USD 3408.5 in 2012. The overall annual disposable income in India medium household income increased from USD 1,366.2 billion in 2010 to USD 1,587.6 billion in 2013. Quick adoption of western culture has largely influenced the drinking habits in the Asia Pacific region. People living in the west usually have a habit of drinking beer with their meals, at parties and even during meetings. Rising Anti-alcohol campaigns and rising aging population are some of the major restraints for beer market.Request for Sample Report @The major companies operating in the beer market include Anheuser-Busch InBev, Tsingtao Brewery, Beijing Yanjing Brewery, San Miguel Brewery, Asahi Breweries and China Resources Enterprise.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Water and Wastewater Pipe Market is Expected to Witness a Steady Growth by 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3542

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3542

Water pipe is a water supply pipe, while wastewater pipe flushes all the wastewater into sewers. Pipes are generally made of polyvinyl chloride, steel, cast iron, polypropylene and copper. Water and wastewater pipe can be segmented on the basis of product into plastic pipe, concrete pipe, steel pipe, ductile iron pipe and others. On the basis of application, water and wastewater pipe market is divided in five categories: sewer & drain pipe, sanitary sewer, potable water, transmission pipe and others. Plastic pipe segment is expected to show a strong growth in the forecasted period. Despite increased competition from plastics, concrete and ductile, iron pipe is expected to retain largest share of the sewer, drainage, and water transmission markets during the forecasted period.Request to view Sample Report @North America is the largest market for water and wastewater pipe, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific region is expected to be the fastest growing market. China and India hold the key for future market trends in water and wastewater market owing to increasing urban population, increase in living standards due to higher disposable income and high growth in the building and construction sector. Rising disposable income increase the living standard of customer and leads to more spending on houses, which indirectly drives the demand for water and wastewater pipe.According to the National Bureau of Statistics China, annual per capita disposable income of urban households in China increased from USD 2,271.0 in 2008 to USD 3408.5 in 2012. The overall annual disposable income in India medium household income increased from USD 1,366.2 billion in 2010 to USD 1,587.6 billion in 2013. Currently more than half of the population dwells in cities. The number is expected to increase to more than 60.0% by 2030. According to United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) in 2013, largest urban population growth took place in Asian countries such as India and China. By 2050, India is expected to add 404 million urban dwellers while China 292 million. Urban population is more concerned about their water and wastewater system, this leads to increase in the demand for water and wastewater pipe.The market of water and wastewater pipe is expected to witness a double digit growth rate in the coming years. Some of the major drivers contributing the overall market growth of water and wastewater pipe include increased demand for housing in urban areas, increasing non-residential building construction and increasing municipal market. Governments and private sectors across the globe are investing in better infrastructure facilities. Construction of residential and non-residential buildings leads to the demand for water and wastewater pipe market. For infrastructure development, the U.K governments public sector investment is expected to rise by USD 4.9 billion to about USD 77.7 billion in 2013-14 over 2012-13. It is further expected to increase to about USD 83.0 billion in 2014-15. With the increase in infrastructure investment, demand for water and wastewater pipe will increase.Request to view Table of content @The major companies operating in the water and wastewater pipe market include CEMEX, Hanson Pipe, JM Eagle, Synalloy Corporation, Saint-Gobain, Tyco International Limited, Vianini Pipe Incorporated, Viega GmbH & Company KG, Westlake Chemical Corporation, Roscoe Incorporated and Pacific Corrugated Pipe Company.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.305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Australia Lime Market Estimated to Value US$ 211.0 Mn in 2016, New South Wales Dominating Region

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11503

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/australia-lime-market/toc

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/australia-lime-market.asp

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com

According to a new report by Persistence Market Research, Australia Market Study on Lime: Industry Analysis and Forecast 2016-2024, the Australian lime market is estimated to reach the value of US$ 211.0 Mn at the end of 2016, expanding at a CAGR of 1.7% through the forecast period. The growing demand for energy and cost-efficient solutions is expected to fuel demand in the Australian market.Request Report Sample @Rapid urbanization and development of infrastructure is resulting in rising demand for lime from the construction sector. The Australian east coast is witnessing major development projects being launched, along with the growth in the mining sector to meet the increasing consumption rate owing to the demand for refining purposes. On the other hand, the end-use markets have slowing demand owing to the repercussions of the economic slowdown in Australia and is projected to restrain the market to a certain extent through the forecast period.In terms of product type, the Australian lime market is segmented as quicklime and slaked/hydrated lime. Slaked/hydrated lime segment accounted to near 70% share in terms on consumption in 2015. The segment is expected to continue its current trend through the forecast period. In terms of value, the slaked/hydrated segment is anticipated to value US$ 146.7 Mn at the end of 2016, whereas quicklime is projected to be the fastest growing segment at a 2.0% CAGR for the forecast period.For More Information Request TOC (desk of content material), Figures and Tables of the report @In terms of application, the Australian lime market is segmented as mining and metallurgy, building materials, agriculture, water treatment, and others. The mining and metallurgy, and building materials segments are anticipated to account for significant shares in terms of volume at 38% and 35% respectively. The mining and metallurgy segment is projected to rise with the highest CAGR through the forecast period owing to increased adoption of lime in refining and extraction of mineral ores.The Australia lime market is segmented in terms of region into New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and Rest of Australia. New South Wales is the dominating region accounting for over 31.1% volume share in the Australian lime market in 2015. The region is projected to continue its dominating trend through the forecast period with estimations of the region to value US$ 59.1% at the end of 2016. Western Australia is the largest producer of lime, accounting for over 65% volume production and is projected to register a CAGR of 0.8% through the forecast period.Browse Report @Some key players in the Australia lime market include Wagners, Omya Australia Pty Ltd., Boral Limited, Sibelco Australia, Adelaide Brighton Ltd, and Lime Group Australia. Companies are focusing on increasing their product portfolio and gain a strong foothold in the market. Manufacturers are looking towards investing in increasing production and profitability, along with providing cost-efficient products. Companies are also focusing on importing quicklime from ASEAN countries to reduce cost of raw materials required in lime production.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:
Superhard Material Market : Impact of Existing and Emerging Market 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3646

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3646

A superhard material is a material with a hardness level exceeding 40 gigapascals. Superhard materials are highly incompressible solids with high electron density and high bond covalency.Request to view Sample Report @The various products of superhard material include cemented carbides, tool steels, ceramics and diamond. Cement carbide is generally used in industrial applications for machining tough materials such as carbon steel or stainless steel. The superhard material market is segmented in the following three categories: monocrystalline superhard, composite superhard materials and super-hard materials and tools. Monocrystalline superhard materials include diamond and cubic boron nitride.Composite superhard materials include clad sheet for oil and gas, clad sheet for cutting tools, clad sheet and wire drawing die blanks used for coal and mining. Super-hard materials and tools include polycrystalline diamond drawing dies, diamond saw blades, diamond drill bits, diamond discs and diamond cutting tools.Due to their incomparable hardness, superhard materials can scratch and shape any object, hence it used in a wide range of industrial operations related to turning, cutting, drilling, boring and grinding. Superhard materials are used in many industries including aerospace, alternative energy, automotive, chemical processing, infrastructure and construction, die & mold, electronic, general machining, mining, oil & gas, paper & pulp, power generation, railroads and shipbuilding. Application of superhard material in these industries includes abrasive, coating, cutting tool, general medical, precision part, refractory parts, sensors, semiconductor fabrication, subsystem components and wear parts polishing.In 2013, affected by the insufficient demand from downstream petroleum, construction and metal cutting machine tool and due to the sluggish economy, superhard material and products industrys growth was slowed down and many companies were facing high operating costs due to this reason. In view of this, SF Diamond Co., Ltd, BOSUN Tools Co., Ltd, Henan Huanghe Whirlwind Co., Ltd, and some other companies adopted number of measures to expand their existing production capacity and extend their industrial chain to enhance their operational capabilities.Asia-Pacific is the largest market for superhard material. China contributes the largest share of superhard material market in Asia-Pacific region generating about 90% of global output and become the top producer of manmade diamond. The superhard material market in China reached about USD 2 billion in 2013, accounting about 21.8% of global market share in superhard material. Market of superhard material in North America and Europe region is driven by improving economy, intensifying manufacturing activity and the ensuing rise in demand for machine tools that used for various industrial operations.Request to view Table of content @Major companies operating in global superhard material market are Zhongnan Diamond Co.,Ltd, Zhengzhou Sino Crystal Diamond Co., Ltd, Henan Huanghe, SF Diamond Bosun Tools, KingDream Public, Advanced Technology & Materials Co., Ltd, Zhengzhou New Asia Superhard Material Composite Co., Ltd., Henan Yalong Diamond Tools Co., Ltd, Shenzhen Haimingrun Industrial Co., Ltd., Zhengzhou Research Institute for Abrasives & Grinding, Monte Bianco Diamond Applications Co., Ltd., King strong Material Engineering Ltd, CR Gems Diamond Co., Ltd, Anhui Hongjing New Material Co., Ltd, Funik Ultra hard Material Co., Ltd, Henan Yalong Superhard Materials Co.,Ltd, Zhengzhou Realy Superabrasives Co.,Ltd and BOSUN Tools Co., Ltd.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.305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Aerospace Coatings Market is Expected to Witness a Steady Growth by 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3649

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3649

A coating is generally referred to as the substrate, is a covering that is applied to the surface of an object. The new technologies in aerospace coating which provide significant value advantages to the aviation industry in terms of longer service life, light weight products and improved application efficiencies. Growth in the aerospace industry can be driven by an emergent middle class in emerging economies and more and more people being able to travel for leisure. To fulfill this demand various airlines are trying to adapt strategy accordingly. Resulted in the increase in demand for aircraft and associated services. Indirectly boost the demand for aerospace coating market. Research and development plays an important role in aerospace coatings market. The leading companies such as AkzoNobel N.V and PPG Industries Inc. of aerospace coating market focus on research and development in response to the market growth and rising demand from customers. The leading companies are investing huge amount for future advancements and improved technology for aerospace coating to reduce coatings life cycle, engineered materials, improved performance and to meet the new demands coming from various types of end-user industries. For instance, PPG Industries Inc. launched Solar Heat Management (SHM) coatings. These coatings allow the reduction in air conditioning requirements while the aircraft is on the ground in warm conditions.Request to view Sample Report @On the basis of end-user, aerospace coatings market is bifurcated into three types: military, commercial and general aviation. Increased in the demand for light weight coating systems durability, environment-friendly solutions, unique color styling, variety of colors and faster product drying times from the commercial and military end-user segment, influencing the growth rate of global aerospace coating market. Commercial aerospace coating is the largest end-user segment, whereas military segment is also a growing end-user industry for aerospace coatings.In terms of geographic, Asia-Pacific dominates the global aerospace coating market, followed by Europe and North America. China and Japan represent the largest market for aerospace coating followed by India in Asia-Pacific. India is emerging as the fastest industry for engineering and design services. Due to this, India has an enormous potential for establishing maintenance, repair and overhaul centers for civil and military aircraft sectors. This may help in creating demand for aerospace coating market. Some of the major factors influencing the growth of aerospace coatings market in Asia-Pacific region are increasing cargo traffic, international trade and rising number of air travelers. In Europe, France, Germany and the U.K. holds major share of aerospace coating market. The U.S. represents the largest market for aerospace coating followed by Canada in North America.The global aerospace coating market is experiencing a good growth, which is expected to continue in the coming years. Some of the major drivers contributing the overall market growth of global aerospace coating market are environment-friendly products, chromo free technology, time saving and cost saving products and growth in the number of people travelling by air.Request to view Table of content @Some of the major companies operating in the global aerospace coatings market are The Sherwin-Williams Company, Akzonobel N.V., Zircotec Ltd, Henkel Ag & Company, BASF SE, Mankiewicz Gebr. & Co., Hentzen Coatings, Inc., Ionbond Ag, PPG Industries, Inc. and Hohman Plating & Manufacturing Llc.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.305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Frozen Bakery Market Revenue Predicted To Go Up by 2020  Persistence Market Research Report

Frozen Bakery Market, Frozen Bakery

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3240

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3240

www.persistencemarketresearch.com

Frozen bakery products such as frozen breads, frozen pizza crust, frozen pastries, frozen cakes bread, frozen patisserie are high in demand, which boost frozen bakery market across the globe. Among all frozen bakery products, frozen pizza crust contributes the highest share followed by frozen bread and frozen pastries. In western countries, many people prefer to take frozen pizza as part of their daily meal. Frozen bakery market holds around 8% of total frozen food market across the globe.Request for TOC @The market is growing towards more diversified operations, which offer sophisticated and healthy products. Due to increase in health conscious level, people prefer food that contains healthy ingredients and keeps the food fresh for long duration of time. Growing demand of these ingredient leads to drive overall frozen bakery market. One of the reasons for the growth of frozen bakery market is due to habit of food on-the-go. In busier life styles, people tend to skip breakfast and grab some frozen food bakery product.The market is expected to continue flourishing in developed and developing regions of the world. Increase in trade activities of frozen pizza and frozen bread in Europe, leads to rise in overall growth of frozen bakery market. Europe region contributes the largest market of frozen bakery across the globe. North America is estimated to be second largest market after Europe due to increase in demand for processed food and busy life-styles population. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market for frozen bakery. The growing influence of western culture, rising middle classes with higher disposable income and changing eating habits of consumers are some of the main reason, which drive the Asia Pacific market. The growth of frozen bakery market is expected to be fastest in emerging market of Latin America and Middle East.Request for Sample Report @Major companies operating in global frozen bakery market include, Lantmannen Unibake, Alpha Baking Company Inc., Associated British Foods Plc, Aryzta AG, Bridgford Foods Corporation, Barilla Holding SPA, Cole's Quality Foods Inc., Cargill Incorporated, Custom Foods Inc., Deiorios Frozen Dough Products, Europastry, Flowers Foods Inc., General Mills Inc., Grupo Bimbo, Kellogg Company, Maple Leaf Foods Inc., Premier Foods Plc, Pepperidge Farm, Vandemoortele and Warburtons Bakery.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Asia Pacific Waste To Energy Market size and Key Trends in terms of volume and value 2014-2020

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-ap-299

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-ap-299

www.futuremarketinsights.com

Waste to energy (WTE) is the process of utilizing waste to generate energy or electricity. Various technologies are used to generate energy from waste source such as, municipal domestic waste. Energy generated from the process can be in form of electricity, fuel or heat.The WTE management is considered as a vital part of the waste disposal infrastructure of any nation as it also comes under renewable energy sources. Waste to energy market refers to electricity generated with utilization of waste resources.Rapid change in consumption pattern and lifestyle of the population, along with migration of people towards urban areas are triggering urban waste accumulation, hence demanding a better infrastructure for its safe disposal and reuse.Various corporate or energy producing companies have ventured into waste to energy market by deploying their facilities. Types of waste that can be used in the waste to energy market include utilization of semi solid waste discharged from the industrial plants, liquid waste like domestic sewage and gaseous waste produced in refinery.Request Free Report Sample@Waste to energy market can be segmented on the basis of technology used, viz. thermal and biological. Thermal technology can be further bifurcated on the basis of oxygen used in the process, combustion (excess oxygen), gasification (partial oxygen) and pyrolysis (no oxygen). Biological process can be used in a process where anaerobic decomposition of the solid waste is required. In Asia pacific, incineration is the most commonly used technology in waste to energy market. Incineration cuts the cost required in the transportation of waste to landfills. There has been a noticeable rise in the production of industrial and municipal waste, demanding innovation in existing waste to energy management technologies.Necessity to maintain balance between the three Es that is, saving the Environment, Economic development and Energy independence can clearly explain the need of waste management thus driving growth in waste to energy market. Companies are adopting aforementioned technologies to reduce discharge of waste material and generate confined energy in parallel. For instance, General Motors through its renaissance center and landfill-free sites has been able to eliminate over 10 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2013.Waste to energy management supports nation to conserve energy resources and earn carbon credits, which can be further used to gain profit via carbon credit trading. Additionally, converting a waste into a beneficial product will leadto an economic development of a country by turning a liability into an asset. China is considered as one of the forerunnersin waste to energy market.Asia pacific waste to energy market is expected to grow two folds by 2020 with promising CAGR. Japan primarily dominates waste to energy market in Asia pacific, owing to its increasing waste to energy technology adoption. Rapid growth of residential and industrial wastes in China and India,and supports by government to endorse sustainable energy generation are anticipated to drive the regional waste to energy market.Rapid rise in industrial and domestic wastes are provoking governments across the region to support energy production from waste, positively impacting the growth of waste to energy market. Also strong shift towards the renewable resources from coal, decreasing carbon footprints is driving the waste to energy market. Rise in economic development is anticipated to lead to the increase in the municipal domestic waste and hence will drive the demand of waste to energy market.Various developing nations have implemented landfills, due to its less implementation cost. This can be an inhibitor for waste to energy market, as methane gas is emitted from the landfill. Industries playing an active role in the economic development of the nation are energetically using WTE technologies.Visit For TOC@Regional key players in waste to energy market includeThe Babcock & Wilcox Company, China Everbright International Limited, Xcel Energy, Suez Environment S.A, Waste Management Inc., C&G Environmental Protection Holdings Ltd., Veolia Environment and Foster Wheeler AG.Waste to energy market is expected to grow significantly in Asia pacific region. India, China and Japan will be the boon for the growth of the nation in the forecasted year duration.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:
Global Ferrite Market Set for Rapid Growth And Trend, by 2025

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-364

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-364

www.futuremarketinsights.com

Ferrite is a compound derived from iron oxides and including magnetite and hematite. Ferrite possesses similar characteristics as ceramics and is hard and brittle. Hard ferrite and soft ferrite are the two major product types for ferrite. Soft ferrites generally contain compounds of zinc, nickel or manganese and find applications in electronic applications such as transformers. Hard ferrite consists of compounds of barium, cobalt or strontium. Hard ferrite is used in several consumer electronics such as refrigerators. Soft ferrite dominates the global the market in terms of market share and the trend is expected to continue through 2019.Growing demand for electronics has been a major factor driving growth for ferrite. Increase in disposable income of consumers in the emerging economies leading to growth in several end user segments also has been a major factor driving growth for the industry. Low cost, high efficiency, easy availability is amongst the major factors driving growth for soft ferrite. Research and development activities to increase application scope of ferrite are expected to offer huge growth opportunity for the market.Request Free Report Sample@Asia Pacific dominates the global ferrite market in terms of consumption and the trend is expected to continue during the forecast period. Demand for ferrite in the region is primarily driven by the emerging economies of India and China. Other major markets for ferrite include North America, Western Europe and Japan. These developed economies are expected to grow at a sluggish rate mainly owing to saturation of end user segments. Growing demand for ferrite in nuclear energy segment is expected to offer huge growth opportunity in the market. Africa and Latin America are expected to drive the market growth in the RoW segment.Major players in the ferrite market include Ferroxcube, TDK Corporation, Amidon Inc., Laird Technologies, Honeywell MetGlas, TAK TECHNOLOGY Co., Ltd. and Ferronics Inc. among others. This research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data and statistically-supported and industry-validated market data and projections with a suitable set of assumptions and methodology. It provides analysis and information by categories such as market segments, regions, product types and distribution channels.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:
Dental Implants and Prosthetics Market 2015-2025 Shares, Trend and Growth Report

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-386

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-386

www.futuremarketinsights.com

Dental implant is an artificial tooth that is placed in jaw to act as replacement tooth. People who have lost their tooth or teeth due to injury, periodontal disease and other reasons may use dental implant as an alternative to the natural tooth. Prosthetics are used to reconstruct the intraoral defects such as soft or hard structure of the jaw, missing parts and others. Rising number of people suffering from periodontal disease is one of the important factors driving the growth of dental implants and prosthetics. For instance, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that 47.2% of the total population above the age of 65 years suffers from some kind of periodontal disease. Thus, with the rise in periodontal diseases globally the dental implants and prosthetics market is also expected to grow in near future.Request Free Report Sample@The global dental implants and prosthetics market can be segmented as follows:Dental Implants MarketBy TypeTitanium Dental ImplantsProcedure StageSingle StageTwo StageConnector TypeExternal HexagonalInternal HexagonalInternal OctagonalZirconium Dental ImplantDental Prosthetics MarketCrowns and BridgesPorcelain fused to Metal Crowns and BridgesAll Ceramics Crowns and BridgesMetallic Crowns and BridgesDenturesAbutmentsRising edentulous population, increasing disposable income and growing awareness for dental care are some of key factors driving the growth of dental implants and prosthetics market. For instance, it has been estimated that in 2010 approximately 160 million people globally were edentulous which accounts for 2.3% of the global population. In addition, increasing geriatric population and changing lifestyle also propel the growth of this market. According, to the World Health Organization (WHO) it has been estimated that the global elderly population is expected to reach around 2 billion by 2050; thiswas around 524 million in 2010. Moreover, the global geriatric population is expected to grow at the fastest rate in developed countries such as Italy, Germany, the U.K., the U.S. and Japan. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, around 40 million people in the country belonged to the elderly category in 2011. Around 89 million people are estimated to be beyond the age of 65 years by 2050.Thus, increasing geriatric population globally augments the demand for dental implants and prosthetics.Technological advancements in the field of dentistry also drive the growth of this market. With the introduction of computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technology has significantly reduced the dental treatment time. Thus, all the above mentioned factors collectively drive the growth of dental implants and prosthetics market. However, unfavorable reimbursement policies restrict the growth of this market during the study period.Geographically, Europe accounts for the largest share of the global dental implants and prosthetic market as the key players are domiciled in this region followed by North America. In addition, increasing geriatric population, presence of organized distribution channels and rising disposable income are of the major factors driving the global demand of this market during the forecast period 2015 to 2025. In addition, Asia-Pacific is estimated to be fastest growing market for dental implants and prosthetic owing to increasing healthcare awareness, population aging and rising medical tourism in countries such as India, Japan, Malaysia and others. However, economic slowdown in developed regions such as Europe and North America coupled with unfavorable reimbursement policies inhibits the global growth of dental implants and prosthetics market.Visit For TOC@3M Company, Biomet, Inc., Nobel Biocare, Straumann, Zimmer Holdings, Dentsply International, Zimmer Dental, BioHorizons, Inc., Ivoclar Vivadent AG are some of the leading companies having their presence in the global dental implants and prosthetics market.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 IndiaContact 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:
Market Research on Clinical Trials Market 2015 and Analysis to 2025

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-384

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-384

www.futuremarketinsights.com

Clinical trials are research studies performed on humans to gain specific information about biomedical interventions such as novel vaccines, devices, treatments and drugs and thereby generating safety data. Clinical trials are regulated by health authorities and ethics committees.Documents required for performing clinical trials are investigators brochure (IB) which include current and relevant scientific information about the investigational product, United States Food and Drug (FDA) form 1572, protocol and amendments, inform consent, other written information for participants, recruitment advertisement, financial disclosure form (FDF), master clinical trial agreement (MCTA), institutional review board (IRB) approval, medical licensure, training records, laboratory accreditation, visit monitor reports, miscellaneous document, signature sheet and documentation of investigational drug destruction. The International Conference on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) brings together regulatory authorities of Europe, the United States, Japan and experts from pharmaceutical industry to frame and regulate the technical and scientific aspects of pharmaceutical product registration. The Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) states rules and standard guidelines for clinical trials. ICH guidelines are followed as law by several countries in the world.Request Free Report Sample@Clinical trials are conducted in four phases namely, Phase I, II, III and IV. Phase I is conducted for safety, phase II is conducted for efficacy, phase III is conducted for final confirmation of safety and efficacy and phase IV is conducted for post sales studies. Risk to participants involved in clinical trials decreases from phase I to phase VI. Number of participants increases from phase I to phase IV resulting in increasing cost of trials. Based on the phases of clinical trials, global clinical trials market is segmented as follows:Phase IPhase IIPhase IIIPhase IVBased on indication, global clinical trials market is classified as follows:Blood disordersOphthalmologyAutoimmune diseasesCirculatory diseasesCancerGenitourinary diseasesCongenital diseasesMusculoskeletal diseasesCentral nervous system (CNS)InfectionsDermatologyMetabolic disordersCardio vascular system (CVS) diseasesGastrointestinal diseasesMental disordersOthersBeing relatively costly process, in order to reduce economic burden on company and shift focus on core business activities, many companies outsource their clinical trial activities to contract research organizations (CROs). Contract research organizations provide services such as clinical trial management, clinical research and preclinical research. Factors such as advancement in technology and increasing demand of innovative solutions in healthcare industry are driving the market of global clinical trials towards growth. On the other hand, factors such as high cost and stringent regulations are restraining the growth of clinical trials market globally. Geographically, the global clinical trials market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World.Visit For TOC@North America is the leading consumer of global clinical trials solutions, followed by Europe. Ample availability of funds to outsource clinical trials serves as the major growth driver for the North America clinical trials market. Asia-Pacific demonstrates impressive growth potential for clinical trials market and is expected to show the highest growth rate as compared to other regions in the world. Countries such as India are attractive markets due to advantages such as availability of skilled practitioners and availability government support in terms development of outsourcing hubs thus attracting pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to outsource clinical trial activities to CROs in this region. Some of the market leaders contributing to the global clinical trials market include Eli Lilly and Company, Novo Nordisk A/S, Ranbaxy Laboratories, Ltd., Sanofi Aventis A.S. and Roche Group.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 IndiaContact 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:
Research report covers the Refrigerated/Frozen Dough Products Market share and Growth, 2015-2025

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-702

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-702

www.futuremarketinsights.com

Some of the fastest growing segments of the food processing industry are frozen/refrigerated dough product. Refrigerated/Frozen Dough products consist of Cookies/Brownies, Biscuits, Dinner rolls, Sweet rolls, Pizza base and other bakery items. Modern equipment and packaging opens up a new demand spectrum in refrigerated/frozen dough industry. Various refrigeration processes increases the shelf life of the product and lowers the chances of product wastage. There is an increasing demand for par baked dough products in sandwich category as it is as tasty as fresh dough.Par baked variety enables food service outlets and coffee bars to provide fresh oven buns and rolls which matches artisan style and taste with convenience. In addition to it, people are trying varieties of dough related dishes at home, which were previously available only at restaurants or coffee shops. Some of the varieties include crepes and filo dough, par baked buns, gluten free bread among others.Request Free Report Sample@Refrigerated/Frozen Dough Product Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe key drivers of refrigerated/frozen dough products market include increased coffee shops, bakery products consumption and booming food service. With increasing disposable income and increasing consumption of coffee in the emerging countries the demand of refrigerated/frozen dough products is also elevating. Dough products are considered healthy options in comparison to meat and other calorific meals. Moreover, dough products can be consumed at any period of day such as during breakfast, lunch or dinner. Large number of product innovation and availability of products through different retail outlets have made it an attractive market overall.Some of the restraining factors in the refrigerated/frozen market growth could be unstable demand forecast and supply chain, perishability of the product. Proper packaging and storing facilities are major concern for manufacturers and distributors as the product requires a specific temperature even while transportation.Refrigerated/Frozen Dough Product Market: SegmentationThe refrigerated/frozen dough products market can be segmented into five major types as refrigerated Biscuits, Cookies/Brownies, Dinner rolls, Sweet rolls and remaining category which come in others. Geographically, the market can also be segmented as North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East & Africa. North America is the largest market in 2014 followed by Western Europe. However, Asia-Pacific is expected to show robust growth during the forecast period due to rising per capita income coupled with increasing trend to live healthy and luxurious lifestyleRefrigerated/Frozen Dough Product Market: Regional OverviewThe refrigerated/frozen dough products market across the globe is expected to show a substantial growth with a single digit increase in CAGR over 2015 to 2020. There is a significant increase in the refrigerated/frozen dough products market because of its low prices than fresh baked products. However the market is expected to grow moderately in developed countries. The refrigerated/frozen market is having huge opportunities as a result of increased snacking and breakfast market (portion eating). It is largely fragmented worldwide having small players supplying the refrigerated/frozen dough to bakeries, quick service restaurants and other food service industry. Emerging countries such as India, Brazil, China and South Africa is expected to grow significantly due to changing eating habits and availability of these products in supermarkets and other retail outlets. Developed economies have seen greater number of in-store bakeries and sandwich programs popping up in outlets such as convenience stores and hyper markets. Family gatherings and holiday parties further fuel the demand of dough related products such as pastries, cupcakes and sweet rolls.Visit For TOC@Refrigerated/Frozen Dough Product Market: Key PlayersSome of the major global players in the refrigerated/frozen dough products market are Goosebumps frozen convenience, Kontos Foods, Inc., Custom Foods Inc., Readi-Bake, Inc., Earthgrains Refrigerated Dough Products, L.P., Gonnella, Wenner Bakery, Europastry and Swiss Gastro Bakery Beijing Co.,Ltd, Dr. Schar USA, Inc. and Boulder Brands among 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:
Advertisement Blockers Market Rapidly Popular Due to Safeguard their Privacy and Preserve User Identity for Website Visitors

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=13199

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/advertisement-blockers-market.html

Online advertising is method of marketing through the use of Internet to convey promotional messages to users and it is done in such a way that is diverts the Internet users attention. Online advertisements comes in a variety of forms including banner ads, text ads, sponsored links, sponsored stories, pictures and animations, and sometimes in the form of pop-up windows employing an auto-play of audio or video. Most of the time these advertisements are disturbing, thus annoying the end users. Moreover, these advertisements also compel user to watch full screen video, while the user is browsing to read an article. Furthermore, these ads cost users money in terms of data usage. To ensure safety and sidestep such incidences consumers are now using ad blockers.Get Free Report Brochure PDF@Advertisement blocking is also referred as advertisement filtering. It is the removal of any undesirable advertising content in a webpage by installing an appropriate web extension/plugin. Suitable extensions are available on all key web browsers, besides they are fast and easy to install. Some of these extensions are available open-source, while rest are available in the form of commercial projects. In early days these advertisement blockers were only compatible with desktop browsers; however, with the recent rise in the use of mobile device advertisement blockers have made their way to smartphones.One of the major factors driving advertisement blockers market includes need for privacy, these advertisements are programmed to monitor users browsing activity. Most of the Internet users are not comfortable in sharing their browsing data to these anonymous publishers and hence to safeguard their privacy and to preserve user identity the advertisement blockers are becoming rapidly popular which is likely to support expansion of the market. Furthermore, a lot of irrelevant content appears through these advertisements, which users find annoying and hence it is another factor boosting the growth of this market. Additionally, to ensure security from criminal activities, advertisement blockers are in great demand. Criminals have a huge reach and through malicious software that encrypts data, they can demand for monetary returns, hence this is one of the key factors driving the market.Though advertisement blockers benefits users by reducing page load time it also results into broken links and disturbs the web browsers settings, thus affecting the entire user experience. This is one of the factors hindering the growth of ad blockers market.Advertisement blockers are threats for the online marketing companies, as advertising is the only source of revenue for them and blocking of advertisement badly affects the companys earning and often leads to loss in terms of money.The key players the advertisement blocker market include Eyeo GmbH, Ghostery, Inc., Adguard and uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger (Developed by Electronic Frontier Foundation). In coming years with rising impact of machine learning technology and analytics the ad blocking quality is expected to improve.Browse Full Report@About Us:-Transparency Market Research 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.Contact Us:-Transparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.com
Worldwide Energy Management System (EMS) Market Will Grow USD 63,161.5 million by 2021

Energy Management System Market

http://bit.ly/2cIdQ5u

http://bit.ly/2d2Kv5b

http://www.marketresearchstore.com/requestquote?reportid=72192

http://bit.ly/2fHd5OM

http://www.marketresearchstore.com

Zion Research has published a new report titled Energy Management System (EMS) by Software (Utility, Industrial, Residential, Enterprises Energy Management) Market - Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2015  2021According to the report, the global energy management system (EMS) market accounted for USD 31,294.6 million in 2015 and is expected to reach USD 63,161.4 million by 2021, growing at a CAGR of around 12.4% between 2016 and 2021.Access Report Sample atEnergy efficiency means to consume less energy with an increased output. Energy management system is gradually being recognized as one of the most significant and cost-effective solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases produced as part of industrial processes, including in the utility, enterprises and residential sector. In fact, energy management system has the technically capable to reduce industrial energy use by approximately 18%. The importance energy management system made it clear that todays industry is responsible for approximately 22% of global CO2 emissions. In global arena, energy management system creates active role in reducing the energy consumption in industrial, enterprises and residential sector.Globally, markets of energy management system are driven by increasing awareness in industrial sectors for the efficient utilization of energy consumption. Moreover, increasing alertness about carbon emission management serves as a major factor which may fuel the growth of energy management system market within a forecast periods. In addition stringent government policies and guidelines or government intervention over misuse of energy consumption can accelerate the growth of energy management system market. However, lack of financial resources in new entrant enterprises serve as a major restraining factor which hindered the growth of energy management system market. In addition, high operational costs in initial stage coupled with late return on investment are most likely to slow down the growth of energy management system market.Do Inquiry for buying report atBased on software, energy management system market is segmented into five types: utility energy management software, industrial energy management software, enterprise energy management software, residential energy management and others. Energy management system market is dominated by the industrial energy management software market due to wide extension of industrial hub across the world. Moreover, energy use in industries is much more related to operational practices than in the commercial and residential sectors. The energy-using systems in industries are designed to support the production practices which may are relatively energy efficient under an initial production scenario. In 2015, industry management software account for over 55% of global energy management system market share.Request a Quote atBased on geography, energy management system market segmented into five regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa. North America was the largest market share in 2015. North America held approximately above 40% of market share in 2015 in terms of revenue. In addition, growing tendency towards efficient utilization of energy in Asia Pacific region coupled with rise in industrialization are likely to expect the growth of energy management system market in coming years.Key market player of energy management system market are Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) Ltd, Cisco Systems, Inc., General Electric Company, Honeywell International, Inc., International Business Machine Corporation, Schneider Electric SE, Siemens AG, Emerson Process Management, CA Technologies and Eaton Corporation PLC.Browse The Full Report atThis report segments the global energy management system market as follows:Global Energy Management System (EMS) Market: Software AnalysisUtility EMS SoftwareIndustrial EMS SoftwareEnterprise Energy Management SoftwareResidential EMSOthers.Global Energy Management System (EMS) Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaEuropeAsia PacificLatin AmericaMiddle East and AfricaAbout 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 USJoel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442 United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWebsite:
Increasing Deployment of GTL Technology for Developing Clean Fuel Globally Supports Growth of Gas to Liquids Market

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=2752

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/gas-to-liquids-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Gas to liquids (GTL) is a refinery process for converting natural gas or any other kind of gaseous hydrocarbons to longer-chain hydrocarbons such as diesel fuel or gasoline. Methane-rich gases get converted to liquid synthetic fuels either via direct conversion or non-catalytic processes. These processes are used for the conversion of methane to methanol in just a single step or by syngas as an intermediate using Mobil, Fischer Tropsch, and syngas to gasoline plus processes.The globally rising consumption of energy and an emphasis on converting of waste flare gas into useful products globally are amongst the major factors fuelling the development of the gas to liquids market. In addition, the policies made by governments globally in favor of the development of clean fuel will also impact the market positively. Furthermore, the increasing consumption of natural gas, particularly within nations such as Japan, China, and India and the rising advancement of smaller sized micro-channel reactors in place of the traditionally utilized reactors have emerged as key growth opportunities in the market.Get PDF Brochure for more Professional and Technical industry insights :There are a number of commercial uses of the gas to liquid processes. Transparency Market Research (TMR), a market intelligence company throws light on the top commercial uses of gas to liquid processes and the ways these processes have been deployed by a number of companies in different application areas.Refineries are able to convert a large amount of their gaseous waste products into valuable fuel oils, which can then be sold as-is or can be blended with diesel fuel. As per the World Bank, more than 150 bn cubic meters of natural gas is vented or flared yearly, an amount worth around $30.6 bn, which is an equivalent to 25% of the gas consumption of the U.S or 30% of the annual gas consumption of the European Union, using the method of GTL.GTL processes are also utilized in the economic extraction of gas deposits within locations where it is not viable to build a pipeline. The popularity of the GTL process is increasing owing to the depletion of crude oil resources.Biofuels Power Corporation (BFLS) signed a letter of intent with Liberty GTL, Inc. and thyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions on August 1, 2014 on building a small scale GTL demonstration facility within Houston, Texas. This GTL pilot plant was completed on December 31, 2014. The key purpose of this GTL pilot plant was to present a commercial demonstration of converting the stranded natural gas resources into synthetic crude oil. More such projects are afoot worldwide and will likely accelerate the development of the gas to liquids market.Research Report:In the early days of experimenting of GTL by a number of organizations, Petrobras, a Brazilian oil company has employed two small experimental GTL production facilities for its offshore oil fields. The research and development center of Petrobras has approved the commercial deployment of this GTL technology, supplied by CompactGTL, a UK-based GTL company. Thus, such development will further augment the development of the market.Thus, the deployment of GTL technology in a number of applications globally will fuel the overall market in the coming years. However, the need for considerable expenditure for the development of large-scale GTL plants is a major factor that may inhibit the growth of the market in the coming years.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: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.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, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207
Non-Magnetic Metals & Alloys Market Revenue Predicted To Go Up by 2026

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11578

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11578

The Non-Magnetic Metals & Alloys are those metals and alloys that are generally non-ferrous type or have only insignificant amount of metal used as an alloy. Major non-magnetic metals include aluminum, copper, lead, and zinc. Other non-ferrous metals include brass, titanium, beryllium and nickel. They are generally more expensive than ferrous metals in terms of mining and extraction. These non-magnetic metals & alloys are generally light in weight, have higher conductivity, has non-magnetic property and is resistance to corrosion and rust. The global non-magnetic metals & alloys market are 1,500 kilo tons in 2015 approximately in volume. Overall, the market is expanding at a decent CAGR of during the forecast period from 2016 to 2026.Request for Sample Copy@The market of global non-magnetic metals & alloys is anticipated to be driven by the use of non-magnetic metals in different industries and their respective purposes. Due to growth of aviation industry and other transportation and structural materials, the global market of non-magnetic metals & alloys are growing in demand. In addition, the favorable Government initiatives such as The National Space policy of United States on June, 2010 and many others programmes help in the consumption of more non-magnetic metals & alloys over the years due to increased number to aircrafts and spaceships. Some of the non-magnetic metals & alloys are also used in building materials and also as a component of various metal alloys. Due to growth of the construction equipment, lead acid batteries, bullets and radiation protectors, the non-magnetic metals & alloys such as lead is highly used in demand of late. The demand for corrosion chemically inert and corrosion resistant products in chemical processing industry is expected to drive the market growth over the predictable period. Also the non-magnetic metals & alloys are highly recyclable in nature which further encourages the growth of non-magnetic metals and alloys. The global non-magnetic metals & alloys market is characterized by continuous mergers, acquisitions and product innovations to gain market share and competitive edge which drives the demand for the product worldwide. The jewelry industry involving precious metals other than gold, is expected to drive the Non-Magnetic Metals market to some extent. The industry is expected to get advantage from the rising magnesium mining and growing extraction of other metals such as titanium, which are used as raw materials for the production of alloys.However, the global non-magnetic metals & alloys being costly as compared to magnetic metals and alloys does have a hindering effect on its market growth as well. On the mining operations front, the non-magnetic metals and alloys mining are currently experiencing a sluggish production rate.The global non-magnetic metals & alloys market is segmented on the basis of product types such as non-ferrous metals, precious metals and exotic or rare metals. Ferrous metals further includes aluminum, lead, tin, zinc, copper, nickel, titanium and others. Precious metals constitutes gold, silver and platinum. Exotic or rare metals are cobalt, mercury, tungsten, beryllium, bismuth and cerium. On the basis of application, the global non-magnetic metals & alloys are divided into aerospace industry, industrial gas & turbine, industrial automotive, electrical &electronics, chemical industry, kitchen appliances, food & beverages industry and others.Geographically, the Global non-magnetic metals & alloys 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. North America holds the largest share in the global non-magnetic metals & alloys market. It is expected to witness a substantial growth at a CAGR of over 3.5% in the forecasted period of 2016-2026. Europe holds the second largest market in terms of global non-magnetic metals & alloys, followed by Japan, Asia-pacific, Middle-East Africa and then rest of the world. Asia Pacific is expected to witness above average growth rates over the next six to eight years owing to the growing aviation industry combined with increasing demand for high durability metals in gas turbines and electrical & electronics.Request for Table of Content@The major players identified across the value chain of global non-magnetic metals & alloys market includes Saru Smelting Pvt Ltd., Lee Kee Group, James Coppell Lee, North Ferrous Cast Alloys Inc., Gravita India Ltd.,Australian Metals Pty Ltd., Nimax, Arcotech Ltd., AMPCO Metal Sa, Plansee Group and others. The companies are investing in their research & development sector to use more and more non-magnetic metals & alloys in aerospace industry. The companies are also focusing on different strategies in order to maintain the market share in the global non-magnetic metals & alloys 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
Biotech Flavor Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=16178

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/biotech-flavor-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Global Biotech Flavor Market OverviewBiotech flavor is an alternative to organic synthesis of flavors. Biotech flavor is playing a significant role in development of flavoring compounds. Generally enzymes were used for developing of flavoring compounds but with the advancement of technology and increasing food science developments biotech flavor found its use for the biotransformation of flavor compounds. Flavor compounds made with the help of biotech method have been considered as natural compounds. Due to increasing preference for natural products, this development creates the positive impact on the consumers mind as well as the flavors produced with the help of chemical synthesis are not considered ecofriendly. Biotech flavors reproduce flavors that are sweet, salty, and savory and also enables the production of healthier food products. Companies can reduce the amount of sugar, salty, savory by using the small amount of biotech flavor. Bacteria is used for biotech flavorings and for the natural cheese flavoring. These bacteria helps to convert glucose into butyric acid and also present in butter and some cheeses.Get More Information:Global Biotech Flavor Market Segmentation:-Biotech flavor market can be segmented on the basis of application, flavour type and forms of the biotech flavor.On the basis of application the Biotech Flavor is used in various product such as dairy products, beverages, confectionery, nondairy ice cream, and bakery. Furthermore, the bakery segment can be sub segmented such as breads, cakes, cereals, cookies, muffins, pastries. Also confectionary segment can be sub segmented such as chocolate, coatings, dips, gum.Biotech flavor market can further be segmented on the basis of flavor type such as vanilla, fruity, essential oils, microbial produced flavors, other flavors. Biotech Flavor market can also be segmented on the basis of forms of the biotech flavor such as liquid, powder, spray dry and paste forms.Global Biotech Flavor Market: Regional Outlook:-Geographically, the Global biotech flavor 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. United States dominates the global biotech flavor market in terms of revenue share and consumption, followed by Europe. The developing economies are expected to depict increasing demand for biotech flavour with the rise in consumer awareness and health consciousness.Browse Full Report With ToC:Global Biotech Flavor Market DriversGlobal biotech flavor market is expected to be driven by the demand of natural ingredients food and healthy food. As people are becoming more health conscious the demand for healthy food is expected to grow. Another factor which is driving the biotech flavor market is the increasing use of innovative technology, enabling the manufacturers to develop new biotech flavor. Apart from that, biotech flavor is also used in vanillin as an ingredient. Vanillin is used in ice creams and soft drinks for flavoring. Increasing consumption of desserts is also impacting the growth of biotech flavor market. A majority of people now a days prefer to buy food products which has biotech flavor for obvious reasons such as healthful fats, omega-3, saturated fat and also due to its properties that makes the foods taste better or fresher. Biotech flavor has already replaced some natural flavors, which were used in foods and required higher cost of production. Advancement technology and scientific breakthrough will support the growth of biotech flavor during the forecast period.Global Biotech Flavor Market Players:-The major players identified across the value chain of global biotech flavor market include Bell flavors & fragrances, Sensient, Allylix, Amyris, Symrise, Mane, Safisis, Naturex, Givaudan, Nestec, Takasago etc. The companies are emphasizing on research & development and product development in order to gain market share in the competitive market. Ben flavor and fragrances launched super fruit flavor. It provides lower cholesterol assists immune system. It also has the nutritional value of all kinds of antioxidants, vitamins and other minerals.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:
Logistics Market: Excellent Flexibility in Operations Makes Roadways the Dominant Segment !

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=154

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/logistics-market.htm

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

The growing GDPs indicate the rise of both imports and exports. It also points out the prolific growth in trade across the globe and the ways in which it has shaped the global logistics market. According to a research report published by Transparency Market Research, the opportunity in the global market is expected to be worth US$15.5 trillion by 2023 as compared to US$8.1 trillion in 2015. Analysts predict that overall market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.5% between the forecast period of 2015 and 2024 in terms of revenue.Download PDF Brochure for More analysis and Trends:Q. What is driving the rapid progress of the overall logistics market?A. The remarkable growth of the global logistics market is attributable to the emergence of e-commerce. The growing online shopping industry has giving the logistics market tremendous impetus. The increasing access to efficient Internet has allowed consumers across to global to shop for various items online, which has augmented the demand for efficient logistics. Today, the various types of logistical solutions are being used by the manufacturing, retail, telecommunication, banking and financial services, and information technology sectors.Q. Which is the preferred mode of logistic transport?A. Roadways are the most popularly used mode of transport and are thus regarded as the backbone of economic development. In terms of both, revenue and volume the roadways held a dominant share in 2015. The other modes of transport under the global logistics market are waterways, railways, and airways. Analysts predict that the roadways segment will continue to enjoy popularity as it offers easy accessibility, flexibility, and provides a door-to-door service. The improving infrastructure of developing regions is anticipated to provide ample of growth opportunities to the global market in the coming few years.Q. Which region will witness the rise of logistics industry in the coming years?A. Geographically, the global logistics market is segmented into Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and Rest of the World. Of these, Asia Pacific is anticipated to lead the global market in the coming years by a significant margin. The developing economies of Japan, China, India, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia are anticipated to offer an outstanding scope for growth of the overall market. Of these, India and China are anticipated to be major contributors as both the countries are known to be key manufacturing hubs of the world. Furthermore, the growing investments by the governments to improve the infrastructure is also anticipated to play a key role in shaping the global logistics market in the near future.Read Full Press Release @Some of the leading players operating in the global logistics market are Americold Logistics, LLC., Ceva Holdings LLC, J.B. Hunt Transport Services, FedEx Corp., C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc., United Parcel Service, Inc., and Deutsche Post DHL Group. Most of these companies are investing in tremendous production innovation, business expansions, and setting up newer facilities in order to expand their businesses and improve their revenues. For instance, FM Logistic is planning on setting up shop in India as the country plans to offer the company warehousing space. The French company services clients such as Nestle and LOreal and is looking forward to developing its business for automotive vendors. Thus, such strategic alliances are anticipated to help players retain their dominance in the global market in the coming years.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Shim Stock Material Market Revenue Predicted To Go Up by 2026

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11623

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11623

Shim is a thin, tapered or wedged piece of material, used to fill small spaces between objects. Shim Stock base material varies with their application. Shim can be made up of materials such as plastic, metal, wood, stone or even paper. Shims Stock materials are widely used to adjust for better fit, support, or provide a leveled surface and for such purpose it is required on ad-hoc basis. Shim Stock material also finds applications as spacers to fill gaps between parts subject to wear and tear. Shim Stock materials are used by various industries such as aeronautical, manufacturing, defense, etc. However, the aeronautical and defense industry mainly finds wide applications for Shim Stock materials.Request for Sample Copy@The global Shim Stock market is primarily driven by aeronautical industry due to its end use application. Increasing demand for commercial aircrafts is fueling the demand for shim stock materials. Shim stock materials also finds application in other industries such as defense and manufacturing. The continuous operations in production facilities requires effective maintenance activities in plants which in turn is fueling the demand of shim stock materials. Increasing global spending on defense equipments also driving the demand for Shim stock materials. However, factors like dependency on end use industries can be a restraint for the global shim stock material market. Therefore, demand variability in end use industries like aeronautical, manufacturing and defense have high impact on the global shim stock market. Other restraints like unorganized market for shim stock material and high profit share of suppliers resulting in price imbalance are few other factors confining the growth of global shim stock material market.Global Shim Stock Material market can be segmented on the basis end-use industry, material, application and type. On the basis of end-use industry, global Shim Stock Material market can be segmented into Aeronautical industry, Manufacturing, Defense and other industries widely using shim stock materials. On the basis of materials, global shim stock material market can be segmented as plastic, wood, metals, paper and others. Global Shim stock market can also be segmented on the basis of application including alignment, filling of void spaces, support, installation of new machinery etc. Shim stock material are available in market in various forms. Lastly, on the basis of end product type the global shim stock market can be segmented into coil, sheet, rod, bar and tube.High defense budget and increasing demand for commercial aircrafts in regions like North America followed by Asia pacific countries like china, Japan, Eastern Europe countries particularly Russia and western Europe countries like U.K are the top markets for shim stock materials. However, Global Shim Stock Market is also fueled by demand in manufacturing industry, manufacturing hub like Asia pacific regions like china followed by North America. Global Shim Stock Material market can be divided into seven major regions including North America (U.S., Canada), Asia Pacific (ASEAN, Australia, China, India, & New Zealand), Japan, Western Europe (Italy, France, U.K, Spain, Germany), Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia), Asia- Latin America (Mexico. Brazil) and Middle East and Africa (GCC, S. Africa, N. Africa).Global Shim Stock Material market is highly competitive due to the presence of number of manufacturers involved in the manufacturing and supply of shim stock materials. Most of the manufacturers provide a wide variety of shim stock materials. Various key players involved are Lyon Industries Inc., United States Brass & Copper Inc., Artus corp., Eagle Alloys Corp., Coronet Parts Mfg. Co. Inc., Accushim Inc., Aloma Shim and Manufacturing. Metallo Gasket Company, SPIROL International Corporation, Shanghai Metal Corporation. and others.Request for Table of Content@The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application, and Industry.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
Human Insulin Market is Projected to Register a Healthy CAGR of 12.4% During the Forecast Period.

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3308

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/human-insulin-market/toc

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/

According to a new market report published by Persistence Market Research Global Market Study on Human Insulin: Asia Pacific to Witness fastest Growth by 2020, the global human insulin market was valued at USD 24,332.6 million in 2014 and was expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.4% from 2014 to 2020, to reach an estimated value of USD 49,197.3 million in 2020.Request for Sample Copy of Report @Globally, the human insulin market is witnessing significant growth due to increasing prevalence of diabetes and increasing awareness among people about diabetes care. In addition, technological advancements in insulin delivery devices and increasing prevalence of lifestyle related disorders such as obesity are also driving the growth of the market. However, uneven pricing and limited access to human insulin in emerging countries such as Brazil, India, and China are inhibiting the growth of the human insulin market. In addition, strict regulatory requirements for drug approval are also restraining the growth of the market. The global human insulin market was anticipated to grow from an estimated USD 24,332.6 million in 2014 to USD 49,197.3 million in 2020 at a CAGR of 12.4% during the forecast period.In North America, increasing prevalence of diabetes with growing age and availability of advanced human insulin infusion devices are driving the use of human insulin in the market.In addition, increasing prevalence of lifestyle associated disorders such as obesity is also boosting the growth of the human insulin market in this region. For instance, according to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), a U.S.-based national public health institute, over one-third children and adolescents were obese in 2012 in the U.S.In Europe, the human insulin market is driven by rising aging population and increasing prevalence of diabetes. In addition, in Germany the market is evolving due to rising prevalence of diabetes and increasing awareness among people about diabetes care. However, in Asia-Pacific the growth for human insulin is much higher than developed countries due to increasing prevalence of diabetes and increasing government initiatives for improving healthcare.Request for Table of content @Novo Nordisk A/S, Eli Lilly and Company, Sanofi, Biocon, Tonghua Dongbao Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Adocia, Merck & Co., Inc., Pfizer, Inc., Wockhardt, Julphar, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Oramed Pharmaceuticals, Inc. are some of the major players in human insulin market.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) 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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who 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 PMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With a wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports strive to serve clients and satisfy their overall research requirement.For information regarding permissions, contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway,7th FloorNew York City, NY 10007United StatesTel: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWebsite:media@persistencemarketresearch.com
Gamma Knife Market is Anticipated to Register a Healthy CAGR of 3.6% During the Forecast Period

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3742

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/gamma-knife-market/toc

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/

According to a new market report published by Persistence Market Research Global Market Study on Gamma Knife: Asia to Witness Highest Growth by 2020, the global Gamma Knife market is valued at USD 526,733.2 thousand in 2014 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.6% from 2014 to 2020 to reach an estimated value of USD 651,241.9 thousand in 2020.equest to view Sample Report @Radiation therapy is a procedure entailing the precise delivery of high doses of radiation to tumors and other relevant anatomical targets. Gamma Knife radiosurgery is a major form of radiation therapy. It is mainly used to treat brain tumors, arteriovenous malformations, trigeminal neuralgia, acoustic neuroma, and pituitary tumors. Globally, the Gamma Knife market is witnessing significant growth due to increasing prevalence of cancer and obesity and growing aging population. In addition, rising number of initiatives undertaken by various government associations and the advanced features of Gamma Knife systems are also driving the growth of the market. However, stringent regulatory requirements and prolonged approval time for Gamma Knife systems and a high cost of implementation and shortage of skilled manpower inhibit the growth of the market. The global Gamma Knife market is anticipated to grow from an estimated USD 526,733.2 thousand in 2014 to USD 651,241.9 thousand by 2020 at a CAGR of 3.6% during the forecast period.In North America, the Gamma Knife market is growing due to the rising incidence of cancer in the region. In addition, increased awareness about Gamma Knife technology for cancer treatment is also boosting the growth of the market in the region. According to WHO, approximately 2.8 million people had cancer, including brain cancer, in the U.S. in 2000. Moreover, according to the Hindawi Publishing Corporation, an international journal of surgical oncology, approximately 98,000 to 170,000 new brain metastases cases occur every year in North AmericaIn Europe, increasing prevalence of cancer is boosting the growth of the Gamma Knife market in the region. According to WHO, Europe accounts for only one-eighth of the worlds population. However, the region records around a quarter of global cancer cases. Several government associations, such as the Women Against Lung Cancer in Europe (WALCE) and European Head and Neck society (EHNS), are trying to increase awareness about breast cancer, lung cancer, and head and neck cancer and their brain metastases effects in Europe.However, Asia represents the fastest growing region in the Gamma Knife market due to the rise in cancer patients in various countries such as India, China, and Japan. According to WHO, the occurrence of cancer in India and China is set to climb at a rate of 78% from 2013 to 2030. In addition, growing aging population is also supporting the growth of the Gamma Knife market in the region.In Latin America, construction of manufacturing and research facilities by many companies is driving the Gamma Knife market in Latin America. Furthermore, the governments of Latin American countries have recognized the growing epidemic of cancer and are actively devising several patient awareness programs to raise awareness of signs and symptoms of cancer, including brain cancers.Request to view Table of content @Elekta AB, Varian Medical Systems, Inc., and Hokai are some of the leading players in the Gamma Knife market. Other major players in the Gamma Knife market include Huiheng Medical, Inc., Cyber Medical Corporation Limited, Masep Infini Global, Inc., Nordion, Inc., ET Medical Group, and American Shared Hospital Services.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) 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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who 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 PMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With a wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports strive to serve clients and satisfy their overall research requirement.For information regarding permissions, contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway,7th FloorNew York City, NY 10007United StatesTel: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWebsite:media@persistencemarketresearch.com
Chatbot Market Experiencing Growth in Recent Years Due to Rapid Development in Artificial Intelligence Software Industry

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=13091

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/chatbot-market.html

Chatbots use natural language processing to stimulate a conversation with user leading to better customer engagement in applications such as e-commerce, retail and healthcare. Chatbots are accessible on various platforms such as hypertext markup language (HTML) pages, social networking websites, smartphones and computers. They are able to interact with human in various languages and are available in various graphical design format based on the end user application such as cartoon character, animal, child or 3D animated creature.Download Free Research Brochure PDF@The other additional factors contributing to the growth of global chatbot market are consumers reluctance to install apps and availability of new interactive interfacing model with online services. However, the complexity and cost of software is hindering the market growth. Also, the lack of skilled resources, privacy and security are restraining the growth of global chatbot market. The chatbot are being trained and designed to retain and learn from past interaction and conversation between bussiness and individuals. This is expected to provide opportunities of expanding chatbot market and its use in various applications ranging from media publications to personalized assistance.Chatbot Market: SegmentationChatbots are used in healthcare, retail, banking financial services and insurance (BFSI) sectors for applications such as dialog systems, e-commerce customer service, internet gaming and call centers. Chatbots also offer specialized services such as Chatfuel a web based Chatbot is used for telegram services, Digit chatbot for banking, to allow users to interact with their bank accounts and Pana Chatbot is used as an online travel agency. Ultimately, chatbot would change the way customers apply for jobs and become the integral part of human like digital ecosystem.The global chatbot market is segmented on the basis of end use adoption, by type and geography. On the basis of end use adoption, the global Chatbot market is segmented into large sized enterprises and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). In terms of type, the global chatbot market is segmented into stand-alone chatbots and web-based chatbots.Stand-alone chatbots enable control of the functions of users computer such as retrieving documents or playing media files. Web-based chatbots usually run on a remote server and the control of personality, behavior and hosting is with end user. Moreover, on the basis of geography the global Chatbot market is segmented into North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America.Chatbot Market: Competitive DynamicsAspect Software is a leading chatbot manufacturer. The integration of Aspect Software, Inc. with Facebook Messenger support the creation of chatbot in various languages using natural language processing and can be easily deployed on SMS and Twitter messaging platform. Some of the leading companies operating in the global chatbot market with the most significant developments include Microsoft Corporation, Apple Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., Artificial Solutions Ltd., eGain Communications Corporation, Anboto Group, Creative virtual Ltd., Aspect Software, Inc., and Inbenta Technologies Inc.Browse Full Report@About Us:-Transparency Market Research 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.Contact Us:-Transparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.com
Global Rooftop Solar PV Market to be driven by Declining Cost of Batteries and Rising Adoption of Distributed PV Technology

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=3160

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/rooftop-solar-pv-market.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

The global rooftop solar PV market has been exhibiting a positive growth recently. The high efficacy of rooftop solar PV systems, coupled with the subsiding energy payback time, which is supported by various subsidies and tax rebate by several governments across the globe, are the key factors fuelling demand from the market. According to a market study, published by Transparency Market Research (TMR) in 2014, the global market for rooftop solar PVs stood at US$1.7 bn.The decline in costs associated with batteries is likely to fuel the demand of rooftop solar PV systems over the next few years. The rising acceptance of distributed PV technology in the global arena is also expected to add significantly to the growth of the worldwide rooftop solar PV market. Analysts at TMR estimate the global market to expand at a healthy CAGR of 11.0% during the period from 2015 to 2023 and reach a value US$4.5 bn by the end of 2023. However, the dearth of strong smart grid infrastructures and net metering policies can hamper the growth of this market in the near future.Get PDF Brochure for more Professional and Technical industry insights :Residential Building Segment Reports Highest Demand for Rooftop Solar PVsThe leading end user of rooftop solar PV systems are the residential buildings and commercial buildings segments. In 2014, the residential building segment reported the maximum demand for rooftop solar PVs, accounting approximately 61.2% of the overall market.The availability of financial leasing, rebate on taxes, third-party models, and net metering has propelled the residential building segment to emerge as the biggest end user of rooftop solar PV systems. The commercial building segments is also significantly aiding the growth of the global rooftop solar PV market on account of increased installations in government buildings.The U.S. Drives North America Rooftop Solar PV MarketThe global market for rooftop solar PV is spread across North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Rest of the World. North America, among these regions acquired the leading position in 2014, holding almost 39% of the overall market.This regional market is largely driven by the rooftop solar PV market in the U.S in terms of production. California, on the other hand, dominates the North America market in terms of installation. Various offers by the U.S. government, promoting rooftop solar PV systems, such as tax rebate are also boosting the rooftop solar PV market in North America.Complete Report with TOC :Europe occupied the second position in the global rooftop solar PV market in 2014. Germany leads the Europe rooftop solar PV market, since the country has substantial funds for the development of this market. Asia Pacific stood third among the regional rooftop solar PV markets in the same year. This regional market is dominated by Japan and China with key rooftop solar PV projects.Global Rooftop Solar PV Market: Major PlayersSolarCity Corp., Jinko Solar Holding Co. Ltd., Vivint Solar Inc., Rina Solar Ltd., Shunfeng International Clean Energy Ltd., Yingli Green Energy Holding Co. Ltd., SolarWorld AG, Canadian Solar Inc., Hanwha Q CELLS Co. Ltd., JA Solar Holdings Co. Ltd., SunPower Corp., and Sungevity are some of the prominent players in the global rooftop solar PV market.ContactsTransparency Market Research90 State Street Suite 700Albany NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: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 insights for 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, TMR employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207
Global Biological Drugs Market is Projected to Register a Healthy CAGR of 10.1% from 2014 to 2020

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/2883

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/global-biological-drugs-market/toc

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/

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.Request to view Sample Report @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.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.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.Request to view Table of content @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 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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who 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 PMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With a wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports strive to serve clients and satisfy their overall research requirement.For information regarding permissions, contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway,7th FloorNew York City, NY 10007United StatesTel: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWebsite:media@persistencemarketresearch.com
Global Neurostimulation Devices Market to Raise at a CAGR of 12.7% from 2014 to 2020

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/2824

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/neurostimulation-devices-market/toc

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/

According to a new market report published by Persistence Market Research Global Market Study on Neurostimulation Devices - Deep Brain Stimulation Devices to Witness Highest Growth by 2020, the global neurostimulation devices market was valued at US$ 5,088.9 Mn in 2014 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.7% from 2014 to 2020, to reach US$ 10,445.7 Mn by 2020.Request to view Sample Report @Neurostimulation technology involves the use of microelectrodes to activate elements of the nervous system. It involves the use of a neurostimulation device - a battery-powered stopwatch-sized device - which is surgically implanted in the brain and delivers electric signals at scheduled time intervals to the nervous system. These electric signals develop tingling sensations (paresthesia) in the damaged nerve and helps chronic pain and neurological disorders. In chronic pain conditions, these electric signals block the pain messages from the damaged nerve from reaching the brain. These devices are gaining importance in the management of chronic conditions such neuropathic pain, nociceptive pain, Parkinsons disease, epilepsy, and depression. Neuropathic pain occurs due to nerve damage, while nociceptive pain arises from diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and arthritis. These devices are mostly used in cases where systemic drug therapies are not effective.The global neurostimulation devices market is witnessing significant growth due to increasing prevalence of chronic pain and rising incidences of neurological diseases. Moreover, rising awareness about various neurological diseases, growing geriatric population, and increasing investments in research and development of innovative neurostimulation devices are also driving the market. However, availability of alternative treatment therapies for neurological diseases and side-effects of neurostimulation therapy inhibit the growth of the market. The global neurostimulation devices market is anticipated to grow from an estimated US$ 5,088.9 Mn in 2014 to US$ 10,445.7 Mn by 2020 at a CAGR of 12.7% during the forecast period.In North America, the neurostimulation devices market is growing due to increasing incidence of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer and Parkinsons disease. Moreover, initiatives taken by various government and private associations for increasing awareness about various chronic pain and neurological disorders and rising investments in the research and development of novel neurostimulation devices in North America is driving the market in the region.The neurostimulation devices market in Europe is growing due to initiatives taken by various governments to improve healthcare facilities in the region. Furthermore, increasing incidences of chronic pain and neurological diseases and growing aging population are also boosting the growth of the Europe neurostimulation devices market. According to WHO, every year, neurological disorders affect one-third of the population in Europe, and approximately 1% to 2% of the population is diagnosed with psychotic disorders. According to the NHS England - a government organization primarily involved in the improvement of healthcare services in England - approximately 8 million people suffered from chronic pain in the U.K. in 2010, and the number reached 14 million in 2012.Asia Pacific represents the fastest-growing region in the neurostimulation devices market. This is primarily due to growing aging population in various countries such as India and China. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - an organization involved in biomedical and health related research activities - approximately 110 million people in China were aged 65 years and above in 2011 and the number is expected to reach 330 million by 2050. In India, approximately 60 million people were aged 65 years and above in 2011 and the number is expected to reach 227 million by 2050.Request to view Table of content @Medtronic, plc, St. Jude Medical, Inc, Boston Scientific Corporation, and Cyberonics, Inc. are some of the leading players in the neurostimulation devices market. Other major players of neurostimulation devices market include Cochlear, Ltd., NDI Medical, LLC, NeuroPace, Inc., NeuroSigma, Inc., and MED-EL.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) 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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who 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 PMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With a wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports strive to serve clients and satisfy their overall research requirement.For information regarding permissions, contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway,7th FloorNew York City, NY 10007United StatesTel: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWebsite:media@persistencemarketresearch.com
Global High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) Market Is Expected To Generate Huge Profits by 2015 to 2021

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/6727

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/6727

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is a liquid sweetener utilizing a modified form of corn syrup which is also an alternative to sucrose used in foods and beverages industry. High fructose corn syrup is made from corn using a process called wet milling. It holds around nine percent of overall global sweeteners market. There is no as such difference in composition or metabolism from other fructose glucose sweeteners for instance sucrose, honey, and fruit juice concentrates. It generally contains either 42 percent or 55 percent fructose, the remaining sugars being primarily glucose and higher sugars. HFCS is has more stablility, particularly works well in acidic beverages, available in liquid form makes it easier to transport, handle, and mix better than granulated sucrose. Since, fructose is sweeter than glucose, the overall sweetness of the syrup increased resulting in more cost-effective use over sugar in food processing. Its caloric content is equivalent to sugar and thus it shares the same concerns from consumers and industry as that of sugar. Further, the human body metabolizes fructose differently than glucose and so high consumption of HFCS has also been attributed to increasing rates of obesity. HFCS has been widely adopted by U.S. food manufacturers because it offers advantages over granulated sucrose, for instance it is easy to supply, good for stability and ease of handling. Corn is an abundant and reliable crop grown widely across the U.S., while sucrose production is limited. This means most supplies must be imported into the U.S. from sugar-growing countries, which leaves the supply vulnerable to changes in the weather and political conditions in those countries. HFCS is also more stable, particularly in acidic beverages, and because of its liquid form, it is easier to transport, handle, and mix than granulated sucrose.View Sample Report @On the basis of applications the high fructose corn syrup market is segmented into food and beverage and pharmaceutical industry. Food and beverage industry is sub-segmented into baking, canning, cereal product, dairy, carbonated soft drinks, condiments, confections, ice-cream and desserts.Geographically High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan and Middle East & Africa. North America and Japan is one of the significant market place for high fructose corn syrup.High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) market is growing with the demand for sweetener in food and beverage industry. High fructose corn syrup 42 is a good alternative sweeteners of sugar and honey in food preparation to the consumers since consumers are trying to avoid sucrose for its harmful effects; HFCS 42 consists around 42 percent fructose where sugar consists around 50 percent and honey consists around 48 percent fructose which is driving the HFCS market. However, health consciousness and change in life style among consumers of emerging countries are restraining the market since rate of obesity and diabetes are increasing day by day. Hence, zero calorie sweeteners market is much popular among consumers, which is also growing at higher rate in terms of both value and volume. However, high fructose corn syrup is granted Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (U.S. FDA). HFCS has been widely adopted by U.S. food manufacturers because it offers advantages over granulated sucrose, for instance it is easy to supply, good stability and ease of handling. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) market seeking high opportunity in the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Latin America market.Request TOC (desk of content material), Figures and Tables of the report:Some the key players operating across the value chain of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) are Archer Daniels Midland Company, Cargill Inc., INGREDION INCORPORATED, Tate & Lyle.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market in-telligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexi-ble without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Welcome to Best Bets, a weekly column in which The Oregonian's arts desk separates the wheat from the chaff of upcoming theater, classical music and dance performances and visual arts events. Here are our picks for Nov. 11-17.

"Coyote on a Fence," Post5 Theatre



Two Death Row inmates, a prison guard and a reporter make up the cast of this play, which delves into the issues of incarceration, rehabilitation and the death penalty. Actor Jeff Gorham, who plays convict John Brennan, told The Oregonian/OregonLive it's one of the most remarkable shows he's ever been in.

7:30 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, through Nov. 20, Post5Theatre, 1666 S.E. Lambert St. $10-$20, plus "pay what you will" on Sunday and Thursday, post5theatre.or g or 971-333-1758.

"The How and the Why," CoHo Productions

An eminent evolutionary biologist and a student debate evolution, feminism and more in a play that The New York Times called "a smart, densely textured work about men and women, love and conflict, genes and destiny." It's by Sarah Treem, a television writer who co-created Showtime's "The Affair" and has worked on Netflix's "House of Cards" and HBO's "In Treatment."

7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday through Nov. 19, CoHo Theatre, 2257 N.W. Raleigh St. $20-$28, cohoproductions.org or 503-220-2646.

push/FOLD and Jamuna Chiarini

Identity is at the core of a dance double bill, "Epoch," that offers two new works by Portland choreographers Chiarini and Samuel Hobbs. In "The Kitchen Sink," a trio explores how Chiarini's life as a dance artist changed after hip surgery; "November," set to a score by Hobbs, "is a quartet of women as the expression of power and exhaustion," he writes. 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Nov. 11-12, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 N.W. 17th Ave. $16; pushslashfold.org or at the door.

Metropolitan Youth Symphony

The youth orchestra opens its season with a new music director, Raul Gomez, who previously was artistic director and principal conductor of the Mississippi Youth Symphony Orchestra and music director of Kids' Orchestra in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He'll conduct performances of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 and Bernstein's "Candide" overture.

7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 S.W. Broadway; $14-$37, portland5.com or 503-239-4566.

"The Place Where You Started," Portland State University Opera

Composer Mark Lanz Weiser and librettist Amy Punt wrote "The Place Where You Started," an English-language production about a modern-day writer who loses her way creatively, specifically for Portland State University Opera. Portland State will follow the world premiere by taking the production to China. 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Nov. 12-19, also Wednesday, Nov. 16; 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 13 and 20, Lincoln Hall, 1620 S.W. Park Ave. $15-$29; pdx.edu/boxoffice or 503-725-3307

"Magic of Venice," 45th Parallel

Seven musicians will perform 17

th

-century Venetian music with period instruments in this concert presented by the nonprofit 45

th

Parallel, which promotes Pacific Northwest musicians. The program includes two pieces by Vivaldi.

th Ave. $10-$25, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, The Old Church, 1422 S.W. 11Ave. $10-$25, 45thparallelpdx.org or Brown Paper Tickets.

Jaik Faulk

Painter Jaik Faulk, a onetime Portland resident known for what critic John Motley called "loose and at times surreal portraits and still lifes," has a new solo exhibition, "I feel alright with azaleas around." Here, Faulk takes the still life tradition and applies twists from his Louisiana upbringing. Opening reception, 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17; on view, noon-6 p.m. Wednesday-Monday, Nov. 16-Dec. 26, Nationale, 3360 S.E. Division St. Free; nationale.us or 503-477-9786.

If you would like your event to be considered for inclusion in Best Bets, email the details to fineartsbestbets@oregonian.com. Find more arts coverage at oregonlive.com/art.
US-CHINA-GE-HAIER

International firms invested $353 billion in the U.S. economy in 2015, an all-time high and twice as much as in 2014, data show. Those deals include Haier's acquisition of General Electric Co.'s appliances unit in Detroit for $5.6 billion.

(Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON -- Allegations of "terrible" trade deals, the shipping of jobs overseas and the dangers of globalization dominated the presidential campaign. But many states are aggressively courting foreign companies to boost and diversify their economies.

"People make it too complicated," said Michigan's Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, a big proponent of foreign -- especially Chinese -- investment in his state. "Globalization is clearly a huge trend that's been going on for some time and is only going to continue. If you want to be a strong economic engine ... you have to engage."

In Snyder's and other Rust Belt states, U.S. manufacturers left behind willing workforces and abandoned buildings when they departed. In California, foreign tech giants and pharmaceuticals are tapping a supply of skilled workers and access to North American markets.

Many states and regions are looking for foreign investors as a way to boost economic growth. At the same time, there is increasing interest among overseas firms in investing in the relatively stable U.S. economy, said Brad McDearman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has extensively studied states and cities that have attracted investment by foreign companies.

With the reduction in domestic manufacturing and other industry because of plant closings and consolidations, as well as U.S. companies moving overseas, he said, "states and regions are recognizing the need to expand their efforts globally."

International firms invested $353 billion in the U.S. economy in 2015, an all-time high and twice as much as in 2014, according to the Organization for International Investment, which represents the U.S. operations of large foreign corporations.

Those deals included everything from Haier's acquisition of General Electric Co.'s appliances unit in Detroit for $5.6 billion to auto firm Ningbo Joyson Electronic Corp.'s purchase of Key Safety Systems, a Detroit manufacturer of auto safety devices like seatbelts and airbags, for $920 million.

Foreign investment boosts state and local economies in many ways: new factories, new U.S.-based research and development, and the expansion of already established firms, the group said.

But McDearman said that while states and cities obviously gain from foreign investment, it's sometimes hard to track benefits from mergers and acquisitions because the foreign companies are buying existing businesses.

About 80 percent of the investment comes from mergers and acquisitions, he said, and those deals may start with just a few new employees or a few new product lines and grow slowly over time.

A much bigger immediate economic impact comes when a foreign firm builds a brand-new facility in a state or locality, such as Yuhuang Chemical Inc.'s $1.9 billion methanol plant in Louisiana or Vastly's $2 billion paper products plant in Virginia.

Big, new projects are what all the states are after, he said. "But there aren't a lot of them out there and that makes it even more competitive." Most foreign investment is not controversial. But in some instances, many times when China is involved, deals can prompt concerns that they may give foreign businesses and governments access to sensitive technology and threaten U.S. security.

In a report to Congress on 2014 foreign investment, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a division of the U.S. Treasury Department that monitors foreign deals, concluded that "foreign governments are extremely likely to continue to use a range of collection methods to obtain critical U.S. technologies."

Snyder said those concerns are being mitigated by stiff technology security. "It's a concern across the board," he said, not just in foreign investment. Snyder, who made his fortune in the computer and venture capital businesses, said Michigan has been "emphasizing cybersecurity along with international trade and development."

Two analysts from the Rhodium Group, a consulting firm that helps governments and private investors track global trends and assess investment risks, noted that while some high-profile deals, particularly mergers, had been scotched because of cybersecurity concerns, the overall uptick in rejections of foreign investment by the Treasury Department had been a result of a greater number of investments -- not more restrictive government policies.

The number of Chinese investments in the U.S. increased from an average of 13 a year in the late 2000s to 43 a year in the early 2010s, according to the Rhodium analysts. The number of Chinese mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. reached 100 in 2014 and 103 in 2015. In the first half of 2016, Chinese firms invested $18.4 billion in the U.S.

Michigan has made a concerted effort to attract Chinese manufacturing and other industry. Snyder has made five trips to China since becoming governor in 2011. Between January of that year and this November, 23 Chinese companies have invested in Michigan, creating 3,541 jobs and investing $649.5 million in 11 cities, according to Kathy Achtenberg, spokeswoman for the state economic development corporation.

Among the companies is Zhongding USA Cadillac, which announced in August it was expanding its manufacturing facility in Cadillac, Michigan, and creating 125 jobs. The company is getting into the heavy truck and agriculture equipment business.

Karma Automotive LLC, which makes luxury hybrid vehicles, announced in June it will establish an automotive engineering and purchasing hub in Troy to house operations supporting its California-based supply chain activities and automotive production. The project is expected to generate more than $3.6 million and create up to 150 jobs.

During a trip there last year, Snyder signed cooperative agreements aimed at promoting bilateral trade and investment with the Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Sichuan, Hubei and Zhejiang, as well as the city of Chongqing. Those regions have many auto companies and related suppliers, the governor's office said, making them a natural fit for Michigan.

In May, the Michigan Strategic Fund board, part of the Michigan Economic Development Corp., approved a $5 million grant to help lure Chinese investment in the state, including setting up the Michigan-China Innovation Center in Detroit.

The head of the center, Brian Connors, brags that Michigan is among the top destinations for Chinese companies among the 50 states, which he attributes to the presence of U.S. automobile companies in the state.

"People come from all over the globe for our R and D and purchasing decisions, because we are the headquarters for so many of the suppliers," he said.

Indianapolis has lost 50,000 manufacturing jobs in the past 25 years, according to Ashley Elrod, the city's program director for economic development.

"When you hear (political speeches) about Carrier picking up and moving to Mexico ... that was a loss just this year in Indianapolis," she said. Carrier, a heating, ventilation and air conditioning firm, announced in February it was abandoning Indianapolis, eliminating 1,400 jobs.

The city, she said, is mounting a concentrated strategy to bring in foreign firms, which it sees as a way to blunt the impact of the departure of American firms. Many of the foreign firms pay higher wages and invest in training to boost traditional manufacturing workers into positions that require advanced skills, she said.

For example, the Danish firm Grundfos, a maker of water pumps including the Peerless brand, bought a small Indianapolis firm in 2013 as a way to expand its U.S. market. It did so after the local firm's owners rejected a bid from a domestic company, fearing it would fold the local plant into its overall U.S. operation and move jobs out of the city. Grundfos kept jobs in Indianapolis and is looking to expand its plant, Elrod said.

"This example shows where it can be a good thing and reverse the narrative that foreign investment is bad," Elrod said.

Columbus, Ohio, has been attracting foreign investment for years, including Japanese automaker Honda, which has a parts and assembly plant that employs 4,200 in the city, and delivery service DHL Express (USA) Inc., a division of the German logistics company Deutsche Post DHL Group that located its U.S. headquarters just outside of Columbus in Westerville.

More recently, according to Jung Kim, director of research and business intelligence for the city's economic development agency, the city has been trying to help foreign companies like DHL Express with their U.S. operations. The delivery company a few years ago consolidated some U.S. operations and now employs more than 2,200 people in Columbus.

In North Carolina, about 230,500 workers are employed as a result of foreign direct investment, which has amounted to $13.6 billion in the last decade, according to the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, a public-private entity.

One argument the agency makes to attract companies to the state is that because the U.S. continues to be a strong market for sales, it's advantageous to have the manufacturing here too, and avoid large shipping costs as well as long delivery times.

"If you are making product over in China and relying on a couple of months of shipping time, you lose the ability to adapt very quickly to consumer changes," said Christopher Chung, CEO of the economic development group. In addition, he said, labor costs have risen in China, and while they are not nearly as high as in the U.S., it's just another factor that Chinese companies may weigh.

San Diego -- home to huge U.S. military installations and industry, as well as a large medical and pharmaceutical research industry -- was anticipating a downturn in federal funding five years ago and looked to investment from abroad, said Nikia Clarke, executive director of the World Trade Center San Diego.

About 40 percent of the foreign direct investment in the city comes from the U.K. and Japan, she said, and is largely concentrated in the information and communications industry, as well as pharmaceuticals.

Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., a giant Japanese firm that makes a variety of drugs, especially ones to treat diabetes and gastrointestinal diseases, consolidated all of its West Coast drug operation in San Diego.

Electronic components manufacturer Murata Manufacturing Co., another Japanese company, acquired San Diego's Peregrine Semiconductor Corp., a maker of air filters. They expected to add about a hundred jobs and are using Peregrine as the "spear for their North American expansion strategy," Clarke said.

Clarke said while domestic companies sometimes merge with San Diego firms and move the manufacturing plants to Texas or Iowa where costs are cheaper, foreign firms tend to keep their operations where they are.

And contrary to some political rhetoric, San Diego's location on the border with Mexico is an asset, she said.

Foreign companies like Japanese electronics manufacturer Kyocera Corp. locate their headquarters and high-skilled work in the U.S and put the lower-skilled manufacturing efforts right across the border.

"That model works very well here," Clarke said. "The border economy is such an engine of economic growth and that's something that's been left out of the debate."

-- Elaine S. Povich, Stateline.org
University of Oregon campus

A University of Oregon professor is being investigated for wearing blackface to a Halloween party.

(Andrew Theen/The Oregonian)

The professor in blackface was just the start.



In the 10 days since a white University of Oregon law professor dressed as a black doctor for Halloween, students say they have seen three young people wearing blackface. And members of the Black Student Union have received racist and vulgar anonymous threats online.



Campus security officers have been unable to determine who sent the messages, which included phrases such as "black lives splatter."



"I have talked to many students, and they are concerned about their safety," said university Police Chief Matthew Carmichael.



The incident reveals the challenges campuses face as they try to protect students in a digital age while also navigating the racial tension that's followed Donald Trump's presidential campaign.



Anonymous messages are difficult to track, Carmichael said. Officials at Lewis & Clark College faced the same issue in 2014 and 2015 when someone posted racist threats on social media soon after the school held its annual race symposium. An African student there said he was attacked by white students soon after the comments were posted.



At the University of Oregon, Carmichael said he increased patrols and planned a campus safety walk Thursday. But parents and students are demanding more. Friday, they will hold a community rally outside the Erb Memorial Union Amphitheatre.





University of Oregon community rally

Where: Erb Memorial Union, 1228 University St, Eugene

When: Friday, Nov. 11, 2 p.m.

"In light of the election results and the most recent blackface students, our students of color need to know they are not alone," said Nike Greene, a North Portland woman whose daughter Natashia was the target of the messages. "The university needs to know that they must aggressively continue to demonstrate, implement and model a safe climate."



Before professor Nancy Shurtz wore blackface to a staff Halloween party, Natashia Greene thought her campus was making progress.





During Greene's freshman year, she said, a white student blocked her from entering the dorms, saying "we don't have any of your kind here." But the school recently voted to remove a former Ku Klux Klan leader's name from a dormitory, has modestly increased enrollment of black students and is considering a new African American cultural center on campus.

Greene, a sophomore, is an officer with the school's Black Student Union. When news spread about Shurtz's costume, a reporter from the Washington Post reached out for comment. Greene said she was hurt -- "She teaches us. She's in charge of our grades. She's in charge of our education," she said -- but saw the experience as fuel for progress.



When the story ran Nov. 3, Greene sent it to her parents.



"We were just cheering her on," Nike Greene said. "'Way to have a voice, way to articulate so you're not just stuck in anger. You're talking about moving forward.' We were excited. My little 19-year-old is doing some big stuff."



A few hours later, Natashia Greene's phone showed a new message. She expected feedback on the article. Instead, she found someone had posted a slew of threats on the Black Student Union's Facebook page. One of them, on an event listing, suggested people who hate African Americans now had a way to find them.



In a direct message peppered with the n-word, the person -- using an Aryan pseudonym -- urged Greene to "go kill more of your own people and leave white alone."



"Black lives splatter!" he wrote in the message, shared with The Oregonian/OregonLive.



Greene knows hatred can turn into violence. In Greenville, Miss., she saw on the news, someone set an African American church on fire and spray-painted "Vote Trump" on an outside wall. In Gresham, police said a white supremacist ran over and killed a black teenager.



"I just broke down into tears," Greene said. "I was just that scared. Being so close to the election, knowing people feel more comfortable to be racist, it just hit me: Something could actually happen to me, and nobody would care."



Her parents rushed to Eugene.



"She was telling us, 'They know where we are. They know where we meet. We don't know who they are or where they are," Nike Greene said.





Nike Greene called the school's diversity department, hoping to find someone to protect her daughter. They sent her to someone's voicemail, Nike Greene said. For much of the drive down, Nike Greene said, they couldn't reach an adult to protect their daughter.



Campus security officers responded, as did a social worker. But there was little they could do.



"It's difficult to track when you have anonymous Internet harassers," Carmichael said.



They saw some successes, Nike Greene said. A black professor left an off-campus event to be with the family. But ultimately, Nike Greene and her husband, Herman Greene, left with their daughter that weekend not confident the school could protect her.



"What's happening is the same thing that happened 70 years ago," Herman Greene said. "The Klan mask has been replaced with Facebook Messenger. The Klan had the comfort of the secret, the thought that no one knew who they were because they couldn't see behind the mask. That's the same thing that's happening right now. As far as she knows, this is someone across the hall forming a hate group."



After a weekend in Portland, Natashia Greene returned to Eugene. She needed to do what she had promised in the Washington Post article, she said. She needed to plot a way forward.



On Monday, Nov. 7, University President Michael Schill sent a campuswide email condemning Shurtz's costume. He said he was angry and "more than a little sad." He asked students and faculty to "leave space in your hearts ... for forgiveness and compassion" for Shurtz.



Near the end of the 1,200-word email, he also wrote he was "aware" some people had received "communications that are hateful, racist and make them feel unsafe."



"I have read some of them, and they sicken me," he wrote. "We have not been able to find any credible evidence that they emanate from members of our university community."



But the letter didn't spend much time addressing the threats.



"You are very articulate when it comes to the professor, but you seem really removed from what is the reality of the impact on specific black students," Nike Greene said. "They don't want people to realize the true impact her actions are having. It's not just a picture that went out there. You weren't the mom on the freeway trying to figure out if your daughter is safe or not. That professor isn't on the phone having to say, 'Mom, can you come get me?'"



As the week wore on, as the presidential election appeared to create deeper divisions around race, the Greene family tried to channel their anger and fear into good. Friday, they will join with University of Oregon students and community members driving from Portland to hold a community rally.



"We're all going to make this a safe place for black students," Natashia Greene said.



They invited Schill to speak. He accepted.

-- Casey Parks

503-221-8271

cparks@oregonian.com; @caseyparks
In the days following the election of Donald Trump, schools in Oregon are working to deal with racially based bullying and attacks.

On Wednesday, two students were suspended from Silverton High School for intimidating classmates. Witnesses reported they were part of a crowd yelling, "Pack your bags, you're leaving tomorrow" and "Tell your family good-bye" at Hispanic students.

Also on Wednesday, three people were seen wearing blackface on the University of Oregon campus.

Now, in North Bend, on the Oregon coast, and Bend, in central Oregon, news sources report more incidents of racism at schools.

According to the World, two racially charged acts were reported at North Bend Middle School in the day after Trump's election.

"Students shouted and chanted 'Go back to Mexico' at an 11-year-old student from Colombia who is an American citizen," wrote The World, "while racist jokes reportedly were told throughout the school."

The school held an "impromptu" assembly after these events were reported.

"They went over the steps we take as a district to handle racism," Superintendent Bill Yester told The World. "They met with the students, which usually handles these types of things, and let them know our policies and that with two or three steps, or recurring actions will lead to suspension."

Yester attributed these incidents to the results of the presidential election.

At High Desert Middle School in Bend, several Hispanic students said they were targeted by classmates after the election.

"They said that we're dumb, we're rapists, we're retarded, we have no jobs," student Brian Zendejas told NewsChannel 21.

At least one parent of a student targeted in the attack blames the election of Trump for increases in racially motivated harassment.

While the school hasn't confirmed what happened to the students involved in the attack, NewsChannel 21 reports that "a teacher at the school posted on social media saying the students involved were either suspended or expelled for saying racial slurs."

In a statement to the channel, Bend-La Pine Schools officials said, "We will not allow bullying, harassment or discrimination. We will not tolerate hateful language or behavior. We will not condone any violation of board policy or state or federal laws. Students who are found to be in violation of district policies and our code of conduct will be subject to discipline, up to and including expulsion."

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052

lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker
For nearly 50 years, the leather doctor's bag served as a reminder of the horrors of war and the fragility of life.

Over the decades, the family took the bag to two countries, four states and five cities. In every place they called home, the bag was prominently displayed next to a framed newspaper story.

That yellowing page featured a black-and-white photograph of a U.S. Army general pinning a medal on a little boy's shirt.

To glance at the bag and the photograph was to pause and reflect on what matters.

Youth. Love. War.

Courage. Family. Loss.

And now, healing.

***

Ginger Carroll and her husband, Dr. J. Michael Carroll, would glance at that bag and photo several times a week. Occasionally, they talked about how it came into their lives.

In 1967, when Carroll was a medical student, a doctor at the school of medicine sent word that he needed to see him. Carroll, then 23 and in his third year, arrived at the senior doctor's office.

The doctor pulled out a used doctor's bag, dark brown and scuffed. The doctor explained that a widow had given the bag to the school. Her husband had been a doctor and she wanted his bag passed on to a student.

Carroll knew there were smarter students, more popular students. He never knew why he'd been selected. But he took the bag that day and went about his business.

That night, he took it home and opened it with his wife. Inside, they found a stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff and rubber tourniquet, all of them clearly used. Tucked inside was a story from The Oregonian. The man who had owned the bag died on a battlefield in Vietnam.

They read the story: Army Capt. Arthur E. Lewis, a battalion surgeon, died in Cu Chi during a search and destroy mission. His widow was identified as Mrs. Kathy Lewis. The photograph showed his son, Mark, receiving a Silver Star awarded posthumously to Lewis, for heroism.

In the photo, the 4-year-old stood at attention.

The young medical student, moved by this gift, vowed never to use the bag. But he would preserve it.

The couple framed the newspaper story. They displayed it next to the bag with other family heirlooms. Shortly after that, someone broke into the house and stole the bag, tossing the contents to the floor.

The bag was gone. But Carroll couldn't shake off the sense of responsibility to Capt. Arthur E. Lewis. The ghost of the war hero he'd never met haunted him.

He felt he owed the man.

So Carroll took a beautiful unused bag, one his father had given him when he was admitted to medical school. He carefully placed the stethoscope, blood pressure cuff and tourniquet in the bag.

He closed it.

He would not open it again.

***

Carroll and his wife, both of whom had been born and raised in Portland, agreed that they needed to one day return the bag to the Lewis family and to explain the circumstances of how they came to care for it.

They never did.

Next month.

Next year.

Always something.

Then, in 2011, Carroll, an oncologist who by then lived in Fairbanks, died unexpectedly of a heart attack in his sleep.

Early in his career, Carroll had been stationed at a small Alaskan Indian village on the Yukon River. He delivered babies, stitched up wounds and cared for the sick. When he decided to specialize in oncology, Carroll moved to Utah for advanced studies and a residency.

He returned to Alaska, where he was helped create a cancer center in Fairbanks, the first in the state. After he died, the center was named after him.

His sudden death stunned his widow.

In a strange way, the bag, displayed in what the family called the museum room, comforted her. It reminded her that, somewhere in the world, another widow understood her pain.

This spring, Ginger Carroll decided it was time to return the bag to the rightful owner. Although healthy, Carroll was 73, and she wanted to return the bag before she died. She tried searching the internet. But she wasn't tech savvy and found nothing. She called the medical school, now Oregon Health & Science University, and explained the situation. She was told they had no available records.

Carroll was ready to quit.

She decided to make one last call, leaving a message at The Oregonian, on an editor's voice mail. She said she had a medical bag and she couldn't find the rightful owner.

She was looking for Mark Lewis, the little boy in the photograph.

After making the call, Carroll went to look at the bag.

Beautiful. Full of meaning and melancholy.

The story of Dr. Lewis' bag was all of that.

What it needed was the right ending.

***

Carroll's message made its way to me. I called her in Alaska. She said she owned a Portland condo where her mother once lived. If I could find the Lewis family, she'd fly to the city with the bag to meet them.

Like her, I ran into dead ends.

But eventually I reached a Mark Lewis at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in Corvallis. I identified myself as a newspaper reporter. I told him I had a crazy question.

Was he related to Arthur Lewis?

A long pause.

The man on the phone was the little boy in the photograph, standing at attention, gazing into the camera. Dr. Lewis was his father.

He knew nothing about a bag or his mother's request. Her name, it turned out, was Kay, not Kathy as the newspaper said.

She'd never told anyone about the bag: Not her parents, in-laws or children. Once she gave the bag to the medical school, she left the past behind. She'd pushed the memories deep down.

Out of pain and necessity, she had to move on.

Life doesn't work that cleanly.

The past is always with us.

In the morning, she picked up the telephone and called me:

"Arthur Lewis was my husband."

***

Kay and Arthur had met and dated when they were students at Portland State University. When he went to what was then the University of Oregon Medical School, she ended up on the hill, too, in the nursing program. They got married, had two children and then her husband went to Texas for his internship. When that ended, with the war going, he had to apply for a commission in the military or be drafted.

He enlisted the U.S. Army and was assigned to the 23rd Infantry Division. He and his family were based in Anchorage, where he'd be a battalion surgeon.

In the spring of 1966, commanders offered him a cushy assignment that would forever keep him out of harm's way. Say the word, and he'd get a permanent post on the base dispensary.

There was no choice.

Lewis was devoted to his men.

And they to him.

Shortly after that, orders came: The men were being shipped to Vietnam.

They went into combat from practically the first day in country.

They were on a mission in a heavily wooded area just a few weeks in. All hell broke loose. Explosions and gunfire from snipers. The soldiers were trapped in a minefield.

Wounded men screamed for help from the man they lovingly called "Doc."

He came running.

He treated them the best he could. It was nothing like medical school. Body parts. Mangled limbs. Uncontrollable bleeding. He moved from man to man as the battle raged all around them. The enemy, watching this doctor, waited until he was crouched over a wounded man.

They remotely detonated a landmine.

Capt. Arthur E. Lewis died.

He was 29.

He'd been in Vietnam for 17 days.

***

I found a private room at the newspaper to talk with Kay Lewis by phone. I told her about Ginger Carroll and what little I knew about the story. I explained that Carroll wanted to come to Portland and give her the bag. Would she agree to a meeting?

The conversation was short and to the point: Yes.

Then Lewis, a home health care nurse, said she had to attend a meeting. She hung up.

The next morning, my phone rang. Our conversation had stirred emotions from long ago. Lewis, reflective, wanted to tell me a story that no one else had ever heard in such detail.

"All this has brought back so many memories. When Art was in Vietnam, I moved with the kids from Fairbanks to Parkrose so we could live with my parents. I'm 77. This was all 50 years ago. I ...

I heard her cry.

"Excuse me."

She gathered herself.

"Let me tell you something. To this day, I hate to iron."

I told her I was confused.

"Please, just listen."

And so I did.

"It's so strange what a person remembers. It feels like yesterday. I can remember every detail. Where I was standing, the colors of the wall.

"I was ironing that day. I happened to look out the window and saw a white sedan drive down the road. I knew the cars around there. This wasn't any of the neighbor cars. I had this awful feeling. I'd been so antsy since Art left.

"Our last conversation had been about what would happen if he didn't come home. I told him I didn't want to talk about it. He said we had to. We were so young. We were just starting out. We married in 1961. We always talked about the future, and what we wanted out of life."

She paused. "I'm sorry. Where was I?"

The car.

"Yes. I saw the white car turn around. At that moment, I knew. There I was, ironing, and in my heart I knew."

I imagined her, a housewife, her parents at work, her kids asleep in a back room.

The before.

A doorbell rings.

The after.

"I opened the door. A man in a uniform was there. He showed me identification. He was a major. He had tears in his eyes. I said that I wanted him to tell me that Art was OK. He said, 'No ma'am. He's been killed.'

"I prayed right there. Right there in the doorway. I prayed that Art hadn't suffered. I ... I...."

We paused. I don't want to pry, I said.

"No, it's fine. It's good to talk."

She took a deep breath.

"Right now, I can tell you what was by the phone on the wall when I picked it up and called my father and said he and my mother had to come home right away. I needed them because Art was gone.

"My daughter was just an infant. I got her from her crib and held her in my arms. I carried her into my son's room. He was in bed, asleep. I woke him up."

A small heart about to break.

"I said that Mommy needed him to come out to meet this nice man. We went to the other room. I sat on a piano bench. I said the man was there to tell us that Daddy wasn't coming home from Vietnam. He was in Heaven and we were going to miss him very much.

"The major began crying. That got Mark crying. He didn't really know what was going on. The only thing that had ever died in our home was a goldfish."

That night, after the extended family had gone home, 4-year-old Mark and baby Teri to bed, Kay Lewis was alone.

"I was sitting in a rocking chair. The only light was from the nightlight. I went and got Art's sweater. It sounds strange, but I wrapped myself in it. It still smelled like him."

His body was flown home to Portland two weeks later. The church where the couple had married became the place for his funeral ceremony.

"I got letters from generals. One from the White House and President Johnson. He said he knew that Art had two children. He said if there was anything he or Lady Bird could do, I was to let him know. Art was awarded the medal, which was pinned on Mark."

A month later, his footlocker arrived from Vietnam.

"His uniform. His captain's bars. The bag. His equipment. I didn't want to let anything out of my sight. He was half of me. He was gone. Part of me was gone."

A few months passed.

Lewis had been buried in a Southeast Portland cemetery. His family planted a tree there, and his widow often drove there to talk with him.

But life is for the living.

She needed to go on.

One day, she opened his medical bag and put inside the instruments that came home in the footlocker: Stethoscope, blood pressure cuff and the rubber tourniquet. He'd used them on the battlefield.

"I had my memories. A part of him had to leave me. I drove up to the hospital with that bag. When he got out of the Army, Art was going to start a residency at the medical school. He wanted to be an eye surgeon. I walked the hospital corridor and saw a doctor that knew Art. I handed the bag to him. I told him to give it to an outstanding medical student. I said that's what Art would have wanted. Then I turned around and left."

The original newspaper story, with the photo of Lewis' son receiving the medal, was floating around the hospital. Someone tracked it down and slipped it into the medical bag.

Michael Carroll was called to the office.

The bag was handed over.

And that was the end.

But not really.

***

In her Pearl District apartment, Ginger Carroll waited. She bustled around the kitchen, preparing something to eat and drink as if hosting an early-evening cocktail party.

Finally - after 50 years - there was nothing for her to do but wait.

My phone rang.

"They're here," I told Carroll.

They were brought together because of the most intimate passages of a life.

And yet they were strangers.

They hugged and nervously chattered: What a beautiful space, what a wonderful view, hope the traffic wasn't bad. No, water will be just fine.

Lewis, introduced her children: Mark and Teri.

They sat at the table. The medical bag in the middle.

"I'm a person of strong faith," Lewis said.

She began crying.

"I'm sorry to be so weepy. The pain of my husband's death was too much for even his parents to talk about. I carried this for so long. I am so grateful to you."

Carroll gently touched her arm.

"I understand."

She pushed the bag toward Lewis.

The widow opened it, pulled out the contents.

"I know these things so well," she said. "That's Art's handwriting on the cuff. I had him for all those years. I knew him. My children loved their father, but didn't know him."

She passed the blood pressure cuff to her daughter.

"This is the first time I've seen my father's handwriting," Teri Lewis said.

That broke the ice. The two widows talked about their husbands. A first date on New Year's Eve. Fishing while pregnant. Nicknames, hobbies and children. Both men had a dry sense of humor.

The conversation quieted.

Carroll handed the bag to Lewis.

"This is yours now," she said. "I want to keep the framed story, though. It will be displayed in my home. It will remind me of you, of us."

Carroll had one last item to deliver, a handwritten note:

In Memoriam

Captain Lewis - May your courage and patriotism be forever remembered and cherished by every American. It was a great honor and privilege to keep safe a symbol of your bravery and ultimate sacrifice and the greatest gift from your family to our nation.

Your medical bag exemplified total commitment to placing the welfare of others before your own - this duty a cornerstone of your family culture.

Thank you.

The Carroll family.

And that is how the long journey drew to a close.

Soon, they'd go their separate ways.

But they'd be forever linked by two good men.

--Tom Hallman Jr.

thallman@oregonian.com; 503 221-8224

@thallmanjr

News researcher Lynne Palombo contributed to this report.
Chronicles-Lion.jpg.jpeg

Anna Popplewell, William Moseley, and Georgie Henley in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," adapted from the C.S. Lewis novel.

(Walt Disney Pictures)

Pay-Per-View/Video-On-Demand

"Sausage Party," a comedy about singing supermarket groceries discovering their position on the food chain, is an R-rated animated movie with drug humor, juvenile puns, profane language and raunchy material. It is not for kids. Also on DVD and Blu-ray.

Also new: "Indignation" (R), an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel with Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon, and the romantic comedy "Operator" (not rated).

Available same day as select theaters nationwide is the crime thriller "Dog Eat Dog" (not rated) with Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe, the romantic comedy "Dreamland" (not rated) with Jason Schwartzman, and the horror film "The Monster" (R) with Zoe Kazan.

Netflix

Kevin James is a mild-mannered accountant mistaken for a professional killer in the action comedy "True Memoirs of An International Assassin" (2016, not rated) made for Netflix.

Kid stuff: the new batch of family movies include the epic fantasy "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" (2005, PG) and the animated Disney films "The Emperor's New Groove" (2000, G) and "Lilo and Stitch" (2002, PG).

Streaming international TV: the crime dramas "Case: Season 1" from Iceland and "Estocolmo: Season 1" from Argentina (both subtitled) and the British murder mysteries "Thorne: Sleepyhead" (2010) and "Thorne: Scaredy Cat" (2010) with David Morrissey.

Amazon Prime

"The Neon Demon" (2016, R), starring Elle Fanning as an innocent in the predatory Los Angeles modeling industry, is a horror film as fashion layout.

True stories: The Edward Snowden documentary "Citizenfour" (2014, R) won an Academy Award.

"The Night Manager" (2016), an Emmy-winning British miniseries based on John le Carre's spy thriller, stars Tom Hiddleston as a civilian taking on international arms dealer Hugh Laurie.

More streaming TV: the miniseries "Flesh and Bone: Season 1" (2015) set in a high-pressure New York ballet company, plus the shot-in-Portland supernatural series "Grimm: Season 5" and the Amazon original "Red Oaks: Season 2."

Also new: the comedy "Morris From America" (2016, R) drops an African-American teenager in Germany and "Battle in Seattle" (2008, R) dramatizes the 1999 World Trade Organization protests.

Hulu

The climate change documentary "Before the Flood" (PG) is on Hulu as well as YouTube and video on demand.

HBO Now

Dakota Johnson, Rebel Wilson and Alison Brie are your guides in "How to be Single" (2016, R).

The World War II documentary "Underfire: The Untold Story of PFC. Tony Vaccaro" (not rated) streams ahead of its Monday cable debut.

New on disc

"Sausage Party," "Indignation," "Morris From America," "Phantom Boy," "Taxi Driver: 40th Anniversary Edition"

Redbox

"The Legend of Tarzan," "Ice Age: Collision Course," "Indignation," "Morris From America," "Phantom Boy"

Sean Axmaker is a Seattle film critic and writer. His reviews of streaming movies and TV can be found at http://streamondemandathome.com.
Chris Hornbecker

10 best concerts up next in Portland, November 11-17

Pink Martini, Kris Kristofferson and more on the way.

-- David Greenwald

dgreenwald@oregonian.com

503-294-7625; @davidegreenwald

Instagram: Oregonianmusic

Don't Edit

Kris Kristofferson

The songwriter behind "Me and Bobby McGee," "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" and other classics rides the highway to Portland.

Friday, Nov. 11, Newmark Theatre, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $39.50-$62.50, portland5.com.

Don't Edit

Lukas Graham

The Danish band behind "7 Years" bring their radio hits to their biggest Portland show yet.

Friday, Nov. 11, Roseland Theater, 8 p.m., all-ages. Tickets: $29.95-$39.95, roselandpdx.com.

Don't Edit

Sturgill Simpson

The country rebel's latest is this spring's "A Sailor's Guide to Earth." Catch Kristofferson the night before for a multi-generational double-bill.

Saturday, Nov. 12, Keller Auditorium, 8 p.m. Tickets: $35, portland5.com.

Don't Edit

Descendents

The punk legends made a major comeback this year: new album "Hypercaffium Spazzinate" is their first since 2004.

Saturday, Nov. 12, Roseland Theater, 9 p.m., all-ages. Tickets: roselandpdx.comsold out, try resellers.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Campo Formio and Prettiest Eyes

One of the final dates on the Know's calendar before it exits NE Alberta. Reminisce over the punk shows of yore and send the independent venue off into the gentrified sunset.

Sunday, Nov. 13, The Know, 8 p.m. Tickets at the door.

Don't Edit

Dream. Do. Dazzle - A Celebration of Lisa Lepine

Over a dozen Portland musicians pay tribute to the late Lisa Lepine, the concert promoter, publicist and booker who was a force in Portland for years. Ed & the Boats and Chervona will lead the charity night, which will benefit the Jeremy Wilson Foundation's Lisa Lepine Musicians Relief Fund.

Sunday, Nov. 13, Crystal Ballroom, 6 p.m. Tickets: $15 donation, crystalballroompdx.com.

Don't Edit

The Beach Boys

They call themselves the Beach Boys, but this is the Mike Love version of the band, along with Bruce Johnston (and without Brian Wilson). Still, Love remains a Beach Boys founder, and the tour arrives alongside his memoir.

Sunday, Nov. 13, Keller Auditorium, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $49-$79, VIP packages available, portland5.com; Nov. 14, Hult Center Silva Concert Hall, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $45-$85, VIP packages available, hultcenter.org.

Don't Edit

Lapsley

The atmospheric British artist's debut, "Long Way Home," has drawn comparisons to James Blake and Adele.

Monday, Nov. 14, Wonder Ballroom, 7 p.m. doors, all ages. Tickets: $20, wonderballroom.com.

Don't Edit

An Evening with Pink Martini

The beloved Portland globe-trotters present a night with new album "Je dis oui!," which pianist Thomas Lauderdale calls the ensemble's "happiest" effort in years.

Wednesday, Nov. 16, Keller Auditorium, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $35-$95, portland5.com.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox

The vintage-style band, a YouTube favorite for doo-wop, ragtime and other retro covers of pop hits, have become stars in their own right.

Thursday, Nov. 17, Moda Center Theater of the Clouds, 8 p.m. Tickets: $39.50-$105, livenation.com.
1trump.JPG

In this Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a campaign state at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in Eau Claire, Wis.

(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

By Clive Crook

President Trump. A handful of syllables still hard to get one's mind around. How on earth did this happen?

There's no single reason. Any number of factors were involved, and it wouldn't have taken much for things to have turned out differently. If the Republican Party had been slightly less willing to be stolen by a populist demagogue; if James Comey and the Federal Bureau of Investigation hadn't waded in (twice) so clumsily; if Wikileaks hadn't supplied a constant stream of reminders about the hypocrisy and venality of the professional political class; if the professional political class had been a bit less hypocritical and venal in the first place; if any of these things and who knows what else had been different, then Trump the outrageous outsider might have lost.

Still, two things seem to loom large. First, that Hillary Clinton was an objectively bad candidate. Second, that having chosen so poorly, Democrats came up with yet more ways to repel a large segment of the electorate. If I'd been asked to advise them on how to lose an election to a manifestly unqualified opponent, I'm not sure I could have been much help: They had it covered.

From the outset, many voters were clearly fed up with Washington and all its works. Up and down the country, the political establishment was cordially detested. Step forward, Hillary Clinton, wife of an ex-president, champion of the downtrodden, somehow wealthy, trailing scandals, friends in all the right places, anointed after a rigged nomination -- in short, the complete representative of politics as usual. Yet if Clinton was a bad candidate, Trump was so much worse. Even many of his supporters acknowledge his unfitness. And remember, the election was close. Something else (aside from the design of the Electoral College) was needed to put Trump in the White House.

The crucial extra ingredient, I think, was the way the case against Trump was framed. Clinton's goal should have been to detach a slice of his support. The best way for her to do that, issue by issue, would have been to acknowledge the particle of truth in his claims, if any, and say why her approach to the problem was better. Instead, she and her supporters refused to grant the validity of any part of Trump's pitch. Even that wasn't enough. Trump was a racist and a fascist, they said. Support him, and you're no better: Either that, or you're an idiot for failing to see it.

Apparently it takes more than four years of college to understand this: You don't get people to see things your way by calling them idiots and racists, or sorting them into baskets of deplorables and pitiables (deserving of sympathy for their moral and intellectual failings). If you can't manage genuine respect for the people whose votes you want, at least try to fake it.

However, forgive me if I go further. It really ought to be possible to manage some actual respect. The complaints that Trump is addressing deserve better than to be recast in caricature then dismissed with contempt.

Take immigration, the issue that Trump first used to claim the spotlight. Illegal immigration on the scale the U.S. has seen in recent years is a sign, at the very least, that something isn't working. Comprehensive immigration reform of the kind suggested by Clinton is a much better answer than building a wall. But you can regard illegal immigration as a problem, believe on the whole that laws should be enforced, and see Clinton's proposal as inadequate, without being anti-immigrant, much less racist.

Trump is a reckless loudmouth, often saying things that beg to be misunderstood -- but consider the endlessly repeated "Mexicans are rapists" controversy. What his supporters understood Trump to mean was that illegal immigrants have committed crimes, including rapes; that those people shouldn't have been in the U.S. in the first place; and that if the system had worked, the crimes wouldn't have happened. In the universally-sanctioned retelling, this became "Trump calls Mexicans rapists." Perfecting the device, Tim Kaine explicitly accused Trump of saying, "All Mexicans are rapists."

This nonsense utterly failed as persuasion. It didn't refute Trump. It was a patent refusal to engage, expressed for good measure as a slur against people who disagree.

This, to me, is where the oft-mentioned parallel with Britain's vote to quit the European Union is closest. Yes, plainly, Trump's election and the Brexit vote are rebellions against elite opinion -- that is, against political orthodoxy and its defenders. In both cases, the question is, how does one account for the uprising?

Elite opinion admits of only one answer: People are more stupid and bigoted than we ever imagined. Without denying that there's plenty of stupidity and bigotry to go around, I think it's more a matter of elite incompetence. Elite opinion heard the rebels' complaints, but instead of acknowledging what was valid, it rejected the grievances in every particular and dismissed the complainers as fools or worse.

The elites weren't deaf. They were dumb.

Crook is a Bloomberg View columnist and writes editorials on economics, finance and politics.

For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.

(c) 2016, Bloomberg View
Mike Francis

This Veterans Day, give a thought to those who have come home from wars overseas and are still working out their place in the civilian world.

Take local veterans Kevin Pannell, Damon Faust and Seth Grant, who went to Haiti after Hurricane Matthew and measured their effectiveness by what didn't happen while they were there. There were no riots. Nobody was shot. Civic officials collaborated to deliver aid, instead of skimming the best material for themselves.

For a month this fall, they helped keep chaos at bay and provided much-needed food, water and toiletries to the people displaced by the hurricane. These Oregon veterans found purpose in Haiti, where the hurricane knocked out power, tore roofs off buildings and disrupted the flow of food and water.

The calm didn't hold.

Not long after the three vets had come home to Portland in late October, the State Department issued a travel advisory to U.S. citizens to avoid travel within Haiti's southern claw because the security environment was "fluid and uncertain." By Nov. 4, the area where the Oregonians had served was riddled with serious crime, mob action and civil unrest.

The veterans went to the storm-battered country to help manage aid operations around Dame Marie, a seaside village where aid was slower to arrive than in more populated areas. As unpaid volunteers working with HERO (Haitian Emergency Response Operations), they helped organize locals to be effective first responders and keepers of security.

They went in like soldiers, not simply as distributors of food and water. Behind closed doors, with the mayor, the police chief and church leaders, they pushed locals from the community on Haiti's southern edge to take responsibility for the relief work -- to take care of their own.

The heat, the post-disaster chaos and Haiti's history of corruption all took a toll on the Oregonians. They were always on alert, even more than when they deployed to war zones, where they could relax between missions inside a fortified base. Pannell, who lost two legs in Iraq and walks with the aid of prosthetic legs, said he was nervous until he got to work in Port-au-Prince, where he helped with communications.

In Haiti, little went according to plan. A relief barge arrived days late to deliver aid. A helicopter relief mission delivered toothpaste and other toiletries instead of the urgently needed food and water. Volunteers unloaded a shipment of supplies at the makeshift landing zone, finding later that they needed to reload the shipment because the aircraft had come to the wrong destination.

The veterans maintain order through it all. As crowds massed around the landing zone, Faust had to walk people around and direct security work. For one local security official, he said, "I had to physically turn his head and say 'Don't look at the plane. Watch the crowd.'"

Share your opinion

Submit your essay of 700 words or less to commentary@oregonlive.com. Please include your email and phone number for verification.

The veterans got as much or more from the work as the Haitians did. Grant, who has been working in Portland as a nightclub bouncer, said his time in Haiti points the way to his next chapter in life. After being ferried around by many bush pilots while in Dame Marie, he'd like to go back to flight school. The experience in Haiti restored their sense of purpose, the esprit de corps they miss. While postwar life has peaks and valleys, the work in Haiti carried a sense of meaning.

Faust feels the same. "I am a fractured, vulnerable human being," he said, alluding to an earlier suicide attempt. "But veterans are ingrained with service; serving others. And serving others is serving myself."

Mike Francis of Portland is a former reporter and editor for The Oregonian/OregonLive who covered military and veterans issues from 2004 to 2015.
-a9f2ce33a0f189c2.JPG

Guests react to election results Tuesday during Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's election night rally in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York.

(Patrick Semansky/Associated Press)

STAGES OF GRIEF: The national election results have left me in one of the stages of grief and feeling profoundly disconnected from the current values and political practices that a majority now seem to hold. What has seemed to prevail is the Republican model of refusing to govern, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Donald Trump vilifying opponents, offering no solutions (health care, budget, foreign policy), and convincing citizens that they are miserable. The last stage of grief, acceptance, is one that I will never reach in these circumstance.

Michael Morrissey, Northeast Portland

*

RIGGED: I'm not quite sure how to take the results of the election. I thought that we were ready to accept a woman as president, since old, white guys have been in charge forever and have seldom gotten it right. We were open-minded enough to elect a black president, although Barack Obama was never given the opportunity to succeed, thanks to an obstructionist, do-nothing, right-wing Congress. Somehow, people were convinced or brainwashed into believing that Clinton is less trustworthy than the hateful, bigoted Trump. But he got elected -- so he must be right when he says it's a rigged system.

Mitch Scheele, Albany

*

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SURPRISE: Unbelievable! Or is it? The Democratic Party saw the possibility of this happening, which is why they were out campaigning so intensely these past few weeks. Hillary, Bill, Chelsea, Obama, Michelle, Bernie and Biden were going all-out to prevent an upset. The polls notwithstanding, they realized that in a severely divided country anything could happen, and it did.

Has any presidential candidate in recent memory produced so many self-inflicted wounds and created so many obstacles to success as Donald Trump? The list seems endless: The Obama birther fiasco; insulting and denigrating women, immigrants and Muslims; his wife's plagiarized convention speech; a poor performance during the presidential election debates; a weak political organization. The list goes on. And yet he still won.

Only one other candidate with so many negatives comes to mind: Hillary Clinton. Individually her transgressions were not as flagrant as Trump's, but collectively they were more damaging. "Clinton fatigue" surfaced in 2000, and then seemed to fade away. However, it resurfaced during the recent campaign. Combined with "Obama fatigue" after almost eight years of weak leadership and failed policies, it was just too much for the American people.

If there was ever a case for believing in divine intervention, this is it. We now have had two miracles in one week. From reading the political polls, one might have concluded that only God or Hillary could cause her to lose the election. One or both of them did.

The other miracle occurred a week earlier in Cleveland when the Cubs won the World Series.

Greg Nelson, Wilsonville

*

CRASS ACT: Is this how racists Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, David Duke, gun idiot Wayne LaPierre and others felt in 2008 and 2012? The primary -- and, actually, the only -- difference between their kicked-in-the-stomach feeling then and ours today is that their racist, sexist, xenophobic wickedness was thwarted, while our pain derives from loss of hope. Hope that civil discourse would return to public officials; hope that crude language and crass behavior would not characterize public officials; hope that rational thought and action would prevail; and hope that sexism, xenophobia, racism, hatred, fear and divisiveness would not fill the White House.

Americans: Many of you have rejected a class act and chosen a crass act. OK, now let's keep Hillary's message, from her astounding peaceful concession speech, in our direct line of sight. It's the message she's repeated throughout her life: Never give up. Keep fighting for what we know is right.

Geoff Godfrey, Newberg

*

ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: I voted for Hillary Clinton. She received the majority of popular votes. Donald Trump won.

Most people believe that the entire premise of democracy is based on the rule that in an election the person who gets the most votes wins. Now, for the second time in recent history, that concept has been trampled to pieces.

If you read the history of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, it is possible to understand the origins of the Electoral College. But our country is vastly different in 2016 than it was 229 years ago. We are no longer just a collection of random states. We are one county, where we say "every vote counts." Really? The way I see it, my vote doesn't count as much as the vote of a resident of Florida and a number of other states. And let's imagine the ruckus that would have ensued today had Trump won the popular vote and Hillary won the required electoral votes and been declared the winner. Trump would have once again roared that it's a "rigged system," and he and the people who voted for him would have had a destructive, divisive and ugly reaction. As it turned out, the "loser" in this rigged system, Hillary Clinton, gave a graceful, calming concession speech in which she encouraged Americans to come together and be hopeful for the best from our President-elect, Donald Trump.

Did the best man win? I don't think so. I think the best woman got ripped off, and it's time to abolish the Electoral College.

Margie Goldschmidt, Northeast Portland

*

ROLE OF THE MODERN PRESS: Help! The press needs to quit licking its wounds and figure out how to function in the internet-based industry. Layoffs or not, journalists need to analyze their own industry and figure out a way to provide their service to their communities. The recent election shows that we need balanced research on the candidates available to all. The current niche news market is contributing to the division of our population. Please, figure out how to distribute the news in the new economy.

Mo Klein, Southeast Portland

*

DRY YOUR TEARS, CRYBABIES: To the crybaby millennials: Dry your tears. Next time, put your money where your mouth is. Hillary lost because of you and your voter turnout. Don't blame Trump; blame yourself. True, she appears to have won the popular vote, but look where that was -- Wall Street and California. In between, there was a whole bunch of red from people who feel they don't count in your eyes and the government's. Your protest and destruction and vandalism proves how much better you are. All you care about is yourselves. Even in the state of Oregon, she only won by about 200,000 votes -- and those came from Portland, Salem and Eugene. Why do you think farmers and ranchers and people from southern and eastern Oregon feel shut out? Get over yourselves -- and next time, vote!

Ron Katterman, Hillsboro
Catch all the action from the Sporting World.
On Sunday, Judge Darnell Jackson will speak at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland at 6220 Jefferson Ave.

Jackson will speak at 10:30 a.m.

He was the first African-American to hold the position of Saginaw County circuit judge and the first to serve as director of Michigans Office of Drug Control Policy. He also has served as deputy police chief and assistant city attorney.

Jackson has spent time touring as a professional speaker. Locally, he was asked to speak at the Saginaw Valley State University TED talks for two consecutive years and was also asked to speak at the Muskegon TED talk this year.

With the vast knowledge and wisdom that Judge Jackson holds, we are very excited to have him lead our Sunday service, the church stated.

The topic is Race: The Final Frontier.

Throughout history mankind has overcome many challenges. We have plumbed the depths of the oceans. We have harvested the land. And we have ventured deep into space. But we have not been able to overcome the issue of racism, the church stated. This presentation will focus on steps we all can take in our daily living to help eliminate this problem.
Mid Michigan Community College, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor, will host an Apprenticeship Open House as part of the second annual National Apprenticeship Week.

MMCC will be opening its doors from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. on Tuesday to companies or individuals who want to see student projects and tour the facilities. MMCC invites the public to visit the Harrison Tech Center on the main campus or the Morey Tech Center located at the Mount Pleasant campus.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Ever since the announcement of the merger between The Dow Chemical Co. and DuPont, a lot of area residents have been concerned for their future. But, one Dow insider has a much different view about the future.

There has never been a more exciting time in my Dow career than where were at right now for opportunities to grow, said Rich Wells, vice president and site director of Dows Michigan Operations, of his 30 years at Dow.

Speaking at a recent WakeUP! Midland, Wells brought a measure of hope for the future as he touched on different topics at the Great Hall.

DowDuPont Merger

Dow was hoping to receive regulatory approval of the merger sometime in 2016, but Wells stated that the approval will probably happen early next year.

Regulatory approval is up to the governments around the world, Wells said. They look at the combined company and determine if it is so anti-competitive that they cant let it happen. We lack approval from the U.S., Canada, Brazil, China and the European Union. The EU is kind of taking the lead in this. Im not an insider so I dont know what those concerns are.

Last week, the EU announced that it had suspended its review of the proposed merger of The Dow Chemical Co. and DuPont Co. for a second time. The commission said it needed additional information from the companies. On Wednesday, after receiving the requested information, the EU resumed its review. A similar pause in the review process took place in September.

Once the merger is approved, The Dow Chemical Co. and DuPont will cease to exist. The merger would result in a combined company, DowDuPont. Then 18 to 24 months later, DowDuPont would be divided into three separate entities: Material Sciences, Agriculture and Specialties.

Material Sciences would stay headquartered in Midland, while Agriculture and Specialty Products would be based in Wilmington, Delaware, where DuPont is headquartered.

The Wilmington headquarters will be a very small headquarters as it will only be the CEO and small staffs. Dow Midland will have all the accounting and back office operations, Wells said.

Material Sciences will be the same size in both the number of employees and revenue as Dow is today.

If you are in Dow today and in the material science side of things, your life is not going to change much as we go through this little journey that will take about two years, Wells said.

Job growth in area

Wells stated that Dow is spending as much investment money as he has seen in his Dow career. But, unfortunately for Midland, the money is all going to the Gulf Coast because the U.S. has the cheapest natural gas in the world.

As a shareholder, I think it is a great move. As a site leader, I want to get some of that up here. Our time will come. But, we have to give the company reason to, he said.

One idea is combining Dow expertise in carbon chemistry with Dow Cornings silicone chemistry.

Nobody has brought those two atoms together. Were starting already to put those two molecules together and see what kind of materials we can invent. I want that new molecule to be manufactured in Midland and we have the raw material to do that in terms of plants, knowledge and land, Wells said.

But that means competing for those plans and showing that Midland has the best workforce, the safest workforce and a community that wants to embrace the company.

Right now our site does not present itself very well. We would like to see an Alden B. Dow designed gate on Saginaw Road. We already have the safest workforce, but we want to create the premier chemical manufacturing site in the Midwest, he said. The combination of Dow, Dow Corning and then bringing in DuPont really presents a unique opportunity to this community for growth.

DuPonts largest site will be in Midland as a tenant.

We want them to grow. They are going to invent new molecules as well. We want this to be their first choice as a place to do it, Wells said.

Being close to the agriculture market gives Michigan Ops a geographic advantage.

We want people to see a site that is vibrant, growing and inviting, Wells said. I am very, very optimistic that if we do this right the opportunities for Midland and the Great Lakes Bay Region have never been brighter.

South Saginaw Road closure

Dow would like to close off a section of South Saginaw Road between Michigan Operations and Dow Corning, which would save the company $4 million per year.

We have a physical and emotional handicap in Saginaw Road. When we ship product back and forth between the sites, because it is a public road, we have to fill out 45 minutes of paperwork for every shipment to just cross the street, Wells said.

Dow is presently in the process of studying the possible closure with the City of Midland. Closing South Saginaw Road would requires drivers to traverse Bay City and South Waldo roads.

We are now doing outreach to find out how big an inconvenience that would be. And to help the community understand that the inconvenience is an investment in the future growth of this town, Wells said.
To the editor:

By the time this letter reaches the Midland Daily News the political elections will be over and the vote for our newly elected president will be decided.

In reference to Dennis Clarks letter, Good and Evil, Nov. 2, praising one of our senators, he wrote, there is no better Democrat than Michigans Sen. Debbie Stabenow. Very true. The Democratic platform upholds systematic abortion without any consideration for the life of the unborn.

I like the scripture reading he submitted at the end of his letter, Woe unto those who call good evil and evil good. So, senator, be careful of the impending deadly danger of your view.

JOE E. BENES

Gladwin
Rescue operations executed for Keen Sword

A U.S. Air Force MC-130J Commando II assigned to the 17th Special Operations Squadron prepares to perform in-flight refueling with a HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter assigned to the 33rd Rescue Squadron Nov. 4, 2016, off the coast of near Okinawa, Japan, during exercise Keen Sword 17. The fundamental role of U.S. forces in Japan is to deter aggression and maintain peace and security in the region, and is an essential component of the U.S.-Japan alliance. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman John Linzmeier)
Cope West 2017, a bilateral aircraft exercise between U.S. and Indonesia military forces at Manado Air Base, Indonesia, concluded operations November 11, ending a week of full-spectrum fighter training.

Cope West, a Pacific Air Forces sponsored exercise, normally focuses on the exchange of techniques related to airlift, air-land and air drop delivery operations, however, this exercise focused on fighter operations, and was the first fighter combat training exercise in Indonesia in the past 19 years.

The exercise was a resounding success at all levels, said Col. Christopher Faurot, PACAFs Director of Air National Guard Forces who served as the commands exercise liaison at Manado. The two countries wrapped up with an 81% mission success rate with the only losses due to weather cancellation. The interaction between the U.S. Marines and the Indonesian Air Force was noteworthy and resulted in all participants walking away better for the experience with a greater appreciation of each other's capabilities."

With PACAF as the planning component for CW17, U.S. Marines from the Marine Aircraft Group 12, Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan, executed the CW17 daily mission operations including subject matter expert exchanges and air-to-air fighter employment.

Lt. Col. Edward Khim, PACAF Chief of Exercises & Aerial Events, lauded the Marines for their willingness and flexibility when it came time to commit forces to the exercise.

"The Marine Corps jumped into this exercise and now that we have reintroduced Combat Air Forces exercises with Indonesia, it is definitely going to better prepare us for future bilateral engagements," Khim said.

Brig. Gen Dirk Smith, the PACAF Director of Air and Cyberspace Operations, highlighted the importance of building exercise capabilities with Indonesia.

As we engage with our Indonesian partners we want to build on what the Marines have accomplished to continue to advance the relationship, interoperability, capability and capacity with the Indonesian Air Force, Smith said.

In his closing remarks, Maj. Gen. Michael Compton, Air National Guard assistant to Commander Pacific Air Forces, thanked Indonesian partners for their invitation and partnership.

The combined training offered by Exercise Cope West 17 will help prepare the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps and Indonesian Air Force to work together in promoting a peaceful Indo-Asia-Pacific region, said Compton.

Conducted since 1989, Cope West exercises have aimed to improve interoperability between the two nations militaries. This is the fifth Cope West exercise since 2009 when the U.S. resumed international military education and training programs with Indonesia.
BLOOMINGTON  After two additional public hearings and one major edit, a new policy for McLean County wind farm construction is headed to the County Board next week.

When the board meets at 9 a.m. Tuesday, it will consider approving a policy mandating specific setbacks, turbine heights, decommissioning requirements and wildlife impact studies for future wind projects.

Other than the wildlife section, the policy is identical to what was submitted to the board July 19, said Building and Zoning Director Phil Dick  and that was drawn from previous special-use permits for wind farms.

County Board members requested the policy be sent back to the Zoning Board of Appeals for additional community feedback. More than a dozen on each side  supporters and detractors  attended additional hearings Oct. 4 and Nov. 1.

We tried to put as much of the information submitted on the (county) website as possible so County Board members would have access to it, Dick said. That includes audio of both hearings and about 10 pieces of written testimony.

Several commenters spoke in favor of wider setbacks separating wind turbines from residences, roads and adjacent property lines, but wind developers said stricter guidelines would make building wind farms in the county unmanageable.

The wildlife section requires developers to conduct pre-siting and post-siting studies "addressing all relevant species" and submit them to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Developers must then implement those agencies' recommendations "unless credible evidence is presented against" them.

Dick said those requirements originated with testimony from Angelo Capparella of Normal, an Illinois State University zoology professor who said the ZBA failed to adequately address wildlife issues in the policy.

Officials hope to pass the policy before two companies, EDP Renewables and Invenergy, file county paperwork for additional local wind farm construction. Both companies are vying for land in Chenoa, Lawndale, Lexington and Yates townships for wind turbine sites and were consulted on the policy.

Houston-based EDP filed a building permit Oct. 28 for a $170,000 meteorological tower off 3050 East Road in Yates Township, near Chenoa. Katie Chapman, an EDP project manager, said the tower represents "a routine wind resource assessment" and is "an early state step in the process.

"Weve got an eye on the (policy) and working leases out with landowners. Well be doing that the rest of this year, and next year we'll do more environmental studies and start submitting permits, Chapman said. Were still looking at the end of 2018 to be up and operating.
NORMAL  Flipping through photographs and telegrams and handling bits of artillery shrapnel that earned him a Purple Heart, Ralph L. Rossman took time on Thursday to recall his service during World War II.

Rossman, 95, of Normal, was 21 years old when the U.S. Army drafted him in November 1942.

I served for three years, one month and 23 days, said Rossman, proving his sharp memory.

The seventh of eight siblings, Rossman left his home in rural Minonk shortly after his brother was drafted.

He completed basic training at Camp Blanding in Florida and was in camps throughout the U.S., including bases in Tennessee, Indiana and Boston.

In February of 1944, I boarded the S.S. Argentina in Boston with 5,000 troops, said Rossman. We left on Lincolns birthday, Feb. 12, and landed in Scotland on Washingtons birthday, Feb. 22.

After a train ride from Scotland to Bognor Regis along the English Channel, Rossmans unit first stayed in civilians' houses because the barracks were full.

They were afraid Germany was going to cross the Channel, so they kept us there for a while, he said.

While there, the company commander told Rossmans unit it was going to maneuver with an incoming armored unit. When the trucks rolled in the next day, Rossman realized it was his brother Wilberts unit.

I hadnt seen him for two years. I asked the driver right away if he knew where my brother was and he said hed holler for him, said Rossman.

Before he could even return to camp to set his tent for the night, Rossman said his brother had rushed to find him.

It was quite a reunion for us, being that far away from home for so long, he said.

Rossman recalls Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and British Army Commander Bernard Montgomery visiting his camp to see if troops were prepared for their first round of combat.

They cheered us on a little bit, said Rossman.

His first action was the Battle of Normandy at Omaha Beach on June 14, 1944, eight days after D-Day.

They had soldiers on this British ship with small assault boats filled with a dozen people. They put troops down in the water, said Rossman. We got in the water and could just wade in. Some guys just didnt stand a chance because the water was too high. We were lucky, being on land at the beach. It felt real, then.

While fighting in St. Jean de Daye in Normandy, Rossman was hit in the crook of his right shoulder by shrapnel from an artillery shell.

All I can remember is a couple of tanks burning up and shrapnel flying everywhere, he said. I was paralyzed from the waist down.

He vaguely remembers a buddy, who he still speaks with today, lying him down and sprinkling sulfa powder in his wound to prevent infection.

Rossman was retrieved by medics who dressed his wounds; he flew back to England for surgery. The feeling returned to his body.

The shrapnel had clipped through his dog tag chain and a holy metal chain he wore from his mother.

Here I am at 95. My mother probably wore out her rosary. Somebody up above was watching out for me, he said.

Rossman received the Purple Heart for his efforts in Normandy. He still has the twisted pieces of shrapnel taken from his shoulder along with other WWII paraphernalia from his service, including the telegram informing his mother he had been wounded, photos from down time, his uniform and foreign coins.

After working in the 14th base Post Office in France, he returned to the U.S. in 1945.

I remember when we were landing in Brooklyn, flying right past the statue of liberty and thinking, 'Oh my God, we made it,' he said.

Rossman began working for the Minonk Post Office, married his wife Bernadette and had two daughters before moving to Normal. The couple has been married 60 years. In 2012, he took the Land of Lincoln Honor Flight to Washington, D.C., with his daughter, Theresa Weldy.

More than 70 years after his service, Rossman said being in WWII has impacted his view of patriotism in a few ways.

You wonder. Why do we have all this fighting? Why cant we do good for people instead of finding more reasons to fight war. Its hard to say, he said.

It makes you feel proud that people still remember you on Veterans Day. Its a duty we all did back then.
A jury in Raymore, Missouri has absolved the mother of a 6-year-old girl from domestic assault charges. She was tried for spanking her daughter, which allegedly left the little girl badly bruised. The jury handed down the not guilty verdict on Oct. 28.

Speaking on behalf of the 26-year-old mom, lawyer Kim Benjamin points out that spanking is parenting in this case, as it was a form of discipline. It was alleged that the mother spanked her daughter five times, citing it was for disciplinary reasons Mommy Page reports.

It was the girl's father, who is no longer with the mother, who saw the bruises on his daughter. It was also learned that the mother's boyfriend spanked the 6-year-old as well, thus it was not easy to establish who among the adults could've caused the bruises. Yet, the lawyer reiterated that it was a necessary disciplinary action.

Laws in child discipline in the state of Missouri, under its Revised Statuses, allows for the use of physical force in disciplining minors. It also cites that the use of such force must not bear risks like disfigurement, extreme pain, emotional distress or death. Members of the jury apparently believed spanking is parenting and have applied this in their own children.

The prosecutor, through Jordan Logan, expressed that the mom's case wasn't about just about using spanking as parenting. "We believe it's (a commentary) on parents lashing out in anger, in a way any other person assaulting (someone) lashes out," Logan said, per Lee's Summit Journal. "It's not a parents' rights issue - it's a protection of children issue."

What the lawyers didn't divulge was what exactly the 6-year-old girl did to receive more than five spankings. Though experts agree that spanking is parenting in some cases, any form of physical discipline must be approached with the proper mindset.

"A child should always receive a clear warning before any offense that might merit a spanking," writes family expert Dr. Jared Pingleton via Time. Experts advise using other forms of discipline first instead of spanking, especially since children are always vulnerable. The spanking could easily escalate as an assault. Watch this panel of mothers discuss if spanking is parenting in the video below.
A California mother, who has been missing for days now, has not been found yet and clues pointing to her whereabouts or what happened to her during that afternoon jog have been scarce. Her husband recently pleaded for the safe return of his wife, noting that she would never leave them and believing she was forcibly taken.

The mother, identified as Sherri Papini, failed to pick up her children from day care and never returned home. Strands of her hair and her earbuds were found in the area where her husband, Keith Papini, recovered her iPhone.

In a recent interview with People, Keith said that he just wants his wife back and he wants her safe. He pleaded to anyone who knows where his wife is to just bring her home. The 34-year-old mother-of-two from Redding was last seen wearing a pink jogging attire. Authorities have not named any suspects in the case.

The Shasta County sheriff said in a statement recently that abduction was possible but they still have no solid evidence to conclude that. They were also determining if Sherri went missing voluntarily or involuntarily. Her family believes that the disappearance was not voluntary because it would be unlike her.

Sherri's husband added that he believes his wife was snuck up on or maybe two or more people carried out the attack. He added, "My gut says it is a person unknown to myself and Sherri. My gut tells me it is just low-life people."

Search teams including their family members and friends have been searching multiple areas since her disappearance. A Help Find Sherri Papini Facebook page and a GoFundMe page were set up in order to raise money and awareness.

The GoFundMe page has received more than $42,000, which will be used in the search efforts to look for Sherri. The Papini family also offered a $40,000 reward for anyone who would lead to Sherri's safe return, Los Angeles Times reported.

Officers also debunked the reports that Keith was behind the disappearance of his wife. A spokesman for the department handling the case said that there was no physical evidence suggesting he was involved in any way.
A missing teenager from the Houston area was found dead on Thursday and authorities believed that her boyfriend was responsible for the teen's deaths, as well as of her mother and her sister. The boyfriend was arrested by police officials and the missing teenager's body was found close to where he was apprehended.

New York Daily News reported that the missing teenager was identified as 16-year-old Kirsten Fritch. The boyfriend was identified as Jesse Dobbs, 21 years old. Dobbs was arrested on Wednesday and the body of Fritch was discovered near. It was believed that Dobbs was hiding information about the death of Fritch, as well as the death of her mother, identified as Cynthia Morris, and her younger sister, identified as Breanna Pavilicek.

Baytown police said in a statement that Dobbs did not provide them information about the death of Fritch, as well as her mother and her sister. They also said that they struggled to detain Dobbs because he refused to go with arresting officials. He was at Shenanigan's Bar at the time of the arrest.

The bar is located near Texas City. Dobbs is only identified as a person if interest and not a suspect.

Officials said that they have notified the relatives and loved ones of Fritch regarding her body's discovery. They did not provide any other details on the condition of the body when it was found and what the probable cause of death was.

Officers were also able to locate the missing PT Cruiser that belonged to Morris. The mother of Morris was the one who asked officials to check on the welfare of Morris and Pavilicek, noting that she could not contact them. When officials went to check on them, the door in their home was unlocked and the two victims each died from at least one gunshot wounds.

According to sources, Fritch started to date Dobbs after they met online. Dobbs eventually moved in with the family. People reported that Dobbs has a former girlfriend, who is the mother of his children. The said woman reportedly hopes the family gets justice.

Meanwhile, there are no other available details about Dobbs or if he had past run-ins with the law. Do you think Dobbs could be the suspect of this case? Sound off below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
President Barack Obama the 45th president of the United States of America focused more on technology. He committed billion of dollars to support initiatives in encouraging innovation in technology, make education better and to spur exploration and discovery. Now Barack Obama's term for eight years has ended, and America is now in the hands of Donald Trump who did not say much during his campaign speech regarding technology. Does this mean the end of the tech industry?

It is clear the Silicon Valley is not excited for the next four years. Recalling in the month of July, 150 tech leaders including Steve Wozniak who is an Apple co-founder, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales and the man who is considered as the father of the internet Vint Cerf, wrote an open letter that describes Trump's presidency as a disaster for innovation. Some other notable broadband providers criticized Trump for policies that they believe would choke their investments.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Silicon Valley woke up on Wednesday morning with their unending tech-powered optimism all of a sudden unable to conquer following the victory of Donald Trump. Shervin Pishevar a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton's candidacy commented on The New York Times described Trump's victory as the horror.

The tech Industry is a big factor for contributing 12 percent of all jobs based on the US Bureau Of Labor Statistics. According to that department, his policies will create a long lasting impact, in consideration of Trump's message about making America's competitiveness and economy to improve.

Although Trump had previously vowed to block the merger of At&t and Time Warner if he will get elected, At&t executives still have high hopes that the deal will be approved. The reason for this is because Trump announced in his victory speech that he plans big investments in infrastructure not giving out the specific details.

Trump made it clear during his so-called stump speech that he will get Apple to build their infrastructures inside the USA. For this reason, Apple will manufacture iPhone at a higher rate instead of $650, it will cost $900 if this is implemented. Apple products are manufactured using Chinese contractors but still designs its products at the Silicon Valley Headquarter. Apple declined to give comment on Trump's statement for the time being.
In September Patently Apple posted a report titled "One of Apple's Top Display Suppliers is on the Ropes." We noted in the report that Japan Display was Apple's leading display supplier. When Apple notified all of the display suppliers that they were switching to OLED, it caught Japan Display off guard. They had committed to new LCD equipment to keep up with Apple's demands and now they were unable to secure new equipment and the Japanese government who was supporting them was was considering to divest because they were too dependent on Apple. A week later we reported on the rumor that Foxconn's Sharp wanted to tag-team with Japan Display in order to become a major Apple OLED supplier in quick order. With the situation becoming dire, the Japanese government is reconsidering a bailout for Japan Display.

It's being reported today by the Wall Street Journal that Japan Display Chief Executive Mitsuru Homma said Wednesday that the INCJ 'is considering financial support to help us grow,' again. INCJ is the Japanese government-backed fund known as 'Innovation Network Corp. of Japan (INCJ).'

Japan Display is projecting a small operating profit for their full fiscal year which ends in March due to Apple's iPhone 7 orders.

Japan Display wants to invest in OLED for the medium to long term while continuing to improve their LCD technology in the hopes of being able to compete against OLED in different markets.





About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Those using abusive language or behavior will result in being blacklisted on Disqus.
I was disappointed when Utah failed to make a stronger statement on election day  though the statement may actually have been stronger than some have realized; see this  but I was deeply saddened to see the headline of an article in the Salt Lake Tribune:

http://www.sltrib.com/news/4565608-155/worried-utah-muslims-on-trumps-win

I understand the concerns of many of Utahs Muslims. As the saying goes (but I really mean it), I feel their pain. Donald Trumps statements about Islam and minorities are among the (very) many reasons that I opposed him. But I think that Utah Muslims are misinterpreting Mr. Trumps victory here in my adopted state.

Im convinced that Mr. Trump didnt win the election. Instead, in my judgment, the Clintons lost it. And I believe this to have been even more clearly true in Utah than it was nationally.

Heres a worthwhile little piece from a libertarian perspective:

Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash

The Trump victory was also, as this more mainstream conservative author points out, a repudiation of certain elements of President Obamas tenure:

Not Just a Rejection of Washington, a Rejection of Obamas Washington

Is Donald Trump a less than ideal vehicle for defeating the Clintons and liberal hubris? Yes. Yes! A thousand times Yes. (My opposition to him has been as visible and as consistent as Im capable of making it.)

Like me, National Reviews Kevin Williamson was a member, from the start, of the Never Trump movement. But I agree completely with his take on the results of the 2016 presidential campaign:

RIP Clinton, Inc.: A shadow is lifted

Im depressed that Donald Trump won. Im not happy that hell soon be our president. However, Im delighted that Hillary Clinton lost.

Ive spoken with many Latter-day Saints and many Utahns about the election, both before and after 8 November. And I think I know my people. In my judgment, the proportion of those who voted for Mr. Trump who can also be described as serious, committed Trumpists is very, very small. My sense is that the vast majority of those in Utah who voted for Mr. Trump did so in order to thwart the ambitions of Hillary Clinton, and did so while holding their noses. And even of those who affirmatively supported Mr. Trump, by far most in Utah (and, also by far, probably most nationally) supported him not because they hate Mexicans and Muslims and other minorities but because they were worried about global trade, uncontrolled immigration, rising healthcare costs, and similar issues. (I dont think that Donald Trump represents anything remotely like the optimal solution to those problems, but thats irrelevant to my point here.) Many elements of the so-called alt-right are genuinely appalling and repulsive, but I dont think that the alt-right was a crucial element in Mr. Trumps victory and Im absolutely certain that it played, at most, a negligible role here in Utah. Utah and Mormon revulsion at the religious and ethnic bigotry that has swirled around Trumpism was genuine, not feigned, and I know of no reason to believe that its no longer felt. Those Latter-day Saints who voted for him did so despite, not because of, his targeting of religious and other minorities.

The bottom line? My point here is that Utahs law-abiding, peaceful Muslim community neednt be afraid that their Mormon neighbors wont have their backs, let alone that the community in which they live hates them.

And Ill repeat the public pledge that I made in a post yesterday: I will publicly oppose actual religious bigotry anywhere I see it. And if measures are proposed or actions undertaken that I judge to violate constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, that are unjust or oppressive, or that seem to reflect intolerance and hate, Ill be there arm in arm with my Muslim brothers and sisters and with whoever else might be a target of such measures. For whatever its worth, thats a promise.

And I hope that my fellow Latter-day Saints will go out of their way to affirm their friendship and support for any and all minority ethnic and religious groups in their neighborhoods, including Muslims, who live peacefully, contribute to their communities, and obey the laws. I intend to do so. And this statement is merely a beginning.
Do we take time away from the press of society, the demands of peace and justice concerns, the obligations of the workplace, and even our family? The word retirement can call us to a time of refreshment, not the end of our work. This may be as simple as a period of meditation in the early morning or before we go to bed Making retirement part of life includes times of retreat  personal retreats especially where one can take a day or a few days alone, in the quiet, to renew inwardly. Similarly, when I take time to write in my journal at the start of the day, or sit quietly and clear my mind, the whole day goes much better. (From A Tender, Broken Meeting, by Margery Post Abbott.)

I have been writing this post in my head for a very long time.

In the months that have passed since my last post, my life has spun out of control. Not everything has been bad, but any sense of calm and order I have had in my life has been thrown to the winds, and Ive had to reexamine all my priorities.

Its hard to write about spiritual insights you havent yet formed Though in point of fact, today is the first day since summer, however, when Ive had enough of a pause in the actionenough of a time of retirement, as Quakers put it, to actually sit at a keyboard and write.

Heres what has been happening:

A little over a year ago, my husband Peter and I helped his parents move in to the house next to ours. It was quite a process, and hard for themboth Peters parents are deeply shy people, and moving from Ohio to New England meant letting go of friends it had taken them decades to make. It was necessary to do it, though, because the house they lived in had been completely getting away from them, and Peters father had begun to experience significant dementia. There was really no question that they were not going to be able to manage any more without help.

Happily, they are both very lovable people. Whats more, after a year of having my in-laws living next door, I can say with real certainty that Sheila is not just important to me because shes my husbands mother, but because shes my friend. I enjoy her company, and she enjoys minethough I think we were a little tentative with one another at first, figuring out how much help would be welcome, either on the giving or the receiving end.

I find myself feeling tender and protective of both my mother-in-law and my father-in-law. But after a year of moving in and out of one anothers houses, I can see that my greatest fear, that they would be unhappy once they were here, has not come to pass. Both are happier than they had been before movingand my husband is especially happy. He loves having his parents next door, and stopping by day by day for short visits, handyman jobs, and moral support.

And as lifelong sci fi nerds, we all love Fridays, when we get together for Star Trek and pizza at our house. (A week ago, during one such visit, Sheila looked up with a wide smile, looking around the living room, and said, I think this may be my favorite place in the whole world. I wish I could find words for how deeply glad that made me to hear)

So, all things considered, life with Peters parents has been a blessing all around.

More than the emotional satisfaction, though, having Sheila and Ed next door has turned out to be financially helpful, too.

Part of caring for parents who are aging, especially when one of them has dementia, involves becoming involved with their finances and planning for what theyre likely to need tomorrow and the next day, and the day after that. So we know a lot more about his parents finances than we used to, and they know more about ours. And one of the things weve researched is long-term careespecially for Ed, should he need itand we can be pretty confident that they will be able to afford what they need.

Whats more, theyve been in a position to lend us a hand, too: things like, because Ed no longer drives, they gave us one of their two cars. Which meant we didnt have car payments to make which meant we paid off most of our debts, and have suddenly been able to make more money than we spend. Enough more that, with their help, we will be mortgage free by the end of January.

And suddenly, I can afford to retire.

I can afford to retire. Waitwhat? Seriously?

How did that happen?

* * *

I have been a full-time teacher for years now. Its work that I took on in midlife, when I learned that I loved teenagers. Ive always known that I love books and writing, so teaching English wasnt much of a stretch.

I still love teenagers. Something about all that passion, all that hunger for adulthood and meaning Teaching, though I have something of a love/hate relationship with my profession.

Likely, most American teachers do.

I dont want to turn this into a rant, so I wont go into detail about all the ways education reform has sucked much of the joy out of this profession. And while its true that my salary is among the lowest in Western Massachusetts, its not the pay thats driving me out: its the way that overwhelming demands on my time make it impossible to do the job the way it deserves to be done. Too many subjects, too much paperwork, not enough time to prepare for my classes and keep up with grading.

Im working myself into the ground and Im still not able to do the job as well as I know that I could, if only I had the time.

Friends who mean well try to buoy my spirits when Im low by telling me that I make a difference.

I know I make a difference. I just dont know how much longer I can, or should, allow making that difference to crowd out every other important thing in my life: time with friends, time with family, time in the woods, at worship doing activism for social justice. Though I recognize that, in some ways, simply being visible and present with my students, bearing witness against racism, may be the most powerful thing I will ever do against racism.

Still, the toll it takes on my health and my relationships is huge.

What would it mean to retire? What would it mean, to be able to take time for something besides teaching?

Just being able to ask the question knocked the wind out of me.

Then came the Hard Things.

* * *

We learned that I might be able to retire during a week in August when, in preparation for the busyness of the school year, Peter was running around, doing a lot of work with his mom, figuring out their finances, talking with their financial advisers. So it was within a week of learning that I might actually be able to retire that we figured out that we might want to transfer ownership of his parents house, and what we can of their assets, to us, to protect them in case they need more nursing care than we know they can afford.

That felt really, really odd.

I have a horror of being thought to be predatory. Its about as rational as Sheilas fears of being a burden to usthat is really very far from what it feels like. Still getting their house put into our names was a disturbing notion.

And just as we were all processing how we felt about that, just as we had scheduled the meeting with lawyers to make it happen, Sheila got her diagnosis.

My mother-in-law has cancer.

My husbands mother has cancer.

My father-in-laws primary caregiver has cancer.

And while it took us a very long time to get all the diagnostic information lined up, yes, it has metastasized. Its not the worst news imaginable, but its pretty bad. With chemotherapy, she may live another two years.

We need to begin planning for Eds care now. Right now. We need to have caregivers he can become familiar with before his dementia progresses further, we need to map out who will feed him meals when Sheila is too sick to do so and we are at work, and we need to think about what will become of him when, rather than if, he outlives her.

This sucks. And Sheila is brave, and Ed is processing the information, and Peter is grieving, and I

am grading papers. And not even getting them back to students in time.

And Im asking myself if this is really where my life energy is best spent: as a hostage to my job, not doing the small things that could be comforting, practical, and yes, rewarding.

* * *

This is what Ive been thinking about, between July and November. My days have been a blur of activity. Teaching has always been time-consuming, but this year, budget cuts and a bad contract for teachers in my district have really made my workload impossible, and Im drowning in work at school, and trying to find the energy and strength to simply be present for the people I love when Im at home.

In some ways, Ive never had a better year in the classroom. Im teaching Advanced Placement Language and Composition for the first time ever, and Im pretty much on fire. As in, kids leave my class and talk about it for the rest of the day, in all their other classes.

And this is the last year I am teaching as seniors the students I taught as freshmen. I really, really love my kids. It is hard to say goodbye.

But while Im teaching, Im not taking my mother-in-law to the library for a knitting club.

Im not feeding my father-in-law lunch when my mother-in-law is unable to.

Im not working with any of the racial justice groups Ive connecting with or organizing that activists support group I wanted to create; Im not training to become an Alternatives to Violence Project facilitator, Im not joining the Raging Grannies Im not finding time for friends or writing or activism or rest or long walks or even, gods help me, prayer, beyond a gasp or two during my commute.

It may be time.

I think its time.

To retire.
Why the Iran Deal Will Survive the Trump Presidency

11/11/16

By Esfandyar Batmanghelidj (source: LobeLog)



Trump's Quake

(Source: front page of Iranian daily Ebtekar)





Trump's triumph is sending shockwaves through the foreign policy community, particularly among supporters of the Iran nuclear deal. Reuters has already reported that Trump's election puts the Iran Deal "on shaky ground." Richard Nephew, a former State Department official who was involved in the nuclear negotiations, told Reuters, "Say goodbye to the Iran deal." Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, which supported the Iran Deal, noted to The New York Times that it was unclear whether Trump "would deliberately or inadvertently take actions that unravel that agreement."

Views from Iran echo this pessimism, as political commentators note that Trumps election could empower Iran's hardliners. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has sought to temper concerns by arguing that the "most important thing is that the future U.S. president sticks to agreements."

Trump's win no doubt introduces uncertainty into the already complicated status of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But the notion that Trump can or will single-handedly dismantle JCPOA overstates his likely power as president. Three factors will constrain his ability to unravel the Iran deal: the relatively low importance of Iran in the current landscape of American politics, the essential security implications of the Iran deal for Russia, and the economic ambitions of Europe.

Trump's Priorities

Trump will arrive in the White House with little pressure to take immediate action on Iran. Although Trump did use the Iran deal as a means to impugn both Hillary and Obama, his vocal opposition to the deal probably had little to do with his electoral success, as other races show. Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, one of the most vocal opponents of the JCPOA, lost his seat to Democrat Tammy Duckworth, a deal supporter.

Although foreign policy was important in the election, it was not for the typical reasons, and this may be a saving grace for the deal. According to data from the Pew Research Center, 89% of Trump supporters highlighted terrorism as a "very important" issue, while 79% considered foreign policy to be "very important." In both categories, the Trump supporters considered the issue more important than did Clinton supporters (74%, 73%). Although these figures might suggest that the electorate expects Trump to take action against what Trump has called a "terrorist state," it is important to remember the tenor of the foreign policy debate in the election and what Trump came to represent.

For the Trump camp, the overall posture of foreign policy amounts to something of withdrawal. This may be reflected in the same Pew dataset-54% of voters believe Clinton would make "wise foreign policy decisions" versus just 36% for Trump. In some sense, Trump supporters may be unperturbed by his lack of foreign policy skills because they want him to make fewer foreign policy decisions overall. As Max Fisher and Amanda Taub argue persuasively in The New York Times, Trump's success in the foreign policy debate was about avoiding the complexities of actual policy, instead using foreign policy as a discussion point to highlight his appeal as a strong leader. Voters will not likely expect Trump to meddle in the details of the Iran deal and even if he did, they would have a hard time discerning its impact. Trump's boastful proclamations may suffice for his supporters, leaving him with little obligation to engage the thorny, multilateral nature of the Iran deal at the level of actual policy.

Security Imperatives

Although Iran and Europe have principally depended on the United States to set the pace and parameters of sanctions relief, particularly as US sanctions remain in place, the matter of implementation is actually somewhat separate from the matter of the deal's viability. Those concerned for the Iran deal's survival argue that President Trump will block sanctions relief for Iran, playing into the hardliner narrative that the US is obstructing the deal and thereby enabling Iran to back out.

However, the JCPOA's promise of sanctions relief is of primary importance only if Iran and the United States remain the two pillars of the deal's viability. With a Trump presidency, the deal will be defined by its more fundamental dimension of security. One of the principal outcomes of the JCPOA was to ameliorate Iran's security dilemma. Iran had been on the back foot, wary of military intervention from the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia on the pretext of its proliferation threat. The Iran deal was conceived as an arms control agreement, despite its current billing as a kind of economic pact.

If security is the chief justification of the deal for all parties, then the new pillars of the deal are Iran and Russia. For Iran, the JCPOA eliminated an urgent threat of attack by Israel and/or Saudi Arabia by removing the only globally acceptable pretext for such an attack-a proliferation risk. The knock-on effects have freed up Iran's security apparatus to take a more aggressive security posture in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria. The notion that this new posture proves that the Iran Deal empowered Iran's security apparatus is worthy of its own debate, but at the very least it has enabled Iran to align with Russia and mobilize in the theater of conflict in Syria. Russia was a key party in the Iran deal negotiations. Russian strategic interest in the JCPOA is not economic-Iranian companies remain generally uninterested in working with Russian firms, and Russian foreign policy is markedly uninfluenced by economic prerogatives as the ineffective imposition of Western sanctions shows. Realistically, Russian support for the deal was about enabling Iran to be a more active geopolitical actor in the region, uniquely free from obligations to toe the US line.

For President Trump, Russian interests may pose the biggest barrier to ripping up the deal. This is true irrespective of any special Trump relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is beyond the scope of this analysis. If Trump were to rip up the deal, Iran would need to take retaliatory action in light of domestic politics, perhaps by (at least symbolically) restarting its nuclear program. If Iran were to do so, it would put the country back on the agenda for military intervention by Israel or Saudi Arabia. Both states would be able to quickly rally support among US lawmakers for any such move-the image of Iran as a nuclear threshold state persists in Washington. But if Iran were drawn into a direct military conflict with any of its neighbors, its ability to align with Russia in the Syria conflict would be seriously compromised.

Russia, already overstretched in Syria, needs Iranian collaboration to keep Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in power. Russia has a strong incentive to keep the current balance of power in the region intact, and the Iran deal is part of that balance. Russian enticements should be sufficient to keep Trump contained regarding Iran, while also shoring up Iran's commitment to the deal through outreach to stakeholders in the IRGC and around the Supreme Leader. In short, the question of faltering implementation during a Trump presidency is unlikely to override the security dimension of the JCPOA. Tearing up the Iran deal means conflict with the nascent Russian-Iranian coalition.

Then There's Europe

Stuck in the middle of this scenario is Europe. The European interest in the Iran deal is largely economic. Economic development in Iran benefits European economies but also supports the process of moderation in Iran that has been a key part of the political justification of the Iran deal in European capitals. As such, Europe cares more about implementation of sanctions relief than perhaps any other actor.

The Trump presidency will no doubt slow the process of implementation in the near-term. But European companies have yet to directly push US policymakers regarding the lingering challenges of doing business with Iran. Some observers in Iran went so far as to suggest that Trump's business background will make him amenable to working with Tehran. Although this might be a leap too far, the notion that "money speaks" for President Trump could hold water. To the same extent that Trump's arrival in Washington discombobulates the foreign policy community, it may do the same for lobbyists. Multinational businesses have an opportunity here to exert influence in the advocacy vacuum if they can get the right mechanisms in place. Given the first and second points made here, the bar will be relatively low: prevent interference in the deal.

Perhaps this explains the brave words already coming from key European actors regarding Iran. French oil giant Total, which this week announced a major investment in Iran's gas industry, has indicated that "the election that took place in the United States does not change anything" regarding its projects in Iran. Other European industrial firms are likely take a similar view-after all a Clinton administration would have posed its own challenges regarding the political and compliance risks of engaging with Iran.

Importantly, Iran deal implementation is the responsibility of a dedicated group of civil servants at the State Department and the U.S. Treasury, and these individuals are unlikely to be moved from the Iran file, even if Trump's secretary of state is a vocal opponent of the deal such as Senator Bob Corker. But the new administration's foreign policy posture will probably sap the ability of the State Department and the U.S. Treasury to actively work on implementation issues through outreach.

So, although the deal's survival may not be under threat, the Trump impact on implementation will certainly limit the scope of its success. To address implementation, outside actors will need to take on greater responsibility to define challenges, devise policy solutions, and drive advocacy. Selling-in policy suggestions to the Trump administration might become the true "art of the deal."

In some ways, it is saddening to once again return to a "great-game" type discussion of US-Iran relations in the Middle East, and to suggest that better lobbying might be a way to mitigate the impact of Trump's presidency. But Trump's ascendency is merely a step backwards on a journey that has been halting and complicated from the outset.
Activist Imprisoned in Iran for Protesting Against Acid Attacks on Hunger Strike

11/11/16

Source: International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran

Ali Shariati, who was imprisoned in 2015 for participating in a demonstration in front of Parliament against acid attacks on women, has gone on hunger strike "in protest against his forced return to prison to serve a sentence that has no legal basis," said his mother, Shayesteh-ol-Sadat Shahidi.



Ali Shariati



"My son has always been a supporter of [President Hassan Rouhani's] government," Shahidi told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. "His participation in the demonstration against throwing acid on women was not an act against national security. In fact, it was a civil protest against the lack of security in the country."

"It has been a week since my son went on hunger strike and he has only been drinking water and tea. Obviously, he's not feeling well," she said. "When he talks to me [on the phone] he sounds lethargic. The truth is that he avoids telling me anything so that I won't get worried. But I've heard that he has been taken to the prison clinic several times. I want this government, which my son has supported, to seek my son's freedom. The verdict that sent him to prison is unjust."

An Appeals Court ruling in June 2016 upheld a five-year prison sentence against Shariati for "acting against national security by participating in a protest against acid attacks acid in front of [Parliament] on October 22, 2014." In late August 2016, Shariati asked Branch 23 of the Revolutionary Court in Qom to review his case, but was turned down.

Earlier this year, from his prison cell Shariati had urged Iranians to vote for reformists and supporters of Rouhani in the February 2016 parliamentary election.

"A day after Ali's grandfather died on May 15, 2016, prison officials granted him furlough (temporary leave)," Shahidi told the Campaign. "While he was out of prison, he requested a review of his case, but unfortunately it was rejected. Then, on October 31, he was arrested and taken to Evin Prison (in Tehran) without prior notice after going to the Tehran Municipality for a personal matter."

"At 3 p.m. on the same day (October 31), when I didn't hear anything from Ali, I contacted the prosecutor's office," she added. "I asked the secretary if Ali had been arrested-he said no. But at 7 p.m. Ali called me and said he had been arrested and was being held in Ward 8 at Evin Prison. Ali said he had immediately started a hunger strike and would not stop until he's acquitted of the unjust sentence against him."

Shariati, 30, was first arrested on February 14, 2010 and held for a month in solitary confinement in Evin Prison. He was released on bail until his trial, which was presided by Judge Abbas Pirabbasi of the Revolutionary Court who sentenced Shariati to two years in prison and 74 lashes. The Appeals Court later reduced the sentence to one year in prison, which Shariati served, and the lashing sentence was never carried out.

The second arrest took place on June 13, 2014. Shariati was detained for a week before being released, but he was afterwards frequently summoned to the Intelligence Ministry for questioning until he was arrested again on February 18, 2015.

The October 22, 2014 demonstration against acid attacks on women in front of Iran's Parliament took place after a series of acid attacks in the city of Isfahan left at least seven women permanently disfigured. Two years later, no one has been punished or arrested for the crimes.
Kofax Power PDF review TechRadar Pro

Kofax has a handful of multi-platform apps to help you alter and annotate PDFs. Standard is likely the one best suited for most needs, and is the software well be exploring in this review.
CORRECTION: The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians has one current member who is a veteran. An earlier version of this story included incorrect information about the number of veterans in the tribe.

The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians is at the forefront of a movement to establish a Native American Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of the American Indian is organizing construction of the memorial and expects to complete the estimated $15 million project by Veterans Day of 2020.

First, however, the project has to be designed. And before that, Smithsonian officials want to get input from American Indian veterans throughout the country. Kevin Gover, director of the American Indian museum is touring the nation, holding a series of meetings to gather those ideas. He was at San Manuels event center Thursday morning, talking with about 50 people interested in the project.

Its long overdue, Gover said of the effort to build the memorial.

Congress originally approved the museums request for the project in 1994. But the restrictions on the location it was supposed to be inside the museum  and on funding  the museum could not use federal funds but also could not campaign to raise private money  made it impossible, Gover said. With the exception of using federal funds, Congress removed those restrictions in 2013.

Gover said it is most likely the monument will be on what is now forested land just north of the Smithsonians American Indian museum.

The memorial is not connected to efforts to build an American Indian and Alaska Native Monument at the Riverside National Cemetery. Promoters of that project have been trying to raise funds for nearly a decade.

RELATED Inland events thank military on Veterans Day

Were happy to see the Riverside memorial and were hoping there will be others, Gover said.

The San Manuel tribe donated $500,000 to the Riverside monument several years ago. It was one of the first tribes to step forward with funds for the memorial on the National Mall, said Gover, who is a member of the Oklahoma Pawnee. In addition, the tribe provided funds for the creation of an exhibit on the history of American Indian veterans, which goes back to the Revolutionary War.

The 16 banners that comprise that project, went on display on Thursday at the San Manuel casino.

They will be up at the casino through the end of December, said tribal chairwoman Lynn Valbuena, who was at the Thursday morning meeting. Were happy to help and do what we can to get this (memorial) done.

Valbuena said that San Manuels small tribe has produced only a few military veterans. But, she said, military service is very much a part of American Indian tradition. During World War II, American Indians served at a higher percentage rate than any other ethnic group, according to Gover.

Defending our homelands also means defending our tribal ways, Valbuena said.

Incorporating those tribal ways into the proposed memorial was the focus of Thursdays discussion.

I come from a long line of veterans, said Steve Dyea, 53, of Barstow, a Navy veteran. Im happy someone came up with this. I want to see it done right.

Dyea said he wanted to see traditional spiritual elements as part of the finished product.

We revere animal spirits, he said. I would like to see those animals incorporated within the design. It brings back the memories when you were growing up, sitting with your grandfather on the porch, listening to his hunting stories.

Gover said he expected such an element would be included.

At every one of these meetings, this has been a concern, he said.

When someone in the audience suggested adding a sound element, some were concerned that it might have to be too loud to rise above the noise of a nearby water feature. They didnt want it to interfere with the tranquil environment many said they hoped would be created.

It doesnt have to be loud, Dyea argued. They hear a rattle, they hear a stick beating against a canvas, they know what it means.

Other ideas included allowing visitors to tie prayers to the surrounding trees and making sure that women veterans and the families of veterans were somehow recognized.

The outside memorial, he said, will also have a companion project that will be inside the museum. He said the museum wants to create an interactive database with stories on American Indian veterans. The Department of Defense cant separate out American Indian service personnel from earlier conflicts, Gover said. Its up to the tribes themselves to contribute information.

Some suggested that recordings in native languages and perhaps music should be a part of that exhibit as well.

Im hearing some really nice ideas that we can follow up on, Gover said.

Thursdays meeting was the 15th of 30 that are planned. The next step, Gover said, will be to hold a competition for the design of the project. Of course, theres also money to be raised.

Gover said he was encouraged that specific requests of tribes and organizations had raised nearly $1 million prior to a planned public fundraising campaign.

I dont think anyone has turned us down yet, he said. Were very optimistic that well find the money we need. Were proceeding full steam ahead.

The end result, he said, will fill a void.

We all know these stories, he said, referring to tribal people, but most Americans do not, and thats a shame.

Contact the writer: mmuckenfuss@scng.com or 951-368-9595
Hey, Redlands businesses  feeling festive this holiday season?

About Redlands and the city of Redlands are looking for participants to be a part of the 2016 Holiday Decoration Contest, an event that looks to spread holiday cheer and attract shoppers to the area.

What we are trying to do, particularly in the downtown area, is make the city sparkle, About Redlands founder Deborah OHara said. People love the lights during the holidays, including those who come from different towns.

More than 25 businesses have registered for the contest, but OHara and the city are looking for more.

Among the businesses participating include Emerson & Farrar, Furry Face and past winner DenM.

Each window that we put up, I feel that we really try to be innovative and creative as possible and present something thats going to grab (someones) attention on the street, said Tess Emmons, DenMs store manager. I think we do a good job of putting avant garde and ideas together thats really going to wow the community.

Interested businesses can register by Nov. 20 on the About Redlands website at aboutredlands.com/contest-registrations. From there, participants are asked to have their decorated windows completed for viewing by Nov. 25, also known as Small Business Saturday during Thanksgiving Weekend. Participation is free and displays should remain up for viewing through Dec. 12  the date contest winners will be announced.

According to the About Redlands site, businesses are encouraged to keep their displays intact through Christmas as the windows will be promoted online until Jan. 1.

Participating businesses can choose a local artist and a nonprofit organization to help design displays.

During a planned holiday stroll on Dec. 10, a secret panel of judges will be making the rounds to select their favorite displays.

Contest organizers will award cash prizes to the top three winners. The first place winner receives $150 courtesy of Paul Barich and Barich & Associates. Second- and third-place winners will receive $125 and $75, respectively.

Residents and shoppers can also have their say by participating in the contests Peoples Choice awards. The businesses voted Peoples Choice will take home $150 in gift cards. Posters displayed in each participating businesses window will share how people can participate in the vote, OHara said.

Contact the writer: khernandez@scng.comTwitter: @TheFactsKris
Being part of a military family as a child took Carol Damgen around the world. It was when she was 9 and living in the Philippines that she discovered theater: a local venue was searching for girls to play students in a production of Lillian Hellmans The Childrens Hour.

I asked my mom if I could go to the auditions, says Damgen, a resident of San Bernardino. We did and I got one of the leads. It was a very progressive play and needless to say I was bitten by the world of theater from then on.

Damgen has gone on to perform in over 50 plays and direct more than 40.

She is a full-time lecturer in the Theatre Arts department at Cal State San Bernardino.

Damgen also serves as the areas respondent circuit coordinator for the national Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, for whom she also serves as vice chair of their National Playwriting Program.

Damgen additionally is a member of Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, acting in film, television and commercials. Damgen has also written three plays that have been produced professionally.

I enjoy being busy, she says. For example, last June, I directed Into the Woods for the California Theatre in San Bernardino, was Lady Capulet in the Courtyard Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet in Riverside, Madame Volanges in Les Liaisons Dangerous at Cal Poly Pomona as a guest artist, taught seven college classes, performed all of my duties with (the Kennedy Center college theater festival) and still found time for family and friends. This schedule is very typical for me.

Damgen had no thoughts of becoming a teacher until her niece, Coral Maiefski, told her that she should consider it.

I didnt know if I would be very good at it, but I knew I loved theater and Coral saw something in me that maybe I didnt see myself, says Damgen, who returned to Cal State San Bernardino, where she had received a bachelors in Theatre Arts, and a masters in Communication Studies. She later received a masters in Writing for the Performing Arts from UC Riverside.

Damgen says that she was nervous about going back to school as an older student, but ended up winning Outstanding Graduate of the Year and Outstanding Graduate Teacher of the Year in the Communication Studies department. She was immediately hired by both the Communication and Theatre Arts departments at Cal State San Bernardino as part-time faculty.

I eventually became full-time in the Theatre Arts department and recently won the Outstanding Lecturer of the Year for the College of Arts and Letters, she says.

Damgens family lost her niece, Coral, to cancer. Since then, she has dedicated every show she is involved with to Corals memory.

She was a gift who inspired me to live every day to the fullest and to always help others achieve their destiny, says Damgen. I never believe you are too old to do anything if you really want to do it. I have never worked more as an artist than I have now.

Damgen is currently appearing as the title character in Federico Garcia Lorcas The House of Bernarda Alba, produced by The Homespun Players at the Garcia Center in San Bernardino for two weekends Nov. 11 through 20.

This show is significant on so many levels, says Damgen. First, it is an all-woman piece with complex characters filled with conflict, fear, lust and betrayal. Second, it is directed by a very talented female artist and third, this cast is filled with incredibly gifted, risk-taking artists.

For more information on the show, visit HomespunPlayers.com or call the Garcia Center for tickets at 909-888-6400.

Patrick Brien is executive director of the Riverside Arts Council. Contact the council at 951-680-1345 or riversideartscouncil.com

Contact the writer: community@pressenterprise.com
One person suffered mild smoke inhalation and six were displaced during an afternoon house fire in Riverside, city fire officials say.

The attic fire was reported at 2:37 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, along the 4600 block of Kansas Avenue, near Bordwell Park in the citys Eastside neighborhood.

The smoke inhalation victim was treated at the scene, but declined to go to the hospital.

The crews of three fire engines and two ladder trucks were assigned to the incident.
A 25-year-old man who was killed Friday, Nov. 4, in an early-morning shooting in Hemet has been identified.

Daniel Ramirez of San Jacinto was found dead in a storm drain near the 200 block of South Palm Avenue, north of Acacia Avenue in Hemet. Police say he had suffered a gunshot wound to his back.

Police went to that location after receiving a call of what sounded like five gunshots, according to officials.

They also learned of a 17-year-old boy who was believed to have been injured in the same shooting. He was found with a graze to his cheek in a nearby backyard in the 200 block of south Western Avenue, according to officials.

No additional information about the shooting or what caused it was available Thursday. In an email, Lt. Eddie Pust wrote the shooting was still being investigated and that police had no leads on suspects.

The Hemet Police Department has been asking anyone with additional information to contact Hemet Police Detective Cpl. Gomez at 951-765-2324.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9693, agroves@scng.com or @AlexDGroves on Twitter.
Dozens plan to meet at the UC-Riverside campus Thursday, Nov. 10, to express discontent over the recent election of soon-to-be President Donald Trump, and to plan an upcoming protest that some students have dubbed the big one.

Several groups are attempting to organize on-campus meetings for Thursday night, explained Oscar Loera, vice president of student government external affairs.

Meetings could start in the same location until at least 7 p.m., explained Miles Andrews-Duve, editor of the school newspaper, The Highlander.

The events have been advertised on social media as discussions to schedule a larger protest, Loera said.

More than 300 people have committed to attending an anti-Trump rally late next week, according to a Facebook group dubbed UCR Bell Tower Protest. Another 500-plus members said they were interested in going. The date listed on Facebook is Friday, Nov. 18, but Loera said thats likely to change because of a conflict with the homecoming bonfire.

Theyll likely reschedule, Im about 95 percent sure, Loera said.

Wednesday nights meeting is expected to draw a sizable crowd, and Loera encouraged students to maintain their composure and stay safe.

We tried our best yesterday to ensure students were safe, and that vulnerable populations were safe, Loera said, referring to undocumented and minority students. Things can get heated if people take it to that next level.

RELATED

Trump backers cite underdog factor in surprise victory

Southern California immigrant-rights groups mobilize to fight Trump

Why Muslim-Americans are bracing for President Trump
Once a month, the ancient Mariners hold court in the Sun City Family Restaurant.

There are no albatrosses, no death ships and not a hermit to be found, just the camaraderie that old shared experiences bring. The gray heads that nod around the table are almost all veterans of the Merchant Marine, and of those, all served in World War II.

Oldest among the veterans, is Charlie Nowell, 100, of Calimesa. Nowell, who lives with his grandson Rick Cox, 58, said he looks forward to the groups meetings on the first Thursday of the month.

Good friends cant be replaced, he said.

Nowell is typical of the group. He joined the Merchant Marine because he didnt want to serve in the Army. He was 28, in 1944, and living in Salinas. Hed seen local recruits marching up and down the streets. He wanted none of that.

I heard the Merchant Marines needed men, so I went down and joined, he said. I decided I wanted to join something to get some action.

The Merchant Marine, a fleet of private and government owned vessels that can be pressed into service during wartime to transport troops and materials, saw plenty of action during the war. The organizations website says more than 1,500 ships were sunk due to war conditions, nearly half of which were over 1,000 tons.

The service saw the highest casualty rate of any branch during the war. Nearly 1,000 men were killed, one out of every 26 who served. Despite that, the group often is overlooked among veterans. Technically, Mariners are not members of the military, but employees of the vessels on which they serve. Because of their exposure to combat, those who served in World War II were granted veteran status in 1988.

Nowell said he was lucky during the war. His ship never came under attack.

After enlisting, he spent two months on Catalina Island doing training, which included a lot of marching, marching, marching, he said. Once he shipped out of Richmond, he was on a ship for the duration of the war.

A fire tender, he kept the ships steam engines, fueled by black oil, in running order. The work was hot and boring, he said.

Its not a vacation, he said.

The crew had a dim view of their prospects.

We all had our little marks along the side of the ship where (we thought) that torpedo was going to come through, Nowell said.

But there was never a situation where the ships guns had to be fired. The closest Nowell ever got to being under fire was when his ship as assigned to deliver materials to Okinawa. The battle for the island was still underway. His ship was off the coast of the island when the war ended weeks later.

Therell never be fireworks like they had that night, he said. Everything was turning loose from those guns.

After the war, Nowell said he found himself stuck on a boat going nowhere. Theyd been carrying a cargo of road graders, lumber and candy for eight months, never receiving orders for where to unload the goods. They ended up in San Francisco, where Nowell was convinced the ship would be decommissioned and scrapped  after it waited around for several months.

The anxious feet that he says bothered him for most of his life, got the better of him, and he left. He wasnt officially in the military at the time  just an employee of the ships owner.

A friend of mine took my sea bag ashore, so it wouldnt look suspicious if I left, he said. His superiors thought he was going for a drink at a local bar. I went down the ladder and waved goodbye and I was gone.

Nowell spent the rest of his life bouncing around the Southwest in places such as Buena Park, Death Valley and Arizona. He had a towing business and garage in Baker for a number of years and invented some of the types of hydraulic systems used on todays tow trucks, he said. A framed press release on his wall shows that he is a member of the International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame.

About 10 years ago, he connected with the Merchant Marine group in Sun City, which has been in existence for 25 years. He attends nearly every meeting and has supplied the flags the group posts at its gatherings. Hes also supplied some of the members, including Bernie Schroyer, who is not a Mariner, but a former Marine.

Schroyer said he met Nowell at a Dennys in Beaumont several years ago.

He had his Merchants Marine hat and I had my American Legion hat and he wanted to know if he could sit with me, Schroyer said.

Theyve been close friends since.

When I met him, he hauled the flags to every meeting, so I rode with him, Schroyer said, adding that the trips were invigorating. He was going through the Badlands at 80 mph. Then he tells me hes only got one good eye.

Nowell finally stopped driving at 98.

Now Schroyer, 82, of Desert Hot Springs, has the wheel. Hes also become commander of the Old Salts. He says he was railroaded into the position and has not been allowed to quit since. Hes willing to take the abuse.

I wouldnt trade them for the world, he said. World War II guys are a different breed of cat.

One such cat, Merle Derscheid, 97, of the Sun City community of Menifee, typically gets up and performs a cappella songs such as Ballad of the Green Beret, or tunes hes composed himself.

Derscheid was a South Dakota farm boy when he joined the U.S. Navy in 1937.

All I had when I joined the Navy was a pitchfork and a milk stool, he laughed, and they didnt need either one of those. 

He left the Navy six weeks before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In 1944, he joined the Merchant Marine, after being called back for service.

He recalls helping to save his ship from friendly attack off the East Coast. The captain and the first mate of the vessel did not know how to use Morse code and the ships signal lamp to identify themselves to a patrol plane. Because of his Navy experience, Derscheid knew how and kept the ship from being fired upon.

Among the groups other members are a Pearl Harbor survivor and an Army Air Corps veteran who flew 28 B-17 missions over Europe.

But like most older veterans, the groups membership is thinning.

It sounds like were going to disband, Schroyer said.

What? Nowell said, perking up.

Well nobody comes to the meetings anymore, Schroyer said.

Two years ago, he said, they had 30 members for their Christmas party. These days, theyre lucky to get a handful sitting at the tables in the restaurants back room. Some members have died. Others have drifted away. Schroyer was concerned that several members were not going to be at the groups Veterans Day event at 11 a.m. at Menifees Webb Hall.

As to whether the group continues, he said, Im very dedicated to it. But well see after this weekend how it goes.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9595 or mmuckenfuss@scng.com
The family of an Ontario man shot and killed by an Ontario police officer in 2014 was awarded $1.2 million on Thursday.

A jury on Thursday found the officer was negligent in the May 10, 2014, fatal shooting of 59-year-old Jose Raul Herrera, the familys attorney said.

The six-woman, two-man jury was unanimous in its decision following the five-day trial in U.S. District Court in Riverside, said Dale K. Galipo, the Woodland Hills attorney representing Herreras widow, Gladdis, and their two sons, Ivan and Marlon Herrera, who witnessed the shooting.

Up until trial, the defendants denied any responsibility, so they forced the case to trial, Galipo said. We were very pleased with the jurys verdict. The family was very grateful. I think this is going to help with the beginning of the closure process.

Attorney Dennis Cota, who represented the city in the case, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

The lawsuit, filed July 9, 2015, named as defendants the city of Ontario and 10 DOES. Ontario police Officer Nicholas Diaz was later identified as the officer who fatally shot Herrera.

Shortly before midnight on May 10, 2012, police were called to the Herrera home, in the 900 block of North Placer Street after Herreras family called police to keep the peace. They informed police the family patriarch had passed out after drinking too much, then awoke and began acting belligerent. When police arrived, Herrera was brandishing a kitchen knife and yelling at police, authorities said.

One unnamed officer used a Taser on Herrera, and Diaz shot him about the same time, Galipo said, adding that neither officer warned Herrera they were going to shoot, not did they tell him to drop the knife.

In an unusual twist, the jury found Herrera to be even more negligent than the police officers  55 percent negligent.

It was undisputed that (Herrera) had the knife in his hand, said Galipo. The real issue in the case was if it was necessary to kill Herrera. I think maybe the jury thought the officers could have handled it better.
In 1939, Sam Silberberg was 9 years old when the Germans invaded Poland and occupied his hometown of Jaworzno. Then at the age of 12 he and his father both worked as prison laborers in concentration camps. Finally, in 1945, he and other prisoners were taken on a death march. Luckily, he escaped.

Despite  or rather because of  such horrific experiences, Silberberg has continually shared his story, doing so Wednesday night at the Corona Public Library.

The event, orchestrated by Congregation Beth Shalom in Corona, took place on the anniversary of Kristallnacht  two nights of violence in 1938 during which Nazis in Germany torched synagogues; vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses; and killed close to 100 Jews. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Silberberg, who is now 87 and living in Laguna Woods, leaped onto the stage and stood for an hour recounting his experiences.

Many lucky breaks kept him alive.

When he was 12, he was supposed to be sent to the death camp Auschwitz. But he tricked the Nazis by standing on a cinder block to appear taller; women and children were sent to death camps and men were sent to labor camps. He and his father instead went to the labor camp Annaberg, where they built barracks for other prisoners.

He and his father eventually were transferred to Blechhammer; it was there that the idea of escape first germinated. Though his father believed that God would protect and liberate them, Silberberg felt that escape was worth risking his life.

Once, Silberberg did escape, but others lives forced Silberberg to return; the Nazis had promised to kill 10 Jews if they discovered a prisoner had escaped.

An alarm announcing an Ally bombing had blared; Silberberg figured anyone who was discovered missing would have been presumed to have been killed in the bombing. Unfortunately, the planes did not drop any bombs.

There was no excuse for me to be missing, he said. I was sure that my father would be one of them (to be killed) so I had to go back, because I did not want to be responsible for the killing of 10 other people.

Another set of miracles helped Silberberg find his mother.

While walking back to camp one day, he happened across his mother  who slipped a note into his fathers pocket. The note contained an address in Neisse.

Silberberg and his father tried to figure out the best way to contact her. They decided to trust their German boss, whom they deemed as not as committed to the Nazi cause as others.

By yet another miracle, the German had contacted his mother and Silberberg learned she was working as a Christian in a monastery.

He would reunite with her in the winter of 1945, when the Nazis evacuated the camp to drive the prisoners deeper into Germany.

With the approaching Russian army, the Nazis wanted to erase evidence of their atrocities and sent the prisoners on a death march. Silberberg managed to escape and found his mother in Neisse.

Silberberg stayed in Israel and eventually immigrated to the U.S. in 1952, where his mother previously had immigrated. Silberberg and his mother were the only surviving members of the immediate family.

Back in Corona, he answered a round of questions and signed his book From Hell to the Promised Land: A Boys Daring Escape from a Nazi Concentration Camp.

Contact the writer: community@pressenterprise.com
With solar panels extending deep into the desert behind them, dozens of energy and government officials marked Californias commitment to clean energy with the commissioning of two neighboring solar plants near Blythe on Thursday, Nov. 10.

The McCoy and Blythe projects, owned and operated by subsidiaries of Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources, will collectively produce a peak capacity of 485 megawatts and make enough carbon-free electricity for 181,000 homes, according to company estimates.

And this $1.2 billion investment is just half of it, explained Scott Busa, the companys executive director of development, speaking above the blare of the Rolling Stones Start Me Up.

Later phases of the projects will double the current production. The completed projects will cover more than 12 square miles of federal lands about 10 miles west of Blythe in eastern Riverside County.

Its the nations largest solar development zone on federal land.

Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit said the projects employed hundreds of construction workers since building began in 2014.

We are doing right for our environment, our kids, and our earth, said Benoit, speaking to about 70 people.

Tribal Secretary Amanda Barrera of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, had mixed feelings.

She commended NextEra for working with tribal monitors, who were on hand to care for artifacts that were unearthed during the construction.

But Barrera also noted that the projects were built on sacred ancestral lands that nourished the Mohave and Chemehuevi peoples.

We can no longer roam freely through here for our medicine, she said, her voice cracking.  The animals that roamed through here can no longer roam through here.

About four million photovoltaic panels now cover the landscape. Computer-controlled trackers adjust the panels angles so that they get maximum exposure to the sun.

McCoy and Blythe are the fourth and fifth large-scale solar plants to go into operation on public land in the deserts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

They follow the Ivanpah and Genesis solar projects, which started up in 2014, and the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm, which began generating power in early 2015.

Ivanpah, off I-15 in northeastern San Bernardino County, uses mirrors to focus heat on three tall towers that are equipped with boilers to make electricity.

The Genesis plant, about 25 miles west of Blythe, uses nearly 620,000 curved mirrors to capture the suns heat to make steam that turns turbines to create electricity.

Like McCoy and Blythe, Desert Sunlight is uses photovoltaic panels to turn sunlight directly into electricity. That plant is north of Desert Center, near Joshua Tree National Park.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9471 or ddanelski@scng.com
Is it a momentary release of anger? Or the start of something more?

That question lingers after a wave of protests in California and elsewhere against Donald Trumps victory Tuesday, Nov. 8 in the presidential election. Thousands on Wednesday and Thursday took to the streets to express their outrage about a candidate denounced by foes as a champion of racism, misogyny and homophobia.

Thousands protested in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other large U.S. cities. Protesters also rallied on college campuses nationwide.

Locally, a walking protest took place in downtown Riverside on Wednesday night and UC Riverside students planned to meet Thursday night to talk about protest plans. High schoolers Thursday walked out of classes in Montclair, San Gabriel and other Southern California schools.

Trumps underdog win over Hillary Clinton stunned her supporters as the real estate mogul and reality TV stars base of blue-collar whites outmatched Clintons coalition, which relied heavily on ethnic minorities. Republicans now control the White House, Congress and the majority of governorships and state legislatures.

After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, the tea party movement rose and lifted the GOP to a congressional majority while providing an organized, sustained resistance to the Democratic president. Will there be a tea party of the left, or will the spirit fueling this weeks protests fade in the course of the Trump administration?

Its too early to say, said Renee Van Vechten, a political science professor at the University of Redlands. The tea party, she said, didnt take shape until about a year after Obama took office and grew with the help of talk radio and clearly defined leaders.

Yelling isnt enough. You cannot sustain a scream for a long time. It dies down over time, she said. Anger has to be channeled.

Van Vechten drew a distinction between an explicity anti-Trump movement and general opposition to the new president.

For an actual movement to take shape, it would be distinguishable because it coalesces around a set of principles that the opposing party leaders (Democrats) either havent fully embraced, or because of policies that seem unachievable without their activism, she said.

Occupy Wall Street grew organically because it seemed to people that Democrats and Republican politicians were in bed with Wall Street, and change had to be forced by activism from outside the system. Same with the tea party movement.

WHICH TRUMP?

Mark Peterson, a professor at UCLAs Luskin School of Public Affairs, said the anti-Trump protests arent a flash in the pan.

We have never had a president-elect like Donald Trump, who in the course of his career and the campaign has done so much to be offensive to such a large range of groups, Peterson said.

Trumps actions as president will influence the intensity of his opposition, Peterson said.

Because he is not an individual of long-standing core convictions or clear policy orientations beyond campaign-inspired rhetoric, as many others have said, we simply do not know which Donald Trump will be sworn in on Inauguration Day, he said.

If it is a version like that one who ran for office, I would expect to see a lot of social action in the form of protests, demonstrations, and other forms of political communication, including in the social medium.

Should the weight of being president of the United States really shape Mr. Trumps sense of time and place, he may take a very different approach, one that may include cross-party alliances on some issues and a much more measured use of tone and language, Peterson added.

Of course, that moderation of tone and language would not be well-received by many of the people who voted for him.

WHO ORGANIZES?

California could be a hotbed for an anti-Trump movement. Clinton dominated Trump in the Golden State, which is more ethnically diverse and Democratic than other states.

Javier Hernandez, director of the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, said his organization will not accept the real threat that a new administration will have on human rights and constitutional protections.

Moving forward, our movement of community, diversity, and inclusion will be even more intentional in building bridges with Muslim, black, LGBTQ, and other underrepresented communities in the region, he said.

Marcia Godwin, an associate professor of public administration at the University of La Verne, said she expects increased activism within established interest groups and the Democratic Party plus newer, grassroots groups focused on younger voters and public protests.

In California, we are already seeing realignment of interest groups around more liberal or progressive candidates versus Democratic candidates that are supported more by corporate interests, she said.

Existing progressive groups will be very aggressive in recruiting support. I also see (billionaire liberal activist) Tom Steyers NextGen organization having even more influence in the 2018 elections.

As a former president, Obama could have a role in organizing opposition as well, Godwin said.

If President Obama follows through on plans to recruit and support local and state candidates, it is more likely for opposition to Trump to be channeled through Obama-supported organizations than to groups more independent of the Democratic Party, she said.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9547 or jhorseman@scng.com
Demonstrations continued Thursday at college campuses, schools and in the streets across Southern California as protesters rallied against the election of Donald Trump as president.

Dozens planned to meet at the UC Riverside campus to plan an upcoming demonstration Thursday after protests were held in that city the night before. Wednesday night several dozen protesters marched near the Mission Inn, carrying signs and shouting anti-Trump slogans.

On the UCLA campus in Westwood, hundreds of students marched, many of them chanting, Love trumps hate. Some participants said they heard about the demonstration through Facebook.

I wanted to be a part of this because what just happened [in the election] shows that were not okay and we need to spend time to make solidarity with one another. We need to show that we will support one another, said 20-year-old math and education major Anne Thomason, who described herself as trans, queer and ready to fight.

Tod Tamberg, director of strategic communications at UCLA, estimated the crowd of protesters at about 450.

Four campus police officers monitored the demonstration, he said.

Following the protest, members of a UCLA group called the Queer Arts Collective invited fellow students to put their handprints on a banner that stretched about 100 feet along Bruin Walk.

Youre signing with your hand [to show] that youll stand up against oppression, said Chris Luna, a 24-year-old doctoral student in physics.

Timna Naim, a 21-year-old dance major from Brooklyn, applied black tempera paint to students palms before they pressed them onto the paper banner.

We wanted people to put their hands in solidarity, Naim said. People are mad [about the election]. People feel the oppression and are scared for whats going to come.

Naim said he expects anti-Trump protests to increase. I think the voice is going to get louder, he said.

Also Thursday, about 100 Montclair High School students walked off campus at 10 a.m. and marched more than 5 miles before being bused back to campus. For nearly two hours, students traveled east from Montclair High to Chaffey High in Ontario and down to James Bryant Park, also in Ontario.

The anti-Trump group tried to enter Chaffey but were locked out. Students inside Chaffey classrooms could be heard cheering them on from windows.

We want to be heard. We dont want Donald Trump, a guy that discriminates against woman, we dont need that for a president, 17-year-old Montclair senior Dreason Elizalde said.

Hundreds of high school students from West Adams Preparatory and Santee Educational Complex walked out of class to protest Trumps election. They then joined a demonstration at USC.

For you all to come together like this and show that youre stronger than what they think you are and smarter than what they think you are  its powerful, USC senior Omete Anassi told the high school students.

It was the first protest for most of the students, many of whom are 15 and in their first year of high school.

After gathering at USC, the students marched through the streets of Los Angeles chanting not my president, and profanities.

West Adams freshman Tiffany Romo said she could not understand why anyone could vote for Trump, saying he made many divisive and hateful comments during his presidential campaign.

How someone could vote for someone like that doesnt make sense, said Romo, 15, adding that walking out with her classmates made her feel like she had a voice even though she didnt get a vote. It feels good.

Santee student Andrew Granados said he joined the protest to make a poignant statement.

Donald Trump aint going to tell us how to live, what we are or what we need to be, Granados said.

Those who participated in the USC protest said the demonstration allowed them to voice their discontent.

It forced us into this unity, Elshaddai Mulugeta, a sophomore at USC, said. She encouraged her peers as they parted ways to just keep talking about it. Be loud about it.

The protests followed similar demonstrations Wednesday at Cal State Fullerton, UC Irvine and Chapman University. Demonstrators also flocked to the streets of several Southern California cities.

Police arrested 28 anti-Trump protesters Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles who spilled onto the 101 Freeway, closing the roadway and drawing a contingent of officers in riot gear.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said many immigrants in L.A. were anxious in the wake of a contentious campaign in which uncertainty emerged about their futures under a Trump administration.

As religious and civic leaders stood behind him at a news conference Thursday, Garcetti said thousands of Angelenos came together publicly to make their feelings known.

He added that Americans right to free expression is one of our greatest privileges but he cautioned protesters to put safety first.

I understand that the results of Tuesdays election are painful for many of us, and this kind of engagement can be a meaningful part of the healing we need after such a long and divisive campaign, Garcetti said. Protests can, should, and must proceed in that spirit.

Protests turned violent Wednesday night in Santa Ana when more than 650 demonstrators blocked intersections and clashed with police. Ten protesters were arrested and several police vehicles and businesses were vandalized.

Similar protests attracted thousands in California cities stretching from San Francisco and Oakland to San Diego.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7767 sschwebke@scng.com Twitter @thechalkoutline
Telecommunication operators in the country spent a total of GH4.92 billion in tax contributions, public funding and network improvement over the last five years.



Out of the amount, the telcos, comprising MTN, Vodafone, Airtel, Tigo, paid GH1.42 billion in taxes in 2015 as compared to GH1.05 in 2014.



A total of GH3.82 billion was used in capital expenditure while other remittances amounted to GH595 million.



Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, who disclosed this in an interview with journalists at the launch of 5th Anniversary celebration of the Chamber at Kaneshie Market, Accra, said the telcos have contributed a lot to the growth of the economy of Ghana.



He said the telcos have created over 6,200 direct jobs and about 1.6 million indirect jobs over the last five years.



Mr. Sakyi-Addo said the formation of the Chamber has helped the telcos to fight for a common cause in the areas of taxes, regulations and legislations, among others.



He said the telecos engage in discussions at the Chamber and find solutions to their problems.



Mr. Sakyi-Addo said currently the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications was working closely with the National Telecommunication Authority and community leaders to develop a formula for charging for mobile infrastructure in various communities.



The formula, when agreed upon, would make fees charged for mounting mast and other infrastructure more predictable and transparent, he added.

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.

Featured Video
Government has announced the release of allowances for nursing trainees in all government assisted colleges.



This was disclosed by deputy Health Minister, Dr Victor Bampoe during an interaction with students at the Atibie Midwifery and Nursing Training College at Atibie in the Kwahu South district of the Eastern region on Thursday.



Dr Bampoe whose announcement was received with deafening cheers from the excited students said somewhat students will begin receiving the amount in the days.



He was addressing the students at a durbar held in honour of Chief of Staff Julius Debrah, a citizen of the area who is on a campaign tour of the Region.



The deputy Health Minister said the students can cross check with their Principals for proof adding that the amount which covers a period of three months will give room for the necessary arrangements to be made for students to access loans to continue their education.



He noted that President John MAHAMA's administration is on record for being the government which has invested so heavily in the health sector over the last four years.



Mr Bampoe mentioned Polyclinics completed or at various stages of completion across the regions, over 17 district hospitals, CHPS compounds, and major facilities like the University of Ghana Medical Center, the Ridge Hospital, the Kumasi Military Hospital which he said will create thousands of jobs for students.



The deputy Health Minister emphasized that as a visionary leader President John MAHAMA is committed to the well being of every Ghanaians and has invested over two billion dollars in the provision of infrastructure, over 267million dollars in the provision of modern equipment under the National Equipment Replacement Programme and government is expanding training facilities.



"We have increased training facilities from 25 to about 96 over the last few years and these include 10 private ones. Over the last seven months we have employed over 7,000 nurses and the facilities we are building are guaranteeing you of jobs." He assured



Earlier the Principal of the Atibie Midwifery and Nursing Training college, Paulina Osabutey commended government for the support and appealed for the provision of additional hostels, staff bungalows and a 100kVa generator to the school.



Chief of Staff Julius Debrah who was brief in his remark wished the students well and urged them to make the right choice in the December 7 elections to guarantee a better future for themselves and the generation yet to be born.



Key among the dignitaries who graced the event were the Eastern regional Minister and her deputy, Professor Kwamena Ahwoi, some national and regional executives of the NDC.

Source: Emmanuel Akorli/PeaceFM









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.

Featured Video
The Supreme Court on Wednesday descended heavily on the Electoral Commission (EC), describing its persistent absence from court over matters of national interest as disrespectful.



The seven-member panel of judges presided over by Justice William Atuguba, were incensed when it became apparent that there was nobody to represent the commission in court.



Thaddeus Sory, the lawyer who had always led the EC, was absent and had directed his junior, Sean Poku, to hold brief for him in the case in which three plaintiffs  Dr Amoako Tuffuor, Benjamin Arthur and Adreba Abrefa Damoa  want the court to order the counting of special voting soon after voting is over.



Disrespect



Justice Anin-Yeboah, one of the panel members, noted that the case is a sensitive one and so the commission should have put in some appearance, stressing that the absence of the EC was shear disrespect.



Justice A.A. Benin, who was equally not enthused about the incident, said if the commission was in court it would have an idea of what happened.



He said the EC, having failed to do so, rely on information from journalists who misreport court proceedings for reasons he could not tell.



According to Justice Anin-Yeboah, Sean, who was answering questions from Justice Atuguba in respect of special voting, was speculating and that the lawyer had still not seen the need for the EC to be in court.



Secrecy



Justice Jones Dotse, another member of the panel, was emphatic that it was prudent officials of the commission appeared in court because they had no time on their side.



He wondered whether the secrecy of the voters would not be compromised if the votes were counted.



In the view of the judge of the apex court, the counting of the votes could send signals to candidates which might not be good for the country.



He argued for instance, What if the special election results were declared and it goes a certain direction?



To that, Egbert Fabille Jnr., counsel for the plaintiffs, told the court that their case was set out in their statement of case filed at the court.



He said it had been the position of sections of the people that the special votes do not reflect in the results of the general poll.



Mr. Fabille explained that the Constitution does not make room for special voting, indicating that the plaintiffs were not challenging the constitutionality of the special voting but the mode.



Plaintiffs Case



According to him, the special voting will be held on December 1, 2016 but the EC, notwithstanding the clear provision of Article 49 of the 1992 Constitution, rely on Regulation 23 (11) of C.I. 94, which is a subsidiary legislation.



Justice Benin wondered if the applicants could not have suggested something (ways) of securing votes after the exercise (until it is added and counted during the general votes).



Answering, Mr. Fabille said the seal in such instances gets broken.



Earlier, Justice Atuguba among others, inquired from the parties if it was the practice the world over for special votes to be counted and declared, a question they all answered in the negative.



He accordingly set Monday, November 14 for judgement.



Meanwhile, Sean said the EC would rely on its statement of case filed on November 7, 2016.



Dorothy Afiriyie, representing the Attorney General (AG), said the state would also rely on its statement of case filed on the same day.



The plaintiffs argued in their writ that Section 23 of C.I. 94  the law which regulates the conduct of the 2016 general election  was inconsistent with Article 49 of the 1992 Constitution.



Per the C.I. 94, the Returning Officer shall at the end of the special voting, ensure that the ballot boxes used in the special election are kept in safe custody after the poll has closed.

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.

Featured Video
Flagbearer of the Progressive Peoples Party (PPP) Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom has said that every political party in Ghana is now afraid of his party as the nation heads to the polls next month.



Addressing party supporters in Bolgatanga on Wednesday after the Electoral Commission announced the PPP among the seven political parties to be on the ballots, Dr. Nduom said his party has become a scarecrow to both the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP).



I want you to be happy about one thing; now, when you ask an NDC man which political party they are afraid of they will tell you PPP. When you ask an NPP man which political party they are afraid of they will tell you PPP. So, now, everybody is afraid of the PPP and it is because of you, he said referring to the supporters.



He said the PPP have been touring the country and feedback they get is impressive. Dr. Nduom charged the party supporters that working a little bit harder will see the PPP winning the upcoming elections.

Source: 3news.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
The 2016 Presidential Candidate of the Convention Peoples Party(CPP), Ivor Greenstreet has described as calculated political mischief the NDCs constant association with Dr. Kwame Nkrumah on their campaign trail.



According to Mr. Greenstreet, the NDC is deceiving Ghanaians by using the name  Nkrumah to gain popularity among electorates as election approaches.



Speaking in the Eastern region, the Flagbearer of the CPP said the NDCs claim of representing the dreams of Ghanas first President is a sham because they could only be said to be a replica of Nkrumah.



NDC which is claiming to be Kwame Nkrumahs party has signed Economic Partnership Agreement(EPA) and that agreement will always make sure that we are slaves in our own country. So if NDC wants to tell you that they are for Kwame Nkrumah, I want to tell you that they are a replica. And you know when you buy something which is a replica within a short time, the replica thing will spoil.



So Im pleading with you it is only the CPP, the Cockerel party, which can rescue you and the fate of all Ghanaians come December 7, 2016.







Source: kasapafmonline









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Three embattled Ghanaian judges have filed a suit at the court of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for alleged violations of their human rights in Ghana.



Justice Paul Dery, Justice Mustapha Habib Logoh and Justice Gilbert Ayisi Addo, in a joint suit, named the Ghana Government, the Chief Justice of Ghana, the Ghana Judicial Council and the Attorney General of Ghana as the first, second, third and fourth respondents, respectively.



By the suit, the three justices are seeking the enforcement of their human rights which have been allegedly violated by the Ghana Government.



The judges are seeking 11 reliefs from the ECOWAS Court under the following laws: United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights.



The judges claim in the suit that they are seeking declarations from the ECOWAS Court on the following grounds, among others:



 That their human rights have been violated;



 That the Government of Ghana owes it as a duty to respect and uphold and also ensure that every person within the jurisdiction of the Republic of Ghana respects and upholds individual human rights enshrined in the laws mentioned earlier;



 That the Government of Ghana has violated their rights to fair trial and administrative justice;



 That the Government of Ghana has violated their rights to equality before the law and freedom from discrimination; and



 That the Government of Ghana has violated their rights to work and to privacy.



The judges are also seeking an order from the ECOWAS Court prohibiting the Government of Ghana from continuing with the impeachment, or prosecution of the applicants based solely on evidence procured in violation of the applicants rights to privacy.



They are further seeking an order from the court to direct the Ghana Government to pay with interest full salaries and allowances which it unlawfully suspended since January, 2016  arising out of a petition by Tiger Eye PI/Anas Aremeyaw Anas for their removal from office.



Last year, Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a Ghanaian private investigator, presented a petition to the President of the Republic of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama, which the President later forwarded to the Chief Justice of Ghana, Theodora Georgina Wood.



The petition exposed 33 judges of the high and circuit courts and magistrates in video and transcripts  allegedly receiving bribes from agents of Tiger Eye PI, an investigation firm owned by Anas.



Acting upon evidences provided by the video and transcripts, the Supreme Court and the Ghana Judicial Service dismissed a number of high and circuit court judges and magistrates for professional misconduct.



But a few of the indicted judges opted to exercise their human rights by challenging the positions taken by the Ghana Judicial Service on the matter.



Numerous court actions taken by Justice Paul Dery and others failed to get them off the hook of the law as interpreted and acted upon by the courts in Ghana.



The positions of the courts in Ghana have been, in sum, that although Anas, a private investigator, is not known to the law in Ghana and that his firm, Tiger Eye PI, is non-existent in law in the country, the evidence he has provided should not be disregarded.



That means the evidence is admissible in court in Ghana.



The courts in Ghana have based their positions on the principle that when information of wrong doing by a public officer is made available to the courts, that information must be investigated  whether the information is lawfully obtained or not.



This position derives from the Machiavellian doctrine that the end justifies the means.



That Doctrine and the positions assumed by the court in Ghana are opposed to the American doctrine of the poisoned tree. A poisoned tree bears poisoned fruits. Therefore, poisoned evidence must not be admissible in courts of the United States of America.



Based on this doctrine, Anas evidence is, therefore, not admissible in American courts.



The various points that the embattled Ghanaian judges have raised in their suit to the ECOWAS Court  cut across Ghanas territorial and legal boundaries.



How are courts of law outside Ghana likely to approach the case? How is the ECOWAS Court going to define and interpret evidence and its admissibility?



When compared with similar cases in Nigeria, it should be noted that the Nigerian National Judicial Council (NJC) has disclosed recently that since 2000, it had regularly received and dealt with petitions from the Department of State Service (DSS) against some judges bordering on corruption and abuse of office.



The NJC has added that it dealt with those petitions. Actions taken by the NJC included dismissals, suspensions, etc., of judges who were found guilty.



Compared with the cases based on Anas expose, it appears that, unlike Nigerias, Ghanas law enforcement agencies went to sleep.



An outlaw private investigator with a private investigation firm unknown to the law, assumed the functions assigned in law to state security agencies.



In the process, Anas and his firm appear to have trampled upon the law with impunity.



He failed to obtain a permit from a judge to invade the privacy of judges of courts in Ghana.



Indeed, for two years, Tiger Eye PI secret agents moved into and out of high, circuit and magistrate courts in the country with hidden cameras and monies.



In the light of the Nigerian National Judicial Councils reaction to the recent raid and search of homes of superior court justices (The Mirror, October 21  27, 2016), I doubt if the Anas evidence would receive a hearing in Nigerias courts  because of the circumstances mentioned earlier including the fact that the President of Ghana omitted to do due process by examining the legal status of Anas and his firm before presenting the petition to the Chief Justice.



In the Ghanaian example, it appears that Anas and his firm had poisoned the sea of justice to catch big sharks.



How is the ECOWAS Court going to react to Anas poisoned evidence and the reliefs that the embattled Ghanaian judges are seeking?

Source: Graphic.com.gh









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.

Featured Video
Any hope of the ruling National Democratic Congress(NDC) making significant impact in the Juaben Constituency has been dashed after its popular stronghold, Boaman-Dumase, fell for the opposition party.



The community is notoriously known for voting for the NDC in previous elections but the trend seems to have changed this time with most of the electorates pledging allegiance to the NPP.



The constituents made true their promise after coming out in their numbers to welcome the Ashanti Regional Chairman, Mr. Bernard Antwi Boasiako and the MP, Hon. Ama Pomaa.



The excitement and enthusiasm of the community indicated clearly that the ruling NDC will have difficulty holding onto the votes achieved in previous polls.



Almost every single voter came out to the share in the celebration during the community campaign organized to interact with the people.



Also spicing the mammoth occasion was the celebrated veteran actor, Agya Adu Kofi, popularly known as Agya Koo, who turned the crowd on with his appearance.

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.

Featured Video
All is set for the launch of the MUSIGA Academy on Thursday November 17 at the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI).



The Academy is a result of a collaboration between the Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA) and NAFTI to provide competence based training for professionals in the music industry.



The Academy is offering training in ten modules. Participants will be taken through core modules such as Using ICT for Career Development, Copyright and Publishing, Survey of Music in Ghana, Music Theory and Musicianship. They will then have the option of specializing in Studio Specialization, Music Business Management, Traditional Instruments Specialization, Western Instruments Specialization, Centre Stage Grooming and Singing and Songwriting, Arrangement and Composition.



According to the MUSIGA President Bice Osei Kuffour, the Academy project has become necessary to enhance the skills of industry players. He noted that the Union decided on the range of modules to ensure that the needs of all industry practitioners along the music production value chain are addressed.



He called on musicians who are interested in upgrading their skills to register for the Academy which will be held at NAFTI.



On his part, the Rector of NAFTI, Prof Linus Abraham noted that the Academy project is a result of NAFTIs desire to work closely with the creative arts to provide skills that are relevant to the arts. He indicated that the Academy will form the basis for the Music Production Department of NAFTI.



The MUSIGA Academy is sponsored by the Skills Development Fund (SDF) of the Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (COTVET) under the supervision of the School of Performing Arts of the University of Ghana, Legon. In all 120 participants will be trained for free.













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.

Featured Video
A 20-year-old Australian backpacker has been raped and murdered in south-eastern Africa  her body allegedly dumped on a beach  just days before she was due to fly home.

Elly Warren, from Mordialloc in Melbourne, spent three months backpacking in Mozambique, spending time with a diving group and as a volunteer, teaching African kids how to swim.

She spent the six weeks before her death volunteering for an eco-research company called Underwater Africa, staying at tourist hotspot Tofo Beach in south-eastern Mozambique.

During that time, she stayed at the companys residences but  having finished up with Underwater Africa on Tuesday  had booked to stay two nights at Wuyani Pariango Beach Motel, about one kilometre away.

She never arrived, and her distraught family were notified that Ellys body had been found in a toilet block (a local guest house owner reported that her body was found on a beach but this is yet to be confirmed).

Her dad, Paul, confirmed the news to family and friends on Facebook, sharing a photo of her with boyfriend Luke Tempany.







Her sister Kristy described the moment they received the horrific news in a post on Facebook.

My sister was in Africa while my mum got a phone call from one of the backpackers saying to her that her daughter has been murdered, as I heard that my heart dropped, she wrote. It is a parents nightmare to get a phone call like this.

A spokesman from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed its providing consular assistance to the family of a woman who died in Mozambique but wouldnt provide any further details.

Her father has confirmed the family will fly to Mozambique in a few days to bring my baby back home, once the autopsy on her body has been carried out.

Elly was due to return to Australia on Monday, before travelling to New Zealand with her boyfriend on Friday.

Our thoughts go out to her family and friends during this horrific time.

Source: The Age.

Photo: Facebook.
The father of a 20-year-old Australian girl who was raped and murdered in Mozambique has said his daughter was concerned about the dangers of travelling to the south African country.

Elly Warren, from Melbourne, was on a three-month backpacking and volunteering trip when the tragedy occurred. Her body was found near a toilet block on Wednesday, just days before she was due to come home.

Elly and her boyfriend Luke Tempany.

Her father Paul Warren has now given a heartbreaking interview to Channel 7.

Its unbelievable, he said through tears. And to go through what she would have gone through you know you often wonder if there is a god.



He said shed spoken to him shortly before travelling to Mozambique, concerned about the possible dangers.



She even told me: Its dangerous, Dad, I dont know if I should be going over there, he said. And I said to her, Yes, it is very dangerous.



He described his daughter as somebody that had a lot of ambitions in life, and now its all been taken away from her because of some bastards.



I hope they catch them. Elly was a treasure, she was a gem. Everybody loved her.





She was a lovely girl and now shes gone, and Im never going to see her again.



He said hed be travelling to Mozambique in the next few days to bring my baby back home.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is providing assistance to the family.

Source: Yahoo.



Photo: Facebook.
The prevailing take-away from Donald Trumps election win (apart from shock, in all its forms, from everyone) is that most of us failed to adequately address the deep political disenfranchisement felt by huge chunks of the American voting populace.

As that becomes clearer, were faced with a new problem: working out how we should respect and react to voters who wanted something  anything  to change, while recognising the man they chose to instigate those changes is an unrepentantly racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and dangerous husk of a human.

Flight Facilities, of all people, dont appear to have struck that balance.

This afternoon, the Aussie choon-merchants posted a wide-reaching post regarding the ongoing protests in the US against Trumps presidency. In it, they write that instead of kicking, screaming and insulting, maybe its time to stop, look around, and look inward as to exactly how this has happened.

Protesting and rioting in response to a democratically held election, undermines the fabric on which a great country was built. Sometimes things dont go the way we want them to. Thats life. But if we live by the mentality of turning to violence and intimidation when things dont go our way, why should we expect our adversaries to take the higher ground when it does?

At this point, you may be able to sense why readers would take umbrage to Flight Facs take, considering Trumps pathological inability to take anything close to the high road. Still, the post continues in a similarly matter-of-fact tone, focussing on the issue of social medias echo chamber, before this:

The Republican party won the 2016 election with less of the white vote, than when it lost in 2012, which hopefully suggests that this weeks truly unbelievable result is less about hate, and more about the resonance of something more we failed to see. The sun will rise tomorrow. The world will keep turning. So, be excellent to each other, especially those you disagree with, and prove to us all that, irrespective of party politics, you can still be the greatest country on Earth.

Its those sentences in particular that have sparked a pretty vigorous response from fans. One reminded the musos that peaceful protests have been at the heart of many of the United States greatest civil rights victories:

I suggest you look back at history. The Boston Tea Party. Vietnam. Stonewall. Dr. King. Womens Suffrage. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

However, the strongest message to the act has been that, welp, Trumps presidency represents a very real threat to the rights and liberties of many oppressed and disadvantaged minorities within the nation.

One commenter wrote telling non white Americans to smile and take it (as they have had to do for all of Americas existence) is condescending as hell, and shows a huge lack of awareness, with another saying the post is such a privileged answer to the issue.

Another wrote this is not a normal election, this is not people whining they didnt get their way, and there is no fucking way youd write this if you werent two white men.

An Aussie poster added a local perspective, saying democracy also gave us Mike Baird but youve happily supported the Keep Sydney Open protests. Why are the Sydney lockout laws somehow more important than the rights of millions of American women, POC, and LGBTQ people?

Perhaps fan Mike Duong landed the most pointed rebuttal. He writes that while some of his mates are white, some are Hispanic, some are Asian. Some are Muslim. There is real, tangible, crippling fear here. And its not just media hype.

Racial epitaphs (sic) are being strewn about. Intimidation, violence, and hatred is visible. I have friends, neighbors, loved ones who are afraid to be themselves. You can no longer love who you want, apparently. You can no longer worship who you want now, apparently. The threat of violence is palpable. It is terrifying.

Duong closed his retort by saying I hope you have the courage to express your sweetest of sentiments to the children who come home from school being bullied, threatened, intimidated, told that they will soon be deported, imprisoned, or killed.

FWIW, the source post also has its fair share of supporters who are fully behind Flight Facilities message of understanding, but youre likely going to see more people railing against that kind of optimistic narrative in the future.

Read the full post, and responses to it, right here.

Source: Flight Facilities / Facebook.

Photo: Flight Facilities / Facebook.
Imagine, just for one second, that Hillary Clinton was elected President. The (literal and on-the-nose) glass ceiling would have shattered, Pauline Hanson wouldnt be grinning like the Cheshire Cat on crack, and we wouldve been able to see if Donald Trump was as gracious a loser as he is a winner.

But that didnt happen, and the world is fairly shook. Questions about why this happened and what this means for Australia are rightly being asked, but it looks like old mate Tony Abbott is straight-up using this shock election to relaunch his own leadership goals.

Congrats to the new president who appreciates that middle America is sick of being taken for granted.  Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) November 9, 2016

In an interview with Radio Nationals Fran Kelly this morning, the former Prime Minister excused Trumps wildly racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and general garbage comments about almost every minority made during his campaign, saying that we should judge him instead by his record as president.

In the end, people are not voting for a saint, or even for a role model, theyre voting for a leader. This was someone they thought would be strong, this was someone they thought would address their real concerns.

Abbott made the same point as everyone else  that Trump had tapped into the disenfranchised American voters  but did it in a way that sounds *remarkably* like he might be talking about, idk, himself.

If people are unhappy with conventional standard bearers, they will find new standard bearers. If you dont have strong centre right party, a strong and sensible centre right party, people who are looking for what might be broadly described as conservative positions will find other voices to represent them. I think this is something that mainstream politicians ignore at their peril.

Kelly obviously picked up on that, pointing out that Abbott  who embodies all of the above  failed in the polls, to which Abbott replied: Trump was constantly failing in the polls!

And look, we all know how that turned out.

Abbott then took aim at political correctness, which is nothing new, but hes predictably now subscribing to Cory Bernardis theory of the silent majority. (He was also quoted by the Daily Telegraphs Simon Benson today as saying that Trumps win was a poke in the eye with a burnt stick for the politically correct everywhere, so ya know. Good fun.)

Both the UK vote last year, the Brexit vote this year, and the Trump vote this year are a good sign that we should not be ruled by polls. Because what weve seen in all three cases were people who werent upfront with the pollsters, because they saw the kind of excoriation that the non-politically correct were getting, and obviously didnt want to tell pollsters what they really thought.

Sounds exactly like something an unpopular politician would say, imo.

The rest of the interview pipped along with a sledging of 18C, a praising of Turnbulls return to traditional Liberal issues like border security over innovation (sounds. familiar), and a final question from Kelly: is it true that he wants to return to cabinet?

Well look, Im in the parliament, Im here to serve, Im very happy being the best possible member for Warringah. As a former Prime Minister, from time-to-time there are national or even international issues where I might speak out, and uh, thats keeping me pretty busy right now.



So, yes.

Im not *asking* to be promoted, Im just seeking to do the best job that I can.





Definitely yes.





For better or worse, it really is Trumps world now, and Tonys definitely living in it.

Watch / listen to his full interview below:

Photo: Getty / Mark Metcalfe.
Hillary Clinton's loss in Pennsylvania spurred a lot of soul-searching among state Democrats this week.

Infighting rocked party leadership in recent years as gerrymandering and weak candidate recruitment efforts turned the state Legislature a deep shade of red. Despite those setbacks, for nearly two decades--since George H.W. Bush's narrow victory in 1988--the Keystone State had been reliably blue, at least in presidential years.

Former Gov. Ed Rendell, still a highly influential party leader, described the fallout of Tuesday's election as "like sitting Shiva," referring to the weeklong period of mourning Jews observe upon the death of a loved one. He's spent much of the time since fielding calls from party loyalists and publicly grappling with the fallout in TV and radio interviews.

Marcel Groen, the actual chair of the Pennsylvania Democrats, said his party--like so many pundits and pollsters--had fundamentally misjudged both Donald Trump and the political climate at large.

"The truth of the matters is we weren't in sync with the voters in much of the rest of the state," he said.

One of the truisms of Pennsylvania politics is that a large turnout in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the more liberal suburbs in places like Montgomery County could easily swing the entire state toward Democrats. A 300,000-vote lead in those places, for example, was typically enough to overcome the rest of the state's rural Republican electorate.

Clinton's 455,000 vote advantage in Philadelphia County was roughly on par with President Barack Obama's 492,000 lead in 2012. Compare that to Luzerne County, a traditional bellwether, where Clinton trailed Trump by 26,000 votes. In 2012, Obama outperformed Republican Mitt Romney by nearly 6,000 votes and went on to win the state.

That surge of Trump support in rural counties, several thousand votes at a time, chipped away at Clinton's surplus from urban, and largely minority, voters.

"I said for the last two weeks that I thought there was a hidden Trump vote," Rendell said. "It was the level of enthusiasm from people who hadn't voted very often."

Trump, Groen said, was an excellent self-promoter who spoke to disenchanted working-class Democrats in rural areas hit hard by factory closings and the recession. Once the tycoon came up with a nickname for his opponents--such as "crooked Hillary" or "little Marco"--they stuck. The taunt became a persuasive mantra for voters tired of the status quo.

"You've got to fight back sometimes with the same tools the other party's using," Groen said. "If you don't, you leave yourself exposed."

Nowhere was the impact of frustrated working-class voters felt more strongly than Erie County. The blue-collar city and its suburbs has always been a reliable Democratic vote. In 2012, for example, Obama defeated Romney there by a 16-point margin. On Tuesday, Trump edged Clinton out by 2 points, or about 2,300 votes.

That sudden shift wasn't a coincidence.

The General Electric plant in Erie closed earlier this year after hemorrhaging jobs for years through a series of layoffs. In August, unemployment there reached 7.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 5.7 percent for the state as a whole.

"I don't know what you do with that," said Larry Ciesler, a Democratic political analyst. "I know they lost a lot of jobs up there when the GE plant closed but--you know what?--those jobs aren't coming back."

Trump, with his tough talk about enacting stiff trade tariffs against Mexico and opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, appealed to working-class voters who've watched both Democrats and Republicans promise jobs on the campaign trail and then approve trade deals with foreign nations.

Ciesler said he believes the Democrats had a strong get-out-the-vote effort. Clinton and her surrogates traversed the state for weeks. Millions were spent on advertising up and down the ticket.

"This is just something much larger," he said. "There's a sense of impotence, that people don't know where to turn . . . I just hope the hope and faith these folks have placed in Trump is fulfilled in some way."

Of course, Clinton had her own troubles.

Weeks before voters went to the polls, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter advising lawmakers of a new cache of emails his agency would be reviewing that could affect the investigation of her private server. Nine days later, Comey sent another letter stating that the emails would not prompt of a reversal of his earlier announcement that Clinton would face no criminal charges.

"As much as people wanted change, they didn't necessary see Trump as the choice but a better choice," said Tom Baldino, a political science professor at Wilkes University, in the heart of Luzerne County. "I think a lot of it has to do with Clinton's baggage."

On the same night that Clinton and U.S. Senate candidate Katie McGinty lost their races to Republicans, voters elected three Democrats into state row offices by wider margins: Josh Shapiro as attorney general, Eugene DePasquale as auditor general and Joe Torsella as treasurer.

Baldino said that fact would seem to point to Pennsylvanians splitting their votes based on the strength of the candidates and not necessarily party affiliation.

In recent years, the electorate has generally become more partisan--voting straight tickets--but the presence of Trump on the ballot seemed to disrupt that overarching trend in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

"The straight-ticket voting should have been in play here, but it wasn't," Baldino said. "You had more D's and R's splitting their ticket."

Not everyone agrees that Clinton's loss was attributable to her weakness as a candidate, although opinions vary widely about what's wrong and how to fix it.

"Writing this off as a problem that was unique to Hillary Clinton would be a significant error in judgement for my Democratic Party," said J. J. Balaban, a Democratic media consultant. "It would almost be burying our heads in the sand."

The party, Balaban said, hasn't yet figured out to communicate with voters who are dropping their newspaper subscriptions and ignoring political ads. It also hasn't figured out a clear and cohesive message that can reach voters who increasingly mistrust the established institutions of a small-D democracy, he said.

"The Democratic Party fundamentally is more a party that believes in the power of government," he said, "and people are deeply skeptical."

Jim Burn, the immediate past party chairman, said the state organization has continued to see its fundraising and campaign infrastructure degrade. He also believes Clinton was a poor nominee.

"When they started seeing the difficulty she was having last year, there should have been a conversation about shifting to Bernie Sanders or someone else who didn't have history and the stigma surrounding them," he said.

Instead, Burn said, most of the key players--party operatives, pollsters and the media covering the race--were blind to what was happening at the grassroots and among the voters, particularly in the southwestern part of the state he calls home.

The party needed to recruit people who could speak authentically to the disaffection of those voters, he said.

"People wanted to see some new faces," he said. "This election was a referendum on dynasty politics and the status quo."

Gov. Tom Wolf, who was generally less visible than several of his predecessors during this year's campaign season, said Thursday that he personally takes responsibility for his party's performance this year. But, like many others, he believes larger anti-incumbent forces were at work.

"This was a grade that was meant not just for me, and not just for Pennsylvania Democrats, but for everyone in public life, Republicans and Democrats," he said.

Other recent governors, including Rendell and Tom Ridge, took a far more active role in campaign activities. Wolf noted that he appeared at dozens of campaign events, but he also emphasized his work behind the scenes, helping to raise money and recruit new candidates.

"I am governor, so I also have to govern and I spend a lot of time doing that," he said. "But I think I was as active as I could possibly be in this campaign while still doing my job."

Of course, it's also important to keep Pennsylvania's 2016 reddening in perspective. Most party officials and outside commentators don't believe Clinton's loss is predictive of future races.

After all, the Democratic presidential nominee lost to Trump by a single percentage point.

"In this business, when you lose everyone says you're an idiot and when you win everyone says you're a genius," Balaban said. "I've learned neither is true."

Staff writer Charles Thompson contributed to this report.
The $40 million lawsuit was gnawing at him.

Something just wasn't right about Eric Schneiderman's fraud case against Donald Trump, according to Jeffrey Lord.

The Trump University class action lawsuit inspired Lord in 2013 to dig into Schneiderman's past. Lord found a Democratic New York attorney general with political aspirations who tried to bring down Trump to bolster his own career.

In numerous columns for The American Spectator, Lord compared the legal drama to a scene in "The Godfather." The Trump Organization was Khartoum, a racehorse that was the victim of fictional mafia boss Vito Corleone's revenge. Schneiderman was a "dime-store godfather" and "vicious Vito Corleone without the gravitas," Lord said.

From his Camp Hill home, Lord wrote numerous columns about it for The American Spectator, a conservative magazine. His words captured the attention of the next president of the United States.

Lord was sitting in his home office on Aug. 31, 2013, when they had their first conversation.

"Jeffrey," the caller said, according to Lord. "This is Donald Trump."

Jeffrey Lord preparing for a CNN broadcast from his home office. Author, political strategist and CNN contributor Jeffrey Lord is a longtime resident of Camp Hill where he lives with and cares for his 97 year old mother Kathleen Lord. September, 16 2016. Daniel Zampogna, PennLive

Meeting Donald Trump

Trump was pleased with Lord's defense of him and branding of his legal adversary as "Shakedown Schneiderman."

The real estate mogul praised Lord during a conservative gala in late October 2013, which they traveled to together. (You can watch the speech in the video above.)

Lord met Trump in the New York City tower bearing his name in gold letters, where the president-elect lives on the top three floors.

"It's just like yours or mine," Lord said sarcastically. "The floors are marble. The fixtures in the bathroom are gold. The ceilings are frescoes, and (there are) stunning views of Manhattan, New Jersey and Long Island."

During their limo ride to LaGuardia Airport, Trump pointed out the buildings and skyscrapers he owned, Lord said.

They flew in a smaller business plane, not a 747 jet, to Washington, D.C., where they attended the 2013 Bartley Gala on Obamacare, Immigration and Conservative Unity.

Trump was the featured business leader and a keynote speaker.

Another hero of the evening was Ted Cruz, a freshman senator from Texas who was threatening a government shutdown over Obamacare.

Trump, in his speech that evening, said Obamacare would die of its own weight and help Republicans get elected in 2016.

And, that night, Lord saw that Trump could be one of those Republicans.

Reaganesque

Lord was the first political analyst to publicly say Trump should run and could win if he did.

Lord, a former Reagan White House political director, saw similarities between Trump and his former boss.

When Lord interviewed Trump in 2014, he assumed the real estate mogul would run for office.

"He talked about China and the press, all the things he's now famous for saying," Lord said.

About a year later, in June 2015, Trump announced his candidacy, making immigration a key part of his platform. He said he would build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to keep out illegal immigrants, claiming they were bringing in crime and drugs.

But during the conservative gala in October 2013, Trump revealed his stance on immigration may also have been about political preservation:

"You're talking about letting in 17 million, 11 million, I heard 35 million. From the Republican standpoint, from the conservative standpoint, all of these people will be voting for Democrats. I say, what are you doing? What are you doing? You have to do what's right, most importantly. You have to do what's right for people. You have to do what's right for the country. But at the same time you can't have a death wish and you have to be smart."

In 2013 and after his 2015 announcement, Lord took him seriously.

Trump's hometown paper The New York Times buried his campaign announcement inside the paper. Numerous political analysts and reporters dismissed Trump's candidacy as an insincere run and impossible win.

But Lord, in a July 2015 column, said Trump could win. Soon after, Lord signed on as a Trump supporter and political commentator for CNN.

As Trump started to defy odds, defeating a field of 16 primary candidates, Lord himself started to get attention. Sometimes, the attention was negative, with people slamming him for comparing Trump to former President Ronald Reagan. Sometimes, it was positive, with people asking what he was seeing that nobody else could.

Even with every poll saying Clinton had a huge lead in Pennsylvania and would win the state as Democrats had since 1992, Lord believed.

Even after the video scandal when most pundits said it was a sure end to Trump's campaign, Lord believed.

And when Trump achieved a historic upset of Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, Lord was perhaps the only person who wasn't surprised.

"In one sense, I feel vindicated," Lord said. "Politically, he is like Reagan. He's the champion of the common man over the elites. He reached blue-collar America and union workers, all the people Reagan brought into the coalition. The Reagan Democrats are Trump Democrats now."

Trump also saw this coming. During numerous campaign stops in Pennsylvania, where he attracted crowds of thousands, Trump predicted a big win in the state. And at events in Harrisburg and Mechanicsburg, Trump mentioned Lord numerous times and said he was taking him to the White House.

For the time being, Lord has a commitment to CNN and caring for his elderly mother.

Jeffrey Lord sits on the couch in the living room of his Camp Hill home with his 97 year old mother Kathleen Lord. Author, political strategist and CNN contributor Jeffrey Lord is a longtime resident of Camp Hill where he lives with and cares for his 97 year old mother Kathleen Lord. September, 16 2016. Daniel Zampogna, PennLive

If Trump's team makes a formal offer, Lord will "have to think about it."

"When the president asks you to do anything, you want to think about it," Lord said. "There are plenty of talented people in Washington. I'll try to be useful in the best way I can."

That might mean spilling ink to take on Schneiderman again.

One of the first challenges facing President-elect Trump is the Trump University court date on Nov. 28 in San Diego, though there's a chance the two sides may settle before the end of the month.

The judge presiding over the case is U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who Trump said had a bias in the case because he's Latino and Trump wants to build a wall. Trump also called the Indiana-born judge "Mexican" and "Spanish."

Trump was criticized at the time for "racist" remarks, including by House Speaker Paul Ryan.

But Lord defended Trump, saying the judge was actually being racist because he belongs to a group of Latino attorneys that is "discriminating against non-Latino lawyers."

Lord has been a loyal soldier to Trump and, quite often, a public adviser.

As Trump spends the next two months transitioning into the presidency, Lord has more advice.

"Decide on the priorities of his agenda," Lord said. "Know that personnel is policy. Pick people who believe in going in the same direction, and are sympathetic and agree with you. Stick with those who brought you to the dance, but continue reaching out to critics and have your hand outstretched to everybody."

As for starting to sound presidential, Lord said don't bother.

"He needs to stick with what brought him there," Lord said. "Sounding presidential now translates as being phony. Political speak is one of the things people are tired of. He should just continue to be himself."
Before a Thursday morning shootout left one police officer and a pregnant woman dead, gunman Michael Cwiklinski had booby-trapped his home and car.

Canonsburg neighbors told local media that the gunman was waiting for police to arrive at his home early Thursday morning, though his motives remain unclear. When police responded to the 3:15 a.m. domestic disturbance call at his Woodcrest Drive duplex, he shot at two officers from an upstairs window as soon as they approached the home.

WPXI cited sources saying Cwiklinski had lit a propane tank in the passenger seat of his vehicle and had a second propane tank inside the home, which was not lit at the time it was found. He shot at both officers and the car, but was unable to make it explode.



Officer Scott Leslie Bashioum, 52, was killed in the shootout. He is the 18th law enforcement officer to have been killed in the state over the last five years.

Cwiklinski also killed his pregnant wife Dalia Elhefny Sabae, who had previously obtained a protection from abuse order against her husband, before turning the gun on himself.

Officer James Saieva was also shot but is expected to survive.

The ambush was part of an especially deadly week for police across the United States. In an eight-day span, seven police officers were shot and killed.

After five officers were killed in the deadly Dallas shooting in July, USA Today reported that killings of police were 44 percent higher than last year.
T20 World Cup: I Am Hopeful That India Will Play Final - Sourav Ganguly Praises Rohit Sharma And Co

WATCH: Virat Kohli Spends Time With KL Rahul in Training Session, Advices Him to Adjust Few Things

IND vs BAN: Dinesh Karthik Pull up Pretty Well in Training Session, Will Take Final Call on Him Tomorrow - Rahul Dravid

T20 World Cup: Jos Butler, Alex Hales Help England Cruise Past New Zealand
wolf.jpg

Gov. Tom Wolf

(File photo/PennLive)

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and state Department of Education are working with York County School of Technology the wake of students carrying a Donald Trump campaign sign and a shout of "white power" at the school on Wednesday.

Gov. Tom Wolf on Friday issued this statement:

"What has occurred at York County School of Technology and other schools across Pennsylvania is overt racism, and my administration will do everything it can to end it and prevent it from happening in the future.

"I am contacting Mayor Bracey and Superintendent Rona Kaufmann, and I have directed the Pennsylvania Department of Education to immediately dispatch resources to York County School of Technology and any school experiencing these type of vitriolic actions. The Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission are working directly with York County School of Technology to develop a plan to address racist and hateful behavior in the school that can be implemented immediately to ensure that all students feel safe in their school. PDE is also deploying a crisis management team to the school to assist with implementing necessary interventions designed to diffuse potentially disruptive situations.



"Furthermore, the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (PaTTAN) will dispatch a school psychologist to the York Tech School who has had extensive experience in trauma and crisis management. Additionally, the Office of Safe Schools will be notifying the Student Assistance Program (SAP) Advisory Team in York County to be on standby. Student Assistance Teams, which are also supported by county children and youth agencies, are trained to work with individuals and small groups who are engaging in negative behaviors.



"On Monday, PDE will be convening a meeting of stakeholders from within the agency as well as PHRC, Mid-Atlantic Equity Center, Law Enforcement, the Communities & Schools Office and PaTTAN to prepare guidance for the field designed to assist with the implementation of prevention, intervention and post-event strategies for use by the field. The guidance will also include strategies for utilization of Quick Response Teams (QRT).



"No child should feel unsafe in his or her school, and I will continue to provide any resources necessary to stop this type of behavior from happening."

Here is other coverage of the situation at York County School of Technology, which serves students from 14 districts across the county.
It was all in good fun, until it morphed into an apparent bank robbery.

Gladys Smith thought she was being funny when she gave her employee, Sharon Mingle, a note and told her to turn it in to a credit union teller at Harrisburg's Strawberry Square last Friday morning.

But Mingle, a Pennsylvania Department of Revenue staffer, wasn't in on the joke. She didn't read the slip of paper that said 'put the money in the bag.'

Mingle unwittingly gave the note to the teller, who didn't reach for cash -- she punched the panic alarm.

Within three minutes, about 10 Capitol police officers swarmed the scene with lights and sirens blaring, TroyThompson, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of General Services, said. The department oversees the department's Bureau of Police and Safety.

Mingle was arrested about 20 minutes ahead of the bustling noon lunch hour in the downtown retail and office complex.

After she was read her rights, Mingle told police things weren't as they appeared, Thompson said. She said she simply followed Smith's orders.

That's when the cops paid Smith a visit in the Department of Revenue offices on the upper floors of Strawberry Square, Thompson said.

Smith admitted she set up Mingle, but she swore it was a joke.

"(Smith) admitted she gave her the note as a joke," Thompson said. "She told her to take it down to the credit union, and basically bring back what they gave her."

The joke soured quickly, and Smith was charged with disorderly conduct. Mingle wasn't charged.

After the scene was deemed safe, PSECU reopened the same day, Thompson said.

Thompson said he could not comment on whether Smith was reprimanded by the Department of Revenue, because it involves a personnel matter.

A Department of Revenue spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment, and neither could Mingle nor Smith.

PSECU spokeswoman Margaret Delmonico said the credit union is cooperating with the incident investigation but would not provide additional comment.
barletta

Rep. Lou Barletta, an immigration hardliner, has been named to President-elect Donald Trump's transition team.

(Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com, file)

Rep. Lou Barletta, a Republican from the 11th congressional district, was Friday selected to be a part of President-Elect Donald J. Trump's transition team.

"It is a great honor to be asked by the next President of the United States to be part of the team that will help put together the new administration to take office in just two months," Barletta said in a written statement. "As I said many times during the campaign, I have seen the 'Board Room Donald Trump' when I sat in meetings with him. In those sessions, he always sought the input of those around him and listened to their opinions and ideas."

Barletta, who himself won re-election on Tuesday, was one of the early supporters of Trump from among the GOP House membership. Barletta, along with Rep. Tom Marino, (R-10), became mainstays of the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, appearing with him at campaign stops and even campaigning for him.

"I anticipate that he will expect similar counsel from his transition team," Barletta said. "It is an exciting time, as we will be assembling the people who will be tackling the problems facing the country and making America great again. I appreciate the confidence President-Elect Trump has shown in me and I take on the responsibility with humility and the resolve to perform to the best of my abilities."

Barletta, a former Hazleton mayor, has during his time in Congress emerged as a hardliner on immigration. He has introduced and supported measures aimed at toughening immigration laws, including a bill that would implement an exit fingerprint program at airports and borders. In 2006, then Hazleton mayor, Barletta led a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigrants and businesses that hired them. He put in place measures that penalized landlords who rented to illegal immigrants and employers who hired them. A federal court later ruled them unconstitutional.

Barletta's sweeping district includes parts of Dauphin, Perry and Cumberland counties.
A 60-year-old man died following a crash in Lebanon Thursday morning.

Hector Ivan Primental-Objio of Lebanon died after the car he was a passenger in was struck by a truck at South Ninth and Chestnut streets at about 10:40 a.m., police said.

The truck was heading north on South Ninth Street when it ran a red light and crashed into the unidentified car, according to police.

The truck pushed the car into a fire hydrant, and it came to rest against a light pole, police said.

The truck driver, 73-year-old Richard Stauffer of Spring Grove, was not injured, according to police.

The driver of the car, Nilsa Bonilla-Vazquez, 67, of Lebanon, also was not injured in the crash, police said.

The rear seat passenger, 27-year-old Ana Jimenez of Lebanon, was treated at a local medical facility and released.

Primental-Objio, who was sitting in the front passenger seat of the car, was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

An investigation continues.
State police are searching for a Lebanon County Correctional Facility escapee.

Lee Davis Hassel, 27, who was on work release, didn't return to the prison after he left work at Henry Molded Products, 16th and Willow streets, Lebanon, at 10 a.m. Thursday, police said.

Hassell is described as a white male who is 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 160 pounds. He has brown hair, blue eyes and a medium build.

Hassell was last seen wearing a light gray hooded sweatshirt, a dark gray t-shir, jeans and white sneakers.

Anyone with information about Hassell's whereabouts is asked to contact the Pennsylvania State Police Jonestown barracks at 717-865-2194.
Locals crowd outside a residential building used as a garment factory, which was gutted in a fire in the outskirts of New Delhi, India, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The fire, that broke out at the garment factory basement, trapped and killed more than a dozen workers as they slept in the building. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
Letters to the Editor: How could anyone vote for Prop 3?
Petrobras posted unexpected losses from massive asset impairments



Operations, cash flow trends have turned more benign

SAO PAULO/RIO DE JANEIRO

Petroleumworld.com 11 11 2016

Brazilian state-controlled oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA posted an unexpected third-quarter loss on Thursday after drastically reducing the value of oil fields and other assets amid a severe downsizing and weak oil prices.

Petrobras lost a net 16.458 billion reais ($4.9 billion) last quarter, five times more than a year earlier. Despite that, operational and cash flow trends improved and, without an impairment, profit could have totaled 600 million reais, Chief Financial Officer Ivan Monteiro told reporters.

The numbers came as Chief Executive Officer Pedro Parente cleaned up a balance sheet with unrealistically priced investments, whose losses were magnified by a stronger currency and a rising cost of capital. The company shaved the value of assets by 15.292 billion reais and of investments by 417 million reais last quarter.

"The message we want to convey is that these impairments are non-recurring, and that we don't expect them to happen, not at least in this magnitude, in the coming future," Monteiro said at an event to discuss the results in Rio de Janeiro.

Petrobras, the world's most indebted major oil firm, faces several hurdles including the lowest oil prices in a decade, a corruption scandal highlighting governance flaws and losses incurred over many years because of government-mandated fuel subsidies and money-losing investments.

Analysts expected on average profit of 1.517 billion reais. U.S.-traded common shares in Petrobras slumped on the news, shedding 8.7 percent and reaching their lowest level since June.

Management will further discuss results on Friday in a conference call with investors.

MITIGATING STEPS

Parente's steps to grow output in some offshore fields, cut debt and keep expenses in check helped mitigate the company's loss. Asset sales and a sharp reduction in capital spending commitments also allowed Petrobras to cut gross debt by about 19 percent since the end of last year to 398.2 billion reais.

According to Monteiro, progress in a voluntary dismissal plan for workers, as well as a faster pace of divestitures, could help recoup part of the ground lost with the impairment. At this point, it is uncertain whether Petrobras will lose money for a second straight year or if dividends will be paid, he said.

Net revenue fell 1 percent to 70.443 billion reais on a quarterly basis, missing consensus estimates of 74.520 billion reais.

Capital spending fell 9 percent, in line with the 8 percent that analysts estimated for the quarter. Gross profit rose above expectations, while operational profit suffered as a consequence of the impairments.

Free cash flow, the money left for holders of bonds and shares after all operating and financial expenses are paid, posted positive readings for the sixth straight quarter. Free cash flow generation is key for Petrobras's goal to reduce debt.

Monteiro reiterated that Petrobras is committed to meeting a $15.1 billion two-year goal for asset sales by the end of this year, even if only 65 percent of it has been completed so far.

($1 = 3.3853 reais)






Feeling tense? Frustrated? Resisting the urge to gloat? Trying to mend fences? People from both side of the aisle have been on high-stress alert for the last 18 months, and that stress doesn't seem to be dissipating any time soon. But self-care is important. Here are some ways to make sure you're doing right by you this weekend.

1. Binge-watch TV

My sister-in-law says she's about to start binge-watching The West Wing, because even the theme music makes her feel better. I'd recommend history, because perspective helps. Amazon Prime has HBO's The Gathering Storm, about Winston Churchill's "years in the wilderness," when he was out of power.

This might also be the weekend for Netflix's The Crown, about the early reign of Queen Elizabeth II, or Amazon's Good Girls Revolt, inspired by the women who fought Newsweek for the right to write, not just research at one-third the pay.  Ellen Gray, television critic

2. Take control

If you feel like things are out of control, consider what is within your power to manage, like breathing deeply, eating healthfully, and getting some movement. Visit a farmer's market for seasonal produce like pumpkins and butternut squash, and try these four healthy and comforting fall recipes. Take a walk in a setting you find soothing. Try these five simple, yoga-inspired moves for better health. Make stress-busting part of your daily routine with these four easy steps.

3. Listen to profound music

If any art finds, through tone, a higher ideal for the goodness of America than Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, it's hard to know what it would be. With text excerpted from James Agee, the piece captures the sound of a nation well worth remembering: a blissful state of security and tenderness. Among more recent recordings, Dawn Upshaw's crystalline sound has power. But in a 1959 recording with conductor Thomas Schippers, Leontyne Price has a searching edge of humanity that seems particularly apt right about now. Anyone in need of comfort from the American spirit can do no better than to start here.  Peter Dobrin, culture writer

4. Talk to your kids

If your kids are anxious about the week's events, peel them away from their screens and talk. Remind them of all the positive things they can do to make their world better, such as volunteer work in the community and random acts of kindness like raking up a neighbor's leaves. Model positive, optimistic behavior for your kids. What Philadelphia pediatrician Gary A. Emmett said in this roundup of advice for parents really applies to all ages: "Don't do mean things even if you see an adult do them."

 READ MORE: 5. Go to the Ocean City Quiet Festival

While the Quiet Festival isn't new, this year is a special one, with an election theme. On Thursday, participants were awarded certificates for surviving the 2016 election.

If you can't make it to Ocean City on Saturday, hold a Quiet Festival of your own and pat yourself on the back for surviving it all.

6. Get offline

To fight your own post-election blues, take time off from snarky comments on social media, advises Jim A. Haugh, associate professor of psychology at Rowan University. "To fire back at them isn't going to make them change, and it isn't going to help you," Haugh said.

7. Take your time

Accept that it's going to take some time to get over feelings of loss, and it may be best just to not talk about it for a while, especially with friends and relations who don't share your politics. And if you can't avoid them, Temple University psychology professor Frank Farley advises these words: "I love you, but I can't get with your candidate. Let's not talk about it today."

8. Float on

Let out some of that post-election stress by getting away from it all, metaphysically, anyway. Hit up one of Philadelphia's float spas for an hour-plus session of sensory deprivation. After all, a little bit of nothingness may be exactly what folks need after such a tumultuous election season. Not sure where to start? Try Halcyon Floats at its Roxborough or Olde Kensington locations, Fishtown's Floatation Philly, or Washington Square West's Phloat.

10. See great art up close and personal

Go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and behold Jitish Kallat's "Covering Letter," an installation that projects a letter written by Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler. The letter is a model of how we approach in peace those who hold utterly repugnant and opposing views. And the installation makes you the center of it.

Then get thee over to the Barnes Foundation to see "Live and Life Will Give You Pictures: Masterworks of French Photography, 1890-1950.". If great art can give comfort, then the Barnes will be like a mother's hug.
No more visa for Asians visiting to Canada for stay up to 90 days

Updated 20/11/2016: The story from CBN-TV below is fabricated as reported by Sbs.com.au. Asians still required visa to Canada including Malaysians and Singaporeans.

Yesterday, CBN-TV reported that the Canadian government has scrapped visa requirements for Asian visitors. We are still unable to confirm the authenticity of the news as there are no words from the officials yet. However, there were talks about relaxing visa requirements for Asians traveling to Canada in the past.

According to CBN-TV, 2016 Tourist Arrivals and Receipts report noted that Asians were 80% contributors to Canadas tourism revenue with only 2% immigration risk.

Bardish Chagger, the Minister of Small Business and Tourism of Canada, said  So we expect the immigration risk to reduce and also have revenue contributed increased in the coming years. Allowing them free on visas would make it more attractive, hence increase in arrivals and receipts.

Visa free travel for Asians would take effect from 1 December 2016 and this is part of the third phase of Canadas visa policy.

Our brother lives in Vancouver and for Malaysians to visit Canada, we need to apply the Canadian visa and the process takes around two weeks to a month. Our parents flew to Canada once in a few years so we went thru the tedious visa applications. We really hope there will be no more visa for Asians as it will definitely boost tourism from Asian countries. It will be easier for us to visit our brother in Vancouver too.

We checked on the High Commission of Canada in Malaysia website and there is no official statement on this ruling yet. We will update the post if there is any updates.

Wilson Ng A Father and traveler who enjoys to eat, shop, travel and taking pictures with Samsung S22 Ultra and Sony ZV-1. Im a full time blogger, youtuber and father for two. I used to travel around 17 International trips per year but now staying at home. Remember to follow us at www.instagram.com/placesandfoods and www.youtube.com/placesandfoods. For advertisements or features, contact me at [email protected] See author's posts
A sergeant with the Lebanon (IN) Police Department is off work after shooting himself in the foot Wednesday night, reports WLFI.

The incident occurred as the sergeant was attempting to clean his department-issued handgun after a training exercise, police said. The gun fired as he prepared to disassemble the weapon.

A bullet struck him in the right foot. He was taken to the hospital by ambulance but is expected to be OK.

The Boone County (IN) Sheriff's Office is investigating.
Trooper Christopher Skinner (Photo: New York State Police)

The man who hit and killed a New York state trooper on Interstate 81 in Broome County back in 2014 has been sentenced to life without parole. A jury found Almond Upton guilty of first-degree murder in August. Upton was traveling from Florida to Connecticut to see family, when he hit and killed Trooper Christopher Skinner.

The courtroom was packed Thursday with people from the community and Trooper Christopher Skinner's friends and family. It was an emotional morning, and several statements were made to the judge prior to the sentencing

Trooper Skinner's mother told the judge this tragedy has had a huge impact on her entire family. She said in an instant, everything was taken away from her. She also showed the judge a slideshow filled with photos that started from Skinners childhood, through graduation, family get-togethers, his whole life really.

Almond Upton then spoke for the first time. He became emotional and broke down in tears. He said to the judge, "I'm not the person the state of New York has made me out to be." He also said his mental state was impaired beyond comprehension and to this day he doesn't know what happened. He promised he would never stop taking his medication and also expressed his deepest sorrow and sympathy to the family.

Judge Cawley then went on to say that he believes this was nothing more than an assassination and that's why he gave Upton that life in prison sentence, TWC News reports.
Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Print

Less than two days after Donald Trump stunned the world and defeated Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, the new president-elect is proving that his entire campaign was a massive con job meant to rile up just enough voters to win a general election.

Prior to Tuesdays vote, Trump promised that  if he won  he would immediately instruct his attorney general to look into [Hillary Clintons email] situation, adding that the former Secretary of State would be in jail if he were president.

He repeatedly implied that Clinton should be taken care of through violent means, whether its Second Amendment people rising up against her or her bodyguards disarming so we could see what happens to her.

Once the results of Tuesdays election came in, though, Trump said the country owes Clinton a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.

Lock her up, lock her up? Nope, not anymore.

He quickly moved on to Barack Obama, who was gracious enough to invite Trump  a man the current president knows is unqualified for the job  to the White House on Thursday. After the meeting between the two men, Trump said it was a great honor to have spoken with Obama, adding that he is a very good man.

This is the same Barack Obama that Trump has spent much of the last eight years doing his best to delegitimize, often urging the first African-American president to release his real papers to prove hes not Kenyan-born.

Let us not forget that without this racist lie about Obamas birth certificate, there would be no President-elect Trump right now. This conspiracy theory is what gave him political oxygen.

After Tuesday, though, he seems to recognize that he no longer needs any of it. The con is complete.

Trump no longer needs to pretend that Hillary Clinton is a criminal. He doesnt have to incite violence against her. No more does Trump have to perpetuate the racist lie that President Obama isnt legitimate or that his birth certificate is a fraud.

He didnt believe any of those things to begin with, but he kept saying them because they were his biggest applause lines. The frightening level of angry enthusiasm he generated has served its purpose. The check has been cashed. Now, after squeaking past Clinton in the electoral college, he can pretend it never happened.

And remember: its only been two days.

In the weeks and months ahead, its likely that, as Trump becomes swallowed by the political system he pretended he would dismantle, he will abandon other core elements of his campaign message  the wall, the Muslim ban, promises to create a government that serves the people, not the special interests.

Just look at some of the folks running his transition team; Trump has already cracked the door open for right-wing lobbyists and special interests to mosey on in and run the show for him. Thats what happens when someone unfit for the office becomes president  theyre more influenced by outside forces, not less.

All of Trumps post-election behavior shows not only that his campaign was a ruse to rustle up just enough support from angry, white voters; it also shows what kind of man he is.

Will his supporters notice?
Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Print

*The following is an opinion column by R Muse*

Out of the midst of a damn dark day for decent and civilized society in America, there was one bright spot in the nation that offers some consolation, no matter how small, that not all Americans are dirty bigots and savage religious barbarians. Although there are reasonable human beings across this tragic nation, there are more of them living in the Golden State and they showed the rest of the nation what civility and social conscious means and looks like. It is not because Californians overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, but because voters went to the polls and defeated the moneyed special interests that prevailed in the rest of the country and had a small part in giving the government, all three branches, to the Koch Republicans..

First, it is noteworthy to confess that even in deep blue California there is a significant number of citizens that would be incredibly comfortable living in thrall to corporate masters or deepest red religious Texas or Mississippi, but they are in the minority. It is a good thing for the state because the majority sees through special interests and votes accordingly and in this election with a record number of special interest propositions on the ballot, the majority stepped up and voted according to what is best for California residents; not the rich, not the religious, and not the corporations.

One of the propositions that passed on Tuesday but failed four years ago to special interest money from law enforcement and prison guard unions was recreational cannabis. Law enforcement and the prison community saw legalization as a threat to their job security, but voters saw through that and passed a proposition that strictly monitors and regulates recreational marijuana use for adults. California voters are not any more stoners than the rest of the country, but they see the relief for beleaguered law enforcement and overcrowded prisons and the very significant revenue generated from regulation, taxation and monitoring as a good thing for schools, healthcare, and the criminal justice system.

Another proposition was actually a bill signed into law by the governor that failed to comport with the demands of the petroleum industry. Two years ago the state legislature passed, and the governor signed into law, a ban on plastic bags at supermarkets. The petroleum industry (plastic comes from petroleum) could not stand for Democrats to ban plastic, so they helped obstruct implementation of the law and said let the voters decided; not the legislators the voters elected. Subsequently, there was a well-funded campaign to save the plastic that voters easily squashed because they see the damaging effects of petroleum on the environment every day as well as see the discarded plastic polluting the landscape and the waterways.

In a similar situation, last year the Democratic majority in the state legislature listened to their constituents and passed sane gun safety laws to overwhelming praise. Of course, the National Rifle Association could not let Democrats pass any gun safety measures so they did what they typically do; martial their in- and out-of-state forces to challenge the law with a familiar refrain; it is up to the people so let the voters decide. What they decided was that when their elected representatives pass a law, they intend for it to go into effect; the NRA be damned. That is precisely what transpired and despite fear mongering about terrorists and Democrats coming to confiscate everyones firearms, voters overwhelmingly shut down the NRA; it can be done.

Voters also beat back an assault on their intelligence and social consciousness by both the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries. One proposition regulating prescription drug costs faced a monumental campaign from big pharmaceuticals, but Democrats and activists in the state were savvy enough to remind voters to take a look at the only opposition that was spending the tens-of-millions of dollars to prevent Californians from getting prescription drugs at the same price the VA pays. It doesnt happen often in America, but the people, liberal people, dealt the high and mighty pharmaceutical industry a serious defeat; it can be done if the people are willing.

In a similar proposition, the tobacco industry dropped some very serious cash to defeat a hike in the tobacco tax because, in every state with a higher tax, smoking goes down particularly among teens. The additional tax will go to healthcare and education programs to convince young people that their health is more important than looking adult with a butt hanging out of their mouth. The proposition passed by a wide margin and the tobacco industry suffered a defeat by the people; it can be done if the people are willing and have a social conscience.

The biggest winner of that dark election was education. There were two propositions Republicans vehemently opposed because one maintained the voter-approved and implemented tax hike on the rich and corporations and the other was a fairly monumental bond for education. Both propositions passed overwhelmingly. Also connected to education was an easily-passed proposition reinstating bilingual education in public schools. Californians comprehend, unlike those other nasty Americans that diversity is what built this country and they want every student, regardless of their heritage to have an equal opportunity to excel in education. The official language of California at its inception was Spanish and English according to the sales contract between Mexico and the United States and it was written into the states Constitution. In 1986 with 40 percent of Californians speaking other languages as their first language, Spanish was stricken from being a co-official language in the state because the yokel community determined that anyone living in American has to talk American.

There were plenty of other propositions Californians approved, like overturning Citizens United and releasing non-violent over-prosecuted drug offenders which demonstrate that if there is a population with a social conscience and enough intelligence to think beyond their own particular greed and hatred, special interests can be defeated with relative ease. It can be done if the voters are willing, have a social conscience and live in a state that rejects conservatism because it is bad for the general welfare of the people. Sadly, Americans learned on Tuesday that a little over 55-million Americans have no concept of, and are not remotely interested in, what the general welfare of the people means and they voted accordingly on a damn dark day for America; something Californians voters had no part in creating.
Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Print

Vindicating the pre-election concerns of many Democrats and Republicans, Donald Trumps victory on Tuesday has quickly triggered a wildfire of hate spreading across the country, from schools to workplaces.

At a school in Pennsylvania, for example, two people were caught on camera parading the hallways holding a Trump sign while a group of students accompanying them shouted, White power!

Video:

1. At York Tech High School in PA white students literally walked down the hall chanting white power while holding Donald Trump signs. pic.twitter.com/vk8h0uKcD4  Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 10, 2016

At Oak Brook Middle School in Michigan, kids were heard chanting, Build the wall! while students of Hispanic and Latino descent listened on, some even crying.

Video:

Yesterday during lunch at Royal Oak Middle School in Royal Oak Michigan, white students loudly chanted BUILD THE WALL, BUILD THE WALL. pic.twitter.com/dfqU2xnMvZ  Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 10, 2016

Tears were running down my face, said one Mexican-American student, according to the Detroit News. I was so upset. A friend went to the bathroom crying. Everybody was chanting along with it. She was scared. She looked really upset. I felt really bad for her.

At another high school, this time in Minnesota, racist messages were found written in and around the schools bathroom  phrases like Go back to Africa or whites only, accompanied by Trumps campaign slogan, Make America Great Again.

You can see the graphic images here, but keep in mind that they are deeply disturbing, especially in 2016.

In Wellsville, New York, a massive swastika was found spray-painted on the wall of a dugout next to the words, Make America White Again.

Wellsville NY softball field dugout marked with swastika, Make America White Again graffiti https://t.co/GBu7WHH17G  Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) November 10, 2016

The list of post-election hatred goes on and on so I will, without commentary, highlight a few more below:

My letter to @USPS about what I witnessed today in Cambridge, Massachusetts. #Trump pic.twitter.com/MyeAQvP28l  Yarden Katz (@yardenkatz) November 9, 2016

I know of at least 50 instances of this happening in the past 48 hours. pic.twitter.com/FFG9HU36HU  Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 10, 2016

White Students in DeWitt, Michigan formed a physical wall of students to block Latino kids from entering the school This is from a parent. pic.twitter.com/dhtrp6U7Yt  Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 10, 2016

These are not isolated incidents.

In the 24 hours since Donald Trump was elected, police departments across the country have been investigating a wave of hate crimes toward Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics, and those in the LGBT community.

Ultimately, it boils down to this: The individuals now openly engaging in or encouraging these racial attacks are simply emulating the new president-elects behavior throughout the long and disturbing campaign.

Did anybody seriously think an electoral victory by Trump  the man endorsed by the KKK  would quiet these voices? If they did, they had their head in the sand.

The last few days have proven that what many people, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, warned us about prior to this election is actually taking place all across the country.

This is the mess Donald Trump created. Before he takes the oath of office next year, he must clean it up.
Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Print

North Carolina is proving to be a lesson in one of the many consequences that come with electing an authoritarian. Its a lesson in what happens to the smooth transition of power from an authoritarian leader.

North Carolinas Republican Governor, Pat McCrory is refusing to concede to Democratic opponent Roy Cooper. Cooper who defeated McCrory by 5,000 votes. However, McCrory said he will not concede defeat until November 18, the date that counties complete a canvass of their votes.

McCrory signed one of the most restrictive vote suppression laws in the country, a law that intended to suppress minority votes with surgical precision. concern for every vote to be counted is wrought with tragic irony.

McCrory, a staunch Trump ally, described then Republican candidate Trump as a role model after video of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women became public.

On the subject of conceding defeat, McCrorys role model said he would keep everyone in suspense unless he won. McCrory borrowed from his role models rule book by dog whistling about voting irregularities while also expressing a sudden concern for all votes to be counted.

The votes have been cast in the gubernatorial election, but many have yet to be counted. Currently, there are tens of thousands of outstanding absentee, military and provisional ballots across the state, and claiming an outcome before the process has concluded is irresponsible and disrespectful to the voters of North Carolina whose voices have yet to be heard. We also have grave concerns over potential irregularities in Durham County, including the sudden emergence of over 90,000 ballots at the end of the night,

It isnt hard to figure out that McCrory is copying his role model by suddenly caring about all votes being counted while simultaneously dog whistling about potential irregularities in Durham County where 49.9% of the electorate are people of color.

Of course, there was no concern for every vote being counted when Donald Trump and Senator Richard Burr declared victory in their respective races.

During the past two days, the corporate media implores us to give Trump a chance as if concerns about Trump were really just a collective licking of wounds over an election law.

Yet McCrorys refusal to concede defeat, in a manner consistent with Trumps behavior, reminds us of what may be coming when it is time for a transition of power from a Trump presidency.

David Frum, said it best in a tweet.

 Lets hold off on that self-congratulation until we see how the transition *from* Trump goes.

The peaceful transition of power is one of those things that we value as Americans, regardless of our party preferences. Its what distinguishes our political system favored by Trumps foreign and domestic allies.

Image: Screenshot from video.
Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Print

*The following is an opinion column by R Muse*

It is probably the case that many Americans have either heard of or had to live through what is known as the framework that helps humans learn to live without someone or something, they lost. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Right now after a little over 55-million voters installed a bigot, fascist, and sexual predator as leader of the free world, Democrats appear to be deep into the five stages of grief and are now so angry they are ready to do battle. Courage is an admirable quality, but courage without strength or power is a lesson in futility and that is what Democrats have to look forward to over at least the next four years and likely over the next decade.

It is understandable that Democrats are in denial and angry; they did just help Republicans and a con man swindle the American people into giving the Koch brothers and religious right complete unchallenged control of all three branches of government. But by dog, theyre going to put up a fierce fight for what they believe in; except they have no weapons and are tantamount to a diapered six-month-old toddler barely able to stand going into a monumental battle against a fully-armed and elite team of commandos. Democrats in Congress, the minority party, will scream and cry like the infant that keeps falling down when it tries to stand, but they have no leverage and no firewall in the White House to stop Republicans from doing any and everything the Koch brothers and religious right have called for over the past eight years.

Although many Americans think they understand the gravity of the elections results, it is likely they are either ignorant of what has transpired in the Republican movement over the past eight years in particular and past eighty years in general, or they are still deep in the denial stage of grief. Suffice it to say, that with unchallenged control of all three branches of government, every last despicable piece of legislation theyve tried to pass, every last regulation, social program, or agency theyve attempted to abolish, and every uncivil idea the evangelical religious movement proposes will be passed with relative ease while Democrats wail and gnash their teeth watching it get signed into law.

And instead of a firewall in the White House, a kill switch to stop an impending disaster, Republicans will have a happy fascist with a rubber stamp. It is not a stretch to say that this election will fundamentally reshape America into the Koch brothers and religious rights vision of what Trump meant when he said make America great; it cannot include again because America was never remotely like what Republicans and evangelicals have in store for it. It doesnt matter what Donald Trump wants or says because he will gleefully sign into law any piece of legislation the Republicans put on his desk so long as it doesnt affect his personal wealth or erode his sense of supreme power; he is a greedy fascist after all.

One hates to be a buzz-kill with more disparaging news; especially when so many Americans with a social conscience are struggling with the denial-anger stage of grief. But the nearly all manner of media has for far too long, not been completely truthful when reporting the hard-to-swallow reality of the state of politics in America; and now the impending state of America.

That being the case, it is with no joy that one tells Americans who thought there was protection against Republicans defunding Planned Parenthood, privatizing Medicare, cutting and privatizing Social Security, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), workplace protections (OSHA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, and handing over all federal land and national parks to corporations are fooling themselves.

Besides Republicans threatening or attempting to complete every last one of those tasks, they are all included in the GOPs official 2016 platform as a veritable Koch brother wish list. That representative list does not include the rash of barbaric religious planks that will install Christianity into all facets of society by government decree according to the GOP stalwarts Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists twenty-year-long crusade to create a theocracy. It is noteworthy that the GOPs official platform included a plank specifically addressing how to make Dominionist theocracy the law of the land in a section detailing how they will rebirth the Constitution to better reflect the evangelical lie that America was founded as a Christian nation.

Many Americans on the left are concerned that Republicans will eliminate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) from existence; they have, after all, attempted repeal the healthcare law 60-plus times. Some Democrats feel Republicans will struggle and possibly fail because they are sensitive to the effects of eliminating healthcare insurance for 22-million Americans. That is an interesting proposition and assessment. Because they have had no problem justifying to voters the wisdom in denying healthcare to 5-million poor people by rejecting Medicaid expansion. They also have no issue justifying to voters that it is just good sense to deny tens-of-millions poor women, children and infants healthcare; at about the same frequency they justify denying healthcare to the elderly, Veterans and the disabled. Whats another 22-million uninsured Americans to Republicans who exist to deny Americans everything for sport?

Remember, these are heartless Republicans who are well aware of the Koch brothers libertarian list of agencies, laws, programs, and departments they want to eliminate, and the Republicans will act according to the Kochs demands and there is no-one that can stop them. It is why being the minority party is similar to being perpetually in the fourth stage of grief, depression. And, Democrats and liberals will remain depressed for some years because two years ago still Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave the Koch brothers a solemn pledge that as soon as Republicans get complete control of the whole government; Were going to go after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board. All across the federal government, were going to go after it. Of course, that it includes every government agency, department, and law the Koch brothers cannot allow remaining in what is now an America that they co-own and control in its entirety.

Readers often query this author to explain why this column is always so cynical. It is cynical, but not in the modern sense of only seeing the bad in everything. However, in the classic sense, it adheres closely to the concept that a cynic simply writes down what they see happening around them as truthfully as possible. Based on what this author sees today, and for the future, after liberals get through the futility of the bargaining stage of grief, they are, all of us, going to have to accept that the 2016 election will indeed transform America for the worse because no few number of groups failed in what is becoming a typically predictable manner every two years. More on that in another column.

*This column is the sole opinion of the author*
Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Print

While Donald Trump considers making white Supremacist Steve Bannon his chief of staff and champion of stop and frisk, Rudolph Giuliani, as his Attorney-General the KKK in North Carolina is planning a parade to celebrate his victory in Tuesdays election.

According to The News and Observer, The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is planning what it calls a Victory Klavalkade Klan Parade for December 3rd at an undisclosed location.

The groups website goes on to say, in all caps, Trump=Trumps race united my people. While I will not include a link to the website, if you want to check it out, Snopes has a direct link to it here. In 2015, the group which the Anti-Defamation League describes as perhaps the most active Klan group in the United States today had 150-200 members.

Last year, the same group was part of the protest against South Carolinas removal of the confederate flag from the state capital.

Shortly before the election, one of the few newspaper endorsements Trump received was from KKKs official newspaper called the Crusader. The newspaper had a full page article explaining its support for Trumps candidacy which states in part,

While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, what made America great in the first place? . The short answer to that is simple. America was great not because of what our forefathers did  but because of who our forefathers were. America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great.

Eventually, Trump denounced the KKKs endorsement it took more time than it took for Trump to denounce the concerned Americans protesting his election win  in a tweet.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

For a person who said he wanted to be a president of all the people, Trump was dismissive of those protesting his impending presidency with claims dismissing the people involved in anti-Trump protests claiming they were paid protesters and blaming the media for inciting them.

In the latest development of Trumps effort to unite Americans, his on again/off again plan to ban Muslims is on again.

The ban is premised on Trumps plan to make American safe again yet the greater danger to Americans is the dramatic surge in white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. This is reflected in a study by George Washington University that found the number of white nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers on Twitter, Trumps favorite hangout, far exceeds that of ISIS.

One doesnt have to be paid to protest the results of Tuesdays election. One needs only to recognize that Trumps definition of people is limited to the white men who voted for him. Even the white women who foolishly cast their ballots for Trump are merely something to grope because, in his words, he can.

The protests are not about partisan interests. They are about people fighting for America. They are fighting to maintain their personhood and those of others Trump targeted in his con to the presidency.

One would be remiss in their responsibilities as good American citizens to sit back and do nothing as Donald Trump burns everything good about our people and our country to the ground.
Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Print

Without question, several factors led to the results of Tuesdays presidential election. People who voted third party or didnt bother to vote at all own the election results as much as anyone who voted for Donald Trump.

However, that doesnt remove the likely role that vote suppression laws played in helping Donald Trump cheat his way to an Electoral College count victory.

Wade Henderson, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights told McClatchy that groups monitoring Tuesdays election documented beyond any doubt that vote suppression and a conscious effort to shave off 1 or 2 percent of the vote in key states, in all likelihood, influenced the outcome of this election.

Indeed, the groups Henderson refers to reported voter intimidation, malfunctioning machines, and late-opening polling places nationwide and particularly in minority communities.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin had new restrictive voting laws for the first time in a presidential election.

Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law points to other tricks enacted by Republicans to make voting harder. They included long lines at the polls, voters name not on registration lists, a lack of polling place assistance for foreign-language speakers and poll workers who requested strict photo ID in states where such ID was not required. When we look back, we will find that voter suppression figured prominently in the story surrounding the 2016 presidential election,

Even with systemic and individual barriers to the vote, Hillary Clinton still won the popular vote. Its also worth remembering that the Electoral College was intended to prevent disasters like Donald Trump.

In light of these issues, electors have a moral duty (and in some states a legal one), supported by a true mandate from the people, to vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump.

As of this year, ten states and the District of Columbia which have 165 of the combined electoral votes, enacted the national popular vote compact mandating electoral college delegates to vote the will of the people.

In an article for The Hill, John R. Koza, chairman of National Popular Vote points to the fact the bill was approved by Arizonas House, Oklahomas Senate, and supported unanimously by legislative committees in Georgia and Missouri.

There just may be a way to stop Trump yet by focusing on Arizona, Oklahoma, Georgia and Missouris electors.
Chris Hart, an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, always wanted to be in the military. "Being one to always seek out challenges, I went to the Marine Corps," Hart said. His first tour of duty was in 2004 in Fallujah. Michael Pronzato/Staff
The possibility that legislators will further restrict abortions in South Carolina this year narrowed to near-impossible one week before Election Day, as a committee trying to work out a compromise considered bans with no chance of becoming law. Read moreSC legislators remain at impasse over abortion ban days before proposal expires
Does your new baby sleep in your bedroom? It should, according to a major policy change, just not in your bed.

The American Academy of Pediatrics unveiled its updated safe infant sleeping recommendations Oct. 24 at a national conference in San Francisco. The biggest change calls for parents to bring the crib or bassinet into their bedroom at night as a way to prevent sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS.

That idea was first recommended after a 2011 study by the University of Massachusetts and has now gained mainstream appeal. Some evidence suggests that the simple change may cut the mortality rate of infants roughly in half, which could save the lives of 1,750 babies each year.

Other safety recommendations through the first 12 months of life include: only allowing infants to sleep on their back, using a firm sleep surface and keeping soft objects and loose bedding away from an infant's bed area. Couches and armchairs are considered "extremely dangerous" places for infants to sleep, while bed sharing is also frowned upon.

Mayo Clinic has followed AAP's safe sleep recommendations for decades and was quick to adopt the best practices. They're now part of Mayo's written recommendations for new parents, and part of its educational counseling from nurses.

ADVERTISEMENT

Heads up

Anita DeAngelis, Mayo's perinatal education supervisor, says the new recommendations are building upon the "Back to Sleep" campaign of the 1990s, which urged parents to have their babies sleep face-up.

"Every parent that's in the hospital receives education from the nurse who is caring for the baby, hands-on as well as written materials," DeAngelis said. "It's seen as a very high priority."

More than 3,500 babies die each year in the United States due to SIDS. Minnesota's infant mortality rate of 5.0 actually ranked eighth, with an average of around 350 SIDS incidents annually from 2008-2012, but the Minnesota Department of Health still adopted an Infant Mortality Reduction Plan in 2015 due to what Health Commissioner Edward Ehlinger described as "stark inequalities."

Of particular concern were infant mortality rates of American Indians and African Americans, which were 9.1 and 9.2 in 2012. By comparison, the rates for Asians, Hispanics and Whites were 4.4, 5.1 and 4.3.

While those are all better than national numbers, Ehlinger seeks "to create a state where all babies are born healthy and have an equal opportunity to celebrate their first birthday."

Move the crib

AAP is now suggesting that simply moving the crib or bassinet into the parents' bedroom could reduce SIDS incidents by up to 50 percent, which would significantly improve infant mortality rates by preventing "suffocation, strangulation and entrapment that may occur when the infant is sleeping in an adult bed" or in a different room.

ADVERTISEMENT

It's unclear when the last death due to SIDS occurred in Olmsted County. Neither Mayo nor Olmsted Medical Center officials were able to recall a local incident, and Olmsted County Public Health did not have data available.

However, the recommendation isn't exactly set in stone.

The American Academy of Family Medicine has not weighed in since AAP announced its recommendation weeks ago. Additionally, the data cited by AAP and others was created through observational research only. That's only logical, DeAngelis said, since no new parent would agree to put their baby at increased risk for the sake of research.

Practical issue

OMC has yet to adopt the new AAP recommendation, according to Dr. Steven Adamson. He feels that it simply isn't practical for all parents to put a crib or bassinet in their bedroom due to space concerns, and wonders at how it might impact sleep patterns for parents, particularly those who don't work similar hours.

Adamson calls any infant death "tragic," but notes there are already many other ways to reduce SIDS, including breastfeeding, using a firm bed, not smoking and various other things.

"I'm not so sure I want this as the standard of care  'if you don't have the crib or bassinet in your room, you're a bad parent,'" Adamson said. "I'm not sure I want to hang that over a parent's head.

"For me, I'm going to tell people that's the recommendation. If it works for them, wonderful. If it doesn't, I understand. There are many other things you can do that mitigate the risk of SIDS."
One woman teared up while sharing a testimonial about how drug and alcohol addiction led to her being raped after a high school party.

A man shared his story about how addiction led him to becoming a drug dealer with a lengthy criminal record.

A Rochester couple detailed an opiate addiction that killed their son in 2014.

About 80 people  concerned parents, recovering addicts, advocates, engaged citizens and a judge  listened with anguish as the stories unfolded Thursday night at John Adams Middle School. Thursday's community forum was the first of two hosted by Mn Adult & Teen Challenge. A second "Know the Truth" forum is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at John Marshall High School.

Local officials began the night by detailing the dangers associated with drug and alcohol addiction. That set the stage for the personal testimonials.

ADVERTISEMENT

Mayo Clinic physician Casey Clements said doctors must shoulder some of the blame for the nation's rising addiction problem.

"I will point the finger at the medical community a little bit," Clements said. "We are not completely innocent in this process as we move forward."

The United States is home to roughly 5 percent of the world's population, but consumes about 75 percent of its medication, according to Adam Pederson, of Mn Adult & Teen Challenge.

There were 47,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. Half of those deaths were caused by heroin and other opiates. Clements says that represents a 4,000 percent increase compared to 2000. He also claims that about 80 percent of heroin users started using after getting addicted to prescription pills.

With almost two months left in the year, Olmsted County Attorney Mark Ostrem says drug cases are already up 60 percent compared to 2015. Olmsted County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson says cocaine sells for roughly 10 times more in affluent Olmsted County than it does in Chicago, making this a targeted area for outside dealers.

Paul Wilson, supervisor of Rochester Police Department's Narcotics Unit, recently wrapped up an 18-month heroin investigation that included federal agencies and links to Chicago. Rather than backslapping, his unit immediately began another coordinated investigation involving a methamphetamine ring operating across the region.

These issues aren't unique to Rochester or Southeast Minnesota, but Clements contends that many of these societal issues can be traced back to patients being overprescribed by their doctors.

"We all go into medicine to help people. We want to alleviate suffering. That's part of our calling," Clements said. "The (hard) part of medicine is when a patient comes to us and the needs of the patient aren't the same as the wants of the patient.  We in the medical community need to learn to say no in the right way."

ADVERTISEMENT

There is a coordinated effort to stem drug and alcohol addiction, but resources are being overwhelmed by rising demand. Eleven local agencies had information booths set up outside the forum and were waiting to answer questions, but they've been set up in response to the problem.

Thursday's forum was the 25th such event that Pederson has hosted across Minnesota this year. Pederson's crew addressed seven classes at Mayo High School earlier in the day and is planning to do the same at Century in the coming weeks.

"A dollar spent on prevention can save over $18 on future costs," Pederson said. "But very little funding is put forth to try to prevent (addiction) and that's what tonight is about.

"No one person is going to solve this. No one entity or organization is going to fix this. We have to do this together."
HASTINGS  A former Wabasha County Attorney was fined and sentenced last month to four days of sentence to service after pleading guilty to third-degree DWI.

James Clyde Nordstrom, 65, entered the plea Oct. 12 in Dakota County District Court; in exchange, an identical count was dismissed. Both are gross misdemeanors.

In addition to the sentence to service and $729 fine, Nordstrom was ordered to complete a chemical assessment and placed on supervised probation for two years.

STS is a sentencing alternative that puts nonviolent offenders to work on community improvement projects.

The charges stemmed from an incident March 10, when a Dakota County deputy was sent to a medical call in a parking lot in Miesville.

ADVERTISEMENT

While there, he saw a man  later identified as Nordstrom  get into the driver's seat of a pickup, start the vehicle and pull forward. As he did, he hit a set of cement steps and a railing of a business, the complaint says, then backed up and struck a fire truck that was on the scene for the unrelated medical call.

The deputy ran to the truck; Nordstrom "stared blankly at the officer when he was asked to put the vehicle in park," the report says. The deputy eventually reached into the truck, put it in park and turned off the ignition himself. As he did, he smelled alcohol and noted that Nordstrom's eyes were "bloodshot and watery."

According to the court document, Nordstrom argued with the deputy about taking the truck keys, but admitted he'd had one beer and two bourbon drinks earlier that day. The deputy then noted "Nordstrom had slowed and slurred speech."

Another deputy at the scene wrote that Nordstrom "appeared unbalanced on his feet, and at times his words were unintelligible." Nordstrom allegedly told that deputy that he'd had a beer and two alcoholic drinks that day, and had taken five different medications as prescribed.

Nordstrom failed field sobriety tests, the complaint says, and throughout the exercises said, "Just arrest me."

His breath sample indicated an alcohol concentration of 0.17 more than two hours after the initial incident.

Nordstrom served as Wabasha County Attorney from 1991 until his retirement in 2015. Prior to that, he was an attorney in Rochester.
CALEDONIA  A woman accused of stealing medication and cash from a woman after conning her way into an apartment has made her first appearance in Houston County District Court.

Anna Marie Tschumper, 22, of Houston, has been charged with two counts of theft by swindle and one count each of third-degree possession of a controlled substance, theft of a controlled substance, and theft. All are felonies.

She was released on her own recognizance after Wednesday's appearance and is due back in court Dec. 22.

The investigation began Aug. 29, when a woman called Houston Police to report prescription pills had been stolen from her residence; she named Tschumper as the suspect, the complaint says.

The woman told officers that Tschumper first came to her apartment Aug. 20, claiming that her employer  Hillview Healthcare in La Crosse, Wis.  had asked Tschumper to do a report on chronic pain management in senior citizens.

ADVERTISEMENT

The two sat on the woman's porch and talked; Tschumper asked to use the victim's bathroom before she left.

Tschumper returned Aug. 23, saying she had more questions to ask the woman. The two again sat on the porch; Tschumper again asked to use the bathroom.

A few hours after Tschumper left, the victim noticed a pill bottle containing 15-20 hydrocodone pills, an opioid pain medication, was missing from the top of her bedroom dresser.

Tschumper returned again on Aug. 27, claiming she'd lost her phone and asking the woman to help her find it. During the search, Tschumper again asked to use the bathroom. They couldn't find the phone, and Tschumper left.

Later that day, the victim learned the same thing had happened to her daughter in Rushford. The woman's daughter said Tschumper had come to her home, said her phone was missing and asked for help finding it.

Tschumper asked to use the Rushford woman's bathroom and was inside the home alone, the court documents say; after Tschumper left, the woman discovered a prescription bottle of oxycodone, another type of opioid pain medication, was missing.

After hearing her daughter's story, the Houston woman called law enforcement.

On Sept. 1, Tschumper stopped at the woman's place of employment with a thank-you note and a gift card signed by Hillview Healthcare. Tschumper allegedly said her employer had asked her to take photos of the homes of the people she'd interviewed for her report; the woman agreed and said she'd send Tschumper a text message when she got home.

ADVERTISEMENT

Instead, she contacted law enforcement, who helped her put a small video camera inside her apartment; the camera provided a view of the bedroom door, closet door and a dresser.

The woman then texted Tschumper to come over, at one point leaving her alone in the apartment.

When officers reviewed the video from the apartment, they saw Tschumper going into the woman's bedroom, taking the lid off a bottle of hydrocodone and looking inside. She didn't take those pills, but went into a closet where she retrieved a bag of approximately 400-500 hydrocodone pills, the complaint says.

Tschumper can be seen going into the bathroom with the bag, then emerging with the bag nearly empty. Tschumper put the bag back where she'd found it, then retrieved a second bag and took that into the bathroom, as well. She can be seen returning the second bag to its original spot.

The woman told investigators she forgot she had the pills in her closet; shortly after receiving the 90-day supply of the medication, she'd had a morphine pump installed and no longer needed the pills.

The second bag that Tschumper took into the bathroom had contained $2,600, court documents say; there was reportedly $600 in it after Tschumper handled it.

Several hours later, a search warrant was executed at Tschumper's home, where she led officers to a bag hidden in her bedroom closet; 139 hydrocodone pills and $500 in cash was recovered, the report says.

According to the criminal complaint, Tschumper admitted taking the pills, but said she'd only done so once. She denied using the pills herself or selling them to anyone else, and insisted she'd been at the woman's home to do a report for her employer.

ADVERTISEMENT

Tschumper's employer denied sending her to do a report about chronic pain in senior citizens, adding that staff suspected her of taking Fentanyl patches from the facility.
AUSTIN  The Southern Minnesota Center of Agriculture has added a new partner to its collaboration: Riverland Community College.

Riverland joins Minnesota West Community and Technical College, South Central College and Southwest Minnesota State University as partners of the Center.

"Riverland's contributions will enhance educational efforts that promote careers in agriculture, food and natural resources, and support farm business management education and support workforce training," Center Director Brad Schloesser said.

Riverland President Adenuga Atewologun said that the partnership will help keep Riverland's agriculture program growing, and benefit the region's agriculture industry.

"We need it in this region," Atewologun said. "The high schools are just bringing back agriculture programs. We need to grow farm wealth, and we think this program can help do that in this region."

ADVERTISEMENT

Riverland, which has campuses in Austin, Albert Lea and Owatonna, offers degrees in agriculture, food and biosciences, and precision agriculture, among others.

The purpose of the center, which was established in 2013 and based at South Central College in North Mankato, is to "(connect) students with the resources of area academic institutions, which are aligned with the needs of an industry to develop and sustain a talented workforce," Schloesser said.

A brochure from the center said that nearly 58,000 jobs in agriculture, food and natural resources will need to be filled in the next five years. The center's goal is to help students with a passion for these areas to find the right pathways  which includes starting ag education earlier.

"One thing the Center of Agriculture provides is professional development for teachers of agriculture in the secondary system," Schloesser said. "Students are exposed in their formative years, middle school and high school, that's when they discover and explore the opportunities."

The center has had a recruiting presence statewide, including events like the state FFA leadership conference.

To continue with its agriculture expansion, Riverland's Austin campus plans to add two new buildings.

"We have a capital bonding request to expand and renovate the existing facility in the west building," Atewologun said. "What that building would do is expand our current biology and chemistry programs to include biological engineering and agricultural engineering. It would include the science of agriculture and soil science, things like that."

The bonding request for $6 million will go to the state Legislature in 2018.

ADVERTISEMENT

The second building would connect Austin's east building to the west building and is planned to be an agriculture simulation lab.

"In order to fund it, we would depend on partnerships with potential local and regional users of that building," Atewologun said. "For instance, maybe farmers who want to see how to demonstrate virtual use of a combine or a spreader. All the entrepreneurs in our area who want to display some of their products in our showcase area. That would be a career pathway display that shows what people can do with agriculture."

That building is projected to cost $5.5 million. Atewologun is consulting with regional partners about the project's vision to see how they can help the college raise funds.
For the last five years, Rochester Public Schools staff and volunteers have hit the streets of Rochester each fall, knocking on the doors of students who had dropped out.

Their request: "We want you back."

The idea was to bring the students back to school and make sure they left with a diploma, but school officials found the effort wasn't as effective as they had hoped.

This year, they're telling students something a little bit different: "We want you to stay."

The "We want you back" program started in 2011 , but this year its focus is adjusting to a more proactive approach of retaining students. The new approach is more individualized, on the student's terms and they're partnered with a mentor to keep them on track and not lose them in the first place.

ADVERTISEMENT

Community volunteers and district staff won't be door-knocking on Saturday mornings anymore. Now, they'll be working with students throughout the year to keep them engaged and enrolled in school.

"We took this one day and thought, what if we do this all the time," said Julie Ruzek, the district's facilitator of family and community engagement. "We're checking in regularly with kids to see where they're at because sometimes they're not ready on the Saturday we go out to their house."

Because of the shifted focus, the program now works with about 150 students. Most of those are still at the high school level, but they've also started targeting middle school students.

"We have found while that process did bring us some students back into the district, we still had students that we were not reaching," Ruzek said.

Graduation rates hover around 80%

Rochester Public School District graduation rates are about 80 percent and generally sit just above the state average . In 2015, the graduation rate was 81.7 percent, down about 2 percent from the previous year.

Last year, 68 students dropped out  that's more than 5 percent of the graduating class, according to the Minnesota Department of Education's Minnesota Report Card . Another 12 percent of students are "continuing," which means they won't graduate in four years but still are looking to graduate or obtain a GED.

The original program was modeled after one in Des Moines, Iowa , and was brought to the district with superintendent Mike Munoz when he came to Rochester from Iowa. Each fall, a team of about 200 community and district volunteers visited students' homes to get them to return to school. While the Iowa district persuaded as many as one-fifth of students to return to school, according to Munoz, those efforts in Rochester haven't been as successful as administrators had hoped.

ADVERTISEMENT

Now, it's more individualized, with a strong focus on creating a student-staff relationship so a mentor can check in on students and direct them to resources available at the school. Ruzek said the process is much more "student-centered and proactive, really working on a case-by-case basis with a variety of stakeholders to address students' needs."

The students they're targeting include those who didn't graduate in four years or are on the "15-day drop list," which effectively withdraws a student from enrollment after they've been absent for 15 consecutive days.

Identifying underlying problems

Ruzek said the team still is trying to identify which students become involved with "We want you to stay," but others who have high absence rates may be involved as well.

Those needs and challenges facing students all are different, said Lisa Weber, the district's truancy and intervention coordinator, who also works with students involved with "We want you to stay." Students are facing a variety of circumstances at home, medical conditions, mental health, chemical addictions and homelessness, all of which often prevent them from focusing on school.

Weber said she's found students can't be successful at school if they've got other underlying concerns or problems that need to be addressed before they really can focus on school.

"There's other circumstances if you dig down deeper that play into why someone has not been in school, or why school may be difficult, but we've got to get in and figure out -- what is that? What are those barriers?" Weber said.

"I have not found a family or student that just flat out says, 'School is not important.' I just feel so strongly that there's always other things going on," Weber said. "And that's really hard for kids or families to recognize sometimes and to get those services they need."

ADVERTISEMENT

To help address those things, students are paired with staff members who act as mentors, and they help coordinate contact with other adults who can help the students, including staff from student support services, the truancy and in-transition coordinators, counselors, administrators and the assistant superintendent's office.

Ruzek said the team makes sure to present options to students, such as whether to encourage them to finish at one of the district's three high schools or consider an alternative option such as going to school at the Alternative Learning Center or pursuing a GED.

"We're checking in with kids on a regular basis when they're ready to talk, instead of when we think they should be  when we decide that it's on that Saturday," Ruzek said. "So far, it's working a lot better for us."
http://www.sos.state.mn.us/elections-voting/get-involved/students-vote-results/ While Hillary Clinton won Minnesota by a slim margin in Tuesday's election, students who took to the polls in a mock election two weeks ago picked Donald Trump.

The now president-elect won the first statewide mock election, sponsored by the Minnesota Secretary of State's Office, by about 1,500 votes. The mock election, held at the end of October, was in an effort to encourage voter participation and "get good habits started early," according to Secretary of State Steve Simon.

Of the 16 Southeast Minnesota high schools that participated and reported their results, the majority  except for Austin Senior High, Century and John Marshall high schools in Rochester and Wabasha-Kellogg Secondary  voted for Trump.

Throughout the state, 280 schools participated and 77,000 students in grades seven through 12 cast their vote. Of the 280 schools that participated, 213 reported their results.

The Minnesota Secretary of State estimates there are 3.9 million eligible voters. In the 2016 election, Clinton won Minnesota with a 1.36 million votes, while Trump grabbed 1.32 million. In Olmsted County the margin was also narrowly in favor of Clinton, by about 600 of the 80,000 votes cast .

ADVERTISEMENT

In the mock election, votes for the two main party candidates totaled up to about 67 percent of the vote. The next biggest portion of vote, nearly 6 percent, went to Dan R. Vacek and Mark Elworth, Jr., of the Legal Marijuana Now party. Gary Johnson and William Weld Libertarian Party followed that with 4,371, or 5.6 percent of the vote. About 7,000 students entered write-in votes.

You can view the full results, by school district, on the Secretary of State's website.
Houston County

Houston EDA seeks board member

CALEDONIA  The Houston County Economic Development Authority is seeking applications for an open board position.

Candidates should have strong business knowledge of the communities they represent. The board is most actively seeking representation from Eitzen or Hokah and is most focused on a countywide tourism initiative, which it will discuss during the next meeting on Thursday at 9 a.m. at the Houston County Historical Society Museum.

Those looking to apply should contact Courtney Bergey at 507-251-9272 or email eda@co.houston.mn.us.

ADVERTISEMENT

Fillmore County

Harvest dinner is Sunday

OSTRANDER  Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church will host a harvest dinner Sunday at 11:30 a.m. It will include traditional Thanksgiving fare. Admission is $10 for adults, $6 for ages 5-12 and free for those younger than 5.

Winona County

Firefighters to receive pet masks

WINONA  First responders with the Winona Fire Department are receiving two pet oxygen mask kits through a donation from Invisible Fence. The first responders will be equipped with masks after a training session and demonstrations on Monday. Dr. Deb Finnegan and Suzie Ehio with the Pet Medical Center also will be in attendance to provide additional pet-saving tips.

The session will begin at 10 a.m. at 1077 W. Broadway.

Mower County

ADVERTISEMENT

Austin Foundation seeks donations

AUSTIN -- The Austin Area Foundation is conducting its annual appeal to support its endowment efforts. To make a donation, visit www.austinareafoundation.org.

Wabasha County

Medical Center offers free screenings

WABASHA  Saint Elizabeth's Medical Center is offering free wellness screenings on Thursdays during November and December. Free screenings are offered on a walk-in basis from 8 a.m. to noon.

Goodhue County

Blanket materials needed

ZUMBROTA The Zumbrota Public Library teen advisory board is making fleece blankets to donate to the Ronald McDonald House in Rochester. Donations of fleece or money can be delivered to the library until Friday.

ADVERTISEMENT

Dodge County

Hayfield veterans programs are Monday

HAYFIELD  Hayfield will commemorate Veterans Day twice on Monday. Two programs will be held  at Hayfield High School at 8:30 a.m. and the elementary school at 9:05 a.m.
Vietnam, China look towards stronger locality-to-locality links

The central city of Da Nang is the next destination on the ongoing tour of Vietnam by Zhang Dejiang, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Chinese National Peoples Congress.









Zhang Dejiang (R) and Nguyen Xuan Anh at the meeting







Zhang, also a member of Chinas Politburo Standing Committee, met with Secretary of the Da Nang Party Committee Nguyen Xuan Anh and Secretary of the Party Committee of nearby Quang Nam province Nguyen Ngoc Quang on November 10.



Introducing his city, Anh said trade between Da Nang and China is rising, noting that the city posted 23 million USD and 200 million USD in exports to and imports from China, respectively.



There were 10 Chinese FDI projects, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwanese investments, worth over 3.88 million USD in Da Nang by July 31, 2016.



Ten direct routes with 54 flights per week connect Chinese localities with the Vietnamese city, and China sends the most foreign tourists to Da Nang.



Anh expressed his hope for enhanced cooperation with Chinese localities in tourism, tree planting, high technology, and smart city building.



At the meeting, Quang also presented the advantages of Quang Nam such as beautiful beaches, two world cultural heritage sites, one world biosphere reserve, and unique traditional craft villages.



The province has enjoyed rapid growth since it was separated from Da Nang two decades ago. Its budget revenue has shot up by over 100 times since then, partly thanks to the establishment of the Chu Lai Open Economic Zone, where the Chu Lai-Truong Hai auto production and assembly complex  the biggest of its kind in Vietnam  is based.



Five Chinese businesses operate in Quang Nam with a total capital of nearly 68 million USD, Quang noted.



Chairman Zhang congratulated Da Nang and Quang Nam on their accomplishments, voicing his hope that they will continue developing and increasing partnerships with Chinese localities.



On November 11, the Chinese delegation is scheduled to discuss administrative reforms with officials of the Da Nang Peoples Committee, visit the citys administrative centre and Hoi An ancient town in Quang Nam.-VNA
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

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.
ELLENDALE  A four-car train derailment in Ellendale this morning has resulted in the evacuation of the town, officials said this morning. All schools in the New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva district are closed as well.

It's believed the cars were carrying liquid propane and butane, according to preliminary reports.

In addition to being extremely flammable, liquid propane can very quickly freeze exposed skin. It is tasteless, colorless and odorless.

The Rochester Fire Department hazardous materials team was sent to the scene to assist in the cleanup. Law enforcement, ambulance and fire crews from Steele County and Freeborn County have also responded. No injuries have been reported.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation has reported that Minnesota Highway 30 at Ellendale is closed to all traffic; detours have been posted.

ADVERTISEMENT

Firefighters went door-to-door after the 6:45 a.m. derailment to advise the town's 688 residents to evacuate; the majority of them were sent to United Methodist Church, where food and water is available for evacuees and responders.
Updated at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 11 with comment from Joe Powers.

A St. Paul administrative law judge has determined that there's probable cause to believe Rochester City Council President Randy Staver violated a campaign finance law in connection with an event at Mayowood Stone Barn in September.

The complaint was filed Nov. 2 with the Minnesota Office of Administrative Hearings by Abe Sauer, of Rochester. Judge Jeanne M. Cochran convened a hearing by phone Monday to hear testimony, and in an order issued Thursday, she ruled that there's probable cause to believe Staver may have violated the statute by accepting an in-kind contribution from an individual exceeding $1,000 in value.

The case will now go to a panel of three administrative law judges, and if an evidentiary hearing is requested by one or both parties, it will be scheduled "in the near future." Otherwise, the judges will review the existing evidence and issue a ruling.

Staver said Thursday he wasn't surprised that the judge had ordered a full review, but he remains confident that his campaign handled the matter properly. He told the Post Bulletin prior to the probable cause hearing that he expected the complaint to be dismissed "once the judge sees the supporting documentation."

ADVERTISEMENT

Sauer said today by Facebook message, "This is not a surprise to me at all. Anyone who reviews the evidence will find that there is more than enough evidence for probable cause to believe Mr. Staver violated campaign finance law regarding his support from Mr. Powers."

Sauer's complaint alleges that campaign contributions related to the Stone Barn fundraiser were not reported properly on Staver's campaign finance report. The Stone Barn is owned by Joe Powers, of Powers Ventures, and the fundraiser was catered by the company. The report that Staver filed Oct. 28 lists three in-kind contributions of $933.33 each from three adult children of Joe Powers, and the complaint contends that the contributions were actually from Powers, as owner of the company, and exceeded the $1,000 limit for individual donors.

According to the judge's order, Staver's attorney, Paul Grinde, argued during the hearing Monday that there was no probable cause to believe Powers made the donation. Grinde provided documents showing the amounts reported on the campaign finance report match the amounts Nick Powers, Joey Powers and Melissa Walker were billed by Powers Ventures.

Grinde also provided an affidavit from Joe Powers' legal counsel that states that "none of Joe Powers' family members have ever had a legal interest in (his) business ventures."

The judge's order concludes, however, that "there is sufficient evidence in the record to support finding probable cause to believe" a violation occurred, and to refer it to a panel of judges who will make a final determination.

The order says there's probable cause to believe that Staver accepted an in-kind contribution of event space from Powers and that the use of the facility was a contribution by Powers exceeding $1,000. The judge also says Powers' children "were not charged the regular, commercial rate for the food and beverages" at the event, which also constitutes a contribution from Powers.

Powers, in a statement to the Post Bulletin today, said, "A finding of probable cause does not mean a violation has occurred; such a determination is made only after a full evidentiary hearing on the allegations has happened, and right now an evidentiary hearing has not been scheduled. I will continue to cooperate and provide full information and hope this matter resolves quickly."

Sauer filed the complaint less than a week before Election Day and the probable cause hearing occurred less than 24 hours before polls opened. Staver won re-election to the council's top job, defeating Rochester businessman Sean Allen.
Though they live about 1,730 miles apart, though they've never met, though they are of different races and backgrounds, Lauren Boebert and Dorothy Johnson-Speight speak almost in unison when they lament the fracturing of America.

Americans must "come together, be nonjudgmental about people and their opinions," says Johnson-Speight. Americans must "come together as one," says Boebert.

Yet, these two women stand squarely at the epicenter of American acrimony.

Boebert owns the gun-friendly Shooters Grill in the aptly named town of Rifle, Colo., and wears a handgun. Johnson-Speight fights for gun control laws after the 2001 murder of her 24-year-old son, Khaaliq Jabbar Johnson, shot seven times in a dispute over a Philadelphia parking spot.

Their differences are stark, but their yearning for a more civil and less divided nation is genuine. In that, they mirror other Americans interviewed during the past six months. They were caught up in a campaign that magnified its disagreements and left them longing for harmony; they live in a country that cannot square its present with its pedigree as "one nation, under God, indivisible."

ADVERTISEMENT

The fact is, America's differences are real, and cannot be glossed over.

In Missoula, Mont., an effort to welcome dozens of refugees  Congolese, Afghans, Syrians  was met with demonstrations and angry confrontations.

"I didn't do this to be controversial. I didn't do this to stir the pot," says Mary Poole, one of the leaders of the refugee project  but she did. Two patriotic visions came into conflict: the America that welcomes the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and the America still shaken by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in the years since, insisting on homeland security above all.

On New York's Staten Island, police and the policed struggle to coexist. On an island that is home to 3,000 police officers, a black man suspected of selling loose cigarettes died in an encounter with police in 2014. The black community knows the police do an important job, but it is deeply distrustful after the death of Eric Garner and other violent encounters with authority. Police, meanwhile, feel unappreciated, their character impugned.

"I think the divide is worse than it should be and more than people think it is," says retired detective Joe Brandefine.

At the Christian Fellowship Church in Benton, Ky., the Rev. Richie Clendenen tells his congregation, "There's nobody more hated in this nation than Christians." Evangelical Christians' numbers are in decline, their political clout diminished. On signal issues  particularly same-sex marriage  they have lost, at least for the moment. They are angry and frustrated and unwilling to surrender.

"We are moving more and more in conflict with the culture and with other agendas," says David Parish, a former pastor at Christian Fellowship.

There's so much more: Americans split on climate change, between those who say it is an existential threat and those who deny it is happening or at least that man has anything to do with it. Even as they contemplated electing the first female president, even as women take on combat roles, Americans are struggling with a misogynistic backlash, online and in real life. Then there's the gun debate, which Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA says is "more polarized and sour than any time before in American history."

ADVERTISEMENT

There is common ground. At the Annin Flagmakers factory in South Boston, Va., seamstress Emily Bouldin says Americans "may be divided on some things, but when it comes down to the most important things we come together." Nearly all Americans, according to surveys, believe in small business, the public schools, helping the less fortunate and caring for veterans.

Some differences, though, are profound and lasting, having less to do with what people think and more to do with where they fall  on which side of the line between prosperity and ill-fortune.

In Logan, W.Va., in central Appalachia, the decline of the coal industry has brought a population drain, rampant drug abuse, heightened poverty (cremations are up because folks can't afford caskets) and deep resentment that fed support for Republican Donald Trump: "I don't know what's in his head, what his vision is for us," said Ashley Kominar, a mother of three whose husband lost his job in the mines. "But I know he has one, and that's what counts."

The recovery from the Great Recession has left behind a lot of rural America. The Washington-based Economic Innovation Group found that half of the new business growth during the past four years was concentrated in just 20 populous counties, and three quarters of the nation's economically distressed ZIP codes are in rural areas.

The recovery meant little to workers in Hannibal, Ohio, where Chinese competition resulted in the loss of the largest employer, the Ormet aluminum plant.

It meant little to students in Waukegan, Ill.; poor school districts had no way to make up funding losses when federal stimulus money dried up. So while the nearby Stevenson district spends close to $18,800 per student, Waukegan spends about $12,600. Its students must cope with a high school that often is maintained badly, where as many as 28 students share a single computer.

That Stevenson is mostly white and Waukegan is mostly minority should come as little surprise. The racial divide endures, at least in some part because minorities continue to be significantly underrepresented in Congress and nearly every state legislature, an AP analysis found. Thanks to gerrymandering and voting patterns, non-Hispanic whites make up a little over 60 percent of the U.S. population but still hold more than 80 percent of all congressional and state legislative seats.

An example: African-Americans represent more than a fifth of Delaware residents, but for the past 22 years Margaret Rose Henry has been the state's only black senator.

ADVERTISEMENT

"If there were more black elected officials, we would have a better chance to get something done," Henry says.

Much of this is not new. As much as Americans like to recall the past as a rosy Norman Rockwell illustration, they have been at odds from the start  thousands of British loyalists battled their revolutionary neighbors in the colonies, North and South went to war over race, labor and management fought for decades, often violently, and the Vietnam era was awash with vitriol.

If today's divisiveness is different, some say, perhaps it is because of a lack of leadership.

"Yes, America is great. It could be a lot better if the politicians weren't fighting each other all the time," says Rodney Kimball, a stove dealer in West Bethel, Maine.

Elvin Lai, a San Diego hotelier, says the voters themselves must accept much of the blame.

"I do believe that our political system is broken," he says. "I do believe that a person that is centered and is really there to bring the country together won't get the votes because they're not able to speak to the passionate voters who want to see change."

It's those passionate voters, after all, who cocoon themselves with the likeminded, watching Fox News if they lean right or reading Talking Points Memo if they're on the left. In their ideological segregation, their minds are not open to compromise.

Take gun control. For all the nastiness surrounding the issue, a Pew Research Center poll in August showed 85 percent of American supported background checks for purchases at gun shows and in private sales, 79 percent support laws to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns, 70 percent approve of a federal database to track gun sales.

Dorothy Johnson-Speight, who founded the anti-violence, anti-gun group Mothers in Charge after her son's death, says these are steps well worth taking. "We don't want to take the rights of responsible gun owners away," she says.

Her aim is peace  both in the streets and in the public sphere.

"We've got to find a way to be more accepting of one another, more tolerant of each other," she says. "We have more things in common than we do that are different, and we need to find those commonalities in order to live in peace."

Lauren Boebert calls most gun measures "crazy," but she is not skeptical about the ability of the American people to rise above division, on this and other issues.

"Right now, we're using our rights to tear each other apart," she says, passionately. "Freedom of speech, it's just being used to say whatever mean, harmful, violent thing you can. ... That's not what it's for. You also have the freedom to lift them up and to hold them up and edify them. Let's come together, let's unify as Americans, all of us."
In a delicious coda to the defeat of Lady Clinton in the election on Tuesday, Minneapolis Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison has emerged as a leading contender to take the helm of the Democratic National Committee. He hasnt yet announced his bid, but he has won the support of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (from the Senates Marxist subcaucus, no surprise) as well as prospective Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (surprise!).

Im doubtful that Ellison is the man to lead the Democrats out of the wilderness. To the extent that may be true, I hope they bring him on. Let them stamp Keith Ellisons face on the leadership of the national Democratic Party.

Revisiting a favorite subject earlier this fall, I gave a talk that I titled The Secret History of Keith Ellison. The title was facetious. Ellisons history only became secret when he ran for Congress in 2006 and staked his campaign on three lies about his involvement with the Nation of Islam. I recounted and recalled Ellisons secret history in the Weekly Standard articles Louis Farrakhans first congressman and The Ellison elision.

Yet Ellisons history as an active member and local leader of the Nation of Islam remains a deep secret to Ellisons constituents in the Fifth District (Minneapolis and inner ring suburbs). He blatantly lied about it when he was running in the competitive four-way DFL primary in the summer of 2006. He suppressed it in his 2014 memoir, My Country, Tis of Thee. Indeed, he presented himself as a critic of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

Speaking of Farrakhan, Ellison writes in his memoir: He could only wax eloquent while scapegoating other groups. Ellison writes of the Nation of Islam itself: In the NOI, if youre not angry in opposition to some group of people (whites, Jews, so-called sellout blacks), you dont have religion.

He should know. He was speaking from his own personal experience in the cult.

Ellison was not happy when the Star Tribune published my column Ellison remembers to forget on its opinion page. In the column I put back some of his own history that he had left out of his memoir. He promptly sent out a fundraising letter to his fans asserting that the column represented a new low in the manifestation of anti-Muslim bigotry against him.

The cry of bigotry was another lie, but Ellison invited Pioneer Press reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger and others on his email list to fight back against his alleged victimization with a modest contribution to his campaign. I posted a copy of his fundraising letter to Stassen-Berger in In which Keith Ellison finds me of use.

Ellisons act has worked well enough that it has inspired local followers including Ilhan Omar. In response to the question whether her brother is the guy named on her 2009 marriage certificate, for example, Omar issued a statement decrying the Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division allegedly motivating questions about her marital status. Thats a royal flush. Even Ellison cant beat that.

How has Ellison gotten away with his act? It helps to be a Democrat. It helps to be a Muslim. It helps to have a sympathetic press. It helps to play to a Minneapolis crowd in a one-party town. And yet Ellison seeks to take his act to a national audience. He dreams of higher office.

In his memoir Ellison recounts his conversion to Islam as a 19-year-old undergraduate at Detroits Wayne State University. By the time Ellison graduated from law school at the University of Minnesota, however, he was toeing the Nation of Islam line. When Ellison first ran for public office in Minneapolis in 1998, he was a self-identified member of the Nation of Islam going under the name Keith Ellison-Muhammad. See Keith Ellison for dummies.

Ellison was still talking up Minister Farrakhan at a National Lawyers Guild fundraiser for former Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson in 2000. By 2002, however, when Ellison was first elected to the Minnesota legislature, and 2006, when he sought the DFL endorsement to succeed Rep. Martin Sabo in Congress, Ellison had abandoned the Nation of Islam and returned to the fold of Islam.

So far as I know, Ellison is the only convert to Islam for whom Islam was a way station to the Nation of Islam. How did that work? Thats one part of Ellisons secret history that actually remains secret.
Nigerian music star, Banky W, and actress, Adesua Etomi, are newlyweds in a new Nollywood film titled the wedding party.

The film, premiered to the press, Thursday, at the Filmhouse IMAX Lekki, Lagos, will be screened in the cinemas on December 16.

A suspense-filled romantic movie, it is inspired by Nigerian weddings and a desire to showcase African music and lifestyle.

Elfike Film Collective, a collaboration of Africas leading powerhouses  EbonyLife Films, FilmOne Distribution, Inkblot Productions and Koga Studios, put it together.

The Executive Producer, Mo Abudu, attended the screening alongside the cast members, Banky W, Adesua Etomi, Ireti Doyle, Alibaba, Sola Sobowale, Ayo Makun, among others.

It is the first time industry giants will partner on a film project and with the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) recognition, it shows that collectives can grow and prosper the continents film community.

Written by playwright Tosin Otudeko and directed by Kemi Adetiba, The Wedding Party is a first of its kind initiative designed to raise the bar in African storytelling through unrivalled technical achievement in filmmaking and creative media arts.

Set in Lagos, Nigeria, it tells the story of Dunni Coker (Adesua Etomi), a 24-year-old art gallery owner and only daughter of her parents about to marry the love of her life, IT entrepreneur Dozie (Banky W)

The couple took a vow of chastity and looked forward to a groundbreaking first night together as a married couple.

Alibaba and Sola Sobowale- the Cokers who were set to show off their affluence played the role of Dunnis parents while the wealthy Onwukas, Iretiola Doyle and Richard Mofe-Damijo played Dozies parents. Both mother in-laws were at loggerheads with each other as the duo wanted to reveal who was the most influential and wealthiest.

The Cokers who were given second place to the grooms family ended up beating the Onwukas to a grand entry at the wedding while the guests could not help but give a dancing ovation.

While the event planner, Zainab Balogun, who is constantly on her hands and toes, was bent on giving her client the much anticipated wedding, Mrs. Onwuka concluded plans on making Dunnis life miserable since she refused marrying her class except her darling Dozie.

The movie was first announced in April 2016 and screened for the first time on September 8 at the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival as a selection of the Spotlight City to City programme.

Other casts include Richard Mofe Damijo Beverly Naya, Emma OhMyGod, Lepacious Bose, Somkele Idhalama, Daniella Brown and Ikechukwu Onunaku. Others are Enyinna Nwigwe, Kunle Idowu, Sambasa Nzeribe, Hafiz Oyetoro among many others.
With only one month to go in 2017, only 43 per cent of the aviation budget for the year has been released, an official said.

The Minister of State for Aviation, Hadi Sirika, said this on Thursday in Abuja when the Senate Committee on Aviation visited the ministry on oversight function.

The budget performance of the aviation sector currently stands at 65 per cent with the release of N8.45 billion of the N19.85 billion allocated to the ministry.

Mr. Sirika said the amount released represented only 43 per cent of the total budgeted sum.

He said of the amount received, the ministry had spent N4.29 billion, leaving a balance of N4.16 billion in its coffers.

The minister also said that the balance on appropriation for the period was N11.40 billion, representing 57 per cent of the total appropriation.

He further disclosed that the amount appropriated for personnel cost was N1.37 billion while N1.14 billion had been released.

Furthermore, he said that N314.6 million had been released for overhead as against N437.2 million appropriated.

On the capital budget, he said that N18.05 billion was appropriated with N7 billion released, leaving a balance of N11.05 billion.

The capital budget implementation was focused on the completion of ongoing projects in the major international airports with key steps taken on the establishment of a national carrier.

You will agree with me from the above budget performance that one of our major constraints had been that of funding, which is largely due to the dwindling resources of the government.

Mr. Sirika said efforts were ongoing to adopt Public Private Partnership (PPP) approach in the funding of the projects due to lean government resources.

On the other hand, he said that the aviation sector had witnessed continuous growth globally in terms of passengers and cargo aircraft movement, adding that the value chain of the sector was enormous.

The minister explained that the government was currently developing some specific policies that would ensure the development of the sector in line with global trend.

He identified some key policy initiatives to be in the areas of safety and security; infrastructure and airport concession; establishment of private sector-driven national carrier and maintenance, repair and overhaul facility.

Others are the establishment of agro-allied cargo infrastructure; restructuring of aviation agencies to address the challenge of over bloated staff and establishment of aircraft leasing company through PPP procurement method.

Responding, Adamu Aleiro, Chairman, Senate Committee on Aviation, expressed satisfaction with the level of performance of the ministrys budget so far.

Mr. Aleiro said that the Senate would support the establishment of a private sector-driven national carrier.

He said that the role of the government was to provide the enabling environment.

Mr. Aliero stressed that Nigeria could become an aviation hub in Africa, if proper policies were put in place and implemented, adding that the initiative was key to achieving the standard.

We are impressed with the performance of the 2016 budget especially on overhead and personnel, he said.

He urged the ministry to always commence its procurement process as soon as the budget was passed.

(NAN)
The Federal Government on Friday said it would consider introduction of incentives to ensure listing of multinationals and telecommunication companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, NSE.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo stated this during a courtesy visit to the management of the exchange and stock market community in Lagos.

Mr. Osinbajo said government would encourage more companies to list on the NSE in order to create prosperity for the investing public.

We are considering incentives regime that will enable businesses to thrive because as you know the immediate challenges are power, exchange rate and infrastructure, and all of these are things we are working on day by day basis.

My interaction today with the council has helped in a great deal in understanding some of the issues and we are looking at a way we can deal with it, he said.

He noted that the new investors of the privatised state-owned-assets had the prerogative to go public but the government could persuade the boards to list.

He said that government would work with the exchange to encourage an incentive regime to ensure listing of more companies on the NSE to deepen the market.

The vice president said that partnership with the broker-dealer community was needed to tackle the present economic challenges.

Mr. Osinbajo stated that government would also support private sector partnership, noting that private sector holds the economy.

He said that private sector must work hand in hand with the government to tackle the countrys economic challenges.

We must see ourselves as partners working together to move our nation forward, he said.

Also speaking, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, NSE Council President, who commended the vice president for the visit, said that the exchange would work with the federal government to overcome economic challenges.

Mr. Aig-Imoukhuede said that the exchange had consulted with Mr. Osinbajo over time on difficult issues in the market and the economy.

He stated the NSE would follow up on the federal governments plans for the market.

He said that the vice president had given hope and confidence to the market community to overcome the challenges facing the market.

We are going through difficult times no doubt but very soon we will see better times, Aig-Imoukhuede stated.

Rasheed Yussuf, a stockbroker, said that the present government had taken some bold steps to strengthen the economy.

He called for proper interaction between the stock market community and the federal government to ensure growth and development of the economy.

Mr. Yussuf, who is also the Managing Director, Trust Yields Securities Ltd., urged Mr. Osinbajo to ensure the inclusion of one of the stockbrokers in the government economic team.

We want to have one of us on the federal government economic management team to ensure friendly policies that will lift the market forward, Mr. Yussuf said.

He said that most of the policies taken in the past were not investor friendly, noting that, the capital market was a barometer for any economy.

(NAN)
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, officials on Friday said Taliban militants killed four people in an attack at German consulate in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

A NATO spokesman said that the militants rammed a truck laden with bomb into the outer wall of the consulate before battling security forces in a late-night attack and killing the victims in the process.

The spokesman said that the explosion, triggered by a suicide bomber, caused extensive damage to the building and shattered windows as far as five kilometres away.

A local doctor said that the blast and subsequent fire also wounded 120 people.

However, no consular staff member was among the victims.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that Germany would review its lead role in the international mission in northern Afghanistan, where violence had escalated sharply in 2016.

The attack which occurred on Thursday underlines one of the tougher foreign policy challenges facing U.S. President-elect, Donald Trump, when he takes office in January.

U.S. combat operations against the Taliban largely ended in 2014, but thousands of its soldiers remained in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.

The Taliban said that the attack was in retaliation for NATO air strikes against a village near the northern city of Kunduz on Saturday in which over 30 people, many of them children, were killed.

Heavily armed fighters, including suicide bombers, had been sent with a mission to destroy the German consulate general and kill whoever they found there, the Islamist militant movements spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said on telephone.

Taliban forces came close to over-running Kunduz in October, a year after briefly capturing it in their biggest success in Afghanistans 15-year-long war.

(Reuters/NAN)
The Russian government has confirmed an open secret, that US President elect, Donald Trump is chummy with President Vladimir Putin and there was contact between them during the Election campaign.

The confirmation was made Thursday by one Russias deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov.

He even added that Mr. Putins aides were in touch with members of President-elect Donald Trumps political team during the U.S. election campaign.

Accused by defeated Democratic contender Hillary Clinton of being a puppet of President Vladimir Putin after praising the Russian leader, Mr. Trump had dismissed suggestions he had anything to do with the Russian government during the campaign.

Reuters reported that Ryabkovs comments could prove politically awkward for the president-elect.

There were contacts, Interfax cited Ryabkov as saying. We are doing this and have been doing this during the election campaign.

Such contacts would continue, he added, saying the Russian government knew and had been in touch with many of Mr. Trumps closest allies. He did not name names.

Obviously, we know most of the people from his (Trumps)entourage. Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions, he said.

I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives.

Moscow was just beginning to consider how to go about setting up more formal channels to communicate with the future Trump administration, said Ryabkov.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a preliminary inquiry in recent months into allegations that Mr. Trump or his associates might have had questionable dealings with Russian people or businesses, but found no evidence to warrant opening a full investigation, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The agency has not publicly discussed the probe.

The U.S. government has blamed Russia for cyber attacks on Democratic Party organizations.

Mr. Trump, who has spoken of his desire to improve tattered U.S.-Russia ties, has said he might meet Putin before his inauguration, but Putins spokesman has said there are currently no plans for such a meeting.

Interfax reported on Wednesday that Dmitry Peskov, Mr. Putins spokesman, would be in New York this week for a chess tournament, a few blocks from Trump Tower, where the president-elect has his office.

But it cited Mr. Peskov as saying he did not plan to pass any message to Mr. Trump from Mr. Putin.

The Russian parliament erupted in applause on Wednesday when it heard that Mr. Trump had been elected and Mr. Putin told foreign ambassadors he was ready to fully restore ties with Washington.

Mr. Ryabkov was more circumspect though, saying the Russian Foreign Ministry felt no euphoria about the Republicans win despite wanting to normalise relations with Washington.

Moscow and Washington are at odds over Syria, Ukraine and NATO.

Mr. Ryabkov said Mr. Trumps allies had made some tough statements about Russia during the campaign and that his ministry was therefore not harbouring any rose-tinted hopes.

We are not expecting anything in particular from the new U.S. administration, Interfax quoted Mr. Ryabkov as saying.
President Muhammadu Buhari and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, on Thursday disappointed a mammoth crowd who thronged the Democracy Park in Akure for the flag off of the 2016 governorship campaign of the All Progressives Congress, APC.

The event, which effectively kicked off at about 11 a.m., was however attended by some APC governors, federal ministers, and top echelons of the party.

Officials of the campaign kept informing the crowd at the earlier part of the event that the president and his deputy were on their way; but as time went on, it was soon clear that they would not be coming.

The publicity secretary of the party in Ondo State, Abayomi Adesanya, said the president and his deputy encountered an emergency situation that they needed to attend to on Thursday.

The President and the Vice President had an emergency state matter they had to attend to and so could not turn up, he said.

PREMIUM TIMES check, however, revealed that the Ondo event was never on Mr. Buharis schedule.

Mr. Adesanya, however, said President Buhari would be in Ondo State for the grand finale of the campaign, scheduled tentatively for November 19.

Messrs. Buhari and Osinbajo were not the only obvious absentees from the rally the party hopes to use to jumpstart its troubled campaign.

A national leader of the APC, Bola Tinubu, and top party leaders close to him, also boycotted the event. Mr. Tinubus allies who were absent include the current Lagos State Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, and the Osun State Governor, Rauf Aregbesola. Vice President Osinbajo is also an ally of Mr. Tinubu and was reportedly nominated for his position by the former Lagos governor under whom he served as justice commissioner.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported how Messrs. Tinubu, Ambode, and Aregbesola would be absent from the event.

Mr. Tinubu, the APCs most influential politician in south-west Nigeria, is opposed to the candidacy of Rotimi Akeredolu, the partys flagbearer for the November 26 election. He had also publicly accused the APC national chairman of manipulating the partys primary process in favour of Mr. Akeredolu and against his preferred candidate, Olusegun Abraham, who was also absent from the rally.

Although party officials kept telling the attendees at the event that Mr. Tinubu and his allies would attend, that was not to be.

At the rally, the National Chairman of the party, John Odigie-Oyegun, formally presented the flag to Mr. Akeredolu.

Mr. Odigie-Oyegun said Ondo residents should effect a change in the government by voting Mr. Akeredolu on November 26.

He advised them to turn out on election day to vote for the APC candidate.

He said Ondo State was strategic to the federal government and a vote for APC would place the state in a vantage position.

While speaking, Mr. Akeredolu said he would provide jobs for the youth through agriculture and entrepreneurial development.

He urged the people to vote for him and said he would ensure prompt payment of salaries.

The rally was attended by Governors Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto, Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun, Simon Lalong of Plateau, Ahmed Abubakar of Bauchi, Kashim Shetima of Borno and the Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom.

Also present were the ministers of solid minerals, defence, health, and labour and productivity. The Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, was announced as representing the Vice President.

The APC is expected to be a major challenger to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party in Ondo which is also engaged in an internal tussle on who would be its candidate between Eyitayo Jegede and Jimoh Ibrahim.
The Commissioner of Police in Nasarawa State, Abubakar Sadiq-Bello, said gunmen killed a police officer during an ambush in Obi Local Government Area of the state.

Mr. Sadiq-Bello disclosed this on Friday in Lafia, while fielding questions from journalists.

But he did not disclose the name or rank of the officer who was serving at the Obi Division of the command.

He said the police patrol team was ambushed along Obi-Agwatashi road about two weeks ago.

He said the police would arrest the killers and prosecute them.

The commissioner described the incident as unfortunate and part of the hazards police officers encounter in the line of duty.

He condoled the family of the deceased officer and prayed God to grant them the fortitude to bear the loss.

He appealed to members of the public to continually support the efforts of the police in order to curb crime and criminality in the state.

(NAN)
No fewer than 10 lives have been lost to the recent outbreak of diarrhoea in Wassa community, Abuja Municipal Area Council of the Nigerian capital, FCT.

Rilwanu Mohammed, the Executive Secretary, FCT Primary Healthcare Development Board, said this at the flag-off of the third round of polio outbreak vaccine response on Friday in Abuja.

Mr. Mohammed also disclosed that the disease affected 38 people in the community.

He said the incidence happened at the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp in the area.

The executive added that the disease broke out on November1, and that the victims were being treated by the board, stressing that the situation is under control.

He said all the children in the community have been vaccinated and the two boreholes in the area decontaminated with chlorine gas.

Mr. Mohammed said people the in the community were encouraged to avoid open defecation and embrace healthy and hygienic life style.

He added that the board had trained the community on the best way to wash hands using soap and ash.

According to him, hand washing is one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of many types of infection and illness in all settings.

Clean hands can stop germs from spreading from one person to another and throughout an entire community, he said.

The scribe said the flag-off campaign in Wassa was to ensure that all eligible children in the area were vaccinated.

We observed that there was an influx of new people from Monguno and Gwoza in Borno state with their children that were previously vaccinated, he said.

He added that third round campaign will commence on November 12 and end on Tuesday November 15.

He said the exercise targets 900,000 children across the Federal Capital Territory.

We have trained 1,688 personnel to conduct the exercise and we have the support of 75 additional people from the National Primary Healthcare Development Board; we also have 78 supervisors and 37 monitors, he said.

Muhammad Bello, the Abuja minister, assured that the FCT administration was committed to elimination and eradication of polio in Nigeria.

Mr. Bello, represented by Alice Ojey-Achu, acting Secretary, Human and Health Resources Secretariat, said there would be adequate support to the programme to ensure effective implementation of the exercise in the FCT.

With the coverage below the minimum acceptable 90 per cent in September round of the immunisation, increasing to 98 per cent in the October round.

FCT has demonstrated progressive improvement in quality of the implementation of the sub-national immunisation plus days, he said.

(NAN)
A manager with Heritage Bank, a cashier, and two other persons were killed on Friday in a robbery incident in Otun Ekiti, headquarters of Moba Local Government Area of Ekiti.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the other persons killed by the robbers included a security guard attached to the palace of the paramount ruler of the town, Adedapo Popoola, and another security guard attached to Unity Bank.

An undisclosed sum of money was carted away from the Heritage Bank branch in the town during the incident.

Mr. Popoola, who spoke to journalists, said the incident happened after working hours.

I was relaxing with my chiefs in front of the palace when we heard what first sounded like

some fireworks and we dismissed it as some of the childrens antics as a result of the festive period

But later, we heard heavier and more shocking sounds that resembled gunshots and explosives

That was when we realised it was no childs play as gunshots and explosives rang loud all over the place.

 I couldnt really rationalise the incident as we ruminated on whether it was a robbery, Boko Haram attack or some form of war.

We later learnt that the robbers planted their men at the four entry points leading into

the town, he said

According to him, the sporadic gunshots and sound of explosives lasted for about an hour and left four persons dead.

The Heritage Bank Manager and cashier, security man at Unity Bank and my own night guard were all killed in the operation

I immediately reported the case to the governor and he mobilised the security operatives who promptly followed up the governors instruction.

But by the time the reinforcement came, the robbers had left the scene, the first class traditional ruler said.

The monarch, who said the incident was the first of its kind in the town, said Otun was prone to such attacks because of its border town status with Kogi, Osun and Kwara .

The border towns and local government areas should be given very tight security so that such incidents do not happen again

Government should put in more efforts into ensuring the protection of lives and property, he said.

Residents said the security guard at Unity Bank had just resumed for work in the evening when the robbers struck.

He was said to be preparing for his wedding in a matter of days while his wife was said to be pregnant.

Confirming the incident, the Ekiti Police Public Relations Officer, Alberto Adeyemi, said the bodies of the victims had been deposited at the morgue in Usi-Ekiti General Hospital

We have commenced investigations into the incident and hope that the perpetrators would soon be apprehended, he said.

A group of dare devil robbers recently also invaded the Divisional Police Headquarters at Ido Ekiti, headquarters of Ido Osi Local Government Area, destroying the entire premises with explosives and carting away arms.

Ido Osi Local Government Area shares boundary with Moba Local Government Area.

(NAN)
U.S. Federal judge, Gonzalo Curiel, on Thursday in San Diego, California, largely sided with plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit against President-elect Donald Trump over the defunct Trump University.

The case is scheduled to go to trial later this month and Trump is expected to testify in his own defence against allegations that Trump University for-profit business seminars were a hoax and hundreds of individuals were charged large sums of money for courses that were essentially worthless.

Judge Curiel ruled against Trumps legal team seeking to ban testimony relating to Trumps conduct during the presidential campaign.

Mr. Curiel also ruled against Trumps request to ban testimony about Trump Universitys F rating by the Better Business Bureau and the fact that it has since gone bankrupt.

He also denied a request by Trumps lawyers to ban discussion of the financial condition of students, many of whom described themselves as poor, and what impact the seminar fees had on their lives.

Mr. Trumps lawyers argued testimony about the presidential campaign, and testimony about the other elements of the case are irrelevant and would serve to colour the jurys opinion of Mr. Trump and his business venture.

Mr. Curiel ruled in favour of allowing Trumps defence team to call students who would tell success stories about how the courses improved their understanding of business and real estate.

Mr. Trump has steadfastly defended Trump University as a worthwhile investment for participants. The courses promised to offer students inside information on how he built his business.

In a technical ruling, Mr. Curiel found insufficient evidence or supporting case law to warrant granting Mr. Trumps other requests, though he said Mr. Trumps lawyers could object to individual pieces of testimony during the trial.

The trial is scheduled to begin Nov. 28.

(NAN)
Igbo leaders from the 31 states of the federation outside the south-east zone and in the Diaspora have pledged their commitment to the unity and development of Nigeria.

They made the pledge on Friday in Jos, during a call on the Plateau State Deputy Governor, Sonni Tyoden.

The leader of the delegation, Pampas Ebu, the leader of the Igbo in Minna, Niger state, said his people would never do anything to compromise the unity of Nigeria.

He called on government at all levels to guarantee their safety wherever they reside and that of the entire Nigeria citizens.

Mr. Pampas said his delegation was made up of representatives of Igbo traditional rulers living outside the south-east state and in the Diaspora who were in the Plateau State capital for a quarterly meeting.

He said the traditional rulers chose to hold their meeting in Jos to showcase the return of peace in state.

We are here in Jos for our quarterly meeting of all Igbo traditional rulers from states outside Igbo own states, as an indication of the return of peace in Jos, he said.

The security of people and property is paramount to us, we as leaders will ensure that our subjects abide by government policies and programmes.

Responding, the deputy governor, Mr. Tyoden, assured the traditional rulers of adequate security of not just Igbo people, but everyone living in the state.

Security of our citizens is key to us as a government, because without an enduring security and peace, there cant be development.

I want to use this medium to affirm that Igbo speaking people are friends of Plateau state, your contributions in the economy cannot be underestimated, Mr. Tyoden said.

The meeting of the Igbo leaders is scheduled to end on Saturday.
Two days after the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States, Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, has hinted that he could implement his decision to tear his American green card.

Mr. Soyinka had said he would cut his card if Mr. Trump triumphs over his major challenger and candidate of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, in the November 8 election.

The moment they announce his [Trumps] victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up, Mr. Soyinka told a gathering at Oxford University.

The comments immediately went viral on the internet.

As soon as it became clear that Mr. Trump had won the elections, many across the world began trolling the professor, with some propagating humour that he had denied making the promise.

But Mr. Soyinka came out on Thursday to clarify the status of his promise.

The professor hinted to The Interview newsmagazine that he could fulfil his promise on January 20 as soon as Mr. Trump is sworn in.

Come January 20, 2017; watch my WOLEXIT! (Donald Trump will be sworn-in as the 45th President of the United States of America on Friday, January 20, 2017), the Interview quoted Mr. Soyinka as saying.

He, however, did not clarify what WOLEXIT really meant.

The green card is a permanent residence permit issued by the United States, and is highly sought by Africans. If Mr. Soyinka destroys his, he could be denied entry into the United States, despite his status.

The magazine also said Mr. Soyinka disclosed when the possibility of Mr. Trumps victory hit him, adding that he took some premium coffee to keep himself energised.

As Election Day approached, the spectre became near palpable. I refused to switch on the television this morning until I had stiffened myself with a strong espresso, Mr. Soyinka said. I felt disaster in my marrow.

The Nobel Laureate has been advised on the Internet to tear his green card on video, but it is not immediately clear if he would take the challenge.
A National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, member is believed to have drowned in a boat accident on Thursday in Okpotuwari Community, Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa.

Sources in the community told the News Agency of Nigeria on Friday that the corps member, who hailed from Anambra drowned when the canoe he boarded capsized.

Tontiemote Yeiyei, a resident, said the deceased, who was serving at Okpotuwari Community, had gone to Ondewari with two of his friends across the Osiana creek by a hand paddled canoe.

Mr. Yeiyei said the ill-fated canoe encountered rough currents at the jetty as the deceased and the others were returning to Okpotuwari.

He said that following the boat accident, sympathisers quickly raised a search party, during which the two others were rescued alive.

The rescue team searched for the remains of the drowned corps member to no avail, and local divers later joined them but they are yet to find the body. Hopefully it will be afloat by Saturday.

The survivors have been stabilised and are being taken care of at a clinic, Yeiyei said.

Marine police sources in Southern Ijaw said that the incident was yet to be reported.

(NAN)
The United States President-Elect, Donald Trump, has reversed his disparaging description of the growing number of protesters marching across the country against his election.

Earlier on Friday, Mr. Trump, who was reacting to the spreading protests his victory at the poll has led to, described those marching on the streets as professional protesters in a tweet.

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair! wrote Mr. Trump, known for insulting his adversaries on Twitter.

Thousands of protesters chanting anti-Trump slogans have flooded American streets since he was announced as the winner of the bitterly contested election.

Mr. Trump consistently blamed the media, which reported on his divisive and scandal-tainted campaign, for ganging up against him.

But nine hours later, in his next tweet, the President-elect did an about-face praising the passion of the protesters for America while making a somewhat conciliatory appeal to them.

Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud, he tweeted.

It is not clear whether his handlers prevailed upon Mr Trump, who hardly shows remorse or apologises for his gaffes, to make the conciliatory tweet; but it clearly did not assuage the anger of the protesters as the protests continued to spread to other cities in the country.
A Lagos monarch has told a court that his family paid N15.1 million to kidnappers who held him captive.

My abductors demanded N500million ransom but my family paid N15.1 million to free me the traditional ruler of Iba Town, Goriola Oseni, told a Lagos High Court sitting at Igbosere.

Mr. Oseni said this on Friday while giving evidence at the commencement of trial of the four men accused of kidnapping him.

The accused are: Duba Furejo, Ododowo Isaiah, Reuben Anthony and Yerin Fresh, who were first arraigned before Justice Oluwatoyin Taiwo on October 24.

They are standing trial on an eight-count charge bordering on conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, robbery, armed robbery, stealing and kidnapping preferred against them by the Lagos State Government.

The monarchs kidnap in July drew widespread condemnation at the security situation in Lagos. The police and the state government sprung promptly into action to help secure Mr, Osenis release.

At the commencement of hearing, the Lagos State Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Adeniji Kazeem, who led a team of lawyers for the state, obtained the leave of court to exclude the public from the trial.

In an oral application, Mr. Kazeem told the court that the accused were part of a criminal enterprise, therefore, it would be in the interest of justice and the safety of the witnesses for the case to be closed to the public.

The court granted his request despite the objections of all the three counsel for the accused.

Selowei Baidi was for the first and second accused, J. O. Egwuaroje for the third accused while Anthony Onwueze represented the fourth accused.

Justice Taiwo, in her ruling, said that there was nothing prejudicial about Mr. Kazeems application and assured the defence counsel of fair hearing.

She ordered all journalists in court to identify themselves with their official identification card in order to be allowed to cover the proceedings.

Led in evidence by Mr. Kazeem, Mr. Oseni, 73, testified as first prosecution witness and narrated how at about 8:00 p.m. on July 16, he was kidnapped while watching TV in his palace.

Mr. Oseni told the court that he was held in captivity for three weeks in an unknown camp.

He described his abductors, about nine, as shirtless, heavily armed men wearing only black trousers.

This is the king, the gunmen said. I asked them, what can I do for you? Then they grabbed me. I was in only a boxer because I was preparing to take a bath.

My Olori (Queens) came in and asked them where they were taking me to but they fled when the gunmen released some bullets in the decking of the room, Mr. Oseni told the court.

He said the gunmen dragged him out of the palace and shot sporadically; in the process, killing his security guard and a motorcyclist.

He said they demanded N500 million ransom but his family paid N12 million and then another N3.1million to another group of the kidnappers, totalling N15.1million following which he was released.

The Obas son, Kazeem, who testified as the second prosecution witness, said he delivered both ransom money of N12 million and N3.1million to the abductors at a canal near Igbehinadun in Iba.

He said they negotiated the ransom from N500 million to N40 million but they couldnt raise that amount, especially after the government refused to pay any ransom.

The militants, he added, gave him directions to the drop off point on phone after warning him not to tell anyone.

Justice Taiwo adjourned the case till November18, following a request by the prosecution for time to present more witnesses.

(NAN)
A member of the House of Representatives and former deputy governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC , in Kogi State, James Faleke, has reportedly survived an assassination plot along Lokoja-Abuja highway.

Mr. Faleke was the running mate of the late Abubakar Audu. Both men were coasting to victory in the governorship election held last year before Mr. Audu suddenly died.

Mr. Faleke was allegedly attacked on November 6 by some unknown gunmen under the overhead bridge at the entrance to Gwagwalada near Abuja around 7 p.m.

His political associates say his SUV was shot at severally at point blank range shattering the windscreen of the vehicle but could not penetrate deeper due to the bulletproof status of the vehicle.

In a statement, Friday, by the Director, Media and Publicity of the Audu/Faleke Political Organisation, Duro Meseko, the group expressed shock at the development which they described as wicked and senseless.

Mr. Faleke had turned down the decision of his party to be the running mate of its nominated candidate and current governor, Yahaya Bello.

Instead, he approached the judiciary seeking to be named governor. He was however, floored in all the courts including the election tribunal by Mr. Bello.

The news of the assassination attempt on our leader, Hon James Faleke came to us as a big shock. How could any sane mind contemplate such evil on an innocent soul who though shamelessly robbed of his governorship mandate has remained humble, calm, peaceful, and law abiding, the group said.

It also said even Mr. Falekes supporters maintained the peace since the Supreme Court judgement.

What else could those wicked masterminds want? the group asked.

It, however, said the attempt on the life of Mr. Faleke, who also represents Ikeja constituency in the House of Representatives, may be due to the mammoth and unprecedented crowd that welcomed Hon Faleke home recently.

His political foes had resorted to this dastardly plan to assassinate him. We thank the almighty God for sparing his life, the statement said.

The group wondered why some desperate and wicked people would want to cause more pain and misery to an already pained citizenry who aside having lost the creme of its political class to both natural and unnatural causes like Barrister James Ocholi, Prince Abubakar Audu, Senator Ohize and even Senator Ohiare who narrowly escaped death recently, are also undergoing the most unprecedented socio-economic crisis ever.

The statement called on the security agencies to ensure that they are on top of their duties to protect lives and property of the people.

It also called on the Inspector General of Police and the other relevant security agencies to as a matter of urgency begin investigations into the assassination attempt.
Eight years after the former governor Lucky Igbinedion was convicted of money laundering and ordered to return N500 million and three houses to the Federal Government, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, is yet to remit the money and property to Edo State.

As governor, Mr. Igbinedion plundered the resources of Edo State into billions of naira; but in 2008 he escaped jail after he reached a controversial plea bargain agreement with the Farida Waziri-led EFCC, leading to his being handed a sentence considered a slap on the wrist based on the enormity of his offence.

A Federal High Court in Enugu sentence him to six months in prison with the option of a N3.5 million fine. As part of his plea bargain,, he was also required to return N500 million and three houses he acquired with stolen public funds.

Now the government of Edo State has asked the EFCC to remit the money and property originally stolen from the people of Edo State.

In a letter to the Chairman of the EFCC by its solicitors, Falana and Falanas Chamber, the Edo State government is asking the anti-graft commission to transfer the recovered property and money back to it immediately.

The letter dated November 7 and signed by Stanley Imhanruor, a lawyer with the Falana and Falanas Chambers reads:

Sometimes in 2008, the former Governor of Edo State, Lucky NOSAKHARE Igbinedion, was arraigned alongside his company, Kiva Corporation Limited (accused in person in the above mentioned charged) on sundry allegation of defrauding Edo State Government. The charges were however subsequently amended pursuit of a plea bargain agreement at the instance of two defendants and the latter pleaded guilty and were accordingly convicted.

Following the conviction of the defendants they were ordered to pay the sum of N500,000 (five hundred million naira only) to the Federal Government.

a. Landed property measuring 4,823 square metres at Asokoro, Abuja acquired on 13/1/06 with file no: ED21620

b. Detached property on two (2) plots of land comprising four bedrooms and Boys quarter situated at No 57 Ihama Road, GRA, Benin City, Edo State.

c. A storey building and bungalow on a large expands of land situated at No 24 Izekor Street off Chris Mary Street, Benin City, Edo State.

While thanking the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for a successful prosecution of the defendants, it will be appreciated if the same sum of N500,000.00 (Five Hundred Million naira) and three properties which have been recovered on the order of the Federal High Court are transferred to Edo State Government forthwith.
Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, has sacked his Senior Special Assistant on protocol matters, Joe Akpa .

A statement by Simeon Nwakaudu, the special assistant to the Rivers State Governor on Electronic Media, said that the governor wished Mr. Akpa well in his future endeavours.

No reason was given for the sack.

Mr. Akpa, a former director in the office of the states secretary to government, was appointed senior special assistant on August 3, 2015, and was charged with with arranging Mr. Wikes appointments and engagements.

The sack of the aide came about a month after the governor recalled four commissioners earlier suspended from office.

The commissioners recalled by the governor were John Bazia, Chieftaincy Affairs; Tonye Briggs-Oniyide; Culture and Tourism; Fred Kpakol, Finance and Boma Iyaye, Sports.
The Port Harcourt Electricity Distribution Company, PHED, said on Friday it lost N2.2 billion in revenue to unpaid bills and electricity wastage by consumers.

The Managing Director of 4Power, owners of PHED, Matthew Edevbie, told the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, in Port Harcourt that 90 per cent of meters in homes were by-passed which was partly responsible for the revenue loss.

In Port Harcourt for example, every 100 units of electricity that comes to our electricity network, we collect only 25 per cent equivalent of money.

Even when we install meters in homes, about 90 per cent of the meters are usually by-passed.

For every N1 billion worth of electricity PHED brings to this region, every month we get N450 million and lose N550 million.

PHEDs supply of electricity to four states is in excess of N4 billion every month, meaning that we lose N2.2 billion worth of investment funds on monthly basis, he said.

Mr. Edevbie said that customers on its R2 platform paid N24.91 per unit which was a shortfall to the average tariff of N28.90 per unit allotted to Port Harcourt.

He said the development meant that DisCos subsidised electricity by N4 which also affected revenue.

He said that PHED was not in advantage position compared to Lagos DisCo which had 55 per cent domestic and 45 per cent industrial users.

This means that Lagos DisCo average-carriage amounts to lower subsidy.

But in our four states of coverage, we have 85 per cent domestic users while 15 per cent are commercial users, meaning that we should go higher to compensate for the low tariff.

Mr. Edevbie said that some customers should be blamed for high electricity bills charged to their homes as such customers allowed neighbours to tap electricity from their meters and wires.

He urged the residents to report cases of electricity theft and vandalism of facilities to PHED outlets.

PHED covers Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River and Rivers.

(NAN)
The non-teaching staff of the Federal Science and Technical College, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, held a peaceful protest, on Friday, against the principal of the girls school, Pauline Etoamaihe.

The protesting workers, who assembled as early as 7a.m in front of the school gate, used an SUV to barricade the gate. A handful of the workers, holding placards, stood in front of the gate, singing solidarity songs.

The workers accused the school principal of insensitivity and highhandedness in her dealings with them. They said for about two years now, the principal was yet to pay Duty Tour Allowance (DTA) to about 100 workers, from different cadres, who attended promotion interviews.

The protest disrupted plans by the principal to organize a send-forth party for retiring workers in the school.

There was a police pick-up truck parked close to the school gate, with four armed police officers inside.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that lectures were going on peacefully inside the school, even though the protesters blocked non-teaching staff and visitors from entering the school.

Some of the school workers who didnt take part in the protest, stood under a mango tree, across the road, to watch what was going on.

Iboro Umoren, a worker in the college and a leader in the Nigeria Civil Service Union, addressed journalists on behalf of the protesters. Mr. Umoren said they decided to disrupt the send-forth party in order to draw the principals attention to the plights of workers.

Mr. Umoren made reference to President Muhammadu Buharis directive, which barred federal ministries and institutions from buying souvenirs and gifts because of the economic recession in the country.

It would have been better for the principal to use the money to pay the DTA or even pay the death benefits to four staffers who lost their lives this year, Mr. Umoren said.

The DTA ranges from N60, 000 to N70, 000, depending on the workers level, while the least gift item she bought is N150, 000, said Mr. Umoren, who alleged that the principal bought television sets, refrigerators, washing machines, and power generating sets as gifts for the retirees.

Because of the party she wants to organize, we want to believe that funds are now available in which the principal could pay the DTA, but she has refused, he said.

The principal, Ms Etoamaihe, told PREMIUM TIMES that the protesting workers were being unreasonable in their demand. She said money meant for payment of DTA comes in small bits, and therefore workers could only be paid in batches. I have not even received mine, she said.

Ms. Etoamaihe said the botched send-forth party was planned for more than 10 workers, as part of the welfare package. She said since the civil service has codes, there was no way she could use money meant for welfare, to pay for the DTA.

Besides, she said she used her personal money for the send-forth, with the hope that she would get it back when funds come in.

She said that some of the gifts she bought for the retirees cost between N3, 000 and N5, 000. She however refused to say what kind of gifts they were.

That one is none of your business. I can decide to give anybody what I want, its my own headache, she said.

A similar tension had rocked the college in September, at the beginning of the new school year, when the principal and the parents clashed over allegation of extortion.

The parents had accused the principal of extorting from them, N2, 500 for a mackintosh bed cover, N5,500 for blazer, and N5, 000 Insurance fees.

About four armed policemen were seen walking round the school premises on the resumption day.

The parents who spoke with PREMIUM TIMES said that the principal wanted to use the policemen to prevent them from dropping their wards in school because of their refusal to pay the insurance fees.

We have never seen armed policemen brought into this school, this is the first time, said Emmanuel Udo, the Chairman of the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA).

We in the PTA are peace-loving people. We are not here to make any trouble.

The director of Basic Education in the Federal Ministry of Education appeared on a national television and said that insurance was optional for the students.

It is optional for me to insure my child. The school cannot force me or any parent to pay insurance, Mr. Udo said.

Mr. Udo had directed parents who refused to pay the insurance fees to drop their wards in the school compound, whether the school authorities accepted to check them into the hostel or not.

Ms. Etoamaihe told PREMIUM TIMES that she called in the police based on government instruction that we should call in the police whenever anything happen in school.

She couldnt explained what the insurance fees was all about.

I dont know what it is (all about). I am under authority. It was passed down to me, and I passed it down to them (the parents).

If they (the parents) have a problem (with the insurance fees) they know who to go to, and not me, she said.

For the mackintosh bed cover, the principal said that the African Development Bank (ADB) which donated the mattresses to the school insisted that it was mandatory for any student using the mattress to cover it with the bed cover, so that it could last longer.

Nseabasi Etukabasi, who has a daughter in the school, told PREMIUM TIMES that most of the parents were disappointed with the management of the school.

The management of the school has lost its integrity, said Mr. Etukabasi, who teaches in the University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State.

Multiple fees are charged. Even when materials or services have not been delivered, they still extort money from parents.

We dont know which insurance is involved here. We dont know the terms of the insurance they are talking about, all they are interested in is to collect money, he said.
For the eighth consecutive November, residents and staff of Dearborns Henry Ford Village retirement community combined outdoor exercise with aid to the needy with a Turkey Trot walk and food donation drive. This years Turkey Trot took placeNov. 2.

Under the direction of Wellness Coordinator Matthew Wallace, a 1 1/2- mile route was laid out completely within the villages 35-acre campus and adjoining Henry Ford Birthplace Park. A shorter Cranberry Cut route also was used.

Edible as well as monetary proceeds from the 2016 Henry Ford Village Turkey Trot will be donated to this years recipient, Friendship House in Hamtramck. Following the event participants enjoyed hot dogs and cider prepared by the Henry Ford Village catering staff.
If youve been notified, or even just worried, that you could lose your home to foreclosure, experts say parts of your home can actually help you fight that fate.

That could be useful knowledge in South Jersey, even if recent statistics show Atlantic County lost its unwelcome status as the foreclosure capital of the U.S. in the third quarter of 2016. ATTOM Data Solutions, which tracks foreclosures across the country, reported last month that the county dropped to the No. 3 market in the nation for that quarter. Still, New Jersey as a whole had the No. 2 foreclosure rate, the company said.

Several local public and nonprofit agencies have experience keeping struggling families in their homes. And officials of those groups know of everyday parts of the home that owners can use  or adjust their use of  to protect themselves from foreclosure.

Start with the mailbox. Atlantic County Sheriff Frank Balles office prints dozens of sheriffs-sale listings every Monday. He knows some owners initial reaction to getting the first notice of foreclosure is to put it aside, or even throw it away.

The worst thing you can do is not open that letter from the bank, Balles warned recently in Atlantic City, at a foreclosure-prevention seminar hosted by the New Jersey Housing Mortgage Finance Agency.

But that isnt just a matter of being informed. Opening the mail can lead directly to another everyday tool owners can use to fight foreclosure: the phone.

Anthony Marchetta is executive director of the NJHMFA, an agency with money available to keep residents in their homes  including a freshly announced round of $115 million in funding for the states Homesaver program. He said the first step toward getting some of that money, or any reliable help, is calling a housing counselor certified by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That certification means those counselors help is free to users.

If you go to a counselor and they ask you for some sort of fee, just walk out the door, Marchetta said. He also advises acting early, possibly even before the first foreclosure notice.

Atlantic City locals divided, confused by possible state takeover ATLANTIC CITY  Dan Pirillo is dead-set against a state takeover of his hometown.

Once you get into the legal system, it becomes more complicated to get (out), he added. No two foreclosures are exactly the same, and these housing counselors are familiar with them.

When Alejandra and Jose Perez realized their Galloway Township condo was in danger, the parents of three first tried to fight on their own. They worked at Showboat and Trump Plaza, two of five Atlantic City casinos to close since 2014. But even before they lost their jobs for good  Jose after 23 years at the Plaza  their hours were cut so much they couldnt keep up with the bills.

Alejandra asked the mortgage company to modify their loan, but they were rejected because of their low income. Still, at the end of that process, she stumbled onto help in the form of the states Homekeeper program.

They had to go through a HUD housing counselor to qualify but ended up getting $50,000 in mortgage help.

When that ran out after two years, they still didnt have full-time jobs in Atlantic Countys struggling economy. NJHMFA suggested they try again for a loan modification and put them in touch with another counseling agency.

Clarifi has 50-plus years of history in the Philadelphia area and has opened local offices in Galloway and at City Hall in Atlantic City because of Atlantic Countys high foreclosure rate.

Stone Harbor hotel buys pizza parlor, adds bar STONE HARBOR  The former Stone Harbor Pizza will have a slightly new name and a whole new o

Clarifi told us about (NJHMFAs) Homesaver, which was then also new to the counselors themselves, Alejandra said. Clarifi helped them apply, and after six months  and loads of paperwork and patience  they were accepted last March.

Their monthly payment was cut from $1,100 to $800, and so far were making it, were up to date, she added. Id tell (struggling owners) first of all to never give up. The worst thing you can do is do nothing. Look for options, look for information.  And dont wait until the last minute. It worked out for us, so it might work out for other people, too.

She also recommended a HUD-certified counselor such as Clarifi, where Stephanie Bittner is outreach director.

Bittner recommended a crisis budget.

They should make sure theyre reducing their electric bills. After the mortgage, utility bills are a major expense, Bittner said. If theyre upside down by maybe $200 a month, its going to be a lot better than if theyre upside down by $500 a month.  They have to ask, Can I reduce the cable bill? Can I cut back on food?

Clarifi and other counseling agencies, such as Consumer Credit and Budget Counseling Inc., which has offices in Marmora and Atlantic City, also can see if homeowners qualify for any state or federal programs, and can be a go-between with the mortgage company, Bittner added.

Local utilities can suggest ways to cut bills. At NJHMFAs foreclosure session, an Atlantic City Electric representative handed out charts detailing the cost of leaving dozens of common items plugged in full-time.

Go through and unplug your devices.  And dont leave your phone charger plugged in, Maria Waldman advised. She recommended adding an already dry towel to each load of laundry in the dryer.

You may get a little lint, she said, but it will cut down on your drying time by five or 10 minutes.
ATLANTIC CITY  Jennifer Scamorza once asked her students if they ever ask to use the bathroom just so they can get up from their desks and take a walk.

Almost every hand went up, she said.

Between tests, Advanced Placement courses, bullying and annual evaluations, school can be a stressful place for both teachers and students. More educators are looking for ways to help themselves and their students cope.

For 15 years Scamarza, of Tinton Falls, was an elementary school teacher. Now she directs Yoga University, which offers workshops on mindfulness and yoga techniques teachers can use in the classroom so students dont have to use the bathroom as an excuse for a break.

The workload today can be challenging, Scamarza said Friday after her workshop at the New Jersey Education Association convention in Atlantic City. This is a wonderful way to create balance. The mind and body work together.

The yoga program and another on Brain Breaks were presented under a category of physical education. But Jacqueline Malaska, executive director of the New Jersey Association of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, was thrilled at how many teachers attending were regular classroom teachers.

Kids need to move, she said. They need breaks from just sitting.

That message is spreading.

The Brain Breaks workshop had so many participants it exceeded room capacity of 62 people and had to turn away at least 20 more.

Christine Baccarella, who taught physical education for 40 years, said the breaks are attractive to teachers because they are easy and quick.

They can keep teaching while theyre moving, she said about the breaks that include Rock, Paper, Scissor Math and teaching the class to make the sound of rain.

Grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are helping groups spread the message that helping children be active and healthy is everyones job  from the school nurse to the cafeteria staff.

Kids come in with issues from home, said Sheila Caldwell, a school nurse in Matawan-Aberdeen. The school has to give them ways to relieve the stress and focus if they are going to learn.

Scamarza taught some simple breathing exercises and yoga poses that could be incorporated into the school day.

Joseph Parsons, a teacher in Glen Rock, said yoga is being added to the physical education curriculum there.

Vineland High School physical education teacher Elliott DeShields and district social worker Tiffany Ewen-Magolda attended the yoga workshop to get new ideas.

Im looking for me, and the kids, DeShields said. I will absolutely integrate this into class.

Ewen-Magolda said students with emotional problems need coping skills, and she can incorporate the breathing techniques into counseling sessions.

Bridgeton physical education teacher Terry Love studies yoga and has his yoga instructor come into school for some sessions. Hed also like to encourage other classroom teachers to try some of Scamarzas techniques.

Everything comes in 15-second blasts today for kids, he said. I came away with some great ideas to get students focus back on class.

Malaska said cutting back recess to squeeze in more academics is counterproductive. Studies have shown that giving breaks to both children and adults makes them more focused and productive when they return.

Recess is where kids can go let off steam, she said.
They have been known to cause insomnia. In others, insanity.

Their names are varied, with roots planted deep in folklore.

Most years, there are 12. Some have 13. And each year, several of them are super.

But on Monday comes the most super one in almost 70 years.

A supermoon occurs when a full moon coincides with the moons closest approach to Earth. When this Novembers full moon arrives early Monday morning, it will be the closest full moon since January 1948. That has some meteorologists, sky gazers and photographers eager to catch a glimpse of the biggest and brightest full moon in the past 68 years.

Press of Atlantic City astronomy columnist Fred Schaaf said the precise time of the closest approach will take place at 6:23 a.m. Monday, just before the moonset and sunrise here in South Jersey.

You can enjoy it any time Sunday night or Monday morning, Schaaf explained, but he added the best time to see the supermoon would be around moonrise or moonset.

Thats because the moon gives the appearance of being larger when it is rising or setting along the horizon, something called the moon illusion.

The moon will rise in the eastern sky at 4:32 p.m. Sunday and will set below the western horizon at 6:26 a.m., just before the 6:43 a.m. sunrise Monday.

So just how super will the supermoon be?

NASA said the upcoming full moon will appear 7 percent bigger than the average full moon, as well as 16 percent brighter. And that has some area photographers anxious to capture it.

John Loreaux, 60, of Egg Harbor Township, has developed a love of and talent for photography during the past 10 years and has since been capturing South Jersey sunsets, skyscapes and other meteorological phenomena.

As a photographer, you get excited for rare opportunities to capture something that only happens once or twice in your life, Loreaux explained.

Loreaux is hoping for a clear night, which current weather forecasts suggest will be the case, and to find the perfect spot.

Like many, former NBC40 meteorologist Monica Ott is excited to watch the supermoon rise early next week. Then again, no one can rival her enthusiasm for each and every full moon.

When I was developing an interest in weather as a kid, my grandfather would quiz me on the moon and its different nicknames, Ott recalled.

Ott explained that many Native American tribes developed names for each full moon, as a way to mark time as well as keep track of what the tribe should be doing or looking for in the coming month.

According to the Old Farmers Almanac, a book Ott always keeps at the ready, the November full moon is the Beaver moon. The almanac explains for both the colonists and the Algonquin tribes, this was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs.

We may not be worried about trapping furs anymore, but its still fun to learn, not to mention a conversation starter, Ott quipped.

Her favorite names from moon folklore come from the Dakota Sioux tribe, such as the September moon when calves grow hair, or the March moon when eyes are sore from bright snow. Both names are hopefully self-explanatory, Ott joked.

Besides the folklore fun, Ott knows that the full moon can sometimes impact the weather, which is why she believes there is even more lunar appeal in South Jersey.

Meteorologists caution that the supermoon can also cause super high tides, also known as king tides. That in turn can lead to significant tidal flooding along the coast, but that depends on the wind.

With the National Weather Service forecast calling for winds to blow rather briskly but also offshore from the west and southwest Sunday and Monday, tidal flooding is not currently expected.

The moon wont come this close to Earth again until Nov. 25, 2034, when it is 19 miles nearer than it will be Monday, according to Schaaf.

Schaaf said Mondays full moon is therefore the closest one that will occur in an 86-year span.

But 18 years from now, that next super supermoon will still be the Beaver moon. And Ott will still remind you to set those traps, or perhaps its easier to buy a new coat instead.
Henry Hank Gibney, 85, served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, but he didnt go to Asia.

He went to Alaska, where he fought the Cold War in every sense of the word in the Arctic Test Branch, doing top secret work.

Gibney, of Little Egg Harbor Township, made targets for testing explosives and other weaponry in temperatures 50 degrees below zero. He survived a grizzly bear attack.

And he witnessed a sad irony there: The beauty of the area, the green-and-pink streaks of the Northern Lights, juxtaposed against the ugliness of race relations in the 1950s, he said.

That was the most difficult thing about the Army then, said Gibney, whose mentor in the service, Carl Henderson, of St. Louis, was half black and half American Indian.

Henderson taught him a great deal about becoming a strong man, he said.

But Gibney said most people mixed only with their own race and called him names because of his friendships across racial lines.

Yet here was also very important work to do as tensions rose between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, with Alaska seen as a possible invasion site early in the Cold War.

People didnt realize we came so close to World War III, said Gibney, who also dug bunkers along the Alcan Highway, the nickname given to the relatively new Alaska Canadian Highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska.

We didnt know if the Russians were going to come across Alaska, he said.

One of the pieces of equipment in Alaska was an atomic canon, he said.

One year we celebrated the Fourth of July firing a conventional 400-pound shell from it. It took seven minutes to land and when it landed (25 miles away) we thought it was an earthquake.

And interspersed among everything else, Gibney witnessed nature up close, the sunsets in the Far North and the flickers of the Northern Lights, the phenomenal light display caused by the collisions of particles in the sky.

In one respect, he saw nature too close.

The grizzly attack happened when he walked into a clearing and saw a mother bear and her cubs in the distance, he said. More important, he could tell she saw him.

I was in the open and had snowtrack shoes on. I stopped dead in my tracks, Gibney said. You cant run or theyll catch up to you.

So he threw away his pack with food in it, and quickly dug about a foot and a half down into the snow. He got into the hole face down in a fetal position, he said.

First the bear opened his pack and rooted through the food. Then she came over and clawed at the back of his fiberglass parka.

She didnt touch my body, he said.

After a while the bear walked away.

And Gibney lived to tell his veterans story.
VINELAND  There will be no runoff election in the mayors race, City Clerk Keith Petrosky said Friday.

But Petrosky said he expects a runoff in the nine-candidate City Council race after the provisional ballots are tallied Saturday.

More numbers needed to decide Vineland mayoral, City Council races VINELAND  Mayoral candidate Anthony Fanucci and members of his City Council slate will wait

Petrosky said he declared Anthony Fanucci the winner Thursday after determining the remaining provisional ballots would not be enough to deny Fanucci an electoral majority.

A mayoral runoff election is held between the top two vote-getters if no candidate garners more than 50 percent of the vote.

Petrosky said he was told about 530 ballots needed to be counted in the mayoral race.

Even if all those votes were cast for the second-place finisher, former Mayor Robert Romano, Fanucci would still be above 50 percent, Petrosky said.

Current Mayor Ruben Bermudez finished last in the race, with less than 20 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results from the Cumberland County Clerks Office.

Fanucci will be the first sitting council president to be elected mayor.

For the council race, two candidates must receive more than 50 percent of the vote for the election to be final.

That isnt likely to happen, Petrosky said Friday.

Residents cast 10,513 votes for David Acosta, 10,418 for Paul F. Spinelli, 10,320 for Ronald John Franceschini Jr., 9,770 for Angela Calakos, 9,490 for Albert Vargas, 5,671 for Diamaris Rios, 5,544 for Antonio F. Romero, 4,616 for Douglas A. Albrecht and 3,462 for Mary Ann Goolsby, according to unofficial results from the Cumberland County Clerks Of- fice.

Unofficial results indicate no candidate finished with more than 20 percent of the vote.

U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo beats challenger David Cole Republican U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo led Democratic challenger David Cole 59 percent to 38 pe

Official results will come after the provisional votes are counted Saturday by the county Board of Elections and County Clerks Office, Petrosky said.

He said an announcement should come Monday on whether there will be a runoff.

Petrosky said results from a runoff election can differ from those from Election Day because of a much lower turnout.

I wish it (turnout for runoff elections) was better, but its just a fact of life, he said.
The state has taken over Atlantic City.

Now what?

Many questions remain unanswered about what the state will do with its new authority over the city. The state hasnt announced who will be in charge, what actions it will take and which powers, if any, will remain with city officials.

There are also legal questions about how the state can execute the major decision-making powers it took from the city and gave to Local Government Services Director Timothy Cunningham, said Marc Pfeiffer, assistant director of the Bloustein Local Government Center at Rutgers University.

The Attorney Generals Office, Im sure, will be deeply involved in providing that guidance and advice, Pfeiffer said. How do they authorize purchase orders or enter into contracts? Do they delegate it to city officials with the states ability to approve all of that? All of those things have to be sorted out.

Cunningham, or his designee, can now sell city assets, hire or fire workers and break union contracts, among other powers, for up to five years as the state tries to fix the citys finances.

Cunningham said there are logistical issues the state is still working out, such as whether the supervising state official will be based in Trenton or in Atlantic City. He declined to comment on whether he would run the city himself or appoint a designee but said he would consider looking outside and inside the division.

I do have a very competent staff that has the majority of the municipalities under control while my attention has been on Atlantic City, Cunningham said Wednesday. If a designee was brought on, I dont know if I have the resources in-house.

City officials, who said they are keeping legal options open, dont know what authority they have left. The so-called takeover law includes a long list of powers the state could use, from suing on behalf of the city to buying goods and services.

We have to sit down with the commissioner and see what powers we still have to continue to represent the people who elected us, Council President Marty Small said Wednesday. Cunningham has all the powers to do everything that was in the (takeover law), and were just hoping it isnt as draconian, he said.

Cunningham said theres still a role for the mayor and council. He said hed meet with city officials to discuss the powers granted to him under the takeover law.

I think there are still some authorities and actions that will be retained by the executive and legislative branches, Cunningham said.

The state took over after it rejected the citys five-year fiscal recovery plan this month. But the state hasnt released its own plan to close the citys $100 million budget deficit and pay down the citys $500 million debt.

If there was such a plan for the state, we could say Theyre planning to implement this power, said Michael Darcy, director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities. It creates a lot of questions.

Darcy said the league would wait to see how the state intervenes in Atlantic City and the possible statewide implications before deciding to get involved.

Were not the league of one municipality, were the league of all municipalities, he said. We are going to keep a close look at it.

Pfeiffer said the states actions may trigger a lawsuit. If the state breaks city union contracts, for example, there may be grounds for litigation.

Cunningham, who declined Wednesday to name specific actions the state would take, said unions shouldnt consider their contracts null and void.

We havent had a conversation, Cunningham said. They are part of a group of stakeholders were going to have to meet with.

The citys Municipal Utilities Authority, the prized water works, was at the center of negotiations between the city and state. City Council failed to get majority support five times to dissolve the authority, a major reason why state officials pursued a state takeover.

Clearly thats an area were going to have to look into, Cunningham said of the authority.

Mayor Don Guardian has battled Gov. Chris Christie for months to maintain his citys sovereignty. With the prospect of Christie leaving New Jersey to work in a Donald Trump White House, Guardian was asked if a new governor would help the city with the state takeover.

What do you think? he joked.
The mother of a Middle Township boy missing for 25 years hopes a documentary debuting at the Cape May Film Festival on Saturday will help draw more attention to the case.

Maureen Himebaugh said she still has hope her son Mark is alive, although she knows realistically he could be gone.

Ive been told that if it is made into a movie that there would be a lot more exposure, Himebaugh said. I just want closure.

Nov. 25 is the 25th anniversary of the day 11-year-old Mark was last seen in Del Haven, Middle Township.

The One Percent: The Mark Himebaugh Story is co-produced by Ed Claypoole and Rip Saling, whose uncle is the longtime boyfriend of Maureen Himebaugh.

Himebaugh, 64, who still lives in the same Del Haven house, said she will watch the 15-minute film for the first time Saturday.

There are so many possibilities about what could have happened to Mark, said Saling, 43, of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Our whole goal is to bring answers to his disappearance.

A huge marsh fire diverted traffic off Bayshore Road the day Mark Himebaugh went missing. He got off his school bus and stopped to watch the fire before heading home about 3:30 p.m. along Sun Ray Beach Boulevard.

He saw his mom, who told investigators she let her son know she was going to run an errand and would be back soon.

Investigators at the time said he was last seen by a worker at Cape May County Park South playing with an unidentified girl his age at the playground on Bayshore Road.

Himebaughs disappearance prompted a massive search involving hundreds of volunteers and members of law enforcement. The search party found the boys white L.A. Gear sneaker a half-block from his house, raising fears he had been abducted.

No one ever has been charged in the disappearance, but police identified Pennsylvanian Thomas Butcavage as a person of interest in the case. He is serving a 36-year prison sentence after being convicted of child molestation in 1999.

The documentary will be shown 4 to 5:30 p.m. at West Cape May Borough Hall at 732 Broadway as part of the Cape May Film Festival.

We interviewed family, friends, former cops, detectives, people who had dogs out there that day. (We used) news footage, Saling said.

A daytime festival pass for Saturday costs $15; an evening pass $20; entire weekend $50.

Saling, who runs Rip Roarin Productions video company, said he hopes to expand on The One Percent after the festival.

Our goal is hoping to get this into a full episode  a TV episode  or a full feature film, he said.

The films title is based on a statistic that about 1 percent of children reported missing by a caregiver are never found, according to the trailer.

Maureen Himebaugh said she was approached by Saling and Claypoole two years ago, when they began the project.

I think its good its happening now, Himebaugh, said. Were hoping for an answer. Contact: 609-272-7411 JTomczuk@pressofac.com Twitter @ACPressTomczuk
John Palmentieri was lying in a hospital with a gunshot wound to the leg when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower walked by and tossed a Purple Heart Medal on his bed, he said.

There was no ceremony and no handshake.

There were so many of us in (the hospital). The place was full, said Palmentieri, of Atlantic City.

A street near Palmentieris Boston Avenue home has since been named Purple Heart Way because of his service and the service of three of his brothers in World War II.

Before being drafted into the largest conflict in human history, Palmentieri was a high school student in Atlantic City.

They drafted me for the invasion, Palmentieri, 91, said of the Allies invasion of France in 1944.

Before he left to fight, the Atlantic City that Palmentieri knew had changed.

Instead of tourists, the Boardwalk was filled with marching soldiers.

Three weeks after receiving the draft letter, Palmentieri reported to Fort Dix and then made training stops in several states before being brought to England in preparation for the offensive against Nazi-occupied Europe.

Although Palmentieri did not arrive in France until after the D-Day invasion, he still saw the horrors it left behind. The fear still existed.

Cold Warrior prepped for WWIII in Alaska during Korean War Henry Hank Gibney, 85, served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, but he didnt go to Asia.

You would stare at a bush and there would be some rustling and you had to be ready to shoot, he said of the front lines.

Shortly after his arrival in France, Palmentieri was shot in the leg by a German sniper.

In the hospital, Palmentieri met Ray Borzellino, a medic who lived around the corner from Palmentieri. After the war, Palmentieri married Borzellinos sister Louise, whom he met at the Veterans Administration Office. Louise was working for the VA at the time. The two have been married for 69 years.

When Palmentieri got out of the hospital, the Army sent him back to France in a limited role. After the war ended, Palmentieri and his fellow soldiers ate dinner at a French familys home outside Paris. He has kept in touch with the family to this day.

With the war over, Palmentieri returned home. His three brothers all survived too.

I got off the train with my bag, walked about 10 blocks, knocked on my door and said, Mom, Im home.
Most research about full-day kindergarten comes to the conclusion that it gives children an educational advantage.

There is disagreement about how much or how long that advantage lasts and debate over what sort of curriculum should be emphasized. But there is general agreement that full-day sessions make kids more prepared academically and socially, increase attendance and promote gains in language and other skills.

Locally, Egg Harbor Township and Linwood are the only districts to offer only half-day kindergarten. They should both find a way to join the other districts in providing a level of education endorsed by groups ranging from the National Education Association to the National Association of School Psychologists.

Egg Harbor Township is studying the issue and recently held a community meeting to get public input. Many in attendance said they support full-day kindergarten, but the prospect of an extra burden on taxpayers already feeling the crush of the shaky South Jersey economy is a major obstacle.

Money, as always, is at the heart of the issue. So local officials need to examine their priorities and find a way to pay for full-day sessions within existing resources.

It would be nice if the state would listen to the repeated local complaints  including a petition at the community meeting  and provide the increased aid the school district says it is due. But there is no sign that stagnant aid will rise anytime soon from a state dealing with its own financial problems. By law, the state is only required to fund half-day kindergarten, although about 80 percent of districts fund full-time classes, anyway.

Interim Superintendent Fred Nickles said the districts goal is to expand to full-day sessions without increasing spending. What could make that possible as next years budget is developed is the reallocation of existing space and teachers in a district that has seen its overall enrollment shrink by about 470 students during the past five years.

Thats a significant change for a district that had been struggling to keep up with growing enrollment as the casino industry and the rest of the region prospered. Its an opportunity that should be grasped as a chance to grow more efficient and free up funds to expand kindergarten.

With its current half-day sessions, the district has 24 half-day classes in 12 classrooms at the Slaybaugh, Swift and Davenport schools. Most morning classes have 15 to 20 students, while afternoon classes have about 10. Those classes educate 375 students this year. The district has 485 first-graders.

State legislators are considering mandating full-day sessions, but Gov. Chris Christie previously has vetoed the idea, and there is no guarantee such a mandate would be accompanied by the money to make it happen.

In practicality, that leaves the responsibility with the local district. Egg Harbor Township seems to be moving in the right direction. Hopefully, that results in a more complete kindergarten experience for the children.
Replace gas-tax-raising officials with computers

How are people liking their new expensive gas? Now it seems they get to vote where all this money goes. Wasnt this tax meant for transportation? Hasnt there been enough of blundering public officials?

Lets get rid of all of them and replace them with computers. Then the people can vote for what they want, instead of electing these people who have no interest in public opinion.

Dan Histon

Egg Harbor City

Casino screens spoil ocean view after dark

Regarding the Oct. 27 letter, Some A.C. casinos pointlessly blaring ads outside nonstop:

I could not agree more with the writer. The LED screens also blast light and noise into residential condo windows throughout the night.

Folks do not pay for oceanfront views only to be forced to sacrifice their nighttime look out at the ocean and boards because they have to shut tight their shades or drapes as soon as the sun goes down. It is called light and sound pollution.

Sandi Fontana

Atlantic City

Age difference mattered in Northfield incident

Regarding the Oct. 27 letter, Court should ban stop-and-frisk:

Is the writer an absolute fool for criticizing the Northfield police for doing their job?

Of course it was suspicious and right for the officers to stop and question the suspect. The guy was 18 years old, and the two young girls were 11 years old. It was not a racial incident. The police were doing their job!

V. George Amiriantz

Atlantic City

GEHR board should not support superintendent

As a career educator and union member, I am alarmed at the Greater Egg Harbor Regional Board of Educations decision to support Superintendent John Keenan following the vote of no confidence taken by the districts school employees.

The boards decision is particularly strange considering the security issues, construction delays and labor disputes that have marred his two years in the district and been extremely costly to taxpayers.

What is more disturbing to me is that several members of the board are retired or current educators, and yet they support Keenan and have gross disrespect of Oakcrest, Absegami and Cedar Creek school employees.

I am a graduate of Oakcrest High School. My four children attended Absegami, and three of my grandchildren will attend Cedar Creek. We should support dedicated school employees in order to preserve excellent schools.

James E. Schroeder

Port Republic
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.




LEVALLOIS-PERRET, France, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Keyrus, an international consultancy in Data Intelligence, Digital Transformation and Enterprise Management, is helping TheLuxer.com to improve its customer experience and extend its presence by setting up a multi-marketplace platform to boost its online sales in China.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160707/387171LOGO )



Owned by Italiantouch, TheLuxer.com operates the e-commerce for the brands of the TOD'S Group (TOD'S, Roger Vivier & Hogan) through THELUXER.COM, a global multi-brand e-commerce platform dedicated to luxury shoes, bags, ready-to-wear, accessories and exclusive capsule collections. Already present in China, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Holland, Spain and the United States, TheLuxer.com aims to provide an unprecedented online buying experience to its consumers.

In early 2016, Keyrus was selected as a business and technical partner to support TheLuxer.com e-commerce vision and implementation in Greater China. The goal of the project has been to launch a new multi-partner solution, based on the SAP hybris solution, and onboarding several key features providing the ability to:

manage several marketplaces from a single point and distribute content to, as well as collect orders from several online channels (JD and Tmall since June 2016 , Xiu and Meici since September 2016 )

, Xiu and Meici since ) automate manual back-office processes, such as photo publishing, product exchanges, order collection, etc.

become autonomous in running its marketplace sales activity in China

The first marketplaces connected to the solution were live just two months after the kick-off of the project. Unlike JD, where TheLuxer.com already had a presence, Tmall was a new channel for TheLuxer.com. The implementation involved the configuration, design, and roll-out of TheLuxer.com store on Tmall, and this was done in record time.

In Autumn 2016, Keyrus has helped TheLuxer.com extend its online presence further via two new vertical marketplaces, Xiu.com and Meici.com, dedicated to fashion and luxury products. Next in line is to launch TheLuxer.com on a fifth marketplace, by the end of 2016.

The multichannel platform now operates all marketplaces in a unified and harmonized manner and provides full insight on the entire product catalog and stock availability.

"With the new solution deployed, we can now focus on added-value activities and manage our e-Commerce operations without the need of a third-party intermediary," explains Fabienne Pellegrin, Country Manager Greater China for Italiantouch. "We wanted to become more autonomous and have more direct control in order to develop our internal market expertise, in addition to optimizing our costs. Keyrus has worked hand- in-hand with us on the entire marketplace project to help us make it a reality," adds Fabienne Pellegrin.

"This multi-marketplace customer-centric solution, that we implemented for Italiantouch, owner of TheLuxer.com brand, is another example of our ability to develop agile and relevant digital platforms for our clients. TheLuxer.com Project relies on Keyrus RapidStore for hybris, our high-performance solution tailored to provide optimal conditions for the implementation of omni-channel commerce strategies on the Chinese market, and already deployed for several local and international retailers in China. Hosted in the cloud on Aliyun, the Cloud Computing platform of e-Commerce giant Alibaba, the platform deployed for Italiantouch provides the flexibility it requires to scale up tomorrow," explains Thomas Alix, Head of e-commerce and digital at Keyrus China.

With Italiantouch as a client, Keyrus China strengthens its foothold in the Luxury sector, on top of its established presence in the fashion, automotive, department store, services and food industries.

ABOUT KEYRUS

Keyrus, creator of value in the era of Data and Digital

An international player in consulting and technologies and a specialist in Data and Digital, Keyrus is dedicated to helping enterprises take advantage of the Data and Digital paradigm to enhance their performance, facilitate and accelerate their transformation, and generate new drivers of growth, competitiveness, and sustainability.

Placing innovation at the heart of its strategy, Keyrus is developing a value proposition that is unique in the market and centred around an innovative offering founded upon a combination of three major and convergent areas of expertise:

 Data Intelligence

Data Science - Big Data Analytics - Business Intelligence - EIM - CPM/EPM

 Digital Experience

Innovation & Digital Strategy - Digital Marketing & CRM - Digital Commerce - Digital Performance - User Experience

 Management & Transformation Consulting

Strategy & Innovation - Digital Transformation - Performance Management - Project Support

Present in 15 countries on 4 continents, the Keyrus Group has 2,500 employees.

Keyrus is quoted in compartment C of the Eurolist of Euronext Paris (Compartment C/Small caps - ISIN Code: FR0004029411 - Reuters: KEYR.PA - Bloomberg: KEY:FP)

Further information at: http://www.keyrus.com

ABOUT THELUXER.COM

TheLuxer.com-the official e-commerce partner of Tod's, Roger Vivier, Hogan -is an online boutique that specializes in limited edition products. TheLuxer.com is a window to the "Made in Italy" mindset, where taste and elegance are the paradigms.

TheLuxer.com is the new destination for those seeking the finest details and service tailored to their personal needs. It is geared towards a fashion-savvy crowd-those who are particular about the way the products they purchase are made. The boutique is therefore much more than an online store: It is an inspiring place to have an unprecedented shopping experience.

http://www.theluxer.com

SOURCE Keyrus
THE HAGUE, The Netherlands, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Aegon has completed the share buyback program announced on October 3, 2016. This program neutralized the dilutive effect of the 2016 interim dividend paid in shares. The repurchased shares will be held as treasury shares and will be used to cover future stock dividends.

Between October 3, 2016 and November 11, 2016 a total of 30,765,224 common shares were repurchased, at an average price of EUR 3.84 per share.

More detailed information about the program is available on aegon.com/sharebuyback.

About Aegon

Aegon's roots go back more than 170 years - to the first half of the nineteenth century. Since then, Aegon has grown into an international company, with businesses in more than 20 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Today, Aegon is one of the world's leading financial services organizations, providing life insurance, pensions and asset management. Aegon's purpose is to help people achieve a lifetime of financial security. More information on aegon.com/about.

Contacts:

Dedia relations

Debora de Laaf

+31(0) 70 344 8730

gcc@aegon.com



Investor relations

Willem van den Berg

+31(0) 70 344 8405

ir@aegon.com



PRN NLD

SOURCE Aegon N.V.
S-BODY's new atomizer, Sunog, comes with push and press function on the top which simplifying the job of refilling e-liquids. Sunog provides one single coil , four finished atomizer coils as well as a RBA coil. The maximum power of the four finished atomizer coils can reach 160w. The new atomizer is made of finely crafted stainless steel. The bottom airflow input design assures fuller enjoyment of the pure flavor of the e-liquid, the production of huge vapor clouds and excellent heat insulation as a result of Derlin materials.

The C2D2 is a large-capacity mod equipped with a replaceable dual 18650-type battery, jointly developed by German VapeDroid and S-BODY. It comes with US-based EVOLV's latest updatable DNA250 temperature protection chip. EVOLV's DNA series chips have been a leader in the e-cigarette industry as a result of their stable performance and the capabilities of the software in terms of the ability to alter the vape parameters. Users can personalize their mods via the software. In addition to a power mode, the C2D2 features three temperature protection modes: TC-Ti, TC-SS and TC-Ni. The unique design and comfortable rubber-like feel also helps to differentiate the mod from competitors in the market.

S-BODY is a brand known for the research, development, production and sale of e-cigarette products worldwide. Since its establishment in 2011, the e-cigarette maker has been committed to manufacturing products that are environmentally-friendly and healthy, by taking advantage of innovative technologies that provide a safe and harmless smoking experience at a fraction of traditional smoking costs. S-BODY products are sold across Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.

The new Sunog atomizer and C2D2 batteries are now available for order.

Please visit www.ele-cigarette.net for more information on S-BODY's e-cigarette products.

For more information, please visit:

Contact:

Johnson Tian

Sales Director

+86-159-8950-9995

Johnson@ele-cigarette.net

Doris

Sales Manager

+86-135-1061-1104

sales001@ele-cigarette.net

Related Links

http://www.ele-cigarette.net



SOURCE Shenzhen S-body Electronics Technology Co., Ltd
SEOUL, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Energy industry leader Total reinforces its commitment to train and equip tomorrow's global engineering workforce at an international education conference in South Korea this week.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/437873 )



"Seoul is a fitting location to bring together the international engineering community, to dialogue, network and build relationships with innovative educators from around the world," said Joseph Cho, Total's representative in Korea, in his welcome address to an audience of distinguished education leaders and industry representatives last night. He was speaking at a Total-sponsored dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of long-term partner the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES).

Total is supporting the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF) and Global Engineering Deans Council (GEDC) conferences taking place this week at Seoul's COEX. The theme of this year's joint conference is 'Engineering Education for a Smart Society" and Total speakers will cover topics including university-industry partnerships and student skills for the future.

"Education is a cornerstone of our commitment to better energy," said Andrew Hogg, Director of Education at Total. "We know that the next generation will be tackling challenges with new ideas and new technology, so it's very encouraging that at this global gathering of engineering education leaders and students we can promote the role of engineers who will be at the heart of the 'smart society' of the future."

This week of engagement is part of Total's commitment to education and its worldwide programme of action with the higher education sector. Total's presence here is also a chance for Korean university representatives to find out about opportunities for their students in this exciting industry. This includes news of 'Team Total' - an annual grants programme that offers 80 000 in funding across selected student projects. Applications are open to 4 December on http://www.total-campus.com.

Notes for Editors

Total is a global integrated energy producer and provider, a leading international oil and gas company, and the world's second-ranked solar energy operator with SunPower. Our 96.000 employees are committed to better energy that is safer, cleaner, more efficient, more innovative and accessible to as many people as possible. As a responsible corporate citizen, we focus on ensuring that our operations in more than 130 countries worldwide consistently deliver economic, social and environmental benefits.

http://www.total.com

Find out more about our engagement with the global education community on our Total Campus channels:

http://www.total-campus.com

http://www.Facebook.com/TotalCampus

http://www.Twitter.com/TotalCampus

http://www.instagram.com/TotalCampus

SOURCE Total
STUTTGART, Germany, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

There's a lot happening at Haselmeier! As the next step in the consistent reorganisation process of the Haselmeier Group, some activities are being moved to other locations to guarantee greater focus on strategic and operative tasks. As a result, the Sales and Marketing department shall relocate from Zurich to Stuttgart, thus coming closer to the Development department and becoming a part of the new sales company Wilhelm Haselmeier GmbH & Co. KG. In future, the facility in Switzerland shall focus more strongly on strategic planning, innovation and intellectual property. The Order Processing, which is currently a part of Haselmeier AG in Switzerland, shall also be active in Germany and shall be integrated into the Order Management department there.

Haselmeier sees itself as a strategic partner to pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies for the development and production of innovative application devices for drugs with the aim of improving the lives of patients. In the course of the restructuring process, the medical devices company shall be more focussed on the needs of its customers. To achieve this, processes and structures are being sustainably controlled internally so that customers can be guaranteed more customised solutions.

We are happy to announce that the Group's Executive Board is now complete with the appointment of a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Business Officer (CBO). Haselmeier welcomes Thomas Durkop as the Head of Applied Development, Project Management and Industrialisation and Dr. Fred Metzmann as the Head of Key Account Management, Marketing and Global Business Development - two experts, who shall also spur the reorientation of the new company philosophy with their long-standing experience and competency.

About Haselmeier:

Haselmeier stands for the development and production of innovative self-injection devices with award-winning designs. The Haselmeier Group primarily works on behalf of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to improve the lives of patients by manufacturing pens and auto-injectors that are easy to use and that can be dosed with precision. The family business covers all steps-from design to planning to industrialisation-in the creation of high-quality self-injection systems.

Founded as early as in 1920 in Stuttgart, Haselmeier has long been an established name in the med-tech industry, thanks to its proprietary technologies and international award-winning designs. In four years from now, this well-established company shall be able to look back on a 100 year-old success story. Spread across eight global locations on three different continents, the Haselmeier Group employs a workforce of about 220 employees. While the Development department is located in Stuttgart, Haselmeier products are manufactured in the most modern production facilities in Buchen in Odenwald (Germany), Dnesice (Czech Republic) and Bengaluru (India). The international sales are controlled from Stuttgart and have representations in Zurich (Switzerland), Lowell, Maryland (USA), Gurgaon (India) and Guangzhou (China).

For further information, please go to: http://www.haselmeier.com

Media contact:

Wilhelm Haselmeier GmbH & Co. KG

Vaihinger Strae 48

70567 Stuttgart

Germany

Jana Heidrich

Marketing and Sales Coordinator

+49-711-71978-176

j.heidrich@haselmeier.com



SOURCE Haselmeier AG
ALBANY, New York, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The global halal products market has expanded at a promising pace in the past few years and is expected to embark upon a path of exponential growth in the next few years as well. Rising global population of the Muslim community and rising disposable incomes across some of the world's prominent Islamic countries are expected to be the key drivers of the market. However, the market is expected to bear the brunt of the lack of transparency with respect to the use of ingredients for the pharmaceutical and personal care products and the absence of a globally uniform halal standard.

Transparency Market Research estimates that the global halal products market, which was valued at US$2.70 trillion in 2015, will rise to US$10.51 trillion by 2024, exhibiting a CAGR of 16.2% from 2016 to 2024.

Download Sample PDF Brochure for Professional & Technical Breakthroughs at http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=16643

Rising Global Muslim Population Key to Market Growth

Being the prime consumer of halal products, the rising population of the Muslim community across the globe is one of the most prominent drivers of the global market for halal products. Studies estimate that by 2030, nearly 26% of the world's population will be accounted by Muslims, which is a vast rise from the 19.9% in 1990. Moreover, the rising disposable income of Islamic countries, chiefly owing to the rapid growth of the Islamic economies in Middle East and South East Asia, is also expected to contribute to the market growth in the next few years. In addition to this, the consumption of halal products by other communities is also on the rise, which is expected to further fuel the global demand for halal products.

The market is also embarking upon a promising growth path owing to rising urbanization and the resultant improvement seen in the retail sector in the past few years across many key markets. Earlier, the halal food market was highly unorganized. The present-day halal products market, on the other hand, features a highly organized retail structure with the presence of a large number of retail outlets selling a vast variety of halal products. Moreover, the high degree of globalization of the halal market and multilateral trade agreements have boosted the trade flow of halal products.

Browse Regional PR: http://www.europlat.org/global-halal-products-market.htm

Lack of Globally Uniform Standards to Hinder Market Growth

There exists a clear distinction between halal products and haram products, with the latter denoting food or daily use items unacceptable for use according to Islamic (sharia) law. Nevertheless, the difference in Islamic regulatory bodies across different countries leads to varying definitions of halal products across the globe. Hence the products accepted by the Halal Certification Board of a particular country may not be accepted in another country.

For instance Non Alcoholic Beer was accepted by the Halal certification board in the ASEAN economies. However it was rejected by their counterparts in the GCC, thus creating chaos among the manufacturers and consumers. Such lack of a global halal certification board is projected to be a significant restraint for the market in the next few years. Such lack of a regulatory body capable of monitoring all the processes involved on the production and marketing of halal products is expected be a key restrain for the global halal pharmaceutical and halal personal care market in the near future.

The global halal products market is highly diversified, comprising product varieties in the areas of food and beverages to personal care and pharmaceuticals. Halal food companies account for the dominant share in the global market's revenue as halal food and beverages account for nearly 50% of the world's total halal products market demand, observes a recent report by Transparency Market Research. With the fast pace of globalization and the increasingly complex nature of supply chains, end-to-end halal integrity has become a profound concern for consumers. In this scenario, companies capable of demonstrating a high level of commitment in this area have an upper hand to the companies who consider halal simply as an add-on to an existing range of product.

The leading players in the halal products market for the food and beverage segment is Nestle S.A. For halal products for cosmetic and personal care application Unilever is the leading player, besides several other notable players. Reckitt Benckiser Group plc. is one of the leading players catering to the chemical and materials industry.

This review of the market is based on a recent market research report published by Transparency Market Research, titled "Halal Products Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024."

For the study, the global halal products market is segmented as follows:

Global Halal Products Market, by Product Type

Primary Meat

Processed Food & Beverages

Pharmaceuticals

Cosmetics & Personal Care

Others Halal Products

Global Halal Products Market, by Geography

North America U.S. Rest of North America

Europe U.K. Germany France Russia Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific China India ASEAN Rest of APAC

Middle East and Africa GCC Egypt Turkey Rest of Middle East & Africa

and Latin America Brazil Rest of Latin America



Recent Research Reports by TMR:

Hospital Linen Supply and Management Services Market : http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/hospital-linen-supply-management-services.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/hospital-linen-supply-management-services.html Refrigerated Display Cases, Beverage Refrigerators and Dispensers, and Chilled Rooms Market:http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/refrigerated-display-cases-chilled-rooms-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: sales@transparencymarketresearch.com



Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Google+: https://plus.google.com/+Transparencymarketresearch

SOURCE Transparency Market Research
The products that win CES Best of Innovation Awards are viewed as likely trendsetters in the global technology industry, with digital imaging being one of the hottest product categories. Despite the fierce competition, previous Best of Innovation Honorees in the Digital Imaging product category had, for the most part, been top international brands such as Sony, Nikon and Canon. The Obsidian 3D Panoramic Camera won among a variety of international competitors, representing the first Chinese brand product that has won the award.

Obsidian, the flagship 3D panoramic camera of KanDao Technology, enables high-quality live streaming and recording of virtual reality (VR) content through its unique 360 stereo video shooting and proprietary 3D seamless stitching technology. Obsidian received critical acclaim from the CES judging panel for its elegant and smooth design in which the metallic texture of volcanic rock complements the sleek lines, allowing for a perfect combination of high-tech feel and the practicability of VR technology.

KanDao Technology CEO Chen Dan said, "The recognition of the Obsidian 3D Panoramic Camera developed by KanDao Technology, a high-tech company specializing in VR software and hardware solutions, demonstrates the power of an innovative approach to technology that has enhanced the international competitiveness of Chinese brands. As a young startup in Shenzhen, KanDao Technology has taken its first step onto the world stage and will continue to focus on the latest technology trends, as part of its mission to promote the evolution of innovation in image recording and provide an ultimate VR experience for everyone. "

Learn more about KanDao Technology at www.kandaovr.com

Contact

Lionel Liu

Lionel@kandaovr.com





Related Links

http://www.kandaovr.com



SOURCE KanDao
READING and NOTTINGHAM, England, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Panaya's CloudQuality[TM] Suite's 57th HANA Migration Represents an Industry Breakthrough, Recognized for Successful Delivery in Record Time With Utmost Quality

SAP and Hillarys Blinds have just announced that Hillarys has won an SAP UKI Quality Award for Fast Delivery for a recent upgrade as part of its move to SAP S/4HANA.

Hillarys, one of the UK's premier providers of blinds, curtains, shutters and carpets, was recently faced with the challenge of an update to its SAP system, which supports multiple locations, a thousand remote sales devices, and a market-leading online business.

If done with the resources actually used, the project would have taken three years, but by working with Panaya's CloudQuality[TM] Suite, Hillarys completed the process in less than six months.

Panaya CloudQuality Suite (PCQ) is a SaaS solution that delivers powerful ERP change analytics and actionable recommendations to effectively plan, scope, test and report change implementation.

By using PCQ to ensure effective planning and execution, Hillarys could estimate time, effort and risk to better understand the business case and determine project cost.

"This award is especially enjoyable since it's for doing one sixth of the work initially projected," said Julian Bond, head of ICT, Hillarys. "Upgrading 15 years of SAP custom-code development was initially assessed to be a major project requiring extensive investments of time, personnel, and money with a plethora of potential pitfalls - including major business interruption. Panaya's tech brought it to heel, reducing all resource requirements and business risk, and we were done in six months."

Hillarys migrated its SAP Business Suite to S/4HANA (ECC, CRM & BW) and upgraded ECC5 to readiness for S/4HANA, while managing the effects of the changes on the other aspects of SAP (SMP, PI). Despite the scope of the project, it was essential to minimize downtime.

"Panaya's CloudQuality Suite highlighted deviations from standard, recommended where and how 'standard' could be re-adopted, and generally shined a light on 16 years of bespoke development," continued Bond. "We achieved everything with a disproportionately small development time and functional investment, a testament to the business value CloudQuality Suite provided - allowing us to move far more quickly to 'running simple' than we originally planned or thought possible."

"With over 50 HANA migrations already completed, customers like Hillarys Blinds trust Panaya to deliver ERP changes faster and with no risk." said Doron Gerstel, CEO, Panaya. "We're delighted that Hillarys achievements along with Panaya's support are recognized by SAP with the presentation of the UKI Quality Award."

About Panaya

With Panaya, an Infosys company, organizations reach ERP agility faster - with zero time to change, zero risk, and zero defects. Panaya CloudQuality Suite enables all types of SAP and Oracle EBS changes. Panaya CloudQuality Suite delivers insights that tell you what will break, how to fix it, and what to test, helping organizations manage testing and collaboration between IT and business during the entire release process. Since 2008, 1,600 companies in 62 countries, including a third of the Fortune 500, have been using Panaya CloudQuality Suite to achieve ERP agility. http://www.panaya.com

Media Contact

Amy Kenigsberg

K2 Global Communications

amy@k2-gc.com

tel: +972-9-794-1681 (+2 GMT)

mobile: +972-524-761-341

U.S.: +1-913-440-4072 (+7 ET)



SOURCE Panaya
CSI and Boston College highlight crisis facing Lebanon's Christian Community in series of talks on The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East

BOSTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- "Without Christians, there would be no Lebanon," Professor Marius Deeb argued at a lecture at Boston College on Wednesday. In Lebanon, he said, "Christian leaders have fought to preserve a democratic polity in which all the religious groups would be equal and represented at all levels of government, and in which all basic freedoms would be protected." In the election of General Michel Aoun as Lebanon's president last month, ending two years of deadlock in which the office went unfilled, Deeb saw positive signs of a "new dialogue among Lebanese," and expected that Aoun "will accomplish a lot."

In his lecture, Professor Deeb traced in detail the history of Christian leadership in Lebanon, from the establishment of Mount Lebanon as an autonomous zone after the massacres of Christians in 1860 to the 1975-1990 Civil War. Deeb argued that the Christians' desire for a "free and open society" helped preserve Lebanese society despite the horrific violence of the war.

Deeb described President Aoun as a "remarkable man." He is a Christian who began his career fighting against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and later aligned himself with Syria's Shi'ite Muslim ally Hezbollah. In Deeb's view, the conditions for the election of Aoun as President were made possible by the declining influence in Lebanon of both Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. The energy of Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, is being absorbed in Syria, while Saudi Arabia is bogged down in Yemen.

Deeb expects that Aoun can make progress on a number of issues in Lebanon, from reintegrating the exiled South Lebanon Army, to improving relations between Israel, Syria and Lebanon, to fighting corruption and improving basic services. Despite Deeb's description of Hezbollah as "villains," he believes Aoun's relationship with them will help "prevent conflict." "Christians in the West should be supportive of Lebanon," Deeb concluded, "and of Michel Aoun in particular."

Deeb also argued that efforts should be made to restore nationality to Lebanese living abroad, most of whom are Christian. While Christians made up the majority in Lebanon at the time of independence in 1943, their proportion of the population has sharply fallen due to emigration and higher birth rates among Lebanese Muslims. If the diaspora is counted, Deeb noted, "they are at least on par with their Muslim counterparts. To count only the Christians who reside in Lebanon is totally unacceptable." The Lebanese diaspora, Deeb explained, remains an organic part of Lebanese society.

"Despite the wars and the conflicts that have ravaged their homeland," Deeb concluded, "the Christians have always rebuilt their country and continue to have faith in a better future. The religious freedom they enjoy is a model for all the Christians of the Levant and Egypt. They ring the bells of their church loudly, and show their symbols in public without fear." Deeb drew a marked contrast between Lebanon and other states in the region like Egypt, where Christians "are harassed all the time, and their churches are burned," Qatar, where the only churches were built under diplomatic pressure and have no bells or crosses, and Turkey, where nearly all the Christians were wiped out decades ago.

Marius Deeb is a retired professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and the author of Syria's Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process. The full video of Deeb's talk can be seen online at www.middle-east-minorities.com, and was part of a lecture series on The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East being held at Boston College, and sponsored by Christian Solidarity International in cooperation with the Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages & Literatures, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and the Department of Political Science, Islamic Civilization and Societies.

Contact: Alexandra Campana

alexandra.campana@csi-int.org

Related Links

http://www.csi-int.org



SOURCE Christian Solidarity International (CSI)
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The Kazakhstan-Korean Center established with the support from the business community and the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan in South Korea begins to promote the International Specialized Exhibition EXPO 2017.

The Memorandum of Cooperation was signed in Seoul at the official ceremony to mark the opening of the Center with the participation of Akhmetzhan Yessimov, Board Chairman of National Company Astana EXPO-2017, and Jong Hui Wu, Director of the Kazakhstan-Korean Cooperation Promotion Center.

"We expect guests from South Korea during EXPO 2017. We are preparing carefully for the exhibition so that tourists can feel comfortable in Kazakhstan, in particular, in Astana," said Mr. Yessimov before signing the Memorandum.

Zhenis Kassymbek, the Minister of Investments and Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, said that "the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev has had a meeting with the representatives of South Korean business community just now. Almost all major Korean companies have a presence in Kazakhstan, and many of them operate in the energy market," he emphasized.

The Minister also reiterated that, starting from 1 January 2017, Kazakhstan would introduce a visa-free regime (up to 30 days) for visitors from OECD countries, including South Korea. Today, there are around ten regular flights, both by Kazakh and Korean airlines, which connect Kazakhstan with the Republic of Korea.

The purpose of the Kazakhstan-Korean Center is to promote EXPO 2017 by organizing special events for various target audiences. Apart from the promotion of EXPO 2017, priorities include the implementation of a ticketing program as part of package tours of Kazakhstan.

In addition, memoranda of cooperation were signed with South Korean tour operators such as Korail and Kim's Travel.

At EXPO 2017, South Korea will have a pavilion of 1,125.47 square meters next to exhibition pavilions of Singapore and Israel, and the Pacific Plaza. The agency responsible for the participation of South Korea in the exhibition is the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA).

South Korean companies such as SIGONGtech and Samsung have been actively involved in the preparation for EXPO 2017.

Astana EXPO 2017

The International Specialized Exhibition Astana EXPO 2017 dedicated to Future Energy is an expositional and recreational event that will take place between 10 June and 10 September 2017 in Astana.

National Company Astana EXPO-2017

For more information, please contact:

Elvina Bulatova

Expo2017@m-p.ru



SOURCE National company Astana EXPO-2017
DUBLIN, Nov 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Cell Culture Market Analysis & Trends - Product, Equipment, End User, Application - Forecast to 2025" report to their offering.

The Global Cell Culture Market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of around 11.4% over the next decade to reach approximately $33.47 billion by 2025.

This industry report analyzes the global markets for Cell Culture across all the given segments on global as well as regional levels presented in the research scope. The study provides historical market data for 2013, 2014 revenue estimations are presented for 2015 and forecasts from 2016 till 2025.

The study focuses on market trends, leading players, supply chain trends, technological innovations, key developments, and future strategies. With comprehensive market assessment across the major geographies such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Latin America and Rest of the world the report is a valuable asset for the existing players, new entrants and the future investors.

The study presents detailed market analysis with inputs derived from industry professionals across the value chain. A special focus has been made on 23 countries such as U.S., Canada, Mexico, U.K., Germany, Spain, France, Italy, China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, etc. The market data is gathered from extensive primary interviews and secondary research. The market size is calculated based on the revenue generated through sales from all the given segments and sub segments in the research scope. The market sizing analysis includes both top-down and bottom-up approaches for data validation and accuracy measures.

Report Highlights:

The report provides a detailed analysis on current and future market trends to identify the investment opportunities

Market forecasts till 2025, using estimated market values as the base numbers

Key market trends across the business segments, Regions and Countries

Key developments and strategies observed in the market

Market Dynamics such as Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities and other trends

In-depth company profiles of key players and upcoming prominent players

Growth prospects among the emerging nations through 2025

Market opportunities and recommendations for new investments

Companies Mentioned:

Becton, Dickinson and Company

Corning, Inc.

Eppendorf AG

GE Healthcare

General Electric

Hi-Media Laboratories

Lonza Group AG

Merck KGAA

Promocell GmbH

Sartorius AG

Sigma-Aldrich Co.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

VWR International LLC

Wheaton Industries Inc.

Report Structure:

1 Market Outline

2 Executive Summary

3 Market Overview

4 Cell Culture Market, By Product

5 Cell Culture Market, By End User

6 Cell Culture Market, By Application

7 Cell Culture Market, By Geography

8 Key Player Activities

9 Leading Companies

For more information about this report visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/56nb82/cell_culture

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com



SOURCE Research and Markets
BUCHAREST, Romania, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Liviu Dragnea, leader of the Social Democratic Party of Romania (PSD), today officially launched his party's campaign to restore government by popular vote and replace the current interim regime appointed a year ago.

In accordance with the nation's election law, PSD launched a series of TV spots to showcase the party's economic program and candidates began door-to-door campaigning across Romania's 41 counties. The center-left PSD, the largest of Romania's political parties according to recent polls, is staking its bid on the slogan "Dare to Believe" and a platform focusing on putting more of the returns from the nation's expanding economy into the pockets of citizens.

In several pre-election announcements, Mr. Dragnea has already rolled out the main elements of the PSD economic plan. These include a major investment program, dramatic tax changes, steps to attract desperately needed medical professionals back to Romania and a program to give bootstrap support for new businesses.

"We want Romanians to believe in the future -- their future in a growing, economically dynamic Romania with standards of living equivalent to anywhere in the European Union," Mr. Dragnea said.

Among the programs announced in recent weeks are the following:

A national reindustrialization program designed ultimately to generate 45,000 new jobs. Linchpin of the plan is a EUR 10 billion (45 billion Romanian Leu) state investment fund, the Sovereign Fund for Development and Investment or SFDI (Fondul Suveran de Dezvoltare si Investitii, or FSDI), which is to be created from the assets owned by the state in 200 profitable companies. The fund is expected to generate revenues of over 50 billion leu in the next four years, as dividends from those companies are reinvested, and private investments are attracted.

Wide-ranging tax reform. This includes the elimination of 102 non-fiscal charges of various kinds which it has been estimated will produce a 90% saving of time spent by citizens queueing, filling out forms and paying various state fees.

A major across-the-board cut to 10% from 16% in Romania's flat income tax, and to nil for those on low incomes.

Increased salaries and tax waivers for physicians, to reverse the brain drain from Romania's hard-pressed health care system. The PSD has also promised to address problems in the nation's medical infrastructure to improve work and treatment conditions. The party is campaigning to stop over-pricing by foreign pharmaceutical companies and to encourage more production by Romanian drug companies.

Mr. Dragnea has also announced a planned "Startup Romania" program as one of the ways his party wants to bring more Romanians into the middle class, encouraging people to take action and start their own businesses. The first step will be elimination of registration charges for new businesses, part of the tax reform program. The party also proposes to establish a specialist entrepreneurship high school in major cities. In addition, It plans to establish a one-day company registration system incorporating free business banking and the provision of electronic signage for new businesses.

In the wake of recent EU confirmation that the current government has failed to meet administrative requirements to collect funds it is entitled to, the PSD has pledged to greatly increase Romania's absorption rate once it is back in charge.

About the Social Democratic Party of Romania

The PSD, in Romanian Partidul Social Democrat, was originally formed in 1992 as a party of the center-left and is currently the largest grouping in both lower and upper houses of the nation's parliament, while also controlling more than half of the mayoralties and over 65% of local and county councils, including the capital of Bucharest. The PSD paved the way for Romania's historic accession process into the EU in 2007, and today holds 16 of the country's 32 MEPs. Its 2012-15 government was considered one of Romania's best, leading the country's emergence from the economic crisis and achieving rapid growth, together with a sharp increase of people's living standards. Liviu Dragnea, the PSD's current president, was elected party leader in 2015 and has since led a series of reforms that have positioned the PSD to form Romania's next government. Mr. Dragnea is a former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Regional Development.

For further information: Steluta Negoita, +40 730 650 545, presa@psd.ro in Bucharest or Zhenya Harrison, +44 (0)20 3397 2825 or zhenya.harrison@belgravestrategic.com in London.

SOURCE Social Democratic Party of Romania
NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The SANY Heavy Industry Co (KENYA) LTD (SANY) has been recognized with the 2016 Excellent After-Sales Service Supplier Award for its contribution to the Mombasa-Nairobi project.

The 480-kilometer Mombasa-Nairobi Railway is Kenya's largest infrastructure project since its independence in 1963. It will cost an estimated US$3.8 billion and potentially increase the country's GDP by 1.5%.

The annual award, given by the project contractor, China Road and Bridge Corporation, honors the service provider who renders outstanding contributions to the Mombasa-Nairobi project. Among a dozen companies, SANY won the recognition by ranking first with the score of 97.45.

SANY has supplied a total of 120 units of construction machines in this project, including concrete pumping equipment, crawler cranes, truck cranes, excavators, and road rollers, valued over US$15 million.

SANY sent its service engineers team on-site to provide around-the-clock support, as well as carry out periodic inspections of machines and render optimal technical solutions to ensure that machines were in full flow operation, keeping the project timelines on track. Three warehouses for accessories were established to support the supply chain.

"What we are concerned about most is our customers' satisfaction," SANY's service manager in Kenya stressed. Guided by the service strategy of "technology, inspection, training and communication", SANY service engineers have been continuously improving their service skills to sort out customers' difficulties.

The construction of the railway has not been without its challenges, as construction teams were confronted with tough geological conditions involving extremely hard rock.

"The award not only represents confidence in SANY's after-sales service, but also gives us great encouragement. SANY will try its best to ensure that the project is successfully completed," Li Lei, General Manager of SANY North Africa business unit said.

After its completion, the railway will connect Kenya's capital Nairobi to Mombasa, the largest port in East Africa, shortening the journey to almost 4 hours.

About SANY Group

SANY Group (SANY), headquarterd in China, is a world-leading heavy machinery manufacturer with plants in the US, Germany, Brazil and India, and business covering over 100 countries and regions worldwide. The company has been recognized as one of the most innovative and successful companies in the world, and its concrete machinery is ranked No. 1 globally.

For more information, please visit: www.sanyglobal.com, or follow SANY Group on Facebook and YouTube.

Rebecca Zhou

+86-10-60737480

Email: zhouyy5@sanygroup.cn

Related Links

http://www.sanyglobal.com



SOURCE SANY
CHICAGO, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SAVO Group, the leading provider of enterprise-grade software solutions for the sales enablement market, today announced it has reached a key financial milestone by achieving sustainable operating profitability during the most recent fiscal quarter ending September 30, 2016.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150827/261749LOGO

This financial milestone was the result of the Company driving double-digit growth in its core product solutions, combined with a strategic focus on the realignment of internal investments to its core products. Achieving and driving sustainable levels of profitability, while driving accelerating growth rates, has been a key goal of the Company.

"Driving to sustainable profitability levels has been a cornerstone of our operating plan for the last 18 months. Self-sustaining existence is critical to maintaining sustainable investment in next generation products and solutions," said Jason Liu, CEO, SAVO Group. "This is a major milestone not just for SAVO, but speaks to the viability of the sales enablement market, as well as to SAVO's continued leadership position in it."

SAVO will continue to aggressively invest in future innovation, with current R&D spend levels approximating 40 percent of revenues, versus an industry average of 20 percent.

"SAVO continues to be the largest player in the sales enablement space, with annual revenues being comparable to recent one-time capital raises in smaller start-up competitors. The size of our annual recurring revenue stream, combined with the strong retention rates of our strategic customers, will allow SAVO to be the continued innovative leader in the space for years to come," continued Liu.

About SAVO

SAVO is the founder and pioneer of sales enablement, powering more leading brands and industries to better connect directly to their buyers. The SAVO sales enablement platform enables prescriptive content, guided selling and custom engagement tools, which drive more predictable sales results. SAVO's Aero platform introduces the first personalized, predictive, connected content experience for sellers. Learn more at www.savogroup.com.

Media Contacts:

Michelle Micor

Tech Image for SAVO Group

Email: michelle.micor@techimage.com

Phone: +1 312-673-6056

Related Links

http://www.savogroup.com



SOURCE SAVO Group
SINGAPORE, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Singapore biomedical firm Restalyst, known for its fuss-free test kits for stomach and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, has come up with a similar product to detect liver carcinoma. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of liver carcinoma, causes up to one million deaths globally every year. It typically occurs in people infected with the Hepatitis B and C viruses, but can also come about when the liver is damaged by too much alcohol. Experts are seeing rapidly increasing number of cases in Europe and the United States.

To address this, Restalyst has developed a patented screening kit to detect if a person has liver carcinoma. The test, called the Hepatocellular Carcinoma Recombinant Antigen-Antibody Detection kit (HCC-REAAD), works by employing an ELISA[1] test that uses antibodies to target a specific biomarker. When a person has HCC, the concentration of this biomarker in their blood elevates[2]. By being able to detect this biomarker, which is known as IGFBP2, the HCC-REAAD test can detect whether a person has liver carcinoma. The HCC-REAAD kit was developed based on a patented technology by Professor Hsieh Sen Yung from Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan.

"The conventional method of detecting liver carcinoma is not good enough and many cases are picked up too late. By developing in-vitro diagnostics like HCC-REAAD, which has a high sensitivity and specificity, we hope that more cases will be found at an earlier stage. At Restalyst, we believe in developing diagnostics to improve the efficacy of diagnosis so as to allow for earlier detection, treatment and indirectly saving lives," said Mr Zaccheus Peh, CEO of Restalyst.

Restalyst's HCC-REAAD can identify those with liver carcinoma to a high degree of accuracy because it makes use of the unique IGFBP2 biomarker. Studies have shown that the HCC-REAAD test has sensitivity and specificity of 82 and 91 per cent respectively. The kit has received CE Mark certification for use as an in vitro diagnostic device. Restalyst will be launching HCC-REAAD at MEDICA 2016, Hall 3 Booth 74.

[1] Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. This is a technique used to measure the concentration of a specific substance in a blood sample.

[2] Patent; Protein markers for detecting liver cancer and method for identifying the markers thereof https://www.google.com/patents/US8741288

SOURCE Restalyst
VIENNA, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Sessions on future perspectives of European migration policy started

The Vienna Migration Conference 2016 organised by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development has been opened in the celebration hall of the Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs yesterday. ICMPD Secretary General Michael Spindelegger describes the aim of the conference against the background of the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants that took place 19 September this year: "We want to discuss and break down the results of the New York Declaration for refugees and migrants to a European level and develop possible scenarios for implementation that would bring better solutions for both the migrants and all the states involved.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161109/437442 )



At the opening session, high-level politicians such as the "Enlargement-Commissioner" Johannes Hahn, the upcoming chair of the EU Council Presidency the Maltese Minister for Foreign Affairs George W. Vella and OSCE Secretary General Lamberto Zannier delivered their statements. Alongside with experts like the Europe-Director of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Vincent Cochetel and Demetrios Papademetriou, Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus of Migration Policy Institute new perspectives for a new European migration policy will be illustrated.

After the opening remarks by the Austrian Minister of Internal Affairs, Wolfgang Sobotka and the Keynote delivered by Oxford-Economist and advisor to the German federal government, Paul Collier, more than 200 international participants at the Vienna Hofburg Palace are going to discuss the two key questions: On the one hand refugee protection in Europe and its necessary foundation, on the other hand international cooperation in the context of a common European migration policy. Led by ICMPD, experts from academia, politics, civil society and international organisations will share their views and analyses.

ICMPD Director General points out that it is fundamentally necessary for the future to "create new comprehensive models, that will guarantee save and orderly migration". Apart from that he points to the importance of "establishing perspectives in the sending countries through sustainable partnerships". Finally, he emphasizes that Europe could only perform well "if it acts solidly united both on the inside and the outside in regards to the neighbouring - and the countries of origin." Spindelegger views the International Centre for Migration Policy Development as a "platform that acts as an intermediary between theory and practice, experts and politicians that paving the way to create conditions that will allow for actual improvement".

http://www.vienna-migration-conference.org/

http://refugeesmigrants.un.org/declaration

Press contact:

Bernhard Schragl

ICMPD - Communication and Media Coordinator

T: +43 1 504 4677 2444

E: bernhard.schragl@icmpd.org

http://www.icmpd.org

SOURCE International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD)
DUBLIN, Nov 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux Disease Drugs Price Analysis and Strategies - 2016" report to their offering.

Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux Drugs Price Analysis and Strategies 2016, provides drug pricing data and benchmarks in the global Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux market.

The research answers the following questions:

What are the key drugs marketed for Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux and their clinical attributes? How are they positioned in the Global Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux market?

What are the unit prices and annual treatment cost for Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux therapies in different countries? What are the drug pricing trends and how are they expected to change in the future? How are the drug pricing and reimbursement landscape different by countries?

What are the unmet needs in the global Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux drugs market? What would be the ideal pricing strategy for a new pipeline therapy for Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux?

Research Scope:

Treatment Options - Identify key drugs marketed and prescribed for Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux including trade name, molecule name, and company

Drugs Attributes - Find out the safety, efficacy, and risk benefit for key drugs marketed for Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux

Market Positioning - Identify how drugs are clinically and commercially positioned in the global Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux market

Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux Drugs Price Analysis - Find out the annual therapy cost and unit price for key drugs marketed

Find out how the price advanced from 2012 and forecast to 2021

Pricing & Reimbursement Landscape - Find out the pricing and reimbursement landscape

Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux New Drug Pricing - Identify the effective pricing strategy for a new drug launch

Key Topics Covered:

1. Treatment Options

2. Drugs Clinical Attributes

3. Drugs Market Positioning

4. Drugs Price Analysis

5. Drugs Price Benchmarks

6. Drug Pricing & Reimbursement Landscape

7. Drugs Price Forecast

8. Market Unmet Needs

9. New Drug Pricing

For more information about this report visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/kvp4t4/gastrooesophageal

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com



SOURCE Research and Markets
From 9:00 am to 1:00 pm, the resource fair will include representatives from several departments within the VA, caregiving resources from AARP Ohio, and community support organizations. Walgreens will be on hand to provide free flu shots for all attendees.

At 10:00 am and 12:00 noon, VA's National Program Manager for Purchased Care, Christopher Esmurdoc, LISW-S will present information. He will be joined by Major General Tony Taguba, US Army, Retired. Their presentation will focus on caring for veterans and their caregivers and will answer questions. All Vietnam Veterans in attendance will be invited to participate in an Honor Pinning to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the United States Armed Forces Vietnam War.

The event is free and includes lunch for attendees who have registered.

To register for this event, please call 1-877-926-8300.

About AARP

AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, with a membership of nearly 38 million, that helps people turn their goals and dreams into real possibilities, strengthens communities and fights for the issues that matter most to families such as healthcare, employment and income security, retirement planning, affordable utilities and protection from financial abuse. We advocate for individuals in the marketplace by selecting products and services of high quality and value to carry the AARP name as well as help our members obtain discounts on a wide range of products, travel, and services. A trusted source for lifestyle tips, news and educational information, AARP produces AARP The Magazine, the world's largest circulation magazine; AARP Bulletin; www.aarp.org; AARP TV & Radio; AARP Books; and AARP en Espanol, a Spanish-language website addressing the interests and needs of Hispanics. AARP does not endorse candidates for public office or make contributions to political campaigns or candidates. The AARP Foundation is an affiliated charity that provides security, protection, and empowerment to older persons in need with support from thousands of volunteers, donors, and sponsors. AARP has staffed offices in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Learn more at www.aarp.org.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438376

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438375LOGO

SOURCE AARP Ohio

Related Links

http://www.aarp.org


DALLAS, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Access Healthcare, a leading provider of end-to-end healthcare revenue cycle services, today announced the achievement of a major company milestone, employing more than 6,000 people. This growth reflects the company's responsiveness to increased demand in the market for its solutions and services.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438037

Company Growth

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438036LOGO

"This is a very eventful year for us. With business steadily growing, earlier this year we opened our 9th global delivery center, and crossed the 5,000-employee mark. Within a few months, we're crossing yet another milestone with 6,000 employees," said Anurag Jain, Chairman of Access Healthcare. "With a healthy pipeline, we plan to employ 10,000 people by the end of 2017. We have also launched new services including applications development and management, remote infrastructure management, and finance and accounting services."

Access Healthcare developed a unique recruitment and training process that serves as an investment in both the development of the people and the long-term culture of the organization. Employees experience a path of opportunity to stay and grow within the organization. Additionally, a consistent focus on innovative technology creates shared excitement among customers and employees around leading the market in revenue cycle management.

"There is a lot of diversity in our company, and we take care of the communities in which we operate," said Vardhman Jain, Vice Chairman at Access Healthcare. "We value our employees and make sure we provide them with opportunities to grow as individuals and professionals which is why, ultimately, we are successful in what we do for our clients. We utilize social media to mobilize candidates for hiring at a quick pace and have focused on reducing the recruitment process time dramatically to less than 45 minutes by making the new hire recruitment process completely automated."

About Access Healthcare

Exceptional healthcare organizations compliment the highest standards of care with a commitment to excellence in revenue cycle management. Billing companies and healthcare provider systems use Access Healthcare to bring excellence to their back-office Revenue Cycle Management enabling better focus on strategic priorities, like profitability and creating great patient experiences. By leveraging the Access Healthcare Best Practice Engine for Revenue Cycle Management, our focus on creating results enables not only improved profitability, but opportunity to cultivate growth through reduced costs, better productivity, and higher quality. For more information, check out accesshealthcare.org\career

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/accesshealthcareindia

Media Contact:

Peter Snell

illumeture

(214) 810-6207

[email protected]

SOURCE Access Healthcare

Related Links

http://www.accesshealthcare.org


LONDON, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Frost & Sullivan report analyzes the global public vulnerability research market. The growth of cyber threats such as malware, viruses, ransomware, botnets and more are of great concern to companies and consumers. Uncovering and disclosing vulnerabilities is important for analyzing and countering potential threats.

The vulnerability material that is collected, queried, and segmented provides rich qualitative commentary on the vulnerability research industry and community of contributors, and recognizes the most prolific disclosers of new vulnerabilities.

Research Scope

Total number of public vulnerabilities Market trends of severity levels Market trends of applications and classes of applications Market trends of different vulnerability flaws In 2015, public vulnerability disclosures increased 43.8% over the previous year. Researchers are covering a wider breadth of applications, such as media players, operating systems, office products, web browsers and many more. There have also been notable changes among the key players. Trend Micro acquired HP TippingPoint and Google Project Zero launched in mid-2014.

The different types of threats which can exploit vulnerabilities are discussed in this report. Frost & Sullivan also conducted competitive analysis of the research institutions involved in disclosing vulnerabilities.

Key Questions this Study Answer

Which institutions have disclosed the most vulnerabilities and what types? Which applications have had the most public vulnerabilities? Have severity levels changed? What are the most likely impacts threats will have on exploitable vulnerabilities?

Download the full report:

https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/2171918/

About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com

For more information: Sarah Smith Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 208 816 85 48 Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

http://www.reportbuyer.com


ATLANTA, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Community Management Associates, Inc. (CMA), a commercial property manager operating in several states, is facing a lawsuit filed by a woman who claims the company retaliated against her for reporting discrimination.

The case, filed in Fulton County Superior Court, alleges that shortly after purchasing a CMA-managed condo in Atlanta's prominent Buckhead neighborhood, the woman reported a terrorism-related remark allegedly made by one of the company's employees.

The plaintiff, who is of Middle Eastern descent, construed the comment as "stereotype-evoking" and "offensive."

According to the lawsuit, CMA and the building's association responded to the woman's complaints by assessing fines against her, threatening her with civil and criminal charges, and forbidding her from communicating with the company.

The plaintiff's attorney, Candice Blain, believes the alleged conduct reflects a prevailing attitude of permissibility relating to discrimination against Arab Americans: "Expressions of anti-Arab sentiment have become normalized," Blain said, adding that, "in this case, the mindset that it is acceptable to punish someone for opposing such mistreatment was not just morally wrongit is unlawful."

The suit, Case No. 2016CV262014, alleges violations of federal, state, and local fair housing laws, and seeks punitive damages.

Blain LLC is an Atlanta-based law firm representing victims in meaningful litigation. Blain LLC - Exceptional Representation. Meaningful Litigation.

Website: www.blainfirm.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/blainfirm

FOR INQUIRIES:

Candice Blain

[email protected]

Telephone (404) 549-5415

SOURCE Blain LLC

Related Links

http://www.blainfirm.com


Both braces and Invisalign were designed to straighten teeth while improving your smile and oral health, however Invisalign is designed to be invisible. Custom aligner trays are made of smooth, comfortable and virtually invisible plastic that you wear over your teeth. The best part about the whole process is that most people won't even know you're straightening your teeth. So whether your teeth are crowded, too far apart, or have shifted since having braces, you'll have a new reason to smile. Bright Side Dental offers the latest technology and their special offers make it possible for everyone.

Dr. Bianca Boji will be providing FREE no-obligation consultations to answer your questions about Invisalign. Make an appointment for this special event to find out if Invisalign is right for you. Space is limited. Call (248) 607-6858 for your reservation.

Dr. Boji received her undergraduate degree at Wayne State University in Biological Sciences. From there, she was able to combine this degree with her passion for art and esthetics into a career. She received her dental degree from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Dentistry, attended a mission trip to Guatemala where she performed oral surgery on the mothers and children of Chichicastenango, and graduated with a distinction in leadership for founding the Student Professionalism & Ethics Association.

About Bright Side Dental

Bright Side Dental is a full-service dental office specializing in all phases of general dentistry. Services include orthodontics, children's dentistry, sedation, same-day emergency dentistry, and more. Bright Side Dental offers evening and weekend hours at each location. There are ten Bright Side Dental offices located in Canton, Clarkston, Farmington, Livonia, Royal Oak, Southfield, St. Clair Shores, Sterling Heights, Warren and Bloomfield Hills. Bright Side Dental has been in business since 1978. For more information, call 1-800-PAINLESS or visit www.BrightSideDental.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438409

SOURCE Bright Side Dental

Related Links

http://www.brightsidedental.com


HOUSTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants, a retail property, casualty insurance brokerage and employee benefits consultant, announced today that Ascende  an EPIC Company has promoted Mary Parker and Dina Flavin to managing principals, joining Steve Goulet and Suzanne McGarey as strategic leaders of Ascende's Health & Welfare practice. Collectively, they also serve as client engagement managers, providing senior leadership support and direction to the firm's consulting clients.

Mary Parker joined Ascende  an EPIC Company in 2005 as a senior associate. Most recently, Mary led the Global Solutions practice, supporting clients' globally mobile employees, including U.S. expatriates, rotators, third country nationals and local nationals. Prior to joining the firm, Mary served as a benefits analyst at Reliant Energy, Inc. and the Westlake Group.

Dina Flavin began her career at Ascende  an EPIC Company in 2005 as a senior associate as well. Prior to joining the firm, Dina held 10 years of experience with actuarial and underwriting roles in the health insurance industry.

The Southwest Region also welcomes Javier Yturralde as its Global Solutions practice leader. Javier brings 20 years of international employee benefits experience. Prior to joining the firm, he served as regional director of Broker/Insurance Partnerships at International SOS where he was responsible for the development and expansion of key brokerage, consulting and insurer relationships in the U.S.

He also previously served as regional director of MetLife's Multinational Solutions, formerly AIG. Javier holds a vast level of experience in expatriate health and welfare services and solutions, working for both Cigna and Aetna at the start of his career.

"We are excited to have Javier join our team as it continues our commitment to the global consulting services supporting our clients and the unique needs of the international assignee population," said Ascende  an EPIC Company COO Cliff Caldwell.

Javier Yturralde can be reached at:

Ascende  an EPIC Company

2700 Post Oak Boulevard, 25th Floor

Houston, TX 77056

[email protected]

832-476-0465  office

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 $250 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: Send2Press.com/mediaboom/16-1111s2p-Yturralde-300dpi.jpg

*PHOTO Caption: Javier Yturralde.

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


AUL Corp utilized the services of authorized Carrier Service Provider "Cuba Travel Services." Through Cuba Travel Services, AUL visited Cuba under the "People to People" license. Under this license, the AUL group had three to four meaningful interactions with the Cuban people a day.

"It was very exciting to be in Cuba and engage with the Cuban people," said Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Atkinson. "We toured several areas before ending in Havana, and the people couldn't have been friendlier. In many ways, it was like stepping back in time. It was an honor to be able to host our Presidents Club agents and share the experience with them."

"Going to Cuba was a determined dream come true for all of our Presidents Club members. It was the most valuable gift to date, the most joyful interlude that we could have wished to make come true for them and their spouses. Moreover, our appreciation for our loyal and treasured agent partners is inestimable. Cuba was our humble attempt to express that," said Luis Nieves, founder and CEO of AUL Corp.

About AUL Presidents Club -- The AUL Presidents Club trip is an annual event that AUL hosts for its top performing agencies. Over the last sixteen years, the event has been held in tropical locations, such as Grand Cayman and Turks & Caicos, along with many other exclusive destinations. The 2017 Presidents Club location will be announced in February 2017 at the National Agency Meeting in Napa, California.

About AUL Corp -- AUL Corp is a vehicle service contract company founded in Napa, California, in 1990 by Luis Nieves, President and CEO. AUL has 117 employees in its downtown Napa offices and hundreds of agents across the country selling its products. AUL Corp founded the national used car service contract industry in 1990 with its still famous Any Year, Any Mileage vehicle service contract. AUL continues leading its industry and is the only provider of its type authorized to conduct business in all 50 States. AUL enjoys a long relationship with its underwriters, who hold an A.M. Best rating of "A" or excellent. AUL Corp also enjoys the longest-term relationships in the industry with its agent and dealer clients as verified by independent third-party research. AUL's mission is to be the premier service contract administrator in America by any quantifiable measurement of business activity.

To find out more, please visit www.aulcorp.com. Press Contact: Jacqueline Swank, Marketing Manager, [email protected] 800-826-3207

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438426

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120606/LA20190LOGO

SOURCE AUL Corp
HOUSTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BBVA Compass, the nation's 22nd-largest bank by deposit market share, is punching way above its weight in its drive to become the lender-of-choice for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2016, BBVA Compass approved 1,801 loans under the Small Business Administration's flagship 7(a) loan program, becoming the program's fifth most-active lender by total number of loans and 10th by dollar volume. The top five were dominated by some of the largest banks in the country, with Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and U.S. Bank claiming spots.

"The SBA is the No. 1 provider of long-term financing for small businesses  whether it's dentists, doctors, fast-food restaurants, manufacturers, wholesalers, dry cleaners, you name it," said Greg Clarkson, who is in charge of SBA lending for BBVA Compass. "In that way, it's the engine of Main Street, and we want to do what we can to keep it humming."

For the full story, go to http://bbva.info/2eiyCx2.

About BBVA Group

BBVA Compass is a subsidiary of BBVA Compass Bancshares Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of BBVA (NYSE: BBVA) (MAD: BBVA). BBVA is a customer-centric global financial services group founded in 1857. The BBVA Group is the largest financial institution in Spain and Mexico, has leading franchises in South America and the Sunbelt region of the United States and is also the leading shareholder in Garanti, Turkey's largest bank based on market capitalization. Its diversified business is focused on high-growth markets and it relies on technology as a key sustainable competitive advantage. Corporate responsibility is at the core of its business model. BBVA fosters financial education and inclusion, and supports scientific research and culture. It operates with the highest integrity, a long-term vision and applies best practices. The Group is present in the main sustainability indexes. More information about the BBVA Group can be found at bbva.com.

About BBVA Compass

BBVA Compass is a Sunbelt-based financial institution that operates 674 branches, including 345 in Texas, 89 in Alabama, 75 in Arizona, 62 in California, 45 in Florida, 38 in Colorado and 20 in New Mexico. BBVA Compass ranks among the top 25 largest U.S. commercial banks based on deposit market share and ranks among the largest banks in Alabama (2nd), Texas (4th) and Arizona (4th). BBVA Compass was recently named Best Digital Bank in North America by global finance magazine Euromoney, and earned top nods for best mobile app and best regional bank in the South & West in Money magazine's annual list of the Best Banks in America. Additional information about BBVA Compass can be found at bbvacompass.com, by following @BBVACompassNews on Twitter or visiting newsroom.bbvacompass.com.

Editor's Note:

BBVA Compass is a trade name of Compass Bank.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160108/320327LOGO

SOURCE BBVA Compass

Related Links

http://www.bbva.com


SUMMERVILLE, S.C., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BJ's Wholesale Club today announced a platinum level sponsorship of Summerville DREAM ahead of its new Club opening in the Summerville area.

"BJ's has a strong history of supporting the communities where we live and work," said Kirk Saville, senior vice president of corporate communications at BJ's Wholesale Club. "We're thrilled to be supporting Summerville DREAM and their mission to revitalize historic downtown Summerville."

"We're delighted to have BJ's Wholesale Club as a platinum sponsor," said Michael Lisle, executive director of Summerville DREAM. "Their support will allow us to continue working to improve the quality of life in Summerville through enhancement of our historic downtown. Partners such as BJ's help us preserve our past, promote our present and protect our future."

The BJ's Wholesale Club is scheduled to open in the Spring of 2017 and could save area shoppers more than $40 million a year, slashing families grocery bills by up to 25 percent.

"BJ's Wholesale stands for outstanding value, and families can save up to $500 off their annual grocery bills by shopping with us," said Saville. "We offer far more fresh produce, dairy, meat and deli items than other clubs at prices that are lower than grocery stores. With almost twice as many products as other clubs, we're the perfect one-stop shopping destination for everything from bananas to diapers to the latest electronics. We're committed to offering outstanding value and great quality to our community in South Carolina."

The BJ's Wholesale Club will be located at the intersection of Interstate 26 and North Main Street, Summerville's primary retail corridor. The Club will also feature a BJ's Gas station, saving Members even more.

BJ's offers the best value of any supermarket or club. BJ's everyday prices on the key items that families buy most often are significantly better value than supermarkets, saving families up to 25 percent or more. The company is the only major wholesale club that accepts manufacturers' coupons, offering families another great way to save. Its own brands, Berkley Jensen and Wellsley Farms, let families save without sacrificing quality or fun.

BJ's biggest advantage is fresh food  produce, dairy, meat and deli. Members buy 65 percent more fresh food from BJ's than from other clubs. BJ's is the only major wholesale club to offer a full-service deli with premium meats and cheeses. Members are able to choose fresh meats cut to their specifications. BJ's butchers will recut and repackage at no charge.

A BJ's Membership is filled with added convenience. BJ's offers the most payment options of any major wholesale club. Members are able to research, shop and install electronics with help from BJ's Tech Advisors. Its new Pick Up & Pay program allows shoppers to stock up by reserving items online and then picking up in-club. Members can save time and money by filling up their tanks at BJ's. The company's gas prices are among the lowest around.



Based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer surveys on household spending, the BJ's Wholesale Club could save area shoppers more than $40 million a year.

Shoppers can learn more about BJ's Wholesale Club by going to www.bjs.com

About BJ's Wholesale Club, Inc.

Headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts, BJ's is the leading operator of membership warehouse clubs in the Eastern United States. The company currently operates 213 clubs and 130 BJ's Gas locations 15 states.

BJ's provides great value in a one-stop shopping destination filled with top-quality, leading brands including its exclusive Wellsley Farms and Berkley Jensen brands along with USDA Choice meats, premium produce and delicious organics in many supermarket sizes. BJ's is also the only major wholesale club to accept all manufacturers' coupons and, for greater convenience, offers the most payment options.

To check out all the MORE BJ's has to offer, visit www.BJs.com and for exclusive content find us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.

BJ's is wholly owned by affiliates of Leonard Green & Partners, CVC Capital Partners and its management team.

SOURCE BJ's Wholesale Club

Related Links

http://www.bjs.com


With HTC Bolt web browsing, file downloading, streaming video and music is smooth and vivid. Sharing photos and videos with friends seems to be almost instantaneous and online gaming races like never before.

Forged from glass and metal, HTC Bolt is a dramatic evolution of HTC's "sculpted by light" design. It features a 5.5-inch Quad HD (2K) display and it is the first water-resistant aluminum unibody Android phone2, along with more precise contours and a flatter back for sharper contrast that catches light beautifully. Bold, chamfered edges are carved out of Gunmetal or Glacier Silver3 metal to make the 3.7mm side cut look and feel slimmer than ever in your hand. HTC Bolt also introduces HTC BoomSound Adaptive Audio earphones that tailor sound to your ears' unique structure for a truly personal audio experience.

"The HTC 10 released earlier this year was the most advanced smartphone we've ever built, so we knew we had to raise the bar even higher for Sprint's most advanced ever network," said Andre Lonne, president of HTC America. "For HTC Bolt, we took everything that was so great about the HTC 10 and made it even better. We took the award-winning design and made it water-resistant. We took the awesome audio and made it more personal. And, of course, we took the wireless speed and supercharged it with Sprint, turning HTC Bolt into a smartphone unlike any you've ever experienced."

HTC BoomSound Adaptive Audio tuned to you

HTC Bolt features HTC BoomSound Adaptive Audio, which scans your ears and the ambient noise around you to adjust audio output to suit your personal hearing capabilities. Just plug in the USB Type C headphones (included) and, almost instantly, you'll experience music and movies with thundering bass and pitch-perfect treble that sound clearer than you believed possible. In addition, Hi-Res audio delivers 24-bit sounds as you would hear it in the movie theater, nightclub or concert hall.

Sharper shots in a snap

Whether you're in town or out hiking, incredible moments can happen when you least expect them, so HTC Bolt's 16MP camera, supported by the Snapdragon processor, has OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) to reduce camera shake and capture sharp photographs and 4K video even in low light. With a quick camera launch time and an ultra-fast autofocus of 0.3s with Phase Detection Auto Focus, you'll be sure to capture the perfect shot every time.

Selfies are great, too, with HTC Bolt. An 8MP front camera with Auto HDR means vivid details will bring out your smile and the environment behind you. Super-wide panorama mode lets you capture your whole family and an expansive background, and an integrated screen flash ensures shots look great in low light.

Power, convenience and customization

Running the latest Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, HTC Bolt offers all the powerful features you would expect from the latest flagship smartphone, including split-screen view, quicker multitasking, free unlimited photo storage with Google Photos, and Google Duo video calling preloaded.

HTC Bolt's built-in fingerprint sensor lets you unlock your phone at the touch of your finger  in as little as 0.2 seconds and lets you lock and unlock apps using Boost+. Even better, Boost+ also keeps your phone in top condition by cleaning up junk files and dynamically allocating resources like phone memory as required, ensuring your phone runs smoothly and efficiently.

HTC Freestyle Layout frees you from an on-screen grid and lets you customize your home screen. Drag icons, stickers and widgets anywhere, layer them, overlap them, group them and more. You can even link stickers to apps, or just get rid of on-screen icons entirely.

Power users can rejoice that all these features are supported by a powerful 3,200mAh battery, enough for up to a day or more use on a single charge. If you need to recharge quickly, HTC Bolt features Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 technology for fast charging4. Load up on photos, videos, movies and games with the HTC Bolt's 3GB RAM and 32GB storage space5, expandable with optional SD cards for up to 2TB of space so your storage needs are covered now and far into the future.

Available today

HTC Bolt is now available at Sprint stores, www.sprint.com and 1(800) SPRINT1 for just $25 per month over 24 months with installment billing.6

Notes to editors:

1Sprint has started to deploy three-channel carrier aggregation in such markets as Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Cleveland and Columbus.

2 HTC Bolt has an IP57 rating and resists water, splashing and dust. Normal wear and tear may decrease splash and water resistance over time. Do not intentionally submerge HTC Bolt. Do not attempt to charge or otherwise use the USB Type-C port on a wet HTC Bolt. For drying instructions and tips on maintaining water resistance, consult the user guide, support site, or the Help app on the device. Liquid damage may not be covered under warranty.

3 Availability of colors varies by market.

4 Battery charge duration may vary based on cellular network, location, signal strength, feature configurations, phone usage, and many other factors. Actual results may vary.

5 Available storage is less because of phone software. Available storage is subject to change based on phone software updates and apps usage.

6 Excludes taxes and service plan charges. If service or installment billing agreement is cancelled early, the remaining payments become due immediately.

About HTC

HTC Corporation aims to bring brilliance to life. As a global innovator in smart mobile devices and technology, HTC has produced award-winning products and industry firsts since its inception in 1997, including the critically acclaimed HTC One and Desire lines of smartphones. The pursuit of brilliance is at the heart of everything we do, inspiring best-in-class design and game-changing mobile and virtual reality experiences for consumers around the world. HTC is listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE: 2498). www.htc.com

HTC, HTC BOLT and the HTC logo are the trademarks of HTC Corporation. All other names of companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Qualcomm and Snapdragon are trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated, registered in the United States and other countries. Quick Charge is a trademark of Qualcomm Incorporated.

Qualcomm Snapdragon and Qualcomm Quick Charge are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438045

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438044

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438043

SOURCE HTC

Related Links

http://www.htc.com


RALEIGH, N.C., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Bulk TV & Internet (Bulk TV), a leading provider of television, data and voice solutions to commercial properties nationwide, was featured by Triangle Business Journal as the 3rd fastest-growing, privately held company in the Raleigh-Durham area. Bulk TV was recognized on Wednesday, November 9th at the Annual Fast 50 Awards Dinner.

Triangle Business Journal's accounting partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, verified and analyzed each company's revenue growth and profitability the three preceding years (2013-2015) to determine the results. This is the eighth appearance among the Fast 50 List for Bulk TV. The company has previously ranked #13 (2015), #15 (2014), #13 (2013), #36 (2012), #15 (2011), #4 (2010) and #27 (2009).

"We are honored to be included among the Fast 50 companies in the Triangle especially at such a high ranking," said Dave O'Connell, CEO of Bulk TV. "It is exciting to lead a privately held company in one of the fastest growing economies in the United States. Our growth and success is attributed to our dedicated employees who work tirelessly to provide value and support to our loyal customers."

Since the company was founded in 2004, Bulk TV has grown to become the leader in television programming solutions for businesses within the hospitality, senior living and healthcare markets. Bulk TV offers customized solutions with flexible and scalable capabilities so that properties of all sizes are able to offer superior television and Internet solutions to their clientele. The company provides turnkey services including engineering, project management, installation and technical support making the transition simple for the customer.

The list is comprised of a variety of industries and all have demonstrated remarkable, substantial growth. In an article on the Fast 50 companies in Triangle Business Journal Jason Christie, publisher of TBJ, said, "Beyond bolstering the top-line performance and a nose for profitability, this list of companies represents the dynamic economic fabric of the Triangle. We have a mixture of private firms that have made this list for years, and we have companies making this list for the first time. Collectively, they reflect the best of the best."

Bulk TV's business profile, as well as the profiles of the other award winners, are featured in the November 11th edition of Triangle Business Journal.

About Bulk TV & Internet

Bulk TV & Internet (Bulk TV) is the leading provider of DIRECTV solutions for hospitality, senior living and healthcare businesses nationally. The company provides service to more than 400,000 rooms with turnkey solutions including engineering and fulfillment, project management, installation, and 24/7 x 365 technical support. Bulk TV also provides Mitel voice and wireless network solutions, and DIRECTV services for restaurants and fitness centers. For more information, please visit bulktv.com.

About Triangle Business Journal

Triangle Business Journal, a weekly business newspaper, is the leading provider of local business news for the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina. Triangle Business Journal also publishes special publications such as SPACE, t.b.j. the magazine and Book of Lists. In addition to producing an award-winning news product, TBJ hosts recognized, sold-out events such as Fast 50, Women in Business, 40 under 40, the GREEN Awards and others. At trianglebusinessjournal.com, you will find daily breaking business news, nomination forms for awards, business event listings and resources for those driven to lead in the Triangle region.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120328/CL78154LOGO



SOURCE Bulk TV & Internet

Related Links

http://www.bulktv.com


JACKSON, Mich., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Board of Directors of Consumers Energy, the principal subsidiary of CMS Energy, has declared a quarterly dividend on the utility's preferred stock.

The following dividend is payable Jan. 1, 2017, to shareholders of record Dec. 5, 2016: $1.125 per share on the $4.50 stock (NYSE: CMS_pb).

CMS Energy (NYSE: CMS) is a Michigan-based company that has an electric and natural gas utility, Consumers Energy, as its primary business and also owns and operates independent power generation businesses.

For more information on CMS Energy, please visit our website at www.cmsenergy.com. To sign up for email alert notifications, please visit the Investor Relations section of our website.

SOURCE CMS Energy

Related Links

http://www.cmsenergy.com


JACKSON, Mich., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- With the much-anticipated opening day of Michigan's firearm deer season Tuesday, Consumers Energy offers a reminder that hunting is not allowed on its property, with the exception of its hydro properties in the northern Lower Peninsula.

"Our goal is to protect the safety of neighbors along our 98,000 miles of rights of way as well as our employees working in those areas, and others," said Mike Williams, Consumers Energy's director of corporate security. "This also addresses the concerns of neighboring landowners who are concerned about trespassers entering from Consumers Energy's property."

Special provisions apply to Consumers Energy-owned lands encompassing 12,000 acres bordering its Au Sable, Manistee and Muskegon river hydroelectric facilities, where hunting is allowed.

However, constructing blinds, target shooting, baiting, burning and fire pits are strictly prohibited on all Consumers Energy land. In addition, dirt bikes, ATVs and other off-road vehicles may not be operated on any company property.

A free online brochure, "A Guide to Consumers Energy Land: To Our Michigan Neighbors," provides information for landowners, developers and others on use of Consumers Energy property.

Consumers Energy, Michigan's largest utility, is the principal subsidiary of CMS Energy (NYSE: CMS), providing natural gas and electricity to 6.7 million of the state's 10 million residents in all 68 Lower Peninsula counties.

Media Toolkit



BROCHURE: Download a free brochure "A Guide to Consumers Energy Land: To Our Michigan Neighbors" which details options for uses of Consumers Energy property: https://www.consumersenergy.com/uploadedFiles/CEWEB/SHARED/Guide-to-Consumers-Land.pdf



OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES AT HYDROS: Here are seven popular activities to enjoy at Consumers Energy hydro properties on the Manistee, Muskegon and Au Sable rivers this fall: https://members.questline.com/article.aspx?accountId=2556&articleId=36272

For more information about Consumers Energy, go to www.ConsumersEnergy.com.

Check out Consumers Energy on Social Media

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/consumersenergymichigan

Twitter: https://twitter.com/consumersenergy

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/consumersenergy

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/consumersenergy

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160126/326177LOGO

SOURCE Consumers Energy

Related Links

http://www.consumersenergy.com


CHONGQING, China, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Daqo New Energy Corp. (NYSE: DQ) (the "Company"), a leading manufacturer of high-purity polysilicon for the global solar PV industry, today announced that it will hold its annual general meeting (the "AGM") at Daqo New Energy Corp. Shanghai Office, Room C, 29th Floor, Huadu Building, No. 838, Zhangyang Road, Pudong District, Shanghai 200122, People's Republic of China on December 16, 2016 at 2:00 P.M. (Beijing time).

The proposals to be submitted to shareholders at the AGM include the adoption by the Company of a dual Chinese name "Da Quan Xin Neng Yuan Gong Si (in Chinese characters)", so that the name of the Company will be "Daqo New Energy Corp. Da Quan Xin Neng Yuan Gong Si (in Chinese characters)" and the adoption of the Fourth Amended and Restated Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Company, which reflects the adoption of the dual Chinese name and will replace the existing Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Company in their entirety. The Board of Directors of the Company recommends that the Company's shareholders and holders of the Company's American depositary shares ("ADSs") vote FOR the proposals. The notice of the AGM, which sets forth the proposed resolutions and contains a copy of the Fourth Amended and Restated Memorandum and Articles of Association to be submitted to shareholder approval at the AGM, is available on the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at www.dqsolar.com.

Holders of record of the Company's ordinary shares at the close of business in the Cayman Islands on November 14, 2016 will be entitled to attend and vote at the AGM and any adjournment or postponement thereof in person. ADS holders who wish to exercise their voting rights for the underlying ordinary shares must act through JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., the depositary bank for the Company's ADS program (the "ADS depositary"). ADS holders at the close of business in New York City on November 14, 2016 will be entitled to instruct the ADS depositary to vote the ordinary shares represented by their ADSs at the AGM.

Holders of the Company's ordinary shares or ADSs may obtain a hard copy of the Company's annual report on Form 20-F, free of charge, by emailing the Company's Investor Relations Department at [email protected], or by writing to:

Daqo New Energy Corp. Shanghai Office

Room C, 29th Floor, Huadu Building

No. 838, Zhangyang Road

Pudong District, Shanghai 200122

People's Republic of China

Attention: Investor Relations Department

About Daqo New Energy Corp.

Founded in 2008, Daqo New Energy Corp. (NYSE: DQ) is a leading manufacturer of high-purity polysilicon for the global solar PV industry. As one of the world's lowest cost producers of high-purity polysilicon and solar wafers, the Company primarily sells its products to solar cell and solar module manufacturers. The Company has built a manufacturing facility that is technically advanced and highly efficient with a nameplate capacity of 12,150 metric tons in Xinjiang, China. The Company also operates a solar wafer manufacturing facility in Chongqing, China.

For further information, please contact:

Daqo New Energy Corp.

Kevin He, Investor Relations

Phone: +86-187-1658-5553

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Daqo New Energy Corp.
HOUSTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Deep Down, Inc. (the "Company") (OTCQX: DPDW), will hold a conference call and webcast on Thursday, November 17, 2016 to discuss the Company's third quarter 2016 financial results.

The teleconference will begin at 4:30 PM Eastern Time (3:30 PM Central Time) and will be hosted by Mr. Ron Smith, President and CEO, and Mr. Gene Butler, Executive Chairman and CFO. The related press release will be issued today, November 11, 2016.

To participate in the teleconference, please dial (877) 303-6187 a few minutes before the scheduled start time. International callers are invited to call (678) 894-3073. Please refer to confirmation code 18041610. A replay of the call will be available one hour after the completion of the call through December 1, 2016. To access the replay, please dial (855) 859-2056, or if you are calling internationally, dial (404) 537-3406. Please refer to confirmation code 18041610. The live webcast and archived replay also can be accessed on the Company's web site at www.deepdowninc.com.

About Deep Down, Inc.

Deep Down, Inc. is an oilfield services company serving the worldwide offshore exploration and production industry. Deep Down's proven services and technological solutions include distribution system installation support and engineering services, umbilical terminations, loose-tube steel flying leads (LSFL), installation buoyancy, ROVs and tooling, marine vessel automation, control, and ballast systems. Deep Down supports subsea engineering, installation, commissioning, and maintenance projects through specialized, highly experienced service teams and engineered technological solutions. Deep Down's primary focus is on more complex deepwater and ultra-deepwater oil production distribution system support services and technologies used between the platform and the wellhead. More information about Deep Down is available at www.deepdowninc.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Any forward-looking statements in the preceding paragraphs of this release are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties in that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. In the course of operations, we are subject to certain risk factors, competition and competitive pressures, sensitivity to general economic and industrial conditions, international political and economic risks, availability and price of raw materials and execution of business strategy. For further information, please refer to the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available from the Company without charge.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121204/LA23242LOGO

SOURCE Deep Down, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.deepdowninc.com


GOLDEN, Colo., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Ductile Iron Pipe Research Association (DIPRA) issued the following statement from President Jon R. Runge commending Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s commitment to sustainability efforts. The company recently unveiled a Sustainable Packaging Playbook for its suppliers.

"Wal-Mart's commitment to sustainable products and packaging sets a remarkable standard for industries. The company's guidelines are a strong step in the right direction, and we hope their focus extends well beyond supplier packaging. Consumers deserve to know from what materials their products are made, and what impact those materials have on the environment.

"Many may be surprised to learn that the packaging that Wal-Mart advises suppliers to avoid  PVC  is the same kind of material used in plastic pipes that can convey drinking water. If one of the world's largest retailers is encouraging its suppliers to avoid use of PVC plastic to improve environmental stewardship, we should encourage policymakers to similarly review the use of a PVC pipe material that is documented to be hazardous in its production and disposal. When making important decisions on the right materials to use in replacing our aging water infrastructure, the safe and reliable choice is Ductile Iron Pipe, which uses up to 98 percent recycled content, and is itself a 100 percent recyclable material."

About the Ductile Iron Pipe Research Association

Since 1915, the Ductile Iron Pipe Research Association (DIPRA) has provided accurate and essential engineering information about cast iron, and now Ductile Iron Pipe, to utility officials and consulting engineers. The association provides research, publications and personal regional engineer services, as well as representation on standards-making committees. While DIPRA member companies have different names and locations, they share a common commitment to produce and deliver the finest quality water and wastewater pipe material in the world, Ductile Iron Pipe, and at the greatest possible value to its purchasers.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160822/400186LOGO

SOURCE Ductile Iron Pipe Research Association (DIPRA)

Related Links

https://www.dipra.org


AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- eRelevance Corp., a leading marketing automation service provider for SMBs, today announced it has been named a finalist for Red Herring's 2016 Top 100 Global Award, a prestigious recognition honoring the year's most game-changing private technology companies and entrepreneurs from across the globe.

"We are honored to be recognized by Red Herring for the way we are revolutionizing customer marketing for small- to medium-size businesses (SMBs)," said Bob Fabbio, co-founder and CEO of eRelevance Corporation. "We have created a disruptive tech-powered marketing service for a multi-billion-dollar industry that is ripe for disruption."

Red Herring selected the companies demonstrating the most innovative technologies and business models from over 1,000 companies in more than 40 nations. These companies, representing past Red Herring Asia, Europe and North America award winners in their respective regions, are judged on a range of qualitative and quantitative metrics, including technology innovation, financial performance, growth, management execution, potential globalization strategy, and market share improvement.

"In today's economies, the unrivaled technology ubiquity is not only disrupting how we work but also how we live and think. The vast amount of data and intellectual property combined with the innovation and disruption created by today's entrepreneurs is touching every sector. More than 300 startups are striving in the construction field alone. The 2016 Red Herring nominees have proven that while some will worry about a bubble, there is no pause in innovation any time soon. And nothing must be taken for granted in this electoral year," said Red Herring CEO Alex Vieux. "Speed, creativity and unconventional business models are constantly shifting investors' thesis and users' behaviorboth are demanding more, not less, from entrepreneurs. An unprecedented number of entrepreneurs are jumping ahead of the competition and making a difference. Constant breakthroughs make recent developments obsolete faster than ever before.

"In light of everything, eRelevance is performing exceptionally well in its field and deserves to be singled out as one of the Red Herring Global finalists. At this stage, we are left with the daunting task to select the best qualified companies for the 2016 Top 100 Global Award." The finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring Global forum in Los Angeles, November 15 to 17. Winners will be announced November 17.

Fabbio will participate in the event keynote, speaking on Managing Growth and Lessons Learned. Known as a visionary and serial entrepreneur, he has founded and built multiple industry-leading healthcare and technology companies by identifying emerging markets, gaining intimate knowledge of market needs, challenging conventional wisdom, and bringing innovative solutions to market.

About Red Herring

Red Herring is a global media company that unites the world's best high-technology innovators, venture investors and business decision-makers in a variety of forums, including print, online and exclusive events worldwide. It provides an insider's access to the global innovation economy, identifying new and innovative technology companies and entrepreneurs. Its Red Herring 100 awards have recognized more than 5,000 companies in their early stages, including Baidu, Google, eBay and Skype.

About eRelevance Corporation

eRelevance's marketing automation service is an innovative approach to helping SMBs generate revenue from customers. Its expert marketing, done by marketing experts, is faster, cheaper and more effective. Unlike traditional marketing consultants, eRelevance marries next-generation technology and experts, at an attractive price. There are no marketing tools to learn or use, nor expensive consulting fees. eRelevance's marketing service generates, on average, 16x the ROI potential per month for its customers.

Photo(s):

https://www.prlog.org/12600879

Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE eRelevance Corporation

Related Links

http://www.erelevancecorp.com


DENVER, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Tata Capital from India and a UN Women campaign from Egypt are the 2016 winners of the EthicMark Awards for advertising and media campaigns that "uplift the human spirit and society."

Advertising is expected to reach $579 billion globally this year. Out of this world-wide information overload, Ethical Markets Media and the World Business Academy announced the winners at the 27th annual SRI Conference on Sustainable, Responsible, Impact Investing in Denver, Colorado. Renowned futurist Hazel Henderson, President of Ethical Markets Media and Founder of the EthicMark Awards, and Rosalinda Sanquiche, Managing Director, introduced the award-winning campaigns to over 650 investors and investment professionals working to demonstrate the positive impact of marketing to their sustainability mission.

The Non-Profit winner is Give Mom Back Her Name. For men in the Middle East, it is taboo to say their mother's name in public. Women become referred to as 'The mother of her eldest son'. To eradicate the taboo, UN Women launched on Egyptian Mother's Day a campaign urging appreciation for a lifetime of love "with one small gift": recognizing mothers as incredible individuals, opening a larger, worldwide conversation on women's rights and gender equality. "Where the individuality of women becomes blurred with her "duties" in the family, it is this notion that we are aiming to challenge", says Mohammad Naciri, UN Women Regional Director for Arab States. The success of this campaign "continues to inspire us to think outside the box in our communication strategy."

The Do Right Initiative from Tata Capital is the winner in the For Profit category. Tata Capital's mission to "Do Right" provides the connection for two Indias  one progressing rapidly, and one still facing basic challenges. The extensive coverage of uplifting stories from some of the most remote areas in India turned into a viral media campaign to "crowdsolve," bringing together celebrities, experts in agriculture and community development, donors, bloggers, and teachers with those most in need. "Tata Capital is delighted to win the EthicMark Award," says Managing Director and CEO, Praveen Kadle. "The Do Right Initiative stems from Tata Capital's brand promise of 'We only do what's right for you' and is a confluence of the brand's purpose and positive societal impact. This prestigious Award is a validation of our efforts on a global stage."

The EthicMark Awards seek to transform advertising by demonstrating the power of media campaigns to inspire, focus on human potentials and further both public and private legitimate interests. Unlike other advertising and marketing awards, EthicMark award-winning companies are recognized for the creativity of their message, the value of the product or service, and the quality of the company culture. This all-encompassing standard ensures the integrity of the Awards and the esteem accruable to winners' reputations.

The international panel of expert judges base their decision on portrayal of healthy lifestyles and behavior for consumers; high standards of responsibility and trustworthiness; respect for diversity and human rights, and avoiding sordid, sensationalist, or degrading depictions. Winners model and publicize the value of ethics in well-functioning markets while simultaneously promoting what is profitable for business, society, and the planet.

The EthicMark Awards are presented annually at The SRI Conference and are co-sponsored by Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil), the World Business Academy, ESPM (Brazil's premier communication and marketing university), Sustainable Brands, GlobeScan, Tomorrow's Company, and TBLI Conference, in cooperation with media partner, Where Good Grows.

ABOUT THE SRI CONFERENCE

The SRI Conference (http://www.SRIconference.com/) brings together leaders in the philanthropy and foundation worlds to participate in the largest, longest-running annual meeting of responsible investors and investment professionals. Conference participation is open to investment professionals, institutional investors, and related organizations and individuals working to direct the flow of investment capital in more positive, healthy, transformative waystoward the creation of a truly sustainable future. The conference experience features educational sessions and a focused opportunity to network with hundreds of like-minded individuals, organizations, and industry leaders.

ABOUT FIRST AFFIRMATIVE FINANCIAL NETWORK

First Affirmative Financial Network, LLC (http://www.firstaffirmative.com) is a Registered Investment Advisor (SEC File #801-56587) offering investment consulting and asset management services through a nationwide network of investment professionals who specialize in sustainable, responsible, impact (SRI) investing. A certified B Corp, First Affirmative produces The SRI Conference (http://www.SRIconference.com).

ABOUT ETHICAL MARKETS MEDIA

Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil) is a multinational Certified B Corporation, whose mission is reforming markets and metrics while helping accelerate and track the transition to the green economy worldwide with the Green Transition Scoreboard, Transforming Finance TV Series, Principles of Ethical Biomimicry Finance and with reports, articles, newsletters, and analysis by Hazel Henderson, editor-in-chief, on EthicalMarkets.com, focusing on best practices to raise global standards. http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/?cat=20 Ethicalmarkets.tv streams original Ethical Markets productions and video gathered from around the world.

SOURCE The SRI Conference, Denver

Related Links

http://www.sriconference.com


NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Markets - 2016-2022

2010, 2015 & 2020

With 1.8 million asylum seekers (UN reports) crossing Western Europe's external borders in 2015, the European border agencies are facing challenges with a far greater reach than ever before. More than 1000 ISIS-trained jihadists returning to Europe every year, coupled with the surge of migrants to Europe are alarming concerns; as present capabilities of the European border, coast guard, intelligence services and immigration agencies simply cannot meet these challenges.



The EU-Turkey deal (if implemented) might lead to a significant decrease in the flow of refugees (by March-April 2016 the rate of migrants entering Greece declined by 90%). However, the agreement faces formidable practical, political and legal challenges (e.g., each and every one of the 22 EU parliaments has to endorse the treaty).



In the aftermath of the migration crisis and the Paris and Brussels terror attacks, a major overhaul of the Western European border security and immigration infrastructure, strategy and funding is already underway.



Following a 2010 to 2015 annual market growth of 10-13% the 2015 to 2020 annual market will surge by 104%.



The "European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Markets  2016-2022" report is the most comprehensive review of the market available today. It provides a detailed and reasoned roadmap of this growing market.



The European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Market is boosted by the following drivers:

The Western European border security, coast guards, immigration agencies and intelligence agencies are ill-equipped to counter the surge of refugees and 21st century jihadists who use sophisticated means to return to the continent.



The Schengen Area is comprised of 26 European countries that have abolished border control at their common borders. Several Schengen Area governments reinstated border checkpoints by 2015.



Europe cannot build a wall to keep out refugees and terrorists or enlist millions of border guards who would need to watch every inch of its over 10,000 land borders and 80,000 coastlines.



Europol estimates that up to 5,000 European jihadists have already returned to Western Europe after obtaining combat experience on the battlefields of the Middle East.



On 15 December 2015, the European Commission presented a proposal for a new agency that would replace and succeed Frontex, having a stronger role and mandate, and forming a "European Border and Coast Guard" along with national authorities for border management.



Of Europe's approximately 50 countries, Russia has by far the longest coastline as well as the longest land border.



Western Europe, the largest economy in the world with a 2015 GDP of approximately $22 trillion (vs. the U.S. $17.5 trillion), can invest "whatever it takes" to protect its citizens from the looming jeopardies of mass migration and terrorism.



The border security and immigration enforcement industry faces a considerable challenge in seeking to provide the necessary solutions to current and future threats. At the same time, this challenge presents multi-billion USD opportunities to the defense, ICT and security industries able to deliver effective functions, integrate systems, and maximize security and productivity per $ invested.



According to European intelligence services, ISIS has approximately 5000 original European blank passports which can be used by jihadists returning to the EU.



The EU and the rest of the European border security and immigration infrastructure enforcement market for products and services are served by local defense and security companies. Even with a preference for locally manufactured products, foreign products can usually strongly compete on the basis of cost-performance. They do not encounter any EU direct trade barriers or quotas. Non-tariff, indirect trade barriers may be the approval process of dual use goods, which include many security market products.



This report is a resource for executives with interests in the market. It has been explicitly customized for the security industry and other decision-makers in order to identify business opportunities, developing technologies, market trends and risks, as well as to benchmark business plans.



* Customers who purchase a multi-readers license of the report will get the "Global Homeland Security & Public Safety Industry  2016 Edition" report free of charge. Single-reader license customers will get a 50% discount for the Industry report.



Questions answered in this 289-page report + one* reports include:

What will the market size and trends be during 2016-2022?

Which are the submarkets that provide attractive business opportunities?

Who are the decision-makers?

What drives the immigration enforcement & border security agencies to purchase products and services?

What are the customers looking for?

What are the technology & services trends?

What is the market SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats)?

What are the challenges to market penetration & growth?



With 289 pages, 31 tables and 49 figures, the "European Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Markets  2016-2022" report covers 12 countries and regions, 4 technologies and 3 revenue source submarkets, offering for each of them 2015 data and assessments, and 2016-2022 forecasts and analyses.



Why Buy this Report?

A. Market data is analyzed via 3 key orthogonal perspectives:

With a highly fragmented market we address the "money trail"  each dollar spent  via the following 3 viewpoints:

By 12 Country and Region Markets:

UK

France

Holland & Belgium

Sweden, Norway, Finland & Denmark

Germany

Austria & Switzerland

Italy

Spain

Poland

Hungary & Czech Republic

Russia

Rest of Europe

By 3 Revenue Sources including:

Products Sales Revenues

After Sale Revenues Including: Maintenance, Service, Upgrades & Refurbishment

Other Revenues Including: Planning, Training, Consulting, Contracted Services & Government Funded R&D

By 4 Technologies:

Automatic Border Control (ABC) Systems

Border & Perimeter Barriers

Visa Issuance IT Systems

Smart Borders, Immigration Enforcement & Border Security Technologies

B. Detailed market analysis frameworks for each of the market sectors, including:

Market drivers & inhibitors

Business opportunities

SWOT analysis

Competitive analysis

Business environment

The 2015-2022 market segmented by 36 submarkets

C. The report includes the following 5 appendices:

Appendix A: European Homeland Security & Public Safety Related Product Standards

Appendix B: The European Union Challenges and Outlook

Appendix C: Europe Migration Crisis & Border Security

Appendix D: Abbreviations

D. The report addresses over 300 European Homeland Security and Public Safety standards (including links)

E. The supplementary (*) "Global Homeland Security & Public Safety Industry  2016 Edition" report provides the following insights and analysis of the industry including:

The Global Industry 2016 status

Effects of Emerging Technologies on the Industry

The Market Trends

Vendor  Government Relationship

Geopolitical Outlook 2016-2022

The Industry Business Models & Strategies

Market Entry Challenges

The Industry: Supply-Side & Demand-Side Analysis

Market Entry Strategies

Price Elasticity

Past Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) Events

F. The supplementary (*) "Global Homeland Security & Public Safety Industry  2016 Edition" report provides a May 2016 updated extensive data (including company profile, recent annual revenues, key executives, homeland security and public safety products, and contact info.) of the leading 119 Homeland Security and Public Safety vendors including:



3M

3i-MIND

3VR

3xLOGIC

ABB

Accenture

ACTi Corporation

ADT Security Services

AeroVironment Inc.

Agent Video Intelligence

Airbus Defence and Space

Alcatel-Lucent (Nokia Group)

ALPHAOPEN

American Science & Engineering Inc.

Anixter

Aralia Systems

AT&T Inc.

Augusta Systems

Austal

Avigilon Corporation

Aware

Axis

AxxonSoft

Ayonix

BAE Systems

BioEnable Technologies Pvt Ltd

BioLink Solutions

Boeing

Bollinger Shipyards, Inc

Bosch Security Systems

Bruker Corporation

BT

Camero

Cassidian

CelPlan

China Security & Surveillance, Inc.

Cisco Systems

Citilog

Cognitec Systems GmbH

Computer Network Limited (CNL)

Computer Sciences Corporation

CrossMatch

Diebold

DRS Technologies Inc.

DVTel

Elbit Systems Ltd.

Elsag Datamat

Emerson Electric

Ericsson

ESRI

FaceFirst

Finmeccanica SpA

Firetide

Fulcrum Biometrics LLC

G4S

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.

General Dynamics Corporation

Getac Technology Corporation

Hanwha Techwin

Harris Corporation

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hexagon AB

Honeywell International Inc.

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd

IBM

IndigoVision

Intel Security

IntuVision Inc

iOmniscient

IPConfigure

IPS Intelligent Video Analytics

Iris ID Systems, Inc.

IriTech Inc.

Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd.

ISS

L-3 Security & Detection Systems

Leidos, Inc.

Lockheed Martin Corporation

MACROSCOP

MDS

Mer group

Milestone Systems A/S

Mirasys

Motorola Solutions, Inc.

National Instruments

NEC Corporation

NICE Systems

Northrop Grumman Corporation

Nuance Communications, Inc.

ObjectVideo

Panasonic Corporation

Pelco

Pivot3

Proximex

QinetiQ Limited

Rapiscan Systems, Inc.

Raytheon

Rockwell Collins, Inc.

Safran S.A.

Salient Sciences

Schneider Electric

SeeTec

Siemens

Smart China (Holdings) Limited

Smiths Detection Inc.

Sony Corp.

Speech Technology Center

Suprema Inc.

Synectics Plc

Tandu Technologies & Security Systems Ltd

Texas Instruments

Textron Inc.

Thales Group

Total Recall

Unisys Corporation

Verint

Vialogy LLC

Vigilant Technology

Zhejiang Dahua Technology

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03837918-summary/view-report.html



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



http://www.reportlinker.com





__________________________

Contact Clare: [email protected]

US: (339)-368-6001

Intl: +1 339-368-6001

SOURCE Reportlinker

Related Links

http://www.reportlinker.com


NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The food safety testing market is gaining growing level of importance worldwide owing to continual increase in number of food-borne disease outbreaks, increasingly stringent regulations on food safety, globalization of food trade, sustained number of food recalls, among others. Food safety is threatened by microbial pathogens, viruses, toxins, genetically modified organism content, pesticides, food allergens and others. Food contamination now-a-days is quickly becoming a worldwide issue, that is raising the concern for adequate food safety testing methods and procedures. Food-related queries and complaints are continuously rising with time, which reflects a growing concern of government authorities and consumers. These reasons put a huge pressure on food companies to ensure food safety. The global food safety testing market is anticipated to expand at a steady rate through 2021.

Food Safety Testing Market by Contaminant - Among contaminant, testing for pathogens dominated the food safety testing market. Toxins represents the second largest segment within the food safety testing market being followed by Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) at the third spot in 2015. Pesticide is the fourth leading contaminant with around XX% share of the food safety testing market in 2015.



Food Safety Testing Market by Pathogen - In 2015, salmonella testing dominated the global market for food pathogen testing owing to the large number of foodborne outbreaks due to Salmonella in foods such as meat & poultry, dairy, processed food, and fruits & vegetables. E-coli testing is the second leading segment of the food pathogen testing market being followed by Campylobacter and Listeria. Campylobacter and Listeria food testing segment is competing closely with each other to grab maximum share of the global food pathogen testing market.

Food Safety Testing Market by Food Type - The global food safety testing market is dominated by processed food and meat & poultry products as maximum number of illnesses have been associated with these applications globally. These two segment together accounted for over 60% share of the total food safety testing market in 2015. Dairy and dairy products is the third leading application of food safety testing market being followed by fruits and vegetables.



Food Safety Testing Market by Region - Geographically, North America is at the forefront of food safety testing market, accounting for lion's share of the market in 2015. Western Europe is the second leading region for food safety testing market and it is likely to remain at this position throughout the forecasting period. Japan captured third highest share of the global food safety testing market in 2015 being followed by China. The Asia-Pacific market is driven by stringent food safety regulations and the trend of globalization in food supply trade.



Food Safety Testing Market by Method / Technology - Immunodiagnostics accounted for largest share of the food safety testing market being followed by traditional microbiology. Traditional microbiology market share is declining year on year owing to the time consuming and labor intensive factors associated with the traditional methods. Molecular diagnostics have the potential to revolutionize quality testing in food production. It is anticipated that molecular diagnostics will capture XX% share of the food safety testing market by 2021. Due to the health and safety risks posed by chemical, microbiological and environmental contaminants, analytical methods are increasingly becoming a centerpiece of food safety programs.



iGATE RESEARCH report titled "Food Safety Testing Market (by Contaminants, Pathogens, Type of Food Tested, Technology/Method and Regional Analysis) - Global Forecast to 2021" provides a comprehensive assessment of the fast-evolving, high-growth global food safety testing Market. This report covers various aspects of the food safety testing market including Contaminants, Pathogen Segment, Food Type, Method / Technology, Regional Market, Company Analysis, Major Acquisitions in Food Safety Testing Market Landscape, and Growth Drivers and Challenges influencing Global Food Safety Testing Market.



This 160 Page report with 52 Figures and 10 Tables has been analyzed from 9 viewpoints:



1. Global - Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast (2008 - 2021)

2. Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - By Contaminant (2010 - 2021)

3. Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - By Pathogen (2010 - 2021)

4. Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - By Food Type (2015 - 2021)

5. Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - Regional Analysis (2010 - 2021)

6. Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - By Method / Technology (2012 - 2021)

7. Global Food Safety Testing Market - Major Acquisitions (2004 - 2016)

8. Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - Key Players Analysis

9. Global Food Safety Testing Market - Growth Drivers and Challenges



Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - By Contaminant



1. Pathogens

2. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

3. Toxins

4. Pesticides

5. Other (Food Allergens and Chemical Residues)



Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - By Pathogen



1. Salmonella

2. E-Coli

3. Listeria

4. Campylobacter

5. Others



Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - By Food Type



1. Meat and Poultry

2. Dairy and Dairy Products

3. Processed Food

4. Fruits and Vegetables

5. Others (Cereals, Grains and Sauce)



Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - Regional Analysis



1. North America

2. Central and South America

3. Western Europe

4. Eastern Europe

5. Japan

6. China

7. Rest of Asia Pacific

8. Middle East and Africa



Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - By Method / Technology



1. Traditional Microbiology

2. Immunodiagnostics

3. Molecular Diagnostics

4. Analytical Chemistry



Global Food Safety Testing Market and Forecast - Key Players Analysis



1. Agilent Technologies

2. bioMerieux SA

3. DuPont

4. 3M

5. Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc

6. Bio-Rad

7. SGS SA

8. Eurofins

9. Intertek

10. Bureau Veritas

11. Neogen Corporation



Research Methodologies



Primary Research Methodologies: Questionnaires, Surveys, Interviews with Individuals, Small Groups, Telephonic Interview, etc.



Secondary Research Methodologies: Printable and Non-printable sources, Newspaper, Magazine and Journal Content, Government and NGO Statistics, white Papers, Information on the Web, Information from Agencies Such as Industry Bodies, Companies Annual Report, Government Agencies, Libraries and Local Councils and a large number of Paid Databases.





Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p04292715-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


LINDON, Utah, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

ForeverGreen Worldwide Corporation (OTCBB: FVRG), a leading direct marketing company and provider of health-centered products, today announced its pre-orders for new product, Prodigy-5, already total more than $1.5M. Management has also instigated cost cutting measures to reduce overhead and anticipates the November launch of Prodigy-5 will grow revenues.

The Company is also reviewing its entire line of products to determine which may be consolidated or reworked to fit into their exciting global Xpress model. "We continually manage our systems and logistics centers around the world to support the demand for our products and business opportunity. We continually challenge ourselves to continue to meet a high standard of quality and customer service and maintain the highest levels of Member satisfaction," commented COO Rob Ferguson.

The company has experienced an increase in overall sales since the announcement of the soon to be released Prodigy-5 and leading up to and following the Paris Momentum European Convention in Paris, France held two weeks ago. Leading up the Paris event and immediately following the event, membership enrollments have increased by over 25%. "The unveiling of Prodigy-5 to the world is already producing indicators for an extraordinary future of success," commented CEO Ron Williams.

The envelope model thrives especially in the European market accounting for over 50% of its sales. The new global Xpress model product, Prodigy-5 is expected to thrive in both the European market and worldwide. The European market is, however, the company's largest market in terms of members and product sold.

For more information on ForeverGreen's products, visit http://www.forevergreen.org.



ForeverGreen Worldwide Corporation develops, manufactures and distributes an expansive line of all natural whole foods and products to North America, Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, including their new global Xpress offerings, PowerStrips, SolarStrips and BeautyStrips. They also offer their new North America weight-management line Ketopia, along with Azul and FrequenSea, whole-food beverages with industry exclusive marine phytoplankton, a line of hemp-based whole-food products, immune support and weight management products, Pulse-8 powdered L-arginine formula, 24Karat Chocolate.



Forward-Looking Statement

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that certain statements in this release are "forward-looking statements" and involve both known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. Such uncertainties include, among others, certain risks associated with the operation of the company described above. The company's actual results could differ materially from expected results.





Contact:

ForeverGreen Worldwide Corporation

Craig Smith

801-655-5500

[email protected]

or

Brokers and Analysts:

Chesapeake Group

410-825-3930

[email protected]



SOURCE ForeverGreen Worldwide Corporation
CLEVELAND, Ohio, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Alphabet, the parent company of Google, recently scrapped plans to partner with Starbucks to deliver coffee using drones. Alphabet had previously tested delivery of the coffee chain's products as part of its Project Wing pilot program. The tests used hybrid vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) drones that hover in place and lower their cargo to the ground on a rope.

According to Bloomberg.com, the decision was made as part of a broader effort by the firm to turn what are currently money-losing experimental projects into real businesses. Disagreements with Starbucks over access to desired customer data also played a major role in Alphabet's decision.

The full article can be read here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-08/alphabet-taps-brakes-on-drone-project-nixing-starbucks-partnership

David Vos, the former leader of Project Wing, said last year that the company's goal was to have a commercial business up and running in 2017. However, his departure from Alphabet last month and subsequent efforts to trim the program's staff will make this difficult at best.

Safety concerns about commercial drone operation and strict government regulations are also likely to keep drone delivery services from being a viable business for a number of years, according to Ken Long, an analyst at the Freedonia Group. Alphabet's recent focus on research and development projects with relatively short term profit potential made it easier for the company to make the decision to cut its spending on drones.

Commercial drone operation is regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which recently eliminated some of the most burdensome and expensive restrictions placed on their use, including the requirement that the operator have a pilot's license. However, other rules that have had a dampening effect on commercial drone use -- such as the requirement that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can only be flown within visual line of sight of the operator -- remain in place, unless the applicant can demonstrate how such flights will be safe and a waiver is granted by the FAA.

"Sense-and-avoid" and other safety technologies have improved greatly in recent years, but drone mishaps still occur. This will prevent commercial drone delivery services from taking off in the US until testing and demonstration projects show that autonomous drone operation is safe in real world settings. As a result, you probably won't be able to order a Caramel Brulee Frappuccino from Starbucks on your smartphone and have it delivered to you by drone anytime soon.

Nevertheless, US commercial drone demand is expected to expand rapidly from what is currently an extremely small market base, according to Long's recent Freedonia Group study. "The largest dollar increases through 2020 will be posted by drones used in real estate and utility business applications," says Long. Current regulatory limitations on drone use are not as important in these markets as they are in technologically challenging applications like delivery services, and the potential cost savings that drone use can provide are substantial. Both factors will lead to robust increases in product demand.

The Freedonia Group Drones (UAVs) study, written by Long, can be accessed here: http://www.freedoniagroup.com/industry-study/3408/drones-uavs.htm

About The Freedonia Group  The Freedonia Group, a division of MarketResearch.com, is a leading international industrial research company publishing more than 100 studies annually. Since 1985 we have provided research to customers ranging in size from global conglomerates to one-person consulting firms. More than 90% of the industrial companies in the Fortune 500 use Freedonia Group research to help with their strategic planning. Each study includes product and market analyses and forecasts, in-depth discussions of important industry trends, market share information and profiles of the leading industry players. Reports can be purchased at www.freedoniagroup.com and are also available on www.marketresearch.com and www.profound.com.

Press Contact:

Corinne Gangloff

+1 440.684.9600

[email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160805/396004LOGO

SOURCE The Freedonia Group

Related Links

http://www.freedoniagroup.com


MANHEIM, Pa., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Texas-born heritage brand, Fuddruckers, will soon have a fourth home for the "World's Greatest Hamburgers" in Pennsylvania thanks to a partnership with regional franchisee, Roth Foods Inc. Proprietor Jeff Roth is putting the final touches on the new 4,500-square-foot fast casual restaurant in Manheim in preparation for the November 14 debut. Roth also owns and operates a Fuddruckers in Hershey, PA.

Located at 2001 Strickler Road, adjacent to the Hampton Inn & Suites Mount Joy/Lancaster West off Highway 283, the restaurant will feature seating for 130 guests and decor that references Fuddruckers' classic, Americana origins, including whimsical elements ranging from arcade games to roadhouse signage.

According to Peter Tropoli, Chief Operating Officer of Luby's, Inc., "We're incredibly grateful for the generous reception we've had in Manheim, as well as the support and local expertise of Roth Foods Inc. in making this pre-opening such a smooth process. We're excited to be expanding in Pennsylvania and eager to become part of this community, welcoming guests with a warm and engaging ambience and great food ideal for family gatherings, business lunches and date nights."

Since 1980, Fuddruckers has been obsessed with making the world happier, one great hamburger at a time. Grilled-to-order burgers feature always fresh and never frozen, 100% USDA premium-cut beef with no fillers or additives. Delicious, sesame-topped buns are baked from scratch on-site throughout the day to achieve the perfect combination of crisp crust and melt-in-your-mouth texture.

And while burgers are the signature, the engaging menu offers variety for many tastes with an array of sandwiches, platters and salads. No matter what they choose, customers can customize their meal with a trip to the legendary Build Your Own produce bar, which features fantastic fixings like sun-ripened tomatoes, lettuce, sliced onions, dill pickles, pico de gallo and classic cheese sauce.

About Luby's, Inc.

Luby's, Inc. (NYSE: LUB) operates restaurants under the brands Luby's Cafeteria, Fuddruckers and Cheeseburger in Paradise and provides food service management through its Luby's Culinary Services division. The company-operated restaurants include 91 Luby's Cafeterias, 74 Fuddruckers restaurants, eight Cheeseburger in Paradise full service restaurants and bars and one Bob Luby's Seafood Grill. Its Luby's Cafeterias are located primarily in Texas. In addition to the company-operated Fuddruckers locations, Luby's is the franchisor for 112 Fuddruckers franchise locations across the United States (including Puerto Rico), Canada, Mexico, Panama, Italy, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. Luby's Culinary Services provides food service management to 23 sites consisting of healthcare, higher education and corporate dining locations.

SOURCE Fuddruckers

Related Links

http://www.fuddruckers.com


LONDON, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Hemodynamic monitoring system enables continuous monitoring of movement of blood and pressure on the heart, veins and arteries. It also enables measuring blood flow as well as the amount of oxygen present in the blood. It is an efficient collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data of cardiopulmonary functions. In the report, we have segmented the market based on technologies and methods: pulse contour, oesophageal Doppler, volume clamp, hemodynamic monitoring sensors and pulmonary artery catheters. The scope of these devices is covered under end use hospitals, clinics, home care settings, ambulatory surgery centers and independent catheterisation laboratories.

In 2014, hemodynamic monitoring systems market was worth US$ 328.7 Mn. North America held the largest share in the global market in 2014 and is expected to retain its dominance over the forecast period.

This report offers updates on advancements in the hemodynamic monitoring systems market. It covers performance in terms of value and volume contribution. It also analyzes key trends, drivers, and restraints that are influencing this market.

The hemodynamic monitoring systems market is anticipated to register healthy CAGR during the forecast period. Factors fuelling market growth include rising prevalence of lifestyle diseases, government, and private sector initiatives to reduce healthcare costs, growing the geriatric patient population, increasing the incidence of respiratory disorders and growing demand for a screening of CCHD.

The global hemodynamic monitoring systems market has been segmented on the basis of device type into the devices based on technologies and methods: pulse contour, oesophageal Doppler, volume clamp, hemodynamic monitoring sensors and pulmonary artery catheters.

The pulmonary artery catheters segment is estimated to dominate the global hemodynamic monitoring systems market with 35.0% share by 2015 end, followed by volume clamp segment. Increasing concerns regarding the use of invasive techniques, particularly pulmonary artery catheter for measuring cardiac output, have paved the way for alternative methods for measuring hemodynamic variables. Cardiac surgeons are increasingly seeking less invasive approaches to aortic or mitral valve surgery. Key players are offering a variety of systems that enable minimal incision valve surgery.

By application, the invasive hemodynamic monitoring segment is projected to lose its dominance throughout the forecast period.

Noninvasive hemodynamic monitoring application segment is expected to gain BPS during the forecast period. However, minimally invasive hemodynamic monitoring segment is forecast to register highest CAGR among all three applications by the end of forecast period.

By end-use, the hemodynamic monitoring systems market is segmented into hospitals, home care settings, clinics, ambulatory surgery centers and independent catheterisation laboratories. Home care settings segment is expected to exhibit above-average growth during the forecast period.

Key market participants included in the report are Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, PULSION Medical Systems SE, ICU Medical, Inc., LiDCO Group Plc and Teleflex Incorporated. Global players focus on research and development initiatives to introduce innovative products in order to attain competitive advantage. Additionally, they are also focused on regional expansion through mergers and acquisitions.

The global hemodynamic monitoring systems market is segmented into:

Global Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, by Device Type

Pulse Contour

Oesophageal Doppler

Volume Clamp

Hemodynamic Monitoring Sensors

Pulmonary Artery Catheters

Global Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, by Application

Invasive Hemodynamic Monitoring

Noninvasive Hemodynamic Monitoring

Minimally Invasive Hemodynamic Monitoring

Global Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, by End-Use

Hospitals

Clinics

Ambulatory Surgery Centers

Home Care Settings

Independent Catheterization Laboratories

Global Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, by Region

North America

Latin America

Europe

APAC

The Middle East & Africa

Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4040022/

About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com

For more information: Sarah Smith Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 208 816 85 48 Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

http://www.reportbuyer.com


ASHDOD, Israel, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Integrity Applications, Inc. (OTCQB: IGAP), maker of GlucoTrack, a non-invasive device for measuring glucose levels of people with Type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetics, announced today that it has appointed Philip M. Darivoff and Revan R. Schwartz to its Board of Directors, effective November 9, 2016.

Mr. Darivoff currently serves as Chairman of the Board of DFG Investment Advisers, a credit asset manager with approximately $2.6 billion AUM, and Chairman of the Board of DFG's parent company, Vibrant Capital Partners, LLC. Prior to joining DFG, Mr. Darivoff spent nearly 27 years at Goldman Sachs, where he most recently served as a member of the firm's Structured Finance Capital Committee and Director of the Goldman Sachs Office of Alumni Relations. He initially joined Goldman in 1985 as an associate, was named managing director in 1996, and general partner in 1998. He served as head of Capital Markets, co-head of the Corporate Bond Department, and chairman of Credit Capital Markets. Mr. Darivoff retired from Goldman Sachs in 2013. Mr. Darivoff graduated from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Economics and MBA. He is also a Chartered Financial Analyst.

Mr. Darivoff previously served as an Integrity director from 2006 to 2009, while the Company was a privately held corporation and subsequently resigned from the Board as the Company transitioned into a publicly reporting company, as he was then holding a senior role at Goldman Sachs. Mr. Darivoff is an investor and has been a significant shareholder of Integrity Applications for over a decade. Through his investment vehicle, Vayikra Capital LLC, he is currently the second largest shareholder.

"Integrity has made significant advancements in the development of the GlucoTrack DF-F," said Mr. Darivoff. "I am pleased to rejoin Integrity's Board at this exciting time, as the Company begins the commercialization phase, and to assist management in executing its strategic plan."

Mr. Schwartz is an attorney and currently maintains a private law practice. He began his career with the East New York Savings Bank (ENYSB) where he held several administrative and management positions, including a position overseeing a life insurance subsidiary. Revan held the position of General Counsel for AAA Computer, Hafco International Trading Corporation, Bermil Industries, Viking Credit Corp and The Pride Group. Most recently Revan was Executive Vice President and General Counsel for Andrew Garrett, Inc., a boutique securities and investment banking firm that has served as Integrity Applications' Investment Bank since 2009. While with Andrew Garrett, Revan possessed NASD/FINRA Series 4, 7, 24, 27, 53 and 55 licenses.

Mr. Schwartz attended the New York Institute of Technology where he attained his Bachelor of Science Degree, Majoring in Accounting with a Minor in Economics, Summa Cum Laude. Mr. Schwartz also attended St. John's University, School of Law, where he attained his Juris Doctor Degree, Cum Laude. He is currently a member of the New York and Florida Bars.

"It is a pleasure to join Integrity's Board and I look forward to working with the other directors and the management team as the Company commences its commercialization of the GlucoTrack in global markets," said Mr. Schwartz.

"We are delighted to have Phil and Revan join our Board of Directors," said Avner Gal, President and CEO of Integrity Applications. "This represents further progress in our goal of expanding our board, to increase our breadth of experience and expertise to support the Company during this important growth phase."

About Integrity Applications, Inc.

Integrity Applications, Inc. is a medical device company focused on the design, development and commercialization of non-invasive glucose monitoring devices for use by people with diabetes. Integrity Applications has developed the GlucoTrack model DF-F non-invasive glucose monitoring device, which is designed to help people with diabetes obtain glucose level measurements without the pain, inconvenience, incremental cost and difficulty or discomfort of conventional (invasive) spot finger stick devices. Integrity Applications operates primarily through its wholly-owned Israeli subsidiary, A.D. Integrity Applications, Ltd. For more information, please visit www.integrity-app.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Statements contained in this news release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, words such as "expect", "plan" and "will" are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that certain important factors may affect Integrity Applications' actual results and could cause such results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements that may be made in this news release. Factors that may affect Integrity Applications' results include, but are not limited to, the ability of Integrity Applications to raise additional capital to finance its operations (whether through public or private equity offerings, debt financings, strategic collaborations or otherwise); risks relating to the receipt (and timing) of regulatory approvals (including FDA approval); risks relating to enrollment of patients in, and the conduct of, clinical trials; risks relating to its current and future distribution agreements; risks relating to its ability to hire and retain qualified personnel, including sales and distribution personnel; and the additional risk factors described in Integrity Applications' filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015 as filed with the SEC on March 30, 2016.

Contact:

Eran Hertz, CFO Integrity Applications,

+972 (8) 675-7878 Ext. 400

[email protected]

SOURCE Integrity Applications, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.integrity-app.com


CHICAGO, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Grainger (NYSE: GWW), the leading broad line supplier of maintenance, repair and operating products (MRO) serving businesses and institutions, today held its Annual Analyst Meeting in Lake Forest, Illinois. DG Macpherson, Grainger Chief Executive Officer, hosted the event. The meeting also included presentations from other Grainger leaders.

"Over the past several years, we have invested to position our business for long-term success and meet the evolving needs of our customers," said Chief Executive Officer DG Macpherson. He added, "We are leveraging these investments to provide unique value to customers of all types and sizes. And, we expect to enhance our industry-leading customer experience by making our pricing simpler and more relevant to drive faster growth and stronger share gain in our U.S. business for a broader set of customers. We expect that these actions, along with continued reductions in our cost structure and a turn-around of our business in Canada, will improve our financial performance and strengthen returns to shareholders," Macpherson concluded.

As part of the meeting, Grainger provided the following outlook for sales and earnings in 2016 and 2017, adjusted for special items that the company believes are not indicative of ongoing operations:

For the 2016 fourth quarter, the company is forecasting sales of -1 to 3 percent and expects earnings per share of $2.27 to $2.57 .

. For the full year 2016, the company reiterated its sales forecast of 1.5 to 2.5 percent and earnings per share guidance of $11.40 to $11.70 .

. For the full year 2017, the company is forecasting sales growth of 2 to 6 percent and earnings per share of $11.30 to $12.40 .

Grainger also updated its longer term operating margin targets. The company now expects operating margins, excluding special items that the company believes are not indicative of ongoing operations, to increase from a range of 11.7 to 12.2 percent in 2017 to a range of 13 to 14 percent by the year 2021. This 25 to 50 basis point improvement per year is expected to come from organic sales growth in the mid to high single-digits and continued strong cost productivity. In addition, Grainger expects its Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)* to improve from a range of 24 to 26 percent in 2017 to 31 to 33 percent in 2021 driven by higher sales and operating margins, lower capital spending and increased productivity across its existing asset base.

Information presented at the Annual Analyst Meeting, including details supporting the company's guidance and longer term expectations, can be found in the News and Events section of the Investor Relations website, www.grainger.com/investor.

About Grainger

W.W. Grainger, Inc., with 2015 sales of $10 billion, is North America's leading broad line supplier of maintenance, repair and operating products (MRO), with operations also in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

*Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)

The GAAP financial statements are the source for all amounts used in the Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) calculation. ROIC is calculated using operating earnings divided by net working assets (a 4-point average for the year). Net working assets are working assets minus working liabilities defined as follows: working assets equal total assets less cash equivalents, deferred taxes and investments in unconsolidated entities, plus the LIFO reserve. Working liabilities are the sum of trade payables, accrued compensation and benefits, accrued contributions to employees' profit sharing plans and accrued expenses.

Safe Harbor Statement

All statements in this communication, other than those relating to historical facts, are "forward-looking statements" based on our current view of the competitive market and the overall environment. Factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those statements include, among other risks and uncertainties, a major loss of customers or suppliers, competitive pressures, legal proceedings, changes in laws and regulations, general economic, industry or market conditions, technological or operational disruptions, natural and other catastrophes and other factors that can be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent Forms 10-K and 10-Q, which are available on our Investor Relations website. We disclaim any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, except as required by law.

SOURCE W.W. Grainger, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.grainger.com


ALBANY, New York, November 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The global halal products market has expanded at a promising pace in the past few years and is expected to embark upon a path of exponential growth in the next few years as well. Rising global population of the Muslim community and rising disposable incomes across some of the world's prominent Islamic countries are expected to be the key drivers of the market. However, the market is expected to bear the brunt of the lack of transparency with respect to the use of ingredients for the pharmaceutical and personal care products and the absence of a globally uniform halal standard.

Transparency Market Research estimates that the global halal products market, which was valued at US$2.70 trillion in 2015, will rise to US$10.51 trillion by 2024, exhibiting a CAGR of 16.2% from 2016 to 2024.

Download Sample PDF Brochure for Professional & Technical Breakthroughs at http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=16643

Rising Global Muslim Population Key to Market Growth

Being the prime consumer of halal products, the rising population of the Muslim community across the globe is one of the most prominent drivers of the global market for halal products. Studies estimate that by 2030, nearly 26% of the world's population will be accounted by Muslims, which is a vast rise from the 19.9% in 1990. Moreover, the rising disposable income of Islamic countries, chiefly owing to the rapid growth of the Islamic economies in Middle East and South East Asia, is also expected to contribute to the market growth in the next few years. In addition to this, the consumption of halal products by other communities is also on the rise, which is expected to further fuel the global demand for halal products.

The market is also embarking upon a promising growth path owing to rising urbanization and the resultant improvement seen in the retail sector in the past few years across many key markets. Earlier, the halal food market was highly unorganized. The present-day halal products market, on the other hand, features a highly organized retail structure with the presence of a large number of retail outlets selling a vast variety of halal products. Moreover, the high degree of globalization of the halal market and multilateral trade agreements have boosted the trade flow of halal products.

Browse Regional PR: http://www.europlat.org/global-halal-products-market.htm

Lack of Globally Uniform Standards to Hinder Market Growth

There exists a clear distinction between halal products and haram products, with the latter denoting food or daily use items unacceptable for use according to Islamic (sharia) law. Nevertheless, the difference in Islamic regulatory bodies across different countries leads to varying definitions of halal products across the globe. Hence the products accepted by the Halal Certification Board of a particular country may not be accepted in another country.

For instance Non Alcoholic Beer was accepted by the Halal certification board in the ASEAN economies. However it was rejected by their counterparts in the GCC, thus creating chaos among the manufacturers and consumers. Such lack of a global halal certification board is projected to be a significant restraint for the market in the next few years. Such lack of a regulatory body capable of monitoring all the processes involved on the production and marketing of halal products is expected be a key restrain for the global halal pharmaceutical and halal personal care market in the near future.

The global halal products market is highly diversified, comprising product varieties in the areas of food and beverages to personal care and pharmaceuticals. Halal food companies account for the dominant share in the global market's revenue as halal food and beverages account for nearly 50% of the world's total halal products market demand, observes a recent report by Transparency Market Research. With the fast pace of globalization and the increasingly complex nature of supply chains, end-to-end halal integrity has become a profound concern for consumers. In this scenario, companies capable of demonstrating a high level of commitment in this area have an upper hand to the companies who consider halal simply as an add-on to an existing range of product.

The leading players in the halal products market for the food and beverage segment is Nestle S.A. For halal products for cosmetic and personal care application Unilever is the leading player, besides several other notable players. Reckitt Benckiser Group plc. is one of the leading players catering to the chemical and materials industry.

This review of the market is based on a recent market research report published by Transparency Market Research, titled "Halal Products Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024."

For the study, the global halal products market is segmented as follows:

Global Halal Products Market, by Product Type

Primary Meat

Processed Food & Beverages

Pharmaceuticals

Cosmetics & Personal Care

Others Halal Products

Global Halal Products Market, by Geography

North America U.S. Rest of North America

Europe U.K. Germany France Russia Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific China India ASEAN Rest of APAC

Middle East and Africa GCC Egypt Turkey Rest of Middle East & Africa

and Latin America Brazil Rest of Latin America



Recent Research Reports by TMR:

Hospital Linen Supply and Management Services Market : http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/hospital-linen-supply-management-services.html

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/hospital-linen-supply-management-services.html Refrigerated Display Cases, Beverage Refrigerators and Dispensers, and Chilled Rooms Market:http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/refrigerated-display-cases-chilled-rooms-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

Google+: https://plus.google.com/+Transparencymarketresearch

SOURCE Transparency Market Research
WASHINGTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Haystack Information Discovery ("HAYSTACKID"), an international eDiscovery and digital forensics solutions provider, announced today the release of its new eCTD Compliance Review Module. Currently, this is the industry's only available solution for handling review, analysis, and production of electronic Common Technical Document ("eCTD") files within the Relativity environment.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/437909LOGO

With the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's May 2017 compliance submission deadline for all New Drug Applications (NDA), Abbreviated New Drug Applications (ANDA), and Biologics Licensing Agreements (BLA) quickly approaching, the FDA has made it clear that any applications submitted after that date that do not adhere to the new eCTD standards will be automatically rejected.

These new regulatory requirements have caused a paradigm shift in the way Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, Drug Marketing, Biotechnology, and R&D companies now handle their application submissions, which, as a result, have also caused a ripple effect in the legal industry.

"eDiscovery just was not prepared for eCTD," said HAYSTACKID Global Director of eDiscovery Michael Sarlo. "These files are highly complex data structures that are simply not compatible with current eDiscovery processing and review products."

eCTD load files contain deep folder structure levels, or "modules," correlating to specific document types and relating to various required topics when submitting an application to the FDA for review, renewal, or approval. These applications contain years of cumulative work product, all of which can be critical to any review of the contents contained within.

The complicated structure of eCTD files has spurred a greater need among attorneys, litigators, corporate counsel, patent specialists, and regulatory proceeding experts for robust access to internal metadata related to eCTD submissions.

In response to the market's need for a solution, HAYSTACKID developed a purpose-built application that enables conversion of eCTD files with a seamless connector directly into Relativity for an optimized review experience, all within seconds.

"Structure is critical with eCTD files, and the Relativity folder tree is a perfect compendium of display," Jefferey Stevens, HAYSTACKID Chief Technology Officer, explained. "With our new module, everything a user needs to understand about an eCTD submission is available in Relativity, where it can also be dynamically searched, culled, tagged, redacted, and acted on for production or review."

Since adding the eCTD Compliance Review Module to its Relativity extensibility line-up, HAYSTACKID has become the premier eDiscovery provider in eCTD reviews for the top law firms, corporations, and other relevant entities around the world.

About HAYSTACKID

HAYSTACKID is an international eDiscovery and digital forensics solutions provider, with office locations throughout North America and Europe. HAYSTACKID provides corporate customers and their counsel with cost predictability options that allow accurate budgeting and forecasting of their discovery expenses without the additional cost of software, hardware or implementation fees. HAYSTACKID is headquartered in Boston with offices in New York; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Dallas; Houston; Los Angeles; San Diego; San Francisco; Beaverton, Oregon; Paris, France; Toronto, Canada; and Frankfurt & Berlin, Germany.

Press Contact

[email protected]

877.9.HAYSTACK (877.942.9782)

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE HAYSTACKID
SAN DIEGO, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- HiMirror, a consumer electronics brand of New Kinpo Group, a global electronics company, today announced it has been named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree in the Smart Home product category. Products entered in this prestigious program are judged by a preeminent panel of independent industrial designers, independent engineers and members of the trade media to honor outstanding design and engineering in cutting edge consumer electronics products across 28 product categories. HiMirror is the world's first personal beauty and health consultant providing a revolutionary approach to daily beauty; offering in-depth, personalized skincare analysis based on the evolving condition of a user's skin as s/he ages.

"We are tremendously honored that HiMirror has been recognized as an Innovation Awards honoree for CES 2017. Technology should solve daily human challenges and make our lives easier and better, and that is what HiMirror is designed to achieve," said Simon Shen, CEO of Taipei-based New Kinpo Group, the global electronics company behind the HiMirror brand. "CES is the most prominent technology forum in the world for showcasing new and innovative products every year, and we look forward to coming to Las Vegas to personally introduce attendees to HiMirror."

Announced as a smart home Innovation Awards Honoree at CES Unveiled in New York Nov. 10, HiMirror scored high among judging criteria including unique product concept, intuitive design and high-quality engineering. The CES Innovation Awards are sponsored by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the producer of CES, the global gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies, and have been recognizing achievements in product design and engineering since 1976.

HiMirror, which launched in the U.S. in October, is available for purchase through its website, https://www.himirror.com. The standard device retails for $189 and includes profile set-up for four users on the device. HiMirror's companion product, the Smart Body Scale ($79), provides body and weight analysis and corresponding exercise solutions. With this recognition, HiMirror joins an illustrious group of smart home products recognized each year at CES, taking place in Las Vegas Jan. 5-8, 2017.

Consumers can also follow HiMirror on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.

About HiMirror

HiMirror is a consumer electronics company within New Kinpo Group, a global electronics manufacturing services (EMS) and original design manufacturing (ODM) company that offers its customers lower costs, faster delivery times and world-class product quality. The company's EMS business spans multiple product lines, including storage, printers, network-attached storage (NAS), wireless and broadband, digital home, consumer electronics, wearables, 3D printing, robotics, power management and smart grid, industrial, automotive, security, medical/healthcare, emerging technologies and now beauty. Other subsidiaries include Cal-Comp, XYZprinting, Kinpo Electronics and AcBel. For more information, visit http://en.newkinpogroup.com.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161012/428149LOGO

SOURCE New Kinpo Group

Related Links

https://www.himirror.com


CHESAPEAKE CITY, Md., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On November 17th a Maryland auction house will offer a large grouping of important historic Chinese documents and propaganda, including a ledger book used by the first American trading house in China. Alexander Historical Auctions researchers discovered the 1804 account book of "E. Bumstead & Co." of Canton in a box of books consigned by a California collector. That company was the first American trading house in China, and the book dates from its first year of operation. It details transactions made with Chinese merchants and lists the names of cargo vessels, many of which were trading American furs for Chinese tea. This ledger is the precursor of what today amounts to billions of dollars a year in trade between the two nations.

Page from the account book used in the first American trading house in China, in its first year of operation (1804) Alexander Historical Auctions will offer a large grouping of important historic Chinese documents and propaganda, Nov. 17

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/437996

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/437997

Also to be offered is a British Royal Navy crewman's logbook in which the young sailor included many original drawings and descriptions of battles of the Second Opium War. Also of special interest to collectors and scholars is a handwritten dictionary of "Tie Chiu Vocabulary", an English translation of the ancient Teochew dialect, and a printed copy in Chinese of the Book of Genesis. Both of these rare books were written by Baptist missionary William Dean.

Another section of the same auction features rare propaganda posters and other items purchased in China and accumulated by a single collector. Included are rare first edition copies of "Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong", commonly referred to as "The Little Red Book". Also to be offered are exceptionally rare World War II posters, one of which depicts the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, with another showing the artist's fanciful impression of the capture of Berlin. China's post-war history is represented in the many dozens of other posters to be offered, including anti-Nationalist images, pro-Stalin posters, support for the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution", anti-imperialist and "Paper Tiger" representations, exhortations for defense of the homeland, and so on. Many of the evocative color posters are rarely, if ever encountered.

The auction house has been known to offer other important historical items, including Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural top hat, a watch given by Marilyn Monroe to John F. Kennedy, Al Capone's pistol, Adolf Hitler's copy of "Mein Kampf" and Dwight Eisenhower's four-star general's helmet.

The current sale includes equally impressive material:

A section of the communist red flag of the Huangma Uprising, precursor of the Red Army.

A siege of Shanghai photograph album.

photograph album. Five additional log books from China trade vessels.

trade vessels. Hundreds of autographs of important figures in Chinese history.

Dozens of original Uchida Japanese "shin-hanga" woodblock prints

A large selection of Chinese art, to be sold without reserve.

Bidding will be available live, by telephone, and at the bidding websites invaluable.com, the-saleroom.com and liveauctioneers.com, which allow bidders around the world to submit offers in real time as the auction progresses.

The auction house may be contacted at: [email protected], telephone 203-276-1570.

Media Contact:

Bill Panagopulos

[email protected]

203-276-1570

SOURCE Alexander Historical Auctions

Related Links

http://www.historyauctioneer.com


LONDON, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- INTRODUCTION

With the rising demand for targeted therapies, high potency compounds such as high potency active pharmaceutical ingredients (HPAPIs) and cytotoxic drugs have become the key focus of researchers and manufacturers worldwide. HPAPIs, which include cytotoxic APIs, are drug substances that are formulated to manufacture high potency drug products. Cytotoxic drugs are a category of highly potent drug products and, due to their increased utility in the treatment of cancer indications, have gained wide attention in recent years.



Some of the key benefits of these compounds include low dosage requirement and lower side effects. With over 25% of the total drugs worldwide being classified as highly potent, the HPAPI market is currently cited as one of the most important segments of pharmaceutical industry. The market is currently dominated by contract manufacturers. Though some pharmaceutical companies have invested in building in-house capabilities, the capital intensive nature and specialized containment requirements make the role of contract manufacturers crucial. SAFC, Lonza and Evonik are amongst the pioneers in the field of manufacturing highly potent compounds. In addition, new entrants such as Labochim, Medichem, OPKO Health, Project Pharmaceutics, Regis Technologies, ScinoPharm and Wuxi Pharma have also recently sprung up.



The growing number of investments and partnerships in this field are evident of the current market intensity. Majority of the investments in recent years have been expansion programs highlighting that manufacturers are keen to expand their existing production facilities to meet the growing demand. Looking at the ongoing focus, we certainly believe that stakeholders will continue to invest in this area. The current market landscape will gradually evolve as manufacturers look to gain competitive advantage in the near future.



SCOPE OF THE REPORT

The 'HPAPIs and Cytotoxic Drugs Manufacturing Market, 2016-2026 (2nd edition)' report provides an extensive study of the rapidly growing manufacturing market of HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs. Due to their numerous advantages and widespread application in treatment of cancer and other disorders, HPAPIs and cytotoxics have emerged as one of the key focus areas of researchers across the globe. When compared to conventional therapeutic products, these compounds offer multiple advantages including low dosage requirements, low cost and high target specificity. The focus of this report is primarily to understand the current competitive landscape and the likely future evolution of both the HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs market over the next decade. Amongst other elements, the report covers the following aspects:

- Review of the manufacturing sites of various CMOs involved in HPAPIs / cytotoxic drugs manufacturing.

- Overview of the pharmaceutical companies with in-house manufacturing capabilities.

- Investments in the expansion or for setting up of new facilities as well as collaborations that have taken place in the recent past.

- A detailed case study on the manufacturing of antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), one of the well-known emerging classes of cytotoxic drugs.



Though some pharmaceutical companies have in-house capabilities, the development of HPAPIs / cytotoxic drugs is primarily outsourced to contract manufacturers. The future growth of this market is likely to be driven by the increasing demand for oncology drugs, as majority of high potency and cytotoxic drugs are being developed for the treatment of cancer. As this segment continues to evolve, the use of HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs in other therapeutic areas such as glaucoma, hormonal imbalances and respiratory disorders are also being investigated.



Despite their benefits and the scope of a promising future, the study also highlights that there are considerable challenges associated with the production of these compounds. Due to their highly toxic nature, they pose significant occupational hazards, if not handled carefully. In addition, cross-contamination with other products can be highly detrimental for the patients. Therefore, adequate containment strategies and a proper classification of hazards is essential for the uptake of this market.



The base year for this report is 2015; actual sales data of respective companies has been presented for up to last five years. The report provides market forecasts for the period 2016  2026. The research, analysis and insights presented in this report is backed by a deep understanding of key insights gathered both from secondary and primary research.



RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Most of the data presented in this report has been gathered via secondary and primary research. For all our projects, we conduct interviews with experts in the area (academia, industry, medical practice and other associations) to solicit their opinions on emerging trends in the market. This is primarily useful for us to draw out our own opinion on how the market is likely to evolve across different geographical regions and technology segments. Where possible, the available data has been checked for accuracy from multiple sources of information.



The various secondary sources of information that we use include:

- Annual reports

- Investor presentations

- SEC filings

- Industry databases

- News releases from company websites

- Government policy documents

- Industry analysts' views



While the focus has been on forecasting the market over the coming ten years, the report also provides our independent view on various technological and non-commercial trends emerging in the industry. This opinion is solely based on our knowledge, research and understanding of the relevant market gathered from various secondary and primary sources of information.



1.1. CHAPTER OUTLINES

Chapter 2 provides an executive summary of the key insights captured in our research. The summary offers a high-level view on the likely evolution of the contract manufacturing market for HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs.



Chapter 3 provides a general introduction to HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs. In this chapter, we have also explained, in detail, specific containment requirements for handling HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs.



Chapter 4 identifies the contract manufacturers actively involved in the HPAPIs / cytotoxic drugs market. The chapter also provides details on various aspects related to these CMOs including their production capabilities, scale of operation, occupational exposure limits (OELs) and the geographic location of their facilities. It also highlights the leading pharmaceutical companies that have in-house capabilities for developing HPAPIs / cytotoxic drugs. In addition, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the current regulatory landscape governing this segment of the industry.



Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of the various CMOs involved in the manufacturing of HPAPIs. The chapter presents an in-depth comparative analysis of the major players in this segment based on regional distribution, scale of operation and OELs. The chapter also highlights the production specifications of the leading manufacturers in the market.



Chapter 6 provides a detailed analysis of the CMOs involved in the manufacturing of cytotoxic drugs. In addition to regional distribution of these organizations, the chapter presents a comprehensive review of various other parameters related to their capabilities such as scale of operation, OELs and fill / finish.



Chapter 7 introduces the one-stop-shop model with respect to HPAPIs / cytotoxic drugs manufacturing. The chapter includes case studies of five leading companies: AMRI, Baxter BioPharma Solutions, CordenPharma, Fareva and Pierre Fabre Laboratories that are operating as one-stop-shops.

Chapter 8 presents our forecast for both HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs contract manufacturing market. All our predictions related to this market's future have been backed up by robust analysis of data procured from both secondary and primary sources. Due to the uncertain nature of the market, we have presented three different growth tracks outlined as the conservative, base and optimistic scenarios. The chapter also presents a region-wise market forecast for both HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs contract manufacturing.



Chapter 9 contains detailed profiles of key CMOs, located in the US, that are involved in the manufacturing of HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs. Each profile includes information such as the company's geographical presence, its financial performance, manufacturing capabilities, investments and partnerships.



Chapter 10 provides detailed profiles of key CMOs, located in Europe, that are involved in the manufacturing of HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs. Similar to chapter 9, each profile includes information on the company's geographical presence, its financial performance, manufacturing capabilities, investments and partnerships.



Chapter 11 provides detailed profiles of key CMOs that provide manufacturing services for HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs in the Asia Pacific region. Similar to the earlier two chapters, each company profile includes information on the company's geographical presence, its financial performance, manufacturing capabilities, investments and partnerships.



Chapter 12 provides profiles of several emerging CMOs in the HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs manufacturing market. As in the earlier chapters, each profile contains information on the company's geographical presence, financial performance (where available), manufacturing capabilities, investments and partnerships.



Chapter 13 analyzes the recent developments in the HPAPIs / cytotoxic drugs manufacturing market. This chapter contains information on the investments that have been made and the various partnerships that have been established in the past few years. It also presents an analysis of how the market has evolved over the years. In addition, the chapter contains a brief section on how recent technological advancements have led to the market's evolution.



Chapter 14 provides a SWOT analysis capturing the key elements that are likely to influence future growth in this market.

Chapter 15 presents a case study on antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) manufacturing market; ADCs represent one of the rapidly expanding segments of biopharmaceutical industry and are expected to emerge as a significant opportunity for the CMOs in near future. The case study contains detailed information on both in-house and contract manufacturing in the ADC market.



Chapter 16 is a collection of transcripts of interviews conducted during the course of this study. The senior people interviewed for this study were Antonella Mancuso, Vice President & Chief Operating Officer and Maria Elena Guadagno, Business Director (BSP Pharmaceuticals), Stacy McDonald, Group Product Manager & Jennifer L. Mitcham, Director - Business Development (Catalent Pharma Solutions), Roberto Margarita, Business Development Director (CordenPharma), Allison Vavala, Senior Manager, Business Development (Helsinn), Javier E. Aznarez Araiz, Business Development (Idifarma), Mark Wright, Site Head, Grangemouth (Piramal Healthcare) and Klaus Hellerbrand, Managing Director (ProJect Pharmaceutics). In addition to detailed interviews, we had also conducted a comprehensive survey to learn more about the manufacturing capabilities / capacities of various stakeholders in the industry.



Chapter 17 summarizes the overall report. In this chapter, we provide a recap of the key takeaways and our independent opinion based on the research and analysis described in the previous chapters.



Chapter 18 is an appendix that provides tabulated data for all the figures provided in the report.



Chapter 19 is an appendix that provides a list of companies and organizations mentioned in the report.



EXAMPLE HIGHLIGHTS

1. Oncology is the key driver behind the growth of HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs. Around 60% of the HPAPIs are being developed for the treatment of cancer. The trend is likely to continue and the anti-cancer market will sustain the growth of HPAPIs and cytotoxics in the future.

2. CMOs are the key stakeholders in the market as a good proportion of HPAPIs / cytotoxics manufacturing is currently outsourced due to stringent manufacturing protocols and safety requirements. During our research, we identified 96 CMOs (with over 130 production facilities worldwide) that are focused in this area; approximately 40% of these facilities are dedicated to manufacturing of both HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs.

3. The market is highly fragmented; companies such as Capsugel, Idifarma, Labochim, Medichem, OPKO Health, ScinoPharm, WuXi PharmaTech are some of the new entrants in this market that have recently expanded their service portfolio. Having said this, established pharma companies such as Roche, Merck, GSK, BMS and Boehringer Ingelheim have also established in-house capabilities.

4. Over 15% CMOs have established one-stop-shop model to provide manufacturing services for both HPAPIs and finished cytotoxic drugs. Examples include AbbVie, AMRI, Baxter BioPharma Solutions, CordenPharma and Fareva.

5. North America and Europe are the predominant regions where HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs production facilities are located. The US accounts for around 23% of the total HPAPI production facilities followed by Italy (13%) and Switzerland (11%). In the case of cytotoxic drugs, 30% of production facilities are located in the US; this is followed by Germany (14%) and the UK (10%). Companies have also moved their focus to developing countries such as China and India in order to take advantage of relatively lower costs.

6. Several collaborations have been recently inked between stakeholders with an aim to combine their manufacturing expertise. Of the 50 partnerships we studied during our research, an overwhelming proportion were acquisitions (55%) and manufacturing collaborations (38%).

7. Catering to the wider demand, several CMOs have regularly engaged in investment programs to expand their production set ups. Since 2006, there have been more than 100 investments to add new facilities and / or to expand existing capacities; SAFC has led this activity followed by Novasep, Aesica Pharmaceuticals, CARBOGEN AMCIS, Lonza, Piramal, Helsinn and Baxter BioPharma Solutions.

8. Overall, the HPAPIs and cytotoxic drugs market holds enormous potential for the contract manufacturers. We anticipate this opportunity for the CMOs to grow at an annualized rate of ~10% over the next ten years. North American and Western European CMOs will continue to dominate with a share of over 70% in the overall market. Developing countries, such as India and China, are likely to emerge with a share of around 13% by 2026.

Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3711824/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

http://www.reportbuyer.com


LONDON, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- This Persistence Market Research report examines the Latin America industrial explosives market for the forecast period 2016-2022. The primary objective of the report is to identify opportunities in the market and present updates and insights pertaining to various segments of the Latin America industrial explosives market.



Industrial explosives are used in various end-use industries to reduce human labor and are primarily used in mining and construction activities. The mining industry is the largest end-use industry segment in the industrial explosives market. Growth in the industrial explosives market is largely co-related to GDP growth of respective countries.



To understand and assess opportunities in this market, the report is categorically divided into three main market analysis sections, i.e., by product type, by end-use industry, and by country. The report analyses the Latin America industrial explosives market in terms of market value (US$ Mn) and volume (metric tons).



The report begins with an overview of the Latin America industrial explosives market, appraising the market performance in terms of revenue and volume, followed by PMR's analysis of key trends, drivers, and restraints witnessed in the Latin America industrial explosives market. Impact analysis of key growth drivers and restraints based on the weighted average model are also included in the report to equip the client with crystal-clear, decision-making insights.



The subsequent section analyses the industrial explosives market as per product type, and presents a forecast for the period 2016?2022.



Product type assessed in the report are:



High Explosives

Blasting Agents



The report further analyses the market based on country and presents the forecast in terms of value for the next six years.



Countries assessed in the report are:



Chile

Peru

Brazil

Colombia

Mexico

Argentina

Rest of Latin America



The report further analyses the market based on end-use industry and presents the forecast in terms of value and volume for the next six years.



Mining

Metal Mining

Non-metal Mining

Quarrying

Construction

Others



To calculate the market size, the report considers various aspects based on secondary research. Furthermore, data points such as country-wise split and market split by application and qualitative inputs from primary respondents have been incorporated to arrive at appropriate market estimates. The forecast presented in the report assesses the total revenue generated by the Latin America industrial explosives market between 2016 and 2022.



When developing the market forecast, the starting point begins with sizing up the current market, which forms the basis for forecasting how the market is anticipated to take shape in the near future. Given the characteristics of the market, PMR triangulates the data via a different analysis based on the supply side, demand side, and dynamics of the industrial explosives market. However, quantifying the market across the above-mentioned segments and regions is more a matter of quantifying expectations and identifying opportunities rather than rationalising them after the forecast has been completed.



It is imperative to note that in an ever-fluctuating economy in Latin America, we not only conduct forecasts in terms of CAGR but also analyse on the basis of key parameters, such as Year-on-Year (Y-o-Y) growth, to understand the predictability of the market and to identify the right opportunities.



Another key feature of this report is the analysis of the industrial explosives market by country product type and end-use industry, and the corresponding revenue forecast in terms of absolute dollar opportunity. This is traditionally overlooked while forecasting the market. However, absolute dollar opportunity is critical in assessing the level of opportunity that a provider can look to achieve, as well as to identify potential resources from a sales perspective, in the Latin America industrial explosives market.



To understand key segments in terms of their growth and performance in the industrial explosives market, Persistence Market Research has developed a market attractiveness index. The resulting index should help providers identify existing market opportunities in the Latin America Industrial explosives market.



In the final section of the report, the industrial explosives market competitive landscape is included to provide a dashboard view of companies that manufacture and supply industrial explosives. The report contains company profiles of some of the major players operating in the Latin America industrial explosives market.



Some of the market players featured in this report include:



AEL Mining Services

Enaex S.A

Orica Ltd.

Austin Powder Company

EXSA SA

MAXAM Corp.

Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4039997/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

http://www.reportbuyer.com


LONDON, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Market barriers affect nearly 20% of myeloma prescriptions. Is your brand losing market share?

We surveyed 150 European oncologists and haematologists to find out how market barriers affect the way they prescribe 8 myeloma drugs. The results show that half of those treatments lose market share overall while the other half make small net gains.

Find out why, and learn what your brand can do to regain lost share, in Market Access Impact: Myeloma (EU5).

The report covers major brands from Amgen, BMS/AbbVie, Celgene, Johnson & Johnson, and Novartis. You'll discover which brands see the biggest gains and losses from 7 different market barriers, which barriers help and hurt your brand the most, and which competitors you take share from and lose it to.

Top Takeaways

Half of brands are widely prescribed: Around 70% or more of the doctors surveyed prescribe 4 of the 8 brands covered. Over 90% of doctors prescribe the top brand.

Half of the surveyed brands gain share: The four most prescribed brands all see small barrier-related net increases, but the most prescribed brand gains nearly twice as much as any other.

The top barrier affects two brands disproportionately: Significantly more doctors experience this barrier with two of the least prescribed brands.

"Other" brands also gain: They take share from all of the surveyed brands, and in aggregate, see the third-largest net share gain.

Eliminating barriers would affect the middle of the market: Two middle-ranking brands would switch places, and the aggregate of "other" brands would move down the rankings.

Market access affects more prescriptions than other barriers: Taken together barriers related to market access drive a third of barrier-related prescription decisions.

Insight into 8 Major Myeloma Drugs

Darzalex (daratumumab; Johnson & Johnson)

Empliciti (elotuzumab; BMS/AbbVie)

Farydak (panobinostat; Novartis)

Imnovid (pomalidomide; Celgene)

Kyprolis (carfilzomib; Amgen)

Revlimid (lenalidomide; Celgene)

Thalomid (thalidomide; Celgene)

Velcade (bortezomib; Johnson & Johnson)

Exploring Important Market Access Issues

Market Access Impact: Myeloma explores key issues affecting Myeloma drug manufacturers. You'll learn:

How barriers affect market access:

What brands do doctors prescribe the most?

How many prescriptions do barriers affect?

Which barriers have the biggest impact?

How barriers affect your brand:

How many doctors prescribe your brand? How many don't, but would consider it?

Why don't doctors prescribe your brand? What do they prescribe instead?

Which competing brands does your brand take market share from?

A Report Based on Expert Knowledge

A We surveyed 150 medical oncologists and haematologists30 from each EU5 country (France, Italy, Germany, Spain, UK)chosen from the largest community of validated physicians in the world.

All respondents have:

Been practicing for 2+ years

Prescribed at least one of the listed products

Seen at least 5 patients with multiple myeloma in total in the last month

We conducted the survey between September 5th and 8th, 2016.

Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4275618/

About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com

For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

http://www.reportbuyer.com


"Advancements in gene editing with tools like CRISPR are helping our customers discover and manufacture new treatments for the most difficult conditions," said Udit Batra, member of the Merck Executive Board and CEO, Life Science . "We will continue to collaborate with the global scientific community to deliver the promise of their innovations faster and work to accelerate access to health for people everywhere."

Recognition of these world-class products showcases Merck's commitment to empowering scientists and researchers with the solutions they need to develop new tools that can improve human health. The awards, known as the "Oscars of Invention," honor the year's 100 most innovative scientific and technological breakthroughs.

Merck's Sanger Arrayed Lentiviral CRISPR Libraries won in the Analytical/Test category. These libraries are the first human and mouse arrayed lentiviral CRISPR libraries for knocking out and screening gene function. The library allows discovery of genes involved in drug resistance, human disease and a wide variety of biological processes. Researchers can use the entire library to screen the entire genome or they can select specific genes and pathways to screen using the associated clones.

This is Merck's fifth year in a row receiving an R&D 100 Award. In 2015, the AFS water purification systems and Simplicon RNA Reprogramming Technology were named in the process/prototyping and analytical/test categories, respectively. The R&D 100 Awards span industry, academia and government-sponsored research.

All Merck news releases are distributed by email at the same time they become available on the Merck Website. Please go to www.merckgroup.com/subscribe to register online, change your selection or discontinue this service.

About Merck

Merck is a leading science and technology company in healthcare, life science and performance materials. Around 50,000 employees work to further develop technologies that improve and enhance life  from biopharmaceutical therapies to treat cancer or multiple sclerosis, cutting-edge systems for scientific research and production, to liquid crystals for smartphones and LCD televisions. In 2015, Merck generated sales of  12.85 billion in 66 countries.

Founded in 1668, Merck is the world's oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company. The founding family remains the majority owner of the publicly listed corporate group. Merck holds the global rights to the Merck name and brand. The only exceptions are the United States and Canada, where the company operates as EMD Serono, MilliporeSigma and EMD Performance Materials.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/437980

SOURCE Merck
SEATTLE, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Milliman, Inc., a premier global consulting and actuarial firm, today released the results of its Fall 2016 Multiemployer Pension Funding Study, which analyzes the funded status of all multiemployer pension plans. So far this year, these pension plans experienced a funding percentage increase of 1%, rising from 75% at the end of 2015 to reach 76% as of June 30. Most multiemployer pensions estimated investment returns of over 3%, slightly below expectations. Pension liabilities for these plans increased by $9 billion.

"These plans haven't seen much movement, though it's worth noting that about half of the total underfunding for multiemployer plans continues to be attributable to plans that are less than 65% funded and have entered critical status," says Kevin Campe, consulting actuary and co-author of the Multiemployer Pension Funding Study. "About 40% of these critical plans are projected to be insolvent at some point."

Where do multiemployer plans go from here? In the aggregate, the return for the rest of 2016 needs to be 3% in order to preserve the current 76% funded status. A 9% return for the second half of the year would result in aggregate funding above 80%, while a -3% return would pull it down toward 70%.

To view the complete study, go to http://www.milliman.com/mpfs/. To receive regular updates of Milliman's pension funding analysis, contact us at [email protected].

About Milliman

Milliman is among the world's largest providers of actuarial and related products and services. The firm has consulting practices in healthcare, property & casualty insurance, life insurance and financial services, and employee benefits. Founded in 1947, Milliman is an independent firm with offices in major cities around the globe. For further information, visit milliman.com.

SOURCE Milliman

Related Links

http://milliman.com


"Advancements in gene editing with tools like CRISPR are helping our customers discover and manufacture new treatments for the most difficult conditions," said Udit Batra, CEO, MilliporeSigma. "We will continue to collaborate with the global scientific community to deliver the promise of their innovations faster and work to accelerate access to health for people everywhere."

Recognition of these world-class products showcases the company's commitment to empowering scientists and researchers with the solutions they need to develop new tools that can improve human health. The awards, known as the "Oscars of Invention," honor the year's 100 most innovative scientific and technological breakthroughs.

MillliporeSigma's Sanger Arrayed Lentiviral CRISPR Libraries won in the Analytical/Test category. These libraries are the first human and mouse arrayed lentiviral CRISPR libraries for knocking out and screening gene function. The library allows discovery of genes involved in drug resistance, human disease and a wide variety of biological processes. Researchers can use the entire library to screen the entire genome or they can select specific genes and pathways to screen using the associated clones.

This is MilliporeSigma's fifth year in a row receiving an R&D 100 Award. In 2015, the AFS water purification systems and Simplicon RNA Reprogramming Technology, were named in the process/prototyping and analytical/test categories, respectively. The R&D 100 Awards span industry, academia and government-sponsored research.

All Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany news releases are distributed by email at the same time they become available on the EMD Group website. In case you are a resident of the U.S. or Canada please go to www.emdgroup.com/subscribe to register again for your online subscription of this service as our newly introduced geo-targeting requires new links in the email. You may later change your selection or discontinue this service.

About the Life Science Business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany

The life science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, which operates as MilliporeSigma in the U.S. and Canada, has 19,000 employees and 65 manufacturing sites worldwide, with a portfolio of more than 300,000 products enabling scientific discovery. Udit Batra is the global chief executive officer of MilliporeSigma.

Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany completed its $17 billion acquisition of Sigma-Aldrich in November 2015, creating a leader in the $125 billion global life science industry.

Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany is a leading company for innovative and top-quality high-tech products in healthcare, life science and performance materials. The company has six businesses  Biopharmaceuticals, Consumer Health, Allergopharma, Biosimilars, Life Science and Performance Materials  and generated sales of 12.85 billion in 2015. Around 50,000 employees work in 66 countries to improve the quality of life for patients, to foster the success of customers and to help meet global challenges.

Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany is the world's oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company  since 1668, the company has stood for innovation, business success and responsible entrepreneurship. Holding an approximately 70 percent interest, the founding family remains the majority owner of the company to this day. Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany holds the global rights to the name and the trademark "Merck" internationally except for the United States and Canada, where the company operates as EMD Serono, MilliporeSigma and EMD Performance Materials.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/437983

SOURCE MilliporeSigma

Related Links

http://www.emdgroup.com


FAIRMONT, W. Va., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE: FE) subsidiary Mon Power today announced it has initiated a review of its ownership stake in the Bath County Pumped Storage Project located in Warm Springs, Virginia. The review is driven by recent changes in the PJM capacity market which in the future are expected to reduce sharply Mon Power's capacity revenues from the facility. There is no assurance that this review by Mon Power will result in any alternatives being announced or consummated.

Mon Power has an indirect 487-megawatt (MW) ownership interest in the pumped storage hydroelectric generating station which consists of two large reservoirs and a powerhouse interconnected by tunnels. Virginia Electric and Power Company, a subsidiary of Dominion Resources, Inc., is the majority owner of the station and manages its operation.

PJM's new capacity rule reduces the value of pumped storage generation stations because they cannot produce electricity continuously during all hours of the day. Under the new rules, Bath's capacity revenues for Mon Power will be reduced by about half.

PJM is the regional transmission operator that operates a competitive wholesale electricity market and manages the electric transmission grid in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia to help ensure reliability for more than 61 million people.

Capacity is the commitment of generation or other resources to be available to provide electricity in the future, particularly when demand surges during extreme cold snaps or heat waves.

Mon Power supplies electricity to both its 385,500 customers and 137,000 Potomac Edison customers in the state's Eastern Panhandle. FirstEnergy is committed to supplying its West Virginia customers with a supply of safe, reliable, cost-effective electricity for years to come.

FirstEnergy is dedicated to safety, reliability and operational excellence. Its 10 electric distribution companies form one of the nation's largest investor-owned electric systems, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York. The company's transmission subsidiaries operate more than 24,000 miles of transmission lines that connect the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions, while its generation subsidiaries control nearly 17,000 megawatts of capacity from a diversified mix of scrubbed coal, non-emitting nuclear, natural gas, hydro and other renewables. Follow FirstEnergy on Twitter @FirstEnergyCorp or online at www.firstenergycorp.com.

Forward-Looking Statements: This news release includes forward-looking statements based on information currently available to management. Such statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. These statements include declarations regarding management's intents, beliefs and current expectations. These statements typically contain, but are not limited to, the terms "anticipate," "potential," "expect," "forecast," "target," "will," "intend," "believe," "project," "estimate," "plan" and similar words. Forward-looking statements involve estimates, assumptions, known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, which may include the following: the speed and nature of increased competition in the electric utility industry, in general, and the retail sales market in particular; the ability to experience growth in the Regulated Distribution and Regulated Transmission segments; the accomplishment of our regulatory and operational goals in connection with our transmission investment plan, including, but not limited to, the proposed transmission asset transfer to Mid-Atlantic Interstate Transmission, LLC, and the effectiveness of our strategy to reflect a more regulated business profile; changes in assumptions regarding economic conditions within our territories, assessment of the reliability of our transmission system, or the availability of capital or other resources supporting identified transmission investment opportunities; the impact of the regulatory process and resulting outcomes on the matters at the federal level and in the various states in which we do business including, but not limited to, matters related to rates and the Electric Security Plan IV; the impact of the federal regulatory process on Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)-regulated entities and transactions, in particular FERC regulation of wholesale energy and capacity markets, including PJM Interconnection, L.L.C. (PJM) markets and FERC-jurisdictional wholesale transactions; FERC regulation of cost-of-service rates, including FERC Opinion No. 531's revised Return on Equity methodology for FERC-jurisdictional wholesale generation and transmission utility service; and FERC's compliance and enforcement activity, including compliance and enforcement activity related to North American Electric Reliability Corporation's mandatory reliability standards; the uncertainties of various cost recovery and cost allocation issues resulting from American Transmission Systems, Incorporated's realignment into PJM; economic or weather conditions affecting future sales and margins such as a polar vortex or other significant weather events, and all associated regulatory events or actions; changing energy, capacity and commodity market prices including, but not limited to, coal, natural gas and oil prices, and their availability and impact on margins and asset valuations, including without limitation impairments thereon; the risks and uncertainties at the Competitive Energy Services (CES) segment, including FirstEnergy Solutions Corp. and its subsidiaries and FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company, related to continued depressed wholesale energy and capacity markets, and the viability and/or success of strategic business alternatives, such as potential CES generating unit asset sales, the potential conversion of the remaining generation fleet from competitive operations to a regulated or regulated-like construct or the potential need to deactivate additional generating units; the continued ability of our regulated utilities to recover their costs; costs being higher than anticipated and the success of our policies to control costs and to mitigate low energy, capacity and market prices; other legislative and regulatory changes, and revised environmental requirements, including, but not limited to, the effects of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan, Coal Combustion Residuals regulations, Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and Mercury and Air Toxics Standards programs, including our estimated costs of compliance, Clean Water Act (CWA) waste water effluent limitations for power plants, and CWA 316(b) water intake regulation; the uncertainty of the timing and amounts of the capital expenditures that may arise in connection with any litigation, including New Source Review litigation, or potential regulatory initiatives or rulemakings (including that such initiatives or rulemakings could result in our decision to deactivate or idle certain generating units); the uncertainties associated with the deactivation of older regulated and competitive units, including the impact on vendor commitments, such as long-term fuel and transportation agreements, and as it relates to the reliability of the transmission grid, the timing thereof; the impact of other future changes to the operational status or availability of our generating units and any capacity performance charges associated with unit unavailability; adverse regulatory or legal decisions and outcomes with respect to our nuclear operations (including, but not limited to, the revocation or non-renewal of necessary licenses, approvals or operating permits by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or as a result of the incident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant); issues arising from the indications of cracking in the shield building at Davis-Besse; the risks and uncertainties associated with litigation, arbitration, mediation and like proceedings, including, but not limited to, any such proceedings related to vendor commitments, such as long-term fuel and transportation agreements; the impact of labor disruptions by our unionized workforce; replacement power costs being higher than anticipated or not fully hedged; the ability to comply with applicable state and federal reliability standards and energy efficiency and peak demand reduction mandates; changes in customers' demand for power, including, but not limited to, changes resulting from the implementation of state and federal energy efficiency and peak demand reduction mandates; the ability to accomplish or realize anticipated benefits from strategic and financial goals, including, but not limited to, the ability to continue to reduce costs and to successfully execute our financial plans designed to improve our credit metrics and strengthen our balance sheet through, among other actions, our cash flow improvement plan and other proposed capital raising initiatives; our ability to improve electric commodity margins and the impact of, among other factors, the increased cost of fuel and fuel transportation on such margins; changing market conditions that could affect the measurement of certain liabilities and the value of assets held in our Nuclear Decommissioning Trusts, pension trusts and other trust funds, and cause us and/or our subsidiaries to make additional contributions sooner, or in amounts that are larger than currently anticipated; the impact of changes to significant accounting policies; the ability to access the public securities and other capital and credit markets in accordance with our financial plans, the cost of such capital and overall condition of the capital and credit markets affecting us and our subsidiaries; further actions that may be taken by credit rating agencies that could negatively affect us and/or our subsidiaries' access to financing, increase the costs thereof, increase requirements to post additional collateral to support, or accelerate payments under outstanding commodity positions, letters of credit and other financial guarantees, and the impact of these events on the financial condition and liquidity of FirstEnergy and/or its subsidiaries, specifically the subsidiaries within the CES segment; the risks and uncertainties surrounding FirstEnergy's need to obtain waivers from its bank group under FirstEnergy's credit facilities caused by a debt to total capitalization ratio in excess of 65% resulting from impairment charges or other events at CES; changes in national and regional economic conditions affecting us, our subsidiaries and/or our major industrial and commercial customers, and other counterparties with which we do business, including fuel suppliers; the impact of any changes in tax laws or regulations or adverse tax audit results or rulings; issues concerning the stability of domestic and foreign financial institutions and counterparties with which we do business; the risks associated with cyber-attacks and other disruptions to our information technology system that may compromise our generation, transmission and/or distribution services and data security breaches of sensitive data, intellectual property and proprietary or personally identifiable information regarding our business, employees, shareholders, customers, suppliers, business partners and other individuals in our data centers and on our networks; and the risks and other factors discussed from time to time in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and other similar factors. A security rating is not a recommendation to buy or hold securities and is subject to revision or withdrawal at any time by the assigning rating agency. Each rating should be evaluated independently of any other rating. The foregoing factors should not be construed as exhaustive and should be read in conjunction with the other cautionary statements and risks that are included in our filings with the SEC, including but not limited to the most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and any subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for management to predict all such factors, nor assess the impact of any such factor on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. FirstEnergy expressly disclaims any current intention to update, except as required by law, any forward-looking statements contained herein as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE FirstEnergy Corp.

Related Links

http://www.firstenergycorp.com


TORONTO, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MyAdMarket launches its latest website solutions through its innovative traffic verification and ad serving system. The system aims to allow its users real-time information regarding traffic scores and ad serving results. Known as the MyAdMarket Traffic Quality Engine, this functionality intends to offer solutions to problems regarding the quality of traffic based on impressions. It is available to various internet channels such as blind ad network, demand side platforms or DSPs, ad exchanges, and direct websites.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438072

On top of its advanced ad monitoring function, it also aims to identify issues with regards to unsuitable contents, traffic coming from bots, incorrect geographies, and VPN traffic. It also recognizes inferior operation and grades of impressions through its built-in scoring system. Clients of MyAdMarket will gain more traction regarding their ad expenses by avoiding unproductive and unnecessary impressions. The system automatically detects bought impressions as it provides more latitude towards high quality site visitors. This results to higher ROI among investors.

Jeff Zeng, the CEO of MyAdMarket recognizes the problem of fraudulent traffic in different internet platforms such as online mobile ads channels. According to Zeng, MyAdMarket has been at the forefront of combating deceitful traffic practices for a number of years already. He hopes that this new system will provide their clients with a more accurate information that can help them in fully optimizing their campaign. The end-result that is expected is a better return-on-investment for their ad campaigns.

Functionalities of MyAdMarket Traffic Quality Engines

Publisher Management

By using a scoring system, users will have the ability to identify where invalid traffic sources originate. This will help them identify which publishers are providing them with worst service while at the same time give them insight to the best sources of quality traffic. The data provided also allows the users to understand what composes valid and invalid internet traffic. Its Site Screening also provides in-depth information on new traffic sources and publishers that drive traffic to websites.

By using a scoring system, users will have the ability to identify where invalid traffic sources originate. This will help them identify which publishers are providing them with worst service while at the same time give them insight to the best sources of quality traffic. The data provided also allows the users to understand what composes valid and invalid internet traffic. Its Site Screening also provides in-depth information on new traffic sources and publishers that drive traffic to websites. Advertiser Management

This functionality provides its user with the ability to drive traffic to advertisers and other internet targets. It also serves as a system for identifying the quality of traffic that is sent to each targeted destination.

Effective Methods of Managing Traffic through MyAdMarket

Filtering

Identifies fraudulent traffic and other deceitful traffic and prevent them from reaching the targeted destination.

Identifies fraudulent traffic and other deceitful traffic and prevent them from reaching the targeted destination. Routing

Automatically identifies high-quality traffic and automatically deliver them to intended sites.

Automatically identifies high-quality traffic and automatically deliver them to intended sites. Billing

Identifies invalid traffic and tag them as non-billable. This functionality makes it possible for the user to create a more intelligent pricing mechanism that provides discounts for high quality traffic.

About MyAdMarket

MyAdMarket is operated by YesUp Media Inc., located in Ontario, Canada and is considered as one of the leading providers of a complete traffic verification and ad serving solution. Through its innovative system, affiliates, ad networks, and advertise can now manage their traffic sources more efficiently. With its real-time monitoring, users now have the ability to detect and fight fraud caused by invalid clicks and impressions. With MyAdMarket, internet marketers now has a tool that will allow them to take their campaigns to greater heights and maximize their ROI.

Related Images

image1.png

image2.png

Related Links

MyAdMarket Website

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com.

SOURCE MyAdMarket

Related Links

https://www.myadmarket.com


SHENYANG, China, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Neusoft Corporation ("Neusoft", SSE: 600718), a leading IT solution and service provider in China, today announced that it has been recently named to the "Emerging Markets Top 30 Software Companies" list by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), ranking third. Prior to this emerging markets ranking, Neusoft was the only software company from China to be included in the 2016 "Global 100 Software Leaders" list.

The "Emerging Markets Top 30 Software Companies" list focuses on emerging markets and is based on software revenue of each company from 2013 to 2014. The list was developed as part of PwC's on-going 2016 "Global 100 Software Leaders" report and is based on data provided by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Along with the trend of globalization, successful software companies are no longer limited to the US and Europe, and leading companies can be found everywhere around the globe. In fact, two-thirds of the Emerging Markets Top 30 Software Companies are located in Asia.

There are an increasing number of emerging companies coming to the forefront, and they have some common characteristics, such as deep experience and understanding of local markets as well as entrepreneurial cultures. These emerging-market leaders are adding to the challenges facing legacy software vendors in more mature markets

Dr. Liu Jiren, Chairman & CEO of Neusoft said: "We are honored to be ranked No. 3 among the 'Emerging Markets Top 30 Software Companies', which is also a recognition of China's software companies by the global market. Rich software talent, strong economic and social development, and other factors will enable more and more outstanding software companies to develop in emerging markets, especially from the Chinese market.

"This year is Neusoft's 25th anniversary and we have gone through several business transformations in the past years in response to the constantly changing market environment. Looking to the future, we are committed to promoting the integration of IT technology with various industries to create more value, and further drive the development of China's software industry."

About Neusoft Corporation

As a leading IT solutions and services provider, Neusoft provides innovative information technology enabled solutions and services to meet the demands arising from social transformation, to shape new lifestyles for individuals and to create value for society. Established in China in 1991, Neusoft has 18,000 employees worldwide, along with 10 software R&D bases and a comprehensive marketing & services network covering more than 60 cities across China, as well as subsidiaries in the United States, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, South America, etc. For more information, please visit: www.neusoft.com

For more information, please contact:

Terry Du

Branding & Marketing Management Center

Neusoft Corporation

Phone: +86-24-8366-2306

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Neusoft Corporation

Related Links

http://www.neusoft.com/en


LOS ANGELES, Nov.11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Not Impossible, in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, will host the first annual Not Impossible Awards at CES 2017, which takes place January 5-8, 2017 in Las Vegas. The Not Impossible Awards will recognize and celebrate the people, companies, technology and transformational inventions that are helping bring positive change to the greater global community.

"Our philosophy is 'help one, help many' and we created the Not Impossible Awards to do just that. Whether the issue is climate change, hunger, clean water, energy or infrastructure, the need for developing affordable, practical solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems exists worldwide," said Mick Ebeling, Founder and CEO of Not Impossible. "Our goal is to put the spotlight on the people and companies exemplifying thought leadership in these areas, while also developing viable technology solutions that positively impact the way we live. CES 2017's theme of 'Let's Go Humans' is the perfect springboard not only for the Not Impossible Awards, but also for the solutions we will be honoring."

The Not Impossible Awards focus on projects and solutions that align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which represent progress towards a better planet and support social innovation in one or more of the following categories:

Communication

Education

Energy

Healthcare

Mobility

Transportation

"One thing we know for sure is that the world's new Sustainable Development Goals can only be met by 2030 if innovators are given the chance to bring forward solutions to change the world," said Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of the UN Foundation.

All submissions will be evaluated on their ability to address global issues through original, cutting-edge technologies. The criteria are:

A clear definition of the issue / UN Sustainable Development Goal(s) the innovation addresses

A powerful social impact message

Uniqueness / Innovativeness

Sustainability

An expressive story proving their ability to "Help One, Help Many"

In addition to Ebeling, judges include:

Kathy Calvin , President & CEO, UN Foundation

, President & CEO, Daniel Kraft , M.D., Founding Executive Director & Chair, Exponential Medicine

, M.D., Founding Executive Director & Chair, Exponential Medicine Nicholas Negroponte , Founder & Chair, MIT Media Lab and One Laptop per Child Association

The winners within each category will be announced at CES 2017, where industry leaders, influencers and government officials will be able to learn about the projects firsthand. From these categorical winners, one overall 2017 winner will be selected and announced.

To access the Not Impossible Awards Submission form, and for more information on categories and submission guidelines, click here.

All submissions must be received by November 24, 2016.

About Not Impossible

Launched in 2009, Not Impossible Labs makes the impossible possible by creating accessible technology-based solutions primarily in the areas of health, mobility and communication. Not Impossible's first project The Eyewriter is an open source, low-cost, DIY device that enable individuals with paralysis to communicate and create using only the movement of their eyes. Time Magazine named the Eyewriter one of the "Top 50 Inventions of 2010" and the device is now part of MoMA's permanent collection. Project Daniel inspired the first 3D-printed prosthetic arm for those impacted by war in South Sudan. The Don's Voice project resulted in a digital communications interface for ALS patient Don Moir, allowing him to audibly communicate. Both projects were awarded SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards in 2015 and 2016 respectively. Learn more at www.notimpossible.com.

Media Contacts:

Molly Wade

[email protected]

(508) 864-1404

Lori Neuman, GLA Communications

[email protected]

(973) 564-8591 x105

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438165LOGO

SOURCE Not Impossible Labs

Related Links

http://www.notimpossible.com


AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- This Veterans Day, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP), the nation's largest organization of nurse practitioners, and Veterans Deserve Care, a grassroots coalition committed to reducing wait times in VA facilities, are calling for the swift enactment of a US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) proposal that would help ensure timely health care access for our nation's veterans in VA facilities.

Two years after it was first reported that veterans were waiting far too long for health care in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), over 530,000 veterans are still waiting 30 days or longer for care. To address this troubling situation, the VA has proposed granting veterans full and direct access to the more than 4,800 nurse practitioners (NPs) working in the VHA, enabling NPs to practice to the full scope of their education and clinical training.

"For more than fifty years, nurse practitioners have proudly treated our men and women in uniform, ensuring them the high-quality health care they deserve," said AANP President Dr. Cindy Cooke, DNP, FNP-C, FAANP. "This Veterans Day, we urge the VA to take immediate action to enact this proposed rule for the benefit of our nation's veterans."

"We can all agree that veterans have waited long enough to get the health care they deserve," said CMSgt Robert L. Frank, USAF (ret.), chief executive officer of the Air Force Sergeants Association. "Before our new President takes office, we call on the VA to enact the proposed rule."

Today, 21 states and the District of Columbia grant nurse practitioners full-practice authority, and a growing chorus of organizations and government bodies has called for others to follow suit. Organizations including the National Academy of Medicine, AARP, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Josiah Macey Foundation, National Governors Association and the Federal Trade Commission have all urged support for removing unnecessary barriers to NP practice.

"We must embrace new approaches to address the challenges facing the current system," added Cooke. "The proposed rule is a zero-cost, zero-risk solution to strengthening health care access and will provide much-needed relief for our veterans waiting for care."

The American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) and Air Force Sergeants Association strongly support enactment of the rule. America's 222,000 nurse practitioners stand ready to meet the needs of patients, inside and outside of the veterans health system.

The American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) is the largest professional membership organization for nurse practitioners (NPs) of all specialties. It represents the interests of 222,000 NPs, including more than 70,000 individual members and 200 organizations, providing a unified networking platform and advocating for their role as providers of high-quality, cost-effective, comprehensive, patient-centered and personalized health care. The organization provides legislative leadership at the local, state and national levels, advancing health policy; promoting excellence in practice, education and research; and establishing standards that best serve NP patients and other health care consumers. For more information, visit aanp.org. To locate a nurse practitioner in your area, visit npfinder.com.

Veterans Deserve Care is a grassroots coalition led by organizations including the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP), Air Force Sergeants Association, veterans organizations, veterans, caregivers, and nurse practitioners (NPs). This year, the coalition submitted nearly 60,000 comments to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in support of a proposed rule that would give veterans direct access to nurse practitioners in VA facilities.

SOURCE American Association of Nurse Practitioners

Related Links

http://www.aanp.org


With support from entrepreneur and philanthropist Christopher Burch , the director of the Division of Gastroenterology Mark B. Pochapin, MD, along with faculty members Elizabeth H. Weinshel, MD and Sophie M. Balzora, MD created the Patient-Centered Care Curriculum for faculty. The curriculum consists of a number of educational activities, including lectures, roundtables, and educational objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) simulation sessions. One OSCE session, for example, was structured as part of an IRB study protocol and was designed such that faculty interacted with actors as "standardized patients" in challenging clinical scenarios such as having to tell a patient she had a specific type of cancer or needing to explain a procedure-related complication. The physicians not only received feedback from the trained "patients," but also were able to review and evaluate their own performance privately, via videotape. Preliminary study results indicated that participants found the exercise beneficial for their clinical practice skills and also pointed to areas in need of further faculty development.

Mark B. Pochapin, MD, the Sholtz-Leeds Professor of Gastroenterology and director of the Division of Gastroenterology, was among the first faculty members to go through the exercise. "After over 20 years of practicing medicine, I found this to be one of the most effective methods I have seen for teaching physicians how to view the clinical interaction from the patient perspective and thus provide a more patient-centered experience," says Dr. Pochapin.

"Empathy and compassion are extremely critical to a patient's care and recovery," says Burch. "My own positive experience with Dr Pochapin as a patient at NYU Langone prompted me to support this extraordinary program and bring attention to the incredible work of the staff there."

In addition to supporting the Patient-Centered Care Curriculum, initiated in mid-2014, Burch introduced the idea of an award for the Division of Gastroenterology at NYU Langone for faculty and staff to be recognized for extraordinary practices of humanism in medicine. "This year, it is a privilege to be able to present the J. Christopher Burch Award for Humanism in Medicine to four individuals who so completely embody and deserve this recognition," said Dr. Pochapin. "They truly are the best of usand the best of medicine."

This year's honorees included:

Jungwon Jun , BSN, RN, CCRN, endoscopy nurse, VA Hospital-Manhattan

Mabel Liu, RN , clinical coordinator, Endoscopy Unit, NYU Langone Medical Center

Carlie Patterson , PA-C, physician assistant, Division of Gastroenterology, Bellevue Hospital

Renee L. Williams , MD, assistant professor of medicine and attending gastroenterologist

The J. Christopher Burch Award for Humanism in Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology is supported by Burch for the purpose of promoting and recognizing qualities such as empathy, compassion, and caring among the entire healthcare team. As part of the selection process, Division faculty nominated candidates they felt are deserving, based on the following award criteria:

Consistently demonstrates active and empathetic listening to patients and their family members regarding their needs and concerns.

to patients and their family members regarding their needs and concerns. Consistently demonstrates caring and compassion in their interaction with patients and their family members regarding their needs and concerns.

and in their interaction with patients and their family members regarding their needs and concerns. Consistently provides a hopeful , positive attitude with patients, their family members, and colleagues.

, with patients, their family members, and colleagues. Consistently demonstrates cultural sensitivity in working with patients and family members of diverse backgrounds.

in working with patients and family members of diverse backgrounds. Consistently seeks to be helpful to his/her patients, their family members, and colleagues.

to his/her patients, their family members, and colleagues. Consistently demonstrates respect for patients, their family members, and colleagues.

"In a time of great innovation and progress in the healthcare profession, this award reminds us to value always the human connection: the art as well as the science of medicine," said Dr. Pochapin.

About the Division of Gastroenterology

The Division of Gastroenterology at NYU Langone Medical Center is dedicated to world-class patient care, advancement in research and innovation, excellence in education and outreach, and a humanistic approach to care. Our physicians are highly trained specialists who provide advanced, personalized care in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of conditions and diseases of the gastrointestinal system, including the esophagus, stomach, liver and biliary system, pancreas, small intestine, colon, and rectum. We believe in partnering with our patients -- not only in treating the disease but in caring for the whole person.

About Christopher Burch

Christopher Burch, founder and CEO of Burch Creative Capital, has been an entrepreneur and active investor across a wide range of industries for forty years. Beyond his professional investing, Burch has a deep passion for charitable projects. In addition to NYU Langone, he has contributed funding toward substantial research and philanthropic initiatives at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, and The Sumba Foundation in Indonesia, among others.

Burch's contribution to Mt. Sinai is dedicated to the ongoing research of Dr Xiu-Min Li at the Center for Integrative Medicine for Allergies and Wellness. Through his generosity, Dr Li and her team are expanding the investigation and use of alternative therapies and her project "Weight loss with or without Asthma."

The Sumba Foundation's aim is to provide humanitarian aid by fostering community-based projects that impact health, including medical access and malaria control, nutrition, education, water and income-generation, while preserving and respecting the culture and traditions of the Sumbanese people. With the enthusiastic support of Burch and his resort, Nihiwatu, the Foundation has set up over 15 primary schools, built 48 water wells and 5 medical clinics, supplied 172 villages with clean water and reduced Malaria by 85% in affected communities.



Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438111

Media Contact: Elissa Lumley, 917-592-6058

SOURCE Christopher Burch

Related Links

http://christopherburch.com


ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- One year after the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, terrorism remains a top concern for American travelers. Demand for travel insurance with Terrorism coverage has tripled for top European destinations over the past year, reports leading travel insurance comparison site Squaremouth. (WATCH VIDEO)

"Terrorism is still a major concern for travelers, especially those going to Europe," said Squaremouth spokesperson Rachael Taft. "While our customers continue to visit Europe in large numbers, France experienced the slowest growth of any top destination over the past year."

Increased Demand for Terrorism Coverage Following Paris Attacks

The terrorist attacks in Paris sparked immediate concern for travelers. The number of customers purchasing travel insurance using Squaremouth's "Terrorism" filter  which narrows search results to only show policies with Terrorism coverage  jumped 126% in the two-week period after the attacks.

In the year following the Paris attacks, the percentage of travelers searching specifically for Terrorism coverage has more than doubled. Click to see chart showing monthly growth in demand for Terrorism coverage over the past year.

Terrorism Concern Triples for Top European Destinations

While overall demand for Terrorism coverage has doubled, regardless of destination, American travelers taking trips to popular European destinations are showing the greatest surge in interest.

Of the top destinations among Squaremouth's American customers, European countries saw the most significant increases in travelers searching specifically for Terrorism coverage when buying a policy

American travelers heading to Germany showed the greatest increase in demand for Terrorism coverage, growing 256% year-over-year

Increase in Demand for Terrorism Coverage

Top 10 International Destinations, Ranked by Growth

Germany (256%) Spain (226%) United Kingdom (206%) Italy (202%) France (192%) Canada (105%) Australia (105%) Mexico (100%) Israel (75%) Bahamas (74%)

Travel Insurance Sales Fall Flat for France

One month after the attacks in Paris, travel insurance sales for trips to each of the top European destinations spiked. However, in the following months, travel insurance sales for France fell and have been slow to recover in the year since the attacks.

Spain , Italy , and Germany each experienced year-over-year increases of at least 20% in the three-month period starting Nov. 13

, , and each experienced year-over-year increases of at least 20% in the three-month period starting One year after the Paris attacks, France and Germany are the only top destinations with single-digit growth

Change in Number of Customers Buying Travel Insurance for Top European Destinations



1 month after

Paris attack 3 months after

Paris attack 1 year after

Paris attack* Italy 47% 22% 21% U.K. 57% 19% 17% France 17% -0.1% 3.5% Spain 26% 27% 22% Germany 22% 20% 8.4%

*Represents year-over-year growth in number of American customers buying travel insurance for trips to one of the above countries between 11/13/15-11/7/16

Methodology: Annual numbers are based on sales through Squaremouth between 10/31 of the previous year and 10/31 of that year and reflect year-over-year changes, unless otherwise noted. Travelers who are visiting multiple countries only have to enter one destination when purchasing a policy on Squaremouth.com.

Related:

ABOUT SQUAREMOUTH

Squaremouth compares travel insurance policies from every major travel insurance provider in the United States. Using Squaremouth's comparison engine and third-party customer reviews, travelers can research and compare insurance products side-by-side. More information can be found at www.squaremouth.com.

Available Topic Expert:

Rachael Taft

[email protected]

(727) 264-5174

SOURCE Squaremouth

Related Links

http://www.squaremouth.com


MONTREAL, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Peter Gibson joins Smardt Chiller Group's fast-growing Asia-Pacific business as Managing Director, based in Melbourne, effective November 21, 2016. Chief executive of German-owned manufacturing group Bitzer Australia since 2013, Gibson's global experience includes several years building sales and a new customer base for ebm-pabst in North America. His initial training as a refrigeration mechanic in Melbourne was followed by an MBA from Swinburne University.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438229

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438230

"Peter's skill set is ideal for accelerating our growth in Asia-Pacific markets," says Roger Richmond-Smith, Smardt founder and CEO. "He will be working closely with our Australian regional team in Melbourne, with Asia VP Sam Ringwaldt and his team in Singapore and with China GM Jeff He and his team in Guangzhou. He reports to Global COO Vince Canino."

Canino adds: "As global no 1 in oil-free centrifugal chillers and the world's largest user of Turbocor technology, Smardt has come a long way since building the world's first oil-free centrifugal chiller in 2002. Our factories in Stuttgart, Montreal, Melbourne, Plattsburgh, Sao Paulo and Guangzhou are proving a very exciting force for growth in our global customer base, now with over 6000 chillers installed. Smardt's product range- from 60 tons to 2500 tons capacity- includes cutting-edge water cooled, air cooled, modular and evaporatively cooled chiller technologies."

Canino continues: "Peter Gibson's customer focus, his agility with technology and product development and his unusual strengths with people and finance all fit incredibly well with our strategic plans for the near future and beyond into the new digital age."

Further details: Lauren Stephens, Global marketing leader, Smardt Chiller Group Inc., 1840 TransCanada Highway, Dorval, Quebec H9P 1H7, Canada. [email protected]; +1 514 627 2090

SOURCE Smardt Chiller Group Inc
BOSTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "Without Christians, there would be no Lebanon," Professor Marius Deeb argued at a lecture at Boston College on Wednesday. In Lebanon, he said, "Christian leaders have fought to preserve a democratic polity in which all the religious groups would be equal and represented at all levels of government, and in which all basic freedoms would be protected." In the election of General Michel Aoun as Lebanon's president last month, ending two years of deadlock in which the office went unfilled, Deeb saw positive signs of a "new dialogue among Lebanese," and expected that Aoun "will accomplish a lot."

In his lecture, Professor Deeb traced in detail the history of Christian leadership in Lebanon, from the establishment of Mount Lebanon as an autonomous zone after the massacres of Christians in 1860 to the 1975-1990 Civil War. Deeb argued that the Christians' desire for a "free and open society" helped preserve Lebanese society despite the horrific violence of the war.

Deeb described President Aoun as a "remarkable man." He is a Christian who began his career fighting against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and later aligned himself with Syria's Shi'ite Muslim ally Hezbollah. In Deeb's view, the conditions for the election of Aoun as President were made possible by the declining influence in Lebanon of both Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. The energy of Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, is being absorbed in Syria, while Saudi Arabia is bogged down in Yemen.

Deeb expects that Aoun can make progress on a number of issues in Lebanon, from reintegrating the exiled South Lebanon Army, to improving relations between Israel, Syria and Lebanon, to fighting corruption and improving basic services. Despite Deeb's description of Hezbollah as "villains," he believes Aoun's relationship with them will help "prevent conflict." "Christians in the West should be supportive of Lebanon," Deeb concluded, "and of Michel Aoun in particular."

Deeb also argued that efforts should be made to restore nationality to Lebanese living abroad, most of whom are Christian. While Christians made up the majority in Lebanon at the time of independence in 1943, their proportion of the population has sharply fallen due to emigration and higher birth rates among Lebanese Muslims. If the diaspora is counted, Deeb noted, "they are at least on par with their Muslim counterparts. To count only the Christians who reside in Lebanon is totally unacceptable." The Lebanese diaspora, Deeb explained, remains an organic part of Lebanese society.

"Despite the wars and the conflicts that have ravaged their homeland," Deeb concluded, "the Christians have always rebuilt their country and continue to have faith in a better future. The religious freedom they enjoy is a model for all the Christians of the Levant and Egypt. They ring the bells of their church loudly, and show their symbols in public without fear." Deeb drew a marked contrast between Lebanon and other states in the region like Egypt, where Christians "are harassed all the time, and their churches are burned," Qatar, where the only churches were built under diplomatic pressure and have no bells or crosses, and Turkey, where nearly all the Christians were wiped out decades ago.

Marius Deeb is a retired professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and the author of Syria's Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process. The full video of Deeb's talk can be seen online at www.middle-east-minorities.com, and was part of a lecture series on The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East being held at Boston College, and sponsored by Christian Solidarity International in cooperation with the Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages & Literatures, the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and the Department of Political Science, Islamic Civilization and Societies.

Contact: Alexandra Campana

[email protected]

SOURCE Christian Solidarity International (CSI)

Related Links

http://www.csi-int.org


CHICAGO, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) today announced that, following rigorous review, they have once again designated Recondo's EligibilityPlus and SurePayHealth products as "Peer Reviewed by HFMA." This marks the third straight year that Recondo has earned the coveted designation, respected industry wide as an objective, third-party confirmation of the value of a company's solutions.

Recondo's EligibilityPlus data service automates the process of discovering a patient's true level of coverage before or after services by seamlessly integrating with Epic and other major systems to drive a rapid drop in eligibility-related denials.

Recondo's SurePayHealth automates patient estimates with an intelligence feed that produces reliably correct patient estimates prior to or at the point of service, ultimately driving up cash collections for hundreds of hospitals around the countryfor many, by as much as 40 percent.

"Recondo is honored to receive the 'Peer Reviewed by HFMA' designation for both SurePayHealth and EligibilityPlus. This designation from HFMA reflects the continued year-over-year increase in client adoption rates, as well as the success and exceptional value Recondo's solutions provide to our clients," said Recondo Chief Operating Officer Perry Sweet. "With the recent news of Recondo's $16 million funding round, aimed at continuing product development investments in areas of API-enabled revenue cycle content, expanded claims statusing, and authorization automation, I am certain we will continue to see strong market demand for our solutions and leverage this investment to further execute on our aggressive growth strategy."

The rigorous, 11-step HFMA Peer Review process includes a Peer Review panel review comprising current customers, prospects who have not made a purchase, and industry experts. The Peer Review status of the healthcare business solution and its performance claims are based on effectiveness, quality and usability, price, value, and customer and technical support.

"We're pleased to have Recondo renew their HFMA Peer Reviewed designation," said HFMA President and CEO Joseph J. Fifer, FHFMA, CPA. "The HFMA Peer Review process assures our members, through a rigorous evaluation, that the reviewed healthcare business solution meets an objective, third-party assessment of overall effectiveness, quality, and value."

Recondo executives will be available to share additional information on the company's revenue cycle solutions in person at two upcoming conferences:

HFMA Region 4 Mid-Atlantic in Asheville, NC - Nov. 13-15

- HIMSS Revenue Cycle Summit in Boston, MA - Dec. 6-7

About HFMA

With more than 40,000 members, the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) is the nation's premier membership organization for healthcare finance leaders. HFMA builds and supports coalitions with other healthcare associations and industry groups to achieve consensus on solutions for the challenges the U.S. healthcare system faces today. Working with a broad cross-section of stakeholders, HFMA identifies gaps throughout the healthcare delivery system and bridges them through the establishment and sharing of knowledge and best practices. We help healthcare stakeholders achieve optimal results by creating and providing education, analysis, and practical tools and solutions. Our mission is to lead the financial management of health care. hfma.org

About Recondo

Recondo empowers more than 900 hospitals and health systems with revenue cycle solutions that connect providers with over 90% of the nation's payers and their patients to ensure maximum and accelerated payments across the care continuum. Recondo's patented software and provider-centric expertise streamline operations to achieve maximum efficiencies in patient access through claim status to payment processing. In a continuum today where inaccuracy and inefficiencies cost U.S. healthcare a staggering $480 billion per year, partnering with a trusted revenue cycle expert to get paid more, faster and at a lower cost has never been more necessary. Visit us at www.recondotech.com.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141109/157498LOGO

SOURCE Recondo Technology

Related Links

http://www.recondotech.com


NEW YORK, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Referred to by many as the "Jimi Hendrix of the pedal steel guitar" and named one of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time by Rolling Stone, Robert Randolph is back with his fifth studio album, Got Soul, out February 17, 2017 on Sony Music Masterworks. The band premiered the album's title track, "Got Soul" today with Wall Street Journal. Listen here.

"[The song] came from thinking about the goodness that everyone naturally has within their soul," Randolph says. "I want people to put on their blinders, take a break from real life, and reconnect with who they are."

With the election now behind us there couldn't be a better time for everyone to take a break from real life and let the music in. The track "Got Soul" is available to stream today on Wall Street Journal



Robert Randolph & The Family Band is currently on tour through December and will announce their 2017 tour dates soon.

UPCOMING TOUR DATES

Nov 17 - Philadelphia, PA - World Cafe Live

Nov 18 - Port Chester, NY - The Capitol Theatre

Nov 25 : Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bowl

Nov 26 : Beverly, MA @ The Cabot

Dec 31 : Fairfield, CT @ The Warehouse FTC

iTunes | Spotify

PRE-ORDER of Got Soul Available Now

Sony Music Masterworks Contacts:

Angela Barkan | Larissa Slezak

212-833-8575 / 6075

[email protected] / [email protected]

SOURCE Sony Music Masterworks

Related Links

https://www.sonymusicmasterworks.com


NEW YORK, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- In honor of Veterans Day, Dashlane, the leader in online identity and password management, is proud to offer U.S. military personnel a 50% discount on up to 5 years of its Dashlane Premium service. The discount will begin Friday, November 11 at 7:00 AM ET and conclude on Sunday at 11:59 PM ET.

All current and former members of the U.S. military can visit Dashlane.com/Veterans to sign up and ensure that their passwords, credit cards, and identities stay safe and protected online.

From well-publicized data breaches to political hacks, cybersecurity threats are ever evolving, posing a unique threat in 2016 and beyond. Despite a heightened awareness of hackers in the news, many consumers don't fully grasp how vulnerable their own passwords are or the value of information passwords intend to safeguard. Dashlane protects its users against online threats by identifying weak or reused passwords and generating unique, strong passwords for every site or account in use.

"We are proud to offer a discount to past and present servicemen and women, hereby ensuring the online safety of those who have sworn to serve and protect us offline," said Emmanuel Schalit, CEO of Dashlane.

For most people, properly managing passwords verges on impossible, given the increasing number of devices and digital services we rely on daily. Dashlane makes it easy for anyone to manage their online accounts and activity securely and safely, whether logging into websites and apps or making transactions. Premium users will enjoy the benefits of Dashlane's password manager and digital wallet across unlimited devices, with automatic sync and backup for accounts. With this discount, military personnel will receive one year of Dashlane Premium for just $19.99. Visit Dashlane.com/Veterans for more information.

About Dashlane

Dashlane makes identity and checkouts simple with its password manager and secure digital wallet app. Dashlane allows its users to securely manage passwords, credit cards, IDs, and other important information via advanced encryption and local storage. Dashlane has helped over 5 million users manage and secure their digital identity. The app is available on PC, Mac, Android, and iOS, and has won critical acclaim from top publications, including: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

Dashlane was founded by Bernard Liautaud and co-founders Alexis Fogel, Guillaume Maron, and Jean Guillou. The company has offices in New York City and Paris and has received $52.5 million in funding from TransUnion, Rho Ventures, FirstMark Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Learn more at Dashlane.com.

SOURCE Dashlane

Related Links

https://www.dashlane.com


SFUAD is proud to participate in the Yellow Ribbon GI Education Enhancement Program and in 2016, Military Friendly designated SFUAD as a Military Friendly School, meaning that SFUAD is recognized as an institution dedicated to helping U.S. military veterans and their dependents earn their degrees.

SFUAD offers active military members and veterans support financially, as well. SFUAD honors the educational benefits for active-duty service members, reservists, veterans of the armed forces, spouses and their dependents.

Beginning in the fall of 2017, students who are Active Duty, Reserves or Veterans of the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard qualify for a tuition discount of up to 40 percent over the life of the program. For more information on the new Military Scholarship, visit santafeuniversity.edu.

To view a video of SFUAD student veterans pursuing their academic and creative dreams at SFUAD, visit santafeunviersity.edu.

About Santa Fe University of Art and Design

Santa Fe University of Art and Design is an accredited institution located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of the world's leading centers for art and design. The university offers degrees in business, contemporary music, creative writing, digital arts, graphic design, film, performing arts, photography and studio art. Faculty members are practicing artists who teach students in small groups, following a unique interdisciplinary curriculum that combines hands-on experience with core theory and prepares graduates to become well-rounded, creative, problem-solving professionals. SFUAD is a member of the Laureate International Universities network  a global network of more than 80 campus-based and online universities with one million students in 28 countries. SFUAD boasts an international student body and opportunities to study abroad, encouraging students to develop a global perspective on the arts. Santa Fe University of Art and Design is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission.

Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK1BylP1qn8

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438416

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160707/387286LOGO



SOURCE Santa Fe University of Art and Design

Related Links

http://santafeuniversity.edu


GAITHERSBURG, Md., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Sodexo, world leader in Quality of Life Services, announced recognition by Victory Media as one of its 2017 Military Friendly Employers. The annual list recognizes companies with leading programs for veterans, members of the Armed Forces leaving military service and military spouses.

Victory Media has led the industry as a ratings entity for over a decade, surveying thousands of institutions and assembling lists that capture best practices in recruitment and retention of military employees, students and franchisees. The program has been instrumental in the development of corporate and college military recruiting programs.

"As the nation's largest federal foodservice contractor and partner to both the United States Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, we recognized that we had an opportunity to improve the quality of life for our country's veterans by helping them thrive in their post-military careers," said David Scanlan, CEO, Sodexo Government, North America. "To accomplish this, Sodexo offers mentoring initiatives, innovative programs, information sharing and community involvement, that employs and harnesses the enormous potential and experience of our retired military population."

To help veterans prosper in its workforce and beyond, Sodexo actively raises funds and awareness for veterans, provides veterans with employment opportunities, and trains veterans to be better prepared for their futures. One of its more recent efforts included a partnership with Volunteers of America, where Sodexo launched a collection of resources specifically designed to support veterans who may be transitioning to the civilian workforce or seeking to enhance their active duty career opportunities.

Sodexo Programs and Initiatives for Veterans

Each year, Sodexo's RED Friday Initiative shows support for veterans and this year it included a special month-long promotion that raised funds for the Armed Services YMCA. RED stands for "Remember Everyone Deployed." Sodexo team members wear red to show support and solidarity for veterans and through special promotions they raise money for Veteran causes.

Sodexo proudly hires veterans, not only to help them transition back to civilian life, but also because veterans, using the skills they learned in the military, are invaluable team members. In 2016, Sodexo was recognized for the eighth consecutive year as a Top 100 Military Friendly Employer by the GI Jobs List.

Training is a vital aspect of veterans returning to civilian life, and one way that Sodexo facilitates it is through the Well Seasoned Culinary Training program. Well Seasoned provides training for senior level enlisted Marines who are getting ready to transition out of the Marine Corps. Through this three-day training session, Sodexo executive chefs, culinary professionals and other subject matter experts meet with the cooks to help them prepare for a food-focused job in a civilian setting.

All Sodexo employees who are veterans can join the company's Employee Business Resource Group, HONOR, whose mission is to provide support, guidance and resources to employees and families connected to the military. HONOR accomplishes this by offering development opportunities, providing a forum to recognize and celebrate contributions made to our country, and establishing partnerships with community groups that support veterans, active duty, National Guard and military reserve.

As a result of these efforts and many others, Sodexo earned recognition on Victory Media's list of 2017 Military Friendly Employers. In assessing those named to the list, Victory Media establishes a standard definition of what it means for an employer or institution to be Military Friendly. It measures how well a company's or institution's military recruiting program does in three primary areas:

Engages the prospective military student or employee in a recruiting environment

Educates the military student or employee once he or she is part of the company or school

Employs the military student or employee in meaningful employment

With more than 40 years of experience working municipal, state, federal and military clients, Sodexo's Government segment and its nearly 3,000 employees improve the Quality of Life for the people it serves at 150 military and U.S. Federal Government locations in 26 states. Headquartered in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Sodexo provides a variety of integrated food and facilities management solutions and is the nation's largest federal foodservice contractor  serving 45.6 million meals annually with a focus on wellness and nutrition.

Sodexo delivers more than 100 services across North America that enhance organizational performance, contribute to local communities and improve quality of life. The Fortune Global 500 company is a leader in delivering sustainable, integrated facilities management and foodservice operations.

Learn more about Sodexo at its corporate blog, Sodexo Insights.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349448LOGO

SOURCE Sodexo

Related Links

http://www.sodexoUSA.com


CLEVELAND, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Beginning November 16, Research & Development Tax Credit experts Tax Credits Group, (TCG) will speak on the topic of the R&D Tax Credit at six seminar events located throughout Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

This income tax reduction series is an annual fall event sponsored by Cleveland-based cost segregation and energy savings specialists Duffy+Duffy. Along with TCG, co-sponsors of this event include Cincinnati-based 1031 exchange experts Strategic Property Exchange, LLC.

CPAs in attendance at this year's event will learn powerful tax planning tools and strategies for maximizing deductions and credits, while receiving 8 free hours of CPE credit, free breakfast and lunch.

This Year's Seminar Agenda Includes:

Cost Segregation/Energy (1.5 CPE)

Research & Development (1.5 CPE)

SEC 1031 Exchange (2 CPE)

Repair Regulations (1 CPE)

Resolving Taxes with IRS (2 CPE)

Event City & Dates:

Detroit  Wednesday November 16, 2016

 Cincinnati  Wednesday November 30, 2016

 Columbus  Friday December 2, 2016

Cleveland  Thursday, December 8 , 2016

 , 2016 Toledo  Friday, December 9 , 2016

 , 2016 Pittsburgh  Tuesday, December 13, 2016

CPAs, CFO's, Accountants, tax preparers or other interested parties can see full event and registration details at: http://costsegexperts.com/free-cpe-seminars.

R&D Tax Credit Session

2016 has been a groundbreaking year for the R&D Tax Credit. With so many new taxpayer favorable changes, CPA's and tax practitioners need to be aware of the new opportunity awaiting their clients, as well as the areas of risk associated with claiming the credit.

In this 75 minute session, TCG will provide attendees with insight on the following:

An understanding of eligibility requirements, including qualifying activities and costs

An examination of the new AMT and Payroll tax offset provisions

An understanding of how CPAs and tax practitioners can help their clients properly plan for a permanent credit

About Tax Credits Group

TCG is an Ohio-based tax consulting specialty firm working to help innovative U.S. businesses of all sizes and industry sectors stay globally competitive. With headquarters in Cleveland, TCG specializes in federal and state research credit studies and tax controversy support for small to mid-size manufacturers, software developers and financial institutions. TCG also specializes in business compliance acquisition work for mid to large-size businesses. Learn more about TCG at www.taxcreditsgroup.com

SOURCE Tax Credits Group

Related Links

http://www.taxcreditsgroup.com


"Men and women in the armed services, as well as their families, give so much to our country  including a peace of mind that allows all of us to sleep soundly at night," said Scott Thompson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Tempur Sealy. "Our goal is to honor and support them by delivering great sleep throughout the year with the help of retailers and other organizations who share our pledge."

Below is an overview of just a few of the donations made by Tempur Sealy in support of our nation's service members, veterans and their families.

Special Beds for Special Ops

Through an association with Darkhorse Benefits, Tempur Sealy will donate a Tempur-Pedic mattress to every member of the United States Special Operations Forces community as part of Operation Darkhorse  a multi-year pledge of more than 15,000 Tempur-Pedic mattresses that will go to individual special ops service members and their families. Since announcing the program in 2014, almost 4,000 mattresses have been delivered to brave warriors defending our country abroad, including 2,300 in 2016 alone.

Retailer Mattress Firm, which has been a strong supporter of the Operation Darkhorse initiative, has donated box springs for each Operation Darkhorse mattress. The mattress sets have been donated to the following branches:

U.S. Army Special Operations Command  Green Berets and Rangers

U.S. Navy Special Operations Command  SEALS and Special Boat Teams

U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command  Para-Rescuers and Combat Air Controllers

U.S. Marine Special Operations Command  Marine Raiders and Force Recon

Comfort in the Field, Far Away from Home

With assistance from Troops Direct, the non-profit on-demand supply line for American units based anywhere in the world, Tempur Sealy was able to provide multiple shipments of mattress toppers to active-duty military and special operations forces. Hundreds of toppers, which provide a portable, soft surface to sleep on when in the field, were sent to troops located in remote regions.

"When our service men and women need something  no matter where they are in the world  Troops Direct is there," said Aaron Negherbon, Founder and Executive Director of Troops Direct. "Thank you to Tempur-Pedic for being part of a network of supportive companies and organizations that respond to the needs of our military."

Surprise! Military Moms Receive Gift of Sleep at Baby Shower

TEMPUR-PEDIC, the Official Mattress of the PGA TOUR, worked closely with Operation Shower to recognize military moms for their service and sacrifices at a special baby shower prior to the PGA TOUR tournament in Boston in September. A raffle to award one lucky mom with a Tempur-Pedic themed shower turned into a comfy surprise for all 25 moms in attendance  they each were able to choose their very own Tempur-Pedic bed and also received a set of TEMPUR-Cloud pillows and a teddy bear for their new baby.

"Seeing these moms light up when they learned that a new Tempur-Pedic bed was on its way was priceless," said Amy Belle Isle, Chief Creative Officer at Operation Shower. "Having sponsors like Tempur-Pedic step up and show these families that they are appreciated and are supported during a very special time means a great deal and is such a special gift."

To share in the surprise, view the Operation Shower video here: http://bit.ly/TempurPedicSweetDreams

Supporting Veterans with Birdies for the Brave

As part of the brand's 'Sleeping on the Lead' campaign with the PGA TOUR, Tempur Sealy honored three military veterans living near tournament markets. Mark van Osdel of LeClaire, Iowa, Garrett Carnes of Burlington, NC and Murphy Hueston of Indianapolis each received a new Tempur-Pedic bed through the PGA TOUR's military outreach initiative, Birdies for the Brave.

An Army veteran and former Navy rescue swimmer, van Osdel has overcome PTSD and other combat-related injuries thanks to his service dog, Chance, who also received his very own Tempur-Pedic dog bed.

"I can't thank Tempur-Pedic enough for this gift," said van Osdel. "It's comfortable and allows me to get great sleep, which has been tough to find over the years. Along with my entire family and including Chance, we appreciate everything that Tempur-Pedic and Birdies for the Brave have done to support veterans as they come back into civilian life."

Sit 'N Sleep Makes an Impact in Los Angeles

Mattress retailer Sit 'N Sleep teamed up with Tempur Sealy earlier this month to donate 2,000 mattresses and foundations to LA Family Housing, a Los Angeles-based organization that provides solutions to end homelessness in the region. The mattress donation, made in honor of Veterans Day and Homelessness Awareness Month, will be used at the LA Family Housing bridge housing facility and distributed to former homeless veterans and other families throughout Los Angeles who have recently found permanent housing.

About Tempur Sealy International, Inc.

Tempur Sealy International, Inc. (NYSE: TPX) is the world's largest bedding provider. Tempur Sealy International, Inc. develops, manufactures and markets mattresses, foundations, pillows and other products. The Company's brand portfolio includes many highly recognized brands in the industry, including Tempur, Tempur-Pedic, Sealy, Sealy Posturepedic and Stearns & Foster. World headquarters for Tempur Sealy International, Inc. is in Lexington, KY. For more information, visit http://www.tempursealy.com or call 800-805-3635.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438251

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438253

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160121/324806LOGO

SOURCE Tempur Sealy International, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.tempursealy.com


COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The George Bush 41 Center at Texas A&M University on Wednesday, December 7th will host a series of events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack starting with outdoor patriotic observances, progressing to an indoor panel moderated by Brit Hume of Fox News examining the significance of that pivotal crisis, and culminating with a tour of the newest exhibit at the Bush Presidential Library called "Pearl Harbor Remembered."

World War II veterans former President George H. W. Bush and Senator Bob Dole are schedule to attend together with other special guests. There is no cost for general public to attend, but interested persons must first RSVP at [email protected] or by calling 979-862-2251.

"This important anniversary is a unique opportunity for us to welcome Senator Dole, other veterans, students and really anyone who cares to join together at the Bush Center for a chain of special events that, we hope, will mark this solemn occasion in a powerful way," said President Bush. "We owe it to those who made the ultimate sacrifice that fateful day  and those who served in the war effort that followed  to remember these events and why they matter so prominently in the grand sweep of American history."

The opening outdoor segment Dec 7th will feature patriotic songs, prayers and a flyover of vintage World War II aircraft at 11:48am CST to mark the exact time the Pearl Harbor attack commenced. Guests will then move indoor to the Bush Center's Annenberg Conference Center for the Brit Hume-moderated panel featuring historians/authors James Bradley and Jon Meacham as well as military experts.

At the conclusion of the panel, guests will be invited to tour the Bush Presidential Library's new exhibit dedicated to many facets of the Pearl Harbor attack, including digital images and documents on loan from each of the presidential libraries dating back to FDR. One of the centerpieces of the exhibit will be the specially restored video and audio of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's hallowed "Day of Infamy" speech delivered to a Joint Session of Congress on December 8, 1941, which is on loan from the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York.

The "Pearl Harbor Remembered" exhibit will be open through December 31, 2016.

"Warren Finch and our Bush Center partners at the Bush Library have gone above and beyond to be sure we have compiled a truly special collection of artifacts and media to help bring the Pearl Harbor experience back to life in both an educational and poignant way," said David B. Jones, CEO of the Bush Presidential Library Foundation. "We respect that there will be a very special gathering in Hawaii on the same day, but it is our intention to make this joint Bush Center's Pearl Harbor commemoration the finest and most comprehensive in the lower 48 states."

Again, interested groups and individuals who have questions or wish to attend these Pearl Harbor 75th Anniversary events must first register at at [email protected] or by calling 979-862-2251.

ABOUT THE BUSH CENTER

Comprised of the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation, the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, and the George Bush Presidential Library, the Bush Center sits on 90 acres on the campus of Texas A&M University. In 2017, the Bush Center will celebrate its 20th anniversary.

SOURCE George H. W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation

Related Links

http://www.bush41.org


NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Given the increasing prevalence of expensive household goods, cars and consumer electronics, insurance has become an unavoidable and often necessary cost in modern life. Mobile phones, and smartphones in particular are no exception to this trend.

Most major wireless carriers, insurance specialists, device OEMs, retailers and even banks now offer insurance plans that cover theft, loss, malfunctions and damage of mobile phones. Many policies now also integrate enhanced technical support and additional protection features such as data backup facilities, allowing users to securely backup their phone data online.



SNS Research estimates that the global mobile phone insurance market is expected to account for nearly $20 Billion in revenue by the end of 2016. The market is further expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 12% over the next four years, eventually accounting for over $30 Billion in revenue by the end of 2020.



The "Mobile Phone Insurance Ecosystem: 2016  2030  Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts" report presents an in-depth assessment of the mobile phone insurance ecosystem including market drivers, challenges, opportunities, value chain, future roadmap, case studies, ecosystem player profiles and strategies. The report also presents market size forecasts from 2016 through to 2030. The forecasts are segmented for 5 regional and 25 country level markets.

The report comes with an associated Excel datasheet suite covering quantitative data from all numeric forecasts presented in the report.



Topics Covered

The report covers the following topics:

- Mobile phone insurance ecosystem

- Market drivers and barriers

- Insurance policy structure, distribution channels and key trends

- Case studies of mobile phone insurance initiatives

- Industry roadmap and value chain

- Profiles and strategies of over 40 leading ecosystem players

- Strategic recommendations for ecosystem players

- Market analysis and forecasts from 2016 till 2030



Forecast Segmentation

Market forecasts are provided for the following regional and country level submarkets:

Regional Segmentation

- Asia Pacific

- Europe

- Latin & Central America

- Middle East & Africa

- North America

Country Level Segmentation

- Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, UK & USA



Key Questions Answered

The report provides answers to the following key questions:

- How big is the mobile phone insurance opportunity?

- What trends, challenges and barriers are influencing its growth?

- How is the ecosystem evolving by region?

- What will the market size be in 2020 and at what rate will it grow?

- Which countries will see the highest percentage of growth?

- Who are the key market players and what are their strategies?

- What risks are typically covered in mobile phone insurance offerings?

- How can insurance plans help wireless carriers in reducing churn?

- What strategies should wireless carriers, device OEMs and insurance providers adopt to remain competitive?



Key Findings

The report has the following key findings:

- SNS Research estimates that the global mobile phone insurance market is expected to account for nearly $20 Billion in revenue by the end of 2016.

- The market is further expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 12% over the next four years, eventually accounting for over $30 Billion in revenue by the end of 2020.

- In an effort to boost the uptake of mobile phone insurance, wireless carriers and insurance providers have extensively enhanced their insurance offerings with the addition of location tracking, data protection/recovery features and integrated technical support.

- The success of mobile phone insurance plans has driven several wireless carriers, such as NTT DoCoMo and Orange, to invest in the sales of other insurance products through mobile phones and their retail outlets.

- New insurance models are also beginning to emerge, such as London-based So-Sure's social insurance for mobile phones, which allows customers to get up to 80% of their money back, if they and their friends don't claim.

- Device OEMs are beginning to invest in tailored plans to suit the specific requirements of certain regional markets. A good example is Xiaomi's Mi Protect plan in India, which covers accidental and liquid damage, for as little as $7 per year.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p04086083-summary/view-report.html



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

http://www.reportlinker.com





__________________________

Contact Clare: [email protected]

US: (339)-368-6001

Intl: +1 339-368-6001

SOURCE Reportlinker

Related Links

http://www.reportlinker.com


NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- This Kalorama Information report, The Worldwide Market for In Vitro Diagnostic Tests, has been updated for two decades in ten editions, keeping readers informed about developments in all areas of IVD, around the world, in one volume. The 1,600-page report provides market size estimates and projections for the entirety of the clinical diagnostics testing market. It also tracks hundreds of competitors, notes significant partnerships, distribution deals and acquisitions and defines the market share situation for the IVD market and competitive analysis for many segments.



Market Size and Forecast for All IVD Market Segments



Published every two years, this report estimates current market size and forecasted market size to 2021 for defined segments of the IVD market and various sub-segments, including:

Molecular Assays (Infectious Disease, Blood Screening, Inherited Diseases, Oncology, Pharmacodiagnostics, Tissue Typing, Prenatal)

Clinical Chemistry and "Core Lab" Markets (including sub segment revenues for General Chemistries, Workstations, Analyzers Blood Gases, Urinalysis, Critical Care)

Point-of-Care Testing (POC), (Professional and Self-Testing, Glucose Testing, Pregnancy Tests, drugs of abuse, HIV, H. pylori, Other, OTC/Self Total, Professional POC, Cardiac Markers, Drugs of Abuse, HbA1c, Pregnancy, Other)

Microbiology and Virology by Test Type (Immunoassays, ID/AST, Infectious Diseases - DNA; ID/AST: Panels and Reagents, automated; Panels and Reagents, manual; Blood Culture; Chromogenic Media; Rapid Micro; Supplies)

Blood Banking (Grouping, Immunoassay Screens, NAT Screens)

Tissue-Based Testing - Histology and Cytology (Pap, ISH, IHC, HPV)

Infectious Disease Immunoassay Testing (Hepatitis, HIV, STDs, TORCH, Respiratory, Sepsis, Parasitology, Mycology, Others)

Hematology

Molecular Tests in Infectious Diseases (HAI, HIV, Hepatitis, GC/Chlamydia, Respiratory, Organism ID, Mycobacteria, TB, Others

Non-Infectious Disease Immunoassay Sales by Analyte Type (Cardiac markers, Tumor markers, Diabetes/HbA1c, Autoimmune, Allergy, Thyroid, Proteins, Anemia, Fertility, Therapeutic drugs, Tox/Drugs of abuse, Vitamin D)

Coagulation Tests (Lab-Based, POC, Genetic Markers)

Sequencing and Flow Cytometry

No other report provides similar understanding of the world diagnostics market. For each of the listed segments, 2016 market size, 2021 projection and compound annual growth rate is provided, as well as significant companies in the market and product innovations. The market data is put into a context with real-world industry and medical practice trends. Shara Rosen (MBA, RT), has authored ten editions of this superior work intended to provide IVD market coverage in a world perspective. The report has been called "The Bible of the IVD Industry" by customers, which include top IVD firms. Using Kalorama Information's report ensures that your firm will have the perspective and data of others in the industry and those that track the industry and invest in it.



Regional and Country IVD Markets Defined



In vitro diagnostics is a global market and the report reflects the global scope. Companies sell globally and think globally. Trends in one part of the world affect product decisions and company financial performance in others. Thus, this is a global report and the following regional and country overall IVD markets are included:



US

Europe

Germany

UK

France

Spain

Italy

Russia

Netherlands

Turkey

Poland

Canada

China

Japan

Saudi Arabia

Brazil

Latin America

Eastern Europe

Emerging Markets

Rest of World



The Worldwide Market for In Vitro Diagnostic Tests is a testament to the Kalorama methodology. It is the result of months of painstaking work by an experienced IVD industry analyst, who has tracked hundreds of companies for developments, trends and financial results. This research is compiled along with the opinion, observations and insights of industry experts to produce an unparalleled vision of the industry as it is in 2016.



Superior Company Profiling



The report concentrates over a thousand pages on detailed and tiered profiles of companies in the in vitro diagnostics markets. The experience that Kalorama Information has in this market is evident in its tiering and segmentation of companies.



Top Tier Companies: These are the dominant companies in IVD. For each company, extensive, discussion of recent financial performance is provided. Their main products are detailed and any significant company strategies, partnerships and acquisitions are considered:



Abbott Diagnostics

Alere Inc

Beckman Coulter, Inc. / Danaher

Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD)

bioMerieux Inc.

Bio-Rad Laboratories

Hologic

Instrumentation Laboratory (IL)

Ortho Clinical Diagnostics (OCD)

QIAGEN N.V

Roche Diagnostics

Siemens Healthineers

Sysmex Corporation

Thermo FisherScientific

Werfen Group S.A.



Next Tier IVD Companies: growth-oriented companies that have significant presence in one or several areas are profiled and their new products and strategies discussed in the report. Among these:



Affymetrix Inc.

Cepheid

ERBA Diagnostics, Inc

DiaSorin S.p.A

Illumina

Luminex Corporation

Menarini Diagnostics.

Mindray Medical International Limited

Myriad Genetics

Perkin Elmer, Inc. (PE)

Quidel Corporation

Randox Laboratories Ltd

Royal Philips

TOSOH Corporation

Trinity Biotech

Wako Pure Chemical Industries



Specialist Companies: While these companies focus on one segment of the IVD market, they can often be dominant in the They are important to watch because they can often develop products in new areas of testing and move categories.



Molecular Specialists

Blood Banking Specialists

Point of Care Specialists

Prenatal Test Service Providers

Quality Control and Pretreatment Specialists

CoagulationSpecialists

Histology and Cytology Specialists

Microbiology Specialists

IT SolutionsCompanies

CTC and Liquid Biopsy Specialists



Deep Understanding of IVD Market Trends



Published continuously for two decades, the report reflects the experience Kalorama has in watching events in IVD and the emergence and reemergence of industry, technological and clinical trends. For instance:



The revolution in bioinformatics is allowing clinical and traditional medical engineering to blend with components derived from the telecommunications, information and computer sciences industries. This opens new niche markets for POC test devices, which will have a positive impact on diagnostic testing.



Getting information to care givers and patients is now not an added plus, it is a prerequisite of all lab operations. Thus the next 3-5 years will see an intensification of the healthcare industry's emphasis on informatics, wireless communications, data networking and cost/effective healthcare delivery.



In the area of test economics, outcomes based disease management establishes guidelines and directives for patient care. This is having a significant effect on the use of new tests, which have to prove their added value to patient care. It also affects how many and which tests are recommended and thus reimbursed for a specific disease group.



None of the above would be happening without significant forces in the market driving them. This updated report presents the trends, technologies, customer needs and major suppliers with an eye on how they are shaping the IVD industry, including the following trends:



Top 20 Companies and Niche Players 2012-2016

Acquisitions in the IVD Market

NGS, LC-MS and Other Novel Testing

Lab Market Segmentation (Hospital, Independent, POLs)

Emerging Markets

Digital Technology, IT and Big Data

Gene Editing

Wearables

Europe and Austerity

Status of LDTs

State of Biomarker Discovery

Test Services Trend

Distribution Agreements

Role of Sequencing

Non-Blood Sampling

LDT Regulatory Picture

New Product Launches

Near-Patient Testing

DTC Testing

New Testing Venues



The Most Comprehensive Picture of Today's IVD Industry



In addition to providing superior business planning tools, the following are among the many topics that the report tackles:



20 Years of IVD: A summary of the IVD industry from 1995 to the present. Amazingly a lot has changed  new tests and technologies have come to market but the very same major companies generate about 90% of product sales.



Demographics: A number of world events bode well for the future of medical devices: an aging worldwide population and demand for new hospitals in developing countries.Increasing numbers of people between the ages of 45 and 75 years in the industrialized world consume more healthcare services such as heart and cancer tests. IVD companies are casting their nets in developing countries, where rising incomes and standards of living have sparked a new health consciousness and growing demands for quality medical care. The next five to ten years or so will see moderate and gradual change in IVD product markets.



Changing Core Lab: Not 10-15 years ago most microbiology and anatomic pathology labs were tucked away somewhere in the basement. The major test areas similarly were separated by impenetrable walls.

Those days aregone: imagine a centralized hospital lab where clinical chemistry, immunoassays, hematology, coagulation, urinalysis, some microbiology, some cytology tests are all performed in one room and often on instrumentation that are linked by an automated track line and all in the same room. More importantly by a lab information system that consolidates test results to an electronic patient record.



Emerging Markets: High growth countries, primarily Saudi Arabia, Brazil, China and India experience market growth of double digits. This is fueled by privatization and health insurance initiatives by governments and employers. However this growth has a negligible effect to compensate for the lack of significant growth in major markets of Europe, Japan and the U.S.



IVD-Focused Government Initiatives: New healthcare disease screening and health insurance initiatives proposed by the new U.S.administration under the guidance of President Barack Obama further bolster the use of IVDs, but continued economic difficulties has U.S. citizens forgo elective procedures because the co-payments may be somewhat unaffordable.



Automation: There is also a lack of trained lab technologists, so there is a decreasing availability of human resources needed to run the more complex new set of molecular and histological tests and immunoassays.



Therefore there has been a proliferation of test and lab automation tools launched that remove precious human resources from mundane pre-analytical and sample-tracking tasks to make time for more sophisticated ones. This phenomenon was once thought to be the purview of core lab biochemistry and immunoassays but automation is becoming a common feature hematology, blood banking,microbiology, and histology. Demand for healthcare and thus diagnostic tests in all the major markets is driven by aging populations and increased incidence of conditions such as: cancer, diabetes,cardiovascular disease, arthritis and obesity.In light of the demand for these tests, they have been reformulated for automated analyzers where the cost per test is traditionally low.



New Sampling: No more blood sampling: be prepared for an IVD world of breath tests for conditions that includes respiratory infections,gastrointestinal disorders, cancer and even chronic diseases. Wearable patch sensors have been commercialized for glucose and vital signs monitoring; more and more applications are in development.



Sequencing Enters the Clinic: In the 21st century, understanding a patient's personal genomic profile equips physicians with valuable information to better diagnose, predict, treat and prevent disease. Personalized medicine using genomic information improves patient outcomes and reduces healthcare costs and adverse drug reactions. The NGS data analysis market includes the market by product (software and services) and by applications such as whole genome sequencing, exome sequencing, targeted re-sequencing, de novo sequencing, RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq and Methyl-Seq. As experience with sequencing intensifies, researchers are beginning to discover some of the ways in which the technology can be used. It is generally anticipated that whole genome sequencing is most appropriate for broad research looking for linkages between gene mutations and disease development.



These and many more topics are covered in The World Market for In Vitro Diagnostic Tests, 10th Edition. We publish other specific reports in molecular diagnostics, U.S. IVD, companion diagnostics and next generation sequencing and many others. Our entire library of reports are available via our Knowledge Center service at considerable savings and convenience for your company.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p04090323-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


WASHINGTON, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) and Complete College America (CCA) announced today the formation of a new partnership that will focus efforts on boosting graduation rates throughout the nation's black colleges, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Predominately Black Institutions (PBIs). The announcement was made as part of CCA's 2016 Annual Convening of the Alliance in San Francisco, an event that brought together close to 600 higher education leaders and advocates from around the country. TMCF President & CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. served as the closing keynote speaker for the event.

TMCF will join CCA as the 41st member of the organization's Alliance  a network of states and institutional consortia that have committed to completion goals and implementation at scale of the organization's Game Changers strategies. TMCF's membership, which greatly enhances CCA's ongoing efforts to close achievement gaps, is the first of its kind - representing a national consortium of nearly 50 publicly-supported black colleges that will now have access to the full breadth of CCA's resources and technical assistance efforts.

"HBCUs have long been our nation's greatest champions for ensuring access to college, especially for African American students," said Complete College America President Stan Jones. "Today's announcement demonstrates the seriousness of their commitment not only to access, but to student success and completion. We applaud the Thurgood Marshall College Fund  and the colleges they represent  and look forward to working together to dramatically boost college completion rates and close achievement gaps."

"I am extremely proud of this partnership and TMCF's inclusion because it is solution driven. It's no secret that black college graduation rates could be higher. TMCF is committed to be apart of the solution to educate, empower and encourage students on our campuses to stay the course, finish the race and graduate," said Johnny C. Taylor Jr. "The strategic alliance with CCA is timely and I have no doubt will lead to positive outcomes for our students and member-schools. This is a new day for black colleges."

The first joint project for TMCF and CCA will be the collection of completion data using CCA's Common College Completion Metrics. The initial collection  which will explore graduation rates, credit accumulation, time to degree, and remediation rates, among other data  will provide baseline information to advance the organizations' shared mission to close achievement gaps.

In addition, TMCF will also be launching a national 15 to Finish campaign with member institutions to encourage more students to take at least 15 credits per semester (30 credits per year)the only enrollment level that puts students on track for on-time completion. The 15 to Finish initiative, which began at the University of Hawai'i, is one of Complete College America's five Game Changing strategies.

The two organizations will invite philanthropic partners to help fund broad-based implementation of CCA's strategies at HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions.

About Thurgood Marshall College Fund

The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), established in 1987 is named for the U.S. Supreme Court's first African-American Justice. TMCF represents all Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and its member-schools include the 47 publicly-supported HBCUs. With TMCF member-schools educating 80% of all students attending HBCUs, TMCF helps students with a clear intention to succeed acquire a high-quality college education at an affordable cost. TMCF also efficiently connects high performing, world-ready students with top tier employment opportunitiesaccess that students or employers might not have on their own. Through its scholarships and programs, TMCF plays a key role in preparing the leaders of tomorrow.

TMCF is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, charitable organization. For more information about TMCF and its initiatives, visit: www.tmcf.org.

About Complete College America

Established in 2009, Complete College America is a national nonprofit with a single mission: to work with states to significantly increase the number of Americans with quality career certificates or college degrees and to close attainment gaps for traditionally underrepresented populations. For more information, visit our website (http://www.completecollege.org/).

SOURCE Thurgood Marshall College Fund

Related Links

http://tmcf.org


ATLANTA, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- UCB, a global biopharmaceutical company focusing on immunology, neurology and bone treatments and research, is proud to announce 16 CIMZIA (certolizumab pegol) presentations at the 2016 American College of Rheumatology/Association for Rheumatology Health Professionals (ACR/ARHP) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. from November 11-16. The results of these presentations offer critical new insights for the use of CIMZIA to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriatic arthritis (PsA), and ankylosing spondylitis (AS), as well as the potential use of CIMZIA in investigational areas for axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA), non-radiographic (nr-) axSpA, and juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). Additional late-stage pipeline presentations include positive, new investigational data on UCB's romosozumab in osteoporosis.

"UCB is committed to providing meaningful solutions to people living with immunologic disorders. We innovate not only through our science, but with an underlying dedication to developing superior patient insights to ensure that our research and data truly deliver sustained value," said Emmanuel Caeymaex, Head of Immunology and Executive Vice President, Immunology Patient Value Unit, UCB. "Our success with validating CIMZIA as a meaningful treatment option has been an important part of this heritage, and we're pleased to present data that will help further inform physicians and patients. We're also looking forward to expanding UCB's late-stage portfolio with new data on investigational compounds that will help us move beyond merely addressing symptomology to developing treatments that can potentially be disease modifying."

Seven CIMZIA abstracts were accepted as oral presentations at the 2016 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting, validating the relevance of UCB's clinical research program for the rheumatology community. Notably, the EXXELERATE trial will be presented in an oral plenary session. EXXELERATE is the first head-to-head superiority study comparing the short-term and long-term efficacy, as well as the safety results, between CIMZIA plus methotrexate (MTX) and Humira (adalimumab) plus MTX in bio-naive RA patients across two years. Additional data from EXXELERATE on the efficacy and safety in patients who switched between the two anti-TNF therapies after failure of the primary anti-TNF therapy will be presented as well. Long-term efficacy and safety data from the RAPID-PsA study evaluating the treatment of patients with PsA will be presented in a poster session.

Other key oral presentations include investigational studies examining CIMZIA in patient populations with significant unmet clinical needs and who are lacking relevant information, such as lactating mothers (the CRADLE study) and pediatric patients with JIA (the PASCAL study), as well as data evaluating CIMZIA dosing strategies and four-year imaging results from the RAPID-axSpA study.

In the U.S., CIMZIA is indicated for the treatment of adults with moderately to severely active RA, for the treatment of adults with active PsA and for adults with active AS. In addition, it is indicated for reducing signs and symptoms of Crohn's disease and maintaining clinical response in adult patients with moderately to severely active disease who have had an inadequate response to conventional therapy. See important safety information including risk of serious infections and tuberculosis below.

Following is a guide to the UCB-sponsored data presentations

Presentations on CIMZIA in Approved Indications:

Rheumatoid Arthritis

1. [2987]: Comparison of Certolizumab Pegol Versus Adalimumab: 2 Year Efficacy and Safety Results from a Superiority, Investigator-Blind, Head-to-Head Study

Fleischmann, R. et al.

Date/Time: Tuesday November 15 ; 11:00 AM  12:30 PM

;  Session Info: ACR Plenary Session, Plenary Session III: Discovery 2016, Hall D

2. [602]: Efficacy and Safety of Switching Between Certolizumab Pegol and Adalimumab after Primary Anti-TNF Treatment Failure: 2 Year Results from a Randomized, Investigator-Blind, Superiority Head-to-Head Study

Fleischmann, R. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session A, Rheumatoid Arthritis  Small Molecules, Biologics and Gene Therapy  Poster I, Poster Hall  Hall C

3. [952]: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Phase 3 Study Evaluating Treatment Strategies (Continuation Versus Withdrawal) for Maintaining Low Disease Activity after 1 Year of Certolizumab Pegol in DMARD-Naive Patients with Early and Progressive, Active RA

Weinblatt, M.E. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 2:30 PM  4:00 PM

;  Session Info: ACR Concurrent Abstract Session, Rheumatoid Arthritis  Small Molecules, Biologics and Gene Therapy I: Treatment Strategies, Hall E

4. [594]: Maintenance of Improvements in Patients' Physical Function, Workplace and Household Productivity, and Reduction in Caregiver Burden with 2 Years of Certolizumab Pegol Treatment in DMARD-Naive, Early RA Patients with Severe Progressive Disease

Bingham, C.O. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session A, Rheumatoid Arthritis  Small Molecules, Biologics and Gene Therapy  Poster I, Poster Hall  Hall C

5. [595]: Clinical Responses and Improvements in Patient-Reported Outcomes Are Associated with Increased Productivity in the Workplace and at Home in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients Treated with Certolizumab Pegol

Bykerk, V.P. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session A, Rheumatoid Arthritis  Small Molecules, Biologics and Gene Therapy  Poster I, Poster Hall  Hall C

6. [3226]: Maintenance of Clinical Remission and Radiographic Non-Progression with MTX after Completion of 1 Year Initial Treatment with Certolizumab Pegol in Japanese Patients with Early Rheumatoid Arthritis

Tanaka, Y. et al.

Date/Time: Wednesday November 16 ; 11:00 AM  12:30 PM

;  Session Info: ACR Concurrent Abstract Session, Rheumatoid Arthritis  Small Molecules, Biologics and Gene Therapy V: New Biologics and Remission Induction, Hall E

7. [2588]: The Real World Comparative Safety of Certolizumab Pegol (CZP) As Compared to Other TNFi in a National US Cohort

Harrold, L.R. et al.

Date/Time: Tuesday November 15 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session C, Rheumatoid Arthritis  Small Molecules, Biologics and Gene Therapy  Poster III, Poster Hall  Hall C

8. [1414]: Access to an Active, Interactive Self-Assessment e-Health Platform Improves Patient-Physician Communication in Rheumatoid Arthritis: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial Including 320 Patients over 1 Year

Gossec, L. et al.

Date/Time: Monday November 14 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session B, Quality Measures and Quality of Care  Poster II, Poster Hall  Hall C

Psoriatic Arthritis

9. [1724]: The Effect of Certolizumab Pegol on Skin Manifestations of Psoriatic Arthritis over 4 Years of Treatment

Khraishi, M. et al.

Date/Time: Monday November 14 ; Poster Display: 8:30 AM  4:00 PM ; Presentation Time: 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

; Poster Display:  ; Presentation Time:  Session Info: ACR Poster Session B, Spondylarthropathies and Psoriatic Arthritis  Clinical Aspects and Treatment  Poster II: Psoriatic Arthritis, Poster Hall  Hall C

Multiple Disease States

10. [1731]: Disease Burden and Impact of Certolizumab Pegol Treatment on Workplace and Household Productivity Across Working Age Rheumatoid Arthritis, Psoriatic Arthritis and Axial Spondyloarthritis Patients

Kavanaugh, A.F.

Date/Time: Monday November 14 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session B, Spondylarthropathies and Psoriatic Arthritis  Clinical Aspects and Treatment  Poster II: Psoriatic Arthritis, Poster Hall  Hall C

Therapeutic Drug Monitoring

11. [2589]: Comparison of Two Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assays Used for Drug Concentration Monitoring in Psoriatic Arthritis Patients Treated with Certolizumab Pegol

Paul, S.

Date/Time: Tuesday November 15 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session C, Rheumatoid Arthritis  Small Molecules, Biologics and Gene Therapy  Poster III, Poster Hall  Hall C

12. [596]: Association Between Plasma Certolizumab Pegol Concentration and Improvement in Disease Activity in Rheumatoid Arthritis and Crohn's Disease

Wolbink, G. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session A, Rheumatoid Arthritis  Small Molecules, Biologics and Gene Therapy  Poster I, Poster Hall  Hall C

Presentations on Investigational Studies of CIMZIA

Women of Childbearing Age

13. [2048]: Evaluating Transfer of Certolizumab Pegol into Breast Milk: Results from a Prospective, Postmarketing, Multicenter Pharmacokinetic Study

Clowse, M.E.B. et al.

Date/Time: Monday November 14 ; 4:30 PM  6:00 PM

;  Session Info: ACR Concurrent Abstract Session, Reproductive Issues in Rheumatic Disorders, 150 A

Axial Spondyloarthritis, including Ankylosing Spondylitis and Non-Radiographic Axial Spondyloarthritis

14. [1042]: Four Year Imaging Outcomes in Patients with Axial Spondyloarthritis Treated with Certolizumab Pegol, Including Patients with Ankylosing Spondylitis and Non-Radiographic Axial Spondyloarthritis

van der Heijde, D. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 4:30 PM  6:00 PM

;  Session Info: ACR Concurrent Abstract Session, Spondylarthropathies and Psoriatic Arthritis  Clinical Aspects and Treatment II: Axial Spondyloarthritis  Treatment, Ballroom B

15. [687]: Safety and Efficacy of Certolizumab Pegol over 204 Weeks in Patients with Axial Spondyloarthritis, Including Ankylosing Spondylitis and Non-Radiographic Axial Spondyloarthritis

Deodhar, A. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; Poster Display: 8:30 AM  4:00 PM ; Presentation Time: 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

; Poster Display:  ; Presentation Time:  Session Info: ACR Poster Session A, Spondylarthropathies and Psoriatic Arthritis  Clinical Aspects and Treatment - Poster I: Axial and Peripheral Spondyloarthritis  Clinical Aspects, Imaging and Treatment, Poster Hall  Hall C

Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

16. [947]: A Multi-Center, Open-Label Study to Assess the Pharmacokinetics, Efficacy and Safety of Certolizumab Pegol in Children and Adolescents with Moderately to Severely Active Polyarticular-Course Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: Week 24 Results

Brunner, H.I. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 2:30 PM  4:00 PM

;  Session Info: ACR Concurrent Abstract Session, Pediatric Rheumatology  Clinical and Therapeutic Aspects I: Juvenile Arthritis, Ballroom C

Presentations on UCB's Investigational Pipeline:

Romosozumab

17. [1023]: Fracture Risk Reduction with Romosozumab: Results of a Phase 3 Study in Postmenopausal Women with Osteoporosis

Cosman F. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 4:30 PM  6:00 PM

;  Session Info: ACR Concurrent Abstract Session, Osteoporosis and Metabolic Bone Disease  Clinical Aspects and Pathogenesis, 145 A

18. [1024]: Superior Gains in Bone Mineral Density and Estimated Strength at the Hip for Romosozumab Compared with Teriparatide in Women with Postmenopausal Osteoporosis Transitioning from Bisphosphonate Therapy: Results of a Phase 3, Open-Label Clinical Trial Langdahl B. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; 4:30 PM  6:00 PM

;  Session Info: ACR Concurrent Abstract Session, Osteoporosis and Metabolic Bone Disease  Clinical Aspects and Pathogenesis, 145 A

19. [321]: Results of a Phase 3 Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of Romosozumab in Men with Osteoporosis

Lewiecki, EM. et al.

Date/Time: Sunday November 13 ; Poster Display: 8:30 AM  4:00 PM ; Presentation Time: 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

; Poster Display:  ; Presentation Time:  Session Info: ACR Poster Session A, Osteoporosis and Metabolic Bone Disease  Clinical Aspects and Pathogenesis  Poster, Poster Hall  Hall C

Epratuzumab

20. [2665]: Epratuzumab Treatment of Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and Secondary Sjogren's Syndrome: An Exploratory Analysis of Phase 3 Studies

Gottenberg, J.E. et al.

Date/Time: Tuesday November 15 ; 9:00 AM  11:00 AM

;  Session Info: ACR Poster Session C, Sjogren's Syndrome  Poster II: Clinical Science, Poster Hall  Hall C

About Romosozumab

Romosozumab is an investigational bone-forming monoclonal agent and is not approved by any regulatory authority for the treatment of osteoporosis. It is designed to work by inhibiting the activity of the protein sclerostin, and has a dual effect on bone, both increasing bone formation and decreasing bone breakdown. Romosozumab is being studied for its potential to reduce the risk of fractures in an extensive global Phase 3 program. This program includes two large fracture trials comparing romosozumab to either placebo or active comparator in more than 10,000 postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. UCB and Amgen are co-developing romosozumab.

About CIMZIA  In the US

CIMZIA  is the only Fc-free, PEGylated anti-TNF (Tumor Necrosis Factor). Cimzia has a high affinity for human TNF-alpha, selectively neutralizing the pathophysiological effects of TNF-alpha.

Important Safety Information about Cimzia in the US

Risk of Serious Infections and Malignancy

Patients treated with Cimzia are at an increased risk for developing serious infections that may lead to hospitalization or death. Most patients who developed these infections were taking concomitant immunosuppressants such as methotrexate or corticosteroids. Cimzia should be discontinued if a patient develops a serious infection or sepsis. Reported infections include:

Active tuberculosis, including reactivation of latent tuberculosis. Patients with tuberculosis have frequently presented with disseminated or extrapulmonary disease. Patients should be tested for latent tuberculosis before Cimzia  use and during therapy. Treatment for latent infection should be initiated prior to Cimzia  use.

Invasive fungal infections, including histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, candidiasis, aspergillosis, blastomycosis, and pneumocystosis. Patients with histoplasmosis or other invasive fungal infections may present with disseminated, rather than localized disease. Antigen and antibody testing for histoplasmosis may be negative in some patients with active infection. Empiric anti-fungal therapy should be considered in patients at risk for invasive fungal infections who develop severe systemic illness.

Bacterial, viral and other infections due to opportunistic pathogens, including Legionella and Listeria.

The risks and benefits of treatment with Cimzia should be carefully considered prior to initiating therapy in patients with chronic or recurrent infection. Patients should be closely monitored for the development of signs and symptoms of infection during and after treatment with Cimzia, including the possible development of tuberculosis in patients who tested negative for latent tuberculosis infection prior to initiating therapy.

Lymphoma and other malignancies, some fatal, have been reported in children and adolescent patients treated with TNF blockers, of which Cimzia is a member. Cimzia is not indicated for use in pediatric patients.

Patients treated with Cimzia are at an increased risk for developing serious infections involving various organ systems and sites that may lead to hospitalization or death. Opportunistic infections due to bacterial, mycobacterial, invasive fungal, viral, parasitic, or other opportunistic pathogens including aspergillosis, blastomycosis, candidiasis, coccidioidomycosis, histoplasmosis, legionellosis, listeriosis, pneumocystosis and tuberculosis have been reported with TNF blockers. Patients have frequently presented with disseminated rather than localized disease.

Treatment with Cimzia should not be initiated in patients with an active infection, including clinically important localized infections. Cimzia should be discontinued if a patient develops a serious infection or sepsis. Patients greater than 65 years of age, patients with co-morbid conditions, and/or patients taking concomitant immunosuppressants (e.g., corticosteroids or methotrexate) may be at a greater risk of infection. Patients who develop a new infection during treatment with Cimzia should be closely monitored, undergo a prompt and complete diagnostic workup appropriate for immunocompromised patients, and appropriate antimicrobial therapy should be initiated. Appropriate empiric antifungal therapy should also be considered while a diagnostic workup is performed for patients who develop a serious systemic illness and reside or travel in regions where mycoses are endemic.

Malignancies

During controlled and open-labeled portions of Cimzia studies of Crohn's disease and other diseases, malignancies (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) were observed at a rate of 0.5 per 100 patient-years among 4,650 Cimzia-treated patients versus a rate of 0.6 per 100 patient-years among 1,319 placebo-treated patients. In studies of Cimzia for Crohn's disease and other investigational uses, there was one case of lymphoma among 2,657 Cimzia-treated patients and one case of Hodgkin lymphoma among 1,319 placebo-treated patients. In Cimzia RA clinical trials (placebo-controlled and open label), a total of three cases of lymphoma were observed among 2,367 patients. This is approximately 2-fold higher than expected in the general population. Patients with RA, particularly those with highly active disease, are at a higher risk for the development of lymphoma. The potential role of TNF blocker therapy in the development of malignancies is not known.

Malignancies, some fatal, have been reported among children, adolescents, and young adults who received treatment with TNF-blocking agents (initiation of therapy 18 years of age), of which Cimzia is a member. Approximately half of the cases were lymphoma (including Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma), while the other cases represented a variety of different malignancies and included rare malignancies associated with immunosuppression and malignancies not usually observed in children and adolescents. Most of the patients were receiving concomitant immunosuppressants.

Cases of acute and chronic leukemia have been reported with TNF-blocker use. Even in the absence of TNF-blocker therapy, patients with RA may be at a higher risk (approximately 2-fold) than the general population for developing leukemia.

Postmarketing cases of hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma (HSTCL), a rare type of T-cell lymphoma that has a very aggressive disease course and is usually fatal, have been reported in patients treated with TNF blockers, including Cimzia. The majority of reported TNF blocker cases occurred in adolescent and young adult males with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. Almost all of these patients had received treatment with the immunosuppressants azathioprine and/or 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP) concomitantly with a TNF blocker at or prior to diagnosis. Carefully assess the risks and benefits of treatment with Cimzia, especially in these patient types.

Melanoma and Merkel cell carcinoma have been reported in patients treated with TNF-antagonists, including CImzia. Periodic skin examinations are recommended for all patients, particularly those with risk factors for skin cancer.

Heart Failure

Cases of worsening congestive heart failure (CHF) and new onset CHF have been reported with TNF blockers. Cimzia has not been formally studied in patients with CHF. Exercise caution when using Cimzia in patients who have heart failure and monitor them carefully.

Hypersensitivity

Symptoms compatible with hypersensitivity reactions, including angioedema, dyspnea, hypotension, rash, serum sickness, and urticaria, have been reported rarely following Cimzia administration. Some of these reactions occurred after the first administration of Cimzia. If such reactions occur, discontinue further administration of Cimzia and institute appropriate therapy.

Hepatitis B Reactivation

Use of TNF blockers, including Cimzia, has been associated with reactivation of hepatitis B virus (HBV) in patients who are chronic carriers of this virus. Some cases have been fatal. Test patients for HBV infection before initiating treatment with Cimzia. Exercise caution in prescribing Cimzia for patients identified as carriers of HBV, with careful evaluation and monitoring prior to and during treatment. In patients who develop HBV reactivation, discontinue Cimzia and initiate effective anti-viral therapy with appropriate supportive treatment.

Neurologic Reactions

Use of TNF blockers, including Cimzia, has been associated with rare cases of new onset or exacerbation of clinical symptoms and/or radiographic evidence of central nervous system demyelinating disease, including multiple sclerosis, and with peripheral demyelinating disease, including Guillain-Barre syndrome. Rare cases of neurological disorders, including seizure disorder, optic neuritis, and peripheral neuropathy have been reported in patients treated with Cimzia. Exercise caution in considering the use of Cimzia in patients with these disorders.

Hematologic Reactions

Rare reports of pancytopenia, including aplastic anemia, have been reported with TNF blockers. Medically significant cytopenia (e.g., leukopenia, pancytopenia, thrombocytopenia) has been infrequently reported with Cimzia. Advise all patients to seek immediate medical attention if they develop signs and symptoms suggestive of blood dyscrasias or infection (e.g., persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, pallor) while on Cimzia. Consider discontinuation of Cimzia therapy in patients with confirmed significant hematologic abnormalities.

Drug Interactions

An increased risk of serious infections has been seen in clinical trials of other TNF blocking agents used in combination with anakinra or abatacept. Formal drug interaction studies have not been performed with rituximab or natalizumab; however, because of the nature of the adverse events seen with these combinations with TNF blocker therapy, similar toxicities may also result from the use of Cimzia in these combinations. Therefore, the combination of Cimzia with anakinra, abatacept, rituximab, or natalizumab is not recommended. Interference with certain coagulation assays has been detected in patients treated with Cimzia. There is no evidence that Cimzia therapy has an effect on in vivo coagulation. Cimzia may cause erroneously elevated aPTT assay results in patients without coagulation abnormalities.

Autoimmunity

Treatment with Cimzia may result in the formation of autoantibodies and, rarely, in the development of a lupus-like syndrome. Discontinue treatment if symptoms of lupus-like syndrome develop.

Immunizations

Do not administer live vaccines or live-attenuated vaccines concurrently with Cimzia.

Adverse Reactions

In controlled Crohn's clinical trials, the most common adverse events that occurred in 5% of Cimzia patients (n=620) and more frequently than with placebo (n=614) were upper respiratory infection (20% Cimzia, 13% placebo), urinary tract infection (7% Cimzia, 6% placebo), and arthralgia (6% Cimzia, 4% placebo). The proportion of patients who discontinued treatment due to adverse reactions in the controlled clinical studies was 8% for Cimzia and 7% for placebo.

In controlled RA clinical trials, the most common adverse events that occurred in 3% of patients taking Cimzia 200 mg every other week with concomitant methotrexate (n=640) and more frequently than with placebo with concomitant methotrexate (n=324) were upper respiratory tract infection (6% Cimzia, 2% placebo), headache (5% Cimzia, 4% placebo), hypertension (5% Cimzia, 2% placebo), nasopharyngitis (5% Cimzia, 1% placebo), back pain (4% Cimzia, 1% placebo), pyrexia (3% Cimzia, 2% placebo), pharyngitis (3% Cimzia, 1% placebo), rash (3% Cimzia, 1% placebo), acute bronchitis (3% Cimzia, 1% placebo), fatigue (3% Cimzia, 2% placebo). Hypertensive adverse reactions were observed more frequently in patients receiving Cimzia than in controls. These adverse reactions occurred more frequently among patients with a baseline history of hypertension and among patients receiving concomitant corticosteroids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Patients receiving Cimzia 400 mg as monotherapy every 4 weeks in RA controlled clinical trials had similar adverse reactions to those patients receiving Cimzia 200 mg every other week. The proportion of patients who discontinued treatment due to adverse reactions in the controlled clinical studies was 5% for Cimzia and 2.5% for placebo.

The safety profile for patients with Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) treated with Cimzia was similar to the safety profile seen in patients with RA and previous experience with Cimzia.

The safety profile for AS patients treated with Cimzia was similar to the safety profile seen in patients with RA.

For full prescribing information, please visit www.ucb.com

Cimzia is a registered trademark of the UCB Group of Companies.

Humira is a registered trademark of Abbvie.

About Cimzia in the EU/EEA

In the EU, Cimzia in combination with methotrexate (MTX) is indicated for the treatment of moderate to severe active RA in adult patients inadequately responsive to disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) including MTX.

Cimzia can be given as monotherapy in case of intolerance to MTX or when continued treatment with MTX is inappropriate. Cimzia in combination with MTX is also indicated for the treatment of severe, active and progressive RA in adults not previously treated with MTX or other DMARDs.

Cimzia has been shown to reduce the rate of progression of joint damage as measured by X-ray and to improve physical function, when given in combination with MTX.

Cimzia, in combination with MTX, is also indicated for the treatment of active psoriatic arthritis in adults when the response to previous DMARD therapy has been inadequate. Cimzia can be given as monotherapy in case of intolerance to methotrexate or when continued treatment with methotrexate is inappropriate.

Cimzia is also indicated in the EU for the treatment of adult patients with severe active axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA), comprising:

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) - adults with severe active AS who have had an inadequate response to, or are intolerant to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).

Axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) without radiographic evidence of AS - adults with severe active axSpA without radiographic evidence of AS but with objective signs of inflammation by elevated C-reactive protein (CRP) and/or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) who have had an inadequate response to, or are intolerant to NSAIDs.

Important Safety Information about Cimzia in the EU/EEA

Cimzia was studied in 4,049 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in controlled and open label trials for up to 92 months. The commonly reported adverse reactions (1-10%) in clinical trials with Cimzia and post-marketing were viral infections (includes herpes, papillomavirus, influenza), bacterial infections (including abscess), rash, headache (including migraine), asthaenia, leukopaenia (including lymphopaenia, neutropaenia), eosinophilic disorder, pain (any sites), pyrexia, sensory abnormalities, hypertension, pruritus (any sites), hepatitis (including hepatic enzyme increase), injection site reactions, and nausea. Serious adverse reactions include sepsis, opportunistic infections, tuberculosis, herpes zoster, lymphoma, leukaemia, solid organ tumours, angioneurotic oedema, cardiomyopathies (includes heart failure), ischemic coronary artery disorders, pancytopaenia, hypercoagulation (including thrombophlebitis, pulmonary embolism), cerebrovascular accident, vasculitis, hepatitis/hepatopathy (includes cirrhosis), and renal impairment/nephropathy (includes nephritis). In RA controlled clinical trials, 4.4% of patients discontinued taking Cimzia due to adverse events vs. 2.7% for placebo.

Cimzia is contraindicated in patients with hypersensitivity to the active substance or any of the excipients, active tuberculosis or other severe infections such as sepsis or opportunistic infections or moderate-to-severe heart failure.

Serious infections including sepsis, tuberculosis and opportunistic infections have been reported in patients receiving Cimzia. Some of these events have been fatal. Monitor patients closely for signs and symptoms of infections including tuberculosis before, during and after treatment with Cimzia. Treatment with Cimzia must not be initiated in patients with a clinically important active infection. If an infection develops, monitor carefully and stop Cimzia if infection becomes serious. Before initiation of therapy with Cimzia, all patients must be evaluated for both active and inactive (latent) tuberculosis infection. If active tuberculosis is diagnosed prior to or during treatment, Cimzia therapy must not be initiated and must be discontinued. If latent tuberculosis is diagnosed, appropriate anti-tuberculosis therapy must be started before initiating treatment with Cimzia. Patients should be instructed to seek medical advice if signs/symptoms (e.g. persistent cough, wasting/weight loss, low grade fever, listlessness) suggestive of tuberculosis occur during or after therapy with Cimzia.

Reactivation of hepatitis B has occurred in patients receiving a TNF-antagonist including Cimzia who are chronic carriers of the virus (i.e. surface antigen positive). Some cases have had a fatal outcome. Patients should be tested for HBV infection before initiating treatment with Cimzia. Carriers of HBV who require treatment with Cimzia should be closely monitored and in the case of HBV reactivation Cimzia should be stopped and effective anti-viral therapy with appropriate supportive treatment should be initiated.

TNF antagonists including Cimzia may increase the risk of new onset or exacerbation of clinical symptoms and/or radiographic evidence of demyelinating disease; of formation of autoantibodies and uncommonly of the development of a lupus-like syndrome; of severe hypersensitivity reactions. If a patient develops any of these adverse reactions, Cimzia should be discontinued and appropriate therapy instituted.

With the current knowledge, a possible risk for the development of lymphomas, leukaemia or other malignancies in patients treated with a TNF antagonist cannot be excluded. Rare cases of neurological disorders, including seizure disorder, neuritis and peripheral neuropathy, have been reported in patients treated with Cimzia.

Adverse reactions of the hematologic system, including medically significant cytopaenia, have been infrequently reported with Cimzia. Advise all patients to seek immediate medical attention if they develop signs and symptoms suggestive of blood dyscrasias or infection (e.g., persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, pallor) while on Cimzia. Consider discontinuation of Cimzia therapy in patients with confirmed significant haematological abnormalities.

The use of Cimzia in combination with anakinra or abatacept is not recommended due to a potential increased risk of serious infections. As no data are available, Cimzia should not be administered concurrently with live vaccines. The 14-day half-life of Cimzia should be taken into consideration if a surgical procedure is planned. A patient who requires surgery while on Cimzia should be closely monitored for infections.

Cimzia was studied in 325 patients with active axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) in a placebo-controlled clinical trial for up to 30 months and in 409 patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) in a placebo-controlled clinical trial for up to 30 months. The safety profile for axSpA and PsA patients treated with Cimzia was consistent with the safety profile in RA and previous experience with Cimzia.

Please consult the full prescribing information in relation to other side effects, full safety and prescribing information. European SmPC date of revision 15th September 2016.

http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/EPAR_-_Product_Information/human/001037/WC500069763.pdf

About UCB

UCB, Brussels, Belgium (www.ucb.com) is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of innovative medicines and solutions to transform the lives of people living with severe diseases of the immune system or of the central nervous system. With more than 7 700 people in approximately 40 countries, the company generated revenue of  3.9 billion in 2015. UCB is listed on Euronext Brussels (symbol: UCB). Follow us on Twitter: @UCB_news

Forward looking statements - UCB

This press release contains forward-looking statements based on current plans, estimates and beliefs of management. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including estimates of revenues, operating margins, capital expenditures, cash, other financial information, expected legal, political, regulatory or clinical results and other such estimates and results. By their nature, such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions which could cause actual results to differ materially from those that may be implied by such forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Important factors that could result in such differences include: changes in general economic, business and competitive conditions, the inability to obtain necessary regulatory approvals or to obtain them on acceptable terms, costs associated with research and development, changes in the prospects for products in the pipeline or under development by UCB, effects of future judicial decisions or governmental investigations, product liability claims, challenges to patent protection for products or product candidates, changes in laws or regulations, exchange rate fluctuations, changes or uncertainties in tax laws or the administration of such laws and hiring and retention of its employees. UCB is providing this information as of the date of this press release and expressly disclaims any duty to update any information contained in this press release, either to confirm the actual results or to report a change in its expectations.

There is no guarantee that new product candidates in the pipeline will progress to product approval or that new indications for existing products will be developed and approved. Products or potential products which are the subject of partnerships, joint ventures or licensing collaborations may be subject to differences between the partners. Also, UCB or others could discover safety, side effects or manufacturing problems with its products after they are marketed. Moreover, sales may be impacted by international and domestic trends toward managed care and health care cost containment and the reimbursement policies imposed by third-party payers as well as legislation affecting biopharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement.

CONTACT: Corporate Communications, France Nivelle, Global Communications, UCB, T +32.2.559.9178, [email protected] or Laurent Schots, Media Relations, UCB, T+32.2.559.92.64, [email protected]; Investor Relations, Antje Witte, Investor Relations, UCB, T +32.2.559.94.14, [email protected]; Brand Communications, Andrea Levin Christopher, Immunology Communications, UCB, T +1.404.483.7329, [email protected]

SOURCE UCB

Related Links

http://www.ucb.com


OMAHA, Neb., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Union Pacific Railroad earned the No. 6 spot on the 2016 Best Companies for Veterans list, compiled by Monster and Military.com. This is the second year the company was listed among the top 10 businesses for its hiring initiatives and recruitment, onboarding and retention focused on veterans.

The company also was recognized on the 2017 Military Friendly Employers list by MilitaryFriendly.com. Ratings are based on veteran hiring, career advancement, culture, retention, and policies and compliance. In each category, Union Pacific exceeded benchmark standards by more than 20 percent.

"Union Pacific is honored to be recognized for its work engaging our nation's military veterans," said Sherrye Hutcherson, Union Pacific's vice president-Human Resources. "Our blueprint for talent management is focused on recruiting, developing and engaging top talent, and veterans are a cornerstone of that strategy because of their focus on safety, proven leadership skills and experience working in challenging environments."

Roughly 17 percent of Union Pacific employees have military experience, and some remain active in the National Guard or Reserves. Union Pacific actively recruits veterans through various initiatives, including its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Veteran Employment Advisory Council, through which the company participated in 14 Hiring our Heroes career fairs in 2015. Union Pacific recruiters also participated in 11 virtual career fairs and 135 other military fairs and events, such as those facilitated by Wounded Warrior Project.

Union Pacific offers unique employment opportunities for veterans, including train crew, diesel mechanics and electricians, assistant signal workers and track laborers. Engineers in the computer science, electrical, civil and mechanical areas will find leadership opportunities in the Information Technologies Department or through the company's Operations Management Training Program. Job opportunities are available at www.UP.jobs.

ABOUT UNION PACIFIC

Union Pacific Railroad is the principal operating company of Union Pacific Corporation (NYSE: UNP). One of America's most recognized companies, Union Pacific Railroad connects 23 states in the western two-thirds of the country by rail, providing a critical link in the global supply chain. From 2006-2015, Union Pacific invested approximately $33 billion in its network and operations to support America's transportation infrastructure. The railroad's diversified business mix includes Agricultural Products, Automotive, Chemicals, Coal, Industrial Products and Intermodal. Union Pacific serves many of the fastest-growing U.S. population centers, operates from all major West Coast and Gulf Coast ports to eastern gateways, connects with Canada's rail systems and is the only railroad serving all six major Mexico gateways. Union Pacific provides value to its roughly 10,000 customers by delivering products in a safe, reliable, fuel-efficient and environmentally responsible manner.

www.up.com

www.facebook.com/unionpacific

www.twitter.com/unionpacific

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110304/LA59497LOGO

SOURCE Union Pacific

Related Links

http://www.up.com


The documentary will highlight Jiangwan Town's folk traditions such as artistic performances celebrating the harvest season, young children dressing up as famous traditional Beijing Opera characters and a percussion band following the parade along the streets and alleys in the ancient town with cheerful music.

The traditional ceremony to worship ancestors was also filmed for the documentary, during which the people in Jiangwan Town burn incense, bow, deliver offerings and beat the drum in the main hall of the ancestral temple to welcome the gods and show their devotion to their ancestors. The ceremony concludes with meat shared among every household or a get together meal for everyone to spread the joy.

This is Wuyuan's second time to be featured on the Remember the Nostalgia documentary. The county's Wangkou Village appeared in the second season in an episode watched by an average audience of 6 million. Released in 2015, the aim of that documentary was to highlight the customs, culture and scenery of traditional Chinese villages as well as the agricultural civilization in China.

"With the 'Remember the Nostalgia' filming in Jiangwan Town this time, the traditional culture, folk traditions and villagers' lifestyle of Wuyuan will present a culturally rich visual feast to audiences," said Zhan Bin, brand manager of Jiangxi Wuyuan Tourism Co. Ltd.

About Wuyuan

Wuyuan County, located on the northeastern corner of Jiangxi Province, is known for its one-of-a-kind mountain landscape and the most beautiful countryside in China. It is also home to the most well-preserved ancient Hui-style architectures, one of the major architectural styles of ancient times in China with rows of dwelling houses with green tiles and white walls.

For more information about Wuyuan, please visit its official website at www.wuyuan.cc.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438209

SOURCE Jiangxi Wuyuan Tourism Co., Ltd.

Related Links

http://www.wuyuan.cc


Georgia Power is a leading employer for veterans, with programs for servicemen and women at all levels, including the company's Military Veterans in Power (MVP) employee resource group. MVP brings together company executives and veterans to help those who have served transition to the civilian workforce while also focusing on charitable activities with other organizations that support veterans and their families across the state.

"Today, we express our gratitude to the brave men and women who have given selflessly to protect the freedoms that we hold so dear," said Paul Bowers, chairman, president and CEO of Georgia Power. "We are proud to be a company that attracts the best and brightest from the United States Armed Forces. These men and women strengthen the fabric of our company as we serve our customers and communities every day."

Mission: Hurricane Matthew

Nowhere is the parallel between front line service in the military and at Georgia Power more pronounced than in storm restoration. Following Hurricane Matthew in October, one of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit the Georgia coast, veterans were in the field as part of Georgia Power teams restoring power to hundreds of thousands of customers in dangerous conditions.

James Laird, currently a Georgia Power lineman and safety specialist, was an infantryman in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1994 to 1999 and Tennessee National Guard from 2000 to 2004.

"With Hurricane Matthew, there was a lot of damage and work that needed to be done," said Laird. "We all had a sense of pride about our jobs and when we finished getting the lights back on, there was a huge sense of accomplishment. I've always had a calling to serve, and working here, in many ways, is about serving."

Programs, partnerships and accolades

Georgia Power's parent company, Southern Company, is a founding partner of the Troops to Energy Jobs program, a recruiting source that links veterans to job openings in the energy industry, and actively recruits members of the Navy as a Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program partner. Through this program, Georgia Power has been able to transition veterans directly from military bases including Fort Stewart near Savannah to positions within the company. Southern Company is consistently recognized for its veterans programs, including being named to G.I. Jobs' annual Top 100 Military Friendly Employer listing and as a "Best for Vets Employer" by Military Times EDGE for multiple years.

About Georgia Power

Georgia Power is the largest subsidiary of Southern Company (NYSE: SO), America's premier energy company. Value, Reliability, Customer Service and Stewardship are the cornerstones of the company's promise to 2.5 million customers in all but four of Georgia's 159 counties. Committed to delivering clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy at rates below the national average, Georgia Power maintains a diverse, innovative generation mix that includes nuclear, 21st century coal and natural gas, as well as renewables such as solar, hydroelectric and wind. Georgia Power focuses on delivering world-class service to its customers every day and the company is consistently recognized by J.D. Power and Associates as an industry leader in customer satisfaction. For more information, visit www.GeorgiaPower.com and connect with the company on Facebook (Facebook.com/GeorgiaPower) and Twitter (Twitter.com/GeorgiaPower).

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhenKx8he1I

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438293

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20050216/CLW066LOGO

SOURCE Georgia Power

Related Links

http://www.georgiapower.com


NAMUR, Belgium, Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- VolitionRx Limited (NYSE MKT: VNRX) today announced that it will present at the Canaccord Genuity Medical Technologies & Diagnostics Forum 2016 being held on November 17, 2016 in New York, NY.

Cameron Reynolds, Chief Executive Officer of Volition, will provide an update on Volition's business, clinical, regulatory and operational milestones, as well as the Company's recently announced product launch of its Nu.QTM Colorectal Cancer Screening Triage Test.

Event: Canaccord Genuity Medical Technologies & Diagnostics Forum 2016 Date: Thursday, November 17, 2016 Time: 4:30 pm Eastern Time Location: Westin Grand Central, New York, NY

Persons attending the conference who would like to schedule a 1-on-1 meeting with Volition management during the conference may do so by contacting Tirth Patel of Edison Advisors at [email protected] or Scott Powell, Vice President of Investor Relations of Volition, at [email protected].

About Volition

Volition is a life sciences company focused on developing diagnostic tests for cancer. The tests are based on the science of Nucleosomics, which is the practice of identifying and measuring nucleosomes in the bloodstream or other bodily fluid  an indication that disease is present.

Volition's goal is to make the tests as easy and simple to use, for both patients and doctors, as existing diabetic and cholesterol blood tests. Volition's research and development activities are currently centered in Belgium as the company focuses on bringing its diagnostic products to market first in Europe, then in the U.S. and ultimately, worldwide.

For more information about Volition, visit Volition's website (http://www.volitionrx.com) or connect with us via:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/volitionrx

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/volitionrx

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VolitionRx/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/VolitionRx

The contents found at Volition's website address, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube are not incorporated by reference into this document and should not be considered part of this document. The addresses for Volition's website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube are included in this document as inactive textual references only.

Media / Investor Contacts

Nucleosomics, NuQ, Nu.QTM and HyperGenomics and their respective logos are trademarks and/or service marks of VolitionRx Limited and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks, service marks and trade names referred to in this press release are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE VolitionRx Ltd
"The introduction of WellDog technologies will contribute greatly to the efficient development of CBM and other unconventional oil and gas resources in China," stated SPIERCE Director Dr. Zhou Lifa.

China's CBM resource is estimated at nearly 40 trillion cubic meters (tcm), with recoverable reserves of about 10 tcm. Over the last few decades, China has dramatically increased investment in CBM technologies, and each of the country's five-year plans has increased CBM production targets, but the results to date have failed to meet those goals.

"We believe we have the operational and technical know-how to make a dramatic improvement in Chinese CBM production," said John Pope, Ph.D., president and CEO of WellDog. "We started in 1999 at the very infancy of CBM and have become one of the major global players in delivering successful CBM technical services to basins around the world. Bringing WellDog's know-how and technologies to China will enable the Chinese producers to maximize value from their assets and hopefully meet their production targets in the near future."

The joint venture meets WellDog's strategic goal of driving georesource innovation to improve sustainability.

"Shaanxi has committed to producing 20 billion cubic meters of natural gas by the end of the 13th five-year plan," said James Walker, WellDog Chief Operating Officer. "The dramatic increase is part of China's push to ease off of burning coal and switch to natural gas, which would substantially improve the average quality of life of Chinese residents."

ABOUT WellDog: WellDog is an energy-focused technical services company that provides practical technical and business solutions in a high volume, cost effective manner with a remarkable customer focus. The company's mission is to develop and deploy innovative technologies to produce resources faster, responsibly and sustainably. Since 1999, WellDog has focused on providing cost effective, reliable, accurate subsurface data and data collection systems to high volume resource production operators such as shale oil and gas, coalbed methane, and coal mining operators. The company's ultimate aim is to assist in improving economic quality of life without reducing environmental quality of life. For more information, visit www.welldog.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161111/438357

SOURCE WellDog

Related Links

http://www.welldog.com


AMSTERDAM and VALHALLA, N.Y., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG; AEX: PHIA) and the Westchester Medical Center Health Network (WMCHealth), the leading provider of advanced medical care in New York's Hudson Valley, today announced the launch of WMCHealth's new precision medicine initiative for personalized cancer treatment, which will use Philips' IntelliSpace Genomics solution to integrate large-scale genomic analysis with extensive patient clinical data.

WMCHealth leverages Philips IntelliSpace Genomics to combine the output from next-generation sequencing (NGS) with clinical data and advanced information sharing, to provide a comprehensive patient view for precision-tailored treatment. With base operations at its flagship Westchester Medical Center, the WMCHealth precision medicine initiative will be available to all hospitals in the WMCHealth Network, as well as other facilities in the Hudson Valley and beyond.

Philips' IntelliSpace Genomics is a configurable, scalable and secure health informatics solution across hospitals for delivering real-time, actionable diagnostic information to physicians and specialists for therapy planning at the point of care. Philips IntelliSpace Genomics' collaborative solution enables physicians to answer key clinical questions by leveraging the best clinical expertise and algorithmic power in integrated workflows. It seamlessly brings data from multiple sources  including raw sequencing data, up-to-date in silico genomic databases, clinical data and knowledge databases, longitudinal patient records, medical images and pathology data, among others.

"Our team at WMCHealth sees and treats the most complex cancer cases. Our new precision medicine platform for oncology is designed to leverage all available sources of critical information to help make the most informed decisions about each patient's care," said John Fallon, MD, PhD, Director, Department of Clinical Pathology, Westchester Medical Center, and Chairman of Pathology, New York Medical College. "WMCHealth's new cancer diagnostic program gives us greater capabilities to test and validate clinical planning, through the fusion of highly specific and individualized patient information with massive and growing genomic knowledge of cancer."

Dr. Fallon added, "The Philips IntelliSpace Genomics solution is a foundation for designing possible therapy plans in a digital framework, such as how to match a tumor's genotype with a potential drug for the best outcome, for example, or matching patients with clinical trials. This is a powerful tool to help improve outcomes through precision medicine."

The genomics project is part of a larger investment by WMCHealth into groundbreaking diagnostic and treatment capabilities, including WMCHealth's new Cellular & Tissue Engineering Laboratory (CTEL), home to state-of-the-art technology that facilitates cellular therapy under investigational new drug applications in support of treatments for a variety of hematological and oncological disorders and diseases.

The IntelliSpace Genomics solution can be configured to define new workflows, create new pipelines, or integrate new sources of data as required, and can be used for collaborative clinical analysis and sharing across multiple hospitals and their affiliates, either on-site or in the cloud.

The Philips' IntelliSpace Genomics solution is built on Philips HealthSuite, a cloud-enabled connected health ecosystem of devices, apps and digital tools that work seamlessly together to enable personalized integrated health and continuous care.

"As the number of targeted cancer drugs and clinical trials continue to expand, it is critical to give clinicians insight into genetic mutations driving a particular patient's cancer, along with the complete patient context of diagnostic tests and medical history to enable a precise focus on personalized treatment," said Louis Culot, General Manager of Philips Genomics.

Culot noted, "The new WMCHealth platform leverages Philips IntelliSpace Genomics' informatics capabilities to help achieve this, as well as to provide physicians with a networked solution that offers a single integrated interface for collaboration between doctors and institutions."

For further information, please contact:

Kathy O'Reilly

Philips Group Communications

Tel.: +1 978-221-8919

E-mail: [email protected]

Twitter: @kathyoreilly

Joost Maltha

Philips Communications Healthcare Informatics, Solutions and Services

Tel.: +31 610-55-8116

E-mail: [email protected]

Twitter: @JoostMaltha

Andy LaGuardia

Westchester Medical Center Health Network

Tel.: +1 914-493-6532

E-mail: [email protected]

About Royal Philips

Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) is a leading health technology company focused on improving people's health and enabling better outcomes across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care. Philips leverages advanced technology and deep clinical and consumer insights to deliver integrated solutions. The company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Philips' health technology portfolio generated 2015 sales of EUR 16.8 billion and employs approximately 70,000 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries. News about Philips can be found at www.philips.com/newscenter.

About Westchester Medical Center Health Network

The Westchester Medical Center Health Network (WMCHealth) is a 1,700-bed healthcare system headquartered in Valhalla, New York, with 10 hospitals on eight campuses spanning 6,200 square miles of the Hudson Valley. WMCHealth employs more than 12,000 people and has nearly 3,000 attending physicians. From Level 1, Level 2 and Pediatric Trauma Centers, the region's only acute care children's hospital, an academic medical center, several community hospitals, dozens of specialized institutes and centers, skilled nursing, assisted living facilities, homecare services and one of the largest mental health systems in New York State, today WMCHealth is the pre-eminent provider of integrated healthcare in the Hudson Valley. For more information about WMCHealth, visit WMCHealth.org.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140122/NE50581LOGO

SOURCE Royal Philips

Related Links

http://www.usa.philips.com


SUFFIELD, Conn., Nov. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Windsor Marketing Group (WMG), a leading producer of in-store marketing solutions for many of the world's premier retailers, today launched a hiring initiative called "Salute" with a goal of hiring at least a dozen military veterans over the next 12 months. Almost nine percent of WMG's current workforce is made up of military veterans and CEO Kevin Armata said there are many reasons for launching this program.

"Veterans sacrifice some of the best years of their lives in service to our country and protecting our freedoms, yet it is no secret that many have had trouble finding employment as they make the transition back to the civilian workforce," Armata said. "This is a way for us to do our part in helping make that transition easier. In addition, because of their training, military veterans have a unique sense of discipline, organization, teamwork and personal initiative that make them incredibly valuable employees."

Armata said that the hiring initiative will not focus on any specific positions or expertise, but will be "across the board" in terms of the job skills being sought.

The "Salute" program is just the latest initiative for the Connecticut-based business with a long record of demonstrated social responsibility. WMG has been recognized for a variety of environmental and conservation friendly policies and programs, including the recent expansion of its 250,000 square foot deep-green corporate headquarters and manufacturing facility.

During the recession of 2008, WMG was able to avoid layoffs of up to 20 percent of its workforce by re-purposing employees into construction and other projects, an effort detailed in the best-selling business book "Conscious Capitalism" by John Mackey.

"We pride ourselves in doing things right in business," Armata said. "And that includes showing our support of those who have served on the front lines to make sure that we are all able to continue pursuing the American Dream. Now it is their turn to pursue that dream."

As part of the program's launch, WMG is honoring its veteran employees this Veterans Day with a special luncheon, hosted by Armata and other executives.

About Windsor Marketing Group

Windsor Marketing Group helps retailers increase sales by developing, manufacturing and distributing in-store marketing programs that captivate shoppers and inspire them to buy. The company is committed to enhancing the shopping experience, increasing basket sizes, and stimulating impulse purchases. Since 1976, the company has grown to over 185 associates serving more than 3000 clients from some of the most respected retail chains in the U.S. For more information, please visit www.windsormarketing.com.

You can also follow Windsor Marketing Group on Facebook at www.facebook.com/WindsorMarketing/ and Twitter at @WindsorMG

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20161110/438088LOGO

SOURCE Windsor Marketing Group (WMG)

Related Links

http://www.windsormarketing.com


Agartala, Nov 8 : The "best boys and girls" of society must join the Communist Party of India-Marxist to change the situation in the country, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar has said.

"To make a qualitative change in the party, the best boys and girls must come into the party fold to change the country's situation," Sarkar told a gathering of partymen here on Monday evening.

The CPI-M leader said: "Though the CPI-M is the largest Left party in India, our party's growth is not balanced everywhere.

"If the party's strength is not adequate in every state, we will not be able to utilise the situation for the welfare of the people."

Sarkar, the Chief Minister for the past 18 years, said: "The party requires genuine and dedicated workers to make the party organisation strong and active.

"To this end, party members and leaders need to visit every home to build personal contact with the people to spread the CPI-M's plans and goals."
Kabul, Nov 11 : At least two persons were killed and more than two dozen injured in an overnight Taliban car bombing against German consulate in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, local officials said on Friday.

"One terrorist detonated a car bomb near the gate of German Consulate office late Thursday night, killing himself and one other person and injuring 28 others," a security source told Xinhua news agency.

UN official sources put the number of the injured at 90 by the powerful explosion which occurred roughly at 11.15 p.m. on Thursday.

"The injured were residents who suffered injuries by the bomb shrapnel and flying glasses as the blast damaged several buildings near the site," the source said, adding an investigation was launched into the incident and further details will be released afterwards.

The Taliban militant group claimed responsibility for the attack shortly after the blast.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a purported Taliban spokesman, told local media that the bombing was a revenge attack against killing of civilians by "invaders" in Kunduz province.

On November 3, a series of air strikes were carried out by NATO-led forces on outskirts of Kunduz city, following ground operations conducted by foreign and Afghan security forces.
Chennai, Nov 11 : The probe by the US Department of Justice into the suspected price cartelization in the pharmaceutical industry will not have a major impact on the Indian drug firms, Fitch Ratings said on Friday.

In a statement Fitch Ratings said: "The ongoing probe by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) into suspected price collusion in the pharmaceutical industry is unlikely to have a significant impact on Indian pharma firms."

Citing news reports, Fitch said while the probe is likely to include more generic drugs, the situation is still evolving amid the current political environment in the US.

"In any case, we expect the impact to be minimal for Indian pharma, given the already-high price-based competition across most categories over the past few years and the reasonably diversified generic portfolios of Indian pharma companies," Fitch said.

The antitrust investigations which began about two years ago have attracted investor attention recently, with news of the likely expansion of the investigation into more generic drugs and the first charges being filed possibly by end-2016.

The probe has focused on a few high-priced complex generic drugs so far, which attracted prosecutors' attention due to considerable price increases amid the ongoing policy focus on limiting healthcare costs in the US.

Indian pharma exports to the US are focused mainly on simple generics, competing with a substantial set of competitors offering similar post-patent products.

Indeed, the high level of direct competition along with channel consolidation has caused downward pressure on prices, leading to deflationary trends in many generic drugs.

"Overall, we expect the regulatory environment in the US to remain supportive for generics-focused pharma," Fitch added.

This is in light of the underlying policy focus on containing healthcare costs and steps to enhance drug affordability such as faster Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) approvals under Generic Drug User Fee Amendments (GDUFA), which will increase the availability of economically priced generic alternatives, said Fitch.
Ghaziabad, Nov 11 : At least 13 persons were killed and more than a dozen injured in a factory fire in Uttar Pradesh's Sahibabad industrial area here, police said on Friday.

The fire, apparently caused by a short circuit, broke out early Friday morning in a neighbouring Delhi district at a garment factory in Shahid Nagar area near the Jaipal Chowk, the police said.

By the time fire tenders could douse the blaze, a dozen people were dead, a police official told IANS.

A large number of factory workers, mostly from Bareilly, were present inside the facility when the fire broke out. Only three persons managed to jump to safety.

Senior district officials rushed to the spot as relief and rescue work continued, a state home department official informed.

The injured were admitted to nearby medical facilities.

The victims were identified as Aazad, Fazar, Negwan, Hasmat, Mehboob, Naazim, Sameer, Alauddin, Aamir, Salman, Momin, Naseem and Shakir.
New Delhi, Nov 11 : National Award winning actor Girish Kulkarni says commercialisation of cinema is affecting independent filmmakers as their films are being watched by a smaller audience -- reflecting how pure art is always consumed by fewer people.

"It has always affected independent filmmakers, but I feel commercial cinema has its own place. There shouldn't be any competition between commercial and independent cinema as such," Kulkarni told IANS on the sidelines of the recently-concluded fifth edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF 2016).

"Independent cinema would be consumed by a number of limited people for sure. Pure art is always consumed by fewer people and will not garner mass support. On the other hand, economy always depends on the numbers. That's why the two equations don't match," added Kulkarni, who has delivered acclaimed performances in films like "Gabhricha Paus", "Deool", "Ugly" and "Highway".

Kulkarni is all for "dedicated screens for independent cinema" in India. "In France, my film 'Gabhricha Paus' was screened for four weeks and was appreciated a lot. It was in 2008. This happens there because they want to inculcate that culture in their country. Art has been an important aspect in their being," he said, pointing out how this is not the case in India.

"Here, in India, we are not finding solutions to basic needs like roads, water or electricity. Culture needs come very late. I feel that culture needs are equally important as your bare necessities. They have to be addressed in that fashion, like there should be a small theatre in every single village," Kulkarni said.

"That's happening because we don't know how to appreciate art. We don't know how to appreciate a painting or a kathak performance. And at the same time, the Western pressure is pouring down on us," he added.

More than providing funds to filmmakers, Kulkarni feels that government intervention is required at the "very root stage and not pertaining to only films as such".

"In the education system, there have to be certain major reforms. Like why can't our schools have a screening of a nice film every month... So, the government should cater to those kind of needs, and not just fund money."

He also finds the Western influence playing a transformational role in how Indians perceive culture.

"Indian society is going through a transformational phase. We are very much influenced by the Western powers -- their cultural powers. Their understanding of films, lifestyle, food and other things is affecting us. But I find it interesting to deal with as an Indian," he said.

Apart from independent cinema, Kulkarni feels that it is also a tough time for those working in theatre.

"With the explosion of media and advent of technology, the access to this medium (films) has got very easy as compared to theatre, which has now become very difficult because people don't have time to watch a play. It has become very difficult to stage a play," he said.

Kulkarni is himself widening his horizon in Bollywood with roles in Aamir Khan's "Dangal" and Hrithik Roshan- starrer "Kaabil".

"I liked the roles and I liked the people. They invited me, I went there and I liked it," added the actor-writer-filmmaker, who chose to keep mum about the projects.

As a writer, he says he keeps on "nurturing stories within by going to places and meeting people".

(The writer's trip was at the invitation of the Dharamshala International Film Festival organisers. Sandeep Sharma can be contacted at sandeep.s@ians.in)
New Delhi : An underlying issue of the controversial killing of eight Muslim undertrials after they killed a police officer and broke out of a jail in Madhya Pradesh is the staff shortage in Indian prisons, where 34 per cent of positions (27,227) were vacant, as on December 31, 2015, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of national prison statistics.

Of 419,623 inmates across all jails nationwide, 282,076 (67 per cent) are undertrials, whose cases take up to five years to come to trial, illustrating the slow speed of justice in India.

Questions have been raised about the post-prison-break firefight, with many describing it as an extrajudicial killing of eight alleged members of the proscribed group, Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The eight men were incarcerated in Bhopal jail, pending trial for several crimes, such as planning the assassination of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders, making and supplying bombs, and involvement in the 2008 Ahmedabad bombings that killed 57 people.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Chouhan described the jailbreak as "very serious" and announced the suspension of five jail officials, including the jail superintendent. As a demand is made for a court-monitored inquiry, the underlying issues are the poor condition of Indian prisons and the delays in trying those accused of crimes.

No state was as short of prison staff as Bihar, which has 2,654 of the 7,860 personnel it should have, a shortage of 66 per cent, followed by Delhi (47 per cent) and West Bengal (41 per cent). In Madhya Pradesh, the shortage is 28 per cent.

The capacity of Indian jails is 366,781, but there are 419,623 inmates in these jails -- which means jails are 114 per cent over capacity. Dadra & Nagar Haveli jails were 277 per cent over capacity, followed by Chhattisgarh (234 per cent) and Delhi (227 per cent).

High occupancy rates in jails can be linked to the large population of undertrials. Of 419,623 inmates across jails nationwide, 67 per cent (282,076) prisoners are undertrials-those detained in prisons during trial, investigation or inquiry --pointing to the slow speed of justice in India.

The large number of undertrials in India can be correlated to the lack of adequate judges in Indian courts, as lower-court vacancies are a leading cause of pending trials.

In absolute numbers, Uttar Pradesh had the highest number of undertrials (62,669), followed by Bihar (23,424) and Maharashtra (21,667). In Bihar, 82 per cent of prisoners were undertrials, the highest among states.

Undertrial prisoners in India are equal to the population of the Caribbean nation of Barbados.

In 2014, the Supreme Court ordered the release of all undertrial prisoners detained for at least half the maximum sentence prescribed for the offences they were charged with. Many who were languishing in jails because they could not pay sureties and bail bonds benefited.

Two million cases have been on trial for a decade or more as on December 2015.

(In arrangement with IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, non-profit, public interest journalism platform. Devanik Saha is with the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. The views expressed are those of IndiaSpend. Feedback at respond@indiaspend.org)
Tokyo, Nov 11 : Ahead of the annual India-Japan bilateral summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori here on Friday.

"An important elder statesman pays a visit. Former PM of Japan Yoshiro Mori, an old friend of India, calls on PM @narendramodi in Tokyo," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted along with pictures of the two leaders.

Mori served as Prime Minister of Japan from 2000 to 2001.

Modi, who arrived here on Thursday, will hold the annual bilateral summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe later on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Modi called on Japanese Emperor Akihito.

"It was an honour to meet His Highness Emperor Akihito and discuss India-Japan relations," he said in a tweet.

The Prime Minister also attended a meeting of the India-Japan Business Leaders' Forum and addresses a business luncheon of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Keidanren or the Japanese Business Federation.

This is Modi's second visit to Japan in two years.
Tokyo, Nov 11 : Ahead of the annual India-Japan bilateral summit, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and Economy, Trade and Investment Minister Seko Hiroshige called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Friday.

"Preparing the ground for the evening bilateral. Foreign Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida calls on PM @narendramodi," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted and posted pictures of the two leaders.

"Final call-on before evening engagements. @SekoHiroshige, Minister of Economy, Trade and Investment calls on PM @narendramodi," Swarup said in a separate tweet.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori also called on Modi.

Modi, who arrived here on Thursday, will hold the annual bilateral summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe later on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Modi called on Japanese Emperor Akihito.

"It was an honour to meet His Highness Emperor Akihito and discuss India-Japan relations," he said in a tweet.

The Prime Minister also attended a meeting of the India-Japan Business Leaders' Forum and addressed a business luncheon of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Keidanren or the Japanese Business Federation.

This is Modi's second visit to Japan in two years.
New York, Nov 11 : Apple CEO Tim Cook has asked his employees to unite and move forward after Donald Trump was elected as the 45th US President.

In an email to his employees, Cook said that regardless of which candidate each of us supported as individuals, the only way to move forward is to move forward together.

"We have a very diverse team of employees, including supporters of each of the candidates. I recall something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said 50 years ago: 'If you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.' This advice is timeless, and a reminder that we only do great work and improve the world by moving forward," Cook wrote.

"While there is discussion today about uncertainties ahead, you can be confident that Apple's North Star hasn't changed. Our products connect people everywhere, and they provide the tools for our customers to do great things to improve their lives and the world at large," the Apple CEO added.

During the election campaign, Cook co-hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton but did not raise any funds for the President-elect Trump.

"Our company is open to all, and we celebrate the diversity of our team here in the United States and around the world -- regardless of what they look like, where they come from, how they worship or who they love," Cook pointed out.

Trump had criticised Apple during his election campaign after it refused to crack an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

After declining to help the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Trump had called for a national boycott of Apple products.

The rift between Trump and Apple was also evident when the latter decided not to sponsor the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this year, Fortune reported.
Islamabad, Nov 11 : The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Friday urged US President-elect Donald Trump to abandon all anti-Islam policies and release Muslims imprisoned in the country.

"(Donald Trump) should abandon the anti-Islam policy in the name of terrorism and should release all Muslim prisoners, especially Afia Siddique, at the earliest," said Taliban spokesperson Mohammed Khurasani in a statement.

Siddiqui, a neuroscientist, who has lived in the US for years, was sentenced to 86 years in prison after being arrested in Afghanistan, accused of trying to kill American soldiers, Efe news reported He also asked Trump to put an end to the military support to Pakistan in the fight against terrorism.

"Pakistan came into being in the name of Islam, therefore, we want Islamic law in it. They are killing us massively and destroying our properties for this demand," Khurasani added in the statement.
New Delhi, Nov 11 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Friday paid tribute to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad on his birth anniversary and recalled his role in the freedom struggle.

"On his birth anniversary, tributes to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. We recall his role in the freedom struggle and efforts towards nation building," Modi said.

Gandhi also paid tributes to the memory of Azad, saying "Maulana Sahab was an outstanding thinker, scholar, educationist and patriot".

Remembering him as a strong believer of inter-faith unity, Gandhi said: "Secularism, religious freedom and equality were matters close to his heart".

During the Quit India movement, Maulana Azad gave decisive leadership to the Congress Party and Indian freedom movement, Gandhi noted.

Latest updates on Gandhi Jayanti 2019
Lucknow, Nov 11 : More than two dozen trains, including the Lucknow-New Delhi Gomti Express, have been cancelled for the next one month after repair work on the railway bridge connecting Unnao to Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh began on Friday, an official said.

The bridge repair would also affect plying of trains on the important Kanpur-Lucknow rail section.

The Lucknow-New Delhi Gomti Express train has been cancelled for the next 27 days, with immediate effect, the official said. The Varuna Express coming from Varanasi will now cut short its trip at Lucknow while trains like the Kushinagar Express going to Mumbai will be rerouted through the Allahabad-Kanpur route.

Other trains that have been cancelled include Agra Intercity, Lucknow-Jhansi Passenger, Gorakhpur-Yashwantpur Express, Gorakhpur-Pune Express, Muzaffarpur-Ahmedabad Jansadharan Express, Chennai-Lucknow Express and Surat-Muzaffarpur Express have been cancelled till the first week of December.
New Delhi, Nov 11 : The JNU Students Union (JNUSU) on Friday called upon major student organisations across the country to hold campus protests on November 14-15 and to intensify the fight for Najeeb Ahmed, student of the Jawaharlal Nehru University missing from campus here for last 26 days.

At a conference organised on the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus by the students union denounced the varsity's inaction and "total abdication" in its duty to bring the culprits to justice, and deliberated the ways in which the protest movement could be intensified.

The JNU students have been staging protests since Ahmed went missing after an alleged brawl with a few activists of the RSS's students organisation Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) at the campus hostel on the night of October 14-15.

"We have organised the national leaders' meet as a step towards intensification of our movement to fight for Najeeb. We have decided upon reaching out to campuses countrywide and tomorrow we will be burning effigies of the Home Minister and Vice-Chancellor (VC) in the campus," Rama Naga, former JNUSU General Secretary, told IANS.

The agitation is likely to spread to Hyderabad Central University (HCU), Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), and campuses in other states.

The leaders spoke about the impunity with which ABVP students, who reportedly assaulted Ahmed, have been shielded from any inquiry and meaningful interrogation by both the Delhi Police and JNU authorities. They also spoke about ABVP's increasing hooliganism on the campus and the accused it of enjoying patronage of the central government.

"The government of the day has waged a war on campuses and on all marginalised sections and dissenting voices across the country. Yesterday it was Rohith Vemula pushed to suicide, then it was JNU students charged with sedition and jailed, today it is Najeeb," a statement released by the JNUSU on Friday said.

The meet was attended by many student parties such as far-Left All India Students Association (AISA), the CPI-M affiliated Students Federation of India (SFI), the CPI's All India Students Federation (AISF), and the Congress backed National Students Union of India (NSUI), among others.
New Delhi, Nov 11 : A local court here on Friday rejected the anticipatory bail plea of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Ram Pratap Goel, accused of gang-raping a woman after luring her with a party ticket to contest MCD elections.

Additional Sessions Judge Sunil Aggarwal rejected the anticipatory bail plea of Goel, saying that the custodial interrogation of applicant Goel is necessary to ascertain facts related to the case.

The court observed that the complaint was registered after accused Goel started blackmailing the woman by threatening to make her sex MMS viral.

"The custodial interrogation of the applicant (Goel) is necessary not only for locating the alleged MMS of the applicant but also for disclosing the particulars of places where the complainant was ravished as also the identity of the co-accused," the court said.

Although nothing adverse in respect of the antecedents of applicant (Goel) has been stated on behalf of the prosecution yet, the probability of investigation getting hampered and witnesses being influenced cannot be ruled out, it added Complainant's counsel Pradeep Rana and Delhi Police have opposed the plea saying that the accused can tamper with the evidence.

The other accused in the case is AAP MLA Rakhi Birla's father Bhupender.

An FIR was registered against Goel and Bhupender for allegedly raping the 24-year-old married woman.

The accused, meanwhile, have termed the allegations as "baseless" and said the case is politically motivated.

The accused are booked under sections 376D (gang-rape) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code.

The woman in her complaint alleged that she was "exploited" by the accused at various places, including hotels and her own house and when she asked the leader about the ticket, he coaxed her to have intercourse with Bhupender.
Mumbai, Nov 11 : The battle over the control of Bombay House, the headquarters of the Tata Group here, on Friday mainly involved three crown jewels of the $103-billion empire -- Tata Motors, Tata Steel and Tata Chemicals.

The first salvo was fired when stock markets were informed that Tata Motors and Tata Steel are in receipt of notices from Tata Sons, the holding company, seeking an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders for the removal of Mistry and Nusli wadia from the two boards.

In one notice, the voting right of Tata Sons in Tata Motors was mentioned as 26.51 per cent, but in the other, no figure was given for Tata Steel.

Wadia of Bombay Dyeing -- on the boards of both Tata Motors and Tata Steel as independent director -- is considered close to Mistry.

The counters of the two group companies were nervous. In the midst of extremely volatile trading, the shares of Tata Motors crashed Rs 26.75, or 5.01 per cent, at Rs 507.40, while those of Tata Steel fell Rs 10, or 2.29 per cent at Rs 426.85.

The scrip of Tata Chemicals receded by 4.62 per cent at Rs 482.65.

The Tata Steel results -- which were declared after the closing bell -- bore the signatures of Mistry as Chairman.

The company's standalone net profit stood at Rs 249.56 crore for the quarter ended September 30, against Rs 575.43 crore for the previous quarter and a loss of Rs 288.48 crore in the corresponding second quarter of last year.

Earlier in the day, Tata Chemicals said Bhaskar Bhat, Non-executive and Non Independent Director, has resigned from the board of the company. Bhat later said his views were not considered by the independent directors while issuing a statement reposing faith in Mistry.

Bhat is Managing Director of Titan Company and had reported the second quarter results to the stakeholders on November 4. He is also on the board of several other Tata Group companies.

On Thursday, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) also issued a special notice under Section 169 (read with Section 115) of the Companies Act, 2013, and made a requisition for an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders to consider Mistry's removal as a director of TCS.

TCS replaced Mistry as its Chairman and appointed Ishaat Hussain as the new Chairman of the board of directors of the company with immediate effect.

Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group companies, removed Mistry, 48, as its Chairman last month and reinstated Ratan Tata in an interim capacity.

The holding arm for the group said Mistry had lost the confidence of the board due to several factors and that the trustees were increasingly concerned with the growing trust deficit.

Following this, on Thursday Tata Sons said the ousted Chairman should resign from all group companies and deplored the manner in which he sought the support of independent directors of Indian Hotels to continue as its Chairman.

"Mistry conveniently forgets that he was appointed as the Chairman of the Tata operating companies by virtue of and following his position as the Chairman of Tata Sons," Tata Sons said in a nine-page statement issued on Thursday.

On its part, Tata Chemicals said that it has received a special notice and a requisition from Tata Sons to convene an extra-ordinary general meeting for passing the resolutions for removal of Mistry and Wadia as directors of the company.

But on Thursday, the independent directors of Tata Chemicals had reposed their faith in Chairman Mistry, while taking up the second quarter results for the current financial year.
Gurugram, Nov 11 : Markets of Gurugram and neighbouring Rewari and Nuh districts were desolate on Friday in the wake of November 8 demonetisation of high denomination notes.

A curfew-like situation prevailed in the markets in Gurugram, tghne tech hub and suburb of Delhi, and other places since customers and traders in old markets still prefer to carry out most business transactions in cash and not through credit/debit cards.

On the other hand, a huge rush of people was seen both inside and outside bank branches and automatic teller machines' booths in Gurugram.

Markets such as the main Sadar Bazaar, Bara Bazaar, and businesses on the Khandsa Road and other markets in the old city area of Gurugram were shut due to low footfalls of customers, who apparently had no money in small denominations currency notes.

A local business association said both traders and customers were running out of cash and rumours of Income Tax Department raids have only added to the fear and chaos.

The bankers association has said at least Rs 100 crore is needed in Gurugram banks on a daily basis to fulfill customer requirement.

Gurugram Additional Deputy Commissioner V.P. Singh has written a letter to the Reserve Bank of India on the demand for cash by bankers in the district.

Gurugram has over 700 branches of various banks and more than 1,300 ATM booths.

The Haryana Police have deployed nearly 2,000 policemen for security and to keep law and order outside banks and ATM booths.

Most of the people facing problems in getting the old currency notes exchanged said the demonetisation step taken by the Modi government on November 8 night was right.

They said it will inconvenience the common man at least for a week or two, but it will help the country in the long run.

With the beginning of the marriage season from November 11, families who were to organise such functions faced problems in the absence of cash for various transactions.

A few families even postponed weddings scheduled for Friday and even the next week.

Markets in Ahirwal's heartland Rewari also were deserted as if struck by curfew-like situation.

Similar situation was reported from different markets of Nuh district in Haryana's Mewat areas.
Gurugram, Nov 11 : Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Friday said a wave of change is blowing in the country after the central government's move to demonetise Rs 500 and 1,000 currency notes.

Khattar said that in the last three days, while a smile has been seen on the faces of the poor and honest, others are depressed.

"This has become possible as a result of the bold steps taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said.

The Chief Minister was responding to the queries of media persons here during his visit to four villages adopted by President Pranab Mukherjee at Gurugram. He inaugurated and launched various facilities in these villages.

Replying to a question, Khattar said the decision to demonetise the currency notes of higher denomination has not only brought cheer on the faces of poor people but it would also keep a check on black marketing.

"Modi's decision is praise worthy," he added.

Khattar also hailed the Supreme Court's decision on the issue of Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) Canal which has come in Haryana's favour. He said that all should respect this decision of the apex court.

When asked if Haryana would also call a special session of Vidhan Sabha, the Chief Minister said there is no such need as the apex court's decision is in Haryana's favour. "We would wait for future action," Khattar said.

He also said the water of SYL Canal would meet the demand mainly of southern Haryana and the people of that region would get canal water for drinking purpose as well as irrigation.
New Delhi, Nov 11 : There was no end to chaos for a second straight day across India on Friday as millions thronged banks and ATMs to deposit the spiked currency and withdraw cash, only to face an unprecedented cash shortage.

With tempers flaring at banks and on the streets, two staffers of a private bank branch here were assaulted by angry customers after they were told there was no cash to disburse, witnesses said.

All over the country, residents and correspondents reported serpentine queues outside banks even before they opened for the day. While the scenes were orderly in many places, desperation led to chaos in most others.

Most people complained that they were running out of cash to buy even essentials as they had not done any banking since Tuesday midnight -- when the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes ceased to be legal tender.

"The rush today is more than yesterday (Thursday)," a guard at a State Bank of India branch in Noida, adjoining Delhi, told IANS. It was the same story almost everywhere.

Government ministers again justified Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to spike the 500 and 1,000 rupee currency in a bid to check black money and corruption.

BJP President Amit Shah denounced the opposition. "I can't understand the problems of these political parties. Why do they oppose demonetisation?"

On the streets, some frustrated people provided the answer.

"We don't know whether this measure will check black money or not but we have been put into massive inconvenience," complained Manoj Kumar, a Noida shopkeeper, echoing a widely held view.

The widespread complaint was that despite queuing up to surrender or exchange the spiked currency and withdraw cash from their own accounts for hours, many could not even enter the overcrowded banks.

In most cases, the crowds were so thick that they spilled over to the roads, causing traffic problems. Police had a tough time managing traffic and agitated bank customers.

In New Delhi, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi surprised everyone by joining a zig-zagging queue outside the SBI on Parliament Street saying he wanted to get Rs 4,000 exchanged for new currency.

"I want to stand in the queue... People are suffering," he said.

Criticism of the government move was rampant, more because of its suddenness and the resultant hardships it had caused to households as well as businesses.

"There is an anarchy like situation in India," Congress leader Anand Sharma said. The AAP urged its activists to help out illiterate people in the queues.

In the first clear sign that the demonetisation was having a political fallout, it emerged that the Prime Minister seemed to have lost over three lakh followers on Twitter.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said there was enough cash with banks across the country to exchange the demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes though it may "take a while for the banks to recalibrate their ATMs".

In Lucknow, people stuck in serpentine queues outside banks and ATM kiosks got rowdy in some places. At others they openly aired their frustration.

Overworked bank staff complained that they were doing their best but people were insisting on taking out more than the permissible 4,000 rupees per day, claiming family emergencies.

The anger mounted when banks ran out of cash even before their stipulated closure time. As for ATMs, tens of thousands did not function in state after state, mainly because they were not configured for the new 2,000 and 500 rupee notes.

A dentist in Kerala said she was accepting cheques from known customers.

Engineering student Ranjan Samal despaired in Bhubaneswar that he had run out of money. SBI customer Sudhakar Rao complained in Hyderabad that he was in the queue for two hours and tired. Chennai resident Syed Ishtiaq Ahmed, a senior citizen, said he had no money to buy milk and vegetables.

"There is a severe shortage of 100 and 50 rupee notes," a Chennai banker admitted to IANS.

The crisis resulted in some tragedies also. A 48-year-old man who had reached the State Bank of Travancore in Kannur in Kerala fell from the third floor of the building and died, said police, while in Mumbai a senior citizen standing in a queue outside a bank to exchange his demonetised notes died of a heart attack.

Apart from this tragedy, there was no end to people's woes in Mumbai as thousands of ATMs did not dispense cash. And those who succeeded in making withdrawals from banks on Thursday encountered problems exchanging them in the markets for smaller denomination notes that seemed to have virtually disappeared.

As much as Rs 53,000 crore was deposited with the SBI in the last two days after the demonetisation, the bank said. The SBI also exchanged currencies valued around Rs 1,500 crore.

However, happy days were reported by the National Payments Corp of India Ltd (NPCI), which recorded a 100 per cent surge or double its normal usage of RuPay cards at points of sales in the past 48 hours.

The government has said that banks across the country will remain open on Saturday and Sunday too. But few expect the problems to wane soon.
New Delhi, Nov 11 : Over 30 per cent of total 1,62,807 people across India, who were asked if they were happy with Donald Trump being elected as the US President said "yes" but a whopping 38 per cent said "no".

The survey, conducted by Inshorts and Ipsos, also said that over 30 per cent people expressed their inability to answer the question and chose the option "can't say anything".

Out of total 20,473 people, who said "yes", 9,913 are in the age bracket of less than 25 years, 7,591 are in the age group of 25 to 35 years and 2,969 are over 35 years of age, the survey report given to the IANS said.

On being asked if India-US relations would improve with Trump as President, more than 44 per cent responded in positive while over 26 per cent people said "no" to it.

To another question if governments all over the world need to tackle illegal immigration more seriously, whopping 80 per cent said "yes" and only seven percent of the survey voters responded in negative, while the rest expressed their inability to express their view on it.
Tokyo, Nov 11 : India and Japan signed the long-awaited civil nuclear agreement following the annual bilateral summit here on Friday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi wooed Japanese businessmen by reiterating his resolve to make India the most open economy in the world.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said in a joint address to the media along with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after delegation-level talks between the two sides.

"Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of climate change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan," he said.

"I thank Prime Minister Abe, the Japanese government and the parliament for their support to this agreement."

According to a joint statement issued after the summit, the two Prime Ministers welcomed the agreement "which reflects a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership in the cause of clean energy, economic development and a peaceful and secure world".

The agreement provides for the development of nuclear power projects in India, thus strengthening energy security of the country.

It will open the door for collaboration between Indian and Japanese industries in India's civil nuclear programme.

US firms like Westinghouse and GE Energy, which have significant Japanese investments, will also now find it easier to set up nuclear power plants in India.

Apart from Japan, other countries with which India now has civil nuclear agreements include the US, Russia, Australia, Canada, France, Britain, South Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Namibia and Argentina.

Stating that India and its economy were pursuing many transformations, Modi in his address to the media said: "Our aim is to become a major centre for manufacturing, investments and for the 21st century knowledge industries. And, in this journey, we see Japan as a natural partner. We believe there is vast scope to combine our relative advantages, whether of capital, technology or human resources, to work for mutual benefit."

Modi said that both sides remained focused on making strong progress on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail project.

Japan committed itself to this project during Abe's visit to New Delhi for the annual bilateral summit last year.

Besides the civil nuclear agreement, nine other agreements were signed in areas like skill development, cooperation in the field of outer space, agriculture and food industries, investment in infrastructure projects, textiles, art and culture, and sports.

Modi said that the India-Japan strategic partnership "was not only for the good and security of our own societies", it also brought peace, stability and balance to the region.

"It is alive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges in Asia-Pacific," he said.

Modi said that the Malabar naval exercise conducted by India, Japan and the US in June this year "has underscored the convergence in our strategic interests in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific".

"As democracies, we support openness, transparency and the rule of law. We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he stated.

According to the joint statement, both the Prime Ministers condemned terrorism in the strongest terms and "also called for Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks including those of November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai and 2016 terrorist attack in Pathankot to justice".

Stating that India and Japan consulted and cooperated closely in regional and international fora, Modi said: "We will continue to work together for reforms of the United Nations and strive together for our rightful place in the UN Security Council."

He also thanked Abe for Japan's support to India's bid for membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Earlier on Friday, Modi wooed Japanese investors saying that stable, predictable and transparent regulations were redefining the nature of doing business in India as the country aimed to be the most open economy in the world.

"All of the economic reforms that India is pursuing point into the new direction. My resolve is to make India the most open economy in the world. The impact of our efforts is being felt and recognised globally," Modi said at a business luncheon here, organised jointly by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Japan business federation, Keidanren.

Modi, who arrived here on Thursday, started Friday by calling on Japanese Emperor Akihito.

This is his second visit to Japan in two years.
#football Tottenham's Son Heung-min leaves Champions League match early after collision Son Heung-min of Tottenham Hotspur has been forced to leave a UEFA Champions League match early following a collision with an opposing defender. Son was subbed out in the 29th m...
Kolkata, Nov 11 : While a large number of businesses in the nation touched a new low following the central government's decision to demonetise high value Indian currency, the business at Sonagachi -- south Asia's largest red light area here -- has been unaffected by the move.

"There has been no impact on the business at Sonagachi," Bharati Dey, the chief Mentor of Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, an organisation that works towards the betterment of sex workers, told IANS on Friday.

One reason for the business not taking a hit is the fact that the sex workers at Sonagachi are still accepting Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes from their clients.

"They would be accepting those notes till the end of this month," said Dey.

Unlike other businesses, the sex trade generally deals with cash payments and, therefore, had a possibility of getting adversely affected after the bigger currency notes were demonetised.

Those involved in Durbar say that a collective initiative by the sex workers organisation and an assurance from the local bank helped them sail through the troubled time.

"The Usha Cooperative Bank has assured us that they will accept the banned notes from us till the end of this month. The sex workers in the area would be able to deposit their cash in denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 till November 30", Dey said.

Though, Dey accepted that some of the sex workers might face a problem as all of them do not have a bank account.

"Almost 30,000 sex workers have bank accounts with Usha bank. Those with no accounts might be a little worried but we would find a way out for them," she said.
Chennai, Nov 11 : The RBI has messed up the lives of crores of Indians by not planning properly the logistics for the demonetisation move, a leader of the All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) said on Friday.

"There are around 46,000 rural and small town bank branches and around 36,000 ATMs in those areas. They are in dire need of small denomination notes. The people living in those areas need cash for their livelihood," C.H. Venkatachalam, General Secretary of AIBEA, told IANS.

He said the central bank should have gradually pumped in smaller denomination notes in large quantities so that common people had them than having 500 or 1,000 rupee notes.

"The RBI has messed up its planning in supply of small denomination notes. Further, the ATMs are to be reconfigured and its software rewritten to vend new notes," Venkatachalam added.

He said there was no mechanism to fix responsibility for fake notes spewed out by ATMs till date.

"For those in the cities the currency crisis may not be acute but it is not so in the case of rural areas. The RBI should attend to that fast," he added.

Queried about the Reserve Bank of India's statement that there was sufficient cash in the system, Venkatachalam wondered why were people then queuing up before bank branches and ATMs.

He asked what can people do with Rs 2,000 note if there is no small denomination notes in the system.

Venkatachalam said the bankers were a harried lot as they have to bear the wrath of common man for no fault of theirs.
United Nations, Nov 11 : A high-ranking Chinese official has been elected president of Interpol, the global police organisation announced on Thursday after a meeting of its general assembly in Bali.

The election of Meng Hongwei, who is China's Vice Minister of Public Security, has raised questions about his influence on Interpol's response to terrorism and the treatment of human rights activists.

At the United Nations Security Council China has provided cover for Pakistan-based terrorists operating against India and Meng's authority as Interpol head could potentially interfere with action against anti-India terrorists favoured by China.

Beijing has used its veto power to block the UN from adding Jaish-e-Mohammed chief, Masood Azhar, to a list of terrorists. It has also blocked New Delhi's request for action against Pakistan for releasing Lashkar-e-Toiba commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi from custody.

India says Azhar was the mastermind of the January 2 terror attack on the Pathankot air force base and Lakhvi planned and directed the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed over 160 people.

Alarm bells also went off at human rights organisations. Amnesty International's East Asia Director Nicholas Bequelin called for close scrutiny of notices issued by Interpol against Chinese dissidents.

"The appointment of Meng Hongwei is alarming given China's long-standing practice of trying to use Interpol to arrest dissidents and refugees abroad," he said.

Meng will head the 190-member Interpol for a four-year term that starts immediately.

Interpol said in a statement that resolutions approved at the assembly called for collection of biometric information of terrorists whose profiles are shared through Interpol. The assembly was attended by 830 police chiefs and senior law enforcement officials from 164 countries.

"We currently face some of the most serious global public security challenges since World War Two," Meng was quoted in the statement as saying after his election. He added that Interpol should innovate its "work mechanisms, in order to adapt to the changing security situation we see today".

Meng's election is another sign of China's growing influence in international organisations. The International Civil Aviation Organisation elected Fang Liu as its secretary general last year. She is a veteran of China's civil aviation administration.

At the UN secretariat, where a major upheaval in leadership is due when the new secretary general Antonia Guterres takes over in January, China is lobbying to have one of its nationals appointed to head the peacekeeping operations, according to diplomats here. Herve Ladsous of France is the head of peacekeeping.

Most of the peacekeeping operations are now in Africa where China's economic presence is growing.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
New Delhi, Nov 11 : The Delhi Noida Direct (DND) Flyover will remain free as the Supreme Court on Friday refused to grant any relief to the project concessionaire which sought resumption of toll collection.

A bench of Chief Justice T.S. Thakur, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice L. Nageswara Rao also asked the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to verify the total cost of the Noida toll project and whether the toll-collection company, NOIDA Toll Bridge Company Ltd., has recovered its flyway cost as provided under construction the agreement.

Referring to the conflicting claims over the recovery of the total cost of the project by the concessionaire, the court said: "We ...request the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) to assist us in this matter."

The court gave the CAG four weeks to complete the audit.

Pronouncing the order, Justice Rao said: "...that the CAG is requested to verify the claim of the petitioner that the total project cost has not been recovered and submit a report within four weeks. The CAG shall be at liberty to call for and examine all such records having a bearing on the financial aspects, as it requires to facilitate its decision."

Asking the concessionaire to cooperate with the CAG in providing all the information, the court said: "This will include matters and information pertaining to all benefits which have flowed to the petitioner (Noida Toll Bridge Company Ltd.) under the entirety of the agreement, including the utilisation, if any."

Declining the company plea to put on hold the Allahabad High Court judgment that ended the toll collection, the apex court said: "We do not agree with the submission that the petitioner (company) would suffer irreparable loss if the High Court judgment is not stayed."

"It will be impossible to provide restitution to the lakhs of commuters from whom the fee would be collected to repay them in the event of dismissal of the SLP by the Noida Toll Bridge Company Ltd. if its petition challenging the High Court order falls."

On the other hand, the court said, "if the petitioner succeeds, it can be compensated suitably by extension of time".

The Allahabad High Court on October 26 ordered the DND flyway to be made toll-free.
New Delhi, Nov 11 : Opposition parties on Friday slammed Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar for his "irresponsible" statement on India's No First Use of nuclear weapons policy, after the minister suggested that India should not bind itself to the doctrine.

While the minister, and the Defence Ministry clarified it was his personal view, the opposition questioned if Parrikar was entitled to have a personal view while holding the key portfolio.

"You have a motormouth Defence Minister, who is irresponsible in every manner," Congress leader Anand Sharma said.

Party leader Manish Tewari added: "Is Defence Minister of India entitled to a personal opinion on No first use of Nuclear weapons? If he is then why does MOD (Defence Ministry) issue clarifications?"

"When Defence Minister of a de-facto NWS (nuclear weapon state) talks of Nukes in such a cavalier manner the world will think has India turned into a banana republic? (sic)" Tewari said in a tweet.

Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) also denounced the statement, and said it will have serious implications both for India's security concerns and for India's standing in international relations.

"This statement represents a complete reversal of the long standing position of India as a country that champions a nuclear weapon free world and consistently stood by its commitment for peaceful use of nuclear energy," the CPI-M said in a statement.

"The Defence Minister's contention that these are his personal opinions is completely untenable. As a member of the cabinet collective in a parliamentary democratic system, under oath to the Indian Constitution, such opinions that are contrary to India's long established policy direction is a reflection of the complete lack of 'governance' of this government," the CPI-M said.

"If the Defence Minister wishes to air his personal opinions then he may do so after resigning from the Cabinet," it added.

The CPI-M also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should issue a clarification.

Parrikar, at a book release function on Thursday, said India should say it will use its nuclear powers "responsibly" instead of stressing on "no first use", but stressed that this was his personal view.

Talking about India's nuclear doctrine, Parrikar questioned why it is said that India is for no first use, saying: "Why lot of people say that India is for 'not first use;... Why should I bind myself. I should say I am a responsible nuclear power and I will not use it irresponsibly," he said.
Pune, Nov 11 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive here on Sunday afternoon for a brief visit to inaugurate a four-day international conference and exhibition on sugarcane value chain, an official said here on Friday.

"Modi will throw open a global conference and exhibition on 'Sugarcane Value Chain - Vision 2025 Sugar', organised by the Vasantdada Sugar Insitute (VSI), in Manjari-Budruk, Pune," he said.

Modi will be accompanied by Governor C.V. Rao, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Union ministers Radha Mohan Singh and Prakash Javadekar, and state ministers Chandrakant Patil, Girish Bapat, Pandurang Fundkar and Subhash Deshmukh.

The Prime Minister will depart from the state after the event the same evening.

Established in 1975, the renowned VSI is an autonomous body set up by sugar cooperatives with a mission to effect improvement in the socio-economic status of sugarcane farmers.

This is done by providing them cutting-edge technologies through scientific research related to sugarcane and its products.

The four-day international conference and expo during November 13-16 will attract around 1,500 delegates from across the world, who will speak on different aspects of the sugarcane value chain.

The exhibition will showcase various technological developments in sugar industry, live demonstrations of sugarcane crops showing advanced technologies and cultivation practices implemented.

The event is being held to commemorate the birth centenary celebrations of the late Vasantdada Patil, who was three-time Chief Minister of Maharashtra and also served as Rajasthan Governor.

Credited with immense contributions in the fields of education and the cooperative movement, Patil died at the age of 72 in March 1989.
Islamabad, Nov 11 : Taking a cue from demonetisation of higher currency notes in India, a Pakistani opposition party lawmaker has submitted a resolution in the Senate to withdraw 1,000 and 5,000 rupee notes from circulation in the country to tackle corruption.

The resolution submitted by Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Senator Osman Saifullah Khan comes at a time when Pakistan's population is gradually shifting to cash economy due to the government's ill-conceived taxation policies, said Express News.

"The house urges the government to take steps to withdraw from circulation as legal tender the high denomination Rs 5,000 and Rs 1,000 notes so as to reduce illicit money flows, encourage the use of bank accounts and reduce the size of undocumented economy," reads the resolution.

This is the only way that will compel people to use banking channels and launch a crackdown on black money circulating in the economy, said Khan, speaking at a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Finance on Thursday.

However, Committee Chairman Senator Saleem Mandviwalla underlined the need for taking the views of all stakeholders.

The resolution was moved in the Senate a couple of days after Indian Prime Minister Modi announced the demonetisation of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 bank notes, making them invalid in a major assault on black money, fake currency and corruption.

"At this point, we do not see a reason to withdraw the Rs 5,000 currency note," Abid Qamar, spokesman for the State Bank of Pakistan, told Express News.

Pakistan's economy has already started making a gradual shift to cash as protection against the government's taxation policies, official statistics reveal.

In fiscal year 2015-16, the growth in banking sector deposits was far lower than the previous year while the currency in circulation increased at a much rapid pace, revealed minutes of the last Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting.

The General Pervez Musharraf-led government had introduced the Rs 5,000 denomination notes despite resistance from the State Bank of Pakistan. The notes made it easy for the people to keep cash instead of depositing money in banks.

Latest updates on Howdy Modi Houston
New York, Nov 11 : Donald Trumps shock victory in the US elections has triggered a flood of calls on Twitter and other social media outlets for the President-elect to be assassinated A and authorities will investigate all threats deemed to be credible, The New York Post has learned.

The development comes as demonstrators continued to take to the streets for a second day across the US against Trump's victory in the country's presidential election.

In Portland, Oregon, an estimated 4,000 protesters chanted "We reject the president-elect!", with some throwing objects at police, prompting several arrests.

According to The Post, a simple search on Twitter can reveal dozens and dozens of calls to gun down Trump. Some posts called for both Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence to be assassinated, and there's even an #AssassinateTrump hashtag.

"Trump chose the literal worst case scenario as VP so nobody would try to impeach or assassinate him," one user posted on Twitter.

Last Saturday, Trump was rushed off a stage on in Reno, Nevada, where Secret Service agents took action after an "unidentified individual shouted 'gun'" in front of the stage. Authorities took the man, Austyn Crites, into custody, but did not find a gun, the Secret Service said in a statement, according to the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Trump, after blasting the media and protesters in aggressive tweets after people took to the streets to protest against the election results, Trump on Friday said he loves the "passion" of his countrymen for their country, media reported.

"Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country," Trump tweeted, the New York Post reported.

"We will all come together and be proud!"

The gracious gesture - playing down the widespread protests or what police labelled as "riots" - was a change from Thursday night when Trump flashed annoyance at his detractors.

"Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!" Trump tweeted.

Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in major cities across the US since Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night, with the slogan "Not my President".

Since Thursday, thousands of demonstrators, including immigration rights and environmental activists, have protested in cities like Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in front of the Trump International Hotel.

On Wednesday in Wellsville, New York a passer-by spotted a swastika and the phrase "Make America White Again" on a softball dugout. Graffiti, with Nazi imagery and the word "Trump", was also discovered on a storefront in Philadelphia.

Police said they would look into the incident, though they haven't received any reports.

The New York City Police Department confirmed on Thursday that at least 65 persons were detained on different charges, including disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.
New Delhi/Lucknow, Nov 12 : Amid rumours of a salt shortage in different parts of Delhi, National Capital Region (NCR) and Uttar Pradesh, both central and Delhi governments on Friday clarified there is no such shortage.

"There is no shortage of salt. State governments have all powers to ensure its availability at reasonable prices," a central government spokesperson said.

The clarification came after rumours were rife that the price of salt has gone up to Rs 250 per kg in Delhi/NCR and Rs 400 per kg in Uttar Pradesh.

This led to a panic-like situation in Noida, Laxmi Nagar, Chandni Chowk and some other places in the national capital.

"The department monitors the prices of 22 essential commodities on daily basis. As per the prices reported by centres from across the country, there has been no increase in price of salt whatsoever," Department of Food and Consumer Affairs said in a statement.

There has been no report about any disruption in production of salt, its supply and distribution, it added.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also took to Twitter to dispel the rumours.

"Some people are spreading rumours that there is a shortage of sugar and salt. This is completely false. Anyone hoarding salt won't be spared," he tweeted.

Manish Sisodia, the Delhi Deputy Chief Minister, also urged people of Delhi not to believe on the rumours.

"There is no shortage of salt in Delhi. Teams of SDMs and Food Supply Officers are patrolling. Salt is available everywhere. No cause for panic," Sisodia tweeted.

On his part, Delhi Food and Supplies Minister Imran Hussain also held an urgent meeting at his residence following the rumours.

Earlier in the day, rumours of no salt stocks in Uttar Pradesh led to panic buying in many parts of the state.

Lucknow Senior Superintendent of Police Manzil Saini trashed reports on paucity of salt and dubbed it as "mischief" by some rumour mongers.

While it was yet to be determined how the rumour started, people flocked to grocery shops and retail outlets in large numbers to buy salt in large quantities. As the panic spread, several quintals of salt vanished from shop shelves.

In some areas salt was said to be selling, if available, anywhere between Rs 100-200 per kg.

Meanwhile, police was directed to increase patrolling as the rumour could result in a law and order situation, an official told IANS.

Lucknow Inspector General of Police A. Satish Ganesh asked all SSPs in the zone to start special patrolling in busy thoroughfares and markets to prevent untoward incidents.

A special team has been put on the trail of a message that went viral within minutes of appearing on social media sites, triggering panic.
Washington, Nov 12 : Vice President-elect Mike Pence will take over the leadership of Donald Trump's transition effort from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, as the president-elect looks to shape a policy team, media reports said.

The president-elect told advisers he wanted to tap Pence's Washington experience and contacts to help move the process along, New York Times reported on Friday.

Christie, along with Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, will serve as vice chairs of the transition.

"Together this outstanding group of advisors, led by Vice President-elect Mike Pence, will build on the initial work done under the leadership of New Jersey Governer Chris Christie to help prepare a transformative government ready to lead from day one," CNBC quoted Trump as saying in a statement.

On Thursday, Trump discussed the transition of power with Barack Obama at the White House and also paid a visit to Capitol Hill for meetings with leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives.

Trump defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the US presidential elections and will succeed Obama on January 20, 2017.
New York, Nov 12 : As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, one of the largest Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the country has announced a parade in his honour, media reports said.

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), is a movement in the United States that has advocated extremist ideologies such as white supremacy and nationalism, anti-immigration, anti-Catholicism etc. and expressed it through terrorism aimed at groups or individuals whom they opposed.

The Loyal White Knights of Pelham, North Carolina said on its website it will hold the event on December 3, NBC news reported.

The time and location of the event were not listed.

An official newspaper of the KKK had endorsed Trump days before the presidential election but Trump's campaign was quick to reject the support.

"Mr. Trump and the campaign denounces hate in any form. This publication is repulsive and their views do not represent the tens of millions of Americans who are uniting behind our campaign," the campaign said then in a statement.

Trump was criticised for being slow to condemn former Klan leader David Duke after he gave the candidate his backing.

Duke celebrated Trump's win over Democrat Hillary Clinton, tweeting early Wednesday, "This is one of the most exciting nights of my life. Make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump!"

The announcement comes amid a background of vandalism and hate crimes by Trump supporters on minorities as well as attacks on Trump supporters and a firebombing of a Republican office in North Carolina.
Carrying the spirit and tradition of honoring U.S. military veterans, VetFriends.com -- the largest website for reuniting U.S. veterans with over 2,000,000 members -- is celebrating its 16th annual Veterans Day campaign to support and honor U.S. military veterans. The site features a Veterans Day parade listing directory, a 'Thank You' forum, a military photo tribute, military discounts and more. VetFriends was founded by a U.S. veteran in 2000 and continues to help reconnect and honor military veterans and personnel.

VetFriends.com founder, Corporal Sutcliffe, states: "Each and every day the entire VetFriends.com team takes time to express our thanks, appreciation and honor toward our veterans and service men and women -- whether it be through helping people reunite, providing information and support, or simply saying Thank You. We are here for our veterans and military."

The VetFriends.com Veterans Day Tribute --

A Veterans Day nationwide parade/event directory can be viewed at https://www.vetfriends.com/parades. Visitors are invited to view and submit community parades and events celebrating Veterans Day. VetFriends.com asks all Americans to take a moment to reflect on the sacrifices and bravery of all those who have served their country in times of need.

The Veterans Discount Center at https://www.vetfriends.com/veteran-discount-center/ provides a simple way for veteran and military heroes, along with their family and friends, to search and find discounts locally and nationwide. New company discounts are updated weekly, and will be posted on the VetFriends.com site. The Veterans Discount Center provides an ideal platform for companies to acknowledge our U.S. military veterans by allowing them to post their special discounts for free on the network.

A Veterans Day 'Thank You' forum has been created on the VetFriends website at https://www.vetfriends.com/veteransday. VetFriends is asking veterans and anyone else interested in contributing their thoughts and insights regarding Veterans Day, or those interested in giving a message of thanks to veterans, to utilize the forum. These submissions are posted online in a Veterans Day collection for all to view and share.

On Veterans Day and throughout the holidays, VetFriends will be taking up to 50% off all the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard pride items within their online store to show their support and appreciation of all veterans and military service men and women. Additionally, visitors are invited to utilize Veterans Day coupon code VB for an additional 15% off all eligible items, including U.S. military caps, shirts, collectibles, patches, stickers and more. Guests can view the catalog at https://www.vetfriends.com/catalog.

As another symbol of support, VetFriends offers a Premium Membership I.D. card. For each cardholder, the card displays their name, branch, years of service and rank. As a benefit to all its members, VetFriends has created a network of companies that honor this card and offer special discounts to veterans and military personnel. Information on the VetFriends membership card can be found here: https://www.vetfriends.com/veteran-id-card/.

The VetFriends.com military photo tribute at https://www.vetfriends.com/militarypics is comprised of thousands of authentic photos in honor of U.S. military personnel. Visitors can search for images by military branch, year, war, state and country. Each picture contains background information along with a brief message or description.

VetFriends.com offers additional services such as: allowing its members the ability to search over 2,000,000 VetFriends members to make contact with military service friends and relatives; information on how to obtain your own or a relative's military records and medals; military message boards; veteran job boards; a photo collection featuring past and present photos; military jokes; site tools where visitors can search for and post military reunion notices, military pride merchandise and more.

In remembrance of the sacrifices and acts of courage that many men and women made during World War I, Armistice Day was declared a federal holiday on Nov. 11, 1938. Soldiers marched in hometown parades, politicians and veteran officers gave speeches, and ceremonies were held -- all in celebration of the peace that had been won. In 1954, Nov. 11 was officially changed to Veterans Day, representing our nation's thanks, loyalty and respect to our military veterans. At VetFriends.com, the spirit of Veterans Day is carried throughout the year.

Founded in 2000 by a U.S. veteran, thousands of people have been reconnected through VetFriends.com, spanning from World War II, to Vietnam, to Operation Desert Storm and the present. VetFriends.com has a current membership of over 2,000,000 people with 500,000 visitors per month to the site. Please visit https://www.vetfriends.com for more information.

Note to the media: For successful veteran reuniting stories, photos, and/or interview opportunities, please contact VetFriends.com at 1-800-975-1618 or use the provided email.
Healthcare Quality Strategies, Inc. (HQSI) announced that its board of trustees has appointed Mary Jane Brubaker as the organization's next chief executive officer (CEO). Brubaker, who currently serves as HQSIs Chief Operating Officer, succeeds Martin P. Margolies, the company's founder and CEO who retired on September 30, 2016.

"The board is pleased to have found the best individual to assume leadership of this long-standing quality improvement and consulting organization," said David I. Kingsley, MD, chairman of the HQSI board of trustees. "Mary Jane exemplifies the values of this organization, and she brings strong leadership abilities and a commitment to innovation. Combined with her deep industry knowledge and institutional tenure, this makes Mary Jane uniquely qualified to lead HQSI successfully into the future."

"I'm honored, and I'm grateful to the board for the opportunity to lead this exceptional organization of dedicated and talented professionals," said Brubaker. "For more than three decades HQSI has been an important partner and improvement catalyst in New Jersey. We look forward to continuing this rewarding work in ways that are relevant and meaningful in this dynamic healthcare environment."

Brubaker holds a bachelor's in journalism from New York University in New York, and a masters degree in communications and information systems from Rutgers University in New Brunswick. She joined HQSI in 1987, and has held various management positions within the organization during that time. Her volunteer work includes serving on the Deacons Committee at the Rossmoor Community Church and on the staff of the Rossmoor News. A lifelong resident of New Jersey, Brubaker currently resides in Monroe Township.

About HQSI

HQSI is a nonprofit consulting firm dedicated to accelerating healthcare quality improvement. As a quality improvement consultant, HQSI designs, implements and evaluates data-driven quality improvement projects on behalf of government, public and private clients. As a URAC accredited Independent Review Organization (IRO), HQSI performs objective IRO medical review services for insurers and providers. For more information, visit http://www.hqsi.org.

###
Steve and April Carver, owners of The Hotel Denver in Glenwood Springs, have acquired the historic Redstone Castle, which was auctioned on October 7, 2016. The Carvers now become the 11th owners in the propertys 114-year history. The longtime Colorado business couple purchased the property for $2,200,000, outbidding two other bidders.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to own a precious piece of history, says Steve Carver. Acquiring the extraordinary Redstone Castle will be an exciting new adventure and an opportunity to revitalize this celebrated jewel of Colorado. Originally built in 1899 for coal and steel magnate John Cleveland Osgood, the English Tudor-style Redstone Castle has been host to such guests as John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt. The main residence offers 23,000 sq. ft. of living space, with 42 rooms that remain much as they were in 1903.

The Carvers are committed to keeping the doors of the historic mansion open for all to enjoy. Tours of the castle, which is located in the historic town of Redstone between Aspen and Glenwood Springs, will continue. Tours are currently held on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Ticket information is available on the Redstone Castle website.

The current plan is to renovate several large suites to rent for lodging. There have not been rooms to rent at the Redstone Castle since 2002. According to April, The accommodations will be lovely and very historic. Pending Pitkin County guidelines and restrictions, plans may include hosting weddings and special events. The next few months will be spent preparing the castle for these changes.

The Carvers add that in the future, they hope that curious visitors will also be able to experience areas of the castle not previously available to guests. These areas may include the servant areas as well as the carriage house and stables. Think Downton Abbey, says April. We think people would like to see how the complex and often difficult support services of the castle functioned.

The homes furnishings and fixtures have been largely untouched. In 2005, while under the ownership of the IRS, a historic conservation easement was placed on areas of the property, ensuring that the exterior and certain rooms will continue to be maintained as they were built at the turn of the 20th century. It is because of the stewardship of past owners that so many original items remain, and have been well cared for, remarks Steve Carver. We plan to continue to care for the property in that tradition.

The Carvers plan to fold the castle into the hospitality operations of The Hotel Denver. The Carvers have spent 25 years preserving and revitalizing the historic Hotel Denver to become an icon in the Roaring Fork Valley. The Hotel Denver celebrates its 101st anniversary this month.

For more information about the Redstone Castle, visit http://www.thehoteldenver.com/redstone-castle.

For press inquiries, please contact Karen Mason, KJM Communications: karen(at)kjmcommunications.com or call (970) 485-2557.
Batavia Urology today announced that their first patients have been treated with the UroLift System, an innovative new treatment for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), also known as enlarged prostate.

The UroLift System is designed to relieve symptoms caused by an enlarged prostate, while preserving sexual function. Delivered during a minimally invasive procedure, the UroLift permanent implants act like window curtain tie-backs to hold the lobes of an enlarged prostate open. Patients recover from the procedure quickly, and return to their normal routines with minimal downtime. The cost of the UroLift System procedure is covered by Medicare in New York.

We are committed to providing patients with the highest-quality, most effective options to address their urology needs, said Mr. Jason Donovan, P.A., who was present for the first procedure. The UroLift System has an excellent safety profile and provides men suffering from an enlarged prostate a beneficial first-line treatment alternative to drug therapy or more invasive surgery. Importantly, the UroLift System provides fast and meaningful relief from BPH symptoms, improving overall quality of life for our patients.

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), also known as enlarged prostate, affects more than 37 million men in the United States alone. Twelve times more common than prostate cancer, BPH occurs when the prostate gland that surrounds the male urethra becomes enlarged with advancing age and begins to obstruct the urinary system. Approximately one in four men experience BPH-related symptoms by age 55, with 90 percent of men over 70 symptomatic.

Data from clinical trials showed that patients receiving UroLift implants reported rapid symptomatic improvement, improved urinary flow rates, and sustained sexual function. Patients also experienced a significant improvement in quality of life. Most common adverse events reported include hematuria, dysuria, micturition urgency, pelvic pain, and urge incontinence. Most symptoms were mild to moderate in severity and resolved within two to four weeks after the procedure.

To schedule a consultation with Batavia Urology, please call (585) 343-4555.

Batavia Urology is located at 36 Ellicott St # 2, Batavia, NY.

About BPH Treatment

More than 500 million aging men worldwide have an enlarged prostate. Medication is often the first line therapy but relief can be inadequate and temporary. Side effects of treatment can include sexual dysfunction, dizziness and headaches, prompting many patients to quit using the drugs. For these patients, the classic alternative is surgery that cuts or ablates prostate tissue to open the blocked urethra. While current surgical options, such as the 'gold standard' surgery, Transurethral Resection of the Prostate (TURP), can be very effective in relieving symptoms, they can also leave patients with permanent side effects such as urinary incontinence, erectile dysfunction and retrograde ejaculation (dry orgasm).

About UroLift

The UroLift System provides an alternative to tissue removing surgery for the treatment of an enlarged prostate. Performed through the urethra, a urologist uses the UroLift System to push aside the obstructive prostate lobes and positions small, tailored permanent UroLift implants to hold the prostate lobes in the retracted position. This opens the urethra while leaving the prostate intact. Adverse reactions associated with UroLift System treatment were comparable to other minimally invasive surgical therapies as well as standard cystoscopy. The most common adverse events reported during the study included pain or burning with urination, blood in the urine, pelvic pain, urgent need to urinate, and the inability to control urine because of an urgent need to urinate. Most symptoms were mild to moderate in severity and resolved within two to four weeks after the procedure. For more information about UroLift, visit http://www.urolift.com.

About Batavia Urology

Our team of providers includes Dr. David Gentile, Dr. Ralph Madeb, Dr. P.Miller Ashman and Jason Donovan, physician assistant. Our providers offer top-notch care and specialize in minimally invasive and non-surgical forms of treatments that our patients and their families have become accustomed to over the last several years.

Batavia Urology treats all urologic conditions which include but are not limited to: BPH, cancers of the prostate, bladder, and kidneys, incontinence, vasectomies, hypogonadism, overactive bladder, urinary retention, and kidney stones.

Urologic health is important to us, and we appreciate our patients loyalty to our practice. We will continue to offer a high standard to our community, our patients and their loved ones. Please contact us at 585-343-4555 to schedule your next appointment with one of our exceptional providers.
The Anchor Dental Team Rhode Island has always felt like home. With Anchor Dental, we have the privilege to provide unmatched patient care to our local community.

Anchor Dental, Inc., a leading dental practice in Newport, RI, celebrated its one-year anniversary with dentists Nick and Megan Catallozzi at the helm. The Catallozzis were previously practicing in Tiverton and Wakefield, Rhode Island.

The practice enables the Catallozzis and their team to provide exceptional dental services to their valued clients in Newport and the surrounding areas. The mission of Anchor Dental is to make a positive difference in our patients lives by offering the highest-quality dental care in Rhode Island. Our goal is to enhance patient health and quality of life in the same warm, attentive, and professional manner we would extend to our own family.

As a Rhode Island native, Im thrilled to be practicing dentistry in Newport, says Dr. Nick Catallozzi. Megan and I have practiced in the Midwest and in Rhode Island for several years, and its no coincidence that we chose Newport. Rhode Island has always felt like home. With Anchor Dental, we have the privilege to provide unmatched patient care to our local community.

Anchor Dental is centrally located in Newport in the Long Wharf Mall. The team provides a variety of dental services, including cleanings, fillings, implants, crowns, dentures, root canals, extractions, Invisalign, periodontal treatment, and teeth whitening.

At Anchor Dental (http://www.anchordentalri.com), our patients are our highest priority. We strive to ensure each individual feels comfortable and take each of their questions seriously. We develop lifelong relationships with patients by combining innovative dental technology, a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere, and a professional, caring staff.

To schedule an appointment at Anchor Dental, call 401.846.4404.

Drs. Nicholas and Megan Catallozzi

Anchordentalri(at)yahoo(dot)com
A new era of rhinestones and crystal in fashion and design is beginning with the introduction of STAR BRIGHT Austrian Crystals. The STAR BRIGHT Austrian crystal brand offers high quality rhinestones, hot fix rhinestones and sew on stones at affordable prices. The STAR BRIGHT brand is a new line of Austrian Crystals exclusive to Har-Man Importing.

We are entering a new era of crystals with the release of STAR BRIGHT Austrian Crystals where affordable luxury is possible, said Alisa Mandel Nogen, CEO of Har-Man Importing. The STAR BRIGHT brand of crystals offers the finest in quality, color selection, and sparkle at an attractive cost. We hear from customers all the time that they love and want quality, but that they just need a product that offers a better price point. STAR BRIGHT meets both these needs.

STAR BRIGHT crystals are available in a large range of colors and sizes. They are lead free, containing .009% lead or less. Rhinestones are available with high quality foiling or with an additional heat activated glue applied. The sew on stones are offered in three popular shapes.

STAR BRIGHT is going to be huge in dancesport, skating wear, and other textile industries that use large quantities of rhinestones and want lots of sparkle under the lights with an easy to work with price range, said Jack Mandel, President of Har-Man Importing.

The STAR BRIGHT brand of rhinestones and sew on stones complement Har-Man Importings other two major crystal rhinestones lines made by Swarovski and Preciosa.

Free samples of STAR BRIGHT Austrian Crystals are being offered as part of the initial product release. Businesses can request samples here: http://www.harmanbeads.com/star-bright-request-a-sample.

Learn more about STAR BRIGHT Austrian Crystals at http://www.harmanbeads.com/starbright or contact Har-Mans corporate office directly at 1-800-BEADS-NY.

About Har-Man Importing Corp.

Har-Man Importing Corp. is a longtime leader in the textile, jewelry and craft industries as a wholesaler and distributor of beads, rhinestones, trimmings and other similar products. It is a third-generation family business established in 1947. Har-Man Importing is also an Authorized Reseller of Swarovski crystals, a Distributor of Preciosa crystals, and an Authorized Distributor of Preciosa Ornela Traditional Glass Beads from the Czech Republic.

http://www.harmanbeads.com
The Tracery Stone Company announced recently that it will fabricate limestone products exclusively, giving up its previous fabrication of granite and marble products. The Birmingham, Alabama company, a fabricator associated with the Indiana Limestone Company, has been a leading provider of stone in the southern United States for more than 90 years.

Jason Garner, president of Tracery, said several considerations guided this decision.

Wed gotten to where granite and marble were 4 percent of our sales and took up 35 percent of our time, he said. His company might spend more administrative time and troubleshooting on one granite slab than on a three-truck-load limestone project.

The nature of the granite/marble business, Garner said, often requires in-process changes by homeowner, with complications that arise when the fabricator isnt notified. These issues cost inordinate amounts of time for which it is difficult or impossible to be adequately repaid.

Customers inspect granite slabs intensely, and may reject them for minor defects. If a slab is broken, which happens all too often, theres an immediate $1000 loss. Limestone is less expensive as a commodity, and if it is broken it can usually be repurposed for other jobs.

Garners great-grandfather emigrated from France in the early 1920s, establishing a business that became a top fabricator and distributor of custom stone across Alabama and in other southern states. Through the generations, Garners family has fabricated many types of stone. The decision to concentrate on limestone fabrication only came after years of consideration.

Unlike granite, there arent that many people down here doing limestone, Garner said. In contrast, Tracery operates a fully-equipped limestone mill, which confers a major advantage on limestone projects.

Tracery Stone continues to operate an extensive wholesale rough-stone yard, offering moss rock (fieldstone), earthtone sandstone, blue grey sandstone, earthtone flagstone, blue grey flagstone, granite veneer, natural cleft bluestone, thermal finish bluestone, bluestone slabs, along with mortar and sand in stock.

About Indiana Limestone Company

Indiana Limestone Company is unmatched as the premier supplier of Indiana limestone in a range of beautiful and lasting building products. Founded in 1926 (with predecessor firms that had been quarrying limestone since the mid-1800s), ILCO today remains the provider of choice for this internationally renowned natural stone. Throughout an illustrious history in which its stone has made such iconic structures as the Empire State Building, National Cathedral, and the Pentagon, ILCO has reliably provided the highest quality products and services carefully tailored to the needs of the market with an environmental, natural focus.
Physician Focus by veEDIS Clinical Systems - ED Documentation The Way It Should Be

veEDIS Clinical Systems, LLC announced today the launch of Physician Focus, a cloud-based Emergency Department documentation software designed specifically for physicians that seamlessly interfaces with virtually any enterprise-wide Electronic Health Records (EHR) system.

Equally important, Physician Focus supports the unique needs of Emergency Medicine providers. The software makes accurate charting and documentation easier and clearer than any other software application on the market, enabling physicians to focus on patient care rather than data entry, while at the same time improving the patient care process. Physician Focus has a very short learning curve with minimal training required, so providers can begin realizing the softwares benefits almost immediately.

We noticed a growing dissatisfaction in Emergency Departments with enterprise-wide EHR systems and decided to invest substantial resources to identify the cause, said Thomas Grossjung, veEDIS CEO. While those systems are very good at managing hospital resources on a broad spectrum, we found they just werent designed to keep pace with the unique needs of Emergency Medicine.

We knew we could fix that problem, Grossjung continued. We developed Physician Focus, an Emergency Department EHR software that has the same thought and workflow processes used by Emergency Medicine providers. The charting and documentation are accurate, swift, and uniquely content ready for that very important patient care area that has distinct needs.

veEDIS also recognized an increasing frustration with a lack of interoperability between the tools needed by the Emergency Department and those offered by hospital enterprise systems. Their team committed to fixing that problem as well.

Physician Focus seamlessly interfaces with literally any enterprise-wide EHR system, said Grossjung. Theres no impact to structured data collection, and the documentation flows with the patients records to ensure continuity of care. Now with Physician Focus, Emergency Medicine providers can have the unique tools they need regardless of what vendor is providing the enterprise-wide EHR system.

An Emergency Department is one of the busiest places in a hospital, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) projects a growth in ED visits of at least 3% annually. Using the CDCs report of 136 million Emergency Department visits in 2011  the most recent data available  that equates to over 4 million additional ED visits in just one year alone. The need to see patients quickly and treat them efficiently grows exponentially with those increasing Emergency Department demands.

Dr. Bruce Burstein, a Florida physician who has been working with EHR systems for several years, agrees. Having practiced in the Emergency Department for many years, I understand how important it is to minimize wait times so patients can be seen and start receiving the care they need. Technology must provide tools that support medical providers rather than being an obstacle or another task they have to complete in what is already a very demanding setting.

Dr. Greg Morter, veEDIS Chief Medical Officer, further explained why and how Physician Focus was developed. The intuitive thought and patient care processes used by Emergency Medicine providers yield the best possible clinical outcomes for patients, but the documentation software on the market simply wasnt designed by or specifically for Emergency physicians. It made sense for veEDIS to combine those real-world proven processes with our expertise of more than 20 years as an Emergency Department information system resource. The result was Physician Focus.

By solving the interoperability issues, the enterprise-wide EHR no longer defines how the Emergency Medicine doctor works, Dr. Morter continued. Weve eliminated those barriers, so now the same logical, efficient, clinically-supported documentation tools can be used by a provider regardless of where the patient care is given. The software also helps ensure appropriate reimbursement is received for the care rendered. I think the name Physician Focus says it all.

Physician Focus uses cloud-based technology, eliminating the need for new hardware or additional IT staff expenses. HIPAA compliant and ICD-10 coding compatible, it is available in a variety of startup options. Intuitive by design, minimal training is required. Physician Focus is content complete and can be implemented in just a few days.

About veEDIS Clinical Systems, LLC

Founded on strong business and clinical leadership, veEDIS has amassed deep experience in all aspects of EHR development, implementation, integration, and support. veEDIS uses cloud-based technology to deliver content complete EHR, Emergency Department Information Systems, and a variety of other software solutions for the healthcare market. These technologies were created by a team of talented, multi-disciplined professionals to enable the sustainable delivery of exceptional patient care. Visit http://www.veedis.com for more information.
The mission of The Blue Card, to help survivors live their remaining years in dignity, is incredibly time-sensitive as at least 50 percent of Holocaust survivors alive today will pass away within the next 10 to 20 years.

The Blue Card, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to aiding Holocaust survivors, will host its annual benefit gala on Monday, November 21, 2016, at Jazz At Lincoln Centers Frederick P. Rose Hall. The event will be hosted by Tony Nominee and Emmy and Golden Globe Award-Winning Actor, Tony Shalhoub.

This years benefit will feature a cocktail reception, seated dinner, and performances by Broadway and film stars Linda Lavin, Lainie Kazan and Raul Esparza. It will also feature a special performance from the cast of the upcoming Broadway play Indecent by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel.

The evening will include the presentation of awards to individuals dedicated to supporting the needs of Holocaust survivors and advancing human rights worldwide. This year, The Richard C. Holbrooke Award for Social Justice will be given to U.S. Senator Charles Schumer. The Blue Card will also present the Irene Hizme Tikkun Olam Award to Brooke Goldstein, Human Rights Lawyer and Founder of the Lawfare Project.

Additional honorees include: New York City Council; Leo Rechter, Founder and President of The National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors (NAHOS), who will receive the Max L. Heine Humanitarian Award; and Broadway, film and television actor Mimi Lieber, The Blue Card President Emeritus.

The Blue Card is proud to recognize Senator Schumer, Brooke Goldstein, the New York City Council, Mimi Lieber and Leo Rechter, for their dedication to raising awareness of the current plight of Holocaust survivors in the United States who are so critically in need of financial assistance, said Masha Pearl, Executive Director of The Blue Card. For those individuals that survived the atrocities of the Holocaust, many are struggling to make ends meet in the face of a growing number of medical issues, the rising cost of living and challenges navigating the health systems. The mission of The Blue Card, to help survivors live their remaining years in dignity, is incredibly time-sensitive as at least 50 percent of Holocaust survivors alive today will pass away within the next 10 to 20 years. We greatly appreciate the work of this years honorees, and are looking to the larger community to help spread awareness about those still in need.

The cocktail hour will begin at 6:00pm and the dinner will begin at 6:30pm. Individual tickets start at $400 and tables at $4,000. Tickets can be purchased by calling Milana Baazov at The Blue Card at (212) 239-2251 or by visiting: http://www.bluecardfund.org

The Blue Cards 2015 Annual Benefit Gala honored Nobel Peace Prize laureate, human rights activist and Holocaust survivor the late Elie Wiesel, and was presented by Academy Award winner Michael Douglas and author and journalist Kati Marton. Past event attendees and honorees have included Mia Farrow and Ronan Farrow, Ambassador Emeritus Thomas Pickering, philanthropists Zach Lonstein and Shoshanna Lonstein, former New York City mayor Ed Koch, musician Regina Spektor, journalist Jonathan Alter, and actors Danny Aiello, Cynthia Nixon and David Hyde Pierce.

About The Blue Card

The mission of The Blue Card is to provide direct financial assistance, with utmost respect and ever mindful of their dignity, to needy Holocaust survivors in the United States. Financial assistance is available on a monthly basis for most basic needs, as well as for emergencies, such as medical and dental care, special equipment, rent and utility shut offs, along with many other programs. Founded in Germany in 1934, and reestablished in the United States in 1939, The Blue Card has distributed nearly $30 million to Holocaust survivors date with 100% of annual contributions made by individuals going directly to survivors. The Blue Card is Better Business Bureau (BBB) certified. Furthermore, The Blue Card has received a Four Star Rating from Charity Navigator. Finally, The Independent Charities of America (ICA) recognized The Blue Card with its Best in America Seal of Excellence, a merit that has been awarded to fewer than 1,000 of the 1,000,000 charities that are a part of ICA.

For more information or to make a donation, please visit http://www.BlueCardFund.org.
Job Shadow Mission Bay H.S. was an obvious choice when we were considering how we could give back to our community

Mission Bay High School will visit The Control Group for a job shadow in their Pacific Beach office. On Wednesday, November 16th from 10am-12pm, 20 students from the 11th and 12th grade IT Pathways classes will visit The Control Group for a hands-on look into the world of a San Diego-based technology company. Students will get to see and participate in creating projects with a developer.

The Control Group does several of these job shadows every school year. Past job shadows have been with Hoover High School and OFarrell Charter School. Mission Bay High School is located where we live and work, says Tischa Culver, PR and Communications Specialist for The Control Group. Mission Bay H.S. was an obvious choice when we were considering how we could give back to our community.

In December, The Control Group will be participating in the annual Hour of Code with Hoover High School. Tischa Culver is also on the San Diego Unified School Districts Career Technical Education Advisory Committee (CTEAC).

About The Control Group

Created in 2011, The Control Group is one of the fastest-growing technology companies headquartered in San Diego. Their expertise is in web development and internet marketing. The company is the developer of InstantCheckmate.com, one of the top people search engines in the world and NextGen Leads, an extremely high quality insurance leads platform focused on streamlining lead acquisition. Because the company is already profitable, it has been able to develop a company culture that is shaking up the Technology Sector. Core to the company culture is its reach into the community to make a positive impact by volunteering, supporting, and getting involved in numerous important causes.
Orchestrate 2016 Logo Orchestrate has quickly established a reputation as one of the largest annual conferences focusing specifically on the business and technology side of craft beverage manufacturing.

More than 300 attendees from breweries, distilleries and other beverage manufacturers across the U.S. and the world gathered in Portland, Ore. October 26th  28th for the annual Orchestrate user conference. Orchestrate is hosted by Orchestra Software, a privately-held company that creates industry-specific business management software to consolidate all company operations into a single application.

Now in its fifth year, Orchestrate has quickly established a reputation as one of the largest annual conferences focusing specifically on the business and technology side of craft beverage manufacturing.

The 3-day conference provided unique opportunities for breweries and distilleries to network, engage, share and learn best business practices to survive todays increasingly competitive climate.

Various presentation formats ranging from keynotes, group workshops, regional-based user forums and other sponsored speaking sessions delivered the actionable insights for attendees to incorporate into the business to stay competitive.

Technology was a key focal point throughout the conference, as noted in the opening keynote provided by Orchestra Software President, Brad Windecker. The Digital Transformation of the Craft Beverage Industry, addressed the craft beverage industrys need for industry-wide adoption of technology in order to radically transform the business:

Its no longer good enough to make good craft beer or spirits, said Windecker. Thats the new baseline. Now, success depends on how manufacturers approach the business side to achieve their goals and execute a vision. This includes investing in technology to escalate your business and outpace the competition.

Special guest and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden joined Windecker on stage to further validate how crafts economic impact has captured the attention of many on Capitol Hill. Wyden detailed how small businesses like breweries, distilleries, wineries and cideries have influenced many important issues like taxes and spent grain regulations.

The conference also featured an expanded exhibitor hall for attendees to connect with current vendors and establish new relationships with industry leaders. This years exhibitor list included a wider variety of vendors ranging from brewery automation systems and crowler machine manufacturers to hop suppliers, brewery architects and business consulting firms.

Our growing network of preferred partners allows us to easily align our users with the industry-leading systems, top suppliers and trusted advisors, said Windecker. Its one of our many efforts to help our customers take their business to the next level.

The Orchestrate welcome reception capped off an engaging day of sessions, offering a Uniquely Portland experience complete with local food options and nine craft beer selections, all generously donated by members of the Orchestrated community.

The user conference concept was born out of a desire to provide Orchestrated customers an experience that combines learning, sharing and networking with the best that Portland has to offer. For Windecker and employees at Orchestra Software, conference end marks the beginning of the next, at least from a planning perspective:

Orchestrate embodies our Customer First mindset and we will continuously improve the conference experience year over year in the same way we improve our products, said Windecker. Weve already started planning Orchestrate 2017 with the goal of providing our users with new knowledge, connections, ideas and inspiration that will help these growing companies run better for years to come.

About Orchestra

Orchestra Software is a privately-held enterprise software company founded in 2008. Orchestra creates industry vertical solutions that are scalable for large companies yet affordable enough for small and midsize growing companies.

Orchestra Softwares business management software, known as Orchestrated, consolidates all company operations into a single application, providing unparalleled insight into the business, creating opportunity for cost savings and increasing profitability.

Orchestra Software has received numerous awards, including a recent nomination as one of Oregons top 50 fastest-growing private companies by the Portland Business Journal.
The Mexico City office of global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP will mark its 5th anniversary with a series of events, including client seminars and an anniversary celebration November 17, 2016 in Mexico City that will gather more than 200 clients, staff, and colleagues from across the firm to celebrate the offices milestone year.

Since its opening in 2011, Greenberg Traurigs Mexico City office has grown to almost 60 lawyers, all of whom are bilingual and many of whom are dual-licensed to practice in Mexico and the U.S. With an extensive track record of award-winning transactions and a proven commitment to excellence, the office in Mexico City is a key element of the firms global platform.

The Mexico City office has played a pivotal role in delivering value and tangible results for local and international clients, further advancing our firms long-held commitment to Latin America, said Patricia Menendez-Cambo, Vice Chair of Greenberg Traurig.

Our Mexico City team has guided clients through complex transactions and regulatory matters, such as anti-corruption, compliance, and antitrust issues, added Yosbel A. Ibarra, co-chair of Greenberg Traurigs Latin American and Iberian Practice. Our team has also helped clients take advantage of opportunities that have become available in the Mexican market, including as a result of recent regulatory reforms.

Executive Chairman Richard A. Rosenbaum said the firm decided to take a different approach in Mexico City compared to what other international firms had done in the country: We did not want to focus exclusively on our international clients doing business in Mexico; for us, it was also important to build a full-service Mexican practice with national clients in Mexico, Rosenbaum said. We took a different approach to the traditional Mexican law firm model and to the way that international firms had operated in Mexico. As we have done in so many other markets, we innovated and challenged the status quo with great success, relying on our culture of collaboration and building value for our clients.

Looking ahead to the future, Mexico City Managing Shareholder Jose Raz-Guzman added: The pride and unity that an anniversary inspires makes this an ideal time to come together with our clients and friends to reflect on our mutual past successes and future opportunities. As we have always done, we will continue to focus our efforts on delivering superior client service and helping clients achieve their business objectives.

About Greenberg Traurigs Mexico City Office

Greenberg Traurigs Mexico City office opened in 2011, offering clients innovative, strategic advice and legal services that span both traditional fields and contemporary regulatory sectors. The office leverages the resources and reach of the firms global platform, which consists of more than 100 practice areas and industry groups, to provide clients with tailored legal services reflective of the specific industry and market conditions in which they operate.

The Mexico City office is an integral part of the firms award-winning Latin American and Iberian Practice. The attorneys in Mexico City work closely with colleagues from across the practice to advise both international and domestic clients with their business interests in Latin America, the United States, and other international markets.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, multi-practice law firm with approximately 2,000 attorneys serving clients from 38 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The firm is No. 1 on the 2015 Law360 Most Charitable Firms list, second largest in the U.S. on the 2016 Law360 400, Top 20 on the 2015 Am Law Global 100, and among the 2015 BTI Brand Elite. More information at: http://www.gtlaw.com.
Two top engagement strategists from Inmar, Inc., a technology and analytics company, will share insights on data-driven shopper targeting at the Fall 2016 LEAD Marketing Conference taking place on Wednesday, November 16. Tim Clark, Director, Inmar Center for Brand Excellence, and Charlie Gage, Senior Shopper Strategist, Inmar, will present Identifying the Right Targets: Data-Driven Strategies for Understanding and Engaging Your Shoppers at 3:50 p.m. ET.

Their program, which closes the day-long event, will identify the in-depth data marketers need to understand their shoppers in order to reach their true customer, and will explore the tools available to collect this data. Brands who leverage these tools will be better positioned to accelerate growth and build share.

The LEAD Marketing Conference is produced and hosted by the Shopper Technology Institute and CPGmatters. This unique virtual conference is presented live and entirely online and will run from 10:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. ET, November 16. It is billed as the only collaborative conference for CPG manufacturers and retailers covering all aspects of loyalty, engagement, analytics and digital applications. More than 500 industry professionals are expected to attend the day-long event which will include eight presentations from a select cadre of industry experts.

Those interested in participating in the conference can register at the conference website.

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.

For more information about Inmars products and services, please contact (866)440-6917 or visit http://www.inmar.com.
More than 50% of all relocations fail and almost two-thirds cite the reason as lack of employee adjustment to a new country. Our goal is to help expats thrive in their new home and community.

Apto, a Nashville-based technology company, announces today the launch of the first scenario-based cultural-linguistic training platform to prepare internationals and their families to relocate to the U.S. In its first product release, Apto has partnered with Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development to promote its online training services to Japanese multinational corporations relocating to the state. Apto completed two betas with 65 users from Japanese companies including Mitsubishi and has a letter of intent to provide training services to their relocating employees. Aptos first product release is in Japanese due to the high concentration of companies in the region and will expand to other languages in the future.

According to the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, Tennessee ranks second in the nation for foreign direct investment from Japan. There are 184 Japanese companies employing 55,000 people across the state representing almost $18 billion in capital investment. Commissioner Randy Boyd says about Apto, Its a great service for a great target market that our state is actively working on. Its a win-win. Its a win for an entrepreneur in our state and its a win for our state.

Apto features informal, regionalized language and cultural experiences to guide learners through authentic, first person perspective training modules in four core areas of development: work, education, social and community. The program features audio and video of real people in real life situations such as getting a drivers license, registering a child for school and visiting a doctors office. Flexibility and convenience are critical factors to adult learners to ensure high adoption rates. Apto is web-based, making it available at any time and learners access the program through their phone, tablet, desktop or other mobile device. Apto is partnering with Nashville software engineering firm Dozen Software (formerly FLO Code) to design the technology platform.

I wish there had been a tool like Apto for all Japanese expats I assisted over the years and for myself, says expat point person Yuko Jordan of Mitsubishi Polycrystalline Silicon America Corp., in Theodore, Alabama. Apto could have helped all of us adapt to life in the U.S. more effectively. I look forward to seeing Apto make a difference in the lives of many in the future.

Its estimated that 83 percent of multinational companies expect to increase global relocation assignments and training is not adequate. Current language training is ineffective and lacks sufficient cultural experiences to simulate life in America, says Traci Snowden, founder and CEO of Apto, an experienced language educator and software sales executive. More than 50 percent of all relocations fail and almost two-thirds cite the reason as lack of employee adjustment to a new country. Our goal is to help expats thrive in their new home and community. Apto helps them experience life in America before they arrive.

Apto co-founders and executive leadership team include Belmont University School of Business graduate in Entrepreneurship, Orlando Pisegna III, who is chief operating officer and client services director. Holly Howell, who serves as chief marketing officer, began her career with ESL learners and has 20 years of corporate marketing and operations leadership experience. She has a B.A. from Sewanee and an M.A. in English from Belmont University. The company plans to expand its core team 25 percent in 2017.

Apto hosts its launch party on Tuesday, November 15, 2016 at 5:30 p.m.  7:30 p.m. CST at the INK Building, 613 Ewing Avenue in Nashville. The evening includes product demos, an opportunity to meet the Apto team, customer testimonials and guest speaker Commissioner Randy Boyd. RSVP to attend the launch party live stream here.

ABOUT APTO

Apto is a Nashville-based technology company specializing in online cultural and linguistic training for internationals and their families relocating to the U.S. In November 2016, the company launched the first scenario-based cultural-linguistic simulator. The heart of Apto is where culture and language meet to create community. Learn more at http://www.aptoglobal.com. Connect with us https://www.facebook.com/aptoglobal/.
Yoga holds tremendous potential for helping veterans heal and build resilience. At a time when resources are limited, we are honored to help bring best practices forward so that more veterans can experience the proven benefits

Today on Veterans Day, the Yoga Service Council (YSC) and Omega Institute for Holistic Studies announced the publication of more than 100 best practice guidelines for teaching yoga to veterans. Best Practices for Yoga with Veterans is a vital new resource written for a general audience, with particular interest to veterans and veteran family members, VA administrators and veterans organizations, and yoga teachers and yoga service providers dedicated to serving this population.

The effects of military trauma and post-traumatic stress are vast, and reintegration can be overwhelming for veterans and their families, said Robert Skip Backus, chief executive officer at Omega. Yoga holds tremendous potential for helping veterans heal and build resilience. At a time when resources are limited, we are honored to help bring best practices forward so that more veterans can experience the proven benefits.

Best Practices for Yoga with Veterans is the second white book in the Yoga Service Best Practices series, which launched in 2016 with the publication of Best Practices for Yoga in Schools.

Medically retired veteran and YSC operations director Kathryn Thomas shares that after sustaining an injury while on deployment as a naval pilot my physical therapist recommended yoga, and Im so grateful that he did. While on my mat, my worries and fears about my physical disability stayed in the back of my mind. Instead, I focused on what I could still achieve. Based on my own experience, I believe that yoga can be a life-changing, and even life-saving resource for veterans.

Yoga Service Council president Jennifer Cohen Harper explains, this work is unique in that it shares the knowledge of over 30 experts in the field. Collectively, the team that co-created this book has expertise not only in yoga, but also in veterans affairs, military culture, integrative medicine, clinical psychology, trauma therapy, social work, and more.

Best Practices for Yoga with Veterans synthesizes this wealth of knowledge on teaching yoga to veterans in ways that are responsive to the particularities of the military experience. Key topics include: 1) Culture and Communications, 2) Staffing and Training, 3) Working with Trauma, 4) Curriculum and Instruction, 5) Gender Considerations, 6) Relationship Building, 7) Working in the VA, 8) Teaching Incarcerated Veterans, and 9) Teaching Families of Veterans.

The partnership of the Yoga Service Council and Omega Institute began in 2009, when Omega offered space for a group of yoga teachers to come together and talk about ways to support those who worked with vulnerable and underserved populations. The YSC emerged from this initial gathering and offered the first annual Yoga Service Conference at Omega in 2012. As a result of the shared commitment to yoga and service, the YSC and Omega decided to formally partner in 2014 to bring yoga and mindfulness practices into the lives of more individuals and communities who have limited access to these vital teachings.

The intention of each of the Best Practices Guides in the series is to be a resource for those who wish to share yoga practices in a way that is safe, effective, and positioned in a broader social context, as well as being in touch with the relevant research and respectful of the many intersecting realities found in any social setting, including the need for skillful relationship building within institutions.

The first book in the series, Best Practices for Yoga in Schools, was the work of 27 of the nations leaders on yoga in schools and is also available on Amazon.com. The third Yoga Service Best Practices Guide will address yoga in the criminal justice system and is expected to be published in 2018.

About Yoga Service Council (YSC)

The Yoga Service Council is a collaborative community that welcomes yoga and mindfulness teachers, therapists, social service providers, educators, health professionals, researchers, and all others who share our mission and vision. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, dedicated to maximizing the effectiveness, sustainability, and impact of individuals and organizations working to make yoga and mindfulness practices equally accessible to all.

YogaServiceCouncil.org

Yoga Service Council contact: Jennifer Cohen Harper, Jenn(at)YogaServiceCouncil(dot)org

About Omega Institute for Holistic Studies

Founded in 1977, Omega Institute for Holistic Studies is the nations most trusted source for wellness and personal growth. As a nonprofit organization, Omega offers diverse and innovative educational experiences that inspire an integrated approach to personal and social change. Located on 250 acres in the beautiful Hudson Valley, Omega welcomes more than 23,000 people to its workshops, conferences, and retreats in Rhinebeck, New York, and at exceptional locations around the world. eOmega.org

Omega contact: Chrissa Pullicino, ChrissaP(at)eOmega(dot)org

# # #
Cureus Journal of Medical Science Our goal is to document clinical experiences and share the results of this program with cardiology, primary care and family practice clinicians worldwide. Ultimately we hope to improve the lives of their patients

An estimated 5.7 million Americans have heart failure(1), a chronic condition in which the heart is unable to adequately pump enough blood to meet the demands of the body(2). In a recently updated treatment guideline, the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association and the Heart Failure Society of America now recommend the use of new pharmacological therapy for the management of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF).

To develop related best practices and encourage clinical knowledge sharing, the Cureus Journal of Medical Science is seeking new publications that document clinical experiences with new HFrEF medication treatments per the focused update to the heart failure guideline. The program seeks original articles and case reports that explore related patient selection criteria, patient monitoring protocols, responses to treatment, etc. Cash prizes totaling $10,000 USD will be awarded to the authors that produce the most novel and impactful publications as determined by the peer review panel and clinical community.

Effective new therapies that potentially impact a large number of patients present both opportunities and challenges, said John Adler, M.D., founder and CEO of Cureus and professor of medicine at Stanford University. To manage these challenges, our goal is to document clinical experiences and share the results of this program with cardiology, primary care and family practice clinicians worldwide. Ultimately we hope to improve the lives of their patients.

Subsequent to peer review and actual publication, all articles will be made available for Cureus SIQ (Scholarly Impact Quotient) scoring. SIQ is Cureus unique crowdsourced post-publication review that allows the clinical community-at-large to assess and score published medical literature. Reviewers can assign scores on article criteria including study design and methods, clarity and rationale, novelty of conclusions, etc.

Enabled by the financial support of Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, article submission and processing is entirely free. All published articles will also be made accessible for search and free full-article download via PubMed Central - the National Institute of Health (NIH) hosted digital search engine for full-text biomedical literature. Eligible articles must be submitted for editorial and peer review by Tuesday, February 21, 2017.

More information regarding this publishing competition and related submission details can be found at http://www.cureus.com/competitions/HFrEF.

1. Mozaffarian D, Benjamin EJ, Go AS, et al. Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics-2016 Update: A Report From the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2016;133(4):e38-360.

2. http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/HeartFailure/AboutHeartFailure/About-Heart-Failure_UCM_002044_Article.jsp#.WBJcT42V-70

About Cureus

The Cureus Journal of Medical Science is a no-cost, peer-reviewed online medical publishing platform leveraging a unique crowdsourced post-publication review process. Relying on the collective intelligence of its clinical community, Cureus enables faster publication, greater access, and ultimately, better research. Visit http://www.cureus.com for more information.
Of counsel Dr. Fang Xie and shareholder Dr. Melissa Hunter-Ensor, in the Intellectual Property & Technology Practice of global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLPs Boston office, will participate in the Boston Bar Associations (BBA) inaugural Life Sciences Conference, Nov. 10 at the Boston Marriott in Cambridge. The conference will explore the interplay between the life sciences sector and the law through panels covering corporate, regulatory, and intellectual property (IP) law.

From 9:15  10 a.m., Xie, co-leader of the firms Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industry Group of the global Life Sciences & Medical Technology Group, will chair the panel, Patent Subject Matter Eligibility in BiotechPerspectives from the Industry, USPTO and Private Practice. This session will address how recent Supreme Court decisions on patent subject matter eligibility are impacting the biotech industry. Practical tips will be provided on how to improve strength of patents and avoid some of the pitfalls in this area.

From 10:15  11 a.m., Hunter-Ensor will chair the panel, The Impact of Brexit on the Life Sciences Industry, which will discuss how Brexit is affecting life science transactions currently, and the risks/opportunities for life sciences as the process moves forward.

Additionally, Chinh H. Pham, co-leader of Greenberg Traurigs Emerging Technology Group, and co-chair of the firms IP Group in Boston, serves on the conference advisory committee.

About Greenberg Traurigs Life Sciences & Medical Technology Group

Greenberg Traurigs Life Sciences & Medical Technology Group advises clients ranging from startups to large multinational public companies to leading research institutions. The groups attorneys work closely with clients, providing innovative legal counsel to help them achieve their objectives  from discovery through commercialization and product marketing.

About Greenberg Traurigs Boston Office

Established in 1999, Greenberg Traurigs Boston office is home to more than 65 attorneys practicing in the areas of corporate, emerging technology, governmental affairs, intellectual property, labor and employment, life sciences and medical technology, litigation, public finance, and real estate. An important contributor to the firm's international platform, the Boston office includes a team of nationally recognized attorneys with both public and private sector experience. The team offers clients the value of decades of legal experience and hands-on knowledge of the local business community, supported by the firm's vast network of global resources.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, multi-practice law firm with approximately 2,000 attorneys serving clients from 38 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The firm is No. 1 on the 2015 Law360 Most Charitable Firms list, third largest in the U.S. on the 2015 Law360 400, Top 20 on the 2015 Am Law Global 100, and among the 2015 BTI Brand Elite. More information at: http://www.gtlaw.com.
Swords to Plowshares Executive Director Michael Blecker (far left), COO Leon Winston (far right), San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee (left) and Dept of Homelessness & Supportive Housing Jeff Kositsky (right) Our Veterans Day Dinner allows us to raise the crucial funds needed to serve San Franciscos veteran population. Without support from the community, our work would not be possible, said Mr. Blecker.

On Monday, November 7, 2016, Swords to Plowshares, San Franciscos leading nonprofit veteran service agency, hosted its 20th Annual Veterans Day Dinner. More than 500 community supporters came together to honor the work of Swords to Plowshares and the thousands of Bay Area veterans they have served. This year, supporters helped make our 20th Annual Veterans Day Dinner our most successful fundraiser yet. Swords to Plowshares raised close to $500,000 to support our critical services for low-income and homeless veterans.

The Fund-a-Need pledge drive was dedicated the memory of our faithful supporter Jon Paulson. Our generous supporters helped us to meet our $100,000 Fund-a-Need goal to support our critical legal services for homeless and low-income veterans in memory. Every $1 pledged towards our free legal services, results in $20 leveraged in direct VA benefits for veterans, resulting in a $2,000,000+ impact for veterans most in need.

The following awardees were honored:

Swords to Plowshares honored its Executive Director Michael Bleckers 40 years of devoted service to helping veterans in need. The City and County of San Francisco further recognized Michael Bleckers commitment to the veteran community by declaring November 7th, 2016 as Michael Blecker Day.

The law firm of Latham & Watkins, LLP was named the 2016 Pro Bono Partner of the Year for their involvement with taking on full representation of 12 veterans cases, staffing numerous Legal Drop-in Clinics, and for working closely on a Rulemaking Petition to change VA policies that unnecessarily deny hundreds of thousands of veterans access to VA healthcare and benefits.

David Addlestone, a Vietnam Air Force veteran, revered veteran advocate, and former co-director of the National Veterans Legal Services Program, was named the 2016 Community Hero for his lifetime of dedicated advocacy on behalf of veteran.

Daniel Ramirez, a Korean War veteran in the U.S. Army and former Swords to Plowshares Legal client; and Isaac Baires, a U.S. National Guard veteran, single father of three young children, and graduate of Swords to Plowshares Employment and Vocational Training program were presented with the 2016 Profiles of Courage award. The Profiles of Courage award recognizes veterans who have turned their lives around and shown courage in the face of adversity. Daniel Ramirez and Isaac Baires stories illustrate the success of the full range of services that Swords to Plowshares provides and demonstrate the personal impact of Swords to Plowshares nationally-recognized programs.

The services that we offer empower veterans to live meaningful and productive lives. We restore dignity and hope to veterans in need on a daily basis. Our Veterans Day Dinner allows us to raise the crucial funds needed to serve San Franciscos veteran population. Without support from the community, our work would not be possible, said Mr. Blecker.

Sponsors of the 20th Annual Veterans Day Dinner include; Morrison & Foerster Foundation and Morrison & Foerster LLP, Keker & Van Nest LLP and John & Tina Keker, Qatalyst Partner, Zephyr Real Estate, Chevron, Latham & Watkins LLP, Gibson Dunn, Wells Fargo, RHE Foundation, and William & Sherrie Millichap Family Foundation

About Swords to Plowshares:

Founded in 1974, Swords to Plowshares is a community-based not-for-profit organization that provides case management, mental health assessment and referral, rapid re-housing and eviction prevention services, employment and training, supportive housing, and legal benefits assistance for low-income, homeless and at-risk veterans in the San Francisco Bay Area. Swords to Plowshares promotes and protects the rights of veterans through advocacy, public education, and partnerships with local, state and national entities. Learn more about the work of Swords to Plowshares, and ways in which you can help, by visiting our website at http://www.stp-sf.org.
Come the end of 2016, Asia Century Investment Limited celebrates its 15th anniversary. It was on December 7th, 2001 that this boutique investment house was officially established to play an active role in the IPO market not just in its home country of Hong Kong but also on a global scale. Focused firmly on the future and very proud of what it has accomplished, ACI Limited celebrates the past 15 years by acknowledging the vision of its architects and the contribution of those who built the institution from the ground up. Thanks to them and to all employees, from the past to today, Asia Century Investment Limited has evolved from a Hong Kong asset management company to a world-class and well respected player within the investment sector.

7th of December 2016  Asia Century Investment Limited (ACIL) will celebrate its anniversary in style. To celebrate the special occasion, the company will be opening its doors to new investors and providing a fantastic opportunity to be part of potentially the largest IPO to ever debut on the Hong Kong market. Asia Century Investment Limited has been a major player in the IPO market since its inception just 15 years ago. Its two most successful placements for clients were the Postal Savings Bank of China (PSBC). The Beijing-based lender raised a total of $7.4 billion in the Hong Kong listingselling 12.1 billion shares, making it the largest offering this year globally and the $25 billion New York IPO of Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba in 2014.

Ant Financial Services Group - This company may not be a household name in the western world but in China, Hong Kong and the Far East as a whole, the company is at the forefront of its industry. Ant Financial Services Group ("Ant Financial"), was officially founded in October 2014 and originated from Alipay which is the worlds leading third-party payment platform founded in 2004. Ant Financial controls Chinas biggest online payment service, Alipay. Its IPO would likely be among the biggest ever for Hong Kong, though the specific amount to be raised hasnt been decided. Ant Financial, controlled by Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, completed a $4.5 billion equity fundraising round. Analyst valuations have varied wildly, ranging from $50 billion to $90 billion USD. A Reuters survey from 25 analysts produced a $70 billion average.

Besides Alipay, Ant Financial also controls the company that manages YuE Bao, the nations largest money-market fund.

Back to the birthday boy, Asia Century Investment Limited have a small but impressive client base and a fast growing number of global partners, the team has grown significantly over the past 15 years and, in doing so, has brought tremendous value to the financial sector.

The company is in a prime position within the private equity market and has a wealth of experience in the Pre-IPO market, and from independent analysis confirming, that the next 18 months within the Pre IPO and IPO markets sets to break all global records in funding, the company sees this as their opportunity to provide clients and the company with a place right at the top

About Asia Century Investment Limited, Hong Kong.

Asia Century Investment is a leading privately held investment management firm, committed to delivering superior investment performance and building long-term client relationships since its founding in 2001. Serving investment professionals, institutions, corporations and individual investors, Asia Century Investment offers a variety of actively managed investment disciplines through an array of products including secure funds, institutional separate accounts. The company's 400 employees serve clients from its headquarters in Hong Kong. Li Kum-Chun, chairman and president and Alfred Livingstone chief financial officer. For more information about Asia Century Investments, visit http://www.asiacenturyinvest.com.

The company is a privately held investment holding company with headquarters in Hong Kong. The group of companies have a prime focus on Asia, North America and emerging global countries.

The company specializes in Blue Chip equities, Fixed Dividend Funds and secure IPOs, and a firm that believes in low risk and high reward investment products that are available to investors today.
21 CFR Part 11 Compliance for SaaS/Cloud Applications 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance for SaaS/Cloud Applications: 2-Day In-Person Seminar

ComplianceOnlines on-demand seminar on 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance for SaaS/Cloud Applications returns to California and Philadelphia in 2017. The 2016 sold-out event was attended by various healthcare and pharma professionals representing FDA regulated organizations such as Abbott Laboratories, Genentech, Novo Nordisk Inc., Sanofi Pasteur, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Vital Therapies, Inc., BioLife Solutions, and others.

The two-day training program led by well-known FDA compliance specialist David Nettleton, will explore proven techniques for reducing costs associated with implementing, using, and maintaining computer systems in regulated environments.

Lack of proper system validation is one of the major reasons for Warning Letters and 483s in most of the FDA regulated industries. This two day seminar will help participants understand the specific requirements associated with local and SaaS/cloud hosting solutions. It will address the latest computer system industry standards for data security, data transfer, audit trails, electronic records and signatures, software validation, and computer system validation.

Seminar instructor David Nettleton is an industry leader, author, and teacher for 21 CFR Part 11, Annex 11, HIPAA, software validation, and computer system validation. He is involved with the development, purchase, installation, operation and maintenance of computerized systems used in FDA compliant applications. He has completed more than 230 mission critical laboratory, clinical, and manufacturing software implementation projects.

This in-person training will assist regulatory affairs personnel, software managers, QA/ QC teams, software vendors and suppliers and others within an organization.

For more information or to register for the seminar, please click here.

Dates: Thursday, February 2, 2017 (8.00 AM- 5.00 PM) and Friday, February 3, 2017 (8.30 AM- 3.30 PM)

Thursday, April 27, 2017 (8.00 AM- 5.00 PM) and Friday, April 28, 2017 (8.30 AM- 3.30 PM)

Thursday, June 15, 2017 (8.00 AM- 5.00 PM) and Friday, June 16, 2017 (8.30 AM- 3.30 PM)

Location 1: San Diego, CA

Location 2: Philadelphia, PA

Location 3: San Diego, CA

Registration Cost: $1,999.00 per registration

Early bird discounts: For discounts on early registrations, please click here.

Register by phone: Please call our customer service specialists at +1-888-717-2436 or email to customercare(at)complianceonline(dot)com

For more information on ComplianceOnline or to browse through our trainings, please visit our website.

About ComplianceOnline

ComplianceOnline is a leading provider of regulatory compliance trainings for companies and professionals in regulated industries. ComplianceOnline has successfully trained over 35,000 professionals from 9,000 companies to comply with the requirements of regulatory agencies. ComplianceOnline is headquartered in Palo Alto, California and can be reached at http://www.complianceonline.com. ComplianceOnline is a MetricStream portal. MetricStream (http://www.metricstream.com) is a market leader in Enterprise-wide Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC) and Quality Management Solutions for global corporations.

For more information please contact:

A Reuben Bernard

Associate Director - ComplianceOnline

2600 E Bayshore Rd

Palo Alto CA USA 94303

Phone - +1-650-238-9656 | +1-888-717-2436

Fax - 650-963-2556

Mail: reuben(at)complianceonline(dot)com

Website: http://www.complianceonline.com
Medical Device Regulation in 2017:

Crossroads Ahead?

**Presented by FDAnews**

Dec. 1, 2016  Washington, DC

http://www.fdanews.com/mdregulationin2017

Get ready for what 2017 holds.

There will be a new president, a new congress and new medical device regulations and guidances.

Come to the Press Club on December 1 and get a preview of what is coming.

Attendees will hear directly from former FDA officials including Herbert Lerner, Heather Rosecrans, Minnie Baylor-Henry, Mary Pendergast, Casper Uldriks  and many other experts and veteran practitioners in medical device regulatory issues who have been or are now on the firing line of the current hot button issues in medical device law, regulation, and policy: cybersecurity, mobile apps and combination products.

Not only will this be the first event of its kind after the election but its different. This FDAnews Summit is completely interactive  no slides just questions, answers and discussion among the keynoter, moderators, panelists and the attendees.

Meet the Keynote Speaker:

Herbert Lerner, M.D., Senior Director of Regulatory and Clinical Sciences Hogan Lovells LLP

Herb Lerner's practice focuses primary on bringing new medical devices to the U.S. market. Uniquely positioned to advise clients in addressing FDA regulatory issues, he brings to Hogan Lovells years of clinical practice and FDA regulatory experience. A clinician with almost 20 years as a general and colon & rectal surgeon, and former Deputy Division Director of the Division of Reproductive, Gastro-Renal, and Urological Devices, FDA/CDRH/ODE, Herb joined the Hogan Lovells Medical Device Group in 2016.

Who Will Benefit:



Quality Assurance/Quality Control

Manufacturing and Contracting

Supply Chain Management

Risk Management and Product Lifecycle Management

Executive Management

Regulatory Affairs

Research and Development

Compliance Officers

Consultants/Service Providers

Conference Details

Medical Device Regulation in 2017:

Crossroads Ahead?

**Presented by FDAnews**

Dec. 1, 2016  Washington, DC

http://www.fdanews.com/mdregulationin2017

Tuition: $697

Significant team discounts are available.

Easy Ways to Register

Online: http://www.fdanews.com/mdregulationin2017

By phone: 888-838-5578 or 703-538-7600

About FDAnews

FDAnews is the premier provider of domestic and international regulatory, legislative, and business news and information for executives in industries regulated by the US FDA and the European Medicines Agency. Pharmaceutical and medical device professionals rely on FDAnews' print and electronic newsletters, books and conferences to stay in compliance with international standards and the FDA's complex and ever-changing regulations.
Supporting educational events such as this is one of the ways we make a difference in our community.

FirstService Residential, Chicagolands leading property management company, will be a sponsor of The Cooperator Expo Chicagoland on Tuesday, November 15, 2016 from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Navy Pier. This event provides a forum for board members and shareholders in condominiums, homeowners associations, co-operatives and property owners to connect with industry experts. FirstService Residential will be at booth 124, where attendees can pick up a copy of the companys new white paper, The Ins and Outs of Short-term Vacation Rental. The white paper is a comprehensive guide to a recent Chicago ordinance which impacts homeowners and associations alike. The report addresses pressing issues such as how associations can regulate rentals in their community or buildings, who is liable for renters, can homeowners rent their home, how do vacation rentals impact home values, and much more.

Attendees will also have the opportunity to learn more about association budgeting with a copy of the companys checklist for building an actionable budget. Financial and property management leadership team members from FirstService Residential will also be available to answer questions.

In attendance at the companys booth will be Asa Sherwood, president; Patricia Bialek, vice president of property management; David Jandak, vice president finance; Robert Meyer, director of engineering services; Jessica Peterson, director of people development and operations; Randy Grimes, regional director and Janice Avery, property manager.

We are excited to sponsor this informative event and share our market insights with association board members and shareholders, as well as vendors, said Asa Sherwood, president of FirstService Residential in Illinois. Supporting educational events such as this is one of the ways we make a difference in our community.

The Cooperator Expo Chicagoland is free to attend, complete with educational seminars.

About FirstService Residential

FirstService Residential is recognized as Illinois leading and most experienced full-service community association management firm. For over 65 years, FirstService Residential has continued to provide the best-in-class community management solutions and genuinely helpful service to its more than 150 communities and 50,000 residents throughout Chicagoland.

FirstService Residential is North America's largest manager of residential communities and the preferred partner of HOAs, community associations and strata corporations in the U.S. and Canada. FirstService Residential's managed communities include low-, mid- and high-rise condominiums and cooperatives, single-family homes, master-planned, lifestyle and active adult communities, and rental and commercial properties.

With an unmatched combination of deep industry experience, local market expertise and personalized attention, FirstService Residential delivers proven solutions and exceptional service that add value, enhance lifestyles and make a difference, every day, for every resident and community it manages. FirstService Residential is a subsidiary of FirstService Corporation, a North American leader in the property services sector. For more information, visit http://www.fsresidential.com.

###
Attorney Harriet M. Hageman The interview focuses primarily on the manner in which federal agencies are using penalties and fees to self-fund, their incentive to slow walk permit approval, and the benefits of local and state management of natural resources. Past News Releases RSS Attorney Harriet M. Hageman Hosts...

Attorney Harriet M. Hageman, founder of Hageman Law P.C., will be participating in a 30-minute interview about property rights, federal regulatory overreach, and tax policy with The County Seat, a weekly television program that studies the role of county government. The interview is set to air on November 12, at 11 p.m. and November 13, at 8:30 a.m. on the ABC affiliate out of Salt Lake City, KTVX.

The interview focuses primarily on the manner in which federal agencies are using penalties and fees to self-fund, their incentive to slow walk permit approval, and the benefits of local and state management of natural resources, said Hageman, who was inducted into the Wyoming Agriculture Hall of Fame in 2011.

The County Seat explores the difficult issues facing county leadership in a frank and straightforward conversation. It was launched five years ago as a solution to counties not being able to reach and engage their constituents through normal media channels.

Additionally, Hageman recently gave a presentation to the American Lands Council in Salt Lake City entitled Regulation without Representation, during which she focused on the unconstitutionality of the current regulatory state, reporting that the cost of such regulations is approaching $2 trillion per year. The American Lands Council is a non-profit organization comprised of elected officials, local governments, non-profit organizations, businesses, resource experts, and citizens who desire a lawful, peaceful path to better, more accountable management of our public lands and natural resources. I spoke on what you should know to protect yourself, your community, your state, our liberties and our Republic, said Hageman.

About Harriet M. Hageman, Hageman Law P.C.

Harriet M. Hageman has been practicing law as a trial attorney for over 27 years and is licensed in Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado and Michigan. She has worked on numerous water (quality and quantity) and natural resource matters. She is actively involved with addressing the impact of federal and state regulations on land and water use and management. Hageman Law P.C. counts among its clients irrigation districts, local governments, and landowners. For more information, please call (307) 635-4888, or visit http://www.hagemanlaw.com. The law office is located at 222 East 21st Street, Cheyenne, WY 82001.

About the NALA

The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361
Sepsis Alliance Preliminary data from the failure to rescue project suggests wide-ranging applications including the enabling of leading edge antibiotic stewardship (to reduce pandemic risks), reducing errors, and even the prevention of suicides.

The High Reliability Organization Council (HROC) and Sepsis Alliance are partnering to battle sepsis, which the Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently declared, a national emergency putting thousands of patients in hospitals across the country at risk of death.

Working with Department of Defense (DoD), Veteran Administration (VA), and civilian hospitals in Ohio, Michigan, and Mississippi, and other states, HROC is saving lives with tools that prevent failure to rescue (FTR). Sepsis Alliance is the largest national sepsis organization, focused on raising sepsis awareness among the general public and healthcare professionals. Together, HROC and Sepsis Alliance will engage in wide-ranging efforts to reduce sepsis and other FTR by reducing "task saturation" (i.e. too much to do in too little time, resulting in preventable errors) among healthcare providers.

HROC has been working with DoD, VA, and civilian hospitals to demonstrate how tools aimed at reducing task saturation save lives by reducing sepsis. Early results of one study, expected to be released in early 2017, show significant reductions in both preventable deaths, as well as preventable instances of sepsis.

"Preventable deaths are also known as failure to rescue, which consists of failure to recognize and failure to act  preventing task saturation is a way to prevent both," said Lt.Col. Jared Mort, the leader of a DoD task saturation study. Preliminary data from the failure to rescue project suggests wide-ranging applications including the enabling of leading edge antibiotic stewardship (to reduce pandemic risks), reducing errors, and even the prevention of suicides.

HROC believes a heightened awareness and focus on task saturation is needed to successfully combat the sepsis emergency, as well as other current healthcare crises. HROC looks forward to joining forces with Sepsis Alliance to combat sepsis and reduce deaths from this terrible disease, said E. Barry Levy, HROCs Executive Director. In 2017, The Joint Commission (TJC) will be putting in place a set of standards on antibiotic stewardship and HROC members are ready to work with TJC, CDC, DoD, and VA to show how healthcare professionals can reduce death by focusing on task saturation to in turn prevent failure to rescue.

Sepsis is the bodys overwhelming and life-threatening response to infection, which can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and death. It is estimated that 258,000 Americans every year are killed by sepsis, with a staggering toll on the U.S. healthcare system.

We are incredibly pleased to be teaming up with HROC, an organization truly dedicated to improving patient and public safety, added Tom Heymann, Executive Director of Sepsis Alliance. Sepsis is an incredibly devastating condition that 45% of American adults have never even heard of. The HROC/Sepsis Alliance partnership will work tirelessly to reduce the incidences of sepsis, which has the potential to save thousands of lives each year.

About HROC

HROC (http://www.thinkhro.org) is a registered non-profit committed to scientific study and public safety, and serves as a platform for education and collaboration, supporting and assisting in the implementation of High Reliability Organizations (HRO) in healthcare, government, and nonprofit entities. It arose from over 2 years of pro bono work by ProcessProxy Corp. with the U.S. Air Force in a Cooperative Research And Development Agreement. HROC members are clinicians, researchers, veterans, and HRO practitioners on the frontline of educating the public on the need for healthcare to adopt HRO principles in the interest of significantly improving both patient and public safety.

About Sepsis Alliance

Sepsis Alliance is the nations leading sepsis advocacy organization, dedicated to saving lives by raising awareness of sepsis as a medical emergency. A 501(c)(3) organization, Sepsis Alliance was founded by Dr. Carl Flatley after the sudden, unnecessary death of his daughter Erin to a disease he had never even heard of. Sepsis Alliance produces and distributes educational materials for patients, families and health providers on sepsis prevention, early recognition and treatment. The organization also offers support to patients, sepsis survivors, and family members through its sepsis.org website which receives more than 1 million visits each year. The organization founded Sepsis Awareness Month in 2011, and works with partners to host community outreach events across North America. Since Sepsis Alliance began its mission, sepsis awareness has increased almost threefold, from 19% to 55%. For more information on Sepsis Alliance, a GuideStar Gold-rated charity, please visit http://www.sepsis.org.
South Korea says North Korea has fired a total of more than 10 missiles off its eastern and western coasts, reports AP.
A little Northwest rain couldnt deter eager readers, young and old, from attending Wordstock, Portland, Ore.s annual literary festival, which took place on November 5, primarily in the Portland Art Museum and at several satellite venues. Wordstock, known as Portlands Book Festival, is a combination of on-stage author conversations, panel events, pop-up readings, and an extensive book fair for all ages (and dont forget the food and beverage trucks, since this is Portland).

Its rewarding to see so many kids sitting enraptured by a story time, teens meeting their literary heroes, and lifelong adult readers leaving events buzzing in conversation, said Andrew Proctor, executive director of the nonprofit group Literary Arts, which is in its second year of coordinating Wordstock. For the first time this year, there were two official booksellers at the festival: Powells Books handled primarily adult titles and Green Been Books focused on childrens and young adult books, in addition to running the always hopping Kids Room.

As Jennifer Green, owner of Green Bean Books, described it, A full line-up of creative authors and illustrators presented their books in the bright balloon-festooned stage area with musical introductions and interactive activities lead by the talented and bubbly musician Emily Arrow. The authors signed at the Green Bean booth, making meaningful and personal literary connections convenient and easy for everyone. There was a diverse range of beautiful books to peruse, a diorama to discover, plenty of plushies, and even a penguin stand-up in which kids could poke their heads through and pretend to be a penguin from Jory Johns hilarious Penguin Problems!

Heres a mini-tour of Wordstock, through the eyes of its smallest literary connoisseurs.

I want my own name. I want a name that sounds like me, said Sherman Alexie, reading from his new picture book, Thunder Boy Jr., illustrated by Yuyi Morales (Little Brown), to a packed crowd of rapt listeners at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Thunder Boy Jr. tells the story of a Native boy who struggles with identity issues as he shares his name with his father, Thunder Boy Sr. Alexie explained to the crowd, in between cracking everybody up with his trademark biting wit, Here is one of the most political images in Native American literature: a loving, Indigenous father holding his loving, Indigenous son on his shoulders.

Author Heidi Schulz, donning a pair of giraffe horns, read her picture book Giraffes Ruin Everything, illustrated by Chris Robinson (Bloomsbury), to a group of young readers in the Green Bean Kids Room.

Green Bean Books offered books by many of the children's, middle grade, and young adult authors who read in their Green Bean-sponsored Kids Room, making it easy for young fans to stock up directly after story time or a panel.

One young penguin fan tries out the Penguin Problems display.

Kate Berube, author-illustrator of Hannah and Sugar (Abrams), signed her latest picture book for a fan after a reading.

(From l.): Kathleen Lane, Jason Reynolds, and moderator/author Rosanne Parry after their panel on middle grade fiction, where they discussed the pitfalls and joys of writing young characters, and what advice theyd give their younger selves. Kathleen Lane summed it up best when she told the audience, and herself, to be more brave, a sentiment that the rest of the panel echoed.

(From l.): Authors Kate Ristau, Bart King, and moderator Diana Armstrong of Multnomah County Library after their middle grade fiction panel, where King and Ristau discussed what made their particular hero and heroines unique and why its important to represent a diverse range of kids in fiction. Ristau, whose main character is in a wheelchair, pointed to her four-year-old neighbor as an inspiration to her when she was writing, wondering, Where will she be able to find her experience in books? She added that she wrote Clockbreakers with her neighbor in mind, as well as her own five-year-old son.

Bart King took time after his panel to autograph for a fan.

Kate Ristau signing her new book, Clockbreakers (Indigo Sea Press). All photos by Jordan Foster.
A California bookseller tries to buy the store where he works; Barnes & Noble to open on Fifth Avenue--in Youngstown; a bookstore pops-up in the Bronx; and more.

Ownership of Diesel in Oakland: John Evans and Alison Reid are in the midst of transitioning ownership of their Oakland store to its manager, Brad Johnson. The sale is contingent on Johnson raising enough funds through a community lending program. If Johnsons funding campaign is successful, he is planning to change the stores name to East Bay Booksellers. Im an unabashed cheerleader for the East Bay, he said.

The Bronxs Lit. Bar to Pop Up Next Month: The bookstore, which hopes to open next year, will have its first pop-up store at the Bronx Museum over the weekend of December 10-11. It will join 50 local artists, farmers, bakers, and brewers as part of the second annual Holiday Market Weekend.

New B&N on Fifth Avenuein Youngstown, Ohio: Youngstown State University chose Barnes & Noble to open a stand-alone bookstore that will open in time for the 2017-18 school year. The new store will have a general reading area and hold author events.

Paperbacks Ink Moves & More Than Doubles in Size: The used bookstore in Newport News, Va., was forced to move last month because of a lease conflict. The change enabled the store to grow its space from 2,3000 sq. ft. to 5,500 and add more sidelines, including homemade placemats, jewelry, soap, and lotions.

Holiday Cash Mob Coming to Greenlight: The Brooklyn bookstore in conjunction with Constant Contact is holding a cash mob on November 19 to support the local Brooklyn business community. Greenlight is planning special activities with chances to win gift cards for up to $50, while supplies last. Participants are being asked to bring canned food for The Food Bank for New York City.

Guide to Kulchur Closing in ClevelandCo-owner RA Washington announced on Facebook that the bookstore will close on Monday, : November 14. This last year has been a difficult one, he wrote. Weve fought to keep the doors open, and now we must close them in an effort to continue our work bringing Books 2 Prisoners all over Ohio, and to continue the amazing work of GTK Press.
Marc Leeds is the author of the indispensable new book, The Vonnegut Encyclopedia, a must-have for any fan of Kurt Vonnegut and his books. Leeds, co-founder and founding president of the Kurt Vonnegut Society, as well as a founding board member of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis, picks 10 essential Vonnegut books.

A member of the Greatest Generation, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. held increasing sway during the second half of the twentieth century as a hero of the 1960s counter-culture. These youthful among baby-boomers were politically leftist, pro-civil rights, pro-womens rights, and developing a green world ethic resulting in such demonstrations as Earth Day.

As evidenced by the atomic bomb, the Greatest Generation gave rise to technologys looming envelopment, the persistent existential crisis. The constant errors of leadership across the world were now matches in a fireworks factory. At any moment, the entire world could blow.

Kurt cant explain the inexplicable, but he does illustrate the Rube Goldberg machines we invent to hold society together. Technology, religion, politics, the failing environment, our biological and cultural ancestries and the traps we leave for the next generation, all inhabit Vonneguts vortex.

1. Player Piano Vonneguts vision of an America restructured by industrial technocrats whose robotics in the workplace result in a devaluing of human participation. Vonnegut poses the question of human purpose in the face of a world commercially and institutionally driven to automate life. This is Vonneguts first novel. It is unlike most of his other novels in which the nature of authorship and/or narrative flow has been characterized as Vonnegutian. This is his most straight-ahead narrative, but the pithy societal observations and questions one comes to expect from Vonnegut are all here.

2. The Sirens of Titan The premise of the novel is that all of human history has been one big Rube Goldberg invention by the Tralfamadorians for the single purpose of getting a spare part to their stranded but intrepid intergalactic messenger, Salo. It takes nearly all of human history to do so. Beyond that grossly inadequate summary, Sirens is the birthplace for key Vonnegutian concepts that reappear in later novels. It is here we first learn of Tralfamadore, as well as the chrono-synclastic infundibulum (where otherwise contradictory viewpoints are all truthful), and the untoward influences of organized religion that has too often been wielded with vengeance. It is also a continuation of Vonneguts literary and personal struggle with identity and the capriciousness of wealth and desire.

3. Mother Night The closest Vonnegut gets to Nazi monkey business until letting go in Slaughterhouse-Five. Framed as Howard W. Campbell, Jr.s memoirs requested by Israeli war crimes investigators, he is an American by birth, a German playwright by occupation, an American spy and, by necessity, a member of the Nazi party tasked with badmouthing the Allied forces through English language broadcasts. Mother Night is a study of the stateless schizophrenic Howard Campbells hyphenated sense of self, trapped by the peculiarities of heredity and environment that mitigate any attempt to produce a satisfying self-image. Not so oddly, Vonnegut was a German American scout captured at the Battle of the Bulge, imprisoned by those he could envision as distant cousins, misunderstood by his captors because he spoke German and had an obviously shared heritage, before being firebombed in his ancestors homeland by his own countrymen (and its ally, England). It is no wonder that Vonnegut begins with the moral of the novel, We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

4. Cat's Cradle Famed literary critic Leslie A. Fiedler once said that every self-respecting hippie had on a coffee table their stash and three books: the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and Cats Cradle. The text follows an intertwining double plot. John/Jonah, the narrator, sets out to write the very human stories of the atomic bombs inventors and their families as they remember the day Hiroshima was incinerated. Wrapped within this journalists quest is the unmasking of government and religion as grand schemes to prod people who otherwise have no motivation. The unifying element to this struggle between personal quest and the bald-faced pretense of religion (Bokononism) is the question of unbridled technological progress that may destroy the planet--as ice-nine does at the close of the novel.

5. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Money is a central character in this tale. Specifically, the unequal distribution of money. Eliot Rosewater, president of the Rosewater Foundation, breaks with the notion of distant charity by leaving his loving Sylvia in New York to provide financial and spiritual ministry to the people back in his ancestral hometown, Rosewater, Indiana. Opposed to Eliots philosophical and financial concerns is his father, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater, whose bombastic speeches parallel the rise and fall of American power with the rise and fall of Rome, preceding right wing talking points developed in the 1980s. While Eliot ceaselessly spreads his love, Sylvia, an otherwise good soul with her own philanthropic streak, breaks down and leaves Eliot. Her diagnosis: samaritrophia. Hysterical indifference to the troubles of those less fortunate than oneself. The text also introduces Kilgore Trout and Vonneguts appreciation for the possibilities of telling truth through literature, particularly science fiction.

6. Slaughterhouse-Five The Dresden novel Vonnegut tried to write for more than twenty years, since rising from his underground meat locker into a splintered, melted, and massacred Dresden. He was twenty-two. Most frequently noted for its post-modern narrative structure, frequently discussed as representative of thinking patterns by PTSD sufferers, Vonnegut returns to Tralfamadore, Tralfamadorian philosophy about time and the structured moment, and ones inability to get out of their own way. Iconic and frequently the subject of school book-banning activities, Slaughterhouse-Five solidified Vonneguts reputation as a writer, becoming fully embraced by the rebellious counter-culture at the height of the Vietnam War.

7. Breakfast of Champions If Slaughterhouse-Five represents the fractured psyche of those suffering PTSD, then Breakfast chronicles how close one can get to the edge of suicide. Vonnegut squares off with himself, alternately examining that secret part of him which fears insanity and his more public character as a writer presenting novel explanations of our collective state of being. As he situates the text at the outset, This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.

8. Jailbird Vonneguts Watergate novel, rooted in the travesties of Sacco and Vanzetti as well as the early factory union movement opposed by private armies of strikebreakers, illustrating that our willful ignorance of historical truth consigns us to continued victimization. Ignoring objective truth in the name of institutional salvation opens the way for establishment schizophrenia. As a result, people live by the designs of conspirators (including the courts and corporatism) and participate in the conspiracy of design by clinging to and perpetuating indoctrinated myths. Vonnegut asserts we have already reached this institutional schizophrenia. What we are missing is the common decency and respect of The Sermon on the Mount.

9. Bluebeard The memoir of minimal painter Rabo Karabekian, admittedly saved by wonderful women he credits with bringing him back to life, Lazarus-like. The novels arc culminates in unveiling Karabekians masterpiece, a triptych entitled Now Its the Womens Turn. It is the repainted canvas of his Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, what was a single band of color representing ones individual awareness. Product suicide destroys the abstract masterpiece when the Sateen Dura-Luxe paint peels away while stored in a basement facility. The retrieved blank canvas becomes the scene Vonnegut describes elsewhere of his POW release by his German captors: over five thousand figures, some no larger than a cigarette, realistically rendered and representing all the nationalities in the war. Perhaps in reference to his own past single-band paintings, Rabo paints himself into the scene. With his back to the viewer, his image is divided by the space between two canvases. Rather than a single band of luminescent color representing ones essential awareness, Rabos single band of emptiness (the space between the canvases) takes the place of his spine.
When someone complains about their relationship, there's always part of me that insists on playing the detective. Even as I say what I imagine to be the right things, I am listening carefully for clues, the unintended self-revelations lodged in the grievances. It seems as though I'm lending a sympathetic ear, but part of me is a Pinkerton agent, pumping information.

I have fewer conversations in this genre than I did ten years ago, before my friends and I started getting married, when it was girlfriends and boyfriends who could be complained about. My friends have, I think, made good choices. This must explain some part of it. And we are early in our married lives. But it must also be that, over time, what occurs inside a couple becomes too private, and too painful, to be discussed with anyone on the outside of it.

Jakob Wassermann tells us all of the private and the painfultoo much, entirely too muchin My Marriage. Wassermann (18731934), a prolific and widely read author in his time, friend to Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, now almost entirely forgotten even in his native Germany, tells here the story of his first marriage, to Julie Speyerwho looks out hauntingly (and, increasingly over the course of the book, unnervingly) from the cover. A thin fictional facade overlays the whole, Wassermann becoming Alexander Herzog and Speyer becoming Ganna Mevis, but as the translator, the brilliant Michael Hofmann, explains in the afterword, this is down to its last detail Wassermann's true confession, the story of his adult life, written with the last of his energy, finished but not published before his early death. "Nothing of significance," Hofmann writes, "has been omitted."

And reading, one appreciates more why so much in usual circumstances is omitted! Because this is the tale not only of one person's undoingand Wassermann's was utterbut of a relationship that like a natural cataclysm destroys everything in its wake.

The disaster begins, as perhaps many such do, with a self-deception: the impoverished young writer Herzog marries Ganna, the daughter of a wealthy family, even though he does not love her (it will be many years before he even knows what love is, and by then it will in a sense be too late). He is flattered by Ganna's devotion to him, drawn to the security he imagines Ganna's dowry might bring to his life and work, and he is also fascinated by this strange, clumsy, and intensely bookish and impractical young woman, who is unlike anyone he has ever met.

And some of what is most compelling in this riveting narrative is the portrait of Ganna that emerges. Herzog/Wassermann has studied her more closely, one realizes, than another person should be studiedand this is precisely the condition of marriage, that one studies and is studied more closely, perhaps, than is reasonable or fair or decent. Ganna is wonderful: she reads poetry while she cooks, and so produces "meat that looks like charcoal" and "cakes that look like book bindings"; there is a brief moment early on when she sees a rose in a vase and, smiling, brings it to her dressing table: "Now she has two roses, because there's a second one reflected in the mirror... " She is also horriblemost of all, one senses, because she is a person of immense energy and strength, and all of it is directed toward Herzog, to keeping him, and then, when she no longer can, to destroying him.

The narrative unfolds something like an Eli Roth or Roland Emmerich film, but instead of sadists or alien invaders, the hostile elements here are time and the bonds of dependency between people. One disaster builds unsparingly on the next. Wassermann, through Herzog, says, "Fate deals with us like a thriller writer. Blow by blow and step by step it discloses its truth, which was kept concealed from us until the inevitable surprise denouementa reflection on the skillful way the author has manipulated our judgement and sense of probability." And this at the very end of everything for him, no Hollywood ending any longer possible.
The Creative Arts Academy and the German American Heritage Center have partnered to create a new exhibit on Santa Claus, on the first floor of the center, 712 W. 2nd St., Davenport.

Two classes of seventh-grade students invented, created, and installed the exhibit themselves, according to GAHC. In "The Untold Story of Santa: Behind the White Beard," visitors will learn about the different interpretations of Christmas and Santa across the world.

The festive exhibit is organized around three themes -- History of Santa, Santa in Germany, and Santa around the world. The CAA students will host a free opening reception at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, on the fourth floor of the German American Heritage Center.

The reception will include light refreshments, a presentation from the staff and children, much of the marketing footage and material created, as well as crafts. The students will take visitors through tours of the new exhibit, and share their ideas and experiences from this project, according to GAHC.

The exhibit will be open through Jan. 8, and the center plans to create an annual exhibit on varying topics with the Creative Arts Academy.

This Saturday (Nov. 12), the center's Christkindlmarkt opens and continues through Friday, Dec. 23. It features ornaments, cookies, nutcrackers, smokers, housewares and more.

You can enjoy "Sausage Saturdays" on Saturday, Nov. 12 and 19, with samples and products for sale from Jerry's Market from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Members get a discount of 10 percent off on Wednesday, Nov. 16 and Thursday, Nov. 17.

The GAHC is open on Tuesdays-Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on Sundays from noon to 4; closed on Mondays. For more information, call 563-322-8844, or visit gahc.org.
The (Dixon) Telegraph reports former Ogle County Sheriff Michael Harn entered the plea Thursday morning to two counts of felony theft between $500 and $10,000. Court documents say Harn bought electronic and boat equipment, radio-controlled toys, party tents, coolers, weapons, Harley-Davidson clothing and accessories, adult novelty items, outdoor fountains and other items with county money.

The charges come from an Illinois State Police investigation that started after an internal audit of the department in December 2014 and January 2015. Investigators say the thefts occurred between June 1, 2011, and Dec. 2, 2014. Harn was sheriff from 2010 to 2014. He's next due in court Dec. 19.
The arrest of Breaion King by Officer Bryan Richter had received little scrutiny until July, when the Austin American-Statesman obtained a copy of a patrol car video showing the clash between the two.

The footage shows a traffic stop traffic stop escalating rapidly in the seven seconds from when officer Bryan Richter, who is white, first gives a command to 26-year-old Breaion King to close her car door to when he forcibly removes her from the drivers seat, pulls her across a vacant parking space and hurls her to the asphalt.

The incident raised questions about how the matter had been handled internally and has since become a focal point of discussion in the community and department about how officials review use-of-force encounters and a culture among some supervisors who thought Richters actions were justified.

At the time, Richters supervisors reviewed the case and issued the most minor discipline, but did not order a broader internal investigation of his actions.

However, when top police officials, including Acevedo learned about the case, they said they were deeply troubled by Richters conduct and ordered an administrative review of how his supervisors handled the matter.

Richter wrote in reports that Richter wrote in his report of the incident that he acted quickly because King demonstrated an uncooperative attitude and was reaching for the front passenger side of the vehicle. He didnt know whether she had a weapon, he wrote. He said King resisted by pulling away from him and wrapping her hands and arms around the steering wheel.

Travis County prosecutors also ordered an investigation, and District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said she wanted a grand jury to decide whether Richter should be charged.

Such panels rarely look into cases that do not involve the use of lethal force, and when they do, indictments are rare.

According to records from the Travis County district attorneys office, that has happened three times since Jan. 30, 2012. All three times, the grand jurors declined to indict the officers.

The last time an officer was indicted in a fatal shooting was in May 2013, when former Detective Charles Kleinert was indicted on a manslaughter charge in the death of Larry Jackson. A federal judge dismissed that case, which is on appeal.

King has a pending federal lawsuit against Richter. The departments internal review of the matter is expected to be complete in the next few weeks.
If you're a veteran, the GI Bill can be your ticket to a debt-free college education. That's huge, given that nearly 70 percent of 2015 graduates who left school with a bachelor's degree also carried student loan debt, with an average of $30,100 per borrower, according to the Institute for College Access & Success.

Under the Post-9/11 version of the GI Bill, you may be eligible for up to 36 months  not necessarily consecutive  of college or career training if you served on active duty after Sept. 10, 2001, and were discharged honorably or with a disability, or are still on active duty. Plus, you can get a monthly housing allowance and yearly book stipend for the period covered under your GI Bill. You need to serve at least 36 months on active duty to be eligible for the full suite of GI benefits, but you can get a portion if you served less active time.

Your benefits can go far if you use them strategically. Here's how:

1. SAVE YOUR BENEFITS FOR YOUR MOST EXPENSIVE TUITION BILL

There's no need to use your benefits immediately; they're generally redeemable for up to 15 years after you're released from active duty. If you're pursuing a bachelor's or postgraduate degree, it may be advantageous to start at a community college and apply your GI benefits later to pricier tuition, says Timothy Greer, associate professor at the College for Financial Planning.

Keep in mind, though, that while the government will cover your tuition as an in-state student completely for up to 36 months if you attend a public school, it will cover only $21,970.46 per year if you attend a private one. Don't rule out private colleges, though: You can get extra money toward many private schools through the Department of Veterans Affairs' Yellow Ribbon Program.

2. TAKE AT LEAST ONE CLASS PER SEMESTER IN PERSON

If you take solely online classes, you'll typically get a smaller housing allowance than you would otherwise. Take at least one course per semester at a physical location to qualify for the biggest possible monthly housing check based on your ZIP code. The VA's GI Bill Comparison tool can tell you the amount of housing allowance you'd get based on your school's location, as well as what you'd get if you took solely online classes.

3. EARN AS MANY CREDITS AS YOU CAN PER SEMESTER

You're entitled to use your GI benefits to pursue your education full-time for a specific time frame. After your benefits run out, you have to cover tuition out-of-pocket or through other types of financial aid. So it pays to take as many credits as you're allowed and can handle per semester while your GI Bill is covering your tuition, Greer says.

Another strategy for completing your degree faster: Earn credits for courses such as business communications and public administration based on your military training and experience. You can request a military transcript though a link on the American Council on Education website. More than 2,300 colleges recognize these transcripts, according to the council, but it's up to each institution to decide whether you receive credit.

4. BEWARE OF MISLEADING SCHOOLS

Aiming to harness GI Bill dollars for revenue, some for-profit colleges "aggressively recruit student veterans," says Derek Fronabarger, director of policy at Student Veterans of America. For-profit schools tend to have higher tuitions and lower graduation rates compared with in-state public schools, according to Department of Education data.

Use the VA's GI Bill comparison tool to research schools before you enroll, including their graduation rates. You can't recoup your GI Bill benefits once you use them, even if the school closes. That was the case for many student veterans who attended a for-profit school owned by Corinthian Colleges, which closed in 2015 after the Department of Education discovered Corinthian had misrepresented its job placement rates.

5. SUBMIT THE FAFSA

On top of your GI benefits, you'll likely be eligible for additional federal, state and privately funded financial aid. Submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA, to apply. GI benefits don't count as income on the FAFSA. If your GI Bill completely covers your education costs, you can use any additional aid dollars for other expenses.

_________

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the personal finance website NerdWallet. Email staff writer Teddy Nykiel: teddy@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @teddynykiel.

RELATED LINKS

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: GI Bill comparison tool https://www.vets.gov/gi-bill-comparison-tool

American Council on Education: Transcripts for military personnel

NerdWallet: FAFSA: Everything you need to know for the 2017-18 application
LOGO by Lori Goldstein Printed Jacket with Faux Suede Sleeves is rated 3.9 out of 5 by 21 .

Rated 1 out of 5 by Retired 2Day from Style isnt great Im 53 140 lbs and ordered Size Med. I could barely get my arms in sleeves and The back side come up to middle of my back... Not a good garment

Rated 4 out of 5 by TASmom from Lovely piece for business casual & "casual" casual Just received this cardigan, which I purchased as a Lunchtime Special. Plan to wear for work and weekend. I bought the blue and layered it over a long grey Eileen Fisher tank with grey trousers, and it looks very polished. I read some of the negative reviews and the comments about the back being too short. The back of the garment is a bit short, but a longer underpinning makes that a non-issue. Bought an XL, and it seems to run true to size, if not a smidge big.

Rated 5 out of 5 by gerid627 from Gorgeous ! Beautiful jacket ! Is as described. It will be very versatile to wear with anything. Purchased the blue in size XL and it fits perfectly- not too loose not too tight. A great addition to any outfit to dress up or dress down.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Lynnenator from Great Cardi.... Had my eye on this for a while...where I live the weather changes on a dime....chilly in the morning and hot in the afternoon so this works out perfect with the tank tops I have from LOGO. It ties them all in together to finish off an outfit....just perfectly. I love the faux suede sleeves they are so soft and it fits Great. It really makes my Tanks pop and I will have a lot of Fun mixing and matching my outfits. Just a Wonderful Piece added to my collection..I wore the Buttercup Henley under the Vineyard Shark bite Slub Knit Tank on top with this piece in Blue thrown on top of all and it looks really cute with my blue jeans...very comfy.

Rated 4 out of 5 by TBond from MY FIRST LOGO PURCHASE & IT LOOKED NICE This was my first Logo Purchase. I bought the Blue one on Clearance Price. It looked nice on however any tank I had didn't look good with it so I had to purchase a tank to go with it. I enjoy how it is not too long and the fit was good. I usually wear a 1-X and that is what I purchased and it works. The color is very pretty. I like how the ruffle lays and that it is different colors. I purchased the A282789 Tank in Blue Dawn to go with it and it looked nice.

Rated 2 out of 5 by marg1 from Nope I've got LOTS of Logo by lg. Bought this in two colors and love the front but the back is cut too short. I've tried layering it over a couple different length logo tops and it just looks awkward, is too clingy in the back, and makes the shoulders look too broad. Reluctantly having to send back.

Rated 5 out of 5 by LR petite from unique This is an unique jacket even for LOGO. The back is shorter allowing for other LOGO layers (and tops from other brands) to show in the back. I am petite and I love to layer, either loose over loose or loose over fitted. The chiffon adds class and makes me feel like I got dressed up for my students.
"What we are really designing this for is the squeezed middle, the people on average incomes who get $800-$1000 worth of tax relief," said Luxon.

2 hours ago
The 44m-long LRVs are scheduled for delivery from mid-2019 and will enter service in October 2020. They will each be able to transport more than 314 passengers, and will be fitted with passenger Wi-Fi. Alstom says the X05 is the latest and lightest tram in its Citadis range, and offers improved energy-efficiency as well as offering a high-level of reliability. In addition, the vehicle is 97% recyclable.

The manufacturer says particular attention was placed on the design of the LRV, which was developed in partnership with Design Saguez & Partners. Eight double-doors on each side of the vehicle will improve the flow of passengers boarding and alighting the tram, while bench seating, 100% LED lighting, and lengthwise information screens will improve interior environment.

Preliminary works is underway on Line T9 while utility diversion work is expected to begin on Line T10 in 2017 after it was granted public utility status on November 9. The 10km Line T9 will run south from an interchange with metro Line 7 and light rail line T3 at Porte de Choissy, serving six districts including Vitry sur Seine, Choisy-le-Roi, Thais, and Orly. Construction is expected to begin next year, and the line should be commissioned in 2020.

Line T10 is an L-shaped 8.2km line running from Place du Garde in Clamart, via Beclere Hospital to La Croix de Berny on RER Line B to the south of Paris. It is planned to open in 2020-21.
At least seven people died as a result of the accident and a further 50 people were taken to hospital, most of whom have since been released.

The LRV was operating a service from New Addington to Wimbledon via Croydon town centre. It derailed just after leaving Sandilands tunnel at Sandilands Junction, which is where LRVs from the Beckenham Junction/Elmers End and New Addington branches converge, shortly before they arrive at Sandilands to the east of Croydon town centre. LRVs approaching from the New Addington direction must negotiate a sharp, left-hand curve with a speed limit of 20km/h before reaching the junction.

The derailment occurred on the curve and initial indications suggest that the tram was travelling at a significantly higher speed than is permitted, says Raib. We are currently collecting evidence needed to identify factors relevant to the cause of the accident and its consequences. Our investigation is independent of any investigation by the tramway industry, or the British Transport Police.

Raib says it will publish an interim report on its website next week. This will be followed by a final report, including any safety recommendations, when its investigation has been completed.

In the meantime, services have been suspended between East Croydon and Addington Village, Harrington Road and Elmers End while repairs to the track and systems are carried out. It is hoped that this part of the network will reopen on November 14.

The 28km network is operated by Trams Operations, a subsidiary of First Group, under a concession which runs until 2030.
On Dec. 4, Italians will head to the polls to vote on a series of changes to the country's institutional framework, specifically the Senate, the upper house of the Italian Parliament. On paper, it is a referendum on amending the constitution. But there is far more than that at stake, for Italy and the European Union.
This article was created in collaboration with the Atlantic Council. Barbara Slavin is acting director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council. The views expressed are the author's own.

President Donald Trump is going to be a very busy man on Jan. 20, 2017, reviewing, revising, and in some cases reversing President Barack Obamas legacy.

One very important element in that legacy that he should leave in place is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with Iran by the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany, and the European Union and implemented on Jan. 16 this year.

Unlike many of those who ran against him for the Republican nomination, Trump criticized the JCPOA during the campaign but did not threaten to rip it up on day one as president. For a businessman like Trump, it makes no sense to break a contract without a replacement in hand, especially when that contract is continuing to deliver important benefits to the United States and the international community.

Those benefits include:

Shrink-wrapping the Iranian nuclear program so that there is no way Iran can build a nuclear weapon undetected for at least 15 years.

Strengthening international non-proliferation norms and discouraging Irans neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia, from seeking nuclear weapons of their own.

Reintegrating Iran into the international economy and bolstering those advocating reform of Irans banking and commercial sector.

Providing tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs through the sale of commercial airliners to Iran Air by Boeing and Airbus  a transaction that hopefully will not be disrupted by the Trump victory.

No easy way out

The product of years of painstaking multilateral negotiations, the JCPOA cannot be easily replaced. U.S. European allies, along with China and Russia  a country whose leader Trump admires  would also react very negatively to any U.S. abrogation of the agreement, assuming Iran continues full compliance. It is by no means certain that they would accept a re-imposition of U.S. secondary sanctions that threaten to penalize their companies for doing legitimate business with Iran.

Why would a new President Trump create a crisis in relations with the international community at the beginning of his tenure?

The agreement carries within it a mechanism for resolving disputes and potentially tweaking aspects of the accord  a Joint Commission on which representatives of each of the negotiating parties sit. Trump could also take up the suggestion of Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and others to augment the agreement by negotiating a follow-on pact to deal with Iranian missile tests and to prolong provisions of the JCPOA that begin to sunset a decade from now.

As a businessman, Trump knows that it is foolish to throw away assets for which you have already paid. During the campaign, Trump complained that Iran had gotten $150 billion in return for its nuclear concessions. That money was Irans in the form of oil revenues frozen in foreign banks under sanctions, and it is not going to be returned now.

There is also the question of upholding presidential powers.

At an event Thursday at the Stimson Center in Washington, Lincoln Bloomfield, the Centres chairman and a former senior national security official in three Republican administrations, noted that if Trump were to tear up the executive agreement that laid the basis for U.S. compliance with the JCPOA, he would be debasing the currency of the presidency.

Bloomfield added that Republicans had been out of the White House for so long that they had perhaps forgotten the value of such currency in convincing foreign governments to do deals with the United States. If Trump goes through with his other campaign pledges to renegotiate trade agreements, for example, he will need foreign leaders to believe that those agreements will outlast his time in office.

There are multiple pressing national security threats that will likely be in Trump's in-box on Jan. 20, from North Koreas real and growing nuclear weapons arsenal to the ongoing destabilization of much of the Middle East.

Why, then, throw away an agreement that is verifiably preventing Iran from joining the nuclear weapons club and risking a major new war in a region already in flames?

In other words, President-elect Trump: if it aint broken yet, why fix it?
Property details:

Here's another opportunity for someone looking for land in Northern California, and this is right next to the one we just sold and is one of the larger size lots, and only 90 minutes from the San Francisco Bay Area and adjacent to the Napa Valley and beautiful wine country. You will be bidding on this residential lot that has great access to the front of the lot, is approximately 9,500 square feet in size, and located just over a mile from Clear Lake, the largest natural lake entirely in the sta...

Price: $ 848 Seller State of Residence: California Property Address: 2268 Harding Drive State/Province: California City: Nice Type: Homesite, Lot Zoning: Residential Zip/Postal Code: 95464 Location: 928**, Orange, California

You will be redirected to eBay



Nearby 95464
Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale

Buy real estate. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale in US and Canada.

Search Real Estate
,



We're sorry, this article is not currently available
As the nation waited to find out who would be its next president on Tuesday night, the Student Government Association senate met to conduct business as usual and vote on several resolutions.
SHARE

Patricia and Ronald Blackmore

50th anniversary

Patricia and Ronald Blackmore of Redding celebrated their 50th anniversary on Nov. 12, 2016 with a dinner hosted by family at Kobe's Seafood and Steakhouse in Redding, and a planned trip to Ireland.

They were married Nov. 12, 1966 in Reno, Nevada. Patricia is now retired, and was a nurse at Kaiser in South San Francisco. Ronald is now retired and was a mechanic and instructor at Skyline College in San Bruno. The couple lived in Truckee and Pacifica before they moved to Redding in 2002.

Their son is Mark Blackmore of Redding. They have three grandchildren.
In this Monday, Oct. 31, 2016, A queen bee, is seen at center with yellow wings, with other bees on a beehive in a field outside Mandres village at the Turkish Cypriot breakaway northern part of the divided island of Cyprus. Greek Cypriot beekeeper Soteris Antoniou and his Turkish Cypriot friend Kudret Balci have resolved to breed a Cypriot queen bee to replace foreign imports that simply can't cope with the ethnically-split island's long, scorching summer months. And in the process, they're showing how the two communities are reaching out to each other for practical solutions to common problems instead of relying on ill-suited, imported fixes. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

SHARE

By MENELAOS HADJICOSTIS, Associated Press

AGILLAR, Cyprus (AP)  For Cyprus beekeepers Soteris Antoniou and Kutret Balci, the imported Caucasian queen bee just doesn't have what it takes.

Despite its reputation as copious honey producer, they say the widely used bee simply can't cope with their island's long, scorching summer and tends to die off in the heat.

That's why the two men, one of Greek and the other Turkish heritage, resolved to breed a Cypriot queen bee  defying their Mediterranean homeland's ethnic divide, the north-south split brought on by a 1974 Turkish invasion in response to a military coup aimed at uniting Cyprus with Greece.

Their partnership is flourishing just as the island's Greek Cypriot president and the leader of the breakaway Turkish Cypriots are set to carry on reconciliation talks in Switzerland next week. Officials said the success of the five days of meetings could determine whether an accord is within reach.

An optimist might find a hopeful sign in the beekeepers' humming collaboration. Separated by barbed wire and mistrust for decades, they are working together to find a homegrown solution to a shared problem. Their efforts have won a 10,000 euro ($11,025) prize from Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the easy Jet founder whose family hails from Cyprus.

So far, Antoniou and Balci say, their indigenous bee-breeding work has produced encouraging results. They have transplanted larvae from the diminishing population of Cypriot queen bees into a custom-built hive to create a bigger, hardier bee that they hope will better cope with the climate and produce more honey.

"A Cypriot bee is best for Cyprus," said Balci's cousin Metin, who helps with the business.

The friendship between Antoniou and Balci blossomed after 2003, when crossing points opened along a U.N.-controlled buffer zone after nearly three decades of virtually no contact between Greeks and Turks. But their connection goes back even further.

Fresh out of high school in 1961, Antoniou learned beekeeping's trade secrets from Balci's grandfather Mustaka, who established a successful honey business in 1918. The Balci surname  it's Turkish for "beekeeper"  attests to the family's heritage. After the ethnic split, Antoniou's family relocated to a town in the internationally recognized Greek Cypriot south.

With 750 hives in the breakaway north, Kutret Balci produces an average of 25 tons of honey a year for the local Turkish Cypriot market. He also exports to Britain, where there is a large Cypriot expatriate community. But drought has cut steeply into his bees' output this year  producing nearly one-third less honey than last year.

Antoniou's smaller operation of 250 hives produces an average six tons of honey each year and only supplies communities in the island's southeastern tip. He and Balci eventually want to join their honey supplies in hopes of marketing it islandwide. They also are seeking foreign buyers for propolis, a wax-like product bees produce to shore up hives, which has a reputation for its medicinal and therapeutic benefits.

Both Antoniou and Balci are unabashedly boastful about the quality of their organic honey. Despite the island's lack of rain, the Cypriot sunshine is a blessing, because it infuses everything that grows with an intense aroma that is transferred to the honey, they say.

"We have the sun, we have the good weather, so if we have rain, we have the best honey," Antoniou says.

Antoniou and Balci may agree on the superiority of their honey, but they don't see eye-to-eye on whether the island's leaders will be able to thrash out a reunification deal. Disappointment over four decades of peace accords has jaded many.

The main issue President Nicos Anastasiades and the leader of the breakaway Turkish Cypriots, Mustafa Akinci, will tackle in Switzerland is how much territory Greek and Turkish Cypriots each would administer under an envisioned federation. A potential agreement would determine how many Greek Cypriots would be able to reclaim homes and property lost in the war.

The United Nations special adviser on Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, said a peace deal has never been closer.

Antoniou is skeptical, saying the decades of deadlock have calcified conditions. But he still holds out hope of a deal that would enable him to bring his beehives back to the fields where he grew up. Balci is much more upbeat that a deal is in the offing.

"I'm very positive they will find a way to resolve it," Balci said.
FILE - This Oct. 1, 2016, file photo provided by the National Transportation Safety Board shows damage done to the Hoboken Terminal in Hoboken, N.J., after a commuter train crash that killed one person and injured more than 100 others. Lawmakers investigating September's deadly New Jersey Transit train crash could finally get a chance to question top agency officials who skipped out on an oversight hearing last month. NJ Transit says new executive director Steve Santoro and other key leaders will testify before the legislative committee on Friday, Nov. 4, 2016. (Chris O'Neil/NTSB photo via AP, File)

SHARE

By MICHAEL R. SISAK, Associated Press

TRENTON, N.J. (AP)  Federal investigators have found numerous safety violations in New Jersey Transit's commuter train operations, including the lack of on-board emergency tools and working fire extinguishers, trains stopping too close to each other and workers using cellphones when they shouldn't have.

NJ Transit Executive Director Steve Santoro disclosed the findings found during a Federal Railroad Administration review that began last spring to lawmakers at a state oversight hearing Friday. The hearing was scheduled after September's fatal train crash in Hoboken that killed one woman and injured more than 100 people.

Santoro said investigators also found that train engineers sometimes failed to blow horns at grade crossings, as required by law, and didn't always perform required brake checks. He said the findings are unacceptable.

The 16-year NJ Transit veteran was appointed to run the agency after the deadly train crash when a packed train going twice the 10 mph speed limit slammed into a bumping post at Hoboken Terminal.

An Associated Press analysis of federal safety data from January 2011 through July 2016 found that NJ Transit trains have been involved in 157 accidents since the start of 2011, three times as many as the largest commuter railroad, the Long Island Rail Road.

According to federal data, NJ Transit trains break down about every 85,000 miles, compared to more than 200,000 miles for the LIRR and the Metro-North Railroad.

Santoro and other top NJ Transit officials skipped out on an oversight hearing last month to instead attend a meeting with federal officials in Washington. The Railroad Administration said that meeting could have been changed if they knew about the Trenton hearing.

Legislators said NJ Transit officials gave short notice that they would be missing the earlier hearing to meet with federal regulators and threatened to issue subpoenas if they did not agree to testify on Friday.

Lawmakers also want information on the agency's finances, how it is responding to victims of the Sept. 29 crash and the status of a project to install sophisticated train control technology that could have prevented the wreck.

NJ Transit board chairman Richard Hammer told the oversight committee last month that NJ Transit would meet a December 2018 installation deadline, with testing scheduled for next year on a 6-mile stretch of the Morris and Essex Line.

He said NJ Transit would look into whether the technology should be installed at Hoboken Terminal. Federal regulators had given the agency an exception for the station.

After the crash, NJ Transit lowered the speed limit at Hoboken Terminal to 5 mph and ordered conductors to stand in the front of the train and act as a second set of eyes for engineers when entering the station.
Andreas Fuhrmann/Record Searchlight

Local fishing guide Dave Neal takes his daughter, Bella, 11, who had a day off school, fishing Thursday on the Sacramento River. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is proposing a four-month annual closure, April through July, of the river from Keswick Dam to Highway 44 to protect winter-run chinook salmon.

SHARE

By Damon Arthur of the Redding Record Searchlight

Closing part of the Sacramento River to all fishing in Redding four months a year could become permanent, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

For the past two years the department has asked the state Fish and Game Commision to prohibit fishing on an emergency basis on a 5.5-mile section of the river from April 1 to July 31.

But this year, fish and wildlife officials plan to present the commission with four alternatives, with the preferred one closing the river annually for four months until the threat to winter-run salmon eases, said Jason Roberts, a fisheries supervisor in the department's Redding office.

"Biologically speaking, the most protective path forward would be to close the river from April 1 to July 31" on a permanent basis while salmon are spawning, Roberts said.

The other three alternatives the department is considering include not closing the river during those four months; allow anglers to use only artificial fly-fishing type lures used in the area; or not take any action but monitor conditions in the river and consider an emergency closure if conditions warrant it.

The department is holding a meeting at 5 p.m. Monday at the Redding Library, 1100 Parkview Ave., to take public comment on the proposals and to listen to any other alternative proposals, he said.

Officials want to close that section of the river because nearly all winter-run chinook  an endangered species  spawn in the 5.5-mile section of river from Highway 44 to Keswick Dam.

Roberts said it will be especially important to protect spawning winter-run in spring 2017 because of the die-off of young salmon in 2014 and 2015 during the drought. Water in the river was so warm during the summer and fall that it killed off nearly all the salmon eggs and recently hatched young salmon those two years.

The meager number of salmon that survived from 2014 will be returning from the ocean next spring, so fisheries officials don't want them being disturbed by anglers during spawning, he said.

Salmon typically hatch in the river, migrate to the ocean, live there for three years and then return to the river to spawn.

Michael Caranci, manager of the Redding Fly Shop's Outfitting Department, said closing the river from April to August actually improves fishing on the river. The Sacramento River in the Redding area is considered a world-renowned trout fishing stream.

But Caranci said there have been unintended consequences from closures the past two years.

"It's actually been great for trout fishing," he said. Closing the area to anglers improves the trout spawning, which means more fish, he said.

He said there are also plenty of other areas on the river to fish during the closure, he said.

"We really don't lose a lot of access to the river," he said.

He said he would like to see the area also closed to motor boats and personal watercraft, which move in after anglers move out, he said. The motor boats and other watercraft can potentially damage salmon and trout nests in the river, he said.

Because of higher rainfall in 2016, the number of young salmon counted at the former Red Bluff Diversion Dam is up significantly this year, said Maria Rea, who manages the Central Valley area office for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Even though the number of young salmon swimming out to the ocean is up this year, the salmon are still in bad shape, she said.

"We're not out of the woods. We have a long way to go for this species," Rea said.

The higher rainfall last winter and spring helped fill Lake Shasta. More colder water from the lake was sent down the river in the summer and fall to prevent the winter-run eggs and recent hatches from being killed by warm summer temperatures, she said.

Winter-run rely on colder water because they once spawned in the cooler waters of the McCloud and Sacramento rivers upstream of Shasta Lake. But the fish were blocked from reaching their spawning grounds after Shasta Dam was built in the 1940s.

Federal fisheries officials are working on a project to return runs of winter-run salmon to the McCloud River by trucking them around the dam and releasing them into the stream.
Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight Virginia Lyn Anderson listens to testimony Thursday in her trial.

SHARE

By Jim Schultz of the Redding Record Searchlight

Testimony in the trial of a Redding woman accused of causing a 2014 crash that killed a 27-year-old motorcyclist is nearly over.

Jurors in the trial of Virginia Lyn Anderson will return to court Nov. 22 as the Shasta Courthouse is closed Friday for Veterans Day and a scheduling conflict will leave the courtroom dark all next week.

With testimony and evidence close to being over, a key defense witness in Anderson's trial spent most of Thursday on the witness stand trying to explain how  and why  the deadly crash happened.

But Roger Koetting, a retired California Highway Patrol who is now an accident reconstruction expert, said those questions are difficult to answer, criticizing the Redding Police accident investigation.

Koetting said police failed to document evidence in the case he believed to be critical, such as skid marks from Anderson's car, while police measurements taken at the intersection where the crash occurred were woefully inaccurate.

"The entire alignment of the intersection was inaccurate," he said.

He also said the short timing duration of the intersection's traffic signals may have played a part in the crash.

Anderson, who began standing trial last month, is accused of driving under the influence of methamphetamine and other drugs when she allegedly ran a red turn arrow at the intersection of Buenaventura Boulevard and Placer Road on April 24, 2014, turning directly into the path of motorcyclist Hayley Riggins, who was riding southbound on her motorcycle.

Riggins, the mother of a then 1-year-old daughter, Kadence, suffered mortal head injuries and died April 30, 2014, after being taken off life support without regaining consciousness.

During his testimony Thursday, Koetting said he spent more than 100 hours investigating the crash.

And, he said, he believes Anderson and Riggins would have missed each other if the yellow light on the traffic signal had been just a half-second longer.

"Another half-second the Honda (Anderson was driving) would have been out of the way," he said.

Under questioning by Senior Deputy Public Defender Stacey Madsen and Deputy District Attorney Laura Smith, Koetting said his reconstruction of the accident shows that Anderson may have been in the intersection lawfully.

"Is it also possible that she (Anderson) entered the intersection illegally?" Smith asked.

"It's possible," Koetting acknowledged.

It's expected closing arguments in the trial could be delivered as soon as Nov. 22, but probably won't be made until the day after.

Redding police have said Anderson, an unlicensed driver whose criminal history includes a 1996 arrest for methamphetamine possession, admitted using methamphetamine and other drugs before the tragic crash.

According to toxicology results, Anderson tested positive for methamphetamine, amphetamine, morphine and hydrocodone, but defense attorneys are trying to refute prosecution claims that the drug levels left her too impaired to drive safely.

Anderson is facing up to eight years in prison if convicted of the charges against her.
SHARE

By Sean Longoria of the Redding Record Searchlight

Law enforcement leaders are bracing for the impacts of Proposition 57, the voter-approved initiative that will make thousands of prison inmates eligible for earlier parole, allow state prison officials to expand credit for rehabilitation and give judges authority as to whether juveniles should be tried as adults.

"There is less offender accountably and to a degree it also revictimizes the victims of crimes," Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko said.

Nearly 64 percent of voters statewide approved the measure, a margin of some 2.4 million votes, according to unofficial election results from the California Secretary of State's Office.

Much of the North State, with the curious exception of Siskiyou County, rejected the measure. Siskiyou County Sheriff Jon Lopey said he thought voters in his county recognized a need for more rehabilitation and sentencing reform amid a climate of rising crime and full jails.

"That's one advantage of the governor's plan is that while it does release some inmates there is a rehabilitation component also," Lopey said.

Laws aimed at reducing the state prison population have increased crime, according to law enforcement leaders, who quickly point to AB 109, which shifted certain inmates released from prison to county supervision, and Proposition 47, which reclassified some felonies as misdemeanors, as contributing factors.

Redding Police Chief Rob Paoletti said the influx of more released inmates will make his already-busy officers even busier. He expects the department to receive nearly 100,000 calls for service by year's end, an all-time high for the agency.

Unlike Prop. 47, which defined a short list of crimes reclassified as misdemeanors, Prop. 57 doesn't break down the crimes now eligible for parole, though Paoletti and Bosenko believe violent offenders, including those convicted of raping an unconscious person, arson and assaulting a police or firefighter with a deadly weapon, will now be eligible.

That understanding comes from analysis of Prop. 57 by the California District Attorneys Association, which leaned on state penal code that explicitly defines about two dozen violent crimes.

Paoletti said AB 109 already allowed for the relocation of those convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual and non-serious crimes to county supervision instead of state prison. It's unclear what type of "nonviolent" criminals are still in state prison, he said.

"Shouldn't they (nonviolent convicts) all be out of prison already? Or not go to prison?" Paoletti said. "What are they releasing?"

Prop. 57's passage coincides with voters rejecting a half-cent sales tax in Redding that would have sent nearly $5 million annually to police to expand the number of officers and firefighters on the streets and money to expand county jail bed space. That could mean the loss of four positions making up the city's Neighborhood Police Unit, funded through use of one-time reserve funds.

Despite frustration with the measure's passage and how it will affect his officers' ability to respond, Paoletti said people should call police when needed.

"We're still going to do the best we can with the resources we have. What I'm afraid of is the workload for this police department is going to go up again," he said. "It worries me."

Lopey seemed a bit more confident, noting the state parole board will still have discretion and Brown has kept promises to fund counties to deal with impacts brought on by AB 109 and Prop. 47. He said, though, Prop. 57 will shift more burden onto counties.

"We'll have to see how things develop in the future and the state needs to think about possibly allocating funding to counties to deal with these situations," Lopey said.

It's unclear exactly how many prison inmates could be paroled through the passage of Prop. 57, though Bosenko estimated earlier this week the number of those eligible statewide at 16,000. It's also unclear how many of those people would return to the North State.

"We don't have that number yet," Bosenko said.

Talk of repealing Prop. 57 emerged locally on social media almost immediately after polls closed Tuesday night. Voters would need to pass a similar initiative to repeal it.
SHARE

By Joe Szydlowski of the Redding Record Searchlight

Shasta Lake city staff and dispensary owners will discuss increasing the marijuana sales tax, mitigating or banning outdoor grows and their smell, legal weed and more at the medical marijuana ad hoc committee meeting Monday.

The meeting begins at 1:30 p.m. at the council chambers, 4488 Red Bluff St., with an update on the compliance checks, which now must be done by code enforcement because of recent court rulings, said City Manager John Duckett.

Then, in response to a rash of phone calls and 23 written complaints about excessive grows and their smell, staff will discuss a ban on outdoor grows as one solution, he said.

No action will be taken by the advisory committee, which serves as a casual roundtable and liaison between the collectives and the city, Duckett said. But because odor is difficult to regulate, as well as the specter of more people growing under Proposition 64, Duckett said he wants to solicit ideas for solutions, he said.

"That's what we're going to the committee for is to discuss that exact thing  there's always going to be an ebb and flow," he said. "Do you allow it indoors or outdoors? Do you hire someone full-time to do nothing but marijuana compliance checks? These are all discussion points."

He also is seeking input on increasing the city's sales tax for marijuana from 6 percent to 10 percent to generate about $278,000 for roadwork. The tax can be increased by the City Council, while the sales tax would require another initiative similar to the one enacted on weed sales, Duckett said. It also wouldn't help much  the general sales tax brings in about $400,000, which is less than the almost $420,000 raised by the marijuana tax, he said.

But that number is expected to fall by up to $70,000 because medical marijuana patients, under Proposition 64, don't have to pay the sales tax if they're registered with the state.

They still have to pay a 15 percent excise tax on retail marijuana, Duckett said.

Then, they'll discuss the other impacts of Proposition 64, what will become of the marijuana industry and how open Shasta Lake should be to it, such as commercial grows, Duckett said.
Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight Ralf Reuschel, shown Thursday in Superior Court, is set to begin standing trial Nov. 29.

SHARE Travis Wallace

Charges filed in water investigation

The Siskiyou County District Attorney's Office has filed misdemeanor charges against three men who failed to report positive bacteria samples that were found in public water systems in the cities of Dunsmuir, Weed and other locations.

The three men failed to report monthly bacteriological water samples with positive findings to the Division of Drinking Water, officials said. The results of an investigation show the men were working for the cities of Dunsmuir, Weed and the McCloud Community Services District.

The DA's office filed 24 charges against the men, according to State Water Resources Control Board spokesperson Andrew DiLuccia.

Charges were filed against Ronald Dean Larue of Dunsmuir, Wayne Garland Grigsby of McCloud and David Dwayne Toms of Weed.

The DA's office issued 18 complaints against Larue, three against Grigsby and three against Toms.

The water board's investigation showed from March 2012 to September 2015 the men failed to take repeat samples when a positive sample was found.

There was at least one positive bacterial sample found in the city of Mount Shasta drinking system, but the DA's office did not include that incident in its complaints and has not filed any charges against the city of Mount Shasta staff.

Six arrested in child-support cases

The Tehama County district attorney's Bureau of Investigation made six arrests Thursday in a warrant sweep of people who failed to appear in court for failing to pay child support.

The six people  five men and one woman  were taken to Tehama County Superior Court and appeared before a commissioner following their arrests on the civil contempt charges, the DA's office said.

California law does not permit the disclosure of names of people who are arrested for civil warrants, the office said.

Anyone who has failed to pay child support may be wanted on a civil arrest warrant. Those in Tehama County are encouraged to contact the Department of Child Support Services, 1005 Vista Way No. A in Red Bluff, or call 866-901-3212 to avoid arrest.

Trial delayed for suspect in murder

A Redding man charged with murder in the shooting death of his nephew won't begin standing trial next week in Shasta County Superior Court because there's not a courtroom available to handle his expected month-long trial.

Ralf Reuschel, 54, who appeared in court Thursday for a trial readiness conference, is now tentatively set to begin standing trial Nov. 29.

Reuschel is accused of killing Timothy Aaron Mitchell, 33, whose body was found May 3, 2015, in an embankment off Cline Gulch Road in the French Gulch area.

Police and prosecutors claim Reuschel shot Mitchell three times with a handgun during the early morning hours of April 30, 2015, at his Redding residence and took the body in his pickup a few days later to the French Gulch area, where he dumped it.

Threats to clerk result in probation

A man who police said dressed up as an "evil" teddy bear and was arrested after he allegedly threatened an Anderson hotel clerk with a knife pleaded no contest earlier this week to possessing a dirk or dagger, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Travis Wallace, who was arrested Oct. 30, was sentenced Tuesday to time-served in jail and placed on probation for three years.

His sentence also requires that he complete a 10-day adult work program.

Wallace, 28, who was also charged with brandishing a weapon, had that felony count dismissed as part of his plea bargain.

Anderson police have said the costumed Wallace had two 10.5-inch hunting knives, a folding pocket knife and a box cutter on him when he was arrested.

They also said he was too intoxicated for his own safety.

A Baymont Inn employee told police Wallace stood behind him for 20 seconds in the hotel lobby without saying a word. Wallace then walked away, turned around and lifted his shirt to reveal a knife, police said.

Still in costume, Wallace went into a hotel laundry room, displayed a knife to a surveillance camera and made stabbing gestures. He also slid the knife across his throat, police have said.
SHARE

Residents of colorfast blue states now are islanders in a rising red sea.

Republicans haven't only recaptured the White House. They kept control of the U.S. Senate, where in two years Democrats will have to defend most of the 33 seats up for election. Republicans also kept their lock on the U.S. House. They expanded from 30 to 33 the number of governorships they hold. And they apparently increased their numerical dominance of state legislative chambers.

On Tuesday, then, the remarkable slippage of elected Democratic clout during Barack Obama's presidency only intensified.

Which provokes a question: Will all of us look back to this as the instant when Republicans started to squander their gift from fed-up voters who want less gridlock and more solutions?

Victory can seduce victors to believe their own hype  and to forget why they won. Witness the Democratic majorities that ruled Congress during Obama's first two years: Shellshocked Americans were slowly emerging from the Great Recession, their home values crushed and retirement accounts savaged. Democrats might have tackled job creation, tax reform and immigration. Instead they oddly put most of their chips on Obamacare, an unpopular, unaffordable program that has to be rehabbed or replaced.

House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has his job due to that Democratic misread of Americans' priorities.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence of Indiana once fretted during a talk with the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board about how, as a congressman, he watched Republicans go native in Washington, voting for lavish spending. We hope Ryan and Pence emerge as sensible Midwestern agenda shapers who focus a distractible President Donald Trump on fixing, not grandstanding. The list of urgent domestic issues is long. In two years, Republicans running for Congress will answer for what they did or didn't accomplish.

Lawmakers have condemned today's younger Americans to enormous debts, and have booby-trapped entitlement programs to go insolvent by the time these young people retire. That injustice helps shape our priorities for Republicans:

 Passing reforms to ward off insolvency of Social Security and Medicare.

 Putting the government on a path toward balanced budgets and reducing the national debt as a share of gross domestic product.

 Delivering on Trump's promise to stoke economic growth and thus job creation. We hope that means re-examining Obama's expansion of the regulatory state. We hope it doesn't get twisted into an attack on trade  a huge source of American jobs, especially in the agricultural and manufacturing Midwest.

 Streamlining a tax code that baffles Americans, incentivizes peculiar business behaviors and puts the government in the inappropriate position of choosing winners and losers among companies and whole industries. Example: energy.

 Finding a "comprehensive immigration solution" that's more than a three-word cliche. Our borders are porous, our policies arguably put too much weight on family reunification and our economy suffers for lack of smarter standards on who is or isn't admitted legally.

 Fixing or replacing Obamacare. Fast.

If you were asleep late Tuesday night when final results came in, we hope you caught up later with this passage on the immensity of what happened:

Voters delivered a humiliating rebuke to America's political establishment and to the hangers-on  the pollsters, the pundits, the media elites, the celebrities who surrounded Hillary Clinton on stages even as Trump stood alone. Humbled Democratic leaders and others who had predicted Clinton would win 300 electoral votes or many more instead watched, agape, as Trump picked off states that Barack Obama had won handily. This wasn't a landslide, but it buried Democrats under plenty of rubble. All that talk of taking back the U.S. Senate and just maybe the House? The assumption that a Democratic president would reshape the U.S. Supreme Court? All gone. Let the Democrats form their circular firing squad for the volleys of blame that now commence.

What we should have addressed is the peril ahead for Republicans. Just as surely as they've raised this red sea, they can sink back to minority status in a couple of election cycles.

Solutions or self-destruction, GOP. What'll it be?

This editorial was originally published in the Chicago Tribune. It has been edited.
"Am I the only one having trouble saying 'aliens'?" Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) asks in the beginning of "Arrival." Instead of succumbing to the usual assumptions of invasion movies, the film nails the bewilderment and uncertainty that would almost certainly stem from an actual extraterrestrial event. "Arrival" takes risks and steps into a cloud of surrealism, but its deft exploration of language makes the film feel impossibly timely.

What happens?

Advertisement

Louise is a linguistics professor mourning the death of her daughter. When 12 alien vessels land at different points on Earth, the military recruits her and scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to head efforts to communicate with the aliens insidecalled heptopodsto determine their purpose on Earth. Facing social unrest and dealing with the reality that 11 other countries are also dealing with the aliens, Louise and Ian face pressure to put the puzzle of communication together.

What's good?

Advertisement

"Arrival" knows what it's doingeven the opening montage of Louise's daughter's life and death has stunning visual callbacks and parallels that could make it a short film. The scene where Louise goes into the vessel for the first time and adjusts to the warped gravity is breathtaking. Director Denis Villeneuve tells his story in a cool, muted palette, using intimate close-ups to establish a connection to Louise. Adams, as usual, is completely fantastic, infusing Louise with both delicate sorrow and determined strength.

Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >

The real triumph of "Arrival," though, is its commitment to the complexity of time and language. "Maybe we should try talking to them before we throw math problems at them," Louise says pointedly to Ian, to which their superior says, "This is why you're both here." The film believes in communication and weaves that into the puzzle of its story.

What's bad?

"Arrival" takes a risk, and it half pays off. Its ending is poignant and touching, if a little muddled and melodramatic. It takes a long time for the film to establish stakes, and once it does, they feel a little silly. Without giving anything away, though some things don't feel completely solid, the way "Arrival" brings everything together is sort of awe-inspiring.

Final verdict

A relevant film that preaches openness and puzzles together an earned conclusion.

3.5 stars (out of four)

@lchval | laurenchval@redeyechicago.com
Starting Tuesday night, as Donald Trump 's victory in the presidential election started coming into focus, anguished questions flooded social media:

Could Trump overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide?

Could he abolish same-sex marriages?

Could he increase deportations?

How about global warming? Could Trump pull out of U.S. agreements on climate change?

What about Obamacare?

The chief executive has a lot of authority over the government, as President Obama has demonstrated. But as Obama has found, he also faces tremendous constraints from Congress , the courts and existing laws.

Here are some areas in which President Trump could act quickly and where he could not.

Could Trump overturn Roe v. Wade?

Not on his own. The Supreme Court decision in 1973 struck down state laws around the country that banned abortions. Ever since, antiabortion groups have called for reversing the ruling.

The decision could be overturned two ways  by a new Supreme Court decision or by a constitutional amendment. The high court has reaffirmed the Roe decision repeatedly, most recently by a 5-3 vote in June that struck down a Texas law that limited abortions.

After Trump's win, even some in Silicon Valley wonder: Has Facebook grown too influential? 

In theory, if enough vacancies arise on the court, Trump could appoint a sufficient number of justices who would overturn Roe. In practice, the Supreme Court has had a majority of Republican-appointed justices since Roe was handed down, except for the past few months of a 4-4 tie, and thats never happened.

As for a constitutional amendment, the president has no role in that process. Amendments have to pass both houses of Congress by a two-thirds vote and be ratified by three-quarters of the states  a high bar.

What could Trump do about immigration?

A lot. The law gives the president broad authority over immigration policy. Trump could speed up deportations, revoke Obamas program that shielded so-called Dreamers  people who came to the U.S. illegally as children  and curb certain categories of visas for legal immigrants.

But as Obama found, there are limits. Courts struck down his effort to expand the deportation shield to cover millions of adults.

Trump also could not build a wall along the Mexican border without money from Congress, although he might be able to get started on construction by shifting funds already in the federal budget.

Could Trump ban Muslims from coming to the U.S.?

Legal experts have said he probably could: Noncitizens seeking to enter the country generally arent protected by the Constitutions guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

Here is how America feels about Trump's shocking win 

As of Thursday morning, mention of the Muslim ban had disappeared from Trumps campaign website. Later in the day, the proposal reappeared on the website. Trump aides insisted the earlier removal had been a technical glitch.

Trump could limit the entry of refugees from Syria, Iraq and other war-torn Middle Eastern countries. He probably would face pressure from U.S. allies not to do so, but he could disregard that.

Are same-sex marriages at risk?

No. Just as with abortion, the president cant overturn a Supreme Court decision by himself, although he could appoint more conservative justices. Even then, the chance that the high court would reverse itself is very small. Unlike abortion, same-sex marriage has steadily gained in public approval.

Trump could try to reverse some Obama administration rulings that favored same-sex couples on issues such as federal benefits. He hasnt suggested that he would. And if he did, his decisions could be challenged in court.

Could Trump reverse current policies on climate change?

He could and quite probably will.

Trump has promised to withdraw the U.S. from an international agreement made in Paris last year that called on countries to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And he has said he would scrap Obama administration rules that aim to shift electricity generation away from coal and oil toward cleaner sources.

Since those policies were adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency, using its authority under the Clean Air Act, they could be reversed by the EPA. But environmental groups could  and almost certainly would  go to court to try to block any such reversal. At minimum, the groups could tie up the Trump administration for a long time.

What happens if Trump tries to repeal Obamacare?

Trump has promised to ask Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something else.

The repeal part is easy since the Republicans control both houses of Congress. The replace part is a lot harder, as my colleague Noam N. Levey explained.

Fear of a Trump-triggered recession gives way to hope for short-term economic boost 

Republicans have never been able to agree on a plan to replace the current law, and they would be under tremendous pressure not to simply repeal the law without a backup plan. Doing so would cause some 20 million people to lose healthcare coverage.

So carrying out Trumps pledge may take quite a while, and, in the end, the GOP may have to settle for less dramatic change than the rhetoric might imply.

Could Trump end federal funds for Planned Parenthood?

Congress would have to act to accomplish that goal, which many conservatives have sought because of the groups role in providing abortion services.

Whether a ban would pass both houses, especially the Senate, remains uncertain.

The federal money that goes to support Planned Parenthoods healthcare activities does not involve abortion but rather funds the groups other services, including cancer screening and other preventive care for women. Several Republican senators have supported Planned Parenthood in the past because those services are popular in their states.

During the campaign, Trump threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton. Could he?

The president, acting through the attorney general, has broad authority to appoint prosecutors. But appointing a prosecutor to go after a defeated campaign rival would be unprecedented, and Trumps aides already have started stepping away from that idea.

Could Trump order police to adopt stop-and-frisk policies?

No. During the campaign, Trump defended the use of so-called stop-and-frisk policing tactics. But police departments dont work for the federal government, they work for state and local governments.

In some cities, stop-and-frisk has been limited by court decisions. In other places, it has been dropped by police chiefs who decided it was not reducing crime enough to justify the tension it created in minority communities.

Trump talked about making libel law less protective of the press. Could he?

No. There is no federal libel law. Each state has its own law. A Supreme Court decision handed down more than 40 years ago  New York Times v. Sullivan  provides broad protection for the press in covering public figures.

David.Lauter@latimes.com

For more on Politics and Policy, follow me @DavidLauter

ALSO

Donald Trump pledged to repeal and replace Obamacare. Can he really do it?

Trump's victory ensures a conservative majority on the Supreme Court

How Donald Trump really won the White House

UPDATES:

Nov. 11, 3:45 p.m.: An earlier version of this article said that Planned Parenthood performs mammograms. It does perform other kinds of cancer screening, but not mammograms.

Nov. 10, 1:55 p.m.: This article was updated to note that the proposal to ban some Muslims from entering the U.S. has reappeared on the Donald Trump campaign website.

The article was originally published Nov. 10 at 1:10 p.m.
'Corruption is the tree.'

'Black money is the fruit from the tree.' 'This scheme will expose the unaccounted fruits of the tree.'

'But since the tree will continue to stand, the story will continue,' say Pramod Kumar Srivastava, Sanghamithra and Kravya.

In a surprise move, the Government of India earlier this week demonetised currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations on Tuesday.

The main argument submitted by the government in favour of the move was that it will curb black money floating into the market.

Yes, in the short-term, it may give some benefits, but it is not a long-term solution. Let us analyse why:

Black money is not just wads of notes

Black money can be in the form of actual and benami properties like farmhouses, jewellery, costly household items, and vehicles.

Hard cash is only a minuscule part of black money.

This scheme will be able to detect the black money in the form of unaccounted hard cash only. It is highly improbable that people will stack up wads of notes in their homes.

Normally the hard cash recovered during income tax raids is of lesser value compared to all other items.

Black money is the end result of corruption

Corruption is the tree. Black money is the fruit from the tree.

This scheme will expose the unaccounted fruits of the tree. But since the tree will continue to stand, the story will continue.

In other words, it is the mindset of the people which needs to be changed. Otherwise, the same person will once again indulge in tax evasion and unlawful activities.

This scheme hits at the symptoms, not the root cause.

In 1978 the government had undertaken the same exercise, but black money did not disappear

In 1978, the Morarji Desai government had demonetised currency notes of Rs 1,000, Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000 value. It did not work.

Skewed cost benefit analysis of such a move

In performing this huge exercise of phasing out old currency notes, new currency being printed, besides logistic, there are huge costs that are involved.

Above all, the time and energy of hundreds of millions of people is being deployed. All this constitutes the cost factor.

The benefit from reducing black money is based on conjectures, and we are not sure how much it will actually be.

This fact itself puts a big question mark over the success of the scheme.

Logic of higher denomination is being assailed, while the same is being proposed in the new scheme of things.

On one hand the government is assailing the concept of high denomination notes, on the other it is saying it will bring in new Rs 500 and even Rs 2,000 denomination notes.

This is contradictory.

The logic is being given that these new notes will be fool-proof, as if when the current denomination notes were brought into the market they were not 'fool proof'.

Hence the success of the whole scheme is under question.

That lower denominations will not create black money is questionable

There cannot be any logical proof that lower denomination currency notes do not create a black money problem.

Lower and higher denominations are a relative term.

It is not about the denominations, but the mindset.

A bribe taker will accept one single Rs 1,000 note, or 10 notes of Rs 100 denomination. It doesn't matter.

This is mainly about the domestic market

The current scheme is directed at the local market, while it is an open secret that the bulk of black money is stashed abroad by unscrupulous people and entities.

Moreover, money stashed abroad is in foreign currency, hence the scheme won't be applicable to those funds.

It is not hitting at the root cause of black money

Black money and fake money are generated because of corruption, poor processes and poor implementation of laws.

This scheme does not touch upon these core issues. Thus, it is a band-aid solution.

So while there will be some feel-good results for a few months, in the long term the situation will return to square one.

Hence, the scheme is inherently flawed.

Extremely flawed execution plan

Will the peanut hawker, coolie, construction labourer, housemaid, student etc have black money? The simple answer is, NO.

But if any of them has even a single Rs 500 note in their possession, they will all have to go through the rigmarole of exchanging that note.

What a colossal waste of human energy and untold agony!

It is nothing but a cruel joke on the entire population of the country.

Instead of setting some income limit etc, a blanket Executive order has been passed.

Such an order can never stand proper judicial scrutiny.

This order is inherently perverse, has been passed without proper application of mind and is draconian in nature, and hence liable to be set aside with strong strictures.

Nations are run on trust and based on role models

Any nation which does not trust its citizens and does not produce real-life role models is doomed to go into the dark, vicious cycle of corruption and black money.

If thousands of crores of black money is spent in elections, where the seats of MPs and MLAs are sold out, medical seats are sold out, jobs are auctioned -- it sets a bad example for society. The poor justice delivery system also adds to the problem.

Unless we have a proper and robust system in place and set positive role models in society, the problem of black money will continue and flourish.

Shock therapies may give the illusion of short-term benefits and people may thump their chest in pride, but in the long-term the problem will continue.

We can conclude that this scheme is totally flawed, draconian in nature, infringes upon the basic rights of citizens and has all the ingredients to create chaos in the financial markets as well as in society.

It is our humble appeal to the current dispensation that the scheme be immediately stalled, properly tweaked with judicial backing, and only then it should be implemented.

Sanghamithra and Kravya are business consultants with PKS Management Consultants. Pramod Kumar Srivastava is CEO, PKS Management Consultants, a generalist business consulting company based in Bangalore.

The views expressed are personal.

IMAGE: An ATM in Mumbai runs out of cash on Friday, November 11, soon after reopening after a two-day break to rejig its systems and issue new currency denominations. Photograph: Sahil Salvi
As people wait in long queues outside banks, they appear happy that the ban on Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes will unearth black money and root out corruption.

IMAGE: College students Ishit Gangar (in red), Harsh Singh (in white) and shopkeeper Anil Gandhi believe the ban on high-denomination notes will stem the creation of black money. Photographs: Prasanna D Zore/Rediff.com

Day 2 after the banks opened following the ban on Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes and the queues -- for depositing, withdrawals and exchanging Rs 500/Rs 1,000 notes -- have only grown longer.

Outside a Bank of India branch, as outside other banks we visited on Thursday, the crowds have almost doubled.

People were standing in serpentine queues for more than two hours on Friday morning to exchange the banned notes as well as to withdraw and deposit money, even as most ATMs shut shop soon after opening for business as the onslaught of withdrawals began.

"Of course, we are facing problems, but this will smoothen in the next couple of weeks," argue Harsh Singh and Ishit Gangar, college students, who say they are in favour of the ban on Rs 500/Rs 1,000 notes.

Harsh and Ishit had taken the day off from college to exchange Rs 4,000 -- the maximum permissible currently -- so that they would have enough "pocket money for a week."

IMAGE: The crowd, which wanted to get their Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes exchanged had doubled compared to what one saw on Day 1 of the ban.

Ask the boys how the demonetisation would help unearth stashed black money or how the re-introduction of new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000, and Rs 1,000 later, will stop the creation of new stocks of black money, they say, "we don't know how, but this is indeed a good move. We congratulate the prime minister for taking such a bold step."

"The Modi government is very, very, decisive," says grocer Anil Gandhi. "Manmohan Singh's government, which lasted 10 years, knew about black money and did discuss the issue for some time. But they turned tail and kept postponing such demonetisation."

Others in the queue reel out the names of some of India's best-known businessmen who, they alleged, are hand-in-glove with the government.

"All the top politicians, though they may be abusing each other on television, knew of this ban and must have already converted their hoarding into legal money," says an agitated woman in the queue.

"It is people like us, who earn Rs 20,000, Rs 25,000 per month, who have to suffer."

Gandhi sticks to his guns: "Our chaiwala PM did what a scholarly economist couldn't achieve in 10 years."

***

'Repairing an old house takes time'

IMAGE: Raksha Ram, extreme left, with his friends had taken a day off to help his family cope with shortage of money.

Raksha Ram, a skilled worker employed in the imitation jewellery business, has a family of four -- wife, son and daughter -- to support. He was standing in the serpentine queue to exchange Rs 4,000.

"In the last two hours we have moved only two feet," he says, standing outside the ICICI Bank, India's top private sector lender. The ATM outside the bank's branch was closed as it had run out of cash and that added to the growing number of people, says Ram.

Ram, who had taken a day off, along with friends from the company where he works, will lose a day's pay for the exercise, but he is not complaining.

"Agar desh ka bhala hota hoga toh hamare ek din ki salary koi mayine nahi rakhti (If demonetisation will help India progress, then the sacrifice of one day's pay makes no difference to us)," he says.

"Won't all the black money now enter the banking system? People like me will have greater access to small and medium loans."

IMAGE: Raksha Ram, who was standing in this long queue, said the ATM machine (red shutter, extreme right) had stopped working since 9.30 am when he just joined the big line.

Ram agrees that those who have crores of hard cash may not come out in the open for fear of facing the law -- the government's voluntary disclosure of the unaccounted money scheme ended September 30 and the government is quite clear that those who declare unaccounted money now will have to pay a 200 per cent penalty on tax payable and also face criminal proceedings -- but believes that that money will become worthless after midnight December 30, when the government-mandated deadline for depositing or exchanging Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes comes to an end.

Ram gives a simple example to drive home his point. Purana ghar repair karne main time toh lagta hi hai na? Lekin, kaam pyra hone ke baad us ghar main rehne ka maza hi kuch aur hota hai (It takes some time to repair or redo old homes but once the repair work is over the feeling of comfort and happiness one gets is something difficult to describe)."

***

'The new Rs 2,000 new note is a new problem'

IMAGE: Meenakshi Chavan and her husband Rakesh in green, were not happy with the disbursement of the new Rs 2,000 notes in exchange for Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 that people exchanged.

Meenakshi Chavan and her husband Rakesh, standing outside the Bank of Maharashtra bank, aren't as ecstatic as Gandhi, Gangar, Singh, or Raksha Ram.

Rakesh works in a casting factory and Meenakshi is a home-maker.

Their daily supply of small cash has been cut off abruptly and they are not hiding their anger though they too, like others, believe the move will squeeze corruption out of their daily lives.

"The woman next door, after standing in a long line, did get her notes exchanged. But the banker gave her two Rs 2,000 notes and ever since then she is running around to buy goods of daily need without any success," Meenakshi says.

IMAGE: The crowd outside the Bank of Maharashtra branch had spilled on to the road.

Meenakshi is pointing out an obvious flaw affecting the smooth transition from the old currency notes to the new ones.

"They have banned the Rs 500 note and people don't have enough of Rs 100 or Rs 50 notes to exchange when one goes out to buy groceries or vegetables. The other lady had to buy her groceries and vegetables on credit."

"The new Rs 2,000 note," says Meenakshi, "is a new problem for women like us who need small change to buy household stuff."
Dabur gets nearly a third of its Rs 2,900-crore international sales from Africa.

Dabur, the fast moving consumer goods major, is increasingly turning to markets outside India for growth, as the domestic market continues to be subdued.

A little over a third of revenue comes from abroad and it is investing Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion) to expand operations in West Asia and Africa. It recently set up a subsidiary and bought a manufacturing plant in South Africa, to cater to the southern part of the continent, a region Dabur earlier served through import.

The move will bring down cost, Sunil Duggal, chief executive officer, said in a recent investor call. "The objective of localisation is not to improve profitability as much as it is to lower prices and thereby improve our market position."

According to Lalit Malik, chief financial officer, the move could increase its revenue from South Africa by four times to Rs 250 crore (Rs 2.5 billion) a year. Expanding its operations in Africa has a rationale, as Dabur gets nearly a third of its Rs 2,900-crore (Rs 29 billion) international sales from there.

Another focus area is West Asia, generating 23% of its annual revenue from overseas operations. It has already started production in Turkey and is setting up a manufacturing unit in Iran, to be ready by 2017.

As consumers keep their purses closed in Saudi Arabia due to economic turmoil, increasing the sales in other markets of the region will be helpful, says a JM Morgan report dated October 3. The market generates a tenth of Dabur's sales and nearly a fifth of profit from international operations.

The firm also recently set up shop in Myanmar. According to Malik, Dabur plans to expand its portfolio, apart from launch of existing products, in newer territories. Local currency fluctuations are an issue; recent devaluations in Nigeria, Turkey, and Egypt impacted Dabur's revenue.

It expects the growth in foreign markets to remain higher than that in India. Its two product lines continue to grow at 10% a year by volume. Duggal says they plan to invest another Rs 300 crore in the next year; they're also open for acquisitions.

Photograph: PTI Photo.
Assuring people that their hard-earned money is safe, the finance ministry on Friday said there was no need to panic and depositing junked Rs 500/1,000 notes of up to Rs 2.50 lakh in bank accounts will not be reported to the tax department.

It also cautioned people against depositing the money of unknown people in their own accounts or falling prey to cheats, thugs and rumour-mongers.

Besides, the ministry said, farm income continues to remain tax free and can be easily deposited in bank.

Small businessmen, housewives, artisans, workers can also deposit cash in their accounts without any apprehensions, it added.

"Deposits up to Rs 2.50 lakh will not be reported to the income tax department. There will be no harassment or investigation. All honest citizen need not worry. Farmers' income is tax free and can be easily deposited in bank," the ministry said in newspaper ads.

In its biggest crackdown ever on black money, the government on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and asked people holding such notes to deposit them in bank accounts.

Since Thursday people have been thronging banks amid concerns among people over exchanging and depositing the scrapped high denomination currency.

People can deposit old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in their accounts till December 30, 2016, without any limit.

Restrictions have been imposed on the withdrawal limit and people can withdraw up to Rs 10,000 per day or Rs 20,000 per week.

This limit will be reviewed after a few days.

Besides, old notes up to Rs 4,000 can be exchanged at any bank or post office till November 24, 2016, by showing photo ID as proof.

ATMs can be used to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 per day per card till November 18 and Rs 4,000 from November 19 onwards. This limit too will be reviewed subsequently.

The ministry also advised people to make payments using cheques, demand drafts, debit or credit cards and electronic fund transfers and there is no restriction on such transactions.

Image: A queue outside a bank ATM in south Mumbai on Friday. Photograph: Sahil Salvi.
Tatas plan to revive, not sell the Port Talbot steel plant.

The investment could be as much as $500 million.

Ishita Ayan Dutt reports from Kolkata.

The Tata group is working towards turning around Port Talbot, which could entail a phased investment in assets and an overhaul of systems.

"The Tatas under Ratan Tata would like to turn around Port Talbot and a plan is in the works. The group realises that Scunthorpe was sold too soon," people familiar with the developments said.

The Tata Sons' latest explanation on why Cyrus Mistry was 'replaced' said that in the past three years the group had written down, written off or made provisions for impairment worth thousands of crores.

'Tata Steel alone has written off a large part of its investment in its UK/European assets. It is interesting to note that the new buyers of some of the steel assets for one pound in the UK have claimed a dramatic turnaround in the very first year of their takeover. In our view, these sub-par results cannot be blamed on the commodity cycle or economic conditions,' the letter released on Thursday, November 10, said.

According to media reports in the UK, the new owners of Scunthorpe were targeting a 10% profit margin on its annual revenues of 1.2 billion pounds, meaning it could make a profit of 120 million pounds a year.

Indeed, people familiar with the UK plants said that the plants' performance could not be just linked to raw material.

The plan to turn around could be a three-pronged exercise with investment in leadership and assets and an overhaul of supply chain.

"The investment in the plant could be around $500 million, but this may be staggered. The blast furnace at Port Talbot may call for relining in 2019 which is when the company will have to weigh in whether they will go for relining or a shift in technology like the electric arc furnace route," sources close to the development said.

Also, an overhaul of supply chain servicing could bring down the cost.

"The supply chain cost in the UK is much higher than Germany and France. It is expensive to import raw material and service markets using roads. But if waterways is used, then it is possible to bring down the cost by $10 to $12 a tonne. It will also be possible to reach out to the right markets," sources explained.

"The investment in Port Talbot has been 185 million pounds in blast furnace and 60 million pounds in gas recovery after acquisition. The plants were under-invested at the time of acquisition and even after acquisition, investment proposals mooted by the Tata Steel management were met with resistance from the erstwhile Corus management," sources said.

It was possible, sources indicated, to turn around Port Talbot and make it profitable and a plan was being put in place for the same.

Ratan Tata is a turnaround man, and he doesn't give up easily, another source said.

In March, Tata Steel decided to explore all options for the UK business, including sale. Tata Steel had said then that the group had extended substantial financial support to the UK business and suffered asset impairment of more than two billion pounds in the last five years.

The statement in March also said that the Tata Steel board had reviewed the proposed restructuring and transformation plan for Strip Products UK, prepared by the European subsidiary in consultation with an independent and internationally reputed consultancy firm, but the plan was found to be 'unaffordable'.

Seven bidders were shortlisted for the sale, but the process was put on hold in July, on Brexit concerns.

According to an earlier plan, in May, Tata Steel completed the sale of its long products Europe business -- which included the Scunthorpe steelworks, two mills in Teeside, an engineering workshop in Workington, a design consultancy in York, and associated distribution facilities as well as a rail mill in norther France -- to Greybull Capital LLP.

Currently, Tata Steel is pursuing a consolidation strategy in Europe which includes a potential joint venture with ThyssenKrupp and a separate process for selling the South Yorkshire-based specialty steels business.

Photograph: Phil Nobel/Reuters
A BJP leader said the money would be spent on welfare schemes for the poor, modernising of defence forces, and improving schools. Archis Mohan reports.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

According to government estimates, or so a top Bharatiya Janata Party leader claimed on Thursday, November 10, as much as Rs 6 lakh crore of unaccounted money was set to come back into the system after Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination currency notes have been demonetised.

The unaccounted money in the economy was to the tune of Rs 15.75 lakh crore.

In an informal interaction with journalists, the BJP leader said demonetising of currency notes was one among a series of steps the Narendra Modi government has taken, and will take in the months to come, as part of its crackdown on 'black money'.

The money, he said, would be spent on welfare schemes for the poor, modernising of defence forces, improving schools and creating infrastructure.

The BJP, just as it had used the Indian Army's 'surgical strikes' terror launch pads on the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, use the Modi government's efforts to curb 'black money' in its election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Assembly polls are due in Uttar Pradesh, along with four other states, by February.

The BJP leader said the criticism of demonetisation by the BJP's rivals in UP, Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati and the ruling Samajwadi Party, betrayed their frustration as the move has impacted their alleged 'war chest' of unaccounted money, which would have come to be used during the elections.

He exuded confidence that the UP election would witness a markedly lesser influence of money.

Those with 'black money' will not be spared, the leader said. He conceded that the BJP's traditional support base of traders was hit by the move.

"But we don't play vote bank politics. We are working for the poor of the country," he said, claiming that the move will in the days to come bring the dream of having a house within the reach of the common man.

In Lucknow, Mayawati said the decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination currency notes was akin to imposition of an 'undeclared economic emergency' in the country.

'Just before UP elections, Modi has realised the problem of black money after remaining in the saddle at the Centre for two-and-a-half years. Ninety per cent people are unhappy with this decision,' she said.

BJP National Vice-President and Lucknow Mayor Dinesh Sharma said those who used black money in politics and ticket distribution were uncomfortable about demonetisation.
'When you want to cross a street in Bhutan, cars invariably stop to let you go.'

'Coming from India, it is a pleasant surprise.'

Claude Arpi, who spent 10 days in the Land of the Dragon, tells us how Bhutan is different from the rest of the world.

IMAGE: Chele La prayer flags swaying in the wind. All photographs: Smiti and Claude Arpi

Coming back to India can be a rude shock after a sejour in Bhutan.

At Delhi international airport's immigration, after scanning my OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) card, the officer suspiciously looked at it, again and again, trying to tally the data on his computer with the one on the card.

It took a long time, not a word, not a smile. Though the conscientious officer was doing his duty, a human touch was missing.

A couple of hours earlier, I had left Paro airport in Bhutan where the staff was all-smiles.

It had been the case during the last 10 days in the Land of the Dragon (Drukyul), today celebrated the world over for having invented the concept of Gross National Happiness.

It is true that Bhutan's culture, based on Buddhist values, is not entirely geared towards 'normal' development, which is often fuelled by greediness and in any case a constant increase of the 'domestic product'.

The term Gross National Happiness was coined in 1972 by Bhutan's fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who turns 61 today, November 11.

It was a stroke of genius, from a monarch who saw the future of humankind, or perhaps the dead-end of the current system.

Today, the Himalayan nation might not be a world decider like the US, China or India, but it is more and more cited in global fora.

IMAGE: Butter lamps being prepared to be lit in Punakha.

Though the definition of Happiness might differ, the tiny nation has made the concept of 'global happiness' something worth studying.

Several Bhutanese think-tanks such as The Centre for Bhutan Studies & Gross National Happiness Research are doing just this.

Established by Bhutan's council of ministers in 1999, the centre's objective is to 'conduct evaluative studies on existing programmes of the government and providing feedback on the basis of which the royal government can improve programmes and policies.'

The aim is to bring Happiness into governance.

The West has often a difference approach to Happiness.

Earlier in 2016, data collected by the UN from people in 156 countries, surprisingly ranked Bhutan a lowly 84 in the list of happy nations. Different variables were used.

The fact that Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Finland were the five toppers shows that the criteria were based on Western values. It is a great pity!

IMAGE: For centuries, the concept of 'happiness' has been central to the Indian and Himalayan culture.

Can you believe that China is listed 83, just before Bhutan (while India is ranked 118)?

In the Western approach, each country is also compared against dystopia, a hypothetical nation characterised by human misery, oppression, disease, overcrowding and pervasive fear, a place where everything is wrong.

Dystopia is the opposite of utopia, synonymous for an ideal society with no crime or poverty.

The fact remains that the UN has begun studying the concept of Happiness which for centuries has been central to the Indian and Himalayan culture.

In Bhutan, this concept translates into governance.

A small but telling detail: When you want to cross a street, cars invariably stop to let you go. Coming from India, it is a pleasant surprise.

If not Happiness, this might be called 'coolness' or 'easy-goingness', but such details do contribute to a more relaxed atmosphere.

IMAGE: A local with the Tibetan prayer wheel.

The Gross National Happiness is based on the four pillars: Sustainable development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment and establishment of good governance.

GNH has officially been incorporated to Bhutan's five-year planning process, which guides the nation's economic development.

What is striking when one visits Thimphu the capital or any other 'big' city is the cleanliness of the environment.

The Himalayan rivers are uncontaminated (rafting is such a delight in Punakha), the air is not polluted, the cities and villages are empty of plastic and garbage (unlike Tamil Nadu where I live).

There is no need of a Swachh Bhutan campaign.

This can be seen at the national level too.

In an oped in Kuensel, Bhutan's national newspaper, Annette Dixon, vice- president of the World Bank for South Asia wrote: 'Bhutan declared in 2009 that it would remain carbon neutral and has made the most ambitious pledges on cutting emissions at COP21.

'But staying neutral as emissions from industry and transport rapidly rise will not be easy,' Dixon warned. 'It will require aggressively finding ways to grow economically in a carbon neutral or reduced way.'

IMAGE: The Punakha suspension bridge.

As the world starts looking back at the mess it has created, many believe that 'after all, this GNH was perhaps not so naive.'

At the end of the recent COP21 Paris Conference, the European Union acknowledged Bhutan's 'extraordinary ambition' in addressing climate change by signing a 'declaration', which recognises 'Bhutan's unique situation as a land-locked and least developed country with a fragile mountainous environment.'

Today Bhutan is often cited as an example to follow.

A few months ago, Tshering Tobgay, Bhutan's prime minister, gave a inspirational TED talk at Vancouver, Canada.

Tobgay spoke with great eloquence of the special culture of the Land of the Dragon, its concept of Gross National Happiness, climate change, environment and free education for all.

'Of the 200-odd countries in the world today,' he said, 'it looks like we are the only one that's carbon neutral. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Bhutan is not carbon neutral. Bhutan is carbon negative.'

'But it is our protected areas that are at the core of our carbon neutral strategy,' the 'Happy' prime minister asserted. 'Our protected areas are our carbon sink. They are our lungs.'

'Today, more than half our country is protected as national parks, nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries.'

During his talk, Tobgay said through the biological corridors 'our animals are free to roam throughout our country.'

With 'development' becoming the universal god, can society remain 'happy'?

Bhutan seems decided to show the way though it does not mean that some Bhutanese are not dreaming of acquiring an SUV or a bigger vehicle.

IMAGE: Tourists stop to soak in the view of the hills.

With Bhutan becoming wealthier, will Happiness be consigned to the backstage for the sake of greater 'wealth'?

It is certainly an issue.

The tourism industry is partly responsible for fuelling the 'race for wealth' though based on a 'high value, low impact' policy, 'profit' remains the main engine of growth.

Many in Bhutan are conscious that the nation is facing a hard choice. Kuensel suggests, 'While Bhutan's economy continues to grow and mature, different forms of economic system must be explored, studied and debated.'

While the capitalist economic system works on 'profit', it creates jobs and brings necessary tax revenues, does it automatically create Happiness?

IMAGE: The Haa Valley.

On the last day of my visit I trekked up to the picturesque Taktsang Gompa (or Tiger's Nest), the monastery complex, hanging on a cliff side of the upper Paro valley.

The gompa was built during the 17th century on the spot where the Swat-born Guru Padmasambhava meditated for three years, three months and three days with his consort Yeshe Tsogyal.

Paro Taktsang is one the 13 Taktsang caves which were blessed by the Master of Supreme 'Sukh'.

While my legs were experiencing dukh trying to reach the cave, I was wondering how Padmasambhava would have seen the GNH criteria.

He had no social security, no WiFi, no means of transportation (except for levitation or on a back of a tigress), no house (though the Taktsang has breathtaking views), but his cave is still charged with happiness.

Whether the traditional contentment can be experienced today is another question.

But it is important to think about it... and to act.
The US foreign and security policy establishment, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar, apprehends that Trump may compel them to exorcise the 'unipolar predicament', and bring foreign and security policies to reflect the desires and priorities of the American public.

The first of a two-part appraisal.

Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

The unthinkable became the thinkable when the biggest political earthquake since the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter century ago occurred with Donald Trump's election as the President of the United States.

The seismic ruptures are going to be phenomenal. An American commentator aptly compared the event to the two fateful German elections of 1932 that led to Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

Of course, that conjures up powerful symbolism, which is unwarranted in its apocalyptic evocation. What indeed bears comparison is that the post-Cold War international order once again threatens to be overrun and the global economy and geopolitics will radically change course.

What lies in the womb of time?

For a start, it is necessary to remove the cobwebs of the mind. There are two searching questions involved here.

One, how is Trump's Presidency going to fare any better than his predecessor Barack Obama's who also had stormed the citadel in 2008 as an 'outsider', but ended up by 2016 as a faithful valet of the American establishment?

Woven into this is the reality that most observers of American politics -- in India, especially -- are blase that the US establishment ultimately devours its demons and will remain immutable, permanent.

Two, there is a troubling question whether in the increasingly dysfunctional American political system Congress wouldn't stymie even Trump's best-laid plans?

After all, Obama couldn't ensure the permanence of his greatest foreign policy legacy -- the Iran nuclear deal -- and had to settle for a mere agreement that can always be rewritten or even erased, instead of a full-fledged treaty, because the latter would have needed Congressional approval, which he feared wouldn't be forthcoming.

Both the above two questions have some merit. But then, the circumstances and context in which those struggles took place have changed -- not only within America but in the world in which American power has been operating for the past seven decades or so since World War II.

IMAGE: US President Barack Obama meets President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office, November 10, 2016. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Trump and Obama are not comparable. Obama's election in 2008 was largely a reaction to the exasperating George W Bush Presidency, which had touched its nadir (for a variety of factors that we need not go into here.)

Obama positioned himself with a perfect sense of timing and receptivity to garner the negative fallouts of the Bush era and turn them to his advantage by presenting himself as the harbinger of 'change'.

Quite obviously, the situation today is different. Obama himself enjoys a high rating for his performance as President.

Trump's platform is fundamentally different. First, it is built on the white vote. Cutting across gender, age or education, whites voted for him. Indeed, he tapped the anti-establishment mood, but it was not an angry 'anti-Obama' mood.

Actually, it went far beyond that. It was a dark mood of despair of the dispossessed who felt abandoned by the country's ruling elites and the two mainstream political parties.

Again, Trump understood the groundswell of American nativism and sensed that what passes for the liberal constituency was underestimating its potency.

Forgotten men and women

Trump's celebrity status may have added to his appeal and most certainly his entry as a rank outsider tilting at the windmills of the discredited political system caught attention.

'If Trump is serious about his domestic agenda, he needs to pursue a certain foreign policy orientation which will not undermine his priority task of America's reconstruction.'

All in all, if Obama's candidacy was tactical, Trump's is strategic.

Therefore, it may have inherent dangers insofar as Trump could be riding the tiger of post-truth politics, which means he is also going to be under incredible pressure to live up to the expectations raised by his narrative.

He does not enjoy the latitude to waffle once in power, as Obama could. Obama's promise of 'change' was inchoate. But Trump's narrative is very specific -- as he underscored in his victory speech in New York: 'The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.'

Obama never brought himself to make such a poignant, horribly accountable promise. Herein lies the salience. What matters is that Trump's domestic agenda cannot be segregated from his foreign policy.

Without a foreign policy that is attuned to the domestic agenda, he cannot deliver on his daunting promises -- 'We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We're going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none, and we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it... We will embark upon a project of national growth and renewal... We have a great economic plan. We will double our growth and have the strongest economy.'

And, vice versa -- if Trump is serious about his domestic agenda, he needs to pursue a certain foreign policy orientation that helps him fulfil his electoral pledge and which at the very minimum will not undermine his priority task of America's reconstruction and relaunch. This needs to be carefully understood.

The second question -- whether Congress would frustrate Trump's programme -- is easy to answer. In systemic terms, the President enjoys free scope of action in foreign policy. The checks and balances that are there in the system are more applicable to domestic policies.

Therefore, except in the event of a war or if appropriations for war are required (which seem far-fetched in terms of Trump's core beliefs), Congress' say in foreign policies is very limited.

Moreover, it must be taken into account that Trumps victory is comprehensive. He held not only the Republican bastions ('flyover states') but most of the so-called 'battleground states'and the Republican Party's Congressional candidates who had initially distanced themselves from Trump finally rode to victory carried by the wave of white electorate he created.

How could they forget that bitter-sweet experience of snatching victory out of the jaws of near-certain defeat by hanging on to Trump's coat-tails?

IMAGE: President-elect Donald Trump meets with Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives at the Capitol in Washington, DC. Photograph: Zach Gibson/Getty Images

It is a rare thing in the past hundred years that the Republicans will now be controlling the White House and Congress together. That makes Trump a strong President.

While there is likelihood of differences cropping up between the President and the Congressional Republicans, this would happen more on domestic issues -- race, gender and sexuality-issues, abortion, etc, rather than on Trump's military, diplomatic, security policies that overlap in his foreign policy.

Core beliefs

This brings us to the third, and most important, question: What are Trump's core foreign policy beliefs? Does he have any such beliefs at all?

The heart of the matter is that behind Trumps bluster, which he was entitled to as any candidate struggling to reach the centrestage in a high-stakes election involving vastly more experienced politicians, it is possible to discern a consistent worldview.

And it stands out as a coherent and well-informed worldview (especially as regards Americas strengths and weaknesses in a world that is spinning out of control), much as one may agree or disagree with it.

At its core, Trump has repeatedly said that his foreign policy ideology narrows down to 'America First'. He has been plain-speaking as to what he meant by that -- 'My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make.' Period.

This core belief has been interpreted to mean that Trump is an 'isolationist'. Nothing can be more far-fetched than the thesis that this billionaire who has business interests or has made his vast fortunes in places as diverse as Manhattan, Panama, Vancouver, Istanbul, Dubai, Pune and Bali never heard of the alluring vistas that 'globalisation' opened up.

Most certainly, Trump's prism is different. His engagement with the world community will be on vastly different terms.

It can no longer be in terms of America's sense of destiny borne out of the credo of 'exceptionalism', which Obama used to extol, but will be almost exclusively rooted in the country's self-interests, in terms of safeguarding American security and economic and political interests.

Equally, Trump is adamant that the US' engagements with the outside world need to be cost-effective. As any American businessman would say, there is nothing like a free lunch.

Trump is completely unsentimental about allies and friends. Everything depends on the utility of the relationships and alliances and he will subject them to severe cost-accounting principles.

Trump is probably making a virtue out of necessity here because he is acutely conscious of the state of disrepair within America and of his stated priority to attend to it as priority.

Having said that, a retrenchment by the US from the world arena is far from his thoughts.

Wouldn't he know, after all, that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism -- if not the monopoly stage of capitalism?

Most certainly, Trump cannot be unaware of the historical place of this stage of capitalism in America. Cartels, protection, the domination of the financiers, colonial policies, military-industrial complex -- these are integral to the working of the American economy.

Put differently, in order to meet the objectives of mercantilism that Trump ardently espouses, the US has no option but to continue to assert its power over other countries.

How does this world view translate in contemporary world politics?

Trump has shared his thinking with regard to the US' relations with Europe, Eurasia, West Asia and Asia-Pacific.

What comes out clearly is that Trump does not attach high importance per se to the US' trans-Atlantic leadership. The dark forebodings in the European mind in regard of a Trump presidency are quite understandable.

IMAGE: Protesters demonstrate against the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement trade accords in Berlin, Germany.

Critics oppose the accords for a number of reasons, including fears over genetically-modified foods, environmental standards, workers' rights and pharmaceuticals.

Photograph: Axel Schmidt/Getty Images

Europe in the cusp of change

Simply put, Trump is not a fan of Euro-Atlanticism.

It is fairly certain that he is not going to revisit the moribund Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement, TTIP, which was supposed to have been a platinum grade trade agreement between the US and the European Union aimed at promoting trade and multilateral economic growth.

Indeed, the TTIP negotiations have been tortuous and the idea has run to headwinds in Europe itself. Considering that United States and European Union together represent 60% of global GDP, 33% of world trade in goods and 42% of world trade in services, the collapse of the TTIP has serious implications for world trade and the global economic architecture.

A free trade agreement between the EU and the US would have meant potentially the largest such agreement in history, covering 46% of the world economy.

More importantly, TTIP was conceived originally by the US as a companion agreement to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (covering 12 of the Pacific Rim countries, but excluding China), and the two together would have provided key pillars of the US containment strategies against Russia and China, alongside the Western alliance system.

If Trump abandons the TTIP, it becomes a serious blow to the EU integration processes, which are already in serious disarray -- coping with the refugee crisis, Brexit, economic difficulties, etc.

Meanwhile, European security, without the overarching compelling trans-Atlantic leadership by the US, is slated to enter unchartered waters.

Added to that, Trump is ambivalent toward the continued relevance of NATO. He has openly demanded that the present arrangement whereby the US underwrites three-fourths of the NATO budget is unacceptable.

However, this is a tall demand at a time when defense budgets among most NATO nations are expected to be flat at best for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, NATO countries also constitute a steady market for American weaponry. The NATO countries' 'interoperability' of alliance assets is a powerful exporter tool for promoting US arms, too.

Evidently, Trump will review the alliance's post-Cold War posturing. It appears that he doesn't yet have his NATO position.

During the second term of the Obama Presidency, following the eruption of tensions over the regime change in Ukraine in February 2014, had shifted the NATO posturing in a pronounced way directed against Russia.

Would Trump see the raison detre of the NATO posturing the way his predecessor did? It seems unlikely.

For Obama, this anti-Russian posturing made sense in rallying the European allies behind the US' trans-Atlantic leadership and in giving Washington the space to insert itself and have a decisive say to interfere in Russia's relations with its European partners.

In short, Obama finessed the NATO posturing in such a way as to strengthen the US' containment strategies toward Russia, pursued by successive administrations since Bill Clinton.

Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

On the contrary, from what one can figure out from Trump's pronouncements, he intends to upturn the US' containment strategies against Russia.

How far he will succeed in overcoming the entrenched animus against Russia -- a legacy of the Cold War -- within the US foreign and security policy establishment and the Pentagon (as well as among think-tanks and mainstream media) remains to be seen.

Unsurprisingly, the early Russian comments on Trump's election victory suggest that Moscow is keeping its fingers crossed.

On the other hand, President Vladimir Putin's initial remarks on hearing about the US election results have underscored that Russia will respond positively and eagerly to any effort by Trump to reverse the downhill slide in Russian-American relations.

Therefore, assuming that Trump eventually succeeds in cutting his way through the thicket of institutional opposition to his Russia policies in the Washington Beltway, we may expect a sea change in the European and Eurasian security climate in the coming period.

Trump is unlikely to put the weight of US diplomacy behind shepherding the European countries to keep the sanctions against Russia in place. Now, in the absence of such a US' diktat, a consensus in favour of keeping the sanctions in place is hard to reach.

Thus, the removal of the Western sanctions against Russia in a near future is to be expected -- possibly, as early as the first half of next year.

At best, Trump may link the dismantling of Western sanctions against Russia to an understanding over the future of Ukraine, where again he has hinted at a willingness to concede Moscow's legitimate interests in Eurasia.

The big question will be the deployment of the ABM system by the US on Russia's borders. Again, it is entirely conceivable that Trump may stall on future deployment and the pre-positioning of US military personnel and weapons in Central Europe and the Baltics.

A rollback cannot happen overnight, but may become possible if and when the US-Russia tensions begin to ease.

The bottom line, therefore, is that Russia may be able to regain its due place in its desired habitat, namely, as a European power, able to develop its partnerships without rude American interference.
'A bit of marketing, a bit of positioning, and a lot of strategic thinking is required, and all this should be in aid of India's strategic intent: Becoming the third pole in a global G3 and aiming for Numero Uno,' says Rajeev Srinivasan.

It was on November 9, 1989, The Economist informs us, that the Berlin Wall fell.

Equally momentous is November 9, 2016, with Donald Trump's unexpectedly large victory. In the context of the former, India was a bit player. But now, India is a serious power, and Trump would be well advised to pay attention to India.

On the other hand, Indians need to also dump their tendency to pontificate or be seduced by flattery, and look at the relationship with cold calculation based on India's long-term interests. I was glad when Rediff asked me to write on this, because I am a little concerned about babus losing the plot.

All rhetoric aside, Donald Trump is an 'America-first' believer. Therefore, one has to assume that he will keep the US' long-term interests in mind.

Going one step further, an India that is in sync with said long-term interests will get the maximum traction and mindshare. Thus, India needs to focus on areas where we share common interests: That would be the logical conclusion.

What are Trump's hot-button issues? Here are some that are evident to me and a few that were suggested by the Financial Times, in some order of perceived priority:

Economy and Trade

Foreign Policy

National Security, Terrorism and Defence

Infrastructure

Healthcare

Tax Policy

The US Supreme Court

Climate Change

Immigration

Economy and Trade: Trump is looking to 'bring back the jobs' and to ensure a decent GDP growth rate. Some likely consequences India should be prepared for:

There will be pressure on the Indian generic pharma industry as part of the push by Big Pharma to improve margins. Indian IPR rules such as Section 3(d) which prevents 'evergreening' of expired patents on inconsequential 'innovations' will be under renewed attack.

There will be opportunities to pursue bilateral trade agreements with the US based on Trump's likely downplaying of both NAFTA as well as TIPP and TPP.

However, there will also be pressure to accept TRIPS+ provisions that help protect US MNCs.

Trump may or may not move ahead with his threatened 45% punitive tariff on, say, China. That will have ramifications for India as well in terms of trade disputes.

It is possible that Trump will remove the Super 301 straitjacket under which India has laboured, in an effort to push India into reducing the trade deficit. This may entail a lifting of sanctions on aerospace and defence related items as well.

Foreign Policy: Trump has indicated that he will pursue a more robust foreign policy against rogue States, while at the same time becoming somewhat isolationist and thinking in terms of 'Fortress America.'

Obama's unsuccessful 'Pivot to Asia' will be rethought.

Of interest to India: Trump has already encouraged Japan and South Korea to develop their own defences including nuclear weapons. Given the threat from China and proxy North Korea, it is possible that a formerly pacifist Japan will forswear its Article 9 and emerge again as a military power.

This will be good for India as Japan is its best and most dependable partner in Asia.

Rethinking NATO: Trump may unilaterally reduce or even revoke some of the US' commitments to defending European allies, or at the very least charging them for the US defence umbrella, and especially downplaying its 'special relationship' with the UK.

This opens up a vacuum for India to play the Indian Ocean card.

The retreat from Europe should also lead to a reduction in hostilities with Russia, as the Obama-Clinton-Kerry mischief of pointlessly irritating Russia with misadventures such as in Georgia and Ukraine will be reversed.

China will be in the cross-hairs, and Trump is likely to attempt to 'contain' China using a grand strategy of alliances with Japan, Australia, India and Vietnam among others. The failure of the 'Pivot' (see how TTP is going nowhere, and see recent moves by the Philippines and Malaysia to appease China) should encourage him to create a real partnership with India, as China continues to rampage in the South China Sea.

Trump is likely to ramp down the Iran nuclear deal; however, in regards to both Afghanistan and the Chinese takeover of Pakistan (aka the China Pakistan Economic Corridor), India's good relations with Iran may help it be a go-between for the US.

On Pakistan, Trump may be far more willing to cooperate with India in the raising of Balochistan as a human rights issue, and to actively dissuade the ISI from further mischief in India using proxies.

India will have to position Balochistan as an issue that hurts American interests and helps Chinese interests.

National Security, Terrorism and Defence: Barring stray incidents of lone wolf terrorism, the US has not seen much terrorist violence as its geographical isolation and fairly effective security mechanisms post 9/11 have saved it from major problems.

India has a limited role in these concerns, except to stress that almost all the terrorism in the US and the rest of the world emanates from, or has strong connections, to Pakistan.

A possible retreat from Afghanistan by the US will see them keen on bringing Indian troops into the war effort there, which may be a good thing for India to resist.

A possible retreat from the Middle East (as Trump realises that the US does not need Arab oil any more, thanks to shale oil and gas) will create problems for India, and again the US will try to induce India to step in to the vacuum: Resist!

Infrastructure and Healthcare: Trump has promised to end expensive foreign wars and bring back the trillions thus saved into rebuilding the physical and human infrastructure and capabilities. India may not have much of a role in this.

Similarly the problems of Obamacare and skyrocketing health costs suggest that there will not be much for India except in exporting generic drugs and nurses.

Tax Policy and the US Supreme Court: High tax rates in the US (around 35%) are encouraging MNCs to park their money abroad and to do tax-inversion acquisitions. Trump is expected to pack the court with conservative judges. India has no role to play in either.

Climate change: Trump's instinct is to deny global warming. Thus the momentum towards the (anyway toothless) Paris Agreements will be reduced. This is a net good for India so that it is not browbeaten into unnecessary restrictions (on coal-based thermal power plants) based on fashionable left-wing causes.

On the other hand, India is one of the nations most vulnerable to global warming and sea-level rises, so it may need to act on its own to push for renewables, especially solar photo-voltaics.

Immigration: Much of what was said by Trump regarding Mexican and Muslim immigrants during the campaign was pure rhetoric.

The fact of the matter is that if the US needs certain immigrants, it will accept them, even if they are Martians with three heads. Thus, skilled Indians should find it not very difficult to immigrate to the US.

This issue is a red herring so far as India is concerned, although racism is definitely an issue and is on the upswing: You need scapegoats when times are tough, and immigrants (especially nonwhites) are always convenient innocents to be sacrificed.

The visible movement of Indians to the US through the IT services route will be resisted. Trump may make it more difficult and expensive to get H1-B type visas. IT services will need to hire more natives, or do more work offshore.

India has a difficult task: Find out where its interests and America's coincide or converge, and emphasise them. This must be done by simultaneously keeping India's long-term best interests in mind.

A bit of marketing, a bit of positioning, and a lot of strategic thinking is required, and all this should be in aid of India's strategic intent: Becoming the third pole in a global G3 and aiming for Numero Uno.

Photograph: Alex Wroblewski/Reuters
India and Japan on Friday sought a peaceful solution to the territorial disputes in the strategic South China Sea, saying parties involved in the matter must not resort to "threat or use of force", in remarks that could anger China which is opposed to any outside interference.

After their comprehensive talks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe also reiterated their commitment to respect freedom of navigation and overflight, and unimpeded lawful commerce, based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

"In this context, they urged all parties to resolve disputes through peaceful means without resorting to threat or use of force and exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities, and avoid unilateral actions that raise tensions," according to a joint statement issued after their talks.

"Regarding the South China Sea, the two prime ministers stressed the importance of resolving the disputes by peaceful means, in accordance with universally recognised principles of international law including the UNCLOS," it said.

The remarks may not go down well with China, which has been asking countries to refrain from "interfering" in the disputed South China Sea.

Ahead of Modi's visit, a Chinese state media report on Wednesday warned India it may suffer "great losses" in bilateral trade if it joins Japan in asking China to abide by an international tribunal's ruling quashing Beijing's claims over the SCS dispute.

As the leaders of the state parties to the UNCLOS, Modi and Abe "reiterated their view that all parties should show utmost respect to the UNCLOS, which establishes the international legal order of the seas and oceans".

This assumes significance given that China had rejected a verdict given by an international tribunal striking down Chinese claims over the SCS.

China has been making aggressive advances in the strategic region -- parts of which are also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei - by rapidly building artificial islets that experts fear could be potentially used as military posts.

China claims by far the largest portion of territory -- an area defined by the "nine-dash line" which stretches hundreds of miles south and east from its most southerly province of Hainan.

China has also objected in the past to India's Oil and Natural Gas Commission undertaking exploration at the invitation of Vietnam in the SCS, which is believed to be rich in undersea deposits of oil and gas.

India and the US have been calling for freedom of passage in the international waters, much to the discomfort to China.

Modi and Abe asked North Korea, which in September claimed to have conducted its fifth and potentially most powerful nuclear test, to comply with its international obligations towards the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

India and Japan's interest have been converging on strategic issues like the dispute in the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion of trade passes annually, and on the threat Japan perceive from a nuclear-armed North Korea.

"The two prime ministers reaffirmed their determination to cooperate against proliferation activities posing a threat to the region," the joint statement said.

India and Japan also called for "expeditious reforms of the UN including the UNSC to make it more legitimate, effective and representative, taking into account the contemporary realities of the 21st century and reiterated their resolve to work closely with like-minded partners to realise this goal."

"The two Prime Ministers reiterated their support for each other's candidature, based on the firmly shared recognition that India and Japan are legitimate candidates for permanent membership in an expanded UNSC," the statement said.

India and Japan along with Germany and Brazil are part of G4 nations, who support each other's bids for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council.

"Prime Minister Abe briefed Prime Minister Modi on Japan's efforts to further contribute to peace, stability and prosperity of the region including through initiatives such as 'Proactive Contribution to Peace,' the statement said.

It said Modi acknowledged Japan's positive contribution to regional and global stability and prosperity.

"Recognising India as the largest democracy and a fast growing large economy in the Asia-Pacific region, Japan firmly supports India's membership in the APEC. The two Prime Ministers decided to work towards liberalisation and facilitation of trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region," the statement added.

On clean energy cooperation, "they further desired to strengthen bilateral energy cooperation as it will contribute not only to the energy development of both countries, but also to worldwide energy security, energy access and climate change issue."

The two prime ministers welcomed the early entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and reaffirmed their commitment to work together in developing the rules for successful implementation of the agreement.

Photograph: Ministry of External Affairs
Making an exception, Japan on Friday signed a historic civil nuclear cooperation deal with India, opening the door for collaboration between their industries in the field even as the countries signed nine other agreements in various areas to bolster bilateral ties.

The agreements, including the one for cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy, marks a historic step in their engagement to build a clean energy partnership, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after wide-ranging talks with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe.

The nuclear agreement comes after tough negotiations for over six years between the two countries and Abe said at the joint media interaction with Modi that he was delighted over the signing of agreement on peaceful use of nuclear energy.

"This agreement is a legal framework that India will act responsibly in peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also in Non-Proliferation regime even though India is not a participant or signatory of NPT," he said.

"It (the agreement) is in line with Japan's ambition to create a world without nuclear weapons," said Abe, whose country has traditionally adopted a tough stand on proliferation issues having been the only victim of atomic bombings during World War II.

He noted that India in September 2008 had made its intention of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and also announced moratorium on nuclear tests.

"Today's signing of the Agreement for Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy marks a historic step in our engagement to build a clean energy partnership," Modi said.

"Our cooperation in this field will help us combat the challenge of Climate Change. I also acknowledge the special significance that such an agreement has for Japan," he said and thanked Abe, Japanese government and Parliament for their support to this agreement.

Other nations who have signed civil nuclear deal with India include the US, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, France, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia.

In his remarks, Prime Minister Modi said as democracies, the two countries "support openness, transparency and the rule of law".

"We are also united in our resolve to combat the menace of terrorism, especially cross-border terrorism," he said.

Later, speaking at a Banquet hosted by Abe in his honour, Modi said there is also a lot that the two sides can do together as close partners, not just for the benefit of their societies, but also for the region and the whole world.

"Our capacities could also combine to respond to both, the opportunities and challenges that we jointly face in present times. And, together with the global community we can, and we must, combat the rising threats of radicalisation, extremism and terrorism," he said.

Abe pushed for universalization of the NPT, entry into force of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and start of negotiations at the earliest on Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty.

"The two prime ministers welcomed the signing of the Agreement between the Government of Japan and the Government of the Republic of India for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy which reflects a new level of mutual confidence and strategic partnership in the cause of clean energy, economic development and a peaceful and secure world," said a joint statement.

Modi said deeper economic engagement, growth of trade, manufacturing and investment ties, focus on clean energy, partnership to secure the citizens, and cooperation on infrastructure and skill development are among key priorities.

"India and its economy are pursuing many transformations. Our aim is to become a major centre for manufacturing, investments and for the 21st century knowledge industries.

"And, in this journey, we see Japan as a natural partner. We believe there is vast scope to combine our relative advantages, whether of capital, technology or human resources, to work for mutual benefit," he said in his joint interaction.

The prime minister said that the strategic partnership between the two countries also brings peace, stability and balance to the region. It is alive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges in Asia-Pacific, he said.

The successful Malabar naval exercise has underscored the convergence in the two sides' strategic interests in the broad expanse of the waters of the Indo-Pacific, Modi said.

On his part, Abe mentioned the high speed train corridor between Mumbai and Ahmedabad that is being built with the help of Japan, saying the project symbolizes a new dimension in the special relations.

Prime Minister Abe said the designing of the project will begin by the end of this year, construction will begin in 2018 and the high speed train will be in service from 2023.

He said Modi, who will travel by one such train to Kobe city on Saturday from Tokyo, will see for himself that it is the safest technology in the world.

The Japanese private sector also would be setting up an institute of manufacturing in India to train about 30,000 people in 10 years, particularly in rural areas, Abe said.

Abe said Japan will set up a tourism bureau in New Delhi to encourage people-to-people contacts. He said he wants to work with Modi in liberalizing the visa rules.

"India-Japan relations have the greatest potential in the world. Strong India is in the best interest of Japan and strong Japan is in the best interest of India," Abe said.

Noting that he had met Modi for the third time in one year, Abe praised him, saying he had a "global vision" and was a "decisive leader".

Photographs: Ministry of External Affairs
All Opposition Congress members of the Punjab legislative assembly on Friday submitted their resignation to the assembly secretary in Chandigarh to protest the Supreme Courts ruling favouring Haryana on the Satluj Yamuna Link Canal issue.

State Congress chief Amarinder Singh, meanwhile, launched a fresh attack on Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, alleging Badal has failed to protect the interest of the people and announced that his party will take out a rally on the issue on Sunday.

The 42 MLAs, including leader of Opposition Charanjit Singh Channi, Sunil Jakhar, Sukhjinder Randhawa and Balbir Singh Sidhu, went to the assembly and submitted their resignations to Assembly Secretary Shashi Lakhanpal Mishra as Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal was not present.

Senior Congress leaders, including Amarinder Singh, Partap Singh Bajwa and Ambika Soni accompanied the MLAs.

I will submit the resignations to the Speaker. He will see whether to accept them or not, Mishra said.

A Congress spokesperson denied reports in a section of the media that they have submitted the resignations to the governor.

Speaking to mediapersons, Amarinder said, I am not in Parliament and our MLAs are not in Vidhan Sabha. We will go to the people. We are going to burn the effigies of the government for not protecting Punjabs rights.

We will hold a rally at the tail-end of the canal system in southernmost part of Punjab on Sunday, which will be affected (by the verdict), he said.

Hitting out at Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, the state Congress chief asked, Why is Badal not protecting Punjabs interests? Is it because he has made a lot of money and doesnt care what happens in his area?

The water dispute assumed a new dimension with the Supreme Court on Thursday holding as unconstitutional the 2004 law passed by Punjab to terminate the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal water sharing agreement with neighboring states.

All the questions have been answered in the negative, a five-judge bench headed by Justice A R Dave said, while pronouncing its decision on the Presidential reference.

The judgment makes it clear that the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004 is unconstitutional and Punjab could not have taken a unilateral decision to terminate the water sharing agreement with Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi and Chandigarh.

The bench, which also included Justices P C Ghose, Shiva Kirti Singh, A K Goel and Amitava Roy, was unanimous in holding that all the five questions of Presidential reference have to be answered in the negative.

The judgment implies that the 2004 Act was not in consonance with the apex court judgment of 2003 which had mandated the construction of the SYL canal that was stalled.

IMAGE: Members of Punjab Congress Legislature Party tender their resignations on Friday. Photograph: @capt_amarinder/Twitter


Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Friday took many by surprise when he visited State Bank of Indias Parliament House branch to exchange demonetised currency notes with new ones, and hit out at Narendra Modi saying the Prime Minister would not understand the problems people were facing due to the Centres move.

Attacking the prime minister, Gandhi said the government should be for the poor and not for just 15-20 persons.

The Congress vice-president said that he was standing in queue as the people were suffering while exchanging their demonetised 500 and 1,000 rupee notes.

There is no crorepati in the queue. Poor people are standing in queue for several hours. I want to say that the government should be for poor people and not for just 15-20 persons.

People are facing hardships that's why I have come to join them. I am here to exchange my Rs 4,000 with new notes, the Congress vice president told reporters here.

Neither you (reporters), nor your crorepati owners, nor the prime minister will understand the problems faced by people, Gandhi said.

The Congress leader, who reached the SBIs Parliament House branch at around 4.25 pm, waited for his turn in queue to exchange his old notes.

He also interacted with people standing in queue and listened to their troubles.

Many people took selfie with Gandhi. There was a huge crowd in the bank with people desperately trying to exchange old notes. They faced inconveniences as Gandhi reached there and some of people tried to catch a glimpse of him. Many bank staffers were also seen clicking pictures of Gandhi.

He was at the bank for about 40 minutes.

While there were excited people and staffers wanting to catch a glimpse of Gandhi, many complained about his visit as there was a lot of a chaos inside the bank.

Police had to intervene as mediapersons jostled with each other to get a perfect shot of Gandhi standing in the queue in front of the exchange counter.

Special Protection Group and paramilitary personnel and police formed a circle around the queue in which Gandhi was standing to keep camera persons at bay.

After he left, a man at the bank said, Why do they have to do politics at the expense of the common man?

The Bharatiya Janata Party, meanwhile, mocked Rahuls visit to the bank as a photo opportunity and said it only underlined the demonetisation moves success as privileged dynasties will now have to queue up and follow the law.

Taking a swipe at the Congress vice president, Union minister Prakash Javadekar said had he queued up in the Congress party and allowed the fittest to rule, then his party would have been better off.

Photographs: Vijay Verma/PTI Photo
The DND flyway connecting Delhi and neighbouring Noida will remain toll free for commuters with the Supreme Court on Friday refusing to stay the Allahabad high court verdict restraining Noida Toll Bridge Company Ltd from levying cess.

A bench of Justices J S Khehar and L Nageswara Rao also asked the Comptroller and Auditor General to verify the cost of the DND flyway project and submit a report before the apex court.

We have requested the CAG to verify the cost of the project... the bench said, adding, We refuse to grant any relief.

The apex court had on October 28 refused to interfere with the HC order restraining the company, saying it will pass directions after Diwali vacations.

On the toll collecting firms plea for interim stay on HC order, the apex court bench headed by the chief justice had said, You have only ten km of highway and you claim that you have made a road to the moon. ... You have done well but not something (great).

The firm had said the high court did not take into account all aspects and submitted that factors like interest on construction cost, depreciation and maintenance expenses, which come to around Rs 12.5 lakh per day, have not been duly considered.

The high court, on October 26, had brought cheers to millions of commuters ruling that no toll will be collected henceforth from those using the 9.2 km-long, eight-lane DND flyway. The order was passed as the high court allowed a public interest litigation by the Federation of Noida Residents Welfare Association.

The PIL, filed in 2012, had challenged the levy and collection of toll in the name of user fee by the Noida Toll Bridge Company Ltd.

In an over 100-page judgment, the high court had held the user fee which is being levied/realised is not supported by the legal provisions relied upon by the Concessionaire (Noida Toll Bridge Company), Infrastructure Leaning and Financial Services (promoter and developer of the project) and Noida Authority.

The court had said that the right to levy and collect user fee from the commuters as conferred upon the concessionaire under the concession agreement suffers from excessive delegation and is contrary to the provisions Uttar Pradesh Industrial Development Act.

It had noted that the concessionaire, according to their own financial statements, has recovered Rs 810.18 crore (approx) from toll income from the date of commencement of the project till March 31, 2014 and after deduction of operation and maintenance expenses and corporate income tax, the surplus was Rs 578.80 crore (computed before interest, depreciation, and lease rental received by the Concessionaire).

They have further realised user fee/toll two-and-a-half years thereafter between April 1, 2014 and September 30, 2016 which, as per the collection of user fee in the year 2013-14 would work out to an additional sum of Rs 300 crore (approx).

We are, therefore, more than satisfied that the concessionaire cannot now recover the user fees from the users/commuters of the Noida Toll Bridge the DND Flyover, the high court had said.
The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre and Chhattisgarh government to find a peaceful solution to the Naxal problem in the state and adopt a "pragmatic" approach towards life.

A bench of Justices M B Lokur and Adarsh Goel said there has to be some peaceful solution to this problem, after the Chhattisgarh government gave an oral assurance that no coercive action will be taken against social activist Nandini Sundar and others till November 15.

On November 7, Delhi University Professor Sundar, Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Archana Prasad and others were booked on charges of murder of a tribal villager in the insurgency-hit Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

"We are trying to help you (Centre and Chhattisgarh), but you are not taking it seriously. You have to find a peaceful solution to the problem. We are not blaming you or them or anybody. You have to take a pragmatic view of life," the bench said.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said there were "authentic and contemporaneous" records which could be placed before the court against all the accused including Sundar.

Mehta's submission came after the bench said it will stay the FIR till the next date of hearing.

He urged the apex court not to form any opinion unless the record was produced before the court in a sealed cover, saying it was a "state of panic" for the country.

Senior advocate Ashok Desai, appearing for Sundar and others, informed the court that after the last hearing, an FIR was lodged against the two professors and the activists.

"This is the most astonishing thing which has ever happened, as the activists who went to the state in May were booked for the murder in November," Desai said.

Countering him, Mehta said there was "more than what meets the eye" and they will file the records in a sealed cover before the court on November 15, the next date.

Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, appearing for CBI, said political activist Manish Kunjam who was directed by the court to be provided with security has no threat perception and two Personal Security Officers have been provided by the state.

He said the Centre was not in a position to provide him security and if the court wanted, the state could upgrade it.

ASG said that in the last hearing of the case, the state government had suggested providing them with security but they refused the offer saying "they don't want to be under the eyes of police".

Police has claimed that alleged armed Naxals had killed the villager, Shamnath Baghel, with sharp weapons on late night of November 4 at his residence in Nama village under Kumakoleng gram panchayat in Tongpal area, around 450 kms from Raipur.

Baghel and some of his associates were spearheading protests against Naxal activities in their village since April this year.

An FIR was lodged against Sundar, Archana Prasad (JNU Professor), Vineet Tiwari (from Delhi's Joshi Adhikar Sansthan), Sanjay Parate (Chhattisgarh CPI-M State Secretary) and others for the murder of Baghel based on the complaint of his wife, the state police had said.

They were booked under section 120B (criminal conspiracy), 302 (murder), 147 (punishment for rioting), 148 and 149 of IPC at Tongpal police station.
'Whatever Kamala is today, it is because of my sister.'

'My sister inculcated South Indian culture and values in her,' Dr Sarala Gopalan, US Senator-elect Kamala Harris' aunt, tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier in Chennai.

IMAGE: Kamala Harris on the campaign trail.

Six years ago after Kamala Harris was elected California's attorney general I met her Chithi (mother's younger sister), Dr Sarala Gopalan in Chennai.

Six years later, when I meet Dr Gopalan -- a consultant at the Voluntary Health Services -- she is even more proud that her niece has just been elected a United States Senator, the first Indian-American Senator in the community's history.

Before the primary six years ago, Harris had called Dr Gopalan and said, 'Chithi, please pray for me, break coconuts at the temple.'

So Dr Gopalan broke coconuts at the Pillayar Ganesha temple where her mother Dr Shyamala Gopalan had once been a committee member when it was first set up.

After she was elected attorney general, Harris called her aunt and said, 'Your coconuts worked, Chithi. For every coconut you broke, I got 1,000 votes.'

So I asked Dr Gopalan whether she had broken coconuts this time too.

"Yes," she said, "I did break 108 coconuts, but without her asking me to do so. She didn't even know that I did. As attorney general, she did very well and coped up with the work. She fought to get many things done for the state of California and that is why she won (the US Senate race) by such a huge margin."

"It is not that we had long chats about what she was doing all these days," Dr Gopalan added. "It was not possible as she had a very busy schedule, but we updated ourselves and knew how she was doing."

IMAGE: Kamala Harris, left, with her youngest aunt Mahalakshmi.

"This time, my younger sister Mahalakshmi flew from Canada to be with Kamala. She has been staying with her to help her during the campaign as her mother, my elder sister, is no more."

"As my brother and myself are in India and quite far away, it was easier for my younger sister to be with Kamala," Dr Gopalan added.

"Kamala's younger sister Maya was one of Hillary Clinton's political advisors," Dr Gopalan pointed out. "Maya was with Hillary throughout her campaign, hence she could not be with Kamala at all. That was one reason why my sister decided to be by Kamala's side. Both my nieces were extremely busy during the elections."

"Mahalakshmi was with Kamala throughout the campaign, travelling with her, attending her rallies," Dr Gopalan said. "On Election Day, she was with Kamala and sent me a message at 9 45 in the morning or so when the counting was over, that Kamala had won."

"Before going to bed, Kamala spoke to me. 'Chithi...' she said, and before she could say anything more, I congratulated her on her victory. We didn't have a long conversation, she was exhausted."

"I didn't miss all the action as my sister kept telling me every minute detail about the programmes, sending me pictures of the rallies, both of them standing by the election bus, etc," Dr Gopalan said.

"After she decided to run for the Senate and before she filed the nomination, she called all of us, her aunts and uncle, and told us of her decision. We hoped for the best as we wanted the best for her. She really wanted to achieve this."

"Though she was confident of victory, she didn't want to even talk about victory. That's why she didn't plan anything till the results came out. She was saying, 'Let the results come out... I will plan a party,' etc. They had a dinner to celebrate the win, my sister told me.'

IMAGE: Dr Sarala Gopalan, Kamala Harris' aunt. Photograph: Sreeram Selvaraj

"It is funny that some newspapers like The Los Angeles Times described her as the first black woman to enter the Senate while some describe her as an Indian American. Let them write whatever they want. Whether black or brown, she is a caring, soft-hearted person who can't see anyone suffer."

"Even though she was born and brought up in America, my sister has inculcated in her South Indian culture and values. She believes in going to the temple because her mother believed in it. Kamala is what she is today because of her mother. The credit doesn't go to any other person. It is my sister, her mother, who brought her up like this," Dr Gopalan said.

"My sister (Dr Shyamala Gopalan) was a very strong woman, very hardworking, very intelligent. After doing her graduation in home science in Delhi, she went to America for higher studies with a scholarship in 1957-58. She went on to do her Masters and get a PhD. She went on to become a scientist who worked on breast cancer. She had done a lot of research on cancer and was quite well known in that field," Dr Gopalan recalled.

"She met Dr Donald Harris, a Jamaican American and married him in 1963. Kamala was born in 1964, the first grandchild in the family. My sister was a true South Indian in all aspects and loved South Indian food," Dr Gopalan remembered. "Whenever we went there, she insisted on cooking South Indian food and feeding us that."

"That is why her daughters also like South Indian food. When they come here they eat only our south Indian food. My younger sister, the best cook in the family, was cooking South Indian food for Kamala and her husband when she was there now."

"Both the girls, Kamala and Maya, loved and respected their mother a lot and she had a great influence on both of them. That is why Maya's granddaughter is named after my sister Amala Shyamala! Yes, I am a great grandaunt now!"

"Though Maya was with me for two weeks last year, Kamala hasn't had the time to come to India recently. I met her at her wedding two years ago. All of us from the family were there to celebrate the day. As she got married a Jewish American who is also a lawyer, there was a Jewish ceremony as well as an Indian ceremony with mangalsutra etc."

"The wedding was a family affair with our family, his family and very close friends attending it. There was vegetarian food for us at the feast as she knew we eat only vegetarian food."

IMAGE: Kamala Harris, right, with her youngest aunt Mahalakshmi.

"Though she missed her mother, both of us Chithis were there. The labels on the table were Sarala Chithi, Subhash Chithappa, etc."

"All of us are planning to attend her swearing-in ceremony. My brother had already planned a trip to visit his daughter. My plan is to go, be with her if everything falls in place."

"Kamala is an ambitious girl; she knew what she wanted to achieve. She wanted to be a lawyer, she did. She wanted to be attorney general, she did. She wanted to run for the Senate and she did."

"When I was there, there was an article in one newspaper listing six women who could be President one day. Kamala was on the list."

"Having known her fighting spirit, I don't think she will stop here. She is not scared of anything and will fight for everything that she aims to achieve."
The battle for Mosul: Tales of horror emerge as thousands flee clashes to oust IS

Publisher Amnesty International Author Razaw Salihy Publication Date 11 November 2016 Cite as Amnesty International, The battle for Mosul: Tales of horror emerge as thousands flee clashes to oust IS, 11 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825cfb54.html [accessed 2 November 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.

"When we came here, we walked past our village. I would walk and cry, looking around at all the destroyed houses. Everything had fallen."

This lament of an elderly woman from a village near Mosul plainly states how so many people in northern Iraq have lost so much, so quickly.

When Amnesty International spoke to her in an internally displaced persons' (IDP) camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq last week, like many others from the villages and suburbs east of Mosul, she had fled the ongoing fighting between Iraqi and coalition armed forces and the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS), bringing little more than the clothes on her back and harrowing tales of life under IS rule and under mortars and air strikes. Many have already been displaced several times to escape hunger and poverty as result of IS repression in their villages, as well as clashes. They have lost most of their possessions, property and livelihoods.

"Militias in Baghdad forced me out of my house in 2006, and I moved to Mosul to keep my family safe. I started from nothing there and rebuilt. In one night I lost it all. I can't go to Baghdad, and even if Mosul is liberated, I don't think it will be safe again. I don't know what else can happen to us now", said a displaced man from Samah neighbourhood, east of Mosul city.

Caught in the crossfire and used as human shields

Those whose areas come under intensified attacks as the Iraqi army advances, are either forcibly moved by IS, or prevented from escaping to safer areas, to be used as human shields, while others manage to hide in relatives' homes.

On 1 November, some 25 relatives were sheltering together in Gogjali when they said their house was struck by a rocket, killing three and injuring five - including three children. A survivor, whose husband, brother-in-law, nine-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter sustained shrapnel wounds, told Amnesty International:

"It was 7:30 am, we were all having breakfast when I heard a whistling sound and then a rocket fell right in the middle of the room, directly on my aunt. She was killed instantly, as fire spread, I could see her hand flying off. The matriarch of the house was also killed right thereMy two children were injured, and another baby sitting on her grandmother's knees had her arm amputated. IS fighters were right outside the door and wouldn't even allow us to leave to tend to the injured or remove the bodiesWe brought them to the back door We couldn't even transport our injured to the hospital until two days later. My children and husband are there, but I am stuck in the camp with no permission to leave. I am so worried about them."

IS fighters further deliberately endanger civilians by stationing themselves in and around civilian homes, including on rooftops. One displaced resident of Samah neighbourhood, east of Mosul, explained their tactic:

"I saw what they do. [An IS fighter] stands by a house and sends two mortars towards the army, then picks up his weapon and runs off to another house before he is hit. The army think he's still there and mortars fall on the house."

One group of 27 relatives hid for three days under the stairs of their house. Among them was a 25-day-old baby whose mother fled the city of Mosul to the village of Bazwaya, some 18km away, the day after she gave birth.

"The children saw the Daeshi [Arabic colloquial term for a person affiliated with IS] running behind our house. They were shooting at the army from the house next door. When the mortar fell on the house, it brought one of our walls down. My husband and his brothers had come out of that room seconds before. They could have been buried under the rubble.".

Hunger, fear and punishment under IS

Displaced villagers sheltering in camps described a life of hunger and fear under IS rule. "We sold what we owned for food - our mattresses, our blankets. We broke our furniture apart to make firewood for cooking. It was like moving back in time," said a mother who fled Bazwaya.

Most children who lived under IS rule were taken out of school by their parents, either out of fear of IS "brainwashing" or to alleviate poverty. Kids who tried to earn money from jobs such as selling sweets and nuts by the road side often received severe punishments from IS.

"They [IS] would take my son [aged 16] most days and give him lashes and bring him back to me, barely able to stand. All because we couldn't afford the fine they imposed for selling things on the street. He'd still go back the next day to sell things. His father has a disability and can't work," she said.

One woman said she did not remove her headdress (khimar) even when the Iraqi army entered the village and told them they were safe: "I thought they [IS] might come out of those tunnels they have dug in the village and kill the soldiers, then behead us if they saw us without the khimar.

You never know where they might come from. They gave my brother 40 lashes because his wife stepped outside to throw rubbish away without covering her face."

Families divided by security screening

Amnesty International observed how families arriving at Khazir IDP camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KR-I) are seeing their relatives for the first time in over two years through wire fences, as most are prevented from leaving the camp as they wait for security forces to carry out security screenings of all males arriving with them.

Whatever the outcome of the ongoing battle for Mosul, IS's brutal rule over the surrounding swathe of northern Iraq for the past two years has left a trail of destruction and trauma, the effects of which could linger for some time to come.

The families we spoke to are safe from IS now, but many fret about what the future will bring. How long will the fighting last? Will the forces who recapture their homes allow them to return? Will they have anything to go back to? Only time will tell.

This blog was first published by the International Business Times here .

Copyright notice:  Copyright Amnesty International
Four things you should know about the other election this week

Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 11 November 2016 Cite as Amnesty International, Four things you should know about the other election this week, 11 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825d7d94.html [accessed 2 November 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.

Next week, millions of people around the world will be glued to their TV screens and social media feeds, watching as the USA decides who will lead the most powerful country on earth.

Around 3,000 kilometers away, in a much smaller nation in the middle of Central America, another election will take place just a couple of days earlier. Although Nicaragua's presidential election lacks the fame of the Clinton-Trump race, it is every bit as controversial.

President Daniel Ortega, leader of the ruling Sandinista Front for National Liberation, will run for office for the third consecutive time. His wife, Rosario Murillo, is his running mate.

Both have been accused of leading a campaign to stamp out any form of opposition.

For the six million people living in resource-rich Nicaragua, political scandals are nothing new. They are symptoms of the deteriorating human rights situation facing one of the most invisible countries in the Americas - where basic natural resources such as land and water mark the front lines of a battle between the powerful few and the marginalized majorities.

Here are four things you should know are taking place in the backdrop to Nicaragua's elections:

One: Development, for some

In 2013, the National Assembly of Nicaragua passed a new law to pave the way for construction of a new interoceanic canal to rival Panama's. If finished, it will connect the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea and, it is argued, inject millions of dollars into the country's economy, including by generating tens of thousands of jobs.

The canal, however, will likely also force tens of thousands of people, including many Indigenous communities, off their lands and affect their livelihoods and vital natural resources such as water with and impact for generations to come, which would effectively outweigh any possible economic benefits of the project.

The project was also used as an excuse to pass a law that effectively gives carte blanche to the Nicaraguan government to allow sub-development projects (including the exploitation of vital natural resources) to go ahead, regardless of what the many communities affected by them think.

Two: Women, second class citizens

Women living in poverty across Nicaragua are still the main victims of maternal mortality, and the country has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy of the Continent, with 28% of women giving birth before the age 18. In spite of this, women are also subjected to some of the harshest abortion laws on earth. Abortion is banned in all circumstances, even if it is vital to save the woman's life.

In a context in which impunity for gender-based crimes remains, local organizations working on women's rights face constant threats. In June, a shelter run by the Civil Foundation for Support to Women Victims of Violence was raided. The authorities have not opened an investigation into the incident. And this is unfortunately one case among many others.

Three: Indigenous Peoples' rights trampled

Indigenous Peoples across Nicaragua are also treated as second-class citizens, their rights constantly trampled on and their voices unheard as their demands often conflict with powerful economic interests.

Last year, in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) -home to the mythical "Mosquitia" - a violent struggle over territory erupted. Indigenous Miskito communities were subjected to threats, attacks, assassinations, sexual assault and forced displacement by non-Indigenous settlers. The state has utterly failed to offer them effective protection. In that context, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures in favour of some Miskito communities, calling on Nicaragua to protect them.

In May 2016, leaders of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities Rama-Kriol said that an agreement for the construction of the Grand Canal of Nicaragua had been signed without an effective consultation process, in violation of their rights to free prior and informed consent.

Four: The 'crime' of defending human rights

Activists working to defend basic human rights and access to natural resources have been subjected to systematic harassment and attacks aimed at silencing their demands. These attacks are very rarely investigated.

The grant of precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called for measures to protect human rights defenders from the Center for Justice and Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, who had received death threats due to their work on Indigenous rights.

Additionally, the Coordinator of the National Council for Defense of the Land, Lake and National Sovereignty, recently reported intimidation and harassment against her and her family. She has been actively denouncing the possible impacts of the Grand Interoceanic Canal in Nicaraguan peasant farmers communities.

Nicaragua is very quickly and dangerously slipping back into some of the darkest times the country has seen in decades, with the government turning a blind eye to violations of the human rights they have promised to uphold and punishing anyone who "steps out of line".

This strategy is both dangerously misguided and illegal.

By failing to protect basic human rights, guarantee access to natural resources essential for life and respect those defending them, the Nicaraguan authorities are condemning millions to a future of inequality and suffering.

But there is another way. Whoever is elected to lead this Central American nation for the next five years must take a hard look at the country's human rights discourse and the reality for millions of people, particularly the most marginalized - and ensure the government's future priorities are properly aligned.

The alternative could simply force the country into a free fall that will be impossibly challenging to recover from.

This opinion piece was originally published by IPS

http://www.ipsnews.net/2016/11/four-things-you-should-know-about-the-other-election-this-week/

Copyright notice:  Copyright Amnesty International
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.
Venezuela: RSF decries government harassment of well-known TV journalist

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 27 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Venezuela: RSF decries government harassment of well-known TV journalist, 27 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825e5674.html [accessed 2 November 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) condemns the Venezuelan government's harassment of Globovision's well-known TV host Melissa Turibbi. In the latest serious violation of her rights, at a time of great tension for the opposition media, intelligence officers searched and ransacked her home on 24 October.

The raid was carried out by five members of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN), the government's espionage and counter-espionage agency, who said they were looking for her when they arrived at her home and then entered without a warrant or any other authorization.

Melissa Turibbi was away on work trip at the time. The only persons there were her son, who suffers from autism, and his nanny. After shutting the boy in a room, the agents proceeded to conduct a thorough search and ransack the apartment. They seemed to be looking for her computer and personal documents and left after finding nothing.

This is not the first time Turibbi has been subjected to this kind of pressure. A specialist in politics and military affairs, she is well known in Venezuela for being outspoken and for criticizing President Nicolas Maduro's government, especially on "Reportes Estelar," the programme she hosts for Globovision.

After temporarily losing consciousness in a car accident on 11 February, Turibbi was found by members of the Bolivarian National Police (PNB), who recognized her and asked her to accompany them. During the ensuing interrogation, she was insulted and, while her hands were bound, she was roughed up and accused of "resisting the authorities."

She was then taken from one police station to another and subjected to further physical violence without being allowed to contact her family or lawyer. She was finally released the next day after several hours in a hospital with respiratory problems. She filed a complaint with the public prosecutor's office but no action was taken.

"We condemn this grave violation of Melissa Turibbi's rights and urge the government to stop harassing and censoring Venezuelan journalists, regardless of their political views or the editorial policies of the media they work for," said Emmanuel Colombie, the head of RSF's Latin America desk.

"The medieval methods used by Venezuela's authorities to censor the government's critics are unacceptable and very worrying for the future of the media in country currently embroiled in a major crisis."

When reached by RSF, Turibbi said she would not file a complaint about the burglary attempt because no action was taken in response to her previous complaint.

Turibbi used to co-host a programme with Vladimir Villega called "Melissa y Vladimir" but was removed on 24 May after interviewing the then parliamentarian Ricardo Sanchez, who was very critical of the pro-government militias. She attributed her removal to direct government pressure.

Tense street protests

Venezuela is currently experiencing a major economic and social crisis, with massive street demonstrations being held in Caracas and the rest of the country in recent weeks and the opposition now calling for a general strike. The climate is extremely tense and many attacks on media personnel have been reported.

During an extraordinary session of the national assembly on 23 October, a group of armed government-supporters stormed into the chamber and disrupted the proceedings. Three journalists were threatened at gunpoint, one was physically attacked and equipment was stolen from many others.

Espacio Publico, a local NGO, reported that three Peruvian journalists working for the Mexican TV channel Televisa  Ricardo Burgos, Leonidas Chavez and Armando Munoz  and Rodrigo Abd, an Argentine photographer with the Associated Press, were denied entry to Venezuela yesterday, shortly after landing in Caracas with the aim of covering a major anti-government demonstration.





Immigration officials at Caracas international airport said they did not have valid work visas and them put on flights back to their home countries. RSF condemned the use of such censorship methods on the eve of big protests on 1 September.





According to Espacio Publico, no fewer than ten journalists were attacked during yesterday's demonstrations.





Venezuela is ranked 139th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Main defendant in trial says accused crime reporter is not guilty

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 29 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Main defendant in trial says accused crime reporter is not guilty, 29 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825e69c4.html [accessed 2 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

After ten months in provisional detention, young Belarusian blogger Eduard Palchys finally left prison as a partially free man at the end of his trial today before a Minsk court, which found him guilty of "inciting hatred" and "distributing pornographic material."





The court sentenced him to 21 months of "release under surveillance" but, on the grounds of his time in pre-trial detention, reduced this to one month. This means he can live at home but for the next month will have to respect a curfew and report regularly to the police, and will not be able to leave his home town without police permission.





The court convicted him in connection with blog posts criticizing Russian foreign policy in Ukraine and Belarus.





"We are relieved that Eduard Palchys is finally out of prison and reunited with his family," said Johann Bihr, the head of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk at Reporters Without Borders (RSF).





"But we are appalled by the court's decision to convict him. This blogger should never have been prosecuted for his posts, which come under the right to free speech, and should not have spent a single day in detention."





Palchys is the founder of 1863x.com, a blog that is often critical of Russian foreign policy. He was arrested in January in Russia and was extradited in May to Belarus, where he remained in detention until today.





Belarusian human rights groups regarded him as a political prisoner and campaigned energetically for his release. Demonstrations were held every day outside the court during his trial, which began on 14 October.





Palchys has announced his intention to resume posting on his blog as soon as the authorities return his computer. However, another complaint against him is due to be examined on 3 November and could lead to 1863x.com being banned for "extremism."





Asked about the state of freedom of expression in Belarus, Palchys replied: "That depends on how many years you are ready to spend behind bars."





Andrey Bastunets, the head of the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ), told RSF that Palchys' arrest, trial and conviction were typical of the drastic curbs on free speech in Belarus. The relatively mild sentence was linked to the government's current desire for rapprochement with the European Union and showed that a dialogue on human rights was possible, he added.





Belarus is ranked 157th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Cumhuriyet, latest victim of "never-ending purge" of Turkish media

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 31 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Cumhuriyet, latest victim of "never-ending purge" of Turkish media, 31 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825e6e74.html [accessed 2 November 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) is appalled by the accelerating extinction of media pluralism in Turkey, with a police raid on Cumhuriyet, one of the last major opposition dailies, at dawn today, less than 48 hours after a decree dissolving 15 Kurdish media outlets, and with the Internet subject to long cuts in the southeast.

In the raid on Cumhuriyet, the police arrested at least 12 journalists and other employees including managing editor Murat Sabuncu, and confiscated the computers of two journalists, Turhan Gunay and Hakan Kara, who were also arrested. Arrest warrants were issued for at least two other Cumhuriyet employees who are currently abroad.

"Cumhuriyet is once again the target of persecution, another 15 media have been closed and there is hardly anyone left to cover this," RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

"If Turkey does not stop using the state of emergency to kill off media freedom it will soon be too late. At this rate, media pluralism will be a distant memory before long. Are people sufficiently aware of the dramatic change taking place in this country, where no media outlet seems to be safe from this never-ending purge?"

Cumhuriyet had established itself in recent years as one of Turkey's leading independent newspapers, winning the 2015 RSF-TV5 Monde Press Freedom Prize in the media category because of its fight for media freedom in an increasingly hostile environment and its courageous coverage of the most sensitive issues.

Former editor-in-chief Can Dundar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul have been sentenced to five years in prison for revealing details about Turkish arms deliveries to Islamist groups in Syria, and are facing an additional charge of "helping a terrorist organization."

Another 15 media outlets dissolved

The last leading media outlets that support the Kurdish political movement were dissolved by decree on the evening of 29 October and their offices were quickly placed under seal. They include the DIHA and JINHA news agencies. They also include the dailies Azadiya Welat and Ozgur Gundem, both of which had ceased to operate in August, when they were closed by force.

The closure of critical media by decree has become almost routine under the state of emergency that was declared on 20 July. A total of 102 media outlets were dissolved at the end of July, followed by a score of TV and radio stations at the start of October.

Internet cuts in the southeast

Internet access is meanwhile badly disrupted in southeastern Anatolia, where the population is mostly Kurdish. The problems began on 26 October, shortly after Diyarbakir's joint mayors, Gultan Kisanak and Firat Anli, were arrested, triggering a wave of protests. Initially covering ten cities, the Internet blackouts have been limited to Diyarbakir since the third day, according to the TurkeyBlocks website.





"The Internet in Diyarbakir is now like the water in the village where I was born, limited to two hours a day," Mahmut Bozarslan, a correspondent for AFP, Voice of America and Al Monitor, said in a tweet on 27 October. He told RSF that the Internet cuts were the worst he had ever experienced.





"The cuts come when there are demonstrations against police operations, and prevent us from working and reporting these events for our media outlets," he said on 28 October. Referring to the leader of the pro-Kurdish party HDP, he added: "The latest cut begun just before the news conference by [Selahattin] Demirtas and ended an hour afterwards, too late for us."





Murat Gures , the managing editor of the Gaziantep-based daily Ayintab, told RSF that he was finding it extremely difficult to produce his newspaper because of the Internet cuts. The Internet was cut half an

hour after the HDP issued a call for demonstrations on 26 October.





Nearly 700 journalists stripped of press cards





RSF learned yesterday that two leading journalists, Dogan Akin and Hasan Cemal, have had their press cards withdrawn by the General Directorate for Information and Media (BYEGM), an offshoot of the prime minister's office.





Akin is the editor of the T24 news website while Cemal is a T24 columnist and founder of the P24 NGO. He used to be a columnist for the newspaper Milliyet until fired in February 2013 after he criticized then Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.





Since the start of the state of emergency, the BYEGM has rescinding no fewer than 670 press cards, in most cases, the cards of journalists who worked for media outlets dissolved by decree.





Already ranked as low as 151st out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index, Turkey has experienced an unprecedented crackdown since the 15 July coup attempt and the ensuing imposition of a state emergency, which has been used to silence critics, close media, and strip journalists of press cards and passports. At least 130 journalists are currently jailed.





Read RSF's September 2016 report on Turkey: " State of emergency, state of arbitrary."


RSF asks Morocco to end all reporting restrictions in Western Sahara

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 4 November 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, RSF asks Morocco to end all reporting restrictions in Western Sahara, 4 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825e8134.html [accessed 2 November 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) calls on the Moroccan authorities to stop violating the rights of Sahrawi and foreign journalists to cover developments in Western Sahara.

By detaining reporters during demonstrations, putting Sahrawi citizen journalists on trial and deporting foreign journalists, the Moroccan authorities make life impossible for media personnel and maintain an arbitrary control over reporting in this territory.

Morocco currently controls more than 80% of Western Sahara, which is regarded by the United Nations as a non-self-governing territory.

The UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) is supposed one day to organize a referendum in which the territory's inhabitants would determine its future status. Meanwhile it continues to monitor the 1991 ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front.

"What residents say when interviewed is damning for the Moroccan authorities," said Yasmine Kacha, the head of RSF's North Africa desk.

"How much longer will these restrictions on reporting freedom be maintained? It is urgent and necessary that journalists should be free to report what is happening in this extremely tense territory and, in particular, to shed light on human rights violations, which MINURSO is not allowed to monitor."

One of the latest media freedom violations was the deportation of French freelance journalist Camille Lavoix on 23 October from the Western Saharan city of Dakhla, where she had been reporting for M le magazine (published by Le Monde). While she was detained, her SIM card and email accounts were suspended. She was the fifth foreign journalist to have been deported by Morocco since the start of the year.

Said Amidan and, Brahim Laajail two citizen journalists who report for Equipe Media Sahara, were arrested in the southern Moroccan city of Guelmim on 30 September and were held for three days.

Charged with "attacking public official," they think the real reason for their arrest was the fact they had been accompanying Spanish activists who had come to investigate the humanitarian situation in Western Sahara

The charge is punishable by up to a year in prison and a fine of 5,000 dirhams (460 euros). They appeared in court in Guelmim on 1 November, when their trial was adjourned until 15 January.

RASD-TV reporter Nazha Elkhaledi was arrested on 21 August while covering a demonstration by Sahrawi women in Foum El Ouad, a town near the Western Saharan city of Laayoune.

Other reporting bans, especially during demonstrations, have been reported to RSF.

Morocco is ranked 131art out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Another journalist killed in Helmand province

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 4 November 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Another journalist killed in Helmand province, 4 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825e85c4.html [accessed 2 November 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 is saddened to learn that Nematullah Zahir, a journalist with Aryana TV, was killed instantly today when his car went over a mine in Sorgur, in the southern province of Helmand.

His driver and two other journalists in the car behind theirs were wounded by the blast but their injuries were not life-threatening. Zahir had gone to cover the fighting in Helmand, the site of fierce clashes between government forces and the Taliban for the past six months.

RSF offers its condolences to Zahir's family and colleagues. His tragic death is a reminder of the dangers to which journalists operating in war zones are exposed.

Zahir is the third journalist to be killed in Helmand this year. David Gilkey, a US journalist working for National Public Radio, and his interpreter, Afghan journalist Zabihullah Tamanna, were killed in a Taliban attack near Marjah, in Helmand province, on 5 June.

Afghanistan is ranked 120th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Indian news channel suspended for 24 hours over terrorism coverage

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 7 November 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Indian news channel suspended for 24 hours over terrorism coverage, 7 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825e9714.html [accessed 2 November 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 today condemned an order by the Indian government suspending the news channel NDTV for 24 hours over its coverage of an attack on a military base in January. The press freedom organization called on the authorities to stop using national security as a pretext for silencing the media.

Since June, the Indian government has had the power to issue closure orders of up to 30 days without authorization by a judge. NDTV has been ordered off the air for 24 hours from midnight on 9 November.

The order was issued by the inter-ministerial committee of the ministry of information and broadcasting, which said the channel disclosed "strategically-sensitive details" about the Pathankot air force base when it was attacked by terrorists suspected to be from Pakistan.

The order, published two days ago, said the channel's report included details of fighter aircraft, munitions stores, rocket-launchers, mortars, helicopters and fuel tanks which was likely to be used by the terrorists themselves or their handlers and "had the potential to cause massive harm not only to the national security, but also to lives of civilians and defence personnel."

Seven Indian soldiers were killed in the attack.

The committee also said the channel had breached the code that bans live coverage of anti-terrorist operations by security forces.

"This penalty is a deterrent not only to the channel, but also to all news organizations whose editorial line may not meet the authorities' approval," said Benjamin Ismail, head of RSF's Asia-Pacific desk.

"By forcing the channel to suspend programmes temporarily, the government knows that it is inflicting a financial penalty without requiring the payment of a fine. At the same time, it is making the public aware of the punishment."

"The response is disproportionate and we call for the penalty to be cancelled. The closure of a news organization, even temporarily, should be not be imposed by anyone other than a judge, at the risk of compromising freedom of the press as guaranteed under the Indian constitution. The 1994 regulations relating to cable operators must be reformed."

NDTV responded the same day, asserting that its coverage of the incident was similar to that of other news outlets and condemned the fact that it was singled out for punishment.

Television channels have previously been ordered off the air by the Indian government but this was the first time that a temporary suspension had been imposed under the rules on the coverage of terrorism, which have been in effect since last year.

India is ranked 133rd in the World Press Freedom Index compiled by RSF.
DRC: RSF and JED decry jamming of radio stations in Kinshasa

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 9 November 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, DRC: RSF and JED decry jamming of radio stations in Kinshasa, 9 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825ea564.html [accessed 2 November 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) and Journalist in Danger (JED), its partner organization in Democratic Republic of Congo, condemn the jamming of the country's two most popular radio stations during the past weekend, at a time of extreme political and social tension.

The jamming of Radio France Internationale (a French station) and Radio Okapi (a station operated by the United Nations mission in the DRC) began on Friday without any warning or explanation.

When asked about the jamming, information minister Lambert Mende accused Radio France Internationale of acting as "echo chamber and press attache" of the organizers of an opposition meeting. When pressed about Radio Okapi, he referred the questioner to the foreign ministry on the grounds that it is a UN station.

"The jamming of the signals of the two radio stations with the most listeners in the DRC is extremely worrying, while government minister Lambert Mende's statements show that the authorities do not deny responsibility," said Clea Kahn-Sriber, the head of RSF's Africa desk.

"In the currently fragile political context, this type of censorship could have a profound impact on public order as well as violating the Congolese public's rights. We ask the country's authorities to restore the signals of these two radio stations without delay and to stop violating freedom of information."

The jamming began on the eve of a meeting that had been scheduled by the main opposition parties in Kinshasa although the Kinshasa provincial government has banned all demonstrations ever since those held on 19 and 20 September, which the police dispersed with a great deal of violence.

The police prevented Saturday's demonstration by moving into the area where it was to have been held and occupying it for the entire day, and by using teargas to disperse groups as they began to gather in other parts of the city.

Ever since the electoral process stalled and mutated into a trial of strength between government and opposition, media outlets that serve as opposition mouthpieces or interview opposition politicians have been exposed to the possibility of closure or reprisals of other kinds.

At least ten media outlets have been closed arbitrarily in the past 24 months. After being closed for a year, two - Vital Kamhere's Canal Futur Television (CFTV) and Jean-Pierre Bemba's Canal Kin Television (CKTV) - reopened in August as a result of political dialogue boycotted by the opposition coalition known as the Rassemblement.

The DRC is ranked 152nd out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Russian journalist to appear in court after 15 months in detention

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 9 November 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Russian journalist to appear in court after 15 months in detention, 9 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825eaae4.html [accessed 2 November 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) reiterates its call for the release of Russian investigative journalist Alexander Sokolov, who will finally appear in court today in Moscow for a preliminary hearing in his case after 15 months in preventive detention on spurious charges.

Arrested in July 2015, Sokolov filed a complaint with the Moscow prosecutor's office after his detention was extended yet again in July of this year, taking it beyond 12 months. This is out of all proportion to the case against him. There was another extension on 18 October, this time until 11 November, two days after today's hearing.

The charges against him have experienced several changes since his arrest along with two other people for their supposed activities within an association that had been dormant for two years.

According to the authorities, this association was the prolongation of a group that was banned in 2010 for extremism, so Sokolov was initially charged with "extremist content" and trying to "destabilize the government."

The second of these charges was subsequently dropped for lack of evidence and, after the prosecutor's office ordered the investigators to beef up the case against him, the main charge was changed to "organizing a terrorist group," which is punishable by eight years in prison.

"We reiterate our call for Alexander Sokolov's release before his trial," RSF editor-in-chief Virginie Dangles said. "The weakness of the charges reinforces our belief that he was arrested because of his journalistic activities and not because he posed any danger to society. We hope his detention will not be extended beyond 11 November and that he will get a fair trial."

At the time of his arrest, Sokolov worked for the RBC media group, which was recently brought under government control. He has a PhD in economics for which his thesis was about the investment consequences of the embezzlement of public funds by major Russian companies.

His last, well-researched, article was about the embezzlement of 93 billion roubles (1.27 billion euros) in public funds in the construction of the Vostochny Cosmodrome. His findings seem to have been corroborated subsequently by an investigation by the Russian Court of Accounts.

Around the time of the article's publication, Sokolov and the two other defendants were arrested for helping to create a website for a group called "For Responsible Government" (IGPR "ZOV") that was campaigning for a referendum to amend the Russian constitution so that politicians could be held accountable under criminal law.

The Russian human rights group Memorial has described Sokolov and his colleagues as "political prisoners."

Russia is ranked 148th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Newspaper's financial director denied medical treatment in prison

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 11 November 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Newspaper's financial director denied medical treatment in prison, 11 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825eae94.html [accessed 2 November 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) is very worried about the health of Faiq Amirov, the imprisoned financial director of the leading opposition daily Azadlig, and calls for his immediate release and an end to the government's harassment of the newspaper.





Held on absurd charges since 20 August, Amirov is now in a critical condition, his lawyer reported on 9 November. He has not been given appropriate food for the chronic stomach ailment he suffers and has lost 20 kilos. His lawyer's request for Amirov's transfer to a centre with medical facilities has gone unanswered.





"Not only is Faiq Amirov's detention completely unjustified but he is also being denied the medical treatment he badly needs," said Johann Bihr, the head of RSF's Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.





"This situation speaks volumes about respect for human rights in Azerbaijan. We are extremely concerned about Amirov and we reiterate our call for his immediate and unconditional release. At the very least, he must be given the care that his state of health demands."





Amirov's arrest has allowed the government to create new, additional problems for Azadlig, which had already been forced to suspend publication as a result of various manoeuvres designed to throttle it economically.





Without Amirov's signature, Azadlig has been unable to interact with its bank, which has illegally refused to recognize the appointment of a new financial director. As a result, the company that prints Azadlig has not been paid and has stopped working with the newspaper.





Police investigators have meanwhile questioned a dozen persons who placed opposition party messages, advertisements, greetings or messages of condolences in Azadlig, asking them whether they paid the newspaper for these services.





Their apparent aim is to bring a criminal charges against Azadlig, accusing it of publishing disguised advertising or commissioned articles, but they have yet to find anyone willing to testify against the newspaper. Those questioned have also been warned that providing any material assistance to Azadlig would be regarded as "supporting the enemies of the people."





"This kind of harassment is not new," Azadlig editor Ganimat Zayid said. "It's just a new attempt to eliminate our newspaper. This is not the first time we have had to suspend publication but we have never given up. The sole reason for Faiq's arrest was the fact that he is our financial director. They have closed the purse strings."





Amirov was detained in the course of a wave of arrests of alleged sympathizers with the movement in nearby Turkey that is led by Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric regarded by Turkey's government as the mastermind of last July's failed coup attempt.





The police planted the books about the Gulen Movement's philosophy that were "found" in the trunk of Amirov's car at the time of his arrest, Amirov says. They are anyway not banned in Azerbaijan and well known figures close to the government even helped to write them.





Azerbaijan is ranked 163rd out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index. Seymour Khazi, a well-known Azadlig reporter who has been in prison for more than two years on trumped-up charges, was nominated for the 2016 RSF-TV5 Monde Press Freedom Prize.
Somalia: Al-Jazeera reporter, two cameramen held after trip outside Mogadishu

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 21 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Somalia: Al-Jazeera reporter, two cameramen held after trip outside Mogadishu, 21 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825ec124.html [accessed 2 November 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.

Their detention by the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) was confirmed to Radio Dalsan by Abdifatah Halane, a spokesman for the government of Banadir, the region that includes the capital. Their equipment was also seized.





They were arrested on their return from a trip outside the capital, during which they were suspected of visiting territory controlled by the rebel Islamist group Al-Shabaab in order to interview senior Al-Shabaab leaders.





"We call on the Somali authorities to immediately free Al-Jazeera correspondent Hamza Mohamed and the two cameramen, who have been held by the intelligence services since yesterday," RSF said.





"Journalists are constantly caught in the crossfire of the war between government forces and Al-Shabaab's armed militants. They are either the victims of deadly reprisals by the militants or they are arrested by the authorities on suspicion of collaborating with Al-Shabaab."





The three journalists have been finally released on 20 October after spending 48 hours in detention.





Their arrest came three days after a NISA raid on the Mogadishu headquarters of the leading national daily Xog Ogaal and the arrest of its editor, Abdi Aden Guled. RSF is relieved to learn that Guled was freed yesterday.





Somalia is ranked 167th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Turkey: State of emergency provisions violate human rights and should be revoked

Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 19 October 2016 Cite as Amnesty International, Turkey: State of emergency provisions violate human rights and should be revoked, 19 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825ec984.html [accessed 2 November 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.

We, the undersigned organisations, recognise that the Turkish government has the right and responsibility to investigate the violent events of the July 2016 coup attempt and to bring all those responsible to justice. We also recognise that the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup is the type of exceptional circumstance in which a government could legitimately invoke a state of emergency but still has to comply with their human rights obligations.

We are however increasingly concerned that the far-reaching, almost unlimited discretionary powers exercised by the Turkish authorities during the first three months of the state of emergency - now extended for a further three months - endanger the general principles of rule of law and human rights safeguards.

We call on the Government of Turkey to revoke the measures under the state of emergency, the application of which, in practice is incompatible with Turkey's human rights obligations.

During the first three months of the state of emergency, the Turkish authorities have abused emergency provisions to stifle dissent, through the detention of large numbers of individuals, including both real and perceived critics of the government and others. The removal of fair trial protections and crucial safeguards against torture and other ill treatment exceed permissible, justified derogations and risk violating the absolute prohibition in international law against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In practice, the application of the provisions enable sweeping arrests, where those detained are not presented with credible evidence, preventing them from challenging or seeking redress for human rights violations.

In light of this, the extension of the state of emergency and its associated provisions for a further 90 days, starting from 19 October, is extremely worrying. At the very least, we urge the Government of Turkey to narrow the scope of the emergency measures by revoking provisions that enable human rights violations and are not consistent with Turkey's obligations under international law.

We also urge Turkey's international partners, in particular the European Union, the United States and relevant international human rights bodies, to publicly and unequivocally condemn the human rights violations occurring in Turkey in the context of the state of emergency. They should also call on the Turkish government to revoke all emergency provisions that enable human rights violations, and rescind the state of emergency, unless the government is able to demonstrate that the domestic situation continues to threaten the life of the nation.

Removal of safeguards against torture and other ill-treatment

Since the failed coup attempt, the Turkish authorities have remanded into pre-trial detention 34,000 soldiers, officers, policemen, judges, prosecutors, journalists, teachers and others. 70,000 people are under criminal investigation. Numerous provisions in Turkey's emergency decrees have suspended key safeguards that protect detainees from torture and other ill-treatment in ways that violate Turkey's international obligations and place detainees at risk. They include:

Prolonged police detention for terrorism-related offences and organised crime without legal review - extended from four days to 30 days;

Denial of a detainee's right to see a lawyer for up to five days and severe restrictions on the right to choose lawyer during police detention;

Interference with confidential access to a counsel, including monitoring and recording of communications at the request of a prosecutor.

In practice law enforcement officials and agents have undermined those safeguards to an extent exceeding even the permissive leeway granted them under the emergency decrees. A number of non-governmental organisations, including Amnesty International, have reported that they have gathered credible evidence that detainees in Turkey were subjected to beatings and torture, including rape.

Abuse of emergency provisions to silence criticism

Provisions of the emergency decrees affect the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and have been used to facilitate the arrest and harassment of journalists, writers and media workers, including:

Empowering higher levels of administration to shut down any media organization;

Enabling the government to impose curfews, ban public meetings, gatherings and rallies, and restrict access to private and public spaces;

Enabling the authorities to cancel or confiscate passports of anyone under investigation. On 1 September, an amendment to the decree extended this power, enabling the authorities to cancel or confiscate the passports of spouses and partners of those under investigation.

Restrictions imposed under the state of emergency go beyond those permissible under international human rights law, including unjustifiable limitations on media freedom and the right to freedom of expression.

During the first two and a half months of the state of emergency, pursuant to the decrees outlined above, authorities closed around 150 media outlets and publishing companies, leaving over 2,300 journalists and media workers without jobs. At least 99 journalists and writers have been arrested, bringing the total number of media workers detained on charges believed to be related to their exercise of the right to freedom of expression to at least 130, as of 19 October 2016. These numbers exclude other journalists who are currently in detention in police holding cells, or have been detained and released without charge during the state of emergency. Emergency provisions have also been used to harass family members of journalists who have fled abroad or gone into hiding, including by cancelling their passports or detaining them in the stead of those accused.

Such measures against journalists and media workers obstruct the right of people in Turkey to receive information about current events and to hold the government to account.

The Government of Turkey should ensure that the state of emergency and the related emergency decrees are not tools to facilitate serious human rights violations and to silence dissent. Meanwhile, Turkey's international partners should not ignore the serious violations committed in the context of the state of emergency and should urgently call upon Turkey to rescind or amend the emergency provisions that are not consistent with the country's international human rights obligations.

Signatories:

ARTICLE 19

Amnesty International

Human Rights Watch

PEN International

Association of European Journalists

Canadian Journalists for Free Expression

Committee to Protect Journalists

Danish PEN

English PEN

Ethical Journalism Network

European Centre for Press and Media Freedom

European Federation of Journalists

Fair Trials

German PEN

Global Editors Network

Index on Censorship

International Media Support

International Press Institute

IREX Europe

My Media

Norwegian PEN

Norwegian Press Association

PEN America

Reporters Without Borders

Swedish PEN

Wales PEN Cymr

Copyright notice:  Copyright Amnesty International
Cameroon: Glimmer of hope in RFI correspondent's trial

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 21 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Cameroon: Glimmer of hope in RFI correspondent's trial, 21 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825ecf44.html [accessed 2 November 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) reiterates its call for the acquittal of Radio France Internationale's Hausa-language correspondent, Ahmed Abba, after a hearing in his case before a Yaounde military court two days ago that saw encouraging developments although a request for his release was rejected.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reiterates its call for the acquittal of Radio France Internationale's Hausa-language correspondent, Ahmed Abba, after a hearing in his case before a Yaounde military court two days ago that saw encouraging developments although a request for his release was rejected.

Prior to this hearing, RSF had said it would be crucial inasmuch as the court would either begin to hear the substance of the case against Abba, who has been detained since 30 July 2015, or would dismiss the case for lack of evidence and release him.

In the event, it was not quite as clear-cut. The court rejected the request for the withdrawal of all the charges against Abba, but it agreed to most of the other requests presented by his lawyers, Charles Tchoungang and Clement Nakong.

An expert report written on the basis of evidence that was never placed under seal was ruled inadmissible. The court declined to accept that Ben Bidjocka, the report's author and main prosecution witness, was a "cyber-crime expert." And after effectively acknowledging other procedural irregularities as well, the court finally requested that two new experts draft a new report.

Cameroon is ranked 126th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.

"The fact that the military court agreed to most of the defence's requests is an encouraging sign of progress in Ahmed Abba's trial," RSF editor-in-chief Virginie Dangles said. "The court has thereby accepted that the trial has been tainted by many procedural errors. Abba should therefore not be in prison and we call again for the withdrawal of all the charges against him."

Abba is facing a possible death sentence on charges of "complicity in terrorist acts" and "failure to report terrorist acts" because he allegedly contacted members of the Islamist rebel group Boko Haram in the course of his reporting. The next hearing is scheduled for 7 December.
RSF decries wave of violence against Afghan journalists and media

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 24 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, RSF decries wave of violence against Afghan journalists and media, 24 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825ee5e4.html [accessed 2 November 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) supports the "Global Solidarity for the Release of Narges Mohammadi" campaign launched last weekend by the Defenders for Human Rights Centre in Iran, which is led by Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi. An Iranian journalist, Mohammadi is the centre's spokesperson.

"By joining this campaign, we are denouncing the persecution of journalists and human rights defenders in Iran," RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. "We hope that an energetic international campaign in support of this courageous Iranian woman will persuade the Iranian authorities to free her immediately."

When Ebadi and Deloire met Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo last month, Hidalgo expressed great concern about the fate of this journalist and staunch women's rights advocate, who was awarded the City of Paris medal on 3 May (World Press Freedom Day). The City of Paris called for Mohammadi's release in a tweet on 29 September.

Aged 46, Mohammadi has been detained since May 2015 and was sentenced to a total of 16 years in prison in April of this year at the end of trial that was marked by irregularities and influenced by the ministry of intelligence. The sentence was upheld by an appeal court on 27 September.

Mohammadi is required to serve 10 of the 16 years under a law adopted in 2015, according to which anyone convicted on several criminal charges serves only the sentence corresponding to the most important charge.

She had often been subjected to intimidation and arbitrary detention in the past. When arrested in 2010, she was held for several months and then released provisionally because her health had deteriorated alarmingly as a result of heavy-handed interrogation sessions. She nonetheless spent another three months in prison in 2012.

Since her return to prison in 2015, she has been denied the medical attention she needs and her health is now in great danger.
Citizen journalist Huang Qi arrested during party plenum

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 25 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Citizen journalist Huang Qi arrested during party plenum, 25 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825eed44.html [accessed 2 November 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) condemns yesterday's arrest of Huang Qi, the founder and director of the human rights news website 64Tianwang, and the previous day's arrest of Liu Feiyue, the founder of the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch website. Both of these citizen journalists were arrested in still unknown circumstances. RSF calls for their immediate and unconditional release.

Based in Chengdu, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, Huang suddenly stopped sending messages yesterday evening, according to a report on the report on the Voice of America website. A 64Tianwang reporter said his family contacted the local police, who said he had been arrested by other police officers but did specify the unit or department responsible, or the reason for his arrest.

Five women citizen journalists who report for 64Tianwang were kidnapped by the police while the G20 summit was under way in early September in the southeastern city of Hangzhou. RSF continues to call for their release and the withdrawal of all the charges against them.

The 64Tianwang website is one of the 22 nominees for the 2016 RSF Press Freedom Prize.

China is ranked 176th out of 180 countries inRSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index, while President Xi Jiping is on RSF's list of press freedom predators.

A photo posted online shows the inside of Huang's home with objects scattered on the floor, suggesting that it was searched by the

police.

Several possible reasons for his arrest have been mentioned. In an interview earlier yesterday for Radio Free Asia, Huang said he had refused to respond to a summons from the authorities.

VOA suggested his arrest might be linked to the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee plenum currently taking place in

Beijing. The authorities often arrest bloggers and human rights activists when major official events are taking place in order to

prevent coverage of unexpected demonstrations by members of the public, especially those with grievances.

Clear information is similarly unavailable about Liu Feiyue's arrest on 23 October in the northern province of Hebei or where he is

now being held. Some anonymous Chinese sources suggested that his arrest might also be linked to the Central Committee plenum.

"We call on the authorities to release Huang Qi and Liu Feiyue and all their detained colleagues without delay ," said Benjamin Ismail, the head of RSF's Asia-Pacific desk.

"The police must stop harassing citizen journalists and must respect the rule of law, which differs from using the law to rule

inasmuch as the former is compatible with China's constitution. We demand explanations for these two arrests, which have all the

hallmarks of abductions."

The ruling Communist Party has repeatedly tried to intimidate both Huang, who was awarded RSF's Cyber-Freedom Prize in 2004, and his reporters. He was last arrested at his home on 19 September, when the authorities seized his mobile phone and other electronic equipment and held him for more than 24 hours.
Burundian regime launches new media clampdown

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 26 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Burundian regime launches new media clampdown, 26 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825ef574.html [accessed 2 November 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 Burundian authorities have unleashed a major new assault on free speech in the past few days, arresting journalists and censoring media outlets that might criticize President Pierre Nkurunziza's authoritarian regime.

An order issued on 24 October by Pascal Barangadyie, the Minister of Interior and Patriotic Training, announced the provisional closure of five civil society and human rights groups for "being liable to disturb order and state security." They include the Burundian Union of Journalists (UBJ), which has repeatedly condemned media freedom violations since the political crisis began in May 2015. Other human rights organisations had ben suspended the day before.





A communique issued the same day by Karenga Ramhadani, the head of the National Communication Council (CNC), announced an additional series of measures violating freedom of information.





It announced firstly that "Karadiridimba" (They Who Progress), a programme on Radio Isanganiro in which the Burundian diaspora express their views, was being suspended for a month for broadcasting "a song that does not conform to media professionalism and democratic and ethical values." The song's Kirundi-language title means "human rights for journalists."





Senate speaker Reverien Ndikuriyo has meanwhile just launched a new community radio station that is also an outlet for the views of members of the Burundian diaspora, albeit pro-government ones. It was Ndikuriyo who caused a controversy a year ago when he recommended "smashing" the capital's opposition neighbourhoods after a meeting at the Bujumbura city hall was recorded without his knowledge.





The CNC communique also announced that Buja FM, which used to be called Radio 10, was being suspended for a month and was banned from henceforth using its new name. The offshoot of a Rwandan radio station, Buja FM had adopted its new name in an attempt to escape persecution by the authorities. It is already currently subject to a broadcasting ban.





Finally, the communique reiterated that it is prohibited for any media outlet to employ a Burundian or foreign journalist whose name is not on the national media register. By giving the government complete control over who can be a journalist in Burundi, this ban constitutes a grave violation of pluralism of opinion.





"These new curbs on freedom of expression and information confirm that the government has opted for even more authoritarianism, that it is cutting itself off from any views different from its own and that it is increasing the isolation of the Burundian population, which was already denied access to almost any objective reporting," said Clea Kahn-Sriber, the head of RSF's Africa desk.





"The criminalization of journalists and groups that are the lifeblood of any society shows that Burundi's leaders are much more interested in holding on to power than in the fate of their fellow citizens. We urge the authorities to remember their political and democratic obligations and to reopen the space for civil society."





The announcements came just a day after soldiers arrested US journalist Julia Steers and Burundian journalist Gildas Yihundimpudu, who was working as her fixer, as Steers was doing a report in Mutakura, the Bujumbura district that was the epicentre of a wave of protests against President Nkurunziza in the spring of 2015.





Steers was handed over to the US embassy after the CNC had verified her accreditation, but Yihundimpudu and their Burundian driver, who was also arrested, were held overnight at the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service (SNR).





Police chief Pierre Nkurukiye told Radio France Internationale that Nkurukiye is still facing charges despite having been released. The authorities accuse Nkurukiye, who also works for the BBC, of not being registered with the CNC. He is also charged with "attempting to destroy evidence of crimes committed by insurgents" in connection with a mass grave near the spot where he and Steers were arrested. The mass grave was discovered a few months ago.





Police arrested Voice of America journalist Fidelite Ishatse as she was doing a report on microfinance in the southeastern town of Bukemba on 7 October and held her for several hours on the grounds that she had not notified the local authorities of her presence.





Other journalists also continue to be arrested and subjected to intimidation. And there is still no news about the fate of Jean Bigirimana, a journalist who has been missing since 22 July. RSF is calling for an investigation into his disappearance.





Burundi is ranked 156th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index, after falling 11 places as a result of crackdown on the media and civil society that began in 2015.
RSF urges Iraqi authorities to protect journalists in the field

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 26 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, RSF urges Iraqi authorities to protect journalists in the field, 26 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825efc14.html [accessed 2 November 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) urges the Iraqi authorities to do everything possible to protect journalists in the field after two Iraqi journalists were killed and at least ten others were injured while covering the military offensive aimed at retaking the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State jihadi rebels.

Ali Raysan, a 33-year-old cameraman with Iraq's Al-Sumaria TV, was killed by an Islamic State sniper while filming clashes near Al-Shura, a village in the Al-Qaraya region south of Mosul, on 22 October.





Ahmed Hajer Oglu, a 30-year-old TV reporter, was fatally shot by an IS sniper while covering clashes between Peshmerga forces and IS fighters on 21 October in the city of Kirkuk (170 km southeast of Mosul), where IS launched a counter-offensive. His death was reported by Turkmeneli TV, the Kirkuk-based Turkmen TV station he worked for.





"We deplore the deaths of these two journalists in the course of their work," said Alexandra El Khazen, the head of RSF's Middle East desk. "In view of the dangers of journalism in a war zone, especially in Iraq, we remind all parties to the conflict that they are required by the Geneva Conventions and its additional protocols to protect journalists. At the same time, journalists covering the conflict should also take care not to endanger either their sources or the conflict's participants."





According to a 22 October release by the Metro Centre for Journalists Rights and Advocacy, a local NGO, 10 journalists have also been wounded while covering the offensive in northern Iraq. They include Arian Brawari and Rasti Khaled of the Kurdish-language Waar TV and freelancer Ari Jalal, who were injured in an explosion Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul.





Bishtiwan Hussein of Zagros TV and Hajer Brawari and Yasser Abdulrahman of Speda TV were wounded by explosions near Tel Skuf (north of Mosul) and Bashiqa. Ahmed Al-Zaidi, a reporter for Iraq's Al-Forat TV, was wounded in the leg by a mortar explosion on 20 October. Rasoul Mahmoud, a freelancer covering the offensive for Radio Free Europe, was badly injured in Mosul by a mortar explosion, sustaining multiple fractures and the likely loss of one eye. Bryan Denton, a US photographer working for the New York Times, was injured by a car bomb near Bartella, east of Mosul.





Heavily covered conflict





A national media coalition was established on 17 October by the state-owned Iraqi Media Network with the aim of ensuring a national media strategy in support of the military offensive, countering rumours that could adversely affect military operations, and providing media outlets with technical and material support.





The Al-Iraqiya, Al-Sumaria, Hona Baghdad, Al-Rasheed, Al-Forat, Al-Hadath and ANB TV channels are all part of the coalition, which produces a joint TV news programme every evening and coordinates communication campaigns on social networks.





The offensive is receiving a great deal of media coverage, including on social networks, with live broadcasting on Facebook. But the public prosecutor's office in Iraqi Kurdistan issued an order on 24 October banning three TV channels  Rudaw TV, Kurdistan 24 and NRT TV  from providing live coverage from any of the frontlines.





The grounds given by the public prosecutor's office in a communique was the need to protect troops and ensure respect for journalistic ethics. The communique cited the case of the fighting in Kirkuk where, it said, Kurdish forces were put in danger because unprofessional live coverage revealed their positions.





The media in Iraqi Kurdistan have long been the victims of a power struggle between the leading Kurdish political parties, a struggle that has been exacerbated by the offensive against Islamic State.





On 21 October, for example, the Nalia Media Corporation's broadcast outlets  NRT, NRT2, Nalia Radio  were banned by the Ministry of the Peshmerga (Iraqi Kurdistan's military forces) from going to Mosul and are having to cover the fighting from afar. According to Nalia, the ban was a reprisal for a broadcast in which the Peshmerga were criticized by guests, including a former parliamentarian who supports the opposition party Goran (Change).





According to RSF sources, the office of the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government has also banned two opposition TV channels  KNN TV and Payam TV from reporting from Mosul since the start of the offensive. They are nonetheless allowed to cover clashes in cities controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of Iraqi Kurdistan's two ruling parties.





In November 2015, RSF and its partner organization in Iraq, the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO) issue a joint report about the appalling media freedom violations in Mosul since Islamic State seized control of the city in June 2014. The offensive to retake Mosul was launched on 17 October.





Ranked 158th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index, Iraq is one of the world's deadliest countries for journalists.


RSF urges Kosovar authorities to protect journalist after death threats

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 27 October 2016 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, RSF urges Kosovar authorities to protect journalist after death threats, 27 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f02e4.html [accessed 2 November 2022] Comments All reference to Kosovo should be understood in full compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244. 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) condemns the death threats, insults and baseless accusations that have been levelled against Leonard Kerquki, the editor-in-chief of the Gazeta Express website, since a documentary he directed was premiered on the site on 23 October.

The documentary, for which Kerquki also did the voiceover, addresses a rarely discussed aspect of the Kosovo War of 1998-2000 - atrocities against Serbian and Bosniak minorities.

The day after it was screened, a photomontage of Kerquki with his forehead riddled by bullet holes in Serbian colours was posted on the Facebook page of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), a paramilitary group that opposed the Serbs during the war.

The UCK is accused in the documentary of carrying out war crimes against civilians in the name of Kosovar patriotism.

"We condemn this public lynching of Leonard Kerquki and we call on the authorities to quickly adopt measures to protect this journalist and his colleagues," RSF programme director Lucie Morillon said. "We also call for an investigation with aim of identifying those responsible for these threats and bringing them to trial."

The documentary was the second in a new series of documentaries and investigative reports about Kosovo's contemporary history recently launched by Gazeta Express, an Albanian-language news portal.

Kosovo is ranked 90th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
Thailand: Free Somyot, arbitrarily detained for 2,000 days

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 20 October 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Thailand: Free Somyot, arbitrarily detained for 2,000 days, 20 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f1764.html [accessed 2 November 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.

Thai authorities must immediately and unconditionally release human rights defender Somyot Phrueksakasemsuk, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (an FIDH-OMCT partnership) reiterated today.

Having spent 2,000 days behind bars, Somyot, 55, is currently the longest-serving lese-majeste detainee. Somyot remains incarcerated in Bangkok Remand Prison, where he is serving a 10-year sentence following his conviction on charges of lese-majeste under Article 112 of Thailand's Criminal Code. Article 112 states that "whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, the Queen, the Heir to the throne or the Regent shall be punished with imprisonment of three to 15 years." Somyot is also serving an additional year in prison as a result of an earlier sentence for defamation in connection with another case.

The Observatory condemns the flaws and delays in the judicial proceedings against Somyot, and the courts' repeated refusals to grant him bail. Somyot unsuccessfully petitioned for bail 16 times - the last time being in November 2014 - and has been waiting 700 days for a Supreme Court hearing.

Several UN human rights monitoring bodies have voiced concern over Somyot's deprivation of liberty. In an opinion issued on August 30, 2012, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) affirmed that Somyot's detention was arbitrary, and called on Thai authorities to release Somyot and award him adequate compensation.

Background information

A former labour rights activist and magazine editor, Somyot was arrested on April 30, 2011, five days after he launched a petition campaign to collect 10,000 signatures required for a parliamentary review of Article 112. On January 23, 2013, the Bangkok Criminal Court sentenced him to 10 years in prison on two counts of lese-majeste. Somyot was convicted for allowing the publication of two satirical articles in the now-defunct magazine Voice of Taksin, of which he was the editor. The articles were authored by someone else and deemed by the Thai authorities to have insulted the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

On September 19, 2014, the Court of Appeals upheld the Bangkok Criminal Court's lese-majeste conviction of Somyot. The Court of Appeals failed to notify Somyot, his lawyer, and his family members that the hearing would take place on that day. On September 23, 2014, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) voiced its disappointment over the Court of Appeals' ruling that upheld Somyot's conviction. On November 19, 2014, Somyot filed an appeal to the Supreme Court against his conviction.

Somyot's conviction and his detention do not comply with Thailand's international legal obligations. Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Thailand is a state party, provides that everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right includes the "freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds."

In its General Comment on Article 19, the UN Human Rights Committee (CCPR), the body that monitors state parties' compliance with the provisions of the ICCPR, affirmed that, "all public figures, including those exercising the highest political authority such as heads of state and government, are legitimately subject to criticism and political opposition." The CCPR specifically expressed concern regarding lese-majeste laws and stated that "imprisonment is never an appropriate penalty" for defamation.

On August 11, 2015, OHCHR urged Thailand to amend the "vague and broad" lese-majeste law to bring it in line with international human rights standards. OHCHR also called for the immediate release of all those who had been jailed for the exercise of their right to freedom of expression.

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (the Observatory) was created in 1997 by the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) and FIDH. The objective of this programme is to intervene to prevent or remedy situations of repression against human rights defenders. OMCT and FIDH are both members of ProtectDefenders.eu, the European Union Human Rights Defenders Mechanism implemented by international civil society.
Quash the sentences against 13 IRA-Mauritania members and cease harassment of human rights defenders

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 20 October 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Quash the sentences against 13 IRA-Mauritania members and cease harassment of human rights defenders, 20 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f1e04.html [accessed 2 November 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.

We, the undersigned organisations, condemn the persistent and strategic targeting of the Initiative for the Resurgence of an Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania (IRA-Mauritanie) and its members and we call on the Mauritanian authorities to quash the sentences of the 13 IRA-Mauritania members currently imprisoned.

IRA-Mauritania was founded in 2008 in response to a culture of widespread impunity regarding slavery in the country. Since 2010, we have documented repeated cases of arrest, judicial harassment, trumped-up charges, arbitrary detention, and, while in detention, ill-treatment and torture of members of IRA-Mauritania in response to their peaceful and legitimate activities in the defence of human rights.

From 30 June 2016 to 10 July 2016, 13 members of IRA-Mauritania were arrested in connection with riots on 29 June 2016 near Nouakchott which were organised by the Hratine people, whose slum the authorities planned to destroy for an alternative development project. No members of IRA-Mauritanie participated in the planning or the execution of the riots, nor did they express opinions on the eviction of the Hratine people prior to their arrest. However, all 13 were arrested in connection with the riots and detained in unknown locations until 12 July 2016 when they met with the public prosecutor who opened the investigation into their case. They were then allowed access to their lawyers and, following this, they were charged on various counts. While in detention, two members reported torture and ill-treatment. On 18 August 2016, all 13 human rights defenders were convicted and sentenced to prison terms of between three and fifteen years. An appeal of their sentences lodged on 22 August 2016 was accepted by the court, but has yet to be heard. On 28 September 2016, all 13 were transferred to a detention center over 700 kilometres from Nouakchott, where they live and work, to the town of Zouerat.

The President of IRA-Mauritanie, Mr Biram Dah Abeid, has also been repeatedly arrested and imprisoned throughout the course of his career working to eradicate slavery in Mauritania. Biram Dah Abeid was the recipient of the 2013 Front Line Defenders Award, the 2013 United Nations Prize for Human Rights and he is a 2016 U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report Hero. IRA-Mauritanie has won the 2015 Human Rights Tulip Award and the 2016 James Lawson Award from the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.

From 2010 to 2016, Biram Dah Abeid was arrested three times and imprisoned three times for varying lengths of time. Most recently, on 11 November 2014, he was arrested and subsequently charged on 15 January 2015 with the crimes of "illegal assembly and rebellion", "encouraging rebellion", and "refusing to comply with administrative orders" after organising and participating in a caravan to raise awareness about enslavement of Hratine peoples in Mauritania. After 18 months in prison, the human rights defender was released on 17 May 2016 when a Supreme Court judge found that the maximum penality for his sentence was only one year. In this same period, there were at least 65 arrests of IRA- Mauritania members throughout Mauritania.

We, the undersigned organisations, condemn the repeated targeting of the peaceful and legitimate work of IRA-Mauritania by the Mauritanian authorities and call on the Mauritanian authorities to immediately cease targeting the organisation.

Furthermore, the undersigned organisations call on the Mauritanian authorities to (i) immediately quash the sentences against the 13 members of IRA-Mauritania detained at Zouerat and (ii) immediately and unconditionally release them from the detention center in Zouerat and ensure their safe return to Nouakchott (iii) cease all harassment of human rights defenders in Mauritania, especially those working on issues relating to slavery, and (iv) ensure their ability to carry out their peaceful and legitimate work in defence of human rights without fear of reprisals and free of all restrictions including judicial harassment.
South African withdrawal from the ICC a deplorable departure from commitments to justice

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 21 October 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, South African withdrawal from the ICC a deplorable departure from commitments to justice, 21 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f2224.html [accessed 2 November 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.

FIDH and Lawyers for Human Rights strongly deplore the unilateral move by the South African executive to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), and call on the South African Parliament to annul this decision.

Withdrawal from the ICC is not only counterproductive to the international fight against impunity, but a shocking departure from South Africa's commitment post-Apartheid to promoting justice and redress for victims of atrocities and has not complied with the Constitution and domestic legislation relating to SA State obligations toward international criminal justice.

"Playing politics with justice is reprehensible," stated Dimitris Christopolous, FIDH President, adding that, "Withdrawing from the ICC is a deplorable and shameful way of dealing with victims of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. South Africa's actions create a deplorable stain on the country's post-Apartheid reputation and credibility."

The decision to withdraw comes amidst a fragmented wave of criticism from some African States against the ICC, who claim the Court to be biased against Africa. Last week, the Burundian parliament approved a measure to withdraw from the Court, though notification has not yet been submitted to the UN. Burundi's decision to withdraw against a conspicuous backdrop of violence and impunity in that country, where the ICC has recently opened a preliminary examination into international crimes.

A number of African States, however, have expressed their opposition to calls for mass withdrawal, including at the most recent AU Summit in Kigali. Such moves indicate that an anti-ICC position is far from universal on the continent, where support for international justice remains high. Additionally, numerous African states continue to cooperate with the ICC with respect to ongoing cases, including in Mali, Uganda, Cote d'Ivoire and others.

"This decision undermines South Africa's credibility as a leader on matters relating to international justice and human rights. We call on the South African Government to reconsider its decision and to allow for active dialogue between government and civil society to promote South Africa's commitment to international justice." said Jacob Van Garderen, LHR Executive Director.

Human rights organisations from around the continent have spoken out in support of the ICC as a fundamental tool for providing justice and redress to victims of international crimes, who often have no recourse at a national or regional level.

The ICC is currently investigating or examining crimes committed worldwide, including in Africa, South America, the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia.

Article 127 of the Statute of the ICC recalls that a withdrawal does not take effect until one year after notification. A withdrawal also does not discharge a State of its cooperation obligations incurred prior to the date on which the withdrawal comes into effect.

South Africa's notification of withdrawal also comes while the government of South Africa awaits a decision by the country's Constitutional Court, which will determine whether the government violated national and international law when it refused to arrest Sudanese President Al Bashir when he was present on South African territory earlier this year. Al Bashir is wanted by the ICC for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Darfur. Withdrawal from the ICC will not affect this case, which is due to be heard in November 2016. South Africa has adopted the Implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Act of 2004 which saw the incorporation of these major crimes within national legal system. The Constitutional Court confirmed this in its 2014 judgment relating to the investigation of crimes against humanity in Zimbabwe.
The case of two disappeared Franco-Syrians in a Bachar El-Assad jail referred to the French justice

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 11 November 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, The case of two disappeared Franco-Syrians in a Bachar El-Assad jail referred to the French justice, 11 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f2c74.html [accessed 2 November 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.

This morning, FIDH and LDH, with Mr. Obeida Dabbagh, referred the case of the forced disappearance of the latter's brother and nephew, Patrick and Mazzen Dabbagh, two Franco-Syrian nationals, to the office of the Prosecutor of the Paris Court's specialised unit for the prosecution of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Patrick and Mazzen Dabbagh were arrested in November 2013 by the Syrian Air Forces intelligence service, and were never seen again.

In the document filed with the Prosecutor, our organisations, together with Mr. Obeida Dabbagh, are requesting an immediate judicial investigation, through the appointment of an investigative judge, into the events which we feel qualify as crimes of forced disappearance and torture, constituents of crimes against humanity.

"We are hoping that the Public Prosecutor's office will file a request to open a judicial investigation as soon as possible into these extremely grave events which reflect the widespread repression that has been inflicted on the people of Syria since 2011", our organisations declared and added: "Since we cannot refer crimes perpetrated in Syria to the International Criminal Court, it is time for the justice systems of third countries to begin investigating the crimes committed by the Bachar El Assad's regime".

Our organisations wish to recall that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had, in September 2015 transferred the Caesar Report to the Public Prosecutor of the Paris Court's specialised unit, who had started a preliminary investigation. Now the unit is too desperately short of resources to move this case forward, as with other cases that have been referred to it.

"It is urgent that the French authorities, as some of their European counterparts have done, provide sufficient funding to the Unit to conduct its investigations adequately", declared our organisations. "This is the only way that we will be able to ascertain how serious the French authorities are about dealing with the impunity of the crimes committed in Syria".

Some of the courts and units specialised in international crimes, particularly in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Austria, have already been addressing the crimes committed in Syria. But the investigations and prosecutions do not address the crimes attributable to the Bachar El-Assad regime.

"The fight against impunity and the application of justice for all the crimes committed against the Syrians should be central to any resolution of the Syrian conflict", declared our organisations.

The facts:

Patrick Abdelkader Dabbagh, a 20-year old student in his second year at the Damascus University Faculty of Arts and Humanities, was arrested at midnight on 3 November 2013 at his home by five persons (two officers, two soldiers and a computer scientist) who said that they belonged to the Syrian air force intelligence services and wanted to take him in for questioning, but did not give any reason or grounds for his arrest.

The next day, 4 November, the same officers, this time accompanied by close to a dozen armed soldiers, returned at midnight to accuse Mazzen Dabbagh, Patrick's father of not having raised his son well, and then arrested him in order to teach him how to educate his son. At the time, Mazzen was the Senior Education Adviser at the French School of Damascus.

Mazzen and Patrick Abdelkader were both taken to Mezzeh, the detention centre of the Syrian Air force intelligence services. The two men have disappeared ever since. Mazzen Dabbagh and his son Patrick have never been involved in any protest movements against the Bachar El-Assad regime, neither before nor after, the March 2011 uprising.

The Mezzeh centre has a very strong reputation as one of the regime's worst places of torture. The Independant International Commission of enquiry on Syria believes that it is one of the centres with the highest mortality rates.
Russia's Role in Syria Raises Questions About Bid for Human Rights Council

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 25 October 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Russia's Role in Syria Raises Questions About Bid for Human Rights Council, 25 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f31b4.html [accessed 2 November 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 United Nations General Assembly will select new members for the Human Rights Council in elections to be held in New York on October 28. Russia is running against Hungary and Croatia for a chance to represent the Eastern European group at the world's foremost human rights body.

The undersigned organizations urge all member states, when deciding which Eastern European candidate to support, to question seriously whether Russia's role in Syria - which includes supporting and undertaking military actions which have routinely targeted civilians and civilian objects - renders it fit to serve on the UN's premier inter-governmental human rights institution.

UN General Assembly Resolution 60/251 asks that those voting for members of the Human Rights Council "take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights." This guidance applies to candidates' efforts to protect and promote human rights in their own countries and abroad.

Russia's actions in Syria stand in clear contrast to its rhetorical commitment to human rights. Member States should particularly consider Russia's indiscriminate attacks, its substantial weapons deliveries to the Syrian government and its efforts to prevent impartial accountability for serious crimes in Syria.

Moreover, Member States should consider Russia's decision, on October 8, 2016, to veto a credible draft UN Security Council resolution aimed at ending atrocities in Aleppo. This was its fifth use of a veto on a resolution concerning Syria at the Security Council. Since September 19, 2016, Russian and Syrian forces have bombarded opposition-controlled parts of Aleppo. The attacks included the use of barrel bombs, cluster munitions, and incendiary weapons, and damaged or partially destroyed at least five hospitals in six separate attacks,Human Rights Watch research shows.

In addition to persistently blocking Security Council action to curb violations by the Syrian government, Russia continues to provide the Syrian government with arms.

Syrian-Russian joint military operations, which began on September 30, 2015, have extensively used internationally banned cluster munitions. They have also increasingly resorted to the use of incendiary weapons, with at least 18 documented attacks on opposition-held areas in Aleppo and Idlib between June 5 and August 10. In June, RT broadcast footage of incendiary weapons-specifically RBK-500 ZAB-2.5SM bombs-being mounted on a Russian Su-34 fighter-ground attack aircraft at a Syrian airbase.

Amnesty International has concluded that Russian and Syrian government forces appear to have deliberately and systematically targeted hospitals and other medical facilities to pave the way for ground forces to advance on northern Aleppo.

In one notable incident, a humanitarian convoy seeking to deliver life-saving aid to Aleppo governorate was attacked on September 19, 2016 by either Russian or Syrian forces. In the past month, indiscriminate airstrikes on opposition controlled eastern Aleppo have also had a devastating impact on civilians.

As part of its 2016 campaign for reelection to the Human Rights Council, Russia published an aide memoire with a pledge to "promote states' compliance with their international human rights obligations." Its ongoing cooperation with the Syrian government in the indiscriminate bombardment of opposition held areas in Syria, including in eastern Aleppo, does not fulfill the terms of that pledge. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council on September 28 that those using indiscriminate weapons in Aleppo "know they are committing war crimes."

The credibility and legitimacy of the Human Rights Council rest upon its members demonstrating a genuine commitment to human rights. When deciding which Eastern European candidate to support, member states should carefully consider whether Russia's Syria abuses are compatible with the principles and aims of the world's principal inter-governmental human rights body.
Free former student leaders arbitrarily detained for 17 years

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 26 October 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Free former student leaders arbitrarily detained for 17 years, 26 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f3544.html [accessed 2 November 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 Lao government must immediately and unconditionally release two former pro-democracy student leaders who have been arbitrarily detained for 17 years and disclose the fate or whereabouts of two others, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (a joint FIDH and OMCT partnership) and the Lao Movement for Human Rights (LMHR) said today.

Mr. Thongpaseuth Keuakoun and Mr. Sengaloun Phengphanh, two former student leaders with the Lao Students Movement for Democracy (LSMD), are believed to be detained in Samkhe prison, located on the eastern outskirts of Vientiane. Messrs. Thongpaseuth and Sengaloun were arrested in Vientiane on October 26, 1999, along with fellow LSMD members Mr. Bouavanh Chanhmanivong, Mr. Khamphouvieng Sisa-at, and Mr. Keochay, for planning peaceful demonstrations that called for democracy, social justice, and respect for human rights. All five were subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison for "generating social turmoil and endangering national security."

Mr. Khamphouvieng Sisa-at died in Samkhe prison in September 2001 as a result of serious food deprivation, prolonged heat exposure, and lack of adequate medical care. In 2006, the government stated that Mr. Keochay had been released in 2002 upon completion of his prison term and "transferred to guardians to further educate him to become a good citizen". However, Keochay's family was never informed of his alleged release, and his fate or whereabouts remain unknown. The government's claim about Mr. Keochay's release as well as Mr. Khamphouvieng's death in custody contradict Vientiane's earlier statement that only two LSMD members - Messrs. Thongpaseuth and Sengaloun - had been arrested on October 26, 1999. The Lao government had initially refused to acknowledge even the detention of Messrs. Thongpaseuth and Sengaloun. To this day, the fate and whereabouts of the fifth former student leader, Mr. Bouavanh, also remain unknown.

The Observatory and LMHR also call on the Lao authorities to determine the fate or whereabouts of nine other activists - two women, Ms. Kingkeo and Ms. Somchit, and seven men, Messrs. Soubinh, Souane, Sinpasong, Khamsone, Nou, Somkhit, and Sourigna - who were detained in November 2009 for planning to participate in pro-democracy demonstrations. Their detention, followed by the Lao government's refusal to acknowledge their deprivation of liberty, amounts to enforced disappearance under Article 2 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED). Despite signing the ICPPED on September 29, 2008, Laos is yet to ratify the convention.

The Observatory and LMHR reiterate their call for the Lao government to conduct swift, thorough, and impartial investigations into all cases of enforced disappearances in the country and hold those responsible accountable. The Observatory and LMHR also urge the Lao government to speed up the investigation into the enforced disappearance of prominent civil society leader Mr. Sombath Somphone, who was last seen at a police checkpoint on a busy street of Vientiane on the evening of December 15, 2012.
Bangkok-Dhaka-Geneva-Madurai-Paris-Quezon City, 26 October 2016  The High Court in Jammu and Kashmir has again prolonged the arbitrary detention of Kashmiri human rights defender Mr. Khurram Parvez, who has already spent 40 days in jail. We call on the Indian authorities to release him immediately, stated The Observatory, AFAD, AHRC, HRDA, FORUM-ASIA, ICAED, and Odhikar.

On 25 October 2016, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court heard the case against Mr. Parvez filed under the Public Safety Act. Mr. Parvez's family had filed a petition on 13 October 2016 challenging his detention, to which the State failed to respond. However, instead of releasing Mr. Parvez, the High Court granted the State another three weeks to respond, sending Mr. Parvez back to Jammu's Kot Balwal Jail, 300 kilometres away from his home, family, and legal counsel in Srinagar. The Court has set the next hearing date for 14 November, meaning that Mr. Parvez risks spending at least 20 more days in arbitrary detention.

On 14 September 2016 Mr. Parvez was stopped from travelling to Geneva to participate in the United Nations Human Rights Council on orders from the Intelligence Bureau, and was arrested 2 days later at his home in Kashmir under Sections 107 and 151 of the Criminal Procedure Code [1] and denied access to legal counsel [2].

A judge from The High Court in Srinagar District issued an order for Mr. Parvez's release on 20 September, but police promptly re-arrested him under the preventive detention provisions of the Public Safety Act (PSA). He has remained arbitrarily detained since, along with hundreds of others individuals detained under the ambiguous and oft-manipulated PSA.

Our organisations denounce this abuse of the PSA by the Indian authorities to silence human rights defenders and dissidents under the guise of national security. Almost 800 people have been arrested in central Kashmir since protests broke out in July 2016, with at least 80 of them booked under the PSA.

On 19 October 2016, several United Nations experts called on the Government of India to release Mr. Parvez, and expressed their concerns regarding the arbitrary application of the PSA against human rights defenders [3]. Nevertheless, the Indian authorities have ignored this call and their obligations under international law by continuing to hold Mr. Parvez in arbitrary detention.

Our organisations condemn the arbitrary use of the Public Safety Act to unlawfully detain Mr. Parvez and call for his immediate and unconditional release. Additionally, we demand an end to the harassment of human rights defenders and that the Indian government remove all legal and administrative barriers that impede their legitimate work. We also call on the international community, notably the other members of the United Nations Human Rights Council of which India is currently a member, to insist that India comply with its human rights obligations, including by allowing Indian human rights defenders to freely engage in their work and to enjoy their rights to free expression, peaceful assembly, and association.

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (The Observatory) was created in 1997 by FIDH and OMCT. The objective of this programme is to intervene to prevent or remedy situations of repression against human rights defenders. FIDH and OMCT are both members of ProtectDefenders.eu, the European Union Human Rights Defenders Mechanism implemented by international civil society.

The Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) is a federation of human rights organizations working directly on the issue of involuntary disappearances in Asia. Envisioning a world without desaparecidos, AFAD was founded on June 4, 1998 in Manila, Philippines.

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) works towards the radical rethinking and fundamental redesigning of justice institutions in order to protect and promote human rights in Asia. Established in 1984, the Hong Kong based organisation is a Laureate of the Right Livelihood Award 2014.

Human Rights Defenders Alert - India (HRDA) is a national network of human rights defenders for human rights defenders. HRDA intervenes in the cases of threats/harassment/attack on HRDs and curbing of freedom of expression, assembly and association.

FORUM-ASIA is a regional human rights group with 58 member organisations in 19 countries across Asia. FORUM-ASIA addresses key areas of human rights violations in the region, including freedoms of expression, assembly and association, human rights defenders, and democratisation. FORUM-ASIA operates through its offices in Bangkok, Jakarta, Geneva and Kathmandu.

The International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances (ICAED) is a network of 42 member organisations concerned with the issue of human rights and the struggle against enforced disappearances. The principal objective of ICAED is maximising impact of the activities carried out by its members in favour of an early ratification and effective implementation of the Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances.

Odhikar, a human rights organisation based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was founded in 1994 with the aim to create a wider monitoring and awareness raising system on the abuse of civil and political rights.
Five years on, still no investigation into Sumlut Roi Ja's enforced disappearance

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 28 October 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Five years on, still no investigation into Sumlut Roi Ja's enforced disappearance, 28 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f56a4.html [accessed 2 November 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.

Burma's government must launch a thorough, independent, and impartial investigation into the disappearance of Sumlut Roi Ja and sign and ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED), FIDH and its member organization ALTSEAN-Burma said today. The two organizations made the call on the fifth anniversary of Sumlut Roi Ja's alleged abduction by the Burma Army [Tatmadaw].

On 28 October 2011, Tatmadaw soldiers from Light Infantry Battalion 321 detained 28-year-old Sumlut Roi Ja, an ethnic Kachin woman, along with her husband and father-in-law from their family farm near Hkaibang Village, Momauk Township, Kachin State.

Soldiers suspected the three had ties to the ethnic armed opposition group Kachin Independence Army (KIA). At gunpoint, the soldiers ordered the three to carry corn to their outpost on Mubum mountain. On the way to the outpost, Sumlut Roi Ja's husband and father-in-law managed to escape, evading the soldiers' gunfire. Witnesses said they saw Sumlut Roi Ja at the Tatmadaw camp on Mubum mountain several days after she was detained.

Sumlut Roi Ja's family members filed numerous petitions asking authorities to disclose her fate or whereabouts. However, both military and civilian authorities have consistently refused to launch an investigation into Sumlut Roi Ja's disappearance in order to identify and prosecute the soldiers who allegedly abducted her. In March 2012, Burma's Supreme Court rejected a writ of habeas corpus submitted by Sumlut Roi Ja's husband two months earlier. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Supreme Court claimed there was no indication that the Tatmadaw had detained Sumlut Roi Ja before her disappearance. Tatmadaw officials denied having detained her. The whereabouts of Sumlut Roi Ja remain unknown, but her family presumes that she is dead.

The case of Sumlut Roi Ja underscores the ongoing serious human rights violations perpetrated by the Tatmadaw in ethnic minority areas, including the deliberate targeting of civilians in conflict, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention, and violence against women. Ninety-seven women and young girls have been recorded as victims of conflict-related sexual violence in Kachin and Shan States since the resumption of conflict between the Tatmadaw and the KIA in June 2011 and November 2015. More than 20 of the victims were killed outright, or died as a result of their injuries. This figure includes the rape and murder of two Kachin schoolteachers, Hkawn Nan Tsin, 21, and Maran Lu Ra, 20, in Kawng Hkar Village, Muse Township, Shan State, in January 2015. The police investigation into the case appears to have stalled and, to date no one has been arrested for the crime.

The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) is currently considering two unsolved cases of enforced disappearance, including the case of Sumlut Roi Ja.

On 24 October 2016, WGEID Chair-Rapporteur Houria Es Slami told all UN member states that it was "high time" for the international community to put the fight against enforced disappearances to the top of its agenda. Es Slami recommended the immediate ratification of the ICPPED, to be immediately followed by the implementation of legislation that incorporates the provisions of the ICPPED into national law.

An FIDH survey of Burma's political parties' human rights commitments, conducted from August to September 2015, found that more than 42% of the political parties surveyed supported the ratification of ICPPED.
Kenya: Looking at the 2017 elections, is civil society beyond the brink?

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 28 October 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Kenya: Looking at the 2017 elections, is civil society beyond the brink?, 28 October 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f6194.html [accessed 2 November 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 Kenyan authorities have the responsibility to protect civil society organisations and defenders, rather than harass them", said the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (a joint OMCT-FIDH partnership), following a fact-finding mission to Kenya. In the context of the upcoming elections, high levels of police violence and patterns of criminalisation, especially during peaceful demonstrations and counter-terrorism actions, are two of the main concerns identified by the mission. In addition, civil society has been for too long waiting for an adequate legal framework ensuring an enabling environment, free from abuse and arbitrariness.

The delegation, who conducted a fact-finding mission to Kenya from October 24 to 28, met with several representatives of the Kenyan civil society, ranging from international to grassroots organisations, from the capital and other regions of the country. The delegates also met with several national authorities such as the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights, the Parliamentary Caucus on Human Rights, the National Police Service, the Independent Policing Oversight Authority, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Judiciary, as well as with the diplomatic community in Nairobi.

The three mission delegates highlighted three major areas of concern that severely undermine the very existence of an enabling environment for human rights defenders to freely and legitimately operate.

First, the high levels of police violence often experienced and reported by human rights defenders, especially when trying to hold accountable public officials for the violations committed, put at risk their physical and psychological integrity. These acts of violence include acts of torture, enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings, including under the guise of combating criminality through "security" and "counter-terrorism" operations.

"The killing of Willie Kimani, Kenyan human rights lawyer, last June, is only the tip of the iceberg of a worrisome pattern of extrajudicial killings, which appear to be increasing and which aim at silencing dissenting voices and perpetuating police and other security forces' impunity. We urge the competent national authorities to end the widespread impunity for such cases and ensure speedy investigations and prosecutions in order to hold perpetrators to account", declared Peter Zangl, Representative of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) to the European Union, who led the mission.

Second, the increasing pattern of criminalisation and intimidation of human rights defenders, including those participating in legal and peaceful demonstrations, through trumped-up charges, episodes of frequent arrests, detentions in police stations and long legal processes, represent a serious concern for the delegation, since they are used as a mean to exhaust defenders and paralyse their work. Moreover, the unreasonable use of force in managing public protests call into question the prevailing standards in crowd control and their actual use by the police.

"We call for sustained police reforms that transpose into reality the constitutional fundamental rights to freedom of expression, peaceful and unarmed assembly and association of all Kenyan citizens. In regards to the constitutional right to bail, a transparent and proportionate implementation of the bail and bond policy is urgently needed in order to ensure that it is not used as a form of punishment against human rights defenders to repress social protest",said Benson Olugbuo, Executive Director of CLEEN Foundation, who was a delegate of the mission.

Third, the delays in the commencement of the Public Benefit Organisations Act 2013 (PBO Act), which streamlines regulation of NGOs, has left the door open for abuses and administrative harassment of civil society organisations (CSOs). As a result, CSOs continue to operate within a hostile environment, characterized by threats of arbitrary de-registrations and asset freezes, continuous attacks and smearing campaigns. It is worrying and a reason of real concern that the past two years have witnessed various failed attempts to restrict such legislation through draconian amendments, aiming at undermining its significant improvements.

"We welcome the long awaited operationalization of the PBO Act, which represents a positive step for opening the space for civil society work in Kenya. However, we urge the Kenyan authorities to ensure that the regulations and bodies that will be created, as well as possible proposed further amendments, will not seek to restrict the rights guaranteed by the Act", highlighted Chiara Cosentino, OMCT Human Rights Officer, who was also a delegate of the mission.

The Observatory calls upon the Kenyan authorities, especially in view of the upcoming elections, to publicly recognise the legitimate and crucial role of civil society and human rights defenders as pillars of every democracy and watchdogs of the rule of law, and to protect them in all circumstances from any kind of harassment.

A mission report will be issued in the coming months and will present detailed conclusions and recommendations to the Kenyan authorities, the United Nations, the African Union, the East African Community, the European Union and other international stakeholders.
Bahrain's most prominent human rights defender Nabeel Rajab remains jailed for his alleged tweets and his human rights activities in violation of his right to freedom of expression after a judge postponed his trial on 31 October 2016 but did not free him on bail despite his illness.

Following a joint trial observation mission, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), FIDH & the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Front Line Defenders call for him to be freed immediately and unconditionally.

During the hearing, where a verdict had been expected, Judge Ebrahim Al-Zayed of the Fourth High Criminal Court postponed the trial until 15 December in order to obtain a technical expert from the Cyber-Crime Unit to determine who runs Rajab's twitter account.

"It's concerning that the Court is effectively advising the Prosecution on its proofs and affording time to get them in order, when it seems the charges should be dismissed; and also that the Court has ordered a technological report be appropriated by the Cyber-Crime Unit of the Ministry of the Interior, which is clearly not an independent party," said the trial observer. It was reportedly suggested that Rajab himself would have to pay 500 BD (approx. USD$1325) for the technical expert.

Rajab arrived at the court right before the hearing, and was taken out immediately after the Judge made his pronouncements, while Rajab's lawyers were still making applications. The trial was attended by diplomatic representatives of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Rajab is the co-founder and president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), founding director of GCHR, Deputy Secretary General of FIDH and a member of the Middle East advisory committee at Human Rights Watch. He was arrested on 13 June 2016 on several charges and has suffered from poor health in prison including irregular heartbeats, an ulcer and problems with his gallbladder.

Rajab was facing up to 15 years in prison on charges relating to his criticism of Bahrain's participation in Saudi Arabia-led military operations in Yemen, which according to the United Nations, have so far been responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians.

Rajab's comments on Twitter about the Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in Yemen first led to his arrest on 2 April 2015. Bahrain's penal code provides for up to 10 years in prison for anyone who "deliberately announces in wartime false or malicious news, statements or rumours." The authorities pardoned and released him for health reasons from this initial detention on 13 July 2015, but the Prosecution did not close the case and ordered his re-arrest on 13 June 2016 on separate charges. Rajab is now facing new charges of allegedly "offending a foreign country" (Saudi Arabia). In addition, he was charged with "offending national institutions," for comments about the alleged torture of inmates in Bahrain's Jau Prison in March 2015. See: http://www.gc4hr.org/news/view/1392

Then in September, an additional charge was brought against Rajab following the publication on 5 September 2016 of an Op-Ed in "The New York Times" with his by-line, which discussed the conditions of his imprisonment and arrest. He was charged with "intentionally broadcasting false news and malicious rumours abroad impairing the prestige of the state," which carries an additional one-year prison term if he is convicted.

On 3 October, Rajab was taken to the Bahraini Defense Forces hospital for surgery to remove his gallbladder. Despite the risks of moving him back to jail, Rajab was taken from the hospital the day after his surgery and placed in solitary confinement in a dirty cell. He has often been held in solitary confinement and denied access to proper care. He is currently awaiting results of other diagnostic tests, and is being held at East Riffa Police Station. A few days after surgery, he was taken to court on 6 October for the next hearing in his case.

Human rights organisations, the UN and government representatives worldwide have all called for Rajab to be released including through the "Their Freedom is Their Right" Campaign which named him Prisoner of the Month in September. See: http://anhri.net/?p=173264&lang=en

On 31 October 2016, FIDH also launched the #RT4Freedom website, aiming to maximise the mobilising power of the web in order to raise awareness about the plight of Nabeel Rajab, and to call on the international community for action. See: http://rt4freedom.fidh.org/en

See also a case history at https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/case-history-nabeel-rajab

ANHRI, Front Line Defenders, GCHR and the Observatory (FIDH-OMCT) call on the government of Bahrain to:

1. Immediately and unconditionally free Nabeel Rajab and overturn the charges against him, or at least release him on bail pending trial;

2. Uphold international legal standards including ensuring that technical experts are independent;

3. Ensure all prisoners, including Nabeel Rajab and other human rights defenders, have access to proper medical treatment and clean conditions while in detention, and that they are not held in solitary confinement; and

4. End all forms of reprisals against human rights defenders and other activists in Bahrain, including travel bans, to which they have been subjected in violation of their rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.
Call for urgent measures to protect health, life and dignity of prisoner of conscience Ildar Dadin

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 2 November 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Call for urgent measures to protect health, life and dignity of prisoner of conscience Ildar Dadin, 2 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f6c44.html [accessed 2 November 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.

oint press-release by FIDH, its member organisation Anti-Discrimination Centre Memorial and World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT)

Ildar Ildusovich Dadin, civic activist whom Amnesty International declared as prisoner of conscience, was transferred to the Penal Colony No. 7 in Segezha, Republic of Karelia, in September 2016. As Ildar Dadin reported through his attorney on 31 October 2016, since the transfer he is systematically being subjected to torture, degrading treatment, and threats of murder and rape. Due to the total information blockade and imposed censorship on his letters and requests for help, Ildar Dadin was prevented from reporting the facts of torture and ill-treatment in the colony. He was threatened with physical reprisals and "sudden" death in the colony, if he complains. By publishing a letter directly accusing the warden of Penal Colony 7 S.L. Kossiyev of abusing him and other prisoners in the colony, Ildar Dadin has exposed himself to a real threat to his life. He is currently in Petrozavodsk hospital for medical check. It has been reported that journalists are banned from entering the village where the Ildar Dadin is serving his term.

Intervention of the Human Rights Ombudsman of Russia and the outcry of a number of media outlets and non-governmental organisations prompted a preliminary investigation of facts of torture and ill-treatment reported by Ildar Dadin. Nevertheless, utmost concern for his life and safety prevails, and in the meantime the deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service Valery Maksimenko has already stated that "As of today, not one bodily injury has been found on I. Dadin. He even confirmed this himself on a video recording. The medical workers' findings have been officially registered."

Inmates' lives being in the hands of prison guards and prison officials, there are grounds for concern that prisoners hesitate to complain on camera about prison administration. In his letter Ildar Dadin warned: "All the video recordingswere staged: before filming, I was told how to act and what to do - not to argue or object and to look down to the floor. Otherwise they said they would kill me and no one would ever find out." Under these circumstances, neither checks by the Federal Penitentiary Service nor registration "for the record" of the absence of "bodily injuries" and complaints have any credibility whatsoever.

Sentenced to three years in 2015 for merely expressing his opinion on relevant political issues, Ildar Dadin must be immediately released and rehabilitated.

An independent investigation of allegations of crimes against inmates of the Penal Colony No. 7 in Segezha must be conducted with the participation of human rights defenders, experts, and psychologists and those responsible should be prosecuted.
Kenya: High Court orders the commencement of the PBO Act without further delays, 1,000 days after its signing into law

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 4 November 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Kenya: High Court orders the commencement of the PBO Act without further delays, 1,000 days after its signing into law, 4 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f78d4.html [accessed 2 November 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 week after a fact-finding mission to Kenya, we welcome the High Court ruling on the long awaited commencement of the 2013 Public Benefit Organisations Act (PBO Act), which civil society has been waiting for almost four years", said the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders today .

On October 31, 2016, Justice J. Onguto of the High Court ruled that the Cabinet Secretary of the Ministry of Devolution and Planning, Mr. Mwangi Kiunjuri, had 14 days to set and gazette the date of entry into force of the PBO Act [1] 2013. Justice Onguto further declared that the delayed gazetting of the Act for more than 1,000 days since its signing into law on January 14, 2013, was "an abuse of discretion", which should be exercised in public interest,and deemed it "unconstitutional".

The Plaintiff, Trusted Society of Human Rights Alliance, brought a judicial review action against the Minister, following his failure to implement the PBO Act, as well as his attempt to restrict freedom of association through the appointment of a governmental taskforce in 2015 which proposed draconian amendments to the already adopted legislation. The Court also declared unlawful those amendments, since, although they were defeated thanks to the advocacy work of the Kenyan civil society, they were made before the coming into force of the law and would therefore infringe on the principle of separation of powers.

"Last week, Kenyan civil society organisations stressed to the Observatory's mission that the delay in the implementation of the PBO Act has for too long left the door open for abuses against them. For the past four years, despite the adoption of a legal framework conducive to human rights work, NGOs have continued to operate under the threat of arbitrary de-registrations and asset freezes, continuous attacks and smearing campaigns", declared Gerald Staberock, OMCT Secretary General.

The Observatory welcomes the Kenyan High Court ruling which at last ordered the entry into force of the 2013 PBO Act. This should allow for a more open space for civil society work in Kenya, with clear straightforward criteria regarding NGOs' registration, enhanced accountability, set timelines for processing applications, as well as tax incentives and benefits for organisations conducting "public benefit activities".

"The Kenyan government still has a long way to go to make the PBO Act a tool that effectively facilitate NGO work. The Cabinet Secretary of the Ministry of Devolution and Planning should first of all implement the High Court ruling by immediately operationalising the PBO Act. Secondly, the Kenyan authorities should ensure that the rights guaranteed by the Act will not be restricted by any subsequent legislation or regulation", said FIDH President, Dimitris Christopoulos.

Footnotes

[1] The PBO Act is available on: http://pboact.or.ke/resources/documents/category/3-legislation
Oman: Case against "Azamn" journalists must be overturned on appeal

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 10 November 2016 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Oman: Case against "Azamn" journalists must be overturned on appeal, 10 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f7e14.html [accessed 2 November 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 7 November 2016, the Omani Appeal Court in Muscat heard the case against three journalists of "Azamn" newspaper, Ibrahim Al-Maamari, Yousef Al-Haj, and Zaher Al-Abri, and judgement will be handed down on 17 November 2016. A coalition of rights groups which monitored the trial called for the sentences to be overturned and the charges to be dropped.

The coalition is composed of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), Front Line Defenders, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), FIDH and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders.

The coalition's lawyer who observed the appeal hearing, presided over by Judge Mukhtar Al-Harthi, on 7 November, said: "The defence team faced significant procedural obstacles in the Appeal Court re-trial today, ranging from a refusal by Judges to call relevant witnesses of fact, denial of disclosure and a basic failure to place the criminal burden of proof on the Prosecution. This has led to a trial of all three defendants, on a cumulative 14 charges, being completed in just two morning sessions."

He noted that the substantive laws under which journalists Al-Maamari and Al-Haj are being prosecuted, including charges of "disturbing public order," "undermining the prestige of the state" and criminal defamation, are ill-defined, arbitrarily enforced and constitute a disproportionate interference with freedom of expression. They were effectively denied a "public interest" defence.

It is of particular concern that Al-Maamari and Al-Haj were held in solitary confinement in a police intelligence facility for 60 days over the summer with access to their lawyer only after the first trial had begun. Al-Abri, charged under Article 19 of Oman's Cyber-Crime law, faces a year in jail for two tweets commenting on his colleagues' detention. Al-Abri was held for 20 days.

"Azamn", once Oman's leading independent newspaper, remains closed by Order of the Ministry of Information. The arrests of the journalists and the closure of the newspaper came after a report, published on 26 July 2016, entitled "Supreme bodies tie the hands of justice," which referred to the corruption of senior officials and their interference in judicial decisions.

If the decision of the lower Court is upheld by the Appeal Court on 17 November, Al-Maamari and Al-Haj face three years in jail for publishing articles alleging corruption in the senior judiciary.

On 26 September 2016, the Court of First Instance sentenced Al-Maamari and Al-Haj to three years in prison and Al-Abri to one year, in addition to ordering the permanent closure of the Azamn newspaper on charges related to the publication of a story about judicial corruption [1].

On 10 October 2016, during the first appeal hearing in the "Azamn" case, Judge Al-Harthi reduced the bail for Al-Maamari and Al-Haj from 50,000 OMR (approx. USD$130,000) to 2,000 OMR (approx. USD$5200). The two journalists were then freed. Al-Abri had already been conditionally freed on 22 August [2].

During the first hearing, the court banned the publication and circulation of the details of the hearing in all forms of media.

The Coalition reiterates its call for the authorities in Oman to:

1. Revoke the sentences issued against journalists Ibrahim Al-Maamari, Yousef Al-Haj and Zaher Al-Abri;

2. Revoke the closure order of "Azamn" newspaper by the Ministry of Information; and

3. Guarantee in all circumstances that all human rights defenders including journalists, writers and online activists in Oman are able to carry out their legitimate human rights activities without fear of reprisals and free of all restrictions including judicial harassment.
UN allocates $12 million in humanitarian funding to support people in Central African Republic

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 10 November 2016 Cite as UN News Service, UN allocates $12 million in humanitarian funding to support people in Central African Republic, 10 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f8ac40c.html [accessed 2 November 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.

10 November 2016 - A senior United Nations relief official today announced the release of $12 million from the Humanitarian Fund in Central African Republic (CAR) for 26 projects for national and international non-governmental organizations and UN agencies in the sub-Saharan country.

This second allocation within this year will enable rapid response to meet the urgent and critical humanitarian needs, according to the relief official in the Central African Republic, Fabrizio Hochschild, said in a statement released earlier today by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

The $12 million will fund projects covering various needs including health, the fight against malnutrition, education, water sanitation and hygiene (WASH), protection and logistics support to restore humanitarian access.

The funds made available will also enable response to the needs of internally displaced persons (IDP), host vulnerable communities and to support the IDP return phase.

Mr. Hochschild stressed the importance of the continued donor support to the country's Humanitarian Fund. It is through their support that the CAR Humanitarian Fund was able to quickly allocate $1.5 million in August, through its emergency funding mechanism, to support the response plan for the cholera epidemic.

Brussels Donor Conference

A week before the Brussels Donor Conference for the CAR, set for on 17 November and organized in support of efforts towards recovery and peace consolidation, Mr. Hochschild urged the international community to continue supporting humanitarian activities in the African country. A lot has already been done but big challenges are still ahead of us. We need to continue with the mobilization so that our efforts will not be jeopardized and to ensure early recovery can take over from humanitarian issues.

Also, Herve Ladsous, the Under-Secretary-General for UN Peacekeeping Operations, recently stressed the importance of the Donor Conference.

In his early October briefing to the UN Security Council on the work of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission (MINUSCA), he noted that, for the international support needed, the importance of the Brussels conference, for which the country's five-year needs had been assessed and a framework for accountability created, could not be over-emphasized.

Sustained international engagement had often been lacking in previous crises in the country, leading to relapse into violence. While the primary responsibility rests with the Central Africans, we must ensure that this mistake is not repeated, he stressed.
UN mission in Afghanistan condemns deadly attack near German consulate in Mazar

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 11 November 2016 Cite as UN News Service, UN mission in Afghanistan condemns deadly attack near German consulate in Mazar, 11 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f8db40e.html [accessed 2 November 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.

11 November 2016 - The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has condemned last night's attack, for which the Taliban has claimed responsibility, against civilians in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, which killed four people and wounded more than 120 others.

According to UNAMA, a vehicle loaded with heavy explosives detonated near the German Consulate in Mazar last evening, killing four civilians and injuring 128 others, including 19 women and 38 children.

Those who survived the explosion suffered minor wounds from broken glass. Victims with serious injuries remain hospitalized. In addition, over 100 homes and shops nearby were damaged, according to the Mission.

UNAMA said that the Taliban claimed responsibility for the explosion, describing it as a revenge for recent airstrikes in the nearby province of Kunduz.

Under the customary international humanitarian law, attacks where civilians are being deliberately targeted as an attempt to spread terror among the population are considered to be war crimes.

The UN Mission expressed its sincere condolences to the families of victims and a speedy recovery to those injured.
Iraq: Citing 'numbing' extent of suffering caused by ISIL, UN rights chief urges focus on victims' rights

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 11 November 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Iraq: Citing 'numbing' extent of suffering caused by ISIL, UN rights chief urges focus on victims' rights, 11 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f90340c.html [accessed 2 November 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.

11 November 2016 - As mass graves and further evidence of sexual exploitation, torture and killings, child recruitment and other grave human rights abuses committed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da'esh) extremists in Iraq come to light, the top United Nations human rights official has called for immediate action to ensure that the rights and the needs of victims and survivors are met  including the need for justice, truth and reconciliation.

The extent of civilian suffering in Mosul and other ISIL-occupied areas in Iraq is numbing and intolerable, said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein in a news release issued today, citing heartbreaking images of children being forced to carry out executions, stories of women being 'redistributed' among ISIL fighters, of killings for possession of SIM cards, and killings of those perceived to be opposed to ISIL's takfiri doctrines.

He also cited the forced displacement of tens of thousands of civilians and their exploitation as human shields, and then the risk of reprisals against these long-suffering women, men and children for their perceived support of ISIL.

Justice for the victims and survivors of human rights abuses and violations  irrespective of when, where or by whom such abuses and violations were committed  needs to be impartial, transparent and effective, he said, urging the Government of Iraq to act quickly to restore effective law enforcement in areas retaken from ISIL to ensure that captured fighters and their perceived supporters are dealt with according to the law.

This is crucial to limit the opportunity for revenge attacks and collective punishments, he added.

Mr. Zeid said that it is equally important that formal justice is supported by actions that promote community reconciliation, such as truth-telling and restorative justice, including the provision of medical and psycho-social services, housing, education and other financial support which may assist people in rebuilding their lives and their communities.

The people of Iraq  all the people of Iraq  must see that their State, by its actions, is capable of protecting them by bringing to justice those guilty of the horrible crimes that have been committed against them, he said.

Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. UN Photo/Pierre Albouy

Just over the past few days, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has received reports that:

ISIL appears to be continuing to carry out killings based on decisions of its self-appointed 'courts'. On Tuesday, ISIL reportedly shot and killed 40 civilians in Mosul city after accusing them of 'treason and collaboration' with the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). The victims were dressed in orange clothes marked in red with the words: 'traitors and agents of the ISF.' Their bodies were then hung on electrical poles in several areas in Mosul city.

Also on Wednesday, ISIL deployed what it calls the sons of the caliphate in the alleys of the old town of Mosul, wearing explosive belts. We are concerned that these may be teenagers and young boys. ISIL also posted a video on Wednesday showing four children, believed to be between 10 and 14 years old, shooting to death four people for spying for the ISF and the Peshmerga. The video shows the victims falling into the river nearby.

Since 27 October, ISIL has been relocating abducted women, including Yezidi women, into Mosul city and into Tel Afar town. Some of these women were reportedly distributed to ISIL fighters while others have been told they will be used to accompany ISIL convoys.

Last Monday, 7 November, the ISF reportedly found in Shura sub-district of Mosul an underground prison containing 961 people, all of them Sunni, and many of them former ISF officers or members of the Iraqi Islamic Party. People in the prison  which reportedly had cages measuring 1 metre by 0.5 metres  bore signs of torture and malnutrition.

Also last Monday, ISIL announced through loudspeakers mounted on vehicles in Mosul that it would execute any members fleeing from the battlefield. ISIL also reportedly announced that, on 6 November it had beheaded seven of its militants for deserting the battlefield in the Kokjali area of eastern Mosul.

OHCHR has more reports of ISIL forcing villagers to leave their homes, and more details are also emerging about the reports of a mass grave containing at least 100 people in an Agricultural College building in Hamam al-Alil that was discovered on Monday.

What is clear is that many more mass killings took place in Hamam al-Alil and other locations, with victims' bodies dumped at various locations, including a cement factory yard, the Tigris River and also reportedly at Mosul airport and in the Tal-al-Zahab area of Mosul District, Mr. Zeid said.

Use of chemical weapons by ISIL

Details are also emerging of the use of chemical weapons by ISIL. On 23 October, four people died after inhaling fumes from burning sulphur from al-Mishrag Sulphur Gas Factory and Field in the Shura sub-district of Mosul, he said.

By referring the situation in Iraq to the International Criminal Court; by giving Iraqi courts jurisdiction over international crimes; by reforming the criminal justice system and reinforcing the capacity of judicial officers to document, investigate and prosecute violations, the Government of Iraq can ensure justice and secure the foundations for a lasting peace for the country. Failure to do so may seriously jeopardize the long-term peace and security that the people of Iraq deserve, the High Commissioner said.

UN human rights officers are continuing to monitor the impact of the armed conflict on civilians, directly and through information provided by implementing partners and networks of sources.
New Lebanese government brings 'mood of optimism' needed to address ongoing challenges  UN envoy

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 10 November 2016 Cite as UN News Service, New Lebanese government brings 'mood of optimism' needed to address ongoing challenges  UN envoy, 10 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f92f40c.html [accessed 2 November 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.

10 November 2016 - Despite continuing challenges, a mood of optimism has taken hold in Lebanon following the recent election of President Michel Aoun and additional political breakthroughs are expected.

The UN Special Coordinator for the country, Sigrid Kaag, spoke with UN Radio as she prepared to update the UN Security Council in New York on the ongoing situation.

Lebanon is in a volatile region, particularly given the ongoing crisis in Syria. The stability of the country is therefore crucial. It is currently hosting 1.1 million Syrian refugees in addition to the 300,000 Palestine refugees since 1948.

"Lebanon is a unique country. It needs to be preserved and shielded," said Ms. Kaag as she called upon the international community to do its part.

President Aoun was elected on 31 October 2016, ending the country's 29 months without a president. Following his election, the Security Council urged the new Government to build on efforts to ensure the nation's stability in the region.

In terms of security challenges, Ms. Kaag explained that the situation is always evolving. "There are risks of incursion, of armed extremists from neighbouring Syria," she said. "There is a continuous slow undercurrent, a risk of radicalization within the country. And, of course, the broader socio-economic conditions that have negatively affected Lebanon in view also of the Syria crisis - that creates new tensions within."

When asked about the effects of the refugee situation in the country, the Special Coordinator applauded the Lebanese Government and its people for their tremendous generosity of spirit. Nearly one in four people in Lebanon are refugees - something that she acknowledged is not sustainable for the small country.

However, according to Ms. Kaag, the matter is "less of a security issue and more of an overall containment of a situation which presents a challenge for Lebanese citizens and of course the refugees who look forward to a safe return when time permits."

She cited the nation's tolerance and accommodating response, but also noted that people remain anxious as the refugees' return depends on a political solution to the crisis in Syria.

"In the meantime," she said, "we have to do as much as we can to provide support to the refugees: protection, access to school, healthcare, and employment opportunities where possible. But we also have to make sure that [those who are] vulnerable [in Lebanon] do not feel left behind and that they are taken care of."

The recently elected Government, she said, has "given a new level of confidence." The "incredible dignity and ability to thrive despite all the challenges is remarkable."
Syria: UN envoy urges action to avert mass hunger in eastern Aleppo ahead of 'killer' winter

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 10 November 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Syria: UN envoy urges action to avert mass hunger in eastern Aleppo ahead of 'killer' winter, 10 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f96840c.html [accessed 2 November 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.

10 November 2016 - The United Nations humanitarian envoy for Syria today urged actions to stave off the threat of mass hunger in eastern Aleppo before the arrival of winter that he fears could be "a real killer" for a quarter of a million people trapped there.

"The fifth war winter is starting in Syria. There is no doubt it will be the worst in this cruel war, and I fear it will be a real killer in too many places," Jan Egeland, Special Advisor to the UN Special Envoy for Syria, told reporters in Geneva.

"Some of the areas are freezing cold, horrible conditions, and people will be in need of digging themselves down in the ground in extreme cases," he said, explaining that humanitarian convoys are being blocked physically or administratively from reaching them, or they cannot depart because of crossfire or insecurity.

He said that the last time eastern Aleppo was reached with significant humanitarian supplies was the beginning of July and reports imply that the last food rations are being distributed now. "There will not be more to distribute next week," he said.

Mr. Egeland said that the UN put forward a humanitarian initiative last week, which has been translated into Arabic and presented to the negotiating parties, including Russia, the Syrian Government and the armed opposition groups.

He said that the initiative calls for four actions to save the people in eastern Aleppo: distribution of medical supplies to the medical facilities; medical evacuations for the estimated 300 or so patients, together with their families; delivery of food and other urgent humanitarian relief supplies; and dispatch of more personnel to provide medical relief.

UN Senior Advisor, Jan Egeland. UN Photo/Luca Solari

"None of the four elements are conditional on the others," he said.

"Having heard back from the [humanitarian] taskforce today, we are hopeful that both sides will, since the situation is so horrendous as it is, grant us the opportunity to both come with supplies into east Aleppo, and evacuate wounded and others out of east Aleppo," he said.

The International Syria Support Group (ISSG) has established the respective taskforces on humanitarian aid delivery and a wider ceasefire. They have been meeting separately since early this year on a way forward in the crisis. Russia and the United States are the co-chairs of the taskforces and the ISSG, which also comprises the UN, the Arab League, the European Union and 16 other countries.

"I do not think anybody wants a quarter of a million people to be starving in east Aleppo," he said. "I do believe we will be able to avert mass hunger this winter."

There are also hardships in western Aleppo, which can still be reached with aid, he said, warning that civilians there are dying every single week from the continued fighting.

Mr. Egeland also noted that the situation has not gotten better in the other besieged areas.

As for Madaya, Zabadani, Foah and Kafraya under the 'Four Towns Agreement,' all relief into these areas and medical evacuations out have been paralyzed because of the "conditioning" between Iran and Ahrar al-Sham.

"I have not seen a place where there has been so much politicization, manipulation of aid, as we have seen in Syria in recent months. It has to stop," he said.
Civilian death toll in Iraq nearly doubles from September to October  UN

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 10 November 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Civilian death toll in Iraq nearly doubles from September to October  UN, 10 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825f99240d.html [accessed 2 November 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.

10 November 2016 - The number of civilians killed in Iraq last month has nearly doubled since September according to recently released figures by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

The latest statistics reported 1,120 killed, up from 609 in September; and 1,005 civilian injuries, an increase from 951 in September. The figures include 15 deaths among local police and security forces as well as eight injuries.

"The casualty toll among civilians continues to rise and the civilians continue to pay the ultimate price," said the Special Representative and head of UNAMI, Jan Kubis.

According to the Mission, 672 people from Iraqi Security Forces - which includes police engaged in combat functions, Peshmerga, SWAT and militias fighting alongside the Iraqi Army excluding those in Anbar Operations - were also killed and 353 were injured.

Baghdad suffered the worst casualties, with 268 killed and 807 injured. In Ninewa, 566 civilians were killed and 59 injured, 58 killed and 112 injured in Kirkuk, 16 killed and two injured in Salahadin, and four killed and two injured in Diyala.

"With military operations in Mosul and other areas of Ninewa underway while Daesh continues to apply its terrorist tactics using civilians as human shields and executing those that resist, civilians are once again in harm's way," said Mr. Kubis.

"The United Nations again emphasizes that all actions necessary must be undertaken to ensure the protection of the civilian inhabitants from the effects of armed conflict and violence," he urged.

UNAMI has had difficulty verifying civilian casualties in conflict areas. Figures for casualties from the Anbar Governorate have been provided by the Health Directorate and may not fully reflect the real number of casualties due to the instability of the situation on the ground and regular disruption of services. In some instances, only partial verifications were possible.

The Mission also received, and has been unable to verify, reports of large numbers of casualties along with deaths by secondary effects of violence such as exposure to the elements, lack of food, water, medicine, and health care. UNAMI has also been receiving reports of civilian deaths since the start of the military operations in Mosul and Ninewa, which have not always been possible to verify.

The numbers presented here, therefore, should be taken as the absolute minimum.
Colombia: Disqualify Criminal Suspects from Army Promotions

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 10 November 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Colombia: Disqualify Criminal Suspects from Army Promotions, 10 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825fab84.html [accessed 2 November 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.

Colombian authorities should ensure that generals and colonels against whom there is credible evidence of involvement in extrajudicial executions and other abuses are not elevated in rank during impending promotions, Human Rights Watch said today.

On October 10, 2016, the Defense Ministry released the resumes of the members of the armed forces it seeks to promote. These include at least five senior officials and commanders about whom Human Rights Watch has identified credible and convincing evidence of involvement in "false positive" killings. These killings were committed in a systematic manner between 2002 and 2008 to boost body counts in the war. A Commission of the Senate will evaluate the promotions.

"The Colombian Senate should review these promotions carefully and ensure that any officer against whom there is credible evidence of abuses is not promoted," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "Otherwise, it would reinforce the longstanding message that senior officers in Colombia can get away with murder."

In the June 2015 report, "On their Watch: Evidence of Senior Army Officer's Responsibility for False Positive Killings in Colombia," Human Rights Watch presented convincing evidence suggesting that numerous senior officials, including some who have now been put forward for promotion, would bear criminal responsibility for false positive killings. In addition to the commanders mentioned in the report, Human Rights Watch has reviewed the investigations on extrajudicial executions opened by the Attorney General's Office as of December 2014, and found that brigades commanded by many of the officers set to be promoted in the new round of negotiations engaged in a significant number of killings.

Given the gravity of the 'false positive' cases and the evidence against these officers, promoting them before criminal proceedings are completed would only convey that Colombian authorities are not serious about ensuring justice for these atrocity crimes

Patterns in "false positive" cases  including their systematic nature and the implausible circumstances of many of the reported combat killings  strongly suggest that commanders of units responsible for a significant number of killings at least knew or should have known about the wrongful killings, and therefore may be criminally liable.

Senior officers, set to be promoted but against whom there is strong evidence of their responsibility for "false positives," are brigadier generals Emiro Jose Barrios Jimenez and Jorge Enrique Navarrete Jadeth, who would be promoted to major generals, and colonels Marcos Evangelista Pinto Lizarazo, Edgar Alberto Rodriguez Sanchez, and Adolfo Leon Hernandez Martinez, who would be elevated to brigadier general.

Brigadier General Barrios Jimenez, who faces a criminal investigation, commanded the 8th brigade of the army while it allegedly engaged in at least 19 killings. In October 2015, the Attorney General's Office summoned him for questioning  the first step of the criminal procedure under Colombian law  on his role in these killings.

Colonel Marcos Evangelista Pinto Lizarazo commanded the Magdalena battalion of the 9th brigade between December 2007 and July 2008. The Attorney General's Office has open investigations on at least 19 alleged killings committed by soldiers of Magdalena battalion during his command.

Colombian courts have convicted over 800 army members involved in extrajudicial killings, the vast majority of them low-ranking soldiers. However, authorities have failed to prosecute senior army officers allegedly responsible for killings and instead have promoted many of them through the military ranks, allowing several to hold top positions within the Colombian armed forces. Two of the nine Colombian army divisions are currently commanded by senior officers who are suspected of army killings and set to be elevated in rank in this impending round of promotions. In addition, the country's current top commander, Juan Pablo Rodriguez Barragan, remains under investigation for his alleged role in false positives. Under his command, the army's 4th brigade allegedly extrajudicially killed at least 28 people.

"Each of these officers enjoys the presumption of innocence unless and until they are held guilty by a court," Vivanco said. "But given the gravity of the 'false positive' cases and the evidence against these officers, promoting them before criminal proceedings are completed would only convey that Colombian authorities are not serious about ensuring justice for these atrocity crimes."

Soldiers Possibly Involved in Killings and Set to Be Promoted

Among the 18 soldiers the Defense Ministry seeks to promote, there is convincing evidence against at least five of potential criminal responsibility for "false positive" killings:
Iraq: Fleeing ISIS Forces Fired Toxic Chemicals

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 11 November 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Iraq: Fleeing ISIS Forces Fired Toxic Chemicals, 11 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825fb004.html [accessed 2 November 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 attacks hit the town of Qayyarah, 60 kilometers south of Mosul, in September and October after Iraqi government forces retook the town on August 25, 2016. The attacks caused painful burns to at least seven people consistent with exposure to low levels of a chemical warfare agent known as "vesicants," or blister agents, a chemical weapons expert told Human Rights Watch.

Police and residents of Qayyarah remove a projectile containing toxic chemicals, without any protective equipment, from the garden of a family home in the town of Qayyarah on September 21, 2016.

"ISIS attacks using toxic chemicals show a brutal disregard for human life and the laws of war," said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director. "As ISIS fighters flee, they have been repeatedly attacking and endangering the civilians they left behind, increasing concerns for residents of Mosul and other contested areas."

Iraqi and Kudistan Regional Government forces, supported by a United States-led coalition, have been moving up the Tigris River, retaking towns and villages from ISIS. The Qayyarah attacks preceded the military operations that began on October 17 to retake Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city.

At the time of the attacks, ISIS forces were holding positions between three and six kilometers north of the town. Fifteen Qayyarah residents told Human Rights Watch on October 31 that these were the first attacks of their kind in the area. They, as well as a staff member at the US embassy in Baghdad, said ISIS carried out the attacks. The residents based this on the fact that Iraqi forces were fully in control of the town of Qayyarah at the time, with ISIS carrying out attacks on the city, targeting military positions. They believed that ISIS was trying to force the town's population to flee toward them, based on reports that ISIS had tried to compel civilians to retreat with them in other areas, then target opposing forces entering the area. Human Rights Watch could not confirm this allegation.

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch Briefing Note for the Fifteenth Session of the International Criminal Court Assembly of States Parties

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 11 November 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch Briefing Note for the Fifteenth Session of the International Criminal Court Assembly of States Parties, 11 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825fb594.html [accessed 2 November 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 states parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC) will meet in The Hague from November 16-24, 2016 at the annual session of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP).

The Assembly session each year is an opportunity for ICC states parties to advance serious debate on the range of challenges the ICC confronts in advancing its mandate to provide justice for mass atrocities, and to take decisions that will equip the ICC to meet these challenges. This year's session, however, takes place within a few weeks of the deposit of notification with the UN Secretary-General of withdrawal from the Rome Statute by the governments of South Africa and Burundi. The government of Gambia has also announced its intention to withdraw.

Related Content

Without a doubt, these withdrawals  and concern that additional state party withdrawals could follow  will cast a long shadow over the essential business the Assembly needs to conduct at this session. These withdrawals pose a serious challenge to victims' access to justice and the reach of the Rome Statute. If anything, these withdrawals should spur states parties to use this Assembly session to greatest effect in reaffirming  on a stage that is likely to be watched all the more closely given these developments  the importance of the ICC, and the core principle underlying its creation: a commitment to standing on the side of victims by holding to account those most responsible for the world's worst crimes.

This briefing note first assesses the current landscape and urges states parties to be prepared to defend the ICC's fundamental principles. That is, states likely will need to guard against any temptation to use the Assembly session to offer concessions that would weaken the ICC's core mandate, in a bid to deter additional withdrawals. This note then provides recommendations to states parties in five other areas for this Assembly session: 1) the article 97 working group; 2) putting in place a stocktaking exercise at the next Assembly session to mark the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute; 3) responding to non-cooperation with ICC investigations and prosecutions; 4) the role of the ICC's performance indicators in increasing the court's impact where it matters most  for victims and local communities; and 5) the urgent need for voluntary contributions to the Trust Fund for family visit for indigent detainees.

ICC withdrawals and defending the integrity of the Rome Statute

This year's Assembly session follows closely on the heels of withdrawals by South Africa and Burundi from the Rome Statute system, as well as an announcement by Gambia of its intention to withdraw.[1]

Under article 127 of the Rome Statute, notifications of withdrawal take one year to come into effect. The notifications of withdrawal, therefore, do not have any immediate effect on the work of the ICC. The prosecutor may proceed with the ongoing preliminary examination into allegations of ICC crimes committed in Burundi since April 2015. Similarly, South Africa remains obligated to cooperate with the ICC in existing cases, an obligation that will continue even once the withdrawal takes effect. The issue of South Africa's cooperation with the court regarding its failure to arrest President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, who is wanted by the ICC on two outstanding arrest warrants for alleged crimes committed in the Darfur region, when he visited South Africa in June 2015, is pending before an ICC pre-trial chamber.[2]

Yet, for the fight against impunity, these withdrawals show devastating disregard for atrocity victims around the world, who look to the ICC as a court of last resort when all other avenues to justice have closed. If, as in the words of then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the opening of the Rome Conference in 1998, "the eyes of the victims of past crimes, and of the potential victims of future ones, are fixed firmly upon us," these victims cannot but be let down by these developments.[3]

The withdrawals have also raised concerns that other states parties may follow suit, especially given South Africa's significant influence within Africa. These concerns are reinforced by the backlash against the ICC pressed by a vocal minority of African leaders and the African Union over the past several years. In January 2016 the African Union agreed that its Open-Ended Committee of African Ministers on the ICC (Open-Ended Ministerial Committee) should explore a "comprehensive strategy including collective withdrawal."[4] While a number of ICC African members Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia  pushed back against an African Union call for ICC withdrawal at the July African Union summit, the African Union nevertheless reaffirmed the mandate of the Open-Ended Ministerial Committee to continue to explore a strategy for withdrawal.[5]

We appreciate that against this backdrop, many ICC states parties may now want to take any action possible to avoid further withdrawals and to use the upcoming Assembly session as a framework through which to take such action.

To be sure, the Assembly can and should be a place for principled discussion rooted in commitment to the ICC, and states parties should undertake efforts to engage with one another both before and during the Assembly session

At the same time, Human Rights Watch urges states parties to guard against initiatives that could compromise the ICC's independence, legitimacy, and effective functioning under the guise of promoting the court's universality.

First, while the prospect of additional withdrawals cannot be discounted, there remains strong support among African governments for the ICC. In the wake of South Africa's withdrawal, Botswana, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Zambia have publicly signaled their opposition to withdrawal and their intention to remain with the court.[6]

Second, it is difficult to identify what principled compromises could be offered.

The discourse around the relationship between the ICC and African countries certainly raises important and legitimate questions. Critics have charged the ICC with unfairly targeting Africans for prosecution. While this charge does not bear up under scrutiny, including because of the role of African governments in referring cases to the court, it speaks directly to the double standards within the international political and economic order. On accountability, as with other human rights issues, officials of powerful governments or their allies are still likely to escape justice because these governments have failed to join the ICC or because they wield the veto power they hold as permanent members of the UN Security Council to protect against prosecutions. This is a problem that cannot be readily remedied by reforming the operations of the ICC. Instead, these double standards need to be addressed head-on, including through ratification campaigns to bring additional countries into the Rome Statute and efforts to ensure that the members of the UN Security Council implement a principled and consistent approach to ICC referrals.

Meanwhile, a significant part of what appears to have fueled South Africa's decision to withdraw relates to a core principle under article 27 of the Rome Statute  the irrelevance of official capacity before the ICC.

In a media statement by South Africa's minister of justice and correctional services regarding the country's withdrawal, the minister cited a conflict between the government's ICC obligations to arrest and surrender individuals wanted by the ICC and its role in promoting peace, in particular within countries in Africa where the ICC may be conducting investigations and prosecutions.[7] The government of Kenya, with African Union backing, has also called for a specific amendment to article 27 to allow immunity before the ICC for sitting leaders and other high-level officials.[8]

The irrelevance of official capacity to prosecution before the ICC is fundamental to the court's mission, as stated in the Rome Statute preamble, that "the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished." The alternative risks an impunity gap at the highest levels and creating a perverse incentive for alleged perpetrators to hold onto power indefinitely or to gain power to avoid prosecution. The irrelevance of official capacity has been a regular feature of international courts since the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg, including the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Allowing official capacity to bar prosecution before the ICC would represent a major retreat in international criminal law and practice. Meanwhile, while tensions may exist between the imperatives of justice and those at stake in negotiating peace, the weight of experience from around the world suggests that impunity is a key factor in perpetuating cycles of violence.[9]

At a special segment of the 2013 Assembly session on the "Indictment of sitting Heads of State and Government and its consequences on peace and stability and reconciliation," convened at the request of the African Union, the statements of states parties indicated that there was no consensus in favor of amending article 27.[10]

South Africa has signaled it may be seeking to press within the Assembly a specific exception to article 27. At last year's Assembly session, it requested a special agenda item on the application and implementation of article 98. In its request, it set out an interpretation of the relationship between article 27 and article 98(1) that would provide immunity from arrest for sitting heads of state of states non-parties like Sudan.[11]

The interpretation of these articles is a matter for the court's judges, however. The judges have already addressed this issue, holding, in one set of decisions, that "customary international law creates an exception to Head of State immunity when international courts seek a Head of State's arrest for the commission of international crimes," or, in a series of other decisions, including in a decision regarding South Africa's obligations to arrest al-Bashir, that the UN Security Council, in referring the situation of Darfur to the ICC, waived the immunity of Sudanese officials.[12]

While accepting judicial decisions that governments disagree with may be a bitter pill to swallow, it is the foundation upon which a judicial institution must exist.

States parties at least year's Assembly session did not act on a request from the South African government that an "interpretation be done of the nature and scope of Article 98 and its relationship with Article 27," and subsequently also opted not to form a working group on this topic appropriately so, given the importance of distinguishing clearly between the oversight and legislative role of the Assembly, and the independent judicial mandate of its judges.[13]

Third, recent practice at Assembly sessions has shown that dialogue on state party concerns has tended to evolve beyond discussion and into negotiations on Assembly texts that blur this essential line. Where negotiations and adopted texts, including rule changes, resolutions, and reports of proceedings, have concerned decisions recently rendered or still pending before the ICC's judges, they have risked the Assembly treading on the independence of the court's judges.

As this Assembly session approaches, therefore, Human Rights Watch recommends states parties resist any efforts toward reinterpretation and concession that would undermine the court's integrity, mission, and independence, and instead prepare to stand firmly on principle. While any withdrawal from the treaty is regrettable, the price of avoiding withdrawals cannot be an ICC hindered in carrying out its essential mandate. The court should remain, as was said many times during the Rome conference, a "court worth having."

ICC states parties should:

Use general debate and other statements strategically to reaffirm the critical role of the ICC as a court of last resort, the essential importance of ensuring that no one is above the law, and the irrelevance of official capacity as reflected in article 27, and to reject politicized attacks on the court's independence;

Ensure high-level representation within delegations to signal the importance governments attach to the ICC and the fight against impunity; and

Prepare to work together across regions within the Assembly to resist outcomes in Assembly texts that could undermine the ICC's independence, legitimacy, and effective functioning.

Recent Human Rights Watch and joint materials

Joint Statement, "South Africa: Continent Wide Outcry at ICC Withdrawal," Human Rights Watch press release, October 22, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/22/south-africa-continent-wide-outcry-i...

"South Africa: ICC Move Betrays Victims," Human Rights Watch press release, October 24, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/24/south-africa-icc-move-betrays-victims

"Burundi: ICC Withdrawal Major Loss to Victims," Human Rights Watch press release, October 27, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/27/burundi-icc-withdrawal-major-loss-vi...

Sarah Rayzl Lansky, "Africans Speak Out Against ICC Withdrawal," commentary, Human Rights Watch, November 2, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/02/africans-speak-out-against-icc-withd...

As noted above, at least year's Assembly session, the South African government requested a special agenda item on the application and implementation of article 97, in addition to article 98. Article 97 provides for consultations between a government and the court when a government identifies difficulties in implementing the ICC's cooperation requests.

At the conclusion of the last Assembly session, states parties "expressed their willingness to consider, within the framework of the appropriate subsidiary body of the Assembly, proposals to develop procedures for the implementation of article 97."[14] At the request of the South African government, states parties established a working group on article 97 in June 2016.[15]

It is unclear at this writing whether the article 97 working group will report to this year's Assembly session on its progress, including consideration of a proposal presented by South Africa for rule or regulation amendments. The proper functioning of article 97 may be important to ensuring cooperation with the court, and, in Human Rights Watch's view, could legitimately be the subject of Assembly discussions in close consultation with court officials. But, as indicated before the last Assembly session, Human Rights Watch considers that further discussion and, in particular, any outcome should be deferred until the litigation on South Africa's cooperation in the al-Bashir case is resolved. The litigation would appear to encompass the government's concerns regarding article 97 in addition to the relationship between article 27 and 98.[16]

ICC states parties should:

Defer further discussion within the article 97 working group until after a final determination by the ICC with regard to South Africa's cooperation in the Prosecutor v. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir case.

Rome Statute at Twenty: Stocktaking of progress and challenges ahead

July 2018 will be the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute. To mark the beginning of the anniversary year, and to set in a place a framework for anniversary celebrations and concrete actions by ICC officials and states parties to bolster support to the court in 2018 and beyond, the Assembly should mandate the Bureau to prepare a stocktaking exercise of progress to date and challenges ahead, to be held during a plenary session at the sixteenth Assembly of States Parties session. This exercise could provide constructive, positive attention to the work of the ICC, a focus needed more than ever now in light of the recent withdrawals.

As this twentieth anniversary approaches, the ICC is growing into maturity. The court has issued five verdicts, and they have become increasingly significant. The recent conviction of Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former Congolese vice-president, for murders and rapes by rebel fighters under his command is of particular importance. Investigations have taken place or are ongoing in 10 situations, widening victims' access to justice.

To be sure, there have also been setbacks, including the collapse of the court's cases related to Kenya's 2007-08 post-election violence. Improving the pace of court proceedings while deepening the ICC's impact with victims and affected communities also should remain key strategic goals for ICC officials. But the court shows signs of emerging as the critical court of last resort its founders envisioned in 1998.

And yet, 2018 looks set to be a vastly different time than 1998. The landscape on which the ICC works has never been more challenging. Two ICC states parties have now taken the unprecedented step of seeking to remove themselves from the Rome Statute community of states, and the court's cases have also attracted political backlash. Multiplying human rights crises around the globe have meant that demand for justice is far exceeding expectations envisioned by the statute's drafters. Budgetary challenges faced by the ICC's member countries have limited the resources available to the ICC to address these demands; the court's capacity continues to far fall behind the need for accountability. With crucial international institutions such as the UN Security Council gripped by paralysis, gone is the post-Cold War optimism that animated projects to consolidate international cooperation and the rule of law when the ICC was first set up.

A plenary session on the Rome Statute's twentieth anniversary will provide an opportunity to take stock of achievements to date, while, critically, also grappling with this changed landscape. It will represent a natural continuation, in a more consolidated format, of the broader stocktaking exercise at the 2010 Kampala review conference.

ICC states parties should:

Include language in the Omnibus resolution deciding to include a specific item on the twentieth anniversary of the Rome Statute in the agenda of the sixteenth Assembly of States Parties and mandate the Bureau to undertake necessary preparations.

Responding to non-cooperation in ICC investigations and prosecutions

This year, ICC judges issued three findings of non-cooperation against ICC states parties. Two of these findings relate to the failure of the governments of Uganda and Djibouti to arrest President Omar Al-Bashir during visits by al-Bashir to those countries.[17] The third relates to the failure of the government of Kenya to comply fully with the prosecution's request for tax, bank, company, land transfer, and telephone records in the now-withdrawn case against Uhuru Kenyatta, the president of Kenya.[18]

In 2011, the Assembly adopted a set of procedures related to non-cooperation. One dimension of these procedures relates to efforts by the Assembly to deter non-cooperation, and following consultations, the Assembly's focal points on non-cooperation have prepared a "toolkit" to be used by states parties to that end.[19]

The other dimension of the procedures relate to a "formal response" to judicial findings of non-cooperation. These procedures provide for a number of possible steps: meetings of the Assembly's Bureau with the state concerned by a finding of non-cooperation; a public meeting with the Bureau's New York Working Group; appointment of a facilitator to discuss the issue; discussion of a draft Assembly resolution containing concrete recommendations; and then possible adoption of such a resolution regarding an instance of non-cooperation.[20]

While some of these steps have been taken with regard to past findings of non-cooperation, the Assembly has yet to discuss a specific instance of non-cooperation or to take action on such an instance during its annual sessions.

It is essential that these non-cooperation procedures be put fully into practice. Securing effective cooperation in its cases remains a central challenge for the ICC.

Indeed, in referring the government of Kenya's non-cooperation to the Assembly, the ICC trial chamber noted that it did so because even though the case against President Kenyatta was withdrawn, the material requested by the prosecution could be relevant for current or future cases arising out of the situation. The chamber also sent a message more broadly regarding the significance of non-cooperation:

[T]he Chamber finds that, in general, the lack of bona fide cooperation by the Government of a situation country, as shown by the Kenyan Government in this instance, may have a serious impact on the functioning of the Court in future proceedings. Therefore, notwithstanding the passage of time, and having regard to the nature of the non-cooperation at issue, the Chamber finds it appropriate for the lack of cooperation in this case to be further addressed.[21]

Human Rights Watch urges the Assembly to ensure that it acts to take up its responsibilities under article 87(7) to enforce the court's judicial findings of non-cooperation. A clear response from the Assembly is key to give meaning to these findings, to bring about future cooperation, and to deter other states from non-cooperation.

As a first step, Human Rights Watch urges states parties to ensure that the issue of the three recent findings of non-cooperation is placed on the agenda of the next Bureau meeting. The Bureau should also convene meetings with the governments concerned as soon as possible after the conclusion of the Assembly session. Consideration could then be given to follow-up steps, including the appointment of a facilitator and the development of recommendations for Assembly-wide action.

States parties may wish to consider whether, as they implement the procedures next year with regard to the three recent findings of non-cooperation, they should, in parallel, review the "formal response" procedures. The Assembly's current procedures outline a clear, if only permissive process for responding to formal findings of non-cooperation, but stop short of prescribing specific steps the Assembly can take collectively to respond to non-cooperation findings. Human Rights Watch has previously urged the Assembly to go further in articulating its "formal response" to findings of non-cooperation. Consultations held by the non-cooperation focal points in 2015 touched on this dimension, resulting in a preliminary set of recommendations.[22]

Such review could include an evaluation of lessons learned to date, the identification of existing gaps, and consideration as to what enhancements are needed in future practice in the implementation of the procedures. The aim of the review should be to stimulate reflection and to secure consensus around recommended actions going forward in order to ensure that a commitment to prevent and respond to non-cooperation can be more easily translated into concrete action on the part of the Assembly and states parties.

ICC states parties should:

Express regret, in general debate, plenary cooperation session, and other statement s during the Assembly session as well as in language in the Omnibus resolution, with regard to the increase in findings of non-cooperation over the past year and at the detrimental impact non-cooperation has on the court's investigations and prosecutions;

during the Assembly session as well as in language in the Omnibus resolution, with regard to the increase in findings of non-cooperation over the past year and at the detrimental impact non-cooperation has on the court's investigations and prosecutions; Call on the Bureau to include these non-cooperation findings within its agenda and, express the expectation in general debate, plenary cooperation session, and other statements at the Assembly session, that the Bureau and Assembly will put the non-cooperation procedures into practice with regard to current findings of non-cooperation as soon as possible after the conclusion of the Assembly session;

Include language in the Omnibus resolution mandating the Bureau to ensure the effective implementation of the Assembly's non-cooperation procedures and the development of recommendations in light of lessons learned.

Performance indicators and the court's impact in affected communities

The court is developing a set of court-wide performance indicators, following a request to the court by the Assembly at its thirteenth session in 2014 that it "intensify its efforts to develop qualitative and quantitative indicators that would allow the [c]ourt to demonstrate better its achievements and needs, as well as allowing States Parties to assess the Court's performance in a more strategic manner."[23] It has prepared a report to the Assembly on its progress in this regard, which, Human Rights Watch understands, includes an initial, preliminary set of data for several indicators.

Through participation in consultations regarding the performance indicators over the past year, Human Rights Watch has urged the court to include indicators that are relevant to the court's impact for victims and in affected communities. By impact, we mean a concern to ensure that court proceedings are meaningful, accessible, and perceived as fair within these local communities.

Court officials have a number of different responsibilities relevant to maximizing the ICC's local impact. These include the prosecution's selection of cases; outreach to affected communities; assisting victims to participate in court proceedings; engaging victims and civil society in consultations; and the possibility of in situ proceedings. They also include implementation of the dual mandate of the Trust Fund for Victims to provide assistance to victims and to carry out court-ordered reparations. And they include "positive complementarity" initiatives to encourage additional national investigations and prosecutions, amplifying the effect of the cases pursued by the ICC, as well as other efforts aimed at increasing the court's long-term legacy. Most of these responsibilities are best supported by a robust presence of ICC staff in situations under investigation and the establishment of court field offices.[24]

Indicators that can reflect progress toward achieving this impact  and through the collection of data over time, highlight areas where continued progress is needed  are an essential part of assessing the court's performance.

Human Rights Watch therefore welcomes what we understand to be the report's acknowledgment of civil society's concern that performance indicators be developed that are relevant to assessing the court's impact for victims and affected communities. While there is further work to be done in future phases of the project to develop performance indicators, we understand that the report already includes some initial indicators relevant to a number of the above areas.

The inclusion of performance indicators relevant to the court's local impact will help to reinforce important progress at the court.

For example, the registry is implementing its new structure in the field, following the ReVision, including the recruitment of senior chiefs of office in the court's field offices.[25] The latter is a critical and overdue step that has significant potential to better root the work of the court locally and strengthen the ICC's connection with affected communities. These heads of office could play a critical reporting function in assessing performance on increasing impact, including through ensuring regular consultations are held in situation countries between ICC staff and affected communities. The Committee on Budget and Finance has recommended that the Assembly approve funding for the recruitment of a chief of office for a Georgia field office.[26] We urge that this position be recruited as soon as possible; having a chief of office in place from a relatively early point in the court's investigations in Georgia should help ensure more impact-sensitive approaches in key areas, including outreach and victim participation.

The prosecutor has also highlighted the importance of the court's impact for victims and affected communities in her office's new case selection and prioritization policy, issued in September 2016. The policy emphasizes that the office of the prosecutor seeks out direct interaction with victims and victims' associations at all stages of its activities and includes as assessment of the impact of investigations and prosecutions on victims and affected communities, as well as the impact of investigations and prosecutions on ongoing criminality and deterring new crimes, as two of the criteria guiding its prioritization between cases selected for investigation.[27] Critically, the policy reaffirms the prosecutor's overall commitment to "represent as much as possible the true extent of criminality which occurred within a situation, in an effort to ensure  that the most serious crimes committed in each situation do not go unpunished."[28] Our observation of ICC practice to date suggests that reflecting in the office's cases underlying patterns of serious crimes  what crimes, committed where, and by which groups  following impartial and independent investigations of allegations against all parties is key to the court's legitimacy within affected communities, a prerequisite for impact.[29]

States parties should encourage the court to continue with its development of performance indicators and to continue to increase, in future phases of the project, its focus on evaluating performance through the lens of impact for victims and affected communities.

ICC states parties should:

Welcome, in statements in the general debate and at other appropriate moments during the Assembly session, the court's progress in developing performance indicators in areas relevant to increasing its impact for victims and affected communities in an assessment of its performance;

Encourage, in statements at the Assembly session, the court in its next phase of indicator development to develop additional performance indicators relevant to the court's impact for victims and affected communities; and

Ensure, in negotiations on the budget, adequate resources to permit the office of the prosecutor to increase the number of investigations and prosecution in order to fully implement its policy on case selection and prioritization, and to support the registry's new structure in the field.

Recent Human Rights Watch materials

"Human Rights Watch Comments on the ICC Office of the Prosecutor Draft Policy Paper on Case Selection and Prioritisation," May 3, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/05/03/human-rights-watch-comments-icc-offi...

The right of all detained persons to family visits is well recognized.[30] The ICC presidency, in a March 2009 judicial decision, held that the ICC has a positive obligation to fund family visits of indigent persons in order to give effect to their right to family visits.[31] In November 2009, however, the Assembly passed a resolution reaffirming many states parties' position "that according to existing law and standards, the right to family visits does not comprise a co-relative legal right to have such visits paid for by the detaining authority or any authority."[32] In 2010, the Assembly established a Trust Fund for family visit for indigent detainees in order to ensure that family visits are now funded entirely through voluntary contributions.[33]

Unfortunately, over the last six years, states parties have not followed through on the creation of the Trust Fund. To date, only two states parties have made voluntary contributions, totaling 180,000. A recent decision of the ICC presidency, reaffirming the right of indigent detainees to funded family visits, emphasized the critically low level of resources of the Trust Fund, and the need to actively seek donations from states parties, other states, nongovernmental organizations, civil society, individuals, and other entities.[34] Indeed, the level of funding within the Trust Fund  less than 10,000  appears to be identical to the amount of funding available one year ago.[35]

There is a substantial and real risk that, in the near future, the ICC will not be able to provide for family visits for indigent detainees. This would place the registry, with its responsibilities to oversee such visits, and the ICC as a whole, in an untenable position. Indeed, in its recent decision, the presidency has indicated that in considering requests for family visits, the registry should take into consideration pending or anticipated requests from other indigent detainees to ensure the equal treatment of detainees. In the absence of sufficient funding to ensure a reasonable number of family visits for all indigent detainees, however, this concern for equal treatment could lead to the perverse result of limiting the rights of all detainees.

Urgent donations to the Trust Fund are needed. In addition, Human Rights Watch believes that the ICC and the Assembly may need to consider alternatives to the Trust Fund, including the court's use of the contingency fund to ensure respect for the rights of indigent detainees to family visits.

ICC states parties should:

Use the Assembly session to announce, on an urgent basis, voluntary contributions to the Assembly's Trust Fund for family visit for indigent detainees; and

Consider, going forward, whether a more effective funding mechanism is needed to ensure the effective protection of the rights of indigent ICC detainees to family visits.

[1] UN Secretary-General, "Withdrawal: South Africa," C.N.1026.2013.TREATIES-XVIII.10 (Depositary Notification), October 25, 2016, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CN/2016/CN.786.2016-Eng.pdf (accessed November 9, 2016); UN Secretary-General, "Withdrawal: Burundi," C.N.805.2016.TREATIES-XVIII.10 (Depositary Notification), October 28, 2016; https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CN/2016/CN.805.2016-Eng.pdf (accessed November 9, 2016); "Gambia announces withdrawal from International Criminal Court," Reuters, October 26, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gambia-icc-idUSKCN12P335 (accessed November 8, 2016).

[2] There has been significant outcry regarding South Africa's apparent circumvention of its own domestic law regarding treaty withdrawal, including the absence of first seeking parliamentary approval. The notification is the subject of a legal challenge before a South African court. Ed Stoddard, "South Africa opposition party challenges ICC withdrawal in court," Reuters, October 24, 2016, http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKCN12O27E (accessed November 8, 2016). It also has been widely condemned by human rights activists across the African continent, who look to the court to play its critical role as a court of last resort. See "South Africa: Continent Wide Outcry at ICC Withdrawal," joint news release, October 22, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/22/south-africa-continent-wide-outcry-i...

[3] "UN Secretary-General Declares Overriding Interest of International Criminal Court Conference Must Be that of Victims and World Community as a Whole," UN press release, SG/SM/6597, June 15, 1998, http://www.un.org/press/en/1998/19980615.sgsm6597.html (accessed November 8, 2016).

[4] Assembly of the African Union, Twenty-Sixth Ordinary Session, "Decision on the International Criminal Court - Doc. EX.CL/952(XXVIII)," Assembly/AU/Dec.590(XXVI), Addis Ababa, January 31, 2016, http://www.au.int/en/sites/default/files/decisions/29514-assembly_au_dec... (accessed November 8, 2016), para. 10(iv).

[5] Assembly of the African Union, Twenty-Seventh Ordinary Session, "Decision on the International Criminal Court  Doc. EX.CL/987(XXIX)," Assembly/AU/Dec.616 (XXVII), Kigali, July 18, 2016, http://au.int/en/sites/default/files/decisions/31274-assembly_au_dec_605... (accessed November 8, 2016), para. 5(iii)(b); Elise Keppler, "Governments Defend ICC at African Union Summit," Human Rights Watch dispatch, July 20, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/07/20/dispatches-governments-defend-icc-af....

[6] For more details on comments and statements by these governments, see Sarah Rayzl Lansky, "Africans Speak Out Against ICC Withdrawal," commentary, November 2, 2016 https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/02/africans-speak-out-against-icc-withd....

[7] "Briefing to the media by Minister Michael Masutha on the matter of International Criminal Court and Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir," October 21, 2016, http://www.dirco.gov.za/docs/speeches/2016/masu1021.htm (accessed November 9, 2016); see also UN Secretary-General, "Withdrawal: South Africa," C.N.1026.2013.TREATIES-XVIII.10 (Depositary Notification), October 25, 2016, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CN/2016/CN.786.2016-Eng.pdf

[8] UN Secretary-General, "Kenya: Proposal of Amendments," C.N.1026.2013.TREATIES-XVIII.10 (Depositary Notification), March 14, 2014, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CN/2013/CN.1026.2013-Eng.pdf (accessed November 15, 2014); Assembly of the African Union, Fifteenth Extraordinary Session, "Decision on Africa's Relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) Ext/Assembly/AU/Dec.1(Oct.2013)," Addis Ababa, October 12, 2013, http://www.au.int/en/sites/default/files/decisions/9655-ext_assembly_au_... (accessed November 24, 2014), para. 10(i).

[9] Human Rights Watch, Selling Justice Short: Why Accountability Matters for Peace, July 2009, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/ij0709webwcover_1.pdf

[10] See Assembly of States Parties (ASP), "Special segment as requested by the African Union: 'Indictment of sitting Heads of State and Government and its consequences on peace and stability and reconciliation': Informal summary by the Moderator," ICC-ASP/12/61, November 27, 2013, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP12/ICC-ASP-12-61-ENG.pdf (accessed November 8, 2016), para. 8.

[11] See ASP, "List of supplementary items requested for inclusion in the agenda of the fourteenth session of the Assembly," ICC-ASP/14/35, October 27, 2015, annex I ("Note verbale from South Africa no. 57/2015, dated 5 October 2015, addressed to the Registrar of the International Criminal Court"), https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP14/ICC-ASP-14-35-ENG.pdf (accessed November 8, 2016), paras. 13-14,

annex II. The agenda item also covered the application of article 97, discussed further below.

[12] Compare Prosecutor v. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir, ICC, Case No. 02/05-01/09, "Corrigendum to the Decision Pursuant to Article 87(7) of the Rome Statute on the Failure by the Republic of Malawi to Comply with the Cooperation Requests Issued by the Court with Respect to the Arrest and Surrender of Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir," December 13, 2011, http://www.legal-tools.org/doc/8c9d80/ (accessed November 9, 2016), para. 43 with Prosecutor v. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir, ICC, Case No. 02/05-01/09, "Decision on the Cooperation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Regarding Omar Al Bashir's Arrest and Surrender to the Court," April 9, 2014, http://www.legal-tools.org/doc/89d30d/ (accessed November 9, 2016), para. 29. The single judge of the pre-trial chamber followed the latter decision with regard to South Africa's obligations. See Prosecutor v. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir, ICC, Case No. 02/05-01/09, "Decision following the Prosecutor's request for an order further clarifying that the Republic of South Africa is under the obligation to immediately arrest and surrender Omar Al Bashir," June 13, 2015, http://www.legal-tools.org/doc/c2dc80/ (accessed November 8, 2016), paras. 5-9.

[13] The initial request was included in South Africa's supplementary agenda item. See Note verbale from South Africa no. 57/2015, dated 5 October 2015, addressed to the Registrar of the International Criminal Court, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP14/ICC-ASP-14-35-ENG.pdf, paras. 13-14. In the report of the Assembly's proceedings, the Assembly noted that "some States Parties raised concerns [regarding the relationship between article 27 and 98]," and that, therefore "interested States Parties could refer the matter to the Bureau for further consideration and attention." The South African government subsequently requested the establishment of a working group on articles 97 and 98. States parties decided not to set up the working group on article 98, but did agree to set one up on article 97, as discussed below. See Bureau of the ASP, "Agenda and Decisions," June 3, 2016, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/Bureau/ICC-ASP-2016-Bureau-03-0... (accessed November 8, 2016), p. 2.

[14] ASP, "Proceedings," inOfficial Records, Fourteenth Session, The Hague, November 18-26, 2015, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP14/OR/ICC-ASP-14-20-OR-vol-I..., para. 59.

[15] Bureau of the ASP, "Agenda and Decisions," June 3, 2016, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/Bureau/ICC-ASP-2016-Bureau-03-0..., p. 2.

[16] See Human Rights Watch Briefing Note for the Fourteenth Session of the International Criminal Court Assembly of States Parties, November 2015, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/supporting_resources/hrw_asp14_b..., pp. 10-12.

[17] Prosecutor v. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir, ICC, Case No. 02/05-01/09, "Decision on the non-compliance by the Republic of Djibouti with the request to arrest and surrender Omar Al-Bashir to the Court and referring the matter to the United Nations Security Council and the Assembly of the State Parties to the Rome Statute," July 11, 2016, http://www.legal-tools.org/doc/a09363/ (accessed November 8, 2016);  "Decision on the non-compliance by the Republic of Uganda with the request to arrest and surrender Omar Al-Bashir to the Court and referring the matter to the United Nations Security Council and the Assembly of State Parties to the Rome Statute," July 11, 2016, http://www.legal-tools.org/doc/51c322-1/ (accessed November 8, 2016).

[18] Prosecutor v. Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, ICC, Case No. 01/09-02/11, "Second decision on Prosecution's application for a finding of non-compliance under Article 87(7) of the Statute," September 19, 2016, http://www.legal-tools.org/doc/2f2e43/ (accessed November 8, 2016).

[19] ASP, "Report of the Bureau on non-cooperation," ICC-ASP/15/31, November 8, 2016, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP15/ICC-ASP-15-31-ENG.pdf (accessed November 9, 2016), annex II.

[20] ASP, "Strengthening the International Criminal Court and the Assembly of

States Parties," Resolution ICC-ASP/10/Res.5, December 21, 2011, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP10/Resolutions/ICC-ASP-10-Re... (accessed November 9, 2016), annex ("Assembly procedures relating to non-cooperation").

[21] Prosecutor v. Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, ICC, Case No. 01/09-02/11, "Second decision on Prosecution's application for a finding of non-compliance under Article 87(7) of the Statute," http://www.legal-tools.org/doc/2f2e43/, para. 35. Three men are wanted on ICC charges for witness tampering in the now-vacated case against William Ruto, the deputy president of Kenya, and a co-defendant, the former broadcaster, Joshua arap Sang. A legal challenge to the surrender of at least one of these individuals, Walter Barasa, is currently pending before the Kenyan Court of Appeals.

[22] See Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch Memorandum for the Thirteenth Session of the International Criminal Court Assembly of States Parties, November 25, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/11/25/human-rights-watch-memorandum-thirte... ASP, "Report of the Bureau on non-cooperation," ICC-ASP/14/38, November 18, 2015, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP14/ICC-ASP-14-38-ENG.pdf (accessed November 8, 2016), annex III.

[23] ASP, "Strengthening the International Criminal Court and the Assembly of States Parties," Resolution ICC-ASP/13/Res.5, December 17, 2014, http://www.legal-tools.org/uploads/tx_ltpdb/ICC-ASP-13-Res5-ENG.pdf (accessed November 8, 2016).

[24] See discussion in Human Rights Watch, Making Justice Count: Lessons from the Work of the ICC in Cote d'Ivoire, August 2015, https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/08/04/making-justice-count/lessons-iccs-..., pp. 14-21.

[25] See ASP, "Report on the review of the organizational structure of the Registry: Outcomes of Phase 4 of the ReVision Project - Decisions on the structure of the Registry," ICC-ASP/14/18, May 4, 2015, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP14/ICC-ASP-14-18-ENG.pdf (accessed November 10, 2016), para. 26, 31.

[26] ASP, "Report of the Committee on Budget and Finance on the work of its twenty-seventh session," ICC-ASP/15/15, October 28, 2016, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP15/ICC-ASP-15-15-ENG.pdf (accessed November 8, 2016), paras. 75-76.

[27] Office of the Prosecutor, "Policy Paper on Case Selection and Prioritisation," September 15, 2016, https://www.icc-cpi.int/itemsDocuments/20160915_OTP-Policy_Case-Selectio... (accessed November 8, 2016), paras. 9, criterion C and D.

[28] Ibid., para. 8

[29] See Human Rights Watch, Unfinished Business: Closing Gaps in the Selection of ICC Cases, September 2011, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/icc0911webwcover.pdf; Human Rights Watch, Making Justice Count, August 2015, https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/08/04/making-justice-count/lessons-iccs-....

[30] See, for example, United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules), A/RES/70/175, January 8, 2016, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/175 (accessed November 9, 2016), rule 58 ("Prisoners shall be allowed, under necessary supervision, to communicate with their family and friends at regular intervals: (a) By corresponding in writing and using, where available, telecommunication, electronic, digital and other means; and (b) By receiving visits."); Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, A/RES/43/173, December 9, 1998, annex, 43 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 49) at 298, U.N. Doc. A/43/49 (1988), http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/43/a43r173.htm (accessed November 8, 2016), principle 19 ("A detained or imprisoned person shall have the right to be visited by and to correspond with, in particular, members of his family and shall be given adequate opportunity to communicate with the outside world, subject to reasonable conditions and restrictions as specified by law or lawful regulations."). Regulation of the Court 100 states that "[a] detained person shall be entitled to receive visits," and Regulation of the Registry 179 provides that the "Registrar shall give specific attention to visits by family of the detained persons with a view to maintaining such links."

[31] Prosecutor v. Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, ICC, Case No. 01/04-01/07, "Decision on Mr. Mathieu Ngudjolo's Complaint Under Regulation 221(1) of the Regulations of the Registry Against the Registar's Decision of 18 November 2008," March 10, 2009, https://www.icc-cpi.int/CourtRecords/CR2009_02787.PDF (accessed November 10, 2016).

[32] ASP, "Family visits for indigent detainees," Resolution ICC-ASP/8/Res.4, November 26, 2009, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/Resolutions/ICC-ASP-8-Res.4-ENG... (accessed November 9, 2016), preambular para. 2.

[33] See ASP, "Financial statements for the period 1 January to 31 December 2010," ICC-ASP/10/12, July 26, 2011, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP10/OR/ICC-ASP-10-20-Vol.II-E... (accessed November 9, 2016), p. 52.

[34] Public redacted version of "Decision on the 'Application to review the 'Decision on Complaint to the Registrar by [REDACTED] concerning Supported Family Visit'' dated [REDACTED] 2016," ICC Presidency, August 11, 2016, https://www.icc-cpi.int/CourtRecords/CR2016_05804.PDF (accessed November 8, 2016), para. 42.

[35] Ibid., para. 14.

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Iraq: 37 Men Fleeing Fighting Detained

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 10 November 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Iraq: 37 Men Fleeing Fighting Detained, 10 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5825fb8f4.html [accessed 2 November 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.

Iraqi and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) forces have detained at least 37 men from areas around Mosul and Hawija suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) since the beginning of the Mosul operation, Human Rights Watch said today.

Human Rights Watch spoke to 46 relatives and witnesses, who described how security forces took the men from checkpoints, villages, screening centers, and camps for displaced people. Most said that they did not know where the men are being held and all of them said that the men have not been able to contact them while in detention.

"On top of the danger and anxiety facing civilians fleeing ISIS control, some are now being detained and denied contact with their families by Iraqi and KRG authorities," said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director. "When detainees are held without contact with the outside world, in unknown locations, that significantly increases the risk of other violations, including ill-treatment and torture."

Iraqi and KRG authorities should make efforts to inform family members, either directly or indirectly, including through camp management officials, about the location of all detainees. The authorities should make public the number of fighters and civilians detained, including at checkpoints, screening sites, and camps during the conflict with ISIS, and the legal basis for their detention, including the charges against them. Iraqi and KRG authorities should ensure prompt independent judicial review of detention and allow detainees to have access to lawyers and medical care and to communicate with their families.

On October 17, 2016, the Iraqi central government and KRG authorities, with the support of an international coalition, announced the start of military operations to retake Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, which ISIS captured in June 2014. Anti-ISIS forces also encircled the city of Hawija, 57 kilometers west of Kirkuk and 120 kilometers southeast of Mosul, which ISIS also captured in June 2014, and began operations to retake the city. Since the operations began, at least 41,900 people have fled into northern Syria, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), and elsewhere in Iraq.

The people Human Rights Watch interviewed individually and in groups had recently escaped from ISIS-held areas near Mosul and Hawija. The interviews were conducted in the Jadah camp for displaced persons, 65 kilometers south of Mosul and under the control of Iraqi Security Forces, and the Zelikan camp, 43 kilometers northeast of Mosul and under the control of the KRG's security forces.

Those interviewed in both camps consistently said that detainees held by both Iraqi and KRG forces had not been able to contact them and that in many cases they did not know where the detainees were being held. Even in one instance in which family members knew that their loved ones were being held in the building where they had been screened, the detainees had been denied the right to communicate with the family members and with a lawyer, relatives said.

On October 27, Human Rights Watch issued a report on the screening procedure facing displaced men and boys from ISIS-held territory at Debaga screening center and camp, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It found that KRG forces have detained men and boys ages 15 and over for indefinite periods stretching from weeks to months, even after they pass an initial security check for possible ties to ISIS. While being screened, detainees told Human Rights Watch, they are denied access to lawyers and detained even in the absence of evidence that they are not individually suspected of a crime.

In a follow-up visit to Debaga camp on October 28, four families told Human Rights Watch that after KRG security forces detained seven male family members at checkpoints and in the screening area at the camp, none of the families were able to get answers from KRG security forces at the camp about where their relatives were being held. The men had been held for up to 11 days, they said.

Enforced disappearances, which occur when security forces detain and then conceal the fate or whereabouts of a detainee, placing them outside the protection of the law, are violations of international human rights law and can be international crimes. Depriving detainees of any contact with the outside world and refusing to give family members any information about their fate or whereabouts can qualify their detentions as enforced disappearances.

Dr. Dindar Zebari, chairperson of the KRG's High Committee to Evaluate and Respond to International Reports, provided Human Rights Watch with an explanation of KRG security force screening and detention processes for displaced persons. In it, he stated that KRG authorities are committed to informing the families of detainees of the process and status but, "due to a lack of personnel and financial resources this task may at times be a difficult one."

"Iraqi and KRG authorities should take steps to make sure that their efforts to keep civilians safe from ISIS attacks don't undermine basic rights," Fakih said.

Jadah camp

Four men from the subdistrict of al-Shura, 40 kilometers southeast of Mosul, separately told Human Rights Watch that on October 29, when Iraqi federal police took control of the area, they detained two men suspected of being affiliated with ISIS and took them away. The four witnesses are now at Jadah camp in adjacent tents and are in close contact with the two detained men's family members, who are also in the camp. The four men said that the relatives of the detained men do not know where they are being held and that the detainees have not phoned them, but that the families are afraid to ask security forces where the men have been taken. Other interviewees raised the same concern.

The four men from al-Shura said that before they were allowed to go to the Jadah camp, federal police took them and the remaining men and boys 15 and over from the village to a screening center run by the National Security Service (NSS) in a mosque in the town of Qayyarah, six kilometers north of the camp.

There, the NSS officers searched and interrogated them, checked their identity cards, and confiscated their sim cards. The interviewees said that they, and the men and boys they were held with, were in the screening center for a few hours before the NSS allowed them and most of the other men to move to the Jadah camp and reunite with their families. But some men were moved to an unknown location, the four men said.

They said that the NSS took at least three men from their group from the mosque and moved them to an unknown location. Four relatives of the three men said on October 31 that they still had no idea where their family members were being held and had not heard from them. They said that they had not yet asked the authorities about the men's whereabouts because they had full faith that the authorities would release those without ISIS-affiliation promptly to the camp.

Five policemen at Jadah camp from Hammam al-Alil, 30 kilometers southeast of Mosul, said that the NSS also took two policemen who arrived with them at the camp on October 29 from the camp. They did not know where they had been taken and had not seen them again. These men all fled ISIS-controlled territory together, without their families, but live in adjacent tents at Jadah camp and described themselves as close friends. They believed that if the detainees were able to contact anyone from detention, the men in the camp would have heard from them. They also said that they had not yet asked the authorities about their whereabouts because they believed that the authorities would realize that these men, who had both been detained and abused by ISIS over the past two years, were innocent and release them promptly to the camp.

An international journalist who visited the Jadah camp on October 26 at around 4 p.m. told Human Rights Watch she witnessed eight men kneeling on the ground outside a tent with NSS officers with laptops inside. They were blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs and one officer was standing above them tapping a thin black stick on their heads. Two other officers were sitting in plastic chairs looking at the group. Camp management staff told Human Rights Watch that the NSS were taking men who were possible ISIS-affiliates away from the camp but did not know where they were being taken.

Zelikan camp

On November 7, Human Rights Watch visited Zelikan camp, 29 kilometers northeast of Mosul, and spoke to 18 people, including family members of seven men who were detained and five who had been released. They said that they and about 200 other families had fled the village of Abu Jerbua, as ISIS retreated on November 1.

Afterward, they said, KRG security forces took all the families to the Zelikan camp's screening center, where they were held for two nights, before security forces transferred them to the main camp.

While at the screening center, the Asayish, which are KRG security forces, picked out 22 men from the group, holding 11 for two days and then releasing them and keeping the remaining 11 in detention, said 5 detainees who saw the men taken away. Those who had been released said that the Asayish forces took the remaining 11 men away from the screening center on November 3. Human Rights Watch visited the screening center on November 7 and found it empty.

Relatives of five of the men who were moved to an unknown location said that they have asked Asayish officers about where their relatives are and why they are being held but received no answer and have been unable to contact the men. An hour before Human Rights Watch visited the camp, Asayish forces arrested another villager from the group at the camp, his father said. He said he did not know where his son was taken or why. When he asked, an Asayish officer told him, "It's none of your business."

Dabaga camp

One woman from Hawija spoke to Human Rights Watch, surrounded by her family of five young daughters and a son:

My husband worked in the local waterworks and ISIS fighters threatened to kill him at one point because he wanted to stop working. When we got to Makhmur, Asayish forces took him  I have no idea why. Later I heard from others in the group we escaped with that one of them said he was ISIS, who knows why. I just don't know what to do, I have been asking the Asayish here every day about where he is, but they say they don't know anyone at the Asayish in Makhmur. He has heart problems, and I have his medicine. I just don't know what to do!

A group of men in the Debaga screening center also told Human Rights Watch that they observed security forces running the site remove two or three men a day on average from the center, out of about 400 currently being held.

One man who arrived at Debaga with his wife was separated into the screening area on October 15, and taken to a prison in Erbil two days later. While in prison, he said, he did not have access to his wife or to a lawyer, and was held in a cell with about 35 to 40 other ISIS suspects. He was never interrogated, and was moved five days later back into the screening area. He did not understand why he had been cleared for prison release but was still being held and prevented from joining his wife.

Hasansham camp

On November 7, Human Rights Watch visited Hasansham camp, 30 kilometers east of Mosul. Researchers interviewed 11 Shabak villagers from the town of Gelyuhan, 5 kilometers southeast of Mosul, who said that on November 3, as ISIS retreated from the area, they and at least 150 families fled toward Ali Arash, 4.5 kilometers away, the first village along their route.

There, the interviewees said, the government-allied armed group known as the Hashd al-Sha'abi, a Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) made up of Shabak fighters, put the women, girls, and young boys in the second floor of a school, and the men and boys 15 years old and above downstairs in classrooms.

The fighters called out three men's names and then took the men into a separate room. The next morning at 10 a.m., Iraqi military officers arrived and, nine of the men said, went into the classroom and said, "Why are you here? You are free to go!" At that point, on November 8, the families were allowed to leave and go to Hasansham camp, but the three men were kept in custody, according to all of the interviewees.

Human Rights Watch interviewed a villager arriving at the camp directly from the school on November 7, who said he had seen the three men still being held in a classroom at the school that morning. The mother and brother of one of the detained men said that a family friend in Baghdad who is linked to the Shabak forces said that her son was being held because he was accused of looting fighters' homes, abandoned once ISIS came to the area. The families have had no contact with the three men still being held.

Iraqi forces, including PMF forces, and KRG authorities should not use schools for security or military purposes such as screening and detention centers except as a last resort when no other facilities are available, Human Rights Watch said. Such use of schools can delay the re-opening of the schools to teach and provide other services to children and lead to damage to classrooms and equipment.

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Despite Mali peace accord, more flee persistent violence

Publisher UN Ad Hoc Committee on Refugees and Stateless Persons Author Helena Pes Publication Date 7 November 2016 Cite as UN Ad Hoc Committee on Refugees and Stateless Persons, Despite Mali peace accord, more flee persistent violence, 7 November 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5826114d4.html [accessed 2 November 2022]

But despite a UN-brokered Peace and Reconciliation Agreement in June last year, which sought to end years of uprisings in the remote region, she is among a growing number of people fleeing what they say are worsening tensions there.

"After the peace deal, we thought that the situation was going to improve but we see it is only getting worse. There is nowhere to be safe in Mali," she said.

In October alone, more than 2,000 people like Fatimata have crossed the border to seek refuge in and around Mbera camp in southeast Mauritania. The influx is the largest since 2013. More are expected to follow as movements are reported at the border town of Fassala.

The mother and her eight month-old baby are living in a makeshift camp around an overcrowded transit centre at Mbera as they wait with hundreds of others to be registered by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

Fatimata hopes that she will be joined soon by her cattle-herder husband, who was hampered from leaving Mali by persistent insecurity, characterized by frequent armed clashes, militant attacks and banditry.

"He cannot reach the nearest town to sell his cows because armed people will seize them. They use force to get what they want. Inshallah  God willing  my husband will join me here in Mbera with the herds soon," she said.

More than 135,000 Malians who had run from the conflict in their country continue live in exile, mainly in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mauritania, where Mbera camp continues to be home to more than 42,000 men, women and children.

Frequent security incidents in northern and central Mali also continue to trigger sporadic forced displacement in the region, both internally in Mali and into the other neighbouring countries. As such, the Malian conflict has led to a protracted displacement situation, calling for a continued humanitarian response.

The families arriving at the camp are of different ethnic backgrounds and mainly come from the region of Timbuktu and Gundam.

Moona, a Fula woman, said she and her family fled their village near Mopti following recent clashes with the Bambaras, another of the region's ethnic groups, and she feels tensions have worsened in recent months.

"We came because of fear  Our community is being targeted," she says, noting that her nephew was shot dead in an ambush.

The family reached Mbera camp in September and received emergency shelter from UNHCR. New arrivals like Moona are given aid including food, shelter and basic items.

A few cases of malnutrition as well as cases in need of medical attention, including pregnant women and vulnerable children, were identified and referred for treatment to health facilities.

Given continuing, and possibly worsening, insecurity, large-scale returns to Mali from Mauritania seem unlikely. UNHCR's representative in Mauritania, Mohamed Alwash, expressed concern that the fresh displacement in northern Mali would further strain resources for the operations.

"Considering the unstable situation in northern and central Mali  and recent waves of arrivals to the camp, there is an urgent need to respond to refugees needs, especially through shelter, food and sanitation facilities," Alwash says.
Orem, UT -- (ReleaseWire) -- 11/11/2016 --D&D Plastics, a design and development company assisting customers with a variety of plastic fabrication jobs, announced it has partnered with BizIQ, a Phoenix-based web marketing company assisting small business owners across North America.



In this partnership, D&D Plastics will enhance its online presence and build up its customer base throughout Utah. BizIQ uses a strategy heavily focused on search engine optimization, which helps customers better find companies like D&D Plastics when performing local business searches on Google. Additionally, BizIQ created a new website for the plastic fabricators, as well as a new marketing campaign that includes a pair of blog posts per month and strategies to encourage better connections between the company and its customers.



This new D&D Plastics website prioritizes relevant, timely and informative content related to the company's service offerings. All of the website content is written by professional copywriters. The site also provides a variety of channels through which people can reach out to the company to learn more about plastic fabrication in Orem, UT.



"Since our founding in 1980, we have provided outstanding plastic fabrication services to manufacturers across Utah," said Chandler Dobson, owner of D&D Plastics. "With more and more people turning to the Internet to search for manufacturers and suppliers, we believed it was necessary to make greater efforts to engage in digital marketing. We are thrilled with the work BizIQ has done for us so far."



About D&D Plastics

Founded in 1980, D&D Plastics assists with vacuum forming, fabrication and many other types of manufacturing jobs, continually focusing on pushing the boundaries of what they can do with plastic today.



For more information about the company and its services, visit http://www.d-dplastics.com/.



To learn more about BizIQ and its expertise regarding local search engine optimization, or to view its extensive list of service options, please visit http://www.ebiziq.com/.
Los Angeles, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 11/11/2016 --Jo Coddington will be joining her friends in Panama City Beach, Florida, for the Annual Emerald Coast Cruizin' Car Show, which a three-day affair beginning November 10th. The weekend is packed with events, concerts and amazing cars.



"I look forward to this car show and cruise every year," says Coddington. "I love coming to Panama City Beach every year to catch up with old friends and of course see their new projects and fabulous hot rods."



For more information about Jo Coddington and to stay in touch with what she has planned next visit http://www.jocoddington.com or download her app Jo Coddington available on iTunes and Google Play.



About Jo Coddington

Television celebrity Jo Coddington works with companies in the automotive industry as a sought after spokesperson, consultant and brand ambassador. A self-proclaimed car girl, Coddington has participated in a plethora of builds, some of which were featured on "American Hot Rod" where Coddington starred with late husband Boyd Coddington. She has also appeared on "Detroit Muscle," "American Icon" and many more. In addition to acting as an official brand ambassador for International AERO Products and Champion Racing, Coddington is busy paving the way for future generations of car girls through her mentoring efforts as a member of the SEMA Businesswomen's Network.



For more information about Jo Coddington and to stay in touch with what she has planned next visit http://www.jocoddington.com or download her app Jo Coddington available on iTunes and Google Play.
Morgan County Election Board reviews financial records

The Morgan County Election Board met Friday to review the campaign finance reports of local candidates running for office.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

This just in...
2016 has just gone from bad to worse in the 'losing musical icons' stakes: Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82.

The world-renowned Canadian musician and poet, born in Quebec in 1932, had said in a recent interview that he was 'ready to die' and paid tribute to the woman who inspired 'So Long, Marianne' by writing her a letter before her own death which said: "...our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine."

Over the course of his extraordinary career which spanned six decades, Cohen was responsible for some timeless songs and albums - too many to name here - and toured up until very recently. His most recent album, 'You Want It Darker', was released just three weeks ago.

His death was confirmed in a statement posted to Facebook, which read: "It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist, Leonard Cohen has passed away. We have lost one of music's most revered and prolific visionaries. A memorial will take place in Los Angeles at a later date. The family requests privacy during their time of grief."

A cause of death was not given. He leaves two children, son Adam and daughter Lorca, and two grandchildren, Cassius and Viva.

R.I.P.
China's Vice Minister of Public Security Meng Hongwei (front L) presents a flag to a member of the country's riot police during a ceremony in Beijing, July 1, 2014.

The appointment of Meng Hongwei, China's former vice minister for public security, as the new head of Interpol has sparked concerns that Beijing may use the organization to extend overseas crackdowns on Chinese dissidents who flee the country.

Meng was elected president of the international policing body by delegates at its general assembly in Bali this week, with immediate effect.

"The appointment of Meng Hongwei is alarming given China's long-standing practice of trying to use Interpol to arrest dissidents and refugees abroad," Amnesty International East Asia Director Nicholas Becquelin said in a statement.

"It seems at odds with Interpol's mandate to work in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," he said, adding: "There now needs to be close scrutiny of the kind of notices that Interpol issues at the request of the Chinese government."

In a post to his Twitter account, Becquelin pointed to a 2014 speech made by Meng, in which he called on recruits to "resolutely put politics, ideology and the [ruling Chinese Communist] Party first" in carrying out counter-terrorism work.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch China director Sophie Richardson told RFA that there was "a problem" with Meng's appointment.

"Recently, the Chinese authorities have clearly bent, and even broken, the rules of criminal investigations when it comes to pursuing corrupt officials overseas," Richardson told RFA's Mandarin Service.

"Human Rights Watch will be keeping a very close eye on the activities of Interpol in future," she said.

U.S.-based rights activist Liu Qing said Beijing regards international organizations as a means to achieve its own policy goals, rather than abiding by their principles.

"The Chinese government has run into some obstacles in recent years when trying to pursue [its citizens] overseas, and that's why they are sure to use the fact that one of their highest-ranking police officers is now head of Interpol," Liu said.

Guangzhou-based rights activist Jia Pin agreed.

"First of all, the president of Interpol wields huge power ... and the major world powers typically don't get given the job according to the principles set out when it was formed," Jia said.

"It's a foregone conclusion that China will try to use this position to achieve its own political goals," he said.

"China is looking to achieve superpower status, and where it lacks real power, it likes to focus on things that boost its prestige instead," Jia said.

Dire consequences for Uyghurs

Chinese political asylum-seekers and members of the ethnic minority Uyghur group are continuing to flee the country, often without documents, to avoid growing persecution under the administration of President Xi Jinping.

In November 2015, Chongqing-based activists Dong Guangping and Jiang Yefei were handed back to Chinese authorities by Thailand's military junta, in a move that drew strong criticism from the United Nations, which had already classified them as genuine political refugees.

Four months earlier, Thailand had forcibly repatriated nearly 100 Uyghurs to China, a move that drew criticism from human rights groups and protests in Turkey, where there is a large Uyghur emigre group.

World Uyghur Congress spokesman Dilxat Raxit said Meng's leadership of Interpol could have dire consequences for Uyghurs seeking a safe haven overseas.

"Chinese law enforcement agencies serve the Chinese Communist Party, and have used Interpol for a number of years to pursue dissidents and Uyghurs leaders overseas," he said.

"We call on the international community to pay close attention to this matter," he said.

Requests to the ministry for public security for a phone interview went unanswered during office hours on Thursday.

Meng said in statement following his election that Interpol should continue to adhere to its principles, without elaborating.

"We currently face some of the most serious global public security challenges since World War Two," he said, calling on the organization to "adapt to the changing security situation we see today."

Beijing blames Uyghur extremists for a string of violent attacks and clashes in recent years, launching a year-long "anti-terrorism campaign in their homeland of Xinjiang.

But critics say China's repressive policies targeting Uyghurs' livelihoods, language and religious practices are responsible for violence that has left hundreds dead since 2009, and that many of those targeted by "anti-terrorism" operations are peaceful advocates of independence for the troubled region.



Reported by Xi Wang for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Wong Siu-san and Pan Jiaqing for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
Wai Phyo (R), chief editor of Myanmar's Eleven Media Group, arrives in handcuffs at a court in Yangon, Nov. 11, 2016.

The chief executive and top editor of Myanmars embattled Eleven Media Group surrendered themselves to police in the commercial capital Yangon on Friday after receiving a summons related to a defamation case, a local police chief said.

Than Htut Aung, head of Eleven Media Group, which publishes several newspapers and websites, and Wai Phyo, chief editor of the Daily Eleven newspaper, turned themselves in at Yangons Eastern District police station a day after they failed to appear there for questioning, prompting police to issue an arrest warrant.

While we were looking for them to carry out our investigation, the two gave themselves up at 1 p.m. at the station, Police Lieutenant Colonel Myint Htwe, head of Yangons Eastern District police force, told RFAs Myanmar Service.

Im now sending them to Tamwe police station, he said, referring to a station in Yangons Pazundaung township.

Earlier this week, Than Htut Aung published an editorial in Daily Eleven about a government official who had received a $100,000 luxury watch from an unnamed drug tycoon. The tycoon, who had recently been released from jail, won a lucrative tender from the governments term to build a city transit project.

From the information provided in the editorial, it was clear that the official was Phyo Min Thein, chief minister of Yangon region.

Eleven Media Group posted more details the next day on Facebook, saying that the information came from two businesspeople whom it refused to identify, prompting Yangon government authorities to file a lawsuit against Than Htut Aung and Wai Phyo.

Myint Htwe said he will make the necessary preparations to prosecute Than Htut Aung and Wai Phyo under Section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law, which prohibits use of the telecom network to defame people and carries a jail sentence of up to three years and a fine for those who violate it.

There shouldnt be this Sectin 66(d), Than Htut Aung told reporters at the police station.

Phyo Min Thein, a former political prisoner, said the allegations against him were meant to defame him, Reuters reported.

He and Than Htut Aung were transferred on Friday to Yangons notorious Insein Prison where they will remain for two weeks, the report said, citing domestic media.

Myanmars Legal Aid Network issued a statement on Friday objecting to the action taken against Daily Eleven and criticized the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party government for appearing to backpedal on freedom of speech, Eleven Myanmar media group reported on its English-language website.

Reported by: Kyaw Lwin Oo and Kaung Htet Kyaw for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte gives a speech during the visit of Moro National Liberation Front founder Nur Misuari to the Malacanang Palace in Manila, Nov. 3, 2016.

As many as six Vietnamese sailors were abducted and another was shot on Friday after armed members of the militant Abu Sayyaf group boarded a freighter in Philippine waters near their Basilan island stronghold, according to news reports.

The bulk freighter MV Royal 16 was bound for Davao City in another part of the province of Mindanao, but it was intercepted when passing through a strait off Basilan island when 10 armed men came aboard and took hostages, Reuters reported.

"One of the crew was shot and was evacuated to a local hospital," said Philipine Coastguard Commander Jerome Cayabyab, according to Reuters.

He said the fate of the captives is uncertain after they were transferred to smaller, faster boats. It was the second kidnapping incident in the area in a week.

The Abu Sayyaf, a militant group that swears allegiance to Islamic State, on Monday claimed to have kidnapped a German national, according to news reports. The military said a woman found dead in an abandoned yacht off an island near Basilan was believed to be his female companion.

A local cargo ship, MV Lorcon Iloilo, passing near Basilan rescued a wounded sailor from the MV Royal 16 who apparently managed to escape and gave him first aid, The Manilla Times reported.

A report by AFP said that two crew members, one of whom was wounded, escaped and were rescued by a local cargo ship in the area. That report said at least five sailors were abducted.

Identities of the hostages and the ships cargo were not immediately known, but Vietnamese state media reported that the hostages are the captain, his three assistants, the crew chief and one sailor.

In a dispatch released on Friday, the Vietnam Marine Administration said the gunmen had released the ship and the remaining 13 sailors, Tuoi Tre News reported.

Gov. Mujiv Hataman of Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) said they are waiting for details surrounding the attack, according to The Manilla Times article.

"Sea and naval assets (were) already deployed to search and rescue the said kidnap victims," regional military spokesman Filemon Tan told AFP.

In recent months, the Abu Sayyaf has been accused of kidnapping dozens of Indonesian and Malaysian sailors in waters off the southern Philippines.

The Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of militants formed in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, and has earned millions of dollars from kidnappings-for-ransom.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has launched a military offensive to "destroy" the Abu Sayyaf.

But the militants have defied more than a decade of US-backed similar offensives, surviving in their mountainous and jungle-clad southern island strongholds where they have support from local Muslim communities.

The Philippines has agreed to allow Malaysian and Indonesian maritime forces to pursue kidnappers into its waters to contain the threat, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Thursday, according to the AFP.
At least six people were killed and more than 100 wounded in a car bomb attack on Germany's consulate in northern Afghanistan. Police said the bomb detonated at the gate of the compound in the city of Mazar-e Sharif late on November 10. (RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan)
A Russian hacker who was convicted for his leading role in one of the largest data thefts in U.S. history has been released from prison after serving most of his 12-year sentence.

Vladimir Drinkman was released from a Pennsylvania jail on October 28, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons told RFE/RL.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not respond to an RFE/RL request for comment on whether Drinkman had been turned over for deportation, a process that can take up to several months. Drinkman's lawyer, Igor Litvak, declined to comment. RFE/RL could not immediately reach Drinkman.

Drinkman was a key member of a criminal hacking group that penetrated major U.S. corporations, including Heartland Payment Systems, which at the time it was breached in 2008 was one of the biggest U.S. payment-processing firms. The Heartland attack -- the largest breach in history at the time -- cost the payment company more than $200 million in losses.

Varonis, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, ranks the attack on Heartland among the 10 largest data breaches of all time.

Chuck Brooks, a cybersecurity expert and adjunct professor at Georgetown University, said the Heartland hack was a "wake-up call" for the payments and financial industries to enhance their cyberdefenses.



He said the breach led to stronger security policies, including a better understanding by CEOs and CFOs of the threats to business sustainability and reputation.

"After the breach, many companies added more stringent data and security policies, including encryption, multifactor authentication, and monitoring of systems and networks," Brooks told RFE/RL.

Heartland also later established the Payments Processing Information Sharing Council (PPISC), which serves as a forum for banks and payment processors to share information about breaches and compliance issues, he noted.

In addition to breaking into Heartland, the hacking gang also breached Nasdaq OMX Group, 7-Eleven, JC Penney, JetBlue Airways, and others, according to prosecutors. In total, they stole the data of more than 160 million credit cards, leading to more than $300 million in damages.

Greg Hunter, a Virginia-based lawyer who has represented cybercriminals from the former Soviet Union, said the Heartland case demonstrated the sophisticated evolution of Russian-speaking hackers.

"This was the beginning of specialization," Hunter told RFE/RL. "Rather than an individual hacker spending a lot of time stealing credit card data and then trying to monetize it, you had guys specializing in breaching the security apparatus of a site, others selling the data."

The appearance of hacker forums was critical to the phenomenon of a division of labor, he said.

Hacker sites "allowed these guys to find each other and work together. A guy who breaches banks could just focus on that, knowing he could find others to either help him know what to get and how to use it, or just buy his services outright," Hunter said.

Several of the most commonly used forums where hackers bought and sold stolen credit card data and traded tips included Cardplanet and Direct Connection. A Russian man, Aleksei Burkov, was extradited from Israel to the United States and later pleaded guilty in 2020 to U.S. charges related to his oversight of those forums.

He was deported to Russia last year.

According to U.S. court filings, Drinkman and another co-conspirator, Alexandr Kalinin, specialized in penetrating network security and gaining access to the corporate data systems. Drinkman along with a third man, Roman Kotov, also focused on mining the networks to steal valuable data.

Another Russian man, Dmitry Smilyanets, then sold the stolen credit card information on forums for $10 to $50 each and distributed the proceeds of the scheme to the others, according to prosecutors.

Kalinin and Kotov, both of whom are Russian citizens, are believed to still be in Russia.

Drinkman was arrested in the Netherlands in June 2012 at the request of the United States, along with Smilyanets.

While Smilyanets cooperated with U.S. authorities and arrived in the United States a few months after his arrest, Drinkman fought his extradition for more than a year.

Ultimately, Drinkman pleaded guilty in 2015 and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, including time served since his arrest. It is one of the harshest sentences given to a Russian hacker.

Drinkman served a total of 10 years and four months, or 86 percent of his sentence. U.S. federal prisoners earn credit each year for good behavior and typically serve 85 percent of their sentence.

Smilyanets was sentenced to just time served, or less than six years, and currently resides in the United States, where he works as a cyberthreat intelligence analyst.

He declined to comment when contacted by RFE/RL.
Germany's defense minister has advised U.S. President-elect Donald Trump not to get too close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and to treat NATO as an alliance of like-minded nations, rather than as a business.

"What his advisers will hopefully tell him and what he needs to learn is that NATO isn't just a business. It's not a company," Ursula von der Leyen told ZDF television on November 10, adding that the military alliance is guided by "shared values" and common historical experiences.

During his election campaign, Trump threatened to abandon U.S. allies in Europe if they do not spend enough on defense.

Von der Leyen cautioned Trump against being drawn in by Putin, noting that NATO had stood by the United States after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"Donald Trump has to say clearly on which side he is. Whether he's on the side of the law, peace, and democracy or whether he doesn't care about all that and instead he's looking for a best buddy," she said.

Trump has expressed admiration for Putin and said he would seek an improved relationship with Russia.

Based on reporting by Reuters and TASS
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.
The United Nations says Islamic State (IS) militants have executed dozens of people this week in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which government forces are battling to retake from the extremists.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said IS militants executed 40 civilians on November 8 after accusing them of collaborating with Iraqi government forces.

Their bodies were then hung from electricity poles in several districts, the office of the UN office said, citing sources.

The November 11 statement said IS militants appear "to be continuing to carry out killings based on decisions of its self-appointed "courts.'"

Also executed was a man who had violated an IS ban on using mobile phones, the statement said.

The UN said another 20 civilians were shot dead on November 9 at the Ghabat military base in northern Mosul.

The executions came as Iraqi forces, backed by U.S. air strikes and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, advanced deeper into Mosul.
A massive cyberattack hit at least five of Russia's largest banks, officials reported on November 10.

The country's largest lender, state-controlled Sberbank, said it had been hacked on November 8 but neutralized the attack without disturbing its operations. Sberbank said it has been attacked 68 times this year.

Russian Internet security giant Kaspersky said the distribution of denial attacks targeted the websites of at least five banks, including Alfa Bank, Moscow Bank, Rosbank, and the Moscow Exchange.

The attacks were continuing on November 10, Kaspersky said, with most lasting one hour but the longest lasting 12 hours.

DDoS attacks involve flooding websites with more traffic than they can handle, making them difficult to access or taking them offline entirely.

Kaspersky said as many as 660,000 requests were sent per second using a network of more than 24,000 hijacked devices located in 30 countries. More than half the devices were in the United States, India, Taiwan, and Israel, it said.

Russia's central bank confirmed "attacks on a number of large banks" of "medium" intensity and said they did not disrupt banking services.

It said the attacks were sent by hijacked devices such as CCTVs or digital video recorders plugged into offices and homes worldwide.

Based on reporting by AFP, TASS, and Interfax
Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has announced via social media his inclusion on "the Kremlin's sanctions list" that prevent him from traveling to Russia.

Mc Faul, who was Washington's envoy in Moscow as bilateral friction mounted in 2012-14 and now teaches at Stanford University, wrote on Twitter on November 11 that he was told that he was blacklisted "because of my close affiliation with [U.S. President Barack] Obama."

"Confirmed that I am on the Kremlin's sanction lists and cannot travel to Russia," Mc Faul tweeted.

He said he learned of the ban when he applied for a visa to travel to Moscow in December "to do Clinton transition work," adding in an allusion to Democrat Hillary Clinton's defeat this week by Republican Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency, "No longer needed!"

Russia has imposed travel bans on a number of Americans since the U.S. administration passed the so-called Magnitsky Act in 2012, aimed at punishing officials implicated in the death of a whistleblowing Moscow lawyer in Russian pretrial detention.

McFaul has been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose return to the Kremlin in 2012 for a third term sparked street protests in Russia by opposition and pro-democracy activists already angered by what they said were seriously flawed parliamentary elections in late 2011.

He noted on November 11 in a reference to Russia that "Since 1983, I've been living in and traveling to that country."

But he added in a tweet, "I probably have been on travel ban list since 2014, in response to US sanctions. Just found out now because I sought to apply for a visa."

U.S.-Russian relations are arguably at a post-Cold War nadir, hung up on differences over Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and its continuing support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, a number of former Soviet republics' and satellites' embrace of the NATO security umbrella, divergent tacks regarding the ongoing war in Syria, and American accusations that Moscow used hackers and other cybercriminals to try and disrupt this month's U.S. elections.

McFaul, the U.S. ambassador from January 2012 until February 2014, complained of being accosted on several occasions by crews from Russian state-controlled television channels who showed up outside his private meetings, prompting Washington to complain to Moscow about security concerns. McFaul suggested his communications were being tapped and leaked to the journalists.

U.S. officials have recently cited an escalating pattern of harassment of U.S. diplomats by Russia, including suspected druggings at a UN anticorruption conference in Moscow in 2015 and the tackling of what the Washington said was an accredited American diplomat by a Russian guard outside the U.S. Embassy in June. After the tackling incident made its way onto Russian television, Moscow said the man was a CIA officer working under diplomatic cover.

The U.S. State Department in 2013 underscored "intensified pressure [on its employees] by the Russian security services at a level not seen since the days of the Cold War."

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned in June that "the more the U.S. damages relations, the harder it will be for U.S. diplomats to work in Russia."
The office of Moscow's mayor has rejected a request by opposition groups to stage a November 20 protest against what they call the "mass annihilation of residents" in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Sergei Davidis, a leader of the opposition December 5 Party, wrote on Facebook on November 11 that the reasons behind the mayor's decision were unclear. He said the decision would be appealed in court.

Davidis said earlier on November 7 that the protest would aim to attract attention to Russian military activities in Syria.

Organizers of the proposed demonstration included his party, as well as opposition groups like the PARNAS party, the Libertarian Party of Russia, the For Human Rights movement, and the Solidarity movement.

Davidis said the opposition is demanding that Moscow only conduct military operations in Syria against groups that the United Nations has deemed as terrorists.

Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes, have besieged the rebel-held eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo.
The Russian military says it has evidence of the use of chemical weapons by rebels in Syria's besieged city of Aleppo.

"Experts from the Russian Defense Ministry have found unexploded artillery ammunition belonging to terrorists that contains toxic substances," the military said in a statement on November 11.

According to the statement, the toxic substances in the rebels' ammunition are very likely to be chlorine gas and white phosphorous.

Using chlorine as a weapon is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in 2013 under pressure from its ally Russia.

Russia's Defense Ministry said a more thorough analysis will be carried out by a Russian military lab.

Last month, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons concluded that Syrian government forces carried out three chlorine gas attacks on villages in 2014 and 2015.

Russia, however, has dismissed the findings as "unconvincing" and said no sanctions should be imposed on Syria for the chlorine gas attacks.

Based on reporting by AFP, Interfax, and TASS
Long-distance truck drivers across Russia have begun a new series of protests against a national highway toll system that was implemented last year.

The drivers, who snarled traffic across the country last winter in a rare display of open mass discontent in the Russia of President Vladimir Putin, began protesting in numerous cities on November 11 to mark the first anniversary of the implementation of the tolls.

The fees are set to be doubled in February 2017 after a compromise reached by protesters and the government in January expires. Under the system, the revenues raised -- estimated at $700 million per year -- are supposed to be used for infrastructure maintenance and development.

According to protest organizers, demonstrations were held in at least a dozen cities across Russia, with drivers crowding major thoroughfares by driving at slow speeds in all lanes and then assembling for rallies.

In the Moscow suburb of Khimki, police broke up the rally before it got under way and detained about 15 activists, as well as several journalists.

In the winter of 2015-16, protesters spent five months camped out in a Khimki parking lot in an unsuccessful effort to force the government to rescind the toll system.

Authorities in St. Petersburg denied a request to hold the protest, so drivers decided to act individually in trucks festooned with banners of the United Truck Drivers of Russia trade organization. Andrei Bazhutin, head of the union, told journalists in St. Petersburg that the truckers are insisting on the resignation of the government and, particularly, of Transportation Minister Maksim Sokolov.

Protesters were also reportedly detained in Ryazan and Tula.

According to the government, about 650,000 of the country's 1.5 million long-distance trucks have been registered with the toll system, which is called Platon. The system is administered by a company owned by a son of Arkady Rotenberg, an oligarch who was once Putin's judo sparring partner.

Protest activists claim the money paid into the system is either stolen by Platon's managers or used for other state budget needs.

Across the country on November 11, however, newspapers published articles with similar headlines such as "The Platon System Repaired 86 Kilometers Of Roads In The Southern Urals" and "In Volgograd Oblast, 72 Kilometers Of Roads Were Repaired At Platon's Expense."

Surkhai Alimirzayev, who owns a trucking company in the North Caucasus republic of Daghestan, told RFE/RL that the tolls have crippled his business and that of many other drivers.

"Many people are trying to sell their trucks," he said. "I have also sold half of my vehicles and plan to sell another five in the near future. Fuel is expensive. Spare parts are expensive. And the roads haven't gotten any better.

With reporting by Rosbalt, Obshchaya Gazeta, and Dozhd TV


ON MY MIND

How will the election of Donald Trump change the geopolitical equation in the post-Soviet space? It's been a question that's been on my mind all week. It is a question that is on a lot of people's minds -- from Tallinn to Tbilisi. And it's a question we'll explore on this week's Power Vertical Podcast.

Joining me will be co-host Mark Galeotti, a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Natalia Churikova, managing editor of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service and host of the program European Connect.

So be sure to tune in later today.

IN THE NEWS

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that Donald Trump's approach to foreign policy is "phenomenally close" to that of Vladimir Putin.

The office of Moscow's mayor has rejected a request by opposition groups to stage a November 20 protest against what they call the "mass annihilation of residents" in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

The Russian military says it has evidence of the use of chemical weapons by rebels in Syria's besieged city of Aleppo.

The Ukrainian military and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have reported a sharp increase in fighting in the country's east in recent days.

A massive cyberattack hit at least five of Russia's largest banks, officials reported on November 10.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov says Russian diplomats spoke with the teams of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the U.S. presidential election campaign.

A Russian police official has been elected as a vice president for Interpol for the first time.

WHAT I'M READING

Operation Successor?

An article by political commentator Valery Solovei, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, which claimed that Vladimir Putin will step down and turn power over to a successor, was pulled down from Moskovsky Komsomolets's website shortly after publication. Solovei is reputed to be well informed about the inner workings of the Kremlin. RFE/RL's Russian-language television program Current Time got a look at the piece and summarizes its arguments.

Putin's World

In a piece for The Daily Beast, Michael Weiss looks at Russian active measures in Montenegro, Hungary, the Baltic states, and the Middle East and argues: "It's Putin's World Now."

The New Geopolitics

David M. Herszenhorn has a piece in Politico looking ahead at the geopolitics of the U.S.-Russian relationship following the victory of Donald Trump.

Another 'Saboteurs' Case

Halya Coynash of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group takes a look at the case of the three people Russia's Federal Security Service claims to have arrested for planning acts of sabotage on the annexed Crimean Peninsula.

Interpol H?

Interpol has elected a Chinese president and a Russian vice president. Foreign Policy's The Cable blog takes a look at the new leadership of the international police organization.

Europe Ponders Life Without America

Former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt has a piece for Project Syndicate on what Europe can do to defend itself if the United States becomes less engaged in the continent's security.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held talks in Belarus, where he will hold talks with top officials and attend the unveiling of a mosque in Minsk.

Erdogan and his Belarusian counterpart, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, discussed bilateral trade and economic ties and attended a bilateral business forum.

Erdogan will attended the unveiling of a new grand mosque, funded in part by Ankara. The new mosque has been built on the site of a historic mosque in Minsk.

The old mosque, built by Belaruss Lipka-Tatar Muslim community, was damaged by communists during Soviet times.

Lipka Tatars settled in what was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the 13th and 14th centuries. Small communities of Lipka Tatars live in modern-day Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania.

Most members of the ethnic group no longer speak their native Turkic language, but they have preserved their religion.
KYIV -- Mikheil Saakashvili, a onetime Georgian president who resurrected his political career in nearby Ukraine, has announced the launch of a new Ukrainian political party and called for early elections just days after resigning his governor's post in Odesa.

Speaking to reporters in the Ukrainian capital on November 11, Saakashvili repeated accusations that rampant profiteering and obstacles to reform are hurting Ukraine, which remains divided two years after Russia seized Crimea and Moscow-backed separatists began fighting against Kyiv's authority.

"We will create a new broad political power, a platform of new forces, and our goal is to change the present, existing, so-called political elite, who are actually profiteers and social misfits," Saakashvili told a press conference.

"Our goal is for early parliamentary elections to be carried out as quickly as possible," Saakashvili said.

He again lashed out at Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, a former schoolmate whom Saakashvili accused of sabotaging reform efforts in the Black Sea port region when Saakashvili unexpectedly quit the Odesa governorship on November 7.

Poroshenko Challenged

Saying he once refused Poroshenko's offer of the post of prime minister, Saakashvili vowed not to meet with the president again until the latter agreed to early elections.

He said working with the president's ruling Petro Poroshenko Bloc Solidarity party was out of the question.

"There will be no alliance with him or anyone else," Saakashvili said.

Poroshenko accepted Saakashvili's resignation earlier this week and suggested that the latter's political ambitions in Ukraine were stoked by a thumping that Saakashvili's former party received in Georgian elections last month.

Saakashvili, who now has Ukrainian citizenship, dared Poroshenko at his press conference to kick him out of the country.

Saakashvili -- whose reforms in postcommunist Georgia following its so-called Rose Revolution in 2003 won widespread international praise -- said his new party would fight for Ukrainian business but oppose the presence of business representatives in politics.

He also said his party would refuse membership to anyone who has served in parliament for more than one term, which could exclude many in the political elite at the time of Ukraine's Euromaidan unrest in 2013-14.

Road Trip Through The Regions

Western leaders and international financial institutions have repeatedly warned Kyiv that billions of dollars in continued lending and aid is contingent on Ukrainian reforms, including curbing runaway corruption.

At the November 11 press conference, Saakashvili, who seized on the U.S. presidential victory this week of Donald Trump by posting a photo of himself and the New York real-estate mogul together at an event in Batumi in 2012, contrasted the U.S. president-elect with Poroshenko.

"Unlike Trump," Saakashvili said, "Poroshenko, who has known me even longer, did not want to use my experience because he didnt want to change Ukraine." He then played archive footage dubbed into Ukrainian of Trump -- who once called Saakashvili "one of the great leaders of the world" -- lauding Saakashvili's reform efforts in Georgia.

Known for fiery confrontations and populist stunts that have included a shouting match at a cabinet meeting and training alongside police during his Odesa tenure, Saakashvili vowed that his new Ukrainian party "will refer to the people" for direction and said he planned a road trip through Ukraine's regions to rally support.

Saakashvili spent much of his time at the November 11 press conference lashing out at critics, calling their attacks against him "bulls**t."

"Give me one region in Ukraine that has delivered even one percent of what we achieved in Odesa," he challenged to the cameras. "Let them shut up now, because they know the truth."

Saakashvili is sought in his native Georgia on criminal charges related to his term as president that he says are politically motivated.


The Ukrainian military and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have reported a sharp increase in fighting in the country's east in recent days.

The uptick in fighting in the Donbas region, where Ukrainian government forces are fighting pro-Russia separatists, coincided with the U.S. election but also with the arrest of three suspected members of an alleged Ukrainian "saboteur group" in Russia-annexed Crimea.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had apprehended three people in the city of Sevastopol on November 9 that it described as "members of a sabotage-terrorist group from the main intelligence directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry."

Ukraines Defense Ministry rejected the FSB's claims, calling them a "fabrication."

After similar arrests in August, hostilities in the Donbas also spiked.

That month, Moscow said it thwarted an incursion into the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula by Ukrainian saboteurs and accused Kyiv of plotting "terror" in Crimea.


The U.S. Treasury Department on November 10 imposed sanctions on four leaders of Al-Qaeda's offshoot in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front.

The Al-Nusra Front has been at the center of a dispute between the United States and Russia, which claims Washington has sheltered the militants because they coordinate with Syrian rebel groups the United States is backing in the war against Syria's regime.

But the Treasury Department's action confirms that the United States still deems the Al-Nusra Front a terrorist organization. The sanctions are aimed at disrupting its military, recruitment, and financing activities by barring U.S. citizens from doing business with the sanctioned individuals.

The U.S. State Department also put Jabhat Fatah al-Sham -- the new name that the Al-Nusra Front adopted this summer in an effort to change its image -- on its terror "blacklist" as an Al-Nusra "alias."

The four leaders targeted by the Treasury Department are Abdallah Muhammad bin-Sulayman al-Muhaysini, who it said is involved in recruiting fighters for the group in northern Syria; Jamal Husayn Zayniyah, who is responsible for planning operations in Syria and Lebanon; Abdul Jashari, a military adviser who has helped raise funds for the families of Al-Nusra fighters; and Ashraf Ahmad Fari al-Allak, a military commander.

Based on reporting by Reuters and The Wall Street Journal
Ahead of an election expected to cement his power, Uzbekistan's acting president has given the people a way to seek his help in solving their problems: a toll-free number.



The free phone line, and an online complaint box also established after autocratic longtime President Islam Karimov's death was announced in early September, have been flooded with pleas from ordinary Uzbeks eager to cut through bureaucracy and steer clear of corrupt officials as they look for solutions to troubles big and small -- from broken cell phones to gas shortages.



The hotlines are part of a campaign to give citizens what are being portrayed as direct channels of communication with Shavkat Mirziyaev, who has been prime minister since 2003 and is expected to easily win a five-year presidential term in the tightly controlled Central Asian nation in the December 4 vote.



"Do you have unsolved problems, petitions, complaints, or suggestions? Send them to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Uzbekistan," says the webpage pm.gov.uz, which is available in Uzbek and Russian and features a photograph of Mirziyaev. Citizens can also call the toll-free number 1000 or 0-800-210-00-00.

Blowing Off Steam



The online box had received more than 70,000 messages by October 22, according to official data, and tens of thousands more since then. The initiative has opened a safety valve, letting some steam escape from a population hit hard by years of economic hardship under an authoritarian government and an extensive bureaucracy.



But critics say it it's a populist move to bolster Mirziyaev ahead of the election, falling far short of real reforms that that could improve people's lives and provide them with basic human rights.

"It's a fool's errand for the prime minister to be occupied solving every little miscellaneous problem. You have to work on the system," Tashkent-based analyst Almardon Annaev told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service.

The death of Karimov, who had ruled with an iron hand since before Uzbekistan gained independence in the 1991 Soviet collapse, has raised hopes for such reform despite Mirziyaev's record as a loyal lieutenant to Karimov and his reputation, from stints at being a regional governor, as a tough boss with a violent streak.



But the image of Mirziyaev as strict leader plays into the apparent appeal of the hotline, with its implication that the prime minister will remove obstacles by putting pressure on local bureaucrats. The move echoes Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual Direct Line call-in show, in which Russians nationwide air their grievances to the longtime leader in a televised broadcast.



In Uzbekistan, many messages contain complaints about specific problems such as the lack of cash in banks, shortages of clean drinking water, electricity, and gas in rural areas, and long waiting lists to buy new vehicles, a government official involved in handling the site told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service.

Widespread Discontent



Mirziyaev's Facebook page, meanwhile, is brimming with alleged accounts from satisfied users of the hotline.



In one such case, a man complained that he had bought a broken cell phone from a private shop, and that the seller refused to give his money back.



"All my demands have been satisfied," said a letter that was ostensibly written by the complainant, and was dated October 28. It said he had been able to return the phone to the shop.



Mirziyaev's Facebook page also publicizes measures that it says are being taken against officials accused of shortcomings.



In Tashkent, the capital, it said the head of the heating company Toshissiqlikquvvati's branch in the Mirabad district was dismissed for not properly considering appeals by a local resident about problems in heating supply.



In another effort to ease widespread public discontent toward government bodies that many Uzbeks believe are rife with corruption and cronyism, Mirziyaev ordered the heads of state agencies in an October 27 decree to allocate three hours a day to receive citizens, including business owners, to discuss "matters of mutual interest."



The measures have prompted some people to speak out about their grievances, such as at an October 28 event in which some 5,000 businesspeople and entrepreneurs reportedly packed Tashkent's Istiqlol theater. Participants were offered the opportunity to submit written questions to government agencies, but the crowd instead demanded microphones.



To the surprise of many, the request was granted and dozens of people lined up to air their complaints about bureaucracy, tax policy, and other issues.



Other citizens have turned to YouTube to address messages directly to Mirziyaev.



In a video posted on October 10 that attracted some 500,000 combined viewers, Tashkent entrepreneur Olim Sulaymonov denounced what he described as unlawful actions by officials at the Yunusobod branch of the Prosecutor-General Office's financial crimes department.



Sulaimonov told RFE/RL he was later invited to participate in a program on national television and a court overturned a previous decision ordering him to pay a fine.



"Mirziyaev helped not only me but all of Uzbekistan's entrepreneurs," Sulaimonov said. "Prior to that, we could not work at all."



But while some Uzbeks are happy they have had problems fixed, others say that the doors of state institutions have remained closed to them despite the prime minister's decree.



Critics of the straight-to-the-people initiatives say that Uzbekistan needs major reforms aimed at improving public administration, and that solving problems on an individual basis in a country of some 30 million people is a tremendously inefficient way to use top-level government resources.

"Solving thousands of problems 'by hand' requires thousands of hands. It's not possible in real life," said Annaev, the analyst. "The system has to work."



And activists say that while people may be able to get their heat turned on or their elevator fixed, complaints related to civil liberties are often ignored.



Shukhrat Rustamov of the Human Rights Defenders Alliance of Uzbekistan in Tashkent, described the initiatives as "window dressing," saying authorities need to address the "very big problems related to human rights and democratic reforms."



"We have several times addressed the matter to the [online complaint box] but never received a response," Rustamov said.



Karimov tolerated no opposition over a quarter-century in power, using security forces to keep a firm lid on dissent and eliminating critical media. He prolonged his power through elections denounced in the West as undemocratic.



Mirziyaev has moved to consolidate his power since Karimov's death, installing allies in key government agencies and bureaucracies, and there have been few signs of significant changes in the country's restrictive political environment.

Written by Antoine Blua based on reporting by RFE/RL's Uzbek Service
On November 12, visitors to Amos Greene Farm in Charlestown will be taken back to Revolutionary times, as the estate will convert into a Revolutionary War encampment for the afternoon. Starting at 9:45 a.m., visitors may park at St. Marys Church off Route 112, where they can take a short ride on a shuttle bus to the property. A donation of $5 is suggested for anyone attending the event over the age of 14.
A knife-wielding man fled Wednesday after attempting to abduct a person near Virginia Commonwealth University, according to police.

The incident occurred at about 8:05 p.m., according to an alert sent by VCU police, who were made aware of the assault Thursday after it originally was reported to Richmond police.

A person was walking in the 100 block of North Morris Street, near Floyd Avenue, when a man grabbed the person from behind. When the person resisted, the man "brandished a knife in a threatening manner," according to police. The victim got away and the man ran down an alley.

The man with the knife was described as wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt. Police provided no additional details.

"It can be assumed that conditions continue to exist that may pose a threat to members and guests of the community," the VCU alert read. "Police have increased patrols in this area."

Richmond police are leading the investigation.
At the beginning of their first transition meeting Thursday, outgoing Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones shook Mayor-elect Levar Stoneys hand with exaggerated enthusiasm.

Im ready to give it to you, Jones said with a smile as he prepares to leave office after eight years, the maximum allowed under the citys term limits.

Mayor Jones, the last eight years, youve done the Lords work. I know it has not been easy, Stoney said. And I look forward to gleaning from you some wise tips on how to get through a four-year term.

After Stoneys surprising outright victory became official on Wednesday, the 35-year-old former secretary of the commonwealth and aide to Gov. Terry McAuliffe is shifting his focus to the transition of power.

On Thursday, Stoney announced the leaders of his transition team. The co-chairs of the team will be Tiffany Jana, a local entrepreneur who advises organizations on diversity and inclusion, and Bill Leighty, a lobbyist with a long resume in state government culminating with stints as chief of staff to former Govs. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.

The transition director is Thad Williamson, a University of Richmond professor who formerly led the citys anti-poverty office, started by Jones.

They have a wealth of knowledge about government and about Richmond, Stoney said in an interview Friday. Those are the sort of people I want to surround myself with, whether its in City Hall or as a team in general.

Leighty, who directed the Virginia Retirement System and held a wide variety of other roles over nearly three decades in state government, brings a wealth of knowledge in government operations as a whole, Stoney said.

He described Jana, a former stage actress who promotes cross-cultural and civic engagement as president and CEO of TMI Consulting, as representing Richmonds transformers.

The mayor-elect said he intends to reveal his full transition committee this week, but he said the list will include former mayoral candidate Jon Baliles. The 1st District city councilman dropped out of the running and endorsed Stoney just days before the election, a move that Baliles described as a consolidation to deny the mayoralty to former Del. Joe Morrissey.

Stoney said he has not had any discussions with mayoral runner-up Jack Berry about possible roles at City Hall.

This weekend, the mayor-elect planned to go to a wedding, serve as the ceremonial starter of the Anthem Richmond Marathon and make thank-you calls to supporters.

Stoney is slated to be sworn in on New Years Eve, assuming office in 2017 on a promise of bringing Xbox-style innovation to a government that at times seems stuck in the Atari era.

Theres a lot of work to do, Stoney said. Im ready and excited to do it. Im still pinching myself.

Based on dozens of mayoral forums and policy papers, the snapshot below offers a glimpse of what to expect as the Stoney era begins.

Basic services

On the campaign trail, Stoney called City Hall a sick patient.

The cornerstone of his plan to address what he described as a culture of dysfunction and inefficiency is the completion of a comprehensive performance review of every city department within his first 100 days in office.

Based on the findings, he said he will shift resources to areas that need them the most and identify and eliminate redundant and outdated programs.

Stoney also laid out a number of financial goals, by promising to make sure the citys annual financial report is completed on time every year hes mayor; increase the citys tax collection rate from 96 percent to 98 percent; and put forward budgets with well-funded line items for such basics as snow removal, leaf collection, and road and alley maintenance.

Education

Stoney made a handful of specific commitments on education.

The most expensive among them is to replace Armstrong High School in the East End during his first term, something he estimated would cost at least $50 million. He also promised to increase funding for after-school programs.

Stoneys positions are somewhat less concrete when it comes to how he would allocate funding for schools. Rather than make any firm promises, he said he would work out a plan upon taking office with his counterparts in the schools and City Council.

He said the plan likely would include some kind of local funding formula for schools  something the school system and education advocates have been advocating.

He said he couldnt commit to any specific numbers before taking office, but in a departure from his opponents, Stoney has said he favors dedicating funding on a per-pupil basis rather than as a percentage of the entire budget.

Stoney also emphasized that he would pursue an increase in state funding for schools through a change in Virginias local composite index. He said he believed his prior experience working in state government would give him an advantage when it came to lobbying for the additional dollars.

I believe the Richmond Education Association has endorsed my candidacy because of my ability to navigate the halls of the General Assembly  whether that means Republicans in the House of Delegates or in the state Senate or friends in the executive branch  I know how to walk across the street and knock on the doors necessary to find the additional funding, he said.

The baseball stadium

Stoney said he would support city financing for a deal in the works to replace The Diamond as long as the surrounding counties pay their fair share.

In mid-October, the city, Virginia Commonwealth University and the Richmond Flying Squirrels announced they are in the early stages of talks to construct a $55 million stadium near the Boulevard. They were silent on how much money Richmond and other surrounding localities might contribute.

So far, no ones asked for a specific dollar figure, but sources said a city contribution likely would be in line with the current annual maintenance cost the city pays on the stadium, about $300,000 a year.

Stoney participated in the negotiations between VCU, the city, the Squirrels and the state as McAuliffes secretary of the commonwealth and then, after he stepped down to run for mayor, as a private citizen.

Business issues

Stoney said he would seek to reduce the citys business, professional and occupational license taxes (BPOL), which are easily the highest in the region.

The tax, which is assessed on a businesss gross receipts, varies by type of business and size, but it generates about $30 million in total revenue annually.

He said he would consider implementing a local, per-pack cigarette tax to make up revenue lost through any reduction.

Stoney also said he would aim to streamline the permitting process, which often is criticized and slow and difficult to navigate.

To address the issue, he said he would focus on staffing. I believe in investing in human capital, he said. You can bring in software, but if the right people arent operating it, its a problem. It has to begin with human capital.

Taxes

Stoney, like all the candidates in the race, offered a blanket promise not to raise taxes, though, as noted above, hes also suggested hes open to instituting a local cigarette tax.

Crime

At multiple points on the campaign trail, Stoney said he thinks the citys current police chief, Alfred Durham, is doing a good job and would keep him in his current role.

He said he would work with Durham to address the police departments current staffing shortage.

Stoney said he supports decriminalization of marijuana, which is being reviewed at the state level.

Public transit

Stoney publicly supported the bus rapid transit line the city is building along Broad Street, calling it a good start.

As mayor, he said he will explore expanding the system to include a north-south corridor. He named Jefferson Davis Highway and Chamberlayne Avenue as a possibility.

On high-speed rail, Stoney said he wants to see Main Street Station become the regions transit hub, eschewing hypothetical proposals for a new Boulevard station.

Confederate monuments

Stoney has taken a moderate approach to the hot-button issue of the citys Confederate monuments, saying that while he would not shed any tears if the Jefferson Davis statue comes down or if the name of Jefferson Davis Highway is changed, pursuing such a removal would not be a priority.
It could be days before the public knows just who won the 5th District seat held by Richmond School Board member Mamie Taylor.

Taylor is in an extremely tight race with local doctor Patrick Sapini, who leads by 153 votes, according to the unofficial count. In all, 10,914 votes were cast in the district, 111 of them for write-in candidates.

What happens next largely depends on Taylor, who may either concede or ask for a recount.

According to Richmond Registrar J. Kirk Showalter, Taylor cannot officially request a recount until the official count is complete, which isnt likely to happen before Tuesday.

For her part, Taylor has been publicly silent about what her intentions are.

There have been no updates on her campaigns Facebook page since a get out the vote meme Sunday, and she has not responded this week to several messages, via email and Facebook, seeking comment.

Her district-issued phone, which is listed on the school systems website for constituent calls, is no longer accepting voicemail messages.

Sapini, 42, said Thursday afternoon that he had heard nothing from Taylor, 47, and was unsure what would happen next.

Im still waiting to see, he said.

Taylors is the only seat on Richmonds School Board where there is uncertainty.

Candidates in the eight other districts won by comfortable-enough margins to be assured their victories will stand.

Liz Doerr won the 1st District, Scott Barlow won the 2nd District, Jonathan Young won the 4th District, Nadine Marsh-Carter won the 7th District, and Dawn Page won the 8th District. Linda Baker Owen ran unopposed in the 9th District.

Jeff M. Bourne, the School Boards current chairman, will be the only incumbent to win if Taylor concedes or a recount upholds the current tally. He represents the 3rd District.

Whatever the final outcome, Richmonds new School Board will have a minimum of seven new members when it is sworn in Dec. 31.

For Dana T. Bedden, Richmonds superintendent, that will bring a fresh start, along with uncertainty.

He said Thursday that he looks forward to collaborating with our governing body to improve the quality of education for all students, regardless of where they live in Richmond.

Progress takes time, patience and resources to overcome the many deficiencies that exist within the district, he said.

While sustaining progress has been a challenge, the new board members can be encouraged that RPS continues to maintain more fully accredited schools than when this administration arrived; more students participating in early childhood education; extracurricular opportunities; a lower teacher vacancy rate; decompression of the teacher salary schedule, resulting in increased teacher compensation; expanded advanced course offerings; along with many operational improvements that have made RPS more efficient and transparent.

Early in their tenure, the new board members will face a series of decisions that need to be made quickly to address structural issues within the district. Among those: a new budget, closing schools, redistricting, deciding what to do about crumbling buildings, and addressing falling test scores.

Bourne said Tuesday night that with so much new blood on the board, he wants a quality transition period. That will include making sure current members are available to answer questions from their replacements and working with the Virginia School Boards Association to discuss training or orientation.

Those things that really give a board member some insight as to what it means to be a good board member, to be active, informed and engaged, Bourne said. I have a high degree of confidence in everyone who has been elected.

Bourne is quite familiar working on a board filled with new people. He was one of seven members elected to the School Board in 2012.
CHARLOTTESVILLE  Three University of Virginia police officers are on paid administrative leave, accused of yelling Make America Great Again! into the intercom system of their vehicles early Wednesday morning.

The officers allegedly yelled the slogan  used by President-elect Donald Trump during his campaign  at student passersby not long after Trumps electoral victory had become apparent.

U.Va. Police Chief Michael Gibson wrote that he was disappointed by the reports and that the department is investigating the matter in a statement Thursday afternoon.

The incident was one of the issues that prompted a protest of Friday afternoons scheduled Board of Visitors meeting at the Rotunda, which was supposed to cover issues related to financial aid and affordability.

The protesters called for the officers to be fired. Some also demanded the university defund the police force.

After Rector William H. Goodwin asked them to leave  to keep from filling the building to capacity, he said  the students stood outside and chanted No justice, no peace, no racist police!

Most of the board members were unaware of the incident. U.Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan and the universitys chief operating officer, Pat Hogan, filled them in.

Sullivan said a couple of students were walking back to their dorms on election night and were unhappy about the direction the elections had taken.

According to reports, thats when the officers taunt began.

After the meeting, Hogan said the alleged behavior by the officers was unprofessional and inappropriate.

Word of the incident may have eroded student trust in the entire 125-member police force, he said.
ADB lends $34b to China in 30 years Updated: 2016-11-11 10:17 (Xinhua)

President of Asian Development Bank (ADB) Takehiko Nakao talks to media during the press conference about his visit to Myanmar, in Yangon, Myanmar, June 15, 2016. [Photo / IC]

SHANGHAI - Asian Development Bank (ADB) has provided $34 billion in loans to China since the country became an ADB member in 1986, bank president Takehiko Nakao said Thursday.

The loans comprised $31 billion for the public sector and $3 billion for the private sector, Nakao said at a symposium in Shanghai to commemorate the 30 years of China's ADB membership.

ADB also supported China with 430 million dollars in technical assistance grants.

"China has made an example of how an economy can achieve very rapid growth drawing on market systems and open trade and investment relations with partner countries," Nakao said.

Chen Shixin, director-general of the department of international economic and financial cooperation at the Ministry of Finance, said China has an all-round mutually beneficial cooperative partnership with ADB, and ADB has played an important role in poverty-reduction, economic and social development.

Chen said under the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development, multilateral organizations need to work with the developing members, especially by investing in infrastructure.

"ADB is ready to help China's further transformation and address economic, social and demographic challenges through our finance and knowledge work," Nakao promised.

He stressed ADB's readiness to support China in reducing CO2 emissions.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
Thai companies join in Singles Day sales promotion Updated: 2016-11-11 11:18 (Xinhua)

A university student stays up late for Singles Day promotion at her dormitory in Beijing, Nov 11, 2016. [Photo/IC]

BANGKOK - Thai companies, after setting up their own online stores on Chinese e-commerce platforms, are joining in the Singles Day promotion on Friday, an annual 24-hour online shopping spree.

Products from Thailand, a country visited by millions of Chinese tourists yearly, have gained popularity among Chinese customers in recent years, which encouraged the Thai businesses to set up their flagship stores on Chinese e-commerce platforms.

"We set up the online store on Alibaba's Tmall about a year ago and our sales reached an amount of 1.84 million yuan ($295,000) on Singles Day last year," said Li Jin, chief of Namu Life's flagship store on Tmall.

The company's cosmetic brand Snail White has become popular as its advertisements in Thai language can often be seen on social media, especially an adaptation of the fairy tale Snow White to publicize their products, which was watched over 1 million times on Youtube and over 6 million times on China's Weibo.

"Thanks to the e-commerce platform, we can talk with our customers directly and understand them better and thus to provide them with better products and services," Li said.

Another Thai cosmetic brand Thann sees their online store as a showcase to attract more buyers to their offline stores in China.

"We set up our online store on Tmall a few years ago as a showcase of our products, because these e-commerce platforms are so powerful and they did help us in attracting more customers to our offline stores," said Ren Li, general manager of Thann China.

She added that their online store offered discounts on some products that they want to popularize during the 24-hour promotion this year.

Moreover, the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP), the largest private company in Thailand, is setting up online shops on these e-commerce platforms and expressed their willing to join in the Singles Day event.

The group is now working together with a team of Chinese youths who started their entrepreneurship recently, to set up an online store on Tmall to sell Thai Hom mali rice.

"We plan to sell our Hom mali rice online to Chinese customers directly, which make it more convenient and efficient in the selling process and also will probable lower our cost," said Vivat Ausavanop, associate vice president of CP.

Vivat added that CP is ready to learn more about the Singles Day shopping festival and will be part of it when the time is ripe.

"We started our entrepreneurship here to encourage Thai enterprises to set up store on e-commerce platforms, because we think those 'cheap and fine' products of Thailand may win popularity with Chinese customers," said Pang Jingyuan, a member of Nebula Technology & Commerce, or the company cooperating with CP in establishing the online rice store.

Pang believe that Singles Day promotion has become more and more influential in China and around the world, so their team advised their partners to join in the trend.

Jack Ma, founder and chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba, said during his visit to Thailand in October that his company was going to work with the Thai government to help small business in the country to develop and boost e-payment, so that more Thai products may be sold on their e-commerce platforms in the future.

Alibaba's sales amount of the Singles Day promotion reached 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in just 6 minutes and 58 seconds after Friday came to China, compared with 12 minutes and 28 seconds in 2015.

The total sales amount of Alibaba reached 91.2 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) during the 24-hour event last year.
E-Commerce in China heading in new direction Updated: 2016-11-11 16:54 (Xinhua)

BEIJING - After eight years of wild growth, China's e-commerce industry is seeking new ways to prosper.

The Singles' Day online shopping bonanza, which happens in China on November 11 every year, showcases the rise of online retailing platforms such as Vipshop, JD and Alibaba.

While turnover of domestic e-commerce companies ballooned from 52 million yuan ($7.6 million) in 2009 to 91.2 billion yuan in 2015, traditional "bricks and mortar" retailers are losing ground.

British retailing giant Marks & Spencer announced on Wednesday that it will shut its 10 stores on the Chinese mainland and lay off more than 400 workers, the latest in a growing list of major western retailers such as Best Buy and Tesco to pull out of a difficult market.

Though e-commerce has seen explosive growth over the past eight years, widespread fraud now haunts online retailers that fail to take appropriate measures.

Just before Singles' Day, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce held talks with the country's 15 leading e-commerce companies, telling them that price fraud, false advertising, unfair competition, sales of fake and shoddy goods, as well as scalping were strictly prohibited.

Even for sales-record holder Alibaba, Singles' Day is a double-edged sword. The company's earnings and share price usually slump in the first quarter of the year after climbing to giddy half-year or full-year highs in November.

"E-Commerce should not develop like a campaign because the economy needs steady growth," said Zhang Li, an e-commerce expert with the Ministry of Commerce.

Zhang noted that generally speaking, e-commerce has a positive impact on the real economy and national economic development. "If it brings a negative impact, the investment-driven business mode should be blamed," she said.

Set to tap the country's growing e-commerce industry, a huge amount of capital has flooded into the sector, but the pace of consumption growth has failed to match the rapid expansion of online platforms. That has led to price wars between e-commerce companies, which have hurt traditional retailers.

A hopeful sign is that many e-commerce companies are reflecting on issues such as how to integrate online and offline marketing and the influence of Singles' Day on inventories.

Meanwhile, e-commerce has become rational and moved to abandon price wars, highlighting new trends such as respect for individuality, global connectivity and increased consumption. In addition, the Internet economy has given birth to intelligent logistics and cloud-based infrastructure.

Law-making for the e-commerce sector is also quickly developing. Insiders say that a draft law has been submitted to the country's top legislature and is expected to clear its first hurdle within the year.

"E-commerce can create value through services," Zhang said.

Alibaba's online marketplace Tmall launched Buy +, the world's first virtual reality (VR) shopping store Friday.

Buy + allows customers to shop and experience far away places with nothing more than a smart device, according to Alibaba. For example, shoppers can enjoy the Rainbow Bridge in Tokyo's Odaiba, or tour Times Square in New York in a 1965 vintage car, all while browsing the online marketplace on their cellphones.
The Israeli Diamond Industry is looking forward to a positive outcome at the Hong Kong International Jewelry Manufacturers Show, to be held November 24-27 at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre, says a press note from IDI.

This year the Israeli Diamond Pavilion, organized by the Israel Diamond Institute Group of Companies (IDI), will host 27 companies, 6 of them participating in the show for the first time.

IDI Chairman Shmuel Schnitzer said that he was cautiously optimistic about this show. We saw a certain recovery at the last Hong Kong show in September. I believe that Asian markets are picking up and that the trend is positive. Also, the timing before the holiday season is right, so were quite hopeful about the show, he said.

IDI will again be a sponsor of the HKJMA 28th Anniversary Dinner on November 24, which attracts local celebrities as well as HKJMA members and exhibitors. IDI Managing Director Eli Avidar also expressed a positive outlook for the show. Asia is a strategic market for us, and while the markets there have slowed down they are gradually coming back, - he said.



Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished




China commemorates 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen Updated: 2016-11-11 11:06 By An Baijie(chinadaily.com.cn)

A gathering to commemorate the 150th birthday of Sun Yat-sen is held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 11, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

People from both Chinese mainland and Taiwan should make joint efforts to fight separatists and safeguard unity of the country, President Xi Jinping said on Friday in a ceremony to mark a late statesman that is widely respected by both sides across the Taiwan Straits.

"We would never allow any people, organization or political party, in any time, with any form, to separate any piece of Chinese land from the nation," Xi said in a solemn tone, which won long-lasting applauses from the listeners at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

The president's remarks are made to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen, who led a revolution in 1911 to end the imperialism rule of the Qing Dynasty and founded the Republic of China.

Sun is also the founder of Kuomintang (KMT), which governed Taiwan for decades from 1940s to 1990s and from 2008 to 2015. Mentioning that Sun is a national hero and compatriot, Xi said that the late revolutionary leader is a firm supporter of national unity.

For all Taiwan political parties, organizations and personals, as long as they acknowledge that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, the mainland side would like to communicate with them, Xi said.
Stellar Diamonds has signed joint venture agreements with Citigate Commodities Trading, a Dubai based commodities group, over the Baoule kimberlite project in Guinea and two earlier stage exploration licences in western Liberia.

The company currently had a 75 percent interest in the Baoule project and wholly-owns the Liberia project.

Stellar chief executive Karl Smithson said it would manage the programmes for at least the first phase of work, which was set to commence towards the end of November.

Importantly, these joint ventures will allow the key management of Stellar to focus on the proposed Tongo-Tonguma transaction in Sierra Leone, which we believe offers significant value potential, he said.

The combined Tongo-Tonguma project demonstrated robust economics in a Preliminary Economic Assessment, with an estimated pre-tax project NPV(10) of $172 million, an IRR of 49 percent, and projected life of mine project revenues of $1.5 billion.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




Titan Co Ltd, a Tata group firm that makes watches and jewellery, reported a 23.51% year-on-year increase in net profit to $27.1 mn in the September quarter as it benefited from cost cuts, improved margins and festive season sales. Titans revenue fell marginally by 0.1% to $399.8 mn during the period.

This was an extremely good quarter for the company, with respect to profit. All businesses of the firm recorded profits in the quarter. The jewellery business had an extremely good studded jewellery activation and the watches business launched its second smart watch, JUXT Pro, Bhaskar Bhat, managing director of Titan.

In early October, Titan had warned that studded jewellery sales had surpassed its expectations in the September quarter but volatile gold prices and low consumer confidence had dented sales of gold jewellery. That, perhaps, explains why revenue from the companys jewellery segment, run under the Tanishq brand, grew just 0.24% year-on-year in the quarter to $298.75 mn. Revenue from this segment typically accounts for a major chunk of overall sales. For the Dussehra to Diwali festive period, Tanishq registered a growth of 39% over last year, Bhat said.



Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished




Sporadic gunfire from around the consulate were reported. According to a NATO spokesman, the explosion had caused massive damage to the building.All German employees of the Consulate General are safe and uninjured, a spokesman from the German foreign ministry said. The area would be locked down until morning. Afghan special forces were still conducting search operations but were not encountering any more resistance, the local police chief Sadat said. Authorities were investigating if a second car had been involved. The consulate is located in a large building close to the Blue Mosque in the center of Mazar-i-Sharif, where earlier this year, the Indian consulate was also attacked by militant gunmen. In Berlin, a crisis task force had been set up, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was receiving continual updates. Germany has about 850 soldiers at the NATO base in the city.
SIG Plc (SHI.L), a distributor of specialist building products, reported Friday that group revenues for the four months July to October increased 10.6% from last year, benefited from movements in foreign exchange rates and acquisitions. On a like-for-like basis, Group sales declined 0.8% in the period.

In the UK & Ireland reported revenues grew 2.7 percent, while, LFL revenues decreased 1.1%, with SIG Distribution and SIG Exteriors recording LFL sales declines of 1.2% and 1.7% respectively

The company noted that trading conditions in the UK have continued to soften and competition in the market has intensified following a slowing of activity around the time of the EU referendum.

In Mainland Europe, reported revenues climbed 20.8 percent, while Group's LFL sales declined 0.5%.

Looking ahead for fiscal 2016, the company now expects underlying profit before tax to be in the range of 75 million pounds to 80 million pounds, reflecting the weaker than anticipated trading conditions and intensified competition in the UK.

Separately, SIG announced that Stuart Mitchell has stepped down as Group Chief Executive by mutual agreement with immediate effect.

Mel Ewell, a Non-Executive Director, has been appointed Interim Group Chief Executive on a full time basis whilst the Board conducts an external search for a new Group Chief Executive.

Leslie Van de Walle, Chairman of SIG plc, said, "Stuart brought together a loose federation of independent businesses; developed a new strategy and plans to improve our procurement and supply chain functions; and identified new areas of organic growth opportunities in Air Handling and Offsite."

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
President Barack Obama's wife Michelle Obama hosted the incoming First-Lady Melania Trump at the White House Thursday.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained its details to reporters at his daily news conference.

Michelle and the President-elect's wife had tea together. The First-Lady gave Melania a tour of the residential part of the building, which she will occupy from January 20.

Part of that tour included stepping out onto the Truman Balcony.

There also was an opportunity for the two women to walk through the State Floor of the White House with the White House Curator, Bill Allman. They also had a discussion about raising kids at the White House. The Obamas' two daughters spent the formative years of their childhood at the White House, and Trump's son Baron will also spend the next four years of his childhood there.

After their tour concluded, the First Lady and Mrs. Trump walked over to the Oval Office, and the two couples visited again before they departed.

"Michelle has talked before publicly about the stresses and anxieties of moving to a new place, living inside a fishbowl, living inside a museum, and raising your family there," Earnest told reporters.

While Michelle and Melania were spending time together at the White House, Trump was discussing with President Obama about the transition of power that will take place over the next two months.

Separately, commenting about the ladies' meeting, Trump said on Twitter that "Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!"

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Women's clothing retailer Nasty Gal has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Founded in 2006 by Sophia Amoruso, the Los Angeles-based company said it expects to attract a new equity partner or sponsor to take the company forward with a healthy balance sheet.

The retailer added that it plans to emerge from Chapter 11 and continue operations with or without such a partner.

Chief Executive Officer Sheree Waterson, a former executive of Lululemon, said the move is expected to help Nasty Gal address immediate liquidity issues, restructure its balance sheet and correct structural issues, including high occupancy costs.

In its bankruptcy filing Wednesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, Nasty Gal estimated both its assets and liabilities at between $10 million and $50 million.

After the company was founded, Amoruso began selling vintage clothes from her eBay account and later switched to selling the company's own label of clothes on its own website. The company also expanded by adding two brick-and-mortar retail stores in Los Angeles.

Amoruso grew the online to $100 million in sales in 2012. However, the brand's growth appeared to have stalled in recent years amid stiff competition.

The company laid off 10 percent of its staff in a company-wide restructuring in February, and was hit with lawsuits from its former employees. Amoruso stepped down from the CEO role in January 2015, with Waterson succeeding her in that position.

Amoruso has published a book "#Girlboss", which is part memoir and also describes her business philosophy. The book became a New York Times best-seller in 2014. Following the book's release, Amoruso launched the GIRLBOSS Foundation to inspire women to take their careers into their own hands.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
With the Mexican government steadfastly refusing to pay for a wall on the country's border with the U.S., Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., has suggested that Congress can help find the money to accomplish one of President-elect Donald Trump's main campaign promises.

In an interview with "Fox & Friends" on Fox News on Friday, Gohmert said money was previously allocated by Congress for similar projects but not used for its intended purpose.

"I've been thrilled how our Republican leadership has just gotten all excited about Trump," Gohmert said. "It's amazing what you can get Congress to do when you lead and push them in the right direction."

"We had appropriated money during the Bush administration that didn't get spent for the wall," he added. "So, yeah, it's going to be great to have somebody that's actually following the law."

Gohmert also argued that the additional funds would be available, as the wall would reduce the cost of in-processing illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report said other Republicans are working to lay out an alternative that would enhance existing infrastructure due to concerns about the cost of erecting a wall along the border.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Political News
Trains carry a cargo of hope Updated: 2016-11-11 07:35 By Pan Zhongming and Lucie Morangi(China Daily Europe)

Crumbling infrastructure replaced by state-of-art network, which is set to deliver jobs and prosperity

As the electrified Ethiopia-Djibouti train pulls out of Furi-Lebu station in Addis Ababa, Omar Nour cannot contain his excitement.

"This is the Chinese way, fast and efficient," he says of the 120 kilometer per hour train after its inauguration in early October.

"China's impetus to modernize and improve our infrastructure has a direct impact on our standard of living. Djibouti will become the gateway of the region," says the 60-year-old entrepreneur as he enjoys a ride on the $3.78 billion train during its official test run.

A train runs on the Ethiopia-Djibouti Railway during an operational test near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Oct 3. The Africa's first modern electrified railway was built by Chinese companies in three years. Xinhua

The 750 km track runs parallel to the now-abandoned meter-gauge line built by the French in 1910. Years of underinvestment have seen Ethiopia cut off from direct access to the port of Djibouti, where the landlocked country does around 70 percent of its trading. All freight is transported by road.

Convenience is what has Nour excited. As a meat exporter, prevailing circumstances have forced him to rely on road transport, which is risky, slow and most times affects the weight of his cows and goats. His abattoir is located in Ethiopia and his products take at least seven days to reach the port in Djibouti, a journey fraught with risks.

Construction of the modern track took just three years.

"I am happy that it is finally complete," he says. "I will be able to manage my costs."

He exports about 10 metric tons daily and predicts an upswing to a million tons over the next five years using trains with 3,000 tons gross capacity as he starts to trade with the Middle Eastern countries.

"China has pushed the bar higher," he says.

According to African Development Bank Group, Africa's prolonged underinvestment in transportation has resulted in dilapidated infrastructure. African countries on average invested 15 to 25 percent of GDP in transport infrastructure over the period 2005-12, while India and China invested about 32 and 42 percent respectively in the same period.

This underinvestment has resulted in Africa having considerably higher transport costs (as much as 100 percent) than other low-income developing countries.

The continent's rail network represents just 5 percent of the 1 million km worldwide. As of 2015, China boasted 121,000 km of railways, the world's second-longest network, including 19,000 km of high-speed rail, the longest such network in the world.

"Rail infrastructure in Africa is skimpy and currently not as well developed as the road network," says Symerre Grey-Johnson, head of the regional integration and trade division at New Partnership for Africa's Development, an economic development program of the African Union.

"Investment in this subsector was never prioritized but the need for transborder infrastructure, which is fast and low-cost, is certainly urgent at the moment. This will especially support mineral-rich landlocked countries."

The colonial builders were not keen to promote intratrade, Grey-Johnson says.

He adds that Africa's current campaign to industrialize makes rail infrastructure a necessity.

"This is the only way the continent is going to build and sustain desired economic growth."

The Ethiopia-Djibouti railway traverses two countries, giving the former a faster route to the port. The standard gauge railway has been developed by China Railway Engineering Corp for the Ethiopian side, while China Civil Engineering Construction Corp completed the Djibouti side. China Export and Import Bank loaned 70 percent of the investment.

"The railway is the first standard gauge electrified railway constructed in Africa by Chinese enterprises," says Li Changjin, chairman of the board of China Railway Group and China Railway Engineering Corp.

"The standard of China's railway technology and equipment has reached first-class level," he says.

The African rail industry is estimated to be a $508 billion market. This includes current and proposed investments.

Access to affordable capital, a large presence in Africa and strengthened bilateral relations have allowed Chinese firms to clinch lucrative contracts such as the Lagos-Calabar and Lagos-Kano route in Nigeria, the Mombasa-Nairobi railway in Kenya, Chad-Sudan railways and Khartoum-Port Sudan in Sudan and the Angola-Zambia-Congo project. Recently, CCECC signed a $2.26 billion deal to build a new railway linking two cities in eastern Zambia.

Chinese firms are also eyeing projects in Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda to add to the feat of building the famous Tanzania-Zambia railway.

"It is symbolic of ongoing relations between China and Africa," says Deniz Kellecioglu, economic affairs officer at the Macroeconomic Policy Division of the United Nations Economic Commission of Africa. "Regional integration has been brought closer since this infrastructure, Ethiopia-Djibouti rail, will also interlink with the Kenyan SGR that connects South Sudan. It is a game-changer."

He says long-term investment promises to trigger the sustained economic growth that has been absent.

"People will also start planning long-term and investing in sectors such as manufacturing. Thinking long-term is a global phenomenon, but the infrastructure deficit witnessed in Africa is proof that this has been lacking."

The direct benefits to be seen are reduced transportation costs, increased industrialization prospects and the establishment of new industries to support the railway sector. This is in addition to job-creation and capacity-building which make a direct contribution to GDP.

"You only have to see the catalytic effect of what these projects do along the routes. Areas that previously had no access to water get boreholes. Locals become service providers for the projects, hence using more labor," says the ECA economist. He especially cites the Ethiopia-Djibouti electrified railway, saying this has taken energy closer to the people, thus driving socio-economic activities in rural areas.

"Small and medium-sized entrepreneurs are the biggest beneficiaries of these projects."

More interestingly, remote territories will be opened up.

"It will also cool neighborly tensions, since countries trading with each other tend to largely maintain peace," says Kellecioglu.

Unexplored areas mean untapped economic potential in the agriculture and mining, sectors that require an efficient transportation network.

But issues such as the displacement of people, unemployment as the network becomes more efficient and the rise of competing political interests have threatened to derail projects.

In Kenya, the Mombasa-Nairobi SRG has been severely interrupted by community disagreements over land compensation, labor disputes and environmental activists opposed to it cutting across a national park.

However, such problems have not occurred in neighboring Ethiopia, where Abebe Bayu, a journalist with Ethiopia Broadcasting Corporation, says work has proceeded largely uninterrupted.

"The buy-in from the citizens was huge as people look forward to the falling cost of imported products," he says.

Despite challenges, Chinese technology has transformed the rail infrastructure picture in Africa. In January 2004, at its 31st congress, the Union of African Railways proposed an integrated railway network on the continent. The construction of several regional railways was put on agenda. The proposal was that trans-regional rail infrastructure should follow the same standard.

"The Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway is the first modern electrified railway in an overseas market using complete Chinese standards and equipment," says Li of CREC. "This success sets a good example for the export and popularization of the Chinese standard."

The Chinese standard has been applied in the Mombasa-Nairobi SGR railway that will extend to six countries in East Africa and in the coastal railway in Nigeria and Chad in West Africa, making it significant for the popularization of the Chinese railway standard in Africa and even in the world, Li says.

"The African market is one of the major overseas markets for Chinese contractors," says Meng Fengchao, chairman and president of China Railway Construction Corporation. "CRCC has been actively involved in sharing China's experience in railway construction with African countries and has been responsible for many building, repair and renovation projects."

"As early as in 2006, the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation under CRCC helped Nigeria build the first modern railway with Chinese technology as standard," Meng said. "Its success provided a reference point for the Ethiopian government."

But while the key visible contractors continue to be Chinese, French firms are also making headway in some West African countries. This has raised fears of disparate rail gauges and technology, disrupting the African dream of seamless integration. Several Southern African rail network use 1,067 mm track while the modern Chinese-built railways use 1,435mm.

But, according to Lin Xiaohua, CREC operation general engineer based in Addis Ababa, the issue of disparate gauges is not as much of an issue as some might think. Continent-wide, there are currently three places where lines of different gauges meet. One example is a link from Nigeria to Cameroon.

In addition, the problem of rail gauge compatibility is not limited to Africa. Europe and Japan both contend with similar challenges.

Lin also dispels fears that Africa is playing catch-up by adopting inferior technology. The Addis-Djibouti and Mombasa-Nairobi trains will run at 120 km/h while high-speed trains in China have reached 320 km/h.

"This is what governments were comfortable with in terms of viability and affordability. The technology we have deployed is state-of-the-art. Moreover, when time comes, we can rehabilitate the infrastructure to enable locomotives of higher speeds to run on it," says the engineer.

It will take 15 to 20 years, depending on frequency of use, before any mechanical parts are replaced, according to Lin.

Nepad expert Grey-Johnson says the conversation on maintenance budgets needs to start now.

"Just as other sectors such as health, education and security have been discussed in high-level meetings, African governments need to start discussing this as investment in these projects gains momentum."

Contact the writers at panzhongming@chinadaily.com.cn and lucymorangi@chinadaily.com.cn

African workers take a rest at the construction site of Abuja-Kaduna Railway in Nigeria. Provided to China Daily

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page6)
In Kenya, railway construction faces challenges Updated: 2016-11-11 07:35 By Edith Mutethya(China Daily Europe)

Work is set to start early next year on the challenging second phase of Kenya's standard gauge railway network development.

The northern corridor link, known as 2A, will be constructed by China Road and Bridges Corp, following commissioning of the project by the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Oct 19.

The Ksh 150 billion ($1.5 billion; 1.35 billion euros; 1.2 billion) project will extend from Nairobi to Naivasha, the country's geothermal production center, located in the northwest of the city.

While this phase of the project is only 120 kilometers long, it is expected to take longer to construct owing to the mountainous terrain.

Workers at the construction site of the Mombasa-Nairobi standard gauge railway in Kenya. Pan Siwei / Xinhua

It is estimated it will take four-and-half years to complete, compared with the first phase - the 472 km Nairobi-Mombasa Standard Gauge Railway - which is expected to take just two years.

The Nairobi-Mombasa project should be completed in December, six months ahead of schedule. Trial operations are scheduled to begin in January, with the railway opening officially the following June.

According to CRBC, the geographical conditions of Ngong Hills and Great Rift Valley are unfavorable and the terrain is complex.

"To overcome the adverse conditions for phase 2A, we plan a large amount of high backfilling and deep cutting. For specific sections, we will construct slab-pile walls or retaining walls to prevent slopes from collapsing," a report from CRBC states.

The project will also involve the construction of four tunnels, the longest of which will be more than 4.5 km and the shortest half a kilometer. Nine long bridges will also be built, three of them more than a kilometer in length, with the longest being 6.7 km, traversing Nairobi National Park. It will be the third-longest bridge in Africa after October Bridge in Cairo, Egypt, which is 20.5 km long, and Third Mainland Bridge, in Lagos, Nigeria, at 10.5 km.

Commissioning the project in October, President Kenyatta urged communities along the route to cooperate with the contractor to ensure the project is completed on schedule.

Clearing the air over fears about land compensation - previously a source of major conflict between the contractor and local communities - Kenyatta assured residents that once the land is surveyed the National Land Commission will evaluate it and the affected people will be compensated. The compensation funds, he said, had already been set aside in the Railway Development Fund.

The president hit out at local leaders, including members of county assemblies, for allegedly inciting residents to attack SGR workers.

On Aug 28, a group of Masai youths attacked 14 Chinese nationals at the Duka Moja Railway construction site in Narok county, demanding job opportunities from the contractor.

Kenyatta advised residents to voice their grievances through official channels such as county governments, the Ministry of Transport and regional commissioners.

"If you attack the workers, it means the project will be suspended, hence you lose your jobs. Please don't opt to do that," he said.

Atanas Maina, managing director of Kenya Railways, says the government has beefed up security to ensure that employees are not attacked.

Maina says the government is engaging various stakeholders to impress on local communities the benefits of the SGR, from job opportunities to lowering the cost of production, making Kenya a more attractive investment destination.

"We will be holding meetings with leaders from various counties alongside the railway line, after which they will engage their electorates to ensure they support the project," he says.

The Nairobi-Naivasha SGR project is expected to create more than 20,000 jobs and will traverse five counties: Nairobi, Kajiado, Kiambu, Nakuru and Narok.

The contractor has promised to source 40 percent of suppliers locally, as required by law.

edithmutethya@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page7)
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
Two weeks ago at this time I was sitting on a beach at Beaches Negril in Jamaica soaking up the sun with a delicious drink in my hand. Today

Im slipping on my boots then picking up my winter coat at the dry cleaner. It is only a matter of time before I have to trudge through the snow. As much as I hate driving in inclement weather, sometimes traveling during the winter months is unavoidable. If you live in areas prone to unfriendly winter weather or will be passing through such areas during holiday travels, it is important to be prepared. Stocking the vehicle in the event you experience car problems, are involved in an accident or find that a turn in the weather requires you to pull over is critical.

Plan accordingly by using these tips to prepare your vehicle and create a winter vehicle emergency kit!

First and foremost, equip your vehicle with winter tires! They handle better than all-season tires and can make a difference when you hit a bad patch in the road.

Whether you keep a duffel bag at home that you throw in the car when you leave or simply store these in a bin in your trunk, they are items that can help.

A shovel. Even if its just a small emergency shovel, its better than nothing.

A shovel. Even if its just a small emergency shovel, its better than nothing. Windshield scraper and small broom

Flashlight with extra batteries

Emergency radio.

Water

Snack food including energy bars, raisins, mini candy bars.

Matches and small candles

Blankets or a sleeping bag

First aid kit including a multi-purpose tool or pocket knife

Necessary medications

Tow chain or rope

Road salt, sand or cat litter for traction

Booster / Jumper cables

Emergency flares and reflectors

Fluorescent distress flag and whistle to attract attention

Cell phone charging cables and portable battery

Most important, pack a sense of reason. If its too dangerous to drive, dont! But if you have to travel in the winter, dont let fashion get the best of you. Either wear boots or pack them along with extra hats, socks and mittens. You may find yourself needing to scrape windows or shovel your car out when youre leaving work, a store or restaurant so youll want to make sure you can do so without getting frostbite.

Stay safe during your winter driving by preparing it with winter tires, completing the necessary maintenance and service and assembling the necessary preparedness kit.

How do you prepare your vehicle for winter driving?
Railways in Africa: A balancing act Updated: 2016-11-11 07:35 By Wendy Noel Ouma(China Daily Europe)

It is prudent to ensure that issues are clearly articulated by governments rather than subjecting projects to rumors

Railways have been a significant means of transport in Africa since the colonial era. Globally, it is known as the mode with the least number of accidents, highest efficiency and greatest convenience.

The advantages rail offers in long-distance coverage, affordability and suitability for heavy and bulky goods attracts shippers.

Most African governments have sought railways as a means to maximize their trade benefits and cut costs. Rail presents an opportunity to ensure that the African continent is interconnected as one.

So when China made a reasonable offer to build railways in Africa, governments on the continent welcomed the idea. The construction of railway lines in Africa is foremost meant to enable transportation of goods and services from one country to another swiftly, efficiently and cost-effectively.

A second motivation is to enable easy movement of natural resources to manufacturing plants within Africa. This will enable Africa to become independent in managing its own resources and ensuring that they are used within Africa and not outside.

Certain conflicting views, however, have been associated with railway construction - for example, the opinion that railways are a losing vision, based on the fact that the majority of infrastructure projects funded by international financial institutions have involved roads and energy. But in Africa it's a different story. Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, Senegal, Zambia, Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco have all taken up railway construction projects.

Railways are indispensable for Africa, offering alternatives for development. Gaining economic traction through its benefits, a majority of African countries - along with foreign investors - have been lobbying governments to get behind rail.

Various challenges in specific countries have delayed certain projects and roped Chinese firms into controversies. The one thing everyone needs to acknowledge is that it is not wise to shoot the laborer, since the work you intended to do will not be done. It has been unfair for African peoples to blame China when controversies have arisen. They forget that it's their own governments' duty to ensure that their citizens are informed.

A case in point is Kenya, where a standard-gauge railway has been held up because it would pass through Nairobi National Park - the only national park in the world that lies within a city. It receives over 15,000 tourists in a month and has blocked rail construction since 2013.

After an uproar from environmentalists, animal preservationists and citizens of Kenya, alternatives have been presented, including the idea of an overpass through the park instead of trains on the ground. This was believed to be the better alternative to a suggested detour, which was said to increase the cost by $220 million (199 million euros; 177 million).

The overpass concept resulted in a study of wildlife interactions with the structures, where video monitors were attached to the animals. This was to aid the government in making a final decision on where the railway line would pass, keeping in mind concerns in regard to interruption of the natural habitat and movement of the animals.

Another controversy associated with the proposed line is the alleged possibility of corruption, including bribery. That prompted a probe by Kenya's Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. Other concerns lodged included a charge that one-third of port cargo being transported by the railway would limit traders' freedom to choose their means of transportation.

Considering the benefits of railway lines, it is worth giving it a chance. It does not present any economic liability.

Meanwhile, as we wait to reap the benefits of railway construction across Africa and other places, it is prudent to ensure that issues are clearly articulated by governments rather than subjecting projects to rumors and negative propaganda.

It is also a simple matter of fairness that the Chinese companies doing the work do not encounter a hostile environment. That only impedes their performance.

The author is a senior policy analyst and coordinator of Center of Emerging Powers at the Africa Policy Institute. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page8)
Several local companies successful in Best of the Best awards
UK media overstepped in criticizing judiciary Updated: 2016-11-11 07:36 By Chris Peterson(China Daily Europe)

Our age-old checks and balances are tried and tested and should not be called into question

In over 50 years of doing this job, I've developed a certain pride in the way the British press, by and large, has behaved and carried out its task of reporting, analyzing and entertaining its readers, and I've played my modest role to the best of my ability.

But outrageous attack on the three High Court judges on Nov 4 who ruled unanimously against the government by saying Parliament should have the right to say when, if and how Article 50, the trigger clause that starts the UK's exit from the European Union, should be implemented, was for me a step too far.

The system under which this country operates, and has done for centuries, is based on a parliamentary model, a free press and an independent judiciary.

That last part is particularly pertinent, as there is no written UK constitution; instead, the law embodies a wealth of legal precedents reached in the highest courts in the land, acts of Parliament, conventions and, of course, parts of the Magna Carta, written back in the 12th century by a group of noblemen concerned that the monarchy was getting out of hand.

The press is largely self-regulating, operating as it does under the strict laws of libel and slander that are in effect in the UK.

The article that incensed me was a dreadful piece in the Mail Online, full of hints and innuendo, on the personal traits of the High Court judges who ruled in the Article 50 case.

They had been asked by a group of private citizens who had become concerned that the government was using an arcane rule known as the Royal Prerogative to railroad through - without any direct involvement of Parliament - the process of leaving the EU.

As was the group's right, they sought what is called a judicial review of the government's decision.

So far, so good. Leaving the EU has become a hugely divisive and contentious issue, and for the right-wing Daily Mail and the equally right-wing Daily Telegraph, both keen advocates of leaving, the judges' decision was tantamount to interfering with the will of the people.

One of the enduring factors in Britain's survival over the centuries has been the establishment of a free and independent judiciary.

We don't elect our judges, and they are not seen to represent any particular party or faction. They are truly independent. Their job, pure and simple, is to uphold the law without fear or favor.

If you disagree with a verdict, well, you can always appeal to a higher court.

The High Court judges, in delivering their verdict, made it crystal clear that their job was to review the government's decision against the background of law and precedent - political comment and bias didn't come into it. Yet the Mail Online and the Telegraph and other publications seemed to insinuate that the judges' personal backgrounds had influenced their decision.

I have never seen the like.

The government of Prime Minister Theresa May has come in for some stick, as well. Critics described its reaction as lukewarm and muted.

Ministers, including May, went out of their way to stress that in addition to an independent judiciary, the country's governing system depends on a free press.

Lord Chancellor Liz Truss, who is responsible for, among other things, maintaining the independence of the judiciary, came in for strong words from commentators and legal experts for not criticizing outright the personal attacks on the judges involved in the High Court decision.

Of course, not all papers were guilty. But it's a trend in the British media I don't much care for.

Chris Peterson is managing editor, Europe for China Daily. Contact him at chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page11)
Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, has offered Samoas congratulations to the new President of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

Following Trumps stunning triumph over Hillary Clinton in the race for the most coveted office in the White House, Tuilaepa reminded that it is God Almighty who appoints leaders in accordance to his will.

So lets just see what happens, he said. We know the Lord appoints governments.

Tuilaepa admitted he is mindful of the outrageous comments made by Trump about women, deporting all immigrant criminals to their countries and many others during the campaign. Still these have not swayed the American voters towards the more seasoned diplomat in Clinton.

I guess the people of America voted for change, he said.

Tuilaepa made reference to Trumps victory speech, saying Trumps tone is that of someone who genuinely wants to reunite the country after the bitter divisions created by the elections.

He compared the rivalry between Clinton and Trump to him and the former Opposition Leader, Palusalue Faapo II.

The arguments were heated just like mines and Palu, said Tuilaepa.

I dont know where he is now but we should team up when he comes back. But in elections there is always that saying by Tui Atua that there is a calm after the storm.

But lets just see what happens because the Bible says that God chooses the governments and leaders.

We dont know if this man was chosen because he will bring good things for America and us all. And if he brings trouble, I guess there are a lot of bad things happening in the world that can teach us a lesson.

Tuilaepa was also asked to comment on concerns the new President will make it difficult for Samoans to migrate to America.

Tuilaepa conceded that he is concerned about that.

If we look at the speeches he had made during the campaign, it will mean it will be very difficult. It might be easier going to hell now than entering America based on the things he had said.

Tuilaepa also disagrees with Trumps views that America should prioritise its own welfare first, saying America should stay away from conflicts elsewhere.

The Prime Minister said this is why millions of people died in World War 2.

At the time when Adolf Hitler was persecuting people, the President of America at the time did not do anything until Japan bombed the Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, he said.

That was when America finally acted but by that time millions had died, said Tuilaepa.

That is why after that World War America no longer stood by and let countries fight their own wars and decided to be at the forefront to protect other countries.

It sounds like Trump has that mindset that they should not meddle with other countries affairs and focus on their own health and happiness. The world is waiting to hear what he will do.

Asked about Trumps administration threatening to cut aid and any agreement between the U.S. and Samoa, Tuilaepa said it wasnt a concern to him.

He explained there is one agreement which is the one that U.S. supports Peace Corps mission in Samoa and the Coast Guards and Navy providing maritime policing

Tuilaepa added the U.S. has interest in the marine life.

About aid, the Prime Minister said there are no direct fund from the United States but only through World Bank and the United Nations and other donor countries  including China.
Suspended Police Commissioner Fuiavailili Egon Keil is a free man.

It follows the decision made in the Court today to withdraw all the charges against him for insufficient evidence.

A Prosecutor hired by the Office of the Attorney General from New Zealand, Paul Dacre QC informed the Court about the decision.

Fuiava was charged with one count each of wrongful arrest of a man at Fugalei market last year during an armed police raid, perjury, disorderly conduct, and providing false statement to the Ombudsman in a commission of inquiry which investigated a complaint on how the police had carried out the raid in a public place.

More details soon.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Barack Obama on Thursday asked Congress for $11.6 billion in additional war-related funding, including money to fight Islamic State militants, sustain higher overseas troop levels, and modernize the Afghan military's helicopter fleet.

The request was sent to lawmakers for consideration during the lame-duck session that starts next week. It's evenly divided between the Pentagon and the State Department and foreign aid accounts related to battling IS.

"In addition to enhancing our effort to defeat ISIL, this plan would fund the president's decision to adjust our troop levels to better support the Afghan government's strategy to secure its nation, and would help enhance Afghanistan's aviation capability," said Defense Secretary Ash Carter. "Swift passage of this plan will help the Department of Defense and our partners in the U.S. government and around the world protect this nation."

The request's fate in the coming weeks is uncertain. It's not clear what Republicans controlling Congress want to do about a raft of unfinished spending bills now that Donald Trump has won the White House.

While top Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., want to clear away the unfinished budget work  and avoid cluttering the Trump agenda with this year's leftovers  many conservatives hope to win better outcomes next year with Trump in the White House. At the very least, however, Congress must pass a temporary spending bill to avert a government shutdown next month, which would give lawmakers and the new administration time to hash out a final accord on more than $1 trillion in unfinished bills to fund agency operating budgets.

Before the election, Democrats promised they would try to play a strong hand against GOP moves to beef up the defense budget without comparable treatment for domestic programs. The White House and congressional Democrats insist that additional defense dollars be matched with increases for non-defense programs, and pairing the upcoming Pentagon request with non-defense items that would still fit under the umbrella of security costs could free up money for domestic programs elsewhere.

The military portion includes $2.5 billion to maintain elevated U.S. troops levels of 8,400 in Afghanistan as announced over the summer. About $383 million would pay for air strikes against IS. The request would mean a total of $85 billion in war-related funding for the budget year that started in October.

The $5.8 billion portion of the request for the State Department and the Agency for International Development would help stabilize areas of Iraq that have been reclaimed for the militants, remove unexploded bombs and increase aid for Somalia, among other purposes.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said the request was not enough since it "does not accommodate the increased pace of operations against ISIL and does nothing to begin addressing the readiness crisis."
Suspended Police Commissioner Fuiavailili Egon Keil is a free man.

It follows a decision made in the Supreme Court yesterday to withdraw and dismiss all the charges against him due to insufficient evidence.

Fuiava had faced charges including unlawful detaining of a person, disorderly conduct in a public place, perjury and making a false statement in relation to the wrongful arrest of a member of the public at the Fugalei Market last year.

Justice Lesatele Rapi Vaai presided.

A Prosecutor hired by the Office of the Attorney General from New Zealand, Paul Dacre QC, informed the Court that there was not enough evidence to proceed with the charges against the Commissioner.

Justice Lesatele granted the application to withdraw and dismissed the charges.

Scenes of joy and jubilation erupted outside the Court when the decision was made.

Speaking to the Weekend Observer, Fuiavailili was a relieved man.

I always knew in my heart that if you do the right thing and you stick to your principles and you do what you are suppose to do you will be ok in the long run, he said.

This is the case it is today.

Fuiava thanked his family, his parents and the people of Samoa, the government for their patience.

Fuiavaililis father, Mapusua Rudolf Keil, was emotional and shared his excitement about the decision from the court.

This is finally over now that my son was speaking the truth, he said.

Fuiavailili was suspended in August this year.

"I tell you I don't hold a grudge, I just want to get back in there and do what I've been doing within the confines of the law in doing something that will make us all proud of the Samoan police.

"Not my rules, not my laws, I'm just implementing what should have been done a long time ago, and there's a few, not the whole organisation, are resistant to that change and I'm holding them accountable to what they're supposed to do in the first place.
Childrens Park downtown was all dressed up for its grand opening on the eve of the 1996 Republican national convention in San Diego. But now, its acting like a juvenile delinquent.

Few people visit the 1.2-acre park at Front Street and Harbor Drive. The police are called regularly to deal with drug use, drinking and other issues. And nearby residents complain about street people who camp out under the Canary Island pine trees and relieve themselves in the Civic Pond.

The Civic Pond, 220 feet in diameter, is no fun . Signs warn against wading in the 14-inch-deep watery art piece by renowned landscape architect Peter Walker. And maintenance crews have to fish out detritus, from litter and feces to a recently found floating television set.

Advertisement

At night everybody avoids the place because its dark and the homeless and transients are all over the place, said Gary Smith, president of the Downtown Residents Group.

Civic San Diego, whose predecessor used $2.8 million in downtown redevelopment money to build the 2.1-acre park, is trying to remedy the many problems with $3.6 million in funds from downtown developer fees. Its holding a public workshop to seek ideas at 6 p.m. Wednesday at City Halls North Terrace Rooms 207-209, overlooking the San Diego Concourse, 202 C St.

Right now theres nothing to enjoy, said CivicSDs vice president for planning, Brad Richter. You can admire the pond, but aside from that, its just a forest.

The agency, which oversees downtown development for the City Council, previously approved a similarly priced plan in 2011 that would have added a restroom, snackbar and play equipment, and replaced trees with grass and pavement. But the effort stalled when redevelopment ended. Now its coming back to life, partly at the request of downtown residents who want a dog park or dog run.

Glen Schmidt, whose landscape architecture firm prepared the 2011 plan, said he and his staff are leading the workshop, ready to see if there are any better ideas to inject new life into a forgotten corner of town.

If the cost is higher, CivicSD would have to rejigger its park funding priorities. The tentative schedule calls for completing a new design over the next year and starting construction in mid-2018 for completion a year later.

It was really meant as more of an art piece (in 1996) than a highly functional, amenitized park, which worked at the time, when relatively few people had moved downtown, Schmidt said. Now we have 40,000 people living downtown and the demographics, the needs, are different.

The park was dedicated to children, partly to get political support, but it never had any child-oriented play equipment. The only time wading was tolerated was on opening day.

Immediately west is the New Childrens Museum that opened in 2008. A one-acre, $2.6 million child-oriented park across Island Avenue includes swings and other play equipment.

Originally Childrens Park contained attractively landscaped mounds that have since been removed to provide better sight lines for police patrols. There are benches and seating blocks but graffiti and vandalism have besmirched some of them, and the grass died during the drought when sprinklers were turned off.

Alonzo Vivas, executive of the Downtown San Diego Partnerships Clean and Safe program, said his staff patrol the perimeter of the park but are not legally authorized to go into the park to deal with security problems. They receive complaints from the public several times a week and alert the police several times a month if a crime is taking place. A monthly count of homeless sleeping overnight in the park ranges showed 13 on one night, five on another.

While everybodys doing the best they can, I think redesigning it is going to go a long way, Vivas said. If its designed properly and we get people to use it, theres going to be less illegal activity happening inside there.

Joan Jingles OBrien, 55, was arranging her jewelry on a bench last week so she could photograph it for sale online. Shes homeless but doesnt sleep in Childrens Park.

I leave after dark, she said, heading for East Village. Its one of the parks thats kind of rough at night.

She said she hopes any changes include a restroom and a dog run  she had her four small dogs in her cart along with other personal items.

California Aquatics contractor Alberto Salgado, 24, spends about two hours daily Monday through Friday cleaning the pool and checking the chemicals.

He tells stories of daily encounters with street people, who regularly wash or shower in the pond, including one woman who stripped naked to take a shower beneath the spigots. On another occasion, Salgados assistant was accosted by a different woman but by the time police arrived, she was gone.

Its the craziest thing, he said of the stuff he removes from the pool. Hes found clothes, a suitcase and that floating TV.

Salgado, who lives in City Heights, said the pool should be reconfigured for waders  an idea proposed five years ago. He also endorsed adding playground equipment.

Its a nice park, he said. Youd want to bring your kids.

If there was something for them to do in a place called Childrens Park.

roger.showley@sduniontribune.com; (619) 293-1286; Twitter: @rogershowley
At Cox Communications regional San Diego headquarters this week, Sam Attisha spoke the words Ill be back into his TV remote control.

On the screen, an icon for the film The Terminator popped up, complete with reviews, recommendations for similar movies and a list of cast members. There was a schedule for when the iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger science fiction film was slotted to air in the near future, and a button for ordering the movie immediately on demand.

Attisha, Coxs senior vice president and region manager for Cox Communications in California, was showing off the companys Contour 2 TV guide technology that makes finding what to watch easier. Its part of the companys strategy to help stem the trend of subscribers cutting the cable video cord.

Advertisement

In 2013, the cable industry saw its first ever decline in video subscribers. It was a small drop. But since then, the trend has accelerated as more customers explore so-called over the top Web alternatives such as Netflix or Hulu.

In 2015, about a million cable video customer cut the cord, about a 1 percent decline in total subscribers, said Ian Olgeirson, senior analyst with SNL Kagan.

Video subscriber losses, however, dont mean customers are abandoning cable companies. Internet subscriber growth has been steadily on the rise..

The broadband pie continues to expand, and not only is it expanding, but cable companies continue to take share from telecommunications companies, said Olgeirson..

Privately held Cox Communications doesnt provide subscriber numbers. It is believed to be the largest pay TV provider in San Diego County.

In its broadband business, Cox has faced competition from AT&T and more recently Google Fiber, which is in exploratory talks to bring a high-speed fiber optic Internet service to the region.

Last month, Google Fiber has put its expansion plans on hold while it explored alternatives for the costly last mile of getting fiber from nearby streets to individual homes.

For its part, Cox has been rolling out GigaBlast fiber optic Internet service in a handful of new housing developments. It is capable of delivering 1 gigabit per second download speeds  enough to download a high definition movie in under a minute.

Cox also is aiming to boost the speeds of its existing coaxial cable network through next generation Docsis 3.1 technology, though the time frame for a network upgrade is unclear.

Its amid this backdrop that Coxs Attisha sat down with the Union-Tribune to discuss the companys network plans and other matters. Here are some excerpts.

Q: With over the top services, how is that impacting your video business?

A: I cant give you any numbers. Our Internet business has been growing with what we have been able to accomplish and the speeds we have been able to deliver.

On the video side, we are excited about Contour 2. It installs easy. Customer love the voice activated remote. They love the user guide.

We are trying to add value and be competitive because you are spot on. There is a lot of competition out there in the video space, and people are consuming video differently. We want to make sure we can be part of that new thinking, whether it is Contour at home, fast Internet to allow them to use other applications or a combination of both. That is really what we are seeing -- a combination of both.

Q: Is over-the-top use as prevalent as it is reported to be?

A: People are using it, but it not this idea that the cable bundle is dead, that video in cable is dead. I am not seeing that at all. Our numbers dont show that. But people are using it.

I think we are in a good position. Things like Contour and innovation on the video side have kept us very relevant. Folks are starting to see there is value in this video product.

Where it gets interesting is when you start adding several of these over- the-top things together  where you say I want this, I want that. I want some games, I want sports. I want some premium content.

When you start adding all that together, now you are basically saying, wow, cable has significant value because not only I am getting all of that, I am getting a lot more. And I am getting bundled together. I have a local company. I have someone to call and they are going to show up. It is not just a box or an app.

So for us it starts with our network. It starts with our people, and we continue to innovate to make sure we have the right value proposition for our customers.

Q: Can you talk about what youre doing to compete with Google Fiber?

A: Whether you live in San Marcos or Santee, or you live in Otay Mesa or Oceanside and you are a residential customer, you can get 300 megabits per second Internet today from Cox. The network is 12,000 plus miles, and most of it is fiber. There is a significant fiber infrastructure, fiber to the node. Those nodes are deep in residential neighborhoods. From there we go out with coax, which is not DSL. It is not twisted pair. It is a very robust platform. We are doing 300 megabits over it today and we are going to be looking at doing a lot faster speeds in the not too distant future.

Q: Is Docsis 3.1 technology ready for prime time?

A: The technology is there today. It is ramping up from what I would call trials to full blown production. The chipsets are there. The vendors are there. There are a lot of folks engaged in making the 3.1 platform a reality.

I believe Comcast has rolled it out. It takes time. It is hard to build a network. We have been here 55 years building this network. We have put in the infrastructure. We have upgraded it and invested in it. That is where it starts, that mindset that we have to build a network that we can innovate on and deliver these services on for our customers.

So Docsis 3.1 is just an evolution. We have done a lot of work behind the scenes to prepare for 3.1. It is a significant investment and a significant undertaking beyond software. It is a whole new hardware platform, basically.

Q: What are the speeds you can deliver with Docsis 3.1?

A: We are looking at a lot of different speeds. One that we are looking at is 1 gigabit per second.

Q: What is your timing for the Docsis 3.1 upgrade?

A: Well have a lot more to talk about on that down the road. Sooner rather than later. There are some things that need to happen. These are significant capital investments. We are owned by a family, 117-plus year old company. The family is very focused on cutting edge network investments. I dont see that changing.

Q: You are providing fiber to the home in new developments with GigaBlast. Is there any innovative way to get fiber into established neighborhoods?

A: We want to deliver a gigabit per second to the home. Docsis 3.1 is going to be one way to do it. In areas that already have existing homes and we put conduit in the ground when the development was opened, because now you are not ripping up all the streets and you can pull fiber through them. So we are doing that today. We have a lot of that going on in San Diego County. We announced one area in Chula Vista. But we have a lot going on right now.

mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com;

Twitter:@TechDiego

760-529-4973
A chair for those who just cant stand it anymore

Chances are, if you really hate sitting in traffic jams, you really, really hate standing in lines at places such as restaurants. Now, Nissan has technology to tackle the tedium of both.

Enter the ProPilot Chair, a self-guiding seat that automatically moves you, like a plate of conveyor-belt sushi, to the front of the line while you wait for your table.

Nissan Motor Co. says the user-friendly chairs eliminate the tedium and physical strain of standing in line.

Advertisement

The idea takes its name from the ProPilot semiautonomous driving technology the Japanese automaker introduced this year in Japan and eventually will bring to the U.S.

In cars, ProPilot keeps the Nissan vehicle a safe distance from the cars ahead, automatically adjusting its speed and steering it around curves, to help drivers navigate brain-numbing stop-and-go congestion.

In furniture, ProPilot provides a comfortable perch with a twist.

It is common in Japan for restaurants to have a row of chairs to accommodate queued-up patrons. With the ProPilot chair, you neednt stand up and move over when the next chair opens. Instead, the ProPilot Chair shuffles you along until you reach the front, and the empty chair then returns by itself to the end of the line.

Nissan previously demonstrated a similar technology in its Intelligent Parking Chair, which parks itself back at the table after a meeting is through.

Nissan, which aims to market fully autonomous vehicles by 2020, said both technologies are designed to bring the benefits of its Intelligent Mobility blueprint to the daily lives of customers. Nissan aims to deploy its ProPilot Chairs to restaurants in Japan next year.

Toyotas pint-size travel buddy

TOKYO  Toyota Motor Corp. has long tried to pitch its vehicles as irreplaceable companions. But in this age of artificial intelligence, the company is taking the man-machine relationship to a new level.

Enter Toyotas newest companion: the palm-sized Kirobo Mini robot. The 4-inch-tall black-and-white talking cherub, complete with cutesy yellow eyes, red boots and a Toyota logo emblazoned on its chest, takes its name from the Japanese words for hope and robot.

Toyota plans to start selling the robot through dealerships in Japan next year for $390.

But this is no mere plaything. Kirobo Mini is designed to create a more personal bond between the car and its driver.

Toyota calls Kirobo Mini a communication partner and it can read facial expressions and recall past vehicle trips. Its job is to engage in casual conversation with people, keep them company and help them stay focused while driving. It will not be riveting discourse for anyone chatting in English because Kirobo Mini speaks only Japanese.

Kirobo Mini connects to a mobile phone via Bluetooth and uses a camera and voice and facial-expression recognition software in a setup that someday may work its way into vehicles.

For instance, if Kirobo Mini notices you looking glum, it asks: Did anything sad happen? It may even say, Dont leave me behind, if you forget it in the car.

When connected with a dedicated vehicle or home, Kirobo Mini can gather even more data for conversation. You had a long drive today, it might say.

Toyota introduced a first-generation talking Kirobo robot in 2013. The original Kirobo was about 12 inches tall and launched into orbit to keep Japanese astronauts company while onboard the International Space Station. Toyota unveiled a prototype of the Kirobo Mini at last years Tokyo auto show.

 Automotive News
More action needed on climate change Updated: 2016-11-11 07:36 By Harvey Morris(China Daily Europe)

Good intentions are not enough to meet targets rapidly slipping from our grasp

In an era of rising sea levels, melting glaciers and ever more punishing tropical storms - one even battered the normally temperate east Mediterranean this month - it sometimes seems that the world is losing the battle against global warming.

In the decades since the phenomenon was identified and scientists concluded that man-made climate change was to blame, the public could be forgiven for thinking there has been much debate but little action.

In fact much has been done, although perhaps not yet enough to meet a target of limiting temperature rise to within two degrees centigrade by the end of the century.

Recent statistics indicate that countries such as China, India and the United States, which, because of their size, population and industrial bases, have been among the biggest polluters, have also contributed the most towards climate change mitigation.

There is an acknowledgement, however, that it is perhaps time for less talking and more doing.

Xie Zhenhua, China's chief climate change negotiator and vice-minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, said the time has come to make detailed plans for the implementation of measures that have already been agreed upon.

"We need to enhance actions to address climate change before 2020," Xie told a news conference on Nov 1. "We need to make sure that the consensus we have reached and the commitments we have made will be honored."

He was speaking as delegates from more than 60 countries were preparing to gather for a United Nations summit that opened in Marrakesh, Morocco, on Nov 7 which Xie dubbed "a conference of implementation".

The meeting is being held just after the coming into force of the Paris Agreement, which aims in part to boost the development and adoption of low-carbon technologies.

However, as is often the case in global affairs, good intentions are subject to the vagaries of economics and politics. Like most of the world, delegates arriving in Marrakesh were talking as much about the outcome of US presidential election as about their own agenda.

In a rare intervention before Americans voted and the result was known, Xie is worried about Donald Trump's threat to back out of the Paris Agreement.

"I believe a wise political leader should take policy stances that conform with global trends," he told a news conference.

Politics have also played a part in a tussle within the European Union over tariffs on solar technology. The climate-change lobby are keen to see cheap solar energy come on stream as quickly as possible to help mitigate global warming. Governments, meanwhile, are under pressure to protect their own industries against competition from foreign producers, specifically China.

Measures imposed on China by the EU in 2012 are regarded by environmentalists and much of the solar industry as a serious barrier to Europe reaching its climate objectives. In mid-October, five activist groups that included Greenpeace and the Climate Action Network called on the EU to remove duties on Chinese solar manufacturers.

In a letter to the European Commission, they said that trade measures against Chinese manufacturers "are making solar power more expensive and slowing down the deployment of solar power in Europe".

Their argument is that anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures have the impact of keeping solar prices high and deterring European customers from adopting the technology.

A similar appeal came from 400 companies in the clean energy sector representing all of the EU's 28 member states. In mid-October, they called for all trade measures against Chinese solar energy products to be removed immediately.

Sebastian Berry, director of the trade association SolarPower Europe, said: "The trade measures have brought only decline to the European solar sector."

European companies involved in the chemicals and engineering sectors, as well as developers, installers and power sellers, believe the tariff measures have been ruinous, leading to the loss of thousands of jobs in the European solar value chain.

In short, the companies argued that in an attempt to safeguard jobs in the manufacturing sector, European bureaucrats had produced the opposite effect of throwing many more people out of work.

The road to climate change, it seems, is paved with good intentions.

The writer is a senior editorial consultant for China Daily UK.

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page11)
When he was a little boy, Steven Paulson loved animals so much that he wanted to be a dog when he grew up. Then in eighth grade, he discovered horses.

From ages 16 to 20, Paulson traveled the country playing polo and buying, training and selling more than 30 polo horses. Now, the 25-year-old Rancho Bernardo man has run off to join the horse circus.

Since April, Paulson has been a featured rider and trainer in Cavalia Odysseo, a Canadian tent equestrian production that each night features 48 riders, acrobats, aerialists and musicians performing with 40 horses.

Advertisement

Since 2011, Cavalia Odysseo has played in 26 North American cities. Next week, it opens a two-month run in Irvine, where Paulson can be seen up to six nights a week jumping horses, riding dressage and more.

Cavalia Odysseo

When: Opens Nov. 16 and runs through Jan. 8. Showtimes, ()

Where: Tented circus at the junction of I-405 and SR-133, Irvine

Tickets: $29.50-$144.50

Phone: (866) 999-8111

Online: cavalia.net

He said riding a horse in a circus-style show is a goal that was on his dream board for many years, and being part of the Odysseo traveling troupe is even better than he imagined.

Its pretty spectacular, he said. I love learning new things, I love the places we get to go and Ive enjoyed becoming a part of this company. Its like a little village and these people become your family.

Paulson grew up in Rancho Bernardo, where his father, Kevin Paulson, said his son had a natural affinity for animal care. Nicknamed Dr. Dolittle as a boy, he raised dogs, cats, rats, chinchillas, hamsters, guinea pigs, snakes and more. Then in middle school, he met a classmate who rode horses and she invited him to take a riding lesson. Almost from his very first day on a horse, Paulson said he knew he wanted his life to revolve around the creatures.

What I love about horses is that every day you get something different, he said. If theyre in a bad mood, you have to adapt to it. Learning to understand how theyre feeling and working with that is something Ive always enjoyed.

To support his hobby as a teen, Paulson groomed horses at the Poway Polo Club in exchange for lessons. Using money he earned exercising other riders horses, he competed on interscholastic and club polo teams that took him all over the country. On his 16th birthday, he bought his first horse, Marley, an 11-year-old thoroughbred mare he still keeps today at a friends estate in Rancho Santa Fe. That same year, he also left Rancho Bernardo High School to do independent study so he could play polo and train horses year-round.

He was always mature for his age and we knew he had that love, so when he said he wanted to take the time to work with horses, we understood, Kevin Paulson said of his son.

In his late teens, Paulson played polo year-round in Texas, Florida, Wyoming and Washington. He also worked for the family of polo legend Hector Galindo, who taught him how to buy, train and sell polo ponies.

Five years ago, Paulson returned to Rancho Bernardo to join his fathers insurance company. But he quickly realized that sitting behind a desk selling car and home policies wasnt his calling. After earning his agent license three years ago, he carved a new niche for himself selling horse insurance policies to friends in the riding and polo industries.

Last year, he began following on Facebook the adventures of an old friend, Rebecca Ratte, who is an aerialist in the Cavalia Odysseo company. When the troupe made its first visit to Irvine last winter, she encouraged Paulson to drive up for an audition.

He described the daylong tryout on horseback and in the stalls as nerve-wracking, but at the end of the day he was offered the job. Kim Huard-Carette, a publicist for Montreal-based Cavalia, said being a good equestrian is just part of what the company looks for in its riders. They also must be good trainers and possess that rare quality of knowing how to communicate with horses.

Its versatility and personality both, Huard-Carette said. Steven had skills in jumping and dressage, but his personality also needed to match the horses. A rider has to know how to build the horses confidence. Our trainers understand how to listen to a horses needs and be so close to them that they know if they dont feel like riding today.

Cavalia Odysseo tells the story of mans history with the horse across time and cultures, including the American cowboy culture as well as equestrian traditions in Western and Eastern Europe, Africa and South America. Paulsons troupe includes human performers from Guinea, Ukraine, Russia, Brazil, Italy, Spain and Canada, and 11 international breeds of horses, including the Lippizan from Austria, the Lusitano from Portugal, the Criollo from Brazil and the Percheron from France.

The shows lineup of acts and horses changes every night, Paulson said, because Cavalia doesnt like pushing its horses to perform when theyre tired or moody.

I like their philosophy, that they just like to let the horses be horses, he said. That keeps it fun for both the horses and the riders.

Besides performing in the shows, all of the riders are required to spend time each day training with the horses.

Paulson said this has been an unexpected bonus because hes learned so many new techniques from the shows international riders, including stage presence and theatricality.

Paulsons sister Sarah, 26, said she and her family were in awe when the first saw him perform in the show last spring.

It was a shockingly cool show, she said. My mom and I both cried. It was very exciting to see him fit in so well and be in his element.

Paulson has a two-year contract with Cavalia and said hes enjoying himself so much he may re-up for a few more years. But he admits he still has many other goals to complete on his dream board.

Hed like to learn French, train dolphins, get his open water scuba diving certification and eventually settle down with a family on a ranch in the R.B. or Poway area where he can ride horses and sell horse insurance.

Kevin Paulson said his family saw Cavalia when an earlier version of the show visited San Diego three years ago, but he never imagined that one day his son would be a part of it.

To see him in this show, its something that makes me very proud, he said.

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com
Too young to vote but old enough to voice opinions, several hundred students at San Dieguito High School Academy walked out of class Thursday to protest the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency.

The moment I realized that Trump was the person we chose to elect, I cried for an hour, said Cordelia Degher, 16, one of the organizers of the walkout. I was disappointed that our country would vote for someone like that.

Students at the Encinitas campus poured out of classes at 1 p.m. and sat down together at an amphitheater, facing about two dozen counter-protesters holding Trump signs or American flags. Degher had texted invitations to friends, urging them to protest Trumps racism, sexism and intolerance by leaving their third period classes to assemble on campus.

Advertisement

Guys dont know what it feels like for us to hear the things hes said about women, said Colleen Coveney, 16.

There were scattered protests across the state in rejection of a Trump presidency.

Male classmates said they do understand that distress.

I know you are angry, and I know youre hurting, senior Austin Dilley told the anti-Trump crowd. This is not the future we want for our country or our state or our school. We need to reject their hate and meet it with compassion.

Others said they opposed Trump but questioned the protest, telling classmates that unwelcome election results are the price of democracy.

Im a Democrat, said Matt Benowitz, 17. But we have a system in place that allows us to choose our president. Im holding that American flag not because Im a Trump supporter but because Im an American. You cannot silence those who oppose you.

Aris Lazerson, 16, who said is Jewish and had family members who died in the Holocaust, warned against over-reacting to Trumps polarizing stances.

Trump is not Hitler, he said. Trump is Democratically elected. I dont agree with his policies. I know you dont agree with what he stands forI want to assure you that you are safe.

Holding a Trump sign, Skyler Terry, 17, said he didnt fully support either candidate, but the controversy over Hillary Clintons e-mails swayed him toward Trump, who he hopes will reform tax policy and improve the economy.

Jill Butler, 17, said she turns 18 on Sunday and missed the chance to vote by days, but still wanted to voice her objections to Trumps election.

No matter what race you are, what religion you are, were all brothers and sisters, Butler said. This is a way we can make our opinions heard, even though we are too young to vote.

Principal Bjorn Paige sent an e-mail to parents and students notifying them of the planned walkout. He said the school wouldnt prevent the students from gathering, that their absence from class would be unexcused.

Linnea Leidy, 17, who helped organize the walkout, said it was worth it.

People think teenagers are the most stupid part of our population, but Im really proud of what we did today, she said.

RELATED
Chula Vista restaurants that choose to offer healthy drink options such as water and milk with kids menus instead of soda will get free marketing from the city.

The City Council voted unanimously this month to adopt a voluntary program called Kids Choice Chula Vista for restaurants automatically offering healthy beverages with the childrens menu.

The program is part of Chula Vistas health initiative to reduce diseases including diabetes, heart attacks and high blood pressure in children by limiting the amount of sugar-sweetened beverages offered to them.

Advertisement

As a community and across sectors, we can help motivate people to make different choices, to provide them healthier options and hopefully prevent some of these future chronic diseases that were seeing in our community, said Stacey Kurz, who coordinates the initiative.

Two Chula Vista physicians spoke in favor of the program.

Sharon Kirby, a third-year resident physician at Scripps in Chula Vista, and a mother, said the program is a powerful tool that can prevent a lifetime of chronic disease beginning with childhood obesity.

Tragically were treating a lot of early Type II diabetes in our adolescent population and even younger than that. Kirby said.

Scripps physician Usha Rao elaborated.

In the past month, I think over half of the kids that Ive seen in my clinic have been categorized as obese, she said. Some of them are not old enough to ride a bike, some cant even talk in coherent sentences yet.

About one-third of the children sampled as part of a 2014 program in the Chula Vista Elementary School District that measured each childs body mass index were categorized as being overweight or obese.

The Kids Choice program will recognize all existing and future Chula Vista food establishments that provide default beverage options of water, milk and/or 100 percent fruit juice on childrens menus.

To promote the program, Kurz said the city would use existing marketing funds and a $200 donation from the California Restaurant Association to provide window decals for participating businesses, as well as free marketing opportunities.

Earlier this year, the city in adopted its first Healthy Action Plan, including strategies on preventative care, chronic disease and access to healthy food to improve the well being of Chula Vista residents.

Kurz said the Kids Choice program aligns with those strategies.

A goal of Healthy Chula Vista is always to increase healthier options for our residents, she said.

RELATED
Retired Naval Officer Mark West and Robert Bobby Patton won the two open seats in the Imperial Beach City Council race.

West garnered nearly 28 percent of the votes while incumbent Patton followed with more than 25 percent.

I had a great campaign team and people who surrounded me with positive thoughts, West said.

West will take Councilman Brian Patrick Bilbrays seat who decided not to run for reelection after serving since 2010.

Advertisement

West served 24 years in the Navy then retired. He is currently the chairman of the San Diego Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation.

Patton will serve his second four-year term after first being elected to the City Council in 2012.

He grew up in Imperial Beach and was a lifeguard and EMT for many years. He created the citys junior lifeguard program in 1995.

He is also a first grade teacher at Lindbergh Schweitzer Elementary School in Clairemont.

Other candidates running for the City Council included Tim ONeal (17.36), Julie Behrens (12.51), Moises Camacho (9.80) and Michelle Sanchez-Huffman (7.48).
In less than three weeks, the class-action lawsuit against Donald Trump and his defunct Trump University is set to go to trial in a downtown San Diego courtroom.

That probably wont change, even with Trumps presidential win on election night, legal experts say. However, it could alter how personally involved Trump will be in the federal trial, in which he must defend accusations he misled and defrauded students who enrolled in his real estate academy.

Attorneys for both sides are scheduled to be in court Thursday afternoon to finalize preparations before jury selection begins on Nov. 28. The election results and their potential effect on the case will probably dominate the courtroom discussion and draw a large media presence.

Advertisement

Trumps attorneys did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment Wednesday, and lawyers for the former students who filed the case declined to discuss the case.

As unusual as this situation is, the U.S. Supreme Court has set legal precedent when it comes to lawsuits against presidents, and that precedent is likely to dictate how Trumps case proceeds.

In 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones sued then-President Bill Clinton on accusations that he made sexual advances on her when he was governor.

Clinton fought the sexual harassment lawsuit. The case made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled that sitting presidents can be sued for events that happened before they took office or are unrelated to their presidential duties.

Clinton v. Jones established that a president does not have absolute immunity, attorney Robert S. Bennett, who argued on Clintons behalf to the Supreme Court in 1997, said in an interview Wednesday.

The ruling also said presidents dont have the right to delay such a lawsuit just because they are in the Oval Office.

While the Clinton case only applies to sitting presidents, Bennett doesnt think Trumps status as president-elect will make much of a practical difference in the looming trial, especially given the possibility that the trial will not have concluded by his Jan. 20 inauguration date.

Still, legal experts expect Trumps attorneys to ask for the trial to be delayed until he leaves the White House, citing how busy he will be. But such a request would not be expected to succeed, the experts say.

I think the likelihood of the trial getting delayed is very low. If it is delayed, its delayed for four years presumably, if not longer, said Shaun Martin, a University of San Diego School of Law professor who teaches civil procedure.

If anything is going to happen [with this trial], its going to happen now. The advantage of it happening now is that hes not president yet, Martin said.

That the 6-year-old lawsuit is so close to trial also makes it more likely to proceed as scheduled. U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who will be presiding over the trial, has been reluctant to grant any more delays.

Bennett said case management, which was one of the major points made in the Clinton ruling, will be key here.

It will be up to the court to manage the schedule vis-a-vis the new presidents time, Bennett said.

In the lawsuit, filed in 2010, students allege they paid up to $35,000 to attend seminars and learn inside secrets to success in real estate from mentors who were handpicked by Trump. Instead, they claim, the program was nothing more than an infomercial trying to squeeze money out of students, and they did not learn what was promised.

Trump has pointed to a large number of students who gave the program positive reviews and blamed the plaintiffs lack of success on laziness and the downturn in the real estate market.

The trial is set to unfold in two parts. In the liability phase, expected to last four to six weeks, the evidence will mostly revolve around whether Trump University misled students by using the term university and claiming that Trump handpicked the instructors. If he loses, then the damages phase would begin, in which every eligible class member from California, Florida and Texas might have to be considered separately as to how much they were damaged and what they are owed.

Trump has said previously he plans to testify in person, but his new presidential status might change that.

Assuming the trial goes on as scheduled, Trumps attorneys could ask the judge to excuse him from having to testify and instead show jurors video from his previous depositions in the case.

If the plaintiffs argue that they didnt get to ask Trump all their questions, then the judge could allow a final deposition before trial, or ask him written questions which he must answer under oath.

Trump could also testify via live video feed.

One thing is clear: Judge Curiel will have a great deal of discretion on how the case proceeds and unfolds in his courtroom.

During the presidential campaign, Trump complained that Curiel had been unfair in rulings against him in the case, saying the judges Mexican heritage made him biased against Trump, who supports tough immigration policies and the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Curiel was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants.

Judge Curiel really can do whatever he wants, law professor Martin said. This is an issue very much within his discretion, which makes it interesting, given the vitriol directed his way.

On the one hand, he might bend over backward to prove hes being fair and give Trump a break here, or he might not be inclined to give him a break, Martin said.

Attorneys for both sides are also waiting for Curiel to issue rulings on several motions, most of them having to do with what will and will not be permitted as evidence.

One area that Trumps lawyers do not want in front of a jury are any of the comments he made during his campaign, including anything from public speeches, media interviews, debates or his Twitter account.

Before trial begins in this case, prospective members of the jury will have the opportunity to cast their vote for president, Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli wrote in an Oct. 20 motion. It is in the ballot box where they are free to judge Mr. Trump based on all this and more. But it is in the jury box where they must judge him and this case only on evidence and argument relevant to the issues at hand.

Trump also could decide to settle the lawsuit before the trial. Although the outspoken tycoon might not seem the settling type, he has settled many past lawsuits brought against him in business dealings.

Martin said there are many reasons for both sides to want to accept a compromise instead of risking an unfavorable jury verdict.

If the parties were both rational and intelligent, this case would probably settle, but not every case is resolved rationally. Each side may overvalue its chances of success. Thats generally how things get to trial, he said.

The makeup of San Diegos population will be an important factor when it comes to picking a jury, experts said. Trump received 39% of the vote in San Diego County to Democrat Hillary Clintons 56%.

He may think hes on a winning streak, but hes got to remember that members of the jury are coming from San Diego, and hes not riding a winning streak in respect to them, Martin said. Im sure his lawyers will advise him not to be too cocky about the [election] results, given the demographics of a San Diego jury dont mirror necessarily the electorate across the nation.

This is not the only lawsuit Trump faces as he heads into office. A second class-action suit regarding Trump University has been filed against him in San Diego, and a similar lawsuit is pending in New York.

Dozens of suits related to his other business interests also have been filed. But because he doesnt play a central role in many, the suits will likely be handled by his legal team without involving him too much personally, Martin said.

kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com

Davis writes for the San Diego-Union Tribune.

ALSO

Trump win sparks student walkouts and protests across the U.S.: I expected better

Car thieves spoke of Trump and made hateful comments about Muslims in San Diego robbery, police say

He is the face of the country but we are the country. Students and teachers react to Trumps win
As executions have declined and public opinion of the death penalty has hit a record low nationwide, many looked to California as a test of whether the public  not courts or governments  was ready to overturn the practice.

But California voters on Tuesday defeated a measure to repeal capital punishment and, as of Thursday, were on course to narrowly approve a dueling proposition that aims to amend and expedite it.

Death penalty supporters lauded the outcome, saying it reflected what they have been pointing to all along: Most Americans want the system fixed, not ended. But abolitionists argued that campaigns in favor of capital punishment benefited from the so-called Trump effect, a wave of mostly white, male voters from rural areas energized by the Republican presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Proposition 62, which would have replaced capital punishment for murder with life in prison without parole, was defeated, with nearly 54% of voters in opposition.

Awaiting approval is Proposition 66, which intends to speed up executions by designating trial courts to hear petitions challenging death row convictions, limiting successive petitions and expanding the pool of lawyers who could take on death penalty appeals.

It has won the approval of 50.9% of voters. California elections officials have been sifting through ballots cast by mail, which account for more than half of the state's voter registration, and may not have a full handle on how many are left to count until Monday.

(Los Angeles Times)

(Los Angeles Times)

Former state Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp and lawyer Ron Briggs  who wrote the proposition that reinstated the states death penalty nearly 40 years ago  already are trying to block the implementation of the ballot measures provisions.

In a petition filed late Wednesday with the state Supreme Court, Van de Kamp and Briggs call the proposition invalid, saying it impairs "the constitutional and inherent powers of the courts." Proposition 66 supporters argue their claims are spurious.

California had been one of the most significant states to watch regarding its decision on the death penalty, legal experts said. With nearly 750 inmates awaiting execution, almost double the number in Florida, the state has the second-highest death row population in the country.

The ballot race results showed a large divide over capital punishment in keeping with national trends and followed voter decisions in favor of the death penalty in Oklahoma, which became the first to approve state constitutional protections for it, and in Nebraska, where voters overturned bipartisan legislation repealing it.

Capital punishment supporters, among them many prosecutors and law enforcement officials, said they are now turning their efforts to implementing Proposition 66, which they contend will save taxpayers money and remove layers of bureaucracy that slow the system down.

California voters have spoken loud and clear that they want to keep the death penalty intact, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said in a statement. This is the ninth time California voters have voted in favor of keeping the death penalty for the most heinous killers.

https://twitter.com/michaelramos/status/796401230381649920

But so-called death penalty abolitionists, a diverse group of celebrities and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, crime victims and lawyers, some of whom have devoted decades to ending capital punishment in California, pledged to continue fighting against it.

Former MASH star Mike Farrell, one of the leading anti-death penalty voices in the country, said he would resume his work against the practice at the helm of the nonprofit Death Penalty Focus.

I think we were swimming upstream against a lot of anger and fear generated by the Trump campaign, and it trickled into our area, Farrell said. There was a lot of fear of bad people, of illegal people, of Muslim people, of the other. 

https://twitter.com/yeson62/status/796478111378354176

Richard Branson, will.i.am endorse California ballot measure to end the death penalty 

Election analysts could not definitively say whether there was a Trump effect in California. But a recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll found a certain overlap between Trump supporters from rural and inland regions of the state, while those along the coast favored Hillary Clinton and opposed speeding up the death penalty process.

Precinct reports from Tuesday show that in San Francisco County, for example, 31.8% of voters supported Proposition 66, compared with 59.8% in Lassen County and 57.7% in San Bernardino County.

Los Angeles was sharply divided, with 49% of people voting for it and 51% voting against, while in Riverside County, which leads the state in executions, 57.5% of voters favored the measure, 42.5% did not.

For now, many questions remain about the implementation of Proposition 66, such as how the state will staff up with additional private attorneys. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has submitted its final execution method protocols to the Office of Law Administration for final review.

But under the provisions of the ballot measure, the department no longer has to comply with that administrative process.

Legal experts said they expected to see many more challenges in court over what they say is the measures erosion of defendants rights. Lawyers also are likely to bring legal challenges on behalf of individual death row inmates and against the state corrections agency over the lack of transparency in the execution protocols approval process.

Ana Zamora, manager of the No on Prop. 66 campaign, called the measure legally and practically unworkable. She said its opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union, intended to bring forth legal challenges as early as this week, though she declined to specify any details.

California just made a mistake the size of Texas, she said.

Sean Kennedy, a constitutional law expert and the executive director of the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy at Loyola Law School, said lawyers were likely to argue that the proposition violated due process in habeas corpus petitions, which death row inmates file to challengetheir convictions. Proposition 66 would require lower courts to hear those cases, instead of sending them directly to the overloaded California Supreme Court.

For 40 years, the state Supreme Court decided all the capital habeas petitions to ensure uniformity and fairness in the application of the death penalty in California, Kennedy said. Now all bets are off because the individual trial judges will decide those issues, leading to conflicting decisions and inconsistent application of the death penalty throughout the state.

jazmine.ulloa@latimes.com

@jazmineulloa

ALSO:

Will ending the death penalty save California more money than speeding up executions?

If California speeds the death penalty, how will the state execute prisoners?

How 'MASH' actor Mike Farrell became a leading voice against the death penalty in California

'I am 25 and still afraid of the dark': Victims' families wrestle with grief as they weigh the death penalty on the ballot

Updates on California politics
With the recent death of a recruit and three investigations substantiating widespread abuse in Third Recruit Training Battalion at Parris Island, S.C., the Marine Corps is grappling with the biggest recruit training scandal since the drowning of six recruits in 1956.

Top leaders have stated that they do not believe maltreatment by drill instructors is endemic to the boot camp environment.

But the truth is that physical abuse and hazing have long been considered a part of the rite of passage of becoming a Marine at Parris Island.

Advertisement

The island is notorious for operating under different, Lord of the Flies-esque rules, making the case that cultural change will be necessary if the training depot is to truly come on line with Marine Corps values.

In April 2016, recruit Raheel Siddiqui plunged nearly 40 feet to his death in an alleged suicide. The resulting investigation revealed that Siddiqui was systematically harassed and abused due to his ethnicity and Muslim faith.

He was denigrated by his drill instructors in full view and hearing of other recruits and Marines and he was not the only victim.

As multiple investigations substantiated, Siddiquis treatment was reflective of the culture of the Thumping Third, with its reputation for being heavy-handed with recruits and junior drill instructors.

Prior to Siddiquis death, leaders from the battalion, regiment, and depot were aware of the systematic humiliation and abuse of recruits and drill instructors the unit. Yet they did little to hold anyone accountable.

The truth is that the problem with hazing on Parris Island runs deep.Through hands-off leadership  an oxymoron at best  several generations of senior commanders and their enlisted advisers established a culture where junior officer and enlisted personnel were allowed to abdicate basic leadership and supervision responsibilities required by their ranks and positions.

As a result, hazing and abuse have long flourished on Parris Island despite the fact that this behavior would be considered unacceptable anywhere else in the Marine Corps.

And such misconduct is not relegated to the male battalions. In June 2014 when I assumed command of the all-female 4th Recruit Training Battalion, the depot was preparing for two high-level military trials for women who had been accused of abusing recruits and their drill instructor peers.

During my tenure, I literally saw Stockholm syndrome in action with some of my Marines. Many had themselves been abused, both as recruits and new drill instructors.

Although such methods conflicted with what they were taught at drill instructor school, they were convinced it was the only way to make Marines. It was a difficult proposition convincing them otherwise.

Tellingly, these drill instructors viewed my daily supervision and impromptu visits as an intrusion into their territory, often making me uncomfortable in my own battalion.

Many of my senior enlisted were of the belief that officers had no place in the making of Marines other than as safety officers at training events.

Some of my officers allowed their senior staff non-commissioned officers to dictate that they had no place in the squad bays after 5 p.m., which is when the majority of recruit abuse takes place.

The lack of small-unit leadership by these officers and the complete lack of support by the regimental staff for my reform efforts made changing the culture of those series and companies impossible.

Because of this lack of leadership, Parris Island has churned out generations of Marines who believe name-calling and use of force against recruits is perfectly OK.

Comments to articles written about the recent investigations reveal the persistent belief by current and former Marines that recruits like Siddiqui are simply weak and not cut out for the Corps.

Their remarks underscore the earnest but misguided belief that hazing is a necessary component to making real Marines.

Those who characterize the abused recruits as the problem rarely consider the moral damage done to these individuals  and to the Marine Corps.

The cognitive dissonance presented by the disconnect between stated institutional core values of honor, courage and commitment and the harsh actions of those in positions of authority perpetuates the cycle of abuse.

It poisons entire platoons of Marines at the most formative stage of development and represents the epitome of a say-do gap.

This is borne out by vocal complaints that the Marine Corps is getting soft because changes to boot camp are being implemented.

There is little consideration for the fact that Siddiqui died as a direct result of physical and mental abuse by his drill instructors. Nowhere else in the Marines would such demeaning treatment ever be considered acceptable, and the lack of compassion by these critics for the dead recruit, his family, and his friends is downright unnerving.

So what makes this type of vitriol persist? Only the long-standing complicity of officers and staff non-commissioned officers at the depot who for years willfully ignored signs of abuse -- either because they were lazy or because it was how they were trained at boot camp.

And the recruits who graduate today are the drill instructors of tomorrow. Much as with domestic violence, they are doomed to repeat their experiences when they are in charge of recruits because it is what they know. This is dangerous.

Recruits are told from day one that Marines possess the highest of military virtues, and that although training will be tough, they will be treated with firmness, fairness, dignity, and compassion.

Yet all too often, once training really begins, such lofty statements become devoid of any real meaning. So is it really true that the recruits are the problem? Is the Marine Corps getting soft?

It is more likely that the culture of Parris Island is not in synch with the rest of the Marine Corps. Clearly, change is necessary to break the cycle of abuse.

Kate Germano writes about the challenges faced by service women, the policy change that opened all military jobs and units to women and the need to desegregate Marine Corps recruit training. She retired from the Marines as a lieutenant colonel in July. You can reach her at germanokki@gmail.com.
When I left the military in 2014 after nearly 12 years of service in the Air Force, a fellow veteran advised me on how to respond when a civilian says, Thank you for your service. Such expressions of gratitude, while never wrong, often leave veterans uncertain how to answer. He suggested a very simple reply: Thank you for your support.

In the past, I found civilians expressions of appreciation humbling, if occasionally awkward. I was proud that Id served in the great struggle and adventure of my generation. In the years since, though, Ive become discomfited by the lionization of the military by those who havent served. More and more I found I met their appreciation with a growing cynicism. This terse response, Thank you for your support, has been my crutch. It gracefully ends the conversation, freeing me from having to explain that my service and their gratitude is a source of consternation for me.

Some of my angst, at first, stemmed from the fact that I didnt feel I really sacrificed enough to earn thanks from strangers. Although I had multiple tours in Iraq, my deployments were shorter and much easier than most others in the armed services. My exposure to danger, though real, was limited to brief moments of hostile action. I never killed, nor were any of my intimately familiar friends killed. The only thing I ever bled was time.

Advertisement

As years have passed, Ive felt a growing disdain for the Iraq War itself. Veterans of other conflicts, I imagine, can take comfort in knowing they served in the defense of their nation, its allies, and its values  their wars reflected in some way the U.S. heritage of military restraint that dates to the very start of our Republic.

In a letter in late 1775, Benjamin Franklin compared this embryonic nation to a rattlesnake, noting that she never wounds till she has generously given notice and She never begins an attack She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. Abraham Lincoln echoed these sentiments in his second inaugural address. Speaking of the Civil War, he said, All dreaded it, all sought to avoid it and that the North would only accept war rather than let [the Union] perish. This idea, that we go to war only as a last resort, persists in the ethos of Americas military.

Unfortunately, that wasnt the case with my war.

The American invasion of Iraq of 2003, which began just months before I commissioned in the military, was baseless, belligerent and detrimental to U.S. interests. It certainly violated the ideals defined by Franklin and Lincoln. We were the aggressor in a conflict that cost our nation thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and international influence. And the result is a region in disarray.

Time revealed that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Any suggested connection to the 9/11 attacks was unfounded. Rumors of weapons of mass destruction were completely fictional. My role, however small, in this unprovoked, unjust and unwinnable war has left me uncomfortable accepting praise for my service.

On this Veterans Day, it is a good opportunity to consider the contributions our military personnel have made to the United States. All veterans made sacrifices to the nation and it is right to be grateful for those who serve in our honorable all-volunteer military. Acknowledging the cost paid by service members is a small but admirable action by those who never donned a uniform or carried a weapon.

Yet with every thank you for your service, I silently squirm. As I struggle to see my service in Iraq as anything but an abrogation of our national ideals, praise falls as a heavy burden. I feel more deserving of hostility than veneration.

But the insults and animosity never come, only continued fawning from the well-intentioned. Unable to avoid the groundswell of appreciation in the post-9/11 culture, and without better words to make sense of my angst, I will fall back on my stoic response.

Thank you for your support.

David Max Korzen is a graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. This opinion column also appears in the Los Angeles Times.
The recent announcement of an overhaul of the Navys enlisted career management by the Chief of Naval Operations has left both head scratching and fuming in its wake.

The fuming can be left to the bloggers who perhaps rightly fear the slide into some vague, bland new service culture that robs us of the Navys traditions.

The head scratching, which significantly includes many active-duty leaders as well as those of us on the sidelines, is more concerning.

Advertisement

Taking the announcement at face value, the intention seems to be to redo the Navys approach to enlisted job descriptions to de-emphasize the long-standing rating structure and move to a broader approach that favors more generalization.

The Navys categorization of its enlisted ranks into discrete specializations distinguished by the rating structure has evolved with the service.

Highly technical knowledge and experience are necessary in doing the very dangerous tasks of keeping ships and submarines at sea and planes in the air.

Individual specialties needed to keep complex machines and systems operating safely must be blended into a team. The hum and vibe evident in any good Navy command are the result of this skillful blending.

Sailors traditionally have taken pride in the individual skillsets that their respective ratings bring to a ship, submarine, or squadron, and the resulting intramural competition among divisions and departments is a key piece of that commands efficiency.

The new directive vows to eradicate this cultural phenomenon of pride in rating over the course of a generation without stating what the specific harm in it is.

In fact, those of us with significant time at sea leading sailors see much good in the unique worldview and approach each rating brings.

It is difficult to see what is wrong with boatswains mates being proud of being called Boats, or engineering ratings being known as Snipes.

More important, the difficult and technical job each does requires all sailors to see their ratings as the cornerstone of their value to the service. Not surprisingly, sailors also see their ratings as an essential part of their own personality and commitment to the Navy.

It is unclear if the Navy plans to eliminate all vestiges of the current and traditional rating structure. Addressing sailors by their rating is now forbidden?

Will the distinctive rating device disappear from uniforms as well? The Navys directive claims this change is part of an effort to allow sailors to shift their specialties and assignments more easily in the course of their careers.

This concept of job-hopping sailors needs a careful examination. It certainly would seem to weaken the skills of an apprentice or journeyman technician. Would a sailor who just starts to gain proficiency head off to a new job?

If so, this could portend even worse scenarios among senior enlisted leaders. We count on our senior petty officers and chiefs to have strong technical understanding and experience in critical situations, which are only gained after years of study and practice.

The shift to generalization and cross training opens many questions. Recent experience, particularly in the surface community, suggests we need to reinforce specialist competencies.

The spate of engineering failures in littoral combat ships has been attributed to poor maintenance and operations practices, the very essence of technical rating proficiency.

The casualties show that we need enhanced technical training and emphasis on detailed procedures. The littoral ship manning concept has been revamped, with reorganization of the crew to look more like that of a traditional ship, with specialization and depth in technical skills. Generalization and the theory that jobs required to run a ship can be shared among a wide range of sailors have not served littoral ships well.

The Navys enlisted career path restructuring seems connected to other recent efforts at gender equality. Why Navy leadership sees a connection between treating people with respect and restructuring technical specialization is unclear.

Technical competency, particularly when it comes to safely operating dangerous machines in hostile environments, has nothing to do with gender.

It is one thing to change names and titles. It is another thing, however, to scrap an effective and proven approach to recruiting, training, and operating. Plain vanilla, untitled sailors may not be the highly trained and skilled technicians the Navy needs to succeed in the 21st century.

San Diego resident Terry J. McKearney is a retired Navy commander and surface warfare officer whose 20 years of service included destroyer and amphibious forces, including command during wartime. In his civilian career, he has analyzed operations and evaluated new technologies for the fleet. He writes for the U.S. Naval Institute.
Call it the sound of freedom.

A new 30-foot bell tower will be dedicated at Miramar National Cemetery on Friday. With a 250-pound cast metal bell, the tower brings a mature look and sound to the young veterans cemetery.

The tower  funded through donations big and small, including a large grant from Korean War veteran Bob Baker of San Diego  was erected late last month after being trucked out from Ohio.

Advertisement

The bells have been put through choir practice over the past few weeks, in preparation for the Veterans Day dedication, said cemetery director Rex Kern.

They ring in the hour and also sound on the half hour.

A carillon, which is a set of electronic bells, plays snippets of patriotic songs several times per day. They include The Marine Corps Hymn, Anchors Aweigh and Taps.

A lot of people who come out here on a daily basis really enjoy it. It provides them a sense of peace. It gives them a sense of remembrance, Kern said.

For some, it brings tears to their eyes.

It marks the largest private gift yet for the veterans cemetery that opened in 2010.

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 towers look is spare and modern, in a bronze color, and it stands on the highest point of the 313-acre cemetery.

Organizers designed it to match the cemeterys modern desert look. It was built by The Verdin Company of Cincinnati, a longtime maker of bell towers.

Baker, known for his namesake San Diego car dealerships, provided $250,000 of the $400,000 cost for the project.

Public funds of $78,000 from County Supervisor Bill Horns office also went into the project.

Baker has said he wants to honor his comrades-in-arms from the Korean War.

Baker was a 20-year-old Army corporal when he participated in the bloody June 1953 campaign at Outpost Harry, near the border of whats now North and South Korea.

The Chinese, who saw the location as the fastest route to Seoul, attacked over nine days.

The Chinese had more manpower, but the United States and its allies unloaded more ammunition. Outpost Harry was held  but at the cost of considerable American blood, in addition to that of Greek and Korean fighters.

When I came home, I said, What am I going to do with my life? Baker, now 84, said in an earlier interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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, he said.

The tower has a plaque honoring the soldiers of the U.S. Third Infantry Division who fought at Outpost Harry. Theres another plaque honoring all U.S. veterans.

A 9 a.m. dedication ceremony will be held at the national cemetery on Friday, Veterans Day.

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com

Facebook: U-T Military

Twitter: @jensteeley
Li, Putin meet in Moscow Updated: 2016-11-11 07:36 By Hu Yongqi in Moscow and Mo Jingxi in Beijing(China Daily Europe)

Premier Li Keqiang met Russian President Vladimir Putin on Nov 8 in Moscow, continuing bilateral high-level exchanges and signaling a desire for further cooperation.

Moscow was Li's second stop in Russia and the last of his eight-day Eurasian trip, which has also taken him to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Latvia. Li also met Putin in June during the Russian president's visit to China.

A major characteristic of the China-Russia relationship is that high-level meetings are frequent between the leaders. This has become the "locomotive" that pulls bilateral ties forward, says Jiang Yi, a Central Asian studies researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In June, Li vowed to further link China's Belt and Road Initiative with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union and to form an industrial chain for cooperation in gas, nuclear power and electricity. Putin pledged willingness to promote production capacity and third-party market cooperation.

Before his arrival in Moscow on Nov 8, Li visited the Russian coastal city of St. Petersburg, where he attended the 21st China-Russian Prime Ministers' Regular Meeting with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. More than 20 agreements were signed to boost bilateral cooperation in fields such as high-speed railway and nuclear power stations.

A joint statement released after their meeting emphasized further cooperation in major projects, including the 280-seat, wide-body commercial aircraft that is being jointly developed with Russia. The plane will make its first test flight by 2020 and be delivered in 10 years, according to a recent announcement by Commercial Aircraft Corp of China.

"While cooperation between Beijing and Moscow has already yielded fruitful results in various areas, there remains great potential to be tapped in fields such as energy and neighboring areas," Jiang says.

He adds that since China is revitalizing its old industrial bases in the northeast and Russia has a strategy to develop its Far East region, the two countries could work toward interconnection and mutual investment in those areas.

"The two countries could also seek more space for energy cooperation in terms of industrial chains, including investment in energy-related projects and joint exploration of gas and oil," Jiang says.

Contact the writers at huyongqi@chinadaily.com.cn

Premier Li Keqiang is greeted by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow on Nov 8. Reuters

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page14)
Fifteen years ago, a 12-year-old girl who had lost her parents was living at a San Diego group home on the same property where she attended a school for at-risk youth.

There, she met a school administrator whom she later accused of sexual assault, but authorities at the time determined there wasnt enough evidence to support her claims.

The administrator, Kettrell Berry, went back to work.

Advertisement

On Thursday, Berry appeared in a San Diego courtroom where he was sentenced to nine years and eight months in prison for having a sexual relationship with another young girl  a teenager who struggled with drug addiction.

Berry, who had been an assistant principal at the San Diego Center for Children in Kearny Mesa, was convicted of 11 felony counts, including sex with a minor and a lewd act on a child.

His first accuser, the one from 15 years ago, was at the sentencing.

Psychologically, Ive been messed up in the head, said the woman, now 27. Because of what happened to her, she said she developed trust issues and had contemplated suicide.

Berry was never charged in her assault, but she was allowed to testify at his trial as evidence of a pattern of bad behavior.

I dont know what was going on in his head  to make him think that the things he did were OK, she said Thursday.

Though she trembled as she spoke, she said she was proud of herself for standing in the courtroom and telling her story in front of Berry.

I wish that no child has to go through the things I went through, she said.

After the sentencing, the woman sobbed for several minutes in the courthouse hallway.

Judge Charles Rogers sentenced Berry, 53, to the maximum prison term available. He noted that the defendant, whose supporters had described him as kind, compassionate and caring, had abused his position of trust to prey upon a lonely and needy child.

The young woman identified in the charges, who was 15 and 16 when the crimes occurred, did not attend the sentencing hearing, but a prosecutor spoke on her behalf.

She does not want one more day given to Kettrell Berry, Deputy District Attorney Renee Palermo said.

dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @danalittlefield
A federal appeals court on Thursday weighed whether the sweeping federal government surveillance program that captured millions of phone records for nearly a decade violated the rights of four Somali men convicted in San Diego of terrorism charges in 2013.

For more than a half hour, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals quizzed lawyers for the men and government prosecutors about the now-discontinued and once secret program.

The four men in the case are Basaaly Saeed Moalin, a San Diego cabdriver; Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, the imam of a City Heights mosque; Issa Doreh, former president of a nonprofit group aiding the Somali community; and Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud of Anaheim. They were convicted of funneling less than $10,000 to the terrorist group al-Shabab.

Advertisement

The main evidence in the trial was excerpts of about 1,800 wiretap recordings of phone calls from Moalin to Somalia and to his co-defendants. Prosecutors said the recordings captured the scheme to raise the funds and wire transfer them overseas.

In June 2013, four months after the trial ended, former National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed the NSA had been collecting telephone metadata for domestic and foreign calls for nearly a decade.

Metadata is information on the phone number called, the number the call is made from, and the date and length of time of the call.

In Moalins case, the government did not reveal it had relied on this spying program to initiate the case until after the trial. After the conviction, lawyers for the defendants said the men should be given a new trial because the program violated their constitutional rights.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller rejected that argument and sentenced Moalin to 18 years in prison, Mohamud to 13 years, Doreh to 10 years and Nasir to six years.

In the appeal, the defense lawyers said the spying program was a violation of the Fourth Amendment protection against searches without a warrant. They said the convictions should be reversed because the methods of obtaining the initial evidence  which came from the NSA program  were illegal.

Moalins case was cited in congressional testimony by an FBI official in June 2013 as the only example of a terrorism-related prosecution where the NSA surveillance program played a role.

FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce testified that Moalin had been investigated by the FBI in 2003 for suspected terrorist links, but the investigation was closed about a year later when none was found.

But in 2007, Joyce said the NSA tipped off the FBI that a phone number in San Diego had been in indirect contact with an extremist in Somalia. Armed with that information, investigators connected the number back to Moalin, launching the case.

The connection was made by running the number through the massive database of records the agency had been compiling and finding Moalin.

Investigators then obtained a warrant to eavesdrop on nearly a year of phone calls Moalin made to people in Somalia and used a portion of those conversations as the backbone of the case against him.

In the appeal, government lawyers downplayed the importance of the NSA connection to the case. They said the NSA information served only as a tip, one that provided law enforcement with the impetus to look into a phone number that turned out to have been used by Moalin.

On Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Smith said that the number was no more than a simple data point and not a critical cog in the case.

But for defense lawyers, the NSA information was the linchpin of the entire inquiry. They argued in court papers that the NSA role was the essential, irreplaceable domino that started the series of dominoes, culminating in conviction of Moalin and his co-defendants.

Even though the surveillance program ended in 2015, the case is being closely watched by civil liberties and privacy groups.

In the appeal, prosecutors urged the court to rely on a 1979 case that there was no expectation of privacy for call log information  the equivalent of metadata  kept by phone companies.

But privacy and civil liberties groups argued in a brief filed in the appeal that the 1979 ruling should not guide the court because digital communications such as emails, cellphones and texts make that view outdated, with new technologies generating far more revealing information.

It is a digital trail of past and present political associations, personal sympathies, and private affairs, lawyers for the groups wrote. It can reveal confidential relationships between reporters and sources, whistleblowers and watchdogs, as well as attorneys and clients.

They argued phone records and metadata should now be given privacy protection and the government should have to get a warrant to look at them.

A decision from the appeals court in the case is not expected for months.

Twitter: @gregmoran

greg.moran@sduniontribune.com
The drama and uncertainty of how the Trump University lawsuit will proceed now that the cases central figure has been elected Americas next president were on full display in a San Diego courtroom Thursday, where attorneys discussed everything from postponing the trial to rehashing settlement talks.

Were in uncharted territory, said Donald Trumps attorney, Daniel Petrocelli. We need a little bit of a timeout.

Petrocelli said Trumps monumental obligations as Americas president-elect offer compelling justification for the Nov. 28 trial to be put off until after the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Advertisement

The request, which is expected to be filed in the next few days, seems unlikely to be granted. Even U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing the trial, reacted a bit incredulously to the idea of putting a sitting president on trial within the first couple months of his administration.

Curiel, who has been reluctant to delay the trial any further, will make a ruling after the request is filed.

The hearing, one of the last before the trial, was to resolve disputes over evidence.

The lawsuit accuses the real estate magnate and his Trump University of misleading students with claims that he had handpicked instructors and that the program was an accredited university.

But Trumps election victory added new gravitas to the afternoon hearing, bringing out dozens of journalists from around the country.

Curiel used the opportunity to urge both sides to make every reasonable effort to settle before trial, reminding the lawyers that there are no certainties a jury will deliver a unanimous verdict or that it wont be overturned on appeal.

Respected longtime San Diego jurist U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller has offered his services as a mediator to help reach a settlement, and Curiel encouraged the attorneys to consider the offer.

Im all ears, your honor, Petrocelli responded.

Outside the courtroom, following the 2 hour hearing, plaintiff attorney Patrick Coughlin said: We have never been close to a settlement.

Coughlin added that postponing the trial into the start of Trumps presidency would only make things more complicated.

Nows the time to do the trial. Our clients have waited 6 years, some are senior citizens.

Curiel did offer some latitude to Trump, saying he would be inclined to allow the president-elect to testify via video and not require him to be present during the trial. Showing the jury Trumps deposition testimony would also be a possibility.

Petrocelli said outside court that he has not had the opportunity to discuss the case at length with Trump since the election but did speak with him Thursday morning about other issues, saying the incoming president was full of optimism.

The lawsuit, filed in 2010, accuses Trump University of misleading students who signed up for seminars to learn inside secrets of real estate investing. Students said they were frequently told to pay more, sometimes maxing out multiple credit cards, to pay for higher levels of education. The elite membership cost $35,000 and included a year of personal mentoring by a handpicked expert.

But the students claim they didnt learn useful tips and werent mentored.

The first part of the trial will focus narrowly on whether Trump misled students by advertising that the instructors were handpicked by him and if the term university was inappropriately used. Trump University was not an accredited college, and New York authorities forced the school to drop university from its name. The second phase, if necessary, would determine how each eligible class member was damaged and how much each is owed.

The case is being brought by three lead plaintiffs: Sonny Low of Chula Vista, in his mid-70s, represents California class members, while two others represent class members in Florida and New York. There are as many as 7,000-plus potential class members in the three states.

An Orange County woman who was an original lead plaintiff was allowed to step down from that role earlier this year due to medical reasons and stress she said has been caused by scrutiny and retaliation by Trump. She still remains a class member and could collect damages.

On Thursday, the judge also heard arguments on a flurry of motions on what evidence will and will not be admissible. He ruled on some issues but wanted to reconsider others.

One issue being considered is how much politics will be allowed to enter into the trial.

In one request, Trumps lawyers asked to ban any mention of statements made by Trump on the campaign trail, including on Twitter, in debates or in media interviews.

That could possibly include public statements Trump made accusing Curiel of being unfair to him in the case, blaming the judge for being biased because of his Mexican heritage. Curiel was born in Indiana to parents who were Mexican immigrants.

The lawyers said any campaign statements would not be relevant, would unfairly prejudice the jury and would be improper character evidence.

The judge ruled he would not issue a blanket ban on such evidence because the request was too vague. But the judge invited Trumps lawyers to bring more specific requests in this area at trial if it comes up.

The judge also declined to ban media coverage of Trump University from being admitted at trial, again saying the request for a ban was too vague.

Witnesses political affiliations, voting preferences or political contributions will not be admissible at trial because it has no apparent relevance and may be unduly inflammatory, Curiel wrote in an opinion.

Trumps lawyers wont be allowed to put on evidence of success stories that came out of the seminars in the liability phase of the trial. Nor will they be able to present evidence that students allegedly gave Trump University 98 percent approval ratings.

The testimony of Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus  who attended a free Trump University seminar, wrote about it, and was allegedly threatened with a lawsuit by Trump in a letter  is still undecided. In a tentative ruling earlier in the morning, the judge said it may be admissible at trial, but only to prove that Trump was put on notice that he did not handpick one of the instructors, Stephen Goff. After hearing arguments from the lawyers, the judge said hed reconsider the motion.

The first phase of the trial would be expected to go to the jury by Dec. 15.

kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @kristinadavis
If you are looking for a job in education, the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District is looking for you.

And if you have expertise in sign language interpretation, teaching English language learners, sciences or the culinary arts  administrators are especially eager to hear from you.

Bolstered by additional state funding that has allowed to college district to increase the number of classes it offers by 12 percent this year, Grossmont-Cuyamaca is seeking the recruitment of 300 new part-time instructors for the spring semester.

Advertisement

A job fair will be held next Saturday that will give potential employees an opportunity to meet with deans and faculty for interviews.

Those who meet preliminary qualifications will be invited back for another round of interviewing. College officials are looking for applicants with graduate degrees or equivalent teaching experience.

The college district said teachers are needed for a wide range of general education and career technical courses.

Grossmont-Cuyamaca is on the hunt for instructors to teach American Sign Language, economics, art, English as a Second Language, biological sciences, history, ceramic technology, math, chemistry, nutrition, child development, political science, computer science, psychology, counseling, sociology and culinary arts/food technology.

The need fill these positions is especially urgent, according to the college district. The spring semester starts Jan. 30.

The Adjunct Recruiting Event will be held from 9 a.m. to noon at the Main Quad at Grossmont College, 8800 Grossmont College Drive, El Cajon.

Job-seekers need to bring four copies of their resume or curriculum vitae (CV) and be ready to sit for interviews.

Grossmont-Cuyamaca, established in 1961, currently employs 725 full-time and 2,076 part-time faculty and staff to serve about 28,000 students. It operates two East County campuses, Grossmont College in El Cajon and Cuyamaca College in Ranch San Diego.

The general fund budget for the current school year is about $204 million.
Detaining Haitians who have arrived at the San Diego border in large numbers in recent months in immigration holding facilities is costing American taxpayers an estimated $379,380 per day, and that number could grow as more Haitians arrive in Tijuana, asking to come in.

Thats about $11.4 million per month.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials estimate that about 3,000 Haitians are being held in immigration facilities across the country. The average cost for immigration detention is $126 per bed per day, according to the fiscal year 2017 budget from the Department of Homeland Security. The Otay Mesa facility in San Diego has 696 beds for immigration detainees.

Advertisement

DHS did not respond to questions from The San Diego Union-Tribune over the past week concerning the detention or deportation of recently arrived Haitians.

DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson released a generalized statement Thursday on security at the southwest border, saying DHS was working to return detainees more quickly because of the increase in migrants this year.

Our borders cannot be open to illegal migration, Johnson said. We must, therefore, enforce the immigration laws consistent with our priorities. Those priorities are public safety and border security. Specifically, we prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants who are convicted of serious crimes and those apprehended at the border attempting to enter the country illegally.

The influx of Haitians asking to enter the U.S. at San Diegos border began in May 2016. Most came from Brazil, where they had worked since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. For the first several months, Customs and Border Protection officers let the migrants in with temporary passes called humanitarian parole. They were fitted with ankle monitors and given documents informing them that they would have to go to immigration court at an unspecified future date.

Ankle monitors cost less than five dollars per day per person, according to a DHS Office of Inspector General report from February 2015. The most expensive alternative to detention, which includes supervision and case management with the ankle monitor, costs $8.37, according to the report.

Since the 2010 earthquake destroyed so much of Haiti, including its capital city, Port-au-Prince, the United States had decided not to deport people to Haiti unless they committed serious crimes. That meant the arriving Haitians were treated differently than people of other nationalities asking for entry.

Normally, when people come to a port of entry at the border, they go through an expedited removal process unless they ask for asylum. That means an officer at the border interviews them and determines whether they qualify to come in. There is no judge or court involved.

If the arrivals dont qualify, theyre placed in immigration detention facilities until they can be deported.

Once the federal government heard that tens of thousands more Haitians might be coming up from Brazil, Johnson announced that deportations to Haiti would resume.

New Haitian arrivals at the border were placed in immigration detention facilities following the expedited removal process.

Immigrant rights advocates were quick to question Johnsons decision and whether conditions had improved enough since the quake to send the migrants back to Haiti.

Then Hurricane Matthew struck. Amid mounting pressure to reverse the decision to deport to Haiti, Johnson announced that deportations to the country would pause until conditions improved.

Unlike this summer when Haitians were given ankle monitors, the waiting Haitians remained in detention.

The Department of Homeland Security has resumed deportations to Haiti without any official announcement, according to a report from the Miami Herald this past week. The newspaper confirmed the arrival of at least two flights totaling about 70 deportees with Haitian police and two human rights organizations. The paper said DHS will continue to deport two flights per week of Haitians back to the country.

Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-Brooklyn, said on Wednesday that DHS had informed her that Haitian deportations had resumed. She expressed concern over sending people back before the country has fully recovered from Hurricane Matthew.

The majority of the people DHS intends to remove have not been accused of any crime, Clarke said. In this period of turmoil, the forced removal of Haitian nationals will only exacerbate the difficulties of rebuilding Haiti and deny families access to remittances from relatives in the United States.

If they remain in detention longer than six months without a known deportation date, ICE would have to release them, based on a Supreme Court ruling in 2001. Now that deportations have resumed again, the migrants will likely remain in detention until they are placed on a flight back to Haiti.

A private prison company recently referenced the increased numbers of detained Haitians as a positive indicator for future revenue at the company.

kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate
A man was arrested Thursday on suspicion of killing a 92-year-old woman during a home invasion robbery that rattled a National City community, police said.

Peter Thao, 26, would be booked into jail on a murder charge, National City police Lt. Robert Rounds said. Thao was taken into custody about 8:30 a.m. outside of his home on Aries Road, west of Camino Ruiz, in Mira Mesa.

Investigators had worked tirelessly since the death of Maria Consuelo Rivera three weeks ago to identify the suspect and arrest him, Rounds said.

Advertisement

I want to commend the detectives that worked on this to get justice for the family. Its such a tragic incident. Neighbors and the community were in shock, being that it was such a random killing. I think detectives deserve a lot of credit, he said

Investigators said Thursday that Rivera died of blunt force trauma, but otherwise remained tight-lipped about the killing. They have not said whether a weapon was used or what items were stolen from the home on D Street near East Plaza Boulevard.

Rounds declined to say what evidence linked Thao to the killing.

Rivera was found dead when her daughter returned home from work about 6 a.m. on Oct. 22. Two days later, police released a sketch that was produced with help from neighbors who had seen a man in the area prior to the homicide. His identity was unknown at the time.

Rounds said he hoped the arrest would be a sigh of relief for residents.

I think this will give the community some sense of closure that we were able to get this dangerous person off the streets, Rounds said.

Cecilia Rivera Aguilar previously told the Union-Tribune her mother immigrated from the Philippines about 40 years ago. For many years, Rivera was active in Filipino-American senior organizations in National City, her daughter said.

Rivera is survived by five children, two who are military veterans, as well as grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Twitter: @D4VIDHernandez
The U.S. Coast Guard called off an extensive search for a fisherman Thursday, about 24 hours after his boat capsized off a La Jolla beach, officials said.

Four other men on board were rescued Wednesday.

There were no signs of the missing man as crews on vessels and aircraft searched up to 13 miles off shore from Point Loma to Cardiff, covering about 204 square miles, Coast Guard spokesman Robert Simpson said.

Advertisement

We completely saturated the area, Simpson said. In a period of 24 hours, we believe we would have found him.

He stopped short of presuming the man was dead.

The group was fishing for lobster 100 or so feet off Windansea Beach when the 24-foot boat overturned in high surf, authorities said. People on the beach heard screams for help and called 911 about 6 p.m.

Lifeguards rescued four men but did not find the fifth man, who was the only one without a life jacket, said San Diego Fire-Rescue Department spokesman Lee Swanson. The U.S. Coast Guard was called to take over the search for the lost man.

Medics took the rescued men to hospitals with unspecified injuries. Two men were released Wednesday and a third was released Thursday, Swanson said.

A lifeguard who swallowed a large amount of water during the rescue efforts also was hospitalized. On Thursday, the lifeguard was released.

The search for the man who disappeared was suspended about 5:30 p.m. Thursday. Simpson said the Coast Guard would renew search efforts if any new information arises.

Authorities have not released the name of the missing fisherman.

Breaking News

Twitter: @D4VIDHernandez
Rep. Duncan Hunters name is being floated as a possibility to serve as President-elect Donald Trumps secretary of defense.

Along with other prospects for the Defense secretarys job, the San Diego-area Republicans name appears on lists of potential Cabinet members from Politico and Buzzfeed News.

Hunters chief of staff, Joe Kasper, did not respond to questions Friday.

Advertisement

Others on the Defense list include Stephen Hadley, who served in a national security post for President George W. Bush; Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas; former Sen. Jim Talent of Missouri; and former Gen. Mike Flynn.

Even being considered for a Cabinet position is seen as a nod to the work a person did for the president-elect.

Hunter, R-Alpine, was one of the first members of Congress to back Trump and helped lead the group of House Republicans working over the summer to get their colleagues to back the then-nominee.

The four-term congressman served in the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps Reserve and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Hes been in the news recently for his misuse of campaign funds, and announced recently he would repay $49,000 to his campaign after months of revelations that he used the fund for personal expenses.

His name also appears on a list of potential secretary of Defense picks compiled by Politico.

The Buzzfeed News list also includes Hoover Institution fellow William Evers as a potential pick for secretary of Education and venture capitalist Robert Grady, a partner in San Francisco-based Gryphon Investors, as a potential for secretary of Energy.

Hunter is also being mentioned as a possible national security adviser.

Another Californian who could join Trump in the White House is Santa Monica native Stephen Miller, who was a senior policy advisor on the campaign and is playing a role in the transition efforts.

Sarah D. Wire writes for the Los Angeles Times
A hotelier involved in the $1.2 billion remake of Seaport Village donated tens of thousands of dollars to a political campaign that days later paid a similar amount to a public relations firm co-owned by a San Diego port commissioner, records show.

Port Commission Bob Nelson said there is nothing untoward about the transactions, and his vote in favor of the redevelopment project presents no conflict of interest.

According to state-mandated campaign reports, Bartell Hotels donated $43,350 to the San Diego County Taxpayers Association on Oct. 12 to help defeat Measure D, a hotel-tax proposal that was rejected by voters on Tuesday.

Advertisement

Five days after it received the Bartell contribution, the taxpayers association paid $46,000 to the newly formed Manolatos Nelson Murphy Advertising and PR agency for its No on D work.

Nelson, a fixture in the local public relations sector for decades who was appointed to the Port of San Diego board in 2011, launched MNM last month with media relations professional Tony Manolatos and advertising expert Kelly Murphy Lamkin.

In total, the new agency received more than $54,000 from the taxpayers association for its work opposing Measure D.

Richard Bartell, the hotel companys founder and CEO, is listed as an advisory team member of Seaport San Diego, the group that won approval for a $1.2 billion makeover at Seaport Village on Tuesday, the same day voters rejected Measure D.

Other hotel operators and port tenants donated more than $150,000 to the Lodging Industry Association, which turned over those funds to the taxpayers association to defeat the Measure D and other ballot measures.

Nelson and legal experts said his vote presented no conflict of interest because the commissioner did not solicit donations from Bartell Hotels or other port tenants.

We have nothing to do with how much money is raised, from whom or how its spent, Nelson said in a statement. SDCTA raises money from a variety of sources, including but certainly not limited to the LIA PAC.

As to the funds his firm accepted that originated with hoteliers, he compared it to the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon parlor game because the money did not come to his firm directly.

How far do you take it? Nelson asked. How many steps, how many hoops?

In an interview last week, Nelson said he relied on written and verbal advice from port attorneys before casting his vote. Both he and port officials declined to release a written opinion regarding the PR firms work, saying it was protected by the attorney-client privilege.

Legal memoranda containing advice related to the official duties of individual commissioners  including memoranda covering potential conflicts of interest that may affect a commissioners ability to vote on district matters  are legally privileged and exempt from public disclosure, the port said in a statement.

According to Board of Port Commissioners Policy No. 22, The port attorney represents the board as a collective body. The port attorney has no attorney-client privilege as to any individual commissioner. The port attorney has no right of legal representation as to any individual or employee outside the official duties owed to the San Diego Unified Port District.

The port did not respond to questions attempting to reconcile the policy with the assertion of attorney-client privilege to an individual commissioner.

The Seaport San Diego project includes hotels and retail space on 70 acres of waterfront property. It would also include office space, a partially underground aquarium attraction and a 480-foot spire that would serve as a bayfront observation deck.

Seaport San Diego would replace the Seaport Village shopping and tourist destination that has been a mainsail of the Central Embarcadero since the early 1980s.

Bartell Hotels is a decades-old company that operates at least 11 hotels and marinas, including Humphreys Half Moon Inn, Hilton Harbor Island and the Shelter Island Marina. Many of the firms properties pay leases negotiated with port officials, as they are located on the tidelands that the port oversees.

According to the Seaport San Diego developers, Bartell Hotels provided key pricing information related to rental slips for mega-yachts and other clarifications in the application.

The Measure D proposal would have increased San Diegos hotel room tax to 15.5 percent from 12.5 percent. It would have allowed hoteliers to create assessment districts and use hotel taxes for a downtown convention center.

Ballots are still being counted, but as of Friday, Measure D was losing with a 60 percent no vote.

Editor Ricky Young contributed reporting to this article.

jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonald
2 most-wanted corruption suspects face extradition from France Updated: 2016-11-11 07:36 By Zhang Yan(China Daily Europe)

Women on list accused of illegally raising funds; trial to be in China

Two of China's most-wanted fugitives, suspected of economic crimes, will be extradited from France to face trial at home, a senior official from the Ministry of Public Security has confirmed.

More fugitives are expected to be sent back now that China is ready to begin talks about sharing confiscated ill-gotten assets with cooperative governments, the Chinese law-enforcement official says.

Both of the fugitives are women. One of them, Feng Jinfang, is a former businesswoman from Hubei province, according to the official. The name of the other fugitive was not available.

The two are former executives of private companies and are accused of fraud and using illegal means to raise funds, according to the official, who requested anonymity.

Both have been detained by French police and are awaiting extradition.

"We have requested assistance from French judicial authorities in extraditing the two fugitives," the official said.

The anonymous official did not disclose further details of the two cases, though he said it will be the second time that key fugitives have been returned from France to stand trial since a bilateral extradition treaty took effect last year.

"Their successful extradition will serve as an example for handling other corruption suspects who are still at large in other Western countries," he says.

In September, Chen Wenhua was extradited from France after spending three years on the run in that country. Chen, who was accused of using illegal means to raise funds totaling 20 million yuan ($2.95 million; 2.69 million euros; 2.37 million), was the first to be extradited under the new treaty.

In recent years, some Western countries, including the United States, Canada and some European countries, have become popular destinations for fleeing corrupt Chinese officials, due to lack of treaties and differences in law, according to the ministry.

Fugitives have transferred billions of yuan in illegally obtained funds to their foreign accounts through money laundering and underground money changers, it said.

In April last year, Interpol issued "red notices" to track down 100 major corrupt Chinese officials. Since then, 35 have returned to face trial from 16 countries and regions.

Although progress has been made in catching fugitives, authorities are facing difficulties in "confiscating and recovering large sums of illegal funds", the ministry official says.

China intends to negotiate with France to sign an agreement on sharing the illicit assets that corrupt Chinese officials have sent illegally to France.

"Such an agreement will provide a legal basis for France to share the confiscated illegal funds with us, provided they can identify the money as illegally transferred to France," he says.

Li Wei, a lawyer from the Beijing Lawyers Association, says that after signing such an agreement, the two countries will "share the ill-gotten money in a reasonable proportion after case-by-case negotiation based on international conventions".

According to the ministry, Chinese police will place more emphasis on returning the ill-gotten assets by enhancing communication and strengthening law enforcement cooperation in an effort to freeze and recover assets.

Huang Feng, a law professor at Beijing Normal University, said: "The priority is to offer a complete chain of evidence to our counterparts in Western countries to request their judicial assistance in identifying, freezing and confiscating the illegal proceeds in a timely manner."

zhangyan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page15)
Look, red state America, its not you, its us. Well, maybe its you, too. This relationship that worked so well for us for 150 years  well, lately it just hasnt been working so well. Its time for us to call it quits and go our separate ways.

Weve been patient and tried to work it out. We stuck with you through the first eight disastrous years of the 21st century, when a U.S. president we had not chosen sent Californians to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending hundreds of billions of tax dollars extracted from Californians in the process. For a while we thought wed gotten past that and could work things out with you. But what happened Tuesday night was the last straw. Its time to face reality: We want different things, and we cant stay together any more. Its time for Californians to make the words on our flag  California Republic  a reality, one with more permanence and commitment than the short-lived breakaway republic that first bore that name.

Advertisement

EDITORIAL: Calexit: All this secession talk is just a waste of time in California

Oh, we know what youll say: California, you cant go it alone. Youre too small and weak. Youll be coming back to us begging to be readmitted to the union. Actually, no, we wont. Weve done the math; well be better off on our own. For most of its existence California has been a tax export state, paying far more in taxes to the federal government than it receives in federal spending. Californias dependency ratio  that is, the extent to which it depends on federal spending  is the fifth lowest of the 50 states. To make up the shortfall in federal spending in-state, California has been forced to increase its state taxes to cover such basics as education, health and disability care, and infrastructure. And were managing just fine.

Its true that as an independent nation wed be forced to raise state taxes somewhat, though far less than the amount we currently send, unreturned, to Washington. Our chief new expense would be national defense, and because we wont be sending Californians to fight in foreign wars and meddle in the affairs of distant countries, well be spending a far smaller share of our GDP on defense. We wont be building a wall. We wont be building a republic based on fear and exclusion. Well be concentrating on what we do best: building peace and prosperity through inclusiveness, innovation, and imagination.

Our industries lead the U.S. and the world, and will continue to do so. Were not proposing a total break  we can still be friends. Well be happy with open borders with the United States, with free and untaxed movement of goods and persons in both directions.

Were not trying to be something radical and different: We like the United States, and want to be like the United States, only without those aspects that arent working for us. (Chief among those aspects: the Electoral College, an archaic institution originally created to strengthen the voting power of landowning white men in slave states, and twice in the past two decades leading to the thwarting of the will of the American majority, including the majority of Californians.) And if our neighbors in the West want to join our new republic, theyre welcome to do so.

True, you may worry what will happen if some of the other states youve treated badly, exploiting them for tax revenue while ignoring their concerns and diluting their votes, choose to leave you as well. Well, thats between you and them, not you and us.

Maybe its time for an independent republic of New York and New England, or a Free State of Illinois. Maybe the union we once believed in, that worked so well for us in the 20th century, doesnt work now that its become little more than a support system for an increasingly expensive and unaccountable foreign policy and a domestic policy characterized by a rhetoric of xenophobia, racism, misogyny and hate.

For me personally, this doesnt come easily; my ancestors came to the United States in 1635, and had to go through one bad breakup in 1776.

But that turned out to be the right choice, and this, too is one of those times when in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Natures God entitle them.

We wont even need a new flag.

Schwabach is the associate dean of strategic initiatives and professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. Schwabach may be contacted at aschwabach@tjsl.edu

ALSO

Calexit: How secession would actually work in California (if it could, which it cant)
Growing up in Sweden I was inspired by then-President Ronald Reagan to come to America. His optimism was infectious and his belief in Americas special place in the world as a bulwark for individual liberty and capitalism was unshakable.

It is the spirit with which Ive pursued my role as chairman of the Republican Party of San Diego County for nearly a decade now  sadly most of it under a president who seems to believe America is not special, embracing the failed ideas of collectivism and constant top-down, big-government interference.

After each election, I am asked to share my thoughts on the way forward for Republicans or how does the party need to change? to appeal to some new development or demographic group du jour.

Advertisement

Well, unlike Democrats who consistently divide Americans into groups and then explore ways to pander to them and pit them against their fellow citizens, our Republican message doesnt change; every American deserves to be treated the same, have a fair shot at the American Dream  however he or she chooses to define it  without we know better government bureaucrats getting in the way.

Its really as simple as that. We trust adult Americans to make choices for themselves and their families.

That said, theres no question that the Republican Party brand is challenging in San Diego. In recent polling we conducted this election cycle, the national Republican Party was seen as unfavorable by a whopping 53 percent of respondents. Democrats shouldnt jump for joy though as 34 percent saw their national party as unfavorable.

(Note: 33 percent of respondents saw the national Republican Party in favorable light and 42 percent felt the same about the national Democratic Party.)

That is quite the headwind in which to operate for local Republicans  especially when we have no control over the national message and developments. For instance, when national Republicans use over-the-top rhetoric regarding immigration, it hurts us in San Diego.

Words matter.

So, to overcome those headwinds, as local Republicans our charge is to field candidates who can articulate our principles well and are willing to take our message beyond traditional constituencies  the chief example being San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer who is the only Republican mayor in the top dozen or so largest cities in America (San Diego is number 8).

Kevin was elected in a city where only 24 percent are registered Republican.

Candidates matter.

We ask every candidate to reach out to every constituency  whether they need their votes to win or not. Go everywhere. Talk to everyone. Give people the opportunity to meet you. Most voters are not single issue voters. Be respectful and make a good impression. Focus on areas where you agree. Its not rocket science. It just takes sincere effort.

Its working. The same polling showing the national Republican Party is very disliked shows 33 percent of San Diegans have a favorable impression of our local Republican Party, 28 percent do not. The local Democrat Party has a 34 percent favorable rating vs. 26 percent unfavorable. Were talking parity here.

Voters are noticing the good work that we are doing. There is other good news.

Fair minded voters are growing numb to the Democrats classic playbook of calling every Republican racist, sexist, bigoted, etc. Oh, and every Republican hates women. Gimme a break. Its getting a little old and the recent national election results prove it.

Two great issues where local Republicans are in sync with voters are fiscal responsibility and school choice. Democrats and their government union allies work in direct opposition to both. Watch our candidates champion both in the years ahead.

Personally, I believe school choice is the civil rights era of our time. A good education is that fair shot I mentioned at the outset. The idea that a single mother is effectively forced by government to send her child to one particular cookie-cutter, underperforming school is abhorrent to me.

While local Democrats will no doubt continue to beat the same old drum against Republicans and dividing Americans by gender, race, etc. San Diego Republicans will continue to offer a positive, inclusive vision, appealing to every voter with the dignity and respect they deserve  without pandering.

We envision a San Diego County where small business thrives, every parent can choose the school their child goes to, every boy and girl receives a personalized education, young people can find a starter job, all citizens are treated the same, nonprofit and faith institutions are strong, and where nobody has to be dependent on government.

Join us.

Krvaric is chairman of the San Diego County Republican Party.
Elections are clarifying events. We should never fear them  they have a way of bringing moments of clarity in an otherwise dynamic society.

Learning the wrong lessons, however, can be worse than nothing at all. For California Republicans, we cannot afford to learn the wrong lessons from the 2016 election.

Political party brands are defined nationally. Perceptions of what the Republican Party stands for is shaped overwhelmingly by media outlets reporting and broadcasting from New York and Washington. The brand carries tremendous influence, especially on down-ticket candidates who are less well known than their party.

Advertisement

Nationally, the Republican Party brand works pretty well, yielding once again majorities in both houses of Congress and now, control of the White House

Statewide in California, however, that brand needs a strong booster shot.

While much of the country turned further to the GOP  Wisconsin voted for a Republican presidential nominee for the first time since 1984 and even Bernie Sanders Vermont elected a Republican governor  California is moving in the other direction. Donald Trump received a record-low 33 percent of the statewide vote. By comparison, Mitt Romney in 2012 received 37 percent. In the 1964 landslide of Democrat Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater received 40 percent.

Demographics is the common excuse used in Republican circles to explain the problem. Yet no one is predestined to join a political party. Honduras, a country whose population consists of over 90 percent Latino and indigenous people, is governed by the center-right National Party. Latinos, African-Americans and Asians are not born Democrats.

Future Republican candidates in California would receive a boost from our compatriots in Congress and the White House if they more clearly articulated the benefits of their ideas, and consistently explained their policy intentions.

Democrats are always talking about their intentions  everyone should have health insurance, civil rights should be protected, etc. Republican elected officials and candidates often speak in terms of processes, instead out of intentions, benefits and outcomes. When we fail to do this, we leave it to our opponents to define us, and they are not doing us any favors.

We support a safe, secure and modern border because it will reduce the presence of drugs in communities, improve safety on both sides of the border, and restore fairness for those working to enter our country legally.

We want to cut taxes to make it easier for families to make ends meet while spurring economic growth needed to create new jobs. Onerous and nonsensical government regulations should be cut back so the small businesses we need to create jobs can do just that.

In California, with its large and diverse population of both recent immigrants and the sons and daughters of recent immigrants, its critical for the Republicans who appear in the media to positively, effectively and consistently articulate how people stand to gain from our ideas, and why we advance them.

Running for office is challenging enough when the wind is at your back. For California Republicans, in most districts, the advantage lies with the other team. Conservative organizations such as the Leadership Institute offer specialized training for candidates, campaign staff, leaders and activists in the skills needed to win campaigns, and more Republican candidates absolutely must seek out and take advantage of such opportunities to improve their skills in a challenging environment.

Republican Party organizations need to organize more effectively as well. The Republican Party of San Diego County is perhaps the best organized and most effective county or district Republican organization in the country. This level of organization and synergy with candidates can turn what would have been a narrow loss into a win, and numerous winning candidates throughout the county might not be celebrating if not for the strength of the local GOP. County Republican committees throughout the state would benefit from studying and replicating the party in San Diego.

Pundits and reporters will often try to predict the future just by projecting current trend lines forward. The world doesnt really work that way. If it did, your 3-foot-tall child would be projected to be 18 feet tall some day. Likewise, California will not move in a Democrat direction forever. But, with skilled efforts on the part of Republican Party leaders, candidates and activists, we can bend that trend line a lot sooner, and restore a true two-party system in the Golden State.

Nehring served as chairman of the California Republican Party from 2007 to 2011 and was the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor of California in 2014. He was the national campaign spokesman for the Ted Cruz for President campaign. The views expressed are his own.
Voter approval of Proposition 66  which is intended to streamline the slow, exasperating California death-penalty appeals process  creates a test for Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Legislature. Will they honor direct democracy and provide adequate funding? Or will they continue the nearly 40-year California tradition of hostility to the death penalty from, at various times, state lawmakers, governors and the state Supreme Court?

Proposition 66 is meant to push aside the obstacles that often lead to death-penalty appeals that take decades. It says appeals in state courts must be finished with five years; limits some types of appeals; revises the rules to make more lawyers eligible to assist death row inmates; shifts some death-penalty responsibilities now handled by the state Supreme Court to lower courts; and requires the state prison system to devise a method of execution that is legal under federal law within 90 days of the current method being found illegal.

The reason the last provision was included is revealing. State officials had to be forced by a lawsuit to develop a legal method of execution after many years of stalling following a 2006 ruling that the method then in use violated federal standards.

Advertisement

Given this history, the 2017-18 budget that the governor will release in January will amount to a moment of truth. The Legislative Analysts Office expects Proposition 66s implementation to cost tens of millions of dollars annually for many years. If this extra money is not included, it will be one more sign that direct democracy sometimes needs Sacramentos cooperation to work  and that follow-through isnt automatic in the state Capitol.
The Affordable Care Act was a good idea poorly executed at a politically divisive time. Come Jan. 20, the Republican Party will control the federal government, and scrapping the act  which is so tied to President Barack Obama that even he calls it Obamacare  will be a top priority of President Donald Trump and probably House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as well.

The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has long urged Congress and the White House to try to fix the ACA, believing that it would never be replaced so long as Democrats held the White House or controlled part or all of Congress. When the GOP runs Washington, a better idea is to dismantle the ACA while keeping whats best about the 2010 law.

This could well happen. There appears to be broad support among lawmakers for retaining popular ACA provisions allowing children to remain on their parents health insurance policies until they are 26 and for banning insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The even better news is that there is a chance that rolling back and improving Obamacare could be a genuinely bipartisan effort, unlike the brutal 2009-2010 cage fight before the laws enactment.

Advertisement

Coming off an ugly campaign, that may seem unlikely. Why wont congressional Democrats behave in the same disputatious way toward a Republican president as congressional Republicans have toward Obama? Why wouldnt they proudly defend a bold initiative that has led to 20 million more Americans having health insurance? Why wouldnt Democratic senators filibuster such a bill and defy McConnell to follow in the footsteps of Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid who as majority leader put some limits on the blocking tactic?

Heres why: Because while ACA has worked out reasonably well in California and some other large states, it is on its way to being a disaster in many small and midsized states, with insurers pulling out of money-hemorrhaging state exchanges, premiums soaring and deductibles going ever higher. A recent analysis predicts that by next year, in one-third of the nation, Obamacare enrollees will have only one insurer option. Bill Clinton spoke for a lot of Democrats  especially House Democrats up for reelection in 2018  when he called whats become of the ACA the craziest thing in the world.

By contrast, Republicans fighting the prospect of Obamacare faced little downside because polls in 2009 showed most Americans were fairly satisfied with the health care status quo. Thats not true now.

So lets not wait until Jan. 20 to get to work. Trump and Ryan have put out position papers calling for allowing insurers to offer policies in all 50 states under one federal standard. They propose giving tax credits and creating IRA-like health savings accounts to help individuals buy coverage. Republicans should ask Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, for input. The 2008 health reform proposal he helped craft was thoughtful and serious, and he has already worked with Ryan on Medicare reform.

There are many knotty problems to address. But we can do much better than a system that gives people incentives to game it by not buying insurance until theyre sick and gives businesses incentives to hire part-time workers instead of full-time workers so they dont have to provide health insurance.

Democrats should join Republicans to scrap what they should and salvage what makes sense.
Will we see a Trump University settlement in the near future? Let us know what you think.

Advertisement

Letters and commentary policy

The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy.

E-mail letters@sduniontribune.com

Mail: Andrew Kleske, Reader Outreach Editor San Diego Union-Tribune P.O. Box 120191 San Diego, CA 92112-0191.

You can also leave a comment below

To all the San Diego Democrats crying in their lattes - remember Trump U, coming soon to a courtroom near you!



As FDR said, paraphrasing John Paul Jones: We have only just begun to fight. The midterm election starts today!

Kennedy Gammage

San Diego

* * *

Trump companies, tax returns and James Comey must be investigated:

1.) All Trump companies and foundations must be investigated for conflict of interest between Trumps actions as U.S. president and his business interests overseas.

2.) Releasing tax returns should be required for candidates or elected presidents. If not, the U.S. is at the mercy of swindlers who want to take over one of the most powerful positions in the world.

3.)FBI Director James Comey must be investigated for defying the Justice Dept & mixing his personal political affiliations with his responsibilities as FBI director. This conflict of interest must never be allowed to happen in any future election process. His innuendos were directly responsible for reversing Clintons winning momentum. Such interference must be deterred in future elections. Comey should lose his job.

Cynthia Wootton

San Diego

State Attorney General Kamala Harris should do her job and initiate California prosecution of the promoters of Trump University, for criminal fraud.

There are still live plaintiffs, who seem willing to testify about their T.U. experiences, but if they settle for treble damages or some lesser amount, they, as witnesses, might be harder to subpoena for their testimony in a criminal trial. Ms Harris should do this on behalf of the women who suffered from groping and might also be sued for defamation, by the President-elect.

If we had an Eliot Spitzer type as our Attorney General, he would have the courage as AT, to go after the perpetrators of this fraudulent University program, claimed by its founder, as being as good as a Harvard degree. Get some courage Lioness Harris (or whomever becomes her successor). If fraud was committed, then the ones responsible should be prosecuted for the crime or crimes committed.

G. Lance Johannsen

Carlsbad

Want to see more letters that appear only online? Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook.
One of the most haunting things about 77 Minutes, a new documentary about the McDonalds massacre in San Ysidro, is the raw emotion expressed by so many of the victims who appear on screen.

Its been 32 years since a gunman walked into the restaurant in a part of San Diego that abuts the U.S.-Mexico border and killed 21 people, including children. Nineteen others were wounded.

For many of the survivors, the pain of what they went through following the shooting on July 18, 1984, lingers.

Advertisement

It destroyed my life, says Maria Leticia Rivera, who was inside the restaurant that afternoon with her husband and two daughters. They were 1 and 4 at the time. In the midst of the chaos, she managed to talk her children into going to sleep, while she played dead.

They survived, but her husband  Victor Rivera  was killed.

Maria Rivera is one of about a dozen survivors featured in the documentary by New York filmmaker Charlie Minn, set to premiere Thursday. The title refers to the time between when the gunman fired his first shots to when a San Diego police sniper, who saw the killer through the restaurants shattered glass doors, took him out.

This photo of Omar Hernandez lying next to his bicycle on July 18, 1984, became a symbol of the devastating San Ysidro McDonalds massacre. The 11-year-old boy was among 21 people killed by James Oliver Huberty. (File photo / San Diego Union-Tribune )

The film also contains interviews with police officers who were there the day of the mass shooting, including former San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, who in 1984 was a police SWAT commander. He also was later police chief.

Sanders and others said there were too many unknowns as the shooting incident began to unfold for police to barge in right away. They couldnt see easily into the building because of the tinted windows, some of which were riddled with web-like cracks and gaping bullet holes. And they didnt know initially how many shooters or how many victims were inside the restaurant.

I simply dont how you would do it differently, Sanders says on camera. You have to have a plan so you dont go in and get more people killed.

Its the central question of the movie: Could the police have reacted differently? Should they have?

This is an extremely difficult tragedy to analyze, Minn wrote in a statement he said would appear at the end of the movie. In it, he says he understands the explanations provided by San Diego police but concludes that its difficult to comprehend how one gunman managed to control 175 police officers.

The story is really ambiguous, Minn said in an interview this week. Did the police take too long? Most people would say yes, if not 100 percent, but if you ask the police they would tell you no. A lot of police have told me, These people who are judging us this quickly, they dont know what we go through.  Its so easy from the outside looking in.

I see where the police are coming from there, he said. Fine, that explains it, but does it excuse it? So, I think thats the really big question. At the end, I would say the police have nowhere to go on this because the results are just horrendous.

WARNING: Graphic. James Oliver Huberty kills 21 people in a San Ysidro McDonalds Restaurant on July 18, 1984. Documentary with News Footage.

That horror is illustrated vividly throughout the documentary, with video footage of the crime scene and photographs from The San Diego Union-Tribunes archives. Bloodied bodies are shown slumped over in their seats or lying on the ground both inside and outside the restaurant. Among the bodies is an 8-month-old baby.

Theres also archival footage of the survivors  some dressed in their McDonalds uniforms  running from the restaurant after the killer, 41-year-old James Oliver Huberty, was shot through the chest. The stories they tell in the movie are harrowing and heartbreaking.

Theres Alberto Leos, then a 17-year-old McDonalds employee, who despite being shot repeatedly was able to crawl down 25 steps and toward a closet where others had taken shelter. They helped drag him inside.

Leos is now a San Diego police captain.

Maricela Duarte, who lost her left eye in the shooting, recalled that her baby daughter was pulled away from her in the commotion. Later, she learned a stranger had handed the infant to a police officer, who rushed the injured child to a hospital.

The baby, Karla Felix, survived.

Duarte is shown in the documentary holding pages of a photo album with newspaper clippings about the shooting. After describing the nightmares she has suffered over the years, she points to an image of the shooter. (The killers name is not mentioned in the documentary.)

I dont hate this man, she says in Spanish, adding that she might feel differently if she had lost her child.

Minn said he made the movie to honor the victims, and because of his relationship to Mexico  a country featured in many of his films. He noted that many of the people killed in the McDonalds massacre were Mexican or of Mexican heritage.

Minn financed the film himself but has yet to find a distributor. He said he may make the movie available online eventually.

Out of the 21 films that Ive made, this is probably the most emotional, said Minn, who commended the victims for the guts, will and humanity they demonstrated throughout the ordeal. The stories are just incredible.

Not everyone interviewed for the film remains plagued by memories of the massacre. Josh Coleman was 11 when he was shot outside the restaurant and played dead on the hot pavement for more than an hour. A photo shows him lying awkwardly on his back, his legs somewhat tangled in the foreground.

Coleman said this week that hes suffered no major emotional problems because of the shooting, possibly because he was so young when it happened. He is looking forward to seeing the documentary.

Now 43, hes a married iron worker who lives in Alpine. He has three daughters, ages 9, 8 and 5.

I guess life goes on, Coleman said.

77 Minutes opens Thursday with a two-day run at The Front art gallery in San Ysidro and Friday with a weeklong run at UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley-Hazard Center.

For more information, go to 77minutesfilm.com.

dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @danalittlefield
Following widespread student protests over the election of Donald Trump as president, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson tried to reassure California public school students  from kindergartners to 12th graders  that they will be protected from discrimination and bullying.

I know that the outcome of the recent Presidential election has caused deep concern among many students and their families.The nation maintains a strong tradition for the peaceful transition of power, Torlakson said in the statement issued late Thursday.

And I want to let all of Californias 6.2 million public school students know that keeping them safe from discrimination and bullying at our great states 11,000 public schools is a top priority.

Advertisement

Students up and down the state  from San Dieguito High School to Los Angeles County to San Francisco  walked out classrooms on Thursday in protest of the nations president-elect. Students at San Diego State University and UC San Diego have also rallied against Trumps victory.

Their protests have focused on Trumps plan for sweeping deportations of unauthorized immigrants and his comments and action towards women, among other things.

In California, diversity is strength, Torlakson said. Our students come from all kinds of backgrounds, cultures, languages, and religions California already has, and will always maintain, strong legal and state Constitutional protections against any and all kinds of discrimination, regardless of a students race, ethnicity, faith, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Torlakson went on to give special reassurances to girls.

And I want to tell young women and girls that they will always be safe, be respected, and be protected at school, he said. As the proud father of two daughters, I know that girls can achieve anything, succeed at anything they choose, and earn the respect that they deserve every day at school, in the workplace, and in our communities. California moves forward, not back.

RELATED

A group trying to get California to secede from the United States said the results of the presidential election give their cause new momentum.

maureen.magee@sduniontribune.com

Twitter:@MaureenMagee
Teaching Mandarin to the world Updated: 2016-11-11 07:37 By Anthony Warren(China Daily Europe)

Confucius Institutes take Chinese language and culture to a global audience eager to learn more about the country

The opening lines of The Analects, one of China's most famous historic texts, read: "Is it not a pleasure to study and practice what you learn? Is it not good when friends visit from far-off places?"

More than 2,000 years after they were written, the aphorisms of its author - the Chinese sage Confucius - might well refer to China's rising language centers.

In a mere 12 years, Confucius Institutes have opened on 500 campuses and are now teaching Chinese language and culture to almost 2 million people.

Attached to foreign universities, the Confucius Institutes - overseen by the Office of Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban - are a network of not-for-profit Mandarin language-teaching schools and cultural centers for those who seek to learn about China.

The first institute opened its doors in Seoul in 2004. By the following year there were 33 in operation. Today there are more than 500, spread across more than 134 countries and on every continent apart from Antarctica.

One of the reasons for the institutes' current popularity, says Chu Hung-lam, director of Hong Kong's own Confucius Institute, is that China is genuinely interested in getting people to learn firsthand about its unique - often misunderstood - culture.

"China wants to tell and show herself and be understood," explains Chu, who is also head of the Chinese culture department at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

China is not alone when it comes to expanding cultural soft power. For years, countries have used their cultural cachet as a way to push their national tongue as a second language.

Among such respected cultural institutions are the likes of the British Council, the Japan Foundation, Germany's Goethe-Institut and France's Alliance Francaise.

The success of the Confucius Institutes did not happen overnight. Julia Gong, senior associate director of the Confucius Institute at The University of Melbourne, recalls that she only had four students when she started her first class in 2007. Today the institute is running at least three classes every weekday and has enrolled 976 students this year.

Gong says: "Our institute runs a fee-paying program, about the same price or slightly higher than commercial schools."

Unlike commercial schools, however, the institute's students can apply for scholarships and study at a Chinese university of their choice thanks to the center's ties with colleges in China.

As well as offering Chinese courses to the general public, the institute provides tailored language classes to a range of would-be Mandarin speakers, including undergraduates and university staff, businesspeople and government officials.

"With the increase in communication between Australia and China, in particular with the signing of the Free Trade Agreement between the two countries (in 2015), there has been more interest in learning Mandarin," Gong says.

With more Chinese travelers going to Australia, demand for language lessons in the tourism industry has grown too.

The Chinese economy is driving global interest in Mandarin, placing the Confucius Institute network in an enviable position. Thanks to China's economic clout and expanding diplomatic links with the 60-plus countries included in the Belt and Road Initiative, there is little work needed to promote the language.

Xu Tao, director of international cooperation and exchanges at the Ministry of Education, says: "We help people in countries along the Belt and Road learn Chinese, and these countries help us learn their languages."

Institutes in countries including Cambodia, Pakistan and Bangladesh have shown particular interest in blending language skills with future Belt and Road projects

However, the reality is that the majority of Confucius Institutes are currently located in only a handful of countries. More than 100, for instance, are in the United States, and more than two dozen in the United Kingdom.

It is unlikely that China's economic power, on its own, can maintain a deep, widespread interest in learning a second language, says Molly Huang, who teaches Mandarin in South China's Guangdong province and Hong Kong. Instead, she says that first and foremost, language is entwined with culture.

Gong, of Melbourne's Confucius Institute agrees, stressing that the teaching of language and culture cannot be separated.

In Hong Kong, where Mandarin is already taught in schools, the emphasis is more on cultural elements than language.

"Rather than offering language courses like most other Confucius Institutes," says Chu of Hong Kong's Confucius Institute, "we leverage our unique environment and the strength of the Polytechnic University to provide high-level cultural events."

The Confucius Institutes' growing influence at foreign universities has not been without controversy, however. They have been accused of being opaque, too political, or sometimes even not political enough.

"Since they bring funding, trained teachers, organized programs, and textbooks, (Confucius Institutes) have been welcomed with open arms by some university administrators," says Robert Bauer, an honorary professor of Chinese linguistics at the University of Hong Kong.

"At the same time, however, I am aware that awkward situations have arisen over political issues at some schools, and their Confucius Institutes were asked to close and leave."

Institutes have suffered such a fate in countries including Canada, Sweden and the US.

In other cases, the institutes simply have not got off the ground. In Japan, none of the elite public universities have agreed to allow a Confucius Institute on campus - though almost a dozen private colleges have done so.

Despite hiccups, Hanban has a clear plan for its institutes. By 2020, it aims to have more than 1,000 worldwide.

"I believe more Confucius Institutes will be established all over the world in the years to come - if China can keep its economic strength and economic impact overseas," says Chu.

"What I would love to see is some of the traditional Chinese values that have enabled China to survive for so long being appreciated by more people in the world, in and outside China."

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page22)
From Mauritius: A transplant story Updated: 2016-11-11 07:37 By Xu Xiaomin and Fang Aiqing(China Daily Europe)

How Jim rediscovered the motherland and forged a happy new connection

At the welcoming party for international freshmen at Changzhou University on Oct 21, Jim Kwee Fat Ip Ping Sheong, a graduate student from Mauritius, shared his life and learning experience in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, with more than 100 new foreign students.

His story began five years ago, when he became one of the first international students at the university, under an agreement signed by the Changzhou municipal government and his hometown, Beau-Bassin Rose-Hill, Mauritius - Changzhou's international sister city.

Jim Kwee Fat Ip Ping Sheong, Mauritius graduate student performs at the 2016 International freshmen welcoming party of Changzhou University. Provided to China Daily

As a Chinese-Mauritian, Jim had longed to see China from a young age. His father, a Mauritian-born Chinese, met his mother in Meizhou, Guangdong province. After their marriage, his mother emigrated to Mauritius to live with her husband. Currently the family runs a small restaurant there.

"Every year on New Year's Eve, my family performs the Chinese ritual of homage to ancestors," says Jim, 24. Since his childhood, Jim has enjoyed listening to his mother talk about her early years in China.

In 2011, his dream of a visit came true, with the successful launch of Changzhou University's international communications program.

Since 2005, the university had been building an international communication platform through various channels. Now, more than 70 cooperative agreements have been signed with institutions in more than 20 countries and regions, including the United States, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, Finland, Russia, Chile and Japan. In 2013, the school's Thailand Research Center was built in East China.

According to Yang Lin, secretary of the Party General Branch of the Institute of International Education and Exchange, the university is now running six cooperative programs with St. Francis Xavier University in Canada, National University of Ireland and New Jersey City University in the US. Over a decade, the programs have seat 350 students abroad for further education. All of them started their careers smoothly after graduation.

"By providing the students with individual training plans and entry into international course systems, the university focuses on the cultivation of their personalized strength, practice and innovation capability, as well as an overall English culture and learning atmosphere," Yang said.

Yang listed what she calls the '4E' goals - English linguistic competence, emotional management, teamwork and intercultural exchange ability, which she considers most needed in the training of students seeking international development platforms.

Jim enjoyed singing and performing ukulele in various activities for the international students. During his university time in China, he has received plenty of help from his Chinese friends, and his teachers are always extra patient, he says.

Over the past five years, he and fellow townsman Sharon Shi Youne Too Yok not only passed the HSK4 test but also won acclaim in Chinese writing.

In 2014, Sharon's delicate words and expression of family-like love for China touched the judges and she won first prize in the "Chinese Dream" essay contest sponsored by the Ministry of Education. In 2015, Jim won a prize in the "My Story of Jiangsu" essay contest.

"I met my partner here in Jiangsu," he says. "We love each other and are both fond of the province. I feel like I belong to it. I would love to give my future to Jiangsu."

In July, Jim and Sharon both received bachelor's degrees from the university. Now working hard with his study in the field of engineering management, Jim has set his mind to work in China after graduation.

"My dream is to settle down here in China with my family," he says.

Contact the writers through xuxiaomin@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page20)
Private retirement homes appeal Updated: 2016-11-11 07:37 By Yuan Zhou and Ma Si(China Daily Europe)

Breaking with cultural norms, retirees pick communities with elder care and amenities

Traditionally, elderly Chinese prefer to age in place, or live in their own home and community, cared for by children or other relatives.

But a changing China is making that more difficult.

Retired professor Hu Qingying, 85, who lives alone, tried to maintain that tradition with her family by having cameras installed in her home so she could be monitored by her daughter, Cathy Liu - who is about 9,000 kilometers away in San Francisco.

Fan Xiaomei, 70, a retired official of the Ministry of Education, plays pool at the Yanda Golden Age Health Nursing Center in Yanjiao, Hebei province, which is just outside Beijing. Zou Hong / China Daily

"I know she cares about me and wants to check in on me now and then," says Hu, of the nanny cam-like devices installed in her Beijing home. "But it felt really weird. Even when I went to the bathroom, I knew there was a camera on."

Six months ago, after trying the cameras for nearly a year, Hu decided to move into a new, high-end suburban retirement community. The Yanda Golden Age Health Nursing Center charges 7,000 yuan ($1,035; 934 euros; 829) a month to rent a fully furnished two-bedroom apartment with basic care, including a nurse call button. It is in Yanjiao, a community just outside Beijing, in Hebei province.

The center has a variety of amenities like a swimming pool and a gym, and is home to 1,600 retirees. Most residents held positions of some responsibility during their working years. Among them are former professors, diplomats and a vice-minister. With an average age of 82, 30 percent have children who live abroad.

"Our first-phase development, which cost 2 billion yuan, has full occupancy," says Cui Kai, deputy general manager of the community. The developer, Yanda Group, is pouring 3.2 billion yuan into the second phase. When finished in 2018, it will add 8,000 beds, bringing the total to more than 10,000.

Cui said he's intrigued by the overwhelming response. His staff provides tours of the site to some 300 to 400 senior visitors a week.

The community was originally planned to house foreign retirees and Chinese who returned from overseas, with apartments of American, European and Southeast Asian styles to choose from, Cui says.

"But we soon changed our mind, because we found visa requirements and domestic medical care conditions were major obstacles," he says.

To the developer's relief, retirees from the capital city soon filled the gap, paying 5,000 yuan to 13,000 yuan - depending on the size of the apartment and the level of care that a resident needs.

"We're surprised to find that most residents want a two-bedroom apartment, even though they live alone," Cui says, noting that they consider their new residence more like home than a nursing home.

Helping explain how all this is being paid for, elderly care researchers in Beijing found that almost all local seniors have pensions. Among couples, 23 percent receive more than 8,000 yuan or more a month, while 65 percent of single seniors collect 3,000 to 5,999 a month.

Also, in a city known for soaring housing prices, 81.8 percent of local seniors own their own homes, with 7.7 percent having more than one, which can also help support them in their later years if they sell or rent out their property, the researchers said in their recently published Blue Book of Elderly Care as an Industry in Beijing.

By the end of last year, Beijing had 2.2 million residents aged 65 or above, about 10.3 percent of the population. They are expected to double in 2020, official estimates said.

Beijing has anticipated 4 percent of all local seniors, or 160,000, will spend their twilight years in nursing homes by 2020. The majority will be taken care of by their families or community elder-care services.

But the lack of adequate caregiver support and medical services have encouraged many seniors with sufficient economic means to find alternatives to the ward-like settings of traditional institutions.

Last year, Qian Liqun, 76, a renowned scholar and professor at Peking University, caused a small stir after he and his wife made the unconventional move of selling their house in Beijing and moving into an elder-care community. Their 100-square-meter apartment, amenities and services cost 20,000 yuan a month at the tranquil Taikang Community, tucked away in the hills of Beijing's suburbs.

Qian says he can now concentrate on writing and reading, without worrying about housework and cooking.

For most well-off residents, being close to medical facilities is a top consideration.

Golden Heights, a high-end retirement community in downtown Beijing, prides itself on having a clinic open to both its residents and their neighbors. Its apartments, including a basic level of care, start at more than 10,000 yuan a month due to its "medical care and nursing" model and prime location.

The Yanda retirement community, where Hu lives, has its own modern, private hospital but charges lower rates mostly because it is outside Beijing's municipal borders.

As healthcare benefits vary between jurisdictions, those who live there but have their official residency in Beijing have to pay out of pocket and get reimbursed later in the capital, which has been a concern for seniors.

Cui, the vice president, says the local governments have been working to solve the problem, which could help lure more seniors to his community from Beijing.

While lower prices mean it takes longer to recoup the total investment, the project is already profitable and the future looks good because of plentiful demand, he says.

Contact the writers through yuanzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page19)
We remember Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to U.S. Congress 100 years ago. The Montana representative believed "that the country people are the best informed people."

Weekly Newsletter The best of The Saturday Evening Post in your inbox! Join

One hundred years ago, Jeannette Rankins home state of Montana voted to send her to Washington, making her the first female member of Congress.

She had long been an advocate for womens rights, but she was also gaining a national reputation for being, as this Country Gentleman item notes, a Pacifist with a capital P.

Pacifism was consistent with western politics in those days. Farmers and ranchers were strongly opposed to the U.S. getting involved in foreign affairs. Rankin remained faithful to her principles in 1917, when President Wilson asked Congress to declare war on the Central Powers in Europe. She, and 50 other congressmen, voted against entering the war.

Subscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive. Subscribe Today

While she had remained faithful to her pacifism, the country was changing its mind under the influence of pro-war propaganda. Pacifism became suspect, and there were accusations of disloyalty to anyone who didnt fully support the war.

Rankins now unpopular principles, and a reapportionment that put her in a Democratic district, resulted in her losing a bid for reelection in 1919.

She retired to the country, though she continued to speak out for peace and the prevention of war. She also lobbied for progressive reforms, such as ending child labor and providing relief to working women with children.

In 1940, she ran for Congress again and won. Rankin believed that campaigns should be run from the bottom up. She and her mother, who was past eighty at the time, drove from ranch to ranch. She believed that the country people are the best informed people in our country.

She was now one of nine women in the House. She gained new notoriety for resisting President Roosevelts efforts to aid Great Britain. The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she was the only member of Congress to vote against the declaration of war. This time, her pacifism drew even stronger criticism and anger from the American public. When President Roosevelt asked for a second declaration of war, this time against Germany and Italy, Rankin abstained to make the vote unanimous. She recognized how unpopular shed become, and so didnt run for reelection the following year.

However, she continued to advocate pacifism over the decades, and as late as 1972 was considering running for Congress again. Her position on war had become far more popular as opposition to the Vietnam war drew thousands to the cause.

Several other women were elected to Congress after Rankin. But she was first, and, for many decades, one of the very few women who were elected for their own merits and not simply to fill an office vacated by a husband or father.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons / public domain
White Plains, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 11/11/2016 -- All those looking for a vibrant and exciting way to pitch their products to the audience, here's an amazing idea use giant inflatable balloons and let the audience experience something that no other advertising medium can add to a marketing/promotional campaign.



The advertising balloons are needed to give businesses that much needed edge over their competition in the market and allow them to advertise, interact and also promote their products/services in a way that is well above their market competition. Great Lakes Inflatables is proud to present its collection of high end inflatable advertising balloons available for marketing, advertising and promotional campaigns all over the United States. The company has got every option regardless of what a business might require when it comes to advertising using inflatable balloons. The company has inflatable balloons available for sale and rent. Advertisers can purchase new or used balloons and even rent new ones on a monthly basis to set up their advertisement as per their need. Great Lakes Inflatables also offers advertisers to set up their advertising balloons for them and provides tutorial videos in case the company wants to do it themselves.



Great Lakes Inflatables is keen on adding a number of new advertising balloons to their inventory soon. The company is welcoming suggestions from advertisers based around the United States.



Great Lakes Inflatables is a God fearing company and believes on giving back to the society as much as it can. The company is already associated with a lot of community and social causes and donates to a number of local schools, organizations, business setups and charities around the West Michigan and Grand Rapids areas.



For more information please visit http://www.greatlakesballoons.com/



About Great Lakes Inflatables

Great Lakes Inflatables has been in business for over 25 years serving the entire United States with Giant Advertising Inflatable Balloons.



Contact Info:

Max Doering

616-291-5472

Email: glimaxdoering@yahoo.com

Website: http://www.greatlakesballoons.com/
Seattle, WA -- (SBWIRE) -- 11/11/2016 -- The report "Microbiology Testing/Clinical Microbiology Market by Microbiology Application (Pharmaceutical, Clinical, Manufacturing, Energy), Clinical Application (Respiratory Diseases, STD, UTI), Product (instruments, Analyzers, Consumables) - Global Forecasts to 2021", analyzes and studies the major market drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World (RoW).



Browse 74 market data tables with 62 figures spread through 176 pages and in-depth TOC on "Microbiology Testing/Clinical Microbiology Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/microbiology-testing-market-219135367.html



Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.



The Global Clinical Microbiology Market Is Projected to reach USD 5.77 Billion by 2021 From USD 3.35 Billion in 2016, at a CAGR of 11.5%, during 2016 to 2021



On the basis of product, the clinical microbiology market is categorized into instruments [laboratory instruments (incubators, gram strainers, bacterial colony counters, autoclave sterilizers, microbial air samplers, anaerobic culture systems, petridish fillers, blood culture systems, microbial culture systems, and other laboratory instruments) and microbiology analyzers (molecular diagnostic instruments, microscopes, and mass spectrometers)] and reagents (pathogen specific kits and general reagents).



Ask For Free PDF Brochure: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=219135367



The instruments segment is expected to account for the larger share of the global clinical microbiology market in 2016. However, reagents segment is projected to grow faster than the instruments segment, growing at a double-digit CAGR during 20162021. Growth in the reagents segment is mainly driven by growing trend of reagent rental agreements (along with instrument sales) by prominent reagent manufacturers, rising private-public funding for researches on specific infectious diseases, increasing market availability of pathogen-specific kits across the globe, and growing demand for specific clinical microbiology reagents during epidemic outbreaks.



Technological advancements; rising incidence of infectious diseases and growing outbreak of epidemics; growing healthcare expenditure across the world; and increasing funding, research grants, and public-private investments in the field of life science researches are the key market drivers for the clinical microbiology industry.



Get Sample Copy@ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestsample.asp?id=219135367



Furthermore, improving healthcare infrastructure across the emerging markets and growing market demand for advanced molecular diagnostic products provide opportunities for players in the clinical microbiology market. Operational barriers for diagnostic test usage and bundled sales by market giants across major markets are the major challenge limiting the growth of the global clinical microbiology market.



In 2016, North America and Europe are expected to be the mature markets for clinical microbiology products. However, emerging regions such as Asia-Pacific (including Japan, China, and India) are expected to become the new revenue-generating pockets in the clinical microbiology market in the next five years. The North American clinical microbiology market is expected to hold the largest share of the global clinical microbiology market in 2016.



However, Asia-Pacific clinical microbiology market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period owing to the growing number of hospitals and clinical diagnostic laboratories in India and China; expanding research capabilities for the development of innovative and affordable clinical microbiology testing procedures across India, China, and Japan; and rising incidences of infectious diseases.



About MarketsandMarkets

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.



Subscribe Reports from Healthcare Domain @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Knowledgestore.asp



Contact:

Mr. Rohan

MarketsandMarkets

701 Pike Street

Suite 2175, Seattle,

WA 98101, United States

Telephone No : 888-600-6441
UNESCO and the US-based Association for Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) signed an agreement on 10 November to use science centers and science museums as platforms to communicate sustainable goals (SDGs) through the organisation of ad-hoc events on local, regional, and international levels, during a meeting in UNESCO headquarters, as part of the commemorations of the first International Day for Science Centers and Museums (IDSCM).

The agreement also aims to enhance informal science, technology and math education (STEM) with hands-on, interactive exhibits, inquiry-based science education programs that advance STEM learning and innovative ways.

According to Flavia Schlegel, Assistant Director-General for the Natural Sciences at UNESCO, in the closing session, science centers are the crucial part of the puzzle to hook up children and their families in science.

We need to persuade policy makers to build and maintain more science centers around the world, which can also reach the rural areas, for example through itinerant exhibitions and activities. Luisa Massarani, SciDev.Net

Talking to Anthony F. (Bud) Rock, CEO of ASTC, he believes that this agreement will help to strengthen science centers among the UNESCO country members. In return, we will try to address the SDGs every year, on the International Day for Science Centers and Museums, he said.

As the head of RedPOP, the Latin American sister of ASTC and a professional of a hands-on science center in Brazil (Museum of Life), I welcome the initiative myself.

Science centers have been increasing around the world. In my own region, there has been an increase in their establishment since the 1990s. At least 470 science centers were identified in the last survey conducted by RedPOP  although keeping them alive every year is still a big challenge due to budget contraints.

Most of the science centers are in bigger cities and many countries in Latin America and the Carribean, as well as in other parts of the developing world  particularly in Africa, still have too few initiatives. We need to persuade policymakers to build and maintain more science centers around the world, which can also reach the rural areas, for example through itinerant exhibitions and activities.

Due to this international effort, about 300 science centers around the world participated in the IDSCM. The agreement can only succeed if UNESCO engages meaningfully with other networks around the world in this initiative. Luisa Massarani, SciDev.Net

Elizabeth Rasekoala, President of African Gong, the African network for science communication, argued at the event that many science centers are Eurocentric. We need to think about the developing world context and the needs of the developing world.

Razekoala is right. There are good examples of science centers that have been doing a good job in engaging people in the developing world. But we need to do more. If we want to make a difference through science centers, we need to create strategies to make them even more relevant for the developing world. They should be a culturally accessible space for dialogue and for public participation on science issues that impact peoples' lives.

The plan is to make IDSCM an annual event. It was organised on the occasion of the World Science Day for Peace and Development by UNESCO, ASTC (United States), International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the regional networks RedPOP (Latin America), ASPAC (Asia Pacific), Ecsite (Europe), SAASTEC (Southern Africa), and Names (North Africa and Middle East).

Due to this international effort, about 300 science centers around the world participated in the IDSCM. The agreement can only succeed if UNESCO engages meaningfully with other networks around the world in this initiative.

This piece was produced by our Latin America and Carribean edition.
The population of the Scotland's national bird, the golden eagle, has soared to historic levels. Currently, there are now over 500 breeding pairs found living in the Scottish Highlands, according to the survey.

Independent reports that the study was conducted by RSPB Scotland and the Scottish Raptor Study Group in 2015. The researchers discovered that there is a 15 percent increase in the eagle population since 2003. That is about 442 to 508 pairs of the eagle.

Duncan Orr-Ewing, the head of species and land management at RSPB Scotland, said that the sight of the golden eagle soaring in the sky above is an awe-inspiring part of their natural heritage and this increase in numbers of golden eagle pairs is great news. He further said that the across many parts of Scotland, there has been a very welcome turnaround in how people respect these magnificent birds, part of a more enlightened public attitude in the birds of prey.

On the other hand, the eagles occupy only about two third of their traditional territories, wherein there are low numbers in the east of Scotland. This is probably caused by a few illegal killings in the recent years. Orr-Ewing said that the continued absence of golden eagles in some areas of eastern Scotland remains a real cause for concern and indicates that much work needs to be done.

In the survey, the team found that the greatest increase in numbers of pairs of eagles is in the northern Highlands and the region between the Great Glen and the Stirling in between 2003 and 2015. There is a recovery seen in the west Highlands and the islands.

Meanwhile, the population of the pairs of eagles in the west of Inverness remained stable for more than the past 13 years. The RSPB blames the recreation, persecution, poor weather and forestry for lack of recovery in that region, according to BBC.
A recent study indicates that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, a database of endangered species, seems to underestimate the number of species at risk. About 200 forest bird species from six of the world most biodiverse are at risk of extinction. On the other hand, in IUCN the species is listed as non-threatened.

The findings of the study were printed in Science Advances. Stuart Pimm, the co-author of the study and Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, said that the Red List employs rigorously objective criteria, is transparent and is democratic in soliciting comments on species decisions. He further said that its methods are seriously outdated.

The study involved 586 bird species from Central America, Atlantic Forest of Brazil, Madagascar, Western Andes of Colombia, Southeast Asia and Sumatra. The team of researchers included geospatial data on the elevational preferences of the birds. Then, they added data on the forest cover remaining for the birds to gauge the amount of suitable habitat remaining within their distributions.

Based on their refined ranges, 210 bird species are in a higher threat category. On the other hand, the IUCN listed 108 species at risk of extinction. One example of the bird species is the gray-winged cotinga found in Brazil. It is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. On the other hand, in the study, its refined range size is smaller than 100 square kilometers that must be categorized as critically endangered, according to Mongabay.

Furthermore, the researchers theorize that the finding would probably expand to mammals and amphibians. Meanwhile, the IUCN disagrees on the study. Stuart Butchart, the head of Birdlife International and oversees the Red List's birds, said that the study is "fundamentally flawed."

He further explained that in the study, they use the various set of metrics than the IUCN. He also said that the IUCN uses a broad habitat range, while the study uses much narrower criteria, as noted by Smithsonian.
One is a non-believer of climate change. The other is a long-time environmental activist. However, despite their differences, former Vice President Al Gore is willing to work with Donald Trump to ensure that the United States maintains its lead in combating climate change.

In an online post on the Climate Reality Project website, the longtime environmental activist said that he hoped, in the spirit of Trump's wish to be president for "all Americans," that they can work with the overwhelming majority who believe in the climate crisis as a threat to the nation.

Unfortunately, this could be more of a statement for the sake of formality. Al Gore campaigned hard against Trump in the last year, even saying that his election could "take us toward a climate catastrophe."

As The Washington Post noted, Trump is a climate skeptic and has called global warming a "hoax" with an "energy independence" statement with ideas that could make environmental advocates cringe.

Trump's site stated, "Rather than continuing the current path to undermine and block America's fossil fuel producers, the Trump Administration will encourage the production of these resources by opening onshore and offshore leasing on federal lands and waters."

This leads to even more problems regarding the Paris Agreement. Niklas Hoehne of the New Climate Institute was quoted by CBC News to have said, "If President Trump abandons current policies as he has threatened to do, we estimate that in 2030, U.S. emissions will be similar to what they are today." This is problematic considering that President Barack Obama promised to cut the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2026 -- from the 2005 levels.

At this point, however, it is too early to say how the policies of the newly elected Trump could affect the wider scope. While his election could increase the global temperature estimate, there are still uncertainties -- although a shift to renewable energies is likely to continue.
Australia is the latest to join Breakthrough Listen to search for alien civilizations with the help of the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales.

Despite the fact that chances of finding aliens are slim, they are joining the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Automated Planet Finder at the Lick Observatory in California in the endeavor that could possibly yield promising results.

According to Phys.org, the combined all-sky range, superb telescope sensitivity and computing capacity, Breakthrough Listen is already the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific research that is looking for signs of intelligent life forms in outer space.

Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives including Breakthrough Listen, told Australia Network News, "The addition of Parkes is an important milestone. These major instruments are the ears of planet Earth, and now they are listening for signs of other civilizations."

The expansion of Breakthrough Listen will work hand-in-hand with the world's largest filled-aperture radio receiver, helping scientists coordinate their searches for artificial signals. Each of these programs will be exchanging observing plans, search methods and data, including sharing of promising signals to help with the observation and analysis. The partnership could further represent a major step forward toward establishing a connected search of intelligent life in the universe.

ARC Laureate Fellow at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology and science coordinator for Breakthrough Listen added that the project could do more than just hunt ET. Their detection system can also simultaneously search for naturally occurring phenomena, including pulsars and large radio bursts.

Still, some scientists are skeptical of the results. John Reynolds, CSIRO program director, said, "I'm a bit of a sceptic, but I like the idea. I think it is actually real science even though the chance of success is small. It's definitely a question that has to be answered and you won't find out unless you actually look."
Sony's "Concept for Android" which released last year for Z3 series has now been released for the Xperia X series on Xperia OS which is similar to the Nougat platform. A few days ago Sony had launched a beta for Nougat for the X performance and has now followed it with Concept for Android. It will be available only for single sim units sold across Europe with model number F5121.

The latest Concept for Android release will offer a peek into Sony's interpretation of latest Nougat features such as multi-window support, notifications, etc. Users will also get access to InTouch community which will put them in direct touch with the engineers and enable them to develop future Xperia phones.

To get the latest Sony's Concept for Android, users will have to download the concept installer app from the Google Play Store and follow the instructions. It is important that users backup all the data before proceeding with the installation. There is a possibility of all the previous data being deleted after installing the program, as reported by XDA developers.

According to a blog post by Sony, "If you don't like something; a feature or app isn't serving your needs - we want to hear about it, to either make the experience better or remove it entirely and focus on something else."

Sony considers the Concept for Android to be a crowdsourcing tool to get real-time feedback from the users. The program is available only for devices based on the Xperia OS. Sony's Concept for Android is a strategy by the company to push the Xperia products further by providing a community feel to the users. By offering a sneak-peek in the future features Sony intends to build a loyal fan base.

The Concept for Android is a good initiative as the users will have a say in the future Sony devices, which even Google does not offer. What do you think of the new initiative? let us know in the comment section below.
No delay expected on investment treaty talks Updated: 2016-11-11 07:38 By Zhong Nan(China Daily Europe)

The ongoing negotiations for a bilateral investment treaty between China and the United States will not be obstructed or delayed by Donald Trump's new administration, as both sides are under pressure to stimulate their economies, experts said on Nov 9.

Their comments came after Trump gained the keys to the White House in the presidential election. The experts were optimistic despite the fact Trump previously pledged to impose tariffs on Chinese products to "level the playing field", even though analysts say this would be contrary to the rules of the World Trade Organization.

He Jingtong, a professor of trade policy at Nankai University in Tianjin, says potential political conflict will not occur after Trump took over the reigns of power, because he needs to fulfill his promise to create jobs in the US manufacturing sector, at least within the next two years.

"The US economy still relies on big-ticket investment from China to create new market growth points to boost both job and export markets," He says. "Shutting down the BIT talk channels will not conform to the interests of either the new US federal government or local governments, especially those located in the so-called Rust Belt of the country."

Backed by its legal environment, infrastructure facilities and market demand, the US remained China's biggest overseas investment destination in the first three quarters of this year. China's outbound direct investment to the US amounted to $16.2 billion (14.7 billion euros; 13.1 billion) during the nine-month period.

Chinese investment mainly flowed into the country's manufacturing, information, food processing, retail and housing sectors.

A bilateral investment treaty is an agreement signed between two countries or regions on cross-border investment. It assures foreign investors of nondiscriminatory treatment and protection against unwarranted expropriation.

"The road ahead is still fairly tough," says Zhang Jianping, director of the International Economic Cooperation Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission.

"The validation of the BIT can help both Chinese and US companies operate businesses in each other's markets independently in the long term, instead of looking for local partners to form joint ventures," Zhang says.

He says this would give investors more flexibility to control their finances and make investment decisions.

China and the US held their 31st round of BIT talks in Washington this week.

China has signed bilateral investment treaties with 130 countries and regions, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

zhongnan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page25)
As the U.S. presidential elections ended. A lot of people are experiencing mixed feelings. Women are currently sending messages to each other. Reports explain why.

Tuesday night, right after the elections, women are sending messages online, saying "Get your feet in the gynecologist's stirrups -- now. You have 70 days."

In a report by 12 News, they have explained that women have access to 18 types of FDA-approved birth control at no cost under the Obamacare. It is not yet sure if the administration of the newly elected president will make the birth control available.

Women use social media to let others know the fear of higher prices for the birth control and the Planned Parenthood will be limited under the Trump administration. Before, the Planned Parenthood caters 2.5 million people yearly. Services such as cancer screenings, STD testing, birth control, pap smears, counseling and abortions are part of the Planned Parenthood.

Ladies make sure you stock up on birth control, free condoms and take advantage of free STD testing while Planned Parenthood still exists  Samantha (@SammanthaKellyy) November 9, 2016

The fear of the women started when the Republican party push to abolish the Obamacare. The alignment of Trump together with the newly elected Vice President Mike Pence, who is a governor of Indiana, agreed to a bill that blocks the federal funds from Planned Parenthood. Also, Pence fought to pass the law inhibiting abortions.

Newly elected President Donald Trump said during his campaign that he will not fund the Planned Parenthood, stating that "as long as you have the abortion going on." He also wrote in a letter that he would take steps to restrict abortions and funding to organizations that cater abortion services.

However, CEO of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy Ginny Ehrlich said: "There is widespread support nationwide for birth control." A current study by the organization result to 81 percent agree that those who oppose abortion should strongly support birth control -- 86 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans.

According to USA Today, Ginny Ehrlich added that "The vast majority of the public across political parties, across demographic groups and across religious identify support birth control access for women. There is a public will around this issue and it's not a wedge issue."
National Geographic's new TV series called "Mars," which is going to air from this Sunday, aims to show how humans would adapt to the Martian life. In preparation for the series, the Royal Observatory in London is hosting a Martian show home that has been constructed with materials that are nearest to those that are available on the Red Planet.

The model home will be displayed at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich till next Wednesday. "This is what we imagine will by a typical house, so to speak, on Mars in about the year 2037," said Stephen Petranek, author of "How We'll Live on Mars," according to Mail Online. Cardiff-based company Wild Creations constructed the prototype based on a dome-like design with recycled spacecraft parts such as a double air locked entrance that would help in protecting the early human inhabitants on the planet from its freezing temperatures and severe atmospheric conditions. The model home includes an underground area, beneath a trap door, where there is an arrangement to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen with the specific machines. Incidentally, 95 percent of the Red Planet's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide.

Head to the Royal Observatory Greenwich tomorrow from 10am to see the worlds first Mars Show Home @ROGAstronomers #MakeMarsHome pic.twitter.com/CzHRkOMN2V  Nat Geo UK (@NatGeoChannelUK) November 9, 2016

The basement of the pod includes heaters and provision for more beds. The house also comprises of a small cooking area, fitted with a microwave to help in cooking. A computer and a bed will also fit into the pod-shaped home. Moreover, the house includes a platform with pots of plants to facilitate in-house food growing by its inhabitant/s.

The first ever Mars Show Home has just been unveiled at the Royal Observatory Greenwich @ROGAstronomers #MakeMarsHome Sunday 9pm pic.twitter.com/K1yR0dhpdF  Nat Geo UK (@NatGeoChannelUK) November 10, 2016

According to Petranek, the reason for constructing and showcasing such an abode is not to satisfy curiosity but rather due to necessity because eventually there is a "100 per cent chance an extinction event will affect the Earth, and is almost certain to wipe out humans -- whether it is an asteroid a mile long or an unbeatable virus." Therefore, humans have to gradually become a multi-planetary species to avoid extinction, a viewpoint that is also shared by tech billionaire and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is currently working on a project to land humans on Mars by 2025. For now, we do not know the exact timeline when humans will actually start to settle on Mars. However, you can see how your house on Mars will look like, if you do plan to move to the Red Planet.

RT .@tomonewsus: Space igloo built for Mars shows how humans could #MakeMarsHome pic.twitter.com/7Ce5t4L2H7  Nat Geo UK (@NatGeoChannelUK) November 7, 2016
A UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) hunter has recently claimed that the British government is hiding the truth about extraterrestrials and UFOs, as per reports. According to paranormal investigator Malcolm Robinson, there have been numerous sightings across various continents, and the United Kingdom is one of the countries that are known UFO hotspots.

Incidentally, Robinson is the founder of Strange Phenomena Investigations, a company that carries out UFO and Paranormal Research. The investigator has also suggested that the former Ministry of Defense (MoD) has revealed several cold case police files from Bonnybridge that serve as proof for at least 300 UFO sightings in the UK, in a region that is the country's own "Area 51."

Area 51 in the U.S. has been alleged to be a secret military base where the supposed remains of extraterrestrial space craft are kept. As per a TIME Magazine report, UK also has its own Area 51 that serves as a top secret facility that stores proof about alien sightings and UFO remains.

Robinson has reportedly already turned in the case files associated with UFO sightings to the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. In addition, the UFO hunter also requested the government to begin a formal inquiry about alien sighting, a request that was however turned down.

According to a CNN report made in 2013, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has admitted the existence of the mysterious Area 51 in the state of Nevada, near Las Vegas. Furthermore, it was suggested that the facility in the region was used for the debris of UFOs. A former Area 51 scientist, Boyd Bushman, has also said to have revealed the evidence that backs the existence of UFOs and aliens in 2014.

Robinson has also gone on to say that the U.K. government has covered up many instances of alien and UFO sightings. Whether there is actually proof or not for the existence of such an area, UFOs or aliens, for now it seems the truth is out there.
FLORENCE---Florence School District One recently received an Energy Reduction Milestone Achievement award.

Pam Little-McDaniel, the districts public information officer, made the announcement of the award Thursday night during the monthly school board meeting. According to McDaniel, 20 of the districts 21 school sites earned Energy Star scores over 75. In fact, the average score for Florence One schools was 90.43.

The award was given for the districts "conservative use and the reduction of energy sources, McDaniel said. Florence School District One received the award at the recent conference of the Association of South Carolina Energy Managers. (The scores) indicate that our facilities are performing better through superior energy efficiency than 75 percent of all similar facilities nationwide.

McDaniel said the energy savings also reduce costs for the schools.

In other business, Randy Koon, assistant superintendent of instruction, gave the board an academic update. He told board members that the graduation rate has continued to rise.

If youll note in 2009 that 63.6 percent of students were graduating on time, thats graduating in four years, Koon said. If youll note, its now up to 84.4 percent; we feel good with the progress were making there. Also, you can see that our five-year graduate rate is up to almost 86 percent.

Koon told board members that there are 471 students enrolled in dual-enrollment courses, compared with a previous dual-enrollment population of 158.

Our kids are really jumping into this, Koon said. This program is growing tremendously. Almost 80 percent of our 2016 graduates were enrolled in some post-secondary education; the state average is around 70 percent.

The district dropout rate stayed steady at 1.9 percent.

Michael Miller of Numerix LLC addressed the board on the issue of reconfiguration. Miller presented a third computer-generated map based on data about the district population and standards set by the administration, also speaking to concerns and questions from board members during past meetings.

This third map addressed the fact that students addresses do not determine which school they attend if they are enrolled in a special program such as Montessori or International Baccalaureate. Program capacities can shift school populations if enough students are traveling outside of their assigned district to attend it.

Board Chairman Porter Stewart cautioned the audience not to look too critically at the information Miller presented.

I know there is concern out there as evidenced by the presence of the growing audience that is here to see you month by month, Mr. Miller, Stewart said. You cant learn and you cant grow and you cant address factually matters that should be explored unless you actually explore them. We do it publicly. No recommendations have been made; were just looking at it. Without facts we cant realize what were doing or not doing; we have to have the information. At this stage, whether the fear is good or bad, threatening or not threatening, we just have to have information so that we can make informed judgments.
FLORENCE, S.C.  The Veterans Day ceremony at 11 a.m. Friday at the Florence Veterans Park will feature as the speaker the first native of Vietnam to become a general/flag officer in the U.S. military as well as the dedication of three new monuments to the park.

Brigadier General Viet Luong and his family emigrated from Vietnam in 1975 as political refugees after the fall of Saigon when he was 9 years old.

You wouldnt think at 9 years of age that something you experience would inspire you to have a lifelong career in the military, but that moment was very profound for me, Luong said. Through our evacuation, the refugee camps in Guam, Arkansas, just the overall experience and the way we were treated just reinforced the fact that I really need to serve and carry on the tradition of these great Americans.

Three monuments  two new monuments and one new to Florence Veterans Park  will be unveiled as well.

The new U.S. Army monument  a black granite obelisk with scenes etched into it honoring the Army  will occupy space in the front of the park, nearest the parking lot it shares with the Florence Civic Center.

Alex Palkovich's statue "Alone with Memories" has been placed by the park's waterfall wall, which now has teardrop-shaped adornments over which the water falls.

Toward the back of the park is placed the Florence County WWI monument.

Ceremony attendees who need seats should plan on taking their own.
Report says steel giant to have 2HQs Updated: 2016-11-11 07:38 By Zheng Xin(China Daily Europe)

China's Baosteel Group will have dual headquarters following its merger with smaller rival Wuhan Iron and Steel (Group) Corp, according to Shanghai-based newspaper The Paper.

The newly merged steel giant will have headquarters in both Shanghai and Wuhan, Hubei province, it said, citing anonymous sources.

A leading industry analyst says it is the very first time a Chinese company would have two corporate hubs.

"Having two headquarters for the newly merged steel giant will substantially boost its efficiency in management and operation," says Wang Guoqing, director of the Lange Steel Information Center.

The two state-owned steel-makers will form the largest steel company in China by capacity.

Despite the fact that Baosteel is taking over Wuhan Iron and Steel Group, the smaller rival will retain some influence following the takeover, Wang adds.

An official with the Baosteel's PR department declined to confirm the report on Nov 8. But he said on condition of anonymity that Baosteel will make official announcement on this issue soon.

According to Wang, the dual headquarter operation is also based on an evaluation of the impact of large scale corporate headquarter on local government.

"Local governments prefer corporate headquarters, as they contribute more tax revenue than branch offices," says Wang.

"Wuhan Iron and Steel Group has contributed substantially to the local government, and moving its headquarters from Wuhan would have a major impact on Hubei province financially."

Wuhan used to be the home to several other state-owned enterprises' headquarters. However, China Changjiang National Shipping Corporation and Gezhou Dam have since relocated to other cities.

First announced in June, the plan to combine the two state-owned steel firms is part of the Chinese government's push to consolidate the vast, fragmented industry to get rid of excess capacity.

The state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission approved the joint restructuring of the two steel-makers to form the largest steel company in China by capacity in the same month.

Based on 2015 capacity, the two companies will produce around 60 million metric tons a year, leapfrogging Hebei Iron and Steel to the top spot among China's steel-makers, according to Reuters.

Wang Ying in Shanghai contributed to this story.

zhengxin@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page30)
Foreign trade falls in October Updated: 2016-11-11 07:38 By Zhong Nan in Zhuzhou and Jing Shuiyu in Beijing(China Daily Europe)

Eager to restore earning strength, manufacturers are upgrading products to cope with the challenge

As both exports and imports failed to meet early forecasts, China's foreign trade decreased to 2.05 trillion yuan ($307.2 billion; 272.3 billion euros; 245.5 billion) in October, down 0.6 percent from the same period last year, Customs data showed on Nov 8.

China's exports declined 3.2 percent year-on-year to 1.19 trillion yuan in October, the seventh straight month of decline, and imports increased by 3.2 percent, according to the General Administration of Customs.

Data showed the foreign trade surplus narrowed to 325.25 billion yuan in October, down 16.8 percent from last October.

A worker checks panda toys at an export-oriented plant in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province. Si Wei / China Daily

The leading index for China's exports shrank to 35.6 from 35.8 a month earlier, the first month-on-month decline in the past three months.

Wang Dongtang, deputy director-general of the Ministry of Commerce's Department of Foreign Trade, says the government will continue to help the processing trade move further up the value chain by introducing new supervision and control models in the processing, logistics and service sector.

"The government has already started to optimize the industrial structure across the country. It has worked with related government branches in making adjustments to nearly 2,000 items on the processing trade negative list to phase out high-energy-consuming, highly polluting and resource-hungry industries," says Wang.

In the first 10 months of this year, China imported more commodities at cheaper prices.

China's exports to its top trading partners varied across the regions in January to October. Exports to the European Union grew 1 percent and to Japan by 0.5 percent from the same period last year, while exports to the United States fell 2 percent, and exports to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations declined 1.8 percent.

Eager to restore their earning strength, Chinese manufacturers are upgrading their products to cope with the challenge.

Liu Yang, deputy general manager of CRRC Zhuzhou Institute Co, an electric bus manufacturer in Hunan province, said the company will establish between seven and 10 sales and service branches in Southeast Asia, India, Canada and the Middle East over the next three years as many countries are keen to adopt electric buses to further cut carbon emissions and reduce fuel costs.

"Traditional industries must extend cooperation in areas such as infrastructure, energy, environment and services," Liu says.

CRRC Zhuzhou Institute has exported electric buses and related power systems to Brazil, Canada and Southeast Asian countries over the past three years.

As a subsidiary of China Railway Rolling Stock Corp, the country's largest train manufacturer, CRRC Zhuzhou Institute will also invest 1.5 billion yuan in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, to build another manufacturing base to focus on domestic demand from the coordinated development of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei. These cities are also facing severe environmental issues.

Contact the writers through zhongnan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page30)
The rise of Jack the giant-slayer Updated: 2016-11-11 07:38 By Fu Jing(China Daily Europe)

Author says internet tycoon Ma knew right from the start that Alibaba was going to lead the world

In the summer of 1999, a slightly built 35-year-old sat in his apartment in Hangzhou a year after US e-commerce giant eBay went public and Amazon online was developing into a heavyweight business player. He told a British author: "I am gonna be bigger than them."

That moment was when Jack Ma, founder of the world's e-business leader, Alibaba, first revealed his ambitions to writer Duncan Clark upon meeting him for the first time in Hangzhou, where his business is headquartered.

Clark, who began his own consulting business in China in 1994, recalled that Ma's startup company had hired fewer than 20 people.

British author Duncan Clark says Jack Ma essentially stands between two important things - the rise of the private sector in China and the rise of the internet. Fu Jing / China Daily

Now things are radically different. From July to September, for instance, Alibaba earned $5 billion (4.5 billion euros; 4 billion) in e-commerce revenue, which is more than Amazon and eBay combined in the same period.

With such rapid expansion, Ma, who now employs 40,000 people, has become a frequent guest of state leaders as varied as United States President Barack Obama and Belgium's King Philippe. He has frequently debated e-commerce, digital economy and social progress on global stages.

Recently, his team announced it was setting up a European office in Brussels, headquarters of the European Union.

Just before President Xi Jinping's state visit to the United Kingdom, then-British prime minister David Cameron hired Ma as a consultant to the government on business.

Since getting in touch with Ma nearly three decades ago, Clark, the writer, chairman of Beijing-based BDA China Limited, has been closely observing how this English teacher-turned businessman fulfilled his dream in building up his business empire, against the momentous backdrop of a tenfold increase in China's per capita GDP during the period.

Clark spent a year incorporating his insights, observations and anecdotes into a book of nearly 300 pages, Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built. It was written in English but has already been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French and other languages.

"Jack is an interesting combination of humanity and ambition," Clark told China Daily in Brussels recently.

That is the lasting impression Clark has of the tycoon, now aged 52. In 1999, he was talking already very clearly about small and medium-size businesses and now, he says his e-commerce platform is still essentially a hub for small entrepreneurs.

"So I think the reason for using the word 'house', but not 'empire', is that he works for the small guys, the little guys," Clark says, referring to the English title of the book.

Clark says Ma maintains a style of informality and makes fun of his looks, his background and even his mistakes.

For example, according to Clark, after just after the internet bubble boom, Ma realized he had a lot of problems in his company, and that it was expanding too fast. He had an office no more than the size of a normal bedroom.

At the time, Ma had hired a foreign executive but cut his office to half its size.

"You know, many rich bosses in China have huge offices and heavy furniture. Well, he is very informal in that sense. So I think he doesn't bring people to his side by showing off," Clark says. "His charisma is built on his humanity. Don't mistake it. He is very ambitious."

Even though Ma has made an impression on Clark, he says this book is not for Jack Ma.

"I mean, it is an independent book. I don't have any connection with Alibaba," he says.

But Clark says he did invite Ma to Stanford University in 2011 when the writer was a visiting scholar there. Ma came to speak and gave an interesting speech on his dispute with Yahoo.

Clark sees that time as a key moment, as he was doing research on a possible book on the internet revolution in China, and the focus would be on e-commerce and social changes in the country.

"From that encounter, I think Ma essentially stands between two important things - the rise of the private sector in China and the rise of the internet," Clark says.

Though Clark intended to write the book in 2011, the real impetus came after Alibaba's successful IPO in 2014, though the stocks started going down soon before coming back again.

"I think it was the IPO made people realize that Alibaba is really a story," Clark says, adding that CBS filmed and interviewed Ma quite a long time ago, but didn't run the hourlong program because people in CBS asked "Is this company really that big?" Only when the IPO happened, did it finally broadcast the program, which it had put together a year and a half before.

After getting a publishing house's green light, Clark contacted Alibaba, which gave him access to the company so he could come to visit, talk to employees and do research.

But he has not seen Ma himself during the writing of the book, saying that he will one day write his own book so no one would misunderstand him.

"And after we did so much research on all of his speeches, there is so much of Jack's (material) already," Clark says.

He says that in this book he is actually critical of Ma and the company in some aspects, particularly on Alipay in 2011, which Clark felt was controversial.

On Ma's weaknesses, Clark says sometimes he is too blunt.

"I think some people will be miserable, like public relations people: They cannot control him," Clark says. "He loves to be very instant, and very spontaneous but also very strategic. He is like a stand-up comedian and can be spontaneous, depending on the audience. He is also a master diplomat in a way."

Even so, Clark says, Alibaba showed trust.

"Their trust is pretty good because even in an American company, if you say you are writing a book, they would probably require you to send them a copy and give you some suspicion," Clark says.

But Alibaba just told Clark that whoever he wanted to talk to in the company, he should just let them know. With such support, Clark talked to former employees, investors and competitors to find the true Jack Ma. Even those who were fired by Ma were interviewed.

Ma started out as a tour guide with humble beginnings. And Clark says Ma is still a tour guide but on a world scale now.

"The G20 in Hangzhou was fantastic imagery. He is the guide who grew up with tourists and now he's growing up with presidents of countries and CEOs," Clark says.

"He really got this passion" for introducing China, Clark says. "I think he is very proud of Chinese history and culture.

"I think, in a way, he is performing the same role he is always performing to send his message to trust in the internet and small businesses."

Clark says Ma has a global view on charitable undertakings, and has been heavily influenced by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

"He sees himself as a global citizen, and again, as a tour guide. His English is good enough to communicate, so people are drawn to him."

Buried in his work, Ma, according to Clark, cares about his own health and has his personal trainer traveling with him. He also meditates.

"He is surprisingly relaxed, and sometimes you see he is tired. He travels a lot," Clark says. "He doesn't seem stressed, and he is very relaxed on stage, even with President Obama."

According to Clark, Ma is a natural performer and loves being with people and crowds.

"He said he doesn't want to be famous, that he regrets running Alibaba," says Clark. "But this is just showmanship."

Yao Yueyao contributed to this story.

fujing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page32)
A mid-year reckoning by the publication Naftiliaki had Angelicoussis at the top of the Greek tonne millionaires with a fleet of more than 100 ships (bulk carriers, tankers and gas carriers) of 20.57m dwt. on the water.

Angelicoussis, who was interviewed by Michael Tusiani, chairman Emeritus of brokers Poten & Partners, injected some humor into his serious presentation, telling the several hundred attendees. I like big vesselsI always have a passion for VLCCs and so far I have been properly rewarded.

When describing his entry into the LNG business, he explained that he ordered his first two vessels on a boat.because they were availableand they were cheap He admitted that: I didnt know much about LNGs; I thought that they were like VLCCs.unfortunately, I was totally misinformed. After consulting with Tusiani, the two vessels were fixed to the Qatari company - Rasgas - beginning an enduring relationship and a major role in Qatari LNG exports, and leadership position in the gas shipping sector.

On the groups chartering strategy for nearly three dozen LNG carrier, he said that almost all were fixed on period charters to topflight counterparties; weve missed the peaks but emerged unscathed from the troughs he said.

In discussing diversification, he said: Its something Ive always liked. People consider me a bit reckless, but I am not as reckless as people think. Weve expanded fast, but I always try to have some diversification, and [expand} into areas I consider appropriate. He added that he considers drybulk (Angelicoussis is a Capesize player), tankers, and LNG as complementary, and part of the industrial energy sector.

On the subject of public companies - Angelicoussis had listed a drybulk subsidiary in the late 1980s and subsequently privatized it in 2001 - he said that the various difficulties taught him a lesson, and If you dont need it, dont use it.. He said that he welcomed the privacy and being a master of your own destiny.

When asked about the importance of quality, he offered that the top charterers have a preference for owners who make the requisite investments- he added that all the top charterers are demanding.

Responding to a question on strategies for buying vessels, he expressed a preference for newbuilds, saying that buying newbuilds is the most economical way to get quality vessels from quality yards. With ten LNGs on order from South Korea, he stressed another reason to order newbuilds, adding that Its well known that we have our own specificationthe Angelicoussis specification.that is imitated by others.

Besides evaluating estimates of future supply and demand, as well as running calculations of investment metrics, he also asserted the importance of market cycles, saying I like to buy counter-cyclically if I can. But sometimes theres more than numbers involved, with Angelicoussis saying: At the end of the day, I use my nose.
Yu Xuewei, chairman of Tianjin Dongjiang Port Ruihai International Logistics Co, was sentenced to death by Tianjin High Court with a two-year reprieve after being found guilty of bribing government officials, obtaining certificates by illegal means to store hazardous chemicals at a warehouse in Tianjin port, and providing fake environmental assessment papers, according to court papers.

Under Chinese law, a suspended death sentences commonly refers to life imprisonment.

Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate Peoples Court and other local courts also handed down prison terms ranging from one year to life for another 48 people.

The courts said officials at Tianjins transport, port, customs, workplace safety supervision and maritime departments showed serious negligence of duty in their jobs, with some taking bribes and issuing unlawful permits, leading to the disaster on 12 August 2015.

The devastating blast was caused by hazardous goods stored in a chemical warehouse of Tianjin port. The explosion destroyed 304 buildings, 12,428 vehicles, 7,533 containers, and incurred economic losses of nearly RMB7bn ($1bn), as well as contaminating the air, water and soil in the surrounding areas.
The ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre (ISC) said in an alert that the 2,999 gt bulker Royal 16 was boarded by an unidentified number of armed men at 3-30am on Friday, 8.3 nm southeast of Coco Island, while heading from Haiphong to Davao.

The armed men abducted six crew members  the master, chief mate, 2nd and 3rd officer, and the bosun and assistant bosun  and fled in a speedboat.

The 13 crew remaining on the vessel reportedly sailed to Zamboanga following the attack.

Philippines Islamic militant group Abu Sayaaf have taken to targeting commercial shipping in the southern Philippines for kidnap for ransom of their crew.

The ReCAAP ISC is concerned about the situation of abduction of crew from ships while underway in the Sulu-Celebes Sea region; and advised all slow moving ships to re-route from the area, where possible, ReCAAP said. Otherwise, ship masters and crew are strongly urged to exercise extra vigilance while transiting the area; and report immediately to Eastern Sabah Security Command (ESSCOM) when transiting nearer to eastern Sabah, particularly when sighting any suspicious activities or boats; and to the Operation Centre in the PCG District Southwestern Mindanao for monitoring and immediate responses in any eventualities, it added.
Warning: There are some moderate spoilers ahead, but nothing much past what you can see in the trailers, and I'll stay far away from the film's central mystery.

"Arrival" is the best sci-fi movie of the year because it does what science fiction does best: It encourages thoughtful conjecture and lateral thinking. It asks us to project our hopes and anxieties out to some notional event horizon, then see what develops. In the choppy wake of this terrible and divisive election season, it's the one movie you should take the time to see, and process and talk about afterward.

But soon the film reveals that it's not going to be like other alien movies. The spaceships have no weapons. Our hero is a linguist. Cerebral narrative puzzles take shape. A procession of subtle and intriguing ideas ultimately blossom into a story of profound insight and hope.

The opening scenes of the new sci-fi film "Arrival" cover familiar territory, as we see enormous spacecraft hovering over cities on our troubled planet Earth.

Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist recruited by the U.S. government to communicate with the aliens. Twelve spaceships - ovoids that suggest seed pods, significantly - have descended over countries around the world. The aliens show no signs of aggression, but the world's nation-states respond with varying defensive postures, scrambling jets and aiming weapons at the ships.

Banks is partnered with mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), who hopes that the language of numbers will help in establishing contact with the aliens. Each day, the ships' portals open briefly and Earth sends its various delegations aboard. Inside the ship, director Denis Villeneuve creates a minimalist marvel of art design, an extradimensional space with sideways gravity. It feels like a prehistoric cave, those sacred spaces where our species first experimented with language and art.

We see the aliens, eventually, but they're cleverly obscured and the visuals underline a storytelling strategy used throughout the film. "Arrival" isn't really interested in the aliens; it's interested in our reaction to the aliens. How will we reach out to this new entity, this ultimate Other? What will we choose to communicate, and how?

In the end, "Arrival" is all about communication. "The language we speak determines how we think," Louise says, referencing a fierce debate in the field of linguistics. Without spoiling too much, the aliens present us with a new kind of language, a new way to communicate. It's a language that imparts meaning directly, does not represent sound or speech, and is not bound by time.

RELATED: Sending Messages to Aliens: Could It Kill Us?

It's so nice to be treated as an adult by a science fiction movie. This is a film that asks us to think, and presents delicious mysteries concerning ideograms, palindromes, game theory and the significance of the number 0.083.

It's said that providence moves in mysterious ways, as does Hollywood, and the timing of "Arrival" is auspicious. The film addresses that nagging suspicion, perhaps you're familiar with it, that the promise of the Digital Age is fading fast. Our precious devices and networks aren't bringing us closer together. They're driving us apart. We sit in public spaces, staring into the tiny screens in our palms. We gather in online cliques and echo chambers with those who share our history and opinions.

Despite our space-age communication technology, we're not talking to each other - not really. We're projecting digital versions of ourselves. We aren't connecting in the important ways. We're fractured and divided, as evidenced by the world's escalating conflicts and even our own domestic elections and referendums.

Thoughtful science fiction like "Arrival" can help us approach this existential dilemma from a sideways vector. As a genre, as a mode, sci-fi provides us with the opportunity to think laterally about ideas and issues. Movies are one of the ways we process change, as a culture, on some unknowable level of collective consciousness that transcends rationality and intent. When a movie like "Arrival" comes along, we should pay attention. We're telling ourselves something.

WATCH VIDEO: Can We Mathematically Prove that Aliens Exist
Description

After returning from his own deployment overseas in 2008, Navy Master Chief Steve Clark knew something needed to be done on the home front to care for veterans who had similar experiences as him. Unfortunately, Steve passed away in 2010, but his mission lives on. Now run by a small group of people, 9-1-1 Veterans has grown to assist large numbers of veterans through financial assistance, guidance and counseling. To bring back their annual Turkey Drop, the organization is seeking funds to add to the over 800 turkeys and meals distributed to veterans and their families to date.

Stop by the TD Bank 6 Main Street Store (East Islip) or 2 Great Neck Road Store (Great Neck) on November 11th and make a donation to 9-1-1 Veterans. On top of your donation, TD Bank will make a contribution to help this organization provide assistance and warm meals to families and veterans for the holidays.
The saliva of a sand fly may help to prevent a horrific skin infection that now affects millions of people in the tropics, subtropics and southern Europe.

Ironically, the infection, cutaneous leishmaniasis, develops when a sand fly infected with Leishmania parasites bites a person. The bite can turn into a raised red lesion that, in some cases, may form an open ulcer that can then become infected with bacteria. Sores in the nose and mouth may cause further complications.

"People get this disease if they visit areas where the sand fly occurs, like parts of Brazil, India and Iran," Camil de Oliveira of the Instituto Goncalo Moniz, Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz in Brazil told Seeker. "The name sand fly is not related to the insect being found on the beach."

RELATED: This Cellphone Hack Could Save Millions from Disease

In Brazil, one of 10 countries where 75 percent of cutaneous leishmaniasis cases are concentrated, the infection is generally caused by the parasite Leishmania braziliesis, and is transmitted in the spit of the biting sand flies Lutzomyia intermedia and Lutzomyia whitmani. Prior research found that immunity to proteins in Lutzomyia intermedia's saliva exacerbated leishmaniasis, resulting in an increased immune response to the bites of infected sand flies.

For the new study, published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, de Oliveira, Aldina Barral and their team tested the effect of immunity to the other major sand fly, Lutzomyia whitmani, on leishmaniasis. As you might imagine, the small insects produce a tiny amount of spit, making the research quite a challenge.

The flies "produce very little of it, and we need to obtain the flies, separate the females - the ones that have the salivary molecules we are interested in - and then dissect the salivary glands," de Oliveira said. "It is all very small and we need the use of lab equipment to do the dissection."

The scientists next immunized mice with the fly spit. They then injected the mice with some of the infection-causing parasites. The mice that were previously immunized with the fly saliva did not develop lesions, but other mice that had no such treatment did. The researchers also noted that the immunized mice had lower levels of parasites at the injection sites and higher levels of certain immune molecules.

RELATED: Insects Are Conscious and Egocentric

The scientists next tested 300 people from Corte de Pedra, Brazil. Some of them had the infection, others had a lesser version of it without the lesions, and still others had no history of the disease. De Oliveira and colleagues detected the antibodies in all three groups of people, but patients with lesions had the lowest levels.

Together, the experiments strongly suggest that immunity against the infection is possible, and that the fly saliva helps to boost an individual's ability to fight off leishmaniasis. Why this happens remains a mystery, since insects do not even have antibodies.

"Nevertheless," de Oliveira said, "they can recognize invaders and trigger different mechanisms of defense ... For sand flies, little is known about how they may fight off Leishmania parasites, however, they can survive Leishmania presence and thrive."

The next phase of the research is a bit blood curdling: the researchers plan to replicate their findings using live sand fly bites. They say this is a critical next step since injected compounds don't fully mirror what happens to a victim after a natural bite.

De Oliveira said this can be done on rodents and possibly primates in labs, but it will demand "vast amounts of sand flies that can be experimentally infected with Leishmania parasites."

Ideally, the scientists will be able to pinpoint the components in the sand fly saliva that induce protection against the infection. If so, then they can chemically recreate them, foregoing the incredible challenge of obtaining spit from countless little flies.
After a suspected 60-year absence from the U.S., a bed bug known for its ability to spread rapidly has just invaded Florida and Hawaii, according to experts who study the parasitic pest.

The tropical bed bug Cimex hemipterus is raising concern because traditional eradication methods might not keep its numbers in check.

"To the naked eye, the common bed bug (Cimex lectularius) and the tropical bed bug would look the same, as would signs of their presence: bites, blood spots on linens and shed skin from the bugs," University of Florida entomologist Brittany Campbell told Seeker. She added that the parasites can cause everything from small bite marks to serious allergic reactions that require immediate medical attention.

"Under a microscope, the two species look different," continued Campbell, who recently authored a report on tropical bed bugs for Entomology Today. "The tropical bed bug has a different-shaped pronotum, or neck-like structure, that doesn't have the 'U-shape' characteristic of common bed bugs."

RELATED: Why Is It So Hard to Get Rid of Bed Bugs?

The bed bug's existence in Hawaii is anecdotal, she said, but more is known about its presence in Florida, thanks to an observant homeowner from Merritt Island near the Ulumay Wildlife Sanctuary in Brevard County, Fla. In 2015 the family reported an infestation, and a sample was sent to Campbell. She and her team discovered the bed bug was from the long-lost tropical species.

From the late 1930s to the early 1940s, the bug was found in several Florida counties. But it hadn't been reported again until the Merritt Island incident. As its name suggest, it's often found in tropical environments including Africa, parts of Australia, Asia and South America.

The parasite favors warm, humid environments, so Campbell said that it potentially could spread to other southern states, parts of California and additional places in the U.S. In fact, because of indoor heating, it might be able to establish itself nearly anywhere, she and other bed bug authorities speculate.

The Merritt Island residence is now free of bed bugs, but how the home became infested in the first place is a mystery that has Campbell concerned. The family hadn't traveled outside of the state, so it's likely the insects became established in Florida before arriving in Brevard County - possibly hitching a ride with tourists or on a cargo shop.

"We have probably encountered the tropical bed bug and not even known it," John Cooksey told Seeker. He works at McCall Service, a family-owned pest control company that's operates in Florida and Georgia. "Our bed bug business is up 12 percent over last year."

RELATED: Bed Bugs Have Fave Colors, Dislike Others



As news spreads about the tropical bed bug invasion, he thinks "pest control operators will start paying more attention to what species they are dealing with."

Cooksey said the species may have resistance to certain insecticides. Exterminators, though, rely heavily on controlled heating to kill bed bugs. When done correctly, the method is both effective and eliminates the use of pesticides that bugs can become resistant to over time.

Tropical bed bugs, however, are used to heat. Cooksey said that some researchers believe bed bugs could evolve greater heat resistance.

Bed bug infestations are more prevalent among certain groups, including millennials, frequent travelers, homestay vacationers and hoarders. The common thread among all but the latter is that these individuals tend to be more exposed to publicly available couches, beds and other items where bed bugs could lurk.

WATCH: Top US Cities for Bed Bugs
Finish researchers are building a demonstration power plant that would use solar-generated electricity, water and carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere to create gas and liquid fuels.

The Lappeenranta University of Technology and VTT Technical Research Centre are working together on the SOLETAIR project, which is being built on the university campus and is scheduled for completion in 2017. Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology also is a player in the project.

RELATED: Less Coal, More Renewables and Warming Reduce US C02 Output to Lowest since 1991

The project involves several different innovations. VTT will design equipment that will capture CO2 from the air and store it, while Lappeenranta researchers will build a device to produce hydrogen from water via electrolysis. Karlsruhe has developed a a microstructured, chemical reactor to convert the hydrogen produced from solar power together with carbon dioxide into liquid fuels, according to a press release. The reactor will be built by INERATEC, a spinoff company created by Karlsruhe.

The idea of the project is to show how solar power could be utilized to not just to generate electricity, but to create renewable fuels as well. Methane produced by SOLETAIR could be used in power plants or to run vehicles, and the hydrogen could also be used in vehicles "This research is the first of its kind in Finland in this type of combination of processes," Lappeenranta Professor Jero Ahola said in a press release in June.

RELATED: Climate Diplomats Call Trump a Disaster

The two main players have invested about $1.1 million in the pilot plant. TEKES, a government innovation fund, the Finnish Transport Safety Agency, and a group of companies that includes ABB, Gasum, GreenEnergy Finland, Hydrocell, Ineratec GmbH, and Proventia Emission Control Oy also will be supporting the research.

In a speech on energy that President-elect Trump gave in May, he said that he would promote more extraction of fossil fuels and said that renewable energy shouldn't be promoted at the expense of "other forms of energy that right now are working much better."

Photo: Finnish and German researchers are working on a revolutionary plant that would use solar energy to create renewable fuels from water and carbon dioxide. Credit: Lappeenranta University of Technology WATCH: Which Countries Run On 100% Renewable Energy?
Press Release

November 11, 2016 Legarda: Membership in AIIB Will Help Boost PHL's Growth Senator Loren Legarda said the country's membership in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) would help achieve its growth targets through accelerated infrastructure spending. Legarda, who chaired the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations' hearing on the Articles of Agreement of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, said, as the Duterte administration aims to increase infrastructure spending of up to 7% of gross domestic product (GDP), membership in the AIIB will give the country additional source of financing for major capital investment projects of the government and the private sector. "While government financing remains a significant source of infrastructure funding, it is never enough. We can easily hit our targeted spending on infrastructure if we can avail of additional finance apart from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB), among others," she explained. Citing a study by the ADB, the Department of Finance (DOF) estimates that the Philippines needs US$127.12 billion from 2010 to 2020 for its infrastructure needs. Moreover, the World Bank estimates that a 10% increase in capital investment into infrastructure projects contributes to a 1% growth in GDP. "Other benefits touted for the Philippines include additional employment for Filipinos through projects funded by the AIIB in the country, reduced trade costs, and increased competitiveness and productivity," Legarda said. "Once the Senate concurs in the ratification of the AIIB treaty, we may avail of loans and grants for our infrastructure needs. But the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) should already prepare projects qualified for AIIB financing even as we in the Senate commit to approve this treaty before end of year," she added. The AIIB is a multilateral institution that consists of 57 member countries, 37 of which are in Asia. It was formally established in November 2014 when 22 Asian countries gathered in Beijing to sign a memorandum of understanding on the bank. It aims to boost lending for infrastructure projects in the Asia-Pacific region, including energy, urban construction, transportation and logistics as well as education and healthcare. It has an authorized capital of US$100 billion and subscribed capital of US$50 billion.
#MILLENNIALGOALS: A GRAND LIBRARY DEBUT

TACLOBAN CITY - One would think eighteen year-olds wish for sugar, spice and everything nice on their debut, but not Jianne Amber Y. Yaokasin who opted to share her blessings with the students of Tacloban by donating libraries.

Amber, the eldest child of Mr. Jimjim Yaokasin, celebrated her 18th birthday last October 2. Instead of splurging on a party, she chose to donate the funds for a fully furnished library, complete with shelves, books, and computers, for the Tacloban North National High School. Senator Francis "Kiko" Pangilinan, her Godfather, was present for the inauguration and ribbon cutting.

"Proud na proud ako sa inaanak ko. Ambata pa, may adbokasiya na siya. Imbes na tumanggap ng mga regalo sa 18th birthday niya, siya pa ang gustong magbigay ng regalo. A generous heart is an indication of the purity of one's soul," Sen. Kiko said.

Tacloban North is where most of the victims of Yolanda relocated, and are now attending school. The libraries, named "Amber's Nook," aim to bring new hope, among others, to the youth who have been victims of the super typhoon.

"The school nourishes the future leaders of our country: teachers, businessmen, public servants, doctors- and what better way to equip these leaders than by sharing to them the stories of the greats who have gone before them," Amber said.

This is not the first time Amber donated a school library. Last September 20, no less than Vice President Leni Robredo attended the inauguration of her first library at the San Jose Central School, also in Tacloban.
The San Francisco Art Institute named Gordon Knox its president in a message to students on Thursday, Nov. 10. Knox, 61, comes to SFAI from Arizona State University, where he has been director of the campus art museum since 2010.

I am a big advocate of the Art Institute. My sister went there, and I have a real recognition of the profound cultural role that the institution has played in the formation of what is San Francisco, Knox said by phone before catching a flight back to Phoenix. It has to do with the creative culture that this city is the profound generator of, and at the heart of that culture is the Art Institute.

Knox will start Jan. 23 and replaces Charles Desmarais, who left SFAI in 2015 to become the art critic for The Chronicle. The search for his replacement took more than a year, by a committee that vetted some 400 potential candidates, according to board chairman Chris Tellis.

Art schools are supposed to be a place of inspiration and joy, Tellis said, and Gordon has the creativity and vision to be able to lead that kind of institution.

Before his job in Arizona, Knox held Bay Area jobs as the director of the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga and director of global initiatives at the Stanford Humanities Lab.

The son of a U.S. diplomat, Knox grew up around the world and across the country, coming to California to attend UC Santa Cruz, where he earned his bachelors in social anthropology in 1977. Since 2002, he has lived in Bernal Heights. His wife and daughter stayed behind while he commuted to Tempe, and the timing is just right for his return, according to Tellis.

We are in the midst of the most interesting year in the history of the Art Institute, said Tellis, who attributes that to the modern art renaissance in San Francisco in general, and the upcoming opening of a new $19 million SFAI graduate school campus in Fort Mason specifically.

When that campus opens next fall, it will return grad students from temporary quarters in Dogpatch to a permanent home nearer to the main campus on Chestnut Street, where Russian Hill slopes down to North Beach.

Founded in 1871, SFAI is one of the oldest academic institutions of higher learning dedicated to the study of contemporary art in the country. It is one of only two institutions that focus solely on fine art. Aspiring commercial artists need not apply.

Enrollment is down this year, from about 700 students to between 500 and 600, after meeting or exceeding goals for seven consecutive years. But that is to be expected in any institution without a leader, said Tellis, who expects it to rebound with the arrival of Knox.

The most significant aspect to me is that Gordon has left every institution better than he found it, Tellis said.

Knox said the biggest challenge ahead of him is to rejuvenate student, faculty and staff culture around the core values of fearless disruptive thinking and sublime communication.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art
Anti-Trump demonstrators spilled onto the streets of downtown Oakland on Thursday night, meeting resistance from police who sought to prevent protesters from stopping freeway traffic and vandalizing downtown businesses as theyd done the night before.

Large crowds from a peaceful rally at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza that ended around 8 p.m. tried to make their way down Broadway, where on Wednesday some lit street fires, smashed windows and sprayed graffiti.

Officers in riot gear stood firm across sections of Broadway, trying to limit the crowds access to the citys central strip of businesses. Splinter groups made their way along other downtown streets and managed to emerge on parts of Broadway where minor vandalism was reported.

Many demonstrators headed north up Telegraph Avenue, where several attempted to get on Interstate 580 around 10 p.m. to block cars. But long lines of police appeared to succeed in keeping traffic mostly flowing. At least two demonstrators who cut through a fence and ran onto the freeway, causing a brief hangup, were arrested.

By 11 p.m., the bulk of the protestors had returned to Frank H. Ogawa Plaza where they resumed chants against Trump and the Oakland Police Department. They numbered a few hundred, down from about 1,000 who attended the initial rally.

Several incidents of graffiti, much of promoting violence and offering such plugs as Kill Trump, were reported. Many small street fires were set and a handful of windows were smashed. The crimes, though, did not initially appear to be as widespread as the night before.

At least a half dozen arrests were made.

Police staffing was increased on both sides of the bay after frustration with Tuesdays election outcome prompted thousands to take to the streets in both Oakland and San Francisco on Wednesday.

Before the Oakland rally near City Hall ended and the crowd of about 1,000 spread out, speakers shared their concerns about what they saw as Donald Trumps racism and sexism as well as the broader issue of police brutality while supporters looked on.

I thought about what people around the world must think about what weve done, said Berkeley resident James George, referring to Trumps election. I think if they see protests, theyll know that not all Americans think that way.

While the real estate mogul and reality star soundly defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, many in the Bay Area and across the country remained concerned about the Republicans agenda, notably his campaign pledges to keep out immigrants, do away with the Affordable Care Act and appoint conservative judges to the courts.

The different branches of government are all going to be controlled by the right, said El Sobrante resident Christopher Ray, 31, who also gathered at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. That is scary for passing any sort of liberal legislation.

In San Francisco, where protests on Wednesday similarly drew thousands of people but remained more peaceful, a small rally began at 6 p.m. at the Embarcadero. About 50 protesters marched on the sidewalk along Market Street to Fourth Street, and back again, chanting such slogans as Not my president and Putin and Trump, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

Its sad we have someone so hateful for president, said Jessie Sharp of San Francisco. Ive had a terrible few days. Im not sleeping. Its just been awful.

Many demonstrations, from high school walkouts to student protests at San Francisco City Hall, took place Thursday morning and continued into the afternoon. Traffic backups were reported at various points, following police advisories Wednesday evening for commuters to avoid downtown areas.

Emilia Mckiley, a senior at Mission High School who had been marching in the streets near the school since 9 a.m., said she and others would be out until they were too tired to walk.

People are going to go home and come back, she said.

Police from across the Bay Area have been brought in to assist local agencies during the rallies, especially in Oakland.

The department has increased our staffing and aligned resources to facilitate a peaceful march, said Oakland Police Department spokesman Joe Wolfcale earlier Thursday. We are committed to upholding the constitutional right to free speech and peaceful assembly, while enforcing all laws against violent acts, vandalism, trespassing or other criminal activity.

Oakland officials pleaded with demonstrators to remain peaceful Thursday after the previous nights violence. Three police officers were injured in skirmishes with protesters and a student journalist from UC Berkeley said he was attacked by four masked men as he tried to photograph the looting and vandalism. He was taken to an emergency room with a fractured cheekbone and abrasions.

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.

Thirty people were arrested for the suspected crimes of vandalism, assault on an officer, failure to disperse, unlawful assembly and possession of a firearm, according to police.

In a letter to Oakland business owners, Mayor Libby Schaaf apologized, explaining why it seems our police department cannot stop the anarchists who invade peaceful demonstrations.

When (police) step in to stop an act of vandalism while it is happening, they become the new focal point for the crowds which can lead to an escalation of violence, not a decrease in the vandalism, Schaaf said in the letter.

On Thursday afternoon, residents and business owners, who were still cleaning up after Wednesdays events, were preparing for more destruction Thursday. Many glass doors and windows on storefronts were covered with plywood.

Sameer Arahimi, who owns the franchise for the MetroPCS store at Broadway and Ninth Street not far from Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, remembered the unruly protests two years ago that sprung from the Black Lives Matter movement and feared similar destruction.

I hope that nothing goes wrong, he said, referring to Thursday nights planned activities. Its possible that protesters are mad and they take it out on every business they see.

In recent years, the MetroPCS store has installed security cameras and a metal retractable fence at the entrance to prevent looters from breaking in.

Were just a family-owned operation trying to make a living, Arahimi said.

Chronicle staff writers Evan Sernoffsky and Sarah Ravani contributed to this report.
New COVID booster may not be more protective. Experts still recommend it

People are surprised that the new highly touted booster appears to be no more protective than the earlier version. Doctors say to get it anyway.
Diesel, the popular independent bookstore in Oakland, is on the brink of being reborn. Its new name: East Bay Booksellers.

Alison Reid and John Evans, who own Diesel, plan to sell the Rockridge district store to its co-manager, Brad Johnson.

We are ready to pass the torch to him, Evans said in a statement, to carry on this rich and storied tradition, in this wonderful neighborhood that has sustained us, and that we have helped to sustain as well.

If you dont shake things up yourself, he added, its only a matter of time before somebody else shakes it up for you.

Reid and Evans also own Diesel stores in Larkspur and in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their Malibu store closed in 2014. Diesel has been in business since 1989.

Johnson, who manages Diesel with Chris Phipps, said he was thrilled at the prospect of becoming the owner of Diesels Oakland store, located at 5433 College Ave.

I caught the entrepreneur bug a bit by working at Diesel, he said in an email. It created an itch I didnt know I ever wanted to scratch. But more than that, I absolutely love bookselling. Im not spilling platitudes when I discuss it almost like a pastoral art. It is one of my sheer joys  and for it to be my profession, all the better.

Johnson added, in a statement, that good bookstores are not only profitable businesses, but are proven cultural institutions. He pointed out that over the past seven years, there has been a 27 percent increase in the number of independent bookstores in the nation, according to the American Booksellers Association.

As for why Johnson plans to change the stores name, he said, Im an unabashed cheerleader for the East Bay. How better to illustrate this than to wed in a store name my affection for where I am with what I do?

He also emphasized that all this comes from a position of health and promise for the store. Its not an escape from a situation, but the hope that maybe the positivity can be harnessed in a very creative way.

Johnson said East Bay Booksellers will look to raise $200,000 through a community-lending program in which the store will solicit private loans of $1,000 or more, primarily from customers and people in the neighborhood. The loans will be repaid over 5 to 10 years. Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn got started on a similar program, and Riffraff, a bookstore and bar in Providence, R.I., is also raising money through community-based loans.

This is primarily to cover the inventory of the store, he said. Beyond that, the owners and I have negotiated what we think to be a fair amount to pay them  for fixtures, the customer base, the mailing list, the reputation of a store there, a trained staff, etc.

He said he expects the change from Diesel to East Bay Booksellers will be gradual.

Possibly imperceptible for the average customer, he said. The present owners are extraordinary book buyers, and are renowned for their support of diverse titles and support of academic and small presses. This is the sort of thing our customers have come to expect, and why more people keep coming back. This will go unchanged.

As for the many events the store holds, Johnson said, We will probably look to cement our place in the young writer and artist scene that is growing in Oakland. Over the past year, for example, weve had a monthly poetry series of young poets, and the reception and energy that has followed has been amazing. I very much want to see this continue.

I ... will ever more loudly bang the drum to attract cutting-edge literary authors  the award winners before (theyre) award winners!  to the store. The East Bay obviously is often in the shadow of San Francisco for such things, and Im very keen on highlighting a cultural sea change.

Johnson, who is 41, has lived in the East Bay  he is now an Alameda resident  for roughly a decade. He grew up in Lexington, Ky., and got his doctorate at the University of Glasgow.

John McMurtrie is The San Francisco Chronicles book editor. Email: jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @McMurtrieSF

Update:

East Bay Booksellers has begun soliciting community-based loans through Feb. 28. For more information, go to www.ebbooksellers.com.
Vacation rentals in private homes, a continuing source of controversy in San Francisco, are set to see lots of action in the coming weeks with stricter rules but an easier registration system. Airbnb and the city government, which have clashed in court in recent months, may be set to show more cooperation.

Updated law: On Tuesday, San Francisco supervisors will weigh a proposal introduced by board President London Breed to limit all vacation rentals to 60 days in a calendar year, whether or not a host is present. Thats much stricter than the current caps of 90 days with no host and unlimited stays when the host is present. People who registered before Oct. 11 would be able to operate under the current cap.

The proposal is on a fast track, and a committee will hear it on Monday. If passed by supervisors on Tuesday  as seems likely, since the board has unanimously passed the last few proposals to tighten vacation-rental rules  it would need another vote at the boards next meeting, then go to the mayors desk, and take effect 30 days after his action, meaning it could be law by the beginning of the year.

Airbnb decried the proposal as political showmanship that will hurt people who make ends meet by renting a spare room in their home, while supervisors say its needed to make sure permanent housing doesnt get diverted to vacation rentals.

The 60-day cap wouldnt overlap with Airbnbs lawsuit against San Francisco, because the cap centers on hosts behavior and the lawsuit deals with the actions of Airbnb and other vacation-rental companies, a San Francisco city attorney said.

Easier registration: San Francisco is a month or two away from providing an automated, online way for hosts to register with the city, according to Kevin Guy, director of the Office of Short-Term Rental. We envision a single place online for the (business registration portion) and our offices portion, he said. We would still require documentation to prove permanent residency, but that could be submitted online instead of in-person.

Registering with the city is the linchpin of San Franciscos vacation-rental law. However, only about 1,700 out of an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 have complied in the 21 months since the law took effect. Airbnb and hosts say the current system, which requires dealing with two city departments and scheduling an in-person visit, is cumbersome. But Airbnb says it wants to work with the city on fixing it.

Airbnb played a big role in drafting the citys laws, including the registration system. Now, it says, its thinking has evolved. Two years ago, it resisted the idea of sharing any information about hosts with San Francisco. It now points to a registration system it helped draft in Chicago as a model. Under that system, which will kick in next month, when hosts sign up with Airbnb, the company automatically registers them with Chicago, passing along their names and addresses to a private city database.

Collaboration on enforcement? A federal judge last week said Airbnb and San Francisco should hunker down together and hash out a plan to enforce the citys short-term rental laws. But the two sides are far from agreement. In fact, each accuses the other of impeding progress.

Its too bad (Airbnb has) been more interested in suing to overturn common-sense regulations than in cooperating with their hometown, said City Attorney Dennis Herrera in an email.

Airbnb executives likewise point fingers. We can figure all this stuff out, but it requires the parties on the other side being willing to engage, said Chris Lehane, Airbnbs head of global public policy, at a meeting with The Chronicles editorial board. The company favors self-regulation over anything imposed by City Hall. For instance, it recently jettisoned San Francisco hosts with multiple listings  a red flag that they are not a homes primary resident and hence probably in violation of city law.

Airbnb, later joined by HomeAway, sued San Francisco in June, saying the citys updated vacation-rental ordinance violates the companies rights under the First Amendment and Communications Decency Act. The update would put Airbnb and HomeAway on the hook for steep fees and criminal penalties if they book lodgings in homes that arent registered.

U.S. District Judge James Donato rebuffed the companes arguments in a ruling on Tuesday, signaling that he is likely to deny their request for a temporary injunction halting the new law, which is suspended until he rules. But Donato wants the two sides to return to court Nov. 17 with joint proposals on how to verify host registration.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

San Francisco officials list three ways Airbnb can do this. Two are available now; the third would require the city and company to cooperate on technology.

For months these platforms have been able to easily verify whether their hosts have registered with the city and are complying with the law, Herrera said. All it takes is a few mouse clicks on the online San Francisco Property Information Map to see if a home is registered. These companies could also request that hosts upload a copy of their registration certificate to their site, just like Uber does for drivers licenses.

Finally, the city said it could work with Airbnb and other companies to create an automated system to query the city registration database to verify hosts status.

But Airbnb questioned those methods in court, and says the fact that the judge wants more input means he agrees with its arguments.

We all agree the citys system is broken, and there are simple ways to protect home sharers and housing, said Airbnb spokesman Christopher Nulty. We respectfully disagree with the judges ruling, but we appreciate his acknowledgment of our concerns about the citys process. We hope we can work together to create a registration process that works.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
Berkeleys 3D Robotics, a top consumer drone maker until a recent slump, hopes to rebuild its business by aiming at the construction industry.

The company, co-founded in 2009 by former Wired magazine editor in chief and technology pundit Chris Anderson, is starting a service called Site Scan, which combines flying drones with software to track the progress of construction projects and to spot potential problems from the air.

Although an industry analyst questioned whether Site Scan will help 3D Robotics take off again, Anderson believes the worlds construction industry needs a technology upgrade.

You dont think about construction that much, but its all around you and its a huge source of employment, Anderson said during a press briefing this week. Its the infrastructure of our nations and it is in many ways still living in the paper era. So what we need to do is digitize the construction industry.

Anderson, author of the best-selling tech book The Long Tail, co-founded 3D Robotics with electronics engineer Jordi Munoz, as an outgrowth of his personal interest as a drone hobbyist. But as the company expanded beyond the do-it-yourself community, Anderson left Wired to become CEO.

Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle

In April 2015, with interest in consumer drones rising, 3D Robotics released the Solo, its first smart drone with technology that was preprogrammed to make it easy for even beginners to fly. But production delays and performance problems kept the Solo from grabbing the market before the entrance of a cheaper smart drone from Chinas DJI Technology, said Gartner senior research analyst Gerald Van Hoy.

The Solo tanked, Van Hoy said. They had an advantage had they been able to release it on time. Because it took them so long, people already knew what DJI was going to come out with, so they could just wait.

3D Robotics had to slash prices to keep up with DJI, but that also cut its margins. The company says it now has 70 full-time employees; Forbes reported that it once had more than 350 employees. Forbes also reported the company closed offices and production facilities in San Diego and Tijuana and burned through about $100 million in venture funding. Anderson said the company has enough funding but declined to be specific.

Now, the company is turning from consumer to commercial drones, although it still sells a $500 consumer Solo. Anderson said the plan all along had been to start with consumer drones and be ready to go commercial when it was time to have them be a tool and not a toy.

It was no fun watching prices fall by 70 percent in nine months, but the good news is that weve really always been a software company, Anderson said. It just puts our software in a box. The box just happens to be a drone.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers report in May said the worldwide commercial drone market should rise from about $2 billion this year to $127 billion by 2020. Anderson said his company will concentrate on the $8 trillion per year worldwide construction industry.

With Site Scan, construction managers can send a Solo aloft in a preprogrammed flight path over a construction site. Using a high-resolution Sony camera, the drone captures images that can track, for example, the volume of dirt being moved or whether pipes or trenches are in the proper location.

Once the drone returns, the images are automatically downloaded into the cloud and integrated with computer-assisted design programs from San Rafaels Autodesk, which is an investor in 3D Robotics.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

But Van Hoy said the technology alone wont be enough, noting that 3D Robotics is already behind several commercial drone service competitors.

And 3D Robotics still has to sell its product to construction companies, he said.

I dont think they can compete all that well in the commercial market, not yet, unless they start building a durable drone thats designed to take a little bit of a beating, Van Hoy said.

Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: bevangelista@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChronicleBenny
While Tuesdays election results put a huge question mark in front of the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the head of the California health exchange has a clear message: Covered California is open for business.

The benefits for 2017 are there. They are in law and in contracts. The subsidies are there, Peter Lee, Covered Californias executive director, told The Chronicle on Thursday. The future is something we dont know  but we do think California and the experience of Covered California can provide lessons for the nation.

But how does Covered California encourage people to sign up for coverage under a federal law that President-elect Donald Trump promises to obliterate?

Trump has called on Congress to repeal and replace the law, often called Obamacare, but no one knows how that will happen and what will take its place. Even the updated health plan that Trumps team posted Thursday on his transition website did little to illuminate his strategy. It repeated his call to create high-risk insurance pools, give states more flexibility in administering their Medicaid programs and promote the sale of insurance across state lines.

President-elect Trumps health plan of a few paragraphs has virtually no detail, but just enough to raise major alarm about the significant threats to Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and our health system overall, said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, an advocacy organization that has supported the federal health law.

Whats clear is that dismantling President Obamas key health legislation cannot be done in a matter of days, or even months.

Under any scenario, if people sign up for coverage this year, it will be good for the next year, said health economist Ben Handel, an associate professor of economics at UC Berkeley. People probably are worrying if they are signing up in the markets, but I dont think they need to.

More than 20 million Americans have gained coverage because of the Affordable Care Act, either through the federal or state exchanges, which offer private insurance to people who do not have it through their jobs, or the expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor.

Covered California has enrolled about 1.4 million people, and more than 3.5 million Californians have gained coverage through Medi-Cal, the states Medicaid program.

Covered California has been clearly a standout among the exchanges  if not the most successful, certainly among the most successful, said Sandra Hunt, a principal in PricewaterhouseCoopers. If you repeal it, what do you do with regards to those people?

Hunt and other health experts agree that the exchanges, including Covered California, are unlikely to survive without the federal subsidies that help offset the cost of health insurance. Covered California officials say that about 90 percent of its beneficiaries receive some level of financial help to pay their premiums.

Rising insurance premiums have loomed large over the presidential campaign.

The government announced last month that the average cost of premiums for plans sold in the federal exchange jumped 25 percent for 2017. The news came after several major insurers, including UnitedHealth and Aetna, pulled back their offerings in the exchanges in parts of the country.

In California, premiums are rising by a weighted average of 13.2 percent, three times the modest 4 percent increases of the previous two years. Covered California still has enough health insurers offering coverage to provide some competition  11 statewide, though the number of options varies by region.

For San Francisco resident Audrey Carlson, who buys her insurance through Covered California, her main fear is not the premium hike shes facing  a whopping 27.7 percent next year for her Blue Shield of California policy.

Carlson, 60, is worried that some of the Affordable Care Acts insurance reforms  particularly the one that prohibits insurers from denying members coverage due to pre-existing medical conditions  will be revoked.

A lifelong runner, Carlson fears she will need a knee replacement. She worried that her 27-year-old son, who also gets coverage through the exchange, will have trouble getting coverage in the future because he underwent a test to rule out asthma.

Shes most concerned about the loss of coverage for those who are more financially strapped than she is. I can pay for health insurance, but there are so many who are just not able and will be ruined financially, she said.

Federal officials said more than 100,000 people signed up for health insurance plans through the federal exchange, HealthCare.gov, on Wednesday, the most since signups began on Nov. 1.

Covered Californias marketing and outreach blitz for open enrollment, which runs through Jan. 31, starts in earnest now. The state hopes to sign up as many as 400,000 more people.

Lees planned bus tour around the state, which starts Saturday in San Diego and ends Nov. 19 in Santa Cruz, will go on as planned  just without the bus.

We did make the judgment call that driving a big bus that seems like were in a big campaign was probably not right thing to do, he explained.

Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver
Two women and their 19-year-old son were found slain early Friday after officers responded to reports of gunfire at an East Oakland home that was partially on fire, officials and neighbors said.

Police said they and the FBI were investigating the incident as a triple homicide and detained a San Jose woman for questioning about her possible involvement.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 2 1 of 2 Show More Show Less 2 of 2 Kimberly Veklerov / The Chronicle / Kimberly Veklerov / The Chronicle Show More Show Less



At 12:21 a.m., police received a call about multiple gunshots on the 9400 block of Dunbar Drive, between 92nd and 98th avenues in the Elmhurst neighborhood, said Officer Johnna Watson, a spokeswoman for the Oakland Police Department. The caller told a dispatcher that a person was down in the street.

When officers arrived they found a man lying in front of the residence suffering from apparent stab wounds, police said. Officers later went into the house and found two women suffering from gunshot wounds, officials said.

All three victims died at the scene.

Oakland police Lt. Dom Arotzarena said the garage of the single-family home was on fire when officers arrived. He said the investigation was in its preliminary stages and did not release further information.

Firefighters responded to the fire shortly after officers got there and had it under control half an hour later, a fire dispatcher said. The cause of the blaze has not been determined.

FBI agents were processing the scene Friday for forensics and other evidence, officials said.

The house where the slaying occurred is in a newly developed residential neighborhood next to a shipping-container yard.

Nate Savage, 17, who lives a block away, said the victims were Benny Wright  one of his close friends  and Wrights adoptive mothers  Patricia Wright, 57, and Charlotte Silby, 55.

Benny Wright lived with Savage for most of his senior year at Berkeley High School when his parents temporarily kicked him out, Savage said.

He said he heard of the slayings from Benny Wrights brother, who attends Mississippi State University and was on his way back to the Bay Area on Friday.

Its not cool, an emotional Savage said. I dont even know what happened.

Ericka Matthews and her 21-year-old son, Erick, were startled when they heard about the triple slaying from a news report, and even more stunned when they realized the house where it happened was only two blocks away from where they live.

Its unnerving, Ericka Matthews said. Three people and the FBI, its not your typical murder case.

Matthews and her son had both slept through the gunshots and didnt hear any sirens, they said. Neither of them knew the people who were killed.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
The texts started coming in around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday. At first, the people I love and I were just talking, using our usual casual shorthand to describe what we were seeing on our TV screens.

Wtf.

Umm. Are you seeing this?

An hour later, things started to turn. The newscasters faces were lined with worry. I was at an election party that had begun boisterously, but now everyone was quiet. We all scrolled desperately through our phones, looking at the websites that were explaining how Hillary Clintons path to victory was narrowing by the minute. My group text messages, meanwhile, were growing quieter as well.

What is happening?

Agitated, I decided to go home and go to bed early. I didnt think Id be able to sleep well  and I was right about that  but neither did I see why it would be useful for me to stay up and tear my hair out. I turned off my phone, got into bed, and tossed and turned. Around 5 a.m., I got up again and turned on my phone. Now the text messages were coming in large horrified blocks, rife with exclamations and pictures.

Courtesy/Twitter

OMFG. I just woke up to this.

Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle

People are going to die. Climate change is game-over. This is not a drill.

I want you to get a gun. The police will not protect you.

I am beside myself. Im standing here crying.

We will all pay.

The people I love are overwhelmingly women, people of color, gay, Jewish or some combination of the above. Donald Trump ran on a platform against our humanity, our rights and our enfranchisement in America.

He told voters that he would be happy to wall out our families, to assault us, to ban us from entering the country, to break up our homes, to subject us to unspecified forces of law and order.

I was surprised, but only briefly, by Trumps victory. I studied American history, and anyone who has deep knowledge of it will tell you that racism, sexism, xenophobia and protectionist economic policy are not outliers in American politics but have in fact been a winning formula time and time again.

The surprise, for me, was that white voters were again so eager to buy into these cons that they fell for a man whos been a con in every other realm of life. They were so eager to believe in easy, ugly solutions that they gave the reins of government to a man who even they acknowledge is unfit for the job.

But they have, and the consequences will be grim.

Since Trump ran against my rights as a citizen and my worth as a human being, I wont be like a lot of other pundits, who will spend the next several months telling you its all going to be fine, and everything will be normal.

I dont have the luxury of their optimism. I have to take him at his word.

Heres the good news: When youre ready to take Donald Trump at his word  when youre ready to believe that his plan really is to take away you and your loved ones dignity, rights, health care and passports  well, then.

Then, my friends, you can respond to this election with the calm, furious focus that it deserves.

I fired up my computer. I put the kettle on for coffee. I glanced at the headlines, and noticed that the markets, if not the pundits, were taking Trumps campaign rhetoric as seriously as I was. Prison stocks were way up. Defense stocks were, too.

I let it sink in for a moment. Then I started taking action.

The first thing I did was to answer all of those early-morning texts. I wrote the same response to everyone. I love you and you are important.

To some readers, this may sound cloying. Its not. The great thing about having so many of your loved ones part of these accused communities is that weve had to practice banding together, and organizing, and drawing power from our belief in each other. Weve had to learn that this is a type of resistance.

Then I started making lists: organizations to donate to, stories to tell about marginalized people, a guide to the information, poems, the small candles of hope that have always been lit against this kind of darkness.

Let me know if you need it. I am not an in-the-streets activist, and maybe you arent, either. But there are many, many ways to resist injustice, and well need to use all of them. Do not despair, but do not turn away.

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 2 1 of 2 Courtesy George Retelas Show More Show Less 2 of 2 Courtesy George Retelas Show More Show Less



The World War II documentary Eleven will receive its San Francisco premiere at the Legion of Honor on Veterans Day, which is also the 11th day of the 11th month.

Linking all those 11s has been the goal of East Bay filmmaker George Retelas in the 11 years he spent researching and making the film about Carrier Air Group 11, a fighting outfit that flew off the USS Hornet in Alameda.
What a time and date to make history: 11 a.m. on 11/11.

The Chronicles front page from Nov. 11, 1918, covers the conclusion of World War I after four years, three months and two weeks of unprecedented bloodshed.

The world war will end this morning at 6 oclock, Washington time, 11 oclock Paris time, the story read. The armistice was signed by the German representatives at midnight.

More than 38 million members of the military from both the Allies and the Central Powers were killed, wounded or went missing during the Great War. More than 9 million troops died, along with at least 7 million civilians. Europe was redrawn and revolutions came to many of the nations involved. The world was forever changed, and at a staggering cost.

In San Francisco, as across much of the world, jubilation reigned when news of the armistice broke.

San Francisco went wild with joy when it received news that the world war was ended and a victorious peace once more has rested upon American arms, read another story on The Chronicles front page.

The Associated Press flashed the news that the greatest war of history had ended in the greatest victory for democracy and humanity of all time. Ten minutes later bonfires were burning on the highest point of the Twin Peaks, Scotts Hill at Twenty-Second and Wisconsin streets and Telegraph Hill.

See more front pages: Go to SFChronicle.com/covers to search a database of hundreds of Chronicle Covers articles that showcase the newspapers history.

Chronicle Covers highlights one classic Chronicle newspaper page from our archive every day for 366 days. Library director Bill Van Niekerken and producers Kimberly Chua, Michelle Devera and Jillian Sullivan contributed to the project. Tim ORourke is the executive producer and editor of SFChronicle.com. Email: torourke@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TimothyORourke

More from the Archive The Vault Home of the San Francisco Chronicle's archive and more than 150 years of journalism covering the Bay Area and beyond.

(Click to enlarge)




At least 26 employees at a San Francisco Recology Center were sickened Friday morning after a hazardous-materials situation inside the companys Pier 96 building, fire officials said.

The incident began about 7:30 a.m. after employees performing routine recyclable sorting began to fall ill, said Eric Potashner, a Recology spokesman.

The workers were sifting through standard materials people throw in the trash, but some items, such as paint and household cleaners, can become hazardous when mixed together, officials said.

The sickened workers suffered various symptoms ranging from itchy eyes to vomiting, Potashner said. Officials estimated about 65 to 70 employees were inside at the time. Two victims were taken to the hospital while others were treated at the scene, said Lt. Jonathan Baxter, a San Francisco Fire Department spokesman.

Center officials did not know what material or materials caused the incident. Hazardous materials workers were assessing the scene.

San Francisco Fire Department sent out a tweet about 8:20 a.m. reporting firefighters were on scene of a unknown hazardous materials incident in the area. The department had temporarily issued a shelter-in-place order. Fire officials later said there was no threat to the general public.

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.

This is not going to be a threat to the bay or general public outside the Pier 96 building, Baxter said.

Workers at the center generally wear hard hats and gloves, and some opt to wear masks, Potashner said.

Jenna Lyons and Sarah Ravani are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com, sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJourno, @SarRavani
A pedestrian was killed and two journalists in a news van were injured in a three-vehicle collision Thursday afternoon in San Jose, authorities said.

The driver of one vehicle, who crashed into a car and the news van near San Jose City Hall around 4:30 p.m., was detained. Police officers were investigating alcohol as a factor in the collision, according to the San Jose Police Department.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Graffiti-lined streets. Shattered windows. Boarded-up storefronts. Destruction had returned to Oakland.

When the sun came up over the East Bay on Thursday, the sweeping damage from the previous nights anti-Donald Trump protests became evident as residents, business owners and city officials set about cleaning up the staggering mess.

This is irritating, Steve Suzio said as he swept up glass from his shattered windows and door at Oakland Coin and Jewelry Exchange along Broadway. I understand people are upset, but why take it out on local businesses?

For many like Suzio here in the citys small but vibrant downtown, this kind of vandalism is nothing new.

Oakland traditionally has been ground zero for Bay Area civil unrest - like the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements - and factions of demonstrators invariably turn their frustrations toward businesses in the community.

Spray-painted graffiti spelling out F Trump was scrawled in multicolored swaths covering the walls along downtown city streets. Windows were punched out or shattered into spider-web patterns at banks, cell phone stores, fast-food joints, and empty retail spaces.

Two city workers argued Thursday morning about whether a red spatter on the side of a Chase Bank on 14th Street and Broadway was paint or blood. After a few minutes of discussion, they agreed it was blood.

Police arrested 30 people during the unruly demonstration. Several thousand people had gathered peacefully at Frank Ogawa Plaza before night fell and things got ugly.

The masses in Oakland were among scores of protests around the country following Trumps election as president of the United States.

From the onset of his candidacy, Trump proved to be a divisive candidate whose bombastic language targeted Mexicans, Muslims and women. But his message of disrupting the status quo helped many frustrated Americans look past his indiscretions and propelled him to the presidency.

Many on Wednesday, though, were not satisfied with how democracy played out. Some in the mob set about lighting fires, spray-painting everything in sight and shattering windows with crowbars as others launched bottles and rocks at officers. Police deployed tear gas and three officers were injured in the melee, officials said.

I guess I underestimated how many rabble-rousers would come to town for the party, Suzio said. The problem is the people who cause problems blend in with everyone else.

Suzio said his shop was wrecked back in 2009 during the protests following the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART cop on New Years Day. He estimates Wednesdays damage will cost about $5,000 but he wasnt ready to start fixing the windows. Another protest was scheduled in Oakland on Thursday evening.

Were going to have to decide whether to board everything up, he said. Well get through. The best you can do is the best you can do.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf reached out to the businesses during a news conference Thursday morning, explaining that the city was making an effort to curb the perpetual destruction.

This is the very difficult set of circumstances we are dealing with, she said. We are deeply sorry that your businesses continue to be targets, but we want you to know we are working hard to employ tactics that will prevent this from happening in the future.

Down the street from Suzios shop on Broadway, 24-year-old Brandon Durant was trying to make sense of why the front glass door was shattered when he got to work.

Hes an intern coordinator at SPUR, an urban planning nonprofit that works with cities to make sure theres affordable housing and that growth does not displace people.

I understand the frustration, but I think people need to relax and think about what to do next, he said. Destroying things, that doesnt make sense to me.

Durant looked out across the street at Oaklands Cathedral Building built in 1913 at the confluence of Telegraph Avenue and Broadway. The walls were covered in spray paint. The ground-floor windows shattered.

That building is iconic - its crazy, Durant said.

Not everything was laid to waste, though. Pauline Baldado owns Cafe Gabriela on Broadway with her sister. Their business has always been spared from the vandalism during Oakland protests.

We are blessed, she said, unable to explain why her coffee shop is spared. We want to rebuild Oakland not destroy it. Were a small business and we do our part  so knock on wood.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
You know who you are.

I recognize the all-black uniform. You stand out in the crowds of protesters as they walk Oaklands streets.

I know you think Im one of your enemies, but Im not. Because of your indignation, you are unable to see that Im similar to you.

I know you think you know the law, but you dont. I know my rights, and you cant tell me what I can film on a public street.

I can take your verbal abuse, but you will stop putting your hands on my body. You are done pushing me around, trying to take from my hand the phone Im always holding.

And you, the reader, might think Im talking to Oakland police officers, but Im not. This message is for those who attempt to hide themselves under the veil of protest as they smash windows, graffiti sidewalks and walls, and set fires in the streets.

Im tired of watching you desecrate The Town.

Michael Short/Special To The Chronicle

While covering the first two of what might be many nights of protests in Oakland, Ive seen people release their frustration by rallying in the streets. I know the pain of women, queers, Muslims and others who, based on the rhetoric spouted by our president-elect and his supporters, now fear they could be targeted every time they leave their homes.

Welcome to my world  and a reality shared by people of color since this country was founded.

Dont you think we should get to know each other a bit more? Lets swap life stories. The next four years could bring the darkest days in generations  or we could use the time to build something thats more representative of our diversity. But first, we should talk to the people who want to burn Oakland.

You know who you are. You were one of a few hundred in downtown on Tuesday after our new president  oh, this hurts to write  Donald Trump was elected. You came back on Wednesday night and moved among the 7,000 mostly peaceful protesters who voiced anger at the American political system and called for police reform.

But as hard as you tried, you didnt blend well with the masses.

Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle

I saw you bust the storefront window of Oaklandish, the Oakland-centric apparel company on Broadway. I watched you scurry as protesters yelled for you to stop. Why did you run? Did you run that fast to your voting station on election day?

I saw you hanging back as concerned onlookers peered into Good Mother, the art gallery on 13th Street, as the shards of glass under their feet crunched like chewed potato chips. You smirked as an employee, shielding his eyes with his arm, knocked jagged pieces of glass from the window frame with his skateboard. You laughed out loud when a young woman ran up to kick him in the rear because she thought she was protecting the store from a vandal.

Do you want us to fight each other? Oh, I understand: You believe in anarchy. I saw several of your symbols Wednesday night among the scribbled tags on the windows and doors you werent able to break.

You werent done on 13th Street, because you then tried to light overturned trash cans on fire, but Assan Jethmal, who owns Good Mother with his three brothers, confronted you.

I just dont get what the point is, Jethmal told me outside the gallery. This just has no message. I knew they were going to take it to another level.

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.

Your tactics ruined the message, and perhaps the demonstration itself.

Oakland police didnt allow the demonstration to move up Broadway toward Auto Row. Instead, the protesters walked in a circle for hours with Broadway and Telegraph Avenue as the main strips. The containment fed your frustration.

As the police marched to clear the street so a fire outside Ubers future home on Telegraph could be extinguished, a billowing American flag was projected onto the side of the building. A helicopter noisily chopped the air overhead, spotlighting the fire below. Flash bangs were followed by tear gas.

I grabbed my friend and held her against a fence so she wouldnt get trampled. Tears streamed down our faces as we choked.

You had arrived with your face already covered by a bandanna, because a provocation that required such a response by police is what you wanted. But why? What changes when you break a window in Oakland?

Tell me youre not out here wreaking havoc for kicks while others struggle to make sense of an uncertain future.

Otis R. Taylor Jr. is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist whose column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr
Within a day of Donald Trumps victory, the idea of California seceding from the union (hashtag CalExit) was quickly replacing move to Canada as a wistful, whimsical punch line for Democrats feeling blue. But in many ways, the state has already declared its independence from the nation east of the Sierra.

Californians dont drive the same cars, drill for oil offshore or treat immigrants as other states do. This week, the states voters extended an income tax on the wealthy, tightened gun laws, and abolished limits on bilingual classes, all steps at odds with the applause lines at Trump rallies.

Repeal and replace Obamacare? Not here. The state adopted the Affordable Care Act with gusto and verve, delivering coverage for 1.3 million people.

Small wonder Trump lost California by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio and only dropped in for a handful of fundraising visits. His brand doesnt sell here.

Thats not to say a new president waving a fresh mandate cant undermine the California way in substantive ways. Trumps threats on deportations, protectionist trade, water use and energy could well play out on the Left Coast.

Beginning with a string of governors, both Republican and Democrat, this state took an independent path on lawmaking that resisted national pressures. In 2006, it approved a carbon trade policy that taxed polluters and rewarded low-emitting industries.

It won a prolonged legal battle with automakers to curb tailpipe pollutants and raise vehicle mileage amounts. Fuel here has lower levels of smog-producing ingredients. Three governors in a row have increased limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Ever-increasing amounts of electricity are due to come from sun and wind, not fossil fuel sources. In California, climate-change action is not just viewed as the right thing for the planet; its a boon to our proud and prospering clean tech industry.

Immigration is a different story, too. The sanctuary city concept that protects law-abiding undocumented immigrants is in place. They can obtain a drivers license, receive medical treatment at public hospitals and attend schools right up to the University of California. Rules that hamstring bilingual instruction were largely wiped away with the passage of Proposition 58.

Other issues remain unpredictable, underscoring Washingtons essential role in the states future. The high-speed rail project connecting the Bay Area with Southern California is taking shape ever so slowly. Its opposed by Republicans as wasteful. But it may appeal to Trump, whos emphasized job creation and the need to upgrade inadequate public infrastructure such as airports, freeways and rail lines. The $68 billion project will test this pledge.

Washington will also be instrumental in settling quarrels over water sharing among cities, farms and environmentalists. Earlier this year, Trump famously insisted there was no drought in California, a fact-free declaration that pleased agriculture pressing for more water from depleted rivers. Trumps choice of appointees to regulatory and environmental agencies will be crucial in achieving a solution or provoking another battle in the water wars.

San Francisco will remain San Francisco, said Mayor Ed Lee in an attempt to calm and reassure a seething electorate that a Trump presidency wont overturn the citys tolerant and pioneering spirit.

We can understand the frustrations behind the #CalExit movement. But seriously, folks, this is no time to leave a nation that needs our innovation, our appreciation for diversity and the environment  and our votes in the next election.
Its a mosaic of madness that famed theater director Robert Wilson and the great dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov have created in the disturbing Letter to a Man, which arrived on the West Coast on Thursday, Nov. 10, at UC Berkeleys Zellerbach Hall, a Cal Performances co-commission. This second of these artists collaborations melds word, image and movement in a manner that yields more than its share of magical moments.

As a solo vehicle for the 67-year-old Baryshnikov, it could not be bettered. True, theres not a lot of dancing on display, but whats there  a turn at the Charleston or the black bottom or the mere act of wafting two branches through the air  reveals a man who negotiates space with uncommon elegance. Choreographer Lucinda Childs takes credit for collaboration in movement.

The piece, running 70 minutes, is about dance because it is a meditation on the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who after dazzling the world of the Ballet Russes, married, suffered rejection by impresario Sergei Diaghilev and was institutionalized for three decades. In that period, he kept an extraordinary diary, the unexpurgated version of which was published in our time by dance writer Joan Acocella. Christian Dumais-Lvowski drew his concise text from that volume.

Letter to a Man delivers the essence of that diarys frenzied ruminations and those moments when the clouds clear. Nijinsky in one page recalls his sexual life with his wife, Romola; in the next, he addresses God.

From the beginning, Wilson stresses the obsessiveness of mental instability. Dressed in tails, a white-faced Baryshnikov sits on a chair reviling his mother-in-law. The dancer speaks sometimes in Russian (subtitles provided), sometimes in English (live and recorded). Childs voice joins the mix, and although theres a good pastiche score by Hal Willner (ranging from Arvo Part to Lets Misbehave), the voices add up to a music of their own.

Wilson lights and designs the project with his customary wizardry and simplicity. Who else can make shadow so gorgeous? Simplicity breeds eloquence. Baryshnikov gazes up at a barred window and the moment speaks volumes about his incarceration (which lasted till his death after World War II). A beguiling moment finds cutout animals quacking their way across the stage, while white roses descend and pelt the performer. In a sensational depiction of madness, Baryshnikov, lit in scarlet, gyrates in front of one of Nijinskys drawings, its lines gradually covering the panel behind the dancer.

Formally, Letter to a Man starts near the end of Nijinskys life in 1945 Budapest and jumps around in time. The text is the tip-off, and dance fans will appreciate the dish. Former lover Diaghilev is dismissed as old-fashioned, and Nijinsky sneers at his successor, Leonide Massine.

The final moments deliver tremendous theatrical power. Back to the audience, Baryshnikov observes a film of men moving slowly through a barren landscape, and the effect is intensely sad. Then we are in a small theater, the curtains part and the dancer bows warmly to us. He is, after all that myth-making, an entertainer.

Allan Ulrich is The San Francisco Chronicles dance correspondent.

Letter to a Man: Directed by Robert Wilson. Presented by Cal Performances. Through Sunday, Nov. 13. $50-$225, subject to change. Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way at Dana St., UC Berkeley. (510) 642-9988. www.calperformances.org

To see a video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKgJTsbe_5o
Fair warning: Nouveau wines dont taste like wine as you most likely know it. They can be cloudy, spritzy, funky, reduced, candied and sometimes, if not fermented all the way, still a little sweet. By their nature, these are not resolved wines.

As if mid-November werent early enough to be releasing a vintages wine, I tasted these wines three to four weeks in advance of those already-premature release dates. Several of these wines were going to be racked or filtered after I tasted them, which would presumably enhance their clarity and stability. In other words: Were giving them some benefit of the doubt.

Scribe Pinot Noir Nouveau Carneros 2016 ($32): A prime example of nouveaus bubble gum aroma: This smells like Hubba Bubba, and is nearly that color too. Well structured, with a firm acid frame, and not very generous of fruit, its light and tart, like a grapefruit.

Broc Coucou Cabernet Franc Nouveau Santa Barbara County 2016 ($24): Opaque and crimson-colored, this smells like pine cones (thats the Cab Franc) and Swedish Fish candy (thats the carbonic maceration). Its fruit flavors are tart, not lush, dominated on the palate by juicy cranberry.

Coturri Young Carignan 2016 ($22): The outlier nouveau, since its made without any carbonic maceration. Its simply a conventionally made wine that vintner Tony Coturri releases early. (He releases a similar version of the same wine, its blend slightly adjusted, on a more-normal timeline, too.) A majority-Carignan base, vibrant but not particularly fruity, gets some depth and punch from smaller percentages of Zinfandel and Syrah. Its very slightly sweet.

Cruse Wine Co. Valdiguie Nouveau Napa Valley 2016 ($20): Formerly known as Napa Gamay, the Valdiguie grape bears similarities to (actual) Gamay, which is the major grape in Beaujolais. The wine shows a lot of varietal character: earth, bramble, dusty red fruit. The palate is plump, set nicely by acid. Brachs strawberry hard candy  those wrapped sweets that your grandmother used to keep in a bowl in the living room  comes to mind.

Poe Pinot Nouveau Olcese Vineyard Sonoma County 2016 ($22): Fresh and intensely floral, with an aroma of sweet red cherry, Poes nouveau shows spice, earth and fruit in nice proportions: warm baking spices, a clean, pure apple flavor and damp leaves.

Stirm Wine Co. Riesling Nouveau Kick-On Ranch Santa Barbara County 2016 ($16): A pale wine expressing aromas very typical of carbonic maceration: cotton candy and banana candy  and an aspect that recalls a candy necklace. Its juicy but has a sour austerity to its fruit, with a subtle herbal component, manifesting as lemon verbena.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Purity Marsanne Calaveras County, Sierra Foothills 2016: Because nouveau wasnt weird enough, this is also an orange wine  a white wine made with skin contact. It smells like maple and guava. In typical orange-wine fashion, its brassy on the palate, with a chewy, nut-skin quality. Its as if those savory characters suppress the wines extreme fruitiness.

Bedrock Wine Co. Zinfandel Esola Vineyard Amador County 2016: Bedrock plans to blend this carbonic Zinfandel with some carbonic Cinsault from the Bechtoldt Vineyard in Lodi to produce the 2016 nouveau. (At press time, they still hadnt been blended into a finished wine.) The Esola Zin, for its part, is persistently floral, underscored by a banana-candy aroma. Tropical fruit  think green mango  comes in on the palate, with substantial (for a nouveau) tannin.

Methode Sauvage Cabernet Franc Nouveau Bates Ranch Santa Cruz Mountains 2016 ($26): Exuberant, juicy fruit dominates this wine, which has flavors of crushed blueberry, sweet black cherry and Triple Berry Gushers candy. The spicy, herbal signatures of Cab Franc grow more prominent as the wine opens up in the glass.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

While no major protests were being organized for Friday evening in Oakland or San Francisco following widespread demonstrations since Tuesdays election of Donald Trump, events were likely to occur this weekend.

At the same, time youth protests continued during the day on Friday as about 100 San Francisco high school students peacefully marched from the Mission District to City Hall.

Protesters were planning to meet outside the Civic Center BART station in San Francisco around noon on Saturday before marching through the city. The protest is expected to focus on Trumps election as president and the U.S. Electoral College system, according to event organizers, who say it will be nonviolent.

Another protest was planned for noon on Saturday in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland.

A rally scheduled to take place on 3 p.m. Sunday at Oaklands Lake Merritt called for peaceful demonstrators to join hands in a circle around the roughly 3.4 mile lake to stand up against racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamophobia.

A march was also scheduled for 11 a.m. Sunday at San Franciscos Golden Gate Park beginning at John F. Kennedy Drive, directly behind the de Young Museum. Protesters told people to wear safety pins as they march to Ocean Beach to show support for victims of hate.

Protests broke out in the Bay Area almost immediately after Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election early Wednesday. About 200 protesters took to the streets of Oakland and surged onto Highway 24, where one demonstrator, a 20-year-old woman, was struck by a car and suffered major injuries.

Since then, protests have occurred night and day. On Wednesday and Thursday, thousands of high school students walked out of classes and marched in the streets of cities throughout the Bay Area, including Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco.

Later both nights, thousands marched through downtown Oakland and San Francisco. Protesters were rowdier in Oakland, where some set fires, smashed windows, and tagged city landmarks with graffiti.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said Friday reaction to the election was understandable and that the city would continue to try to deescalate violence caused by a very small group of cowardly vandals who used the protests to shield their acts.

Peaceful protests are the bedrock of democracy  for Oaklanders, a sacred right, she said. That is a beautiful thing that is something we cherish.

Thirty people were arrested Wednesday night in Oakland for alleged offenses that include vandalism, assault on an officer, failure to disperse, unlawful assembly and possession of a firearm, officials said. Three officers were hurt, though police didnt say how.

At least 11 people were arrested in Oakland late Thursday night and into early Friday morning, according to the Oakland Police Department, as hundreds of protesters took to the citys streets in a march authorities said wasnt planned in advance.

One of the arrested had a cache of Molotov cocktails, said Officer Johnna Watson, a spokeswoman for the department. The 11 arrests, as well as seven citations, were for crimes such as assault on police officers, vandalism, failure to disperse and public intoxication.

Chronicle staff writers Kimberly Veklerov and Michael Bodley contributed to this report.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJourno
A Superior Court judge is poised to compel HomeAway to give San Francisco detailed information on its vacation-rental hosts so the city can ensure theyre paying the hotel tax and business registration fees.

San Francisco Treasurer Jose Cisneros subpoenaed host records from HomeAway a year ago, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera went to court in June seeking to force HomeAway to comply.

Judge Harold Kahn rejected HomeAways contention that the subpoena violated the First Amendment and the federal Stored Communications Act. He disagreed with the Texas companys assertion that the citys request, which sought contact and booking information for all local hosts from Jan. 1, 2012 to Oct. 5, 2015, was burdensome or overbroad. He then stayed his order, giving the company until Nov. 21 to decide whether it will appeal.

HomeAway, which was purchased for $3.9 billion a year ago by travel giant Expedia, said it does not comment on pending litigation. HomeAway and its VRBO subsidiary have about 1,770 vacation listings in San Francisco, according to a city report. The company has stated that most are second homes, meaning they do not comply with city rules that only primary residences can be rented to travelers.

This action is an important step in our efforts to collect transient occupancy taxes from short-term rentals operating in San Francisco, said San Francisco Treasurer Jose Cisneros in an email. Businesses in San Francisco cant ignore our laws. (This) action should put on strong notice anyone who has yet to register their business and collect and remit taxes as required.

The decision could be relevant to Airbnb and other vacation-hosting companies as well.The Superior Courts order ... supports (San Franciscos) authority to seek similar information from hosting platforms in connection with future investigations and enforcement actions, said Jim Emery, an assistant city attorney.

While San Francisco and Airbnb often butt heads, tax collection is one area where they agree. Airbnb collects and remits the citys 14 percent hotel tax for all guest stays, and provides information on hosts and guest stays to the tax collector. By law, that information is confidential.

For hosts who only use Airbnb, there is no filing or payment obligation because Airbnb, as a qualified website company, has committed to pay and file on behalf of all their hosts, said David Augustine, the city tax collector.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

President-elect Donald Trump has made a lot of threats regarding foreign trade.

In the course of his campaign, Trump said he would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enact steep tariffs against China and Mexico, and possibly even pull out of the World Trade Organization, among other things.

But if he were to follow through on those promises, the U.S. would likely face a trade war that would hit California and Washington hard in the labor market, as well as impacting the rest of the U.S. economy, according to a September analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).

In California, San Mateo and San Francisco counties would be hit hardest in the business-services sector, while Alameda and Santa Clara counties would be hit hard in at least one specific sector.

Washington state, under a full trade-war scenario, could expect to lose more than 5 percent of its jobs -- at least 170,000 jobs and the highest percentage in the nation -- the analysis found.

The fact that the trade organization analyzed Trump's and Hillary Clinton's trade policies at all is something of a rarity in itself.

"Since international economic policy has largely been an area of continuity and bipartisanship, at least since World War II, there has not been the need to examine trade in previous elections," the authors wrote in the PIIE analysis. "In this election, however, the need is pressing for an unbiased, transparent, and evidence-based analysis."

The report noted that both Trump's and Clinton's trade policies could have negative impacts on the American economy, but Clinton's policies would have had mild impacts compared to the potential to incite a trade war and drive a recession from Trump's policies.

A trade war would be anything but good for the U.S.

"Enormous economic damage to U.S. firms, workers, and communities could ensue from a trade war long before the legal battlefield is cleared," the authors wrote. "It would be a mistake to suppose that the US courts will intervene to stop a trade war."

Though many of Trump's proposals would likely be legal initially, opponents would likely challenge them in Congress and in the courts. But it would take several years before either body of government could -- if at all -- reverse his policies, the analysis found.

"U.S. citizens and firms should not rely on the U.S. courts or Congress to shield them from the consequences of Trump's threats, should he carry them out," it read.

A trade war could take many shapes, but an "asymmetrical" trade war -- if other nations retaliated more harshly than just with steep tariffs -- could have more sweeping impacts that would also be harder to overcome.

China, for example, could end imports of U.S. aircraft, hitting Boeing disproportionately hard as China picks up a major share of Boeing's sales.

The Seattle metro area could lose 31,000 jobs -- 2 percent of private employment -- due to Boeing cuts, according to the analysis.

China could also end its use of U.S. business services, cutting another 4,000 King County jobs, the report found.

Any legal challenges would take years to complete, possibly longer than Trump's time in office.

The results could be grim at best.

"The analysis presented here shows that the trade war these policies is likely to spark would send the U.S. economy into a recession and cost millions of Americans their jobs," the report read. "His (Trump's) policies place at risk the livelihoods of millions of Americans, most of whom probably do not think of their jobs as tied to international trade. The American casualties in this trade war would be drawn disproportionately from the ranks of lower-income and lower-skilled workers."

RELATED: GOP security experts: Trump would be 'most reckless president' in our history

RELATED: Clinton wins popular vote, loses presidency: Time to change Electoral College?

Daniel DeMay covers Seattle culture, business and transportation for seattlepi.com. He can be reached at 206-448-8362 or danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay.
CANONSBURG, Pa.  A gunman with a history of domestic abuse fatally shot a police officer and wounded another on Thursday before he and a woman were found dead after a fight at their apartment, authorities said.

Officer Scott Bashioum and the other officer were responding separately to an emergency call from neighbors at around 3:15 a.m. when they were ambushed upon their arrival and immediately shot, state police Trooper Melinda Bondarenka said. The officers had arrived almost simultaneously, though authorities said other details of the initial confrontation were unclear.
San Francisco police have used force on more African Americans this year than on any other racial group, according to Police Department data.

Police have reported 2,787 instances in which officers have used force since Jan. 1, 45 percent of which involved African Americans  1,266 total. Hispanics and whites have each been on the receiving end of officers use of force in 23 percent of incidents, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have accounted for 8 percent of the total.

The pattern was consistent into the third quarter of the year, newly released data show. Of the 915 incidents of police use of force from July through September, nearly half  448  involved African Americans. Blacks make up less than 6 percent of the citys population.

The data warrants further analysis, and the SFPD is looking to partner with an academic institution to delve deeper into the numbers, including examination of factors leading to these reported uses of force, said Officer Grace Gatpandan, a police spokeswoman.

The Police Department requires that officers report all uses of force, including pointing a firearm at a person, using physical control, striking someone with a fist or object, using a carotid choke hold, or using a firearm, baton, pepper spray or a less-than-lethal beanbag round.

The most common is pointing a gun at a person, which until December was not a reportable use of force under department policy.

There were no instances of officers using deadly force in the most recent quarterly report. In the previous quarter, covering April through June, there were two  the April 7 shooting of Luis Gongora, an unarmed Mexican man, on a Mission District street, and the May 19 shooting of Jessica Williams, an unarmed black woman who allegedly drove a stolen car at officers near the Bayview neighborhood.

The Williams shooting prompted the resignation the same day of Police Chief Greg Suhr. Acting Chief Toney Chaplin is one of three finalists Mayor Ed Lee is considering to replace Suhr, sources told The Chronicle.

The Police Departments quarterly reports are required under legislation that the Board of Supervisors passed last year. Supervisor Malia Cohen, who introduced the measure, said the data showing a disproportionate number of uses of force on African Americans wholeheartedly support the anecdotal evidence weve been hearing from the community for years.

Many use-of-force incidents this year have involved officers who work out of Bayview Station, a predominantly black neighborhood that is in Cohens district. The Bayview was where Mario Woods, an African American stabbing suspect, was shot to death by five officers on Dec. 2. The shooting spurred reform efforts and a review by the U.S. Department of Justices community-policing division.

In its report, which listed 272 recommendations for the police force, the Justice Department found that race and ethnicity were not significantly associated with the severity of force that San Francisco officers use. But it did conclude that the majority of deadly use-of-force incidents involved nonwhites and said, The SFPD must commit to reviewing and understanding the reasons for the disparate use of deadly force.

Following the Woods shooting, the Police Commission passed a new use-of-force policy that put more emphasis on de-escalation techniques. The policy is stalled in negotiations with the police union, which is resisting a provision that would bar officers from shooting at moving vehicles.

Last month, Ronald Davis, director of the Justice Departments Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, said shooting at moving vehicles was a bad practice, and called for the union to stop drawing out negotiations.

Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @VivianHo
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Updated November 11, 4:30 p.m.: This article has been updated to reflect the more current number of signatures.

There is one thing that would prevent President-elect Donald Trump from becoming the United States Commander-in-Chief, and over three million signees are hoping to make it happen.

A Change.org petition created by a person named Elijah Berg would appeal to the electors of the electoral college to vote for Hillary Clinton, regardless of if their state voted for Donald Trump. This loophole is, to put it simply, rarely used, and when it is, it's not used very effectively.

When a political party wins in a particular state, it sends its selected electors to the electoral college to cast a vote that officially decides who the next president will be. The idea is that the elector will vote as their party dictates, and in 29 states, these electors are legally required to do so. However, in other states like Nevada, Texas, Georgia, and Minnesota, they are technically able to vote for whichever candidate they want, or to not vote at all. These voters are called "faithless electors."

Additionally, if there is a faithless elector voting on behalf of a state that legally mandates its electors to vote along party lines, the penalty is relatively small (in Washington, for example, the fine is $1,000).

There have been 157 faithless voters in American history so far, according to FairVote, and they've never swung an election before. In Clinton's case, she would need more than 20 Republican faithless electors to vote for her, per the New York Post.

The petitioners are hoping to make such a request of those electors with the Change.org page, which has been signed over three million times.

"We are calling on the Electors to ignore their states' votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton," the petition reads. "Why? Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic."

According to the National Archives, no faithless elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged.



Read Alyssa Pereira's latest stories, and follow her on Twitter at @alyspereira. Send her news tips at apereira@sfchronicle.com.
Who speaks for Earth?

If scientists ever succeed in making contact with extraterrestrial beings, who gets to steer the conversation? Indeed, how do we even have a conversation? Despite what Gene Roddenberry told you, any real aliens command of English will be meager.

A major new sci-fi film, Arrival, deals with these and other frequently ignored matters. Its unconventional style is both understated and cerebral. This is not a shoot-em-up alien flick; rather, the makers have emphasized empathy and character development, an approach that may disappoint middle school boys, but is refreshing for the rest of us.

The first thing that becomes obvious once the film gets into its second reel is that it has veered from the usual playbook for cosmic encounters. In nine out of ten films featuring space beings, the aliens  presumably cranky from a peanutless trip of hundreds of trillions of miles  take it out on the locals. A favorite amusement is to level cities and zap the citizenry. The hunt is on, and the peasants are the pheasants. Cue the computer-generated imagery.

That, at least, makes for a straightforward story line, and is an excuse for an alien wilding in which iconic buildings are the first to go.

But the visitors in Arrival arent interested in giving postcard cities instant urban renewal. Theyve got some problem in their future that only our descendants can solve. Consequently, theyre here to negotiate and play nice.

Unfortunately, theres still that pesky language barrier. A linguist (Amy Adams) and a theoretical physicist (Jeremy Renner) are brought to bear, seeking ways to converse with these squid-like guests.

Theres a faint hint of reality in this, because honest-to-goodness academics have thought about how we might deal with the language problem should our radio telescopes pick up a signal from another world. Some scientists have proposed devising patter based on mathematics. My preference would be to simply compile a picture dictionary. Even a few hundred words might be adequate for simple conversation of the kind found in most dive bars.

In the film, this latter approach is taken and, gratifyingly, works out. The calamari creatures are soon spelling out sentences in their own inefficient writing style while bellowing like a sousaphone quartet. Its better banter than what Chris Columbus was able to manage with the Caribbean natives.

But even aside from the chit-chat, you have to admire the innovative way in which Arrival depicts its aliens. Central Castings little gray guys, with their glabrous complexions, big eyes, and anthropomorphic build, have been jettisoned in favor of large, shadowy creatures who stay behind glass in their own life-sustaining atmosphere. Indeed, you might suspect that they share some evolutionary heritage with redwood trees, given their preference for a foggy environment.

Whatever theyre breathing, it cant be put in tanks, cause these aliens never leave their spaceships. Thats novel too. Imagine sending humans to the moon, but with instructions to keep the hatch closed and never, ever take a small step for your species. And unlike the interiors of most interstellar rockets, the ones in Arrival are devoid of flashing lights, computer screens, knobs, dials, white plastic, or any other geeky accouterments. Their vessels are more spartan than Leonidas.

And then theres the aliens peculiar conception of time that, like their writing style, is somehow circular. I had a vague unease that this probably violates fundamental physics, but at least its something new in an invasion film.

One concern: While its not a certainty that these aliens are sea creatures, that seems a good bet. After all, they have tentacles and a pair of arms that can mess up the furniture by belching gallons of ink. But these guys are big, and I figure that, given their unthreatening behavior, theyre vulnerable to ending up as delicacies at Japanese restaurants. Best estimate: at least two thousand sushi rolls per alien.

How refreshing to think that visitors from another world have landed, and the cookbook applies to them.

Aliens have been the go-to bad guys for movies ever since the Soviet Union imploded, at which time humorless villains with Slavic accents were replaced by extraterrestrials marinated in mucus. That was good for Hollywood, as these computer-generated characters didnt argue about residuals. However, like many film fixtures, most aliens have become typecast and are vaguely similar from one film to the next.

Not here. Arrival dances to the beat of a different drum, and  because of its imaginative take on familiar situations  will still be buzzing your brain the day after you see it.
Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney found himself fighting backlash to a post-Election Day email he sent to employees Wednesday that asked employees who didn't agree with the company's "culture of support and inclusiveness" to resign.

The missive was sent to more than 1,000 Grubhub employees Wednesday in response to past statements made by President-elect Donald Trump.

"While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr. Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior - and these views, have no place at Grubhub," Maloney wrote in his email.

Maloney pledged to fight for the dignity of his employees, should any of them feel scared following Trump's election to the presidency:

As we all try to understand what this vote means to us, I want to affirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and everyone else here at Grubhub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States.

If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here. We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team.

Shortly after the email went public in a Fox News article on Thursday, Grubhub customers vowed not to use the online food-ordering app. Many took to Twitter with the hashtag #boycottgrubhub, the Chicago Tribune reported, encouraging others to stop using the business.

Meanwhile, Fox News also reported that Maloney said "almost 20 percent" of his employees have thanked him for his words and that he was "not embarrassed by it."

More for you Protestors Take To The Streets For Third Night

When asked for further comment on the email, Grubhub released a statement from Maloney on the controversy: "Some of the statements in my email have been misconstrued. I want to clarify that I did not ask for anyone to resign if they voted for Trump. (emphasis theirs) I would never make such a demand. To the contrary, the message of the email is that we do not tolerate discriminatory activity or hateful commentary in the workplace, and that we will stand up for our employees.

"Grubhub welcomes and accepts employees with all political beliefs, no matter who they voted for in this or any election," the statement goes on to say. "We do not discriminate on the basis of someone's principles, or political or other beliefs."

Maloney's full statement regarding his email can be found here.
ATLANTA  A wannabe weatherman was jailed for arson after admitting he started a wildfire to draw attention to his selfie videos on Facebook, his towns police chief said Friday. Meanwhile, a Georgia sheriff appealed for help identifying the driver of a blue sport utility vehicle last seen where other wildfires began. And in North Carolina, authorities suspect arson in more than 20 wildfires burning in a national forest.

Its really too bad because hes not a bad kid  hes just misguided, said James Stephens, the police chief in Jenkins, Ky., where Johnny Mullins, 21, was arrested this week on a second-degree arson charge.

He likes to do Facebook videos and have people follow him on his weather forecast, so thats pretty much why he did what he did, the chief said. He enjoyed the attention.

A teenager in Harlan County, Ky., also was arrested for arson this week, and in Tennessee, authorities said Friday that Andrew Scott Lewis was charged with setting fires causing more than $250,000 in damage and threatening homes outside Chattanooga.

No arrests were announced in most of the rest of the suspicious fires, which have been torching forests in and around the southern Appalachian Mountains. The relentless drought across much of the South has removed the usual humidity and sucked wells and streams dry, making the woods ripe for fire.

Tens of thousands of acres have burned, about a dozen of the largest fires remain uncontained and many people had to evacuate their homes ahead of fast-moving flames.

The Rabun County sheriffs office urged people to be on the lookout, saying the SUV was last seen in the area of the fires. The office was more emphatic in a separate Facebook post, asking residents to spread the word and help us lock this criminal up!!!

The area is less than 50 miles from North Carolinas Nantahala National Forest, where more than 20 wildfires are all being investigated for suspected arson, forestry officials said.
1 Accused bomber: A man accused of setting off bombs in New Jersey and New York appeared before a Manhattan judge Thursday on federal terrorism charges. Ahmed Khan Rahimi did not enter a plea. He previously pleaded not guilty to charges related to a shootout with police officers. His lawyer, David Patton, said Rahimi has medical concerns after eight to 10 surgeries, many for infections. He says one of Rahimis hands doesnt close, and he has an open wound and liver damage. Rahimi is accused of detonating a pipe bomb along a Marine Corps charity race in Seaside Park, N.J., and planting two pressure cooker bombs in New York City.

2 Pipeline controversy: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says its trying to defuse tensions between Dakota Access pipeline protesters and law enforcement in North Dakota, but the pipelines developer isnt cooperating. The Corps asked Energy Transfer Partners of Texas this week to stop work in the area where protests against the $3.8 billion pipeline have resulted in more than 400 arrests. The Corps similar plea last week was rebuffed. ETP this week said crews were mobilizing equipment in preparation for tunneling under Lake Oahe. The 1,200-mile pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois is complete except for under that Missouri River reservoir, which has been delayed while the Corps reviews its permitting.
NEW YORK  Robert Vaughn, the debonair, Oscar-nominated actor whose many film roles were eclipsed by his hugely popular turn in televisions The Man From U.N.C.L.E., has died. He was 83.

Mr. Vaughn died Friday from acute leukemia, according to his manager, Matthew Sullivan.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was an immediate hit, particularly with young people, when it debuted on NBC 1964. It was part of an avalanche of secret agent shows (I Spy, Mission: Impossible, Secret Agent), spoofs (Get Smart), books (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) and even songs (Secret Agent Man) inspired by the James Bond films.

Mr. Vaughns urbane superspy Napoleon Solo teamed with Scottish actor David McCallums Illya Kuryakin, Russian-born agent. The pair, who had put aside Cold War differences for a greater good, worked together each week for the mysterious U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) in combatting the international crime syndicate THRUSH.

Girls age 9 to 12 liked David McCallum because he was so sweet, Mr. Vaughn said in 2005. But the old ladies and the 13- to 16-year-olds liked me because I was so detached.

The show aired until early 1968, when sagging ratings brought it to an end.

In recent years, Mr. Vaughn had starred for eight seasons on the British crime-caper series Hustle, playing Albert Stroller, the lone Yank in a band of London-based con artists. Hustle also aired in the U.S.

Before U.N.C.L.E. Mr. Vaughn made his mark in movies, earning an Oscar nomination in 1959 for his supporting role in The Young Philadelphians, in which he played a wounded war veteran accused of murder.

The following year, he turned in a memorable performance as a gunfighter who had lost his nerve in The Magnificent Seven.

A liberal Democrat, Mr. Vaughn became passionately opposed to the Vietnam War while he was making U.N.C.L.E. and delivered antiwar speeches at colleges and other venues around the country.

Robert Francis Vaughn was born into a theatrical family Nov. 22, 1932, in New York City. His father was a radio actor, his mother performed on Broadway and his grandparents acted in theater.

His parents divorced when he was only 6 months old, however, and he was sent to live with his grandparents in Minneapolis, where he said his childhood was miserable. I cried all the time and I was always getting beat up.

After his grandparents died, Mr. Vaughn moved to Los Angeles. Spotted in a college play, he was signed to a contract with Burt Lancasters company but was soon drafted into the Army. After his discharge in 1957, he made his first movie, No Time to Be Young.

Mr. Vaughn is survived by his wife, Linda Staab Vaughn, their son Cassidy and daughter Caitlin.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Paul Chinn/The Chronicle Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Alex Brandon/Associated Press Show More Show Less 3 of 3





WASHINGTON  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi set a leadership election for House Democrats next Thursday, under the widely held expectation that she will run again for the job.

Pelosis office did not discourage speculation that the San Francisco Democrat wants the job she has held since losing the speakership in 2010. On Friday, Sacramento Democrat Doris Matsui circulated a letter signed by 40 female members urging her to run again.
The toxic cocktail of emboldened Trumpism and jilted liberalism appears to have intoxicated the Bay Area.

Reports of behavior one could not have imagined a week ago almost feel commonplace after the election. Think that's overly dramatic? Here's a small sampling of the reports sent to SFGATE:

 A self-identifying American citizen speaking on the phone in Assyrian while traveling on BART Thursday was confronted by another woman on the train. While being recorded, the woman calls her "an ugly, mean, evil little pig who might get deported."

 A politically-charged argument late this week that took place onboard a flight from SFO to Puerto Vallarta became heated enough that the passengers needed to be separated, and the pilot needed to calm the cabin by speaking over the PA.



 On Wednesday, a woman at a gas station in Napa says she witnessed a man walk up to an Asian-American woman and say, over and over again, "We won. Now get the f--- out of my country." As the man continued to yell, the witness ran over and "threw [her] arms around her" as she cried.

 In a parking garage on the San Jose State campus Wednesday afternoon, a 19-year-old woman named Esra Altun reported that a man approached her from behind and yanked her by her hijab, causing it to tighten around her neck and choke her. When she broke free, he was gone. Altun says the skin on her attacker's hand was white, but that she can't say for sure that it was racially-motivated violence.

 A female student attending Woodside High School on the Peninsula who supported Donald Trump in the election was physically attacked on Wednesday. Her father believes the attack was politically motivated, as the student posted on her Instagram account the night before that she hoped Trump would win.

 Milpitas High School principal Phil Morales was put on leave following an on campus student protest. During the demonstration, he stood before the protesting student body and said "F--- Donald Trump" over a megaphone.

 A 14-year-old Latina high school student in Vallejo told Univison (via CBS SF) that her physical education teacher approached her Wednesday and asked, "Did you get your plane tickets? Because you are going to leave." The student's mother is working to have him removed from working at the school.

 A San Francisco woman named Divya Dhar wrote on Facebook that a white man shoved her and then drew a knife on her. She says he called her the n-word "very aggressively for several minutes." She reports that she and a few other people then called the police to report the incident.

Sure, a few reports across the country are turning out to be fake (although those tend to be the remarkably disturbing acts). But the local stories may seem relatively tame compared to the 5th grate assassination plots at a school in Sacramento and threats of lynchings seen elsewhere.

This is the Bay Area. Sure, some companies still struggle to pay women an equal wage and people have been known to spew anger over traffic resulting from a Black Lives Matter protest.

Reactions to the incidents listed above on SFGATE and on SFGATE's Facebook page indicate many Bay Area residents thought the region was long past shouting "get out of our country" to fellow Americans.

Some of the rage is expected. As a candidate, President-elect Donald Trump said that he would accept the results of the election if he won. Opponents waving "not my president" signs are now returning that favor.

A post-election admonition from Bernie Sanders seemed especially directed to cities like San Francisco, where he won 45.8% of the vote in June.

"To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him," Sanders said.

The members of the California Legislature Thursday echoed the request to show the rest of the country that strength and civility can overcome bullying, releasing a statement saying, "California has long set an example for other states to follow."

The joint statement continues, "California was not a part of this nation when its history began, but we are clearly now the keeper of its future."

On Saturday, President-elect Trump tweeted, "This will prove to be a great time in the lives of ALL Americans. We will unite and we will win, win, win!"

To win and unite, Trump will have to mollify the countless #NotMyPresident respondents to that Tweet, many asking for a swift rebuke of violence in the name of Trump. A response from @BestofRaps to @realDonaldTrump said, "I find it concerning how fast you were to denounce protests, but not the hate crimes spreading like wildfire."

In his victory speech, the president-elect said, "I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be President for all of Americans, and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I'm reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country."

How he will reach out beyond the tweets will become apparent in the weeks to come.
Environmentalists already bracing for hard times in the wake of the election of Donald Trump won't be cheered by the names being floated for secretary of the Interior in the president-elect's cabinet.

The leading contender, according to Politico, is Indiana oilman Forrest Lucas. Also mentioned as candidates are former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer; Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin; Wyoming Rep. Cynthia Lummis; and Oklahoma oilman Harold Hamm.

A sleeper candidate is the president-elect's son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a big fan of trophy hunting, which he seems to think makes him qualified for the job.

Palin made the pro-oil exploration slogan "Drill baby, drill" a catchphrase of the 2008 election when she ran for vice president on the Republican ticket with Sen. John McCain.

To environmentalists, entrusting an oil executive or other Big Oil-friendly candidate with the stewardship of the nation's natural resources is akin to putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

As Khalid Pitts, the Sierra Club's national political director, told Politco in September:

"Putting an oil executive in charge of our public lands and precious coasts in places like North Carolina, Virginia and Florida is a virtual guarantee that Trump's promise to throw open season on drilling in our special places will come true if he's elected."

Lucas, the 74-year-old founder of California-based Lucas Oil Products, may be more disliked by animal-rights activists that he is by environmentalists. According to Politico, he is one of the biggest donors to groups that attack the Humane Society, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty of Animals and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

He has defended puppy mills, circuses, animal agriculture and trophy hunting. A nonprofit that he founded and bankrolled produced the feature film "The Dog Lover," which portrays dog breeders and puppy mills as victims of animal-rights agencies "who aren't REALLY interested in animal welfare."

A review of the movie on Roger Ebert's website called it "shamelessly manipulative" and "a pretty bald piece of anti-SPCA and/or PETA propaganda."

Many of the promises made by Trump during the campaign may never be kept, but his vow to gut regulations on oil and gas exploration to boost fossil fuels development appears to be doable.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday last year, Trump revealed his feelings about protecting the nation's natural resources.

"Environmental protection, what they do is a disgrace; every week they come out with new regulations," Trump told host Chris Wallace.

"Who's going to protect the environment?" Wallace asked.

"We'll be fine with the environment," Trump replied. "We can leave a little bit, but you can't destroy businesses."

Americans will have to decide if they're OK with being left with a "little bit" of the nation's natural treasures.
Opponents of a newly passed initiative aimed at speeding up executions have asked the state Supreme Court to block it from taking effect.

Proposition 66, approved by voters Tuesday, will cause confusion and upheaval in the courts, interfere with their authority, and force both courts and lawyers into hurried and less-reliable decisions in capital cases, said the suit filed Wednesday by former state Attorney General John Van de Kamp and Ron Briggs, a former El Dorado County supervisor. Briggs father, state Sen. John Briggs, sponsored the states current death penalty law as a 1978 ballot measure.

With all precincts reporting but some late ballots yet to be counted, Prop. 66 had a 50.9 percent majority. Voters meanwhile rejected Prop. 62, which would have repealed the death penalty and made life in prison without parole the mandatory sentence for capital murder.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Eric Risberg/Associated Press Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Eric Risberg/Associated Press Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Prop. 66, sponsored by prosecutors, requires the state Supreme Court to rule on death penalty appeals within five years of sentencing, more than twice as fast as its current pace. It sets the same five-year deadline for the second-stage appeals known as habeas corpus and requires defense lawyers to file those appeals with the trial judge within a year, compared with the previous three-year deadline.

Another provision seeks to expand the pool of defense lawyers by requiring attorneys to take capital cases if they accept court appoints to represent criminal defendants in other cases. Prop. 66 also eliminates administrative review of the states newly adopted rules for executions by a single drug, replacing the previous three-drug procedure.

The lawsuit said the measures timetables and other restrictions would impair the courts exercise of discretion, as well as the courts ability to act in fairness to the litigants before them.

Under the new one-year filing deadline, the suit said, lawyers who file habeas corpus appeals will be forced to cut corners in their investigation and representation. Prop. 66 would also redirect death penalty appeals to lawyers who do not currently meet the qualification standards, lawyers for Van de Kamp and Briggs argued.

Proposition 66 was passed by the voters because they are sick of lawyers who oppose the death penalty constantly undermining the system with lawsuit after lawsuit, said McGregor Scott, former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California and co-chair of the Yes on 66 campaign. It is not at all ironic, and is in fact a slap in the face to the voters, that their response to the passage of Proposition 66 was to file another lawsuit trying to thwart the will of the voters.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko
MOSCOW  The Russian military and a main Syrian opposition group traded allegations Friday about whether new evidence indicates that either rebels or Syrian military used chemical weapons in the northern area of Aleppo where government forces are trying to regain control of areas they recently lost to insurgents.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said ministry experts have found unexploded ordnance and fragments of munitions containing chlorine and white phosphorus on Aleppos southwestern outskirts. Konashenkov said the discovery proves the militants have used chemical weapons against civilians and Syrian army soldiers.

The Syrian National Coalition, a main opposition group, denied that rebels used chemical weapons in Aleppo. They say the shells that were fired are similar to those used by government forces and militias fighting with them. The SNC called on U.N. organizations to open an investigation into the case.

Russia, meanwhile, is asking the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to send its experts to the site, Konashenkov said, adding that munitions fragments and ground samples collected at the site will be handed over to the international chemical weapons watchdog.

The U.S. and its allies have pushed for sanctions on the Syrian government for using chemical weapons. Russia has questioned international investigators conclusions linking chemical weapons use to the Syrian government and pointed at evidence of their use by the militants.

The U.N. Security Council has voted to extend the mandate of inspectors working to determine those responsible for chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

The announcement comes as the Syrian government and Russia appear to be preparing for an all-out offensive on the besieged eastern parts of Aleppo that are held by opposition fighters. Pro-Syrian media outlets in Lebanon have been reporting that heavy reinforcements have been arriving in Aleppo over the past weeks in preparation for the attack.

Aleppo, Syrias largest city and once commercial capital, has been the center of violence in recent months where government forces have besieged eastern rebel-held neighborhoods.

The insurgents had seized a couple of strategic areas in western Aleppo since they launched an offensive on government-held parts of Aleppo on Oct. 28 in an attempt to break the siege imposed on areas they have controlled since July. The siege on eastern Aleppo was coupled with a punishing bombing campaign by Syrian aircraft and supported by Russia, which has been backing the government of President Bashar Assad.
GENEVA  Islamic State militants have summarily killed scores of civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul in recent days, sometimes using children as executioners, and have also used chemical agents against Iraqi and Kurdish troops, U.N. officials said Friday.

Video posted by the militants Wednesday showed four children, who appear to be 10 to 14 years old, shooting four civilians accused of disloyalty at a location near the Tigris River, said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office in Geneva. The video release identified one of the children as Russian, another as coming from Uzbekistan and two as Iraqis.

U.N. investigators had not identified the time of the killings but believed they were recent, citing the surge in executions by Islamic State courts and fighters in and around Mosul in recent weeks and the brutal training the militants have forced on children in the parts of Iraq and Syria they control.

They are showing they are still in business, Shamdasani said of the Islamic State.

In one massacre, militants were said to have summarily shot 40 civilians in Mosul, dressing them in orange clothes adorned with words, marked in red, labeling them traitors and agents of the ISF, the abbreviation for Iraqi Security Forces, Shamdasani said. Afterward, the militants strung up the bodies of their victims from electricity poles around the city  a practice the Islamic State has used to strike fear into those who live in the groups strongholds.

The next day, Islamic State fighters shot 20 civilians at a military base in the north of the city and also strung up their bodies with signs carrying statements like used cell phones to leak information to the ISF, she said.

The battle for Mosul, with tens of thousands of security forces bearing down on Iraqs second-largest city, is now almost a month old. At the beginning, the fighting moved relatively quickly because the first objective was to clear dozens of outlying villages that were largely uninhabited by civilians. But in the 10 days since Iraqi counterterrorism forces punched into the city itself from the east, the fighting has slowed, as soldiers go house to house in brutal urban fighting in areas where there are still large numbers of civilians.

The United Nations said it had credible reports of militants using chemical weapons and chemical agents like chlorine gas against advancing Iraqi and Kurdish forces.
Mark Ralston/Associated Press

MCMURDO STATION, Antarctica  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry became the highest-ranking American official to visit Antarctica on Friday when he landed for a two-day trip during which hell hear from scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent.

Kerry left from New Zealand after being held up for about a day by bad weather. He and his entourage left the Christchurch airport aboard a C-17 Globemaster military cargo plane.
Mayor Javier Gonzales and fellow city councilors are working to support expanding and improving early childhood education offerings in Santa Fe to reach an estimated 1,237 3- and 4-year-olds in the city who don't yet have access to high-quality early education programs.

"We are at a go-big moment in Santa Fe," Gonzales told attendees at a press conference Thursday afternoon. "We're either going to decide we want to stop the generational cycles of poverty and start to pivot and focus on opportunity for every child and every family, or we're just going to charge forwards and hope this problem solves itself."

Research shows pre-K enrollment increases the chance that a student will be reading at grade level in third grade and finish high schooland grow up to increased earnings potential that contributes to boosting the local economy.

And how is the city going to tackle the investment?

After crunching the numbers on property tax and gross receipts tax, the Early Childhood Working Group, a part of the mayor's Children, Youth and Families Community Cabinet, determined the best source to generate an estimated $10.6 million annually to expand these offerings is a tax on sweetened drinks like soda.

Whether that tax of $.02 per ounce would hit consumers directly or distributors who sell wholesale remains one of several pieces still being ironed out in this proposal, as is the timeline. To enact the tax, the mayor will need first to take the ordinance to city council, where he expects to introduce it in December. If it passes, it will go before voters sometime in 2017 in a special election.

"I think Santa Feans are committed to giving the youngest members of this town a healthy, vibrant start," said Mayor Pro-Tem Signe Lindell. "Who doesn't deserve that?"

The money generated will go toward improving the quality of existing programs and increasing the number of certified teachers. The initiative is expected to create 261 new jobs, most of them for certified early education teachers.

The mayor said during a press conference Thursday that he thought existing facilities had enough seats to accommodate these students, so most of the costs would go to programming. All of new tax revenue would stay in early childhood education and if funds become available could expand to include programming for infants and neo-natal care. Some will go to building a navigation system for families to understand how to make use of the services available, and some to education on the connections between enrolling children in these programs and better ensuring their success later in life.

"This could be a game changer for this community," said Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Veronica Garcia, who could not directly endorse the issue but spoke of her strong support for early education programs.

The roughly 1,200 students not able to access early education programs are thought to be disproportionately Hispanic and poor, according to research from the Brindle Foundation. The foundation aided in developing the proposal and referenced other municipalities that have passed a similar tax for the model on a tax on sweetened drinks.

Some of the city's pre-K centers score a three on a scale of five; part of the goal is to hire teachers and expand programs so that those centers score higher.

"I want the people in my district to benefit from early childhood education as much as the kids on the north side of town," said Councilor Chris Rivera, who represents District 3 on the city's Southside and the area with the greatest demonstrated need for this expansion. He pointed to the YMCA a block away from his house, with 50 children on the waiting list for its early education programs.

Like the mayor, he's campaigned on a platform of improving education.

"It's true that it takes a village to raise a child, and that's what we're asking," Rivera said. "We're asking the entire city of Santa Fe to rise up and help us raise our children on every side of town."

The city is stepping in to help in the ongoing absenceone that's only expected to continueof funding for these programs from the state or federal government, Gonzales said, "So we have to do this as a community." Half an hour after this story's publication, the following comment came in from the New Mexico Beverage Association: "While providing more early childhood education is a worthy goal, paying for it with a tax just on beverages comes with real downsides. Soft drink consumption has been declining for more than a decade, meaning this important program will depend on an unreliable and unsustainable revenue source. While we disagree with taxes that single out one set of products, we would like to work with the mayor and community leaders on better ways to help move forward important programs like early childhood education.

"In the meantime, our energy remains squarely focused on reducing the sugar consumed from beveragesengaging with prominent public health and community organizations to change behavior."

Santa Fe Reporter
OK, we made it, and everyone is feeling a bit tense. Thus, it might be time to take a step back, breathe, and focus on a little bit of culture. Congratulations to everyone who played a part in our democracynow lets party.

Francisco Benitez: Aristocrats Among Industrial Ruins Benitez presents a series featuring goddess-like women in traditional Greco-Roman garb immersed in post-industrial environments. Through Nov. 26. More Info >>

Benitez presents a series featuring goddess-like women in traditional Greco-Roman garb immersed in post-industrial environments. Through Nov. 26.

Mangchi and Kid Koala Mangchi makes thrash pop-rock that is somewhere between Depeche Mode and the Beastie Boys and Kid Koala is a scratch DJand side note, an award winning authorwho has played with other well known groups, like the Gorillaz. More Info >>

Mangchi makes thrash pop-rock that is somewhere between Depeche Mode and the Beastie Boys and Kid Koala is a scratch DJand side note, an award winning authorwho has played with other well known groups, like the Gorillaz.

DJ Miss Ginger Dance party in the Tavern with DJ Gingeran artist/activist who has recently been keeping it way real up at Standing Rockfor the annual He She Bang dress rehearsal. More Info >>

Dance party in the Tavern with DJ Gingeran artist/activist who has recently been keeping it way real up at Standing Rockfor the annual He She Bang dress rehearsal.

He She Bang 2016 The annual cross dressing, gender bending extravaganza celebrates its 25th anniversary! The party usually sells out, but there were still tickets available at press time so nab yours while you can and join the bash featuring Siren Shipwreck. More Info >>

The annual cross dressing, gender bending extravaganza celebrates its 25th anniversary! The party usually sells out, but there were still tickets available at press time so nab yours while you can and join the bash featuring Siren Shipwreck.

Lulz Comedy Show Get some laughs with Yedoye Travis, Prox and Stephen Jules Rubin with host Maxwell Lucas. More Info >>

Get some laughs with Yedoye Travis, Prox and Stephen Jules Rubin with host Maxwell Lucas.

Zircus Erotique Burlesque & Variety Show See a sultry burlesque performance featuring tantalizing shimmying, shakin' featuring Holly Rebelle, Coco Caliente, Nymphaea Dance Collective and more with mistress of ceremonies LinZ. More Info >>

See a sultry burlesque performance featuring tantalizing shimmying, shakin' featuring Holly Rebelle, Coco Caliente, Nymphaea Dance Collective and more with mistress of ceremonies LinZ.

Don J Usner, Katherine Ware and Daniel Kosharek: Orale! Custom Made In New Mexico The three authors present their book about lowrider culture in New Mexico. See original photographs from the book showcased in the bookstore's gallery. More Info >>

The three authors present their book about lowrider culture in New Mexico. See original photographs from the book showcased in the bookstore's gallery.

Standing Rock Fundraiser Food, music, poetry readings and community are on the list of reasons to attend the fundraising event that includes raffles and an art auction. More Info >>

Food, music, poetry readings and community are on the list of reasons to attend the fundraising event that includes raffles and an art auction.

A Conversation With Pussy Riot Maria Alyokhina and Alexandra Bogino participate in the lecture about their time in the Russian feminist punk rock protest group based in Moscow. More Info >>

Maria Alyokhina and Alexandra Bogino participate in the lecture about their time in the Russian feminist punk rock protest group based in Moscow.

Get more information about how to spend your fun days when you sign up for the SFR Weekend newsletter, delivered to your inbox each Friday afternoon.

Santa Fe Reporter
Technology investment fund manager Movac has raised $105 million for its latest fund, including $75 million from institutional investors such as Ngai Tahu Holdings, the iwis commercial arm.

Movac partner Phil McCaw said he couldnt name the other institutional investors for Movac Fund 4 but the balance of the funds has come from the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, leading New Zealand family offices, community trusts and private investors, including investor migrants.

The fund will be investing in established New Zealand technology companies with a track record of sales that are looking for capital to accelerate their growth and scale their business internationally. It is a later stage fund than Movacs previous ones and covers an area where there is currently a large gap in investment capital.

McCaw said it has a strong pipeline of potential investments for the new fund and had already conducted due diligence on a number of quality companies. He anticipates making the first investments before Christmas.

The fund will remain open until its final close in April next year.

Founded in 1998, Movac has deployed more than $65 million in capital by investing in 25 companies that have helped create over 250 jobs in New Zealand. Significant returns to investors have come from its investments in Trade Me, eBus, GreenButton, and Givealittle.

Ngai Tahu Holdings chief executive Mike Sang said the company was looking forward to its new partnership with the Movac team and adding diversity to its portfolio by investing growth capital in the tech sector. Its other interests include farming, property, seafood, tourism, transport, and manuka honey.

At an International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds in Auckland yesterday, Sang was asked how important it was to separate the commercial investment arm from the tribal owner.

He said he hated the term separation and questioned how the commercial arm could be separate when it was owned by its owners.

No capital works when divorced from its owners, he said. We tend to view it as bits of the jigsaw that fit together to give you the whole picture rather than truly separate entities.

Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu sets the investment policy framework, the risk they're prepared to take, and annual spend while the commercial arm carries out the investment and the distribution arm is responsible for allocating returns.

Having a framework and structure where everyone knows their role and how it fits together and works well together was more important than separation, Sang said.

That got broken, in peoples minds they saw it had been broken and they saw Holdings wasnt aligned with its owners so they made a change.

In April this year Mark Solomon stood down as head of the tribes parliament, a position hed held since Ngai Tahu agreed to a $170 million Treaty of Waitangi cash settlement in 1998.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

Comments from our readers

No comments yet

Add your comment:

Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process.

Related News:

Air New Zealand issues Performance Rights

Heartland announces new Director of Heartland Bank

GEN - Agreements in Principle to Issue New Shares

Geraldine McBride steps down from Sky Board

Sky ASM 2022

South Port NZ Ltd - Results of 2022 Annual Meeting

November 2nd Morning Report

AIA - Auckland Airport announces executive team change

South Port NZ Ltd - 2022 Annual Meeting

ENS - Rights Issue Offer Document


New Zealand and Israel are close to signing an innovation agreement that would lead to joint research and development.

Israeli ambassador to New Zealand Itzhak Gerberg told a Start-Up Nation summit in Auckland today that the tech collaboration agreement was close though not yet signed as it was still in the hands of the lawyers.

The bilateral R&D agreement has been pushed by New Zealands chief scientist Peter Gluckman who was part of a New Zealand Innovation mission to Israel in June led by Spark chief executive Simon Moutter. Gluckman said today he wasnt in a position to comment on the progress of the deal.

New Zealand recently signed a film co-production agreement with Israeli that will encourage collaboration between the screen industries in both countries and covers film, television, animation and digital productions.

A small but vocal group of Auckland supporters of the Palestine Solidarity Network protested outside todays meeting, saying Israel was trying to foster links with countries such as New Zealand for political not economic reasons. The network labelled the co-production agreement as a calculated entanglement of New Zealand with Israelis propaganda agreement.

Spark's Moutter told the meeting he was pushing eight key actions that came out of lessons learnt from the innovation mission that centre around building a stronger innovation ecosystem in New Zealand. They include building a corporate venture capital innovation fund which Moutter said he was getting a warm reception to from the other corporates hes approached for backing.

Its an unusual idea to have a corporate-backed VC. Corporations dont normally go around throwing money into VCs unless youre a big, tax-dodging US company with piles of money in Ireland and Dutch bank accounts, he said.

A lot of work had gone into the idea with the current funding community to figure out the best way to construct it so it would be large scale additive to existing capital, he said.

Theres a reasonable chance we can make that come to life and it certainly would be of substantial scale, much bigger than anything we have today which was the idea.

New Zealand has an estimated $500 million gap for expansion capital for existing start-ups beyond their early seed capital.

Israeli entrepreneur Dov Moran, whose M-Systems company invented the now ubiquitous USB stick and was sold for US$1.6 billion, said if Israel with its small land mass and lack of resources can build a flourishing innovation eco-system then New Zealand can too.

New Zealand is in a much, much better situation, you dont have enemies knocking down the doors every day and you have much greater natural resources, he said.  If you dont have local money, most of Israels money came from external smart money that did very well for its investors and theres no doubt you can do it, but the sooner you do it, the sooner it will happen, thats the key message.

Moran also founded Grove Ventures, a venture capital fund thats primarily investing in cloud, big data and the internet of things. He said New Zealand lacks experienced entrepreneurs used to running big, global companies but they can be brought into the country to help initiate this industry.

Moran has just written a book about the pain points for entrepreneurs and how success comes from not giving up despite rejection after rejection. He posed the same question he did at an Australia-Israeli investment conference in Sydney earlier this week: if youre locked in a room with 100 doors and each one has only a 1 percent chance of being unlocked, whats the chance of getting out of the room?

Peoples backgrounds tend to shape how they answer the question with finance workers tending to be more pessimistic and answering under 10 percent while entrepreneurs tend to shoot for the more optimistic 100 percent, he said. One of the best answers hes had was from an Australian entrepreneur who said if this door doesnt unlock, then the next one will.

The answer is the chance of every door being locked is 0.99 to the power of 100 which equals 36.6 percent so that means the chance of at least one door being unlocked is 63.4 percent.

Success rates for start-ups are a lot lower than that  averaging between 1-and-10 percent in Israel, he said, though the ones that have been successful have made the venture capitalists backing them lots of money.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

Comments from our readers

No comments yet

Add your comment:

Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process.

Related News:

Air New Zealand issues Performance Rights

Heartland announces new Director of Heartland Bank

GEN - Agreements in Principle to Issue New Shares

Geraldine McBride steps down from Sky Board

Sky ASM 2022

South Port NZ Ltd - Results of 2022 Annual Meeting

November 2nd Morning Report

AIA - Auckland Airport announces executive team change

South Port NZ Ltd - 2022 Annual Meeting

ENS - Rights Issue Offer Document


MarketWatch

After record-breaking sales of I-bonds in October, the U.S. Treasury is dangling another good deal in front of savers for the next six months. Starting Nov. 2, when I-bonds will be available again after site maintenance at TreasuryDirect.gov, the inflation-adjusted annualized rate will be 6.89%, down from 9.62%. The fixed rate at the time of purchase will stay with the bond as long as you hold it  up to 30 years  but the inflation adjustment resets every six months in November and May.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Restaurants give thanks to United States veterans across the country -- and on Staten Island -- come Friday, Nov. 11.

Show a military ID card or other proof of service -- a photograph in uniform will do, according to TheMilitaryWallet.com -- for various food freebies from a cup of Joe to complete meal.

Here's a rundown of Veterans Day dining deals -- if you know of one not listed here, please share it in the comments section:

APPLEBEE'S

2655 Richmond Ave., 718-370-3761, New Springville; 430 New Dorp Lane, 718-980-7800, New Dorp; 1451 Richmond Ave., Bulls Head; 2720 Veteran's Rd. West, 718-943-1200, Charleston. Applebees.com

The menu for vets is the following: Butcher's Meat and Potatoes, Oriental Chicken Salad, Fiesta Lime Chicken, Chicken Tenders Platter, Double Crunch Shrimp, American Standard All-In Burger and Three-Cheese Chicken Cavatappi.

Special events:

Applebee's of New Dorp -- 2 to 6 p.m. the SSG Michael Ollis VFW Post 9587 will have a table set up with information about benefits and membership.

Applebee's of Graniteville -- Girl Scouts return to hand deliver hand made thank you notes to Veteran's and active-duty military.

Applebee's supports the Thank You Movement, which gives a chance to connect with veterans and active military through personal messages of gratitude via Thankyoumovement.com.

BOSTON MARKET

854 Arthur Kill Rd., 718-227-8200; 2530 Hylan Blvd., 718-980-4300; 1465 Forest Ave., 718-815-1198; BostonMarket.com



Free Brownie or Cookie with any purchase for all veterans, service members, and their families.

BUFFALO WILD WINGS

1447 Richmond Ave., Bulls Head; 718-983-6912, BuffaloWildWings.com

Free order of wings and a side of fries to veterans and current military members. Dine-in only. Bring proof of military service.

CHARLIE BROWN'S

1001 Goethels Rd. North, Mariners Harbor; 718-494-0197 CharlieBrowns.com

A special lunch menu runs from 11 to 3 p.m. At no charge are these items: Cheeseburger, chicken tenders, Golden Fried Shrimp, Grilled Chicken Sandwich, Panini and the salad bar combo that includes soup.

CHILI'S

1497 Richmond Ave., Bulls Head; 718-697-0883, ChilisToGo.com

From a special menu, a choice of lunch or dinner with a full-size flat bread eaten in the restaurant. Those selections include: an "Old Timer" with Cheese, Soup and Salad, any flat bread or Chicken Crispers.

CHIPOTLE

2602 Hylan Blvd., New Dorp; 718-980-1742, Chipotle.com

Buy one-get-one free from 3 p.m. to close.

IHOP

935 Richmond Ave., Graniteville; 718-494-4467, IHOP.com

One free short stack is available from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

JIMMY MAX

280 Watchogue Road, Westerleigh; 718-983-6715; JimmyMax.com

Jimmy Max gives VFW members 15 percent off their meals.

LA FONTANA

2879 Amboy Rd., Oakwood; 718-667-4343

Says owner Joe Fauci: "LaFontana and Rolling Thunder are doing free breakfast for all Vets in honor of Danny Ditonno, my bartender for 30 years who just passed." Breakfast runs from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Fauci adds, "Military appreciation is very important to us since my nephews just served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars."

LEO'S SANDWICH SHOP

1153 Forest Ave., West Brighton; 718-718-8757

There is a 50 percent discount to all veterans as well as other law enforcement officers.

LIBERTY TAVERN

382 Forest Ave., West Brighton; 718-442-8121, LibertyTavernSI.com



As part of Assemblyman Mike Cusick's VETS program, the business routinely presents 10 percent off daily on food and drink. But on Veterans Day, all Vets can buy one meal or drink and get one free all day.

MARINA CAFE

154 Mansion Ave., Great Kills; 718-967-3077 Marinacafesiny.com

A vet gets 15 percent off his or her entree.

PLAY SPORTS BAR

2 Sneden Lane, Annadale; 718-984-3700, PlaySportsBarSI.com

The first drink is on the house all day with proof of service.

RED ROBIN GOURMET BURGERS



The Staten Island Mall, New Springville; 718-477-1063, RedRobin.com

Vets and active duty members can have a free "Tavern Double Burger" with bottomless steak fries. Also, Red Robin Royalty military members receive deals throughout the year.

OUTBACK STEAKHOUSE

The Crossings at The Staten Island Mall, New Springville; 718-761-3907, Outback.com

Active duty military and veterans receive a free Bloomin' Onion and a non-alcoholic beverage. This offer is available to military personnel and veterans with ID. Also receive 15 percent off purchases from Nov. 12 through Dec. 31, 2016.

PERKIN'S RESTAURANT & BAKERY

1409 Hylan Blvd, Staten Island, NY 10305Phone:(718) 979-9180; 1745 Forest Ave., Graniteville; (718) 720-8888; 4370 Amboy Rd., Eltingivlle; (718) 317-1153, PerkinsRestaurants.com.

Current service members and veterans receive a free Magnificent Seven meal which includes two eggs, three buttermilk pancakes, and a choice of two bacon strips or two sausage links. Beverage not included. ID or proof of service required.

T.G.I. FRIDAY'S

The Crossings at The Staten Island Mall, New Springville; 718-982-7801 TGIFridays.com; 2754 Hylan Blvd., 718-980-0892; 2505 Richmond Ave., 718-494-4451; The Staten Island Mall 718-477-5010

Free lunch for all current military members and veterans with valid ID from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dine-in only.

THE HOP SHOPPE

372 Van Duzer St., Stapleton; 718-448-3400

The first drink or beer is on the house all day with proof of military ID.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Annadale resident James Castoro considers himself ''one of the lucky ones.''

Twenty-eight-year-old Castoro, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, came home in 2012 a healthy man -- something he says not all veterans are able to do.

He also comes from a line of military men -- his father a Vietnam veteran and his grandfather a Korean War veteran.

Now, a member of Rolling Thunder on Staten Island, Castoro said it's his way of continuing to serve now that he's no longer and active member of the armed services.

"It's my way of reaching back out and continuing my service. I like to ride my motorcycle, but riding like this is for a good reason," Castoro said.

"We'll escort to wakes and funerals if the family wants, bring out a full honor guard with all the flags for whatever branch of service they were in. Things like that help me realize that the original meaning (of Rolling Thunder) is to raise awareness for prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action to understand what that black and yellow flag is and why it's flying."

Castoro and the rest of Rolling Thunder also offer numerous services to veterans, like helping wounded warriors gain access to ''smart home,'' donating books, sending care packages overseas and making veterans who are home aware of the services available to them.

ADDITIONAL SERVICES NEEDED UPON RETURN

Castoro said that making sure veterans know about what services are offered to them upon returning home, as well as providing additional services, is what "we really need to focus on."

"Luckily for me, returning back to 'normal life' wasn't that bad," Castoro said. "It was a little weird at first because you get set in your ways; you get into a routine; I was used to being up early and going to bed so late, combined with an 11-hour time difference."

"I didn't have any traumatic events happen to me personally; I really feel for those guys and girls who went through that who now have problems," he said.

Because Castoro was in the Reserves, the Yellow Ribbon Organization offered its services when he returned home from Afghanistan in 2012 -- though for him, it was not needed.

The Yellow Ribbon Organization aids in integration to civilian life, as well as providing medical fairs, job fairs, and a variety of other services.

"(A lot of) the resources are there but sometimes I feel like soldiers have a difficult time reaching them. I feel like (for) some people ,it's their pride, but others just don't know what's available to them," he said.

"In the military when you wake up you have a routine. You do this, then this, then this and then you go to bed. So when you don't have that anymore, a lot of men and women don't know what to do; they don't know how to function and they feel like they don't have any purpose."

"(A lot of) soldiers are out in these horrific situations, so how do you just expect somebody to come home and just be OK?" Castoro asked.

SERVICES OFFERED OVERSEAS

While deployed, Castoro said there would be regular classes on suicide and sexual harassment prevention.

"They kinda do it in a way that they quickly shove it down your throat, and after we've just worked a 12-hour day, we kind of just wanted to go to sleep. But it is good that they're giving information there," he said.

"I think they needed to emphasize it more when we come home but don't get me wrong, we still need it over there because I'm sure there are depressed soldiers and guys and girls with suicidal tendencies."

He said many men who are overseas are not able to witness the birth of their first child or attend a family members' funeral.

"It's very demanding for the spouse and the soldier. And how do you cope with it? You can ask one of your superiors who has been through it and they can tell you what they did, but that's about it. There's no textbook definition to help to tell somebody how to get through this," he said.

LOST OF BUDDY

Though he was not injured while deployed, his time in the war zone wasn't without hardship and sadness.

A friend from basic training, Castoro's bunkmate, was killed in Afghanistan.

"I know a few people who lost their lives and I'll never see them again; it's sad. Brian was his name and his job was to drive a high ranking officer around and the Humvee he was driving got hit by an RPG and they both lost their lives that day," Castoro said.

"It was really tough for me when I found out."

Castoro was stationed at a prison near Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where he and his platoon were training the Afghan Military Police how to maintain and run the facility until President Obama signed over control to the Afghans.

Day-to-day, Castoro wasn't on the front lines in combat but there was still a risk of danger.

"One day I was outside on a perfectly clear day and I saw these three little dots moving and then I saw them stop," he recalled.

"After I saw them stop, I saw something go up in the air and I said to my sergeant 'I think we gotta go.' Everything was locked down after that. Thankfully, every situation I was in was indirect fire," he said.

Castoro said there were constant small groups of "bad guys" who would set off mortars, hoping to disrupt the airfield.

"When we were there we learned their language and tried to make them understand that we weren't the bad guys ... but I actually had a guy make a throat cutting gesture at me and say, 'Go home Americans, we don't want you here,'" he said.

"Then there were other guys who had tears in their eyes while thanking us for everything we'd done to help them."

Despite it all, Castoro said he would go back if his country needed him to.
wagnerbuild.jpg

In September 1946, construction began on housing for veterans on the Grymes Hill campus. The Wagner College Administration Building, today's Main Hall, is in the background. (Wagner College Archives)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- As World War II drew to an end and veterans returned home to recover and resume their lives, Wagner College reached out a helping hand.

In September 1946, construction began on temporary barracks on the Grymes Hill campus to house servicemen who were looking to complete their college education.

Veterans Village, located off Campus Road on the site of today's Spiro Hall, consisted of one two-story hall and six one-story buildings manufactured by the War Department.

Veterans Village at Wagner College in June 1950. The barracks would be severely damaged by a storm five months later. (Wagner College Archives)

Like most colleges across the country, Wagner saw a surge in enrollment after the war. In 1945, enrollment was 440. It climbed to 1,164 in 1946 and peaked at 2,061 in 1949.

Wagner welcomed the veterans, most of whom were older than traditional college students.

"They had the incredible experience of serving overseas in combat, and meeting all kinds of people they would have never met," said Lee Manchester, Wagner's director of media relations. The veterans brought a global perspective into the classroom, he added.

An aerial view of the Wagner College campus in April 1950 shows Main Hall at center and Veterans Village in the lower left, off Campus Road. (Wagner College Archives)

Wagner dormitories had been accommodating servicemen in the year before the barracks were built, following V-J Day in September 1945. Families on Grymes Hill also opened their homes to the veterans attending Wagner.

It was a time when "everyone was pulling together," Manchester noted.

DESTROYED BY A STORM

Sadly, Veterans Village did not last long. A fierce storm on the post-Thanksgiving weekend of Nov. 25-26, 1950, damaged buildings across the campus and destroyed nearly all of the barracks.

New York City recorded a peak wind gust of 94 mph and Newark, N.J., recorded a 108-mph wind gust during the storm. Snow, heavy rain and coastal flooding impacted 22 states, killing 353 and ranking it "the storm of the century."

On the Grymes Hill campus, students were displaced when the roofs were blown off Luther Hall and Cook Hall residences. The Cook Hall roof smashed into Veterans Village, reported the Dec. 1, 1950 edition of The Wagnerian student newspaper.

Most of the buildings in Veterans Village were destroyed by a fierce nor'easter in November 1950. (Wagner College Archives)

Fortunately, most students and veterans were off-campus for the weekend because of the Thanksgiving holiday. Wagnerian reporter and English major Theodore (Ted) Lovington Jr. described the storm's aftermath poetically.

"The winds had whipped across the flat face of The Hill and scoured the small settlement of Wagner College," he wrote. "Now, the metallic water in the distant Narrows, that widened into the sun-glazed sea, looked calm and gentle, giving no hint of the fury that broke loose on that gray Saturday morning and stormed like a million demons up the forested hanks of the sleeping hill."

Lovington was a veteran himself, serving in the U.S. Army in Japan during the late 1940s. He went on to become an accomplished contemporary poet on Staten Island, and a frequent contributor to the Advance.

The lifelong Port Richmond resident died in 2009 at the age of 81.
rumc.jpg

Police are still searching for a patient missing from Richmond University Medical Center. (Staten Island Advance file photo)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Police continue to search for a man who went missing from Richmond University Medical Center Thursday morning, police said.

The 47-year-old man went missing from the West Brighton hospital at 355 Bard Ave. at approximately 8:30 a.m.

Police were searching for the man Thursday morning at RUMC and the surrounding area, but were unsuccessful in locating him

Hospital spokesman William Smith said the patient was voluntarily admitted and was not under NYPD guard or any order to remain in the medical center.

"There was an admitted patient who departed the medical center earlier today under their own power," said Smith. "Out of concern for the patient's care, we contacted the NYPD.

He is described as black, over 6 feet tall, with a beard and was last seen wearing a hospital gown.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A Staten Island man was charged in connection with a fatal car crash in Delaware Thursday night, according to a report by WBOC 16.

James J. Flynn, 29, was driving his 2016 Dodge Dart on a road near Milton, Del., when the car went off the roadway, traveled northbound on the grass and struck a utility pole at around 8 p.m., the report said.

Brittani R. Yilmaz, 25, of Delaware, was the front seat passenger and pronounced dead at the scene, the report said.

Flynn suffered non-life threatening injuries and was charged with operation of a motor vehicle causing death of another person, failure to remain in a single lane, and failure to have insurance, according to the report.

Speed doesn't appear to be a factor at this point and alcohol or drug impairment is unknown, police told the site.
NWS Darryl Simmons

The NYPD has asked for the public's help in locating Darryl Simmons, 47, a homeless man who went missing on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, from Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton. (Courtesy of NYPD)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The NYPD is asking for the public's help in locating a 47-year-old man who has been reported missing from Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton.

Darryl Simmons, 47, was last seen at the medical facility at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, according to a statement from the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

Police described the man as homeless, standing 6 feet tall and weighing 240 pounds. He was last seen wearing dark-colored jeans, a T-shirt and a sweater.

Anyone with information is asked to visit the NYPD's Crime Stoppers website, call the Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-8477 (TIPS) or for Spanish, 1-888-577-4782 (PISTA) or text their tips to 274637 (CRIMES), then enter TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential.
Trump on SI1.jpg

Donald Trump won Staten Island and the country on Tuesday. That day, the red borough had guests from many other countries seeking to understand his supporters here. Pictured, Trump visits in April. (Staten Island Advance/Hilton Flores)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - Most Staten Islanders going about their daily tasks on Tuesday, which included voting, didn't notice that their borough had welcomed many overseas visitors, journalists who came to see for themselves just what a Donald Trump supporter looks like.

Staten Island was expected to go to Trump, and it did give him 57 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton's 40 percent, but most didn't expect a national Trump victory.

Reporters from Germany, Britain, Norway and Australia landed here and roamed the red borough looking for subjects. They wanted to understand the voters of the only borough in the whole city expected to vote for Trump.

Several contacted local reporters, asking about good spots to catch red-blooded Americans in their natural habitat -- Where were the hangouts? Would they be gathered watching the Election Day returns? How can we get to them?

For anyone who noticed, it was fascinating watching the overseas journalists be fascinated by a group of people that reflected the makeup of much of the rest of the country.

Borough President James Oddo on occasion has pointed to the fact that Staten Island mirrors the rest of America in many ways.

Part of the American Dream is to own a home and that's no different for Staten Islanders -- homeownership rates here are 68.6 percent and nationwide homeownership rates are 64.9 percent.

That certainly can't be said for the rest of this city.

Throughout the country, 28.8 percent of Americans have bachelor's degrees, and on Staten Island, that number is 29.7 percent.

On Tuesday, Staten Island, like the rest of the country, voted for Trump.

And so they came, the foreign journalists who wanted to understand supporters of the Republican candidate.

Jim Waterson, a London-based political editor for BuzzFeed UK, visited the borough, one of the many journalists from overseas who contacted Scott LoBaido, the conservative artist outspoken about his support for Trump.

"Staten Island was one of the few places where it was easy to report the views of Donald Trump supporters from New York," Waterson said. "BuzzFeed has sent me to talk to Trump supporters across the U.S. during the last 18 months and we had a team of reporters all over the country for our live broadcast with Twitter. But being based in New York and wanting to report pro-Trump opinion it made sense to come to Staten Island and meet fantastic characters such as Scott LoBaido, who drove us around in his truck."

Another foreign journalist seeking local input was Jim Taylor, along with his colleagues at BBC radio, who set up shop Tuesday on the outside terrace of River Dock Cafe at the ferry terminal in St. George.

They remarked on the beautiful waterfront location, the mild weather and warm sun creating a perfect spot to see downtown Manhattan across the water as they interviewed locals.

One of those guests was Councilman Joe Borelli, who has been a surrogate for the Trump campaign, speaking regularly on CNN and Fox News. He did the BBC radio radio, following behind LoBaido and local Democratic activist Maria Vella.

This reporter did a quick spot, explaining to the audience listening across the ocean that Staten Island wasn't unlike the rest of the country.

For months, foreign news outlets have contacted LoBaido, whose patriotic creations often come in the colors of the flag and who created a 16-foot "T" sculpture on the Sam Pirozzolo's lawn in Castleton Corners.

The two men have spoken with reporters from Norway, Britain, Spain, Japan and more.

Two foreign news outlets, one from Germany and one from the United Kingdom, ITN News, spent hours at the New Dorp election night headquarters of Rep. Daniel Donovan, interviewing the only Republican member of New York City's congressional delegation about his support for Trump.

A few miles away in Grymes Hill, Phil Williams was reporting for Australian Broadcasting Corporation, spending the early part of the night at a combined election results watch party/birthday party held by attorney Richard Luthmann, a pro-Trump Democrat.

Luthmann said in recent weeks he was also contacted by a German news organization and a Belgian one about his Trump support.

The Australian news broadcast includes a shot of Williams taking the ferry from Manhattan and speaking to Trump supporters on Staten Island, capturing their enthusiasm as the early returns started to point toward a Trump victory.

BuzzFeed's Waterson filed three reports from his two days in the borough.

"I don't think I'll forget walking up and down the roads of New Dorp in the dark as it rained, trying to get people to talk to me -- but almost everyone was incredibly friendly, regardless of their politics," Waterson said. "Although it's possible that being approached by someone with a British accent shocked them into submission."
FDY Angelinas

Vincent Malerba, co-owner of Angelina's Ristorante on March 13, 2015 in front f the Tottenville location. (Staten Island Advance/Pamela Silvestri)

(Staff-Shot)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The popular Tottenvile Restaurant, Angelina's Ristorante -- known for its Italian cuisine -- is opening a second location in New Springville, adjacent to the Staten Island Mall in the space formerly occupied by Bonefish Grill.



The mother-and-son team of Angelina and Vincent Malerba plan to provide an "old world Italian family vibe" in their new restaurant, Angelina's Kitchen. It will be located in a 6,000-square-foot space at 280 Marsh Ave. that has been vacant for nearly three years after the Bonefish Grill abruptly closed in 2014.

The restaurant will stand out as the only mom-and-pop restaurant in a shopping center filled with chains, including Outback Steakhouse, Panera Bread and TGI Friday's.

"The location is serviced by public transportation, and is centrally located on Staten Island. Thousands of people from Staten Island and Brooklyn shop at the Mall every day. Angelina's Kitchen will give them a reason to cross the street and explore beyond the footprint of the Mall," said John Pitera, associate broker for Casandra Properties in St. George, the agency that brokered the real estate deal.

The restaurant is expected to be open by the first week in December.



"Providing the public with good food in a welcoming atmosphere has always been important to my mother and me," said Malerba.

"Our goal for Angelina's Kitchen is to create an authentic, Italian experience the entire family can enjoy. Though the price point will be lower than that of Angelina's, the quality of ingredients will remain the same. Even our chef will be imported from Italy," he added.

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS



The Malerbas' first restaurant was a small pizzeria. "Our singular focus was to create a pizza that would stand out above all others in New York City -- the pizza capital of the world," said Malerba.

"From the flour for the dough to the wine in the tomato sauce, we made sure that every ingredient used to make the pizza was the very best. From that small pizzeria, we expanded to a larger one -- always searching for the freshest and best ingredients available," he added.

When the Malerbas opened Angelina's, they knew that the food and atmosphere had to be a cut above everyone else in order to attract people to the far end of Staten Island. "I am humbled and grateful that people who enjoy exceptional quality food have recognized Angelina's as a unique dining experience worth coming back for," said Malerba.

Said Rob Nixon, Casandra Properties' sales associate who negotiated the deal: "I am extremely confident that Angelina's Kitchen will become a place where millennials, baby boomers and everyone in between will gather to enjoy an authentic Italian meal as only Vinny and Angelina Malerba can provide."

FOLLOW TRACEY PORPORA ON FACEBOOK